Sean Jacobs's Blog, page 190
February 11, 2020
The end of the CFA franc?
Adjame mannequins. Image credit Carsten ten Brink via Flickr CC.
A group of progressive African artists and intellectuals are calling for greater debate on the future of monetary union in West Africa following the surprising announcement on December 21, 2019 by the presidents of France and Cote d���Ivoire, Emmanuel Macron and Alassane Ouattara, to reform the CFA franc and rebaptize it the eco. Bowing to growing anti-colonial sentiment, especially to its military presence in the region, the French government and its allies have been forced to concede some changes to the CFA while still angling to preserve the status quo.
Ouattara is emblematic of the neocolonial ties between France and its former African colonies. He rose to power due to French military intervention after the disputed elections of 2010. He has long been a loyal servant of European and North American political and economic interests, both as a former IMF official and as head of the BCEAO, the common central bank that issues the West African CFA franc. With presidential elections in Cote d���Ivoire scheduled for later this year, critics view the accelerated timetable to introduce the eco���by July 2020���as an electoral ploy. In response, critics have decried the proposed reforms as merely cosmetic, falling far short of the monetary sovereignty West Africa needs in order to build widespread prosperity.
Trumpeted in many headlines as the ���end of the CFA,��� the announced reforms would do more to preserve the current arrangement than to fundamentally alter it. While we have yet to see detailed formal proposals, Ouattara and Macron called for changing the name from CFA, removing requirement to keep foreign reserves with the French treasury, and the removal of French representatives. These moves do not significantly change the operation of the CFA, they do not change the peg of the CFA to the euro while French government promises its controversial ���convertibility guarantee.��� The eco would still prioritize monetary stability exclusively, to the detriment of economic development.
A rebrand
Originally, CFA stood for colonies francaise d���Afrique (renamed at independence in 1960 communaute financiere africaine in West Africa and Cooperation financiere en Afrique centrale in Central Africa), the name is one of the most powerful symbols of continuity with French colonialism. Incredibly, the CFA franc���the colonial African franc���still exists in a world where the French franc disappeared 20 years ago. The Economic Community of West African States��� (ECOWAS) plan for monetary integration envisaged first a monetary union including the anglophone states���Nigeria, Ghana, The Gambia, Sierra Leone, and Liberia���and Guinea-Conakry which would later merge with the West African CFA zone���Guinea-Bissau, Senegal, Togo, Niger, Mali, Benin, Burkina Faso, and Cote d���Ivoire. What the choice of eco means for this project is now unclear, but by rebranding the CFA, Ouattara and Macron are getting rid of one of its most objectionable elements: its name.
On January 16, 2020, the finance ministers of Nigeria, Ghana, Sierra Leone, Liberia, and Guinea denounced the move since eco was the name the ECOWAS leaders had agreed to in July, 2019 for an eventual currency union of all 15 members. Although its defenders argue it is an attempt to restart ECOWAS��� project despite years of stalling by Nigerian authorities, most left-wing analysts interpret the renaming of the CFA as a cynical attempt, led by France and its allies in the region, to ���kidnap the eco,��� undermine an eventual ECOWAS��� monetary union and isolate Nigeria.
Moving the savings account from Paris
Long a source of conspiracy theories and resentment, Ouattara and Macron promised to eliminate the requirement that the CFA countries keep half of their foreign reserves at special accounts with the France���s treasury. Originally, two regional central banks had to keep all their foreign reserves in French francs with the treasury, later dropped to 65% when African governments amended their treaties in the early 1970s, and finally to 50% with further treaty changes in 2005. Critics have asserted that African savings were subsidizing French public spending or that they could have been invested in better assets (stronger currencies and/or assets with higher yields). The writing has been on the wall since November 2019 when the President of Benin, Patrice Talon, declared that the BCEAO would retire all reserves from Paris. This change too, however, is largely symbolic as the BCEAO is likely to hold its reserves in euros and in Europe, even if it diversifies away from French assets.
French official still waiting in shadows
Perhaps the most untenable part of the CFA arrangement���the most blatant example of ongoing French imperialism���is the presence of French officials on the Boards of Directors of the two CFA regional central banks. The Macron-Ouattara proposal removes all French representatives. But it also maintains the French government���s ���convertibility guarantee��� for the eco and its ability to name an ���independent��� Board member. This promise by the French government to backstop the CFA franc (by standing ready to buy CFA and sell euros at a fixed rate in ostensibly unlimited amounts), has been hailed as the key to the CFA franc���s remarkably stable exchange rate (changed only once since 1948). Historically, this guarantee, has proven hollow. The two regional central banks have only had to borrow from the French treasury once in their history, during the debt crises of the 1980s. Instead of supporting the CFA franc indefinitely, the French treasury and the IMF (historically close) imposed a steep 50% devaluation of the CFA in 1994. The French government will only support the eco if governments in the region come under IMF surveillance. Moreover, the proposals call for the return of French representatives to the BCEAO���s management if it ever needs to borrow from the French government to support the peg of the eco to the euro. Ouattara can therefore boast of the end of French tutelage while still leaving the door open for its return.
Same peg, same problems
Most importantly, under the Macron-Ouattara plan the eco would remain pegged to the euro, leaving in place the same decades-old obstacles to the region���s development: the restraining of much needed credit to local economy, overvaluation of the currency hurting exports and capital flight. As long as the peg remains, the BCEAO���s main priority is to maintain a high level of foreign reserves (wherever it chooses to hold them) instead of stimulating the regional economy to achieve full employment. In order to maintain this exchange rate, the BCEAO commits to limiting the creation of money, which necessarily implies less domestic investment. The choice of the exchange rate level (currently about 656 CFA francs for one euro) is arbitrary and has led in the past to overvaluation, which hurts the competitiveness of exports from the region. The main beneficiaries of this fixed exchange rate regime have been African elites���who can protect the value of their often stolen wealth from devaluation and stash it away safely in Europe���and French capital who avoid exchange rate risk when remitting profits and enjoy a chasse gardee (private hunting ground) as investors in the region.
Opening the debate
In raising the question of the CFA���s future, Macron and Ouattara have opened a policy debate that might not lead to their preferred outcome: the eco as simple avatar of the CFA franc. Progressive economists have long debated alternative proposals, from the creation of separate national currencies for current members of CFA, to separate currencies tied to a regional unit of account, to a common currency pegged to a basket of major currencies���not simply the euro. The Ghanaian government responded that it is open to the joining the eco but only if it had a more flexible exchange rate. Nigeria, with more than two-thirds of the region���s GDP and half its population, would dominate any monetary union, but with its protectionist streak might prefer to guard its monetary policy autonomy (and avoid subsidizing its poorer neighbors).
Few governments meet ECOWAS��� ���convergence criteria��� (macroeconomic performance targets inspired by the Maastricht Treaty that created the euro) for joining the eco. The tug-of-war between the French and Nigerian governments for regional hegemony is likely to continue, making it impossible to predict the future. Equally unclear is what, if anything, will change for the Central African CFA zone (comprising Chad, Congo-Brazzaville, Equatorial Guinea, Central African Republic, Gabon and Cameroon). What is clear is that progressive pan-Africanists should fight for an inclusive, democratic debate on the monetary policies, necessary to promote just, egalitarian, and sustainable economic development.
The end of the CFA Franc?
Adjame mannequins. Image credit Carsten ten Brink via Flickr CC.
A group of progressive African artists and intellectuals are calling for greater debate on the future of monetary union in West Africa following the surprising announcement on December 21, 2019 by the presidents of France and Cote d���Ivoire, Emmanuel Macron and Alassane Ouattara, to reform the CFA franc and rebaptize it the eco. Bowing to growing anti-colonial sentiment, especially to its military presence in the region, the French government and its allies have been forced to concede some changes to the CFA while still angling to preserve the status quo.
Ouattara is emblematic of the neocolonial ties between France and its former African colonies. He rose to power due to French military intervention after the disputed elections of 2010. He has long been a loyal servant of European and North American political and economic interests, both as a former IMF official and as head of the BCEAO, the common central bank that issues the West African CFA franc. With presidential elections in Cote d���Ivoire scheduled for later this year, critics view the accelerated timetable to introduce the eco���by July 2020���as an electoral ploy. In response, critics have decried the proposed reforms as merely cosmetic, falling far short of the monetary sovereignty West Africa needs in order to build widespread prosperity.
Trumpeted in many headlines as the ���end of the CFA,��� the announced reforms would do more to preserve the current arrangement than to fundamentally alter it. While we have yet to see detailed formal proposals, Ouattara and Macron called for changing the name from CFA, removing requirement to keep foreign reserves with the French treasury, and the removal of French representatives. These moves do not significantly change the operation of the CFA, they do not change the peg of the CFA to the euro while French government promises its controversial ���convertibility guarantee.��� The eco would still prioritize monetary stability exclusively, to the detriment of economic development.
A rebrand
Originally, CFA stood for colonies francaise d���Afrique (renamed at independence in 1960 communaute financiere africaine in West Africa and Cooperation financiere en Afrique centrale in Central Africa), the name is one of the most powerful symbols of continuity with French colonialism. Incredibly, the CFA franc���the colonial African franc���still exists in a world where the French franc disappeared 20 years ago. The Economic Community of West African States��� (ECOWAS) plan for monetary integration envisaged first a monetary union including the anglophone states���Nigeria, Ghana, The Gambia, Sierra Leone, and Liberia���and Guinea-Conakry which would later merge with the West African CFA zone���Guinea-Bissau, Senegal, Togo, Niger, Mali, Benin, Burkina Faso, and Cote d���Ivoire. What the choice of eco means for this project is now unclear, but by rebranding the CFA, Ouattara and Macron are getting rid of one of its most objectionable elements: its name.
On January 16, 2020, the finance ministers of Nigeria, Ghana, Sierra Leone, Liberia, and Guinea denounced the move since eco was the name the ECOWAS leaders had agreed to in July, 2019 for an eventual currency union of all 15 members. Although its defenders argue it is an attempt to restart ECOWAS��� project despite years of stalling by Nigerian authorities, most left-wing analysts interpret the renaming of the CFA as a cynical attempt, led by France and its allies in the region, to ���kidnap the eco,��� undermine an eventual ECOWAS��� monetary union and isolate Nigeria.
Moving the savings account from Paris
Long a source of conspiracy theories and resentment, Ouattara and Macron promised to eliminate the requirement that the CFA countries keep half of their foreign reserves at special accounts with the France���s treasury. Originally, two regional central banks had to keep all their foreign reserves in French francs with the treasury, later dropped to 65% when African governments amended their treaties in the early 1970s, and finally to 50% with further treaty changes in 2005. Critics have asserted that African savings were subsidizing French public spending or that they could have been invested in better assets (stronger currencies and/or assets with higher yields). The writing has been on the wall since November 2019 when the President of Benin, Patrice Talon, declared that the BCEAO would retire all reserves from Paris. This change too, however, is largely symbolic as the BCEAO is likely to hold its reserves in euros and in Europe, even if it diversifies away from French assets.
French official still waiting in shadows
Perhaps the most untenable part of the CFA arrangement���the most blatant example of ongoing French imperialism���is the presence of French officials on the Boards of Directors of the two CFA regional central banks. The Macron-Ouattara proposal removes all French representatives. But it also maintains the French government���s ���convertibility guarantee��� for the eco and its ability to name an ���independent��� Board member. This promise by the French government to backstop the CFA franc (by standing ready to buy CFA and sell euros at a fixed rate in ostensibly unlimited amounts), has been hailed as the key to the CFA franc���s remarkably stable exchange rate (changed only once since 1948). Historically, this guarantee, has proven hollow. The two regional central banks have only had to borrow from the French treasury once in their history, during the debt crises of the 1980s. Instead of supporting the CFA franc indefinitely, the French treasury and the IMF (historically close) imposed a steep 50% devaluation of the CFA in 1994. The French government will only support the eco if governments in the region come under IMF surveillance. Moreover, the proposals call for the return of French representatives to the BCEAO���s management if it ever needs to borrow from the French government to support the peg of the eco to the euro. Ouattara can therefore boast of the end of French tutelage while still leaving the door open for its return.
Same peg, same problems
Most importantly, under the Macron-Ouattara plan the eco would remain pegged to the euro, leaving in place the same decades-old obstacles to the region���s development: the restraining of much needed credit to local economy, overvaluation of the currency hurting exports and capital flight. As long as the peg remains, the BCEAO���s main priority is to maintain a high level of foreign reserves (wherever it chooses to hold them) instead of stimulating the regional economy to achieve full employment. In order to maintain this exchange rate, the BCEAO commits to limiting the creation of money, which necessarily implies less domestic investment. The choice of the exchange rate level (currently about 656 CFA francs for one euro) is arbitrary and has led in the past to overvaluation, which hurts the competitiveness of exports from the region. The main beneficiaries of this fixed exchange rate regime have been African elites���who can protect the value of their often stolen wealth from devaluation and stash it away safely in Europe���and French capital who avoid exchange rate risk when remitting profits and enjoy a chasse gardee (private hunting ground) as investors in the region.
Opening the debate
In raising the question of the CFA���s future, Macron and Ouattara have opened a policy debate that might not lead to their preferred outcome: the eco as simple avatar of the CFA franc. Progressive economists have long debated alternative proposals, from the creation of separate national currencies for current members of CFA, to separate currencies tied to a regional unit of account, to a common currency pegged to a basket of major currencies���not simply the euro. The Ghanaian government responded that it is open to the joining the eco but only if it had a more flexible exchange rate. Nigeria, with more than two-thirds of the region���s GDP and half its population, would dominate any monetary union, but with its protectionist streak might prefer to guard its monetary policy autonomy (and avoid subsidizing its poorer neighbors).
Few governments meet ECOWAS��� ���convergence criteria��� (macroeconomic performance targets inspired by the Maastricht Treaty that created the euro) for joining the eco. The tug-of-war between the French and Nigerian governments for regional hegemony is likely to continue, making it impossible to predict the future. Equally unclear is what, if anything, will change for the Central African CFA zone (comprising Chad, Congo-Brazzaville, Equatorial Guinea, Central African Republic, Gabon and Cameroon). What is clear is that progressive pan-Africanists should fight for an inclusive, democratic debate on the monetary policies, necessary to promote just, egalitarian, and sustainable economic development.
February 10, 2020
Bernard-Henry L��vy in Nigeria: spectacle versus analysis
Bernard Henri Levy speaks at a conference in Argentina in 2017. Image credit Mauro Rico via Argentinian Ministry of Culture Flickr CC.
Bernard-Henry L��vy���s article in Paris March, declaring a ���pre-genocidal��� situation in Nigeria, reveals a gap between spectacle dressed as news versus the reality on the ground. By seeking to shock the audience, one runs the risk of misrepresenting the facts, discrediting the media, and making the situation on the ground worse. The following is an interview with Vincent Foucher, CNRS Research Fellow at Les Afriques dans le Monde lab-SciencesPo Bordeaux, by Caroline Roussy, researcher at IRIS.
Caroline Roussy
Is there currently in Nigeria a ���pre-genocidal��� situation, with violence perpetrated by the Fulani from the north against the Christians in the center and the south of the country with the approval of President Buhari and the army���s leadership? Is such geographical representation of the religious divide accurate?
Vincent Foucher
No. The current situation is not one of a pre-genocide. It is true that there are brutal sporadic violent episodes, generally pitting nomadic pastoralist Fulani against farmers in the rural areas (but there are also some violent clashes in urban areas as well, and some involving non-nomadic Fulani). This is true both in the center and the south, but also in the northern region, where Fulani herders are confronting other communities, whether Muslim or not, especially over grazing areas and damages to crops by the herds.
This violence is however localized, and it is not coordinated on a large scale contrary to what L��vy claims, even though certain episodes may reverberate in other parts of the country. This violence is not new, but it has been on the rise in recent years due to a number of factors���the development of increasingly massive herds, rising demand for meat in urban centers in the south, climate change, and expansion of farmlands. There are also victims in both camps. For instance, members of the ethnic Mambilla community, who are mostly Christian, killed several hundred Fulani villagers in 2017 in Taraba state in the center-east of the country.
It is therefore inaccurate to describe the current situation as one of a pre-genocide. Raphael Lemkin, the lawyer who coined the word ���genocide,��� defines it as ���coordinated strategy of destruction [of a community].��� Genocide requires a coordinated plan by a state or an organization. That is not the case in Nigeria.
The Nigerian state is absolutely not operating with a genocidal logic, even a preliminary one. And this is certainly the most astonishing of L��vy���s claims: yes, President Buhari is a Fulani and a Muslim, but he is definitely not an Islamist, or a genocidaire. Like all his predecessors, President Buhari is trying, with unequal success, to maintain Nigeria���s unity. He has allies in all regions, in all communities. Nigeria has no organized system of exclusion and discrimination against specific communities. Of course, there are clientelist networks, and some local political leaders or military commanders can favor one community or another, or they may take bribes. And in this regard, the herders may have an advantage because their cattle is more fungible than, say, crops: with cattle, they may find it easier to buy favors. But all communities, regardless of their faith, are involved in the governance of Nigeria, notably through the federal system. As for the army, it is quite inclusive, thanks again to the constitutional notion of ���federal character,��� according to which all communities must be represented fairly in all state institutions and bodies.
It is true that President Buhari picked many Muslim northerners like himself for key positions in the security sector (army, state security, national security adviser). But other communities are present at high level positions in the security sector too. Muslims do not have a monopoly. Also, many of these senior Muslim security officials are not Fulani, and come from other northern communities, especially from the northeast, which the region most affected by the Boko Haram activities.
Moreover, the idea of a Muslim north and Christian south is not accurate, even though that may also be how many Nigerians imagine and represent their country. There are indigenous Christians in the north, and Islam is very influential in the South, because of the large northern diaspora in the south, but also the Yoruba, a large portion of which are Muslim. As for the central region, it is an ethnic and religious melting pot. Therefore, L��vy���s version of the ethno-religious map of Nigeria is wrong.
Caroline Roussy
Is there, as L��vy claims, a coordination between the Fulani and Boko Haram? He claims that there are ���bush camps������which he said he heard from an American humanitarian worker���where Boko Haram trains the Fulani. Is that credible?
Vincent Foucher
Some have claimed, over many years now, that there is a link between Boko Haram and the Fulani. But there has been no solid evidence to support that claim. Of course, men in arms can circulate from one role to another: armed bandits, cattle thieves, jihadists, herders, and even soldiers or police officers ��� Symmetrically, some sources mention for instance that some communities such as the Tiv, a predominantly Christian community in Benue State in the south of the country, recruited former Boko Haram militants as mercenaries to protect themselves against Fulani herders. But, in any case, we still do not have evidence of a close link between Boko Haram and the Fulani herders. Recently, sources have indicated that another Nigerian jihadist movement, Ansaru, which is linked to Al-Qaeda, is seeking to recruit among armed bandits, including some Fulani. But just because some Fulani herders are shouting ���Allahu Akbar��� while fighting does not necessarily mean that they are jihadists, or that they are linked to Boko Haram. In fact, Muslims in the Nigerian army also shout ���Allahu Akbar��� when they are fighting against Boko Haram.
Regarding the so-called ���bush camps,��� there is no evidence that they exist. I���m wondering who the ���American humanitarian worker��� that L��vy encountered really is. You know, Nigeria is one of the playgrounds of the US ultra-conservative evangelical missionary work, which is also violently anti-Muslim. This in fact partially explains the radicalization of Nigerian Islam, which has been more precocious than elsewhere in West Africa. The story that L��vy peddles resonates in the United States, especially within Evangelical and conservative circles. L��vy���s article has since been republished in the Wall Street Journal, and it is welcomed with enthusiasm by the ultra-Christian right and relayed by American and French magazines and sites such as aleteia.org or Valeurs Actuelles.
Boko Haram first emerged in Borno state in the northeast of the country and has never really established itself in the rest of the northern region. The northeast is an ethnic melting pot, and Boko Haram recruited first from the Kanuri community, but also from other groups, including the Fulani of Borno. But Boko Haram has also attacked Fulani herders and other groups with livestock. The Fulani have regularly fought back Boko Haram with their rifles (or bows). So, we must avoid the simplistic narrative of rival ethnic identities: they are never a given, they result from the process of ethnicization of social relationships, a process to which L��vy contributes.
Caroline Roussy
What made you decide to speak out against L��vy���s narrative?
Vincent Foucher
L��vy���s article has outraged all researchers and journalists familiar with the situation in Nigeria. With some colleagues, we published an op-ed in Le Monde, and we also engaged in the debate on social media. Beyond L��vy���s weekend adventure and rushed analysis, his reading of and writing on the situation in Nigeria is very dangerous. Some Nigerian Christian religious and political leaders are trying to politicize the situation, not necessarily to find a solution, but rather to mobilize an electorate and networks of support in and outside of Nigeria. All this is potentially explosive for a country that is divided roughly between two major religious communities, and which, tellingly enough, is experiencing controversies regarding the demography of its component parts and its census. The religious divide partly overlaps with ethnolinguistic, economic, and political divisions. Also, the imaginary in Nigeria is marked by the idea of genocide. The brutal civil war in Biafra (1967-1970) left a lasting scar, even if it ended with a remarkable reintegration of the vanquished.
These days, the craziest rumors and conspiracy theories are circulating, pitting Muslims and Christians against each other: in the north of the country, rumors once alleged that polio vaccination campaigns were in fact aimed at sterilizing the Muslim community to curb its demographic growth. Similarly, many Christians believe that the Nigerian state protects Boko Haram and deliberately sends Christian soldiers to their death in Borno. Fake news is a huge problem in the very tense Nigerian public space.
I do no know what led L��vy to involve himself in this matter. Whether he is aware or not, he has allowed himself to be used for a dubious cause. In any case, instead of helping solve a problem, he has made the situation a bit worse, feeding a potentially larger and deadlier confrontation. His defense is weak: he claims that he only told what he saw. Yet, bearing witness also requires work, research, and analysis. And L��vy has allowed himself to be paraded���in every sense of the word���by a few Christian militants, without bothering to seriously engage with any Fulani, which he caricatures as aggressive, proselytizers, and even pro-Nazi. However, there are Fulani politicians or herders��� unions with whom he could have easily talked to.
Caroline Roussy
Does the possibility of international pressure seem plausible to you?
Vincent Foucher
All states should be subjected to both national and international scrutiny. For instance, the international community���s reaction to police violence in France is both necessary and useful. However, the local context must be taken into account.
Nigeria is a demographic and economic powerhouse, and Nigerian nationalism is acute. In general, Nigerian authorities are not responsive to international pressure, they can afford to ignore it because of the country���s oil resources. Still, national and international human rights NGOs are regularly trying to hold the Nigerian state accountable. They continue, each in their own way, their courageous, serious, sustained work of advocacy, criticism, assistance to the victims and also of dialogue, when possible, with the authorities. In such a situation, one has to be careful and attentive to complexity, in order to make a positive impact. L��vy���s cavalier attitude can contribute to discrediting the international community in the eyes of the Nigerian authorities. This is all the more a problem as the Nigerian authorities are aware of the problem and are trying to remedy it.
February 9, 2020
Excavating forgotten histories in South Africa
Ohlange Institute (Ccarlstead, Flickr CC).
When the 1913 Land Act of the Union of South Africa is recalled in the public imagination, Sol Plaatje���s name and book Native Life in South Africa become the obvious example which captures that historical moment. The Land Act legislated the dispossession of land which had already begun with Dutch settler colonialism; it further entrenched land segregation by prohibiting black people from buying and occupying 93 percent of the land. The remaining 7 percent was demarcated as “native reserves” for the majority of the population. Plaatje���s book was an expose of the effects of the law; he began writing the book in 1914 to share his observations with an international audience and garner sympathy for the growing resistance against the law. While Plaatje���s work is an extensive and rich historical text, I have often wondered what it would mean to read the text in conversation with Adelaide (Tantsi) Dube���s poem ���Africa my native land��� which was also published in 1913.
The lack of engagement by the public and mainstream education with a variety of historical texts which help with the work of remembering and unremembering poses questions about how narratives are shaped and reshaped over time. The nature of historical studies and analysis remains preoccupied with historical events and profiles of history makers���who are mostly men���as though events happened in isolation rather than in conversation with a complex set of circumstances. This is to say, history is configured through the eyes of those who have access to knowledge production in elite institutions without a serious consideration of oral history.
Published in October 1913, four months after the Land Act passed, ���African my native land��� raises questions about the poet as well as the ways in which women were participating in public discourse in early 1900s South Africa. Adelaide Tantsi was a writer, activist and teacher who was Charlotte Maxeke���s peer at Wilberforce Institute in Ohio from 1901 until 1904. She was one of the handful of South Africans studying at Wilberforce and returning to South Africa to establish schools and churches. However, in spite of her connection with this small group of the educated elite, little has been written about Adelaide Tantsi in textbooks and historical narratives about early 1900s South Africa other than that she was married to John Langalibalele Dube���s brother (the founding president of the South African Native National Congress, the precursor to the African National Congress), Charles Dube.
Virtually nothing is written about any other writing Tantsi may have contributed to newspapers or her involvement in politics during a period where public discourse was growing in the newspapers in the 1900s. The absence of engagement with Adelaide���s intellectual and cultural production highlights the nature of erasure of black women who wrote themselves into history. Furthermore, her absence reveals the ways in which the transnational experience of black women are seldom taken seriously. The most recent attempt to address this marginalization of black women���s internationalism can be found in the book To Turn the Whole World Over: Black Women and Internationalism (2019) edited by Keisha N. Blain and Tiffany M. Gill, which locates black women within the conversation of internationalism, which is often dominated by narratives about men who were traveling and sharing ideas in the nineteenth century. The book shows how women are part of this tradition, advancing women���s rights and laying the foundation for feminism.
The poem is the only clue we have of Adelaide���s voice and her own engagement with the Land Act which altered the lives of black people and continues to have a political and social presence in South Africa. The poem was published in the newspaper, Ilanga laseNatali, and has been anthologized in other texts such as Women Writing Africa: Southern Region which offers the most extensive information available about Adelaide���s biography, even though it is scant considering that she founded and taught a school she established in Johannesburg before joining Dube���s school, Ohlange Institute in Natal.
I am most interested in the final stanza of the poem:
Despair of thee I never, never will,
Struggle I must for freedom���God���s great gift
Till every drop of blood within my veins
Shall dry upon my troubled bones, oh
thou Dearest Native Land!
These lines resonate with the political rhetoric of African nationalism, suggesting evidence of a poet attuned with the public discourse of her time. ���Struggle I must for freedom��� continues to resonate in political discourse even today. It is possible that Adelaide could have been a prolific writer whose work remains in the newspaper archive waiting to be excavated. The challenge with the newspaper archive is access; most newspaper archives have only been recently digitized but mostly remain inaccessible in university databases. Other newspapers were destroyed or lost as they were not deemed as a valuable archive to protect.
This is the challenge with erasure: the idea of women in public life seems to emerge anew as though there is no tradition and lineage which has already normalized the political involvement and intellectual labor of black women. But the archives tell us otherwise. Women such as Adelaide Tantsi, Nokuthela Dube, Charlotte Maxeke, Nontsizi Mgqwetho, Lilian Tshabalala, Mina Soga, Frieda Matthews, and Ellen Pumla Ngozwana Kisosonkole (to name a few) were not only in conversation with each other, but they actively participated in the political and social affairs of their time. Without an acknowledgment of these voices and a rich tradition of public engagement, the narratives we hold about the past remain incomplete.
February 8, 2020
Reading List: Peter James Hudson
Cestos, Rivercess County, Liberia. Image credit Cameron Zohoori for Together Liberia via Flickr CC.
Caree A. Banton���s More Auspicious��Shores: Barbadian Migration to Liberia, Blackness, and the Making of an African��Republic (Cambridge, 2019) offers a thoughtful perspective on the history of pan-African praxis���a perspective that is most welcome given Ghana���s just-concluded 2019 ���Year of Return,��� with its jump-starting of black celebrity applications for African citizenship. Banton, a Jamaican historian at the University of Arkansas, recounts the emigration of 346 Black Barbadians to Liberia in 1865. They left an island, where the promises of emancipation had floundered due to imperial indifference, to start new lives in a black republic striving for a stable sovereignty, but shaken by class and ethnic rivalry. More Auspicious��Shores narrates the complex politics of black solidarity���played out in the ongoing contretemps between West Indian and African-American settlers and indigenous Liberians���that had as its backdrop both the righteousness of pan-African idealism and the condescension of western civilizationism. Meticulously researched and elegantly written, More Auspicious��Shores is an important intervention into the early history of pan-Africanism. Banton���s reconstruction of the 19th century black Atlantic offers important lessons for the 21st.
Diasporic African Press has quietly built a reputation as the premier publisher of critical writing from and on the black world. They have combined the re-release of ���lost��� classics, such as T. Ras Makonnen���s Pan-Africanism Within, with the publication of smart, sharply designed single-issue readers and edited collections. Discourse on Africana Studies: James Turner and the Paradigms of Knowledge (Diasporic African Press, 2016), edited by UCLA historian and legendary funkster Scot Brown, falls into the latter category. Turner, a scholar-activist who founded Cornell University���s Africana Studies and Research Center, is a pioneer in the Black Studies movement. Discourse on Africana Studies pulls together a selection of his essays and interventions, grouped here under the rubrics of black nationalism, the disciplinary formations of Black/African Studies, pan-Africanism and black internationalism, and the politics of race. Together, the essays demonstrate why Turner remains such a revered and respected figure in the field, while showing how his vision for both the political and intellectual claims of Black Studies are as relevant and urgent now as they were when the discipline was born in fire 50 years ago. ���The Political Economy of American Investment in South Africa,��� for example, which first appeared in the Cornell Review in 1979, remains a remarkable model for what a Black Studies critique of the political economy of imperialism and racial capitalism should look like. If the pedagogical impulse for the Black Studies curriculum is to provide a blue print for education for liberation, then Discourse on Africana Studies is our urgently needed text-book.
M. NourbeSe Philip is perhaps best known to many readers for “Zong!,” her harrowing, long poem on memory, mortality, and the middle passage. But the Tobago-born, Toronto-based writer and intellectual has for many years worked across a range of genres including novels, plays, editorials, and essays. Blank: Essays and Interviews (Book*hug, 2017), contains a wide-ranging selection of Philip���s critical work, much of it previously published but often out of print and exceedingly hard to find. For those who know Philip primarily as a poet, Blank is an excellent introduction to the range and depth of her intellectual engagements���and the uncompromising and torrid terms of her critique. In prose that is sharp, clear-eyed, and startlingly trenchant, and at once profoundly morale and radically experimental, Philip���s interventions tackle question of racism and cultural politics, of diaspora and black geographies, and of language and imperialism. Blank is a stunning collection from a towering figure of black letters.
Aaron Kamugisha���s Beyond Coloniality: Citizenship and Freedom in the Caribbean Intellectual Tradition (Indiana, 2019) offers a provocative, occasionally disturbing, account of the cultural and political economic landscape of the contemporary Anglophone Caribbean. Drawing deeply from the region���s leftist intellectual traditions, Kamugisha, a political theorist based at the University of the West Indies, Cave Hill, is bold and unrestrained in his critiques of the post-independence Antilles. For Kamugisha the modern Caribbean has settled into the contented discomfit of neocolonialism while imbibing the imported elixir of a bootleg neoliberalism. Caribbean states are shaped by clientelism, elite domination, and a vampiric off-shorism while their societies are stratified through a naturalized racial hierarchy whose categories are refracted and distorted through the chipped prisms of class, color, caste, and gender. Working together, these terms and practices constitute the dispiriting ���coloniality��� of Kamugisha���s title. But there���s hope. Kamugisha finds salvation in the long tradition of Caribbean revolutionary critique, especially across a bridge connecting the writings of C.L.R. James, the anti-colonial Marxist, and Sylvia Wynter, the radical humanist. For Kamugisha, these two intellectuals offer a pathway to a world ���beyond coloniality��� and towards Caribbean freedom.
February 7, 2020
How African is the African Studies Review?
[image error]
During a recent visit to Senegal, I spent time with Dr. Cheikh Thiam and Dr. Divine Fuh discussing what makes African studies particularly African. We reflected on some of the structural tensions in African studies research, the inequities embedded in the field, and disjunctures between research programs imagined outside the continent and realities on the ground for African scholars and visiting researchers. This meeting was one of several in Senegal, Mauritania, Ghana, and South Africa during which I considered the disconnect between those who research, write, and publish about Africa, and the lived experience of African researchers affiliated with universities, research institutes, and other scholarly networks and fora. A recurring theme in our discussions centered on how and why so many articles written about a particular place, nation, community, or group are rarely accessible or circulated among those who inhabit the very site of study. In many respects, these many and related concerns return us to a central question: how African is the��African Studies Review (ASR)?
After mulling over this conundrum, my colleagues offered a suggestion. What if we were to actively promote new research about a particular country��in��that country? What if, for example, we took the newest work about Nigeria published in the ASR to emerging Nigerian scholars in Nigeria, to share it and discuss it? Building on this proposition, the ASR Seminar was hatched. The ASR Seminar is a new initiative piloted twice in late 2019 to engage young, emerging, and early-career scholars based at institutions of higher learning in Africa with pertinent new scholarship appearing in the ASR. Two interdisciplinary seminars were co-hosted by Dr. Thiam and locally-based scholars in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia [Dr. Daniel Assefa] and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania [Dr. John Wakota, one of the team of ASR Book Review Editors], along with me (in my role as current ASR Editor-in-Chief). Fifteen participants were granted complimentary access to six recent ASR articles germane to scholars of Ethiopia/Tanzania, to be read in advance of the event. The seminars were conducted in the form of a graduate/postgraduate question and discussion running approximately two hours, followed by light refreshments and an informal discussion of the ASR, its mission and structure, and publishing in peer-reviewed journals more generally. Participants created CambridgeCore accounts and were provided with a complimentary one-year ASA membership, granting access to all the Cambridge University Press African studies journals.
After planning and hosting these initial seminars, I am optimistic about the future of African studies. Our hope is that ASA members will step forward in the future and offer to host seminars across the continent. The sustainable growth and future health of the��African Studies Review��rests heavily on the new generation of African studies scholars on the African continent. Over the past two years, we have taken concrete steps to make the journal more accessible to and inclusive of Africa-based scholars. We have expanded our editorial team and Editorial Review Board to include numerous African scholars. We���ve transitioned to being a bilingual journal, accepting and reviewing submissions in English and French. We have added Portuguese abstracts to gain traction with our lusophone peers. We have developed the Pipeline for Emerging African Studies Scholars (PEASS) to workshop, develop, and mentor new scholarship by scholars on the continent. We have rolled out a new scheme to incentivize first-time peer reviewing by African scholars. The journal���s editors are attending more conferences, meeting more emerging scholars, soliciting fascinating new manuscripts, and elucidating the process of article submission. And we have reformed our internal peer-review policies, enhancing equity and mitigating some of the deficiencies arising from inadequate resource access and distribution in African institutions of higher learning.
Just as the health of the membership is vital to the life of a professional association, a dynamic journal is only as healthy as its readership. Like the submission volume, the readership must be growing. As Editor-in-Chief, one of the most important responsibilities I have is demystifying journal publishing for people less familiar with, or entirely unacquainted with, the process. Our newly-updated FAQ page provides expert guidance on how to respond effectively to the Revise and Resubmit decision letter and an example by a published scholar in this very issue, Dr. Rachel Silver. As a result of our newest implemented editorial change, the dates of original submission, revision, and acceptance appear below the abstract. This invaluable data helps readers understand the timeline of production. One of the best ways to maximize the likelihood that your submission will move through the peer-review pipeline is if you yourself have reviewed for us previously.
The��African Studies Review��wants to publish the best new critical scholarship, and much of that is written on the African continent by Africa-based scholars. All Africanists want our work to be disseminated, read, digested, and engaged with by scholars globally. Many of us hope that our research has real and direct impact. As much as I dislike essentializations, the ASR has a long way to go before most Africa-based scholars recognize it as an especially African journal.
February 6, 2020
Liberal democracy has failed in Nigeria
Abuja & Environs. Image credit Juliana Rotich via Flickr CC.
When I was an undergraduate at Bayero University in Kano, Nigeria, in the mid 1990s, I was enthralled by liberal democracy. The concept came to us as students, a generation accustomed to military rule and its oppressions, spruced up in superlative adjectives. I wrote a laudatory term paper on it in light of Francis Fukuyama���s triumphalist proclamation of the dawn of liberal democracy as��the end of history.
More than twenty years later, I am ashamed to admit that I was duped. I am not the only one. Backed by millions of dollars from Western pro-democracy foundations and governments, Nigeria���s civil society and pro-democracy activists sheepishly adopted the rhetorical claims of liberal democracy. We all assumed that liberal democracy was the only form of democracy and that any modification of or deviation from its proclaimed ideals was sacrilegious. Twenty years later, civilian rule in Nigeria has not brought the vaunted benefits of democracy���development, accountability, and civic freedoms.
The legitimizing��rhetoric��of post-Cold War democratization was that even if democracy fails to improve the lives and civic freedoms of Nigerians and other African peoples, there is a consolation prize: the electoral mechanism of voting out nonperforming governments, which would, over time, entrench a culture of accountability. This claim has floundered spectacularly in Nigeria. As bloody and manipulated presidential, legislative, and governorship elections since 1999���and especially the violent sham elections of February 2019���have shown, Nigerians��� votes count for little. Failed incumbents endure in office by brazenly subverting the electoral will of the people.��The violent, chaotic��gubernatorial elections��in Kogi and Bayelsa States in November 2019 were another chapter in this grim history, demonstrating that Nigeria���s crisis of electoral legitimacy is deepening rather than abating.
Since 1999, Nigeria���s civic arena has also constricted under the weight of increased state repression. The recent arrest, detention, and��courtroom re-arrest��of journalist and activist, Omoyele Sowore, in defiance of court orders and ongoing judicial proceedings signify the recent descent into the raw, unabashed tyranny of military rule. Mr. Sowore was��released��last December, along with former National Security Adviser, Sambo Dasuki, who had spent more than four years in detention, but only after US senators wrote a strongly worded letter to the Nigerian government on the matter.
The truth is as compelling as it is bitter: the dreams and promises of democratization have morphed into an elaborate, haunting mirage. Did Nigerians make a mistake by uncritically adopting liberal democracy, and if so should they heed the counsel of their country���s acclaimed novelist,��Chinua Achebe, and go back to when the proverbial rain started beating them and make amends?
The adoption of liberal democracy in Nigeria was not an organic product of homegrown political struggles. Nor did it emanate from the deliberative and ideological disputations of Nigeria���s vibrant civic public sphere. Instead, democratization was predetermined by a toxic mix of three crosscutting phenomena: the post-Cold War search for a new logic of neocolonial control and domination; the suffocating global ubiquity of a pro-democracy slush fund disbursed strategically by governmental and non-governmental Western actors; and the ideological certitude and arrogance of a unipolar political formation located in the Global North.
As with other democratization projects in Africa, Nigeria���s democratization was birthed by and remains beholden to the Washington Consensus, which posited economic and political liberalization as an all-purpose solution to Africa���s developmental and governance challenges. Proponents claimed it had a universal applicability, and was the endpoint of human political evolution, suitable for all times and all places.��The ideological factor proved particularly decisive as a catalyst for the spread of liberal democratic claims and assumptions to Nigeria and the rest of Africa. Nigeria���s democratization was coextensive with the neoliberal fetishization of liberalization as the preeminent organizing idiom of the new global order.
Nigerian political and civic leaders neither questioned nor scrutinized the foundational prescriptions of liberal democracy, such as adversarial, zero-sum elections. Nor did they raise the obvious contradiction between these prescriptions and the consensual, non-adversarial foundations of��African political cultures. In the 1990s, self-named civil society and pro-democracy organizations such as Campaign For Democracy (CD), Civil Liberties Organization (CLO), Democratic Alternative (DA) and others were seduced by the inflow of pro-democracy funding and rhetorical claims from Western entities. This seduction conduced to what in hindsight was a profound complicity in the grafting of neoliberal political ideas onto Nigeria���s body politic. This complicity also helped domesticate the operational jargons of liberal democracy, ensuring that they became the baselines of all conversations and debates about politics and governance in the country. The specific discourse of liberal democracy supplanted the broader debate about democracy, representation, accountability, and rights. This discursive reference point remains in place, unquestioned and approvingly invoked.
Nigeria���s civil society organizations are agenda setters. They establish the terms and supply the lexicon for framing the most consequential political debates and transitions in the country. Nigeria���s ���prodemocracy��� activists, lionized since the return to civilian rule in 1999 as heroic catalysts of democratization and the overthrow of military rule, were instrumental in naturalizing, normalizing, and legitimizing a set of ideological claims valorized as universal political endpoints in neoliberal Western policy circles. These claims were just that���provincial and self-serving constructs of the neoliberal moment. More crucially, they were untested in and unsuitable for a Nigerian society with weak institutions, deepening poverty occasioned in part by neoliberal economic prescriptions, and a fractious union containing divergent demographic and aspirational tendencies.
In this crucial moment of ���democratization,��� Nigeria���s political class failed to question the very framing of ���democratization��� in Western neoliberal political discourse as the antithesis of what Western thinkers and scholars caricatured in generic terms as pathological African despotism, a mildly racist construct for designating a nonexistent or hyperbolized African political deficit.
Nigeria���s historically radical left, their ideological skepticism dulled by the fall of communism and their political energies coopted and channeled into new, trendy struggles for democratization, neglected to ask the question of whether and how democracy could be achieved without competitive, winner-takes-all electoral contests or without elections altogether. The simple logic that if there is liberal democracy, there must also be illiberal democracy, one that is unmoored to Western political evolution, did not register with Nigeria���s political actors. Swamped by the dollars and the cute PowerPoint presentations of Western pro-democracy foundations, Nigerian civil society activists failed to explore possible ways that aspects of democracy���rights, rule of law, accountability, and participation���could be married to traditional African consensual leadership selection practices. Adversarial elections were, as a result of this failure, accepted as the only path to representative and accountable government.
Liberal democracy���s capstone ritual, zero-sum elections, endow winners with all the rewards of victory���millions of dollars in licit and illicit earnings, local and international political visibility, and power. The loser, conversely, gets nothing. The result is a high-stakes version of what is called FOMO, or the fear of missing out, in American popular lingo. This fear of political exclusion in turn catalyzes desperation, which consistently and predictably produces messy, violent, and compromised elections.
In addition, since its return to civilian rule in 1999, liberal democracy has been an unacceptably costly enterprise for Nigeria. In 2019, the country spent��about $670 million��on a general election widely condemned as a sham. With budget financing increasingly steeped in��external and internal debt, and given the fungibility of state funds, there is a depressing possibility that Nigeria is borrowing to fund elections and to finance its fledgling democratic institutions and processes. It���s a hefty price tag in a country where most people subsist on��less than $2 a day.��When this financial outlay is added to Nigeria���s notoriety for having some of the��highest paid��legislators in the world and for spending the national fortune to maintain a large army of elected and appointed civilian officials, the unsustainability of this ���democratic��� trajectory emerges in full relief.
It is not just the fiscal cost of elections and civilian administration that threatens to cripple Nigeria. The social cost of this ���democratic��� adventure poses the most potent threat to the country. Plural, adversarial, and zero-sum elections have frayed the social fabric and undermined the cohesion of a notoriously fragile country. As mentioned previously, elections have been marked���and marred���by killings, displacement,��scorched earth violence, and malicious manipulations.��Electoral contests are little more than political warfare between factions of Nigeria���s political elite for access to the country���s resources.
The result of this charade has been a steady trend of voter apathy, represented by declining voter turnout, which stood at 35 percent in 2019. Nigerians are communicating their��disillusionment��with this iteration of democracy. Without urgent, profound reforms, the current path may destroy the country. It is no longer enough to argue that the current challenges are mere setbacks on the path to democratic maturity, or that escalating ���democratic��� tyranny is an aberration.
What is the way out? To argue that Nigeria���s democracy is fatally broken is not to endorse Dambisa Moyo���s oxymoronic solution of a��“decisive benevolent dictator”��as dictators by their nature are rarely benevolent. Nor does it authorize a complacent embrace of the status quo. Nigeria���s democracy needs a complete makeover. This requires alternative ideas that move the country closer to the African political culture of consensus and away from divisive, zero-sum electoral competitions that deepen and magnify the country���s familiar fault lines.
Eminent Nigerian scholar,��Nimi Wariboko, has suggested the drawing of lots, or random selection from a pool of eligible candidates, to fill one third of political offices. That proposal deserves serious consideration as part of a broader menu of reforms. Nigerians also have to come to terms with the fact that it is possible to attain democratic ideals without formal elections or at least without adversarial, winner-takes-all elections.��The selection of leaders at small sub-national units can be done on a rotational representation basis through informal community congresses according to agreed rules. In other words, Nigeria needs to rediscover, refine, and operationalize the concept of democracy without elections, which encapsulates the African essence of representative, inclusive, consensual, and accountable leadership.
Nigeria should adopt a proportional electoral allocation process whereby elective public offices are distributed based on the number of votes received by candidates in an election. Under this proposal, there would be no absolute electoral winners and losers. Instead, there would be big winners and small winners. There would be fewer electoral contests, freeing up revenue for investment in Nigerians��� welfare, because a single election would produce multi-tiered winners. Candidates would go into elections knowing that even if they are not the top vote getters, they would end up with other public positions stipulated in a new electoral legislation.
Nigeria needs to constitutionalize the rotation of public offices between constituencies, according to rules agreed upon by all invested parties. This would remove the uncertainty of inclusion, diminishing political desperation and the attendant willingness of politicians and their supporters to win electoral contests at all costs for fear they would be shut out of the political space.
Neither pretense nor pro-democracy jargon can conceal the destructive effects of Nigeria���s liberal democratic practice. The impulse of Nigerian political and intellectual elites is to posit liberal democracy as a sacrosanct, infallible idea. They rarely attribute the problem with Nigeria���s dysfunctional politics to liberal democracy itself. Instead, the dysfunction is analyzed as a failing of Nigerians and their purportedly undemocratic orientation and character.
This intellectual maneuver is no longer tenable and has clearly exhausted its capacity to deceive and obfuscate in the face of the crisis that has befallen liberal democracy in the Global North and in the face of the economic damage the uncritical and wholesale embrace of neoliberal democratization has wrought on non-Western peoples on multiple continents. The global rise of inequality in correspondence to increased ���democratization���; the rise of tribal nationalisms in Western democracies; and the virulent emergence of authoritarian strains in societies considered bastions of democracy discredit arguments about the intrinsic superiority of liberal democracy.
The problem is liberal democracy itself and its uncritical adoption at a critical moment of ruthless, strategic Western inroads into Nigeria and Africa. The escapism of Nigeria���s elite, expressed through the unwillingness to locate the problem in the democratic typology itself, only fuels Western hubris. It only accentuates the avuncular racism of exculpating Western ideas from the Nigerian political and economic crisis while blaming Nigerians��� inability to adapt to these ideas or the obduracy of their ���anti-democratic��� ethos.
Nigeria needs to craft something new, indigenous, and legitimate in liberal democracy���s place.
A question of desperation
Still from Queen & Slim.
Slim, a salt-of-the-earth homebody played by Daniel Kaluuya, is definitely punching above his weight when late one weeknight he gets the right swipe from Queen, a hardened defense lawyer played by newcomer Jodie Turner-Smith. What begins as a lackluster first date takes a sharp left turn when Slim is pulled over by a racist police officer as he drops her home. In a blood curdling scene that echoes Sandra Bland���s infamous encounter with police in Texas in 2015, Queen���s exasperation with the ���routine��� stop rachets up tensions until multiple shots are fired. The first bullet grazes Queen���s leg and the second fatally wounds the officer when Slim leaps to her defense. As the enormity of the situation dawns on the unlikely pair, they make a pact: risk facing Ohio���s death penalty or flee the scene. Their decision to run and the emergence of police dashcam footage turns them into the internet���s ���black Bonnie & Clyde,��� dividing the US and audiences along the fault-line of justice vs. just us. The remainder of director Melina Matsoukas & writer Lena Waithe���s debut feature leads audiences on a stylized inversion of the underground railroad, slow cruising from Ohio to Florida via New Orleans in a pimped-out Pontiac Catalina borrowed from Queen���s Uncle Earl. Along the way, a handful of workaday Americans throw into tragicomic relief the intensely personal and inadvertently political choices the duo make as they attempt to follow in Black Panther Assata Shakur���s footsteps and escape to Cuba.
It���s a rollicking ride, brutally honest in its look at hood politics and unapologetically aimed at black and allied audiences. I attended two previews of the film and there was spontaneous applause at both, for characters that restored unexpected faith in humanity or brought light relief to its darkest moments. Nevertheless, both (predominantly people of color) audiences exited in a state of visible shock with a number of people weeping freely at its close. But making a film ���for the culture��� doesn���t mean excluding, it���s purpose is to heal. In an interview with an American radio station, screenwriter Lena Waithe declares:
Hearing that Sandra Bland tape is traumatizing. People don���t realize that for black people, when these stories come across our news feeds or televisions ��� it���s not just another story, it���s not just a piece of news to us, it���s like a piece of us dies every time we hear about an unarmed black person being killed by a police officer. We are all living in a state of trauma.
That kind of audience reaction raises several questions. Why do Black Britons feel a connection to African American trauma so keenly? When we hear the bloated mosquito bloop of an American cop car why do the hairs on our necks stand up? It���s more than simply pop culture saturation, the connection that race brings or the film���s tactical use of two British actors in the lead roles. It���s a question of desperation. Desperation in Queen���s tongue, tired as she is of police violence disproportionately affecting black urban communities on both sides of the Atlantic. Desperation in Slim���s finger on the trigger, subverting all precedents of who dies when state matters collide with black lives. Desperation in a story of this ambition from Waithe, an Emmy-winning young artist on the rise who could have tackled any narrative but felt compelled to address this one. Indeed, desperation for new narratives and new heroes is what will propel black audiences worldwide to see this film and partake in its revolutionary energy. Despite what some critics have made or failed to make of this film, the work speaks to an ongoing cultural renaissance that is as affirming to blackness as the preceding century of on-screen culture was to whiteness. Of the nine films nominated for Best Picture at this year���s Oscars, six have failed to amass a social media following larger than Queen & Slim. It has received no nominations in a year that promises yet more diversity dodging at the Academy. Instagram is by no means a comprehensive indicator of a film���s quality, but online engagement ahead of its European release shows demand is growing for stories offering real representation to communities of color.
Despite heavy themes, Queen & Slim fizzes with the energy of quiet-storm R&B in a drive-thru soda cup, in large part thanks to Devont�� Hynes��� sound track which offers a mosaic of black musical innovators to heighten every scene. Roy Ayers, Fela Kuti, Luther Vandross, and Ms Lauryn Hill ride shotgun alongside Syd, Vince Staples, Burna Boy, and Bilal. Matsoukas��� work as a music-video director, notably on Beyonce���s ���Formation��� video, pioneered aesthetics that have become integral to the contemporary black art experience. Solange and Moses Sumney, who both feature on the score, have produced cinematic visuals that follow this tradition, as has Hynes in work with British director Akinola Davis Jr. on “Charcoal Baby.” Matsoukas��� rich coloring, neon lighting, and elastic timing is steeped in a Blaxploitation-cum-hip-hop heritage, which expands each vignette into a microcosm. The resulting space allows Kaaluya and Turner-Smith���s expressive versatility to shine. Special mention too for Shiona Turini���s costume design. A long-time collaborator of Matsoukas, Turini works wonders with a plot that requires just one costume change. Queen���s transformation is remarkable, a thick white turtleneck and matching jeans at the film���s outset invert her black power sensibilities: she is a freedom fighter trapped in a white supremacist criminal justice system. But when the police hunt them down to her Uncle Earl���s ghetto Eden, she unpicks her braids and steps into a zebra print dress with snakeskin boots. When it comes to securing her own freedom, she���ll need a second skin naturally suited to evading her predators.
The film is a revelation in the way it weaves together the aesthetic and the political in this way. It mirrors an ever-present conversation in the African diaspora���how can western sensibilities co-exist with innate African signifiers? The passage of time through the film may feel episodic, but it is the lead characters��� personal growth and romance that holds the common thread���this tale is one of liberation. Not only the physical liberation they feel as they speed away from the inhospitable cold of Cleveland to the southern tropics, but also a liberation of the mind and spirit. Their repressed inner city lives drift out of focus as they find their true nature through each other. Slim learns to ride a horse because ���nothing scares the white man more than looking up to a black man.��� Queen���s character shifts from irritable atheism to choosing to say grace over her and Slim���s last supper. The small miracles of their journey teach her to believe in something more intangible than personal excellence. Matsoukas describes the deliberate choice they made casting a newcomer like Tuner-Smith:
It was important to both Lena and I to use this opportunity to create a platform for a new black actress, for a new voice because we don���t get many of those opportunities and we knew we didn���t want to waste it. We wanted to find our Queen, we wanted to introduce somebody new, we wanted to have somebody that would stand up against Daniel and the other thing that was really important for us is that she was dark skinned, I love to be part of redefining what beauty is in the world.
Stand up against Kaaluya she does, but more importantly, Turner Smith plays a black woman unleashed and it is beautiful.
The final act of the film manages to be poetic and punchy, an impressive feat not diminished on a second viewing. A sex scene, which has divided opinion, is memorable for dovetailing the film���s romantic climax with a violent protest scene. For those that find it jarring, it is worth grappling a little longer with those feelings of confusion. Of course, it is disconcerting to have such intimacy marred by graphic violence, but for many marginalized communities, the truth is that love exists in the midst of violence. Both protagonists learn that no matter how they choose to live their lives, in pious domesticity or directly facing a fight, the white gaze will catch up with them. For young Black Americans facing systematic oppression, love and freedom are framed by daily struggle.
The takeaways this film offers are ambiguous, more grey than black or white. When they have to flag a car down to borrow petrol, Slim declares ���I hope they���re black��� to which Queen retorts ���That isn���t always a good thing.��� It prepares us for the string of stereotype defying characters they meet throughout their getaway. Race is never a clear-cut signifier of solidarity and it���s great to see that truth acknowledged here in increasingly divisive times. Ambivalence defines a Tinder-addled generation grappling with questions of climate change, democratic manipulation, and social insecurity. Waithe and Matsoukas respond to this crippling uncertainty with a call for self-liberation and to leave a legacy of love. They cleverly reference this in a movie-poster-within-the-film moment which has effectively condensed Queen & Slim���s plot into an iconic meme. While immortality seems out of step with a society dominated by rationalism, Queen & Slim manages to flirt with forever convincingly.
February 5, 2020
The Gig Economy Blues
Lucy Nyangasi, domestic worker, Kenya. Image credit Kate Holt for the Solidarity Center, 2016 via Flickr CC.
Switching from a formal job in marketing to driving a taxi in Nairobi was difficult for Ivy, but she needed an immediate income to support her family. Ivy is a single mother who had separated from her husband and moved back to Kenya (from Uganda) to care for her ailing mother, as well as a young son and nephew. Ride-hailing apps had just started in early 2017 when she joined one of the ride-hailing app companies, and she soon found herself working from 4am to midnight to earn a liveable wage. Within a few months, Ivy realized that these hours were affecting her family negatively; her son started crying more and demanding that she play with him instead of going to work. This led her to reallocate some of her time from paid work to looking after her children:
I would [go] for weeks without [seeing] my children ��� I would come [home] very late when they had already gone to sleep so they would not see me at all. So, I changed. ��� I am the one who takes them to school now, I bond with them, we talk, we enter the car, and we do our prayer session as we are going ��� to school. I get to pick them [at around 3pm] and drop them home. Then I go back to work and do the evening, from around 5pm to 11pm, [finding] jobs at night.
Ivy is not alone in facing such trade-offs. The Gig Economy is expanding rapidly in countries like Kenya and South Africa to include services such as cleaning, driving, gardening, beauty supply, and catering. Workers obtain “gigs” through mobile apps (or “platforms”) that connect them with service purchasers, providing work opportunities in economies often characterized by high un- and under employment. In a recent Overseas Development Institute report, we interrogate how such gig work affects women���s economic empowerment in Kenya and South Africa, and argue that the flexibility gig platforms offer is not always evident in practice.
Our interviews with women gig workers showed that those with young children often awoke as early as 3am to prepare their children and commute to their gigs. Where they could, women sought childcare from family, neighbors, friends, and paid child minders. Some sent friends or colleagues to pick up their children from school or a childcare center if they were running late. Others took their children to work risking occupational accidents and/or client hostility. A few women reported declining gigs, especially on weekends, in order to spend time with their families.
However, our research also suggests a reliance on high-risk strategies to balance paid and unpaid work. One domestic worker in Kenya, who lived outside the city where housing was more affordable, had to commute for two hours with her six-month old toddler every time she got a gig, while her other three children, all under age seven, would walk on their own to and from school. Another woman had to ask the boda bodas (motorbikes used for public transport in Kenya) near her child���s school to drop her children home after classes if she was held up at a gig. Such experiences risked exposing children to a range of harmful consequences associated with being unaccompanied in Kenya���s informal settlements and at home.
The women we interviewed also attached little value to rest and self-care. They were always ready to take a gig and often described an ideal day as one in which they had earned a liveable wage. They expressed pride in always working and not taking a break. Days off, when taken, were spent on childcare, cleaning, cooking, and going to the market.
Ivy said that taking the weekend off would require her to work longer days in the week in order to earn the income her family required: ���I can decide I’m resting on Sunday, but if I decide I’m resting on Sunday, then that means I will have to work more over the week.���
As such, she found little or almost no time to rest, eat lunch, or see friends. She had started carrying a packed lunch in her car to save time and money, and had cut her hair to reduce the time needed at a salon.
Because platform companies may provide gigs at any time of the day or night, resting would mean switching off apps or phones and not responding to gig requests. However, almost all the workers we spoke with would rarely switch off from the platforms as they were not in a position to forgo any potential income.
Instances of gig worker organization are few and far between. In Kenya, Ivy���s fear of losing her only income source prevented her from demonstrating alongside other platform drivers in the city in 2017 and 2018. Despite her belief that platform companies needed to improve working conditions, she was not willing to forgo a day���s livelihood in order to spend a day on the streets in protest. ���What was happening like in this last strike, is that people were told, ‘Do not ��� do not work.’ So, ‘do not work,’ for us as ladies, mothers, what does it mean? Our families do not eat.���
In other words, Ivy���s focus on providing for her family did not give her the luxury to consider better working conditions, or to want to be part of the change process. The trade-offs that gig work pose need addressing through platform design features that strike a balance between flexibility and stability, government policy that seeks to uphold worker rights and protections, and to redistribute care work by encouraging men to take on more responsibility for unpaid care and providing supports to childcare. While worker organization has historically been an important pathway to change, the responsibility must not be left to workers alone, particularly lower-income women workers who are by necessity focused on short term survival.
The Gig Economy blues
Lucy Nyangasi, domestic worker, Kenya. Image credit Kate Holt for the Solidarity Center, 2016 via Flickr CC.
Switching from a formal job in marketing to driving a taxi in Nairobi was difficult for Ivy, but she needed an immediate income to support her family. Ivy is a single mother who had separated from her husband and moved back to Kenya (from Uganda) to care for her ailing mother, as well as a young son and nephew. Ride-hailing apps had just started in early 2017 when she joined one of the ride-hailing app companies, and she soon found herself working from 4am to midnight to earn a liveable wage. Within a few months, Ivy realized that these hours were affecting her family negatively; her son started crying more and demanding that she play with him instead of going to work. This led her to reallocate some of her time from paid work to looking after her children:
I would [go] for weeks without [seeing] my children ��� I would come [home] very late when they had already gone to sleep so they would not see me at all. So, I changed. ��� I am the one who takes them to school now, I bond with them, we talk, we enter the car, and we do our prayer session as we are going ��� to school. I get to pick them [at around 3pm] and drop them home. Then I go back to work and do the evening, from around 5pm to 11pm, [finding] jobs at night.
Ivy is not alone in facing such trade-offs. The Gig Economy is expanding rapidly in countries like Kenya and South Africa to include services such as cleaning, driving, gardening, beauty supply, and catering. Workers obtain “gigs” through mobile apps (or “platforms”) that connect them with service purchasers, providing work opportunities in economies often characterized by high un- and under employment. In a recent Overseas Development Institute report, we interrogate how such gig work affects women���s economic empowerment in Kenya and South Africa, and argue that the flexibility gig platforms offer is not always evident in practice.
Our interviews with women gig workers showed that those with young children often awoke as early as 3am to prepare their children and commute to their gigs. Where they could, women sought childcare from family, neighbors, friends, and paid child minders. Some sent friends or colleagues to pick up their children from school or a childcare center if they were running late. Others took their children to work risking occupational accidents and/or client hostility. A few women reported declining gigs, especially on weekends, in order to spend time with their families.
However, our research also suggests a reliance on high-risk strategies to balance paid and unpaid work. One domestic worker in Kenya, who lived outside the city where housing was more affordable, had to commute for two hours with her six-month old toddler every time she got a gig, while her other three children, all under age seven, would walk on their own to and from school. Another woman had to ask the boda bodas (motorbikes used for public transport in Kenya) near her child���s school to drop her children home after classes if she was held up at a gig. Such experiences risked exposing children to a range of harmful consequences associated with being unaccompanied in Kenya���s informal settlements and at home.
The women we interviewed also attached little value to rest and self-care. They were always ready to take a gig and often described an ideal day as one in which they had earned a liveable wage. They expressed pride in always working and not taking a break. Days off, when taken, were spent on childcare, cleaning, cooking, and going to the market.
Ivy said that taking the weekend off would require her to work longer days in the week in order to earn the income her family required: ���I can decide I’m resting on Sunday, but if I decide I’m resting on Sunday, then that means I will have to work more over the week.���
As such, she found little or almost no time to rest, eat lunch, or see friends. She had started carrying a packed lunch in her car to save time and money, and had cut her hair to reduce the time needed at a salon.
Because platform companies may provide gigs at any time of the day or night, resting would mean switching off apps or phones and not responding to gig requests. However, almost all the workers we spoke with would rarely switch off from the platforms as they were not in a position to forgo any potential income.
Instances of gig worker organization are few and far between. In Kenya, Ivy���s fear of losing her only income source prevented her from demonstrating alongside other platform drivers in the city in 2017 and 2018. Despite her belief that platform companies needed to improve working conditions, she was not willing to forgo a day���s livelihood in order to spend a day on the streets in protest. ���What was happening like in this last strike, is that people were told, ‘Do not ��� do not work.’ So, ‘do not work,’ for us as ladies, mothers, what does it mean? Our families do not eat.���
In other words, Ivy���s focus on providing for her family did not give her the luxury to consider better working conditions, or to want to be part of the change process. The trade-offs that gig work pose need addressing through platform design features that strike a balance between flexibility and stability, government policy that seeks to uphold worker rights and protections, and to redistribute care work by encouraging men to take on more responsibility for unpaid care and providing supports to childcare. While worker organization has historically been an important pathway to change, the responsibility must not be left to workers alone, particularly lower-income women workers who are by necessity focused on short term survival.
Sean Jacobs's Blog
- Sean Jacobs's profile
- 4 followers
