Sean Jacobs's Blog, page 126

Where do just ideas come from?

Episode #41 of AIAC Talk explores Senegal���s early post-colonial history, to make sense of the unhappiness with the government of incumbent president Macky Sall. Watch it Tuesday on Youtube. Photo: Francesca Noemi Marconi, via Unsplash.

Now treated as a prescient representation of the 1968 generation that forever transformed left-wing politics, Jean-Luc Godard���s 1967 film La Chinoise portrays a group of French students forming a Maoist collective and living together in a cosy Parisian apartment where fierce discussions over politics and revolutionary strategy happen with religious devotion. On the only occasion an outsider enters the secret enclave, it���s to deliver a seminar on the ���Prospects for the European Left.��� The gentleman, introduced only as Omar, is also the film���s only black character. In the seminar���s Q&A, one of the French students asks if a non-socialist revolution can peacefully be changed into a socialist one. In answering the question (���Yes, but under specific conditions���), Omar claims it is based on a false, underlying notion, and asks back: ���Where do just ideas arise? Where do just ideas come from?���

Of course, we know that this man is the only true revolutionary in the film because Omar Blondin Diop was a revolutionary in real life. His appearance in the film counts as the only record of him speaking available, and part of a handful of visuals in general. Blondin Diop never had much of a chance to fully announce himself to the world ��� at 26 years old, he suspiciously died in Senegalese detention in May 1973, 14 months into a three-year sentence handed to him by L��opold Sedar Senghor���s regime. Senghor is equally thought of as a revolutionary, and a significant intellectual for theorizing N��gritude. But why would one revolutionary be an existential threat to another?

Writing of the ���Senghor myth���, AIAC contributor Florian Bobin notes that ���Once you���ve exhausted all the Negritude quotes, you have to confront the fact that Leopold Sedar Senghor ran Senegal as a repressive, one-party state.��� Senghor was the quintessential philosopher-king, and as Bobin further observes, ���Under the single-party rule of Senghor���s Senegalese Progressive Union (UPS), authorities resorted to brutal methods; intimidating, arresting, imprisoning, torturing and��killing dissidents.��� A prime example was when Senghor accused Mamadou Dia, the president of Senegal���s Council of Ministers, of attempting to stage a coup against him. Dia had long been advocating for decentralizing power and vesting it in the hands of peasant communities. Despite being a fighter, moving to wage a military campaign against Senghor���s regime, Blondin Diop was thinking against him too. In his segment in La Chinoise, Blondin Diop (who at 21, was already a student-professor) answers the question he puts to the group by affirming democracy, political and economic. Just ideas come from social interaction, from the fight to produce, and scientific research, but above all, ���From the class struggle. Some classes are victorious, others are defeated. That���s history. The history of all civilizations.��� Who is victorious in Senegal?

In this AIAC Talk then, we want to investigate Senegal���s post-colonial history, especially to grapple with it in the context of Senegal���s ongoing civil unrest against incumbent president Macky Sall. This will not be the first time a popular uprising has emerged in Senegal���s recent history to resist creeping authoritarianism. On June 23, 2011, the Senegalese people mobilized to challenge former president Abdoulaye Wade���s attempt to change the constitution to permit him to run for a third term and to win elections by securing less of the vote. The moment produced the M23, a broad movement for democratization in Senegal, as well as groupings like ���Y’En A Marre��� ; which means ���Fed up��� and is a collective of mostly rappers and youth disgruntled with Senegal���s political and economic stagnation. What have become of these movements in the 10 years since their inception? How do we make sense of the fact that, this time round, dissident energy is rallied behind Ousmane Sonko, the opposition leader whose arrest following accusations of rape are what precipitated the current crisis?��

We are joined by Florian�� and Marame Gueye to help us make sense of all of this. Florian Bobin is a student in African history and host of Elimu Podcast. His research focuses on post-colonial liberation struggles and state violence from the 1960s and 1970s in Senegal. Marame is an Associate Professor of African and African Diaspora Literatures at East Carolina University. Her work explores gender, verbal art, and migration. She is also an activists of women���s rights in Senegal and its diaspora.

Stream the show on Tuesdays at 4 p.m. in Dakar, 6 p.m. in Harare, and 12 p.m. in New York City.

Last week, we tackled Africa���s long, complicated, and evolving relationship with Asia, from its promising, Third-Worldist past to its present, as both are fully integrated into the world capitalist system. Thanks to Christopher J. Lee, Lina Benabdallah, and Abdou Rehim Lema for being such insightful and provocative guests. That episode is now available on our��YouTube channel. Subscribe to our��Patreon��for all the episodes from our archive.

 

Trapped by history

Mexican American director John Gutierrez new film, set in Cape Town, South Africa, touches on colonialism, displacement, and man���s complicated relationship with nature. Still from Sons of the Sea.

Abalone (or marine snails) is a hot commodity on the black market. It is a luxury food item particularly sought after in the far East and Europe. It is not surprisingly, also the life blood of working class families of fishermen who poach the marine mollusk from protected waters. Large syndicates, often linked to the drug trade or turf gangs, act as middlemen in the trade. South Africa, especially the coast around Cape Town, is a key node in this illegal trade. Just earlier this month, Cape Town police arrested 65 suspected abalone poachers in one day.

Sons of the Sea is a new feature film by Mexican-American director John Gutierrez. (The film had its premiere at Cinequest in March 2021 and will be showing again at the Durban International Film Festival in South Africa which takes place between 22 July and 1 August. 2021.)�� The film is set on the False Bay coast in Cape Town. The plot follows two brothers from the ���council flats��� on the wrong side of the tracks of the picturesque fishing village and tourist haven of Kalk Bay. One of the brothers stumbles across a motherload of poached abalone, or perlemoen as it is known locally. Older brother Mikhail (Marlon Swartz) sees it as his last ticket out of the ghetto, while for younger brother Gabe (Roberto Kyle) it could spell the end of a promising future. As they figure out a plan to sell the abalone on the black market, a rogue city council official (Brendon Daniels), who has his own set of personal tragedies to deal with, begins to hunt them down.

Still from Sons of the Sea.

Without being didactic, the film touches on colonialism, displacement, and man���s complicated relationship with nature. It is a beautifully shot, authentically performed thriller that will travel well on the festival circuit. Gutierrez is based in Cape Town (his life partner is the acclaimed South African writer and director Nadia Davids, an executive producer on Sons of the Sea) and we met to talk about the film and its themes; his documentary approach to making fiction; and the similarities between his native California and his current home on the tip of Africa.

Dylan Valley

This film is very much a labor of love. How did the project begin?

John Gutierrez

It really started in 2013 where a producer friend of mine and I came down to Cape Town looking for a story for a feature film. I told him ���dude we gotta take the train, head to Kalk Bay and you gotta see that coast.��� We did and took a couple of still 35mm cameras, hung out in the harbor took some photos and spoke to people ��� we knew there was something there. We just didn���t know what the story was, and then it just fell in the background.

In 2018, I had written this script, I was introduced to (producer) Khosie Dali through Imran Hamdulay, who also produced and did production design on the film. I wrote this script called Lie of the Land about a white family who moves into a home in Protea Village and the people whose home it was tries to get it back. It was a bit ambitious for a first feature, and Khosi was like ���I don���t think we can do this on $5,000!��� I was starting low. I knew we could raise more money, but I realized we had to do this on a shoestring.

Still from Sons of the Sea.

So, I put that away and I decided to do something very documentary style���with a few actors and a very simple story. I started to think about my own home in California, and about the themes I wanted to explore, and I wanted to explore brotherhood. I went back to this old story in the Mexican American community about this diver called Mechudo who goes diving as part of this contest. He gets greedy and goes for the biggest pearl and dies down in the water. There are many iterations of this story. He was also a Yaqui Indian, who are an incredible tribe that my family is descended from. This story was picked up by John Steinbeck, who wrote the novella The Pearl, and these became the two inspirations that I thought could be something that I could transplant to Cape Town. From there I started returning to Cape Town and talking to the young kids who live in the fisherman cottages, hanging out with them, watching them surf, etcetera and kind of approaching the story from a documentary angle, not really sure where it was going. I would hear little pieces of what they were up against. I came across the book The Poacher by [South African journalist] Kimon de Greef around the same time, and I became friends with him. And then I just started doing this deep dive into the abalone scene which is incredible. And then I realized this is not just about people trying to make a quick buck, this is everything. This is a global story. This is people trying to survive off their sea that they can no longer survive from.

John Gutierrez. Dylan Valley

Why is the abalone trade such a big thing in Cape Town���s underground?

John Gutierrez

You can go into the crime story, where it���s about gangsters, it���s about the Chinese triad, and it���s about drugs that get pumped into the Cape Flats in exchange for abalone that gets sold in China for hundreds and hundreds of dollars. For me, the abalone that Gabe and Mikhail find, that���s the bag of treasure, the ���McGuffin��� that pulls you through the story. At the core of the story, it���s about a group of men who come from a place in the world, who lived off that place, and they���ve been displaced. Because of systemic racism and the history of colonialism, they���re struggling to survive in the place they���re from. And that���s a universal story that connects to my people back home; the Black community, the Native American community and the Hispanic community. When they watch this film, they see themselves reflected in it. So, while I was telling a very specific South African story, in that specificity, I was telling a global story about brownness and blackness in a world that���s been colonized.

Dylan Valley

There are definitely many historical and cultural similarities between California and Cape Town. Have you also found this to be the case?

John Gutierrez

There are profound similarities in the landscape, particularly the San Francisco Bay Area where I���m from and Cape Town, that incredible, breath-taking meeting of mountain and sea. Then there are the radical differences between the wealthy and the impoverished���though of course those differences are much more intense in Cape Town. At an intimate level, I sense and feel a familiarity between brown Cape Town and mestizo California���the same history of cultural collision, of being a mix of indigenous people, folks brought over by force and settlers.��Other things are familiar too: the coming together of family in large numbers over food, the fashioning of the individual as a part of a collective, of a community. So there are both painful and beautiful markers of sameness.

Still from Sons of the Sea. Dylan Valley

Keeping in mind the themes of colonialism and displacement, I noticed that there are no white characters in this film, despite Cape Town having a relatively large white population. Cape Town is often described in this way as feeling very colonial, despite being decades into democracy. Was this a conscious decision and what was the motivation behind this?

John Gutierrez

The initial financiers recommended three white male actors for the role of Peterson, the government official but we (the producers) met as a group and decided to decline the offer. For two main reasons; I wanted to de-centralize whiteness in the film, though of course, it���s a consistent feature, the colonial imprint is everywhere, in the landscape, in the paintings, in the entire social context/construct of the boys��� world. But also, it was important because the official needed to come from the same world as the boys, and in a sense, all four of the male characters (from the little boy to the grown man) are representative of a single life and how trapped we can be by history. Also, it always hurts more when your own enact violence on you, we know that, and there���s a difficult, complicated history of how that happens.

Sons of the Sea premiered in March 2020 at Cinequest Film Festival in San Jose, California (John Gutierrez���s hometown).

The legacy of French colonial psychiatry

French psychiatry in West Africa saw Black bodies as ���alien��� to white ones. It hasn't changed much. A still from Ousmane Sembene's "Black Girl."

This limited series, Psychiatry Beyond Fanon, published once a week, explores the history and politics of psychology in Africa. It is edited by Matt Heaton, historian from Virginia Technical University with contrIbutions from Heaton and Victor Makanjuola (Psychiatrist at the University Hospital, Ibadan), Katie Kilroy- Marac (Anthropology at the University of Toronto), Ursula Read (Anthropology, King’s College, University of London), Ana Vinea (Anthropology and Asian Studies at UNC Chapel Hill), Shose Kessi (Psychology at the University of Cape Town) and Sloan Mahone (History at Oxford).

Between 1897 and 1914, the French colonial government transferred more than 140 West African mental patients from Senegal to Marseille, where they were institutionalized within a large public asylum called l���Asile de St-Pierre. Though justified in humanitarian terms, this colonial experiment was an abysmal failure on all counts���an act of colonial violence framed as care, and staged within the Metropole itself. Few West African patients sent to Marseille were ever repatriated, and most died within two years of their arrival within the asylum.

Colonial psychiatry in West Africa had emerged first and foremost from an imperative to maintain colonial order, joining together medicine, surveillance, and incarceration in powerful and enduring ways. Always central to this project were questions of racial difference and the (im)possibility of assimilation. According to many colonial psychiatrists of the day, madness in Africa had been rare in precolonial times, but was growing more common precisely because of the inability of Africans to adapt to the conditions of colonial modernity. The possibility that colonial oppression and dispossession might itself be the root cause of mental distress was not given serious consideration until much later. Instead, the onus was placed wholly upon those who could not (or would not) assimilate.

With the transfer of West African mental patients to the Marseille asylum, colonial psychiatry was brought home, so to speak, producing a particular kind of encounter in which African bodies���and African madness specifically���became an object of medico-scientific scrutiny and careful observation at close quarters, within the Metropole itself. West African patients confined at St-Pierre were scrutinized for signs of assimilability and described in terms of their alterity. The patients, or les ali��n��s as they were called at the time, were imagined ���alien��� in the double sense of the French word later remarked upon by Frantz Fanon: both as estranged from themselves in their madness, and as distinctly foreign others. In a 1908 medical thesis written by a doctor named Paul Borreil that drew on his two years��� work as an intern in the Marseille asylum, for example, West African patients at St-Pierre are described as pitiable, but also indecipherable, unassimilable, and dangerous: these patients, Borreil writes, cannot be allowed to participate in events organized for patients because of their ���disorderly behavior, their tendency to run away, their unsociability,��� and anyway, they don���t ���take pleasure in that which entertains the other patients.��� They required constant surveillance and extra guards, and their unpredictable (sometimes violent) behavior means that they often need to be separated from the white patients and from each other. What is more, Borreil notes, the high number of tuberculosis-related deaths within the asylum is directly related to the presence of these patients, who are a ���source of infection��� and contaminate the other (read: white) patients. ���[T]hey spread their sputum (spittle) everywhere, and when it dries it mixes with the dust,��� Borreil writes. What is more, he stresses, West African patients refuse to sleep in beds, and instead ���wrap themselves in a blanket and sleep on the floor, where certain and inevitable infection��� awaits them. Borreil���s message is clear: the failure or inability of West African patients to comply with doctors��� demands and integrate themselves into the daily activities of the asylum not only stands as confirmation of their madness, but also reinforces racial difference as radical otherness, posing a threat to the institution itself.

I was in Marseille in spring 2020, doing archival research related to this story and searching for traces of the men and women subjected to this cruel intervention, when COVID-19 took hold. From the very start of the pandemic, I watched as the same gamut of racist tropes that animated the writings of colonial psychiatrists circa 1900���from speculations about Black immunity, to ideas about heightened vulnerability due to comorbidities, lifestyle choices, or a refusal to comply/assimilate, to fears that Black communities might in fact fuel the spread���began circulating in media outlets and online fora in France and beyond. By July, results from an INSEE (l’Institut national de la statistique et des ��tudes ��conomiques) study were showing an excess mortality rate of +144% in France for citizens or residents who had been born in sub-Saharan Africa���a markedly higher rate than that of French-born citizens (here and across many epidemiological studies, the French government���s ���color-blind��� approach to public policy and refusal to allow for the collection of data related to race or ethnicity leads researchers to lean on ���country of origin��� data to do comparable work). While it was by then generally accepted that these higher mortality rates were related to the overrepresentation of persons of African origin among frontline workers, many commentaries still fixated upon behavioral choices and noncompliance as the heart of the problem: ���Take a walk ��� around Ch��teau-Rouge and Ch��teau d���Eau, near the Gare du Nord and the Gare de l���Est, and you will see the African neighborhoods of Paris: nobody���s wearing a mask and people stand huddled together. That���s the first ��� risk of contamination.���

I was still in Marseille when, in the wake of the brutal murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis in the US, thousands of people took to the streets in cities all over France in a show of solidarity for Black Lives Matter and to demand justice for Adama Traor��, a young black man who died in police custody in July 2016, and greater accountability from their own police. Since those protests, it should be noted, quite the opposite has happened: A ���global security��� bill was fast-tracked through the French National Assembly in November 2020 that aimed to both increase the surveillance capacities of the police and expand police protections. Article 24 of the contentious bill imposed a penalty of up to a year in prison and ���45,000 for disseminating images of officers or soldiers engaged in police operations, a move that critics fear will allow police to operate with even greater impunity. The bill met with such massive public outrage and large-scale protests, however, that ruling party members of parliament walked it back in early December with the promise that Article 24 would be rewritten.

A brilliant recent AIAC article written by Florian Bobin titled ���Law and Disorder��� draws a direct connection between forms of surveillance, policing, and incarceration that were established and refined in France���s colonies and the contemporary crisis in policing in France today, where young men perceived to be Black or Arab are 20 times more likely to be stopped for a police identity check than young white men, and where the practice of racial profiling has begotten numerous cases of harassment and police brutality. In a similar vein, colonial medicine and colonial psychiatry laid the foundation for the ways in which ���native��� minds and racialized bodies���Black bodies in particular���come to be imagined and pathologized in terms of risk and contagion, both within popular media and in the domain of healthcare in France today. Significantly, this alienation has contributed to a slew of negative health outcomes: Among patients of African descent, for example, legitimate health concerns are frequently downplayed, dismissed, or misunderstood in culturalist terms. French citizens/residents with origins in sub-Saharan Africa report high rates of discrimination in health care settings (the highest of these being among Muslim women), which has in turn been linked to patients avoiding or forgoing health care altogether.

My own research likewise underscores the extent to which the (il)logics of race in contemporary France���born and refined in the colonial encounter, perpetuated through its institutions and policies, and played out in myriad forms each day���are both recursive and accumulative. Racial discrimination and inequality pose an ever-present and enduring threat to the health and livelihood of racialized persons in France, even as the social reality of race continues to be denied, and even at a moment when postcolonial scholarship is itself blamed for creating the very problems it seeks to address.

Kwame Nkrumah and Israel

Israel styled itself as a plucky postcolonial nation. Many African nations and leaders bought it. Israel's occupation of the Sinai in 1967, changed that. [image error] Photo credit, Africa Renwal (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

Parts of this text are adapted from Israel in Africa: Security, Migration, Interstate Politics, published by Zed Books.

In April 1959, the first Africa Freedom Day event was held at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in New York. It was a ceremonious gathering that marked the anniversary of the First Congress of Independent African States, held in Accra exactly one year earlier. The only member of the United Nations not invited to attend the event was Israel. Israel already had diplomatic ties with several independent African states at the time, but among the sponsors of the event in New York were Egypt (then the United Arab Republic), Libya, and Tunisia, who threatened to boycott if Israel was included. Their position prevailed.

In Jerusalem, Israel���s exclusion from the ���African Party��� caused considerable anxiety, to which a pile of telegrams in the Israel State Archives testifies. In the following year, therefore, attempts were made to guarantee Israel���s participation in advance, and Ghana, upon Israel���s insistence, agreed to call for its invitation. This led to a confrontation between the Ghanaian and Egyptian ambassadors to the UN, but once again, the Arab position prevailed. Ironically, Israel���s complaints that it was being unreasonably singled out only led to the exclusion of another country from the 1960 Freedom Day gathering: apartheid South Africa, the last country Israel wanted to be publicly associated with at the time.

There was a good reason behind Israel���s preoccupation with its right to attend these early celebrations of African independence. In April 1955, Israel was excluded from the first Asian���African Conference in Bandung. Not only that, but the participants of the conference also formally expressed their support ���of the rights of the Arab people of Palestine and called for the implementation of the United Nations Resolutions on Palestine and the achievement of the peaceful settlement of the Palestine question.��� The Bandung conference prompted a reassessment of Israel���s foreign strategy. To prevent Arab states from mobilizing, as one official put it at the time, ���a broad and unified front of Asian and African nations��� against it at the UN, Israel soon began to seek alliances in Africa, making an effort to brand itself as a legitimate member of the postcolonial Afro���Asian world.

Israel���s relationship with Ghana marked the beginning of these diplomatic efforts. A consulate in Accra was established in 1956, prior to Ghana���s independence, and it was upgraded to an embassy upon independence the following year. Ehud Avriel, Israel���s first ambassador to Ghana, recounted that at independence Kwame Nkrumah presented the Israeli delegation with ���the same list of urgent requirements he expected from other older states,��� and that within a year ���every single requirement on Nkrumah���s list had become a subject for intensive cooperation between Ghana and Israel.��� Ghana was to turn into a ���showcase of Israel���s aid in Africa���s development,��� and thus pave its way to international legitimacy.

Several bilateral initiatives were developed. The Israeli water planning authority assisted with water infrastructure development, the Israeli construction firm Solel Boneh helped establish the Ghana National Construction Company, and a Ghanaian���Israeli shipping company was established, 60% of which was owned by the government of Ghana and 40% by the Israeli shipping company Zim. The two countries signed a trade agreement and Israel extended Ghana a $20 million loan. Israel also sold light arms and provided training to the Ghanaian army, while Israeli military officers assisted with the establishment of the Ghanaian Nautical College and the Flying Training School, which trained pilots for the Ghana Air Force and Ghana Airways. One Israeli expert even assisted with the establishment of the National Symphony Orchestra.

Ambassador Avriel became a close confidant of Nkrumah, who was able to facilitate contact with other African leaders. In March 1958, Israeli Foreign Minister Golda Meir attended Ghana���s first independence anniversary as part of her first visit to the African continent. She met with both Nkrumah and Trinidadian Pan-Africanist George Padmore, and was invited by the latter to address representatives of multiple African liberation movements visiting Accra. If Padmore and Nkrumah hoped to prevent Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser and the Soviet Union from dominating the Pan-African agenda, Israel hoped that an autonomous African bloc over which Arab leaders had�� limited influence would strengthen its position in the international arena and allow it to obstruct Arab initiatives at the UN, particularly with regard to the right of return of Palestinian refugees.

Following the experience in Ghana, a decision was taken in Jerusalem to pursue ties with other African nations before they gained independence in order to curb Arab influence as early as possible. Israel began sending envoys to African countries to court those who were expected to lead their nations after independence, promising technical assistance and military training. This strategy worked. By 1963, Israel had 22 embassies in Africa. The only two countries that achieved independence at the time south of the Sahara and did not establish ties with it were Mauritania and Somalia. The growth in Israel���s presence in the continent in the early 1960s was extraordinary, especially given that it did not build on any existing diplomatic networks from the colonial period.

The warm ties with Ghana were crucial for Israel���s expansion in Africa at the moment of the continent���s independence, but they were also short-lived. By 1961, Nkrumah���s vision of a federated Africa drew Accra closer to Cairo. In January that year, the leaders of Ghana, Mali, Guinea, Morocco and the United Arab Republic convened in Casablanca against the background of the political crisis in Congo. At Egypt���s behest, one of the topics discussed was the Israeli���Arab conflict, and a resolution was adopted, denouncing Israel as ���an instrument in the service of imperialism and neo-colonialism not only in the Middle East but also in Africa and Asia.��� To pursue his political vision, Israeli diplomats assessed, Nkrumah was willing to take a more critical stance towards Israel. But Israel���s close relationship with France (then its main arms supplier), the US and the UK, was also undermining its relationship with Ghana.

Israel, in response to the developments in Casablanca, sought closer ties with the leading states of the opposing ���Monrovia bloc���, whose members rejected the idea of an African federation propagated by the ���Casablanca group��� in favour of a greater emphasis on state sovereignty and non-interference. The ���Monrovia states��� were not necessarily more pro-Israeli. Among them were Somalia, Libya, and Mauritania. But they avoided the Israeli���Arab issue altogether for the sake of pragmatic multilateral cooperation, a position that ultimately served Israel as well. Due to their opposition, the issue also remained largely off the agenda of the Organisation of African Unity (OAU), established in Addis Ababa in May 1963, in its early years. By then, Israel���s focus in Africa shifted to the eastern part of the continent, where it cultivated close (and more militarized) relationships with elites in Ethiopia, Uganda, Kenya, and Tanzania.

In the years of African independence, Israeli rhetoric portrayed Israel as a young, post-colonial nation and Zionism as a liberation movement, associating the Jewish state with other newly independent nations in the ���Third World,��� and rejecting the comparison between Zionism and imperialism. After the war of 1967 and Israel���s occupation of the Sinai Peninsula, this narrative became increasingly untenable, and Israel���s ���golden age��� in Africa gradually came to an end. One thing that the brief Ghanaian���Israeli ���honeymoon��� of the late 1950s indicates, however, is also how from the very moment of African independence, concerns over Arab influence over African affairs meant that Israel was suspicious of initiatives that appeared to take too seriously the idea of Pan-African integration and unity. Such initiatives, clearly, threatened to complicate its efforts to project its influence into the continent.

More than five decades later, it is now Gulf countries that are trying to persuade African states���from Sudan to Mauritania���to normalize ties with Israel. But precisely for this reason and as extreme international inequality becomes ever more entrenched, the logic that underpinned earlier calls for continental unity continues to resonate. ���Singly we are too weak to avoid being used by those whose help we need, but together we shall be able to accept aid and investment without endangering our national integrity and independence,��� Julius Nyerere wrote to Israeli prime minister David Ben-Gurion following the formation of the OAU in 1963. ���It is in this spirit that we are working towards African Unity. We have no desire to isolate our continent from the rest of the world, nor to build an aggressive, hostile continent.���

The house of migrants

Two brilliant filmmakers and two stunning documentaries creating new narratives about migration. A still from the film The Last Shelter.

Ousmane Samass��kou just won the main DOX:Award at the 2021 CPH:DOX for his second feature-length documentary, The Last Shelter (Le dernier refuge, 2021). The film is an intimate portrait of the lives of Esther, Khady, Natacha, and several other individuals who pass through the House of Migrants, a refuge in Gao, Mali, as they embark upon or return from their tumultuous journey across the Sahara in hopes of reaching Europe. The film also screened at Hot Docs and is in competition at Doc.fest Munich. A��cha Macky���s film Zinder (2020) had its world premiere at the Visions du R��el festival, where it entered the feature-length documentary international competition before going on to the Change Makers program at CPH:DOX. It is now competing in the Official Selection Competition at DOK.fest in Munich. Zinder, the second largest city in Niger, and where A��cha was born and raised, became her camera���s focus once she earned the trust of gang members from the disadvantaged neighborhood of Kara Kara. By telling their story with them as opposed to about them, Zinder changes the narrative about the lives of gang members, not only in that country, but across the world. Ousmane���s and A��cha���s films are the first two films that figure among those selected for the Generation Africa project in collaboration with STEPS South Africa, a series of short and feature-length documentaries made across Africa that seeks to create new narratives on migration from youth perspectives across the continent.

I spoke with Ousmane Samassekou (OS) and A��cha Macky (AM) about their films, their collaborations, the inspirations for their films, their documentary auteur styles, and reception and funding.

Sara Hanaburgh

Ousmane and A��cha, your first films were successful and now here you are once again, both on the international festival circuit. You���ve worked together as well. Can you talk about your collaborations?

A��cha Macky

I sought out Ousmane. I had met him a few times when we were in school, when he was a young producer. I had never made a feature before, and Ousmane gave me a chance to prove my worth. He is also lively and pragmatic and willing to take risks. For me, [the way to do it is] you start with someone who has zero experience and you let them shine. That���s how I came to work with Ousmane, and I do not regret it.

Ousmane Zorom�� Samassekou

I met A��cha in 2013. We were pitching our films then: she, The Fruitless Tree, and I, The Heirs of the Hill. I was in awe of the way she brought out fragility and humanity in her story. When she contacted me about her project Zinder, I was quite moved because I like what she does, not only as a film director, but also for her activism on social issues. It was also an honor for me, fresh out of production school. I immediately agreed. It was a pretty colossal project, a challenge, and it brought me back to my own first film, which was also inside a system that was quite violent.

Sara Hanaburgh

What inspired you to make your films?

Ousmane Zorom�� Samassekou

As a kid, I was fascinated by the people who would leave, because I had an uncle who had left. I don���t know why he left, or why he didn���t come back. And in my family, there was always this story about my uncle that remained in suspense. The absence of this uncle. As I was growing up, I came to realize that the entire family had helped him prepare to leave. Some had given him money; others had made sacrifices, prayed. My grandmother would tell me the story of this uncle who was brave, a warrior who had to leave everything to go and find happiness for the family, leaving his two children and his wife who never remarried. So I was always curious about how someone could just leave everything and go, and I wanted to make a film about it.

Sara Hanaburgh

How did you go about writing?

Ousmane Zorom�� Samassekou

I remember the first draft that I had written. I sent it to A��cha and she said to me, ah, that���s very poetic, but there is no story in there. I was searching for the story I wanted to tell, and I was gathering images that were a bit metaphorical, you know? At that point, I was thinking only of the departure, of putting together various stories of people who had left along with abstract images of the desert, a pirogue on the river. Around that time there was the call for films by Generation Africa in Burkina [Faso], and my proposal was accepted. So we went to [Ouagadougo], and while we were there, a gentleman named Albert from Niger gave a talk on migration, and he started talking about a place called the House of Migrants. And being one of the only Malians there, I was amazed to find out that there was this house in Gao on the edge of the desert that welcomed migrants upon their departure as well as their returns. I had to go see what was happening there. Albert gave me the email of the coordinator at the House of Migrants, whom I harassed many times before I could get the authorization to go there. Finally, when I arrived, I was fascinated by a woman there who was amnesic, who no longer knew how to return to her home. She had been there for five years. That woman���s story brought back memories of my uncle. I thought that he, too, was lost somewhere.

Sara Hanaburgh

That���s Natacha���s story?

Ousmane Zorom�� Samassekou

Natacha, exactly. I thought, maybe my uncle is dead, or perhaps he is like Natasha, whose family is waiting for her somewhere, thinking that she is dead and awaiting her return. That���s how the journey of making The Last Shelter began. The question had become how to transport the viewer into the space of the desert on the migrant���s journey without filming an individual or a migrant actually making the journey, with only images of the desert.

Sara Hanaburgh

What inspired Zinder, A��cha?

A��cha Macky

I was born and grew up in Zinder, and until I was 30 years old, I had never once set foot in Kara Kara, a neighborhood up on a hill, where lepers and beggars were sent away to. It seemed mythical to me. Mythical because people talked about it but had never been there. I thought back to my childhood. When I was in preschool, age four or five, there was a water tank which would cross the city every day, transporting water to the people in Kara Kara so they could have water to drink. As children, we would see this, and I remember we would give food to the children of Kara Kara; but we would open their bags with sticks so as to avoid coming into direct contact with them, so we were not contaminated. So there was this injustice that we committed, even as children. You see, there was a sort of invisible border��� a psychological barrier���between us and them, and that astounded me. As children we were manipulated to think that lepers were contagious and so I started thinking of making some sort of reparations for the people whom we had stigmatized. Additionally, at one point, the international media started reporting on acts of violence carried out by gangs, called ���palais.��� It brought back childhood memories when we used to welcome anyone who was hungry to share our food���our doors were always open���or when I would run around with my friends, and climb and slide down those huge boulders which you saw in the film. All of that was no longer possible because of those stories of violence. That resonated with me. So I decided to go back to my city to find out what was really going on. That was the first time I ever set foot in Kara Kara, that neighborhood completely ocher in tones, and it stirred up all sorts of emotions inside of me, including fear, and fascination too.

Sara Hanaburgh

How did you decide to portray Kara Kara in your film?

A��cha Macky

I had to kind of completely change my life and meet the people there; let go of my judgments. In Kara Kara, I saw people who were not so different from elsewhere, from gangs in the ghetto of the United States, for example, or from the children in the Parisian banlieues and other peripheral neighborhoods across Europe, where people live a certain social injustice and are seeking rights. Rights to education, rights to food, to shelter. Quite simply, that was what led me to point my camera at this social situation, to try to document it from the perspective of this youthful population whom people wanted to hide from view.

Sara Hanaburgh

At the beginning of Zinder, you ask one of the reformed gang members, Siniya Boy, what the difference is between you and him. His response is education. What does he mean by that?

A��cha Macky

There are many things lacking in Kara Kara compared to my neighborhood, which is also a rather modest neighborhood in the city. Arriving in that neighborhood led me to understand so many things, not only a certain poverty all around, but also that strong communities had formed around these people who knew that their wrongdoings were not the answer. On the state level, the neighborhood was created; it was unplanned. There was no water, no hospital, there was absolutely nothing at all. It was a sort of nomad���s land to herd people, like animals. At first, lepers were sent there. Then beggars. It was a sort of statelessness within the state. Even in terms of forms of ID: they didn���t have it. As a result, many people there did not have the right to go to school. The few who were allowed to go to school had to leave their desks and let other children sit there because some more advantaged families didn���t want their children sharing the desk with the poorer children. And that really got to me.

Sara Hanaburgh

Also, I think of the favelas in Brazil, which is yet another example of communities that society prefers to hide and maintain invisible, voiceless.

Ousmane Zorom�� Samassekou

Actually, the favelas in Brazil, the banlieues in Europe, or the ghettos in Nigeria were exactly the types of examples we talked about when we were producing Zinder. These are neighborhoods which at one point or another had been invaded by modernization and urbanization, and were just left to fend for themselves, make their own laws. The police didn���t go there, nor did the government. In fact, there was no policy for the development of these enclaves.

Sara Hanaburgh

Let���s talk a little about the writing, the creative process of your films. Both of you had to gain the trust of the individuals and the communities you were filming. It comes out very clearly in each of your films. Ousmane, you capture a deep intimacy with regard to your characters Khady and Esther. And then they become friends with Natacha. It is obvious that you also have contributed to this sense of intimacy between them.

Ousmane Zorom�� Samassekou

Actually, when I pitched the script, I didn���t even know that I was going to meet Khady and Esther. I met them during the last shoot. But what I did know was that Natacha was always there. So the project developed quite a lot in terms of writing while I was filming Natacha. However, in practice it was quite difficult with Natacha, because she was always very quiet and didn���t manage to construct her own story. And then, by chance, during the last shoot, I found Khady and Esther. At first, Khady was more willing to be filmed, and Esther outright refused. She just wanted to leave, and the people from the House tried to calm her down. But she was very spirited, she wanted to leave. So I started filming Khady first and started showing her images to Esther and as she watched, she became more and more relaxed. Once I had established those exchanges with Esther, I said, now let���s make a short scene, but this time without Khady. And when I made that short scene, she said, oh wow, I want to be an actress now! She started to loosen up. She had dreams: of becoming an actress, a boxing champion. And I was there, like, wow. I told her that what we were doing was a little different. It���s a documentary, so you have to be more natural. We���re going to film you in your everyday without interfering very much. I started filming them together and getting to know Esther better and better. She was extremely natural and unbelievable! Sometimes she would forget I was even there with my camera and would fall asleep while I was filming her! There���s something unbelievable about that young girl! She is incredibly warm, intelligent, spirited. I mean, she can be jovial, happy, joking; then she can be completely curt. And when she started telling me her story for the first time, about her mom, I made the connection with Natacha, who was also searching for her family. Esther almost didn���t know her family at all. She did not know her father. She only knew the woman who raised her, and when she passed away, Esther was told that that woman was not her real mother. The children of that woman told her, ���You are not our mother���s child.��� So it was a double shock. Esther was looking for a mother and Natacha was looking for a family. She doesn���t remember if she has any children. But when you look at Natacha, you sense that she does have children. So I tried to focus on her interactions with Esther in particular, on connections between a mother and a daughter���one looking for her family and one looking for her mother.

Sara Hanaburgh

What a process, wow!

Ousmane Zorom�� Samassekou

Yes, that���s what I like about the documentary genre. It���s those surprises. I could have never imagined Esther and Khady. I didn���t know at first that they were going to be the main characters in the film. And yet, they carry the film, and I am happy about it.

Sara Hanaburgh

A��cha, I noticed that the members of the palais love to flex their muscles for the camera. Did that allow you to enter into their space with your camera? But seriously, how did you gain their trust and in what ways were they engaged in the process of telling their stories?

A��cha Macky

I had the opportunity to meet some of the palais members several times. [Electricity cut interrupts the interview, we laugh.] And I started observing how those palais function, and there were all sorts of rituals involved. If, for instance, someone wanted to join a palais, they were given a test, to test their loyalty. I didn���t manage to pass the tests, and they tried to scare me, but I kept going back and, at some point, they gave up. They could see that I was not going there just to film them. I was for real and I wanted to talk with them. I went back several times, which allowed them to see there was something that I wanted to have with them. In the end they understood that I wanted to make a film that would allow their voices to be heard, to allow them to express themselves. That is how I managed to convince them that I had a way for them to make themselves heard beyond that border. And once they understood that I could also be their bullhorn, all the walls they had built between them and me started to come down. It took years.

Sara Hanaburgh

How many years did it take you to build this trust?

A��cha Macky

Eight years. From the pitch to the pilot, it took eight years. It was a project in the making well before The Fruitless Tree. Also, I did not set out to make a film about the children of Kara Kara. My preference was to make a film with them. And making a film with them implies their participation in making the film. If you���re going to make a film, you have to come to where I am from. To come to where I am from, you cross borders. When I was going to Zinder, I was also working on several other smaller projects. I was also a volunteer in a USAID program called Search for Common Ground. For that, I was training youth with respect to transformations from conflicts and how we could confront extremism and violence through debates and conversation, and so the film is about something very real that exists in the heart of communities. That is how I really came to understand the mechanism of how those gangs worked and that���s how I ���infiltrated��� them.

Sara Hanaburgh

Ousmane, many people who pass through the House of Migrants have some sort of psychological trauma. What inspired you to place emphasis on this subject in your film?

Ousmane Zorom�� Samassekou

Well, it has always been a sort of taboo subject when someone does not manage to achieve their goals, doesn���t manage to get to Europe and is repatriated and returns home in spite of him or herself. This has always been a taboo subject because immigration has always been a family affair in Africa. That���s to say that when a child decides to leave, the whole family supports him. What the child is not told is that when you are on that journey, you will pass through dangerous zones in the Sahel or the desert or on the sea; there is a lot of smuggling���human smuggling, sexual enslavement���many things that are really inhuman. And when you go through that sort of thing, you never come back as a full human being. I thought it was important to show in the film that there are many types of trauma.

Sara Hanaburgh

The absence of the state is noticeable in each of your films. Can you talk about that?

A��cha Macky

Yes, it���s important to talk about that. Kara Kara, as I mentioned, was a village that was created with absolutely no public policy, whether access to health care or education, and this continues today in the 21st century. So as we are organizing international screenings for June, I���ve asked UNHCR if we can bring five characters so that they can bear witness to the film being shown internationally. But of course, in order for them to travel abroad, they need an ID card to get on the plane. To travel. And they don���t have one. So right now Siniya is having his friend���s birth certificate made. And the guy, Tchicara, is in prison. He has no birth certificate! This thirty-year-old has no civil status. That���s one reason I talk about these stateless individuals inside the country. You are there. You exist, but in reality, you do not exist, not when it comes to the state. And you mentioned the hospital. Even when it comes to the public hospital, there isn���t really basic care for stateless people. That���s the reason that many children who are born in Kara Kara have not been to school, because in order to receive even a little care at the hospital, you have to have a little money. To pay for the bed when a woman gives birth. But that���s money people don���t have because they barely have money to eat. There are many people who are born without legal status, and if you don���t have access to civil status, you don���t have access to school. And when the child is old enough to vote, he cannot vote. His voice is stolen.

Ousmane Zorom�� Samassekou

Immigration is a situation that brings grief. Everyone in my family is still asking whether my uncle is coming back. Is he alive or dead? We also know other families who are grieving the departures of their sons and daughters, women who are widows but don���t know it, who are there waiting for their husbands; there are lots of fatherless children because of that. Why does this situation persist today in the 21st century? It���s because there is no real policy, actually, that prevents people from leaving. Why do people leave? They leave because they don���t have basic care. They leave because there is a lack of education. The majority of those who leave have not had the chance to go to school. So either they went to school and did not finish, or they completed their studies but there are no jobs. They go so they can provide for their families. There is also inequality of opportunities in the hiring system, so those who come from minority or poor families have to go looking elsewhere. The first thing that comes to mind is to go to Europe, to go through the desert or across the sea. There���s a lack of political commitment on behalf of the state. That���s what makes me want to be in this profession, to make documentaries, to talk about taboo subjects and denounce what is wrong. That���s also why I love the name of A��cha���s production company, Taboo Productions. Those are topics that are almost untouchable in our societies, but we are going to touch on them. We���re going to talk about them.

Sara Hanaburgh

Let���s talk about sound and visual framing. Ousmane, your film is very poetic. Particularly striking in your film are the whipping winds of the desert. But also, visually, your framing is distinctive.

Ousmane Zorom�� Samassekou

In terms of sound, when I was in the desert for the first time, I was amazed to hear that the desert has its own musicality, and its silence is glacial! It���s different from any other silence. When you���re in the desert and there is absolutely no sound, it���s unbelievable. And the force of the wind brings out different emotions. Visually, I wanted to make something photographic, to show for example that when the sun starts coming up and you see a little sand, it���s as if the sand were coming out of embers. It���s stunning. So what I wanted to convey in the film is that the desert has something poetic about it but at the same time something sad.

Sara Hanaburgh

A��cha, visually, one thing that resonates in your film is the relationship between the body and the land of the Sahel. For example, you manage to capture beauty even when you���re filming scars. Can you talk about that?

A��cha Macky

Yes, for me it was important to approach it allegorically. The history of that neighborhood goes back to the question of skin, actually. Just as drought leaves marks on the earth, leprosy leaves scars on one���s skin, and in the same way terrorism in a city also leaves its indelible mark. So, whether drought, illness or terrorism, it all leaves scarring on one���s skin. So, I made allegories out of this, and I am proud to hear that they come through in my film.

Sara Hanaburgh

How were your films received at the festivals?

A��cha Macky

When it comes to festivals, with these world premieres, I find it to be quite a beautiful thing but also quite a pity at the same time, because oftentimes the people who are in the film don���t have the opportunity to see themselves on screen before the international audience sees it. On the other hand, the interest of the international audience allows the film to echo beyond borders.

Sara Hanaburgh

Have you shown your film locally? Did your cast get to see themselves in your film?

A��cha Macky

Locally, I was able to show my film while it was in completion to one of the protagonists, Siniya Boy, who had come with me to attend a forum. He came to speak on behalf of the youth. He is among those who represent Zinder. I had invited him to my place, into my small living room, together with another person who had made contact with Siniya, whose name was Asmana. When they watched the film, it was very emotional. It was also the first time that I became emotional after the film, because they said to me: ���We have never before been shown to be as dignified as you showed us to be, A��cha.��� And that moved me, them telling me that I had shown them to be human, as opposed to just showing them as criminals or thugs. For Siniya to come away from the film knowing that he was shown with so much humanity, so much dignity as he said, that made me feel like I succeeded. I could have shown them in a different way, images of their fights, their fresh wounds.

Sara Hanaburgh

But there is not a single image of that.

A��cha Macky

Right, I really wanted to show that violence was something they had left behind, that they had taken the path of change. And what I am doing currently is, I am organizing a peace caravan to bring my film to more communities in Niger. Each morning, there are about a hundred buses that leave Niamey, the capital where I live now, for various cities around Niger. My impact campaign, with support from UNHCR, is to put my film inside those 100 buses, and I will be there too, along with some characters from the film. And like that, we are turning those buses into mobile movie theaters.

Sara Hanaburgh

And the funding?

A��cha Macky

I am currently seeking funding. We have already applied to the USAID YALI���the Young African Leaders Initiative���because each year they have the Alumni Engagement Innovation Fund. I need to secure additional funding, and I am going to seek funding from the government of Niger. And with the support from UNHCR, the impact campaign is something that resonates throughout the world, in the US and in Europe. It���s a model. We make linkages between the children of Kara Kara, for example, who can participate in training and educational programs if we have funding. And they can then pursue their dreams. My larger goal is to build bridges between these youth and international organizations

Sara Hanaburgh

Ousmane, have you been able to show your films locally as well? In Mali? In other countries in Africa?

Ousmane Zorom�� Samassekou

Regarding the circulation of my film, like A��cha, we have what you call an impact process, and we are seeking institutional funding from NGOs and private companies to circulate my film. In Mali, we are quite used to working with the Digital Mobile Cinema, the CNA, to show the film across Africa. We���ve also promoted the film in Mali, for instance at the French Institute, at the Cine Balimbao, and also at a few big schools in Mali, which allows us to show the film to lots of youth, some of whom want to leave. We talk about what is at stake when it comes to immigration. And we hope that we���ll be able to go beyond that, to go to the most remote areas of Mali to show the film, because I think that, like A��cha said, it���s extremely important for an African filmmaker to be able to show our work in our countries. We are also planning to show The Last Shelter in Gao at the House of Migrants, which is organizing a screening for each group of migrants upon their arrival because their role is to inform people as best as they can about their departure. Also, the film allows people to see themselves and what this House offers in terms of welcoming and recovery, and reestablishing contact with families.

Sara Hanaburgh

What do you hope that The Last Shelter can bring to international audiences?

Ousmane Zorom�� Samassekou

We have the capacity to show what is happening in our area of the world in ways that are not dehumanizing, without showing the poverty, misery, and illness that are usually incorrectly projected about Africa and that hide our actual reality, our humanity and humanism. I think it���s an opportunity for people to learn not only about what is happening, but also, I hope that a lot of people who see the film will understand what is at stake for those who are in this situation, who have these dreams, the desire to leave on a journey through the desert.

Sara Hanaburgh

Let���s talk about production. In Bamako, you work with DS Productions?

Ousmane Zorom�� Samassekou

I am an associate producer at DS Productions in Mali. With digital filming being favored, there is a lot happening. A lot of people are interested in cinema and television, and there are many initiatives, like Illustration Africa, OuagaLab, Africa Direct, and lots of young directors. The thing with digital filmmaking is that it has not facilitated North-South co-productions. What is of interest with regard to North-South productions is that it allows for the promotion of our films beyond Africa. We still need the North for financing and to be able to develop our films, because on the continent we don���t have a real cinema industry. But for digital filmmaking, we have great African technicians who can make films without any need for contributions from the North.

Sara Hanaburgh

A��cha, can you tell me about your production company in Niamey, Taboo Productions?

A��cha Macky

I ended up creating my own production company because there were practically none in my country. Also, in economic terms, making documentary films is not a big moneymaker like commercial films and doesn���t necessarily allow you to live from your art. You make a film and it basically belongs to your producer. So Ousmane encouraged me to open my own production company. However, I am not a producer. That���s why I called Ousmane, so that he could produce my film and I could concentrate on the artistic aspects of my film. Additionally, the idea was to help young talent, much like Balibari did for me, and so my production company is open to any artist who would like to work in it.

Accra to Bandung, Addis to Beijing

On AIAC Talk this week, we are tackling Africa���s long and evolving relationship with Asia. Watch it live Tuesday on YouTube. South African and Chinese diplomats in February 2017 (GCIS, via Flickr CC).

Increasingly, the global political order is viewed as being in a proto-Cold War moment. The West is in decline, and the East is rising. Rather than walking back the enmity displayed towards China from Donald Trump���s presidency, US president Joe Biden has sharpened it, elevating the stakes of the post-COVID recovery as concerning not just a return to national normalcy, but the question of who will lead the COVID-free world. Not only would this be a world after COVID, but a world without a credible growth model, in the ruins of neoliberalism and at the door of climate catastrophe.

As these ���great power��� binaries make their way into politics again, it���s helpful to recall that the last time they existed, there were other political possibilities. Before the boring neutrality of the ���Global South���, there was the counter-hegemonic posture of the Third World. As AIAC contributor Christopher J. Lee once wrote, in the mid-twentieth century:

In contrast to many contemporary understandings of this expression, the Third World was embraced as a positive term and virtue, an alternative to past imperialism and the political economies and power of the US and the Soviet Union. It represented a coalition of new nations that possessed the autonomy to enact a novel world order committed to human rights, self-determination, and world peace. It set the stage for a new historical agency, to envision and make the world anew.

The historic site for the official formation of Third World identity was the 1955 Asian-African conference when delegates from 30, mostly newly independent states descended on Bandung in Indonesia to discuss their mutual ambitions for post-colonial world-making. Then, the affinities between Africa and Asia were obvious and deeply felt���as the first president of Indonesia, Ahmed Sukarno, stated in his opening address at the conference: ���For many generations, our peoples have been the voiceless ones in the world. We have been the unregarded, the peoples for whom decisions were made by others whose interests were paramount, the peoples who lived in poverty and humiliation.��� In Africa Must Unite, his manifesto for African unification, Kwame Nkrumah (who also spearheaded the Non-Aligned Movement that would concretize principles developed at Bandung), echoed Sukarno by declaring that ���The great millions of Africa, and of Asia, have grown impatient of being hewers of wood and drawers of water, and are rebelling against the false belief that providence created some to be menials of others.���

What has become of this organic Afro-Asian solidarity? Of course, the world after national liberation is very different, one where the imperial power structure involves the participation of, rather than contestation from, national governments and the domestic capital they represent. With the rules of the economic order accepted, all Asia represents for Africans is a developmental model outside the scars of�� US-sponsored free trade liberalism and structural adjustment. Buoyed by generous investment from China, some believe Africa���s ���Asian tiger��� moment is around the corner; while others warn of a ���Debt trap��� where China ensnares countries in financial arrangements that ultimately give it exclusive control of national assets. But, as AIAC contributor Lina Benabdallah recently said in an interview, ���We have no evidence to back these speculations but from an African perspective, these speculations have one thing in common: they imagine Africans to be incapable of making decisions on their own.���

But how do we restore the agency of Africa in conversations about her fate in this conjuncture? And what of the relationship not only between Asia and Africa but between Africa and Asia? There is, for example, a sizeable African diaspora in Asia, and despite coziness at the level of the political elite, ordinary African migrants in Asia are racially othered as much as they are anywhere else in the world���as Abdou Rehim Lema has written about for the site. So, to help us make sense of the complicated, contradictory past and present of Afro-Asian relations, this week on AIAC Talk we are joined by Abdou, Lina, and Christopher.

Abdou, from Benin,��is a Yenching Scholar of Peking University, where he completed a Master���s Degree in China Studies, focusing on Politics and International Relations. His research work focuses on South-South Cooperation, Triangular Cooperation, and the growing Sino-African security and development relations; Lina is an�� Assistant Professor of Politics and International Affairs at��Wake Forest University. Her��research��focuses on international relations theory, foreign policy,��critical theories of power, and knowledge production and hegemony in the��Global South; and she is the author of�� Shaping the Future of Power: Knowledge Production and Network-Building in China-Africa Relations��(University of Michigan Press, 2020); and Chris is an Associate Professor of History and Africana Studies at Lafayette College in Easton, Pennsylvania, and is the author of six books, including Making a World after Empire: The Bandung Moment and Its Political Afterlives (2010, 2nd edition 2019), Frantz Fanon: Toward a Revolutionary Humanism (2015), and Kwame Anthony Appiah (2021).

Stream the show on Tuesdays at 4 p.m. in Accra, 11 p.m. in Bandung, and 12 p.m. in New York City on Youtube.

Last week, we continued exploring the concept of exile through two new artistic works: one, a film on a Libyan dissident directed by Khalid Shamis, and the other, an exhibition on the black experience created by Cedric Brown and co-curated by Odysseus Shirindza. We were joined by Khalid, Cedric and Odysseus to discuss their works. That episode is now available on our��YouTube channel. Subscribe to our��Patreon��for all the episodes from our archive.

Another neoliberal Spring

Now that we have had time to process it: Uganda's January 2021 elections were a key step in the country's long transformation towards a fully fledged neoliberal society. Photo: Random Institute.

Uganda���s January 2021 elections were a showdown of domestic and international politics, global political economy, and international development, all at once. They also marked another step in the long transformation of the country towards a fully fledged neoliberal society.

The two competing main narratives of the election campaign were not new. President Yoweri Museveni was portrayed either as a dictator or as a visionary; the country was either on the road to prosperity and with a secure future for all, or instead was a country in deep crisis and back to ���square one��� politically. These bifurcated discourses and the state violence that underpins them are long-standing features of the making and operation of neoliberal Uganda. The idiosyncrasies of these two competing discourses were already manifest before the beginning of the 2021 election campaign���a mix of economic depression, systemic corruption, widening inequalities, and endemic poverty hand-in-hand with growing state repression of mushrooming, diverse, and localized social struggles.

Two events were significant in the years leading up to the election: First, the detention and torture in August 2018 of the popular ���ghetto��� musician-turned-politician Bobi Wine���the NUP (National Unity Platform) presidential candidate, the main opponent to the US-backed military rule of Museveni, and, for significant numbers of people, an embodiment of the aspirations and imaginaries of masses of young voters. Second, the imprisonment of Museveni���s vocal critic, feminist scholar, and activist Stella Nyanzi in the same year. They point to the increasingly authoritarian character of Museveni���s government which, finding itself in a serious crisis of legitimacy, responds with the inherited violence of the colonial state.

Challenged by the explosion of popular mobilizations and protests, and inundated by public controversies (such as around allegations of high profile corruption), the state framed existing political formations as a threat to national security and the country���s road to progress, allowing it to shift the terrain from struggles for social justice, emancipation, and the construction of political alternatives, to�� questions of patriotism, national security and political stability.

Notably, the use of political violence in 2020/21 is not solely linked to the political turbulence caused by the election campaign. Indeed, it does not signal the failure, but rather the successful implementation of the model of authoritarian neoliberalism: using state power and coercion to establish functioning markets and defend/advance the core political-economic interests and preferred social order of the ruling actors. Without it, the very existence of the government would be jeopardized. Its constant deployment is meant to secure the maintenance and reproduction of the larger social block in power. It is the same violence the government unleashed against recalcitrant rural populations resisting state-orchestrated land enclosures and other contentious, state-led, donor-funded development projects. Human, civic, and other political rights in today���s Uganda are being sacrificed on the altar of the neoliberal model.

Day-to-day politics���election mode or not���is about the use of power. The question is what does the election violence in contemporary Uganda tell us about power and political economy, and about the relationship between capitalism and democracy in the country? It is here where most human rights-based analyses fall short.

To follow the dynamics in election-mode Uganda means to observe and come to terms with the character and impact of this neoliberal restructuring, and with the actual operations of this proto-type market society. It also means to critically think about the decades-long discursive hegemony of Uganda as a success story, which has produced a dominant set of data and self-celebratory interpretations. These conceptual hunches help to situate presidential elections in the broader context of the post-1986 political, economic, ecological and socio-cultural changes which transformed Ugandan society, polity and economy in unprecedented ways.

Against this wider background, we offer a set of analytical points emerging from a collective analysis written by more than 20 scholars from across disciplines. They are key features of the neoliberalization of Uganda over the last three decades (see the conclusion here for an extended version of the summary below).

Neoliberalization is a multidimensional process which emanates from multiple poles of power, discourse, interest, and wealth. As such, it is not simply exogenous to, or imposed on Uganda. Rather it is articulated with���and metabolized within���society and politics at many interconnected levels. In Uganda���s case, the process was a joint exercise of power by way of an alliance of resourceful foreign and domestic actors. The triad of state-capital-donors rolled out its agenda of reform in various ways over a significantly vulnerable population. It cemented structural, institutionalized, and bureaucratized forms of discipline in the state and the economy.

Economic growth has become the center of gravity, a key indicator of political success at the expense of social justice, emancipation, equality, political, and civic freedoms, and human rights. The maximizing of private profits is the dominant principle that informs policy making.

Uganda is a striking example of authoritarian neoliberalism. Sector restructuring through privatization and liberalization was often executed in an uncompromising way, with ample use of authoritarianism and state violence and with little concern for the harmful social and ecological repercussions. International financial institutions (IFIs) along with the international development sector enabled the build-up of a powerful and oppressive security apparatus and are implicated, directly and indirectly, in the growth of corruption, authoritarianism and militarization, and in a more explicit turn towards crony/rentier capitalism. Violence has been an intrinsic component of the neoliberal project, rather than its antithesis. As in other neoliberal societies, the escalation of violence has taken multidimensional forms���military, disciplinary, economic, political, cultural, and verbal. State policies (especially those that hit the poor) have unleashed systemic violence and corresponding widespread social harm. The militarization of whole villages and districts to curb dissent and protest���for instance, against large-scale land acquisitions and related displacing dynamics���has been a constant feature of post-1986 Uganda. The emerging agribusiness, oil, and mining sectors are driving this agenda further.

There are notable similarities and continuities between the neoliberal and colonial development projects, especially with regard to access and control of key natural resources and the accelerating extractive logic of capitalism. Uganda is undergoing a deep structural transformation into an extractive and authoritarian enclave where foreign interests are treating land, water, oil, forestry, and conservation areas as sinks for resource extraction.

Economic achievements (housing, road and education infrastructure, GDP growth, cheap mobile communication technologies, etc.) are uneven across classes, genders, ethnicities, and geographies, and are mobilized to strengthen national pride, making neoliberalism appear desired, especially (but not only) among the middle classes. Yet, a colonial matrix of dispossession and domination persists in the neoliberal period, reproducing neo-colonial structures of inequality and projects of subjugation through development projects, market violence, land theft, looting of natural resources, exploitation, and cultural assault.

Popular protests against the government have taken different forms and contributed to shaping important alliances among social constituents that created new political space by challenging the implementation of neoliberal development projects. Myriad social struggles are taking place around key areas of societal transformation. Social media has become a protest platform that the state constantly strives to restrict in order to control dissent and criticism of state action.

The neoliberal agenda has advanced inequalities and divisions between classes and exacerbated social injustice. Systemic elite bias and elite capture of development projects turned these into tools to advance and consolidate the power of dominant classes. Over the years, President Museveni���s rhetoric and vision for the country has been consistent and insistent on the role of foreign investors. Symptomatic of neoliberal Uganda is an acceleration of ���jobless��� economic growth, whereby much of the investment takes place in the extractive and financial sectors, with little or no linkages to local economies, with wealth captured by a plethora of actors with little societal redistribution, and with public debt at heightened levels.

Neoliberal policies have negatively impacted the most vulnerable segments of the population. The financial demands and pressures on these people to just survive and recover from ill-health for example are extraordinary. The multiple and interacting crises produced by neoliberal restructuring are often addressed by more neoliberal reform, which promotes little advancement. Neoliberal reason has become a habit of thought, a cognitive frame that shapes the way many people see themselves and others, and consequently the ways in which they act in that context.

Neoliberal discourses���from good governance to empowerment and accountability���provide a sanitizing spin to the brutal exercise of power and relentless restructuring that has locked in a capitalist social order based on increased inequality and permanent social crisis. This results in the depoliticizing of debates about development and change. Donor-led development narratives and ideologies systematically conceal the class interests behind thereforms. Narratives of free markets, empowerment, and competition among free individuals tend to conceal the substantial concentration of wealth, monopolistic tendencies, and resulting profit accumulation strategies inherent in the neoliberal economy.

The Ugandan situation is part and parcel of institutionalized neoliberal capitalism globally. There is no way out of these crises unless the key pillars of neoliberal order are questioned, and inroads towards a significant de-neoliberalization of the country are made. But where are the political actors who could push for such a change in Uganda?

Indeed, a little over a month after the elections, there was a sense of being back to pre-elections normality. A ���business as usual��� atmosphere prevailed, with routine discussions resuming on the next development programmes, business investments and elections, the national development plan, and so on. By early March, the UN Resident Coordinator stated that Uganda has ���some of the most robust systems in place,��� a vision that ���is considered one of the best in the world,��� and a development plan that the UN considers to be ���one of the most transformative in the world.��� The major TV channels offered live coverage of development workshops and conferences���in the usual hotels, with the usual organizers, sponsors and topics (e.g. social protection, empowerment, resilience, human rights). There were reports about development programs and new aid deals signed. The prisons filled with political opponents of the government; parliamentarians debating missing persons and state abductions; some political activists fleeing ��to neighboring countries, and so on. By mid-April, the press reported that landmark oil deals were signed between Uganda, Tanzania, France���s Total, and China���s CNOOC; dozens of NUP party supporters were�� released from months-long security detention, and that debates about the next speaker of parliament were at intense levels. In May: Prime Minister Rugunda declares that the implementation of the NRM manifesto 2016-21 is at 95%; government officials promise better accountability for ���every shilling��� in the years ahead; the government hires a PR firm for an image polish abroad days after travel sanctions for some officials were declared by the US; NUP supporters remain in prison. In mid-May: Museveni starts the new term in office; the opposition stays away from the swearing in ceremony; and a new TV late night show kicks off in the evening of the same day.

In the coming years, the powers that be in Uganda will likely have another very serious go at the one thing that is so desirable for ruling classes: hegemony. As Museveni put it: ���the elections are over…let us get down to work.��� The political and business class and ���development partners��� can focus again, and perhaps more fully than ever, on expanding and managing capitalism and sort out the ���remaining��� issues: production and markets, and prosperity for all.

Uganda in 2021 remains a major exemplar of the dynamics and wonders of power in capitalist Africa. The bifurcated narrative that has prevailed in the last thirty years is there to stay, while the structural violence that characterizes primitive accumulation in the context of extractivism has become a staple of Ugandans��� daily lives. Across major sectors���mining, agriculture, forestry, oil and charcoal production���the Ugandan state supports violence through militarization of the sites of contestation, securing the preconditions for capital accumulation.

The three authors are co-editors of the book Uganda: The Dynamics of Neoliberal Transformation (Zed 2018).

International thief thief

There can no longer be false justifications for holding Benin Bronzes, and other pilfered materials, in museums outside of Africa. Queen Mother Pendant Mask, Iyoba, 16th century, Metropolitan Museum

In 1909, Sir Ralph Denham Rayment Moor, British Consul General of the British Southern Nigerian Protectorate, took his life by ingesting cyanide. Eleven years earlier, following Britain���s ���punitive��� attack on Benin City���s Royal Court, Moor helped transfer loot taken from Benin City into Queen Victoria���s private collection and to the British Foreign Office. Pilfered materials taken by Moor and many others include the now famous brass reliefs depicting the history of the Benin Kingdom���known collectively as the Benin Bronzes. This is in addition to commemorative brass heads and tableaux; carved ivory tusks; decorative and bodily ornaments; healing, divining, and ceremonial objects; and helmets, altars, spoons, mirrors, and much else. Moor also kept things for himself, including the Queen Mother ivory hip-mask. After Moor���s suicide, British ethnologist Charles Seligman, famous for promoting the racist ���Hamitic hypothesis��� undergirding much early eugenicist thought, purchased this same mask, one of six known examples. With his wife Brenda Seligman, an anthropologist in her own right, Charles amassed a giant collection of ���ethnographic objects.��� In 1958, Brenda sold the Queen Mother mask for ��20,000 to Nelson Rockefeller, who featured it in his now-defunct Museum of Primitive Art before gifting it in 1972 to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. That���s where I visited it this week in New York City���and as Dan Hicks pointed out in a recent tweet, if you are reading this in the global North, there���s a good chance that an item taken from the Benin Court is in the collection of a regional, university, or national museum near you, too.

For Hicks, author of The Brutish Museums: The Benin Bronzes, Colonial Violence and Cultural Restitution, this provenance history of the Queen Mother mask���and every single other history of the acquisition and transfer of objects from Benin City to museums across the ���developed��� world���is a history that begins and ends in violence. Indeed, the category of ethnographic museums emerged in the nineteenth century precisely out of the demonic alliance between anthropological inquiry and colonial pillage. In 1919, a German ethnologist observed that ���the spoils of war [Kriegsbeute] made during the conquest of Benin … were the biggest surprise that the field of ethnology had ever received.��� These so-called spoils buttressed these museums��� raison d�����tre: to collect and display non-Western cultures as evidence of ���European victory over ���primitive���, archaeological African cultures.����� The formation of ethnographic museums, including the Pitt Rivers Museum at Oxford, where Hicks currently works, ���have compounded killings, cultural destructions and thefts with the propaganda of race science [and] with the normalisation of the display of human cultures in material form��� (my italics). For Hicks, the continued display of these stolen objects in poorly lit basement rooms, sophisticated modern vitrines, and private collections is an ���enduring brutality … refreshed every day that an anthropology museum … opens its doors.���

After this book, there can be no more false justifications for holding Benin Bronzes in museums outside of Africa, nor further claims that changing times mean new approaches are sufficient for recontextualizing art objects. This book inaugurates its own paradigm shift in museum practices, collection, and ethics. While there are preceding arguments for returning Western museums��� holdings in African art (most notably Felwine Sarr and B��n��dicte Savoy���s Restitution of African Cultural Heritage, or Rapport sur la restitution du patrimoine culturel africain), the comprehensiveness of Hicks���s argument is extraordinary. In chapter after chapter, shifting agilely between historical perspectives and conceptual frameworks, he revisits the siege on Benin and its afterlives in museums across the globe. From Hicks���s detailed appendix, we learn that these stolen objects can be found in approximately 161 different museums and galleries worldwide, from the British Museum to the Louvre in Abu Dhabi, with only 11 on the African continent.

For part of the book, Hicks engages in a kind of conventional historiography, tracing how the Benin Punitive Expedition was justified, planned, and funded by a range of individuals and institutions in chartered joint-stock companies, the military, the British government, and the press. The 1897 British ���expedition��� to Benin City in present-day Nigeria was defended by the British as a necessary ���punitive��� response to the killing of at least four white men. These men had been murdered trying to make their way to the City of Benin, doing so despite the strict injunction given previously by the Oba that they not attempt entry or else they would face death. Hicks traces how the British regularly fabricated reasons for this kind of retributive violence (often even in the name of abolitionism) to mask what was actually a concatenation of overlapping ���small wars��� and punitive expeditions reaching back into the middle of the 19th century.

An accretion of details halfway into the book���the maneuvers and lines of attack, the catalogues of officers, Hausa soldiers and carriers, the weight and numbers and types of guns and other weaponry (���Dane guns (muzzle-loading smooth-bore flintlock muskets), pistols, machetes, cutlasses, spears, bows and arrows, knives���)���makes the book sag a little in the middle. While this will grab the attention of those readers interested in plumbing colonialism���s ultraviolent depths and its flagrant disregard for the legal limits of what was permissible in war (we learn of bullets filed down ���to convert them into expanding bullets [to] cause a more extensive wound when hitting a human target,��� for instance), for those most interested in Hicks���s arguments about the ethnographic museum today, I recommend skipping ahead to the last chapters.

For after all, Hicks���s details recount a history that has been woefully told and retold in different incarnations: a narrative of extraction, ultraviolence, racism. The Brutish Museums��� most forceful contribution lies ultimately in Hicks���s assessment and condemnation of the present state of affairs of museum curatorship, especially within anthropological museums and associated institutions.

The complicity of museum curators and staff in efforts to justify the looting is not unique to the early collectors and anthropologists. Hicks deplores the rhetorical ruses of contemporary curators and museum officials who gloss over the problem at the heart of museums��� acquisitions by arguing instead that museums have become ���international,��� ���borderless,��� and ���universal��� spaces showcasing ���world culture.��� These claims that a kind of international inclusivity can be brought about under the banner of the ���universal museum,��� and that this is sufficient to remedy the violences inherent in the collections themselves, sidestep the fact that that such frameworks do nothing to dislodge the colonial geographic logic of metropole and periphery that brought the museums into existence in the first place.

Hicks also picks a fight with art history���s love affair with Object Studies, a field which treats an object���s meaning as determined mainly by its context and reception. As he points out, this often allows us to detach an object from the (often violent) human histories that brought those newer meanings into being. The misuse of Mary-Louise Pratt���s concept of the ���contact zone��� as a way to organize museum collections comes under similar attack, since curators have used it to emphasize colonial cultural encounters as exchanges and ���entanglements��� rather than as relations of subordination and pillage under duress.

Today, Hicks avows: ���A time of taking is giving way to a time of returns.��� As Greer Valley has pointed out, there have been endless debates; action is the only possible way forward. Some museums and galleries have heeded the call to repatriate stolen material culture, and museums such as Senegal���s Museum of Black Civilizations in Dakar and the soon-to-be-built Edo Museum of Western African Art in Benin City (designed by architect David Adjaye) indicate that shifts are occurring at the level of action as well as idea.

In order for repatriation to be accelerated and standardized, museums particularly need to be more transparent about their holdings. Hicks notes that ���it is … currently unclear how many skulls and other human remains taken from Benin survive in museums and private collections���although at least five human teeth found their way from Benin City in 1897 to London, and are now lying at the British Museum in a divination kit, strung on a necklace, and contained within a brass mask.��� It���s not apparent to me why museums aren���t able to give an appropriate account of both what objects they have and how they have come to have them. In recent debates in the US about human remains held at the University of Pennsylvania���s Archeology and Anthropology Museum, the Smithsonian, Harvard University, and elsewhere, similar obstacles are regularly raised about these problems of counting collections. But catalogs need to be clear and made public, and museums must hold themselves accountable in both material and ethical senses. This, they all know now, means the first necessary step is to return what is not theirs. How they then reinvent themselves as spaces of accountability will be the next task of the curator.

The making and unmaking of permanent minorities

Mahmood Mamdani���s new book asks how communities that have been enemies can heal. But does it succeed? Nelson Mandela and members of the ANC listen to a UN Security Council debate on South Africa. Credit: UN Photo, Milton Grant, July 1992

There is no doubt that Ugandan political scientist Mahmood Mamdani���s new book, Neither Settler nor Native: The Making and Unmaking of Permanent Minorities (Harvard University Press, 2020), is a major effort towards an understanding of the untold and distorted history of the US, and the consequences this mythologized history has had on other parts of the world, especially Sudan, Israel, and South Africa.�� For this reviewer, however, the effort could have gone much further.

Mamdani���s objective is to analyze how the colonizers constructed or defined the way in which they should rule the colonized. In that sense, this book is a continuation of the argument in his previous books: Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism (1996) and Define and Rule: Native as Political Identity (2012). Whether the form is direct or indirect rule, the colonizers understood themselves as superior to the colonized. They were, by definition, civilizers. That phase is referred to, by Mamdani, as colonial modernity, and the period following independence is referred to as post-colonial modernity.

The book���s emphasis on the legal approach the colonizers took to defining their rule ends up downplaying the inherent and automatic violence that accompanied those historical phases of genocide (e.g. the Herero and Nama genocides in Namibia), industrialized enslavement, and colonization or fascism. By contrast, the post-colonial violence is presented as extreme. On closer examination of the historical record, the contrast between the colonial violence and the post-colonial violence is not as obvious as it is presented. All colonizers have always made sure that their histories get written according to their own views. As is well known, history does get written by the winners and they make sure that the narrative matches the civilizing mission.

As a political theorist, Mamdani pinpoints the problem (the contrast between the violence) as the by-product of the nation-state structure imposed by the colonizers/settlers. In its place, he argues that, in order to avoid the extreme violence of post-colonial modernity, the protagonists have to agree to move away from the nation-state structure to an imagined political community that creates a level playing field, removing the hierarchical relationship imposed by the colonizing/settler legacy. The principal architects of this hierarchical relationship are listed as Hobbs, John Locke, Thomas Babington Macaulay, jurist Sir Henry Maine, Hugo Grotius, and Juan Gin��s de Sep��lveda. In his summary of how the strategy operated, Mamdani implicitly downplays the extreme violence that went along with colonial modernity: ���By inducing [local] elites to take the role of colonizer nation, colonizers hoped to inject a kind of Trojan Horse into subject societies.���

When colonies became independent, the colonizing practices of divide and rule created the conditions for extreme violence. As Mamdani puts it: ���Contests over national belonging are at the heart of extreme violence in the post-independent period.��� By contrasting the violence of colonial rule with the extreme violence of post-colonial rule, Mamdani ends up downplaying the former despite the availability of the evidence���among the most recent, the best known is Adam Hochschild���s King Leopold���s Ghosts. The downplaying of the colonial violence is surprising given Mamdani���s own use of Sven Lindqvist���s Exterminate All the Brutes to illustrate the colonial violence in Africa.

Ironically, Mamdani indicates that, in fact, colonial violence was just as extreme as the post-colonial violence: ���Like other nationalist projects, post-colonial nationalism has been deeply violent. Indeed, the violence of the militant nationalist project often felt like a second colonial occupation.��� In order to buttress his point, Mamdani recalls a comment reported by the late professor Ernest Wamba dia Wamba, at the University of Dar es Salaam, quoting a peasant asking, after independence in the Democratic Republic of the Congo: ���When will this independence end?��� The quote is meant to prove that post-colonial violence was more extreme than the one exercised by the colonizers. That assessment is questionable, once the details of colonial violence are unveiled.

Yet, Mamdani does not hide the violence that was part and parcel of colonial modernity as illustrated by insurrections in India (1857), in Jamaica (1865), and in Sudan (1881-1898). In order to avoid the violence, the jurist Sir Henry Maine was tasked with crafting a type of rule that resorted to the natives as subject partners or collaborators tasked with maintaining law and order through indigenous or customary law, supervised by the colonial masters.

Mamdani ends up, seemingly, admiring the result: ���The genius of the British was not in inventing differences to exploit but in politicizing real and acknowledged differences by turning them into legal boundaries deemed inviolable and predicating security and economic benefits on locals��� respect for these boundaries.�����

As long as Mamdani restricts himself to the case studies, his argument seems to hold. For example, why didn���t the British approach work to prevent the Mau-Mau rebellion in Kenya, which led to extreme violence? To refresh my memory I went to an article published in the UK Guardian in 2016, about the brutality of the Kenyan Gulag. The British were not the only ones interested in erasing their colonial extreme violence. On Independence Day, the new prime minister Jomo Kenyatta asked his compatriots to ���forgive and forget.��� To his credit, Mamdani is not interested in simplifying a complex history by way of forgiving and forgetting. He explains: ���I seek to theorize extreme violence as political, and thereby to argue that a crime-and-punishment approach is more likely to aggravate than to ameliorate this violence.���

In his speech at Congolese independence in 1960, Patrice Lumumba, the first prime minister of an independent Congo (the later DR Congo) sought to present colonial rule for what it was, and then proceeded to tell the Belgians and the Congolese that now that the Congolese are independent, they could all work together, without acrimony. But the Belgians could not take any Congolese, prime minister or not, to paint their colonial rule differently from how they saw it: an altruistic exercise. The Belgians treated it as an insult.

Mamdani���s use of political theory is aimed not only at understanding the roots of conflicts, but also at how to bring them to an end in ways that are politically satisfactory to both sides. From such a perspective, it would have been useful to include the works and practices of authors such as Alain Badiou, Ernest Wamba dia Wamba, Peter Hallward, Cheikh Anta Diop, G��nther Anders, and Varlam Shalamov, among others. To these authors, one should add organizations like AbahlaliBaseMjondolo (The Shack Dwellers) in South Africa, the Landless and Homeless Movements (MST and MTST) in Brazil, the Zapatistas Army of National Liberation in Mexico, and The Movement for Socialism-Political Instrument for the Sovereignty of the Peoples in Bolivia, and so on. The common objective of these organizations and individuals has been to bring about political change through practices of liberation or emancipation politics. Their understanding of political theory is generated through their battles to transform the conditions under which they had been forced to live or survive.

Looking at the ���Indian Question,��� as Mamdani calls it, in the US, one can see that the focus of political theory promoted by Indigenous militants is not restricted to their own specific status. Nick Estes, a young Indigenous scholar, offers a vision of political theory that goes beyond their confrontation with the settlers, as can be seen from his book���s title: Our History is the Future: Standing Rock versus the Dakota Access Pipeline, and the Long Tradition of Indigenous Resistance.��

Although Mamdani is at pains to stress the importance of not falsifying history, it is obvious that any history can be seen, interpreted, and acted upon from different perspectives, including ones that do challenge politically the established nation-state narrative. Estes��� approach can be looked at as political theory, inspired by Philip Deloria, a prolific Indigenous scholar and, at one time, executive director of NCAI (National Congress of American Indians). For Deloria, Native Americans do not have to submit to the defining rules of the settlers: ���We suggest that tribes are not vestiges of a past, but laboratories for the future.���

After several readings of Mamdani���s book, it seems clear that he has been more influenced by political theorists than by the cultural practices that emerged from the militants, whether they are Native Americans, Palestinians, or Africans. Holding on to tradition does not necessarily mean refusing modernity; it can mean going beyond the boundaries set by modernity.

Another young Indigenous scholar, David Treuer, commented on how not to look at Wounded Knee, by insisting that Black Elk���s mourning the death of a dream (at Wounded Knee) must mean ���to us to do the next thing: to dream a new one.��� To make sure that he, (Treuer) is not misinterpreted, he quotes Walter Benjamin:

To articulate the past historically does not mean to recognize it “the way it really was”����� It means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger.�� In every era the attempt must be made anew to wrest tradition away from nonconformism that is about to overpower it��� Only that historian will have the gift of fanning the spark of hope in the past who is firmly convinced that even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he wins. And this enemy has not ceased to be victorious.

Later, in the text Treuer echoes Mamdani���s preference for political resolution of differences that do lead to survivors:

We are, in a sense, the children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren of those hundreds who survived Wounded Knee and who did what was necessary to survive, at first, and then���bit by bit to thrive.

In this sense, through their activism they are showing how prescriptive politics can lead toward decolonizing, de-Nazifying, de-Zionizing political communities (as stated by Mamdani). From such an angle, the political community is no longer the US, but the planet.�� In the process, they are practicing one of the lessons I learned from working with Ernest Wamba dia Wamba: politics of truth means overcoming any obstacle, including those that seem impossible at first sight.

Historical situations are not chosen. In the current times, humans are faced with the challenge of deciding which path to choose, between ���civilization or barbarism,��� as Cheikh Anta Diop framed how he saw the future of Africa, in his book of the same name, published in 1981. In its encounter with Europe, Africa lived through the barbarism of genocide, industrialized enslavement, colonization, fascism, and apartheid. What tends to be forgotten or downplayed is that all of the consequences of these phases are still embedded and active in the neoliberal capitalism currently dominating the world. Therefore, it should not come as a surprise that the colonial violence that reigned during colonial times increased during the post-colonial era. The end of any given historical phase, proclaimed or not, should not lead one to think that its consequences for the beneficiaries and/or the victims would automatically cease. The abolition of slavery in the Americas, for example, ensured that the benefits would be maintained through different devices.

With regard to Nuremberg, German philosopher G��nther Anders made a similar point. As Jean-Pierre Dupuy pointed out in his preface to Anders��� Hiroshima est partout, Anders is the most disregarded Western philosopher whose biography and works should have drawn as much attention as his spouse, Hannah Arendt. The main reason for Anders being treated as a pariah, one suspects, stemmed from his pointing out the continuity between the Holocaust, the dropping of the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the ensuing permanent threat to humans and life on the planet. For Anders, philosophizing was not enough; action to stop the turning of death into a permanent industry had to be constant. The refusal of the Nuremberg trial to include and reconcile with the mass civilian deaths of Hiroshima and Nagasaki proved that humans were headed for the apocalypse. Dupuy agreed, writing:

The threat posed by the worldwide death industry comes from the combined crises of climate, energy, the mad rush toward new technology, international terrorism, etc. From wherever one looks, it is obvious that knowledge of these threats, some of which are extremely serious, does not incite anybody to act. Why? Because we do not believe what we know, because we cannot bring ourselves to visualize the implications of what we know.

As a moral philosopher, Anders made others uncomfortable because he insisted on sharing his outrage at what he was witnessing: a laissez-faire attitude by humans in the face of a nuclear catastrophe that, sooner or later, would liquidate life on the planet. Wars became the reason for manufacturing weapons that would make killing ���easier,��� so to speak. Long before drones replaced guided missiles, Anders wrote:

The war by tele-murder that is on its way shall be the war most free from hatred that has ever existed in history. [���] This absence of hatred shall be the most inhuman absence of hatred that has ever existed: absence of hatred and absence of any scruple will become one and the same.

With regard to how this mindset came to be, one should add the reinforcing ingredients of individualization, competition, hierarchization of everything: knowledge, race, gender, culture, etc. From such a perspective, the militant Native Americans see themselves fighting for the same kind of future as those���Palestinians, Africans, Indigenous peoples, immigrants, homeless, landless, poor people���who are fighting against the destructive devastations brought about by climate change, over-dependence on fossil fuel, militarization, racism, and capitalism. The consequence of such a reading prevents humans from grasping the continuities that have transformed the system into more than the sum of all of its historical phases, from genocide through enslavement, to fascism/colonization/apartheid and neo-liberalism.

The lesson from G��nther Anders is that each destructive step of the dominant system paved the way to a more destructive phase. The destructiveness of capitalism is more than the sum of its historical parts. And, in the process, the possibility of surviving is consistently diminished.

I do not disagree with Mamdani���s theorizing and calling for transformative transitions that would ideally benefit all sides.�� However, his reductive selection of historical evidence demonstrates why and how it is bound to lead to failure. The final phrases of the book���s concluding chapter could be understood as describing the obsolescence of the nation-state:

Political modernity led us to believe we could not live without the nation-state, lest we not only be denied its privileges but also find ourselves dispossessed in the way of the permanent minority. The nation made the immigrants a settler and the settler a perpetrator. The nation made the local a native and the native a perpetrator, too. In this new history, everyone is colonized���settler and native, perpetrator and victim, majority and minority.�� Once we learn this history, we might prefer to be survivors instead.

So far, surviving under the conditions proposed by Mamdani has not been the best option. As one can see from the DR Congo and its meandering from independence to the secession of Katanga and Kasai provinces; then reuniting, changing its name for the sake of authenticity under President Mobutu. This trajectory should not hide the fact that, to this day, from within and from without, the country has been a constant target of balkanization. Scholars like Jeffrey Herbst and Greg Mills offered a solution: erase the Congo and carve it up among its neighbors. (I responded to the idea in Pambazuka News.) In the case of the DR Congo as, in fact, for the entire continent, the colonizing history opened the way to a never peaceful future thanks to global predators, be they nations or corporations. That kind of transition to independence could not but lead to a worsening of the violence that started during colonial modernity. In one of his poems, Aim�� C��saire captured very well what had happened: ���When the world shall be a tower of silence / Where we shall be the prey and the vulture ������

With regard to Israel and Palestine, Alain Badiou offered a solution by way of an interview published in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz. It boiled down to stepping away from what the founders of Israel concluded: the Jews are ���the��� victims, and any group that does not abide by it, such as the Palestinians, shall be treated as ���the��� enemies.�� In spite of formulations that drew criticisms (e.g. Palestinians and Jews must forget the Holocaust), Badiou never diverted from his insistence on the creation of a country in which Israeli and Palestinians would treat each other equally.

Unfortunately, the Middle East (among other many territories) has been treated as a sort of permanent laboratory for the maintenance of the world as framed after the Nuremberg Trial���to serve the interests of the dominant nation-states, and, within them, in particular, the military industrial complex. The functioning of such a paradigmatic world has been maintained by an ideological frame that was aimed at perpetuating the wars against the Indians under a new name: The War on Terror.

In the chapter on the Native American question, Mamdani relied a great deal on historian Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz���s An Indigenous Peoples��� History of the United States, while ignoring completely her other work, Loaded: A Disarming History of the Second Amendment . Yet, the latter provides a better historical source for understanding the role played by distorting the history of Native Americans in order to serve the narrative of white supremacists in the US.

In his final and concluding chapter, Mamdani argues that the way to resolve the failures presented by all the situations, is to practice a politics of decolonizing the political community. In other words, face the reality not as a nation-state construct, but as a political community. He illustrates the point, with regard to what happened in South Africa.

As the South African struggle showed, this requires a politics that refuses to accept the battle lines drawn by the adversary and is dedicated to isolating that adversary by providing its constituency with alternatives.

Mamdani prefers not to mention what happened at Lonmin���s Marikana Platinum Mine in August 2012, when 34 miners were slaughtered in cold blood. The miners were on strike for better pay, among other things. Cyril Ramaphosa, the current president, was at the time a member of the board of directors of Lonmin as the company approved the lethal methods used by the South Africa police. In this case a leading anti-apartheid figure takes the lead on an action which is straight out of the apartheid playbook.�� �� Peter Alexander, Thepelo Lekgowa, Botsang Mmope, Luke Sinwell and Bongani Xezwi (2012) wrote: ���As underlined in a statement on Marikana signed by several hundred South African social scientists, continuities from the apartheid era are profound.��� As any observer can see on the African continent, the continuities between colonial and post-colonial government practices persist.

The second point that should be acknowledged is the role played by Cubans, MPLA military forces, SWAPO, Soviet military advisers in the defeat of the South African apartheid army, UNITA, and the US support at the battle of Cuito-Cuanavale. As Nelson Mandela pointed out during his visit to Cuba in 1991, the victory sounded the beginning of the end of the South African apartheid regime.

This book will be a landmark in trying to figure out how to transform the way humans relate to each other. As I read and re-read some of the chapters, it became clear that the objective was to promote healing between communities that had been enemies. From such an angle, it is difficult to understand why Mamdani ignored the works of those who have written extensively on that very theme, such as Cheikh Anta Diop, Th��ophile Obenga, Ayi Kwei Armah, and Yoporeka Somet, to mention a few. The focus of their individual and collective work on Africa has been, and continues to be, to heal and to recover from centuries of destruction. If Mamdani is analyzing the decolonizing process, how does he manage to leave aside these voices?

To view the post-colonial nation state as completely severed from its colonial legacies overlooks and simplifies the intricate connections that were maintained through the economic, financial, political, ideological, and cultural ties. As the COVID-19 pandemic evolves, will humans learn the necessary, urgent lesson that the hierarchization of knowledge, and of human histories, dehumanizes all humans, not just those who consider themselves superior?

The possibility of thought

A Black South African academic in the United States on breaking the silence on Israeli apartheid in US classrooms and on campuses. [image error] Images of late May demonstrations in the US capital, Washington DC, protesting Israel's latest military offensive against Gaza, by Zachary Rosen.

The past two weeks have proven that the brutal character of the Israeli military cannot be overstated. As witness to the atrocities taking place in Gaza, the world is yet again at a loss for adequate words, unable to explain the vehement bloodlust of an unaccountable oppressor state. While this is hardly a controversial subject in many countries, by contrast in the United States�� where news outside the bubble rarely takes hold, one nevertheless feels an awkward silence when it comes to the occupation of Palestine. The Palestinian-American cultural critic Edward Said maintained that any long-term justice beyond survival and interim calls for ceasefires will have to include a type of cultural movement, shifting the battleground from an uneven field in which Palestinians��� only defense against their aggressive colonizer is throwing stones and exposing themselves ���to the depredations of the Israeli military.��� Said appreciated that a program of condemnation would have to be worked at, in the same way that Israel has kept itself busy within American society, manufacturing consent to kill Palestinians by gripping the hearts of many Americans.

Perhaps because he lived in the US through a period when the image of Islam was being concretized as the paragon of evil in the American popular imaginary (that is as terrorism), Said had an intimate view of the levers of power from the other side of the dynamic; he saw the importance of displacing Israel���s monopoly on the American public���s sympathies. Therefore, he saw that the struggle for Palestinian self-determination had to include a concerted and organized effort on the part of the Palestinian diaspora, that it cannot avoid the task of wrenching American popular culture from its ignorance and moral apathy regarding the occupation.

Just a few months before he died in 2003, Said noted in his book of interviews, Culture and Resistance, that ���the Palestinian elites, intellectuals and others, still think that there���s a shortcut to influencing America, which is the main actor in this besides Israel.��� Reading this today rings frustratingly true, one knows the truth of matter deep down, and yet it is hard to think that the key to curtailing the barbarisms of Israel lies not only in the hands of a proxy US government, but in the hearts and minds of ordinary Americans. And judging by the US mediascape, America has a terribly allergic reaction to the most basic facts about Israel. In addition to America���s continued denial of the impact and reach of slavery, in addition to its own track record of institutionalized and everyday racism;there is yet an added difficulty in influencing this particular public conscience, owing to a stifling atmosphere that persists, the result of an unspoken and accepted censorship around the question of Palestine. Said recognized that such an atmosphere was sustained by ���a massive propaganda effort on the part of Israel, which has employed public relations firms in the United States, has the entire US Congress at its beck and call, and has an enormous amount of financial, political, and other resources blocking any effort at the UN to protect Palestinians against Israeli military onslaught.���

I have experienced the effect of this at some point. For instance, I teach a course on post-apartheid literature at an elite New England private college. The class involves some scaffolding of the history of South Africa, and early on a screening of ���From Selma to Soweto���, the sixth episode of the Emmy Award winning documentary series Have You Heard from Johannesburg. This episode provides a chronicle of the Boycotts Divestments and Sanctions (BDS) movement started by African-American grassroots collectives who were determined to organize against US complicity with the South African apartheid regime in the 1980s. The campaign gathered momentum as students across American campuses engaged in direct action that included sit-ins, petitions, and other disruptive efforts that made them instrumental in changing American popular opinion towards the apartheid regime. The film documents how BDS, directed by grassroots movements who later enlisted college students to their cause, eventually and effectively strong-armed a recalcitrant President Ronald Reagan (along with some of their own university presidents) into imposing economic sanctions and cutting ties with companies that had business interests in South Africa. Although initially a tough sell to a certain generation of white Americans, BDS eventually managed to position itself not only as a legitimate response to human rights violations in South Africa, but also as a moral obligation to ���decent Americans.���

The BDS campaign against the apartheid government in South Africa holds lessons about the role of complicity with a tyrannical nation and government. When I ask students to reflect on the resemblance of South African and Israeli apartheid, I notice a type of sentimentalist affection that gets in the way of the discussion. Try as they do to conceal it, I immediately sense a squirminess set in, accompanied by contagious and rapid foot tapping or some other nervous tick. Sensing the weight of the silence, I realize that I���ve crossed an emotional danger zone, and I conclude that like me, they must somehow expect that even mentioning Israel���s occupation and the violence towards Palestinians can quickly alter the mood in a room. I say to them that, in any case, most companies in Israel are not Jewish or Israeli companies but multinational entities operating out of or headquartered in Israel and, therefore, implicated in the apartheid regime���s bloodletting and the death drive of its political and military infrastructure.

Image credit Zachary Rosen.

What I extrapolate from my experience in an elite American classroom is that extending the epistemic parameters of Americans about their own positionality would entail two major tasks. Firstly, getting them to see Israel���s 1948 moment as coeval with apartheid South African���s 1948, that they not only share a birthday (both established in the month of May 1948), but that from inception both states had been exchanging notes on how to put into practice their desire for an ethnically stratified society, while the primary collusion of the US helped maintain the prolonged violation of customary international law in respect of both regimes.

It���s astonishing how difficult it is for many of my mostly white American students to overcome their cognitive dissonance and wrap their heads around such synergies, confronting their own country���s proud sponsoring of terrorism and dispossession. While it���s easy for progressives and young centrist-liberals to retrospectively get on board with BDS in South Africa, I suspect that a significant number of them would consider BDS in relation to Israel to be anti-semitically inflected if not an act of outright discrimination, even where they may value the non-violent qualities of BDS over other type of actions.

We may consider applying the notion of apartheid to other contexts where it might be said to operate under different names. The ultimate task would be to get them to be confident with the notion that denouncing Israel or Zionism and their own country���s endorsement of Israeli policies cannot be equated with disfavoring or hating Jews/Judaism, that there is furthermore something rather anti-Semitic in the unquestioned congruity of that equation. I try to help students understand that democracy entails accepting responsibility for their position as US citizens, as in ���the ability to respond��� to what is done in their name and to decide how they will petition their government for action. But to do this, they will have to flip the narrative about discrimination and antisemitism that is currently used to repress any expression of dissent against the prevailing attitudes, and only works to shield the government of Israel from all criticism. How does one prepare students to take the mental leap from the idle state of a silent observer, or worse, the disgraced complicity of one who, faced with bare evidence, ignores the injustice, to help them respond with a more productive indignation that would have them actually act upon their convictions? The task is more difficult when people fear the charge of antisemitism.

Despite that, 2020 saw political tensions on the global stage heightened by US sanctions targeted at Iran. That this goes unremarked should help make the point about the baselessness of the blanket charge of anti-Semitism and the manner in which it has been weaponized by those who deny Israeli apartheid. It tells us that it is possible, after all, to conceive of US sanctions against a religious-identifying government, Tehran, as neither religiously motivated nor directed at all Muslims or Islam ���as such���, but instead as an action apparently informed by a considered governmental response solely towards its policies.

So I realize that many Americans simply do not know���and indeed how could they, given the navel-gazing posture of US news networks���that in reality the actual victims of the Israeli state���s aggression are the five million Palestinians who are violently evicted from their homes twice and thrice over decades; who are rendered stateless; who have lived through a lifetime of collective punishment, afflicted by merciless killings of innocent civilians like flies to wanton boys; affected by checkpoints that impede freedom of movement; relegated to what amounts to crowded bantustans, permanently walled in and encircled by an Israeli military that hunts them down and periodically airstrikes them while they sleep, destroying swaths of residential units in the process. They don���t really know about Israel���s targeted destruction of economic and administrative infrastructure such as water and electricity supplies; they surely must not know about the pleasure and sense of accomplishment Israel derives from that, just so a few hundred settlers can claim their share of yet more illegally occupied territory. And through all of this, Israel can count on unconditional subsidy from US taxes. They cannot begin to imagine the scale of the crimes against humanity that this silence has upheld for decades.

The Palestinian writer and poet Mohammed el-Kurd was asked a pathetic question during an interview on private American cable news channel, CNN:�� ���Do you support the violent protests that have erupted in solidarity with you and other families in your position right now?��� It was the kind of question that seeks to delegitimize Palestinian resistance at best and, at worst, has the effect of publicly ���incriminating��� those who are resisting occupation, earmarking them for further harassment by Israeli occupation forces. El-Kurd immediately responded with an ever more pressing question: ���Do you support the violent dispossession of me and my family?���

While not surprising, the misgivings and dithering skepticism in response is instructional, it leads me to conclude what I instinctively know about the immense difficulty of mourning Muslim lives in the US; that whether we are talking about the oppression of the Rohingyas in Myanmar, the Uyghurs in China, or the Hindu nationalist government���s actions towards Muslims in India and Kashmir, to say nothing of Israel���s ongoing brutalization of Palestinians, all these examples patently illustrate how for many Americans the term ���islamophobia��� does not carry the same moral turpitude as the term ���anti-Semitic.��� And if the campus is even a minor indicator of the temperature at a national level, if one can extrapolate from there an insight about the allotment of American popular sympathies, one could further assert that the unfortunate lack of urgency that the term islamophobia fails to conjure makes organizing against Muslim persecution in the same order of magnitude quite arduous if not virtually impossible. Islamophobia is de facto a less serious offense or crime, as seen by the impunity with which much anti-Islamic behavior is carried out, from vitriolic expressions of enmity to more violent actions targeted at Muslims in manifestation of such enmity. When has a well-known case of islamophobia of a public figure ever led to anyone losing their job or being reproached, much less ���held accountable��� to the moral rubrics of a cancelling culture? If one is hard pressed to recall such a situation, might it be because islamophobia is a more superficial charge, whereas anti-semitism is imbued with some sacred essence, a special kind of ���sentience���, which might explain American���s identification with a self-serving nationalism that is undifferentiated from its own self-image?

No wonder then, that it is apparently prohibited and even illegal to hold activities under the banner of BDS at places such as Harvard University, on the basis that this constitutes discrimination against Jews. Given Harvard���s status as a policy incubator for so much insidious US foreign policy, it���s no surprise that the US consistently and unilaterally votes and vetoes as it does on the international stage on the subject of Israel, since this is in any event fully commensurate with its own domestic policies, in that at least 42 states have anti-BDS laws that prohibit any state contractor from involvement in BDS. It’s not enough for the social stigma to exist, but dissent must be further criminalized.

Saree Makdisi writes a candid and scathing account of the consequences of this conditioned silence in US institutions when he declares that ���what has prevailed here [on US campuses], is the virtual suspension of thought.��� It���s been nearly two decades since Makdisi wrote about this state of affairs as it relates to BDS, decrying the anti-intellectual behavior of academic elites who refuse engagement on the question of Israel and Palestine, the avowed progressive who decides they would rather sit this one out, who shuts down any discussion by claiming anti-Semitism in advance. Meanwhile, as long as you don���t bring up Palestine, what can go unchecked, and what has indeed gone unchecked is the real and life-threatening anti-Semitism that is on the rise in both the US and, as ever, in Europe.

Solidarity and support for BDS will only trend upwards in the short to long term, as we have seen recently throughout several US cities where pro-Palestinian protesters showed up in their tens of thousands. A generation of progressives in America, both on the ground as well as public representatives like Rashida Talib (the first congressperson of Palestinian descent) frequently use terms like ���apartheid���, ���settler-colonialism��� and ���ethnic cleansing��� to describe Israel���s ethno-nationalist character. Along with Ilhan Omar, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders, these progressive congresspeople have introduced legislation to block America���s latest sale of weapons to Israel. Through such intervention, we immediately understand that if the US continues to sell Israel the very weapons it uses to commit its dreadful crimes against Palestinians then calls for peace do nothing but pay lip-service to justice. The growing popularity of such measures indicates that Israel is beginning to lose its grip on US public opinion, that its bewildering chicanery is an embarrassment to an awakening nation still battling a sleep paralysis induced by decades of unwittingly aiding and abetting the subjugation of Palestinians. But importantly, the vocal opposition to Israel���s terrorism is accompanied by action, and such action smooths the path for BDS to accelerate its drive and exert more pressure for divestment.

And to the extent that it has the potential to transform the public opinion of Americans in relation to the question of Palestine, BDS is an antidote to the anti-intellectual posture that leads to stasis, it requires people to align their minds, to be guided by their conscience in deciding to actively take a position against the violence they now know of and see on a daily basis. Americans should assert that they refuse to have their taxes diverted from their own institutions and channeled to prop up Israel���s war crimes and its continued violation of the most basic international laws.

They must refuse the vilification of BDS and challenge the counter measures that seek to silence ���free speech.��� Such reactionary measures are not merely facile recriminations, therefore anything shy of their rejection is tantamount to an active defense of oppression which, as Makdisi cautions, would ���articulate more than merely a logic of sympathy with Israel���s actions. And indeed, in many cases the position articulated by anti-divestment campaigners is not that Israel���s version of apartheid does not exist: it is that that apartheid is justified. This is neither paranoia nor denial, this is a gesture of active collusion, an altogether different matter.��� As much as I wish it were not so, Said was right that American popular opinion regarding Palestine will need to change along with the necessary political and material instruments of justice. BDS therefore has the potential to reframe approaches to the question of Palestine in the US. As to the willful ignorance of people in top tiered institutions especially, one way to reframe their mindset would be to think of BDS as an invitation to think, and think again. The success of BDS is not only in its future; its eternal achievement on campuses will be that at any moment it can snap people back from their indifference. There must be an anti-apartheid campaign that emphasizes that the lives of Palestinians matter, and one wonders what it would take to evince such a response. When the call to end Israeli apartheid finally gains enough traction on campuses across the US, an effort which hitherto has been suppressed, BDS will have inaugurated a pivotal moment, as Makdisi asserts, ���the point at which the possibility of thought returned once again to American university life.���