Sean Jacobs's Blog, page 143

Making the city possible

Re-visiting Nairobi's urban history offers a glimpse into the forces that shaped modern life. Photo by Paulstern Madegwa on Unsplash

In the early 1920s, the colonial administration of Nairobi municipality demolished a large number of ���African villages,������some of the few spaces providing residence for Africans in this urban node of the recently declared colony. The impetus was to make the city legible to empire���racially, spatially, ecologically, and economically.

One hundred years later, in May 2020, not too far from where Mji wa Mombasa, Kaburini, and Maskini villages were demolished a century earlier, 8,000 residents of Kariobangi and Ruai were evicted���their settlements deemed illegal���despite a court order halting such action. Both the Ruai and Kariobangi lands are to be used, supposedly, for water and sewage treatment plants for the ���legal��� city connected to these service grids. The evictions happened at the height of both a pandemic and the rainy season, and despite the fact that many residents had various forms of legitimate claims to this land.

In their recent book The City Makers of Nairobi, the urbanists Anders and Katrina Ese draw connections between such colonial and postcolonial incidences when they write: ���in creating this image,��� one of illegality and unwanted informality and people, ���the city turns its back on its actual centre.��� Through evictions, neglect, and historical narratives of degenerate ���slum��� life and people, the center of Nairobi, the former ���native city��� has historically been overlooked. As a consequence, the actual contributions of the majority of its residents���from vernacular forms of urbanism to Nairobi���s cultural, economic, and social life���is off staged. The authors argue, above all, that this ���image��� has been used, both on scholarly and public fronts, to uphold Nairobi as a colonial construct and its majority black residents as historically inconsequential peons in its reproduction. Rather, that the legacy of unjust and segregated planning has been disproportionately cited as having the largest imprint on the city, while the lives, work, and everyday practices of Africans who have lived here for generations has not been duly recognized as critical ���city making.���

To make this argument, they dwell in a period of Nairobi���s history that is not well documented, 1899-1960, and bring together an exemplary mix of sources from the archives, oral histories, personal relationships, photos, maps, and other varied forms of documentation. Commendably, their concern is not just the spectacular; they paint portraits of mundane African ���city making��� in this period: from building mosques, local music festivities, neighborhood social functions and fights, alcohol brewing, Comorian migrants in the 1930s, and even trade union activism.

In drawing out the multiplicity of these urban processes, their narration revolves around four fluid axes: between conformity and nonconformity, between structure and agency, between disruption and continuity, and between acceptance and resistance. In bringing forth these orienting continuums, they highlight the varied positions that Africans embodied throughout Nairobi, that have rendered its particular forms, and, ultimately, assert black residents��� prominence as important to past and ongoing social and spatial environments in the city.

In a context where monographs on the histories of Nairobi are still rare, and especially those that focus on the early colonial period, The City Makers of Nairobi is an important complement to this limited archive. Much of the recent work on this complex city has taken a developmental lens, focusing less on the ���city making��� of its residents, and more on its service inadequacies, poverty, and crime. Although these themes are important to reflect on, particularly the larger structural violence they point to, they disregard the life force and struggles that keep people���s homes in place; the different ways in which the majority on the margins respond to the always looming socio-spatial erasure. Important academic exceptions to this are the interventions by Andrew Hake, Nici Nelson, Louise White, Chege Wa Githiora, Joyce Nyairo, Connie Smith, Naomi van Stapele, and others. This academic work is expanded by the more accessible and much loved brash and often irreverent cultural offerings of writers such as Meja Mwangi, of ���Going Down River Road��� fame, and the music offerings of youth from former native cities, such as the recent Genje style that can only come from the heartbeat of Kanairo City (Nairobi in Sheng).

At the same time, while their argument is valid, I feel that Ese and Ese have overstated it. Though I agree that the perpetuation of Nairobi as a ���colonial construct��� endures, this does not mean that this one sided legacy ���implies that inhabitants had and still have no command over city making.��� Highlighting and privileging the violent coloniality that shaped this city, and continues to shape it, as many do, does not mean that we do not recognize and live the reality that it did and does not have total power in the landscape. The city sentiences described within the works of the authors listed above���from housing to kinships to languages to activisms���certainly do not ignore the vitality of African lives, and their primary role in shaping this city���s varied horizons, even if they highlight the enduring hegemony of colonial constructs.

Kariobangi and Ruai evictees in 2020, as their predecessors, will continue to find ways to make home within or without the vicinity of their demolished houses. And the presence of the oppressive colonial surveillance practices and ordinances, past and present, implicitly and explicitly recognize/d this power: that African forms of life and urbanism could not be suffocated, that there was and would never be an African city without them, even if the director of Public Works, from 1900 to 1922, stated that his department did more for oxen than had been done for native housing.

While cautious of the overstatement of a one-sided legacy, I commend the critical task that Ese and Ese have given themselves; that of highlighting African life by detailing housing patterns, cultural lives, and everyday practices in ways intended to decenter the colonizer. Ultimately, the authors have managed to ���encourage people to reflect on the fact that this is indeed their city, and has always been so;��� a supportive endorsement of Nairobi���s primary city making communities who, from 1920 to the present, continue to find the post-colonial eviction bulldozer at their door.

More morbid symptoms

Much of what passes for politics these days is actually just anti-politics: not a function of too much politicization, but a severe lack of it. Where is the left in all this? Photo by Piron Guillaume on Unsplash

Most people entered the new year restlessly���exhausted by the tumult of the year before, uncertain there would be respite ahead. Given what 2020 turned out to be, one would be forgiven for forgetting just how chaotically it began, starting with the United States assassinating Iranian general Qasem Soleimani three days into January. A year later, it would be America itself at the receiving end of an insurrectionary assault after Trump supporters stormed the US Capitol in a terrifying, yet ultimately feeble bid to halt the certification of the 2020 election result. It was an unexpected event, replete with terribly familiar images of street confrontations and standoffs.

Here in South Africa, the easiest analogue of comparison are the events of 1993, when the far-right Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging (AWB) stormed the venue where multi-party negotiations to end apartheid took place. But there are more recent examples������there���s #FeesMustFall students breaching the parliamentary gates in Cape Town and coming close to doing the same at the Union Buildings in Pretoria (in both cases they were quickly quelled by the police). This is not at all to equate the political causes being advocated for, but rather to say something tentative about the political style of the moment, that unites the righteous and the reactionary. For anyone paying attention to today���s nagging crisis of representation, that America���s ���temple of democracy��� was ���desecrated��� should come as no surprise. Outside of some violence, that this so-called desecration consisted of hooligans mostly taking selfies, is no surprise either. It represents the spirit of the age, the future of politics.

A year ago we asked ���Where will neoliberalism end?��� At that point COVID-19 was not a word yet, and it looked like neoliberalism���s unravelling would be hastened by multiple insurgencies happening in the latter half of�� 2019 (recall all the unrest in Chile, Lebanon, Iraq, Sudan, Hong Kong, Algeria, Uganda, France). Then, as the pandemic spread, people thought that lockdown restrictions would discourage political demonstrations, but their unjust implementations and the underlying inequalities they exacerbated forced restive populations to the streets. But as it was the case in 2019, South Africa appeared to sidestep much of the protest ferment erupting everywhere else. We did not witness anything of the scale of BLM, #EndSARS, the estallido social, or the extraordinary Indian farmers strike that has spilled over into this year. The most significant effort at popular mobilization was a ���general strike��� in October that saw collaboration between South Africa���s two largest and otherwise competing trade union federations. Turn-out was poor, and while numbers on the street are not a good measure of popular power, they can be one of weakness. South Africans are largely resigned politically.

But not all of them. South Africa���s recent political history has produced some memorable episodes of political confrontation that dominated the discourse when they happened. The first, surrounded the magistrate court appearances of those accused of murdering a white farm manager Brendin Horner in a small, rural town called Senekal in South Africa���s Free State province, where protesters (most of them white and donning ���Stop Farm Murder��� t-shirts or carrying ���Boer Lives Matter��� signs) stormed the court to demand custody of the accused.�� After this South Africa���s third largest party, the Economic Freedom Fighters, ensured that the next time round its members were in town in order to guard the court and ���confront white arrogance.��� Having long-campaigned for the killings of white farmers to be declared hate crimes, South Africa���s official opposition party, the supposedly “non-racial” Democratic Alliance (DA), also joined the protests but in solidarity with the farmers. (In this, they had taken on board baseless claims by AfriForum and Solidarity, two NGO���s dedicated to advancing white Afrikaans grievances.) There were genuine fears (and some hopes) that a ���race war��� was imminent. It did not materialize.

Not long after that, the EFF was again ���confronting white arrogance��� at Brackenfell High School in Cape Town, after a parent-organized prom-like function was exclusively attended by white students. White parents mobilized a counter-protest against the EFF���s picket, and eventually even attacked some of their members. The DA, who governs the Western Cape and as such is responsible for school administration in the province, predictably sided with the violent white parents and played down the racism allegations. These two incidents (and the fallout from a racist ad by South African cosmetics retailer Clicks, where the EFF also led the backlash) constitute the events which most captivated South African public consciousness. Mainstream media reacted to them with consternation, bursting with missives bemoaning political polarization and the loss of ���the middle���, against the social media commentariat who saw these events as accelerating a reckoning on race that this country has for too long tried to sweep under the carpet. Yet, rather than being an unfortunate kind of politics, or even a cynical expression of identity politics, most of it is actually just anti-politics. Not a function of too much politicization, but a severe lack of it.

So we should now ask, what is politics anyway? We would be hard-pressed to give any kind of stable and precise definition. No definition of politics is immutable���it depends on the epoch, and how those living through it understand its meaning. At one point politics was about taking collective action towards clear and discernible goals, goals pertaining to the matter of how society ought be governed and its resources produced and distributed. The sphere of the political was one of clear materiality and clear antagonism���different groups had different interests on the matters that politics concerned. The first prize for political actors was acquiring the requisite power in social institutions, or exercising substantial influence over them.

And then something happened���apparently, history ended. Following the Cold War, neoliberalism marched triumphantly into the new age, indexing everything other than itself as the mark of a failed state. Politics was over! There existed a finite set of societal models, all of which had been exhausted, and America���s version of ���liberal, constitutional democracy��� was for better or worse declared the best of the rest. Since the 2008 financial crisis, we have been witnessing the unraveling of this consensus. In South Africa, it had its local translation through the mythology of Rainbowism that papered over racialized inequalities arising as a legacy of apartheid, and the inability of the still-ruling African National Congress (ANC) to chart a meaningfully redistributive program after it.

The effect of neoliberalism was to depoliticize. In retooling the state to shield the market from politics, governance, and public policy was subject to a post-ideological, technical rationality that portrayed the interests of capital as the objective, national interest. In the process, South Africa���s left got swallowed up into the governing alliance of the ANC, the Congress of South African Trade Unions and the Communist Party. The reign of Thabo Mbeki (1999���2008) brought ���clean��� accumulation through financialization and privatization, until Jacob Zuma came into power (2009���2018) and ushered in the period of ���dirty��� state capture which haunts South Africa until today, well into Cyril Ramaphosa���s first presidential term. Rather than viewing this ���dark time��� of rampant corruption as an aberration to South Africa���s political story, with anticorruption as the movement to get things back on track, both phenomenon are also expressions of anti-politics, an indication that the political order has reached aporia���there is no track to get back on.

Anti-politics shouldn���t be treated as a desire to go ���beyond��� politics as the ideology of neoliberalism insisted. Humans are by nature political animals, but not in circumstances of their own choosing. What anti-politics is, is the reaction of a populous that is so thoroughly depoliticized, so unmoored culturally and socially, that it is not a rejection of the political, but an inchoate and confused effort to be political. It has for a while been obvious to most people that something is wrong about the state of the world, that things have been getting worse. Today���s political dysfunction arises out of people being unable to state exactly what is wrong, why it is wrong, and who is responsible. They then look elsewhere for explanations.

The proliferation of anti-vaccination conspiracy theories exemplifies this well. The latest Ipsos survey shows South Africa as having the largest drop in vaccine willingness between October and December of last year, and ranking in the bottom three of the 15 countries surveyed. As we pointed out early last year (when a conspiracy theory that Nelson Mandela died in 1985 was doing the rounds), conspiracy theories, wherever their origin, always have political content to them in that they are an attempt to make sense of a dynamic but decaying world, by reducing its conflicts to a Manichean struggle between occult forces of good and evil. Since the pandemic began, conspiracy theorizing has been in overdrive, producing a dizzying cocktail of panics around 5G networks, Bill Gates, and vaccine microchips, child-sex trafficking rings and so on. QAnon���the ���movement��� aiming to be the container for this toxic mix���even possibly originated in South Africa.

Yet, all the conspiracy theorizing at the end of the end of history has a distinct class character to it. An important thing to note about the Ipsos survey, for example, is that in South Africa, online samples tended to be ���more urban, educated, and/or affluent than the general population.��� By itself, this is not a reliable measure of anything (though there is generally more vaccine hesitancy in wealthier countries than in poorer countries). But, William Callison and Quinn Slobodian spot a similar dynamic in the anti-lockdown, anti-vax, and generally anti-establishment sentiments pervading everywhere else���they are supported by a base of a kind of lumpen middle-class, comprising a mix of small to medium sized business owners, the self-employed, and generally downwardly-mobile. Callison and Slobodian call this explosion of middle-class politicization, of which the Capitol riot is one incident������The Revolt of the Mittelstand.���

Naturally, it���s those with internet access, and mostly working from home or an office whose attention-spans are completely soaked up by social media as their work and ���social��� lives migrate online, the line between the two blurred.�� A quick but incomplete scan of social media supports the middle-class tenor of present-day hysteria, and reveals them to overlap with a series of other middle-class concerns, crossing racial lines. It���s no surprise, that a good portion of vaccine skepticism on one side originates from the infamous ���RET crowd���, a moniker to describe the preoccupations of a scattered and incoherent black political bloc, some aligned with the Jacob Zuma faction in the ruling party, others supporting the EFF and being supposedly on the ���left���, and others backing former Johannesburg mayor (and ex-DA member) Herman Mashaba���s new political outfit ActionSA. What unites this tendency is a diagnosis of South Africa���s political impasse as being rooted in unresolved questions of identity and belonging, that the country���s political and economic order is insufficiently indigenized and demands ���radical economic transformation.��� It is no wonder then that this rhetoric has graduated to the nativist demand to #PutSouthAfricansFirst, and is beginning to result in concrete policy (proposed legislation in South Africa���s most densely populated province, Gauteng, seeks to exclude foreign nationals from owning and running businesses in its township economy).

For this group, vaccines are an imperialist tool, a plot to use Africans as guinea pigs to advance the push for total, world domination by the West and powerful elites like Bill Gates. Somewhere in there, there is a dormant critique of the vaccine apartheid where richer countries horde supply and big pharmaceutical companies like Pfizer and Moderna cash in big. Instead, a narrow, nationalist rhetoric is advanced, and countries which appear to be COVID free���like John Magufuli���s Tanzania that has stopped reporting cases since May last year and suppressed all talk of the virus���are looked upon favorably. On another side, it���s leafy suburbanites following the pseudo-scientific trails of alternative medicine advocates like the very popular Tim Noakes. For this group, the target of distrust is the South African government. While the incompetence of the ANC runs deep, the extent of cynicism in this group is driven by an entrenched mistrust in the post-apartheid state, a belief that rule by black people is forever doomed to end in disaster.

This new terrain cannot be mapped on a traditional left-right axis���this has stopped being meaningful in South Africa for some time now. Supporters of the new pop-up populisms share a lot of the same concerns���mainly immigration, rising crime, social, moral, and economic decline���yet they are divided across identity lines, manifesting in the hyper-racialized forms of black Afro-pessimism and white melancholia. Whether it���s because of�� the increased power of the state over their lives, or by falling victim to the general pattern of violent crime and social disorder, a lot of white South Africans have lately felt under siege. As a whole, white South Africans have increasingly become militant in the aftermath of 2008 (which coincided with Zuma’s lost decade���they infamously led the #ZumaMustFall protests), because where they once had the economic muscle to opt out of society��� through gated communities, private schools and private healthcare���now more than ever they are realizing that they live in a society.

The DA has consolidated its raison d���etre as the representative of the anxious white. At its recent Federal Congress, it elected the boilerplate, right-libertarian John Steenhuisen to lead the party (Steenhuisen had already been acting as leader, after the resignation of its first black leader, Mmusi Maimane), and side-lined Mbali Ntuli, a young prospect leading efforts to transform the both the party���s demographics and its strategic vision (Ntuli championed a number of progressive issues, like rent-control and climate change). Steenhuisen���along with former party leader and Federal Council chair Helen���have steered the DA���s sink into the culture wars, giving up its aspirations of being a mass party and instead preferring to curry favor with an ecosystem of social media personalities, podcasters YouTubers, and hordes of faceless, angry posters bent on fashioning their political complaints in the image of the American Right.

It���s a strategy that is already bleeding the DA���s electoral support, but it���s also demonstrative of the new normal of political life���it is no longer viable to maintain the sharp distinction between the online and real life, for better or worse the internet is as real as anything else. And the new, mediatized politics comes with its own, digitized political subject���one driven more and more by affect rather than well-developed political commitments. The communities formed around today���s political grievances constitute not an organized solidarity around collective interests, but what Hebert Marcuse once prefiguratively called the ���instinctive, spontaneous solidarity of sentiment.��� And this moment���s overriding sentiment is one of deep malaise, isolation, paranoia and skepticism, of the kind producing for the left and the right the negative movement���anti-lockdown, anti-vaccination, anti-immigration, anti-racism, anti-capitalism���all grand repudiations of things, and aptly summarized in the Fallist declaration that ���everything must fall.��� But if so, what must rise in its wake?

Last year was the 5th anniversary of the Fallist movements (#RhodesMustFall and #FeesMustFall). As current and ex-students, academics, plus others either fondly or bitterly recalled the two years of upheaval on South African campuses, it became clear that most are still vexed on what the Fallist legacy is. Its vestiges are apparent in the vocabulary South Africans now regularly use to go about framing political disputes, and Fallism properly inaugurated the era of #HashtagActivism and digital politics in this country. But its political significance is still undecided���underplayed by some, overestimated by others. The truth is that the Fallist moment presented the singular, most serious challenge to the post-apartheid political order. Instead of blaming its failures squarely on the shoulders of students and dismissing that period as now bygone (fees never really fell, and a resurgence is likely as COVID ravages the higher education sector); it must be confronted as an authentic effort to work through the contradictions of our time, while simultaneously being conditioned by our time. People make their own history, but not in circumstances of their own choosing.

These points are put rather well in a recent intervention from Endnotes, one bringing the last decade and a bit of disorder into sharp relief. There, the authors repurpose Asef Bayat���s notion of the ���non-movement��� to describe the political mobilizations characteristic of the interregnum���ones that have typically been structureless, chaotic, and with short life-spans���from the Arab Spring and #OccupyWallStreet, to #FeesMustFall, #BlackLivesMatter, and #EndSARS. According to Bayat, Nonmovements refers to the collective actions of noncollective actors; they embody the shared practices of large numbers of ordinary people whose fragmented but similar activities trigger much social change, even though these practices are rarely guided by an ideology or recognizable leaderships and organizations.

The nonmovement is the organizational form for a disorganized age.

A criticism often levelled against the Fallists, and indeed against nearly every mobilization part of ���the global accumulation of non-movements��� is that their constituencies, and as a result their aspirations, tend to be middle-class. It is beyond our scope to give an insightful breakdown of who exactly are the middle-classes, but as G��ran Therborn recently argues, we have been witnessing, ���an accelerated convergence of the Northern and Southern middle classes on the bleak path of inequality.��� As Endnotes observes, it would be wrong-headed to proceed by viewing the increasing involvement of the middle-class in the political arena as an advance of any coherent project���rather, they should be seen as ���subjective expressions of the objective disorder of our times.��� It is a response to a stagnating capitalism, one which at some point was capable of delivering reward to those who ���worked hard���, but which now subjects all but an elite few to the constant threat of expiration no matter how hard they work.

The implicit, albeit often inceptive complaint in today���s protest articulations is not necessarily that capitalism is wrong because it is exploitative per se���neoliberalism outmoded critiques of the production process by promising emancipation and individual identity through consumption���but that it has become an unlivable form of life. Everything is just too damn expensive now, and in quarantine who can enjoy it anyway? It is unlikely that this state of affairs will change���we are unlikely to see a post-COVID economic boom, and we are losing the very environment that makes production possible.

The oversized role of the middle-class in politics produces both progressive and reactionary disruption. What it does do for those it jolts into consciousness across the spectrum, is sharply identify the problem through a register that resonates���living in ���these strange times����� is precarious, exhausting, alienating, anxiety, and resentment-inducing; the disorder is no longer remote but painfully felt. Today���s political confusions were already foreseen by Wendy Brown, who almost thirty-years ago clarified that: ���The problem is that when not only economic stratification but other injuries to body and psyche enacted by capitalism (alienation, commodification, displacement, disintegration of sustaining, albeit contradictory, social forms as families and neighborhood) are discursively normalized and thus depoliticized, other markers of social difference may come to bear an inordinate weight.��� The task ahead is to politicize the widespread feeling that the world can no longer be a home for anyone.

But it will be hard���neoliberalism has not ended. If anything, the crisis has demonstrated its surprising resilience, and Ramaphosa���s government is taking advantage by increasingly portraying the COVID-19 health crisis as an unforeseen catastrophe, one which the government must endure like every other household by tightening its pockets. The government looks tired of governing, bumbling through what many are hoping is the last stretch of the pandemic by messing up South Africa���s vaccine procurement and roll-out plan, and increasingly pushing the message that the actual responsibility for managing the pandemic resides primarily with individuals themselves���in his address to the nation announcing harsher lockdown restrictions, Ramaphosa might as well have said ���there is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women, and there are families.���

It is important to now say that social movements are not obsolete, and that the future of this country will be determined by its working-class. Class struggles are being waged in the battle to secure grants and social relief, to fight for access to housing, for water and sanitation, against mineral extractivism, for jobs, and against retrenchments and wage-cuts. All this while coming up against a government increasingly aware that it is managing an increasingly untenable situation���the other day it sent police to spray water cannons on civilians queuing to renew their temporary disability grants. The stated reason was to ���enforce social distancing.��� The real reason, is that it���s a message to the working-class as the government is on the cusp of pulling the plug on its COVID-relief efforts: don���t revolt, stay in line.

Much as there has been some revolt across the world, it was, however, an overcalculation by the global left that the extent of the crisis would be immense enough to dig neoliberalism into its grave. The global working-class is still by and large in decline���union membership is at an all-time low, and the pressures for survival (and lockdown constraints) are enough to make anyone weary of engaging in risky political activity. This is why for the biggest mobilizations of last year���in Chile, the United States, and Nigeria���the first proverbial stones were usually thrown by groups outside of the organized working-class, often coming onto the political scene for the first time (even in India, a crucial role is being played by relatively wealthier, medium-sized farm owners). For a lot of these people���often young, middle-class, and downwardly-mobile, this moment has thrust upon them a heightening awareness of their proletarianization, and with it the realization that they possibly have nothing to lose but their chains. The unresolved question remains what world they are trying to gain.

Throughout the pandemic, South Africa has seen flashes of mobilization spearheaded outside of the pre-existing social movements. Last spring, national opinion was divided when a queer-feminist collective called #WeSeeYou, occupied a mansion in Camps Bay, Cape Town, one of the wealthiest suburbs on the continent not unlike Malibu for its appeal to celebrities and rich tourists. The collective undertook a 21st century tactic���they simply booked the house via Airbnb, and remained after their paid for three night stay was over. You could critique its middle-class composition, and you could critique the performance and spectacle of it (one question that nags us, is why they didn���t make common cause with already existing social movements on housing like Reclaim the City, Ndifuna Ukwazi or The Social Justice Coalition, or why those activists didn���t support or make the protest go viral)��� but in a very noteworthy way the occupation drew attention to not only the fact of Cape Town���s spatial apartheid which brutalizes its poor and working-class, but the generalized housing precarity which defines the situation of most. Additionally, it raises today���s social rupture as producing not only struggles for redistribution, but struggles for recognition as well. The desire to feel seen, refracted through the familiar and immediate terms of race, gender, or sexuality, reflects a general and deep-seated state of social dislocation and anomie. The world can no longer be a home for anyone, and no one feels at home in the world anymore.

Therefore, Mario Tronti was right������We have populism because there is no people.����� So, it is worth paying attention to Mazibuko Jara���s proposition that ���The working-class must build an African nation.��� It is clear that our society aches for the restoration of the social bond, a durable link between the governing and the governed, and does anything to give expression to this need such as construct imagined communities on the basis of exclusion���of who doesn���t belong. Contrary to that, as Jara���who was famously purged from the leadership of the Communist party����� notes (no doubt channeling Fanon), ������ nation-building, for the working class, should mean unifying itself nationally as the leading class whose developing culture, aspirations and economic interests become increasingly those of the overwhelming majority of our people.��� The working-class remains the revolutionary class because its interests are objectively universal���as Chris Hani, the South African freedom fighter assassinated by white right-wingers in 1993, reminds us, Socialism is not about big concepts and heavy theory. Socialism is about decent shelter for those who are homeless. It is about water for those who have no safe drinking water. It is about health care, it is about a life of dignity for the old. It is about a decent education for all our people. Socialism is about rolling back the tyranny of the market. As long as the economy is dominated by an unelected, privileged few, the case for socialism will exist.

And it is this case that must be made to all those in want of a fundamental change, across the class stratification. The South African Left must construct a new vision and political instrument that not only leads to a renewal of our social movements, but that captures the imagination of groups waiting to be politicized. The pandemic has seen otherwise unorganized groups, like parents, enter the political sphere to exercise influence over state decision-making such as on the question of if and when schools reopen, a question that has become a big flashpoint of public debate. There are opportunities not only to organize them towards changing our resource-segregated education system, but also around issues of racism and transformation��� like we saw in Brackenfell. Long before the EFF and the DA���s theatrics, Brackenfell students had established an Instagram page to share their stories, and had handed over a memorandum to the school by July 8 already. Of the concerned political parties, were any efforts made to engage students? To engage the affected parents? To organize them? Instead, we got street battles and Brackenfell reduced to fifteen minutes of fame for a white social influencer before the media and everyone else moved on.

South Africa���s political opposition remains hopelessly weak. The more they are mired in facile political confrontations like we saw in Senekal and Brackenfell, the more they enable the ANC���s hegemony to slouch on. That there have been almost no political costs for the ANC���s gross mishandling of the pandemic, is telling of this age of anti-politics��� not only is the opposition impotent, but they are short of a competitive vision themselves. It���s probable they don���t even aspire to govern anymore, they are happy to simply oppose.

And so, the left everywhere must lead with its vision. The strength of our case is stronger than those we oppose. There is no easy way out of this morass, there are no vaccines for social and political disorder. We know that the only way out is through struggle.

The politics of vaccines

Tomorrow on AIAC TV, on Youtube, Facebook, and Twitter, we discuss the inherent inequality in the system of global distribution of the COVID 19 vaccine with Achal Prabhala and Indira Govender. Achal Prabhala. Image via Wikimedia Commons.

Most of us started of 2021, hoping that COVID-19 vaccines become widely and cheaply, if not freely, available globally. But we are quickly learning that something akin to COVID apartheid exists. The citizens of rich, northern countries will receive the vaccine first (as The New York Times projects: ���these countries can expect, at best, to have about 50 percent of their populations covered by the end of 2021���) and it will take a while, including up to a year, for people in the Global South or what used to be known as developing countries or the Third World, to get access to the vaccine.

As Achal Prabhala, coordinator of AccessIBSA, a tri-continental project set up to expand access and speed up the discovery of new drugs in the developing world, specifically India, Brazil and South Africa, wrote in The New York Times in December 2020, what adds insult to injury is that while the vaccines were developed thanks wholly or partly to taxpayer money and they essentially belong to the people, ������ yet the people are about to pay for them again, and with little prospect of getting as many as they need fast enough.���

It is also in rich countries��� interests, as Achal wrote in that same article, to ���negotiate with their pharmaceutical companies for cheaper drugs and vaccines worldwide. Leaning on those companies is the right thing to do in the face of a global pandemic; it is also the best way for the governments of rich countries to take care of their own populations, which in some cases experience more severe drug shortages than do people in far less affluent places.���

For the last few years, Achal was a Shuttleworth Fellow (full disclosure: I am currently a fellow). As Achal described his mission then: ���Medicines save lives. Unfortunately, the private right to profit overrides the public���s right to access. Fake innovation manifested in bad patents harms humanity and blocks affordable, life-saving drugs while impeding real innovation. Too often, the cost of bad intellectual property is the price of life.���

He will join us tomorrow, Tuesday, January 19, to talk about the politics of vaccines.

We will also be joined by Indira Govender, a medical doctor and public health expert as well as a frequent contributor to Africa Is a Country, who will discuss a twin calamity: quackery and COVID-19 denialism.

Stream the show Tuesday at 19:00 SAST, 17:00 GMT, and 12:00 EST on��YouTube,��Facebook, and��Twitter.

This is our first episode of 2021.

Clips from previous episodes are available on our��YouTube channel, but you���re better off checking of the whole thing on our��Patreon along with all the episodes from our archive.

The tragic delusions of white exceptionalism

A half a century ago, at another historical inflection point, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. wisely recognized white Americans��� delusions as the property not simply of the United States, but of the West more broadly. Photo by Max Letek on Unsplash

When US Congress members resumed deliberations on the Electoral College vote after a pro-Trump mob violently stormed and temporarily occupied the Capitol building on January 6, many of them expressed shock and dismay that such an event had occurred in the United States. The scene was certainly abominable. More than fifty people were injured, and five people died in the attack, including a Capitol police officer. But the greatest damage had been inflicted upon the feeble facade of American exceptionalism and white innocence.

In a revealing display of historical delusion, the mantra in Congress that evening and throughout the following day was that the barbaric attempt to subvert the outcome of the election was an aberration in US political history and culture. ���This is not who we are,��� members of congress repeated. Instead of introspection, there was deflection. ���This is how election results are disputed in a banana republic���not our democratic republic,��� former President George W. Bush related through a formal statement, without any apparent awareness of his own irony and racism.

And there were even boasts. Vice-President Mike Pence, in his address to the reconvened Senate envisioned a world in awe of the US. ���The world will once again witness the resilience and strength of our democracy,��� he said. New York Senator Chuck Schumer, revealing the limits of his historical literacy, was aghast that this aberrant event will stain America���s image. ���Unfortunately,��� he said to his colleagues, ���we can now add January 6, 2021 to that very short list of dates in American history that will live forever in infamy.���

A half a century ago, at another historical inflection point, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. wisely recognized these delusions as the property not simply of the United States, but of the West more broadly. The US, he discovered, shared with European states and their imperialist outposts in Africa and the Caribbean a near pathological determination to dress up labor exploitation, gross materialism, militarism, and white supremacy as democracy. We are at a similar historical moment.

This myth of exceptionalism and white superiority continues to yoke the white working class in the U.S. and elsewhere���France, Britain, Brazil, and in South Africa, among other places���to an economic system that is destroying them. King, in his time, implored us to recognize this fact. Today, he would remind us that what Americans saw on January 6 was a domestic variant of a world problem of persistent adherence to white supremacy casually cloaked in political and economic grievance.

The US, like South Africa, needed collective myths to fuel its national pride, and allow its leaders the self-assurance they displayed. Their myopic sense of exceptionalism fueled their claims to superiority vis-��-vis the rest of the world. The same internal inhibitors to self-reflection allowed Donald Trump to label country���s ���shitholes��� and former President Bush to dismiss others as ���banana republics.��� This absence of self-reflection compounded by delusion inspired the pro-Trump white-nationalist mob to attack the US Capitol building in an act of domestic terrorism.

We can learn from King���s prescient admonition for white Americans, Western Europeans generally, to recognize the inevitable calamity that will result from the ease with which they hold aloft the banner of racial superiority, while they trod aggressively toward an all-encompassing conflagration. King offered an alternative path forward borne of his engagement with non-violent movements in Asia and Africa to end of European imperialism, and the movement in the US against racial segregation and economic exploitation.

King���s analysis of global white supremacy grew increasingly astute in the early 1960s, through his involvement in initiatives to end white-minority rule in southern Africa. King was not alone in his thinking. He espoused a philosophy that was in the tradition of the Black social gospel theologians who mentored him, such as Benjamin E. Mays, Howard Thurman, and King���s father, Martin Luther King Sr. The inspiration they derived from Mahatma Gandhi���s nonviolence was immense, first in his struggle for Indian rights in British-ruled South Africa and then, after 1915, in India, toward its independence from Britain. Others, such as W.E.B. Du Bois, Ida B. Wells, Mary McLeod Bethune, and South Africa���s Albert Luthuli, shaped the rich, internationally-oriented intellectual and political environment that nurtured King and shaped his political outlook.

King���s goals for the Civil Rights Movement were also consistent with those of his contemporary radical activists who were unsatisfied with arguments for integration into an unaltered American society. His Black social gospel predecessors, as would King himself, insisted that the US social and economic system be understood in its global context, which would evince the necessity of a radical reordering. The global perspective that King and his contemporaries in the Civil Rights Movement gained through their involvement in the struggle against white-minority rule in southern Africa, equipped them to discern the global dimensions of capitalism, white supremacy and resulting forms of creeping authoritarianism.

Part of King���s brilliance and his usefulness for understanding the current political moment was his capacity to link culture, philosophy, and national politics within broad, global economic and political structures. In his speech to the First Conference on New Politics Chicago in 1967, King derided the persistent myth of the US as a paragon of justice, equality, and freedom. He diagnosed America���s social malady as a ���triple-prong sickness that has been lurking that is the sickness within our body politic from its very beginning. That is the sickness of racism, excessive materialism and militarism. Not only is this our nation���s dilemma, it is the plague of Western civilization.���

King did not issue diagnoses without prescriptions for a more healthful body politic. He strove toward the realization of what he referred to as the ���Beloved Community,��� built on justice and equality. Toward that end, we must be honest about and learn from our own history.

King warned that it was detrimental to the US to continue to deny that ���capitalism was built on the exploitation and suffering of black slaves,��� and demanded the acknowledgement that capitalism ���continues to thrive on the exploitation of the poor, both black and white, both here and abroad.��� Again, his antidote for this sickness was not mere social integration, but true social justice, which required a radical remaking of American society. ���The problems of racial injustice and economic injustice,��� he argued, ���cannot be solved without a radical redistribution of political and economic power.��� What he called for, in other words, was a social revolution.

King���s internationalism and the deepening sophistication of his social analyses in a global context were most fully displayed in his Human Rights Day address at Hunter College in 1965, in which he warned that the delusion of superiority and exceptionalism among white South Africans was propelling that country toward internal violence, as he feared it would among whites in the US. The prospect of white violence prompted King to muse on the image of the African savage in the European imagination, reinforced by innumerable books, motion pictures, and magazine photos. He lamented that this figment of Africa as home to backward savages had persisted for more than a century despite the nimiety of facts that controverted it.

King contrasted the African-savage narrative with Europe���s well-documented economic and political savagery on the African continent: ���Africa does have spectacular savages and brutes today, but they are not black. They are the sophisticated white rulers of South Africa who profess to be cultured, religious, and civilized, but whose conduct on philosophy stamp them unmistakably as modern-day barbarians.���

He feared that the persistence of these brutes, these barbarian white rulers would propel South Africa toward a race war, as Africans exhausted all peaceful routes to liberation and self-determination. To forestall or, even better, prevent such an outcome, King called for an international moral coalition against white-minority rule in southern Africa. ���The leaders of South Africa���s openly and virulently racist regime were very specific about their intention to secure and maintain white dominance in the country. Quoting Prime Minister Verwoerd [of South Africa]: ���We want to keep South Africa white.��� Keeping it white can only mean one thing, namely white domination, not ���leadership,��� not ���guidance,��� but control, supremacy.���

King neatly summed up apartheid���s corrosive efficiency for securing white political and economic power in the country, while ensuring a stable reserve of cheap Black labor. Rather than a southern outpost of Western civilization, as many South African leaders claimed, their country���s social and economic system made it, as King put it, ���a formidable adversary of human rights.���

He emphasized his endorsement of international sanctions against South Africa, in this speech. Although the push for sanctions in the US would fail to shift the US government���s position on South Africa until the 1980s, King recognized the potential for a sanctions campaign, beyond the specifics of its immediate goal to cripple the apartheid regime, to form the basis of a global movement; what he called an ���international alliance of all peoples of all nations against racism.���

As the minister extolled the virtues of sanctions, he singled out the US for its hypocritical and economically gratuitous embrace of South Africa. There had always been quick and deliberate US action in international events when the US believed its interests were at stake. He said that when the US invaded the Dominican Republic, which took place that year, it showed what it was capable of doing if willing. ���We inundated that small nation with overwhelming force, shocking the world with our zealousness and naked power.��� But toward South Africa, he bemoaned, ���our protest is so muted and peripheral, it merely mildly disturbs the sensibilities of the segregationists, while our trade and investments substantially stimulate our economy to greater heights.���

Such is the hypocrisy of exceptionalism. The US would not condemn South Africa at the height of its own hypocrisy on race relations, because to do so would indict both countries. They mirrored each other, with their racist economic and political systems, hyper militarism and historical delusions. ���Colonialism and segregation,��� he wrote in an essay published that year in the New York Amsterdam News in 1962, ���are nearly synonymous; they are children in the same family, for their common end is economic exploitation, political domination and the debasing of human personality.���

King would have recognized the raiding of the US Capitol building as a stark reflection of what America has always been. Like the white rulers of South Africa during the 1950s and 60s ���who profess to be cultured, religious, and civilized,��� U.S. leaders have conjoined mythology and delusion to blind themselves to the fact that the marauding horde that brought such shame to the US Capitol on January 6 and, indeed, to the US, acted in the long and dependable tradition of white nationalism in America and in the indomitable spirit of global white supremacy.

King endeavored to steer whites from the course on which their historical delusion had fixed them and that would lead them inevitably toward violence. His legacy inspires a clear-eyed examination of movements like Marine Le Pen���s National Front (National Rally), Boris Johnson���s Brexit, and Trumpism, to understand their deep-rootedness in the ethos and praxis of white supremacy. Naming it, as King counseled, will allow for self-reflection and an opportunity for true exceptionalism. Success within this process will enable US politicians to recognize the marauding horde wandering the corridors of the Capitol building as themselves and a product of their history.

We work like elephants, and eat like ants

The weakening of Nigeria���s oil trade unions has a devastating impact on workers. Now workers are paid by Shell and others to sabotage union strikes and actions. Photo by Ayanfe Olarinde on Unsplash

In January 2020, I was speaking to a group of so-called ���artisanal refiners��� in Port Harcourt, Nigeria. ���Yes, we are in the oil,��� they said. By law they are criminals, though many argue that artisanal refineries are a way for the local population to retake control of what is legitimately theirs���in opposition to an industry that gives little back to communities, while also destroying local fishing and farming. It is unclear how many artisanal refineries are scattered around the Niger Delta, the oil region in southeastern Nigeria, partly because the military regularly attacks and burns them down. But the artisanal refinery workers I talked to believe that artisanal refineries are responsible for up to 90% of the local supply of paraffin, petrol, and diesel.

The workers I spoke to are both former Shell employees and ���militants������the latter among groups who fought for resource control and jobs and started this parallel industry to generate income. Today���s bush refineries followed the amnesty program, which promised reintegration and rehabilitation for laying down their arms and pledging to end fighting in 2009. Perhaps one quarter of Nigerian oil is stolen, by a complex network of individuals in the military, politicians, oil companies, and local communities. Perhaps a fifth of this is related to the swamp refineries.

Nigeria is the archetypal example of the ���oil curse,��� where countries endowed with large oil resources score low on democracy and welfare, but high on conflict and corruption. Even though the lack of jobs creation and working conditions are crucial for understanding the social conditions in the country, there is seldom talk of working conditions in the oil industry. Nigeria is Africa’s largest oil producer and produces more than two million barrels of oil daily. The profits mainly befall the ���oil complex������a small elite of politicians, company managers, and local community leaders, while 70% of Nigerians are poor, and social benefits scant. The country has just over 200 million inhabitants, so the petroleum profits would not lift the majority out of poverty by direct profit sharing, but the oil industry and the petroleum dependency as it stands is in the way of other industrial developments and job creation. Nigeria is a net importer of refined products (the four state-owned refineries operate at a quarter capacity), and the country has a small supplier industry.

Nigeria is also a country characterized by systematic violations of trade union rights, according to the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC). Oil workers are particularly vulnerable. In 2015, an estimated 60,000 worked in the oil industry, and unions claimed about half were organized in the oil workers’ unions NUPENG (blue-collar workers) or PENGASSAN (white-collar workers). An official from PENGASSAN’s regional office in the Niger Delta told me in October last year, that during the combined COVID-19 and oil crisis, even without proper statistics, he could say that over 20% of members have been made redundant.

Nigerian workers are the face of IndustriALL���s global campaign to secure permanent and decent conditions in the oil industry. ���We work like elephants, and eat like ants,��� a worker told the global union federation for energy workers, IndustriAll. In 2019, a contract worker earned between US$137 and $257 a month, for a 72 hour week. Since then, inflation has eaten up much of these wages��� purchasing power. In the ongoing oil crises, union officials say that many members have accepted lower wages to keep their jobs. In 2020, there were three labor disputes against Chevron alone (which is also Norwegian Equinor���s partner in Nigeria) over dismissals without dialogue. An employee of PENGASSAN said that joining the union carries a 50 percent risk of losing his job, still the two unions estimate a membership increase: In times of crisis, unions provide hope for jobs protection.

For 60 years, there have been annual oil spills similar to the Exxon Valdez accident in the Niger Delta, and in 2019 Nigeria flared almost 8 billion cubic meters. There is little documentation about oil workers��� health, but those from the artisanal refinery camps, communities, and union representatives all talk about skin diseases, vision impairment, respiratory, and fertility problems.

Shop stewards describe extensive health problems but say workers are afraid of risking their jobs if they go to doctors who often report to company management. Organized workers normally receive higher wages and better job security. But collective bargaining is resource-intensive, since it is at the company level, and is primarily about wages. One shop steward from PENGASSAN said that he would rather ask for monetary compensation so that the members can support their family. Another said ���All I can do is ask the members to drink milk. So, I buy milk.��� Milk calms the throat, he explained. Interestingly, the artisanal refinery workers explain that health costs are paid by the camp leader, and that they work actively to reduce emissions and avoid environmental damage. If they are formalized and become legal, this will improve, they say.

The labor market in the Niger Delta is characterized by high unemployment, conflict, and violence. Oil workers often refer to the colonial strategy of ���divide-and-rule��� to describe how oil companies operate to avoid trade unionism. Blue-collar workers are most vulnerable with more precarious conditions, and the few who are left in permanent positions in a given company are often promoted. The blue-collar union, NUPENG, is considered more radical and ���militant,��� so such promotions are a way of keeping that union out of the workplace, as the promoted workers will belong to the more moderate white-collar union PENGASSAN. Another way to avoid labor conflict, is to breach the local content law on the use of foreign workers. The two unions have jointly fought against the abuse of the expatriate quota, as ���expats��� are not locally organized and can keep production going in the event of a local strike. Companies also stoke and take advantage of ethnic differences to pitch workers from different communities against each other.

Some jobs created under ���local content��� schemes are problematic. So-called host communities (where production takes place), have witnessed oil spills that have ruined alternative livelihoods, such as fishing and agriculture, but not the expected jobs from the oil industry. This has been central to peaceful resistance (such as the struggle by the Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People���Mosop since the early 1990s) as well as violent conflict. Over the past decade, Shell, and later others, have developed so-called Memorandums of Understanding with the host communities. This includes contracts for cleaning, security, and food canteens���the so-called ���stand-by-workforce.��� They are often employed through patronage relations that require loyalty to the community leaders, rather than a formal contract. These workers are often difficult or sometimes dangerous to organize.

Those I spoke to who work under such community contracts presented themselves as Shell employees. In 2014, I met a group of security guards hired by the community leadership who had not been paid for six months. They considered Shell responsible, while Shell responded that the local leader had been paid and thus was accountable to the workers. However, that leader was threatening and considered dangerous. Despite assistance by non-governmental organizations to press for environmental and human rights, these workers are unfamiliar with their rights as workers and remain vulnerable to exploitation by big oil interests. According to union representatives, contracted workers are also exploited, used to sabotage union strikes or actions. The community contracted workers I talked to explained that many in the communities get paid, but not for working. However, they can be called upon when needed. According to union representatives, they can be used to sabotage union strikes or actions. A former community liaison officer at Shell confirmed this but added that in some cases the unions have ���the upper hand,���, including better contacts in the villages to support worker actions against companies.

���When the oil unions in Nigeria sneeze, the whole country catches cold,��� a company manager reflected. The oil unions have a particular and historical importance in policy influence and in the trade union movement and popular resistance. The oil unions have strong strike power, in that a production and distribution stop of petroleum could cut off fuel flows to the country and financial flows to the political and economic elites. They have often used this power in popular protests for democracy and petrol subsidies, most famously in 1993 when oil union strikes contributed to the departure of two dictators. During Occupy Nigeria, in January 2012, it was only when PENGASSAN threatened to strike that President Goodluck Jonathan called for negotiations. However, in 2012 many other protesters and unions��� civil society partners, accused the Nigerian Labour Congress in general and the oil unions in particular for abandoning their social engagements and alliance politics. The oil unions are weakened, on the defensive, and their capacity and will to strike has waned. In conversations with oil union officials, they describe themselves as having no time to participate in popular protests. In the #Endsars protests, for example, the oil unions declared sympathy, but explicitly asked their members to stay at home. This has led to continued dissatisfaction and further division in alliances between the trade union movement and other civil society groups. The weakened oil unions is a weakening of the Nigerian trade union movement as a whole.

This is an edited version of a post first published, in Norwegian, on Frifagbevegelse.no.

Museveni and the Americans

The United States must make the choice to side with the majority of Ugandans who would like to see democracy take root in Uganda. Uganda's President Yoweri��Museveni in 2012 (Russell Watkins / DFID Flickr CC.)

The road to Uganda’s 2021 elections has been treacherous for the opposition, with media attention duly focused on the deaths, threats and violence enacted both on those running against President Yoweri Museveni, in power for 36 years already, and their supporters. A missing perspective, taken up in this article, is the role that America has played in upholding this Museveni-led “beacon in the Central Africa Region.”

This article is part of a series where we republish selected articles from The Elephant. The series is curated by Africa Is a Country editorial board member, Wangui Kimari.

Since taking power in 1986, President Yoweri Museveni has enjoyed total bipartisan support from six American administrations. Along with America���s help, Museveni���s domestic repression has grown steadily, stymying Uganda���s fledgling democracy. Uganda���s general election takes place today, a week before President Joe Biden���s inauguration. The Biden administration must not give Museveni carte blanche but should instead make America���s continued support contingent on good governance and accountability.

When he first became president five years after launching a rebellion against President��Milton Obote over the disputed December 1980 election, Museveni portrayed himself and his movement, the National Resistance Army/Movement (NRA/M) as the antithesis of all previous groups. After 33 years at the helm, Museveni and the National Resistance Movement are indistinguishable from the people he launched a rebellion to dislodge from power.

A speech given and a memo written 13 years apart, laid out the vision and the contradictions within the NRM, and more broadly within Uganda, and cast the authors as protagonists in the struggle for democracy in Uganda. The speech was given by Yoweri Museveni in 1986, shortly after he seized power. Kizza Besigye issued the memo on November 7th, 1999.

The speech, often referred to as the ���fundamental change��� speech, laid out the future of Uganda under the NRM, while the memo, ���An insider���s view on how NRM lost the broad base,��� was the most realistic appraisal of the NRA/M 13 years after it took power.

When he delivered his speech on January 29th, 1986, Museveni said, ���No one should think that what is happening today is a mere change of guard: it is a fundamental change in the politics of our country.��� Museveni added:

The people of Africa���the people of Uganda���are entitled to democratic government. It is not a favour from any government: it is the right of the people of Africa to have a democratic government. The sovereign power in the land must the population, not the government. The government should not be the master, but the servant of the people.

Regarding democracy, Museveni said, ���It is a birthright to which all the people of Uganda are entitled.���

In November 1999, while still a serving army officer, Col. Kizza Besigye offered an opposing view of the NRA/M when he said, ���All in all, when I reflect on the Movement philosophy and governance, I can conclude that the Movement has been manipulated by those seeking to gain or retain political power in the same way that political parties in Uganda were manipulated.��� Besigye went further to say that, ���[W]hether it���s political parties or Movement, the real problem is dishonest, opportunistic and undemocratic leadership operating in a weak institutional framework and a weak civil society which cannot control them.���

Museveni���s vision of ���fundamental change��� has produced ���no change��� and the servant leadership and democracy espoused in his speech are illusory. Besigye���s assessment of the selfish, opportunistic and undemocratic leadership within the NRA/M and in Uganda is all too familiar and the competing realities embodied by Museveni and Besigye have dominated Ugandan politics for over a decade.

A central plank of the NRM was the establishment of a broad-based government and the elimination of all forms of sectarianism. To make good on its promise, the NRM introduced an��anti-sectarian law in 1988. The NRM also instituted a no-party system where elections were contested on personal merit rather than party affiliation. For Museveni and the NRM, political parties were the root cause of Uganda���s crises since independence���as they inherently promote ���sectarianism,��� unlike the Movement, which ���fosters consensus.���

Three elements have sustained Museveni���s vice-like grip on power in Uganda: the use of the security apparatus to suppress the opposition, the passing and selective application of laws���even when the courts strike them down���and America���s generosity despite Uganda���s dubious human rights and governance record.

Three years after publishing the memo, Besigye ran against Museveni in the 2001 general election. The electoral commission declared Museveni the��winner. The run-up to the election saw the arrest and assault of Besigye���s supporters.����A Select Parliamentary Committee established to examine electoral violence stated that, ���violence experienced in elections includes physical assault and shooting, intimidation, abduction and detention of voters.��� In all, according to the commission, 17 people were killed and 408 arrests were made.

A few months after the election, Besigye was detained and questioned by the Criminal Investigations Division (CID), allegedly in connection with the offense of treason. Besigye left the country In September 2001, citing persecution by the state. He returned on October 26th, 2005.

Unlike in the 2001 elections, in 2006 the state was keen to derail Besigye���s candidacy through legal maneuvers from the outset to prevent his name from appearing on the ballot. The police filed a case in court accusing him of rape and treason, and arrested him on November 12th, barely a fortnight after he returned to Uganda from exile, and a few months before the election scheduled for March.

When the military realized that the civilian court would grant bail to Besigye and his co-accused, the military prosecutor brought terrorism and weapons offences charges. The court eventually acquitted��him of the rape charge. In dismissing the case, high court Judge John Bosco Katutsi said, ���The evidence is inadequate, impotent, scandalous, monstrous against a man who brought himself up to compete for the highest position in this country.���

Despite already competing in an election with the odds stacked against him, Besigye lost six weeks to legal fights in the courts where he spent as many days as he did on the campaign trail.

After losing two elections, Besigye realized it was almost impossible to beat Museveni at polls which were neither free, nor fair, nor peaceful, or by having the courts overturn the election results and sought to employ other means.

In 2011, Besigye joined other activists in a Walk to Work campaign, a simple yet profound form of protest that highlighted the stark economic realities in Uganda. Even as many Ugandans were struggling to meet their daily needs, the country bought at least eight fighter jets and other military hardware worth US$744 million. Museveni���s inauguration ceremony cost US$1.3 million. That the protest came a few weeks after the electoral commission declared Museveni the winner of the election with over 60 percent of the vote illustrated the hollowness of Museveni���s victory.

The election took place against the background of the Arab Spring and its potential for contagion, with Museveni viewing the remarkably benign act of people walking to work instead of driving an existential threat. Museveni and the security agencies could not countenance the Walk to Work or other similar activities turning into a popular movement. The 2013 Public Order Management Act and its convenient interpretation came in handy.

Museveni fell back on the template set during the 2001 election. Security agencies visited unspeakable violence on Besigye and his supporters during the election campaign and Museveni was declared the winner by the electoral commission. Besigye contested the validity of the election in court but, while it recognized that there were irregularities, the court ruled that they were not sufficient to modify the outcome of the election.

State violence against Besigye and his supporters has been a constant in the Besigye-Museveni contest but today, for the first time, Museveni���s opponent is not Besigye. He is competing against the Kyaddondo East Member of Parliament, Robert Kyagulanyi, popularly known by his stage name Bobi Wine. Kyagulanyi was four years old when the NRM came to power in 1986.

And just like with Besigye, Bobi Wine has been at the receiving end of the violence of the state agencies ahead of 2021 election. The police have��disrupted��his campaign and��detained��him several times and he has on occasion��suspended his campaign in protest at the violence meted out against him and his supporters. He was recently arrested for��defying the COVID protocol��while campaigning. Predictably, the protocol does not seem to apply to President Museveni, who has been campaigning unimpeded.

Museveni���s ascension to power also coincided with the deterioration of the security situation in Sudan and the Democratic Republic of Congo, and with Muammar Gaddafi���s actions to prop up various African regimes. An astute political entrepreneur, Museveni put Uganda at the service of America and in return, successive American administration gave him political support and financial backing.

When President Ronald Reagan warned him to be wary of Gaddafi���s activities during their first ever meeting, Museveni told Reagan that he had fought Gaddafi before the Americans started fighting him, to which Reagan replied, ���I am preaching to a choir.���

Since then, Museveni has made himself indispensable to America���s security calculus in the region. During her visit to Kampala in 1998, Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright called Uganda a�����beacon in the central African region.”

Uganda is among the largest beneficiaries of the Department of Defense ���Train and Equip��� program. The Department of Defense has notified Congress of over US$280 million in equipment and training for Uganda since the 2011 financial year, over US$60 million in joint support to Uganda and Burundi for AMISOM and significant funding for the 2011-2017 counter-LRA effort (Lord���s Resistance Army insurgency). Additionally, Uganda also receives counterterrorism aid through State Department funds. It received over US$30 million in support via the African Peacekeeping Rapid Response Partnership (APRRP).

The state is coming down hard on Bobi Wine because he is tapping into and articulating the latent discontent among the vast majority of��Ugandans, those under under 30 who make up over 70 percent of the country���s population and who cannot relate to Museveni���s self-aggrandizing rendering of the Bush Wars or the Idi Amin scarecrow. America has a choice: to side with most Ugandans who would like to see democracy take root in Uganda or with Museveni under the pretext of maintaining stability.

Stop selling out

Ugandan activist and politician Dr. Stella Nyanzi challenges a younger generation of women to take up the struggle for political freedoms and social change in Uganda. Stella Nyanzi, right, at a conference in Kampala, Uganda, in May 2018. Image credit Chapter Four Uganda via Flickr CC.

Introduction and transcription by Serubiri Moses.

It is difficult to articulate the place and position of Dr. Stella Nyanzi, medical anthropologist and women���s and LGBTQ rights activist, in Ugandan politics in the current moment. I view that place���as she articulates in this interview carried out by writer Arao Ameny���as critical of the office itself as an instrument of power, and the ways that power has been abused. Not only by those in office for decades, but also by women leaders, especially, who have been given a seat at the table. What Dr. Nyanzi articulates in this interview is important because it suggests that the women���s rights struggle is largely incomplete, and will require the efforts of a younger generation to be fully enacted. Dr. Nyanzi, who emerged onto the political scene through her Pads4Gals campaign in 2017, is currently running for the office of Woman Member of Parliament for Kampala Municipality in the 2021 elections.

The emergence of several political movements in the last two decades shows the changing terrain of politics in Uganda, and simultaneously reveals the changing laws of Uganda with notable constitutional amendments that reflect a tightening hold on power, or what can be argued is the instrumentalization of the law in countering political activism in unconventional spaces. Thus, Dr. Nyanzi is concerned with the institutionalization of women by and large: ���That is another form of women���s participation in politics: that they may come and sit at the table, using whatever means, but when they get to the table, they forget the core values of women empowerment, feminist agendas, and they participate with those who oppress us through models of patriarchy and misogyny that must be combated.���

Recent activism has taken place in the era of social media, that is, after 2006, when Facebook first launched. Prior to this, Uganda was said to be ���progressive��� in multiple cases citing the 1995 Constitution, which made provisions for gender and women’s education, among others. Similarly, Uganda���s inclusive politics such as having a first woman Vice-President as early as the mid-1990s, has been lauded by various Western governments and international NGOs. Yet in recent years, the inclusive politics of the 1990s has appeared to be primarily benefitting the incumbent National Resistance Movement party, rather than effecting any real change amongst what Stella Nyanzi calls ���the masses.��� Dr. Nyanzi is attempting to forge a new working class-oriented politics.

That working class activism has taken place within unconventional spaces such as the entertainment industry or the university, and as such the music collective Firebase Crew is notable in the emergence of the ���ghetto youth��� movement in Kampala between 2000 and 2010, of which dancehall musician, Member of Parliament, and current Presidential hopeful Bobi Wine (Robert Kyagulanyi) is a proponent. There are also the various feminist and women’s rights campaigns that took place in public spaces of Kampala streets; the LGBTQ Pride Parades which took place in semi-public gardens in Entebbe and elsewhere; and a growing youth movement in Uganda. This is important because according to census statistics, the majority of the country is below the age of twenty-five but its leadership averages above sixty. On the other hand, the increased influence of the Christian Evangelical Protestant church dominating not only spaces of worship, but corporate spaces as well, has pushed its own agendas in the House of Parliament. These various movements have shaped recent politics in such a way that has prompted the government to aggressively counter the various youth, artistic, feminist, and queer movements.

The introduction of the Computer Misuse Act in 2011 is an example. Under this law Dr. Stella Nyanzi was detained and charged for cyber harassment after calling the president of Uganda a ���pair of buttocks��� on Facebook.

Similarly, other laws such as the Public Order Management Act targeted students protesting fee increments in the compound of Makerere University, and the Act was instrumentalized to shut down LGBTQ Pride Parades. The law was introduced in the aftermath of the Walk to Work protests in 2011, launched by long time opposition leader Dr. Kizza Besigye, and predominantly supported by the youth movements in the country such as the dancehall musicians and Lugaflow community. The Anti-Homosexuality Act, 2014, was introduced by Christian Evangelical Protestant politicians in the parliament of Uganda. By doing so, they hoped to use the law to enforce conservative Evangelical Protestant Christian values. This is contrary to the 1995 Constitution which provides that the Ugandan republic is not beholden to a singular religion.

Similarly, the Communications Act 2013, and the Anti-Pornography Act 2014, have targeted musicians, artists, theatre makers, and the arts industry at large. ���These laws have been widely criticized for violating individual’s right to privacy on the internet,��� notes a recent CIPESA study. The latest in these is the Excise Duty (Amendment) Act, 2018, known most commonly as the ���social media tax”, which introduced a social media tax for Ugandan citizens.

In the following interview, Dr. Nyanzi locates herself within a broad range of women participating in Ugandan politics. She demarcates this field of participation through distinct groups: the group of elite ���first women��� who were appointed to office in the 1990s validated by the Yoweri Museveni regime; the second group of women who made their own way to the office through affirmative action, or family ties, or education privilege; the third group of women who use the office not to counter oppression but rather to enable those who are oppressed, suppressed, abused; the fourth group of women who are not in elite circles, and have a particular focus on women���s rights and cultivate an intimacy with the masses; the fifth group which consists of women predominantly outside of office in unconventional spaces of activism, consisting of majority young Ugandan women.

While this is narrated in the interview for purposes of her own rhetoric and how she places herself on the spectrum of Uganda politics at large, Dr. Nyanzi’s points are significant, such as mentioning the tendency of the Uganda government to rest on laurels of progressive inclusive politics, while the office itself is attributed mere symbolic power and financial capital. This implies that despite the 1995 Constitution and its provisions for women���s rights, it is still a major area lagging behind, as Dr. Nyanzi proved with her own Pads4Gals campaign.

The 2017 Pads4Gals campaign was aimed at school-going girls discouraged from attending classes for lack of menstrual towels or sanitary pads. In response to Dr. Nyanzi���s arrest on April 7, 2017, Amnesty International���s Muthoni Wanyeki issued a statement on April 10: ���Lack of sanitary towels is one of the leading causes of girls dropping out of school in Uganda. Dr Nyanzi has led a campaign to ensure girls continue to attend school with dignity during their periods and, instead of commending her, the authorities have harassed, intimidated and now arrested her.���

In the following excerpt, I have transcribed an interview which took place via Zoom and Broadcast Live on Facebook on Friday July 24, 2020. Organized by writer Arao Ameny, it was advertised under the theme of ���women in politics.���

Arao Ameny

How have women contributed to politics in Uganda and politics across the African continent? Do you think Ugandan women embrace your form of activism? I thank you for giving us that history lesson that you are drawing from a long line of African women who are using their body as a form of activism.

Stella Nyanzi

The idea that it is men who are visible; who are seen; who are acknowledged in writings about Africans in political (spaces) or political participation has to be redressed. Being an African scholar and academic, I cannot start the conversation without highlighting the urgency for more scholars of political science and political participation to write about women in politics. We must address this, because women have been participating side by side, or alongside���sometimes even (effectively) more than men in the politics of our country, and of our continent, ever since politics began. But I will go on to speak about Uganda���though I could talk about Africa more broadly���and the role of women in politics.

It is everywhere, whether historically or within the last 35 years of the Yoweri Museveni regime. I think that women must be looked at holistically. There���s a spectrum of women���s participation in Ugandan politics over the last thirty-five years. Under Museveni���s presidency, there are women such as former Vice President Specioza Kazibwe; Winnie Byanyima (lawyer and former Executive Director of Oxfam), Cecilia Ogwal (businesswoman, Member of Parliament), and Miria Matembe (lawyer, lecturer, and Member of Parliament), who give or legitimize the rhetoric around dictator Museveni bringing women from the kitchen and into Parliament, or into State House, or into wherever it is that he brought them.

There is a corpus of women who legitimize the idea that women and society must be grateful for dictators and other authoritarian leaders shoving us into the limelight of politics. But do women have agency to enter politics on their own? Or must we be beholden forever to male patriarchs, and misogynistic dictators, to whom we are answerable for our political participation?

That is the first angle I want to look at, and I leave questions for those who want to engage more with the topic. Another group of women are those who have entered politics of their own accord, having been empowered by whichever forces in society, whether dictatorships like Yoweri Museveni or using the privilege of their family backgrounds, or using the education they obtained, or using affirmative action. They are women we���ve had such as Betty Kamya (Cabinet Minister of Lands, Housing, and Urban Development) in Kampala, who entered as an opposition activist and then was bought out. There are women such as Mama Mabira (named for her activism to save Mabira forest) who was in my political party, Forum for Democratic Change, and then was given a ministerial position to shut her up. There are women such as Rebecca Kadaga, who have come in through whatever route, and are participating with the authoritarian government that oppresses women; that abuses women���s rights; that exists by being patriarchal, right? That is another form of women���s participation in politics: that they may come and sit at the table, using whatever means, but when they get to the table, they forget the core values of women empowerment, feminist agendas, and they participate with those who oppress us through models of patriarchy and misogyny that must be combated.

Arao Ameny

Why do you think this happens? You gave a long list of people who are either bought out or who crossed over.

Stella Nyanzi

As a woman who wants to enter the Uganda parliament, that second class of women for me is interesting because I want to learn from their biographies as political actors. Why is it that having entered politics, having attained political capital to make changes for oppressed Ugandans, or for subjugated women������What is it that keeps them away? What is it that cuts off their power? Why is it that they yield after having entered?�� I don���t have the answers, but I want to learn so that I will not be like them.

Arao Ameny

Thank you.

Stella Nyanzi

They are women whose examples we show up, and we teach, and we flag. But we teach about them by saying to younger women entering politics, ���Do not be like Betty Kamya��� ���When you get to your position of power, remember to work for those who are oppressed.��� Why these women do it, I am still studying. I am a late entrant into this race. But I am studying and want to understand what it is, and how can a woman do that?

The third layer of participation for me are women who become enablers. They are not working with, but right from the word, ���go���, they enter politics to enable those who are oppressed, suppressed, and abused. Like Evelyn Anite Kajik (formerly State Minister for Youth, and currently Ugandan Cabinet), a brilliant woman. She entered politics through a proposal that Yoweri Museveni should become sole candidate, and she was rewarded. Brilliant woman, articulate woman. A woman with so much potential. Yet, right from the word, “go,” her participation in politics was polluted.

We have the Evelyn Anite���s. We have the Ruth Nankabirwa���s. We have the Justine Lumumba���s. We even have the Acheng Diana���s. They are women like that. Firebrands. Very powerful; with a lot of potential, and who decide right from the point of entry that they are not going to work for the masses. That they are not going to work against oppression. But they are just going to empower and enable. This is how women are participating. A whole array.

They are women, for me, who may be in the opposition, or who may be in the incumbent party, who may be wherever they are along the political participation continuum, but actually are working for Ugandans. They are working for the masses. They are working against the dictatorship. They are working against the oppressive regime of dictator Museveni. I can name a person such as Monica Omoding who is a National Resistance Movement Member of Parliament. She entered parliament through the incumbent, but we saw her actively working with comrades to oppose the removal of the age limit article in the constitution. These women are working, no matter where they are placed within politics. They entered political participation with the heart of the masses, the heart of the people, with the will to work against oppression.

I could also talk about professional women such as Edith Nakalema, or Jane Frances Abodo who is Director of Public Prosecutions in Uganda, that sanctioned a file against honorable Francis Zaake (Member of Parliament), who was beaten almost unconscious. She sanctioned a file for a man who had been tortured while in police custody, and I���m like, ���what sort of woman are you?��� These are professional women who have professional qualifications; who are elite; who are empowered, but are working against the masses.

I have brought to your attention local Ugandan examples������people who are living today, with you and I������to highlight that there is a whole range of political participation. I think that, for me, there are model examples who are not necessarily perfect, but women that I look up to, women such as Betty Nambooze. People such as Winnie Kiiza, who only recently retired. People such as Salaam Musumba. These are women who come from all shades.

Betty Nambooze is in the Democratic Party. Salaam Musumba is in the Forum for Democratic Change. Winnie Kiiza was in Forum for Democratic Change but is now retired. These are women we look up to and we say, ���I want to be like her. She may not be perfect, but at least in everything she does, one sees that she���s motivated by the will to redress oppression and violation of human rights. She���s working for the people.��� I was hoping to answer your other question.

Arao Ameny

I was wondering if you think women of Uganda understand and embrace your form of activism?

Stella Nyanzi

I think what I was doing there was to highlight women���s participation in local politics in Uganda. Now the question about whether women such as all of those I have highlighted, or talked about, or mentioned, understand the kind of activism I do? I would say yes and no. I would say there is a caliber of women such as the last group of women I talked about: those who are working for the masses; working against oppression; working against dictatorship���for me, women I look up to as my mentors. Those women surely must understand why I do what I do.

No wonder, when I was fundraising for sanitary pads, to challenge and contest and mock dictator Museveni, after he had failed in his promise to give sanitary pads to young girls, Betty Nambooze opened up Mukono district (her constituency) to me, and we distributed sanitary pads to over 1200 young women in school. She opened up space to us when many other politicians were saying, ���Stella will not come (to give sanitary pads) because she has touched the hem of the garment of Yoweri Museveni with menstrual blood-filled hands. She has shamed our president.���

I think that a very small corpus of women���for whom the fight for liberation of Uganda, against dictatorship���understand what I do and why I do it. However, the vast majority of women who have been compromised, who choose to serve the dictatorship, and authoritarian regime, those women challenge, contest, resist, rebuke, ridicule, shame what I do as an activist. For many women, there is a great cost to pay, to challenge the status quo, because they benefit from it. Their children benefit from it. Doing the sort of activism that I do, threatens to take away from one���s status, or privilege, or wealth, or whatever it is they benefit from.

Even if they understood they would not be willing to take the extra mile. I want to say that there is a younger generation of women, who are very encouraging and they say, ���Stella! Will you mentor us in what you do?��� I think that breaking the convention has become a necessity for those of us who see that conventional means of engagement, and conventional means of activism do not serve us anymore, and perhaps the younger generation is more hopeful and enthusiastic. Maybe it is because of their naivety. Because, for them, there is hope. There is longer life for them to lead, and there is more time and energy for them to dream about liberation. The younger generation gets what I am doing. It is the more conventional, more conservative, greedier, more���I don���t know what else to say���that do not understand, and if they do understand, they will insist on, posturing as if they do not understand, because they have a lot to gain from the status quo.

Women���s liberation and media in post-independence Tanzania

Fatma Alloo (of the Tanzania Media Women's Association) on how women used the media and cultural spaces to organize and challenge gender norms. Fatma Alloo at the 2015 Zanzibar International Film Festival. Image credit Peter Bennett via Wikimedia Commons.

This article is part of the series “Reclaiming Africa���s Early Post-Independence History” from Post-Colonialisms Today (PCT), a research and advocacy project of activist-intellectuals on the continent working to recapture progressive thought and policies from post-independence Africa to address contemporary development challenges. Sign up for updates here.

Fatma Alloo���s activism grew in the decades following Tanzania���s independence in 1961, when she worked as a journalist under Julius Nyerere, or Mwalimu, the first president of Tanzania; co-founded the feminist advocacy group Tanzania Media Women’s Association (TAMWA) in 1987; and co-founded the vibrant Zanzibar International Film Festival (ZIFF) in 1997. Here, she unpacks how women used the media and cultural spaces for social mobilization and shifting patriarchal norms, particularly in periods where they were marginalized from state power. In the ���Reclaiming Africa���s Early Post-Independence History��� series, and the Post-Colonialisms Today project more broadly, we���re learning from African activists and policy makers from the early post-independence era, to understand how their experience of a unique period of economic, societal, cultural, and regional transformation can aid us in the present day, when questions of decolonization and liberation are more pressing than ever.

Heba M. Khalil

You have lived through so many changes in so many different political systems, from the Sultanate, colonialism, the Nyerere years; you���ve seen the dawning of liberalism and neoliberalism.

Fatma Alloo

As you say, I���ve been through a lot of ���-isms��� in Tanzania. The other day I was reflecting that although I grew up under colonialism in Zanzibar, as a child I was not aware that it was colonialism, I was not aware there was a Sultanate. We used to run and wave to the Sultan because he was the only one with a shiny, red car and we used to love that car, a red Rolls Royce. But as I reflect now, I realized that these were the years Mwalimu was struggling for independence in Tanganyika.

Then, of course, as you grow, life takes you on a journey, and I ended up at the University of Dar es Salaam in the 1970s, where the Dar es Salaam debates were taking place. Tanzania hosted liberation movements, and that is where socialism, communism, Marxism, Leninism, Trotskyism, Maoism, and feminism were being debated, and that���s where my consciousness grew, because I was in the midst of it. As the progressive, international community at the university was ideologically fired up by Mwalimu���s socialism, I began to understand that even my feminism had come from the West. Nobody had taught me that women lived feminism on the continent. This realization came when, as a student, I participated in an adult literacy program launched by Mwalimu. As students, we were sent to a rural and urban factory to teach literacy, but I emerged from those communities having been taught instead!

Heba M. Khalil

What do you think the role of women was in Tanzania in particular, but also on the continent, in defining the parameters, the choices and the imagination of post-independence Africa?

Fatma Alloo

Women had always been part and parcel of the independence movement in Africa. In Southern Africa and Tanzania they stood side-by-side with the men to fight, so they were very much part of it. The unique thing about Tanzania was that Mwalimu established a party called the Tanganyika African National Union (TANU), which had five wings with women being one of them. The others were youth, peasants, and workers, so as to mobilize society as a whole.

Post-independence is another story, one that very often has been narrated by men in power. There was a struggle for the visibility of women. I remember the debates in South Africa, where the African National Congress was arguing about the women���s wing wanting to discuss power relations. And there was resistance to this, the party leaders would argue first let���s just get independence, let���s not waste our time, women���s liberation will come later. It was a very bitter struggle, and of course after independence, women lost out quite a bit.

Heba M. Khalil

Why were post-independence power structures and ideologies defeated and replaced at some point by new ideologies of liberalism and, eventually, neoliberalism?

Fatma Alloo

The western media portrays Mwalimu as a failure. He has not failed, from my point of view. The whole issue of national unity is important. Tanzania has been a relatively peaceful country. Why? It did not happen by accident, it had to do with Mwalimu���s policies���he realized he had to deal with profound divisions, and he understood the role of education. Administratively, the nation had been inherited after decades of divide and rule policies. It was divided on racial and religious bases, as Tanzania is half Christian and half Muslim. We could have had a civil war, like in Lebanon, or a tribal-oriented conflict, like in Kenya or Libya. Mwalimu really understood this from the very beginning. I remember when we started TAMWA, when the women came together, we had no idea who belonged to what tribe. He was that successful.

We had free medicine, free education, but of course, all that went away with neoliberalism. My generation remembers this, and I think we have to make sure that the younger generation knows the history of the country, knows the literature that emerged from the continent. In my opinion, of all the contributions of Mwalimu, the most important was the peace and unity���amani, in Kiswahili.

Because Mwalimu was so successful, the West, especially Scandinavian countries, made him their darling. As you know, Scandinavian countries had not colonized Africa much, so people also trusted them and accepted their development aid. Very sadly, it did eat away at the success of Mwalimu with his people, and eventually made us dependent on that development aid, which continues to date. Without development aid we don���t seem to be able to move on anything. We have stopped relying on ourselves.

Heba M. Khalil

What was your experience of organizing during the rapid growth of the mass media sector in Tanzania?

Fatma Alloo

I was very active, first as a journalist in the 1980s and early 1990s, and it was extremely different. We were very influenced by Mwalimu���s ideology and ready to play our role to change the world. Mwalimu had refused to introduce television because, he argued at that time, we did not have our own images to portray, to empower our younger generations. He said if we introduce television the images shown will be of the West and the imperialist ideology will continue. In Zanzibar, however, we already had the oldest television on the continent, and it was in color. When Abeid Karume attained power in Zanzibar in 1964, after a bloody overthrow of the sultanate in power, the first thing he did was to introduce not only television, but community media, so every village in Zanzibar already had these images. But television didn���t come to Tanganyika until 1992 (Mwalimu stepped down in 1986), when it was introduced by a local businessman who established his own station. Until then the state had controlled the media, so history began to change as businesses were allowed to establish media.

I remember I was then in TAMWA and we had to encourage a lot of production of plays and other visuals, for which there was no market before. The radio had been powerful; when the peasants went to the countryside, they would take the radio and listen as they ploughed the land. So, the radio was the main tool that was used to mobilize society during Mwalimu���s era.

The press gave women journalists little chance to cover issues of importance to women. We were given health or children to cover as our issues. Before, Tanzania had one English paper, one Kiswahili, Uhuru, and one party paper. By 1986, there were 21 newspapers, and it became easier for us to really influence the press, and TAMWA began talking about issues like sexual harassment at work. But it was a double-edged sword, because the television stations recruited pretty girls to do the news reading, and the girls also wanted to be seen on television as it was a novelty. So, while we were expanding the conversation on the portrayal of women, here was television, where women were used as sex objects. The struggle continues, a luta continua.

Heba M. Khalil

How are movements trying to achieve change on the continent, particularly youth movements or younger generations, by utilizing media and cultural spaces?

Fatma Alloo

The youth need to develop tools of empowerment at an educational level and at an organizational level. Africa is a young continent, and our hope is the youth. Many youth are very active at a cultural level, they may not be in universities but at a cultural level they are extremely visible, in music, dance, and street theater.

At the moment, you see the pan-African dream has sort of lost the luster it had during independence. Even if you look at the literature of that time, it was a collective dream for Africa to unite���Bob Marley had a song ���Africa Unite,��� we used to dance to it and we used to really identify with it, and the literature���Franz Fanon, Ng��g�� wa Thiong���o, Semb��ne Ousmane, Miriam Ba, Nawal al Saadawi���and also the films that came out. In fact, Egypt was the first country to produce amazing films; when we established the Zanzibar International Film Festival (ZIFF), in our first year we showed a film from Egypt, The Destiny by Youssef Chahine.

Zanzibar International Film Festival was born because we asked the question, ���If we in Africa do not tell our stories, who will?��� We ask that question particularly to train and stimulate the production of films on the continent, including in Kiswahili, because while West Africa has many films, East Africa lags behind. The festival has been in existence for 21 years. This part of the world has more than 120 million people who speak Kiswahili, so the market is there. We also encourage a lot of young producers and we encourage putting a camera in children���s hands, because from my own experience, children get so excited when they can create their own images. Twenty-one years later, these children are now adults, and they are the directors and the producers in this region. So, one has to play a role in impacting change and liberating consciousness on our vibrant and rich continent.

Removing a dictator

How did popular music become the battlefield of Uganda's future? And what are the consequences? Image credit Russell Watkins via Wikimedia Commons.

In the campaign for Uganda���s presidential election, 2021 has started where it left of in 2020. The 38-year-old musician-turned-politician, His Excellence Ghetto President Bobi Wine aka Robert Kyagulanyi Ssentamu, as well as his team and supporters, are being harassed, arrested, violently deterred and blocked from campaigning by Ugandan authorities bent on ensuring that President Yoweri Museveni, in power since 1986, stays there.

Bobi Wine and his People Power Movement are not unlike other youth-driven protest movements across Africa that are making their voices heard by organizing through digital media. But while the international community celebrates the emancipatory potential of these new young voices, the complexities of their political engagements as well as the consequences of the abuses that participants face seem to fade from view. In Uganda, specifically, the emergence of cultural figures in politics is rooted in how the role of popular musicians changed in the elections of 2011, which coincided with the height of Bobi Wine���s musical career.

Bobi Wine rose to fame in the mid-2000���s Kampala, as an Afro-pop star inspired by global icons like Michael Jackson and Bob Marley. Bobi took on the title Ghetto President and his Firebase crew jokingly became the ���ghetto government��� of Kamwokya, the neighborhood was where he was from. Though Bobi released socially conscious songs advocating for ���the ghetto people,��� the crew considered formal politics in Uganda as dangerous and would warn ignorant friends, like me, not to ���get mixed up in politics.���

The more than 100 artists and music industry professionals that I interviewed throughout the 2000s were, with a few exceptions, not into politics. They had grown up in the 1980s war-time Uganda, and saw the emerging, largely informal, music industry as a chance to cast off the burdensome ties of kin and ethnicity that seemed to rule politics. They rather saw themselves as entrepreneurs and brand names in a global market for music; as individual stars lighting up the skies above Kampala. Wine and his fellow superstars like Chameleone and Bebe Cool instead politicked in diss-songs and beefs about being the biggest name, the most famous artist, in the country. Not many would have imagined that beef would one day challenge President Museveni. But as anthropologist Kelly Askew duly warned, in Eastern Africa ���economic and political practice need not be conceptualized as distinct from aesthetic principles.��� New forms of ���bigness��� and power emerged around the young musicians with digital means of production and the aesthetics of entrepreneurship.

On July 7, 2010, the extremist group Al Shabab, which had been operating in East Africa, attacked several night-time venues in Kampala. Insecurity and cumbersome new security measures meant empty concert halls and night clubs, and this was bad business for artists. Around the same time the election campaigns for the 2011 elections were taking off, and musicians now found work performing at rallies and allowing politicians to use their hits as campaign songs. ���After all, I am a business man, and there���s too much money in politics,��� said one of my friends who was on the campaign trail for the ruling NRM of Museveni. But this did not mean that singers were now the clients of the ���big��� men and women of politics. Rather, they framed their relationship with politicians as a market transaction, as just another sponsored show. The Firebase Crew too performed at rallies for candidates of opposed parties in 2010, and one crew member commented: ���If I go for his [the politician���s] show, then he has to pay me. Then voting is something else.��� In this way, they enforced their status as street-wise, self-made men and women, hustling the old, political elite without being caught in their patrimonial networks of political allegiance.

While career politicians in Uganda usually emphasize belonging and legitimacy with voters in election campaigns through direct exchange and by engineering relations of mutual dependence to gain influence, pop artists make their livelihoods and fame through mediated connections to fans and consumers. The relational form of their ���bigness��� can neither be characterized as relations of political activism, nor as patronage, nor as pure market relations. Rather, young musicians here operate as kind of cultural brokers within the tensions of all three forces at once.

A second way that artists brokered between music, market, and politics in the 2011 elections was as candidates for political office. As the industry grew, artists and celebrities in Uganda were beginning to show the same material properties as the more traditional elites. They built mansions and drove cars more extravagant than any politician; they owned businesses, as well as the means for the production of their ���bigness������studios, night clubs, and concert grounds. One of these candidates was Eddy Yawe, musician, producer, studio owner���and Bobi Wine���s older brother. As a candidate for Member of Parliament, he remarked that musicians had so far been considered as bayaye (hoodlums, hustlers) only to be used by the elite as entertainers in formal politics, but this was about to change:

A maid, or a house girl, would be expected to cook, but not expected to be found at the dining [table] eating with the boss. So, at the time of eating, musicians are not always welcome. They are supposed to campaign for politicians, they are supposed to make drama for the politicians. (…) Then we are good for nothing in society. That���s why I come out as a musician to run for an important post in the society. And when I run, I am showing these guys that we are not only good for preparing food. But we are also good for dining with you.

In the eloquent imagery of what the political scientist Jean-Francois Bayart referred to as the ���the politics of the belly,��� Eddy explained how artists could broker their fame beyond the kitchen, where power is cooked, for a seat the dining table and a bite of the national cake. He was neither singing praises, nor protesting an increasingly authoritarian regime, but rather sought to extend his sphere of influence as an artist by entering into politics. Though Eddy Yawe had a big turnout at rallies, he did not win the election, according to some, because of electoral fraud.

While musicians brokered their fame in the field of politics, some politicians also sought to extend their power through the field of music. If there had been any doubt about the political elite taking the music of the new generation seriously as an effective means to mobilize voters, it was put to rest when President Museveni launched his own campaign rap song, ���Do You Want Another Rap?���

In early 2017, a parliamentary seat opened up in Kyadonddo East. Wine shaved off his dreadlocks and ran as an independent candidate, with a campaign based largely on music and social media. His stance was clear: he was not a politician, but had come to politics as a musician to represent the young generation, the Ugandans whose interests were being ignored by the government. He won. When the political platform, People Power ��� Our Power, formed by Bobi in the struggle against the removal of the presidential age-limit which allowed Museveni to rule for life, it was not a political party but a movement. He released the People Power anthem ���Freedom��� and continued to host shows at his concert grounds One Love Beach. When his driver was shot and Wine himself arrested and tortured in August 2018, protests broke out across Uganda and fellow artists came out to support People Power in songs and social media. In the following months the Ghetto President started hinting at a run towards presidency in both interviews and quite direct diss-songs against Museveni.

People Power launched the party the National Unity Platform as their political wing in July 2020 and Robert Kyagulanyi Ssentamu as their leader and presidential candidate. Using social media and beef tactics from the music industry to gain traction in politics, Bobi Wine successfully insisted on his integrity as an artist. But this also drew the music industry into politics in ways that made music the battleground for the future of the country.

As the 2021 elections approach, the Ugandan government has used a progressively more violent repertoire of strategies to repress Wine���s run for president and stifle the music industry. On one hand they confirm Wine as a legitimate candidate and the political power of music, but they also point to the limits of the cultural brokerage and ���bigness��� of artists in the face of state repression and violence.

One strategy is the use of legislative power to block political opponents. Since 2018 the police have systematically denied security clearances to venues and shows that include Bobi Wine, the Firebase Crew as well as other singers associated with People Power. While Bobi Wine flew abroad to perform, less known singers now effectively became clients of People Power as their livelihoods as artist-entrepreneurs had been undermined.

In early 2019 the parliament sought to update the ���Stage Plays and Public Entertainment Act Cap 49������hitherto a legislative, colonial leftover from 1943. The act requires all music, stage and film producers to be licensed by Uganda Communications Commission (UCC), limits touring and number of performances by singers, and requires them to submit their lyrics, music, and visual material for approval at a government censorship board. The enforcement of such a law would, naturally, devastate the cultural industries in Uganda. Further, as the COVID-19 pandemic spread across the world in 2020, the authorities have weaponized the emergency for repressing political opposition and militarizing public space.

A second strategy was co-optation. In the second half of 2019, music stars and celebrities who had been People Power supporters and critical of NRMs politics were invited to visit personally with Museveni and were gifted large sums of money to change sides. For some, the switch seemed voluntary, while the musicians I interviewed in December 2019 described being both cajoled, intimidated, and threatened into publicly accepting money ���gifts��� and entering into a patron-client relationship with the president. At the same time Museveni attempted to appropriate the imagery of the Ghetto Government,�� when he hired former Firebase Crew member Buchaman as his special ���ghetto��� advisor, launched new initiatives in Kampala���s slums as well as a paramilitary group of crime-fighters, the ���ghetto army.���

Thirdly, the violence that the Ghetto President���s campaign has been subjected to demonstrates that beefing with the president of Uganda is no joke. Bobi Wine was arrested minutes after submitting his presidential nomination forms, and this led to riots across the country, with more than 50 civilians losing their lives, and many more injured, in November 2020. Members of Bobi Wine���s campaign team have been shot with rubber and live bullets, knocked by cars, killed, ambushed, and arrested. On December 30, 2020, the entire campaign team of more than 90 people were arrested and their cars impounded. Firebase Prime Minister and signer Nubian Li, Producer Dan Magic and bodyguard Eddy Mutwe and 46 other civilians were court marshaled on January 8th based on dubious evidence collected four days after their arrest.

These violations have been documented by Facebook Live and YouTube channels run by young men with cameras, at times just mobile phones. The daily streams allow both Ugandan and international audiences to participate in the campaigns, but is also a strategy to Bobi Wine and his team safe from harm.

The NRM government has a history of controlling Ugandan media and shutting down the internet during elections and protests. But in December, the Uganda Communication Commission reached all the way to Silicon Valley and requested Google and Facebook to shut down eight of the social media channels for inciting violence. Meanwhile, both Ugandan and foreign journalists have been injured and their credentials revoked. ���We don���t have guns to fight, but use the camera as our weapon,��� Bobi Wine said as a reaction to this in a press conference on December 15, 2020.

While his entire campaign and security teams are incarcerated and his campaign suspended by the country���s Electoral Commission, Bobi Wine has filed a complaint with the International Criminal Courts against Museveni and Minister of Security Elly Tumwiine (also an artist), among other officials, for crimes against humanity. During a video call with international press about the ICC case, he was assaulted by police officers. After returning to the video call a visibly affected Bobi Wine, with running eyes from the tear gas, commented: ���I am a presidential candidate. But as you can see, if I can be harassed like this, you can imagine what is happing to Ugandans who don���t have a voice.���

Read the article behind this piece here.

On Safari

What a year. Stay safe, wear a mask, social distance and when the vaccine becomes available where you are, get vaccinated.





217 Cuban health specialists arrive in South Africa in April 2020 to curb the spread of COVID-19 (GovernmentZA, via Flickr CC).

In South Africa, where I am from, December is usually a time to wind down, to travel home for days (despite the claims that it���s people don’t travel much, South Africa is a place of migrants). For others, less fortunate, it may be a solitary trip to the beach. Most locals call this feeling ���Dezemba.���

This December, the government encouraged citizens to cancel Christmas parties, closed beaches in Kwazulu-Natal province and extended an emergency in the Eastern Cape province (a key exporter of labor to other parts of South Africa for at least 150 years) which has been the epicenter of the country���s second wave of COVID-19, to the Garden Route, a largely holiday district in the neighboring Western Cape province.

On 23 December, the health minister announced that South Africa was recording its highest ever single-day increase in Covid-19 cases, with more than 14,000 recorded within a 24 hours period. More than 400 deaths had been recorded within a period of 24 hours, only the third time since the pandemic started in March. Now the government was talking about a lockdown again. In my own family in Cape Town, within the last two weeks, two of my sisters tested positive for COVID-19. They went to isolate two suburbs over. Then a nephew got COVID-19. He lives with my 78 year old dad. My dad took a test and was negative. But the anxiety is palpable.������

So much for Dezemba.

This is a far cry from earlier this year when South Africa���s government, led by President Cyril Ramaphosa and Health Minister Zweli Mkhize (an actual medical doctor) received plaudits from no less than the World Health Organization for its response to COVID-19.�� At that time, the country introduced a hard lockdown for a few months, told people to stay at home and encouraged testing.

By August 2020, however, the shine was taken off South Africa���s COVID-19 response, largely because of the violent response by police to routine violations of South Africans��� human rights (at one point, more people were killed by police than COVID-19) and by the failure of the government to provide a safety net (food parcels, augmenting people���s wages) or strangling aid in red tape.

Elsewhere in the continent, other governments didn���t do well by their citizens either when it came to the police response (Kenya, Nigeria and Rwanda) or in their denial of the severity of the crisis (Tanzania and Egypt come to mind) or peddling snake oil remedies (Madagascar). We���ve written (we organized it all as a series) about the continental response to COVID-19, including the West���s propensity to wish the worst scenarios on Africans. We also suggested that Africans take their cue from their own experiences of living and coping with pandemics or look east: Vietnam, the state of Kerala in India or South Korea.��

In the end, like elsewhere on the globe, it’s been the resilience of public health care workers and citizens��� own responsibility that���s kept themselves safe.

As contributor Camilla Houeland wrote earlier, our greatest tribute to these workers would be to make sure these workers have decent work conditions, are paid, are protected and have a strong, public health care system���not just applause.

Like you, we are happy that we are still here although some of us had tragedies this year (for example, Boima, our managing editor, lost his dad. I lost my mom.)��

This was a big year for as���amid the pandemic���we launched a number of projects. Our a talk show (presented by Sean Jacobs and Will Shoki; produced by Antoinette Engel) as well as a radio show, appointed a staff writer (the same Will), upped our Instagram game (thanks Antoinette Engel again) launched two funded series (on Capitalism in Nairobi, Kenya; and on Climate Politricks), and, most of all, selected ten young writers to be Africa Is a Country Fellows. We will start publishing their work in the new year.����

We plan to be back on January 11, 2021.

During the break, check in at our Facebook and Twitter accounts where we will occasionally post links.

What a year. Stay safe, wear a mask, social distance and when the vaccine becomes available where you are, get vaccinated.