Sean Jacobs's Blog, page 133
March 29, 2021
Food and the struggle for Africa���s sovereignty
Image credit PWRDF via Flickr CC BY-NC 2.0. This article is part of our Reclaiming Africa���s Early Post-Independence History series edited by Aishu Balaji from Post-Colonialisms Today (PCT), a research and advocacy project of activist-intellectuals on the continent recapturing progressive thought and policies from early post-independence Africa to address contemporary development challenges.
The COVID-19 crisis has highlighted the stark reality of Africa���s extreme dependence on imports to feed our populations. In West Africa, 40% of the rice consumed is imported; African countries do not produce enough processed agricultural products to sustain their populations, with the three highest agricultural imports being wheat, rice, and vegetable oil; and local agriculture across the continent is dependent on imported inputs for production and therefore dependent on foreign exchange.
For Africans to chart a course away from extreme dependence on food imports prevalent now, the policies and thinking of early post-independence Africa���countries like Ghana and Tanzania ���and international peasant movements, like La Via Campesina���offer a wealth of lessons.
As key countries adopted restrictive measures in their attempts to manage the spread of COVID-19���including the closure of air, land, and sea borders, and agricultural export restrictions���Africa is seeing a significant disruption of the supply chain due to the resulting decrease in the volume of imports. If exporters of cereals and staple foods, also affected by the pandemic, were to suddenly cease production, the many African countries dependent on these imports would be unable to feed their populations.
The monoculture cash crop and export agriculture system that pervades in Africa is a colonial legacy that has, over time, been maintained by the global neoliberal trade regime, trapping countries in a vicious cycle of dependence. By primarily exporting low value, unprocessed agricultural products with volatile prices in the global market, countries often fall short on the foreign exchange necessary for purchasing essential food stuff, and they are forced to turn to predatory conditional World Bank/International Monetary Fund (WB/IMF) loans that further undermine agricultural diversification and modernization by pushing for reductions of agricultural subsidies and price support policies for small farmers.
As well as impacting government revenues and foreign currency resources, the fragility of Africa���s agricultural sector directly impacts farmers’ incomes. Curfews, quarantine, and the closures of markets, schools, restaurants, and businesses have completely disrupted local supply chains, and producers have found themselves stuck with perishable food with no market prospects. This has highlighted serious shortcomings in terms of logistics, transportation, and the isolation of some marginalized regions. The resulting drop in the income of producers, most of whom are small farmers, has also jeopardized future harvests due to the lack of inputs.
The COVID-19 crisis pushes us to reflect on the agricultural production in Africa, highlighting the urgent need to develop more sustainable food systems and more resilient family farming systems. But this is not a new debate. In the period immediately after independence in the 1960s and 1970s, different governments on the continent designed and implemented policies to achieve what was known at the time as food self-sufficiency.
Governments led by figures like Kwame Nkrumah and Julius Nyerere pursued policies to feed their populations sustainably from their own production and also develop a strong agricultural sector that could boost decent jobs. Self-sufficiency was seen as integral to sovereignty as they recognized economic dependence allowed their former colonizers to exert power over their domestic political space. Policies included setting up agricultural cooperatives and state farms; establishing storage and distribution facilities; expanding grants and facilities for agricultural research; and land reform including establishing communal rights.
The drive for self-sufficiency was supplanted through structural adjustment policies in the 1980s���which made WB/IMF loans conditional on the ���reduction or removal of export taxes, quotas, and government controls, reduction of import tariffs and removal of import restrictions, removal of internal market regulations and private-sector restrictions; and reduction in public production and infrastructure services������and later the notion of food security in the 1990s. Rather than emphasize the importance of agricultural production to meet the needs of a specific state, such as enough foodstuffs to feed its population, food security emphasizes access to affordable food, whether it’s imported or otherwise. For example, Singapore, classified as one of the most food secure countries, only produces 10% of its own consumer products. It is a neoliberal concept that encourages import substitution in lieu of strong domestic agricultural production, the weakness of which is evident today.
In contrast, the international peasant movement, La Via Campesina, call for food sovereignty���the right of the people to healthy and culturally appropriate food produced with sustainable methods, prioritizes local agricultural production to feed the population, ensure peasants’ access to land, natural resources, seeds, and loans, and protect the rights of small farmers to produce and consumers to decide what they want to consume. This notion encourages and depends on diversified family and peasant agriculture as opposed to industrial agriculture. Family agricultural systems are based on short cycles, and they have the capacity to both feed the family and also supply local markets, prioritize sustainable agricultural practices that use traditional knowledge, and build on recent ecological innovations. Family agriculture is the predominant agricultural system in African countries, but it is oriented towards monoculture production for export at the expense of production for domestic consumption and it is not effectively linked to other sectors in the economy.
In the aftermath of COVID-19, it is critical African countries diversify and improve productive capacities and create economic opportunities for small-scale producers. This includes adopting targeted policies that guarantee access to vital inputs for agriculture such as finance, land, and technology, and rethink resource management, including water, which is in competition between extractive industries and agriculture. It is also clear we need to revert to policies oriented towards bolstering the smallholder agricultural economy that seeks to improve their technical and material production conditions, like access to technology, finance, and land.
When we talk about technology, of course this includes all irrigation services, extension services, training, technical support services which have, under structural adjustment and other neoliberal policies, been drastically reduced. It is important to shift back to active investment and financing policies in the sector and focus on processing agricultural products in Africa so that the added value remains on the continent. This will also help us develop more productive sectors, create value-added jobs, and foster a vibrant local and regional economy while linking agriculture to other key sectors.
In recent years, Senegal and Mali have included food sovereignty in their national platforms, and various continental and regional initiatives have emerged, including from the Economic Community of West African States. Food sovereignty is also referenced in the Egyptian constitution. However, the continuing growth of food imports in Africa highlights the gaps in these models and the profound constraints posed by global capital and the free trade agreements and neoliberal economic institutions that leave it unchecked. Early post-independence governments in Africa had a clarity around the critical links between food self-sufficiency and national sovereignty that has been eroded by decades of neoliberal ideological onslaught. With COVID-19 and the climate crisis disrupting value chains and escalating price volatility, and concepts like food security simply repackaging food dependence, early post-independence policies offer an anchor for contemporary efforts.
Watch a related video from Issa Shivji on agricultural development and nation-building.
Representation that sells us shoes
Image via the Instagram account of Siv Ngesi. A few weeks ago, a South African ad campaign for Adidas and Beyonce���s Ivy Park spotlighted a black drag queen. Adidas presumably expected to be lauded for this step by the queer community and to face a fair amount of backlash from homophobes around the country. There was only one problem: the drag queen in question was Siv Ngesi, a prominent local comedian and cishet man who was, so far as we could see, in drag for only the second time in his life. The internet exploded and, perhaps unexpectedly, the backlash came from the queer community���enraged that drag queens who had invested years into the craft had been overlooked in favor of someone with no visible link to the queer community. The frustration was understandable. Here was an opportunity for South Africans from all walks of life to be exposed to drag and all of its gender-bending wonder. Surely the opportunity to represent the queer community on this platform should have gone to a member of the community, especially since these (paid) opportunities are so rare. And yet there was something about the outrage that made me deeply uncomfortable. Why did we expect queer liberation from a multinational corporation and why were we so disappointed that they had failed us?
Historically, queer activism has been intrinsically linked to anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist, and anti-racist work that challenges the state, elites, and other structures of power. Stonewall, the protest widely credited with giving rise to pride marches, was a riot against police violence and state interference in queer spaces led by trans women of color and drag queens. Closer to home, queer icons such as Simon Nkoli (who served as inspiration for the HIV/AIDS movement), Bev Ditsie (a filmmaker and the first gay person on a reality TV show) and hundreds of others fought not only for queer rights but were explicitly anti-apartheid and internationalist in their focus. They formed important connections with other activists in apartheid South Africa and contributed greatly to the struggle against an oppressive state. Now though, I struggle to think of a popular, queer, and leftist organization or mainstream queer activism that shares any of the radical features of our predecessors��� work.
This is not to say that queer organizations and NGOs do not do important work. It is also not to say that queer people do not contribute to leftist organizations and movements. In late 2020, for example, a black queer feminist collective called #WeSeeYou occupied a luxury Airbnb in Camps Bay to make an important point about land, housing, and the socio-economic inequalities that make queer people especially vulnerable to violence and destitution. But such projects are in the minority. There has been a distinct shift in what we consider our goals and how we go about achieving them.
There are two factors worth exploring to trace the shift in queer activism in recent years. The first is specific to South Africa���s context. Under the new democratic dispensation, a broad coalition of queer organizations came together to form the National Coalition for Gay and Lesbian Equality and agreed to adopt a targeted legal and political strategy in terms of which the politics of mass struggle, so effective during apartheid, were abandoned. The decision was made because there was real fear that taking to the streets would incite a response from the religious right and that the queer community simply did not have the mass support necessary to counter this force. Instead, as the interim constitution was drafted and the country prepared for its first democratic elections, teams of lawyers and lobbyists worked to incrementally secure legal and political protection for the queer community under the direction of a small group of leaders who tightly controlled the movement���s trajectory.
It worked. South Africa was the first country in the world to prohibit discrimination on the grounds of sexual orientation and gender, and a series of progressive court cases extended a range of other rights to same-sex couples, including the right to adopt, to inherit from one another and eventually, to marry. Trans people can receive healthcare in state hospitals, and processes exist to change one���s legal gender markers. These services are often flawed, weighed down by the same bureaucratic troubles that plague South Africa in general and the added burden of homophobia and transphobia from state officials. But we cannot deny that queer people in South Africa enjoy a greater standard of living than many of our peers on the continent and indeed the world.
Unfortunately, the tightly controlled, heavily centralized strategy that brought us these victories also significantly weakened grassroots queer organizations and activism. Queer organizations doing important work exist but are generally small and professionalized and we are still more likely to achieve change in front of a court than on the streets. In the country that pioneered the term corrective rape���to describe the rape of queer people in an attempt to convert them to heterosexuality���and in which queer people still face significant violence and prejudice, the absence of a grassroots mass queer movement is glaring.
The second factor contributing to the transformation of queer activism is global. Pinkwashing is a term most famously used to describe Israel���s strategy of trotting out its LGBTQ+ friendliness to portray itself as progressive and distract from its apartheid policies. The term describes the way brands and various political actors use support for the queer�� community as a marketing tactic or to distract from their harmful policies and actions. Despite criticism, pinkwashing has become increasingly popular and, in a neoliberal world, a global trend has arisen with queer activism becoming contingent on market solutions, politics of ���inclusion��� and calls for representation. The political economist Ellie Gore writes that:
The struggle for queer liberation is being co-opted by corporate pinkwashing and the commodification of LGBT+ Pride, which shapes and reinforces a dominant queer liberal politics. This politics prioritises representation over more structural, redistributive demands… Together, these dynamics work to obscure the connections between LGBT+ rights and other key social justice issues, specifically anti-racist, anti-capitalist, and pro-worker politics.
Instead of demanding from the state housing for homeless queer people, healthcare for trans and intersex people or those most at risk of AIDS, safety for queer people, and an end to imprisoning trans people, we demand representation from Disney and Netflix, rainbow merch from corporations that make use of slave labor in Africa and Asia, and that Twitter censor homophobic rhetoric. When someone expresses homophobic or transphobic opinions, we alert their employer or their school and weaponize our buying power to hit them where it hurts���their career, their livelihood, their ability to sell their labor to sustain themselves. The same is true of corporations like Chick-fil-A or Afropunk, who donate to homophobic causes or platform homophobic artists. Instead of throwing bricks through their windows, our great revolutionary act is to buy a chicken sandwich from the other million-dollar corporation that treats its minimum wage workers like trash.
We have tailored our activism to those meaningless reforms that the market can offer, rather than demanding and creating true liberation as the people. Our demands, even when directed at the state, are devoid of any kind of class-consciousness or anti-imperialist sensibility. The queer community in the USA celebrates the fact that trans people can now serve in the same military that ravages the global South. Around the world there is a push for queer people to be protected by hate crimes legislation, a move that seems commendable but that trans-activist Dean Spade points out only lends legitimacy and puts more tools in the toolbox of the very same police forces who regularly mete out violence to queer people.
All this is apparently worthwhile because we are receiving representation and integration that will allow us to self-actualize and normalize queerness, eventually leading to our acceptance by broader society. Representation is important; it feels good. When I was seventeen, I exclusively read and watched queer media for almost a full year. It was exhilarating to see myself and my experiences reflected in a way that assured me that I was not alone. Art is undoubtedly important, but representation alone is not enough, and I worry that for the most part, we have made it the sum total of our popular activism. Looking back, I can���t help but wonder why I had to learn about Sapphic safe sex from a YouTube series or start questioning my gender by watching RuPaul���s Drag Race. Why was there no community to guide me through these realizations? Why were the only queer elders I knew on a screen?
Most worrying of all is that in the process, we have handed the reigns of queer liberation over to private, for-profit companies. It is far easier to rage against a corporation on Twitter until they relent, than it is to form our own community, protest against the state and pursue genuine political change. Corporations are in fact more likely to give in to our demands because we are not some aberration to them, we are simply the contents of our wallets. But corporations, when given the power to represent us, promote a very specific, defanged version of queerness, a version that is not a threat to them nor the system they rely on. The gay couples we see in adverts or on screen fit neatly into a cooker-cutter mold. They are generally white, cisgender, abled, conventionally attractive, monogamous and, most importantly, liberal and wealthy. They are an attempt to normalize queerness, which at its core is a celebration of difference and a rejection of normalization. This phenomenon has been described as homonormativity, which according to Lisa Duggan ���does not contest dominant heteronormative assumptions and institutions, but upholds and sustains them, while promising the possibility of a demobilized gay constituency and a privatized, depoliticized gay culture anchored in domesticity and consumption.���
Drag, in particular, is about messing with the gender binary. It is about understanding gender���and for drag queens, femininity���as a performance rather than a fixed and restrictive category. In doing so, with wigs and lipstick, it threatens the very structures that keep us oppressed. It is about community and support, drag mothers teaching young queer people how to apply their makeup and also how to navigate the world and organize against injustice. It is loud and vulgar and sexy and joyous and liberating.
So, while people of all sexualities and genders should be free to explore drag and all that it represents, Adidas chose Siv precisely because he was none of those things. In their advert, drag was nothing more than a man in a dress. We should not have been surprised. Adidas and all the companies like them embracing corporate queerness are never going to offer us representation that liberates us. They are only ever going to offer us representation that sells us shoes.
March 28, 2021
What is decolonization for?
The late Cedric Robinson in 2006. Image credit Doc Searls via Flickr CC BY-SA 2.0. As Bhakti Shringarpure recently wrote on Africa Is a Country, ���Decolonization has taken over our social media timelines with a vengeance. With hundreds of thousands of ‘decolonize’ hashtags, several articles, op-eds, and surveys on the subject���and plenty of Twitter fighting over the term���one thing is clear: decolonization is all kinds of trendy these days. So, we are naturally forced to ask: What counts as ‘authentic’ decolonization in 2020?��� For some, decolonization, and its attendant concepts like ���decoloniality,��� have become something of an empty signifier, too much of a catch-all to meaningfully refer to anything. For others, it raises a complaint still worth addressing: that knowledge production, across universities, media and culture, remains built on a foundation that marginalizes non-Western sources of knowledge.
These debates often proceed as non-starters because there is very little precision over what exactly is being debated. Beyond the terms in use (which is what typically clouds things), there is a need to ask what is decolonization for? For all of its supposed weaknesses as a theory and practice, what need must it be addressing for it to demonstrate such resilience in spite of those weaknesses? Therefore, this week on AIAC Talk we are exploring two scholars and activists whose body of work, though once marginal, are beginning to grow in prominence as these questions become more pressing. With Bongani Nyoka and Joshua Myers, we will discuss the social and political thought of Archie Mafeje and Cedric Robinson.
At first glance, there is seemingly little that unites the thought of these two thinkers, one a South African and the other an American���their writings never directly engaged each other, their activities never overlapped, and they are hardly talked about together. But their object of critique is the same: Eurocentrism. Then follows, Eurocentrism as it pertains to whom and what? Critically, as it pertains to left-wing political thought, in advance of its emancipatory agenda. The direct target was mainstream Marxism, and its inability to appreciate non-Western epistemologies. For example, there is this from Mafeje: ���If Marxism is a universal scientific theory, how does it overcome its own syntactical as well as semantic limitations? How does it relate, methodologically, to vernacular languages, understood in the analytical, political sense?��� And then, there is this from Robinson: ���Marx had not realized fully that the cargoes of laborers also contained African cultures, critical mixes and admixtures of language and thought, of cosmology and metaphysics, of habits, beliefs, and morality.���
In his seminal text, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition, Robinson posits the group of black intellectuals challenging Marxism at the height of anticolonial consciousness as forming a distinct, political tradition, one whose critiques constituted ���the continuing development of a collective consciousness informed by the historical struggles for liberation and motivated by the shared sense of obligation to preserve the collective being, the ontological totality.��� What should we make of figures like Mafeje and Robinson, and the range of concerns they championed, which, although they did not use the term, could be read as a project to decolonize classical left-wing theory? What informs their resurgence today, and is it a project that in its assertion of an African cultural heritage, eschews the universal? Or, should we take our cue from Mafeje, who in his defense of Africanization in the essay ���Africanity: A Combative Ideology��� argued that ������if what we say and do has relevance for our humanity, its international relevance is guaranteed.���
Dr. Bongani Nyoka is a Lecturer in the Department of Political and International Studies at Rhodes University, and is the author of two books on Mafeje: Archie Mafeje: Voices of Liberation��(HSRC Press, 2019) and��The Social and Political Thought of Archie Mafeje (Wits University Press, 2020). Joshua Myers is an Associate Professor of Africana Studies in the Department of Afro-American Studies at Howard University. He is the author of We Are Worth Fighting For: A History of the Howard University Student Protest of 1989 as well as a new biography of Cedric Robinson, which is called Cedric Robinson: The Time of the Black Radical Tradition, forthcoming with Polity Books.
Stream the show the show on Tuesday at 18:00 in Cairo, 16:00 in London, and 12:00 in New York on��YouTube.
Last week, we commemorated 10 years of the Arab Spring by exploring its unfinished, revolutionary business. We spoke to Nihal El Aaser about the movement���s unfolding in Egypt and the legacy its left on Egyptian politics today, and then were joined by Zachariah Mampilly to generalize its influence on social movements across the rest of the continent.
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.
March 26, 2021
What is whiteness to a cyborg?
Photo by Pawel Janiak on Unsplash For much of the nineteenth century, Sundays in an open field at the gates of New Orleans saw a spectacular congregation of human activity. Picture a hot, humid, swampy Louisiana summer day, the Spanish moss dripping from the trees, and the bass drum pulse reverberating as you approach a mass gathering at the fringe of the United States���s most Caribbean city. You���d see New Orleaneans of all stripes, dressed in everything from the latest Parisian fashions to simple rags, standing around in circles, watching the most talented musicians, dancers, actors, and diviners of their city on full display.
If you could have angled your head to see inside the circle, you would be privileged to witness the diversity of humanity coming together. People from across Africa and the Americas co-mingling, sharing their culture, celebrating the arrival of the one day they can express their home and ancestral cultures in public. Unaware that their communing would one day birth a novel culture, which would in turn branch out to influence cultures in the rest of the world, there must have been an urgent feeling to the gatherings, fleeting if not quite ephemeral, but temporary enough to make them feel dreamlike, religious even. As soon as that feverish dream of a day would break, they would be returning to unpaid labor, toiling in fields or answering to the whims of their white masters. Because they were not, in the society in which they lived, human.
In 2018, after returning to the US from living in Brazil, I visited New Orleans for the first time. While there, I picked up a book on the history of Congo Square, and in the following months I couldn���t help from periodically daydreaming about the historical Sunday gatherings in that city. I drew parallels to the basement house party or the rented community center of my childhood in Milwaukee, where immigrants would dance the night away, speak in their own language, eat their own food, even worship in their own cosmos. They were also there at the nightclub that I frequented as a student in Madrid, filled with young men who may have risked their lives crossing deserts and seas to arrive in Europe, and who now danced in the center of circles to Youssou N���Dour. Or they were in the hidden away bars and nightclubs of New York and San Francisco, where migrants of a variety of classes and national origins brushed up against each other, catching up on the latest sounds from their various home lands. They were also in online spaces, in which young people across the world found a foothold for expression, with various permutations of digital soul music pulsing on the parallel circuits of a global capitalism still guided by the logic of white supremacy.
While European colonizers found their justification for the enslavement of continents in the dehumanization of Africans and Native Americans, connecting a historical moment like Congo Square to my own experiences helped to challenge lingering colonial logics embedded within my imaginings of America���s past. It particularly helped to destroy an invisible line that tends to be drawn between those whose ancestors arrived on these shores from Africa in bondage hundreds of years ago, and those who arrived more recently for other purposes. It forced me to recognize that African migration to the Americas (or elsewhere) can and should be thought of as a continuum, and the humanity of those who migrate, forced or by choice, is unbroken across space and time.
Last summer, I sat in a parking lot in King City, California, a small town surrounded by mountains and endless fields of fruit and vegetables, listening to a local Spanish language radio broadcast. On it, alongside various Mexican regional musics, they had public service announcements about COVID-19 and ads for English language classes. King City sits in the heart of one of the centers of industrial agriculture in the United States. The manual labor performed in this region is done by workers from Mexico and Central America, some undocumented, but all descended from people who occupied and moved around these lands freely for thousands of years. Largely invisible in the enclaves of wealth nearby, they are an integral labor force that save for a periodic scapegoating, demonization, and dehumanization in the media, isn���t normally seen as part of the nation���let alone having their hopes, joys, or individual expressions considered in mainstream discourse.
So I sat there, listening to the bright horn choruses and upbeat snare drum rolls, and imagined that these local radio broadcasts served to provide a sense of community and humanity to their audiences, not unlike those of the Sunday gatherings in New Orleans two hundred years ago. Humanity denied, humanity reclaimed, the contours of citizenship and their interplay with labor are perpetually dancing at the edges of the settler colony.
Contemporaneous to the gatherings at Congo Square, the American settler colony was in an expansive phase moving west across the North American continent. Around the same time, European powers were doling out territories for themselves in Africa, and across the world they accomplished these ���civilizing missions��� by pushing the existing inhabitants off of the land, killing or imprisoning them, or attempting to wipe out their way of life. The structural advantages of white settlers in these extensions of Europe were fortified by the legal structures of the colonial state. In the United States, laws like the Homestead Act and the Second Amendment to the Constitution turned white frontier families into state-sponsored militias, their structural advantage scrawled across the physical landscape of the continent.
In the wake of the guns and military campaigns (sometimes manned by colonized peoples themselves), urban professionals of the colonial metropoles followed with their pens, phonographs, and cameras and became the documentarians of the folk culture of the marginals, misfits, and natives at the frontier (as well in the working class neighborhoods of cities). These state agents and entrepreneurs would chronicle the transition from an Atlantic society based on slave labor to capitalism. The legends they constructed would become the foundation for an imperialist ideology that continues to this day.
Starting around the mid-1800s, the US witnessed the rise in popularity of the blackface minstrel show. Through the medium of vaudeville, and with Congo Square as one of the direct source materials, the minstrel show denigrated people of African descent (or anyone deemed other at the time), mocking the expressions of humanity that they managed, while simultaneously integrating them into the identity of the nation. This form of entertainment would produce America���s first pop stars who would in turn become global ambassadors for the new American society that was emerging.
The legal mechanisms for enclosure in the world of ideas mirrored those of physical territory. As communication technology rapidly advanced, the mechanical copyright emerged to protect property in the cultural realm. This mechanism ensured a structural advantage for those with the resources to extract and define the value of the culture of those at the margins. The owners of patents and copyrights did more than just document their changing world, they also ossified racial categories and ushered racism along from the biological realm into the cultural one. This was the foundation on which the global entertainment industries of today were built.
After the very slow and wrought process of abolishing Atlantic slavery, and the violent consolidation of the colonial territories, by the turn of the twentieth century debates about citizenship and civil rights would arise to mask the battlefield over humanity. As Native Americans were cordoned off to reservations, Africans would be folded into the nation as Black (Negro, Colored, etc). And as the western literary genre moved from the written word to the screen, and the minstrel show moved from live theater, to radio and phonograph, to film and television, the twin legacies of the fascination with and denigration of a dehumanized other would leave their mark on each. White capitalist copyright owners would position themselves as the authoritative gatekeepers on the pure folk cultures of the inferior races, or white performers, on stage with their actual faces, would insert themselves as the individual genius responsible for the synthesis of a unique cultural innovation, the social relations behind the slick final product forever obscured. While various cultural rebellions have arisen throughout the years to counter these processes of dehumanization, the tools of extraction inherited from the nineteenth century have proven to be more than effective in upholding the logic of empire and racial capitalism.
In parallel to this cultural push and pull, a political debate would arise amongst Black Americans over how to (or whether to) integrate into the settler colonial society. Visions of a return to Africa would wax and wane, while an anti-colonial politics was violently repressed. Ultimately, the call to own property as a way to secure one���s rightful place within the nation, the ghosts of 40 acres and a mule, would ring out loud over the decades. This echo has found new life in today���s discourse around race, resulting in an ascendant black nationalist purism, particularly online. This trend is unfortunate. While there is certainly agency within the beauty and virtuosity that has come into the world as a result of the cultural resilience of African descended peoples in the Americas, it doesn���t mean that it is the result of some intrinsic quality unique to one racial group or national historical context. In fact, it could be argued that the African retentions that remain in the Americas survived because the dominant systems either tolerated them or weren���t able to read them as such. In other words: Black American cultures have arisen as a result of both black resilience and white supremacy. Still, America���s Blackness is one of the most important cultural expressions of resilience and resistance in modern society. To put an enclosure around it only reinforces the settler colonial mentality, leaving the aims of universal humanism incomplete. Even those Africans at Congo Square, who helped start this whole thing in the first place, would likely remain outside of the gates.
If mass media was born amongst the colonization project of Euro-American imperialism, the dehumanization of non-European peoples, and the consolidation of racial capitalism, then today���s information economy is also built upon that same infrastructure. Just over an hour drive from that King City parking lot where I was listening to the radio in Spanish, and on the western edge of the continental territory colonized by the United States, sits the headquarters of the world���s most valuable companies: Google, Facebook, Tesla, Apple���the heart of the global information economy. Even though the bubble of the California Gold Rush has long since burst (a process that seems to repeat itself every few decades), it has turned into a region with one of the largest concentrations of wealth in the world.
On the wild frontiers of the early internet, online communities emerged that would freely exchange infinitely replicable digital material. In what many thought was a new reality of a post-scarce digitally permanent world, the reign of the regime of copyright briefly found itself in crisis. Music was the most fertile ground from which to declare one’s liberation, but it wasn���t the only one. And while interaction with the old guard of racial capitalism allowed a tradition of gatekeeping and cultural appropriation inherited from vaudeville to continue, what had emerged within the confines of the virtual world���torrent libraries, file sharing sites, personal blogs, forums and chat rooms���collectively could be thought of as a sort of digital Congo Square. The response from the United States Department of Homeland Security, alongside other policing efforts, was to raid the safe houses of free exchange and try and put an end to it all through intimidation.
Before the average uploader became familiar with the DCMA takedown, some big companies looked at the anarchistic landscape and lured the loosely organized scattering of digital cultural producers onto their free platforms. Soundcloud, Youtube, Instagram, Twitter, etc all provided sleek design, convenience, and a veneer of protection from the harshest crackdowns by the state. Yet, these platforms were not immune to the demands of capital or its watchdogs. Perhaps, they never were meant to be. Investors eventually wanted returns, and the landed copyright elite needed their cut too, and whether planned or not, all the platforms would eventually make concessions that favored the biggest property owners over the public. These concessions would ultimately result in the phenomenon we now know as ���surveillance capitalism.���
Eventually, the ideological struggles of our time would also move on to the individualized ���feeds��� and ���timelines��� of the Silicon Valley platforms. No longer reserved for the stage of fights between or within nations, political speech is tailored, tracked, and manipulated in the interest of generating more interaction with minimal regard to the resulting real world consequences.
We may constantly measure ourselves against how we think other people might see us online, but when you strip us back down to our most human needs and desires, what still concerns much of the population of this planet, the questions are simple: What is the right of any individual human to exist wherever they are on earth? And under what conditions do they have a right to do so? So today, when workers are forced to leave smallholding agricultural livelihoods to work in fields and factories, they do so with the slightest hope that integration into the global economy will provide a better future for them and their families. When the masses take to the streets and demand a more just political reality, or when they feel like they have no alternative to hit the unmarked highways of the world’s most dangerous migration routes and seek a better future elsewhere, they are doing so with the idea that the same world that can beam them images and sounds via satellite to a mobile phone in their pocket must be able to recognize a humanity denied as a result of neocolonial economic, environmental, and military policy.
Like in the post-Reconstruction era in the US, many of the proposed solutions to the injustices that have emerged in the digital realm have concentrated on finding technological fixes to restore (old) systems of fair(er) compensation for the output (input) of online denizens. However, rather than provide solutions to the structural inequalities inherent to capitalism, technological fixes such as blockchain capitalism, cash app mutual aid, personalized sponsorship accounts, and other enclosure-oriented solutions ultimately retrofit the exploitative infrastructures of capitalism against the claims of universal humanism. While there certainly is value in building community online, especially as a form of resistance or resilience, the question remains: What forms of online participation, even in what seems like a totalizing surveillance capitalist age, emerge from the claims to humanity of the marginals, misfits, natives, and Africans at the frontier?
In our resistance, we should also never forget that the reality of surveillance capitalism is that one person���s individual wealth, clout, or social relevance is insignificant in comparison to the aggregate picture of all the behaviors of the world���s population. By the time the platforms had a monopoly on audiences, they no longer needed the cultural products they claimed to be supporting to have any exchange value at all (with human moderation ultimately resulting in a system of corruption and payola). While influencers try to squeeze out a few pennies from sponsors or trickle down monetization schemes based on clout they���ve managed to accumulate in their online and real world social networks, the runways of the digital future are paved with the promise of returns from the proprietary algorithms built on data hoarded from the behavior of the masses.
As the data farmers amass more and more information about our ways of living, they have brought the debate around the negotiation of who or what can claim humanity to the digital world. However, unlike the popular science fiction fantasy in which the future battles for humanity will happen between robots and humans, our future struggles are more likely to look like the age old one of humans who can harvest the fruits of their enclosures versus those of us who can���t. And at a time when life in general on this planet is headed towards existential crisis, our debates about rights have to move beyond questions of humanity.
As it stands, a few companies, concentrated in specific geographic locations, fortified by an accumulated wealth never seen before, defended by the largest military force ever to exist, swallow all the information we give them: our behaviors, our desires, all of our humanistic acts and expressions, and employ small armies to sort, categorize, process and program in order to ultimately convince us that their formulas can stake a claim to humanity too. The end goal of all this data hoarding is the creation of an ���artificial intelligence��� that can ultimately beat us at our own game of deciding who and what can be human. So, if blackness is the foundational currency on which the capitalist information economy is built, what will whiteness mean to a cyborg?
This essay was developed from a series of lectures given at the Afrorazones conference in Havana, Cuba in July of 2018.
March 25, 2021
Angola’s backyard revolution
Photo by Jorge S�� Pinheiro on Unsplash Our theme of port cities continues on Africa Is a Country Radio, and this month we head to Luanda, capital city of Angola. One of the earliest permanent European settlements on the African continent, historical Luanda is most notable for being the exit point for an astonishingly large proportion of enslaved Africans heading to the Americas. This has meant that the influence of the nearby kingdoms of Kongo and Ngola, and smaller proximate communities, have contributed an outsized influence on cultures from Argentina to Alaska.
After the abolishment of slavery, Luanda became a ���backwater��� of the Portuguese empire, and a sort of absentee landlordism allowed some Angolans to enter into the colonial urban elite. However, in the wake of the Berlin Conference, with Angola having to shore up its colonial territory against the claims of other European powers, Luanda and the surrounding territory of Angola would become the site of mass white European migration. With the ascendance of the fascist Salazar dictatorship in 1932, driven by the state policy of the “national integration” of Portugal’s colonial territories, the migration only intensified. By the 1940s, this would result in Luanda having, alongside Cape Town, one of the largest populations of Europeans on the African continent.
It is this late colonial period that eventually saw the rise of a strong anti-colonial resistance movement. And while political dissent grew and solidified through local organizing, a unique cosmopolitan musical culture started to grow in the urban periphery of Luanda. After an anti-colonial war broke out in 1961, and the fight for independence moved beyond the borders of the colony, the local music scene became more subversive than explicitly political, and in doing so helped solidify a unique identity���Angolanidade���on which the nation of Angola was able to stake its claim for independence.
Africa Is a Country Editorial Board member Marissa Moorman literally wrote the book on this subject. So, we are excited to have her on the show to help us sort out what can seem like a very complex history of music intertwined with fashion, language, the anti-colonial struggle, the Cold War, oil, and the internet.
We will also be joined by legendary Angolan musician Paulo Flores. One of the original sonic innovators of the now globally popular dance Kizomba, Paulo grew up as a child of the Angolan diaspora, coming and going throughout his life, and has an interesting perspective on what nation means through the lens of culture. He is also, importantly, is an excavator of the 1960s and 70s ���Golden Age��� of Angolan music. We will preview and talk about his forthcoming album In-dependencia.
Tune in today, Friday, March 26th from 2pm to 4pm GMT (9am to 11am EST) on Worldwide FM to listen live. After that, visit the show page and follow us on Mixcloud.
The reluctant scientist
Tanzanian President Joseph Magufuli takes photos during Inauguration at Loftus Stadium in Pretoria. [GCIS] via Flickr CC BY-ND 2.0. The most tragic thing about the late Tanzanian president, John Pombe Magufuli, is that he and countless other Tanzanians might have died from a virus that he denied existed in his country. Although Tanzanian officials insist that the 61-year-old leader died from heart-related complications, it is widely rumored that he ultimately succumbed to COVID-19. Many of his top government officials have died from the disease in recent months. His mysterious disappearance at the end of February also suggested that he did not want his illness to be made public. As one Kenyan commentator put it, ���Magufuli is a sad lesson of the illusion of invulnerability and indestructibility that newly-minted dictators revere.���
It did not have to end this way. When he was first elected president in 2015, Magufuli was lauded for his no-nonsense approach to corruption and for reducing wastage and grandiosity in government, earning him the moniker of ���Bulldozer.��� Jaded Kenyans, who have in recent years seen millions of dollars being stolen or misappropriated under the debt-ridden government of Uhuru Kenyatta, looked on with envy at their neighbor. Magufuli restricted unnecessary foreign travel by his cabinet members and was known to personally inspect hospitals and other public service facilities to see if they were doing their job. The Tanzanian president did not even shy away from telling off so-called ���development partners.��� He was probably the only African leader to have told China off for its punitive infrastructure loans (see the ongoing controversy over whether China will seize the Port of Mombasa if Kenya defaults on its loans). Kenyans even created the hashtag #WhatWouldMagufuliDo to remind their own leaders what they were doing wrong.
But as the years went by, Magufuli became increasingly authoritarian, but not in the usual way of African dictators���which often involves the use of military might and the rigging of elections���but in a bizarre Donald Trump kind of way. Despite being a highly qualified scientist (he held a PhD in Chemistry), Magufuli turned his back on science last year by announcing that there was no coronavirus in Tanzania. He refused to impose lockdowns and social distancing measures (let alone consider the option of less extreme response strategies), and stopped releasing public health data on the number of COVID-19 cases in Tanzania. This not only made Tanzanians more vulnerable to the virus, but also posed health risks to countries that shared a border with Tanzania. Schools and restaurants remained open even as stories of people dying in hospitals from ���pneumonia��� were spreading.
The cracks had already begun to appear within months of his presidency. Shortly after assuming office, Magufuli started displaying the hallmarks of a tin-pot dictator. He banned political activities on the pretext that they interfered with ���nation building.��� He curtailed media freedom and arrested opposition leaders. Journalists who opposed his policies were harassed. In 2017, he decreed that girls who fell pregnant would not be allowed to attend school, a policy that shocked education officials and women���s rights activists alike. He also started displaying xenophobic tendencies that portrayed foreigners as the enemies of the Tanzanian people.
Commenting on his rule, the researcher Abdullahi Boru Halakhe described�� the difference between Magufuli and his widely respected and revered predecessor Julius Nyerere as the following: ���Nyerere was an outward-looking globalist who saw Tanzania as a leader in world affairs. He invited people of African and non-African origin to witness Tanzania���s nascent experiment with an alternative model of governance and economic independence that was not controlled and exploited by global capital. Magufuli, on the other hand, is an inward-looking provincial nativist who wants a Tanzania for Tanzanians alone.���
Despite its poverty and dependence on donor aid, Tanzania has always been viewed as a nation that does not suffer from the sicknesses of its neighbor Kenya, where an avaricious and visionless political elite has no qualms about hollowing out the state for its own benefit, or of Uganda, where an ageing dictator is ruthlessly crushing a youthful opposition to maintain a hold on power. When a Tanzanian is in the room, Kenyans feel slightly uncomfortable, even ashamed, because we know that unlike Kenya, Tanzania is held together by an ideology that is not centered around primitive wealth accumulation and individualism, and also because we have never had a visionary leader like Nyerere. Fondly called ���Mwalimu��� (meaning teacher in Kiswahili), he once said that ���We, the people of Tanganyika [what Tanzania was called before its union with Zanzibar in 1964] , would like to light a candle and put it on top of Mount Kilimanjaro which would shine beyond our borders giving hope where there was despair, love where there was hate, and dignity where there was before only humiliation.���
While Nyerere���s African socialist experiment of Ujamaa was largely an economic failure in Tanzania, it left a psychological and social legacy of brotherhood and unity among the people. While Kenyans often deride Tanzania for its socialist tendencies that have only spawned more poverty, they have always maintained a certain amount of respect for the country and its leaders, even those who ended up being corrupt���because we know that despite its poverty, Tanzania has always held the moral high ground on affairs to do with the continent. When Kenya was secretly supporting the apartheid regime in South Africa in the 1970s, Tanzania was the frontline state that was actively arming and hosting the African National Congress and Pan-Africanist Congress���s anti-apartheid struggle. When Kenya almost descended into an ethnic-based civil war after the 2007 elections, it was the Tanzanian president, Jakaya Kikwete (among other eminent African leaders), who was brought in to mediate with the warring political factions. Kenyans know that when confronted with an ethical dilemma, Tanzanians will always strive to do the right thing.
When I was in Dar es Salaam for a meeting just after the Kenyan presidential election in 2013, it was a Tanzanian taxi driver who reminded me that Kenyans had made a mistake by voting in two people who had been indicted for crimes against humanity at the International Criminal Court. ���Why did they do it?��� he asked me. It was a question laced with incredulity, as if to remind me that despite claiming to be the economic powerhouse of the region (although Tanzania and Ethiopia���s economic growth rates have surpassed it in recent years), Kenyans lacked a moral conscience.
The death of a sitting president would most likely have led to a power vacuum in African countries such as Kenya, where ethnic kingpins would no doubt have jostled for power and positions and created conditions for conflict. But Tanzania, once again, has showed us the way. Vice President Samia Suluhu Hassan was sworn in without much fuss or opposition as Tanzania���s president the day after Magufuli���s death, becoming the first female head of state in Eastern Africa, and a potential role model for aspiring women politicians across the region.
Her immediate task will no doubt be to tackle the COVID-19 pandemic that has led to a deadly third wave in many African countries, and to convince the international public health community that Tanzania is back on board. Since she is relatively unknown, even within Tanzania, she will also need to carve her own unique identity as an African leader that is not perceived as a continuation of her predecessor���s legacy.
March 24, 2021
Border wars
The Sani Pass Border Post in Lesotho. Image credit Michael Jansen via Flickr CC BY-ND 2.0. In early January 2021, one of the co-authors, Moletsane Monyake, passed away in Lesotho from complications from COVID-19.
Within the last year, Lesotho���s politics have been rocked and roiled by a series of scandals around now former Prime Minister Tom Thabane that ended with his ouster. Current Prime Minister, Dr. Moeketsi Majoro, has been hailed as a new, technocratic face in politics, qualities in high demand in a country long led by political insider figures. Former prime ministers Thabane and Pakalitha Mosisili, who between them exclusively held the top office from 1998 until 2020, were not quick to leave the scene. Despite the Basotho public clamoring for new leaders at the top, Majoro still faces strong headwinds. Coming to power at the helm of an unwieldly nine-party coalition, and in control of only part of his own fissiparous ruling All-Basotho Convention (ABC), there was pessimism that Majoro would be able to achieve anything of note, especially given the coronavirus pandemic and a new general election due within two years.
However, after two sets of meetings, one in Pretoria in early November and one in Maseru in mid-November, the governments of Lesotho and South Africa have announced they are ready to rekindle and reenergize an obscure 2001 agreement that could hold the key to materially improving the lives of Basotho residents. The blandly titled Joint Bilateral Commission of Cooperation (JBCC) is, perhaps, an unlikely vehicle upon which to place optimism. Originally conceived as a mechanism to facilitate better communication at the ministerial levels between governments, this bureaucratic and technocratic framework for discussions is now being utilized to work towards a historic border deal that would facilitate better, easier, and freer movement between the two countries. The free border movement agreement could take the form of the current arrangement between the United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland, in which virtually all border checks and controls have been abolished, and Irish and British citizens are not required to carry a passport. In a move that is exciting for the potential it holds to make the JBCC truly revolutionary in rethinking relations between South Africa and its enclave state, the revised agreement also covers important but mundane details like protection of migrant workers, harmonization of education qualifications, defense cooperation and intelligence sharing, agricultural development, direct sea access for Lesotho���s exports, and cooperative disease surveillance, among other matters. In short, it marks a comprehensive attempt to harmonize not just the border but most important policy areas between the two countries.
The recent meeting in Pretoria and Maseru marked the first time since 2013 that the pact was even activated, highlighting how little the governments had worked together on this issue under ex-President Jacob Zuma in South Africa and the recent procession of Thabane and Mosisili-led coalition governments in Lesotho.
In a twist, it was the coronavirus pandemic and the restrictions on border crossings that led to this potential breakthrough in talks between the two countries. It would be ironic, but in some ways fitting, that it took a crisis of global proportion to finally make progress on the local border issues that give Basotho such hassle. Tanki Mothae, Principal Secretary in Lesotho���s Ministry of Law and Justice, claimed that the overarching goal of the JBCC was to make the borders more ���user friendly��� for commerce via the implementation of new ���one stop border posts��� at both Maseru and Ficksburg, and to make all high-traffic border areas more efficient for the movement of people. Likewise, South Africa���s Minister for International Relations and Cooperation, Dr. Naledi Pandor, declared that the JBCC would ���change lives for the better��� by focusing talks and policies on better serving youth, women, and others negatively impacted by the borders. This synchronism in talk about reforming the border is a new development that has not been seen at any point recently from such a broad swath of political actors.
Of course, this kind of talk, until the implementation of a deal that brings about measurable change, is just that���talk. Lesotho���s Prime Minister Majoro stressed border policy from his very first visit to South Africa onward, but all of these developments build on the momentum generated by ex-Prime Minister Thabane���s government that had finally pushed through Parliamentary approval for a constitutional amendment that allowed for dual citizenship. This change has been pushed for decades by Basotho in civil society and their pressure campaign finally came to fruition, as deeper integration between the two countries has long been much more popular among Basotho writ large than their political leaders who feared loss of population to South Africa and a commiserate decline in their own political power.
Talking a good game on border policy reform but failing to deliver has been a leitmotif of Lesotho���s Prime Ministers since independence. What gives the JBCC a new feel is the popular pressure from Basotho ���voting with their feet��� in moving to South Africa in ever-increasing numbers and the rhetorical agreement coming from the South African side. With the support of President Cyril Ramaphosa, a frequent visitor to Lesotho from his time leading regional mediation teams to Maseru when he was South African Deputy President, discussions around the JBCC have a substantively different feel than any previous border talks this century.
The devil will always be in the details and will bear careful watching in early 2021 as the first deals are officially signed, and there are still plenty of opportunities for this chance to also slip through the fingers like sand, but the popular support in Lesotho, joint high-level support, and the political courage it takes to do this at the moment when xenophobia is again tearing across South Africa suggests that this process has a real chance of success. The most vocal support for stronger ties between the two countries has come from South African Finance Minister, and former Governor of the Reserve Bank of South Africa, Tito Mboweni. Looking fondly on the Mountain Kingdom from his time spent there as an undergraduate at the National University of Lesotho, Mr. Mboweni has over the past decade criticized SA-Lesotho border restrictions and called for the free movement of capital and labor between the two countries. Across the political aisle, leaders of the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) have also consistently questioned the existence of the hard border between Lesotho and South Africa.
The border is such a live issue in Lesotho because it impacts so many Basotho. While the country is relatively small, with a de jure population just over 2 million, the number of crossings at Lesotho���s border posts with South Africa is rivaled only by the number of crossings between RSA and Zimbabwe. This makes the main border posts���Maseru Bridge and Ficksburg Bridge���particularly difficult crossing points with long queues, especially during the festive season when seasonal and migrant workers flock back to the Mountain Kingdom. Of note, of course, is the fact that many people also cross the border unofficially at points distant from the designated areas.
The creation of the Lesotho Special Permit (now the Lesotho Exemption Permit (LEP)) that regularized the status of some Basotho in South Africa starting in 2016 suggests that the South African government has increasingly come to worry about the presence of Basotho in the Republic without valid papers, and has been seeking solutions. Still, the LEP represents a stop-gap measure subject to cancellation at any time. The JBCC agreement, on the other hand, marks the best possibility for reaching a broader agreement that would regularize crossing for more Basotho and potentially eliminate some of the more-dangerous illegal crossings.
So, what is it that makes this deal one with such possibility? First, the updated agreement takes a process that had been at the ministerial level and elevates it to the level of the presidency (for South Africa) and the prime minister (for Lesotho). This high-level attention could keep the process focused on the areas of greatest need (i.e., changes in border crossing procedures and living/working permissions) rather than on issues that happen to cater to the whims of individual ministers at any given point.
Another piece of the optimism comes from the fact that the second largest party in Lesotho, the Democratic Congress (DC) under its leader, Deputy Prime Minister Mathibeli Mokhothu, seems fully onboard with it. Mokhothu led the Lesotho delegation to Pretoria at the start of November. Combined Majoro���s ABC and Mokhothu���s DC hold 78 of the 120 seats in Parliament. If the JBCC can, indeed, move beyond Ministerial talk to the stage that it is delivering border relief and policy harmonization for Basotho���both issues that would profoundly and positively impact the lives of thousands of ordinary Basotho���it could, firstly, unleash new economic opportunities with a potential to address the widespread poverty and economic despair that stalk many Basotho.
Secondly, it could end the era of shaky coalitions in Lesotho. With the ABC and the DC both under newer, younger leadership, and barring major splits that could decimate their electoral fortunes, a significant political victory like the JBCC could provide the necessary optimism to allow these parties a convincing victory in the upcoming 2022 parliamentary elections. Returned with a similar majority, the ABC and DC could then ditch their minor coalition partners that have so destabilized Lesotho���s politics over the past eight years. This, in turn, could lead to better governance, as the bloated cabinet could shrink since ministerial portfolios would not have to be reserved for junior coalition partners. Of course, it could also all blow up or the ruling parties could split yet again, forestalling any political gains. But for there to be a viable path forward out of Lesotho���s political morass represents progress in itself.
The revival of the JBCC was unexpected and has for the first time in recent memory breathed a sense of hope into some in Lesotho and South Africa that the thorny problem of the border might just see some solutions beneficial to ordinary people. It has jolted a fairly jaded populace that, just maybe, a post-COVID world can indeed be one where transformational change is possible in ways that did not seem likely before the virus upended social and political norms. If it leads to substantive talks and agreements that help ordinary Basotho surmount the legal and physical obstacles to crossing the border, the JBCC represents the possibility that the two countries could govern in the interest of their citizens, using not the politics of cronyism, but rather a broad definition of public good.
The promise and discontents of kissing the ground
Still from Kiss The Ground. This post is part of our series ���Climate Politricks.���
I come from a family that has been farming for generations and is still farming (I have three sheep). In recent years, and according to my mother who keeps a close eye on these things, the yields have been declining. A portion of it may be attributed to climate change, but as tillers, I couldn���t help but wonder how much of our declining yield is due to our farming practices. As a result, I keep my eye out for solutions that we could employ to minimize our damage to the ground.
The documentary film Kiss the Ground seems to point to solutions. It focuses on using the soil���s carbon absorbent properties to solve the climate change problem. More than that, it ���offers a way to heal our bodies, bolster our immune systems and heal our planet��� according to Rebecca Tickell, who, along with her husband Josh, directed the film. It is narrated by Hollywood actor and environmental activist Woody Harrelson. He founded Voice Yourself, a website that promotes and inspires individual action to create global momentum towards simple organic living and to restore balance and harmony to our planet.
The film puts forward regenerative farming as a solution for climate crises. It begins by highlighting the journey and omnipresence of carbon, and its importance to both the environment and our bodies. It goes on to explore the negative impacts of tilling and industrial pesticides on human health and the environment. Through the juxtaposition of a farm that uses regenerative agriculture, we see the vast difference in yield as a result of each respective method. The film ends on a positive note, showing the results of restorative methods in Loess Plateau in China, previously succumbing to desertification and now a ���paradise��� that is improving the livelihoods of the community.
What stood out for me was how well the film contextualized the challenges that the planet is facing right now. For example, it shows a carbon map to underscore the effects of farming on carbon levels in the atmosphere at different stages of the farming cycle throughout the year. During March and April in the northern hemisphere, when farmers are tilling, the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is extremely high. In June when the crops start to grow, the carbon dioxide in the air decreases significantly as it is absorbed by the growing crops. This demonstrates the directors��� main thesis that the soil releases large amounts of carbon when tilled but can also have the potential to absorb large amounts of carbon, through restorative farming, which is a type of farming that ���repairs the damage we���ve done [to the earth] and makes this better.��� However, as I watched the film I wondered how have these ���civilized��� and more ���efficient��� modern methods of agriculture contributed to our extractive methods of farming and what were we doing before the big machines and pesticides?
What resonated with me was that we are saving not the earth but rather ourselves. The earth will be fine, the earth is self-healing and will heal itself, which could mean ridding itself of humans. By appealing to the human instinct of self-preservation, the documentary invites to the conversation, not just the ���tree-huggers��� but anyone with a will to live.
The film also highlights the role that colonialism and industrialization have played in stripping the land���such as how the killing of the buffalo led to the starvation of indigenous communities in the US. These are the same practices who caused the Dust Bowl in the 1930s dubbed one of the greatest man-made eco disasters in US history. I couldn���t help but wonder if the people responsible for this ecological disaster should be the same people accountable for ���restoring the ground.��� Could this be an opportunity to look at how indigenous people in North America and Africa lived on the land for so many years and managed to retain its value and its good properties? Should we look to them for solutions? The film cites money as one of the vital constraints inhibiting the widescale adoption of restorative farming. This, however, begs the question: how did our ancestors preserve the ground with limited resources?
There was, however, one awkward scene that stood out like a sore thumb. In it, the American actress Patricia Arquette is pictured in Haiti and Uganda practicing white-saviorism. On a visit to Haiti, she realizes that the locals don���t have proper sanitation and pilots a compost sanitation project, which is then exported to Uganda. The project teaches people how to have composting toilets, so they can collect and treat their own waste to use as compost. Local communities are, however, reluctant to adopt the method as it involves human poop.
Something else that stood out was lack of BIPOC among those profiled or featured in the film. There are a number of sequences shot on the African continent, where black people are few and far between. If they feature they tend to be in subservient positions and lacking in agency, with the heavy thinking left to the white settlers. Some notable organizations led by people of color who could have made the film richer include: Aranya Agricultural Alternatives in India founded by Padma and Narsanna Koppula; Soils, Food and Healthy Communities in Malawi, a farmer-led organization; and the Traditional Native American Farmers Association in the US.
Given that we live in a capitalist society, I found it quite relevant that there is a business case for the restorative method of farming. Farmers may speak of loving the land like their own offspring, but the reality is for many it has all been corporatized. The moral argument for preserving the earth appears to have had limited success and perhaps now is the time to appeal to the farmers��� bottom line. By making a business case, the methods of restorative farming not only appeal to passionate organic farmers, but to all farmers.
March 23, 2021
Les Tunisiens noirs d��fient les interdits
Image credit Xavier Donat via Flickr CC BY-NC-ND 2.0. Cet article fait partie du travail de notre classe 2020-2021 de AIAC Fellows.
Juin 2020, sur l���avenue Habib Bourguiba, principale art��re de Tunis, un hommage est rendu �� George Floyd. L�����motion soulev��e par la mort de l���africain-am��ricain, tu�� par la police de Minneapolis, a trouv�� un ��cho en Tunisie. Plus de 200 personnes se sont r��unies devant le th����tre municipal. Pour crier des slogans, ����I can���t breath����, ����let us breath����, pour brandir des pancartes o�� figure ces trois mots ����black lives matter����, ����denying racism suports it����.
Des manifestants de tous les ��ges, de tous les sexes, beaucoup de Tunisiens, certains originaires d���Afrique subsaharienne.
Maya est certainement la plus jeune ici. Elle a 14 ans et elle a ��crit sur un morceau de carton une liste funeste des derni��res victimes de violences polici��res aux Etats-Unis. Elle y a ajout�� le nom de ����Falikou Koulibaly����, un Ivoirien tu�� en 2018 �� Tunis, lors d���une agression. ����En Tunisie, il y a autant de racisme envers les Noirs.���� Mais tout le monde n���est pas du m��me avis. Une passante demande la raison de ce rassemblement : �� Le racisme��? ��a n���existe pas chez nous.���� Et beaucoup pensent comme elle.
Ce samedi ensoleill�� de juin, une grande partie des personnes r��unies a r��pondu �� l���appel de M���nemty. L���association anti-raciste tunisienne existe depuis 2013. Elle est dirig��e par Saadia Mosbah. Ce jour-l��, quand la militante parle de George Floyd, elle ne peut pas retenir ses larmes. �� ��a parle aux personnes Noires du monde entier et d���ici aussi. C���est �� peu pr��s la m��me condition, plus ou moins, selon certains degr��s. La particularit�� du racisme en Tunisie, c���est qu���il est silencieux. (���) C���est une hypocrisie sociale insoutenable. ��
Deux mois plus tard, nous la retrouvons dans une grande villa du Bardo, �� deux pas du parlement. ����M���nemty c���est un r��ve, un r��ve d�����galit�� pour tous����, explique-t-elle en traduisant le nom de son association, tir�� du dialecte tunisien. Elle a install�� le si��ge dans la maison familiale, construite par son p��re qui ��tait architecte.
A plus de soixante ans, Saadia Mosbah est une h��tesse de l���air �� la retraite, qui consacre tout son temps, ou presque, �� son combat tr��s personnel. Tout a commenc�� pour elle apr��s la r��volution. Le changement de r��gime s���est accompagn�� d���une lib��ration de la parole et de la soci��t�� civile. ����Avant, il y avait quelques petits mouvements. D���abord le chanteur Salah Mosbah, qui a chant�� sa n��gritude, qui s���est battu et se bat encore. Il y a eu Affet Mosbah, qui a ��crit une tribune ���Etre noir en Tunisie���, en juillet 2004.����
Elle vient de citer son fr��re et sa s��ur, engag��s dans l���antiracisme �� une ��poque, o�� il ��tait interdit d���en parler dans son pays. Elle raconte comment la tribune de sa s��ur publi��e dans le magazine Jeune Afrique a ��t�� censur��e : ����Je me dirige vers le kiosque pour r��cup��rer les copies, je ne trouve rien, le vendeur me dit que tout a ��t�� ramass��. Les Tunisiens n���ont pu acc��der �� cet article qu���apr��s 2010 sur Internet. L���article de 2004, personne ne l���a eu en version papier. Nous, on l���a achet�� �� Paris, on l���a lu �� la maison. J���ai alors vu l�����motion de mon p��re et sa fiert��. Je pense que quelque part, elle avait ��crit ce qu���il avait toujours pens�� et il n���avait jamais dit tout haut. ��
Racisme au placardAbdessattar Sahbani est sociologue �� la Facult�� des Sciences Humaines et Sociales de Tunis. Il est membre d���honneur de l���association M���nemty. Pour lui, l���Etat a rendu invisibles les Tunisiens Noirs pendant des d��cennies, emp��chant de traiter des questions raciales. A l���ind��pendance, ����on a essay�� de donner de la Tunisie une image moderniste, ouverte����. ����Cette Tunisie n�����tait pas noire. C�����tait ��a le discours de Bourguiba (premier pr��sident de la Tunisie). Le Tunisien ��tait de loin plus d��velopp�� que les Africains, de loin plus d��velopp�� que les musulmans, de loin plus d��velopp�� que les arabes. Il aspirait �� ��tre europ��en.���� Absents des postes �� responsabilit��, dans l�����conomie, en politique, dans l���administration, les Tunisiens Noirs sont comme mis de c��t��, et avec eux le probl��me du racisme.
Le silence de l���Etat a des cons��quences tr��s concr��tes. Dans la soci��t�� tunisienne, on peut ��tre victime de discriminations, c���est un fait normal et accept��. Saadia Mosbah a travaill�� pour la compagnie a��rienne nationale pendant trente-neuf ans. Elle ��tait cheffe de cabine : ����Je me souviens d���une dame qui arr��te ses enfants en disant ���Stop on n���est pas sur Tunisair, on a d�� se tromper de porte���. Je lui ai r��pondu que non ���Vous voyez bien que je porte l���uniforme avec l���insigne de la compagnie���.���� Plus tard, pendant le vol, la passag��re demande �� lui parler. ����Elle me questionne ���Mais comment ��a vous ��tes tunisienne, noire et h��tesse de l���air �� la fois ?������� En Tunisie, dit Saadia Mosbah, ����le noir ne doit pas faire d�����tudes, ne doit pas ��tre bien habill��, ne doit pas avoir de voiture. C���est tr��s bien s���il est gar��on de caf��, c���est tr��s bien s���il fait des petits travaux, s���il est cireur, s���il est porteur, mais d��s qu���il a un dipl��me en poche, qu���il veut travailler ou aller �� la facult��, ��a pose probl��me.����
C���est ce racisme violent mais terriblement ordinaire qu���Anis Chouch��ne essaie de d��crire, d���expliquer. Il est po��te et chanteur. Il conna��t donc la puissance de la parole. ����L���impact des mots est plus fort que les armes, une bombe agit en une fraction de seconde, alors que les mots ��a d��truit sur le long terme.���� Il a ��crit des textes sur le racisme, pour ��vacuer sa souffrance, dit-il. �� Les mots comme Kahlouch (noiraud), degla (datte), oussif (esclave), kahla (noir), moi je ne r��ponds pas quand on m���appelle comme ��a.���� Parfois, c���est encore plus dur. Quand on le prend un ��tranger et qu���on parle de lui en arabe, en pensant qu���il ne va pas comprendre.
Anis Chouch��ne ne laisse plus rien passer d��sormais. ����Des fois, je me bagarre avec des amis Noirs pour qu���ils se fassent respecter et affrontent le racisme. ��a me touche quand je dis �� quelqu���un de ne pas se taire et qu���il dit ���non ce n���est pas grave, ils n���ont pas fait expr��s���.���� Pour certains Tunisiens ces mots font partie du langage courant, sans connotation p��jorative. ����Les insultes sont devenues folkloriques et on les accepte comme moyen d���int��gration sociale����, analyse Abdessattar Sahbani.
Dans la maison de son enfance, Saadia Mosbah allume une cigarette, aspire une bouff��e de tabac avant de raconter de vieux souvenirs, comme s���ils s�����taient pass��s la veille. Elle a huit ans, quand sa meilleure amie de l�����cole la traite d�������oussifa����. ����Pour ma m��re, comme pour tout le monde, oussifa d��signait la couleur. Pour moi, je ne sais pas pourquoi, c�����tait une insulte. C���est quelque chose que vous ressentez tout simplement. Il est dit seulement aux noirs ce mot ���Ya Oussif���, mais il sort comme un carton rouge : ���Attention n���oublie pas qui tu es.�������
M��canisme de protectionM��me cette militante a d�� apprendre �� composer avec le racisme de sa soci��t��. Plus jeune, Saadia Mosbah a d�� parfois faire comme s���il n���existait pas. ����On dit qu���on n���a jamais rien subi, car on ne veut rien entendre, c���est une r��action que je connais, c���est une r��action que j���adoptais moi-m��me. J�����tais sportive, je faisais partie de l�����quipe nationale de basketball. Au moment de rentrer sur le terrain, je ne voyais plus rien, je n���entendais plus personne. Dans un match on peut rater 10 lancers, m��me 20 lancers, imaginez si �� chaque fois on vous traite d���oussifa. C���est quelque chose !����
Zyed Rouin ��tait comme ��a.��Pendant longtemps, il a refus�� de regarder la r��alit�� en face. Ce trentenaire s���est engag�� dans l���antiracisme �� partir de 2013. Aujourd���hui, c���est un pilier de l���association M���nemty. Il est aussi consultant pour l���ONG Minority Rights Group International, qui d��fend les droits des minorit��s �� travers le monde. Pourtant, Zyed Rouin dit avoir mis du temps �� se rendre compte de sa diff��rence et de ce qu���elle signifiait.
Sa rencontre avec Saadia Mosbah a ��t�� d��terminante. Lors d���une conf��rence, il s���oppose �� la militante et soutient qu���il n���y a pas de racisme en Tunisie, qu���il n���a jamais subi aucune discrimination. ����Elle m���a dit ���prends ton temps, essaie de rassembler tes souvenirs et on en parlera apr��s���.���� Cette phrase lui fait l���effet d���un ��lectrochoc. Il r��unit ses souvenirs et r��alise qu���il a toujours ��t�� le seul Tunisien Noir de sa bande : �� A l�����cole, avec mes amis, je me sentais oblig�� de fournir plus d���efforts pour ��tre accept��, avoir les meilleurs r��sultats, faire plus de blagues. Je n���ai jamais eu d���amis Noirs, quand je montais dans un bus, par exemple, si j’apercevais un groupe de personnes Noires, je les ��vitais. ��
Remontent alors �� la surface des moments de sa vie qu���il avait enfouis profond��ment dans sa m��moire, comme son premier jour d�����cole. �� Ma m��re m���a encourag�� en me disant qu����� l�����cole j���allais rencontrer de nouveaux enfants, qu���on allait jouer ensemble, que j���allais m���amuser��� J’attendais le moment de rencontrer mon premier nouvel ami, mais en arrivant je me retrouve dans une classe o�� je suis le seul Tunisien Noir. Ce sont les enfants qui me l���ont fait comprendre, avec des expressions et des phrases que j���entends pour la premi��re fois alors, du genre ���Qu���est-ce que tu as, tu es br��l�� ou quoi ? Tu es noir, c���est parce que Dieu ne t���aime pas��� et j���en passe. Je me retrouve avec une r��alit�� autre que celle qu���on m���a promise �� la maison. L���enfant de six ans que j�����tais n���avais aucun moyen de se d��fendre et �� ce moment-l�� les enfants de mon ��ge avaient beaucoup d���arguments pour m���expliquer que j�����tais Noir et diff��rent. ��
Selon le sociologue Abdessattar Sahbani, ce ����d��ni���� est ����un m��canisme de protection et d���int��gration����. ����Je dois me prot��ger et accepter le racisme pour trouver ma place.���� Ce d��ni constitue une ����immunit�� sociale���� que chaque Tunisien Noir doit acqu��rir d��s son plus jeune ��ge ����pour prot��ger son enfant dans une soci��t�� qui est raciste����. En r��sulte un consentement psychologique: l���enfant tr��s t��t est ����conscient qu���il est Noir et qu���il n���est pas dans la m��me situation, une situation analogue �� celles des autres enfants ��.
Pendant la r��volution, Saadia Mosbah a ��t�� marqu��e par l���absence des Tunisiens Noirs dans les cort��ges. C���est aussi ��a qui l���a encourag�� �� militer. ����Ils ne se sentaient pas tunisiens, ils ne se sentaient pas citoyens, voil�� le terme. Ils se sentaient exclus et s���auto-excluaient.��(���) M���nemty c�����tait ��a, cette recherche de citoyennet�� d���abord, d�����galit�� et d�����quit��.��Il est inconcevable qu���on soit tunisiens et qu���on ait peur d���entrer dans la foule et qu���on ait peur de d��noncer quoique ce soit, et qu���on ait peur de participer �� une manifestation. ��
Le probl��me est profond, estime Saadia Mosbah. A l���origine : Le refus de son pays de se reconna��tre comme soci��t�� ����multi-ethnique���� et �� multiculturelle����. ����La Tunisie a donn�� son nom �� notre continent et pourtant rejette son africanit��, c���est ��a ce qui est g��nant.����
L���Africain c���est l���autreL���historien Nouri Boukhchim, enseignant chercheur �� l���Universit�� de Tunis, partage ce point de vue. Tout commence par la n��gation d���une ��vidence : le pays se trouve en Afrique. �� Le regard des Tunisiens est tourn�� vers la M��diterran��e, vers le nord et non pas vers le sud. C���est comme ��a qu���on s���est ��loign�� de notre africanit��, au nom de l���unification du peuple tunisien.���� C���est Habib Bourguiba, le premier pr��sident de la Tunisie ind��pendante, qui lance dans les ann��es cinquante-soixante de grandes r��formes pour ����moderniser le peuple tunisien����. ����Tout doit changer, le mode de vie, l���habitat������� Tout cela aboutit �� une refonte de l���identit�� tunisienne, une rupture historique. Pour Nouri Boukhchim, ����il y a un d��ni dans la soci��t�� tunisienne, l���Africain c���est l���autre����.
Cependant, les recherches scientifiques qu���il a men�� avec son ��quipe, dans le sud de la Tunisie, montrent l���inverse. Les populations de la r��gion ont des origines tr��s diverses. ����On a pr��lev�� 80 ��chantillons d���ADN dans 3 localit��s, r��sultats : un m��lange Afrique est/ouest et arabe. (���) Il ne faut pas oublier qu���il n���y avait pas de fronti��res, les populations se d��pla��aient beaucoup.����
Tant que la question raciale n���aura pas ��t�� r��solue dans le pays, les Tunisiens Noirs devront vivre avec les discriminations et seront oblig��s de d��velopper des strat��gies de contournement. Dans la rue, Saadia Mosbah est imperturbable : ����J���ai des ��ill��res et je n���entends plus rien, parce que nos oreilles ont ��t�� pollu��es par les propos racistes, par des hommes qui vous disent ���L���Oussifa purifie le sang��� ils fantasment sur votre physique, sur votre corps que vous avez envie de cacher, vous avez envie de courir, vous n���avez m��me plus envie de porter des couleurs tellement on vous emb��te dans la rue. Parfois des gens me disent ���Je t���ai appel��e, tu ne m���as pas r��pondu, tu ��tais en face de moi, je te faisais des signes, tu ne m���as pas vu���. Et bah non, je ne vois rien, je n���entends rien.����
Black Tunisians breaking taboos
Image credit Dimitry B. via Flickr CC BY 2.0. This post forms part of the work by our 2020-2021 class of AIAC Fellows.
In Tunisia, racism is a well-kept secret that the revolution partially unveiled. This society, which still thinks of itself as white and Arab, has a hard time confronting the discriminations suffered by a good portion of its population.
In June 2020, on the Avenue Habib Bourguiba, a major artery in downtown Tunis, tribute was paid to George Floyd. Emotions and grief over the death of the African American, murdered by the police of Minneapolis, reverberated all the way to Tunisia. More than 200 people gathered in front of the municipal theater, chanting slogans and waving placards.
There were protesters of all ages and genders. Maya, 14, was possibly the youngest in the crowd. On her placard were written the names of recent victims of police violence in the US. Also on the list was Falikou Koulibaly, the head of the Association of Ivorians in Tunisia (AIT), who was killed in Tunis in 2018 for speaking out about racism. ���In Tunisia, there is just as much racism against black people as in the United States,��� Maya said. But not everyone agrees. A passerby asked what the protesters were denouncing: ���Racism? It does not exist here,��� she replied. Hers is a common view.
On that sunny Saturday in June, many in the gathering�� answered the call of M���nemty, a Tunisian anti-racism association. M���nemty was established in 2013 and is currently headed by Saadia Mosbah, 60, a retired flight attendant. As Mosbah spoke to the crowd about George Floyd, she could not hold back tears. ���It resonates with black people all over the world and here too,��� she said. ���It is pretty much the same condition, more or less, to some degree. What���s particular about racism in Tunisia is that it is silent���It is an unbearable social hypocrisy.���
Two months later, we met Mosbah again, in a big villa in Bardo. Built by her father, an architect, and steps away from the parliament, it also serves as the headquarters of the organization. ���M���nemty is a dream, a dream of equality for all of us,��� she says, explaining the meaning of the organization���s name.
The struggle, for Mosbah, began after the revolution. The change in regime brought with it new�� freedoms of speech and civic organizing.�� ���Before (the revolution), there were only a few movements,��� Mosbah says. She recalls the activism in her own family, the work of her brother and sister, in times when freedom of speech was not granted in Tunisia: ���For example, there was the singer Salah Mosbah, who celebrates and sings his negritude. He fought hard and still fights today. There was also Affet Mosbah who wrote a column, ���Being black in Tunisia,��� in July 2004.
The column that her sister wrote for Jeune Afrique magazine was censored: ���I walked to the newsstand to pick up copies of it, I could not find anything,��� Mosbah says. ���The seller told me that they were all removed. Tunisians were only able to access the article after 2010 on the internet. Nobody was able to see the paper version from 2004. We bought a copy in Paris and we read it at home. I then saw the emotions and pride of my father. I think somehow she wrote what he had always thought, but never said loudly.���
Abdessattar Sahbani is a sociology professor at the Humanities and Social Sciences University in Tunis, and�� an honorary member of M���nemty. Sahbani argues the state has rendered invisible, for several decades, black Tunisians, making it hard to even raise the question of racism in the country.
At independence, ���there was an interest in molding Tunisia in the image of a modernist, open country,��� Sahbani says. ���This Tunisia was not black. This was due to the rhetoric of [Habib] Bourguiba,��� Tunisia���s first president. In Bourguiba���s view, Sahbani explains, the Tunisian was ���the most developed and progressive of all Africans, by far more developed than Muslims, by far more developed than Arabs. The Tunisian aspired to be European.��� The resulting absence of black Tunisians in positions of power in government, politics, or the economy, he explains, resulted in marginalizing the entire community���and sidelining the question of racism.
The silence of the state on the issue of racism in Tunisia has very concrete consequences. In Tunisian society, one can be a victim of a variety of discriminations that are generally accepted as a fact of life. Saadia Mosbah worked with the national airline for 30 years, and was a cabin crew chief. One time during boarding, she recalls, ���A lady halted her kids telling them they must have gotten the wrong gate; that it could not have been a TunisAir flight. I said to her, ���you can very well see that I am wearing a uniform with the company���s badge.������ Later, during the flight, the woman asked to speak to Saadia. ���She was asking me ���But how are you Tunisian, black and a flight attendant at once?���
In Tunisia, Saadia says, ���A black person is not supposed to get an education, be well-dressed, or have a car. It���s fine if they are a waiter at a caf��, or if they do little jobs such as shoe shining or working as a porter, but the moment they have degree, they want a professional job or to pursue higher studies, then it���s really a problem.���
It is this violent but terribly ordinary racism that Anis Chouch��ne tries to unpack and explain. He is a poet and a singer, so he knows the power of words. ���Words have a greater impact than weapons,��� he says. ���A bomb���s reaction is felt in a matter of seconds, but words last longer��� Words such as Kahlouch (dark-tanned), degla (date), oussif (slave), kahla (black)���I do not talk back when I am called these names.��� Sometimes it hurts even more, as when people assume he is a foreigner and speak Arabic in front of him thinking that he won���t understand.
Now, Chouch��ne won���t let this casual racism pass. ���Sometimes, I argue with my black friends, telling them to demand respect,��� he says. ���It hurts me to see my friends say, ���no big deal, they didn���t do it on purpose��� when I tell them not to remain silent.��� Indeed, many Tunisians consider such terms to be part of everyday language, and don���t question their pejorative meanings. ���Insults have become like folklore, accepted without being questioned and adopted as a way of integrating social groups��� says Sahbani.
In her childhood home, Mosbah draws on her a cigarette and recalls old memories. She was eight years old when her best friend in school called her ���oussifa,��� she says. ���To my mother, like many other people, the word ���oussifa��� was a word used to describe a color. To me, for whatever reason, it felt like an insult. It was something I could only feel, not describe. It���s only used toward black people and in a sanctioning tone, like a red card in football: ���Be careful, don���t forget who you are.������
Even as an activist, Mosbah has had to find accommodations with the ambient racism of her society. At a younger age, she often had to pretend it didn���t exist:
We denied that we ever felt discriminated against because it was so hard to talk about it, we didn���t want to say or hear anything about it. It���s a reaction that I know, it���s a reaction that I adopted myself. I was athletic and was on the national basketball team. When I entered the court, I couldn’t see anything, I couldn���t hear anyone. In a match, you can miss 10 shots, even 20 shots, just imagine if each time you are called oussifa. It���s something!
Zyed Rouin, too, for a long time preferred not to face reality. The 30-year-old became involved in anti-racism work in 2013. Today, he is a pillar of M���nemty, as well as a consultant for the NGO Minority Rights Group International. Rouin says it took him a long time to realize his enforced otherness and what it meant. An encounter with Saadia Mosbah was decisive. Dis-agreeing with her at a conference, he maintained that there was no racism in Tunisia, and that he had never experienced discrimination. ���She said ���take your time, try to cobble your memories together and we���ll talk about it later,������ he now recalls. Her message struck him like an electric shock. He thought about memories he had long suppressed and realized that he had always been the only black Tunisian in his group: ���At school, with my friends, I felt obliged to out-perform everyone in order to be accepted, I had to have the best grades, crack more jokes������ Rouin says. ���I never had black friends. When I got on a bus, for example, if I saw a group of black people, I avoided them.���
Memories he had learned to bracket and ignore, began to flow back, for instance, from his first day of school. ���My mother encouraged me by saying that at school I was going to meet new kids, that we were going to play together, that I was going to have fun,��� he recalls:
I was looking forward to meeting my first new friend, but as I arrived at school, I found myself to be the only black Tunisian. It was the kids who made me understand that with expressions and phrases that I heard for the first time then. They said things like ���What���s the matter, are you burned or what?��� or ���You are black, it���s because God doesn���t love you,��� and I was okay with it. I found myself in a reality totally different from the one promised to me at home. The six-year-old that I was had no way of defending himself, and already children my age had arguments to explain to me that I was black and different.
For Abdessattar Sahbani, the sociologist, this denial functions as a ���defense and integration mechanism���I have to protect myself and accept racism in order to fit in.��� It constitutes a form of ���social immunity,��� he argues, that black Tunisians develop from childhood to protect themselves in a racist society. The result is a level of psychological acceptance of the idea that being black, one is not ���in the same situation as other children.���
During the Tunisian revolution, Saadia Mosbah was struck by the absence of black Tunisians in the demonstrations. This too helped to spur for her own political commitment, she says:
They didn���t consider themselves to be Tunisians���or more precisely, they didn���t consider themselves to be citizens. M���nemty was formed to meet this need for belonging, for citizenship first and foremost, and then for equity. It was unacceptable that someone should be a Tunisian yet feel afraid to join the movement, to take a stand, to march in the crowd.
This problem runs deep, Mosbah says. It is entrenched, she argues, in the society���s refusal to acknowledge itself as multi-ethnic and multicultural. ���Tunisia gave our African continent its name, yet it rejects its Africanness,��� she says. ���That���s what���s embarrassing.���
Nouri Boukhchim, a historian, shares this view. It all starts with the denial of a basic fact, he says: that Tunisia is located in the African continent. Tunisians��� gaze is turned to the Mediterranean, to the North and not the South. This is how we moved away from our Africanness, in the name of the unification of the Tunisian people,��� Boukhchim says. In the 1950s and 1960s, Bourguiba launched major reforms to ���modernize the Tunisian people: Everything must change, the way of life, the habitat …��� All this, Boukhchim argues, led to an overhaul of the Tunisian identity, a rupture with Tunisia���s African identity that persists today. ���There is a problem of denial in the Tunisian society where the African is viewed as the ���other���.���
Boukhchim���s research, conducted with a team of colleagues in the southern regions of Tunisia, shows a different reality. The population of the region has very diverse origins. ���We took 80 DNA samples from three localities,��� he says. ���The results were a mixture of East African, West African, and Arab. We must not forget that in the past there were no national borders, people used to move around a lot.”
As long as questions of race and racism in Tunisia are not addressed, black Tunisians will be forced to live with discrimination. In the meantime, when she���s out and about in the city, Mosbah refuses to be bothered: ���I have blinders and I can���t hear anything anymore,��� she says.
Because our ears have been polluted by racist remarks, by men who say things like: ���the oussifa purifies the blood.��� They fantasize about your appearance, about your body that you want to hide; it makes you want to run away; you no longer even want to wear colors because of the annoying remarks people make on the street. Sometimes people say to me: ���I called you, you didn���t answer me, you were in front of me, I was waving at you, you didn���t see me.��� Well, no, I can���t see anything, I can���t hear anything.
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