Sean Jacobs's Blog, page 149
November 16, 2020
Academic reparation and stepping aside
Photo by Gift Habeshaw on Unsplash
Two years ago, as I concluded my time as President of the United States-based African Studies Association (ASA), I delivered the obligatory ���presidential lecture.��� Mine was entitled, ���#HerskovitsMustFall: A Meditation on Whiteness, African Studies, and the Unfinished Business of 1968.��� (A revised and expanded version of the lecture eventually appeared in the ASA���s journal, African Studies Review.)
Africa Is a Country founding editor, Sean Jacobs, has been nudging me for almost two years now to write about that 2018 lecture and its aftermath. We served on the ASA���s board together for three years. In contemplating my response to him, I kept remembering this run-down tro-tro I used to see plying the roads of Accra. The words, ���NOTHING LEFT TO SAY ��� ��� were emblazoned on its back door.
As I said in Atlanta in 2018: much of what I had to offer the audience had been said before���by�� other scholars (in print and lecture format), including by some of my presidential predecessors, like Sandra Greene, James Pritchett, Pearl Robinson, and Paul Tiyambe Zeleza. The vexed, racist history of the association and the ways in which, with the support of the US government and major philanthropic institutions, it helped empower traditionally White universities as African Studies powerhouses, while marginalizing Black scholars, especially at Historically Black Colleges and Universities (where African Studies had first taken root in the US) was a well-known story, at least for some. (My capitalization of ���Black��� and ���White��� reflects my agreement with recent public commentary. See, for example, Kwame Anthony Appiah, ���The Case for Capitalizing the B in Black,��� The Atlantic and Nell Irvin Painter, ���Why ���White��� Should be Capitalized, Too,��� The Washington Post.)
Based on the ASA���s documentary archive, I was perhaps able to offer a deeper dive into events in Montreal in 1969, when Black radical scholars and their allies took on the association���s entrenched White power. I also compiled and shared some statistics: on presidents elected and prizes awarded, by race and by gender, from the founding of the organization in 1957 to the present. Those numbers were stark, and they were unforgiving. I even recall some gasps from the audience.
In the end, the lecture was greeted by a standing ovation. It left me elated and just as quickly deflated. Let me explain.
I would say that in equal numbers Black and White scholars approached me after the lecture to thank me. I was touched by their words of support, especially those from the youngest cohort, who had no idea of the history of the association and now felt they understood why the meeting ���looks like it does.���
I was equally struck by the fact that a good many White audience members wanted to ���thank me for my words,��� and then share an anecdote that was clearly intended to distance them from racism, White privilege, and White supremacy within African studies. I ended up calling these stories ���White woke anecdotes.��� The ���woke��� storytellers ranged in age from those who had been in attendance in Montreal in 1969 to those still in graduate school, but they had in common a clear need to establish distance from the historical narrative (and the accompanying statistics) I had offered. The anecdotes were inevitably about what they had ���done��� to counter ���prejudice,��� as if they had single-handedly figured out a way to transcend, to exist outside the structures of academic power and privilege within African Studies. Not one person shared how they might possibly be implicated in the reproduction of that racialized power and privilege.
In the weeks that followed, there was a fair amount of discussion about the lecture across various social media outlets, much of it positive. But several African and African American scholars rightly questioned whether so many White scholars would have jumped to their feet in applause if the speaker���me���had not been White; they wondered how my positionality (by race and gender) facilitated my being heard in ways that Black scholars before me had not. This line of questioning seemed right on target, especially in the wake of the ���woke��� anecdotes that kept coming my way, unsolicited, for months. That questioning seems even more urgent now.
Indeed, I���ve wondered over this past year���of pandemic, of quarantine, of event after event after event after event of anti-Black violence in the US, including the insidious violence of Jessica Krug���s minstrelsy���how we might connect some of the systemic dots, as we prepare for the first ���virtual��� ASA meeting in just a few days.
My education as an African Studies scholar did not unfold outside structures of US academic power and privilege. From the classes I was able to take, to the FLAS-funded language study so easily in reach, to the grants that funded my research, my education was a direct product of a well-funded, calculated system of affirmative action for White students, including first generation college students like myself. It began in the 1960s at schools like Wisconsin, Northwestern, Indiana, Boston, Florida, Illinois, UCLA, Michigan State, and the like. I was a 1980s beneficiary. There was at least one generation before me, several after, and those well-supported students have gone on, as professors, to reproduce themselves well into the 21st century, via successive generations of still overwhelmingly White African studies scholars in the US, at the same African studies ���powerhouses.���
Yet, despite this entrenched institutionalized reproduction of racialized academic power in the US, I am somehow heartened these days. When I look at the ways in which the arts, the humanities, and the humanistic social sciences are flourishing in so many parts of the continent, both inside universities and outside of them; when I look at young African studies scholars across the globe, whose trans-Atlantic diasporic autobiographies belie the static identity categories we���ve operated within for so many decades; when I look at all that is new and possible and out-of-the-box, the energy, the promise, and yes, the decolonizing and the decolonial ��� I can���t help thinking that a very different African studies may finally be dawning in the US and globally.
Even the ASA seems newly and creatively future-focused. From the Board, to the past, present, and future presidents, to the new executive director, to the extraordinary 2020 Call for Papers���forged by Carina Ray and Prinisha Badassy���the ASA seems poised to ponder transparently and constructively a reparative plan, as it works to eliminate any and all legacies of racism. As the 2020 program title proclaims, it is ���The Hour of Decision: Power, Persistence, Purpose, and Possibility in African Studies.���
In the meantime, for those White scholars like me, who have benefited deeply and for decades from the systemic mechanisms of affirmative action support first granted to Melville J. Herskovits and his cohort 60-plus years ago, for those of us who are as old as the ASA (and older!), ���this hour of decision,��� this now, might be the moment for enacting a kind of personal academic reparation: don���t just move the furniture around to make extra room ��� step aside.
Bling politricks
Photo by Axel Antas-Bergkvist on Unsplash
In 2019, the rapper Noname tweeted in defense of Black capitalism. Some people reminded her that view was antithetical to progressive and radical politics. No less than Fred Hampton, before he was murdered by the US government, stated: ���We���re going to fight racism not with racism, but we���re going to fight with solidarity. We say we���re not going to fight capitalism with black capitalism, but we���re going to fight it with socialism.��� As Rawiya Kameir documented on Pitchfork, Noname, instead of getting defensive,���did her own research, and publicly admitted she was wrong.��� One of her actions was to launch her , where her fans and followers were introduced to Angela Davis��� ideas about prison abolitionism or that classic of revolutionary politics, The Wretched of the Earth by Frantz Fanon. In the process, she pointed, in Kameir���s terms, to ���a version of artist activism that is more in line with the collective goals of movement work.���
That can���t be said for all of hip hop which still more broadly, like mainstream black American political culture, continues to have hope in the promises of American capitalism. And as Su’ad Abdul Khabeer, assistant professor of American Culture at the University of Michigan, wrote last week on AIAC, that ���what we learned about hip hop this election season is how it, and the Black political mainstream more broadly, continues to have hope in the promises of American capitalism.��� Ice Cube, Lil Wayne, 50 Cent and Kanye West���s either open support, praise for or rationalizing Donald Trump���s rule is not that radical. ���Hip hop is often seen as a counterculture that will challenge the status quo. While this view is valid, it is also incomplete because hip hop has always had a parallel track about getting money, power, and respect. So, while open support of Trump makes many of us clutch our gold chains, hip hop���s embrace of Obama was not exactly chanting down Babylon.���
Su���ad, who has written a book Muslim Cool: Race, Religion and Hip Hop in the United States, will join us on Tuesday, November 17, on AIAC Talk to to discuss hip hop and its relationship to politics, along with ethnomusicologist Warrick Moses (who has done research on hip hop in Cape Town, South Africa) and photographer and musician Ts’eliso Monaheng, who has an extensive knowledge of hip hop in the Southern African region. On the African continent, political parties co-opt rappers for their agendas (as Boima Tucker, our managing editor, has shown in his own research), but at the same time, as Fees Must Fall in South Africa, People���s Power in Uganda or #EndSars in Nigeria, has shown, hip hop is at the head of movements to make leaders more accountable and to make Fred Hampton���s world possible for people of African descent.
Stream the show Tuesday at 19:00 SAST, 17:00 GMT, and 12:00 EST on Youtube, Facebook, and Twitter.
If you missed our previous episode���we skipped a week because of the US election���we had Abraham T. Zere and Aya Saed on to chat with us about African migration to the United States. Abraham is a US-based Eritrean exiled writer/journalist and Aya Saed is a Bertha Justice Fellow at the Center for Constitutional Rights challenging unlawful detentions, counterterrorism practices, the criminalization of dissent, and systemic unlawful policing practice.
Clips from that episode are available on our YouTube channel, but best check out the whole thing on our Patreon along with all the episodes from our archive.
Hip Hop Politricks
Photo by Axel Antas-Bergkvist on Unsplash
In 2019, the rapper Noname tweeted in defense of Black capitalism. Some people reminded her that view was antithetical to progressive and radical politics. No less than Fred Hampton, before he was murdered by the US government, stated: ���We���re going to fight racism not with racism, but we���re going to fight with solidarity. We say we���re not going to fight capitalism with black capitalism, but we���re going to fight it with socialism.��� As Rawiya Kameir documented on Pitchfork, Noname, instead of getting defensive,���did her own research, and publicly admitted she was wrong.��� One of her actions was to launch her , where her fans and followers were introduced to Angela Davis��� ideas about prison abolitionism or that classic of revolutionary politics, The Wretched of the Earth by Frantz Fanon. In the process, she pointed, in Kameir���s terms, to ���a version of artist activism that is more in line with the collective goals of movement work.���
That can���t be said for all of hip hop which still more broadly, like mainstream black American political culture, continues to have hope in the promises of American capitalism. And as Su’ad Abdul Khabeer, assistant professor of American Culture at the University of Michigan, wrote last week on AIAC, that ���what we learned about hip hop this election season is how it, and the Black political mainstream more broadly, continues to have hope in the promises of American capitalism.��� Ice Cube, Lil Wayne, 50 Cent and Kanye West���s either open support, praise for or rationalizing Donald Trump���s rule is not that radical. ���Hip hop is often seen as a counterculture that will challenge the status quo. While this view is valid, it is also incomplete because hip hop has always had a parallel track about getting money, power, and respect. So, while open support of Trump makes many of us clutch our gold chains, hip hop���s embrace of Obama was not exactly chanting down Babylon.���
Su���ad, who has written a book Muslim Cool: Race, Religion and Hip Hop in the United States, will join us on Tuesday, November 17, on AIAC Talk to to discuss hip hop and its relationship to politics, along with ethnomusicologist Warrick Moses (who has done research on hip hop in Cape Town, South Africa) and photographer and musician Ts’eliso Monaheng, who has an extensive knowledge of hip hop in the Southern African region. On the African continent, political parties co-opt rappers for their agendas (as Boima Tucker, our managing editor, has shown in his own research), but at the same time, as Fees Must Fall in South Africa, People���s Power in Uganda or #EndSars in Nigeria, has shown, hip hop is at the head of movements to make leaders more accountable and to make Fred Hampton���s world possible for people of African descent.
Stream the show Tuesday at 19:00 SAST, 17:00 GMT, and 12:00 EST on Youtube, Facebook, and Twitter.
If you missed our previous episode���we skipped a week because of the US election���we had Abraham T. Zere and Aya Saed on to chat with us about African migration to the United States. Abraham is a US-based Eritrean exiled writer/journalist and Aya Saed is a Bertha Justice Fellow at the Center for Constitutional Rights challenging unlawful detentions, counterterrorism practices, the criminalization of dissent, and systemic unlawful policing practice.
Clips from that episode are available on our YouTube channel, but best check out the whole thing on our Patreon along with all the episodes from our archive.
November 15, 2020
Oil and Angola���s ‘crusade’ against corruption
Near Djeno Cabinda, Angola. Image credit J. Bdodane via Flickr CC.
Scholarship on the political economy of Angola has established oil as the lubricant of politics in the country. Oil is the major force behind the emergence of the national bourgeoisie. Contrary to South Africa, for instance, where fortunes have been made through corruption in the tendering process���in which a class of influential players gravitating around the ruling party have been given the chance to enter into businesses with the state���wealth making in Angola is cruder and more basic. It has been in most cases through direct transfers of money from the coffers of the state to the pockets of individuals. Furthermore, most of these individuals have joined the entrepreneurial class without relinquishing their posts working for the state.
At the center of it all is Sonangol, the state-owned company that oversees oil operations in Angola. Ever since Angola shed ties with its socialist orthodoxy and embraced neoliberalism in the early 1990s, the fortunes of the majority of multi-millionaires in the country can be traced to the largesse of Sonangol. However, under the presidency of Jo��o Louren��o, who replaced the long serving Jos�� Eduardo dos Santos in 2017, the state-owned company has been entrusted with a novel endeavor. It has now been put at the center of an anti-corruption crusade. This has taken place through investigative procedures undertaken by Angolan prosecutors that consist of tracking the paths of money stolen through Sonangol.
This is, for instance, the case of the investigation by Angolan authorities into H��lder Vieira Dias, also known as General Kopelipa. Kopelipa was the head of the Gabinete de Reconstru����o Nacional (GRN, Office for National Reconstruction)���under direct supervision of the former president���which managed the billions of oil-backed loans that China started to pour in Angola���s economy from mid-2000. Sonangol was a part of all this given that the co-director of GRN was the head of Sonangol. Kopelipa and his associates managed to divert resources from the funds coming from China in order to build a vast array of companies, whose interests ranged from construction and retail to real estate and bioenergy.
Ironically, Isabel dos Santos might have been the person who led the way in using Sonangol as an anti-corruption outfit. In 2016, her father appointed her as head of Sonangol. For many observers, this appointment was tantamount to placing a fox in charge of the chickens. Unsurprisingly, she has since been accused by the government of Jo��o Louren��o of embezzling millions of dollars under dubious schemes, such as the excessive payment of consultancy services that were never rendered. However, during her tenure at Sonangol, she claims to have uncovered numerous illicit practices from previous administrations. Some of these have been used by her legal team as leverage in current negotiations with Angolan judicial authorities.
If one takes Isabel dos Santos by her word, that she had attempted to deal with the problem of corruption at Sonangol, she might have encountered the case of one of the most outrageous acts of corruption involving Carlos S��o Vicente, who is married to Irene Neto, the eldest daughter of the first Angolan president, Agostinho Neto. Succeeding at transferring Sonangol���s insurance business to his own companies, he set up a complex operation that allowed him to siphon hundreds of millions of dollars out of the country, paid in the form of inflated premiums by international oil companies involved in extractive activities in Angola.
In a statement sent to the Portuguese news agency Lusa in October 2020, the Swiss lawyers hired by S��o Vicente found a contradiction in the procedures of the Angolan judicial authorities, who, in August 2020, exculpated him of any wrongdoing when Swiss authorities froze $900 million deposited in Swiss financial institutions. However, when the accounts of the criminal proceedings leaked, the Angolan government arrested S��o Vicente on September 22.
The crux of the matter is that Angolan political authorities are not particularly interested in justice. Having been deprived of the opportunity to groom an African entrepreneurial class during colonialism, Angolans have officially used corruption as a way to nurture the ���national bourgeoise.��� According to an estimate by Jo��o Louren��o, in an interview with The Wall Street Journal, about USD 24 billion were siphoned from public coffers during the tenure of�� Jos�� Eduardo dos Santos, the lion���s share from Sonangol. But Jo��o Louren��o, a prominent member of dos Santos��� administration, was not known for speaking out about the excesses of that time, and there is no indication that he is opposed to corruption as a matter of principle either.
Governing a country in desperate need of cash, Jo��o Louren��o is using Sonangol���s historical archives to go after those who have benefited from oil money. For him it is simply payback time and a chance to settle old scores.
November 13, 2020
Remembering Emma Gama Pinto
Emma Pinto, the wife of Pio Gama Pinto, died on October 29. Her husband, Kenya’s first post-independence victim of a political assasination, is remembered as a political activist, revolutionary journalist, Mau Mau ally and trade unionist. But not much is known about Emma, questioning our own enduring inabilities to honour the powerful contributions of women like her to liberation struggles. Not much is known about Emma, and so this article is important. Also because this article also queries why (and pertinent now as the Boniface Mwangi film ‘Softie’ has just been released) we still don’t know how to talk about women who are married to political activists — above all how they have their own independence, their own struggles and power, while also still holding down the fort for the revolutionary figures they happen to be married to. This post, originally published by The Elephant, is part of a series curated by Editorial Board member, Wangui Kimari.
The first time Emma Dias stepped foot in Kenya, it was jacaranda season in Nairobi. September 1953. She had flown from India to visit her twin sister Joyce, who had just married a Goan man working in the Kenyan civil service.
Emma was beautiful: shoulders set with assurance, face framed by strong, straight brows and a soft but deliberate smile. She had a good head on her shoulders. She was whip-smart, she stood her ground. You know the story. A beautiful, intelligent woman arriving in Kenya���a single woman? Of course Goan families began making ���inquiries.���
Anton Filipe da Gama Pinto was eager for his son Pio to meet her. He was getting worried about Pio���s political activities. Goans were whispering that Pio was Mau Mau, that he was a communist, that he was���in hushed, scandalized tones���”politically active.��� A.F. da Gama Pinto believed that marriage would ���settle��� his son. So inquiries were made, arrangements followed, and one day in Nairobi, Emma met Pio.
At the time, Pio was 26 years old. He was built like an athlete, with a thick, black shock of hair. But Emma found him, in other more important ways, unlike other Goan men. Pio was invariably kind, generous, with an easy laugh. He was sharp. He was driven. At the time, he was working as a journalist, writing for a radical newspaper. He was always getting thrown out of places for breaking Nairobi���s ���colour bar��� which segregated Europeans, Asians, and Africans in restaurants, buses, residences, and in virtually all other spaces in the colonial city.
Even as Emma found herself drawn into his laugh, it was clear to her that he ���was not the marrying kind.��� It was clear from the beginning where Pio���s heart truly lay: with the Kenyan people. Later, she would often wonder what made him decide to marry after all, when it was so clear that his first love was his ���cause.���
Still, despite these very honest ���terms and conditions���, Emma was dazzled by Pio. He was not patronizing. ���Pio was honest in a funny way,��� she said. ���He told me he did not make much to support me and I should therefore start thinking about getting a job myself!��� And he was drawn to her quiet intention, the way she listened carefully to your words and folded them away in her mind. They chose each other.
Pio and Emma were engaged in October 1953. Within the three months that Emma had on her visitor���s visa to Kenya, she had become Emma Gama Pinto. The two honeymooned in Jinja.
Once they returned to Nairobi, Emma realized that Pio would remain true to his word. Their life was not comfortable. They lived in a bedsitter in the courtyard of a friend���s house. The four foot by four foot kitchen had only a single-burner stove. The toilet was a hole in the ground.
Emma���s parents flew in from India to visit the newlywed couple. When they saw the conditions in which their daughter was living, they asked themselves in dismay if they had given their daughter over to a life of poverty. They gifted the young couple a car, a washing machine, and some cash. Later, Pio confessed sadly that he had used some of that money to make a down payment on a printing press. There were hardly any printing presses owned by Africans then, and Pio wanted to operate one as ���the voice of the people��� to print radical papers in local languages. Emma knew then that she would be sharing her husband with the entire country.
She had married a flitting shadow, always moving, always working. He was hardly ever in their tiny bedsitter. He barely slept. To protect Emma, Pio compartmentalized his life and kept each compartment sealed. He kept his two worlds apart and made sure they did not touch.
But in the end, Pio���s work would do more than just touch Emma. It would shape her entire life.
The film��Softie, directed by Sam Soko, follows human rights activist Boniface Mwangi as he vies for the Pumwani Member of Parliament seat in 2017. The documentary follows Boniface���s campaign, but it features two main characters: Boniface and his wife Njeri.
Boniface has made a name for himself expressing raw fearlessness. He puts himself on the line, from photographing the frontlines of post-election violence in 2007 to leading demonstrations where he is shot point-blank with a tear gas canister. It is clear that Boniface���s vision of a better Kenya drives the risks, big and small, that shape his political life. It also becomes clear that his wife and three children are not always a part of that calculus. Through Njeri���s eyes, we see that, actually, they are more often an afterthought.
At one point during Boniface���s campaign, Njeri has no choice but to leave Kenya with the children and seek asylum in the United States because of escalating death threats. In one of many strained video calls, Boniface asks Njeri to return. He needs her by his side, he says. Njeri says that she would, in a heartbeat. She is always there for him. But he needs to be there for her.
The plotline of the revolutionary is familiar to us. We know how to speak of Boniface Mwangi and Pio Gama Pinto. With praise: that they have chosen country over family, country over self, country above all else. In these stories, their domestic obligations���if at all they are acknowledged���are cast, at best, as sacrifices made in fighting the good fight or, at worst, as impediments.
But the other plotline���that of Njeri and Emma���is not as familiar. Women who, of course, like anyone else, want a better Kenya. But women who also never felt like they were the first love. Women who advocated for a more complex worldview to husbands wearing blinkers. A worldview in which political organizing carries a steep opportunity cost.
We do not yet have the language to fully honor people like Njeri and Emma in their complex contribution to struggles for liberation. Instead, we speak of them only in relation to their husbands. The work of Njeri���an active partner in the campaign who is often right beside Boniface on the frontline of demonstrations, and who pulls close to both their weight running the household so that Boniface is free to engage in the heavy, draining, consuming work of politics���is reduced in TV interviews to the question: ���Do you worry about his safety?���
A question that is not only patronizing but that also somehow manages to place the onus of care on Njeri and not, say, on the state violence against which both Njeri and Boniface are fighting.
���People don���t see me for me. They don���t know me. It���s like I don���t exist,��� says Njeri in the film. ���It���s like I don���t have my dreams, I don���t have my ambitions, I don���t have normal struggles, girl problems���it���s like I don���t have all that. Why are you introducing me as ���somebody���s��� while I am standing right here myself?���
Pio was arrested only a few months after he and Emma were married. It was a long time coming; Pio was deeply involved with the Mau Mau Central Committee based in Mathare. He had trafficked guns into Nairobi and had had them delivered to Mau Mau forest fighters. He had assisted Mau Mau in drafting documents, and had coordinated the non-military wing of Mau Mau in planning its ���subversive campaign.��� All of it without Emma���s knowledge.
Pio���s friend Fitz de Souza took Emma to see Pio at the Nairobi Prison. He was thereafter transferred to Mombasa, then to the detention center on Manda Island, where the ���hardcore Mau Mau���, the most incorrigible, were held under brutal conditions.
That was the last time she would see him for four years. The printing press which Pio had paid for with their wedding money, was lost after his arrest.
A year had not passed since Emma had arrived in Kenya. She was alone, unprepared to make an income in an unfamiliar country, in a nation that was undergoing a revolution, and married to a man who was inside the revolution.
In the first four years of her marriage to Pio, Emma heard her husband���s voice only through handwritten letters���censored, of course, by the colonial administration. She would not hear about the torture, snakes, and backbreaking manual labor to which detainees at Manda were subjected, nor the nine-day hunger strike that Pio staged to protest the inhumane conditions at the camp. She could only imagine.
Emma spent those years reading. She wanted to understand why Pio fought so hard for a country that was not his. A country that would one day betray them both.
On February 24, 1965, Emma stood in her house, her mind muted with shock, her house spinning around her, a carousel of strangers and friends entering and exiting, asking her questions she could not hear, putting their hands on her, crying and wailing.
A heavy sky, a body wrapped in a pink blanket, shards of glass.
���Gosh. Pio looks so pale.���
The light in the house turned to a strange, warm color. Emma turned towards the back door and caught a glimpse of a huge fire burning in the backyard. Two of Pio���s close friends had gathered Pio���s books, papers, everything that they thought could expose and endanger other organizers around the world. Without thinking to ask Emma, they fed them to the fire.
A phrase that came to Emma���s mind, though she could not remember in which book she had read it, perhaps it was from one of those books on South Africa that she read while Pio was in detention: ���Bitterness is like a fire in the corner of a house which will eventually consume the whole house.��� Emma decided she could not give bitterness air to burn. Whatever she had folded and set aside in her mind as memories���those would be all she had. Pio was gone. His voice���even the familiar voice of his handwritten letters���was gone.
The country reeled from the news. Independent Kenya had lost its innocence; this, then, was how power would be wielded. Pio, a man who had given everything to the struggle for liberation, would be murdered by those with whom he had fought only years before.
It broke the country, but it broke Emma more. Yet she had no time to reel. Emma, fearless.
This year, Emma Gama Pinto and the families of her three daughters Linda, Malusha, and Tereshka celebrated the 33rd anniversary of landing on the docks of Montreal. They set up a Zoom call with all three families and sang rounds of CA-NA-DA, the ���Centennial Song.���
Because of the pandemic, Emma was moved from an assisted living residence into the home of her eldest daughter Linda, which turned out to be a true blessing. Emma���s final year was spent enjoying almost daily video calls with her daughters and her grandchildren, in different time zones.
Though I could not imagine a more beautiful way to spend her final days, the news of Emma Gama Pinto���s death broke my heart. I feel that, for months, I have been gazing at her life through a one-way mirror, collecting her words and memories through my research. I have been producing a podcast/radio series on the life and work of Pio Gama Pinto, alongside Brian ���Stoneface��� Otieno, a community organizer at the Mathare Social Justice Centre. Together, we aim to not only illuminate the various roles that Pinto played in the liberation struggle���Mau Mau ally, land justice advocate, trade unionist, radical journalist, and political mastermind���but to also use them��to��answer the central question of decolonization: how was the nation of Kenya able to become free without the people of Kenya becoming free?
Stoneface and I were looking forward to sending Emma photos and notes from listeners who will have been deeply impacted by her husband���s work. Unfortunately, it was not to be.
But then again, I suppose Emma Gama Pinto is really the last person to whom an explanation of what a huge difference Pio Gama Pinto made in this country needs to be made. Although we would have loved for her to hear the voices of those ���thousand beacons that arise from the spark he bore������the epitaph engraved on Pinto���s grave���we know that Emma understands, more than anyone else in this world, how the price which both of them paid for a better Kenya will lead to the continuation of the fight for freedom.
In our correspondence, Linda Gama Pinto wrote this to me:
Mum was a powerful match to my Father. Her strength, independence, non-conformist tendencies, and intelligence, freed Pio to pursue his vocation���justice for the Kenyan people. Without self-pity, she was proud of his work and his sacrifice.
To those who did not know her she was “the wife of���” To those who knew her, she was Emma! Fearless!
Emma Gama Pinto died peacefully on October 28, 2020 at the age of 92 in Ottawa surrounded by her loved ones.
November 12, 2020
Preparing for the long struggle ahead
Photo by Daoudi Aissa on Unsplash
In 2020, the Algerian uprising embarked on its second year and despite the immense difficulties and challenges encountered in the first year, the movement has not disappeared. We are in a situation of relative equilibrium in the balance of forces on the ground. The Hirak (movement) could not topple the regime, and the latter could not exhaust the movement. Due to the global health crisis caused by COVID-19, the Hirak decided to halt its weekly protests and marches in mid-March.
But the amazing energy and dynamic created by this magnificent revolution has not disappeared. In fact, it metamorphosed into health campaigns and solidarity actions with the needy and most vulnerable in society during these difficult times. We have seen several initiatives of cleaning up and disinfecting public spaces, caravans of solidarity to Blida, which is the epicenter of the pandemic in the country, campaigns to raise awareness about the disease, and other creative actions to keep the Hirak���s flame alive.
Meanwhile, the authoritarian and reactionary regime is doubling down on its actions to suppress and repress journalists and activists. Many activists are being judicially harassed, and several journalists have been jailed since the start of the lockdown. Dozens of protestors, political activists, and journalists are currently in jail, many of whom were arrested for social media posts and charged with ���threatening the integrity of national territory.��� The regime has also introduced a new penal code in order to further its crackdown on basic freedoms. The amendments stifle dissent further and criminalize certain actions that are deemed to ���undermine state security and national unity,��� accusations that have been levelled at many activists and journalists of the Hirak for well over a year. According to the new penal code, activists could also spend three years in jail for ���propagating false information,��� and be punished for ���receiving foreign funding.��� Moreover, the regime continues tightening restrictions on online media by blocking access to several dissenting sites, such as Radio M, Maghreb Emergent, and Interlignes.
COVID-19 has been a blessing to the ruling classes in Algeria. However, the popular movement has not said its last word yet. These times of confinement and temporary truce must be taken as a moment of collective reflection and learning about the achievements as well as the shortcomings and mistakes of the popular uprising. The system will not yield easily. For this reason, the balance of forces must be shifted significantly toward the masses by maintaining the resistance (acts of civil disobedience that don���t endanger people���s health and lives in the exceptional times of COVID-19 or preparations for actions post-pandemic) to force the regime to give way to people���s demands for radical democratic change, and the enshrinement of individual and collective rights and freedoms. There is no doubt that the Hirak will resume after this pandemic subsides, because the same conditions that gave rise to it are still present if not exacerbated by the current health crisis (a crisis that reveals the dire state of the public health sector that has been hollowed by decades of underfunding and mismanagement), as well as the crumbling oil prices (currently fluctuating between $20 and $30 a barrel).
To consolidate itself, the Hirak needs to realize other gains and victories and this can be done through:
Structuring the movement at the grassroots level by pushing and encouraging local self-organization at the workplace, through neighborhood committees, student and women���s collectives, independent local representations and the opening up of more spaces for discussion, debate and reflection in order to have a solid platform or a coherent program. This will inscribe the dynamic in the medium and long term and might enforce a situation of dual power.
Insisting on individual and collective freedoms of expression and organizing and campaigning tirelessly for the release of all political prisoners. The Hirak cannot afford a setback, as democratic space is shrinking week after week.
Wedding social justice and socio-economic rights to democratic demands. If Algeria continues on the path of liberalization and privatization, Algerians will definitely see more social explosions and discontent. Social consensus cannot be achieved while pauperization, unemployment, and inequality continue. The recent slump in oil prices might be the final nail in the coffin of a rentier system that is highly dependent on oil and gas exports for its survival.
In this context, evocative of the calm before the storm, Algerians will not dig their own graves by halting their revolution halfway. If the reactionary Algerian regime thinks that it can bury the Hirak during the pandemic, it knows little of the revolutionary youth, who are like seeds waiting to grow again, hopefully with more vigor and energy. The struggle for democratization will be long and will go on.
This is an edited excerpt from ���The Algerian revolution: the struggle for decolonization continues��� by Hamza Hamouchene and Selma Oumari, from a new book: A Region in Revolt: Mapping the recent uprisings in North Africa and West Asia, a co-publication between Daraja Press and the Transnational Institute (TNI). The collection consists of five chapters reflecting on and analyzing the five uprisings that took place in North Africa and West Asia during 2018-2020 including Algeria, Sudan, Lebanon, Iraq, and Iran. The book is available to purchase on Daraja Press��� website at a discounted price and to download on a Pay What You Can (PWYC) basis (An Arabic version of the book will also soon follow).
The hip hop president?
Image credit Eva Rinaldi via Flickr CC.
Following the recent elections, the US has a President-elect and a current President who refuses to concede. The race was tight, tighter than many had hoped, and race���the social construct���is central to why. The majority of white Americans voted for Donald Trump and the overwhelming majority of everybody else went for Joe Biden. Black voters, in particular, were key as Biden himself said: ���The African American community stood up for me again��� whereas Trump only walked away with 12 percent of Black votes. Twelve percent is not huge but considering the open white supremacy of the Trump administration it still comes as a shock. A friend told me she knew five of these Black voters and all said Trump was good for their business.
Their reasoning immediately took me back to the lead-up to the election when Ice Cube, 50 Cent and Lil��� Wayne shocked us all with their support for, or willingness to work with, Trump in the name of economic prosperity. Yet, for a cultural movement that popularized both ���fuck the police��� and ���bling��� in a society that routinely places profit over people should we have been so surprised? What we learned about hip hop this election season is how it, and the Black political mainstream more broadly, continues to have hope in the promises of American capitalism.
In January 2017, critic Hanif Abdurraqib eulogized a White House that welcomed hip hop, because until Barack Obama the relationship between hip hop and the office of the US president was generally adversarial. For example, ���Eric B is President��� from 1986, when Ronald Reagan was US President, is a hip hop classic that makes the Afrodiasporic cultural move to appropriate power that, according to the norms of white society, you are least likely to hold. It is worth noting the song samples James Brown���s ���Funky President,��� which was a rebuke of US president Gerald Ford. Emcees also consistently rejected presidents, as Biz Markie did when he rhymed “Reagan is the pres but I voted for Shirley Chisholm.��� (Biz Markie was referring to the congresswomen from New York City, who became the first Black woman to be elected to Congress and also the first Black woman to run for president in 1972.)
This was repeated by Common and Method Man about Bill Clinton and then by LL Cool J for George H.W. Bush, president from 1989 to 1994. Athough most rappers seemed to be with LL when it came to Bush, Eazy-E surprised everyone by attending a Republican fundraiser during Bush���s presidency. By all accounts it seems a mailing error was taken as an opportunity, not so much to be down with Bush, but as a kind of trickster move to take up space in a place, again, not meant for you. Bill Clinton tried to seal the designation of ���first Black President��� through his 1992 appearance on the Arsenio Hall Show, which was at the time definitely a preeminent home to hip hop. That was all abrogated by his attack on Sister Souljah, which sealed his actual bid for the presidency.
The nature of hip hop���s relationship to the US Presidency changed with the election of Barack Obama. For many in the hip hop community, Obama���s Blackness was a point of connection and his success evidence that despite the past there can be a future for Black people in the US. Yet, race is not the entire story; for some Black hip hop artists the possibilities they saw in Obama were not only for their race but also for their class (aspirations). As hip hop became an economic powerhouse with its own moguls, the claims to power that have been its staple moved from the purely figurative realm to a more tangible proximity to political and economic power���from being president on a track to chilling with a sitting president.
Hip hop is often seen as a counterculture that will challenge the status quo. While this view is valid, it is also incomplete because hip hop has always had a parallel track about getting money, power, and respect. So, while open support of Trump makes many of us clutch our gold chains, hip hop���s embrace of Obama was not exactly chanting down Babylon. When hip hop gets political, the figures who are most cited���Malcolm X, Minister Louis Farrakan and Assata Shakur���represent a radical Black politics that is definitely far afield from Obama’s kinder and gentler status quo (after all it was during the Obama presidency that Shakur became the first woman on the FBI���s list of Most Wanted Terrorists).
I think it is safe to say that on the whole, Black Americans are skeptics when it comes to the US political system. By the same token, many of us still hold on to the possibility that we can fix things enough so that we too can access American prosperity. To me, this has to do with how mainstream Black politics puts forth a critique of racism but leaves capitalism relatively unexamined in order to get a seat at the table so we can get our piece of the pie. This plays itself out in hip hop when individual success is seen as the promise of collective success; wherein successful individuals, such as Jay-Z, critique not only racial inequality but also Black folks who are not ���successful��� because they didn���t heed him when he gave them ���a million dollars��� worth of game for nine ninety-nine.��� A similar positioning happens with Ice Cube���s Contract with Black America. The contract identifies how racism disadvantages Black people and a need for ���Black responsibility.��� It seeks repair for past wrongs primarily by demanding Black people get their piece of the pie, as per mainstream Black politics. The problem with this strategy, however, is it never considers whether the pie is too rotten for anyone to eat.
For me, this metaphor of the pie and its shelf life is really about two things. First, while I don���t think hip hop support for Trump is particularly astute, I also do not find it so surprising. If getting paid is the aim, then capitalism is the game, and that by its nature will lead to all kinds of relationships to power. Second, it is a call for interrogating what really are our visions of liberation. If, as the scholar Ruth Wilson Gilmore argues, capitalism requires inequality, racism enshrines it, then can we really financially plan our way to freedom? Can we all be billionaires? And should that even be our goal? Simply put, can we get rid of racism if we don���t also get rid of capitalism?
I would like to think we can build a world where there is no need for billionaires because everyone has access to what they need to live a good life. I know the road to getting there is not paved by presidential votes but begins with asking ourselves some tough questions about money, power, and respect.
November 11, 2020
Living on
Image credit Yutaka Nagata for UN Photo.
For over four decades, ES Reddy led international opposition to apartheid, then turned to chronicling, interpreting, and keeping alive its internationalist connections, even as his health waned. He died November 1 at age 96. Reddy was also known for helping out students of South Africa���s anti-apartheid history. In that work, he reminded researchers and revolutionaries alike that socio-political change works best when we cooperate. ���I feel satisfaction when I can help researchers,��� he wrote in an early exchange to me. Maybe it was his own dissertation, left unfinished when he transitioned to full-time advocacy. Or the opportunity to, once again, connect a global cadre of like-minded people. Perhaps it satisfied restlessness in his busy nonagenarian mind.
His death marks another in a line of passings in 2020 of activists tied to South Africa���s struggle for human dignity. George Bizos, Andrew Mlangeni, and Dennis Goldberg took with them a proximity to the iconic Rivonia Trial. On the other side of the Atlantic, US citizens mourned civil rights icon John Lewis and lawyer-activist-Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. These deaths represented not just those individuals, but the collective remembrance of struggles such as that against the global color line that we told ourselves had been won against all odds. So, too, does that of ES.
Enuga Sreenivasulu (���ES from now on,��� he sternly told researchers) was born in India and grew up watching his father���s arrests for protesting British occupation. Ramachandra Guha has written of the young man���s own youthful agitations. Reddy became interested in anti-apartheid work during the 1940s, then earned a Master���s degree at New York University. In the midst of his PhD in Political Science at Columbia, he joined the United Nations, eventually serving as secretary and then chair of its Special Committee Against Apartheid. He managed the organization���s efforts to pressure South Africa���s apartheid state into dissolution. Beyond that, he ran the UN Trust Fund for South Africa, a respectable-looking organization that veritably laundered money into the country���s internal struggle. Its contributors included states like the US and UK, whose governments often sympathized with the National Party, and its beneficiaries included South Africa���s national leaders, particularly when they faced trial or persecution.
���Over the years I took some personal risks,��� he told journalist Dennis Herbstein. ���I could have been fired if all I was doing was known.��� Amid these, it was easy to become discouraged, disillusioned even, as was often true in the face of apartheid���s domestic and international brutality. Commitment to international solidarity and the memory of his family���s own early struggles kept Reddy working. ���Even if there was a victory���e.g. a court judgment���the government would pass a law undoing it,��� he added. ���People were being jailed and banned. Many people were displaced. That was frustrating. In India, too, there was a long struggle for freedom. That kept me going. That was true of hundreds of thousands of activists.���
Much ink has been spilled on the contributing factors to apartheid���s demise: internal resistance, political isolation, economic boycotts, the collapse of the Cold War. Through all of those ran the current of the Special Committee. It hosted Namibians and South Africans petitioning the UN, connecting them with donor and support networks. It coordinated a global response to racist policies that South Africa argued were purely domestic. In moments of jail and banning, exile and assassination, it provided camaraderie.
By the time ES retired, apartheid had become an international cause c��lebr��. The connections he built coalesced into a movement that captivated politicians, celebrities, and hundreds of thousands of activists���from students to veterans of civil rights movements. His work undone, he turned to board memberships and research. According to Ismail Vadi, who was an activist in the South African United Democratic Front, ES���s manuscripts numbered more than 50 at the time of his death, including a remembrance of Oliver Tambo. More than that, he became an information trove in dozens of studies on South Africa���s liberation movement. As a 22-year-old Master���s student, I found his suggestion of a writing topic so fascinating that it followed from thesis to dissertation and, finally, a book that I was so glad he read during his final months. As a veritable research assistant, he made interview contacts, rustled up personal papers and hidden documents, and read drafts for dozens of young researchers. It was a work he seemed to relish, not because it involved naval gazing at the good times, but because it gave him an opportunity to once again connect people and mentor young folks interested in studying and implementing the types of socio-political change about which he was so passionate.
The internationalism of which he was part, that which fought against one of the world���s most notorious examples of systemic racism amid Cold War exacerbations, seems almost quaint. From my vantage point in a US that came so close during the week of Reddy���s death to re-electing an openly xenophobic man to whom Haiti, El Salvador, and all of Africa itself are ���shitholes,��� a US that has left international cooperative efforts such as the World Health Organization or the Paris Climate Agreement, this brand of global cooperation indeed looks quaint and distant. To ES, however, that was never the case. It was hard fought, hard built, hard won. The forum he constructed allowed voices from the global South to be elevated against those from the global North in whose financial capital he operated. It facilitated opportunities for some of those northern actors to circumvent their own governments in crafting more humane foreign policy. It internalized the lessons of struggle and non-violence from his birthplace, combined with an admiration for the bravery of South Africans, and built a worldwide movement that rendered the seemingly impossible ending of apartheid into ���The Miracle.���
The loss of ES and his comrades is not complete. They live in the systems they changed, in the scholarship they facilitated for the purpose of remembering these very lessons. In our own heady times, these are lessons we would do well to internalize, too.
Achille Mbembe���s decolonization
Image credit Sebastien Lienard-Boisjoli via Flickr CC.
���Achille Mbembe, 2020We will have to learn to remember together, and, in so doing, to repair together the world���s fabric and its visage.
Out of the Dark Night: Essays on Decolonization, the latest offering from Achille Mbembe (from the Wits Institute on Social and Economic Research in South Africa) takes its title from a remark by the late Frantz Fanon (1925-1961), whose work has long been arguably the most central influence on Mbembe.
A substantially reworked and amended version of a monograph first published in French in 2010, it offers a profound meditation on the potentialities and limitations of what we know as decolonization, and a future vision of the proverbial planetary humanism made to the measure of the world as seen from Africa and the global South.
Common habits of thought have led us to think of decolonization as a new term, and the political, historical, and social processes it purports to describe as limited to the assertion of national and political sovereignty among previously colonized territories and peoples in the 20th century. These habits of thought have been and remain particularly prevalent among Western political scientists mired in Eurocentric assumptions about the world. Yet, as Todd Shepard demonstrated in his seminal The Invention of Decolonization: The Algerian War and the Remaking of France (2006), the term has an etymological lineage going back to at least 1836. When Jan C. Jansen and J��rgen Osterhammel in their Decolonization: A Short History (2017) note that decolonization had its ���most decisive phase in the middle of the twentieth century during the three decades following the Second World War��� and that ���as a political process, decolonization has by now passed into history,��� they are of course technically speaking correctly.
At the same time, such a representation risks traducing what decolonization was and meant for formerly colonized people, as well as for politicians, activists, and intellectuals who brought about these epoch-making and world-historical changes.
In Western political science, a hitherto predominant but seriously flawed historical account of what decolonization was and entailed has represented decolonization���as Adom Getachew reminds us in her recent brilliant Worldmaking After Empire: The Rise And Fall of Self-Determination (2019)���as a natural outgrowth of Wilsonian liberal principles of self-determination, and as flowing naturally from the founding documents of the United Nations after World War II. The fact of the matter remains, colonial powers saw little contradiction between their own professed liberalism and the brutalities of colonialism, and one cannot and should not ���disregard anticolonial nationalism as a site of conceptual and political innovation.���
In this revisionist reading of decolonization, with which Mbembe���s account is aligned, decolonization entails much more than simply what Mbembe describes as ���a diffusion of Western models of popular sovereignty.���
Mbembe was trained as a political scientist and a philosopher. His important contribution to the by now sizeable body of academic literature on decolonization must be placed alongside important critiques of the canonical interpretations of decolonization within Western liberal political science and theory from recent years, such as Gary Wilder���s Freedom Time: Negritude, Decolonization, And The Future of the World (2015), Getachew���s Worldmaking After Empire (2019), and David Scotts Omens of Adversity: Tragedy, Memory, Justice (2014). For if anything, Mbembe���s revisiting decolonization as ���a key moment in the history of our modernity��� is animated by an intellectual urge to explore precisely the ���world-making��� and the ���will to community��� that decolonization entailed, and what potential lessons it holds for our troubled and dark present. Mbembe does so in full awareness of the historical failures of the African postcolonial elites, who were brought to power through decolonization to realize the critical humanist potential inherent in decolonization as a critical and epoch-making historical event. For, according to Mbembe, the humanist critique that enabled decolonization had ���the idea that Western modernity was imperfect, incomplete and unfinished��� at the heart of analysis. It was an ���impossible revolution,��� which resulted in ���a form of domination that has been described as ���domination without hegemony��� on the part of former colonial powers.���
As in his 2017 Critique of Black Reason, Mbembe does not in Out of the Dark Night operate with a one-sided, one-dimensional and institutional account of what colonialism was and entailed: ���colonization was in many regards a co-production of colonizers and colonized.����� This introductory formulation points directly toward chapter one of Mbembe���s book, which bears the title ���Planetary Entanglement.��� For the Africa of the past, present, and future has in Mbembe���s vision���and contrary to the visions of Africa offered in the canons of Western political thought���never been a world unto its own, let alone pure and isolated. Inspired by John L. and Jean Comaroff���s Theory From The South (2012), Mbembe argues that ���the Southern Hemisphere��� is ���perhaps the epicenter of contemporary global transformations��� and that there may in fact be ���no better laboratory than Africa to gauge the limits of our epistemological imagination.��� What is in Mbembe���s view pre-figured in developments in Africa and its experiments in neo-liberal deregulation is nothing less than the future of global capitalism itself. And this is in Mbembe���s optics a bleak future characterized by a growing crisis of reproduction in which human lives are increasingly rendered as devalued, superfluous and expendable forms. Africa offers us tell-tale signs that capitalism in its neo-liberal form is increasingly sutured from and incompatible with democracy. Mbembe does not fail to register the fact that Africa has become an experimental playground for the global rise in power and influence of China, but one wishes perhaps that he would have had more to say about the ambiguities involved in that for a great many Africans.
If any thinker is indispensably central to Mbembe���s account in this monograph, it is once more Frantz Fanon. For according to Mbembe, Fanon is ���one of the very few thinkers who have risked something that resembles a theory of decolonization.����� Chapter two of Out of the Dark Night, entitled ���Disenclosure,��� is dedicated to an analysis of Fanon���s account of decolonization as ���a hermeneutics and a pedagogy.��� And in this chapter, Mbembe really demonstrates why he is one of the most original and insightful interpreters of Fanon���s life and legacy in our times. The categorical error of post-colonial elites that Fanon cautioned against was, as Mbembe duly reminds us, to take European models of capitalist development, popular sovereignty, and self-determination as their models. Decolonization for Fanon, was ideally about ���provincializing Europe��� and its claims to represent universal history and reason, and the creation of a new form of planetary humanism by starting from a tabula rasa and creating the proverbial ���new Man.��� Mbembe refers to this as ���an ascent into humanity,��� which he defines as ���a new beginning of creation.��� What Mbembe here advocates for is a return to the sources of what Aime Cesaire famously described as a ���humanism made to the measure of the world��� in the works of Fanon and other key thinkers in the Black Atlantic tradition in order to envision new and alternative futures beyond nationalism, racism, and environmental devastation.
In spite of the profound ambiguities relating to postcolonial theory that have registered in Mbembe���s work all the way back to his breakthrough monograph On the Postcolony (2001), we may identify him as a postcolonial intellectual in a Black Atlantic tradition that traverses the terrain charted out in that tradition in both its Anglophone and Francophone articulations. For against all the Western political scientists who profess positivism as their personal faith and imagine themselves to be neutral and non-situated observers of the world out there, Mbembe is adamantly clear that ���theory is always a particular theory of the world.��� In chapter two of Out of the Dark Night, Mbembe also offers his readers an insightful account of the development of postcolonial theory. In later chapters, such as chapter three, ���Proximity without reciprocity��� and chapter four, ���The long French imperial winter,��� he proves to be sharply critical of the by now routine dismissals of the seminal contributions of postcolonial theory that have long been a fixture of what passes for ���intellectual discourse��� in France. According to Mbembe, this dismissal is symptomatic of a general crisis among French intellectual elites in the face of globalization that has increasingly rendered French historical self-understandings and French claims to represent both humanism and universalism parochial and obsolete. For Mbembe, postcolonial theory is far from unitary, and a product of global entanglements: it is a body of thought to be likened to ���a river with multiple tributaries.���
In the context of the current right-wing onslaught on critical theory, critical race theory, and postcolonial theory seen in the USA, the UK, France, and even in my native Norway recently,�� one cannot but recommend Mbembe���s chapters on postcolonial theory and its critics to anyone still interested in what nuanced and critical scholarship may actually mean. For France���s very ���inability to think about the postcolony��� in Mbembe���s view has dire consequences for how France engages with the world, but also for how it thinks about the persistent problems of racism and discrimination against racialized minorities in France, whether they be African, Arab, Asian or Caribbean people. Mbembe rightly reserves special scorn for the omnipresent French media intellectual and bien pensant Alain Finkielkraut and his serial televised and by now theatrical targeting of French Muslims in the name of secularism, enlightenment, reason, and republicanism, and his preposterous claim to the effect that ���antiracism is the new antisemitism.���
Mbembe is in Out of The Dark Night critical of certain tendencies within the intellectual successor to postcolonial theory, namely decolonial theory, ���to theorize multiplicity as difference,��� and to tether difference to acts of simple ���disconnection and separation.��� For this very move goes against Fanon and, by extension, Mbembe���s rendering of decolonization as an attempt to ���make the world whole again.��� Mbembe is in fact adamantly opposed to the form of decolonial gestures ���by which one is cut off, or one cuts oneself off, from the world.���
A central and recurrent debate following in the wake of decolonizing movements in Africa and Europe in recent years has involved debates about the return of artifacts appropriated in the course of European colonialism. Chapter five of Out of the Dark Night, ���The house without keys,��� is dedicated to Mbembe���s deft analysis of what is at stake in these debates. He here takes issue with those opposed to restitution in the name of both legalism and paternalism. Legalism here entails arguments to the effect that since one cannot always know to whom the artifacts in European museums originally belonged, the artifacts cannot legally be returned; whereas paternalism entails arguments to the effect that contemporary Africa does not have the required institutions, knowledge, or resources to preserve the artifacts in the event that they should be returned. For Mbembe, these are all at base moot arguments: ���every authentic politics of restitution is inseparable from a capacity for truth.��� It entails nothing less on the part of Europeans, than ���a recognition of the seriousness of the harm suffered and the wrongs inflicted.���
We return, once more, to world-making and the ascent into humanity: honoring truth and acts of repairing the world are for Mbembe foundational acts meant to engender a new connection and a new relationship . The hope remains, of course, but it is in the present historical conjuncture���which has been marked by a European descent (or return) into inhumanity���a faint hope to think that Europeans will cease to approach others without ���the attitude of someone who considers that only their own reality counts and is necessary.���
Out of the Dark Night was first published as Sortir de la Grande Nuit in French in 2010. In the ten years that have passed since then, both the world at large, and Mbembe���s own rendering of our global present have taken a discernably dark turn. This is particularly noteworthy in Mbembe���s Necropolitics, which was published in English by Duke University Press last year, and in his Brutalisme, which was published in French by Editions Galimard earlier this year. In Out of the Dark Night, Mbembe still sees great hope in what he refers to as Afropolitanism. In the last chapter of Out of the Dark Night, he identifies Afropolitanism firstly, with the postcolonial literature of African intellectuals such as Ahmadou Kouroma and Yambo Ouologuem in the 1970s, and secondly with the intensification of migration and the establishment of new African diasporas in the world at large. These are for Mbembe processes by which Africa has become ���decentered.��� Like former South African president Thabo Mbeki���who for all his political flaws insisted on defining South Africa as a nation for all who live in it in speeches such as I am an African���Mbembe opposes a racialized grammar of African citizenship, and the idea that Africa ���belongs��� to black Africans alone. For the very idea of Afropolitanism is for Mbembe centered upon the idea of circulation between and co-imbrication of worlds, and the human recognition and valorization of ���the foreigner.��� In the face of the recurrent waves of xenophobia, racism, and violence against black Africans from other parts of the African continent that have marred the post-apartheid era, and which Mbembe has repeatedly spoken out against in his adopted homeland of South Africa, these are crucially important reminders on Mbembe���s part.
In the postcolonial Black Atlantic tradition in which one may rightly place Achille Mbembe alongside other distinguished and remarkable scholars such as Paul Gilroy, Stuart Hall, Felwine Sarr, Saidiya Hartman, and Hazel Carby, male scholars working within this tradition have rightly been criticized for a lack of attention to feminism and feminist themes. So many will be pleasantly surprised at the sections of the last chapter of Out of the Dark Night, in which Mbembe writes about the question of sexuality and changing mores relating to women���s and LGBT sexualities in contemporary Africa. I must admit that Mbembe here writes in a very philosophical and psychoanalytic register with which, I am as a social scientist, not completely comfortable with or convinced by. But it will nonetheless be of interest to Mbembe���s many readers. Mbembe���s South African readers may perhaps be disappointed by the fact that the English version of this monograph is so centered on the French context that it has relatively little to say about recent decolonial movements in South Africa, and especially the 2014-2015 #RhodesMustFall movement. Readers interested in a detailed account of that movement, its fractures, and limitations, will arguably be better served by Francis B. Nyamnjoh���s monograph #RhodesMustFall: Nibbling at Resilient Colonialism in South Africa (2018).
But let this not distract from the fact that Out of The Dark Night: Essays on Decolonization is an indispensable book for anyone seeking to understand our global present, and to think about the urgent matter of charting ways out of our shared dark night.
November 10, 2020
Gambia’s truth commission
Photo by Bekky Bekks on Unsplash
���You are an older person, who is 50 or 80 years old, and you are mixed with youngsters of 18, 20 years who are your children or the age of your grandchildren,��� explained Lamin Korta at The Gambia���s Truth, Reconciliation, and Reparations Commission (TRRC) earlier this year. He continued his description of the conditions in the infamous Mile 2 prison: ���You are lying down inside the same cell, you go to the toilet in the same place���that is despicable and no one can say its humane in a normal society.��� While the administrators of the TRRC���s public hearings often focus on human rights as defined by the United Nations and international covenants, the commission has also emerged as a space, albeit imperfect, for Gambians to express their own ideas of what constitutes a violation of a human being���s basic rights.
Nigerian scholar Bonny Ibhawoh is among those who suggest that pre-colonial African societies had their own indigenous rights traditions that could be said to constitute human rights paradigms. While he points to significant overlap with the post-World War II rights regime, he also highlights a focus on the elderly as well as a more collective understanding of rights and responsibilities. These are reflected in the Kurukan Fuga, thought to have been established by Sundiata Keita in the 14th century, which in addition to sanctifying life and establishing special protections for women and children, also dictates social relations intended to preserve peace and harmony. The Gambian scholar, Aboubacar Abdullah Senghore, points out that Islam also brought its own moral code and court system, which can be seen as a human rights discourse. While there are universal ideas about the inherent dignity of all human beings, these are always filtered through every societies unique value systems, resulting in slight differentiations in how those rights are expressed and enshrined.
The Gambia���s first President, Dawda Jawara, signed onto the emerging post-war international human rights order, especially the focus on civil and political rights, with gusto. However, in July 1994, the country���s respected place in Africa���s human rights landscape was shattered when 29-year-old lieutenant Yahya Jammeh seized power. Although he initially presented himself as standing up against Jawara���s corrupt administration, Jammeh built a brutal authoritarian state that grew more capricious with time. Hundreds of people were arbitrarily arrested and detained. Dozens more suffered horrendous torture and others were brutally murdered by a secret hitman squad, their bodies unceremoniously dumped down a well. Jammeh himself is credibly accused of a litany of crimes, including rape. While he publicly built a seemingly progressive gender and youth politics (cynically designed to entrench his own rule), he framed human rights as a Western tool to deprive Africans of sovereignty, and threatened Gambians who focused on human rights with death.
By the time Jammeh was finally dislodged in January of 2017, truth commissions had become part of the checklist for countries emerging from conflict or authoritarianism. Drafted by the then minister of justice, Abubaccar Tambadou, the bill that established the TRRC centers post-World War II international understandings of civil and political rights, listing torture, unlawful killings, sexual and gender-based violence, enforced disappearance, inhumane and degrading treatment, arbitrary arrest, and detention without trial as the crimes under investigation. The hearings have been divided into thematic sections���muzzling of the press, attacks on opposition politicians, sexual and gender-based violence and so on���which further centers this outlook. The counselors themselves (the people interviewing witnesses) are lawyers who generally focus their questioning on these crimes.
Yet, the truth commission has emerged as a place where every day Gambians express their own understandings of what constitutes a violation of their humanity. As the quote at the beginning of this piece illustrates, Lamin Korta, a prison officer at a facility where numerous inmates were tortured, denied medical treatment, and ultimately killed through negligence, saved his harshest criticism for how the elderly were treated. (It might shock him to hear that in prisons across the US and other so-called developed societies elderly inmates are subjected to the same degrading treatment as other prisoners.)
Another telling moment came during the testimony of Binta Kuyateh, a farmer and petty trader from the rural town of Brikama Bah. During the 2011-2012 election cycle she was arbitrarily arrested and detained, most likely for being a member of the opposition party. Last year she testified that when she was asked to bathe, she was told she would have to do so in front of a younger (female) prison officer. She said she absolutely refused to strip naked in front of a younger woman, choosing instead to forgo washing herself for her 23-day arbitrary detention. Similar stories have been told by other elderly women who expressed outrage and shame that their rights, and privileges, as elderly women were robbed from them in the most humiliating of ways.
Popular ideas about basic rights are also revealed in stories of resistance. In 2006 Duta Kamaso, a parliamentarian known for her independent streak, was arrested and detained without charge. She described how while in detention she appealed to the guard, a young man, to let her pray outside the cell. He obliged, and in deference to her age, gender, and status, told her to spend the rest of the day outside the cell sitting with the other officers. In another case an officer with the National Intelligence Agency refused to arrest a woman who was still nursing her child, forcing local police in the small town of Janjanbureh to call in other agents from the capital.
Similarly to what Abena Ampofoa Asare notes in her fascinating study of Ghana���s National Reconciliation Commission, political violence seemingly targeted at a single individual is often expressed in terms of the ripple effects through loved ones. Alhagie Nyabally, a student leader and teacher who witnessed the massacre of students in April 2000 and was later arbitrarily arrested multiple times, eventually fled to Senegal in 2007. During his testimony he expressed his exile not only in terms of the suffering he endured, but how his wife���s thesis was disrupted, their children were denied an education, and his extended family members had to return to their villages in rural areas. Other survivors describe similar experiences���education denied, marriages broken, and the general breakdown of social relations���as a violation of their rights. Articulating human rights abuses by how they disrupted wider families is common at the TRRC, and suggests a more communal, as opposed to individualistic, understanding of how someone���s basic rights as a human being are violated.
It remains to be seen whether these articulations will be codified in the final report or recommendations at the end of the commission. While the TRRC provides space for multiple rights discourses, there is still a hierarchy in terms of which rights are given more attention. As in other truth commissions, just talking about what happened in the past does not ensure that it will not happen again. That being said, bringing different ideas about human rights together in a privileged place and broadcasting them to the nation might help give all of them more currency. As The Gambia seeks to reform its institutions, incorporating a more holistic vision of human rights that reflects the rich philosophical and cultural norms of the country could help bridge the gap between people���s needs and governance systems that tragically still fail the majority of citizens.
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