Sean Jacobs's Blog, page 192

The best solution is coexistence

War, peace, and cooperation among herder-farmers in northeastern Uganda.

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Pro-Jie graffiti on the roadside in the disputed area between Kotido and Abim districts. Image credit Sam Meyerson.

On the night of December 30, 1998, the rebels of the Lord��s Resistance Army (LRA) arrived in Abim district, a mountainous area in the Karamoja region of northeastern Uganda. The LRA rarely ranged this far east, but sensing a soft target in the communities of minority Ethur farmers who lived in the towns and villages of Abim, the rebels struck their health centers and schools, stealing medical supplies and kidnapping medical personnel and students. The rebels, however, had underestimated the resistance they would meet in Abim. In Karamoja at the time, small arms were ubiquitous among local pastoral groups, and some Ethur farmers had also managed to acquire guns, which they immediately put to use combatting the LRA incursion. Heavily armed Jie herdsmen, who had driven their cattle west into Abim district in search of pasture during the dry season, came to the aid of the embattled Ethur, giving chase to the rebels, soundly defeating them and liberating the captured civilians.

The story of the joint Jie-Ethur victory over the LRA has been told and retold in both Jie and Ethur communities for more than two decades. For some, the tale is simply one of triumph over a feared adversary, but for many Jie herders and Ethur farmers, the story cannot be extricated from the tension and conflict that have characterized the relationship between the two groups for more than 30 years. Prior to the conclusion of the disarmament process in 2011, in which the Ugandan military seized weapons from the majority of Karamoja��s herdsmen, Jie herders frequently committed acts of theft and violence against Ethur farmers, who often did not have sufficient firepower to defend themselves. Since disarmament, tensions between the Jie and Ethur have taken the form of disputes over the boundary between the predominantly Jie district of Kotido and the Ethur-dominated district of Abim, which the central government carved out of Kotido district in 2006.

Animosity between the Ethur and Jie has also resulted in heated debates over the rights of Jie pastoralists to graze their livestock in Abim district, and, on occasion, deadly violence. Thus, some Ethur renditions of the story of the LRA attack on Abim leave out the participation of the Jie entirely, seeking to emphasize the bravery and self-sufficiency of the local Ethur farmers. ��The Ethur people are very tough,�� stated Ethur politician Lokinomoe Joseph, ��When the LRA came to attack Abim �� we would finish them off. A woman could even pick up a stick and cane a rebel, because we are very brave.�� Some Jie versions of the story, on the other hand, cast the Jie as the benevolent saviors of the helpless Ethur, in order to underscore the injustice of present-day Ethur attempts to limit Jie herders�� access to pasture in Abim. ��We used to save the Ethur from the LRA,�� Jie herdsman Longok Lokolita insisted, ��But when the Jie were disarmed, that is when the Ethur started refusing the Jie entry, that��s when they started making us pay for water and everything else.��

These ethnically partisan versions of the battle fit into an Africa-wide narrative of antipathy between herders and farmers that has made its way into international headlines with increasing frequency in the wake of bloody clashes over the course of the past four years in West Africa and the Sahel. Many Western narratives of these conflicts have cast herder-farmer violence in Africa as the product of primordial ethnic and religious hatreds or of the spread of Islamic terror networks south of the Sahara. In reality, however, much like the Jie and Ethur, pastoral and agrarian communities in West Africa have shared long histories of cooperation and coexistence, and the conflicts between them have their roots in resource scarcity, climate change, and the machinations of political elites.

Prior to the colonial period, the Jie and Ethur enjoyed a close relationship founded on economic interdependence and kinship ties, and many elders and oral historians from both communities state that, in spite of the conflicts that have arisen in the past several decades, the Ethur and Jie are ��one people.�� In light of the parallels between herder-farmer conflicts in northeastern Uganda and those in West Africa and the Sahel, the experiences of the Jie and Ethur people who fought together against the LRA and who have managed to flourish side-by-side in the years following disarmament, in spite of mounting tensions over land and grazing rights, offer an instructive example of how herders and farmers in sub-Saharan Africa can fruitfully coexist.

The polemical tales told by Lokinomoe and Lokolita bear little resemblance to the accounts of the survivors of the 1998 battle with the LRA, which uncover a longer history of Jie-Ethur economic cooperation and reveal the importance of immediate mutual interests in facilitating joint defensive action. Jie elders Lomongin and Apalopus (not their real names) were young men in 1998, and they happened to be grazing their animals in the vicinity of the town of Morulem in southern Abim district when the LRA struck. When the fighting broke out, Lomongin, Apalopus, and their fellow Jie herdsmen took up their guns and pursued the LRA attackers and their captives, finally routing the rebel force at a watering hole in the nearby Lango region.

In an interview in April 2018, Apalopus and Lomongin recalled that their primary motivation was the desire to rescue Jie women and girls who had been captured by the rebels while residing in local Ethur homes as part of the longstanding process known as agwer, in which Jie women aid Ethur families with the harvest in exchange for a share of the crops. However, Lomongin and Apalopus were also enticed by potential economic gains. ��If the Jie girls had not been taken we would still have gone,�� Lomongin recalled with a grin, ��since the Jie love fighting, and we still wanted guns.�� The social and economic interests that Jie herdsmen now shared with Ethur farmers in the fight against the LRA enabled Lomongin and Apalopus to fully consider the moral and inter-communal implications of the battle.

��Another thing that motivated us was the atrocities we used to hear the LRA were committing,�� Lomongin explained, ��they would mutilate [people], cut off their lips and leave them. A person would come home looking like an animal. When we heard about that �� we thought, ��Let��s go.�� Apalopus went on to elaborate on the ways in which their alliance against the LRA fostered, if only temporarily, a more amicable relationship between the two groups: ��During the time of the LRA, the Ethur would accept the Jie to come and be around them, because they knew that the Jie were their bulwarks and their protection against the LRA.”

Similarly, shortly after expressing their opposition to the migration of Jie pastoralists into Abim district during the dry season, a group of Ethur women stated of the 1998 LRA attack, ��Fortunately, our brothers from Jie were also there. Since they were armed, they really helped us.�� In short, for local Ethur farmers, the moment of cooperation and mutual defense created by the threat of the LRA transformed Jie herdsmen like Lomongin and Apalopus from an armed menace into key allies and ��brothers.�� Since the threat of rebel violence disappeared with the expulsion of the LRA from Uganda in 2008, tensions have mounted between many Jie and Ethur communities due to disagreements over rights to farmland and pastureland. Much of the land in dispute is located along the recently established border between Kotido and Abim districts, where communities known as ��resettlement camps�� have begun to spring up since the conclusion of the disarmament campaign in 2011.

During the decades of warfare in northeastern Uganda, Jie and Ethur civilians had been forced to seek refuge in overcrowded towns and villages, where soil erosion and overgrazing threatened their agrarian and pastoral livelihoods. After disarmament, Ethur and Jie people began to make for the fertile farmland and pastures located between Abim and Kotido districts, which had previously been rendered uninhabitable by the threat of rebel attacks and cattle raids, giving rise to the resettlement camps and prompting questions over whether this land belonged to the Ethur of Abim district or the Jie of Kotido. The ethnic homogeneity of many of these resettlement camps has encouraged inhabitants of predominantly Jie camps and their counterparts in predominantly Ethur camps to regard each other with suspicion and hostility. Lojok Peter, a Jie resident of the resettlement camp of Kotidany, underscored this climate of ethnic and political polarization when he warned darkly that, if the disputed territory falls under the authority of Ethur-dominated Abim district, ��it will be the Jie who will be under the Ethur. So, those people will celebrate and try to chase us away and kill us. But we will not accept to be killed and leave those people alive. They will all die.��

In spite of the fear and hostility that exist within the resettlement camps in the disputed territory between Kotido and Abim, some communities have managed to revive the spirit of pragmatic symbiosis and cooperation that inspired Lomongin and Apalopus to fight alongside the Ethur against the LRA back in 1998. Founded by Ethur elder and former politician Othu Marino Abala in 2010, the resettlement camp of Somalia is located along Kotido-Abim road in the heart of the disputed territory. The stretch of road where Somalia is located was notorious for armed banditry prior to disarmament, earning the comparisons to the volatile nation in the Horn of Africa from which the community��s tongue-in-cheek moniker is derived. Its troubled history notwithstanding, Somalia has emerged as an exemplar of Jie-Ethur cooperation and coexistence in the midst of rising herder-farmer tensions along the Abim-Kotido boundary. Before founding Somalia, Abala served as a sub-county chairman in Abim district and earned a reputation as a fair and balanced leader capable of forging compromise between Jie and Ethur communities. He has used his stature among the residents of Somalia to build a multi-ethnic community committed to the principles of coexistence and economic cooperation. Regarding the Kotido-Abim boundary dispute, Abala argued that, ��Whether this place is to be Kotido district or Abim district, the best solution is coexistence. That��s something very important for the local community. The local leaders at the local and government levels should embrace and encourage that.��

Abala��s sentiments were echoed by Agiro Surambaya, a Jie resident of Somalia, and his friend Obura Kallisto Okidi, an Ethur. Surambaya asserted that, in the event of large-scale land conflicts in the area, the people of Somalia, ��would stand strong and say, ��No, let��s resolve things peacefully �� Why do you want to divide people?�� Seeking the guidance of Abala and other local elders, the people of Somalia collaboratively solve local disputes arising from disagreements over boundaries between farmers�� fields and incursions by Jie livestock into the plots of Ethur farmers. Their shared struggle to eke a living out of what was, only several years ago, uninhabited bush has allowed the Ethur and Jie residents of Somalia to form a united front against elites seeking to instrumentalize land disputes and herder-farmer conflicts for their own political and economic ends. In a moment of frustration, Abala accused these elites of attempting to sow inter-ethnic divisions through ��cheap politicking.��

��Do you realize that it��s not us, the common men, who are causing these issues but the leaders back on the other side?�� Agiro Surambaya asked his neighbors at a community meeting, ��Have you forgotten that, in those days, there used to be a lot of conflict between people, but now people are staying together �� So why do the leaders want to divide us?��

Given the severity of recent herder-farmer violence in regions like Nigeria��s Middle Belt and southern Mali, the sort of coexistence achieved by the residents of Somalia might seem like a dream nearly impossible to realize. However, the experiences of individuals like Abala, Lomongin, and Surambaya show that the road to coexistence begins not with utopian visions but in the mutual pursuit of common interests and in the joint struggle to defend them, whether against armed adversaries or against elites seeking to exploit historical divisions within communities for their own gain, a factor that has played a major role in herder-farmer conflict throughout the continent. Acknowledging their shared interests can initiate shifts in how pastoral and agrarian communities interpret their histories of interaction and imagine their shared futures.

When herders and farmers work together to secure their mutual survival and prosperity, they can slowly begin the arduous transition from ��enemies�� to ��brothers.��

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Published on January 26, 2020 16:00

The unfinished business of the Tunisian revolution

Meryam Joobeur��s film, Brotherhood explores Tunisia's outsized role in the Syrian conflict; the country contributes a disproportionately large number of foreign fighters to the conflict.

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Still from Brotherhood.

Nearly a decade after the Tunisian revolution, the country has made remarkable progress toward establishing a stable liberal political order. The work of upending the security state built up during the Ben Ali regime however, remains far from complete and the structural economic problems that sparked the revolution have not been addressed.

Despite the efforts of nine governments in as many years, with a tenth being negotiated now, post-revolutionary Tunisia is plagued by the same high unemployment and corruption that were a central grievance of the protesters back in 2011. Whatever form the government takes after this latest round of parliamentary negotiations, it will be forced to continue implementing unpopular austerity measures tied to the 2016 International Monetary Fund (IMF) agreement, while trying to make the case that it is acting in the economic interests of the average Tunisian.

Ben Ali may have been relegated to a death in exile, but it seems international financial institutions will not be so easy to get rid of.

Still from Brotherhood.

It is this context of mounting economic dissatisfaction and a shrinking horizon of political possibilities that Meryam Joobeur��s short film, Brotherhood, conveys so convincingly across its short 60-minute run-time.

Joobeur, a Tunisian-Canadian writer and producer, built the project around three red-haired brothers she came across while on a trip to northern Tunisia. Malek, Chaqer, and Rayene are not professional actors and were initially hesitant to participate, but Joobeur managed to convince them and they are undoubtedly the focal point of the film. Their presence gives the narrative a real weight, which is saying something given the tremendous performances of Mohamed Grayaa and Salha Nasraoui as the boys�� parents.

Joobuer drew inspiration for the plot upon learning about a village that was dealing with a high number of young men returning from fighting in the Syrian civil war while on a trip in northern Tunisia. This became the central conceit of Brotherhood, which begins with the eldest brother, Malik, returning from fighting in Syria with a young niqabi wife. Malek��s father is deeply suspicious of his son, and believes that the marriage is proof that he has been radicalized in Syria.

Brotherhood succeeds in developing a multilayered story with dialogue that is very sparse, but always pointed; every exchange carries years of weight. The family��s knotty dynamics��which are revealed through subtleties in the performances of the actors rather than straightforward exposition��serve as an analogy for contemporary political issues in the region. The claustrophobic interior shots bely the chasmic distance between the father and his son. We learn that Malek left his family to take up the call of the Syrian war partially because he felt stifled by his relationship with his father, echoing the marginalization that led to Mohammed Bouazizi��s self-immolation in 2011. All the while, the specter of the state hovers ominously in the background as the narrative unfolds. Its appearance in the final third shatters the otherwise organic and gorgeous setting. The black uniforms and shiny, angular SUVs of the state security agency move across the screen in sharp relief to the rolling landscape and the roaring sea.

Still from Brotherhood.

There is undoubtedly room to graft any analysis of the Arab uprisings onto the plot of the film, and the Syrian war��a microcosm for the political and economic problems that the rest of the Arab world is contenting with now��is fertile ground for divergent opinions.

As the only country so far to experience a real, mostly non-violent change in regime, Tunisia is uniquely positioned among Arab states. Some have used this fact to make the argument that Tunisia has succeeded precisely because it is not really an Arab country like the others in the region. Taken to its logical conclusion, this an argument that posits Arab culture and progress as incompatible.

By placing Syria at the centrality of this otherwise exclusively Tunisian project��Joobeur is of Tunisian heritage and the film uses an all-Tunisian cast��she reveals the incoherence of such arguments and puts forward a regional perspective on the issues of extremism, poverty, and violence the film deals with. For it is impossible to understand Tunisia��s outsized role in the Syrian conflict, contributing an disproportionately large number of foreign fighters, without understanding the Tunisian revolution as part of wider-ranging, cross-border processes.

Malek��s disaffection might have once drawn him into one of the left wing movements animated by the idea that, in the words of Slovenian philosopher Slavoj ��i��ek, ��humanity as a collective subject has the capacity to somehow limit impersonal and anonymous socio-historical development, to steer it in a desired direction,�� but those ideas are almost universally discredited today. The rise of ISIS is symptomatic of this absence. It is a phenomenon that is best understood as a nihilistic inverse of the great utopian projects of the twentieth century.

The Tunisian experience is rightly held up as an exemplar for its progress in achieving a liberal democratic government, but is also exposing the limitations of liberalism and the dire need for a deeper form of democracy capable of fundamentally restructuring the economies of the region for the benefit of the mass of people.

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Published on January 24, 2020 00:00

Postcolonialism does not exist in France

It is no longer shocking to witness the prejudice among French institutions and intelligentsia against Africa and Africans.

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Passerelle de la Fraternit��, Aubervilliers, Paris, 13 June 2010. Image credit John Perivolaris via Flickr CC.

Racism and exclusion have always been at the heart of France��s neocolonial project in Africa. What is new, however, is the pervasive and active discursive process of making invisible, and therefore containment, of the violent reality of France��s policies and its devastating consequences for France��s racialized citizens as well as the African populations on the other side of the Mediterranean. Today it is important to consider what France has become: to slightly stretch the words of philosopher Herbert Marcuse, a one-dimensional society where repressive and exploitative forces of domination and injustice that have been at the heart of France��s national consciousness challenge any possibility of a genuine vision of change.

It is no longer shocking to witness the prejudice among French institutions and intelligentsia against Africa and Africans. The state, the media, and the academy in France actively embody the role of new agents of state neocolonialism to reject any resistance against racism and Islamophobia through complex methods of containment and abstraction.

Race blindness for instance becomes an effective tool to safeguard the neocolonialist foundation of France��s state apparatus and contain any possible threats to its national consciousness. As writer Lauren Collins observes, ��There is a common belief that there cannot be racism in France because in France there is, officially, no such thing as race. The state, operating under a policy of ��absolute equality,�� does not collect any statistics on race or ethnicity.�� By doing so, the state apparatus in France ignores its racialized and ethnic citizens and represses their rights to be fully acknowledged.

State neocolonialism in France has been impregnated in its national consciousness to the extent that its networks of domination and dehumanization have blurred the traditional distinctions that are made on the basis of color and between racialized and ethnic citizens emigrating from Africa. In France, to draw upon Fanon��s analysis that racism is fundamental to the economic structures of capitalism, the political infrastructure is also a superstructure: you are French because you embody France��s state neocolonialism, you embody France��s state neocolonialism because you are French. The French state no longer presupposes certain racial and aesthetic characteristics of the ideal citizen: Black African intellectuals and brown Maghrebi media pundits can also be incorporated as new agents of state neocolonialism. In contemporary France, Africans are not othered and excluded on the basis of race, ethnicity, or color, but rather on the basis of their politics, culture, and religion.

When Emmanuel Macron, the French president, decided in October 2019 to share his views on immigration and Islamophobia, he chose the far-right magazine Valeurs Actuelles, declaring that ��the failure of our (economic) model coincides with the crisis of Islam�� and adding that this crisis leads to the emergence of more radical forms of political Islam. Macron criticized a demonstration in support of the right to wear veils as ��non-aligned Third-Worldism with Marxist tendencies�� (he used the word ��relents,�� which can be translated to hint or trace, but also to stink or stench). This interview was published a few days after a mosque shooting in Bayonne, in south-west France. No terrorism offenses were brought by the French government against the white shooter.

The media��s complicity overwhelms any possibility of a meaningful public debate. At its basic form, the process of invisibilization in a one-dimensional society involves the dispersal of productive energies through diversion and abstraction so to ensure that a revolutionary momentum is as unattainable as the end of capitalism itself.

This complicit relationship between the media and the state in France is carefully exposed in Serge Halimi��s Les Nouveaux Chiens de Garde (translated to The New Watch Dogs, 1997-2005). Halimi, the chief editor of Le Monde Diplomatique, lays down a seething critique of a “capitalist” press and media in France that are heavily influenced by the elite interests of politicians and powerful corporations and likely to manufacture propaganda to serve their agenda.

This is exemplified by the controversial debate in France around returning works of African art, stolen during colonial times, to the continent after the publication of the report by the French historian B��n��dicte Savoy and the Senegalese economist and writer Felwine Sarr, and commissioned by Macron, which recommends to cancel the project of long-term loan of items to African museums and to support the full and unconditional restitution of the looted heritage back to Africa. The glaring discrepancies in reporting the ambivalent position of the French Minister of Culture, Franck Riester, a right wing politician, regarding the return of the stolen artifacts to Africa highlight the dangerous complicity between state institutions and the media in France. There were two opposing reports of this event: on the one hand, major French media outlets celebrated the efforts of the French government to return 26 works of art to Benin. Radio France International, for example, chose the title: ��Restitution of works of art in Benin: France goes a step further�� while Lib��ration opted for: ��Restitution of works in Benin: Paris says it works for a quick return.�� But once we dive into these articles, we are faced with the many approximations and ��possible scenarios�� under which France will actually return the art. The conditional supplants the affirmative, and what remains is the strong belief that much has been left unsaid.

On the other hand, The Art Newspaper, a leading global art magazine, commented differently on the same event: ��France retreats from report recommending automatic restitutions of looted African artefacts�� ran the article. Here, what is emphasized is the strong opposition of France��s powerful gallery owners and art collectors against any form of permanent restitution and the pressure they put to change the ��restoration without delay�� decision into a ��temporary return.�� The new scenario, according to the minister’s comments, refers now to a temporary ��exhibition dedicated to the diversity, complexity and aesthetic richness of these works�� that will be held, not in Africa, but across France this summer as part of Macron��s highly publicized event entitled ��Africa 2020.��

While most news outlets in France continue to briefly comment on the ongoing debate between supporters and critics of Savoy-Sarr report on the restitution of African art, The Art Newspaper insisted that ��the report made international headlines, recommending the restitution of African artifacts in French museums, but the country has not returned a single item to Africa.�� A year after the publication of Savoy-Sarr recommendations and Macron��s promise for a quick return, ��neither the 26 pieces from Benin nor indeed the 90,000 other Sub-Saharan artifacts in French museums�� have been returned to Africa.

What is often dismissed from the debate on the restitution of African heritage is the capacity of the French president to secure political and economic gains while asserting the hegemonic power of France over its neo-colonies. Macron accepted to temporarily return El Hadj Omar Tall��s sword to Senegal for a period of five years during another highly publicized ceremony, and at the same time he persuaded Macky Sall, the Senegalese President, to sign a new, multi-hundred million euro contract ��for the construction of three offshore patrol vessels for the Senegalese Navy.�� Again, there is nothing new here: as Sally Price reports, ��[R]estitution is part of a two-way interaction, based on inequality and demanding something in return.�� However, Macron successfully manages to obscure this inequality through a highly-calculated, affective, and Africa-friendly communicative strategy.

In France, as the old world is dying and the new is waiting to be born again, a specific breed of pseudo-intellectuals highjacks the public discourse to further promote a republicanism of inequality and exclusion. Among white French intellectuals, the complexity of the postcolonial field is often reduced to a corrupt discursive technology of deceptive arguments, false readings, and deliberate confusion. It is unconceivable to think of a public debate about, say, the case for reparations.

Whenever I am faced with the abysmal state of postcolonialism in France, I remember how Carina Ray, associate professor at Brandeis University, at a panel on the racial politics of knowledge production in November 2018, described the state of African studies in Europe: There are still issues that are ��so 1940s and 1950s.�� White Europeness�� has made it difficult to bring new perspectives on the postcolonial question. As she put it blatantly: it is a disaster.

The dangerous pseudo-intellectualism of Bernard-Henri L��vy, Alain Finkielkraut, ��ric Zemmour, Rapha��l Enthoven, Michel Houellebecq, Renaud Camus, Robert M��nard, and others – the list is absurdly long – has caused a permanent damage to any possibility of a qualitative change. There is no pause here: these figures have always been central to France��s neocolonial project of domination and exploitation.

As Marcuse writes, ��The most effective and enduring form of warfare against liberation is the implanting of material and intellectual needs that perpetuate obsolete forms of the struggle for existence.�� The omnipresence of L��vy, Finkielkraut, and Zemmour in public discourse in France is meant to turn meaningful propositions of liberation into obsolete forms of insignificant punditry.

In an infamous manifesto signed by 80 figures of the French intelligentsia such as the reactionary Alain Finkielkraut and published in 2018 postcolonialism was deemed ��a hegemonic strategy�� that attacks the ideals of republican universalism, and it involves ��the use of methods of intellectual terrorism reminiscent and far exceeds what Stalinism once did to European intellectuals.��

What is often recurring in these incendiary attacks on postcolonialism among the white French elite is this amalgam of postcolonialism with the North American scholarship. There is the tendency to believe that postcolonial studies, an interdisciplinary field of inquiry and activism, is due above all to the contributions of the American and Anglo-Saxon schools to the developments of its theories and practices. When the existing tensions between France (and Europe) and the United States on issues of knowledge production and cultural superiority is taken into consideration, one is inclined to consider that their attacks against postcolonialism are a deep and irrational fear of hegemonic American interventionism.

The view of postcolonial thought as a universal, progressive praxis that has been forged by the struggles of the peoples of the South is dismissed. The fundamental thrust of postcolonialism as moving beyond racial and identity issues to rethink also political, cultural, and utopian ideals is attacked. While the Americans and others have grasped that, in a world in flux, we cannot afford not to be postcolonial, France��s established networks of neocolonial power continue to dismiss postcolonialism as unpatriotic and as a homogeneous threat.

Faced with Finkielkraut��s racist and misogynist attacks during a televised debate, Maboula Soumahoro, the activist and chair of the Black History Month in France, was succinct in her reply: ��Your world is ending! You can be panic struck as long as you want, it��s over!��

Meanwhile, the complicity between the political, media and cultural institutions in France continues to silently enforce the state neocolonialism against the African diaspora. The death of Zineb Redouane, the islamophobic attack against a French Muslim women by a white far-right politician during a school trip with her son and other children to the regional parliament in eastern France, the outrageous and ignorant falsehoods made-up by a white French writer about slavery, the racist mural of Herv�� Di Rosa in the National Assembly, the decision of the French government to backtrack on the full and permanent restitution of stolen works of African art, and France��s murky role in Libya��s ongoing civil war are all visible signs of a pervasive state of neocolonialism that dictates the violent relationship between France and Africa.

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Published on January 23, 2020 16:00

The artwashing of Sindika Dokolo?

Coverage of the #LuandaLeaks revelations have steered clear of the art world dealings of Isabel dos Santos��s husband, and art luminaries have largely defended Dokolo��s reputation.

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President Manuel Pinto da Costa opening the VII Biennale of S��o Tom�� e Pr��ncipe. Sindika Dokolo in the background. Image credit Kris Haamer via Flickr CC.

Sindika Dokolo is reputedly the biggest collector of African art and also its most generous patron. Dokolo is also seen as a leader in the movement to repatriate stolen African art and artifacts from Euro-American institutions to African ones. And he is the husband of Isabel dos Santos, celebrated as Africa��s richest woman and a longtime target of criticism by Angolans, like investigative journalist Rafael Marques de Morais and now #LuandaLeaks, for her corrupt business dealings and large scale theft from the Angolan state. (She got her start as daughter of Angola��s longtime former president.) What has been striking thus far has been that coverage of the #LuandaLeaks revelations, and previous investigations of dos Santos, have steered clear of Dokolo��s dealings in the art world and luminaries in that world have largely defended Dokolo.

If you missed it, #LuandaLeaks, which broke last Sunday, show how Dos Santos and Dokolo ��were allowed to buy valuable state assets in a series of suspicious deals�� that personally benefited them and cost the Angolan state and taxpayers millions of dollars.

That little connection has been made between #LuandaLeaks and Dokolo as art patron and activist, may because of his own PR. Dokolo articulates his efforts to investigate and repatriate stolen art objects to African nations in a decolonial discourse that distances him from global systems of economic injustice. To be sure, he is unique in the world of collecting, fashioning himself as both a member of the elite and a postcolonial activist who has made good on his talk about restitution, even as he propagandized it. He promotes this image in countless media interviews and on his own social media. Take a recent Instagram post by Dokolo. His foundation had bought space on the NASDAQ electronic billboard in Times Square in New York City, highlighting his work repatriating African art. The Instagram video of the billboard is accompanied by this comment by Dokolo:

#GiveBackOurArt. We repatriate African art to museums in Africa. African art is our history, our identity, our dignity. My history didn’t start in 1482, the 1st time a Portuguese explorer set eyes on a subject of the Kongo kingdom. I was there before, I was there all along.

Will the #LuandaLeaks story cast his narrative in a new light?

The launch of #LuandaLeaks has sent Isabel dos Santos, the Angolan government, international banks, accounting firms and bankers scrambling. The Sindika Dokolo Foundation website is suddenly ��undergoing some maintenance.�� On the eve of the World Economic Forum, organizers removed dos Santos�� name from the list of participants gathering this week in Davos, Switzerland. EuroBic �� a Portuguese bank in which dos Santos is a key shareholder – announced it would sever all ties with her. The London-based global business services firm Pricewaterhouse Coopers did the same. The head of its Lisbon office��s fiscal and audit department, Jaime Esteves, went so far as to step down, citing the ��seriousness of the Luanda Leaks allegations.�� The Angolan Attorney General, Helder Pitta-Gr��s, said the Angolan judiciary is working to bring them back and to pursue action against dos Santos and Dokolo for using state money for personal profit. As global businesses and their leaders avert their eyes, cut links, and publicly declare their distance from dos Santos and Dokolo, the art world seems to be taking a wait-and-see-approach.

Luanda Leaks has not left Dokolo unscathed. Still, no one has raised the implications for Dokolo��s art collecting and art restitution campaign. The French newspaper, Le Monde, reports, that for the most part and for now, Dokolo��s associates in the art world are standing by him. Le Monde quotes Simon Njami, a leading curator of African art in Paris and an advisor to Dokolo: ��I refuse to scream with wolves. As far as I know, Sindika was not a dealer in weapons or drugs.��As far as I know, he did not manage national companies. Until further notice, what I retain from him is that he has advanced contemporary art in Africa and I keep all my respect for his action.��

Most of his art-world colleagues find Dokolo sincere in his love of art; they seem willing to separate his profile as a collector (and now curator) from any allegations of financial wrongdoing with his spouse. Anna Alix-Koffi, a French-Ivorian magazine publisher and curator, told Le Monde: ��Do you know many people who would buy works for hundreds of thousands of euros to return them to their country?��He is a defender of African art and, as such, I am by his side.�� Further, they tend to believe Dokolo��s now-undermined claim that his money and interests are separate from Isabel��s.

Here��s the problem: of course, we fully support the restitution of African art, the expansion of art scenes on the Continent, and rethinking museums, but we question whether the economic system that makes Dokolo��s work possible comports with the social benefit of art repatriation. If African art becomes an empty symbol of decolonization, it risks becoming a fetish once more.

It is also the case that Dokolo��s aggressive publicizing of his efforts tends to obscure the years-long effort to repatriate Angolan art that preceded him. Dr. Nuno Porto has written about the risks and rewards of those efforts for many years. As art institutions become nearly totally dependent on philanthropy, the restitution of African art risks becoming a PR maneuver for political or business ventures, a practice that has garnered its own neologism: ��artwashing.�� Philanthropy underscores the power and glamor of giving, whether it is George Clooney, Oprah Winfrey, Bill and Melinda Gates, or Mo Ibrahim. However, the bright lights and bling of giving obscure the almost total non-transparency of philanthropy. The purported ��good�� of art to society is completely undermined by the lack of the very ��public�� scrutiny that is required of policy work. We should all worry when private money replaces public policy.

Dokolo has worked with the Angolan Ministry of Culture, advocating a mixture of public and private funding that carries the risk of the philanthropists losing their financial stability or shifting their focus. State entities are tasked with collecting and displaying cultural heritage and the terms are clear: it belongs to the public and should be a visible part of public life. The MPLA, Angola��s ruling party since independence in 1975, was clear about this public ownership of art in their many statements about culture and art after independence.

#LuandaLeaks gives us an opportunity to consider the privatization of public goods, whether Sodiam funds, loans from Sonangol, or artworks. This is a story that should make us all uneasy; it braids together kleptocracy, philanthropy, and a discourse of decolonization. Dokolo and dos Santos argue that Africans are often unfairly singled out as corrupt, despite their use of this fact to deflect scrutiny. And they aren��t wrong. There is talk about trouble at PwC, but reporting shows that attention clings to dos Santos and Dokolo more readily than to the accountants, especially Western ones. Accounting and business service firms facilitate and regulate the global economy, crafting tax shelters and offshore accounts, but they tend to not have exciting public images or much of a presence on social media platforms. Yet we might do well to think of them as Hannah Arendt imagined German bureaucrats under Hitler: accountants make theft banal. These European and American firms helped dos Santos and Dokolo launder the money, like much of the art world is now called to do. Dokolo��s repatriation efforts and his patronage of African artists, no matter how sincere his interest, clean up his image while making art dependent on dirty money. This is why his art world and academic collaborators are so quiet. But just as the pressure mounts for museums worldwide with campaigns like #decolonizethisplace, the time may be up for revolutionary rhetoric funded by illicit gain.

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Published on January 23, 2020 06:00

Is Heineken brewing a better Africa?

Multinational corporations are considered motors for development in Africa and the Dutch beer giant Heineken is often cited as one of the best examples. The reality is different and distressing.

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Image credit Olivier van Beemen.

In the Netherlands, there��s an old secret that involves a local, world-famous beer brand. Only we Dutch know that Heineken is actually an average beer: nothing wrong with it, but nothing special either. It��s somewhat similar to eating a hamburger at McDonald��s: the taste is unlikely to upset most people and you can even experience a burning desire to eat one, but you know it��s not great and might regret it afterwards.

However, thanks to decades of successful marketing campaigns, people across the globe believe that Heineken is a so-called premium beer, for which many are prepared to pay a premium price. People consider Heineken a drink for winners who compete in European Champions League soccer and Formula One auto races, just two of the major sports events the corporation is sponsoring. These days, even secret agent James Bond alternates between his classic vodka martini and the green bottle from Amsterdam. An iconic former CEO of the brewing company, Freddy Heineken, used to say: ��People don��t drink beer. They drink marketing.��

In Heineken��s global beer empire, Africa holds a special place. The company doesn��t only expect substantial future growth from the continent��s emerging economies, it already makes mouth-watering profits here. According to the latest available results, Africa is 42 percent more profitable than the worldwide average for Heineken. Nigeria is one of the three most important global markets for the company, ahead of big western markets, such as the United States, the United Kingdom, or France.

Like elsewhere, marketing is of great importance and to the delight of the industry there are few limits for advertising in many African countries. In Kinshasa, the capital of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Heineken has painted whole neighborhoods in the color of a popular local brand, including beer logos on a police station, pharmacies, and school buses. In several countries, the brewing company has put logos on the walls of primary schools it has renovated. And in Lagos, Nigeria, Heineken has organized several beer and health conferences, where the audience was told that drinking beer would increase their life expectancy, prevent diseases, and make them more beautiful. People were recommended to drink 1.5 liters (51 fl oz) of beer each day to benefit from all the supposed advantages.

Across the continent, Heineken hires thousands of young women to promote its beer at bars and clubs. They used to be called ��promotion girls�� but Heineken now calls them ��brand ambassadors.�� Many of them have to deal with sexual abuse at work: they are victims of groping, are put under pressure to have sex with managers to keep or get the job, and/or sell sex to supplement their meager earnings.

In 2018, when I first uncovered the widespread sexual abuse of these women, Heineken promised quick improvements. If the company couldn��t guarantee good working conditions in a particular country within three months, it would cease its promotion activities there. Yet, when I discovered that in Kenya nothing had changed after the self-imposed deadline, Heineken broke its own promise and simply continued exposing the women to sexual harassment.

Moreover, instead of taking full responsibility, Heineken��s current CEO, Jean-Fran��ois van Boxmeer, blamed the intermediary agencies that hire the women in most countries. “We can��t control everything,” he said in an interview in the Dutch financial newspaper FD. Commenting on the short and tight dresses the women have to wear on the job, in which many feel uncomfortable, he said: ��Should they walk around in a sack of potatoes instead of a nice dress? You can endlessly discuss about that.�� Van Boxmeer further pointed at the ��huge cultural differences�� between various countries. The Heineken CEO considers #MeToo ��a western phenomenon.��

Image credit Olivier van Beemen.

During last year��s annual shareholder meeting, he admitted to having an affair with a beer promoter when he was expat director in Kinshasa in the 1990s. He called it ��a consensual love relationship�� and he was applauded by his shareholders for admitting to the affair, which had no consequences for his position.

The treatment of the promotion women is one of many examples of Heineken��s controversial business conduct in Africa. After more than six years of investigating its operations, I discovered that the global number two beer company (behind Anheuser Busch Inbev) got involved in structural malpractice and numerous alleged crimes, including high-level corruption and fraud. Through a Belgian subsidiary, the company has set up a scheme of tax avoidance.

In my book Heineken in Africa, I show that the company was also allegedly complicit in crimes against humanity. Currently in Burundi, Heineken’s activities represent 10 per cent of the GDP and more than 30 percent of the tax revenues. Thus it’s the main pillar and lifeline for Pierre Nkurunziza’s authoritarian regime, and it can be argued that Heineken is complicit in the crimes that were committed there; in Congo, the company collaborated with the violent rebel movement RCD and was a source of revenue for another, M23; while in Rwanda, it played an important role in the 1994 genocide. There, Heineken continued to brew beer in Rwanda, knowing that it was used to motivate and reward the killers. And it continued to pay taxes to the regime that committed the genocide.

The book also argues that Heineken’s contribution to economic growth, employment and development in most countries is negligible and likely to be negative, if the costs for the economy and society are taken into consideration.

Despite these concerns, Heineken is a company with an outstanding reputation for its activities on the continent. The company has convinced governments, business partners and NGOs that its presence is highly beneficial to African host nations��a win-win. To emphasize this, Heineken uses slogans like ��Brewing a Better World�� and ��Growing Together in Africa.�� It created the Heineken Africa Foundation, a charity that spends just over $USD 1 million per year to ��bridge the gap between the haves and have nots in Africa.�� Heineken��s African activities are the equivalent of its ��Dutch secret��: the company that transformed an average beer into a premium product cherished by the world has likewise succeeded in presenting itself as a corporate benefactor for Africa.

Essentially, the company is using the same recipe: marketing and story-telling. Over the years, Heineken created a positive narrative in Africa. The continent is presented as a minefield: people are poor so they can��t buy as many beers as elsewhere, the infrastructure is in bad shape, so it��s hard to distribute the product, and poor education levels make it hard to find skilled employees.

But Heineken, almost miraculously, conducts successful business here, claiming it complies with all the laws and international guidelines. At headquarters in Amsterdam, a former manager spoke to me of his company as ��an island of perfection in a sea of misery.�� Although obstacles to business certainly do exist in many African countries, Heineken fails to mention that those same obstacles also make the continent very attractive. Poverty and bad roads make a competitor think twice before entering the market��and fewer players means higher profits. The lack of government regulation and poor education systems make it easier for Heineken to convince people that drinking its product is good for your health.

Nowadays, many governments, both in the west and in Africa, have put their hope in multinationals as motors for development. ��Aid for trade�� is a new mantra and Heineken has received huge sums in government subsidies for its African investments��with USAID as an important contributor. Heineken keeps growing in Africa, creating wealth for mostly western shareholders.

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Published on January 22, 2020 16:00

Colonial revisionism; German edition

The German far right party AfD has extended its revisionism of German history to the colonial era. It amplifies global far-right discourses on colonialism��s ��balance sheet.��

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Berlin, Germany, September 2011. Image credit Riccardo Romano via Flickr CC.

The German parliament, the Bundestag, is rarely an exciting place, and even less often the site of debate and protest. But in December, the far-right Alternative f��r Deutschland (AfD) managed to scandalize the German public by hosting an academic lecture on German colonialism.

The speaker the AfD invited has made a name for himself as a colonial revisionist in the most literal sense: Bruce Gilley, professor of political science at Portland State University, became the subject of global debate in 2017 when the (small, but renowned) journal Third World Quarterly published his essay ��The Case for Colonialism.�� In it, Gilley argued not only that colonialism was ��objectively beneficial,�� but also that it should be reconsidered as a model of governance for countries in the Global South today. Critics, while scandalizing the proposal itself, mainly focused on the question of how a paper that was ��blind[��] to vast sections of colonial history,�� contained major ��empirical shortfalls,�� and was essentially ��the academic equivalent of a Trump tweet, clickbait with footnotes�� made it through peer review. As it turned out, the paper had been rejected by three peer reviewers, and the decision of editors to publish it without consulting the editorial board of Third World Quarterly led to the resignation of most members of the board and the retraction of the article.

None of this has stopped Gilley from continuing to promote his argument to reconsider colonial modes of governance for “weak” states while at the same time complaining in the international press that his freedom of speech is under attack by ��left-wing ideologues.��

So, what did Markus Frohnmaier and Petr Bystron, the two AfD parliamentarians who brought Gilley into the Bundestag, intend to achieve by inviting him to such a symbolical and politically relevant venue?

Like his ��Case for Colonialism,�� Gilleys speech to the AfD is an apologia of colonialism based on spurious empirical evidence and a selective reading of the literature. But, he also approvingly refers to revisionist colonial ideologues like Heinrich Schnee. Schnee was the last governor of German East Africa and a campaigner for the recovery of German colonies after they lost them in 1919; he joined the Nazi Party in 1933.

Gilley continues to downplay colonial violence by claiming its ��reactive nature�� and that it was an exception rather than at the very core of the colonial project. But the particularly brutal nature of the Herero genocide makes this stand out even more. Though not denying the actual events of the German war against the Herero and Nama, he claims it is ��wrong to call this a genocide�� and lays the full blame on the German military commander Lothar von Trotha, the author of the infamous ��elimination order�� against the Herero. Gilley calls him a ��war-traumatized outsider�� who ��committed a war crime�� and was ��condemned and recalled�� (none of this is supported by historical research; Trotha had the full support of the Kaiser and Chief of General Staff Von Schlieffen, despite criticism from the Reich Chancellor B��low and other generals).

Gilley directly takes over the arguments of reactionary colonial revisionists in the Weimar Republic and transplants them into modern academic and public discussions of colonial history. Heinrich Schnee��s phrase ��the lie of colonial guilt�� (Die koloniale Schuldl��ge is the title of his 1924 book, an influential work of colonial revisionism), says Gilley, ��is now an accurate description of virtually the entire academic industry writing on colonialism.��

He goes further. Not only is academia lying about colonial ��guilt,�� but also, according to Gilley, the whole project of anti-colonialism in interwar Germany (a minority position held mostly by the Communist Party, parts of SPD membership, and left liberal movements, but organized through the Communist International’s League against Imperialism based in Germany) led to a ��rejection of liberalism and cosmopolitanism�� and ��a return to German purity, exceptionalism, and separateness,�� which paved the way to Auschwitz.

Gilley��s presentation fits well into the AfD��s own efforts at writing an ��alternative�� history of Germany in the 20th Century, one which rejects the ��guilt cult�� (��Schuldkult��) of the memory of the Holocaust, as well as of colonial violence and genocide. But it is also tied to the AfD��s stance on development aid and its extreme economic imperialism.

Frohmaier and Bystron are the AfD��s representatives for development policy and foreign policy, respectively. Bystron is a chairman in the parliamentary foreign committee; Frohnmaier a member of the committee for economic cooperation and development. Both have been mentioned in the Verfassungsschutz (internal secret service) reports on the far-right (Bystron was under observation by the Verfassungsschutz until he became an MP), and both have contacts to right-wing extremists in Germany, such as the German Identitarian Movement. Bystron made headlines when, during an official trip as an MP to South Africa, he met with members of Suidlanders, a white supremacist group that promotes the “white genocide” conspiracy among the international far-right, and took part in a shooting training. Asked about the group by German TV, he called them “an organization of South African civil society.”

Inviting Gilley to the parliament to talk about the ��positive�� character of German colonialism is an obvious provocation in a time when pressure mounts on the German government to negotiate with Herero representatives on reparations, and to take concrete measures in the area of provenance research and restitution of cultural artifacts and human remains stolen during colonial times. But it also points to the AfD��s gradual efforts to develop a far-right profile in the areas of foreign policy and economic cooperation. And, it points to an increasingly connected international far-right, organizationally and ideologically.

In an AfD motion to the Bundestag, submitted the same day as Gilley��s presentation��December 11, 2019��these connections become clearer. It demands the Bundestag declare that colonialism ��should be regarded in a nuanced way.�� This means taking account of the ��dark sides�� (which, to the AfD, only means the colonial wars in Tanzania and Namibia), but refusing any reparations and emphasizing the ��beneficial sides of the German colonial era�� in the public, in the ��dialogue with representatives of former colonies�� and in school curricula. The motion downplays the ��dark sides�� by denying the systemic genocidal nature of the German war against Herero resistance and claiming it was an outlier in what was otherwise a benevolent colonial rule. These are formulations reminiscent of both Gilley��s rhetoric and the Oxford Empire and Ethics project, which was criticized critics as taking a ��balance-sheet�� approach to imperialism. The AfD also denounces most of academic colonial history, especially post- and decolonial approaches, as being inspired by ��cultural Marxism,�� a conspiracy theory popular with the far-right from US and UK alt-right groups to the European Identitarian movement and terrorists, such as Anders Breivik.

This memory politics of the AfD also translates into a far-right platform for current foreign and development policy. Frohnmaier and Bystron pursue the same mixture of economic nationalism and racism in the realm of foreign policy that the AfD has become known for in its national platform. Frohnmaier wants to abolish German development aid (a ��lefty helper industry,�� according to him) and replace it with an interventionist strategy designed to open ��new markets for the German economy,�� citing China��s ��new Silk Road�� strategy as a model to emulate. He also sees a ��population explosion�� in Africa, which he claims is ��the biggest challenge of our time.��

Gilley��s references to the beneficial nature of German colonialism, his downplaying of the Herero genocide and rehashing of Schnee��s narrative of the ��guilt lie�� are par for the course for a party whose chairman called the Nazi era a ��mere bird shit�� in German history, and a prominent AfD cadre called the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin a ��monument of shame.�� Thus, the AfD has found in Gilley a useful ideologue delivering a historical narrative that fits its reactionary revision of German history, while firmly embedding it in international far-right discourse.

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Published on January 21, 2020 16:00

Colonial revisionism in Germany

The German far right party AfD has extended its revisionism of German history to the colonial era and connects to global far-right discourses on colonialism��s ��balance sheet.��

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