Sean Jacobs's Blog, page 132

In search of Ethiopia���s past and present

The film "Finding Sally" grapples with Ethiopia's past, but may romanticize its present. Still from Finding Sally film.

The camera gazes upon a neighborhood in Ethiopia���s capital, Addis Ababa, with all its colors and sounds. A young woman adjusts her headscarf as she herds a flock of sheep across a bridge; a small boy wearing a worn-out Ethiopia national jersey plays with a stick; an older woman sits on a stool in front of her home as she chats with someone out of view. An elderly woman emerges out of a parked black Corolla, while another waits for her outside of her rusted, corrugated iron gate; they embrace and kiss each other���s cheeks, asking repeatedly between pleasantries: ���sint amet? How many years?��� They embrace again and sob. ���We should go in,��� the first woman urges as they make their way toward the front door. ���The past is the past. It���s over.���

One wonders if filmmaker Tamara Mariam Dawit takes this statement as a provocation for her 2020 documentary Finding Sally, an exploration of Ethiopian history, collective trauma, and memory through the lens of her family���s grief and the unanswered questions surrounding her late aunt Selamawit (Sally) Dawit. For Dawit the filmmaker, the past is never over, but central to her very understanding of the country of her estranged father, its contemporary challenges, and her search for meaning and identity in the present. We soon learn that the two elderly women in the documentary���s opening scene are Tsehai Tesfamichael, Sally���s mother and Tamara���s grandmother, and Abrehet Asefa, the mother of Sally���s late husband, Tselote Hizkias. The two mothers are forever bound through love and loss, their children among the millions who lost their lives to liberate Ethiopia from the military dictatorship of Mengistu Haile Mariam.

A protest in Ethiopia. Photo courtesy of the Dawit family.

That Sally died during Ethiopia���s civil war���during which she was a guerilla fighter in the northern Ethiopian highlands with the leftist Ethiopian People���s Revolutionary Party (EPRP)���is well known to the Dawit family, which makes the documentary���s framing somewhat disingenuous. ���How could there be a close relative that I knew nothing about?��� asks Tamara as she narrates her film, describing Sally as the aunt ���that no one had ever mentioned,��� one she only learned about as an adult. The documentary portrays Sally���s story as one shrouded in mystery���an angle even more pronounced in its trailer and promotional materials���with Dawit taking on the project of unraveling the ���collective silence��� of her family through film. Yet when she asks her aunt Menbere why she did not know that Sally existed until she was 30, Menbere is stunned and reminds her that Sally is in all the family albums. ���I mean, there was a lot of time that we didn���t spend together,��� Menbere suggests as a possible explanation.

Dawit tells us that she was raised by her Canadian mother and that her late father disappeared from her life after remarrying; her relationship with his sisters is one that she mainly develops independently in her 30swhen she moves to Ethiopia. She admits that anything she learned about his family as she grew up was through her ���own persistence to connect;��� one can deduce that the reason she did not know about her aunt Sally was because of her father. We learn much about Sally and the lives of her sisters, who are interviewed throughout the documentary, but nothing about Tamara���s father, their only brother. His name is not mentioned in the film but shown once, inscribed in Amharic on his gravestone: Solomon Dawit. I found myself wondering more about the film���s silences surrounding Solomon than Sally.

Dawit family portrait, courtesy the Dawit family.

Finding Sally weaves together the story of the Dawit family with that of Ethiopia, particularly during the revolution that ousted the imperial government of Emperor Haile Selassie and the military regime���the Derg���that seized power in 1974. The patriarch of the family, Dawit Abdou, was a noted diplomat and adopted son of the emperor; the Dawit children���Solomon and daughters Brutawit, Selamawit, Menbere, Tsion, and Kibre���spent their lives primarily abroad as a result, staying in Canada to continue their educations after their father, then Ethiopian ambassador to Canada, left for a new assignment. Meanwhile, the Ethiopia they left behind is one in the midst of widespread famine, social upheaval, and revolt, as a popular revolution called into question the continued existence of the imperial regime, its archaic feudal land system, and the hierarchies of class and ethnicity that structured it. The Dawits belonged to and were privileged by this system, revealed in moments in the film such as Kibre finding Haile Selassie���s explanation that ���the famine was concealed��� from him plausible, or Tsion���s outrage that his removal was undignified because he was escorted away in a broken-down Volkswagen.

To her credit, Tamara Dawit treats the revolution with sensitivity and incorporates a wide array of archival images and film, including footage of members of the student movement. This use of archival imagery is generally effective at giving the viewer a sense of the historical events shaping the lives of the Dawit family, but there are a number of times where the images are disconnected from the narrative and lack important context, making it difficult for those unfamiliar with Ethiopian history to interpret.

Still from Finding Sally film.

It is returning to an Ethiopia in revolution that changes the trajectory of Sally���s life. Intending to only stay for the summer holidays with her siblings, she falls in love with the country and Tselote, who is a teacher, political activist, and member of the EPRP���s leadership. After Mengistu Haile Mariam emerged as leader of the Derg, he embarked on a violent campaign of repression known as the Red Terror to consolidate his control and eliminate the EPRP and other opposition and dissident groups. Sally and Tselote, who quietly marry with only their families present, are forced to go underground as they become targets for their political affiliation and activities.

It is fascinating to see the difference between the sisters��� account of Sally���s politics and that of the one EPRP member and friend interviewed in the documentary, Ferkete Gebremariam. To Ferkete, Sally was a comrade and radical, someone deeply concerned with the plight of women and children in particular and committed to remaking Ethiopia. She was an intellectual and an activist. To her sisters, on the other hand, we are left with the impression of a young woman easily influenced by the men in her life, beginning in her teenage years in Ottawa where she would throw herself completely into her relationships and take on the interests of her boyfriends; her decision to join the insurgency against the Derg, they imply, was more a reflection of Tselote. How the sisters felt about Sally���s political activity is unclear beyond their fear and concern for her wellbeing. It is her mother, Tsehai, who speaks of Sally���s heart and her kindness; who reminds us that her daughter���s name was Selamawit, meaning ���she is peaceful;��� of how she ���didn���t want to see the starving and suffering of her people;��� and how she witnessed her quietly tell a sick child ���it will be better in your time.���

Still from Finding Sally film.

Among the most powerful scenes in Finding Sally is when Kibre returns to a detention site where she spent ten days after being removed from her grandmother���s home by military personnel searching for Sally. Standing in one of the rooms used to confine and torture, she cries and describes how she was shown the blood-covered walls in an attempt to terrorize her, and how she survived through meditation and repeating to herself that no one would touch her. Another memorable scene is Tamara Dawit���s wedding, paralleling her aunt Sally���s wedding, both diaspora women choosing intimate gatherings at home in Addis to celebrate their unions to the men who helped them see Ethiopia in new ways and anchored them to the country they hardly knew.

In 1984, the family learns that Sally died from illness, possibly several years earlier, and that Tselote died shortly after from a gunshot wound. Closure takes the form of a family road trip organized by Tamara to the northern highlands of Tigray, the sisters looking at the rugged terrain and imagining how Sally must have survived it. They arrive at the village of Assimba, which was an EPRP training site, and meet with a local woman named Brur Gebrai who tells them about Sally���s final days and burial. They commemorate the site with a plaque at the local Orthodox church in honor of Sally and Tselote and their sacrifice for Ethiopia. In perhaps the most moving scene of the documentary, the sisters gaze out at the landscape as Kibre calls out to the mountains: ���woooh! Selamawit!���

Still from Finding Sally film.

Finding Sally should have ended there. One can overlook its minor hiccups prior to its final scenes: the way Sally���s narrative is occasionally lost and overpowered by that of her sisters at the expense of the story, including a strange detour into Kibre���s involvement with the Transcendental Meditation movement and her encounter with Maharishi Mahesh Yogi; how Tsehai���s death, clearly during the making of the documentary, is unexplained; an awkward scene that juxtaposes Fekerte���s voice speaking of the hardships she and Sally endured in the countryside, such as their hands peeling from a lack of nutrition, with an unbothered Kibre painting at her home; the film���s overemphasis on silence and forgetting, both familial and national, regarding the violence and trauma of the Derg years, when there is no evidence that Ethiopians believe that it is ���safer to forget than to remember��� because ���there���s too much trauma attached to their memories.��� In fact, an entire scene���again, unexplained to the unfamiliar viewer���shows Tamara Dawit walking through Addis Ababa���s Red Terror Martyrs Memorial Museum, which commemorates this period,, and looking at the framed images of thousands of the Derg���s victims.

What one cannot overlook, however, is the film���s failure at what it set out to do; that is, to connect Sally���s story to Ethiopia���s historical past and its political present. Following the scene at the church at Assimba, Tamara Dawit describes Sally as a ���gateway into understanding the complicated history of Ethiopia [���] as well as the contemporary landscape��� and asks if Sally would fit into today���s Ethiopia or whether she would still be fighting. She then catches the viewer up to the present with an extremely sectarian narrative of the post-Derg years, describing the successor regime of the Ethiopian People���s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF)���which instituted a system of ethnic federalism as a way of grappling with the ethnic diversity of the Ethiopian state���as one that ���ignited a dangerous ethnic divide among the people.��� She describes how ���it took 25 years for Ethiopians to feel brave again and to demand change,��� referring to the mass protests that first began in Ethiopia in 2014 without acknowledging the fact that these protests were led by the historically marginalized Oromo people, Ethiopia���s largest ethnic group. This grassroots movement led to a significant realignment within the EPRDF, resulting in a change in leadership that saw Abiy Ahmed of the Oromo Democratic Party���one of the EPRDF���s four coalition political parties���become Prime Minister in 2018. It was, in effect, a co-optation of the popular protest and grievances of the periphery, and it did not take long for Abiy to crack down on opposition, undermine ethnic federalism, and embark on a new project of Ethiopian unity that harkened back to the centralizing regimes of Emperor Haile Selassie and Mengistu Haile Mariam.

Still from Finding Sally film.

It is in the name of ���Ethiopian unity��� that the state is currently engaged in a brutal war against Tigray, backed by Eritrean troops and ethnic Amhara militias; one where harrowing accounts and evidence of sexual violence, ethnic cleansing, and hunger as an instrument of war emerge by the day. That Dawit chooses to end her documentary with her and her aunts��� elation over Abiy was inappropriate in 2020 when the film first came out; it is morally indefensible today. The documentary ends with a montage showing the faces of people walking around Arat Kilo square in Addis Ababa to the words of an Abiy speech. Dawit tells us that while ���the questions raised by Sally and her comrades may be different from those of young people today,��� the ���values she risked her life for are just as important.”

So what were the values that Sally fought for, the Ethiopia she fought for? And are the questions that Sally and her comrades raised really that different? As Dawit closes Finding Sally with her hope that ���a new generation of leaders can inspire the unity that Sally dreamed of,��� I could not help thinking that Sally certainly wouldn���t have wanted this. Assimba, where she rests, is, like the rest of Tigray, under siege. I wondered about the elderly woman Tegaru woman, Brur, who described Sally���s death to the Dawit family, and where she could be today, if she is even alive.

Still from Finding Sally film.

In its erasure of ethnicity, Finding Sally presents the radicalism of the Ethiopian Left���Sally���s politics���as strictly concerned with questions of class, when the reality is that ���the nationalities question��� was vigorously debated and theorized throughout this period as it would be impossible to understand capitalism in Ethiopia without it. Some research would have shown Dawit that the EPRP���he party that Sally committed her life to���held a position quite similar to that of the EPRDF in that they advocated for national autonomy for Ethiopia���s ethnicities, what she had referred to in the film as ���igniting dangerous ethnic divisions.��� The fall of the Derg and the advent of a new state in which sovereignty, according to its 1994 constitution, ���resides in the nations, nationalities, and peoples of Ethiopia��� was what Sally fought for.

While Sally remains an enigma, subjected to the various projections of her family members, what Finding Sally ultimately succeeds at is illuminating a particular Ethiopian experience���that of the Addis Ababa elite���and telling the story of the Dawit family and their grief through Ethiopia���s difficult history.

Finding Sally by Tamara Mariam Dawit will air on WORLD Channel as part of “AfroPoP: The Ultimate Cultural Exchange” season 13 on Monday, April 12 at 8 pm ET/PT. The film will begin streaming for free at the same time on worldchannel.org and viewers can check local listings for TV re-airings.

The class curse

How is Kenya's "new middle class" contributing to a pervasive low-quality oppression that leaves Kenyans feeling hopeless? Image via Open Institute on Flickr CC BY-SA 2.0.

This post is from our series of reposts from Kenyan publication The Elephant.

Despite many Kenyans��� opposition to the Building Bridges Initiative (BBI), there is a sense that politicians are moving with the project full steam ahead and there is nothing the people can do about it. More perplexing is the fact that with elections just over a year away, the fear of what supporting BBI could do to their political careers does not seem to faze the politicians. What explains this powerful force against democracy?

I argue here that the aspect of the BBI���and its charade of public participation���that most passes under silence is the role of the civil service and the intelligentsia. Behind the spectacle of car grants to members of the county assemblies is an elite that is growing in influence and power, and is pulling the puppet strings of the political class. The bribery of MCAs would have been impossible without the civil service remitting public funds into their accounts. The president would not succeed in intimidating politicians if there were no civil servants���in the form of the police and prosecutor���to arrest politicians and charge them with corruption.

The academy���s contribution to the BBI has been in controlling the social discourse. The mere fact that it was written by PhD holders brought to the BBI an aura of technical expertise with its implied neutrality. Using this aspect of BBI, the media and academics tried to tone down the political agenda of the document. They demanded that discussion of the BBI remain within the parameters of academic discourse, bombarding opponents with demands of proof that they had read the document and exact quotations, refusing to accept arguments that went beyond the text to the politics and actors surrounding the initiative. Discussing the politics of BBI was dismissed as ���irrelevant.���

Two cases, both pitting male academics against women citizens, illustrate this tyranny of technocracy and academics. In both cases, the professors implicitly appealed to sexist stereotypes by suggesting that the women were irrational or uninformed. In one debate in February last year, political science professor and vice-chair of the BBI task force, Adams Oloo, singled out Jerotich Seii as one of the many Kenyans who had ���fallen into a trap��� of restricting her reading of the document to only the two pages discussing the proposed prime minister���s post, while leaving out all the goodies promised in the rest of the document. Jerotich was compelled to reply, ���I have actually read the entire document, 156 pages.���

Likewise, earlier this month, Ben Sihanya sat at a desk strewn with paper (to suggest an erudite demeanour) and spoke in condescending tones about Linda Katiba, which was being represented by Daisy Amdany. He harangued Linda Katiba as ���cry babies���, demanded discussions based on constitutional sociology and political economy, and declared that no research and no citation of authorities meant ���no right to speak.��� He flaunted his credentials as a constitutional lawyer with twenty years��� teaching experience and often made gestures like turning pages, writing or flipping through papers as Amdany spoke.

The conversation deteriorated at different moments when the professor accused Linda Katiba of presenting ���rumors, rhetoric and propaganda.��� When Amdany protested, Sihanya called for the submission of citations rather than ���marketplace altercations.��� The professor referred to the marketplace more than once, which was quite insensitive, given that the market is the quintessential African democratic space.

Meanwhile, anchor Waihiga Mwaura did too little too late to reign in the professor���s tantrums, having already taken the position that the media is promoting, which is that every opposition to BBI is a ���no��� campaign, essentially removing the opposition from the picture on the principle of a referendum taking precedence.

Both cases reveal a condescending and elitist attitude towards ordinary Kenyans expressing opinions that run counter to the status quo. The media and academy have joined forces in squeezing out ordinary voices from the public sphere through demands for academic-style discussions of BBI. When discussions of BBI first began in 2020, these two institutions bullied opponents of the process by imposing conditions for speaking. For instance, in the days before the document was released, opponents were told that it was premature to speak without the document in hand. In the days following the release of the document, demands were made of Kenyans to read the document, followed by comments that Kenyans generally do not read. The contradiction literally sounded like the media did not want Kenyans to read the BBI proposals. Now it has become typical practice for anchors and the supporters of BBI to challenge BBI opponents with obnoxious questions such as ���You have talked of the problems with BBI, but what are its positive aspects?��� essentially denying the political nature of BBI, and reducing the process to the clich�� classroom discussion along the lines of ���advantages and disadvantages.���

Basically, what we are witnessing is autocracy by the media, the academy and the bureaucracy, where media and the academy exert symbolic power by denying alternative voices access to public speech, while the civil service intervenes in the material lives of politicians and ordinary people to coerce or bribe them into supporting BBI. Other forms of material coercion that have been reported include chiefs forcing people to give their signatures in support of the BBI.

In both these domains of speech and interactions in daily life, it is those with institutional power who are employing micro-aggression to coerce Kenyans to support BBI. This ���low quality oppression���, which contrasts with the use of overt force, leaves Kenyans feeling helpless because, as Christine Mungai and Dan Aceda observe, low-quality oppression ���clouds your mind and robs you of language, precision and analytical power. And it keeps you busy dealing with it so that you cannot even properly engage with more systemic problems.��� In the end, despite the fact that there is no gun held to their heads, Kenyans face BBI with literally no voice.

But beyond the silencing of Kenyans, this convergence of the media, the academy and the civil service suggests that there is a class of Kenyans who are not only interested in BBI, but are also driven by a belief in white supremacy and an anti-democratic spirit against the people. I want to suggest that this group is symptomatic of ���a new middle class���, or what Barbara Ehrenreich and John Ehrenreich have referred to as the ���professional managerial class���, which is emerging in Kenya.

For the purposes of this article, I would define this class as one composed of people whose managerial positions within institutions give them low-grade coercive power to impose the will of the hegemony on citizens. The ideology of this class sees its members as having risen to their positions through merit (even when they are appointed through familial connections), and holds that the best way to address problems is through efficient adherence to law and technology, which are necessarily neutral and apolitical. This class also believes that its actions are necessary because citizens do not know better, and that by virtue of their appointment or their training, the members of this class have the right to direct the behavior of ordinary citizens. Basically, this class is anti-political.

The worst part about this class is that it is a group of people who cannot recognize themselves as such. As Amber A���Lee Frost puts it, it is ���a class that dare not speak its name.��� This means that even as they exert coercive power in Kenya, members of this class remain largely unrecognized or discussed as a class with its own economic interests.

Even worse, this is a class that holds contemptuous���and ultimately racist���views of Africans despite being made up of Africans. For example, Mohammed Hersi, chair of the Kenya Tourism Federation, has been at the forefront of proposing the obnoxious idea that Kenya should export her labor abroad, the history of the Middle Passage notwithstanding. Despite a history of resistance to the idea that Africans should not receive any education beyond technical training, from the days of WEB Dubois to those of Harry Thuku, the Ministry of Education has introduced the Competency Based Curriculum (CBC), a new education system affirming that ideology. A few months ago, Fred Matiang���i waxed lyrical about the importance of prisons with these words which I must repeat here: ���To Mandela, prison was a school; to Malcolm X, a place of meditation; and to Kenya���s founding fathers, a place where visions of this country were crystalized. We���re reforming our prisons to be places people re-engineer their future regardless of the circumstances they come in.���

How is it possible for educated Africans to talk in public like this?

One factor is historical legacy. The civil service and institutions such as the mainstream media houses were established during colonial rule and were later Africanized with no change in institutional logic. This factor is very disturbing given that the media and the civil service in Kenya opposed nationalist struggles. During colonialism, it was the civil service, its African employees in the tribal police and the local administrations (such as chiefs and home guards), who crushed African revolt against oppression. This means that the Africans who were in the civil service were necessarily pro-colonial reactionaries with no interest in the people���s freedom.

Essentially, Kenyan independence started with a state staffed with people with no economic or political allegiance to the freedom and autonomy of Africans in Kenya. The better-known evidence of this dynamic is the independence government���s suppression of nationalist memories through, for instance, the assassination of General Baimungi Marete in 1965. What remains unspoken is the fact that the colonial institutions and ideologies remained intact after independence. Indeed, certain laws still refer to Kenya as a colony to this day.

It is also important to note that colonial era civil servants were not even European settlers, but British nationals sent in from London. This meant that the primary goal of the civil service was to protect not the settlers��� interests both those of London. Upon the handover of the state to Africans, therefore, this focus on London���s interests remained paramount, and remains so now,�� as we can see from the involvement of the British government in education reforms, from TPAD (Teacher Performance Appraisal and Development) to the curriculum itself. This dynamic is most overt in the tourism and conservation sector, where tourism is marketed by the government using openly racist and colonial tropes, including promises to tourists that in Kenya, ���the colonial legacy lives on.���

There was also a practical aspect to the dominance of these kinds of Africans in the civil service. As Gideon Mutiso tells us in his book Kenya: Politics, Policy and Society, the Africans who were appointed to the civil service had more education than the politicians, because as other Africans were engaged in the nationalist struggles, these people advanced in their studies. Upon independence, Mutiso says, the educated Kenyans began to lord it over politicians as being less educated than they were.

Mutiso���s analysis also points us to the fact that colonial control remained in Kenya through the management of the state by people whose credentials and appointments were based on western education. The insidious role of western education became that of hiding the ideology of white supremacy behind the mask of ���qualifications.��� As such, Africans who had a western education considered themselves superior to fellow Africans, and worse, British nationals remained civil servants in major positions even a decade into independence, under the pretext that they were technically more qualified.

Less known, and even less talked about, is the virulent anti-African dispensation in the post-independence government. The new government not only had within its ranks Africans who had fought against African self-determination during colonial rule, but also British nationals who remained in charge of key sectors after independence, among them the first minister of Agriculture Bruce McKenzie. Similarly, the only university in Kenya was staffed mainly by foreigners, a situation which students complained about during a protest in 1972.

The continuity of colonial control meant that civil servants were committed to limiting the space for democratic participation. Veteran politicians like Martin Shikuku and Jean-Marie Seroney complained that the civil service was muzzling the voice of the people which was, ideally, supposed to have an impact through their elected representatives. In 1971, for instance, Shikuku complained that the government was no longer a political organ, because ���Administrative officers from PCs have assumed the role of party officials [and] civil servants have interfered so much with the party work.��� Shikuku inevitably arrived at the conclusion that ���the foremost enemies of the wananchi are the country���s senior civil servants.��� For his part, Seroney lamented that parliament had become toothless, because ���the government has silently taken the powers of the National Assembly and given them to the civil service,��� reducing parliament to ���a mere rubber stamp of some unseen authority.��� Both men were eventually detained without trial by Jomo Kenyatta.

However, the scenario was no different in the education sector. As Mwenda Kithinji notes, major decisions in education were made by bureaucrats rather than by academics. It was for this reason, for example, that Dr. Josephat Karanja was recalled from his post as the High Commissioner to the United Kingdom to succeed professor Arthur Porter as the first principal of the University of Nairobi, going over the head of professor Porter���s deputy, Prof. Bethwell Ogot, who was the most seasoned academic in Kenya with a more visionary idea of education.

Unfortunately, because the appointment went to a fellow Kikuyu, reactions were directed at Dr. Karanja���s ethnicity, rather than his social status as a bureaucrat. Ethnicity was a convenient card with which to downplay the reality that decisions about education were being removed from the hands of academics and experts and placed in the hands of bureaucrats.

And so began the long road towards an increasingly stifling, extremely controlled administrative education system whose struggles we witness today in the CBC. As Kithinji observes, government bureaucrats regularly interfered in the academic and management affairs of the university, to the point of demanding that the introduction of new programs receive approval from the Ministry of Education. Other measures for coercing academics to do the bidding of civil servants included imposing bonding policies and reducing budgetary allocations.

In the neoliberal era, however, this ideology of bureaucracy expanded and co-opted professionals through managerial and administrative appointments. For instance, the practice of controlling academic life was now extended to academics themselves. Academics appointed as university managers began to behave like CEOs, complete with public relations officers, personal assistants and bodyguards. The role of regulating academic life in Kenya has now been turned over to the Commission for University Education whose headquarters are in the plush residential suburb of Gigiri. CUE regularly contracts its inspection work to academics who then exercise power over curriculum and accreditation under the banner of the commission.

With neoliberalism, therefore, bureaucrats and technocrats enjoy an increase in coercive power, hiding behind the anonymity provided by technology, the audit culture and its reliance on numbers, and concepts such as ���quality��� to justify their power as neutral, necessary, and legitimate. However, the one space they now need to crack is the political space, and by coincidence, Kenya is cursed with an incompetent and incoherent political class. Life could not get better for this class than with the BBI handshake.

BBI therefore provided an ideal opportunity for an onslaught of the managerial class against the Kenyan people. The document under debate was written by PhD holders, and initial attempts by professors and bureaucrats to defend the document in town hall debates hosted by the mainstream media backfired spectacularly. These technocrats were not convincing because they adamantly refused to answer the political questions raised around BBI, so they have taken a back seat and sent politicians off to the public to give BBI an air of legitimacy. Behind the scenes, however, support for BBI brings together the bureaucrats and the foot soldiers who are behind Uhuru, and the educated intelligentsia that is behind Raila.

And as if things could not get more stifling, Kenyans are looking favorably at the declared candidacies of Kivutha Kibwana, a former law academic, and Mukhisa Kituyi, a former United Nations bureaucrat, in the next presidential election. The point here is not their winning prospects, but the belief that maybe people with better paper credentials and institutional careers might do better than the rambling politicians. However, this idea is dangerous, because it places inordinate faith in western-educated Africans who have not articulated their political positions about African self-determination in an age when black people worldwide are engaged in decolonization and the Black Lives Matter movement.

Basically, BBI is camouflaging the attack on politics and democracy in Kenya by a new managerial class. We are paying a heavy price for not decolonizing our institutions at independence. Since independence, bureaucrats have whittled away at our cultural and institutional independence through police harassment, underfunding, the tyranny of inspections and regulatory control, and through constriction of the Kenyan public and cultural space. Even the arts and culture are tightly regulated these days, with the Ministry of Education providing themes for schools��� drama festivals and the government censoring artists in the name of morality. Worse, this new managerial class collaborates with foreign interests in a shared contempt for African self-determination.

Kenyans must be wary of academics and bureaucrats who use their credentials, acquired in colonial institutions, to bully Kenyans into silence. We must not allow bureaucrats and technocrats to make decisions that affect our lives without subjecting those decisions to public debate. We must recognize and reproach the media for legitimizing the bullying from this new managerial class. And we must continue to recognize the Kenyan government as fundamentally colonial in its logic and practice and pick up the failed promise of the NASA manifesto to replace the master-slave logic of the Kenyan civil service. Most of all, we must learn to demystify education, credentials, and institutional positions. Kenya is for everybody, and we all have a right to discuss and participate in what happens in our country.

What���s Left of the South African Left?

This week on AIAC Talk, we���re debating whether the moment is right for South Africa���s left to form a new party. Watch it live on YouTube. Photo: Tony Carr, via Flickr CC.

After its unbanning in 1990, the African National Congress (ANC) entrenched itself as the main political force in South Africa, beginning to make the transition from a mass democratic movement to a political party. In the process, it demobilized popular forces: the ANC as a political party would henceforth represent and lead the masses. It also formalized a tripartite alliance with the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU), the federation of the most powerful trade unions, and the South African Communist Party (SACP). Together they were getting ready to govern South Africa.

The Alliance espoused a commitment to the ���National Democratic Revolution���, which conceived of a two-stage process of liberation. This framework was essentially a local articulation of the classic Marxist-Leninist theory that underdeveloped countries must first pass through a stage of capitalism (realised through a bourgeois-democratic revolution where universal suffrage is extended to all citizens), followed by a socialist stage. The Alliance���s commitment to the NDR, which would involve the stabilization of capitalist relations, represented a departure from popular hopes arising during the twilight of apartheid (in the internal resistance movement, the United Democratic Front or Mass Democratic Movement, social movements like the civis and the trade unions) that the struggle against apartheid would culminate in the struggle for socialism. As South Africa���s labor movement rapidly grew during the 1980s, the extent of poverty and deprivation across South Africa���s villages, townships and cities, resulted in millions being mobilized in a struggle that not only sought liberation from the apartheid state, but the capitalist class that it represented as well.

Following the democratic transition, the popular structures of the anti-apartheid movement were either dissolved and absorbed into the ANC (most notably, this happened with the UDF which led the anti-apartheid resistance in the final decades of apartheid while the ANC was in exile), or consolidated into a vehicle for the ANC, like what happened with disparate on the ground civic organisations when they became constituted under the South African National Civic Organisation in 1992. In addition, the ANC swallowed rightwing groups like ethnic parties (the coloured Labour Party or elements of the National Party, which had governed South Africa during apartheid), former homeland politicians and traditional authorities. The latter would become organized under the Congress of Traditional Leaders and, like under colonialism and Apartheid, be salaried by central government. The late 1990s and early 2000s therefore was a moment wherein many formations re-evaluated the strategy of organizing with and through the Alliance in the face of its disappointing volte-face away from a policy of economic distribution.��

As such, a structural shift occurred where the South African left fragmented into basically two camps: left within the Tripartite Alliance and the independent left. The independent left has a longer history in South Africa (think intellectuals like Neville Alexander or the various movements deemed ���Trotskyist��� or black consciousness during the long 20th century) but it got a new impetus from the proliferation of social movements in the early 2000s that mushroomed against the growing failures of the ANC to deliver the popular reform it promised. While many of these were primarily located within working class communities, these institutions were not typically rooted in factory floor organising but rather in grassroots and community organising, usually around single issue struggles like access to antiretroviral medication, housing, or electricity. Think the Soweto Electricity Crisis Committee, the Anti-Privatization Forum, Anti-Eviction Campaign and groups like Abahlali Basemjondolo, which organized shack dwellers. Even the Treatment Action Campaign, the only one of these groups that became a national movement, can be considered part of this independent left.�� Further, the most developed and active layer of cadre within them were usually middle-class activists (largely white), well-placed to advance these causes due to their access to resources and donor networks, as well as from the pedigree of formerly being anti-apartheid activists (usually associated to the ANC itself).

The interplay between the Alliance left and the independent left continued to shape the development of the South African left well into South Africa���s post-Apartheid existence. The economic leadership of the ANCs has mostly brought about rapid deindustrialisation, the consolidation of an extractive and financialised minerals energy complex, and the creation of a black bourgeoisie through the advent of Black Economic Empowerment (BEE) initiatives which sought to deracialise South Africa���s capitalist class by making affirmative action policies compulsory for most South African companies, especially those seeking to do business with the government. Although significant changes have happened for the poor, especially by way of basic service delivery, these have been motivated by the goal of minimum provision for social stability rather than equality, and unemployment, poverty and inequality have increased, all exacerbated by COVID-19 (and set to worsen as President Cyril Ramaphosa���s government pushes through an austerity agenda in its wake).��

Following the Marikana massacre in 2012 (a turning point in post-apartheid South African history), the largest union in South Africa, the National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa (NUMSA) broke away from the Tripartite Alliance in 2013. At once, it resolved to form a new working class party. It spearheaded the formation of the United Front, a wide coalition of workers, the unemployed, rural people, civic organizations, academics and activists that would unite workplace and community struggles and lay the groundwork for a worker���s party. The project stalled, and feeling that it had been taken over by NGOs, NUMSA left, throwing the UF into quiet death. In 2017, NUMSA then also played a hand in the creation of the South African Federation of Trade Unions ot SAFTU (the new union federation���s president was Zwelinzima Vavi, a former COSATU general secretary) so as to displace COSATU as South Africa���s largest trade union confederation. Right then, the sense that a new party was on the horizon began to lift, and at the end of 2018, the Socialist and Revolutionary Workers Party held its pre-launch convention with delegates drawn primarily from SAFTU.

But after the SRWP���s humiliating defeat at the 2019 general election following a rushed campaign (it amassed only 25,000 votes, below the threshold required to obtain at least one seat Parliament), South Africa���s left is once again left roaming in the political wilderness. (It is worth noting that the only independent left politician that ever won office was Trevor Ngwane, a former ANC city councillor who ran as an independent in Soweto and won; Ngwane was instrumental in the founding and brief success of the Soweto Electricity Crisis Committee.)����

At the same time, the Economic Freedom Fighters, formed in the wake of Marikana, occupied that space usually taken by left groups and the trade union movement and after 2015 younger people, especially university students and intellectuals, found a home in politics that combined black consciousness and radical feminism. The latter politics, though it harked back to Steve Biko and BC, also revived the politics of the black nationalist Pan Africanist Congress, but also, notably, drew on discourses from black politics in the United States. Of all these groupings only the EFF managed to capture mass sentiment which carried that party to the third largest in parliament and to act as kingmakers in coalition governments in a number of cities at the expense of the ANC. The EFF, however, displays a mix of populism, intolerance, nationalism and jingoism, that are as far from Leftism as you can imagine.��������������

To face the worsening political, social and ecological crisis before us (that most acutely affects the poor and working-class), requires effective and coordinated action from South Africa���s progressive forces. What should be the vehicle for this? As Niall Reddy recently wrote (his was the inaugural post in a��series of republications, as part of Africa Is A Country���s partnership with the South African Left publication,��Amandla), ���Social strains look set to keep accumulating. But assuming that any crisis they produce will�� automatically redound to the Left���s benefit would be folly. That will only happen if we have the political vision and the organizational capacity to ensure that class becomes the fault line of social polarization. And for that we need to face up to the challenge of constructing a new party.���

So in this week���s AIAC Talk, we���re joined by Niall, Mazibuko Jara and NAME TO ADD HERE to debate the question of whether South Africa���s left needs a new party. Some are not convinced ��� as this editorial of South African publication New Frame claims, ���Party politics as a whole is an expression of the failures of the past quarter of a century and carries no possibility of a viable way forward, let alone any emancipatory prospects.��� Instead, ���a Left that could find a way out of the gathering crisis would need to be rooted in genuinely popular organisations, grounded in democratic practices, able to speak to the lived experience of the escalating social and political crisis and directly articulated to actual, existing struggles ��� from workplaces to communities and campuses.��� Or, should we be persuaded by AIAC Talk co-host Sean Jacobs, who, claiming that South Africa needs democratic socialism, wrote with Benjamin Fogel that, ���Like it or not the majority of South African believe in democracy. Dismissing their belief as false consciousness and elections���which so many fought and died for���as a mere trick of the bourgeoisie, insults our struggle. Any future left project needs to begin with the premise that 1994 marked a victory for democracy and progressive forces, something that should be built upon rather than rejected or dismissed.���

Niall Reddy, from South Africa, is a doctoral student in sociology at New York University, Tasneem Essop is a researcher at the Society, Work and Politics Institute (SWOP) at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, and Mazibuko Khanyiso Jara is an activist, trainer and popular educator and a former national spokesperson of the South African Communist Party also serving on the Amandla editorial collective.

Stream the show the show on Tuesday at 18:00 in Harare, 17:00 in London, and 12:00 in New York on��YouTube,��Facebook, and��Twitter.

On our last episode, we were joined by Bongani Nyoka and Joshua Myers to investigate Archie Mafeje and Cedric Robinson, two scholars and activists whose efforts to challenge Eurocentrism in political thought are becoming more widely known. Clips from that episode are available on our��YouTube channel, but as usual, best check out the whole thing on our��Patreon��along with all the episodes from our archive.

If you were wondering where we���ve been, we took a break after the Easter weekend to rest up a bit but also to inaugurate the first broadcast of our new partnership with the Ghana Studies Association ��� we hope everyone got the chance to do as well.

South Africa���s Left needs a new party

Assuming today���s socioeconomic crisis benefits the Left is folly. That will only happen if we have the political vision to make class the fault line of social polarization, and for that we need to face the challenge of constructing a new party. Construction workers. South Africa. Image credit Trevor Samson for the World Bank via Flickr CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.

This is the inaugural post in a series of republications, as part of our partnership with the South African Left publication, Amandla.

Over the last decade, the Left in a number of Western countries has undergone a historic transition from “protest to politics,” to borrow the words of the late Canadian Marxist Leo Panitch and his frequent co-author Sam Gindin. From Podemos in Spain to Sanders in the United States, a new wave of parties and electoral coalitions have emerged and made rapid gains. Despite setbacks and defeats, Panitch and Gindin���s indispensable analysis of these events in The Socialist Challenge Today, casts them in an unambiguously positive light. None of the examples they study offer formulas for resolving the vexing dilemmas facing the socialist movement in our globalized present. But in their determination to take state power seriously they constitute an unmistakable step forward, after decades in which the Left���s confinement to episodic instances of mobilization left the electoral field wide open to the parties of business. Part of this “new new” Left’s success stems from a willingness to shake free of its own past. Building a viable socialism of the 21st century, they argue, requires dispensing with the outmoded parts of the Leninist model, like its wager on insurrection, while retaining that which still holds value, like its internationalist spirit.

These developments hold important lessons for us on the South African Left. Just under a decade ago it seemed that we were on the verge of effecting a similar transition “from protest to politics.” During the first decade and a half of democracy, a socialist opposition��had found a locus in the so-called “new” social movements���like the Anti-Privatization Forum���which grew in reaction to various parts of the ruling African National Congress��� neoliberal agenda. These waged a number of important defensive struggles and scored a few key victories but fundamentally did nothing to loosen capital’s grip on policymaking. By the end of the 2000s most were a spent force. It became clear to a growing segment of the Left that lasting gains would not be achieved unless social agitation were more effectively linked with efforts to seize governing power. The ability to think these more ambitious terms received a major boost when the National Union of Metalworkers South Africa (NUMSA), the nation���s largest manufacturing union, appeared to redraw the political map of the country by breaking from the ANC, amidst a wave of working class militancy.

Of course for the “official” left which NUMSA represented there had never been any turn away from politics as such. But decades of compromise had bred a form of politics that had become completely unmoored from the guiding thread of class antagonism. NUMSA’s move thus constituted a kind of mirror image transition���from a back-room corporatism to a politics more grounded in the methods and spirit of ���protest���. This is what imbued the “NUMSA moment” with such hope���it promised to re-connect the two sides of South Africa’s bifurcated Left, and supply the strategic elements that had been missing from each. By matching the militancy and class-independence of the social movement Left with structural and organizational might of the “official” Left, it seemed possible that a mass socialist movement could be rapidly brought into being.

That was not to be. From today’s vantage it’s impossible to regard the NUMSA moment as anything but an abject failure. The political party which eventually issued from it is the farthest cry from the unifying force that so many had hoped for. While the international left has been able to advance by breaking with its shibboleths, the Socialist Revolutionary Workers Party (SRWP) has fallen back on a slavish appropriation of Bolshevik ideology, almost comical in its extremes. Despite enormous resources, a large part supplied by a US-based billionaire, the party ran a dismal general election campaign in 2019 where it failed to get even a tenth of NUMSA’s own membership to vote for it (it ultimately only amassed 25 000 votes nationally, below the threshold to obtain one seat in Parliament). It���s since never recovered, joining a host of other failed socialist parties on the margins of political life. Marginality seems in turn to have degraded the internal culture of the party, which now resembles closely the Stalinism of the ANC-aligned South African Communist Party in all its worst aspects.

The floundering of the NUMSA moment is a terrible blow. But the setback inflicted on us will far greater if we fail to draw the correct lessons from it. Perhaps the most worrying outcome is that it precipitates a slide back into movementism, and shuts the window that we’ve had to execute the transition from “protest to politics.” Party politics acquired a bad name during the era of “protest” in South Africa, and many on the Left already feel that the SRWP���s example vindicated their worst suspicions.

But what the SRWP actually reveals to us is are not flaws inherent in the party-form as such, so much as the limits of a certain kind of party, one founded on a hidebound Leninism. If the Left were to abandon party building altogether there would, quite simply, be no socialist future. All visions of radical change that eschew parties and an active takeover of the state suffer from a principal defect in that they misconceive the nature of class formation���the process by which individuals become aware of their class position and begin to articulate their politics through it. This is presented as a quasi-automatic effect of the capitalist class structure.

But history offers no support for such a view. Class is impactful because it frames the options we have over so many major decisions in our lives���but not so narrowly as to make resistance to one���s employer, or the system behind him, inevitable. Indeed, the extreme vulnerability of workers under capitalism means that individualized modes of coping tend to be more commonplace than collective action. That’s why socialist consciousness has been the exception rather than the norm in the global history of capitalism, and exceedingly rare in the absence of a well-organized party. As Panitch argued with the force of a life���s work���parties make classes as much as they are made by them.

Thankfully, an outright repudiation of the party-form is not really where we are at in South Africa. The variant of movementism which took hold here, and which has revived in the aftermath of the NUMSA moment, was not really this more extreme kind, which denies the ultimate need for a party. Rather what it advocates is a downgrading of the role of party building or its deferral to some indefinite future.

What seems to be the common premise for this position is that party building can only succeed when perfectly timed to the right ���objective conditions��� ���conditions which are only likely to form in the wake of a rupture moment defined by intensified street-level mobilization. Only the transformation of mass consciousness brought about by such an episode of struggle can furnish the base for a party. Moreover, efforts to “impose” a party on the working class before this are liable to be rejected by its most conscious and active layers. Cut off from nourishing energy of grassroots movements, they are likely to grow in authoritarian directions. The task of socialists in the present, therefore, is devote ourselves to strengthening movements, and hope that a party may gestate from within them in some future context.

Related but distinguishable from this, is an ingrained hostility on the South African Left towards electoral politics. This view tends to draw a sharp line between the electoral arena and movements. While movements unlock popular power by sensitizing their participants to their potential for collective action, elections offer no such platform for consciousness-raising. Instead, they tend to reproduce the atomization of liberal democracy, and to fortify the myth that progress is possible within it. Moreover, movements which take the electoral road subject themselves to debilitating pressures. The logic of getting the vote tends to conflict with the logic of grassroot mobilization, and all too often to overwhelm it.

Movementist positions contain many insights. It is wise, for example, to be attuned to the importance of ruptural breaks���the likelihood that we will ever get to a mass party simply through a molecular accretion of our ranks is slim. But the contention that movement building alone is the best way to prepare for such a rupture fails to take seriously the inherent weaknesses of social movements.

Of the numerous movements which sustained the first era of “protest” in post-Apartheid South Africa virtually none remain (barring one major exception). New ones have of course cropped up, and a tide of less organized community protests has continued unabated across the country. But these show equally little likelihood of autonomously cohering into anything bigger or more resilient.

It���s now very hard to avoid the conclusion that their failures resulted from internal rather than external factors. The model underpinning them rested on localized mobilization around immediate demands, while actively eschewing efforts to politicize a leadership layer. Some of their more excitable proponents portrayed them as crucibles of anti-capitalism, in which the mere experience of collective decision making offered a form of political education beyond what traditional forms of Left organization could hope to match.

But in doing so they exhibited the same fallacious thinking about class formation that informs all ventures aimed at ���changing the world without taking power.��� Much less a break with capitalism, it���s not clear that social movements even succeeded in getting most of their members to question their loyalty to the ANC. That left them prone to demobilization and disorganization when circumstances changed, when defeats where incurred or when key individuals drifted off or were co-opted.

One strategic upshot of this critique is that the trade-off between movement and party building posited by movementists is a false one. It���s likely that there is no winning formula for transforming single issue mobilizations into lasting, mass organizations without NGOifying them. But what we can do is to ensure that the small advances made by movements each time they arise are not dissipated. After all���the notion that struggle develops consciousness is not a false, what movementists get wrong is overstating the extent to which it does so organically. Virtually every movement throws up militant leaders, who stand to become tribunes for socialist politics if they can be identified, recruited and supported appropriately. This is work that a party is best suited to undertake.

But facing up to the limits of social movements should lead us to even stronger conclusions than this. It should lead us to question the overwhelming strategic significance that they have been accorded in the politics of the ���independent left.��� If movements are tough to sustain and to politicize, they may not be the vehicles best suited to bringing about a political rupture or ensuring that it outcome favors the Left.

Of course this was a strategic orientation that was largely foisted on us by circumstance. The stranglehold that the Tripartite Alliance (whose third member is the Congress of South African Trade Unions) exercised on organized labor and mass politics generally left little room for an alternative. But the situation has changed. The factionalization of the ANC, the split in COSATU and the emergence of its rival, the South African Federation of Trade Unions, have created an opening for a more militant socialism to regain a foothold in organized labor. This ought to be the clear priority of socialists.

For all its infirmities, the union movement still presents a much more promising site for grounding socialist politics in a mass base. Although this may not hold for much longer, unions remain mass membership organizations with considerable resources. Most importantly, and most differently from social movements, they have access to structural power (i.e, the power to withdraw labor and shut down the economy). Here is one insight of Leninism which time has not invalidated��� that our project will most likely fail unless that structural power is at its center.

If organized labor is once again to become our strategic focal point, this strengthens the case for not consigning the party to an intangible future. The synergies between party-building and organization building are arguably stronger in the case of unions than social movements. At a fairly abstract level, one reason for this is that union building (or revitalization) typically relies on a few individuals being prepared to take bold action out of moral conviction. Marxists have often argued something very different���that shopfloors collectivize as soon as workers wake up to their material interests. But narrow self-interest is unlikely to ever motivate someone to take the first steps towards organizing their co-workers, since doing so incurs enormous risks but yields no extra benefit���the essence of the ���free-rider��� problem.

Thus, it���s not a coincidence that so often in history, socialists of various stripes have been significantly overrepresented among the ���militant minority.��� The values that draw people to the banner of socialism are often the same as those that move them to action against workplace injustices. It’s also not a coincidence that a militant minority is more likely to take shape when socialist ideas are more prominent in the public realm.

Arresting the decline of South African unions, and returning them to their proud history of worker control and grassroots democracy will require a herculean organizing effort. At the simplest level this is why we need an organizational vehicle that at�� least broadly resembles a party. Without one we have no real means of translating strategic debates into action���of coordinating our energies towards the tasks most likely to yield long-term gains.

There���s therefore a case for not delaying in building a fighting organization, that tries to cohere leading militants from workplace and community struggles around a socialist program. But such an organization should do more. As soon as it has the numbers needed, it should seek to involve itself in elections. In all likelihood it would have to start at the local level, and logic would dictate that it seeks out community and social movement partners in doing so. But as quickly as possible is should seek to graduate to the national stage. South Africa���s unusually proportional representation electoral system (which was in fact designed to provide space for smaller parties), makes this a reasonable short-term goal.

The first thing that sceptics of this strategy tend to get wrong is that they overstate, or misunderstand, the legitimacy problem facing formal political institutions. The SRWP seems to think that any worker with lingering attachments to electoral politics is suffering from ���false consciousness.��� But in our current circumstances, there is nothing the least bit irrational about remaining invested in the electoral arena, even while recognizing the severity of its class bias. The simple reason for that, is that there is no existing social force capable of challenging state power while remaining entirely outside its institutions, nor does one show any prospect of coming into being in any foreseeable horizon. Worker organizations in SA are locked a desperate defensive struggle���not preparing to set up a parallel state.

It���s not a failure of dialectical imagination that causes people to conflate politics with elections, but an appraisal of our situation that is more accurate than the one provided by the apostles of imminent revolution.

It���s thus not surprising that despite the tremendous alienation produced by decades of neoliberalism, electoral movements in the West have been able to engineer a political realignment that was much deeper than what post-2008 movements were able to achieve on their own. Their location within the domain of mainstream politics provided both visibility but also a kind of credibility���they promised to take over the institutions in front of us, rather than replace them with ones we can’t see and can���t yet imagine. Several of these examples stood the movementist model on its head. Rather than an electoral breakthrough growing out of a period of intensified movement activity, it was the electoral arena itself that has delivered the rupture moment, the energy from which can then be filtered down to social and labor struggles.

In the process they challenged another fallacy of movementism���that the electoral arena is entirely inimical to a politics of struggle. Sanders, Corbyn, and others imbued their campaigns with a spirit of insurgency that succeeded in appealing to many otherwise turned off by politics, particularly among younger generations. Rather than sucking energy from the streets, these examples provided a renewed model of “class struggle elections��� ���not their own invention but one that had faded from the Left���s repertoire during the era of movementism.

Class struggle elections seek to deliberately leverage electoral campaigns, and political office itself, to bolster movements. They use every platform available to raise awareness of, and encourage solidarity with, labor and social struggles. In doing so they try to inculcate the understanding that radical policies can only be won with an inside-outside strategy, in which legislators are supported and pushed forward by powerful movements. At the same time they use campaigns as tools of organization building. They recruit and deploy a mass of activist to spread a socialist message, and simultaneously try to develop those activists by building political education into their activities. Done properly, this can bridge the gaps that supposedly separate movement from electoral organizing, infusing the latter with a powerful sense of collectivity. That���s why so many thousands of young Americans (to pick a recent example), were politically activated through their involvement in the Sanders campaign, which became a gateway to organizing in their workplaces, campuses and communities.

Note that this is completely different to the SRWP’s narrowly propagandistic approach to elections which didn’t promote social struggles so much as fantasies of revolution, whilst denouncing ‘bourgeois democracy’ as a sham and doing nothing to actually win. After a predictably disastrous outcome, the party chose to compound the embarrassment, and feed into a profoundly dangerous trend by denouncing South Africa���s independent election management body and claiming the result was rigged. Contrast its subsequent marginalization with the early trajectory with the Economic Freedom Fighters (now South Africa���s third-largest party), which leveraged the electoral know-how of its ex-ANCYL cadre and Malema’s media savvy to run an enormously successful first campaign. It then built on the success, steadily expanding its vote share each cycle, while using parliamentary office to bolster its national profile. Sadly it drifted off the orbit of the Left along the way. But the two diverging cases provide an obvious lesson: if elections are to be useful to us, we have to show that we are capable of succeeding in them. If we can’t, how on earth will we convince anyone that we’re capable of transforming society from its roots up?

None of this is to suggest that the concerns movementists raise about electoral politics are meritless.��Its unquestionably true that electoral competition imposes its own logic, which can be ruinous if it totally subsumes the party’s strategic purview. We can trace the decline of many a worker’s party, at least proximately, to misguided efforts to capture middle-class votes by abandoning a politics of class antagonism. But all socialist strategizing in our dismal conjuncture is the consideration of perilous alternatives. Far better for us to confront the dangers of succumbing to a narrow electoralism than the near certitude of permanent marginalization should we choose to abstain from mainstream politics altogether.

The NUMSA moment may have come and gone. But the many elements of the broader conjuncture which produced it, and which seemed to augur a new direction for socialist politics, persist. The Alliance coalition is in the doldrums. Expecting its inevitable demise is of course a pastime of which we ���independent leftists��� should now be wary. But the material facts this time really are different. The state faces a fiscal crisis that President Cyril Ramaphosa has neither the wherewithal nor the institutional tools to escape from. His factional opponents preach a ���radical economic transformation��� that offers nothing whatsoever to workers.

Social strains look set to keep accumulating. But assuming that any crisis they produce will�� automatically redound to the Left���s benefit would be folly. That will only happen if we have the political vision and the organizational capacity to ensure that class becomes the fault line of social polarization. And for that we need to face up to the challenge of constructing a new party.

The king is dead

The death of the Zulu king highlights the unresolved issues that continue to shapes lives in the KwaZulu-Natal province of South Africa. President Cyril Ramaphosa delivering the eulogy at the Special Official Funeral of King Goodwill Zwelithini KaBhekuzulu. Image credit GCIS via Flickr CC BY-ND 2.0.

On March 12, 2021, Goodwill Zwelithini, the king of the Zulus in South Africa, passed away from COVID-19 complications while being treated for diabetes at Chief Albert Luthuli Central Hospital in Durban. He was 72 years old. The longest-reigning Zulu monarch, Zwelithini���s reign stretched across the apartheid-era, the civil war in Natal, the political transition, the fight against HIV/AIDS (which hit the province of KwaZulu-Natal especially hard), and the COVID-19 pandemic. At the same time, his rule has not been without controversy and, for many, his reign has coincided with major economic burdens and societal strains. Despite these issues, for two weeks after his death, South Africa���s attention turned fully to Nongoma in the KwaZulu-Natal province where South Africans��� political elite and Zulu royalists struggled to chart the path forward.

In the wake of the announcement of his passing, high profile South African political leaders, especially from the ruling African National Congress, traveled to KwaKhethomthandayo palace in Nongoma to pay their respects to the late monarch and his family. They include former president Jacob Zuma, ANC treasurer-general Paul Mashatile, Minister of Cooperative Governance and Traditional Affairs Nkosazana Dlamini Zuma, and Kwazulu-Natal Premier Sihla Zikalala. Additionally, on March 16, Julius Malema, the leader of opposition party, the Economic Freedom Fighters, traveled to Nongoma to warn the royal family against division in the wake of the monarch���s death. Malema urged the royal family to stick together: ���The Zulu nation is celebrated as a united monarchy and we want to see that unity continue beyond this.���

While the ANC���s deference to the Zulu royal family doesn���t come as a surprise ��� it���s been part of its electoral strategy since the end of apartheid���Malema���s actions came more of a surprise.�� Zwelithini is the largest landowner in the province; he owns 29.67% of the province���s land as the sole trustee that controls Zulu ancestral land through the Ingonyama Trust. Founded in 1994, the Ingonyama Trust serves as a fund to manage land formerly owned by the KwaZulu Bantustan government. These lands (nearly 2.8 million hectares) are vested under Zwelithini as a trustee. Earlier this year, in January 2021, the Trust came under scrutiny for poor bookkeeping and issues of governance. Rural black people in KwaZulu complain of exploitation and excessive rents under the Trust. In 2018, Malema drew the ire of the Zulu Royal Family when he spoke out against the Ingonyama Trust as part of its larger focus on land reform as the EFF���s primary political strategy. However, in more recent years, Malema has changed his tone towards Zwelithini, courting the monarch���s favor, most ironically by gifting the king five cows in 2017. Given the centrality of land reform to the EFF���s political strategy, Malema���s praise of Zwelithini seems out of character.

Then there is Mangosuthu Buthelezi, the leader of the Zulu nationalist Inkatha Freedom Party. During apartheid, as I have written here earlier, he enjoyed a testy and at times needy relationship with the king (his KwaZulu Bantustan paid the king a salary). Buthelezi claims to be Zwelithini���s ���prime minister.��� Right after Zwelithini���s death, he publicly complained of being disrespected by the Zulu royal family over how the king���s corpse was being prepared for burial, claiming ���I cry because I take��unnecessary hits.���

Buthelezi also railed against negative press coverage of the late king in the days following his death; not surprising since complaining about the press coverage (and frequently suing South Africa newspapers is kind of Buthelezi���s modus operandi). Most of the initial coverage of Zwelithini���s legacy was quite fawning, including in Euro-American media. The BBC called him a ���straight talking king,��� while the New York Times credited him with ���”shepherd[ing] his people from the apartheid era into a modern democratic society.” This is not very surprising, given the lack of critical engagement with the king���s actions during the apartheid-era. Africa Is a Country���s tweets about my 2018 post about Zwelithini, ���The Emperor has no Clothes,��� surprised a few younger South Africans, unaware of the king���s collusion with apartheid since the start of his reign.

One exception was City Press editor-in-chief Mondli Makhanya. Makhanya wrote that the deceased king ���should be remembered for what his most prominent role was in our history: a useful idiot in the hands of the apartheid government, whose willingness to lend his powerful position to the service of that regime cost tens of thousands of lives.��� Sunday Times journalist Chris Barron similarly penned an opinion piece which described Zwelithini as a ���kept man,��� referring to the extravagant government salary enjoyed by the late monarch. Buthelezi responded that the royal family had ���been pierced to the heart by the vulgar lies splashed across two national newspapers by the editor of the City Press and in the obituary of the Sunday Times.��� The two articles, Buthelezi charged, amounted to ���sadistic cruelty.���

President Cyril Ramaphosa extended the distinction of a Special Official Funeral Category 1, which is a distinction reserved for ���outstanding persons specifically designated by the President of South Africa on request by the Premier of a province.��� Ramaphosa has also granted this distinction to former Chief of State Protocol Billy Modise in June 2018, BaPedi King Victor Thulare in January 2021 and human rights lawyer and social activist George Bizos in September 2020.�� Obviously, holding a state funeral in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic posed challenges and measures were taken to lessen the number of mourners who would appear in person to celebrate the late king. Buthelezi sent out a plea to mourners to ���not to travel to Nongoma to pay their respects,��� adding that it is ���vital that we avoid crowds gathering at this time, as this would place lives in jeopardy;��� with this in mind, the family decided not to have Zwelithini���s body lay in state as had been done with his father, Cyprian.

With the threat of a super-spreader event in mind, Eskom, South Africa���s electrical provider, decided to suspend load shedding to allow as many mourners as possible to watch the livestream of the service. A statement from Eskom explained: ���This extraordinary measure has been implemented to allow the nation to witness a key and significant historical event at this difficult time in the life of the Zulu nation. Afterwards, load shedding will then be implemented and continue as previously communicated.��� It is estimated that this suspension of load shedding cost 20 million rand; the last in a long line of government-shouldered expenses stemming from the late Zulu monarch and his family of six wives and estimated 32 children.

Even with this effort to avoid large crowds (and extravagant expense to be shouldered by taxpayers), hundreds flocked to Nongoma on March 18, 2021 to honor the life of Zwelithini. Although the king had been buried privately the night before, his subjects, South African political elite, and celebrity mourners (including Princess Charlene of Monaco). Numerous speakers took to the stage to honor Zwelithini���s legacy, including Buthelezi and Ramaphosa.

Ramaphosa���s comment that Zwelihtini ���was a bridge-builder between cultures,��� stands in harsh contrast to the xenophobic and homophobic comments that Zwelithini has made in recent years At the end of Ramaphosa���s remarks, Zulu amabutho (warriors) attempted to storm the stage. An anonymous source reported that this was meant to embarrass the President and let him know ���that he isn���t welcomed in the province until he has smoked a peace pipe with Zuma and others,��� referring to Ramaphosa���s negative comments on the former president���s refusal to appear before the Constitutional Court.

As for Buthelezi, he propagated a similarly revisionist version of the late monarch���s career and political legacy, purporting that ���his reign saw no wars ��� yet he reigned through one of the most turbulent times in our nation���s history.��� Not long after this statement, however, Buthelezi contradicted himself, noting that Zwelithini ���was always a king at war and we, his warriors, were always in battle.���

Now that the king has been buried and honored, attention now turns to the future of the Zulu Kingdom. With the late monarch���s estimated net worth valued at R284 million and an annual budget of R71.3 million awarded to the royal house by the government in 2020, the next monarch of the Zulu kingdom is already a very wealthy man. At a private reading of the Zwelithini���s will, his ���great wife��� (and sister to current Swazi King Mswati III) Mantfombi MaDlamini Zulu was named as regent and the king indicated that he wished his successor to come from her Kwakhangelamankengane palace. Many expected Zwelithini���s successor to be his first-born son, Lethukuthula, but his suspicious death in November 2020 complicates the path to succession. The selection of Mantfombi as regent indicates that her son, Misuzulu, is likely to be the next Zulu king, though we will not know for sure until the three-month mourning period comes to an end.

In addition to the issues surrounding succession, the future of the Ingonyama Trust immediately emerged as a major source of concern. Debates over the future of the Trust have proliferated for years, with Zwelithini standing as a staunch defender of this land-holding organization. This role as protector of the Ingonyama Trust is of particular importance as a new trustee (in the form of the new Zulu king) will collect profits from the Trust, while collects funds for each ���permission to occupy��� certificate and lease agreements. Many have expressed concerns about the future of the trust, including a prominent chief, Mabhudu Tembe, who shared with IOL.com reporters on that interested parties (namely, the state) ���may exploit the vacuum and rush the process to grab it.��� Tembe, a chief in the Manguzi area, warned of the repercussions is the state disbanded the trust. ���I must warn them that they must know we are still around as traditional leaders and we will defend the trust,��� Tembe declared. With the pressures of COVID-19 and decades of economic downturn pressing on the Zulu nation, these tensions threaten to boil over if the situation is not managed carefully.

The unforeseen threat

Many of Nairobi's apocalypse merchants and prophesy peddlers have disappeared in the past year. Reflections on how a year of coronavirus has re-shaped the city and the lives of its residents. Fruit seller trading from a garage on the Mombasa to Nairobi road. Image credit Robert's Life in Colour on Flickr CC BY-SA 2.0.

This post is from our series of reposts from Kenyan publication The Elephant.

A year after COVID-19 was officially declared a crisis by the Chinese government in Wuhan Province, I traveled to Moi Ndabi on Christmas eve 2019, a fast-growing trading center 40 kilometers from Naivasha town and 140 kilometers northwest of Nairobi. The area is mainly populated by the Maasai people and migrant Kikuyus. I arrived in the sweltering heat of midday, my light blue surgical mask in place. It was the first thing that my hosts and the people at the trading centre noticed. ���You people from Nairobi are the ones bringing this corona to us,��� one of my hosts, Silvanus Kaamamia said, only half in jest.

���Can you see anybody wearing those things here? Here in Moi Ndabi there���s no corona, this is a foreign disease. It is a white man���s disease and we don���t believe it can infect a black man.��� It was as if my mask had suddenly reminded the Moi Ndabi dwellers of the pandemic.

Kaamamia is the archetypal Maasai man. He once lived in the forest with other morans before being conscripted into the Kenya Army where he trained as a tank commander. ���I���ve not worn any mask,��� said Kaamamia, ���nobody wears them here. They are not even sold in the shops.��� A cursory stroll around the centre proved him right���no one wore a mask and no shop stocked them. I was the ���sick man of Moi Ndabi��� walking around with my nose and mouth covered.

The ex-army man told me that the coronavirus is an alien disease of the rich: ���I���m yet to meet anyone who knows anybody who has died of the disease. Yes, I have been watching the television which has narrated how the devastating disease has invaded the white people in Europe and America. The white people are weak, their body immune system cannot withstand even the slightest of a feverish attack.���

���What about the black people who have been felled by the disease, including Kenyans?��� I asked him. ���They had taken to the modern western lifestyle and heavily relied on western medicine,��� he replied.

Kaamamia said he could not remember being hospitalized or even swallowing any antibiotics since coming of age: ���When you live in the forests, you are taught to identify all the cultural and traditional medicinal plants that one can always rely on if sick. Forget about these pharmaceutical drugs, they are all toxic.��� Kaamamia said he had already gathered some herbal plants which he had mixed and boiled for his family and friends. Ole tarmunyo is a bitter, stinging concoction, which can be taken at any time of the day by men, women, and children alike.

Kaamamia���s wife, a university graduate and a teacher who is currently breastfeeding, takes a dose of ole tarmunyo every day. ���The concoction is so effective that simple ailments like fever and fatigue are kept at bay, because the medicine bolsters your immunity and clears off toxicants from the body,��� said the teacher. ���It is the ultimate detox drink.��� Taken for the first time, it can easily knock you out.

Kaamamia���s first cousin Jacob Letoya���a feisty, fast talking lanky fellow aged 32-years-old who looks like he has just turned 27���had recently been down with fever. ���I couldn���t tell what it was, I felt weak in the joints, like I���d caught malaria, I couldn���t eat meat, it felt tasteless, my body felt tired. What was that? Don���t tell me it was coronavirus. No real Maasai man can get this crazy disease. Anyhow, I called Kaamamia who ferried ole tarmunyo in a gallon to my house where I lay motionless.��� Letoya lives a kilometer away from his cousin.

The following day, Letoya said, he was back to his usual self���as fleet of foot and as sprightly as an antelope. ���The fever was all gone. You can never go wrong with our time-tested traditional medicine. As you people wait for the vaccine to come from abroad, which will be sold to you like gold by the thieving politicians even though they���ll have been given to distribute freely to the masses, we, we already have our own vaccine. I recommend you take a gallon full of ole tarmunyo back to Nairobi, I promise you, you won���t even be wearing that thing.���

On March 3, the first batch of one million AstraZeneca vaccines arrived in Nairobi under the COVAX program. COVAX is a global collaborative initiative driven by the World Health Organization (WHO) to ensure that even the poorest countries that cannot afford the vaccine have access to it.

In Nairobi, the pandemic has led the urbanites to rediscover the value of garlic, ginger, and lemon and they have been mixing their own concoctions with these ingredients to fend off the disease, with the result that the price of lemons has shot up and remains high. A lemon that used to cost KSh5 pre-pandemic is retailing at KSh20 today. Many Nairobians have been religiously drinking this concoction morning and night so business is brisk for garlic, ginger, and lemon merchants even as dispensing chemists have seen a spike in the number of people trooping in to stock up on antibiotics.

As life in Moi Ndabi went on oblivious to this pandemic that is ravaging humanity, Nairobi County, where I had been in lockdown for close to ten months, was already showing signs of ���pandemic fatigue.��� Pandemic fatigue has been described by the World Health Organization (WHO) as ���demotivation to follow recommended protective behaviors, emerging gradually over time and affected by a number of emotions, experiences and perceptions.���

In a report titled Pandemic Fatigue���Reinvigorating the Public to Prevent COVID-19 published in August 2020, the WHO further states, ���At the beginning of a crisis, most people are able to tap into their surge capacity���a collection of mental and physical adaptive systems that humans draw on for short-term survival in acutely stressful situations. However, when dire circumstances drag on, they have to adopt a different style of coping, and fatigue and demotivation may be the result.���

Nairobians have been breaking critical pandemic rules: they are not maintaining social distancing in the crowded fruit and vegetable markets, at the matatu stops, in the pubs or in other social gatherings. The temperature gun has become a gadget to be casually pointed at customers entering office buildings, restaurants, schools, and supermarkets. In many government buildings security does not even bother to pretend to take your temperature. Water dispensers at government buildings are more often than not either broken or simply not available. A friend recently told me bluntly: ���Coronavirus is over, what���s your problem?���

Even masks have been discarded and many just hang them around their necks to avoid harassment from the police. At Marigiti Market, which I frequent often, I asked my friend Morgan Njeri, a fruit vendor, why she had taken off her mask. Her reply was curt and precise: ���I���m tired of this thing, I���ll not continue covering my face forever. Masks are for oldies like you, and the rich. Look around here, do you see anybody wearing any mask? What for? We don���t board planes and we don���t live in the leafy suburbs.���

But panic swept through Githurai Market after the deadly disease claimed the lives of more than ten men between March 13 and October 2020. ���The men were all veterans of the market, and they succumbed one after the other,��� said a market woman. Their deaths were hushed up among the market traders, said the vendor. ���People have dismissed COVID-19 as a scare disease, one that would hardly find its way to Githurai. I mean how? Then we heard so-and-so was down with a terrible fever and the next thing he was was gone, just like that. Then another and another and people were now really scared.��� The fruit vendor said that the men were hastily buried in their rural homes, eerily clothed in polythene suits.

���I wear this thing because of the police,��� said Njoroge, a friend of mine who works as a tout on the Nairobi-Kikuyu route. Once we reached Kangemi, he yanked off his mask and threw it away. ���We���ve become slaves to these things, it hinders my work, I feel hot around the face, it���s just tiring. I hate it.���

The police have found a new lucrative line of extortion. If they catch you not wearing your mask properly, they pounce on you and demand KSh500. Five hundred bob is the bribe you must surrender to a predatory policeman or policewoman.

Although many of the 33-seater matatus have had their seats re-arranged to accommodate the social distancing rule, the reality is that no one really cares about social distancing. While during the day many matatus may indeed enforce physical distancing of just about a meter between passengers, in the evenings and at night all caution is thrown out of the window.

Travelling in a matatu to Kiambaa one evening in the thick of the pandemic lockdown, I asked the conductor why he was not afraid of being arrested for carrying a matatu that was full to capacity:

You boarded at the terminus, did you hear any passenger complain? They all want to go home, pay a fairer price and beat the curfew. If you want to observe social distancing, you���re free to hail an Uber. Wear your mask if you must, who really knows whether this COVID-19 exists or not. Personally, I���m very sceptical that it exists. But what do I know and what do I care? The police? For all they care, COVID-19 is a boon for them to make hay while the sun shines. At the roadblock, they���ll stop us, and you watch, I���ll come out, a one hundred shilling note folded in my hand, we���ll exchange pleasantries and they���ll wave us on, another day, another ritual and life goes on.

The Kabete Police Station roadblock, which used to be erected just outside the station, was considered one of the most notorious in the country. It has since been removed. Oblivious of the public, the police would openly solicit and collect bribes day and night from matatus, private vehicles, and lorries. ���The advent of the pandemic had emboldened the Kabete cops to harass the motorists, more so the matatus because of their vulnerability and familiarity with the police officers.���

���All they needed to do is accuse a matatu of not observing social distancing, accuse a motorist of carrying ���excess��� passengers and everything else fell into place; they collected more and more bribes until they started boasting about it,��� said a matatu Sacco boss. The powerful matatu bosses of the Nairobi-Kikuyu-Kiambaa route came together and complained to authorities higher up: if something was not done about the roadblock, they were going to ground their vehicles.

The coronavirus crisis has created a new revenue stream for the famously money-hungry Kenyan police and many have minted a fortune out of the pandemic. Last December some police officers from the Kikuyu Police Station came up with an invidious scheme���they stalked shoppers at a Zambezi Centre supermarket and arrested all those who were not wearing masks or were hanging them around their necks. Some waited for shoppers outside the supermarket. Threatened with the public embarrassment of being hauled off to the police station, many women shoppers quickly parted with KSh500 or more.

���That���s why these people never end well,��� one woman who had fallen victim said to me. ���Imagine there are some women who parted with half of their money. Every calamity has its own beneficiaries. At the top government echelons, coronavirus has been a blessing in disguise���some state bureaucrats have minted millions of shillings and their greatest prayer is: if only this thing could continue. The police have taken the cue and they are not to be left behind in the latest scheme to defraud the public.���

The coronavirus pandemic came as a shock to Kenyans: none had ever experienced an epidemic of global proportions so they assumed it was a whirlwind that would soon dissipate. The management of a private hospital in Nairobi decided to test all its staff for coronavirus. ���Staffers were turning positive by the numbers,��� confided a dispensing chemist stationed at the hospital. ���In the finance department, human resources, nurses, consultant physicians and even pharmacists, all were tested. The management had neither anticipated the outcome nor prepared for the shock. The hospital immediately stopped the testing and forbade staff from talking about the exercise. The management reasoned that if a critical number of the staffers were quarantined, the hospital would grind to a halt because there would be no one to run it.���

A year later, the coronavirus has wreaked havoc everywhere: ���I���m not talking to my husband,��� one friend said to me in July. ���I don���t know what���s wrong with him.��� What was ���wrong with him��� was that he had lost his job and with his source of money gone, he could no longer support his young family and it now fell on his wife to take on most of the financial responsibilities. Unaccustomed to being the sole provider for the family, the added financial responsibilities were weighing her down. ���He doesn���t even leave the house. Why can���t he take a stroll like other men?���

Another told me she had separated from her husband. ���I couldn���t take it anymore,��� she said. What she ���couldn���t take anymore���, was the fact that he could not now bring any bacon home ���but he still wanted to be treated like the boss of the house���. ���If you want to be king, let your actions prove it���don���t depend on your wife to prop up your bossy life.��� She accused her husband of ���bumming��� around the house, ���ordering everybody and waiting to be served.���

I asked my friend Eric why he was drinking on a weekday and at midday. I had met him in a mutual friend���s office. ���I���m cooling off, can���t you feel the heat?��� I did not immediately get the irony. Eric had lost his job and his wife, he told me, had become intolerable: ���Every other day we are just picking quarrels. I don���t know where all these quarrels are coming from suddenly. I no longer want to stay in that house. I don���t even eat in that house nowadays. When I enter, I go straight to the bedroom and doze off.��� The ���heat��� in the house, ostensibly caused by his wife, had driven him out.

Yet another friend shared with me how working from home has caused a lot of friction and grief between him and his wife: ���I���m now having my Zoom meetings in restaurants; I���ve left the house to her. This COVID-19 crisis seems to have given her an excuse to transplant her office in the house. She will not do anything because she���s at the ���office��� working.���

Even people who have been married a long time have not been spared. ���My husband has relocated to shags [rural area]. It seems Nairobi had become too much for him,��� said a friend I have known for 35 years. She did not want to divulge much about the husband whom I have known for just as long. ���He now wants to spend more and more time with his mother, more than anything else������ I could sense something was I amiss but I could not put my finger on it.

The arrival of the pandemic in Kenya has also exposed how some expatriates relate to Kenyans. My friend Otis, who works with a Chinese construction company, China Wu Yi, told me how in the middle of the raging coronavirus crisis, the Chinese staff at the company���s Kikuyu Town offices treated them like lepers. ���They cautioned we Kenyans not to get anywhere near them. They barricaded themselves in the offices. They barked orders from afar and if they needed to pass on something to us the local team, they threw whatever it was at us. The Chinese staff claimed that we could pass coronavirus to them,��� said Otis, who operates heavy machinery.

In the period between March 13, 2020���when the government declared a quasi-lockdown in the country���and the arrival of the vaccines on March 3, 2021, COVID-19 had claimed its fair share of victims, among them people I had interacted with.

One such coronavirus victim was politician Joe Nyagah, a man I had come to know in his later years. Three weeks before his sudden death on December 11, 2020, I had been with Joe at his house in Nairobi where we spent the entire afternoon talking nothing else but raw politics, of course. Joe took every caution that a man of his age would take; whenever he was in Nairobi he walked regularly around his huge courtyard, he ate light and his hygiene regimen was impeccable. Joe was a spirited soul; he laughed often and regaled one with stories from his life in the corporate world, as a diplomat and of course as a canny politician. You could be a careful Joe, but coronavirus is no respecter of age, agility, or ambition.

The pandemic picks its victims from all ethnicities and all races, and does not discriminate along gender lines. My friend Hanif Adam, a Kenyan of Asian descent, told me how the coronavirus has caused havoc in the Asian community, with infections initially occurring at weddings. ���Since then weddings have become no-go zones for [rich] Asians. Important as they are to our community, I���ve also stopped attending weddings: it doesn���t matter whether it is the wedding of my closest relative, social distancing notwithstanding.���

In the one year that the coronavirus has wrought havoc here and abroad, threats of Armageddon and rapture have suddenly disappeared from the incantations of the self-anointed and self-appointed apostles, bishops, evangelists, exorcists, ministers, pastors, prophets, spiritualists, and soothsayers. What happened? COVID-19 has exposed the hollowness of these miracle merchants and prophesy peddlers. By a twist of fate, God had not forewarned or revealed to them the great calamity that was coming and that was going to create such apocalyptic anxieties.

Even when it came, they still could not decipher the meaning of the strange disease, the�� anxieties it was creating among their flock and what it portended for the future of humanity. The self-styled evangelical preachers who are used to ���performing miracles��� at crusades and holy sanctuaries could neither perform nor preach, whether privately or publicly. Fearing they would be victims of a modern pandemic themselves, the preachers went underground and secretly sought medical care from established private healthcare facilities as they abandoned their flock. They are yet to resurface. To use a clich��, it was everybody for themselves and God for us all.

Essentialism and the making of African refugees

African ���refugeeness��� as it is currently depicted in the media, policy, and even academia is an essentialist physical image conflating material deprivation and multiple victimhoods. Image credit Zoriah via Flickr CC BY-NC 2.0.

Historically, African refugees were capable of political participation even to the point of building vibrant states in the new lands they fled to in precolonial Africa. The migrations triggered by the Mfecane in Southern Africa, often discussed as part of precolonial state-building, are historical refugee movements by people who, in hindsight, moved because of ���well-founded fear of persecution��� enshrined in the 1951 Geneva Refugee Convention. As breakaway factions that fled Nguniland in present-day South Africa settled in new areas, they built new states, exemplified by the Ndebele State founded by Mzilikazi and his followers in present day southern Zimbabwe.

Colonial era refugees similarly exercised political agency and contributed to liberation and independence. In the frontline states, refugee status was intertwined with political and military activities, as refugee camps accommodated both liberation movements and civilians exemplified by Black people who fled Rhodesia and were accommodated at Mgagao in Tanzania, and Chimoio and Nyadzonia in Mozambique. Refugee camps, such as those at Nyadzonia and Chimoio, were hives of political activity and military strategizing. This led to Rhodesian forces bombing both camps in 1976 and 1977 respectively in what became the infamous symbols of Zimbabwe���s liberation war. At independence, colonial regimes were supplanted by African regimes that similarly generated refugees in many instances. Post-independence states were deemed as subversive and outlawed political and military activities among refugees. Refugee hosting became an apolitical, social, and humanitarian act.

Therein lies the contemporary pathologization of African refugees. Post-independence African refugees have become the embodiment of an apathetic state symbolized by victimhood and ���bare life.��� More than being a legal status, the refugee status, as it is borne by Africans, has an essence of ���refugeeness.��� African ���refugeeness��� as it is currently depicted in the media, policy, and even academia is an essentialist physical image conflating material deprivation and multiple victimhoods. It blends insecurity with poverty, lack of education, old age, and diseases. Its gender dimension is made up of vulnerable femininity and desperate motherhood, represented by sexual and gender-based violence and malnourished babies and toddlers in a category Cynthia Enloe (1992) in the edited collection, Collateral Damage-���New World Order��� at Home and Abroad, aptly describes as ���womenandchildren.��� These women are gender-balanced by masculinity in a state of dangerous vulnerability, which makes them the object of both empathy and antipathy.

Over the years, the muting power of images has rendered African refugees an undifferentiated although gendered mass of victimhood. This has become the yardstick against which ���refugeeness��� as an essentialist status or the genuineness of asylum claims are measured in public opinion. Refugees who do not fit the stereotypical image of ���refugeeness��� as a state of multiple victimhoods are dismissed as spurious. It would seem that it is only the poor, aged, infirm, and female who flee violent conflicts. Yet, the reality of violent conflict is that it also displaces the well-to-do, young, healthy, and male. African refugees are made up of varied demographic characteristics and come from diverse backgrounds that cannot be homogenized into a single socioeconomic status captured by essentialist discourses framed around the forlorn image of the African refugee.

The transcendence of boundaries

What kinds of radical emancipatory futures are being imagined in Africa���s speculative fictions? Ouadane Ksour, Mauritania. Image credit Carsten ten Brink via Flickr CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.

Speculative fiction in Africa is currently enjoying a renaissance moment. For those ���Who No Know Go Know������to borrow Cape Town platform Chimurenga���s motto���it���s becoming an increasingly prominent genre and an exciting challenge to keep up with the great range of authors and texts imagining possible futures in Africa.

By setting narratives in spaces not only beyond our real world but also in it, and writing stories that blend mythological and futuristic elements, Africa���s speculative fiction writers are imagining manifold emancipatory futures.

In an introductory essay titled ���Afrofuturism: Ayashis��� Amateki��� and published in the short story anthology Intruders in 2018, the South African novelist Mohale Mashigo presented a manifesto of sorts for speculative fiction writers on the continent. She proclaims there that to fully engage with this body of fiction, there is a need to engage with the continent as a whole and then with the specificities of specific sites, cultures and languages in Africa. This proclamation nuances, and even counters, some of the tenets of Afrofuturism, an African American cultural aesthetic that emerged in the twentieth century.

It may seem obvious to say so, then, but Africa takes center stage in its speculative fictions. And the simple act of centralizing the continent has key emancipatory potential. Malawian writer Wesley Macheso���s ���Waking Up in Kampala��� (2016) illuminates this point clearly. The story is set in Kampala, the so-called Silicon Valley of Africa, during the age of the post-Technocalypse in the summer of 2515. While the story explores futuristic forms of life in all sorts of ways, the depiction of a technological takeover that has destroyed the Western world and left Africa as a single country is the driving force of the story. Africa has combatted the Technocalypse by means of its ���rich natural resources��� (for Macheso); indeed, Africa is the world���s leading power. Here, Macheso works to reverse the global order of socio-politics today, and with it the story registers a radically transformed future.

An interesting addition here is that, while speculative fiction���s project is to centralize the continent as landmass, as a place, as a unified power, it also projects Africa���s people as a collectivity in the future. Of course, there are some powerful superhero tales out there which focus on the individual, but concepts such as ubuntu are vividly interwoven in speculative texts in Africa today. Further to this, one could also add that much speculative fiction works to collapse the self-other dichotomy���there appears to be very little interest in producing yet another ���Other��� in Africa���s imagined futures. In this sense, the future is inclusive.

The above points contribute to the idea that speculative fiction in Africa intervenes in and disturbs dominant present-future narratives so often prescribed by the West. Further to centralizing Africa, then, writers of the genre are also effectively unravelling the thread of logic that keeps progress narratives in place. This is largely achieved by disrupting linearity. Let���s take Zimbabwean Tendai Huchu���s ���Njuzu��� as one example: Huchu���s story is set on Ceres���the agricultural hub of the main asteroid belt���but it also incorporates the Shona water sprite believed to live in lakes and rivers. Various expectations are subverted here. For one, the story immediately wreaks havoc with linear temporality by integrating a traditional mythical creature into a futuristic tale based on a planet in space.

Beyond the existence of njuzu in the future, the blending of spirituality and technology in the short story is also important. In a moment of ceremony on Ceres, the story���s characters gather around Bimha���s pond, joining drummers and ululating women in front of a hologram of ���Nyati, the buffalo, their clan���s totem��� (included in Afrosf, the 2018 anthology edited by Ivor Hartmann). From this simple extract, we see that hologram and totem���spirituality and digitality; past, present and future temporalities���are conjoined. Nyati���a traditionally sacred figure���is technologically advanced and digitally connected here. This leaves the reader with the strong impression that indigeneity is certainly not antithetical to technology or modernity. Ultimately, Huchu combines apparently incompatible things to create a radically different, emancipated futurescape.

While mythical creatures are significant in speculative fictions in Africa, the depiction of human-nature interaction is yet another interesting way in which writers are imagining radically liberated futures. Think of Nigerian-American Nnedi Okorafor���s many works. In Lagoon (2014) alone we find various marine creatures, a bat, and a spider. Beyond mere representation, each of these creatures owns a first-person narrative in Lagoon. Similarly, in Namwali Serpell���s The Old Drift (2019), mosquitoes tell their story. A dragonfly is central to Wole Talabi���s short story ���Incompleteness Theories��� (2019). Lauren Beukes��� Zoo City (2010) incorporates various animals in the dystopian landscape of Johannesburg. Another example is Stacy Hardy���s short story ���A Butcher Fantasy��� which asks: what would it be like if a person got trapped inside a cow? What if human-animal roles were reversed? Engaging with multispecies in this way, by attempting to understand the experiences of various animals and giving voice to creatures in narratives, is an essential step toward acknowledging non-human agency on earth; a significant step in our current age toward a more sustainable future.

In sum, the imagined future in Africa���s speculative fictions is not restrictive. On the contrary, it is open-minded, multiple, non-linear, and ultimately focused on the transcendence of boundaries.

On a final note, the above sentiment carries from the content of speculative fictions to form. Not only is ���speculative fiction��� an expansive category, but the form in which many speculative fiction writers are publishing their works today contributes to its emancipatory potential. Transcending some of the boundaries imposed by a publishing industry which largely performs a gatekeeping role, writing in the short form, and to a large extent appearing in the digital space, the speculative text seems not to be so constrained by some more traditional publishing structures. This is importantly helping to diversify���indeed, emancipate ���the narrative of the future in interesting ways.

Parts of this article are based on Woods���s paper in the journal Scrutiny2: Issues in English Studies in Southern Africa. Permissions under the Creative Commons License.

A compassionate take on an invisible struggle

A new film by South African director Nomawonga Khumalo represents the contradictions and nuances of black women���s interior lives. Still from Five Tiger.

Early in Five Tiger, a short film from South Africa, the audience is confronted with a striking visual: a woman in a car passenger seat accepts a folded R50 (about US$3.50) note (colloquially known as a ���five tiger���) from a man in the driver seat. The transaction is almost wordless, but the viewer feels the resigned movements of the film���s lead, played tenderly by Ayanda Seoka.

The beautifully shot short film, which was written and directed by Nomawonga Khumalo in her debut, is screening at this year���s Sundance Film Festival. It tells the story of Fiona, a young woman living in the outskirts of Johannesburg, and how she makes ends meet for herself, her daughter, and sick husband. (You can watch the trailer here.)

Still from Five Tiger.

Despite the film���s runtime of just over 10 minutes, we get a sense of the complexity of the protagonist���she engages in sex work to supplement the household income, finds joy in religion, knows how to wield a panga, and has a green thumb. She is a mother who listens to and cares for her daughter, especially her education. This vignette of Fiona���s life is told with generosity and sensitivity, which is a testament to Khumalo and the team���s dedication to representing the contradictions and nuances of black women���s interior lives.

In a Sundance Institute interview Khumalo says that ���the fetishism of violence enacted upon the black, female body creates a type of compassion fatigue. It was important that Fiona���s dignity took precedence over her adversaries, poverty being the most urgent one.���

In South Africa, all aspects of sex work are illegal. Yet, as the film demonstrates, transactional relationships abound even in the most righteous places. Fiona���s pastor, Fumani Shilubana, is revealed later to be the man in the driver���s seat.

According to Khumalo, Five Tiger ���takes an intersectional approach at unpacking feminism in the religious context.��� At the end of the film, there is a scene where Fiona and her church congregation are sitting in a field, all dressed in white. The tray for tithes comes around, and with a content smile, Fiona takes a folded R50 from her Bible, and places it on the tray. Seeing as that was where she put the eponymous five tiger from earlier in the film, we are led to reflect on the cyclic nature of patriarchy, and how religion often plays a role in sustaining it.

Nomawonga Khumalo.

Khumalo was inspired to write this short film in 2018, after she met sex workers who were waiting for clients���truck drivers mostly���in the scorching heat. The road wasn���t busy, and in their downtime the women would ���collect reeds to make grass mats and firewood to sell,��� says Khumalo.

���A thin piece of fabric tore, and the fallen sticks presented me with an opportunity to engage a woman that my culture and religion would prefer I���d treat as invisible. A shy, timid smile revealed bright pink gums and a few stained teeth as she spoke softly���praying, speaking a blessing over my work and my health. She told me [���] about how one day, God would look favourably upon her because she tithed and kept her faith. ���God loves us all��� were her parting words and that just made me livid.���

This story grounds the film in a reality many would prefer to ignore and adds dimension to ways in which Five Tiger makes visible religion, patriarchy, and African women living in the shadow of the city.

Equatorial Guinea’s ‘American Dirt’

A novel and Netflix film about Spanish colonialism in Equatorial Guinea raises questions about appropriation and storytelling. Still from Palmeiras en la Nieve.

Readers of Africa Is a Country might be familiar with the controversy stirred by the publication of Jeanine Cummins��� novel American Dirt and Oprah Winfrey���s enthusiastic endorsement, a proverbial thumbs-up that Ms. Cummins took straight to the bank. The story is about the travails of a middle-class Mexican woman forced into an epic journey with her ten-year old son from her native Acapulco to the mythological ���Norte������the Mexico-Texas border.

While Cummins��� novel at first received a positive reception due particularly to Oprah���s imprimatur, a group of writers, intellectuals, immigration activists, and readers with direct knowledge of migration experiences did not see American Dirt���s rendering of complex immigration problems as enlightening. Some charged Cummins with stereotypical character portrayals, an implicit adherence to Trump-like projections of a Hispanic invasion of the US.

The polemic surged (and still surges) with reviews that appeared in popular journals and on-line media. One review in particular by�� a recognized latinx writer, Myriam Gurba, added to the assessments of the contents of the novel with an equally severe evaluation of Cummins��� writing. The title (in Spanglish) of her review gives an idea of why she is annoyed, ���Pendeja, You Ain���t Steinbeck: Mi Bronca With Fake-ass Social Justice Literature���: a series of invectives about implausible if not unbelievable situations and circumstances, an ingenuous exaltation of a North American xenophobic and simplistic vision of Hispanic immigrants, to say nothing of the embarrassingly poor word usage and sentence structure. As a response Oprah called on some of the critics to discuss the novel with the author on her show.

As someone with a long-time interest in immigration-emigration issues as they relate to the border between Africa and Spain, I���m not surprised by the controversy. In fact, there is a similar case in Spain, although it has not received nearly as much attention as it deserves. A novel by Luz Gab��s, Palmeras en la Nieve (Palm Trees in the Snow) was adapted into a Netflix film about Spanish colonialism in Equatorial Guinea, a country often described as the only area south of the Sahara whose language of colonization is Spanish. Like American Dirt, Gab��s��� novel has had a great deal of commercial success even though it���s critical reception among historians of Spanish colonization efforts in Africa has been less than positive.

Palm Trees (novel and film) is about a love relationship between a Spanish colonialist from a family of plantation owners and a ���native��� (Gab��s��� designation for a colonial subject, i.e. a black woman) who like virtually all the ���natives��� in the area work on the plantation. The novel is set both in Africa and Spain in the 1950s: ���Fernando Poo,��� the colonial name for what today is Bioko (Equatorial Guinea), and the hometown of the plantation owners, Pasobolino in Aragon (Spain) from the 1950s to independence in 1968 and post-independence. The black-white contrast is a fundamental theme of the novel within the conventions of a historical romance: an impossible love affair between a powerful (albeit sensitive) man and a beautiful ���native���: lots of drama, violence stemming from colonialism and racism, tragic separation, ending in the pathetic reality that after all the years of yearning, the dream of integration and/or reconciliation is impossible even in a present historical moment in which Equatorial Guinea is free of Spanish rule. This indeed is a pathetic fallacy in the midst of Spanish colonialism in Africa.

The success of both cultural productions has much to do with reader and viewer expectations, those of a predominantly white audience in both cases eager to learn about the pressing issue of race relations in areas with which they are not directly familiar. Historical accuracy is less an artistic concern than keeping the pages moving. A Spanish historian, Gonzalo ��lvarez Chillida, a longtime researcher on Equatorial Guinea, published a lengthy academic review of the novel stating that Gab��s��� text is filled with historical inaccuracies, some more egregious than others, and gives readers a jaded view of the complexity of Spain���s colonial role in African history. However, to Gab��s��� credit, her book includes a postscript in an ���Author���s Note��� in which she assures her readers that the novel is ���pure fiction,��� a statement that sounds disingenuous considering that she also tells us how much research she has done for her novel, so much so that she includes a bibliography. Can we imagine Tolstoy including a list of ���Works Cited��� for his War and Peace? Also important in her claims of authority is her background: she is the daughter of plantation owners who lived for a time in Equatorial Guinea as exploiters of a coffee plantation. The subject position could not be more clear.

So what are we to do���academics, intellectuals in the know, other fiction writers who explore themes surrounding colonialism and postcolonialism? What do we or should we make of these popular texts? Should we care? In the case of American Dirt, there was and remains an answer to those questions. After the indignation settled down critics of the novel got in touch with Oprah, pressured her and the communications networks into a discussion of the issue, and the result, I hope, is that many members of Cummins��� audience were made aware of another reality. The most positive result was that the author of American Dirt unwittingly created a movement called ���Dignidad Literaria��� (Literary Dignity, spearheaded by some of the authors of the negative reviews; the stated purpose of the organization appears on their web page:

Dignidad Literaria is a network of committed Latinx authors formed to combat the invisibility of Latinx authors, editors and executives in the U.S. publishing industry and the dearth of Latinx literature on the shelves of America���s bookstores and libraries. #DignidadLiteraria believes in the social and political power of wholly authentic Latinx voices and that it is the duty of the publishing industry and literati to use their full power and privilege to elevate these voices.

The case of the controversy over Spanish cultural production related to the former empire���s history in Africa is, unfortunately, less in the popular limelight, although the success of Gab��s��� novel and the Netflix adaptation has given rise to a similar indignation among a lively group of Equatorial Guinean writers and activists. Perhaps in the long run�� Palmeras en la nieve has awakened interest in an area of the globe of which few Spaniards are even conscious. A member of Spanish civil society is more likely to be aware of areas of Africa not colonized by Spaniards than the Spanish Africa they have in front of them. What is most unfortunate (for me) is that there is a vast corpus of cultural production out of Spanish Africa that the communications industries (the targets of Dignidad Literaria���s major objections) choose to ignore. Instead they promote Equatorial Guinean Palm Trees growing metaphorically in the snowy mountains of Aragon from a former colonialist���s perspective. I���m still waiting for famed Equatorial Guinean writer Donato Ndongo���s novels to be adapted by Netflix, one in particular about African emigration to Spain (El metro), an epic novel beginning in Senegal and ending on a Madrid metro. The publishing industries in collaboration with major film makers might also be interested in the novels of Juan Tom��s ��vila Laurel, Mar��a Nsue, and Trifonia Melibea Obono, whose novel La bastarda is the first African-Spanish narrative dealing with the issue of homosexuality from the perspective of an African lesbian.

The most important issue raised by the controversies surrounding American Dirt and Palm Trees in the Snow has everything to do with the voice of the colonial other, or as Gayatri Spivak would say, the speech of the ���subaltern.��� That voice has sounded, and regardless of the murky issue of its authenticity, it���s up to us viewers, readers and listeners, like those of Dignidad Literaria, to demand a forum where they can be heard.