Sean Jacobs's Blog, page 203
September 23, 2019
Are you really Global apartheid?
Airport. Image credit Jacky CZJ via Flickr CC.
The fascinating dimensions of the oft-repeated idea and much endorsed dictum of our day, ���Global,��� allude to the almost warm, fuzzy feeling of human fraternity in ���progress��� alongside the many wonders of the age of digitalis.
This begs the question; Are we all Global, or are just some of us Global?
A few ���others��� are more Global than most. They are the shifting mixed populations in search of the ideal Hollyweird-induced gold standard of the nation or republic, with the transparent and very much talked about old, and almost sacred, constitution. The kind of nation that spills a dream of Democracy, Peace, and Harmony over all of Wo/mankind. So says cablevision. Versus a group of folks who live in a world where deference is accorded them anywhere, everywhere (if not white, white passport will do). The rich and powerful in places of the Global South embrace the mantra/motto with an almost tranquilizing exuberance. (Them and their brood who later visit us in a giant blowback of afropolitan-chic, multilingual [Euro] eloquence���ease with western capitals, several dwellings, flamboyant scarfs, passports to match.)
Globals can wake up in the middle of the night and catch a bus to the airport in, say, New York, passport in hand. Ticket bought online, leave to go to any place in the world without much preparation. They wait not in long lines, and don���t pay a tear-jerking 100 pounds or dollars, for a fleeting chance to be a resident in the shadows, to acquire the status in a local (back home) paper’s obituary:
The deceased is also a cousin of John K. Karanga of Baltimore, MD.
So and so of the United States gets listed along with the deceased relative���who in their death is bolstered in status from the largess of the foreign domicile���perhaps Maryland is heaven.
The process of traveling, for an African of even above average means, is produced through vigilant anticipation. For the Global in spirit, it means months of preparation. The already wealthy country pilfers the poor further by a staunch no-refund policy. It seems they are saying, “we will punish you for even thinking about that Hollywood dream.” The line-dwellers and Globals, in tragic spirit, understand it to be like an old John Wayne feature���all is FAIR and Square, white horse riding off into the sunset (with visa). Alas, the applicants are at times happy to have entertained the thought and still dream of a touch down.
In this apartheid Global system, I include myself���a shadow man for some years, accorded the privilege to come home both ways, yet oftentimes disputed by African officials aghast at my audacity to wander around with a Somali passport and an American residency permit. On many occasions, I have had the door close to being shut, the plane about to take off���my Somali Globalness suspicious and even scandalous. I hear the echoes of my African Global South compadres who threw parties to celebrate acquiring a US passport.
I am thinking those close calls were too too many. Heck I may throw a party to herald uninterrupted sojourns. However, I hear from Somalis who have had these celebrations that it doesn���t matter what passport you hold. Being Somali elicits digressions from even this seeming place of gold-standard bliss. Look for stoppages, lots of hours waiting (head shaking in disbelief, overqualified-Nigerian for company! Sequestered Somali/Nigerian pan-African unity) in silence undergoing the exercise of ���just how much disdain I can show you��� (by fellow African authorities). Random returns may follow, or even a visit from the local white airport official���usually a low budget version of yesteryear���s Tom Cruise, the not so subtle air of surveillance dark glasses resting on the low cropped (blond/brown) buzz.
Thus the Global world is more like an apartheid ���village������security everywhere, hotels, buses, restaurants in Mogadishu, Mombasa, Addis, Hargeisa, New York, Nairobi, all of these places I set my foot in are ���secure��� with what I guess is a new opportunity to solve unemployment along with gender inequity all in one (men and women who frisk you every time and everywhere on this giant airport we call Earth).
I already see translations of this securitization as a symptom of growth, a very ���sustainable��� factor in #Africarising���s glib proclamations, of the Next Big Power. This is through the wand-waving (metal detectors) minions employed in every country. All spaces are state/police spaces now too. To see how the world was before 911, I suggest you go to a wildlife game reserve. Here you will find a semblance of this bygone era.
September 22, 2019
Love in the time of war
Still from film Akasha. Credit Big World Cinema.
The director Hajooj Kuka���s first feature film,��Akasha, is a war-time romantic comedy that blurs the boundaries between soldier and civilian, rebel and authoritarian, man and woman, reality and fantasy. It forces us to grapple with the farce of war���s everyday life, even in the hands of revolutionary fighters battling an ever-present and ever-violent state power. Set in Sudan, the film offers no definite marker for either geography or time period. With his first two documentary films in mind, Beats of the Antonov (2014) and Darfur���s Skeleton (2009), set in Sudan���s Blue Nile and Darfur regions respectively; one could surmise that Akasha is at once offering a panoramic view of Sudan���s war-ravaged peripheries as well as a specific look at the ongoing rebellion of the SPLM-North (Sudan People���s Liberation Movement-North) against the repressive tactics of the ruling NCP (National Congress Party).
The story of Akasha centers on an ambivalent soldier, Adnan, and his relationship to the room of its female lead, Lina. Adnan betrays the boundaries of the typical individualistic protagonist as magic and spirituality guide him toward friendship rather than toward redemption through demonstrations of militaristic courage. When we meet Adnan, his tenderness is evident in the gratitude and respect he shows for Nancy using only a blue tin of Nivea moisturizer. Within Lina���s room, we first encounter the love story between both she and Adnan, as well as between Adnan and Nancy. Shaped by both love and loss, these relationships help shape the film���s story of war’s emotional life. We glimpse the main wall of Lina���s room lined with images of bespectacled, black turtle-neck wearing, Afro-crowned figures that evoke veneration for the revolutionary leaders from the movements of the 1960s and 1970s throughout the global African world. We hear Adnan share his feelings for Lina, his aspirational vision of their future together in Khartoum, and the significant role Nancy has played in his life as a soldier accompanying him on the frontline of their revolutionary war. Lina���s room is a warm, inviting, and pristine place around which the main characters of the film orbit as they make sense of their roles as soldiers in a war that means little to them.
The film introduces the broader context of village life with rebel commanders hassling young men who have apparently defected from their military service and are attempting to lead lives beyond the realm of war. As we see the young men grasping for answers to the tirelessly repetitive and frivolous interrogations, young women pass by balancing water-filled jerry-cans on their heads as village life of course continues amidst the violence. The hum of the rebel Land Cruisers resonates with the booming whine of menacing government aircraft that signal those on the ground to duck-and-cover within nearby rock formations. The resonances between the vehicles of rebels and their state adversaries challenge us to confront the farce of categorical distinctions between warring parties. We discover that Adnan is himself a military hero, having downed an unmanned drone with a single shot. His reputation both precedes him and weighs heavily on his shoulders as he navigates love, friendship, and freedom.
Still from film Akasha. Credit Big World Cinema.Adnan eventually finds himself linked to an unlikely friend, Absi, an extremely creative personality, who carries his own vision of a broader and more mobile world that connects him with Nairobi, and an urban experience of chocolate and ice-cream eating luxury. Such visions, both real and imaginative, transform soldiers into civilians who direct both their guns and aspirations toward the sky so as not to participate in the taking of more human life.��Absi promises to help him recover a lost item in Lina���s room. Much of the film���s comedy centers on a series of foiled attempts to accomplish this simple task. Their most notable scheme requires that they play with normative gendered behavior in an attempt to disguise themselves and enter Lina���s family compound without suspicion. Despite their numerous failed attempts, Absi nevertheless remains committed to the task in an earnest effort to support Adnan. They carve out and discover unlikely opportunities for autonomy and happiness, while they evade the expectations of the roving rebel soldiers with apparently little else to do than chase the two of them.
The persistent chase that both pulls them toward and pushes them both away from Lina���s room, and the lost item in it, is fundamentally harnessed, not simply to the expectations of a soldier���s wartime responsibility, but also to the mundane companionship that enables one to endure the banality of active duty. The elements of this banality, pieces on a chess board, appear in striking relief during Adnan���s formative and visionary epiphany in which he confronts his mistakes, his fears, and how he too has capitalized on the farce of war to enjoy an overinflated reputation.
This film is of course important for its contribution to a broader awareness of the everyday life of war in Sudan, particularly in the aftermath of its recent profound political transitions and the end of era guided by Omar al-Bashir. It also provides an extremely important perspective on the contours of masculinity, reminding one of both the ambivalent would-be freedom fighters of Hany Abu-Assad���s Paradise Now (2005), as well as the fool-hardy vengeance of the male-lead in Abderrahmane Sissako���s Timbuktu (2014). Hajooj Kuka���s Akasha undresses masculinity to reveal its anxieties and hopes as well as the possibilities for its fundamental reorientation to love and the emotional life of the men harnessed to it.
September 21, 2019
The beautyful ones
Bulawayo Street Life, Zimbabwe. Image credit Julien Lagarde via Flickr (CC).
Bhasop! Handidi kukurova. Ndikakurova, ndinokuuraya. Saka, bhasop. [Beware! I would rather not strike you. Because, violence entails death. So, beware.]
That was my father���s refrain when I was naughty. And I was a curious and hyperactive child. So, I received a lot of warnings. I was in grade two when it escalated. My father gave me a single 20 cent coin for daily pocket money.��Always. It felt like a fortune. Until, I discovered that I could have much more, from a pile that was on my parents��� dresser. More precisely, I could take more. Without permission.
Hearing the unmistakable clank as I skipped to open the gate for him to drive me to school that morning, he addressed me by my full name. Andriata, come here. I knew then, kuti nyaya yacho yakora. Empty your pockets. There, in my tiny hands, lay more than 2 dollars-worth of 20 cent coins. Red hands.
Ndakarohwa ndikazvirega. For that was the goal. Kuzvirega. Today, more than 30 years later, I remember his exact words. Handina mwana mbavha. No child of mine will be a thief.
Methodical and calculated strikes to my young and supple buttocks. Never again. Bhasop. I wept. The first and last time he ever struck me.
Mugabe has died. Nematambudziko. The funny thing about death is that no matter how much you expect it, or how much you know that it���s coming, it is always jarring. Surprising, somewhat.
Consciously, I was indifferent. But, underneath. Beneath the day-to-day reality of daycare runs, chores and adult responsibilities, I writhed. Amidst the depths of undecipherable emotions.
My father died a year before I left Zimbabwe. I miss him when I am sad. I miss him when I strive. He never used to say much. But when he did speak, gosh. And on the rare occasions he laughed, it was loud and gregarious. Hearty.
Much of what we learned about his war days came through the interventions of senior family members and comrades who visited him toward his final days.
Has your father ever told you about the time he spent weeks in the ���pit��� for talking back at the muguard jeri?
Dozer, have you told your kids about the time we swam across the Zambezi?
Through others, I learned tidbits about his and some of his siblings��� activities in the Second Chimurenga. In the war of liberation.
About Moscow.
About how, as a ZIPRA cadre and political commissar, he had been lured from his base in Zambia to the interior, and ���sold out��� to Rhodesian agents. Of his subsequent near decade-long detention in a maximum-security prison, on treason charges. With occasional stints in the ���pit.��� Solitary confinement. Torture.
And, what about Shonga���s detention and interrogation at Matapi cells in Salisbury, together with her oldest daughter, Ever? To account for the whereabouts and intentions of her three sons: Arnold, Robson, and Hudson. Has he told you that story, at least? Asi mdhara, chii nhai?
Part of the disenfranchised and dispossessed black multitudes packed in the crowded and dusty townships of colonial Rhodesia, all three boys had vanished from Mbare or Neshinari, as it was known to the Africans. One by one, in that order.
They left the ���comfort��� of the tiny two-roomed house they shared with their parents and six other siblings on Vito Street, presumed by both family and state security to have joined the liberation struggle. Correctly so.
About Chiutsi, the second-oldest son, who did not make it back from the war? Nicknamed ���Smoky��� for the intensity of his dark, dark skin. Disappeared into thin air. Like smoke. Who knows, perhaps his remains lie in a mine shaft. Somewhere. (On page 80 of his autobiography, The Struggle Continues: 50 years of tyranny in Zimbabwe, David Coltart, a white Zimbabwean and current high-ranking official in the opposition MDC-Alliance opposition party, narrates his role as a Rhodesian security officer while serving with the British South Africa Police (BSAP) during the Second Chimurenga war. During this time, he partook, together with his subordinates, in the disposal of a dead black guerilla fighter���s body down a mine shaft, a practice he acknowledges as prevalent.)
About how Arnold met my mom. And vice versa. She, a younger and beautiful trainee nurse at Gwelo hospital. He, a strapping and bearded gandanga sent to the hospital under heavy guard, for near-fatal appendicitis. The audacity of love, huh?
Why, why haven���t you asked him?
I did not know how to, you see. Bhasop. He was my father. My protector. Disciplinarian. Sa Chironda.
The man whose incessant coughs helped me feel safe in the darkest of nights. No vampires could sweep and steal me away. For my blood. My Daddy would never let that happen. You see, he hardly slept. Whenever I turned and woke, I could hear him cough. A sound that tore through the night and his chest. And the reassuring whiff of his cigarette smoke as it drifted through the cracks of my bedroom door. Emphysema. Madison 20, always. His blood. For mine.
Representing Chaminuka house, I came first in my high school���s public speaking and earned, together with my Mzilikazi runner-up, the principal���s dispatch to the Zimbabwe National Students Union (ZINASU) inaugural conference held at the University of Zimbabwe (UZ) in 1997.
The houses of Chitepo and Tongogara did not cross the finish line.
Student leaders from the UZ, Harare���s Polytechnic and the National University of Science and Technology had decided to include high-school representatives at ZINASU���s inaugural conference.
There, I saw Tinomudaishe Chinyoka, former UZ student leader. Way before my time at Dadaya mission, in 1990, he had been one of the leaders who spearheaded the student strikes that led to an intervention by the Zimbabwean National Army.
Something that started as unrest over the bad food served in the dining hall had become much bigger. A student march to Zvishavane demanded an end to corruption writ-large. We, who came later, remembered the students who had marched as legends. Who, in standing up to local injustice, joined a long line of nationalist and historical figures who had also walked and rattled the hallways of Dadaya.
The preceding Dadaya student strike of 1947 had begun on the basis of something just as seemingly innocuous. It was a ���protest against the whip; that most conspicuous symbol of European rule throughout colonial Africa [and] female students angered at being spanked responded with a class boycott.��� The student strike led then principal of Dadaya, Garfield Todd, to fire the alleged instigators, including a teacher by the name of Ndabaningi Sithole.
It was at Dadaya where Sithole met Robert Mugabe, who taught there briefly after completing his teacher training in 1945.�� In post-independent Zimbabwe, Todd became more esteemed than Sithole and emerged to criticize the government for its heavy-handed response to the 1990 student strike.
I mustered the courage to introduce myself. He was courteous and encouraging. Be involved, my sister, he said. I was tongue-tied.
And there, I heard the likes of Brian Kagoro. Eloquent and substantive talk about the necessity of constitutional reform and the potential role of students and civil society in bringing that to bear.
I saw and heard many, many others. Many who debated, with great passion and abandon, the politics and future of our country. Our home. Be involved. I was sold.
What a time to be alive. To be young. Unbridled. Or so I thought.
Emboldened by these encounters, during my final year of high school, I sought an audience with Cephas Msipa, then Chairperson of the Governing Board, to petition against corruption and mismanagement of school affairs. One principal grievance pertained to the suspension of three senior ���A��� Level teachers on the critical eve of preparing for our final examinations. Their alleged crime – inciting student unrest.
After the student strikes of 1990 and the ensuing violence and destruction of property, the school administration had become uneasy. And paranoid.
Plans to meet the Chair had been discussed and finalized with my History classmates in Upper Six Arts. We would all meet in front of the administration building at the crack of dawn and board the 6 am school truck into Zvishavane. But alas, none of my comrades appeared for our planned rendezvous. So much for the fervor and unison of our chants during Saturday ���disco nights���. That no matter what, we would always be Iron like a Lion, in Zion!
Caught between crippling fear and my general disdain for unfinished business, the latter triumphed. I went alone. Ndakatsvinda. Spick and span in my crisply ironed school uniform – bottle green pleats, white shirt and blazer.
I received a two-week suspension and was sent back home with a letter. For my parents. Insubordination. Bhasop.
Politics is a dangerous game mwanangu, he said to me. You do not know what they can do to you. To sabotage your future. Focus on your studies and upcoming exams first. But I also noticed something else. A faint smile of pride on his face. Fleeting, but there, nonetheless. I was warned but emboldened.
And when the National Constitutional Assembly (NCA) roared to life, and thereafter, the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), I snuck out of the house to go to meetings and rallies. He had become frail.
Kufa kwangu zvarova. 2000.
Very few of his esteemed comrades turned up for his burial, KwaMutasa. No one fought or haggled over his remains. Over his memory. No ill-gotten wealth or power upon which to pontificate. Or inherit.
Many villagers and distant relatives we had never met came to mourn with us. To share and condole us with stories of his ceaseless generosity. Of his kindness. The many village kids he had helped with school fees. The old woman whose children had left to find work in the mines of Johannesburg in the 1960s, but never returned. How, she was set to receive a pauper���s burial, but he had intervened and paid for a coffin and funeral costs. The piggery projects he had financed. Many stories, hitherto unknown to us, about who and what he had been to others.
I did not view his body. I could not. I convinced myself that I was relieved at his passing. He was a shell, toward the end. I did not want to see the man he had become. It was too hard.
A few days before that. Manheru daddy, maswera sei? I did not expect him to respond. He was not talking much, at that point. Bedridden. I was going through the motions. Salutations of an obedient child. Back home late, from another MDC rally. An escape, of sorts.
Please make some tea and come and sit with me, mwanangu. The whites of his eyes looked so-so white, in the nearly dark room. It was not dark yet. Yes, I said. I closed the door and never went back.
He was ���the man.��� 2006. Realizing, belatedly, I shook. Eventually, I put the book down and wept. The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born. The tears would not stop. For a long time. Grief. Regret. Nyadzi.
As an insolent child, I had once wondered out loud. Why we ���had��� to live in an average-sized house and neighborhood, compared to some of his comrades from kuhondo or his subordinates at the Department of Civil Aviation. Many, ordinary public servants who had become inexplicably wealthy in the post-independent years, and were living it up Kuma dale-dale.
(In slang parlance, Kuma dale-dale is used to describe Harare���s more affluent Northern suburbs such as Borrowdale, Mount Pleasant etcetera. Historically, prior to independence in 1980, these were mostly white neighborhoods. Blacks resided in these white suburbs as cheap labor. However, with independence, due to newly acquired affluence (legitimately or not), upward social mobility, and desegregated residential laws, many black Zimbabweans moved into these neighborhoods.)
He looked at me. At length.��And said nothing.
And now, I get him. I get it. Somewhat. Or rather, I am striving to. Everyday.
As I was reading a few of the obituaries, tributes and tirades about President Robert Mugabe, I wept.
For my father. For the opportunity and moments forfeited. To youthful ignorance and vanity. For the times that I could have asked questions and gotten to know the man. To be more discerning. Kinder. Grateful.
For his humanity. And, for the many, oh-so-many unsung souls, who, in braving and fighting to guarantee that of future generations, gave up elements of their own.
September 19, 2019
South African rugby’s race problems
A cardboard cutout inviting Springbok fans to pose with the likenesses of then-captain, John Smit, and national coach, Peter de Villiers. Image credit Warren Rohner via Flickr (CC).
It was a heartwarming moment. In June 2017, in the absence of injured Captain Warren Whitely, Springbok lock Eben Etzebeth was chosen to captain the team in the third rugby test against France, with��a 35-12 Springbok victory. When he approached the microphone in the media center after the match, he said, unprompted: ���Welcome to the best day of my life.���
Spend enough time paying attention to elite sport and you end up jaded. The players come across as automatons programmed to spew clich��s and to avoid saying anything resembling human emotion. This was different. This was a young man who had been a Springbok for five years, who had grown up with dreams of Springbok glory, and who had achieved the ultimate honor of leading his team in a victory with the captain���s armband conferring on him a status that relatively few in the long history of Springbok rugby have attained.
Forget that Bok coach Allister Coetzee, only the second black national team coach, had inexplicably chosen Etzebeth to captain the squad against France rather than Siya Kolisi, Etzebeth���s teammate and captain at the Stormers, the Cape Town Super Rugby side. Forget that naming Kolisi captain would have made him the first black Springbok captain, representing a watershed moment in rugby history. Forget Etzebeth���s reputation as an occasional hothead, something customarily not suitable to the captain of a rugby squad, one of whose duties is to keep the calm among his teammates, and to be the interface between the referee and his teammates.
Forget all that. At that podium in Ellis Park Stadium, we were all reminded that these are human beings. We were reminded how much wearing that jersey and that armband means to these young men. We were reminded of children playing with friends in their back yards, announcing their own play like a television commenter, always the stars of their own dramas.
Yet that little bit of humanity, honest as it was, as much as I believe it to have been earnest and true, does not mean that we know Eben Etzebeth.
Human beings are complicated. They can get up in front of an assembled media horde and even a massive, world-class athlete can evoke childhood. But they can also find themselves accused of ���racially abusing��� a man, late on a Saturday night and into the small hours of Sunday morning, when they had already been involved in a fight outside of a bar in Langebaan in the Western Cape. Which is what Etzebeth is accused of doing in late August 2019.
It is an incident about which we know very, very little despite the passage of several weeks. It is an event about which we should know so much more. But it is an event about which one gets the sense that South Africa���s rugby potentates want to know as little as possible. There was a fight after a conflict in a bar. So far, run-of-the-mill stuff. But where it gets tricky is with the allegations that the fight was racially motivated, and that the racism came from Etzebeth���s camp, and according to some observers, likely from Etzebeth himself.
If Eben Etzebeth seems unknowable then Peter de Villiers, the former Springbok head coach and the first black person to hold that position, has made a life out of being completely, utterly, transparently knowable. Which in its own way paradoxically makes him nearly as inscrutable.
The Southern Kings��� search for a coach is revelatory in understanding how the South African rugby community consistently has undervalued, marginalized, and betrayed de Villiers. The best word to use to describe the Kings��� search process is ���dysfunctional.���
The Kings is a Port Elizabeth-based team that plays in Europe���s Pro-14 rugby league. The search was characterized by accusations that de Villiers did not have proper coaching certificates (this, the most serious of the accusations, proved to be false); that he thought the Kings��� job was his birthright; that the Kings��� hierarchy preferred a New Zealand coach; and by withdrawals from candidate after candidate who looked at the processes governing the search in Port Elizabeth and saw an organization in disarray. Each new turn of events made clear just how much of a disaster that process had become. Fans of rugby in South Africa and its Eastern Province and Border regions, the Kings and certainly Peter de Villiers deserved better.
Instead of showing a sense of entitlement every indication was that de Villiers believed that the Kings were serious about finding the best coach. It is perhaps not surprising, then, that someone with a pedigree including (but hardly limited to) a Tri-Nations title (the Springboks��� last win in any version of that competition prior to their 2019 victory in the Rugby Championship), a series victory over the British Lions (the only one for the Boks since they emerged from isolation), and a win against the All Blacks in Dunedin (the only time they have ever won in the legendary ���House of Pain���), might just believe that he is indeed the best man for a domestic head coaching job in South Africa. His winning percentage during his tenure with the national team surpasses the overall win percentage of the Boks since their return from isolation in 1992. That de Villiers has many friends and advocates in the Eastern Cape, that he was clearly the best candidate on the issue of maximizing the Kings as a development center of excellence for diversity and transformation, and that he was passionate and outspoken should have been seen as manifest strengths. Instead they were somehow turned into either weaknesses, or perhaps more puzzlingly, irrelevancies.
Can de Villiers be outspoken? Absolutely. Since when is outspokenness a problem in South African rugby culture? Will he ruffle feathers? Certainly. There are feathers that sometimes need to be ruffled and those with feathers that don���t deserve a ruffling will survive. Will a de Villiers press conference or interview come with the occasional malapropism? More than likely. The man is not a robot. And little is more endearing than a bit of humanity among the ranks of coaches who increasingly speak from empty, tedious, monotonous talking points and for whom spontaneity sometimes seems as much of a sin as handling errors and missed tackles.
It seems clear that de Villiers, quite clearly the peoples��� choice for the Kings job, earned some enemies who decided that they could not beat him by playing fairly. Thus, they chose to try to win through innuendo about his coaching credentials and a smear campaign about a belief in a birthright to a coaching position that he never expressed. Did these calumnies come from within the search panel? Did they come from allies of the other candidates? We will likely never know ��� that is at least part of the problem of anonymous allegations passed via whisper (a standard in South African sports media), sent via emails to friendly or ambitious journalists, and dispersed as if by the wind. They are easy to disseminate. They are a lot harder to contain and to counter precisely because the gutlessness of the dissemination makes them so amorphous.
Perhaps de Villiers was not the best choice for the Kings, though it is difficult to see why a successful South African head coach at the highest levels is not more qualified, or at least a better fit for the job than someone who has never been a head coach at any level. Perhaps there is a reason why the most persistent issues with de Villiers��� candidacy have been expressed unattributed and without evidence or substantiation. But Occam���s razor���the idea that the simplest, most obvious answer is usually the correct one���applies here. And Occam���s razor would indicate that when the question is Peter de Villiers��� competence and qualifications for the job or Eastern Province Rugby���s competence and qualifications, well, one need not be a historian of the recent past to understand that the shortcomings of EP Rugby is probably the winning answer even if everyone ends up losers.
This long diversion serves a larger purpose: De Villiers has long been outspoken in South African rugby circles, and one of the issues about which he has been passionate is race and racism within South African rugby circles. His outspokenness was likely the reason why he was sent into the wilderness after being released from his Springbok coaching duties in 2011, his post-Bok jobs hardly matching what should have been his exalted status even after his firing. (His last job was as national coach of Zimbabwe, hardly a rugby power.) He should have had a position like the Kings��� job long ago. And it is hard to come up with a reason beyond that outspokenness for De Villiers��� externally-imposed isolation from the game he loves.
Well, there is one other reason���De Villiers has been most outspoken, most consistently vocal, on the issue of race.
But it is within this duel contexts of De Villiers��� mistreatment from the Southern Kings search and the country���s journalists that De Villiers��� latest controversy should be assessed. The perhaps disgruntled former Bok coach recently announced that he would not support the Springboks in the 2019 World Cup in Japan as long as Etzebeth is on the squad while allegations of racism hang over him. This is a very strong take. But it is not an irrational or unjustifiable one.
The demand to recall Etzebeth has not gained much traction. The South African Human Rights Commission has been investigating the event. Police and prosecutors too are still determining whether there is sufficient evidence to bring criminal charges. South African Rugby has been by and large silent.
Perhaps one believes that Etzebeth deserves the benefit of the doubt. There is certainly merit to the argument that he, like any citizen in South Africa, is innocent until proven guilty. But the South African Rugby Union (SARU), the body that controls rugby, is not a court of law, nor is it a governmental body. It could have conducted a thorough investigation to find out some approximation of the truth and it could have gone a long way to help answer those questions that still linger. Although SARU (also known as SA Rugby) is not a governmental body, it has consistently presented itself as a tool of nation building, and as a symbol of national transformation.��Yet the reality has always been more complicated. The truth is that the officials who have benefited from the Rainbow Nation, Amaboko-boko narrative have done so on a surface level. And often, rugby has been a source of conflict as much as of healing.
Consider this brief, episodic, and far from complete history of racist tempests surrounding Springbok rugby:
From the early (and in the minds of many, premature) readmission of the Springboks to international play in 1992, too many white supporters insisted on public displays of white and especially Afrikaner nationalism at Springbok matches. After the ANC victory in the 1994 elections and the adoption of the new South African flag and national anthem, intransigent white fans insisted upon waving the old flag at matches and singing only the elements of the new anthem drawn from ���Die Stem,��� the Afrikaans portions of the old national anthem included in the new one as an act of reconciliation that was, in the minds of many, unearned. Even today at Springbok matches vast swathes of the disproportionately white crowds at Springbok matches bellow out the Afrikaans parts far louder than the rest of the song.
Racial incidents have followed Springbok rugby like a stench. And the 1995 World Cup victory, with all of its Rainbow Nation pretensions, hardly proved to be a panacea. In 1997 Andre Markgraaf, who had been appointed Springbok coach in July 1996, resigned after a tape aired on national television in which he referred to Black rugby officials and politicians as ���fucking Kaffirs.��� It was especially rich when he claimed to resign in part in the interest of national reconciliation.
Just over a year later, Springbok prop Toks van der Linde was in New Zealand with the Western Province Stormers when his group was approached by an excited Black South African expatriate in Christchurch. Van der Linde berated her and called her a ���kaffir.��� He was fined and given a six-month suspension by South African Rugby, with all but a month of the suspension suspended, meaning he would be eligible to play almost immediately. The decision was met with outrage, rightfully, in no small part because the South African Rugby Football Union or SARFU (as SARU was then known) honestly believed and publicly asserted that their decision would serve as a deterrent to further acts of racism.
In August 2003, Geo Cronje, a lock who represented Northern Transvaal and has recently made his test debut against New Zealand, was thrown out of the World Cup training squad. He had refused to room or share a shower or toilet facilities with fellow lock Quinton Davids. Initially Rudolph Streuli, the Springbok coach and a former Northern Transvaal player himself, ordered Cronje and Davids to hash out their differences, but officials soon realized this solution was insufficient and decided to send Cronje home.
And none of this takes into account the myriad assertions of a pernicious atmosphere of racism expressed by former Black Springboks and others within the South African rugby hierarchy. After his retirement Chester Williams recounted myriad instances of racism within South African rugby, including in the vaunted 1995 World Cup winning team that allegedly brought South Africans of all races together. Peter de Villiers has a long and credible list of incidents and arguments about systemic racism in South African rugby circles. In 2000 SARFU���s black president Silas Nkanunu claimed that racism was behind alleged failed plots to oust him. And in 2018 former Springbok wing Ashwin Willemse, tired of what he believed to be racist undertones at satellite sports network Supersport, where he worked as a studio analyst, walked off the set rather than deal with what he felt was patronizing, condescending behavior from two colleagues, Naas Botha and Nick Mallet, both who had made their reputations playing all-white rugby under Apartheid. (Mallett was also one of the most successful of the post-isolation Springbok coaches, overseeing the Boks from 1997-2000). These examples, though perhaps more prominent than most, hardly seem to be outliers.
In what many believe to have been the most arrogant act on the part of SA Rugby officials who had displayed no lack of arrogance, President Nelson Mandela was dragged before the country���s High Court in 1998 to justify his decision to establish a commission of inquiry to look into racism in South African rugby. On the stand he justified the decision for the simple reason that he believed there was racism (and nepotism) in the country���s rugby hierarchies. The decision to confront Mandela backfired in most circles, but in a sense the rugby leadership cared less about the court of public opinion, or the High Court for that matter, than in its own rather smaller white and especially Afrikaans constituency that was happy to see the attempted humiliation of Mandela. The very figure who had almost single-handedly provided cover for the legitimacy of South African rugby beyond the laager just three years earlier through his strategic embrace of the Boks became a target of the ire of some of the sport���s leadership when he would no longer carry their water.
On the eve of the last World Cup in England in 2015, Oregan Hoskins, President of SARU (and a long-time antagonist of Peter de Villiers) claimed that racism in the sport in South Africa was a thing of the past. Hoskins, who is Coloured and who does deserve credit for making racial inclusion a central platform of his leadership during his 2006 to 2016 tenure, asserted, ���Let us get one thing absolutely clear: our sport is massively transformed from where it was in 1992. The idea of an ���exclusive���, ���white-dominated��� game is frankly laughable.��� Of course, there is a long gap between the sport having changed a great deal since 1992 ��� it has, unquestionably���and racism being eradicated. As if in response to Hoskins��� selective reading of the recent past, in April 2016 ANC Sports Minister Fikile Mbalula, decided to get tough on rugby, along with three other sports codes, for its lack of progress in achieving racial transformation not only on the playing fields, but also in its higher structures.
It sometimes seems that Afrikaners and Coloured South Africans are, to steal from Winston Churchill, two people separated by a common language. Etzebeth, or perhaps one or more of his mates, allegedly called a Coloured bar patron a ���hottentot,��� or a ���hotnot,��� language that euphemistically might be referred to as ���racially charged,��� but given South African history and politics is simply racist. No one using the term would be unaware of its inflammatory nature any more than a white South African using the K word or a white American using the N word could claim plausible denial.
And yet ���
Etzebeth has been found guilty of nothing. And if SARU has dragged its feet on its investigations, quite likely out of self-interest, most observers also would probably be uncomfortable with a rugby governing body acting as police, prosecutor, judge and executioner. Though no one is asking SARU to arrest, convict, or sentence the giant and occasionally irascible lock, they are looking for an honest investigation of grave allegations of what has been a consistent theme in South African rugby throughout the entirety of the sport���s history in the country. They are asking the rugby hierarchy to take allegations of racism seriously and to follow the accusations wherever they lead. If they lead to a one-way ticket back to South Africa for Etzebeth, so be it. If they lead to Etzebeth helping lead the Springboks in Japan, well, critics will have to live with that result as well.
At the same time, Peter de Villiers deserves to be taken seriously. He has been treated as a punch line too often by too many yet he has seen South African rugby from the inside, and so many of the accusations he has levied in the past have been confirmed through other, similar instances. The outspoken former man-in-charge makes some people in South African rugby circles uncomfortable, but maybe comfort has reigned for too long in the office suites at SARU House.
Occam���s razor does not only apply at the provincial levels when it comes to South African rugby. South African Rugby knows as much ��� otherwise why would they have kicked off a highly publicized campaign against discrimination and racism to coincide with this year���s Rugby Championship? The simplest answer is that racism in the sport is not simply a thing of the past. Unless, of course, the anti-racism campaign was simply a form of window dressing, a cynical gesture aimed at public relations more than at addressing real, deep, and systemic racism in South African rugby. If so, a perfunctory wait-and-see approach to the allegations against Etzebeth would make perfect sense.
The reality is that racism still swirls around some circles of the ruffians��� game played by alleged gentlemen. And that will be the case in spite of whatever decisions are made regarding Eben Etzebeth, who once, not so long ago, experienced the best day of his life.
September 18, 2019
Is the nation state the best we got?
Image credit Adrian Jenkins via Flickr (CC).
With the re-emergence of global right-wing nationalism, predatory racialized capitalism, and the realities of what Kwame Nkrumah termed ���neocolonialism,��� a strong state is often presented on the left as a remedy. The state is seductive.
In development terms, a weak state makes it vulnerable to foreign influence, structural adjustment, lack of public expenditures, and foreign capture, all of which limit sovereignty and development. A strong state, on the other hand, is thought better able to centralize resources and citizens to protect economic interests yet is often is criticized as monopolizing violence undemocratically and is responsible for repression, elitism, and reproducing what some term coloniality. The state and development are simultaneously necessary and something to be avoided, or at best decentralized and democratized.
What would an alternative to the nation state and national development look like and what might this mean for contemporary social movements? Here, we can draw on lessons from African anticolonialism and visions of pan-Africanist futures in the 1960s and 1970s. Western concepts about what such new states would look like, who they would represent, and what policies they would adopt, were challenged by these movements. The paradox is that these projects were nonetheless translated and configured through the state and mainstream development discourses ���both liberalism and Marxism���reproducing state violence, while struggling to enact alternatives.
A recent special issue of the journal Interventions���to which I contributed���tries to think through this contradiction with Frantz Fanon���s ideas about national consciousness in postcolonial contexts, Ghana and Algeria included. Fanon demands that we think through how ���national consciousness, which is not nationalism, is alone capable of giving us an international dimension.��� Taking Fanon with decolonial studies generally, it is important to reframe the question to consider the novel ways anticolonial movements succeeded, and sometimes failed, to rethink the nation state and national development.
In the case of Nkrumah���s Ghana, of which historian Jeffrey Ahlman has written about in Africa is a Country, nationalism or socialist development is not a sufficient analytic. Nkrumah advocated for a mixed-planning, one party state utilizing institutions and development models as a means to an end. In taking seriously his writings, policies, and tensions, it becomes clear that he justified his economic and political policies in Africentric terms���centered on African experience and struggle���highlighted in the theory of consciencism. He believed in organizing the nation as a resource in the struggle for pan-Africanism against (neo)colonialism, which would ultimately allow for the freedom to develop without external coercion.
I think it is appropriate to think through Nkrumah as a decolonial theorist, whose nationalism and development was internationalist in scope and not narrowly Westphalian, appropriating theories and policies toward an unspecified decolonial end. It was a vision filled with tensions and ambiguities. But it still resonates today.
In 2018, leading pan-Africanists, trade unionists, and activists gathered in Accra to remember Nkrumah and discuss strategies for implementing pan-African unity in the 21st century. One of the principle conclusions was that pan-African socialism is ���the only strategy��� to centralize institutions, resources and people to successfully achieve decolonization, development and unity.
Ghana was not exceptional, whether it is Kenneth Kaunda���s Zambian Humanism, or Julius Nyerere���s Ujamaa, attempts were made to escape the seductive traps of western models, respond to the legacies of slavery/colonialism, local political-economies and the realities of the Cold War, while falling victim to them. It is this same haunting contradiction���of the almost necessity and pitfalls of the nation state���which puzzled Fanon and inspired Nkrumah among countless others.
Taking these experiences seriously and applying them to the present means looking beyond the state to see the strategies of creative survival, networks of social movements, innovative forms of direct participation, solidarities and expressions of a decolonial democracy. Current alternatives are not coming from elites, but from streets, homes, online spaces, workplaces, student bodies and decolonial movements���what might be termed democracy from below. Ideas can be found not just in resistance to acts of environmental degradation or human rights abuses, or in the linking of local activisms to national and international politics, but also in poetry, literary figures, artists, and musicians. How can these non-elitist visions, born in the immediacy of struggle and experience, be translated into re-thinking the state and development? I do not have any answers, but I am listening.
Imagining an alternative to the nation state
Image credit Adrian Jenkins via Flickr (CC).
With the re-emergence of global right-wing nationalism, predatory racialized capitalism, and the realities of what Kwame Nkrumah termed ���neocolonialism,��� a strong state is often presented on the left as a remedy. The state is seductive.
In development terms, a weak state makes it vulnerable to foreign influence, structural adjustment, lack of public expenditures, and foreign capture, all of which limit sovereignty and development. A strong state, on the other hand, is thought better able to centralize resources and citizens to protect economic interests yet is often is criticized as monopolizing violence undemocratically and is responsible for repression, elitism, and reproducing what some term coloniality. The state and development are simultaneously necessary and something to be avoided, or at best decentralized and democratized.
What would an alternative to the nation state and national development look like and what might this mean for contemporary social movements? Here, we can draw on lessons from African anticolonialism and visions of pan-Africanist futures in the 1960s and 1970s. Western concepts about what such new states would look like, who they would represent, and what policies they would adopt, were challenged by these movements. The paradox is that these projects were nonetheless translated and configured through the state and mainstream development discourses ���both liberalism and Marxism���reproducing state violence, while struggling to enact alternatives.
A recent special issue of the journal Interventions���to which I contributed���tries to think through this contradiction with Frantz Fanon���s ideas about national consciousness in postcolonial contexts, Ghana and Algeria included. Fanon demands that we think through how ���national consciousness, which is not nationalism, is alone capable of giving us an international dimension.��� Taking Fanon with decolonial studies generally, it is important to reframe the question to consider the novel ways anticolonial movements succeeded, and sometimes failed, to rethink the nation state and national development.
In the case of Nkrumah���s Ghana, of which historian Jeffrey Ahlman has written about in Africa is a Country, nationalism or socialist development is not a sufficient analytic. Nkrumah advocated for a mixed-planning, one party state utilizing institutions and development models as a means to an end. In taking seriously his writings, policies, and tensions, it becomes clear that he justified his economic and political policies in Africentric terms���centered on African experience and struggle���highlighted in the theory of consciencism. He believed in organizing the nation as a resource in the struggle for pan-Africanism against (neo)colonialism, which would ultimately allow for the freedom to develop without external coercion.
I think it is appropriate to think through Nkrumah as a decolonial theorist, whose nationalism and development was internationalist in scope and not narrowly Westphalian, appropriating theories and policies toward an unspecified decolonial end. It was a vision filled with tensions and ambiguities. But it still resonates today.
In 2018, leading pan-Africanists, trade unionists, and activists gathered in Accra to remember Nkrumah and discuss strategies for implementing pan-African unity in the 21st century. One of the principle conclusions was that pan-African socialism is ���the only strategy��� to centralize institutions, resources and people to successfully achieve decolonization, development and unity.
Ghana was not exceptional, whether it is Kenneth Kaunda���s Zambian Humanism, or Julius Nyerere���s Ujamaa, attempts were made to escape the seductive traps of western models, respond to the legacies of slavery/colonialism, local political-economies and the realities of the Cold War, while falling victim to them. It is this same haunting contradiction���of the almost necessity and pitfalls of the nation state���which puzzled Fanon and inspired Nkrumah among countless others.
Taking these experiences seriously and applying them to the present means looking beyond the state to see the strategies of creative survival, networks of social movements, innovative forms of direct participation, solidarities and expressions of a decolonial democracy. Current alternatives are not coming from elites, but from streets, homes, online spaces, workplaces, student bodies and decolonial movements���what might be termed democracy from below. Ideas can be found not just in resistance to acts of environmental degradation or human rights abuses, or in the linking of local activisms to national and international politics, but also in poetry, literary figures, artists, and musicians. How can these non-elitist visions, born in the immediacy of struggle and experience, be translated into re-thinking the state and development? I do not have any answers, but I am listening.
September 17, 2019
Mugabe and the tradition to not speak ill of the dead
[image error]
Robert Mugabe in Juba. Image via Al Jazeera English Flickr (CC).
It has been difficult for many Zimbabweans to process the death of former President Robert Mugabe. This has been compounded by the calls from some African dignitaries for the nation to cherish what Mugabe did for it and the continent. Gra��a Machel, a former government minister in neighboring Mozambique and spouse to both Samora Machel and later Nelson Mandela, recently appealed to young Zimbabweans to have a “balanced assessment” of Mugabe’s legacy. Machel went on to relay that Mugabe was “a brother” to her, and made many sacrifices building institutions on the continent, as well as giving many Zimbabweans access to education and more.
In 2007, the novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie talked of the dangers of a single story, especially how impressionable and vulnerable people are in the face of a single story. Her talk remains relevant, particularly in the wake of Mugabe���s death and around the narrative constructing his legacy. Many young Zimbabweans (the so-called “Born Frees”), have only lived under the Mugabe regime. All they have been taught is patriotic history coined by the ruling Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF) party. Even after the departure of Mugabe from the party���s leadership, followed by his death at old age, the Born Frees are being coerced to view his legacy through the lens of a misconstrued, self-serving narrative.
Nearly 80,000 people died during the liberation struggle, yet limited effort has been made to publicly acknowledge individuals by name. Young Zimbabweans were obviously not around at the time nationalist movements were forged to fight white rule, but they do have members of their family that were party to the colonial and post-colonial struggle. This is largely the case because for the ruling party: to be Zimbabwean means one has to be ZANU-PF.
What seems to be forgotten is that a social contract was never and still has not been established between the state and its citizens. Rather, what exists is a collective of elites who are running the state by subduing “others.”�� In 2014, I conducted interviews with victims of the Gukurahundi genocide��(when government forces murdered up to 20,000 people in Matabeleland province between 1982 and 1987), in Nkayi district in the western part of the country.�� All the participants I interacted with had not yet received any justice for the violence they encountered at the hand of state security agents. One participant even asked ���If Gukurahundi was a moment of madness ��� has the mad person regained sanity now? Has he atoned for the period of madness, and what should the aggrieved do about it?���
After receiving the news of Mugabe���s death I have been reflecting on the encounters I have had with several victims from different episodes of terror at the hands of the ZANU-PF regime. It is insensitive for an influential leader in Africa to call on Zimbabweans, and other Africans, to honor Mugabe���s legacy.
I believe these calls befit the Shona proverb Wafa Wanaka (death is the ultimate rule), employed to show how the dead take both their transgressions and good deeds with them. For some, when they use this proverb it signals a call to focus on the good, because it is often a bad thing to hammer on the ugly, as the dead are no longer answerable to the living but to the Supreme Being.
Even if Mugabe contributed to fighting colonial rulers, Mugabe���s regime failed to uproot the colonial culture of subjugating the citizenry, and this what sustained him in power for decades���an extension of colonial rule. Everisto Benyera, Professor of African Politics at the University of South Africa, recently pointed out that if the Mugabe of 1975 or 1980 was to meet with the Mugabe of 1982, 1987, 2002, 2008 and 2017, there will be a lot of conversations to be had, because the later version institutionalized discrimination, oppression, and the subjugation of those Zimbabweans who were othered.
A few years ago Sabelo Ndlovu-Gatsheni, author of the book��Mugabeism: History, Power and Politics in Zimbabwe,��interrogated the question: ���Do Zimbabweans exist?��� after observing that the subjugation of black Zimbabweans continued under the leadership of a “new” black dispensation. How then can the youths who have been raised to be jobless, valueless, emigrants, and destitute cherish the very leader who has destroyed their future?
Businessman Mutumwa Mawere has cautioned against the deification of Mugabe by playing into the idea that he is the sole founding father and liberator of Zimbabwe. Zimbabwe has a diverse population that is deeply spiritual and religious. People���s lives are anchored in the belief that their liberty and essence of life is not brought forth by another human being, rather, it comes from Musikavanhu/Mudzimu anoera/Mwari/Nyadenga (God the Creator/Supreme Being).
Even though it is an African custom to not speak ill of the dead, I also know that when one has died, people are expected to come forth and clear the debts that they owe and are owed by the deceased before burial. It is possibly from this juncture that those who were wronged by Mugabe are recalling his injustices. They are still owed justice, compensation, and some form of redress commensurate with their needs.
Mugabe and the tradition of not speaking ill of the dead
[image error]
Robert Mugabe in Juba. Image via Al Jazeera English Flickr (CC).
It has been difficult for many Zimbabweans to process the death of former President Robert Mugabe. This has been compounded by the calls from some African dignitaries for the nation to cherish what Mugabe did for it and the continent. Gra��a Machel, a former government minister in neighboring Mozambique and spouse to both Samora Machel and later Nelson Mandela, recently appealed to young Zimbabweans to have a “balanced assessment” of Mugabe’s legacy. Machel went on to relay that Mugabe was “a brother” to her, and made many sacrifices building institutions on the continent, as well as giving many Zimbabweans access to education and more.
In 2007, the novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie talked of the dangers of a single story, especially how impressionable and vulnerable people are in the face of a single story. Her talk remains relevant, particularly in the wake of Mugabe���s death and around the narrative constructing his legacy. Many young Zimbabweans (the so-called “Born Frees”), have only lived under the Mugabe regime. All they have been taught is patriotic history coined by the ruling Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF) party. Even after the departure of Mugabe from the party���s leadership, followed by his death at old age, the Born Frees are being coerced to view his legacy through the lens of a misconstrued, self-serving narrative.
Nearly 80,000 people died during the liberation struggle, yet limited effort has been made to publicly acknowledge individuals by name. Young Zimbabweans were obviously not around at the time nationalist movements were forged to fight white rule, but they do have members of their family that were party to the colonial and post-colonial struggle. This is largely the case because for the ruling party: to be Zimbabwean means one has to be ZANU-PF.
What seems to be forgotten is that a social contract was never and still has not been established between the state and its citizens. Rather, what exists is a collective of elites who are running the state by subduing “others.”�� In 2014, I conducted interviews with victims of the Gukurahundi genocide��(when government forces murdered up to 20,000 people in Matabeleland province between 1982 and 1987), in Nkayi district in the western part of the country.�� All the participants I interacted with had not yet received any justice for the violence they encountered at the hand of state security agents. One participant even asked ���If Gukurahundi was a moment of madness ��� has the mad person regained sanity now? Has he atoned for the period of madness, and what should the aggrieved do about it?���
After receiving the news of Mugabe���s death I have been reflecting on the encounters I have had with several victims from different episodes of terror at the hands of the ZANU-PF regime. It is insensitive for an influential leader in Africa to call on Zimbabweans, and other Africans, to honor Mugabe���s legacy.
I believe these calls befit the Shona proverb Wafa Wanaka (death is the ultimate rule), employed to show how the dead take both their transgressions and good deeds with them. For some, when they use this proverb it signals a call to focus on the good, because it is often a bad thing to hammer on the ugly, as the dead are no longer answerable to the living but to the Supreme Being.
Even if Mugabe contributed to fighting colonial rulers, Mugabe���s regime failed to uproot the colonial culture of subjugating the citizenry, and this what sustained him in power for decades���an extension of colonial rule. Everisto Benyera, Professor of African Politics at the University of South Africa, recently pointed out that if the Mugabe of 1975 or 1980 was to meet with the Mugabe of 1982, 1987, 2002, 2008 and 2017, there will be a lot of conversations to be had, because the later version institutionalized discrimination, oppression, and the subjugation of those Zimbabweans who were othered.
A few years ago Sabelo Ndlovu-Gatsheni, author of the book��Mugabeism: History, Power and Politics in Zimbabwe,��interrogated the question: ���Do Zimbabweans exist?��� after observing that the subjugation of black Zimbabweans continued under the leadership of a “new” black dispensation. How then can the youths who have been raised to be jobless, valueless, emigrants, and destitute cherish the very leader who has destroyed their future?
Businessman Mutumwa Mawere has cautioned against the deification of Mugabe by playing into the idea that he is the sole founding father and liberator of Zimbabwe. Zimbabwe has a diverse population that is deeply spiritual and religious. People���s lives are anchored in the belief that their liberty and essence of life is not brought forth by another human being, rather, it comes from Musikavanhu/Mudzimu anoera/Mwari/Nyadenga (God the Creator/Supreme Being).
Even though it is an African custom to not speak ill of the dead, I also know that when one has died, people are expected to come forth and clear the debts that they owe and are owed by the deceased before burial. It is possibly from this juncture that those who were wronged by Mugabe are recalling his injustices. They are still owed justice, compensation, and some form of redress commensurate with their needs.
Do not speak ill of the dead
[image error]
Robert Mugabe in Juba. Image via Al Jazeera English Flickr (CC).
It has been difficult for many Zimbabweans to process the death of former President Robert Mugabe, and this has been compounded by the calls from some African dignitaries for the nation to cherish what Mugabe did for it and the continent. Gra��a Machel, a former government minister in neighboring Mozambique, and spouse to both Samora Machel and later Nelson Mandela, recently appealed to young Zimbabweans to have a “balanced assessment” of Mugabe’s legacy. Machel went on to relay that Mugabe was a brother to her, and made many sacrifices building institutions on the continent, as well as giving many Zimbabweans access to education and more.
In 2007, the novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie talked of the dangers of a single story, especially how impressionable and vulnerable people are in the face of a single story. Her talk remains relevant, particularly in the wake of Mugabe���s death and around the narrative constructing his legacy. Many young Zimbabweans (the so-called “Born Frees”), have only lived under the Mugabe regime. All they have been taught is patriotic history coined by the ruling Zimbabwe African National Union Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF) party. Even after the departure of Mugabe from the party���s leadership, and then his death at old age, the Born Frees are being coerced to view his legacy through the lens of a misconstrued, self-serving narrative.
Nearly 80,000 people died during the liberation struggle, yet limited effort has been made to publicly acknowledge individuals by name. Young Zimbabweans were obviously not around at the time nationalist movements were forged to fight white rule, but they do have members of their family that were party to the colonial and post-colonial struggle. This is largely the case because for the ruling party, to be Zimbabwean means one has to be ZANU-PF.
What seems to be forgotten is that a social contract was never and still has not been established between the state and its citizens. Rather, what exists is a collective of elites who are running the state by subduing “others.”�� In 2014 I conducted interviews with victims of the Gukurahundi genocide in Nkayi district and all the participants I interacted with had not yet received justice for the violence they encountered at the hand of state security agents. One participant even asked ���If Gukurahundi was a moment of madness ��� has the mad person regained sanity now? Has he atoned for the period of madness, and what should the aggrieved do about it?��� After receiving the news of Mugabe���s death I have been reflecting on the encounters I have had with several victims from different episodes of terror at the hands of the ZANU-PF regime. It is insensitive for an influential leader in Africa to call on Zimbabweans, and other Africans, to honor Mugabe���s legacy.
I believe these calls befit the Shona proverb Wafa Wanaka (death is the ultimate rule), employed to show how the dead take both their transgressions and good deeds with them. For some, when they use this proverb it signals a call to focus on the good, because it is often a bad thing to hammer on the ugly, as the dead are no longer answerable to the living but to the Supreme Being.
Even if Mugabe contributed to fighting colonial rulers, Mugabe���s regime failed to uproot the colonial culture of subjugating the citizenry, and this what sustained him in power for decades���an extension of colonial rule. Everisto Benyera, Professor of African Politics at the University of South Africa, recently pointed out that if the Mugabe of 1975 or 1980 was to meet with the Mugabe of 1982, 1987, 2002, 2008 and 2017, there will be a lot of conversations to be had, because the later version institutionalized discrimination, oppression, and the subjugation of those Zimbabweans who were othered.
A few years ago Sabelo Ndlovu-Gatsheni, author of the book��Mugabeism: History, Power and Politics in Zimbabwe,��interrogated: ���Do Zimbabweans exist?��� after observing that the subjugation of many black people has continued under the leadership of a “new” black dispensation. How then can the youths who have been raised to be jobless, valueless, emigrants, and destitute cherish the very leader who has destroyed their future?
Businessman Mutumwa Mawere has cautioned against the deification of Mugabe by playing into the idea that he is the sole founding father and liberator of Zimbabwe. Zimbabwe has a diverse population that is deeply spiritual and religious. People���s lives are anchored in the belief that their liberty and essence of life is not brought forth by another human being, rather, it comes from Musikavanhu/Mudzimu anoera/Mwari/Nyadenga (God the Creator/Supreme Being).
Even though it is an African custom to not speak ill of the dead, I also know that when one has died, people are expected to come forth and clear the debts that they owe and are owed by the deceased before burial. It is possibly from this juncture that those who were wronged by Mugabe are recalling his injustices. They are still owed justice, compensation, and some form of redress commensurate with their needs.
September 16, 2019
Why are we only learning to cook French food in Africa?
Image credit Andrea Moroni via Flickr (CC).
If you are pursuing a career as a chef in South Africa, you should know French cuisine. If you attend culinary school in South Africa, that���s what you���ll be trained in, you don’t really have a choice in the matter. And as a chef in South Africa, and all over the world, your value will be measured in how well you can cook French recipes and use French techniques.
Although French cuisine dominates everywhere, even other European countries, it���s a bitter pill to swallow when combined with the legacy of colonialism. If, for centuries, Africans have been seen as less than human, then of course our food has been looked down on too. So, while��colonizers appropriated local foods, they also simultaneously attacked local food traditions.
Although African food��(acknowledging the vastness of Africa and diversity of its cuisines) might be starting to have a (small)��international moment, with award winning chefs like Kwame Onwuachi in the US and Zoe Adjonyoh in the UK��bringing West African cuisine to mainstream dining in those countries, it has not been celebrated as much as other foods. Around the world, European food is still largely perceived as the superior cuisine. It wins more awards, is considered the default cuisine for celebratory dining, and comes at a higher price than most cuisines from the Global South.
Culinary schools all over the world take a standardized approach to training young chefs, and this is the way that cooking is taught and graded universally. In South Africa, in order to progress in a professional kitchen, all young chefs have to take the City & Guilds exam, a UK-based food training curriculum that is globally recognized. Culinary schools all over the country teach to accommodate the requirements of the City & Guilds qualification. This means one to three years of French cuisine, and it might include a week or a month per year of local cuisines. This short period spent on local cuisine is extremely limiting, especially when young chefs aren���t able to express themselves according to their own contexts and food heritage. As institutions of education are witnessing a new wave of “decolonizing” the curriculum, culinary schools continue to teach European norms of cooking in Africa. Wouldn���t it make more sense if it was flipped and the curriculum was African techniques and recipes with a week called ���European cuisines?���
I visited New York earlier this year and found it easier to find African food restaurants there than in Cape Town, where I live. In South Africa, people across cultures have the fondest appreciation for their grandmother���s traditional cooking, which (especially in rural areas) is often organic, sustainable and consists of whole foods���all very popular right now in the wellness movement. Yet, most of the plentiful successful city restaurants do not reflect pride in these traditional foods. Whilst one might find more traditional foods in township eateries, it is not easy to find African food when dining in the central food hotspots in most cities in South Africa. This begs the question of which food is seen as acceptable for the urban public.
There has been a call from South African chefs, as well as a collective called South African POC at the Table, to challenge��bias against African foods and black chefs. There are also of course chefs who are going against the grain and running African food restaurants.��Notable names include: Chef Coco of Epicure, Abigail Mbalo of 4Roomed Ekasi Culture, and Nolu Dube-Cele of Seven Colours Eatery (all in Cape Town). They, among others, have made it a point to celebrate African foods, but they are still very much exceptions in the industry.
Chef Nompumelelo Mqwebu has written extensively about embracing African foods in her cookbook, Through the Eyes of an African Chef, writing about the lack of authentic South African cuisine in restaurants, whilst also questioning why our culinary schools still teach only French cuisine.��In an interview by Yolisa Qunta, South African food legend Cass Abrahams encourages the younger generation to stand up and embrace their food heritage:
Not that it will be easy, even in the so-called free South Africa, because there are still very real barriers to entry. As a young person, formal training will never give you the opportunity to cook your own traditional food. I believe that is done deliberately to keep us in our place.
Things start to become extra frustrating when certain traditional foods and medicines, which have been used to justify the “backwardness” of Africans, become trendy due to “newly discovered” health benefits. The likes of sorghum, buchu or baobab are being hailed as the new superfoods, causing their prices to soar, while none of those profits come back to the communities whose culture has provided the know-how for cultivation.
That is currently what we are seeing with insects, which are commonly eaten all over central and southern Africa. Things like mopane salt and crickets are making their way onto the shelves of health food shops. Even world-renowned chef, Rene Redzepi is serving them in Noma, the world���s top restaurant. And recently, South Africa���s first all-insect restaurant opened in Cape Town. ���The store is about introducing South Africans to the concept of eating insects��� said co-founder Jean Laurens. One has to ask Laurens which South Africans he means, because the majority don���t need an introduction.
Challenging the status quo is going to be near impossible if even in African countries, culinary schools do not participate in a decolonial curriculum. This relates to both the curriculum and the exorbitant fees for attendance. African chefs are not trained in local culinary traditions, but are able to produce the five “mother sauces” or tell you the different knife cuts like batonett, paysanne and brunoise. But when African chefs are asked to represent their country internationally, nobody wants to see that they can cook French cuisine. It all doesn���t make sense. Something has to change.
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