Sean Jacobs's Blog, page 200
October 23, 2019
What kind of ancestor do you want to become?
Maun, Botswana. Image credit Serena Tang via Flickr CC.
In Southern African development circles, Botswana is often held up as an exemplar of doing it ���right.��� From its marginal position within the colonial migrant labor system to its current position as one of the most stable and richest countries in the region, with largely functional social welfare systems and continual economic growth, Botswana is sometimes called Africa���s ���miracle.�����(This despite it having the third highest gini coefficient on the continent, which tells us something about the kind of miracles that modernity can promise.)
In Self-Devouring Growth: A Planetary Parable from Southern Africa (Duke, 2019) medical anthropologist Julie Livingston takes a look beneath the miracle to speak to the most pressing global issue of our time: the fact that the conditions of capitalist modernity in which we live are not sustainable and are leading to increased rather than lessened inequality. Even if, as was the case for Botswana, you play the game of development by the rules and you play it well, the environmental and social consequences of the growth-at-all-costs model are quickly revealing themselves to be far from benign. And as usual, the worst effects are felt by those without the resources.
Human beings, Livingston argues, are consuming ourselves: not only in Botswana, of course, but everywhere. Livingston traces the deep mistakes humans in late-capitalist modernity are making through three Tswana routes: rain-making; cattle; and travel (or, as we may see them in policy documents, water and sanitation, the beef industry, and transport). She is sympathetic in so doing, recognizing the complex entanglements of power and politics that make it close to impossible for Botswana to act outside of the current world system. Nonetheless she argues (along with a host of academics and increasingly active groups of citizen activists across the world) that continuing with a business as usual model will have massive long-term detrimental effects and that we need new (or maybe old) imaginaries.
Botswana is a dry country, but there is water beneath it, and the aquifers have been used both to extract the diamonds on which much of Botswana���s economic security is predicated, and to feed the industry that saw a shift from cattle-as-part-of-life, cattle as ���interspeciated familiars��� (page 42), to cattle as beef. Livingston���s parable for the world is to do with the skewed ways in which we have structured value, such that diamonds hold more value than aquifers and beef more value than cattle, even as these value systems affect long-term water security, present day public health, and inter-species relationships. In Botswana, however, this value system is not the only one that exists: older cosmologies are still around, and can be contrasted with the forms of value that are being rapidly normalized across the globe.
The lessons we can take from this parable are hugely useful to all of us, wherever we are. In Cape Town, where I sat reading, these lessons are not unfamiliar. Just last year, the City of Cape Town was facing what was ominously called Day Zero: the day the dams would be so empty that private taps would go off, and people would need to join queues for an allocation of 25 liters a day. Day Zero didn���t happen, but the run up to it fundamentally shifted Capetonian public attitudes towards water, but not, sadly, wider policy towards economic growth at all costs. Right now, for example, the Phillipi Horticultural Association, a group of small-scale farmers from an agricultural region right in the center of the Cape Flats, who draw on the Cape Flats aquifer, are taking the City to court as a result of a decision to zone the land as urban rather than agricultural, which opened the door to developers for upscale housing. I also inhabit Cape Town as a Zimbabwean migrant, from a country where just a few weeks ago the taps���public and private���were turned off in my hometown of Harare as drought, mismanagement, and the level of pollution in the water coming in to the main plant pushed the system close to collapse. At the heart of the water issues facing Botswana, Cape Town, and Harare is the confluence of man-made climate change and the value systems of modernity, which emphasize growth and profit over sustainability.
Viewed through the lens of global development discourse, Zimbabwe has made some very bad decisions where South Africa and Botswana have made some good ones. The point that Livingston very clearly illustrates, however, is that in the long-term the “good” decisions lead to similar outcomes as the “bad” ones, as growth-as-good is driven by an unsustainable logic.
It is time, she argues, to look for new imaginaries of how to structure our world: or time to bring back the older imaginaries that were disregarded as “tradition” in the colonial version of progress. Take rain-making, for example. In the past, rain was the foundational category of Tswana political philosophy: now, through the lens of capitalist modernity, water is the property of market-driven technoscience. Rain-making relied on collective agreement and on carefully curated forms of sociality. ���Where once there was public healing, in which people attempted to merge rain and social relationships in a dynamic moral economy, now we have public health, in which rain is a necessary calculable element of population management��� (page 13).�� Such a change doesn���t necessarily feel like progress. Livingston���s book asks us to think through some very hard questions: what would it take to shift our economy in the present from one which espouses growth, to one which espouses the common good? Rainmaking is premised on people working together, across species and landscapes, in order to make and distribute water. Instead of relying on growth-based developmental models���implemented by the state and by NGOs���can we imagine a world where “development” means something different, a world of collaborative, sustainable and shared prosperity?
Livingston has written a beautiful book, which speaks from Tswana cosmology towards the complexities of global problems, and that points towards forms of activism that we can all take forward. She writes that, ���In Botswana, the ethical temporality is the present continuous. When someone is sick or injured, those who care are expected to remain active in their responsibility to their patient. It is the regular performance of these commitments, the countless small acts of tending, that allow the potential for healing��� (page 126). The future world, Livingston reminds us, is something we create every day in the present. We are the rainmakers of the future: the decisions we make now will determine where the rain falls, and how hard or how gently, for those who come after us. What kind of ancestor, she asks us, do you want to become?
October 22, 2019
Troubling times in Burkina Faso
Soldier in Burkina Faso. Image credit C. Hugues via Flickr CC.
Manna wanna Burkina Faso ?
Wend na yaafa.
(How���s it going Burkina Faso?
May God pardon them.)
Though much has changed for Burkina Faso since January 15, 2016, it hasn���t been for the better. On that day in Ouagadougou, a handful of gunmen took more than one hundred guests at Splendid Hotel hostage. They then killed 30 individuals and wounded dozens more by firing on civilians who had been enjoying their evening on the terrace of the popular caf�� Cappuccino. An attack like this was previously unimaginable in the capital. But it now looms like a constant threat. Early 2016 marks the beginning of Burkina Faso���s association with terrorism, violent extremism, militant Islamism, jihad, and it could not have come at a worse time.
Months earlier, in the middle of a political transition, the R��giment de S��curit�� Pr��sidentielle���the most experienced, well-trained, and best equipped unit in the Burkinab�� armed forces���staged a coup that failed and subsequently resulted in the unit���s dismantlement. The failed coup sparked a major overhaul of the security forces setting in motion reforms, which continue to present challenges for the security sector. Even more, the attack occurred on the seventeenth day of Roch Marc Christian Kabor�����s presidency. Kabor�� and his brand-new prime minister, Paul Thieba, formed the government on January 12, 2016���three days before the attack took place. (How many, do you think, of the newly appointed ministers had even made it to their offices?)
In the wake of what happened at Splendid Hotel and Cappuccino, imagine the internal chaos and scrambling that must have taken place as the new leaders tried to determine the best way to respond. Imagine the disappointment of all those who struggled to cling to the legitimizing narrative of a successful democratic transition. A transition made successful by the Burkinab�� people���s determination and integrity, and indeed by their resistance and revolution. There must have been an immediate change in narrative as its irresistible magnetism drew the world���s attention to security in the capital and the threat of terrorism emanating from Mali. Given that magnetism, is it surprising that we are where we are today?
Today, news of attacks on security forces, assassinations of local leaders, the targeting of civilians, confrontations between community militias, and hundreds of thousands of displaced persons facing the threat of famine dominate headlines. Two years ago, this seemed unlikely, but the characteristic fragility of the state in Burkina Faso has rapidly eroded any semblance of state-delivered stability and security in the countryside.
It is not only the impact on communities in the countryside or people unlucky enough to suffer at the hands of these groups that are affected. Burkinab�� friends, educated in the US and committed to ���beating the brain drain��� by finding work in la patrie, are now searching for jobs dehors. Colleagues and civil servants seeking to advance professionally have completely shifted their career trajectories, sensing that the winds of opportunity blow in accordance with the conflict and countering violent extremism (CVE). The big business of CVE has become a regional affair, after all. These indirect effects contribute to the transformation of the region and pose a potentially much more enduring challenge.
Not long ago, Africa Is a Country contributor and historian Greg Mann described the current situation in Mali as a ���bloody scandal,��� pointing to the failed efforts of the international community, regional leaders, Malian political elites, various security and armed forces and Bamako-based campaigns to curb violence and insecurity. Burkina Faso, on the other hand, had not, until recently, captured nearly the same amount of attention as Mali. Perhaps this is because the pace of violence for those tracking it has at times seemed slow during the last four years. Today, after the steady deterioration of security has led to hundreds of thousands displaced by conflict and at risk of famine, the violence has begun to attract significant international attention. Though, it remains unclear what good this might do.
More pernicious is the transformation of the region into the next ���hot spot��� given its ever expanding ���red zone,��� primed for the deployment of a European policy laboratory for future conflicts. This is the scandal. A handful of armed men have upended social order and destabilized the lives of millions making the powerful appear powerless���or worse indifferent. This tragedy has resulted in a containment response leading some to suggest a new status quo of permanent military intervention in a place where social cohesion and tolerance governed the land. The ���bloody scandal��� continues in Mali, and Burkina Faso just seems like the latest casualty.
Yet, national security initiatives do exist and much of what makes Burkina Faso special continues to persist. Even with the immense pressures resulting from instability and insecurity, political stability has, so far, been maintained. The political processes established during the 2015 political transition remain in place. Recent Burkinab�� military operations like Ndofou and Otapuanu, despite their shortcomings, are underway in both the eastern and northern regions; potentially laying the foundation for renewed stability. That is assuming, of course, that the resources for these operations can be sustained and that security forces avoid the traps of heavy-handed human rights abuses.
Furthermore, there is little evidence that the armed insurgent groups terrorizing communities in Burkina Faso���s north and east have much support. The Islamic State in the Greater Sahara and Ansaroul Islam, historically the two groups most active in Burkina Faso, show very little entrenched local support. Rather, they appear to derive their support from extorting communities in exchange for protection or by serving as a grievance vehicle for the most disgruntled and disillusioned in society���as has also been the case across the border in central Mali. There remains much to be done to restore elements of peace and stability to these areas, but the work has begun.
It is not difficult to envision a significantly worse situation. The popular protests that roiled the former regime and successfully ousted Blaise Compaor�� could have continued. Steeped in the success of the popular insurrection, one can imagine continued protests and political instability over frustrations with the growing insecurity or even popular calls for military intervention. It would not be the first time in Burkina Faso���s history that a popular movement resulted in military rule. And yet, the military, despite its historically important influence in politics and despite arguably facing its most complex and challenging threat from the insurgencies destabilizing the Sahel, has remained subordinate to civilian leadership and governance.
These reminders and could-have-beens point to the hope that still exists in Burkina Faso. Yes, the number of violent events in Burkina Faso this year is projected to be many times higher than the number in past years. Yes, the northern and eastern regions are in a state of crisis which has been getting steadily worse. Yes, hundreds of thousands of displaced people are in need of aid. Yes, the government of Burkina Faso is confronting immense resource and capability constraints. But, most importantly, the government will be held to account for its efforts to address these challenges and for its efforts to deliver governance, peace, and stability. The Burkinab�� people���s determination and integrity laid the foundation for political institutions, which persist, and if the government fails them, there will be a reckoning.
The views expressed above are those of the author and are not an official policy or position of the Africa Center for Strategic Studies, the National Defense University, or the US Government.
October 21, 2019
The imperial legacy in scholarship
French soldier in Mali, December 2015. Image credit Fred Marie via Flickr CC.
On March 22, 2019, I learned that the director and three other members of the scientific board of the journal Afrique contemporaine had resigned. The director, Marc-Antoine P��rouse de Montclos, protested political interference in the publication of a special issue on Mali that I was editing and that was set for publication in early 2019. All of the articles had been through a thorough peer-review process, which had all authors revising their texts and two articles being rejected. Yet, after the scientific team���s decision to publish, I continued receiving awkward demands to revise my own texts (I wrote the issue���s introduction and one article). Coupled with unusual delays, I began to suspect political obstacles���suspicions confirmed by the director���s resignation.
Contrary to some comments I received later, we were not na��ve when we submitted our issue to this French journal. I have been working on French security and military policy in Africa since 2002 and was fully aware of how difficult it can be to talk critically about the French state in Africa, especially when the critiques are written in French by non-nationals. A long list of anecdotal experiences comes to mind. I also knew about the basic history of the journal, understood its affiliation with the Agence fran��aise de d��veloppement (AFD; the French development agency), and recognized how French military engagement in Mali had almost become taboo, too delicate politically to allow for contradictory or opposing views.
The interference into the publication process backfired. The scientific director���s resignation allowed me to protest and share the news. The floodgates were opened and gave the issue, our work and our research profiles much publicity. Scholars protested and demanded in our names the protection of academic freedom. The journal lost its credibility as an academic space and several forthcoming contributions, even though it is trying to come back after revising its policies and editorial board (see its recent communiqu��).
I lived the whole thing as a very personal experience: initial (paranoid) fear of being the victim of state censorship, pressure and stress to respond to multiple demands, responsibility and guilt towards my colleagues and Malian friends, and so on, including having to find another venue (it will appear in the Canadian Journal of African Studies, December 2019 issue ). In the eyes of many, it gave our work credibility. Vocal supporters, however, emphasized the issue of academic freedom to the detriment of discussing the situation in or our work on Mali. For others, we were simply na��ve or irrational. A few months later, a former Malian prime minister told me about his discussion with a high-ranking French official who called us ���hysterical extremists.�����I doubt that the key issue is academic freedom, but our little censorship story tells us much about the state of France-Africa relations, imperial legacies and the impact these have on the production of knowledge about Francophone Africa.
I learned later that three issues bothered the journal���s political overseers. One was my article, which criticized the French-led counterterrorist approach to Mali and the Sahel, exposing its limits and effects on conflict resolution. The article is the least critical piece that I have written on the matter, but it was still too much. I knew full well that questioning the French strategy in Mali was taboo or sensitive in certain circles, so I avoided using ���radical��� terms and emphasized a general ���counterterrorist approach��� wording instead of a specific ���French policy��� one.
The second sensitive issue was the references made, in almost all articles, to the corruption of the Malian state and its effects. A short piece on the Malian army���s abuses, written by R��my Carayol, was said to be particularly problematic, susceptible to legal liability, and dangerous, even though it was based on public sources, discussed and documented events, and the fact that the UN itself had already blamed Malian forces. One could not, it seemed, criticized too much France���s key allies in Bamako.
The third issue was that our research was deemed to be unidirectional, one-sided, leading to the same or similar conclusions about the worsening situation in Mali and the failures of the counterterrorist approach. They wanted the special issue to include or consider the ���other side��� of the picture. This was clearly politics, not research. Despite all indications, a broad consensus in the literature, and several UN reports demonstrating that the situation in Mali has been increasingly worsening since 2015, with no end in sight to the armed conflicts, it was us who were ���radicals��� and ���extremists��� for not wanting to consider a ���debate���.
There is no doubt in my mind that the whole episode speaks loudly to the specificities of Francophone Africa as a space of intervention. The imperial legacies of this space mean that France is always at the centre of diplomatic, political, and military efforts at conflict management. It is a world that Franco-African elites ���own,��� including who and what can be said about it.
This speaks to the politics of knowledge production in and about a context-specific space. If you write in English about France in Africa, there is more room for critique (I have published in both languages). Writing in French, however, in a French journal, is to be confronted with colonial legacies that have not spared the academy. Through my years of research, I have met various forms of neocolonial and nationalist paternalism that circumscribes the tolerable parameters of debate.
Our ���censorship story��� was not so much about academic freedom per se. It was and is a reflection and a symptom of imperial legacies. It speaks to the need to critically address the colonial and imperial legacies of both intervention practices and habits of mind.
October 20, 2019
African migration and the charade of ‘return to safety’
17 year-old Jacky in Ethiopia. Image via UNICEF Ethiopia Flickr CC.
Over the past few weeks, the UNHCR (the UN Refugee Agency), the African Union and the Rwandan government have jointly initiated the ���evacuation��� of African migrants from torturous Libyan detention camps to Rwanda. All actors involved, as well as the European Union, which likely contributes significant funding, have celebrated this intervention as a ���lifeline��� providing migrants with ���options for a safe future.��� The UNHCR quotes a woman saying upon arrival in Kigali that ���we had a dream of getting out of Libya and now we are finally able to live in peace.���
These evacuations follow the well-established pattern of casting the return of Africans to Africa not only as an act of protecting lives, but also of restoring migrants��� dignity and enabling their very futures. Other common types of interventions also link protection to return in this way: taking those who have been shipwrecked in the Mediterranean back to North African shores, ���assisting��� migrants to go home ���voluntarily��� or informing them about ���the risks of irregular migration��� and unseized opportunities at home.
Yet, making access to even the most basic safety dependent on immobility or return is a double-edged sword: while it saves lives in the most immediate sense, it also suggests that Africans should be grateful to just stay alive, and are only���theoretically���entitled to anything beyond that on their own continent. It seeks to confine Africans in Africa, urging them to accept their fate and, as a young Nigerian returnee wearily acquiesces, ���stay in our country and feed on what we have.��� Critically, using the language of protection also omits that evacuation has meanings other than the restoration of safety. To evacuate also means to empty out. To expel. After all, before the dream of ���getting out of Libya,��� there was another dream, now entirely eclipsed: to go to a place of one���s own choosing. This omission reinforces and naturalizes the idea that national communities best stay separate if they want to be safe and prosper.
The focus on rescue also hides that the threats migrants face are the direct result of political decisions and practices that deliberately make life for migrants life-threatening���so much so that return becomes not just their only option but something they are made to feel grateful for. Something they are generously permitted to do, as reinforced by the International Organization for Migration���s expression of gratitude to the EU ���for their continuous support allowing thousands of migrants to return home safely.���
Limiting the focus to safeguarding the right of Africans to stay conceals that real freedom and dignity mean to have a choice: to stay or to move. While evacuations and other forms of return may save physical lives, let nobody try to tell you that this furthers Africa���s progress, dignity and emancipation. Reproducing colonial discourses and methods of controlling African movement, it serves the very opposite.
October 19, 2019
The fa��ades of liberal democracy
US Route 50, Indiana. Image credit Mobilus In Mobili via Flickr CC.
The specter of right-wing authoritarianism looms over liberal democracies across the world. In an attempt to explain the current political moment, many moderate-minded members of the western intelligentsia ground their analysis within terms of Enlightenment, liberalism, and western democracy. ���We come from the tradition of the European Enlightenment, the Age of Reason. So we find it extremely hard to face down the emotional force of right-wing populism using rational arguments,��� argues Michael H��upl, the former mayor and governor of Vienna and former acting chairperson of the center-left Social Democratic Party of Austria. In an interview with Slate, Timothy Snyder, the historian and author of the wildly popular On Tyranny, invokes a similar sentiment: ���[Trump���s] attempt to undo the Enlightenment as a way to undo institutions, that is fascism.���
Although these sorts of analyses might prove useful in some respects, we must acknowledge their narrow ideological application; in fact, there exists a danger in solely relaying these sorts of narratives of liberal democracy. To lift the veil on these ideals is a difficult task, but incredibly important if we���re to begin mounting a viable effort to counter right-wing insurgency.
In explaining the current moment as a freak deviation, we���re chained to dominant narratives of liberal democracy. Liberalism emerged as a rupture to the yokes of medieval monarchy, ecclesiastical authority, and feudal social order. Humanism provided the language to establish inherent human worth and agency, while liberalism, at least in an ideal sense, provided a political framework that could privilege individual liberties and protections. By the mere virtue of being human, liberal democratic governments could endow their constituents with rights on a scale never before seen. Freedom would now always be conceived of at the personal level, and most importantly, its protections were applied universally. Social, economic, technological, and cultural progress would endlessly flow from these wellsprings of liberty. The rise of right-wing movements, it is said, fundamentally signifies the abandonment of liberal Enlightenment ideals, which have solidified the democratic foundations of the western world. This perspective presents liberalism as the zenith of western political thought and represents an outlook that anchors the present political moment as an aberration from, rather than a natural stage of the civic ordering of liberal democracy.
But as history reveals, the edicts of liberal democracy have been far from universal, given the scope of colonial and imperial activity, and the material consequences of that activity. From establishing transatlantic networks of chattel slave trade, to eradicating entire indigenous community and ethnic groups, to exploiting natural resources on scales beyond comprehension, any claim to liberal values in European and American contexts must be so heavily qualified, that the resulting ideology fundamentally belies basic conceptions of liberty.
In his magnum opus, Discourse on Colonialism (1950), Martinican poet and politician Aim�� C��saire dismissed the ���pseudo-humanism��� espoused by the European political order, writing, ���for too long it has diminished the rights of man, that its concept of those rights has been���and still is���narrow and fragmentary, incomplete and biased and, all things considered, sordidly racist.���
A seminal figure in the canon of Caribbean literature (and post-colonial literature more generally), C��saire articulates the horrors wrought by colonialism throughout his Discourse, and ultimately declares: ���a civilization which justifies colonization���and therefore force���is already a sick civilization, a civilization which is morally diseased that irresistibly, progressing from one consequence to another, one repudiation to another, calls for its Hitler, I mean its punishment.��� In describing the ���boomerang effect of colonization,��� C��saire maintains that colonialism ���dehumanizes even the most civilized man,��� and ���inevitably tends to change him who undertakes it������
By this account, three centuries of brutal colonial violence were a portent of the Nazi fascism that was to overcome Germany throughout the 1930s and 1940s, not only because the exploitation, dehumanization, slaughter, and annihilation of people in the Global South prepared Nazi political leaders to carry out genocide, but also because ordinary citizens were persuaded to accept it. For C��saire, this is the ultimate indictment of the European pseudo-humanism: at its most basic level, not as much its double standards, but its utter bankruptcy concerning basic humanity.
The social ecosystem that was spawned out of this particular context of colonizer and colonized���white supremacy���has continued to inflect individual patterns of behavior, institutions, and power structures across the world. The nature of liberal economic organization (capitalism) has only amplified the material inequalities among racial and gender lines. Since the outset of this social order, those with the capacity to gather and maintain capital across the western world have historically been overwhelmingly of Anglo-European descent and male; this largely continues to be the case today, especially in the United States.
For much of the 20th and 21st centuries, glowing narratives lauding liberal democracy have remained unchallenged, standard among power brokers within Europe and the United States. And while there exist subversive, critical currents of this political and intellectual status quo, they haven���t yet critically reshaped discourses within the western political canon. Even today, the damage incurred by colonial violence remains a footnote in western histories, buried within and obfuscated by narratives of imperial glory. Or even worse, some actively seek to contort history, bending it to the whims of colonial apologia.
Neither the lingering afterlives of colonialism on western political culture writ large, nor the pathologies sowed at the individual, interpersonal level, have yet to be seriously examined through these dominant social and political narratives. The resulting analysis is painfully shallow and incomplete; as a result, it doesn���t provide much use in fully understanding and combating the contemporary rise of the right wing.
From the rise of far-right parties in parliaments across Europe, to the Republican Party in the United States (not to mention the right-wing authoritarian strongmen reigning over Brazil, Turkey, the Philippines, Israel, and India), the present political moment is deeply alarming.
Among the issues triggering these reactionary political movements are: the 2008 global economic crisis and subsequent swellings in economic inequality, as well as the mass migrations from the Middle East, Africa, and Central America, caused by European and American interventionist foreign policy (and soon to follow, climate catastrophe, which will displace hundreds of millions of people by 2050, and will surely foment additional political instability in the coming decades). Far right-wing movements across Europe have seized upon this pervasive discontent. Although their individual agendas may vary depending on their national contexts, they virtually ground their respective programs in chauvinist ethno-nationalism and xenophobia, and these parties have experienced unprecedented political successes within the last five years.
Dominant, uncritical Eurocentric narratives about western liberal democracy treat such rapid developments as a regrettable exceptionalism, which leaves us paralyzed. How could liberal democracy, a political system that endowed individuals with the potential to reach their full humanity, ever give rise to massive support for such heinous sentiments? Reading C��saire (and other thinkers, especially in the black radical tradition), the quixotic mirage of liberal democracy and its historic application quickly dissipates. We soon realize that a more apt question would be the following: how can we mobilize a movement to dismantle the structures and institutions that have allowed the far-right to flourish?
Once we dismiss the fiction that Enlightenment liberalism and liberal democracy will inoculate western society from fascism, we can begin the project of actively combating right-wing extremism. And while centrist politicians across the West, such as Hillary Clinton, Tony Blair, and Matteo Renzi, seem to suggest that we ought to capitulate to the demands of the far-right, particularly in regards to refugees, we know this will only further embolden the forces of division. The task at hand is a tall one, but not insurmountable. By building support for grassroots, internationalist left political movements���and not wallowing in whitewashed liberal nostalgia���we can mobilize support to fight back against the destruction wrought by the right wing as they ascend to power.
Yanis Varoufakis, the former finance minister of the Greek political party Syriza, provides the ethos for resistance at its most essential level: ���The only way you can compete with [the right-wing] is by appealing to the humanity of humans and also to their rationality.��� Varoufakis��� movement, DiEM25 (Democracy in Europe Movement 2025) is a blueprint for how this work can be carried out at a pan-European level. It���s a movement that���s challenging in elections across the continent, building coalitions with likeminded stakeholders, and providing a formal space for otherwise disparate activists, from Spain to Greece to the Czech Republic, to stand together. In the United States, the progressive movement is growing in power, challenging the Democratic Party consensus increasingly by the day. It���s poised to capture a massive victory in the 2020 presidential primary, which would send shockwaves throughout the American political system.
We can, and ought to, debate strategy of how we���re going to upend the status quo and capture electoral victories to reverse the calamitous policies of austerity, dismember apparatuses of white supremacy, and implement inclusive humane policies that privilege human life over capital. But, as long as we remain self-aggrandizing and blindly devotional to the grand narratives of liberalism, liberal democracy, and Enlightenment progress, we will continue to protract the reign of right-wing domination. Only by renouncing these myths and actively constructing an alternative will we forge a victorious path forward.
October 18, 2019
Cape Verde���s culture of recalcitrance
Palmeira, Sal, Cape Verde. Image credit Mal B via Flickr CC.
At a time of imperiled democracy, when the West can no longer brazenly declare illiberal ways ���as peculiar to Asian and African peoples,��� as Pankaj Mishra writes, or ���on the despotic traditions of Russians or Chinese, on African tribalism, Islam, or the ‘Arab mind,’��� it���s worthwhile to look back at the exemplary democratic transition of the West African nation of Cabo Verde, consistently ranked as one of the top countries in the Ibrahim Index of African Governance, and the musical foundations that underpinned its initial success and stably navigated the country to a new era.
In 1991, Cabo Verde had its first democratic election. Elections are tricky business anywhere, let alone in a state divided into several islands, each needing a tailored approach. Political parties found a novel solution, perhaps even a model, to successfully get their campaign messages out to large audiences with ears wide open: music festivals. Till today, Cabo Verde plays host to dozens of festivals a year, some government backed. The largest, the Atlantic Music Expo, is run by a relative of Cabo Verde���s first prime minister of the democratic era.
Winning votes involved tapping into a complicated national identity, and politicians across the spectrum channeled independence leader Am��lcar Cabral���s belief that ���even if in Cabo Verde, there was a majority white native population ��� Cape Verdeans would not stop being Africans.��� Even conservative parties, more aligned with European interests, chose long shunned African rhythms and styles, especially Funan�����the raucous, percussive, accordion-driven music of the rural inlands, the music of the proud African interior���as the soundtrack for campaign rallies. It drew large crowds, engaged the youth, kept people content, and undoubtedly won votes.
But that sound, born from revolt and resistance, was hard-won. In 1910, the small village of Ribeir��o Manuel, on the island of Santiago, led a rousing call for rebellion against colonial landlords.
���Homi faca, mudjer matxado, mosinhos tudo ta djunta pedra (men knives, women machetes, all children gather stones),��� became an anthem of revolt. The episode is etched into the Cabo Verdean imagination as a defining historical event, yet it was preceded by periodic insurrections from all spaces on Santiago island, where lucrative, dehumanizing practices continued unabated.
The pristine beaches and luxury resorts dotting the 10-island chain belie a harsher reality. A hive of volcanoes and cyclical droughts and famines���exacerbated by Portugal���s transformation of the colony into a cash crop economy of water-heavy maize and cotton production���form a harsh ecology that have plagued Cabo Verde. ���Resistance in the context of periodic droughts and famines,��� writes Peter Karibe Mendy in his biography of Am��lcar Cabral, ���has been a salient feature in the history of Cabo Verde ��� embedded in the various facets of Cabo Verdean culture.���
Santiago Island was the bleeding heart of a culture of recalcitrance, the Badius its fiercest ambassadors, resisting what C.L.R. James called the ���special violence of slave-owners and the ardent temperament of the tropics.��� Descendants of Cabo Verde���s own maroons who carved out a more dignified life in the virtually inaccessible mountainous hinterlands of the island���s north, Badius refused to abandon control of their bodies or labor. Deep inside Santiago���s interior, free from the fangs of European supremacist rule, Badiu culture maintained and built upon its distinctly African nature. Their music, Funan��, grew in almost total isolation.
In the 1950s, as Badius scraped together a difficult living in a baron economy, a number of young men ���went South,��� a common worker���s journey from Santiago to S��o Tom�� off the coast of Gabon, 2,300 miles away and rife with malaria, to meet demand for labor on cocoa plantations. Among them was a 17-year-old Bitori Nha Bibinha, who falsified a birth certificate to travel. But he made the arduous journey not to earn money or send remittances home.
���I enrolled to go to S��o Tom��,��� Bitori told scholar Rui Cidra in a 2003 interview, ���just to get an accordion.���
���I said that as soon as I got an accordion I would return. As a punishment, I endured three years and six months to buy a return ticket! I suffered, boy.���
S��o Tom�����s more profitable cocoa economy had created a petite bourgeoisie. Luxury goods like a button diatonic accordion were imported and stocked in abundance. With no electricity in the small villages of Santiago, an acoustic instrument was key.
One by one, as the likes of Bitori returned to Santiago Island, they became adept, self-taught musicians whose accordions were tuned in ways only possible on the island. A contemporary accordion-maker or technician would have a hard time navigating the guts of the Badiu gaita.
In their home villages, by the ���60s and ���70s, Badiu gaita players became masters in their own right, grand elderly statesmen of the Funan�� sound, played with lackadaisical harmonies amid circling congregations of women adorning white robes not dissimilar to the practices of Brazilian Candombl��. A ferrinho player scrapes a disheveled iron rod resting on his shoulder with a blade. Funan�� derives from a great accordionist, Funa, and ferrinho percussionist, Nana. The gaita became the maximum expression of Badiu identity.
Gaita players achieved a status similar to the line of West African Griots, repositories of history transmitted through the songs of Funan��, its lyrics spoke of the trials of daily scarcity or playfully incorporated whole metaphors. The classic song ���Nha Boi��� translates as ���My Bull.��� To be trusted with a bull is to become a man, and a respected member of one���s village. Bulls are used to crush sugarcane to make grogu, the moonshine, a sibling of Colombian aguardiente, copiously washed down at Funan�� parties. But ���Nha Boi��� is simply a metaphor for reaching manhood (a bull) through sex (crushing sugarcane).
Funan�� remained exclusively a Badiu affair, the gruff screams of its singers and the bubbling Badiu accent certify authenticity. And since Portugal vacated its African colonies only in 1975, Funan�����s exposure was delayed. Portugal���s colonial secret police kept a close eye on Funan�� traditions and parties because of its sensuality, but they ���had nothing against the music of Funan�� itself,��� Bitori told me, ���they just didn���t like to have congregations of several people,��� given the long history of well-organized rebellions. Even with 8pm curfews, Funan�� parties continued, leading to fines and arrest. Playing even a few notes on the gaita under the stars became a small but powerful dissenting act.
Funan�����s ascension into mainstream culture was propelled by independence and elections, but professional production and recording remained elusive. The masters were limited to an elite but small class of elderly men from the interior.
Younger artists, like Orlando Pantera, empowered by the politically backed proliferation of Funan�� in the early ���90s, began traveling inland to learn the trade secrets from the gaita griots, taking up the rural artform to counter what they saw as global pop sounds diluting the vast majority Cabo Verdean output and preventing genuine local music from competing on the airwaves. Another revolt was afoot.
���It was a reaction to some of the music that was entering Cabo Verde,��� said Pantera���s daughter Darlene, ���like the Zouk style from the Caribbean and also the influx of hip-hop.���
���They wanted to go back to the roots to see what was their role, what was their typical Cape Verdean way.���
In 1997, an ���earthquake shook the country,��� a Cabo Verdean newspaper wrote, when a group of youths, calling themselves Ferro Gaita, ���dared to make a disc based on the gaita, ferrinho and bass guitar.��� That best-selling first album���selling 40,000 copies in a country of just 400,000���changed the entire trajectory of the country���s music.
���I searched the interior of Santiago,��� said Iduino, the band���s bass player, in the same piece, ���which was harassed and had too many difficulties, and the compositions speak about the reality and culture in this part of Cabo Verde.���
Ferro Gaita���s success caught the attention of the more affluent producers based in Cabo Verde���s large European diaspora, namely Rotterdam. At the height of the CD era, Rotterdam���s Cabo Verdean music scene was selling upwards of 80,000 copies of mainstream electronic Krioulu pop. Healthy profits allowed for greater risks with more traditional Funan��.
���Together with democracy,��� said producer Vada Semedo, ���came a lot of business opportunities.���
The widespread sentiment amongst producers was to honor old masters of the gaitas from the small villages by publishing releases for the very first time, to give what was once hidden a bigger stage. Semedo chose the late Tchota Suari, held alongside Bitori as the greatest of all time. ���I fell in love with his way of playing,��� said Semedo, ���because I had a memory of my youth in Cabo Verde of hearing the gaita, but not like he did.���
���This guy could use the whole accordion: in one song he uses all the notes.���
Curiously, Funan�� was captured, packaged, and sold at the peak of Cesaria Evora���s worldwide fame when Cabo Verde was well established on the music map, yet recordings like Semedo���s never shared the same success or global acclaim. In a way, Semedo said, Funan�� was never ear-marked to go global. Just the journey from the interior to Cabo Verde���s cities was seen as a great achievement because the rural heartlands viewed cities as parasitic, where nothing is produced, only consumed. The song ���Nha Boi��� quips that the bulls of Praia, urban bulls, exist only for sale as a steak.
The challenges of getting the very best gaita players from the inland, accessible today only by long winding roads and long hours of travel, and securing visas to record at studios overseas kept Funan�� a cry in the middle of the Atlantic, with anticipated fanfare in Cabo Verde���s Lusophone siblings, Angola and Mozambique only.
The isolationist Badiu disposition stood firm. Funan�� for years remained a well-kept secret, a subculture to coexist parallel but incognito from Evora���s global brand���until the late 1990s, when, thanks to a fateful election and intrepid music entrepreneurs, the masters finally got their chance in recording studios.
Ferro Gaita���s Iduino predicted in 2004 that Funan�� and all its masters ���will be known one day worldwide.���
Prophetically, their story and impact are known today. And perhaps the most poignant lesson from Cabo Verde���s maiden election and the revolutionary inclinations of its accompanying music is that, for all the chest-beating of the world���s supposed bastions of liberal democracy, this dogmatically celebrated political system was never a gift bestowed, but seized through sheer agency and hard-fought autonomy. The Badius of northern Santiago personify a naturally democratic way of life and their most cherished Funan�� pioneers legitimized one of the most successful post-colonial political transitions in one of the youngest countries, an election that gave a grand spotlight to the most marginalized and once deliberately silenced.
With defining elections scheduled around the world, the small handful of candidates and parties with a modicum of decency would do well to follow the Cabo Verdean example, tapping into the stories, values, and culture of their society���s own Badius to cement a more dignified future.
Ostinato’s latest compilation is “Pour Me A Grog: The Funana Revolt in 1990s Cabo Verde.“
This is the story behind Ostinato Records’s latest compilation:��Pour Me A Grog: The Funana Revolt in 1990s Cabo Verde.
October 17, 2019
Reading John Mbiti from Uganda
Idi Amin addressing clergy. Image from Uganda Broadcasting Corporation.
John Mbiti died at the start of October 2019, at the age of 87. His 1969 book African Religions and Philosophies set the parameters for a whole field of scholarly inquiry: it powerfully showed that African philosophical and religious traditions were consistent and sensible, and that they could be understood as a religious system, and not as superstition. The eulogies have���rightly���been full of praise. Kenya president Uhuru Kenyatta hymned him as ���a role model and an ambassador for the Kenya brand abroad���; while Raila Odinga, sometime leader of the opposition, described his book as ���an eye-opener and groundbreaking work.���
The praise from Kenya���s leading public figures make it easy to ignore the fact that Mbiti���s scholarly career was largely defined in Uganda, at Makerere University, where he was appointed lecturer in 1964, and where he taught until 1974. Thinking about John Mbiti as a Ugandan intellectual sheds light on the genealogy of his scholarship. It also helps us see how his scholarly preoccupations with tradition could also offer a theological justification for tyranny. In these days following Professor Mbiti���s passing, it is worth thinking through where the notion of ���African traditional religion��� came from, and where it leads, politically, and culturally.
At the time of his appointment at Makerere, Mbiti was already an accomplished writer, with a PhD from Cambridge University and an impressive scholarly and political network. He had published his first book, Mu��tu��nga na Ngewa Yake (Mutunga and his Story), in 1954; in 1955 he had published a kiKamba translation of Robert Louis Stevenson���s Treasure Island. These and other early works of translation gave Mbiti a vocation as a spokesman for African language and cultures. In 1959, he presented a paper���titled ���Reclaiming the Vernacular Literature of the Akamba tribe������at the Second Congress of Negro Writers and Artists in Rome, the most important trans-national collective of African, Caribbean, and African-American writers and artists at the time. The paper was later published in the negritude journal Pr��sence Africaine. A few months later he published, also in Pr��sence Africaine, an essay entitled ���Christianisme et religions indigenes au Kenya.���
The Makerere University that Mbiti joined in 1964 was full of creative, politically engaged scholars. At the center of all of this was Transition magazine, edited by Rajat Neogy with the assistance of the political scientist Ali Mazui, the Nigerian poet Christopher Okigbo, and others. There were short stories from the South African Bessie Head, essays from Nigerian Wole Soyinka, fiction from Brit Paul Theroux, and philosophy from Ugandan Okot p���Bitek. Makerere lecturers were regular contributors to Transition. Among them was Fred Welbourn, whose East African Rebels (1961) had powerfully argued for the political rationality of dissident Christian movements. Another contributor was Bethwell Ogot, who was at the time of Mbiti���s appointment revising the book that would be published as History of the Southern Luo (1967). Dozens of students taught by Ogot and other Makerere historians were engaged in the History of Uganda project, which involved the collection of oral histories from rural elders. All of these scholars were public figures, and all of them saw themselves as contributing toward the building of a specifically African university, furnished with a curriculum that responded to the priorities of the age.
Mbiti published two works in Transition during those years. His first, ���Masks of Fear,��� appeared in 1965. It is a poem whose paranoid protagonist is a ���solitary street traveler,��� afraid to cross the street, fearing death around every corner. His second poem, ���The Snake Song��� (1966), went as follows:
I have neither legs nor arms
But I walk on my belly
And I have
Venom, venom, venom!
I have neither bows nor guns
But I flash fast my tongue
And I have
Venon, venom, venom!
I have neither radar nor missiles
But I stare with my eyes
And I have
Venom, venom, venom!
There is a lovely creativity about these poems. Here Mbiti feels free to experiment, try on authorial voices that are not his own, invest unlikely characters with voice and meaning. It must have been a relief, as source of wonder and enjoyment at a time when so much serious work had to be done.
Professor Mbiti published his African Religions and Philosophies in 1969. The book was composed to fulfill Mbiti���s obligations to an academic discipline which was, under his stewardship, coming into view. Here there was no space for experimentation with literary voice. He wrote it as a course of lectures on African religions, the first of its kind in Makerere���s curriculum. The book laid out, in chapter after chapter, a systematic theology for African traditional religion. Their outward diversity notwithstanding, Mbiti argued, African religions shared an underlying structure: a veneration for the divine, a sacred sensibility, rituals, an awareness of evil, an account of creation. The book was a work of huge ambition, a powerful argument for the intellectual integrity of a religious system.
In his own time Mbiti���s account of traditional religion was subject to a scathing criticism from his colleague, the anthropologist and poet Okot p���Bitek, whose African Religions in Western Scholarship was published in 1970. Okot argued that Mbiti and other scholars had forced the changeable dynamics of African religious practice into the foreign categories of western theology. ���The African deities of the books, clothed with the attributes of the Christian God, are, in�� the main, creations of the students of African religions,��� he wrote. Mbiti must surely have known of Okot���s criticism, but he made no public response. The same year that Okot���s criticism was published Mbiti brought out his second book, Concepts of God in Africa. It was published for the Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge. For Mbiti it was essential that African religions be grasped systematically. In Kampala, he offered regular lectures to young priests-in-training on the subject of traditional religion and Christianity. His scholarly work was an aspect of his larger vocation: he was opening up paths of comparison and mutual dialogue between Christianity and African religions.
[image error]Pastors��� Conference, Makerere University, September 1971. Credit Uganda Broadcasting Corporation.
By January 1971���when General Idi Amin overthrew Milton Obote and became president of the Second Republic of Uganda���John Mbiti was Professor and Head of the Department of Religion. A scant two weeks after the coup President Amin���s secretary wrote to Mbiti to ask for his views on a new initiative: a new Ministry of Religious Affairs, with political and administrative powers over religious organizations. There were several questions for Mbiti to address: ���Do you seriously think that there is a need for such a Ministry?��� and ���What field of responsibility would the Ministry cover in relation to religious affairs?���
Mbiti was thrilled at the prospect. In the heady days immediately following Milton Obote���s overthrow there were throngs celebrating on the streets of Kampala, heralding Amin as a liberator. Were the chants echoing in his study as he composed his letter? In six-page typed pages he laid out, in numbered paragraphs, a series of justifications for government supervision over religious life. Uganda had known too much religious conflict, Mbiti wrote. ���Some of the conflicts took on political forms, others tribal, some even had backing from outside countries.��� The new ministry would reduce conflict between religions through ���reconciliation, mediation, or even the use of governmental powers.��� Moreover it would allow for easier coordination between different service agencies. While universities could enable dialogue in small-scale settings, ���the practical meaning of dialogue would best be achieved under governmental initiative, supervision, and encouragement.����� There were organizational reasons for the new bureaucracy, too: Mbiti hoped it might provide accountants for parishes struggling with their finances.
The most remarkable part of Professor Mbiti���s letter came under point 10, where he set out a theological rationale for Amin���s dictatorship. ���African traditional life does not have a vision between secular and sacred, between what is religious and what is not,��� he argued. ���The division of life into religious and secular compartments was imported into Africa from Europe��� under colonial government. Mbiti argued that:
��� this division has greatly undermined and ignored a basic African philosophy in which the universe in the whole of life are conceived religiously, and in which the spiritual realities and physical realities are only two dimensions of the same basic concept of existence.
Mbiti was cribbing from his scholarly writing. It is ���unnatural for African people to be made to live a divided life,��� he told Idi Amin���s secretary, ���and we have to safeguard against such a division.��� Europe and America had already paid the price for their secularism: the evidence could be seen in the ���rebellion of their young people against authority, tradition, and so on.���
Professor Mbiti was confident that Idi Amin���s government could mend the division between the sacred and the secular. The new Ministry of Religious Affairs would:
��� be a concrete symbol and expression of the basic African philosophy that the whole of life is a deeply religious experience. In setting up this ministry, Uganda would be reasserting a profoundly African heritage which our colonial past has eclipsed and in many ways undermined seriously.
���We are very fortunate in that our leaders are religious people, and Africans are not embarrassed about expressing their religious life in practical terms,��� he wrote. The new ministry was ���consistent with our heritage.���
In these heady days, that is where John Mbiti���s religious thought led him: toward an embrace of Amin���s dictatorship. Working from a theological position which asserted that African religions were���or ought to be���unified in their consonance with ancestral tradition, Mbiti saw in Idi Amin���s administration a vehicle by which to bring dissension, argument, and debate to an end. Here was an infrastructure for religious unification.
He could not have know that, in the years that followed, Idi Amin would make the project of religious unification into a brutal campaign against dissenters. In May 1971, a few months after Mbiti���s letter, Amin convened a week-long conference involving hundreds of Islamic, Catholic, and Anglican leaders. There were committees to discuss the problems facing each religion; each committee was chaired by a government minister. There was no space for Quakers, Pentecostals, or other non-conformist religious movements in Idi Amin���s conference hall. In the speech that opened the conference President Amin averred that
��� religion must be a source of togetherness ��� This government does not believe that any religion or religious organizations should tolerate any tendencies that bring about ��� disunity among people who profess the same religion.
In 1975 Idi Amin���s government outlawed dozens of religious denominations���the Pentecostal Assemblies of God, the Jehovah���s Witnesses, the Seventh-Day Adventists, the Bahais, the African Israel Church and many others���as dangerous to peace and order. Their buildings were seized by government; their archives were destroyed; and some of their leaders were executed by Amin���s men.
In those vexed and dangerous times a great many intellectuals fled Uganda, seeking refuge in other places. In October 1972 Frank Kalimuzo, the Vice-Chancellor of Makerere University, was seized by Amin���s men and murdered. Ali Mazrui fled to my institution, the University of Michigan, where he was to become a leading interpreter of African and African-American history. John Mbiti remained at his post in Makerere even as the institution folded around him. In 1971 he published New Testament Eschatology in an African Background, and in the years that followed he brought out several other works: translations of African Religions and Philosophies in French and German; an edition of his inaugural lecture; a book about prayer and African religion.
In 1973 Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi visited Uganda, and before an audience at Makerere University he offered to furnish Idi Amin with funds to effect the transformation of Uganda into an Islamic country. In response Professor Mbiti delivered a sermon to a packed audience at Makerere���s chapel. ���Christianity and Africa have fallen in love with each other, and intend to live in bonds of a lifelong marriage,��� he said. ���Christianity is here to stay.��� It was an act of great courage. A few months later Professor Mbiti���doubtless fearing for his life���fled Uganda and took up the directorship of the Ecumenical Institute in Geneva where he was to spend the remainder of his life.
The first essay that Professor Mbiti wrote after coming to Geneva, titled ���The Future of Christianity in Africa,��� was sunnily optimistic about the future of African Christianity: against pessimistic predictions that Christianity would die with the end of colonialism, Mbiti highlighted how quickly the faith was growing. African religion, Mbiti argued, had prepared the ground for Christianity, ensuring its rapid spread. Mbiti did not write about the dangers that he had personally faced as one of the leading spokesmen for Uganda���s Christianity. Neither did he write about Janani Luwum, Bishop of Uganda, who had been murdered by Amin���s men the year before ���The Future of Christianity in Africa��� was published. The African religion about which Mbiti wrote was an abstraction, a set of principles and dogmas that were disconnected from the real world of conflict and terror.
How ought we remember John Mbiti? He was one of the architects of the curriculum of multiculturalism. Working from Kampala, he helped to define a whole world of ritual and thought. It is right that he should be honored and celebrated, for his work greatly enabled a more respectful, more sympathetic, and more systematic engagement between religious traditions.
And yet, in our own time, it is important to remember how quickly calls for cultural integrity can become engines for nativism and intolerance. From his lecture hall at Makerere John Mbiti conjured up a religious order in which people fit seamlessly into a theological system that governed their thought and dictated their dispositions. Mbiti���s view of African religious life���as integrated, whole, and all-embracing���made non-conformists seem to be opponents of good order. His scholarly work converged with the Amin regime���s bloody efforts to root out dissenters, target minorities, and impose political conformity on Uganda���s people.
The poverty of poor economics
Farmer���s Assembly in Mumias, Western Kenya. Image credit Michael Brander for ETH Zurich via SNSF Flickr CC.
This past Monday, the Swedish Academy of Sciences awarded the ���Nobel Prize��� in economics to Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo and Michael Kremer for ���their experimental approach to alleviating global poverty.��� The prize in economics is not one of the original prizes endowed by Swedish armaments manufacturer Alfred Nobel. It was established in 1969 as a tag along and is endowed by the Bank of Sweden.
Banerjee and Duflo teach at MIT while Kremer is at Harvard. The trio have been at the forefront of pushing the use of randomized control trials (RCTs) in the sub-discipline of economics known as development economics. And partly as the result of their efforts, an ecosystem has developed in which the vampire squids with tentacles of influence across the globe are the ���poverty action lab��� JPAL, 3ie, and the World Bank���s development impact evaluation group (DIME). The main idea behind their work is that RCTs allow us to know what works and doesn���t work in development because of its ���experimental��� approach. RCTs are most well-known for their use in medicine and involve the random assignment of interventions into ���treatment��� and ���control��� groups. And just like in medicine, so the argument goes, RCTs allow us to know which development pill to swallow because of the rigor associated with the experimental approach. Banerjee and Duflo popularized their work in a 2011 book Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way to Fight Global Poverty.
Even though other Nobel prize awards often attract public controversy (peace and literature come to mind), the economics prize has largely flown under the radar with prize announcements often met with the same shrugging of the shoulders as, for example, the chemistry prize. This year has however been different (and so was the year that Milton Friedman, that high priest of neoliberalism, won).
A broad section of commentary, particularly from the Global South, has puzzled over the Committee���s decision to not only reward an approach that many consider as suffering from serious ethical and methodological problems, but also extol its virtues and supposed benefits for poor people.
Many of the trio���s RCTs have been performed on black and brown people in poor parts of the world. And here, serious ethical and moral questions have been raised particularly about the types of experiments that the randomistas, as they are colloquially known, have been allowed to perform. In one study in western Kenya, which is one-half of the epicenter of this kind of experimentation, randomistas deliberately gave some villages more money and others less money to check if villages receiving less would become envious of those receiving more. The study���s authors, without any sense of shame, titled their paper ���Is Your Gain My Pain?��� In another study in India, the other half of the epicenter, researchers installed intrusive cameras in class rooms to police teacher attendance (this study was actually favorably mentioned by the Swedish Academy). There are some superficial rationalizations for this sort of thing, but studies of this kind���and there are many���would never have seen the light of day had the experimental subjects been rich Westerners.
There are also concerns around the extractive nature of the RCT enterprise. To execute these interventions, randomistas rely on massive teams of local assistants (local academics, students, community workers, etcetera) who often make non-trivial contributions to the projects. Similarly, those to be studied (the poor villagers) lend their incalculable emotional labor to these projects (it is often unclear whether they have been adequately consulted or if the randomistas have simply struck deals with local officials). The villagers are the ones that have to deal with all the community-level disruptions that the randomistas introduce and then leave behind once they���ve gone back to their cushy lives in the US and Europe.
And while there is an increasing amount of posturing to compensate for this exploitation, with some researchers gushing about how they and their ���native assistants��� are bosom buddies, the payoffs of the projects (lucrative career advancement, fame, speaking gigs, etcetera) only ever accrue to the randomistas and randomistas alone. The extreme case is obviously this week���s award.
Beyond the ethics of the Nobel winners, their disciples, and the institutions they have created in their image are two serious methodological problems that fundamentally undermine their findings.
The first is that the vast majority of studies conducted using these methods (our rough guess is more than 90%)��have no formal basis for generalization. In other words, there is no basis to believe that the findings of these studies can be applied beyond the narrow confines of the population on which the experiments are undertaken. This is simply fatal for policy purposes.
The prize giving committee addresses this only in passing by saying that ���the laureates have also been at the forefront of research on the issue of [whether experimental results apply in other contexts].��� This is misleading at best and false at worst. There are some advocates of randomised trials who have done important research on the problem, but the majority of key contributions are not by advocates of randomised trials and the three awardees have been marginal contributors. The more important point is simply that if the problem of whether experimental results are relevant outside the experiment has not been resolved, how can it be claimed that the trio���s work is ���reducing world poverty?”
The second contradiction is more widely understood: despite the gushing headlines in the Western press, there is simply no evidence that policy based on randomized trials is better than alternatives. Countries that are now developed did not need foreign researchers running experiments on local poor people to grow their economies. There is ample historical evidence that growth, development and dramatic reductions in poverty can be achieved without randomised trials. Randomistas claim that their methods are the holy grail of development yet they have not presented any serious arguments to show why theirs is the appropriate response. Instead, the case that such methods are crucial for policy is largely taken for granted by them because they think they are doing ���science.�����But while they are certainly imitating what researchers in various scientific disciplines do, the claim that the results are as reliable and useful for economic and social questions is unsupported. It is instead a matter of blind faith���as with the conviction many such individuals appear to have of a calling to save the poor, usually black and brown, masses of the world.
We do not have a view on whether these individuals ought to have been awarded the prize���prizes are usually somewhat dubious in their arbitrariness and historical contingency. But the claims made about the usefulness and credibility of the methods employed are concerning, both because they are unfounded and because they inform a missionary complex that we believe is more of a threat to the progress of developing countries than it is an aid.
October 16, 2019
The voice of the Republic’s forgotten
Still from "BACK UP!"
For observers of the endless examples of racism in the United States legal system, the month of October began with surprising news. Amber Guyger, the white Dallas police officer who shot and killed Botham Jean, her black neighbor, in his living room, was found guilty of murder.�� Across the Atlantic, another family member of a slain black man also began the month in a courtroom. Assa Traor��, whose brother, Adama Traor��, died in 2016 in police custody under suspicious circumstances, stood in a French courtroom on the same day that Guyger was convicted in Dallas. Unlike Guyger, there were no hugs or tears for Traor��. Instead, Traor�� was the defendant in a defamation suit for naming in a Facebook post the three police officers involved in her brother���s arrest on his 24th birthday, the arrest that led to Adama���s death in a holding cell.
Still in France, but some 6,000 kilometers and an ocean away from Paris, police brutality is not a particularly hot button issue in Martinique. Instead, on this overseas French island, the long-running scandal is the poisoning of agricultural land and water sources with the American-manufactured insecticide chlordecone, nearly 20 years after the French government banned its use in the metropole. The fact that the French state did not take the same measures to safeguard the health of its citizens in the Caribbean, but instead allowed the continued use of a chemical deemed too toxic for the rest of France, means that the chlordecone scandal, like Adama Traor�����s death, is very much about French racial discrimination that has its roots in the country���s imperial past.
With the US as the site of production, France as the seat of power and Martinique on the receiving end of destructive policies that are economically expedient for the predominantly white banana plantation owners, chlordecone unites three disparate places that are rarely spoken of in the same breath. Indeed, not many people connect police brutality in the French capital to an environmental disaster that has given the small Caribbean island the dubious distinction of having the highest rate of prostate cancer in the world. Connecting those dots is at the heart of the new film “BACK UP!” by Christophe Gros-Dubois.
“BACK UP!” is a low-budget film that makes lofty promises. It delivers on some. The story revolves around an underground group of investigative journalists who style themselves ���the voice of the Republic���s forgotten.��� Their mission is to uncover the hidden truth behind acts of state violence. At the start of the film, that violence comes in the form of the police killing of Sami Adibi, a young French man of Tunisian origin. The police have no answers, only the well-rehearsed narratives that criminalize the dead man.
Still from “BACK UP!”The four journalists of Back Up turn to social media to diffuse their counternarrative. Professor X pontificates on camera. Hakim Tafer, the ostensible leader, meets with an American investor who can ���take Back Up to the next level.��� The group���s only white journalist bears that most quintessential of French names, Fran��ois, and sees his work behind the camera as a steppingstone to a more stable gig at a mainstream media outlet. The only woman, La Rageuse, is also the only person who does any investigating. Her task is to connect Adibi���s death to historical examples of state violence, specifically the disappearance of Georges Beltran, a Martinican activist in Paris, in the 1990s. Amidst a flurry of likes, livestreamed chats and debates about how to maintain a steady flow of faithful online followers, the conflict among the underground journalists reveals the complicated mess that the neat descriptor of ���speaking truth to power��� seeks to encapsulate.
Expertly played by Astrid Bayiha, La Rageuse is at once the film���s flaw and redeeming quality. Hers is a compelling character. She is angry. We know that it is a justified, righteous anger. But we do not know the reason for it. In fact, we never learn her real name. For all its self-reflexiveness on the fine line between the radical politics of sousveillance and the self-aggrandizing desires of activist-influencers, the film is remarkably shortsighted in its rendering of La Rageuse as yet another angry black woman with no backstory.
Despite the film���s shortsighted representation, La Rageuse is also the only one who sees that Back Up���s insistence on access to the Adibi family���s grief ���for the cause��� borders on the exploitative. She questions the ways that the underground nature of the group���s work will be changed by American investment backing. In a film peppered with heavy-handed monologues about the illegitimacy of state violence, La Rageuse is the voice of nuance. On one occasion when a security guard ejects her from the grounds of a company she is investigating, she throws a tampon in his face as a metaphorical middle finger. Ultimately, she is the only person who connects Martinique���s white plantation owners and French police as complementary agents of state violence via economic repression and brutal force respectively.
Police brutality and the chlordecone scandal come together in the film as the Janus-faced representation of the French state, terrifying on both sides. The shaky movements of the handheld camera simulate the clandestine smartphone recordings that the Back Up team marshal as evidence in the court of public opinion. They invite the viewer to consider the promises and limits of body cameras and bystander footage as tools for destabilizing state power. Juxtaposed with the grainy images of the VHS tape of the disappeared Martinican activist, Georges Beltran, they also invite the viewer to connect past to present, environmental crimes in the French Caribbean to racism in the French capital.
���BACK UP!” offers no answers, even as it clumsily attempts a neat resolution at the end of the film. But it is the start of an important conversation about the truly global net cast by imperialism then and now.
October 15, 2019
“Converting Eviction”
The first showing of ��Converting Eviction��, May 30, 2019, at The Centre for the Less Good Idea, Johannesburg. Performers: Christoph Rath, Hlengiwe Madlala. Picture: Zivanai Matangi.
More than most people can imagine, Switzerland���s history is closely aligned with South Africa’s. During apartheid, the Swiss government was ���neutral��� towards the Swiss corporations and banks’s involvement with the racist regime. The enterprises just “did business”���never politics. This of course was just the public pretense. Behind the curtains, the Swiss government supported relations with the apartheid system, for financial, racist and���allegedly���anti-communist reasons. To give just one example, from 1958 until the end of apartheid, the Swiss government and the apartheid regime worked together to relocate companies such as UBS Bank (formerly known as SBG) to South Africa, in case of nuclear attacks or political unrest in Europe.
���Political neutrality��� (more on that later), is one of the themes of Converting Eviction, a performance-project and a transnational collaboration between the Johannesburg-based collective Ntsoana and KMUProduktionen from Zurich, Switzerland. Within a trans-national framework, together we try to reflect upon the history of exploitation, property and��eviction of people out of their living conditions.
Some of our starting points were: The actual threat of evictions resulting from the Xolobeni mining project in the Wild Coast region; the movement to reclaim the recently discovered remains of the Kweneng Kingdom; Swiss-South African relations during apartheid; the attempts by the Jubilee 2000 movement for cancellation of apartheid debt; and the Khulumani Support Group���s work to hold to account 28 companies and banks that profited from dealing with the racist apartheid regime.
As we approach the following questions, we are strongly aware of our respective positions: That of Swiss-based cultural workers, struggling for some kind of global solidarity while still profiting from involvements into a colonial past and a strong neo-colonial, neoliberal present. And, that of African artists, who reflect upon self-images shattered by apartheid, while re-constructing new futures.
Nomarussia Bonase from Khulumani Support Group.In our conversations as Converting Eviction, here are some of the questions we���ve asked and reflected upon:
What political and economic structures lead to people being evicted?
Wealth:��Wealth should not be material accumulation, but rather ���wealth in people.��� Housing is wealth from and for people.
Naturalized Economy:��Evictions are enabled when capitalist economy is defined as ���neutral,��� rather than anti-social. Such an economy attempts to turn every human relation and all basic needs–be they water, housing, emotions or friendship–into quantifiable and extractable commodities.�� Through this process, capitalist economy has been split from collective living, culture and politics, and thus is conceived as ���neutral by nature.”
As Felwine Sarr puts it: In African societies, the economy used to be embedded into a broader social system. It is no longer like that. To anchor the economy in society again, African societies could reconnect to relational economy; that is ���including the whole palette of positive and negative relations, that individuals build up, produce, exchange, or perpetuate���independently from material considerations or pure material interest.��� So called ���informal economy�����would also be an important part of that relational economy, even though contested from the point of view of ���good government��� and not considered if it comes to estimate the gross national product of a country.
Political neutrality:��Again, with Sarr, such economical abstractions have been the very motive of colonialism for ages. They were meant to dehumanize black workers, render their landscapes into extractive economies and universalize the Global North/western concept of the human being. African societies were framed as needy and inferior. In combination with the physical eviction of people out of their ancestral and legitimate spaces, the eviction of colonized people out of their cultural realm was a necessary and horrible stepping stone towards the extraction of wealth.
These structures persist until today, spatially and mentally. They have been reinstalled by neoliberal concepts, that, again, pretend the economy would be ���neutral��� or ���natural.��� The colonial scheme has shifted to ���no alternative��to neoliberalism������exploiting black labour while wielding the threat of violence, as shown by the horror of the Marikana-massacre and workers dying in Swiss-based Glencore���s mines every year.
Emptiness:��Switzerland participated in upholding the apartheid-idea of South Africa as an empty and basically white country. The relocation of bank head offices���a dislocation-agreement between Switzerland and South Africa���was conceived directly after the Sharpeville massacre, and at a time in which, cynically, international investment to South Africa grew from all sides. In the eyes of the investors, it seemed, the apartheid-state had violently proven its will to keep cheap black labour under control.
It was crucial that apartheid did this not only on its own terms, but with international support and esteem. Nowadays, it���s poverty and the lack of education, which are used to discriminate against people, force them into underpaid jobs, and move them out of areas that are claimed by the rich and so called knowing�������who are, historically, still white. As long as the education-system is not changed radically, such discrimination along racial lines will stay in place.
Performer: Hlengivwe Madlala. Image: Zivanai Matangi.What are the minimum appropriate conditions needed to make a home for oneself and one���s family?
Colonial phantasmagorias:��If we speculate about what ���standards of living��� means, the structural global injustice becomes obvious. Too often conceptions of ���liveable life��� are compared with the north/western standards of the colonizers���including��the ideas of success, self-realization, or how a family should look. These phantasmagorical visions are omnipresent and very much still responsible for wrong approaches not only in the former colonized countries, but in the Global North/west as well. As these phantasmagorias of wealth grew themselves on colonial land-taking and exploitation, specifically in the USA, they were wrong from the beginning. The US-American standard of each family living in a house of their own, owning two cars, following heteronormative gender- and job-relations��was enabled only by huge amounts of violence against indigenous people, enslaved black workers and nature. Now why should these ideas still be exported globally, to solve housing problems on the African continent? To conceive houses for a core-family of father, mother and two kids?
Ubuntu, again:��Together with the reestablishment of a relational economy, relational family- and social-structures, a broader understanding of human networks through friendship, solidarity and migration should be reconsidered. To enable such networks that produce sustainable living conditions for every human being, idea of shared properties, ubuntu, cooperatives and transnational communes have to be picked up and improved. Private property has to be overcome.
Performers: Lukas Piccolin and Vivien Bullert interviewing audience members. Image: Zivanai Matangi.What are the traumas of the past that are restricting people?
Recognition:��As long as there is no recognition of all the harm done by white colonialists, the trauma of violence and eviction will remain. After so many perpetrators got away unpunished through the process of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa, it���s time to re-evaluate the crimes committed,��on the physical level as well as on psychological, cultural and material ones.
Economically, the colonial north/west is afraid of making any confession. The South African Khulumani Support Group wanted to hold 28 international corporations and banks to account in a New York court, for trading with and thus supporting apartheid. The case was lost, in 2014.
Silenced history:��If corporations would have been sued for their profit making with Apartheid,��and such a precedent could have been made, the opportunities for other de-colonizing countries to do the same would have risen enormously. A big threat for colonial profiteers! That���s why Switzerland, obstructed its own official research: The very executive, the ���Bundesrat,��� which ordered the research project into the Swiss-South African relations from 1948���1994 (the so called NFP42+ ��� National Funds Project 42+, from 2001���2004), decided to close all relevant documents in the Federal Archives regarding the Swiss-South African relations, as soon as the historians started their research. This silencing is no approach to historical harm, but on the contrary trauma-extension.
What is the agency that people have to convert hostile environments in a way that suits them?
Voicing Involvements:��We could research and document experiences of witnesses, digging into our personal relations, and make them speak. Everybody should have a very close look into his or her or their involvements into any kind of racist policies. Only then can our societies start redefining themselves, by changing the passive role of the victim into an active one, and unlocking the perpetrators��� silent aggression. And only then, can we find ways for perpetrators who profited on a very abstract or structural economical level from racism and colonialism to pay back what they took.
Deviant Narrations: The legitimation for eviction lies in ways of ���narrating space,��� i.e. naturalized narratives about what belongs to whom and why, and then embedding these stories into a legal framework. Therefore, we have to start telling new stories and produce counter-narratives that enable a redistribution of resources, which are no longer solely based on the idea of private property.
Performers: Hlengiwe Madlada, Vivien Bullert. Image: Zivanai Matangi.Ghosts:��The countries that suffered and still suffer from colonial exploitation need the opportunities and means to re-center their understanding of themselves. These decolonizing countries offer crucial insight into rethinking the concepts inherited from colonialism, and to confront them with their ancestral economic and social ideas���ideas that are older than liberalism or neoliberalism.
These ghost-like social relations need to be reactivated to confront nowadays��� neoliberal exploitation of the world���s wealth. One important step will be to question the form of the nation-state itself. We have to bring up new concepts of migration, and understand how it is weaving peoples and families together, creating places, housing opportunities and alliances beyond nationality, as social theorist Achille Mbembe insists. On a small-scale level, it will be all about sharing-economies and sharing the legal and economic knowledge that allows us to create small cells of collective wealth.
‘Converting Eviction‘ is co-directed with Sello Pesa, performance artist and choreographer from Soweto.
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