Sean Jacobs's Blog, page 119
September 17, 2021
Curing the Sahara blues
Tanezrouft Basin. Image credit European Space Agency via Flickr CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO. Tinariwen, a Tuareg desert blues band that has gained international acclaim over the last few decades, titled one of its albums Aman Iman, or ���water is life��� in the Tuareg language Tamashek. They chose the title with good reason: water is essential for survival in the arid Sahara and in the Sahel region immediately south of the Sahara. As climate change intensifies and water supplies dry up, this truth will be underscored in dramatic fashion.
Global warming is a major threat to the African continent, imperiling the lives and livelihoods of millions. Forty-six of 54 African countries are threatened by desertification. The most recent International Panel on Climate Change report and other IPCC meta-analyses confirm that, for the rest of the 21st century, the Sahara will endure soaring temperatures, heat extremes, and decreases in precipitation, while the Sahel will experience temperature increases coupled with intense monsoon rains in the central and eastern Sahel, flooding, and greater soil moisture levels. Chaotic climate patterns and heat waves will wreak havoc on people already struggling to make ends meet. Crop yields will be devastated, and droughts will cause food insecurity. The Sahel will be one of the regions with the highest number of people impacted by poverty caused by climate change.
In recent decades, US involvement in the Sahel and Africa more generally has largely been restricted to spending nearly $2 billion a year on military operations and sending thousands of American soldiers to Mali, Niger, Chad, and countries in the Horn of Africa with armed Islamist presences. The US military has made feeble efforts to finance development projects, but these have largely withered on the vine. In 2020, US aid to Africa through USAID and the State Department was $8.5 billion���not insubstantial, but a pittance compared to the overall federal budget.
The United States and former colonial powers in the global North, especially France, Belgium, and the United Kingdom, owe countries in Africa a tremendous debt for centuries of slavery, economic exploitation, and political domination. Their imperialism triggered a vicious cycle of underdevelopment whose legacy stretches to the present and whose cost, although impossible to calculate exactly, runs into the tens of trillions. Despite decolonization and African countries��� ostensible liberation from external political hegemony, Western corporate interests continue exploiting natural resources with near impunity. The West owes Africa and the rest of the global South another gigantic debt for its grotesquely disproportionate greenhouse gas emissions: the US, Canada, and Western Europe are responsible for nearly 50% of total cumulative worldwide emissions since 1750.
On February 5, 2021, President Biden addressed the African Union in an effort to reset US���Africa relations, declaring, ���The United States stands ready now to be your partner in solidarity, support and mutual respect.��� His campaign website���s climate plan promised that the Biden administration would ���fully integrate climate change��� into American ���foreign policy and national security strategies.��� USAID���s current commitments aren���t insubstantial, but they are far from enough. If the Biden administration is serious about playing a constructive role in Africa, and if it is genuinely interested in achieving global climate justice, then it should put its money where its mouth is and���without falling prey to a Western savior mentality���finance a Green New Deal that will promote climate change adaptation and resilience in Africa.
Climate scientists have identified a raft of concrete policies that could reverse desertification and mitigate climate change. These policies range from improved agricultural techniques like drip irrigation to investment in clean energy technologies. They also include investment in meteorological and climatic observation infrastructure to provide an early warning system for drought, heat waves, monsoons, and other severe weather events; the introduction of salinity-tolerant plants that fight soil erosion and serve as windbreaks; investment in healthcare infrastructure to combat malaria and dengue fever, which will have a greater range due to climate change; and funding for clean water and desalination programs. One ambitious program that African governments have already begun���the Great Green Wall of the Sahara and the Sahel, an attempt to build a 15-kilometer-wide wall of greenery along a 7,775-kilometer route from Senegal to Eritrea������will be challenging without significant additional funding,��� according to IPCC scientists.
The United States is well situated to help. Universities like Cornell and the University of Illinois have world-class agricultural science programs. The US could share the fruits of this expertise by expanding exchanges that send agronomists abroad to advise on conservation and plant selection and cultivation. As the richest country on the planet, the US can easily supply the money for the policy program that IPCC scientists recommend. And as the world���s biggest polluter by cumulative emissions, the US has an obligation to do so. If the US makes funding climate mitigation and adaptation programs a priority in its international aid, then perhaps the Sahel can find the silver lining in the storm clouds on the horizon.
Netflix Nollywood tackles political corruption in Nigeria
Netflix promo image for King of Boys: The Return of the King. Kemi Adetiba���s The Wedding Party (2016), a buoyant, star-studded romantic comedy, was a major box-office hit in Nigeria, earning over one million dollars in the country���s theatrical marketplace���a feat that, to date, has been equaled only by the film���s sequel, Niyi Akinmolayan���s The Wedding Party 2 (2017), and exceeded only by the recent Omo Ghetto: The Saga (2020). A box-office take of 250,000 dollars typically qualifies a film as a hit in Nigeria, which has just over 60 modern movie theaters. COVID caused all of those facilities to close from March until October of last year. The December 2020 opening of Omo Ghetto was proof of the persistent popular demand for big-screen entertainment���of the desire of Nigerians to return to the cinemas even during a pandemic.
Codirected by Funke Akindele and her husband, Abdulrasheed Bello (popularly known as JJC Skillz), Omo Ghetto is a gangster film with comedic overtones, and a sequel to the 2010 epic of the same name. The tale of an all-girl gang���by no means Nollywood���s first���the original Omo Ghetto made Eniola Badmus a star and cemented Akindele���s reputation as one of the industry���s most versatile talents. In strictly representational terms, The Wedding Party and Omo Ghetto might seem polar opposites: the former celebrates romance and opulence (without exactly ignoring the underclass), while the latter offers a far grittier take on contemporary life, in keeping with Akindele���s resolutely populist star image. Indeed, it is difficult to imagine Akindele���s spliff-smoking Lefty, one of the protagonists of Omo Ghetto, showing up, with her dirty face and torn overalls, in a swank ���island��� film like The Wedding Party.
Adetiba���s follow-up to that smash hit, 2018���s King of Boys, is situated somewhere in between. A crime drama that focuses on the fruits of gangsterism, it is equal parts underworld opera and fashion-conscious ���Lekki porn.��� It opens with a reference to perhaps the most famous wedding ceremony in cinema history: the nuptials with which Francis Ford Coppola launches The Godfather (1972). While no one is actually getting married at the start of King of Boys, the festive atmosphere, with scores of sprucely dressed celebrants congregating in a courtyard in Lagos, contrasts (as in The Godfather) with somber ���backstage��� scenes of dealmaking and violence. The squat, fifty-something Eniola Salami (played by the great Sola Sobowale) is being f��ted for her supposed contributions to the local economy. Powerful politicians have turned up for the occasion. The emcee repeatedly refers to Salami as ���the mother of the whole community.��� Famous musicians materialize to sing her praises. It is all, of course, an elaborate front. Behind the scenes, Salami oversees the torture of those ���area boys��� who fail to carry out her orders; she even clubs one of them to death, getting blood on her ceremonial robe. It is Salami, the outwardly upstanding oba (or ruler), who is the ���king of boys������a Godfather of sorts, her ill-gotten gains increasingly breeding resentment. A later scene directly references the Coppola film: seated in her shiny office, where, flanked by crosses and portraits of Jesus Christ, she receives all manner of supplicants, Salami is forced to assert her authority, ordering a market woman who has come to her for help to stop crying. ���Tears are not allowed here!��� she screams, echoing Don Vito Corleone���s ���You can act like a man!���
The allusions to The Godfather do not end there, but King of Boys is no mere pastiche. Like Adetiba���s previous film, it examines some uniquely Nigerian realities within the structure of a broadly familiar genre. The appeal of The Wedding Party lay, perhaps, not in its status as a romantic comedy, but instead in its capacity to reflect some of the recognizable contours of a ceremony that is at once general���a big Nigerian wedding���and particularized (some would say strategically) according to the experiences of a range of ethnic groups, who make the nuptials a truly multicultural affair. The Wedding Party features a rich linguistic blend from the start: standard English coexists with Yor��b��, Igbo, and various inflections of Pidgin, marking the eponymous celebration as a diverse occasion. Such diversity is hardly taken for granted, however; at one point, the mother of the groom, sneering at traditional Efik dancers, says to the Efik mother of the bride that, as an Igbo woman, she can hardly be bothered with reminders of ethnic minorities. This is an Old Nollywood tension���familiar from so many romantic melodramas focused on cross-ethnic affairs���updated to fit New Nollywood���s fancier circumstances. Here, they include formal elements like widescreen cinematography and carefully monitored dialogue recorded in professional, soundproof postproduction studios, as well as the general excess of the wedding itself, with its catered meals depicted in an extended montage of mouthwatering close-ups. The multilingual King of Boys continues the trend, with cutaways to bowls of exquisite ��m��l��, gbegiri, and ewedu.
Whatever the reasons for its success with audiences, The Wedding Party clearly had ���legs,��� moving from the Toronto International Film Festival to multiplexes in Nigeria to, eventually, an ���afterlife��� on Netflix. King of Boys followed a similar trajectory, its nearly two-year run on Netflix preceding the streamer���s decision to obtain exclusive distribution rights to Adetiba���s sequel, King of Boys: The Return of the King, a seven-part limited series that premiered on Netflix in late August. The 2018 film ended with Salami���besieged not only by those attempting to usurp her crown as king of the underworld but also by law enforcement agents eager to ensure her prosecution���fleeing to Brooklyn. The Netflix series, whose seven episodes were all written and directed by Adetiba, opens with the oba returning to Nigeria after a two-year exile in the United States.
Above all, the series, like the feature film that preceded it, is a showcase for the outsize talent of Sola Sobowale. She is utterly transfixing, even when ordering two cups of ata rodo. Giving her new housemaid detailed instructions, concentrating on every word, Sobowale quietly conveys Salami���s power. The dinner order is a threat: get it wrong, and you will surely suffer. The housemaid is rattled, and so is the viewer; Sobowale���the actress as oba���has both in her grip. (She isn���t as menacing as Mama G, but who is?) Moments later, the grieving Salami, whose daughter-cum-consigliere died (at the end of the 2018 film) taking a bullet intended for the oba, and whose wayward son committed suicide shortly thereafter, is overcome with sorrow. Alone in her bedroom, she self-flagellates, wailing over the deaths of her two children, wondering if she is truly to blame, appealing to God for answers. Sobowale���s range is remarkable, and the seven-episode Return of the King gives her the expansive screen time she deserves.
Salami has returned to Nigeria not simply because the corrupt federal government has exonerated her, but also because she herself wishes to run for political office. Appealing to popular dissatisfaction, seeking to exploit the very unrest that her own criminality exacerbates, Salami swiftly enters the race for governor of Lagos State. Like that of so many politicians, her populism is merely a masquerade, a smokescreen for despotism. Eventually, she is able to secure the support of a major party and runs against the incumbent in a race as twisted as anything in House of Cards (2013���2018). Dramatizing the domain of domestic politics, The Return of the King takes for granted that fraud and corruption are companions of electoral politics in Nigeria, as inescapable as egusi soup. To an even greater degree than the original feature film, the Netflix series alludes to the recent history of Nigeria. While portraits of Goodluck Jonathan appear throughout the former, a fictional president is installed in the latter, allowing Adetiba to explore, through an imaginary proxy, the scandals of some of Nigeria���s actual leaders. Former President Olusegun Obasanjo, in particular, haunts the dramatic proceedings, as does the fact that, in 2007 (the year Obasanjo left office), 31 of Nigeria���s 36 governors were indicted on charges of corruption. Obasanjo���s anti-corruption rhetoric served to conceal���especially for the foreign press���the misconduct that he allowed to persist. His anti-corruption trials were toothless and purely for show, much like the displays of concern that Salami and others (including Adetiba���s fictional president) so self-servingly make in The Return of the King.
Adetiba even ruthlessly satirizes Obasanjo���s establishment of the Independent Corrupt Practices Commission and the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (both of which received technical assistance from Washington). While other recent Nigerian films (like Faraday Okoro���s 2018 thriller Nigerian Prince, financed by AT&T) approvingly depict the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (Nigerian Prince even shows the agency successfully collaborating with the US Secret Service), Adetiba is much harsher. Fictionalizing the agency as the ���Nigerian Corruption Crime Commission��� (NCCC), she caricatures the hypocrisies of those who claim to be ridding the country of vice. Those who seek to expose Salami���s crimes are bedeviled by personal troubles even before they invite the oba���s wrath. Nurudeen Gobir (Paul Sambo), the Hausa man who heads the NCCC���s special financial crimes department, is so exhausted by the end of the 2018 King of Boys that he decides to ���spare��� Salami. His wife seriously ill, his medical debts mounting, he finally gives up hope of ever bringing criminal kingpins to justice. He lets Salami go, allowing her to relocate to Brooklyn. When she returns to Nigeria two years later, at the start of the Netflix series, Dapo Banjo (Efa Iwara), an ambitious young reporter for the fictional Conscience newspaper, is eager to expose her crimes and to investigate Gobir���s complicity. The workaholic Dapo, estranged from his wife, is obsessed with revealing the existence of the ���Nigerian mafia��� over which Salami has long presided, and he is the only incorruptible character in The Return of the King. Through him, Adetiba explores historical alternatives to rampant corruption, drawing on a countervailing tradition that has been a source of Nigerian national pride since the colonial period: the press. But her approach is hardly innocent. She knows that journalists are bribable too, and that governmental malfeasance is often so entrenched as to be effectively immune to exposure. Dapo is the lone voice of conscience in The Return of the King. ���Where is the dignity in keeping quiet while the masses face unspeakable atrocities?��� he asks the tired, defeated publisher of the newspaper, who has lost all sense of mission and struggles simply to keep the lights on. He continues:
Those people who can���t speak for themselves, while the people in power, all they do is pillage, rape, and destroy this country. And what do we do? We turn the other cheek. Sir, nobody is bold enough to stand up for what is right. This country has so much potential. And what do we do? We do nothing with it. It is our duty as the conscience of the people to stand up and speak for what is right.
Produced at the height of the End SARS protests���a popular movement launched in 2017 to disband the Nigerian Special Anti-Robbery Squad���The Return of the King is skeptical of all forms of law enforcement. Everyone���s a criminal in Adetiba���s Nigeria���politicians and lawmen most of all. So cynical is her approach that she leaves even Dapo hanging. Heroically resisting Salami���s attempts to pay him off, narrowly escaping a letter bomb intended to end his life, Dapo is nevertheless unable to penetrate the protective mechanisms of power politics. He���s last seen fleeing on foot on an empty street in the dead of night���a ghost on the run.
There are some literal ghosts in King of Boys. At times, Salami���s younger self shows up to taunt her. Closer to the abject poverty into which she was born, this twentysomething Salami, with her more immediate memories of forced childhood prostitution, ridicules the relative ���softness��� of her older self. Skillfully played by Toni Tones, who matches up well with Sobowale, the young Salami is an Old Nollywood demon, like the ghosts of the oba���s dead children���who also, evoking the original Living in Bondage, turn up to torment her. Adetiba does, however, overdo the auto-tune, giving Tones some silly ���otherworldly��� inflections.
Adetiba���s stylistic inconsistency, triumphantly resolved in the communal celebration with which The Wedding Party concludes, but increasingly confusing and staccato in the unwieldy three-hour film of King of Boys, is better suited to the serial form. Early episodes of The Return of the King are given over to the oba���s anguished imaginings���to expressionist materializations of her inner demons. Later ones eschew this occult style, opting for sheer sociopolitical realism, as Salami confronts the gubernatorial race and its attendant immoral economies. Still other episodes focus on the street violence that the oba both authorizes and is unable to control. Taken together, these seven episodes amount to a sustained���if ultimately pessimistic���critique of Nigerian corruption.
September 15, 2021
Am��lcar Cabral and the limits of utopianism
The past decade has seen a resurgence of scholarly interest in the life and work of the ���founding fathers��� of decolonization. In this literature, Lusophone African intellectuals and activists have been accorded limited attention, at least in the English language literature. The Angolan-born and South African-based anthropologist Ant��nio Tom��s now offers a valuable contribution in his nuanced and non-hagiographic account of the life and times of the revolutionary Am��lcar Cabral.
Am��lcar Cabral was born in Bafat�� in what is now Guinea-Bissau in 1924.�� He died at the hands of a group of his own Guinean PAIGC soldiers led by the disgruntled Inoc��ncio Cani, in neighbouring Guinea-Conakry in 1973. Having spent his formative years in Cape Verde, from where both his parents hailed, he was educated as an agronomist in Portugal under the fascist dictatorship of Ant��nio de Oliveira Salazar. Cabral���s father, Juvenal, was arguably part of the intellectual elite of Cape Verde, but was expelled from the seminary of S��o Nicolau after a brawl with a fellow Guinean student, and forced to take up a lowly position as a primary school teacher in Guinea-Bissau. His mother, Iva Pinhel ��vora, having duly expected more from marriage to an educated man, had to work several jobs in order to stave off poverty after the couple���s return to Cape Verde. As Tom��s correctly notes, Juvenal Cabral did in effect work for the colonial state, and was as such part of the Cape Verdean elite of ���subaltern colonizers��� who ���made up large parts of the military units and occupied the majority of posts in the public administration in Guinea-Bissau.��� Juvenal Cabral was also ���a staunch defender of the colonization of Guinea by the Portuguese��� and saw the appointment of Ant��nio de Oliveira Salazar which followed in the wake of the military coup in Portugal in 1926 as ���an act of divine intervention.��� It is no doubt one of history���s manifold ironies that two of Juvenal���s sons, Am��lcar and Lu��s Cabral (1931-2009), would later lead the movement to free Guinea and Cape Verde from colonial domination.
Cabral as a maker of utopiasTom��s��� rendition of Cabral���s life is rich in historical and contextual detail, but relatively short on theory. That is both a source of weakness and strength in the book. For Tom��s, the life of Cabral originated as a biography first published in Portuguese under the arguably more appropriate title Cabral, O Fazedor de Utopias (Cabral, The Maker of Utopias) in 2007. Having started as a journalist in his native Angola, Tom��s went on to do a PhD. in Anthropology at Columbia University in New York, and currently holds a position as an associate professor at the University of Johannesburg in South Africa. The two most significant theoretical influences on Tom��s biography of Cabral are David Scott and Mahmood Mamdani. From Scott���s seminal Conscripts of Modernity, Tom��s adopts the generative idea that ���if anticolonial critique were the answer to the problem of colonialism, postcolonial critique should be concerned with the question itself, and not whether we arrived at the answer, as if we still live in those historical times.��� Scott���s is of course a warning against the widespread tendency to read decolonization���s moments of stasis, failure and disillusionment into the foundation of decolonization. From Mamdani���s equally seminal Citizens and Subjects, Tom��s extricates the idea that ���the colonial state���redefined itself as the guarantor of tribal cohesion.��� Tom��s��� book is written in a very accessible form and format, and there is of course much more to be made of Mamdani���s productive framework than what Tom��s��� biography ultimately allows.
Guinea-Bissau will in many respects have been seen as an unlikely arena for the revolutionary uprising against Portuguese colonialism that Am��lcar Cabral led there from 1963 to 1973, and which after his death manifested in the form of the country���s independence under the leadership of Lu��s Cabral from 1973 onwards. For as Tom��s notes, Guinea-Bissau not only remains ���one of the most underdeveloped countries in the world,��� it had long before that been ���the most underdeveloped colony of the Portuguese empire.��� After the end of the lucrative transatlantic slave trade, in which the Portuguese were certainly�� among the most central actors, the Portuguese colonies became more of a source of expenditure than income, argues Tom��s. One suspects that this is a debatable point, but one better left to economic historians rather than this reviewer.
In the Portuguese colonial scheme under Salazar, Guinea-Bissau was mainly of interest as a source of cheap labor for the production of primary goods. Portuguese colonialism shrouded itself in a mythology of benignness, underwritten by a propaganda about ���lusotropical��� tolerance for ���interracial liaisons,��� belied by the fact that rates of intermarriage were lower than even in the segregationist US South. On the international arena, few really seemed to care about the excesses of Portuguese colonialism. Levels of illiteracy in the population in Guinea-Bissau were abysmal up to independence and beyond: Cabral and the PAIGC made intense use of radio broadcasts in order to mobilize Guineans for the war against the Portuguese colonialists.
In highlighting how the racially bifurcated Portuguese colonial state radically divided Guineans and Cape Verdeans, Tom��s��� account will by no means be welcomed by all. In the racial hierarchy of Portuguese colonialism, Cape Verdeans were both seen by the Portuguese and saw themselves as superior to Guineans, and for the most part lived worlds apart, whether in Guinea-Bissau or Cape Verde. They were in other words, in Mamdani���s classical formulations from Citizen and Subject, ���citizens��� and ���subjects��� respectively. This colonially imposed bifurcated legal and political status���made into a lived and experiential ���reality��� in so many colonial contexts���must also, according to Tom��s, go a long way towards explaining the simple fact that Cabral and his fellow revolutionaries found so few willing takers in their uprising against Portuguese colonialism in Cape Verde. Practically all the fighting took place in Guinea-Bissau, and apart from a small cadre of revolutionary leaders and commanders of the uprising who, like the Cabral brothers, were Cape Verdeans, all the actual fighting and bleeding on the Guinean battlefield were undertaken by Guineans. It is not hard to understand why, over the course of a war that lasted for 10 years and was both brutal and bloody, this would breed a resentment that Tom��s sees as a contributing factor in the assassination of Cabral.
Tom��s��� description of Cabral as a ���maker of utopias��� in the original Portuguese title of this biography seems particularly apt, as it is precisely because it required an act of a truly radical will on Cabral���s part to think that ���Guineans and Cape Verdeans could be brought together through the armed conflict��� and into ���accepting new forms of identity��� merely by ���being forced to live together under these circumstances.��� For, even if one were prepared to go along with Cabral���s Marxist analysis, in which ���race and ethnic affiliation��� are not a priori categories, but rather the outcome of concrete conditions, it requires a fair amount of utopianism to imagine that the racialized legacies of the Portuguese colonial grid could be so easily undone.
Which way to Cabral���s Marxism?The first actions against Portuguese colonial military units in Guinea-Bissau took place in Tite in January 1963, and were ordered by Am��lcar Cabral. After his premature death in 1973, Cabral became a sort of proverbial ���man of all seasons��� for revolutionary and anti-colonial Marxists. In Tom��s��� rendering, Cabral���s turn to revolutionary militarism was a gradual one, and marked by hesitancy and ambiguities: his natural inclinations being towards diplomatic and intellectual means of achieving the independence of Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde. Where other and more hagiographic biographers have tended to portray Cabral as a thoroughly committed Marxist determined to wage war on Portuguese colonialism from Guinea-Bissau from an early stage, Tom��s��� Cabral is a man who ���had always been a pragmatist��� who tried ���as much as possible not to identify with any ideology��� in light of the fact that ���the world he was trying to navigate was complex and demanded flexibility of language.��� Yet ���ultimately, the liberation movement shared the same theoretical backbone as communist revolutions, inspired by Marx, Lenin, and Mao and Cabral himself was ���marked profoundly��� by ���N��gritude, Marxism and nationalism��� that he had been exposed to as a student among other students from the Portuguese colonies in Africa in Lisbon. The ���reluctant nationalist��� of the book���s title, is the Cabral who only became fully committed to the nationalist cause in 1960, when he left Portugal and moved to Guinea-Conakry, which had then recently achieved independence under the leadership of Ahmed S��kou Tour��.
Cabral���s turn to the endorsement of anti-colonial violence was a result of the brutal force used by the Portuguese in the face of a PAIGC-supported cessation of work by Guinean dock workers at the Port of Bissau in August 1959, which left 15 Guineans dead, scores injured and corpses floating down the Geba river. ���These events convinced Cabral of the impossibility of developing peaceful means of protest and that ���armed force was the only way to adequately respond to the violence of the Portuguese.����� Cabral had little by means of military training to draw on: his theory of guerrilla warfare to a large extent drew, as one would expect, on what he had learned from the writings of Mao and Che Guevara. Tom��s��� is not first and foremost an intellectual biography, and one duly expects the question of the nature and inflections of Cabral���s Marxism as interpreted by the author to give rise to some heated scholarly debates.
What to this reviewer seems as one of the more important and original contributions to scholarship about Cabral that this biography makes, is the underlining of the profoundly transnational character not only of the anti-colonial struggle in which Cabral and his contemporaries were involved, but also of the profoundly transnational Lusophone African character of this struggle. For among those who, according to Tom��s, influenced Cabral���s decision to take up a clandestine life and the struggle against Portuguese colonialism, were Viriato da Cruz and Azancot de Menezes, Cabral���s Angolan comrades from Lisbon, who would later become founding members of the MPLA in Angola.
Not an hagiographyThough the military achievements of the PAIGC in the ten-year war against Portuguese military forces in Guinea-Bissau were significant, and gave rise to the idea of Cabral being a brilliant military strategist, Tom��s points out that the envisioned ���mobilization��� of the Guinean peasants and the attempt to maneuver between the Balanta, the Fulani, and the Mandinka of Guinea-Bissau proved challenging. To Cabral and the PAIGC, the long-standing divisions in Guinea-Bissau were to be transcended in the name of nationalism, but it seems clear that this vision could not be sustained in the long run. Cabral himself was not above brutality in his dealing with PAIGC soldiers that had gone rogue or who were seen as posing a threat. Tom��s notes that Cabral oversaw the military tribunal of the PAIGC in Cassac�� in February 1964, which saw at least two militants accused of abusing the local population executed in front of them. Similarly, in Madina do Bo�� in June 1967, a PAIGC tribunal executed two soldiers on suspicion of having been involved in a conspiracy to kill Cabral.
Tom��s also indicates that the anti-colonial war in Guinea-Bissau and the Guinean declaration of independence of September 1973 may be seen as one of several important factors that would ultimately lead to the military coup in Portugal and the ensuing Carnation Revolution of April 1974. For though Tom��s provides no figures on this expenditure, the cost of holding more than 30,000 Portuguese soldiers in Guinea-Bissau in order to defend a relatively small territory and to protect a white population of no more than 3,000 by 1968 must have been significant for the fledgling Salazar dictatorship. Add to this that Salazar���s Portugal, at this point, was also waging wars to quell armed uprisings in the significantly larger colonies of Angola and Mozambique, and the strain on the colonizer���s financial resources and domestic political capital emerged as significant. The military officer who was a leading figure in the Carnation Revolution that brought down the Salazar regime in April 1974 would, in fact, be none other than General Anton��o Spinola, who was the Portuguese commander-in-chief in Guinea-Bissau from 1968 to 1973 and who coordinated and oversaw the most brutal phase of the war against Cabral���s PAIGC. In the course of these years, Spinola and the Portuguese intelligence service PIDE also tried on several occasions to have Cabral assassinated.
The assassination of Cabral outside his house in neighboring Guinea-Conakry took place in the evening of January 20 1973, and was witnessed by his second wife Ana Maria. According to Tom��s��� account, the assassination was part of an attempt by Guinean PAIGC soldiers to wrest control over the PAIGC from the Cape Verdeans by means of an internal military coup. The racial resentment that Cabral had imagined could be undone through the crucible of military struggle had in fact ended up as a significant factor in his own death. All the Guinean PAIGC soldiers rounded up after the assassination of Cabral and accused of being involved were summarily executed, some of them badly tortured before being shot. On the orders of S��kou Tour��, Cabral was given a state funeral. Cabral���s brother Lu��s became the first president of independent Guinea-Bissau, built a de facto one-party state and embarked on a Soviet-supported attempt to construct socialism in Africa by means of industrialization, which ultimately proved a failure. He was deposed in a military coup orchestrated by his erstwhile PAIGC comrade Nino Vieira���who, for several decades, played a key role in Guinea-Bissauan politics until�� he too was assassinated in 2009. The revolutionary pipe-dream of unity between Guineans and Cape Verdeans never materialized, though the PAIGC continued to rule a nominally bi-national state until the first free multiparty elections in 1991.
We should be grateful for Antonio Tom��s��� important contribution to the field. Especially in the context of the burgeoning and important scholarly literature taking us back to the crucible of decolonization and permitting us to assess its aspirations and limitations anew.
September 14, 2021
A legacy beyond the vintage records
Alemayehu Eshete performing at the ��thiopiques concert on August 22, 2008 as part of Dun Laoghaire Festival of World Cultures. Image credit Redhead Walking on Flickr CC BY-NC-ND 2.0. With the death of the singer Alemayehu Eshete on September 2, Ethiopia lost another musical icon, just a few months after the passing of mandolin player Ayele Mamo and the innovative producer Amha Eshte. These figures, along with Mulatu Astatke, the late Getachew Mekurya, Girma Beyene, Wallias Band. and others were pioneers of Ethio-groove, the unique synthesis of Eastern Europe brass, African American funk and Ethiopian pentatonic melody which burst out of Addis Ababa in the late 1960s and early 1970s. It still moves Ethiopians emotionally���and on the dancefloor���to this day, and remains one of the country���s most successful cultural exports.
While we mourn the loss of these pioneering artists our melancholy should be tempered with the recognition of just how influential they remain on both the local and global music scene, and how ingeniously they worked around huge obstacles to found a unique Ethiopian sound. Amha, for example, was one of the first to start importing American soul and funk into Ethiopia in the 1960s, alongside new music from Kenya, Sudan, and India. He soon moved on to producing local acts, in the face of a 1948 imperial edict from the days of Hallie Selassie still in force, which granted a monopoly in music publishing and distribution to Hager Fikir Theatre, who were failing to produce anything new. The first release on his new Amha label was Alemayhehu Eshete���s debut single ���Timarkialesh / Ya Tara����� in 1969, which Amha cannily had pressed in India to work around the ban on independent production. The single was an immediate success in Addis Ababa, and Amha went on to produce 103 singles and 12 LPs by local artists between 1969 and 1975, putting Ethiopia firmly on the contemporary musical map.
But this fecund era for Ethio-groove was all but stopped in its tracks in the mid-1970s, following the overthrow of Haile Selassie, a devastating civil war and the installation of the hardline communist Derg regime, which significantly diminished this musical momentum. Like many in the music scene Amha was driven into exile, first to Greece and then the US. He wouldn���t return to the country for 19 years.
With the fall of the communists in 1991, the scene that Amha and many others had helped create was revived from the late 1990s, and today new generations of musicians in Addis Ababa, such as Ka��n Lab, Addis Acoustic and��Samuel Yirga perform those grooves in the many venues of the buzzing capital. The up-and-coming artist Kassmasse has shown that this vintage musical repertoire can also find a home outside the traditionally defined Ethiopian groove and jazz.
It wasn���t until several decades after its 1970s highpoint that Ethio-groove caught the attention of the West. The two key factors were, first, the reissuing of Ethiopian records, which began in 1986 with Mahmoud Ahmed���s��Ere Mela Mela��and gained momentum in the 1990s and 2000s with the best-selling��Ethiopiques��series. Second, in the mid-2000s, non-Ethiopian bands became interested in Ethiopia���s popular music, and new groups formed that were dedicated entirely to the genre. They started recording original Ethio-grooves and writing their own. According to guitarist and producer��Girum Mezmur, one of the musicians who drove the resurgence of Ethio-groove in Addis Ababa, ���you can no longer tell, whether someone in Europe or someone in Ethiopia is playing it.���
At least a dozen non-Ethiopian bands are performing Ethio-groove in different parts of the world, and some influential Ethiopians are collaborating with some of those musicians from outside the country. The Paris-based band Akale Wube specialise in authentic-sounding versions of Ethio-groove classics such as Alemayehu���s�����Addis Abeba Bete��� and work with Girma Beyene. Mulatu Astatke keeps his music evolving in collaborations with the Australian band Black Jesus Experience and The Heliocentrics from the UK. Getachew Mekurya fused his saxophone melodies with punk-rock in his collaboration with the Dutch band The Ex. And songs from the golden period of Ethio-groove have even been sampled by rap notables Nas & Damien Marley, The Game, K���naan and others.
Alemayehu, Amha and Ayele���s generation created a cosmopolitan fusion���heavily influenced by the sounds of James Brown, Motown, Latin and jazz, but woven into a distinctly Ethiopian tapestry���and sent it back into the global music stream. Though the original generation is passing on, the genre keeps evolving through covers by Ethiopian and non-Ethiopian bands, and new compositions that extend the repertoire. This music is not an artifact stuck in time, but a globally evolving genre. This thought should console us as we pay our respects to the golden generation of Ethio-groove pioneers.
September 13, 2021
Even dogs are racist
Security dog handlers training dogs in IITA Ibadan, Nigeria. Image via International Institute of Tropical Agriculture on Flickr CC BY-NC 2.0. I recently moved to a small, cynophilic Canadian city called Kelowna. The first home I visited in this city had a special sofa for dogs. It took me only a few days here to discover that people take their dogs to daycare and that dog doctors are well-to-do. In fact, holding funeral services for demised dogs, adopting stray dogs or financially rewarding lost dog finders are not�� uncommon practices in Kelowna. The day I arrived in the city, I was visited by a couple of Canadian friends and their dogs. The visit started out with a tinge of awkwardness because of the way I dramatically recoiled at the sight of these sweet, harmless dogs. It startled my Canadian friends that someone could be that terrified of dogs. However, as I have come to realize, it only takes a minute to get comfortable with dogs in Kelowna (and much of Canada) because they���alongside cats���are human���s best companions.
I have not always been uncomfortable around dogs. I actually grew up in their company. My grandmother had many of them, so many that our house was often jokingly referred to as what in English would translate as a ���doghouse��� or a ���house of dogs.��� Sometimes people suspected my grandmother to be a witch because she excessively and uncommonly anthropomorphized dogs. As a child, I learned to love dogs from my grandmother; I learned that dogs love to be petted and cuddled. I learned that dogs have an acute sense of smell and that they can identify or remember a person by how they smell. I also discovered that dogs cozy up to you when you rub them gently in the head or lovingly pat their back. A particular female dog lived with us for so many years. I do not remember the name my grandmother gave her, but I am sure it had ���God��� and ���love��� in it. I remember bathing her and carrying her in my arms. I remember how she would follow me everywhere I went. I remember always feeling distraught whenever she fell ill. My bond with her was obvious to everyone in our neighborhood.
And then I moved to the city of Ibadan to study. And my grandmother died. And the dogs in our house disappeared one after the other. It didn���t take long before I discovered that dogs were different in the city. They were hostile and combative. They were trained to hate strangers and capture intruders. I also noticed in the city that dogs were almost always caged during the day and unleashed behind fenced walls and barbed wires at night. I learned, for the first time, in the city, that people ate dogs. I was stupefied when I read in the news about hungry, young city men who specialized in hunting stray dogs for meat. I learned in the city that some dogs eat raw human feces and, worse still, that they eat human beings.
In Ibadan, I learnt about a dog that ate its owner. The owner allegedly traveled for a few days and left the dog alone and unfed. By the time he returned from his trip, the dog was so hungry and angry that he feasted on its owner���s bones. It was also in Ibadan that I learned that people avoid dogs not only because they could be bitten but because they could contract diseases. One of my Ibadan friends once underwent treatments for rabies because he was bitten by a dog after he barged into a fenced house unannounced. While the high-rate of crime in many Nigerian cities might partly explain the overwrought human-dog relationship, the country���s widespread pet-unfriendliness also has a mythical side to it. To own a dog or cat���especially a black one���is to make an open invitation to bad omens or become a suspect of diabolic acts.
Then I moved to Johannesburg, South Africa and encountered dogs trained to hate Black people. While I had come across cannibalistic dogs in Ibadan, I was not prepared for the world of racist canine subjects that I became exposed to in Johannesburg. The first place I lived in the city was a cottage in a white Afrikaner household. They had a boerboel named Lexi. Lexi was an ugly-looking and inordinately-muscled dog that scared the hell out of me when I first saw him. Lexi barked at me unceasingly. My Afrikaner landlady assured me Lexi would get used to me with time and would stop barking at me eventually. She was wrong. Lexi never stopped barking at me but, thankfully, there was a barricade between the main house and the cottage. So, Lexi could only bark, there was no chance that he could jump the barricade and attack me.
After a few years in South Africa, it became clear to me that Lexi barked only at me and other Black people who visited the house. When a white guy moved to the cottage beside mine, Lexi was not hostile to him. When white people visited the house, Lexi didn���t bark at them. This was when I realized that in South Africa even dogs are racist���or, better put, dogs in South Africa often become socialized into antiblack racism. Boerboels were notorious for their aggressive attacks on melanated people. This fraught relationship between Black people and dogs in South Africa goes way back to apartheid days when police dogs were specially trained to hunt and clamp down on Black people���especially protesters���who resisted the dracony of apartheid.
Now, in the post-apartheid era, there are still residues of anti-blackness amongst dogs owned by white people. White South Africa, broadly speaking, substituted its police with its security dogs as a way of protecting its property, privilege, and power. Almost every posh suburban home (a.k.a. white homes) in South Africa has a security dog, some even put a photo of their dog in front of the house as a way of warding off and instilling fear in potential trespassers who are always assumed to be Black. Historically, white South Africa is known to prize dogs more than it prizes Black people. During apartheid days, the South African police held memorial services for dogs that were killed by Black protesters. Today, we hear and know of white families that put their dogs, but not their Black maids, on medical insurance. Of course, there is nothing wrong with dog humanitarianism, only that in South Africa there is an almost unconscious yet ���in your face��� white attitude that suggests that they���d rather humanize their dogs than dignify Blacks. It was after coming to this understanding that it became less surprising to me that most ordinary Black South Africans (especially men) are exceedingly cynophobic. In essence, in post-apartheid South Africa, security dogs are more or less the unnoticed weapons of a racial cold war; they are white people���s shield of armour and black people���s worst enemy. After half a decade of mingling with Black South Africans, this cynophobia rubbed off on me too.
However, my relocation to Kelowna has, despite the initial trepidations, revived my childhood affections for dogs and I am now thinking of adopting one. At the same time, I have realized that the love for dogs in Canada (and much of the Western world) often becomes commodified. It is not unusual to see people with designer dogs as well as handbag or toy dogs on the streets of Toronto. While acquiring teacup dogs (as they are commonly referred) is not inherently wrong, the rise in the demand for them feeds into the upmarket Western consumerism that creates a proliferation of commercially bred dogs. This is also not unconnected with the rise in unethical canine breeding, which often creates questionable genetic contortions of dogs. In view of this, Canada continues to grapple with ���puppy mill��� problems.
There is even a darker side to the love of dogs in Canada (and much of the Western world). Cynophilia sometimes becomes cynosexual. While bestiality is illegal in Canada, there were 103 cases of sexual encounter between people and animals reported between 2011 and 2016. And, as the report indicates, most cases of bestiality in Canada or anywhere else go unreported because, obviously, animals are incapable reporting cases of violation. Also, there are many loopholes in the law about human-animal sexual encounters in Canada. For example, in 2013, a Canadian man charged with bestiality had his conviction overturned after he appealed that there was no ���penetration��� involved in the bestial act. Also, of the 103 cases of bestiality reported between 2011 and 2016, only 47 resulted in people being charged. It was only in 2019 that the Canadian law recognized ���all sexual acts with animals��� as illegal.
What my vernacular attempt at a social anthropology of dogs across three countries (Nigeria, South Africa and Canada) reveals is not new. If some dogs are beastly and racist, it is because human beings made them so. Canine subjects across the world are masticated, politicized, weaponized and abused.
Jivin’ in Johannesburg
DJ Invizable. Image credit Chris Saunders. For a city I have never set foot in, Johannesburg has had an outsized influence on my life. Living in Brooklyn in the early 2010s, driven by a regular run of local magazine cover stories, visits from various folks in the Joburg music scene at times seemed like a monthly occurrence. That connection to New York media meant that, alongside Lagos, Johannesburg really became a node for early influence in the current moment of international Afropop/beats appreciation.
Yet, for such an influential city in my own career, and in the greater global African music scene, it tends to get overlooked in the global media these days (besides a current obsession with Amapiano). So in order to continue our theme of Clubbing on the Continent for this season of Africa Is a Country Radio, we turn to South African journalist Sean O’Toole, who contributed an illuminating essay to the Ten Cities book, about his experiences growing up in the Johannesburg club scene.
We as always include a taste of classic and new sounds from our featured city. Listen back on Worldwide FM or follow our Mixcloud account for the archive and to not miss any future episodes.
September 12, 2021
A different sort of truth
Photo by Moulaye Sidi Aly on Unsplash When Mohamedou Ould Slahi Zoomed into my graduate class from Mauritania in March 2021 to discuss his new novel, The Actual True Story of Ahmed and Zarga, he shared a bit about the role writing fiction played during his detention at Guantanamo Bay from 2002 to 2016. Writing fiction helped him ���create a world that doesn���t exist��� and ���then I picture myself in a world that is so good, so much better than prison.��� With this novel, Slahi offers readers a glimpse of the world he created to escape Guantanamo Bay Detention Camp.
Fiction tells different truths than nonfiction. Released in 2015, Slahi���s nonfiction work Guantanamo Diary chronicles the brutal reality of his experience of extradition and detention by the US government. The truth shared in Guantanamo Diary sheds light on the secret programs that enabled the torture and prolonged imprisonment he suffered. The Actual True Story of Ahmed and Zarga tells the story of a local Mauritanian camel herder to explore a different sort of truth, the truth about our shared common humanity. If Slahi���s nonfiction condemns the methods of the war on terror, his fiction rebukes the Orientalist images of the Muslim world that provided a rationale for those methods.
The Actual True Story of Ahmed and Zarga was originally drafted while Slahi was a detainee at Guantanamo Bay. After 14 years of captivity without charges, Slahi was released in October 2016, but the original manuscript of Ahmed and Zarga has never been released. Upon his return to Mauritania, Slahi set about rewriting the story from memory and it was published by Ohio University Press in early 2021.
Ahmed and Zarga follows the journey of Ahmed, a devout Bedouin from the fictional Idamoor tribe, as he searches for his beloved camel, Zarga. Set at a moment when traditional Mauritanian life is under threat from a French colonial administration, the novel serves as an allegorical examination of maintaining faith and loyalty to one���s beliefs in a changing and often threatening world. At times, readers will find the unmistakable imprint of Slahi���s own circumstances as he, like Ahmed, tries to maintain his humanity in a harsh and dangerous environment.
Drawing on the rich storytelling tradition in Bedouin culture, Slahi uses an unnamed narrator to encourage readers to sit by the campfire and listen to ���the only true version of the story, the real and complete thing.��� In addressing readers directly and building in a self-aggrandizing narrator, Slahi inflects the early part of the novel with a lightheartedness that cuts across cultural differences and invites readers to connect with his characters. From the outset, cultural difference is never presented as a problem as the reader is treated like a welcomed guest in the pages of the novel.
As Ahmed travels into the desert in his quest to bring Zarga home, he faces a range of hardships that take him farther and farther from his village and into increasingly dire circumstances. These moments reveal the fragility of life and a reliance on others, the natural world, and limited resources for survival. These events do not engender pity or sympathy, emotions that reinforce distance and difference between a reader and text, but instead offer a reminder of our underlying vulnerability.
At times readers will find the link between Slahi and Ahmed unavoidable. This connection is particularly evident when Ahmed is captured and held prisoner near the conclusion of his quest. These scenes are imagined with painful details and convey a disorienting feeling that highlights the incomprehensibility of the situation. After Ahmed is imprisoned he is left questioning, ���Why did they drug him? Why did they shackle him like a crazy bull? What else did they do to him while he was unconscious?��� As the tension escalates, Ahmed reaches a moment in which he thinks he will die. He reflects that ���all traces of hate and resentment toward others were erased from his heart. Even toward those who were about to butcher him he had no hate.��� It is difficult to fathom how a person who endured torture and 14 years of detention without ever being charged is still capable of expressing an indomitable human spirit. The grace that permeates the novel reflects a deep humanness that is central to Slahi���s understanding of suffering, war, and human relations.
The journey framework keeps readers engaged and following a linear plotline, but there are moments in which the purpose of the journey becomes obscured. Towards the end of the novel some of Ahmed���s ordeals seem to be spaces in which Slahi is processing trauma, which results in a significant shift in tone and subject matter from the outset of the novel. This shift does not diminish the core themes of the novel, but reveals how our humanity wrapped up in both good and bad experiences.
Towards the end of Slahi���s visit with my class, he expressed the sentiment that ���we are much more like each other than we are different from each other.��� The class grew silent in that moment and was in awe of Slahi���s unshakable commitment to a shared humanity in the wake of all that he has endured. The Actual True Story of Ahmed and Zarga stands as a testament to that belief and as an imam reminds Ahmed, ���we are all brothers and sisters.���
While Slahi created the world of Ahmed and Zarga to escape his detention, his willingness to share that world with readers is an act of generosity and gift to us all.
August 8, 2021
On Safari
Editor Sean Jacobs and Staff Writer Will Shoki when they met in person for the first time in Cape Town, South Africa, in July 2021. The name of this site is meant to be ironic, though a few on Twitter still take it literally and remind us that Africa is not a country. Similarly, the title of this annual post is meant to be tongue in cheek. It marks our annual month long publishing break that we take every August. But it is hard to imagine “taking a break” these days. Like everyone else, we’ve all been living with a global health pandemic since March 2020���for at least a year and a half now. And it doesn’t seem like things are looking up. Some of us, by virtue of our location in the first world, are fully vaccinated. (It even allows us to travel: In fact, I traveled to Cape Town, South Africa, for much of July 2021; more on that later.) A few of us, those members of the team living in countries like South Africa or Zambia, have one shot of the COVID-19 vaccine only, while others will have to wait a bit longer. In the meantime, more variants of the coronavirus appear.
Nothing could have prepared any of us for the challenges and anxieties of the COVID-19 pandemic. The pandemic is far from over, but most of us have probably lived through its worst period. As the world opens up again, we recognize that our work has been irrevocably changed, in some ways presenting new challenges, in others new opportunities.
That said, the last year we were quite productive. Here’s what I wrote at the start of our last break in August 2020:
… while it easy to focus on the failures of post-independence Africa (and there���s a lot there), we feel that, going forward, it is more useful to ask what world we joined and what can we do to change that world. And what conversations can we have with fellows in Asia and Africa or with the movements of marginalized people in the global North (and places like Australia and Japan) to arrive at new ideas and new tactics to deal with old and new problems: class inequalities, racism, climate crisis, political representation, authoritarianism, erosion of work, and migration and borders, among others.
For starters, that means looking at the experience of Latin American countries and societies (here, here and here) or exploring the connections between Africa and Asia (here, here and here) or forming partnerships, like the ones we have AJ Plus, The Wire (part of Progressive International), The Elephant, the Africa Institute in Sharjah (more on the latter after we come back from our break) and via our Creative Commons license, which allows anyone to republish our content.
At the same time, we have started a number of projects. First up, we started a weekly talk and interview show, presented by our staff writer, Will Shoki, and me. The show is produced by Antoinette Engel. The show is truly transnational. Will is in Johannesburg, I am in New York City and Antoinette in Cape Town. A couple of guests have come back regularly and contribute to the show’s unique flavor. They include Anakwa Dwamena, one of our contributing editors and our new book editor, based in Mexico City. Another, Wangui Kimari, who is on our editorial board and based in Nairobi, Kenya as well as Grieve Chelwa, currently living in Lusaka, Zambia. More on both later.�� Footnote: Anakwa has just heard he has been awarded a Fulbright to do some research and writing about how climate change affects faith, traditional beliefs and how we understand who we are in a changing environment. He will travel to Ghana. Anakwa’s Fulbright is among the latest testaments to the very talented crew we have assembled.
On the transnational production of AIAC Talk: That visit to Cape Town I talked about, was also the first time I met Will Shoki in person. We had been working together for at least two years (Will started out as a contributor and once we were funded was appointed Staff Writer). You can watch the moment we finally met and broadcast the last episode of our first season in person from the offices of the Alternative Information and Development Center in Cape Town. Of course, we discussed football.
You can watch the archive of the show via our Youtube channel, on our Facebook page or via our Patreon. Since we started broadcasting in June last year, we have done forty-six episodes in total. The show will be back in mid-September. Once the show returns, it will have some changes. These changes are geared to, as Will reminded the subscribers of our weekly email newsletter (“Weekend Special”), make AIAC Talk more accessible, increase the quality of the content, and better nurture the community of supporters we are so grateful to have.
Long before we had AIAC Talk, we’ve had Africa Is a Country Radio. The brainchild of managing editor, Boima Tucker, the radio show took on a new format in the last year: each season has its own theme. Right now, Boima is focusing on African club culture. Already he has covered Nairobi and Cairo. Before that he looked at port cities: Freetown, Sierra Leone; Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago; Cape Town (Dylan Valley and I made cameos here); Luanda; and Dakar. All those shows are archived here.
Three other projects started in the last year or so deserve a special mention: The first is Climate Politricks (full name: “Climate��Justice, Tax��Justice and Extractives in African spaces”). This project, edited and managed by Grieve, is funded through a grant from the Africa Regional Office of Open Society Foundations. We’re doing a bunch of things with it: a series of op-eds by scholars and experts from the diaspora and the continent exploring the politics of climate justice; documentary shorts; and, finally, providing a forum for climate activists based on the continent to amplify their ideas.
Climate Politricks is part of a larger effort aimed at decolonizing and shifting public narratives around the climate crisis. The big idea is to deepen and move the needle on mainstream conversations in Africa (and globally) about natural resource extraction, the distribution of wealth and the effects of climate change, as well as to galvanize popular pressure for reform toward lasting political change. A key goal is to amplify the voices of Africans on the frontlines of struggles around climate and tax justice.
Grieve is perfect as the lead on this project: He is an economist with a commitment to public facing scholarship and quite adept at the new media environment.�� Just check his Twitter account, his media interviews (here and here, for example) or his archive of writings on the website. Until recently, he was on the faculty of the University of Cape Town���s Graduate School of Business; this year he was appointed as Inaugural Postdoctoral Fellow at the Institute on Race and Political Economy at The New School, where I happen to work too.
Then there is our fellows program. 2020/2021 marked the first year of our fellows program. Funded by the Shuttleworth Foundation (through a generous fellowship I have been awarded for the last two years), we support original work by ten fellows. They’re mostly young writers based on the continent. The fellowship supports my long term goal with Africa Is a Country, to construct a world where Africans are in control of their own narratives. The fellows���list here���started their work at the end of last year and you can see work they’ve published thus far, here. They’re all working hard, but shoutouts to Youlendree Appasamy, Amar Jamal Mohamed Ali, Liam Brickhill, Ricci Shryock and Fatima-Ezzahra Bendami, who have all published pieces already. (Also, a special shoutout to our mentorship coordinator Siddhartha Mitter and our mentors Aida Alami, Beno��t Challand, Grieve Chelwa, Marissa Moorman, Sisonke Msimang, Anjali Kamat and Bhakti Shringarpure.) Watch out for more of the fellows’ work as we extended their fellowships into the Fall. Also, look out for our call for new fellowship applications later this year. I am proud of the fellowship because it builds legacy.
Then there’s Capitalism in My City. In this, we partnered with the Mathare Social Justice Centre in Nairobi to produce a series of posts and videos to document everyday capitalism in Nairobi. The project, like the fellowships, is funded via my Shuttleworth Fellowship. Capitalism in My City aims to ������ analyze capitalism in the manner with which we interact and observe it as opposed to a very academic approach of analysis.��� Eight local activists and other community members have received training to produce publication-ready articles and publication-ready videos. The first two videos are archived here and here. The articles are published in both Swahili and English and the videos come with English subtitles. Shoutouts to the editors of Capitalism in My City, Gacheke Gachihi and Lena Anyuolo. Gacheke is a social justice and human rights advocate in Nairobi and Lena is a writer and social justice activist with Mathare Social Justice Centre and Ukombozi library. Also, thanks to Wangui Kimari and Jorg Wiegratz as well as the Mathare Social Justice Center.
I could go on and on, but the point of all of this is to encourage you to also stop what you’re doing and visit our site and our social media handles and check out our work for the rest of this month.
Finally, a personal note from me. August is now also a heavy month for me. My mother, Eliza, passed away last year, on the 21st of August, in Cape Town, of a stroke. She was only 75 years old. I couldn’t travel to South Africa for her funeral and had to follow it on Zoom. It was a surreal experience. Last month was my first visit to a Cape Town without her. My father, Paul, 79, and 7 siblings���I am from a large working class family���still live there. Her passing made me appreciate how much she shaped me (as poet Nayyirah Waheed wrote, ���my mother was my first country, the first place I ever lived”) and how far she came in a life that did her no favors. At some point, I want to write about her. One of 12 children of a poor, coloured farm worker family in the small Karoo, she grew up as apartheid was intensifying. On turning seventeen in 1962, she had the courage to leave the farm for the city on her own to work as a live-in domestic worker for a white family in Cape Town���s northern suburbs.�� She created a new life, later a family and a community on the Cape Flats where I was born and grew up. People who met her���I had a habit of taking my friends to meet her, and later in her life she came to visit us in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and Brooklyn, New York���always marveled at her calm energy; at how unruffled and centered she seemed. It would be easy to forget that how many worlds she traveled and the kinds of challenges she took on, all with a lot less support and none of the recognition that began to come to me once I left the Flats for the University of Cape Town and beyond. I hope someday to live up to her example.
We will be back on Monday, September 13th.
August 4, 2021
Christianity and new queer African imaginations
Mercy Amba Oduyoye at the 10th Anniversary Phyllis Trible Lecture Series at Wake Forest University in March 2012 (Image via Wake Forest University on Flickr ��). Ghana is currently causing global headlines for a new anti-gay bill that proposes ���up to 10 years in jail for LGBTQ+ people as well as groups and individuals who advocate for their rights.��� Dubbed ���the worst anti-LGBTQ bill ever,” the bill has been claimed to potentially ���destroy lives,��� which may not be an exaggeration given the incidents that have occurred in other countries, such as Uganda and Nigeria, that have previously passed similar legislation. (In late May, a group of Ghanaian activists were arrested for attending an LGBTQ workshop. They were held for three weeks, then released. They may still be prosecuted.) Several commentators recognize the hand of the World Congress of Families, an organization with strong links to the American Christian right, in this latest push towards anti-LGBTQ legislation. At the same time, they point out that the bill receives strong local support from religious leaders, especially the influential fraternity of Pentecostal pastors.
The recent events in Ghana are one example of the politicization of homosexuality and LGBTQ rights on the African continent, and indeed worldwide, and of the role of religion, specifically popular Pentecostal Christian movements, in fueling anti-LGBTQ campaigns. However, this is not the only story that needs to be told. For instance, several countries in Africa, most recently Botswana and Angola, have decriminalized homosexuality. In relation to religion, too, the situation is more complex than often is suggested. As historian Marc Epprecht has pointed out in his book Sexuality and Social Justice in Africa with reference to Christianity, Islam, and indigenous religions: ���All three groups of faith in Africa have historically been and remain more amenable to accepting sexual difference than is generally understood.���
The main objective of our recently published book Reimagining Christianity and Sexual Diversity in Africa is to further explore this point specifically in relation to Christianity. Nuancing generalizing accounts of ���African homophobia��� and ���religious homophobia���, it draws attention to discourses and social movements emerging in Africa itself that engage with Christian faith in progressive ways���in support of sexual diversity and the quest for justice for LGBTQ people.
The book opens with a chapter about the former Archbishop of Cape Town, Desmond Tutu, who is globally known for his stance in support of the rights of sexual minorities. Immediately after the end of apartheid, in the mid-1990s, Tutu stated: ���If the church, after the victory over apartheid, is looking for a worthy moral crusade, then this is it: the fight against homophobia and heterosexism.��� This statement is significant, because it recognizes the role that churches and Christian leaders played in the struggle against apartheid in South Africa, and the potential for religious organizations to continue contributing to progressive social change. Moreover, it puts the struggle for gay rights in a longer history of struggles for justice. Indeed, Tutu himself opposed racist apartheid ideology and homophobia in the strongest theological terms: declaring them both to be a heresy and blasphemy.
At first sight, it appears that the church has not followed up on Tutu���s prophetic call. In South Africa and elsewhere on the continent, Christianity has often been, and still is, invested in campaigns against homosexuality and LGBTQ rights. There are plenty of examples, such as from Ghana, of church leaders using their influence to make issues relating to sexual diversity a central public concern, and of biblical rhetoric and imagery shaping public debates. Illustrative is how the legendary Tutu was categorically dismissed by a fellow Anglican bishop from Nigeria, Emmanuel Chukwuma, as being ���spiritually dead��� because of his support of gay rights.
Yet our book presents nine further case studies of leading African writers who are reimagining Christian thought, of several Christian-inspired groups who are transforming religious practice, and of African artists who creatively appropriate Christian beliefs and symbols. In short, Christianity is a major resource for a liberating imagination and politics of sexuality and social justice in Africa today. Because as Achille Mbembe has pointed out, ���Struggle as a praxis of liberation has always drawn part of its imaginary resources from Christianity.���
One chapter features the leading African feminist theologian Mercy Oduyoye, from Ghana, who also already in the 1990s firmly denounced religious homophobia and called for respect of sexual minorities in Africa. Then there is Cameroonian church leader Jean-Blaise Kenmogne, and the Botswanan biblical scholar Musa Dube, for whom sexuality is not a single-issue concern but is connected to other concerns, such as with race, gender, HIV and AIDS, human rights, and climate change, and is embedded in a progressive pan-African vision of what it means to be human.
In the category of organizations and movements, think of the Ecumenical HIV and AIDS Initiative and Advocacy, a program set up by the World Council of Churches with strong African ownership, which has mainstreamed issues of sexual diversity as part of its work on HIV and AIDS. There���s also�� The Fellowship of Affirming Ministries, an originally African-American Pentecostal organization that in recent years has become active in various African countries to promote a ���radically inclusive��� form of Christianity and to combat the influence of white conservative evangelicalism in Africa.
Finally, there are�� several forms of queer African cultural production. Their critical and creative engagement with Christian language, symbols and imagery points to new queer African imaginations. The work of creative artists in Nigeria and Kenya among other countries, ranging from novels (e.g. Chinelo Okparanta���s Under the Udala Trees) and poetry (e.g. the anthology Walking the Tightrope) to storytelling (e.g. Unoma Azuah���s collection Blessed Body) and film (e.g. Rafiki), have been decisive in this regard. Importantly, Christianity exists not only in the form of institutionalized religion, but also as part of popular culture and the arts.
Our tone is a hopeful one, because the activists and organizations we discuss�� represent a strong optimism that another world is possible and is already in the making. Of course, this does not deny the reality that Christianity is also deeply invested in the politicization of homosexuality and LGBT rights in Africa and elsewhere. However, we�� foreground African agency and progressive religious thought, as a way to counterbalancing secular approaches to LGBT rights in Africa, and decolonizing queer theory, theology, and politics. We do so, in order to explore and capitalize on the ���community-building, humanistic potential��� that faith has, including its potential for stimulating new, queer African imaginations.
August 3, 2021
No two elephants are alike
Photo by Matt Hearne on Unsplash Debates about June 2021 unrest in South Africa reminded me of the parable of the blind men and the elephant.
Protagonists posed a series of sharp dichotomies. There are elites and there are masses. The unrest was orchestrated by elites assembled around former president Jacob Zuma, or the masses spontaneously seized the initiative and gave it progressive potential. It was an insurrection or a food riot, a criminal plot or a popular revolt, an assault on constitutional democracy or possibly a democratizing drive.
Each grasps a tusk, the trunk, a leg. They attempt, from a part, to describe the new and fantastical creature that takes form in their imagination. They disagree, accuse each other of dishonesty, and maybe they come to blows. The prudent demur. They counsel caution given the limits of available evidence. The entity before us, they say, is many-sided. The elements perceived might be co-present. Mixed in not yet known proportions. Related in still unknown ways.
Everyone fails to conceive the elephant, but there are those who have seen one before.����
In December 2001, Argentina erupted in protests and riots. The country was three years into a brutal depression. Carlos Menem of the Peronist Justicialist Party, who had led the country for a decade from 1989, oversaw its first months. By 1999, mired in allegations of corruption, with his own party maneuvering for succession, his bid for an unconstitutional third consecutive term came to nothing. In general elections of that year, the Peronists lost the presidency to Fernando de la R��a of the Radical Civic Union, who promised anti-corruption, economic stabilization, and growth.
The depression, however, wore on. De la R��a���s administration courted popular opposition by curtailing social expenditure. It was itself beset by scandal, as ministers were accused of paying bribes to senators to pass contentious union-busting legislation. In June 2001, Menem was convicted for illegally authorizing an arms deal while president, only to be controversially acquitted in November. Still under a cloud of prosecutions, he remained leader of the Justicialist Party, which in October legislative elections had taken command of both houses of Congress. With De la R��a���s own coalition coming undone, the prospect of his removal now rose into view.
The hand of the Peronists in what followed is well-attested. The party prefers to ride into power on the back of popular protests. These played a part in Juan Per��n���s ascent in 1946 and 1973. The same with Menem in 1989. By 2001, the Justicialist Party operated an elaborate and mass-based patronage system. It continued to govern a series of provinces and municipalities. There it had constructed a transactional relationship with the police, where the party turned a blind-eye to corruption in exchange for financial contributions. The Peronists had a strong presence in the unions and cultivated a broad network of municipal councillors and grassroots brokers, who distributed government assistance and other benefits in exchange for political support.
When December came, the unions were mobilizing their seventh general strike against the De la R��a government. The so-called piqueteros���a broad movement of unemployed people who blocked roads to make claims on the state, and Peronist patronage networks���came out onto the highways. Peronist mayors led mass marches.��
Argentina���s poorest and most unequal provinces reported no looting. In those that did, sociologist Javier Auyero has shown that ordinary people had a variety of motives for joining in. Many had pressing material needs, but many others were simply curious and drawn in by the excitement, by the influence of family and friends and the seductions of the crowd. What they all needed was an opportunity. Whatever their motives, what enabled them was a credible guarantee that they would not be met with armed force, arrest and prosecution.
Peronist operatives, because they were understood to be associated with the government, were well-placed to provide this guarantee. Acting on information from municipal officials, they knew in advance which sites to target and when. They set about notifying their communities accordingly, mobilizing supporters, distributing flyers, and spreading rumors. On the day, police would be absent or, where present, they would stand back and sometimes even direct the looting. Among the people, a vanguard, perhaps paid for their troubles, would lead the assault, establishing a breach into which others could pour.
The protests and looting in Argentina peaked on the 18th and 19th of December 2001. At this moment the Argentine middle class���alienated from the federal administration by its continuing corruption, by the ongoing downturn, and by a recent announcement of harsh restrictions on bank withdrawals���entered the fray with widespread cacerolazos (pot-banging) and street protests. On the 20th, after intervention by federal security forces resulted in seventeen deaths, De la R��a resigned, climbed into a helicopter, and fled the presidential palace, the Casa Rosada. The Peronists elevated a caretaker president, fell into factional strife, fomented unrest against each other, and when Menem���s cooling-off period expired, he lost the country���s 2003 presidential election to a member of his own party.
In Argentina, then; those hoary dichotomies between elites and masses, orchestration and popular agency, insurrections and bread riots, these orbit each other and collide, are integrated and dissolved. They become something different and more concrete.
No two elephants are exactly alike, but when we see one, we know it���s an elephant.
Zuma and his faction of the ANC ruled South Africa for a decade. There they established an elaborate, mass-based patronage system. They drew the police more tightly into party politics, including by exercising case-by-case discretion over how police engaged with protests. They used state power to accumulate resources, distributing some of the proceeds, through local wards and branches, into a grassroots support base which was often mobilized in mass actions against political opponents. When they lost the ANC presidency to Ramaphosa in 2017, they were strong enough to play him to a stalemate, ensuring a foothold in the party-state and maintaining their political machine���especially across the geography of the recent unrest, in the KwaZulu-Natal and Gauteng provinces.
The Zumaists, though increasingly threatened, have continued to show a capacity for mobilization. In mid-2019, when Durban Mayor Zandile Gumede was removed from office (she was associated with widespread corruption and factional ANC violence), the Zumaists responded with a wave of protests and violence. As they���ve lost traction in the party and state, they���ve increasingly relied on an assortment of parallel structures, each exhibiting their own distinctive modes of operation and accumulation. These include certain Zulu traditional authorities, hostel lords, charismatic churches, and breakaway political parties like the African Transformation Movement (ATM). The Zumaist machine extends to so-called business forums, which operate extortion rackets around construction and other development projects. It incorporates the likes of the paramilitary uMkhonto weSizwe Military Veterans Association (MKMVA) and the All Truck Drivers Foundation (ATDF), which promotes the employment of locals in the trucking industry by blocking highways, beating foreign drivers, and burning their trucks.����
In July, this normally Cimmerian edifice was suddenly and conspicuously illuminated. What we know is that in the prelude to Zuma���s arrest, the MKMVA and a Zulu regiment took up guard around his home at Nkandla. When he turned himself in, prominent leaders and aligned local councillors, ANC branch-members, and Zulu hostel-dwellers, organizing in person and through an architecture of Whatsapp groups, targeted roads, malls, logistics hubs, and a range of other sites. They mobilized people toward these, sometimes even providing transport.��
At the sites, there are reports of professionally orchestrated attacks. David Makhura, Premier of the Gauteng province, has highlighted the presence of experienced and well-resourced tactical teams, who opened the way into malls for other looters and then went straight for ATMs. In the aftermath, the business forums have gone about extorting protection money from affected businesses.
The Zumaists followed a familiar political stratagem, but from a position of relative weakness. The Peronists were a resurgent political movement, which had earlier taken control of the national legislature and had a clear path into the presidency. They had a social base that extended beyond patronage distributions, because they offered substantive programs to unionized workers and the independently organized unemployed. The Peronists also operated in a context of much wider social unrest, which allowed them to portray their mobilizations as organic. They struck when the sitting president, Fernando de la R��a, was forced by a run on the banks to announce painful limits on withdrawals, as he was losing his base in the middle class.��
The Zumaists, in stark contrast, are in the process of being purged from the ANC and they have no viable electoral existence outside it. Their base is confined to a deteriorating patronage system, supplemented with vaguely radical, Zulu nationalist, and ever more chauvinistic appeals. Their social project amounts to the appropriation of economic positions and assets from whites, Indians and foreigners, with no visible strategy for distributing and employing the proceeds in an egalitarian and developmental way. They attacked, after all, not when Ramaphosa had made any unpopular decision, but when their own figurehead was arrested for refusing to appear before a judicial commission, to face questions about his grand corruption.
The Peronists would go on to dominate Argentine politics into the present. The Zumaists, for the time being, have no such prospect. Since the unrest, polls suggest that Ramaphosa���s favorability remains high at 57%, compared to Zuma���s 25%. With no plausible strategy for taking executive power, Zuma���s people must settle for applying their ideologically unadorned and declining disruptive power, in an attempt to force the government to limit the scope of prosecutions, ease incarceration, and recognize a principle of non-interference in key spheres of interest in the illicit economy. The Zumaists are powerful and entrenched enough that they���re not going anywhere soon, but they also have nowhere to go.
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