Sean Jacobs's Blog, page 138

Decolonizing the COVID-19 response

This week on AIAC Talk, we���re looking beyond the West to understand how to manage pandemics in ways that don���t require choosing between saving lives and saving livelihoods. Stream it live on YouTube Tuesday and subscribe to our Patreon for the archive. Shinuya, Japan. Image via Wikimedia Commons.

The campaign for global immunization against the SARS-CoV-2 virus is proving tougher than everyone anticipated. The simple reason is that the world was never prepared for something like this. A combination of underfunded and disjointed health systems, dwindling vaccine supplies, and emerging variants compromising the efficacy of the available vaccines have complicated the roll-out for most countries, with many others being unable to even begin as the richest horde stock.

A key question that will be answered in the coming months is just how well the available vaccines work in the real world. Clinical trials are one thing, but gauging efficacy in the ordinary course of life (where it���s hoped that some degree of social mixing will now be restored), is another. An additional question, is how long does immunity actually last? In all this uncertainty, it���s increasingly looking like COVID-19 is here for the long-haul���which is perhaps only just a more solemn outlook on things. Managing it in the long-term would therefore require regular vaccination (and updated vaccines), at least to the extent that every country can be in a position where controlling outbreaks and developing vaccine-induced herd immunity is a feasible strategy. The ultimate question then, is whether the public health systems have the capacity for this new world.

This is a world where not only COVID-19 will linger, but where new pathogens are likely to emerge. The heightened occurrence of viruses worldwide is linked to corporate-led ecological destruction, and short of far-reaching systemic change, we will see more of them. It is therefore crucial that as we hope for the best and prepare for the worst, we draw from the experience of those administrations that have proven themselves capable of managing disease spread, but in a manner sensitive to the circumstances of their citizens. As was written by Vikram Patel and Richard Cash in The Lancet a while back: ���Context is central to the control of any epidemic, a truism we���ve known for centuries but that we seem to have overlooked in this pandemic ��� The key principles of global health are context and equity. We urge less-resourced countries to devise policies that speak to their unique demographics, diverse social conditions and cultures, precarious livelihoods, and constrained infrastructure and resources.���

This week on AIAC Talk, we���re looking at both the successes (and shortcomings) of how places in Asia and the Pacific (like Bhutan, Vietnam, Japan and the Indian state of Kerala) responded to COVID-19, widely praised as avoiding the false dichotomy of saving lives or saving livelihoods. We are interested in developing a comparative perspective that refrains from oversimplifying it to a single factor. To help us assess these countries varied efforts we���ll be joined Sakiko Fukuda-Parr, a development economist and a�� professor of International Affairs at The New School, where her teaching and research have focused on human rights and development as well as global health.

Stream the show Tuesday at 19:00 CAT, 17:00 GMT, and 12:00 EST.

On last week���s AIAC talk, we were joined by Derek Hook, Precious Bikitsha and Phethani Madzivandhila to explore the life, thought and legacy of anti-apartheid revolutionary and Pan-Africanist Robert Sobukwe. Clips from that episode are available on our YouTube channel, but best check out the whole thing on our Patreon along with all the episodes from our archive.

A special type of political personality

Lateef K. Jakande, also known as Baba Kekere, was the first civilian governor of Nigeria���s Lagos State. Photo by Ayoola Salako on Unsplash

Nigerians old and young received the news of the death of Lateef Kay���de Jakande on Thursday February 11, 2021 with a near-universal outpouring of positive grief. At just six months shy of his 92nd birthday, the first civilian governor of Lagos State lived to a graceful old age.

With the death three months earlier of Abdulkadir Balarabe Musa, his counterpart in the old Kaduna State, Jakande���s demise marked the passing of the era of a special type of political personality. The truly progressive office-holder, well-spoken and well-informed, invested in politics as public service, heroically championing social democracy without losing sight of personal probity.

The impulse that motivated his generation of politicians found an outlet in public service only as a re-dedication to the social experiment that an earlier generation of African political figures, the likes of Kwame Nkrumah, Ahmed Ben Bella, Oginga Odinga, and Mamadou Dia had failed to pull off. The dark patch in his career���serving as a minister under military dictator General Sani Abacha (1993-1998)���was the kind of choice a politician would make. The tragedy was that Jakande took that decision at a time he���d attained the rank of a statesman.

Born in ���p���t���do, on Lagos Island, on July 23, 1929, Jakande was a preternatural intellectual, and he chose journalism as his primary vocation. Coming of age in the 1950s, he entered the anti-colonial fray as a reporter with the Daily Service. In a few years, he caught the attention of ���baf���mi Awol���w���, the rising central political figure in Western Nigeria and leader of the Action Group (AG), a political party with perhaps the most forward-looking understanding of social democracy.

In 1953, the year after Awol���w��� became premier of the region, Jakande joined The Nigerian Tribune, the newspaper Awol���w��� had established four years prior. He rose quickly to become the editor-in-chief and stayed on the masthead through the 1960s. In an age when nationalist enthusiasm blurred the lines between professionalism and political gamesmanship, Jakande���s writings, under the pen-name John West, stood out for their forthrightness. It was a trait that stuck to him throughout his life, in public and private.

It was the fashion of the time, too, that the forthright journalist wrote with an eye on political career. Through his association with Awol���w���, Jakande became a suspect in the treasonable felony trials of 1963, and was sentenced to a term of imprisonment. While serving time, he narrowed his focus to a problem close to his heart: the status of Lagos as a metropolitan city. Lagos was often a bargaining chip in the struggle for power among the country���s political elites. Culturally and geographically of the Western region, it also functioned as the federal capital, and it seemed politically expedient to maintain its neutral place in the interest of national cohesion. Parts of the mainland fell under the regional government, but the island, the traditional Lagos, also known as the Crown Colony, had elected representatives who lacked the legal powers of accountability.

Jakande wrote to question the city���s nebulous status. ���The Minister for Lagos Affairs, who has never been a Lagosian,��� he noted in the pamphlet The Case for a Lagos State, ���is for all practical purposes the ruler of Lagos. This means that Lagos is being governed by one who is not responsible to the people, who does not understand them, and who is unknown to the Lagos electorate, while the elected representatives of the people in the City Council are rendered impotent to fulfill their election pledges.”

This was in 1964.

Two years later, the military government of Col. Yakubu Gowon came to power as a result of a counter-coup of July that year, and set about averting the looming political crisis. Jakande and other prisoners were freed, and he promptly published his pamphlet. As fate would have it, that dream became a reality the following year, although Jakande got to rule it only 12 years later. (State creation did not resolve the crisis. Within weeks of the birth of Lagos state, the country commenced a war with secessionist Biafra.)

Running on the platform of the Unity Party of Nigeria, the Second Republic party formed by Awol���w���, his old political associate, Jakande was popularly elected the first civilian governor of Lagos and took office in October 1979.�� His tenure marked the beginning of unprecedented social programs in the state, executing his party���s famous ���four cardinal programs��� beyond the call of duty. Setting up low-cost housing schemes, new school buildings to accommodate the brimming-over student population, and the ambitious Metro Plan earned Jakande the moniker ���Action Governor.��� The durability of those school buildings worried many, other than his political detractors; those who approved of his commitment to social equality did not stint on criticisms of his doing things on the cheap.

Lagos being the seat of the federal government, all eyes were on the governor, and Jakande rose to the challenge. Political aspirants of all kinds often held him up as the only exemplary governor. He had a successful first term, and his re-election was a resounding success.

A politician must politick. Determined to stay relevant, and in a calculated attempt to checkmate some of his rivals in the Awol���w��� camp, Jakande agreed to serve as the minister for works and housing under Abacha. It could have been just another job, except that most people did not expect Jakande to be just another jobber. He never regained the shine of his ���Action��� years.

His personal style was simple. Usually dressed in sharp-cut lace bu��ba�� and pants, with the trademark golden cap of embroidered wool, he carried a flywhisk. For many years, even after leaving office, he owned only an old Toyota, according to Lai Olurode, his biographer. He lived in a house he built for himself at Ilupeju, in central Lagos, having sold an older house from his journalism days, unwilling to own two houses. A workaholic, he was reportedly at his office poring over files when news of the military coup that ousted him and others broke on December 31, 1983.

His achievements in office loomed large, still. In fact, his real disposition was an intellectual���s; seriously populist. It is more accurate to put him in the company of committed social reformers like the educationist Tai ���olarin and Aminu Kano (of the People’s Redemption Party) than with his party allies like B���la Ige.

It is the passage of that age of high idealism that Nigerians mourned in the outpouring of grief that followed his death.

Upsetting color and its representations

What is one particular place when represented photographically? From Like Stains of Red Dirt by Juan Orrantia.

This post is part of a series of interviews with African artists from across the diaspora.

The Colombia-born photographer Juan Orrantia has lived in Johannesburg, South Africa for the past 12 years. His practice and career as a photographer have gone through many iterations. He was fully aware of South Africa���s history of documentary photography and complicated history with apartheid before relocating there. However, he never could have expected the uncertainty and self-doubt that would grip his practice after arriving, and lead him to not take pictures. Traveling to central and southern Mozambique offered him an opportunity to further develop his photographic interests in the affective qualities of landscapes. It would take him several years before he published the handmade diary-like photobook titled There was heat that smelled of bread and dead fish, an exploration of sites of anti-colonial struggle and civil war in Mozambique, and the varied ways in which inhabitants of these landscapes continually live within these histories of war and displacement.

While completing this project, Orrantia taught at the Wits School of Arts and pursed an MFA in Photography at the Hartford Art School. Since then, he has dedicated himself full-time to photography and distanced himself in a formal and conceptual sense from his doctoral training as a visual anthropologist. Like Stains of Red Dirt, the title of his latest photobook project and recipient of 2019 Fiebre Dummy Award, takes its name from the color of dirt in South Africa and is a metaphor for how the place of South Africa has literally stained him and his photographic practice. In the featured body of work, Orrantia photographs life from inside his family���s Johannesburg apartment, positioning intimate scenes of cohabitation at the center of questions about what it means to see history photographically and in color. Africa Is a Country contributor Drew Thompson spoke with Orrantia regarding his longstanding interest in making photobooks, and what it means to think about photography a place like South Africa.

From Like Stains of Red Dirt by Juan Orrantia. Drew Thompson

You are a photographer who invests in photobooks and the making of photobooks specifically. For you, are photobooks an important mode for exhibiting and engaging with photographs?

Juan Orrantia

The way I transitioned into still photography years ago was through the idea of the essay film. I was interested in the essay film as a form and concept, but not in making films. My first approach was to make still photographs, and I would mix them with audio and soundtracks that I recorded. Taking the elements of an essay film, breaking them apart, and putting them together in some way, I discovered as an approach to photobooks, or [at the very least] a way of thinking about them. The photobook, from the way I see, is an interesting space or form where you can ask questions. I like non-linearity. At the beginning I would add text, and it would support all of these other elements in the form of a book but without the restrictions of a film. The book has certain freedoms that the film does not have. Also, I was never a darkroom photographer. I was not the one who was there [in the darkroom] for hours making photographs, even though it was a way of connecting with the materiality of the photograph. So, when I started to make books, I felt that I was making something instead of taking photographs or making photographs for a screen.

Drew Thompson

In Southern Africa there is a rich history of photobooks. Can you elaborate on the types of choices you confront when editing your photographs in a photobook context?

Juan Orrantia

One of the things I like about photobooks is that the meaning of photographs can change completely. There are a lot of possibilities. If you want to tell a super linear kind of traditional story, you can do it. If you want to completely mess it up and do something very random, where each image is questioned by the next one, or by the one next to it, or by the one on top of it, or by a paper that suddenly shows up in the middle of the signature. Those are the possibilities I like. Because of the way I have been working as of late, I am interested in questioning that initial idea of an image, what we see in an image. I know that someone who works in exhibition style or installation will say you can do that in an exhibition. But, for me, there is a personal choice, [and] I feel like I can do a lot of that with the book. At the beginning I thought it was because I could add text to it, and the text, like in an essay film, would be something very different from the image. [The text] would not be related, creating a new meaning by association or montage. However, the whole effect is to put them together, or cross them, or read them in some way. Now, I have gone to try and take the text out and see what those possibilities are with the images themselves and with the elements of the book itself, adding a particular paper or cover in a certain way, or even the threads that can allow me to disrupt the meanings of the images as you go back and forth. The book is something that helps me explore what I am trying to work out photographically.

Drew Thompson

In (your recent book), Like Stains of Red Dirt, you speak of how your work explores the outside world from interior spaces. How has the pandemic forced you to rethink this dichotomy of inside and outside?

Juan Orrantia

When the pandemic started, I was like ���The book is going to come out now and it is totally going to look like a pandemic book.��� Pre-pandemic I was already discovering the pleasures of making things at home and creating my own photographs within my own enclosed space and with the elements I had available in my immediate space. So, it was both a way of playing with a different way of making my photographs, but also of using the elements within my own environment to make those photographs as well. Photographing inside was a way of approaching the way I could bring myself closer to the work that I was producing. That project basically taught me to take the pressure off from trying to ���find��� what I was looking for ���outside.��� It forced me to think from within, both conceptually and materially.

Drew Thompson

As you were taking these photographs what kinds of choices were you facing? There are no images of inside your house looking to the outside world. Such a view is largely conveyed through the way you engage with light.

Juan Orrantia

Initially I tried to take a lot of photographs outside, thinking that it was going to be about ���South Africa.��� I photographed a lot and they really were not working. So, I started to think how the outside suddenly becomes part of the inside: metaphorically, historically, and to translate that photographically. I started to think about it through my daughter. A lot of that history [outside of my house] came in through her, literally to my life through her. That idea expanded into how this place has come into me, into forming a relationship, into my space in different ways. I was asking myself how do I look for, or how do I engage with, those traces from this place that I am inhabiting? I started to take seriously the light coming into the house, which is why I started to think about color much more.

From Like Stains of Red Dirt by Juan Orrantia. Drew Thompson

Maybe this is a good place to shift to color. What is your relationship to color photography in the context of Southern Africa?

Juan Orrantia

My initial approach to black-and-white was specific. I wanted to photograph in black-and-white because I wanted the possibilities of things that were more poetic, that could take the image that I was making into something less real. [Poetic for me] was something that would have more leeway with what we were seeing. A lot of the [new] documentary work that was coming out of South Africa was made in color. I wanted to photograph in much more of an ambivalent, ambiguous way. The grain, the tones of black-and-white, playing with blurriness would make things less defined. When I switched to color, I was really just exploring how to work with color. Fast forward a few years to when I get to do the work here in the flat, and I was really looking for the light, for those colors and their changes. I asked: What is color really doing for me? Then I started to think critically, conceptually, and metaphorically about color per se. So, that tied in one of my interests with the work, which has to do with the representation of the continent. In Binyavanga Wainaina���s piece ���How to Write About Africa,��� he talks about light. I wanted to use tropes prevalent in representations of the continent in order to upset them, [which was] when I started to upset the colors. But color was also a metaphor about race [and] how race is spoken about here in South Africa. People talk about color. Everything is described in the colors of racialized categories. Color was thus both a metaphor and reality. Then, this whole other world opened���of transforming or upsetting the images I was making through color manipulations.

Drew Thompson

I really like this word ���upset.��� How technically and conceptual did you find yourself upsetting color?

Juan Orrantia

It was really using color to make an image that you know is very banal but that also tells you there is something not completely truthful, or right with it. There is something more to it in a way. Conceptually, for me, that was a way of talking about representation. For example, what is South Africa if you see an aloe plant completely in purples and pinks. Why is that not true? Why is it that pictures of the continent, say like those complicated ones made by Leni Riefenstahl, are believed to be more true? To me it was a way of opening up the question: What is one particular place when represented photographically? I am not photographing the light of Southern Africa; I don���t want to essentialize that. I upset the color. That meant literally putting these papers on the flash and changing the image that I was seeing. I would also get surprised by what I thought I was seeing. I wanted to have that element of surprise be part of my own process. Suddenly I am seeing the image I just composed but it is completely changed because it is all purple, or half of it is purple and half of it is green.

From Like Stains of Red Dirt by Juan Orrantia. Drew Thompson

When we speak about upsetting color, the image that comes to mind is of the watermelon and cellophane paper. Your work challenges commonly held views on the everyday and the artificiality that we ascribe to the everyday through photography.

Juan Orrantia

Artificiality was something that was very important to me. Some of them [the photographs] are in natural light, and some of them are in artificial light. What happens when you mix the two? I think questioning what is artificial and what is not artificial ties a lot to the history of South Africa, where [there���s] an ambivalence about race. Something that [is] so natural becomes something artificial through the way [that] it is completely manipulated by history, laws, and regimes. Categories and identities are fluid, but we tend to read them as givens (natural or artificial) depending on where we stand, or how we look.

It also was related to my thinking back to those ideas from the film essay. For example, when they start to include the tripods in the frame to make the point that what you are producing is obviously a construction. It was important for me to reinforce that we live with constructed categories, and fluid, shifting meanings. That is why in some of the images I leave the pieces of the cellophane hanging out or they become part of the frame. And, in others, they become the photograph itself. In those I am photographing the artificiality itself; it becomes my subject by photographing the means that I am using to transform the color of the photographs themselves. That image of the watermelon, for me, points to how these ideas and practices are literally embedded in the banality of our everyday lives.

Drew Thompson

Paging through the Like Stains of Red Dirt, I get the sense that the photographs are particularly constructed images, and they are precisely what you want to show. You force us to engage with critical concepts of photography, like what is the documentary, what is seriality, or what is color?

Juan Orrantia

I���m trying to create images that can make us think what an image of something is. Is this really what Y or X place looks, or is supposed to look like? According to whom? Because that deals with questions in the first place which interest me, about how people and places have been defined. To me these are questions tied to notions of photographic truth and its limits. I want a fluid engagement with both real histories that produce very real effects for people���s lives, but also to remind us that things aren���t necessarily what we are told they are. When I was making the book, I was adamant about not having a linear narrative. Precisely the way I had made those images, they were moments and fragments. There was not one story I wanted to tell. I don���t want to ���capture��� any particular one story to tell in any particular way. I am exploring this relationship with all of these trajectories, undercurrents, and all of these come in different ways. For me, a relationship is basically moments tied together. What I have after 12 years living here is an accumulation of moments, feelings, etc. In its most basic way, that also is what photography is: a bunch of moments and fragments that suddenly transform into ���narratives��� and ���stories.��� I wanted to go to the fragmentary nature of it, to how (photographic) fragments get tied together by histories and choices. That is why I started and finished the book with a fragment of a Shirley card, because that���s also part of this representational reality.

From Like Stains of Red Dirt by Juan Orrantia. Drew Thompson

We can talk about the Shirley card in terms of racializing photography. In your project, there are elements of engaging and questioning race and it���s artificiality and how it reveals itself through color. How did the Shirley card emerge in your work and inform how you were seeing light? How did the Shirley card factor into your technical practice?

Juan Orrantia

Technically, if anything, the Shirley card is tied to ideas of balancing and creating some sense of norm about ���natural��� color. The idea of a natural color is itself racialized and literally embedded in photographic technology. I wanted to deal with this problematic history through my own disruption of color [and] color correcting images. If I were a�����proper�����photographer I would have color corrected the images and have them in their�����true�����natural colors. That became a problem for me because that was not what I wanted to do. In a way, the Shirley card is part of that history. In the last couple of years, people have started to talk about the Shirley card much more. There is the Broomberg and Chanarin piece�����To Photograph the Details of a Dark Horse in Low Light��� or Daniel Blight���s book��The Image of Whiteness: Contemporary Photography and Racialization. There is also the approach by the filmmaker John Akomfrah about recognizing these inherent problems and what forms of agency they have produced. I am not discovering anything new; it [the Shirley card and its history] is something that I can rely on to make the point of color being manipulated historically, racialized, and contested. I think it is a good referent to this history that people are recognizing now about the problematic relationship between photography, particularly through color, to photography in Africa and representations of the African continent and also of the possibilities of fighting it from within. The Shirley card is a referent to this history [and] also tied to the way I was working. To wanting to question definitions or assumptions of ���normal��� in how we see or recognize places, histories, etc. At the beginning I color corrected a lot. In the end, I would color correct, then I would upset it, and then play with both in the making of the final image.

Drew Thompson

How do you place Like Stains of Red Dirt in relation to your work, and what comes next?

Juan Orrantia

This work really pushed me to work much more photographically and to think about how I can use the medium and its limits for questions I have about the medium and my relationship to it. When I talk about the medium, I mean photography���s relationship to colonialism, to the effects of European reason in how we see and are seen. On the one hand, the work was the hardest I made as I had to confront something that in a way I had avoided. I had to confront the if and how I was going to photograph here in South Africa. Twelve years had passed [since I arrived in South Africa] and I hadn���t really photographed here. After such time I think it is fair to ask whether you are going to photograph or not. It was hard to think through why and how I was going to do it because it also meant thinking about choices over the last 10 years of my life. That has expanded into rethinking other bodies of work that I have done and messing with them. I am basically working with color and thinking about what I want color to do in relation to questions of representation and history. That expanded my interest in color itself, color���s relationship to colonialism or masculinity, for example, which are basically questions tied to the medium I chose to work with.

The politics of blessings

Over the past decade, support from Western Christian groups have become an increasingly dominant force in Israel���s relationships with Africa. Photo by John Price on Unsplash. Parts of this text are adapted from�� Israel in Africa: Security, Migration, Interstate Politics ,��published by Zed Books.

On a sunny morning in early January 2016, a motorboat was making its way through Lake Victoria to Bussi, a small island situated a few kilometers west of Entebbe. On board were two foreign visitors: Deputy Ambassador Nadav Peldman from the Israeli embassy in Kenya, and Jos van Westing, the Fundraising and Development manager of the Evangelical Zionist organization Christians for Israel International. The two were traveling to Bussi to attend a five-day ���repentance conference��� for officers of the Uganda People���s Defense Force (UPDF), organized by Christians for Israel���s Ugandan branch.

Christians for Israel���s office in Uganda was established in 2009 by Drake Kanaabo, a known evangelist from one of the most popular and oldest Pentecostal churches in Uganda, the Redeemed of the Lord Evangelistic Church. The organization���s offices are conveniently located in central Kampala, close to the Ugandan Parliament, and its members have been participating on a regular basis in ���prayer breakfasts��� in this institution and organizing various outreach events among Ugandan churches, government officials, and political elites. They also run pilgrimage tours to the Holy Land and host Israeli Independence Day celebrations.

The 2016 conference in Bussi was organized by Kanaabo in cooperation with several high-ranking UPDF officers. It brought together more than 150 Christian military men who gathered to pray and fast in order to repent, as members of the Ugandan military, for their country���s mistreatment of Israel during the period of Idi Amin���s rule. ���These people, when they knelt down to confess, all of them burst into tears,��� one volunteer of Christians for Israel later described the event, in which the officers pleaded with Peldman to forgive Uganda on behalf of the Jewish Nation. ���It was historical. And we believe God forgave us, forgave our military.���

There is a long history of Western Evangelical support of Zionism and Israel, particularly, since the 1970s, from Christian groups in the US. Over the past decade, such support has become an increasingly dominant force in Israel���s relationships with African leaders and peoples as well. The Evangelical theological justifications for support of Israel mean little to Jewish Israelis, and Israeli diplomats also often stress the importance of establishing Israel���s image in Africa as a modern, tech-savvy nation and not only as the ancient Holy Land many Africans know from the Bible. And yet the pro-Israel messages Evangelicals promote, their suspicion of Islam, their urge to express unconditional support of Israeli policies, and their expanding influence on public life in many parts of Africa render them invaluable allies of the Jewish state.

Support for Israel comes from various Christian movements in Africa, but the most dominant among them are the Pentecostal (or ���neo-charismatic���) churches that have emerged in West Africa since the 1980s and have gained immense popularity across the continent, influencing the doctrines and practices of other denominations as well. Supporting the spread of Evangelical Zionist theologies among these churches, however, are also a host of foreign groups. The Africa���Israel Initiative, a Norwegian organization that seeks to create ���a highway of blessings from Israel to Africa and from Africa to Israel,��� is one of them. Christians United for Israel (CUFI)���America���s largest Christian pro-Israel lobby���is another.

Although Christian Zionist theologies and practices vary widely, the fascination of different conservative Evangelical groups with the Jewish People and Israel is commonly grounded in their literal interpretation of the Bible. Most fundamentally, Christian Zionists reject what they call ���replacement theology,��� that is, the notion that the Jews have lost their significance as God���s chosen after rejecting the messiahship of Jesus and were ���replaced��� by the church. This interpretation of the New Testament has been propagated by Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant churches for centuries. But a close reading of the scriptures, many Evangelicals argue, indicates that it is false. God���s covenant with the people of Israel is still valid.

This conviction has several implications of political significance. One is that whoever ���blesses��� the Jewish people���and by implication, the modern state of Israel���is believed to be rewarded with divine blessings. This is based on God���s promise to Abraham in Genesis 12:3 to bless whoever blesses him and curse whoever curses him. Another implication of the rejection of ���replacement theology��� is that the Jews are understood to have a central role to play in bringing about the end times and the Millennial Kingdom. Evangelicals thus often view Israel���s wealth, military prowess, and developmental achievements as clear indications of blessings and righteousness, and its ongoing conflicts as the fulfilment of biblical prophesies.

There are good reasons, therefore, that African Pentecostal churches have found Christian Zionist theologies persuasive and appealing. The notion that pro-Israel activism can have positive consequences resonates strongly with the Pentecostal emphasis on healing, entrepreneurship, prosperity, and the favorable powers of the Holy Spirit. The rejection of mainstream ���replacement theology������portrayed as a misleading doctrine implanted in people���s minds by foreign missionary churches���similarly resonates with the born-again concern with biblical authenticity. For spiritual movements relentlessly preoccupied with the uncovering of falsities and the clearing of doubts, the state of Israel is increasingly becoming an undisputed index of divine truth and revelation.

These trends, of course, have not gone unnoticed in Jerusalem. ���We are interested in ties with any religious, ethnic and political group, and it doesn���t matter whether it is Muslim, Evangelical or Catholic or anything else,��� Gideon Behar, previously the head of the Africa Bureau at the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs, explained. ���But the fact that there are Evangelical communities that are becoming larger and stronger everywhere in Africa��� these communities naturally have a stronger connection with Israel, and a stronger urge to have links with us, and they are certainly a factor that is increasingly encouraging African countries to strengthen their ties with Israel.���

Consider, for example, Nigeria���the epicenter of Africa���s ���Pentecostal revolution.��� Members of Nigeria���s Pentecostal elite, such as Chris Oyakhilome, TB Joshua, and Enoch Adeboye��� celebrity preachers with a high-profile media presence, representing churches with branches across the world and influencing millions of believers���have visited the Holy Land in recent years. Some returned, multiple times, accompanied by hundreds of pilgrims, regularly sharing impressive footage from their trips on social media and their popular TV channels. Prophet TB Joshua, founder of the Synagogue Church of All Nations in Lagos, was recently named ���Tourism Goodwill Ambassador��� by the Israeli Minister of Tourism after holding a two-day mass prayer event in Nazareth.

Zionist rhetoric is prevalent in these circles, and hence the warm welcome from Israeli officials. ���The problems that we are seeing between the Jews and the rest of the world, is because they are the favorites of God,��� Nigerian mega-pastor Enoch Adeboye of the Redeemed Christian Church of God explained in 2011 while visiting Israeli settlements in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. ���When you are special to God, then automatically the devil wouldn���t like you either.��� In line with the imperative to bless Israel, in his regular pilgrimage tours to Israel in recent years, Adeboye also donated several ambulances to the Israeli national emergency service and disaster recovery organizations.

Pentecostal elites like Adeboye, as Ebenezer Obadare shows, are powerful actors in the country���s political landscape. President Goodluck Jonathan (2010���2015), a Christian from the country���s south-east, ���wore his supposed Christian and Pentecostalist credentials on his sleeve��� and strategically courted the nation���s most influential Pentecostal pastors and tapped into their powerful public influence. Among other things, he repeatedly visited Israel on pilgrimage tours���once as vice-president in 2007 and then twice during his presidency���each time traveling with an entourage of high-profile officials and pastors. In 2014, months before the elections that he eventually lost, he visited Israel accompanied by Bishop David Oyedepo, the founder of one of Africa���s largest Pentecostal movements, Winners��� Chapel.

As part of Jonathan���s branding of himself as Nigeria���s Pentecostal president, pilgrimage tours doubled as friendly formal visits and relations with Israel improved. To Israel���s benefit, Nigeria was a non-permanent member of the UN Security Council in 2014���2015. In December 2014, when the council voted on a resolution calling for Israel to withdraw from the Occupied Palestinian Territories within three years, Nigeria (with Rwanda) abstained, though reportedly only after a last-minute personal phone call from Netanyahu to Jonathan. The abstention surprised many observers and allowed the US to avoid using its veto power.

A similar manifestation of the politics of blessings can be identified in Ghana. Though an Israeli embassy was only opened in Accra in 2011, ties between Israeli businesses and Ghanaian Evangelicals had developed earlier. Since its re-establishment, the Israeli embassy openly supported the activities of the local branch of the Africa���Israel Initiative, hosted its leaders at the ambassador���s residency, participated in their religious conferences and in recent years even organized its own prayer events. A regular attendee of the Israeli embassy���s events is Archbishop Nicolas Duncan-Williams, the founder of the Christian Action Faith Ministries and one of the most influential religious figures in Africa.

As faith-based organizations increasingly extend their spiritual and material influence into spheres that are commonly perceived as ���secular������electoral politics, business, education, popular culture���their impact on Israel���s standing is multi-layered. ���Our main objective as an embassy of the State of Israel is to strengthen the ties between Israel and Ghana. And we do this on three levels: ��� government-to-government ��� business-to-business ��� and people-to-people,��� Shani Cooper-Zubida, Israel���s ambassador to Ghana, explained. ���These churches are integrated in all three fields.��� Not only do they influence the media, public opinion, and governments, but they are also important economic actors. Indeed, Archbishop Duncan-Williams is also the ���Patron��� of the Ghana���Israel Business Chamber, inaugurated in 2016.

Ghana, Nigeria, and Uganda are not the only examples of such dynamics. The more public life and politics take an explicitly Pentecostal tone, across Africa, the more frequent such engagements become. Under the leadership of Lazarus Chakwera, an Evangelical Christian and former pastor, Malawi recently announced its intention to open an embassy in Jerusalem. In March 2020, Democratic Republic of Congo President Felix Tshisekedi, addressing the pro-Israel lobby AIPAC and his ���Evangelical Christian brothers and sisters��� in Washington, promised to open an embassy to Israel with an economic section in Jerusalem as well. ���I want to build strong connections with Israel and an alliance in which my country will be a blessing for the nation of Israel, in accordance with the promise of the Almighty God,��� Tshisekedi explained, citing Genesis 12:3.

In South Africa, meanwhile, Israel and the local South African Zionist Federation (SAZF) have long partnered with a host of born-again groups as well as the older Zion Christian Church (ZCC) to counter the pro-Palestinian stance of political leaders and curb popular support for the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement. ���Help us push back this scourge and this obsession that has captured the ruling party,��� SAZF chair Ben Swartz passionately pleaded with the attendees of a 2018 pro-Israel conference organized in Johannesburg in cooperation with the Israeli Ministry of Strategic Affairs. ���For we do not wish to bring upon us the curse associated with these actions. We wish to bring upon South Africa the blessings that South Africa so rightfully deserves.���

It is important to see these discourses and dynamics within a broader context. From Ghana, through Nigeria, Zambia, Uganda, Kenya, and all the way to Ethiopia, the rise of born-again Christianity in recent decades has transformed not only Africa���s religious landscape but also its politics. The aesthetics, truth claims, and practices associated with this faith are altering the very nature of citizenship, statehood, political action, and public life in many parts of the continent. The embracing of Christian Zionist theologies and the impact of these theologies on Israel���s standing in Africa are only some of the secondary consequences of this process, but they testify well for the anxieties and hopes that underly it, the multiple transnational actors and forces that shape its course, and its potential implications.

Israel and its supporters around the world are clearly grateful for these developments. For now, the Evangelical politics of blessings help legitimize apartheid and further suppress calls for accountability, justice, and democratization in Israel-Palestine. But the rise of born-again Christianity is ultimately entangled in much wider epistemological crises and political trends, which might be acutely felt in Africa but are hardly limited to it. Critics who hope to meaningfully intervene in the conversation will need to appreciate, at the very least, not only the changing circumstances, but also the new ways of knowing, speaking, and acting that are commanded by the Spirit.

Telling Nigerian stories

Director Taiwo Egunjobi disavows Nollywood���s penchant for crass comedies and maudlin dramas. Still from In Ibadan courtesy Taiwo Egunjobi.

Lagos is Nollywood���s hub.�� However, every day, films continue to be shot across other Nigerian cities such as Asaba, Enugu, Ibadan, and Abuja. These films may fit outside mainstream Nollywood, that is, films shot in Lagos for theatrical release, but they are equally watched and are even more reflective of the lives of the better percentage of Nigerians than the cinema films that mostly romanticize wealth and luxury living. Nollywood is typically sub-categorized into other branches like Asaba Nollywood (films shot in the less bustling city of Asaba or other parts of southeastern Nigeria) and Yoruba Nollywood (the Yoruba-language film industry), known for the less ���artistic��� films that are still released straight-to-video (the method of film distribution that birthed the industry) and, recently, on YouTube.

The industry is, however, quite de-structured. Sporadically, independent filmmakers outside of these industry divides, with a keen attention to both the technicality and art of filmmaking, spring up to tell quintessential Nigerian stories. For��In Ibadan, first-time feature film director Taiwo Egunjobi disavows Nollywood���s penchant for crass comedies and maudlin dramas, offering instead a simple yet heartfelt story about love and forgiveness set in the ancient city of Ibadan.

Former Lovers, Ewa (Goodness Emmanuel) and Obafemi (Temilolu Fosudo), are reunited in their hometown of Ibadan, years after their breakup, which was partly a consequence of Ewa���s relocation to Lagos. They confront the issues that caused their separation and attempt closure. The story is inspired not just by the life of the director, but also other members of the cast and crew domiciled in Ibadan, who have had to juggle relationships and career opportunities between the ancient city and Lagos, the city of dreams.

Taiwo Egunjobi and I conversed about the making of In Ibadan and Nigerian cinema.

Dika Ofoma

In Ibadan��isn���t your first film. For a few years now, you���ve been writing scripts for other directors and have made a couple of shorts. Many see short films as a journey into learning filmmaking and fully developing into a filmmaker. What convinced you that the time was right for you to make a feature?

Taiwo Egunjobi

Great question. I think it was a sudden realization that the Calvary wasn���t coming, I wasn’t going to be handed the kind of money I needed to make the kind of films I wanted to make. But more importantly, I felt making a feature film was the right step in my education as a filmmaker. You need to put out your art and keep honing it.

Taiwo Egunjobi, Dika Ofoma

It means then, that part of your hesitation was seeking perfection. Instead of continuing in that, you finally found courage to allow yourself to evolve.

Taiwo Egunjobi

Exactly. Every filmmaker begins at that mental point. You always start with a lot of dreams: you want to make the next classic, have a big cinema run, go to Cannes, and win all the Oscars. If you���re not really honest with yourself, that could just be a prison.

Dika Ofoma

Something striking about��In Ibadan��is that you stayed true to your style. You still play with colors and with music like in your shorts. (You previously made an experimental film about music, Musomania). I���d like to hear about the thought process of creating the sequence of scenes where there���s a band just playing music, interspersed with flashbacks of our protagonists��� past love lives. It���s almost as though the music was a voice over narration replacement for those scenes.

Taiwo Egunjobi

Well, I guess it���s how I was educated in film and the things that I���ve come to love in cinema. Music is a big part of film and I���ve always been inspired by great performances in films and how to employ them in telling the story. Especially the films of Tunde Kelani. So yes, we wanted the music��In Ibadan��to be a part of the story and not simply for the fun of it. And we were lucky to find amazing musicians.

Dika Ofoma

I was coming to Tunde Kelani. The film also employed a comic style that seems to have been inherited from him. He is one of your influences. Are there other influences, especially from Nigeria and the rest of Africa?

Taiwo Egunjobi

Interesting. And that���s the funny thing about influences, I guess they creep into your work somehow.��I���ve been influenced by a lot of filmmakers. In Nigeria, Femi Odugbemi, and there���s Djibril Diop Mamb��ty, the legendary Senegalese filmmaker. But my influences extend beyond the continent���I’m big on Yasujuro Ozu and Yorgos Lanthimos. I just resonate deeply with a lot of what I���ve seen or read from these people.

Still from In Ibadan. Dika Ofoma

These are all interesting filmmakers. Sticking to your style also means that you did not compromise for commerciality.��In Ibadan��is calm and quiet���a slow burn. The storytelling is nonlinear. Something else very unconventional about the film was the open-ended conclusion. One of your experimental short films, aptly titled Don���t be a Nollywood Stereotype, ridiculed certain Nollywood tropes. Were you trying to hold yourself to your word when making this film? How deliberate were you on working at not making the conventional Nollywood film?

Taiwo Egunjobi

Well, it���s all about the story. A simple, honest tale set in Ibadan. I think the slow, contemplative style just felt right for the story, the world, and the resources we had to tell it. Yes, there are lots of languages a director can employ to tell a story, and yes, there are also directorial styles: commercial or art. To me, it���s a bit of both, staying true to the story and staying true to myself and also my language. And I think it just points to what everyone has been saying, Nigeria has a lot going right now in film, call it the new wave or neo-Nollywood; a lot of filmmakers are emerging and becoming a part of the global Nollywood experience.

Still from In Ibadan. Dika Ofoma

I like this thought. Someone unfamiliar with your works might pin the choice of relatively unknown casts for the film on budget constraints. While this could be true, actors such as Temilolu Fosudo and Simisola Olatunji have featured recurringly in your films. How important was it for you to work with a familiar crew and cast to actualize your vision for the film? And when you were making the film, were you thinking cinema? How did you hope to sell the film and recoup investments?

Taiwo Egunjobi

Wow. Well, I just happen to know these actors from way back and we’ve grown together. They know and understand our process and how we like to work. It was a lot of fun on set. We were a family, and I will continue making stuff with them.��In Ibadan��required very honest performances and I was able to get that from them with no hassles.

Honestly, we didn’t think a lot about distribution, we didn’t even consider theatrical distribution. We took a leap of faith and we are learning a lot about the market. We all know what the cinema business so no use stressing there. We are quite pleased with being on AfrolandTV though.

Dika Ofoma

How did you get it on AfrolandTV?

Taiwo Egunjobi

My friend Damola Layonu told me about the platform. I reached out and they got back in about a week. Pretty simple.

Dika Ofoma

The three women who exist in your film, happen to be thorns in the life of the protagonist or have hurt him in some way. Two had sexually harassed him, even. There���s a way the world today seems to have cast women as the better of the sexes in terms of morality. In flipping the script, were you trying to make conversation?

Taiwo Egunjobi

Well, we just told the story, in a lot of ways, inspired by events in my life, in Temi (Fosudo)���s life. I���m sure there are aspects that are interesting to discuss, but that didn���t play on my mind. I must say though, life happens to both men and women, mistakes happen all the time and we learn from them. Love needs a lot of sacrifice and forgiveness to work, from both men and women.

Still from In Ibadan. Dika Ofoma

In��In Ibadan, Ibadan is breathtakingly photographed. In a sense, Ibadan became one of the characters. The movie explored our protagonists’ relationship with the city���Ewa relives her memories in Ibadan and wishes she never left for Lagos. Lagos is the land of opportunities, hopes, and dreams for Nigerians. The consensus is that the better pastures, better jobs, and opportunities are there. Year in and year out, young Nigerians in their multitude leave their smaller cities and towns for Lagos, hence the overpopulation of the city. Aspiring filmmakers and actors are not exempt. Despite the difficulties of shooting in Lagos, it has remained Nollywood���s hub for years. Did you consciously attempt to make a case for Ibadan with the cinematography?

Taiwo Egunjobi

Great question. Ibadan has been perceived in a way and by extension, photographed in a way, with a lot of clich��s. So, like you said, Ibadan was a key character in this story. We wanted to do better, and really romanticize the city in a different way. You know the deal with the famed brown roofs, the amala, the gruff etiquette of the people, we didn���t want to fixate on that. But instead, find the beauty in the simple things.

Dika Ofoma

There was this shot at the start of the film that juxtaposed the brown roof with the skyscrapers/tall buildings. And I thought that was brilliant.

Taiwo Egunjobi

Yeah. That���s Ibadan in transition. Old and new.

Dika Ofoma

At the start of our interview, you acknowledged that part of your delay in making a feature film was seeking perfection. I am curious to know if there are parts of��In Ibadan��you think you could have done some things differently or even better.

Taiwo Egunjobi

Sure, there are aspects of the plot I felt we could have tightened and handled better, especially the third act. And I wasn���t too pleased with the quality of the sound at times, I felt we could have done better. But water under the bridge now. You can always get better.

The life and times of Trevor Madondo

Trevor Madondo achieved a certain immortality in Zimbabwean cricketing lore precisely for the way in which he confronted cricket���s history as an instrument of empire. Trevor Madondo. Image credit Richard Harrison.

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

In a sense I am the fiction I choose to be. At the same time, I am the ghoul or the harmless young man others take me for. I am what the rock dropping on my head makes me. I am my lungs breathing. My memory remembering. My desires reaching. My audience responding with an impatient sneer. I am all those things. Are they illusions? I do not know. And I think that is the point.

��� Dambudzo Marechera, The House of Hunger

Zimbabwe was once famous for its schools. There���s a particularly prestigious boarding school in Esigodini, 55 kilometers southeast of Bulawayo near the old Bushtick Mine, called Falcon College. It was founded in 1954, and finds its motto in the work of the Roman poet Virgil: Sic itur ad astra, meaning literally ���thus one goes to the stars���, and more generally ���such is the way to immortality.���

In 1990, a student named Trevor Madondo arrived at Falcon College. During his time there he was to grow an unparalleled reputation as the next big thing in Zimbabwean cricket. In a strange way, Trevor���s short life, and his lasting impact, have come to embody the school���s maxim.

Or perhaps it���s not that strange at all. There���s an old game called sortes vergilianae. The gist is that it���s a sort of bibliomancy, or divination, by way of Virgil���s poems. Open any page of the Aeneid at random, pick a passage, and you���ll learn your fate. This was the method by which, legend has it, Hadrian���s ascent to the Roman emperorship was foretold, while King Charles 1 is said to have happened upon a passage that predicted his own execution by beheading. In the works of Dante, Virgil is the author���s guide to the underworld. In the medieval period, Virgil was thought of as a pagan prophet who had foretold the birth of Christ.

Needless to say, this arcane pastime has long fallen out of popularity. But Virgil still pops up in odd places. There is, for instance, a line from the Aeneid at the 9/11 Memorial Museum in New York. And, of course, at Falcon College in Esigodini. But there is a bittersweet irony in these words as they relate to Trevor.

Bittersweet because he died before leaving much more than hints of what he may have been capable of achieving at the sport���s highest level. Ironic because the Aeneid was, to many, a celebration of imperial dominance and indigenous subjugation, while Trevor achieved a certain immortality in Zimbabwean cricketing lore precisely for the way in which he confronted cricket���s history as an instrument of empire.

 

Trevor is born in Mount Darwin, a small town 160 kilometers northeast of Harare, on November 22, 1976. It���s an area of both agricultural and mining interests not far from the border with Mozambique. Harare is still called Salisbury, and Mount Darwin is one of the epicenters of the battle for Zimbabwe���s liberation, being smack-bang in the middle of the northeastern operational area known as ���Hurricane.��� There is a major military base in the town, and it is here that the Rhodesians first implement ���Protected Villages��� and the ���Fire Force��� counter-insurgency strategy.

The war has been ongoing for over a decade and is deep into its second phase when Trevor comes into the world at the beginning of the rainy season. The doomed Geneva Conference (mediated by the British and involving both the Rhodesians and Black nationalists) is ongoing, compulsory military service has just been extended to 18 months, and none other than Henry Kissinger, his hour come round at last, slouches forth to involve himself in Rhodesia���s affairs. Kissinger attempts to engineer a post-Rhodesian government sympathetic to US interests but despite (or perhaps because of) his machinations the war only intensifies.

This is the fractious and uncertain milieu of Trevor���s birth. Holding their infant child, his parents can surely not imagine the career their son will choose, nor the mark it will leave on his country. In those circumstances, he had as much chance to walk on the moon as he had to represent, in cricket, that quintessentially English game, a nation that did not yet exist, but in the hearts and minds of revolutionaries.

Image credit Richard Harrison.

First years in the world. From crying toddler to smiling child. Born a Rhodesian, now a Zimbabwean. A younger brother, Tafadzwa, is born in a newly independent Zimbabwe in February 1981. Trevor is six years old when the family leaves Mount Darwin the following year. They move around the country for a while, following his father���s work as an Agritex Officer. Zimbabwe���s renowned agricultural extension service is probably the best in Africa at the time, with skilled extension workers and agronomists such as Madondo Sr. working throughout the countryside, offering expert training and advice.

When the growing Madondo family do eventually settle down again, it is in Mutare, a city nestled in a nook within the undulating mountains of the Eastern Highlands. Yet Trevor remains unsettled, even at this young age. He is sent to boarding school at Lilfordia, 20 kilometers west of Harare. It is here that he finds the sport that will change his life.

Lilfordia is a beautiful farm school with an odd history. Agnes and Atherton Lilford open the school in 1909 as a way of easing their financial troubles. Leaving those early money worries well behind, their son Douglas ���Boss��� Lilford goes on to become something of a financial tycoon, with mining, farming, and industrial concerns. He plays a key role in the formation of the Rhodesian Front in the 1960s, helping to mastermind the Unilateral Declaration of Independence, Rhodesia���s first attempt at thwarting majority rule, in 1965.

���Boss��� Lilford is murdered in what appears to be a robbery at his Doornfontein farm in 1985, at around the same time Trevor is first enrolled at Lilfordia. (Ian Smith calls Lilford ���my closest and greatest friend��� upon hearing of his death). One can only speculate as to what Lilford made of the increasingly progressive and multi-racial character of the school, but as Lilfordia���s own online history notes: ���With the coming of Independence the pendulum swung spectacularly.���

The school is by this stage run by Iain and Letitia Campbell, Iain being particularly keen on cricket in addition to his duties as headmaster. Indeed, the Campbell family are something akin to royalty in Zimbabwean cricketing circles, with Iain���s son Alistair going on to captain the country in the late 1990s, and Lilfordia���s alumni includes several national cricketers. Iain takes one look at the young Trevor Madondo and knows a cricketer when he sees one.

���Trevor grew up under the guidance of one of the most brilliant cricketing brains in this country,��� explains veteran Zimbabwean journalist Enock Muchinjo. ���One of the most humble, but knowledgeable, cricket minds. Iain was mesmerized by Trevor. He took him under his wing.���

Iain Campbell passes away in 2008, shortly before Lilfordia���s centenary, but his son Alistair is still involved in the running of the school, and in cricket in Zimbabwe. ���I remember him well,��� Alistair says of Trevor. ���My first memories of him are of my old man saying ���you���ve just gotta look at this guy, we���ve got this guy who���s really good, come and have a look at him bat���.���

���He really did have something special. And not only in cricket, just sports in general. Anything he turned his hand to, whether it be cricket, athletics, rugby, hockey. At junior school he was an absolute standout. A prodigy. You���d say this guy is destined for greater glory.���

The glories are not long in coming. Trevor is inducted into the school���s cricket set-up when he is in Grade 3 and by the time he is in Grade 5 he is already playing in the school���s first team with children a year or two older than him. He opens the bowling and bats at No. 4��� the prime batting slot in any team. In Grade 6 he is selected for the Partridges, the national primary schools cricket team, and in 1989 he is part of the Mashonaland Country Districts primary schools select team that tours England. In Grade 7 he averages an incredible 84.00 with the bat, scoring five centuries including 108 against Rydings School. A destiny in cricket seems already to be calling him, and his parents��� choice of high school is tailormade to fulfill it: Falcon College has produced two national Test captains, and numerous Test cricketers. Word soon begins to spread of his talent, and by the time Trevor gets to Falcon College in 1990, though he is over-age and distinctly under-sized, his star is well on the rise.

It is not uncommon, in the 1980s and 1990s, to find foreign teachers in Zimbabwean schools. Indeed, there is something of an influx of young teaching professionals into the country at this time, partly as a result of the government���s commitment to expanding access to education across the country. Zimbabwe���s education system is much lauded, and many Zimbabweans still boast of the country���s extraordinarily high literacy rates���though such a brag is at best only a half truth these days. Many of the expat teachers will flee Zimbabwe���s economic and sociopolitical woes in the 2000s, but a handful stick around, and one such example is Richard Harrison. He arrives at Falcon College fresh from Durham University in September 1986, thinking he is coming for a couple of years, and never leaves. And from that day to this, he���s coached cricket at Falcon too.

���I can remember the very first practice session Trevor came to,��� he says. ���I���d heard all about this hot-shot cricketer who was going to join and transform my team. And then this tiny little fellow appeared on the field the first day. I thought: really? But as it turned out, he did know exactly what to do.���

It is not only at Falcon College that Trevor���s cricketing prowess begins to precede him. Word is also spreading in his hometown of Mutare. Baynham Goredema is a Mutare-born graphic designer, creative, and social commentator. He is also a keen follower of Zimbabwean cricket, and was a handy player in his youth. ���When I was in Grade 6 I was chosen amongst players from our school to play in the Casuals Cricket Festival held every year at Mutare Sports Club where boys from around the country were selected and placed into four different teams,��� Goredema explains.

���Before the cricket started, there was already a buzz around the ground, whispers of ���Trevor Madondo is here���. So I wanted to see this guy. I eventually saw him when he went out to bat. They would call out the incoming batsmen on the PA. He definitely was special as he was hitting all the bowlers around the park. And he had a captive audience. It seemed all the older guys knew who he was. That day when he was walking around you could see that he commanded a lot of respect. He seemed like a quiet person.���

Trevor breathes rarified air into the small Mutare sporting scene as a young, black batsman. This is the fourth-largest city in Zimbabwe, with a population of around 150,000 in the 1990s. The sporting community is small but passionate, and cricket is at this time run largely by whites.

���Word just spread around the city that there was this prodigious talent who was going to be the greatest ever to come from Zimbabwe,��� says Muchinjo, who is also from Mutare. ���He���d come back on school holidays and play for the local club, Mutare Sports Club. Some of my earliest memories are of going to watch Trevor bat. I���d walk from our family home, a distance of about five or six kilometers, just to see him practice with the seniors. Quite a few of the senior players in the white community also really took to him. Every time he came back home during the holidays, they would immediately, even when he was as young as 15 or 16, draft him into the first team.

���What was also amazing was the foresightedness of people like Mark Burmester, who was the captain of Mutare Sports Club. He took Trevor through the paces, guided him. I think he saw that for cricket in Zimbabwe to have a future, it needed to grow. It needed to change. And people like Trevor represented that future.���

Cricket is an aesthetic game, and one obsessed with numbers and technique. Other games have rules. Cricket has laws. It is recognized that there is a certain ���correct��� way to play, yet no two cricketers are exactly alike. Each plays the game in their own way. As a teenager, this is Trevor���s way: to see the technical nuances others can���t. To play the shots others won���t. To take on the biggest and baddest among the opposition. It���s a style that leads to moments of brilliance and frustration in equal measure.

Amid formative years and teenage frivolity, Trevor starts to find his way. He makes friends. Brighton Watambwa, who had also been at Lilfordia and will also play Test cricket for Zimbabwe, is one. Qhubekani ���Q��� Nkala is another. ���Trevor was one of the most talented cricketers I met and played with,��� says Nkala. ���If we were playing a team and everyone was scared of a fast bowler, Trevor would be like: ���no, that���s the one I want���. And he���d try and hook him. Or pull him. Because he was that confident. And, technically, I don���t know any schoolboy who was his equal.���

Trevor and Qhubekani on the field, on some hazy afternoon in the long ago. An opposition batsman bullying their team. Trevor with his arm around Q���s shoulder, a word in his ear: ���He would look at a batsman and say Q we can work this guy out like this,��� Nkala says. ���Drop your mid on. Look at how this guy holds his bat. How he stands. This guy is bottom-handed, so put someone at midwicket, toss it up outside off stump, he���s going to try drag it across. That���s how we get him. He had such a wealth of knowledge about the game at such a young age.���

He is a natural. Cricket comes easily. Too easily? He begins to display some of that impatience particular to those endowed with exceptional talent. A sort of boredom at being that much better than everyone else. His coach is frustrated by Trevor finding ways to get himself out even if the bowlers can���t. He wants more runs from the young batsman. He knows he���s good enough.

Yet he is not arrogant, and he doesn���t like arrogance in others. ���If there was someone walking around all cock-a-hoop and big boots, Trevor would be like, ���ja today I���m going to take this guy to the cleaners and put him in his place on the field���,��� says Nkala. ���On the cricket field, he���d naturally come into his own, simply because he was so good. But he didn���t talk it up. It was in the way he played his cricket.���

But now also a stubborn streak, a strong will, begins to show itself. Trevor does not fit neatly into the strict hierarchies of a traditional boarding school. He talks back. He goes his own way.

���The coach would be like, ���you know Trev, as an opening batsman you can���t try and hit the opening bowler back over his head���,��� says Nkala. ���But Trev would want to do that. Because, I think, he was confident in his own ability, and he never liked to be dominated on the cricket field. He did have quite a strong, stubborn streak. It���s a thread that you���d pick up if you were close to him.���

Harrison, his coach, goes further: ���He irritated me, and I suspect that I irritated him, and Trevor was never one to hide his views if he didn���t particularly like someone.��� But they will work it out in the end. In 1992 Trevor is selected for the Fawns���the national Under-15 age-group team���that tours Namibia. Though their relationship is still prickly, Harrison helps him to organize everything he needs for the trip. ���After that I seem to have finally convinced him of something. We didn���t look back. He was a schoolboy who became a friend.���

Image credit Richard Harrison.

It is 1995. Trevor is 18, has grown several feet, and added kilograms of muscle. He is still at school when, in April of that year, he is picked to play for Matabeleland, a senior provincial team, against a touring Glamorgan county side���his First Class debut. Molded into a wicketkeeper via Harrison���s attentions, he marches out in floppy hat and flannels to bat at no. 9 in Matabeleland���s innings, and promptly cracks 48 against a team that includes two bowlers to have played Test cricket for England. He adds 36 more in the second innings, along with three catches in the match, and Matabeleland win by 159 runs.

The following year he enrolls at Rhodes University in South Africa to study for a Bachelor of Commerce degree, entering straight into the university���s 1st XI. He plays regularly for the Zimbabwe Board XI in the UCBSA Bowl, a competition administered by South Africa���s national cricket board, scoring 86 against Transvaal B, 77 against a visiting Durham University side, and generally earning himself a reputation as a confident player of fast bowling.

But another sort of reputation also starts to build. One night he falls drunkenly from the third floor of his halls of residence, saved from serious injury only by luck. He lands in a bush that breaks his fall. After less than two years, he drops out of university and returns home to Zimbabwe to concentrate on his cricket.

He���s still scoring runs, but now it is his after-hours behavior, rather than his batting skills, that people are talking about. The occasion of his 21st birthday falls the day before a Zimbabwe Board XI game against Northern Transvaal.

���We went out and hit it really, really hard the night before that game,��� admits Darlington Matambanadzo, Trevor���s friend and club team-mate at Universals CC. ���I think we got back into the hotel at around five in the morning. And then transport comes to pick him up at about six-thirty. And then the whole time he���s like, man, if we have to bat first, I���m in so much shit.���

Moments later, the Board XI captain wins the toss and���of course���decides to bat. Far from being incapacitated, Trevor takes on the opposition fast bowlers and races to 98 not out, scoring almost half of the entire team���s total as wickets tumble at the other end and the Board XI is skittled for just over 200.

���Honestly, if they had bowled straight and full at him, they would have knocked him over,��� says Matambanadzo. ���But they were bowling in the channel outside off, and that gave him half an hour to shake off the cobwebs. And that was a top class attack. They had Chris van Noordwyk, who was quick. Another guy called Rudi Bryson, who was quick. And then there was Andre van Troost, who played for the Netherlands. And during the Dutch off-season he���d play a lot of provincial cricket in South Africa. So they had three really good quick bowlers.

You hear the word ���talent��� thrown around so much when you play any kind of sport, but that was the first time in my life that I really understood what talent is. Because there was no way in hell that he should have made those runs. And it���s great that he made those runs, but at the same time ��� you know, people don���t remember that kind of thing. They remember the other times when you don���t make a score and you���d been out all night. And once you get a reputation like that, it can actually end up stalling your career. He didn���t know how to manage it. There was a level at which he was responsible for those outcomes. And everybody drank. We were young. Earning a bit of money playing cricket. I don���t want to make it sound like Trevor used to drink alone. Because he didn���t. I was there. A lot of people were there. But he just couldn���t manage those perceptions correctly.���

Matambanadzo believes���as does Campbell, as does Muchinjo, Nkala, Burmester and anyone else you might speak to���that a lot of his troubles could have been avoided if there was a support structure around Trevor. If he had a mentor. But there are all sorts of factors working against him. Zimbabwean cricket is still in the first throes of professionalism, and such structures simply do not yet exist. Campbell also speaks about the lack of openness around personal mental health struggles among Zimbabwean athletes at the time.

���We just didn���t have that in our day. It was ���suck it up and get on with it.��� If you had a problem, and you delved into the bottle to deal with the problem, it was considered normal. It was just one of those things. Everyone���s got their own crosses to bear. Their own issues. And you don���t really want to get involved in other people���s issues. And then that person doesn���t really have anyone to turn to. It became a very dark space for some guys.���

Trevor also isn���t one to go and ask for help. Campbell does once try to talk to him about the need to focus, the need to slow down off the field. But he doesn���t press the issue. ���Having known his family for so long, that is something I regret,��� he says. ���Maybe I should have stepped up a bit more. Someone should have stepped up.���

A mentorship vacuum is something that many of that first generation of black Zimbabwean cricketers struggle with. The first black cricketer to be picked for Zimbabwe is Henry Olonga, in 1996. Players like Henry, and Trevor, are very much pioneers in a sport that is changing rapidly.

���A lot of the black kids had to figure it out for themselves, so they made mistakes that they didn���t have to,��� says Matambanadzo. ���I did it as well. We were immature. Trevor was immature. A lot of it I place at his own feet. He made a lot of mistakes. It was just dumb, young stuff. But if you have people you can trust who can tell you this is dumb, young stuff and you shouldn���t be doing this as regularly as you���re doing it, that might have made a difference.���

Despite the off-field distractions, Trevor���s batting performances are impossible to ignore and soon there is talk of a national call-up. One day, a few months before his debut for the national team, Trevor bumps into an old friend in downtown Harare. It is Qhubekani Nkala. The two have not seen each other since high school. But what should have been a happy reunion is now a sad memory for Nkala.

���I���ll tell you the saddest story for me,��� he says. ���It was probably about two or three months before he made his debut. I was walking downtown, and I see this black guy, slightly above average height, but muscled, hey. Muscled. And I���m like ���wow, look at that guy. He���s got muscles���. And this guy was carrying a bottle wrapped in brown paper. Not exactly the best way of concealing alcohol, right. Anyway, I walk past and then turn around and I���m like, ���Trevor, that���s you?���

���I���m not sure why he started having these problems. But I did speak to him, and the honest truth, I think, is that at the time, for a young black aspiring player, it was tough. It was hard to break in and be part of the inner circle. And I think Trevor just felt that pressure, and I think he never pulled himself towards himself, and probably didn���t have an appropriate role model. It was about three months after I met him that day in town, he debuted in a Test match against Pakistan.���

On the eve of his national debut, Trevor sits down with Zimbabwe���s coach, Dave Houghton. The coach is not convinced that Trevor is ready for the highest level. His reputation as a batsman who thrives under the challenge of facing down quick bowlers has brought him this far, but Pakistan���s bowling attack is unlike anything he���s experienced before. ���These guys know you���re on debut,��� Houghton says to Trevor, ���so whoever is bowling when you go in is going to try and knock your head off first to see if you���ve got any courage. Then when he sees that he���s going to try and break your toes.���

Pakistan is a mercurial team, and one that has always been known for its fearsome fast bowlers. They have in their XI Waqar Younis, perhaps the world���s best exponent of a toe-crushing, reverse-swinging bowling delivery called a yorker, and Shoaib Akhtar, almost certainly the fastest bowler to have ever played the game, clocking truly terrifying speeds in excess of 100mph.

Trevor receives his Test cap in a small ceremony on the edge of the field just before play starts on a late summer���s day in March 1998. The venue is Queens Sports Club in central Bulawayo, a majestic tree-lined throwback of a cricket ground. Trevor walks out to bat with the match in the balance: Zimbabwe five down with just 123 on the board. His heart thumps in his chest. His parents are watching. His high school coach Richard Harrison is watching. Having ducked and weaved past the inevitable bouncers, he is off the mark with a crunchy checked drive for three. He is hit on the toe by a Waqar yorker, but follows that up by punching a full toss straight back past the bowler to the sightscreen. Then he unfurls a fierce pull to smash offspinner Saqlain Mushtaq to the midwicket boundary, before bad light stops play.

���I take my hat off to him, because he batted about 45 minutes,��� says Houghton. ���He came into the changing room and I went in to try and talk to him, but he couldn���t speak. He chain-smoked about 10 cigarettes, one after the other, before he could get his words out.���

Trevor plays in the next game, in Harare, but he is run out without facing a ball in the first innings, and then grits his way through half an hour of obdurate batting before nicking off in the second. It will be two years before he can once again force his way into the Test side, this time in New Zealand.

The next two years of Trevor���s fledgling international career are marked by ups and downs, even as seismic changes are rippling across the country around him: political opposition springs out of the trade unions and civil society to challenge Zanu-PF���s hegemony, the dollar crashes, unemployment rises, and there are strikes and student protests that are met with blunt force. It is, generally, a time of heightened intensity in all areas of Zimbabwean life.

In 1999, Trevor is part of the first intake at the brand new Zimbabwean cricket academy, an institution aimed at making professionals out of the country���s best young cricketing talent. In April of that year, he is in the 30-man provisional squad for the World Cup in England, but doesn���t make the cut for the final 15 because Zimbabwe���s batting order is stacked with established players such as the Flower brothers, Neil Johnson and Murray Goodwin. It doesn���t help that his spell at the academy has been accompanied by rumors of a wild lifestyle.

Opportunities at the highest level are decided by a selection panel, usually comprising the coach, a convener (who has the final say), and a revolving door of administrators and ex-players who scout for talent and then meet to pick the national squad. Surviving the whims of the selectors can be a bruising experience for any young cricketer, and as an unestablished player Trevor is often in and out of the national side.

After missing out on a World Cup spot, he is omitted from a Zimbabwe ���A��� tour for ���disciplinary reasons.��� In October he plays against the visiting Australian team, top scoring in one game, but Zimbabwe lose every match of the series. Trevor keeps his place for Zimbabwe���s next assignment, a home series against Sri Lanka in December, but midway through the tour he arrives half an hour late for a training session.

His punishment is to be removed from the national squad for the remaining three games. This draws accusations of racism. The Zimbabwe Cricket Union, who are the administrators of the game in the country under longtime chairman Peter Chingoka, appoints two judges to investigate the matter: Justice Roger Korsah, originally from Ghana, and Justice Ahmed M. Ebrahim. Both have sturdy reputations, and Ebrahim is a keen follower of cricket. They decide that while the severity of Trevor���s punishment was not warranted, ���on the evidence heard it is not possible to conclude with conviction that Trevor Madondo was treated as he was because of his race.���

Yet their statement does not end there, and they advise that ���in the multiracial and multicultural diverse society that we live in, there is need for sensitivity in one���s approach when dealing with issues which cross the cultural or racial divide.��� They suggest that Trevor did not benefit from an ���even-handed approach��� from some of those who dealt with him.

Remaining on the fringes of the national team, Trevor picks up an injury and is not included in the touring party for a trip to South Africa in the new year. He also misses out on selection for tours of the Caribbean and England in early 2000. ���Disciplinary reasons,��� say the selectors.

Everywhere, tensions are rising. In July 2000 the Zimbabwean government formally announces the commencement of a fast track land resettlement program, a radical recalculation of property rights aimed at restoring to local landowners what was taken from them by colonialism. There is chaos in the countryside. Virtually all of the white players in the Zimbabwean cricket set-up are in some way connected to the farming community, and white farmers are losing their land.

The Zimbabwean cricket team���without Trevor���are on tour in England at the time. When they return, Tatenda Taibu notes in his autobiography, ���I could tell things had changed. There seemed to be more tension in the air than before [and] the changing rooms weren���t like they had been before. People seemed to be on edge, and there were a few racial fights that broke out in the changing rooms, which I had never previously seen.���

There seems a growing divide between black and white cricketers in Zimbabwe. Neither side trusts the other. Both sides foster negative perceptions. The Zimbabwe Cricket Union conducts a player survey about racism in cricket: as Olonga notes in his own autobiography, 80% of the white respondents believe it���s not an issue, 80% of the black respondents believe that it is. Aside from a few individuals, Trevor seems to stop trusting many of his white team-mates. One day, he tells Matambanadzo: ���These people are out to get me.���

Trevor speaks his mind and doesn���t care who hears. He channels more of himself into his cricket. He meets a nice girl. She has pretty eyes, and dreadlocks. He stops getting into quite so much trouble. He trains harder. He claws his way back into the national squad for a three-month tour to Sharjah, India, Australia, and New Zealand toward the end of 2000 and into the new year. In India, he is included in the playing XI for the 4th and 5th One-Day Internationals, and sets about making up for lost time. He opens the batting with Alistair Campbell, contributing 32 to an opening stand of 60 in the 4th match, and then launching into India���s pace attack in the next game with a blistering 71 that gives Zimbabwe a fighting chance of chasing a total of over 300.

In New Zealand, he slots back into Zimbabwe���s middle order for the Boxing Day Test. The game is played on a featherbed wicket, making it very difficult for either side to take control. The match grinds through four days, with rain and bad light washing out almost a full day���s play. The night before the fifth and final day, there���s a team meeting. The talk is of the possibility of contriving a result through a strategic declaration: the Zimbabweans will prematurely close their batting innings in the hope that New Zealand���s batsmen will either be taken by surprise and offer a chance to Zimbabwe���s bowlers, or may then declare their own innings early as well to try to tempt Zimbabwe with a total to chase before time runs out. The decision about when exactly to declare their innings closed will rest with Zimbabwe���s captain, Heath Streak. But New Zealand are in a very strong position, well ahead, and the tactic is at best a sort of ���Hail Mary��� with a slim chance of success.

Trevor is batting the next day and eases his score past 50 with an innings of poise and control. He seems set to score a Test century: a milestone that is the pinnacle of achievement for a batsman. He is on 74 not out, within sight of three figures, when Streak declares the innings closed, holding to the plan from the team meeting the night before. The opportunity for a Test hundred has just slipped from Trevor���s grasp. His would have been the very first by a black Zimbabwean. Olonga, who is in the playing XI and watching from the team balcony, writes that Trevor is ���gutted��� by the decision. ���Many cricket lovers back home could not understand why the innings was declared with Madondo so close to such an historic landmark. It may be that it was lost on some of the players in the squad, but not on the black players. We saw that it was an opportunity lost and we were surprised that it seemed we were the only ones thinking that way.���

There are differing opinions about this declaration. ���It���s a very touchy subject,��� says Muchinjo. ���I would have personally wanted to see Trevor go and score a hundred too, but I think in the wisdom of the captain, of the decision makers, they thought it was for the best of the team, of the group. Rather than any particular individual.���

It is true that many a batsman has had his captain declare on him when he���s in sight of a hundred. A tension between individual and team is something that is intrinsic to cricket. But in this context, in this time and place in Zimbabwean history, it is inevitable that such a decision would create friction and be seen as a slight on the aspirations of a young black cricketer.

This will be the last time Trevor takes the field in a Test match.

Image credit Richard Harrison.

Back in Zimbabwe, Trevor is untethered once more. In March 2001, with summer and the domestic season drawing to a close, he plays a handful of games for Mashonaland and the Zimbabwe Board XI without much success. His on-off relationship with the girl with pretty eyes and dreadlocks is now off. Old habits resurface. Olonga remembers Trevor turning up noticeably drunk to a team meeting. He is not considered for selection for Zimbabwe���s next Test series against Bangladesh in April. He tears out of town and heads for Victoria Falls, far away from everything.

After a few weeks in the bush he comes back to Harare and, after a typically wild night out, crashes his car. It���s not a serious accident, but he is clearly shaken. His friends notice that Trevor is being troubled by waves of cloudiness and confusion. Whatever concussion he has from the accident is minor and the confusion will clear up soon, the doctors say. It doesn���t.

One Saturday morning, about two weeks later, he misses what had become, over the years, a traditional brunch at the Matambanadzo home. Darlington and his twin brother Everton drive over to the bachelor pad he is renting to collect him, thinking he must have overslept.

He���s inside. They knock, but no-one answers. They call, and no-one comes. Eventually the brothers force the lock on the door to get inside. Trevor won���t wake up. Everton takes him to Parirenyatwa Hospital. Darlington calls the Madondo family in Mutare. The following week, on June 11, 2001, a cold mid-winter���s day, Trevor dies in hospital of cerebral malaria, undiagnosed until it was too late. He must surely have caught it while in the Zambezi Valley, and it may well be that his symptoms were mistaken for a concussion from the crash.

Trevor is buried at Yeovil cemetery in Mutare. At his funeral Mark Burmester, who had welcomed Trevor into the Mutare Sports Club cricket team a decade earlier, speaks on behalf of the cricket community. ���This was a very hard thing to do,��� he remembers. ���He had such a strong beginning to life and then only dreams and what could have been.���

The casket is open. There lies Trevor. He has his Test kit on. His Zimbabwe cap. A familiar half-smile on his face.

���I still remember, even today, seeing his face there,��� says Campbell. ���Seeing him in that Test cap. It was surreal. I remember hugging his dad. There were no real words. It was a hell of a thing. And yes, Zimbabwean cricket lost someone who could have been great. But a father and mother, a family, lost their son. That���s the biggest thing. Life is precious.���

The gravity of the situation is lost on one of the attendees. At one point during the funeral, one of the white players turns to Olonga and says ���well it���s not as if anybody is going to miss him because nobody liked him.��� Olonga, the genial, temperate fast bowler, is shocked almost to the point of violence. ���It was almost as if this white player was glad that Trevor was dead,��� he writes in his autobiography.

India���s cricket team is touring Zimbabwe at the time. Before the start of play at the next match at Harare Sports Club a couple of days later, the teams line up to observe a minute���s silence. Heads down, no sound but the wind, the creak and slap of flags at half mast, the hum of the city beyond the cricket ground. Zimbabwe play in black armbands against a team of bona fide cricket legends���Laxman, Dravid, Tendulkar, Ganguly���and they pull off a remarkable four-wicket victory. ���This is for Trevor,��� says captain Streak.

Trevor Madondo is just 24 when he dies. He has only played 16 games for Zimbabwe, in an international career that is cut short after two eventful years.

He is Zimbabwe���s first black Test batsman. His footsteps are the first. His innings the first. His failures the first. He never seems to settle into a particular position or role. Whatever labels are applied to him never quite fit. He is a free spirit, or a rebel, depending on who you speak to. He has only just begun to find out for himself who he really is.

And so it is that there is not one story of the life of Trevor Madondo, but several���and many of them contradictory. Rumor and memory become entwined and inseparable in time. Trevor cannot be precisely situated in the framework of all these stories. He is both elevated, and ultimately let down, by a system he is never fully accepted by. He also plays a leading role in his own downfall. And yet more, always more: he sets out to rewrite history and craft new limits for what an African cricketer is allowed to be. His life does not end with a full stop, but a question mark.

���Trevor was like a realization that anybody can play in any role in cricket,��� says Muchinjo. ���He opened up minds. Not particularly about batting, but also about other areas which were not common with black cricketers. If somebody can bat so well, as a black player, then why can���t we have black players who bowl spin, or even allrounders? Why not have a black captain? People started to realize that anybody can do anything on a cricket field.���

A little over a month after Trevor dies, a 17-year-old named Hamilton Masakadza is picked to debut for Zimbabwe against the visiting West Indies team. In the second innings of the second Test, Masakadza becomes the first black Zimbabwean to score a Test hundred, and the youngest ever debutant centurion in Test cricket���s 186-year history. There is another teenager in Zimbabwe���s line-up that day: Tatenda Taibu. Masakadza���s classmate at high school, and now his team-mate in the national side, Taibu will also go on to play his part in some historic turning points in Zimbabwe���s cricketing history, becoming the country���s first black national captain, and the youngest Test captain in the game���s history. They grow up with friends who play alongside them for Zimbabwe: Stuart Matsikenyeri, Vusi Sibanda, Elton Chigumbura. Where Trevor walked alone, now many walk together.

Today, the Madondo family is hoping to start a foundation in Trevor���s name to support young cricketers in Zimbabwe. Trevor���s legacy remains entwined within a country that faces an uncertain future. And we are left asking: who was Trevor Madondo? We might ask, rather, who he would have become.

When discussing war is taboo

Dieudo Hamadi���s film 'Downstream to Kinshasa' is a powerful antidote to the DRC's collective amnesia around the Six-Day War and its aftermath. Still from Downstream to Kinshasa.

More than 20 years ago, a series of battles over a six-day period between Rwandan and Ugandan forces erupted on the soil of the Democratic Republic of Congo���s third largest city, Kisangani.�� Commonly referred to as the Six-Day War (June 5-10, 2000), the violent mutiny also occurred during the broader national context of the Second Congo War (1998-2003), considered to be the largest inter-state war in modern African history. The war in Kisangani led to the death of more than 1,000 people, injuries to 3,000, widespread property damage, and the civilian population feeling the legacy of this warfare even decades later. While the story of the war has primarily been recounted through analysis of the country���s conflict dynamics and polarized regional politics, Dieudo Hamadi���s film Downstream to Kinshasa uniquely centers the mobilization by survivors of the war and their 2018 journey to the nation���s capital demanding their victim reparations from the government, which they have yet to receive.

It is worth noting that in 2002 the DRC filed for relief with the International Court of Justice (ICJ) against Rwanda. The application was dismissed by the court. In 2005, the ICJ found Uganda guilty of aggressions and entitled the DRC compensation for ���acts of looting, destruction, removal of property��� and other unlawful acts committed by Ugandan troops during the war. The DRC initially demanded $10 billion in reparations, which was contested by Uganda. Both states are still in the midst of negotiations.

Hamadi, being from Kisangani himself and having lived through the Six-Day War at the age of 15, carefully threads a type of memory work effort into the documentary as discussing the war has become taboo within the town. Aiming to resist against the silencing and politicized forgetting of the event, the documentary opens with a gathering of the Six-Day War victims��� association and a chilling shot of a mass grave where thousands of dead lie. One of the association���s leaders articulates the suffering of the victims, and the stagnant response of the town���s leaders when they have inquired about their compensation money over the last 20 years. He ends the meeting with: ���We need to make them understand that our patience has reached its limit.���

From then on, Hamadi focuses on nine principal members of the victims��� association: Chairman Lemalema, Modogo, Mama Kawele, Old Jean, Bozi, Mama Bahingi, G��d��on, Mama Kashinde, and Sola.

The Chairman suggests that if the group were to travel to the capital and speak with national leaders, they would have a better chance of being heard and finding solutions. With many of the association members being amputees or physically disabled as a result of the war, we are offered a glimpse into their quotidian struggles, with closeups of their prosthetics, crutches, and wheelchairs as they go about their neighborhoods and homes, and as they brainstorm how to logistically make their way to Kinshasa for the first time.

The group decides to take a barge along the River Congo, tightly packed among hundreds of other passengers and merchandise with only thin, unsteady tarps for protection from the elements. Both figuratively and aesthetically, the shots of this boat ride are central to the documentaries��� unfolding. Hamadi alternates shooting banal exchanges among travelers with wide shots of the serene river flow, more intimate discussions, and closeups of the members��� blank expressions looking out at the water unsure of what lies ahead. The journey is made even more treacherous as the group gets caught in turbulent wind and rainfall, even getting hit by another boat. The ride is perilous and unpredictable but fundamentally a testament to the desperation one arrives at when patience wears thin.

Another original stylistic feature of the film is how Hamadi briefly cuts away from the journey to show the victim association���s theater troupe performing on stage. With zeal-filled monologues and intense stage lighting, the theatrical piece offers a cathartic space for the members to recount parts of their personal stories of survival on their own terms.

Once they arrive in Kinshasa, the association members are faced with obstacle after obstacle in trying to plead their case to authorities. The 2018 election is the backdrop as political rallies and posters of former presidential candidates, such as Martin Fayulu, are shown as well as President Tshisekedi���s ���victory��� later on in the film. The group visits the national parliament building to ask to speak with an MP. They are repeatedly ignored and told by police officers to leave despite their persistence in demanding to claim their rights. As representatives leave the building one by one, the association holds a demonstration on the steps, shouting: ���Why aren���t you doing anything for us?��� and ���We���ve lost everything.��� They are ignored by the MPs. This repeats at the MONUSCO headquarters where the group are barred entry and told by an official that the war does not concern the United Nations. Chairman Lemalema even confronts the armed police and asks: ���If you had fought the Rwandans, would we be like this?����� It is in these scenes that we witness not just a message about the Six-Day War, but about the insensitivity of the Congolese political class even with the population���s suffering quite literally being brought to the doorstep of their workplace.

The emphasis Hamadi places on the journey to the capital, and the site of potential political transformation on which the country���s future rests, speaks to a larger question of what it means to journey toward the change one wants to make happen in the face of physical and institutional constraints.

The victims��� association symbolically morphs into representing the Congolese nation as the lines between their ���victimhood��� experience and the plight of ordinary Congolese become blurred.�� Despite not successfully obtaining the reparations (in what Hamadi himself describes as having been a somewhat naive endeavor), the trip serves as an important initiation for the victims��� association in the development of their consciousness on the state of the country. It exposes that the absence of reparations for their suffering during the war was always a thread within a larger web of historical governance that has failed to prioritize its constituents.

In this way the journey isn���t totally inconsequential; one can hope the awareness brought to them can positively inform and shape future organizing efforts for survivors navigating the constant struggle with the DRC���s institutions. Hamadi challenges narratives seen time and time again by striking a balance between focusing on the state���s unquestionable lack of political will without telling a story of Congolese war survivors solely as victims of inaction or victorious activist heroes. As the film shows through the group���s treacherous journey, tangible outcomes such as election results or receiving reparations are not nearly as instructive as the details of the processes that lead up to them.

The violence of the Six-Day War still lingers in national memory, hostility, and the framing of conflict history for many Congolese. Writer Jason Stearns in his book Dancing in the Glory of Monsters has even described Kisangani as ���the graveyard of Rwandan and Ugandan reputations.��� While the historical roots of this particular wave of the conflict can be attributed to 1990s Kagame-Museveni personality politics, regional power struggles, and the diamond trade in Kisangani, much of the present-day outrage still comes from the lack of accountability observed since then. Dieudo Hamadi���s Downstream to Kinshasa is bound to feature as one of the most thorough records against the collective amnesia around the Six-Day War and its aftermath in contemporary Congo.

Nigeria���s ecological emergency

No amount of clean technology, industrial growth or boosts to GDP will avert the economic and climate crises inextricable to profit-driven extraction. Dredging at the Dangote refinery. Image credit Godwin Paya CC BY-SA 4.0.

This post is part of our series ���Climate Politricks.���

In 2013, billionaire Aliko Dangote, the President of the Dangote Group, announced the construction of an oil refinery in the Ibeju-Lekki suburb of Lagos, Nigeria. While the completion date for Dangote Refinery has been pushed back several times (it���s now expected for 2021), the finished project is projected to be massive: at a cost of US$12 billion, the refinery will be the biggest on the African continent and among the largest in the world. Its expected refining capacity is forecasted at 650,000 barrels per day (bpd) and could potentially create up to 70,000 jobs.

Nigeria of course is one of the world���s largest crude oil exporters���typically in the top 10 globally���and the largest in Africa. The Nigerian economy is heavily reliant on oil as its major source of revenue and for almost 100% of its foreign exchange earnings. Yet, the energy needs for most people go unmet: the nation is one of the world���s lowest in power consumption per capita and approximately 25% of the population does not have a regular source of power. Despite its export capacity, Nigeria imports $7bn of refined petroleum per year for domestic consumption, up to 70%-80% of the national demand for gasoline, cooking fuel, and inputs for petroleum-based products. Refining on a large scale at Dangote is intended to up-end that reliance. But why does Nigeria import fuel for domestic use? And also, in a moment of global climate emergency, why is a major investment in the national energy supply anchored in an environment-destroying, fossil fuel-based solution?

Importing oil reflects and reinforces an array of dynamics in the Nigerian national economy. Currently the four state-owned refineries are decades old, and have virtually ground to a halt from disrepair. Over the past few decades, industrialization has reversed relative to the 1960s and 1970s. World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF) structural adjustment programs (SAP) set the process in motion with requirements for loan recipients to lower tariffs and devalue the local currency, undermining the process of Nigerian industrial development and largely reinforcing economies reliant on the extraction and export of raw materials. The SAP ���conditionalities��� also ensured nations in the global South subject to ���adjustment������in the context of a global drop in oil prices and ballooning public debt���would remain profitable markets for imports of finished products from ���the West,��� goals continuous with those of the colonial powers. These historical factors contribute to current economic conditions, where industrial levels remain weak and oil is mostly refined abroad.

The overwhelming reliance on imported oil in Nigeria has been particularly harmful for the environment. A study by the monitoring organization Stakeholder Democracy Network (SDN) found that refined oil imported from Europe ���exceeded EU pollution limits by as much as 204 times, and by 43 times the level for gasoline.��� Approximately 80% of oil imported by Nigeria comes from the Netherlands and Belgium alone. Dumping dirty fuel is no doubt an important factor in air quality that is among the worst on the planet.

The refinery project is moving forward under volatile economic conditions. The process of importing petroleum is a drain on foreign reserves yet for sections of the Nigerian business class, oil importing is a lucrative proposition. For other elites���above all Dangote, Africa���s richest man���the Nigerian refinery presents a major opportunity despite the estimated $15 billion cost. Once fully operational, it���s forecasted to add $13 billion���a full 2.3 percent���to total GDP. Still, volatility in global oil prices and the loss of foreign exchange earnings from crude sales presents a major risk. The IMF has projected the economy to shrink by 5.4% in 2020 because of the worldwide oil price crash. The petroleum industry hasn���t hesitated to pass along a series of painful fuel prices hikes, ensuring the energy needs of ordinary people remain largely unmet.

Another element in the risk assessment for Dangote is likely the global shift among corporate multinationals and governmental bodies toward a hypocritical support for ���clean fuel��� standards. African industry groups and the African Union have likewise supported alternatives to imported dirty petroleum, and Dangote has promised climate-friendlier refining technology. Notwithstanding these declarations, work on the new Dangote site has been a nightmare of construction-related pollution, with extensive digging and pipeline- and road-building. The highly-congested urban area is now threatened with intensifying traffic problems and threats of groundwater contamination. With these developments, the region���s fish are vanishing. As former fisherman Ayo Falade told The Guardian (UK), ���The dredging of the coast to sand fill [Lekki Lagoon] for the construction of the refinery made the fish in the area disappear. We had to travel far into the ocean to get fish, but even that became dangerous because the waves became unpredictable. A conservationist came and told us that the sand-filling was changing the local ecosystem.��� Oil spills once the refinery is operational are another serious danger.

The World Bank is supporting the project, despite its stated institutional commitment to renewable energy. Meanwhile, Nigeria���s long-planned Petroleum Industry Bill (PIB) under discussion in the National Assembly contains provisions for a host community fund ostensibly to compensate oil-producing regions for environmental destruction; however, the PIB leaves the determination of ���host community��� to the discretion of the oil companies. All told, the new oil refinery is an expression of a wider context of a state���and global capital���anchored in a fossil fuel-based energy framework.

For decades, environmentalists and community activists have spoken out and struggled against the domination of the oil industry in Nigerian society, most visibly in the Niger River Delta oil-producing region. As elsewhere around the globe, the call for a society based on renewable energy sources is gaining strength. The Benin City-based ecological think-tank Health of Mother Earth Foundation writes:

With fossil fuels driving climate change and surely entering its last phases as a dominant energy source, the development of the Niger Delta requires urgent re-imagination….The route to bringing into fore truly sustainable development of the Niger Delta will come through the recognition and development of indigenous knowledge, clean-up and restoration of the region and a development of a pathway based on sustainable biodiversity management that maintains the full ecological integrity of the region.

Dangote may claim that the refinery will reduce pollution and the environmental impact of oil, but these solutions are inadequate to the ecological emergency. No amount of clean technology, industrial growth or boosts to GDP will avert the economic and climate crises inextricable to profit-driven extraction. Only community organizers mobilizing that vision of re-imagination can compel the systemic change so urgently needed.

Restaging global history

The performative documentary 'Sun of the Soil' restores the historical record of the 'great king' of Mali, Mansa Musa. Still from Sun of the Soil.

The void of written records about Mansa Musa, king of the Mali Empire (1312-1332) is deeply troubling. This is the subject of director Joe Penney���s 26-minute short performative documentary,��Sun of the Soil (2020), featured as part of the 2021 ���Notes from Home��� themed New York African Film Festival. Written by Ladan Osman and narrated on camera by contemporary Malian artist, Abdou Ouologuem, the film is the fruit of the trio���s ongoing creative collaboration, striking a three-way balance between poetic lyricism, organic art, and pristine cinematography.

Sustained throughout by a motif of unearthing���digging up, excavating���the narrative follows a neatly packed three-act structure that seeks to make sense of and, ultimately, undo the erasure of this figure seven centuries hence. Ouologuem asserts that Mansa Musa was a great king���under whose rule written manuscripts flourished and who built mosques, including Djenne���s. So why is there such a lack of information about this figure, whose grandfather���s brother, Soundiata Keita, is so well documented? Leading scholars in Islamic studies, history, literature, and gold recount a well-organized critical viewpoint, leading Ouologuem to admit that the king posed a grave danger to the Mali Empire because he exhibited its wealth to the world, notably while on his lavish two-year pilgrimage to Mecca. ���[A]nd then we were invaded. And we continue to be invaded today��� (15:39-15:43). But Ouologuem is not satisfied with this.

Still from Sun of the Soil.

The opening act presents an impromptu modern-day gold rush, captioned with: ���In 2016, villagers in Noono, southwestern Mali, found priceless gold jewelry, swords, and pottery buried in the ground. […] Some suspect the gold belonged to the legendary king, Mansa Musa, the richest person in the history of the world.��� A haunting acoustic improvisation accompanies a series of wide shot pans across holes and mounds of red earth as local residents nonchalantly try their chances at striking gold. The title of the film appears in deep red accompanied by eerie music and a smooth cut to an aerial drone camera flying backward opposite the oncoming crowd of cars and motorbikes in present-day bustling urban Bamako. Next the camera fixes and tracks main protagonist and narrator, Ouologuem, riding his motorcycle through the city. The movement is stilled when viewers arrive at his minimalist studio, where propped strategically on display are his natural materials as well as a tortoise���a symbol associated with high spirituality particularly in the Dogon country���clearly in reverence to his late father, whose story also needs unearthing. The scene is set with a final long take of the artist staring directly into the camera as he shares his commitment to be one with the elements, how his art materials reflect that, and how it all reflects the responsibility he feels to preserve Mali���s history, its natural environmental resources, and its communities.

Still from Sun of the Soil.

Prior to the 15th century when ���most of the world lived off the economic world created by Mali through the circulation of gold, ��� [i]t was mainly Malian gold that, prior to Mansa Musa, fueled the minting of gold currency in Andalusia and fed European and Asian trade.��� In act two, the documentary narrative is a tight weave of expert interviews, recent Sahelian news footage, and scenes contrasting past and present blended with kora and guitar music. The West���s construction of historical narrative is proven (once again) bogus, particularly for its active erasure of an African past, including European colonizers��� theft of manuscripts and its insistence on referencing transatlantic slavery as the beginning of African history. This part of the film argues, thus, for the recovery and revision of history, which in spite of being copiously documented in ���hundreds of thousands of manuscripts,��� was relentlessly pillaged, erased, and re-written.

In a final act, Ouologuem sees the only viable solution to be through art and performance. Spoiler alert: act three of the film is a theatrical re-staging of history curated brilliantly by the creative artist-director-writer trio. Ouologuem wants to ���re-live��� the past and ���re-creat[e] history through art.��� He wants to retell the stolen historical legacy of the land of his ancestors and of his father. The accomplished artist who felt compelled to return home after more than a decade abroad designing sets and costumes for the theater is also a homonymous ���son��� of the soil; the artist���s work with the ���sun,��� or gold, and other natural elements of his homeland reads as a homage to this land.

Still from Sun of the Soil.

Documenting, as it does with responsible critical awareness, the region���s present through the excavation of the past, Sun of the Soil is a form of artivism that aims to engage not only local communities through street performance, but also global communities through gallery photo exhibits of the sculptures, jewelry, props, and costumes of Mansa Musa.

Drugs and police in Mathare

Drug use among young people in Nairobi's slums is on the rise. Youth also face arbitrary arrests by the police, resulting in jail time which turns them into hardcore criminals in a vicious cycle. Image credit Matt Rhodes via Flickr CC BY-NC 2.0.

This post is from our series Capitalism In My City, presented in partnership with the Mathare Social Justice Centre in Nairobi, Kenya.

Those who have lived in Mathare know the various challenges faced by the many people that call this place home. When I say Mathare, I mean the whole six wards in Mathare. We lack basic services and needs; there is poor sanitation, a lack of proper housing, and a lack of jobs mostly for our youths. Many of us also count ourselves lucky if we have food every day.

At the same time, youth between 9-30 years are now increasingly using drugs. And I want to highlight why they are into drugs, where they get the money for drugs, and how this makes them a target of police abuse of power, including: extrajudicial executions, enforced disappearances, extortion, and arbitrary arrests.

The connection between drugs and crime among the youths in Mathare is seen, for instance, when they involve themselves in criminal activities like petty robbery in order to get money to buy drugs. Criminals also use drugs as a form of boosting confidence before they get into crime. At the same time, due to arbitrary arrests happening daily within the slums, youths are detained on allegations of drug use and trafficking, which land them in jail. After they are released, they come out being hardcore criminals, involving themselves more in crime.

Being born and brought up in a family that sells and uses drugs creates an environment for one to get into crime as well. This is even if your family are selling ���illegal��� alcohol and drugs to make ends meet; there are barely any jobs for us from Mathare, and our mothers selling chang���aa has enabled us to eat and go to school. But the addiction that comes about, even when one just started with small doses, can change one���s life completely. For example, Sandra, a woman I know said:

I am a mother of two and I am in my late twenties. My addition started when I was just a young girl. My mother used to sell chang���aa [illegal alcohol] and sell shash [marijuana]. I first indulged in drugs when I was just eight years old and I would take the drugs unnoticed and use them without anyone knowing. My thirst for money and harder drugs increased, and I started spiking the drinks of the clients who came to drink in our home, and I would steal from them any valuables I would find like watches, money, phones, and any other thing that would equate to cash. That���s how I got myself into crime and to date I still go to the big bars and clubs, and when I see an easy prey, I spike their drink and run away with anything I could lay my hands on. The desire for money and addiction to drugs is what makes me do this. I blame my mum for this because were it not for the environment she brought me up in I would have studied, and I would be a better person in the society.

But depression and life situations also can influence us to use drugs. Halima (20), a single mother from Mathare also shared that:

When I was just a small girl my dad was killed by the police after he was labeled a criminal. After my father was killed, me and my brother were raised by a single mum and life was not easy for us. At the age of 15 I got married and got a child. When my child was two years old my brother got arrested and jailed. My husband had a road accident the following year and died. I was left to raise my kid alone and this drove me to depression, and I started using drugs. It got so serious to the extent that I was not able to raise my kid and my mother-in-law took him to raise him.

We can see that the government also has a role to play, they create and sustain this negative environment. When I interacted with most youths here in Mathare, I understood why the Kenyan authorities and young men in the slums play a cat and mouse game: they are like water and oil, they can never mix. According to most youths in the area, they say that instead of police officers maintaining law and order and protecting life, they make crime increase. The police are the ones who provide guns to them to go and commit crimes, and police get money from drug dens, ensuring that drugs are always sold where poor people can see them, where poor people live.

At the same time, the police are arresting youths daily using fabricated charges, and some end up being disappeared and others are killed by police. This makes youths get into crime and use drugs because they have given up on life, and they don���t know who will be next in the hands of a killer cop.

The protection of drug peddlers is also enabled by many people ���in high places,��� who protect them and protect their interests. These people have both interests in drugs and in crime and stopping any of these businesses would definitely cost them a lot. These peddlers include politicians, the police and the so-called local business community.

It is said that politicians are the ones who own these drugs, and they have to protect the people who sell them to ensure that there is regular flow of cash. These politicians are the ones who benefit most from criminal groups, and the ones who do nothing when we are killed. They use the petty drug dealers to cause mayhem during campaigns and other political functions, by just giving them some drugs and little cash that can make them go wild. And the police know both the politicians and those who sell drugs. But for them they make it a profit: they go to these dens daily collecting cash, which people call ushuru [taxes] or tango, and if they target anyone, they target the young men peddlers trying to make ends meet not the politicians.

The taxes they get, given out by the peddlers and other members of the ���business community,��� are costs for protection, making sure that drugs can be sold another day. And it is the poor who suffer the most because of these profits, like Halima and Sandra, when their families are torn apart.