Sean Jacobs's Blog, page 158

The media and the workers of Marikana

As the anniversary of Marikana just passed us, it is important to look back on how the events of those days were represented and how it is has informed our understanding about the massacre and about politics in South Africa.





Photo by Marc St on Unsplash

On August 16, 2012, South African police opened fire on striking mineworkers at the Lonmin Platinum Mine at Marikana near Rustenburg in the North West province of South Africa, killing 34 workers. Eight years later, as the anniversary of Marikana just passed us, it is important to look back on how the events of those days were represented and how it is has informed our understanding about the massacre and about politics in South Africa.

The mineworkers were shot after they had occupied a mountain near the mine and embarked on a ���wildcat strike��� for a living wage of R12,500 (about US $1,474 at the time). Early media reports presented the strike as inter-union rivalry between the relative newcomer, Association of Mineworkers and Construction Union (AMCU), and the older government-aligned National Union of Mineworkers (NUM). Yet journalists and academics later found that the mineworkers had organized themselves and most were still members of the NUM at the time. On the mountain, the mineworkers elected their own representatives, the ���five madoda��� and communed together, demanding their bosses come to hear their grievances and rejected the representation of their trade union.

In the days and weeks following the massacre, the media took up the conversation at the Farlam commission with fervor. They focused on the traditional weapons the mineworkers used, the blankets they wrapped themselves in, and the fact that they used muthi which, it was argued, made them ���aggressive.��� There were hardly any reports where journalists spoke directly to the mineworkers. The message seemed to be that these were just violent muthi���crazed rural traditionalists, who were trying to ruin ���hard won��� collective bargaining structures and the NUM. Only a few journalists, mostly outside mainstream media platforms took workers voices seriously, and it was these journalists who discovered the second killing site at Marikana. The media behavior, as Jane Duncan has argued, amounted to pack journalism.

The mainstream media reprinted, uncritically, what was being foregrounded in the commission proceedings. At the commission these features of the strike, foregrounded in the media, would be used to portray mineworkers as rural traditionalists who created the violent situation at Marikana, where police were ���forced��� to intervene. The commission was used to explain police violence as ���unfortunate��� but ���necessary.��� In doing so, it subverted the political demand of the mineworkers. By refusing to hear them, Lonmin, the NUM and the government reinforced the idea, well established in the public sphere today, that political demands will only be taken seriously if presented through a recognized institutional representative body. That the NUM was intent to frame the strikes as part of a ���third force��� in the form of AMCU to steal members from the NUM, shows how the idea that the workers could organize themselves, efficiently, without the aid of a representational body like a union, was not even considered.�� By using these so-called ���rural��� features as justification, the government revealed to us, as citizens, who is killable and what can be used as justification for violence.

In academia, many sympathetic writers saw the strikes at Marikana as a new hope for socialism, and a new trade union insurgency. The events at Marikana were ���cleaned up.��� If the media had become obsessed with the ���rural��� and ���backward��� features of the strike, the academics were intent to foreground how ���urban��� and ���progressive��� they were. The workers appear, in these writings, to be without culture, without history, without aesthetics that signify anything particular or political. Instead, the strikers are abstracted into the figure of the ���universal worker��� that continues to stimulate some Marxist imaginations. Whatever the intention, they too re-inscribed the idea that only trade unions and institutional bodies could be an appropriate vehicle for political demands.

Yet, if we look closely at these features, not as excessive, dangerous or menacing but as markers of difference, we will be forced to reckon with what that difference signified. For example, as members of NUM, surely all the men on the mountain must have had union t-shirts, they could have chosen a variety of ways to present themselves, why did they choose to appear as they did? If we take seriously workers self-presentation it may lead us to echoes of other historical events, organizations, and struggles that don���t fit neatly within nationalist or socialist imaginations.

Comparisons with Marikana could be made to the Soweto Uprising, the Sharpeville Massacre and other urban struggles. Yet, the Marikana strikes bore resemblance to other historical events. One example is the Mpondo Revolts of the 1960s, in which rural dwellers revolted against corrupt chiefs, met on mountains and organized alternative networks of governance that came to be called mountain committees or iKhongo. Their revolts too led to a massacre at Ngquza Mountain in 1960. The mountain was seen not only as a space of refuge and a good vantage and look-out point, but also as a sacred and religious space, exclusively for men, to communicate with the ancestors and gods and perform prayers sometimes involving muthi, especially during times of war.

Whilst the strikes at Marikana were about a living wage, these markers of difference lead us not only to other political forms but also to other political demands. One of them has been that Lonmin is on land owned by the Tswana Traditional Authority. Whenever mineworkers and their families who now live in Nkaneng, the shack-settlement below the mountain, approach the mine and local authority for proper housing, they are told that the land is not for them and that they have land in the Eastern Cape. In other words, ethnic difference and the idea that Xhosa people actually ���belong��� in the Eastern Cape, and are merely temporary laborers at the mine, continues to deny them a space at Marikana, regardless of how long they have lived and worked there.

Marikana shows us how far we have yet to go in our decolonization process, not merely to dismantle corrupt forms of governance and ownership, but also to expand our definitions of politics and the forms in which it should appear.�� In a country where popular protests happen every day and are seen by many in the state and society to be irrational outbursts of violence, or where Helen Zille calls residents of shack settlements in Cape Town refugees from the Eastern Cape, we have to think seriously about who is seen as citizen, and how we are able to make political demands.

This article is drawn from the Chapter, “The Politics of Representation in Marikana.” in Babel Unbound: Rage, reason and rethinking public life. Edited by Lesley Cowling and Carolyn Hamilton. Published by Wits University Press (2020)

Our turn to eat

Reflections on Malawi���s recent election rerun, false starts and the hope that public representatives in Africa become accountable to their electorates��� aspirations.





Photo by Aditya Septiansyah on Unsplash

Malawi finds itself in the midst of a profound transformation that calls for a change in the way that we do business. This paradigm shift is a development imperative in today���s world, where the need for leaders to listen to the voice of the people has been clearly established. Since Government is asking the people to make sacrifices, there must be a fair and equal burden-sharing.

��� ���Consolidating Our Bold Steps Toward a Better Future for Malawi: 2001/2002 Budget Statement,��� by Professor Mathews A.P. Chikaonda, Minister of Finance and Economic Planning, June 22, 2001

On Father���s Day this year, I started reading a book called It���s Our Turn to Eat. It is the explosive story, by talented writer and journalist Michela Wrong, of a whistleblower working in President Mwai Kibaki���s new government in Kenya in 2002. She chronicles how, over several years of anti-corruption work, this whistleblower���a government bureaucrat and later academic named John Githongo���eventually found himself on the wrong side of not only President Kibaki, but the majority of the new government and, critically, the Kikuyus: his own ethnic group, of which Kibaki himself was a member and from whom Kibaki had appointed most of his cabinet. My father had recommended the book to me in the last year of his life, almost two years ago in 2018: he thought that the entrenched problems Wrong chronicled were profoundly illustrative of not just one particular country���s quagmire of governance issues, but indeed representative of most of Africa���s, with Malawi being no exception. Since his death, I try to do something to bring me close to him on important anniversary dates, and so though I had had the book on my shelf for several months, Father���s Day was the day I chose to finally brave opening it. I���m glad I did, especially in the context of the election re-run in Malawi later that week.

Githongo, the protagonist of Our Turn to Eat, had been tasked by President Kibaki with rooting out the corruption left behind from departing leader Daniel Arap Moi���s preceding administration. He was to identify all the ways corruption had happened before, and then ensure it would never be replicated under Kibaki. What soon came to light, however, was that not only was the corruption so deeply embedded in the entire country���s way of life that it was impossible to ever fully eliminate it: it became evident that Kibaki himself was in on it, and had never meant for Githongo���s office to be more than appearance. After much effort for which he was at first mocked and later endangered, precious little ends up having changed in Kenya: the same politicians remained in power; the same money continued to disappear behind questionably awarded government contracts and mysteriously formed companies with no office or staff; and the rich and poor remained entrenched as ever in their societal and economic standings.

Thus the book does not end on a fully hopeful note, at least not beyond the arguably positive fact that Githongo was still alive at the time of writing, rather than having ended up in a suspiciously convenient car accident. And I think this was what my father appreciated so much about the book���it aligned with his beliefs, at the end of his life, that most of Africa���s governance problems were intractable, and that any effort to change the way we did things would inevitably prove itself to be futile. The problems simply ran too deep, he believed, and one���s peace of life and mind was ultimately worth more than the stress, and even danger, caused by trying to do more good than both system and society allowed. Sometimes I wondered if he was also suggesting that his efforts hadn���t been worth what he lost as a result, his greatest losses being his health and, eventually, his life, to cancer. But Dad had never believed in regret prior to his cancer diagnosis, and I didn���t want to now ask him about such things in a moment when he did not have the power to reverse his fate.

I finished It���s Our Turn to Eat one day before the results of Malawi���s historical election re-run were ratified, and Lazarus McCarthy Chakwera���the candidate representing the opposition coalition���s Tonse Alliance���was confirmed as being Malawi���s newly elected President. It was a unique intersection of experience: to have finished reading a book about failed election promises just as Malawi���s re-run elections were being celebrated, to feel a profound disappointment in the story of a neighboring country���s electoral and governance failures just as the continent was celebrating my home country as a shining example of democracy in action. I was of two minds in that moment���both wishing I were at home celebrating in the streets with everyone else who felt they had finally wrested control of the country���s direction back into the people���s hands, and, at the same time, feeling an unstoppable and overwhelming cynicism. I wondered how long the jubilance would last before the same-old, same-old would settle in, and the new leaders would find new places to conceal the spoils of power.

One day back in February this year I was searching the library catalogue of the university I have worked at for the last eight years, the University of Pennsylvania, to see if there were any papers in there authored by my father. Prior to our return to Malawi he had been a well-regarded academic in Canada, and that work had been the basis of the job offer he later received that brought our family back home to Malawi. One of the stranger compulsions of grief is the search for the lost loved one seemingly everywhere, but especially in places one had never thought to look before, and I had never until this year thought to look for his work in our libraries. While Penn did not have any of his papers in their catalogue, I discovered that Columbia University had a copy of his sole budget statement to the Malawi Parliament in 2001, ���Consolidating Our Bold Steps Toward a Better Future for Malawi������delivered a little over a year after he had been named Minister of Finance and Economic Planning���and excitedly ordered it through our inter-library loan system.

I did not get to see this speech delivered; I was away from Malawi at the time, at the University of Rhode Island on a pre-college summer program. But 19 years later I now desperately wish that I had, if only to have been in that room in which Dad gave one of his rare public shows of optimism and hope. His brilliance���as caustic as it was compassionate���radiates from the pages of this statement, as does his real belief in Malawi���s promise and desire to turn the country���s course away from insistent impoverishment and victimhood to the thriving self-reliance he always insisted we had the resources for and were capable of. I now wonder how many late nights he spent at his office on Capital Hill putting this statement together, trying to strike the perfect balance between stroking the egos of his listeners in Parliament so they would be willing to hear him, and motivating them toward wanting to do better than they were, refining night by night Malawi���s economic course.

While I was in university, I would submit monthly expense reports to my father, documenting how I was spending the money he sent me off to Philadelphia with each term. It was a vague annoyance but I understood how he worked, and knew he wouldn���t continue to send money without proof that I was being reasonable with it. Dad was nothing if not a consistent man, and he was exactly that same person in his professional capacities; in government, however, this indiscriminate scrutiny turned out not to be an asset but a liability, as it meant that every kwacha and tambala spent came under his questioning eye. That level attention to the specific details of a person or division���s expenditure was no way to make friends in most governments anywhere���let alone the governments of so many countries south of the Sahara, where looking in the opposite direction to discovered indiscretions is often an expected professional courtesy. Barely six months after he delivered his address to Parliament he was summarily removed from his position, even as he had been appointed to the role at least in part to symbolize the then-President���s commitment to national economic and financial discipline.

As Malawi writes a new chapter for its future I have been reflecting on the identical lessons of It���s Our Turn to Eat and ���Consolidating Our Bold Steps Toward a Better Future for Malawi���. How hope can be so bright that it potentially blinds us to the hopeless reality in front of us; how long the arc of change actually stretches in time. Most of all, though���how impossible it is for a single man to carry the entirety of those hopes, whether the newly elected leader of a nation���s reprised democratic experiment, or the solitary industrious academic burning the midnight oil in his cramped office, stubbornly acting upon the commission to end corruption���s necrotic legacy. The shared word between both texts��� titles is ���our,��� and this captures the truth of what sustainable progress in any context, African or not, looks like���not ���I��� but ���we,��� not a sole man but a critical mass, not munthu, but anthu. The opposition coalition that is now setting up shop in Malawi���s houses of government called itself, in a genius move, the Tonse Alliance���literally, the All of Us Alliance. Let us hope, against Malawi���s repetitive curse of demolished electoral and governance hopes, that this time the future really stands a chance of benefitting all of us���at last allowing an entire nation to finally eat

The privatization of healthcare in Kenya

In Kenya, only the rich and politically connected can afford decent healthcare. Everyone else is a major illness or a road accident away from ruin.





Photo by Arseny Togulev on Unsplash

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

It is often said that a healthy nation is a working nation, but in a country where healthcare has been largely privatized and with high unemployment rates, there is no health and no work. I have witnessed this firsthand, especially when my sister fell ill.

I graduated with a bachelor���s degree in economics from the University of Nairobi���s School of Economics in 2017. While in university, I worked at Kenya Wines and Agencies Limited (KWAL) as a casual laborer. It is a space where the workers are completely alienated from the products of their labor. We worked to manufacture, repackage, and distribute alcoholic and other sweet beverages, but the majority of the workers, earning a wage of Kenya shillings 400 ($4) per day, were not able to afford what they produced, and it was common that you would be arrested and taken to the Industrial Area police station if you were found to have tasted any of the products.

The motivation behind my decision to study economics at university level was the desire to understand the economics behind macro and micro scales of production in Kenya, and to improve the material conditions of my family. As students, our expectations varied from being employed in a government ministry, the Central Bank or the Treasury. However, after being given the power to read, write and do all that pertains to our degree, the reality in the job market is different, since there are limited employment opportunities in a country where at least 9,000 graduates are released into the job market every year.

Photo by Marcelo Leal on Unsplash

After my graduation, in addition to family expectations to improve their material conditions, my sister, the late Winnie Anyango Otieno, fell ill in January 2018. We found her three days after she had collapsed in her house. She was admitted to the Kenyatta National Hospital where the doctors diagnosed her as having a problem with her nervous system, which consequently led to the loss of coordination in her legs. She went through treatment for two and a half years, but she never got better. In the first week of May 2020, she collapsed again and was rushed to St. Mary���s Hospital in Lang���ata, where it was discovered that, all along, she was suffering from a brain tumor. When the doctors from St. Mary���s hospital compared the MRI scans that were done in 2018 at the Kenyatta National Hospital and the ones they did in 2020, it was revealed that the tumor appeared in the first scan but it was small and manageable at that time. My sister was thus misdiagnosed in 2018.

This discovery came as a shock to the family because, among others, brain surgery for Winnie would be expensive. Several questions were asked within the family: how will we afford her treatment? In case she was required to travel outside the country for treatment, how would it happen given the COVID-19 lockdown? We did all we could as a family to raise the funds for her treatment, but Winnie succumbed to her illness on May 28, 2020.

Photo by Piron Guillaume on Unsplash

Coupled with unemployment, my country is also faced with poor healthcare for its citizens and only those who are in bed with capitalism can afford decent healthcare. Even the middle class, who resemble our petty bourgeoisie, are a major illness or a road accident away from poverty. Cases of misdiagnosis when seeking treatment are many, and many people die from diseases which would have otherwise been treated if discovered early, or if they had gone to the larger more expensive private hospitals. The situation is worse for those who are poor and are living in the informal settlements, as revealed in a research project���on ���Access to Quality Healthcare in Embakasi North Constituency in Nairobi������that we recently conducted. It is worth repeating the findings here:

Most private healthcare facilities often demand a minimum of 10,000 KES (Kenya shillings), or about US$100, before giving emergency treatment to patients who are taken to the hospitals while in critical condition, and most of them risk dying before they are attended to;
Public health facilities have inadequate medicine (which is a structural problem) and patients are often referred to pharmacies next door to the hospitals for drugs that are sold to them at exorbitant prices;
The health facilities are also not friendly to persons living with a disability, who cannot, for example, use the washrooms because there is no equipment to handle them;
The patient care services are poor in some hospitals, as it is common to see the health care providers side chatting instead of attending to patients;
There are no specialized doctors, a fact that has resulted in many cases of misdiagnosis;
Most public health facilities also lack essential laboratory services, and this has also resulted in several cases of misdiagnosis of many patients;
Lack of awareness and inadequate family planning services or sexual reproductive health information programs.�� Currently, young people as young as 12 years of age are sexually active and are engaging in unsafe sexual activities exposing them to sexually transmitted diseases, sexual and gender based violence and early unplanned pregnancies (it is important to note that 1 in 5 girls between 15 ��� 19 is either pregnant or has given birth). This can also lead to unsafe abortions which in turn increase the risk of dying. It is therefore necessary to lower the eligible age for young girls and adolescents to get access to sexual reproductive health information so that they can make informed decisions;
Islamic practices demand that male patients should be attended to by male doctors and female patients should be attended to by female doctors. In many hospitals this need has not been factored into service delivery;
There is no professionalism in public health facilities; medical practitioners use abusive language and expectant mothers are beaten to push the baby while in labor;
Finally, we don���t have enough medication for expectant mothers in the public hospitals. After delivering, they are always forced to buy their own medication in the nearest pharmacies.

In the quest to maximize profit, capitalism has robbed the common people of the basic needs for survival. It is therefore our commitment as social justice activists in the social justice centers to continue with political education and demand better healthcare, housing, food, clean water and sanitation, free quality education, jobs, and respect for human rights and dignity, among other rights. Ultimately, as Dedan Kimathi once said, ���it is better to die on my feet than to live on my knees��� and eventually the people themselves will rise up to liberate themselves. For us to be a healthy working nation, we need to demand both quality work and more just health services.

We don’t want to reinforce capitalism and imperialism as we save the planet

In this, the first of a series of posts, we critically look at the implications of climate policy in the most powerful Western country for Africans.





A municipal worker cleans canals that reduce the risk of flooding in Beira, Mozambique. Image credit Sarah Farhat for the World Bank via Flickr.

Today, Monday, September 21, 2020, we launch a new series, “Climate Politics” as part of a larger focus on “Climate Justice, Tax Justice and Extractives in African spaces.” A series of short posts by experts and activists, along with a documentary film, this project is part of a larger effort aimed at decolonizing and shifting public narratives around the climate crisis. The big idea is to deepen and move the needle on mainstream conversations in Africa (and globally) about natural resource extraction, the distribution of wealth and the effects of climate change, as well as to galvanize popular pressure for reform toward lasting political change. A key goal is to amplify the voices of Africans on the frontlines of struggles around climate and tax justice.

The series is edited by Grieve Chelwa, one of our contributing editors. An economist, Grieve is on the faculty of the University of Cape Town���s Graduate School of Business.

The climate media project is generously funded by the Africa Regional Office of Open Society Foundations.

With presidential elections weeks away, the US Congress and a ���unity��� task force stitched together by former presidential candidate Bernie Sanders and Democratic Party nominee Joe Biden have offered two major climate proposals. These plans offer a route to the ���green��� recovery that Western advocates have touted to resolve the pre-existing inequalities that the COVID-19 pandemic has exposed. More importantly, they seek to reassert US imperialism with the climate crisis as guise.

The Biden task force plan and the Democratic Party���s congressional committee report on the climate crisis claim to put forward environmental justice reforms. Nonetheless these plans are steeped in climate imperialism. Littered throughout are proposals that consider the climate crisis a national security threat for the US. The global South is also treated as a problem to be solved and policed, especially as the potential major source of climate refugees. The Paris Agreement, which was abandoned by the US and is now increasingly viewed as ineffective by scientists, is treated as the gold standard for fairer climate policy. Yet, the global South only has resort to the Green Climate Fund, which was set up in 2010 as a the global financial mechanism to catalyze climate action among developing nations, and which has increasingly been subsumed in the sphere of a US-dominated financial system.

At this juncture it bears repeating that the US, followed by the European Union (EU)���made up of colonial and imperial powers���are, historically, the biggest contributors to the crisis. Together they contribute 47 percent of global historical carbon emissions. Neither the US congressional climate plan, nor Biden���s task force report urgently reflect on the implications of this fact. Instead, these climate proposals entrench colonial and imperial ideas and policies based upon continuing subordination of the global South through climate capitalism. It is no secret that Southern African countries ��lead the world in terms of exposure to climate change (followed closely by Caribbean and Pacific Island states), and the potential of utilizing the military to meet the US objectives is not an exaggeration.

The climate crisis congressional committee report indicates that ���[d]eveloping countries are especially ill-prepared to face the impacts of climate change.��� Further, the report deems the climate threat, which has already upended life and livelihoods in the global South, as an investment opportunity to ���facilitate commercialization of affordable carbon capture retrofit technologies for export to the developing world.���

Meanwhile, the Biden-Sanders ���unity��� committee���s plan (co-chaired by congressperson Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez and former US secretary of State John Kerry) is no less dangerous. It suggests that the ���the United States does not stand alone in the fight against climate change and global environmental degradation��� but does not in any way recognize the country���s environmental crimes. These further increase the burden on marginalized countries facing climate devastation, while calling on those same countries as ���partners and allies to increase their ambition to reduce their own carbon pollution.��� This version of trickle-down climate policy is far from the radical agenda the world needs.

Western media share the political aims of their public representatives when it comes to climate change. A recent BBC climate report on the 2020 Atlantic hurricane season bizarrely attributed warmer sea surface temperatures, increased rainfall and rapid formation of tropical storms to a ���seed��� rooted in Central Africa. This can truly stand as a meme for the West���s historicizing of the climate crisis that will only continue under a Biden presidency.

Biden���s track record is clear. In the Obama administration, the Africa agenda continued to couple ���investment��� in African countries with increased militarism. His US$2 trillion presidential climate agenda is similarly framed in militaristic terms. Looking back, Biden had a prominent role in energy diplomacy during Barack Obama���s presidency, whose US$7 billion dollar ���Power Africa��� scheme aimed to enrich multinational private sector energy providers like General Electric, through a continent-wide electrification agenda.

The immense US military infrastructure across African countries, now estimated at 29 bases and additional installments, and the Democrats linking the climate crisis and a potential rise in climate refugees as ���national security threats,��� offer us a potential glimpse as to how climate action might be enforced under a Biden presidency. When Biden, as vice president, launched the Caribbean Energy Security Initiative, it was meant to sabotage and reassert US power in the hemisphere, in the face of the widening anti-neoliberal influence of Venezuela. As anthropologist Ryan Jobson, of the University of Chicago, noted in 2015, ���alternative energy, rather than a means of reducing carbon emissions and mitigating climate change, is invoked here as a means of undermining the growing popularity and political influence of the Bolivarian Republic in the Caribbean.���

While some form of global climate action is necessary, we cannot let the specter of US imperialism escape scrutiny. There is need for a more reflective, sound, and progressive agenda based on international solidarity to reverse and atone for the major climate injustices facing countries of the south. The US, like other imperial powers, must acknowledge its outsized role in the climate crisis as a first step to initiating an agenda for climate reparations.

Climate imperialism and the US elections

One takeaway from the climate debate in the US, with consequences for Africans, is that we do not want to reinforce capitalism and imperialism as we save the planet.





A municipal worker cleans canals that reduce the risk of flooding in Beira, Mozambique. Image credit Sarah Farhat for the World Bank via Flickr.

Today, Monday, September 21, 2020, we launch a new series, “Climate Politics” as part of a larger focus on “Climate Justice, Tax Justice and Extractives in African spaces.” A series of short posts by experts and activists, along with a documentary film, this project is part of a larger effort aimed at decolonizing and shifting public narratives around the climate crisis. The big idea is to deepen and move the needle on mainstream conversations in Africa (and globally) about natural resource extraction, the distribution of wealth and the effects of climate change, as well as to galvanize popular pressure for reform toward lasting political change. A key goal is to amplify the voices of Africans on the frontlines of struggles around climate and tax justice.

The series is edited by Grieve Chelwa, one of our contributing editors. An economist, Grieve is on the faculty of the University of Cape Town���s Graduate School of Business.

The climate media project is generously funded by the Africa Regional Office of Open Society Foundations.

With presidential elections weeks away, the US Congress and a ���unity��� task force stitched together by former presidential candidate Bernie Sanders and Democratic Party nominee Joe Biden have offered two major climate proposals. These plans offer a route to the ���green��� recovery that Western advocates have touted to resolve the pre-existing inequalities that the COVID-19 pandemic has exposed. More importantly, they seek to reassert US imperialism with the climate crisis as guise.

The Biden task force plan and the Democratic Party���s congressional committee report on the climate crisis claim to put forward environmental justice reforms. Nonetheless these plans are steeped in climate imperialism. Littered throughout are proposals that consider the climate crisis a national security threat for the US. The global South is also treated as a problem to be solved and policed, especially as the potential major source of climate refugees. The Paris Agreement, which was abandoned by the US and is now increasingly viewed as ineffective by scientists, is treated as the gold standard for fairer climate policy. Yet, the global South only has resort to the Green Climate Fund, which was set up in 2010 as a the global financial mechanism to catalyze climate action among developing nations, and which has increasingly been subsumed in the sphere of a US-dominated financial system.

At this juncture it bears repeating that the US, followed by the European Union (EU)���made up of colonial and imperial powers���are, historically, the biggest contributors to the crisis. Together they contribute 47 percent of global historical carbon emissions. Neither the US congressional climate plan, nor Biden���s task force report urgently reflect on the implications of this fact. Instead, these climate proposals entrench colonial and imperial ideas and policies based upon continuing subordination of the global South through climate capitalism. It is no secret that Southern African countries ��lead the world in terms of exposure to climate change (followed closely by Caribbean and Pacific Island states), and the potential of utilizing the military to meet the US objectives is not an exaggeration.

The climate crisis congressional committee report indicates that ���[d]eveloping countries are especially ill-prepared to face the impacts of climate change.��� Further, the report deems the climate threat, which has already upended life and livelihoods in the global South, as an investment opportunity to ���facilitate commercialization of affordable carbon capture retrofit technologies for export to the developing world.���

Meanwhile, the Biden-Sanders ���unity��� committee���s plan (co-chaired by congressperson Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez and former US secretary of State John Kerry) is no less dangerous. It suggests that the ���the United States does not stand alone in the fight against climate change and global environmental degradation��� but does not in any way recognize the country���s environmental crimes. These further increase the burden on marginalized countries facing climate devastation, while calling on those same countries as ���partners and allies to increase their ambition to reduce their own carbon pollution.��� This version of trickle-down climate policy is far from the radical agenda the world needs.

Western media share the political aims of their public representatives when it comes to climate change. A recent BBC climate report on the 2020 Atlantic hurricane season bizarrely attributed warmer sea surface temperatures, increased rainfall and rapid formation of tropical storms to a ���seed��� rooted in Central Africa. This can truly stand as a meme for the West���s historicizing of the climate crisis that will only continue under a Biden presidency.

Biden���s track record is clear. In the Obama administration, the Africa agenda continued to couple ���investment��� in African countries with increased militarism. His US$2 trillion presidential climate agenda is similarly framed in militaristic terms. Looking back, Biden had a prominent role in energy diplomacy during Barack Obama���s presidency, whose US$7 billion dollar ���Power Africa��� scheme aimed to enrich multinational private sector energy providers like General Electric, through a continent-wide electrification agenda.

The immense US military infrastructure across African countries, now estimated at 29 bases and additional installments, and the Democrats linking the climate crisis and a potential rise in climate refugees as ���national security threats,��� offer us a potential glimpse as to how climate action might be enforced under a Biden presidency. When Biden, as vice president, launched the Caribbean Energy Security Initiative, it was meant to sabotage and reassert US power in the hemisphere, in the face of the widening anti-neoliberal influence of Venezuela. As anthropologist Ryan Jobson, of the University of Chicago, noted in 2015, ���alternative energy, rather than a means of reducing carbon emissions and mitigating climate change, is invoked here as a means of undermining the growing popularity and political influence of the Bolivarian Republic in the Caribbean.���

While some form of global climate action is necessary, we cannot let the specter of US imperialism escape scrutiny. There is need for a more reflective, sound, and progressive agenda based on international solidarity to reverse and atone for the major climate injustices facing countries of the south. The US, like other imperial powers, must acknowledge its outsized role in the climate crisis as a first step to initiating an agenda for climate reparations.

Make Ghana pan-African again

Official Ghanaian pan-Africanism is now less motivated by African liberation and solidarity and more by profit incentives. Ghana���s Year of Return is the best example of this.





Photo by Hello Lightbulb on Unsplash

The 8 minute, 46 second cell phone video shot by a bystander of George Floyd���s murder by police in Minneapolis sparked a global wave of protests. On the African continent, eight countries held events to honor Floyd���s memory. On June 6th, members of the Ghanaian government and diaspora community in Ghana���s capital, Accra, held a memorial. The speakers included the US Ambassador to Ghana, the director of the Ghanaian government���s Diaspora Affairs Office, and Barbara Oteng-Gyasi, Ghana���s Tourism Minister.

In her speech, Oteng-Gyasi invited African-Americans to relocate to Ghana, an appeal that Ghanaian leaders have made since independence in 1957. ���Please take advantage, come home, build a life in Ghana,��� she said. ���You do not have to stay where you are not wanted forever, you have a choice and Africa is waiting for you.��� The memorial ended with George Floyd���s name being mounted on the wall of the Diaspora African Forum at the request of President Nana Akuffo-Addo. News of this was met, three days later at Floyd���s funeral in Houston, Texas, with a standing ovation.

The next day, the Economic Fighters League (EFL) Ghana, a radical Nkrumahist movement, also held a vigil in honor of Floyd at The Black Star Square in Accra. Like other vigils in the US and around the world, attendees chanted ���I Can���t Breathe!��� and ���Black Lives Matter!��� and carried signs demanding justice for Floyd, Breonna Taylor (murdered by police while she was sleeping; police had barged into the wrong house in Louisville, Kentucky), and Ahmaud Arbery (gunned down by two white neighbors while jogging in a suburb of Atlanta). But something else stood out: they also had signs that spoke specifically to injustices in Ghana. There were signs demanding justice for Eric Ofotsu, an unarmed man who was shot by a soldier in Ashiaman, a suburb of Accra; and for The T���adi Girls, three girls who were kidnapped and murdered in 2018.

By connecting the deaths of Floyd, Taylor and Arbery with that of Ofotsu and the T���adi girls, the EFL Ghana vigil put a direct spotlight on Ghana���s own issues with its police and military. The vigil ended violently when police and military arrested Ernesto Yeboah, the head of the EFL, and shoved attendees. Security forces later shot at people who had assembled peacefully in front of the station where Yeboah was detained, demanding his release. Yeboah was charged with not notifying the police of the vigil, although the EFL could prove the police were notified in accordance with the Public Order Act. ���Never have we been prevented or inhibited in any way from holding such sessions,��� Yeboah said, before he was arrested. ���Only when it came to [acting in solidarity] with Black people all over the world, especially with Black people in America.���

Apart from security forces��� harsh response, critics also pointed to the hypocrisy of the government of Ghana, long associated as a leader of pan-Africanism, claiming solidarity with Black people globally against injustice and state violence when it is guilty of doing the same against Black people at home. But the whole episode also highlighted something else: Official Ghanaian pan-Africanism was now less motivated by African liberation and solidarity and more by profit incentives. Ghana���s Year of Return is the best example of this.

Ghana���s history of global Black solidarity goes back to the work of Kwame Nkrumah, Ghana���s first president and an ardent pan-Africanist. Nkrumah used Ghana to promote a pan-African ideology that was rooted in the liberation and solidarity of people in Africa and of African descent. Nkrumah provided funds to African nations to support their liberation movements, allowed African freedom fighters to seek sanctuary in Ghana, and, looking abroad, supported the Civil Rights Movement in the United States.

After Nkrumah was overthrown in a coup d�����tat in 1966, pan-Africanism lost its importance on the national level as Ghana faced political instability. Between 1966 and 1981, Ghana endured four successful coups and several other attempted coups. When pan-Africanism regained importance in Ghana, it coincided with the imposition of World Bank/IMF structural adjustment initiatives which introduced neoliberal policies to Ghana. It was during this period that Ghana���s pan-Africanism developed a focus on connecting with the African diaspora, especially African-Americans, through heritage tourism and the commodification of their roots.

Jerry Rawlings, Ghanaian head of state throughout the 1980s, created and promoted pan-African institutions and initiatives that are popular in Ghana today, such as the DuBois Center (in honor of W.E.B. Du Bois, the great African American historian who settled in Ghana after independence), the George Padmore Research Library (for the Trinidadian journalist and collaborator of Nkrumah), the Kwame Nkrumah Mausoleum, and the PANAFEST theatre festival. In 2003, under then-President John Kufuor, Ghana���s Ministry of Tourism launched an action plan that focused explicitly on diaspora tourism with the desire to establish Ghana as the homeland for Africans in the Diaspora. The World Bank still encourages Ghana to use heritage tourism as a mechanism for increasing its economic development. It is in this context that the Ghanaian government is calling the African diaspora ���home.���

While it may seem that Ghana has lost its way, all is not lost. There is still an opportunity for Ghana to reclaim its original pan-African heritage. If Ghana truly wants to be a pan-African nation, it can begin by treating its citizens with respect. Some of the issues that Ghanaians face on a daily basis, such as dumsor, corruption, and police violence, will also be waiting for the African diaspora if Ghana does not change. It is only by creating a Ghana that is safe for all its people that Ghana will become a safe place for anyone who wants to repatriate there. Or, in lieu of systemic change, Ghana���s government can at least be honest about the treatment people in the African diaspora can expect when they return. In the meantime, we are reminded of the words of Kwame Nkrumah: ���The forces that unite us are intrinsic and greater than the superimposed influences that keep us apart.���

Nkrumah’s legacy on AIAC Talk

This week on our livestream show, we focus on the legacy of Kwame Nkrumah. Stream it live Tuesday at 12:00 EST on Youtube, Facebook, Twitter, or subscribe to our Patreon for the archive.





Kwame Nkrumah's Mausoleum. Image credit
Guido Sohne via Flickr CC.

Last week on AIAC Talk we inaugurated our livestream series with a show about the politics and legacy of Steve Biko. You can catch a transcript of the interview with Dan Magaziner on Jacobin magazine’s website, and highlights from all our shows on our YouTube channel. To access the entire show’s archive, download or listen as a podcast, subscribe to our Patreon.

Tune in to our next episode of AIAC Talk, this Tuesday, September 22, on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter at 12:00 EST and 18:00 SAST. We will discuss the legacy of another large figure from African history, Kwame Nkrumah.

On March 6, 1957, Nkrumah, the newly elected Prime Minister of Ghana, declared, ���the independence of Ghana is meaningless unless it is linked up with the total liberation of Africa.��� That night Ghana was celebrating independence from its former European colonizer, Britain. It was the first African country south of the Sahara to win its independence. This week coincides with his birthday, Nkrumah was born on September 21, 1909.

Three years after independence, Nkrumah had promoted himself to President. It was a post he held until 1966 when his enemies in the army overthrew him (as Euro-American powers looked the other way). In Ghana, his ideas and memory were largely marginalized in the 1970s as its successive governments made a turn to the right. He died in Romania in 1972 following exile in Sekou Toure���s Guinea. Today, Nkrumah is making a comeback, and it is the impact of his legacy on today’s generation that we will explore on this week’s show.

For this program, we���ve brought a panel consisting of journalist Anakwa Dwamena and historian Ben Talton together to unpack Nkrumah���s legacy. Both are known to our regular readers and followers. Anakwa, originally from Ghana, is on the editorial staff of The New Yorker. More importantly he is books editor and a contributing editor at Africa Is a Country. He has written for AIAC about Nkrumah. In March 2017, he wrote about Nkrumah���s connection to New York City, starting as a young student at Lincoln University in Pennsylvania. He���d travel up to New York City regularly. ���While at Lincoln University, Nkrumah would often travel to Harlem. Here, the theology student would most often preach in local churches as he did back in Philadelphia, but perhaps just as importantly, he met thinkers like C.L.R. James and Arturo Schomburg, encountered a thought of Marcus Garvey and was inspired by a pride for Africa that stood in sharp contrast with the colonial situation back in the Gold Coast.���

Ben Talton is a historian of Africa. He wrote book about postcolonial Ghanaian politics, The Politics of Social Change in Ghana: The Konkomba Struggle for Political Equality (Palgrave, 2010). Ben is a native of Harlem, New York City, once a hotbed of Pan-Africanist organizing, of the kind promoted by Nkrumah. His book, In This Land of Plenty: Mickey Leland and Africa in American Politics (UPenn Press, 2019), tells the story of a US Congressman, whose life was the embodiment of pan-Africanist politics. Ben wrote about that pan-African politics for us when he wrote about Africa’s place in African American politics and popular culture. The book-end was the release of Nelson Mandela in 1990: ���Nelson Mandela���s freedom and the Mandelas��� international tour did not end Apartheid but left no doubt that its end was imminent. Resistance to white-minority rule in Africa, and anti-colonialism generally, had been the tie that bound African American engagement with African affairs. The end of abject white supremacy in Africa was the African American consensus on Africa. Multiracial elections in South Africa in 1994 did not completely end African American engagement with Africa. But in subsequent years, Africa���s presence in African American politics and popular culture rapidly decreased.���

We will also feature a short interview with Grieve Chelwa, one of our contributing editors. He edits a new series for us on decolonizing and shifting public narratives around Climate Justice, Tax Justice and Extractives in African spaces. The big idea is to deepen and move mainstream conversations in Africa (and globally) about natural resource extraction, the distribution of wealth and the effects of climate change, as well as to galvanize popular pressure for reform toward lasting political change. One idea is to amplify the voices of Africans on the frontlines of struggles around climate and tax justice. The first phase of the project kicks off today.

The climate media project is generously funded by the Africa Regional Office of Open Society Foundation.

The rising lakes of the Rift Valley

How climate change is threatening lives in Kenya.





Image credit Ferdinand Omondi.

While wildfires rage in the US, in Kenya unparalleled flooding has submerged communities in the Rift Valley region, allowing for the possibility that Lake Baringo, a freshwater lake, and Lake Bogoria, a saline water source, may merge. Facing government apathy, COVID-19, locusts and now climate-change induced floods, how long can the Rift Valley’s displaced residents hold on for? This post, originally published by The Elephant, is part of a series curated by Editorial Board member, Wangui Kimari.

It was an easy Wednesday morning when the phone call came in. I was seated in my study, pitching ideas, studying for my semester exams and trolling the net for news. The COVID-19 pandemic has us working from home and away from offices and fieldwork unless absolutely necessary. My producer, Joe, told me there was a situation developing down in Baringo that fitted the ���absolutely necessary��� description.

Early the next day, I packed up to leave Nairobi for the first time since March, an overnight stay. Risk assessment? Check. Equipment? Check. PPE? Check. Headphones? Check. Waterproof shoes? I forgot to buy those.

The Landcruiser meandered its way down the winding highways and picturesque scenery of Kenya���s Rift Valley. Up at Mau Summit, Mount Longonot���s imposing mass upon the lowlands reminded me of the breath-taking scenery that is Great Rift Valley���s gift to Kenya. But this marvel of nature has been sending warning signs lately. Two years ago, the ground split open at Suswa, leaving a giant crack several kilometres long and forty feet deep in some areas. Geologists wondered whether Africa was beginning to split again, whether two tectonic plates were moving away from each other. Thousands of people were forced to relocate.

[image error]Image credit Ferdinand Omondi.

This August it was the lakes in the Rift Valley, some 280 kilometers north of Nairobi, that had us heading out to investigate. Our drive to Baringo was uneventful, except for a stop in the middle of Marigat to move a tortoise off the road. The noise of passing vehicles had driven it to recoil into its shell in the middle of the highway. Baringo is teeming with wildlife.

We eventually pulled up at Kampi ya Samaki, a sleepy lakeside fishing and tourism settlement. A group of excited young men crowded the windows and aggressively tried to get our attention.

���No hotel here sir, they are all flooded. I take you somewhere else. Please. Good price.��� I hear the words, but can���t figure out who spoke.

���All of them?���

���Yes. All of them. The flood is very bad. All the good hotels are gone.���

These young men are tour guides, starved of revenue since lakeside resorts in Baringo became submerged under water. One of them identifies himself as Rama. Rama says it has been months since he last had a good day���s pay. We are standing at the green gate of what would have been the entrance to Robert���s Camp. The entire facility is flooded. Every structure is under water. It was a beautiful lakeside resort with cottages and tents, camping grounds and a bar. We would probably have spent the night here. But today we will have to make do with the Tamarind Garden, situated several hundred meters away and across the road that runs alongside the lake. It is modest, clean and basic. The rooms are a bit claustrophobic, but the service more than assuages my insecurities. We retire for the night, to begin a fresh day in the early morning and really digest the extent of the damage caused by a lake that is aggressively extending its boundaries.

[image error]Image credit Ferdinand Omondi.

The sun is just rising over the hills, the rays beautifully reflecting on the calm water. It is early morning, and we have hired the services of Julius, a boatman whose thriving tour business now depends on ferrying stranded locals from one end of the lake to another, and occasional visitors like us. Dickson Lenasolio, a middle-aged local, is taking us to the place he used to call home, which he says is now all under water. As we weave through the trees and shrubs that were once Robert���s Camp���s lush gardens, I am warned not to trail my bare hands in the water. This is crocodile territory.

We move slowly along the edges of the lake. We sail past a building half submerged in water, only the green roof protruding above the morning waves. This was the fisheries department, and just beyond it was a health center. All around me used to be dry land on which a community once thrived. There were homes, farms, schools, and hospitals. Much of that has been submerged. As we speed up, another tourist resort comes into view. The Soi Safari Lodge, a striking 74-room hotel with an Olympic-size swimming pool stands desolate and ghostly. It was deserted after the lake flooded the ground floors. I am told the owners had only recently made renovations in preparation for tourists.

[image error]Image credit Ferdinand Omondi.

We speed up across the lake, past a dead crocodile floating in the water. After about twenty minutes, the boat slows down as we approach Dickson���s former village. I can see the protruding roofs of houses where people used to live. I can make out sections of maize plantations from the extended stems of dying maize plants swaying in the waves. I can make out paddocks and homestead fences from the dangerously sagging wires and posts that are threatening to stall our boat. Dickson is now guiding us through the maze of roofs, trees and weeds, his wrinkles too prominent for one aged only 54. As he points to the spot where his house once stood, he tells us he was once a wealthy dairy farmer, before Lake Baringo swelled and swallowed up all his material wealth and he lost everything.

���I had Sahiwals [a breed of high-yield dairy cows]. I sold milk to the locals and it was good business. I would sell milk every day, and I had lots of grass in my farm.���

Dickson goes on to describe what he lost:

My farm here was wire-fenced. We were using solar power to keep out wild animals. But when the water approached and we kept thinking it will recede, it did not, until it became impossible to retrieve the wire. Now it���s all below here, and the wire was very expensive. One roll is over 200 dollars. I fenced over 40 acres with it. My brother fenced 60. All of that is gone. It���s hard to get it out because you can hardly even see the posts. These were 9-foot posts.

It wasn���t just me. There were other farmers who also did the business. They kept cows either for beef or milk. We suffered heavy losses. Because all the farms are now under water. We had no means of preventing it. At first, we thought we could seal the farms off. But, no. The lake kept rising night and day. Until it covered all the farms and we moved.

Dickson says they have never seen the water levels rise like this since they were born. Not even his father, who he says is now 92. He recalls how the flooding began during the heavy rains back in March and everyone thought it would ease off with time. It did not.

Image credit Ferdinand Omondi.

���I brought down my buildings and so did my neighbors,��� says Dickson. ���We moved up about 800 meters. We started living there, and the water still got to us. We pulled our homes down. Now many have moved up the hill, to Marigat, Leberer, all the way up. Unfortunately, when we moved the animals up there, away from the grass they were used to, they fell sick and died.���

���Our father lived here. Our grandfathers lived here too. But now we have no hope. We don���t see the water receding because it has risen to unprecedented levels.���

We drop Dickson off as close to his new home as possible, and he alights and wades off into the distance. He fears he may have to relocate his home for the third time.

The flooding has also cut off essential services. Power, transport, health. A building that used to be a clinic sits lonely among the tall dead trees in the still water. We watch as sick women are brought in by boat. They wade to the shore in search of medication. They will meet nurse Emily, who provides free health care in a little green tent, from where she has noticed a surge in crocodile attacks.

���We were treating burns, wounds and snake bites,��� says Emily. ���We also helped women with family planning and gave HIV/AIDS support. Since the flooding, our work has been affected because many people can���t get to us because they used to come on foot. Others fear traveling over water because there are crocodiles and hippos.���

[image error]Image credit Ferdinand Omondi.

Next to Emily���s small tent a group of women are sifting quality grass seeds. The seeds would have been planted on the land which is now underwater. The health facilities and grass are provided by RAE (Rehabilitation of Arid Environments), a trust that helps local people turn arid land into sustainable pasture. The social enterprise runs a project called ���Nyasi ni Pesa������grass is money���which provides the locals with indigenous species of dryland grass which can survive the area���s arid conditions. This is the grass that Dickson���s purebreds thrived on. After harvesting, RAE then buys back the seeds, giving the women and their families a healthy income too. But the whole model is now under threat.

Murray Roberts, a Kenyan of British ancestry, runs the RAE project. He has lived in Baringo his whole life, and has watched the water levels rise and rise. Roberts shows me an extraordinary family photo taken in the 90s. It���s a photo of his two sons jumping off a cliff outside his home. It appears to be at least 30 feet high. We take another boat ride to the place where the photo was taken; the entire cliff face is now below the water.

But Murray has an even bigger fear than the loss of land and livelihoods. Less than 40 kilometers south of Lake Baringo is Lake Bogoria. The highly saline lake is home to a famous colony of flamingos and is a gazette national park. But Lake Bogoria is also rising. I learn that the Kenya Wildlife Service has moved its main gate three times, each one submerged as the lake expands. Senior KWS Warden James Kimaru has been quoted saying that the water levels increased within one month from a width of 34 km squared to 43 km squared. We see one of the KWS buildings in the distance, half submerged in water. New roads into the reserve are being constructed after previous ones were also covered by the water. As the lakes expand in width, the distance between them shrinks. Murray is concerned that with both Lake Baringo and Lake Bogoria rising, the two lakes could eventually contaminate each other.

���The thing that is really worrying me about this situation is if Lake Bogoria starts flowing into Lake Baringo. What would be the outcome of that because Bogoria is a highly alkaline lake and it will be an ecological disaster. Once that water reaches Lake Baringo it will affect the fish, it will affect the bird life, it will affect the aquatic life.���

Image credit Ferdinand Omondi.

It is a concern that the Baringo County government shares. A post-floods report published in June by the Kenya Inter-Agency Rapid Assessment Mechanism concluded that the Rift Valley is becoming the most flood-prone region in Kenya. Much of that water ends up in the lakes, which inevitably swell. The report attributed the flooding to a combination of poor land use practices, deforestation and accumulation of silt. In May, the government counted over 200 deaths from flooding, with at least 800,000 people affected countrywide, Much of the destruction happened along river and lake settlements like Lake Baringo and its feeder rivers. Outside the Rift Valley, Lake Victoria was reported to have risen to its highest levels in over 50 years.

Helen Robinson, a geologist with extensive experience in East Africa, explained to me that when it is hot and dry for a long time the soils becomes so dry that they cannot absorb water. Then when it rains, huge amounts run along the surface to the rivers, then the lakes. Robinson explained that if the soils had some moisture content, much more of the rainwater would drain into the groundwater system. Trees help soils to retain moisture, but Kenya���s forest cover is only 7% of its landmass, 3% less than the 10% recommended by the United Nations.

All these points reinforce the concerns that human activity is contributing to the extreme changes in our climate. The UN says climate change is a reality, and that human activity is the main cause. Scientists have stressed the importance of lowering our carbon emissions to limit the impact we���re having on our planet. Robinson said that if we don���t try harder, the damage could become irreversible including melting ice at the poles, rising sea levels, more climate extremes, loss of habitats and mass extinctions.

Baringo is experiencing extreme weather changes and destruction to its habitat. But across the Rift Valley, similar swellings were recorded in Lake Nakuru and Lake Naivasha this year, and even in Lake Turkana in the north, with the varying levels of destruction pointing to a pattern. Whatever the causes, it is a race for survival, and at the moment, nature is winning.

Eritrea���s deteriorating state

The Eritrean government continues to force students into military service in the middle of a pandemic. Things are about to get even worse.





Asmara, Eritrea. Image credit Clay Gilliland via Wikimedia Commons.

The Government Response Stringency index (GRSI) is a composite score developed by researchers at Oxford University, to compare countries��� policy responses to the coronavirus pandemic. It uses nine response indicators to rank governments, including school closures, workplace closures, and travel bans in its assessment of who has the strictest measures. Eritrea has topped the list most of the time.

Eritrea has enforced a total lockdown since April 1, effectively banning all public transport, closing schools, and suspending everything in the literal sense, even postponing publishing the state newspaper���the only newspaper in the country���for five months. Although the pandemic���s consequences had been fatal across the world, in extremely impoverished countries like Eritrea where the essential food items are rationed in stores run by the ruling party, the magnitude of the lockdown is immense. Eritrea���s elites who hold absolute power have already frozen the state in time for more than two decades. Now families who have relatives in the diaspora depend on remittances to survive, subjected to extremely low exchange rates set by the ruling party���s financial sector, while the unlucky ones without family abroad suffer even more.

While the entire country has been put on hold, there is always an exception. During the past months, President Isaias Afwerki has traveled internationally three times to Ethiopia, Sudan and Egypt with his big entourage. He also received Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed and the President of Sudan���s Sovereign Council, General Abdul Fattah al-Burhan in July and September, respectively. Prior to that he has been absent from the scene for more than two months ensuing the usual rumor of that he is incapacitated, or dead.

The second exception is secondary in school in Sawa, the notorious military training center. Since 2003, the final year of secondary school has been taught at Sawa. Eritrean secondary school students as young as 16 years old attend their last grade of secondary school at the harshest place and most unconducive environment. According to the country���s national service proclamation and other international treaties Eritrea signed, the minimum age of military training is 18. With barely any facilities; a temperature that reaches up to 45 degree Celsius (about 113 Fahrenheit); and very frequent sandstorms, Eritrean children in Sawa are officially introduced to the machinery of slavery. In the one-year program, students combine military drills and academic studies. After spending a year in the military camp, they sit for the secondary school graduation certificate examination, which decides the fate of their life: either join colleges or head to the army with no exit. The school has been described by Human Rights Watch���s senior Africa researcher as: ���at the heart of its repressive system of control over its population.���

Many governments have been releasing thousands of prisoners and adopting their programs to ensure social distance since the COVID-19 pandemic broke out. The Eritrean diaspora has been pleading to their ���government��� to release prisoners of conscience and disperse thousands of students in Sawa, known for its overcrowding. In early April, the head of Economic Affairs for Eritrea’s ruling People’s Front for Democracy and Justice (PFDJ) party, Hagos “Kisha” Gebrehiwet, in an online seminar said that Sawa and prisons are the safest places for quarantine as they are secluded. About three months later, Sawa hosted two heads of states with their first ladies accompanied by an entourage. In July, Ethiopia���s prime minister, Abiy Ahmed, facing tremendous pressure at home and in search of externalizing his domestic crises, visited Sawa to observe ���graduation-parade rehearsals.���

A month later in mid-August, Sawa held its graduation ceremony, televised live. President Isaias Afwerki, who has never attended any graduation ceremonies of the defunct University of Asmara or other colleges, never misses Sawa���s ceremony. There was no indication in the ceremony of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.

Amid the strictest lockdown, 11th grade students have been recalled in August in what the minister of information described as ���partial easing of restrictions,��� to make up for the lost months. The aim was to prepare them at Sawa to attend their final year of training. Partial easing of lockdown restrictions, however, did not materialize apart from the recall of the students.

According to official announcements from the country���s ministry of health, the latest cases of COVID-19 have been from nationals who have returned from neighboring countries and no local transmission has been reported since early June. Yet, the lockdown has not been eased and there are now different quarantine centers for nationals who are returning from neighboring countries. It seems the pandemic came as a blessing for the regime that has been looking for excuses to confine its population.

There is no sense of urgency in today���s Eritrea. It is a country under self-imposed political siege. Eritrean parents are still unsure about the fate of their children who were expected to start school in September. There is not any information about the lockdown���s end. In an already improvised state, famine has started hitting hard. The only response from the state has been to reinforce the lockdown.

There is no way to challenge the state policies from inside Eritrea. Former students of Sawa, in exile, have been campaigning to end the practice of sending secondary school children to the military camp. The campaign #EndHighSchoolInSawa has gained traction among the Eritrean diaspora and has been amplified inside the country with the help of the diaspora-based independent media. Some prominent figures, such as former defense minister and now an exile, Mesfin Hagos, have joined the call.

���The most important impact of the #EndHighSchoolInSawa campaign is it re-sensitizes as many Eritreans were numb and accepted this hideous policy as normal,��� says US-based Haikel Negash, who was among the initiators of the campaign; she is also a former student of the school. Her colleague and a PhD student of history at Queens University, Samuel Emaha maintains that although they could not stop the school, ���The campaign aims to bring the issue to the agenda and attention of the common people. The campaign effectively brought the problems associated with the program, mainly because former students lacked the platform to speak about the school.���

Many former students of the school have now been loudly describing their harsh treatment at the school. Some former students have shared that they experienced rape and sexual harassment at Sawa, in line with reports on the problem from human rights organizations for years.

But the campaign was unable to force the Eritrean government to change its policy. Since September 8, high school students from all over the country have been heading to Sawa. The possible consequences of such a policy in the pandemic is not difficult to imagine. Students in Sawa live in crowded military barracks in the most communal lifestyle anyone could imagine. Social distancing is not only impossible, but there is enforced physical proximity. None can justify that the benefits of this untimely pronouncement would outweigh the possible consequences. Many have been pleading for the government to reconsider its decision, in the face of pandemic. But the regime prefers to contribute to the fastest possible spread of the pandemic.

Challenging notions of whiteness in South Africa

White South Africans have never really had to look in the proverbial mirror and reflect on where they come from, and how their histories have shaped their current realities, which inform their sense of belonging, shame, and entitlement.





Nossob Kalahari Rest Stop, November 2016. All images credit Sydelle Willow Smith.

Since 2015, mass student protests have made the narrative of the ���new South Africa��� impossible to accept, and quite personally have called into question my own story-telling abilities as a photographer. In the wake of protests over the student-led movement, Rhodes Must Fall, I confronted questions about my portrayals of the events, and whether I was best suited to document such a story. Events like this have led me, and quite possibly other white South Africans, to consider what it means to be white and what it means to be born with an invisible backpack of privilege. From my purview, white South Africans have never had to consider the historical and present-day. They have never had to look in the proverbial mirror and reflect on where they come from, and how their histories have shaped their current realities, which inform their sense of belonging, shame, and entitlement.

Ina Van Der Merwe, Ladies Christian Home, Cape Town. March 2018 ���My grandmother was a Voortrekker, she was in a concentration camp as a child. The British burnt all the farms. My husband worked for the Apartheid government. He was involved in some of the forced removals under the Group Areas Act. You can���t inherit the sins of the past. I have to be different. Everyday more and more I realize I have to listen, listen, listen to what people say.��� – Extract of interview.

This led to my ongoing documentary photography project Un/Settled, which explores settler colonial histories, white South Africans��� conceptions of belonging, and white privilege. I urge participants and audiences to examine their historical and future roles within a landscape marked by deep social scars. In my interviews, and the images that result from them, I am asking participants to step outside for a moment���to look at the house from the outside in.

I work with photography influenced by ethnographic research. These methods are steeped in colonial legacies, and are the tools I use to try to understand the world, in the belief that white people, like myself, need to interrogate the deeply embedded structures of whiteness. I draw from the definition shared by Daniel C. Blight in his book The Image of Whiteness as the social, economic, political, and legal power structures underpinning white culture���a vast system that sits in the heart of Western culture and spreads through its entirety. Blindness to how whiteness operates only causes a more polarized and precarious present.

The end of apartheid in 1994 was signaled by a collective gesture of forgiveness and hope. South Africans collectively bid farewell to out-and-out white supremacy, but its categories of race stayed with us. Its urban design stayed with us. Its divided beaches and schools stayed with us. Its long-term economic effects and inequalities only became further entrenched. White South Africans seem to have taken the peaceful turn to genuine democracy and public acts of healing like the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. However, this was no absolution, rather it was a necessary olive branch extended to white South Africans, many of whom chose to clutch on to as exoneration for past sins.

Last year the work was installed for three months along Government Avenue, in the historically significant site of The Company Gardens in Cape Town. The garden was created in the 1650s by the region���s first European colonial settlers, and provided fertile ground to grow fresh produce to replenish ships rounding the Cape, and to provide vegetables to the growing settlement. A few days after the work was installed in the Gardens, it was defaced with human feces and permanent marker. The media jumped on the opportunity to report on the vandalism. However, I don���t feel that it was necessarily vandalism. For me, it was an expression of unspoken anger around the lack of honest conversations about identity and race in South Africa. There has been the dangerous use of ���Simunye [we are one], the rainbow nation myth, stronger together, rugby is going to save everything��� without looking underneath, at the blatant inequities that persist in our society.

A day at the horse races, Cape Town, January 2017.

Un/Settled attempts to make the familiar unfamiliar. By studying the communities I come from and am familiar with, Un/Settled recognizes the otherness of our own selves and our own histories, thereby attempting to turn the colonial gaze inward. One of the project’s main objectives is to understand the dynamics of white power, and whether anything unites white identity across different genders, cultures, languages, religions, and economic backgrounds. I spent the last five years interviewing white South Africans of varying economic backgrounds and cultural heritage in communities across the country.�� I combined portraiture and landscapes with the aim of picturing everyday white life. I paired photographs of white people in South African landscapes with interview text, and printed them on large aluminum boards. My intention was to display the photographed sitters enjoying the freedom of space around them and their sense of place within the landscape. The work will move to the aptly named ���Victoria and Albert��� Waterfront in Cape Town in the coming months to continue these conversations in public.

Un/Settled is a work of conversation and collaboration that extends outward to the place and the people I listen to, write about, and photograph. It is a place of vulnerability, fear, and curiosity aimed at dismantling the ubiquitous nature of whiteness that continues to plague South African society. As Olivia Walton, a key writer and collaborator on the project urges: ���Certain questions take on a whole new shape: Why is it that no one was ever really held accountable for apartheid? Why, though the apartheid regime ended, do we still see its structures intact? You may feel yourself a rightful resident here, but what does your existence demand or deny of others?���

These are the questions I am still grappling with in my work. Based on my lived experience, and through engagement with the project, I hope other white South Africans will be motivated to confront the fraught histories of whiteness deeply embedded in apartheid���s lasting legacy.

Chavi Alheit, Sea Point February 2016 ���I just think white people, white South Africans are the luckiest nation, community, whatever you want to call it, in the world. For all intents and purposes we all should have been macheted a long time ago. And the fact that we are still living with comforts and advantages that we have, really goes to say a lot for the black population. We really should be thankful towards them. They have been very tolerant of us. It irritates me when white people say things like ���we need to get over race issues and we need to move on���. You���re still at so much of an advantage being born as a white person in South Africa, than you are being born as a black person.��� – Extract of interview.