Sean Jacobs's Blog, page 109

Turning the camera back home

The women filmmakers in the Ethiopian diaspora who have taken the risk of dedicating their lives to documenting their homeland. Still from The Fig Tree.

Last year, I wrote an article������Ethiopian Women Making Movies������about the central role of women in a remarkably diverse Ethiopian cinema. At the time, I was concerned primarily with those who lived and worked in Ethiopia���s capital city, Addis Ababa, and who were instrumental in transforming the local movie and television industry. However, some readers responded to that article by reminding me of the Ethiopian women living and making films in the diaspora, such as the famously iconic Salem Mekuria. Indeed, these past few years, Ethiopian women living outside the country have taken center stage in the making of documentary and dramatic films about their motherland. So, listening to this feedback, I concluded that I needed to follow up with a sequel.

Among the most recently emergent filmmakers of the Ethiopian diaspora is Jessica Beshir, whose poetic documentary Faya Dayi (2021) has been winning awards at festivals and playing in theaters across the world���with rave reviews from Vogue magazine and other periodicals. It was recently announced that the film had made the shortlist for Best Documentary Feature at the American Academy Awards (the Oscars) in March 2022. It is currently available for streaming on Janus Films��� Criterion Channel in North America, and will soon be available for streaming on MUBI in Europe. Last year, another documentary filmmaker, Tamara Mariam Dawit, saw her documentary Finding Sally (2020) screened at international film festivals and broadcast by both Al Jazeera and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. In addition to documentaries, there is a new fictional drama, Fig Tree (2018), a film by A��l��m-W��rqe Davidian which tells the story of Ethiopian Jews (known as Beta Israel) during the Derg regime in the 1980s. Behind the scenes, meanwhile, Ethiopian fashion model Gelila Bekele has begun producing films, including the documentary Anbessa by Mo Scarpelli (2019). Other promising young filmmakers who have more recently come to America and are just beginning their careers further reflect the ethnic diversity of the Horn of Africa, including Sosena Solomon, Eden Daniel, Keyirat Yusef, and Ariam Weldeab.

Before this new generation, the pioneering work of Salem Mekuria and Lucy Gebre-Egzhiaber certainly led the way. What���s more, all of these filmmakers have served as mentors who support upcoming filmmakers both in the diaspora and in Ethiopia. In fact, some of the professionals currently working in Ethiopia���s television industry took Gebre-Egzhiaber���s filmmaking class in Addis Ababa in 2015. Today, Gebre-Egzhiaber teaches at Northern Virginia Community College and has just launched a new Cinema Academy for middle-school-aged youth in Virginia. Meanwhile, Finding Sally���s Tamara Mariam Dawit in addition to making her own movie, has worked with influential Ethiopian film producer Mehret Mandefro and her program Ethiopia Creates to encourage growth in the creative economy. Tamara���s own Gobez Media spearheads the Creative Producers Training Program to empower young men and women in Ethiopia, such as the up-and-coming talent Hiwot Admasu Geteneh. For her leadership in the community, Tamara was recently awarded the DOC Institute���s Vanguard Award.

Still from Finding Sally.

Tamara Mariam Dawit is a Canadian-Ethiopian filmmaker and producer whose first feature film, Finding Sally, premiered in April 2020 at the Canadian HotDocs festival before its television broadcast. It is now available online. It begins with the filmmaker asking herself two questions that are intensely personal but have broad historical resonance: Why didn���t she already know about her Aunt Salamawit (also known as Sally), a revolutionary soldier in the Ethiopian People���s Revolutionary Party (EPRP) who fought against the Derg regime in the 1970s? And what happened to her? Seeking answers to these questions, and wondering about the broader implications, Tamara interviewed her family and other women who have different memories and views of the political conflict. While watching the film, one can appreciate how Tamara managed its multiple target audiences. Considering that much of her funding comes from Canadian public media���which would demand accessibility to a (mostly white) audience���Tamara at the same time addresses multiple generations of Ethiopians living across the world. Two things make her movie unique: first, that it centers the voices of women in the making of this history, and second, that it foregrounds a difficult conversation between the older and younger generations, which are both still recovering from a traumatic history that many still avoid talking about.

In a sense, Finding Sally is the next generation���s film for working through the complexity of Ethiopia���s past. Many readers of Africa Is a Country may already be familiar with Salem Mekuria���s classic documentary Ye Wonz Maibel, which was first broadcast on Britain���s Channel 4 in 1997 and is more commonly known by its English title, Deluge. Salem is a distinguished professor emerita in the art department at Wellesley College in Massachusetts. Before teaching, she worked many years for public television in the US, and then began to establish herself as a unique voice among black filmmakers with several documentaries such As I Remember It (1991), about the Harlem Renaissance novelist Dorothy West, and Sidet: Forced Exile (1991), about Ethiopian refugees in Sudan. In both of these films, Salem focuses on the complexity of black women���s struggles and triumphs.

Deluge is her most personal work. It begins with a dedication to her brother Solomon, her close childhood friend Negist, and the ���tens of thousands who lost their lives for their ideals.��� The film is an attempt to come to terms with how her brother and best friend came to be on opposing sides and how they died. Solomon was committed to the EPRP, the party which opposed Derg military leadership, while Negist was in the All Ethiopia Socialist Movement, which chose to make a strategic alliance with the Derg. Between 1976 and 1978, at the height of the conflict between these two socialist parties, thousands were assassinated and tortured. Families and friends were suddenly and unexpectedly deeply divided. Salem explores this dark history while also reflecting upon her own geographic distance from the political realities of her homeland, since she was living and working in America as an expatriate at the time. The film concludes with an essay by Salem���s daughter about the significance of her Uncle Solomon, who had disappeared���an essay she wrote for school when she was just eleven years old. Salem remarks that it was her daughter���s essay that gave her the idea to make her film.

In a sense, Tamara���s film Finding Sally is the film we might imagine Salem���s daughter making. Both Tamara and Salem���s uniquely introspective approaches to Ethiopian history offer some insightful reflection that prompt us to engage in ongoing dialogue about the past. One might contrast their work with the dramatic movie Teza (2008), directed by the towering giant of Ethiopian cinema, Haile Gerima. Indeed, the diversity of cinematic, literary, and academic approaches to that singularly traumatic event ought to impress any attentive reader with its complexity. The Ethiopian intellectual Bitania Tadesse, for example, published a scholarly article about how the infamous ���Red Terror��� has been depicted on screen. Her probing survey of films made inside and outside of Ethiopia raises the question of how we remember the past and to what ends. Likewise, Ethiopian-American novelists such as Dinaw Mengestu and Maaza Mengiste have written critically acclaimed novels about this period. For their part, scholars such as Bahru Zewde and Elleni Centime Zeleke have published works analyzing its political history. Meanwhile, filmmakers continue to offer films that give us surprising perspectives. For example, Israeli-Ethiopian filmmaker A��l��m-W��rqe Davidian made Fig Tree, which tells a love story about a Jewish girl and a Christian boy set in the context of Israel���s offer of asylum to Jews in Ethiopia. The girl is conflicted about who she is and where she wants to be, while the boy considers the possibility of pretending to be Jewish in order to leave the country and avoid being conscripted into the army.

Still from Faya Dayi.

Other filmmakers have tackled subjects of more recent history. Jessica Beshir���s new movie Faya Dayi is an entirely different kind of documentary film experience, kind of like watching a visual poem. To make this film, Jessica spent ten years traveling back to Harar in Ethiopia, patiently getting to know the community and their stories. Although she grew up in Ethiopia as a child, her family (including her Ethiopian father and Mexican mother) left the country during the civil war in the late 1980s���when she was a teenager���to move to Mexico. She now lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Her new film layers many different stories and images on top of each other, almost like a mystical onion that we peel back layer by layer, never finding a center. One story is the story of the industrialization of the khat industry. Khat is a popular narcotic plant whose effect, when one chews the leaves, is simultaneously stimulating and relaxing. Although it was once something consumed as part of the daily work life of a farmer (like afternoon tea) and incorporated into some local Islamic rituals, the industrialization and globalization of Ethiopian society have made khat a popular urban drug that is sometimes abused. A second story in the film is the Sufi Islamic myth of khat���s discovery. Jessica has remarked that her approach to making the film and the patient, intimate connections with the characters were influenced by her conversations with Sufi imams in the ancient Ethiopian city of Harar. Indeed, what is so beautifully remarkable about the film is its patience; the eye of her camera does not dictate the stories in the film but waits for those stories to come to it. A third story of the film is the lives of the young men and women growing up in a rapidly changing society, where they feel politically and economically alienated. One of the central characters is a young boy whose mom has emigrated out of the country and whose dad abuses khat, so he asks himself whether he should emigrate, too. The fourth story is the film���s historical context; it was shot during years when political protests across Ethiopia eventually prompted Prime Minister Hailemariam Dessalegn to resign in 2018. In the film, the young men and women reflect on the meaning of the Oromo Protest Movement in their lives.

In Faya Dayi, all of these stories are blended together but told in a poetic style that asks the audience to enter a dream world with their characters, who dream of a better life. Also significant historically is the fact that Jessica���s movie is the first movie in the Oromo language (the language of one of Ethiopia���s ethnic groups) to win awards at major international film festivals such as Switzerland���s Visions du R��el and to find a home at such prestigious venues as Sundance and FESPCO.

These are only some of the most prominent and successful women in the Ethiopian diaspora who have taken the risk of dedicating their lives to documenting their homeland through filmmaking. They courageously raise complex questions that are difficult to answer. What I believe makes their contribution to Ethiopian cinema so significant is that they are committed not only to their own individual success but also to that of their communities and their fellow artists.

From Kampala to Soviet Kyiv���and back

The Ugandan architect, Stephen Mukiibi, reflects on his studies in Soviet Ukraine and the lessons he learned on equality, environment, race, and friendship. The Faculty of Architecture, Institute of Construction, Kyiv, 1987. Photo by Oleksandr Ranchukov.

In the wake of decolonization, many African leaders exploited Cold War rivalries in order to extract resources for modernization and development. Architecture, planning, and construction were at the forefront of the Soviet and Eastern European offer for Africa. From the early 1960s, state-socialist institutions designed and constructed multiple medical, educational, cultural, and sports facilities as well as housing and industrial plants across the continent. Some of these buildings were highly visible gifts for countries pursuing the socialist development path, such as Ethiopia during the Derg regime, while others were bartered for raw materials, sometimes with governments hostile to socialism. The socialist countries also supported architectural education in Africa, both by sponsoring universities on the continent and by offering scholarships for Africans to study in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. Among the recipients of such scholarships was Stephen Mukiibi, who in the 1980s studied architecture at the Kyiv Institute of Engineering and Construction (known today as the Kyiv National University of Construction and Architecture) in the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic.

��ukasz Stanek

Stephen, thank you so much for agreeing to talk to us. Let us introduce ourselves briefly: I���m an architectural historian at the University of Manchester. I have recently written a book, titled Architecture in Global Socialism, focused on the Cold War-era architectural exchanges between the socialist countries in Eastern Europe and the decolonizing countries in West Africa and the Middle East.

Oleksandr Anisimov

I am an urban scholar based in Kyiv. I am currently working on a project called ���After Socialist Modernism,��� which addresses Soviet Ukrainian architecture and architectural education and connects them to post-socialist urban transformation.

Stephen Mukiibi

Thank you for that introduction; let me also introduce myself. I come from Uganda and I���m an architect, scholar, and educator. I was trained in Soviet Ukraine, and I still have good memories of my time there. At that time, I entered adulthood and I was forming my tools as a professional. I have good memories of Kyiv���I miss it in a way���and I don���t regret studying there. Afterwards, I returned to Uganda, then I continued my studies in the UK, and after my training there I came back to Uganda. I joined academia and that is where I am now.

I first arrived there, in Kyiv, into the field of architecture, with almost no previous experience nor any idea of what it was. By then, the Soviet Union was giving bursaries for studies in different areas based on the students��� performance in physics, math, and chemistry, and I was selected. Initially, I was going to study engineering in Uganda, as architecture was not being taught in the country. The only architects in Uganda were those who had been trained in Nairobi or countries in the West. We also had a few Ugandan architects trained in the Soviet Union���in Russia, Ukraine, and other republics.

��ukasz Stanek

What year did you come to Kyiv?

Stephen Mukiibi

I came to Kyiv in 1983, by the end of the year. Then I started a yearlong preparatory course, and in 1984 the actual studies started. I graduated in 1990.

��ukasz Stanek

Did you know Russian?

Stephen Mukiibi

No, I didn���t. I had a few colleagues who had studied a bit of Russian. Ugandans who went to the Soviet Union for training did so through two different channels. There were those who, like me, applied for a scholarship through the government of Uganda and the Ministry of Education. Others applied through the Russian Cultural Center in Kampala. They often had received some training in the Russian language and in Russian culture.

The first year was the year of preparation: they taught us the language and took us through the subjects, including those relevant for the profession. And so we had some mathematics, physics, chemistry, and a few other things. We also received some training in the fine arts, drawing, and sculpture.

��ukasz Stanek

Who participated in the preparatory course?

Stephen Mukiibi

We had fellow students from Latin America and Africa. We learned about the history and culture of the Soviet Union. It was also ��� a bit political.

��ukasz Stanek

How so? Were political topics part of the curriculum?

Stephen Mukiibi

Yes, they were part of the whole thing, because you had to be introduced to the basics of what Karl Marx wrote about the socialist system. Since this was the time of the Cold War, it was important for the Soviets to communicate their position. I think that this included the expansion of their influence to other countries, in competition with the West.

��ukasz Stanek

How did you think about why you were there? Did you see yourself as part of this Cold War competition?

Stephen Mukiibi

I think that we had mixed feelings about it. We were not very sure about the whole thing, but as time went on you could see the competition between the East and the West. We also saw that Soviet assistance to Africa was part of this competition. But at the same time, we were appreciating the fact that we could study for a profession, which we had to focus on.

The Soviets were competing with the other system, and therefore they were trying to show that their system was better. So you had to listen and to think about it. … I did try to compare what I saw with what I had gone through since my childhood, and it was a challenge, but it also gave me another perspective. Remember that the country where I came from was basically a capitalist state, but it was not an advanced country. So we were not advanced within capitalism, and then I was told about socialism and communism, and how they came about, and how they were going to be. So I was wondering: was communism our future? I was really wondering about that. What is interesting to me is that I had an opportunity to see the two sides of the coin, and I can appreciate the good and bad sides of each of the systems.

��ukasz Stanek

During the 1980s, many Western critics challenged the tradition of modernist architecture. Was this also the case in Kyiv?

Stephen Mukiibi

Yes, that discussion was going on, and it was interesting, because some teachers referred to it as a way of explaining how the socialist system was possibly a better option. Not everyone participated in that discussion, but a few professors were following it and talking about it.

��ukasz Stanek

Was that critical view directed at Soviet architecture too?

Stephen Mukiibi

Not really; that wasn���t there. Nonetheless, a number of Soviet students expressed their views guardedly, criticizing architecture in the Soviet Union as monotonous, ideological, and lacking the expression of freedom of opinion. Otherwise, in lectures, the professors used to discuss Western architecture with both fair and unfair criticism.

Dr. Stephen Mukiibi as a student in Kyiv, 1980s. Courtesy of the archive of the Kyiv Institute of Engineering and Construction, Kyiv, Ukraine. ��ukasz Stanek

You were studying in Kyiv, the capital of Soviet Ukraine. Was the question of national identity or specificity discussed?

Stephen Mukiibi

Do you mean the issue of the national identity of Ukrainians versus the USSR?

��ukasz Stanek

Yes.

Stephen Mukiibi

It was not evident, and it was not openly discussed. The message was that the USSR was a unified, single country. And you couldn���t easily see the differences until you interacted with a few of your colleagues. For example, in the hostel, I shared rooms with Soviet students from other republics. And a few of them could tell you about these differences. There was a feeling that the Russian influence was overshadowing others. As far as the difference between Russian and Ukrainian culture was concerned, it was there but latent; you couldn���t really see it on the surface.

��ukasz Stanek

What about Soviet Central Asian republics?

Stephen Mukiibi

I had lectures about their architecture in class, but my exposure to this region was not big.

��ukasz Stanek

Were architecture and planning in Africa discussed at all?

Stephen Mukiibi

There was a bit of that, but not in detail, because of the scarcity of professionals who had experience in Africa. There was more focus on northern Africa because some among our teachers had longer interactions with those countries and gained more knowledge about them. But discussion about sub-Saharan Africa was really limited.

��ukasz Stanek

Soviet scholars published a couple of books on architecture and urban planning in tropical climates; for example, Rimsha���s Gorod i zharkii klimat [The City and the Hot Climate]. Were you aware of them?

Stephen Mukiibi

Yes���not exactly this book, but others going into that direction were there. Our teachers were telling us about architecture in different climates: hot and humid, hot and dry. … They were also telling us about the general principles of design in response to climate.

��ukasz Stanek

When you were working on your designs, did you choose locations in Uganda or in the Soviet Union?

Stephen Mukiibi

From the first to the fourth year, we did projects based on locations in the Soviet Union, but for the final year project we were given the option to choose, and I chose a location in Uganda, in the town of Jinja.

��ukasz Stanek

What kind of feedback did you get on this project from your tutors?

Stephen Mukiibi

They didn���t know that place; they had never been to the country like that. They were aware, though, of the crucial requirements of design. But I had colleagues from Uganda who were also in the same program, who were ahead of me, and one of them [Professor Barnabas Nawangwe] is now the vice-chancellor of our university. They used to go home and come back and get some of the information I would require, including situation plans, demographic data, building regulations, and so on. I got these pieces of information from them, and I could discuss them with my professors. Environmental questions were high on the agenda, and we discussed them a lot, which I appreciated. When I look back, it is striking to me how much we focused on these environmental issues���which are so important, as today everybody understands.

Oleksandr Anisimov

Did you travel in the Soviet Union during your studies?

Stephen Mukiibi

The training was done within Ukraine, and we moved around within Ukraine. But during holiday times we had the opportunity to travel. I don���t know how it is now, but traveling was cheap back then. Actually, that was one of the advantages of studying in the Soviet Union. Once you learn the language, you could move anywhere and get exposed to new things. So we managed to travel to Leningrad, Odessa, and Tashkent. But that was our own initiative, not part of the course.

Students of architecture at the Kyiv Institute of Engineering and Construction, 1970s. Collection courtesy of Lai Chu, Hanoi, Vietnam, via Facebook. ��ukasz Stanek

Did you go on these trips alone or with your fellow students?

Stephen Mukiibi

There were times I traveled with African students, and a few times I traveled with my Russian friends. They took me to see some places.

Oleksandr Anisimov

Did you feel the difference in architecture across various places in the Soviet Union?

Stephen Mukiibi

Yes, to some extent. Of course, you could feel it when you traveled, for example to Moscow, which was different from Tashkent. But Soviet planning meant that there was not much difference in architecture. This was interesting for me: the fact that there was something common in architecture. They tried to provide common services and facilities which could be more or less replicated across the Soviet Union. There was something monotonic about these facilities, being constantly replicated.

��ukasz Stanek

Did you see this monotony as a bad thing?

Stephen Mukiibi

In one way, yes, because you wish to see more variety, more creativity. But when I look back, I can understand it as a cost of solving the problem of the multitude. It was about numbers: how to ensure that everyone was provided with a minimum of services. In that case, of course, you can lose some creativity. The second thing was that this repetition could have resulted from political decision-making, starting with ideas of what was preferable or desirable, but also involving restrictions on alternative solutions.

��ukasz Stanek

How do you remember your everyday experience in Kyiv?

Stephen Mukiibi

I would say that it was a rich experience. I had very memorable, good moments, and I also had bad moments. You could face serious racism from some individuals, but you also had friends���good friends���who would always protect you and guide you in many ways. During the first year of training, we were living as foreigners, alone. But we came from different countries, and I could learn how different people lived. And when I started the first year of my architectural studies, that was also when I started living with Soviet students. I could learn more about them, and I had an interesting time. It had some challenges, especially when you go to some places and find that there were those who called you ���monkey.��� But after living in many other places, I found that those things happen. What is more important is to meet those who accept you, and consider how they do accept you. Do they accept you as an individual? Someone you can trust and relate to? And I had that. All those years affected and shaped me, because those were my young years, and it was the first time I went away from home and became independent. It was a good experience.

��ukasz Stanek

Did the authorities react to these racist incidents?

Stephen Mukiibi

You see, it wasn���t something that was accepted in the society, as far as the Soviet Union was concerned. But what can you do if someone on the bus does that? There were a few cases when someone reported incidents to the police, but nothing was done. Or you found that the policeman was also of that nature, so you let it go. Still, we had friends that could stand up for us. But on the other hand, because the Soviet Union was trying to sell itself to the outside world and to the developing countries, racism was rebutted. It also happened that someone who was found to be doing this was reprimanded.

��ukasz Stanek

Did such incidents also happen at the university?

Stephen Mukiibi

There were a few incidents with students and teachers. For example, I���ll tell you the story about a colleague from the preparatory course. He wanted to go in for a swim, and the moment he entered the swimming pool, other students moved out. He found it funny, of course, and just continued swimming. Those incidents could happen, and it would depend on the administration how such cases were handled.

��ukasz Stanek

How did you make sense of this behavior? Especially in view of the official Soviet position of antiracism?

Stephen Mukiibi

I saw it as very unfortunate, because the official message was different. I realized that you have to be a bit careful how you move around and conduct yourself in public, because you could experience certain things of that nature. But on the other hand, it also varied from place to place. And now, when I look back, I know that racist people can be found in any country, and that is something you can���t argue about. But as far as the Soviet Union was concerned, the reality was a bit different from the official position.

Oleksandr Anisimov

Did you travel abroad?

Stephen Mukiibi

Yes, during our holidays we traveled to other parts of Europe. That was a time when I had the opportunity to travel and see other parts of the world. There was limited possibility of traveling for the Soviet people, but as foreigners we had that opportunity. So we used to travel to Europe and see what it was like. And you could feel the difference, especially the moment when you moved out of the Soviet Union. While [East] Germany was still a bit the same, after leaving Eastern Europe you could feel the difference. And it was quite remarkable.

��ukasz Stanek

Where did you travel?

Stephen Mukiibi

To Spain, the UK, Germany���East Germany at that time. I traveled to some countries of Eastern Europe as well, including Poland.

��ukasz Stanek

Traveling to Western Europe must have been expensive.

Stephen Mukiibi

By that time, it wasn���t. This was one of the things that were interesting in the Soviet system. Russian currency was cheap by that time. We were given a stipend, which was enough for us in terms of food and also some extras. And foreign students could also benefit from illegal dealings. You could buy a few things in the West that were not on the market in the East, and if you found someone who bought that item, you could earn some extra money. Some people were very involved in that. I also had an opportunity to work in the UK, as I had a cousin there, and then I would come back to Kyiv and life would continue.

��ukasz Stanek

Have you stayed in touch with anybody?

Stephen Mukiibi

Unfortunately not; that���s the part which I regret. What happened was that when I finished the training, I went to see my cousin in the UK. And I lost my suitcase with all the contacts, and I never got it back. The only contacts I have are of the other Ugandan colleagues who also studied in Kyiv.

��ukasz Stanek

After your move to the UK, you studied in Newcastle. What was the difference between your studies in Kyiv and your studies in Newcastle?

Stephen Mukiibi

Newcastle, actually, was a bit later. I first came back to Uganda and joined the University as a junior assistant lecturer. Later on, I applied to the University of Newcastle upon Tyne, and I enrolled into a short course. Afterwards, I pursued a master���s course, then another master���s, and then a PhD. Of course, there was a difference in culture: the level of openness to certain things was different. I do appreciate having had that wide exposure, that comparative experience���unlike a person who studied architecture from year one in the UK, for example. Nevertheless, I also saw that there was something in common in the former Soviet Union, and Europe, even in America: there was little knowledge about Africa. I met only a few professors who had worked in Africa and had very good knowledge about the subject. And working with those professors made my studies much more complete.

The full version of this interview will appear in the special issue of the e-journal City: History, Culture, Society (no. 1, 2022), titled “After Socialist Modernism: Architecture, Urban Design and Planning of the 1980s,” edited by Svitlana Shlipchenko and Oleksandr Anisimov, published by the Institute of History of Ukraine, National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine and Faculty of History, Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv.

There is no fight without the women

During Guinea-Bissau���s war of liberation, women filled key positions on the frontline. That is often forgotten in the mythology of the struggle for independence. Fatou Man��. Image credit Ricci Shryock.

This post forms part of Ricci Shryock���s Africa Is a Country Fellowship. You can read all the posts by our fellows here.

Without saying a word, Fatou Man�� sits in her living room in Bissau, the capital of Guinea-Bissau, and uses her fingers to speak the language of a different time.

���Tap, tap, tap.��� Her hand moves with rapid muscle memory, even though 47 years have passed since the country���s liberation war ended with victory over the Portuguese.

���What did you say?���

���Comrade,��� Man�� replies softly. For nearly four years during the 11-year war for independence she served as the Morse code operator for Guinea-Bissau���s revolutionary leader, Amilcar Cabral.

After a war is won, history builds monuments to men, vaulting the contribution of the male soldier onto a pedestal as the most valued work and the key to victory.

During Guinea-Bissau���s fight for liberation, much of the movement���s ammunition was smuggled across the border from Guinea-Conakry by women, who hid the bullets in the fruit and fish they carried in baskets on their heads. After independence, it was mostly men who filled positions of power and were celebrated in the new names of the liberated streets. As for the women who carried the bullets, it is left to the trees that grew from the fallen seeds of the fruit they carried to whisper their names.

As the battlefields shifted during the war, the liberators depended on the liberated. To confront the better-equipped Portuguese,��freedom fighters from the African Party for the Independence for Guinea and Cape Verde (PAIGC)��needed the support of local residents, allowing the soldiers to launch sabotage and secret attacks from their forest bases.

According to Cabral, one of the best ways to win and keep the people���s support was to show them how their daily lives would be better under the liberation forces than under Portuguese rule. ���Always bear in mind that the people are not fighting for ideas, for the things in anyone���s head,��� he said. ���They are fighting to win material benefits, to live better and in peace, to see their lives go forward, to guarantee the future of their children.���

A United Nations delegation visited the liberated zones in 1972 and noted that while the guerrillas��� ability to wrest control from the Portuguese was admirable, ���even more admirable is the work being done by PAIGC to organize the civil life of the community, and, while in the throes of the struggle, to create a new society, with its own institutions, suited to the characteristics of the Guinean people rather than foreign cultures forcibly imposed.��� Although few women fought alongside the male soldiers on the front lines, many more were charged with the tasks that would do what Cabral prescribed���help the residents ���live better������by serving as healthcare providers, teachers, political officers, and more.

In present-day Guinea Bissau, where schools and the health system fall woefully short of the promise to ���guarantee the future��� of the children, one wonders if there is a correlation between the current condition and the way that the role of educators, health providers, and other ���caretakers��� during the revolution is a historical afterthought.

Though much of this work fell on the shoulders of women during the liberation war, after victory women���s work became again devalued, reduced to a given���something to take advantage of, not reward.

Recently, four women who took part in this revolutionary work reflected on their time in the struggle and contributions to the cause.

Fatou Man�� (Amelia Sanca) [Morse Code Operator for Amilcar Cabral]

���There are many things that I will not be able to explain to you here,������ says Man�����a.k.a Amelia Sanca���of her time as Cabral���s Morse code operator.

She spent years by Cabral���s side during the struggle, encoding and deciphering messages from one front to the other. ���I joined the fight because I am the only daughter of my father and mother, and they were killed during the fight. You know an orphan always has a bit of a habit���if you do something, you already have a grudge in your head. That was what led me to join the fight.���

Soon after the war broke out, Cabral sent Man�� for military training in��the Soviet Union. She returned to Guinea-Bissau in 1969��and became his Morse code operator.

���Our messages were directed by commanders,��� she says. ���For example, when they said that they attacked barracks and the ���Tugas��� (slang for Portuguese fighters) lost five people and we lost one man, I would write this. Sometimes I would start to worry that I made a mistake, and when it arrived on national radio (R��dio Liberta����o), this is what they will read to explain to the population. It had to be written in numbers, encrypted in numbers and then deciphered in numbers.���

Her job was made��more difficult��by the fact that often commanders did not speak��Criolu,��one of the many local languages. Although Guinea-Bissau is a small country, just 36,000 km2, and with only 600,000 inhabitants at the time of the conflict, it has more than14 ethnic groups with different languages. ���Sometimes the commanders did not know how to speak Criolu, so it would come��out as a painting [abstract] and camouflage to take to another person to interpret in your language.���

As is��common��of many who were close to Cabral, Man�� lights up when she speaks of the independence hero. Instead of��focusing on his ideas or his military valor, she relays��his humanity. ���Everywhere he went he was always playing with the kids, as if sometimes he had forgotten his destiny. He said that children are the flowers and the reason for our struggle.���

Cabral had frugal habits, Man�� remembers. ���He ate little and slept little. But when he slept, he looked like he was dead. He would sleep every day between 1 and 2 pm.��� She smiles as she recalls the day one soldier bet another that he could move Cabral���s tent���with Cabral in it���without waking him. The other soldier took the bet and lost. ���But he didn���t sleep at night,��� Fatou adds.

Women played an integral role in all areas of the struggle, Man�� concludes. ���There is no fight where the woman is not a part��of it,��and there is no good moment that��the woman��did not take part in.���

Brinson XX [Cook]

���There was a fight at that time that everyone participated in, but we never��knew what tomorrow would��be like,��� says Brinson.

After Brinson XX was married to a soldier in 1966 in Guinea-Conakry, she traveled to the front with her husband. There, she and other women served the integral role of cooking food for soldiers in the liberated zones.

���Everything was difficult, because they bombarded us. The whites tried to make their plans come to fruition and they controlled almost the entire air surface of our country,��� she says.

This meant that even liberated zones that PAIGC controlled on land were vulnerable to Portuguese attacks from the sky.���There were liberated zones, but��no one could believe they were liberated, because the whites arrived at any moment and bombed��us in a way that none of us hoped��would happen��while��walking��around a place called the liberated zone.���

When liberation fighters returned to base after an attack on the Portuguese, it was Brinson and the other women who would make sure they were fed.�����I cooked even if the mission was returning at dawn, they called me to wake up to serve them.���

During the war, women found that the large��wooden��mortar and pestle typically used to pound rice were too loud.��The thumping of wood on wood��could��signal to the colonial forces where fighters were hiding. So Brinson and other women devised a new method��for cooking.��Dotting the red earth of Guinea-Bissau, there are often termite mounds that tower higher than two meters.��They carved large holes��out of��the sides of the mounds, and then used dried cow dung to smooth the surfaces. That���s where they would pound the food.

She remembers a song they would sing, when they felt it was safe to make noise.�����There was a girl who felt sad, and her sadness gave her the inspiration to write a beautiful song that I still remember to this day. This girl was a great fighter. She cried, singing this sad song.���

We are now reassured.
Many of our comrades have arrived.
They watch over us in Komo.
We no longer fear death in Komo.
We no longer fear anything in our area.
The strength of PAIGC is in Komo. Amilcar Cabral is our leader.
Where then can we find Cabral?
Cabral is in Cacine, Cabral is in Conakry.
Cabral is everywhere, he is also among us.

���During the fight��we��sang to motivate the combatants so they would not lose morale and never gave up the fight,��� Brinson says. ���The girl���s��songs were very moving. She taught me and a lot of my colleagues, and not only that, she brought us together and taught us to sing different songs. But unfortunately she passed away.���

Brinson says��she��felt that women were��treated more��equally��during the struggle��than they are today. ���During the fight women are always on the side of men, but after the fight, it is men on their side and women on the other.���

Brinson XX. Image credit Ricci Shryock. Joana Gomes [Healthcare worker]

In 1971, as the struggle continued in Guinea-Bissau, a cholera outbreak hit West Africa. According to a United Nations report from the time, healthcare workers dispatched by liberation forces in Guinea Bissau were able to stem the disease through a vaccination campaign.

The report reads: ���PAIGC has several hospitals and healthcare posts scattered over the liberated areas; these are not only to care for wounded in the war, the majority of whom are civilians, but also carry out curative and preventative campaigns against endemic diseases in those regions and give intermediate level personnel training, thereby creating a new kind of soldier for peace working for his people.���

Joana Gomes was one of those soldiers for peace. After��a nurses��� training��course��in��Kiev,��Gomes returned to West Africa in��the late 1960s. She was��first��sent to the��PAIGC-run��hospital in nearby Boke, across the border in Guinea-Conakry, an important rear base that received both wounded soldiers and high-ranking officers for vaccines, treatment, and routine care.

���In that moment in Boke, we were nationalists,��� Gomes says. ���We had no money, but we had everything. We had food, we had soap, we had milk. We ate, we did everything.���

By rule, the health workers were not allowed to take money for their services. ���But when the people (officials from Guinea Conakry) came to the hospital they brought sacks, huge sacks of money. One diplomat, so rich, came and started to give the nurses and everyone money, but we were prohibited from taking any of the money. We also must help them, but we cannot take money.���

In 1972, Gomes was ordered to the southern front in Guinea-Bissau. In the town of Cubacare,��she��helped to take care of not only soldiers, but also the population in the liberated zones. One day in 1973 at Guerra Mendes hospital, a Portuguese air strike hit. ���It was in the morning. The bombing was not in a village near the hospital.���

When the bomb dropped, she says, shrapnel flew everywhere. ���We heard the bombardment, but we did not know where it was at first.��� About an hour later, residents brought in a 9-month pregnant woman who had been badly injured by the shrapnel. A large piece of metal was lodged in her sternum.

���The woman��said she heard the planes and started running.��Then they dropped the bomb. When the shrapnel hit her, she stayed there because, when they are bombing, there is nothing you can do. You cannot run. Everybody is looking for a place to protect themselves,��� Gomes says.

���Only afterward, people went to pick her up with the stretcher to take her to the hospital. Thank God, we managed to extract the shrapnel, treat her and do all the necessary things. We let her stay for a couple of days or so and that���s it. At that time, we could not let a patient stay in hospital for too long. As soon as they were feeling better, they were walking, eating well and there was not any risk���they had to go.���

Coba Sambu [Political Officer]

Coba Sambu remembers the day when a piece of paper almost cost her her life.

During the struggle, residents��in the liberated��zones were��served by��five-member political committees in each village, whose duties included representing the��community���s��needs to the party and vice versa.

Cabral insisted��that two of every five officers on the committee be women. Sambu served as a political officer in Tit��, a small town located a short boat ride across from the Portuguese-held capital city of Bissau.

Her work primarily consisted of communicating between the population and the PAIGC leaders, Sambu says. She helped the liberation leaders understand what services the community needed, and informed residents in turn what the fighters needed from them to help win the war.

���I was a messenger. I delivered information,��� says Cobe. ���When something needed to happen or they wanted��to give the��population��some information, I was the one who would bring the information to the community. And��what the community said back, I would tell PAIGC.���

The chief��political��officer��on her committee��was a man named Vasco,��who would travel with her to the surrounding communities. They would listen to the residents��� concerns, and Vasco would write them down. But often it was Sambu who would deliver the message to the leaders.

���Once I went to Bissau to give PAIGC our messages, and they gave me letters to take back,��� she says. ���I didn���t know if I would get caught by the Portuguese. One time when I was on my way back to Tit�� with a message, I saw a Tuga (Portuguese), and I started running. They chased me. They would have killed me if they had caught me with the message I had in my pocket, so I ran and jumped in the river and buried the message in the mud on the riverbed. When they found me, they took me to prison, where I stayed for a month. But they never found the message.���

���We were the ones to chase away the Portuguese, but to do that we had to work together,��� Sambu adds. ���Some people wanted to leave the struggle, but I would advise them not to.��� In the struggle, she says, ethnic differences faded away. ���There was no Bifata, no Manjac, no Bijagos. In the forest we were all brothers.���

Uganda���s most controversial and disruptive politician

A new book revisits the career of Uganda���s first elected prime minister, Benedicto Kiwanuka, his followers, and political ideas. President John F. Kennedy Meets with Benedicto Kiwanuka, Chief Minister of Uganda. Public domain image credit Abbie Rowe, John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, Boston.

To be honest, I have never thought that Benedicto Kiwanuka was particularly interesting. He was Uganda���s first elected prime minister, but his election in 1961 was an accident, for people in Uganda���s most populous region had boycotted the vote. His government was subject to the tutelary authority of colonial authorities, since Uganda was still under British rule. His party, the Democratic Party, was largely made up of Catholics, and its politics were staid and predictable. As the leader of government business, Kiwanuka was ineffective. According to archival research, the US consul in Uganda called Kiwanuka���s performance in the Legislative Council ���lack-luster and inept.��� He read his answers to legislators��� questions in a soft monotone, keeping his eyes fixed on the printed page. His chief opponent, Milton Obote, was by contrast ���blunt, forthright, fluent and lightning fast��� in debate. Kiwanuka���s party was in power for a bare seven months; when fresh elections were held early in 1962, it lost by an outsize margin. It was Milton Obote, not Benedicto Kiwanuka, who was to lead Uganda into independence in October 1962. Kiwanuka spent the rest of the 1960s composing bitter letters and angry petitions complaining against the electoral and political malpractice of Obote���s regime. One historian termed the Democratic Party the party of ���sour and alienated��� Catholics.

Contesting Catholics: Benedicto Kiwanuka and the Birth of Postcolonial Uganda (2021), a new book from historians Jon Earle and Jay Carney, aims to show that the Democratic Party was altogether more interesting, and more consequential, than its leader���s performance in the legislature suggests. Contrary to the diplomats��� view, Kiwanuka���s party was stirring up trouble, amplifying the voices of marginalized people, and mapping a multi-centered Ugandan politics. Earle and Carney take readers on a chapter-by-chapter tour of Uganda���s provinces during the late 1950s and 1960s, highlighting how Democratic Party activists cultivated constituencies in unexpected places. In western Uganda, party organizers found common cause with Rwenzururu rebels, who had launched an insurgency against the Protestant aristocracy of the kingdom of Tooro. In the southwest, it became the party of commoners who had been excluded from the aristocratic power of the ruling elite. In the northwest, Kiwanuka forged common cause with oppressed Catholics demanding that their homeland should be liberated from the government of the kingdom of Buganda. In short, the Democratic Party���as it emerges in Earle and Carney���s book���was dynamic, responsive to the demands of marginalized people, and sometimes inclined to challenge the cultural and social hierarchies that tradition upheld. That is why, I imagine, the authors begin their work with an unlikely claim: that fumbling Benedicto Kiwanuka was actually ���Uganda���s most controversial and disruptive politician of the 1950s and early 1960s.���

Kiwanuka was convinced that���in life and in death���he was destined to be a source of inspiration and edification for the living. His personal archive is correspondingly voluminous: there are 4,900 pages, filed in 83 folders, alongside 900 pages of unfiled loose-leaf papers. Did he create the archive with sympathetic biographers like Earle and Carney in mind? The archive is both the source material and the occasion for Earle and Carney���s book, and they use it to good effect and singular purpose. Whole sections of the book are summaries of the relevant files in Kiwanuka���s archive. It is fascinating to watch Kiwanuka and his colleagues as they tacked between the divergent contexts in which the Democratic Party found its constituents. It is fascinating, too, to see some of Uganda���s most consequential figures brought to life on these pages. Earle and Carney are generous with their attention, and Cuthbert Obwangor (republican leader of opinion in Teso), A.D. Lubowa (newspaperman and royalist in Buganda), and a number of other important people are the subjects of carefully drawn intellectual biographies.

This is the singular achievement of Earle and Carney���s book: showing that Uganda���s local histories were never local, highlighting the cosmopolitan sources of inspiration with which activists could work. The most interesting parts of the book excavate the religious and ritual resources from which Democratic Party thinkers drew. It is fascinating, for example, to think that activists working to claim the ���Lost Counties��� for the kingdom of Bunyoro could draw from the hymns and prayers of the Sacred Heart tradition in French Catholicism. The canticles that believers composed in the wake of the French Revolution pled for mercy from a conquering God; years later, Lost Counties activists found them useful in claiming the attention and favor of a God who would, surely, bring justice to their land. It is fascinating, too, to learn that Kiwanuka saw himself as standing within the tradition of the Uganda martyrs, suffering���like his 19th-century forebears���for Christian principles. In these and in other instances, Earle and Carney show Democratic Party activists to be both people of the world and partisans of a particular tradition of interpretation.

But what would Benedicto Kiwanuka not say? What did he not know? The Kiwanuka who Earle and Carney show us is a man of many words, with something to say about virtually every issue in Uganda���s politics. It is harder to see where���outside the theater of formal discourse���Catholics lived political lives. The actors in this book were literate men, whose education and sense of vocation drove them to take positions, compose editorials, keep files, and store them in tin trunks and other archives. Men and women who were not in correspondence with Kiwanuka rarely appear on these pages. Augustine Kamya, whose claim to being the ���most controversial and disruptive politician of the 1950s and early 1960s��� outstrips Kiwanuka���s, is mentioned only in passing. Kamya, a Catholic, was the firebrand behind the 1958���59 boycott of Asian-owned businesses. His racism, his prejudice, his ribald speeches were meant to shape the social and financial relationships of urban Ugandans. His activism was not guided by the conventions that structure liberal democracy. Did Benedicto Kiwanuka not know Augustine Kamya? Or did he deliberately ignore him? Whatever the reason, Kamya finds no space in Earle and Carney���s book. This biography amplifies Kiwanuka���s knowledge and reveals the limits of his regard.

Contesting Catholics puts Benedicto Kiwanuka at the center of things. This is its strength and its weakness. The book is an important work of intellectual history. It is likewise an important work for Uganda, helping to reveal the connections between controversies and contexts that are often seen and studied in isolation. But in its ambition to resurrect one man���s pivotal role in Uganda���s history, Contesting Catholics draws a veil over forms of political life that Kiwanuka neither knew nor understood.

Tweeting apartheid sport

What if the social media conditions of 2021 existed in 1981? A group of New Zealand writers tweeted the damned 1981 Springbok rugby tour as if it was happening now. Brown squad. Image credit John Miller.

When I was a child my parents had a collection of old VHS tapes wedged behind the TV. They were dusty, their labels faded and peeling. There was probably a wedding video among them, and some dubbed episodes of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, but the truth is I can only remember the contents of one of them. Luckily for me, it was one of the most powerful films ever made in New Zealand: Patu!

Directed by legendary filmmaker Merata Mita, Patu! documents the story of the people who protested apartheid South Africa���s 1981 rugby tour of New Zealand. It follows groups like Halt All Racist Tours (HART) as they campaigned to have the tour canceled; it documents bands like Herbs and speakers such as Andrew Molotsane as they addressed crowds of anti-tour demonstrators on university campuses. And then, once the Springboks arrived and the rugby matches were underway, it shows ranks of police and protesters as they engaged in a conflict that has been described as reaching ���the brink of civil war.���

As a child, I was hooked. I can still remember loading the tape into the VCR, watching the static resolve itself into an image. Sometimes I watched Patu! by myself, on other occasions with my sister. But most of the time in our small house, Mum or Dad would be nearby. For a while, there would be no reaction from them. The sound of chanting wasn���t a problem; not even the heckles of businessman Bob Jones drew much of a reaction. But then came the riot police yelling ���Move! Move! Move!��� as they advanced towards the demonstrators. Then the crunch of batons.

That would be it: Mum or Dad would hurry into the living room and the tape would be stopped, put back in its jacket, and tucked away among yellowing paperbacks. At the time I never knew why they reacted like this, although the reaction was part of the experience of watching it. Later I learned more about their and other family members��� involvement in the Springbok tour protests. Speaking to my grandma in 2018, she explained how the sound of helicopters still made her nervous. They reminded her of 1981, the tension and potential for violence.

Patu! is well known in New Zealand, but still not as well-known as it should be. The story of its construction is almost as striking as the work itself, with the footage recorded on cast-off strips of film then assembled by Mita despite ongoing police harassment, including attempted court orders to seize the reels. You just need to see the film to realize why they wanted to do this: images of police violence out in the open. Repeatedly. Mostly directed towards protesters, on one occasion towards the camera operator herself. And all of it happening in familiar places for New Zealanders: the beachside town of Gisborne; outside parliament in Wellington; the suburban streets of Auckland. As a child I was particularly fond of seeing the plane dropping flour bombs on Eden Park, but always stopped the tape before the final footage of the crying and unconscious clowns.

Earlier this year I was talking to a reporter when she mentioned that 2021 marked the Springbok tour���s 40th anniversary���and by extension, the anniversary of the filming of Patu! I ended up watching the film again, and as I did a question came to mind, one that I���ve subsequently been asked by several people: what would have happened if Merata Mita���s footage was seen the day it happened, rather than two years later when it reached cinemas? What if Mita and her team���along with every other protester���had a phone with a camera and steady Wi-Fi? What if the social media conditions of 2021 had existed in 1981? Would the police have faced greater legal scrutiny? Would the public have had a more accurate understanding of events? Moreover, would the tour have been stopped? Tweet the Tour was my attempt to find out.

The premise behind the project was simple: I would livetweet the events of the 1981 Springbok tour 40 years after the fact, sticking to the hour or minute events occurred where possible (except for those that happened in the middle of the night, such as the regular noise assaults on the Springboks��� hotels). I included personal stories, photos, newspaper articles and audio clips. I looked for opinions relating to everything from apartheid to international politics, M��ori sovereignty to family tensions. Most of all, I searched for details that went unreported at the time, often relating to the intensity of the violence.

Through this process, I quickly learnt something. It turns out that when your ���live-tweeting��� is four decades behind schedule, you can���t influence events. No matter how much you want to. There is no way to recreate the relationships that exist between protesters, social media, traditional media and public opinion forty years after the fact. On some levels I knew this already. But as I tweeted away, I increasingly came to realize that some part of me had hoped that if I made Tweet the Tour good enough, if I put in enough work, the story would somehow end differently.

This was especially true during the events of July 25, 1981. The date is one of the most well-known of the tour, often seen as the pinnacle of the protesters��� success. According to the Springboks��� schedule, they were meant to be playing the provincial Waikato rugby team (often referred to as the Mooloos) in Hamilton, a town not far south of Auckland. The Springboks showed up to Rugby Park early, their bus splattered with paint and eggs on the way. They warmed up in the changing rooms. They put on their uniforms. And then they sat back down. Because outside, several hundred protesters had pulled down a fence, charged through the crowd and huddled together, terrified and determined, in the middle of the field. After a stand-off of more than an hour���as well as the threat of an incoming plane and an explosion at Christchurch airport���the match was canceled.

That was the scene the news ran with at 6pm: protesters forcing the cancellation of the game. But when you���ve got the benefit of hindsight���40 years of it���the events in Hamilton start to look different. What seemed like a victory was something more ominous, a hint at what lay ahead. As victorious protesters were escorted out of the park, significant numbers of them were attacked. Accounts vary, but most of them share a common theme of elation turned to terror. The protesters were punched and kicked and cut with shards of metal; ambulances were attacked; camera crews assaulted and their film destroyed. I spoke to one group of protesters who escaped a beating at the hands of a pro-tour mob by wielding a newly sharpened motor mower blade that they���d left in the boot of their car. The attacks weren���t restricted to Hamilton, either, they were across the country, with known anti-tour organizers receiving death threats on the phone and bottles tossed through windows.

Tweet the Tour covered these events. It even issued a nationwide warning. But of course, none of this had any impact. When I checked the newspaper headlines for July 26 1981, they carried limited mentions of violence. They talked of restrained rugby supporters who had been denied their match and the deep levels of shame felt by police officers who had been unable to move the protesters from the ground. Inspector Phil Keber of the Red Squad (a police riot unit) stated that the failure left him ���humiliated. That night, more than anything, I wanted the tour to go on.���

So it did. As the weeks of rugby rolled by, this sense of being at the mercy of the past grew stronger. I interviewed protesters who���d been screamed at by family friends, read about the assassination of International Defence and Aid Fund lawyers. There were moments of encouragement when I realised how committed so many people were to fighting apartheid, and occasional despair at learning about how many New Zealanders secretly���or not so secretly���supported it. I became aware of what Tweet the Tour really was: something more akin to theater than news reporting; historic non-fiction told at the speed of life. But somehow this made things more intense. My heart started to race as I composed tweets; on the day of the Test matches I would sometimes find myself on the edge of adrenaline-filled tears. And always, at the back of my mind, was Auckland.

Auckland. September 12, 1981. The third and final Test of the tour. The climax of Patu! Probably the most significant game of rugby ever played. The ground was fortified before the match, transformed from suburban rugby paddock to armoured outpost of apartheid. Aligned against it were 6,000 protesters divided into three squads: Tutu, Biko and Patu. In their ranks stood members of HART, the Polynesian Panthers, the Waitangi Action Committee, Artists Against Apartheid, the King Cobras and a host of other groups. All of them aiming���at least on paper���to get into the ground and stop the match.

To examine photographer John Miller���s images of the day is intimidating. With their hockey masks and helmets, the protesters look like a cross between medieval knights and Hollywood serial killers. The police are even more threatening: a hard plastic mass of visors and batons. There were countless conflicts around the ground, charges and counter-charges, batonings, rocks and fence posts thrown, flour bombs dropped from planes, mock erupting volcanoes, tuna bombs, flares, hot air balloons and car tippings. More than 300 people needed medical treatment, with many significantly���and permanently���injured. I could see now why Mum and Dad turned the video off, why they eventually hid it elsewhere so we couldn���t watch it anymore. I���m still not sure how Merata Mita managed to watch the footage over and over again as she edited it into the masterpiece it would finally become.

When Tweet the Tour finished, I had to stay offline for a few days so I could remember it was 2021. The tour was over. It had been for 40 years. But even as I re-emerged, I didn���t have to look far to see the thread running from September 13, 1981 (the day the Springboks flew out of New Zealand) to events around me. The news at the time carried stories of protests by Extinction Rebellion (XR). I���d heard of XR before, and had seen photos of their ���Tell the Truth��� yacht in Oxford Circus back in 2019. But it wasn���t the yacht I noticed this time: it was the protesters. And the police. Soon I had found my way further back, to the demonstrations surrounding the trial of Derek Chauvin and the Black Lives Matter solidarity protest that had filled Auckland���s Aotea Square after the murder of George Floyd in 2020.

It wasn���t just the imagery that was similar to what I���d encountered with Tweet the Tour, it was the language. I listened in as individuals tried to turn conversations about systematic racism into issues of ���law and order��� and ���individual liberty������just as the Society for the Protection of Individual Rights (SPIR) had tried to do in New Zealand in 1981. In June 2020, 67% of Americans showed at least some support for Black Lives Matter, but again and again, there were attempts to re-categorize the movement as a small group of hardcore radicals corrupting a naive public. It was the exact same tactic used throughout the tour, including by Prime Minister Robert Muldoon when he released a previously confidential report from his spy agency that purported to show communist manipulation of groups like Mobilization to Stop the Tour (MOST). To be clear, New Zealand���s media outlets at the time didn���t always subscribe to these interpretations���opinions differed across publications. But as I scrolled through my Twitter feed 40 years later, there was a definite sense of d��j�� vu.

Only, this time something was different. There were other voices speaking: experienced, disciplined voices like Black Lives Matter that could compete online���often successfully��� to shape wider public conversations. As I continued my research, I came to learn that the success of these groups came not just from an ability to create headlines and hashtags, but also, as Associate Professor Deva Woodly described in The New Yorker, an understanding of social media���s limits. Their strength lay in knowing when conversations needed to move offline to become deeper, stronger, more purposeful. In the final scene of Patu!, Merata Mita ends not with celebrations, or the newspaper headlines of the day, but another march. People are seen walking together, talking, smiling and linking arms. The marchers are filmed with a compressed perspective, creating a smooth, unified look, so it���s not quite clear where one person starts and another ends. They keep going and going until the end.

Corruption is a class project

Different factions of South Africa's ruling elite are implicated in looting and profiting from the state. South Africans should take an attitude of a plague on both their houses. Image credit Government ZA on Flickr CC BY-ND 2.0.

The ongoing scandal surrounding South Africa���s former health minister, Zweli Mkhize, who was implicated by a special investigator in a COVID-19 corruption case, fired from office, yet thanked by President Cyril Ramaphosa for serving the nation well, is symptomatic of a terrible disease gripping South Africa. Literally, billions of rands are looted, not just by the predatory elite (a small collection of wannabe capitalists), but also by the ���civilized��� elites in Sandton (the financial heart of Johannesburg, where the country���s white-dominated private sector is headquartered). Their combined efforts are laying waste to the country���s economy.

COVID-19 has laid bare the depth of social, economic and political crises facing South Africa. No country or state can sustain a society where almost 50% of the workforce is unemployed. Nor is it possible to talk of a united single nation where just 10% of the super-rich own 90% of the wealth. And no society can develop where a woman is raped, on average, every 25 seconds.

Billions of rands is lost to looting, price gouging and profit shifting. This is money that the state should be investing in social renewal, creating decent work and reindustrializing the economy for a low carbon future. For example,

Global Financial Integrity estimated South Africa lost around US$26 billion. through trade misinvoicing, transfer pricing, profit shifting and other forms of illicit financial outflows;According to Kenneth Brown (South Africa���s former chief procurement officer), in his 2016 report, 40% of the government���s budget for goods and services was being consumed by inflated prices from suppliers, and fraud.Davis Tax Commission conservatively estimated that South Africa loses at least R50 billion to corporate profit shifting annually;Former finance minister Pravin Gordhan estimated that ���state capture��� between 2014 -2017 cost R250 billion.

Corruption and cronyism dominate the discussion of South Africa���s current political situation. They are the symptoms of the crisis, at the core of the project to create a black capitalist class without redistributing wealth in the form of assets as capital.

The reality of state capture

A predatory elite has increasingly taken control of the ANC and used it as a platform to influence state tender and procurement processes. This has been done from within the state at all levels, including state-owned enterprises. Hence the term ���state capture.��� This illustrates the linkages between capital and the state.

But instead of that being made clear, we get a story that it���s all about a bad faction of the ANC.

It is not something exclusive to Zuptas���members of the notoriously powerful and corrupt Gupta family with close connections to former state president Jacob Zuma. It stretches from CEOs of state-owned corporations, to director generals, chiefs, headmen, ward councillors, and even trade union officials. All desperate to accumulate, in order to escape their Apartheid-defined circumstances.

A key focus for all components of the aspirant black capitalist class is the state procurement budget, worth +/- R900 billion per year. It is to this procurement budget, and in particular the budgets of state-owned enterprises, that the organized network of predatory capital honed in on. And with Broederbond precision, they placed their people to facilitate access to the contracting process.

Civil war in the capitalist class

Even within the new black capitalist elite there are divisions. There are sections dependent on the state for accumulation, and others more dependent on transnational capital. Hence the political differences between a Jimmy Manyi, on the one hand, and a Sipho Pityana or Cyril Ramaphosa, on the other.

Ramaphosa���s clean-up campaign against corruption is convenient. It deals with his political opponents in the ANC. But it is riddled with contradictions. Some of his closest allies are deeply embroiled in corruption scandals. David Mabuza, the Deputy President, his close ally in the Eastern Cape Oscar Mabuyane and, of course, Gwede Mantashe, Pule Mabe and now Zweli Mkhize.

The roots of this crisis lie in the failure of the state and the ruling elites to renew a strategy for accumulating wealth that was capable of sustained economic growth and rates of profit for capital. Instead, the post-Apartheid government attempted to reproduce the accumulation model of the minerals-energy complex. At the same time it tried to engineer greater black ownership of the economy.

It has been a dismal failure, and a source of conflict inside the capitalist class. On the one hand there is an emerging black capitalist group hungry to secure ownership of the heights of the economy. On the other hand is big business, desperate to restore profitability in the face of global competition.

A dysfunctional state

This has coincided with a neoliberal hollowing out of the state. And this state is what the so-called ���predatory elite��� depend on. This has made the state even more dysfunctional as its institutions have been perverted to serve their interests.

Using the state for accumulation has consequences. Provision of water and other services is contracted out to private companies, whether they have the expertise to provide the service or not. Outsourcing and subcontracting become a major means of delivery of services and infrastructure development. This requires over-pricing and the cutting of corners to be profitable. And worse, neglect and even sabotage and destruction of infrastructure become a positive as they create opportunities for outsourcing, from which state officials can benefit. We are not short of examples: an estimated R57 billion needed to fix defective RDP houses and Rand Water���s accusations that water tanker contractors are sabotaging water pipes,�� to name but two.

So rivalries within the capitalist class, rather than between capital and labor, are most significant in shaping the current political situation. The consequences of this are not hard to see. Clover announced recently that it is closing down the country���s largest cheese factory in Lichtenburg, North West, blaming water and power outages. The company also struggled to use the road leading to the factory due to large potholes. Likewise, Astral Foods���South Africa���s largest poultry company, listed on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange with a market capitalization of R6.6 billion���was forced to take the government to court to try to get a reliable supply of electricity and water to its Standerton operation. As the CEO of Sibanye Stillwater, Neil Froneman, complains: ���It���s one of the reasons why foreign companies don���t want to come here, because they can see they���ll have to do what the government is supposed to do but isn���t doing. They���ll end up tarnished with social issues that they haven���t caused.���

Opportunities for accumulation

This dysfunctionality is not a random outcome of looting. It is intentional. For big business it justifies liberalization and privatization; for the predatory elite it provides accumulation opportunities.

Eskom, the country���s electricity supplier, is a case in point. On the one hand, its crisis is justifying the creation of a private electricity sector, worth billions of rands, through the Renewable Energy Independent Power Producers Procurement Programme. And then, as the crisis deepens, the opportunities for private accumulation multiply. The R218 billion for Karpowership, a 20-year deal to��supply 1,220 megawatts of��electricity��from gas-burning��power��plants stationed on ships moored offshore. And of course there is the plundering of Eskom���s massive procurement budget, whether for Kusile and Medupi or to supply coal.

The same process is unfolding at Transnet and Prasa where billions were looted. And it has given rise to the government’s plan to privatize part of the rail system and ports.

So where do we go from here?

As the fight between different sections of the ruling class intensifies, it is crucial to avoid false dichotomies: Ramaphosa good; Magashule bad. Neither faction of the ANC are friends of the workers and the poor. And as Ramaphosa gains the upper hand, leading to prosecutions against erstwhile comrades, this should not be seen as a renewal of the ANC.

Different factions of the ANC are differently implicated in looting and profiting through their political connections and proximity to the state. All factions agree on austerity and some version of neoliberalism as appropriate economic and social policy. The workers and popular movement should consider there to be a plague on their houses.

It is imperative not to repeat the mistakes of Cosatu and the SACP, which chose Zuma over Mbeki. The politics of ���my enemy���s enemy is my friend��� is mistaken. It leads to disasters, such as the 2007 Polokwane conference of the ANC.

The Alliance (the historical bloc consisting of the ruling ANC, the Communist Party and the main trade union federation, COSATU) is dead as a progressive block. In spite of the challenges of rebuilding the mass movement on principles of working class independence, it is the only way for the workers and popular movement to recapture relevance and move toward renewal. This will entail struggle on multiple fronts, not least corruption and state dysfunction.

The provision of decent social services, especially at local government level, is at the center of the struggle against corruption, cronyism and state capture. This struggle, and demands for in-sourcing and against privatization, will be important to unite workers in the labor movement with their sisters and brothers in working class communities.

The struggle against austerity, against wage cuts and retrenchments in the public sector, and the struggle against corruption are intimately linked. They provide the bridge for building the necessary worker/community alliance. To fight effectively against corruption, we have to join the struggle against austerity and neoliberalism.

Swallowed by the archive

53 years after it was first made in 1968, the Ghanaian filmmaker King Ampaw���s short film ���Black Is Black��� celebrates its inconspicuous premiere. Image credit Dorothea Tuch.

In September 2021, Ghanaian filmmaker King Ampaw���s feature film ���They Call It Love��� (1970) was part of a curated series of films set in Germany by ���migrant��� filmmakers at Frankfurt���s Film Museum. The film follows Paul (William Donald Powell), a former American GI, who gets by as lead singer of a band in the wake of the 1968 cultural revolution in Munich. The band regularly plays in a hotel bar frequented by former GIs and their white German girlfriends. Paul is simultaneously engaged in an affair with Linda, a sales assistant at a record shop he frequents, and the wife of the friendly, oblivious record shop owner (Linda���s boss). Paul���s monotonous life plays out between the hotel bar, his adjacent studio apartment, and the rare night out on the town or a visit to the suburbs. He secretly despises his lackluster, loveless life, muttering ���let���s go somewhere else��� to one of his bandmates in the pensive closing dialogue of the film, after which they both leave the bar for an undisclosed location.

This particular screening was probably only the second time that ���They Call It Love��� has ever been seen publicly anywhere in the world. Its 2018 premiere was at Berlin���s Zeughauskino almost 50 years after the film was produced. At the Frankfurt screening, excerpts of an interview with Ampaw���which is available online���were shown instead of his presence. Ampaw speaks about his experiences in both Germanies and neighboring Austria.

Arriving in the German Democratic Republic in 1962, he enrolled at the Babelsberg film academy to study directing but was soon forced to relocate to Vienna���s University of Music and Performing Arts because the national educational agreements between East Germany and Ghana were discontinued. When the first Film Academy opened in 1966 in Munich, West Germany, King was accepted into the first film direction cohort and can be counted among the pioneers of New German Cinema alongside Wim Wenders, Werner Herzog, and others. His thesis film ���They Call It Love��� was the second film by an African filmmaker to be shot in Germany (the first being Ibrahim Shaddad���s ���Jagdpartie��� in 1964). Ampaw worked in film production in Germany for a few years before returning to Ghana in 1977 to establish a film production company. He subsequently produced ���Kukurantumi: Road to Accra��� (1983), ���Juju��� (1985), and ���No Time to Die��� (2006), among many others.

Still from Black Is Black.

The most striking passage of the above interview is when Ampaw reveals that after submitting ���They Call It Love���, and receiving his degree, he never saw his film again. It would only resurface in the mid-2010s, finally being shown to an audience five decades after it was produced. Ampaw, who maintains professional and personal connections to Germany, happened to be around and was in attendance. Three years later, another one of Ampaw���s films was shown at the aforementioned Frankfurt screening for the first time. In 12 minutes, ���Black Is Black��� (1968) explores the challenges of Black people in Germany���s Housing sector. Ampaw���s film creatively documents landlords��� responses to the question of whether they would rent to a Black tenant, which ranges from explicitly racist takes to well-meaning, problematic clich��s. Despite their incredible historical and aesthetic value, Ampaw���s films, certainly not the only ones to have suffered this fate in Germany, seem to have simply been ���swallowed��� by the archive.

The panel Looking Back 1930 | 2020: Building on Fragmented Legacies at Berlin’s HAU theater, which I moderated in September 2020, discussed how cultural producers can build on overlooked work after painstakingly extracting it from the archive. The panel was preceded by ���We Call It Love: An Oppositional Screening��� (2018), a performance by filmmaker and film scholar Karina Griffith. Seated at a table covered in assorted film equipment, Griffith was flanked by two huge screens, one of which showed her fingers flipping through hundreds of film stills from ���They Call It Love.��� Meanwhile, the larger screen showed film material from a camera that Griffith had installed in front of the Federal Archives, Berlin-Lichterfelde. Since 2017, Griffith had unsuccessfully attempted to gain access to ���They Call It Love��� for her Ph.D. research, but her efforts had been repeatedly frustrated by the Film Archive and Ampaw���s Alma mater, the HFF Munich. To symbolically represent the archive that readily takes but rarely gives, the large screen showed footage of the closed gates of the archive intercut with excerpts from an interview that Griffith did with Ampaw in 2018.

Abdulrazak Gurnah and the afterlives of German colonialism in East Africa

Gurnah���s Nobel Prize invites us to ponder Germany���s colonial past between the Scramble for Africa and the First World War in what is now Tanzania, Burundi, and Rwanda. German colonial volunteer mounted patrol, 1914. Image via Bundesarchiv, Bild 105-DOA3114, credit Walther Dobbertin CC-BY-SA 3.0 de.

When Abdulrazak Gurnah was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in October 2021, the jury honored ���his uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the effects of colonialism.��� With East Africa being central to much of Gurnah���s work, German colonialism is a regular presence in his novels, more precisely the colony of German East Africa, the biggest German colony of all, which comprised modern Tanzania, Burundi, and Rwanda. Although the history of this territory has been thoroughly studied, it still very much stands in the shadow of contemporary public debates on the German genocides perpetrated against the Herero and the Nama, as well as the debate on the continuities between that genocide and the Holocaust.

German East Africa is especially prominent in two of Gurnah���s novels: the early Paradise (1994) and the recent Afterlives (2020). They invoke several themes. The first, perhaps unsurprisingly, is colonial violence. Though such violence is not always in the foreground of Gurnah���s books, it is always present. When Gurnah���s characters refer to the Mdachi, the Germans, and their African soldiers, the askari, they often use terms like merciless, viciousness and ferocity. German colonial rule in East Africa began with violence, when Hermann von Wissmann waged war on the coastal populations from 1889 to 1890, after these had resisted the attempt of the German East Africa Company to run the colony as a private enterprise. The hanging in 1889 of one of the revolt���s leaders, Al Bushiri, which the Germans orchestrated as a grand spectacle, recurs as an incisive event in Afterlives.

As recent research has made apparent, European perpetrators of colonial violence employed such ���spectacles��� of brutal violence as they believed these would send a message to what, in British colonial discourse, was frequently referred to as ���the native mind.��� However, the colonial masters seldom stopped to consider what constituted this so-called ���native mind,��� which they perceived to be monolithic and unchanging. This theme is also evident with Gurnah. While German violence frequently indeed shocks the local population, it remains equally incomprehensible: Paradise relates for instance how the Germans ���hanged some people for reasons no one understood.��� At times, however, Gurnah���s references to such German ���spectacle��� of violence also reveal some irony. The over-the-top braggadocio of an askari in Afterlives, who boasts that everyone should fear the ���merciless angry bastards��� of the Schutztruppe colonial force and that its German officers are ���high-handed experts in terror,��� is unable to make much of an impression on Pascal, an African belonging to a local mission.

Once the Germans had subjugated the coast in 1890, they turned their attention to wresting control of the Arab-dominated caravan trade that ranged from the sea to the Congo. The end of this caravan trade serves as the backdrop for Paradise: ���There will be no more journeys now the European dogs are everywhere,��� one experienced caravan guide bemoans at some point. But this was only the beginning of German conquest. German rule continued to penetrate inland territories until the turn of the 20th century. The wars that ensued were characterized by especially destructive violence. Indiscriminate targeting of fields, harvests, and villages was part of the colonial wars��� standard repertoire (not only that of the Germans) to starve the evasive enemies into submission. Weaving in German epithets, Gurnah explains through an askari character: ���That was the way the schutztruppe worked. At the slightest sign of resistance, the schwein were crushed and their livestock slaughtered and villages burned.���

The most devastating episode in this mode of warfare was the Maji Maji War of 1905-1907, when several ethnicities simultaneously revolted against the forced labor and punitive taxation of colonial rule. The war provides the initial setting for Afterlives, even if the East African coast was largely unaffected by fighting and the events thus only appear in the background. Still, Gurnah is unambiguous about the gruesomeness of the war: ���the Germans have killed so many that the country is littered with skulls and bones and the earth is soggy with blood.��� Research estimates that the war cost up to 300,000 lives, principally due to the starvation that resulted from the scorched-earth tactics.

When the First World War reached the shores of East Africa, Europeans for the first time battled other Europeans in this region. As Gurnah emphasizes, though, the armies that faced off on this theater were mostly composed of Africans and Indians, who constituted the rank-and-file of colonial forces on both sides. On the German side, the commander Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck, who saw himself outnumbered by British, Belgian, and Portuguese forces, pursued a guerilla-like fighting retreat, which he maintained until the war���s end. This campaign earned him renown in Germany for decades thereafter. However, the post-war glorification of the commander masked the brutal reality of the retreat, whereby Lettow-Vorbeck���s troops ruthlessly confiscated the stores of the local population to feed themselves, and then proceeded to burn everything in their wake to stall their enemies. The result���once again���was desperate hunger. Moreover, tens of thousands of African civilians were conscripted as porters and died of exhaustion. Local populations that resisted faced severe reprisals, as in Afterlives, where a corporal executes a village elder with a bullet to the head. The trauma induced by the horrific German retreat is a recurring theme in the book. Current research suggests that several hundred thousand lives were lost in East Africa during the First World War, and many hundreds of thousands more after the Spanish Flu descended on an already emaciated and devastated population.

Reading these novels as but a literary treatment of colonial violence, however, would not do them justice. They also provide a rich view into the lives of colonized people. Gurnah, who himself was born under British colonial rule on the island of Zanzibar, pays particular attention to the lives of the coastal population and its African, Indian, and Arab influences. In this cosmopolitan milieu, Islam, as religion and worldview, and Swahili, the lingua franca, were most often the connective elements. Precisely this worldliness has recently brought this region to the attention of global history, as it shows globalization as not driven exclusively by Western actors. A dense net of connections across the Indian Ocean, the East African coast, the Horn of Africa, Madagascar, the Comoros, the Arabian Peninsula, and the west coast of India prevailed here centuries before European colonization. Traders in Zanzibar could activate networks to take out loans in India, and Islamic scholars moved freely between the various poles in this cosmos.

With great sensitivity and sometimes a fairy-tale atmosphere, Gurnah explores this world of caravans and coastal cities, warts and all. Gurnah���s characters live their lives in spite of colonialism. They grow up, gather experience, enjoy wealth or suffer poverty, and fall in love. Sometimes the colonial masters are relegated to the background. Thus, these novels tell stories of resilience in which the colonized are not merely victims.

Toward the end of Afterlives, Gurnah engages with the question of continuities between German colonialism and Nazism, though in his very own way. It turns out that Ilyas, an askari whose whereabouts after 1918 long remain obscure in the book, relocated to Germany in the 1920s. There he found work as a singer, performing at propaganda events with a revisionist-colonial bent. Due to an affair with a white woman, he was interned in a concentration camp in 1938, where he died in 1942. As unbelievable as it may sound, similar life stories of actual former askari in Germany are recorded. Many Germans of African descent spent the war in concentration camps, but some remained in Germany after the war. They represent a different kind of continuity: that of an enduring Black community in Germany.

What does China want in Africa?

On this week's AIAC Talk: China���s engagement with Africa is much debated. What exactly does it want on the continent? Photo by Adib Hussain on Unsplash.

China���s involvement in Africa is typically viewed with skepticism. Many think its development initiatives seek to trap African states in exploitative economic relationships, and that China, like the former Soviet Union during the Cold War, is competing against the United States to spread its political model globally.

In this episode of AIAC Talk, Will talks to Professor Tang Xiaoyang, who is Chair of the Department of International Relations at Tsinghua University. Professor Tang���s new book, Coevolutionary Pragmatism: Approaches and Impacts of China���Africa Economic Cooperation (CUP, 2021) challenges the idea that China wants to export its ideology to Africa. So then, what does China want to achieve?

https://podcasts.captivate.fm/media/0174dcc5-2f8a-4854-9b49-ff7d07317fec/aiac-talk-what-does-china-want-in-africa.mp3

The ultimate end of decolonization

Islamic scholarship in Africa and the meaning and end of decolonization in the work of religious studies scholar, Ousmane Kane. Taken on the street (from a taxi) in Dakar, Senegal. Image credit Angela Sevin via Flickr CC BY-NC 2.0.

During the 2018 Miriam Makeba keynote address to the General Assembly of the Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa (CODESRIA), the largest and oldest pan-African body of African scholars, Professor Ousmane Kane told his peers that they needed to take religion seriously. This entreaty expressed a basic idea and an urgent project. The idea was that social science, having been elaborated through the secular-modern separation of the spheres of life, has relegated ���religion��� to the domain of the marginalized specialist. In contrast to the political, the economic, and the sociocultural, religion has become a matter of individual belief and practice within the regime of expertise that governs life globally.

This regime has sometimes been called coloniality. Kane, who teaches at Harvard Divinity School, proposed, however, that all social science needs to consider religion if it is to truly understand contemporary Africa and its problems, implying that in Africa, religion is no private matter. ���Religious developments in Africa deserve serious attention from African intellectuals, and especially pan-Africanists,��� he said. The developments to which Kane referred might be summarized as the emergent publicity of religion, the decentralization (and/or erosion) of authority, and the integration into global networks throughout the African continent. This emergence has proven modernization and development theory to be patently false; religion has not eventually disappeared or become irrelevant for public life. In short, African theory needs to catch up to Africans in their decolonization of the mind and spirit.

The publication of Islamic Scholarship in Africa: New Directions and Global Contexts, edited by Kane, adds to a growing wave of academic work on the histories, cultures, and meanings of Islamic thought in Africa. It features established and emerging voices of the field that takes on the project of overturning many long-held fictions about Africa in the modern imagination. African historicity and mobility, dynamics of orality and literacy, evolving Islamic education, and popular vernacular poetic expression are themes that frame a diverse set of contributions that offer a fair representation of the major issues of the field.

Alongside recent monographs, edited volumes, and translations Islamic scholarship in Africa explores a robust and active field. It is a work that is current, forward-looking, engaged with global issues and directed to a general audience. The bibliography is broad and the glossary of terms are of benefit to the non-specialist. Given that the individual essays in this volume reflect many distinct research agendas, sites, and objects of inquiry, I will not attempt to summarize their contents. Instead, I focus on the broader issue of the decolonization of knowledge flagged for the reader���s attention in both Kane���s introduction and the conclusion by the former executive secretary of CODESRIA, Ebrima Sall.

Questions of decolonization

Sall situates the volume, along with the broader proliferation of academic works on the topic, within CODESRIA���s now decades-long project to bridge knowledge divides within Africa. These divisions are defined by differences in research language, intellectual training, and presumed racial identity. In particular, Kane���s research agenda to recognize the intellectual contributions of Muslim African scholars actualized many of the Pan-African principles of the organization. His Non-Europhone Intellectuals, published as a CODESRIA working paper in 2003, set forth the terms for a new field that would eventually come to be known as Timbuktu Studies. This field has solicited interest and support from international foundations, African governments, and a global network of university-based researchers.

We might ask, however, how does this interest in Islamic scholarship sit in relation to African studies more broadly? The objections that followed Kane���s keynote in 2018 highlight some common resistance to this work. The responses from the floor, as I recall them, were somewhat predictable. Some asserted that Islam was not modern. Others found that the neglect of African traditional religions by Kane was an inexcusable lapse. For them, if social science is to take religion seriously in Africa, it should be truly African religions upon which they must focus their seriousness. Islam and Christianity, they argued were either copies of originally African ideas or antagonistic to what was authentically African. ���African��� for them, it seems, meant autochthony. It meant differences from other geo-racial types and their specific religiosities that are ultimately products of colonization. These objections were predictable because they form opposing positions, based as much on epistemic commitments as points of view that frame the problem of religion in Africa. Kane and others have responded to such ideas exhaustively.

For example, Islam, from its origins, has been African, from the first hijra, or exodus, to Abyssinia through to the very rapid spread to Fustat, or what is now Cairo, and then with the history of the mostly peaceful and gradual spread of Islam in West Africa. And yet, the idea of Islam���s coloniality, if we can stretch the term so thin, persists. Much like the ideas about primordial African orality, they form discursive structures that seem impervious to empirical invalidation. It is indeed an old idea that West African Muslim scholars have been refuting since at least the 17th century Timbuktu scholar Ahmed Baba, and echoed in the 20th century by Senegalese polymath Shaykh Musa Kamara. Perhaps, that is a good thing for the future of the field.

All of this being said, one wonders beyond the scope of Islamic Scholarship in Africa, how might Timbuktu Studies deal with some of the thornier issues that have emerged in the long history of developing an epistemological alternative. Specifically, I am thinking here of the field���s relation to the older project of the Africanization of knowledge, which sought to consider Africa in indigenously African terms and the Islamization of knowledge/Islamic social sciences, which sought to establish modern social scientific method on Islamic foundations. Is the study of Islamic scholarship in Africa simply a continuation, an evolution of these two separate projects, or does their convergence make a qualitative leap that makes it distinct and uniquely promising? There might also be a generative encounter between Timbuktu Studies with Critical Muslim Studies such as that coming out of South Africa, emanating as it does from post-Rhodes debates on decoloniality.

Decolonization has become a big tent, a broad term enveloping many meanings, a concept that approaches protean status. Much like ���religion��� and ���modernity��� it bears different significations that correspond to conflicting epistemological, disciplinary, and political commitments���each one ultimately seeking different objectives. For a radical, anti-historical but utopian decolonial project, Islamic Scholarship in Africa might not satisfy the performance of rupture. However, this volume is vital if one is willing to agree with Sall and Kane, as I do, that African epistemic self-affirmation is the ultimate end of decolonization.