Sean Jacobs's Blog, page 101

Red and Black

Yunxiang Gao���s new book takes a fresh look at connected lives of African American and Chinese leftist activists, artists and intellectuals after World War II. Mao Tse-tung greeting W. E. B. Du Bois and Shirley Graham Du Bois, 1959. W. E. B. Du Bois Papers, Robert S. Cox Special Collections and University Archives Research Center, UMass Amherst Libraries ��.

In 1959 an aging W.E.B. Du Bois, then still living in the US, visited Beijing University, China���s most prestigious institute of higher learning, where he gave a powerful and provocative speech to a large audience. ���China, after long centuries, has arisen to her feet and leapt forward,��� he said. In a breathtaking and earnest expression of solidarity he implored Africans to follow in China���s footsteps, turn away from the West and to ���stand straight, speak and think!��� ���China is flesh of your flesh and blood of your blood���, he dramatically declared. The speech, part of a national celebration of Du Bois��� birthday, was hugely impactful not least because Beijing Radio broadcasted it globally.

Du Bois was known for his sympathies with East Asia���s great powers. He believed the ���color line��� was the main cleavage in world politics and that European racism and colonialism were a common blight that Africans and Asians should unite to confront. He wrote enthusiastically in support of Japan during its early 20th century war with Russia, viewing Japan���s victory as one that belonged to all non-white people.

He was initially an ardent believer that Japan would lead what he called the ���darker world��� to freedom from colonial rule, but following its defeat in World War II he anointed Beijing despite the fact that he sometimes whitewashed and at other times supported Japan���s violence in China during the war. But his belief that China could lead the Third World chimed well with Chairman Mao Zedong as well as Premier Zhou Enlai, who worked to position China as a leader and lighthouse for former colonies seeking liberation.

Socialism, Du Bois believed, was the remedy to the dreaded ���color line��� and he wasn���t quiet about it, despite the fever pitch of Cold War politics that often got him into trouble. In 1951 he was arrested for his vocal and dedicated activism for the USSR and China following allegations that he was spying for a foreign country. His efforts didn���t go unnoticed and when he was arrested China vigorously protested. Chinese officials would also fete him during his many visits between 1959 and 1962. Such was his standing that upon his death Mao sent a letter to Shirley Graham Du Bois, his wife, offering his condolences. He was a ���great man of our time���, wrote Mao, whose friendship would ���forever remain in the memory of the Chinese people.����� A prominent activist in her own right, Graham Du Bois would go on to settle in China after his death.

Du Bois��� life was one among a handful of examples according to Professor Yunxiang Gao���s new book, Africa Rise, China Roar, which examines the ���intertwined lives��� of a group of activists, artists and intellectuals ���who strove in their own ways to create a politicized transpacific discourse��� by linking up with their Chinese counterparts. Whilst many of the key characters in her book, such as Paul Robeson, Langston Hughes and W.E.B. Du Bois are by now household names, Gao���s book also sheds light upon their China-based collaborators, as well as their spouses and partners, who played important roles but for the most part were consigned to the ���dustbin of history.���

Robeson often dedicated his music to furthering the cause of labor, but one particular song called Chee Lai, which he recorded with Liu Liangmo, a Christian activist and journalist,�� would go on to inspire millions across China for generations to come. The Chinese Communist Party would rename the song ���March of Volunteers��� and make it the anthem for the Peoples��� Republic. In Moscow in 1934 Robeson would meet Si-Lan Chen, a popular revolutionary choreographer and committed anti-imperialist of Sino-Afro-Caribbean descent.

Though Chen didn���t initially enjoy the approval of her contemporaries, who said her work contained no ���proletarian ideology,��� she later enthusiastically reinvented herself as the Communist answer to Josephine Baker. Her brother, a journalist, would describe her as ���the new woman of the awakened East.��� The Herald dubbed her and Madame Sun Yat-sen (wife of Chinese nationalist intellectual Sun Yat-sen) the ���two most prominent women in China.��� Despite her fascinating life and the impact of her performances and musicals, when Chen attempted to write a memoir, one publisher took interest in the people she���d enjoyed the company of but said it might be more interesting if she could provide ���new information or closer views of the famous persons you mention.��� The book apparently wasn���t that interesting because it was mainly about her.

In addition to meeting Robeson in Moscow, Chen also met Harlem poet Langston Hughes who visited the Soviet Union to film Black and White, a movie about race relations and labor disputes in the American south. They had a brief but passionate affair, regularly exchanging letters and poetry, which this book doesn���t overlook. She was like a ���delicate, flowerlike girl, beautiful in a reedy, golden-skinned sort of way��� Hughes said of Chen, ���Si-lan was the girl I was in love with that winter.��� Despite his insistence that she come to visit him in the US, Chen wasn���t convinced they could build a life together. ���We���d live together, maybe a day, a week, I go east and you go west��� she wrote to him, ���I guess we���d have a good time while together, I suppose that���s as much as one can demand from this life of ours.���

Chen encouraged Hughes to visit China, which he eventually did, heading to Shanghai in 1933. According to Professor Gao Yunxiang, he said it was ���incredible.��� The warm welcome he received surprised him despite the fact that he was warned against entering Chinese quarters of the city. ���I found the Chinese in Shanghai to be a very jolly people, much like colored folks at home,��� he wrote in his memoir. He wasn���t the only African-American in Shanghai at that point, as Black Jazz bands dominated the city���s clubs, which Hughes said had a ���weakness��� for African-American culture.

Following his brief but entertaining sojourn, he threw down the gauntlet, writing a poem which incited China against the West: ���Roar China, roar old lion of the east. Snort fire, yellow dragon of the Orient, tired at last of being bothered��� You know what you want! The only way to get it is to take it!��� This defiant solidarity was a common thread running through the art and activism of these personalities during their time in a China suffering because of its asymmetric relationship with Europe. They saw in China���s helplessness an echo of their own experiences as African-Americans in the US, and found a coterie of sympathetic Chinese counterparts with whom they could collaborate.

Du Bois and Hughes recognized and resented the presence of ���Jim Crow��� treatment against Chinese on their land. Chen noted with dismay how a people could be ���so brutally excluded from a part of their own country.��� They projected their own hopes onto China, encouraging it to break with its shackles and demonstrate the feebleness of the racial prejudices which had bound it to other colonized peoples by charting a path that they could follow.

In this interview conducted by Faisal Ali, Professor Yunxiang Gao speaks about her new book:

Faisal Ali

A reasonable amount has already been written about the connections between African Americans and China. What does your book aim to do differently?

Yunxiang Gao

Arise, Africa! Roar, China! reveals much earlier and widespread interaction between Chinese leftist figures and Black ones than the familiar alliance between Black radicals and Maoist China. It expands the scholarship on Sino���African American exchanges by illustrating how three African-American cultural giants, W. E. B. Du Bois, Paul Robeson, and Langston Hughes, were perceived, studied, and critiqued among the Chinese, and by introducing Liu Liangmo and Sylvia Si-lan Chen as significant new subjects in this discourse.

This book examines the intertwined lives of people usually perceived as inhabiting non-overlapping spaces. It is about individuals who strove, in their own ways, to create a politicized transpacific and enable global communication between African Americans and Chinese. While situating each of the five figures in a complex and shifting political context, this book formulates an account of the personal, artistic, cultural, and political networks they established. It illustrates their formative effects both on Chinese views of the Black diaspora and African-American views of China���s place in an emergent imaginary of anticolonial and racial liberation. Directly comparative works about the three famed African Americans are somewhat rare among current studies; discussions of individual Afro-Chinese relationships are even harder to find, and narratives of interactions between Chinese and African-American women are even scarcer.

Faisal Ali

What did these activists, intellectuals and artists see in China that attracted them to it?

Yunxiang Gao

Overall, solidarity of the colored world in their shared destiny of anti-racism and anti-colonialism attracted these figures��� attention to China. As a minority facing overwhelming, state imposed systematic racism and white supremacy, these black figures looked toward the similarly oppressed China for inspiration of resistance and strength.

These figures��� ties with leftist Chinese and China were built on a profound emotional and intellectual foundation. They shared faith in Sino-Afro racial, linguistic, philosophical, and artistic kinship. Hughes observed Chinese ���a very jolly people, much like colored folks at home;����� Du Bois lauded the Chinese as ���my physical cousins:���

That Sun which burned my fathers ebony,

Rolled your limbs in gold,

And made us both, cousins to the stars!

Both Du Bois and Robeson consistently articulated the linkage between African and Chinese civilizations and cited famous Chinese cultural giant, such as Confucius and Laozi, to argue for sophistication of African civilization, counter negative stereotypes associated with perceived African ���primitivism,��� and to debunk white supremacism.

Cultural kinship necessitated political alliance. By embracing China���s revolutions as vehicles for the social and economic uplift of nonwhites, these figures directly linked the struggles of African Americans and those of nationalist forces in China. The Communist victory in 1949 placed China as the pillar of colored peoples��� revolutionary struggle and model for millions to beat colonialism. Robeson romantically imagined that the colored world could view the rising China as a ���new star of the East . . . pointing the way out from imperialist enslavement to independence and equality. China has shown the way.��� During his epic China trip in 1959, Du Bois repeatedly proclaimed Chinese and African dignity and unity in the face of Western racism, colonialism, and capitalism. He predicted that the ���darker world��� would adopt socialism as ���the only answer to the color line,��� and that the status of African Americans would thereby be elevated.

Faisal Ali

What impressions did they gather during their trips in China of the country and its revolution?

Yunxiang Gao

These figures��� impression of China evolved within the shifting transpacific political and ideological landscape. When they traveled in the 1930s to semi-colonial China���facing a worsened national crisis stemming from Japanese military aggression���they inevitably noted China���s humiliation, frequently citing the clich�� story of abused rickshaw pullers as the symbol.

Yet, their focus and reactions varied. Back then, treating imperial Japan as hope of ���the darker world,��� Du Bois saw Chinese nationalists under the despised Chiang Kai-shek as ���Asian Uncle Toms,��� likening them to willing Black menials of white racism in the US. Du Bois witnessed a shocking racial incident in Shanghai in 1936. ���A little English boy of perhaps four years of age ordered three Chinese children out of his imperial way on the sidewalk on the Bund; and they meekly obeyed and walked in the gutter.��� It reminded him of Mississippi.

In contrast, witnessing Japan���s aggression during his 1932 trip to Shanghai, Hughes would pen the poem, Roar, China! and, although he never visited China, Robeson was acutely aware of China���s suffering, helping to globalize the future national anthem of the People���s Republic of China, Chee Lai.

Robeson���s wife Eslanda was among the first to receive the unprecedented state hospitality in the People���s Republic of China in 1949, followed by Du Bois and his wife Shirley Graham a decade later. Feeling honored and enlightened by what they saw, they served as enthusiastic messengers to the American public, lauding a happy, egalitarian, and prosperous socialist China ���rising over the entrails of dead empire,��� when official ties between the two nations were suspended.

State feminism particularly inspired the visitors to understand the new China as a strong nation inhabited by robust men and women. Testifying China���s industrial development, Du Bois recalled watching in astonishment as ���a crane which moved a hundred tons loomed above��� in ���one of the greatest steelworks of the world��� in Wuhan and commenting to his wife, ������My God, Shirley, look up there!��� Alone in the engine room sat a girl with ribbon braids, running the vast machine.��� All three visitors insisted that Chinese women were more liberated than their Black and white sisters. As Du Bois put it, ���the women of China are becoming free. They wear pants so that they can walk, climb and dig; and climb and dig they do. They are not dressed simply for sex indulgence or beauty parades. They occupy positions from ministers of state to locomotive engineers, lawyers, doctors, clerks, and laborers.���

The couple also witnessed and benefited from the People���s Republic of China���s (PRC) expanded African contacts, renewing their connection with Ghana by meeting its representatives to Beijing, who would, in turn, enable Du Bois���s long-delayed visit and eventual immigration to their country.

Faisal Ali

This book looks at the personal stories and relationships of these figures as much as the ideas they championed. Why was that important to you?

Yunxiang Gao

The personal stories and relationships of these figures are integrated with their ideas. Du Bois, Hughes and Robeson all had expansive ideological and artistic visions before they encountered Chinese and China. Yet, those contacts powerfully shaped their philosophical and personal perceptions of life and the future. For W.E.B and Shirley Graham, the trips to China and comments on China and Asia within the context of race, colonialism, capitalism, and socialism or communism enlarged the story of their lives and thought. Du Bois��� famous dictum that the question of the 20th century is that of the color line is incomplete without the Chinese perspective and the crucial class dimension.

For Robeson, China became a joyful expansion of his left views. His long-term alliance with the leftist Chinese artists who sojourned abroad, including Liu Liangmo and ���the King of Peking Opera,��� Mei Langfang, led to his eventual embrace of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and the PRC, which promoted him to the unprecedented status of a heroic model for China���s socialist citizens.

The wandering Hughes found comfort and celebration in the Soviet Union and China. He shared with Du Bois and Robeson a renewed leftist political commitment, along with material for his writing. Hughes���s romance with Sylvia Si-lan Chen was impacted by the shift of his ideology, peaked as fellow self-claimed revolutionaries in Moscow and ebbed with his withdrawal from radicalism.

Faisal Ali

Why did China court African-American artists and political figures, how successful and what did it hope to gain?

Yunxiang Gao

The Chinese intelligentsia had long connected���through literature and drama���the shared ���enslavement��� of the Chinese nation as a semi colony and that of African Americans. In the introduction to their 1901 translation of Harriet Beecher Stowe���s Uncle Tom���s Cabin (1852), Lin Shu and Wei Yi argued that the tortures ���yellow��� people faced were even worse than those endured by Black Americans. Chinese people needed the book because ���slavery is looming for our race. We had to yell and scream to wake up the public.”

However, the Chinese state did not always court the friendship of African-American figures. To the contrary, the mainstream media in the Republic of China (1911-1949) barely covered Black celebrities. While it made an exception for Robeson, due to his global fame, his singing and acting ultimately put him in the denigrated category of musicians and entertainers, where the ���primitive��� stereotype was reinforced and celebrated. Robeson���s enthusiasm for Chinese civilization, his friendship with leftist Chinese cultural and political celebrities, and his activism on behalf of China���s resistance failed to earn him respectability and recognition from conservative Chinese.

The Sino-Afro alliance was underlined by their shared leftist intellectual and artistic tradition, as illustrated by Robeson���s collaboration and friendship with leftist Chinese sojourners and Hughes���s embrace by Shanghai���s leftist cultural circle as the ���first established Black revolutionary writer,��� who had been ���howling and struggling for the oppressed races.��� Such leftist legacy portraying African-American figures as the true revolutionaries facilitated the PRC embrace of them as heroes and models who supported the CCP during China���s civil war and Korean War.

By the late 1950s, the PRC had immediate reasons to welcome public support from the African-American cultural giants. The disastrous Great Leap Forward called into question the CCP���s leadership and policies for the first time since 1949. The CCP needed a new domestic perspective to reinvigorate the revolution and socialize the nation. In addition, it required new diplomatic defenders and tactics as it contested Soviet dominance of world communism and aspired to leadership of the Third World that bound the destinies of China with former agricultural colonies in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. The CCP was already reaching out to Africa for friendship, but newly independent African states met Chinese overtures with caution and reserve. The stature of these African-American figures among the African diaspora helped open doors for alliances there. Du Bois��� preeminent reputation and endorsement particularly meant a great deal. China���s outreach to Africa through diplomatic exchanges, aid, and propaganda soon peaked following his 1959 visit. For diplomatic and economic reasons, China continued to maintain a large presence in Africa, which the W.E.B Du Bois and Shirley Graham helped to foster.

Faisal Ali

How was the relationship between these figures and Communist China received by the American establishment?

Yunxiang Gao

The American establishment reacted with hostility and has never fully reckoned with such an alliance. While Hughes���s radical writings, inspired by his journey to the Soviet Union and China, earned him great reputation across the Pacific throughout the 20th century, they won little support in the US. Carl van Vechten and Blanche Knopf, two key figures in Hughes���s publishing career, strongly disapproved of his new style.

Most significantly, the US State Department canceled the passports of both Du Bois and his wife, as well as Robeson, preventing them from visiting China. Robeson continued accepting invitations from China, even though there was little hope that he could attend, in order to keep his passport issue alive. The CCP repeatedly expressed outrage over the US government���s treatment of Du Bois and Robeson, viewing this denial�� as a violation of the freedom of travel and communication guaranteed in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

After the Supreme Court of the US ruled that the State Department lacked the authority to deny passports to citizens who refused to sign the affidavit that they were not communists, the Du Bois, Graham and Robeson immediately secured their new passports. Yet, these precious documents were ���not valid for travel to or in�� communist controlled portions of China[,] Korea [and] Viet-Nam[,] or to or in areas of Albania [and] Hungary.���

But Du Bois felt that he would like to revisit China ���because it is a land of colored people.��� Thus, ���this risk [of being jailed for ���trading with the enemy���] I thought it my duty to take.��� When the Du Bois and Graham arrived in China in 1959, border officials asked if they wanted to keep the visit quiet to avoid irritating the State Department. Du Bois defiantly responded that his wife and he were honored to be invited to China and that the officials could let the whole world know. While his words received rapid and universal approval in China, the New York Times commented that Du Bois had no authorization to be there. The FBI took note and prepared to cancel the couple���s passports upon their return to the US. The couple���s home at 31 Grace Court in Brooklyn was ransacked for incriminating evidence. During Robeson���s transition through Budapest, the State Department considered invalidating his hard-won passport, pending whether his intended visit to China materialized, which deterred Robeson from heading there.

Not surprisingly, Du Bois expressed profound appreciation of the ���universal goodwill and love, such as we never expected,��� that he and his wife had received in the PRC, in contrast to the ���insult and discrimination on account of our race and color��� that ���all our lives have been liable to.���

New world disorder

The world has changed significantly since the 2008 financial crisis. But the roots of today���s disorder, stretch further back than we think. This week on the AIAC Podcast, we discuss. Photo by Chris LeBoutillier on Unsplash

Will is joined by Helen Thompson, Professor of Political Economy at Cambridge University, to discuss her latest book, Disorder, Hard Times in the 21st Century (OUP, 2022). Since the 2008 financial crisis, many analysts have scratched their heads to make sense of the crisis of liberal democracies, the decline of neoliberal hegemony, and the emerging multipolar world where the West���s dominance is challenged by China and Russia. Professor Thompson argues that a key factor driving these interlocking geopolitical, economic and political crises, are the predicaments around energy���how it is produced, distributed, and consumed. As the climate crisis makes structural change an existential necessity, how much of the coming world will change, and how much of it, will stay the same���especially, for the global South, which is rich in clean earth metals, the energy resource of a green future?

Listen to the show below, and subscribe via your favorite platform.

https://podcasts.captivate.fm/media/7d8c38c9-9747-4e37-80aa-8992374257c1/New-20World-20Disorder-20ft-20Helen-20Thompson-converted.mp3

Rushing to boycott

The cultural boycott of Russia turns to the flawed precedent of apartheid South Africa for inspiration, while ignoring the much more carefully considered boycott of official Israeli culture by the BDS Movement. ��mer Y��ld��z, via Unsplash.

Cultural boycotts have increasingly been in the news over the past few months, as cultural institutions in more Western countries have enforced boycotts against Russian artists and sportspeople. Such cultural boycotts can be psychologically devastating, especially for a country such as Russia that prides itself on its artistic and sporting achievements. For many decades, the Russian government has used culture and sports as forms of soft power to build ���brand Russia��� abroad.

The cultural boycott of Russia has become increasingly necessary as the administration of Vladimir Putin threatens to drag the world into an abyss of protracted war. After all, there is an historical precedent for a successful cultural boycott, offered by South Africa. The country���s isolation from global arts and sports was extremely successful because it had a huge psychological impact on white South Africa. The boycott communicated the message that apartheid was abnormal and that the regime was a pariah in the eyes of the international community.

However, cultural institutions today risk delegitimizing the boycott as a means of applying pressure on the Putin regime. This is because the criteria these institutions are using to apply it are arbitrary, confusing, and even contradictory. Some heads of institutions have taken decisions to boycott artists due to closeness to Putin or failure on the part of the artist to denounce the invasion of Ukraine. The Glasgow Film Festival, meanwhile, excluded two Russian films based on their funding links to government officials. This occurred even though the filmmakers had denounced the invasion. One of the filmmakers even argued that it was practically impossible to make Russian films without financial backing from the government. Other decisions smack of Russophobia, with artists being boycotted purely because they are Russian.

It is ironic that supporters of the boycott against Russia have looked to the cultural boycott of apartheid South Africa as inspiration when it, too, was deeply flawed in its execution. In the global clamor to isolate Russia, a cultural boycott that has been far more carefully thought through has barely registered as a source of wisdom. That is the boycott of Israeli official culture.

The cultural boycott developed by the Palestinian Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) campaign is a model of clarity compared to the South African boycott. But as Western governments have rejected the isolation campaign against Israeli institutions as anti-Semitic and have even criminalized it as hate speech, they have done themselves no favors, instead vilifying the very boycott that could be a source of guidance now.

The cultural boycott of apartheid South Africa started out as a blanket boycott. In other words, no artists were allowed into or out of the country. Artists from among the oppressed and exploited increasingly experienced this blanket boycott as counterproductive double censorship; in it, the oppressor and the oppressed alike were being boycotted. This position was unsustainable and correctly began to change in the 1980s.

Liberation and solidarity movements argued for a selective boycott instead, in which any South African artists traveling abroad needed to consult with the national liberation movement about whether their art qualified as progressive culture. To enforce this boycott, the African National Congress (ANC) in exile and the United Democratic Front (UDF) inside the country set up cultural desks that organized artists into formations aligned to them. These formations involved decisions about who would be considered representative of progressive culture and whether they could travel or not.

But the problem was that not all artists who came from among the oppressed agreed with asking the UDF and ANC for permission to travel, especially those who came from black consciousness or pan-Africanist traditions. They felt that the ANC and UDF were using the cultural boycott to declare themselves sole and authentic representatives of the oppressed. Other artists wanted to remain independent from any political formation, as they did not want to become subservient to politicians who sat in judgment about what qualified as progressive culture.

This sectarianism extended to the British Anti-Apartheid Movement (AAM), which insisted that artists seek permission from them, the UDF, and the ANC to travel. In one case, a black theater group touring a strongly anti-apartheid play was denied venues in Labour Party-controlled areas because they had not been ���cleared��� by the AAM. In an interview I conducted at the time, the theater director described this treatment as ���petty and ill-informed��� and as ���an affront to the fact of our struggle.���

The Palestinian cultural boycott avoids the dangerous trap the South African boycott fell into. There can be little doubt that a selective cultural boycott is preferable to a blanket boycott. In the case of Russia, artists who choose not to promote ���brand Russia��� abroad���possibly at great cost to themselves and their art���should be heard. But the confounding question is, who decides who should be heard?

The BDS movement has solved that problem. Their Guidelines for the International Cultural Boycott of Israel are so clear that there is no need for Palestinian political organizations to sit in judgment over which Israeli artists are considered acceptable enough to tour. In fact, the BDS movement set out to create guidelines that were as unambiguous, consistent, and coherent as possible. This means that the boycottable cases select themselves.

Many of the BDS movement���s nuances were absent in the South African cultural boycott. For instance, BDS avoids making judgments about the content of artworks, including their political messages or lack thereof. The boycott is institutional rather than individual: it targets the institutions that promote the Israeli state and its normalization. In fact, the guidelines argue against artists being targeted due to their nationality or religion in order to counter accusations of the boycott being anti-Semitic.

The BDS movement does not even call for a boycott of Israeli artists purely because they have received state funding. Only if the funding comes with strings attached���such as requiring the artist to promote Israeli state policies abroad���do they consider these artistic events or products to be boycottable. If official Israeli institutions sponsor the artists to promote the branding of Israel as a normal society, then those artists, too, would be boycottable.

By focusing on institutional and branding links, the BDS boycott steers away from decision-making based on what individual artists or their artworks do or don���t think or say. This precedent is important for the boycott against Russia, where artists may now be jailed for opposing the invasion of Ukraine or denouncing the Putin regime.

Had the supporters of the Russian boycott applied similar principles in making decisions about what and who to boycott, they may well have made different decisions.

However, the BDS guidelines acknowledge that they cannot cover all situations that may arise. In fact, they recognize the possibility of what they call ���commonsense boycotts.��� These are instances���not catered to by existing guidelines���where Israeli artists may be boycotted if their conduct is so clearly supportive of the occupation that it cannot be ignored. In the case of Russia, such an approach could apply to an artist who loudly and unapologetically supports the invasion.

The double standards in how global and Western sporting and cultural institutions have leapt to boycott Russia while refusing to boycott Israeli institutions have been pointed out already, and correctly so.

However, if these very institutions had taken the BDS boycott seriously as a learning moment���instead of rushing to the South African example uncritically���then perhaps they wouldn���t be falling into the ill-considered, individualized, and even xenophobic traps that they are. Cherry-picking struggles against oppression and the lesson they offer will not make the world safer, freer, or more just.

Where is black feminism?

The first book collection dedicated to contemporary Black South African feminist perspectives has seen the light. One of the editors breaks down the content. Wits Student during Protest. Image credit Nicholas Rawhani ��.

What should a postapartheid black feminism look like? Gabeba Baderoon and Desiree Lewis, editors of the new book, Surfacing: On being black and feminist in South Africa, have been at the heart of academic debates about this and related questions for at least the last two decades, so they would have an idea. To mark the book���s appearance, I interviewed Lewis about some of the debates swirling around black feminism in South Africa.

One of the main quarrels of the book is with global black feminism; its insularity and limited focus. As Baderoon and Lewis write in the introduction, ���… our students often cite African American theorists and, less often, the Caribbean and West African scholars, but very rarely southern African ones ������ At some level, this may have to do with the political economy of publishing, social media and celebrity culture, but it may also have something to do with the disappointment that younger, black feminists have with the ruling ANC, its Women���s League, the transition as well as with previous generations of feminists. But the young feminists, whose politics found concrete expression in Rhodes Must Fall (RMF) and Fees Must Fall (FMF) in the mid-to-late 2010s, may also be reacting to a perceived sense that their elders haven���t produced enough theory or activism to help them make sense of and challenge the new. To the credit of Baderoon, Lewis and contributors, some of the difficult generational debates and divides are taken on, and new ones introduced. For example, they insist on a dynamic definition of black that connects them with the Black Consciousness Movement of the early 1970s as well as the RMF and FMF activists. The same energy is present in how they include contributors from elsewhere on the continent who live and work in South Africa. Some highlights include an interview by Lewis with Zoe Wicomb, arguably one of South Africa���s finest novelists and literary theorists. Other contributors write about how their most significant influences are white feminists���Gertrude Fester writes about being influenced by Sally Gross, and Sa���diyaa Shaikh by Denise Ackermann���suggesting possibilities for meaningful collaborations between black and white feminists in South and Southern Africa.

This book covers a lot,�� and should be celebrated for being the first collection dedicated to contemporary Black South African feminist perspectives. However, I was looking for contributions that relate to questions animating blogs and social media. What do the editors and contributors make of popular figures such as Chimamanda Adichie (mentioned in passing in the introduction), who now occupies a lot of space (often controversially) in mainstream feminist discourses for her commentary on African and Black feminism, including trans identities? Even more striking, the book is silent on class politics or how black feminism relates to postcolonial, mainly state-led nationalist projects in the region. For example, where would Myrtle Witbooi of the South African Domestic Service and Allied Workers Union, Women on Farms, the working class women in places like Manenberg profiled by the late Elaine Salo, or those women who left the ANC Women���s League for the EFF, feature in all this? Where do they fit into new conceptions and applications of black feminism? How do aspirations of black South African feminism relate to existing social movements? The interview was conducted over email.

Sean Jacobs

Firstly, belated congratulations on the publication of the book. Let���s start by briefly telling me about the genesis of the project. How did it come together?

Desiree Lewis

This needs responses at different levels. The idea of a book about feminism from the perspective of black women resulted from three of us being strategically positioned���at different points���in writing/ publishing worlds: Gabeba [Baderoon] as a poet and academic, myself as an academic with various other writer-editing interests, and Roshan Cader as a commissioning editor at Wits University Press. I���d been thinking about a collection of my own essays on feminism, intersectionality and assemblage, and discussed this with Roshan from the end of 2014. With the explosion of black feminist thought in public debate and especially among students in the context of the Fees Must Fall (FMF) Movement (from 2015), Gabeba, then a research fellow at the Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Studies (STIAS), began a conversation with Roshan about the value of a black feminist collection. Roshan felt that this would be politically important and commercially viable. The outcome was our meeting and committing ourselves to a collection at STIAS. The STIAS is in many ways a bizarre space to think about this particular book���s conceptualizing. But it���s also possibly symbolic (if one wishes to be optimistic about ���storming a bastion of hegemonic knowledge production���) or dismally prophetic (if one is being cynical about centers appropriating margins).

A second and hugely important level��had to do with the timing of work on the book. A first conceptualizing meeting took place in the wake of the start of the FMF movement when young black South African feminists were speaking out extremely bravely about misogyny and homophobia within FMF and anti-racist movements generally. The wide circulation of their views���especially through social media, images and the mass media meant that black feminist thought was dramatically thrust into the public domain. One aim of the book was to demonstrate how black feminist politics and thought energized (and didn���t simply ���add on��� to) critical race theory, decoloniality and anti-racist politics. Another was to participate in the discussions, arguments and interventions among young black feminists at the time. And to signal that�� black feminist thought has a long legacy in South Africa. What could be called the editors��� generation may seem like ���a first.��� because we went to university around the time of South Africa���s transition to democracy and wrote and circulated our thoughts in almost ���mainstream��� ways. But, as I hope the collection indicates, Gabeba and I wrote and grew in the wake of generations of southern African feminist thinkers and activists before.

As radical teachers and women who are active in worlds of knowledge-making, the two editors felt it was important to archive certain voices between the covers of a book, and the challenge of course was where to draw the line. The collection probably contains twice as many contributions as what we initially envisaged and discussed with the publisher.

At yet another level, South African publishers have tended to focus on black women���s fictional and autobiographical writing, or on poetry. This tends to be symptomatic of a publishing and reading/marketing stereotype about black women in the public sphere being ���interesting��� mainly as entertainers, storytellers, or so-called ���creatives,��� rather than as knowledge-makers and critical thinkers with writing to offer a broad audience. One aim of the collection was to collapse the usual distinction between fiction/autobiography and non-fiction, to focus on the collection as being ���knowledge,��� and to be provocative about which forms of knowledge are considered to be authoritative. Hence the choice of the personal essay, whose force the introduction discusses.

Sean Jacobs

Who were some of your own early influences among black South and southern African feminists?

Desiree Lewis

First and foremost, Patricia McFadden. And in relation to that, several Zimbabwean-based feminists including Rudo Gaidzanwa and Ruth Meena (who were very immersed in the hub of black southern African intellectual activism based in Harare, especially in the 1980ss). The radical focus of intellectual activist work at Southern African Political Economic Series (SAPES) in Zimbabwe was actually huge for me, and of course the radical women especially so because they were speaking about what many of the admired male scholars were, while also flagging attention to gendered dynamics. Ultimately their takes on, for example, postcolonial nationalism were for me much richer than those of Ibbo Mandaza, Sam Moyo, or Brian Roftopolous, for example. Second,�� my peers. A number of black feminists were starting to publish in the mid-1990s, so people I studied with or connected with socially and in groups (for example, Yvette Abrahams started an important collective in the 1990s called the ���women of colour consciousness raising group���) included Elaine Salo, Gabeba of course, Pumla Gqola, Zimitri Erasmus, Zine Magubane, Mary Hames (who has a chapter in the book), and many others. All of us were grappling with our positionality relative to white-centric academia and masculinism.

But another important influence for me, and I suspect for very many other young and older South African feminists, were fiction writers, especially Bessie Head, Yvonne Vera and Zoe Wicomb, among others. What was remarkable was their attentiveness to so many levels of social and psychic experience. Theoretical frames require us to categorize power quite technically to explain it, hence our use of stolid terms like ���intersectionality���. Writers like Head, Vera or Wicomb (who I interview in ���Surfacing���) plumb depths of racialized and gendered human experience in ways that defy clinical categorization, and that are so much richer. African-American feminists, because they have been hypervisible, were definitely an influence, as is the case for many young feminists today. Retrospectively I realize I leaned on them mainly as sources of authority, because African-American feminists had more conventional ���clout,��� and not necessarily because they were as useful to what I was trying to explore as, say Patricia McFadden or Bessie Head.

Image credit Barry Christianson ��. Sean Jacobs

One of the main quarrels of the book is with global black feminism, meaning ��African-American feminism; its insularity and limited focus. The introduction is very frank about this, but it appears less frequently in the chapters. Can you say more about this?

Desiree Lewis

Mmmmm. I hope the ���quarrel��� as you put it doesn���t seem like an incidental or contrived intervention of the book. The various chapters make the case implicitly since it���d be pointless for each individual essayists to invoke the problems of hegemony in global black feminism; they speak to and about their locations in colonial legacies and global knowledge economies against the backdrop���so to speak���of the authority of certain strands of black feminism. The introduction establishes why the need for a regional geopolitical focus is important in the identification and appreciation of positioned knowledge. What���s often understood as global or diasporic black feminism has drowned out certain voices, not only South African (though the case is made about this). But also, for example, black British writers. I started reading the work of the black British feminist Gail Lewis only after meeting her at a conference somewhere fairly recently, and found (still find) her wide-ranging work extraordinary, especially because of its connection to activism. (Much black South African feminism bears similar evidence of connectedness to activism). The introduction���s point about black American feminism isn���t that it���s set out to be insular or dominant of course, but that it has become so because of the weird operation of the global knowledge economy, which elevates what is Euro-American, and mainly North American. It irks me terribly when certain black American feminists are incessantly quoted for saying something that southern African feminists may have said in much more compelling or relevant ways. The essays certainly don���t talk about this, because the introduction frames the essays. But they do implicitly demonstrate that, for example, intersectionality (that word again!), for example, can be thought about differently and in ways that resonate for many readers in southern Africa compared to North America. What I do hope that readers of the book recognize is the distinctiveness of voices that are attentive to race and gender, and also the politics of region and standpoint epistemologies.

Sean Jacobs

Let���s talk about the politics of definitions. In the introduction, you write that by Black South African you mean those who identify as black and that yours is a dynamic definition. This connects you to the Black Consciousness Movement dating back to the early 1970s and more recently to Rhodes Must Fall and Fees Must Fall activists.�� But at the same time, we also know that there is no consensus among those student activists about these definitions; that in some instances coloured and Indian South Africans and even black people from elsewhere on the continent are excluded from it; this also points to concerns about inequalities within these social movements. So your definition of black rubs up against a more restricted or exclusive definition of black that only includes South Africans who were classified as ���African��� under apartheid. Some who identify as ���Khoisan��� also resist being included in these blanket categories. Can you comment on these tensions?

Desiree Lewis

Mmmm. An ongoing South African story. To start off with, the inclusive Black Consciousness definition of black is shared by the editors, and determined our approach in finding and selecting writers. It may not be shared with all the contributors, but I think it is with most. As editors, we wanted to develop a collection that countered the sorts of claims to identity that ultimately mirror South Africa���s colonial and apartheid era chauvinism, prejudice, and hatred. The book seeks to draw together writers who have neglected but radical ideas about South African experiences and senses of self. And this meant they shared experiences of being othered in gendered and racial terms. We didn���t want it to mean a shared or collective effort to claim or celebrate any essentialized identification���whether gendered, racialized, national, or ethnicicized. The claims to identification that you refer to are, of course, very real for many South Africans, in recent social movements as they have been in the past. We hope that readers of the book will value or at least find meaningful and important the senses of being black (the use of the present continuous was meant to signal identification, rather than a fixed identity). This would be a very different response from trawling the book in desperate search of an expression of identity that a reader wishes to claim for various political or existential reasons���and only when this is found deem the book satisfying. In this sense, we could be said to have deliberately excluded writing that insisted on, for example, celebrating being coloured, or affirming the significance of entitlement to South African citizenship and belonging by virtue of birth or national origin. What we call South African culture and writing is profoundly affected by regional and continental figures and trends.

Sean Jacobs

Similarly, there are people who would contest how you define national belonging. Why do you think that an expansive definition of South Africanness is so elusive among South Africans, including among its scholars?

Desiree Lewis

South African society thrives (and has always thrived) politically, economically, and culturally because of the flow of ideas, bodies and things across arbitrary borders created by colonialism. Many of the contributors to the book would���to some���not be South African. But they belong to this place in many ways; they have invested their intellectual excellence, their creativity, their passions in people, places and activities in this country and have been inspired by and inspire these. It is hard to understand how many South Africans truly believe that ���the rest of Africa��� has nothing to offer, which is a sad and tragic colonial legacy at the heart of many South Africans��� sense of exceptionalism; Stuart Hall���s ironic use of ���the west and the rest��� is very real in the fixation among South Africans with ���us��� and ���Africa���. It was encouraging that a sense of South Africa���s inextricable connectedness to the rest of the continent surfaced at moments in the FMF struggle. But the curiosity about and interest in African politics, literature, and academic knowledge still hasn���t really taken off, whether among students or established scholars. Clearly a groundswell of feeling around this�� ���among an intellectual elite and people in general���has not begun to go far enough, as we see in the recent spate of politically orchestrated and rationalized attacks by South Africans on black African foreigners in the form of the social media campaign, Operation Dudula. Not, of course, on white ���foreigners.���

Soccer capitalism

Soccer academies in Africa sprang from European club interventions with varied success, but, as examples in Ghana prove, they can be sites of local, entrepreneurial spirit. Photo by Enoch Appiah Jr. on Unsplash

Soccer academies are springing up across Africa with remarkable speed, evidence of the immense popularity of the sport and the many aspirations it arouses. These academies���institutions that at their core combine a sportive and an educational system���first arrived in Africa from Europe in the late 1990s, following three interrelated processes: (1) the mistreatment by unscrupulous agents of young African players who migrated to Europe; (2) the Bosman ruling of 1995 that further increased the migration of African players to Europe; and (3) the introduction of new transfer regulations by FIFA in 2001 that aimed at curbing the abuse of young migrant players by making it harder for clubs to sign players under the age of 18.

As a result of the new regulations, European clubs began to seek alternative ways of securing the services of young talented players from Africa. Soccer academies provided them with an effective solution. European clubs began establishing academies throughout the continent, nurturing young players with the expectation that, once they reached the age of 18, they would automatically be eligible for transfer to Europe. Gradually, not only European-funded academies but also African-owned ones began forming across the continent, hoping to benefit from the globalized and commercialized world of soccer.

Since the founding of the first of these academies, scholars and journalists have sought to uncover their impact primarily through the prism of migration. On the positive side, academies have been seen as a springboard to migration to Europe where players can earn improved salaries that contribute to their upward social mobility. Such migrations can also create ripple effects as the players send remittances to their home communities. On the negative side, academies have been identified as reproducing neocolonial relations in which the Global North profits from the underdevelopment of the Global South. By exporting Africa���s talents abroad, academies are seen to be contributing to Africa���s muscle drain. Many Africans who migrate with the hope of finding a club, sign exploitative contracts or fail to make the grade. They feel reluctant to return home and face the humiliation that they expect their failure might bring to their local communities.

The focus in academia and media on aspects of migration is illuminating, and contributes important insights on the potentials and pitfalls of the academy system in Africa. Nevertheless, such a focus also marginalizes academies that have fewer international links, namely, African-owned academies, thus limiting our understanding of the impact different types of academies have. Furthermore, the emphasis on the player���s transfer from a local setting (academies) to a global one (leagues and markets) overlooks the roles that academies play locally. If we are to understand the roles these institutions play in their communities, it is critical to look beyond the focal point of migration and observe the local entrepreneurs who establish academies, the young women and men who play there, their parents, and people surrounding the academies, such as teachers, spectators, and vendors. An examination of soccer academies established by Ghanaians, rather than by Europeans or through European-Ghanaian cooperation, reveals the diverse ways in which Ghanaians create new paths for improving their lives through soccer, as well as the lives of those in their adjacent communities. Whereas Ghanaian soccer academies at times promote nefarious practices or raise unattainable expectations, they can also be seen as engines for local development in various areas. Such academies can provide educational opportunities, empower youth, advance the participation of young women, promote public health, serve as a source of pride and identification for local fans, be a source for mutual help, and provide gathering and entertainment spaces free of charge.

For example, Unistar Soccer Academy provides sustainable development to its local community in the towns of Kasoa-Ofaakor. Ernest Kufuor, a chartered accountant by profession, formed the academy primarily as a way of exploiting the economic potential of soccer and to provide children with access to education to better their lives. Unistar has been successful in kick-starting the careers of dozens of professional players, employing local workers, inspiring a local fandom culture, and transforming an unused plot of land into an ample communal park. However, where Unistar falls short is on academic performance. Most children ignore the reality that most do not end up achieving a professional contract by neglecting their schooling obligations.

Shifting the focus from European-owned to African-owned academies can challenge not only the predominance of the former in scholarship and media, but also the notion that a successful academy should be judged only by the number of players it produces (that is, the players who migrate to Europe and earn a living there as soccer players). Success can be achieved in various ways, both on and off the pitch, and these benefits are not limited to the wealth and knowledge of Europeans. Europeans might have brought the academy system to Africa, but many of these institutions have also developed according to local circumstances, needs, and resources.

Sanitizing the Kenyattas

Why are Kenya's ruling family trying to reinvent themselves as friends of Mau Mau so many years later? Image credit Jnncreatives via Wikimedia Commons CC BY-SA 4.0.

In a bid to rehabilitate their image, the Kenyatta family is seeking to insert itself into Mau Mau history by claiming that Mama Ngina, the president’s mother and daughter of a loyalist chief, fought “in the forest” and was jailed with the only surviving female field marshal: Muthoni Kirima. By inventing fables of the Kenyatta’s involvement in the Mau Mau, Mama Ngina, the “self-styled mother of the nation,” recently shaved off Field Marshall Muthoni Kirima’s 70 year old dreadlocks, which she had been growing until Kenya gained real independence. While a possible entreaty to a nation who from recent surveys appears only too glad to see her son leave office after the August elections, this most recent grasp for freedom fighter status’ has failed to sanitize histories of oppression for which the Kenyatta’s are well known. The following article is a part of our series of reposts from The Elephant. It is curated by editorial board member and author of this post, Wangui Kimari.

The Kenyatta family is trying to falsely reinsert itself into Mau Mau history, and thereby bask in its legacy, with ahistorical claims that both Jomo and his widow Mama Ngina fought in the forests. Mama Ngina is seen shaving the dreadlocks of a nonogenarian former forest fighter, while curiously adorned in Maasai dress. What can it all mean?

The reality is that Jomo Kenyatta was never in Mau Mau, let alone spent any time in the forests. He spent much of his life post-1951 (the year Mau Mau began, although its seeds were planted earlier) railing against Mau Mau, which he called a ���disease.��� It is highly unlikely that Mama Ngina, who married him in 1951, was a forest fighter either. This story asks, why are the Kenyattas trying to reinvent themselves as friends of Mau Mau so many years later? The historical legacy of Kenya���s first family is at stake ���

���We fought for our children���s sake,��� declared Mama Ngina after shaving the long dreadlocks of 92-year-old former Mau Mau fighter Mary Muthoni wa Kirima at her home near Nyeri. In a bizarre ceremony organized by the women���s wing of the Kikuyu Council of Elders, the former First Lady wore Maasai-style clothing and adornment. Mama Ngina wrapped the 70-year-old dreads in the Kenyan flag and placed them in a traditional kiondo basket, saying they would be stored at the national museum.

But who exactly fought the colonialists? Not Jomo Kenyatta, nor Mama Ngina���not in the literal sense. Yet the Nation���s version of this story went on to claim that Ngina had been Muthoni���s ���friend during their stay in the forest and jail term at Kamiti Prison.��� Given that Mau Mau only began officially in 1951, the year Mama Ngina became Jomo���s fourth wife, it is highly unlikely that the new bride spent the early 1950s in the forests fighting alongside the people he so despised. The Kamiti story has surfaced before, but no evidence has ever been provided.

Let us remind ourselves what Jomo Kenyatta���s stance on Mau Mau was. ���Mau Mau was a disease which had been eradicated, and must never be remembered again,��� he declared in a public speech at Githunguri in 1962. This heralded the start of a period of suppression of public memory of the Mau Mau movement. Mau Mau was banned by Kenyatta, and remained banned under his successor, Daniel arap Moi. As Hughes has written before: ���National unity was to be achieved at all costs, with history the bloodless casualty.��� The Kenyatta regime maintained a ���deafening silence about Mau Mau,��� according to historian David Anderson. This was interspersed at times with limited recognition of Mau Mau veterans, when it suited Kenyatta politically. This selective ���forgetting��� has led to the apparent confusion and ambivalence many Kenyans feel about Kenyatta���s legacy. How can a man who denied leading or even endorsing Mau Mau, which is widely seen as having brought about uhuru, be regarded as the person who led Kenya to independence? The two things do not hang together. Kenyatta also sharply told poor landless veterans that they shouldn���t expect anything for free, when they asked, after independence, for land and other rewards for their sacrifice. Veterans have been crying ever since.

One of Hughes���s best research informants was the late Paul Thuku Njembui. He fought in the forests, spent seven years in British detention camps, and claimed to have sheltered Dedan Kimathi for a while in his home at Karima Forest, Othaya. If anyone knew what Kenyatta did in the war, it was men like Thuku. He was adamant on that point:

I want you to pay attention. Kenyatta was not a Mau Mau. Who could have become the first president of Kenya? Is it Kenyatta or Kimathi? Kimathi continued fighting for freedom up to the end of his life, but Kenyatta surrendered���he betrayed his people, even though he became president. If Kenyatta was a forest fighter, or had he been, he could have helped the forest fighters thereafter. But he did not. The colonial government of course declared Mau Mau an illegal movement and Kenyatta remained with the same idea that Mau Mau was illegal. So did Moi.

He also believed that Kenyatta told the British to execute Kimathi: ���Kenyatta was there to say, ���Kill Kimathi! Let him die!��� Because he knew that he would [otherwise] have no chance of being president.��� In other words, Thuku alleged that British officials consulted Kenyatta about this. That is highly unlikely, if not impossible.

A leading historian of Kenya, who asks to remain anonymous, had this to say:

Mama Ngina is clearly trying to write herself into heroic history. A senior chief���s daughter, she was more likely to have been under Home Guard protection than in the forest. Nor can she ever have been in Kamiti. Some of Jomo���s children were lodged with Nairobi���s Etonian grocer, Derek Erskine, for quite some time during the Emergency. Mama Ngina was certainly with Jomo during his period of detention at Lodwar and then Maralal, after his jail term had expired. How else was Uhuru conceived? I remember one Kenyan friend [another leading historian] saying how important it was politically for Jomo to have proved himself still sexually potent before taking on political power.

On checking with other historians, they too have not found any evidence that Mama Ngina was in the forest in the 1950s. If she had been, why have we not heard anything about it until now?

It is not clear from the press coverage whether the journalists concocted these claims, or whether they reported what Mama Ngina had told them. Either way, it is a very strange concoction, since the claims can be so easily dismissed by historians who have researched this period.

The symbolism of the imagery is easy to decode. Mama Ngina is wearing an elaborate white mantle, similar to that worn by important elders or (in another culture) royalty. In her hair sits a tiara or Kenyan-style crown. It is Maasai in derivation, but branded with the Kenyan flag. Hughes, who has long researched Maasai culture and history, has never seen this style, with a vertical piece standing up over the forehead, worn by older women, only little girls, so that is odd in itself. This story began by describing her dress as ���Maasai style��� because it is not authentic. Red dresses and shirts to which tiny metal mirrors are sewn (are they not Indian in origin?) have only become popular among Maasai in the past 10 to 20 years or so; they didn���t wear such clothing, or even much beadwork, in the not-so-distant past. As a former First Lady she is effectively conferring an ennoblement, or blessing, on a rather bewildered-looking Muthoni.

From a cultural heritage perspective, the ceremony is a cultural invention, masquerading as traditional, though Kikuyu co-wives and friends did traditionally shave each other���s heads. In a rite of passage not dissimilar in some ways to FGM/C (female genital mutilation/cutting), and the shaving of Maasai warriors��� dreads by their mothers when they graduate to junior elderhood, the self-styled Mother of the Nation has cut and removed a precious part of the body which symbolizes a past state of being. The only problem is: this past has nothing to do with her. Thereby, through false pretenses, she has appropriated Mau Mau-ness and its legacy for present political purposes. In so doing, she has attempted to weld Mau Mau to the Kenyattas, when in fact they have always had a deeply troubled relationship.

It is tragic that Muthoni may well not know, or remember, the history of the strained relationship between Kenyatta and Mau Mau, and could not object to being used in this way by such a powerful figure. However, others insist she knew what she was doing, and specifically asked for Mama Ngina to shave her.

Kenya���s first First Lady has always kept an extremely polite low profile. This is not to say that Mama Ngina has been inert, especially where serious, if not controversial, business interests and deals are concerned. Her extensive commercial pursuits are well known, and some have brought her the wrong kind of attention. Now, in a ���reunion��� hosted by the women���s wing of the Kikuyu Council of Elders during which she cut off Field Marshal Muthoni wa Kirima���s hair���and where it was reported that the two women had ���buried old differences and together, passed on the baton to the new generation of economic freedom fighters and peace crusaders������Mama Ngina has stepped back into the limelight, and into more public controversy.

Mama Ngina has absolutely no record of mingling with the hoi polloi, the madding crowd of have-nots such as Field Marshal Muthoni who have consistently threatened to invade the pitch of the sanitized politics of ���law and order,��� as they did in 1952. Having been born into a traditional chiefly family (her father was Chief Muhoho wa Gatheca), Mama Ngina married the country���s founding president and together they proceeded to amass huge family fortunes and establish a commercial empire. Some view this union as having been Jomo���s ���lunch��� card to African respectability, Gikuyu elderhood. In a sense, there was no Jomo without Ngina, who hailed from a kind of African ���royal ancestry��� that is oblivious to the struggles of ordinary people.

These people solicited her help in 1966 when they wrote to Mama Ngina, begging her to take up their case with the president. Wanjiku Wariku, writing on behalf of the Women War Council, a veterans��� group, expressed their shock. For it seemed to them that Mama Ngina had forgotten the women who had played a crucial role in producing and bringing food to forest fighters at the height of the struggle. They told Ngina they had been writing to Kenyatta for years, without success. Now they were appealing to her in the hope that she would pass their petition to the president. Their entreaty is even more forceful in its original Gikuyu rendering: ���Tw��na k��mako k��ingi n�� tond�� tuonaga tawarigan��irwo n�� atumia a kara�� na g��ciko,��� translated as, ���We are stupefied by the fact that it seems to us that you forgot all about the women of the cooking pot and spoon.���

There is no archival record of Mama Ngina having responded to the women of Kara�� na G��ciko, or Pots and Spoons, as they called themselves. We may surmise that no help was forthcoming. Had she met the likes of Field Marshal Muthoni before 2022? Most probably not. Why now?

We need to go back in time in order to understand the background to this event. As an ageing Jomo drew close to the end (he died in 1978), many of the people around him, including Mama Ngina, grew increasingly apprehensive and fearful of what would happen after his death. Mama Ngina���s fears were personal, not political.

According to letters between members of the British diplomatic corps in the mid-1970s, ���stories about Mama Ngina��� were ���interesting��� (wrote a diplomat at the British High Commission, Christopher Hart, in a 23rd January 1975 confidential letter to Messrs. B.T. Holmes and Mr. Wallis). There was mention of Kenya���s endangered and dwindling elephants, the ivory trade, and the occasional mention of the word corruption. The letter mentioned reports from other sources suggesting that Kenyatta realized that when he died, Mama Ngina would ���have to flee the country��� and others would have to ���provide for her future.��� According to Hart, Kenyatta had no illusions ���about popular feelings toward his family��� and realized ���there will be many out to get Mama Ngina as soon as his protection��� was removed. Mama Ngina was justifiably afraid of Jomo���s demise.

This partly explains why the Kenyatta family remained in relative silence and obscurity until Uhuru, one of two sons Jomo had with Ngina, was plucked by Moi out of relative obscurity in the mid-1990s. It came as a surprise to many people when he was put on the KANU presidential ticket in 2002. The Kenyattas had spent more than 20 years in the political shadows, and in Gikuyu internal ethnic politics, and did not openly seek to court public support until it became clear Uhuru had a chance of gunning for State House after President Mwai Kibaki in 2013.

Even then, Kamwana, as Uhuru was popularly known, was unconvinced. He admits to having listened to mademoni (demons of self-doubt concerning the bid, and naysayers of it). What we have seen since Uhuru overcame mademoni is the re-ascendance of the Kenyatta name and family in national politics. With the looming end of ten years of Uhuru���s presidency, what is now at stake is this ascendancy and newfound credence. Their political relevance. And, most importantly, once again, the protection of their inestimable wealth and vast commercial empire. But this time around, Mama Ngina isn���t afraid. She is confident of her role in securing the double Kenyatta legacy. She has come out and spoken, finally.

What we now see, therefore, are emboldened attempts since 2013 to use the combined memory of Mau Mau and Jomo to this end���the political relevance and protection of Kenya���s royal family. Gone are the days when Uhuru Kenyatta shied away from bringing up the memory of his dad, saying that people should let him rest in peace. Here is a chance to redeem the memory of the man who publicly fell out with the KLFA.�� A chance to re-make and re-write the history of this blatant betrayal of freedom fighters, maladministration, brazen greed, self-aggrandizement and corruption of the two Kenyattas, elder and younger.

Unfortunately, and this should come as no surprise to the Kenyattas, this is how the supposed ���reconciliation��� between Mama Ngina and Field Marshal Muthoni will be seen: as a desperate and long-belated attempt to conflate the memory of the KLFA with that of the Kenyattas. Maybe there were worthy intentions behind the attempt to reconcile different generations of historical players. But this event was more than a little disturbing and shocking; it was sad, and ill-advised.

Our University of Nairobi historian colleague, Margaret Gachihi, who has researched the role women played in Mau Mau, has a different perspective:

In my view, and you can quote me on this, Marshal Muthoni���s physical and symbolic shaving of her dreadlocks marks the end of an era in the history of the Mau Mau liberation war. Not many took note of her words that at 92 years she felt the end was nigh. She���s closing a very special and important period of our nationalist history. In her shaving she shed her burden to the next generation, indeed threw the gauntlet to those who honor and uphold the legacy of what the war represented. What���s sad, and ironical, is that recognition of our gallant freedom fighters has been left to the very last of their days.

As the elections near, we will no doubt see more of this kind of crude cultural mash-up for political ends. Meanwhile, Mama Ngina, daughter of a loyalist chief, has been born again as a Mau Mau. Or has she? The last word goes to Paul Thuku. He sang an old Mau Mau song to Hughes, which referred to black chiefs: ���These people wearing crowns are the ones who sold off our land.���

The party question

Marcel Paret���s book, "Fragmented Militancy: Precarious Resistance in South Africa after Racial Inclusion," tries to make sense of politics in South African urban informal settlements. Aerial picture of Somoho, Soweto. Image credit Impact Hub Global Network via Flickr CC BY-SA 2.0.

In December of 2007, delegates of South Africa���s ruling party, the African National Congress (ANC), gathered in the midsize city of Polokwane in the far northeast province of Limpopo. The city of a little more than 100,000 residents had been called Pietersburg for much of the 20th century, named after an Afrikaner ���voortrekker��� leader in the late 19th century. The city had once been home to a notorious British concentration camp of some 4,000 Afrikaners between 1899 and 1902. Now, under a democratic dispensation inaugurated by the first non-racial, universal elections in 1994, the city has been renamed in Sotho to mean ���place of safety.���

The ANC delegates gathered in Polokwane were there to make a decision that many observers perceived to be reckless or, at the very least, pregnant with the contingency of any historic turning point. By the time the conference closed on the 20th day of the month, the party had elected its new president. The delegates��� choice, Jacob Zuma, had risen from a poor, rural, self-educated background during apartheid to become a political prisoner alongside Nelson Mandela on Robben Island and the head of intelligence in the ANC���s armed wing, Umkhonto we Sizwe.

When Zuma won the ANC party presidency in 2007 and the national presidency a year and a half later in May 2009, his victory was cheered by the country���s powerful trade union movement and by a range of populist forces whose members had felt shut out by the perceived elite-oriented rule of his predecessor, Thabo Mbeki. Mbeki had been the figurehead of what is often understood as a neoliberal turn in postapartheid policy. This entailed a shift away from post-1994 policies such as the direct provisioning of collective goods like housing and the developmental intervention into the commanding heights of Africa���s most industrialized economy. Mbeki���s presidency, which began in 1999, was marked by the expansion of tenets of the Growth Employment and Redistribution policy framework���known by its acronym, GEAR.

During this period, the first significant winds of postapartheid social protest began to blow. Notably, in informal settlements in Johannesburg���s Soweto township, the Anti-Privatization Forum (APF) emerged in the 2000s to challenge the market-based pricing of water and electricity. The APF had begun to link together a number of communities under the banner of a common programmatic agenda in opposition to the outright policy legitimacy of the ANC. But by the ANC���s Polokwane conference of 2007, this challenge to political power had been hobbled by internal conflict, failing to make a meaningful dent in policy change.

Zuma���s subsequent rise was marked by folksy rhetorical flourishes and ebullient political rallies. In 2009, I was working as a reporter for a daily South African newspaper when I attended Zuma���s final ���Siyanqoba��� (victory, in isiZulu) preelection rally in the Ellis Park stadium in central Johannesburg. Though the rally was being held in the urban heart of the country, the imagery was an appeal to Zuma���s rural upbringing. The stadium was packed with attendees wearing t-shirts emblazoned with Zuma���s face and a slogan rich with rural ethnic appeal: ���100% Zulu Boy.���

The event was one of Nelson Mandela���s final public appearances. The elder statesman appeared onstage in a wheelchair and sat silently while his prerecorded message was broadcast from the stadium���s jumbotron screen. The crowd was reverent, if somewhat reserved in its reaction.

When Zuma took the microphone, he gathered his political allies onstage, many of whom had felt shut out by the cultural globalism and economic inequality of the Mbeki years. Zuma leaned into a familiar, full-throated rendition of an anti-apartheid anthem of the armed struggle, ���Mshini Wam���������bring me my machine gun.��� The stadium rafters shook as attendees danced and sang along with the putative populist prophet.

Shortly after Zuma took office as president, the streets of South Africa���s informal settlements caught fire. For almost every day of the past ten years, somewhere in South Africa, a community has been protesting. And for every day of the past 28 years, the African National Congress has held national power. In the politics of the street, South Africa is the protest capital of the world. In the politics of the ballot box, it is also one of the most stable. In a country whose struggle for democracy once inspired the world, how could both of these facts possibly be true?

This question lies behind Marcel Paret���s long-awaited first monograph, Fragmented Militancy: Precarious Resistance in South Africa after Racial Inclusion, published in early 2022 by Cornell University Press. Paret has spent the past decade producing a prolific stream of peer-reviewed ethnographic and survey-based studies on the evolution of protest in urban South Africa. He is a sociologist at the University of Utah with a long-standing research association with the University of Johannesburg���s Center for Social Change. In part drawing from Paret���s collaborations with several eminent researchers at the University of Johannesburg, the university���s Center for Social Change has established itself as South Africa���s premier center for the study of the country���s seemingly impenetrable fog of intense social protest amid formal political stasis.

In his extremely readable, deeply researched, and theoretically thoughtful book, Paret brings to life South Africa���s peculiar brew of upheaval in the streets and stability at the ballot box. The book is a landmark contribution to the contemporary study of urban protest and democracy in South Africa and across the globe. The heart of the text consists of four case studies of informal settlements in the Johannesburg metropolitan region. These case studies all share similar degrees of vulnerability associated with informal residential life in cities in South Africa, and, indeed, most of the urban world. These include risk of eviction by private and public landowners and marginal access to basic public services like water and sanitation.

Paret is primarily concerned with explaining why high degrees of local mobilization in these settlements have added up to so little in terms of their political effects. The thing to be explained, in other words, is in the title of the book: why, if popular protest in South Africa is so active and plentiful, is it also so ���fragmented���?

The answer is in the subtitle. To protest amid the persistent political dominance of the African National Congress is too ���precarious��� a proposition.

Paret uses his deep ethnography of four informal settlements to study the effects of the ANC���s domination of grassroots civil society. Two of these settlements���Motsoaledi and Tembelihle���are within the municipal boundaries of Johannesburg. A third, Tsakane Extension 10, is within the boundary of the adjacent municipality of Ekurhuleni, to the east of Johannesburg. And the fourth, Bekkersdal, is to the south of the metropolis, in the municipality of Rand West City.

Each of these case studies, which feature similar degrees of material deprivation decades after the transition to democracy, illustrates the extent to which a sense of betrayal by political elites has animated new forms of resistance in the postapartheid era. In the face of persistent exclusion from the basic fabric of urban life���public goods like housing, water, and sanitation���these communities have drawn on solidarities of both race and class. Their active mobilization, Paret argues in the first part of the book, has pushed forward a project of racial inclusion in which material inclusion has increasingly been abandoned by the ruling ANC.

What stops these mobilizations from growing into a broader challenge to political power is their isolation���or, in Paret���s terms, fragmentation. ���Administrative fixes��� have been proffered by government actors and agencies in response to the protests of individual settlements. This is in contrast to more programmatic, policy-based responses. In these fixes, the demands of each individual neighborhood are treated as standalone issues. In some cases, this means promises of development. In other cases, this means threats of eviction.

In all cases, the various settlements that Paret tracks throughout the chapters of this book have been unable to link together precisely because their interactions with the government are so ad hoc. This has had significant consequences for the evolution of their political claims, including the growth of xenophobic organizing within these informal settlements, largely against migrants from other African countries or from South Asia. Activists in these settlements have also struggled to gain a toehold in formal politics: some are absorbed into the ANC���s juggernaut of an electoral machine, while others are sidelined by virtue of the fundamental unviability of an electoral vehicle that does not network across even more than a single neighborhood.

Overall, Paret develops a perspective in his book that is deeply skeptical of the role of political parties in postapartheid South Africa. This view from below, shaped by the case studies of informal settlements marked by activist fragmentation and frustrated material progress, carries a profound empirical weight. The book makes a convincing case that the ANC���s relationship with grassroots mobilizations is a major problem for the health of South Africa���s democracy. The space for organizing in the residential spaces of the urban poor is deeply constrained, making informal settlements some of the most mobilized and simultaneously unheard territories in the country.

Even so, it is not clear that by observing the effects of the dominance of a political party in society���what Paret calls ���fragmented militancy������we can necessarily conclude that the role of party politics is the fundamental problem. In fact, Paret���s astute emphasis on the ���fragmented��� nature of grassroots mobilization in South Africa today might well be said to underscore the absence of engagement with party politics. The kind of city-wide scale of policy-making that would protect such mobilization in urban informal settlements from ad hoc treatment by the ANC-led government would certainly require legitimation through the ballot box.

This suggests something of a strategic puzzle. If the domination of the civil sphere by a single political party is the problem, it may very well be that engagement in the electoral sphere is a necessary���though by no means sufficient���way out of that domination.

The persistence of this party paradox is not only a phenomenon that bedevils mobilization in urban informal settlements. Zuma���s rule was characterized by a creeping and ever more brazen capture of state agencies for private gain, justified by a thin ideological veneer of ���radical economic transformation,��� or RET. Those within the ANC who flocked to this banner had little to do or say about actual economic policy, but the RET banner united a wide array of actors under an increasingly transparent scheme of kickbacks, bribes, and nepotism.

A series of professional-class civil society campaigns emerged to challenge what became commonly known as ���state capture��� by Zuma and his allies. A network of business leaders, academics, and nongovernmental organizations joined together in this effort, most notably in the 2016 Save South Africa (Save SA) campaign, which included a few notable ANC parliamentarians and former ministers. This campaign was strikingly nonpartisan, framing itself as a loyal opposition that called for the resignation of Zuma and, implicitly, the internal renewal of the ANC.

The decision to stay out of the electoral arena certainly had a strategic basis: it cast a broad, inclusive umbrella for activists to join. But as soon as it became clear that Zuma���s preferred candidate to succeed him as leader of the ANC would fail to do so at the party���s elective conference in 2017, the Save SA campaign lost all organizational momentum. The winner, trade unionist-turned-business tycoon Cyril Ramaphosa, has now presided over persistent economic malaise, and not a single person implicated in the endless ���state capture��� commissions and investigations has been convicted and gone to jail. In March, the most conservative estimate of unemployment in the country reached 35%, marking South Africa���s labor market as one of the most unequal in the world.

All of this underscores one of the key lessons in Paret���s critical study of South African politics. Namely, that despite the strong forces���largely from within the ANC���that have sought to tamp down on grassroots urban mobilization calling for further inclusion in the country���s postapartheid order, the country���s informal settlements hold the greatest potential for producing egalitarian change. Where professional civil society has largely eschewed the electoral arena for the obvious reason that it has no grassroots base, mobilization in informal settlements has avoided the electoral arena because it faces a significant constraint in the form of the ANC.

Paret���s book underscores just how structurally demobilizing this relationship between the ANC and contemporary grassroots mobilization in South Africa���s cities has become. He concludes by avoiding prognostications for the future. An article he published in Sociology of Development the month after his book���s release is deeply skeptical of electoral engagement under current conditions in South Africa.

But I read this book as providing distinctly strategic insights about what it may mean to do precisely what Paret warns against. To the extent that Fragmented Militancy illuminates a path toward a more egalitarian future, I would suggest that his findings point precisely to the strategic desirability of building an electoral alternative rooted in the country���s urban informal settlements. This would certainly require a decisive break with the ANC at the ballot box. On this point, I am in full agreement with Paret. It may also mean a break with the logic by which professional civil society has turned its back, largely by choice, on the electoral sphere. By contrast, Fragmented Militancy shows how grassroots civil society has been forced, often for lack of choice, out of it. A large survey-based study by Paret���s colleagues at the University of Johannesburg���s Centre for Social Change shows that poor evaluation of service outcomes drove significant abstention by urban informal settlement residents in the 2021 municipal election.

The struggle against apartheid was rooted in an abiding faith in both the perpetual bottom-up democracy of social movements and the capacity of state institutions to deliver the structural inclusionary change that those movements demand. Paret makes a convincing case that despite their internal democratic organizing capacities, urban movements today are prevented from building large-scale alliances because of political domination by the ANC. Only by achieving scale can the fragmented mobilizations of today turn that organizing capacity into political power that can authorize meaningful redistribution through state institutions. The struggle for organizing such counterpower at a scale as large as even a single city in South Africa���s urban shacklands will require a toehold simultaneously within electoral politics and outside of the ANC.

The longing to belong

Why would African Christians in the West, discriminated against in Europe and the United States, embrace views that marginalize not only others but also themselves? Photo by Matt Botsford on Unsplash

In the last thirty years, the presence of African Christians in the West has attracted significant study. The focus has been on what may be called the new African diaspora: that is, Africans who have come to the West since about seventy years ago (as opposed to those who were brought to the West through the trans-Atlantic slave trade). With the rise of Africa as the continent with the most Christians in the world, the study of African Christianity has included not only the Christianity in the continent but also its forms in the new African diaspora. A central question driving the study of the Christianity of the new African diaspora is the significance of African Christians in the West���that is, what the presence of African Christians in the West might portend for the future of not only Christianity, but also the West itself.

This study of new African diaspora Christianity has sometimes been placed within the framework of African religiosity. Thus, looking at the presence of African Christianity, Islam, and African indigenous religions in Europe and the United States, some have suggested that African religiosity may diminish the progress of secularism in the West. African religions, such writers suggest, have become potent phenomena, filling the gap left by a waning Western Christianity in Europe and America. In the case of Christianity in particular, it is often pointed out that two majority-African and African-led churches���the 12,000-member Kingsway International Christian Center in London, led by Nigerian Matthew Ashimolowo, and the 25,000-member Embassy of the Blessed Kingdom of God for all Nations in Kyiv, Ukraine, led by Nigerian Sunday Adelaja���are the biggest churches in Europe.

The presence of African Christians in the West has led some to speak of a ���reverse mission,��� a concept that implies that Africans are now evangelizing the West rather than the other way around, as was the case in the heyday of colonialism. It has, however, been noted that because Black Africans are often seen as the ���other��� in the West and discriminated against, these churches are having a hard time breaking into white society. For this reason, a central preoccupation of these churches has been helping African migrants gain a sense of belonging in these societies. But in seeking to belong to these societies, African Christians have often embraced right-wing views that are antithetical to their own well-being. In this piece, I suggest that embracing right-wing views in the West jeopardizes the ability of new African diaspora Christianity to effectively enhance the well-being of Africans.

In her recent book, Afropolitan Projects: Redefining Blackness, Sexualities, and Culture from Houston to Accra, Anima Adjepong demonstrates how Ghanaians in Houston, mostly Pentecostal Christians, enshrine their sense of belonging in the United States by embracing conservative politics like portrayals of America as a Christian nation, Islamophobia, and homophobia. These are all positions that are held by right-wing and racist forces in the United States and Europe���forces which often seek to curtail immigration. The view of America as a Christian nation, for example, seeks to exclude non-Christian religions that are often practiced by people of color. This is connected to Islamophobia, which excludes Muslims and sometimes foments violence against them, and homophobia, which excludes LGBTQ+ people. As historian Anthea Butler recently noted in her book, White Evangelical Racism: The Politics of Morality in America, these views that exclude others are often rooted in racism. ���It is racism,��� she writes, ���that binds and blinds many white American evangelicals to the vilification of Muslims, Latinos, and African Americans.��� And it is this same racism that has forced many African churches in Europe and America to exist in states of virtual apartheid, ministering mostly to other Africans.

Given the connections between these forms of discrimination, how can we understand groups of African Christians who embrace views that fund their own marginalization? How can embracing these right-wing views address the racist experiences of African Christians in the West? Adjepong suggests that Ghanaians in the United States who embrace these views probably brought some of them from Ghana, where Islamophobia and homophobia are rife, and where claims that Ghana is a Christian nation have increasingly been amplified. This connection between right-wing views in Africa and the West may need further investigation, as the influences may be more complex than they seem.

This notwithstanding, the question remains: why would a people who are discriminated against in Europe and the United States embrace views that marginalize not only others but also themselves? Addressing this question seems to call for a thorough rethinking of the views which many African Christians in the new African diaspora embrace.

The missing pieces

Between melancholy, terror, and disillusion, Petit Pays is a groundbreaking and eye-opening take on one of the darkest pages of African history, one that is often misunderstood in the West. Still from Petit Pays.

April 7th, 2022, marks 28 years since the start of the Rwandan genocide. In Petit Pays (Small Country), Ga��l Faye provides a new outlook on the events, with special attention to how the ethnic conflict spilled into the Burundian civil war. Written from the perspective of a young French-Rwandan boy living in Burundi, the book challenges misconceptions about the period leading to the tragedy and sheds light on the complex psychological dimensions of the genocide. Between melancholy, terror, and disillusion, Petit Pays is a groundbreaking and eye-opening take on one of the darkest pages of African history, one that is often misunderstood in the West.

In the Francophone world, Faye is known as a recording artist. His homonymous 2011 song, ���Petit Pays,��� was accompanied by a colorful music video staged in the luxuriant hills of Burundi. Released five years prior to the book, the song acts as a sequel to Gaby���s story and describes his struggle to heal from his traumatic experiences in Burundi, with writing as his only escape from the past. In the song, Faye evokes how genocides breed a complex combination of anger and culpability among survivors like Gaby, who often find themselves stuck between ���suicide and murder.��� Writing is a safe and neutral way to face this trauma and externalize the psychological intricacies of the genocide in a world where a Manichaean interpretation of historical events is the norm.

A cinematic interpretation of the novel was released in 2020. The movie, co-directed by Eric Barbier, was critically acclaimed, and it constitutes the final facet of Faye���s multimodal work, Petit Pays.

The novel is at the core of this project. Despite its fictional nature, the main protagonist, an 11-year-old boy nicknamed Gaby (short for Gabriel), is blatantly inspired by Faye���s own childhood. Gaby lives in Kinanira, a wealthy expatriate neighborhood in Bujumbura, with his father, the family cook Proth��, the driver Innocent, and his friends, with whom he enjoys eating mangos in an abandoned Volkswagen Kombi. The first chapters of the book are imbued with joy and melancholy, as the reader is taken through the emotions and sensations of this child whose only preoccupations are explorations and treasure hunts. From discovering the wonders of Lake Tanganyika to visiting abandoned palm oil factories, Gaby���s childhood, contrasting with the daily hardships of Burundians, is portrayed as a colorful anomaly amid the country���s rampant poverty. However, Gaby���s bubble is short-lived; it eventually bursts after his parents��� breakup and the coup that overthrew newly-elected president Melchior Ndadaye on October 21st, 1993.

Still from Petit Pays.

Often overshadowed by the events in Rwanda, the Burundian civil war also opposed a Hutu majority against a Tutsi minority (of which Gaby���s mother is a member). In the second half of the novel, Gaby is faced with new realities. In a political context where, as an ethnic Tutsi, he is forced to take sides, Gaby is struck by disillusionment, mistrust, and doubt. As ethnic hatred starts to permeate public discourse, Gaby���s attitude towards his relatives, friends, and acquaintances shifts. By gradually politicizing Gaby throughout the novel, Faye stands against the misconception that the conflict between Hutus and Tutsis was just an out-of-the-blue occurrence. Instead, the author sheds light on the vast operation of divisive propaganda and the complex psychological manipulation perpetrated by the genocide���s multiple actors, which ranged from governments to civil society. Western historians, political scientists, and organizations like Human Rights Watch have often claimed that the genocide could have been avoided if international actors had undertaken tougher action. While this is certainly true, the genocide did not occur in a vacuum, and grasping the magnitude of the events was, according to Faye, a complex task at the time.

The novel helps readers grasp this complexity: its first-person narrative style allows for an immersive experience in Gaby���s physical and psychological environment. As readers, we become empathetic to all of Gaby���s endeavors���as if we had been indoctrinated ourselves���even when he is forced to murder a Hutu man in the final pages of the novel. Still, Faye avoids excessive use of melodramatic language and makes the conscious choice to craft a realistic novel. According to him, the genocide is an event that literature would fail to describe in its entirety. Gaby���s understanding of the genocide is thus very limited and confined to his own personal experiences���and, as a result, so is the reader���s.

African historical events like the Rwandan genocide and the Burundian civil war are too often recounted through the lens of the Western world. The remembrance of these events is therefore tainted with a European bias, while new voices and interpretations have struggled to make it to the surface. History is much more than just a linear, one-sided timeline, and new narratives like Gaby���s have often been sidelined on the basis of race, gender, or nationality. This is a mistake, because works like Petit Pays allow us to rethink history and challenge mainstream ways of remembering. A collective effort must be made to further empower these new narratives, as they are crucial missing pieces of this puzzle we call history.

Paulo Lara and Angola���s anticolonial war archive

The death of Paulo Lara warrants an appreciation of his and his family���s contribution to preserving the documented history of Angola���s liberation struggle. Image credit Associa����o Tchiweka De Documenta����o (ATD) ��

Paulo Lara, Angolan liberation fighter, military general, filmmaker and archivist died on March 22 at the age of 65 in the Portuguese city of Porto where he had gone for medical treatment. As the son of L��cio Lara, the co-founder and foremost political thinker in the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA), and born in 1956, the year that the MPLA claimed to have been established, Paulo���s life was always going to be enmeshed with the politics of Angolan liberation���and was in many ways a product of the socialist internationalism of the third quarter of the 20th century. He once told me that given his parentage���with a half-Portuguese father and a mother of German Jewish origin���he could have claimed at least German, Israeli and Portuguese nationality. Angolan, however, was all he ever wanted to be.

His childhood was spent largely in Congo-Brazzaville, where his parents were based in exile. (His Congolese adoptive brother, Jean-Michel Mabeko-Tali, would go on to write a challenging history of the MPLA���s exile politics, and is now a professor at Howard University.) During his teenage years, Paulo accompanied his father in the liberated zones established by the MPLA in the forests of Cabinda and the remote bushveld of eastern Angola. In 1975 he saw service in the MPLA���s army, FAPLA, as it halted the advance by its rival movement, the FNLA, in the days before independence. His military career continued until after the peace accord with UNITA in 2002.

To those of us who study Angola, however, Paulo Lara had become known and admired for his more recent civilian role in documenting history. He and his sister Wanda established the Associa����o Tchiweka de Documenta����o (Tchiweka Documentation Center) (Tchiweka being his father���s nom de guerre) to preserve the history of the Angolan anticolonial struggle. An important part of this has involved the curation of papers left by L��cio Lara, which form the nearest thing we have to a primary paper record of the MPLA���s years in exile and in the Angolan bush before independence.

Equally ambitious was a project called Angola nos trilhos da independ��ncia (Angola on the tracks to independence), established to preserve the memories of the dying generation that had fought for independence. Paulo returned to the remote lands of eastern Angola, this time with a team of researchers and filmmakers (many from generations born after independence), to record life histories. Of the thousands of hours of footage that remain available, Paulo and his colleagues produced a film in which guerrillas not only from the MPLA, but also from the FNLA and UNITA speak in their own voices about their experience of the liberation struggle. This is remarkable in a country where the past is deeply politicized, and where the MPLA for a long time based its legitimacy on a claim to have been the country���s only liberator while casting its rivals as imperialist puppets and enemies of the people.

It may seem surprising that the son of the MPLA���s premier ideologue should be the one to challenge this narrative. As the government led by Jos�� Eduardo dos Santos sank into decadence and corruption from the 1990s onwards, and some MPLA intellectuals of his generation became part of a critical civil society, Paulo���s status as a military man allowed him to remain inside the system but outside an increasingly dirty politics. His friend, the Angolan cartoonist S��rgio Pi��arra, recalled that while reading the eulogy during his father���s funeral in 2016, Paulo had ���reminded everyone present of what he had learned from his father: that the duty of a militant is to serve the party and not to serve himself������a remark that Pi��arra understood to be a rebuke to Dos Santos, who was present at the funeral.

One of my own memories of Paulo involves a dinner during a conference in ��vora, the Portuguese university town where Professor Helder Fonseca has attracted a procession of Angolan scholars, including several former soldiers, to do research on the country���s past. The laughter grew loud as Paulo exchanged anecdotes about the war with UNITA generals who had been on the other side of the same military engagements. Angola is a country where generals blame the 27-year war on self-serving politicians and take pride in the apolitical soldiers��� truce that ended it. It was Paulo���s status as a soldier rather than a politician that allowed him to find common ground with adversaries.

Independ��ncia, the film, ends its story shortly before independence, thus not needing to confront the fact that the fighters who have spoken of their various struggles against colonial rule would end up at war against one another. Similarly, the paper record kept by L��cio Lara and curated by his heirs ends before 1975, while the post-independence records of the MPLA and the government it controlled remain locked in official archives. Much remains unknown about the rivalries between liberation movements in the run-up to independence, and the MPLA���s relationship with the Portuguese revolutionary government after 1974, and with its later Cuban and Soviet-bloc allies. Although discussion of the uprising of May 27, 1977 and subsequent retaliatory massacres is no longer the taboo that it was 20 years ago, little is certain about the internal politics that led to the protest and the decisions that were taken to suppress it. These differences, coming as they did from within the fractious family that is the MPLA, may prove harder to resolve than the divided history of the civil war itself.