Sean Jacobs's Blog, page 19
February 2, 2025
Elon Musk and the hypocrisy of the West
Paris, France, November 2024. Image credit Hadrian via Shutterstock. When Elon Musk marked Donald Trump���s inauguration with what seemed very much like a Nazi salute and was defended by a lobby that claimed to fight anti-Jewish racism, he and his defenders confirmed the death of two illusions. The first illusion is the belief that Zionism, the ideology that prompted the Israeli state���s genocide in Gaza, is about protecting Jews from racists.
The organization that rushed to Musk���s defense is the Anti-Defamation League, which was founded to fight racism against Jews but has become a strident enforcer for the Israeli state. It claimed that he had simply made ���an awkward gesture in a moment of enthusiasm.���
No one can, of course, prove that Musk meant to give a Nazi salute. But US Nazis seemed to recognize the gesture immediately, and it was close enough to one to convince many people that this was what he was doing. Organizations that fight anti-Jewish racism do not usually give the benefit of the doubt to gestures that appear to be Nazi salutes. Nor was it outlandish to see it as a Nazi salute, given the views he has expressed of late.
Not only is Musk loudly cheering the German AfD, which is teeming with Nazi sympathizers, and endorsing the British Muslim-baiter Tommy Robinson, whose racism is so extreme Nigel Farage���s hard-right Reform Party will not have anything to do with him, but Musk has also endorsed the racist claim that Jews encourage people outside the West to immigrate to white-run countries in order to supplant whites.��
So, an organization that is meant to be fighting prejudice against Jews has no problem with a man who echoes anti-Jewish racism. The reason is not obscure: Like just about all white supremacists today, he is a firm supporter of the Israeli state.
The ADL���s response may seem bizarre, but it is not new. Nor is it an outlier���the Israeli state and its allies have been cozying up to right-wing white supremacists who make excuses for Nazism for years. One way in which the state cements the relationship is to invite them to Yad Vashem, the official Israeli memorial to the victims of the Nazi genocide. They spend a while there very publicly pretending to be horrified. Musk has partly maintained the tradition: After agreeing that Jews were white-anting the white race, he went off to the Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland, where he expressed the required dismay.��
Why do a state and an ideology which claim to protect Jews, and white supremacists with a soft spot for Nazism, find each other so appealing? Because Zionism and the state it created have never been about protecting Jews���their purpose is to make Jews white and Western.
The Jews who founded the ideology and the state were all European. They were reacting to a centuries-old reality: Jews were in Europe but not were not European in the eyes of its elites. As my book Good Jew, Bad Jew shows, they desperately wanted to be European. Since the nation-state was then all the rage in Europe, they believed that the best way to become European was to establish a state.
This worked���but not because Europe���s elites believed that founding a state made Jews better at being white. The attraction of the state they founded was that it was outside Europe, and so an outpost of Europeanness in the Orient: West Germany���s first chancellor, Konrad Adenauer, described the Israeli state as the ���fortress of the West.���
As bigotry directed at Muslims became a more pronounced feature of European prejudice, the state became even more appealing to white supremacists, because most of the people of the Orient it has dispossessed and is dominating are Muslim. It is, therefore, on the front line of white supremacy���s war on everyone else.��
This explains the role that anti-Semitism now plays in Europe and North America (whose elite is of Europe even if it has not lived there for centuries). Anti-Semitism used to mean anti-Jewish racism. Today, it means hostility to or criticism of the power of the West. Because ���anti-Semitic��� now means ���not Western enough,��� Jews are anti-Semites if they believe Palestinians are people entitled to safety and rights. Racists who believe the Jews are plotting to destroy the white race or who say the Nazis are really not as bad as we are told are not anti-Semites, because they endorse the Israeli state, their role model for white supremacy.
Musk has declared sarcastically that he is accused of being both a Zionist and a Nazi as if it was impossible to be both. But Nazis���or at least the politicians and parties who endorse their racism���are today the most enthusiastic Zionists in the world. Whatever they think of Jews, a militarized ethnic state that beats up on Muslims ticks all their boxes.
The second illusion whose death Musk and Trump are burying is the brand of democracy that has reigned since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.
No longer fixated on defeating communism, Western elites set about remaking the world���and their own countries���in their image. They did this by avidly promoting a view of what democracy is and how it should function, which was virtually unchallenged for two decades but is now collapsing.
It has two features. The first feature is Western cultural arrogance, which assumes that the form of democracy practiced in the West is the only authentic brand on offer. To be ���really��� democratic is, therefore, to be Western.
Western academics invented an entire cottage industry that tracked ���democratic consolidation��� across the globe. Stripped of its academic finery, its task was to figure out whether new democracies outside the West were becoming Western. Governments and donor agencies quickly joined the quest and baked it into their strategies.
The second feature insists���often as much in what it does not say as what it does���that democracy is a system in which everyone can vote and speak and associate as long as no one challenges the elites who hold power in the economy and society.��
Democracy, it was assumed, was a system in which citizens limited the power of governments. Because corporations, or powerful professional associations, were run by citizens, their power was no problem, even if it decided the fate of millions of people. The rich and powerful outside government were victims, not perpetrators.
In one sense, the elites who framed democracy in this way had no double standards: They expected the democracies of the West to accept this version as well as those everywhere else. And it is against this that Western countries who are now electing illiberal right-wing governments are reacting.
Because Western democracies were meant to be Western (and white), the presence of growing numbers of people from other parts of the world in the West worried the elites. Academics fretted that ���social cohesion��� would be threatened unless Africans, Asians, and Arabs spoke and acted���and thought���as Western power holders do.��
Since this assumed that people who were not Western were a problem, it is no surprise that public debates in these countries began framing immigrants as a threat, triggering a wave of bigotry that fuels the Western right.
Because democracies were supposed to leave private power alone, parties that once reined in the rich and powerful on behalf of the vast majority now concentrated on trying to be friendlier to businesses than their traditional opponents were. And so the power of the few grew, and that of the many shrank. Millions now believe that democracy offers them nothing, because in this version, that is what it offers them.��
This is why Western liberal democracy is now in crisis. But while it is fashionable to insist that the crisis is that millions are turning to the right because they reject democracy, reality is more complicated. The West���s flight from liberalism is a story of the collapse of its supposed center, not of the people���s shift to the right.
After Musk gave his salute, Trump was inaugurated. Although he was responsible for an insurrection against the US Constitution and did not attempt during the campaign to hide his plan to shred what remains of liberal democracy in that country, Democratic former presidents and elected representatives attended in large numbers and the media treated the event���and everything else to do with Trump���as though he was a centrist committed to constitutional government.
This highlighted the key feature of the rise of the illiberal right���the degree to which it has been helped along by the elites who run Western societies. Not that long ago, any Western public figure who gave anything vaguely resembling a Nazi salute would be shunned across the spectrum. Now, the man who did it will take up a job in the new government. The media will treat this as entirely normal, and the Democratic Party will restrict itself to grumbling.
Ironically, the only aspect of Trump���s inauguration that showed the old model was not entirely dead was the presence of the unaccountable heads of the biggest tech companies, who were no doubt there to exercise the citizenship rights this view of democracy gives them.
The normalization of the right, which Musk���s gesture underlines, has been evident for years in the embrace by mainstream parties of racist immigration policies and their willingness to absorb the hard right into the political center. The hard right is acceptable in Europe and North America largely because the politicians and the media of the supposedly liberal mainstream made it acceptable.��
This is not surprising if we recall the two core principles of liberal democracy over the past few decades. First, being Western is more important than being democratic. And, second, because protecting private power is vital, the hard right is more acceptable than those who want private power to recognize the needs and views of the majority.
The two illusions are linked. Both show the dangers of confusing Westernness with democracy, a system in which every adult has a share in the decisions that affect them, not one in which some people are always assumed to be better than others and power can do as it pleases to people as long as governments do not wield it.
Right now, the twin illusions��� collapse has empowered a right-wing view of democracy that values freedom for a few, bondage for the rest. For real democrats, the core question is whether and how a version of democracy that really values equality may begin to emerge.
January 30, 2025
Dakar’s fashion revolution
Image credit Pierre Laborde via Shutterstock. In 2023, the US exported 17.9% of its second-hand clothes making it the leading country in the second-hand exportation market worth USD193.7 billion. Many Western charities, such as Goodwill, receive donated items, assuming these pieces of clothing will help clothe people in dire financial situations or housing insecure. In reality, however, charities are part of a booming industry selling most of the clothes to companies that in turn sell them to countries of the Global South, especially in Africa.
This phenomenon has been recorded across the continent, raising alarm, such as in Ghana. Fashion activists and designers are tackling the issue by raising awareness of the dangers of Westerners ���donating��� their clothes to charities that send them on to destinations in the Global South where they may well end up in landfill.
Dakar, Senegal, is one of the destinations where discarded clothing���mostly fast fashion brands���finishes its journey. Some Senegalese fashion shops, such as Guiguiss boutik and Friperzz have decided to tackle the issue by promoting second-hand fashion and in some cases, upcycling it.
These Senegalese fashion brands primarily promote their work online, targeting a young, hip crowd of other Africans on the continent and in the Diaspora. They also scout popular second-hand markets such as March�� Colobane, one of the most popular markets in Dakar.
Guiguiss boutik upcycles 90s and Y2k second-hand clothes (they dropped a collection featuring upcycled football kits during Africa Cup of Nations (AFCON) 2023), as well as creating jewelry from discarded items. Friperzz specializes in selling upcycled football tees as trendy fashion items, perfectly timed with the rise of attention to the upcoming AFCON championship, set to take place in 2025 in Morocco. Once they acquire the clothes, they go through them to identify what can be sold and what should be discarded. They usually have a vision of the specific items they want to upscale or will come with ideas after sourcing second-hand clothes at different markets. The next step is to communicate their vision to the tailors they work with���and if there���s something Senegal excels at, it���s tailoring, with around 61,000 tailor shops in Dakar alone.
The capital has an extraordinary number of Fashion brands such as Tongoro by Sarah Diouf (worn by Beyonce and Rihanna), Selly Raby Kane, Xalil Xiss��m Owens by Ousseynou Owens Ndiaye, and Mody Tidiane Fall. Dakar Fashion Week is a known hub for the latest in contemporary fashion out of the continent. Many renowned tailors in the region have set up shop locally, such as Pape Beye and Bada Seck. There are also multiple markets to buy fabric directly, such as March�� Colobane or March�� Sandaga.��
While Senegal���s reputation for impeccable tailoring remains, second-hand clothes are cheaper and more accessible for the average customer; you don���t have to find a piece of fabric, take it to your tailor, and wait for the clothes to be made, reducing the barrier of labor costs. These items are also sometimes perceived as more fashionable because they are coming from Western countries. The unintentional byproduct of this surge in upcycled fashion, despite it being an innovative approach to a massive environmental issue, is that customers with limited budgets are less likely to buy homegrown brands.
Upcycling for these online brands can be as simple as adding a few pieces of fabric to garments���usually scraps from fabric used to make tailor-made clothes or from items that are about to be discarded���or as complex as completely transforming them, such as turning a sports tee into a skirt. The most prized and popular items in the secondhand market tend to be sports tees and football kits,.But with the other growing number of fast fashion items being discarded in the Global North and then arriving in Senegal, the quality of the fashion items Africans have access to in second-hand markets and stores has decreased.
The irony in the fast-fashion waste debacle is that countries such as l export cotton only to have the end product returned to their shores to be discarded as ���charity.��� In 2022- 2023, it was estimated that Senegal exported 28,000 bales, but because the country lacks a mature cotton industry due to lack of infrastructure, sellers and businesses pay a hefty price to import new or second-hand clothes, many made of cotton.
Although it���s undeniable that the second-hand fashion market has had a positive impact on the overconsumption of clothing items���making a dent in greenhouse emissions, for example���the emerging industry is not a net positive in Africa. While the growing niche is creating jobs for different populations���from the people selecting the clothes when they arrive in Africa to sellers and even upcycling fashion brands���the second-hand market is still a precarious endeavor. The profits that charities make selling second-hand clothing are not shared with the sellers in Africa. The latter have little control over the quality or quantity of the clothes they receive and often have to go into debt to buy their first bales.��
The growth of the second-hand market also has a devastating impact on local African fashion markets and brands that simply can���t compete.�� The roots of this dilemma go back to the Transatlantic slave trade and colonization. European powers have sought to make the continent entirely dependent on their exports that they controlled and made fortunes from, from food to infrastructure, to fashion. Although Africans have made certain imports their own���such as Ankara wax, a Dutch import that was inspired by Indonesian Batik���it���s undeniable that the rich diversity of African traditional clothing has certainly suffered as a result. And now, the second-hand fashion market is putting the nail in the coffin for the contemporary African local fashion industry, maximizing the revenues from selling bales of discarded waste in the Global North under the pretense of ���conservation.�����
It is very unlikely that Western charities which are responsible for the mass exportation of fashion items in Senegal will use the significant funds they earn from it to improve the working conditions of African workers in the second-hand fashion industry. It���s also likely that African fashion brands and the fashion industry, in general, might not be big enough to resist the growth of the second-hand industry. While initiatives like Senegalese second-hand upcycling brands are welcome, more needs to be done to stimulate the local market and to resist the practices of Western countries acting like Africa is a dumping ground for everything that needs to be discarded���fashion or otherwise.
January 29, 2025
The inheritance of hope
Nairobi, Kenya, 2018. Image credit Miaron Billy via Shutterstock. In 2002, Kenyans were polled and ranked as the most optimistic people on the planet. The decades-long rule of President Daniel arap Moi, that had seen cynics spout witticisms such as ���L�����tat, c���est Moi,��� had finally ended. After 24 years under Moi���s rule Kenyans witnessed the first peaceful transfer of power through the ballot box since their independence. A significant departure from the norm in many African countries at the time, where power often changed hands violently. The fact that Moi gracefully accepted defeat and did not attempt a military takeover contributed to the sense of optimism. People celebrated late into the night, feeling as though they had achieved a miracle.
They felt that Moi had reduced the country���s once prosperous economy to a state of bribery and corruption. Mwai Kibaki���s campaign had focused on the issue of corruption, promising to eliminate it from public life. He vowed that the government would no longer be run based on the whims of individuals. Ordinary citizens began refusing to pay bribes and demanded accountability from officials. The media was able to freely depict Kibaki in cartoons, a stark contrast to the fear and self-censorship that existed during Moi���s reign. Kibaki reinforced this optimism with actions, such as refusing to put his face on currency and pledging not to disrupt traffic with presidential motorcades. He also appointed a new permanent secretary in charge of governance and ethics, signaling his commitment to fighting corruption. The country believed they were being shepherded into a new era, devoid of all the ills that had marked the previous reign. These expectations were, of course, in hindsight, quite a bit off the mark. Some have described the reign of the then people���s chosen Moses, President Mwai Kibaki, as an orgy of corruption and looting. Still, hope did not die.
Some years later, the period between 2007 and 2008 saw the nation plunged into its darkest hour of recent times. The post-election violence that erupted following disputed presidential election results threatened to tear the country apart. Scores died, and even more were displaced, losing their homes and livelihoods. Still, Kenyans did not lose hope. In 2010, the adoption of a new constitution and the overwhelming support for the new governance framework showcased Kenyans��� enduring hope. Kenyans were optimistic about the new constitution in 2010; a poll taken just before the new constitution���s implementation showed that��77 percent of Kenyans believed that it would lead to a better economy in the coming year. This optimism was comparable to that seen in 2003 after the election of the National Rainbow Coalition (NARC).
In the 15 years since, this hope has been tested time and again. The 2013 election, the first under the new constitution, was marked by tensions but ultimately saw Kenyans peacefully accepting the results. The 2017 election cycle proved even more challenging, with the initial election nullified by the Supreme Court���a first in Africa���and a repeat election boycotted by the opposition. Most recently, many have stepped up in protest to demand that our administration do better. In the best instances, we were ignored; in the worst cases, we were abducted, mutilated, tortured, and murdered. Even still, we have held on to hope. There���s a joke that you cannot depress Kenyans, because there is nothing you can do to them that their government has not already tried.
Kenyans do not give up hope. It���s just not something we do. Even after hope is dashed, we pick ourselves up and slog through. After Moi, we were counted the most optimistic people on the planet. After the promulgation of the 2010 constitution, post the devastating violence of 2007, we still retained hope. Every election cycle, we have held on to hope. Hope is having something to latch onto in the midst of a storm, something that enables us to know that as long as we hold on, it might be long, very long, but ���this, too, shall pass.���
It���s hard to believe that it���s going to get better, especially when you see folk heroes slowly morph into the very things they were advocating against���like pieces of white cloth that turn slowly black as they sink to the bottom of a dyeing vat. That���s our country. Every time we turn on the news, we gain another reason to be angry and afraid. But if there is pain, there is hope. That���s the magic of the universe, of this reality that we inhabit: We cannot know everything that could happen, and thus we cannot effectively rule out a favorable outcome to whatever predicament we find ourselves in, and so, we hope. We hope, even against reason, because hope is something outside of the machinations of our mundane human minds���something beyond them.
It is the nature of the democratic process that sees us take a meandering dance with development as a nation, but slowly and surely, we win in the end���because of hope. Hope is the barrier to our loss of humanity. Kenya���s collective consciousness is sustained by one thing: hope. When I think of hope, I think of Boyan Slat, who saw that our oceans filling with garbage is a problem that needs solving, and if no one else is going to take care of it, then that someone might as well be him. He did away with helplessness and decided to actively bring the world that was in his heart of hearts into being.
Kenya today is easily one of the most heartbreaking places to live in. Our ministers peddle dirt as fertilizer, sell our airports, and posture in churches. Now imagine if every single Kenyan citizen decided that this was the way to be? It would be the Purge come to life, every damn day���everyone trying to defraud everyone, to get ahead at all costs, to destroy everything in their pursuit of more, more, and even more. Still, today, people show up on the streets to protest and demand a better way of being. Why? Because of hope, hope that somehow, someway, the world around us can become that which we hold in our heart of hearts���full of joy, peace, and serenity. Hope is driven by the light in our hearts. It is not extrinsic; it is of the soul, it is divine. Without hope, we become helpless receptacles of our circumstances���passive, inert humans. The world becomes gray and lifeless. We can lose everything else, but let us never lose hope.
January 28, 2025
Mati Diop’s reparative cinema
Still from Dahomey �� 2024. ���Aim�� C��saireFar from contradicting, diluting, or diverting our revolutionary attitude toward life, surrealism strengthens it. It nourishes an impatient strength within us, endlessly reinforcing the massive army of refusals.
���Serigne Seck, AtlantiquesLook at the ocean. It has no borders
To maintain historical and cultural superiority, Western empires silence the atrocious means (plunder, conquest, and genocide) by which they pillaged treasures. These stolen items���from Asante gold regalia to the Benin bronzes���once served specific cultural functions. Now, they decorate museum interiors, heralded as cultural preservation or embraced as a ���pathway to racial and [colonial] healing, repatriation and reconciliation.�����
While cinema has played a vital role in pacifying historical rampages, further stabilizing the stories of empire within the historical record, it has also been an antidote. Artists like Alain Kassanda and Onyeka Igwe have used film to excavate Black counter-histories and challenge dominant regimes of visual representation that silence the traumas of the colonial past. They belong to a contemporary diasporic wave of Black anticolonial cultural producers and experimental filmmakers who tend to ���revolutionary memory work,��� a crucial tenet in both continental African and Afro-diasporic filmmaking.��
The Franco-Senegalese filmmaker Mati Diop is another steward of this practice. She appropriates cinema to find where the past meets the present, rupturing the colonial monopoly on Black and Afro-diasporic histories and representation. Nowhere is that modus operandi more explicit than in Dahomey, her unconventional second feature which won the top prize at last year���s Berlin International Film Festival, has been shortlisted for a 2025 Oscar, and is now available to stream in the United States. The film depicts the return of 26 looted artifacts from France to Benin in 2021 and is narrated by an anthropomorphized royal sculpture of King Ghezo, to which Diop gives an eerie, distorted imagined voice. Through the narrative, written by Haitian writer Makenzy Orcel, the statue comes to life. ���There are thousands of us in this night,��� Ghezo, speaking in the Indigenous Beninese language Fon, says at the beginning of the film. ���We all bear the same scars. Uprooted. Ripped out. The spoils of massive plundering.���
In Dahomey, as in her other work, Diop contests the archives��� accumulated erasures, projections, fabulations, and misnamings���enlivening silenced histories and centering the forgotten victims of historical violence. ���Early on in my filmmaking career, I felt a sense of urgency to fight against the colonial, hegemonic gaze by putting [marginal] subjects at the center of their own stories,��� Diop said in a recent interview with me. The director���s experimentation across genre, form, and sound engenders a new filmic language that is hauntological, which the scholar Christina Sharpe in In the Wake defines as ���a work of haunting, where the specters of the undead make themselves present.��� By incorporating African oral storytelling traditions, supernatural elements, and Afro-surrealist aesthetics into her cinematic language, Diop blurs the lines between speculative and nonfiction.��
This hauntological and Afro-surrealist approach underpins her experimental short documentary Atlantiques (2009), and debut feature, Atlantics (2019), both of which begin and end with Senegalese youth journeying from Dakar, Senegal, to Spain. Atlantiques recounts the story of Serigne Seck, a young man whose failed voyage speaks to a greater epidemic of, in Diop���s words, ���a ghost generation.��� Atlantics dramatizes this fraught position between life and death by focusing on how the absences of these young men spiritually and physically haunt the women they leave behind.��
Both films attend to the ongoing neocolonial issues of labor exploitation and corrupt governance in Senegal, which has resulted in a lack of opportunities for young people and enabled their transmigration to Europe. These earlier works also oppose Western media and televisual depictions of the crisis unfolding in the Mediterranean Sea. Much of disaster reporting on the plight of refugees rely on scenes of shipwreck desperation, suffering, and even rescue to minimize the role of modern colonialism and contemporary European border policing as major culprits.��
The ���colonial archetypes��� that permeated coverage of Black migrants propelled Diop to create a liberated and ���new cinematic language.��� In Atlantiques, the director invites us to listen to Seck���s experiences and motives for embarking on a fatal journey to Europe rather than indulge in gruesome details of his death. In Atlantics, Diop uses spectrality to animate the effects of centuries of Western imperialism and colonization experienced by African youth. Ada and Souleliman are a young couple whose tragic love story ignites a series of supernatural happenings. While attempting to emigrate to Spain, Souleliman (along with other men) abruptly drowns at sea. The young men ���return��� as ghosts, inhabiting the bodies of their girlfriends every night. At the behest of the spirits, the women haunt the young men���s former bosses, whose exploitative practices provoked their passage overseas. Diop���s use of hypnotic soundscapes by Fatima Al Qadiri���lush dark backgrounds engulfed in beach mist, and vast aquatic imagery���enhances Atlantics��� eerie, dreamlike melancholia.��
As Diop details in our interview, part of her cinematic motivations can be attributed to her uncle Djibril Diop Mamb��ty. The Touki Bouki director approached filmmaking with a kind of ���radical inventiveness through form,��� Diop said. She wanted to extend that into the present through her own reinvention. Mamb��ty experimented across genres to produce visually striking agitprop that exposed the issues plaguing post-independence Senegal, such as the realities of neocolonialism, globalized capitalism, and postcolonial malaise. Similarly, Diop melds genres (horror, fantasy, romantic tragedy, and police crime drama) in Atlantics to advance her haunting narrative and pushes formal boundaries in Atlantiques to create a visually textured, multisensory spectral narrative enlivened by the central phantom.��
In Dahomey, Diop moves from ghostly possession to resurrection. The director grants the Beninese artworks autonomy in light of their centuries-long dispossession and removes France from the center of restitution debates. In our interview, Diop described this current conversational configuration, which includes Beninese President Patrice Talon as a kind of manipulation. ���This restitution from the French perspective, [on the surface] looks as if France is reaching some sort of new age [post-colonial] relationship with Africa, which is unfortunately false,��� she said.��
Working with cinematographer Josephine Drouin Viallard, Diop charts the ���return��� of these 26 artifacts, from their packaging into boxes at the Mus��e du quai Branly in Paris to their re-captivity at the Beninese presidential palace in Cotonou. Throughout this journey, Dahomey centers their speculative interior lives and thoughts. ���I have in my mouth an aftertaste of the ocean,��� Ghezo says at one point. ���I���m torn between the fear of not being recognized by anyone and not recognizing anything.�����
To consider the statue���s anxiety, Diop observes how the Beninese people engage with the homecoming of these treasures. But she rarely focuses on the elite or diplomatic response. Instead, Diop directs the lens at the general, ostensibly more working-class population. From the young men who become enamored by the returned treasures while setting them up in glass cages to the Beninese curator singing quietly to a returned sculpture, the camera lingers on the subtle moments of appreciation, curiosity, and connection. As visitors arrive at the palace, special attention is paid to the intergenerational attendees in their traditional Beninese dress. Dahomey documents and centers the historical moment around their gatherings, watching as patrons attentively listen to the museum guide as he explains the historical context in which the returned objects lived and the conditions of their dispossession.
Diop does not, in her own words, ���let two presidents, French and African, take hostage of this historical moment.��� The opening-night ceremony leads into a fervent debate between Beninese youth, which becomes the focal point of Dahomey. A prolonged sequence of students at the University of Abomey-Calavi consumes the latter half of the film. They collectively interrogate the restitution and exhibition of these artifacts in relation to their own cultural heritage and identities. As the debate (organized and staged by Diop) continues, the students��� voices permeate the space, and the camera pans to folk outside listening via radios in a courtyard and their cars. The moment nods to the staged IMF/World Bank vs. The People trial in Abderrahmane Sissako���s Bamako (2006). One student describes being completely ���unaware��� that these sculptures were held abroad, and another describes crying for 15 minutes after seeing the treasures for the first time.��
The French colonization of the Kingdom of Dahomey between 1892 and 1894 was a direct consequence of the Berlin Conference, in which colonial entities partitioned Africa for their rule. As Fazil Moradi examines in ���Catastrophic Art,��� ���The carving up of the African continent into colonies produced France, Britain, Belgium, and Germany as empires���and the imaginary ���West��� was created as a purified body with no trace of African or any other���s touch.��� The emergence of cinema not only coincided with the Berlin Conference, but it also helped materialize these colonial and white supremacist structures. The visualization of territorial and economic imperialism through the emergence of visual technologies in the late 1880s imagined film to be an integral part of the colonizing process. Cinematic technologies and the advent of nonfiction and ethnographic cinema helped shape and execute Europe���s imperial fantasies across the continent.��
By blurring the lines between speculative and nonfiction, Dahomey���s visual aesthetic becomes hauntingly trance-like. Wally Badarou and Dean Blunt���s ghostly musical score, heavy with tidal synths and ethereal hums, helps ensnare audiences. In the film���s opening scene, the camera is fixed on the imagery of the treasures incarcerated in glass fixtures at the Mus��e du quai Branly, functionally an extension of France���s colonial project. In Benin, lush and vibrant landscapes fill the screen, only to be disrupted by the specters (returned treasures) contemplating their exilic experiences, new surroundings, and cages. The colonial tradition of cultural preservation aimed to exploit Indigenous African cultural production for non-African audiences, and these unsettled histories of cultural epistemicide are obscured by ���restitution.��� Diop���s phantasmic cinematography underscores the spectacle of ���return��� as France remains unwilling to fully contend with the toll of its annihilatory violence on its former colonies. Because the terms of restitution in the African context aren���t in the hands of the people, it becomes an instrument in political ���peacemaking��� backroom dealings that further enshrine Franco-African relations.��
The narration of the anthropomorphized treasures and the ���restitution��� debate among the students provide a launching pad for a greater discussion around African self-determination in the fight for true decolonization. In a similar vein, Franco-Guadeloupean filmmaker Sarah Maldoror���s 1976 short film Et les chiens se taisaient, a great work of cultural decolonization adapted from the play of the same name by Martiquinian poet and scholar Aim�� C��saire, takes place in the reserves of the Mus��e de l���Homme in Paris. The short follows the ���rebel��� character (played by Gabriel Glissant) who works in the museum���s storage area as he gives a group of young Black children a rage-induced educational tour of the archives filled with unseen looted African artifacts. Both Maldoror���s short film and Dahomey subvert the museum scenography to create a space for youth to be active participants in their history and futures. ���I can���t see how the youth cannot be put in the center,��� Diop reiterates in our interview. ���They are the ones who have been dispossessed by the physical traces of their history.���
While we don���t see the children speak in Et les chiens se taisaient, Dahomey completely turns her lens onto the students as they sharply voice some of the colonial and neoliberal entanglements embedded within these restitutive gestures. ���Restituting 26 out of 7,000 is an insult,��� says one student. As the debate rages on, another student recounts being estranged from their Indigenous African language, and forced to speak the ���colonizers��� language because Fon, Nago, and others are not part of the Beninese educational system. This leads to discussions highlighting the continued abandonment of African knowledge systems and philosophies. Toward the end of the conversation, one student brings up workers��� purchasing power and another declares, ���We need a revolution.��� This dialogue of restitution connects the specters of the past to the young people advancing the fight against global capitalism and neocolonialism in the present. With Dahomey, Diop ultimately charts a shift in consciousness that lends itself to a revolutionary storm brewing across the African continent, led by the younger generations.
January 27, 2025
Jacob Zuma’s enduring relevance
Jacob Zuma. Image via Gov. of South Africa on Flickr CC BY-ND 2.0. Leading a nation is hard work. It is unsurprising that former leaders devote post-presidential life to rest and reflection. Unlike their Western counterparts, who retire to lucrative book deals and endowments to establish centers and institutes, African presidents have little to look forward to after active politics. Those who depart office with intact reputations can serve as ���statesmen��� who routinely grace public events or embark on all-expense-paid trips across the continent to observe elections for ���democracy promoters.��� Even these modest perks have eluded Jacob Zuma.��
Zuma, South Africa���s president from May 2009 to February 2018, has had a difficult retirement. He has been forced to account for corruption during his presidency. When he failed to appear before an inquiry investigating widespread graft and ���state capture��� that occurred during his rule, he was found in contempt of court. For that offense, he was jailed for 15 months, serving two months until he was released on ���medical parole.��� Aside from these, he faces legal woes for alleged bribes, money laundering and racketeering in a 1999 arms deal with a French firm.
Scandals and corruption have dogged the 82-year-old Zuma���s political career. From being an exiled operative of the African National Congress (ANC), he rose to become the deputy president of Thabo Mbeki but was fired over corruption allegations. When he later displaced his former boss to become the ANC���s and South Africa���s president, corruption seeped into every aspect of the state. This alarmed ANC���s leaders to boot him from office. His missteps in office aside, Zuma was accused of raping an HIV-positive woman. The very public and divisive trial that controversially acquitted him was, in itself, a scandal that would have capsized many political careers. He survived, earning the nickname ���Teflon president��� for his ability to stage political bounce-backs.��
When it appeared he was leaving for good in 2018 after his resignation, the BBC mocked him as ���the survivor whose nine lives ran out.��� With the benefit of hindsight, the jokes are on the BBC. Six years after the British broadcaster announced his political demise, Zuma is on a strong comeback act. He has led and galvanized a six-month-old party, uMkhonto we Sizwe (MK), to secure an impressive 14.6 percent in South Africa���s May 2024 elections.
Meaning ���Spear of the Nation��� in isiZulu, MK takes its name from the ANC���s paramilitary wing founded in 1961 to bolster resistance to white minority rule. In its present avatar as a fully fledged political party, it is Zuma���s vehicle for the ���total liberation��� of South Africa. Founded in December 2023, Zuma���s affiliation has been the central fuel of MK���s surprising shake-up of South Africa���s political landscape. Although the ANC was poised to lose its majority for the first time since 1994, it is undeniable that the arrival of the Zuma-backed party has deepened the ANC���s electoral troubles. Moreover, the MK party has eaten into the vote shares of other smaller opposition parties. The influence of the Economic Freedom Fighters, led by the acerbic Julius Malema, has been dented, with some of the EFF���s leaders migrating to join Zuma���s organization. Aubrey Matshiqi, a South African commentator, has described the MK party as the ���newsmaker of the year.�����
Zuma���s unabating relevance and the MK party���s immediate impact on South African politics has forced analysts to speculate about its implications for the country, with some describing its existence and exploits as a ���frontal assault on the survival prospects of South African democracy.��� What the party and its leader will do in the future can only be subjected to such conjectures. Here, I am concerned with why Jacob Zuma, pronounced politically dead by critics and trailed by corruption and scandal, retains the vast influence he has used to power his new party to transform politics in South Africa.
I suggest that two key factors underlie Zuma���s appeal. His appearance as a ���relatable��� politician gives him a nationwide appeal in South Africa. In his native province, KwaZulu-Natal, where the MK party derives much of its support, the story is much thicker. He is seen as an embodiment of traditional values of a fruitful life that have been blighted by democratic modernity. I consider the two factors in turn.
When Zuma became president in 2009, he won 66 percent of the national vote. The scale of his victory was called ���a Zunami.��� Postmortem of the polls found that he won the heads and hearts of people. His triumph emerged from a belief that as a minimally educated person who hails from a poor rural background, Zuma would sympathize with the plight of the poor masses and do something to better their conditions. These elements of Zuma���s life gave him the personal and political credentials to speak to and, perhaps, tackle the political and economic upheavals people were experiencing when promises of political liberation were less forthcoming. As a traditionalist and polygamist who supports several wives, girlfriends, and many children, Zuma was perceived by some as a solution to the ���crises of social reproduction,��� which manifested in declining marriage rates and an increasing number of men shirking fatherhood responsibilities. This strategic use of identity allowed him to transcend ethnicity, gender, and generational divides. While he provided hope for the young with promises of job provision, he embodied a renewed sense of respect for traditional and generational dignity for the old.
Moreover, his affable persona, what Roger Southall calls ���charismatic buffoonery,��� casts him as a down-to-earth person. His willingness to sing for and dance with his supporters sharply contrasts with Mbeki���s perceived distant and out-of-touch appearance. The strategies that secured him the heads and the hearts of many South Africans are on full display again as he steers the MK party to reshape the Rainbow Nation���s politics. Interestingly, despite having presided over the country���s political, economic, and social decline, he has framed his agenda as a ���total liberation,��� positioning himself as a representative of the aspirations and ���real��� concerns of black people striving against a new apartheid. In doing this, he cast the ANC, the party he once promised to serve all his life, as a failure.��
In this sense, the style and substance of Zuma���s politics resemble that of contemporary populists, not least Donald Trump, who also displays charisma to play ���the charlatan and the fool��� to win hearts. The MK party���s fortunes in 2024 have come about through a rhetoric that successfully harnesses the discontents of economically marginalized people while presenting Zuma, who spent almost a decade in power, as a challenger to the establishment (again, not unlike Trump). At the MK party���s rallies, Zuma deploys a familiar charm by singing his signature song, ���Umshini wami��� (a war song meaning ���bring me my machine gun���). This is more than an attempt to win hearts. Liz Gunner notes that this song collapses the past and the present and articulates ���a deep need to return and create the just state.��� When his young and old supporters swing their arms and roll their hips to match his movements, they accept the message he is peddling. Those who follow him see Zuma not as a calculating kleptocrat but as a champion of the downtrodden whose good intentions have been hamstrung by spiteful forces. Now, he is being unfairly persecuted. They accept him as the man to foil a great political betrayal. Anytime they do, a nail is driven deeper into the coffin of the ANC and the prospect of accountable democracy in South Africa.
The second explanation for Zuma���s popularity can be gleaned by looking at his personal and the MK party���s exploits in KwaZulu-Natal (KZN), where the party secured 45.3�� percent of votes. It is not surprising that Zuma���s home province is his party���s stronghold. Before he became leader of the ANC in 2009, KZN politics was dominated by the Zulu nationalist party Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP). His ascendence to the ANC���s helm provoked a migration of Zulu nationalist impulses from the IFP to the ANC. In Zuma���s leadership, Zulus perceived that the ANC was evolving towards traditionalism. Until then, the Party of Liberation was advancing policies of cosmopolitan modernization, as seen in Mbeki���s ���African Renaissance��� vision. Believing firmly that Zuma is a conduit of ���Zuluness,��� Zulu migrants in cities and those in rural areas happily invested their emotions and support in the ANC. The clear message is that his believers will follow him wherever he goes.
Jason Hickel���s Democracy as Death: The Moral Order of Anti-Liberal Politics explains this shift and sheds light on another dimension of Zuma���s staying power. He draws on extensive sources to argue that the Zulus believe ���the state of nature is one of sameness, disorder, and sterility, and fruition can only be realized by properly ordering the social world��� through strict social hierarchies regulated by cultural and moral codes (umthetho). Adherents of this cosmological theory of fortune and misfortune or affliction and healing believe that the idea of democracy, which aims to dismantle hierarchies and liberate individuals to realize their agency, disrupts the order that is conducive to fruitful social reproduction. Consequently, they perceive liberal policies promoted by the ANC���equal rights for women, children, and sexual minorities as well as abortion rights and support for single mothers���as the underlying cause of misfortunes such as unemployment, illness, inability to pay bridewealth or even death.
These beliefs, Hickel argues, undergirded the unyielding resistance to the ANC in Zulu heartlands. It motivated violent clashes between the IFP and the ANC over the mantle of fighting for black liberation. After apartheid, these sentiments determined party allegiance and voting behavior, underwriting the IFP���s decades-long dominance in KZN until 2009, when Zuma was elected ANC president. Hickel argues that Zulus ���see him [Zuma] as embodying many of the values that they feel are otherwise under threat.��� He respects the hierarchies of the rural homestead and upholds the ideals of traditional patriarchal masculinity. Through his deep understanding of cultural idioms and competent use of isiZulu, he slips easily into his supporters��� worlds, assuring them that he would ���bring culture back.��� Additionally, Zuma���s disapproval of same-sex marriage and his rejection of abortion rights signal to his supporters that he only partially supports liberal ideals. It is by embodying these values, Hickel argues, that his co-ethnics have come to regard him as an uBaba (father) who has an isizotha (dignity) of an inkosi (chief).��
Aubrey Matshiqi has made a similar point recently, that Zuma is the symbolic ���leader of the Zulus,��� and attacks on him are interpreted by his supporters as attacks on the Zulus. This explains why his affiliation with the MK party swiftly boosted the party���s popularity and displaced other parties like the EFF that were lining up to dethrone the ANC.��
If his time in office is anything to go by, Zuma would have very little political substance to offer his staunch supporters and South Africa. But his followers��� willingness to stick with him indicates performance matters less to them. Perhaps they believe in him not solely, if even, because he can offer the economic empowerment he is promising. In a country where the national story is no longer coherent, as Will Shoki argues, and in heady times when globalization is making us all ���people of nowhere,��� he represents a salve for his followers��� longing and loss.��
The components that form the foundations of Zuma���s movement���culture, ethnicity, traditional morality, and deployment of the past as a critique of the present���largely render standard democratic reasoning and counterpoints useless. Liberals in South Africa and around the world don���t have much in their arsenal to respond adequately to such cultural populists and ethno-nationalists. Every counterargument becomes proof of the accusation of elitist arrogance.
The rise, the fall, and the rise again of Zuma teach us that culture inflects the positive and not-so-positive trajectories of democratic change in ways that demand attention. It is my hope, at least, that his opponents have learned better than to pronounce Zuma and his ilk politically dead, for they will have heirs.
January 26, 2025
The trials and tribulations of Rokia Traor��
Rokia Traor�� at the Bout du Monde Festival in Crozon in 2013. Image via Wikimedia Commons. Lire en fran��ais��ici.
From the world���s biggest music stages, which she toured for over two decades, to the severity of the Italian and Belgian prisons, Malian singer Rokia Traor�� has seen her world collapse. After spending over six months in detention between Rome and Brussels, she was finally released on January 22. For five years now, a legal dispute over the custody of her daughter has opposed her to ex-spouse Jan Goossens, Belgian stage director and former director of the Royal Flemish Theatre in Brussels, with whom she was in a relationship from 2013 to 2018. He accuses her of preventing him from seeing his daughter since their separation; she argues to have brought her up alone in Bamako, despite inviting the father to Mali.
New African artists have recently joined the singer���s long-standing supporters, giving more media attention to a case that could have remained private. At the beginning of January, thirteen musicians produced an album titled Support Rokia Traor��. From Malian instrumentalists Bassekou Kouyat�� and Mamadou Diabat�� to Senegalese stars Youssou Ndour and Daara J Family, as well as Nigerian singers Nneka and Keziah Jones, each track is an ode to struggle and freedom. The chorus of Senegalese folk musician Dady Thioune���s ���Fi la bok��� intones: ���I���m from here, and here is where I belong. And you, where are you from? We all belong to this Earth we share��� (���Fii laa bokk, fee laa book. Fan nga bokk? ��un ����pp fu ��u bokk,��� in Wolof).
Support Rokia Traor�� album cover (2025) via Madoky.As is often the case, each protagonist is supported by their country���s justice system. While the Malian courts issued an interlocutory judgment awarding sole custody of the child to the mother in 2019, the Belgian courts took the opposite decision that same year. In October 2019, the latter issued a European arrest warrant for the Bamako-based artist for ���kidnapping, illegal restraint and hostage-taking.��� For the father���s lawyer, the Malian decision was nothing more than ���a temporary order��� issued without respect for the rights of the defense.
In March 2020, Rokia Traor�� was��arrested at Roissy airport in France, while on her way to appeal against the Belgian judgment. While in police custody, she went on a hunger strike, denouncing what she described as the ���hostage-taking��� of her international career. Her arrest sparked a wave of support: several prominent figures, from film director Mati Diop and actor Omar Sy to scholars Judith Butler and Achille Mbembe,�� called for her immediate release, stating that ���it is unacceptable that a five-year-old child should be deprived of her mother because she complied with a court summons. It is unacceptable that France, which prides itself on being a country of human rights, should disregard women���s rights to such an extent.���
Two weeks after her arrest, the French courts released Rokia Traor�� but banned her from leaving the country. She circumvented this restriction by taking a flight to Bamako. ���I am shocked that the European arrest warrant could be used against me in this way as a method of blackmail,��� the musician reacted immediately. Jan Goossens��� lawyer believes that his client ���wants to see his child during the school holidays: to say that he wanted to take her and separate her from her mother is, once again, a lie.�����
Back in Bamako, the Belgian courts��� restrictions on the artist���s movements put her career on hold. In October 2023, a new verdict was handed down: the Brussels Criminal Court sentenced the musician to two years in prison for ���kidnapping��� and ���failing to represent a child.��� She was tried in absentia, claiming the court had not informed her of the trial.
Record from Rokia Traor��’s first album, Moune��ssa (1998), via Indigo France / Label Bleu.When she resumed her concerts outside Mali in the spring of 2024, the musician was due to perform in Italy. However, upon arrival in Rome, when she presented her French passport to customs (she has dual Malian-French nationality), the European arrest warrant resurfaced, and she was arrested again. Traor�� was detained in the Italian capital for over five months until her extradition to Belgium in late November 2024. Until January 22, she was held in the Haren prison in Brussels.
Shortly before her extradition from her Italian cell, Rokia Traor�� shared her dismay in a letter in which she denounced ���a limitless, omnipotent judicial machine:���
During these five years, the father, a Belgian citizen, never came to see his child in Mali. He never contributed to his child���s school fees. He never had any idea of the budget for her food or clothing. But from one European arrest warrant to another, from one prison to another, I���ve been terrorized for the past five years. […] What is this rule that says that a child born to an African and a European must live in Europe, or at least with the European parent? Why does this rule apply first, and then why does it seek and find justification in the rules of law, disregarding the rights of the African parent and the child?
In Bamako, where Rokia Traor�����s ten-year-old daughter still lives, her family has been raising the alarm with the Malian authorities since 2020. The youngest daughter, Naba Aminata Traor��, continued to plead for her sister���s release. The Haren prison imposes a strict visiting regime, and the thousands of kilometers between Bamako and Brussels made the trip expensive���over 800 dollars for a round-trip flight. News was scarce, as the prison administration did not provide an internet connection or telephone flat rates for Mali. Isolated from her family, to whom she sent letters through relatives in Europe, the musician spent her days reading, mainly law, and writing the manuscript of a forthcoming book.
One of Rokia Traor�����s rare visitors was Fatma Karali, who had launched an online petition calling for her release from custody in March 2020 that then gathered over 30,000 signatures. Co-founder of the M��res Veilleuses collective, an association dedicated to defending the rights of single mothers and their children, she campaigned tirelessly in Europe to release the musician; attending all the public hearings following Rokia Traor�����s extradition to Belgium.
Fatma Karali (front row, second from the right) with the Belgian and French support committee for Rokia Traor�� at the Brussels courthouse during the hearing on 23 December via DR.In 2021, the Malian singer agreed to become the patron of M��res Veilleuses to support the women in need whom the collective accompanies. ���In reality, Rokia���s story is ordinary,��� Fatma Karali explains. ���Other mothers are in situations stricken by economic, psychological or institutional violence. Often from Sub-Saharan Africa, they are forced to stay in Belgium to be with their children as if the child were the property of the state.���
The opposite scenario ��� that of a Belgian father being held for months in a Malian prison despite a favorable ruling by his country���s courts ��� would seem unlikely, at least before the coups in Mali.�����His embassy would have mobilized, defended him, and got him off the hook, regardless of Malian law,�����said Senegalese intellectual Felwine Sarr the day after Rokia Traor�����s first arrest in Paris.��He went on: ���This case, although private and intended to remain so, has become political: it reflects the state of political, legal, and symbolic relations between Africa and the rest of the world. […] If words still have meaning, the little girl in question was never kidnapped and taken from her mother, who looked after her in Mali when everything was going well.���
While some have gone so far as to denounce the racist treatment of Rokia Traor��, the courts only rule based on positive law, as Abdoul Aziz Diouf, professor of private law at the Cheikh Anta Diop University in Dakar, points out: ���Court rulings are sometimes superficial: women who cannot prove their accusations are powerless before the law because of patriarchy, and many suffer as a result.���
While an ���amicable��� agreement was finally the favored option, the decision on custody arrangements remains in the hands of the Belgian courts. A new closed-door hearing at the Brussels Criminal Court is scheduled for June to examine the terms of this agreement before pleadings allow a final decision by the end of the year. As for the singer���s appeal against her two-year sentence in absentia in 2023, her lawyer believes it should be a ���formality,��� provided both parties respect the agreement.��
In the meantime, Rokia Traor�� will not be able to leave European territory, at least until her next hearing in June. ���Strong personality or not,��� says Fatma Karali, ���by choosing to stay in Mali for five years, she has paid a high price for her career.���
Proc��s et tribulations de Rokia Traor��
Rokia Traor�� au festival du Bout du Monde �� Crozon en 2013. Image via Wikimedia Commons. Read in English here.
Des plus grandes sc��nes musicales du monde, qu���elle a sillonn��es pendant plus de deux d��cennies, �� l���aust��rit�� des prisons italiennes et belges, la chanteuse malienne Rokia Traor�� a vu son monde s���effondrer.�� Apr��s plus de six mois en d��tention entre Rome et Bruxelles, elle a Des plus grandes sc��nes musicales du monde, qu���elle a sillonn��es pendant plus de deux d��cennies, �� l���aust��rit�� des prisons italiennes et belges, la chanteuse malienne Rokia Traor�� a vu son monde s���effondrer.�� Apr��s plus de six mois en d��tention entre Rome et Bruxelles, elle a finalement ��t�� lib��r��e mercredi 22 janvier. Depuis plusieurs ann��es, une proc��dure judiciaire l���oppose, pour la garde de leur fille, �� son ex-conjoint, le metteur en sc��ne belge Jan Goossens, ancien directeur du Th����tre royal flamand de Bruxelles, avec qui elle a ��t�� en couple de 2013 �� 2018. Il l���accuse de l���avoir emp��ch�� de voir sa fille depuis leur s��paration ; de son c��t��, elle soutient avoir ��lev��e seule son enfant �� Bamako et avoir invit�� le p��re �� plusieurs reprises.��
Cette affaire, qui aurait pu rester priv��e, a ��t�� d���autant plus m��diatis��e qu���aux soutiens de longue date de la chanteuse se sont r��cemment ajout��es de nouvelles personnalit��s artistiques africaines, m��diatisant un peu plus une affaire qui aurait pu rester priv��e. Au d��but du mois de janvier, treize musiciens se sont r��unis autour d���un album sobrement intitul�� Support Rokia Traor��. Des instrumentistes maliens Bassekou Kouyat�� et Mamadou Diabat�� aux stars s��n��galaises Youssou Ndour et Daara J Family, en passant par les guitaristes-chanteurs nig��rians Nneka et Keziah Jones, chaque morceau est une ode au combat et �� la libert��. Le refrain du musicien folk s��n��galais Dady Thioune dans �� Fi la bok �� entonne en boucle : �� Je suis d���ici et j���y appartiens. Et toi, d���o�� viens-tu ? Nous appartenons tous �� cette Terre que nous partageons. �� (�� Fii laa bokk, fee laa book. Fan nga bokk ? ��un ����pp fu ��u bokk ��, en wolof).
Couverture de l���album Support Rokia Traor�� (2025) �� Madoky.Comme c���est souvent le cas, chacun des protagonistes est confort�� dans sa position par la justice de son pays. Alors que la justice malienne a attribu�� en r��f��r�� la garde exclusive de l���enfant �� la m��re en 2019, la justice belge a, de son c��t��, pris une d��cision contraire la m��me ann��e. En octobre 2019, Bruxelles ��met un mandat d���arr��t europ��en contre l���artiste, qui vit �� Bamako, pour �� enl��vement, s��questration et prise d���otage ��. Pour l���avocat du p��re, la d��cision malienne ne serait qu���une �� ordonnance temporaire���� accord��e sans respecter les droits de la d��fense.
En mars 2020, alors qu���elle se rend en France pour faire appel du jugement belge, Rokia Traor�� est arr��t��e �� l���a��roport de Roissy. Plac��e en garde �� vue, elle entame une gr��ve de la faim, d��non��ant une situation qu���elle pr��sente comme la �� prise en otage �� de sa carri��re internationale. Sa d��tention suscite une vague de soutien : un ensemble de personnalit��s ��� de la cin��aste Mati Diop, en passant par l���acteur Omar Sy, ou encore les philosophes Judith Butler le Achille Mbembe ��� appellent �� sa lib��ration imm��diate et affirment qu���il �� est inacceptable qu���une enfant de 5 ans soit priv��e de sa m��re au motif que celle-ci a ob��i �� une convocation de justice. Il est inacceptable que la France, qui se targue d�����tre le pays des droits de l���homme, bafoue �� ce point ceux des femmes ��.
Deux semaines apr��s son arrestation, la justice fran��aise lib��re Rokia Traor��, en lui interdisant de quitter le territoire.��Contournant cette restriction, elle prend un vol pour Bamako. �� Je suis choqu��e que puisse ��tre utilis�� ainsi contre moi le mandat d���arr��t europ��en comme m��thode de chantage ��, d��clare-t-elle dans la foul��e.��L���avocat de Jan Goossens estime, pour sa part, que son client �� a une volont�� de voir son enfant pendant les vacances scolaires : dire qu���il a voulu se l���accaparer et la s��parer de sa m��re est, une fois de plus, un mensonge ��.
De retour �� Bamako, l���artiste voit ses d��placements limit��s par la justice belge. Sa carri��re est mise entre parenth��ses.. En octobre 2023 tombe une nouvelle d��cision��: la voil�� condamn��e par le tribunal correctionnel de Bruxelles �� deux ans de prison pour �� s��questration �� et �� non-repr��sentation d���enfant ��. Elle est jug��e par d��faut, assurant ne pas avoir ��t�� inform��e du proc��s.
Disque du premier album de Rokia Traor��, Moune��ssa (1998) �� Indigo France / Label Bleu.Alors qu���elle commence �� reprendre ses concerts hors du Mali au printemps 2024, la musicienne est programm��e en Italie. Mais �� son arriv��e �� Rome, elle est de nouveau arr��t��e : �� la pr��sentation de son passeport fran��ais �� la douane (elle dispose de la double nationalit�� malienne-fran��aise), le mandat d���arr��t europ��en refait surface. Elle est incarc��r��e pendant plus de cinq mois dans la capitale italienne, jusqu����� son extradition vers la Belgique fin novembre 2024. Jusqu���au 22 janvier, elle ��tait d��tenue �� la prison de Haren, �� Bruxelles.
�� la veille de son extradition, depuis sa cellule italienne, l���artiste a partag�� son d��sarroi dans une lettre o�� elle fustige �� une machine judiciaire sans limite, toute-puissante �� :
�� Pendant ces cinq ann��es, le p��re, citoyen belge, n���est jamais venu voir son enfant au Mali. Il n���a jamais particip�� �� ses frais de scolarit��. Il n���a jamais eu aucune id��e du budget pour sa nourriture, son habillement. Mais d���un mandat d���arr��t europ��en �� l���autre, d���une prison �� une autre, depuis cinq ans, je suis terroris��e. [���] Quelle est cette r��gle qui veut qu���un enfant n�� d���un Africain et d���un Europ��en vive en Europe, ou en tout cas avec le parent europ��en ? Pourquoi cette r��gle s���applique-t-elle d���abord pour ensuite chercher et trouver sa justification dans les r��gles de droit, au m��pris des droits du parent africain et de l���enfant ? ��
�� Bamako, o�� r��side toujours la fille de Rokia Traor�� (aujourd���hui ��g��e de 10 ans), sa famille a multipli�� les alertes aupr��s des autorit��s maliennes depuis 2020. La s��ur cadette de la chanteuse, Naba Aminata Traor��, a poursuivi le plaidoyer pour la lib��ration de sa s��ur.��La prison de Haren impose un r��gime strict de visites et les milliers de kilom��tres entre Bamako et Bruxelles ont rendu les d��placements co��teux : pr��s de 800 euros pour un vol aller-retour. Faute de connexion internet, ou de forfaits t��l��phoniques pour le Mali fournis par l���administration p��nitentiaire, rares ont ��t�� les nouvelles. Isol��e de sa famille, �� qui elle a adress�� des lettres transmises par des proches en Europe, la musicienne a pass�� ses journ��es �� lire, notamment du droit, et �� r��diger le manuscrit d���un livre �� para��tre.
Fatma Karali, initiatrice d��s mars 2020 d���une p��tition en ligne qui avait recueilli plus de 30 000 signatures, a fait partie des rares visiteurs de Rokia Traor��. Co-fondatrice du collectif M��res Veilleuses, une association d��di��e �� la d��fense des droits des m��res isol��es et de leurs enfants, elle a poursuivi le combat en Europe pour la lib��ration de la chanteuse.��
Fatma Karali (1er rang, 2��me en partant de la droite) avec le Comit�� de soutien �� Rokia Traor�� de Belgique et de France au Palais de justice de Bruxelles en marge de l���audience du 23 d��cembre 2024 �� DR.Depuis l���extradition de Rokia Traor�� en Belgique, elle a assist�� �� chacune des audiences publiques. En 2021, la chanteuse malienne avait accept�� de devenir la marraine de M��res Veilleuses pour soutenir les femmes en d��tresse accompagn��es par le collectif. �� En r��alit��, l���histoire de Rokia est une affaire banale, t��moigne Fatma Karali. D���autres m��res, non-m��diatis��es, vivent des situations de violences ��conomiques, psychologiques ou institutionnelles.Souvent originaires d���Afrique subsaharienne,�� elles sont oblig��es de rester en Belgique pour ��tre �� c��t�� de leur enfant ; comme si celui-ci ��tait un objet qui appartenait �� l�����tat. ��
�� l�����vidence, le sc��nario inverse ��� celui d���un p��re belge ��crou�� dans une prison malienne des mois durant, en d��pit d���un jugement favorable de la justice de son pays ��� para��trait improbable, du moins avant les coups d�����tat du Mali. �� Son ambassade se serait mobilis��e, l���aurait d��fendu et, quelle que soit la loi malienne, l���aurait sorti d���affaire ��, estimait ainsi l���intellectuel s��n��galais Felwine Sarr sur un r��seau social, au lendemain de la premi��re arrestation de Rokia Traor�� �� Paris. Et de poursuivre : �� Cette affaire, bien que priv��e, et qui devait le rester, est devenue politique : elle refl��te l�����tat des rapports politiques, juridiques et symboliques entre l���Afrique et le reste du monde. [���] Si les mots ont toujours un sens, la petite fille en question n���a jamais ��t�� enlev��e et s��questr��e par sa m��re qui en assurait la garde, quand tout allait bien, et qui vivait avec elle sur le sol du Mali. ��
Si certains vont jusqu����� d��noncer un traitement raciste inflig�� �� Rokia Traor��, les tribunaux ne se prononcent qu���au regard du droit positif, rappelle Abdoul Aziz Diouf, professeur titulaire en droit priv�� �� l���Universit�� Cheikh-Anta-Diop de Dakar : �� Les d��cisions de justice agissent parfois en surface : les femmes qui sont dans l���incapacit�� d���apporter des preuves de leurs accusations sont d��sarm��es face au droit, du fait du patriarcat, et beaucoup en souffrent. ��
Tandis qu���un accord �� �� l���amiable �� a finalement ��t�� privil��gi��, la d��cision sur les modalit��s de la garde reste entre les mains de la justice belge. Une nouvelle audience devant le tribunal correctionnel de Bruxelles est pr��vue en juin, �� huis clos, pour examiner les termes de cet accord, avant que les plaidoiries sur le fond ne permettent de trancher d��finitivement d���ici la fin de l���ann��e. Quant au proc��s en appel de la chanteuse, relatif �� sa condamnation par contumace �� deux ans de prison en 2023, son avocat estime que cela ne devrait ��tre qu���une �� formalit�� ��, �� condition que l���accord soit respect�� par les deux parties.
En attendant, Rokia Traor�� r��sidera en Europe au moins jusqu����� sa prochaine audience, au mois de juin. �� Personnalit�� forte ou pas, en choisissant de rester au Mali pendant cinq ans, elle a pay�� le prix fort sur sa carri��re ��, conclut Fatma Karali.
January 24, 2025
You are not the sun: FESPACO 85′
FESPACO headquarters, Ouagadougou. Image credit Sputniktilt via Wikimedia Commons CC BY-SA 3.0. In the now notorious interview with French reporters, renowned Senegalese filmmaker Ousmane Sembene leans towards us, pipe clasped in hand. ���Europe is not my center. Europe is on the outskirts. After 100 years, did they speak my language?��� He goes on to describe how combining the landmass of America and Europe, it could not even stretch out to cover Africa. The multitudes of the largest continent on Earth could not be contained within the walls of the Western imaginary. He finishes his response, ���Why be a sunflower, and turn towards the sun, when I myself am the sun?���
The hegemony of Western power over the material aspects of film still haunts our contemporary moment, with filmmakers across the Global South suffering lack of funds, distribution, and infrastructure to truly serve the sociocultural needs of the people as outlined by the political artists of Sembene���s era. Most discourse around Africa as a ���new��� continent for the film canon focuses on its private potential, quoting the growing youth population and possible profit centers. Is this all one can imagine, pandering to global streaming behemoths and audiences looking to break into the Western mainstream? History offers other narratives and displays the continual pitfalls of reliance on the framework of neocolonial-backed institutions.��
For some time in Burkina Faso, a vision of an independent, radical, pan-African cinema was realized in the culmination of the Pan-African Festival of Cinema and Television in Ouagadougou (FESPACO 85���). The festival sought to dismantle the colonial distribution and creation of cinema, and the ideals expressed at the event embody the intimate relationship between economic development and expansion of cultural form. As Senegalese filmmaker and writer Paulin Samanou Vieyra stated at the 1959 Second Congress of Black Writers and Artists, ���There must be economic development. At the very least in the vital sectors, cinema is one of them.���
The early history of cinema across the continent largely reproduces colonial logics. LA Notcutt, a British plantation manager, founded one of the early colonial cinema projects in Kenya called the Bantu Educational Kinema Experiment. In his reflections on the role of Europe in African cinema, he said: ���With backwards peoples unable to distinguish between truth and falsehood, it is surely in our wisdom, if not our obvious duty, to prevent as far as possible the dissemination of wrong ideas.
When faced with the issue of undoing years of colonial dehumanization and paternalism toward African peoples, the camera would need to be liberated and taken hold of by the oppressed peoples to construct a vision of the future.��
Even after settler forces pulled out from their occupied regions in the decolonial period, new methods of colonial practices sprung to the forefront of foreign aid and loan programs. In the case of Burkina Faso, the stranglehold of the CFA Franc���assisted by policies of the IMF and World Bank���centralizes the process of foreign exchange to the hands of the French treasury and tightens around the emancipatory attempts of the nation.
Cinema reflected this continuing colonial attitude and practice. In the aftermath of independence in Francophone nations, Compagnie Africaine Cin��matographique Industrielle et Commerciale (COMACICO) and Soci��t�� d’Exploitation Cin��matographique Africaine (SECMA) held an iron grip on West African film distribution. As of 1969, Upper Volta (now Burkina Faso) had only six cinemas, and the films on display were primarily French, and aligned with the cinematic colonial project.
Under the guise of supporting cultural development, the French Minist��re de coop��ration also provided filmmakers with postproduction houses and funding opportunities in coalition with COMACICO and SECMA. This French monopoly meant that the language and content of West African cinema would have to pass through the censorship of tastes, politics, and aesthetics of French financiers. For example, Ousmane Sembene ran into many issues with his French producers during the making of Mandabi, the first film in the Wolof language. Producers gawked at his script, telling him that it needed erotic scenes and to be produced in French. Sembene refused, filming with primarily non-actors and delivering on his anti-colonial vision. Sembene could understand their language, but could they speak his?
The private distributors paralleled the practices of their state counterparts. In 1960, for example, Mali attempted to move off the CFA Franc and was struck with severe sanctions by the French government. Reflecting this in the realm of cinema, Upper Volta in 1969 attempted to nationalize their cinema industry. COMACICO and SECMA responded by pulling distribution and boycotting the nation from its distribution line. While the country may have had control of the screens, they had no films to fill them.��
It is within this backdrop that African filmmakers, inspired by the revolutionary rhetoric of figures such as Franz Fanon and Amilcar Cabral, sought to build a new infrastructure for the creation and distribution of cinema. Shortly after the country nationalized its cinema industry, Upper Volta hosted the initial biennial Pan-African Festival of Cinema and Television in Ouagadougou and became the headquarters of the Pan-African Federation of Filmmakers (FESPACI). Founded during the height of pan-African excitement and discourse in Algiers, the festival sought to showcase and support the respective national cinema projects of the neighboring countries. Upper Volta subsequently became a focal point of cinema for Africa through the continental celebration, even if it still had to contend with the duopoly of French distributors.
There were many attempts to articulate the vision of an anticolonial, independent cinema from African cineastes and filmmakers. From the Algiers Manifesto in 1970 to the Niamey Charter in 1982, those working within the continent���s industry expressed the need for a liberatory film. However, their respective state���s answers to their calls were lackluster until the installation of the Sankara government.
In 1983, pan-Africanist and Marxist leader Thomas Sankara came to power in the Upper Volta, which he quickly renamed Burkina Faso. Alongside large infrastructural and economic projects, Sankara recognized the emancipatory potential of cinema and began to lay the frameworks of supporting Burkinab�� filmmakers with funding and distribution. Seeking to build national sovereignty within cultural and economic arenas, Sankara also poured funds into the FESPACO and decided, along with the guiding congress FESPACI, on the theme ���Cinema and the Liberation of Peoples��� for the 1985 iteration of the festival.
1985 also saw the nationwide ���Battle of the Rails��� take place, in which citizens from around the country would compete as squads in clearing land for a railway to the largest manganese deposit in Burkina Faso. FESPACO, in an act of solidarity with the people���s mission, took to the countryside, hammer in hand, and joined the workers on the site of their act of emancipation from neocolonial hegemony.
The image of the filmmakers from across the continent shoulder to shoulder with the workers and volunteers set the scene for the festival and highlighted the momentous occasion for not only cinema but anticolonial movements across the globe. Sankara told journalists prior to the festival, ���The purification of the cinema is a requirement of our struggle, we must conquer our screens, reconquer our culture, to spread the messages that are going to serve the people���s interests. Cultural achievement is part of the overall strategy of the Revolution.���
In the midst of the festival, liberation became the center point of all filmic activity. The cinema halls, hotels, and streets of Ouagadougou were adorned with decorations and posters calling out ���Free the African Screens!��� and ���FESPACO 85, weapon of the liberation for peoples.��� The films on display stretched beyond just the continent of Africa, with Cuban and other Latin American countries sending delegations and screening their own films on national liberation. Filmmakers of the African diaspora held seminars and discussions in Africa���s first and only international film school.
Sankara took a leading role in the festival, speaking at and hosting the opening and closing ceremonies. He also took personal care to meet with African filmmakers and offer support in funding and production. Med Hondo was one of the directors who had been abused by French production monopolies in the pre-production of his epic Sarraounia. Sankara invited Hondo for a drink during the festival and promised him funding and support from the Burkinab�� government. The film was entirely shot in Burkina Faso, premiering at the following FESPACO 87���.
The festival was a rousing success, with Brahim Tsaki���s ���Tale of an Encounter��� winning the ��talon de Yennenga (first prize) award and Euzhan Palcy���s ���Sugar Cane Alley��� winning the Audience Award. Two years later, Sankara would be assassinated, and his national liberation project would be quashed by a French and American-backed coup headed by his former compatriot Blaise Compraor��. FESPACO would continue, however its anticolonial character and revolutionary expressions of solidarity would be rolled back under the French-backed regime. The material gains of the country would be revoked as well, returning to dependence on Europe for its economic livelihood.
The flow of history is not a totalizing force, however. Thirty-seven years after the death of Sankara, the anti-colonial rhetoric of those four years has returned in the form of the Alliance of Sahel States (AES). Burkina Faso���s military leader, Ibrahim Traore, left the imperialist-controlled Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) and formed the new AES coalition, which includes Mali, Niger, and Burkina Faso. There is also a strong movement to abandon the CFA Franc as currency, although there are attempts to maintain oversight by reforming it. The movement for a truly post-imperial Africa continues.
Film distributed for and by Africans across the continent maintains its kinetic potential for articulating the struggles, vision, and hopes of ordinary people. The US and European powers still pursue power over Africa���s resources, and thus seek to undermine their attempts at all aspects of sovereignty. Domestic film distribution of local artists has not been fully supported as access to cultural institutions remains an issue. As of 2019, there are only around 1,650 cinema screens on the entire continent, which equates to one per seven hundred thousand. For reference, France has about eleven thousand people per cinema screen, and in the US seven thousand per screen. Pushing for foreign private investment toward development in cinema does not equate to increased popular expression. Even if new theaters and screens are made available, what will fill their screens?��
Moments like FESPACO 85��� offer a history to lean upon. By listening to artists who express solidarity with the masses, states, and organizations can push forward cultural ideals that counter the imperialist hegemony that still seeks to subjugate and exploit the Global South. In the words of Amilcar Cabral, ���it may be seen that if imperialist domination has the vital need to practice cultural oppression, national liberation is necessarily an act of culture.���
January 23, 2025
When Brazil’s African Muslims scared the world
Maculele dance at the Toror�� Dike in the city of Salvador, Bahia, Brazil �� Joa Souza via Shutterstock. Leia em portugu��s��aqui.
On January 24, 1835, rumors that Africans were planning a revolt for early the following day started circulating in Salvador, the capital of the then province of Bahia, in Brazil. The news quickly reached the city���s enslaved and free Black people, then the majority of the city���s population. As slave owners panicked, the police quickly responded to the threat by frantically searching the houses of African-born formerly enslaved men and women, whom they suspected of participating in the plot.
But the police couldn���t stop the conspiracy right away. As the hunt for suspects continued, groups of Africans armed with swords, spears, pistols, and other weapons took to the streets of Salvador, which quickly became a battleground. Led by a group of Yoruba-speaking enslaved and formerly enslaved Muslim men, the insurrection was the largest urban slave uprising in the Americas. It became known as the Mal�� Revolt, after the term used in Bahia to refer to African-born Yoruba speakers and followers of Islam.
The revolt���s international repercussions and the panic it provoked derived from slaveholders��� persisting fear that a slave insurrection could end slavery and lead to another Haiti, the first Black independent nation free of slavery in the Americas. My book Humans in Shackles: An Atlantic History of Slavery shows how several international newspapers reported the news about Brazil���s African Muslim uprising. The Mal�� Revolt evolved from a series of smaller revolts that took place in Bahia during the first three decades of the 19th century.
Brazil became independent from Portugal in 1822, but the negotiated process of independence maintained the monarchy as the form of government. The post-independence period was marked by divisions and instability. Droughts provoked food shortages, therefore causing an economic crisis that affected Bahia.
After the Portuguese court escaped the invasion of Napoleon Bonaparte to relocate in Brazil in 1808, Britain put pressure on Portugal to end the slave trade to Brazil, therefore signing several treaties to stop the trade in enslaved Africans. This process increased the prices of enslaved Africans, and eventually culminated with the passage of new legislation, which prohibited transporting enslaved Africans to Brazil in 1831. As the Bahia sugar economy was growing, slave owners increased the workload of the scarcer enslaved workforce, thereby worsening their working conditions. Enslaved people resisted by escaping, joining runaway slave communities, and organizing revolts.
In the 15 years before the 1835 rebellion, nearly 60 percent of Bahia���s and Salvador���s African-born population was composed of individuals enslaved in the Bight of Benin, the coastal area stretching along what is today Togo, the Republic of Benin, and Nigeria.
Most of these Africans were Yoruba speakers (called nag��s in Brazil) captured during the wars opposing the Muslim Fulani and the states subjugated by the Oyo Empire. Others were made prisoners by the Kingdom of Dahomey army that waged war against its Yoruba-speaking neighbors, including Oyo. In other words, the West African context���especially the wars that led to the disintegration of the Oyo Empire and the concentration of Yoruba speakers in Bahia���is central to understanding the revolt.
���Bahia,��� by Jules Marie Vincent de Sinety, 1838. From Cole����o Brasiliana, Pinacoteca do Estado de S��o Paulo (via Wikimedia Commons).Several of these Africans were warriors, war prisoners, or captured as byproducts of warfare, which is why some scholars see the Mal�� Revolt as the continuation of the African jihad begun on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean.
Most Yoruba speakers adopted the Orisha religion. Whereas some were already Muslims in West Africa, others may have converted to Islam after reaching Brazilian soil. However, we can assume that most of these West African���born individuals of various ethnic groups, especially those living in Salvador, had been baptized in the Roman Catholic Church and, therefore, received Catholic names.
Even when these enslaved Africans purchased their freedom, their social position remained precarious. The Brazilian Constitution of 1824 established that only Brazilian-born freedpeople became citizens after manumission. Therefore, freed Africans were considered aliens, as acquiring Brazilian citizenship was impossible despite an existing procedure.
After a series of rebellions in the early 19th century, Brazilian authorities strictly controlled freed Africans. An 1830 decree restricted the mobility of African-born men and women, even in their own cities, where they had to carry a passport issued by Brazilian authorities confirming their good conduct.
In this context of increasingly anti-African repressive measures, Islam became a shelter and offered them a tool to resist slavery and anti-African discrimination. Ultimately, through the leadership of a small number of Muslim Yoruba speakers, many dozens of non-Muslim Yoruba-speaking enslaved men and freedmen joined the Mal�� Revolt.
The Mal�� Revolt was planned to start at dawn on Sunday, January 25, 1835, during a festival day commemorating a Catholic saint, when both enslaved people and slave owners were distracted. In addition, in the Arabic or Hijri calendar, January 25, 1835, was the date 25-Ramadan-1250 AH, a few days before the end of Muslims��� fasting for Ramadan.
The revolt���s goal was to wage war against white people or all people in the white man���s land, including mixed-race and Black Brazilian-born enslaved, freed, and free individuals.
The city���s insurgents hoped that the slaves in the neighboring plantations would join them, but as the rumors about the conspiracy spread, the police quickly started an operation to arrest the suspects. Still, 600 men took to the streets and fought for several hours.
���Vista da cidade de Salvador,��� by Anonymous, 1860. From Cole����o Brasiliana Iconogr��fica, Pinacoteca do Estado de S��o Paulo (via Wikimedia Commons).Eventually, the Mal�� Revolt was defeated on Sunday.
Bahian authorities interrogated and arrested hundreds of suspects. The main Brazilian newspapers in Rio de Janeiro, then the capital of the Brazilian Empire, reproduced a report by Bahia���s chief police officer narrating in detail the events of January 24���25, 1835.
This report estimated that 50 insurgents were killed, and many others were wounded. Both the report and the investigation that followed concluded that most African insurgents were Muslims familiar with the Koran, who could read and write in Arabic. Insurgents were wearing the white gowns (abad��s) that only Muslims wore in private spaces in Bahia. The police also found rebels carrying amulets, prayers, devotional manuscripts, and other items written in Arabic.
Newspaper articles in Rio de Janeiro complained about Brazil���s large population of enslaved Africans, due to the continuing illegal slave trade from Africa. They demanded Brazilian authorities deport to the African continent those Africans who, having been introduced to Brazil after the 1831 legal ban on the slave trade, were subsequently emancipated and acquired the status of ���Free Africans.���
Reporting rumors of new African conspiracies and calling for increasing surveillance of African-born men and women, some newspapers even warned about the influence of ���Haitian doctrines preached with impunity.��� These claims were not based on a direct connection but rather expressed slave owners��� fears of a broader revolt that, as happened in Haiti, would lead to the end of slavery. Brazilian slave owners and government authorities were terrified that Africans would lead other rebellions in Bahia and even in Rio de Janeiro.
Drawing on the report by Bahia���s chief police officer from mid-March to the end of August 1835, British, French, Spanish, US, and German newspapers reported on the Mal�� Revolt. One British newspaper said that ���some of the prisoners were found with little Arabic books and folded papers, inscribed with verses from the Alcoran, which African Mahometans are accustomed to wear about the person as charms.��� As the original Brazilian report stated that some rebels were owned by British nationals residing in Salvador, British newspapers falsely reported that ���the insurgents consisted almost entirely of negroes who were the favorites of their masters and had always been particularly well-treated.��� As slavery had already been abolished in British colonies by 1835, British newspapers presented the rebellion as a warning against the horrors of slavery. While denouncing the illegal slave trade to Brazil, they also depicted British residents of Brazil as benevolent slave owners, therefore promoting themselves as saviors.
In the next months, international newspapers continued reporting slave owners��� anxieties that new insurrections would follow. In May 1835, the French newspaper Le Spectateur and the Spanish newspaper El Guerrero y el compilador reported persisting fears of new rebellions in other parts of the country, especially in the capital Rio de Janeiro.
In the revolt���s aftermath, 231 people were tried. Of the 135 documented sentences, 28 enslaved people were acquitted, 4 African-born men were executed, and 12 death sentences were commuted to prison and whippings. Sixteen freed people were sentenced to prison, 8 to forced labor, 40 enslaved individuals were flogged, and 34 freedmen were deported. Later, more than 150 additional freed Africans were added to the deportation list.
The Mal�� Revolt was the most important slave rebellion staged in Brazil. It remains, 190 years later, a symbol of resistance against slavery and the fight against anti���Black African racism both in Brazil and across the Americas.
Rememorando os 190 anos da Revolta dos Mal��s no Brasil
Capoeira, Salvador, Bahia, Brazil �� Joa Souza via Shutterstock. Read in English��here.
Em 24 de janeiro de 1835, rumores de que africanos planejavam uma revolta come��ou a circular em Salvador, ent��o capital da prov��ncia da Bahia, no Brasil. A not��cia rapidamente chegou �� popula����o negra, escravizada e livre, que compunha a maioria da cidade. Enquanto os propriet��rios de escravizados entravam em p��nico, a pol��cia reagiu freneticamente, vasculhando as casas de homens e mulheres africanos libertos, suspeitos de participa����o na conspira����o.
No entanto, a pol��cia n��o conseguiu deter imediatamente a insurrei����o. Enquanto a ca��a aos suspeitos continuava, grupos de africanos armados com espadas, lan��as, pistolas e outras armas tomaram as ruas de Salvador, transformando a cidade rapidamente em um campo de batalha. Liderada por africanos mu��ulmanos, o processo foi reconhecido como Revolta dos Mal��s, sendo o maior levante urbano de escravizados nas Am��ricas.
As repercuss��es internacionais da revolta e o p��nico ��s elites provocado derivaram do medo persistente dos escravocratas de que uma insurrei����o escrava pudesse acabar com a escravid��o e dar origem a um “novo Haiti”. Meu livro, Humans in Shackles: An Atlantic History of Slavery, mostra como diversos jornais internacionais noticiaram a revolta dos africanos mu��ulmanos no Brasil. A Revolta dos Mal��s foi o ��pice de uma s��rie de levantes menores ocorridos na Bahia durante as tr��s primeiras d��cadas do s��culo XIX.
O Brasil tornou-se independente de Portugal em 1822, mas o processo de independ��ncia, negociado, manteve a monarquia como forma de governo. Contudo, o per��odo p��s-independ��ncia foi marcado por divis��es e instabilidade pol��tica. Secas provocaram escassez de alimentos, desencadeando uma crise econ��mica que afetou diretamente a Bahia.
O contexto internacional tamb��m teria influenciado. Ap��s a corte portuguesa fugir da invas��o de Napole��o Bonaparte e se realocar no Brasil em 1808, a Gr��-Bretanha pressionou Portugal a acabar com o tr��fico de escravizados para o Brasil, assinando v��rios tratados para interromper o tr��fico infame. Esse processo aumentou o pre��o dos escravizados e culminou com a aprova����o de uma nova legisla����o que proibia o transporte de africanos escravizados para o Brasil em 1831. Com o crescimento da economia a��ucareira na Bahia, os propriet��rios de escravos aumentaram a carga de trabalho, agravando suas condi����es de trabalho. Em resposta, os escravizados resistiram fugindo, juntando-se a comunidades de quilombolas e organizando revoltas.
Na Bahia, os africanos mu��ulmanos nascidos no continente, falantes de yor��b��, fossem escravizados ou livres, eram chamados de ���mal��s���. Assim, a revolta ficou conhecida como Revolta dos Mal��s, por ter sido liderada por um grupo de homens mu��ulmanos yor��b��s, escravizados e libertos.
Nos 15 anos que antecederam a rebeli��o de 1835, quase 60% da popula����o africana nascida no continente na Bahia e em Salvador como um todo, era composta por indiv��duos escravizados da Costa do Benim, regi��o costeira que abrange hoje o Togo, a Rep��blica do Benin e a Nig��ria.
A maioria desses africanos era composta por falantes de yor��b�� (chamados de nag��s no Brasil), capturados durante as guerras entre os mu��ulmanos fulas e os estados subjugados pelo Imp��rio de Oy��. Outros foram feitos prisioneiros pelo ex��rcito do Reino do Daom��, que travava guerras contra seus vizinhos yor��b��s, incluindo os de Oy��.
Em outras palavras, o contexto da ��frica Ocidental, especialmente as guerras que levaram �� desintegra����o do Imp��rio de Oy�� e �� concentra����o de falantes de yor��b�� na Bahia nos anos anteriores �� revolta, foi central para compreender a Revolta dos Mal��s.
���Bahia,��� by Jules Marie Vincent de Sinety, 1838. From the Cole����o Brasiliana, Pinacoteca do Estado de S��o Paulo (via Wikimedia Commons).V��rios desses africanos eram guerreiros, prisioneiros de guerra ou capturados como em conflitos, raz��o pela qual alguns estudiosos compreendem a Revolta dos Mal��s como uma continua����o do jihad africano iniciado do outro lado do Atl��ntico.
A maioria dos falantes de yor��b�� praticavam a religi��o dos orix��s. Enquanto alguns eram mu��ulmanos na ��frica Ocidental, outros podem ter se convertido ao islamismo ap��s chegar ao Brasil. No entanto, pode-se presumir que a maioria desses indiv��duos nascidos na ��frica Ocidental, de diferentes grupos ��tnicos, especialmente os que viviam em Salvador, foram batizados na Igreja Cat��lica Romana e, portanto, receberam nomes cat��licos.
Mesmo quando esses africanos escravizados conseguiam comprar sua liberdade, sua posi����o social permanecia prec��ria. A Constitui����o Brasileira de 1824 estabelecia que apenas os libertos nascidos no Brasil se tornavam cidad��os ap��s a manumiss��o. Assim, os africanos libertos eram considerados estrangeiros e, apesar de existir um procedimento, adquirir a cidadania brasileira era imposs��vel.
Ap��s uma s��rie de rebeli��es no in��cio do s��culo XIX, as autoridades brasileiras controlavam rigorosamente os africanos libertos. Um decreto de 1830 restringia a mobilidade de homens e mulheres nascidos na ��frica, mesmo em suas pr��prias cidades, onde eram obrigados a portar um passaporte emitido pelas autoridades brasileiras, confirmando sua ���boa conduta���.
Nesse contexto de medidas repressivas crescentemente anti-africanas, o islamismo tornou-se um ref��gio que lhes oferecia uma ferramenta para resistir �� escravid��o e �� discrimina����o anti-africana. Por fim, sob a lideran��a de um pequeno n��mero de mu��ulmanos falantes de yor��b��, dezenas de yor��b��s n��o mu��ulmanos, escravizados e libertos, uniram-se �� Revolta dos Mal��s.
A Revolta dos Mal��s foi planejada para come��ar na madrugada do domingo, 25 de janeiro de 1835, durante um dia festivo em comemora����o a um santo cat��lico, quando tanto os escravizados quanto os senhores de escravos estariam distra��dos. Al��m disso, no calend��rio ��rabe ou hijri, o dia 25 de janeiro correspondia a 25-Ramadan-1250 AH, poucos dias antes do fim do jejum do Ramadan para os mu��ulmanos.
Os insurgentes na cidade esperavam ser acompanhados pelos escravizados das planta����es vizinhas, mas, como os rumores sobre a conspira����o se espalharam rapidamente, a pol��cia iniciou uma opera����o para prender os suspeitos. Ainda assim, 600 homens tomaram as ruas e lutaram por v��rias horas. Sendo a Revolta dos Mal��s derrotada no domingo.
���Vista da cidade de Salvador,��� by Anonymous, 1860. From Cole����o Brasiliana Iconogr��fica, Pinacoteca do Estado de S��o Paulo (via Wikimedia Commons).As autoridades baianas interrogaram e prenderam centenas de suspeitos. Os principais jornais brasileiros, no Rio de Janeiro, ent��o capital do Imp��rio Portugu��s, produziram um relat��rio feito pelo chefe de pol��cia da Bahia narrando em detalhes os eventos de 24 e 25 de janeiro de 1835.
O relat��rio estimou que 50 insurgentes foram mortos e muitos outros ficaram feridos. Tanto o relat��rio quanto a investiga����o que se seguiu conclu��ram que a maioria dos insurgentes africanos eram mu��ulmanos familiarizados com o Alcor��o, capazes de ler e escrever em ��rabe. Os insurgentes vestiam t��nicas brancas (abad��s), que apenas mu��ulmanos usavam em espa��os privados. A pol��cia tamb��m encontrou pessoas portando amuletos, ora����es, manuscritos devocionais e outros itens escritos em ��rabe.
Os propriet��rios de escravos brasileiros e as autoridades governamentais estavam aterrorizadas com a possibilidade de africanos liderarem outras rebeli��es na Bahia e at�� no Rio de Janeiro.
Artigos de jornais no Rio de Janeiro criticavam a grande popula����o de africanos escravizados no Brasil devido �� continuidade do tr��fico ilegal de escravos. Eles exigiam que as autoridades brasileiras deportassem para o continente africano aqueles que, introduzidos no Brasil ap��s a proibi����o legal do tr��fico em 1831, fossem posteriormente emancipados e adquirissem o status de “africanos livres”.
Relatando rumores de novas conspira����es africanas e pedindo maior vigil��ncia sobre homens e mulheres nascidos na ��frica como medida para evitar novas rebeli��es, alguns artigos de jornais at�� alertavam sobre a influ��ncia de ���doutrinas haitianas pregadas com impunidade���. No entanto, essas refer��ncias n��o se baseavam em uma conex��o direta, mas refletiam os temores dos propriet��rios de escravos de uma revolta mais ampla que, como no Haiti, levaria ao fim da escravid��o.
Com base no relat��rio do chefe de pol��cia da Bahia, de meados de mar��o at�� o final de agosto de 1835, jornais brit��nicos, franceses, espanh��is, norte-americanos e alem��es noticiaram a Revolta dos Mal��s.
Um jornal brit��nico afirmou que “alguns dos prisioneiros foram encontrados com pequenos livros ��rabes e pap��is dobrados, inscritos com versos do Alcor��o, que os maometanos africanos est��o acostumados a usar no corpo como amuletos”.
O relat��rio original brasileiro mencionava que alguns rebeldes eram escravos de cidad��os brit��nicos residentes em Salvador, jornais brit��nicos falsamente relataram que “os insurgentes consistiam quase inteiramente de negros que eram os favoritos de seus senhores e sempre foram particularmente bem tratados”. Como a escravid��o j�� havia sido abolida nas col��nias brit��nicas em 1835, os jornais brit��nicos apresentaram a rebeli��o como um alerta contra os horrores da escravid��o. Enquanto denunciavam o tr��fico ilegal de escravos para o Brasil, tamb��m retratavam os residentes brit��nicos no Brasil supostamente como senhores benevolentes, promovendo-se como salvadores.
Nos meses seguintes, jornais internacionais continuaram relatando as ansiedades dos propriet��rios de escravos sobre novas insurrei����es. Em maio de 1835, o jornal franc��s Le Spectateur e o jornal espanhol El Guerrero y el compilador relataram temores persistentes de novas rebeli��es em outras partes do pa��s, especialmente na capital, Rio de Janeiro.
Como consequ��ncia da revolta, 231 pessoas foram julgadas. Das 135 senten��as documentadas, 28 escravizados foram absolvidos, quatro homens nascidos na ��frica foram executados e 12 senten��as de morte foram comutadas para pris��o e a��oites. Dezesseis pessoas libertas foram condenadas �� pris��o, 8 aos trabalhos for��ados, 40 escravizados foram a��oitados e 34 libertos foram deportados. Posteriormente, mais de 150 africanos libertos foram inclu��dos na lista de deporta����o.
A Revolta dos Mal��s foi a mais importante rebeli��o de escravizados no Brasil. Passados 190 anos, ela permanece como um s��mbolo de resist��ncia contra a escravid��o e a luta contra o racismo anti-africano no Brasil e nas Am��ricas.
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