Sean Jacobs's Blog, page 173

At sea

Refugees held at sea cannot claim rights to asylum. Both in life and death, they are in limbo.





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.

The afterghosts of protest

Jumoke Verissimo���s first novel, A Small Silence, explores the psychic afterlives of protest in Nigeria���s Fourth Republic.





Lagos, Nigeria. Image credit Satanoid via Flickr CC.

������How could anyone tolerate light which brought even more darkness?��� Prof asked.���

Through Nigeria���s four republics and interludes of military rule, waves of civilian protest have echoed through the streets to confront state violence and power. Regardless of the regime, critiquing the government is arguably a national pastime. It infuses into each domain of daily life, from animated political discussions around newsstands and relentlessly playing the subversive songs of Fela Kuti, to vibrant university student movements and organized demonstrations. Particularly striking moments of Nigerian protests and state brutality have captured international headlines, such as the slum demolitions and the execution of environmental activist Ken Saro-Wiwa in the 1990s. Yet what happens after the protest is crushed, when the activists are gone or imprisoned, the soldiers go home, and street life resumes? How does state brutality endure beyond one moment of violence and continue to re-traumatize different generations, decades later?

Set in the tumultuous 2000s of Nigeria���s fourth republic, Jumoke Verissimo���s first novel A Small Silence (Cassava Republic Press, July 2019) explores these questions through the ghosts that continue to haunt an activist, released after ten years of imprisonment and torture. The novel explores the psychic afterlife of protest through the distant intimacy forged between an unlikely pair���the formerly imprisoned activist professor (���Prof���) and Desire, a bright young woman determined to know him. Through the eyes of Prof and Desire, the novel moves through major contours of Nigerian political life in the 1990s and 2000s. Yet the depictions of vivid activism, political uncertainty, infrastructural precarity, municipal slum demolitions, and vibrant university protests resonate with Nigeria���s news headlines to today.

The novel begins after a decade of Prof���s imprisonment for political activism during Nigeria���s 1990s military regime, when he is unceremoniously released back into a society where much has changed and moved on without him. Yet much has also remained the same; the familiar daily rhythms of Lagos residents breathe through the streets and university students continue to boldly protest injustice into the 2000s.

Haunted by his years of torture and isolation, Prof finds refuge in the familiar voices in his head and in the darkness of his home, unable to be coaxed back to normal life by his mother and childhood friend. Prof���s sworn solitude is interrupted by Desire, a young woman who has been dreaming of Prof since their encounter during the Prof���s activist days and her precarious childhood in the slum of Maroko in Lagos. This encounter from Prof���s activism against the infamous 1990s slum dwelling demolitions impresses in both of their minds and drives Desire to seek Prof upon his release from prison. Together, they sit in the darkness of Prof���s room and grow to know each other through tendrils of conversation and shared silences.

Desire is part of a new Nigerian generation, who recall living through the slum demolitions of the 1990s military regimes but come of age in Nigeria���s new democratic era, the fourth republic. Beyond Desire���s relationship with Prof, Verissimo paints a young woman���s graceful navigation through a childhood wrought by socio-economic struggles, domestic violence, and mental illness, along with her brilliant ascent to university life. Desire���s intimate friendship with her roommate and confidant, Remilekun, and her awkward exploratory encounters with a university classmate, Ireti, are a careful exploration of the transition between girlhood and womanhood. Through Desire���s eyes, Lagos��� dense vibrancy reaches through the novel���s pages, and street scenes of its neighborhoods like Maroko, Oshodi, and Ojo are felt through the senses: ���Against a faded signpost, Desire watched as young boys and girls sold bread, sachet yogurt, biscuits and other sweets about the streets, while men in suits and women in high heels rushed everywhere. There were also streams of school students fooling around and chatting in twos and threes, while the lonesome ones dragged along looking lost���.Car honks belted out a incongruous tune that travelled into her eardrums, beating the sanity from her head.��� Verissimo���s characters wittily banter in pidgin, Yoruba, and English, while acutely observing and experiencing Lagos��� material and metaphorical deterioration as they traverse the Nigerian megacity.

Although life continued and political regimes have changed since the Professor was imprisoned, the cyclical tides of Nigerian politics and dissent are relentless. The novel is set between the early 2000s with flashbacks to the 1990s, yet the political dissidents, historical psychic trauma, slum demolitions, and disillusioned university student protestors featured in the novel certainly strike a chord as Nigeria continues into over twenty years of its fourth republic today. Old generations of activists give way to new ones, whose slogans eerily echo the past. Without a substantive reckoning, Nigeria continues to be haunted by the same political figures from decades past: ���Obasanjo of the 70s contesting against Buhari of the 80s, and this is 2005!…How can this country move forward when it seeks the dead to bring revival?���

A Small Silence asks readers to consider what healing might look like in the aftermath of state brutality. Moments of state violence against protest are not simply flashpoints in history, but instead moments that spawn afterlives that continue to haunt and re-traumatize those involved. For Prof, sitting in darkness serves as a space of refuge, while Desire���s patience with his silence creates a space of generosity. As one of the voices in Prof���s head reminds him, ���Home is where your body settles even in the dark.��� In the darkness, time appears suspended, and Desire and Prof can truly listen to each other���s voices without other distractions. In the darkness, it does not matter that power outages are a constant fixture in Nigerian daily life. Through a series of flashbacks, we also learn that darkness was Prof���s only rest between torture sessions during imprisonment. Yet as Prof and Desire eventually learn, as much as darkness and silence can enable the healing to begin, they also can obscure as much as they illuminate. The same darkness that enabled a fruitful companionship and a psychological reckoning with the past also left too much to the imagination; ultimately when the lights are turned back on, it is difficult to face what was there all along.

Voices in the dark

Jumoke Verissimo���s first novel, A Small Silence, explores darkness as a space of refuge and obfuscation in Nigeria���s fourth republic.





Lagos, Nigeria. Image credit Satanoid via Flickr CC.

������How could anyone tolerate light which brought even more darkness?��� Prof asked.���

Set in the tumultuous 2000s of Nigeria���s fourth republic, writer Jumoke Verissimo���s first novel A Small Silence explores a distant intimacy forged between an unlikely pair���a formerly imprisoned activist professor and Desire, a bright young woman determined to know him. Through the eyes of Prof and Desire, the novel moves through major contours of Nigerian political life in the 1990s and 2000s, yet the depictions of vivid activism, political uncertainty, infrastructural precarity, municipal slum demolitions, and vibrant university life and protests resonate with Nigeria���s news headlines today.

The novel begins after a decade of Prof���s imprisonment for political activism during Nigeria���s 1990s military regime, when he is unceremoniously released back into a society where much has changed and moved on without him. Yet much has also remained the same; the familiar daily rhythms of Lagos residents breathe through the streets and university students continue to boldly protest injustice into the 2000s.

Haunted by his years of torture and isolation, Prof finds refuge in the familiar voices in his head and in the darkness of his home, unable to be coaxed back to normal life by his mother and childhood friend, Kayo. Prof���s sworn solitude is interrupted by Desire, a young woman who has been dreaming of Prof since their encounter during the Prof���s activist days and her precarious childhood in the slum of Maroko. This encounter from Prof���s activism against the infamous 1990s slum dwelling demolitions in Lagos impresses in both of their minds and drives Desire to seek Prof upon his release from prison. Together, they sit in the darkness of Prof���s room and grow to know each other through tendrils of conversation and shared silences.

Beyond Desire���s relationship with Prof, Verissimo paints a young woman���s graceful navigation through a childhood wrought by socio-economic struggles, domestic violence, and mental illness, along with her brilliant ascent to university life. Desire���s intimate friendship with her roommate and confidant, Remilekun, and her awkward exploratory encounters with a university classmate, Ireti, are a careful exploration of girlhood and womanhood.

Lagos��� dense vibrancy reaches through the novel���s pages, and street scenes of its neighborhoods like Maroko, Oshodi, and Ojo are felt through the senses: ���Against a faded signpost, Desire watched as young boys and girls sold bread, sachet yogurt, biscuits and other sweets about the streets, while men in suits and women in high heels rushed everywhere. There were also streams of school students fooling around and chatting in twos and threes, while the lonesome ones dragged along looking lost���.Car honks belted out an incongruous tune that travelled into her eardrums, beating the sanity from her head.��� Verissimo���s characters wittily banter in pidgin, Yoruba, and English, while acutely observing and experiencing Lagos��� material and metaphorical deterioration as they traverse the Nigerian megacity.

Although life continued and political regimes have changed since the Professor was imprisoned, the cyclical tides of Nigerian politics and dissent are relentless. Prof and Desire���s personal story lines intersect with major contours of Nigerian political life in the 1990s and 2000s. Although the novel is set between the early 2000s with flashbacks to the 1990s, the political dissidents, historical psychic trauma, slum demolitions, and disillusioned university student protestors featured in the novel certainly strike a chord as Nigeria continues into over twenty years of its fourth republic today. Old generations of activists give way to new ones, whose slogans eerily echo the past. Through all this, friendships and companionships grow and change everyone, however unresolved.

A Small Silence asks readers to consider how darkness serves as a space of refuge and how silence can be a space of generosity. As one of the voices in Prof���s head reminds him, ���Home is where your body settles even in the dark.��� In the darkness, time appears suspended, and Desire and Prof can truly listen to each other���s voices without other distractions. In the darkness, it does not matter that power outages are a constant fixture in Nigerian daily life. As Kayo, Prof���s childhood friend notes about the transition to privatized electricity, ���We have gone from ���Never Expect Power Always��� to ���Problem Has Changed Name.��� ��� Through a series of flashbacks, we also learn that darkness was Prof���s only rest between torture sessions during imprisonment. Yet as much as darkness and silence are able to comfort and nurture a relationship, they also ultimately obscure as much as illuminate. The same darkness that enabled a fruitful companionship also left too much to the imagination; ultimately when the lights are on, it is difficult to face what was there all along.

Things fall apart

Paranoia is my friend since, as Achille Mbembe says, ���the pandemic democratizes the power to kill; now we all have the power to kill.���





Abuja, Nigeria storm. Image credit Jeff Attaway via Flickr CC.

We are in exile from the world, living in a sort of home arrest which is also a sanctuary. I am bewildered by this collective normal; I can���t believe what is happening ���out there.��� However, I am at peace; home lends me a certain safety. Going out into the streets is unpleasant, with its shifty faces, distancing, and mistrust. ���Outside��� no one wants to be near anyone, and ���inside��� I decree solitary spaces for my three sons. Living together, 24 hours straight under the same roof, is delirious. I ride an emotional roller-coaster while creating routines as mother, coach, teacher, cook, and radio presenter.

Overwhelmed by sorrow, I think of these deaths. They���re far from anonymous���I know these faces they portray. Little by little, the pain of distance turns to fear. I only want to talk about what���s happening, while I long to be back in the world we���ve left behind. Those who are gone will not take part in the odyssey of what is yet to come.

This confinement routine will be succeeded by others, but things will never be the same. Again we���ll adapt, we���ll obey in order to stay healthy. I listen closely now to my body, I am aware of this mass I am made of, and look for symptoms. Paranoia is my friend since as Achille Mbembe says, ���the pandemic democratizes the power to kill; now we all have the power to kill.��� So my body is a weapon with the power to kill while it is ready to be slain. ���The way we think of the future will also change, suddenly we don���t know what tomorrow will be like,��� adds Mbembe���a future that���s picking up speed at a dizzying pace, breaking with the idea of ongoing progress while imposing, in a way, a sense of cyclical time.

I feel like a standby showing up abruptly in a science fiction film, unprepared. I guess we���ll have to improvise the roles. Pandemics have always had a place in the apocalyptic imaginary of science fiction, promoting information about the future. And this information, according to Kodwo Eshun, is merchandise. Possible futures are one more value within the wheel of capital, and their speculations materialize based on the hypotheses created by commercial film utopias.

This sense of a time coming to an end reminds me of the novel Things Fall Apart, by Chinua Achebe set in Nigeria, which tells the story of Okonkwo���an Igbo warrior from the village of Umuofia���who loses his mind when he sees his power threatened by the arrival of the white colonist. Achebe portrays an African village with its negative and positive aspects; its organization is hard to understand for a stranger, though it is subject to a brutal colonization. Okonkwo feels the world he���s always known coming apart. ���It is the fall of a traditional world that disappears, and inevitably, a new one begins; same as always, but not quite.��� This is the same feeling I have now���that the cruel, sick world we were living in is falling apart and things will probably change, but we don���t know in which directions or what will stand without mutation, just like in Okonkwo���s universe. Today the enemy is neither the white colonist nor the dystopias he brought down on the African people. It���s a virus.

This pandemic does not ignore the traits of class, gender, or race; it���s like a monster knocking on our door, as Mike Davis recently described it. When we can walk out on the streets again, we���ll do so in fear, staring at the ravage done, incredulous. We���ll suffer to a greater or lesser extent from the psychological and material consequences of this devastation. And just as stunned, we���ll be witness to the reinforcement of the nation state, and to fascism and racism spreading their wings.

Meanwhile, thousands of miles away, my parents are confined at home and afraid, but they���re used to undergoing wars and times of want. I watch COVID-19 making its way slowly into the African continent, and I find it impossible to forget that colonial power is still there, more blatant than ever. Confinement is a utopia that���s incompatible with African ways of life, where economic and hospital conditions are vulnerable, and this is just evidence, once more, of the place Africa occupies in the world.

Prophecies are being laid out on the table; speculations theorizing the world of post-COVID-19 are too. The noise is truly deafening, and yet we see the empty streets as if they were waiting for something to come.

One of the parts I find most rewarding of the times we are living is the call to community and the collective processes for dealing with this huge Kafkaesque dystopia. Mbembe asks how to create community at a time of such calamity, when we���re not even able to bid farewell to those who pass away. I���m bold enough to seek dialogue with him, and to venture that perhaps only specific communities can be created: a community of survival and solace, but especially for political strengthening and accountability.

Okonkwo, the Igbo warrior from the village of Umuofia, had to re-imagine his world, and he did it on his own terms, unsuccessfully, because Okonkwo was only interested in preserving his power above all else, while his world fell apart. Today we���ll have to re-imagine the world from the bottom up, reinvent the collective and, most importantly, take on the tools that will make it all possible.

Global finance and charity killed African healthcare

What happened to the once universally accepted idea of healthcare for all?





A man gets his temperature checked at the entrance gate of Mpilo Hospital in Harare, Zimbabwe, April 2020. Image credit KB Mpofu (ILO) via Flickr CC.

In sub-Saharan Africa, healthcare has been shifted from the realm of politics and democratic accountability to that of billionaires and so-called ���experts��� in a process that has resulted in what Egyptian economist, Samir Amin, has referred to as ���low intensity democracy.��� Bill Gates has a much greater say in public health issues concerning Africans than African citizens themselves. Similarly, it is perfectly uncontroversial for South African president Cyril Ramaphosa to publicize local billionaire pledges to the COVID-19 pandemic on national TV, perhaps reflecting that they form his real constituency. Where are the voices of the millions of ordinary citizens who vote in African elections? Have they been hollowed out by the rich and powerful?

Let���s consider Zimbabwe. The country���s Forbes-listed billionaire Strive Masiyiwa, who has invariably donated to the country���s health-care system through his Higherlife Foundation, has proposed the creation of a Special Purpose Trust to help Zimbabwe and Sudan���s response to the coronavirus pandemic. A few months before the outbreak of the coronavirus, a prolonged doctors��� strike, which had all but paralyzed the Zimbabwe���s healthcare sector, ended with doctors��� accepting a funding offer from Masiyiwa���s Higherlife Foundation. In sidelining the government and democratic accountability, Mr Masiyiwa advocates for the exclusion of the state and the promotion of ���third parties��� in the management of humanitarian responses.

Unsurprisingly, the UK based philanthropist exclaimed, ���Don���t just wait for governments” after donating 45 ventilators to be used in Zimbabwe’s public hospitals. To be clear, this is by no means a reproach of good deeds except to point out that these acts illustrate how the government���s duty of service provision has been subordinated to private actors. Besides, a public health system that’s worth its salt cannot rely on the benevolence of private foundations. A closer look at Mr. Masiyiwa���s interventions reveals that they probably reinforce existing systemic failures which they intend to solve. By quelling a doctors strike with a cash payout, Zimbabwe���s healthcare system lost out on the opportunity for broad systemic change through labor struggle���especially given that the doctors were striking for broad issues beyond pay. Likewise, failing to advocate for the lifting of economic sanctions on Zimbabwe under the guise of entrepreneurial activism as opposed to political activism is hypocritical. No one can possibly sustain an argument that sanctions have not negatively affected Zimbabwe���s economy in general and healthcare system in particular.

In the case of South Africa, the statement by President Ramaphosa that the Oppenheimer and Ruppert families had pledged 1 billion Rands ($57 million USD) each for small enterprises to tap into during the COVID-19 pandemic was an unprecedented publicity stunt for private individuals by a state president. In addition, the president announced the set-up of a solidarity fund. According to Ramaphosa, the government would provide seed capital of R150 million into the fund to complement public sector efforts to combat corona virus. The Fund���s website states, ������ individuals and organizations will be able to support these efforts through secure, tax-deductible donations.��� Most significantly, he stressed that: ���The Fund will be administered by a reputable team of people, drawn from financial institutions, accounting firms and government.��� This provides irrefutable evidence of the growing role of accountants and managers in healthcare provision.

What the aforementioned actions belie is the transformation of African public health into a core site of accumulation. Moreover, health philanthropy as an alliance of national governments, charities, NGOs and Western capital allows elites to mask their real intentions as humanitarian actions. And yet, this has significantly undermined the resilience of global south national health systems. African ministries of health have increasingly shifted towards serving the needs of financiers by focusing on disease specific interventions instead of broadly strengthening national health care systems. NGOs and western capital have promoted this through vertical funding. Because of this, social justice, egalitarianism and community participation in health care have been displaced. It is thus important to shed more light on this transformation.

For decades, until the end of World War II, public health in the Global South had been under the purview of colonial rulers. Hence, health services extended to the ���third world��� peoples was strongly linked to capital accumulation. However, by 1978 at the height of the Cold War, third world peoples became conscious of the benefits of healthcare for all. This culminated in the Alma-Ata Declaration whose ethos was ���health for all.��� It declared that: ���The people have the right and duty to participate individually and collectively in the planning and implementation of their health care.��� Consequently, 134 members of the World Health Organization (WHO) signed the declaration in Alma-Ata, USSR on September 6, 1978. Indeed, the declaration reflected the popularity of socialist policies at the time. Most importantly, its proponents led by the Chinese delegation to the WHO viewed it as a tool for redressing injustice.

This effort, however, was undermined by the US which hindered the development of self-sustaining healthcare systems in the global south by starving them of funding. This culminated in the 1993 World Development Report which criticized Alma-Ata���s financing mechanisms. The final death knell was struck on socialist health programs by structural adjustment programs, which further deprived public healthcare programs of funding. Its place was filled by ���global health governance��� (GHG) as part of the ���new world order.��� This meant the supplanting of governments in the realm of public health by foundations, NGOs and Public-Private Partnerships (PPPs). Instead of supporting governments in the provision of holistic health-care, global financiers alienated health ministries through sophisticated financial schemes. As a result of this, the WHO was greatly weakened and reduced to servicing private foundations instead of the majority of the world���s population.

By far the most striking effect on the public health of the developing world by the GHG agenda is its focus on ���health-care verticals.��� This has been promoted by initiatives such as the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria and Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, both initiatives heavily influenced by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. A key feature of health verticals is their focus on specific diseases, as well as their pliability to hierarchical management by multiple stakeholders. Consequently, health ministries have been significantly weakened. Their focus has been diverted towards funded initiatives much to the detriment of other conditions, which are equally important but perhaps less profitable to the foundations. This is the state of the milieu in which COVID-19 finds a majority of African countries.

At present, sub-Saharan Africa is experiencing a low reported numbers of cases and deaths from COVID-19 relative to other parts of the world. Many governments on the continent have implemented social distancing measures and are now easing them. However, because of the virtual absence of both adequate public services and a social safety net, there has been a short shrift consideration of their effectiveness. This has been in part caused by years of neoliberal decimation of the resilience of Global South governments in the past four decades.

Take for instance South Africa���after almost three decades of ���democracy,��� informal settlements and rural areas still lack basic services like running water and adequate sanitation. Social distancing in the townships which are home to the majority of South Africans is almost impossible. Similarly, South Africa���s former colony, the Republic of Namibia, which grappled with Hepatitis E last year, instituted a lock-down. However, it faces immense sanitation challenges and has had to rely on tippy taps for hand washing water. In Zimbabwe, the death of a prominent journalist in the country���s main COVID-19 facility prompted elites to establish a private state of the art facility in a PPP with the government���once again reinforcing the divide between the haves and the have-nots.

To sum up, COVID-19 provides Africans with a prism for reflecting on what GHG might mean to them. Following the freeze on funding by the US president to the WHO, its apologists have come out guns blazing. As argued in this article, the WHO has long been unfit for purpose, after years of onslaught by private financiers���this might be an opportunity to restore the sovereignty of nations at the WHO and revert back to the principles of the Alma Ata Declaration. Surely a few billionaires cannot continue to speak on behalf of millions of Africans.

How global finance and philanthropy killed African healthcare

What happened to the once universally accepted idea of healthcare for all?





A man gets his temperature checked at the entrance gate of Mpilo Hospital in Harare, Zimbabwe, April 2020. Image credit KB Mpofu (ILO) via Flickr CC.

In sub-Saharan Africa, healthcare has been shifted from the realm of politics and democratic accountability to that of billionaires and so-called ���experts��� in a process that has resulted in what Egyptian economist, Samir Amin, has referred to as ���low intensity democracy.��� Bill Gates has a much greater say in public health issues concerning Africans than African citizens themselves. Similarly, it is perfectly uncontroversial for South African president Cyril Ramaphosa to publicize local billionaire pledges to the COVID-19 pandemic on national TV, perhaps reflecting that they form his real constituency. Where are the voices of the millions of ordinary citizens who vote in African elections? Have they been hollowed out by the rich and powerful?

Let���s consider Zimbabwe. The country���s Forbes-listed billionaire Strive Masiyiwa, who has invariably donated to the country���s health-care system through his Higherlife Foundation, has proposed the creation of a Special Purpose Trust to help Zimbabwe and Sudan���s response to the coronavirus pandemic. A few months before the outbreak of the coronavirus, a prolonged doctors��� strike, which had all but paralyzed the Zimbabwe���s healthcare sector, ended with doctors��� accepting a funding offer from Masiyiwa���s Higherlife Foundation. In sidelining the government and democratic accountability, Mr Masiyiwa advocates for the exclusion of the state and the promotion of ���third parties��� in the management of humanitarian responses.

Unsurprisingly, the UK based philanthropist exclaimed, ���Don���t just wait for governments” after donating 45 ventilators to be used in Zimbabwe’s public hospitals. To be clear, this is by no means a reproach of good deeds except to point out that these acts illustrate how the government���s duty of service provision has been subordinated to private actors. Besides, a public health system that’s worth its salt cannot rely on the benevolence of private foundations. A closer look at Mr. Masiyiwa���s interventions reveals that they probably reinforce existing systemic failures which they intend to solve. By quelling a doctors strike with a cash payout, Zimbabwe���s healthcare system lost out on the opportunity for broad systemic change through labor struggle���especially given that the doctors were striking for broad issues beyond pay. Likewise, failing to advocate for the lifting of economic sanctions on Zimbabwe under the guise of entrepreneurial activism as opposed to political activism is hypocritical. No one can possibly sustain an argument that sanctions have not negatively affected Zimbabwe���s economy in general and healthcare system in particular.

In the case of South Africa, the statement by President Ramaphosa that the Oppenheimer and Ruppert families had pledged 1 billion Rands ($57 million USD) each for small enterprises to tap into during the COVID-19 pandemic was an unprecedented publicity stunt for private individuals by a state president. In addition, the president announced the set-up of a solidarity fund. According to Ramaphosa, the government would provide seed capital of R150 million into the fund to complement public sector efforts to combat corona virus. The Fund���s website states, ������ individuals and organizations will be able to support these efforts through secure, tax-deductible donations.��� Most significantly, he stressed that: ���The Fund will be administered by a reputable team of people, drawn from financial institutions, accounting firms and government.��� This provides irrefutable evidence of the growing role of accountants and managers in healthcare provision.

What the aforementioned actions belie is the transformation of African public health into a core site of accumulation. Moreover, health philanthropy as an alliance of national governments, charities, NGOs and Western capital allows elites to mask their real intentions as humanitarian actions. And yet, this has significantly undermined the resilience of global south national health systems. African ministries of health have increasingly shifted towards serving the needs of financiers by focusing on disease specific interventions instead of broadly strengthening national health care systems. NGOs and western capital have promoted this through vertical funding. Because of this, social justice, egalitarianism and community participation in health care have been displaced. It is thus important to shed more light on this transformation.

For decades, until the end of World War II, public health in the Global South had been under the purview of colonial rulers. Hence, health services extended to the ���third world��� peoples was strongly linked to capital accumulation. However, by 1978 at the height of the Cold War, third world peoples became conscious of the benefits of healthcare for all. This culminated in the Alma-Ata Declaration whose ethos was ���health for all.��� It declared that: ���The people have the right and duty to participate individually and collectively in the planning and implementation of their health care.��� Consequently, 134 members of the World Health Organization (WHO) signed the declaration in Alma-Ata, USSR on September 6, 1978. Indeed, the declaration reflected the popularity of socialist policies at the time. Most importantly, its proponents led by the Chinese delegation to the WHO viewed it as a tool for redressing injustice.

This effort, however, was undermined by the US which hindered the development of self-sustaining healthcare systems in the global south by starving them of funding. This culminated in the 1993 World Development Report which criticized Alma-Ata���s financing mechanisms. The final death knell was struck on socialist health programs by structural adjustment programs, which further deprived public healthcare programs of funding. Its place was filled by ���global health governance��� (GHG) as part of the ���new world order.��� This meant the supplanting of governments in the realm of public health by foundations, NGOs and Public-Private Partnerships (PPPs). Instead of supporting governments in the provision of holistic health-care, global financiers alienated health ministries through sophisticated financial schemes. As a result of this, the WHO was greatly weakened and reduced to servicing private foundations instead of the majority of the world���s population.

By far the most striking effect on the public health of the developing world by the GHG agenda is its focus on ���health-care verticals.��� This has been promoted by initiatives such as the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria and Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, both initiatives heavily influenced by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. A key feature of health verticals is their focus on specific diseases, as well as their pliability to hierarchical management by multiple stakeholders. Consequently, health ministries have been significantly weakened. Their focus has been diverted towards funded initiatives much to the detriment of other conditions, which are equally important but perhaps less profitable to the foundations. This is the state of the milieu in which COVID-19 finds a majority of African countries.

At present, sub-Saharan Africa is experiencing a low reported numbers of cases and deaths from COVID-19 relative to other parts of the world. Many governments on the continent have implemented social distancing measures and are now easing them. However, because of the virtual absence of both adequate public services and a social safety net, there has been a short shrift consideration of their effectiveness. This has been in part caused by years of neoliberal decimation of the resilience of Global South governments in the past four decades.

Take for instance South Africa���after almost three decades of ���democracy,��� informal settlements and rural areas still lack basic services like running water and adequate sanitation. Social distancing in the townships which are home to the majority of South Africans is almost impossible. Similarly, South Africa���s former colony, the Republic of Namibia, which grappled with Hepatitis E last year, instituted a lock-down. However, it faces immense sanitation challenges and has had to rely on tippy taps for hand washing water. In Zimbabwe, the death of a prominent journalist in the country���s main COVID-19 facility prompted elites to establish a private state of the art facility in a PPP with the government���once again reinforcing the divide between the haves and the have-nots.

To sum up, COVID-19 provides Africans with a prism for reflecting on what GHG might mean to them. Following the freeze on funding by the US president to the WHO, its apologists have come out guns blazing. As argued in this article, the WHO has long been unfit for purpose, after years of onslaught by private financiers���this might be an opportunity to restore the sovereignty of nations at the WHO and revert back to the principles of the Alma Ata Declaration. Surely a few billionaires cannot continue to speak on behalf of millions of Africans.

The politics of sugar in Tanzania

Sugar has become the new gold in Tanzania as prices for the commodity soar and stocks vanish.





Sugar plantation worker in Tanzania. Image credit Evans Francis via Pexels.

As COVID-19 rages, the struggle for survival has not stopped in Tanzania and sugar is now at the epicenter. On a recent cool Saturday morning in Morogoro, a town in the eastern part of Tanzania, some 196 kilometers west of Dar es Salaam, dozens of people flocked to a store on John Mahenge street that was reportedly selling sugar. Sugar, a commodity that has a long and pitiful history of being at the heart of the East African nation���s politics, had recently vanished from store shelves. After going without sugar for weeks, people told the local media that they had woken up very early in the morning, hoping that at last luck would be on their side.

So desperate were these people in their struggle for sugar that their health and possible exposure to the coronavirus mattered less. For while Tanzania no longer releases updates on the status of the COVID-19 pandemic in the country, the situation on the ground is far from satisfactory. Amidst this growing threat, however, the people that queued to get sugar did not bother to maintain the social distancing requirement advised by health experts to contain the spread of the pandemic. Nor did many wear masks. Nowhere could the relationship between poverty and ill-health have been more relevant.

What happened in Morogoro on that day was typical of the general situation across almost all major cities and towns in Tanzania. It took place exactly two weeks after the government informed the public of its intention to allow the importation of a total of 13,000 tons of sugar, projected to fill the deficit left by local sugar producers, which according to Tanzania���s business daily The Citizen, have the capacity of producing only an estimated 360,000 tons of sugar annually against a domestic demand of about 670,000 tons. The deficit is usually filled through imports, which have been made more urgent recently given the closures of local manufacturing factories for maintenance purposes and due to the rainy season. But Tanzania is no stranger to sugar shortage, nor has the importation of the commodity been a temporary solution to the problem. It is not known for how long the solution will persist now that it is known that sugar importation compromises Tanzania���s prospects to become a sugar exporter. In 2016, one year after having been elected to office, President John Magufuli banned the importation of sugar saying it was hurting local producers, but the politics of sugar is too complex to allow the ban to function effectively. It was lifted two years later.

The government���s latest attempt to import sugar came on the heels of an unprecedented price hike on the table condiment.�� Consumers started to feel this in early April after they found themselves being forced to buy a commodity whose price fluctuated between 2,600 Tanzanian shillings (about $1.12 USD) to as high a price as 5,000 Tanzanian shillings (about $2.16 USD). In the bustling city of Dar es Salaam, for example, on May 1, 2020, I was forced to go to about ten retail stores in my neighborhood asking for sugar, but the whole thing turned out to be an exercise in futility. On the same day, because I was ravenously in need of the commodity, I went as quickly as I could to a nearby supermarket, but no sooner had I been there than I realized I had wasted my time. Acting on the advice of a friend, I had to call another friend who lives in another town in the city who, as luck would have it, had bumped into the commodity miraculously after he had gone to three other stores to no avail.

The reasons behind the current sugar crisis in Tanzania remain complex and a matter of fierce debate among the country���s economists, politicians, social justice activists, and ordinary citizens. On the one hand, there are those who believe that the situation is nothing but the result of changes to supply and demand. They also argue that the situation might have been aggravated by the Ramadan season, as almost half of Tanzania���s population is Muslim and sugar is an important recipe in the preparation of many evening meals for Iftar (end of fasting); it is not surprising then to see the price shoot up and the commodity even disappear from the shelves.

On the other hand, there are those who put the blame on the sugar manufacturers and wholesale traders of the commodity. They accuse them of hoarding it, creating an artificial shortage in what critics say is a plot to take advantage of the novel coronavirus and the holy month of Ramadan to amass more profit. The government, at least until the time of writing, belongs to this group and has so far been its staunchest proponent. It was in fact based on this belief that led the government to announce a cap on sugar prices, a move that nevertheless exacerbated the shortage for many retail stores owners. They would have rather not sold the commodity instead of selling it at an unprofitable, government-fixed price. The enforcement of the directive became more problematic and unpopular as regional and district authorities carried out patrols in neighborhood stores to see who is complying with the directive and who is not. With some arrested after being caught selling the commodity above the set price cap, other retail store owners abandoned trading in the commodity entirely, or sold it to their regular customers only.

As I was preparing to file this report, media reports in Tanzania indicated that authorities have been successful in importing a total of 25,000 tons of sugar to offset the severe shortage being experienced throughout the country. I couldn���t immediately and independently verify these reports for the stores in my neighborhood were still short of the supply. But, whatever the reason for the current sugar crisis, the problem seems to be more political rather than economic. And while it is undoubtedly true that economic solutions will be needed if a lasting solution to the challenge is to be found, politics remains the most influential arena from which the latest struggle for sugar���the struggle for survival���will be wedged for the coming few days. The flocking of residents from the ���city without an ocean,��� as Morogoro is famously known, to a store to get sugar was in its very nature a political act, and when all is said and done it was a real slap on the face of a cabinet minister who a few weeks ago suggested to the poor citizens of the country to consider using honey if sugar was too expensive!

COVID-19 and the politics of sugar

Sugar has become the new gold in Tanzania as prices for the commodity soar and stocks vanish.





Sugar plantation worker in Tanzania. Image credit Evans Francis via Pexels.

As COVID-19 rages, the struggle for survival has not stopped in Tanzania and sugar is now at the epicenter. On a recent cool Saturday morning in Morogoro, a town in the eastern part of Tanzania, some 196 kilometers west of Dar es Salaam, dozens of people flocked to a store on John Mahenge street that was reportedly selling sugar. Sugar, a commodity that has a long and pitiful history of being at the heart of the East African nation���s politics, had recently vanished from store shelves. After going without sugar for weeks, people told the local media that they had woken up very early in the morning, hoping that at last luck would be on their side.

So desperate were these people in their struggle for sugar that their health and possible exposure to the coronavirus mattered less. For while Tanzania no longer releases updates on the status of the COVID-19 pandemic in the country, the situation on the ground is far from satisfactory. Amidst this growing threat, however, the people that queued to get sugar did not bother to maintain the social distancing requirement advised by health experts to contain the spread of the pandemic. Nor did many wear masks. Nowhere could the relationship between poverty and ill-health have been more relevant.

What happened in Morogoro on that day was typical of the general situation across almost all major cities and towns in Tanzania. It took place exactly two weeks after the government informed the public of its intention to allow the importation of a total of 13,000 tons of sugar, projected to fill the deficit left by local sugar producers, which according to Tanzania���s business daily The Citizen, have the capacity of producing only an estimated 360,000 tons of sugar annually against a domestic demand of about 670,000 tons. The deficit is usually filled through imports, which have been made more urgent recently given the closures of local manufacturing factories for maintenance purposes and due to the rainy season. But Tanzania is no stranger to sugar shortage, nor has the importation of the commodity been a temporary solution to the problem. It is not known for how long the solution will persist now that it is known that sugar importation compromises Tanzania���s prospects to become a sugar exporter. In 2016, one year after having been elected to office, President John Magufuli banned the importation of sugar saying it was hurting local producers, but the politics of sugar is too complex to allow the ban to function effectively. It was lifted two years later.

The government���s latest attempt to import sugar came on the heels of an unprecedented price hike on the table condiment.�� Consumers started to feel this in early April after they found themselves being forced to buy a commodity whose price fluctuated between 2,600 Tanzanian shillings (about $1.12 USD) to as high a price as 5,000 Tanzanian shillings (about $2.16 USD). In the bustling city of Dar es Salaam, for example, on May 1, 2020, I was forced to go to about ten retail stores in my neighborhood asking for sugar, but the whole thing turned out to be an exercise in futility. On the same day, because I was ravenously in need of the commodity, I went as quickly as I could to a nearby supermarket, but no sooner had I been there than I realized I had wasted my time. Acting on the advice of a friend, I had to call another friend who lives in another town in the city who, as luck would have it, had bumped into the commodity miraculously after he had gone to three other stores to no avail.

The reasons behind the current sugar crisis in Tanzania remain complex and a matter of fierce debate among the country���s economists, politicians, social justice activists, and ordinary citizens. On the one hand, there are those who believe that the situation is nothing but the result of changes to supply and demand. They also argue that the situation might have been aggravated by the Ramadan season, as almost half of Tanzania���s population is Muslim and sugar is an important recipe in the preparation of many evening meals for Iftar (end of fasting); it is not surprising then to see the price shoot up and the commodity even disappear from the shelves.

On the other hand, there are those who put the blame on the sugar manufacturers and wholesale traders of the commodity. They accuse them of hoarding it, creating an artificial shortage in what critics say is a plot to take advantage of the novel coronavirus and the holy month of Ramadan to amass more profit. The government, at least until the time of writing, belongs to this group and has so far been its staunchest proponent. It was in fact based on this belief that led the government to announce a cap on sugar prices, a move that nevertheless exacerbated the shortage for many retail stores owners. They would have rather not sold the commodity instead of selling it at an unprofitable, government-fixed price. The enforcement of the directive became more problematic and unpopular as regional and district authorities carried out patrols in neighborhood stores to see who is complying with the directive and who is not. With some arrested after being caught selling the commodity above the set price cap, other retail store owners abandoned trading in the commodity entirely, or sold it to their regular customers only.

As I was preparing to file this report, media reports in Tanzania indicated that authorities have been successful in importing a total of 25,000 tons of sugar to offset the severe shortage being experienced throughout the country. I couldn���t immediately and independently verify these reports for the stores in my neighborhood were still short of the supply. But, whatever the reason for the current sugar crisis, the problem seems to be more political rather than economic. And while it is undoubtedly true that economic solutions will be needed if a lasting solution to the challenge is to be found, politics remains the most influential arena from which the latest struggle for sugar���the struggle for survival���will be wedged for the coming few days. The flocking of residents from the ���city without an ocean,��� as Morogoro is famously known, to a store to get sugar was in its very nature a political act, and when all is said and done it was a real slap on the face of a cabinet minister who a few weeks ago suggested to the poor citizens of the country to consider using honey if sugar was too expensive!

Transnational African feminisms

What roles have francophone African women played in movements for pan-African liberation, historically and now?





Still from Mariannes Noires.

This post is the introduction to 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).

Until now, our series Talking back: African feminisms in dialogue has been focused on the work of African feminists online. We will now shift to ask: To what extent has the rise of digital technologies led to new modes of feminist organizing

offline?

In the 2016 documentary, Mariannes Noires, seven different French-born women of African descent confront their own unique identities and challenge the expectations of French society. The film was directed by Mame-Fatou Niang and Kaytie Nielsen. In the film���s PR, Niang and Nielsen wrote that their interview subjects ������ share their ideas and solutions to France���s most daunting issues at the heavy intersection of racism and misogyny, and they bravely lead the way forward.��� Niang was born in Dakar, Senegal, and studied in the US and France, and apart from her interests in contemporary African identities in France, wants to explore the longue dur��e of that history, as you will learn in this interview.

Rama Salla Dieng

What role have francophone African women played historically in movements for pan-African liberation? Are there any concrete examples that come to mind?

Annette Joseph-Gabriel

Women from French-speaking Africa have historically played crucial roles in theorizing liberation and working against imperialism, both in leadership positions and at the grassroots level. In my book I identify women such as Aoua K��ita and Andr��e Blouin as ���political protagonists.��� There were central actors in the story of pan-African liberation in the 20th century. They also chronicled these movements through their autobiographies. Other women, like Jeanne Martin Ciss�� and Annette Mbaye d���Erneville, put forward a woman-centered politics of liberation in their political work and literary practice. In some ways, I think that national narratives have maintained echoes of their name such that people might find their names to be familiar, but will not know much more than that. That too is a form of erasure.

Mame Fatou-Niang

Annette summed it up perfectly. The situation of African women under colonial rule, and particularly under the French Napoleonic Code, was marked by great loss of power. Whereas indigenous customs gave a special place to women in precolonial societies, France imposed jurisprudence aimed at forcing the social standards of the M��tropole. Under these circumstances, African women stood at the intersection of multiple marginalities. It is that particular set of circumstances that led women like Jeanne Martin Ciss�� and Annette Mbaye d���Erneville to break from the national Union des Femmes Fran��aises (UFF) and create the Union des Femmes Senegalaises (UFS). Although the UFS centered its actions around the emancipation of (francophone African) women, the motto of the organization was ���independence before anything.��� It is in the same vein that we can think of the Union of African Women, a group established a year before the Organization of African Unity (OAU). UAW, most commonly known as La Panafricaine des Femmes or Pan-African Women���s Organization (PAWO), was created by women who had taken part in the anti-colonial struggle, and who wanted to achieve the dreams of liberation and unity set forth by the 1960s wave of independence. This project is clearly stated in Aoua Keita���s inaugural speech in which the Malian feminist reiterated the central mission of UAW: the fact that ���unity and solidarity of all Africans were the sole condition for the liberation of the African man.���

Through political activism, social interventions, and literary productions, francophone African women established significant networks across their countries��� borders. After independence, they also made sure that the new states honored the demands for more rights for women and girls. To build on what Annette just said, we were led to think of pan-Africanism���s major icons as being exclusively African men, such as Sekou Toure or Modibo Keita. Similarly, when one thinks of the influence of feminism, our generation has been quick to point at Western figures or Black Americans, effectively erasing the women���s movements that were born in and acted out of francophone Africa. That amnesia speaks volumes about the (non)place of black women in our history.

Rama Salla Dieng

How have women in our time continued to be influenced by that legacy?

Annette Joseph-Gabriel

I think that the erasure that Mame points to makes it difficult to have conversations about legacy. For African women to consciously work in the legacies of those who have come before, we have to do far more digging to learn those legacies. We have to look beyond educational institutions that continue to valorize an all-male cast of freedom fighters, and to become learners of our own history independently and in other, often non-institutional spaces.

Because my work is primarily in the literary domain, one of the continued legacies I see is in the literary production of African women. Aoua K��ita���s autobiography, Femme d���Afrique: La vie d���Aoua K��ita racont��e par elle-m��me was the first autobiography written in French by an African woman. It won a Grand prix litt��raire de l���Afrique noire, making K��ita the first (African?) woman to win the prestigious literary award. Even if she is today not known continent-wide or in the diaspora, I see these multiple ���firsts��� as having paved the way for subsequent writers like V��ronique Tadjo, Aminata Sow Fall, and Calixthe Beyala who became the literary voices of subsequent generations. The stories they tell hold space for women and girls at the center of worlds that would otherwise relegate them to the margins. Beyond the literary sphere, the political activism of these foremothers continues today in the form of feminist thought and organizing in many forms (academic, grassroots, labor movements, politics etc.) throughout the continent.

Mame Fatou-Niang

As an Afro-French girl growing up in the 1990s, I never heard of these black women from Africa. Never. When I learned about pan-Africanism, the names of black men came first, then that of foreign women. My generation knew Assata Shakur, loved Angela Davis, learned about Claudia Jones, Amy Ashwood Garvey, and Amy Jacques Garvey, but we never heard of Jeanne Martin Ciss�� or Annette Mbaye d���Erneville. Like Annette said, academic research on the political and literary endeavors of these francophone African women kept the memory of their actions alive. It is really in the past decade that these stories sprung out of their intellectual niches, to slowly make their way into broader audiences. The names, actions, words and thought of these foremothers are currently infusing feminist and social movements at many levels in Africa, but also in the African diaspora.

Rama Salla Dieng

How have these pan-Africanist movements and ideals been present in conversations about Black French identity?

Annette Joseph-Gabriel

Beyond Africa, I see a black feminist, pan-Africanist collective like Mwasi as explicitly and deliberately continuing the legacy we���ve been discussing, all the while adapting their discourse and action both to their diasporic location and to a broader and more inclusive vision of black womanhood. Mwasi is also a really important example of pan-African feminism���s intervention in contemporary debates about race and identity in France. They very explicitly draw on a political genealogy of Black French women and a pan-Africanist ideological lineage. Contrary to the worrying rise of a nativist strand of thought in the United States that pits so-called American Descendants of Slaves against all other black people, Mwasi���s vision of Black Frenchness underscores liberation as necessarily transnational and pan-Africanist, because the white supremacy that it seeks to counter is at once specifically French and broadly global.

Mame Fatou-Niang

This might sound very trivial, but for me it has been absolutely essential to read about blackness, Black French identity and black (francophone) womanhood in the French language. It has been essential to read about these topics from the perspective of black francophone women. Because the conversation on race has been taboo in France, I was introduced to racial theory in English, by African-American and Black British theorists, before stumbling on male francophone thinkers such as Fanon and C��saire. Unearthing the voices of these forgotten women, and adding these missing pieces to the current conversations on race, blackness and citizenship in France is crucial to ensure that the mosaic being assembled reflects as much as possible the long experience of black people in France.

Rama Salla Dieng

Recent works such as Mariannes Noires, Ne reste pas �� ta place and Ouvrir la voix have sparked conversations in France and beyond. What role do you think internal exploration and biographical methods can play in France and in Europe in this particular moment of increased right-wing nationalist movements?

Annette Joseph-Gabriel

These works emphasize what Ir��ne d���Almeida has described as ���destroying the emptiness of silence.��� We throw the word ���silencing��� around so often now that we almost take it for granted. Sometimes we say marginalized groups are silent when in reality we simply don���t know how to hear their expressions and articulations of themselves and their political visions. But silencing as an active verb and strategy has been a long, deliberate process of disenfranchisement that is not always captured in the facility with which we use the word. D���Almeida���s formulation reminds us that silencing is not only about voice. The emptiness and alienation it creates is also about the total destruction and erasure of the person, the human. In works such as Mariannes Noires for example we hear black women who refuse that silencing, alienation, erasure, and destruction. They assert that they are human (which in a white supremacist structure is actually a radical idea that a black woman is human and not an object or marginalized subject). They speak of the complexity and messiness and beauty of their humanity and that is a political project that directly counters the racist nationalist movements that are not so much increasing or rising as regaining respectability and acceptance.

I also wholeheartedly agree with Mame���s previous point about the importance of the language in which we are able to imagine resistance and liberation. From benign terms such as ���twist out��� in the natural hair movement to more complex theories such as intersectionality, the size and power of the United States means that we have a significant anglicization of much of the language that we use to describe black women���s experiences. How do you say intersectionality in French? I do not mean how do you translate Crenshaw���s crucial and vital word but rather how do you convey its meaning in a way that captures the particularities of the ways that racial, gendered, and class oppression intersect in France? On one hand, having a vocabulary that crosses borders is powerful because it highlights the artificiality of linguistic and national borders. But at the same time, substituting English words such as ���black��� for a French word such as ���noir.e��� means that we step outside of the specific social, historical and political realities that constitute what we are trying to name, and end up with tools that are ill-adapted for the work of liberation at hand. Mariannes Noires is unapologetic about owning the French language and provides such a thoughtful template for how to dream of freedom in a language that initially began as imposition, for how to speak black womanhood in French without replaying the old colonial scenes of assimilation.

Mame Fatou-Niang

I love this! Annette���s words beautifully reflect something that has been central to my work as a scholar-artist analyzing black women���s experience in France. I love the figure of the mosaic. A mosaic starts with a single piece around which the structure is slowly built. As an Afro-French woman, I see that first piece as the ability to break both the silence and the invisibility that have been the hallmarks of our lives in France: the silence of numbers and the lack of ethnic statistics, the silence of language and the lack of words in French to account for a racialized experience, the silence of history and our effective erasure from France���s roman national. Being able to say ���Je suis noire. Je suis Afro-Fran��aise!” (I am black. I am an Afro-French woman!), this is the piece around which I built my research, my art and my identity quest. I love mosaics because, unlike puzzles which are pre-cut, mosaics allow for fluidity and creativity, while producing pieces whose originality and strength stem from their diversity. Whereas people perceive Annette���s, Rokhaya���s, Amandine���s, and my own work as a threat to France���s identity, they fail to realize that we unearth and weave narratives that enrich the national tapestry.

Place matters

If COVID-19 teaches us anything, it is that the virus has no boundaries, and the well-being of both rich and poor are co-dependent. What we do about that matters.





Empty Nairobi street during Kenya's lockdown. Image credit Sambrian Mbaabu for the World Bank via Flickr CC.

A version of this article will be published in the journal, City and Society.

As the novel coronavirus sweeps across the globe, it raises fundamental questions about spatial justice in Africa���s rapidly transforming cities. With the majority of Africa���s urban populations living in crowded settlements susceptible to mass infection, adhering to World Health Organization (WHO) social distancing guidelines is next to impossible. Where is the water for handwashing? The space for separating the infected? Or the wages that will pay for food, if it is even available? (See here, here and here). For the millions of Africans living under such conditions, WHO���s advice is a cruel joke: a reminder of the urban poor���s position at the fringes of citizenship. Accompanied by lock-downs and curfews, the urban poor who rely on daily earnings to put food on the table and must decide between viral exposure or starving. As an Abuja food seller pointed out: ������ we will die of hunger faster than being killed by the virus.��� There is a risk some governments may not care; or worse, that COVID-19 provides cover to further entrench socio-economic and spatial marginalization.

We already know part of the story. Around the world, the economically and politically marginalized are affected disproportionately by COVID-19. While we don���t yet know how the pandemic will unfold across Africa, there are few reasons to expect the poor will fare any better. What may differ are the long-term consequences. Indeed, even well-meaning interventions to slow the spread���hand washing, distancing and restricted mobility���may well erode what resilience the urban poor have built. They may save lives, but these measures will undermine already precarious livelihoods. Where the UK or US governments may dole out trillions in aid, African governments have no such resources. Given existing levels of limited political accountability and heightening autocracy, they also have few incentives to do so.

Place matters

The spread and responses to the novel coronavirus highlight the politics of geography. Place is not a neutral theatre in which development activities take place. People growing up in disadvantaged neighborhoods are less likely to prosper than those raised in ���good��� neighborhoods. In other words, place matters. Researchers at Brown and Harvard show that a child born in a poor area has little shot of getting ahead. To paraphrase the authors, some places lift people out of poverty, others trap them there. In his 1983 article “On Spatial Justice,” Gordon Pirie pointed out that place is a ���social product��� that significantly shapes individuals��� and households��� developmental choices, outcomes and trajectories.

The COVID-19 pandemic only sharpens the dialectical relationship between space and (in) justice. Poor urban communities face intersecting challenges making them susceptible to crisis. First, physical conditions facilitate disease spread. Second, chronic conditions like HIV, tuberculosis, and malnutrition make people vulnerable, risks exacerbated by inadequate health services. Third���and most importantly��� many among the urban poor live and work in ���extra-legal��� labor and housing markets. Even under normal circumstances, their very presence violates the law.

These very elements of urban life make them particularly vulnerable to disease and state violence. Every failure to comply, every violation of an impracticable law or regulation becomes justification for additional restrictions and violence. The danger is that these facets of urban life will now be turned against the poor in ways that further their social and geographic marginalization.

Rather than draw citizens closer to their governments, the pandemic presents states with extraordinary license to evict, lock-down and control the movements of poor urban communities. In an era of humanitarian politics, governments are even less likely to be participatory or inclusive. We have seen this already with violent stay at home orders in Rwanda, South Africa, Kenya, Ghana and elsewhere where state security agents shoot dead and publicly flog people caught in the wrong place. These actions not only punish transgressors, but also collectively reinforce people���s fears of state caprice and coercion. South Africa, ostensibly one of the continent���s most progressive states, has begun implementing plans to de-densify informal settlements in the name of health. Activists decry the evictions, as they have in the past. But unable to go to the streets or counter the towering authority of public health expertise, their cries will likely go unheeded.

What Africa needs now are strategies that avoid stigmatizing the poor or blaming them for their vulnerability. Regulations and practices exposing the poor as law-breakers and coding them as disease vectors make it more, rather than, less likely that they will be subject to coercion and urban exclusion. Humanitarian politics acts on people, ostensibly in their interests. This is no more sustainable than other forms of autocratic rule, especially when such rules are ultimately oriented to preserving existing socio-economic and spatial hierarchies. Instead, interventions justified by COVID-19 should be consultative and forward looking. As the continent���s experience with Ebola shows, combatting the pandemic requires strengthening accountability and the social contract between the state and its vulnerable citizens.

If this pandemic teaches us anything, it is that the virus has no boundaries, and the well-being of both rich and poor are co-dependent. The only way to disentangle the risk is to remove the poor entirely from cities���but this is not practical, possible or just. Rich and poor lives are imbricated within Africa���s urban economies. This pandemic is a fulcrum. Without domestic mobilization and international pressure, it opens the door further to anti-poor autocracy and urban marginalization. With luck, it may also encourage policy makers to act with the urban poor, rather than ���for��� them.