Sean Jacobs's Blog, page 115

Performing Angolaness

In contemporary Angola, the gap between the public discourse on culture and the on-the-ground reality of the arts and culture sector is deepening. Image credit RNW.org via Flickr CC BY-ND 2.0.

This post forms part of the work by our 2020-2021 class of AIAC Fellows.

I still remember Matadidi Show dancing, dressed like James Brown, in the first edition of FENACULT, the national arts festival organized by the Angolan Ministry of Culture in 1989, when I was 8 years old. Captivated, I watched the affair on television, as my parents did not allow me to go to the event. In my memory, Show is performing the song ���Nkuwu��� in his characteristic style of ostentatious funk dance backed by the sounds of Congolese percussion.

As part of the festival, kids and youth were mobilized into rehearsals���and, eventually, a performance���for the opening ceremony. This mobilization was accomplished through schools and the Angolan Organization of Pioneers (OPA, the youth group of the ruling MPLA party). At the time, schools and the OPA were linked to each other, all part of the same socialist system. The community engagement of schools and parents���with everyone else watching live on TV���was the result of the nationalist spirit of the time, a last sprint by the socialist government before losing its breath and acceding to multiparty democracy and market capitalism.

Twenty-five years later, in 2014, the government held a second edition of FENACULT. This time, the festival was an attempt to resuscitate the national feeling broken by 27 years of civil war and unequal development in an oil-rich economy. In the second edition, there were no longer kids, school groups, or parents. Instead, the opening ceremony featured 300 soldiers performing alongside professional dancers. The ostentatious use of oil funds in service of a certain definition of national culture replaced the funk and energy of the first edition. This time, FENACULT was composed of three main parts: a huge exhibition of Angolan visual art in an improvised tent created for the occasion at the Ba��a de Luanda, a train traveling through the country with musicians and artists, and cultural events in every province.

In Luanda, the Ministry of Culture organized three symposia. The first celebrated the life and contributions to culture of the country���s first president, Agostinho Neto, and the second did the same for Jos�� Eduardo dos Santos, head of state since his predecessor���s death in 1979. The third one, designated the ���Symposium on Culture,��� had panels on topics such as cultural policy, globalization, museums, and restitution, and included participants from other African countries and elsewhere. I gave a paper at that symposium that interrogated the role of the state in culture during Angola���s contemporary history. Until the end of the civil war in 2002, the socialist state had had a grip on culture that inhibited private initiative and markets. In my paper, I argued that moving forward, the state should assume the role of a regulator rather than a cultural agent. This question of the state���s relationship to culture remains relevant���and unresolved���in the Angolan arts landscape to the present day.

Surprised by the invitation to the symposium, I wanted to take advantage of the opportunity to share my ideas with the small group of people who influenced and decided national cultural policy. As an independent art curator at the time, I was deeply familiar with the visual arts scene and aware of the impact politics and the state had on the sector. I decided to argue for a better regulatory structure that would allow this sector to function without direct intervention from the Ministry of Culture. More specifically, I advocated for removing the ministry from an active role in arts management and events such as the very one in which I presented.

The symposium, which had a very official feel, took place at the auditorium of the Palace of Justice in front of an audience composed mostly of young college students. At the time, the palace was a recent building in the Cidade Alta neighborhood, around 200 meters from the Ministry of Defense and 500 meters from the President���s official residence on top of the hill. This is the oldest and most official quarter in the city, with pink and white buildings and clean streets���a place where, unlike the rest of the city, you won���t see trash bins or potholes. Against this background, the reception of my paper was not surprising: the responses ranged from disagreement to shock at the notion of not having the state in control of culture. In Angola, culture is the battlefield of the nation, more political than cultural, so to remove the state from that sounded like an offense.

A great deal had changed in Angola in the quarter century between the two editions of FENACULT. The second iteration happened 12 years after the end of the civil war���and seven years after the first Luanda Triennial, an event that engaged the international arts biennial model and which had begun to inscribe Angola into the globalized contemporary art world. Yet the official narratives about FENACULT and its purpose, propagated by the state-run media, seemed unchanged. The Jornal de Angola, the daily newspaper, reported on the conclusion of the event, proclaiming the country ���a stronger Angola with Fenacult.��� During the festival, the Minister of Culture at the time, Rosa Cruz e Silva, claimed that Fenacult exhibited ���Angolaness��� to the world. It wasn���t just the press narrative that was the same, but the content and format as well, with the emphasis on grand stadium ceremonies and the holding of symposia celebrating the cultural contributions of Angola���s political leaders.

In 1989, Angola was deep in a civil war. The socialist spirit of the ruling People���s Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA) had not yet caught up with the new times. What already felt like dated slogans and a staid state-imposed national culture stood in for a dynamic policy or autonomy for the cultural sector. FENACULT, and cultural policy more broadly, served the ideological function of asserting a ���popular culture��� that narrowed the gap between the ruling class and the proletariat. In 2014, by contrast, Angola was at peace, awash in oil revenue that, thanks to opaque management and an artificially manipulated exchange rate, was extremely unequally distributed, creating a vast class divide. Yet, here again, it fell to culture to serve as glue for unity and peace. In both cases, culture had to work for politics.

Since independence, the official conception of Angolan nationhood has been based on the assertion of a unified population across the country���s geographic territory. The national anthem declares, ���One people, one nation.��� An independence-era slogan claims: ���From Cabinda to Cunene, Angola is one country.��� Culture, in turn, has assumed an auxiliary or instrumental role to this idea of unity. Yet the fixed space ascribed to the nation belies an anxiety: the nation is not stable, but at risk from war or political difference. Both iterations of FENACULT portrayed the MPLA party leadership as central to national history and to cultural unity. Even as the state proclaimed the country���s diversity, it simultaneously erased any reference to distinct regional and ethnic political histories.

With the end of the civil war and the ensuing oil boom came changes in Angola���s cultural economy, which was at first separate from and gradually integrating into the globalized economics of the international arts sector. Among other innovations, a growing number of local collectors began to invest in the work of local artists. By 2007, a new venue and vehicle for thinking about culture in Angola���s social formation had come into being in the form of the Luanda Triennial, which aimed at creating a movement for the visual arts in the country.

Following its first edition, the Luanda Triennial held two further editions, in 2010 and 2013. After the third edition, the format changed to focus more on performative arts and music, assuming a year-round program. In the process, it introduced new debates regarding nation and culture. It turned to a global practice focused on singular, contemporary artists, an approach in stark contrast to pronouncements about what constituted Angolan art and culture. This provoked unintended responses. The reaction from the Cokwe people to a series of billboards exhibited throughout Luanda in 2006 that used images of the Pinturas da Lunda, a book by Portuguese colonial ethnographer Jos�� Redinha, was an example of this tension. These billboards contested the narrative of the nation as a single people and a single history and claimed a particular story for Cokwe people. In response to the depictions, protests erupted in Angola���s interior; meanwhile, the official press attempted to silence them. This episode laid bare the absence of other narratives beyond the coastal colonial histories of assimilation and creolit�� so dear to state power.

The Luanda Triennials and their repercussions painted a much more complex and lively picture of culture in the country than the ���Train of Culture��� promoted by the Ministry of Culture in FENACULT 2014. In fact, the survey exhibition organized in 2014 failed to show the growth of the visual arts sector and its expanding international footprint. A great example of this expansion is the awarding of the Golden Lion award at the 2013 Venice Biennale for the Angola pavilion, which was organized not by the state but by Paula Nascimento and Stefano Pansera (Beyond Entropy Ltd), and which featured the photographic works of artist Edson Chagas. As a result, far from gathering together national culture production, FENACULT 2014 instead exposed a split in the visual arts scene. The split was not just conceptual but aligned culture producers into two distinct groups. On one hand stood the National Union of Plastic Artists, the national visual artists union and a remnant of Angola���s single-party days. On the other hand was a group of young artists that claimed the right to engage critically with the country���s history and political narratives, exploring themes beyond nation and identity.

Today, the gap between the public discourse on culture and the on-the-ground reality of the arts and culture sector is deepening. The former has been reproducing a top-down construction of culture, while the latter has been recreating itself by engaging socially and politically with the country���s many contentious issues���not just in visual arts, but also in music, cinema and theater. The state still propagates a static concept of ���Angolaness��� and assumes the position of custodian of its intrinsic values, maintaining and legislating a view of culture as a vehicle of such ideals. The contemporary arts scene, however, more strongly resembles an installation of Angolan artist Paulo Kapela: a collage that navigates meanings of nation alongside questions of national culture, history, and traditional cosmologies.

The class contradictions of scholar activism

The radical politics of the professional middle classes���too often found full of rhetoric, but short on action���are explored in Leo Zeilig���s new novel, The World Turned Upside Down. Photo by Tope. A Asokere on Unsplash

In writer and activist Leo Zeilig���s latest offering, The World Turned Upside Down, the richest one percent are wreaking havoc on both people and planet. Meanwhile, a social movement is out to stop them���one grizzly murder at a time. As the movement grows, it eventually engulfs the life of the story���s protagonist Bianca Ndour, a lesbian Senegalese professor raised in Nigeria and working in London. A thunderously irrepressible, unapologetic, and radical thinker, Bianca uses her public platform to speak out against the injustices inflicted on the many by the powerful few.

The result is a provocative and pulsating call to arms against capitalism���s grotesque excesses and inequalities, one centered around a violent revolutionary movement: the One Percent Murders.

Who is behind the murders? Can they be stopped? Should they be stopped? Bianca thinks not, and in her refusal to condemn the One Percent Murders, and her brazen, polemical style, her character drips with the spirit of political radical Frantz Fanon. When asked during a live television interview if she condones the murders, she fires back: ���Do I approve of the violence? What violence? Whose? The violence that you have���both of you���spent wealthy years celebrating, writing nauseating books salivating over imperial tryanny and the never-ending murder spree of the rich ��� in their wars. How many died in Iraq and Afghanistan?���

As Fanon wrote in his most celebrated work, The Wretched of the Earth, ���Decolonization reeks of red hot cannonballs and bloody knives. For the last can be first only after a murderous and decisive confrontation between the two protagonists.��� Bianca, too, sniffs the revolutionary potential behind the unfolding violence. ������Rarely in history can you say this,��� she tells a small crowd, ���but we are living through a moment of extraordinary reckoning. The rats, forced out of their lair, are panicking���watch where they run, get read for what they unleash on us���.���

Like Fanon, Bianca bursts with energy, ideology, and anger. ���I had always believed in anger,��� she tells us at one point. ���Is this not the time for anger? It was the opposite of inertia, of academic pontificating���anger worked up action, and only through anger and action could justice ever come.��� The emphasis on the centrality of action to revolutionary change and upheaval is a major motif of Zeilig���s work. His first novel centered around two generations of activists and the anti-war movement in the United Kingdom. His last novel, meanwhile, took its title���An Ounce of Practice���from a Freidrich Engels quote that ���an ounce of practice is worth a ton of theory.���

Yet there is an intriguing sense that for all her anger-fueled political sermons, Bianca fails to enter the decisive arena of action herself.

There is a hint of activism in her youth, when we are told she attended a demonstration against South African apartheid as a teenager having just arrived in London from Zimbabwe. Her life as a university professor, however, is in many ways highly insular, absorbed by personal relationships, exercise, and the demands of her work. As she shuttles between international flights and university campuses, there is little to suggest that her actions extend beyond preaching at her pulpit and promoting her books at events. The only direct action we see her engage in throughout the entire novel is a cleaners��� strike on her London campus. Even here, she stumbles across the strike by chance and gives an impromptu speech calling for ���the total expropriation of the capitalist class,��� entirely abstracted from the specific demands and lived realities of the cleaners��� struggle.

There is a sense in all this that Bianca never really manages to escape her upbringing: she was raised in a wealthy, middle-class family on a Shell Oil compound in Nigeria. Her father was full of radical rhetoric but lived in comfort, ensconcing himself and his family from the harsher realities of Nigerian life that lay beyond the compound���s walls. While Bianca found some temporary escape from those walls during childhood���leaving them behind completely in adulthood���the stifling bureaucracy and demands of a professional career in the modern university appear to have walled her off from society once more, this time in a compound of her own making.

Here, Zeilig appears to be interrogating the class contradictions of scholar activism, and, more broadly, the hypocrisy of the professional middle classes. Even the most ideologically committed among them, like Bianca, are too often found full of rhetoric, but short on action.

It is likely that in passing this commentary, Zeilig is drawing at least in part on his own experiences, having lived in Senegal and South Africa, been active in a range of social movements and struggles, and written extensively on working-class struggle, the development of revolutionary movements, and some of Africa���s most important political thinkers and activists, including Thomas Sankara, Patrice Lumumba, and Frantz Fanon.

And again, there are echoes of Fanon here, in his argument that many of Africa���s early postcolonial intellectual leaders betrayed the aspirations of the working classes and popular masses, whose interests they claimed to represent and whose backs they had climbed upon in their ascent to power.

In one passage, we see Bianca run to work, shower at the office, and look out over the city of London, in perfect mimicry of the daily ritual of a wealthy city banker callously murdered in the novel���s opening pages at the hands of an unknown assailant. By drawing this parallel, Zeilig pushes us to ask whether, through her seeming inaction, Bianca���and the class she represents���is in fact complicit in the system she believes she is fighting against, no better than the wealthy one percent she so despises.

And yet all might not be as it seems. Those around her, including her students, protect her ferociously when required, and wherever Bianca travels, another murder is never far behind. It is a mark of the depth and complexity of The World Turned Upside Down that there are no clear or easy answers, only unsettling questions combined with a relentless expos�� of capitalism���s ills and injustices. All of these questions are designed to jolt us out of complacency and comfort and into the one state that we all must occupy if a better world beyond capitalism is to be won: action. When, in the real world, even an establishment figure such as the current UK government���s chief scientific adviser is publicly pronouncing that ���nothing short of transforming society will avert catastrophe,��� we had better take notice.

Reimagining local government in South Africa

If re-municipalization���returning a privatized service to local public control���is to work in South Africa, we need other forms of social contracting between municipalities and citizens. President Cyril Ramaphosa arrives at South African Local Government Association (SALGA) National Members Assembly, Durban. Image credit Gov. of South Africa via Flickr CC BY-ND 2.0.

This is one in a��series of articles republished as part of our partnership with the South African publication��Amandla.

A successful referendum to expropriate apartments in Berlin, Germany, for social housing has generated excitement worldwide about what is possible in the fight to resocialize��� or re-municipalize���public goods. (Re-municipalization means returning a privatized service to local public control.) The activist-led campaign to buy back over 10% of apartments has been described as ���one of Europe���s most radical ripostes to gentrification.��� It was supported by over a million people, as residents faced increasingly unaffordable rents in Berlin.

Across the world, even in the most industrialized nations, citizens are finding it harder to maintain decent living conditions in the financialized economy. Speculative real estate investment is just one of the many late-stage capitalism offshoots that are pushing essential public goods outside the reach of more and more people.

In South Africa, the site of redistribution is meant to be the local level of government. The Local Government Municipal Systems Act of 2000 intends, among other things, ���to establish a framework for support, monitoring and standard-setting by other spheres of government to progressively build local government into an efficient, frontline development agency capable of integrating the activities of all spheres of government for the overall social and economic upliftment of communities in harmony with their local natural environment.���

Some two decades after the passing of the act, South Africa���s municipalities are in shambles. In June of this year, the auditor general, Tsakani Maluleke, told the parliamentary committee on public accounts that the financial state of municipalities was fast deteriorating, along with their ability to deliver. According to the auditor general:

Over 25% of municipalities were at risk of not continuing as going concerns.Half of the collected revenues were going toward salaries, while only 2% of revenues were going toward maintaining public infrastructure.A shocking 63% of municipal debt was not recoverable, while the average creditor payment collection period was a staggering 209 days.

In the lead-up to the local elections on November 1, 2021, it may be tempting for analysts to say that our municipal woes are purely a result of low accountability and poor governance. After all, bankrupt municipalities fail to deliver water and sanitation, they fail to connect households to electricity, they fail to protect the environment against degradation, and they fail to protect citizens against the adversity caused by pollution. But reducing the failures of local government to issues of financial stability and corruption alone fails to acknowledge the inappropriateness of chosen delivery models in reckoning with our past.

Proponents of re-municipalization have the aim of�� reclaiming service provisioning of public goods from private and public-private partnerships back to public hands. This has particularly focused on water and electricity, and comes in response to private failures, particularly post-crisis austerity measures that put financial sustainability above public good.

A question then arises: can the concept of re-municipalization be applied to the South African context? And if so, how?

The vast majority of South Africans are poor. But to fully understand the implications of poverty in South Africa, one must understand how that society has manufactured such poverty.

An integral part of apartheid rule was to create racial, gender, and other forms of domination and exclusion. These were institutionalized through law to create a class of cheap labor. Any discussion about public service provisioning that does not start with a recognition of this point inadvertently mischaracterizes the postapartheid state���s failures. The majority, composed of the poor and working class, was created through the commodification of labor.

From the late 1800s to the early 1900s, the growing mining sector saw exponential growth in the demand for labor. Meanwhile, white farmers and white labor grew more concerned by the competition presented by black labor and black farmers. Coalitions ensued, and lobbying culminated in the 1913 Native Land Act and a multitude of other pieces of legislation that would successively deepen systemic diswelfare and entrench labor devaluation and exclusion. Citizens were stripped of their land and their citizenship and reduced to poor, unskilled laborers���if that.

Black people were made servants to a capitalist system that created progressively fewer jobs for poor labor. Meanwhile, public policy for white South Africans moved towards a mixed economy with extensive welfare benefits. The state underinvested in social and economic infrastructure such as health, housing, and education for Black people. At the same time, it invested heavily in the same public goods for the minority white population. By the 1970s, the state had raised the standard of living of white South Africans to those of industrialized economies in the global west. As a result, private sector actors began to put pressure on the apartheid state to privatize.

But the apartheid state itself was slow to privatize. This was partly because of the economic context and partly because, aside from the private sector, there was no political pressure in favor of privatization.

The pressure would eventually fall on the incoming African National Congress (ANC) government. This was a party which, until the late 1980s, had been committed to active intervention in distribution for a welfare state. This welfare state would be founded on principles of universality and give relief to people who suffer from the diswelfare caused by the economic system.

Within a few months of coming into government, the ANC swiftly moved away from its long-held principles on the role of government.

In late 1994, for example, the ANC gave officials the authority to only provide water if they could fully recover the cost of managing the water resources. In that same period, its government cut municipal grants and subsidies; meanwhile, municipalities were expected to generate the lost revenue that the state no longer provided. Consequently, municipalities were forced to run corporations. In turn, many created agencies that were privately minded, even if they were publicly owned.

And so it was that the citizens, reduced to laborers in the apartheid state, became customers in the postapartheid state. If there is such a thing as re-municipalization, this was when it happened.

Water boards were established through the Water Services Act of 1997 to provide, according to the government, retail water and sanitation services. Municipal utilities companies were created to play a large role in the distribution and supply of energy, highly dependent on a now corruption-ravaged state utility. Provisions were made for the indigent through the allocation of free basic water and electricity, indigent programs, and a revenue model that was based on cross-subsidization.

And though the vast majority of customers earned very little or nothing, most were expected to pay for social goods at progressively increasing prices. Many townships faced double and triple figure inflationary increases for water and other services.

The postapartheid government has continuously used human rights language to frame its interventions. But its chosen municipal delivery model has not addressed the injustices of our past. Today���s municipalities are contributing to deepening inequality, both through their intended model of provisioning and their ethical and governance failures.

The corporate model of delivery fails to acknowledge that most South Africans did not have equitable access to the labor market. For this reason, any social policy that bound welfare to labor participation was regressive and anti-poor.

But is re-municipalization the right answer, particularly in a system fraught with corruption and maladministration? Should citizens be asked to give over more power to public servants who have used the available public resources to strengthen patronage networks at the expense of service delivery, even as we argue that the system is flawed?

We, the people, must be more imaginative than that. The biggest lesson we can learn from Berlin is that to galvanize society, activists must find the one issue that all citizens understand and experience equally. But we don���t have a strong and ethical government to assure resocialization. That���s why different models of accountability, overseen directly by the people, are required���models like, for example, community land trust funds.

In its transition to becoming a governing party, the ANC let go of its founding principles at the directives of the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and the powerful business community that would benefit the most from privatized public goods. The ANC failed to understand that its role was transformation and redistribution, not just service provision. But while many activists warned us of these risks, we the citizens failed to hold the party and its government accountable for this betrayal.

Campaigns for re-municipalization must not fail at acknowledging the unique South African context. This unethical and corrupt state has failed to transform society. It cannot be the guardian of universal public goods. If re-municipalization is to work in South Africa, the accountability model between the municipality and the citizens will need to be reimagined. Social solidarity must be built through other forms of social contracting, and not through the state as was once envisaged. Not, at least, until the state has fundamentally transformed.

Beyond the boundary

South African cricket is currently the subject of TRC-style hearings into the racism and nepotism in the game. It makes for riveting TV, but focuses too much on individual instances of racism and discrimination. Image credit It's No Game via Flickr CC BY 2.0.

This is one in a��series of republications as part of our partnership with the South African publication, Amandla.

A recent historical biography, Too Black to Wear Whites, tells the story of Krom Hendricks, a talented black bowler thought to be the fastest in South Africa in the 1890s, whose national cricketing career was blocked by the colonial state. The authors demonstrate how Hendricks��� exclusion from his country���s national team on a tour to England, due to his ���race,��� formed part of the broader history of racialisation and segregation of that period.

Cricket, and the drama that unfolded on the various pitches, in boardrooms, and clubhouses in Hendricks��� time, and over his own career, expressed the contests over racial identity and the construction of a strict racial hierarchy that would culminate in the formation of the apartheid state in the 1940s. Cricket, in other words, is an expression of broader social life and needs to be seen as such.

Today, South African cricket, like South African society, is in disarray. The results on the field have been the worst in a generation���the Proteas find themselves languishing far from the top of the test and ODI rankings (this writer does not take T20 rankings seriously). At the same time, the game���s administration is in a desperate state, rocked by various financial scandals and general mismanagement. A postcolonial state, a government of the black majority, has replaced an apartheid and colonial state. Yet the issues that plagued South African cricket and society in the time of Krom Hendricks���racism, nepotism, corruption���stubbornly persist.

While the South African cricketers struggle to perform on the pitch, Cricket South Africa has launched the Social Justice and Nation-Building (SJN) hearings to address instances of racism in cricket since unification. Many black players have given testimony at the commission. Omar Henry, Ashwell Prince, Paul Adams and others have testified to experiencing various forms of racism while playing and training with the national side.

The commission���s aims are focused mostly on individual instances of racism and discrimination. It also seeks to understand the causes of racism in order to eradicate it from the game. More ambitiously, it has set for itself the principal objective to ���realise greater equality in cricket.��� The commission may indeed provide a necessary platform for players to speak freely about their experiences. Whether South African cricket will embody a greater sense of equality and fairness, and whether the national team will experience a meaningful shift in its institutional culture, remains to be seen.

Reconciliation, where?

It was Lungi Ngidi���s innocuous words, spoken during a press interview in 2020, which in retrospect can be viewed as the beginning of a series of events that would finally lead to the formation of the SJN. Asked about the American political movement Black Lives Matter���s potential impact on South African cricket, Ngidi casually responded that he thought it necessary that his team address issues of racism and discrimination in the sport. At this stage, the message of BLM and the ���taking the knee��� protest synonymous with the movement, had spread beyond the shores of the US. The protest gesture had reached various international sporting codes, from European football to rugby to cricket. Inspired by the moment, Michael Holding, the great West Indian fast bowler, gave an improvised and emotional account of his own experience as a victim of racial prejudice and abuse during a live broadcast in the UK.

Ngidi���s words were widely perceived to have provided a welcome opening to discuss problems related to racism and institutional culture within the South African cricketing community. But they attracted sharp rebukes from former white South African cricketers. Pat Symcox alleged Ngidi���s interview was simply ���nonsense.��� Boeta Dippenaar, in pure rooi gevaar form and clearly inspired by alt-right American tropes that are themselves expressions of deeply ingrained anti-Semitism and racism, suggested that BLM was nothing more than a ���Marxist plot.��� Both argued that farm attacks needed more attention than racism in sport.

Viewed in a longer history and with a realistic view of our present social context, the views of Symcox and Dippenaar are unsurprising and more broadly shared than perhaps many of us would like to admit. Indeed, while many of Ngidi���s teammates���black and white���supported his efforts to bring the issue of racism and culture to the fore in the local cricketing community, some were uncomfortably silent or equivocal. Around the same time as Ngidi���s interview, many South African rugby players refused to take the knee in solidarity with the message of BLM while playing in the European rugby leagues. Their stance was soon embraced by a group of South African cricketers, several of whom refused to take the knee.

Ultimately, a seemingly simple gesture in solidarity with anti-racism, embraced across the globe by variously racialized people and cultures, came up against the reality of South Africa���s curious social dynamics. Conspiratorial right-wing ideologies, conservative Christianity, submerged or outright racism, and defensiveness and evasion regarding the persistence of racism in our social institutions, still prosper and flourish.

While Ngidi has insisted that the South African team are united in the cause to fight racism, the vagueness of that unity is expressed in the awkward manner in which the team attempted to express solidarity with the cause. The team simply could not agree on whether to kneel or to stand. Some, like Quinton de Kock, have stood stone faced making no gesture as those around him chose their own way of expressing solidarity. De Kock refused to explain why he chose to do this.

Clearly, what matters is not exactly how the players choose to express their commitment to eradicate racism. But the clumsy approach of the South Africa team cannot be reduced, as Ngidi would now have it, to the whimsy of individual decision. Those with a sharper historical perspective, and a less comfortable view of the reality of contemporary South African society, know better than this. One can speculate, moreover, that the recent resignation of the Proteas assistant coach���who cited his discomfort with the institutional culture in the national side���has something to do with his own, less sanguine interpretation of the events of the past year, and how they have been received and interpreted in the team camp.

Transformation deferred

Cricket, unlike any other sport, was deliberately constructed as the sport of national unity. Cricket could perform a role that rugby, with its associations with conservative Afrikanerdom, could not. Cricket abandoned the Springbok for the Protea and was packaged by the media and government as the sport that would carry the aspirations of the new ���rainbow nation.���

Recent events have exposed just how much of an illusion that sentiment was. Black cricketers of the 1990s and early 2000s have shared painful memories of exclusion and alienation in the national team during the first years of ���reconciliation.���

Makhaya Ntini was one of the first black South Africans to make the Proteas side on a regular basis. In a recent emotional interview on the SABC, Ntini confessed how he would sometimes prefer to jog to the games in the morning rather than sit with teammates on the bus. At the SJN, Paul Adams, who played in the 1990s, recalled that he was regularly called a ���brown shit��� by his teammates, including current coach of the national team Mark Boucher.

Boucher���s response to the accusations from Adams are telling. While he has apologized for his role in contributing to a climate of exclusion and alienation, he maintained that he was ���na��ve��� about the offensiveness of his team���s behavior. Boucher is ultimately a product of his own upbringing in apartheid South Africa and his actions and those of his teammates express the attitudes that many white South Africans carried with them into democracy. In these communities one could, with a straight face, use racially abusive language and claim that one was unaware of the offense caused. One could have reaped the benefits of racial discrimination, yet, when confronted with the bald facts of apartheid, plead ignorance about one���s legislated privilege. Boucher claims that he was ���na��ve��� when entering the national team in the 1990s. Yet it was not ���naivety��� that led to Paul Adams being called a ���brown shit.���

Social solutions for a social problem

Despite the flimsiness of Boucher���s apology, he is correct to bemoan that, in his words, ���there was no guidance, no culture discussions, no open forums and no-one appointed by the CSA to deal with the awkwardness or questions or pressures that were being experienced by players and in particular players of color��� during his and Adams��� playing days.

This lack perhaps speaks to the awkwardness of the transition, where a recalcitrant old order was giving way to a new dispensation. Yet today, decades down the line, the fact that players are raising similar issues regarding exclusion and alienation, expresses a more disturbing reality.

The fact of the matter is that the hope for reconciliation and social transformation that came with the dawn of democracy has been frustrated and betrayed. The current rumbling in South African cricket is an expression of this broader failure to create institutions that embody the ideals of reconciliation, non-racialism and equality in substance. And, just as our social problems of inequality cannot be resolved by replacing white faces in high places, the use of quotas in cricket is exposed to the contradictions of an approach to transformation fixated on racial representation alone. We should recall that the use of quotas in cricket was championed by the same Mbeki government that was obsessed with creating a ���black bourgeoisie,��� an obsession which has left us with even wider inequality in the country.

Recognizing the limitations of this approach to transformation, the SJN has turned towards attending to the spirit of the national team and South African cricketing culture more broadly. It is indeed positive that it is giving a platform for players, past and present, to reflect on their experience of racism. Yet the commission���s blind spots are the same ones that have plagued other institutions and policies that have been assigned the task of transitional justice.

Cricket is reliant on its own physical infrastructure���nets, fields, pitches���and development and transformation require greater investment in this area. Yet, cricket is also reliant on social infrastructure. Indeed, as long as our communities are plagued with poverty and related stressors, it is hard to imagine how South Africa will produce self-sustaining transformation on the cricket field. All of the stories of Ngidi, Rabada and Springbok captain Kolisi are stories of how talented black youth were afforded opportunities to study on scholarships and bursaries at private boys��� high schools on their way to the national team. This is not a sustainable pathway for substantive transformation of the sport and our society. The problems in cricket are thus intimately connected with the problem of austerity, the neoliberal form of governance and the corruption that has decimated our public sector and administration.

There are international constraints worth mentioning. Treasury���s fiscal approach is justified for fear of reaction from domestic and international investors and the threat of credit downgrades. Global cricketing governance is analogous with the subordinate position that South Africa occupies in the global political economy. India, England and Australia dominate decision making at the International Cricket Council (ICC). They monopolize funding and schedule matches which suit their own agendas���leading to these teams dominating the test playing schedule in particular, starving our players of the opportunity to excel in the most meaningful format of the game.

Ultimately, while the SJN desires greater equality in cricket, it does not foreground the material barriers to succeeding in this endeavor. The connection, in other words, between the specific issues of racism, alienation and exclusion in South African cricket and the broader material context of these issues is not being made. This limitation mirrors the limitations of other commissions of inquiry in post-apartheid South Africa���such as the TRC, Zondo and Marikana Commissions���which focus on ���truth-telling��� and individual narratives, while ignoring systemic issues at work.

If the SJN is to realize its principal objective, and if the opening provided by the BLM moment is to translate into meaningful change, then the current efforts in South African cricket cannot continue to imitate the disabilities of previous attempts at transitional justice. It is up to progressives interested in cricket, and cricket���s place in society, to amplify this message and leverage the current conversation to raise the imperative of progressive social transformation.

Capitalism Mtaani at the Dandora dumpsite

In the third video for our Nairobi edition of Capitalism in My City, Gacheke Gachihi visits a site of environmental injustice. Still from Capitalism In My City.

The video is shot at sites of working class struggle. These are the informal settlements of Mathare and Dandora. These areas continue to experience the human rights violations of police brutality, enforced disappearance, and environmental injustice due to waste dumping by local and international companies.

Dandora Dumpsite in Dandora is one of the largest dumping sites in Nairobi City. The dumpsite is a symbol of neoliberal globalization whose effects of poverty, exploitation, poor health, and environmental degradation are felt by the poor.

Mathare Social Justice Centre, Mathare Green Movement, and the Organic Intellectuals Network within the social justice movement have been organizing against these social injustices through the Capitalism in My City project. It is part of creating collective consciousness on ecological justice and human rights in today���s capitalist crisis.

Disentangling memory from truth

In the collective consciousness of global football, Zaire and Haiti���which both qualified for the 1974 World Cup���are remembered for their dismal performance. But is this legacy justified? Image via FIFA on Twitter.

Soccer is the global sport. It is so universal that it often intersects with global events. One can read 20th-century world history through international soccer. A major theme of the century���European colonialism���is written all over the sport. In 1974, as the last African countries were winning their independence, colonial dynamics erupted on the biggest soccer stage of all. The 1974 World Cup in West Germany was the first time a Black team made it to the tournament, won eventually by West Germany. (They beat the Netherlands in the final.)�� In fact, it was two Black teams: Zaire, the first sub-Saharan African team to qualify, and Haiti. In the collective consciousness of football history, both teams are remembered for their dismal performance. But is this legacy justified?

By the numbers, there is not much to brag about in their showings. Both teams lost all three games they played, and each suffered one staggering defeat. If we look at the details, however, it becomes clear that their performance wasn���t as atrocious as collective memory would have it. Memories of the Zaire and Haiti teams in the World Cup were skewed by contemporary commentators, who were writing in a historical context characterized by anxiety over the loss of Europe���s centrality in world football in particular and world politics in general.

In their opening match, a 2-0 loss to Scotland, Zaire nevertheless proved their mettle. Before the game, Scottish manager Willie Ormond said, ���there���s no danger of us underestimating Zaire [���] we go for as many goals as possible, for that is the only way we will make Brazil and Yugoslavia respect us.��� After the game, however, Ormond said ���Zaire surprised us with their second half performance and are obviously a side for the future. In fact, they may well trouble both Brazil and Yugoslavia.��� Midfielder Billy Bremner admitted that ���they played better than we ever believed possible.��� A French reporter remarked, ���The African players justified both their reputation and their presence,��� while a Scottish commentator said, ���they showed they had status in their own right as they fought with great fun and sweeping long balls to test Scotland���s defence to its limits.���

Haiti also exceeded expectations in their first game. Italy���s keeper was none other than Dino Zoff, one of the greatest of all time. Zoff was accumulating a clean sheets record; he hadn���t let in a goal in over 1,200 minutes of international play. This record���which stands to this day���came to an end 46 minutes into their match against Haiti, when 22-year-old stiker Emmanuel Sanon delivered a goal that has gone down in Haitian sport history. For the next six minutes Haiti was ahead of one of the best teams in the world. The Italians turned it around for a 3���1 victory, but Haiti sent a message that they were by no means out of their league.

In short, both teams started strong. Things went downhill after that. Zaire faced Yugoslavia next; it was a massacre. Yugoslavia scored a staggering nine goals. Haiti, similarly, lost 7���0 to Poland. The results of their third and final matches were more typical. Both lost by three goals. This doesn���t tell us much, because Brazil and Argentina just needed a win to advance, so the scores were moot (notably, however, Manno Sanon managed another goal against Argentina). History remembers the crushing defeats, but there is reason to believe that their opening matches are more representative.

The performance of both teams in their respective second matches was hampered by events off the field. Before the Zaire���Yugoslavia match, President Mobutu Sese Seko pulled their Yugoslavian coach, Blagojev Vidinic, out of fear that he was ���selling their secrets��� to his compatriots. The team had to rely on the ad hoc directives of Mobutu���s officials. Likewise, Haiti���s defeat was pinned on their own president���s meddling. After Haiti���s first match, a random drug test on midfielder Ernst Jean-Joseph showed a positive result. Jean-Joseph attributed it to asthma medication, but he was nonetheless booted from the tournament. But it was the reaction of their furious president, Jean-Claude (Baby Doc) Duvalier, that was most troubling. On his orders, Jean-Joseph was roughed up and sent home in disgrace. His teammate Fritz Andr�� later recalled that ���as successful footballers, we���d been protected from that side of the regime, but now we saw the dark side. We had a sleepless night before the game against Poland, and to be honest, I was only thinking about Ernst, not the game.���

After each team���s second match, commentators were quick to proclaim that the teams did not belong. Although Zaire had astonished Scotland, and Sanon���s goal had shocked the world, reporters began to refer to an ���abyss between the standards of the best in Europe and the best in Africa.��� One reported called the teams ���an embarrassment to a series endowed with so much talent.��� Denunciations went all the way to the top of football administration. UEFA president Artemio Franchi proposed changes to the qualifiers, in order to keep developing nations out. And the outgoing FIFA President, Sir Stanley Rous, believing that teams ���devalue the currency of a World Cup,��� planned ���to table a ��� proposal that would help to separate the sheep from the goats in the early stages.��� The game two scores were certainly an embarrassment to the losing teams, but it was not as if World Cup audiences hadn���t witnessed crushing defeats before (e.g., Scotland 0���7 Uruguay in 1954) or since. But it is doubtful that anyone called for the restructuring of World Cup qualifiers to keep Brazil out after their 7���1 loss to Germany in 2014.

So, what was going on in 1974?

The historical context is key. At the start of the 20th century, Western Europe was in many ways the center of the world. But by 1974, political and economic centers had moved to the US and the Soviet Union. With the loss of their African and Asian colonies, Europe became parochial. Football was one of the few domains where Europe still ruled; FIFA is based in Switzerland, and every president since its founding had been European. Just two days before the 1974 World Cup began, however, FIFA elected a new president, the Brazilian Jo��o Havelange. Europeans saw his election as a symptom of Europe���s loss of centrality in world football. The incumbent president, the Englishman Sir Stanley Rous, said to European members during his campaign ���I appeal to you to vote for me because it is Europe versus South America, and we want Europe to retain the leadership of football.���

But Havelange won. He did so mainly by courting votes in the underdeveloped world. By 1974, 38 African nations were FIFA members���up from four in 1957. Havelange realized if he won in Africa, he would win the presidency. He toured the continent and promised a massive football development program. A key part of his platform was to add slots to the World Cup with more reserved for African nations. This proposition scandalized European football. Louis Wouters, president of the Belgian Football Association said, ���In the finals this year we have Zaire, Haiti and Australia. [���] If this is what you want, the organization of a world championship where the Soviet Union, Slovakia, England, Spain and Belgium are not taking part in the final, I would rather be a European champion than champion of the world.��� The West German captain said, ���For Haiti and Zaire to be coming here and not England does not make sense,��� while his Italian counterpart remarked, ���the competition should be for the best 16 teams, no matter where they come from, and we should forget these arguments about fostering the game in little countries by encouraging them to play.���

Conversely, as Kuwait���s delegate to the 1978 FIFA conference argued, ���one of the major means by which the standard of the game could be developed is the creation of incentives, the best of which as far as Asian and African teams are concerned would be to give them the opportunity for more than one team to qualify to [the] World Cup Finals.��� Asian and African teams have since distinguished themselves against Europeans (e.g., Senegal 1���0 France in 2002). But in 1974, the European football community wasn���t interested in this conversation.

So, when Haiti and Zaire arrived in West Germany mere days after Havelange was elected, a lot was riding on their performance. Europeans had already made up their minds about who belonged. For them, it was a stroke of luck that both teams happened to choke in one of their three games. Despite Sanon���s famous goal and Zaire���s impressive showing against Scotland, the memory of the first two Black teams at the World Cup was a casualty of European attempts to protect their privileged position in world football. More broadly, European backlash against the Haitian and Zairian sides is emblematic of the continent���s crisis of identity following decolonization.

For the record, things are remembered differently in Haiti and Zaire. Here, the 1974 World Cup is not an embarrassment. Both countries are proud of their teams��� success at qualifying. Emmanuel Sanon, for his part, joined the pantheon of Haitian sports. You can still see murals bearing his face in Port-au-Prince today. In other words, the memory of an event depends on who is doing the remembering and is influenced by the way it is depicted at the time. It is important to go back and disentangle memory from truth so that false narratives like Haiti and Zaire���s failure at the 1974 World Cup don���t live on to reinforce racist ideas and policies.

The United States is not a country

The US federal system is a patchwork of states and territories, municipal and local jurisdictions, each with its own laws and regulations. This complex map provides ample opportunities for shell games of ���hide the money.��� Image credit ccPixs.com.

I���m not referring to the electoral reality of red states versus blue states, or to the split between a radicalized Republican Party and those of us who hope that an inclusive democratic vision of the nation might eventually prevail. Nor am I speaking here of racial or ethnic divisions, however defined.

Rather, what I mean is that the US, where countless corrupt billionaires and dictators have stashed their loot, is not a single tax haven, but many separate tax havens. Each state and territory has its own laws and regulations about financial transactions used for tax evasion or money laundering. Enforcement often also depends on municipal and other local officials, leaving ample opportunities for cronyism or simply failures to investigate.

The Pandora Papers, released on October 3, show that the USs is second only to the Cayman Islands in facilitating the secrecy of illicit financial flows. But it���s not a simple picture. To analyze the role of the US in global money flows, one must dig into a labyrinth of financial jurisdictions and players. Wall Street and the federal government in Washington are important actors, but they are not the central players who manipulate the entangled threads.

Based on an investigation by a network of 600 journalists around the world, the Pandora Papers revealed some 12 million financial documents���still only a tip of the iceberg. Among the national leaders exposed was Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta, who met with President Joe Biden at the White House on October 14.

Ironically, Biden���s home state of Delaware is renowned as a tax haven, beginning in the late 19th century. Reliably Democratic in national politics, Delaware still ranks at the top among US states providing secrecy for corporations and extraordinarily wealthy individuals, both domestic and foreign.

Red states and blue states are destinations for those who seek to hide their money from tax collectors and public scrutiny. The US federal system is a patchwork of states and territories, municipal and local jurisdictions, each with its own laws and regulations. This complex map provides ample opportunities for shell games of ���hide the money.���

Although the same is true to some extent of other nations with federal systems, and of the intricate financial network of the UK and its overseas territories, the US offers unparalleled opportunities for concealment, lax enforcement, and legal obfuscation.

The Pandora Papers cite the example of South Dakota, an attractive destination for billionaires and others seeking to avoid estate taxes. The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ), which led the Pandora Papers investigation, obtained access to the records of the Sioux Falls office of Trident Trust. Among its clients were the family of Carlos Morales Troncoso, former president of Central Romana, the largest sugar plantation in the Dominican Republic. Owned principally by two Cuban exile billionaires in Florida, the plantation is notorious for its exploitation of Haitian workers.

South Dakota led the way in providing such trusts, as reported in detail even before the current revelations. But other states, including Alaska, Florida, Delaware, Texas, and Nevada, have followed suit. The Pandora Papers also document the luxury real estate holdings of Jordan���s King Abdullah in Malibu, California. Like many other politicians and oligarchs around the world, King Abdullah owns real estate in many places outside his country. The ICIJ found records of his purchases in London and Washington, DC, among other cities, as well as three side-by-side mansions in a luxury enclave in Malibu, near Los Angeles.

Money-laundering cases often feature luxury real estate, found in almost every region of the world. And the US Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) has orders requiring stricter reporting of all-cash sales in 12 metropolitan areas. But fully tracking such transactions for shady deals or tax evasion is far beyond the capacity of FinCEN or the underfunded Internal Revenue Service, much less local or state governments with few incentives to investigate influential people.

Bottom line: those seeking to track down the hidden wealth that dictators, criminals, or jet-setting billionaires have lodged in the US must not limit their efforts to supporting changes in national legislation in Washington, DC. They must also turn the spotlight on state and local communities around the country, in both red and blue states.

In February 2017, for example, the Washington Post called attention to the fact that US relations with Gambia and Equatorial Guinea were not just ���foreign policy��� but also a local story in Potomac, Maryland. The ousted Gambian dictator Yahya Jammeh lived at 9908 Bentcross Drive. The US Department of Justice filed a forfeiture complaint in June 2020 to recover $3.5 million of corrupt proceeds. His counterpart Teodoro Obiang Nguema, who has ruled Equatorial Guinea since his successful coup in 1979, still owns the house at nearby 9909 Bentcross Drive.

The message to look beyond the national political arena in Washington applies not only to tax justice advocates within the US, who are now making significant progress in reform of national legislation. It also applies to global tax justice networks seeking to expand the transnational impact of their combined efforts. And it applies to African governments and international agencies tracking down the spoils of corruption, such as the still untraced portion of billions hidden overseas by Nigerian dictator Sani Abacha and his associates.

The same hidden mechanisms that siphon money upward to the rich are ubiquitous both in the US and on the African continent. The effects are felt at all levels, from failure to address global crises such as climate change and the COVID pandemic to gross inequality in housing and other essential needs. Exposing those mechanisms and building the political will to curb illicit financial flows requires action not only in national capitals and global institutions, but also in all the jurisdictions where wealth is hidden. Nowhere is this more true than for the United States.

In the US, new African immigrants have taken the lead in battles to defend social justice on many fronts. Prominent figures include Congresswoman Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, Ns�� Ufot of the New Georgia Project, and Ay��� (Opal) Tometi, one of the three founders of #BlackLivesMatter.

In Washington, this message from the Panama Papers is beginning to be heard if not yet followed.

On October 17, the headline of a Washington Post editorial read ���States must stop letting the ultra wealthy dodge taxes���and the law.��� Despite the limited progress on national legislation, African and other global advocates for tax justice should recognize US political realities and make good use of the many links they already have to states and local communities in the US.

Organized irresponsibility

On this week's AIAC Talk, a discussion with historian Adam Tooze on the history and future of the COVID-19 crisis. Image credit Chadolfski via Shutterstock.

In this edition of AIAC Talk, we speak to Adam Tooze, Professor of History at Columbia University, about his latest book Shutdown: How COVID Shook the World Economy. The COVID pandemic is ongoing, and since its outset has provoked unprecedented response from governments, central banks, corporations, and civil society. Although some key fiscal and monetary responses have departed from mainstay neoliberal orthodoxies, were they pursued to keep things fundamentally the same���to restore the ���normal��� that was the very problem? How have these measures failed to end the pandemic, as elites continue to prioritize their own self-interests in acts of organized irresponsibility. As social and ecological crises worsen, is there hope for more egalitarian politics within and between countries? How do Africa and the global South, more broadly, fit into the escalating power struggle between China and the US?

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

https://podcasts.captivate.fm/media/9a0d512b-98df-4637-be2a-410eda4a85d0/aiac-talk-s2-ep4.mp3

Post-apartheid symptoms of morbidity

Ordinary working-class people have been forced to the belief that there can never actually be real solutions; stripped of the confidence that fundamental change can happen. Photo by Pawel Janiak on Unsplash.

Something is dying in South Africa, and everyone���s focus is on trying to save it. Few are paying attention to what is struggling to be born. That is the nub of the crisis of post-apartheid society. In Antonio Gramsci���s words: ���The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.���

Apartheid died. Many people throughout the world helped defeat this crime against humanity when they participated in one of history���s greatest solidarity movements. But sadly, I must inform you that the job is not yet complete. The pain and suffering associated with apartheid continues. The new generations who inherit the gains of the past find that with them come continuities of oppression and exploitation.

What was apartheid in essence? Racial capitalism. Well, the ruling class continues to own and continues to rule. On August 16, 2012, thousands of miners in Marikana went on strike fighting for a living wage of R12,500 (USD500) per month. The post-apartheid ruling class saw red. The state police shot and killed 34 of the strikers. The message was clear. Anyone who wants to end the system that guarantees the exploitation of cheap black labor in South Africa���s gold, diamond, and platinum mines must be willing to wade through a river of blood.

Nevertheless, people must be allowed to remember the greatness of the anti-apartheid movement and our role in it. We must remember the excitement and joy of the struggle of the 1980s. We must remember the spirit of youth in the Caribbean who fantasized about crossing the oceans to take up arms in support of the oppressed black people in South Africa. Workers in the United States and Europe taking boycotting action to stop the transportation of apartheid goods. We must remember what it meant to survive, share, struggle, and the gains made as we forced the regime and the capitalist class to make concessions. We must remember what it was like to feel that we were making history, that we could win real victories. All this made us braver and more determined to fight for a better future for all. For socialism.

Yet, South Africa did not become that different future, the alternative to capitalist barbarism. Racial capitalism continues. And with it the symptoms of morbidity that Gramsci talked about. One of these symptoms is corruption, what is popularly known as ���state capture��� in the country. The other is the crisis of everyday life of the working class and the poor.

In 2016, Advocate Thuli Madonsela, then the country���s Public Protector, issued a report that has since left South Africa gripped in a frenzy and obsession with corruption.

After reporting on the shenanigans of the then president of the country, Jacob Zuma, she recommended that a judicial state commission into state capture be established to cast the net wider and conduct further investigations. The country���s Deputy Chief Justice Raymond Zondo conducted daily public hearings on national television during the past three years or so. Revelations and developments from the commission dominated public discourse with the image of the African National Congress (ANC), the ruling party, and of Nelson Mandela, probably irreparably tarnished.

Literary outpourings have accompanied the obsession with state capture, with books exploring its sensational aspects becoming bestsellers. One of these has a somewhat deeper take: Ebrahim Harvey���s The Great Pretenders: Race and Class Under ANC Rule (Jacana Media, 2021)

The revelations by witnesses at the Zondo Commission may sell books and enliven dinner table talk, but ultimately they are disappointing. A lasting impression is that the country, despite the idealism and dreams of the anti-apartheid struggle, is run by greedy comrades with grubby hands and groggy brains. Looting and stealing, self-enrichment, abuse of office, lies, even murder; all these and more are the ingredients of the unpalatable broth that is brewed by the ANC partly as a result of its policy of Black Economic Empowerment.

In the political dispensation negotiated between, on the one hand, the apartheid state and the capitalist class, and on the other hand, the ANC and the national liberation movement, it was ostensibly agreed that in exchange for political office, creation of a black middle class, and helping a few aspirant black bourgeoisie to join the corporate sector as bosses, private (stolen) property would be protected in the ���new South Africa.��� This deal is what Chris Hani, the popular leader of the South African Communist Party (SACP) who was assassinated in 1993 on the eve of liberation, reputedly warned the ANC about. He asked: ���Comrades, do you want to dance with the hyena? It will chop off your hand.��� It seems the capitalist hyena is intent on chopping off the ANC���s head.

It is not as if the daily hearings at the Zondo Commission have changed�� anything. The stealing and looting continues. Private sector price gouging is the order of the day. COVID-19 afforded the hungry comrades-turned-hyenas another avenue to pilfer. ANC-connected business people suddenly set up companies selling personal protection equipment (PPE) at inflated prices to the state, some of whose quality did not meet minimum standards. On May 26, 2021, Zweli Mkhize, the Minister of Health, announced that a R150-million (US$10,884,212) communications contract awarded to Digital Vibes by his department had been irregular. Investigative journalists had established over several months that the minister had hidden ties to the communications consultancy, which was inflating prices, including charging millions of rands for scheduling Mkhize���s media briefings during the pandemic.

Chris Vick, a journalist who set up COVIDComms, a voluntary communications operation to help spread the message about COVID-19, is starting to get over his anger ���at how public money was chowed in the midst of a pandemic. But I still can���t get my head around the fact that the money that was chowed was meant to save lives, to empower people in such a way that they could prevent infection and avoid transmission. It wasn���t money to market margarine���it was money to prevent sickness and death.��� Some of the lives of the 88,506 dead at the time of writing from COVID-19 could have been saved.

Ordinary people see the rich and powerful looting and stealing all around them. They see them talking about it on TV. Meanwhile, ordinary working-class life is a life of crisis. Everything is a crisis: jobs, housing, services, education, income, food, healthcare, security. Every day is a struggle. For the nine million people who live in informal settlements, there is no respite. As S’bu Zikode, leader of the movement, Abahlali baseMjondolo (���The People of the Shacks���), puts it:

Our bodies itch every day because of the insects. If it is raining everything is wet���blankets and floors. If it is hot the mosquitoes and flies are always there. There is no holiday in the shacks.

Revelation upon jaw-dropping revelation are aired daily about how the state electricity company, Eskom, was mismanaged and disorganized by looters connected to the state president. Meanwhile, some black working-class communities, such as Sun Valley, Soweto, and other townships and villages, live up to nine months without electricity with the state doing nothing to help them. Instead, the victims are more likely to be blamed because of the user-must-pay mantra, which���in the light of Eskom���s debt crisis���justifies less or even no service at all to the poor.

When the World Bank���s latest report states that: ���South Africa remains a dual economy with one of the highest, persistent inequality rates in the world, with a consumption expenditure Gini coefficient of 0.63 in 2015,��� it is not just numbers. It is real living human beings paying the price for the capitalist economic crisis in South Africa, made worse by COVID-19, corruption, and state neglect. Black grannies living in darkness in the height of winter. Children inhaling paraffin and charcoal fumes because there is no electricity in the house.

The masses daily confront the contradictions of bourgeois democracy and the hypocrisies of bourgeois morality. The latter denounces some forms of corruption. Thus, it is fine to make profits, that is, to steal through ownership of private property. It is not fine to steal by grabbing the handbag of an old lady. It is fine that millions die because they are denied medical care. It is fine when millions are denied electricity when they cannot pay. But it is not fine when corruption starts to mean that law and order are undermined. Or when corruption starts to mean that there is economic inefficiency���so that when the middle class pays, they do not receive the goods. And when the middle class works hard, their savings disappear because of government decisions. It is at that point that the issue of corruption becomes a crisis.

The capitalist state epitomizes this contradiction. The public sector is not just the public sector. It is the public sector under capitalism���corrupted, commodified, commercialized. The public sector has been turned into a center of distribution of public money to the hands of the capitalist class. Some of it as profits, some of it as crude corruption.

In South Africa, as in many other parts of the world, bourgeois democracy has not satisfied the needs of the working class. The freedom of bourgeois democracy is limited. But with the defeat of apartheid, the political freedom that is being claimed is that of bourgeois democracy. The latter comes historically with limitations. It is an inherently restricting impoverished political form and view of freedom. It comes with the imperative of protecting private ownership of the wealth. This means acceptance of exploitation and oppression. Protection of private property leads to continued poverty, requiring suppression of the struggle of those trying to put an end to exploitation. As such, bourgeois democracy is a diseased, limited, discriminatory, oppressive, and inadequate freedom. It is a million miles less than the freedom that human beings have imagined in the course of their struggles for freedom.

There was a time in history when capitalism was young, lively, and growing. That time has passed. Today���s generations must live with a system in crisis. There is and has been for a long time a rolling capitalist crisis. The 2008 crash was an aspect of it. The truth is, capitalists and capitalist governments cannot resolve their crisis. And the social force that has the power to institute an alternative economic order, the working-class movement, is not organized politically to resolve that crisis through the seizure of power.

It is primarily a crisis of profits. The predicament is how to manage the crises of everyday life. From the capitalists��� point of view, it is a problem of how to impose the costs of the crisis on the working class. From the capitalist states��� point of view, it is how to maintain law and order in a system that is increasingly failing to deliver on its promise of political rights and economic prosperity for all.

As the capitalist system loses its vitality, so does bourgeois democracy. It gets increasingly exhausted, limited, distorted. We have seen struggles for democracy such as in the Arab Spring and struggles for the deepening and extension of democracy such as by the Occupy Movement. This includes various other protest mobilizations in the world, not least in South Africa, which at one time claimed to be the ���protest capital of the world.��� The South African experience in this regard provides a lesson and a vantage point from which to see and understand what happened in other countries.

Despite its many protests, the South African protest movement did not challenge for state power. The protesters made demands, but it was as if the government would always be the government; the ANC would always be the governing party; there would always be a capitalist government. There was hardly a hint of ���regime change.��� There was no popular mobilization around the call for the government to fall. There was no vision of an alternative government. A new political party, the Economic Freedom Fighters, formed in 2013, projected itself as such an alternative, but its leaders have not cut their political umbilical cord with the ANC from which they split. As such, the authenticity of their ambitious claim and revolutionary aspiration are questionable.

The South African protesters were eclipsed by even more vigorous protests from other parts of the world thus losing in the ���protest capital of the world��� championship stakes. The power of these protests saw regimes fall, such as Mubarak in Egypt and Ben Ali in Tunisia. The call was for ���free and fair elections,��� and indeed, there have been the elections of bourgeois democracy in these countries. In Egypt, the military staged a coup against the democratically elected government and the mass movement was unable to stop this. In sum, the political questions of social and economic power were hardly posed let alone answered. The dictators resigned without alternative popular structures of power being instituted. There was no seizure of power by the masses. Social media, apps, and smartphones played their role in the mobilizations, but they could not govern. And so, we saw revolutions without taking power. Indeed, revolutions that ceded power.

The process of forcing governments to resign without popular structures in place meant that the result was ���free and fair elections��� with the repressive structures of the state left untouched. In other words, these were classic political revolutions that saw power changing hands at the top but the same social structure remaining in place. Even when the armies stood with the masses, they only promised not to shoot the protesters but had no intention of handing over their guns to them. When the revolutionary fervor subsided, some of them were ready to shoot.

In the US last year, we saw George Floyd making history. His death spearheaded the greatest mobilization of protest in that country, if not in the world. Some of the movement���s banners and demands were or implied direct attacks on American racial capitalism and its reliance on racism and class suppression to maintain law and order. The situation raised the question of power but was hardly asked by the vast majority of the protesters. Since politics tolerates no vacuum, this was replaced by the call ���Trump must go!��� Booting this douchebag out was good but not good enough.

As the working class and the poor are realizing in South Africa from the truth of their own lives, the problem with the ANC is not just this leader or that leader. Jacob Zuma is gone, but the crisis continues. Nor is it just a problem in this place or in that place. It is a problem everywhere all the time, because the ANC is a capitalist political party. It is acting to protect the capitalists. And protecting capitalists means that it is acting against workers. And when working-class organizations such as the SACP and the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) are supporting the ANC, they are supporting a capitalist political organization even against workers.

There is a pattern in the world where mass anger is directed against neoliberalism. And there are attempts to revive social democracy, or bring social democratic solutions. But what does this mean in the context of a rolling capitalist crisis, which capitalism cannot resolve? It is not about defense and incremental gains. It is about a different way of resolving the crisis of bourgeois government. The masses are not protected. Everyday life is still filled with everyday problems. It becomes part of a struggle to deal with the exhaustion of bourgeois democracy, of sustaining capitalist governance.

Underneath the morbid symptoms of a dying capitalism, two things never change: the need for a comfortable, safe, healthy life���and everything that makes that possible���and the fact that everything that can make that possible already comes from the hands of the working class. Workers are the producers. The problem is only this: Everything is not organized and controlled and planned to meet the needs of the people; it is organized and planned and controlled to provide profits to bosses.

The needs are there, and they provide a basis for developing a unifying set of demands. When the struggle seems to stall, it does not mean the possibilities are not there. It means that the obstacles are also there. Workers are never just left alone to draw strength from each other. There is a class enemy that is fighting back. In South Africa, bolstered by the anti-working class policies of the ANC government, it is a class enemy that is getting more arrogant and more confident. The problems of everyday life, which were intolerable, are getting worse.

The struggle against apartheid reminds us that, as much as we struggle with the immediate issues of everyday life, we have to take the lesson of history, repeated again and again in place after place. We cannot take power from the capitalist class in the absence of the organized working class, confronting and answering the questions of power. In South Africa, it sometimes seems easier to substitute the energy and militancy of unemployed youth for the struggle to draw on the energy and militancy that can and must come from workers with jobs. Substitution is a political problem. It ends up compounding the difficulties of mobilizing workers with jobs.

Part of the obstacle in the way of mobilizing organized workers is the crisis of confidence: Ordinary working-class people have been forced to the belief that there can never actually be real solutions. They have been stripped of the confidence that fundamental change can happen. An acute part of that is a lack of confidence that they themselves and their class can be the agents of real solutions. For workers there can be no solution as long as the power and wealth lies with the capitalists. These are problems that must be addressed and cannot be solved by taking workers for granted. They need patience, respect, and understanding of what is forced onto workers every day. And what was forced on them historically, going back to the days of slavery, colonialism, and apartheid. They need to rebuild the confidence that there actually is this power���the power of workers. They need confidence that workers have this power in their own hands. The power to struggle not just for wages and conditions, but for everything. What is waiting to be born is a workers��� plan under workers��� control of production, not for profit but to meet workers��� needs.

Probing the depths of the CIA���s misdeeds in Africa

The CIA committed many crimes in the early days of post-independence Africa. But is it fair to call their interference ���recolonization���? Woman walks by the rather large vibrant mural dedicated to Patrice Lumumba, political leader who brought freedom to the Congo, in L.A.'s Leimert Park. Photo credit Joey Zanotti via Flickr CC BY 2.0.

In 1958, a year after it achieved independence from colonial rule, Ghana hosted a conference of African leaders, the first such gathering to ever take place on the continent. At the invitation of Ghana���s newly elected prime minister, Kwame Nkrumah, more than 300 leaders from 28 territories across Africa attended, including Patrice Lumumba of the still-Belgian Congo and Frantz Fanon, who was then living in still-French Algeria. It was a time of unlimited potential for a group of people determined to chart a new course for their homelands. But the host wanted his guests not to forget the dangers ahead of them. ���Do not let us also forget that colonialism and imperialism may come to us yet in a different guise���not necessarily from Europe.���

In fact, the agents Nkrumah feared were already present. Not long after the event began, Ghanaian police arrested a journalist who had been hiding in one of the conference rooms while apparently trying to record a closed breakout session. As it was later discovered, the journalist actually worked for a CIA front organization, one of many represented at the event.

British scholar Susan Williams has spent years documenting these and other instances of the United States��� secret operations during the early years of African independence. The resulting book, White Malice: The CIA and the Covert Recolonization of Africa, may be the most thorough investigation to date of CIA involvement in Africa in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Over more than 500 pages, Williams counters the lies, deceptions, and pleas of innocence perpetuated by the CIA and other US agencies to reveal a government that never let its failure to grasp the motivations of Africa���s leaders stop it from intervening, often violently, to undermine or overthrow them.

Though a few other African countries appear on the sidelines, White Malice overwhelmingly concerns just two that preoccupied the CIA during this period: Ghana and what is now the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Ghana���s appeal to the agency was based merely on its place in history. As the first African nation to gain independence, in 1957, and the homeland of Nrukmah���by far the most widely respected advocate of African self-determination of the day���the nation was inevitably a source of intrigue. The Congo stepped out of its colonial shackles soon after, in 1960. Because of its size, position near southern Africa���s bastions of white rule, and reserves of high-quality uranium at the Shinkolobwe mine in Katanga province, the country soon became the next locus of the agency���s attention���and interference���in Africa.

���This is a turning point in the history of Africa,��� Nkrumah told Ghana���s National Assembly during a visit from Congolese Prime Minister Lumumba a few weeks into the Congo���s self-rule. ���If we allow the independence of the Congo to be compromised in any way by the imperialist and capitalist forces, we shall expose the sovereignty and independence of all Africa to grave risk.���

Nkrumah possessed an acute understanding of the threat and of the people behind it. Only months after his speech, Lumumba was assassinated by a Belgian and Congolese firing squad, opening the door to decades of pro-western tyranny in the country.

Lumumba���s assassination is remembered today as one of the low points of the early years of African independence, but a lacking documentary record has allowed partisan investigators to minimize the CIA���s role. It���s a failure of accountability which has allowed the agency to appear blameless while reinforcing a fatalistic view of African history, as if the murder of an elected official was merely another terrible thing that had ���just happened��� to a people utterly unprepared for the challenge of independence.

But as Williams shows, the CIA was actually one of the chief architects of the plot. Only days after Lumumba���s visit to Ghana, Larry Devlin, the agency���s leading man in the Congo, warned his bosses of a vague takeover plot involving the Soviets, Ghanaians, Guineans, and the local communist party. It was ���difficult [to] determine major influencing factors,��� he said. Despite a complete lack of evidence, he was certain the ���decisive period��� when the Congo would align itself with the Soviet Union was ���not far off.��� Soon after, President Eisenhower verbally ordered the CIA to assassinate Lumumba.

The CIA���s agents did not, in the end, man the firing squad to kill Lumumba. But as Williams makes clear, that distinction is minor when one considers everything else the agency did to assist in the murder. After inventing and disseminating the bogus conspiracy plot of a pro-Soviet takeover, the CIA leveraged its multitude of sources in Katanga to provide intelligence to Lumumba���s enemies, making his capture possible. They helped to deliver him to the Katanga prison where he was held before his execution. Williams even cites a few lines from a recently declassified CIA expense report to show that Devlin, the station chief, ordered one of his agents to visit the prison not long before the bullets were fired.

When Nkrumah learned of Lumumba���s assassination, he felt it ���in a very keen and personal way,��� according to June Milne, his British research assistant. But horrifying as the news was to him, the Ghanaian statesman was hardly surprised.

White Malice is a triumph of archival research, and its best moments come when Williams allows the actors on both sides to speak for themselves. While books about African independence often show Nkrumah and his peers to be paranoid and hopelessly idealistic, reading their words alongside a mountain of evidence of CIA misdeeds, one sees how fear and idealism were entirely pragmatic reactions to the threats of the day. Nkrumah���s vision of African unity wasn���t the pipe dream of a naive and untested politician; it was a necessary response to a concerted effort to divide and weaken the continent.

In Nkrumah���s own country, the US government appears not to have pursued a course of outright assassination. But it acted in other ways to undermine the Ghanaian leader, often justifying its ploys with the same kinds of paternalistic rationalizations the British had used before them. Those efforts reached their nadir in 1964, when the US State Department���s West Africa specialists sent a memo to G. Mennen Williams, the department���s head of African affairs, titled, ���Proposed Action Program for Ghana.��� The United States, it said, should start making ���intensive efforts��� involving ���psychological warfare and other means to diminish support for Nkrumah within Ghana and nurture the conviction among the Ghanaian people that their country���s welfare and independence necessitate his removal.��� In another file from that year, an official from Britain���s Commonwealth Relations Office mentions a plan, ostensibly approved at the highest levels of the foreign service, for ���covert and unattributable attacks on Nkrumah.���

The level of coordination between governments within and outside the United States might have shocked Nkrumah, who, until the end of his life, was at least willing to believe the CIA was a rogue agency, accountable to no one, not even US presidents.

White Malice leaves little doubt, if any still existed, that the CIA did grave harm to Africa in its early days of independence, often violently. But while Williams presents numerous instances of the CIA and other agencies undermining African governments, often violently, the CIA���s wider strategy in Africa���apart from denying uranium and allies to the Soviet Union���remains opaque. What we call ���colonization��� as practiced by Britain, France, Belgium, and others involved a vast machinery of exploitation���schools to train children to speak the masters��� language, railroads to deplete the interior of resources���all maintained by an army of functionaries. But even in the Congo, the CIA���s presence was comparatively small. Huge budgets and the freedom to do virtually whatever they wanted in the name of fighting communism gave them an outsize influence over Africa���s history, but their numbers never rivaled the colonial bureaucracies they supposedly replaced.

Williams shows how the CIA plotted with business people who stood to benefit from pro-western African governments in both the Congo and Ghana. But far from a systematic practice of extraction, the agency���s designs for Africa often seem befuddled with contradiction.

That is especially true in the aftermath of Lumumba���s assassination; an overabundance of secrecy still prevents a full accounting. But what records have been pried from the agency���s hands reveal details of a multitude of CIA aerial operations in the Congo, involving planes owned by agency front companies and pilots who were themselves CIA personnel. During a period of upheaval, the agency appears to be everywhere in the country at once. ���But,��� Williams writes, ���it is a confusing situation in which the CIA appears to have been riding several horses at once that were going in different directions.��� The agency ���supported [Katangan secessionist president Mo��se] Tshombe���s war on the UN; it supported the UN mission in the Congo; and it supported the Congolese Air Force, the air arm of the Leopoldville government.���

As contradictory as these efforts seem to have been, all of them, Williams writes, ���contributed to the objective of keeping the whole of the Congo under America���s influence and guarding the Shinkolobwe mine against Soviet incursion.���

Even if such conflicting plans shared a common goal, it���s not unreasonable to ask whether we should consider them ���colonialism������neo- or otherwise���or rather the schizophrenic response of an agency drunk with power it never should have been afforded. In White Malice, the CIA���s capacity for committing murder and sowing discord is on full display. Its capacity to rule, however, is less so.