Sean Jacobs's Blog, page 172
June 10, 2020
Saturday mornings
November 10, 2019, Bronx, NY, At the NY Dragons' semifinal league match, Jeffery Konvelbo, originally from Burkina Faso, awaits the signal to come onto the field.
On a Saturday morning last September, Samuel Komolafe-Nath stood next to his older brother on the sidelines of a pickup game on Staten Island���s North Shore. The weekly soccer match brings together players from Nigeria, Senegal, Ghana, Sierra Leone, and of course Liberia, which counts a significant diaspora on the island.
The 18-year old Komolafe-Nath, wearing a FC Barcelona No.10 Lionel Messi jersey, patiently awaits the moment to come onto the field for the first time since arriving here a week earlier from Lagos. He moved back to Staten Island, where he was born, after 15 years in Nigeria.
���I left when I was really young, so this is all pretty foreign to me,��� says Komolafe-Nath of his new life back in the U.S. with his dad, brother and sister. He studies Computer Science at the College of Staten Island, where he hopes to play soccer in the fall.
A voice calls him onto the field: ���Messi, you���re in.��� His brother looks on attentively.
September 21, 2019, Staten Island, NY, A week after arriving from Lagos, Nigeria where he lived for the past 15 years, Samuel Komolafe-Nath stands on the sidelines of a weekly pickup match on Staten Island���s North Shore. Image credit Michael de Vulpillieres.Scenes like these play out every week in parks run by New York City and on high school athletic fields across the five boroughs, where African immigrants gather to practice, compete, or simply catch up with old friends. Soccer in New York City offers significant social, cultural and sometimes economic support for the African diaspora, one of the fastest growing immigrant communities in the city.
The Old Timers
More than 30 years ago, the Old Timers, an association of Liberian men living in New York, began organizing pickup games regularly in the Park Hill section of Staten Island. The tradition has evolved today to include players ranging in age from 16 to nearly 70 years old and from multiple countries.
Matches are now played at Corporal Thompson Park, sandwiched between the West Brighton Houses, a housing project to the South, and the shipping docks to the North, over which a large Trump flag waves overhead. The presence over the years of more non-Liberian African players like Komolafe-Nath at the Saturday matches underscores the growing diversity in New York���s least diverse borough.
October 07, 2019, Bronx, NY, Abubakar Ahmed Ali trains a young Nigerian teenager on the sidelines of a weekly pickup game near Yankee Stadium. Image credit Michael de Vulpillieres.Tunis Hashim, who arrived here from Monrovia in 1986 and helps organize the matches today, is one of a few from the older generation who still comes out regularly.
���Soccer for us represents peace,��� says Hashim of the role soccer has played in his country���s history.
Under his track suit, he wears a tee shirt bearing the image of the most famous Liberian, current president and former FIFA World Footballer of the Year, George Weah.
Prince Yates, fellow match organizer, knew Weah well in Monrovia: ���We grew up in the same neighborhood and played together up until he left to play in Cameroon. He even played with us here on his visits to Staten Island.���
Los Dragones Africanos
At a high school football field overlooking the East River in Upper Manhattan, Latin music plays from the stands as an announcer calls a soccer match live in Spanish over a portable PA system for a few dozen spectators. On the pitch, a Honduran squad competes against the NY Dragons, a team led by Togolese player/coach Florent Sodji.
Sodji (42), a former club pro and Togolese national team player, founded the Dragons in 2009. He sees it as part soccer club, part youth academy and part support system for fellow West Africans. Today, they participate in different amateur leagues throughout the year and practice in the Bronx every Saturday morning at 6.30 am, rain or shine.
December 7, 2019, Yonkers, NY, Abubakar Ahmed Ali stands outside his Yonkers, NY apartment wearing a USA-Ghana scarf from a 2017 friendly. Image credit Michael de Vulpillieres.Thirty-two-year-old NY Dragons midfielder Aly Lawal, one of a few non-Togolese players on the team, initially arrived in Houston from Burkina Faso for his studies before making his way to New York City to find work a few year later.
���When I came to New York, Florent and the NY Dragons welcomed me with open arms,��� he says after his team���s loss to the Hondurans. ���Life in the US can be so stressful. That���s why this team is so important for me. It���s like family.���
From Accra to Kano State to the Bronx
Abubakar Ahmed Ali���s soccer career spans nearly six decades, three countries and two continents. Every Saturday morning, the 69-year-old former pro (Accra Hearts of Oak, Raccah Rovers and the Green Eagles) and current youth coach travels from his home in Yonkers, NY, to a pickup game a few blocks from Yankee Stadium in the Bronx to meet up with old friends and to help train African ���youth,��� as he calls them.
The quality of play on the pitch is high. Mostly African, current and former professionals as well as college players, aspiring pros, and even a former boxing world champ from Ghana come out regularly.
Ali seems to know everyone, switching with ease from English to Hausa to Twi. His slow gait up and down the sidelines reveals the wear on his legs of a long career played at the highest level.
September 14, 2019, Bronx, NY, Abubakar Ahmed Ali, who had several caps with the Nigerian national soccer team in the 1970s, shows off his silver medal from the 1978 All Africa Games. Image credit Michael de Vulpillieres.One of several links in the Bronx to Ali���s life back in West Africa is his best friend Ahmed Yakubu Mohamed, whom Ali has known since the 1960s when they played together in Accra. Mohamed drives to the Bronx from his home in New Jersey every weekend and brings his teenage grandson Mubashir, an aspiring college player, with him so Ali can help train him.
Reflecting on these friendships and on his work training kids here in NYC, Ali says proudly: ���This is my passion ��� soccer is love.���
June 9, 2020
Notes on post-revolutionary Sudan
Image credit Hind Mekki via Flickr CC.
Malcolm X once said that ���racism is like a Cadillac; they make a new model every year.��� I think about these words every day. They give me the power to make sense of the reality of post-revolutionary Sudan, limitations and all.
The legacies of Sudan���s postcolonial traumas and the Presidency of Omar al-Bashir (1989-2019) have loomed heavily over the lives of Sudanese���to varying degrees, given the past and present regime���s reigns of racial terrorism in Darfur, the Nuba Mountains, and South Sudan���as well as in the Sudanese diaspora.
After nearly thirty years of this reality and its unfettered consequences, hopes for a Sudan borne out of a collective imagination, freed from the strangle of austerity measures, indiscriminate policing and murder, and the orchestrated oppression of those who did not fit into the mold of the regime���s ���imagined community��� began to manifest before my very eyes.
This ���new��� Sudan was emerging out of the December 2018 uprisings and the subsequent sit-in at the military headquarters (April 6���June 3, 2019). I personally saw it in the glimmers of faith I had finally seen in my parents and those of their generation. The fruits of their arrests, their activism, and their exile had graduated and been succeeded by the perseverance of those that came after them. Power had proven itself to resoundingly be in the people.
The revolution and I officially met on May 23, 2019. Newly graduated from a college on the American East Coast, I returned to Sudan after having left eight years prior. I was eager to take part in it and see for myself what this ���new��� Sudan was made of. The moment I stepped onto Qiyada street and into the many worlds of the sit-in, I was engulfed by a determined chant: ���kol al-balad Darfur��� (the whole country is Darfur).
I believed in the spirit of the chant because I wanted to. For so many years I had been weighed down by the fact that the place I called home, my safe haven from the US���s deep-seated hostility towards black lives and black bodies, was equally shaped by state-sanctioned anti-blackness. Here was the opportunity to rectify it. It started with a chant, but hopefully, it would be followed by critical conversations many of us would have to have with our families about the ways we���ve perpetuated Arab supremacy and violence against non-���Arab��� communities in our shared complicity with so-called societal norms. I was so enamored by the zeal that I did not even register the fact that Qiyada street was surrounded by janjaweed-turned-Rapid Support Forces��� tanks and vehicles. I was so determined to hold on to the spirit of the revolution that I told myself that the janjaweed���s murder of a six-month pregnant tea lady, Mayada John, near Qiyada street on May 29, 2019 was an aberrant, horrific circumstance of this ���new��� Sudan that would be vindicated upon the inauguration of a civilian government. The lies I was telling myself to assuage my fears and avoid confronting reality as it truly was, were beginning to feel less and less believable.
My relationship to the revolution and to Qiyada street took a sharp turn on June 3, 2019. On the eve of the night before the massacre, I had been planning to go to the sit-in after breaking my fast. The day after next was Eid al-Fitr, and a mass prayer in front of the military headquarters had been organized by the Sudanese Professionals Association. The energy leading up to the day was bound to be bustling and energizing. At the conclusion of the night���s taraweeh prayers, it started pouring rain and the power went out at Qiyada street, so I did not go. I told myself I would just go tomorrow, and if not tomorrow, I would go the next day. The sit-in was immortal. There would always be an opportunity to go.
The following morning, I woke up to a de facto lockdown, the constant whizzing sound of gunshots, and an internet blackout. The revolution, as I had come to know it, was over.
A part of me felt na��ve for thinking it could even exist. The courage and fearlessness I had seen in the revolutionaries on Qiyada street and beyond assured me that I had every reason to think that the goals of the revolution were achievable. Maybe they would be in a world where individual agency was not limited by the structures imposed around it. A world where neocolonialism by way of the US, China, and Qatar (among others); Saudi Arabia and the UAE���s imperial campaigns in Yemen, and their use of janjaweed mercenaries to sustain it; and the long-standing relationship between the Sudanese government and the state���s military infrastructure did not define Sudan���s past, present and future.
In less than a month, it will be the one-year anniversary of the ���dispersal��� of the sit-in. In the year since, a sovereignty council including one of the perpetrators of the Khartoum massacre was declared the head of state of Sudan; Rapid Support Forces have continued to kill non-���Arab��� civilians in West Darfur, their attacks on the Kerending camps in El Geneina resulting in the death of 80 people and the displacement of 47,000; and at the same time, the transitional government has been lauded for banning female genital cutting and lifting some of the ���former��� regime���s restrictions on the press and freedom of speech. Sudan now has the highest number of coronavirus cases and deaths in East Africa, which led to a nationwide lockdown and the criminalization of travel between Sudanese states. Although these measures are necessary, I worry how the pandemic will be used to justify the thwarting of Sudan���s slated transition to a civilian government in October 2022.
Racism is at the very ethos and heart of the modern Sudanese state. As long as ���former��� structures continue to be relied upon and perpetuated, it will be a fundamental part of every iteration of it. This is the case with the current transitional government. The ghosts of our past mercilessly haunt our present. Racism, like the state���s other technologies of power, is mutating, although it has been muffled by the empty promises of a more politically correct and internationally ���respectable��� government. It is entrenching itself deeper and deeper into the fold of the Sudanese state.
Revolution, however, is a process, not an event.
Abolition across the Atlantic
Black Lives Matter Plaza, Washington DC, June 6, 2020. Image credit
Geoff Livingston via Flickr CC.
On Thursday May 28th, the Minneapolis Police Department���s (MPD) 3rd Precinct was engulfed in flames. Set ablaze by protestors enraged by the murder of George Floyd at the hands of police, its torching marked a new chapter in the struggle against state violence in the US. Transmitted in real-time to audiences around the globe via social media, the vision of the burning building was a clear message to those in power: if you refuse to reform the system, we will destroy it ourselves.
Given the intensity of the past two weeks, it is easy to forget that the ongoing uprisings are not simply organic outbursts, but the result of decades of organizing. The brutality of police in the United States has long provoked enduring resentment and resistance in poor and racialized communities. But until the emergence of Black Lives Matter in 2013, this fury lacked national political attention. Even then, the movement struggled to translate its prominence in the discourse into durable reforms. It has remained profoundly constrained by a Democratic Party, cowed by police and prison guard unions, and stifled by a white liberal consensus that is uncomfortable with violent or even militant protest. These structural constraints have made sure that the movement for black lives has mostly only been able to extract vacuous statements of support from Democratic politicians and ineffectual reforms. The movement has not been able to ensure the conviction of killer cops���let alone deep structural changes to the criminal punishment system.
That moment, however, seems to be over. The burning of the 3rd Precinct and nation-wide protests that followed have not only forced the prosecution of Floyd���s killers, but brought the question of police abolition fully into the American mainstream for the first time. This profound, and in many ways stunning shift towards abolition comes in part because the movement has shifted its tactics. Formed originally around affirmative slogans like ���Black Lives Matter,��� protestors have moved firmly towards the denunciatory������Fuck the Police,��� ���Fuck 12,��� and ���ACAB.��� The latter is short for ���All Cops Are Bastards.��� Moreover, the clowning of opportunist and erstwhile BLM ���leader��� DeRay Mckesson���s policy platform, signals there is little appetite for what abolitionists call ���reformist reforms������those policies that entrench or expand the power of policing. While it is too early to know if abolition becomes the vision of the whole movement, the turn to militancy signals, at the very least, a growing abolitionist instinct.
But what is most extraordinary about the current moment is not so much the shift within the movement, but its broader acceptance outside of the movement. According to a recent Monmouth Poll, 54% of Americans believe the protest, including the burning of the 3rd Precinct, was at least partially justified. In Minneapolis, the school board and the University of Minnesota��cut ties with��the police department before the city council committed to disbanding the MPD Monday. In Los Angeles, Mayor Eric Garcetti committed to cutting up to $150 million from the LAPD���s budget to be redirected to jobs, health initiatives, and ���peace centers.��� Under the white-hot pressure of the moment, municipalities across the country are considering similar steps.
One should be careful to note these actions, though welcome, do not add up to abolition. Abolition is a far more capacious project that requires not only the end of institutions like the police and prisons, and of the systems that undergird and require them, but their replacement with relations of mutual care and accountability. Moreover, it remains to be seen if this incipient progress will be stymied by a spineless Democratic Party or crushed by a fascist Republican Party. Let us hope that it is not. The escalating health, economic, and political catastrophes are plunging the US into a full-blown crisis of legitimation. Without an ideological fig leaf to cover its predation, the ruling class will rely ever more heavily on the police to maintain the line between themselves and the masses. Seen from this vantage, abolition looks very much like the last best hope, not only for left politics, but for American democracy itself.
Compared to South Africa, that fellow settler colony on the other end of the Atlantic, the contrast could not be starker, as William Shoki points out in his excellent recent piece. While the country’s security forces have killed at least 12 people since the beginning of the pandemic lockdown, there is little outrage over police violence in South Africa. This is shocking, not only because South African police kill three times as many people per capita than their American counterparts, but also because South Africa, unlike the US, has a rich history of broad militancy against the police and security forces. Why then are South Africans not also in the streets?
Shoki offers two answers: one proximate���that recent police violence in South Africa was not captured on video and therefore could not become a media spectacle���and one ultimate���that South Africans, particularly those in the middle class, approach police violence with a distinctly American perspective that emphasizes its racial character and obscures its class character. These are compelling, but I believe only partial answers.
Let���s begin with the first. It is undoubtedly the case that the capture and circulation of the murder of George Floyd played an important, inciting role. But images themselves, however grotesque the content may be, are not sufficient to provoke an uprising. It has taken decades of organizing and movement-building not only to get people in the streets, but to structure the public���s very affective reactions to police violence. As philosopher Judith Butler observed about the Rodney King trial, the ideological construction of criminality weighed so heavily on the minds of white jurors while watching the footage, instead of seeing King being savagely beaten by the cops, they saw King as the source of danger. Rolling back that subjectification takes work, work that is clearly not being done in South Africa. After all, it is simply not the case that South Africans do not have widely-circulated images of police violence. Quite the contrary, as I have written previously, police departments have taken to posting images of ���criminals��� on Twitter who they themselves have shot dead. South Africa does not lack for spectacles of police violence; it lacks a civic culture that questions who becomes ���a criminal��� and under what conditions.
This brings me to Shoki���s second point on class and American cultural hegemony in South Africa. It is without question that a race-reductionist analysis of police violence allows some in the black middle and upper classes to, by curious alchemy, turn the suffering of black Americans into self-promotion. Look no further than South African President Cyril Ramaphosa���s new ���Black Friday anti-racism��� campaign for corroboration. But in making this critique, we should not lose track of the ideological diversity within the US struggle against state violence. Specifically, it is important to remember that abolition as a tradition emerges not from BLM, but from the work of black socialist women like Angela Davis, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, and Beth Richie. And while there may be some misguided souls that think that abolition, as Shoki writes, means ���reimagining policing as a public good,��� there is no self-respecting abolitionist who would agree. Those at the core of the tradition have always been forthrightly anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist. Wilson Gilmore puts it plainly: ���Abolition has to be green (environmentalist), and in order to be green, it has to be red (anti-capitalist), and in order to be red, it has to be international.���
Given the superficiality of Twitter, it is not surprising that middle class South Africans have taken up the American struggle in its most sanitized form. This speaks less to American culture hegemony per se than how South Africans��� imaginations���middle and working class alike���have long been so thoroughly captured by punitive logics. When I called for consideration of prison and police abolition in South Africa in September, it was mostly out of despair. At the time, the discourse around policing was dominated by ultra-reactionaries who believe that the police in the country are not violent enough, think-tankers who lauded Police Minister Bheki Cele���s ���maximum crackdown,��� and liberal NGOs, who fight against sexual violence in prisons with terrifyingly inhumane slogans like ���rape is not part of the penalty.��� The fact that there is now a sense that the country has a problem with police violence is reason for cautious optimism.
Those interested in cultivating this sensibility into a movement could do worse than abolition. It is natural for those unfamiliar with it to be skeptical of it, but those on the left will recognize themselves in abolition. In many ways, abolitionists put Mao���s maxim������from the masses, to the masses������in practice better than anyone else in the US. Drawing on the rage of poor people and black people as an archive, abolitionists have transformed it into a vision of the future, and worked to bring it into being. The rage in the streets today is not knee-jerk or inchoate; abolitionists have helped nurture it into an uprising. Let���s hope it wins and crosses the Atlantic soon.
June 8, 2020
The Senghor myth
President Senghor at the first Black Arts Festival in Dakar. Image Credit The Wire via Quai Branly.
On April 4, 2020, Radio France Internationale broadcast literature professor and critic Boniface Mongo Mboussa���s portrait of L��opold S��dar Senghor, Senegal���s first president (1960-1980). The event was Senegal���s 60th anniversary of independence and the message was clear: ���Senghor ruled his country as a teacher, with method and organizational spirit. During the school season, he was president in Senegal; in summer, he was a poet in Normandy.��� In short, Mboussa explains that Senghor���s policy and poetry were inseparable because, ���poet-president, [he] was not one without the other.���
This narrative is dangerous because it implicitly praises ���he whose pen mattered more than his sword.��� Although Senegal did not experience the same political crises as its neighbors, the mythification of ���poet-president��� Senghor has blurred our understanding of his political actions. Under the single-party rule of Senghor���s Senegalese Progressive Union (UPS), authorities resorted to brutal methods; intimidating, arresting, imprisoning, torturing and killing dissidents. Recalling he was both a poet and a president is a matter of fact, but associating both, while refusing to recognize the authoritarianism he displayed, is historical nonsense.
Born in Joal in 1906, Senghor left Senegal for the first time at the age of 22. While in Paris in the late 1920s, he started frequenting black literary circles. In the columns of the journal L�����tudiant Noir, alongside writers like Aim�� C��saire and L��on-Gontran Damas, he expressed his desire to carry ���a cultural movement whose goal is the black man, whose research instruments are Western reason and the Negro soul; because it takes reason and intuition.��� Senghor continued his studies as the N��gritude movement developed, becoming professor of classical studies in 1935. According to his former collaborator Roland Colin, his own n��gritude was more of an ideal than a reality. Senghor���s identity had been confiscated from an early age at a mission school, and he sought, for the remainder of his life, to reclaim it. Colin explains:
From the age of seven until the end of his life, Senghor was a man struggling with contradictions, with intimate sensitivities which led him to projects that he could not afford to implement in his personal life to the extent of his aspirations.
At the end of the Second World War, Senghor joined the Monnerville Commission, responsible for ensuring the new representation in the French Constituent Assembly of territories under colonial occupation. The following year, he joined the ranks of the French Section of the Workers��� International sitting, alongside Lamine Gu��ye, as representative of Senegal and Mauritania. In 1948, with Mamadou Dia and Ibrahima Seydou N���daw, Senghor participated in the creation of the Senegalese Democratic Bloc, the precursor of the UPS.
However, Senghor never fully positioned himself outside of the colonial framework. Aim�� C��saire said of him that he ���knew the French would leave one day; he just took his time. At heart, he loved them.��� Honoring the hundreds of innocent African soldiers killed by the French army at the Thiaroye military camp on December 1, 1944, Senghor expresses his regret of a France ���forgetful of its mission of yesterday��� in his poem ���Tyaroye.��� African literature professor and literary critic Lilyan Kesteloot argues that, through these lines, he ���admits that [France] still represents for him an ideal of justice, honor, and loyalty to its commitment.��� In that same poetry collection Hosties Noires (1948), Senghor indeed reaffirms his attachment to the French Republic by passionately praising Charles de Gaulle and F��lix ��bou��, two figures who helped lead resistance to German occupation.
When de Gaulle became France���s President, Senghor was torn. The new institutional framework he advocated for was set to implement relative autonomy to colonies in Africa while maintaining them under French rule in community. Seeking a common position, several African political platforms met in Cotonou in July 1958. The UPS sent a delegation and agreed on voting ���no��� to the upcoming referendum on maintaining French rule. It was a matter of time, however, before Senghor expressed his reservations, after a promise he had made to the French government. ���Yes, independence, of course, nobody can give that up, but let���s take some time,��� he argued. ���How long?��� his comrade Dia asked, surprised at his sudden change of position. ���Twenty years!��� Senghor retorted before the two agreed on a four-year timeline.
The agreements for the ���transfer of powers��� from France to the Mali Federation were signed on April 4, 1960, and implemented on June 20. Two months in, internal divisions shattered the union. Senegal established a two-headed parliamentary system. While Senghor enjoyed the prestige of being the first President of the newly independent Republic, Dia presided over the Council of Ministers and was responsible for implementing national policies. Quickly, tension grew between the two.
Since independence, Dia had been calling for decentralizing public administration and empowering peasant communities. A faction within the UPS composed of sympathizers to Senghor decided to table a vote of no confidence against Dia���s government, whose policy was deemed too radical. Provided that it was the only recognized political authority at the time, every decision went through the ruling party. Dia, therefore, opposed a motion he deemed illegitimate. Senghor accused him of ���attempting a coup��� and sharply ordered his arrest in December 1962 alongside ministers Valdiodio N���diaye, Ibrahima Sarr, Alioune Tall and Joseph Mbaye. Just two weeks after the events, Senghor argued that ���in an underdeveloped country, it is best to have, if not a single party, at least a unified party, a dominant party, where reality���s contradictions are confronted within the dominant party, given that the party decides.��� Dia gave into Senghor���s arguments and revoked a vote of no confidence which members of the UPS had brought forward without giving room for any internal discussions. But Senghor seized this opportunity to repeal Dia���s post of President of the Council and strengthen presidential powers.
Discontent towards Senghor���s administration escalated with time. In 1968, anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist movements threatened governments around the world and the University of Dakar concentrated frustration in Senegal. Their country was a ���neo-colony,��� students argued, and Senghor a ���valet of French imperialism.��� Army raids on the campus resulted in at least one death and hundreds of wounded. Alongside trade unionists, many students were arrested and deported to military camps. Not only did Senghor call upon French troops for support in crushing the rebellion, he also regularly corresponded with the French ambassador to Senegal on the situation���s developments. At the height of the crisis, the president even suggested that the head of Senegal���s army, General Jean-Alfred Diallo, take power if he wished.
By February 1971, Senghor���s embrace of France seemed to reach its peak with the state visit of French President Georges Pompidou, a close friend and former classmate. A few weeks prior, a group of young radical activists set fire to the French cultural center in Dakar. To them, Senegal���s reception of the French President was an open provocation, emblematic of the enduring remnants of colonialism. During the visit, they attempted to charge the presidential motorcade but were arrested.
Upon learning about his brothers��� implication in the failed attack, Senegalese activist and artist Omar Blondin Diop embarked on military training. Months of traveling led him to Syria, Algeria, and Guinea before authorities in Mali arrested him in November 1971. Imprisoned on Gor��e island for ���being a threat to national security,��� Blondin Diop was reported dead on May 11, 1973, aged 26. The State of Senegal claimed he committed suicide, but several testimonies, including that of the case���s investigating judge, attest to a cover-up. Then interior minister Jean Collin, who vigorously maintained the myth of political prisoners��� ���humane conditions of detention,��� was the president���s nephew-in-law. Two years later, activists from the anti-imperialist front And J��f (To Act Together) were arrested and severely tortured���hung upside down with their skin burned and electric shocks applied to their genitals.
President Senghor announced his resignation on December 31, 1980. After reinstating the post of Prime Minister (formerly President of the Council) in 1970, he amended Senegal���s Constitution in 1976 to ensure his heir apparent Abdou Diouf could take over after his resignation. ���I told you that I wanted to make you my successor and that is why there is this article 35,��� Senghor told Diouf in 1977. ���I will be standing for election in February 1978 and, if I am elected, I intend to leave [���]. At that moment, you will continue, assert yourself and be elected afterwards.��� Shortly after, Senghor left Senegal to settle in France, where he spent the rest of his life. The transition of his chosen heir was seamless.
By the end of his presidency, the time is long past when, in his poem ���Pri��re de Paix��� (1948), Senghor praised the masses ���who face […] the powerful and the torturers.��� He was now the embodiment of the powerful, whose rule was the source of Senegal���s neocolonial governance. While Senghor claimed in 1963 that ���opposition is a necessity, [���] the dialectic of life, of history,��� political parties were only legalized in Senegal in 1981, after a period of limited multi-partyism. Until then, they were either dissolved or absorbed by the ruling party.
Senegal���s independence is neither a coincidence of history, nor a generous gift granted by France. It is an ideal for which successive generations fought for, from Lamine Arfang Senghor to Valdiodio N���diaye. Independence for many meant the full emancipation from the conquest of profit through lands, bodies, and spirits, which does not dwindle with time. If indeed, as Boniface Mongo Mboussa indicates, ���rigor and dignity��� are the values that best characterize L��opold S��dar Senghor, then we must refuse complacency in how we remember his time in power. We must continue to uncover the buried secrets and explore the repression culture of Senegal���s history, as it continues to labor under the gaze of Western ���partners.���
The hand that wrote poetry to empower was also responsible for acts of great injustice.
Queer feminists organizing offline in Ghana
Photo: UN Women.
This post is part of our series ���Talking back: African feminisms in dialogue.��� It is dedicated to guest editor Rama Salla Dieng���s late sister, Nd��ye Anta Dieng (1985-2019).
In this interview, Rama Dieng talks to the four founding members of the LBQ Gathering about the challenges and promises of queer feminist organizing offline in Ghana, as well as on insights on how allies and comrades can join them to speak truth to power in the context of hostile civic spaces.
Rama Salla Dieng
Thanks for accepting to be part of this interview series. I am grateful to have met you on social media. Can you please introduce yourself and tell us more about the LBQ Gathering (The LBQG henceforth) and its members? How did you guys meet?
LBQ Gathering
Thanks for having us on your interview series, Rama. The LBQ Gathering is a collective organized by four queer Ghanaian feminists namely Rita Nketiah, Sheila Adufutse, Golda Gatsey and Fatima Derby.
Our activism focuses on building a community of queer Ghanaian women and non-binary people where we support one another to unpack and navigate our queer identities and experiences in ways that are empowering and restorative. We do this by hosting workshops, dialogues and panel discussions that center Black/African women and non-binary people and are informed by feminist theory and praxis.
We met through the cracks of feminist and queer women���s organizing spaces in Accra. We felt that there was a gap that needed to be addressed in both spheres, and wanted to create a space that could articulate, celebrate and support queer women and non-binary folks in the city. We also wanted to resist the NGOization of women���s rights work in Ghana, by not defaulting to the typical structuring of social justice collectives. It���s a political choice that we are still articulating as we grow.
Rama Salla Dieng
How is the LBQ gathering organized in terms of decision-making, accountability, leadership structures?
LBQ Gathering
In terms of decision-making, accountability and leadership structure, the power dynamics that influence the way that we organize means that we don���t have a hierarchy where there���s one person who is the ���Leader���, and another person to whom we are accountable to. We hold each other accountable in our politics and in the implementation of our tasks. Our decision-making process is based on shared responsibility and conclusions that we all come to together. And this is again a function of our resolution to not default to conventional structuring of activist groups.
Rama Salla Dieng
Can you tell us more about your LGBTQIA+ advocacy campaigns and activities?
LBQ Gathering
We have hosted a few social gatherings in the city, where we discuss various topics that affect the community. Usually, we take turns facilitating discussion. It is our feminist principle that we try to make these gatherings as low cost as possible. Instead of money, we ask that each participant contributes food or drinks as their offering to the space. We see The Gathering as a space where we can build community and encourage participants to think more critically about the importance of feminist praxis in our relationships with each other.
Last year, we were fortunate enough to participate in The Adventures festival entitled ���Decentering the D,��� where we facilitated a discussion on women exploring pleasure with other women. We continue to be amazed by how much support and interest there is for these spaces, and we hope to organize similar events in the future.
Aside from these events, we all actively participate in feminist spaces across the city (and online).
Rama Salla Dieng
What are the main challenges queer and non-binary people face in Ghana in general? And during the pandemic? What are the priorities to address these?
LBQ Gathering
The main challenges that affect queer and non-binary people in Ghana are similar to the issues that affect many queer and non-binary Africans such as discrimination, targeted violence, lack of access to safety and legal protection, inability to find paid employment, inability to access healthcare and the fear and anxiety that comes with living in a sexist and homophobic climate. Increasingly, mental health, substance abuse and intra-community violence are also key issues plaguing the community. All of these issues are further exacerbated by the pandemic as lockdown orders and restrictions force queer people to be isolated with homophobic family members/guardians/friends. Many queer people also lose access to safe spaces and community.
The priorities to address this lie in eliminating the systemic inequalities that enable violence against queer people. Oftentimes, the onus to correct these structural problems is pushed to civil society, NGOs and other activist groups. But the reality is that there is only so much we can do. Protecting queer people and upholding LGBTQIA+ rights is the job of the state. We can offer insights, data, ideas and so forth, but we think that the actual correction of these problems should also be the state���s priority. In Ghana���s context, that means changing colonial era sodomy laws that are currently used to persecute LGBTQIA+ people and addressing our structural discrimination across society.
Rama Salla Dieng
So you are organizing both online and offline? I wonder how challenging is it to do so and to engage with your community about your vision, activities and political positioning?
LBQ Gathering
At the moment, we predominantly organize offline, but we���ve also just set up a Twitter and Instagram page, where we hope to start engaging queer people who are not necessarily based in Accra or who cannot or don���t feel comfortable to attend our meetings. The queer community in Accra is growing both in terms of numbers and political consciousness. Unfortunately, because of lesbo/biphobia, there aren���t a lot of options for public spaces that we can use for our events. At the moment, we mostly organize out of our homes, or we ask for support from community members. Because of this, we are often limited by how many people can attend our gatherings each time.
Generally, we have received massive interest from the community. Feminism is not a new concept in Ghana, but it is still a fairly recent praxis in the queer LGBQT communities here. Women, trans and non-binary folks tend to have less visibility in movement building in Ghana and we see it as part of our contribution to encourage more leadership amongst these groups. One of the reasons why we started The Gathering is because we recognized that many of us had internalized patriarchal values, which often shows up in our relationships with each other. It isn���t uncommon to hear queer women talk about the femme/stud dynamic which, in its worst form, mirrors the gender roles found in heteronormative relationships (i.e. femme = feminine, submissive, domestic, emotional and stud = dominant, breadwinner, aggressive and unfeeling). As feminists, we want our sisters to challenge the violence that comes with those rigid gender roles, because we believe that we will all be more liberated for it.
Rama Salla Dieng
HOLAA recently shared a blog post on How to be an LGBTQ Ally; any recommendations from your side?
LBQ Gathering
One of our main recommendations to share would be for allies to be aware of their privilege and to be mindful of not speaking over queer people. Allies should be committed to confronting their own biases and doing the work of unlearning, rather than pushing that labor on to queer people.
Also, within feminist spaces/movements, allies should be more intentional about creating and holding space for queer women to provide leadership, rather than just being voices in the background.
We think also that allies should be willing to stand up for and defend LGBTQIA+ folks from discrimination and violence at all times, and not only when it is convenient for them to do so. We get that being an ally can come at great risk but that risk pales in comparison to the violence that queer people are subjected to daily. It is in the interest of our collective freedom that we stand with and stand up for those who face other forms of oppression that we don���t.
Rama Salla Dieng
What is the role and place of compassion in this online feminist engagement?
LBQ Gathering
While we are not yet actively engaging online as a Collective, we do recognize the importance of compassion in online feminist engagement and we have some thoughts on what its role and place is. Although the internet has been a useful tool for organizing and mobilizing people and resources, it can also be limiting in many ways. Twitter���s 240- character limit for instance, is grossly insufficient for any kind of comprehensive feminist analysis and it���s very easy for a lot of nuances to be overlooked. There is also the challenge of not being able to hear or see people in real time and this can affect the way messages are received and interpreted. When you are speaking to someone face to face, you are able to pick up on body language���facial expressions, a nod of acknowledgement here and a sigh of impatience there. These non-verbal cues give us an idea of how our message is being received and whether to adjust our communication tactics.
In online engagement, many of these things get lost because we can only see names and profile pictures and it can be hard to empathize with an ���abstract��� voice, so to speak. And this is particularly the role that compassion plays because the tendency to dehumanize one another is much higher if we���re thinking of one another as ���social media accounts��� rather than as people. Compassion in online feminist engagement means that we can hold space for one another to have dissenting opinions on how to achieve collective liberation, while still recognizing that our privilege and patriarchal conditioning creates blind spots which might exclude other marginalized women and visit violence upon them.
Rama Salla Dieng
Last year, one of your members had written a compelling article: “How Social Media is Impacting African Women���s Liberation.” What are the main challenges and promises you are facing while articulating your campaigns online? Do you have to endure the same hostile and vicious commentaries that many feminists, especially queer feminists, do online?
LBQ Gathering
At the moment, we don���t have a strong online presence, because our work is mostly rooted in offline in-person engagements. However, given the current global pandemic, we are having to re-think the ways in which we organize queer women in the city, and the online space is definitely one of our targets. As individuals, some of us are quite active in the online space and we are well aware of how hostile that space continues to be for queer people. Some of the challenges we face with online advocacy include online harassment and threats of violence.
There are some promises too. Many young queer people are becoming visible online, taking up space and having open conversations on their experiences. We have observed people move from a place of homophobia to a place of allyship. The online space also provides a chance for us to identify and engage with other queer activists that we could collaborate/organize with.
Rama Salla Dieng
Also in 2019, one of your members went undercover for two days to investigate the anti-LGBT ���hate movement���: The World Congress of Families (WCF). Can you please tell us more about what must have been a very traumatic research experience? What were your main findings, and what can be done to speak truth to power while minimizing harm for queer researchers and activists?
Rita Nketiah
The WCF event was one of the strangest experiences that I���ve encountered. Certainly, as a queer person, you have to make daily choices about your safety vis a vis ���outing��� yourself. So, to willingly choose to be in such a hostile environment in order to capture the violence of this group was something that I didn���t take lightly. In fact, I���m sure there are parts of me that are still recovering. What I discovered is that we still have a long way to go in realizing social justice for queer people in Ghana/Africa. There are still far too many people out there who think that we are an abomination and that we are destroying the very fabric of African society simply by daring to exist. I was also reminded that the fight for queer liberation is an anti-colonial fight. It means uprooting the colonial frameworks that continue to bring homophobia to the African context. It is no coincidence that the same religious forces that colonized us have returned (did they ever really leave?!) to spread their message of hate and violence. Homophobia exists in Ghana because we never really decolonized, culturally. We may have been given a flag and a parliament, but our psychological shackles are still deeply seated. WCF���s rise to prominence in Ghana and across Africa is evidence of this. They are a white western evangelical hate group that has lost the war on LGBT rights in America, and as usual, they have decided to exploit Africans for their cause.
I also discovered that the work of queer activists in Ghana has not been in vain. The fact that homophobes can organize big conferences in our honor (lol!) shows that we have managed to shake the table across this continent. We must continue in our pursuit of truth and justice.
Rama Salla Dieng
I know that most of the founding members of your collective are ���veteran activists��� well-versed in civic and feminist movement-building in West Africa. If you were to share three main lessons you have learnt on the changing landscape for feminist activists in Ghana, what would those be?
LBQ Gathering
Actually, we���re all fairly young in our activist journeys. (Our oldest member is 33!) Queer women���s activism in Ghana is quite new. We see our work as contributing to contemporary grassroots movements in the city such as Sisters of the Heart, Courageous Sisters, DramaQueens and Young Feminist Collective. While we are still learning our lessons, we do have some observations about the contemporary landscape for feminist activism:
There is a growing visibility of queer and younger feminist activists in Ghana, but unfortunately, many of us are still working in silos. We need to create more opportunities for collaboration, understanding and political solidarity across our various movements.
Queer women���s issues are still not fully incorporated in mainstream feminist organizing in Ghana. We have yet to fully recognize that all women must be brought to the table to affect transformation in gender relations. For example, during a recent Supreme Court Judge vetting process, feminist professor Dr. Henrietta Mensa-Bonsu was asked about her stance on LGBT rights in Ghana, and she suggested that while it was important to protect queer people, this could not be done ���at the expense of the majority.��� Such framing has the effect of suggesting that queer people���s demands for basic human rights and social justice could somehow pose a threat to the majority heterosexual world. Last year, when one of our members attended the WCF event, one of Ghana���s prominent feminist activists was not only in attendance, but chaired one of the key panels. We seriously need to talk about the complicity of straight feminists in institutional and societal homophobic violence in Ghana.
There is still a need to address class and classism within the feminist and queer activist movements in Ghana. Let���s start thinking more about who is in the room, who is left out and what are the consequences? How we organize is political: the venues that we choose, the language that we speak, and where we promote our events (online) all have political consequences for who shows up. What we want to avoid is a movement that is solely for the elites of this country. As a collective, we recognize that when we address the issues of the most marginalized, we���re tapping into our shared humanity. The feminist movement mandates that we bring everyone along. None of us are free unless all of us are free.
Rama Salla Dieng
Members of your collective have recently shared that you (and many other young feminist activists) have sometimes been faced with the unfortunate assumption that ���your feminism is incomplete because you haven���t read enough feminist theory.��� How can we challenge such a partial view?
LBQ Gathering
First, we want to acknowledge that there is a long legacy of feminist literary activism in Africa���much of which is currently available in the online space and some of which, has not always been accessible. As avid readers, we recognize the transformative power of learning and reading about feminist activism on this continent. We also recognize that far too many women still don���t have access to mainstream ivory tower theory���even the kind that is created by African feminist academics.
But, we also think that care should be taken not to assume that all feminist activists particularly prioritize knowledge of feminist theory as a marker of feminist identity. We think in some ways that that raises questions as to the relationship between feminist theory and the evidence and insights acquired from grassroots organizers. Feminist theory is embodied theory. It comes out of the reality of our lives. It���s important to counter the elitist narrative that theory is something that is only practiced or developed by academics. We engage in theory by creating art, listening to each other and building community space. We create language for our movements as we build them.
Rama Salla Dieng
Fatima, you are a contributing writer on the award-winning blog, Adventures from the Bedrooms of African Women, and Rita, you are a writer. How do you manage to juggle these different creative activities with your research/activism and other hobbies?
Rita Nketiah
I see myself as a scholar-activist, so my writing/research life is part of my activist life. However, activism (in the sense of ���grassroots organizing���) also demands a very different set of tasks that can become quite time-consuming. The LBQ Gathering is unpaid and voluntary labor that we love. One of the things that I am quite proud of is that while we recognize the enormous weight of the work that we are doing, we encourage each other to engage the work with kindness and compassion for ourselves. This means taking breaks, knowing when to ask for help and remembering to center our self-restoration at the heart of this work. I cannot be of service to others if I am depleted.
Fatima B. Derby
I don���t think my writing and my activism are mutually exclusive of each other. Most of my writing both on the Adventures blog and in other places are informed by observations and thoughts which come out from my interactions with queer women and other feminists and from my experiences with organizing.
In terms of managing the individual components of writing vs activism, I often write in the early hours of the morning or very late at night when it is quiet and still. I spend my daytime hours doing my day job while I do the work for the LBQ Gathering work over the weekends or at other dedicated times during the week.
Rama Salla Dieng
What acts of radical self-care do you practice?
Rita Nketiah
Rest. Full stop. No qualifiers.
Fatima B. Derby
Setting and enforcing boundaries.
Golda Gatsey
Going on spontaneous road trips with friends. Turning off all social media app notifications and listening to music.
Sheila Adufutse
My acts of self-care entail my mind fighting for what my being needs to thrive well. I resort to answering messages when I can make space for thorough answers. This comes with its consequences but I would rather give off my most authentic full self when I feel ready. Masturbation has been doing a lot of great things to my body in recent times. It makes me feel full, whole and not dependent. My body tends to feel well taken care of and I am more attentive to the peculiar needs of my body as a result. A conscious activity that I love to indulge in is sharing space (virtually and physically) with my self-chosen sisters. Time with them reminds me of my core self and re-energizes me in a way that makes me feel settled and celebrated. I also made a conscious decision to get on social media only on weekends and seldom on weekdays. This is my way of managing outside influence and also helping me focus and be more productive.
I take time to think and avoid chastising myself for being a sporadic thinker and feeler. I allow my mind to do what it does best and filter the thoughts where need be. Essentially, my acts of radical self-care looks like just being���in the most organic way.
Feminists organizing offline in Ghana
Photo: UN Women.
This post is part of our series ���Talking back: African feminisms in dialogue.��� It is dedicated to guest editor Rama Salla Dieng���s late sister, Nd��ye Anta Dieng (1985-2019).
In this interview, Rama Dieng talks to the four founding members of the LBQ Gathering about the challenges and promises of queer feminist organizing offline in Ghana, as well as on insights on how allies and comrades can join them to speak truth to power in the context of hostile civic spaces.
Rama Salla Dieng
Thanks for accepting to be part of this interview series. I am grateful to have met you on social media. Can you please introduce yourself and tell us more about the LBQ Gathering (The LBQG henceforth) and its members? How did you guys meet?
LBQ Gathering
Thanks for having us on your interview series, Rama. The LBQ Gathering is a collective organized by four queer Ghanaian feminists namely Rita Nketiah, Sheila Adufutse, Golda Gatsey and Fatima Derby.
Our activism focuses on building a community of queer Ghanaian women and non-binary people where we support one another to unpack and navigate our queer identities and experiences in ways that are empowering and restorative. We do this by hosting workshops, dialogues and panel discussions that center Black/African women and non-binary people and are informed by feminist theory and praxis.
We met through the cracks of feminist and queer women���s organizing spaces in Accra. We felt that there was a gap that needed to be addressed in both spheres, and wanted to create a space that could articulate, celebrate and support queer women and non-binary folks in the city. We also wanted to resist the NGOization of women���s rights work in Ghana, by not defaulting to the typical structuring of social justice collectives. It���s a political choice that we are still articulating as we grow.
Rama Salla Dieng
How is the LBQ gathering organized in terms of decision-making, accountability, leadership structures?
LBQ Gathering
In terms of decision-making, accountability and leadership structure, the power dynamics that influence the way that we organize means that we don���t have a hierarchy where there���s one person who is the ���Leader���, and another person to whom we are accountable to. We hold each other accountable in our politics and in the implementation of our tasks. Our decision-making process is based on shared responsibility and conclusions that we all come to together. And this is again a function of our resolution to not default to conventional structuring of activist groups.
Rama Salla Dieng
Can you tell us more about your LGBTQIA+ advocacy campaigns and activities?
LBQ Gathering
We have hosted a few social gatherings in the city, where we discuss various topics that affect the community. Usually, we take turns facilitating discussion. It is our feminist principle that we try to make these gatherings as low cost as possible. Instead of money, we ask that each participant contributes food or drinks as their offering to the space. We see The Gathering as a space where we can build community and encourage participants to think more critically about the importance of feminist praxis in our relationships with each other.
Last year, we were fortunate enough to participate in The Adventures festival entitled ���Decentering the D,��� where we facilitated a discussion on women exploring pleasure with other women. We continue to be amazed by how much support and interest there is for these spaces, and we hope to organize similar events in the future.
Aside from these events, we all actively participate in feminist spaces across the city (and online).
Rama Salla Dieng
What are the main challenges queer and non-binary people face in Ghana in general? And during the pandemic? What are the priorities to address these?
LBQ Gathering
The main challenges that affect queer and non-binary people in Ghana are similar to the issues that affect many queer and non-binary Africans such as discrimination, targeted violence, lack of access to safety and legal protection, inability to find paid employment, inability to access healthcare and the fear and anxiety that comes with living in a sexist and homophobic climate. Increasingly, mental health, substance abuse and intra-community violence are also key issues plaguing the community. All of these issues are further exacerbated by the pandemic as lockdown orders and restrictions force queer people to be isolated with homophobic family members/guardians/friends. Many queer people also lose access to safe spaces and community.
The priorities to address this lie in eliminating the systemic inequalities that enable violence against queer people. Oftentimes, the onus to correct these structural problems is pushed to civil society, NGOs and other activist groups. But the reality is that there is only so much we can do. Protecting queer people and upholding LGBTQIA+ rights is the job of the state. We can offer insights, data, ideas and so forth, but we think that the actual correction of these problems should also be the state���s priority. In Ghana���s context, that means changing colonial era sodomy laws that are currently used to persecute LGBTQIA+ people and addressing our structural discrimination across society.
Rama Salla Dieng
So you are organizing both online and offline? I wonder how challenging is it to do so and to engage with your community about your vision, activities and political positioning?
LBQ Gathering
At the moment, we predominantly organize offline, but we���ve also just set up a Twitter and Instagram page, where we hope to start engaging queer people who are not necessarily based in Accra or who cannot or don���t feel comfortable to attend our meetings. The queer community in Accra is growing both in terms of numbers and political consciousness. Unfortunately, because of lesbo/biphobia, there aren���t a lot of options for public spaces that we can use for our events. At the moment, we mostly organize out of our homes, or we ask for support from community members. Because of this, we are often limited by how many people can attend our gatherings each time.
Generally, we have received massive interest from the community. Feminism is not a new concept in Ghana, but it is still a fairly recent praxis in the queer LGBQT communities here. Women, trans and non-binary folks tend to have less visibility in movement building in Ghana and we see it as part of our contribution to encourage more leadership amongst these groups. One of the reasons why we started The Gathering is because we recognized that many of us had internalized patriarchal values, which often shows up in our relationships with each other. It isn���t uncommon to hear queer women talk about the femme/stud dynamic which, in its worst form, mirrors the gender roles found in heteronormative relationships (i.e. femme = feminine, submissive, domestic, emotional and stud = dominant, breadwinner, aggressive and unfeeling). As feminists, we want our sisters to challenge the violence that comes with those rigid gender roles, because we believe that we will all be more liberated for it.
Rama Salla Dieng
HOLAA recently shared a blog post on How to be an LGBTQ Ally; any recommendations from your side?
LBQ Gathering
One of our main recommendations to share would be for allies to be aware of their privilege and to be mindful of not speaking over queer people. Allies should be committed to confronting their own biases and doing the work of unlearning, rather than pushing that labor on to queer people.
Also, within feminist spaces/movements, allies should be more intentional about creating and holding space for queer women to provide leadership, rather than just being voices in the background.
We think also that allies should be willing to stand up for and defend LGBTQIA+ folks from discrimination and violence at all times, and not only when it is convenient for them to do so. We get that being an ally can come at great risk but that risk pales in comparison to the violence that queer people are subjected to daily. It is in the interest of our collective freedom that we stand with and stand up for those who face other forms of oppression that we don���t.
Rama Salla Dieng
What is the role and place of compassion in this online feminist engagement?
LBQ Gathering
While we are not yet actively engaging online as a Collective, we do recognize the importance of compassion in online feminist engagement and we have some thoughts on what its role and place is. Although the internet has been a useful tool for organizing and mobilizing people and resources, it can also be limiting in many ways. Twitter���s 240- character limit for instance, is grossly insufficient for any kind of comprehensive feminist analysis and it���s very easy for a lot of nuances to be overlooked. There is also the challenge of not being able to hear or see people in real time and this can affect the way messages are received and interpreted. When you are speaking to someone face to face, you are able to pick up on body language���facial expressions, a nod of acknowledgement here and a sigh of impatience there. These non-verbal cues give us an idea of how our message is being received and whether to adjust our communication tactics.
In online engagement, many of these things get lost because we can only see names and profile pictures and it can be hard to empathize with an ���abstract��� voice, so to speak. And this is particularly the role that compassion plays because the tendency to dehumanize one another is much higher if we���re thinking of one another as ���social media accounts��� rather than as people. Compassion in online feminist engagement means that we can hold space for one another to have dissenting opinions on how to achieve collective liberation, while still recognizing that our privilege and patriarchal conditioning creates blind spots which might exclude other marginalized women and visit violence upon them.
Rama Salla Dieng
Last year, one of your members had written a compelling article: “How Social Media is Impacting African Women���s Liberation.” What are the main challenges and promises you are facing while articulating your campaigns online? Do you have to endure the same hostile and vicious commentaries that many feminists, especially queer feminists, do online?
LBQ Gathering
At the moment, we don���t have a strong online presence, because our work is mostly rooted in offline in-person engagements. However, given the current global pandemic, we are having to re-think the ways in which we organize queer women in the city, and the online space is definitely one of our targets. As individuals, some of us are quite active in the online space and we are well aware of how hostile that space continues to be for queer people. Some of the challenges we face with online advocacy include online harassment and threats of violence.
There are some promises too. Many young queer people are becoming visible online, taking up space and having open conversations on their experiences. We have observed people move from a place of homophobia to a place of allyship. The online space also provides a chance for us to identify and engage with other queer activists that we could collaborate/organize with.
Rama Salla Dieng
Also in 2019, one of your members went undercover for two days to investigate the anti-LGBT ���hate movement���: The World Congress of Families (WCF). Can you please tell us more about what must have been a very traumatic research experience? What were your main findings, and what can be done to speak truth to power while minimizing harm for queer researchers and activists?
Rita Nketiah
The WCF event was one of the strangest experiences that I���ve encountered. Certainly, as a queer person, you have to make daily choices about your safety vis a vis ���outing��� yourself. So, to willingly choose to be in such a hostile environment in order to capture the violence of this group was something that I didn���t take lightly. In fact, I���m sure there are parts of me that are still recovering. What I discovered is that we still have a long way to go in realizing social justice for queer people in Ghana/Africa. There are still far too many people out there who think that we are an abomination and that we are destroying the very fabric of African society simply by daring to exist. I was also reminded that the fight for queer liberation is an anti-colonial fight. It means uprooting the colonial frameworks that continue to bring homophobia to the African context. It is no coincidence that the same religious forces that colonized us have returned (did they ever really leave?!) to spread their message of hate and violence. Homophobia exists in Ghana because we never really decolonized, culturally. We may have been given a flag and a parliament, but our psychological shackles are still deeply seated. WCF���s rise to prominence in Ghana and across Africa is evidence of this. They are a white western evangelical hate group that has lost the war on LGBT rights in America, and as usual, they have decided to exploit Africans for their cause.
I also discovered that the work of queer activists in Ghana has not been in vain. The fact that homophobes can organize big conferences in our honor (lol!) shows that we have managed to shake the table across this continent. We must continue in our pursuit of truth and justice.
Rama Salla Dieng
I know that most of the founding members of your collective are ���veteran activists��� well-versed in civic and feminist movement-building in West Africa. If you were to share three main lessons you have learnt on the changing landscape for feminist activists in Ghana, what would those be?
LBQ Gathering
Actually, we���re all fairly young in our activist journeys. (Our oldest member is 33!) Queer women���s activism in Ghana is quite new. We see our work as contributing to contemporary grassroots movements in the city such as Sisters of the Heart, Courageous Sisters, DramaQueens and Young Feminist Collective. While we are still learning our lessons, we do have some observations about the contemporary landscape for feminist activism:
There is a growing visibility of queer and younger feminist activists in Ghana, but unfortunately, many of us are still working in silos. We need to create more opportunities for collaboration, understanding and political solidarity across our various movements.
Queer women���s issues are still not fully incorporated in mainstream feminist organizing in Ghana. We have yet to fully recognize that all women must be brought to the table to affect transformation in gender relations. For example, during a recent Supreme Court Judge vetting process, feminist professor Dr. Henrietta Mensa-Bonsu was asked about her stance on LGBT rights in Ghana, and she suggested that while it was important to protect queer people, this could not be done ���at the expense of the majority.��� Such framing has the effect of suggesting that queer people���s demands for basic human rights and social justice could somehow pose a threat to the majority heterosexual world. Last year, when one of our members attended the WCF event, one of Ghana���s prominent feminist activists was not only in attendance, but chaired one of the key panels. We seriously need to talk about the complicity of straight feminists in institutional and societal homophobic violence in Ghana.
There is still a need to address class and classism within the feminist and queer activist movements in Ghana. Let���s start thinking more about who is in the room, who is left out and what are the consequences? How we organize is political: the venues that we choose, the language that we speak, and where we promote our events (online) all have political consequences for who shows up. What we want to avoid is a movement that is solely for the elites of this country. As a collective, we recognize that when we address the issues of the most marginalized, we���re tapping into our shared humanity. The feminist movement mandates that we bring everyone along. None of us are free unless all of us are free.
Rama Salla Dieng
Members of your collective have recently shared that you (and many other young feminist activists) have sometimes been faced with the unfortunate assumption that to ���your feminism is incomplete because you haven���t read enough feminist theory.��� How can we challenge such a partial view?
LBQ Gathering
First, we want to acknowledge that there is a long legacy of feminist literary activism in Africa���much of which is currently available in the online space and some of which, has not always been accessible. As avid readers, we recognize the transformative power of learning and reading about feminist activism on this continent. We also recognize that far too many women still don���t have access to mainstream ivory tower theory���even the kind that is created by African feminist academics.
But, we also think that care should be taken not to assume that all feminist activists particularly prioritize knowledge of feminist theory as a marker of feminist identity. We think in some ways that that raises questions as to the relationship between feminist theory and the evidence and insights acquired from grassroots organizers. Feminist theory is embodied theory. It comes out of the reality of our lives. It���s important to counter the elitist narrative that theory is something that is only practiced or developed by academics. We engage in theory by creating art, listening to each other and building community space. We create language for our movements as we build them.
Rama Salla Dieng
Fatima, you are a contributing writer on the award-winning blog, Adventures from the Bedrooms of African Women, and Rita, you are a writer. How do you manage to juggle these different creative activities with your research/activism and other hobbies?
Rita Nketiah
I see myself as a scholar-activist, so my writing/research life is part of my activist life. However, activism (in the sense of ���grassroots organizing���) also demands a very different set of tasks that can become quite time-consuming. The LBQ Gathering is unpaid and voluntary labor that we love. One of the things that I am quite proud of is that while we recognize the enormous weight of the work that we are doing, we encourage each other to engage the work with kindness and compassion for ourselves. This means taking breaks, knowing when to ask for help and remembering to center our self-restoration at the heart of this work. I cannot be of service to others if I am depleted.
Fatima B. Derby
I don���t think my writing and my activism are mutually exclusive of each other. Most of my writing both on the Adventures blog and in other places are informed by observations and thoughts which come out from my interactions with queer women and other feminists and from my experiences with organizing.
In terms of managing the individual components of writing vs activism, I often write in the early hours of the morning or very late at night when it is quiet and still. I spend my daytime hours doing my day job while I do the work for the LBQ Gathering work over the weekends or at other dedicated times during the week.
Rama Salla Dieng
What acts of radical self-care do you practice?
Rita Nketiah
Rest. Full stop. No qualifiers.
Fatima B. Derby
Setting and enforcing boundaries.
Golda Gatsey
Going on spontaneous road trips with friends. Turning off all social media app notifications and listening to music.
Sheila Adufutse
My acts of self-care entail my mind fighting for what my being needs to thrive well. I resort to answering messages when I can make space for thorough answers. This comes with its consequences but I would rather give off my most authentic full self when I feel ready. Masturbation has been doing a lot of great things to my body in recent times. It makes me feel full, whole and not dependent. My body tends to feel well taken care of and I am more attentive to the peculiar needs of my body as a result. A conscious activity that I love to indulge in is sharing space (virtually and physically) with my self-chosen sisters. Time with them reminds me of my core self and re-energizes me in a way that makes me feel settled and celebrated. I also made a conscious decision to get on social media only on weekends and seldom on weekdays. This is my way of managing outside influence and also helping me focus and be more productive.
I take time to think and avoid chastising myself for being a sporadic thinker and feeler. I allow my mind to do what it does best and filter the thoughts where need be. Essentially, my acts of radical self-care looks like just being���in the most organic way.
June 7, 2020
I join my president to pray for my country
President John Magufuli, left, and South African President Cyril Ramaphosa in August 2019. Image credit the Government of South Africa, via Flickr.
Tanzania���s response to COVID-19 has been criticized for its mixing of ���faith and science.��� In mid-March, while many countries across the world suspended all public gatherings, including religious services, Tanzania���s government announced that mosques and churches would remain open. At the time, President Magufuli, speaking at a church in Dodoma, said churches and mosques had to remain open as that is where ���real healing��� takes place. However, a handful of religious leaders took the opposite move. Severine Niwemugizi, the Roman Catholic Bishop of Rulenge Ngara Diocese and Bishop Benson Bagonza of the Lutheran church, Karagwe Diocese announced to cancel all church gatherings. A similar move was announced by Sheikh Said Haroun who leads a mosque in the Northern city of Arusha. Another mosque was temporarily closed in Dar es Salaam but reopened following the president���s remarks which are quoted below. In his address in the swearing in of the new Minister for Home Affairs on May 3, President Magufuli (acting as if he is the country���s High Priest) expressed his disappointment at the path taken by these religious leaders, which he saw as human fear caused by lack of faith:
Let us disregard those who are trying to frighten us because they are useless. But let us continue praying to our God. God exist! There are even religious leaders who have forgotten God whom they have been preaching to us every day ��� and this is this the time to test the faith of the leaders we have, even the religious leaders.
On April 16th, the President implored Tanzanians to dedicate the next three days to praying. A few days later, the Ministry of Health announced a day-long, mass prayer meeting against COVID-19 in Dar es Salaam. Prime Minister, Majaliwa Kassim Majaliwa, was a guest of honor.
For this, Magufuli was heavily criticized. For example, journalist Khalifa Said tweeted: ���if any Tanzanian dies of COVID-19, President Magufuli will be held responsible … Tanzanians elected a president, not a pastor or a sorcerer.���
There is empirical evidence for a link between religious identity and partisan politics. In societies where religion (including traditions) plays a central role in public life and can sway elections, especially during a crisis, populist leaders can exploit people���s deeply held beliefs and anxieties. From the east to the west, populist leaders are rising: Narendra Modi in India (from 2014) and Donald Trump in the US (from 2016). They both combine religious discourse and nationalism in their mission to make their countries ���great again.��� Modi embraces Hindu nationalism���the idea of a ���pure��� Hindu nation. In the US, it is usually done by declaring support for Israel (the Holy Land) and identifying with Christian pastors (mainly Evangelicals). On April 12, during an interview with Fox News anchor Bill Hemmer, President Trump declared that he wanted churches packed on Easter all over the country.
Africa is not exceptional. Mixing or substituting science with religious beliefs is not uncommon. An African head of state, Yaya Jammeh (then president of Gambia) once claimed to cure AIDS while Mbeki���s presidency in South Africa (1999-2008) was marked with the politics of AIDS denialism, which included him cynically using traditional leaders. Abdoulaye Wade of Senegal, despite his history as a socialist, drew on links with Mourides when he wanted to stay in power. His ministers, regardless of their religion, have to go before the Mauride Khalife general to solicit his prayer each time that they undertook an important state mission.
Magufuli appears to be motivated by political expediency. He is neither that ignorant nor a devout disciple of Jesus Christ; rather he is simply a politician seeking political survival. He employs religious rhetoric strategically to inspire or support certain policy positions. Magufuli knows that though the constitution declares that Tanzania is a secular state, its citizens are not. Many Tanzanians are religious. Consequently, Tanzanian politicians utilize religious symbols, morals and narratives to influence religiously minded voters. This is a strategy to manufacture legitimacy by tapping into collective frustrations (poverty, unemployment, ignorance) over the inefficacy of state institutions to deliver basic goods and services. Magufuli often uses religious terminology in his political campaigning. Hence, his politics has become quasi-religious as the struggle between the people (the poor) and the corrupt elites or any other human or non-human forces like coronavirus is portrayed as a war of redemption between ���the side of the Devil and the side of God.��� Still, the prime motivation is clearly populism, not religion.
This is in stark contrast to Tanzania under Nyerere. That government���s ���pro-people��� policies focused on fighting poverty, diseases and ignorance. ���We should treat a peasant as a god,��� Nyerere used to say. Three decades of neoliberal policies have not only reversed achievements of the after-independence period but have created new problems. Land and labor dispossession in rural and urban areas respectively have left many in a state of hopelessness. While there are pockets of resistance here and there, the public has also internalized the practices of neoliberal capitalism. For example, the now common adage Kazi na sala (work and prayers) insinuates that the returns of one���s labor by itself isn���t enough. This precariousness has compelled people to seek divine interventions for their financial and health problems: faith provides solace in such circumstances. There has been a proliferation of neo-Pentecostal churches that preach financial prosperity (or the ���wealth and health gospel���).
On February 1, 2020, at least twenty people (including children) died and over a dozen were injured in a stampede during a church service at a stadium in Moshi in northern Tanzania as they rushed to get anointed with mafuta ya upako (anointing oil). This reminded me of an earlier incident, when in 2011, tens of thousands of people from all over the country and from neighboring states flocked to Samunge, Loliondo (a village in Arusha, Tanzania) for a miracle dose (Kikombe cha Babu) administered by Ambilikile Mwasapile. Ambilikile claimed that the dose provided cure for several diseases, including diabetes, tuberculosis and HIV. Cabinet ministers (some in the high office today) were among Ambilikile���s customers.
To a religious society like ours, any mention of God evokes euphoria in the hearts and minds of the believers. Magufuli knows that. His call to prayers is simply rhetoric to win the hearts and minds of the religious voters and obscures the state’s incapacity to handle the public health problem. After all, this is an election year. Since his election in 2015, Magufuli has aligned himself with the ���Servants of God��� (or religious elite) including a controversial Bishop Josephat Gwajima (popular on social media) and Bishop Zacharia Kakobe, both of whom were once pro-opposition. Religious leaders command followers, and their word is synonymous to God���s, at least to those who follow them uncritically. Hence, for Magufuli, buying into religious rhetoric is a good selling strategy for political expediency: On May 10, Bishop Josephat Gwajima tweeted ���Those opposing the President are the agents of Satan.���
June 5, 2020
Young, gifted, and pregnant
Image credit Kuap Pandipieri via Flickr CC.
Kenya still does not provide comprehensive sex education and confidential sexual and reproductive health services to adolescents, and this contributes to the alarming local statistic that 1 in 5 teenage girls
between 15-19 years is either pregnant or has had a life birth.
This post is from a new partnership between the Kenyan website The Elephant and Africa Is a Country. We will be publishing a series of posts from their site every week. Posts are curated by Contributing Editor Wangui Kimari.
One in every five Kenyan girls aged between 15-19 has had a live birth or is pregnant. It���s a mind-blowing statistic that speaks to the teenage pregnancy crisis in the country���the United Nations Population Fund estimates that there were about 380,000 cases in 2019 alone. Eighteen-year-old Patricia* (not her real name) was referred to me for legal advice, as she had one such pregnancy. Orphaned at an early age, her paternal uncle took her in but sexually abused her for several years. Today Patricia is five months pregnant and not in school, even though this should have been her final year. And while her uncle should be charged under the Sexual Offences Act���facing not less than 15 years in prison if convicted���Patricia will not testify against him for fear of losing the only financial support she has.
The month of May is dedicated to preventing and ending teenage pregnancies worldwide. But as the month comes to an end, Kenya is still not close to achieving this goal. Patricia is one of thousands of girls in Kenya stuck in a predicament caused by sexual violence, lack of information on, and access to youth-friendly sexual and reproductive health. For these girls, their education will be interrupted and their social and economic choices taken away from them.
But there are also increased health risks associated with teenage pregnancies, including physical health issues like convulsions, uterine infections and obstetric fistula���a hole in the birth canal, resulting in incontinence of urine or feces that often affects women who give birth too young���and mental health challenges like depression and anxiety. And there are risks to the unborn child including premature birth, low birth weight and other neonatal conditions. Preventing teenage pregnancies is about protecting the holistic health of both the mother and the potential unborn child, and by extension, society as a whole.
The Kenya Demographic Health Survey 2014 reported a 2% drop in teenage pregnancies over a 20-year period. This was caused by major changes in girl���s education programs and in the sexual and reproductive health and rights landscape in Kenya that made birth control and other services more accessible to teenage girls. Yet in 2014, the Kenyan Parliament shot down the Reproductive Health Care Bill sponsored by Senator Judith Sijeny, which suggested among other things, that adolescents be given unrestricted access to comprehensive sexual education and confidential sexual and reproductive health services. There was uproar around the bill, with Kenyans citing religious and cultural beliefs to reject it. But the facts betray this opposition: the same survey (KDHS) shows that about 11% of teenagers, nationwide are having sex before their 15th birthday. Kenya���s teenagers need better access to sexual and reproductive health services.
It���s not all doom and gloom though. In 2013, Kenya signed the Ministerial Commitment on Comprehensive Sexuality Education and Sexual and Reproductive Health Services for Adolescents and Young People in Eastern and Southern Africa. In 2015, the Ministry of Health enacted the National Adolescent Sexual and Reproductive Health Policy that aims to enhance the sexual and reproductive health status of adolescents in Kenya and contribute towards realization of their full potential in national development. Additionally, two months ago in March, Kenya through the National Council on Population Development (NCPD), launched the first-ever government-led multi-stakeholder campaign against teenage pregnancy dubbed ���Let���s Act to End Teenage Pregnancy.���
But sex education is still not being uniformly delivered across the country. Teachers are not all adequately trained and can often pass misinformation onto the students. An African Population and Health Research Center (APHRC) study found that one in four secondary school students in Homa Bay, Mombasa and Nairobi counties thinks that using a condom during sexual activity is a sign of mistrust. The content of the curriculum is also heavily focused on content covering abstinence and sexually transmitted infections, ignoring other important topics like contraceptive use and access to safe abortion. Furthermore, a new Reproductive Health Care Bill (2019) threatens to negate the gains made on adolescent sexual and reproductive health and rights as it requires health providers to seek parental consent before providing adolescents with sexual and reproductive health services. Requiring parental consent is likely to result in an increase in unintended teenage pregnancy and unsafe abortions because teenagers may not want their parents to know about their sexual activities.
Ending teenage pregnancies will take a concerted effort of policy mixes. The judiciary must strictly implement the Sexual Offences Act. The legislature must review the issue of bride price, particularly, where teenage girls are concerned to de-incentives teenage marriages. Increased girls educational programs and opportunities created. Teachers must receive adequate training on comprehensive sexuality education. A wide range of sexual and reproductive health topics should be taught in the classroom but also parents and guardians must take the lead in providing their teenagers with correct and age appropriate information on sex. Lastly, the legislature must urgently amend Section 33(a) of the proposed reproductive health care law, to enable teenagers freely access quality, youth friendly sexual and reproductive health services. It���s time to bring down Kenya���s startling teenage pregnancy statistics.
June 4, 2020
Our inaugural class of Africa Is a Country Fellows
Image credit Nicholas Rawhani.
When I founded Africa Is a Country in 2009, one of my goals was for the website (then still a blog) to emerge as a stage for a vibrant exchange of ideas about issues affecting Africa and its diaspora. I wanted to provide thoughtful, informed and critical analysis on politics, culture and social change by the very people in the middle of these situations���and get that analysis to new audiences. I mainly felt this because a vital world of ideas, opinion, artistic production, political innovation and social ferment existed in Africa, but was hidden from most of the world. And sadly today, the media construction of Africa by the rest of the world continues to be largely the same.
We have worked over the years to fight back against the one-dimensional and caricatured portrayals of Africa and Africans in the western media. Then, as the website grew we shifted our focus to bringing you original and insightful perspectives on contemporary African issues. But still, many of these viewpoints came from writers and artists already visible for their work in some platforms, even if they themselves felt marginalized in the global public sphere. So my thinking evolved: what if we provided the space for a next generation of African and Africanist writers and producers to emerge and build a body of work with us?
After many years of the website being run without funding, last year I was awarded a generous fellowship by the Shuttleworth Foundation to create an infrastructure for ���a world where Africans are in control of their own narrative.��� One of the projects we are launching to that end is the Africa Is a Country Fellowship. As we wrote when we announced the fellowship in January 2020, ���the purpose is to support the production of original work and new knowledge on Africa-related topics that are under-recognized and under-covered in traditional media, new media, and other public forums. It particularly seeks to amplify voices and perspectives from the left that address the major political, social, and economic issues affecting Africans in ways that are original, accessible, and engaging to a variety of audiences.���
We had planned to announce our eight winners in March 2020, but then COVID-19 happened. We also received an unprecedented 800 applications. While we were surprised at the volume, it reveals the need for increased funding for creatives working on Africa. As a result, we created two additional fellowship slots.
We are now thrilled to announce 10 fellows, who will each be awarded $3,000 to work on a writing project for one year. They represent a diversity of regions, backgrounds and are each exploring exciting ideas related to politics, culture, sports or social movements. We hope they will make our inaugural class proud���please stay tuned to read their work over the next year on AIAC.
2020-2021 Fellows:
Youlendree Appasamy, a freelance writer and editor from South Africa, will explore South African Indian class identities, particularly in Kwazulu-Natal province.
Lassane Ouedraogo, a media scholar from Burkina Faso, will explore radical student movements in that country.
Omar Robert Hamilton, an Egyptian writer, will explore how colonial structures persist in hydrocarbon economics, including oil extraction from the Niger Delta, coltan and cobalt from Congo and the web of dark money that centers around Luanda.
Anna Karima Wane, a Dakar-based artist, will trace the history of protest movements in Senegal via oral histories.
Mariga Wang’ombe Thoith, a journalist based in Nairobi, Kenya, will investigate the political economy of the homegrown porn industry in Africa.
Amar Jamal Mohamed Ali, a Sudanese journalist based in Egypt, will explore the post-revolution future of the Sudanese left.
Suzana Sousa, an art curator and writer based in Luanda, Angola, will dive deep into Angolan cultural politics.
Liam Brickhill, a freelance journalist from Zimbabwe, will unearth stories on Zimbabwean cricket.
Ricci Shryock, an American journalist based in Dakar, Senegal, will explore the role of women in Guinea-Bissau���s liberation war.
Fatima-Ezzahra Bendami, a journalist from Tunisia, will explore racial politics, especially the marginal position of black Tunisians.
A nowhere space
Migrants in the Mediterranean. Public domain image credit Wesley R. Dickey for the US Navy via Flickr.
Over the course of Easter Weekend 2020, 58 migrants died in the Mediterranean Sea. Their calls for assistance were ignored by the Italian, Maltese, and Libyan coastguards. While the mounting body count in the Mediterranean no longer elicits public outrage like it did in 2015, the COVID-19 pandemic heightens the dangers migrants face as they cross the Sahara and central Mediterranean to Southern Europe. In an unprecedented move, on April 8th, the Italian government closed its ports to NGO search and rescue missions. Italy, a country which bore the brunt of the pandemic early on in its global trajectory, has declared that because of the COVID-19 epidemic, it cannot guarantee the safety of refugees escaping from war-torn Libya. Italy as well as Libya, which has been a partner to European border externalization schemes, have argued that the threat of COVID-19 outweighs any obligations towards African refugees in particular, destroying what little remains of maritime law.
Indeed, the Memorandum of Understanding Between Libya and Italy, which furnishes militias in Libya with substantial aid in the interception, sequestration, and detention of migrants, was extended with little public deliberation. This disavowal of responsibility towards refugees and migrants is the consequence of longstanding extralegal push back schemes between the European Union and Libya.
As Libya���s coastguard refuses to carry out migrant interception operations until financial details are hammered out, Maltese authorities have held refugees in indefinite detention at sea. They have repurposed the tourist ferry, the Captain Morgan, as a floating detention center, in effect precluding migrants from applying for asylum should they broach the impasse between territorial sovereignty and the sociopolitical space of the Mediterranean sea. Refugees held at sea cannot claim rights to asylum. Both in life and death they are in limbo.
This isn���t the first time, however, that the Mediterranean Sea has been used as a site of extra-legal detention, as a quarantine zone for ���contagious and contaminating��� migrants and a nowhere space between the European Union and the countries of the African continent. The political calculus of blocking migrants and refugees hinges on repurposing the sea as a sociopolitical space of absence. At sea, migrants are made absent by the abrogation or selective enforcement of existing treaties, by the very materiality of the sea which makes enumerating the numbers who���ve died difficult, and by images of racialized and spectacular (most often black) death.
While the 1982 amendment to the law of the sea stipulated that states and private maritime actors have a legal obligation to rescue those in distress regardless of nationality or refugee status, since the 1990���s maritime migration has been met with securitized practices to block migrants in third countries like Libya, or to return those same migrants to third countries. Third country mechanisms, like the push-back deals, or even the Khartoum Process, arrest the movements of African nationals between the countries of the African Union. EU policies aimed at getting at ���the root causes of migration,��� while initially promulgated as a development partnership between the EU and African countries, have instead focused on the containment and detention of African migrants and the exportation of European border regimes further into Africa.
This has dire consequences for migrants from the Horn of Africa especially as Europe’s hostile environment and authoritarian immigration policies are furthered without public deliberation under cover of the COVID-19 crisis. Eritreans in particular, who transit in high numbers relative to their population through the Central Mediterranean, are often kidnapped, extorted and tortured in Libyan detention centers. COVID-19 is yet another problem for Eritrean refugees trapped in abysmal conditions, alongside the abuse by unscrupulous guards, tuberculosis infections, starvation and mounting desperation. Nevertheless, the focus on COVID-19, the number of cases of which are small in Libya and much of Africa, and the common-sense language of containment and lockdown in the fight against COVID-19 obscures Europe’s involvement in the near decade long war in Libya and normalizes anti-migrant policies and sentiments within and outside the African continent.
Libya is in the midst of a protracted civil war, and in turn a proxy war in which Russian, Turkish and the EU interests are at play, one whose material and human costs have rarely been reported by mainstream Western media outlets. At heart in this African theater of war is a battle for what Europe means vis-��-vis Africa and the wider Mediterranean world. By keeping Africans out, European politicians hope to curb populist anti-immigrant politicians who threaten the integrity of the European Union, much like the Turkish and Russian arms and mercenaries who threaten whatever fragile legitimacy the Libyan Government of National Accord holds. The war in Libya, moreover, is also a battle for liberalism���one which my interlocutors, Eritrean refugee activists argue, hinges on whether the rule of law actually applies to black African refugees. Moreover, for Eritrean refugee activists, Libya indexes Europe���s racial contract with Africa in which Africans are unwanted but needed, while their struggles for freedom are largely illegible to Europeans.
Since the beginning of the pandemic, the rights of migrants and refugees have only been further diminished by literally holding them in limbo and pre-emptively blocking them from reaching territories where they can make claims on rights. The pandemic has ultimately furnished European powers the ability to further their longstanding projects to limit African mobility within the African continent under the logic of policing and expelling dangerous and contaminating bodies. This in turn circumscribes Africans��� hopes for the future, while Europe is engaged in the radical dehumanization of African refugees trapped in Libya���s migrant detention regime which the Global Detention Project cited as one of the most damaging in the world. While European pandemic fears justify longstanding racist practices, the irony is that many African countries have actually had significantly more success in containing the pandemic than their European counterparts. The commonsense policies of border closures, moreover, have done little to curb the spread of a virus that moves alongside global logistics and travel routes. It has instead made even clearer our inter-dependence, the need for coordination and mutuality that global apartheid policies preclude.
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