Sean Jacobs's Blog, page 108
February 1, 2022
Are strongmen or liberal democracy our only choices?
Nigerien soldiers in Agadez. (Image: US Africa Command. via Flickr Creative Commons License). If you haven’t yet, subscribe to our newsletter. This is an excerpt from the January 30, 2022 edition. Subscribe via the form at the end of this page.
If the coup in Burkina Faso (where the military��overthrew a democratically elected government) tells us anything, it is that liberal democracy does not, or cannot, protect people (in Burkina Faso‘s case it is from terrorist violence). We also learn that if people��don’t experience any��changes in their daily lives (economic and material deprivation is usually a clue), it will leave the door wide open for rule by the gun. It doesn’t help if citizens begin to think of state models, like the neoliberal authoritarianism of Paul Kagame (complete with advertising on Arsenal FC’s shirt sleeve), as representing a better and more��stable option.
Of course, we can’t really know how popular these authoritarian models are. For example, the Burkinabe and Malian militaries have organized protests��framing their coups as anticolonial��(while at the same time they present themselves as France’s junior partner in the so-called War on Terror); and��in Kagame’s Rwanda,��you��can not find people who will openly say what they think of his rule. (Remember when a parliamentary��commission��traveled the country and��could only��find 10 Rwandans��who��would go on record to object to��his rule, since 2000,��be��extended to 2034?)��In some quarters, some are buying the Malian and Burkinabe militaries’ spin. The trouble is that��military��and or��authoritarian rule gets you nowhere, even in cases where we may agree with the politics of the coup leaders, or the charismatic ruler claiming it’s his “national duty” to suspend the constitution, fire judges and disband parliament.
The long-term effects are no good��as we have learned in cases as diverse��as Ghana or in the same Burkina Faso. But��then��you ask, what does liberal democracy offer��in Africa?��We get the uninspiring choices of��Bola Tinubu��(tainted by corruption) in Nigeria;��Ousmane��Sonko (charges of sexual violence)��or��Macky Sall in Senegal;��and Cyril Ramaphosa’s��bloated and corrupt ruling party��and��his tightfisted finance ministry��in South Africa.
But like��we’ve said before, we need to study how social movements in Latin America and the Caribbean are working to make electoral politics have more weight.��One idea is to heed the advice of someone like��Karl Cloete, the South African trade unionist, about how we imagine post-nationalist or post-liberation movement politics. Otherwise, all we have is��depression.
January 31, 2022
The humanization of public monsters
Graphic by KTV News. This post is part of a series of republications from The Elephant. It is curated by one of our editorial board members, Wangui Kimari.
Charles Njonjo was a Kenyan lawyer who served as Kenya���s first post-independence Attorney General. While he is rumored not to have finished his law degree, he held the position from 1963 to 1979, under the leadership of Jomo Kenyatta and then Daniel Arap Moi. The latter then appointed Njonjo as Minister of Constitutional Affairs from 1980 to 1983. Njonjo died on January 2nd, 2022. When he passed, most tributes were laudatory.
John Githongo, publisher of The Elephant, described Njonjo in a tribute as a steadfast friend and counselor, one who was ���particularly dismissive of tribal chauvinists,��� whom he insisted ���held Kenya back in fundamental ways.��� He even writes that Njonjo urged him to resign when the Mwai Kibaki regime moved Githongo���s anti-corruption office from the Office of the President to the Ministry of Justice, effectively downgrading it.
Many Kenyans, however, experienced Njonjo during his tenure in government as a ruthless, ambitious member of what was known as the Kiambu Mafia, itself a gang of Kikuyu chauvinists who surrounded Jomo Kenyatta and used the state to corruptly amass vast fortunes. The Njonjo the public knew���and that history will remember���did not resign when the government he was a part of murdered people like Pio Gama Pinto or J.M. Kariuki, nor when it committed massacres against its own people in places like Kisumu and the former Northern Frontier District. In fact, as Attorney General and Minister for Legal Affairs, he legitimized the theft and oppression of the Kenyatta regime.
The eldest son of the late Josiah Njonjo, a paramount chief and one of the foremost collaborators with British colonial rule in Kenya, Charles Njonjo did not fall far from the tree. He was famous for aping the mannerisms of the British upper classes, something he had been conditioned to do from his school days. ���My father had a horse, and on weekends, when we were given off days, he would send a servant to bring it to Alliance early in the morning. I would ride it home and back to school in the evening. The servant would then take it back home,��� he once recalled. The Kenyan press would sardonically bestow upon him the title of ���Duke of Kabeteshire.���
Njonjo was openly contemptuous of Africans, once proposing recognition of, and exchange of ambassadors with, the apartheid regime in South Africa, and even declaring he would not shake hands with Luos for fear of contracting cholera. He was uncomfortable being flown by black pilots and was said to have slowed down Africanization of the judiciary, then effectively a department in his ministry.
Clearly, there is nothing that says public monsters cannot be loving human beings in private. And throughout history, many of the world���s tyrants have tried to use humanizing private moments to counter their brutish public image. For example, Stephanie Pappas wrote in 2016 in a piece published by Live Science that ���as Hitler strong-armed his way to dictatorship, profiles of him rusticating in his residence in Obersalzberg, Bavaria, portrayed him as a cultured gentleman, beloved by dogs and children.��� She noted that he managed to expand his appeal beyond ���the beer-soaked halls of Munich to the rest of the country,��� in part through portrayals ���as a good man, a moral man, and the evidence for that com[ing] from his private life.���
And therein lies the danger. The public is wont to see things in black and white, discarding nuance. As such, there is a resistance to imagining people who have committed heinous acts as being capable of expressing humanity, and conversely, of those who show such humanity in private of being capable of committing monstrous acts. When my boss describes his friend, I have no doubt he is doing so as an honest reflection of his own private experience of the man he knew and loved. But we must be careful to ensure that his characterization adds to, rather than erases, the equally valid experience of many others who saw him in a very different light.
Perhaps more importantly, we must ask about the value of seeking to humanize those who dehumanize others. I don���t mean this in the sense that we should regard them as alien or subhuman, but rather that we actively consider how portrayals of the joy and comfort they brought to a few can be used to downplay the pain they have caused to the many. If Githongo���s obituary helps soften the image of the man who once famously warned us that we could be put to death for imagining the demise of the president, then it would do Kenya a great disservice. But if it makes us appreciate that even supposedly ���good��� men in private can do really bad things when in power, it could be a great asset, especially in an election year when we will be assailed with exhortations to vote for ���good��� leaders.
This realization may lead us to have conversations about the systems we have and whether they prevent or incentivize nice people to become tyrants, and to keep in mind the words of 19th-century American attorney and orator Wendell Phillips: ���The hand entrusted with power becomes, either from human depravity or esprit de corps, the necessary enemy of the people.��� This, above all, is the lesson of Njonjo.
January 27, 2022
Resonant music
Still from Africa Mia. It is a marvelous story.
In 1963, ten young aspiring musicians (all men and just barely out of their teenage years) are selected to represent their country���the Republic of Mali���as exchange students at the prestigious Alejandro Garc��a Caturla Conservatory in Havana, Cuba. Their studies are supported by full scholarships from the Cuban government, a generous provision that covers the cost of travel, room, board, and advanced musical study over several years.
For the Cuban sponsors of these African scholars, the investment reflects a desire to support and strengthen ties among newly independent socialist states within a postcolonial world cleaved by the Cold War. Just three years earlier, on September 22nd, 1960, Mali had declared its full independence from French colonial rule, aligning itself with the communist bloc. Cuba���s socialist state isn���t much older, seizing power from the defeated Batista regime on January 1st, 1959. In 1963, both countries are still full of the fervor of anti-imperial struggle, and both perceive the promise���but also the pitfalls���of a nascent and precarious independence.
For Cuba, transnational solidarity is key to sustaining these vanguard socialist revolutions. For Mali, nation-building (fasobaara in Bamana, Mali���s lingua franca) is a paramount and pressing concern. In both countries, ���culture��� is considered essential to accomplishing these distinct but related goals. Cultivating and mobilizing the performing and visual arts, their leaders argue, fosters and strengthens a sense of belonging, trust, and common purpose both within and beyond the nation.
In this way, ten aspiring Malian musicians travel from Bamako to Havana on January 10th, 1964 as cultural ambassadors and civil servants: hopeful embodiments of Afro-Cuban solidarity and youthful harbingers of a much-anticipated Malian modernity.
The orchestra born of their studies, Las Maravillas de Mali, provides the inspired soundtrack of these postcolonial dreams and desires, of transnational unity and national uplift.
It is also a maudlin story.
A generation later, the story of these artists���their journey, their mission, and their music���has been largely forgotten. The memory of their adventures and exploits gather dust on the shelves of archives, in half-forgotten boxes of personal souvenirs, or just lie fallow in the minds of aging men too seldomly asked to tell their tale.
This is where French music producer and documentary filmmaker Richard Minier arrives on the scene, a bit clumsily and somewhat by chance. On vacation in Mali, Minier and a friend find themselves bored and hungry at the Hotel de l���Amiti�� (a towering staple of the Bamako skyline) on New Year���s Day, 2000. Following a tip from a musician friend in the hotel lounge and armed with a camcorder, they make their way to Akwaba, a local nightclub where an Afro-Cuban band is holding court. Struck by the charismatic and peculiar style of the group���s flutist, the late Dramane Coulibaly (1943���2010), Minier starts asking questions. And, just like that, the story of Las Maravillas de Mali begins to unfold.
Together with a small but committed cohort of interlocutors and collaborators, including co-director Edouard Salier, Minier travels back and forth from France to Mali, Niger, C��te d���Ivoire, and finally Cuba to gather material for his project. Minier���s mission is to reunite Las Maravillas for one final recording. The result is Africa Mia, a film that impresses with both its perspective, the result of a remarkably stubborn persistence, and its pathos, the effect of being present with cameras rolling when it matters.
Let���s start with the film���s perspective. From start to finish, Minier���s documentary research spans eighteen years. There are many onscreen markers of the project���s remarkable lifespan. When we first encounter Minier, he appears as a carefree youth (still partying all night at thirty), with an unruly head of dark hair and a palpable zeal for Mali���s turn-of-the-century popular culture. Pushing fifty, Minier ends the film cleaner cut and grayer around the hairline but also more reflective and subdued, though he is no less wise for the wear.
It is a wisdom born of patience. Early on, we learn that one of the reasons the Las Maravillas story has not received the attention it deserves has to do with lingering grievances among the surviving members. These are resentments born of an old���and still keenly felt���betrayal.
When the Las Maravillas members were called home to Mali in the early 1970s, they returned to a country transformed by a coup d�����tat (November 19th, 1968), with a young and zealous military leadership eager to break ranks with the previous regime and its ���communist��� sympathies. The Malian arts sector, built up by and still closely aligned with the First Republic���s nation-building project, suffered mightily.
���They killed the arts,��� legendary Malian singer Salif Keita, an elder of this era, explains in the film. For Keita, the junta���s motivations were as crassly political as they were crudely personal. ���The President hated music!��� says Keita. ���His wife, too!��� Trained to be conservatory professors, with advanced degrees in music theory, composition, and performance, the members of Las Maravillas felt this hatred acutely, alternately ignored and abused by their new statist patrons. For Maravillas bandleader Boncana Maiga, it was a bridge too far.
Sensing an opportunity in neighboring C��te d���Ivoire, where a burgeoning commercial music scene was taking shape (in stark contrast to the situation in Mali), Maiga made the difficult choice to leave his home country to find his fortune abroad. Many other Malian artists would follow suit, including Salif Keita (but that���s another story). Resisting this urge, the remaining members of Las Maravillas de Mali decided to stay home, hoping that things would change for the better in their native land���but also wary of Ivorian claims to their musical output.
Boncana Maiga���s departure in 1973 not only broke up the band, but his subsequent success in Abidjan, becoming one of West Africa���s most sought-after professional musicians, kindled both regret and more than a little jealousy among his former comrades in Mali.
Time would add insult to injury. When Minier began his quest to uncover the story of Las Maravillas de Mali in January 2000, only five of the original ten members were still alive to share their story. By 2018, only Boncana Maiga was left.
This perspective���which gazes back at the fraught longue dur��e of Mali���s postcolonial history and then watches its millennial afterlife unfold in the dwindling company of pioneering elders���also adds considerable pathos to the film.
Minier���s quixotic campaign to ���get the band back together��� may be a pipe dream, but it does stage several deeply moving encounters, as joyful as they are mournful. Recounting them here risks blunting their impact, and for me this is where the film shines���so no spoilers. (Having previously published on the early history and cultural politics of Las Maravillas de Mali, I accept those details as fair game for prior knowledge.) Suffice it to say that the documentary is full of laughter and more than a few tears, captured by the fleet-footed lens of Minier���s camera.
Cinematically, the sense of immediacy and intimacy Minier and his team achieve is reminiscent of the cin��-v��rit�� (filmic truth) espoused by fellow cinematic griot Jean Rouch (1917-2004). Indeed, Rouch���s deeply personal and historically attentive filmic dramas of late-colonial life in the West African Sahel strike me as obvious precursors to Africa Mia, and not only for their content. Theirs is a kinship rooted in a common method.
Like that of Rouch, Minier���s ���cin��-eye��� is always in motion but no less focused on moments of affective interest. And if some of these moments are clearly staged, a cinematic ruse which Rouch knew well and often employed, they are no less powerful or authentic. Beyond the mise en sc��ne, structure gives way to practice, engendering unscripted scenes of emotional honesty.
Without revealing too much, Boncana Maiga���s late-in-life return to Havana is, by itself, worth the price of admission. But the whole is also greater than the sum of its parts. I laughed, got choked up, and cried watching this film. And I can strongly recommend the experience to others. Africa Mia warrants wide distribution and ample praise.
Still, there are a few gaps and some missed opportunities. Most notably, the internecine and regional crises that struck C��te d���Ivoire (2002-4, 2010-11) and Mali (2012-present) are entirely absent from the film���s narrative. How did the Ivorian civil wars impact Boncana Maiga, for example, a ���Muslim northerner��� living in Abidjan? And how did Mali���s present troubles affect the planning and execution of the film���s final chapters, which play out mostly in Havana but also sporadically in Bamako?
Minier notes how ���old and tired��� Maiga seemed in 2015, and the contrast to footage from 2010 is certainly striking. Maiga has aged a lot during these five years, in ways not sufficiently explained (in my view) by the man���s biological clock. Indeed, Maiga���s world-weary demeanor gives way to a youthful buoyancy upon arrival to Cuba in 2018. There is a sense in which Minier does not see���or is simply not willing or interested in seeing���the geopolitical forest for the interpersonal trees, here and elsewhere.
And I am, with some reservations, okay with that point of view, intentional or not.
As a careful���but also increasingly anxious���observer of Malian history and culture, I admit to having relished in a story that does not get bogged down in the turbulent politics of the present, that privileges intersubjective storytelling over macrosocial argument. Zooming in on the immediacy of an affecting presence, Africa Mia bears witness to the complex humanity of a group of remarkable men, their turbulent lives, and their resonant music.
It is truly a marvelous story.
The future of South Africa���s labor movement
Photo by Ilse Orsel on Unsplash Are South Africa���s unions relevant? Are they still too closely connected to the politics of the country���s ruling party, the African National Congress? [The party still enjoys an alliance with the country���s largest trade union federation, the Congress of South Africa���s Trade Unions (COSATU).] Can they rebuild to unite workers, communities and the unemployed? What we know is that South Africa���s labor movement is in crisis. Only 27% of workers are members of a trade union and soaring joblessness leaves many outside of employment relations altogether.
In this episode, Will chats with Karl Cloete, the former deputy general secretary of South Africa���s largest trade union, the National Union of Metalworkers South Africa (NUMSA).
https://podcasts.captivate.fm/media/8ef1edb7-f2fd-45ce-8c86-3b032521e6a5/aiac-talk-karl-cloete-2022-01-26-16-35.mp3January 26, 2022
The water oriented away from normativity
Image credit Adam Cohn via Flickr CC BY-NC-ND 2.0. There is an argument���made most recently on this site by religious studies scholar David Tonghou Ngong���that the roots of African homophobia might be found in African indigenous religions rather than in the religions that followed later. I don���t necessarily want to offer a counter argument, but I do want to think alongside, and perhaps to trouble and extend, some of these contentions.
What if our starting place is to claim that Africa has always been queer? This would be to claim a queer Africa that is simultaneously homophobic, drawing on a reading of queer that both includes alternative and fluid sexualities and exceeds them. To be queer is to be oriented away from the norm. To live askance. Borrowing from Sarah Ahmed���s Queer Phenomenology, I cast Africans as queerly oriented to normative codes of being. Because to be normal is to be Western European, North American, male, white, middle class, able bodied, and heterosexual, all our attempts at normativity fail. We live in queer failure. We are oddities to the Global North. We are barely human. We drown in boatloads while crossing the Mediterranean and the world carries on without missing a beat. So no, we are not normal. We do not aspire to normalcy.
If we narrow the gaze and focus on sexuality, on this score, too, we are queer. To claim a queer orientation would require us to accept the proposition that a spiritual life of ancestral reverence can���t have been���and is not intrinsically���homophobic. Modern coupling is not a natural state but a social artifact popularized and propagated by organized global religion and modernity. To assume one partner of an opposite sex as default would be to think of history too narrowly and from a presentist lens. To suggest that indigenous African spirituality sowed the seeds of today���s homophobia is to unsee how pervasively queer we are. It is to turn away from our flow that eschews straight lines. Indigenous African spirituality is steeped in queerness. It defies centuries of derision. African spirituality carries across oceans on slave ships and digs roots in Brazil and Haiti. These roots are centuries deep. Indigenous spirituality resists a single god even when that god brings aid, gold, and plagues. It embraces queer ecstasy, touchings, laying of hands, shaking, collapse, charms, and magics that resist rules and recipes. Jayna Brown���s Black Utopias cogently captures black spiritual utopias and their world-making potentialities in the United States. These utopias are grafted onto an African ethic of worship and being. African spirituality centers feeling. It is as queer as fuck. It cannot be bothered with who sleeps with who.
To think of desire as unmoored is to refuse to use modern, binary categories of naming such as gay, lesbian, or trans, but it is not a denial of homopoetics. These categories do not translate well in rural spaces. Instead, we have multiple ways of being that operate along local registers and are often incommensurate with global discourses of rights and identity. For every homophobe, there are hundreds of Africans who live in varying levels of relation with queer sociality. We who are cast as belated or trailing the West do not all want equality on terms such as those based on the rights or recognition which characterize the Global North. We see how one might be recognized as gay and able to marry while impoverished and murdered for their blackness. Perhaps a different architecture is needed in queer Africa. Heteronormative bliss is not the model of our personhood. We desire something more complicated and liberated than the rainbow. To paraphrase Rinaldo Walcott: we want rights, but we are cautious of their stultifying potentialities���e.g., that all queer men are gay and women necessarily always rigidly lesbian���and their legitimation of the state as the arbiter of desire. We trouble the assumption that all covet marriage, a sexual contract with the state and capital. More fundamentally, we want to own our desire and live unbeholden to others.
I demur: African indigenous spirituality cannot plant the seeds of homophobia. For African homophobia, we have to look elsewhere. Homophobia is pervasive and it pushes against African queerness. African homophobia is harmful and it kills. Keguro Macharia correctly reminds us not to give African patriarchs a free pass by attributing all homophobia to external sources. Africans can be homophobic. I have nothing to gain by protecting homophobes; this piece is not in their defense. The postcolony embraced homophobia, and African nations that draw their identity from Christianity are generally directly opposed to queer ways of being. ���We are a Christian nation��� or ���we are an Islamic people��� is often code for ���no queers.��� But since we are a fundamentally queer continent and people, homophobia often fails spectacularly here. Being queer is an undying spirit. It is always evading capture���fugitive from big men and people that police desire. Queerness is a practice of renewal and invention. Our very capacity to live in this place is a queer ethic. African homophobes are on the losing side. Imported religion, colonial regimes, and a heterosexual capitalist order have failed to vanquish the queer spirit of Africans. We bob like corks on choppy water. When the tide turns in, we are still there: clinging, gliding, touching, and erupting. We are hidden in plain sight. We genuflect to homophobic governments and churches and then we turn around to furtively love and rub.
I do not trace the genealogy of this argument to John Mbiti and others who have theorized African culture by propping up patriarchy. Instead, I read Neo Sinoxolo Musangi, Zethu Matebeni, and Keguro Macharia. I look to what I see and know. When I can, I run along the shoreline or the length of rivers. In almost every southern African country I have been to, I see groups of people in white, blue, green, or yellow flowing robes. I watch them as they wade in the water to commune with ancestors and ancient gods. These practices are feeling-based. Hierarchies, sexual categories, and gendered orders do not survive the water. So no, as a queer African, I disagree that indigenous practices are our undoing. That is not the direction from which the hate blows. The hate comes from organized spaces of religion and politics. These are spaces with something to gain from hate. These spaces discipline feeling and eruption and propagate uniform structures of kinship. Spaces that insist on heads of families and subordinates. Spaces that stultify creativity and domesticate feeling, relation, and roles. The chaos of eruption that indigenous spirituality invites is not invested in discipline and order. African spiritualists come as they are, not as straight, lesbian, or gay.��They emerge from the water oriented away from normativity���as queer AF.
January 25, 2022
Wyuyata’s story
Photo Courtesy Asmaa James Foundation. The child rape victim whose story sparked the outcry that led Sierra Leone to change its sexual violence laws in 2019 has died. Wyuyata Konneh, who was brutally raped at the age of 5, died in Bo on January 23. She was 9 years old. At the 2021 UN General Assembly, President Maada Bio moved for a UN Resolution on survivors of sexual violence. He promised ���absolute commitment��� to survivors. Wyuyata���s death shows that child rape survivors need long-term safeguarding and protection.
I first met Wyuyata at the fistula ward at Aberdeen Women���s Center (AWC) in October 2018. I had gone there to meet with the Scottish philanthropist who has financed the clinic for a decade. I got there while she was still in a meeting. Her assistant asked one of the doctors to show me around in the meantime.
That���s when I saw Wyuyata, a frail brown-skin girl, with thick long cornrows, her legs so small they dangled. She was in a wheelchair. I asked who she was visiting in the fistula ward (a fistula is usually caused by obstructed childbirth) and that���s when I learned that the 5-year-old in front of me was a fistula patient. She had been raped and sodomized and as a result, had a golf-sized tear at the bottom of her vertebrae. It had left her paralyzed. The doctor had said Wyuyata was going to need long term medical care and support. Her rapist had yet to be reported or charged.
When I left AWC, I was devastated. To process how there could be so much silence around the rape of a 5-year-old girl, I wrote a blog. It was shared over 200 times on Facebook and downloaded and distributed in Whatsapp groups. The story made national headlines. The group, Legal Access through Women Yearning for Equality Rights and Social Justice (L.A.W.Y.E.R.S.) brought the matter to the police to seek justice for the victim.
In the months after I broke the story, Asmaa James began the Black Tuesday Campaign to raise awareness about child rape. By December the same year, Sierra Leone���s�� First Lady, Fatima Maadaa Bio, had launched her flagship Hands Off Our Girls Campaign. Four months after I went to AWC, President Julius Maada Bio announced a national emergency on rape on February 9, 2019, acknowledging for the first time that gender-based sexual violence was a ���scourge��� on the nation.
By July 2019, parliament debated amendments to the Sexual Offenses Act to increase the sentences for those who raped children and other victims of sexual violence. While the government focused on changing the law and expediting prosecution. Wyuyata remained at the Aberdeen Women���s Center where well-wishers would pay her visits. It became a bit of a media fiasco.
One person who took a long-term interest in Wyuyata���s well-being was Asmaa James. She became an advocate for Wyuyata���s care and mobilized resources on her behalf. A year after I met her at the clinic, Wyuyata and her guardian left Sierra Leone for medical treatment in India. They stayed in India for several months and Wyuyata had operations that we hoped would increase her mobility.
The Sexual Offence Act 2019 passed in September that year mandated a minimum 15-year sentence for rape convictions and up to life in prison for child rapists. The government also promised to enhance psychosocial support and protection for victims of sexual violence. They set up a Sexual Offences Model Court to July 2020 to expedite prosecutions.
A month earlier another 5-year-old, Kadijah Saccoh, was allegedly raped and killed. The Rainbo Center, a one-stop for psychosocial support for victims of rape, reported 3,548 cases at their five centers in 2020, 600 more cases than in 2018. Half of all victims were girls 12 and younger.
When Khadijah���s story broke, a coalition of Sierra Leonean advocates and organizations led by Asmaa James, diaspora-based celebrities like Idris Elba, and former CNN anchor Isha Sesay launched a Survivor���s Solidarity Fund to raise money for victims of sexual gender-based violence. Since its inception, the fund has raised $109,000 distributed to four organizations supporting rape victims.
By the time Wyuyata and her mother had returned home, Sierra Leone was grappling with the coronavirus pandemic. She was in better shape but still in need of care. In Freetown, James said she continued to check on Wyuyata until her mother decided to move her back to their hometown Bo, three hours from the capital city. Asmaa says she questioned the decision to move Wyuyata away, but because she was not her legal guardian, she had no say.
James lost touch with the family, although she exchanged phone calls with Wyuyata from time to time. Because Wyuyata���s story had been so widespread, she had become the breadwinner thanks to one foreign-based benefactor. In Bo, Wyuyata would have been away from the doctors and quality healthcare at the Aberdeen Women���s Center where she had been treated for free for months until she left for India.
On January 23, Wyuyata���s mother contacted James to say that her daughter had died in the early hours of the day. The wound had opened again and she was in a lot of pain. Wyuyata was buried before sunset in keeping with Muslim protocol.
Justice was only one part of what Wyuyata needed. She also required protection, perhaps from members of her own family. At a minimum, a social worker should have been assigned to monitor her progress. Anyone who got the details of her story from the beginning would have known that being at home with her mother was not in her best interest.
While Sierra Leone has made significant progress in its fight against sexual violence, when it comes to safeguarding survivors, especially children, there is no system of social protection. Survivors are left to depend on the kindness of strangers. For Wyuyata, that wasn���t enough.
January 24, 2022
We���re actually being exploited once again
Image credit F Mira via Flickr CC BY-SA 2.0. At the beginning of November, a great controversy erupted, mainly on social networks, as a result of statements made by Anabela Lemos, an environmental activist, who argued that Mozambique should not proceed with its natural gas exploration project. But who supports Lemos��� position, at a time when most social sectors in Mozambique, including civil society, see gas as a great opportunity to develop the country and fight poverty? In an interview conducted by Boaventura Monjane with Lemos (founder of Justi��a Ambiental, JA, and one of the loudest voices in the environmental movement in Mozambique), she responds to the question, arguing that insisting on extractivist mega-projects will always contribute to serious violations of human rights, cause irreversible damage to the environment, and deepen the climate crisis. She also claims that Mozambique���s position at COP26 was largely inadequate. The interview first appeared in Jornal Savana, a Mozambican publication.
Boaventura MonjaneIn a television news interview, you�� argued that Mozambique should not proceed with the natural gas exploration project in Cabo Delgado. Can you explain this position?
Anabela LemosBy choosing to explore natural gas, Mozambique is following the same path followed by other African countries such as Nigeria and Libya that have also tried to develop through the exploration of fossil fuels. In all the examples we have on the continent, these projects have led to an increase in corruption, conflict and militarisation, national debt, poverty, and a general deterioration in the standard of living of local populations. This is not a position of radical activists. Even the World Bank has acknowledged in its Extractive Industry Report that the oil and gas industries in developing countries have not only failed to improve the lives of the poorest people, but have made them even worse off.
Mozambique is one of the countries most affected by climate change and is looking to boost one of the industries that contributes most to this crisis, in the midst of a global movement calling to end the exploitation of fossil fuels. This is a contradiction and therefore we have to fight for our right to say no to environmentally destructive and socially unjust projects.
Boaventura MonjaneWhat do you mean by the right to say no?
Anabela LemosThe fight for the right to say no aims to challenge the usual way in which mega-projects are allowed in our countries, where public consultations or negotiations are carried out in the final stages of the project only to agree on small details and compensations. The right to say no aims to bring about a drastic change in the way affected people and civil society are brought into these debates. If the option of saying no is on the table, it is an indication that the people have power, and this opens up space for creating real debates about the best paths for development for the country.
This right started being demanded in several popular struggles of communities directly affected by extractivist projects, whose negative impacts affect these communities. People lose their land, livelihoods, access to rivers and the sea, ability to support themselves and to survive. The environment is destroyed and the people who survive are harassed. When everything is exhausted, corporations leave a trail of destruction and a huge debt for the state and the people.
For us perhaps the greatest reference to the right to say no is an inspiring struggle of a community in South Africa, in the Eastern Cape province. The community association Amadiba Crisis Committee, together with a team of lawyers and a South African civil society organization, took its Ministry of Mineral Resources to court. And they got the higher court to recognise that a titanium mining project in that region could not proceed without the consent of the local community.
Boaventura MonjaneDoes JA! fight against any and all development projects? After all, didn���t the industrialized countries develop with these types of projects?
Anabela LemosWe say no to any project that we believe will bring more negative than positive impacts for the people and the environment. Unfortunately, we are part of a national and global context in which governments are captured by the interests of large transnational corporations, and therefore the projects that are coming to our country will invariably benefit local and global elites, as they are not intended to solve the needs of the people.
The argument that industrialized countries developed with these types of projects is a misconception. European countries, for example, controlled virtually every component of the global value chain. They got rich from patents, from research, from manufacturing the equipment, from exploring, processing, and transporting resources. They became rich because they controlled and owned all the significant companies and markets at that particular time. And they got rich mainly because they colonized and exploited countries in the Global South. No African country that is already exploiting its fossil resources has developed from the exploitation of these, as it controls absolutely nothing in the value chain or any other critical component of this industry. So, regarding the gas, we’re actually being exploited once again.
Boaventura MonjaneThere has been a lot of debate about the right of less developed countries, such as Mozambique, to exploit their fossil fuel reserves to boost their economic growth. Don���t you think that industrialized countries should have a greater responsibility to cut their greenhouse gas emissions, rather than countries that have contributed little to these emissions?
Anabela LemosCertainly. That is why we speak of historical responsibility, because it was the countries of the North that created the climate crisis, and the countries of the South, such as Mozambique, are suffering the greatest impacts. This means that the past and present actions of industrialized countries are creating damage and losses as we saw with cyclones Idai and Kenneth, with direct and indirect economic losses projected at $3 billion.
As a country, we don’t have to lead the way in terms of climate action. But this does not mean that in Mozambique we should explore gas or any other fossil fuel and contribute to global emissions. We can pretend we���re fighting for a right, but given the climate crisis and the other impacts I’ve already mentioned, we���re basically fighting for the right to jump into an abyss.
But we can be an example of a country that is looking to its future and the future of planet earth, by moving towards a more sustainable economic model, while demanding that the Global North drastically reduce its emissions and pay the South a climate debt. This financing will allow the country to develop and be able to provide clean, just and decentralized energy to the entire population.
Boaventura MonjaneIn Mozambique, and in many other African countries, energy poverty still affects the majority of the population. Many families still depend on polluting energy sources that are very harmful to health, such as firewood and charcoal. How does JA! propose to resolve these issues in Mozambique?
Anabela LemosIn a country like ours, the priority is certainly to create a strategy of decentralization and diversification of energy sources, analyze the country���s energy potential by different areas and geographies, and build a system based on justice and the right of everyone to have access to a safe, healthy and clean energy source. Part of these studies already exist, completed by JA! and other researchers, but they continue to be largely ignored.
In September 2021, Friends of the Earth Africa published a ���Just Recovery Renewable Energy Plan for Africa,��� which shows that it is not only urgent but completely feasible to reduce emissions, transform our energy system, and make a just transition in our continent.
The plan, based on the work of renowned academic Dr Sven Teske of the University of Sydney, outlines how the continent can dismantle existing dirty energy systems and achieve 100% renewable energy for all by 2050. This plan would require more than 300 gigawatts (GW) of new renewable energy by 2030, as agreed by the African Union, and over 2000 GW by 2050. The plan also highlights the potential to create seven million new jobs in renewable energy on the African continent. It is not just a technical plan, but a vision of how renewable energy systems can serve people and protect biodiversity.
Boaventura MonjaneDon���t you think that a lot could be done if each of us, individually, had greater environmental awareness? I���m talking about reducing consumption levels, not throwing garbage on the floor, saving water. With these types of actions wouldn���t we be able to achieve major changes?
Anabela LemosIt is always good for individuals to practice sustainable habits and protect the environment. But individual actions, as important as they are, must somehow aim at more structural changes in society, because if they are not intended to bring about a general change in how we understand the system and what attitude we take, they have no real impact.
Furthermore, we need to recognize the ecological footprint (a method of calculating the pressure that the human population, and each of us in particular, exerts on natural resources and the planet) of the majority of the Mozambican population; with the exclusion of our own elites, it is absurdly small. The huge ecological impact of industries makes any action at the individual level completely meaningless. Mozal, for example, consumes more water and electricity than all domestic consumption in the city of Maputo. It is a company that did not even pay dividends to the Mozambican state throughout 2019.
So the big problem here is that industrial consumption and the linear model of extraction (production – use – disposal) are not compatible with ecological balance. We need circular systems that are capable of reusing all the components produced, as raw material in other processes. Of course, reducing consumption levels, especially in rich countries and [among] our domestic elites, is fundamental for this to be viable.
Boaventura MonjaneLooking at the impacts of extractivist mega-projects in Mozambique, many claim that their positive impacts are not felt due to high levels of corruption. How do you see this issue of corruption?
Anabela LemosThe debate about corruption in our country is on the rise and we all see the impacts of corruption on a daily basis. This scenario must be urgently reversed and we need to fight it at all levels. But we also need to recognise that corruption is intrinsically related to the economic viability of extractive projects. If it weren���t for corruption, they wouldn���t advance. Buying off some government officials to sponsor this type of investment project will always be cheaper than bearing all the real costs of fair compensation for land expropriation, decent wages, damage to health, restoration of the degraded environment, and the impacts of climate change, among others things.
Boaventura MonjaneBy solving the problem of corruption, would it be possible for Mozambique to be able to exploit the gas in a way that would benefit the country and the majority of Mozambicans?
Anabela LemosThe problem of corruption will not be resolved within the current development model that we have in the country. But beyond that, there are economic trends around fossil fuels that are undeniable, for anyone seeking to examine. Coal is a declining resource, with several countries (including China) already with divestment strategies and phasing out coal projects. Fifteen years ago when we started betting everything on coal, the scenarios were absurdly optimistic. We believe that gas extraction will follow a very similar path to coal. According to calculations by the Global Energy Monitor, there are already close to $100 billion in gas investments at risk of becoming stranded assets. Coal had a slow transition to become an unproductive asset, but with gas this risk will be faster and more abrupt, because it is a less labor-intensive industry.
As if this were not enough, current gas exploration contracts provide enormous benefits to private companies during the first decades, and only later will the country gain from exploration. All of this should be worrying for Mozambique, as we have major infrastructure problems, socio-economic instability and conflicts that are causing delays, putting gas projects even more at risk of becoming unproductive assets, and having a minimal contribution to the country���s economy. Other studies such as those carried out by the Center for Public Integrity (CIP), which do not focus on the risk of unproductive assets, still project weak gas contributions to the country���s economy due to tax exemptions, tax havens, low gas prices, and high operating costs, among others; this, of course, without even counting the costs of militarization and security that will fall on the state.
Boaventura MonjaneAt the national level, some see environmentalists or human rights defenders as having anti-development agendas, or accuse them of being manipulated by outside interests. How do you, personally and organizationally, deal with these criticisms?
Anabela LemosThe reason for the attacks on JA! is because our views are very upsetting to the interests of the elites, both national and international. There is no interest in having in-depth debates on these issues because then we will arrive at the undeniable facts that these projects do not bring development. There is a lot of information available and studies that confirm our positions.
We are always available to debate views and alternatives, but we don���t waste too much time on strategies that are based on hearsay and misinformation, and are intended to avoid deeper discussions.
Boaventura MonjaneWhat do you think of proposals like the one tried in Ecuador, in which more than $300 million was pledged to stop the exploration of 846 million barrels of oil beneath the Yasun�� National Park, one of the richest areas of tropical forest in the world. Do you think this solution would be viable for Mozambique?
Anabela LemosYes. With this kind of funding, and access to patents and technology that are unfortunately mostly owned by the Global North, countries like Mozambique can focus on energy transition.
It is very clear that funding for this exists. Data from the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) state that around $50 to $100 billion is lost each year due to tax evasion. Data from the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) show that $89 billion is lost in illicit financial flows. Data from the Tax Justice Network shows that $600 billion is lost every year due to tax fraud. Friends of the Earth International figures show that the wealth of the 53 richest people around the world could provide 100% renewable energy for Africa by 2030. We clearly know that this money exists, so we need to fight to demand the political will necessary to make the changes we need. This fund could also come from the payment of climate debts by industrialized countries.
Boaventura MonjaneThe UN climate summit (COP26) was held recently. World leaders pledged to transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy by 2050. Do you find this goal realistic? What did you think of Mozambique���s position at that summit?
Anabela LemosMozambique���s position at COP26, given that we are one of the countries most vulnerable to climate change, was largely inadequate. We should have brought a discourse relaying respective demands around the right to life, the right to develop our country without exploring fossil fuels, and the right to the climate debt. COP26 is a suicide pact for Africa that African negotiator Lumumba Di-Aping warned us about at the 2009 COP. Twelve years have passed and African leaders want to set the continent on fire.
The 2050 goal is completely unrealistic. As we often say at JA!, these negotiations are debating how many people we agree to let die, how many forests we accept to destroy, how many islands will be submerged, so that fossil fuel companies and captured governments can continue to increase emissions and their profits.
Rich countries do not take responsibility for creating the climate crisis. They also fail to meet the financial commitments for countries in the Global South to embark on a just transition. Furthermore, we are shocked that they have reached an agreement on Article 6 of the Paris Agreement���carbon markets. This undermines emissions reduction targets because it allows polluters to continue to pollute, giving them an escape route. A study published by the ���Glasgow Agreement��� during COP26 demonstrated how there are at least 800 new fossil fuel projects under exploration. COP26 was nothing more than an insubstantial conversation to safeguard the interests of those who want to continue to pollute.
Boaventura MonjaneA photo of an activist holding a sign that said ���Stop funding gas in Mozambique����� also raised a lot of controversy and debate on social media. It is known however that a group of activists in the UK have filed legal action to force the government to withdraw from Cabo Delgado gas. Is JA! involved in this campaign?
Anabela LemosThe British agency United Kingdom Export Finance (UKEF) has pledged more than $1 billion for gas projects in Mozambique. The gas industry in Mozambique has already had irreversible impacts even before any gas has been extracted. People have lost their homes and livelihoods, and the climate impact of the construction phase, which is not even complete, is already significant. It is essential that people know this, because corporations, pension funds, investors and even governments of various countries (with tax money) are financing these projects. This is unacceptable and a big risk for the Mozambican people. And that���s why we support Friends of the Earth groups in the UK, who are working in solidarity with us, and challenging their own government in court to stop funding Mozambique���s gas because of its negative impacts. We need an energy transition. Instead of gas, we want people-centered renewable energy.
This interview was originally published in Jornal Savana in Portuguese.
We need a people-centered energy policy
Image credit F Mira via Flickr CC BY-SA 2.0. At the beginning of November, a great controversy erupted, mainly on social networks, as a result of statements made by Anabela Lemos, an environmental activist, who argued that Mozambique should not proceed with the natural gas exploration project. But who supports Lemos��� position, at a time when most social sectors in Mozambique, including civil society, see gas as a great opportunity to develop the country and fight poverty? In an interview conducted by Boaventura Monjane, Lemos, founder of Justi��a Ambiental (JA) and one of the loudest voices in the environmental movement in Mozambique, responds to the question, arguing that insisting on extractivist mega-projects will always contribute to serious violations of human rights, cause irreversible damage to the environment, and deepen the climate crisis. She also claims that Mozambique���s position at COP26 was largely inadequate.
Boaventura MonjaneIn a television news interview, you�� argued that Mozambique should not proceed with the natural gas exploration project in Cabo Delgado. Can you explain this position?
Anabela LemosBy choosing to explore natural gas, Mozambique is following the same path followed by other African countries such as Nigeria and Libya that have also tried to develop through the exploration of fossil fuels. In all the examples we have on the continent, these projects have led to an increase in corruption, conflict and militarisation, national debt, poverty, and a general deterioration in the standard of living of local populations. This is not a position of radical activists. Even the World Bank has acknowledged in its Extractive Industry Report that the oil and gas industries in developing countries have not only failed to improve the lives of the poorest people, but have made them even worse off.
Mozambique is one of the countries most affected by climate change and is looking to boost one of the industries that contributes most to this crisis, in the midst of a global movement calling to end the exploitation of fossil fuels. This is a contradiction and therefore we have to fight for our right to say no to environmentally destructive and socially unjust projects.
Boaventura MonjaneWhat do you mean by the right to say no?
Anabela LemosThe fight for the right to say no aims to challenge the usual way in which mega-projects are allowed in our countries, where public consultations or negotiations are carried out in the final stages of the project only to agree on small details and compensations. The right to say no aims to bring about a drastic change in the way affected people and civil society are brought into these debates. If the option of saying no is on the table, it is an indication that the people have power, and this opens up space for creating real debates about the best paths for development for the country.
This right started being demanded in several popular struggles of communities directly affected by extractivist projects, whose negative impacts affect these communities. People lose their land, livelihoods, access to rivers and the sea, ability to support themselves and to survive. The environment is destroyed and the people who survive are harassed. When everything is exhausted, corporations leave a trail of destruction and a huge debt for the state and the people.
For us perhaps the greatest reference to the right to say no is an inspiring struggle of a community in South Africa, in the Eastern Cape province. The community association Amadiba Crisis Committee, together with a team of lawyers and a South African civil society organization, took its Ministry of Mineral Resources to court. And they got the higher court to recognise that a titanium mining project in that region could not proceed without the consent of the local community.
Boaventura MonjaneDoes JA! fight against any and all development projects? After all, didn���t the industrialized countries develop with these types of projects?
Anabela LemosWe say no to any project that we believe will bring more negative than positive impacts for the people and the environment. Unfortunately, we are part of a national and global context in which governments are captured by the interests of large transnational corporations, and therefore the projects that are coming to our country will invariably benefit local and global elites, as they are not intended to solve the needs of the people.
The argument that industrialized countries developed with these types of projects is a misconception. European countries, for example, controlled virtually every component of the global value chain. They got rich from patents, from research, from manufacturing the equipment, from exploring, processing, and transporting resources. They became rich because they controlled and owned all the significant companies and markets at that particular time. And they got rich mainly because they colonized and exploited countries in the Global South. No African country that is already exploiting its fossil resources has developed from the exploitation of these, as it controls absolutely nothing in the value chain or any other critical component of this industry. So, regarding the gas, we’re actually being exploited once again.
Boaventura MonjaneThere has been a lot of debate about the right of less developed countries, such as Mozambique, to exploit their fossil fuel reserves to boost their economic growth. Don���t you think that industrialized countries should have a greater responsibility to cut their greenhouse gas emissions, rather than countries that have contributed little to these emissions?
Anabela LemosCertainly. That is why we speak of historical responsibility, because it was the countries of the North that created the climate crisis, and the countries of the South, such as Mozambique, are suffering the greatest impacts. This means that the past and present actions of industrialized countries are creating damage and losses as we saw with cyclones Idai and Kenneth, with direct and indirect economic losses projected at $3 billion.
As a country, we don’t have to lead the way in terms of climate action. But this does not mean that in Mozambique we should explore gas or any other fossil fuel and contribute to global emissions. We can pretend we���re fighting for a right, but given the climate crisis and the other impacts I’ve already mentioned, we���re basically fighting for the right to jump into an abyss.
But we can be an example of a country that is looking to its future and the future of planet earth, by moving towards a more sustainable economic model, while demanding that the Global North drastically reduce its emissions and pay the South a climate debt. This financing will allow the country to develop and be able to provide clean, just and decentralized energy to the entire population.
Boaventura MonjaneIn Mozambique, and in many other African countries, energy poverty still affects the majority of the population. Many families still depend on polluting energy sources that are very harmful to health, such as firewood and charcoal. How does JA! propose to resolve these issues in Mozambique?
Anabela LemosIn a country like ours, the priority is certainly to create a strategy of decentralization and diversification of energy sources, analyze the country���s energy potential by different areas and geographies, and build a system based on justice and the right of everyone to have access to a safe, healthy and clean energy source. Part of these studies already exist, completed by JA! and other researchers, but they continue to be largely ignored.
In September 2021, Friends of the Earth Africa published a ���Just Recovery Renewable Energy Plan for Africa,��� which shows that it is not only urgent but completely feasible to reduce emissions, transform our energy system, and make a just transition in our continent.
The plan, based on the work of renowned academic Dr Sven Teske of the University of Sydney, outlines how the continent can dismantle existing dirty energy systems and achieve 100% renewable energy for all by 2050. This plan would require more than 300 gigawatts (GW) of new renewable energy by 2030, as agreed by the African Union, and over 2000 GW by 2050. The plan also highlights the potential to create seven million new jobs in renewable energy on the African continent. It is not just a technical plan, but a vision of how renewable energy systems can serve people and protect biodiversity.
Boaventura MonjaneDon���t you think that a lot could be done if each of us, individually, had greater environmental awareness? I���m talking about reducing consumption levels, not throwing garbage on the floor, saving water. With these types of actions wouldn���t we be able to achieve major changes?
Anabela LemosIt is always good for individuals to practice sustainable habits and protect the environment. But individual actions, as important as they are, must somehow aim at more structural changes in society, because if they are not intended to bring about a general change in how we understand the system and what attitude we take, they have no real impact.
Furthermore, we need to recognize the ecological footprint (a method of calculating the pressure that the human population, and each of us in particular, exerts on natural resources and the planet) of the majority of the Mozambican population; with the exclusion of our own elites, it is absurdly small. The huge ecological impact of industries makes any action at the individual level completely meaningless. Mozal, for example, consumes more water and electricity than all domestic consumption in the city of Maputo. It is a company that did not even pay dividends to the Mozambican state throughout 2019.
So the big problem here is that industrial consumption and the linear model of extraction (production – use – disposal) are not compatible with ecological balance. We need circular systems that are capable of reusing all the components produced, as raw material in other processes. Of course, reducing consumption levels, especially in rich countries and [among] our domestic elites, is fundamental for this to be viable.
Boaventura MonjaneLooking at the impacts of extractivist mega-projects in Mozambique, many claim that their positive impacts are not felt due to high levels of corruption. How do you see this issue of corruption?
Anabela LemosThe debate about corruption in our country is on the rise and we all see the impacts of corruption on a daily basis. This scenario must be urgently reversed and we need to fight it at all levels. But we also need to recognise that corruption is intrinsically related to the economic viability of extractive projects. If it weren���t for corruption, they wouldn���t advance. Buying off some government officials to sponsor this type of investment project will always be cheaper than bearing all the real costs of fair compensation for land expropriation, decent wages, damage to health, restoration of the degraded environment, and the impacts of climate change, among others things.
Boaventura MonjaneBy solving the problem of corruption, would it be possible for Mozambique to be able to exploit the gas in a way that would benefit the country and the majority of Mozambicans?
Anabela LemosThe problem of corruption will not be resolved within the current development model that we have in the country. But beyond that, there are economic trends around fossil fuels that are undeniable, for anyone seeking to examine. Coal is a declining resource, with several countries (including China) already with divestment strategies and phasing out coal projects. Fifteen years ago when we started betting everything on coal, the scenarios were absurdly optimistic. We believe that gas extraction will follow a very similar path to coal. According to calculations by the Global Energy Monitor, there are already close to $100 billion in gas investments at risk of becoming stranded assets. Coal had a slow transition to become an unproductive asset, but with gas this risk will be faster and more abrupt, because it is a less labor-intensive industry.
As if this were not enough, current gas exploration contracts provide enormous benefits to private companies during the first decades, and only later will the country gain from exploration. All of this should be worrying for Mozambique, as we have major infrastructure problems, socio-economic instability and conflicts that are causing delays, putting gas projects even more at risk of becoming unproductive assets, and having a minimal contribution to the country���s economy. Other studies such as those carried out by the Center for Public Integrity (CIP), which do not focus on the risk of unproductive assets, still project weak gas contributions to the country���s economy due to tax exemptions, tax havens, low gas prices, and high operating costs, among others; this, of course, without even counting the costs of militarization and security that will fall on the state.
Boaventura MonjaneAt the national level, some see environmentalists or human rights defenders as having anti-development agendas, or accuse them of being manipulated by outside interests. How do you, personally and organizationally, deal with these criticisms?
Anabela LemosThe reason for the attacks on JA! is because our views are very upsetting to the interests of the elites, both national and international. There is no interest in having in-depth debates on these issues because then we will arrive at the undeniable facts that these projects do not bring development. There is a lot of information available and studies that confirm our positions.
We are always available to debate views and alternatives, but we don���t waste too much time on strategies that are based on hearsay and misinformation, and are intended to avoid deeper discussions.
Boaventura MonjaneWhat do you think of proposals like the one tried in Ecuador, in which more than $300 million was pledged to stop the exploration of 846 million barrels of oil beneath the Yasun�� National Park, one of the richest areas of tropical forest in the world. Do you think this solution would be viable for Mozambique?
Anabela LemosYes. With this kind of funding, and access to patents and technology that are unfortunately mostly owned by the Global North, countries like Mozambique can focus on energy transition.
It is very clear that funding for this exists. Data from the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) state that around $50 to $100 billion is lost each year due to tax evasion. Data from the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) show that $89 billion is lost in illicit financial flows. Data from the Tax Justice Network shows that $600 billion is lost every year due to tax fraud. Friends of the Earth International figures show that the wealth of the 53 richest people around the world could provide 100% renewable energy for Africa by 2030. We clearly know that this money exists, so we need to fight to demand the political will necessary to make the changes we need. This fund could also come from the payment of climate debts by industrialized countries.
Boaventura MonjaneThe UN climate summit (COP26) was held recently. World leaders pledged to transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy by 2050. Do you find this goal realistic? What did you think of Mozambique���s position at that summit?
Anabela LemosMozambique���s position at COP26, given that we are one of the countries most vulnerable to climate change, was largely inadequate. We should have brought a discourse relaying respective demands around the right to life, the right to develop our country without exploring fossil fuels, and the right to the climate debt. COP26 is a suicide pact for Africa that African negotiator Lumumba Di-Aping warned us about at the 2009 COP. Twelve years have passed and African leaders want to set the continent on fire.
The 2050 goal is completely unrealistic. As we often say at JA!, these negotiations are debating how many people we agree to let die, how many forests we accept to destroy, how many islands will be submerged, so that fossil fuel companies and captured governments can continue to increase emissions and their profits.
Rich countries do not take responsibility for creating the climate crisis. They also fail to meet the financial commitments for countries in the Global South to embark on a just transition. Furthermore, we are shocked that they have reached an agreement on Article 6 of the Paris Agreement���carbon markets. This undermines emissions reduction targets because it allows polluters to continue to pollute, giving them an escape route. A study published by the ���Glasgow Agreement��� during COP26 demonstrated how there are at least 800 new fossil fuel projects under exploration. COP26 was nothing more than an insubstantial conversation to safeguard the interests of those who want to continue to pollute.
Boaventura MonjaneA photo of an activist holding a sign that said ���Stop funding gas in Mozambique����� also raised a lot of controversy and debate on social media. It is known however that a group of activists in the UK have filed legal action to force the government to withdraw from Cabo Delgado gas. Is JA! involved in this campaign?
Anabela LemosThe British agency United Kingdom Export Finance (UKEF) has pledged more than $1 billion for gas projects in Mozambique. The gas industry in Mozambique has already had irreversible impacts even before any gas has been extracted. People have lost their homes and livelihoods, and the climate impact of the construction phase, which is not even complete, is already significant. It is essential that people know this, because corporations, pension funds, investors and even governments of various countries (with tax money) are financing these projects. This is unacceptable and a big risk for the Mozambican people. And that���s why we support Friends of the Earth groups in the UK, who are working in solidarity with us, and challenging their own government in court to stop funding Mozambique���s gas because of its negative impacts. We need an energy transition. Instead of gas, we want people-centered renewable energy.
This interview was originally published in Jornal Savana in Portuguese.
January 23, 2022
To give the horror a name
Image credit Elsadig Mohammed, used with permission. ��� Theodor W. Adorno[a]ll social phenomena today are so completely mediated that even the element of mediation is distorted by its totalizing nature. It is no longer possible to adopt a vantage point outside the mechanism that would enable us to give the horror a name; one can tackle it only where it is inconsistent with itself.
During the early days of the Sudanese revolution of December 2018, the limited but defiant resistance against the military-Islamist regime revealed the depth of its violence, utilitarianism and ideological inconsistencies. That widened the revolution���s base and eventually ousted the dictator. Now, as the second wave of the revolution attempts to achieve the slogans that fuelled it, the fight is moving beyond individuals to challenge the dominant social and political structures, revealing this time the inconsistencies of our postcolonial order. Though without the elaborated analysis of the global order or its imperial capitalism, youth across the country are giving the ���horror a name.��� The calling out of the perpetrators of this horror can be heard in the comic dissonance between what is communicated through local and international propaganda machines and what is actually taking place across the streets of Sudan.
What happenedOn the October 25th, 2021 the military (one of the two parties leading Sudan���s transitional period), unilaterally decided to suspend some of the constitutional declaration articles concerned with the involvement of its civilian partners from the Forces of Freedom and Change (FFC)���the same partners who led the ousting of al-Bashir. By the time General al-Burhan, head of the armed forces, announced the decision, several ministers and political leaders had been arrested. Prime Minister Abdalla Hamdok was removed to an unknown location.
A few hours after the announcement, 10 protestors were shot dead in front of military headquarters, and more than 100 were injured. Within days, heads of civil service entities opposing the decision were dismissed or arrested. At least 60 more were killed, more than 1000 injured and unknown numbers forcibly disappeared or arrested during the violent repression of successive protests. The true plot twist came on November 21, when the erstwhile prime minister appeared from house arrest at the presidential palace to co-sign a political declaration with the head of the military. The new declaration reinstated Hamdok as prime minister of the now military-headed government.
What was communicatedCondemnations of the coup by international and regional states and organizations were followed shortly thereafter by congratulatory letters. The UN mission to Sudan, the US, the EU and troika countries took the release and reinstatement of the ���civilian��� prime minister as a return to constitutional order that ���could allow for a democratic transition.��� Apparently, that one party has the power and immunity to suspend the constitutional order whenever it deems necessary is something that the Sudanese people should be satisfied with since ���calling into question this particular solution … would be very dangerous for Sudan,��� as Antonio Guterres, the UN Secretary-General���s legitimizing statement suggests. The statement in which Guterres appealed ���for common sense��� was not only legitimizing the coup, but also the violence the resistance faced. The peaceful resistance that lasted for almost three years has never been ���dangerous��� for Sudan. Meanwhile, instability, atrocities, and all sorts of dangers have been orchestrated by the power-hungry generals.
The fact that the so-called ���democracies��� of the world are supporting such an undemocratic arrangement was relatively new for Sudanese people. From the time that the anti-Bashir resistance and the first wave of the Sudanese revolution toppled the Islamist regime in April 2019, the international community has been an ally. The alliance was repurposed to ensure Sudan���s smooth return to the ���arms of the international community��� with its delisting from the US list of sponsors of terror and Hamdok���s unconditional implementation of liberalization policies prescribed by the World Bank. Unlike Bashir, the new multi-headed dictator is openly willing to collaborate with the neoliberal missionaries, normalize ties with Israel, and provide access to strategic ports for regional agents in the Gulf states.
What could be more evocative of the old colonial rhetoric of how natives are not ready for independence or self-rule than fans and supporters fully embracing the new arrangement that maintains the exploitation of resources and populations? As in many postcolonial contexts, Sudan���s political club has been both heir and guardian to the elitist colonial mindset, where the enlightened and exposed local elite replaced the white faces of the civilizing mission. This local elite made sure to level Sudanese expectations and aspirations to the interests of international and regional powers. Moreover, it is trying to convince the millions who are marching the streets of Sudan today that there is no alternative but to share power with the military.
How people reactedBut the Sudanese collective memory has made it difficult for many of us to trust the military in any way. Sharing power with the military after each uprising has allowed it the opportunity to restore its power and legitimacy through the gradual absorption of the revolutionary fervor and the vilification of political parties. Hence, the three Nos slogan������No negotiation, No partnership, No legitimacy,������adopted by the Resistance Committees and calling for the removal of the military from political life.
The al-Burhan-Hamdok deal didn���t lead the military junta to soften its repressive measures, or to pretend to be a democracy. All sorts of violence against civilians continued, whether in the old forms of live ammunition and forced disappearance, or the rape and sexual assaults of women protestors.
Protestors across the country couldn���t find a better language to express their disregard for the condescending pleas of local and international imperial agents to accept the deal, other than to keep on self-organizing, protesting and denying any legitimacy to the new order. They forced Hamdok to resign in early January after he failed to restore calm or form his cabinet. They exposed the global propaganda machine and its deafness to a movement spearheaded by youth under the age of 25; youth who are reclaiming their ���common sense��� through real time communication platforms; youth whose upper hand is best expressed by a protest banner that reads: ���you are fighting a generation that knows everything about you, but about whom you know nothing.���
January 21, 2022
The politics of elegance
Students in the teaching laboratory, medical school, Yakusu Hospital, Yakusu, Belgian Congo. Credit Wellcome Trust via Wikimedia Commons CC BY 4.0. In November 2021,�� the New York Times (NYT) reported on allegations of colossal corruption regarding the management of the Congolese state-owned mining company G��camines by Albert Yuma, its former chairman and one of Congo���s most well-known businessmen. The newspaper cited overwhelming evidence against Yuma, including mentions of secret documents and multiple interviews with insiders to the world of Congolese capitalism and politics.
Something else, the NYT suggested, seemed to indict Yuma: his character and lifestyle. The article described him as ���a perpetual flashy presence,��� known for his taste of Crystal Champagne, contemporary art, and luxury cars (and the article included a link to a video of a ���Las Vegas-like��� wedding ceremony thrown by Yuma for his daughter). The cult of elegance and the celebration of bourgeois extravagance are, of course, not foreign to Congolese society and popular culture. But the NYT���s description also carried echoes of a central colonial trope: the suspicion about improper appropriation of bourgeois culture by overdressed ���Europeanized��� Congolese.
In The Lumumba Generation: African Bourgeoisie and Colonial Distinction in the Belgian Congo, Berlin-based historian Daniel T��dt revisits the history of this colonial discourse, showing how the Belgian colonizers used claims about the Congolese���s supposed deficient civilized lifestyle to deny them rights to emancipation. T��dt���s book centers around the figure of the �����volu��,��� the evolved colonized, which became central in the Belgian colonial discourses of the 1940s and 1950s. The colonizers demanded that Congolese master the proper tenets of European bourgeois culture before they could be considered mature interlocutors worthy of rights. At the same time, they constantly questioned the performances of civilized behavior staged by the Congolese to meet their demands. T��dt���s work explains how this vicious cycle and the constantly receding horizon of reform and equality generated frustration and resentment that ultimately led many members of the colonial elite-in-the-making to turn radically against the colonial system by the end of the 1950s. In this interview, I ask T��dt questions about the historiographical interventions of his book and the role of Patrice Lumumba in the history of the Congolese ��volu��s.
Pedro MonavilleYour careful analysis of the tensions of postwar elite-making in The Lumumba Generation offers a very useful reappraisal of late colonialism in the Belgian Congo. But what I also find particularly interesting are the many connections you make through the book to various historiographical debates beyond Congolese history, in particular to the scholarship on the global bourgeoisie and to global history more generally. I wanted to start by asking you how you see your work in relation to this field, which has been so lively in Berlin in recent years.
Daniel T��dtWhen I started the research in 2009, my initial approach was comparative. I wanted to look at elite culture in two different colonies: the Belgian Congo and the Gold Coast. Yet, I quickly realized how unbalanced such a comparison would be. By the 1880s, cities like Cape Coast had already a vibrant elite culture, with associations and journals dedicated to projects of ���self-perfection.��� These types of associations and journals did not develop in the Congo before the Interwar years; and the Belgian focus on colonial elite-making only hit its climax after the Second World War, at a time when the Gold Coast was already quickly moving towards decolonization. So, I made the choice to only focus on the Congo. But I studied elite culture in Leopoldville not as local history, but as a project located within a wider context.
What I find particularly inspiring in the development of global history in Germany is that this field of research was mostly championed by historians who came from area studies and who used their expertise about specific places to reframe our understanding of the ���global stage.��� My book builds on previous attempts to challenge the Eurocentric bias in the history of bourgeois culture. For me, it was important to bring the Congo into this history, also because the whole ���civilizing mission��� so centrally featured in the making of global bourgeois culture, even if it has not been seen enough as that.
Pedro MonavilleThe book uncovers the contradictions of the colonial project of ���bourgeoisification��� through the figure of the ��volu��, which is at the center of your analysis. While this figure was not unique to the Belgian Congo, it seems it was much more prominent there than it was in other colonies. How do you explain this specificity?
Daniel T��dtThe term ��volu�� comes from the French colonial sphere. It was used in Senegal quite early on and throughout French territories in West and Equatorial Africa. But it is true that in no other colonies was it so obsessively discussed as it was in the Belgian Congo. If the Belgians so strongly invested in the project of elite-making centered on the ideal of the ���evolved��� African, it was partly because it helped them to project the image of a ���model colony.��� Belgian officials had not forgotten the international campaign against the Congo Free State���s regime of atrocities. They continued to fear external interference and a possible take-over of their colony by another imperial power, which is also why their propaganda was so attached to the narrative of the model colony, with its model subjects-in-the-making, the ��volu��s.
At the same time, the Belgian colonizers refused to open any discussion about the type of imperial citizenship that emerged in French colonies in the aftermath of the second world war. Instead of the question of rights, they remained fixated on the problem of status. The discussion in Brussels and Leopoldville continued to evolve around questions of manners, habits, and accurate levels of cultural development, whereas the French agreed to a form of imperial citizenship detached from cultural considerations. By contrast, the Belgians, like the Portuguese, continued to envision perfect adherence to European bourgeois cultural values as a precondition for any form of legal equality. There was something anachronistic in this position, but it was in line with a racist discourse that posited the Congo as the least civilized place on the continent. The Belgians constantly referred to this idea of specific backwardness to deny demands for more rapid change in their colony. They viewed the ��volu��s as inherently incomplete. But the colonized, on the other hand, had little other choices than embracing the discourse and performances of self-perfection to contest the denial of their status as civilized subjects. So, this ��volu�� trope was so central in the Congo because until nearly the very end it served as the only battleground for discussing status, rights, and entitlements.
Pedro MonavilleOne of the most iconic figures on this battleground was, of course, Patrice Lumumba. As you write in the conclusion of your book, your goal was not to write another biography of a great man, but instead to embrace a broader Congolese generation. What would you see as the main insights of this generational approach in our knowledge of Lumumba?
Daniel T��dtThere are already several great biographies of Lumumba [see here, here, or here]. My goal was to understand a generation. Viewed through this lens, the trajectory of Lumumba is maybe easier to grasp. He was sometimes described as a chameleon or turncoat because he went from praising Belgian colonialism and the memory of Stanley in 1954 to championing Congolese nationalism in 1960. But this evolution was not his only. Instead, it was emblematic of how educated Congolese related to a rapidly changing field of political pathways. It is why it is important to focus on other figures beyond Lumumba that struggled through the same changing landscape��� figures like Antoine-Marie Mob�� for instance. Mob�� is particularly interesting because he was a real role model for Lumumba in Stanleyville, where they both worked at the post office and in numerous associations. In the book, I notably talk about the strong resistance that Mob�� faced when he first arrived in Stanleyville in the early 1950s, with the ambition to breathe life into the local ��volu�� scene. He took the rhetoric of colonial reformism seriously, and he was therefore particularly frustrated when local colonial officials frontally opposed his efforts at organizing the ��volu��s because they worried about possible subversions of the colonial status quo. This is the same kind of disillusionment and frustration that Lumumba, and countless others, experienced through the rest of the decade and that animated the anti-colonial struggle once political parties began to emerge in 1958. The Congolese who embraced the subjectivity of the ��volu�� were not unconditionally committed to Belgian colonialism. What they responded to was a promise of reform and more equality.
Pedro MonavilleAs you show in the book, the discourse of self-perfection was not only embraced by people like Lumumba who, through their education and positions as white-collar employees in the colonial economy, could pretend to be recognized as ��volu��s by the colonizers.�� Other groups���women and uneducated migrants to cities���also sought to participate in the forms of sociability that developed around colonial elite-making. Can you talk a little bit about these forms of appropriation?
Daniel T��dtAn early choice in my research was to resist the temptation to reconstruct an ideal-type. I don���t relate to the term ��volu�� as designing a neatly defined social group, but as a term that entered the world of Belgian colonialism���a world of racism and systemic injustices���and that was embraced by a variety of social actors. Belgian colonizers, but also members of the Congolese elite offered very strong normative views on what true ��volu��s should look like, but it was always possible to challenge their categories. ��volution was first a question of situational performances. When uneducated workers created organizations that resembled the type of ��volu�� associations to which people like Lumumba belonged, it was not simple mimicry or mockery. Because the colonial state denied rights to the Congolese on the pretense of their supposed civilizational lag, there was always an impetus to demonstrate that you were actually more civilized than you were seen as. This may have been a losing battle in the face of colonial racism, but it was taken seriously by many���men and women alike.
Pedro MonavilleThinking about Lumumba through a generational lens also brings to mind Jean-Paul Sartre���s famous preface to Lumumba Speaks. One of the arguments of Sartre in this text���and it is an argument that upset many Congolese nationalists despite the fact that they otherwise strongly connected to Sartre���s preface���was that the failure of Lumumba, his inability to resist his enemies’ efforts to suppress him in the last months of 1960, came from the fact that he remained too much of an ��volu��, a ���Black Robespierre��� who had not sufficiently broken away from colonial elitism and failed to activate the power of the popular masses that were ready to support his revolution. What is your view on this? Do you see Lumumba as breaking away from the ��volu�� mold or still captive of it in 1960?
Daniel T��dtAs a French ��volu�� intellectual, Sartre perhaps expected others to be more radical than he was, and he may have wished that Lumumba was more like the Algerian liberation front (FLN) leaders. But in his preface, he also defends the idea that ��volu��s were able to subvert Belgian colonialism by embracing its civilization discourse. At the end of the day, Lumumba was not limited to one role. Like others in his generation, he had engaged in the battle opened up by the ��volu�� question in the mid-1950s, but his trip to Accra at the end of 1958, the violent riots that erupted in Leopoldville in January 1959, and the political struggle for dominance fundamentally transformed the script that Lumumba and others had to compose with. If you look at Lumumba���s independence speech in June 1960, it is difficult to see what is left of the ��volu�� imprint by that time.
Translated from German by Alex Skinner, The Lumumba Generation is published by De Gruyter as part of its series “Africa in Global History.” The book is available in open access on the publisher���s website.
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