Sean Jacobs's Blog, page 20
January 21, 2025
Requiem for a revolution
���America���s strongest weapon is a blue note in a minor key��� punctuates Soundtrack to a Coup d���Etat���s thumping opening sequence. A moment later, American radio phones are dropped from the sky, appearing as bombs, and teleported into African households. Louis ���Satchmo��� Armstrong, armed with his golden trumpet, tours a variety of newly-liberated African countries to swathes of adoring fans; another searing title card appears on-screen: ���Today he���s got a saxophone, tomorrow he���s a spy.�����
Soundtrack to a Coup d���Etat is a tremendous historical thesis into the early years of post-coloniality and the crunching, brutal machinery of Western imperialism. America���s puppeteering of foreign governments in the Global South during the Cold War warrants little elaboration, and what makes Johan Gimonprez���s effort a revelation is that it argues that American arts and culture, imparted by its larger-than-life cultural emissaries, were as influential a weapon of the imperial arsenal as any forms of espionage or militarism. As Dizzy Gillespie chirps, who the American government also deploys to perform in Iran to commemorate the election of the US-backed Shah, and in Egypt while Gamal Abdel Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal: ���I would be a better emissary than Kissinger.���
One of Soundtrack���s central themes concerns the position of African Americans in the functioning and upkeep of the American imperial core, while that same system imprisons, dehumanizes, and impoverishes them domestically. Black Americans are seen as Africa���s children, naturally, they are inconspicuously welcomed and adored by their ancestral lands and peoples, while for intents and purposes, they are American citizens who, whether they know it (or like it) can become emissaries of imperialism���s machinery. The polarity and contradictions of the African-American position in the struggle of people in the Global South are played out stunningly. During a particularly affecting scene, where so rarely has a film ever uncovered the dramatic heft of archival footage, Louis Armstrong performs in Accra, Ghana. He sings (What Did I Do To Be So) Black & Blue?�� As his voice quavers with the passion of the lyrics, his eyes are joined by the reverent gaze of Kwame Nkrumah. The edit cuts between them, although they do not eventually share the frame. They may both know all that it means to be Black and Blue, and could even be distant relatives to one another. However, a chasm of geo-political power structures still separates them from becoming brothers in any meaningful sense. Later on, it is revealed that Armstrong is sent to perform in the secessionist Katanga state as a smoke-screen for agents of the CIA to plot the assassination of Patrice Lumumba with Moi����se Tshombe and his cronies. ���Today he���s got a saxophone, tomorrow he���s a spy.�����
Much like the bittersweet scene between Armstrong and Nkrumah, Soundtrack combs through history by use of experimental re-interpretation of archive material from news clips, documentaries, home videos and television shows, with a chorus of voice-overs sourced from voice-acted excerpts of memoirs, audio dairies and a staged interview which avoids the talking-head model in favor of performative spoken word from author In Koli Jean Bofane reciting his book, Congo Inc.��
Despite the depth and scope of the research that makes up his two-and-a-half-hour thesis, Gimonprez resists the temptation of scholarly-inclined documentarians to opt for stolid didactic storytelling for the sake of narrative efficiency and legibility. He employs a frenetic, pastiche editing style that presents history as a scribbled manuscript���littered with a dizzying onslaught of footnotes, quotes, satisfying visual and stylistic quirks, and tangential passages with the lifespan of a whisper of smoke; long enough to make their point, but short enough to escape the obligation of justifying their existence.��
Soundtrack begins its chronology of events with The Bandung Conference, held in Indonesia in 1955. Hosting a consortium of leaders from newly independent colonies from Africa and Asia (a line-up of heavyweights including Egypt���s Nasser, India���s Jawaharlal Nehru, and China���s Zhou Enlai), the prestigious heads of state are gallantly paraded on-screen as champions of the new world, forebearers of a new international order that���s neither East nor West but Non-Aligned. Concurrently, Dizzy Gillespie announces a fake bid for the presidency, with his cabinet featuring (among others) Charles Mingus, Miles Davis, and Thelonius Monk. Both events are played for spectacle, which risks trivializing the force behind the genesis of the Non-Aligned Movement. Yet the euphoria of the time, emphasized by the unburdened expressionism of the post-bebop jazz sound that scores most of the film, presents the future as one malleable towards the imperatives of Black and Brown people from Mississippi to Mumbai. Soundtrack manages to celebrate the valor and vision of those post-colonial leaders while painting a picture of Cold War realpolitik that made those promises impossible to realize.��
The year 1960 marked Nkrumah���s ���Year of Africa��� and, most significantly, Congo���s independence from Belgium. Shortly after the latter, a Belgian invasion to protect its citizens began, and the minerally rich southern province Katanga (backed by the Belgian-owned mine Union Mini��re) seceded. Afro-Asian countries intervened in the unfolding crisis by establishing a UN peacekeeping force formed from neutral European countries and soldiers in the Afro-Asian bloc. The first of its kind, the UN peacekeeping force was a resounding indication that newly independent African and Asian states could influence anti-imperialist policies and precedents through the UN. What especially troubled Western powers was the ability to implement that influence in opposition to their interests. Scenes of the UN General Assembly in 1960, repeated, segmented, and dispersed throughout the film��� sound of Nikita Khrushchev emphatically banging his shoe on a table is set to the rhythm of a jazz drum beat���are as riveting as any political thriller.
Noticing the shifts in world politics, Malcolm X beams from his podium: ���There���s a new bloc emerging.���. Malcolm commands many sections in Soundtrack, often accompanied with accounts of his compatriot���s deployment as human camouflages for American interest in newly independent African countries (one account, featuring Nina Simone���s tour to Nigeria). He outlines to his audience that the liberation of African countries from colonial rule was synonymous with Black Americans��� struggle for racial equality in America. Soundtrack holds reverence for the clarity of Malcolm X���s convictions and affinity to the struggle of Africans on the continent, understanding that as much as the American imperial core was willing to inflict violence against its Black civilians, it was more than willing to do it, often in greater force, towards poorer nations abroad.��
As stretched, tangled, and seemingly unwieldy as the many threads of Soundtrack���s thesis are, the events leading to the assassination of the Democratic Republic of Congo���s first prime minister, Patrice Lumumba, are what hold everything together. One of the world���s most minerally rich countries, Congo���s plentiful cobalt, rubber, and uranium resources have made it a site of plunder and instability for centuries. Franz Fanon is aptly quoted in Soundtrack stating, ���If Africa is shaped like a revolver, the Congo is its trigger.��� The man with his finger on Africa���s trigger was Patrice Lumumba.��
At the time Raoul Peck made his early masterpiece on the same subject, Lumumba: Death of a Prophet (1990), accounts of Lumumba���s assassination as a Western-backed coup were shrouded in mystery, treated as a conspiracy from disaffected radicals. In the 30 years since the film���s release, recently declassified CIA intelligence materialized much of what Death of a Prophet could only suggest. Elements of Soundtrack to a Coup d���Etat may be the film Peck would���ve wanted to make all those years ago. Peck exploited the censored pages in Congo���s history to create intrigue, where the absence of evidence did not mean the evidence of absence. Armed with everything Peck was deprived of, Gimonprez provides an abundance of textual, anecdotal, and visual evidence that beyond a reasonable doubt indicates whose hands are stained by Lumumba���s blood.��
There are few martyrs whose image is as inextricably linked to their demise as Patrice Lumumba. In an early sequence, footage of Lumumba���s rise in political influence is masterfully intercut with a dramatization of Jesus Christ���s procession to his crucifixion. The fate of the two men is inevitable. Whether or not one is yet to familiarize themselves with Lumumba���s story, the film���s message is clear: the events presented will portray our hero in the process of writing his death warrant.
The small victories during Lumumba���s short-lived tenure as prime minister can feel pyrrhic viewed through the perspective of time, but Soundtrack is most astonishing when it���s able to revitalize these moments with their initial revolutionary zeal. The Belgian King Baudouin���s unceremonious tour to the newly independent Congo, which began with a theft of his sword during his introductory parade, is comically represented in the film with a fitting vaudeville flair. The humiliating peak of King Baudouin���s visit, where after an unapologetic speech glorifying the history of his family���s colonial rule over the Congo, Lumumba would quickly improvise one of his most iconic speeches, castigating Baudouin���s ancestor, King Leopold II, for decades of brutal colonial dictatorship. The scene is an utter triumph, but quick to snatch us from the high of Lumumba���s righteous indignation, Soundtrack reminds us it was moments like these that only emboldened his detractors.
As much as some contemporary analyses of Lumumba���s tenure can characterize him as a charismatic leader without any cogent political strategy for his country���s independence, unity, and sovereignty, Soundtrack paints the realistic picture that his position was insurmountable, impossible to even the most adept of diplomats. The tragedy of his troubled tenure is cleverly articulated through the film���s emphasis on time-stamping the various crises and obstructions that occurred through the days, weeks, months, and, subsequently, quarter-months after Congo declared its independence. The repetition becomes an absurdist leitmotif, spelling out the impossibility of Congo���s sovereignty, that even if Lumumba���s vision could be a mirage, it only lasted for a paltry two-and-a-half months. With a conglomerate of interests spanning international mining companies, the Belgian government, and neighboring white-settler states in South Africa, Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), and Namibia, the guardian of the heart of Africa was isolated, defenseless, and outnumbered.��
Lumumba was not the first or last post-colonial leader to be assassinated for his uncompromisingly anti-imperialist disposition. The timing and shocking brutality of his murder was a sober reminder at the twilight of Nkrumah���s ���Year of Africa��� that as much ground had been gained, the indifferent machinery of imperialism would continue to operate as crudely and oppressively as it always had. Soundtrack often breaks its visual harmony to display dazzling modern-day adverts for the latest iPhone smartphones and Tesla vehicles, made from Congo���s cobalt reserves, as well as the current war waging in the East, articulating something the film is self-aware enough not to elaborate over a title card: colonialism has never left Congo.��
Soundtrack���s post-modern flair renders other towering and complicated figures of history as symbols, bordering on caricatured representations of themselves without accounting for the weight of their contradictions or nuances in politics. In some shades, it works. In others, it paints the foil of the Non-Aligned Movement to a robust and bluntly violent opposition instead of its internal contradictions. As William Shoki argued in his reflection on non-alignment half a century after the Bandung Conference, one of the primary reasons it could not coalesce into a significant geo-political bloc was that it lacked a formidable working-class base. The material conditions for such couldn���t materialize because ���the sociological conditions for mass society and associational life���industrialization and collective provision through a strong state���never came to pass.��� Non-aligned leaders saw equity in global politics as a means towards domestic development, but it was precisely domestic development that would���ve provided robust support from below for the newly independent countries to form a formidable geo-political bloc.
Soundtrack is brilliantly seductive at arousing justifiable geopolitical ressentiment, which has only fermented as the years since the Cold War have continued and intensified American imperialism and its hegemony in the developing world. For all its exceptional touches, Soundtrack dwells in this ressentiment, which at times imagines that adept diplomacy and more sympathetic world leaders (in the vein of Russia���s Nikita Khrushchev) may have been all it took for non-alignment to materialize outside of the mass-mobilization of working peoples of the Global South. However, Gimonprez takes us there in the film���s final act.��
Soundtrack reaches its crescendo as Max Roach & Abbey Lincoln���s performance of ���Freedom��� reaches its fever pitch, and a group of protestors, including Roach, Lincoln, and Maya Angelou, storm the UN General Assembly in 1960 shortly after news of Lumumba���s assassination is announced. As Lincoln���s voice roars, the protestors breach the conference hall. While the majority of the film takes place in the halls of power and explores covert espionage against the newly independent Congo, Soundtrack���s final message functions as a rallying call for global mass mobilization. Better late than never.��
In the half-century since the protest at the UN General Assembly in 1960, Non-alignment appears to carry more semiotic weight than material force, sincerely inheriting few of the ideas born in Bandung, often in the service of pursuing global equality to create domestic inequality in favor of the domestic ruling elite. Most jarringly, in contrast to the generation of Maya Angelou and Malcolm X, is the posturing of the modern-day African-American intelligentsia, who tend to exceptionalize the plight of their compatriots at the expense of building solidarity across the Atlantic. Ta-Nehisi Coates��� recent launch and tour of his book ���The Message��� garnered controversy through his reflection and newly-found understanding of the functioning of Israel as an Apartheid state. As one of the foremost voices speaking on race relations during Barack Obama���s presidency, there was a sense on either side of the fence that he was risking something.��
The institutions that had placed him on a pedestal felt betrayed, and even the most skeptical of observers could appreciate his willingness to test (and at times erode) the goodwill he had built over the past decade. The story that surrounded the launch of Coates��� book revealed less about the author than it did of the positionality of many public voices speaking for the advancement of African-American interest, many of whom have drawn themselves so intimately to the heartbeat of the imperial core, that condemning a state-sponsored genocide is tantamount to career suicide. As Soundtrack lays out clearly in its thesis, as Nina Simone and Louis Armstrong protest their deployment in Nigeria and Katanga after learning about the covert motivations behind their respective tours, in the public sphere, it appears no American is exempt from oiling the gears of the American empire.��
In its entirety, Soundtrack to a Coup d���Etat is tremendous. Conventional forms of filmmaking have manufactured an expectation for legibility in our cinema.�� Filmmakers begins to ask themselves a question, finds an answer, and start making their film. Few filmmakers dare to make the question itself a point of departure. It���s in these films that an ignition of improvisation and dialecticism takes hold. The answer a filmmaker arrives at in their final cut may not be succinct, but it nonetheless charts a remarkable journey. The splendors of these journeys are almost solely dependent on the depth and color of the filmmaker���s introspection.
For his part, Johan Gimonprez���s work on Soundtrack to a Coup E���tat is an outstanding testament that a film need not always be the conclusion to a thesis, but the thesis itself.
Making a killing for investors
Swearing-in ceremony of Nigeria���s President Bola Ahmed Tinubu, Abuja, 2023. Image credit Paul Kagame via Flickr CC BY-NC-ND 2.0. The month of August saw mass protest erupt in the West African country of Nigeria. Spurred by anger over a cost-of-living crisis and drawing inspiration from the Kenya���s youth revolt, the #EndBadGovernance protests became a rallying point for calls to take action to curb inflation and reverse the hike in prices of fuel, electricity, and food. But instead of answers to the cost-of-living problems, the protests were met with water cannons and live bullets in most parts of the country, and especially in Northern Nigeria where at least 40 protesters were reportedly shot dead by security forces. This violence was also accompanied by a string of Gestapo-style arrests of alleged protest leaders and sponsors, many of whom were legally under-aged.
Characteristically, the Nigerian authorities promptly denied that any killing took place, with the inspector general of police on one occasion saying his men did not fire any live bullets. However, a new report released by Amnesty International has exposed the gory details of the repression that unfolded while the protest lasted. Titled ���Bloody August: Nigerian Government���s Violent Crackdown on #EndBadGovernance Protests,��� the report present a chilling insight into the brutal class war unfolding in Africa���s most populous country as an unpopular pro-West regime employs state terror to try to accelerate the full liberalization of Nigeria���s economy���an IMF/World Bank���inspired project from the 1980s, which had moderately slowed down under the previous administrations.
Seventeen months ago, barely minutes after he was sworn into office, President Bola Ahmed Tinubu, in an off-cuff remark that deviated from his written speech, announced the removal of the prevailing petrol subsidy. Hardly had the newly elected president left the Eagle Square, venue of the elaborate ceremony that ushered him into office, that the immediate effect of his imperious announcement began to manifest. Across the country, a condition of a partial strike developed as society came to a momentary halt. Queues surfaced at petrol stations as many motorists embarked on panic buying of petrol while thousands of commuters, including workers and students, were stranded at bus stops nationwide as transport fare rocketed.
At the time, Tinubu���s action was viewed by many as either a product of hubris or, worse, a stroke of madness. Later on, in a speech to a group of Nigerians in Paris, the president would try to cast his action in ethereal halo by saying he was seized by a sudden confidence. However, in hindsight, it has become clear that Tinubu���s action on May 29 is only a foretaste of the shock therapy that would define his regime���s methodology in the execution of the neoliberal project. In opposition to the gradualism of the Buhari years, which earned him the sobriquet ���Baba Go Slow,��� Tinubu���s approach consists of three parts: shock, awe and shock again. Before Nigerians had fully taken in the impact of the rocketing petrol prices, the regime went ahead to devalue the currency. By the time Nigerians were beginning to reel from the consequences of the foreign-exchange fiasco that ensued, the full impact of the band classification for electricity supply���effectively a dramatic hike in electricity costs���introduced by the outgoing Buhari regime about six weeks before leaving power, began to kick in, to the chagrin of household and industries.
Nearly two years after, not only has the price of petrol defied the laws of gravity but the combined effect of other neoliberal reforms also introduced in quick succession by the regime have plunged the Nigerian people into the worst cost-of-living crisis in nearly three decades. While prices of food and fuel have risen by 61 percent and 355 percent respectively in the last 16 months, wages have declined in real value. The result is that many are starving as transport and energy costs take up nearly all of people���s monthly wages. Tragically, over 80 percent of Nigerians work in the unregulated informal sector where the national minimum-wage law is hardly respected. Also many are out of jobs with over 11 companies leaving the shores of the country within the first year of the regime���s existence. Despite this, the privilege and opulent lifestyle of the ruling elite has continued with the president taking delivery of a new Cadillac Escalade and an Airbus 330 aircraft costing US$150 million in the midst of the general hardship.
In pure military terms, shock and awe���a rapid dominance strategy involving the utilization of overwhelming power to paralyze an adversary���is meant to demoralize the enemy making it incapable of resistance. Tinubu���s shock therapy was aimed at exactly the same goal, hence the regime���s knee-jerk response as the cloud of resistance began to gather from early July until it broke out the following month.
In their report, Amnesty International presents the gory details of excessive force utilized by security forces, principally the police and the army, to quell the protest. According to the report, at least 24 protesters were killed in Kano, Katsina, Jigawa, Niger, and Borno States but other accounts show that the death toll is much higher. ���In almost all cases the victims were shot by the police���firing live ammunition at close range, often at the head or torso, suggesting that they were shooting to kill. Of the survivors interviewed, two protesters suffered gunshot injuries after being shot in the arm and leg by the police. Several survivors were suffocated by indiscriminate use of tear gas,��� the report claimed.
Some of the victims did not even participate in the protest, demonstrating how vicious the repression was. For instance Nana-Firdausi Haruna, 30 years old, was cooking a meal for her family when she decided to step out to buy charcoal. She never made it back home. The same goes for 20-year-old Salahuddeen Umar who was shot and killed while seeing off his friends who came to check on his well-being because he had been ill for days. Similarly, five-year-old Muhammad Sani was playing with other kids in front of their house when a bullet pierced his lap. Abduljal Yusuf of Rijiyar Lemo in Kano state was shot dead in his provision store while 20-year-old Fa���izu Abdullahi was accosted by policemen who ordered him to raise his hands, which he did, yet he was still shot dead.
If the state-orchestrated propaganda and threat that presaged the protest was anything to go by, they showed a regime in momentary panic about the prospect of the mass movement, if allowed to develop, upending the status quo. Recent events on the continent have shown how even small protests on any economic or democratic issue can supercharge underlying grievances while rapidly becoming a rallying point for a mass revolt. Therefore, the gratuitous repression against the August protest was an action of a state grappling for survival,�� as are the allegations of a “Russian plot��� and the ongoing trial of protesters for treason, which in Nigeria���s laws carry a death sentence.
Suffice to note that Tinubu had come to power after winning the lowest vote cast for any Nigerian president since 1979. He was elected by just 8.7 million voters���10 percent of the total number of registered voters and 36 percent of votes cast. Whatever slight social base the regime had managed to retain following the 2023 elections had gradually collapsed as the economic catastrophe of the neoliberal reforms tore through society. Ordinarily, if there was any regime ill-suited to implement IMF/World Bank neoliberal reforms, it is the Tinubu regime. Former President Goodluck Jonathan, a more popular president, was nearly overthrown in January 2012 when he made a similar attempt. Yet it is this lack of any real support at home that is acting as a compelling factor for the regime to act not only as the evangel of neoliberalism within Nigeria but also the poster boy of Western interest within the region. To do either, however, requires a social base the regime is lacking; hence the turn towards the police and the army to suppress and awe.
Wider afield, we see the iteration of the same pattern. Kenyan President William Ruto���s attempt to accelerate the neoliberal agenda catapulted him overnight from a president with a measure of popularity, because of his rags-to-riches history, to one whose political career now hangs by a thread. According to official figures, nothing less than 39 protesters were killed, 361 were injured, and 627 were arrested during the anti���Finance Bill protests in the East African country. This is in addition to at least 32 cases of ���enforced or involuntary disappearances.��� In the end, therefore, it can be safely averred that violent repression of civil liberties is an inevitable concomitant of the implementation of neoliberalism. In the case of Nigeria, the event of August may well be the first steps toward the consolidation of a civilian capitalist dictatorship.
Taken as a whole, the Amnesty International report presents damning evidence of extrajudicial murder against the Nigerian state and its appurtenances of repression. Sadly, there is no guarantee that anything will come out of this expos��. This is not the first time the Nigerian state has murdered innocent citizens without consequence. During the #EndSARS protest four years ago, a judicial panel of inquiry set up by Lagos State found the army responsible for the killing of at least 12 protesters in a brutal crackdown at Lekki toll gate on October 20, 2020. The report also recommended a number of people for sanctions, including officials of government and private persons, who played direct and indirect roles in the tragedy. Up till today, no one has been brought to justice for the killings.
In all likelihood, a similar fate may befall this new report unless activists, civil society groups, and unions are able to ramp up pressure on the regime to act. The potential for even limited action to have an effect was demonstrated early last month when social media outrage forced the regime to hastily free sick and malnourished underage protesters arrested in connection with the #EndBadGovernance protest, when footage of their arraignment in court set the internet agog.
Due to the lack of serious public engagement with the report, the inspector general of police appears to want to seize the initiative by promptly announcing an investigation even while simultaneously describing the report as ���falsified and confusing.��� Of course, it goes without saying that such a probe conducted by the police will not serve the cause of justice. The Amnesty International report implicated the entire police force, so any real investigation can only come from without, not within. This is why it is now urgent for activists to begin to organize online campaigns and physical actions, including protest rallies and demonstrations to demand the immediate constitution of an independent and public probe into the brutal repression of the #EndBadGovernance protest.
January 19, 2025
Bring back Ngonnso
Restituted sacred society mask of the Bangwa people of Cameroon. Credit: @REGARTLESS on X. Every evening, I would gather with my late grandparents around the fireside, where their stories wove a tapestry of history and memory. This ritual was a clever ploy to keep me awake for dinner���too often, my playful spirit would lead me to doze off before my meal, which my grandparents could not abide. The crackling fire wrapped us in its warm embrace, its flickering light dancing across our faces as we shared tales that felt almost alive.
Among the many stories they shared, the tale of the theft of the statue of our goddess Ngonnso by the Germans was a somber masterpiece in their repertoire. Unlike the others, their tone would shift to one of mourning whenever they recounted this story. Ngonnso is the founder of the Kingdom of Nso, located in the grassland area of southwestern Cameroon. She established the kingdom following a violent succession dispute with her two brothers, and in her honor, an elaborate wooden statue covered with cowrie shells and standing nearly a meter tall was created as a symbol of hope and peace. This treasured artifact was stolen in 1902, however, and donated to the Ethnological Museum of Berlin in 1903 by Kurt von Pavel, severing the Nso people���s connection to their founder. Pavel, a German colonial officer, is reported to have killed at least 1,300 people in the grassland area of Cameroon during his military operations, taking nearly 500 individuals as prisoners.
Ngonnso sits at the Humboldt Forum in Berlin, Germany, separated from her people. Credit: Bring Back Ngonnso, via X.Whenever this story was shared, my grandparents would recount the Germans��� brutal treatment of the Nso indigenes. My grandmother would hum a sorrowful tune in our dialect (Lamnso) while stirring corn flour in a large pot, a song she said was sung by Nso indigenes during their forced labor for the Germans. The lyrics recount the horrors of German rule, echoing the pain of our ancestors. My grandfather often spoke with unshed tears, constantly shaking his head and lamenting how even traditional rulers, revered as gods, were not spared from the maltreatment.
���Doh,��� he would say after sniffing snuff���the very snuff I���d steal and sniff, causing me sneezes and dizzy spells. It seemed to inspire and relieve him. ���We have never been defeated in war by any tribe,��� he���d boast, ���until the Germans came. Those white people had the support of tribes we had once defeated.��� Had he not been bound by the old rulebook that men don���t cry, tears would���ve cascaded freely whenever he shared this story.
The Nso people were once a dominant kingdom, subjugating many tribes under their rule. But the arrival of the Germans abruptly ended their ambitions. My grandfather would always conclude with curses and express gratitude to the ���English man��� for defeating the Germans and expelling them from Cameroon; little did he realize that the so-called English man was also complicit in the looting of Cameroonian and African artifacts.
As a child, I couldn���t grasp why my grandparents were so emotionally invested in the story of what to me was a ���mere��� sculpture. However, as I matured and came to understand the spiritual significance of this artifact, I began to see it through their eyes.�� As these narratives continue to be told today to children of my generation across Africa, most of these treasures regrettably�� remain captive in museums outside of Africa.
A 2023 research article estimates that 40,000 objects from Cameroon are in German museums, a far cry from the roughly 6,000 pieces in the state collections in Yaound��, the capital of Cameroon. The artifacts in Germany consist of musical instruments, ritual masks, textiles, manuscripts, weapons, and tools, many of which were acquired through violent raids. The research identifies at least 180 instances of ���punitive expeditions��� characterized by looting and destruction that occurred during 30 years of German colonial rule in Cameroon, from 1886 to 1916. It is a situation Maryse Nsangou Njikam, a cultural advisor at the Cameroonian embassy in Germany, describes as Germany being ���full��� and Cameroon ���empty.���
Njobati Sylvie. Credit: Njobati Sylvie via X.While the generation of my grandparents felt helpless, perhaps because of the hangover of Europe���s brutal conquest of Africa, which they witnessed, the present generation has broken through the barriers and is actively demanding the restitution of Africa���s stolen artifacts. ���The awakening among Cameroonians and Africans in general regarding restitution stems from the fact that we are in a technology-driven era,��� explains Slyvie Verynuy Njobati, a Cameroonian restitution campaigner. Njobati emphasizes the role of social media in her Bring Back Ngonnso campaign. ���Technology has contributed so much in creating awareness among Cameroonians and Africans about their looted artifacts,��� she adds. From her perspective, Africans are on a mission to rediscover themselves, and the return of these artifacts is a way to reclaim their history and heritage, fostering a sense of unity and cultural revival. It marks another beginning, she says, in the process of�� the ���decolonization��� of Africa. ���You call us a dark and primitive continent,��� she declares, ���but our primitive arts are lighting up your museums and institutions. Africans can���t wrap their heads around this hypocrisy.���
Since the statue of Ngonnso was discovered for the first time at the Ethnological Museum in Germany in 1974 by a Nso intellectual, Bongasu Tanla Kishani, after it was stolen, efforts have been made to restitute the sculpture, predominantly led by men, but with no breakthroughs. Now, a young woman has stepped in, and despite current delays, the restitution of this artifact is within walking distance. ���I am motivated when people tell me I cannot succeed; I simply go ahead and prove to them that I can,��� Njobati states.
Njobati initially embarked on her restitution journey to fulfill her grandfather���s wish of restoring the same Ngonnso statue that my grandparents spoke to me about. She soon realized, however, that this desire extended beyond her grandfather; it resonated with many tribal groups in Cameroon and across Africa, whose artifacts remain locked away in museums and private collections in Europe and the Americas. In the time since, her vision has expanded, and she is focusing on the broader goal of restoring Cameroon and Africa���s stolen heritage items.
While the activist is satisfied with her accomplishments thus far, she regrets that the patriarchal structure of her kingdom and Cameroon as a whole has been an impediment to her journey. ���As a woman, it has not been easy to lead this movement,��� Njobati says. ���People have undermined my efforts simply because I am a woman,��� She adds, revealing that there have been individuals who have sought her life at various points.
In March 2024, Njobati, through her organization REGARTLESS, facilitated the return of eight looted Bangwa artifacts that were in private holdings and up for auction online in Germany and the Netherlands. The Bangwa, a tribal group in southwestern Cameroon, were among those who fiercely resisted the German colonial conquest of Cameroon, though they ultimately fell under colonial rule at the barrel of a gun. The restitution of Bangwa heritage, Njobati says, is very significant ���because it is the first restitution from the colonial context in Cameroon.��� She goes on, her voice filled with a deep sense of accomplishment, ���Watching the people connect to their artifacts upon return���the tears, the emotions, and the excitement���reminded us of the importance of the work we do as an organisation��� I won���t sacrifice that moment for nothing.���
Restituted Bangwa heritage items at home for the first time after hundreds of years abroad. Credit: REGARTLESS via X.Germans looted these artifacts with impunity, disregarding their spiritual significance, but the consequences for the Bangwa people were profound. ���The impact of the absence of these treasures��� were very glaring: children died, crop yields dwindled over the years,��� HRM Fon Asabaton, the king of the Bangwa people, stated regretfully during a public event in Yaound��, Cameroon, to receive the returned artifacts. While the monarch remains hopeful that all the heritage items of his kingdom will one day be returned, he struggles to understand the fact that most of these artifacts are still callously exhibited. ���What truly perplexes me is how these handlers of stolen goods can shamelessly exhibit our precious artifacts without any guilt,��� he says. The scope of the issue throughout the continent cannot be understated: according to estimates, up to 90 percent of African art is located outside the continent. In Europe and the US alone, more than 500,000 pieces are on display in museums and private collections.
But more significantly, this milestone has, according to Njobati, opened another complex layer in the journey to restore Cameroon���s cultural heritage. ���If these heritage items are sold online,��� Njobati cries out, ���then we are missing the bigger picture.��� She emphasizes that beyond exploitation in the museum economy, profiting off prized cultural artifacts in the black market continues to be a profitable enterprise. ���Instead of holding only institutions accountable,��� she says, ���we need to also hold the dark web and dark web traffickers accountable.���
Bangwa people jubilant as they welcome their cultural artifacts back home. Credit: REGARTLESS via X.While there is victory on the Bangwa front, the battle to bring back Ngonnso, which motivated Njobati���s restitution journey, has stalled. Njobati describes the delays she has encountered in the restitution of the goddess���s statue, for which she has fiercely campaigned over the years, as a ���political setup.��� In mid-2022, the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation, the organization that oversees Berlin���s major museums, promised to return the Ngonnso statue, but more than two years later, nothing has happened.
���The delay to physically return Ngonnso and other heritage is reopening wounds and pain we had all thought would be healed soon,��� REGARTLESS writes on its X account. ���We approached Germany despite being the victims, we didn���t ask for too much but our heritage.����� ���Here we are,��� the post continues, ���gradually getting back to the depression, to the reality that no one is really willing to match words and signed documents with actions.���
To facilitate the return of Cameroon���s plundered artifacts, the government has established a restitution commission. While Njobati appreciates the government���s push in the restitution process, she regrets that its involvement has unfortunately slowed the process of restituting Ngonnso, given that the government ���has this big vision of many more heritage items to come home, apart from Ngonnso.��� She believes that the restitution of these artifacts, including Ngonnso, would be faster if the concerned communities took the
It is not only Njobati who is concerned about the continued stay of Ngonnso in Germany; Nsaibirni, like many other Nso indigenes, is also worried.lead with minimal government intervention. ���If restitution was left to communities and their leaders to negotiate the return of artifacts, we could have been celebrating at least a hundred returns today,��� she says, lamenting that Ngonnso, which literally translates as ���Mother of the Nso,��� may return to Cameroon no sooner than late 2025.
Not everyone in the restitution community holds the same perspective as Njobati, however. Hugues Heumen Tchana, the chair of the commission to restitute Cameroon���s stolen artifacts, says negotiations with Germany regarding the return of cultural artifacts ���is the state���s responsibility, not that of individuals.��� He claims that restitution campaigners like Njobati are primarily driven by self-interest, rather than a genuine commitment to the cause. Njobati, however, insists that her restitution mission is purpose-driven and free from any trappings of self-interest. She also emphasizes that the government���s powers regarding the issue should be clearly defined, and it should know when to intervene and when not to.
In late 2017, French President Emmanuel Macron pledged in a speech in Burkina Faso to return African patrimony held in French museums. ���I want to move toward allowing for the temporary or definitive restitution of African cultural heritage to Africa,��� he declares. Four years after this pledge���which many, including this writer, took with a pinch of salt���Macron took action by returning 26 artifacts to the West African country of Benin, marking the beginning of the process.
A year later in neighboring Nigeria, Germany returned 21 bronzes that were looted and sold to it, about 125 years ago by the British. However, when the then President of Nigeria Muhammadu Buhari decided to hand these pieces to the traditional ruler of the Kingdom of Benin, from where they were looted, instead of keeping them in government custody, it caused outrage in Germany.
While the outrage was expected, given that the initial understanding with Germany was that the artifacts would be kept by the government in a museum, it raised a fundamental question of who should decide the fate of Africa���s restituted artifacts. More importantly, it brought to the forefront the flawed argument of�� European nations that continue to prolong the retention of African looted artifacts due to the perceived inability of Africans to care for them.
It is not only Njobati who is concerned about the continued stay of Ngonnso in Germany; Nsaibirni, like many other Nso indigenes, is also worried.At the opening of the Humboldt Forum in Berlin, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Nigerian writer and social activist, offered her insights on this fundamental debate, arguing that ���it does not matter whether Africans or Asians or Latin Americans can take care of the arts stolen from them; what matters is that it is theirs.��� Adichie chastised Germany, like other Western nations, for preaching the rule of law while practicing the contrary. ���A nation that believes in the rule of law,��� she declares, ���cannot possibly be debating whether to return stolen goods, it just returns them.��� Just like Adichie, Njobati finds the argument that Africans are not capable of taking care of their artifacts ridiculous. ���Before colonial times,��� she says, ���our artifacts lived for hundreds of years; the ones that were not taken [by the Europeans] are still living up till today��� even if we can not take care of them, they still belong to us.���
Around mid-2023, the Ethnological Museum in Berlin returned 23 cultural objects to Namibia on loan. This sparked widespread criticism across the board, but the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation insisted that the term ���loan��� was chosen for bureaucratic reasons and that the loan is a permanent one. Interestingly, around this time, the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation also pledged to return Ngonnso and several Tanzanian heritage items. However, Ngonnso remains housed at the Humboldt Forum in Berlin. The question of where the sculpture will be kept upon its return to Cameroon remains unanswered. Its natural home,
King of Nso, HRM Sehm Mbinglo I, visits Ngonnso in Germany and performs rituals, assuring her that she will be back home soon. Credit: REGARTLESS via X.Kumbo, the capital of the Nso people, is significantly impacted by a bloody civil war, now referred to as the Anglophone Crisis. A replica of Ngonnso sits abandoned at the center of an empty palace in Kumbo, and Sehm Mbinglo I, the king of Nso, now lives in exile in Yaound��, the political capital of Cameroon as a result of the civil war. This civil war is a sad reminder of the enduring consequences of colonialism, the effects of which continue to haunt Cameroon, a former German colony that was partitioned between Britain and France after World War I.
Where Ngonnso will be kept isn���t a major concern for Njobati, however. All she wants now is for the goddess of her people to come back home. ���Where Ngonnso will go when it returns and its safety is no longer within my sphere of influence,��� she says, adding that the King (also known as Fon) of Nso and his traditional council will decide.
Njobati would die a fulfilled woman if the sculpture of Ngonnso finally returns home, and she has dedicated her life to seeing it come true���a homecoming that our grandparents have lamented for multiple lifetimes.��As momentous as this occasion would be, it is still one of 500,000 looted African artifacts���an indication of just how far we have to go to reclaim what has been rightfully stolen.
December 23, 2024
On Safari
Circuito de playas in Lima, Per��. Image credit alobos life via Flickr CC BY-NC-ND 2.0. As we prepare to take our annual publishing break, the question on everyone���s minds is: what should we make of 2024? In this moment of global certainty, it is a human impulse to search for historical parallels. This is a fraught exercise. On the one hand, drawing analogies to the past can put into sharp view all the lessons that human civilization ought to have internalized by now. On the other, comparisons which are too quick, can obscure what is discontinuous about our conjuncture. But, as Hegel warned us������The owl of Minerva takes flight only at dusk������we will only know in retrospect.
In the latest New Left Review, Matthew Karp writes of probably the most decisive event of 2024, i.e., the US��� decisive election�� last November: ���In substance as in form, the 2024 election reconstituted the essential features of 2016.����� Once again,�� Trump successfully positioned himself as a challenger to the political establishment despite his prior tenure as president. Once again, the Democrats failed to mobilize key portions of their coalition, and are, in fact, alienating the working-class votership which once formed a key constituency of their base. Hegel���s successor���Marx���remarked somewhere, ���first as tragedy, then as farce.��� But in our moment, historical repetition could just as well go the other way. Phenomena that are initially dismissed as laughable and absurd can escalate into tragedy, with catastrophic consequences, because we failed to take them seriously. This is where we are now.
I wrote in last week���s newsletter (subscribe!) that Luigi Mangione���s assassination of Brian Thompson and the political debate it has ignited risks collapsing into ironic, apolitical content if predominantly refracted through the idiom of memes. But memes are not simply viral flashes of humor that come and go, thereafter consigned to the dustbin of history and the internet. Instead, they are powerful carriers of mimetic desire (the theory by Ren�� Girard that humans imitate others in determining what to desire, as our wants are not inherent but shaped by models we observe). As digital expressions of imitation, memes act as compact models of behavior, beliefs, or desires, inviting replication and adaptation by others. Memes create a shorthand for shared aspirations, fears, or critiques, creating models of desire that influence behavior on a mass scale.
It is, in part, difficult to fully exorcise the specter of the culture wars from modern politics because their predominance reflects a more fundamental dynamic shaping the contemporary: the memeification of politics. Consider�� how different demographics receive Daniel Penny and Luigi Mangione. In Zack Beauchamp���s analysis at Vox, conservatives celebrate Penny as a defender of ���order��� while condemning Mangione as a force of ���anarchy.��� And, as Beauchamp points out, right-wing defenders of Penny are even resorting to comic book analogies to elaborate this perceived distinction (for Christian Schneider in National Review, Penny is Batman, and Mangione is the Joker).
What we call ���identity politics��� or the ���culture wars��� may just be what politics is now, where ideas, figures, and movements are reduced to simplified, shareable, and emotionally charged symbols that spread rapidly online. This has been in the offing for some time. Already in 1981, with remarkable prescience, Jean Baudrillard saw how postmodern society was becoming a place where the real is produced through media, advertising, and other forms of symbolic representation, so much so that it becomes impossible to distinguish reality from its simulation. In fact, what is ���real��� is preceded and determined by its symbolic representation.
The memeification of politics extends beyond traditional political figures and arenas, spilling into the cultural domain where artists and entertainers increasingly embody societal tensions. Boima Tucker���s analysis of the Kendrick Lamar and Drake beef underscores this, noting how their public conflict became a proxy for deeper societal crises. Kendrick���s accusations against Drake���ranging from cultural appropriation to symbolic emasculation���tapped into anxieties around identity, power, and authenticity that resonate far beyond the world of hip-hop. As Tucker pointed out, the symbolic weight carried by such figures reveals the ���illiberal mood��� underpinning a crisis of democratic liberalism, where reactionary ideas and sentiments find fertile ground in popular culture. These moments of cultural spectacle, Tucker argues, are not mere distractions but symptoms of a deeper malaise, with Kendrick and Drake serving as avatars for broader struggles over race, gender, and power.
Still, the material conditions that underpin society���class inequality, economic precarity, climate catastrophe���have not disappeared (despite the fact that it is in severe crisis, and whether we are in a ���post-neoliberal��� world or not, capitalism is still the only game in town). But they are increasingly mediated and refracted through symbolic representations, rendering politics less coherent and more performative. This disjuncture between embodied reality and symbolic reality creates fertile ground for contradiction. For instance, how has the world���s richest man���Elon Musk���become the figurehead of a new ethnonationalist, ���pro-worker��� populism (he is also, lest we forget, an immigrant from Africa). How does a leader whose program includes slashing taxes for the wealthy and dismantling the welfare state position themselves as a champion of the working class? These paradoxes are not just rhetorical sleights of hand; they reflect the deeper logic of a political moment where perception increasingly supplants substance. The memeification of politics is not just a byproduct of online culture but a structural transformation in how political meaning is constructed and contested, resulting in a fragmented public sphere where shared understanding is increasingly difficult to achieve.
This dynamic is only compounded by what the sociologist Paolo Gerbaodo recently describes as ���Tiktokficiation.��� Second-generation social media, like TikTok, differ from earlier platforms like Facebook and Twitter, which were based on explicit interpersonal connections. Instead, TikTok uses algorithmic curation to form ���clustered publics������groups organized around shared interests rather than direct user connections.�� As more platforms mimic TikTok���s algorithmic design, ���a danger of clustered publics,��� Gerbaodo writes, ��� is that they exacerbate the fragmentation of the contemporary public sphere, further fueling political polarization and making it more difficult for citizens to find common ground.��� This, coupled with social media���s Balkanization���which Elon Musk is accelerating by flooding Twitter with right-wing and OnlyFans content���means that there will no longer be any single platform that can approximate being a unified public sphere.
Is it really all that bad though? In 2024, two things stand out. From June to August, nationwide protests erupted in Kenya against the government’s controversial tax hike proposals in the 2024 Finance Bill, which outlined its fiscal plans. Led predominantly by Gen Z and millennials, the demonstrations were met with a brutal police crackdown, killing at least 60 protesters. However, the sustained pressure forced President William Ruto to withdraw the Finance Bill and pledge substantial reforms. Social media platforms like X, TikTok, and WhatsApp were pivotal in mobilizing protesters, disseminating information, and coordinating actions, such as spamming MPs with messages to oppose the bill. As Naila Aroni summarized on Africa Is a Country earlier this year, ���Digital activism played a significant role in amplifying the impact of the #RejectFinanceBill2024 and #RutoMustGo protests���not because we had anything to prove to politicians, but for the sake of Kenya���s democratic future. While the government underestimated online mobilization, these efforts exposed the illegitimate political class and raised civic awareness, proving that the revolution will be digitized.���
But in a world of memefied politics, how far can online mobilization go? Months later, as Achan Muga chronicles, the Kenyan government has infiltrated and suppressed protests, co-opted activists, and stealthily reintroduced unpopular policies. (For another treatment of these questions, Ruth Mudingayi���s analysis of the hashtagification of the ongoing catastrophe in the DRC is also helpful).At their peak, hashtags like #RejectFinanceBill2024 and #RutoMustGo crystallized widespread discontent into digestible, shareable symbols of resistance. Memes, videos, and slogans spread like wildfire, collapsing complex grievances���ranging from economic precarity to disillusionment with governance���into compelling narratives that could be consumed, replicated, and amplified within seconds. In this way, digital activism illustrated its greatest strength: the ability to rapidly mobilize diverse publics around a single, symbolic cause.
Yet therein lies the paradox of digital-era mobilizations: they can appear immense, dynamic, and effective in the moment���yet rapidly dissipate. Kenyan protestors, having tasted a symbolic victory against the Finance Bill in June, found by December that the same or similar measures were quietly being reintroduced under different names and rationales, while police infiltration and government co-optation hampered new forms of organizing. Muga���s account is telling: in social media circles, hashtags, and viral memes had once provided collective momentum, but now those channels are riddled with trolls, disinformation, and stoked infighting, making it harder for activists to coordinate or even trust one another.
Kenya is but one example in a long line of what Vincent Bevins dubs ���the mass protest decade,��� where movements across the globe���from Brazil to Lebanon, Chile to Sudan���have exploded in response to systemic inequality, corruption, and the failures of neoliberal governance. These uprisings have become a defining feature of the contemporary political landscape. Yet, they often share a troubling trajectory: spectacular moments of mobilization followed by rapid demobilization, repression, or co-optation. By 2025, the anniversaries of pivotal movements like #EndSARS in Nigeria and #RhodesMustFall in South Africa will serve as poignant reminders of the power and limitations of digital activism. Some questions we want to ask next year include: what has become of Africa���s long decade of mass protest, and what could become of future ones? What similarities do they share regarding their organizational modes, character, and focus, and how are they different? Do they augur a new mode of African political organization, or are they symptomatic of broader, inconclusive historical processes? Are internationalist inflections visible or are they representative of predominantly nationalist sentiments? Is generation, and specifically generational discontent, a principle organizing logic or is there a broader political displeasure that convenes wider constellations of people?
The second event that stands out in 2024 is Israel���s ongoing genocidal war against Palestinians and the enormous outpouring of global solidarity it has prompted. What is hard to square is the fact that we all have access to a genocide being live-streamed before our very eyes, and yet the response from global power structures has been one of relative apathy, if not outright complicity. Social media has allowed ordinary citizens to bear witness in unprecedented ways, with videos, images, and firsthand accounts flooding platforms like TikTok, Instagram, and X. This has fueled an upsurge in global protests, with scores of people rallying in cities from New York to Nairobi to demand an end to the violence. But even as solidarity grows, it seems unable to stem the tide of destruction.
There is something profoundly unsettling���perhaps even Baudrillardian���about the simultaneous immediacy and impotence of this moment. In Simulacra and Simulation, Baudrillard wrote about how the hyperreal���the endless reproduction of images and symbols���can obscure the reality it purports to represent. The live-streamed genocide in Gaza exemplifies this dynamic in a horrifying way. On the one hand, the constant flow of content has made the violence undeniable, confronting viewers with its visceral reality. On the other hand, the normalization of this imagery���its ubiquity in our feeds, alongside memes, advertisements, and banal updates about daily life���renders it almost surreal. We can witness atrocities in real time and then scroll to a video of a cat or a cooking tutorial, as if the two were part of the same continuum.
This duality points to a deeper crisis in contemporary politics: the disjunction between visibility and action. Never before have atrocities been so widely documented and disseminated, yet the mechanisms of accountability and intervention remain as elusive as ever. This raises urgent questions about the role of witnessing in a digital age. What does it mean to ���bear witness��� when the act of viewing is mediated through platforms designed for distraction and commodification? And how can solidarity transcend the symbolic realm to effect material change?
Perhaps what haunts me most as we near the close of 2024 is the last commentary Immanuel Wallerstein wrote before his passing in 2019, just before the convulsions and atomization wrought by the COVID-19 pandemic. In it, Wallerstein reflected:
So, the world might go down further by-paths. Or it may not. I have indicated in the past that I thought the crucial struggle was a class struggle, using class in a very broadly defined sense. What those who will be alive in the future can do is to struggle with themselves so this change may be a real one. I still think that, and therefore I think there is a 50-50 chance that we���ll make it to transformatory change, but only 50-50.
Four years into this turbulent decade, those odds feel even dimmer���perhaps something closer to 70-30, stacked against the possibility of genuine transformative change.
This pessimism is not borne of despair but of a sober reckoning with how profoundly the material conditions that structure our lives remain obscured and distorted by the symbolic terrain in which we operate. Once again, the conditions of class inequality, economic precarity, and ecological collapse have not disappeared, but they have been rendered increasingly inarticulable, leaving us unable to fully express or make sense of our experiences, values, or beliefs. This growing inarticulacy emerges as the gap between societal expectations and material reality continues to widen. As life gets worse���while technological advancements and symbolic spectacle mask this decline���we default to simplistic scapegoating, projecting blame onto convenient ���others��� rather than diagnosing the structural forces at play.
Much like conspiracy theories, these misdiagnoses are grounded in a partial truth: that the world is indeed structured by unequal power relations, and that the powerful act overwhelmingly in their own interests, often to the detriment of the majority. But the diagnosis goes astray when it targets the wrong powerful people: ���woke��� college students in the US, climate justice activists, or the left more broadly. These distortions become memefied explanations for systemic problems, reinforcing existing grievances while deepening polarization. They offer neither clarity nor solutions, only a compounding sense of alienation and distrust. This alienation is exacerbated by a digital environment that thrives on reducing complexity into binaries, feeding algorithms that reward emotional outrage over critical thought. In such a world, the tools we use to articulate and organize around material struggles are increasingly blunted by the spectacle.
So where does that leave us? Wallerstein���s final reflection is as much a challenge as it is a lament: ���What those who will be alive in the future can do is to struggle with themselves so this change may be a real one.��� The struggle is not only external���against the systems of power that perpetuate exploitation and inequality���but also internal: to rediscover the language, frameworks, and concepts that allow us to articulate a shared vision of transformation. Without this, the risk is not merely stagnation but regression into an increasingly fragmented and incoherent politics, where the forces of reaction consolidate power while the rest of us fight over symbolic scraps.
What is the responsibility of a publication like Africa Is a Country in this moment of crisis and transformation? It is a question we are actively grappling with, as we navigate a landscape where the tools of communication are simultaneously vital and fraught. At Africa Is a Country, we see ourselves engaging in what Antonio Gramsci called a ���war of position������building a counter-hegemonic force by meeting our audience where they are, while maintaining the critical rigor and depth that are essential for meaningful analysis. This dual strategy is at the heart of how we approach our mission in an era of memefied politics and fractured public spheres.
While we continue to produce in-depth, thoughtful essays, we are also expanding into short-form and audio-visual content to reach wider and more diverse audiences. Our new TikTok presence, for instance, is not a concession to the fleeting nature of online attention but a deliberate attempt to craft meaningful narratives in spaces where millions now consume and share ideas. In the New Year, we will release our first feature-length documentary, After Oil, which examines the promises and pitfalls of the green energy transition and its impact on communities in Amadiba (South Africa), Mathare (Kenya), and Tindouf (Algeria). Through a deep analysis of past and present developments, the documentary interrogates the notion of a ���just transition,��� challenging its assumptions and highlighting the lived realities of those on the frontlines of environmental and economic change.
Beyond our online and audio-visual content, we remain committed to building an alternative public sphere���one that fosters democratic ideas and nurtures collective imagination. This commitment is inspired by the legacy of historic African radical anti-colonial and leftist magazines, which served not only as platforms for critique but as spaces for envisioning and organizing a better future (see the ���Revolutionary Papers��� series which showcases the enduring influence of these publications and the lessons they offer for contemporary struggles.)
In doing this work, we aim to counter the inarticulacy that defines much of our present conjuncture, where the language to describe systemic inequality and articulate transformative visions is eroded by the spectacle of daily crises and memefied discourse. We believe it is possible���and necessary���to reconnect the symbolic and the material, to translate visibility into action, and to build solidarities that are not only broad but deep.
Fortunately, we are not alone, and belong to a broader ecosystem of thinkers, writers, organizers, and readers who share a commitment to imagining and creating a more just future. So, as we end 2024 and prepare for the year ahead, we do so with clarity and purpose. In a world fractured by inequality, distraction, and despair, our role is to insist on connection, substance, and hope. The work of reclaiming our political imagination and expanding the horizons of possibility continues, and Africa Is a Country will remain a space where those horizons are explored, challenged, and made real. Together, we press on.
December 21, 2024
Feeding fear and prejudice
Spaza shop in Johannesburg. Image credit Vladan Radulovicjhb via Shutterstock �� 2018. The recent spate of food poisoning incidents across South Africa has caused panic and anxiety in township and urban communities alike, creating fertile ground for conspiracies and baseless accusations against migrants and migrant-owned businesses. In October, Dr. Aaron Motsoaledi, the minister of health, confirmed that the National Joint Operational and Intelligence Structure (NATJOINTS) was treating the fatal incidents as a potential national security threat. This came after at least 12 children died within a month following a number of incidents of food poisoning, allegedly from food and snacks bought from migrant-owned spaza shops and township vendors.
���Those affected have concluded that these ailments are a result of food poisoning emanating from foodstuff, particularly snacks, sold by foreign-owned spaza shops. This has become the generally held view in the country, which prompted some people to take action based on this belief,��� Motsoaledi said.
These incidents have fueled a much older narrative that foreigners are somehow unclean or carry disease. This stereotype has long historical roots, serving as a convenient explanation for social problems and health crises across the world. As an example, in the early 20th century, immigrants in the United States, particularly those from Eastern Europe, were accused of spreading tuberculosis and other diseases. Entire communities were stigmatized, creating barriers to health care and jobs and justifying restrictive immigration policies.
Similar scapegoating was seen in West Africa during the Ebola outbreak, where people from affected regions were banned from travel and faced violent stigmatization globally. Recently, the COVID-19 pandemic, and the initial hysteria around the virus, brought its own share of nativist fear-mongering in the name of public health. Donald Trump, who was president of the US at the time, called it the ���Chinese virus,��� insisting the term was not racist or xenophobic. Despite his denials, there was an increase in anti-Asian racism around the globe.
Associating a certain group of people with danger and disease allows societies to deflect blame, avoid accountability, and project internal fears onto those seen as ���outsiders.��� In South Africa, we have become accustomed to this in many different forms. From Motsoaledi���s previous term as minister of health, where he blamed migrants, and especially migrant mothers, for many of his department���s failures, to the government���s response to the COVID-19 pandemic, to former Johannesburg mayor Herman Mashaba���s public citizen���s arrest of a street vendor. Mashaba at the time proudly tweeted: ���We are going to sit back and allow people like you to bring us Ebolas in the name of small business. Health of our people first. Our health facilities are already stretched to the limit [sic].��� The tweet was grossly xenophobic and devoid of fact.
The recent food poisoning incidents have not only led to accusations against migrant spaza owners and vendors but also given rise to dangerous conspiracies, resulting in the looting of spaza shops in a number of areas in Gauteng. The people who run these informal businesses in the townships often deal with long supply chains, poor refrigeration, and tight finances. Instead of a malicious conspiracy about migrants who want to poison the nation, the reality so many are willing to overlook is that potential spoilage in these shops may be the result of poorly enforced regulations and having to cut corners to save money. For these same reasons, shopkeepers sometimes use unregulated pesticides to deal with rodents and other pests���such as the pesticide terbufos, which was found to have resulted in the deaths of the children in Naledi.
As Loren Landau, a professor of migration and development at the University of Oxford and research professor at the University of the Witwatersrand���s African Centre for Migration and Society, explains, migrants already have a precarious legal and social status in the country, so it would be absurd and completely counterproductive to want to kill off customers, as many conspiracies have suggested.
���What I see happening here is akin to blood libel charges against groups of yesteryear. Foreigners are disliked and their presence correlates with a generally anxious society. Naming and accusing is a way of channeling those anxieties���of helping to explain unknowns or disappointments with people���s economic, social, or material security. It is not surprising that these anxieties exist, given the state of South African society. Nor is it surprising that people are being scapegoated for them. But that makes this no less absurd or dangerous,��� he said.
���These specific events may be a fulcrum for further action, yet that action remains undetermined. Such accusations may well be the justification the government feels it needs for further ���Operation Fiela������style sweeps and arrests. Already deportations are up and this may encourage more. If people don���t see the government taking action, they may well take it on themselves���as they have in the past���to clean up their townships. By this I mean targeting specific migrants or migrant groups. Such actions may be violent and spontaneous, but may also be supported and organized by SA-owned businesses who stand to benefit by eliminating the competition.���
And that is exactly what���s already happened in Naledi, Soweto, where six children died as a result of food poisoning. Lazarus Mmota, a local ward councilor, told me that some members in his community decided to loot, vandalize, and close the business where the food was allegedly bought, along with some other spaza shops. Mmota said that those who looted and closed the shops did so for their own interests and not because they were particularly interested in justice or the law.
Amir Sheikh, the chairperson of the African Diaspora Forum, told me that the phrases ���Somali business��� and ���Pakistani business��� are used as a blanket term to refer to any migrant-owned business in the area. In the case of the Naledi incident, many made the accusation that the food was bought from Somali spaza shops, with one man who made the accusation later admitting to me he wasn���t sure whether the owner was Somali or Ethiopian. ���I don���t know how to differentiate between them,��� he said. ���People just say, ���Go buy from the Somali shop.������
Sheikh warned that the food poisoning incidents and the people inciting xenophobic rhetoric and actions in response pose serious risks to society. We can see how these narratives are opportunistically exploited by those with hateful agendas. When migrant shopkeepers are blamed for isolated food poisoning cases, it gives vigilante groups and angry community members a pretext to enact violence.
Rather than examining the real causes of food safety issues���such as insufficient regulatory standards, economic desperation, or the failures of public health oversight���these groups target migrant shopkeepers, vandalizing their stores, assaulting them, and driving them out of neighborhoods. This provides a temporary release for communities facing hardship but ultimately perpetuates the cycle of poverty, violence, and lack of access to basic needs, as those who provide affordable goods are forced out.
To prevent the continued exploitation of these stereotypes, South Africa must first address the root causes of these narratives. Public leaders need to stop stoking the fires of xenophobia and, instead, work to foster a more inclusive national identity that values diversity. A shift in political and media discourse is critically needed. Educating the public on the contributions of migrants to the economy and society can counteract the narrative that foreignness equates to impurity.
December 20, 2024
Rebuilding Algeria’s oceans
Artificial reef. Image credit Subphoto.com via Shutterstock �� 2018. Fatah cuts a solitary figure on the quay of Algiers��� fishing port. His silhouette blends seamlessly into the dead of night in the center of the Algerian capital. The only sources of light come from the Che Guevara Boulevard, which runs along the seafront in the distance, and rhythmic orange bursts of glow emanating from his cheap cigarette, illuminating one side of his grizzled face. In a matter of hours, dozens will join the solitary forty-year-old man, and the port will transform into an animated, makeshift market. The action begins with the return from sea of a handful of fishing boats, their evening���s catch aboard.��
In Algeria, the average quantity of fish taken out of sea has been recorded at a consistent 100,000 tons per annum over the last three decades. However, as Algeria���s population continues to grow, authorities estimate that they will need to rely on techniques such as fish farming to reach the 200,000 tons that will be necessary to meet domestic needs.��
Artificial reefs at a larger scale might also provide support for fishing by promoting the reproduction of fish and other marine species close to the coast. But Algeria has a long way to go, since artificial reefs have only been immersed on an experimental level by diving associations helped by scientists the last ten years. ���There has been a drop-off in the number of fish over the last few years. We have to go farther and farther into sea. In other countries fishing is halted for a few weeks every year so that the species can repopulate, but not here,��� Fatah claims.
Contrary to Fatah���s assertions, Professor Samir Grimes of the National Higher School of Marine Sciences and Coastal Planning, insists that Algerian authorities do impose periodic fishing bans on specific species to respect the biological rest and their reproductive seasons, but the real issue is a lack of ���governance��� in fishing management.
Algeria enforces a yearly ban on swordfish fishing between January and March. The government also prohibited trawlers from using pelagic, semi-pelagic, and bottom trawls in fishing zones located within three nautical miles of the shore from June to the end of September 2024, according to Alg��rie Presse Service, the state press agency.
���The problem is not overfishing, per se. The real problem is the distribution of locations that fishermen frequent.��� Grimes confirms.��According to the professor, Algerian fishermen continue to use traditional fishing methods passed down orally from father to son, despite financial incentives and subsidies to help them acquire sophisticated equipment for offshore fishing. ���Instead of going out to sea, some fishermen return to ancestral fishing spots. Essentially, what happens is that they are plowing the seabeds and temporarily disturbing the ecosystem and killing their own livelihood because many fishing areas near seagrass beds are nurseries,��� explains Professor Grimes.
These practices, along with other variables related to climate change and socioeconomic factors (nine out of ten Algerians live in the northernmost 12.6 percent of the country���s land area, according to a study published in 2015 by the Algerian Ministry of Water Resources and Environment), are putting pressure on certain areas of the Algerian coast and threatening emblematic species of the Mediterranean Sea such as the grouper and the posidonia, the latter having now been listed as endangered by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN).
Caroube beach on the coast of Annaba, 600 kilometres east of Algiers. Photo �� Zahra Rahmouni.Six hundred kilometers east of Algiers, in Annaba, divers have decided to take action to combat the destruction of the Algerian seabed and raise awareness among fellow citizens and authorities about the importance of preserving these natural resources, which are not immediately visible.��The Hippone Sub Association is set up on a small hill overlooking Caroube beach. In the distance, Annaba, also known as ���Hippone��� in the Roman era, dominates the skyline.
The group often meet and organize their activities at the Fortin, a fortified stone monument that dates back to 1862. On a regular basis, Hippone Sub gets together to swim, dive, and, perhaps most importantly, carry out artificial reef immersions.
Karim Chiri, the association���s director, first thought of the idea in 2008, explains Lyes Basaid, a diving instructor and head of the Artificial Reef Project at Hippone Sub. But it wasn’t until 2016 that the first model was submerged after securing funding through a United Nations Development Program grant (UNDP).
At the beginning of the initiative, the members of the association, which also includes marine biologists, were fully aware that there was no legal framework for artificial reef immersions in Algeria. That���s why they began involving the authorities to create a legislative framework for members of Algerian civil society to submerge artificial reefs along the Algerian coast without risking legal consequences.��
���The goal of our first years was primarily educational. It was about promoting artificial reefs and sending a message to institutions about what we could do to protect the biodiversity that is being harmed by human intervention,��� explains Basaid.��
As part of their efforts to raise awareness, the association helped produce Les Maisons de la Mer, a 2017 film�� directed by marine biologist Hamza Mendil. Mendil���s film documented the entire process that led to the immersion of the first artificial reef in Annaba as well as the natural developments over the following months. The film, the first of its kind in Algeria, won awards at the World Festival of Underwater Images in Marseille, France, in 2018.
Thanks to their advocacy, Hippone Sub in coordination with the Probiom Foundation���Algeria���s network for marine biodiversity protection, created in 2009���managed to attract the attention of the highest authorities in Algeria. In 2017, just one year after the first reef was submerged by the association in Annaba, the government passed a law to regulate the immersion of artificial reefs.��
���This law allows a local wilaya (provincial) commission to grant permission for the immersion of artificial reefs to project sponsors, whether they are associations, institutions, or others,��� explains Emir Berkane, a doctor, environmental activist, and president of the Probiom Foundation. The legislation also enabled Hippone Sub and Probiom to begin their second project in 2021 with ���two new pyramidal immersions that measure 33 m�� and 66 m��,��� creating one of the largest reefs in Algeria, says Emir Berkane. In Annaba, ���one of the two pyramids is still thriving, along with the first artificial reef,��� the environmental activist notes.
Over the last decade, there has been a surge in activity surrounding this issue, observes Professor Grimes. Several artificial reefs have been submerged off the Algerian coast by associations and researchers, notably in Oran and Mostaganem, which are located 420 and 330 kilometers west of Algiers, respectively. Other projects are in preliminary stages, including one in A��n T��mouchent, 490 kilometers west of Algiers, which is being worked on by Professor Grimes, himself.
A map of some of the most significant artificial reef immersions off of the Algerian coast. Credit: Zahra Rahmouni���However, artificial reefs are not panaceas,��� cautions Professor Grimes. ���We should not let people, fishermen, and managers believe that artificial reefs will solve the fishing problem and restore biodiversity.���
���These reefs are beneficial for fishermen because they provide habitats for species to reproduce,��� He continues. ���Eggs and larvae don���t disperse; they remain trapped in a habitat where they will find suitable temperatures and nutrients, so a food chain will develop. If you create one reef here and another not too distant from it, they will facilitate ecological connectivity, but it���s complex and takes several years to establish.�����
There are three main types of artificial reefs: production reefs, protection reefs to prevent trawling, and landscape reefs. So far, the models submerged by Algerian associations are all experimental production reefs with the goal of showing the authorities what could be possible at a larger scale.
���Observational reports conducted by Professor Farid Derbal, our scientific advisor at Probiom, identified nearly 50 species living in the first reef [in Annaba]. He also observed that metal is more conducive for colonization than concrete,��� explains Emir Berkane. Looking out over the shimmering sea of the Annaba coast, Derbal, a professor in marine biology and marine science at the Badji Mokhtar University, confirms, ���During the first 6 months of immersion in the main module, with an area of 4 m��, we were able to identify 47 species, including 12 algae, 17 invertebrates, and 18 fish. Some of these species are considered rare in the Mediterranean (cystoseira meadows, golden grouper) or non-native (Asparagopsis, Schizoporella errata).���
An example of a pyramidal artificial reef in the initial stages of biocolonization. Photo by Hippone Sub Annaba.Despite these observations, the professor believes there is still a long way to go in raising awareness about conservation efforts in government. The scientist himself was arrested six years ago by coast guards while conducting an authorized dive to collect samples necessary for his research. The immersion of artificial reefs on the coast of Annaba, which he has been monitoring, allowed him to witness the bio-colonization that began within the first few months after the immersion of the artificial reefs in 2016 and 2021.
���We saw the installation of initial organisms like algae, cephalopod eggs, and small resident fish such as gobies, blennies, and the painted wrasse. We already observed a small school of fish swimming around this reef in just the first months of its establishment. Afterwards, the reefs quickly saturated leaving no more space for new organisms. Each organism occupies its little habitat, and from there we said, ���These are the results for two or three cubic meters.��� This helped us communicate the importance of artificial reefs and the need to take it to the next level,��� explains the professor.
For many environmental advocates, the next phase of this effort must be led by the state, as local associations often lack the financial and technical resources to manage and expand protective artificial reef systems. “At Probiom, we stopped initiating reef-immersion projects because we believe the next step should be a large-scale governmental initiative,��� says Emir Berkane. He remains optimistic, noting that there appears to be institutional goodwill toward the development of artificial reefs.
This optimism was validated when Algeria enacted a 2017 law to support sustainable fishing practices and artificial reef projects. Subsequently, the country launched a partnership with Japan, renowned for its expertise in reef development, to establish large-scale reef systems.��This partnership will last for the next two years and will include the training of fisheries administration officials, professionals, as well as members of associations in the same field.
One of the most ambitious initiatives under this partnership involves immersing 10 hectares of artificial reefs in the Bay of Bousfer, off the coast of Oran, 400 kilometers west of Algiers. As part of this project, 40 concrete blocks were submerged across 500 square meters on November 14, 2024, in collaboration with different organizations from civil society.These efforts signal a significant shift from grassroots advocacy to national action. With the continued support of local activists, international expertise, and governmental commitment, several actors are putting their right foot forward to slow the damage of Algeria���s marine coasts.
This story was produced with support from Internews’ Earth Journalism Network.
December 19, 2024
Citizens for hire
Domestic worker in Beirut walking with employers. Image credit Stphanie CROCQ via Shutterstock �� 2018. Many African governments, including Kenya���s, are increasingly leveraging labor export as a ���quick fix��� for domestic unemployment, often at the expense of workers��� welfare and human rights. Kenya���s labor brokerage model exemplifies this dynamic, where the state, in collaboration with private sector actors, facilitates the export of low-cost workers while profiting from their vulnerabilities long before they even depart. This system prioritizes economic gains, such as remittance inflows, over the rights and welfare of its citizens, often ignoring the exploitative conditions that define these arrangements. Francis Atwoli, the Secretary-General of the Central Organization of Trade Unions���who has been criticized himself for being complicit in failing to prioritize workers��� welfare���succinctly described this exploitative model when he stated, ���We [the Kenyan government] see Kenyans as commodities.���
Attention must be paid to the critical role of sending states in manufacturing migrant precarity. The formalization of labor export in Kenya traces back to the 1990s when the country began establishing agreements with the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) states. Over the decades, this strategy has intensified, driven by promises of remittances, which are currently Kenya���s leading source of foreign exchange, contributing 3.6% to its GDP in 2023. Moreover, the Ministry of Labour and Social Protection���s new labor pacts with Middle Eastern and European countries in 2024, including Saudi Arabia, Germany, and the UK further underscore this growing dilemma.
In a stark illustration of this growing labor export trap in Kenya, Alfred Mutua, Kenya���s Cabinet Secretary for Labour and Social Protection, recently pledged to export one million workers annually, while Kenyan migrant women currently caught in Israel���s bombing of South Lebanon, face abandonment by the very government profiting from their labor. This comes at a time when advocacy against the exploitation of African migrant laborers has gained momentum, particularly since the 2022 Qatar World Cup, when the kafala system was heavily criticized. According to sociologists, comparisons of the kafala system (which governs most Gulf countries) being akin to modern slavery are justified. Workers are legally bound to their employers for the contract duration, giving employers power and domination and inversely making workers vulnerable to exploitation. These human rights abuses as documented by migrants themselves include sexual and physical abuse, starvation, and imprisonment.
Structural factors rooted in Kenya���s political economy explain why labor exports are prominently featured in its foreign policy. The global labor market trends are divided into push and pull factors. Push factors include domestic issues that force individuals to migrate, such as poverty, ethnic conflict, and high unemployment. For example, youth unemployment in Kenya stands at 43% (ages 18���35) while 83% of the labor force operates in an informal economy characterized by low wages, lack of benefits, and job insecurity.
Pull factors, on the other hand, are opportunities available in destination countries, such as better-paying jobs, healthcare, and security. These factors particularly appeal to African women as migration offers not just financial independence but also the potential for social empowerment by providing for their families. This context helps explain the depressing reality that choice-constrained domestic workers in Lebanon were still hesitant to leave, even if offered the option, considering the better quality of life, including access to education, they were able to offer their children while employed abroad.
Advocacy against the kafala system has successfully pressured sending states to improve governance and recruitment models to protect migrants. In light of these, Kenya has made a considerable effort, on paper, to improve the regulation of labor migration in recent years, through several laws, policies and regulations. These include drafting a national labor migration policy, ratifying International Labour Organization (ILO) Conventions No. 97 and No. 143, and implementing the Employment Act (2007) and Labour Institutions [General] Regulations (2014) to oversee recruitment agencies. However, the issue is not merely that Kenya is failing to enforce its regulations effectively. Feminist scholars argue that mainstream explanations���focusing on ���regulatory failures��� and ���limited state capacity������oversimplify the problem. These approaches fail to address deeper systemic issues underpinning Kenya���s labor export strategy; hence, why these objectives of curbing migrant abuse are not achieved, as the recent revelations in Lebanon have shown.
Although Kenya���s regulatory framework appears to position its labor brokerage model as a tightly controlled statist regime, closer examination reveals that these regulations have, in practice, amplified the power of private actors, particularly recruitment agents. These non-state actors operate as intermediaries in a system of ���governance from a distance,��� where the state delegates significant responsibilities to improve management efficiency while deflecting accountability for migrant welfare. Under the Employment Act of 2007, for example, the Kenyan government explicitly empowered recruitment agencies to oversee the entire migration process, placing a legal onus on these agencies to monitor and ensure the welfare of recruits once they have settled overseas. This mandate includes critical functions such as visa applications, pre-departure training, and contract preparation, down to specifying working hours.
This unchecked power has recruitment agencies commodifying workers through commissions they receive from employers or placement agencies abroad. Under the Labour Institutions [General] Regulations of 2014, agents are permitted to charge a service fee to overseas principals (employers or placement agencies) to cover recruitment costs. However, the lack of specified maximum or minimum limits allows agents significant leeway to maximize their profits. Reports indicate that agents often receive commissions averaging around $2,000 per recruit, translating to annual profits ranging from USD19,500 to USD48,900, depending on the scale of operations. This unchecked system incentivizes agents to focus solely on profit generation. As one agent admitted, ���there is money to be made��� and they do not intervene when there is trouble, as their ���work is done once they receive the commission.���
In addition to commissions from employers, agencies frequently violate the Labour Institutions Act by charging migrants exorbitant fees directly. Despite regulations mandating that recruitment costs be borne by employers (with the exception of one month���s salary as a deductible), migrants report paying up to $2,200 for expenses such as passports, medical certificates, and visas. Those unable to pay upfront are often subjected to wage deductions, leaving many in debt bondage for months. This intricate ���web of debts and obligations��� contributes to workers being treated and disposed of like commodities, which is reflected in their subordination and abuse.
Recruitment agents argue that their profits pale in comparison to the gains amassed by the Kenyan government. Official fees for documentation, such as a birth certificate, are inflated tenfold���from $3 to $30���while security bond fees, ostensibly meant to cover repatriation costs, remain inaccessible to agents and workers alike. Despite raising $3.6 million annually from licensing fees and security bonds, the government has failed to deliver on its obligations, with one insurance company monopolizing the bond system and reportedly paying not even a single claim. This results in a continuum of blame-shifting between the Kenyan government and recruitment agencies, a key reason why many workers were left stranded in Lebanon.
Rather than relying on remittances���a strategy that has proven unsustainable for long-term economic growth and detrimental to local Kenyans and the African continent at large���Kenya must prioritize the development of local employment opportunities to tackle its youth unemployment crisis. Domestic employment can foster economic growth by retaining skilled labor within the country. However, solving Kenya���s unemployment crisis requires more than job creation, it demands regulatory reform of the domestic labor market, which is plagued by significant governance gaps.
Economists often point to tourism, horticulture, and technology as untapped sectors with immense potential to drive job creation and structural transformation in Kenya. Among these, Kenya���s tech industry, branded as the ���Silicon Savannah,��� is marketed as a cornerstone for turning Kenya into a premier investment destination. Yet the same structural forces that drive labor migration from Kenya, including widespread underemployment, and a surplus of educated, low-wage workers, also attract tech giants to Kenya. Capitalizing on this, the Kenyan government���s foreign investment strategies frequently enable systematic worker exploitation under the guise of maintaining the country���s competitiveness in the global outsourcing market. For instance, Senator Aaron Cheruiyot recently proposed a Business Laws Amendment Bill that seeks to shield tech companies from being sued locally, a move that comes in the wake of a landmark Kenyan Court of Appeal ruling in September that allowed Meta, the parent company of Facebook, to be sued in Kenya, despite Meta claiming it bore no liability in Kenya due to its lack of local registration.
In a recent CBS documentary, moderators employed by SAMA, an American Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) firm contracted by both Meta and OpenAI, detailed allegations of exploitative working conditions and human rights abuses. The workers, now pursuing a lawsuit against SAMA, report suffering from severe psychiatric conditions, including depression, anxiety, and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). These conditions stem from their roles in content moderation, which required them to review hours of graphic and distressing material, including child pornography and suicides. Despite the psychological toll of the work, these moderators were paid a mere $2 an hour, far below the $12.50 per worker that OpenAI had reportedly agreed to pay, with no psychological support.
Cheruiyot���s conveniently timed bill shifts employee liability exclusively to BPOs, arguing this will still protect workers��� rights, asserting that workers��� rights will still be protected since tech companies would remain obligated to adhere to certain labor standards. This claim comes under heavy scrutiny, however,, as the bill could effectively shield parent companies like Meta from accountability. Without the ability to sue these tech giants locally, it remains unclear how workers can effectively seek redress for labor violations; the government���s apparent choice to weaken labor laws indirectly enables tech companies to dissociate themselves from these digital sweatshops.
Proponents of the bill argue that holding tech companies liable could hurt Kenya���s business environment and deter foreign investment, noting that SAMA, which employed over 3,000 Kenyan workers, has ceased content moderation operations following the court ruling. However, to genuinely protect workers, the government must heed the Court of Appeal ruling, holding both tech companies and BPOs accountable for labor rights violations. This includes instituting better working conditions, standardizing employment contracts, implementing livable minimum wages, and regulating work hours. To echo tech workers from Kenya Tech Workers United: ���We acknowledge and support the government���s push for digital job creation. However, this responsibility does not end with job provision. No company or individual is above the law, no matter how powerful.���
Kenya���s labor export policies represent a short-sighted attempt to address unemployment by relying on migrants to alleviate the national debt through remittances. The Kenyan government must invest in domestic job creation and establish sustainable avenues for generating foreign currency. While foreign direct investment can boost domestic employment opportunities, the Kenyan government cannot hand corporations a blank check to exploit its people under the guise of economic development. Failing to do so perpetuates the neocolonial dynamics that treat Kenya���s citizens as raw commodities, ripe for colonial extraction.
December 18, 2024
Metal that will bend
SAFTU March in February 2019. Image credit Ashraf Hendricks for GroundUp CC BY-ND 4.0 In July 2023, the leadership of South Africa���s largest trade union, the National Union of Metalworkers South Africa (Numsa), suspended 25 of its members, including its deputy president Ruth Ntlokotse. It also placed one of its largest regions (from the Mpumalanga province) under ���administration,��� barring it from participation in an upcoming national Congress, originally set for the end of July.
These decisions were contested by the purged members in South Africa���s Labor Court. Coming from a judicial body known for skewing towards the status quo, the judgment was devastating. Judge Graham Moshoana found himself in the strange position of having to remind the leaders of an organization famed for its democratic militancy ���that a trade union prevails for the workers and not the leaders of the trade union.��� He ruled the suspensions unlawful and interdicted the upcoming Congress.
Numsa���s spectacular coming apart���in full face of the public, punctuated by draining legal battles and exposing a deep rot in the organization���s upper echelons���is dampening social confidence in trade unions as a force for good. It reveals the unremitting scale of the crisis facing labor. Numsa, the ���metal that will not bend,��� was meant to be a different breed of union, one that stood for an alternative to the ossification and decay engulfing the broader movement. It was the historic bedrock of the ���workerist��� tradition with its emphasis on shop floor democracy and class independence.
At the time of the democratic transition, Numsa led an effort to split the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) from the African National Congress (ANC). Together with the South African Communist Party (SACP) those organizations formed the ���Tripartite Alliance��� following the unbanning of opposition parties in 1990. The ANC has been the alliance���s sole representative in electoral politics throughout the democratic era: senior SACP members took up parliamentary and executive positions but as ANC representatives. The attempt to split fizzled, and the Alliance was reaffirmed���but Numsa always remained on the left of that formation, more vocal in its criticisms of the ruling party and nominally less entangled in its patronage circuits.
In 2013, following a lively national congress, Numsa finally cut ties with the ANC and SACP. This happened in the wake of the 2012 Marikana massacre, in which 34 striking mineworkers were gunned down by police. The workers were engaged in a struggle not just with their bosses, but with the COSATU-affiliated National Union of Mineworkers, which they accused of selling out. That fight turned violent and eventually led to the rise of a rival union across the platinum sector and other parts of mining. COSATU and the SACP backed the police���s brutal response to the strike. Numsa broke ranks with them���supporting wildcat strikes which spread out from the platinum mines to other sectors, especially agriculture. It was expelled by COSATU the following year, along with the federation���s own general secretary, Zwelinizima Vavi, who had also soured on the ruling party. Other unions followed Numsa out of COSATU, or splintered internally. The dissidents went on to form a rival federation, the South African Federation of Trade Unions (SAFTU), with Vavi at the head.
The house of labor grew more divided. But for the so-called ���independent left,��� which had long regarded the Tripartite Alliance as the main bulwark to a revival of contentious politics, these were portentous events. The ���Numsa moment��� heralded the possibility of bridging the huge gulfs between community and workplace struggles, a gap that had widened with organized labor���s incorporation into the post-apartheid ruling bloc.
Now, Numsa���s turn for the worse has tarnished those hopes. The organization���s woes are closely linked to Irvin Jim, its general secretary since 2008. Charismatic and domineering, Jim was once feted by the Left as a principled spokesperson for the cause of workers. He���s now accused of the same corrupt practices that have become standard fare in the union movement. Invariably, the union���s investment arm stands at the center of the allegations trailing him. The Jim-appointed head of that arm, Khandani Msibi, has well documented links with the ���radical economic transformation��� faction of the ANC responsible for state capture. Jim has also struck up a very public friendship with Matshela Koko, a former Eskom executive found by the Zondo commission into state capture to have been ���an integral component of the Gupta family’s strategy to capture [the public power utility],��� at which Numsa has a strong base. On Twitter he has become openly supportive of RET forces, including uMkhonto weSizwe, the new political party of disgraced former president Jacob Zuma.
The investigative journalism unit amaBhungane has shown that a life insurance company owned and overseen by the Numsa trust improperly executed payments of no commercial value but of personal benefit to Jim and his allies. These include money spent for a new laptop for Jim���s daughter and a lavish birthday party for himself. The company has been under provisional curatorship due to governance questions raised by investigations into its dodgy financial management. It also failed to pay back a Numsa loan to the tune of $8 million, while its erstwhile executives received $5.6 million in preference shares in March of this year. It is this web of graft afflicting Numsa���s higher leadership layers that members began openly questioning.
Party politicsAnimating all of this is a bigger strategic rift between rival factions of Numsa and the broader federation. In 2018, SAFTU convened a working-class summit (WCS) where 147 organizations representing unions, social movements, and civics were present. The majority of delegates affirmed the need to form a new working-class party, but the question of when and how was left open. Before these efforts, there had been another attempt to cohere South Africa���s popular forces into a pre-party formation: the United Front.
Spearheaded by Numsa in 2014, the front stitched a wide coalition of workers, the unemployed, rural people, civic organizations, and academics, hoping to build on-the-ground unity ahead of any political venture. It was exactly the kind of initiative that many hoped would spring from the “Numsa moment.” But just three years in, fearing the democratic energies it was beginning to unleash, the Jim leadership abruptly torpedoed the project.
When the WCS rolled around, Jim���s charges took its resolutions as an invitation to get going with the task of setting up a working-class party. Without consulting other stakeholders, they established the Socialist and Revolutionary Workers Party (SRWP) in 2019. Jim was paraded forward as its leader and it began hurriedly readying itself for national elections scheduled for just two months later. A manifesto was stitched together from shop-worn Bolshevik slogans and blasted across social media only days before the election.
Numsa members were corralled into the new party, which overnight grew to more than 36,000 sub-paying members. Flashy merch and slogan-emblazoned 4x4s suggested large sums were being splashed around, but there was little evidence of serious ground-level campaigning. Resting on its laurels, the SRWP leadership assumed that the rest of the Numsa rank-and-file would automatically support them at the polls.
They were wrong. The party won just 25,000 votes���below the threshold required to secure a single parliamentary seat and in fact fewer than its own nominal membership. SAFTU spurned the party, having been excluded from the decisions behind its launch. Rather than introspection, the SRWP turned to conspiracy theory to deal with the defeat, blaming its poor showing on South Africa���s well-regarded Independent Electoral Commission.
It never recovered. Internally, its culture corroded as Jim bullied critics to secure his hold on power. Just two years after its founding, the SRWP had been reduced to only 900 dues-paying members and was organizationally moribund. An internal discussion document seen by the New Internationalist written by a former central committee member and right-hand man of Jim (subsequently purged), describes a ���cocktail of political inertia, incompetence, intimidation, bullying, autocracy, authoritarianism, individualism, fear��� and ���patronage around the key personalities in the party��� that led to this result.
How did it come to this? How did the ���Numsa moment��� which inspired such flights of hope among the global Left, peter out in such a soggy ending?
Was there a ���Numsa moment���?The truth is that those hopes were misplaced. Breathless certainties about the historic significance of the ���Numsa moment,��� which were so widespread a decade ago, rested on two fallacies.��The first was the belief that Marikana represented a fundamental rupture in popular political consciousness. Some accounts from the ���independent Left��� ascribed it a kind of millenarian significance. Like the 1946 South African miners’ strike it was to be ���one of those great historic incidents that, in a flash of illumination, educates a nation, reveals what has been hidden, destroys lies and illusions,��� to quote Ruth First���s oft-reproduced line on those earlier events. Marikana would finally shake the masses from their misbegotten devotion to the ANC.
The reality was a little more sober. The massacre and its aftershocks did dent the ANC���s popularity, but its impacts were heavily concentrated within the activist layers of the Left, the union officialdom, and among those workers most directly affected. Wildcat strikes and sympathy protests followed in its wake, but there is no real evidence that they reflected any wider sea change in popular attitudes.
Anecdotally this is seen through the trajectory of Cyril Ramaphosa, the former ANC general secretary who was a Lonmin director at the time. His political career not only survived Marikana, but flourished: he was elected deputy ANC president just months after and succeeded Jacob Zuma as president in 2018. His involvement was not merely circumstantial: an inquiry found he had been solicited by Lonmin management to coordinate ���concomitant action��� against striking miners due to his heft in the ANC.
A 2021 survey found that well over half of South Africans had either not heard of the massacre or knew very little about it.����This demands we rethink the ���Numsa moment.��� From the standpoint of Marikana-as-watershed, the fracturing of COSATU was simply the organizational expression of tectonic changes in the political landscape. A handful of union leaders might have taken the final decision to denounce the ANC, but in doing so they were merely being pulled along by the tides of history.
In reality, the dissident union leadership had much more say in the matter from the start. The massacre created new pressures and opportunities, but there was no rank-and-file wave making a break with the ANC inevitable.�� One upshot of this is that the efflorescence of popular activity that was hoped to follow in tow from the massacre never materialized. The post-Marikana strike wave was big, but contained to specific sectors, without sparking any generalized industrial unrest. So-called service delivery protests simmered on but still failed to congeal into any sustained challenge to the political order.
This impinged directly on the fate of the United Front, which began its short political life in an environment still defined by the familiar dilemmas of post-liberation, in which deeply ingrained cultures of protest provided ample resources for mobilization, but in which the ANC���s all-pervading dominance over civil society continued to frustrate efforts to implant deep organization. As Marcel Paret documents in his recent book, on-the-ground attempts to forge unity between Numsa and its social movement partners hit numerous snags, in part because of their very different political cultures and strategic outlooks.
Had the launch of the UF actually coincided with a new phase of social struggle, as many had predicted, the outcome of the ���Numsa moment��� might have been completely different. An influx of members and grassroots energy might���ve held at bay the Stalinist revanchism of parts of the leadership and allowed processes of democratic renewal to take full effect.
As it were, the independent left forces that entered the coalition provided no real counterweight to Jim’s eventual attempts to reassert control and close down democratic spaces. They were simply too disorganized.����Prior to the UF, the only serious attempt to build unity outside the Alliance had been mounted by the�� Democratic Left Front (DLF), which brought movement activists together with small, non-COSATU unions as well as Trotskyist groupings and SACP exiles. But while it aspired to replace the ghettoized struggles of community movements with nationally coordinated campaigns, the DLF never really surmounted debilitating horizontalist tendencies and sectarian divides within its own ranks. It failed to evolve beyond a loosely affiliated network, with no clear political identity, no centralized structures, no program of action, and hence no capacity to recruit and develop cadres.
When the UF process started, the DLF took the ill-fated decision to dissolve itself. The coalition that resulted was thus precariously imbalanced, with Numsa members and resources vastly outweighing those of its social movement partners. Absent the transfusion of energy that many hoped would be delivered by the post-Marikana awakening, its dynamic remained heavily determined by the personalities and proclivities of the union leadership.
This is where the second fallacy comes in, which is the simpler mistake of believing that Numsa������the metal that will not bend������had somehow stayed immune from the malaise engulfing the wider movement. In reality, a militant facade concealed symptoms of decay that were troublingly familiar. As Roger Etkind���a former Numsa official and now outspoken critic���points out: ���The facts in Numsa are the same as the facts in every bureaucratized trade union. There is no individual monster. Rather, there is a whole layer of leadership who have become isolated from their base.���
None of this means that the failure of the Numsa moment was foreordained. A more capable set of leaders might have stewarded the movement through its infancy to a point at which politics and program, rather than personality, once again became decisive. But the leadership that history dealt us���or at least the rump of it that has clung to power���has proven devoid of political vision, susceptible to outside influence, intolerant of dissent, organizationally incompetent, and personally corrupt.
Foreign interference?Having ended up so quickly back in the orbit of the ���party-state��� and its Stalinoid politics, it remains something of a mystery why Jim and others ever bothered breaking up with the ANC in the first place. Ambition and venality might have been their watchwords throughout: Jim���s break with the SACP came a few years after a failed bid for leadership over that party. The more nuanced possibility is that Numsa���s zigzags reflect the contradictory pulls acting on its leadership: a genuine desire to represent worker issues checked by a stronger desire to remain in control of the union and its funding pipelines.
Other pieces of the puzzle have begun to more clearly fall into view in the wake of the collapse of New Frame, a progressive media outlet operating out of Johannesburg. The publication was abruptly shut down after its core funder, the American tech magnate and philanthropist, Neville Roy Singham, decided to suddenly pull the plug on funding. Ongoing investigations have given reason to suspect that Singham���s motives relate to his involvement in a broad initiative aimed at re-aligning the third-world Left towards China. The investigative journalist outfit amaBhungane recently uncovered evidence that Singham has been reprioritizing his funding targets as ���part of a broader Chinese Communist Party-linked plan to consolidate the Left in South Africa��� and draw the country ���closer into China���s sphere of influence.���
Singham won Jim���s ear soon after the Numsa moment got going. He has reportedly poured vast sums into the organization and worked hard to embed its structures within the wider nexus of organizations he oversees, with a reach across various countries of the global South. Jim���s opponents see him as the real power behind the throne. We don���t know precisely how far Singham���s influence extended over the Numsa process���whether the leadership���s reversion to Stalinism was his orchestration, or whether he simply helped to reinforce a trajectory that was already unfolding.
Either way, there is clear evidence that Numsa���s leadership has been pivoting the organization in a Russia and China-sympathetic direction in recent years. A pre-congress report from its Secretariat, for example, asserts that ���NATO and [the] European Union provoked Russia into a war in Ukraine��� in order to ���maintain a stranglehold on the working class throughout the world, particularly in the Global South��� and to ���offset their declining economic influence���in contrast to China���s economic growth.���
Frustrated with the failures of the SRWP, Singham is now pushing Numsa to reunite with the SACP and COSATU, according to amaBhungane���a move that���s causing consternation within both those organizations, where Jim is not popular. There’s been no overt sign of these plans yet, but it has become apparent that the Numsa leadership is attempting to pull the curtain down on SAFTU. Conflicts stemming from the latter���s commitment to the WCS summit as a democratic alternative to Jim���s SRWP party have grown more acrimonious.
Numsa���s withdrawal from SAFTU would likely collapse the entire federation, given that the metalworkers currently comprise more than half its members and supply much of its resources. The only reason this hasn���t happened already is the unpopularity of such a move with the Numsa rank and file. But the federation continues to skate on thin ice.
Future fracturesSAFTU was meant to offer a new dawn to the beleaguered labor movement. As its travails deepen, the Left is increasingly giving up on organized labor altogether. ���Labour is lost,��� declared the veteran journalist and activist Terry Bell ahead of May Day last year, which in his view marked a new nadir for the once proud movement.
Accentuating the despair is a sense that labor���s fate is being written by forces beyond its ken and control. The crisis of leadership, which Numsa���s story bitterly illustrates, is only the nearest of its problems. Deindustrialization and economic stagnation pose challenges of a different, more intractable order.
But these forces have worked extremely unevenly���meaning that the picture for unions is not as uniformly dire as many seem to assume. While union density in the private sector has been collapsing since the early 00s, in the public sector it continued to rise for much longer and has since held steady. Public sector membership has kept the labor movement afloat, although it���s seen by many of the South African Left as a moderating force, diminishing the movement���s capacity to lead emancipatory struggles.
But as Sebastian Etchemendy and Germ��n Lodola show in a recent paper, the public sectorization of unions has been a truly global trend, holding across hemispheres and varieties of capitalism. In other contexts it���s been read in a very different light���with public sector unions heralded as more combative than their private sector counterparts, and better able to build bridges beyond the workplace.
To the extent that they���ve played a different role in South Africa, this is not because of inherent defects. It���s because of political dynamics, in particular their deeper entanglement in the ANC party-state. In the private sector, the ANC was left with little room to offer concessions to workers because of its commitment to disembedded markets. The same was not true in the public sector. The expansive Public Service Coordinating Bargaining Council has given workers considerable leverage. Public sector wages have consistently risen faster than the private sector while employment has steadily expanded, accounting for basically all net job creation since the early 2010s.
It is not surprising that public sector workers have generally kept more faith in the ANC. But their loyalty is not without limit. It���s being repeatedly tested as the ruling party is forced into a deepening austerity regime to deal with the fallouts from COVID-19 and the state capture crisis.
A bruising week-long strike erupted in the healthcare sector last March 2023, led by the National Education, Health and Allied Workers Union (Nehawu). The strike wasn���t the biggest public sector action in recent memory, but it was the most politically fractious. It came on the back of years of mounting tensions between unions and the ruling party, with Nehawu growing increasingly vocal in its calls for the SACP to run on its own ballot line, in effect ending the Tripartite Alliance. The strike also fed a growing fallout���marked by legal threats and accusations of violent intimidation���between Nehawu and the South African Democratic Teachers Union, which has remained more loyal to the ANC.
Once again the Alliance managed to patch things up at the last minute. Nehawu announced in December 2023 that it would campaign on behalf of the ruling party in the 2024 national elections, citing the need to defend the gains of the democratic revolution against “counterrevolutionary forces and their imperialist sponsors.���
But the structural sources of tension remain. Recent events seem to confirm Etchemendy and Lodola���s ���reverse economic cycle��� hypothesis, which predicts that public sector unions will become more militant during economic downswings when budgetary constraints bite harder, inverting the pattern followed by sectors more exposed to competition. South Africa looks set for prolonged bouts of austerity as the economy limps forward through a seemingly endless string of crises.
The ANC���s post-election alliance with the virulently anti-union Democratic Alliance will only ratchet up tensions. Some union and SACP leaders have been vocal in their denunciation of that Alliance.
A ���Nehawu moment��� might be loading in the future.
The Left would do well to approach it free from the illusions that fueled past disappointments. Breaking free from the ANC won���t automatically restore unions to their militant roots. Decades of democratic erosion have left deep scars, evident in Nehawu���s recent conduct. The ruthless tactics employed in last year���s strike���which reportedly resulted in the deaths of several patients���reflected a union that���s become socially detached and incapable of putting class-wide interests above the narrow concerns of its members.
Those same features will open the union to infiltration from forces of the populist right. The political momentum right now belongs to Jacob Zuma���s uMkhonto weSizwe party which won a stunning 14.6% in last May���s election despite having (officially) formed only six months prior. MK has been aggressively courting labor, particularly in its stronghold province of KwaZulu Natal, where it has already established client unions.
So far there’s no evidence that these efforts have made much headway. The way remains open for a more capacitated Left to turn the crisis in the Alliance to its own advantage and to widen the space for worker-led, social movement unionism.
It���s a chance that must be taken. For all their warts and weaknesses, South African trade unions are still by far and away the largest, best organized, and most highly resourced institutions of the working class. Hard as it might be to imagine them regaining the immense stature they enjoyed in the liberation years, the idea of a genuinely transformative Left existing in their absence is even more far-fetched.
December 17, 2024
The sun shows the way
Rashid Vally, producer, label and record store owner at Gallo Studios in 1975 with engineer Peter Ceronio (As-Shams Archive). Rashid Vally���s reputation preceded him. Vally, who passed away on December 7 at age 85, was a cultural visionary and innovator in South Africa. His passing reveals just how far-reaching his legacy goes, with numerous tributes written from all over the world. Yet to many in South Africa, his story isn���t known, and in many ways, he is an unsung hero of jazz.��
At his core, Vally was a true music fan���a music producer, label owner, and record store dealer.�� During the height of apartheid���s oppression, when the state clamped down hard on culture, he nurtured a racially inclusive home for music. Tied in with how jazz in apartheid had seen black musicians actively take a stance in a fight for freedom, Vally was in his own way a big part of the liberation struggle.
Born in 1939, Vally grew up in the Champion Buildings on Market Street in downtown Johannesburg. His father, Ismail Vally, ran a general dealer shop, Azad Cafe, which was situated on 11 Kort Street. As a side job, his father sold Indian music at the shop.���He often allowed Qawwali singers like Suliman Patel to practice in the grocery store, the bags of sugar and flour acting as soundproofing.��� writes Matsuli Music���s cofounder Matt Temple in the liner notes of Dick Khoza���s Chapita reissue. His father then recorded some of these artists, like Patel and singers from the S.S Karanja at Trutone recording studios, releasing them as 78s and 45s.
Vally started to enjoy big band music. By 1956, when he left high school, he was selling jazz LPs at the shop due to customer demand. The album Somebody Up There Digs Me by Louis Jordan was one of his favorites. He spent time between delivering groceries by bicycle and playing records at the shop. At the beginning of the 1960s, Vally recorded langarmmusiek (ballroom dance) bands from areas like Fordsburg, Fietas, and Vrededorp, such as The Merry Mascots, El Ricas, and The High Notes.��
The iconic Dorkay House became one of the only venues where black musicians could play, and Vally spent afternoons at the Sunday jazz sessions getting to know musicians like pianists Gideon Nxumalo and Lionel Pillay and drummer Early Mabaza. Club Pelican was another venue he would hang out at. Soon after, he opened a wholesale account with a US music dealer and sold imported jazz records. At this time, the caf��on Kort Street was then renamed Kohinoor (���mountain of light��� in Persian).��
Upstairs from Kohinoor was the Indian restaurant��Kapitan,��owned by the Ranchod family, which Nelson Mandela would visit as a young lawyer; important for being one of the only restaurants in Joburg that served both black and white clientele during apartheid.��
Vally���s nephew Nazeer Mohamed paints a memory of his uncle���s shop: ���A typical day in downtown Johannesburg, as you���re walking down Market Street, you hear this tenor saxophone blaring, and then you can get that smell. There was an incense shop next to Kohinoor, it was called Begums. And on a Saturday morning, you���re hearing this tenor sax blasting away, you���re getting the scents, cars are hooting loudly. Joburg was abuzz. That gave that part of the city a different kind of flavor.�����
Rashid Vally – 25 Jan 2021 (As-Shams Archive)For music fans, this became one of the most loved record stores in South Africa, and people flocked from all over the country to visit. The shop was a hub for writers, political figures, poets, and photographers to gather and form a community around���with Vally being at the center of it. It resisted apartheid as one of the few places inclusive of different racial backgrounds, and many township and migrant workers were regulars at the store. Photographer Omar Badsha shared a memory of when he first got to know the shop in the mid-60s, and he was introduced to Vally through one of South Africa���s greatest artists, Dumile Feni. For musicians, it was a meeting place.
Artist Mogorosi Motsumi says, ���The original Kohinoor in Kort Street was the go-to store for any serious jazz lover. I remember that it was the smallest record store I knew, yet it had the largest jazz collection. It was intimate. And the staff made you feel like you were one of the family.��� He continues, ���I remember one day buying an Abdullah Ibrahim record. I don���t remember the album���s title, but it featured Archie Shepp. As I handed the empty cover over, before disappearing into the recesses of the store room to retrieve the LP, the guy who helped me looked up and said, ���You���ve just picked up a gem!��� That was the Kort Street Kohinoor! Much later Rashid opened other stores. They were more spacious and stuff, but you know what, I still preferred the Kort Street Kohinoor.��� In 1982, another branch of Kohinoor opened up on Market Street. Over time branches popped up in Joburg CBD, Southgate Mall, Vereeniging, Pretoria���roughly 10 stores at its peak. Towards the end, Market Street was one of the last remaining, which moved downstairs, known as the Kohinoor Jazz Basement.��
Musician Pops Mohamed worked at Kohinoor for three years with Vally and shares this memory: ���We were a happy bunch of people. It was myself, Rashid, his younger brother Chota, and there was a lady who worked with us, Lillian. She was like the right hand of Rashid, she knew the shop like the palm of her hands. So Friday is shillaz [money] day. Friday is payday. Everybody���s coming to buy records! And we were always happy. We would buy fish and chips and lots of polony and maybe sometimes biryani, and spend the afternoon eating that food and selling albums, which was really nice.�����
Inserts in The Post newspaper advertising Kohinoor’s records, 30 October 1980. Photo by Gregory Franz A journey into ���The Sun��� During the sixties, soul was all the rage, and Vally���s first label was Soultown Records, which released local soul and funk bands. The first jazz LP he recorded was Gideon Nxumalo, entitled Early Mart. In 1970, Abdullah Ibrahim (then Dollar Brand) visited Vally to discuss a recording partnership, which resulted in the recordings of a number of albums, including Dollar Brand +2 (Peace) in 1971 and Dollar Brand +3 (with Kippie Moeketsi) in 1973.��Later,��Underground in Africa��was recorded in 1974 and issued on his Mandla label (which Vally said alluded to the freedom chant ���Amandla��� but was hidden for political reasons).��Other significant musicians from the Cape, such as saxophonists Robbie Jansen and Basil Coetzee, collaborated on a recording with Ibrahim of Oswietie who helped greatly to mold the sound emerging at the time.��
The long-term relationship between Vally and Ibrahim was cemented through these recordings and lasted until his passing. Vally funded further recording sessions for Ibrahim���s new Cape Town band (which included Jansen and Coetzee), the sessions resulted in the iconic tune ���Mannenberg,��� recorded in June 1974. Around this time, Ibrahim coined the name As-Shams, translating to ���The Sun��� in Arabic, for the record label and its logo was designed by Vally���s brother-in-law, the late Abdul Kader Ali. The logo, with its big red sun and ���as-shams / The Sun��� with the Arabic text in between, has become one of the most iconic and easily recognizable logos for vinyl enthusiasts today.��
As-Shams, “The Sun,” Logo by Abdul Kader Ali, the brother-in-law of Rashid Vally.���Basil was from Manenberg, and for us Manenberg was just symbolic of the removal out of District Six, which is actually the removal of everybody from everywhere in the world, and Manenberg specifically because ��� it signifies, it���s our music, and it���s our culture ������ said Ibrahim in an interview about the song.
After the album came out, they took it to record companies and no one was interested.��In an��interview,��Vally states, ���The funniest thing was that after we���d finished the session, I went looking around to several big record companies to offer them distribution of the record.��I was only asking them for R100 advance, and they all turned me down, saying it was too much for a group of South African musicians.���
Ibrahim had an idea to make demos and play the record and sell it at Kohinoor. Vally played it on loudspeakers outside in the street, and people entered the store wondering what that sound was. He sold 5,000 copies in the first week, without them even having covers yet or being officially released. It was an instant hit. ���Mannenberg��� exploded, not only in South Africa but beyond, and it became an anthem performed at massive anti-apartheid rallies which took places at universities, cinemas, even at funerals. After being licensed to Gallo, it sold more than 50,000 copies in less than a year. In exile, soldiers in the uMkhonto we Sizwe camps would play the songs on Christmas Eve and New Year’s. How the song traveled around the continent in a pre-internet time is extraordinary.
From left to right: Basil Coetzee, Pat Matshikiza, Selby Ntuli, Producer Rashid Vally, Sipho Mabuse, Alec Khaoli, Kippie Moketsi (Seated) – Tshona! Session, Gallo Studios 1975 (As-Shams Archive).Vally continued funding recording sessions for jazz musicians, allowing them freedom in the studio, producing those records, and then selling them in Kohinoor. That sense of freedom of expression, in the height of apartheid, is evident through the brilliant music released subsequently through the label, including albums by Tete Mbambisa, Black Disco, The Beaters / Harari, Kippie Moeketsi, Lionel Pillay, Basil ���Manenberg��� Coetzee, Pat Matshikiza and more. He also licensed albums from jazz record labels from across the world, especially the US.��
In Temple���s interview, Vally says that most of the records had fairly good success, ���These were all without radio play, no support from the record companies as such, it was just by word of mouth. And to get it onto the SABC you had to fill in a hundred different forms, so we just forgot about them. It was all word of mouth.���
He continues, ���In the early ���70s there was a big upsurge in local jazz music, and the normal record companies were not interested in jazz per say, they were only looking for hits. When the local artists came to me, they had complete freedom to record what they wanted.�����
Valley put out about 50 records in the label���s heyday, but later put out more records in recent times like Sisonke Xonti���s uGaba the Migration (2020) and Bird Song Ensemble���s Imvuselelo (2020).
Forward everAs-Shams is the first, and undoubtedly the best, black-owned independent label from South Africa. One that, despite odds, was hugely successful under apartheid, and one whose legacy continues today and into the future through a younger generation of DJs and crate-diggers. In 2013, when I started collecting records and DJing, coming across an As-Shams record was like encountering black gold, a rare treasure. The original records were and still are extremely hard to find. However, it was through reissues via Matsuli Music that those albums saw life again and found a new audience of post-apartheid youth. The work of As-Shams was deeply inspiring in every way to our DJ collective Future Nostalgia because of the incredible music and its role in our revolutionary history.��
Tribute artwork for Rashid Vally, by Futurist, artist and artist Grant Jurius from Future Nostalgia following the news of his passing on 7 December 2024.Fast-forward 11 years, vinyl has made a huge comeback in South Africa���with many record stores, local labels, vinyl-only parties, and DJs now part of the culture. Matsuli Music kept us on the edge of our seats, as we anticipated which rare South African gem they would be reissuing next. And in this way, finding our own sounds helped us grow a stronger identity as Africans in a post-apartheid but still highly colonized country. As Temple notes, ���Today, the albums issued on the As-Shams label are highly prized by collectors, archivists and lovers of South African jazz for the freedom of spirit they capture and embody.���
Speaking of the influence on his life, record collector and DJ Boeta Gee says he first learnt about As-Shams around 1999 when purchasing two CDs from a street vendor���Black Disco���s Night Express and Abdullah Ibrahim���s Underground in Africa���and noticed they were both released by the same label. ���A label I���d never heard of, but intrigued me. How was it possible that there was a record label in 1970s South Africa that had Arabic script in its name; issued two records with titles that suggested black radical activities, AND left-of-center jazz on top of it! It was only a few years later that I was able to find more information about the label���s important recorded archive of South African jazz, and the owner, Rashid Vally. This also springboarded my deeper dive into jazz from South Africa and the visual arts that often accompanied the albums.���
Vally was also a visionary in working with South African artists to create album artwork for the albums. These include artists Mafa Ngwenya (African Herbs���Dollar Brand; Tshona!���Pat Matshikiza); Winston Saoli (Dollar Brand Plays Sphere Jazz; Dollar Brand + 2; Dollar Brand + 3) and Hargreaves Ntukwana (Underground in Africa���Dollar Brand; Plum Cherry���Lionel Pillay and Basil Coetzee; Did You Tell Your Mother���Tete Mbambisa).
Alternate cover artwork for Tete Mbambisa’s Did You Tell Your Mother by Hargreaves Ntukwana, advertising the shop too (As-Shams Archive).
PAT MATSHIKIZA-KIPPIE MOKETSI – Tshona (1975) artwork by Mafa Ngwenya.To the delight of many fans, a few years ago the As-Shams label was brought back to life through the work of Calum MacNaughton from Sharp-Flat, who sought Vally out over a decade ago for a license to reproduce a recording he owned. ���He was reputed to be a tough businessman but I found him to be kind, engaging, and extremely generous with his time. He held a palpable spiritual grace, his knowledge of jazz was encyclopedic, and his enduring enthusiasm for South African jazz was infectious. Rashid introduced me to his archive in the basement of his former record store in downtown Johannesburg and invited me to take on the administration of the label as the vinyl renaissance of the 2010s took off and correspondence from international labels eager to discover South African jazz streamed in.�����
The pair devised the As-Shams Archive as a custodian organization for the label���s cultural history, availing the catalog to imprints abroad, dabbling in new artist releases and launching a series of in-house compilations and unreleased recordings. He adds, ���As-Shams Archive is Rashid Vally���s enduring legacy and his gift to South African music history. The work continues in 2025 as we bring the As-Shams Archive series to a close with a focus on saxophonist Kippie Moeketsi, Rashid���s dear friend and one of the label���s many emblematic artists.���
A gentle, passionate legend
Rashid Vally – 18 Jan 2021 (As-Shams Archive).Valley was one of 11 children. The shop was a family affair and many of his nieces and nephews spent their weekends and school holidays there. Recalling working in the shop, nephew Nazeer says, ���A lot of the customers we used to encounter were township folk, and they were very refined gentlemen. They would sit for hours having chats with Uncle Rashid. He had a special way when he dealt with people, especially with his customers. He helped a lot of people realize their passion for jazz.�������
He adds, ���Having worked there we had to quickly learn the names of the artists, because when customers came in, we were sort of like cloned versions of Uncle Rashid ��� I mean, we knew the titles of spiritual music. Customers would walk in and ask us for assistance with choosing these various different types of genres. And they would take what we gave them simply because we���ve learned that from him. I remember once���you know with LPs how it was with the needle that you���ve got to place very carefully so it doesn���t scratch and jump? I remember, in the Kort Street shop, he asked me to play one of Abdullah���s LPs. I was as nervous as you can imagine, because as I���m holding that needle it���s shaking and I���m shaking uncontrollably, because he���s like towering over and he���s watching me. But he said to me, ���Son, just calm down. Take a deep breath and just let it down gently.��� He was so cool and calm about it. And that was his nature, you know with every single thing.���
In tributes that poured in after his death, many commend his gentle, kind, and knowledgeable nature and shared beautiful memories of trips to his shop and their encounters with him. ���He was never one for fame and glory. He did what he did very passionately and loved what he did. I don���t think he even realized the contribution that he���s made,��� says nephew Nazeer Mohamed.
Photographer Rafs Mayer says, ���I first heard about Kohinoor Records when I was a roadie / sound tech with Spirits Rejoice and Joy. Duke Makasi, Gilbert Matthews and Robbie Jansen told me about how much they enjoyed recording for Rashid, ���We���d come out of a session, and there���d be this big pot of lekker food waiting for us in the foyer.��� ��� He also shares that the last time he saw Vally was outside the old Market Street shop, ���ensconced in a nice comfy chair in front of the store, enjoying the wintry sunshine. We crossed over and introduced ourselves and chatted to this unassuming man who had done so much to keep the�� music alive.��� He noted that ���Rashid showed the same respect to [the customers] as he did to musicians. He never made them feel they were imposing on him, he���d get a staff or family member to assist them, and said many of them were repeat customers who grew with his enterprise. He displayed great humility to all that he came across.���
Pops Mohamed, whose Black Disco records were released via As-Shams, shares a great memory, ���The funny thing was, before I went to work at Rashid���s store, I never liked jazz. I hated jazz!��� He played top-40 hits in a pop band, like langarm, Jimi Hendrix, Cliff Richard, and The Beatles. This was before he worked with indigenous instruments. But he says, ���I hated jazz with a passion! The day when I started working for him, he said to me, ���I���m going to teach you to love jazz as of today onwards.��� He mentored me to such an extent that he actually would point to an album, and he would cover the name and ask me, ���Who is this?��� And I would guess and say ���Dexter Gordon,��� or he would play a track on the turntable and ask me, ���Who���s playing here?��� And I would guess and say,�� ���Duke Ellington Orchestra.��� So all those little things, he was testing me. And that���s how I slowly, slowly started getting to know about jazz music. And now I have a huge collection of jazz albums in my archives, not only overseas jazz but local jazz too.���
���The one thing that people don���t know is that Rashid was a very, very dedicated and devoted Muslim brother. He had Allah in his heart all the time. From back then, Rashid was into dhikr and other Islamic practices, apart from his musical career as a record label manager, he used to go to all these dhikr sessions,��� shares Pops Mohamed, who said Vally inspired him to seek spiritual knowledge too.��
In Temple���s interview, Vally briefly talks about the oppression under apartheid through the Group Areas Act, Pass laws, and so on, ���It was endless, you could write a whole book on that. It was very, very difficult. I mean we used to go to recording sessions on weekends, in the evenings, during business hours. We used to work late at night. There were times when I had to go to the township to pick up some of the musicians. It was very difficult, but the atmosphere was strong. And we did what we had to do.���
It was the very harsh conditions of apartheid that forced Vally to carve out his own path. While we mourn the loss of a mountain of knowledge, we continue with that spirit of freedom. He indeed lived up to the noor (light), and we will assure that his name is always remembered.��
Compiled with contributions and thanks to Matt Temple, Calum MacNaughton, Pops Mohamed, Nazeer Mohamed, Boeta Gee, Rafs Mayet, and Gregory Franz.��
How Rashid Vally showed us the way
Rashid Vally, producer, label and record store owner at Gallo Studios in 1975 with engineer Peter Ceronio (As-Shams Archive). Rashid Vally���s reputation preceded him. Vally, who passed away on December 7 at age 85, was a cultural visionary and innovator in South Africa. His passing reveals just how far-reaching his legacy goes, with numerous tributes written from all over the world. Yet to many in South Africa, his story isn���t known, and in many ways, he is an unsung hero of jazz.��
At his core, Vally was a true music fan���a music producer, label owner, and record store dealer.�� During the height of apartheid���s oppression, when the state clamped down hard on culture, he nurtured a racially inclusive home for music. Tied in with how jazz in apartheid had seen black musicians actively take a stance in a fight for freedom, Vally was in his own way a big part of the liberation struggle.
Born in 1939, Vally grew up in the Champion Buildings on Market Street in downtown Johannesburg. His father, Ismail Vally, ran a general dealer shop, Azad Cafe, which was situated on 11 Kort Street. As a side job, his father sold Indian music at the shop.���He often allowed Qawwali singers like Suliman Patel to practice in the grocery store, the bags of sugar and flour acting as soundproofing.��� writes Matsuli Music���s cofounder Matt Temple in the liner notes of Dick Khoza���s Chapita reissue. His father then recorded some of these artists, like Patel and singers from the S.S Karanja at Trutone recording studios, releasing them as 78s and 45s.
Vally started to enjoy big band music. By 1956, when he left high school, he was selling jazz LPs at the shop due to customer demand. The album Somebody Up There Digs Me by Louis Jordan was one of his favorites. He spent time between delivering groceries by bicycle and playing records at the shop. At the beginning of the 1960s, Vally recorded langarmmusiek (ballroom dance) bands from areas like Fordsburg, Fietas, and Vrededorp, such as The Merry Mascots, El Ricas, and The High Notes.��
The iconic Dorkay House became one of the only venues where black musicians could play, and Vally spent afternoons at the Sunday jazz sessions getting to know musicians like pianists Gideon Nxumalo and Lionel Pillay and drummer Early Mabaza. Club Pelican was another venue he would hang out at. Soon after, he opened a wholesale account with a US music dealer and sold imported jazz records. At this time, the caf�� on Kort Street was then renamed Kohinoor (���mountain of light��� in Persian).��
Upstairs from Kohinoor was the Indian restaurant��Kapitan,��owned by the Ranchod family, which Nelson Mandela would visit as a young lawyer; important for being one of the only restaurants in Joburg that served both black and white clientele during apartheid.��
Vally���s nephew Nazeer Mohamed paints a memory of his uncle���s shop: ���A typical day in downtown Johannesburg, as you���re walking down Market Street, you hear this tenor saxophone blaring, and then you can get that smell. There was an incense shop next to Kohinoor, it was called Begums. And on a Saturday morning, you���re hearing this tenor sax blasting away, you���re getting the scents, cars are hooting loudly. Joburg was abuzz. That gave that part of the city a different kind of flavor.�����
Rashid Vally – 25 Jan 2021 (As-Shams Archive)For music fans, this became one of the most loved record stores in South Africa, and people flocked from all over the country to visit. The shop was a hub for writers, political figures, poets, and photographers to gather and form a community around���with Vally being at the center of it. It resisted apartheid as one of the few places inclusive of different racial backgrounds, and many township and migrant workers were regulars at the store. Photographer Omar Badsha shared a memory of when he first got to know the shop in the mid-60s, and he was introduced to Vally through one of South Africa���s greatest artists, Dumile Feni. For musicians, it was a meeting place.
Artist Mogorosi Motsumi says, ���The original Kohinoor in Kort Street was the go-to store for any serious jazz lover. I remember that it was the smallest record store I knew, yet it had the largest jazz collection. It was intimate. And the staff made you feel like you were one of the family.��� He continues, ���I remember one day buying an Abdullah Ibrahim record. I don���t remember the album���s title, but it featured Archie Shepp. As I handed the empty cover over, before disappearing into the recesses of the store room to retrieve the LP, the guy who helped me looked up and said, ���You���ve just picked up a gem!��� That was the Kort Street Kohinoor! Much later Rashid opened other stores. They were more spacious and stuff, but you know what, I still preferred the Kort Street Kohinoor.��� In 1982, another branch of Kohinoor opened up on Market Street. Over time branches popped up in Joburg CBD, Southgate Mall, Vereeniging, Pretoria���roughly 10 stores at its peak. Towards the end, Market Street was one of the last remaining, which moved downstairs, known as the Kohinoor Jazz Basement.��
Musician Pops Mohamed worked at Kohinoor for three years with Vally and shares this memory: ���We were a happy bunch of people. It was myself, Rashid, his younger brother Chota, and there was a lady who worked with us, Lillian. She was like the right hand of Rashid, she knew the shop like the palm of her hands. So Friday is shillaz [money] day. Friday is payday. Everybody���s coming to buy records! And we were always happy. We would buy fish and chips and lots of polony and maybe sometimes biryani, and spend the afternoon eating that food and selling albums, which was really nice.�����
Inserts in The Post newspaper advertising Kohinoor’s records, 30 October 1980. Photo by Gregory Franz A journey into ���The Sun��� During the sixties, soul was all the rage, and Vally���s first label was Soultown Records, which released local soul and funk bands. The first jazz LP he recorded was Gideon Nxumalo, entitled Early Mart. In 1970, Abdullah Ibrahim (then Dollar Brand) visited Vally to discuss a recording partnership, which resulted in the recordings of a number of albums, including Dollar Brand +2 (Peace) in 1971 and Dollar Brand +3 (with Kippie Moeketsi) in 1973.��Later,��Underground in Africa��was recorded in 1974 and issued on his Mandla label (which Vally said alluded to the freedom chant ���Amandla��� but was hidden for political reasons).��Other significant musicians from the Cape, such as saxophonists Robbie Jansen and Basil Coetzee, collaborated on a recording with Ibrahim of Oswietie who helped greatly to mold the sound emerging at the time.��
The long-term relationship between Vally and Ibrahim was cemented through these recordings and lasted until his passing. Vally funded further recording sessions for Ibrahim���s new Cape Town band (which included Jansen and Coetzee), the sessions resulted in the iconic tune ���Mannenberg,��� recorded in June 1974. Around this time, Ibrahim coined the name As-Shams, translating to ���The Sun��� in Arabic, for the record label and its logo was designed by Vally���s brother-in-law, the late Abdul Kader Ali. The logo, with its big red sun and ���as-shams / The Sun��� with the Arabic text in between, has become one of the most iconic and easily recognizable logos for vinyl enthusiasts today.��
As-Shams, “The Sun,” Logo by Abdul Kader Ali, the brother-in-law of Rashid Vally.���Basil was from Manenberg, and for us Manenberg was just symbolic of the removal out of District Six, which is actually the removal of everybody from everywhere in the world, and Manenberg specifically because ��� it signifies, it���s our music, and it���s our culture ������ said Ibrahim in an interview about the song.
After the album came out, they took it to record companies and no one was interested.��In an��interview,��Vally states, ���The funniest thing was that after we���d finished the session, I went looking around to several big record companies to offer them distribution of the record.��I was only asking them for R100 advance, and they all turned me down, saying it was too much for a group of South African musicians.���
Ibrahim had an idea to make demos and play the record and sell it at Kohinoor. Vally played it on loudspeakers outside in the street, and people entered the store wondering what that sound was. He sold 5,000 copies in the first week, without them even having covers yet or being officially released. It was an instant hit. ���Mannenberg��� exploded, not only in South Africa but beyond, and it became an anthem performed at massive anti-apartheid rallies which took places at universities, cinemas, even at funerals. After being licensed to Gallo, it sold more than 50,000 copies in less than a year. In exile, soldiers in the uMkhonto we Sizwe camps would play the songs on Christmas Eve and New Year’s. How the song traveled around the continent in a pre-internet time is extraordinary.
From left to right: Basil Coetzee, Pat Matshikiza, Selby Ntuli, Producer Rashid Vally, Sipho Mabuse, Alec Khaoli, Kippie Moeketsi (Seated) – Tshona! Session, Gallo Studios 1975 (As-Shams Archive).Vally continued funding recording sessions for jazz musicians, allowing them freedom in the studio, producing those records, and then selling them in Kohinoor. That sense of freedom of expression, in the height of apartheid, is evident through the brilliant music released subsequently through the label, including albums by Tete Mbambisa, Black Disco, The Beaters / Harari, Kippie Moeketsi, Lionel Pillay, Basil ���Manenberg��� Coetzee, Pat Matshikiza and more. He also licensed albums from jazz record labels from across the world, especially the US.��
In Temple���s interview, Vally says that most of the records had fairly good success, ���These were all without radio play, no support from the record companies as such, it was just by word of mouth. And to get it onto the SABC you had to fill in a hundred different forms, so we just forgot about them. It was all word of mouth.���
He continues, ���In the early ���70s there was a big upsurge in local jazz music, and the normal record companies were not interested in jazz per say, they were only looking for hits. When the local artists came to me, they had complete freedom to record what they wanted.�����
Valley put out about 50 records in the label���s heyday, but later put out more records in recent times like Sisonke Xonti���s uGaba the Migration (2020) and Bird Song Ensemble���s Imvuselelo (2020).
Forward everAs-Shams is the first, and undoubtedly the best, black-owned independent label from South Africa. One that, despite odds, was hugely successful under apartheid, and one whose legacy continues today and into the future through a younger generation of DJs and crate-diggers. In 2013, when I started collecting records and DJing, coming across an As-Shams record was like encountering black gold, a rare treasure. The original records were and still are extremely hard to find. However, it was through reissues via Matsuli Music that those albums saw life again and found a new audience of post-apartheid youth. The work of As-Shams was deeply inspiring in every way to our DJ collective Future Nostalgia because of the incredible music and its role in our revolutionary history.��
Tribute artwork for Rashid Vally, by Futurist, artist and DJ Grant Jurius from Future Nostalgia following the news of his passing on 7 December 2024.Fast-forward 11 years, vinyl has made a huge comeback in South Africa���with many record stores, local labels, vinyl-only parties, and DJs now part of the culture. Matsuli Music kept us on the edge of our seats, as we anticipated which rare South African gem they would be reissuing next. And in this way, finding our own sounds helped us grow a stronger identity as Africans in a post-apartheid but still highly colonized country. As Temple notes, ���Today, the albums issued on the As-Shams label are highly prized by collectors, archivists and lovers of South African jazz for the freedom of spirit they capture and embody.���
Speaking of the influence on his life, record collector and DJ Boeta Gee says he first learnt about As-Shams around 1999 when purchasing two CDs from a street vendor���Black Disco���s Night Express and Abdullah Ibrahim���s Underground in Africa���and noticed they were both released by the same label. ���A label I���d never heard of, but intrigued me. How was it possible that there was a record label in 1970s South Africa that had Arabic script in its name; issued two records with titles that suggested black radical activities, AND left-of-center jazz on top of it! It was only a few years later that I was able to find more information about the label���s important recorded archive of South African jazz, and the owner, Rashid Vally. This also springboarded my deeper dive into jazz from South Africa and the visual arts that often accompanied the albums.���
Vally was also a visionary in working with South African artists to create album artwork for the albums. These include artists Mafa Ngwenya (African Herbs���Dollar Brand; Tshona!���Pat Matshikiza); Winston Saoli (Dollar Brand Plays Sphere Jazz; Dollar Brand + 2; Dollar Brand + 3) and Hargreaves Ntukwana (Underground in Africa���Dollar Brand; Plum Cherry���Lionel Pillay and Basil Coetzee; Did You Tell Your Mother���Tete Mbambisa).
Alternate cover artwork for Tete Mbambisa’s Did You Tell Your Mother by Hargreaves Ntukwana, advertising the shop too (As-Shams Archive).PAT MATSHIKIZA-KIPPIE MOKETSI – Tshona (1975) artwork by Mafa Ngwenya.To the delight of many fans, a few years ago the As-Shams label was brought back to life through the work of Calum MacNaughton from Sharp-Flat, who sought Vally out over a decade ago for a license to reproduce a recording he owned. ���He was reputed to be a tough businessman but I found him to be kind, engaging, and extremely generous with his time. He held a palpable spiritual grace, his knowledge of jazz was encyclopedic, and his enduring enthusiasm for South African jazz was infectious. Rashid introduced me to his archive in the basement of his former record store in downtown Johannesburg and invited me to take on the administration of the label as the vinyl renaissance of the 2010s took off and correspondence from international labels eager to discover South African jazz streamed in.�����
The pair devised the As-Shams Archive as a custodian organization for the label���s cultural history, availing the catalog to imprints abroad, dabbling in new artist releases and launching a series of in-house compilations and unreleased recordings. He adds, ���As-Shams Archive is Rashid Vally���s enduring legacy and his gift to South African music history. The work continues in 2025 as we bring the As-Shams Archive series to a close with a focus on saxophonist Kippie Moeketsi, Rashid���s dear friend and one of the label���s many emblematic artists.���
A gentle, passionate legendRashid Vally – 18 Jan 2021 (As-Shams Archive).Valley was one of 11 children. The shop was a family affair and many of his nieces and nephews spent their weekends and school holidays there. Recalling working in the shop, nephew Nazeer says, ���A lot of the customers we used to encounter were township folk, and they were very refined gentlemen. They would sit for hours having chats with Uncle Rashid. He had a special way when he dealt with people, especially with his customers. He helped a lot of people realize their passion for jazz.�������
He adds, ���Having worked there we had to quickly learn the names of the artists, because when customers came in, we were sort of like cloned versions of Uncle Rashid ��� I mean, we knew the titles of spiritual music. Customers would walk in and ask us for assistance with choosing these various different types of genres. And they would take what we gave them simply because we���ve learned that from him. I remember once���you know with LPs how it was with the needle that you���ve got to place very carefully so it doesn���t scratch and jump? I remember, in the Kort Street shop, he asked me to play one of Abdullah���s LPs. I was as nervous as you can imagine, because as I���m holding that needle it���s shaking and I���m shaking uncontrollably, because he���s like towering over and he���s watching me. But he said to me, ���Son, just calm down. Take a deep breath and just let it down gently.��� He was so cool and calm about it. And that was his nature, you know with every single thing.���
In tributes that poured in after his death, many commend his gentle, kind, and knowledgeable nature and shared beautiful memories of trips to his shop and their encounters with him. ���He was never one for fame and glory. He did what he did very passionately and loved what he did. I don���t think he even realized the contribution that he���s made,��� says nephew Nazeer Mohamed.
Photographer Rafs Mayet says, ���I first heard about Kohinoor Records when I was a roadie / sound tech with Spirits Rejoice and Joy. Duke Makasi, Gilbert Matthews and Robbie Jansen told me about how much they enjoyed recording for Rashid, ���We���d come out of a session, and there���d be this big pot of lekker food waiting for us in the foyer.��� ��� He also shares that the last time he saw Vally was outside the old Market Street shop, ���ensconced in a nice comfy chair in front of the store, enjoying the wintry sunshine. We crossed over and introduced ourselves and chatted to this unassuming man who had done so much to keep the�� music alive.��� He noted that ���Rashid showed the same respect to [the customers] as he did to musicians. He never made them feel they were imposing on him, he���d get a staff or family member to assist them, and said many of them were repeat customers who grew with his enterprise. He displayed great humility to all that he came across.���
Pops Mohamed, whose Black Disco records were released via As-Shams, shares a great memory, ���The funny thing was, before I went to work at Rashid���s store, I never liked jazz. I hated jazz!��� He played top-40 hits in a pop band, like langarm, Jimi Hendrix, Cliff Richard, and The Beatles. This was before he worked with indigenous instruments. But he says, ���I hated jazz with a passion! The day when I started working for him, he said to me, ���I���m going to teach you to love jazz as of today onwards.��� He mentored me to such an extent that he actually would point to an album, and he would cover the name and ask me, ���Who is this?��� And I would guess and say ���Dexter Gordon,��� or he would play a track on the turntable and ask me, ���Who���s playing here?��� And I would guess and say,�� ���Duke Ellington Orchestra.��� So all those little things, he was testing me. And that���s how I slowly, slowly started getting to know about jazz music. And now I have a huge collection of jazz albums in my archives, not only overseas jazz but local jazz too.���
���The one thing that people don���t know is that Rashid was a very, very dedicated and devoted Muslim brother. He had Allah in his heart all the time. From back then, Rashid was into dhikr and other Islamic practices, apart from his musical career as a record label manager, he used to go to all these dhikr sessions,��� shares Pops Mohamed, who said Vally inspired him to seek spiritual knowledge too.��
In Temple���s interview, Vally briefly talks about the oppression under apartheid through the Group Areas Act, Pass laws, and so on, ���It was endless, you could write a whole book on that. It was very, very difficult. I mean we used to go to recording sessions on weekends, in the evenings, during business hours. We used to work late at night. There were times when I had to go to the township to pick up some of the musicians. It was very difficult, but the atmosphere was strong. And we did what we had to do.���
It was the very harsh conditions of apartheid that forced Vally to carve out his own path. While we mourn the loss of a mountain of knowledge, we continue with that spirit of freedom. He indeed lived up to the noor (light), and we will assure that his name is always remembered.��
Compiled with contributions and thanks to Matt Temple, Calum MacNaughton, Pops Mohamed, Nazeer Mohamed, Boeta Gee, Rafs Mayet, and Gregory Franz.��
Sean Jacobs's Blog
- Sean Jacobs's profile
- 4 followers
