Sean Jacobs's Blog, page 156
October 4, 2020
What Africa and Asia can teach each other
Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash
When independent Congo���s first prime minister, Patrice Lumumba, was assassinated in 1962, over 100,000 people protested in Beijing Workers��� Stadium. Thousands more protested in New Delhi and Singapore.
When Sudan lacked a formal plaque at the 1955 Bandung Conference, where the leaders of Asia and Africa declared the Third World project, India���s Jawaharlal Nehru wrote ���Sudan��� on his handkerchief, ensuring Africa���s then largest country a seat.
It was a time when Asia and Africa, home to almost 80 percent of humanity, found kinship in their shared trauma and conjoined destiny. Both were always spoken of in tandem. Martin Luther King Jr.���s ���Letter from a Birmingham Jail,��� drew inspiration from what he saw overseas: ���The nations of Asia and Africa are moving with jet like speed toward gaining political independence.���
Too often we forget that the most defining event of the 20th century was not World War II or the Cold War, but the liberation of billions in Asia and Africa between the 1950s and 1980s as citizens of almost 100 new-born countries.
It also marked the revival of an ancient, pre-European connection. Historically, Asia and Africa were enmeshed centers of wealth and knowledge and the gatekeepers of the most lucrative trade routes. The Roman Empire���s richest region was North Africa, not Europe. A severe trade imbalance with South Asia forced Roman emissaries to beg spice traders in Tamil Nadu to limit their exports.
Western Europeans left their shores in desperation, not exploration, in the 1500s to secure a maritime route to the wealthy Indian Ocean trading system that integrated Asia and Africa. Somali traders grew rich as middlemen transiting coveted varieties of cinnamon from South Asia to Southern Europe. The Swahili coast shipped gold, ivory, and wildlife to China. Transferring the world economy to the Atlantic first required Portugal���s violent undoing of the flow of goods and peoples between Asia and Africa.
In Bandung, Indonesia���s Sukarno declared ���a new departure��� in which peoples of both continents no longer had ���their futures mortgaged to an alien system.���
Yet that departure became a wide divergence that is complex to comprehend. Over the last few years, I���ve shuttled between the megacities of Asia to East and Central Africa. I also grew up in four Asian countries���India, Thailand, Philippines, and Singapore���and lived through Southeast Asia���s exponential rise.
The gap between Africa and East Asia, including Southeast Asia, is perplexing because we share much in common���culture, values, spirit, and worldview. I���m reminded of this in Somalia, Sudan, Uganda, or Ghana, where I���ve felt an immediate sense of fraternity.
It���s now a familiar story: 70 years ago, African incomes and literacy rates were higher than East Asia, then an epicenter of major wars. But in one generation, East Asia achieved wealth, human development, and standards of living that rival a tired, less relevant Western world.
The shockingly inept response by many Western countries to a historic pandemic has only amplified calls for Africa to abandon the Western model and learn from its once closest allies. A new book titled Asian Aspiration: How and Why Africa Should Emulate Asia, hit stores this year, co-authored by former Nigerian and Ethiopian heads of state. An op-ed in Kenya���s Star newspaper even prior suggested Kenyans shift their gaze from the supposed advancement of Westerners to ���the progress of our comrades in the East.���
The incessant idea that Africa���s future lies in models not of its own making can be patronizing. But Africa can indeed learn from the successes and pitfalls of East Asia, the world���s most economically dynamic region also built from scratch, while imparting wisdom of its own.
Many who previously pondered this gap came up with multiple theories, but often ignored a simple reality: Africa���s geography. Like Latin America, Africa is bedeviled by a predatory power to its north that siphons capital, talent, labor, and hope. By contrast, East Asia, even with several U.S. bases, is an ocean away from the United States and a 12-hour flight from Western Europe.
Europe���s proximity to Africa also cultivated a perennial barrier to development: the Western aid industry. Whether I���m in Haiti or Chad, the sheer domination of Western NGOs, development agencies, aid convoys, and all manner of plunder masquerading as goodwill���$40 billion more illicitly flows out of Africa than incoming loans and aid combined���is something I never saw even 25 years ago in Southeast Asia. Industries look for growth opportunities. Developed societies with robust public systems in East Asia offer few for saviors. The streets of Bangkok and Hanoi are lined with Toyotas and tourists, not wide-eyed youths in armored vehicles guided by white burden. The development industry and most of its participants I���ve had the misfortune of meeting are toxic. Large swaths of Africa remain under occupation of a different kind.
For much of the 20th century, Africa also faced a virulent settler colony in its south which destabilized the region and was so hateful of Black Africans that its mercenaries set up a series of bogus health clinics to surreptitiously spread HIV under the guise of charitable healthcare.
East Asia���s settler colony, Australia, was never able to replicate South Africa���s belligerence. It did lay waste to Papua New Guinea (where it continues to imprison asylum-seekers) but Australia never invaded or occupied Indonesia or the Philippines.
Another fallacy explaining African inertia is poor leadership. Leadership is paramount, but Africa produced a generation of independence era leaders whose values and decency the world desperately needs today. All were killed or overthrown by the West���because Africa is a far deeper reservoir of resources than East Asia.
South Korea, Singapore, and Taiwan are not resource rich. Thailand was never even colonized. An Asian country afflicted by similar conditions to Africa is mineral-rich Myanmar, closed to the wider world and progress for decades. Showcases of democracy aside, its kleptocratic, authoritarian political culture, like many African countries, was inherited from British rule. George Orwell���s less referenced book Burma Days, a recount of his time as a police officer in colonial Burma, called the British Empire ���a despotism with theft as its final object.���
Resources prevented African leaders from towing a middle road that kept Western powers happy while investing in their society. The choice was resource nationalism or authoritarian acquiescence ���with theft as its final object.��� It was either Lumumba or Mobutu.
East Asian success stories worked within the global capitalist system and conducted deft diplomacy to placate Western superiority complexes while fortifying relationships with the rest of the global South. At independence, Singapore dispatched diplomats around the world, including several African countries, to build trade ties. Its manufacturing companies provided cassette tapes for Sudan���s then booming music industry. It hired Israeli advisors to train its military while staying in the good books of neighbors and Arab partners who stood with the Palestinians. These maneuvers are only possible when you aren���t sitting on $24 trillion worth of minerals.
Geography aided East Asia. Colonial borders, with a few exceptions, resembled some form of community that came before the nation-state. Consider both the Malay and Korean Peninsulas. Thailand���s borders, while amended as concessions to imperial powers, conformed largely to the cultural and linguistic boundaries of ancient Siam.
Africa���s artificial borders concocted nation-states with no experience as a community of any kind. The nation-state model creates fissures even in Europe, with the Yugoslav wars and constant, violently suppressed demands for statehood by the Basques and Catalans in Spain, not to mention a referendum by the Scots. Partitions across Africa, a special kind of cartographic violence, congealed animosity for generations.
So while Africans were marginally better off at independence than East Asians, structurally they actually did not have a head start. But Africa still thrived in the 1970s. It is only now reaching average income levels akin to half a century ago. To dismiss the continent���s record since independence as a perennial failure is a historically illiterate point of view. Its cultural output and musical dynamism were astonishing���arguably unrivaled���during this era. Liverpool and Manchester? Try Luanda and Mogadishu.
Africans were well aware of the right course but were thwarted more viciously than East Asia���s most developed states. Perhaps the West is more tolerant of Asian success because of racial hierarchies, just as the US parades Asian-American affluence as a symbol of the universality of the US-led Western model but violently responds to the smallest hint of actual wealth creation in Black-American communities.
Now, amid a precarious coming decade, East Asia indeed offers prescriptions for not only natural allies like Africans but societies worldwide seeking transformation in record time.
First off, it���s all about networks. Do the rules of your country facilitate local, regional, and international networks? A new Harvard study concluded that brisk business travel has the single biggest impact on building networks, diffusing knowledge, and birthing new industries. Europe���s own development benefited from its small land space, which tailored expansive, tight-knit networks that rapidly spread ideas revolutionizing everything from the sciences to football tactics.
Frequent trips to any major city in East Asia connect you to lucrative networks half a world away. Business travel (at least before the chaos of coronavirus) to East Asia is accessible, affordable, and hassle-free. The right infrastructure and laws���state-of-the-art airports, good accommodations, low-cost, high-speed telecommunications, rapid transportation links and whole scale visa liberalization���are needed to accommodate network-building travelers of every stripe and budget. African countries should follow suit, and streamline business travel, which would allow African travelers to build dense regional and continental networks���currently a tough ask when pre-pandemic flights from Nairobi to London were far cheaper than to neighboring capitals.
Since the 1980s, the Anglo-American West, ideologically intoxicated by deregulation, abdicated their society���s fate to self-interested individuals and free markets alone. East Asian countries enacted hardcore capitalist policies but never bought into this demented idea. The US and UK spent the last four decades dismantling their states; East Asian countries meanwhile reinforced their capacity with vast investments in education, telecommunication, and especially healthcare.
Thailand abandoned the neoliberal approach to healthcare in the early 2000s for a private-public model that guaranteed universal coverage and secured its place as the first country in Asia to eliminate HIV transmission from mother to child. Both Singapore and Hong Kong have the most efficient healthcare systems in the world. Sharply guided public health policies underwrote East Asia���s masterful management of COVID-19. Vietnam and Laos had zero deaths from coronavirus while Germany, somehow a celebrated success story in the Western press, has over 9,000 deaths.
Recently, Kenya sought Thailand���s expertise in revamping a typically price-gouged private healthcare system. Ethiopia invited Vietnamese telecommunication companies to make its systems reliable, fast, and, like much of Southeast Asia, affordable.
In the Nigerian and Kenyan corners of Twitter, ���The Singapore Solution��� resonates. People yearn for a Lee Kuan Yew figure. Lee once told an Indian audience that Singapore���s model cannot be adopted by India, which, according to him, ���is not a real country���Instead it is thirty-two separate nations that happen to be arrayed along the British rail line.���
The same can be said about Nigeria and Kenya. Singapore is an entrepot state of a few million at the gateway to the Malacca Straits, the world’s busiest shipping lane, with deep ancestral ties to China and India, the world���s richest economies for 1,800 of the last 2,000 years.
Each country���s trajectory is highly contingent on a set of unique circumstances and should never be applied wholesale. With the immense benefit of hindsight, Africans can choose from the best, most fitting lessons from the region, while staying vigilant of and mitigating many pitfalls.
For every one of me, inheritors of East Asia���s boom, there are, like New York City and London in the early 1900s, millions trapped as cheap labor servicing endless growth, forced to compete over scraps in unforgiving cities. East Asian inequality is nauseating. South Korea has the highest elderly poverty rate in the OECD, with almost half of its senior citizens condemned to destitution rather than retirement. Only disparities that torture the soul can create award-winning films like Parasite.
This is a feature, not a bug, of East Asia���s rapid growth. Opening up to global capitalism inevitably instills hierarchies and racialized aspirations. When I see advertisements for new luxury condominiums, possibly the most prevalent hoardings in Southeast Asia, it���s an image of a white man with his East Asian wife and mixed-race child. The message is clear. As Frantz Fanon wrote, ���you are rich because you are white, you are white because you are rich.���
East Asia may not have the levels of violent, heartless racism on brazen display in Western societies, but the 1990s were a turning point. East Asians began to look down on those modernization taught them to distrust. You don���t go from mourning an assassinated Congolese leader by the thousands to treating African expatriates as diseased in one generation without a drastic, very recent shift.
Some Westerners, like washed up drunks screaming profanities at a bar, might be tempted to repeat the mantras falsely underlining their sense of superiority to make preposterous demands of such young countries pieced together overnight. They might ask, ���Well what of democracy? Human rights? Freedom of the press? Free markets?��� These are all wonderful things, if they actually existed.
Not a single Western country was a democracy during its development. Western Europe had a fascist government in Spain until 1975. France and Britain fought horrific wars to deny Algeria and Kenya independence even after defeating Nazism. You can���t be a democracy when you deny democracy to others. European colonies were run as totalitarian dictatorships and lasted well into the late 20th century.
Freedom of the press? Try criticizing Israel in the mainstream US or German media.
Human rights? Europe lets migrants drown by the thousands in the Mediterranean. Australia has offshore camps for asylum seekers where abuse and rape are rampant. The US has kids in cages and its cops murder young Black men for sport.
Free markets? Both the US and Britain were viciously protectionist societies that relied on massive state intervention, and overwhelming military force, to mint its corporations.
The marriage of free markets to supposedly liberal democracy gave us Brazil���s Jair Bolsonaro, India���s Narendra Modi, the Philippines��� Rodrigo Duterte, and kept war criminal Benjamin Netanyahu as Israel���s longest serving leader. The Western liberal order, Indian writer Pankaj Mishra meticulously reveals, is an ���incubator for authoritarianism��� because it���s premised on fairy tales.
An open society, a vibrant marketplace, and a respect for human dignity are of course worthy and necessary goals. More representative forms of government, hopefully devised by us rather than imported from Cornwall, England, will arrive. We need not be ���Jeffersonian Democrats���; we can surely do better than a system championed by slave owners. As Deng Xiaoping said when China opened up after its century of humiliation, ���Let some people get rich first,��� which should be interpreted as a call to enrich societies as a whole before succumbing to obnoxious Western moralizing about values they rarely practice themselves.
Advancement need not only be predicated on economic growth and democratic politics and Africa need not only be the student and Asia the mentor. Asia has much to learn from Africa���s grand investments in culture in its earliest days. Aside from Vietnam, whose communist government funded the arts, and South Korea, which subsidized its K-Pop industry, most East Asian countries pay little attention to their cultural prowess on the world stage.
When kids in Djibouti listen to songs on their phone, it���s Somali music or Nigerian hits. Hop in a taxi in Accra or Khartoum and you hear that country���s sound. Africans listen to their own music. Southeast Asia does not. The richest music is derided as a pastime of lower classes, unfit for well-heeled urban elites. Talent gets lost in the never-ending roster of cover bands for top 40 American pop.
In Jakarta���s many behemoth malls, ���you will not hear Indonesian music,��� wrote journalist Vincent Bevins. ���You will not hear Japanese music, or anything from Asia��� It will all have been packaged and sold in the USA.��� It���s the same story anywhere in the region.
This may seem trivial, but a country���s image is vital to any lasting progress. In a world no longer able to ���identify with, let alone aspire to, Hollywood���s white fantasies of power, wealth and sex,��� wrote Fatima Bhutto in New Kings of the World: Dispatches from Bollywood, Dizi, and K-Pop, ���a vast cultural movement is emerging from the global South��� Truly global in its range and allure, it is the biggest challenge to America���s monopoly of soft power since the end of the Second World War.���
African countries laid the foundations in the ���70s to fill this vacuum. Their image will be defined in the next decades by their stellar music, set to be in our lifetimes the global staple and standard. Independent labels and corporate players like UMG and Sony, now with headquarters in Lagos and Abidjan, have ensured unprecedented international access to Africa���s abundance of music, past and present.
African literary festivals have also blossomed, adding to an impressive six percent growth in the industry. It���s only a matter of time before small and multinational publishing houses scout a new cadre of young African writers to make household names, as they did in South Asia. Africa hosts over 35 annual literary festivals, even in struggling cities like Mogadishu, while East Asia only enjoys 21.
Economic engines inevitably slow. Southeast Asia in particular must emulate African pride in its own music and related expressions of culture to seize on openings left behind by a once omnipotent cultural hegemony in full retreat. South Korea understood this early and enjoys a powerful, beloved global brand molded by pop music and films, not per capita income.
Even if Africa and Asia swap carefully selected approaches, ultimate success is only possible from a unity akin to the 1955 Bandung Conference. When we again mingle and ally, when we mourn each other���s dead, when we scribble names on napkins as acts of solidarity, we will again realize our lasting success. The final phase to complete the process of decolonization will have to be done jointly, in unison, or never at all.
October 2, 2020
Hospitali za mabepari
Photo by Piron Guillaume on Unsplash
For English click here.
Chapisho hili limetoka kwa Ukiritimba wetu katika safu ya Jiji langu, kushirikiana na Kituo cha Haki ya Jamii cha Mathare jijini Nairobi.
Inasemekana kuwa taifa yenye afya ni taifa ifanyayo kazi, lakini katika nchi ambayo huduma ya afya inamilikiwa na watu binafsi na ukosefu wa ajira umezidi, hamna afya wala kazi. Nimeshuhudia haya dada yangu alivyo ugua.
Nilihitimu shahada ya uchumi kutoka chuo kikuu cha Nairobi, mnamo mwaka wa 2017. Nikiwa chuoni, niliajiriwa katika kiwanda cha mvinyo (Kenya Wines and Agencies Limited) kama mfanyakazi wa kawaida. Ni nafasi ambayo wafanyakazi wametengwa na bidhaa inayotokana na kazi yao. Tulitengeneza, pakia, na kusambaza mvinyo na vinywaji vingine, lakini wengi wetu walikuwa wanalipwa shilingi mia nne (dolla 4) kwa siku. Vile vile, hatukumudu tunazotengeneza na ni sheria kutiwa mbaroni na kufungwa katika kituo cha polisi cha sehemu ya viwandani ungelipatikana kutumia bidhaa hizo.
Motisha ya uamuzi wangu kusomea shahada ya uchumi katika chuo kikuu ilikuwa kuelewa madogo na makuu ya uchumi yaliyokuwa misingi ya uzalishaji nchini Kenya, na kuboresha hali ya Maisha nyumbani. Kama mkufunzi, matarajio yetu yalikuwa kama kuajiriwa katika wizara ya serikali, benki kuu ama wizara ya hazina. Lakini, baada ya kupewa uwezo wa kusoma, kuandika na kufanya inavyohitajika na shahada yetu, ukweli wa mambo katika ulingo wa ajira ni tofauti kabisa, kwani nafasi za ajira ni nadra nchini ambamo wasomi elfu tisa huhitimu kila mwaka.
Photo by Marcelo Leal on UnsplashBaada ya kuhitimu, pamoja na matarajio ya familia ya�� kuboreshewa hali ya kimaisha, dada yangu, marehemu Winnie Anyango, akaugua Januari 2018. Tulimpata siku tatu baada ya kuzimia nyumbani kwake. Alilazwa katika hospitali ya kitaifa ya Kenyatta mbapo mdaktari wamkuta kuwa na shida ya mfumo wa neva, kilichozalisha ukosefu wa uratibu miguuni. Alipokea matibabu kwa muda wa miaka miwili na nusu lakini hakupona. Juma ya kwanza ya Mei 2020, alizimia tena akapelekwa hospitali ya St Mary Langata alikokutwa kuwa na uvimbe wa ubongo. Madaktari wa St Mary walipolinganisha MRI iliyofanywa katika hospitali ya Kenyatta na waliyofanya, walipata kuwa uvimbe ulionekana lakini ulikuwa mdogo wakati ule. Hatakama hospitali ya Kenyatta haikuitambua hapo awali.
Matokeo haya yalitupumbaza sana kwa kuwa upasuaji wa ubongo ungehitaji pesa nyingi. Tulijiuliza maswali mengi: tungemudu kivipi matibabu yake? Na angehitaji kusafirishwa ughaibuni kwa matibabu, ingewezekana kweli na huku kusitishwa safari za kawaida kwa jili ya covid-19? Tulifanya kadri ya uwezo wetu kutafuta zile hela za matibabu lakini Winnie aliaga dunia tarehe 28 Mei 2020.
Pamoja na ukosefu wa ajira, nchi yangu inakabidhiwa na ukosefu wa huduma ya afya ilhali wanaojihushisha na ubepari wanamudu huduma bora ya afya. Hata daraja la kati ya kiuchumi wanaofanana na mabwanyenye, wana umbali wa ajali mbaya ya barabarani na ugonjwa mbaya kutoka kwa umaskini. Utambuzi mbaya umeenea sana na watu wengi wamekufa kutokana na magonjwa ambayo yangetibiwa yangelitambuliwa mapema, au kama wangeenda katika hospitali kubwa na ya kibinafsi inayotoza tibabu ghali. Hali huzorota kwa masikini wanaoishi katika makao isiyo rasmi kulingana na matokeo ya utafiti iliyofanywa muda sio mrefu uliopita: Upatikanaji wa huduma bora za afya katika eneo bunge ya Embakasi North. Tulifanya utafiti huu a muda sio mrefu uliopita. Ni vyema kutilia manani matokeo yake hapa:
Zaidi ya vituo vya afya vya kibinafsi hutoza shilingi 10000 (dolla 100) kwa kiwango cha chini kabla ya kumpa mgonjwa matibabu ya dharura na wengi wao wamo hatarini mwa kufa kabla ya kuhudumiwa.
Vituo vya afya vya uma vina ukosefu wa dawa (ambacho ni uvivu wa kimuundo) na wagonjwa wanaelekezwa katika maduka ya dawa jirani kununua dawa ambazo zinauzwa kwa bei ghali.
Vituo vya afya haviwafirikii wanaoishi na ulemavu ambao wanashindwa kutumia vyoo kwa mfano kwani havina miundo ya kuwasaidia.
Umakini kazini katika vituo hivi vya afya umezorota sana. Wafanyikazi wanapiga gumzo badala ya kuwahudumia wagonjwa.
Ukosefu wa madaktari wenye ujuzi wa kitaaluma ambacho husababisha utambuzi wa kimakosa.
Vituo vingi vya afya havina huduma za maabara .
Ukosefu wa ujuzi pamoja na huduma za kupanga uzazi au huduma za afya ya kimapenzi . Hivi sasa, vijana wa umri wa miaka 12 wanajihusisha kimampenzi bila kutumia kinga na wamo hatarini mwa magonjwa ya zinaa, ubakaji, mimba za mapema , na ukatili wa kijinsia. Ni muhimu kunakili kuwa mmoja kati ya wasichana watano walio na umri wa 15-19 ni waja wazito au wamejifungua. Hali hii huchangia pakubwa kuavya mimba kwa njia isiyo halali kiafya na kisheria hivyo kuhatarisha maisha yao. Kwa hivyo ni muhimu kupunguza umri wa wasichana kuhalalisha kufunzwa afya ya kimapenzi ili wafanye uamuzi mwema ulio na ujuzi.
Sheria za kiislamu zinahitaji wagonjwa wa kike wahudumiwe na madaktari wa kike na wanaume wahudumiwe na madaktari wa jinsia yao. Katika hospitali nyingi kanuni hii haizingatiwi katika kutoa huduma za afya.
Ujuzi wa kitaaluma umekosekana katika vituo vya afya vya umma. Wauguzi na madaktari hutumia lugha chafu na wajawazito wanapigwa wakijifungua.
Mwisho, hatuna dawa za kutosha kwa wajawazito katika vituo vya afya vya umma. Wanalizimshwa kujinunulia dawa nje ya vituo hivi.
Photo by Arseny Togulev on UnsplashKwa minajili ya kuzidisha mapato, ubepari umewapora wananchi wa kawaida mahitaji ya kimsingi ambayo ni muhimu kwa kuishi.�� Kwa hivyo ni jukumu letu kama wanaharakati wa haki za kijamii katika vituo vya haki za kijamii kueneza elimu ya kisiasa na kudai huduma bora ya afya, makazi, chakula, maji safi na uchukuzi wa taka, elimu bora ya bure, ajira na heshima kwa haki za kibinadamu na utu kati ya haki zingine nyingi. Kumalizia, Dedan Kimathi alisema ��� ni bora kufa kwa miguu yangu kuliko kuishi kwa magoti,��� na mwishowe watu wenyewe watainuka ili kujikomboa. Ili kuwa taifa yenye afya inayofanya kazi, ni jukumu letu kudai ajira bora na huduma ya afya zaidi.
In the shadow of a liberation war
Oromo Liberation Front troops in 2006. Image credit Jonathan Alpeyrie via Wikimedia Commons.
While the cultural links between Oromo in Kenya and Ethiopia are recognized, both states have worked hard to delegitimize the struggles of the Oromo Liberation Front. In this article, Dalle Abraham reflects on the substantive and aspirational ties between the Kenyan Oromo and the OLF, and the music and journalistic efforts that are the vehicles for possible political solidarity. This post, originally published by The Elephant, is part of a series curated by Editorial Board member, Wangui Kimari.
A Kenyan journalist was arrested in Addis Ababa in the wake of the assassination of Haacaaluu Hundeessaa, a popular Oromo musician. Yassin Juma was arrested alongside prominent Oromo opposition political figures like Jawar Mohammed, the founder of the Oromo Media Network. Juma was later charged with ���incitement and involvement in violence, plotting to create ethnic violence and plotting to kill senior Ethiopian officials.���
A court freed him but the police continued to hold him.
Yassin Juma is perhaps the only Kenyan journalist to show interest in the Oromo liberation movement. In Kenya, both the media and government functionaries view the Oromo Liberation Front (OLF) as a security threat, with journalists rehashing half-baked arguments about what the OLF means in the region���s conflict.
It was Yassin Juma who introduced the Oromo cause to a larger Kenyan audience with his TV documentary, Inside Rebel Territory, 10 years ago. In it we follow Yassin as he goes in search of OLF fighters: ���It was a journey that finally yielded [the] faces of one of Africa���s longest albeit low-key rebellions ��� the OLF was for decades a mystery.���
Inside Rebel Territory earned him the respect of the Oromo and the ire of Meles Zenawi���s regime. Five months ago, he was invited to Finfinnee Radio���s 5nan Show where he spoke about the state of the media and reflected on his coverage of the Oromo movement.
���My reason for being here is to make a follow-up documentary to [���] Inside Rebel Territory ��� I am doing a documentary about the rebels I met then, their life now, after Dr Abiy took over [as Ethiopia���s prime minister] ��� how they find life and so forth.���
We can already guess what the new Ethiopia looks like. Guracho, who featured in Yassin���s documentary, is now in jail. Falimatu, a woman he had interviewed, may have been killed two or three years ago. He was in Addis Ababa when Haacaaluu Hundeessaa was killed and the country erupted into violence. Ethiopia prefers to hide its face from the roving cameras of the likes of Yassin Juma.
On Finfinne Radio Yassin reveals who he is, how the story he had done on the OLF was almost killed. How he was offered $150,000 by the Zenawi regime to kill it. How he had received threats. How the owners of Nation Media Group had not been happy with that coverage. How it had caused a diplomatic row between Kenya and Ethiopia. How it triggered a series of events that eventually led to his leaving NTV. How since then his life and that of his family has not been very secure: ���In 2009 I was almost shot dead twice in front of my house ��� In 2016 I had to move to Uganda for three months for helping to organize Oromo protests in Kenya.��� He was officially banned from entering Ethiopia.
Yassin Juma had covered the Oromo Liberation Front at a time when the movement badly needed the coverage. Ethiopia���s notorious media laws, stemming from the US-backed antiterrorism law, had forced its outspoken journalists into prison. That coverage was important on many counts; it came out at a time when the Oromo cause was transitioning from armed rebellion to an ideological youth- and artists-led movement at around the same time that Haacaaluu was breaking onto the music scene. A scroll through Yassin Juma���s Facebook page shows how important a player he had become in the Oromo cause; he is seen posing with Jawar and Haacaaluu and appears in most Oromo events held in post-revolution Ethiopia.
For Kenya, Ethiopia is a landlocked market of 100 million people, a destination for goods from its ports and, more recently, a partner in the LAPSSET (Lamu Port, South Sudan, Ethiopia Transport) corridor project. In this context, complex stories such as Yassin Juma sought to tell were to Kenya an unwelcome initiative, going against sixty years of close cooperation built around keeping Somalia���s aggression in check. For their part, both the OLF and successive Ethiopian regimes have recognized the strategic importance of Kenya.
As an immediate neighbor, Kenya was important for the Oromo cause���as a refuge for thousands of fleeing Oromos and as transit territory for Oromos escaping oppression at home. Kenya���s importance in the Horn���s geo-politics, it���s appeal as a regional ���bastion of peace��� and as the regional capital for all manner of international media outlets and posh Western think tanks, as well as Kenya���s role in Somalia���s pacification efforts and its shuttle diplomacy in South Sudan���s independence, have fueled the Oromos��� desire to secure Kenya as an important ally. But how Kenya perceived and portrayed the Oromo struggle spoke volumes about the liberation movement���s international image.
In Kenya, the roots of the OLF rebellion were whitewashed and a truncated history was often told, the Oromo liberation struggle being portrayed as a threat to regional peace. The Kenyan media has reduced the OLF in the Kenyan mindset to illegitimate militias out to destabilize the region. Ethiopian ambassadors have reinforced the local political and media narrative that the Oromo cause is a quest to establish an Oromo super-state stretching all the way to Tana River, a narrative intertwined with other stories about the skirmishes between the Gabra and Borana in Marsabit. The OLF thus became the regional insecurity scapegoat, blamed for the October 1998 Bagalla Massacre in which 140 people were killed in Wajir and the July 2005 Turbi Massacre in Marsabit in which almost 90 people perished, and for the proliferation of arms in the north, for banditry, and even for livestock rustling.
Yet, this conclusion glossed over the complexities at play; the Ethiopian army���s harassment of Kenyans at the border was either ignored or the frequent abductions, killings, and harassment of Kenyans by the Ethiopian military were dismissed as being the work of locals.
Following the Turbi Massacre, the OLF���s Dr Fido Ebba said that the OLF���s image was wrongly tainted and that the problem in Marsabit is two-fold, as some of the raids are purely tribal. They pit civilian communities against each other over scarce resources and cattle. The rest are diversionary tactics by militias engaged by authorities within Ethiopia���s ruling class. They aim at inciting communities on the Kenyan side and possibly the government into fighting the OLF back.
Ethiopia also issued a similar counter-argument, for example in April 2006, when the OLF was blamed for the killing of two herders in Dukana. Ethiopia���s then acting ambassador to Kenya, Ajebe Ligaba Wolde, insisted that it is the OLF that provokes and incites people along the border with Kenya. ���They [OLF] put on Ethiopian soldiers��� uniforms to defame Ethiopia ��� OLF is not only a threat to peace in Ethiopia, but also to Kenya and the whole region. They want to destabilize the region��� said Mr Wolde.
Oromo Liberation Front ideologues and leadership view Kenya as an important player to whom they look with hope, believing that peace will come sooner if Kenya steers the talks between the Oromo and Ethiopia. ���If Kenyans mediated between the Ethiopian government and the Oromo they would understand the problems better, just like they did with Sudan and Somalia��� said Dr Fido Ebba.
Ethiopia, which contributed to the liberation of Kenya���s struggle for independence (and was gifted an embassy in appreciation), has enjoyed a long, peaceful diplomatic relationship with Kenya, having signed a defense pact and a treaty of friendship and cooperation in the 1980s. Dr Fido Ebba wishes that the OLF could have its administrative base in Kenya, and not in the US (Washington) as is currently the case. ���Our push for liberation would then be coordinated from close proximity��� he says.
Incursions into Kenyan territory by the Ethiopian army in search of the OLF are very common. In 2015 the Ethiopian army crossed into Kenya six times, once even taking over a police station in Illeret, Marsabit. Cross-border massacres���like the March 1997 Kokai Massacre in which 80 people including 19 police officers were killed���have been raised with the Ethiopian regime.
The OLF pointed an accusing finger at the Kenyan government and army, claiming that the Kenyan army has supported the Ethiopian army to wage war against the OLF, that Kenya had broken with several international protocols to abduct and repatriate legitimate Oromo refugees and that Oromo activists have been assassinated by Ethiopian security agents on Kenyan soil.
The decades-long struggle and the fraught relationship between Kenya, the OLF and Ethiopia seemed for a brief moment to be water under the bridge when the Oromo Media Network (OMN) was launched in Nairobi in the wake of the Qeerroo revolution. During the launch, Jawar Mohammed said:
I have come to this place many times before. I had to change my name and look. I am happy that we now can reveal our names and faces to each other. We didn���t plead for this ��� We fought for it ��� We threw those who made us hide our faces in a hole and came out ��� It���s not play that brought us here ��� We lost people like Jatani Ali to arrive here ��� I would like to say thank you to the government of Kenya even though they were not open and fully supportive of our struggle ��� There cannot be liberation for Oromos or for Ethiopia without its neighbors.
Mohammed spoke of how the OMN would lead to the establishment of a bridge between the two countries by bringing the Oromos in Kenya together and by connecting the Oromos in Kenya with the Oromos in Ethiopia through listening to the OMN.
In the constructed narrative, this talk could easily be misconstrued as alluding to the establishment of an Oromia republic stretching into Kenya.
When Dr Abiy Ahmed became the Ethiopian premier, there were celebrations in Nairobi and in the streets of Isiolo, and a commemoration for all the slain Oromo people was held in Marsabit.
The Marsabit County Woman Representative, Safia Sheikh Adan, organized a memorial day for slain Borana heroes and waxed lyrical about the Oromo liberation���Bilisumna���weeping as she recited a poem and read the names of leaders slain through political machinations.
But one name was repeated again and again by Governor Mohammed Ali, by Jawar Mohammed and by the representative: Mebastion Jatani Ali Tandhu, the former Provincial Governor of Borana Province in Southern Oromia who was assassinated by Ethiopian security agents on�� July 2, 1992 at Tea Zone Hotel in Nairobi. Tandhu had been in Kenya to seek political asylum from Zenawi���s Ethiopia. Over the past three decades, he had become an Oromo political liberation martyr and cultural icon, his words revisited in songs and Oromo protest poetry. In commemoration, a message was carried in Kenya���s Daily Nation on the 10th anniversary of his death: ���Exactly 10 years since you were brutally murdered by the operatives of Tigre Peoples Revolutionary Front (TPLF)/Ethiopian People���s Revolutionary ���Democratic��� Front (EPRDF), The course for which you died is still alive.��� With Abiy in power, his glory was resurrected and an equestrian statue was installed in the center of his hometown of Yaballo. New songs were composed in his praise. Tandhu had been buried in Marsabit and when Abiy came to power, his grave at the Marsabit cemetery was repainted.
It was Safia Sheikh Adan who financed the commemoration day. She spoke about Jattani Ali Tandhu���s contributions and mentioned other prisoners like Jatani Kunu who she said was still being held in an underground prison in Ethiopia. ���We have lost many brave and strong people ��� Jatani Ali Tandhu, Galo Wolde, Qala Waqo, Sheikh Hassan, Hussein Sora Agole, Mohammed Halakhe Fayo and Hersi Jatani.���
In her overly sentimental tributes, Safia Sheikh Adan mentioned the names of slain former Kenyan parliamentarians like Guyo Halakhe, Philip Galma and Isacko Umuro. Their assassinations, like that of Daudi Dabasso Wabera (the first African Colonial District Commissioner who was assassinated by the Shifta in 1963), were unrelated to anything Oromo.
But the poem Safia Sheikh Adan recited, her tears and her actions were out of sync with the local politics and current feeling. A few understood her but most people watched her and wondered where her emotions were coming from and her efforts were finally without significance or consequence, dismissed as part of the initial euphoric joy that an Oromo was finally the Ethiopian premier.
When popular musician Haacaaluu Hundeessaa was killed on June 29, 2020, our hearts were broken and the sense of grief that engulfed us had a familiar weight. As Ethiopia descended into mourning and chaos, in Marsabit I listened to Haacaaluu���s albums anew. My friend and I paused and replayed certain songs to try to decipher what he meant and our sadness was deepened by the raw honesty of the injustice he described. That this was the soundtrack of a now stolen revolution added to the feeling that Ethiopia was a place of great injustice.
I remembered the image of Haacaaluu bursting onto the music scene about 10 years ago, a skinny boy in oversized shirt and trousers. We spoke about his music and his political education, his five-year jail term when he was just 17 years old. We revisited the words of the Oromo liberation struggle as if we were reminiscing, as if it was about us. And we said aaaayyyiii, expressing the turmoil in our hearts. But at the end of the day, none of the political pathos and calls to action were about us, and nor were they happening on our doorstep. The deep articulation of the injustice that we listened to was in our own language but that struggle was not ours.
The aftermath of Haacaaluu���s death and the blowback in Oromia leads me to thoughts about what the Oromo struggle means to those of us who have come of age under its shadow.
To grow up in a liminal space like Marsabit is to be in an endless interregnum of something not quite yours. The earliest memory of the Oromo liberation struggle for me dates back to when I was six years old in mid-1990s Marsabit. Back then, a tape of a poet would be shared across the town, and we would listen alongside our parents, picking up words that sounded funny and made no sense to us.
It was hard, then, to link those words to concepts like oppression and injustice. But over the years, the OLF became the subject of whispers in Marsabit. OLF stories circulated in the manner of a secret; tales of disappearances were told, of men whose wives were taken in the night, of people whose lips had been cut off for snitching. The whisper was a mix of many fears, of the Kenyan Special Branch, of District Commissioners who had lists of OLF sympathizers, of the OLF itself, of Ethiopian spies. In Marsabit some of the murders in the town were linked to these fears.
In our home, the land of our grandparents��� past, Ethiopia, was the unspoken and unacknowledged thought. But its music was the future we aspired to; our heartbreak, our love, our longing for elusive dreams were in those lyrics.
Once, my dad came home with a small OLF flag, with the tree in the middle and the star above it. He stuck it up one side of our wall. It was the first symbol of the OLF as something good that was forbidden.
Many years later, I asked my Dad what that flag had meant to him and where he got it from. He had been in a car heading to Nairobi when he met a man who had engaged him in talk, telling him how liberation for the Oromo would benefit us all, how my dad in Kenya had to be conscious too, how the war being fought needed him.
My inquiry was short but in my father���s clipped answers I found an explanation I could relate to. I knew what his words meant and I knew what his silences meant. He had, like me, grown up on the poetry of Oromo oppression and on the songs of their hopeful salvation. Yet this long political induction had never called him to any action.
Calls for independence have a liberatory romance about them that is inviting to sympathizers. And nowhere is the Oromo call for liberation, and the reason for this call, and the status of this call, as articulated as it is in the music of the Oromo. The Oromo songs we listened to in Moyale, Marsabit, Isiolo, and Nairobi arose from the liberation struggle. They were songs and poetry that articulated Oromo suffering and encouraged resistance. Through the songs, the turmoil and suffering of the Oromo was transmitted to us in Kenya. But in Kenya, we seemed to run away from it all, not learning how to speak of the injustice that followed us.
In Marsabit we carried other stories of Ethiopia in our hearts, stories of an unacknowledged past as we forged new Kenyan identities, stories of the Amharas and how the gabbar system had forced our grandparents out of Ethiopia. Stories of slavery and of Abyssinian expansionism into southern Ethiopia.
We followed the Qeerroo protests keenly and vouched for them. But stolen revolutions break the heart even more. Haacaaluu���s murder was testament to a stolen revolution, an encore to the 1974 Derg, when the army through Mengistu stole another revolution. How many of the men in Marsabit escaped conscription in Ethiopia���s many wars with Eritrea and on its own people? How many had had hopes that their suffering would come to an end before the revolution was stolen from them in 1974, in 1991 and again in 2018?
I sit with a local musician in Marsabit and try to understand the influence of Oromo music on the Borana music produced and consumed in Kenya. How devoid of politics the songs in Kenya seem. I ask, ���how come Borana musicians from Kenya haven���t contributed to the Oromo protest tradition?���
He says, ���birds from different places speak a different tongue.���
It is a common saying about how things that look similar can be unrelated. In his answer, I understood so much. It is the caged bird that sings better of freedom.
A social-cultural state that defied the Westphalia model did exist in a section of northern Kenya and southern Ethiopia. A cultural state called Oromia did exist but, more than political aspirations, it was language, music, traditional political institutions, and contiguous populations that marked its boundaries.
Is the Oromo cause over? Is it legitimate? How has their struggle progressed? Which parties speak for the Oromo? Where are they? What���s happening in Ethiopia? Asking Kenyan Borana/Oromo these questions is asking them far too much. None of these questions have been considered before. Yet somehow, a version of the Oromo pain has been inscribed in the psyche of the Kenyan Oromo through the Oromo music and protest tradition. The revolutionary spirit is appealing but there is no substance beneath the thin veneer of solidarity.
It was thus easy to romanticize the struggle itself, to hang posters of Lemma Megersa in khat shops while not knowing which party speaks for who. Yassin Juma had tried to put a story to this romantic idea of a political rebellion.
The Kenyan government���s choice of silence as a strategy and its hush-hush attitude towards the Oromo or the Ethiopian army���s repeated aggression on the border is just a convenient excuse, as is the simplistic idea peddled by security analysts that Kenyan Oromo also desire an Oromia super-state. It is reading too much into a romantic idea.
I know now that sympathy for���or identification with���the Oromo cause became intertwined with local politics as early as the 1990s, and allegations that local politicians had begun enlisting the services of OLF fighters were rife in Marsabit and that that there was some truth to these allegations.
For the states of the East African region there is a need to understand the Oromo cause and what is happening in Ethiopia. The Oromo call and the Ethiopian regime���s response to it should not be considered inconsequential, for the response is an indicator of how oppression, inclusion, and participation of the marginalized are viewed in those states.
The old pattern in the region���s attempts at reform has been to gain one kind of political progress and lose another. To allow for the judiciary to be pseudo-independent but to cut it back when it does its work. Extrajudicial killings, mass arrests, clamping down on the freedom of association and freedom of speech, the arbitrary arrest of journalists, torture and detentions without trial, draconian and controversial laws like the social media tax in Uganda, the controversial hate speech law in Ethiopia, Internet shutdowns in Uganda and Ethiopia, declaration of a state of emergency to suppress legal and peaceful protests, all these speak of identical regional infirmities. For activists, pseudo-revolutionaries and politicians there are lessons here on the pitfalls of revolutionary nationalism in mainstream politics.
For the people of northern Kenya, whether viewed as potential citizens of a future ���Oromia��� or as relatives of disenfranchised, broken OLF fighters, or as the inhabitants of places invoked in Oromo songs, the sooner Ethiopia addresses the Oromo plight the better for the region. But even as Ethiopia sorts out its politics, the region also needs to formulate the ways in which the armed fighters are going to fit back into the community and not become a security threat by being enlisted to serve Marsabit politics.
In August 2017, four days after Ethiopia lifted its 10-month state of emergency, and as Kenya was in the throes of post-electoral violence, I crossed the border into Ethiopia at Moyale. In southern Ethiopia, in towns like Mega, Yaballo, and Soyama, I counted a few T-Shirts adorned with the portraits of gubernatorial contestants in Marsabit. My grand-aunt was very worried that Kenya would burn with her daughter in it. After 10 days of drinking copious amounts of Ethiopian bunna in many towns and even in a restaurant at Akaki Kaliti, a sub-city of Addis Ababa, I returned to Kenya. On the way to Yaballo, political campaign songs about Marsabit���s politics played on the matatu���s stereo.
It is in this larger context that Yassin Juma found himself in a prison in Ethiopia. He has since been released and is back in Kenya and we are waiting for his documentary about what Ethiopia is doing to its youth.
Parallels can be drawn between the struggles in Ethiopia and the situation in Kenya, how a minority wields economic and political power, keeping out the majority of citizens by means of elaborate political machinations. Keeping Kenyan youth in check with guns is not any different from the Ethiopian government���s incarceration of its youth and its heavy-handed reaction to dissent.
But there is something markedly different in the civil response in Ethiopia; 10-year-olds are active in the streets of Ambo.
It was important to observe Kenya���s reaction to Yassin Juma���s arrest and his release as this could be a signal to northern Kenya of a change in the government���s attitude towards the killings and assassinations that have been perpetrated in the name of the OLF in Kenya, and that the border regions will finally be treated with the seriousness they deserve.
October 1, 2020
Precarious Somali boyhoods
Photo by Brendan Church on Unsplash
Hassan Ghedi Santur���s novel Youth of God and Mohamed Abdulkarim Ali���s Angry Queer Somali Boy: A Complicated Memoir, both published in 2019, explore accounts of troubled and ruptured boyhoods.
The two books could not be more different, despite straddling very similar themes. Santur���s novel introduces us to the vulnerable 17-year-old protagonist, Nuur, who is in a deeply religious phase as bullying at school and abuse at home have become unbearable. Abandoned by his biological father, Nuur alternates between two Somali father figures, his progressive schoolteacher, Mr. Ilmi, and the conniving Imam Yusuf. Written in melancholic prose, Santur creates a vivid constellation of migrant characters all of whom are bound by an overarching feeling of alienation. The present never matches up to rosy memories of the past, and the trauma of having fled a war-torn homeland is passed down from generation to generation, leaving everyone trapped in a perpetual state of mourning.
Ali���s memoir is an altogether different composition. Hard-hitting and harshly cynical, the protagonist punches through his trauma by lashing out in every way possible. Also abandoned by his father, and left to a vicious and violently abusive stepmother, Ali refuses any kind of emotional refuge, admission of vulnerability, or self-love. He does not engage in the moral reckoning or with the kind of alternative familial structures that underscore Santur���s work. Throughout the memoir, Ali is prone to instances of extreme self-harm. Being bullied at school turns him into a bully, and being beaten up at home leads to vandalism jaunts. The memoir can be a verbal assault upon the reader, and is designed to shock, repel, and prod us into an upsetting and resigned submission.
Yet, oddly, these works complete each other. What is left out in one is brought full circle in the other, thus bringing them into symbiotic and productive tension with one another. These are stories that rupture romantic notions of typical coming-of-age narratives. They expose instead the emotional chasms left by traumatic migrant journeys and the impossibility of healing. Moreover, they shatter the myths of liberal tolerance in Canada by zooming in on a flawed and violent education system that is ironically unable to produce the obedient, assimilated, ���good��� migrants that the country desires.
Toronto is the object of complicated disdain in both works. One of the world���s most multicultural and diverse cities, and known to be socially progressive, it has a reputation for absorbing many traditions, nations, and experiences. Yet, as the texts show, Somali migrants live in enclaves here, the inequality is acute, and the death toll from all kinds of racialized violence is surprisingly high. In the memoir, Ali moves from Somalia to the UAE to the Netherlands, and finally to Canada. His is not a wide-eyed arrival to Toronto. Ali immediately sniffs out the wealth disparities and racist hostility that lurks beneath the surface of cheery Canadianisms. When he later enrolls at Ryerson University in downtown Toronto, he tries hard to endure the fact that he is the only Black student in his class, though he does slowly tire of his white classmates��� ���anthropological intrigue��� about his upbringing in Toronto���s so-called ���ghetto��� neighborhood.
In Youth of God, we get a glimpse of cold and cramped high-rise living common in the neighborhood called Dixon, populated mainly by Somali migrants who fled dictatorship and war in the 1980s and 1990s. Gang violence, police violence, and random targeting of Black youth seem commonplace. Even in the heretic, sealed-off world of Santur���s novel, students in Nuur���s high school often end up injured in shootouts. When Nuur���s older brother, Ayuub, decides to move to Alberta to find work, Nuur is reminded that not even a month ���passed these days without news of another young Somali man���s body being found in some snowbank or muddy ditch somewhere.��� The police ubiquitously offer up ���drug war��� as the cause. Santur, however, attempts to excavate the relatively unknown nature of racialized violence, not just in Toronto but also in other parts of Canada.
Violence is a totalizing framework in both worlds. Ali describes it with an almost salacious brutality, and in Santur���s world, it is a menacing presence threatening Nuur at all times, even though descriptions of blood and gore are minimal. The violence is omnipresent in school and at home, which means that the young boys never have a safe space in which to relax and exist within their own skins. Ali���s home is an openly hostile space where terrifying beatings are common and verbal abuse is non-stop. Nuur���s home is a place of neglect and isolation, and when his unreliable father suddenly returns out of the blue, verbal and physical punishment also enter the fray.
The space of school, however, is absolutely horrifying in both narratives. Santur and Ali extensively explore the bullying experienced by young boys. School life is a dog-eat-dog world, and these Black and Muslim youth are the butt of nasty, racist jeering, with random beatings par for the course. Ali weathers these better than Nuur and does not hesitate to retaliate. For Nuur, desperately in search of a peaceful and spiritual realm of God, a singular retaliatory incident costs him his entire future. Such a comprehensive exploration of bullying in both books, published within months of each other, exposes an education system in crisis, and in which�� migrant children are being specifically targeted for being different.
In both stories, nostalgia for the old homeland seeps in. Notwithstanding, neither writer indulges narratives of perfect pasts and perfect nations. Ali and Santur focus on the home as a site of extreme migrant pain. Ali writes:
Violence as the expression of our frustrations. We were a proud people brought low by historical circumstance. No one had the time to go figure out what went wrong because life had to go on. We had to thrive in this alien land and jealously guard whatever we had left of our culture.
It is heartbreaking to see the young boys becoming the objects of all the frustrations experienced by their mothers and fathers. The forced departure from one���s home and the experience of being unwanted in the West result in a gaping, festering wound. Violence begets more violence. Parents are irredeemable and cruel characters in these stories, as they upturn all notions of kind, loving, and supportive family life.
Santur and Ali beautifully capture the rage of diaspora children and the precarity of not belonging. Left adrift by their parent���s generation and rejected in the West, the boys attempt to perform different identities in order to fit in. Nuur recedes into the life of the mosque under the tutelage of a manipulative and fanatical Imam, while his brother Ayuub rejects tradition in favor of a white girlfriend and a passion for rap and hip hop. Ali explores the play of various identities in greater detail as he takes on and sheds several avatars throughout the memoir. The most complicated affiliation is, without doubt, with Blackness.
In Toronto, Ali sees that migrant kids are encouraged to express their own culture, unlike in the Netherlands, where the key to assimilation is erasure of past selves. However, this is quite confusing to him because he sees that the ���young Somalis in the area��� become ���Black.��� He writes that they ���spoke Jafaican and dressed no differently from youths in Baltimore or Detroit. At home it was Islam and anjeero for breakfast, while outside it was beef patties and hip hop. The duality came at an existential cost.��� Indeed, the glove does not quite fit, and the Somali boys are mocked for appropriating identities forged out of histories of slavery and colonialism. ���You���re not really Black,��� they are told.
At home, a disgusting anti-Blackness prevails. Aware of being attracted to boys and certain he is gay, Ali finds refuge in friendships with Black girls. ���I don���t know what I would���ve done without these brilliant girls…I will forever be grateful for the space they made in their lives and hearts, for a boy who felt unwanted by the world.��� But his evil stepmother Samira would have none of it and ���encouraged us to avoid these black people.��� Samira���s gluttonous consumption of racist and sensationalist media meant blackness was a perennial fear. This fear and it���s ���odious effects drove a wedge between those born or raised in Western cities with large populations of black Americans, Caribbeans, or African������ and traditional Somali migrants who declared all sorts of things as ���a corruption of our Islamic values.�����This is the high existential cost that Ali refers to when he poignantly asks, ���And when did we stop being black?���
Across the border, those in the US have watched with great envy as Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has bragged about upholding the policy of multiculturalism. Trudeau declared that ���Canada has long recognized that we are all better off when we respect and unite behind our differences. But our work is not yet finished. We must all continue to learn about each other, embrace our diversity, and celebrate what it is to be Canadian.��� Compared to the open xenophobia being practiced in the US and Europe, each beset with escalating right-wing hatred, Canada certainly appears a beacon of tolerance. But it only takes two books to uncover how shallow these narratives of unity, respect, and tolerance are to those experiencing the exact opposite. Anti-Black, anti-Muslim, and anti-poor structures are endemic, parts of a planetary disease, and Canada and Canadians are certainly not exempt.
Youth of God and Angry Queer Somali Boy are wrenching stories of two boys, mid-air, in a trapeze act with no safety net to catch them if they fall. Somali boyhood in Toronto is a joyless experience. Love is scarce, as is lasting friendship. Physical and emotional precarity is the order of the day. The only way out is to run as fast as possible from these cruel circumstances. Although Nuur and Ali manage to free themselves from their oppressive families and violent schools, the reader will find little comfort in knowing where they end up.
The university of patriarchy
Nkrumah Hall, University of Dar es Salaam. Image credit Nick Fraser via Wikimedia Commons.
On June 19, 2020, Zuhura Yunus, the first woman presenter on BBC Swahili, hosted an in-depth discussion about sextortion in Tanzanian higher education on her independent Swahili talk show, ���Zoom With Zu,��� broadcast on YouTube. Yunus highlights a renewed national debate on sexual harassment in the country���s higher education institutions���sparked by Dr. Vicensia Shule���s controversial tweet in late 2018 about the ubiquity of sexual extortion (shortened to sextortion in Tanzania) at the University of Dar es Salaam.
In the episode, four invited guests���including Shule and Muhidin Shangwe, both academics from the University of Dar es Salaam���reflect on what social forces contribute to the problem of sextortion perpetrated by lecturers against students, why existing policies are not working, and what steps universities should take to address the problem.
In the context of Tanzanian higher education, sextortion occurs when lecturers and other university staff members take advantage of unequal power relations to extort sexual favors, usually from students. On ���Zoom with Zu,��� Shule describes the problem as rooted in the patriarchal structure inherent in the University of Dar es Salaam and Tanzanian universities more broadly, which reflects societal power relations. She emphasizes that a steadily increasing number of women in leadership positions does not automatically transform a patriarchal structure: ���When women enter positions of authority, that authority was created and shaped by patriarchal forces. And, so, they often turn out to be a part of that system, they become the executors of that system.���
Dr. Muhidin Shangwe and Shule lament that within the patriarchal structure of Tanzanian higher education, there are some men in positions of authority who are actively looking to exploit vulnerable students. Shule explains, ���What is really a big issue here is that a man looks for a student that he perceives as vulnerable either because of a problem with money or who is perhaps at risk of failing a class.���
An intense familial pressure to succeed leads some students���especially low-income women students���to participate in sextortion. ���There is so much pressure that comes from the family. You���ve come from a family that has little economic means, and you���re expected to return home with a degree and a job,��� says Shule. ���It is often the case that students who see themselves as at risk of failing use this opportunity ��� they must look for an alternative option in order to survive.���
Sextortion is a form of sexual abuse, insists Shule. ���You can���t say that sextortion and sexual assault are two different things…because sextortion is done without consent as well as through deception or fraud.��� Shule and Shangwe explain that the problem is not with the written policies that are in place to address sexual abuse in higher education������We���ve done a really good job of putting in place laws and procedures,��� says Shangwe���rather that existing policies are not implemented. One issue is a general lack of awareness among students about what constitutes sexual abuse and how to report it. The University of Dar es Salaam has a program for first-year students to raise awareness about the issue of sexual harassment and abuse, says Shangwe, but ���it only takes place for the first week of classes, and many students never get a chance to participate in it before it���s done.
Another issue is that when students do report sextortion, they often face hostility from the people within reporting mechanisms and structures. Shangwe cites victim shaming as a common form of hostility students face when they report sexual abuse: ���You may say something and then be told, ���But it was you who dressed provocatively, why did you dress like that?��� Furthermore, the university is structured to protect the interests of faculty over the wellbeing of students when it comes to sexual abuse, which dissuades students from reporting and enables the problem to continue. Shule explains:
Remember that the men who engage in such behavior here have a huge network, like [Shangwe] said. Perpetrators have structural support. They tell each other, ���We can���t get rid of our colleague, that���s a person with a PhD, a full professor who can���t be expelled from his work because of a girl like this.��� They reassure each other in their network that it���s a system for protecting each other���s interests…When you report or give evidence, the system just victimizes you even more.
Shangwe and Shule insist that the goal moving forward should be to make sure existing policies are properly implemented. Encouraging students to report and creating a safer environment for reporting would help to ensure accountability. ���We have not put in place friendly structures that actually encourage victims to come forward and demand accountability. Changing this would improve things,��� says Shangwe.
Shule and Shangwe both argue that there should be more transparency in case outcomes. When students report cases of sextortion, they are often frustrated that ���no information has been shared about what measures have been taken, which is an issue of communication,��� says Shangwe. Shule reiterates, ���We have to receive the results of these cases.���
Shule additionally calls for universities to allow ���independent bodies���that operate separately from our universities���to offer external assessments of the problem of sextortion in universities.��� When Shule herself sought to explore student perceptions of sextortion on campus, the university was quick to shut her down: ���Because of this, it���s clear that there is something being hidden by the system.���
Shule sees the issue of ���sextortion��� as inextricable from corruption more broadly. Like other forms of corruption, it is often the result of economic and power inequities and involves a deceptive or fraudulent economic exchange. ���The chief inspector of the government should work closely with the Prevention and Combating of Corruption Bureau (PCCB) to make sure that the government money flowing into our universities isn���t enabling sextortion,��� says Shule.
Ten days after the ���Zoom with Zu��� episode about sextortion was aired, the Swahili Times reported on Twitter that St. Augustine University of Tanzania (SAUT) in Mwanza had dismissed three lecturers for their involvement in sextortion. In a public press statement, the university condemned sextortion and encouraged students to continue coming forward.
While SAUT���s public denunciation of sextortion and dismissal of three lecturers is a start, universities, in their efforts to ensure systemic change, must also try to understand and address the underlying social, economic, and political forces that enable sextortion. As Shule reminds us, ���We are confronting a structure that is deeply rooted. We can only dismantle the structure by digging up the roots.���
September 30, 2020
Frozen in time
Photo by Kenny Luo on Unsplash
The most surprising aspect of Bhakti Shringarpure and Lily Saint���s survey of the African literature, taught in mostly US and European universities, is that there are depressingly few surprises���at least as far as North African literature is concerned.
Shringarpure and Saint describe sending emails to more than 250 academics, mostly members of the African Literature Association. Responses from 105 show that teaching tends to cluster around a single text as a ���representative��� of each country. Although the titles would not be a surprise to those who read US and UK criticism, they might well be a surprise to an Arabic literature professor in Cairo, Rabat, or Khartoum.
If you asked an Arabic literature professor teaching at Cairo University which Egyptian writer they would expect at the top of this list, they might think it���s a trick question. Naguib Mahfouz, right? Or ��� what, Taha Hussein? If you said, no, no, it���s a woman writer, they might suggest novelists who are canonized in Arabic, such as Radwa Ashour, Latifa al-Zayyat, or Salwa Bakr, all of whom had works on the Arab Writers Union���s list of top novels of the 20th century. A particularly well-read professor might suggest Iman Mersal. But none of those women appear. Overall, there are roughly as many works by women as by men, but there is more variety among male writers. For women, there are fewer, seemingly representative writers: for Algeria, it���s work by Assia Djebar (particularly Women of Algiers in Their Apartments) that dominates. For Morocco, it���s a book by Laila Lalami (Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits).
As for Egypt, it���s Nawal El Saadawi who appears most often, with five books, one of which���Woman at Point Zero���was mentioned 17 times, making her one of the most-taught authors continent-wide. Sixteen percent of the survey respondents taught with this book. Indeed, in the US and UK, El Saadawi has been much-feted, her name circulated for a literary Nobel. In Arabic, she is not rated as a novelist. That is not to say she isn���t an important writer in Arabic. Nawal El Saadawi is acclaimed as a memoirist, researcher, and polemicist. As Ahdaf Soueif said in a 1996 interview: ���El Saadawi writes good scientific research, but she writes bad novels.���
Yet, it was not for its aesthetic qualities that El Saadawi���s work became firmly entrenched in US syllabi in the 1980s and early 1990s. And there it remains, seemingly cemented in place, seemingly preventing new work from appearing. The classic essay that Amal Amireh published 20 years ago, ���Framing Nawal El Saadawi,��� remains relevant today; it details El Saadawi���s conscription as a celebrity author, how she was simultaneously posited as representative of Arab women and utterly unique. At the time Amireh was writing, El Saadawi was already heavily anthologized in English, the only Arab woman writer who had an entry in the Feminist Companion to Literature in English.
The Hidden Face of Eve, first published in English in 1980, was El Saadawi���s breakthrough book. When it appeared, Amireh writes, there was significant Western attention being given to FGM, and the book���in its English translation���emphasizes the practice, even adding a chapter not in the Arabic, ���The Circumcision of Girls.��� At the time, El Saadawi expressed anger at how English-language reviewers exclusively focused on FGM. But, as Amireh describes, El Saadawi also grew accustomed to her place in the Anglophone academy.
El Saadawi���s books also coincided with the rise in the popularity of the ���saving Muslim women��� narratives that Lila Abu-Lughod describes in Do Muslim Women Need Saving? Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, Amireh wrote, ���El Saadawi���s book becomes a testament to the progress that American women have achieved in contrast to their oppressed Arab sisters.��� There is little evidence that El Saadawi���s novels were considered great literature; rather, they were received as ethnographic documents. Students, in Amireh���s experience, ���tend to see the novels as windows onto a timeless Islam[.]���
That is not to say that El Saadawi���s feminist writing wasn���t important for many men and women. Amireh herself was influenced by El Saadawi as a young reader in Palestine. Yet, when seeing El Saadawi re-framed in English, she said, ���I hardly recognized the author I knew. Even more disturbingly, I hardly recognized myself.���
From a glance at the list, it is hard to know how El Saadawi���s books are being taught. It would be interesting to teach her work alongside Amireh���s ���Framing Nawal El Saadawi: Arab Feminism in a Transnational World��� and Abu-Lughod���s Saving Muslim Women. We can hope, at least, that El Saadawi is no longer stripped of context and taught as a non-representative representative, the lone Arab feminist.
A syllabus certainly needn���t keep up with the latest releases. But the North African titles on this list feel unhelpfully frozen in a recent past. There are only two books from the last decade: Youssef Rakha���s groundbreaking Sultan���s Seal, presumably taught in Paul Starkey���s 2014 translation, and Ahdaf Soueif���s Cairo: Memoir of a City (2014).
And Naguib Mahfouz? As the only Arab author to have won a literary Nobel Prize, his place in the ���world literature��� canon is secure. Yet, his place in the syllabus is less so. The Thief and the Dogs appears most often (six times); the Cairo Trilogy and Children of Gabalawi are mentioned once each.
Algeria and Morocco, like Egypt, have a healthy number of titles on this list. Algerian titles are all translated from French, which might reflect knowledge expertise in African-literature departments. Although there are 11 different Algerian authors, that country���s list is overwhelmed by Assia Djebar (1936-2015). She has five different titles as well as a ���general��� mention.
Works by Laila Lalami dominate titles from Morocco, which also has one work translated from Arabic, even though it seems to be an excerpt published on Words Without Borders rather than a whole novel. The most recent Maghrebi books are all by Lalami, a Moroccan American, who writes in English.
Tunisia barely registers, with three authors who have one title each. There is one author listed for the Western Sahara. Strangely, there is not a single title from Libya. Not Hisham Matar���s brilliant cross-genre The Return, nor a historical novel by Alessandro Spina. There is no short story by Najwa Binshatwan, nor even a single mention of the prolific, much-translated, much-laureled Ibrahim al-Koni, whose The New Waw won the US���s National Translation Award in 2015.
Overall, the most-taught work by a North African author is Tayeb Salih���s classic novel, Seasons of Migration to the North. An English translation by Denys Johnson-Davies was first published in 1969. And in this case, the Anglophone and Arabophone canons agree.
Yet teaching clusters around this one work of Salih���s, although one respondent apparently teaches with The Wedding of Zein. The only other Sudanese author to make the list is Leila Aboulela, who writes in English. There is a startling lack of the vibrant literature being crafted by Sudanese and South Sudanese writers, such as Stella Gaitano, Abdel Aziz Baraka Sakin, Bushra al-Fadil, Hammour Ziada, and Rania Mamoun. There was also a surprise appearance in Sudan: a listing for What is the What, a book written by the American Dave Eggers, based on the story of Valentino Deng.
Overall, the selected women���s writing seems to be more focused on testimonial and ethnography, while men���s writing has slightly more freedom to be high literature. Poetry is nearly absent. According to the Saint-Shringarpure survey, poems made up nine percent of the texts being taught from the continent. But for all of the North African texts that made the list, there was only one poetry collection: Amina Said���s 1988 Sables funambules, which has not appeared in English translation. The great Moroccan writer Abdellatif Laabi is listed without giving a specific work; perhaps it is his poems being taught. Surprising, there is not a single poem translated from the Arabic, even though, as they say, ���poetry is the diwan of the Arabs.��� (In Soueif���s suggested translation, this becomes: ���for Arabs, poetry is the medium of choice.���)
Many thanks to Saint and Shringarpure. Inspired by this survey, a group of us hopes to put together a similar survey of which Arab and Arabic literary works (broadly understood) are taught in US, UK, and European universities.
Building a revolutionary party in Nigeria
Photo by Joshua Oluwagbemiga on Unsplash
African Action Congress (AAC) was registered as a political party by Nigeria���s Independent National Electoral Commission two years ago. From its radical roots it set itself apart as a platform for the struggle of the popular masses within and beyond the electoral sphere of politics. It has flourished unapologetically into a party for revolution. The AAC���s immediate fount and its scaffold to date is the Take It Back (TIB) movement, founded in the beginning of 2018. It has inspired tens of thousands of young working-class and professional/middle-class people across the length and breadth of the country and indeed globally among the Nigerian diaspora. This movement���s alliance with revolutionary socialist groups gave birth to the Coalition for Revolution (CORE) and the launch of its #RevolutionNow campaign.
The birth of the party
The Take It Back movement emerged at the beginning of 2018 in the contradictory context of radical politics in Nigeria. The world, as I pointed out while looking at the soil from which TIB/AAC germinated in an earlier article, had changed since the Great Recession of 2007-2009. The status quo���s hegemony or apparent legitimacy was fractured. Beyond Nigeria, mass movements spread across the world were bursting out as revolts, and in the Middle East and North Africa region, revolutions threw hitherto invincible dictators into the trashcan of history.
The ���Occupy Nigeria��� uprising in January 2012 was part of that moment of global rising. But the tragedy of the radical movement is that unlike the situation in many other countries this did not translate into organization to take the fire forward for deepening popular struggle in an anti-systemic manner. Four years after ���Occupy Nigeria���, you could still put all self-avowed revolutionaries in the country into a molue (long bus) and still have to pe ���ro s���oko (call in passengers to fill empty seats).
This partly accounted for an equally bankrupt party of the one percenters emerging as the apostle of ���change��� to steal power from the People���s Democratic Party (PDP), which had held the reins of government for 16 years and that felt it would for 44 more years. The All People���s Congress victory in 2015 spoke more to the failure of a credible revolutionary party���s emergence from the flames of Occupy Nigeria than to the resilience of a fortified bourgeois opposition at the time.
The seething mass anger, which burst out in 2012, continued to bubble below the surface like a dormant volcano, and the reality of the ���change��� party being nothing but one of ���all promises cancelled��� dawned on people within a few years of the APC coming into power. These combined to kindle the interest of a broader swathe of forces and persons in the 2019 elections than in any before this century. These included not a few (self-avowed revolutionaries and middle-class careerists alike) that take mobilization to win power only as seriously as they take watching Tom and Jerry on television. There were also quite a few who really did seriously think that they were taking power seriously.
Between March 2018 and the elections in February 2019, the TIB movement and the AAC organized no less than 500 political events across virtually every state in the federation, as well as 15 countries spread over all the regions of the world. Most of these had packed halls, with many people having to stand up or peer in from the window due to limited space. Unlike the rented crowds that the big���and of course bourgeois���parties, which alone could also amass followings of any significance, these were Nigerians who rather paid their way to the activities and were happy to support what they saw as a serious alternative project. The core message of the movement was clear: we need much more fundamental change than any of the parties involved in serious politics thus far could offer. And we are not going to get that on our knees. We will fight and win our liberation on the streets as much, if not more than, through the ballot.
Mass mobilization, including with the use of new information and communication technologies, went hand in hand with the establishment of movement or party structures. Inspired Nigerians of all walks of life at home and in the diaspora saw and became part of a movement that offered much more than they had dared hope for, even as much as they yearned for it. They chipped in their bits to sustain the hurricane.
The party raised 157,884,938 Naira (about US$408,000) as donations���most of these very small donations from tens of thousands of people. Never since the period of parties like the Action Group (AG) and Northern Elements Progressive Union (NEPU) had any political party raised such kind of money from ���inconsequential��� Nigerians. This is noteworthy, particularly for the mischievous, such as Adams Oshiomhole (a former trade unionist, governor of Edo State and national chairperson of AOPC), who try to reduce #RevolutionNow to a post-election afterthought.
The truth is that even during the electoral campaign the AAC did not reduce its politics to one of simply canvassing for votes. The party was on the streets organizing demonstrations for press freedom, extension of voter registration, and against demolitions of informal settlements. The ruling class was conscious of the problem that AAC constituted to them and they took action to suppress the party. As early as December 2018, five of its activists were arrested while pasting campaign posters in Lagos. They were charged with defacing other parties��� posters, even though this was demonstrably false. The state was sending out a clear message that it would not tolerate revolutionaries.
By the end of 2018, the TIB formed a coalition with the Alliance for the Masses Political Alternative (AMPA), which was coming together of Socialist Workers & Youth League (SWL) and Socialist Vanguard Tendency (SVT). The two groups had worked within the National Conscience Party (NCP) for a few years as the NCP Socialist Forum (NSF). The TIB had favored the NCP among myriad parties it held discussions with on which to float its electoral bid. The treacherous collapse of the NCP bureaucracy into an alliance with the PDP made real this possibility. Taking a principled stand, the two groups constituting the NSF pulled out of that party to form AMPA, which later brought on several other groups. The TIB-AMPA Coalition would later become known as the Coalition for Revolution���CORE.
After the elections, TIB/AAC-AMPA played a critical role in building resistance to wildly inflated power bills and epileptic power supply in working-class communities. Its activists, as part of CORE were also at the barricades in solidarity with rank and file workers during struggles, such as those of non-academic staff at Lagos State Polytechnic.
As radicalization of the party deepened in the immediate post-election period, the right-wing of the party played its hand as Esau for the Jacob of the state. The illegitimate splinter group that emerged under Leonard Ezenwa, the AAC national secretary before his suspension, was proclaimed to be representative of the party in a questionable court ruling in July. But even as the legal battle rages, the facts on the ground have made it tedious, if not outrightly impossible, for the state to stick to the fairy tale of an Ezenwa-led AAC.
The actuality of #RevolutionNow
The�� CORE���s launch of the #RevolutionNow campaign on August 5, 2019 was a milestone in the development of AAC and the history of Nigeria. It went beyond the 1948 Zikist Movement���s ���A Call for Revolution,��� to demanding ���Revolution Now!��� on the streets. On the launch day, a record five million people in the country searched the word ���revolution��� online. The movement thus placed revolution as a popular question in the minds of many more Nigerians than the left groupuscules preaching to the choir had done in decades.
Alas, the state repression was swift and brutal. Party chair, Omoyele Sowore, was arrested on the eve of the nationwide protest and all venues scheduled for rallies in every state of the federation were taken over by combined teams of the army, anti-riot police, and state security service (secret police), among others. In several states they took to flexing their muscles with patrols through the major roads and possible sites of mass gatherings. Notwithstanding, this brazen show of strength demonstrations was held in 14 of Nigeria���s 23 states. #RevolutionNow activists also took action in Berlin, Geneva, Johannesburg, London, New York and Toronto.
The largest of the demonstrations was in Lagos. About 150 activists had a faceoff with the police in front of the national stadium in Surulere, where the flag-off rally for the revolutionary campaign was meant to take place. At the end of the day 57 activists were arrested in six different cities across five states, and many of them were badly beaten up.
This hour marked not just the deepening of AAC���s radical politics. It was equally a watershed in its transformation into the driving force of a mass-based revolutionary movement. As with all such moments, there was confusion, even within the ranks of the left, as to what was happening. More than a few condemned such (in their view) rash declarations of revolution���as if revolutions were singular events and not processes that include affirmation around mobilization.
To some, it would have made sense for the August nationwide action to have been described as a ���protest,��� to avoid prematurely falling foul of the state. Obviously, such ideas, incidentally from comrades on the left, were backwards compared to those of Maureen Onyetenu a Federal High Court judge. On May 4, 2020, she ruled that the nationwide #RevolutionNow action was well within the realm of even bourgeois democratic rights, irrespective of what it was called. She further declared the state���s disruption of the protest as ���illegal, oppressive, undemocratic and unconstitutional.���
The detention of Sowore for almost five months, and the absurd theatrics of the state security service in flouting rulings and respect for the courts, including the invasion of the federal high court premises at Abuja to re-arrest Sowore, also showed state suppression for what it is. The bail condition of restricting him to Abuja is partly face-saving by the ruling class, as well as a desperate attempt to try to take the winds from the sails of the emergent revolutionary movement.
Despite the COVID-19 lockdown, TIB/AAC continued with revolutionary agitation on important political issues with skillful use of social media. As soon as the confinement restrictions were lifted in June, TIB/AAC and its allies constituting the CORE continued organizing on the ground. This included a series of demonstrations in June in five cities against police brutality and the rising incidence of rape and femicide. The protesters also declared their solidarity with the global #JusticeForGeorgeFloyd movement.
Branches of the AAC in localities where police violence against poor citizens is rife���for example, in Oworonshoki where 16-year old Tina Ezekwe was killed by police in May���promptly organized community-based protests. Political education for party cadres was also introduced in this period, in the Lagos state chapter, where the first of a series of ���education for revolution��� programs are now running. The party is also back on the electoral trail with its radical agenda for the polls. It conducted well organized primaries to produce candidates for the forthcoming gubernatorial elections in Edo and Ondo states. Also, in May, The Socialist Workers and Youth League initiated a seven-week process for democratizing and consolidating the structures of CORE. The TIB and all but one affiliated organization supported these genuine aims. For the first time in its history, an inclusive and democratically elected leadership of the coalition emerged.
The new CORE leadership had barely one month to prepare for the commemoration of the launch of the #RevolutionNow campaign with the #August5thProtest. Despite myriad challenges, these were a success. In fifteen states, including Niger and Yobe where there was no action the previous year, activists took to the streets. Though most demonstrations were not large, the movement���s showing in Abuja and Lagos, the two main cities, outmatched the previous year���s demonstrations. More than 60 people demonstrated at the Unity Fountain Abuja. A busload of activists from a satellite of the capital was turned back at a checkpoint while trying to enter the city center. In Lagos, between 400 and 600 protesters took over the Ikeja roundabout compared to barely 150 persons in front of the national stadium a year earlier. Twice the police dispersed them and twice they regrouped, with popular support from traders, commuters, and residents where they rallied.
The state machinery of coercion was no less active in attempts to suppress these activities. More than 100 people were arrested in different parts of the country for participating in the demonstrations. These included 42 in Abuja, 22 in Lagos, seven in Osun, five in Abeokuta and the AAC Kano Chair in Kano city, who was released only recently. Working assiduously with the Revolutionary Lawyers Forum (RLF) and the Radical Mandate Agenda for the Nigeria Bar Association (RAMIMBA), the party and the CORE leadership ensured the release of all the arrested comrades.
Building the party���what is to be done?
The COVID-19 pandemic has driven home sharply the failures of the profit-before-people-basis of capitalism. The worst is yet to come. As the capitalist world lurches into what could very well be its worst social-economic crisis in history, the bosses will attempt to make the mass of poor people bear the brunt of an exploitative system. Working-class people and youth will have no choice but to fight back. Sparks of discontent will set off moments of spontaneous mass movements on the streets, in workplaces, and across communities. But these massquakes will dissipate like hot steam and the bosses will still have their way, if there is no mass-based revolutionary organization that like a steam engine, can turn the steam of mass anger into motion of lasting struggle for system change. But there is still so much to do in building the party, movement, and coalition for revolution.
Probably the top priority is a systematic and intensive approach to cadre education. As we learn from Che Guevara, ���the first duty of a revolutionary is to be educated.��� The education he means of course, is not that which you acquire in the four walls of school, but rather questioning why society is how it is, what alternatives could be constructed from concrete reality to change how society is, and how we go about struggle to bring to birth the better society we desire. This education is one which we get from the largest university in the world���the school of life.
However, the dominant ideas through which the direct lessons from life are perceived are shaped by the interests of the dominant classes of oppressors in any society. What immediately appears to us as ���common sense,��� even the most radical of such, tends to be inadequate for the thinking we need to overthrow the oppressive system we find ourselves in. To forge the ���good sense,��� which alone can help us grasp the tasks and strategy for what is to be done as revolutionaries requires education to deepen our theoretical understanding. That is precisely why Vladimir Lenin said, ���without revolutionary theory, there can be no revolutionary movement.��� The time is ripe to consider establishing a living party school and research center, which harnesses and enriches decentralized education for revolution programs in all branches.
The party must build its capacity for producing, distributing, and facilitating the study of revolutionary literature. Pamphlets, leaflets, and books must be part of the mental staple food of party cadres. The fantastic use of social media, and other audio-visual means have to be taken to a new level to ensure deeper cadre and mass political education. We must also learn from the strengths (and weaknesses) of historical and contemporary revolutionary party-building projects. Drawing from some of these and contextualizing them concretely, the party has to develop intervention programs that have meaning to working-class people and youth in their daily lives.
For example, AAC cadres across the country could set aside a day every few months for ���environmental sanitation��� exercises. Free tutorial/coaching for children of poor working-class people could be organized. This could include e-learning through webinars, with children from poor working-class homes who might not be able to afford data being provided airtime to join. Physical contact sessions must however be prioritized as much as possible.
Free breakfast programs could be developed, as the Black Panthers in the US did. These, and similar programs, are not to be conducted in the supposedly non-political manner that NGOs render services. Our politics must run as the thread that ties these expressions of alternative power as much as service delivery together, and link the party���s social provision intervention with its more partisan political mobilization for revolution work. The party program and our class orientation are two vital issues that must be clearly addressed at this point.
The AAC manifesto as adopted at the 2018 party convention reflected a shotgun marriage arrangement with the party���s right-wing at the time. As we pointed out in the January-February 2019 edition of Socialist Worker:
The movement of #TIB is moving more and more to the left. There are internal struggles with a party rightwing in AAC ready to uphold the status quo of capitalism, merely with some ���decency���, so to speak. But what the movement as a whole seeks is the revolutionary upturn of the exploitative system and as it gets more engaged in mass work, this orientation deepens.
Events thus far have confirmed this analysis. An overhaul of the AAC manifesto to reflect its politics of struggle for social system change is now imperative. This must be a program that addresses the social, economic, political, and ecological problems of the day with a view to bring about fundamental transformative change. This change must break from the logic of growth and development that has pauperized the majority of the population and put the earth in the perilous state of climate crisis. We need to formulate a revolutionary program for a party of revolution.
The orientation of AAC to working-class people has never been in doubt. The party membership includes young professionals; middle-class change-seeking Nigerians, who are fed up with the disaster life has become for all but the 1% of super-rich people in the country. It also includes students as well as working-class people, who constitute a significant proportion in the ranks of the party. Revolutionary political parties can lead revolutions, but revolutions are never waged and won by any one party. Revolutions are massive anti-systemic uprisings of the mass of working-class people. AAC has to strengthen its ties with all strata of workers, artisans, poor farmers etc. We must be the tribune of all exploited and oppressed sections of the population.
AAC activists in several states have joined workers on strike at the barricades, supported and fought alongside the people in poor working-class communities for electricity rights and against police brutality, and organized political education programs for workers in both the formal and informal sector. Such activities must become generalized, a normal part of revolutionary politics across all states of the federation.�� Organization for revolution requires unification-in-action of many social forces, parties, and other groups committed to struggle, with the aim of bringing down the oppressive system of exploitation that determines the status quo. This entails building united fronts. CORE is the united front for revolution now. Building CORE with other affiliates of the coalition must be a key priority for AAC���s revolutionary activists. This will involve constituting CORE in all states where we have TIB structures along with other affiliates��� chapters, and expanding the coalition���s affiliation base to include all organizations who stand for revolutionary transformation today.
The unfolding revolutionary movement that TIB/AAC/CORE sharply manifests in Nigeria is an integral wave in the global tsunami of popular risings against exploiters and their oppressive system. Internationalism must thus be woven into the fabric of our struggle. The primary devil we confront is at home, but our battle is against all the powers and principalities of the hellish exploitation of the masses. An injury to one is an injury to all. We must continue to call on our sisters, brothers, comrades, and revolutionary organisations across the world to stand with us as we fight our battles for #RevolutionNow.
The mission of our generation, rising from the obscurity of neoliberalism, is global revolution���to build a better and more just world. We must not betray it. Working-class people united and determined cannot be defeated!
This is an edited version of a paper presented for the second anniversary webinar of the African Action Congress. An abridged version was published in the Socialist Worker of August-September 2020.
September 29, 2020
A rare cinematic portrait of queer women���s intimacy in Nigeria
Still from "If��."
The short Nigerian film “If��” (35 minutes), written and directed by Uyaiedu Ikpe-Etim and produced in partnership with Pamela Adie and The Equality Hub, begins with the titular character, If��, preparing for a date. As she���s getting ready, a reggae-infused ballad plays in the background and the lyrics ���How I wish Mama would not have to cry when she finds out my love is on the other side��� cues audiences to the fact that the date is with another woman. When If�� opens her front door, on the other side she finds Adaora. Meeting for the first time in person, the two women are nervous and tentative with each other, and some light comedy ensues when If�� serves Adaora her failed attempt at pepper soup and fried rice. But eventually they bond over their love of poetry, recite a Warsan Shire poem out loud, playfully bicker about whether listening to an audiobook is as good as reading, and open up emotionally to each other. Needless to say that the one night date stretches into three intimate days. At one point Adaora asks, ���Is it too soon to say I���m in love with you?��� and If��, referring to the often joked about speed with which queer women fall in love replies, ���We���re lesbians, this is the perfect time.���
“If��,” confined to just the three days of the date and the four walls of If�����s home, is a close-up study of queer women���s intimacy in Nigeria when it gets to exist, for just a moment, in a protected space, walled off from the outside world. This is precisely what makes “If��” so moving. It���s impossible not to smile at the initial awkwardness or not to giggle innocently at If�����s nervous attempts to make Adaora feel comfortable.�� It���s also impossible not to feel your heart soften as the two women discuss their pasts and become slowly able to express their vulnerabilities. The tightness of the framing, the deliberate pacing of the story, and the decision to limit the scenes to just a few rooms in If�����s apartment, in fact, often seems to invite viewers into the intimate space the two women share. Ikpe-Etim seems to dissolve the screen that divides the characters from the audience, and it feels as if we are being asked to come and share the passion (and pathos) of If�� and Adaora, to tap into our own memories of innocently falling in love. In bringing the characters and viewers into such close proximity, Ikpe-Etim also deftly avoids making the film feel voyeuristic. By focusing on the rawness of the characters��� emotions, the film eschews a sensationalized or sentimentalized drama. Although the film is made by and for queer Nigerian women, it is, at the end of the day, a film that is about the delights and difficulties of human relationships, a film that anyone should be able to relate to even if the exact circumstances might not match their own.
But because this film takes place in Nigeria, where the 2014 Same Sex Marriage Prohibition Act (SSMPA) has made it more difficult to be out, and because it is written and made by openly queer women who have been incredibly savvy about promoting the film via social media, the not-yet-released love story has drawn the attention of international news outlets. The BBC, with a click-bait worthy title, recently reported that Adie and Ikpe-Etim ���face the prospect of imprisonment if they ignore the stern warning of the authorities and proceed with the release of a movie about a lesbian relationship��� and wrote that ���the dramatic face-off with the regulators���the Nigerian Film and Video Censors Board (NFVCB) ���is worthy of a film itself.���
The reality, however, is much tamer. Adie and Ikpe-Etim plan to exhibit the film at several international film festivals and then release the film on a streaming platform. They never intended to show the film in Nigerian theaters or on television and therefore do not need the NFVCB���s approval. Nor are they breaking any laws since there is nothing in the SSMPA that prohibits this type of film, Adie insisted when I spoke to her recently. The ���face-off��� that the BBC refers to seems to be largely manufactured by a press eager to sensationalize Nigerian homophobia, and Adie says that she has never even spoken with the NFVCB. Despite the BBC���s comparison, the situation of “If��” is therefore very different than that of the Kenyan lesbian film Rafiki, which was banned by Kenya���s much stricter Kenyan Film Classification Board (KFCB) after supposedly altering its pre-approved ending and which was indeed aiming for a theatrical release in that country. (Though Nigeria���s anti-homosexuality laws are more stringent than Kenya���s, the NFVCB does not require film scripts to be pre-approved before a license to film is granted as does the KFCB).
Furthermore, international news outlets like the BBC seem to think that “If��” is pushing boundaries by showing two women being physically intimate with each other. In fact, CNN, referencing Adaora and If�����s declaration of love, writes, ���These intimate scenes wouldn’t be out of place in a Hollywood movie, but in Nigeria’s film industry, Nollywood, they are near taboo.��� Although “If��” is no doubt a ground-breaking film���a first in many respects���CNN���s�� statement is not at all true. As the article acknowledges, lesbians have been portrayed in Nollywood, southern Nigeria���s booming film industry, since the 2003 popular film Emotional Crack. On the heels of that film���s success, several dozen films depicted lesbian relationships, many of which contained erotic and intimate scenes. Emotional Crack treated lesbianism somewhat sympathetically, yet in all those that followed it, the lesbian characters were depicted as predatory, motivated by money, or under the influence of cults or witchcraft, and ultimately either punished for their behaviors or ���saved��� by the church. When Nollywood eventually turned its attention to stories about gay men, the scripts were determined by the same moral condemnation.
It is not the case, then, that queer intimacy is taboo in Nollywood. On the contrary, stories about queer characters are often quite popular, with A-list stars regularly taking on these roles and engaging in provocative on-screen same-sex intimacy and even occasionally speaking out against homophobia. In fact, at a time when many Nigerians and public officials would deny the existence of same-sex relations in Nigeria, Nollywood has been neither shy nor prude in its depiction of queerness. But, as many LGBTI activists in Nigeria have pointed out, that does not mean that these sensationalized depictions have been welcomed by the queer community or that they have been useful in fighting public perceptions of queer people as dangerous, a threat to society.
Acknowledging the power of stories, activists have begun making their own queer stories, stories that portray queer characters sympathetically in all their complexity and that invite audiences to examine the ramifications of homophobia. In 2016, The Initiative for Equal Rights made the short film Hell or High Water, which garnered critical acclaim in Nigeria, and in 2018 they released We Don���t Live Here Anymore, which won five prizes at the Best of Nollywood Awards and proved that Nollywood films could indeed handle the topic of homosexuality sensitively (and still be approved by the NFVCB). The Initiative for Equal Rights also has an online talk show, Untold Facts, a web series, Everything in Between, and most recently co-produced the adaptation of Jude Dibia���s novel Walking with Shadows with Funmi Iyanda. But Pamela Adie, founder of The Equality Hub who released her own autobiographical documentary about coming out as a lesbian last year, noticed that there was still a lack of queer-positive films that focused on women and that were told by queer women themselves. And this is where “If��” comes in. Here, inside the walls of If�����s home, If�� and Adaora share their past and imagine their futures. They cook, they drink wine, they make love, they cuddle. And they get to do so, unlike Kena and Ziki, the queer protagonists of Rafiki, in a room of their own, away from the gaze of nosey neighbors and the threats of violence.�� In a sense, “If��” is a cinema of what could be.
But intimacy is always complicated, and it���s uniquely complicated when one has to chose between loving a lover and being loved by one���s family. In her forthcoming book, Knowing Women: Same-Sex Intimacy, Gender, and Identity in Postcolonial Ghana, anthropologist Serena Dankwa, understands ���intimacy through the emotional rifts, the passions, and the fragilities engendering same-sex relationships that are inspired by both material and affective needs and desires.��� Though Dankwa���s book is about women both similar to and different from If�� and Adaora, her description of intimacy as shot through with fragilities as well as passion helps to shed light on why this seemingly simple love story is really not that simple. Dankwa focuses her study on working class women in Ghana who practice same-sex intimacy but do not necessarily identify with terms like ���lesbian,��� ���queer,��� or ���bisexual��� that presume a legible and easily categorized sexual identity or coming out story. Intimacy, and what she calls ���the vibrancy of everyday same-sex intimacies��� spans a range of practices and exchanges that, as Dankwa argues, cannot always be captured in simple declarations of sexual identity. I do not want to spoil “If��,” but one of the things that the films opens up is how these declarations of sexual identity (i.e. ���we are lesbians���) do not always articulate the complexity of queer women���s lived reality. Indeed, as Dankwa���s work makes clear, sexual identity is often an over-simplified way of accounting for same-sex desires, especially outside of the West. And what “If��” beautifully dramatizes is that the lives of its same-sex desiring protagonists are also full of other emotional attachments, attachments that hold sway beyond the protective enclosure of If�����s home.
“If��” makes its global debut at the Inside Out Toronto LGBT Film Festival that begins on October 1, 2020. If you live in Ontario, you���ll be able to see it there. Announcements about other festival screenings and streaming will be made on the film���s Instagram account, so follow ife_movie to get updates. And if you are interested in complex stories about queer Nigerian women, film does not have to be your only medium. You can read Chinelo Okparanta���s Under the Udala Trees, Unoma Azuah���s new memoir Embracing My Shadows, and the anthology She Called Me Woman, a book that sits prominently on If�����s bed.
An African case for carbon removal
Photo by Devon Janse van Rensburg on Unsplash
This post is part of our Climate Politics series.
Carbon dioxide removal (CDR) refers to a variety of approaches that remove carbon from the atmosphere after it has been emitted. These CDR techniques range from ���nature-based solutions��� that restore ecosystems to technological approaches like ���direct air capture,��� which filter carbon dioxide out of ambient air. The stakes of developing these approaches are high: every pathway that limits global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius in the most recent UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report projects the use of carbon removal approaches: that is, deploying them on an unprecedented scale is a ���bio-physical requirement��� of meeting climate change goals. Yet, governments worldwide are repeating the mistakes made on both climate and the pandemic crisis: investing too little and too slowly in research and deployment of CDR.
Who will be faced to bear the most serious burdens if underinvestment continues? Since 1751, the entire African continent has contributed a paltry 3% of global emissions: utterly dwarfed by the contribution of individual countries like the US, China, and Russia. However, the calamities caused by the climate crisis have hit the continent first and hardest. Mozambique is still reeling from last year���s cyclones, with the highest wind speeds ever recorded; meanwhile, the Sahel region loses 100,000 hectares of arable land every year, driving mass displacement and conflict.
Given the stakes and the responsibility borne by global Northerners, one would think that justice minded, North-based organizations would back CDR. Yet, the reception from such organizations has been icy. The Center for International Environmental Law (CIEL), based in Washington DC and Geneva, to its credit, is one of the few organizations that has offered an extensive, public position: one expressing support for ���natural approaches to CDR��� over ���tech��� solutions.
The CIEL and likeminded (but quieter) groups have plausible concerns about carbon removal, but their decisions about how to respond to them miss the mark. They worry, for example, that the development of carbon removal technology will act as a blank check for coal and oil industries, who indeed want to co-opt carbon removal for profit-serving purposes, such as enhanced oil recovery. Similarly, some worry that carbon removal will pose a ���moral hazard��� to emissions-reduction: making us unserious about making the necessary cuts to emissions that CDR cannot possibly replace.
But the needed argument is not about what the oil companies should want, but about what the rest of us should want. The political world is much too complex to expect incentives to perfectly divide friend from foe on every constituent issue���at least environmentalist groups ought to hope so, given the well documented historical connection between white supremacy, eugenics, Nazism, and environmental movements. Arguments that keep meticulous track of what is in it for ExxonMobil are often uncurious about what will happen to Africans and global Southerners in the scenarios they describe. While CIEL insists that it is at least biophysically possible to reach lower climate targets by ���natural approaches,��� they do compare the plausibility of winning a political fight with oil companies over the direction of carbon removal with the apparently more politically plausible scenario of ���the virtually complete elimination of fossil fuel emissions and fossil fuel infrastructure by 2050.���
Recent research estimates that land-intensive CDR (including afforestation, a ���natural��� approach) could lead to a five-fold increase in the price of food: genocidal, famine conditions. Relatedly, Africa has been hit hardest by a global land rush, and accounts for 75% of the land pledged to the global ���Bonn challenge,��� which aims to bring 350 million hectares of the world���s deforested and degraded land into restoration by 2030. Meanwhile, the land use implications of ���natural based approaches��� for food, housing, and conflict go unanalyzed.
In short, while environmental groups give sobering and relevant analyses of the political challenges of technologically-intensive carbon removal, they do not give reasons to prefer their alternative. Since we cannot moralize the pollution out of the air, the IPCC���s target of 100-1000 gigatons goes largely unaddressed by the sorts of rejoinders that emphasize odd convergences of interest between villains and heroes. Pointing out inconvenient political incentives raises important questions: but they are questions about how to do carbon removal, not whether.
Africa should demand a politics where carbon removal features as an aspect of systemic change rather than an alternative to it; where carbon removal targets and techniques are set by community decisions rather than by market forces; a commitment by global North countries to public funding for CDR research rather than ceding knowledge production to the oil industries; and one where African communities and researchers are empowered over both research and deployment of CDR.
As the Pan-African Climate Justice Alliance���s insists in its manifesto: ���Africa must sign no suicide pact������no matter who���s writing it.
September 28, 2020
How to govern Angola
Photo by Jorge S�� Pinheiro on Unsplash
In late March 2020, following parliamentary approval, Angola���s Conselho da Rep��blica (Council of the Republic) recommended that the first-ever municipal elections should be held in the country before the end of 2020. Beyond the uncertainty caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, this seemed to be a positive development in Angola���s long, complex, and tortuous path towards democracy during the past 40 years. After independence in 1975, Angola entered immediately into a civil war that lasted almost consecutively until 2002. In the meantime, the regime transitioned from a socialist single party system into a multiparty ���social democracy,��� which nevertheless has only known one ruling party: The People���s Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA). Concomitantly, the country���s legislative history has also been a complicated one, with provisional texts until the final approval of the current constitution, in 2010.
The 2010 constitutional reform included a Section VI that put in place a process of decentralization of ���poder local��� (���local government���), but, 10 years into the new juridical framework, this has never gone from ���paper to practice,��� with constant delays and postponements. However, after the 2017 elections, President Jo��o Louren��o announced his public commitment to tackle the issue of local elections, with the promotion of an ���overarching public debate.��� Subsequently, a 2018 memorandum from the Ministry of Territorial Administration and State Reform revealed a specific plan with phases for the effective implementation of local authorities through a gradualist process. The March 2020 decision, emerging at the onset of COVID-19, was another important and necessary step toward the long-awaited celebration of elections.
Although this implementation of municipal elections might be one of the few political initiatives that gathers consensus across Angola���s social political spectrum, it became, in the pre-COVID-19 moment, the main political battle in the country. For example, in August 2019, while the Angolan parliament unanimously approved the municipal legislative package, a demonstration was held outside the National Assembly, with dozens of young activists protesting against it.
The participants in the demonstration were mostly members of several local citizen platforms that emerged after 2016, in the aftermath of the notorious ���15+2������the arrest and trial of 17 activists in 2015, accused of an attempted coup d�����tat. Many of the detainees were activists of the so-called ���Rev����� or Revolutionary Movement that emerged in Angola in 2011 in reaction to the Arab Spring, leading several demonstrations against then-President Jos�� Eduardo dos Santos and his cabinet. After the trial, however, many activists regrouped to focus on addressing local and regional problems, while networking with each other. This is the case, for instance, of the Projeto Agir, which emerged from the mobilization of activists in the district of Cacuaco, north of Luanda. Similarly, other groups have emerged throughout Luanda: Plataforma Cazenga em Ac����o (PLACA) and Libertadores de Mentes (LDM) in the district of Cazenga, Mudar in Viana, Plataforma de Interven����o (PIKK) in Kilamba Kiaxi, and N��cleo de Boas Ac����es (NBA) in Benfica. Outside Luanda, other citizen movements have also emerged: Okulinga in Matala, Kintwadi in Uige, Laulenu in Moxico, Movimento Revolucion��rio de Benguela (MRB) in Lobito, and Balumukeno in Malanje.
Throughout 2018 PLACA, Projeto Agir and other groups staged several protests against the administrator of the district of Cazenga, Tany Narciso, over insecurity, lack of access to water, and financial malpractice, among other things. Similarly, in September 2019, the Laulenu group used Jo��o Louren��o���s presidential visit to the region to stage a protest against the local governor Gon��alves Muandumba and corruption. All groups embraced the issue of the autarquias as one of their main demands, through the convergence into a national network called Movimento Jovens pelas Autarquias (Youth for Municipalities Movement). Here, while they necessarily converge with the government���s municipal elections project, they strongly contest the geographic gradualist strategy to implementation (whereby only 55 of the 164 constituencies would be able to vote in a first phase, while others would only do so at a later stage), which is based on ���merit���, and determined by government, with no public consultation or accountability.
Coincidentally, constituencies such as Cacuaco and other districts or municipalities traditionally non-aligned with the MPLA were left out of the initial roster. From the perspective of Projeto Agir and other groups, this was a trickster move: while the government was aware of its constituency���s ambition for more direct representation, they were also aware of the possibility of losing power to opposition parties (namely National Union for the Total Independence of Angola���UNITA).
In response, activist groups not only challenged the government���s Pacote Legislativo Aut��rquico (Municipal Legislative Package) in recurrent demonstrations in front of the National Assembly, but also promoted several debates, roundtables, and onjangos (collective communal gatherings) to discuss the process and raise citizen awareness. Both PLACA and Projeto Agir co-authored revisions of the legislative package, in which they offered arguments for the implementation of a non-gradual, horizontal, and universal aut��rquico system based on the logic of ���devolu����o do poder aos cidad��os��� (devolution of power to the citizens). They argued that municipal autonomy, albeit not the solution for all of Angola���s problems, is certainly a more effective and legitimate instrument of governance than the current central state administration���in itself an obstacle for sustained development toward a transparent and just democracy due to lack of accountability, the concentration of resources, the lack of popular representation, weak citizen participation, and the single party control of local communities.
In July 2020, amid the COVID-19 crisis, the Angolan parliament approved yet another legislative package related to the municipal election system. Still, the mood in Luanda is one of uncertainty regarding the upcoming poll. Recently, the suspicion was finally confirmed, after the Conselho da Rep��blica officially announced a further postponement sine die, ���until the right conditions are met.��� The uncertainty stems from the make-believe consensus built around the process, which continues to ignore the views and expectations of ordinary Angolans.
In this respect, the struggle continues.
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