Sean Jacobs's Blog, page 194
December 20, 2019
The black son shines
Masauko Chipembere in NY.
Given his tremendous musical output, it is hard to believe the Malawian-American musician Masauko Chipembere just released his first solo album, Masauko. It came out in June 2019. The album is about liberation, love, resilience, activism, giving voice to the powerless, a usable past, and connecting the world of his ancestors, Malawi, with that of his childhood and youth, Los Angeles. But a forthright review wouldn���t do justice to what he has achieved here. To get a full sense of the complex, remarkable world where Masauko���s music comes from, you need to know the man.
This means that you have to start before he was born, with the story of his parents, especially his father, the late Henry Masauko Chipembere, to whom he dedicates the album.
��� from ���Come to Life��� by Masauko.Poor water up this seed come to life
Nurture the growing dream come to life
In 1954, 27-year old Henry Masauko Chipembere graduated from South Africa���s Fort Hare University and returned home to colonial Nyasaland. The territory, now known as Malawi, was landlocked between Mozambique and Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) and Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia). Nyassaland and its people were governed by the British as part of a federation with Southern Rhodesia. The British maintained power via a mix of paternalism, Christian missionaries���who preached obedience to colonialism and liberation in the afterlife���and a local African elite of indirect rulers. While in South Africa, Chipembere had joined the ANC Youth League of Nelson Mandela, which was radicalizing that country���s largest liberation movement. (Even in this, Chipembere stood out: He was one of the first non-South Africans to join the ANC Youth League.) At Fort Hare, his mentor was Z.K. Matthews, a professor and legendary ANC leader. Masauko captures his father���s dilemma:
My father wanted to stay and fight the apartheid he saw growing in South Africa. But Z.K. Matthews told him to go back to Malawi. Matthews felt the federation was simply apartheid heading north. He told my father to take what he was learning in South Africa about protest and struggle and apply it to Nyasaland.
Chipembere was understandably restless when he got home. Soon he immersed himself in the independence struggle for Malawi. Though he quickly developed a reputation as a leader, Chipembere felt himself too inexperienced and too young to be in charge of the independence movement. He and his closest comrade, Kanyama Chiume, were in their early 30s. So, on the advice of Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana and Jomo Kenyatta of Kenya, they convinced an older Malawian medical doctor, Hastings Kamuzu Banda, to lead the movement, though Banda was living outside of the country. Banda had studied in the United States and Scotland, and had publicly condemned a colonial plan to merely reform British rule in the region. He also had an air of authority which was needed to convince elder Malawians, especially chiefs. ���We needed some grey hair,��� Chipembere later wrote in his biography, Hero of the Nation. For the next few years, Chipembere shuffled between doing the grunt work of revolution and spending time in prison for his politics. By July 6, 1964, Malawi was independent, partly due to Chipembere���s organizing skill. Banda���s party���the Malawi Congress Party (MCP)���won the independence vote outright. In the new government, Chipembere became Minister of Local Government and Education.
Masauko album cover.The honeymoon did not last long as Chipembere soon clashed with Banda over the latter���s growing authoritarianism, personality cult and rightwing politics. Far from transforming Malawi, Banda supported Portuguese colonialism in Mozambique and Angola, South African apartheid and retained colonial British officers in key positions in Malawi���s military. Banda���s increasingly corrupt regime also failed to implement necessary social and economic programs to alleviate the poverty and degradation wrought on Malawians by colonial racism. In September 1964, Chipembere left government in support of other cabinet members who were removed unfairly by Banda for attempts to question his totalitarian leadership. Chipembere made a classic speech as he left parliament in which he said:
��� history takes long to declare its judgement. The scoundrels of today may be the heroes of tomorrow, the villains of today may be declared saints tomorrow, it may be after their death. So, although today I am condemned, I may be declared a traitor, I know that ultimately, however long it may take, my stand will be justified.
Banda ordered him arrested and he went underground. By the next year, Chipembere was leading an armed rebellion against Banda���s regime. The rebellion failed because Banda was tipped off and had his military and police prepared.
��� from ���Selassie and Chipembere��� by Masauko.Out on the corner of Chipembere and Haile Selassie
Up in Malawi, a part of my destiny was spelled out to me
Through a message from my ancestry
Exile became Chipembere���s only option. After a brief stay in Tanzania where he linked with other liberation movements and leaders, he ended up in Los Angeles, where he was eventually reunited with his wife, Catherine Ajizinga (a political activist in her own right), and their five children, who were smuggled out of Malawi six months after Chipembere fled. In LA, Chipembere became a professor of history at Cal State University-Los Angeles and began his doctoral work at UCLA. But he never lost his sharp political insight. A lecture to students at the University of California-Santa Cruz in 1970 displayed Chipembere���s clarity in tying together critiques of colonialism and third world authoritarianism. Discussing migrant labor in Southern Africa (Banda���s government was acting as a recruitment agency for South African mining companies on terms undermining workers), Chipembere told his audience that, ������ supplying South Africa with cheap labor means perpetuating her economic and therefore military superiority which is used to keep the Africans of South Africa down and poses a threat to the rest of Africa.���
In September 1970, Chipembere and Catherine Ajizinga���s seventh and last child was born (and the only one to be born in the US���their 6th child was born in Tanzania). They named him Masauko Glyn Chipembere, after his dad. Sadly, young Masauko would only spend a short time with his father who passed away from complications related to diabetes on September 24th, 1975. This was just two days before Masauko’s 5th birthday.
In Pasadena, the Chipemberes lived down the street from the famed South African musicians, Caiphus Semenya and Letta Mbulu. Like some of their contemporaries���Hugh Masekela, Abdullah Ibrahim, Sathima Benjamin and Miriam Makeba���the Semenyas had left South Africa in exile in the mid-1960s and settled in Los Angeles. Mbulu had completed five albums by 1977 and with her husband had made a name for herself working with Quincy Jones on the soundtrack music for the TV series Roots.
By serendipity, their son Mosese attended Catherine Chipembere’s 24-hour daycare (a first in Los Angeles to provide 24-hour care). When Letta and Caiphus were on tour, their son stayed at the Chipemberes. Masauko often swam in the pool at the Semenya house, and crucially, took in the musical lessons. There he heard songs like ���Angelina��� (later a cult classic) coming from Caiphus��� studio even before it was released. Caiphus Semenya also bought Masauko his first record player as a child. This is how he got introduced to music, his older brother, Vita, brought home from college: Bob Marley���s Exodus, Steel Pulse���s True Democracy, The Clash���s Sandinista, and UB40���s Signing Off. You can still hear those influences in Masauko���s music, which is a unique mixture of Southern African traditional music with jazz, folk, funk, hip-hop, reggae, and what became known as World Music in the late 1980s.
Whether he planned to or not, in connecting with the Semenyas, Masauko was continuing his father���s regional and pan-African politics, especially linkages between South Africa and Malawi. As Masauko recalls: ���In Steve Biko���s I write what I like, he mentions that he was not inspired by events in the United States as many would have suspected, but by events in places like Malawi in the 1960s.��� For Masauko, this means essentially that pan-Africanist consciousness was circular in nature: ���Matthews inspired my father to go home and fight. Later, Biko was inspired by the successful resistance he had witnessed in Malawi as a youth. I believe one of our huge problems in the region is the failure to see how all of these struggles have always been connected.���
��� ���Africa Calling��� by Masauko, M. Ntaka, L. Klaasen.Africa is calling you
back to the strength in your soul.
If young Masauko was picking up politics from his mother and the Semenyas, he was also being shaped by Los Angeles. The late 1980s and early 1990s was a particularly violent and oppressive period in the city for black people, culminating in the LA Riots of 1992, when the city���s black population orchestrated an uprising against the brutal LAPD after the Rodney King beating. During this time, Masauko also received his musical education in an LA scene that included Ben Harper, Leon Mobley, Primus, Jellyfish, and Freestyle Fellowship, among others. Like most LA artists, Masauko started by playing a mixture of rock, funk, ska, reggae, and hip hop. Bands like the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Fishbone and Jane’s Addiction were the standard; collectively they didn���t sound like anyone else. Especially Fishbone. Masauko had met their keyboardist Chris Dowd at age 14. ���He literally gave me a list of music to go study: Sly Stone, Don Drummond, U-Roy, Funkadelic, The Meters, The Skatalites. He told me straight up that if I wanted to make my mark in music I couldn���t be a copycat. I needed to go to the roots of the music and create my own sound. Best advice ever given to me by an elder musician.���
Masauko Chipembere in NY.In the early 90s Masauko���s band Skin brought down the house at the Whiskey A Go-Go, a famed rock venue on Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood, scouted by record executives. Masauko was rewarded with a record deal by RCA Records through Bruce Flohr, who also signed Dave Matthews at that time. A few songs were recorded but never released because RCA changed presidents and recruited a new batch of artists.
If Masauko���s world was changing fast, so were politics back in Malawi. In 1994, the by now 96-year old Kamuzu Banda had finally stepped down as Malawi���s President after thirty years in power. A mixture of factors���the end of the Cold War, old age, a restive population and regional contagion���had caught up with him. The winds of change were blowing all over Southern Africa. Even South Africa was politically free. Catherine Chipembere announced her return home from exile after 30 years in Los Angeles; to help put an end to the Kamuza era. Leaving behind her seven adult children, she was invited to run for political office upon her return. Her inclusion in the UDF government was a sign to many Malawians that the reforms were irreversible. The Chipembere name brought credibility to the party opposing Banda. She was elected to the country���s Parliament and served as Deputy Minister of Education. None of her children were, however, especially keen about going to visit her in Malawi. Except her youngest, Masauko. In 1996, he traveled to Malawi, ���That���s when Malawi and the whole Chipembere story became real to me, more especially the thought of my mother taking a flight to Malawi to fight someone who was an enemy of pan-Africanism.���
��� from ���Welcome Home��� by Masauko and Mongezi Ntaka.Welcome home
this is our hour
this is our place
this is our time
let���s show some grace
In Malawi, Masauko stayed for a year, getting to know his mother���s world. She was now a Minister, traveling widely in the region and speaking Chichewa, a language he did not speak. His mother blossomed in her return home. It was in the loneliness of living in his mother���s house, away from his life in the US, that he began playing music with local artists and studying traditional Malawian music. He had a grand idea to develop the local music industry and start a band there, but felt he���d be better off decamping to South Africa, following stops in Mozambique and Zimbabwe, hoping to re-connect with the Semenyas, who had returned to South Africa post-apartheid. And this is how he became a pop star in Africa.
In February 1997, at Jahnito���s, a small jazz caf�� in Yeoville, Johannesburg he met songwriter Neo Muyanga, from Soweto, working as a journalist for local station, Radio 702. They started to perform as an acoustic duo called Blk Sonshine. They chose this name for their band as an affirmation and command: ���Black son, shine!���
It made sense that Masauko landed in Johannesburg in the late 90s. It was the region���s most capitalist economy with a deeply embedded music industry. South Africa was also a new country. Black creatives were coming into their own. Spaces were opening up for musicians and artists to try new things. In 1998, Blk Sonshine recorded a self-titled album, which quickly charted. One song, ���Building,��� climbed to number one on the South African jazz charts. The music was what could broadly be described as black folk music. Kwaito, a hybrid of slowed down house music and hip hop dominated in the clubs and on the airwaves, so the album came out of left field. Kwaito was characterized by sparse lyrics and celebration. There was little time for introspection. Blk Sonshine���s music did the opposite. It widened the horizon for what was musically possible in South and Southern Africa. Blk Sonshine took another decade to record a second album, ���Good Life.��� But by then, Chipembere and Muyanga had moved onto other projects. Muyanga began a series of university fellowships, explored South Africa���s musical histories and made an opera. As for Masauko, who by now was married and a father of two young children, he moved to Brooklyn, New York, where he performed locally and internationally as well as being part of a scene that included Talib Kweli and Mos Def. Now and then the duo performed together at major concerts, like they did for Nelson Mandela at his ���46664��� charity concert in 2005, in front of thousands of fans and millions watching on television.
Masauko Chipembere in NY.Masauko also played regularly with South African musicians based in the US. One of these was Mongezi Ntaka, the original guitarist for reggae artist Lucky Dube (murdered in 2007) and who currently plays with Vusi Mahlasela, another South African musician. Mongezi is a master of the township jazz guitar style made popular in the west by Ray Phiri (another South African with roots in Malawi) on Paul Simon���s Graceland. Mongezi���s mom is Malawian and his father is South African. Masauko and Mongezi met in the early 2000s:
I saw him play and his vibe reminded me of John Blackie Selowane from Masekela���s band. I told him so. He dug that because Selowane had lived in Malawi when Mongezi was young and was actually a big influence on his playing. We hit it off right away. They are both guitarists who come from township music but can play all Southern African styles.
Like his father, Masauko retained a certain rebelliousness and a desire to travel. After an eight year career as sound engineer at the Brooklyn Museum of Art, countless projects in Malawi with his mother���s organization and his own musical ambassadorship, he and his family took the leap to leave the United States as the Obama-era was coming to an end. With a budding black teenage son and a curious pre-teen daughter, Masauko and his wife read the signs that were telling them that life outside of the US was their best option. With the increasingly depressing atmosphere for black people in the United States (police violence, the election of Donald Trump), Masauko moved his family to Costa Rica. (His wife���s family is from there; Natasha Gordon-Chipembere, who he met in South Africa, is an English professor.) He now lives between Costa Rica, Los Angeles, and New York.
��� from ���Birds will Sing��� by Masauko.One day my bird will sing a song to heal us all.
The song will give us wings
The song won���t let us fall.
Masauko immersed himself in his new surroundings, learning Spanish by playing with local musicians, and eventually forming a band of musicians from all over Latin America, including Roberto Roque from Cuba and Huba Watson, an Afro-Costa Rican rapper. They began building the concept of ���Casa Africa��� which were African-based cultural and musical ���pop-up��� events throughout San Jose, which featured a wide arrange of art from the African Diaspora. Masauko also became the DJ of a jazz radio show called Connections, on 95.5, the national jazz station of Costa Rica. At the same time, he continued to travel internationally, to play music, and eventually, at a concert in Salt Island, Vancouver hosted by the tea company Guyaki, he was approached about recording an album under their new record label Come To Life. In July 2017, he was flown to Malawi with Darryl Chonka, his co-producer and engineer at Guyaki, to meet his Malawian band and rehearse. A week later, the band was flown to Cape Town, South Africa to be recorded. His album ���Masauko��� was made with a stellar cast of young Malawian jazz musicians, including on lead guitarist and background vocals, Ernest Ikwanga; Sam Mkandawire on keyboards (and background vocals); bassist Chambota Chirwa; and drummer Kyle Luciano Phikiso.
It is no surprise that the ensuing years of traveling between the US and Southern Africa profoundly inform Masauko���s music and politics: ���Music is about connection for me. As I have traveled back and forth to Africa over the years, I have found every form of music I learned in the States has some roots in Africa. There is even village music that feels like reggae in Malawi.���
The songs on the album reflect Masauko���s hybrid nature. ���Ilala������on which he shouts out his family name and ancestors���has South American and Southern African sounds mixing. ���Birds will sing��� and ���Building��� reprise two songs off Blk Sonshine���s 1998 album. The guitar-driven ���Watch this woman��� sounds like something Harry Belafonte would have done; in the late 1980s it would have been called World Music. ���Chilembwe,��� is a homage to John Chilembwe, an earlier revolutionary liberation figure in Malawi who had led a bloody, but unsuccessful , insurrection against British rule in the first decade of the 20th century. It has the same reggae inflections of ���Ichi Chakoma��� and ���Selassie and Chipembere.��� The latter songs make explicit the politics of the founder of the Organization of African Unity (OAU) and his father. ���Old Shackles��� and ���Come to Life��� have the feel of Soul Brothers��� Mbaqanga. The songs are conscious and the lyrics expansive. From the very beginning of Masauko���s musical journey, he says he understood that songwriting was the medium to give voice to people struggling against inequality and to show solidarity.
Half the songs on the album were written with Mongezi. As a child, he lived in both South Africa and Malawi and brought Masauko tons of knowledge about township jazz, Malawian Kwela, and reggae. He now lives in the Washington DC area. ���Mongezi has really been a teacher to me as a child of exile. He was the one always pushing Lucky Dube to add the Southern African touches to the reggae and stay away from imitating Peter Tosh���s sound which Lucky loved.���
In the end, what drives Masauko is, as he emailed to me in October 2019:
Music has a role to play in shaping consciousness back home. This is conscious music. I’m not with the rappers who say they are not trying to make conscious music. I’m trying to hit folks where Bob Marley, Peter Tosh, Fela, Bob Dylan, Hugh Masekela, Chuck D., Nina Simone and Miriam were hitting them. I’m not interested in being the next big pop sensation. I’m interested in liberation. African governments are still controlled by old men from the Banda era. The old men are still clinging to power though they understand few of the issue at play in modern reality.
The black son shines.
Skewing sexuality
A classroom in Ghana. Image credit Ben Gray via Flickr CC.
In May 2011, the then-President of Ghana, John Evans Atta-Mills, declared at the annual convention of the Pentecost Church of Ghana: ���Christ is the president of Ghana,��� and that he owes no one any apologies for the statement which, according to him, is his ���guiding principle as head of state.��� Atta-Mills��� statement at the time collapsed the complex religious composition of Ghana���which includes Islam, traditional African religions, and those who identify as atheists among others���and essentially proposed Christianity as Ghana���s national religion.
Atta-Mills��� utterances underscored the political dominance of Christianity in Ghana since its introduction by Europeans during the slave trade and under colonialism, but also how, as a religion, it has been deployed to define citizenship and deny basic human rights���especially in respect to LGBTQ people. The very beings of LGBTQ in Ghana are decried and derided as ���un-African��� and a western import. At the lead of anti-LGBT groups are a set of organizations that vehemently advocate for the preservation of ���proper��� family values in Ghana.
Front and center is the National Coalition for Proper Human Sexual Rights and Family Values, a tripartite coalition made up of the Christian council, Catholic secretariat, Catholic Bishops Conference, Ghana Pentecostal and Charismatic Council, the Muslim community and traditional rulers. It was founded in December 2013. These organizations, despite their historical differences, unify in opposition to the rights and freedoms of LGBTQ people.
Founded in December 2013 by Moses Foh-Amoaning, the coalition is fiercely anti-LGBTQ. On its Facebook Page, Foh-Amoaning declares: ���I may lose some friends over this, but homosexuality is a sin.��� He is citing Leviticus 18:22, a Bible passage often quoted by homophobes to support their views that homosexuality is abominable.
What has particularly drawn the ire of the coalition is the decision, in September 2019, by the Ghana Education Service (GES) to introduce a new sexuality education policy. This policy, which is supported by United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) and the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), incorporates gender, human values, and sexual and reproductive health and rights perspectives into the current curriculum of primary schools on sexuality education. According to the director of the GES, the policy will facilitate ���positive attitudes, open-mindedness, respect for self and others, non-judgmental attitudes, and a sense of responsibility concerning their sexual and reproductive health issues.��� On a sociocultural and political level, sexuality education programs are crucial because they also touch on human rights, gender equality and empowerment, and have been shown to enhance ���young people���s knowledge of gender and social norms.���
A wave of LGBTQ-phobia���mainly under the guise of protecting children and preserving family values and couched in such rhetoric���followed the announcement, with anti-LGBTQ organizations complaining that the policy would ���legitimize LGBT identification.)��� Organizations like the aforementioned National Coalition for Proper Human Sexual Rights and Family Values, the Christian Council of Ghana (CCG), and the Ghana Pentecostal and Charismatic Council (GPCC) interpreted the content of the policy as “legitimizing LGBT identification.” The President of the Ghana Pentecostal and Charismatic Council (GPCC), Paul Yaw Frimpong-Manso, referred to the policy as ���Comprehensive Satanic Engagement.���
No surprise that evangelicals and conservatives outside Ghana, especially from the US, chimed in. Last month, the African Family and Sustainable Development Summit, a two-day conference supported by the US-led network called The World Congress of Families (WCF), was held in Accra. The WCF has connections to white supremacist, anti-LGBTQ, and Islamophobic organizations.
To make sense of the current anxieties around rights-based sexuality education in Ghana, however, it is important to situate them in a history that produced the current discourses and attitudes on what constitutes family values. In 1961, the Christian Council of Ghana (CCG) established the Committee on Christian Marriage and Family Life (CCMFL) ���to promote positive Christian teaching on sex, marriage and family life.��� Some of the projects pursued by the CCFML included youth outreach programs that introduced Ghanaian youth to ���proper sexual behaviors.��� The projects, funded mostly by the Christian Aid, an organization based in Britain, pursued the Christian marriage and family life projects in some parts of Ghana. Their execution not only transplanted Euro-American ideas of ���proper��� family values onto indigenous ideas of gender, sexuality and desire, but also radically redefined them. Letters exchanged between the Christian Council of Ghana and the Christian Aid between 1965-1975 expose how some politicians and clergy relied on funding from Britain and other European nations to circulate western notions of the heterosexual family and monogamy.
Evangelical groups like the WCF, based in the US���a country with a violent history of racism���repeats these dangerous liaisons by supporting organizations like the National Coalition for the Preservation of Proper Human Sexual Rights and Family Values. The WCF���s recent conference in Accra exemplifies its links to the coalition, provoking what the Zambian theologian Kapya Kaoma calls ���the global cultural wars.��� In the midst of these cultural wars, some Ghanaians make the questionable claim that heterosexuality is authentically African while supporters of LGBTQ visibility view homophobia as a phenomenon imported to Africa from the west.
If the history of the relationship between Christian Aid and CCG has taught us anything, it is how the meanings of gender, sexuality, and marriage shift over time. It is critical, then, that we situate these conversations in the contexts of complex histories. Such a pursuit prompts us to ask how feminist and LGBTQ movements in Ghana can become the vehicle for envisioning a future in which ���preserving proper family��� values does not become an alibi for the rape and violent abuse of girls, as the veteran Ghanaian journalist Elizabeth Ohene���s recent expose�� demonstrated? How can such collaborations dismantle the virulent male supremacy that allows gender-based abuse to continue? In a country where Christianity has become the reason for indefensible actions like scapegoating members of the LGBTQ community, duping the poor, infirming the sick, and targeting ethnic and non-Christian minorities and the country���s most vulnerable people, it is clear that our communities and broader society needs fundamental moral, spiritual and political restructuring.
December 19, 2019
I only have eyes for Bobi Wine
Bobi Wine. Screenshot from SABC News.
Ever since Bobi Wine, Uganda���s biggest pop star, won his seat in parliament in a contested 2017 race, western journalists have flocked to the country���s capital, Kampala, to conduct interviews with and profile him. The interest is certainly justified: in a short time, Wine, real name Robert Kyagulanyi Ssentamu, has turned a decade-long career in music, often addressing the problems faced by Uganda���s poor, into a political movement of which he is, undoubtedly, at the center (and what that has the Ugandan state nervous). He has announced he will challenge President Yoweri Museveni for the presidency in 2021. Far from replicating the conventional trappings for which western journalists are often criticized with regards to reporting on Africa and its politics, reporting on Wine has presented a rather distinct challenge, one that reinforces a formidable challenge in Uganda political history.
In June, at a cafe in Kololo, Kampala, I spoke with Moses Khisa, Assistant Professor of political science at North Carolina State University and a regular contributor to Uganda���s opposition newspaper, the Daily Monitor:
I���ve been fascinated ��� by the overwhelming interest, and perhaps even obsession if I may put it that way, with Bobi Wine. So, I keep asking myself ���Why? What is it that you see that I, as a Ugandan, haven���t quite figured out?��� Okay, so I know that this guy is a celebrity, he appeals to young people, he���s a new kid on the block ��� But I have never in my lifetime seen such enormous western media interest in an African politician, let alone a Ugandan politician ��� Almost every media house that matters has been reporting on Bobi Wine.
Though my own reasons for focusing on Wine have certainly changed, for many western journalists (especially those who spend very little time visiting, let alone living in, the countries they report about), Bobi Wine represents the latest shiny new object through which to grow by-lines. The nexus of music, politics and Africa where Wine resides, makes for a rather sexy subject matter that can grab a readership interested in any of those areas. It certainly doesn���t hurt that Wine is quite handsome, has an incredible voice, catchy songs, an absurdly cool joie de vivre that gets pronounced by his slight, purposeful limp, and a political lexicon as aesthetically radical as the red berets worn by his movement, People Power. But for Khisa, as for many Ugandans, including People Power supporters and Wine himself, the singer-turned-politician represents little that could be considered new for the national political landscape.
These parachute journalists also make elementary mistakes. For example, journalist Philip Pilling, in an article based on his interview with Wine in Kamwokya and published in The Financial Times in July, not only confused the ingredients of his own lunch, but also one of Wine���s associates. However, the bigger problem with the FT coverage, and many of the outlets that have reported on Wine, is that they fail to deliver anything of substance or context regarding the nuances of Uganda politics and the challenges facing Wine and People Power. With few exceptions (one being Helen Epstein���s reporting in The New York Review of Books), the only context usually included in interviews with and short profiles on Wine are the one or two lines devoted to Museveni and his 33 years in power, often written in the same brain-numbingly similar formula.
While it could be convincingly argued that the mountain of media attention heaped on Wine has benefited both himself and his movement by assuring his continued safety, his rise and People���s Power���s significance within Uganda���s post-colonial history is vastly more complex than western journalism represents. In focusing strictly on Uganda���s ���Ghetto President��� (as Wine likes to be known) and merely mentioning his autocratic rival, Museveni, readers are led to construct a simple, bipolar model of young vs. old, good vs evil���a pitched political battle between two equal and opposite forces. This could not be further from the case. Most significantly, and as someone who has spent considerably more than a few days in Uganda researching the Ugandan political landscape, there are other political actors to consider. Take Dr. Kizza Besigye and his Forum for Democratic Change, which prior to the emergence of Bobi Wine and People Power, were the primary force of Uganda���s opposition.
Besigye, a former army officer, medical doctor and one-time confidante of Museveni, has until recently been the most prominent opposition leader. For his troubles, he has faced multiple arrests, is likely under constant surveillance, and he and his supporters have been subjected to violent attacks by the police. Besigye has been, and remains, a critical figure on the Ugandan political landscape. So much so, that many believe Wine���s success in defeating Museveni depends on Besigye���s cooperation in forming a coalition that could front a single candidate.
When I spoke with Nabilah Ssempala, the MP for the Kampala Women Parliamentary Constituency and so-called ���rogue member��� of Besigye���s Forum for Democratic Change, she illuminated further the nature of Besigye���s relationship to People Power.
It’s existed since independence, people power; but with different generations it has dawned different clothing. But it’s generally the hope of Ugandans for a better government, for better policies and for fundamental change. Even President Museveni in the bush days, he dawned the people power ��� [Nasser] Sebaggala, who was a very popular mayor [of Kampala] ��� he got that baton for some time, which he handed over to Besigye.
In other words, and as I heard it many times, Besigye was People Power before People Power was People Power. Besigye has, in fact, consistently been the runner-up in all four presidential elections since multi-party dispensation was restored in 2005, receiving a high of 37% of the vote in 2006. It is true that we can never know the real vote counts of elections in Uganda where every public institution���from the Electoral Commission, to the police and military, to the Supreme Court���rests firmly in the grip of Museveni���s tentacular authority. Besigye���s electoral performance, in spite of this corruption, is all the more impressive.
Plenty of others, including Besigye himself, have so little faith in the democratic process ���being of the belief that President Museveni, through various institutions, has rigged some or all of the presidential and parliamentary elections���that the notion of a coalition as a solution to the problem is laughable. Still more, like Ssempala, believe Besigye has developed the same narcissistic tendencies inherent to the despot he has for so long tried to unseat, and that his own desire for power will prevent him from forming any coalition or falling in behind Wine���s People Power front. This is, perhaps, one of the reasons undergirding the emergence of the latest political force in Uganda, a breakaway from the FDC: the Alliance for National Transformation led by General Mugisha Muntu.
These details, critical as they are to understanding Bobi Wine���s chances going forward, are not what you would read in the Financial Times, let alone the Los Angeles Times, The Guardian or any other mainstream publication. There is also little or no mention of others who have more recently aided in the opposition to Museveni���s regime. For example, Francis Zaake, the MP who was arrested and tortured on the same day as Wine; or Ziggy Wine, the People Power musician who was abducted and then died shortly after his body was dumped at Mulago Hospital; or the nearly thirty opposition politicians and supporters (including the MP���s Kassiano Wadri, Gerald Karuhanga or Paul Mwiru) who were arrested in Arua in August of 2018 and continue to face trumped-up treason charges.
Nor do mainstream publications broaden the discussion of Wine���s political movement, and therefore, readers are precluded from understanding what People Power is���and what it is not. Some attention has been given to Wine���s views on homosexuality, which���from what I have seen and heard���seems to have undergone a shift. Though People Power lacks an overt policy recognizing LGBT rights, it is far from participating in the violent anti-homosexual rhetoric that is pervasive in Uganda���s Parliament. Reporting on policy positions beyond this, which has always been more focused on Wine���s personal sentiments than on his movement, are virtually nonexistent. Admittedly, People Power as a political organization (Wine and his affiliates would object to this label) suffers from an extreme lack of policy.
Apart from rhetoric regarding corruption, unemployment, and the need to build stronger, independent institutions, People Power offers little in terms of a substantive or divergent agenda. This does not, however, necessarily make them an outlier among Uganda���s political parties. If one cannot envision wielding power, knowing what to do with it becomes a rather difficult hurdle. Hence, People Power���s primary message of uniting across identity groups���a closing of the fist as it were���to coalesce around the collective aim of unseating Museveni.
People Power���s mission is what its name implies, a realization of the supreme agency of the masses. But what happens after? If the pressure that accompanies journalistic attention could force Wine to reconsider his views on homosexuality, could not this same attention provoke deeper considerations of policy on the part of his movement? Perhaps such policies���whatever they may be���that might strike at the heart of Uganda���s perpetual strongman problem?
For mainstream publications and the drop-in journalists who write for them, Bobi Wine is the sole star of the show. For whatever number of obscure reasons���naivet��, a lack of resources, or just plain journalistic vanity���painting a more nuanced portrait of Uganda politics remains outside the interests of mainstream western publications. In this way, mainstream publications reinforce the condition from which Ugandan politics has suffered since independence. While there is certainly much that can be said���too much to say here���regarding the colonial origins of strong man politics, it is worth questioning the ways in which contemporary journalism is complicit in its continuation. If journalists are to be truly dedicated to the practice of speaking truth to power���whether that journalist be western or that power be African or not���is it not worthwhile to get to know the subtleties and complexities of that power?
Time travelin’
Chimurenga: Pan African Space Station at the Vera List Center Forum 2019, Sheila C. Johnson Design Center, The New School, October 23-25, 2019. Image credit Jordan Rathkopf, courtesy Vera List Center for Art and Politics.
In January 1977, Nigeria���s government hosted 17,000 artists from Africa and its diaspora for 29 days at the 2nd World Black and African Festival of Arts and Culture (FESTAC) in the country���s commercial capital, Lagos. (The first such festival was held in Dakar, Senegal in 1966). FESTAC remains the largest gathering in one place of black and African artists as well as intellectuals from the continent and in the diaspora. One group that stood out by their presence was the African-American delegation. This contingent included Sun Ra, singer-songwriter Stevie Wonder, the feminist academic Audre Lorde, and writer Alice Walker, among many others.
Fast forward to October 2018, when the Vera List Center for Arts and Politics (VLC) at The New School awarded its prestigious Jane Lombard Art Prize to Chimurenga���the Cape Town, South Africa-based pan-African artist collective. The finalists for the prize included Vietnamese-American artist Tiffany Chung, Russian-Ghanaian photographer Liz Johnson Artur and the artist-run, Bethlehem-based initiative Dar Yusuf Nasri Jacir.
At the beginning of October 2019, three Chimurenga staffers���Ntone Edjabe, Dudu Lamola, and Graeme Arendse���were to travel to New York City to accept the prize. Chimurenga is widely known for its publications, most notably the Chronic, but it also runs a music project, the Pan-African Space Station (PASS). The latter consists of concerts, an archive, and a pop-up radio event, which Chimurenga has hosted in a number of cities including Cairo, Harare, Helsinki, London, and previously in New York. As part of the festivities for the prize-giving, Chimurenga wanted PASS to recreate the experience of FESTAC.
Upon Ntone, Lamola, and Arendse’s in New York, the white-cube gallery of the Aronson Galleries at The New School���the venue for PASS���transformed almost overnight. Before a wall covered in a soft but serious red���Chimurenga red���was a plush sofa set adorned with kitenge print fabric. Pastel colored, retro armchairs huddled around coffee tables throughout the rest of the room. A black and white photomural of young, African-American artists in a conference hall in Lagos covered the adjacent wall. This image was captured by Calvin Reid, a photographer who had been a part of the US delegation at FESTAC. Once the setup was complete, the room felt like a personal library, but one owned by an erudite person with a taste for making guests feel at home.
Chimurenga: Pan African Space Station at the Vera List Center Forum 2019, Sheila C. Johnson Design Center, The New School, October 23-25, 2019. Image credit Jordan Rathkopf, courtesy Vera List Center for Art and Politics.As the first day of the broadcast got closer, I tried to articulate for friends and on the VLC���s social media platforms what was meant by a ���Pan-African Space Station.��� It���s a literal space station? Well, it���s at the New School gallery. Oh, so it���s an exhibition. No, there won���t be anything hanging on the walls. It���s more like a radio show. So, they���ll be recording there and we can listen in? Yes, but the point is to have guests present. Huh? Yes, think of it as a radio show hosted before a studio audience. I exhaled. That sounded close. But I knew it wasn���t quite right. This implied a separation between audience and speakers, between backstage and frontstage. But the layout spoke to something else entirely.
PASS would begin with a reflection on afrofuturist bandleader Sun Ra Arkestra���s performances at FESTAC. Jazz musicians Craig Harris and Ahmed Abdulla, who traveled to Lagos as then members of the Arkestra, would join Edjabe, photo documentarian Calvin Reid, and jazz educator Richard Harper for this conversation. On day two, the poet Harmony Holiday would host black, female artists who had attended FESTAC. Among her guests were official FESTAC photographer Marilyn Nance, sculptor Valerie Maynard, and novelist Louise Merriweather. Day three would explore the visual memory of FESTAC through the archives of photographers who had documented the event, including Nance and Reid.
PASS would culminate in a rare performance led by Craig Harris, who had written a jazz suite commemorating the spirit of FESTAC soon after his return from Lagos. Harris had only performed the suite once before, in 1982.
The day finally arrived, and it felt like a homecoming. FESTAC alumni greeted one another with such emotion; some had not met since Lagos more than 40 years ago. Students, academics, artists and others slowly streamed in, walking around the room with keen interest but keeping a respectful distance. The alumni excitedly pointed out their younger selves on the photomural, a photograph by Calvin Reid, and in the massive book of FESTAC archives that Chimurenga launched at PASS.
Craig Harris, FESTAC ’77 at the Vera List Center Forum 2019, Tishman Auditorium, The New School, October 25, 2019. Image credit Jordan Rathkopf, courtesy Vera List Center for Art and Politics.As the room filled up, FESTAC participants settled in on the couches up front. An ���On Air��� light flickered on. The room fell into a hush. The alumni recalled stories of their time in Lagos like it was yesterday. As they talked, recorded sounds floated in the background���radio interviews from the FESTAC venue, performances by various groups that had been in attendance. I can only liken it to time travel. When the lights came back on for a brief break, I had forgotten where I was.
As Tadiwa Madenga, a PhD candidate of African and African American Studies put it, ���when an older person looks you in the eye and says: ���This was the best event in my life,��� it is different from hearing it in a podcast.��� This was part of Chimurenga���s intention and design, to construct a space that allowed time for these questions to form and to inform conversations between FESTAC participants and audience members gathered to hear them speak. As I replaced thermoses full of hot coffee, I overheard a few of those questions. Did you meet Kenyan artists while you were at FESTAC? How did the event influence you personally? And your artistic practice?
All of a sudden, there was so much to talk about. These stories from this largely forgotten event gave us a shared history in the recent past. For me, it felt personal. Coming to the US from Ethiopia as an undergraduate, I had felt a strong kinship but was sometimes at a loss among the various communities of black people from the US and from around the world. We were of Africa but recent histories had diverged our paths. What was our common language?
I would later learn that, during their studies in the US, front-runners of the Ethiopian Student Movement had fought and organized alongside black Americans in the Civil Rights Movement. That Claude McKay, a literary giant of the Harlem Renaissance, had written Amiable with Big Teeth about the African-American campaign to support Ethiopia at the onset of the fascist Italian invasion in 1935.
Rediscovering this shared legacy gave me a stake in the conversation, and much more. But, learning about FESTAC was entirely different. The very scale of this gathering in Lagos was epic.
Craig Harris, FESTAC ’77 at the Vera List Center Forum 2019, Tishman Auditorium, The New School, October 25, 2019. Image credit Jordan Rathkopf, courtesy Vera List Center for Art and Politics.Neither was FESTAC simply a celebration of black culture. The festival became a lobbying ground against apartheid South Africa and the still-colonized Rhodesia. On a larger scale, the organizing committees became embassies of new imagined black states, ���Black Britain,��� ���Black America,��� ���Black South Africa������alongside recently independent African states. This facilitated a direct line of communication among black peoples that was not mediated by the official state apparatuses that invariably oppressed the people they claimed to represent.
During her conversation with the female alumni, Holiday read a reflection about the communities of black female artists that had emerged from FESTAC. Among many questions, she asked, ���can a festival turn into eternal solidarity?��� ���Can we defeat our common enemies ��� [and] ��� capitalism���s ability to turn all creative output into a commodity?���
These questions highlight how relevant FESTAC remains to global discourses about blackness and diaspora, community and resistance. While we no longer have the same colonial apparatus to battle on the continent, these questions still remain. What does global black solidarity mean in this day and age? How do we institutionalize solidarity towards a concerted outcome? The possibilities are endless.
In the meantime, it was enough that the event just happened. ���I was so moved to be in that space and to be transported to this time and place [that] I had imagined largely by myself,��� said Kleaver Cruz, a writer in the audience who is independently researching FESTAC for a forthcoming book������imagine��� being the key word here. For curator Koyo Kouoh, the Jane Lombard Prize jury chair, Chimurenga ���boldly and unapologetically reclaim[s] the African imaginary.���
Craig Harris���s concert brought PASS���s three-day journey full circle. A spirit of generosity and communion permeated the concert, as undoubtedly it had done at FESTAC. By the end, there was a murmur floating around from conversation to conversation. It sounded like, ���imagine what FESTAC might look like in 2020 ���”
December 18, 2019
On meeting Pastor Evan
Pastor Evan. Image credit This Flag Citizens Movement.
April 19, 2016���It���s night-time in a small, fluorescent-lit church office. A man sits alone, anxious and ashamed. He cannot provide for his family. His rent is due and so are his children���s school fees. He has a knack for fixing things, but not this. Not when his country���s economy has collapsed. Not when its President���in power for thirty-six years���rules with an iron fist. In the man���s office hangs a flag. He reaches for it as he considers the promise that a nation���s flag represents. He drapes the flag around him, picks up his phone, and begins recording. Hunched in front of the camera, hands toying with the ends of the flag, words pour out of him with passion and urgency. He ends his lament on a call to action:
���This is the time that a change must happen. Quit standing on the sidelines!”
Posting the video to social media would be preposterous, he knows. People in his country have been beaten, imprisoned, and disappeared on the mere suspicion of dissent. But a few hours later, he does it anyway. He uploads the video to Facebook and tags it: #ThisFlag. By morning, his four-minute video has gone viral and soon virtually everyone with a cellphone in his country, as well as many thousands who have fled the country, will see it. This hitherto unknown man is now a marked man.
#ThisFlag
What Evan Mawarire cannot foresee when he posts his video is that thousands of Zimbabweans will be emboldened to join him in speaking out, many for the first time, on the injustices, corruption, and decades-long collapse into poverty of their once prosperous nation. Within weeks, #ThisFlag will give rise to the largest social media movement his country has ever witnessed, and Evan will be called ���the flag guy,��� heralded far and wide as the spark for Zimbabwe���s Arab Spring. In a clever act of subversion, inspired by his act of wearing it, Zimbabweans from all walks of life begin displaying their nation���s flag.
Initially, the government appears clueless about the reach and power of social media with the government Minister of Higher Education dismissing #ThisFlag as a ���pastor���s fart in the corridors of power.��� At one point and farcically, the government attempts to ban the flag, but within weeks they realize its power. Evan starts receiving threats that range from anonymous phone calls to blatant physical assaults, which include being accosted by the government Minister of Information. Undeterred, he continues posting his videos���one a day for the month of May, and more in June which he now narrates both in English and Shona thereby expanding his audience and reach. At the start of July, Evan narrowly escapes an abduction attempt. He moves to a safe house. Then he takes his social media activism one step further.
Evan calls for peaceful protests in the form of a series of national stay-aways. Under President Robert Mugabe, any form of public protest is banned. And yet, on July 6th, 2016 Evan���s call for the first stay-away is, to everyone���s surprise, heeded by the entire nation as people stay at home. The nation comes to a standstill and the ruling Zanu-PF Party will almost certainly resort to its usual, brutal playbook. Under Mugabe, opposition leaders and activists are routinely imprisoned, beaten, and disappeared���and all for doing far less than bringing a whole nation to a halt. Preparing for the worst, Evan records a video to be released should he be arrested or abducted.
The day after the national shut down, I land in Zimbabwe for a family visit. The US has issued travel warnings and there is talk of riots; but on our drive from the airport to the northern suburbs of Harare, things appear calm. Visibly, not much has changed since my last visit three years earlier, other than further deterioration of the roads. But there is something new���all the roadside vendors are selling Zimbabwe���s national flag. The flag is now on cars, in shop windows, around people���s shoulders���it���s everywhere. Even more striking is what I hear. Everyone, from relatives to friends and even strangers, seem animated with mention of ���the flag guy.��� It���s the first time in my twenty-four years of visiting Zimbabwe that I���ve heard Zimbabweans speak so openly, almost fearlessly, in support of someone critical of Mugabe and his Zanu-PF government. What���s more, I learn that the flag guy is a pastor.
Over the years, I had been following the rise of Pentecostal preacher-prophets and their mega churches in countries where I once lived: Nigeria and Kenya as well as Zimbabwe. I���d seen how these preachers enjoyed extravagant lifestyles funded by the tithes and donations of their congregants while many of these same congregants struggled to make ends meet. In Zimbabwe, millions were surviving on food aid. These same preachers often courted the favour of repressive leaders in power, blessing them, and welcoming them into their churches. I had grown disillusioned with such leaders who, to my eyes, were not setting a Christ-like example of humility and service to others. So, to hear of a Pentecostal pastor of a small congregation, who was not only brave enough to speak truth to power, but to speak on behalf of ordinary citizens, was both inspiring and exciting.
The Junior President
When Evan was born, in 1977, Zimbabwe was still Rhodesia and under white, apartheid-style, minority rule. At that time, the black majority lived either in dense, segregated city townships or in the rural areas labeled maruzevha (native reserves). Evan���s family lived first in the rural areas and then later moved to Glen Norah, one of the older black townships on the margins of the capital. As the first-born of six children, Evan was expected to set a good example for his younger siblings and especially so once admitted to Prince Edward School.
I have visited this boys school on a number occasions���my husband was one of the first black students admitted after Independence in 1980. Until then, Prince Edward was a whites-only school steeped in the nation���s colonial history from its royal name and famous Jubilee Field to its school motto: Tot Facienda Parum Factum (So Much to Do; So Little Done) attributed to the imperialist Cecil Rhodes, who named the country after himself. This hundred-year-old school continues to be known for its academic excellence and sporting prowess with its own astronomy observatory, vast acres of lawns, sports fields, and state-of-the-art science labs.
When Evan started at Prince Edward in the early 1990s, this was an exciting time for him and for the country. Zimbabwe was doing well and seemed to be bucking the trend of other African countries. Its President, Robert Mugabe, was lauded at home and abroad as a model for Africa. Yet under the surface all was not well. Unbeknownst to many, a genocide had been committed in Matabeleland in the 1980s under Mugabe���s orders, and the news of this was kept suppressed. Meanwhile, at school, Evan was not faring as well as expected. He performed poorly on his Form Three exams, and his father decided to withdraw him. The fees were high and the family couldn���t afford to keep a child, who wasn���t doing well, in an expensive school. To Evan���s consternation, he was sent to a Salvation Army mission school under the supervision of a strict disciplinarian uncle.
Charles Clack Secondary School in Magunje could not be more different than Prince Edward. It was located in the rural areas and designed for black Africans pre-independence. It had no running water, no electricity, and only pit latrines for toilets. Cattle routinely wandered the school grounds. But at Charles Clack, Evan studied hard and did well. He became a school prefect and discovered an interest in civics. He joined the inter-schools��� competitions for Zimbabwe���s Junior Parliament and through this countrywide competition he would ultimately be selected, from students all across the country, as Zimbabwe���s Junior President.
A flag seller at a sports event. Harare, July 2016. Image credit James M. ManyikaThe first arrests
July 12, 2016���Evan has been in hiding for several days when his wife sends urgent word that the police are looking for him. On advice from the Zimbabwe Lawyers for Human Rights (ZLHR) he turns himself in and reports to a police station. Accompanied by a ZLHR lawyer, he is questioned for hours. Then his home is searched. No incriminating evidence is found. Regardless, he���s detained and charged for ���inciting public violence and disturbing the peace.��� He is thrown into Baghdad���a crowded holding cell in Harare���s Central Police station, where two dozen men sit huddled on the concrete floor. It���s wintertime. Evan has never been to prison before. The only spot available is next to the open toilet. His blanket, the last remaining one, is stained with fresh feces. Hours later, in the middle of night when other prisoners have fallen asleep, two men quietly remove Evan from Baghdad.
He is handcuffed and marched to a basement cell. Here he is ordered to remove his shoes and sit on the floor. The interrogators play good cop/bad cop. He is asked repeatedly for whom he is working and who funds his media activism. They don���t believe him when he says he���s acting alone. It���s freezing, and Evan soon loses sensation in his bottom and feet. The interrogators ask: What will you do if we send someone to rape your wife while we hold you in jail? How will you feel if we release you to bury your children? When they dump him back in Baghdad, they warn him to watch out for vamwe vacho vanoda varume (the men that like men).
July 13, 2016���It���s morning and Evan has been awake all night, shivering. He is transported to Rotten Row Magistrates Court. A crowd of several thousand has gathered. Inside, Evan is shuttled between one filthy holding cell and another. Finally, when night falls, he is led into the courtroom which has been opened to hear his special case. His face lights up when he sees his wife. She doesn���t look harmed. She isn���t under arrest. His lawyer is asked to stand, and alongside him are nearly one hundred more lawyers who have shown up in support. But then comes the pronouncement that his charge has been escalated. He is now being charged with attempting to subvert a constitutionally elected government. He looks visibly shaken. This new charge, akin to treason, carries a twenty-year prison sentence.
Then Evan hears the crowds outside singing���freedom songs and church songs! Like the Biblical battle of Jericho, the metaphorical walls collapse. His lawyers successfully argue that the switch to this second charge is unconstitutional and Evan is released. Now he���s outside with a moment of freedom, fresh air, and the noise of the crowd. Then the whisper, from one of the guards, that he will be immediately rearrested. To save him from rearrest, he���s told to go out through the crowds. The crowds in their excitement nearly crush him. They also act temporarily as a shield, but his lawyers know this is not enough. Another safe house, a quick disguise, and a fast journey south through a quiet border town into Botswana, and Evan is in exile.
Days after Evan escapes, President Robert Mugabe himself rebukes Evan on national television, questioning whether ���he���s a true man of God���. Days later, on July 23rd, the government-sponsored newspaper, The Herald, carries the headline: Mawarire Is No Saint. The article claims that Evan made up his story of financial woes and that he was in fact ���sponsored by Western governments to distabilise (sic) the country.���
When news arrives that Evan is safely out of the country, many Zimbabweans feel relief, but soon there are grumblings. What good is their Savior outside? And now that the State had lost its prey, officials are undeterred in their efforts to discredit Evan. Fueled by clever disinformation, people���s disappointment grows. Evan is called a ���sellout��� and after the years of war, the pastor knows well what happens to a sell-out. Meanwhile, President Mugabe continues to ridicule him in public. It is clear that Evan is not welcome back in the country.
Evan spends the next six months out of Zimbabwe, first in South Africa and then in the United States, during which he finds the support to get his family out of the country too. Abroad, his wife gives birth to their third child. Evan is safe, his family is safe, but he is dislocated. He has no job in this place of safety, no friends, no community. He had acted on impulse, impulse born of desperation, and his voice had been the voice of the people, but now he feels rudderless. After discussion with a few close friends, and his lawyers, he decides to return. He knows it���s dangerous for him to return to Zimbabwe but he also doesn���t want to abandon the cause. He makes plans to return telling only a few people the date of his arrival.
February 1, 2017���Evan is met by the authorities as soon as his plane lands. Five men march him away, interrogate him, then turn him over to the police. He is arrested and sent to remand prison. That night, Evan is thrown into a truck and told that he���s going to Chikurubi. He���s the only prisoner in the truck. His leg irons began to clatter as his legs shake. The mere mention of Chikurubi (like Robben Island, Rikers, or San Quentin), is enough to instill terror. Chikurubi Maximum Security Prison is known for housing the most hardened of criminals, and for its prison violence, overcrowding, and disease. It is here, in the years before Independence, where the white Rhodesian government used to throw the leaders of the struggle. Evan asks his guard if this is the end. He���s imagining being dumped in a ditch or worse. They arrive at Chikurubi���high concrete walls, razor wire, security lights, and armed guards everywhere.
Inside, Evan is given a bucket to hold all the possessions he���s allowed to take���his Bible, some underwear, and a striped prison-issue sweater made by the prison guards��� wives. He���s placed in the D Wing. D is reserved for the most serious offenders���from murderers to rapists���those serving eight years to life. Now comes his crash course on life in a maximum-security prison���a beating from a prison guard and some unexpected kindness from fellow inmates.
For the next few months, Evan will be in and out of prison in a continuing cycle of arrests, imprisonment, and release on stringent bail conditions that include the surrender of his passport as well as the title deeds to his parents��� house. This pattern persists until November. Then, the unimaginable happens.
November 14, 2017��� Major General Sibusiso Moyo appears in full military fatigues on Zimbabwe���s national TV. He announces that the armed forces have stepped in to ���pacify a degenerating social and economic situation in the country.��� It is not ���a military take-over��� or a coup, he insists, even as troops appear on the streets of Harare. The troops block government buildings and occupy the State House. Within days, Robert Mugabe is forced to step down. And with him goes his wife���his one-time secretary and hugely unpopular would-be successor, mocked as the ���The First Shopper��� and ���Gucci Grace.���
Two weeks later, Evan���s case is finally brought to trial and he is acquitted of all charges. He becomes a free man as Robert Mugabe is deposed. The country goes wild with jubilation at Mugabe���s removal���people crying, ululating, dancing, horn-blaring in the streets. Pastor Evan is amongst them. He���s ecstatic���laughing and crying, as people pose with him to take selfies with their flags. Flags are everywhere���on cars and buildings and wrapped around people like superhero capes. Mugabe is out and his former Vice President-turned rival, Emmerson Mnangagwa (nicknamed ���The Crocodile��� for his suspected role in the Gukurahundi genocidal killings) is made interim President. Mnangagwa (also known as ���ED���) proclaims a ���New Zimbabwe��� wearing a scarf in Zimbabwe���s flag colours. The fact that Evan was the first to wear the flag as scarf appears forgotten. The scarf is now called the ���ED Scarf.���
Abroad
It���s early evening in the summer of 2018 and Evan is wearing jeans and a Stanford university sweatshirt. I notice the Zimbabwean flag tied around the straps of his backpack which he puts down as he arrives. My husband, who had met Evan two years earlier after Evan had escaped to the United States, has invited him to our home in San Francisco for dinner. Two others join us, both Zimbabweans���one is a cousin visiting from out of town and the second, an undergraduate at the University of California, Berkeley.
When Evan sees me, his greeting is warm and effusive: ���Hello ma���am, how are you? It���s a pleasure to meet you,��� he says, smiling broadly as he turns to greet the others. As I watch the ease with which he interacts with the younger student, it���s easy to see what made him a popular, humorous youth pastor. ���Wow!��� he exclaims enthusiastically when hearing what each of us is doing, even though we are more interested in hearing about him and the situation in Zimbabwe.
We are meeting in the run up to Zimbabwe���s first election following Mugabe���s��removal from power, and Evan is running for political office. He is running as an independent for a seat in Harare���s city council, which is where he feels he can make the most difference to improve people���s daily lives. He had been campaigning up until a few weeks prior. But then, as he explains, being offered the prestigious Draper Hills Summer Fellowship at Stanford University was an opportunity he couldn���t turn down, as it enabled him to see his family in America whom he hadn���t seen in a year and half. Meanwhile, he remains in close touch with Zimbabwe via phone and social media, and his excitement for the promised hope of this election is palpable.
A few days later, with the election results now in, we meet up with Evan again and this time his mood is subdued. He says his disappointment is not about his own electoral loss, but about the lives of the peaceful protestors and bystanders shot dead on the streets of Harare in the wake of the election. The election has been won by Mnangagwa, the interim President who replaced Mugabe. Mnangagwa is from Mugabe���s Zanu-PF party, not the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC). For years, Mugabe had brutally repressed the MDC. He had also cheated the party, most blatantly, out of the 2008 election.
Indignant and angry, Evan sits hunched at the dining table with his muscular forearms braced in a semi-circle in front of him���a stance like that of his first #ThisFlag video. Our conversation around the election and the ensuing violence pauses when, after dinner, we attend the first International Congress of Youth Voices, where our son is a delegate. As we listen to the passionate presentations, Evan is visibly heartened. One of the congress mentors is Congressman John Lewis, the much-revered civil rights leader who once worked with Martin Luther King, Jr. When Congressman Lewis speaks of the necessity of getting into what he calls ���good trouble��� and ���necessary trouble,��� his words strike a chord with us all. By the end of the evening, Evan is the first to stand in applause. Soon after, he leaves California to return to Zimbabwe.
In the words of others
I am now keen to know, with the passage of time, what people think of Evan. In Zimbabwe, I ask everyone who will speak with me���from young to old, black and white, formally educated or not, rich and poor, professors, students, artists, and business leaders. Similarly, I ask Zimbabweans in the diaspora���in South Africa, the U.K., and the U.S.���many of whom left Zimbabwe either because of the country���s economic collapse or simply to escape Mugabe���s brutal ruling party. Everyone I ask expresses admiration for what Evan did, or attempted to do. Most, however, only seem to know a small part of his story and few are aware of his ongoing work within civic society, which includes mobilizing for clean water services in the wake of a cholera epidemic.
Of the many who praise Evan, some know him from his church, others from what they have heard or read in the news or social media, and one from a chance encounter at Avondale Shopping Center where, in the carpark, they had discovered a shared love of Land Rovers. People describe Evan as a ���good person,��� as ���grounded,��� ���level-headed,��� ���a church man of morals,��� ���humble,��� and a man of ���Presidential potential.��� Several highlight the fact that Evan never set out to be a political leader and that his aim all along was to engage citizens���to start a citizen���s movement. He had resisted joining any political party and refused to run for President as many had wanted him to do. Nevertheless, one Pan-African businessman suggests that Evan ought to have done a better job of acknowledging the activists that came before him (such as Morgan Tsvangirai, a respected leader of the opposition MDC).
One student says that in a country like Zimbabwe where most people are religious, Evan could have done more to harness the power of the pulpit. Others say that Evan should not have ���run away��� from Zimbabwe after his first arrest in 2016. In a heated conversation between a group of Zimbabwean students studying at the University of California, Berkeley, one claims that had Evan stayed in Zimbabwe just two more weeks in August of 2016, something ���fundamental��� would have happened. ���Yeah,��� quips another, ���he would have been dead!��� Others make the point that so much was beyond Evan���s control. Funding was a challenge, says a struggling Harare-based entrepreneur, explaining how difficult it was for Evan to get his message to the rural communities where people, though connected to social media, didn���t have funds to buy ���bundles��� (data packages) to download his videos.
Many blame Zanu-PF as well as ex-President Mugabe for destroying Evan���s credibility by pushing the story that Evan was backed by Western sponsors. Also, as one businessman puts it, Zimbabweans had been conditioned to see their opposition leaders (such as Nelson Chamisa and Tsvangirai) beaten up and because Evan never appeared to have severe cuts or visible bruising, this made some people suspicious.
In his own words
When Evan speaks, his passion and oratory skills are reminiscent of other preacher-activists such as Martin Luther King Jr. and Bishop Desmond Tutu. His speech has a Biblical ring to it when he uses phrases such as ���the least among us,��� ���those who are heavy laden,��� or references ���widows and orphans,��� and occasionally he quotes scripture. He has an ear for accents and a natural feel for the poetry and rhythm of language. What is also striking is the conviction and passion conveyed through his words.
Evan becomes particularly animated when he speaks of some of the most marginalized people who have had a lasting impact on his life, including prisoners he met while at Chikurubi.
He is humble when talking about himself, frequently referring to others as brighter and more courageous. Those that he mentions as having inspired him are not the famous people he has sometimes been compared to, but ordinary, everyday people including his parent���s pastor and a caretaker at Prince Edward School.
When I ask Evan to describe the events following his first arrest, he does so with a sense of timing and drama that keeps me rapt, sometimes adding deadpan humor at the tensest moments of his story. When being transported���handcuffed in the back of a pickup truck���to his first court appearance, he describes the moment when he asks the heavily armored guards if he might pray with them and, to his surprise, they all lower their weapons and close their eyes. And when recalling his first stint at the notorious Chikurubi Maximum Security Prison, he describes the way prison guards looked at him as though he were a rare, wild animal caught in a residential area. They were surprised to find him so young and so short.
Evan is not only quick to draw on humor, often poking fun at himself, but he is also candid when chronicling the rollercoaster of emotions felt in the course of his journey. He admits to sobbing uncontrollably and to nearly convulsing on the first night he was interrogated, to struggling to hold back tears when he saw his pregnant wife patiently sitting in court on the following day. Often in the course of conversation, Evan is contemplative, reflecting on what he has learned since the events of 2016 which brought him to national prominence:
One of the things I learned when people responded by calling me a sellout [was] the realization that if you���re going to do it, you have to do it out of conviction and not out of the applause or what people want to hear. The way I learned the lesson was that my two major arrests had one very distinct difference. The first had thousands of people gathered there. The second, when I was arrested at the airport, there was nobody. No one! It was a shock but also the penny dropped that if you���re going to do this, you can���t do it for the crowd because they���ll be there when it���s exciting, but when it gets tiring, they don���t have an obligation to be there at all.
I lost a lot of friends along the way when I started speaking out. I still have one or two but it���s a very small circle. I���m in one of these strange situations where you feel like everybody knows you, but you know no one.
One of the fears in the kind of space that I���m in right now is that I would disappoint the people who do love me [���] Sometimes I���m caught off guard, I���m not in the space of “here���s the other cheek.” That���s why, as a pastor, it has been such a terrible thing for me and I���ve said to people: “you know what, I���m not speaking as a pastor. I���m speaking as an ordinary person who has hurts, who has frustrations, who has fears, and who is concerned about how they���re going to deal with a future that has been messed up by someone who���s no longer here.”
When people look at me and my life through the lens of the high moments���the different nominations for prizes and the invitations to speak at these high-level gatherings, or amazing institutions of learning���they don���t understand the aspect of cost. None of that could ever be a replacement or a reward for being away from my kids for three years, missing all of their birthdays. None of that could ever help me explain why my daughter would ask me, after she hadn���t seen me for fourteen months, if I���m her dad. So sometimes people see my life through the lens of some of those things and they think that the cost is easy, but it���s quite a cost to bear. The prison arrest and the attempted abductions and threats to life���all put a value on how much I value my family. I���m prepared to die for them, I���m prepared to go to prison for them, so that my children understand what freedom means, what justice is. And it���s my hope that my kids will learn earlier in life what it means to fight for what you believe in. In many ways, it started off being about my family, but it has become much bigger. Sometimes I regret it. Many times, I regret it. When I speak in public, I have to find the courage to be brave for everyone else, to not say I���ve had enough, to not say I can���t take it anymore even though I feel like that a number of times. It���s just not the thing you say when you happen to be the symbol of hope for everybody else.
Evan at an Avondale coffee shop. Harare, July 2017. Image credit James M. Manyika.More arrests
January 16, 2019���In the dead of night, armed men arrive at Evan���s Harare apartment and attempt to abduct him. They assault the caretakers in his block and try ramming down his front door. Unable to get in, they send police to arrest him early the next morning. The arrest is filmed by neighbors and posted online. Evan is remanded and charged with inciting public violence and for being in support of the trade unions who called for peaceful demonstrations protesting the doubling of fuel costs. His charges are later escalated to that of subverting a constitutionally elected government���identical to the charges leveled at him =two and half years earlier. He is thrown back into Chikurubi. This time, he���s placed with fifty-three others in a cell measuring just eight by five meters. Many of these inmates had been rounded up in the course of the fuel protests. Some have broken bones while others have open wounds from police beatings. A few are minors only sixteen years old.
January 30, 2019���Evan is released on bail. He is suffering from a chest infection. One of the first questions a reporter can be heard asking on a posted video is: ���Were you beaten?��� As in 2016, the conditions of his bail are stringent. At each successive court date, Evan���s case is kicked down the road. Between January and September 2019, he makes ten court appearances.
Meanwhile, things in Zimbabwe continue to deteriorate. An Amnesty International report published in August describes Mnangagwa���s first year in office as marked by a ���systematic and brutal crackdown on human rights including the violent suppression of protests and a witch-hunt against anyone who dared challenge his government.��� On August 26th, Evan writes an op-ed for TIME Magazine describing the depth of the nation���s economic hardships and the government���s brutal response to those who dare to protest. Then, in September, the unimaginable happens again. Ex-President Robert Mugabe is dead. He was ninety-five years old.
September 6, 2019���On the day Robert Mugabe dies, I am in Cape Town participating in South Africa���s Open Book Festival. In a surreal moment, I awake to the news of his death from the animated chatter of Zimbabwean housekeeping staff that I can hear standing outside my hotel room. I understand enough of what they are saying in Shona to guess that something significant has happened. I switch on the TV and that���s when I hear Zimbabwean government officials speaking of a deceased Mugabe as though he were a hero���the same officials that had cheered at his ousting less than two years earlier.
Three days later, I fly to Harare. I message Evan to ask if we can meet. I���d like to hear what he makes of Mugabe���s passing and of reactions to his death. I���m also concerned for his mental and physical wellbeing given how long he���s been held in limbo and separated from his family and also given the continued hardship of daily life in Zimbabwe. Zimbabwe���s economic collapse had not ended in the two years since Mugabe���s ousting. My mother-in-law, like so many others in Zimbabwe, has not had running water for months and power outages are now the daily norm. The prices of things���including basic commodities such as bath soap, deodorant, and Vaseline���have become prohibitively expensive. Cash is also in short supply. I wonder how Evan is supporting himself, let alone his family of four and responding to the extended family expectations that come with being the eldest son.
At home
I���ve arranged to meet Evan at Avondale���s popular Caf�� Nush. While I wait for him, I try figuring out where best to sit. I am guessing that his movements and meetings are constantly monitored but still, I���d like to find a spot which is not in full view of everyone.
Evan greets me with his warm smile. It���s his choice that we sit outside. He���s dressed casually in jeans and a t-shirt bearing Zimbabwe���s initials���ZW. There���s a tear in the seam of his shirt and he looks thinner. He���s been running marathons, he tells me. He is wearing sunglasses, and after we order (a coffee each and a barbecue beef wrap for Evan) he asks if I mind him keeping his shades on. He says his eyes are sensitive to light then, half jokingly, that the sunglasses make him feel invisible, but of course ���they see me,��� he adds.
His voice turns serious as we begin to talk about Mugabe. ���The saddest thing in all of this,��� he repeats ���is that whilst he [Mugabe] lived, we were forced to be silent, and when he dies we are again forced to be silent. And the least he could have done, the least he could have done,��� his voice now getting louder, ���was to die here in Zimbabwe!��� Angrily, Evan describes how as Zimbabwe���s hospitals were falling apart, Mugabe received treatment in an expensive hospital in Singapore until his death. Evan tells me that he cannot bring himself to say ���rest in peace��� for Mugabe and he���s furious with the hypocrisy of those who do.
After a pause, he apologizes for raising his voice. I respond by saying that I���m not surprised by people���s hypocrisy, coming as it does from a country so traumatized, until Evan���s cold stare stops me short. His voice grows quieter but even more steely as he reminds me of Mugabe���s cruelty which he insists was there from the very beginning. He reminds me of the Gukurahundi genocidal killings of the 1980s and the notorious Fifth Brigade ordered by Robert Mugabe to commit the atrocities. The death toll estimated by some reports was as high as tens of thousands. ���His [Mugabe���s] death has to be a point of clarity rather than a point of contention!��� Evan insists, with a stern, no-time-to-waste demeanor.
As we continue speaking, Evan is even more candid about his emotional state than I remember him being previously. He speaks of how difficult he finds it when strangers tell him what he should do, when they lecture him on how he must not exhibit rage as a pastor. But writing, he tells me, has helped him deal with things. That morning he had written what he felt were a few good pages in the memoir he is working on. And yet, just as he shares what gives him focus, he admits to feeling confused. He describes these feelings with the same fervor and urgency as in his #ThisFlag video, except this time there is no sense of hope:
It���s like I���m stuck with this thing, this ball of yarn. And I don���t know where the start is or the finish anymore. And I feel like I���ve spent the last two years trying to figure out where is the beginning of it, where is the end of it? And I���m on my own and I���m just frustrated with the thing that I���m trying to unravel and it won���t. It just won���t unravel. Each time I���m coming to the end of it you just get caught up in another arrest and then you pull it and ���
Feeling stuck, he says, makes him question his relevance. He���s worn down by those who accuse him of being a sellout. The determination I had heard him express a year earlier���of the need to do things out of self-conviction rather than be swayed by the fickle whims of crowds���seems to have been ground out of him. And with a heavy sigh he acknowledges that those in power have also been successful in baiting and taunting him.
���Up to today,��� he says, banging on the table, ���People still say, why did you run away? I feel like saying just F-off! Bloody hell! Not only did I come back and get arrested and spent a whole year in and out of prison and got tried for it. Do you realize that I was tried for this? And then, after all is said and done, I still stayed. If I was a freaking coward like you said I was, the moment I was acquitted, I would have packed up my little bags and left! And never come back! Not only did I stay, but I spoke out again.���
Now his tone is bitter and combative. He admits to being less patient, to swearing where he never used to, and to being prone to pouncing on people rather than giving them the benefit of the doubt. He tells me he hasn���t been able to speak freely to anyone for a long time. He doesn���t trust people to be genuine. He feels that everyone has an angle. As he speaks, I am reminded of the moment in his first video when he wonders whether those who sacrificed for Zimbabwe in years past would feel, in hindsight, that their sacrifice had been worth it. I���m wondering if he feels his sacrifices have been worth it when he tells me:
The 2019 arrest, I feel like that was not worth it. I feel like it was because of all these people. I feel like I had to do something, I had to prove that I was still in the game, that I was still committed. Because people, they keep taking. They take, and take, and take, and take!
As I listen to Evan and watch him, it���s almost as if I can see him enmeshed in the ball of yarn, twisting between acknowledging that he���s on edge (and not wanting to be) while simultaneously justifying his right to lash out. Now there���s no deadpan humor in his narration, only anger and frustration followed by silence, then further outpourings:
People seem to be enjoying watching you taking the hard punches. We love it when you���re hit hard and you just return a soft answer or you just say something inspirational. And I���m saying: sometimes I���m fresh out of inspirational quotes. Sometimes I���m caught off guard, I���m not in the space of “here���s the other cheek.”
Evan flicks away tears from under his sunglasses as he angrily clanks his way through his beef wrap, always careful to be polite and cheery to the workers who wait on our table. Still thinking of what he���s said about his last arrest not being worth it, I find myself wanting to reassure him. I tell him he doesn���t have to prove his relevance. Surely, he has proven this already. He listens silently before the words pour out again:
I can���t be a Mandela! I don���t feel like being a Mandela! Is that what it means for me to continue to be relevant? Is that what it means for me to continue to be someone that you love, appreciate, and trust? Because I don���t know if I can sustain that. There are days I can do it, there are! But there are days and moments when I���m just a human. I���m just a human being.
He falls silent until he picks up his phone to show me the latest pictures of his daughters that his wife has sent. In these pictures, unlike the ones he had shared in 2018 while visiting us in San Francisco, Evan does not appear. The other day, he says, his youngest daughter screamed ���Daddy!��� so excited was she to see him on the video call that he couldn���t help but burst into tears. He describes his girls with love and tenderness���one is ���a fireball,��� another just started school, and then there���s the daughter that recently Googled him. She told him that she���d figured out he was a ���YouTuber,��� that he���d been with the police, and that he���d been in prison���all this before she asked: ���What do you really do, daddy?��� And here for one brief moment in the seriousness of things, Evan���s humor returns. ���If I could have taken a commercial break, that would have been the time to do it,��� he laughs.
I ask Evan what he wants. ���That���s a really tough question, but whatever I do, I don���t ever want my girls to go without me.��� Then, after a pause he returns to my question. ���But if there���s anything you couldn���t stop me from doing, it���s finding ways to help people that need it. You can���t stop me from that. It���s a good thing. And sometimes, it���s what gets me into trouble.���
October 3, 2019���Evan is back in court. His case is once again kicked down the road. The next court date is scheduled for January 2020.
November 20, 2019���I receive a text message from Evan: ���Just come from court and got some good news. They have withdrawn the charges and will proceed by way of summons whenever they are ready. The only downside of it is that the case continues to hang over my head and can be called up anytime.��� I text him back, excited to hear this good news. Hours later, I see a post on his Facebook page denouncing a new round of police brutality. Peaceful crowds waiting outside the opposition leader���s headquarters had been beaten and tear gassed by police forces.
And so it continues.
On Meeting Pastor Evan
Pastor Evan. Image credit This Flag Citizens Movement.
April 19, 2016���It���s night-time in a small, fluorescent-lit church office. A man sits alone, anxious and ashamed. He cannot provide for his family. His rent is due and so are his children���s school fees. He has a knack for fixing things, but not this. Not when his country���s economy has collapsed. Not when its President���in power for thirty-six years���rules with an iron fist. In the man���s office hangs a flag. He reaches for it as he considers the promise that a nation���s flag represents. He drapes the flag around him, picks up his phone, and begins recording. Hunched in front of the camera, hands toying with the ends of the flag, words pour out of him with passion and urgency. He ends his lament on a call to action:
���This is the time that a change must happen. Quit standing on the sidelines!”
Posting the video to social media would be preposterous, he knows. People in his country have been beaten, imprisoned, and disappeared on the mere suspicion of dissent. But a few hours later, he does it anyway. He uploads the video to Facebook and tags it: #ThisFlag. By morning, his four-minute video has gone viral and soon virtually everyone with a cellphone in his country, as well as many thousands who have fled the country, will see it. This hitherto unknown man is now a marked man.
#ThisFlag
What Evan Mawarire cannot foresee when he posts his video is that thousands of Zimbabweans will be emboldened to join him in speaking out, many for the first time, on the injustices, corruption, and decades-long collapse into poverty of their once prosperous nation. Within weeks, #ThisFlag will give rise to the largest social media movement his country has ever witnessed, and Evan will be called ���the flag guy,��� heralded far and wide as the spark for Zimbabwe���s Arab Spring. In a clever act of subversion, inspired by his act of wearing it, Zimbabweans from all walks of life begin displaying their nation���s flag.
Initially, the government appears clueless about the reach and power of social media with the government Minister of Higher Education dismissing #ThisFlag as a ���pastor���s fart in the corridors of power.��� At one point and farcically, the government attempts to ban the flag, but within weeks they realize its power. Evan starts receiving threats that range from anonymous phone calls to blatant physical assaults, which include being accosted by the government Minister of Information. Undeterred, he continues posting his videos���one a day for the month of May, and more in June which he now narrates both in English and Shona thereby expanding his audience and reach. At the start of July, Evan narrowly escapes an abduction attempt. He moves to a safe house. Then he takes his social media activism one step further.
Evan calls for peaceful protests in the form of a series of national stay-aways. Under President Robert Mugabe, any form of public protest is banned. And yet, on July 6th, 2016 Evan���s call for the first stay-away is, to everyone���s surprise, heeded by the entire nation as people stay at home. The nation comes to a standstill and the ruling Zanu-PF Party will almost certainly resort to its usual, brutal playbook. Under Mugabe, opposition leaders and activists are routinely imprisoned, beaten, and disappeared���and all for doing far less than bringing a whole nation to a halt. Preparing for the worst, Evan records a video to be released should he be arrested or abducted.
The day after the national shut down, I land in Zimbabwe for a family visit. The US has issued travel warnings and there is talk of riots; but on our drive from the airport to the northern suburbs of Harare, things appear calm. Visibly, not much has changed since my last visit three years earlier, other than further deterioration of the roads. But there is something new���all the roadside vendors are selling Zimbabwe���s national flag. The flag is now on cars, in shop windows, around people���s shoulders���it���s everywhere. Even more striking is what I hear. Everyone, from relatives to friends and even strangers, seem animated with mention of ���the flag guy.��� It���s the first time in my twenty-four years of visiting Zimbabwe that I���ve heard Zimbabweans speak so openly, almost fearlessly, in support of someone critical of Mugabe and his Zanu-PF government. What���s more, I learn that the flag guy is a pastor.
Over the years, I had been following the rise of Pentecostal preacher-prophets and their mega churches in countries where I once lived: Nigeria and Kenya as well as Zimbabwe. I���d seen how these preachers enjoyed extravagant lifestyles funded by the tithes and donations of their congregants while many of these same congregants struggled to make ends meet. In Zimbabwe, millions were surviving on food aid. These same preachers often courted the favour of repressive leaders in power, blessing them, and welcoming them into their churches. I had grown disillusioned with such leaders who, to my eyes, were not setting a Christ-like example of humility and service to others. So, to hear of a Pentecostal pastor of a small congregation, who was not only brave enough to speak truth to power, but to speak on behalf of ordinary citizens, was both inspiring and exciting.
The Junior President
When Evan was born, in 1977, Zimbabwe was still Rhodesia and under white, apartheid-style, minority rule. At that time, the black majority lived either in dense, segregated city townships or in the rural areas labeled maruzevha (native reserves). Evan���s family lived first in the rural areas and then later moved to Glen Norah, one of the older black townships on the margins of the capital. As the first-born of six children, Evan was expected to set a good example for his younger siblings and especially so once admitted to Prince Edward School.
I have visited this boys school on a number occasions���my husband was one of the first black students admitted after Independence in 1980. Until then, Prince Edward was a whites-only school steeped in the nation���s colonial history from its royal name and famous Jubilee Field to its school motto: Tot Facienda Parum Factum (So Much to Do; So Little Done) attributed to the imperialist Cecil Rhodes, who named the country after himself. This hundred-year-old school continues to be known for its academic excellence and sporting prowess with its own astronomy observatory, vast acres of lawns, sports fields, and state-of-the-art science labs.
When Evan started at Prince Edward in the early 1990s, this was an exciting time for him and for the country. Zimbabwe was doing well and seemed to be bucking the trend of other African countries. Its President, Robert Mugabe, was lauded at home and abroad as a model for Africa. Yet under the surface all was not well. Unbeknownst to many, a genocide had been committed in Matabeleland in the 1980s under Mugabe���s orders, and the news of this was kept suppressed. Meanwhile, at school, Evan was not faring as well as expected. He performed poorly on his Form Three exams, and his father decided to withdraw him. The fees were high and the family couldn���t afford to keep a child, who wasn���t doing well, in an expensive school. To Evan���s consternation, he was sent to a Salvation Army mission school under the supervision of a strict disciplinarian uncle.
Charles Clack Secondary School in Magunje could not be more different than Prince Edward. It was located in the rural areas and designed for black Africans pre-independence. It had no running water, no electricity, and only pit latrines for toilets. Cattle routinely wandered the school grounds. But at Charles Clack, Evan studied hard and did well. He became a school prefect and discovered an interest in civics. He joined the inter-schools��� competitions for Zimbabwe���s Junior Parliament and through this countrywide competition he would ultimately be selected, from students all across the country, as Zimbabwe���s Junior President.
A flag seller at a rugby match in 2016. Image credit James M. ManyikaThe first arrests
July 12, 2016���Evan has been in hiding for several days when his wife sends urgent word that the police are looking for him. On advice from the Zimbabwe Lawyers for Human Rights (ZLHR) he turns himself in and reports to a police station. Accompanied by a ZLHR lawyer, he is questioned for hours. Then his home is searched. No incriminating evidence is found. Regardless, he���s detained and charged for ���inciting public violence and disturbing the peace.��� He is thrown into Baghdad���a crowded holding cell in Harare���s Central Police station, where two dozen men sit huddled on the concrete floor. It���s wintertime. Evan has never been to prison before. The only spot available is next to the open toilet. His blanket, the last remaining one, is stained with fresh feces. Hours later, in the middle of night when other prisoners have fallen asleep, two men quietly remove Evan from Baghdad.
He is handcuffed and marched to a basement cell. Here he is ordered to remove his shoes and sit on the floor. The interrogators play good cop/bad cop. He is asked repeatedly for whom he is working and who funds his media activism. They don���t believe him when he says he���s acting alone. It���s freezing, and Evan soon loses sensation in his bottom and feet. The interrogators ask: What will you do if we send someone to rape your wife while we hold you in jail? How will you feel if we release you to bury your children? When they dump him back in Baghdad, they warn him to watch out for vamwe vacho vanoda varume (the men that like men).
July 13, 2016���It���s morning and Evan has been awake all night, shivering. He is transported to Rotten Row Magistrates Court. A crowd of several thousand has gathered. Inside, Evan is shuttled between one filthy holding cell and another. Finally, when night falls, he is led into the courtroom which has been opened to hear his special case. His face lights up when he sees his wife. She doesn���t look harmed. She isn���t under arrest. His lawyer is asked to stand, and alongside him are nearly one hundred more lawyers who have shown up in support. But then comes the pronouncement that his charge has been escalated. He is now being charged with attempting to subvert a constitutionally elected government. He looks visibly shaken. This new charge, akin to treason, carries a twenty-year prison sentence.
Then Evan hears the crowds outside singing���freedom songs and church songs! Like the Biblical battle of Jericho, the metaphorical walls collapse. His lawyers successfully argue that the switch to this second charge is unconstitutional and Evan is released. Now he���s outside with a moment of freedom, fresh air, and the noise of the crowd. Then the whisper, from one of the guards, that he will be immediately rearrested. To save him from rearrest, he���s told to go out through the crowds. The crowds in their excitement nearly crush him. They also act temporarily as a shield, but his lawyers know this is not enough. Another safe house, a quick disguise, and a fast journey south through a quiet border town into Botswana, and Evan is in exile.
Days after Evan escapes, President Robert Mugabe himself rebukes Evan on national television, questioning whether ���he���s a true man of God���. Days later, on July 23rd, the government-sponsored newspaper, The Herald, carries the headline: Mawarire Is No Saint. The article claims that Evan made up his story of financial woes and that he was in fact ���sponsored by Western governments to distabilise (sic) the country.���
When news arrives that Evan is safely out of the country, many Zimbabweans feel relief, but soon there are grumblings. What good is their Savior outside? And now that the State had lost its prey, officials are undeterred in their efforts to discredit Evan. Fueled by clever disinformation, people���s disappointment grows. Evan is called a ���sellout��� and after the years of war, the pastor knows well what happens to a sell-out. Meanwhile, President Mugabe continues to ridicule him in public. It is clear that Evan is not welcome back in the country.
Evan spends the next six months out of Zimbabwe, first in South Africa and then in the United States, during which he finds the support to get his family out of the country too. Abroad, his wife gives birth to their third child. Evan is safe, his family is safe, but he is dislocated. He has no job in this place of safety, no friends, no community. He had acted on impulse, impulse born of desperation, and his voice had been the voice of the people, but now he feels rudderless. After discussion with a few close friends, and his lawyers, he decides to return. He knows it���s dangerous for him to return to Zimbabwe but he also doesn���t want to abandon the cause. He makes plans to return telling only a few people the date of his arrival.
February 1, 2017���Evan is met by the authorities as soon as his plane lands. Five men march him away, interrogate him, then turn him over to the police. He is arrested and sent to remand prison. That night, Evan is thrown into a truck and told that he���s going to Chikurubi. He���s the only prisoner in the truck. His leg irons began to clatter as his legs shake. The mere mention of Chikurubi (like Robben Island, Rikers, or San Quentin), is enough to instill terror. Chikurubi Maximum Security Prison is known for housing the most hardened of criminals, and for its prison violence, overcrowding, and disease. It is here, in the years before Independence, where the white Rhodesian government used to throw the leaders of the struggle. Evan asks his guard if this is the end. He���s imagining being dumped in a ditch or worse. They arrive at Chikurubi���high concrete walls, razor wire, security lights, and armed guards everywhere.
Inside, Evan is given a bucket to hold all the possessions he���s allowed to take���his Bible, some underwear, and a striped prison-issue sweater made by the prison guards��� wives. He���s placed in the D Wing. D is reserved for the most serious offenders���from murderers to rapists���those serving eight years to life. Now comes his crash course on life in a maximum-security prison���a beating from a prison guard and some unexpected kindness from fellow inmates.
For the next few months, Evan will be in and out of prison in a continuing cycle of arrests, imprisonment, and release on stringent bail conditions that include the surrender of his passport as well as the title deeds to his parents��� house. This pattern persists until November. Then, the unimaginable happens.
November 14, 2017��� Major General Sibusiso Moyo appears in full military fatigues on Zimbabwe���s national TV. He announces that the armed forces have stepped in to ���pacify a degenerating social and economic situation in the country.��� It is not ���a military take-over��� or a coup, he insists, even as troops appear on the streets of Harare. The troops block government buildings and occupy the State House. Within days, Robert Mugabe is forced to step down. And with him goes his wife���his one-time secretary and hugely unpopular would-be successor, mocked as the ���The First Shopper��� and ���Gucci Grace.���
Two weeks later, Evan���s case is finally brought to trial and he is acquitted of all charges. He becomes a free man as Robert Mugabe is deposed. The country goes wild with jubilation at Mugabe���s removal���people crying, ululating, dancing, horn-blaring in the streets. Pastor Evan is amongst them. He���s ecstatic���laughing and crying, as people pose with him to take selfies with their flags. Flags are everywhere���on cars and buildings and wrapped around people like superhero capes. Mugabe is out and his former Vice President-turned rival, Emmerson Mnangagwa (nicknamed ���The Crocodile��� for his suspected role in the Gukurahundi genocidal killings) is made interim President. Mnangagwa (also known as ���ED���) proclaims a ���New Zimbabwe��� wearing a scarf in Zimbabwe���s flag colours. The fact that Evan was the first to wear the flag as scarf appears forgotten. The scarf is now called the ���ED Scarf.���
Abroad
It���s early evening in the summer of 2018 and Evan is wearing jeans and a Stanford university sweatshirt. I notice the Zimbabwean flag tied around the straps of his backpack which he puts down as he arrives. My husband, who had met Evan two years earlier after Evan had escaped to the United States, has invited him to our home in San Francisco for dinner. Two others join us, both Zimbabweans���one is a cousin visiting from out of town and the second, an undergraduate at the University of California, Berkeley.
When Evan sees me, his greeting is warm and effusive: ���Hello ma���am, how are you? It���s a pleasure to meet you,��� he says, smiling broadly as he turns to greet the others. As I watch the ease with which he interacts with the younger student, it���s easy to see what made him a popular, humorous youth pastor. ���Wow!��� he exclaims enthusiastically when hearing what each of us is doing, even though we are more interested in hearing about him and the situation in Zimbabwe.
We are meeting in the run up to Zimbabwe���s first election following Mugabe���s��removal from power, and Evan is running for political office. He is running as an independent for a seat in Harare���s city council, which is where he feels he can make the most difference to improve people���s daily lives. He had been campaigning up until a few weeks prior. But then, as he explains, being offered the prestigious Draper Hills Summer Fellowship at Stanford University was an opportunity he couldn���t turn down, as it enabled him to see his family in America whom he hadn���t seen in a year and half. Meanwhile, he remains in close touch with Zimbabwe via phone and social media, and his excitement for the promised hope of this election is palpable.
A few days later, with the election results now in, we meet up with Evan again and this time his mood is subdued. He says his disappointment is not about his own electoral loss, but about the lives of the peaceful protestors and bystanders shot dead on the streets of Harare in the wake of the election. The election has been won by Mnangagwa, the interim President who replaced Mugabe. Mnangagwa is from Mugabe���s Zanu-PF party, not the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC). For years, Mugabe had brutally repressed the MDC. He had also cheated the party, most blatantly, out of the 2008 election.
Indignant and angry, Evan sits hunched at the dining table with his muscular forearms braced in a semi-circle in front of him���a stance like that of his first #ThisFlag video. Our conversation around the election and the ensuing violence pauses when, after dinner, we attend the first International Congress of Youth Voices, where our son is a delegate. As we listen to the passionate presentations, Evan is visibly heartened. One of the congress mentors is Congressman John Lewis, the much-revered civil rights leader who once worked with Martin Luther King, Jr. When Congressman Lewis speaks of the necessity of getting into what he calls ���good trouble��� and ���necessary trouble,��� his words strike a chord with us all. By the end of the evening, Evan is the first to stand in applause. Soon after, he leaves California to return to Zimbabwe.
In the words of others
I am now keen to know, with the passage of time, what people think of Evan. In Zimbabwe, I ask everyone who will speak with me���from young to old, black and white, formally educated or not, rich and poor, professors, students, artists, and business leaders. Similarly, I ask Zimbabweans in the diaspora���in South Africa, the U.K., and the U.S.���many of whom left Zimbabwe either because of the country���s economic collapse or simply to escape Mugabe���s brutal ruling party. Everyone I ask expresses admiration for what Evan did, or attempted to do. Most, however, only seem to know a small part of his story and few are aware of his ongoing work within civic society, which includes mobilizing for clean water services in the wake of a cholera epidemic.
Of the many who praise Evan, some know him from his church, others from what they have heard or read in the news or social media, and one from a chance encounter at Avondale Shopping Center where, in the carpark, they had discovered a shared love of Land Rovers. People describe Evan as a ���good person,��� as ���grounded,��� ���level-headed,��� ���a church man of morals,��� ���humble,��� and a man of ���Presidential potential.��� Several highlight the fact that Evan never set out to be a political leader and that his aim all along was to engage citizens���to start a citizen���s movement. He had resisted joining any political party and refused to run for President as many had wanted him to do. Nevertheless, one Pan-African businessman suggests that Evan ought to have done a better job of acknowledging the activists that came before him (such as Morgan Tsvangirai, a respected leader of the opposition MDC).
One student says that in a country like Zimbabwe where most people are religious, Evan could have done more to harness the power of the pulpit. Others say that Evan should not have ���run away��� from Zimbabwe after his first arrest in 2016. In a heated conversation between a group of Zimbabwean students studying at the University of California, Berkeley, one claims that had Evan stayed in Zimbabwe just two more weeks in August of 2016, something ���fundamental��� would have happened. ���Yeah,��� quips another, ���he would have been dead!��� Others make the point that so much was beyond Evan���s control. Funding was a challenge, says a struggling Harare-based entrepreneur, explaining how difficult it was for Evan to get his message to the rural communities where people, though connected to social media, didn���t have funds to buy ���bundles��� (data packages) to download his videos.
Many blame Zanu-PF as well as ex-President Mugabe for destroying Evan���s credibility by pushing the story that Evan was backed by Western sponsors. Also, as one businessman puts it, Zimbabweans had been conditioned to see their opposition leaders (such as Nelson Chamisa and Tsvangirai) beaten up and because Evan never appeared to have severe cuts or visible bruising, this made some people suspicious.
In his own words
When Evan speaks, his passion and oratory skills are reminiscent of other preacher-activists such as Martin Luther King Jr. and Bishop Desmond Tutu. His speech has a Biblical ring to it when he uses phrases such as ���the least among us,��� ���those who are heavy laden,��� or references ���widows and orphans,��� and occasionally he quotes scripture. He has an ear for accents and a natural feel for the poetry and rhythm of language. What is also striking is the conviction and passion conveyed through his words.
Evan becomes particularly animated when he speaks of some of the most marginalized people who have had a lasting impact on his life, including prisoners he met while at Chikurubi.
He is humble when talking about himself, frequently referring to others as brighter and more courageous. Those that he mentions as having inspired him are not the famous people he has sometimes been compared to, but ordinary, everyday people including his parent���s pastor and a caretaker at Prince Edward School.
When I ask Evan to describe the events following his first arrest, he does so with a sense of timing and drama that keeps me rapt, sometimes adding deadpan humor at the tensest moments of his story. When being transported���handcuffed in the back of a pickup truck���to his first court appearance, he describes the moment when he asks the heavily armored guards if he might pray with them and, to his surprise, they all lower their weapons and close their eyes. And when recalling his first stint at the notorious Chikurubi Maximum Security Prison, he describes the way prison guards looked at him as though he were a rare, wild animal caught in a residential area. They were surprised to find him so young and so short.
Evan is not only quick to draw on humor, often poking fun at himself, but he is also candid when chronicling the rollercoaster of emotions felt in the course of his journey. He admits to sobbing uncontrollably and to nearly convulsing on the first night he was interrogated, to struggling to hold back tears when he saw his pregnant wife patiently sitting in court on the following day. Often in the course of conversation, Evan is contemplative, reflecting on what he has learned since the events of 2016 which brought him to national prominence:
One of the things I learned when people responded by calling me a sellout [was] the realization that if you���re going to do it, you have to do it out of conviction and not out of the applause or what people want to hear. The way I learned the lesson was that my two major arrests had one very distinct difference. The first had thousands of people gathered there. The second, when I was arrested at the airport, there was nobody. No one! It was a shock but also the penny dropped that if you���re going to do this, you can���t do it for the crowd because they���ll be there when it���s exciting, but when it gets tiring, they don���t have an obligation to be there at all.
I lost a lot of friends along the way when I started speaking out. I still have one or two but it���s a very small circle. I���m in one of these strange situations where you feel like everybody knows you, but you know no one.
One of the fears in the kind of space that I���m in right now is that I would disappoint the people who do love me [���] Sometimes I���m caught off guard, I���m not in the space of “here���s the other cheek.” That���s why, as a pastor, it has been such a terrible thing for me and I���ve said to people: “you know what, I���m not speaking as a pastor. I���m speaking as an ordinary person who has hurts, who has frustrations, who has fears, and who is concerned about how they���re going to deal with a future that has been messed up by someone who���s no longer here.”
When people look at me and my life through the lens of the high moments���the different nominations for prizes and the invitations to speak at these high-level gatherings, or amazing institutions of learning���they don���t understand the aspect of cost. None of that could ever be a replacement or a reward for being away from my kids for three years, missing all of their birthdays. None of that could ever help me explain why my daughter would ask me, after she hadn���t seen me for fourteen months, if I���m her dad. So sometimes people see my life through the lens of some of those things and they think that the cost is easy, but it���s quite a cost to bear. The prison arrest and the attempted abductions and threats to life���all put a value on how much I value my family. I���m prepared to die for them, I���m prepared to go to prison for them, so that my children understand what freedom means, what justice is. And it���s my hope that my kids will learn earlier in life what it means to fight for what you believe in. In many ways, it started off being about my family, but it has become much bigger. Sometimes I regret it. Many times, I regret it. When I speak in public, I have to find the courage to be brave for everyone else, to not say I���ve had enough, to not say I can���t take it anymore even though I feel like that a number of times. It���s just not the thing you say when you happen to be the symbol of hope for everybody else.
Evan in 2017 at the Avondale coffee shop in Harare. Image credit James M. Manyika.More arrests
January 16, 2019���In the dead of night, armed men arrive at Evan���s Harare apartment and attempt to abduct him. They assault the caretakers in his block and try ramming down his front door. Unable to get in, they send police to arrest him early the next morning. The arrest is filmed by neighbors and posted online. Evan is remanded and charged with inciting public violence and for being in support of the trade unions who called for peaceful demonstrations protesting the doubling of fuel costs. His charges are later escalated to that of subverting a constitutionally elected government���identical to the charges leveled at him =two and half years earlier. He is thrown back into Chikurubi. This time, he���s placed with fifty-three others in a cell measuring just eight by five meters. Many of these inmates had been rounded up in the course of the fuel protests. Some have broken bones while others have open wounds from police beatings. A few are minors only sixteen years old.
January 30, 2019���Evan is released on bail. He is suffering from a chest infection. One of the first questions a reporter can be heard asking on a posted video is: ���Were you beaten?��� As in 2016, the conditions of his bail are stringent. At each successive court date, Evan���s case is kicked down the road. Between January and September 2019, he makes ten court appearances.
Meanwhile, things in Zimbabwe continue to deteriorate. An Amnesty International report published in August describes Mnangagwa���s first year in office as marked by a ���systematic and brutal crackdown on human rights including the violent suppression of protests and a witch-hunt against anyone who dared challenge his government.��� On August 26th, Evan writes an op-ed for TIME Magazine describing the depth of the nation���s economic hardships and the government���s brutal response to those who dare to protest. Then, in September, the unimaginable happens again. Ex-President Robert Mugabe is dead. He was ninety-five years old.
September 6, 2019���On the day Robert Mugabe dies, I am in Cape Town participating in South Africa���s Open Book Festival. In a surreal moment, I awake to the news of his death from the animated chatter of Zimbabwean housekeeping staff that I can hear standing outside my hotel room. I understand enough of what they are saying in Shona to guess that something significant has happened. I switch on the TV and that���s when I hear Zimbabwean government officials speaking of a deceased Mugabe as though he were a hero���the same officials that had cheered at his ousting less than two years earlier.
Three days later, I fly to Harare. I message Evan to ask if we can meet. I���d like to hear what he makes of Mugabe���s passing and of reactions to his death. I���m also concerned for his mental and physical wellbeing given how long he���s been held in limbo and separated from his family and also given the continued hardship of daily life in Zimbabwe. Zimbabwe���s economic collapse had not ended in the two years since Mugabe���s ousting. My mother-in-law, like so many others in Zimbabwe, has not had running water for months and power outages are now the daily norm. The prices of things���including basic commodities such as bath soap, deodorant, and Vaseline���have become prohibitively expensive. Cash is also in short supply. I wonder how Evan is supporting himself, let alone his family of four and responding to the extended family expectations that come with being the eldest son.
At home
I���ve arranged to meet Evan at Avondale���s popular Caf�� Nush. While I wait for him, I try figuring out where best to sit. I am guessing that his movements and meetings are constantly monitored but still, I���d like to find a spot which is not in full view of everyone.
Evan greets me with his warm smile. It���s his choice that we sit outside. He���s dressed casually in jeans and a t-shirt bearing Zimbabwe���s initials���ZW. There���s a tear in the seam of his shirt and he looks thinner. He���s been running marathons, he tells me. He is wearing sunglasses, and after we order (a coffee each and a barbecue beef wrap for Evan) he asks if I mind him keeping his shades on. He says his eyes are sensitive to light then, half jokingly, that the sunglasses make him feel invisible, but of course ���they see me,��� he adds.
His voice turns serious as we begin to talk about Mugabe. ���The saddest thing in all of this,��� he repeats ���is that whilst he [Mugabe] lived, we were forced to be silent, and when he dies we are again forced to be silent. And the least he could have done, the least he could have done,��� his voice now getting louder, ���was to die here in Zimbabwe!��� Angrily, Evan describes how as Zimbabwe���s hospitals were falling apart, Mugabe received treatment in an expensive hospital in Singapore until his death. Evan tells me that he cannot bring himself to say ���rest in peace��� for Mugabe and he���s furious with the hypocrisy of those who do.
After a pause, he apologizes for raising his voice. I respond by saying that I���m not surprised by people���s hypocrisy, coming as it does from a country so traumatized, until Evan���s cold stare stops me short. His voice grows quieter but even more steely as he reminds me of Mugabe���s cruelty which he insists was there from the very beginning. He reminds me of the Gukurahundi genocidal killings of the 1980s and the notorious Fifth Brigade ordered by Robert Mugabe to commit the atrocities. The death toll estimated by some reports was as high as tens of thousands. ���His [Mugabe���s] death has to be a point of clarity rather than a point of contention!��� Evan insists, with a stern, no-time-to-waste demeanor.
As we continue speaking, Evan is even more candid about his emotional state than I remember him being previously. He speaks of how difficult he finds it when strangers tell him what he should do, when they lecture him on how he must not exhibit rage as a pastor. But writing, he tells me, has helped him deal with things. That morning he had written what he felt were a few good pages in the memoir he is working on. And yet, just as he shares what gives him focus, he admits to feeling confused. He describes these feelings with the same fervor and urgency as in his #ThisFlag video, except this time there is no sense of hope:
It���s like I���m stuck with this thing, this ball of yarn. And I don���t know where the start is or the finish anymore. And I feel like I���ve spent the last two years trying to figure out where is the beginning of it, where is the end of it? And I���m on my own and I���m just frustrated with the thing that I���m trying to unravel and it won���t. It just won���t unravel. Each time I���m coming to the end of it you just get caught up in another arrest and then you pull it and ���
Feeling stuck, he says, makes him question his relevance. He���s worn down by those who accuse him of being a sellout. The determination I had heard him express a year earlier���of the need to do things out of self-conviction rather than be swayed by the fickle whims of crowds���seems to have been ground out of him. And with a heavy sigh he acknowledges that those in power have also been successful in baiting and taunting him.
���Up to today,��� he says, banging on the table, ���People still say, why did you run away? I feel like saying just F-off! Bloody hell! Not only did I come back and get arrested and spent a whole year in and out of prison and got tried for it. Do you realize that I was tried for this? And then, after all is said and done, I still stayed. If I was a freaking coward like you said I was, the moment I was acquitted, I would have packed up my little bags and left! And never come back! Not only did I stay, but I spoke out again.���
Now his tone is bitter and combative. He admits to being less patient, to swearing where he never used to, and to being prone to pouncing on people rather than giving them the benefit of the doubt. He tells me he hasn���t been able to speak freely to anyone for a long time. He doesn���t trust people to be genuine. He feels that everyone has an angle. As he speaks, I am reminded of the moment in his first video when he wonders whether those who sacrificed for Zimbabwe in years past would feel, in hindsight, that their sacrifice had been worth it. I���m wondering if he feels his sacrifices have been worth it when he tells me:
The 2019 arrest, I feel like that was not worth it. I feel like it was because of all these people. I feel like I had to do something, I had to prove that I was still in the game, that I was still committed. Because people, they keep taking. They take, and take, and take, and take!
As I listen to Evan and watch him, it���s almost as if I can see him enmeshed in the ball of yarn, twisting between acknowledging that he���s on edge (and not wanting to be) while simultaneously justifying his right to lash out. Now there���s no deadpan humor in his narration, only anger and frustration followed by silence, then further outpourings:
People seem to be enjoying watching you taking the hard punches. We love it when you���re hit hard and you just return a soft answer or you just say something inspirational. And I���m saying: sometimes I���m fresh out of inspirational quotes. Sometimes I���m caught off guard, I���m not in the space of “here���s the other cheek.”
Evan flicks away tears from under his sunglasses as he angrily clanks his way through his beef wrap, always careful to be polite and cheery to the workers who wait on our table. Still thinking of what he���s said about his last arrest not being worth it, I find myself wanting to reassure him. I tell him he doesn���t have to prove his relevance. Surely, he has proven this already. He listens silently before the words pour out again:
I can���t be a Mandela! I don���t feel like being a Mandela! Is that what it means for me to continue to be relevant? Is that what it means for me to continue to be someone that you love, appreciate, and trust? Because I don���t know if I can sustain that. There are days I can do it, there are! But there are days and moments when I���m just a human. I���m just a human being.
He falls silent until he picks up his phone to show me the latest pictures of his daughters that his wife has sent. In these pictures, unlike the ones he had shared in 2018 while visiting us in San Francisco, Evan does not appear. The other day, he says, his youngest daughter screamed ���Daddy!��� so excited was she to see him on the video call that he couldn���t help but burst into tears. He describes his girls with love and tenderness���one is ���a fireball,��� another just started school, and then there���s the daughter that recently Googled him. She told him that she���d figured out he was a ���YouTuber,��� that he���d been with the police, and that he���d been in prison���all this before she asked: ���What do you really do, daddy?��� And here for one brief moment in the seriousness of things, Evan���s humor returns. ���If I could have taken a commercial break, that would have been the time to do it,��� he laughs.
I ask Evan what he wants. ���That���s a really tough question, but whatever I do, I don���t ever want my girls to go without me.��� Then, after a pause he returns to my question. ���But if there���s anything you couldn���t stop me from doing, it���s finding ways to help people that need it. You can���t stop me from that. It���s a good thing. And sometimes, it���s what gets me into trouble.���
October 3, 2019���Evan is back in court. His case is once again kicked down the road. The next court date is scheduled for January 2020.
November 20, 2019���I receive a text message from Evan: ���Just come from court and got some good news. They have withdrawn the charges and will proceed by way of summons whenever they are ready. The only downside of it is that the case continues to hang over my head and can be called up anytime.��� I text him back, excited to hear this good news. Hours later, I see a post on his Facebook page denouncing a new round of police brutality. Peaceful crowds waiting outside the opposition leader���s headquarters had been beaten and tear gassed by police forces.
And so it continues.
December 17, 2019
The fight for the future of food
Dr. Jahi Chappell, Victoria Adongo, Mariann Bassey-Orovwuje (Left to Right). Image courtesy Joeva Rock.
Who gets to decide African food and agricultural systems? And what does it mean���and what does it look like���to build political power of communities, of farmers and of social movements? These questions���recently posed by Dr. Brian Dowd-Uribe at a gathering at the University of San Francisco���are of particular importance in the current moment wherein an international consortium of development donors, private foundations, and multinational corporations are attempting to spark what is being called a ���New Green Revolution” for Africa. This revolution, spearheaded in part by the US Agency for International Development, along with Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and Rockefeller Foundation, seeks broadly to (a) increase the purchase and use of high yielding seeds and chemicals; (b) transition smallholder farmers to contract laborers; (c) integrate networks of contract farmers into international value chains; and (d) encourage farmers to increase production of certain commercial crops. To achieve this, New Green Revolution funders create new organizations to act as brokers, who in turn work across the continent to help write policies that liberalize African seed, chemical and trade sectors. These efforts are taking place at a time where global financiers are increasingly looking to African markets���whether agricultural, extractive, or otherwise���to extend their reach. The Economist has called African markets ���the final frontier��� for capital.
Victoria Adongo, Mariann Bassey-Orovwuje, Dr. Million Belay, Mariam Mayet, Bern Guri (Left to Right). Image courtesy Joeva Rock.On October 23, 2019, over 150 people gathered at the University of San Francisco. They included African activists who for years have been opposing these efforts and demanding space to theorize different food futures. The event���held in collaboration with the University of San Francisco and 11th Hour Project���sought to center African voices in a discussion so often dominated by non-African observers.
Moderated by Food First Executive Director Dr. Jahi Chappell, the panel consisted of Victoria Adongo, the Executive Director of the Peasant Farmers Association of Ghana; Mariann Bassey-Orovwuje, Program Manager of Friends of the Earth Nigeria and Chair of the Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Africa (AFSA); Dr. Million Belay, Coordinator of AFSA; Mariam Mayet, Executive Director of the African Centre for Biodiversity (South Africa); and Bern Guri, Executive Director of the Center for Indigenous Knowledge and Organizational Development (Ghana). Collectively, the panelists are all active members of the Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Africa, a continent-wide umbrella organization that boasts members in 50 of 55 African countries. (A recording of the full event can be found here.)
For some panelists, the New Green Revolution marks, in Mayet���s words, ���neocolonial, corporate occupation.���
���The Green Revolution is a foreign concept,��� Adongo explained, noting the emphasis on outside, rather than African, expertise in developing and executing Green Revolution polices.
Mayet and Adongo���s remarks served as an important reminder of questioning who gets to drive development narratives. Or, as Bassey-Orovwuje put it starkly: ���we need to deconstruct the ideology behind this [New Green Revolution].���
For many of the panelists, countering New Green Revolution efforts is partly a war of words. This narrative, Dr. Belay argued, helps drive the idea that African knowledge and technology are ���backwards,��� African farmers unproductive, and therefore in need of intervention and substitution: outside experts must be brought in, land must be given to commercial entities, and new chemicals must be bought and sold on the market.
Panelists and event co-organizers from the University of San Francisco and 11th Hour Project. Image courtesy Joeva Rock.���We the activists and smallholder farmers in Africa resist this, and we will not accept a green revolution that is foreign,��� Adongo said. ���Africa has its own homegrown agricultural protocols that we have formed and we are looking at feeding our citizens in the best ways that we can.���
While the first half of the talk was spent dissecting New Green Revolution efforts, the second half was dedicated to discussing alternatives. This was a particularly interesting aspect of the evening, given AFSA���s work to promote agroecology���an agricultural framework that privileges biodiverse and organic inputs across the continent. This work is driven in part, Dr. Belay and Adongo explained, to increase food production. But where panelists see their production goals differ from those of New Green Revolution proponents is the framework taken. For AFSA, Dr. Belay explained, a fundamental question is how to produce food in a way that is socially just, culturally appropriate, healthy and nutritious, and environmentally friendly. ���In Africa food is not just a commercial commodity,��� Guri clarified, emphasizing the need to develop policies and frameworks that incorporate socio-cultural meanings of food and agriculture.
Drawing upon examples from South Africa���s anti-apartheid movement, Mayet emphasized that achieving food sovereignty is more than achieving an agricultural model of production, whether agroecology or otherwise. It is about, she said, ���power, control, autonomy, and agency.��� Guri furthered: ���political freedom is not enough. Until we have a free food system determined and designed by us, we are not free.���
���The power of the people is strong,��� Adongo told the crowd, smiling. And with that, the event was over.
Reenchanting Teju Olaniyan
Tejumola Olaniyan. Image credit Adeleke Adeeko.
Tejumola Olaniyan passed away on November 30, 2019, at the age of 60. His writing on drama, literature, popular music, and political cartooning redefined the contours of African literary and cultural studies. Indeed, his work has done no less than reconstitute the study of culture in Africa���what it is, how it might be understood���in ways that have inspired countless other scholars and rechanneled the field���s flow of ideas.
Olaniyan (Teju or TJ to those who knew him) was Louise Durham Mean Professor of English and African Cultural Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, as well as a recipient of one of the UW���s highest distinctions, a ���named professorship��� which he claimed in honor of his mentor and first scholarly inspiration, Wole Soyinka. Teju succumbed, very suddenly, to an asymptomatic heart condition that he and his immediate family had been aware of for 13 years. To the rest of us, however, it was a total shock. His passing has left an immeasurable hole not just in the fabric of African literary and cultural studies, but in yards of social fabric composed of readers and writers, students and teachers, friends and family, who span the Atlantic Ocean, and indeed the globe.
Teju came from a generation of Nigerian intellectuals who cut their teeth in the embattled field of postcolonial studies. He often remarked that, while he may have mastered the field���s discourse, he did so with a healthy dose of skepticism. That was no doubt part of his training, from his days in the Department of Dramatic Arts at the University of Ife (now Obafemi Awolowo University) in Nigeria, studying under Soyinka, to his time as a graduate student at Cornell University, working with scholars like Biodun Jeyifo. Teju���s work always bore the imprint of Soyinka���s iconoclasm and Jeyifo���s resolute Marxism. Equity, he told group of scholars who recently gathered in Madison to discuss decolonizing African Studies, must be the goal of postcolonial thinking and intellectual liberation. Asserting African identity, writing back, and recuperating philosophical traditions are meaningless projects unless undertaken in the name of material and cultural redistribution, of creating a world without barriers to both the means of producing and access to knowledge.
As Teju articulated it, the discursive field where postcolonial studies gives way to African cultural studies is defined by two ���accents,��� the ���affirmative��� and the ���interstitial������concepts he confidently adapted from Jeyifo���s work. Both are forms of discursively fighting imperialism, but the affirmative accent is inflected by claims to, or affirmations of, the very forms of difference and processes of differentiation on which domination is built. Meanwhile, the interstitial, Teju writes, ���tries to relativize and deconstruct��� binary ideas of race, gender, class, ability, and more, in order to create an ���in-between, ���interstitial��� space supposedly subversive against the great binary absolutes of the West and the non-West.��� Pragmatic as always, Teju acknowledged that interstitial scholarship ���reigns supreme��� in Euro-American universities, while the affirmative accent still has great purchase in Africa. His unique and undoubtedly controversial take���being a resolute materialist���was to suggest that greater resources, often enjoyed by scholars based in Euro-America, create better scholarship. Yet only the incisive power of the affirmative accent, he showed, can help us understand that clearly, even as it ultimately ought to dissolve, were resources allocated equitably. Ideally, Teju suggested in another article, the only test capable of determining whether a discourse is truly spoken in the name of Africa is not geographical, or even racial, but ideological. Put simply, ���Africa��� is an ideological concept, one that emerged along with modernity, but which has also often been the best weapon wielded against it.
Teju���s first book, Scars of Conquest/Masks of Resistance (1995), argued that drama from across the African world���Nigerian, Caribbean, African-American���bore scars of modernity that also hardened into masks. In that book, which he wrote as an Assistant Professor at the University of Virginia, he first began elaborating a conception of subjectivity that he was able to bring into sharper focus with his next monograph, Arrest the Music! Fela and His Rebel Art and Politics (2004). There, Teju describes Fela Anikulapo Kuti���s nativism, or affirmative accent, in terms of a search for ���authentic subjectivity.��� The phrase is an oxymoron, he admits, but a useful one. If subjectivity refers to the interplay of agency and the structural conditions within which it is not only practiced, but without which it would be illegible, as well as the very structural conditions shaped over time by acts of agency, then subjectivity cannot be, by definition, authentic. Yes, we choose, but never under conditions we have chosen. (Teju had a way of effortlessly prompting you to bring Marx���s Eighteenth Brumaire into a discussion without you quite realizing that you did.) ���Authentic subjectivity��� is, nevertheless, appropriate because it names a set of conditions, or power relations, that are not overdetermined, not dominated by outside forces. Fela���s quest was to be able to deal with Nigerian national domination, essentially, without having to simultaneously deal with imperial domination. That quest may have been quixotic, to be sure, but Teju was right to name and acknowledge the enduring importance of affirmative accents���not just their strategic usefulness, but their identify-defining and life-shaping quality. Writing about Fela was, therefore, the logical extension of Teju���s work on black dramatists, whom he wrote in Scars of Conquest/Masks of Resistance were ���questing for cultural identity not because they are black but because they are black and dominated.���
Biodun Jeyifo and Tejumola Olaniyan.Another key concept from Teju���s book on Fela is the idea of the ���postcolonial incredible,��� a phrase he originally developed in his work on the Nigerian playwright Femi Osofisan. Here, ���incredible��� refers to that which cannot be believed, a state of things that not only makes no sense, but cannot invite the imaginative thinking necessary to make things make sense. By the time Fela had become famous, postcolonial politics had become so incredible, so bereft of the ideological substrate necessary to elicit belief, let alone consent, that affirmation and authentic subjectivity were the most logical responses. Therefore again, Teju was able to acknowledge the superiority of a potentially interstitial understanding of power, while simultaneously recognizing, and even endorsing, the kind of affirmative accent that accompanies conditions of relative disempowerment. It is no wonder that he was beloved at home in Nigeria, where his passing has been widely mourned, as well as the North American academy where he found an intellectual home and many, many places to intervene.
There is not enough space here to review all of Teju���s great works, nor will I attempt to recount the details of his professional biography. There are many other writers better placed than I to recall his days as an emerging scholar. I studied under, and then worked alongside Teju for nearly fifteen years. I teach in the Department of African Cultural Studies that is, in many ways, made in his image. The above concepts are some of the many he fashioned as he shaped the department and the field. And all of them would no doubt have factored into his unfinished magnum opus, a ���cultural biography of the postcolonial state in Africa,��� as he was known to describe it. Some of the preliminary work for that project became other projects, such as his many articles and eventually an edited collection on political cartoons. I helped him build an online encyclopedia of African political cartoons. I also worked with Teju on a conference focused on the state and culture in postcolonial Africa that he called ���Enchantings.��� That word constitutes one of Teju���s most enduring, and in a way, heartbreaking concepts.
In several publications, including an edited volume derived from the conference, Teju would elaborate his conception of enchanting by writing something to the effect of ���I have elsewhere characterized������ That ���elsewhere,��� if you take a look at the footnotes, is the book he never published. Indeed, Teju���s great project, which is elaborated well in the work he did publish, but is yet to be fully articulated, was an account of modernity as disenchantment and reenchantment. Drawing on Max Weber, but forging a conceptual paradigm all his own, and uniquely capable of expressing the aporias of contemporary Africa, Teju labored to show that modernity is a form of disenchantment in Africa, oppression that must be fought, while it is equally a reenchantment, a container holding the promise of overcoming oppression. If he is right about accents, that the interstitial is better at dealing with, and surpassing the modern world, if it is postmodern in the best sense of what that term might mean, he is also right that without access to the means of thinking interstitially, the whole venture is very disenchanting. Among the many legacies of Teju���s teaching and writing, therefore, would be a project to not only speak in the ideological name of Africa, but to redistribute the power of speaking in that name. More institutions, more jobs, more books, more voices, more access to the means of producing knowledge about Africa, by whatever means necessary, would honor Teju best.
December 16, 2019
Zimbabwe���s food security in crisis���but not for reasons you might think
Melford Farm and elderly persons home in Harare, Zimbabwe. Image credit Kate Holt via IRIN Flickr CC.
In late November, the UN reported that Zimbabwe was ���on the brink of man-made starvation.��� Some 5.5 million people in the country currently do not have enough to eat.
There is no doubt that there is currently a shocking food security crisis in Zimbabwe, but this is not something that has suddenly occurred ���out of the blue.��� It has deep historical, political, economic and ecological roots. A recent report from Hilal Elver, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the right to food, explores the reasons for the crisis but some of the conclusions are ambiguous.
The UN report implies that the lack of commercial maize production and land redistribution are the major causes of the current food insecurity crisis. This assertion is politically loaded and is already being used on social media by vested interest groups to argue that land reform should be reversed. The report also fails to mention the efforts by Zimbabwe���s Food and Nutrition Council, the Ministry of Health and Child Care and civil society in supporting rural communities and reducing chronic malnutrition in the country during the past couple of decades. Below are some of the key factors leading to the current emergency.
The history behind the crisis
Zimbabwe has become extremely vulnerable to food insecurity largely as a result of almost a century of policies (pre- and post-independence) that have failed to support sustainable food production by smallholder farmers or develop local markets for nutritious food.
The current food crisis came to a head after an extremely severe drought from 2018 through 2019, occurring after a decade of successive droughts. This, on top of a deeply eroded system of food production stemming from policies that primarily support commercial cash crop agriculture.
Researchers have shown that from the 1920s until independence in 1980, the Rhodesian government deliberately sought to destroy smallholder subsistence agriculture to push peasants into the workforce and clear the most productive land in the country for white commercial farmers intent on cash cropping and cattle ranching. In his 1998 study Land Degradation in Zimbabwe: a Geographical Study, Richard Whitlow noted:
��� the history of soil conservation and land degradation in the peasant farming areas is associated very closely with land alienation policies during the colonial period (1890���1980). A persistent theme in this history is the gradual deterioration of man-land relationships as population pressures, both human and livestock, increased.
Whitlow goes on to explain that the Rhodesian government saw black farmers as competition and sought to pressurize them to leave their land and become laborers. He cited important factors contributing to widespread land degradation in the communal areas, including ���the widespread adoption of maize growing and the use of ploughs.��� By the late 1920s, maize had become a staple and cash crop and maize-growing areas were extended ���partly to supply an expanding market in the towns and mines and partly to counter the lower, less reliable yields of maize��� when compared with small grains.
Pre-independence land tenure and natural resource management policies destroyed the existing production systems of diverse traditional crops and livestock and displaced most of the population into ���tribal trust lands.��� The soils and climate in these areas were not conducive to agriculture and population densities became too high for these farmers to obtain sufficient land to make a living and grow food.
Then in the 1940s and 1950s, an American missionary employed by the Rhodesian government as the ���Agriculturalist for the Instruction of Natives,��� led a team that forced communities to abandon their traditional land-use patterns and to cultivate centralized fields that were separated from grazing areas. These tribal trust lands are now known as the communal farming areas���where some of the worst food insecurity exists due to severe land degradation, the drought-prone climate and a serious lack of investment.
The UN Special Rapporteur���s report mentions poor agricultural productivity as a major contributing factor to the current food security crisis; however, there is no direct correlation between agricultural productivity and food security when the focus of productivity is on cash crops rather than nutritious food production. In Zimbabwe, as in many countries, the worst chronic malnutrition (stunting) rates are consistently found in the areas where agricultural (and maize) productivity are highest���Manicaland and Mashonaland. If the argument is that cash cropping raises incomes in rural areas and therefore improves access to nutritious food, this is relevant only where there are local markets for nutrient-dense foods. This is usually not the case in Zimbabwe.
Overemphasis on maize
A major problem highlighted in the UN report is the dependence on maize in the Zimbabwean diet. Although maize can be part of a healthy diet, its nutritional worth is severely limited when it becomes the dominant food source.
Maize was first introduced to southern Africa around a century ago, replacing indigenous millet and sorghum as the national staple. Maize production was boosted by the development of the SR-52 hybrid in Rhodesia in 1964, which increased yields by more than 300%. Agricultural investment became focused on developing maize varieties and markets at the expense of the more nutritious millet and sorghum, which are tolerant to drought, pests and diseases and require less fertilizer and pesticides than maize, making them more affordable for smallholder farmer production. When farmers began to select their own, more drought-tolerant maize varieties, the government made it illegal to sell open pollinated maize, forcing farmers into a debt cycle, as they had to buy hybrid seed, fertilizers and pesticides from companies owned by whites. Historically, most maize was produced by white commercial farmers and this is where the narrative that Zimbabwe was the ���breadbasket of southern Africa��� comes from. However, cereal security is not the same as food security.
Since independence, and particularly since the land redistribution program in the early 2000s, an increased emphasis has been placed on smallholder cash cropping, notably of tobacco and cotton, but also maize. Very little government investment has gone to promoting or developing better varieties of crops that are more palatable, easier to process and able to resist attack by birds. Markets for small grains are weak and undeveloped. The smallholder tobacco sector, meanwhile, has increased by more than 15% since 2010 and is expected to expand further. This focus on cash cropping has led to land degradation and reduced bio- and dietary diversity.
Policies, rolled out during the past five years, including the national nutrition strategy, the food and nutrition security policy, the Zimbabwe Agenda for Sustainable Socio-Economic Transformation (ZimAsset) and the new agriculture policy, have sought to redress the focus on cash cropping to achieve a balance between household income generation and the production of nutritious food. Unfortunately, the recent Command Agriculture Program and the Transitional Stabilization Program���both emerging from the administration of the neoliberal leader, Emerson Mnangagwa���have swung away from food security.
Increasing food insecurity has also led to a cycle of food aid that has become so reliable that many communal farmers don���t bother to plant crops at all. They know that in the extremely likely event of a drought, the World Food Program and other major donors will come to the rescue. Although it is essential during an emergency, food aid further undermines local food security, created dependency and boosting the demand for maize. Instead of buying and distributing local surplus cereals during times of crisis, food aid is usually purchased from donor nations as a way to dispose of the subsidized surplus grain produced in developed countries. In Zimbabwe, during a food security emergency corn soy blend is routinely distributed to traditionally small-grain consuming areas, sending the message once again that maize is a superior food to small grains.
The malnutrition context
The malnutrition picture in Zimbabwe remains complex. More than a decade of national nutrition surveys show a dramatic decline in chronic malnutrition, from 35% of children under 5 years in 2005 to 26.8% this year. Although all provinces in Zimbabwe have a stunting prevalence above the World Health Organization threshold (20%), it is clear that great progress has been made in addressing this type of malnutrition. In terms of acute malnutrition, prevalence is below global target levels but seems to be increasing slightly. The highest prevalence of global malnutrition measured this year is in Mashonaland East and West, while the highest prevalence of severe acute malnutrition is in Manicaland and Mashonaland East (per the Zimbabwe Vulnerability Committee Rural Livelihoods Survey of 2019 and the National Nutrition Survey of 2018)���all areas of high agricultural production.
It is well understood that the most important time in a person���s life to get a good diet is from conception to the age of 2 years (often called the first 1000 days). In 2019 only 6.9% of children aged 6-23 months in Zimbabwe received the minimum acceptable diet���a very serious situation that has become a trend, compared with only 8% in 2010 and 4% in 2018. A study carried out by the Ministry of Health in 2012 found that most Zimbabwean children aged 6���23 months eat predominantly maize porridge.
It is well established that people who obtain more than half of their daily energy intake from maize are prone to malnutrition due to the low levels of lysine, tryptophan, vitamins A, B and C, iron and iodine. To achieve adequate nutrition, people eating a maize-based diet need to consume legumes or animal products regularly. In Zimbabwe, poor households seldom achieve this diet. The situation is far worse in the more marginal parts of the country (Matabeleland, the Midlands and Masvingo provinces), which not only face the problems of severe lack of investment in infrastructure and livelihoods, but also have to deal with the impacts of climate change and the severe land degradation resulting from pre-independence and early independence land policies.
Although few people are happy with the way that land reform was implemented in Zimbabwe, it has presented an opportunity for a more just system of land distribution. Some very credible research has shown that land reform has improved food production and food security for smallholder farmers in Zimbabwe. That stunting rates have fallen during the past 15 years is largely thanks to a massive program by the Ministry of Health and civil society agencies. Yet, I wonder if anyone has actually looked at the contribution that land reform has made to reducing stunting, as the dates of both do coincide.
Due to intensifying climate change, with projected average rainfall declines of between 5% and 18% and temperature increases of 4��C by the end of the century, Zimbabwe will have to make some difficult choices about the future. There will have to be a shift away from the agriculture focused economy and much more emphasis on supporting the sustainable production of nutritious food.
The UN Special Rapporteur ends her report by talking about her inspirational visit to Shashe Agroecology School. Indeed, this type of agriculture based on traditional knowledge systems and ecological principles holds great promise, but unless it is underpinned by supportive policies it will remain a fringe approach.
December 15, 2019
Between democracy and despotism
Rural Transkei, South Africa. Image credit Chris Bloom via Flickr CC.
Last weekend, Ugandan musician-turned-politician, Bobi Wine, touring South Africa, gave a rousing performance at the packed Johannesburg City Hall. Attendees were dressed in the signature red of the People Power Movement, the resistance group led by Wine (who���s real name is Robert Kyagulanyi Ssentamu) that formed out of popular protests against current Ugandan president Yoweri Museveni. Museveni plans to extend his 31-year long term by running for office again in 2021. Wine, who recently announced his intention to challenge Museveni for the presidency in that general election, was in South Africa to receive a prize in recognition of his vocal opposition to Museveni, having been in and out of jail over the last two years because of it.
At one point, after coming to power following a liberation war, Museveni was praised for democratizing Uganda���s political system, especially local rural government. During the revolution and immediately after he came to power, Museveni���s National Resistance Movement (NRM) detribalized rural administration by removing the power of local tribal chiefs (mostly appointed by the British as part of indirect rule). Although ultimately, the decentralization of local government in Uganda became associated with a lack of independence, ineffective funding, corruption and subject to party political struggles (Museveni reinstated parts of kinship rule to bolster his power), the extent of the reforms cannot be underestimated.
It is ironic then that just before Bobi Wine arrived, the South African Parliament announced a new law to consolidate the power of unelected traditional authorities. On November 28, President Cyril Ramaphosa signed the controversial Traditional Leadership and Khoi-San Act (TKLA). Last year, South Africa���s National Assembly passed the Act and the National Council of Provinces consented. (Only one province, the Western Cape, governed by the opposition Democratic Alliance, withheld its support.)
Directly affecting roughly a third of South Africa���s population, the TKLA is rightly marred by controversy. Along with the still-to-pass Traditional Courts Bill (which denies people living in customary law communities the right to choose whether to use state or customary courts), the pair are nicknamed the ���Bantustan laws��� for their reintroduction of colonial and apartheid-era dominion over rural populations, distorting the local practice of customary law and trampling on rural democracy. The law affords sweeping powers to traditional leaders, most outrageously through Clause 24 of the Act, which allows traditional councils to enter into partnerships and agreements with third parties without first acquiring the consent of the communities whose land and livelihoods will be affected.
As Museveni attempted his first reforms of local government in Uganda, he appointed political scientist Mahmood Mamdani as chair of the 1987 Commission of Inquiry into the Local Government System. In 1996, a decade after Museveni first came to power, Mamdani published his book Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism. In the book, Mamdani presents a provocative and imaginative account of the enduring legacies of colonialism which stand as roadblocks to democratization. In Mamdani���s view, the gap between the urban and the rural in Africa is the starting point of its contemporary (?) history. This gap originates in colonialism���s bifurcated state, where direct rule in urban areas was characterized as an unmediated, centralized despotism, featuring civil rights as the preserve of ���citizens,��� a racialized category. In the countryside, tribal society was invented as a mechanism for indirect rule, predicated on chieftainships manufactured and imposed on previously stateless communities, with what was deemed ���customary��� being based on what would strengthen a ruler���s (?) control over their subjects.
South Africa���s apartheid and colonial experience then���as it was with many other African countries subject to British rule at some point���was one of both territorial and institutional segregation. So the task of democratization before most African states at the moment of independence required that state power was deracialized and detribalized. While the former was more or less achieved, it wasn���t so with the latter. Some radical regimes like that of Julius Nyerere���s Tanzania (a nation of 120 or so ethno-linguistic groups) made a deliberate effort to liquidate tribal identity by, for example, adopting Kiswahili as the sole national language. As Mamdani would note, however, these attempts to ���unify the nation��� by stamping out tribal affiliations���mimicked in Ethiopia, Libya and others���was centralized despotism refashioned as revolution from above, doing little to transform the rural-urban schism or deepen democracy from below.
As the writer Sobantu Mzwakali helpfully recalls in a piece for New Frame earlier this year, South Africa���s Interim Constitution initially set out to dismantle the powers inherited from the Homeland system by traditional leaders. In an abrupt u-turn, the 1996 Constitution in Chapter 12 enabled Parliament to pass legislation defining the role of traditional leaders. Ramaphosa���s part in signing the TKLA completes the South African government���s embrace of colonial vestiges, which started with the passing of the contentious Traditional Leadership and Governance Framework Act in 2003 which the TKLA replaces.
Much like in South Africa, as already noted���Museveni���s NRM rode to power in the late 1980s with the ambition of undercutting chiefly rule in the Ugandan hinterland. In 1986, before Uganda even decided its Constituent Assembly for drafting a new Constitution, it had already moved hastily to introduce Resistance Councils��� a country-wide attempt to institutionalize village self-governance by electing bodies of representatives at the most local and immediate level, such that chiefs were ���stripped of judicial, executive and legislative powers and reduced to the position of an administrative official.��� But, as the 1994 elections to the Constituent Assembly approached, Museveni���s incipient regime worried that it would be unable to hold onto the support of peasants in the Buganda region that it amassed during armed struggle, so it struck an unholy alliance with Baganda royalty by reinstituting the kingship in 1993 to ward off the threat of multi-party politics��� and so, as Mamdani says, ���local rule in Uganda was once again at a crossroads, hovering between self-governance and indirect rule.���
In more ways than one, Ramaphosa���s so-called ���new dawn��� (as African National Congress party loyalists and boosters refer to his tenure in office) is instead revealing to be the return of an enveloping darkness���and to borrow a phrase from another publication, ���democracy dies in darkness.��� Although perhaps not so, for if South Africa is exceptional to the rest of the continent in any regard, Mamdani writes, then it is for ���the strength of its civil society, both white and black.��� Enormous strides have been made to advance the rights of rural South Africans, culminating in October last year with the Constitutional Court���s judgment in Maledu and Others v Itereleng Bakgatla Mineral Resources and Another. That judgment held that mining cannot proceed until compensation for host communities is determined, and that compensation requires broad community consent rather than only from traditional leaders.
Historically, it���s been the belief affirmed by the practice of the Department of Mineral Resources that a mining right extinguished informal rights to land. This means that if a mining right were awarded using the investor-friendly Mineral and Petroleum Development Resources Act (MPRDA), compensation for customary communities as an antecedent to mining was unnecessary, since the MPRDA only requires compensation for lawful occupiers and owners. However, the Constitutional Court ruled that the MPRDA must be read concurrently with the forever-temporary Interim Protection of Informal Land Rights Act (IPILRA) which protects informal land rights holders, thus customary communities are lawful occupiers of land through this legislation.
With Baleni and Others v Minister of Mineral Resources and Others, the North Gauteng High Court went further. While the MPRDA only requires that a community is fully consulted prior the granting of a mining right, IPILRA demands that the community gives its full consent, with the court confirming that no community be deprived of their land without consent. The judgment was a victory for the Xolobeni community in the Eastern Cape, which has been waging a more than ten year battle against Transworld Energy Resources (TEM), an Australian mining conglomerate desperate to extract its titanium deposits. The Amadiba Crisis Committee, which leads the charge against TEM, is spearheading the movement for the ���Right to Say No��� to mining, which include groups like the Mining Affected Communities in Action (MACUA) and Women Affected Communities in Action (WACUA). Alongside the ���Stop the Bantustan Bills��� campaign led by the Alliance for Rural Democracy, resistance efforts against the suppression of democracy in favor of the interests of traditional leaders in concert with mining companies and the state will only intensify.
So why would Ramaphosa make such an unpopular decision, one that in the above ways resemble Museveni���s in 1990s Uganda? There���s no question that it is in part to appease the Congress of Traditional Leaders in South Africa (CONTRALESA), the controversial pressure group formed in 1989 with the support of the ruling ANC, initially to build an anti-apartheid front in the Homelands. Collecting its dues in democratic South Africa, it was CONTRALESA that pushed first for the constitutional recognition of the powers of traditional leaders, and now for the TKLA and TCB. The dispute in Maledu arose after Kgosi Nyalala Pilane of the Bakgatla ba Kgafela attempted to evict villagers from a plot of mineral-rich land that they had purchased 100 years before���Pilane is CONTRALESA���s deputy president.
The ANC���s allegiance to CONRALESA re-enacts and reinforces the apartheid relation of chiefs owing their fidelity to the state, not to the people, and like it was then, it is a marriage of convenience for the preservation of power. The ANC has arguably relied on CONTRALESA to marshal rural voters to the polls in their favor, especially in a year that had an election where the ANC���s waning, urban support (chiefly with South Africa���s middle classes) has seen it turn to rural South Africa. In what will prove to be a grave miscalculation and show of contempt, it has done so bypassing the people themselves, treating them not as citizens, but subjects.
South Africa���s rural and traditional elites have been a crucial component to the mineral energies complex which so far stands as South Africa���s oldest system of capital accumulation. Yet this system is crumbling. Communities are alert to the well-documented devastation that awaits in the Trojan horse of development���environmental destruction, dispossession of productive land meaning the loss of subsistence and incorporation into precarious and casual labour, food insecurity and social disruption. It is a profound repudiation of the extractivist, capitalist economy upon which this country has been shakily built. In this period of global disaffection with the neoliberal order, it is inevitable that in the face of a disintegrating economic consensus and social compact, elites unwilling to consider just and humane alternatives would prefer the struggle to conserve and maintain the existing structure, despite all evidence to its deep failure.
The fight for rural democracy realizes Mamdani���s prescription that any reform of the bifurcated state must be ���an endeavor to link the urban and rural���and thereby a series of related binary opposites such as rights and custom, representation and participation, centralization and decentralization.��� The compatibility of customary law and Constitutional rights come together in ���living customary law,��� the actually existing practices of people rooted in self-governance. This fight is also the rejection of another false dichotomy, one looming large over African states post-independence���that between democracy and development. Development is not an end in and of itself, but a means to creating a society that is more democratic, just and fair. The means must therefore conform to the ends.
One of the songs Bobi Wine performed in Johannesburg was ���Kyarenga,��� loosely translated from Nkore as ���It���s Too Much.��� In the song, Wine tells a classic love story about a beautiful village woman coveted by two suitors. One, wealthy and pompous who charms her father with gifts and money; the other, humble and down to earth, offering her nothing but his love, pure and simple. Unimpressed with the rich man, she rejects him and against her father���s will, chooses her true beloved. The rich man takes back his gifts (to her father���s dismay) and sends a gang of thugs to intimidate his lowly but dignified opponent. After a light-hearted dance off between the thugs and the poor man���s own posse, the two parties reconcile, and the video cuts to a jovial, wedding-like party full of dancing, laughter and a pyramid of culinary delights in the center, with the two lovebirds also reunited.
The song has become an East African pop anthem, racking up 2 million views on YouTube. Since the release of his album, Wine also held his infamous ���Kyarenga Concert,��� coming a month after his planned Independence Day one had been cancelled (the Ugandan government had been trying to thwart Wine���s concert for months, famously barricading Wine���s home only for him to make a dramatic escape via motorcycle). While some have dismissed Wine for his pop-star fame, tender lyrics and cheesy music videos, it is precisely that simplicity which makes him so dangerous���for what is ���Kyarenga��� if not a metaphor for the crossroads in which most African politics finds itself today���between democracy and despotism.
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