Sean Jacobs's Blog, page 175
May 26, 2020
An ode to Somali girlhood
Still from Dhalinyaro.
In the popular imagination, Somali women are viewed as passive, oppressed subjects, the hapless victims of their patriarchal culture and religion. Where they are visible, it is often through the iconography of the veil and female circumcision. Lula Ali Isma��l���s Dhalinyaro (Youth)���the first full-length feature film by a Djiboutian woman���is a radical departure from this corpus in depicting Somali girlhood in its full depth and complexity. Most importantly, it does this through depicting the mundane events of everyday life in Djibouti City. There are no wars here, or pirates, or terrorists, no young women escaping fathers, husbands, or the blade of a female elder, no white saviors ready for the rescue. What we see in Dhalinyaro is a coming of age story that shows Somali girls as they are.
The film���s storyline revolves around the final qualification examination for Djiboutian secondary students to enter university, the baccalaureate. The three main characters, Deka, Hibo, and Asma, are classmates at the Lyc��e de Djibouti but hail from markedly different class backgrounds. The Lyc��e space becomes one where the different segments of Djibouti���s population interact and form friendships, bonding over the shared ritual of studying for the baccalaureate. Yet, it is the question of higher education that renders class divides most explicit. For wealthy Hibo, who arrives at the Lyc��e each day in a chauffeured private car, there is no question that she will continue her education in Paris. Deka, who is securely middle class, is less certain, but with the funds saved up by her mother over a number of years, the idea of going to France for university is within the realm of the possible. Asma has no such choices available to her; poverty dictates that she must stay in Djibouti, unless she is among the few top students to receive a scholarship to study abroad.
The palpable burden of class difference saturates the film. One shot silently juxtaposes a well-dressed man at a cafe with a young boy on the street as he hands his shoes to the child to polish while drinking coffee. In another shot, women in wide-brimmed sun hats sweep the city streets at dusk to the sounds of ciyaar Soomaali, a traditional Somali folk dance. It is palpable in Asma���s hesitation to attend Hibo���s birthday party at the luxury Djibouti Palace Kempinski, and in the fuul bean stew her family eats at mealtimes, like the poor neighborhood children that come to Deka���s home for bread. When Hibo gets into an altercation with a group of schoolgirls outside of the Lyc��e, she disparages them as the ���stupid Balabois������residents of the impoverished Balbala suburb. An angered Asma, who tells her that she is ���one of them,��� accuses Hibo of believing that her wealth gives her more rights. Over the course of the film, Hibo���s character arc moves from a sheltered and careless rich girl to a more understanding and self-sufficient individual, a transformation made possible by honest friendships across difference.
The stunning cinematography with long shots of the sea and glimpses of the Port of Djibouti subtly signals the confluence and contradictions of global wealth and local poverty. This infrastructure of state capitalism���and, at the end of the film, the national radio broadcasting examination results���are the only glimpses of the state or politics in Dhalinyaro. Djibouti is among the most enduring dictatorships in Africa, ruled by an extended family since its independence from France in 1977. Its ruler, Isma��l Omar Guelleh, is famously a patron of the arts and culture, and Lula Ali Isma��l has described the support she received for the film from both the private sector and a government eager to develop the country���s nascent film industry. While one can wonder about the possible implications of this government hand for artistic freedom, Isma��l���s decision not to engage formal politics explicitly is another subversive act of representation, given that the region is mired in images of political dysfunction. Isma��l���s political critique is muted and indirect, but no less searing. It takes the form of a city-wide power outage that forces the ���haves��� to turn on their private generators and the ���have-nots��� to light lanterns; it is in the figure of the elderly veteran telling Deka the forgotten stories of Djiboutian soldiers who fought for France during the Second World War; it is, at the metalevel, what the film itself embodies in its very existence, in its very refusal to conform.
What Dhalinyaro foregrounds is female sociality and intimacy as it unravels the complex layers of contemporary Djiboutian life. The film has a decidedly female gaze, decentering maleness to the extent that most of the male characters in the film remain marginal and unnamed. Instead, it is the inner worlds of Somali women that are fleshed out in full, and with the immense care and tenderness of a Somali woman behind the camera. When Hibo has a miscarriage in a bathroom stall at school, it is the conservatively-dressed Asma who immediately removes her abaya to cover her friend���s blood-stained clothing, stating that ���girls look out for each other.��� They openly discuss sexuality and their relationships, the lively female banter reminiscent of the Somali riwaayad (play) and theater tradition that has pushed the envelope on notions of female morality and modesty in Somali society since the 1960s. Markers of Somali womanhood are interspersed throughout the film: the breezy dirac shiid worn as loungewear at home, the fragrant uunsi smoke used to perfume one���s household, clothing and hair, the huruud face masks made of turmeric to keep one���s skin soft.
At the heart of Dhalinyaro is the tension between visibility and invisibility in the desire for a particular kind of freedom. In an early scene, Deka, Hibo, and Asma quietly talk at their desks as their teacher���played by Lula Ali Isma��l herself���explains the upcoming deadlines for students seeking to go abroad for university. ���Think of the freedom!��� Deka whispers to her friends, ���no one holding you to account, no one looking at you and saying ���you���re the daughter of so and so.������ These moments of recognition occur most often in their encounters with men. As the girls sit by the waterfront and jokingly evaluate the appearances of young men passing by, a man pauses and greets Hibo, telling her to say hello to her father for him. ���There���s no getting away!��� an exasperated Hibo tells her friends. In another scene, the searching glance of a male waiter at a restaurant where Deka is having an intimate dinner with the older married man she is seeing is enough to unsettle her and abruptly end the date. Yet, it is the same surveilling gaze���this time by women���that precipitates the end to the predatory relationship, after Deka���s mother hears about it. The communal nature of the Somali social world, while frustrating any notion of individual anonymity, fosters a sense of interdependence and female solidarity that uplifts the girls in times of need, as their friendship illustrates. Ultimately, Deka chooses this world by staying in Djibouti for university.
Ethnicity is conspicuously absent from the film. Djibouti, while dominated politically, culturally and demographically by Somalis, is a multi-ethnic country comprised of the Somali and Afar, as well as smaller communities of Arabs, Ethiopians and Europeans. That diversity is represented in the casting, with the three lead actresses themselves belonging to Djibouti���s different ethnic groups: one is Afar, one is Somali, and one is Arab Somali. Yet each plays a Somali character, in a Djibouti where only Somali people and culture appear to exist. However, there is some ambiguity to Hibo���s background that is not discernible to the non-Somali speaker and flattened by the limited subtitles. In the scene where Hibo is confronted on the schoolyard, a voice in the background, which does not make it into the subtitles, can be heard saying ���the little Arab girl is being attacked!��� in Somali. Her father, in other scenes, speaks one or two words of Arabic, albeit words that have entered the Somali lexicon. Asma and Deka���s households are completely immersed in their Somaliness, with illustrative scenes including Asma���s sisters playing jag on the veranda as their mother gives them advice using Somali proverbs, and Deka���s single mother listening to gabay poetry composed by a heartbroken Cilmi Boodhari. Hibo���s family, on the other hand, only speaks Somali at home when talking to their maid; they converse in French exclusively between themselves, listen to European classical music during formal dinners, and go to France for education. There is an unexamined politics of language and ethnicity yearning to be explored.
Dhalinyaro is a remarkable feat, particularly for a first full-length film by a self-taught filmmaker hailing from a country with a film industry still in its infancy. Though initially released in 2018, it has recently seen a surge in popularity when it was made available for free streaming as part of this year���s Cinewax Online African Film Festival, breaking OAFF streaming records. It is a beautiful film���a love letter to Somali girls���that deserves to be seen widely.
May 25, 2020
The lesser of two evils
Image credit Kate Holt for AusAID via Flickr CC.
As the COVID-19 pandemic continues to spread and a state of emergency is declared, preexisting forms of domestic and intimate partner violence are being acutely exacerbated in Ethiopia. The high prevalence of domestic and intimate partner violence, and deeply entrenched patriarchal terror takes a toll on the physical and mental health of women and girls. This compounds the impacts of COVID-19, as women who are in need of physical or mental health services due to abuse, or who might have contracted the virus and need treatment, are reticent to go to hospitals as they face risks along the way, including being stopped and harassed by police due to heightened state surveillance related to the coronavirus.
Many of the Ethiopian women and girls who come to shelters, such as the Good Samaritan Association (GSA) and Association for Women���s Sanctuary and Development (AWSAD), are returning from work abroad���particularly as domestic workers in the Gulf States. There was already a well-documented trend of abuse and human rights violations against migrant domestic workers in the Gulf States; due to COVID-19, the Saudi government repatriated 3,000 Ethiopians. The influx of returnees puts more pressure on the Ethiopian government���s efforts to tackle COVID-19, particularly as they come from countries with a higher number of cases. Returning Ethiopian workers must first go through a mandatory quarantine period; afterwards most of them are referred to shelters, such as GSA, because they report having suffered violence and sexual abuse. This, in turn, strains the capacity of the shelter providers, forcing them to take in more people than can be safely accommodated under physical distancing rules. Lack of adequate water supply, frequent power cuts, scarcity of protective items (especially masks), and the fear of running out of food remain common challenges. Bemnet, a former resident in one of the shelters, spoke to me of her overlapping challenges:
I stopped work, as a disabled person who fully depends on touch for mobility. I am terrified of going outside of the house. My livelihood is touch-based, when I hop on the taxi I bend and hold a grip on the floor for support because it is inaccessible. I give people my crutches while I do that, which also entails physical contact. I usually fall while I move around because people throw banana peels on the street. I am trapped, and walk in shame in the compound I live in because I am unable to pay rent ��� I need to survive this chaos for the sake of my offspring.
Former residents and returnees, who have been supporting themselves by engaging in small businesses, are disproportionately affected by the government���s lockdown measures. They live together in unhygienic and overcrowded spaces, often without an income; they struggle to pay rent, access health facilities, and to provide food for their children and themselves. Helen, a migrant returnee and single mother, recounts her struggles:
I used to leave my baby girl at the daycare when I go to work but now it is closed. I now leave her at one of the older ladies in the neighborhood, who sometimes give us food. Since the taxi fare has multiplied, I walk long distances back and to work. The carton recycling company I work for has gone bankrupt. I buy paper, magazines, and old exercise books from street children while enduring physical fighting with durye (vagabonds). Since the company has been hit hard and I don���t make enough money for rent and food, I wash people���s clothes. If you see my hands now, they are bruised from overwork. And it pains me deeply that my child is extremely suffering.
The Ethiopia Network of Women Shelters (ENWS) opened an emergency shelter in Addis Ababa on April 7, 2020 for those who are currently facing violence. However, they have only received 10 people, eight of them under 18 years of age. Although authorities have reported a spike in domestic violence, incidents remain under-reported because people are even more afraid to go to the police than usual for fear of exposure to the virus in crowded police stations.��Also, neighbors often intervene as peace brokers, quashing any hope for legal accountability.
One of the major challenges that these shelters face during the pandemic is that they do not have the equipment to screen for COVID-19. Because of the need to minimize infections, new admissions have been halted. For most women living in violent circumstances, staying at home means staying with an abuser. Moreover, the closure of shelters, legal aid offices, training, schools, and other provisions is likely to be a death sentence for many. According to the Amhara Regional Women and Children Affairs Bureau, child marriage/rape has been increasing as a result of school closures amid the COVID-19 pandemic. The Ethiopian Women Lawyers Association (EWLA) is an organization that had already been hit hard by the 2009 Ethiopian Charities and Societies Proclamation, which placed draconian restrictions on rights-based organizations. Now according to Lensa Biyena, the director of the Ethiopian Women Lawyers Association (EWLA), they have had to adjust their legal aid services as the courts were partially closed due to the pandemic, but reopened to prioritize gender-based violence cases. ���There are four rape cases that we are following and 30-plus cases of single mother divorcees who came to us because of the discontinuation of child support. COVID-19 has adverse economic implications whereby children are going hungry and mothers unable to feed them,��� said Biyena.
Though more women in Ethiopia may be suffering violence and oppression during the pandemic and the concurrent partial lockdown, they are not seeking shelter in numbers at the centers for women and girls around the country. They may be choosing long-term oppression and violence (and possibly death), rather than an immediate death from COVID-19. It is a horrific reality of choosing the lesser of two evils. The Ethiopian government must address the gender gaps that are proliferating as a result of the pandemic. Sexual assault prevention and response measures must be included in the government���s emergency package; 24-hour crisis hotlines, emergency shelter/transitional housing, and counseling, legal, and economic support are all central.
The bedroom adventures of African women
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Image credit Nana Darkoa.
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).
When you click on the front page of the blog, Adventures from the Bedrooms of African Women, you are greeted by headlines as diverse as “I Thought The First Thing I was Going To Do After Lockdown Was Get a Brazilian,” “Sex Drough,” “West African Tales of Sex and Love,” and “How can you tell when a woman orgasms?” The founders of this blog make no excuses that they are trying to demystify and educate on how African women talk, think, and write on sex and sexuality. As they write on their “About” page: “��� the blog provides a safe space where African women can openly discuss a variety of sex and sexuality issues with the intention of learning from each other, having pleasurable and safer sex, and encouraging continuous sex education for adults.” Below is a conversation with one of the founders, Nana Darkoa Sekyiamah.
Rama Salla Dieng
Hello Nana. I met you for the first time in Accra in 2009. This was the very year you launched Adventures from the Bedrooms of African Women to ���share experiences of sex and our diverse sexualities.��� Can you please tell us about what motivated you to create the blog?
Nana Darkoa Sekyiamah
I co-created Adventures from the Bedrooms of African Women with Malaka Grant, the woman I call my BFFFL (Best Friend for Freaking Life). In January 2009, I went on a girls beach trip to Axim in the western region of Ghana with three other African women. We had the best time and part of that was because we spent so much time having really frank open conversations about sex. It was also the occasion of my 30th birthday and I was really struck that it had taken me up until that age to feel that I could talk to other women about my sexual experiences, desires and fantasies without feeling judged. When I got back to Accra, I called Malaka up (she lived in the US at the time) to tell her about the amazing experience I’d had and that I wanted to start a blog to talk about sex. She told me that she’d been thinking about writing a book called Adventures from the Bedrooms of African Women. I convinced her that we should collaborate on the blog together and later turn it into a book.
Rama Salla Dieng
Analyzing how women organized online in Kenya, Nanjala Nyabola explains that most feminist campaigns tended to be countered with resistance articulated around ���decency��� or ���morality.��� Did you experience these tensions and how do you navigate threats made to feminists on online spaces?
Nana Darkoa Sekyiamah
I am really good at ignoring people who try and tell me that I’m a bad role model, or that the people who read Adventures are going to get AIDS and die (the person who made that comment on the blog immediately got blocked). I don’t expend energy from those kinds of folks. They are not my target audience.
Rama Salla Dieng
You invite both submissions based on creative non-fiction, fiction, and erotica, but I notice you created ���heterosexual��� and ���lesbian��� content. What led you to this choice?
Nana Darkoa Sekyiamah
We created these categories in 2009, it’s probably time for us to update them. At the time I wanted people to recognize that African women’s sexuality was not limited to heterosexuality, but as I have grown in my feminism I now recognize that having only these two sexual orientations is limiting. If anyone wants to sponsor a significant redesign and update of Adventures please holla.
Rama Salla Dieng
You also illustrate some of your stories with mmh ��� how to say this ��� very sensual and beautiful visuals ��� did you feel this innovation contributed to increased online engagement with the blog?
Nana Darkoa Sekyiamah
Ha ha. I’m glad you think so because this is actually one of the content types that I’ll like to improve on the site. We created a beautiful set of illustrations depicting a range of sexualities and sexual experiences with HOLAAfrica and Francis Brown of AnimaxFYB Studios. I love that series and would love to do more. I’d also love for us to be able to commission a number of African women photographers to create original images for us. Pictures definitely help drive engagement, especially when you can share the post via social media with a suitable visual.
Rama Salla Dieng
I was recently having a conversation with Tiffany Mugo of HOLAA, and she was explaining how your labor of love, a sex positive feminist blog, inspired her. Indeed, Adventures is now a veteran in the African digital landscape (happy birthday to the blog by the way!). Do you know of any other African or non-African work similar to yours?
Nana Darkoa Sekyiamah
I love Tiffany and I love HOLAA. She’s like my perfect little sister from another mother. I think there’s a lot of African work that creates space for African women to think, talk, and reconsider the age old ideas about sex and sexualities. Those works may not necessarily be similar to Adventures but they are complimentary in the sense that we’re all working towards the same vision, a world in which African women have ownership over their bodies and have pleasurable sex lives. Across the continent HOLAA and all their publications and associated platforms are definitely a fav. I was recently listening to an episode of The Spread by Kaz from Kenya featuring Magic Dyke which I really enjoyed, and I loved Nnenna Marcia’s (she’s also an Adventures contributor) West Africa Hot, an erotica collection. I also can’t forget about Queer Africa and The African Sexualities Reader. To me all these works are part of the same ecosystem, we just do the work differently.
Rama Salla Dieng
If you were to cite three lessons that you learned from curating Adventures, what would those be?
Nana Darkoa Sekyiamah
One, collaboration is everything (this is also something I’ve also learnt from working at AWID). If Adventures didn’t have all these guest contributors, I doubt that we will be as popular as we are. Two, telling your own story is important. The vast majority of stories I’ve written for Adventures are based on my own life and experiences, even the fictional stories. Writing is how I process my thoughts, and for me is also an act of healing. Three, just do it. I did have a slight hesitation before starting Adventures. I wondered whether I should write under my own name or not. I decided that it was politically important to me to do this publicly, as myself, and the backlash I feared has never come. On the contrary, Adventures has actually helped me get to greater heights in my personal and professional life.
Rama Salla Dieng
What are your plans for Adventures? Any future collaborative work?
Nana Darkoa Sekyiamah
We’re working on too many things. Malaka and I are currently working on an Adventures series with US-based filmmakers Nosa Garrick and Li Lu. Famia Nkansa and I have been working on an Adventures Live! series which we run via the Adventures Facebook page. Myself and an entire community of friends and activists put together the first Adventures Live! event, a one day festival on sex and sexualities, which took place on the 16th of December, 2019, in Ghana. We’re also hoping to start a podcast and finally get the book version of Adventures going.
Rama Salla Dieng
How do you reconcile your work with Adventures with your other activities including your writing?
Nana Darkoa Sekyiamah
It’s a question I get asked often and understandably so ����. To me everything I do is interconnected. I’m a feminist activist, so the work I do with Adventures is about heart work, which is also how I feel about the work I do with AWID. I’m also very disciplined. At the moment I wake up at 5am so I can write for an hour on my book which has been acquired by Dialogue Books, an imprint of Little Brown in the UK. And then I’ll walk my dog, or go to the gym, or go for a swimming lesson. Mondays to Thursdays I usually work from about 9am-7pm for AWID. I don’t work for AWID on Fridays so that’s also another day that revolves around writing. Sundays are for hanging out with my family. Everything gets planned in my calendar well in advance. My friends all know this about me.
Rama Salla Dieng
Nanjala Nyabola’s recent book explains that social media sometimes perpetuates existing power structures and dominant narratives when it amplifies the voices of a happy few, mostly not-ordinary citizens. You use social media a lot in your professional activities, especially your work with AWID. How do you make sure to engage with ordinary feminists and join their struggles offline?
Nana Darkoa Sekyiamah
I guess I question the idea of who an ordinary feminist is. To me, a feminist is an ordinary person who recognizes that we live in an unfair world, and works with others to create a more just world. My feminist struggle and engagement is both online and offline. The virtual world and the physical world are both real to me. As much as I can (although not as often as I’d like to), I commune with my feminist sisters in person. I used to convene Fab Fem, a space for feminist women in Ghana, but as I’ve become more and more busy that’s something I haven’t been able to continue doing. I try to make myself as available to my various communities as much as possible, so I’ve been a resource person/facilitator for collectives like the Drama Queens and the Young Feminist Collective in Ghana. I’ve hosted LBQ gatherings in my home, and when I can I support various causes financially.
With AWID, we’re a decentralized organized network, so we have staff in 16 countries all over the world. That’s an advantage in terms of keeping connected to local struggles. When we have staff meetings, which we rotate and host in different countries, we always make sure to connect with local activists and communities. Plus, every three to four years we host the AWID Forum, which brings together about 2000 feminist and social justice activists to learn from each others��� struggles and successes.
Rama Salla Dieng
What acts of radical self-care do you practice to keep going as the busy Director of Communications and Tactics of an international feminist organization?
Nana Darkoa Sekyiamah
I don’t think my self-care is very radical, but it���s simple and works for me. I do some form of exercise every day and I only do fun things that I enjoy like pop step classes, walking, and playing squash. In the middle of my working day, I’ll usually take a break to go and play with my puppy Kiki. If I need professional help to think through a personal issue, I’ll book a session with Frances Williams, a coach I’ve worked with when I’ve needed the extra support for several years. This year AWID also invested in coaching for its director team, so we can strengthen our collective leadership. That has also been super helpful. Lastly, I have a super supportive family and I’m especially close to my Mum. She’s super wise and pragmatic and if I’m ever upset about anything she’s able to shift my perspective by saying something like, “so what are you going to do about it.”
May 24, 2020
Whiteness in Southern Africa
Nigel Theron. Image via
Jeppestown Flickr CC.
This post is part of the series Whiteness in Southern Africa edited by Duncan Money and and Danelle van Zyl-Hermann.
The idea of whites in colonial Africa usually conjures up a particular set of images: pith helmets and khaki shorts, rural landscapes and vast estates, madams and masters parked on verandas alternately sipping gin and barking orders at African servants. The stereotype is of whites as a uniformly wealthy and homogenous group, sitting securely atop a binary power structure. In this view of the past, race and class are synonymous, the one a consequence of the other in the context of a race-based order.
But historians are now challenging this picture and the assumptions on which it rests. Our new book focusing on Southern Africa���s white workers and white poor, and their relationship with the white-ruled state, reveals colonial white societies as inherently fragile and anxious, wracked by divisions, conflicts and contradictions. While the presence of a white underclass is well-established in histories of early industrial South Africa, historians of white societies rarely deploy class as an analytical category beyond the advent of apartheid in 1948, which is understood to have elevated any remaining ���poor whites��� into the comfort of middle-class life.
In this book, a collection of upcoming and established scholars challenge such homogenizing understandings. Concentrating on the 1930s to 1990s, our work reveals the continued presence of white workers and poor whites throughout this period associated with white privilege and power. It also expands the focus beyond South Africa to include Angola, Mozambique, Zambia and Zimbabwe in a truly regional approach. This brings up all kinds of unexpected vignettes: white workers in South Africa comparing themselves to rightless Africans; African farmers writing letters for illiterate white peasants in rural Mozambique; white miners unperturbed by Zambian independence; or the Rhodesian state deporting white settlers on account of their ���undesirability.��� Across the region, we find broad similarities in white-ruled societies���most notably, that racial identity was never the sole marker of social status and power in the region. Due to their class position, white workers and the white poor���what we call ���nonhegemonic whites������were never firmly established in the dominant political, economic and social structures of the racial state.
Why investigate this? It is not simply a question of academic curiosity or a somewhat pedantic plea for historical accuracy. Rather, we argue that these studies illuminate the construction and maintenance of race, how this intersected with the formation of class, and how the resulting social, political and economic complexities animated the regimes in question throughout their existence. The category of ���white��� was never an automatic or natural one���it was diligently and carefully maintained.
Across the societies examined in our volume, white elites were consistently concerned that white workers and the white poor cast doubt on ostensibly innate racial superiority���the legitimizing basis for colonial and minority rule. Their poverty as well as their proximity to blacks���living alongside, performing the same kind of work, maintaining social relations with, or, perhaps more than anything, having sex with���provoked acute fears of racial degeneration and the disruption of the carefully constructed racial boundaries on which white rule depended. At the same time, white authorities were also concerned about lower-class whites��� ostensible propensity for hostility towards Africans. Especially later in the century, as local and international imperatives shifted, white elites increasingly sought to cloak continued white power in the veneer of nonracialism. Hence, overt racism came to be seen as uncivilized and the purview of poorer whites, who were blamed for racial tensions.
Thus these potentially disruptive or deviant whites were perpetually the objects of state discipline and rehabilitation���efforts to mold them into ���proper��� whites. Colonial states had vast resources at their disposal and used both welfare and punitive measures in a broad repertoire of interventionist racial disciplining. In apartheid South Africa, whites in the public service were subjected to often invasive and intimate forms of regulation and surveillance. Afrikaner elites clearly had little faith in their more humble brethren���s ability to provide the productive and ideological labor their project required of their own accord. In Southern Rhodesia, rehabilitation schemes aimed to turn recalcitrant white male youths into productive farmers, or lower-class girls into respectable women. Such efforts were routinely flouted. This is evident not only in archival evidence of whites absconding from under the nose of the racial state���s interventions, but in the very continuation of such efforts throughout the century.
The failure of state efforts to control poor and working-class whites demonstrates that non-hegemonic whites had their own ideas and pursued their own interests. This book shows that white indocility was much more widespread than existing literature recognizes, and that throughout the twentieth century, white elites regarded the lower-classes as threatening racial hierarchies. At the same time, the indocility of poor and working-class whites seldom amounted to actual transgression or sustained opposition to reigning racist practices, codes and behaviors, or the jettisoning of racial privilege. A focus on lower-class white agency therefore reveals race as functioning not in terms of clear dividing lines or borders, as the mythology held, but in terms of zones or spaces in which working-class realties produced room for maneuver and space for ambiguity.
The scholarship collected in this volume shows the extent to which race and class remained not only deeply entangled throughout the period of ostensibly monolithic white minority rule, but in fact was constitutive of white identities and animated state policy throughout the century. Today, Southern Africa is no longer ruled by whites. But since the 2008 economic crisis and the subsequent rise of right-wing populism, most visibly in the global north, workers and the poor are back in the spotlight. Class disrupted as much as race bound together in twentieth-century Southern Africa���today, this is still the case.
This is a condensed version of the Introduction of Rethinking White Societies in Southern Africa, 1930s-1990s (2020), published by Routledge, and edited by Money and Van Zyl-Hermann. The full introduction can be read for free here.
White mineworkers at Zambian Independence
Fragment of a Zambian print from Independence. Image credit Tommy Miles via Flickr CC.
This post is part of the series Whiteness in Southern Africa edited by Duncan Money and and Danelle van Zyl-Hermann.
Whites in twentieth-century Southern Africa are regarded as being among the most resolute defenders of colonial and white minority rule. Across the region, colonial governments fought vicious, protracted and unsuccessful conflicts against African nationalist movements, and the intransigent attitude of governments towards these movements was largely supported by whites. This support is often contrasted with the actions of the small number of whites who joined liberation movements.
Yet there was another unexpected and puzzling white reaction to African nationalism: indifference. Why did white mineworkers on the Zambian Copperbelt not seriously resist decolonization?
The center of Zambia���s economy was���and is���the copper industry. Until the mid-1970s, several thousand white workers were employed on the mines and in 1963, the year before independence, these mines employed some 7,800 whites, 17 percent of the total workforce. Some of these were managers or mining professionals like engineers���anyone in a position of authority was white. But most were employed doing the kind of jobs common to mining anywhere in the world: driving winding engines hauling men and material up the shafts, operating pumps, repairing machinery and driving locomotives.
These whites were among the highest paid workers in the world and, what���s more, avoided most of the hard manual work normally associated with mining, like drilling and blasting. Instead, this work was done by African mineworkers and almost all whites also supervised African workers as part of their job.
Such a privileged position, however, did not mean that they intended to stay on the Copperbelt. In some ways, these whites were the opposite of settlers. They were a highly mobile workforce accustomed to moving frequently between mining and industrial sites across and beyond the British Empire, in search of work or better pay. In 1963, almost half the white workforce had been on the mines less than three years.
End of empire in Zambia
In many ways, the Copperbelt contained all the ingredients for a bloody struggle against decolonization: an armed, racist white minority in a highly privileged position which suddenly, and unexpectedly, found itself at the northern edge of white-ruled Southern Africa, with the British Empire disintegrating around them. It might reasonably be expected that these mineworkers would have fought tooth and nail against an African nationalist movement about to upend white minority rule and take power.
It is difficult to exaggerate the speed of political developments in colonial Zambia in the late 1950s. The colony was then grouped with Malawi and Zimbabwe in the Central African Federation, a formation designed to bolster white settler control over the region. In 1959, settler politicians were pushing for Dominion status���which would have effectively made the Federation an independent state under white rule���while the main nationalist party, the United National Independence Party (UNIP), was illegal and its leader Kenneth Kaunda was in prison. No-one could have plausibly expected that, within five years, Zambia would be an independent nation, with UNIP as the governing party and Kaunda as president.
While there was much bluff and bluster, whites in Zambia seemed to come to terms with these changes remarkably quickly. When I started my research, I assumed that, with some diligent archival work, I would uncover details of plots by white settlers to thwart independence at the last minute, some kind of precursor to UDI. When I didn���t discover anything like this, I turned to the question of what the absence of concerted resistance to decolonization actually told us about white society on the Copperbelt.
Labor and strife at Mufulira Mine
The lack of resistance to decolonization was not because whites on the Copperbelt were generally a laid-back or easy-going bunch. Their affluence and privileged position rested on collective action, a willingness to engage in often bruising encounters with their white employers. Strikes in the 1940s and 1950s had won huge wage increases and a de facto color bar for well-paid skilled work, as the white mineworkers��� union imposed a closed shop on the mines: you had to be in the union to get a job, and the union only accepted white members. Shortly before Zambian independence there were a series of wildcat strikes, including one of the longest dispute���s in the region���s history at Mufulira Mine, then the world���s largest underground copper mine. Yet these disputes had little to do with the rapidly changing political situation.
Managers at Mufulira wanted to introduce scientific management techniques to get a better idea of how much work was being done and to adjust wage rates accordingly. In early 1963, a new form was issued to white underground workers requiring them to detail how long they spent on each job during their shift. Most refused point-blank to do this���many having experienced scientific management elsewhere in the world���and triggered a dispute that shut the mine for three months.
Filling in a form might seem like an absurdly trivial issue, especially given the magnitude of unfolding political events, but it was taken seriously as it threatened the root of the racialized privileges of white mineworkers: the workplace. Here lay the root of white mineworkers��� indifference. White mineworkers��� continued receipt of these benefits was dependent on their position in the workplace and not on the colonial state. High wages, comfortable housing, subsidized healthcare and leisure activities were all provided by the mining companies.
White mineworkers could, quite literally, afford to be unconcerned about the emergence of African nationalism, confident that looming political changes would not greatly change their lives, which it did not. Moreover, few of them intended to stay on the Copperbelt anyway, regardless of the political situation. If they didn���t like it, they could simply up and leave.
Indifferent attitudes to African nationalism were rooted in mobility and the workplace as the source of racialized privilege. It did not reflect a progressive stance, or because these white workers were not racist. Racism operated in a different way in this context. Many whites were indifferent towards Africans, and indifference can be callous or cruel. White mineworkers were not particularly interested in Africans, their lives, experiences or interests. They simply did not care, and generally thought that the wages and working conditions of the men who worked beside them every day were none of their business.
Creating colonial Portugal in Africa
Ilha do Ibo, Mo��ambique. Image credit Rosino via Flickr CC.
This post is part of the series Whiteness in Southern Africa edited by Duncan Money and and Danelle van Zyl-Hermann.
The aftermath of the Second World War witnessed a crescendo of anti-colonial sentiment across the world. This prompted European imperial powers in Africa to seek ways to reform colonial structures in such a manner as to legitimize continued imperial rule. To this end, Belgian, British, French, and Portuguese colonies mobilized and deployed knowledge, planning and public funding in unprecedented ways.
Portugal, which had a lengthy history of colonial occupation in Africa, took a particularly uncompromising stance in the 1950s and 1960s. As other empires disintegrated or introduced forms of power sharing, it sought to strengthen its imperial grip. A key element of its strategy was rhetorical���it sought to deny that the empire existed at all. In the early 1950s, the terms ���empire��� and ���colonies��� were replaced with ���Portuguese overseas��� and ���overseas provinces��� in Portuguese constitutional law. The imperial state now sought to project the idea of a multi-continental and multiracial country, rather than an empire, to justify Portuguese permanence in Africa. In concert with this rhetorical strategy, Portugal initiated a drive to encourage white settlement in Angola and Mozambique. Between 1940 and 1960 the European population of Angola rose from 44,000 to 170,000, while in Mozambique it rose from 27,000 to 97,000.
This policy on demographic colonization constituted a curious experiment which ultimately reveals the fractured nature of mid-century white societies in Portugal���s African colonies. Specifically, to counter the concentration of settlers in cities, Portugal targeted rural areas of its colonies for population with settlers from the metropole. State-sponsored rural settlements were established in Angola (Cela and Cunene) and Mozambique (Limpopo). These settlers, moreover, were mainly impoverished peasants with few prospects in the mother country. For them, colonial settlement presented an opportunity for socioeconomic improvement.
In official communications, these settlements���known as colonatos���were envisioned as archetypes of Portugal in Africa. With reference to Angola, for instance, a colonato was imagined as ���an entirely white district in black Africa, a miniature Portugal inside its largest province from which it will radiate colonizing energy.��� Such efforts went to extreme lengths. The colonato of Cela in Angola contained a village named Santa Comba, after the birthplace of Portugal���s dictator Salazar, complete with a replica of the village church.
State plans for white settlement
Such efforts marked a dramatic departure from previous colonial policy. State-directed white settlement schemes hardly existed before the mid-twentieth century and the white population of Portugal���s territories was small. Moreover, the colonial governments were extremely selective about the Europeans admitted for settlement. The ideal type of settler brought specialist knowledge in agriculture, commerce and industry to the colony, and had their own resources or a guarantee of employment. Unskilled workers and anyone performing manual tasks, who would compete with African workers in the labor market, were considered unsuitable and were discouraged (see also George Bishi���s piece in this series, on ���undesirable��� whites in Rhodesia).
This approach changed drastically with the beginning of the colonatos scheme in the early 1950s. At Cela, Africans were dispossessed and their villages bulldozed to make way for Portuguese settlers. These poor and often illiterate peasants had been deliberately selected from the poorest regions in Portugal to discourage them from returning to the metropole. Those with large families in particular were targeted, as these settlers were prohibited from employing African labor on the colonato and thus needed the labor power to cultivate the land themselves.
At the site of the Limpopo colonato in Mozambique, the extreme poverty of the Portuguese settlers made a deep impression on African residents and that memory persisted after independence. In an interview, Abner Ngwenga, recalled:
They did not even have shoes when they got here for the first time. The whites here gave them blankets, clothes and shoes when they disembarked at the port of Lourenco Marques [Maputo]. This was done at night so that the blacks did not see that those settlers were badly dressed and barefoot.
Despite their elevation in Portuguese propaganda, the colonatos were poorly planned. Sites were selected on the basis of impressionistic surveys, not detailed scientific studies, leading to problems with infrastructure and agricultural production. In Limpopo, the climate was congenial for human habitation, but was unsuited for the cultivation of either tropical or temperate crops. The first settlers at Cela encountered serious problems: while houses were provided, these had no furniture and no piped water. There was little infrastructure or technical assistance. In both Angola and Mozambique, colonatos were located at great distances from potential markets and had poor transport links, so peasants had difficulty selling their produce. Unsurprisingly, many newly transplanted peasants did not stay long on the land and soon absconded to the main colonial cities.
Hierarchies in white society
The majority of Europeans in the Portuguese colonies were in fact based in the cities, held higher educational and professional qualifications and worked in commerce, services and public administration. As the recollection of Ngwenga suggests, the arrival of peasants from Portugal caused anxiety in the upper echelons of white colonial society. Although the new settlers were unquestionably European, the bulk of white Portuguese in Angola and Mozambique did not identify with them and perceived their poverty and low levels of education as disrupting the colonial racial order. For instance, colonial officials were aghast at reports of illiterate white settlers in the Limpopo colonato relying on Africans to read and write letters on their behalf. In other instances, peasant settlers were said to steal African livestock, and engage in drinking and fighting. Whether in the form of congenial reliance on Africans, hostility towards Africans, or failing to adhere to the ostensibly respectable moral conduct of European society, these new white settlers were seen to threaten the established racial order. Peasants were seen as caricatures of an archaic Portugal.
Despite all the official rhetoric and propaganda of the rural colonatos as representative of Portugal in Africa, and of white peasants as the heart of this project, post-war schemes to boost the legitimacy of the colonial order in fact exposed the frailty of the late-imperial order. Rather than strengthening white power in the colonies, the arrival of peasant setters exposed colonial white society as deeply fractured along class lines. The entanglement of class and racial anxieties, moreover, exposed the shallowness of imperial efforts to obfuscate race and safeguard white minority rule by reformulating the Portuguese colonial project as multiracial and multicontinental.
This condensed version of Cl��udia Castelo���s chapter ���’Village Portugal’ in Africa: Discourses of differentiation and hierarchisation of settlers, 1950s���1974��� was compiled by Duncan Money and Danelle van Zyl-Hermann.
Uncovering ���undesirable whites��� in the colonial archive
Wankie Motel, Rhodesia, 1975. Image via cloud-cuckoo-land.com on Flickr CC.
This post is part of the series Whiteness in Southern Africa edited by Duncan Money and and Danelle van Zyl-Hermann.
Without sanitizing colonialism and settler colonialism, how can Africans (re)think and (re)write critical social and cultural histories about white societies and settler communities? And how can we do so using the colonial archive largely produced by the colonists who controlled the state apparatus? Colonists wielded the scepter of producing knowledge on and about Africans. In the course of their administration, white colonial bureaucrats, politicians, clergymen and their metropolitan counterparts all produced records, archives, manuscripts and state-sanctioned publications. With these power relations evident in the colonial archive, can we write different histories about settler societies���especially as Africans or Africanist scholars based in Africa or in the diaspora? Indeed, can we invert the gaze and use the colonial archive to tell us about the nature of settler societies?
My chapter ���Immigration and settlement of ���undesirable��� whites in Southern Rhodesia,��� in the book Rethinking White Societies in Southern Africa, 1930s���1990s, edited by Duncan Money and Danelle van Zyl-Hermann, speaks to these very issues. It contributes to new social and cultural histories of Rhodesian white society by showing that, while the colonial state was obsessed with producing knowledge on and about Africans, classifying them into different ���tribes,��� ethnic groups and so forth, it in fact did the same to some whites. It subjected the lives of those whites, whose behavior was deemed ���deviant��� from the (shifting) norms of white society, to exceptional levels of state surveillance, attempting to understand why they behaved in the manner they did and to discipline them into social conformity.
Race, class, and ethnicity in settler societies
In historical writing on settler societies, the dominant narrative is that race determined colonial privilege, power and security. Yet my work suggests that ideas about class, political ideology, culture and ethnicity also played a key role. In mid-century Southern Rhodesia (modern-day Zimbabwe), these were sources of tension within the settler community, and saw whites classified into categories of ���desirable��� and ���undesirable.��� The Rhodesian state routinely deported whites it deemed undesirable.
Various factors beyond race determined white undesirability. It is well known that, officially, the Rhodesian state sought white Britons as their desired immigrants to bolster the white minority state. Yet individuals in this category could become undesirable. For instance, after the British immigrant Charles Taylor led a strike by white railway workers in 1954, the government branded him a communist and dangerous demagogue of the Mussolini and Hitler type. Despite Taylor belonging to the officially preferred group, he was deported.
In addition to political attitudes, individuals��� socio-economic circumstances or ethnic background could also override race to render them undesirable. The Rhodesia settler community and the colonial state termed a number of post-war British immigrants as ���white trash��� and as ���cotton-wool,��� in reference to their class position. Worse seemed to be Portuguese, Greek and Italian immigrants, who threatened the ���British��� nature of Southern Rhodesia. Rhodesian whites regarded them as ���inferior��� because of their cultural extraction, alleged questionable moral conduct and unhygienic habits, and poor English language. In official documents, they were termed ���wops, dagos��� and ���scum of the earth.��� They were blamed for freely associating with Asian, Coloured and African women, living in seamy conditions and their indecent behavior was against rhetoric notions of white purity.
Files in the National Archives of Zimbabwe are filled with examples. In November 1954, Joao Salgado Ferreira entered Rhodesia and, after being dismissed by his employer, walked around the country accepting casual employment. He was subsequently joined by his wife���three months pregnant by Ferreira���s brother���and three children. Following an investigation, the state found the family living in squalor. Ferreira was deemed an embarrassment to the industrious and respectable self-image of whites, and deported as an undesirable immigrant shortly after. The transgression of accepted racial and sexual boundaries could have similar consequences. Portuguese migrant Joao Filipe Viegas was deported in 1956 for having an affair with a coloured woman. The same year, four Greek railway workers were deported for alleged homosexual practices. So the list continues.
Settler society projected itself as the custodian of ���civilization and modernity��� in Africa, a united white race justified in its subjugation of the indigenous population. The archives reveal that this homogeneity was clearly a fallacy, and this self-understanding was fragile at best. There were layers of the contradictions, tensions and divisions within the settler communities.
Colonial borders and politics of exclusion
The presence of undesirable whites in the colony provide insight into the limits of the power of the colonial state. Migration from metropolitan centers to colonies and the movement between and among settler societies meant constant movement over colonial borders, and colonial immigration officials could not always act as the gatekeepers they were supposed to be. In 1955, for instance, the Rhodesian Government declared Joaquim Antonio De Lemos a prohibited immigrant and he was deported. As if to mock Rhodesian immigration officials, De Lemos swiftly re-entered Rhodesia, and proceeded to run an informal Employment Bureau at Bulawayo undetected, making his money by charging exorbitant fees to Portuguese artisans he recruited. He was arrested again.
Clearly, race was not the only factor determining the fortunes of those living in colonial societies. For white settlers, ideological, class, ethnic, economic and social factors shaped the politics of inclusion and exclusion. Not all whites were linked with the rhetoric of white moral purity, respectability and other settler ���standards��� associated with colonial ���civilization.��� Those who failed to live up to the expected settler and white colonial self-imposed standards became undesirable. Depending with time and space, whiteness could mean nothing or could mean everything���and this could shift, depending on prevailing circumstances. However, while being white was sometimes not enough, it was certainly better than being black. Even whites excluded from or on the margins of respectable society retained some privilege and power in comparison to Africans of all classes.
These examples from the archive demonstrate that colonial record-keeping can be employed to uncover uncomfortable���and too often overlooked���historical truths about colonial-era white societies. Moreover, we can make connections between the settler colonial and post-colonial African communities. The system of excluding settlers considered less white has, to some extent, parallels in post-colonial African states and governments. Many African leaders, while paying lip service to ideas of national unity, rely on ethnicity, nepotism, exclusion of minority groups, and often treat migrants from other African countries and opposition political parties with utmost disdain. In conclusion, my work shows that as Africans or Africanist scholars, we can use the colonial archive to write critically about the nature of settler societies.
Working-class whiteness vs. the apartheid state
The segregated stands of a sports arena in Bloemfontein, South Africa, 1969. Image credit H Vassal for UN Photo via Flickr CC.
This post is part of the series Whiteness in Southern Africa edited by Duncan Money and and Danelle van Zyl-Hermann.
The 1970s are widely recognized as an important turning point for apartheid South Africa. The decade saw post-war economic growth grind to a halt, resulting in spiking living costs and unemployment. As this hit the disenfranchised African population hardest, enduring discontent about race-based exploitation and subjugation erupted in large-scale industrial action and popular revolt. In the midst of economic crisis, the black population rose to demand rights and political freedoms.
As with European colonial powers earlier in the century (see for instance Cl��udia Castelo���s piece in this series), these developments provoked a crucial shift in the white regime���s rhetoric and strategies of dominance. Even as the National Party government sharpened its repressive tactics���pumping money into defense and counterinsurgency���the realization dawned that stability and economic growth could not be restored through repression alone. Reform was needed.
Labor was the obvious starting point for forestalling a full-blown crisis. In July 1977, a commission of inquiry into labor legislation was appointed to investigate and make recommendations regarding all existing labor legislation in South Africa. On Labor Day 1979, the Wiehahn Commission���known after its chairman���presented its report to Parliament. In a historic move, it recommended the abolition of race-based job reservation and the legal recognition of African trade unions. This amounted to the dismantling of the apartheid labor dispensation.
Yet local labor observers, and scholars subsequently, were quick to point out that the reforms presented thinly-veiled efforts to safeguard continued white power. The commission recommended strict controls on African unions, and the state envisioned granting labor rights only to African workers in the cities while continuing to exclude the bulk of the labor force seen as migrant workers from the homelands. It was hoped that redefining the status of urban Africans by granting them industrial citizenship would secure their allegiance to the state and divide the black population.
This reading of late-apartheid politics assumes that all of white society stood to benefit from these reforms: for white elites, it would imbue the state with legitimacy and secure continued political dominance; for white capital, it promised the return of labor stability. Ordinary white citizens do not feature in these accounts���they are assumed to have been securely middle class, supportive of state policy, and oblivious to shop-floor unrest and black political demands.
Such interpretations overlook the experiences and interests of South Africa���s white working class���those whites uncomfortably far removed from elite white policymakers and uncomfortably close to the politicized black workforce. Although they formed a minority of the industrial labor force vis-��-vis African labor, these whites represented a crucial and historically powerful part of the workforce: they held the majority of supervisory and skilled jobs, as well as a significant proportion of semi-skilled positions, and effectively controlled the organized labor movement. In the racial state, they were also the only workers with political rights.
By the 1970s, some 400,000 white workers���29 percent of South Africa���s economically active white population of 1.4 million���were organized in trade unions. The South African Confederation of Labour (SACLA) was the largest white-only labor federation, representing some 200,000 white workers. It represented racially exclusive industrial unions in older industries, such as mining, steelworks and the railways, as well as construction and state employment. These workers were historically most invested in South Africa���s racial order. Their inclusion in the white body politic as citizens secured them privileged employment opportunities, bargaining power and wages.
For SACLA members, labor reform had dramatic implications. In testimony to the commission, SACLA and its affiliated unions drew a distinction between white workers, as citizens entitled to state protection and privilege in their own country, and Africans as gasarbeiders���temporarily employed guest workers or foreign labor without any claim to rights or residence. This did not amount to discrimination, SACLA���s affiliates argued, but reflected the principles of separate development as set out by the government. If Africans would be granted labor rights, ���we will become gasarbeiders in our own country,��� the president of the Mineworkers Union warned. Similarly, other white trade unionists insisted that race-based job reservation was a matter of the principle of the ���self-preservation of the white worker in his own country,��� protecting whites from replacement by cheaper labor. Reforms, they warned, would plunge many white workers into poverty.
These arguments demonstrate the entanglement of race and class in white working-class subjectivities. Labor reforms raised fears of impoverishment, rightlessness and exploitation���that is, the relegation to social positions associated with blackness. Such class fears were expressed in terms of race and citizenship. Indeed, industrial citizenship for Africans called the established convergence between race and rights into question: if blacks could be given rights, whites could have them taken away. For white workers, the uncoupling of race from rights implied their potential exclusion from racial citizenship in a context in which other classes of whites would retain their privileges in the racial state.
Moreover, white working-class testimonies highlighted the contradiction inherent in attempts at labor reforms, namely that African workers could be granted industrial rights without political citizenship. The SACLA workers were the only group to impress upon the commission the potential political ramifications of this strategy: granting Africans labor rights would offer avenues for demanding and seizing full citizenship���precisely the strategy that the workers��� movement with COSATU would take in the 1980s. Hence Attie Nieuwoudt, SACLA���s president and member of the Wiehahn Commission, implored his fellow commissioners to consider ���where are we going with this fatherland of ours?��� But white politicians paid no heed. Following the Wiehahn report, the NP scrapped job reservation and legalized African unions. The rest is history.
The testimony of SACLA workers before the Wiehahn Commission shows that this section of white society clearly did not support labor reform as a means to secure continued white dominance, but regarded it as an onslaught on white workers��� rights as citizens and a threat to the racial state itself.
Indeed, if reform constituted a redefinition of the status of African workers, it follows that this would also entail the redefinition of the status of white workers, whose very position relied on the exclusion of Africans from the privileges of industrial citizenship, and whose identity was intimately bound up with the rightlessness of blacks. Labor reform marked the withdrawal of state support for working-class whiteness. As a scheme to ensure continued white dominance, it did not include white workers.
These findings necessitate a rethinking of interpretation of late apartheid politics of inclusion and exclusion. Contrary to existing understandings, it reveals white workers��� precarious position in the racial state and their often hostile relationship with white elites. Contestations around reform and citizenship in the late apartheid period was not just between the white state and African masses. Rather, white workers��� experiences and interests show that class position colored racial standing and attenuated citizenship in the racial state, even at the height of apartheid.
May 22, 2020
The cover up
The Genocide Memorial in Kigali, Rwanda. Image credit Dylan Walters via Flickr CC.
Starting in April 1994, Felicien Kabuga, ethnic Hutu militias waged a 100-day killing spree against Rwanda’s Tutsis and moderate Hutus in what became known as the Rwandan Genocide. By the end, more than 800,000 people were murdered. One of the key figures of that genocide was Kabuga, accused of financing the genocidaires and importing large amounts of machetes. He was also a co-owner of Radio Television Milles Collines, from where anti-Tutsi messages were
broadcast. On May 16, he was arrested after 26 years in hiding. His last address was in a suburb of Paris. It is not widely known that Kabuga spent a few years of his time on the run in Kenya, living under the protection of senior government officials. John Allan Namu, a Kenyan investigative journalist, reflects on trying to track him in Kenya and on his victims in both Rwanda and Kenya.
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.
May 16th, 2020 1:43 pm
News of the arrest in Paris, France of Felicien Kabuga, the man long accused of funding the genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda 26 years ago, has now reached a one-bedroom house in Pangani estate, Nakuru, Kenya. Josephat Gichuki, the tenant in this threadbare home, calls me to ask if I have heard the news. We talk now and again, our conversations mostly prompted by the slightest of wisps of news about Rwanda���s octogenarian outlaw. Today I can hear excitement in his voice. I ask to interview him on his thoughts and call back eight minutes later.
���I am very, very happy. This is important to me because there is no office I have not gone to seeking justice,��� he says. Josephat has cause to be happy. His younger brother, Kenyan journalist William Munuhe was murdered hours before he was set to lead Kenyan and US authorities to Felicien, Kabuga on January 16th 2003. Kenyan Police first claimed that he had killed himself by lighting a charcoal burner and inhaling carbon monoxide fumes. Yet the evidence found in his Karen home told a completely different story.
Josephat has been searching for the truth for the last 17 years. Just like that, he very possibly could get the closure he has sought for close to two decades. Pushing for the Kenyan government to provide him with the answers his family needed hasn���t been good for the Gichukis. His father passed away in 2018. Gichuki says that his father was ���distraught��� that he ���struggled so hard to raise a child only to see him killed��� and no one to answer for it. ���Heartbreak killed my father,��� he says. Almost as if his mouth was working on muscle memory, he fires off nearly every attempt he has made to get a response from the government, as well as every missed opportunity.
���[Former President] Kibaki was a guest of the Rwanda government in 2004. We expected him to say something. He didn���t. In 2014 at the 20th commemoration of the genocide, [President] Uhuru was a guest of the Rwanda government. We expected him to say something. He didn���t.���
Neither one of us would be surprised by this. The Kenyan government has long denied any knowledge about the whereabouts of Felicien Kabuga and the crimes that have been linked to him. The day of his capture doesn���t seem to inspire any volunteering of information either. ���He isn���t our criminal,” I can almost hear some local public relations spin doctor say. Would Kabuga���s arrest matter to a population whose median age is 19 anyway? It should, in the way that all life-altering events do matter.
May 16th, 1994
A situation report issued daily by the United Nations Mission in Rwanda (UNAMIR) rattles off statistics on food, water and fuel rations, a rundown of the fighting between the RPF (Rwandese Patriotic Front) and the RGF (Rwandese Government Forces) on this day. Fighting between current President Paul Kagame���s forces (RPF) and government troops was focused in the north of the country and in Kigali, the small nation���s capital. Journalists had visited various refugee camps to look into distribution of food rations. A meeting brokered to discuss a ceasefire took place at the Hotel Diplomat. The RPF didn���t send any representatives. It makes for a mundane reading of the facts about one of the worst tragedies to have ever taken place on the face of the earth. Yet every detail is important. This one line sticks out:
���HA (Humanitarian activities) team held a meeting with the OPS (operations) officer of the Gendarmerie, GSO II of the RGF and representative of the Interahamwe and the militia, concerning the evacuation of orphans from Giimba and Gitega. Numerous problems were posed regarding the evacuation of orphans.���
This statement meant two things: first, that any humanitarian aid organization working in Rwanda at the time had to work with the approval of the Rwanda government. That is normal. Secondly, a representative of the Interahamwe, a brutal, bloodthirsty militia responsible for the murder of hundreds of thousands of Tutsis and moderate Hutus was also at the table. That should strike out any doubts of how central it was as a player in the civil war.
26 years later, in the middle of the second month of Rwanda���s Kwibuka commemorations, it also spotlights how important the arrest of the Interahamwe���s chief benefactor Felicien Kabuga is bringing the arc of history that much closer to the endgame; bending it towards justice. Kabuga bought hundreds of thousands of machetes that were given to these men. He owned media houses that trumpeted the ���cut down the tall trees��� narratives that captured a misled public���s imagination that their brothers and sisters were actually vermin. He was at the heart of the plans to eliminate more than 20 per cent of Rwanda���s population. He was a rich man whose money bought him 26 years of freedom ��� in Kenya, the Democratic Republic of Congo and France.
Few people have walked the earth freely after committing the crimes that he is accused of. Many of the main actors in the holocaust were arrested, tried and hung. Dictators responsible for bringing untold suffering to their citizens have risen and fallen in the time since Felicien Kabuga escaped imminent capture (and possibly a similar fate) by the RPF in the early days of June 1994, starting a 26-year life on the run that ended on May 16th 2020.
Kabuga traveled to Switzerland first, where he was denied entry, before coming to Kenya. Here, he was received with open arms. He and his family bought properties in Kilimani, owned fancy cars and lived quiet lives between 1994 and 1997. His children went to school here. He registered his businesses here and was well on the way to gaining a foothold in the Kenya-Rwanda logistics industry when he was arrested and jailed at the Kilimani Police Station. He was released at the behest of very senior Kenyans including a current Member of Parliament. He would go underground, and official accounts denying his presence in Kenya would begin.
May 16th, 2012
My wife and our two children had just moved into what would be our home for the next one month. I had been investigating Felicien Kabuga���s whereabouts and my sources and I had begun receiving threats. We were in the process of getting passports for our two young children just in case we would need to leave the country. We had already pulled them out of school and my wife had to take leave from work. Meanwhile, I needed to keep on the track of the story. I had turned in the first draft and it was decided that I would need to travel to Rwanda to deepen it.
I had picked up the thread of Kabuga���s sojourn in Kenya in December of 2011. I would read about the man whose money and beliefs sowed bitterness in the hearts of his countrymen through his radio station, Radio T��l��vision Libre des Mille Collines in the years before the start of the genocide. I visited Kigali Prison to speak to a woman who worked for Kabuga at RTLM as Rwanda commemorated 18 years since Kabuga and senior Rwandan government officials plotted a genocide.
I pored over documents linking Kenyan military officers to a cabal of Kabuga���s protectors in Kenya. I interviewed former senior government officials in confidence about the man���s whereabouts. I read books about the genocide, spoke to foreign correspondents and senior Kenyan journalists who had covered the genocide. I spoke to genocide survivors, broke bread with young Kenyans working in Rwanda and watched in horror news of a helicopter crash that would kill, among others, Kenya���s internal security minister, George Saitoti. I had planned to interview Saitoti when I got back to Kenya on the subject of Kabuga. I chased leads that led nowhere, and received some that opened up even more information about what Kabuga was up to while in Kenya.
I also interviewed the former Prosecutor General of Rwanda, Martin Ngoga, about Kabuga���s whereabouts. Earlier in the year I had received a photograph of a man who my sources claimed was Kabuga. I showed it to Ngoga, as well as to the lady I interviewed in Kigali Prison, and to a doctor who it was claimed had treated Kabuga in Nakuru, among other people. With the exception of the doctor (who passed away weeks after my documentary aired), everyone else was agreed on the identity of the man in the photo. It was the photo that would cast doubt on a story I had toiled so long to tell.
The man in this photo was produced at a press conference addressed by former Kenya Police Spokesman Eric Kiraithe. Daniel Ngera, a businessman from Isiolo, had been forced into the frame by what Kiraithe called shoddy journalism on my part. I couldn���t respond because I wasn���t there to do so. My wife, our children and I had left the country the Friday before the story ran, and were just settling into life on the run. My heart sank and my stomach turned. I could never have imagined that an error on my part would serve as a distraction from the existing facts about one of Rwanda���s most dangerous men.
The month that followed was one of the darkest in my life. I spent it fighting anxiety attacks. Would I have a job to come back to? My wife had already lost her job because she couldn���t explain in detail why she had to be away from work for three months. All through this, I was trying to reassure my wife that everything would be alright. To be honest, she did most of the reassuring.
Fortunately, I had a boss���Linus Kaikai���who stood by me, and (I hope) believed in the integrity of my intentions and the rigor I had applied to the story. I will always regret having exposed Mr Ngera, a man I had never met, to that kind of ridicule���even if I hadn���t set out to do so, much less plot to pass him off as a genocidaire. Yet for all the efforts that my team and I made, or the shame that Mr Ngera was exposed to or the anxious days and weeks that followed, this was the least important part of the story of Kabuga���s life as a fugitive.
Kabuga���s freedom, enabled by people in different countries across the world, was a slap in the face of every Rwandese citizen; those who lost lives during the genocide, those who have endured life without loved ones, even those who were brought to justice years before he will see the inside of a courtroom. The soil that turned red and the rivers in which bodies floated, the churches that were turned into slaughterhouses, all of the history that heaves with the weight of this dark chapter deserves a twist like this one. The hilltops from where the cries of the innocent rang out 26 years ago should hear news of Kabuga���s capture loudly beamed.
Back to May 16th, 2020
My day draws to a close with a call from my mother. She called to say she���d seen the news about Kabuga���s arrest, and that she was proud of me for playing my part in bringing to justice an evil man. ���You may not have succeeded, but you did your best���and I feel vindicated on your behalf.��� Those words wrung out a bitterness I���ve carried for eight years because of how my attempt to find a bad man ended. If only for tonight, I feel a lightness I haven���t felt whenever I have thought about Kabuga. Earlier, Josephat had ended our call with the same note of hope that he had had for answers 17 years ago. Maybe the request for a public inquest into his brother���s murder will be heeded now that the chief suspect in that murder is behind bars. Maybe not. All he and his family have wanted is justice. Josephat was 33 years old when his younger brother William was murdered because some people in Kenya chose to stand on the side of a butcher than with the millions for whom Kabuga���s crimes can never be fully atoned. His hope may have wavered many a time, but on this day, May 16th 2020, his ageing eyes opened to see the day when an ageing criminal���s luck ran out. The end of Felicien Kabuga���s freedom has freed Josephat and I to nurse the hope that justice does not have a sell-by-date. I know we must nurse this flame with care and not shout too loudly, lest we extinguish it before we have fought the many other battles ahead of us. Hope, it seems, may actually spring eternal.
Who���d have thought it?
A brief history of anti-black violence in China
Wuhan, China. Image credit Tauno T��hk via Flickr CC.
��� The Nanjing Branch of the General Union of African Students in China, June 1986[W]hat kind of security do we have, if crimes are committed in the eyes of the people responsible for our security and yet nothing is done about it.
The recent wave of evictions and forced detentions of Africans living in China, especially in the southern city of Guangzhou, has shocked most people, especially Africans. While the reporting and analysis of the ongoing situation have been quite widespread, and have even forced a response from the Chinese government, most observers have generally not connected this episode to previous, and even uglier, episodes of anti-black African action in China. In fact, there is a long history of these kinds of violence and discrimination against Africans in China, which are linked to how Africans are viewed there. During the 2014 Ebola outbreak in three West African countries, Africans in China were subjected to forced quarantine episodes too, but they did not capture the popular imagination the way similar episodes of mistreatment do now.
Chinese perceptions of Africans draw from two separate threads: that Africans are dangerous, disease-carrying individuals, and also a tolerated minority subject to the whims of state violence.
It is worth revisiting this long history.
Scholarly tensions
African students have been coming to China since 1960, and violent tensions between those students and the Chinese have been occurring since 1962, when a Zanzibari was beaten by hotel attendants. Still, it would not be until 1979 in the Shanghai Textile Engineering Institute when a pattern of anti-African violence was established by Chinese students, which “culminated in the [Nanjing] 1988-89 racial turmoil.” The Shanghai violence began on July 3, when Chinese students complained about the African students’ loud music and confronted them. A brawl ensued, and eventually a mob of Chinese students attacked the African students with makeshift weapons, following rumors Africans had raped Chinese women. The police response was insufficient to protect the Africans. According to scholar Barry Sautman, “Sixteen foreign students were hospitalized, but as many as 50 foreigners and 24 Chinese may have been injured.” A similar clash took place in Tianjin in 1986, this time over the mostly male African students’ relations with Chinese women. They were also reproached for playing loud music. The African students, after being detained by the police, needed protection from Chinese student groups raiding the foreign students��� dormitories. It should be noted that African diplomats had no success in trying to work with the Chinese authorities to better protect their citizens in China; some ambassadors suggested their governments send fewer students to China.
Nanjing universities in particular seemed to have problems dealing with African students, and their branch of the African Students Union sent a letter to the authorities protesting their treatment a year before the 1979 Shanghai violence, with no apparent change in policy. In 1980, according to Michael J. Sullivan and Philip Snow, Chinese students put up posters denouncing their government for welcoming African visitors.
The incident
There were multiple racially motivated attacks against African students between 1985 and 1986, and the Chinese police would arrive but not protect the students. In 1988, officials in Hehai University built a wall around the foreign students hall, ostensibly to protect against theft, but actually to ensure that African students did not bring Chinese women to their rooms. When the African students knocked down the wall, the university officials informed them that funds from their stipend would be docked in order to pay for the damages, and the students staged demonstrations. It was during this tumult that the university decided on December 24, the day of the Christmas Eve dance, that all foreign students must register their guests at the university gate. Two African students, from Benin and Liberia, wanted to bring two Chinese girls with them to the dance, and went to the main gate at Hehai. After that, what actually happened is bitterly disputed, as illustrated by two passages in Michael Sullivan���s article:
[T]he entrance guard asked the two girls to register, the two African students and refused to let them do so. At that point, several other African students came over and started a quarrel with the entrance guard. In the ensuing brawl, eleven staff members were injured, one of them seriously, including a university vice-president who had one of his ribs broken when he tried to persuade the combatants to stop fighting.
The African students ��� claim that the security guard permitted them and their guests to enter the campus after he saw the women’s Hong Kong passports. When the Benin student later returned to the front gate to wait for another Chinese friend, a group of heckling Chinese students attacked him, chanting ���Black Devil, you must respect the laws of China!��� and ���What do you want, Black Devil?��� The African students then ran to the foreign students’ hall to inform their friends of this attack after which several African students ���began to arm themselves with wooden sticks, empty Jinling beer bottles and stones.���
Official accounts stress that the African students were difficult to manage. African student accounts stress the racist provocation of the Chinese students. Regardless of whose ���fault��� it was (I personally believe the African students’ interpretation of events), there was a fundamental hardening of Chinese student attitudes after the incident. Within hours, a rumor of a Chinese woman being kidnapped by the African students mobilized 300 Chinese students to lay siege against the African students��� dormitories, and both group of students fought until 4 a.m. on December 25.
Black devils
��� from ���The 1988���89 Nanjing Anti-African Protests: Racial Nationalism or National Racism?��� by Michael SullivanBlack devils! Kill the black devils!
On December 25, Christmas Day, another group of 300 Chinese students attacked the foreign students’ hall because they believed a rumor that a Chinese man had been killed by an African student the night before, but the authorities had failed to arrest him. Shouting that they wanted to “kill the black devils,” they began another melee with the African students, which lasted for over two hours until it was broken up by the police. The General Union of African Students in China (GUASC) requested from the university a police escort to the train station so they could go to Beijing to contact their respective embassies, which was swiftly refused. The African students, after suffering multiple attacks from mobs and being offered minimal protection by the university administrators, decided to go to the rail station on foot. To the Chinese students, it looked like they were fleeing after one of their own had murdered a Chinese man and that the government was letting them go free.
In the evening, 600 students from Hehai University went off to gather support for their cause. They marched to Nanjing University, but as Sullivan recounts, “only a handful of students… responded. The vast majority had been bribed with five RMB and a special meal by the school authorities not to participate.” Though Nanjing University did not offer much in the way of student support, other universities had students march in unison with the Hehai contingent, where they eventually made their way to the Jinling Hotel, the largest hotel in Nanjing and where the protesters believed the local officials were hiding the African students. Those African students, in the meantime, made their way to the Nanjing rail station but had no tickets to board any trains, and the security bureau would not allow them to leave because they needed to get to the bottom of what happened during the Christmas Eve fight. The bureau stationed forces to both prevent the African students from leaving and the Chinese students from attacking the African students.
On December 26, as the Chinese students were returning to their universities, a group of 200 went to Nanjing University again to try and muster more support for their cause. A group of white foreigners engaged with the protesters, and when asked why they wanted to kill the African students, a Chinese protester explained that they wanted justice for the Africans’ supposed killing of one of his classmates, and that he had no quarrel with white foreigners. Undercover policemen grabbed that student and a few others and hauled them away. Student demonstrators went to the Nanjing Provincial Government Building complex and demanded that the legal system be changed so as not to privilege foreigners, and that the murderers be arrested. The Chinese police dispersed the crowd after an hour. More dark-skinned foreigners went to the Nanjing rail station as they came under attack by racist Chinese mobs, and several non-dark-skinned foreign students from the US, Japan and Europe also joined in solidarity. This group of 140 foreign students was eventually discovered by the Chinese student demonstrators, and they gathered 3,000 supporters to insure that ���justice��� was meted to the murderers. In the end, the situation was resolved when armed guards forced the African students onto buses and transported them to a military guest house in Yizheng, roughly an hour outside of Nanjing. This protected the African students, removed their presence from the student demonstrators, and allowed the police to hold the instigators of the Christmas Eve incident, whoever it might be.
Beginning on December 27, the police took steps to quash any further demonstrations in Nanjing, and, perhaps most importantly, had a spokesperson at the Jiangsu Ministry of Education inform that public that nobody had died during the Christmas Eve incident. While there were limited pockets of further demonstrations, they had all ended by December 30 in Nanjing. PRC authorities also moved quickly to make sure stories about the incident did not leak to the US or European press, as non-African students came under increased surveillance and the African students were indirectly told that they would face expulsion if they communicated their experiences to foreign reporters.
Also, on December 27, Sullivan writes:
A diplomatic delegation representing the African nations of Zambia, Ghana, Congo, Benin, Burundi, Cameroon, Senegal, Equatorial Guinea and Niger were allowed to travel to Yizheng to meet the African students. The diplomats were not successful in winning the release of their students, reflecting the African nations’ lack of influence with the Chinese government.
In contrast, the American students that were brought to Yizheng were immediately returned to Nanjing after the US consulate threatened Chinese authorities. While in Yizheng, on December 31 the police forcefully held six African students they believed to be responsible for the Christmas Eve incident, and the Hehai students were taken to a military base while the others were sent back to Nanjing. The remaining Hehai students returned to their university on January 5, though not after new regulations were created to ensure that they could not have Chinese girlfriends sleep with them in the university. Of the six detained students, three were released, and three were expelled.
Historical memory
This marks the end of the incident proper, though there were still flare ups in other cities, including mob attacks on African students in Wuhan���the same Wuhan where African students faced difficult choices some 30 years later. Kaiser Kuo had been in Beijing during that winter and had heard about the protests, and he graciously took to the time to share his recollections in a personal email correspondence, from Washington DC, on December 20th, 2012:
I was actually in Beijing in the winter of 1988-1989, not in Nanjing, but there were some anti-African protests that spread to Beijing as well, and there was (back in those days, without the Internet or any more reliable means of transmission) all sorts of confusion as to where the actual events took place to spark anti-African demonstrations ���
��� We kept hearing stories, filtered of course through a very unsympathetic international student crowd, that they started simply because some African students in Nanjing (other versions said Hangzhou, and sometimes these stories were repeated with Beijing as the setting) had taken some Chinese girls to a dance and weren’t allowed in, or had trouble with the security or with male Chinese students at the door. These stories escalated into tales about fistfights, about sexual assaults, even about a woman who was supposed to have been (in the exact words I was told) “fucked to death” by African men whose penises were too large for her, so she bled out. I was very skeptical, and was horrified when there were actual marches in Beijing protesting against African students.
Incidentally, there appeared to be a connection between the Nanjing Anti-African Protests and Tiananmen in 1989, as it fused nationalism, racism, gender and youth movement into a powerful force. This confluence is further explored in the important scholarship on Chinese conceptions of race, though Sautman and Sullivan’s articles provide excellent backgrounds on the genesis of the Nanjing protests as they related to Chinese racism, nationalism, and perhaps most importantly, the protection of Chinese women. To wit, as noted in Sautman, a 25-year-old Chinese man quoted by John Pomfret in January 1989 said:
When I look at their black faces, I feel uncomfortable. When I see them with our women, my heart boils.
Then and now
Note that one of the most telling aspects of this incident is that African countries could not pressure the Chinese government to release their students from Yizheng, while the US could. Considering that there were only two students from two countries, Benin and Liberia, who were actually involved in the Christmas Eve gate incident, at minimum the Chinese government could have figured out which countries��� citizens were not involved and released them, but that did not happen.
One might argue that African governments exerted similarly weak pressure regarding the crisis in Guangzhou. However, African governments exerted strong public and private pressure on behalf of their citizens in response to the incident, and that did generate statements from various organs of official China. Did this pressure have a material effect of Africans on the ground? That is a more difficult question, and answering it would require an entirely new investigation, but getting official China to make any statement is an achievement. Moreover, African governments indicate that these sort of repeated bouts of discrimination against Africans may no longer be acceptable. As Deputy Chairperson of the African Union Commission, HE Mr. Kwesi Quartey said earlier this month: ���Africa values its relationship with China but not at any price. Further act of brutality meted out to Africans will not be countenanced by the African Union and indeed all Africans.���
In conclusion, the Nanjing Anti-African Protests were a defining moment of Sino-African relations because they revealed how people on the ground interacted, rather than what leaders expressed to each other in meetings and in documents. To be clear, Chinese people are not uniquely or irredeemably racist. Americans have their own history of rioting against black students, for example. We must collectively ensure that these narratives are part of the current discourse. To that end, part of maintaining these stories is connecting them to the present when necessary. Africans suffer because of the color of their skin, because of false rumors, because of short-sighted Chinese officials, because of a prickly national government. These underlying issues have not significantly improved in the intervening decades.
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