Sean Jacobs's Blog, page 208
August 6, 2019
On researching in and out of Africa
"Waiting for..." Labadi Beach, Ghana. Image credit Alzwww via Flickr (CC).
Matthew Parris, columnist for The Times of London, wrote in December 2008: ���As an atheist, I truly believe Africa needs God.��� Parris was born in South Africa where his father went to work as an engineer and grew up in Swaziland and Rhodesia (later Zimbabwe). A former British diplomat, he also worked for right-wing Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, and served as a member of parliament for the UK���s Conservative Party.
���Missionaries, not aid money are the solution to Africa’s biggest problem���the crushing passivity of the people’s mindset,��� Parris continued. Parris���s argument���that Africa needs more than the education and training development projects offered by secular NGOs, government and international development efforts���was that Africa needs Christian evangelism to bring about a spiritual transformation. Without this there can be no real change: people need to be offered something to replace the fear of evil spirits, of the ancestors, of nature, tribal hierarchy and so on which structures rural African thought: ���direct, personal, two-way link between the individual and God, unmediated by the collective, and unsubordinate to any other human being … offers something to hold on to those anxious to cast off a crushing tribal groupthink.���
When my father gave me this article to read in 2008, I was incensed but said nothing; no need to upset him and my mother, former missionaries who do not understand my beliefs and disbeliefs.
So, I was angry���but not surprised���that my parents thought Africa’s problems could be solved overnight by Christian evangelism.
As missionaries from 1958 to 1975, my parents worked for the Sudan Interior Mission (SIM) which sought to bring evangelical Christianity into the ���unoccupied regions��� since the 1930s, as Rowland Victor Bingham, the cofounder and long-time director of the SIM once put it. (He is cited in Donham, D, 1999, Marxist Modern: An Ethnographic History of the Ethiopian Revolution). The missionaries used aspects of modernity, particularly technology and medicine to propagate their Christianity: ���Imbued with a progressive sense of time and increasingly impatient with ���tradition,��� mission converts dreamed of a better day��� (p. 83).
Parris���s article was like a re-invitation to colonialists and missionaries to go back to Africa to have another go at things.
Seven months after The Times published Parris���s column, former US President Jimmy Carter wrote an article in the Sydney Morning Herald, ���Losing my religion for equality.��� Severing ties with the US-based Southern Baptist Convention, Carter argued that some of their leader’s beliefs conflicted with his belief that we are all equal in the eyes of God. Using a few carefully selected verses to justify the superiority of men, they claimed that ���Eve was created second to Adam and was responsible for original sin, ordained that women must be ���subservient��� to their husbands and prohibited from serving as deacons, pastors or chaplains in the military service.���
Carter argued that religion has long provided reasons to discriminate against women and that the male interpretations of many religious texts has reinforced traditional practices that justify some of the most pervasive, persistent, flagrant and damaging examples of human rights abuses and continues to deny many girls and women ���fair access to education, health, employment and influence within their own communities.���
It means boys are favored over girls in education and health care and that many girls ���face enormous and unacceptable risks in pregnancy and childbirth because their basic health needs are not met.���
My childhood was polarized between an authoritarian Christian boarding school and school holidays in what I thought of as the Garden on Eden in rural southwest Ethiopia. Kafa Zone���s montane rainforest, renowned for being the habitat of wild Ethiopian coffee and the origin of the genetic diversity of Arabica coffee (Coffea arabica), was recognized by UNESCO as one of the biodiversity hotspots of the world in 2010.
In 2007, I returned to Ethiopia to do research in international development, focusing on maternal health and reducing maternal mortality. Most health policy makers argue that high rates of maternal morbidity and mortality should be reduced through the transfer of modern health service interventions, but there are clearly other “development” factors affecting whether women could access these health services: for example, distance, lack of transportation, cost, women���s status and empowerment, education, employment, decision-making, and intimate partner violence.
I���ve returned to Ethiopia to conduct research many times, and many issues I identified 10 to 15 years ago are yet to be addressed. Like ambulances to transfer women in labor to a health center or hospital, being used for other purposes.
Not unlike the religious fundamentalist searching for the way to live, studying international development enabled me to better understand what is going on in the world, why it is happening, and how to find a way to live.
While others continue to do excellent research about maternal health���whether quantitative or qualitative���I think enough is known about the causes and ways to prevent maternal and neonatal morbidity and mortality. Some of the latest research has shifted from promoting health facility delivery to concerns about the quality of care women receive during labor and delivery in health facilities.
It���s clear there���s a problem of disrespect and abuse or mistreatment of women seeking maternity care in some health care settings.
But I don���t want to be a “white savior.”
I do want to write without the expectation of “outputs” in the formal academic sense. Consciously choosing the words, the musicality of the words���writing sentences and paragraphs���writing has become one way to “know” about life: ���Writing is selection. ���The creativity lies in what you choose to write about, how you go about doing it, the arrangement ��� making the most of what you have ������
What I have to start with now is a narrative about my first tiny cup (sini) of coffee as seven-year-old in a round thatched hut (tukul) outside Bonga in southwest Ethiopia and the many times since then that I���ve returned to stay in the guest house on the side of the hill not far from my childhood home.
No religion, no rhetoric of development, just stories about coffee and food with women I���ve met along the way.
The problems of Africa
"Waiting for..." Labadi Beach, Ghana. Image credit Alzwww via Flickr (CC).
Matthew Parris, columnist for The Times of London, wrote in December 2008: ���As an atheist, I truly believe Africa needs God.��� Parris was born in South Africa where his father went to work as an engineer and grew up in Swaziland and Rhodesia (later Zimbabwe). A former British diplomat, he also worked for right-wing Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, and served as a member of parliament for the UK���s Conservative Party.
���Missionaries, not aid money are the solution to Africa’s biggest problem���the crushing passivity of the people’s mindset,��� Parris continued. Parris���s argument���that Africa needs more than the education and training development projects offered by secular NGOs, government and international development efforts���was that Africa needs Christian evangelism to bring about a spiritual transformation. Without this there can be no real change: people need to be offered something to replace the fear of evil spirits, of the ancestors, of nature, tribal hierarchy and so on which structures rural African thought: ���direct, personal, two-way link between the individual and God, unmediated by the collective, and unsubordinate to any other human being … offers something to hold on to those anxious to cast off a crushing tribal groupthink.���
When my father gave me this article to read in 2008, I was incensed but said nothing; no need to upset him and my mother, former missionaries who do not understand my beliefs and disbeliefs.
So, I was angry���but not surprised���that my parents thought Africa’s problems could be solved overnight by Christian evangelism.
As missionaries from 1958 to 1975, my parents worked for the Sudan Interior Mission (SIM) which sought to bring evangelical Christianity into the ���unoccupied regions��� since the 1930s, as Rowland Victor Bingham, the cofounder and long-time director of the SIM once put it. (He is cited in Donham, D, 1999, Marxist Modern: An Ethnographic History of the Ethiopian Revolution). The missionaries used aspects of modernity, particularly technology and medicine to propagate their Christianity: ���Imbued with a progressive sense of time and increasingly impatient with ���tradition,��� mission converts dreamed of a better day��� (p. 83).
Parris���s article was like a re-invitation to colonialists and missionaries to go back to Africa to have another go at things.
Seven months after The Times published Parris���s column, former US President Jimmy Carter wrote an article in the Sydney Morning Herald, ���Losing my religion for equality.��� Severing ties with the US-based Southern Baptist Convention, Carter argued that some of their leader’s beliefs conflicted with his belief that we are all equal in the eyes of God. Using a few carefully selected verses to justify the superiority of men, they claimed that ���Eve was created second to Adam and was responsible for original sin, ordained that women must be ���subservient��� to their husbands and prohibited from serving as deacons, pastors or chaplains in the military service.���
Carter argued that religion has long provided reasons to discriminate against women and that the male interpretations of many religious texts has reinforced traditional practices that justify some of the most pervasive, persistent, flagrant and damaging examples of human rights abuses and continues to deny many girls and women ���fair access to education, health, employment and influence within their own communities.���
It means boys are favored over girls in education and health care and that many girls ���face enormous and unacceptable risks in pregnancy and childbirth because their basic health needs are not met.���
My childhood was polarized between an authoritarian Christian boarding school and school holidays in what I thought of as the Garden on Eden in rural southwest Ethiopia. Kafa Zone���s montane rainforest, renowned for being the habitat of wild Ethiopian coffee and the origin of the genetic diversity of Arabica coffee (Coffea arabica), was recognized by UNESCO as one of the biodiversity hotspots of the world in 2010.
In 2007, I returned to Ethiopia to do research in international development, focusing on maternal health and reducing maternal mortality. Most health policy makers argue that high rates of maternal morbidity and mortality should be reduced through the transfer of modern health service interventions, but there are clearly other “development” factors affecting whether women could access these health services: for example, distance, lack of transportation, cost, women���s status and empowerment, education, employment, decision-making, and intimate partner violence.
I���ve returned to Ethiopia to conduct research many times, and many issues I identified 10 to 15 years ago are yet to be addressed. Like ambulances to transfer women in labor to a health center or hospital, being used for other purposes.
Not unlike the religious fundamentalist searching for the way to live, studying international development enabled me to better understand what is going on in the world, why it is happening, and how to find a way to live.
While others continue to do excellent research about maternal health���whether quantitative or qualitative���I think enough is known about the causes and ways to prevent maternal and neonatal morbidity and mortality. Some of the latest research has shifted from promoting health facility delivery to concerns about the quality of care women receive during labor and delivery in health facilities.
It���s clear there���s a problem of disrespect and abuse or mistreatment of women seeking maternity care in some health care settings.
But I don���t want to be a “white savior.”
I do want to write without the expectation of “outputs” in the formal academic sense. Consciously choosing the words, the musicality of the words���writing sentences and paragraphs���writing has become one way to “know” about life: ���Writing is selection. ���The creativity lies in what you choose to write about, how you go about doing it, the arrangement ��� making the most of what you have ������
What I have to start with now is a narrative about my first tiny cup (sini) of coffee as seven-year-old in a round thatched hut (tukul) outside Bonga in southwest Ethiopia and the many times since then that I���ve returned to stay in the guest house on the side of the hill not far from my childhood home.
No religion, no rhetoric of development, just stories about coffee and food with women I���ve met along the way.
August 5, 2019
Can a hamburger free a people?
Image still from Chicken Licken advertisement.
In his article ���Burgers for the Soul,��� South African literary critic Wamuwi Mbao observes that “Burgers are a psychologically complex experience.��� Mbao argues that the sandwiches��� rise in culinary status can be attributed to ���how burgers make you feel.��� Inspired by these lingering impressions I strode ardently into the Mowbray, Cape Town, branch of the Chicken Licken fast food chain to order a Big John Burger. Since the fast-food chain���s slogan is “Soul Food,” the burger promised a moving experience.
In the weeks prior, the Big John Burger was at the center of a media furor after Chicken Licken released a new advertisement promoting it in the lead up to the Christmas and New Years festive season of 2018. The ad recounted ���the legend of Big John,��� a young Black African man, who out of sheer hunger for adventure, embarked on a solo ocean faring journey, and his discovery of a new land which he names Europe. Yet, it was controversially banned by the Advertising Regulatory Board (ARB), the body charged with regulating the tastefulness of advertising content in South Africa, for ���making a mockery of colonialism.���
Back in the Chicken Licken branch, I took a bite of my burger and waited in vain for the affirmative feelings of adventure to rush over me. There was no psychologically complex experience. This postcolonial burger was a salty, soggy mess. Yet in my disappointment, I left wondering about the relationship between branding, postcolonialism and heritage, and especially about how the advertisement served up a kind of conceptual value meal so to speak, comprised of the notions of representation, theory and pastness.
These concepts appear in various elements of the advertisement���s narrative style and content. The two-minute long advert starts off in a branch of a Chicken Licken store where an employee narrates the legend of Big John to an inquisitive customer. This oral history starts in 1650, when Big John embarks on his epic solo sea journey from Africa to satisfy his great hunger. He sails treacherous oceans and has many harrowing encounters with animals and fearsome sea-creatures along the way. While, ���Big Mjohnana did many things,��� declares the narrator, ���he will always be remembered for discovering a foreign land,��� which he named ���Eu-rope.���
The advertising agency, Joe Public United (JPU), developed a special webpage dedicated to Big John���s travels. The landing page declared, ���Hola! You���ve found the big map Big Mjohnana used on his legendary journey.��� Visitors were invited to ������ join the adventure and see the many treasures he found along the way,��� by using the interactive, multimedia online platform and learn more about his legendary discoveries. Strikingly, Big John���s map was different: his was an inverted, aged version of the standard Mercator map, which positioned Africa prominently at the center and South Africa at the very top of the world.
This intentional upturning was, according to JPU, about putting ���South Africa and Africa on top of the world. [To] get people to look at things differently, to be proud of where they���re from and to help them see that anything is possible if they���re hungry enough.��� With both the advertisement and website, JPU said they wanted to ���show South Africans that Chicken Licken believes this country has all the potential to conquer the world and rewrite history from an African perspective.���
For the cultural theorist Stuart Hall, representations such as advertisements were systems of signs that communicated information that was always charged with power. In the case of the Big John Burger, the advertiser used satire as a subversive medium to, without putting it in so many words, invoke a postcolonial troubling of dominant historical and cultural representations of European voyages of the discovery of Africa. Hall and other theorists have suggested that the postcolonial is a conceptual space, one marked both a temporal break with colonial time, but also the ongoing struggle to overcome the persistence of forms of colonial representation and structures of knowledge. In the conceptual space of the Big John advertisement, three themes have a particular postcolonial flavor: mapping, naming and discovery.
The map used on the Big John Burger website invokes the important colonial practice of drawing up charts of foreign lands for purposes of making a claim to ownership. For example, the literature studies scholar Jose Rabasa argues in his article Allegories of Atlas that the Mercator map structured a new configuration of time and space that positioned Europe at the center of the world and at the beginning of time. ���If specific political configurations establish boundaries and national identities for a European geographic space, then the rest of the world acquires spatial meaning only after the different regions have been inscribed by Europeans.���
When Big John arrives in “a foreign land” to find ���Jan van Riebeeck and his crew as they load cargo onto their three ships (the Dromedaris, Reijger and Goede Hoop) before they embark on their voyage,��� he takes a moment to think, then plunges his spear into the ground and announces, “I call this place Eu-rope.” European nations also marked their “discoveries” with pomp and theater. In Ceremonies of Possession, the historian Patricia Seed shows how colonial powers enacted rites of possession to stake their claims over new foreign lands. The English planted gardens, the French paraded on the shore and the Spanish read The Requirement, a brutal declaration of possession. And when it came to naming, Jose Rabasa observes, all new territories needed new names, as ���the newly discovered territories acquire semanticity in terms of their inclusion within a European perspective.��� A Black male naming a “formerly unknown” land populated by Caucasian people, however, can be seen to prompting the question about who and how claims to foreign lands can and were made.
To name is also to assert “discovery”; to say that one was first. Colonial discovery has a strong cultural and political resonance in South Africa. For example, the historian Leslie Wits shows that Jan van Riebeek, who established the first fort at the Cape, was seized upon by the apartheid state in 1952 as a progenitor figure for the white South African nation. Van Riebeek had already been seen as ���the volksvader, the initiator of farming in South Africa, the bearer of Christianity to the sub-continent, and the [British] colonial founder.��� His arrival at the Cape in 1652 was promoted as the founding of South Africa. His image was used on currency and symbols of the Dutch East India Company, such as that of the Castle at the Cape, were used in apartheid state insignia. The moment of “colonial discovery” therefore anchored the history of the white South African nation and secured the authority of the apartheid state.
But I do not need to quote history books to bring home these points to the many black viewers who saw and liked the advertisement. Big John���s antics were a kind of nod and a wink about historical knowledge already widely shared. While the burger certainly was not the best, the advertisement is palatable precisely because of the way that it promotes African agency. This is not a mockery of colonialism. Rather, it creates a space of speculation beyond the boundaries of history, for wondering about the possibilities of Africans��� own “great voyages of discovery.” Of course the advert is caught up in the trappings of capitalism, yet it also generates a postcolonial imaginary space for thinking differently about colonial discovery and especially the possibilities of blackness in history.
Can a hamburger uplift a people?
Image still from Chicken Licken advertisement.
In his article ���Burgers for the Soul,��� South African literary critic Wamuwi Mbao observes that “Burgers are a psychologically complex experience.��� Mbao argues that the sandwiches��� rise in culinary status can be attributed to ���how burgers make you feel.��� Inspired by these lingering impressions I strode ardently into the Mowbray, Cape Town, branch of the Chicken Licken fast food chain to order a Big John Burger. Since the fast-food chain���s slogan is “Soul Food,” the burger promised a moving experience.
In the weeks prior, the Big John Burger was at the center of a media furor after Chicken Licken released a new advertisement promoting it in the lead up to the Christmas and New Years festive season of 2018. The ad recounted ���the legend of Big John,��� a young Black African man, who out of sheer hunger for adventure, embarked on a solo ocean faring journey, and his discovery of a new land which he names Europe. Yet, it was controversially banned by the Advertising Regulatory Board (ARB), the body charged with regulating the tastefulness of advertising content in South Africa, for ���making a mockery of colonialism.���
Back in the Chicken Licken branch, I took a bite of my burger and waited in vain for the affirmative feelings of adventure to rush over me. There was no psychologically complex experience. This postcolonial burger was a salty, soggy mess. Yet in my disappointment, I left wondering about the relationship between branding, postcolonialism and heritage, and especially about how the advertisement served up a kind of conceptual value meal so to speak, comprised of the notions of representation, theory and pastness.
These concepts appear in various elements of the advertisement���s narrative style and content. The two-minute long advert starts off in a branch of a Chicken Licken store where an employee narrates the legend of Big John to an inquisitive customer. This oral history starts in 1650, when Big John embarks on his epic solo sea journey from Africa to satisfy his great hunger. He sails treacherous oceans and has many harrowing encounters with animals and fearsome sea-creatures along the way. While, ���Big Mjohnana did many things,��� declares the narrator, ���he will always be remembered for discovering a foreign land,��� which he named ���Eu-rope.���
The advertising agency, Joe Public United (JPU), developed a special webpage dedicated to Big John���s travels. The landing page declared, ���Hola! You���ve found the big map Big Mjohnana used on his legendary journey.��� Visitors were invited to ������ join the adventure and see the many treasures he found along the way,��� by using the interactive, multimedia online platform and learn more about his legendary discoveries. Strikingly, Big John���s map was different: his was an inverted, aged version of the standard Mercator map, which positioned Africa prominently at the center and South Africa at the very top of the world.
This intentional upturning was, according to JPU, about putting ���South Africa and Africa on top of the world. [To] get people to look at things differently, to be proud of where they���re from and to help them see that anything is possible if they���re hungry enough.��� With both the advertisement and website, JPU said they wanted to ���show South Africans that Chicken Licken believes this country has all the potential to conquer the world and rewrite history from an African perspective.���
For the cultural theorist Stuart Hall, representations such as advertisements were systems of signs that communicated information that was always charged with power. In the case of the Big John Burger, the advertiser used satire as a subversive medium to, without putting it in so many words, invoke a postcolonial troubling of dominant historical and cultural representations of European voyages of the discovery of Africa. Hall and other theorists have suggested that the postcolonial is a conceptual space, one marked both a temporal break with colonial time, but also the ongoing struggle to overcome the persistence of forms of colonial representation and structures of knowledge. In the conceptual space of the Big John advertisement, three themes have a particular postcolonial flavor: mapping, naming and discovery.
The map used on the Big John Burger website invokes the important colonial practice of drawing up charts of foreign lands for purposes of making a claim to ownership. For example, the literature studies scholar Jose Rabasa argues in his article Allegories of Atlas that the Mercator map structured a new configuration of time and space that positioned Europe at the center of the world and at the beginning of time. ���If specific political configurations establish boundaries and national identities for a European geographic space, then the rest of the world acquires spatial meaning only after the different regions have been inscribed by Europeans.���
When Big John arrives in “a foreign land” to find ���Jan van Riebeeck and his crew as they load cargo onto their three ships (the Dromedaris, Reijger and Goede Hoop) before they embark on their voyage,��� he takes a moment to think, then plunges his spear into the ground and announces, “I call this place Eu-rope.” European nations also marked their “discoveries” with pomp and theater. In Ceremonies of Possession, the historian Patricia Seed shows how colonial powers enacted rites of possession to stake their claims over new foreign lands. The English planted gardens, the French paraded on the shore and the Spanish read The Requirement, a brutal declaration of possession. And when it came to naming, Jose Rabasa observes, all new territories needed new names, as ���the newly discovered territories acquire semanticity in terms of their inclusion within a European perspective.��� A Black male naming a “formerly unknown” land populated by Caucasian people, however, can be seen to prompting the question about who and how claims to foreign lands can and were made.
To name is also to assert “discovery”; to say that one was first. Colonial discovery has a strong cultural and political resonance in South Africa. For example, the historian Leslie Wits shows that Jan van Riebeek, who established the first fort at the Cape, was seized upon by the apartheid state in 1952 as a progenitor figure for the white South African nation. Van Riebeek had already been seen as ���the volksvader, the initiator of farming in South Africa, the bearer of Christianity to the sub-continent, and the [British] colonial founder.��� His arrival at the Cape in 1652 was promoted as the founding of South Africa. His image was used on currency and symbols of the Dutch East India Company, such as that of the Castle at the Cape, were used in apartheid state insignia. The moment of “colonial discovery” therefore anchored the history of the white South African nation and secured the authority of the apartheid state.
But I do not need to quote history books to bring home these points to the many black viewers who saw and liked the advertisement. Big John���s antics were a kind of nod and a wink about historical knowledge already widely shared. While the burger certainly was not the best, the advertisement is palatable precisely because of the way that it promotes African agency. This is not a mockery of colonialism. Rather, it creates a space of speculation beyond the boundaries of history, for wondering about the possibilities of Africans��� own “great voyages of discovery.” Of course the advert is caught up in the trappings of capitalism, yet it also generates a postcolonial imaginary space for thinking differently about colonial discovery and especially the possibilities of blackness in history.
Can a burger uplift a people?
Image still from Chicken Licken advertisement.
In his article ���Burgers for the Soul,��� South African literary critic Wamuwi Mbao observes that “Burgers are a psychologically complex experience.��� Mbao argues that the sandwiches��� rise in culinary status can be attributed to ���how burgers make you feel.��� Inspired by these lingering impressions I strode ardently into the Mowbray, Cape Town, branch of the Chicken Licken fast food chain to order a Big John Burger. Since the fast-food chain���s slogan is “Soul Food,” the burger promised a moving experience.
In the weeks prior, the Big John Burger was at the center of a media furor after Chicken Licken released a new advertisement promoting it in the lead up to the Christmas and New Years festive season of 2018. The ad recounted ���the legend of Big John,��� a young Black African man, who out of sheer hunger for adventure, embarked on a solo ocean faring journey, and his discovery of a new land which he names Europe. Yet, it was controversially banned by the Advertising Regulatory Board (ARB), the body charged with regulating the tastefulness of advertising content in South Africa, for ���making a mockery of colonialism.���
Back in the Chicken Licken branch, I took a bite of my burger and waited in vain for the affirmative feelings of adventure to rush over me. There was no psychologically complex experience. This postcolonial burger was a salty, soggy mess. Yet in my disappointment, I left wondering about the relationship between branding, postcolonialism and heritage, and especially about how the advertisement served up a kind of conceptual value meal so to speak, comprised of the notions of representation, theory and pastness.
These concepts appear in various elements of the advertisement���s narrative style and content. The two-minute long advert starts off in a branch of a Chicken Licken store where an employee narrates the legend of Big John to an inquisitive customer. This oral history starts in 1650, when Big John embarks on his epic solo sea journey from Africa to satisfy his great hunger. He sails treacherous oceans and has many harrowing encounters with animals and fearsome sea-creatures along the way. While, ���Big Mjohnana did many things,��� declares the narrator, ���he will always be remembered for discovering a foreign land,��� which he named ���Eu-rope.���
The advertising agency, Joe Public United (JPU), developed a special webpage dedicated to Big John���s travels. The landing page declared, ���Hola! You���ve found the big map Big Mjohnana used on his legendary journey.��� Visitors were invited to ������ join the adventure and see the many treasures he found along the way,��� by using the interactive, multimedia online platform and learn more about his legendary discoveries. Strikingly, Big John���s map was different: his was an inverted, aged version of the standard Mercator map, which positioned Africa prominently at the center and South Africa at the very top of the world.
This intentional upturning was, according to JPU, about putting ���South Africa and Africa on top of the world. [To] get people to look at things differently, to be proud of where they���re from and to help them see that anything is possible if they���re hungry enough.��� With both the advertisement and website, JPU said they wanted to ���show South Africans that Chicken Licken believes this country has all the potential to conquer the world and rewrite history from an African perspective.���
For the cultural theorist Stuart Hall, representations such as advertisements were systems of signs that communicated information that was always charged with power. In the case of the Big John Burger, the advertiser used satire as a subversive medium to, without putting it in so many words, invoke a postcolonial troubling of dominant historical and cultural representations of European voyages of the discovery of Africa. Hall and other theorists have suggested that the postcolonial is a conceptual space, one marked both a temporal break with colonial time, but also the ongoing struggle to overcome the persistence of forms of colonial representation and structures of knowledge. In the conceptual space of the Big John advertisement, three themes have a particular postcolonial flavor: mapping, naming and discovery.
The map used on the Big John Burger website invokes the important colonial practice of drawing up charts of foreign lands for purposes of making a claim to ownership. For example, the literature studies scholar Jose Rabasa argues in his article Allegories of Atlas that the Mercator map structured a new configuration of time and space that positioned Europe at the center of the world and at the beginning of time. ���If specific political configurations establish boundaries and national identities for a European geographic space, then the rest of the world acquires spatial meaning only after the different regions have been inscribed by Europeans.���
When Big John arrives in “a foreign land” to find ���Jan van Riebeeck and his crew as they load cargo onto their three ships (the Dromedaris, Reijger and Goede Hoop) before they embark on their voyage,��� he takes a moment to think, then plunges his spear into the ground and announces, “I call this place Eu-rope.” European nations also marked their “discoveries” with pomp and theater. In Ceremonies of Possession, the historian Patricia Seed shows how colonial powers enacted rites of possession to stake their claims over new foreign lands. The English planted gardens, the French paraded on the shore and the Spanish read The Requirement, a brutal declaration of possession. And when it came to naming, Jose Rabasa observes, all new territories needed new names, as ���the newly discovered territories acquire semanticity in terms of their inclusion within a European perspective.��� A Black male naming a “formerly unknown” land populated by Caucasian people, however, can be seen to prompting the question about who and how claims to foreign lands can and were made.
To name is also to assert “discovery”; to say that one was first. Colonial discovery has a strong cultural and political resonance in South Africa. For example, the historian Leslie Wits shows that Jan van Riebeek, who established the first fort at the Cape, was seized upon by the apartheid state in 1952 as a progenitor figure for the white South African nation. Van Riebeek had already been seen as ���the volksvader, the initiator of farming in South Africa, the bearer of Christianity to the sub-continent, and the [British] colonial founder.��� His arrival at the Cape in 1652 was promoted as the founding of South Africa. His image was used on currency and symbols of the Dutch East India Company, such as that of the Castle at the Cape, were used in apartheid state insignia. The moment of “colonial discovery” therefore anchored the history of the white South African nation and secured the authority of the apartheid state.
But I do not need to quote history books to bring home these points to the many black viewers who saw and liked the advertisement. Big John���s antics were a kind of nod and a wink about historical knowledge already widely shared. While the burger certainly was not the best, the advertisement is palatable precisely because of the way that it promotes African agency. This is not a mockery of colonialism. Rather, it creates a space of speculation beyond the boundaries of history, for wondering about the possibilities of Africans��� own “great voyages of discovery.” Of course the advert is caught up in the trappings of capitalism, yet it also generates a postcolonial imaginary space for thinking differently about colonial discovery and especially the possibilities of blackness in history.
Silencing the national anthem
South Sudan flag raising ceremony, Washington DC. Image credit Martha Heinemann Bixby via Flickr (CC).
Late last month, South Sudan���s Minister for Information Michael Makuei Lueth told Agence France-Presse that the national anthem could only be sung in President Salva Kiir Mayardit���s presence, by official decree: the anthem is ���not for everybody.��� National radio, MPs, and South Sudan���s busy online community have responded with a combination of mockery and concern. Some have asked whether Kiir feels threatened by the frequent mentions of God in the lyrics; one commenter wondered if the national anthem is as transitional as the constitution.
South Sudan���s national anthem was composed by competition in 2010 (much like Nigeria���s in 1977, and St Kitts and Nevis���s in 1983); the winning version was written by a local university team. The competition included artists and poets who had composed songs during South Sudan���s struggle for liberation in the 1980s and 1990s. The aim of the competition committee was to find a less martial, and more inclusive and hopeful tune than the old Sudan anthem. The new tune barely had time to bed in before the new civil war in 2013. But written in a time of relative optimism, with lyrics focused on peaceful unity and prosperity, it still has potential as a symbol of hope.
Popular derision of the order has prompted clarification from the Ministry. Lily Albino Akol Akol, Deputy Minister for Information, explained this decree aimed to stop ministers, under-secretaries, or state governors having the anthem sung to them at functions; schools and embassies could carry on using it, and people could sing it if they wished to. The Ministry has emphasized that the Presidential decree also orders security and military men in uniform to stop speaking at public rallies, something welcomed by prominent Juba civil society representatives as a step towards curbing the militarization of public life.
There are two obvious interpretations of this combined order. Firstly���and most obviously, as pointed out on Twitter and Facebook���the President is feeling insecure. This insecurity is not just about the possibility of nationalist lyrics being used or re-crafted against him, but also about his immediate rivals using national symbols to build their own legitimacy. Ateny Wek, the Presidential Spokesperson, was quoted in a Juba newspaper last Thursday, July 25th complaining specifically of state governors getting the anthem sung to them ���even when the event has nothing to do with the sovereignty of South Sudan.��� The President���s Office is quite concerned with the risk of other powerful commanders and politicians building credibility as statesmen, particularly when it is obvious that the President himself has so little of the same.
There is a second interpretation that is more mundane but possibly more insidious. The President���s Office and the Ministry of Information are very good at playing with the South Sudan gossip circuit. Shrewd local observers have noted that this decree is the latest in a long line of dramatic, confusing and hard-to-implement declarations���recently including bans on tinted car windows, skin bleaching creams, particular forms of dress, etc.���from the “Ministry for Controversies.” These news stories soak up attention from a small critical South Sudanese public and (particularly) the international and humanitarian community, providing a convenient few weeks of outrage and “clarifications” that distracts from, for instance, questions around the new land act, or public oil revenue accounts that are quite a bit late.
In some respects, then, South Sudan is bucking the global trend of authoritarian governments. Most states use their anthems to unite, and police, a governable corpus, and many polities sanction those who don���t sing or stand for the anthem (for example, Jeremy Corbyn in the UK, and Colin Kaepernick in the USA). This last week, the Chinese government has played their national anthem over speakers to Hong Kong protesters. Not singing the anthem is more often a concern.
August 4, 2019
Frankenstein’s monster in Khartoum
Image credit Hossam el-Hamalawy via Flickr (CC).
The Transitional Military Council (TMC) has decided to try and finish with the popular movement of Sudan. Its Vice President Mohamed Dagolo, better known as Hemeti, is suspected of orchestrating the Monday, June 3rd massacre of protesters at the central Khartoum sit-in. Beyond his poisonous reputation, the recent trajectory of the ousted president Omar al-Bashir���s one-time underling reveals the dynamics of a regime in crisis, and illustrates the terrible danger Hemeti and Sudan���s “deep state” pose to the uprising six months in.
���My patience with politics has limits,��� said Hemiti sometime in April, not long after this former leader of the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) militia was promoted to Vice President just days after the dismissal of Omar al-Bashir. Despite his reputation as a marauder and war criminal, Hemeti has since imposed himself as the undisputed face of the TMC without even being a member of the regular army���a coup de force in the eyes of most Sudanese.
As leader of the RSF, Hemeti is amongst the principal beneficiaries of the regime���s recent engagement with international questions over migration and border controls. Additionally, alongside General Abdel Fatah Burhan, the President of the TMC, Hemeti has been a key promoter of the Sudanese contingent���s involvement in the Saudi-led coalition���s war in Yemen. Hemeti himself went to Saudi Arabia on 24 May, and met with Prince Mohamed Bin Salman.
In mid-April he grabbed a bit of international attention in an on camera debate with Jean-Michel Dumond (representative of the European Union), the French, British and Dutch ambassadors, as well as US representatives���establishing himself as “the man of the hour.” Since the uprising began in December, he has come to embody executive power in Khartoum; present at every front, a participant in every decision, and making multiple appearances and announcements���with several notable rhetorical variations, however.
Contradictorily we���ve seen him freeing about a hundred prisoners following an official visit to the infamous Kouber prison, and on the other hand threatening the insurgents and the Sudanese Professionals Association (SPA), a trade union confederation playing a leading role in the uprising during their general strike of 28-29 May. It was his troops that blocked critical journalists��� access to the national television headquarters���summoning police whilst blaming some NGOs for “instigating the trouble,” exactly what was done in Darfur. Hemiti is now presenting himself as the ultimate arbiter after the impasse of the TMC���s negotiations with the Forces for Freedom and Change (FFC), the coalition of opposition forces that includes the SPA.
Ascension to the summit
Nothing suggested that Mohamed Hamdan Dagolo of the Rezeigat tribe would achieve such a rapid ascent in the world of politics. He started as a cattle merchant and guard of commercial convoys traveling across the west of Sudan, Chad, and east Libya. In 2010 he started dabbling in politics, establishing himself as an alternative to the former strong-man of the Darfur war, his distant cousin, Moussa Hilal. Hilal, a former advisor to al-Bashir, a chief of the Janjaweed���the infamous quasi-official militia���and the head of the border guard was ostracized following an internal purge, and captured by Hemetti himself in November 2017.
Initially, under the patronage of both the powerful National Intelligence and Security Service (NISS) and the president���s office, the RSF mutated out of the Janjaweed. In 2013, it was officially recognized, and Hemeti and the militia grew together.
Though the RSF has imposed itself as the premier force in the country, the command and control structure of the militia remains opaque. Their prerogatives definitively surpassed the army after parliament passed the rushed and contested Rapid Support Force Law in January 2017, which substantially increased their funding and formalized their autonomy. Though they don���t take orders from the army hierarchy their violence is legitimized and even aided by the state. When al-Bashir was deposed, Hemitti as leader of RSF was well-placed to fight for a high position.
Governor of the margins
In only a few years, Hemeti rose to become a militia “general,” entirely outside of formal military structures. He accumulated innumerable functions within the al-Bashir regime, and became “governor” of the country���s margins, meaning he took brutal control over ���internally displaced people��� camps in Darfur, and in regions like Jabal Marra, the Blue Nile and South Kordofan, which all remain gripped by violence.
Hemeti has established himself as the premier border guard in both the east���the region bordering Eritrea and Ethiopia���and the west, his stronghold. There, he attempts to control���not without difficulty���the borders with Libya and Chad. He flatters himself as working on behalf of the European Union and its borders policies, enacted in 2014 through the controversial Khartoum Process, through which the Sudanese state receives EU funds to police migration. In this position, he has become the ambiguous promoter of the fight against human trafficking in Sudan, which is both a “transit” and “departure” country, whilst generating private income���somehow���from the trade.
He is a main player in Sudan���s involvement in the war in Yemen, as led by Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, though he has had to face mutineers amongst the young forces sent there. Of late, he has become the owner of a gold mining operation in Jabal Amir, in north Darfur, which in turn has allowed him to strengthen his militia.
In an October 2016 interview with a newspaper in Um El-Gura, his fief, on his role, he announced; ���my forces and I have assumed every role, even the police, the army, and the local leadership. We���ve done a lot, for security and reform to development ������
For some observers of the Sudanese political scene, Hemeti manages the tensions between the army, paramilitary forces, and the various Islamist tendencies within the state���and replicates what al-Bashir managed to achieve for so long before he was ousted: to resolve and evade contradictions.
Hemeti���s troops are now abundantly present on the outskirts of Khartoum. The number of RSF men in Khartoum is estimated to be between 5,000 and 7,000, and he is reportedly enlisting new recruits, particularly in the east of the country.
Following the June 3rd massacre, the central sit-in is no more.
The war of the barricades
One of the obsessions of Hemeti and the TCM are the al-Mat��r��s (the barricades). Built with stones and wood, these barricades represent Khartoum���s symbolic and physical recovery on the part of protesters. They served as the protesters��� security checkpoints guarding access to the largest sit-in, in front of the army���s Khartoum headquarters, which began on the 6th of April. This re-appropriation of space has made it possible to counter repression: a key part of the peaceful self-defense that has characterized the movement since the beginning. Several attempts at dismantling these barricades have been reported by protesters and the SPA during the April 15th confrontations, the repeated intimidation attempts on May 6th, and so on.
For Hemeti, overthrowing this re-appropriation is a priority: to subdue Khartoum, it is necessary to attack and neutralize the insurgents��� esprit de corps from all sides. This will to recapture Khartoum���the desire for an authoritarian restoration���became evident during what some protesters called the “barricade war.��� In an issue which became a point of discord amongst protesters, the TMC put pressure on the movement to dismantle the mat��r��s as a condition for the resumption of negotiations. The tacit agreement by the FFC (which includes the SPA) to remove some barricades has been badly received by many Sudanese, adding to questions about the balance of forces within the opposition coalition.
For the young F., contacted by telephone:
The dismantling of some of the barricades is dangerous for the movement and its pursuit; it is an additional restriction and an obstacle to maintaining a balance of power between the protesters and the SPA, in the face of Hemeti’s omnipotence and the delaying attitude of the TMC.
‘A new Darfur!’
The night of Monday, May 13th would become a premonition of the events we witnessed on Monday, June 3rd, with the death toll of that first night standing at 11 and the injury list at 200.
That first murderous night will be remembered in the common imaginary as the “Massacre of 8 Ramadan.” Present at the edge of the sit-in, M. said:
What Khartoum has experienced these last nights is almost routine at the margins of the country, in Darfur; something similar happened in the attack of May 4 in the city of Niyala. The moving of this visible violence to Khartoum���it���s already well-known in the margins���is relatively new. It’s like a test, a further provocation made to the movement. It bares the signature of Hemeti.
The modus operandi leaves little doubt about the involvement of the RSF and Hemetti in the June 3rd slaughter. By night, men in RSF uniforms surrounded the sit-in. According to witnesses, shooting live bullets, they felled a dozen peaceful demonstrators in a few minutes.
Removing himself from all responsibility, Hemetti said on television that he had captured those responsible for the killings who “disguised themselves” as the RSF. There has been no official commission to investigate the facts. Speaking after May 13th, for G., “the RSF are a bit like the guard dogs of the regime. They do not attack neighbors, they do not attack thieves, but they terrorize all the inhabitants as soon as the master is no longer there.���
The RSF now patrol several areas of the city. It is a regime of terror and rumor that seeks to impose itself. It is what some protesters now call “Hemetti���s reconquest of Khartoum.” It is governance by terror, familiar in the country���s margins, and it has now come to the capital.
The offensive of June 3rd
The dawn of June 3rd marked the beginning of a terror offensive against the revolution and the peaceful movement calling for the transfer of power to civilians. It resulted in the bloody dismantling of the sit-in with live ammunition, tear gas, and the razing of protesters’ tents by uniformed men driving unmarked vehicles.
In one day, the repressive offensive resulted in tens of deaths, hundreds of wounded, and one hundred missing persons. According to witnesses, the toll could be more. The Central Committee of Sudanese Doctors claim corpses were thrown into the Nile.
The RSF have besieged parts of Khartoum and Omdurman, parading there. The TMC is being called the ���Majlis al-Mujrim��n al-Qatalah��� (Council of Murderous Criminals) by many Sudanese people. Its spokesman, General Chamseddin Kabachi justified the attack, citing “the presence of harmful and criminal elements that must be neutralized” within the perimeter of the sit-in.
The TMC press conference scheduled for mid-afternoon on June 3rd was cancelled. In Khartoum, Hemeti is widely perceived to have been the chief architect of this massacre. The FFC and the SPA denounced the attack as, “the bloodshed and the supreme betrayal, through live ammunition, of the Transitional Military Council.”
The SPA called for:
An action of total civil disobedience throughout the country, to erect barricades in the streets, as well as extended general strikes and total paralysis of all sectors until the fall of the Transitional Military Council, now renamed “Treason Council,” the regime’s security apparatus, its militia as well as its “shadow forces.”
Many cities in Sudan responded to the call for solidarity with Khartoum, with protests in El-Doueim, Niyala and Port Sudan.
Back to the future
Hemeti does not have a political base, much less a popular one. Although, he is attempting to compensate by securing a consensus amongst the historic opposition parties and various armed groups. Called in Arabic the “Hab��t al-N��a��m“��(the Soft Landing), this counter-revolutionary strategy appears to be the solution preferred by the international and regional powers.
He is probably not the most militarily powerful in Khartoum and is still unable to conquer the capital by force���as he was able to rule the country’s margins. But, he is more reckless and feared than any other potential leader, and because of that he could prevail over the army and other security apparatus.
Hemeti and the RSF were developed by key elements of the Sudanese “deep state,” and are still supported by the security services. Together they are attempting to make Sudan a security state par excellence, under the shadow of the gloomy Salah Gosh, former chief of the NISS.
Under these circumstances, will Hemeti�� be accepted as a partner for the next three years, pending elections? Will he be represented in the National Council, which is still a matter of contention between the TMC and the Forces for Freedom and Change (even within the civilian forces)?
In any case, he is a threat. His forces now appear strong enough to attack any opposition groups, whether it be the FFC, the SPA, or any army or even security cadres resistant to his rule. Even if the military remains in power, he could turn it into a Frankenstein monster, which would not only annihilate the hope for a new Sudan, but it could turn against those who helped create him as well.
August 1, 2019
Fighting rape culture in Ghana
Dancers. Image credit C.C. Chapman via Flickr (CC).
In early��February 2019, someone on Twitter argued that that ���Kakyer����me,��� a song released in 2007 by Ghanaian musical trio, Praye, ���would have hit more if it���d been released this year than years ago, because feminists would have blasted them for daring to ask who will wash the husband���s clothes and clean his room divider after his wife left him.���
Some six months earlier, towards the end of August 2018,��two other friends and I stumbled on another song, ���Konkontibaa��� by Obour (featuring Samini) whilst making a playlist for an old-school themed party. We initially thought about including it, because the song was a hit song from the past; fifteen years ago to be exact. We soon realized we���d be much better off not including it. We also realized that we had sang along and danced to ���Konkontibaa��� when it first came out.
A closer look at ���Konkontibaa,��� points to how problematic the song is. Here���s an English translation of Konkontibaa���s opening lines:�����… this one is indeed small / I know that she���s small / but she���s the only one that I like.��� The chorus goes: ���The little tadpole is bound to grow into a big frog.���
The tadpole he sings about is a young girl, specifically someone in her pre- or early-teens. Obour and Samini were both 22 years old when they put this song out, which makes the much beloved song predatory at best, and, at worst predatory.
As far as I know, ���Konkontibaa��� did not experience any significant pushback upon its release. However, something really interesting���and very telling���happened: One day in March 2005, the nomination committee of Ghana���s National Music Awards show summoned Obour and Samini, asking them to defend their songs���which were all vying for the Popular Song of the Year award���against charges of indecency. The former, there to defend ���Konkontibaa,��� and the latter, there to defend his own song, ���Linda,��� which features a young man pining for sex from a temporarily absent lover.
In the end, according to��one article that reported on the proceedings, ���Linda��� was sentenced to non-inclusion in that year���s nominations while ���Konkontibaa��� was acquitted and included in the nominations. The article also noted that ���another song that was dropped from competing in the Popular Song category was Mzbel���s ���Awoso Me.������ (In MzBel���s song, much like in Samini���s, the singer expresses a yearning for sexual pleasure.)
So, the two songs wherein young adults were merely expressing sexual desire were incriminated, and the other song, the third one with its predatory, pedophilic content, was cleared. And thus, it was able to go on, freely, to win its maker not only the Most Popular song of the year award, but five other awards, which included the equally coveted artist and album of the year awards.
In a post-ceremony interview with the Ghana News Agency, Obour is reported to have said that he indeed expected to win massively at the awards, ���because��of the high level popularity ‘Konkontibaa’ generated last year, among the young and old; it became a household song.���
���Everywhere, you hear people singing it,��� he added.
Any society that demonstrates this level of enthusiasm about such a song is a society where rape culture is normalized, and therefore, thrives. Examples abound to corroborate this fact, as brilliantly detailed in��an essay��by journalist and feminist activist, Nana Ama Agyeman.
Two years ago, rapper Sarkodie ran into trouble for spewing arguably misogynist lyrics that perpetuated a stereotype born from a myth about the Krobo people of Ghana���that Krobo women have been cursed, by Okomfo Anokye, a priest of the Asante kingdom, with promiscuity. There was a furor. And Sarkodie had to apologize, albeit halfheartedly.
A year earlier, in May 2016, a Ghanaian intersectional feminist website, Ghana Feminism, published��an essay in which six out of seven women���s allegations of rape against a rapper, XO Senavoe, were detailed. According to founder of the blog, Obaa Boni, who published the article���even after the rapper���s attorney had called and threatened legal action if the piece went up���she wanted to publish the allegations to ���disrupt the cultural wall of silence that allows perpetrators to continue to inflict their violence without accountability������ And disrupt silence she did, considering the level of attention created by the article. XO Senavoe���s public voice has been extremely muffled, his career suffering an arguably irreparable blow. His deflated power and reduced influence are little victories in their own right.
Ghana Feminism��makes up but��one part of the movement that has emerged a little short of a decade after the release of ���Konkontibaa.��� There are the likes of Drama Queens, Pepper Dem Ministries and The Young Feminist Collective who, to borrow from Ghana Feminism���s mission statement, ���aim at liberating Ghanaians from constricting gender oppression,��� essentially patriarchal violence, of which normalized rape culture is a central part. Together with several other Ghanaian women fighting patriarchy on the net and beyond, they wait for the artist who shall dare release the next ���Konkontibaa��� and expect no pushback or repercussions at all.
Notwithstanding these efforts, it is too soon to think the (male) Ghanaian rapper has ceased spewing offensive, inappropriate raps about girls or women. Yet it is worth acknowledging the shift in the cultural climate since fifteen years ago when Obour, the current�� president of Ghana���s National Musician���s Union, released his rather despicable song.
In a fantastic scenario, the preteen girl who was so wrongly being sung about some fifteen years ago is now the twenty-something year old young woman who joined forces with her sisters and realized that long-chanted battle cry to ���end rape culture.��� Really, though, the news is not all that fantastic: there���s bad news, which is that the train moving towards a rape-culture-free destination is moving so slow; and the good news is that: the train is moving, regardless. A luta continua.
July 31, 2019
Black authors, maids and madams
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Zanele Muholi, "Massa and Minah 2," 2008
��� Zukiswa Wanner, The Madams (2006)Damn, and I thought madamhood was going to be easy.
In the wake of President F.W. de Klerk���s 1990 announcement that liberation movements such as the African National Congress and the Pan-African Congress were unbanned, South African writers began to shift their focus from the struggle against apartheid���which was, until then, the grand narrative of twentieth-century South African literature.
In spite of political changes, one of the most traditional aspects of South African life continued as before: the demography of cities, and the fact that black domestic workers continued to be employed by white families. To this day, over a million workers remain in domestic employment. However, as in similar situations elsewhere and in other times, the literary representation of domestic workers began to change and ever since 1990, black female characters have been stepping out of the shadows, with their own names, voices and identities.
While white authors such as Antjie Krog, Jo-Anne Richards and Damon Galgut continue to grapple with the ambivalent and complex relations involving black women in subordinate positions in post-apartheid South Africa, black authors, on the other hand, have opened new spaces, as if in response to the call of Njabulo S. Ndebele to “rediscover the ordinary.” Jacob Dlamini���s autobiographical Native Nostalgia (2009) is a case in point. It might be said that many black authors “write back” to the metropolitan “center” (i.e. the grand anti-apartheid narrative) by writing stories not of heroic political activists, but of ordinary people such as mothers and aunts, many of whom happen to be domestic workers.
Marita, MaRosie and Pertunia���Johannesburg, post-2000
My maid became my rock as she held me and I cried on her shoulder.
A 2004 Financial Mail survey found that close to 300,000 black South Africans were earning middle-class incomes. This was two years before Zukiswa Wanner���s The Madams was published, and about the time sociologist Alison King was working on her study, Domestic Servants in Post-Apartheid South Africa. According to King, “domestic service is a supreme site to discover if class inequalities are replacing racial inequalities as the means to exploit and oppress the vulnerable in South African society.” After interviewing many employers and employees, King noted that her sample might not be sufficiently representative, as she could not find a single white domestic worker to interview in the Eastern Cape: “All I spoke to were adamant that no white woman in Grahamstown would work for a black employer as a domestic servant.” King���s finding that black employers could be extremely harsh on their black servants supports those of K Hansen, whose research showed that in 1989 Zambia social hierarchies between employers and employees develop regardless of race. Similarly, with reference to Tanzania, J Bujra argued as follows: “It is important not to discount the possibility that the oppressed can become oppressors, and that women together are not bound in sisterhood if divided by class.”
It is against this background that The Madams may be read. The daughter of a Zimbabwean mother and a South African political exile, Wanner was raised in Lusaka before moving to Johannesburg, and then to Nairobi. The cover promises that Wanner���s book is a “wildly provocative novel,” asserting that “nothing is simply black and white.” Set in Lombardy East, a Johannesburg suburb, the focalizer of The Madams is Thandi, who manages a government tourism department. Thandi, an ambitious black woman, is “done with being a Supermom to her five-year-old son, a Superslut to her man and a Superwoman to her staff���,” and decides to acquire “the great South African bourgeois accessory,” a domestic worker who must be white���a scenario that promises to disrupt reader expectations regarding madams and maids.
Her neighbor, Lauren, “an Anglo plaasmeisie without the plaas”��is a lecturer at Wits university, a job she would not have been able to hold down without a servant. Lauren prides herself on the fact that her children get on well with their nanny, and that the first word they spoke was not “Mommy” but “MaRosie.” Thandi���s other neighbor is Nosizwe (Siz), a successful black entrepreneur who, we are told, is “one of those few black South African pre-independence children who were born with beaded silver spoons in their mouths.” Professing to alleviate black unemployment, Siz “imports” a cousin from the Eastern Cape to look after her husband���s illegitimate children.
Thandi, however, does not want a black domestic worker. Even though her own mother had black helpers, and fully aware that township women often employ poorer sisters or nieces to look after their children, Thandi has nevertheless made up her mind: regarding Siz���s “maid-recruiting” efforts, she says: “I simply do not have it in me to insult a ‘sister’ in my home.” Her assumption is that domestic workers are by definition treated badly, and she believes she would feel less guilty “lashing out at a white person.”
All expectations are therefore disrupted when Thandi finds “an employable-challenged individual,” a young white Afrikaans woman who has just served a prison sentence after murdering her abusive husband. Marita is thrilled to get the job, and her reaction is instant when Thandi asks whether she might not have a problem working as a “maid for kaffirs”: “Marita flinched visibly when I used the k-word and said, ‘Sorry madam, please don���t use words like that around me, ne?'”��� Marita is an ANC-supporter, and maintains that black people have only ever been kind to her. She gets the job, moves into the en-suite granny flat with its own TV, and wears a traditional pink maid���s uniform with pride. Soon afterwards, MaRosie from next door becomes her best friend.
In her very amusing novel Wanner reverses traditional roles and makes important political statements while wryly revealing the complexity of relationships between employers and employees in South Africa. She disrupts and unsettles typical representations of the madam-maid situation, and does so in a satirical manner that teaches as it entertains. Similarly, her apparently humorous Maid in SA: 30 Ways to Leave your Madam (2013) is a serious analysis of exploitation in the domain of domestic work. Wanner demonstrates that factors such as economic status are becoming influential new markers of identity in post-apartheid South Africa. Madams are to be found at all levels of society, with domestic work being a last resort, irrespective of race.
Old Virginia and Gogo���Johannesburg, post-2000
Stuck between two worlds, shunned by both.
The first part of Kopano Matlwa���s coming-of-age novel Coconut (2007) is told from the perspective of a young black girl from a rich family who describes the difficulties of growing up in a white neighborhood. Ofilwe lives in a wealthy Johannesburg suburb where she and her brother Tshepo are the only black children. Old Virginia is the family���s domestic worker. In contrast, the second part of the novel focuses on the ambitions of a poor black girl working as a waitress in an upmarket coffee shop. Fikile���s grandmother, a typical go-between figure, used to bring her magazines from her white employer���s home. Fikile “lived in those magazines, and the more (she) read, the more assured (she) was that the life in those pages was the one (she) was born to live.” This fantasy world leads her to hate her people���and also to a kind of self-hatred. As a waitress she moves around in the world she aspires to become part of, clearly in denial that she is in fact nothing more than a servant in a public place.
Pertinent issues such as race, language and identity in South Africa are discussed in a fresh manner, with domestic workers functioning as important go-between characters. They are seen to embody traditional labor relations, but patterns are radically changing. Characters such as Old Virginia and Gogo, elderly black women who, thanks to their servant positions, gained insight into white people long before apartheid ended, play pivotal roles. They know how impossible it was to aspire to live like white people, and their function is to formulate the ongoing complexity of negotiating racial boundaries. As such, Old Virginia and Gogo play significant roles in this unravelling process. For many decades, women like them lived in close proximity to white people, an experience that underlined the comparative discomfort of their own home lives. In their cramped rooms, a cold-water tap and inside toilet would have been considered a luxury. Harsh apartheid laws made it impossible to aspire to becoming a part of city life. Despite the everyday contact between maids and madams, the dividing lines were clear and non-negotiable.
The title Coconut is an internationally used term which also has currency in post-apartheid Johannesburg and the “coconut” motif is key to examining race as a determinant in the formation of identity. Matlwa does so in uncomfortable and unpredictable ways. For a young black author writing in a new political dispensation, Matlwa���s approach is especially daring. Coconut deals with nouveau riche pretentions, but it also investigates the complex emotional and social aspects of lives lived between cultures and classes. Coconut carries a strong message to a new generation of young black people: nothing is easy in post-1994 South Africa, and to “walk home” to one���s “roots” may not be a bad option���whether through keeping contact with rural families or with township gogos in domestic service.
Tokkie���Cape Town, the 1950s and beyond
Tokkie was part of their family so to speak.
In�� Zo�� Wicomb���s first volume of short stories, You Can���t get Lost in Cape Town (1987), it is already clear how accurately the author, born in 1948, the year the National Party came to power, reads and represents South African society. Then, a few years after the publication of her novel, David���s Story (2000), Playing in the Light (2006) appeared. It tells the story of a young businesswoman in post-apartheid South Africa who discovers that she is the daughter of “try for white” parents. Though men were attracted by her beauty���”a hint of Italian perhaps”���she generally kept her distance from people, much as her parents had. The first part of the novel is situated in post-apartheid South Africa, while the events of the second part occur in the 1950s, when Marion���s parents were newlyweds and later when she was a young child.
A coloured servant, Tokkie, often comes to visit Marion���s mother, a “white” woman who turns out to be Tokkie���s daughter, with the main character being her granddaughter.��Confronting the cruel irony of her family���s lonely “try for white” life now that racial separation is not longer legislated, Marion angrily demands that her father should reveal everything, especially since he seems oblivious of the “terrible injury” he and his wife inflicted on the family. Their decision to change their “status” happened by chance, he explains: while applying for a job at the Cape Town municipal council it was presumed from his appearance that he was white���an indication of the arbitrariness of the racial classification of “coloureds.” The re-classification of John and Helen to white enabled them to live far more comfortable lives, but it came at a huge cost.
Tokkie, an engaging domestic worker character, plays a central role in the plot. Each week, the old coloured woman arrived at the small house in Observatory, with the neighbors being told that Helen���s Afrikaans family were rich enough to employ Tokkie as a nanny. She always sat in a dilapidated cane chair where she shelled peas in an enamel bowl on her lap. Marion has fond memories of Tokkie, the way she comforted and petted her until she fell asleep on her lap.
Years after both her grandmother and her mother have died Marion is concerned not so much with the new racial identity she only finds out she has when it is in any case no longer of legal consequence, but rather with the implications of the race classification system for her mother and the grandmother she had so loved:
How am I to bear the fact that my Tokkie, my own grandmother, sat in the backyard drinking coffee from a servant���s mug, and that my mother, her own daughter, put that mug in her hands?
This scene is a poignant reminder of the in-between position occupied for centuries by domestic workers in South Africa. They were the only “non-white” people who could legitimately enter the domestic space of white people without arousing suspicion, and their enamel mugs signaled their “servant status.”
Estella���Durban, early Twenty-first Century
If one was unhappy then so was the other.
Imraan Coovadia���s incisive and amusing novel, High Low In-between (2009), made its appearance the year after President Thabo Mbeki left office; during his nine-year tenure, his contentious views on HIV/AIDS had caused a national uproar. Coovadia���s character, Arif, a virology professor, is largely based on his father, Dr. Hoosen Coovadia, a respected HIV/AIDS researcher whose findings were allegedly suppressed by the ANC government.
High Low In-between addresses the issue of social change through the character Estella, a beautiful Zulu woman who shifts the perception of her Indian employer, Nafisa. Estella makes her aware that power relations have not only altered politically, but also on a personal level, as she looks forward to an upwardly mobile future. In examining the complex in-between position of Indians in South Africa, the novel zooms in, at times, on the ambivalent relationship between Nafisa and Estella, a character who has largely been ignored by critics. This “blind spot in relation to a domestic worker character” is especially noteworthy in a novel whose very title points to the notion of hierarchy.
HIV/AIDS, a world-wide problem that would become one of post-apartheid South Africa���s greatest burdens, is highlighted in Estella���s refusal to be tested for the disease, which may be symptomatic of the government’s controversial treatment campaign at the time. Four years prior to publication of High Low In-between, Sally Peberdy and Natalya Dinat had released findings relating to domestic workers and HIV/AIDS in the Johannesburg area. Of the 1,100 domestic workers interviewed, 60% had sex at least once a month, while 7.7% had sex only once or twice per year; 40% described themselves as single, widowed or divorced; many had children, and many admitted to having “boyfriends.” Most domestic workers had access to the state���s health services, and those who consulted traditional healers also went to “ordinary” doctors. A disturbing finding was that domestic workers took few precautions to protect themselves from the disease:
[D]espite their use of health services, the majority of these women do not appear to be protecting themselves from HIV infection. A defining characteristic of this group is the lack of condom use. Over 60% of the sample had never used a condom in their lives.
The situation in Durban would not have been very different, and Estella���s circumstances could be said to reflect those of her Johannesburg counterparts. Nafisa would have laid down strict rules concerning Estella���s room on the premises, since even though she lived alone there, she had a small child in the township, and probably also a “boyfriend.” Estella refuses to get her HIV status checked, despite her employer���s concern: “Estella���s chances weren���t good. The numbers in this province for sexually active black women like Estella were the worst in the world, one in two.”
The entanglement of Nafisa and Estella is continuously expressed in terms of their intimate working relationship, and right from the start we are told: “Estella, the maid, was miserable because of Nafisa, her employer. If one was unhappy then so was the other. In this one way Estella and Nafisa were, people said, like mother and daughter.” In Coovadia���s High Low In-between, the employer is devastated when she realizes that she is losing the one person she thought she could order around and claim as a daughter or friend forever. Precisely because she is not family, Estella will disappear from her employer���s life as suddenly as she became a part of it.
Seismographs of change
Traditional hierarchies are fast changing in South Africa, and although anonymous servant figures still appear in post-1994 literature, these characters frequently serve important new functions. The silences that traditionally shrouded such figures has been broken: they not only embody but also problematize the interdependence and intimacy in employer/employee relationships. They also dramatize the insecurities of changing identities. This is achieved in unique and often humorous ways in the novels by Wanner, Matlwa, Wicomb and Coovadia. These authors not only give voice and agency to domestic worker characters, but also individual identity. These and other post-apartheid novels by black authors sensitive to seismographic shifts in the South African order of things articulate the deep-seated anxieties of employers���whether white or black���and do so in often humorous ways, exposing the fragility of these close relationships as workers decide to move on.
A new generation of domestic worker characters signals a significant break in a long literary tradition of stereotypes, of�� marginal��and meek figures. These genies have escaped the bottle: liberated from traditional roles, Estella and her sisters pose an ongoing challenge to outdated societal norms, and do so in urgent and often entertaining ways.
This is an abridged version of chapter 11 of Jansen���s book Like Family (2019). It appears here with the permission of the publisher, Wits University Press.
Brown skin women
Image via author.
Every year, the African-style clothes of female scholars of African descent paint the vibe and air of the annual meeting of the US-based African Studies Association (ASA), from the boubou, a traditional West African women���s robe, to the tobe, the Sudanese traditional dress. Women plan outfits weeks or months ahead. Many have the garments made in their respective countries, either traveling across the Atlantic with the attire themselves, or having visiting relatives or even neighbors, from back ���home,��� carry the clothing or fabric to them. ���Your aunt sent this for you,��� a neighbor from childhood might say, presenting a package, wrapped in familiar plastic.
Ablaze with colorful fabric, such as Akwete, Kanga, Kente and Shweshwe, the vibrant dynamics of women���s clothing practices also unfold in more intimate spaces within the conference, in moments of exchange. Here, women���as friends, colleagues, mentors���knit small gatherings, admiring one another���s latest attire. Friends ask permission to touch the material they find attractive, delicately feeling the fabric, inquiring about its origins. Stories unfold about visits back ���home������gifts of cloth, latest styles observed at social gatherings. Discreetly, some exchange gifts���fabric, adornments.
Friends pose for photographs to show to the architects of their ensembles, seamstresses (most are women) who may live in the United States or on the African continent, to show their gratitude, solidarity, and pride. The seamstresses will show the photos on their own cellphones to (potential) clients. Similar dynamics take place at parties, burials, church services, meetings of local US-based African cultural associations, and important public events. Women play key roles in facilitating and preserving cultural traditions and norms in many of these spaces, affirming cultural linkages to the African continent through visual bodily aesthetics, drawing from local and global ideas about African fashion trends, cosmetic rituals, and other bodily performances. Women���s bodily practices matter in potent and tangible ways, in hidden unconscious ways that continually shape the lives of women of African descent in the diaspora and on the continent.
Women attend a Women���s Caucus event at the African Studies Association meeting in Georgia, Atlanta. December 1, 2018.��Bidget Teboh,��Oy��r��nk����� Oy��w��m��, the author��and��J. Jarpa Dawuni.Women on the continent, like their diasporic counterparts, frequently (re)negotiate bodily practices in diverse spaces, expressing various forms of agency and ideas about aesthetic rituals that navigate cultural and national boundaries. They play a key role as ���authentic voices,��� or ���true representatives��� of their respective cultures, communities, and nations. Consequently, women���s daily actions carry weight for the preservation of ���true��� African cultural ideals, the concerns resonating on a larger scale, socially, politically and economically. Thus, women���s bodily practices, such as clothing choice, often prompt surveillance in largely patriarchal communities and societies. Previous AIAC contributors have examined how African women���s varied body rituals, and beauty ideals, have stirred anxiety and provoked intense scrutiny: from how (black) African women���s hair is policed from a young age in homes and schools in South Africa, to public surveillance of women���s clothing practices in Morocco and Kenya.
Yet, as a recent issue of African Studies Review (which happens to be the official journal of the ASA) illustrates, women of African descent continue to express agency and pleasure in shaping their own ideas about varied bodily practices, and thus modeling varied identities in diverse spaces.
For example, and going back in time, newspaper advice columns by and for women in English-speaking regions of Cameroon from the 1960s exemplified women���s attention to and pleasure in what was called in the local colloquial term nyanga���beauty and stylishness. As I discuss in an article in the African Studies Review, in their advice columns female journalists documented how women exercised agency through bodily and clothing practices. However, the journalists also sought to regulate such bodily practices in their columns by striving to define the parameters of ���natural,��� or ���authentic,��� black/African beauty ideals.
In contemporary Nigeria, as Oluwakemi Balogun outlines, beauty pageant contestants and other stakeholders in Nigerian beauty pageants undertake similar negotiations between ���varied ideas of Nigerian nationalism and contesting cultural ideas,��� particularly around the question of bikini-wearing (ASR introduction). ���[P]ersonal, domestic, and international frames about women���s bodies��� determine these discussions of embodied respectability at two modern-day national beauty contests in Nigeria (ASR introduction).
Meanwhile, online, Sudanese women and girls discuss cosmetic and bodily practices in female-only Facebook groups, sharing advice to sculpt their bodies and even their voices to conform to aesthetic ideals. In Niger, women bring their understanding of childbirth to constructions of their postpartum bodies and the significance of the placenta and umbilical cord. Hausa, Zerma, Tuareg and Fulani women in Niger engage in ritualized practices that ���reflect their understanding of childbirth, the shaping of birthing practices in urban and ethnic interaction, and their understanding and experiences of medical practices��� (ASR introduction). And in Mauritania, women have long worn the mala���fa, a veil that creates certain everyday constraints and possibilities.
These examples are only snapshots of the numerous ways in which African women all over the continent and the diaspora have reimagined bodily practices in aesthetic rituals in vibrant and imaginative ways.
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