Sean Jacobs's Blog, page 106

There was no Green Revolution

The Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa was presented as a game-changer to address hunger. The consensus 15 years later: It failed. Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash

Launched with both funding and celebrity largess in 2006, the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA) has as its objective the doubling of agricultural yields and income for 30 million smallholder African farmer households in eleven countries by the end of 2021. With this period over, and after a billion dollars in funding, this “green revolution” is far from realized. The following article is from our series of reposts from The Elephant curated by editorial board member Wangui Kimari.

When the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation launched the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA) in 2006, it was billed as a game-changer in addressing the continent���s hunger crisis. Africa would get the sort of productivity revolution that could reduce hunger, improve livelihoods and create jobs. ���Sustainable intensification��� was the goal���getting more food from the same land, the ���green��� in the name being in opposition to the ���red revolutions��� that were sweeping through Asia in the 1960s.

While at the outset this ambitious project appeared to be the sort of aid that could transform Africa���s agricultural sector and feed its growing population, AGRA is now hard-pressed to demonstrate its achievements after 15 years and one billion dollars in funding.

The criticisms against AGRA emanate from diverse quarters and are gaining momentum. The Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Africa (AFSA), the continent���s largest civil society network, comprising 35 groups that involve some 200 million food producers, has embarked on a robust campaign, painting AGRA as a misguided effort that has fallen short in bringing any sort of productivity revolution in its 13 focus countries. Faith leaders in southern Africa issued their own challenge to the Gates Foundation. Neither has received a reply from AGRA���s major donors, which include the two US foundations and aid agencies from the United States, United Kingdom, Germany and Canada.

Those challenges came to a head on September 2, 2021 at a press conference prior to the opening of AGRA���s annual Green Revolution Forum when civil society leaders called for donors to stop funding AGRA. ���What African farmers need is support to find communal solutions that increase climate resilience, rather than top-down profit-driven industrial-scale farming systems,��� said Francesca de Gasparis, the executive director of the Southern African Faith Communities��� Environment Institute (SAFCEI).

AFSA released an open letter signed by its 35 member networks and 176 international organizations from 40 countries. ���AGRA has unequivocally failed in its mission to increase productivity and incomes and reduce food insecurity, and has in fact harmed broader efforts to support African farmers,��� reads the strongly worded letter.

AGRA Vice President for Innovation Aggie Asiimwe Konde disagrees. ���We focus on informing farmers, enable access to technology and increase production and income to farmers. We have had a resounding success in that we have seen farmers doubling their income, diversification of crops, and integration into the market.���

Searching for evidence of Green Revolution success

AGRA was founded in 2006 with ambitious goals: To double productivity and incomes for 30 million smallholder farming households by 2020 while reducing food insecurity by 50 percent. That deadline has now passed, and independent research suggests that AGRA���s rosy promises are far from being realized.

In fact, AGRA is unable to provide evidence of that progress, says Timothy A. Wise, a senior advisor on the Future of Food at the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy and senior research fellow at Tufts University���s Global Development and Environment Institute. Wise undertook an impact assessment in 2020 and found no comprehensive evaluations of AGRA���s progress in meeting its goals by AGRA itself or by its major donors. After AGRA refused to accede to his request for data on its beneficiaries, Wise took a broader and more revealing approach.

���I chose to examine data from AGRA���s 13 priority countries to see if there were indications that a productivity revolution was taking place with rising incomes and improved food security. I found little evidence of significant productivity improvements,��� notes Wise on his research. As he explained in a recent article for The Conversation, ���By any estimate, 30 million smallholder farming households represent a significant majority of farmers in the 13 focus countries. If the alliance had doubled yields and incomes and halved food insecurity for that many farming households, that would indeed have shown up in the data.���

It did not. For a basket of staple crops, Wise found that productivity increased just 18 percent over 12 years. That is nowhere near the goal of doubling productivity, which would be a 100 percent increase. More tellingly, it is barely higher than the rate of productivity growth before AGRA was launched.

Neither did incomes nor food security improve significantly. According to the latest United Nations estimates, the number of severely ���undernourished��� people in AGRA���s 13 focus countries has increased by 30 percent since 2006, a far cry from AGRA���s promise to cut food insecurity by half.

���After 15 years and one billion dollars in outside funding, AGRA has failed to catalyze a productivity revolution in African agriculture. Farmers��� yields have not grown significantly,��� Wise stated at the press conference on September 2. ���It is time for donors to listen to African farmers and community leaders.���

Wise pointed out that his critique goes well beyond AGRA, implicating the entire Green Revolution approach to which African governments devote significant resources, including an estimated one billion dollars per year in subsidies for seeds, fertilizers and other inputs. ���Our research assessed the progress of the Green Revolution project as a whole. This should indeed have produced measurable results in 15 years given the billions of dollars invested in the project. It has not,��� he wrote in The Conversation.

African and German civil society organizations produced a report drawing on Wise���s research. Titled False Promises, the report calls on countries to abandon AGRA and its Green Revolution and instead support initiatives that boost small-scale food producers, particularly women and the youth, to develop climate-resilient and environment-friendly farming practices.

A lot of money went into supporting maize production, and total production went up 87 percent, according to the report. But most of that increase came from farmers increasing the land under maize cultivation, encouraged by the subsidies. Yields increased only 29 percent over 12 years, but land under maize production went up nearly 50 percent, hardly a sustainable way of farming.

The bias towards maize at the expense of other equally essential food crops such as millet, which are drought-tolerant and more nutritious, has also been cited as one of the downsides of AGRA���s interventions. Millet production had declined by a quarter, says the report.

Rising hunger across the continent

The decline in crop variety can result in a drop in diet diversity, which may be contributing to the alarming rise in hunger. According to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization���s annual hunger report published on July 12, 2021, the world experienced an almost unprecedented increase in severe hunger from 2019 to 2020. The agency���s annual estimate of ���undernourishment��� showed an increase of up to 25 percent over the 2019 levels, to between 720 and 811 million people.

In sub-Saharan Africa, about 44 million more people faced severe malnutrition in 2020, with 30 percent of the continent���s population struggling to feed their families. Some 66 percent of the population faced ���moderate or severe food insecurity��� in 2020, says the FAO, up from 51 percent in 2014, an increase of 244 million food-insecure people in just six years.

Wise points out that since AGRA was founded in 2006, hunger in Sub-Saharan Africa has not gone down by half but has increased nearly 50 percent. ���The Green Revolution is taking Africa in precisely the wrong direction,��� he says.

AGRA���s defense

AGRA has itself faulted Wise���s survey, conducted under the aegis of Tuft University���s Global Development and Environment Institute, saying the research failed to meet ���basic academic and professional standards of peer review������ Andrew Cox, chief of staff and strategy at AGRA, is quoted terming the research as ���not professional and ethical.��� But Tufts University administrators have defended Wise���s methods.

AGRA���s Konde said in an interview that the organization was successful. ���We targeted 9.5 million farmers and now we have 10 million farmers with minimum technology.��� She then went on to fault African governments for not doing their part. ���Unfortunately, only Ghana, Rwanda, and Nigeria have implemented the 10 percent of their budget to the agricultural sector as per the 2003 Maputo Declaration. The rest of Africa has only committed 2 percent of their budget to agriculture.���

Konde took issue with the demands of AGRA���s critics. ���Taking into account the uncertainties brought about by climate change and the COVID pandemic, it would be unfortunate to call for the disbandment of AGRA at this point in time. I wonder which farmers they are representing. AGRA believes in increasing choices to farmers, and promotes ways how more farmers can have access to technology and apply them.���

She went on: ���We have been carrying out value for money assessments and every $1 we have spent has produced close to $10. The questions we should be asking are did the African farmers get access to information and technology?���

AGRA officials say that the agency���s budget and contributions are too small to have its impact reflected in national-level data. ���The data could not possibly be extrapolated onto the kinds of regional/sub-regional work that we do,��� AGRA���s Cox wrote via email to Stacy Malkan of US Right to Know. Critics point out that if AGRA reached the 30 million farmers it set out to reach and transformed their practices, such impacts would be evident. Still, AGRA claims that its recent annual report provides evidence of yield increases, income gains and improved food security.

Wise reviewed the new documents and was critical of the data, saying it was hastily constructed, poorly documented, and highlighted improvements in just a few crops and countries over a very short period. Other critics also consider AGRA���s failure to document its impacts over its full 15 years of existence as telling.

Muketoi Wamunyima, country coordinator for PELUM Zambia, which works to improve the livelihoods of small-scale farmers by fostering ecological land use management, co-signed a letter to AGRA last year asking for evidence of its impacts. They received a long response from AGRA���s Andrew Cox, which they dismissed as non-evidence. ���As civil society organizations working in Zambia, we have challenged AGRA���s model and engaged with our local government to highlight the fact that AGRA���s approach does not respond to the needs of the small-scale food producers,��� Wamunyima said.

Rwanda is widely touted as a star performer in AGRA���s plan, with a quadrupling of maize production since 2006. But according to the False Promises report, the Rwandan ���miracle��� showed weak overall productivity improvements across staple crops in the country as farmers abandoned the cultivation of more nutritious local crops for maize. And according to the UN���s latest hunger estimates, the number of undernourished people in Rwanda has increased by 41 percent since the advent of AGRA.

Mariam Mayet, executive director of the African Centre for Biodiversity, said, ���For years we have documented the efforts to spread the Green Revolution in Africa, and the dead-ends it will lead to: declining soil health, loss of agricultural biodiversity, loss of farmer sovereignty, and locking of African farmers into a system that is not designed for their benefit, but for the profits of mostly Northern multinational corporations.���

Africa is not a monoculture

AGRA���s Konde dismissed AFSA���s criticisms. ���We invited those that have been complaining to the AGRF summit so that we can exchange views but they did not come.���

AFSA���s General Coordinator, Million Belay, confirmed that he was invited but only at the last minute. Belay explained why he declined the invitation in an opinion piece for Al Jazeera:

We at AFSA disagree with the Green Revolution���s approach on a basic level. The strategy has indebted our farmers, ruined our environment, harmed our health and undermined our seeds and culture. We object to the flurry of initiatives to amend our seed laws, biosafety standards, and institutionalize fertiliser rules and regulations that seek to entrench Africa���s overreliance on corporate agriculture.

He took particular issue with AGRA���s claim that the forum would speak for Africa in a ���single coordinated African voice.���

Africa is not a monoculture and we do not want it to become one. Africa does not speak with a single voice, certainly not that of the Green Revolution Forum. Its diversity of voices is as rich as the diversity of the continent���s landscapes, cultures and food traditions. Those voices want to sing, not in monotones but in harmony, with one another, with nature, and with government leaders and donors who value that diversity and support it.

Anne Maina, the Coordinator of the Biodiversity and Biosafety Association of Kenya (BIBA-K), concurs. She believes that sustainably improving nutrition, increasing production, enhancing biodiversity, raising resilience and boosting incomes will come about with the participation of all���smallholder farmers, pastoralists, fisher folk, hunter/gatherers and indigenous peoples���in their diversity and not through expensive, high-input monocultures.

And while AGRA���s technocrats have in the past been more combative in their response to criticism, its board chairman, Ethiopia���s former Prime Minister Hailemariam Dessalegn, sounded conciliatory in an op-ed published by African Arguments:

The solutions for transforming Africa���s food systems [have] come down to one approach over another. Such binary debates are unhelpful and at times counterproductive. Building more resilient food systems on the continent will require a mix of approaches from agroecology to the latest crop and soil science.

Whatever the case may be, the need to resolve Africa���s hunger crisis in a sustainable way is an urgent one.

Israel and the geopolitics of a South African dairy strike

On The Africa Is a Country Podcast: Israel's entanglement in a strike by South African dairy workers, and its campaign to acquire accreditation at the African Union. Image via Wikimedia Commons.

In 2019, South African dairy giant Clover was taken over by Milco, a consortium led by Israel���s Central Bottling Company���which also operates in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. Since November 2021, Clover workers have been striking against the restructuring campaign that Milco seeks to implement, which includes widespread retrenchments and factory closures; as well as the takeover itself, seen as economic collaboration with Israeli apartheid. In this episode of the Africa Is a Country Podcast, I chat with Mametlwe Sebei, who is the president of the General Industries Workers Union of SA (GIWUSA), one of the unions involved in the strike.

And then, I talk to Na���eem Jeenah about Israel���s efforts to acquire accreditation at the African Union, and the dearth of Palestinian solidarity on the continent. Na���eem is Executive Director of the Afro-Middle East Centre, a research institute dedicated to studying the Middle East and North Africa and relations between that region and the rest of Africa.

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

https://podcasts.captivate.fm/media/7e5d89cc-6bfc-4b51-b8ba-229fd893bff6/clover-workers-strike-and-israel-s-au-manouvres.mp3

Israel and the Geopolitics of a South African Dairy Strike

On The Africa Is a Country Podcast: Israel's entanglement in a strike by South African dairy workers, and its campaign to acquire accreditation at the African Union. Image via Wikimedia Commons.

In 2019, South African dairy giant Clover was taken over by Milco, a consortium led by Israel���s Central Bottling Company���which also operates in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. Since November 2021, Clover workers have been striking against the restructuring campaign that Milco seeks to implement, which includes widespread retrenchments and factory closures; as well as the takeover itself, seen as economic collaboration with Israeli apartheid. In this episode of the Africa Is a Country Podcast, I chat with Mametlwe Sebei, who is the president of the General Industries Workers Union of SA (GIWUSA), one of the unions involved in the strike.

And then, I talk to Na���eem Jeenah about Israel���s efforts to acquire accreditation at the African Union, and the dearth of Palestinian solidarity on the continent. Na���eem is Executive Director of the Afro-Middle East Centre, a research institute dedicated to studying the Middle East and North Africa and relations between that region and the rest of Africa.

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

https://podcasts.captivate.fm/media/7e5d89cc-6bfc-4b51-b8ba-229fd893bff6/clover-workers-strike-and-israel-s-au-manouvres.mp3

Israel and the Geopolitics of a South African Diary Strike

On The Africa Is a Country Podcast: Israel's entanglement in a strike by South African dairy workers, and its campaign to acquire accreditation at the African Union. [image error] Image by JBDodane, via Flickr CC.

In 2019, South African dairy giant Clover was taken over by Milco, a consortium led by Israel���s Central Bottling Company���which also operates in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. Since November 2021, Clover workers have been striking against the restructuring campaign that Milco seeks to implement, which includes widespread retrenchments and factory closures; as well as the takeover itself, seen as economic collaboration with Israeli apartheid. In this episode of the Africa Is a Country Podcast, I chat with Mametlwe Sebei, who is the president of the General Industries Workers Union of SA (GIWUSA), one of the unions involved in the strike.

And then, I talk to Na���eem Jeenah about Israel���s efforts to acquire accreditation at the African Union, and the dearth of Palestinian solidarity on the continent. Na���eem is Executive Director of the Afro-Middle East Centre, a research institute dedicated to studying the Middle East and North Africa and relations between that region and the rest of Africa.

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

https://podcasts.captivate.fm/media/7e5d89cc-6bfc-4b51-b8ba-229fd893bff6/clover-workers-strike-and-israel-s-au-manouvres.mp3

Two women, two stories, both winners

The documentary film Mane about two women���a rapper and a wrestler���is a much-needed boost of fresh air in the male-saturated tale of the ���Generation hip hop��� of Senegal. Still from film Mane.

Wrestling and hip hop are domains that vibrantly capture the resilience and creativity of Senegalese youth in a globalized world���youth who struggle to fulfill their dreams of a meaningful life against the odds of severe unemployment and a struggling educational system. Senegalese wrestling, a traditional sport and art form, witnessed a revival in the 1990s. Today, it pays millions to male wrestlers who practice what is called modern wrestling: a type of wrestling introduced by French colonialists which incorporates some boxing moves such as hitting. Hip hop, on the other hand, arrived in Senegal in the late 1980s and was transformed into a unique brand that espouses local languages and aesthetics. Senegalese hip hop also has a robust activist component, epitomized by the Y���en a Marre (Enough is Enough) movement and their epic impact on the outcome of the 2012 presidential elections. (Y���en a Marre���s decision to endorse then-candidate Macky Sall had a big influence on mobilizing young people to elect him to the presidency.)

The documentary film Mane (2020), by Austrian director Sandra Krampelhuber, follows two young Senegalese women in their journey to self-actualization in male-dominated terrains. The stories of Toussa (Astou Gueye), a rapper from Dakar, and Emodj (Jeanette Sambou), a wrestler in southern Senegal, alternate in a call-and-response style as the camera moves from one setting to the other.

Still from film Mane.

Mane is a feminist film. The stories of Senegalese hip hop artists have been told in scholarly publications and documentaries such as African Underground: Democracy in Dakar (2007), 100% Galsen (2012), and Krampelhuber���s own 100% Dakar: More Than Art (2014). Though some of these works feature women, none of them are exclusively dedicated to their unique and gendered experiences. That���s what Krampelhuber accomplishes in Mane with her focus on Toussa, paralleling it with the story of Emodj. The beauty of the film lies in its exclusive look into the women���s experiences; it prioritizes their voices rather than burying them in a sea of hegemonic male performances. The title, which means ���Me��� in Wolof���the country���s lingua franca���centers the experiences of the two women and highlights their individuality. One can understand why Krampelhuber did not use ���Man,��� the correct Wolof spelling, which���in an ironic linguistic coincidence that would have nonetheless been a travesty���would have put a confusing focus back onto men for the film���s English speaking audiences.

Krampelhuber gives space and agency to the two young women. She sets their stories against the backdrop of a legacy of strong women in Senegal���s history, such as Alin Sitoe Diatta, J��mbat Mboji, and the women of Nder in Northern Senegal, who, one Tuesday in November 1819, immolated themselves rather than become slaves to their raiding neighbors, the Trarza Moors. There are lots of women in the film, from women in the bustling markets of Dakar to the women in Toussa and Emodj���s family circles. The interviews with Toussa���s grandmother and Emodj���s mother, who was also a wrestler in her youth, ground the young women in a genealogy of resilient matriarchs who forged their personalities and inculcated in them a sense of pride and determination. These scenes also allow the viewer to witness the young women���s humanity and vulnerability. Toussa and Emodj���s sense of identity and awareness of the challenges they face are palpable, and so is their determination to succeed in their self-designed goals.

Still from film Mane.

The two storytelling arcs display a culturally and geographically diverse Senegal. Krampelhuber contrasts the cacophonous and colorful streets of Dakar with the green and natural sceneries of southern Senegal. The hustle and bustle of the city is creatively juxtaposed with the lone chirping of birds in the forest where Emodj goes for a run, emphasizing the cinematic call-and-response. This diversity is also rendered in how the two women move across time and space in their respective communities. Toussa���s a cappella is serious and upbeat, sharpening the urban swag of Dakar and her own resilience in the male-saturated hip hop landscape, while Emodj���s movements are unhurried and calm even during training.

While Toussa is well-known in Senegal and has even had some international exposure, Emodj is a hidden gem, and her parts have several merits. It is safe to say that not many Senegalese people know that Ekolomodj���female wrestling among the Joola���exists, and that it is indigenous to southern Senegal. The focus on Emodj integrates the often-isolated south of Senegal into a broader national fabric. Also, contrary to the assumption that wrestling is a male sport, Emodj���s story shows that women have wrestled in this part of Senegal for many generations. Her aspiration to become a professional wrestler shows the region���s enduring cultural resistance to coloniality even as female wrestlers struggle to get serious recognition. Indeed, the experiences of Isabelle Sambou, the 2012 World and repeated African Champion in Beach Wrestling, underscore the gendered double standards in Senegalese wrestling���where men can make a living from the sport and women are relegated to the less lucrative Olympic domain.

Still from film Mane.

At times, the staging seems to slow the flow of the filmic movements. The connection between Toussa and Emodj is not explained in the film, even though we see that they know each other and share a bond. Urban life photographer and director Ndeye Fatou Thiam (also known as Ina) and Emodj���s trainer, Isabelle Sambou, both have substantial appearances in the film, and their presence complements the stories of Toussa and Emodj. However, they are not introduced by name, making it difficult for viewers to guess who they are. The orthographical confusion in the film���s title remains an issue because it echoes the unrelated English word ���mane.��� Relatedly, when you google the film, the top hits are about Made in Senegal (2020), a documentary about famous Senegalese soccer player Sadio Man��, who scored the winning goal during Senegal���s first-time win in the 2022 Africa Cup of Nations. This could have been solved by using ���nje,��� the word for ���me��� in Emodj���s native Joola, thereby dismantling yet another hegemony: that of Wolof over other indigenous languages in Senegal.

Even with these minor imperfections, Mane is a much-needed breath of fresh air in the male-saturated tale of Senegal���s ���generation hip hop.��� Toussa and Emodj are winners because they dared to enter spaces that resist and undermine their presence. Krampelhuber is a winner, too, for breaking away from the stereotype of the hapless African woman. I tip my mus��or���the traditional Senegalese headscarf���to all three of them!

Letters of recommendation

On the South African-born anthropologist John Comaroff and the political economy of silence in academia. Photo by Sincerely Media on Unsplash

Over the last week or so, the lawsuit against Harvard University filed by three anthropology graduate students has animated online conversations amongst scholars and researchers. At the center of the lawsuit stands South African-born academic John Comaroff. After a lengthy Title IX investigation at Harvard, Comaroff was found responsible for ���verbal sexual harassment,��� but other claims of�� ���unwanted sexual contact��� and retaliatory behavior had not been substantiated, according to the university. The students��� lawsuit against Harvard accuses the university of failing for years to respond to allegations of Comaroff���s sexual misconduct, of ignoring and misconstruing evidence in their investigation, and ultimately, of failing to protect students.

John Comaroff and his partner, Jean, are influential names in anthropology where they have created extensive networks of influence, loyalty, and support. The case sheds light on the systems of patronage that sustain power in academia and exposes how a small group of people act as gatekeepers and maintain a chokehold on the discipline.

The lawsuit makes the case that the alleged harassment and abuse committed by John Comaroff were an open secret around campus and throughout the discipline of anthropology. Comaroff taught at the University of Chicago for 34 years before moving to Harvard. The lawsuit alleges that graduate students from Chicago had warned the head of Harvard���s African and African American Studies (AAAS) department not to hire him because of harassment accusations dating back to the late 1970s. When the complainants in the lawsuit went to report him to Harvard administrators, the latter anticipated that it was about Comaroff and still did nothing. Instead, they told the students they���d be better off exposing Comaroff in the media.

At Harvard, Comaroff���s harassment first became more publicly known in May 2020, when the campus student newspaper, the Crimson, reported that three female students accused Comaroff of ���unwanted touching, verbal sexual harassment, and professional retaliation.��� Two other anthropologists, Gary Urton and Ted Bestor, were accused in the same story. Graduate students of Harvard���s anthropology and AAAS (African American and African Studies) departments immediately called for the university to revoke any privileges and titles these three may hold before the start of the Fall 2020 term.

In response to the Crimson story, Harvard put Comaroff on paid administrative leave. By October 2020, the Chronicle of Higher Education ran a story, ���The Patron,��� detailing the women���s accusations. If until then the story had circulated only among anthropology scholars, it was now front and center in the leading publication on academic affairs in the US.

Nearly one year later, in the wake of the Title IX decision against Comaroff, Harvard announced in January 2022 that it was placing Comaroff on unpaid leave for the spring semester, and it banned him from teaching required courses and taking on additional graduate students for a one-year period. This implied, however, that he could keep his current students and teach elective courses this coming fall.

Following Harvard���s decision to place Comaroff on leave, 38 of Comaroff���s Harvard colleagues ���all of them endowed professors or senior ranking professors���signed an open letter in support of Comaroff. It was published on February 4 and included signatures from Henry Louis Gates, Jamaica Kincaid, and Homi Bhabha, and people well known to African Studies scholars: Caroline Elkins, Paul Farmer, Maya Jasanoff, Biodin Jeyifo, John Mugane, and Jacob Olupona. Signatories represented a wide range of backgrounds and races. What they had in common, it seems, was an attitude that people like them should not have to answer to anyone. They misrepresented what the accusations against Comaroff were all about, criticizing ���the process.��� They also, bizarrely, included rhetorical questions about what were acceptable ways to talk to students while advising them, a reference to a single incident that the signatories were representing as the entirety of the charges against Comaroff. This was supposedly about academic freedom.

The signatories were harshly criticized, but they didn���t change their minds at that point.

But equally significant was a second letter published the day before, February 3, in the Chronicle of Higher Education. This one was signed by 50 academic luminaries. Similar to the Harvard letter, most of them were well known in anthropology and all work in African Studies. A number of them work on questions of power and gender. A few were at American universities, such as Adam Ashforth, Nancy Hunt, Louise White, and Kenda Mutongi. (Interestingly, Mutongi is the only black woman who signed the Chronicle letter.) Also, a signatory is Ann Stoler from The New School, a scholar of Dutch and French colonialism.

Another group was from European universities; among them were Peter Geschiere of the University of Amsterdam and Birgit Meyer at Utrecht University.

But the most significant group of signatories to the Chronicle letter are or were based at South African universities. Among these are Max Price, Dennis Davis, Deborah Posel, Hylton White, Jane Taylor, Robert Morrell, Mike Morris, Neil Roos, Mugsy Spiegel, Imraan Coovadia, and Steven Robins.

They are mostly white and quite influential in South African academia. Price is the most recent�� former vice-chancellor of the University of Cape Town. Davis is a high court judge and an emeritus professor at the same university. Posel is Price���s spouse and, until recently, was director of UCT���s Humanities Institute. Morris (economics) and Coovadia (English) are also on the UCT faculty. Taylor is on the faculty of the Center for Humanities Research at the University of the Western Cape. Robins and White are anthropologists at Stellenbosch and Wits, respectively. White is a former student of the Comaroffs at Chicago.

The Chronicle letter was more strident than the Harvard letter. It minimized the accusations against Comaroff, referring to the process at Harvard���which is hardly favorable to victims of sexual abuse���as ���a Kangaroo court��� and ���a show trial.���

Oddly, the Chronicle letter did not receive the same attention or public criticism as the Harvard letter, even though it was more explicit in its support of Comaroff. There are many reasons for this. One may be the simple fact that it was behind a paywall. Another was that the allegations against Comaroff were still considered an internal Harvard matter; on social media, much of the criticism was reserved for the 38 Harvard faculty. And, finally and probably most significantly, was that it had not been covered in South African mainstream media (which largely still sets the news agenda there) or on South African Twitter and Facebook.

This seems odd as John and Jean Comaroff���s ideas are quite influential in certain sectors of the South African academy, especially the humanities, where they have deep networks. The signatures were doubly jarring, coming as they did from a country with such high levels of gender-based violence and sexual harassment. South African universities also have well documented problems with sexual harassment of students by faculty. Like this, this, this, this, this and this. You assumed the signatories would have paused before signing.

But things were about to change. Four days later, the three graduate students filed the lawsuit, which was reported by the New York Times. Now everyone was talking about it. It was trending on Twitter. This appeared to have a major effect on Comaroff���s Harvard supporters. Thirty-four of the 38 signatories to the Harvard letter announced that they were retracting their support; they seemed embarrassed or aware of the changing power dynamics as well as shifting public opinion. Those who retracted, now claimed they did not have enough information when they first signed the letter. It took a few more days (some as late as last weekend) before seven of the signatories of the Chronicle letter asked to retract too: Hunt, Rafael Sanchez from the University of Geneva in Switzerland, Gabrielle Spiegel at Johns Hopkins, James Smith at UC Davis, Patricia Spyer at the Graduate Institute in Geneva, Robins and Coovadia. (You can follow in real-time who is still committed in their support of Comaroff; the Chronicle letter puts an asterisk next to retractors’ names.)

Despite all of this, the majority of the signatories to the Chronicle letter remain resolute in their support but hard to reach for comment, according to that newspaper. In any case, for critics it doesn���t matter much whether they retract or not now: they showed their hand.

Sexual harassment is just one particularly egregious form of bad behavior by people at this level that is often whispered about but rarely confronted. For example, accusations against Dipesh Chakrabarty and Arjun Appadurai of bullying and abusive behavior circulated online again. These instances in turn highlight the decisive role of social media in these kinds of cases. Before they filed the lawsuit, Comaroff���s accusers realized they had no other recourse. University officials who were supposed to help them told them to go to the media instead. In fact, one of Comaroff���s supporters, Daniel Herwitz (a literature professor at the University of Michigan and who is credited with being the primary author of the Chronicle letter), told the Chronicle that Twitter had been a ���nuclear element��� in this case. He suggested that ���the Harvard professors [who retracted] may be feeling pressure because of the support the lawsuit has received on that platform.��� He may at least be right about this part of the scandal.

This case shines an unflattering light on the star system in academia and the role of patronage networks. As two studies (here and here) posted online last week showed, the Comaroffs do much to control and shape the field of cultural anthropology and place their students in jobs in departments all over the world. To speak out against them is to risk being locked out of those networks.

In my own initial reaction, angry that the focus was shifting from sexual harassment to the question of whiteness in African Studies, I wrote on Twitter that the scandal was about power���that it was about powerful people defending their ranks. My argument was that prominent black Africans like Olupona, Mugane, and Jeyifo had signed the Harvard letter and that the signatories also included people who aren���t in African Studies and aren���t white (like Gates, Kincaid, Evelyn Higginbotham, Randall Kennedy, Sheila, and Maya Jasanoff). If I wanted to, I could have added that most of these people would be insulted to be accused of furthering the cause of whiteness and white supremacy.

At one point I argued that no one serious about African Studies thinks John Comaroff���as the lawsuit suggests������is one of the world���s leading experts on Africa and the Global South.��� After all, if you take what we understand as African Studies���its journals, conferences, associations, prevailing ideas, and so forth���Comaroff hardly features. The Comaroffs may be well known in South Africa, but South Africa isn���t ���Africa.��� African Studies has been concertedly moving away from this white or American idea of what African Studies is and who Africanists are. So the Comaroffs and their supporters are increasingly marginal in that domain.

But as I was reminded by several graduate students, the problem my argument failed to account for is Comaroff���s influence on anthropology specifically and for the internal workings of AAAS at Harvard. In the same way, I underestimated how racialized the South African academy is and the dominant role of white academics. This, after all, was the whole point of the Fees Must Fall and Rhodes Must Fall protests between 2015 and 2017, to take on these racial imbalances.

John and Jean Comaroff trained generations of professors who went on to populate various disciplines all over the globe. They sat on countless dissertation defenses, had a say in what work was good and important, what topics are worthy of study (as someone asked in exasperation, ���Why was witchcraft such a thing for so long in anthropological studies of Africa?���), and through it, bred all sorts of loyalties with former students. Former students who were ���in their favor��� were given all sorts of awards and positions. Those who spoke out or made noises were not. As the lawsuit implies, the discipline of anthropology is now populated by Comaroff loyalists. Many who opposed them or who spoke up against them, ended up with their careers stalled or quit altogether in a field where there was a shrinking number of academic positions already.

The events of last week are prompting new actions and demands. On Monday, students and faculty at Harvard staged a walkout in support of the campus union���s demands for ���real recourse,��� a third-party arbitration process for issues of sexual harassment. There are plans in the works for high-level roundtables at the American Anthropological Association. There are also numerous statements on social media by students and faculty that the Comaroff scandal had made them want to interrogate their own universities��� protection for victims of sexual harassment and abuse. One of the key lessons of the events at Harvard is the role of trade unions. All of the claimants in the lawsuit are active Harvard Graduate Students��� Union members and two of them were recently elected to union leadership, proving again as someone opined on Twitter that ���unions are the best mechanism for workers to remedy imbalances of power in the workplace.���

After another of the Chronicle signatories retracted, Suren Pillay, who is a colleague of Taylor���s at UWC, had a question for those who signed, especially the ones who had retracted since. Pillay felt that he was none the wiser as to why they signed in the first place. Pillay wrote:

The puzzling element remains that [Comaroff���s actions] have been in the public domain for a while now, and the details in the lawsuit were raised by graduate students before the filing of the lawsuit itself against Harvard. Were the signatories not aware of the longer history that was in the public domain? Or did they ��� have access to knowledge that many others did not have that could make for such certain judgments about the internal processes of Harvard or the vouching for a colleague based on the rationale of scholarship and friendship? Apologies are important, but I think it would�� help to have answers to these questions for those of us who might want to learn from the mistakes of others.

On Monday, the Crimson published an editorial signed by the staff, arguing along similar lines: For them, the 38 Harvard professors who rashly signed a letter based on selective and incomplete information provided by Comaroff’s lawyers: ���… will have to live with the reality that, when push came to shove, with the most limited, slanted information, they sided with their colleague over his accusers. A quick retraction will not change that.���

At the time the latest episode in the Comaroff story broke, I was watching the documentary series, ���We Need to Talk About Cosby,��� about the American comedian and actor who for decades was lauded for how his creations contributed to more complex, mostly positive, depictions of black people in a very racist media landscape. At the same time, he was drugging and raping women. Near the end of the documentary, Renee Graham, an op-ed columnist with the Boston Globe, was asked about Cosby���s ultimate legacy. ���He is a rapist who had a really big TV show once.���

The academy���populated as it is by members of the professional-managerial class���conceives of itself as moral leaders of society and as a vehicle of social change, especially in recent decades. It has also always thought of itself as separate from society, in some way. But its patterns of hierarchy and patronage are just as bad if not worse (given its blinkered, exceptionalist self-concept). How will future generations of scholars talk about the legacy of John Comaroff and those who rushed to his defense? From the talk online among early career academics and graduate students it appears they want to end the silence. Ironically, this may be a consequence of students��� limited prospects; some feel that the job market is bad enough so they have little to lose in calling out powerful harassers who might otherwise promote their careers.

We are witnessing older academic hierarchies, which are almost unabashedly feudal and based on ideas of apprenticeship, come aground onto the escalating austerity in the neoliberal university. As a young academic���emboldened by the actions of the three brave Harvard graduate students who filed the lawsuit (Margaret Czerwienski, Lilia Kilburn, and Amulya Mandava)���told me this week: the liberal managerialism that attempted to contain the abuses of feudal academia is increasingly delegitimized among younger generations of academics, who turn to social media and labor organizing to try to shift the balance of power. To older academics, these moves are seen (quite rightly) as serious attacks on their position and the decorum of academia, which was always supposed to value civil debate and to be above the grubby materialism of the private sector. This may explain the quick support for Comaroff.

In many ways, my interlocutor argued, older academics (some of whom have been very quiet during this whole scandal) resent and fear their students, who with some justice seem to see them as occupied with obscure subjects while administrations gutted the university. The lawsuit by Czerwienski, Kilburn and Mandava and the open support of their comrades may present an opportunity for this generation to begin to forge a new model for academia, in which solidarity isn���t just about protecting one���s powerful friends.

The ideological vacuum in Kenyan politics

The Kenyan Organic Intellectuals Network wants to challenge the vague manner elites there deal with the past and take on the challenges of the present. Photo by Rohan Odhiambo on Unsplash

In Kenya, the bourgeoisie class of intellectuals serves systems of oppression by revising history to sanitize the legacies of dictators such as Jomo Kenyatta, Daniel Arap Moi, and their neoliberal descendants like Uhuru Kenyatta. This, while erasing the history of freedom fighters such as Bildad Kaagia and Pio Gama Pinto.

Kaagia was part of the Mau Mau Central Committee that launched the war for independence in Kenya and opposed the land grabbing initiated by African elites, led by the elder Kenyatta, who took power at independence in 1963. Pinto,�� another freedom fighter and a close friend of Kaggia, also opposed the unequal distribution of land and wealth. Pinto was a selfless individual who believed in a free and fair society in which the government would ensure that everybody had access to basic needs and rights, and he fought to achieve that.

We are part of a group of young, Kenyan intellectuals who want to make public the histories of figures like Kaagia and Pinto. The latter is particularly significant as he became the first Kenyan political leader to be assassinated after independence. Pinto was murdered in 1965 when he was only 38. He is also the subject of our first book as a collective, Kenyan Organic Intellectuals Reflect on the Legacy of Pio Gama Pinto.

Pio Gama Pinto was born on March 31 1927 in Nairobi, Kenya. In his short life, he wore many hats as a freedom fighter, journalist, writer, and politician. In 1964, Pinto, who was closely involved in the ruling KANU party, was elected as a member of parliament. In his short-lived stint in post-independence politics, he vehemently opposed what he saw as a betrayal of those freedom fighters against British colonialism and how a small elite amassed vast wealth after independence.

For his outspokenness, Gama was assassinated. He was shot in the driveway of his Nairobi home as he was waiting for his gate to open. His daughter was in the car.

As Kenya���s first political martyr in 1965, Pinto is one among the many who remind us of the importance of fighting for social justice. As young people who chose to reflect on the contribution of Pinto 56 years after his assassination by the government of Jomo Kenyatta, we show that there is a generation of youth who are fighting for an alternative method to the violence of neoliberal capitalism.

The censorship in historical accounts of revolutionary struggle stalwarts such as Pinto takes place at every point where neoliberal knowledge is being produced and distributed���at the universities, in media institutions, and other places of learning. We are forbidden to challenge the interpretation and distorted history that made us a passive population. During the tenure of President Daniel Arap Moi in the early 1980s, Marxists and progressive literature that was deemed too radical were banned from the universities. Radical scholars like Maina Wa Kinyatti and Ngugi wa Thiong’o were detained for exposing true history to their students, while spies were embedded inside universities to monitor what was taught. The dominance of neoliberal knowledge�� has greatly affected our thinking by masking crises created by capitalism.

On May 29, 2021, 14 writers gathered at Cheche Bookshop in Nairobi, at the first meeting to launch the Organic Intellectuals Network. The network aims to generate writers and thinkers inside the movement advocating for social justice. We are from diverse backgrounds, coming from Ukombozi Library and the social justice centers. We are connected by the need to participate in the struggle for social justice and revolutionary change in Kenya.

Our discussion at the bookshop gathering focused on how best to investigate our society through research, and apply our writing skills to deconstruct ruling class knowledge. We decided to write a book about Pinto, an extraordinary Kenyan freedom fighter.

Inspired by the legacy of the Italian writer and activist Antonio Gramsci, our mission was to continue the work of abolishing censorship by ruling class education, to inspire change by using tools of historical and dialectical materialism to analyze society and produce knowledge that is rooted in the struggle of the common people. We wrote this book especially for young people , a generation likely unfamiliar with Pinto as a symbol of resistance and representation of progressive politics of his time. We know that Pinto did not act alone. We have chosen to magnify his legacy because there is an ideological vacuum in current politics.

This book is also relevant because not only are we writing within our various social movements and referencing our personal experiences in relation to the life of Pio Gama Pinto, but also using this documentation as material for political education in study cells conducted at the social justice centers and within other social movements that we are involved in.

The collection is published by Daraja Press, with a foreword by Linda Gama Pinto, Pio���s daughter, and an introduction by Shiraz Durrani, the editor of Pio Gama Pinto, Kenya���s Unsung Martyr, the inspiration for our reflections. Apart from our�� collection, there are other projects that keep the memory of Pinto alive. They include the podcast, ���Until Everyone is Free,��� which narrates the story of Pinto in Sheng (a combination of English and Swahili). The Mathare Social Justice Centre also created a commemoration and study of the life of Pinto at his grave to coincide with the day of his assassination, February 24.

After months of compiling and editing the reflections, we organized a launch of the book on December 12 2021, also Kenya���s Jamhuri (Independence) Day. We chose Jamhuri Day to challenge the government celebrations of Uhuru Kenyatta that are disconnected from the masses. Pio Gama Pinto believed that uhuru (freedom) must truly mean freedom for the people to be free from exploitation and poverty. He was among those who were courageous enough to speak out against land injustice by a government that left many landless. We chose to commemorate Jamhuri Day in a radical manner to symbolize that Pinto���s vision endures and from his spark a thousand socialist beacons have been born. We are a generation that refuses to be complacent and accept the crumbs from the tables where capitalists sit. As workers who produce the wealth of the world, we have the power to seize the present and future free from oppression, and in which workers own the means of production. We owe it to ourselves to do just that.

The Kenyan Organic Intellectuals Network�� will continue to be a platform for emerging writers within social movements. We have also published our writings on the crises of capitalism in Nairobi on the Mathare Social Justice Centre website. We have upcoming reflections on the despair brought about by NGOs operating in the workers��� movement. Our study is based on Issa Shivji���s book Silences in NGO Discourse: The Role and Future of NGOs in Africa.

Also, listen to our podcast interview with Lena and Nicholas about Pio Gama Pinto���s legacy.

Worshipping other people’s gods

Kenyan filmmaker Jim Chuchu explores the struggle between indigenous cultural practice and Pentecostal Christianity. A still from Tapi!, 2020.

When Pastor Wanyota and the National Council of Churches in Kiunga Diocese that he represents succeed at outlawing Utapishi���an annual cleansing and healing ceremony practiced by the people of Kiunga since the early 1500s���a specter of despair haunts the screen in Tapi! (2020). The film is a speculative documentary short film directed by Jim Chuchu of The Nest Collective, a multidisciplinary collective living and working in Nairobi, Kenya. The film fictionalizes the erasure of Utapishi in favor of [neo]colonial-modernity pervading contemporary Kenya under the veil of Pentecostal Christianity.

We are introduced to Jackson Matiere���a healer and performer in Kiunga town���grappling with the enforcement by the government of the Witchcraft Act at the behest of Pastor Wanyota and his supporters. The Witchcraft Act, Chapter 67, became law on November 12 1925, more than four decades before Kenya gained independence from Britain. . The Act contains nine clauses prescribing penalties for ���causing injury, fear, annoyance��� through acts or postures related to witchcraft, solicitation and possession of ���charms.��� It comes with many inconsistencies, including that what counts as evidence necessary to confirm culpability is nebulous and could be contrived.

Although not captured in the Witchcraft Act at the time, prophecy and oath-taking, or the suspicion about it, were severely punished as they had the potential of mobilizing community resistances against colonial rule. Indigenous cultural practices on the whole were reduced to ���witchcraft��� and punished indiscriminately because of the threats colonial officials imagined they posed. It should be noted that the ���witch��� did not embody a gendered character similar to medieval Europe���s witches, but rather functioned as a euphemism for recalcitrant colonial subjects. Thus, punishments ranging from executions to deportations operated in wide excesses of the law, speaking to the absolute nature of colonialism���s hysteria.

Before this, local elders would conduct careful assessments based on corroborated testimonies before expediting consequences on accusations brought to them. Colonial officials found this system in place and supplanted it with Native Tribunals consisting of local agents deputized to act against their own people. The result was a vulgar reshaping of methods and narratives that subordinated custom to colonial codes of demonology and ���crime.��� According to court records in the Kenyan colonial administrator John Nottingham���s ���Some Notes on Witchcraft in the Eastern Area of Machakos District,��� estimated to be written in the 1950s:

���nearly two thousand people confessed to having brought about the deaths of an average of between forty and a hundred victims each, witches still abounded and communities were at least as concerned about their activities as before though they were perhaps less likely to kill them.

Tapi���s Matiere maintains a casual demeanor, wearing shoulder-length dreadlocks, neck ornaments and loathing the thought of having to wear a suit and tie when challenging the local church groups rallying against Utapishi. Matiere however ends up wearing one upon persuasion by Fred Ombati, a bureaucrat and also county representative of the Ministry of Sports, Culture and Heritage. Ombati assumes a more liberal approach to the preservation of Utapishi, arguing that it can be a lucrative stream of revenue for the people of Kiunga if packaged as a cultural product for tourist consumption. After a heated debate in the courtroom and Matiere���s subsequent refusal to strip Utapishi of its spiritual and healing properties, the practice is banned by the Kiunga county government.

Reflecting on the loss, Matiere concludes,

People who have no convictions, no roots, no beliefs are the weakest. It is not money or armies that makes strong societies, it is a strong sense of self. And that is the biggest problem with us Africans. We have been made to believe that everything that is ours is inferior and that is why we take everything from outside. So we fight other people���s wars, we worship other people���s gods, we bleach our skin, straighten our hair, we wear the suit and tie, and most importantly we forget who we are.

Herein lies a familiar thread on loss of collective identity. Matiere mourns an identity that connects us to each other, to our ancestries, the earth, freedom, and truth. It is one that breaks with the impositions inherited during the colonial period. Because Western cultural imperialism cannot map itself neatly onto these realities, it works to diminish and discard the spiritual bases of indigenous practices, casting them as inferior.

In her recent lecture “Africana Philosophy and Feminism” (2020), Nkiru Nzegwu, a research professor at the State University of New York at Binghamton, noted that, ���the social categories that have arisen from the beingness of the West���which are not exportable to other places but have been exported���are creating nightmarish distortions in those areas.���

Towards the end of Tapi!, the county government permits the participants of Utapishi one final ceremony, but no one in the town of Kiunga shows up. Matiere speculates that it could be a sign of fear rapidly etching itself onto the people of Kiunga, associating the practice with evil, perversion and sin. With the help of two fellow healers, Patrick and Chul from Parani town, Matiere prepares for the ceremony by making a mixture of cleansing spices and herbs together with ashes from a fire that has been prayed over and dedicated to the participants��� ancestors. The mud thickens. It is then applied over their bodies as they pray and dance to songs of spiritual cleansing. They do not stop until the mud is wiped off of their bodies, a signal of the entire community���s karma being reset. All this is captured in a montage where they splash water delicately against each other���s bodies, rubbing mud over their hands, faces, necks and torsos, repeating the ritual and dancing till they hit repose. Utapishi is an unmistakably intimate practice intended to draw communities closer, not just to themselves but also to the contiguous realms where their ancestors reside; gesturing to liminality; to another way of being, away from the corporeal.�� Utapishi is an iterative engagement in erotic socialities that produce healing and spiritual restitution for participants as they surrender their bodies to the rhythms of the ceremony. While they vibrate, their bodies become vessels for slippages and frictional acts of pleasure, transcending that which they were assigned to do and marking intense pulses of pleasure. The Kenyan writer and literary scholar, K���eguro Macharia, refers to this as frottage. These are ���the moments when blackness coalesces through pleasure and play and also by resistance to antiblackness.��� Tapi! invites us to question the viability of blackness modified for propriety and what is lost when indigenous blacknesses are appropriated into anti-black regimes.

In the film, Pastor Wanyota argues that he is ���not against traditional practices��� and that the churches he represents are ���all for cultural expression��� in as far as it does not exceed the bounds of evangelical Christian doctrines. He then goes on to offer the Africana philosophies of Ubuntu and Ujamaa together with the touristification of Maasai culture as examples. Perhaps Pastor Wanyota and Ombati���s insistence on dislodging Utapishi from its healing and spiritual capacities is evidence of a dissonance that persists when African indigeneity is perceived as inhabiting modalities of spiritual fulfillment and pleasure. It evokes anti-indigenous sentiment, even animus, in those whose relationships to African cultures have been successfully separated from the indigenous knowledge systems and practices at their foundation. African languages, too, find themselves impacted as such entanglements persist.

In addition to undermining indigenous belief systems and practices, the pleasures intrinsic to them are read as pathological, deviant, even queer, focusing attention to the ways that they complicate and threaten Christian moral values of chastity, purity, and so on. Plurality of expression rings unfamiliar tunes within Western frames of cultural dominance that seek to atomize and discipline every aspect of personal life. Naminata Diabate has observed that, ������in addition to the challenges of reformulating pleasures elsewhere, the difficulties are compounded in the African context because of historical traumas that denigrated images of naked black bodies.���

Following the eschewal and often outright dismissal of African indigeneity as absent of progressive values and spiritual significance, it is clear why Utapishi was pushed to the fringes, and ultimately rendered illegal and obsolete. What Tapi! provides, with the different dimensions of its three main characters, is a doleful image of indigeneity decaying at the seams while its pleasure habits are perceived as carnal knowledge and immoral. It is a cue for an audience acculturated to Western ideals to hold the mirror and look back at itself.

Our history is here

The founders of Tarikhona Hona aim to archive the lives of the LGBTQI+ community in Morocco. Rabat. Image credit Christine Henske via Flickr CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.

In Morocco, same-sex relations are criminalized under Article 489 of the penal code and punishable by up to three years in prison. Although the law is enforced eratically, it has contributed to a dangerous climate of intolerance towards queer and trans people who are simultaneously vilified in the media and erased from the national narrative. In this context, the Moroccan feminist platform Tanit put out a call for volunteers in June 2021 to help construct an archive of the LGBTQI+ community in Morocco. Their project, Tarikhona Hona (Our History Is Here), focuses on four main themes: the queer movement in Morocco and its political context; queer issues in Moroccan media; LGBT people in Moroccan culture and art; and queer Moroccan folk culture. I spoke with two of the organizers about the inspiration behind Tarikhona Hona, the logistics involved, and its larger significance for queer people in Morocco.

Kristin Gee Hickman

Can you introduce the project, and say something about how you got involved in it?

Marwan Bensaid

I used to work in Morocco with Aswat (Voices), which was one of the first LGBT groups in Morocco. I started it with LA and other queer activists. I’m currently living in Amsterdam, where I���m a refugee. I���ve been here for five years now, working as a visual artist and filmmaker. I started making videos when I was in Aswat because we had a small camera. At the time, I was filming everything that was happening in the movement���protests, our meetings���but I had no idea what I was going to do with all that footage. We were collecting a lot of stuff: what was written about us in the media; police reports from when someone from the community was arrested. We were just documenting stuff spontaneously without thinking about it.

L.A.

In 2019, Marwan and I were like, hey, maybe we should do something with all this stuff. Let���s create a platform that���s not specifically academic, something that is not subject to copyright, accessible to everyone, a place where you can find information about queer stories in Morocco. We started our project this year; it���s called Tarikhona Huna (TH), or ���Our History Is Here.��� It���s super complicated to do a project like this in Morocco. It���s not safe to be queer�� in Morocco. You could go to prison at any moment. So we���re trying to find a strategy for doing it safely, not just for us, but also for the people that we���re recording. Me and Marwan, we���ve been activists for more than 10 years, we���re okay with the danger. But we don���t want to put other people at risk.

Kristin Gee Hickman

Since both you and Marwan came to this project through your participation in Aswat, can you say something about your shift from activism to archiving?

Marwan Bensaid

In a context like Morocco, making an archive about the LGBT community is an activist activity. We���re doing it because we want to make a change through this archive. For example, archiving human rights violations helps with the international visibility of what the government is doing to our community. It puts pressure on the government to make a change. But it���s also about sharing stories. In Morocco, there are a lot of people who don���t have contact with other queer people. Through this archive, people can read stories and learn about the community in Morocco, and connect with it.

L.A.

Archiving is also a way to write our own history. Because if we don���t do it, it���s going to be written by some group of white European academics who will be like ���Yeah, let���s archive the story of these people!��� So I think it���s kind of like, hey, we���re going to do this by ourselves because we have the capacity to do it. We���re the experts. So we can do it.

Kristin Gee Hickman

How do you get people involved? How do you keep participants and the archive safe?

L.A.

Yesterday we had a cybersecurity training for volunteers who are recording interviews for TH. Morocco is a state that can send malware to your laptop or phone; or it can send a hacker to steal people���s information and put them at risk. They could be killed or go to prison. For example, one of the people who was going to volunteer with us is a sociologist like me and she really wanted to participate. But at some point she called me and said, ���I’m really sorry, I can���t do it because I am a professor at a [Moroccan] university and I might lose my job.��� And I completely understand! I���m not allowed to be a professor in Morocco because I’m queer. Just doing this work can be problematic, not just being interviewed.

Marwan Bensaid

We���re actually planning two kinds of archives. There���s the archive that isn���t safe to share publicly yet. And then there���s the archive that we���ll share publicly on our website, which will be accessible to everyone. We���re also thinking about making visualizations of the archive. There will, of course, be longer texts and stories, but we also want to take those stories and make visuals with them as a way to make them more accessible, since a lot of people can���t read long academic texts or prefer to hear stories as videos or drawings.

Kristin Gee Hickman

Do you think this archive has the capacity to challenge narratives about Morocco? Or larger discourses about queerness?

Marwan Bensaid

Here they tell us that being gay and LGBT rights are concepts coming from the West. That���s true, in the sense that activism maybe started in another place. But in our country, there are stories of queerness in different ways, using different terms. For example, historically in Morocco we have something called a moussem. It���s a kind of traditional festival where queer marriages used to be performed.

L.A.

Moussems were a way to explain queerness. Like, you are queer because you have a spirit inside you and this spirit wants to have sex with a person of the same gender. It was a way to explain being queer and still be accepted by everyone.

Marwan Bensaid

Within Morocco, I think the archive will give visibility to stories like this that are part of our culture. So you can���t say that it���s something that came from abroad.

L.A.

We���re here. And not just during the past 10 years of activism. There have been artists and writers and even other ways of being queer, like in moussems. I think it���s really important to archive all of this, to make it visible and share these stories, so that we���re not erased.

Pio Pinto���s legacy for the Kenyan left

This week on AIAC Talk: Pio Gama Pinto was Kenya���s first post-independence martyr. Why does he matter today? Pio Gama Pinto, right, in 1964 with members of Nairobi's Goan community. (Image from the collection of Luis Assis Correia, via Frederck Noronha and Flickr CC).

Pio Gama Pinto was a Kenyan socialist activist and intellectual who was assassinated in 1965, shortly after Kenya won independence two years prior. Who was he, why was he feared, and why was his legacy erased?

This week, Will chats with Lena Anyuolo and Nicholas Mwangi, two members of the Organic Intellectuals Network in Kenya that have put together a volume of reflections on Pinto and his legacy called Kenyan Organic Intellectuals Reflect on the Legacy of Pio Gama Pinto (Daraja Press, 2021). Along the way, they also address the state of Kenya���s left, the prospects left unity and how it is approaching the upcoming general election in August.

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

https://podcasts.captivate.fm/media/76b95eec-63bc-4115-9e48-1e57b1f25295/pio-pinto-s-legacy-and-prospects-for-the-kenyan-left.mp3