Sean Jacobs's Blog, page 215

African homophobia and the colonial roots of African conservatism

Turn any homophobic corner in Africa and you're guaranteed to run into a delirious celebration of "African culture," but there's nothing African about homophobia.





Nairobi Skyline. Image credit Mkimemia via Wikimedia Commons.

A petition to decriminalize sexual acts between people of the same sex was recently rejected by the Kenyan High Court. The litigation process was once again characterized by frequent references to ���African culture.��� One of the interested parties attached to the case was Irungu Kangata, the senator of Murang���a County whose interest in the petition was ���to secure the diversity of Kenyan culture in their common rejection of homosexuality.��� Kangata argued before the court that ���none of the Kenyan communities or culture embraces homosexuality and that historically, homosexuality was punished through ostracization or death,��� and that decriminalizing homosexuality would be ���in breach of their right to preservation of their culture.���

Turn any homophobic corner in Africa and you���re guaranteed to run into a delirious celebration of ���African culture.��� Kenyan president Uhuru Kenyatta, standing next to President Obama in 2015 at a press conference in Nairobi, declared that homosexuality was something ���our culture��� doesn���t accept, echoing the remarks of the eccentric Robert Mugabe, the deposed Zimbabwean leader, who, speaking before the UN General Assembly in New York that same year, announced that Africans ���reject attempts to prescribe ���new rights��� that are contrary to our values, norms, traditions, and beliefs.��� It is the commonly repeated warning to white people not to infringe on authentic African culture which has not tolerated homosexuality since time immemorial.

Ever since Europe colonized Africa on the back of an imperial propaganda of the ���Civilizing Mission,��� the West has always been seen as an enemy of the customary, a modernizing savior rescuing a reluctant Africa from the jaws of a tribal existence. In this narrative, pre-colonial Africans lived in corporate tribal units characterized by a common language, culture, kinship, hereditary membership and tribal laws enforced through tribal hierarchies of power. Europe then swooped in and disrupted this centuries-old order, actively dismantling African cultural life and forcibly modernizing the continent, making it imperative for Africans today to decolonize themselves by reclaiming and protecting their ���original��� culture. This narrative is as neat and efficient as it is thoroughly fictional.

Despite pretensions before the public in Europe that colonialism was being guided by la mission civilisatrice, European powers realized from the outset that a ���modernized��� African population would constitute an immediate threat to colonial rule. A ���detribalized��� African majority united around race consciousness and ���civilized��� around European democratic ideals would immediately challenge white minority control. This suspicion was confirmed early on in places like Senegal���s four communes and the Cape Colony in South Africa, where ���detribalized��� Africans ruled under modern law began to demand civil and political equality with the white population. Europe, therefore, turned towards a tribal strategy known as indirect rule: to enforce divisions in the racial majority by entrenching the tribe as the basis of social, economic and political life in Africa; and to keep Africans tribalized by making customary laws the basis of colonial control.

There was only one problem with this strategy: tribe���as a political category���was not a dominant feature of sociopolitical life in Africa before the onset of colonial rule. Ethnolinguistic groups���people who shared a language and ethnicity���did not necessarily constitute a tribe: they did not automatically belong to a political category that defined rights and duties based on tribal identity. This is an important distinction to make, notes the eminent scholar Mahmoud Mamdani in Define and Rule:

Did tribe exist [in Africa] before colonialism? If we understand by tribe an ethnic group with a common language, it did. But tribe as an administrative entity that distinguishes between natives and non-natives and systematically discriminates in favor of the former against the latter���defining access to land and participation in local governance and rules for settling disputes according to tribal identity���certainly did not exist before colonialism.

Primary African identities were not tied to such a thing as tribe but rather to local societies, religious movements, clans, political leaders, craft associations���or as the historian Terence Ranger puts it in The Invention of Tradition:

Almost all recent studies of nineteenth-century pre-colonial Africa have emphasized that far from there being a single “tribal” identity, most Africans moved in and out of multiple identities, defining themselves at one moment subject to this chief, at another moment as a member of that cult, at another moment as part of this clan, and at yet another moment as an initiate in that professional guild��� the boundaries of the “tribal” polity and the hierarchies of authority within them did not define conceptual horizons of Africans.

In the European imagination, this untidy ethnic picture of pre-colonial Africa in the 1800s was a perverse deviation from a ���true��� and ���original��� Africa that was characterized by bounded and pure tribes living together in their defined territory under a common customary law and hierarchy of power. Even more importantly, it was quite an inconvenience to their strategy of tribalized administration in Africa. What followed at the dawn of colonial control, therefore, was an effort to ���restore��� the true Africa by clearly defining the original tribes, their homelands, their customary laws���a collaborative effort that utilized missionaries, explorers, government agents and anthropologists.

Ethnolinguistic groups were designated as tribes. Igbos were said to belong to an Igbo tribe; Kikuyus were said to belong to a Kikuyu tribe; Chewas were said to belong to a Chewa tribe. A homeland was designated for each defined tribe, and tribal identity became a legal category. Freedom of movement and settlement across tribal homelands was heavily regulated. A native authority, backed by the full force of colonial power, was put in charge of each tribalized administrative unit to enforce customary law by force. The British appropriated ���native��� chiefs where they could find them, and invented them where they couldn���t find them. The French destroyed all indigenous authorities and replaced them with new administrative cadres, but they still had the same function: to enforce customary law by force.

To understand just how farcical it was to tribalize ethnolinguistic groups in Africa, you���d have to start by imagining something like a nonwhite colonial power arriving in Switzerland today and deciding to institute tribalized rule in the country in order to subjugate the white majority. The French Swiss are designated as a tribe; the German Swiss as another tribe; the Italian Swiss as another tribe. The Romansh are simply left undesignated and instructed to become German or Italian. Government agents, missionaries and anthropologists then set to work discovering and documenting the ���original��� ancient customary laws of the tribes. A homeland is designated for each of the tribes in the western, central and southeastern regions of the country; a native authority is placed in each region to enforce customary law by force; and freedom of movement and settlement is limited to one���s tribal homeland.

This tribalization of Africa was not even limited to singular ethnolinguistic groups. Multiple ethnolinguistic groups living in a geographical area known by a common name would sometimes be designated as a single tribe. Since their region was known to explorers and traders by a common name, communities living to the northeast of what would become Lake Victoria���speaking 18 languages among them; some of them completely alien to each other���were defined as a single Luhya tribe. Even multiethnic states, such as Ndebele in southern Africa, were designated as a tribe. This creative picture would lead to amusing episodes where people had to be informed about which tribe they belonged to, as one Zambian chief put it: ���My people were not Soli until 1937 when the Bwana DC [district commissioner] told us we were.���

If the tribalization of Africa could at least piggy-back on visible ethnolinguistic differences, the definition of tribal customary laws enjoyed no such luxury. The reconstruction of the ���original��� customs that supposedly characterized the African tribal past was inevitably going to be a thoroughly creative exercise. It comes as no surprise, then, that Terence Ranger discovers that the tribalization of Africa was most inventive when it had to define customary law:

The most far-reaching inventions of tradition in colonial Africa took place when the Europeans believed themselves to be respecting age-old African custom. What were called customary law, customary land-rights, customary political structure and so on, were in fact all invented by colonial codification.

African customary law was not being defined and codified as a mere anthropological curiosity. It was to become the basis of colonial rule: Africans were to be legally required by colonial powers to abide by the customary laws of their tribal homelands. Codified customary laws were therefore going to inescapably conform to the objectives of colonial domination. Colonialism was an exercise of absolute autocratic control: Europe maintained control in Africa by force rather than consent, and customary law was therefore tweaked and nurtured to conform to the authoritarian objectives of colonial rule. This meant recruiting and enforcing hierarchies of domination for the colonial project in each level of African social life.

From top to bottom, an authoritarian customary hierarchy was put in place: colonial officers in charge of native chiefs, native chiefs in charge of subjects in the tribal unit, elders in charge of youth, men in charge of women. This customary hierarchy was invented as the original African way of life and given full customary legitimacy as a supposed reinforcement of African culture. ���African customs��� were defined and codified into law: losing the dynamism and continuous change that normally defines custom and becoming frozen in time as an ���original��� artifact: becoming conservative by definition.

This conservative, authoritarian customary artifact was then imposed as the centuries-old standard for ���proper��� African-ness���the uncompromising adherence to an unchanging, original customary code. Africans were created as traditionalist, customary creatures. Since the Europeans had been so kind to discover true African-ness for Africans, they were now going to teach Africans how to be true Africans by requiring full adherence to the rediscovered customary law. Just as a Northern Rhodesian district commissioner had discovered that some of the Soli did not know they were Soli, another district commissioner in Southern Rhodesia was horrified to learn the Ndebele did not know how to be Ndebele, as Mahmoud Mamdani narrates in Citizens and Subjects:

Imagine the horror of the [white] native commissioner of Malema District when he realized that the Ndebele did not behave as the Ndebele are supposed to: ���Deference is shown by no-one to anyone,��� [the commissioner reported], there reigned ���a state of anarchy in which the old vital and essential laws and customs were either forgotten or swept away���, and, horror of all horrors, far from a woman being kept in her place, ���a girl may choose whom she likes, when she likes, and as often as she likes���! The commissioner���s remedy was to teach ���the Ndebele��� how to be Ndebele by bringing to them a version of the Natal Native Code of 1891.

The Ndebele did not know how to be Ndebele: they had to be taught how to be Ndebele by the Europeans. The Kikuyu had to be taught how to be Kikuyu; the Igbo had to be taught how to be Igbo. Africans had to be taught how to be Africans. They had to be panel-beaten into proper African-ness through the imposition of rediscovered customary codes. Such was the breath-taking arrogance of European colonialism in its quest to tribalize Africa.

If it was abhorrent for a ���proper��� African woman to choose whom she liked whenever she liked, it was equally abhorrent for a proper African man to sleep with a person of whichever gender he liked. Like other peoples anywhere in the world, pre-colonial African communities generally placed paramount importance on heterosexual marriage as the basis of family life. But African social lives were also characterized by a diversity of sexual expression that found outlets outside the institution of heterosexual marriage. This could take the form of such activities as sex-play between unmarried adolescents, or even sexual relationships between people of the same sex. In his comprehensive study of pre-colonial African sexualities titled Heterosexual Africa?��Marc Epprecht documents some of these sexual diversities quite well:

…a Portuguese document from 1558��� observed ���unnatural damnation��� (a euphemism for male-to-male sex) to be esteemed among the Kongo. Andrew Battell, who lived among the Imbangala (in modern-day Angola) in the 1590s, was similarly disapproving: ���They are beastly in their living, for they have men in women���s apparel, whom they keepe among their wives.��� Jean Baptiste Labat, cribbing from an Italian explorer in the same region of Angola, also described a caste of cross-dressing male diviners known as chibados or quimbandas��� From elsewhere in Africa also come hints of African men who expressed same-sex practices in the idioms of traditional medicine or magic��� there were also unspoken erotic relationships between African women within the rubric of spirit mediumship or divination.

Africa was not the only pre-colonial realm whose fluidities of sexual expression attracted European puritanical revulsion. Homosexuality was decried by European explorers as a widespread ���problem��� outside the West���so widespread that the celebrated explorer Richard Burton felt he could only capture it adequately using geographical coordinates, as Alok Gupta documents in This Alien Legacy:

Fears of moral infection from the ���native��� environment made it urgent to insert anti-sodomy provisions in the colonial code. A sub-tradition of British imperialist writing warned of widespread homosexuality in the countries Britain colonized. The explorer Richard Burton, for instance, postulated a ���Sotadic Zone��� stretching around the planet���s midriff from 43�� north of the equator to 30�� south, in which ���the Vice is popular and endemic������ The European codifiers certainly felt [they had a] mission of moral reform���to correct and Christianize ���native��� custom.

This ���correction��� of native custom in the colonies was carried out through the Indian Penal Code of 1860 and the Queensland Criminal Code of 1899, both of which outlawed homosexuality and were transplanted to African colonies in the early colonial period. Customary laws in Africa were shaped in the image of the puritanical sexual sensibilities of Europe, in line with the general trend that shaped African customs in the image of Europe���s conservative and authoritarian objectives. These customary laws were given ancient cultural legitimacy and legally enforced by customary authorities backed by colonial power. The beneficiaries of revised customary hierarchies in Africa���the chiefly class, elders, men, a whole ���ethnicity��� in the case of Rwanda and Burundi���were only too eager to protect their newly enhanced power by claiming original customary legitimacy for their new privileges, giving the new order an internal means of self-reproduction.

The entrenchment in Africa of homophobia, ultraconservative sexual attitudes, and the authoritarian streak that oozes out of what is purported to be genuine African social culture���all resulted from a thoroughgoing process that tribalized Africa and enforced conservative customary laws nurtured to conform to objectives of colonial domination. It was more than a simple ban on this or other activity: it involved the total recreation of Africans as customary tribal creatures that have always adhered to fixed, unchanging, conservative traditions.

Colonialism was not an exercise of detribalization but an exercise of tribalization in the image of a reimagined customary past. ���African culture��� is a colonial designation thoroughly contaminated with colonial motives and the whole concept therefore needs to be exposed for its coloniality. That is the challenge for African progressivism. There are no ���original��� sets of customary regulations that defined African communities for centuries: Africa was not a timeless space defined by customary stagnation, and custom and social life in African communities was just as fluid and gradually changing as it was in any other part of the world.

When a Kenyan senator appears in court to speak on behalf of customary opposition to homosexuality, he is simply continuing the colonial practice of enforcing ���original��� customary law in native courts. He is an exact replica of the customary agents that characterized colonial courts in Africa: a colonial agent in a postcolonial world. Uhuru Kenyatta and Robert Mugabe are not really saying ���it���s against our African culture��� in their warnings to white folks not to preach gay rights in Africa. They���re really saying ���it���s against the African culture you gave us���and we intend to remain the proper Africans you taught us to be.���

African homophobia and the colonial intervention of African conservatism

Turn any homophobic corner in Africa and you're guaranteed to run into a delirious celebration of "African culture," but there's nothing African about homophobia.





Nairobi Skyline. Image credit Mkimemia via Wikimedia Commons.

A petition to decriminalize sexual acts between people of the same sex was recently rejected by the Kenyan High Court. The litigation process was once again characterized by frequent references to ���African culture.��� One of the interested parties attached to the case was Irungu Kangata, the senator of Murang���a County whose interest in the petition was ���to secure the diversity of Kenyan culture in their common rejection of homosexuality.��� Kangata argued before the court that ���none of the Kenyan communities or culture embraces homosexuality and that historically, homosexuality was punished through ostracization or death,��� and that decriminalizing homosexuality would be ���in breach of their right to preservation of their culture.���

Turn any homophobic corner in Africa and you���re guaranteed to run into a delirious celebration of ���African culture.��� Kenyan president Uhuru Kenyatta, standing next to President Obama in 2015 at a press conference in Nairobi, declared that homosexuality was something ���our culture��� doesn���t accept, echoing the remarks of the eccentric Robert Mugabe, the deposed Zimbabwean leader, who, speaking before the UN General Assembly in New York that same year, announced that Africans ���reject attempts to prescribe ���new rights��� that are contrary to our values, norms, traditions, and beliefs.��� It is the commonly repeated warning to white people not to infringe on authentic African culture which has not tolerated homosexuality since time immemorial.

Ever since Europe colonized Africa on the back of an imperial propaganda of the ���Civilizing Mission,��� the West has always been seen as an enemy of the customary, a modernizing savior rescuing a reluctant Africa from the jaws of a tribal existence. In this narrative, pre-colonial Africans lived in corporate tribal units characterized by a common language, culture, kinship, hereditary membership and tribal laws enforced through tribal hierarchies of power. Europe then swooped in and disrupted this centuries-old order, actively dismantling African cultural life and forcibly modernizing the continent, making it imperative for Africans today to decolonize themselves by reclaiming and protecting their ���original��� culture. This narrative is as neat and efficient as it is thoroughly fictional.

Despite pretensions before the public in Europe that colonialism was being guided by la mission civilisatrice, European powers realized from the outset that a ���modernized��� African population would constitute an immediate threat to colonial rule. A ���detribalized��� African majority united around race consciousness and ���civilized��� around European democratic ideals would immediately challenge white minority control. This suspicion was confirmed early on in places like Senegal���s four communes and the Cape Colony in South Africa, where ���detribalized��� Africans ruled under modern law began to demand civil and political equality with the white population. Europe, therefore, turned towards a tribal strategy known as indirect rule: to enforce divisions in the racial majority by entrenching the tribe as the basis of social, economic and political life in Africa; and to keep Africans tribalized by making customary laws the basis of colonial control.

There was only one problem with this strategy: tribe���as a political category���was not a dominant feature of sociopolitical life in Africa before the onset of colonial rule. Ethnolinguistic groups���people who shared a language and ethnicity���did not necessarily constitute a tribe: they did not automatically belong to a political category that defined rights and duties based on tribal identity. This is an important distinction to make, notes the eminent scholar Mahmoud Mamdani in Define and Rule:

Did tribe exist [in Africa] before colonialism? If we understand by tribe an ethnic group with a common language, it did. But tribe as an administrative entity that distinguishes between natives and non-natives and systematically discriminates in favor of the former against the latter���defining access to land and participation in local governance and rules for settling disputes according to tribal identity���certainly did not exist before colonialism.

Primary African identities were not tied to such a thing as tribe but rather to local societies, religious movements, clans, political leaders, craft associations���or as the historian Terence Ranger puts it in The Invention of Tradition:

Almost all recent studies of nineteenth-century pre-colonial Africa have emphasized that far from there being a single ���tribal��� identity, most Africans moved in and out of multiple identities, defining themselves at one moment subject to this chief, at another moment as a member of that cult, at another moment as part of this clan, and at yet another moment as an initiate in that professional guild��� the boundaries of the ���tribal��� polity and the hierarchies of authority within them did not define conceptual horizons of Africans.

In the European imagination, this untidy ethnic picture of pre-colonial Africa in the 1800s was a perverse deviation from a ���true��� and ���original��� Africa that was characterized by bounded and pure tribes living together in their defined territory under a common customary law and hierarchy of power. Even more importantly, it was quite an inconvenience to their strategy of tribalized administration in Africa. What followed at the dawn of colonial control, therefore, was an effort to ���restore��� the true Africa by clearly defining the original tribes, their homelands, their customary laws���a collaborative effort that utilized missionaries, explorers, government agents and anthropologists.

Ethnolinguistic groups were designated as tribes. Igbos were said to belong to an Igbo tribe; Kikuyus were said to belong to a Kikuyu tribe; Chewas were said to belong to a Chewa tribe. A homeland was designated for each defined tribe, and tribal identity became a legal category. Freedom of movement and settlement across tribal homelands was heavily regulated. A native authority, backed by the full force of colonial power, was put in charge of each tribalized administrative unit to enforce customary law by force. The British appropriated ���native��� chiefs where they could find them, and invented them where they couldn���t find them. The French destroyed all indigenous authorities and replaced them with new administrative cadres, but they still had the same function: to enforce customary law by force.

To understand just how farcical it was to tribalize ethnolinguistic groups in Africa, you���d have to start by imagining something like a nonwhite colonial power arriving in Switzerland today and deciding to institute tribalized rule in the country in order to subjugate the white majority. The French Swiss are designated as a tribe; the German Swiss as another tribe; the Italian Swiss as another tribe. The Romansh are simply left undesignated and instructed to become German or Italian. Government agents, missionaries and anthropologists then set to work discovering and documenting the ���original��� ancient customary laws of the tribes. A homeland is designated for each of the tribes in the western, central and southeastern regions of the country; a native authority is placed in each region to enforce customary law by force; and freedom of movement and settlement is limited to one���s tribal homeland.

This tribalization of Africa was not even limited to singular ethnolinguistic groups. Multiple ethnolinguistic groups living in a geographical area known by a common name would sometimes be designated as a single tribe. Since their region was known to explorers and traders by a common name, communities living to the northeast of what would become Lake Victoria ��� speaking 18 languages among them; some of them completely alien to each other – were defined as a single Luhya tribe. Even multiethnic states, such as Ndebele in southern Africa, were designated as a tribe. This creative picture would lead to amusing episodes where people had to be informed about which tribe they belonged to, as one Zambian chief put it: ���My people were not Soli until 1937 when the Bwana DC [district commissioner] told us we were.���

If the tribalization of Africa could at least piggy-back on visible ethnolinguistic differences, the definition of tribal customary laws enjoyed no such luxury. The reconstruction of the ���original��� customs that supposedly characterized the African tribal past was inevitably going to be a thoroughly creative exercise. It comes as no surprise, then, that Terence Ranger discovers that the tribalization of Africa was most inventive when it had to define customary law:

The most far-reaching inventions of tradition in colonial Africa took place when the Europeans believed themselves to be respecting age-old African custom. What were called customary law, customary land-rights, customary political structure and so on, were in fact all invented by colonial codification.

African customary law was not being defined and codified as a mere anthropological curiosity. It was to become the basis of colonial rule: Africans were to be legally required by colonial powers to abide by the customary laws of their tribal homelands. Codified customary laws were therefore going to inescapably conform to the objectives of colonial domination. Colonialism was an exercise of absolute autocratic control: Europe maintained control in Africa by force rather than consent, and customary law was therefore tweaked and nurtured to conform to the authoritarian objectives of colonial rule. This meant recruiting and enforcing hierarchies of domination for the colonial project in each level of African social life.

From top to bottom, an authoritarian customary hierarchy was put in place: colonial officers in charge of native chiefs, native chiefs in charge of subjects in the tribal unit, elders in charge of youth, men in charge of women. This customary hierarchy was invented as the original African way of life and given full customary legitimacy as a supposed reinforcement of African culture. ���African customs��� were defined and codified into law: losing the dynamism and continuous change that normally defines custom and becoming frozen in time as an ���original��� artifact: becoming conservative by definition.

This conservative, authoritarian customary artifact was then imposed as the centuries-old standard for ���proper��� African-ness – the uncompromising adherence to an unchanging, original customary code. Africans were created as traditionalist, customary creatures. Since the Europeans had been so kind to discover true African-ness for Africans, they were now going to teach Africans how to be true Africans by requiring full adherence to the rediscovered customary law. Just as a Northern Rhodesian district commissioner had discovered that some of the Soli did not know they were Soli, another district commissioner in Southern Rhodesia was horrified to learn the Ndebele did not know how to be Ndebele, as Mahmoud Mamdani narrates in Citizens and Subjects:

Imagine the horror of the [white] native commissioner of Malema District when he realized that the Ndebele did not behave as the Ndebele are supposed to: ���Deference is shown by no-one to anyone,��� [the commissioner reported], there reigned ���a state of anarchy in which the old vital and essential laws and customs were either forgotten or swept away���, and, horror of all horrors, far from a woman being kept in her place, ���a girl may choose whom she likes, when she likes, and as often as she likes���! The commissioner���s remedy was to teach ���the Ndebele��� how to be Ndebele by bringing to them a version of the Natal Native Code of 1891.

The Ndebele did not know how to be Ndebele: they had to be taught how to be Ndebele by the Europeans. The Kikuyu had to be taught how to be Kikuyu; the Igbo had to be taught how to be Igbo. Africans had to be taught how to be Africans. They had to be panel-beaten into proper African-ness through the imposition of rediscovered customary codes. Such was the breath-taking arrogance of European colonialism in its quest to tribalize Africa.

If it was abhorrent for a ���proper��� African woman to choose whom she liked whenever she liked, it was equally abhorrent for a proper African man to sleep with a person of whichever gender he liked. Like other peoples anywhere in the world, pre-colonial African communities generally placed paramount importance on heterosexual marriage as the basis of family life. But African social lives were also characterized by a diversity of sexual expression that found outlets outside the institution of heterosexual marriage. This could take the form of such activities as sex-play between unmarried adolescents, or even sexual relationships between people of the same sex. In his comprehensive study of pre-colonial African sexualities titled Heterosexual Africa?�� Marc Epprecht documents some of these sexual diversities quite well:

a Portuguese document from 1558��� observed ���unnatural damnation��� (a euphemism for male-to-male sex) to be esteemed among the Kongo. Andrew Battell, who lived among the Imbangala (in modern-day Angola) in the 1590s, was similarly disapproving: ���They are beastly in their living, for they have men in women���s apparel, whom they keepe among their wives.��� Jean Baptiste Labat, cribbing from an Italian explorer in the same region of Angola, also described a caste of cross-dressing male diviners known as chibados or quimbandas��� From elsewhere in Africa also come hints of African men who expressed same-sex practices in the idioms of traditional medicine or magic��� there were also unspoken erotic relationships between African women within the rubric of spirit mediumship or divination.

Africa was not the only pre-colonial realm whose fluidities of sexual expression attracted European puritanical revulsion. Homosexuality was decried by European explorers as a widespread ���problem��� outside the West ��� so widespread that the celebrated explorer Richard Burton felt he could only capture it adequately using geographical coordinates, as Alok Gupta documents in This Alien Legacy:

Fears of moral infection from the ���native��� environment made it urgent to insert anti-sodomy provisions in the colonial code. A sub-tradition of British imperialist writing warned of widespread homosexuality in the countries Britain colonized. The explorer Richard Burton, for instance, postulated a ���Sotadic Zone��� stretching around the planet���s midriff from 43�� north of the equator to 30�� south, in which ���the Vice is popular and endemic������ The European codifiers certainly felt [they had a] mission of moral reform���to correct and Christianize ���native��� custom.

This ���correction��� of native custom in the colonies was carried out through the Indian Penal Code of 1860 and the Queensland Criminal Code of 1899, both of which outlawed homosexuality and were transplanted to African colonies in the early colonial period. Customary laws in Africa were shaped in the image of the puritanical sexual sensibilities of Europe, in line with the general trend that shaped African customs in the image of Europe���s conservative and authoritarian objectives. These customary laws were given ancient cultural legitimacy and legally enforced by customary authorities backed by colonial power. The beneficiaries of revised customary hierarchies in Africa���the chiefly class, elders, men, a whole ���ethnicity��� in the case of Rwanda and Burundi���were only too eager to protect their newly enhanced power by claiming original customary legitimacy for their new privileges, giving the new order an internal means of self-reproduction.

The entrenchment in Africa of homophobia, ultraconservative sexual attitudes, and the authoritarian streak that oozes out of what is purported to be genuine African social culture���all resulted from a thoroughgoing process that tribalized Africa and enforced conservative customary laws nurtured to conform to objectives of colonial domination. It was more than a simple ban on this or other activity: it involved the total recreation of Africans as customary tribal creatures that have always adhered to fixed, unchanging, conservative traditions.

Colonialism was not an exercise of detribalization but an exercise of tribalization in the image of a reimagined customary past. ���African culture��� is a colonial designation thoroughly contaminated with colonial motives and the whole concept therefore needs to be exposed for its coloniality. That is the challenge for African progressivism. There are no ���original��� sets of customary regulations that defined African communities for centuries: Africa was not a timeless space defined by customary stagnation, and custom and social life in African communities was just as fluid and gradually changing as it was in any other part of the world.

When a Kenyan senator appears in court to speak on behalf of customary opposition to homosexuality, he is simply continuing the colonial practice of enforcing ���original��� customary law in native courts. He is an exact replica of the customary agents that characterized colonial courts in Africa: a colonial agent in a postcolonial world. Uhuru Kenyatta and Robert Mugabe are not really saying ���it���s against our African culture��� in their warnings to white folks not to preach gay rights in Africa. They���re really saying ���it���s against the African culture you gave us ��� and we intend to remain the proper Africans you taught us to be.���

Invisible voices in the production of knowledge

In the Bukavu Series, researchers from two Congolese and two European universities explore how they interrogate violence in the DRC.





Residents in Beni region greet peacekeepers passing by in a MONUSCO armored personnel carrier. Image credit Sylvain Liechti for UN Photo via Flickr (CC).

In early 2018, a group of 30 researchers based in eastern Congo and Europe who all write on conflict affected areas began a collective and reflexive process to give space to those voices that often remain invisible in the production of knowledge. Over the last year-and-a-half, these researchers have critically examined their own positionality and (in)visibility in the cycles of research they���ve been part of. In addition, they explored the ethical and emotional dilemmas they face when conducting research in conflict affected areas. A number of workshops initiated by researchers from two Congolese and two European universities provided the necessary space to share experiences, reflect on their roles and positions and think about ways forward. A collective writing process offered an additional opportunity to share and critically reflect about each other���s positions and experiences. The result of this process is a series of blog posts known as the Bukavu Series.

Many researchers based in the global North who do fieldwork in the global South engage research assistants based in our areas of research, close to or in the field. Experiences learnt that at best, their contribution is mentioned in a footnote of articles or reports written by global North researchers. At worst, they are kept completely invisible, this despite their own agency, and crucial roles in the research cycle. Recent debates in development and conflict studies have challenged the often-institutionalized practices, mechanisms and requirements that keep research collaborators and assistants who are based in the areas of research, silent and invisible. Yet, many of these debates are often limited to discussions between “lead researchers from the North.” Emerging debates explore how to redefine research collaborations, but hardly ever give a voice to the research collaborators themselves. They reflect on how to improve the position of locally based researchers, but seldom challenge existing logics guiding the production of knowledge and defining the respective roles of those involved. They commit to increased visibility for research collaborators and assistants but tend to disconnect this from the skewed power relations in which they are embedded. Often guided by a paternalistic reflex, in the end, these debates risk reconfirming researchers living and working in areas of research to the margins of research rather than reversing existing logics.

The renewed attention for the position of research collaborators and assistants based in the areas of research is not, in fact, all that new. It connects to a rich literature on research ethics, which emerged within different disciplines as early as the 1960s. The constant recycling of themes and critiques suggests that despite the recognition of the issue, little has been done to reverse the silencing of these voices in a process of knowledge production dominated by academics based in the global North. Although these contributors play a crucial role in forging access to difficult areas and source persons, as well as the collection of data, the production of preliminary research reports and eventually also the successful dissemination of research results, their role has seldom been made visible in research outputs. Their personal ambitions, priorities, agendas and challenges are hardly ever priorities in research cycles, nor has their role been recognized in the institutional field of research, guided by individual performance records and the ���subsequent single-authored peer reviewed article standard.���

There seems to be an overall consensus to critically consider how to fully integrate research collaborators and assistants based in the areas of research into processes of knowledge production. Yet, this can only be done when the collaborators themselves are directly included in the debate. They not only “help” to gain access to the field and collect data, but also co-define the field. They read and interpret it and are involved in a constant process of co-production. Most scholars would not have made it through their PhD research without their collaborators��� contributions and guidance.��Many research projects would have failed to come up with tangible results without the direct involvement and engagement of research collaborators and assistants. So not only should their roles be recognized in the final outputs of research; they should also be allowed to take up equal responsibility for these outputs, equal participation in the design of project cycles and equal ownership of the research data.

The blog posts presented in the Bukavu Series critique the existing logics behind the production of knowledge but also reflect on our own responsibilities. The different contributions call for a more inclusive debate and ask for the recognition of the ethical and emotional challenges that research collaborators and assistants face.��One of these challenges is related to the strategies they have to employ in order to navigate and negotiate access to the field. Navigating in conflict-settings requires a rich set of navigation skills. Several blog posts discuss the incompatibility between research projects��� expectations and the local field complications, which may jeopardize their functioning. These incompatibilities are not only prevalent when assistants negotiate access to the field but are often embedded within the methodological set-up of research projects as such.

A second challenge is related to collaborators��� and assistants��� interactions with populations in contexts of violence, conflict, or economic hardship. As some blog posts witness, research collaborators and assistants in the field often struggle with responding, or failing to respond, to people���s financial expectations, and their questions around communication of research results to the local level.�� Besides the inherent ethical issues, this oblivion of restitution also complicates any potential return to these populations for future research activities.

Another oft-neglected challenge that this series tackles, is how to deal with the emotional dimensions of doing research. As some of the authors show, the research in conflict-affected environments can have profound effects on researchers��� mental well-being. It is often assumed that local embeddedness facilitates researchers��� navigation options. However, doing research “at home” comes with a wide range of difficult challenges that are largely ignored by the wider research community and those funding the research. Various posts indeed reflect on researchers��� entanglements and traumas, and they shed light on strategies that might reduce the risk of traumatization.

A final and obvious challenge is how to deal with a lack of visibility. Several contributors claim the right to be recognized as full partners in research projects. Some blog posts put this claim in a broader perspective and critique the way in which the hegemonic model of academic knowledge construction entrenches inherently skewed power relations. Particularly when not embedded within the formal statute of PhD student or professor, the role of research collaborators is almost automatically confined to that of “research assistants.” This implicitly or explicitly pushes collaborators into a position of subordination. On top of this, local budgetary limitations are a huge constraint to the development of a locally-driven research dynamic and reduce most research to commissioned work. This kind of research is too often guided by the interests of the donors and/or academics in the North and does not necessarily respond to local priorities or interests.

If the aim is to move forward and build a research environment based on equal partnerships, we must progress from thinking to action. Research collaborators and assistants should get the necessary space to raise their voices and express their constraints. This is not only a moral obligation but also a necessary condition to transform the production of knowledge and academia at large.

After the scramble

It's time to return Africa's vinyl records.





Vale in Mabu Vinyl. Image credit Mallix via Flickr (CC).

In August of 2018, the Ethiopian government ���requested��� Britain���s National Army Museum to return two locks of hair of the late Emperor Tewodros II, killed during Britain���s oft-forgotten invasion of Abyssinia in 1868. It was the latest movement in a snowballing repatriation of looted treasures and historic symbols during Europe���s four centuries of sordid theft. In one case, France patted itself on the back for concluding, after a comically unnecessary but inevitably rigorous study on what its many museums of contraband should immediately return to its ���former��� African colonies. Netherlands, Germany, and Belgium have promised the same.

Of course, these gestures���a tiny fraction of the grand total amassed from gratuitous plunder, not dissimilar to the ratio between western aid to African countries and taxable income siphoned offshore���are designed to placate an increasingly young, diasporan votebank and the new elites they will have to deal with in these African countries. But let���s not get carried away. Were a coalition of African countries able to exert the kind of pressure China usually puts on, they could sway a European country to rapidly surrender 800 prized artifacts. But until then, this incredibly rare concession and de-facto admission of guilt from normally unyielding erstwhile masters must suffice. Between 90 to 95 percent of Africa’s cultural wealth no longer resides on the continent.

Yet, while calls are made to return the bronze statues of Benin, the masks of Cabinda, a range of artwork, and even the remains of rulers, one of the most powerful artifacts from the African continent, which circulates through online auctions and lines the shelves of private collectors in rich countries, has not figured in demands: physical recordings of African music from independence onwards, large catalogs of which are no longer on the continent. This could be an opportune moment for a global movement of Africans and their allies to carefully amass, organize, and begin the process of repatriating the immortalized soundtracks to one of Africa���s proudest eras back to their respective countries. Quite simply, we have to give Africa its music back.

From the 1960���s to the mid-1980���s, western cultural centers like New York, Chicago, Liverpool, and London were no match for the innovation and creativity in Africa���s newly independent capitals. Dakar, Khartoum, Kinshasa, Luanda, Mogadishu���you could literally name them all���were at the forefront of sound, far from the margins of the world, rather at the very center of the very best that humanity has ever produced.

Western bands, largely blessed with unrivaled marketing and export power, won over ears and hearts worldwide. Had African bands had similar reach and clout, at worst they would have gone toe to toe with Europe and North America���s most revered. At best, you may have never heard of your favorites. I would argue without respite that what was happening in the buzzing cultural citadels of Africa���the railway station hotel of Bamako with Rail Band, Mogadishu���s Jazira Hotel with Iftiin Band, Dakar���s Le Miami nightclub with Star Band, the recording studios of Cotonou with Orchestre Poly-Rhythmo, the musseques of Luanda with Jovens do Prenda���was simply a notch above.

In contrast, ���The Beatles,��� Quincy Jones said confidently and bluntly in an interview with Vulture, ������ were the worst musicians in the world. They were no-playing motherfuckers. Paul [McCartney] was the worst bass player I ever heard.���

Jones may not have even had an opinion on the Liverpool group if recordings of�� Zani Diabate, Zoundegnon Bernard, Axmed Naaji, or Paulino Vieira were more accessible at the time. Africa���s post-independence music housed the story of the world; the centrality of the continent to the cultural exchanges of the Atlantic and Indian Oceans, the blending of sounds from far and wide a testament to an innate cosmopolitanism and openness.

Music of this immediate independence era was the maximum expression of a new found genuine autonomy. A world class showcase of the continent���s capabilities when given just two decades of breathing space by western political and financial power. Whatever their leanings or however neurotic, or at times brutal, Africa���s first generation independence leaders shared the same affinity for and utility of authentic cultural ideas, long repressed, to decolonize spiritually and reaffirm a much needed sense of self confidence.

In Senegal, Leopold Senghor spent nearly a quarter of the national budget on the arts, proclaiming Dakar as the capital of Black civilization and hosting the Festival of the Black Arts in 1966. In Somalia, Siad Barre���s belief of music as a public good funneled state funding towards the national theater, whose soundtracks comprise Somalia���s finest musical hour. In Sudan, Gaafar Nimeiry, emulating Gamal Abdel Nasser, befriended the artistic elite, guaranteeing them all the support they asked. In both Congos, titans like Franco inspired instrumentalists and vocalists across the continent. In Angola, as independence shuttled into civil war, the bands of 1970s Luanda remain some of the strongest guardians of the country���s recent history.

The culmination of this political will and youthful endeavor was a massive network of exchange between African countries, their musicians, their cultures, all as a necessary tonic for stolen histories and even more necessary unifying force. The likes of Sudan���s Mohammed Wardi performed in Yaounde, Cameroon to a sold out 60,000-capacity stadium unable to understand his Arabic lyrics but infatuated with Sudanese music nevertheless. Somali bands and dancers were heralded as the leading acts in Nigeria���s 1977 FESTAC event. The smoothest musicians from then Zaire recorded and mingled regularly in Nairobi. I���m reminded of Orchestre Veve���s saxophone-driven Congolese classic ���Nitarudia��� where the lead singer proclaims to his lover, ���Don���t worry baby, I will come to Nairobi to see you,��� and just the extent a simple lyric reveals about this era.

Mogadishu was the cultural epicenter of not just East Africa, but the Indian Ocean, its musicians seamlessly blending the melodies of Persia, India, and East Asia into their rich repertoire. Many who were fortunate to experience Mogadishu���s nightlife before the war speak only of the ubiquity and caliber of Somalia���s relentless bands. Let���s also not forget the powerful Authenticit�� movements of Guinea and Chad.

The true depth of recorded music from this burst of creative freedom and celebration of economic and political autonomy is untold. But most of it, the very best of it, has been pressed on vinyl records, recorded on cassettes, finely interlaced on master tapes. Collectively, these recordings form the single most important historical document of a continent on the right course.

By the 1980s, western financial power had laid waste to almost all gains. Currencies were destroyed, borrowing increased, economics were carved open, tariff protections gutted. Music was not spared. Countries collapsed, economies paralyzed, and the cultural arms of neoliberal capitalism sequestered one of the finest eras of human cultural history.

Not too long after, and perhaps as a consequence of the nadir of the ���80s, Africa���s recordings were forcefully inducted into the global marketplace, with arbitrary values based on contrived rarity turning a perishable medium of history into luxury items for affluent markets. The most coveted sounds from harder to access countries regularly sell for four figures on eBay or record collecting site Discogs. An original LP of Hailu Mergia���s Ethiopian classic, ���Tche Belew,��� sold for over $4,000. Auctions occur with numbing regularity. Nigerian boogie and funk LPs, many recorded as the Biafra War raged, require very deep pockets. The 7-inch singles from 1960s and ���70s Sudan and Ethiopia often sell for not dissimilar sums a piece. The constant inflation of value of Sudanese singles inevitably drove up the prices in Sudan itself, outpricing local incomes. With the exception of a small handful of labels that recycle lucrative record sales into payments to artists, almost none of this money is remitted to musicians or their families.

The head of Radio Metropole, a historic institution in Haiti with a well maintained archive of the country���s lavish musical output, told me one of the biggest collections he���s seen is in a Caribbean-themed Tokyo bar.

My shelves alone are filled with hundreds of East African cassettes, Haitian records, some of the most treasured cuts of traditional Malian music, masterpiece LPs from Brazzaville in mint condition, amongst much, much more. This call to action is born out of an intensive self-critique, immediately inspired by a cassette shop owner in Djibouti, who, upon handing the receipt, reminded me that I was ���taking all this culture out of the country.��� Consent and a fair price are no longer an excuse.

Most recently, to locate LPs in reasonable condition to use as master sources for a compilation of Star Band de Dakar���s Afro-Cuban recordings, I had to go through three European dealers. Our contacts in Dakar could not find a single copy.

The right of return, firstly, involves gatekeeping. From the National Library in Singapore, which houses historic recordings from across Southeast Asia, to the Smithsonian, it remains standard operating procedure to furnish sufficient licensing documents to access physical copies for commercial use or otherwise. The gatekeeping of African records should be with institutions and museums on the continent. This small step alone would prevent piracy and wrest back control of auditory heritage.

To chart a course, the recently unveiled Black Civilizations Museum in Dakar is an ideal place to start. If the museum���s operators agreed to house an archive, record dealers, shops, and private collectors could begin repatriating parts of their collection in the best condition. This would of course require empathy and moral graciousness. Any refusals to ship even symbolic amounts would be a scathing indictment of a diminutive but growing worldwide music community. It would reveal a love for African culture conditional on control and concepts of private property.

This proposal may seem quixotic, but it is eminently feasible. We need not empty all the record shops, libraries, and private collectors��� cellars. A modest collection demonstrates a rare appreciation for cultures relegated to the margins of the world and a much-needed global mindset. But the surplus amassed from hoarding should be on the same shipments as the treasures rescued from the crime scenes of European museums.

Somalia and Somaliland, through immense foresight, have already established exclusive guardianship of its music. To access recordings, one must be granted entry by archives in Hargeisa and Mogadishu. The same template must follow for the rest of the continent. For archives starved of investment and in a decrepit state, like those in Ghana or Sudan, the commandeering of a gatekeeping role would be revitalizing. Fees could be charged for foreign access to recordings, for commercial use or otherwise. There is enough demand for the continent���s historic musical output for this to work.

Record labels who no longer need the master copies of the material they have published must to be among the first to begin this process of return. All our efforts should focus on digitization: a win-win solution that allows outside use of recordings and provides a digital archive for the gatekeeping entity.

No longer should music be removed from the country in large amounts. Similar to how Thailand bans all images of Buddha from export, because they believe, according to the signs warning of harsh penalties for illicit export, that these are not meant to be ���decorative items.��� African recordings, especially given their magnificent artwork, need laws governing their removal. Indeed, large quantities were manufactured in Europe and produced by European labels. Yet we can all agree where true ownership lies even for the riches mined from the silt of Africa���s earth by western and Chinese companies.

But by and large the most pressing reason to return these artifacts of sound rests with images.��To control access to someone���s history is to control their image. For the world���s youngest continent���the median age in Niger is 14���to come of age without a sense of the high cultural achievements of its past, to be unable to physically touch said achievements, is to enter the world without confidence, a world where many walls and ceilings are built and strenuously maintained for young black Africans.

���History is not a mere accumulation of facts,��� the late scholar Ivan Van Sertima said in a lecture in the 1980s, ���it is the creation of a different vision; a different way of seeing, thinking, and feeling. What happened in history���or what we think happened in history���affects the way we think. It affects our prejudices, our reflexes, our conceptions of ourselves, the way people conceive of us, the way we treat ourselves, the way we are treated by others.���

A flooding back of Africa���s cultural wealth from an era that is now three to four generations removed from the current generation would engender confidence and eradicate lingering notions of an empty history. It would remind everyone that we need not hark back to the ancient past or the great stories of medieval Africa to draw a sense of its centrality to world affairs, but only a few decades ago.

Music, particularly physical music, is the most powerful corrective force, a guaranteed remedy for one���s global image. A Somali official told me one of the hardest existential challenges his government faces is the transformation of Somalia���s image in the global imagination. We agreed the music that survived three decades of civil war, sitting today in Radio Mogadishu���s archives, is the ideal place to start.

Consider when Mali descended into violence and extremism, a fallout from NATO���s war on Libya, and grand old cities, centers of learning like Timbuktu had music banned and musicians persecuted. An ancient culture was on the brink of destruction.��The healing effect a return of the many copies of Timbuktu���s most famous outfit, Le Mystere Jazz de Tombouctou, floating around auctioning circles, is glaringly evident.

Indeed, recorded music can be reproduced and consequently lose its value, unlike sculptures, jewels, and artwork. But music itself is an intangible patrimony. And many of Africa���s most wonderful yet unsung late talents, like Amara Tour��, who personified the deep bond between Cuba and the continent, and Abu Obaida Hassan, whose tambour music is a shining modern relic of the ancient traditions of northern Sudan, recorded very few songs in comparison to the leading legends. However many reproductions come about, the few originals are invaluable.

An argument is made that recordings are better off sitting with private collectors or institutions in the global North, more capable of ensuring their longevity through meticulous care. While this is not untrue, for reasons of infrastructure and available public funds, it is simply not for anyone but the cultural vanguards of African countries��� to decide. ���We cannot let those who looted our assets,��� Hamady Bocoum, director of the Black Civilizations Museum told OkayAfrica, ���then tell us what we should do with them. Restitution needs to happen with the knowledge that the looter has no right to decide what happens with items that were never theirs in the first place.���

We must not, even with the best of intentions at heart, even out of pure love for the power and awesomeness of this special era of music, be complicit in the rampant extraction of cultural wealth, the cornerstone of a people���s self-image, confidence, and, by extension, their chances for future success.

���My aim,��� the African-American journalist Howard French wrote in A Continent for the Taking:

…is to help those who yearn to know and understand the continent better, and indeed Africans themselves, of the continent���s cultural strengths; my own discovery of them kept me going through otherwise depressing times, injecting relief in a tableau of terrible bleakness. Therein lies a genuine source of hope for Africa���s nearly [one billion] people and for Africans of the future.

Those cultural strengths are preserved on the recorded mediums of music that from the next decade must make their way back home.

In Uganda, posting a poem about Museveni gets you jailed

The charge is "misusing a computer." Dr. Stella Nyanzi remains incarcerated to this day in Luzira Women���s Prison.





Stella Nyanzi at a human rights conference in May 2018. Image Credit: Chapter Four Uganda.

The opening lines of a poem written by Dr. Stella Nyanzi and posted on Facebook in November 2018, the day after Yoweri Museveni���s��alleged birthday, read: “Yoweri, they say it was your birthday yesterday / How bitterly sad a day!” Alleged, because this date was one he estimated, due to the fact that his exact date of birth was never recorded. The poem expresses intense regret and sorrow about Museveni���s birth, stating that Uganda would have been spared the oppression, suppression, corruption, demise of public institutions, unemployment, bad governance and the erosion of morality in society, had Yoweri had not been carried to term.

I wish the infectious dirty-brown discharge flooding Esiteri���s loose pussy had drowned you to death.

Dr. Nyanzi invokes images of the vagina in expressing her low opinion of Museveni���s rule of Uganda. The vagina, as a conduit of life, joy, disease and death is linked to childbirth, motherhood and corruption in her poetry. Esiteri, who Dr. Nyanzi names in the poem, is scorned for being mother to Yoweri, who is himself a source of bitterness to many.

This linkages between the vagina, childbirth, corruption and motherhood play out in a variety of ways. In biology as in society, there is little to zero burden of proof on mothers concerning the parentage of children as compared to that borne by fathers, and traditionally as well as biblically, the burden of scorn, bitterness, reproach often falls on the mothers of ill-mannered children. The last lines of the Facebook post are a challenge:

Ask the bodabodamen to direct you to Mama Stella���s house with a red gate. I refuse to be gagged!

On November 2, 2018, Dr. Stella Nyanzi was arrested at a police station where she had gone to secure clearance ahead of a planned peaceful protest against Makerere University���s failure to reinstate her as a researcher at the Makerere Institute of Social Research (MISR) after she had been unjustly fired for staging a naked protest.

The state claims that her arrest was for disrupting the peace of the President of Uganda. Based on the provisions of the Computer Misuse Act, 2011, the charges focus on the language of her poem, characterizing it as obscene and deviating from ���African culture.��� However, these charges run counter to the very African culture that the state invokes. Ganda culture and traditions bestow a semi-god presence upon a Nnalongo (mother of twins). Dr. Nyanzi is a Nnalongo. A state that drafts laws that penalize homosexuality because it is ���not African��� cannot be the same state that penalizes a Nnalongo for functioning within the same cultural precepts.

This is not the first time that Dr. Nyanzi has been apprehended or imprisoned by the police.

In addition to her having been imprisoned for 33 days in 2017, Dr. Nyanzi has three different cases currently pending in Ugandan courts. The first case arose from Makerere University suspending her for staging a naked protest against what she described as ���compromising the research mandate��� at the Makerere Institute of Social Research (MISR) where she was a research fellow. She successfully challenged the suspension before the Staff Appeals Tribunal, but Makerere University refused to reinstate her. She is therefore suing the University for not reinstating her to her job. The second is a “cyber harassment and offensive communication” case which stems from a Facebook post in which she calls President Yoweri Museveni “a pair of buttocks.��� The third is a civil case at the High court protesting the violation of Dr. Nyanzi���s right to freedom of movement as she has been placed on a no-fly list.

Social Media has been the most effective alternative platform for political activism and government criticism in Uganda since a 2009 clampdown on radio, newspaper, and television in an attempt to curtail protests and flow of information in Buganda kingdom following tension between Museveni and the Ganda king.

In 2011, social media, especially Facebook was the main medium for mobilization for “Walk to Work” protests which were organized to bring about a Tunisia/Egypt type change of government in Uganda.

In that same year, the Museveni government introduced a law that would govern computer use (The Computer Misuse Act, 2011). The law���s intent is censorship. That law alone could not stem online criticism of Museveni and the use of social media for political mobilization. During the 2016 presidential election, social media platforms had to be blocked in Uganda.

Dr. Nyanzi made a name for herself as an activist primarily on Facebook, using the platform to critique Museveni���s regime. In the last line of the poem that landed her jail in this instance, she declares her resolve to not bow to censorship.

Dr. Nyanzi is an activist, a writer and renown researcher in the fields of sexuality, family planning and Public health. She holds master���s and PhD degrees in Anthropology from University of London, and a bachelor���s degree in Mass Communication from Makerere University. She is widely published in African Queer studies. She also boasts of street cred in Political and Human rights activist circles. She is one the most prominent allies of the Ugandan Queer movement. She convened a Women���s Protest Working Group and a Women���s March in Kampala condemning femicide in the country. She has also mobilized support for victims of military brutality or what is commonly known as the Arua Saga.

Museveni���s response to Dr. Nyanzi does not address the failings she raises poetically and metaphorically but has instead levied criminal charges against her. By charging Dr. Stella Nyanzi, the government aims to make an example out of her and send a warning to others who use social media platforms to criticize the regime.

In an aged chief magistrates court building at Buganda Road in Kampala, close to a hundred people regularly wait for Dr. Stella Nyanzi���s file to be called. The presiding magistrate is wont to call other cases ahead of Dr. Nyanzi���s in as much as Dr. Nyanzi arrives at court promptly.

Ugandan activists, journalists, friends and supporters of Dr. Nyanzi sit in the court, waiting with her for the judge to finally call her case. Some of them post updates on Twitter, and all around the world, people who have become friends and supporters of Dr. Nyanzi because of the work of these people wait with them.

For these friends and supporters outside Uganda, Dr. Nyanzi���s fight feels at once close and far away. Far away, because one tends to feel the weight of distance and seeming powerlessness. Close because it is easy to recognize the forces that are trying to squash Dr. Nyanzi and other dissenting Ugandan voices by association.

As state and security organizations increasingly pay attention to social media and to the opportunities these platforms provide for repressed groups to organize and agitate, Museveni���s use of the Ugandan state apparatus to silence Dr. Nyanzi must concern all of us.

Oppressive systems worldwide are interconnected, and therefore our struggles against these systems need to be interconnected as well. Here, the words ���nobody is free until everybody’s free��� by Fannie Lou Hamer serve to both warn and remind us that our liberations are connected.

The desire by oppressive regimes to crush opposition and the need for patriarchal systems to punish women especially for stepping out of line are linked, and both come into play where Dr. Nyanzi is concerned.

That which fuels the Museveni government attempts to crush Dr. Nyanzi in Uganda are the same things that drive Nkurunziza in Burundi to throw schoolgirls into prison for ���insulting��� him, and the reason why Ilhan Omar is singled out for particularly intense vitriol in the USA, is the same reason why for the past thirty years, Diane Abbot has been the target of intense hate and harassment in the UK.

From Marielle Franco in Brazil, to Alisha in Pakistan, Diana Sacay��n in Argentina as well as countless others who have been murdered, there is real danger in being a woman who speaks up and speaks loudly against oppression.

And because there are differences in the levels of risk we face for espousing political views depending on where in the world we live, we can work in solidarity across boundaries by supporting movements in other places in the ways we are better placed to do.

���Nobody is free until everybody’s free��� is worth repeating frequently���lest we lose sight of the need to work together in solidarity with all the people around the world who seek freedom.

This spirit of understanding that our liberations are connected was invoked by Ghanaian journalist and feminist activist Nana Ama Agyemang Asante in response to the policeman who asked, “Don���t you have problems of your own here?” as she applied for a permit to hold a protest in solidarity with Dr. Nyanzi in Accra.

This same spirit was present in all the people who showed up on Saturday, March 9th, 2019 in Accra to march in solidarity with Dr. Nyanzi and all Ugandans fighting for freedom. The march was organized by Namata Serumaga-Musisi with support from Nana Ama Agyemang Asante, Nana Darkoa Sekyiamah, Ernesto Yeboah of The Ghana Economic Fighter���s League, Eyram Seshie and Professor Akosua Adomako-Ampofo of African Studies Association of Africa.

About a week earlier, it was in this spirit of global solidarity that 5 people���Kuukuwa Manful, Nomfundo Ramalekana, Martin Williams, Gautam Bhatia, and Rishika Sahgal���stood in the freezing Oxford rain with a “Free Stella Nyanzi” banner, speaking to passersby about the struggles of our friends in Uganda.

The African Studies Association of Africa have published a statement of support in which they state that ���the freedom of one group of Africans is meaningless without the freedoms of all��� and ���demand that the Ugandan government bring the harassment of its citizens to an end.���

In Kenya, when Museveni showed up to address a university audience, he was booed and heckled by some shouting Stella Nyanzi���s and Bobi Wine���s names. Such solidarity acts abound in other places.

We call on friends and comrades in Africa and around the world to join this solidarity movement and demand an end to this persecution of Dr. Nyanzi and Ugandans who seek freedom in any of the following ways:

Social Media: Post updates and content around the protest on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram etc under the hashtags, #PushforStellaNyanzi, #FreeStellaNyanzi, #SukumaKwaStellaNyanzi, #BamuweEddembeLye, #DropTheCharges
Solidarity events: From talks and film screenings to protests and marches. No number is too small to take a stand.
Donations: Send money to support Dr. Nyanzi���s legal costs. Mobile money.

Dr. Nyanzi remains incarcerated to this day in Luzira Women���s Prison.

It has been 222 days.

A remarkable celebration of African cinema

At this year's New York African Film Festival, we saw films united by key thematic concerns, some of them quite unexpected.





Still from film Oga Bolaji

The New York African Film Festival debuted in 1993.��This year marked the 26th edition of the Festival, which concluded on June 4th. It was a remarkable celebration of African cinema, past and present. Expertly curated (by longtime director, Mahen Bonetti), the festival brought to Lincoln Center in Manhattan a collection of films both old and new. Representing a range of national, cultural, and linguistic contexts, the films were united by some key thematic concerns, some of them quite unexpected. As someone who teaches and writes about African cinema, I was struck by the care and originality with which these titles were selected. None of them obvious choices, they nevertheless seem, in retrospect, apt, even inevitable pairings, and they offered festival goers a glimpse of the influence that the masters of the past continue to exert on the African filmmakers of today.

Consider, for instance, the juxtaposition of Ola Balogun���s Black Goddess (1978), a classic Nigerian-Brazilian dramatization of the history and legacy of the transatlantic slave trade, and Toyin Ibrahim Adekeye���s documentary Bigger Than Africa (2018), which similarly considers slave ships as carriers of Yoruba culture; or the contiguity of Mamb��ty (2000), Papa Madi��ye Mbaye���s moving documentary about the making of Senegalese director Djibril Diop Mamb��ty���s The Little Girl Who Sold the Sun (1998), and the equally invaluable Behind the Scenes (1981), Paulin Soumanou Vieyra���s film on the making of Ousmane Sembene���s Ceddo (1976). Such pairings evince important connective threads, from the formal to the thematic, and they made for a most memorable edition of the always-stimulating New York African Film Festival.

Balogun���s Black Goddess is an essential meditation on the transatlantic slave trade and the global diffusion of Yoruba culture. It opens with a depiction of the capture of African men and women by Portuguese merchants bound for what is now Brazil, where much of the film was shot. A subsequent scene, set in Nigeria in the late 1970s, involves a man���s deathbed request to his son, Babatunde: the dying man wants Babatunde to travel to Brazil, where his ancestors were enslaved, in order to connect with those family members still living there. (Babatunde���s great-grandfather relocated to Nigeria upon the abolition of slavery in Brazil.) Balogun���s task is thus to particularize the legacies of the transatlantic slave trade in terms of contemporary Nigerian national-cultural identities. While Black Goddess was not the first African film to focus on the institution of slavery (Senegalese director Mahama Johnson Traor�����s The Town, for example, was released 6 years earlier, in 1972), its influence on subsequent projects���particularly Haile Gerima���s Sankofa (1993)���cannot be overstated.

Balogun depicts a kind of witchcraft that compels those under its spell to envision a past that the director powerfully recreates���the time of the transatlantic slave trade. In Black Goddess, the historical sites of slavery contain the potential to transport (as in Sankofa, with its depiction of the possessive power of Cape Coast Castle). Here, some of the actors play dual roles, suggesting at once the reincarnation of enslaved persons and the persistence of the experience of African alterity in a white-supremacist world. For Balogun, the memory of slavery is necessarily a familial memory, wrapped up in an awareness of ancestry, of lineage. ���There can���t be any friendship between slave and master,��� declares one character, articulating a major theme of the film, which ends with a breathtaking homage to Sembene���s La noire de��� (1966), recalling an African cinematic past just as, for today���s audiences, it clearly anticipates the future.

Still from film Suicide by Sunlight.

That future was beautifully represented at the festival, including by Sierra Leonean-American writer-director Nikyatu, whose short film Suicide by Sunlight (2019) is a beautifully made, delightfully suspenseful exploration of themes of expropriation, abandonment, and othering. Nikyatu���s talent for building tension is on abundant display in this tale of a Black vampire, as is her facility for upending genre conventions, including through examinations of race, class, gender, and sexuality.

Kayode Kasum���s Nigerian film Oga Bolaji (2018) is a delight���and, by the director���s own admission, a principled corrective to the kind of big-budget Nollywood film that focuses exclusively on the wealthy, glamorous denizens of Victoria Island and other elite enclaves. The title character, played to perfection by Ikponmwosa Gold, is, at 40, a former highlife musician who lives with his ailing mother (played by veteran actress Idowu Philips, also known as Iya Rainbow) and works the day shift at a local bar, where his predilection for free products leads him to empty the contents of unfinished beer bottles into a big pitcher that he then refrigerates for later consumption, much to the chagrin of his coworker. (Bolaji is an unapologetic cheapskate.) Dreaming of recording his own album, the music-obsessed Bolaji likes to hold court on the roof of the bar, addressing Nigeria���s countless political and economic problems to an audience of friends who have heard it all before (and who can barely get a word in edgewise). These include Omo (Gregory Ojefua, with his marvelously raspy voice), a taxi driver who gives Bolaji free rides, and whose double takes are among the film���s comic highlights.

Still from film Bigger than Africa.

 

Bolaji is so parsimonious that he refuses to purchase fruit from a little girl who hawks at the bus stop that he frequents. Glimpsing the girl���s beautiful mother, Victoria (Omowunmi Dada), Bolaji is instantly enamored. When two bullies attempt to steal the daughter���s oranges, Bolaji intervenes. The bullies end up costing the little girl a few hundred naira, which the newly solicitous Bolaji borrows from Omo to give to her. The child���s troubles have only just begun, however. Hounded by a task force set up to crack down on trading on busy roads, she is struck and killed by an okada (motorcycle taxi). The rest of the film concerns the title character���s efforts to help the grief-stricken Victoria, including by getting her a job at the bar where he works, and splitting his salary with her. Victoria, it turns out, harbors lofty ambitions of her own. An aspiring fashion designer, she motivates Bolaji to work toward achieving his dream of recording his own highlife album, but the matter of his connection to the dead girl���a connection of which Victoria is unaware���remains to be resolved.

Oga Bolaji is a breath of fresh air���both a throwback to such Nigerian classics as Amaka Igwe���s Rattlesnake (1995 ��� 1996) and Tade Ogidan���s Owo Blow (1996���1998) and emblematic of the new Nollywood style of immaculate widescreen cinematography. Frequent aerial shots show not the glitz of Victoria Island (as in so many other recent Nigerian films) but the congestion of the mainland marketplaces. Kasum, who is only in his mid-twenties, falters in some of the more serious sequences (overdoing the cuteness of Victoria���s daughter, for instance, in moments that become cloying) but shows a flair for comedy and an obvious affection for Nigeria���s 99 percent. The Pidgin-language Oga Bolaji is his tribute to the struggling, hustling masses, and it is a memorable, at times uproariously funny romp.

Still from film Black Goddess.

The inclusion of Souleymane Ciss�����s masterpiece Baara (1978) in this year���s festival would have been cause for celebration even if the organizers hadn���t managed to bring Ciss�����the legend himself���to Lincoln Center for a post-screening discussion with a reverent audience. As Ciss�� made clear to festival goers, Baara is about the persistence of forms of sociopolitical oppression associated with the rapacious capitalist system. The film focuses on the experiences of workers at a factory in Bamako. Some of them desire revolution; others must be taught the importance of organizing. ���What happened to our revolutionary projects to change social conditions?��� asks one disillusioned man. ���When you work in the private sector, it���s forced labor. You work like the devil, and you earn nothing.��� Several workers are too tired even to attend union meetings. The director of the factory, in response to disappointing financial returns, opts for massive layoffs. Those who remain in his employ want shorter workdays, better pay, and less toxic conditions at the job site. The factory director is unyielding.

���You got rich because your father was a small clerk misusing public funds,��� his wife reminds him, with such justified venom that he strangles her to death on the spot���a stark reminder that capitalist exploitation and patriarchal violence go hand in hand.

Still from film Baara

There are masterful images in Baara: the wife���s corpse spread across the marriage bed; the irate workers chasing after the director���s car; the men carrying the corpse of the factory���s latest engineer, murdered because he agitated for change; and, finally, the montage of faces silently contemplating revolution.

During the post-screening discussion, Ciss�� talked about wanting to make a film about corruption, stressing that the issues at the center of the now-41-year-old Baara are those that we who live under capitalism are still dealing with today. A framing device, depicting two figures���the engineer and the laborer who shares his name���walking through a field of flames, forcefully conveys Ciss�����s message, which he rearticulated in person for the Lincoln Center audience: an incineration is required���a burning away of capitalist evils���and an acceptance of the fact that, in order to achieve meaningful change, we must walk through fire. We must go through hell.

Hollywood’s 419 Scam

Africa is apparently hot in Hollywood, but can Hollywood be trusted with African stories?





Still from film Nigerian Prince.

Last year, British-Nigerian actor John Boyega was in Lagos to promote his film, Pacific Rim Uprising. During his stay, Boyega told CNN, “Hollywood wants African stories and I think Nigeria is at the forefront of that. They are ready to see all these epic stories that we have in Nigeria.��� This statement should be good news for Nigerian cinema because going to Hollywood means going global. However, there is something discomforting about it; poverty porn-loving Hollywood, with its history of telling formulaic narratives of crime, child soldiers, and poverty about Africa, wants to tell our stories.

A recent Hollywood production with a Nigerian story is Faraday Okoro���s Nigerian Prince (2018). Featuring a mostly Nigerian cast, but backed with American money (including from phone company, AT&T), the film explores one of Nigeria���s infamous identities���its association with internet and email scams.

Nigerian Prince follows Eze (Antonio J. Bell), a first-generation Nigerian-American, sent to live with his Aunt, Grace (Tina Mba), in Nigeria against his wishes. Auntie Grace is a law professor whose son, Pius (played with Nigerian swagger and a problematic Nigerian accent���really a generic Hollywood ���African��� accent���by the British-born American actor Chinaza Uche), is an internet scammer who enjoys being a yahoo boy. Eze befriends Pius and helps him with a con in exchange for a return ticket back to the United States.

Mr. Okoro, like Eze, was sent to school in Nigeria by his parents against his wishes. The two years he spent studying in a Catholic boarding school in the country put him in a different space compared to other Hollywood filmmakers who have told Nigerian or African stories without having lived on the continent. So, one might have expected Okoro to tell a story that would stay away from the usual one-dimensional stories of poverty, corruption, and backwardness Hollywood often associates with Africa. But he goes down that road with irrational desperation.

The portrayal of Nigeria as ���a place where everyone is scrambling for cash, and you���re either toiling away at a dead-end job or have joined the underground culture of scam artist��� (as Variety���s Owen Gleiberman puts it in his typically slanted review) makes this film potentially unsettling and annoying to a Nigerian living in Nigeria; but for the film���s primary American audience, it probably confirms their idea of Nigeria.��

Tina Mba���s character, Aunty Grace, is written with so much misrepresentation; she is a law professor who doesn���t have a shower, has no internet or a second bed for her nephew who is coming to stay with her, and is unnecessarily harsh to him���there is a scene in which she pours a bucket of water on him when he refuses to leave the bed and threatens boiling water next time. In reality, a Nigerian-American is often the darling of the home when they visit. That the average Nigerian law professor can afford a car, internet, and a good-sized apartment appears to have been lost on the author. It is incredible how rationality walks out the door when Hollywood is bent on portraying Africans as one-dimensional, always poor.

What Okoro may fail to realize is that the one-dimensional story of poverty, scam, and corruption that he tells opens the country to scathing comments similar to Donald Trump���s reference to the African continent as consisting of ���shithole countries.���

However, not all of the film is a misrepresentation. Nigerian Prince paints a realistic picture of the scam culture and corruption in Nigeria, especially Lagos, although in a myopic manner. As novelist Chimamanda Adichie put it in her essay for Esquire, ���to live in Lagos is to live on distrust. You assume you will be cheated������

These stories are part of the dark side of Nigeria; they are our realities and it is okay if they are told without dilution, the same way that Hollywood discusses the corruption and abuse of power by those in the White House in films like Andy Mckay���s Vice (2018) and Steven Speilberg���s The Post (2017). But more accuracy and more complexity are needed to show a side of Africa beyond poverty and corruption.

Blind to the matatus

The future of Kenya's matatus (commuter buses) and their inherent place in the capital Nairobi's culture and society, is all but absent in the government's neoliberal vision for urban planning.





Image credit Hansueli Krapf via Wikimedia Commons (CC).

 

Strikes against new regulations and reforms of Nairobi���s matatu sector by its workforce are nothing new and regularly bring the Kenyan capital to a standstill. On March 8th, operators of the colorful minivans and buses organized a procession to bring a petition against their exclusion from official meetings of the Board of the Nairobi Metropolitan Area Transport Authority (NAMATA) regarding the future of Nairobi���s urban transport. They claim that they are being left out of important decisions that affect their employment. Their struggle brings to mind the question by popular Kenyan musician Muthoni Drummer Queen (MDQ) in one of her famous songs:�����Nai Ni Ya Who?��� Whose Nairobi is it?

The matatu has served as the dominant mode of commuter transport since colonial rule in Kenya, carrying approximately 70% of the urban population every day. Initiatives such as Digital Matatus, as previously discussed here, highlight their central role in Nairobi and how they have become accessible to the population despite their informal status. Yet, government attempts to phase out 14-seater minivans and recent plans to introduce a bus rapid transit (BRT) system without including transport workers reveal how national development schemes dismiss existing forms of informal transport and exacerbate uncertainty for urban dwellers already living in precarious conditions.

In 2008, President Kibaki introduced ���Vision 2030��� and ���Nairobi Metro 2030���, two national strategies aiming to build ���a globally competitive and prosperous country with a high quality of life by 2030.��� Developed with support from American management consulting firm McKinsey, the plan seeks to integrate Kenya in the flow of global capital and attract foreign investment, exemplifying global trends in neoliberal policy that focus on market solutions to development. It proposes new, standardized systems of mass transport managed through public-private partnerships without plans to build on the matatu economy or absorb its workforce. The omission of Nairobi���s most widely used mode of public transportation from blueprints for the city, and spaces where such decisions are made, sheds light on the larger contradictions of forms of urban planning that are termed neoliberal:

First, these plans increase uncertainty over livelihoods rather than reducing it. Employment relations between matatu owners and operators are highly unequal and exploitative for workers. Without formal contracts, most operators enjoy little to no legal protection and they have to pay high daily usage fees that sometimes exceed daily profits. This unequal relationship was also highlighted by protestors in March, who noted that matatu owners were included in NAMATA meetings about BRT while they were not. Navigating this inequality and their precarious working conditions, workers are known to use transgressive practices (such as speeding or overcrowding) to increase profit margins and ensure they receive an income at the end of the day, which has contributed to occupational stigma and a contentious relationship with authorities. At the same time, although seemingly in conflict with the government, the matatu as a space has also been used for political campaigns and some matatu owners themselves are political elites, revealing a complex and intimate relationship between the matatu and the state. As a public-private partnership, BRT proposals add another layer of complexity, bringing in new corporate partners but excluding matatu operators.

Vision 2030 claims it will improve ���quality of life and inclusiveness in the region,��� seeking to promote employment and reduce poverty. To the contrary, however, the plans have generated uncertainty and anxiety among matatu crews. Matatu spokesperson and former driver Joseph Nderitu articulates this anxiety by asking: ���How many jobs will be lost and what will be done to support the many poor when they lose their jobs?���

Second, the matatu economy exemplifies notions of entrepreneurship and innovation, key phrases in Nairobi Metro 2030, and yet these plans do not envision a place for the entrepreneurial matatu in Nairobi���s future. In her 2017 book, Matatu, Kenda Mutongi traces the history of this economy, revealing how matatus emerged in colonial Nairobi in the 1950s as a response to racist exclusionary policies and a lack of transport for black commuters. Responding to the growing need for transportation, Kenyans owning private cars started to provide transportation for commuters in return for a small fare, giving rise to the matatu industry. The number of matatus grew significantly after independence in 1963, creating a large informal network and contributing to economic growth of the newly independent nation.

Aligned with free market ideology, competition currently drives the matatu economy and matatu owners and operators devise various strategies to beat the competition by branding their vehicles with special features. Often, matatus include references to global brands, such as Nike, and they serve as a platform for musicians to share their music, promoting public consumption. Matatu crews embrace the exact notions of innovation and competitiveness set out in Kenya���s development blueprints and firms have even recognized matatus as sites of marketing. Rather than capitalizing on this potential, as has been done in the case of taxis in South Africa, omitting matatus from national plans for development suggests that the government does not acknowledge their contribution to the Kenyan economy.

Third, contrary to creating a unique city identity as envisioned in Vision 2030 and Nairobi Metro 2030, the plans ultimately fragment Nairobi by dismissing the connections and identities created and sustained by the matatus. While the plans focus primarily on infrastructural and economic development, they are also a project of representation sketching out a specific image of future Nairobi. Spray-painted matatus with special features, such as loud speakers or flatscreens, have become famous under the name manyanga and receive much attention from the public, as shown by the emergence of Matwana Matatu Culture and the so-called ���Nganya Awards��� that highlight the ���most pimped matatus��� in annual ceremonies.

The anthropologist Mbugua wa Mungai provides a detailed analysis of matatu graphics and fashion in his 2013 book, Nairobi���s Matatu Men: Portrait of a Subculture, arguing that matatu culture has become a key vehicle to understanding Kenyan society. Rather than standardizing and defining one kind of ���Nairobi-ness,��� he illuminates how matatus offer different experiences through their music and graphics, ranging from a notorious ���bad boy��� to religious imagery. Indeed, matatus display different identities that reflect Nairobi���s heterogeneity and commuters can assert their specific identity by entering a specific matatu. With their strategies to counter competition and navigate uncertainty, matatu workers thus also create outlets for the production and consumption of popular culture, where Nairobians express their aspirations and anxieties, make sense of their relationship with Nairobi and reveal frictions and contradictions of life in the city. Although claiming it seeks to ���carve out a niche for the city, uniquely its own,��� Nairobi Metro 2030 fails to tap into the city���s existing uniqueness and ultimately reduces the city to its place in the global economy. By attempting to homogenize a heterogenous city, the plan ultimately flattens and fragments Nairobi identity.

As nations across the globe shift to neoliberal mass transit schemes, we should not only analyze state policy but also ask what happens to city identities and the subaltern. Who makes the city and whose city is it?

Blind to the matatu

The future of Kenya's matatu sector, and its inherent place in Nairobi's culture and society, is all but absent in the government's neoliberal vision for urban planning.





Image credit Hansueli Krapf via Wikimedia Commons (CC).

 

Strikes against new regulations and reforms of Nairobi���s matatu sector by its workforce are nothing new and regularly bring the Kenyan capital to a standstill. On March 8th, operators of the colorful minivans and buses organized a procession to bring a petition against their exclusion from official meetings of the Board of the Nairobi Metropolitan Area Transport Authority (NAMATA) regarding the future of Nairobi���s urban transport. They claim that they are being left out of important decisions that affect their employment. Their struggle brings to mind the question by popular Kenyan musician Muthoni Drummer Queen (MDQ) in one of her famous songs:�����Nai Ni Ya Who?��� Whose Nairobi is it?

The matatu has served as the dominant mode of commuter transport since colonial rule in Kenya, carrying approximately 70% of the urban population every day. Initiatives such as Digital Matatus, as previously discussed here, highlight their central role in Nairobi and how they have become accessible to the population despite their informal status. Yet, government attempts to phase out 14-seater minivans and recent plans to introduce a bus rapid transit (BRT) system without including transport workers reveal how national development schemes dismiss existing forms of informal transport and exacerbate uncertainty for urban dwellers already living in precarious conditions.

In 2008, President Kibaki introduced ���Vision 2030��� and ���Nairobi Metro 2030���, two national strategies aiming to build ���a globally competitive and prosperous country with a high quality of life by 2030.��� Developed with support from American management consulting firm McKinsey, the plan seeks to integrate Kenya in the flow of global capital and attract foreign investment, exemplifying global trends in neoliberal policy that focus on market solutions to development. It proposes new, standardized systems of mass transport managed through public-private partnerships without plans to build on the matatu economy or absorb its workforce. The omission of Nairobi���s most widely used mode of public transportation from blueprints for the city, and spaces where such decisions are made, sheds light on the larger contradictions of forms of urban planning that are termed neoliberal:

First, these plans increase uncertainty over livelihoods rather than reducing it. Employment relations between matatu owners and operators are highly unequal and exploitative for workers. Without formal contracts, most operators enjoy little to no legal protection and they have to pay high daily usage fees that sometimes exceed daily profits. This unequal relationship was also highlighted by protestors in March, who noted that matatu owners were included in NAMATA meetings about BRT while they were not. Navigating this inequality and their precarious working conditions, workers are known to use transgressive practices (such as speeding or overcrowding) to increase profit margins and ensure they receive an income at the end of the day, which has contributed to occupational stigma and a contentious relationship with authorities. At the same time, although seemingly in conflict with the government, the matatu as a space has also been used for political campaigns and some matatu owners themselves are political elites, revealing a complex and intimate relationship between the matatu and the state. As a public-private partnership, BRT proposals add another layer of complexity, bringing in new corporate partners but excluding matatu operators.

Vision 2030 claims it will improve ���quality of life and inclusiveness in the region,��� seeking to promote employment and reduce poverty. To the contrary, however, the plans have generated uncertainty and anxiety among matatu crews. Matatu spokesperson and former driver Joseph Nderitu articulates this anxiety by asking: ���How many jobs will be lost and what will be done to support the many poor when they lose their jobs?���

Second, the matatu economy exemplifies notions of entrepreneurship and innovation, key phrases in Nairobi Metro 2030, and yet these plans do not envision a place for the entrepreneurial matatu in Nairobi���s future. In her 2017 book, Matatu, Kenda Mutongi traces the history of this economy, revealing how matatus emerged in colonial Nairobi in the 1950s as a response to racist exclusionary policies and a lack of transport for black commuters. Responding to the growing need for transportation, Kenyans owning private cars started to provide transportation for commuters in return for a small fare, giving rise to the matatu industry. The number of matatus grew significantly after independence in 1963, creating a large informal network and contributing to economic growth of the newly independent nation.

Aligned with free market ideology, competition currently drives the matatu economy and matatu owners and operators devise various strategies to beat the competition by branding their vehicles with special features. Often, matatus include references to global brands, such as Nike, and they serve as a platform for musicians to share their music, promoting public consumption. Matatu crews embrace the exact notions of innovation and competitiveness set out in Kenya���s development blueprints and firms have even recognized matatus as sites of marketing. Rather than capitalizing on this potential, as has been done in the case of taxis in South Africa, omitting matatus from national plans for development suggests that the government does not acknowledge their contribution to the Kenyan economy.

Third, contrary to creating a unique city identity as envisioned in Vision 2030 and Nairobi Metro 2030, the plans ultimately fragment Nairobi by dismissing the connections and identities created and sustained by the matatus. While the plans focus primarily on infrastructural and economic development, they are also a project of representation sketching out a specific image of future Nairobi. Spray-painted matatus with special features, such as loud speakers or flatscreens, have become famous under the name manyanga and receive much attention from the public, as shown by the emergence of Matwana Matatu Culture and the so-called ���Nganya Awards��� that highlight the ���most pimped matatus��� in annual ceremonies.

The anthropologist Mbugua wa Mungai provides a detailed analysis of matatu graphics and fashion in his 2013 book, Nairobi���s Matatu Men: Portrait of a Subculture, arguing that matatu culture has become a key vehicle to understanding Kenyan society. Rather than standardizing and defining one kind of ���Nairobi-ness,��� he illuminates how matatus offer different experiences through their music and graphics, ranging from a notorious ���bad boy��� to religious imagery. Indeed, matatus display different identities that reflect Nairobi���s heterogeneity and commuters can assert their specific identity by entering a specific matatu. With their strategies to counter competition and navigate uncertainty, matatu workers thus also create outlets for the production and consumption of popular culture, where Nairobians express their aspirations and anxieties, make sense of their relationship with Nairobi and reveal frictions and contradictions of life in the city. Although claiming it seeks to ���carve out a niche for the city, uniquely its own,��� Nairobi Metro 2030 fails to tap into the city���s existing uniqueness and ultimately reduces the city to its place in the global economy. By attempting to homogenize a heterogenous city, the plan ultimately flattens and fragments Nairobi identity.

As nations across the globe shift to neoliberal mass transit schemes, we should not only analyze state policy but also ask what happens to city identities and the subaltern. Who makes the city and whose city is it?

Running is work

What a documentary on running can tell us about Ethiopia's development trajectory.





Still from film Town of Runners.

���Running is work,��� our narrator, a young Biruk Fikadu, tells us in the introductory sequence to the documentary film Town of Runners. The film���shot over the course of three years (2008-2010) follows the trajectories of two young women from Bekoji, Ethiopia, in the Oromia region, as they pursue careers in the sport of athletics. A look back at the film, which was first released in 2012, now offers much more than a glimpse into the working conditions of athletes; it also offers insights into the overall changing economic landscape and infrastructural development in Ethiopia.

Alemi Tsegaye and Hawi Mergesa, teenagers coached by the legendary Coach Sentayehu, are aspiring runners seeking to follow in the footsteps of Bekoji-born legends Derartu Tulu, Tirunesh Dibaba, and Kenenisa Bekele, among others. We learn early on that, like many young women in Bekoji, their options outside of running are few. ���Her future must be running. There is nothing else���only education, running��� marriage,��� Hawi���s mother tells us.

That running is even a serious option, however, is depicted as a locational opportunity-specific to Bekoji. It is a town of runners, after all, a space of exception where Coach Sentyaehu tells us running is accepted, as opposed to other places in Ethiopia where parents would think their children had ���gone mad��� if they were trotting through the forests in early mornings.

However, Bekoji���s centrality to Ethiopian running, while perhaps true when filming began in 2008, has changed. The reasons for the more widely disseminated athletic centers currently in Ethiopia is in part due to the inauguration of the expansive club system that the film documents. As the Ethiopian Athletic Federation and local governments pledged to roll out a network of training centers in 2008 to develop the next generation of athletic icons, Coach Sentayehu brings Hawi and Alemi, among others, to the neighboring city of Assella to compete at a regional competition. Performing well on the gravel track means they will be selected to a club elsewhere in Ethiopia.

Infrastructure runs parallel to Hawi and Alemi���s athletic development. As the two move out of Bekoji and enter the club system, we are given periodic glimpses of the Chinese-funded road to Bekoji that is under construction. This development, unsurprisingly, is non-linear, and carries a plethora of ironies along with it. In one scene, Coach Sentayehu���s athletes use rakes shovels to restore the local track after the rainy season. He points out that with Chinese machinery, they could do the work in 30 minutes that will take the athletes days to complete. ���The work is endless��� he says, before we hear one athlete in the background exasperatedly yell, ���Oh, Ethiopia!���

The contradictory forms of development also follow Hawi and Alemi���s athletic trajectories. When they get selected to new government-funded clubs, from which they are promised a salary, accommodations, and high class training, they confront bleaker realities. Alemi gets selected to the Holeta Club under a two-year contract and is greeted by the club manager with running clothes, new shoes, and an assigned bunk in female quarters. Hawi, by contrast, despite showing more promise, ends up at Woliso club, gets outfitted with dramatically oversized clothes, and arrives in an unfinished dormitory with no bed.

We see the girls reunite in Addis Ababa where the Ethiopian Athletics Federation and the Ministry of Youth and Sport announce the dedication of governmental support to the clubs. A teary-eyed Hawi tells her friend Alemi, as they stare at officials dining on a literal red carpet, that her club���s organization was chaotic.

Hawi returns to Bekoji for Easter but cannot finish a training session under Coach Sentayehu. Concerned, he approaches her, and she confesses that she has not trained in four months, due to illness and injury. The added pressure she feels becomes clear to Coach Sentayehu when she tells him she has been told to be grateful and that the ���money spent on [them] could build a new road.���

Although Alemi excels at her club, she is among the few. Others, not performing to a high enough standard, are let go. Hawi, meanwhile, begs her manager for a release, and transfers to a new club in Asella, which for a while she finds far more preferable. However, despite enjoying the training, just one day before her and her teammates are due to attend the Oromia club championships in Nazaret, budgetary constraints threaten their promised transport. The athletes band together and demand a meeting with the manager, threatening, hazily, to go on strike.

Ultimately, Hawi returns to the town of runners to train again under Coach Sentayehu. When she does go back to Bekoji we see shots of a finished road, but Biruk skeptically ruminates on how this will affect the future of his town, his own options for work, and later foreign investment in Ethiopia. The film is chalk-full of these tense moments���grounded with unfulfilled promises and lack of funds, but over-ridden, if only for the few moments of a beautifully tactical race, by glances of future triumphs and athletic success. And, it is for this reason, that Town of Runners does help tie together domains often separated in analyses���sport, work, and international infrastructural and economic investment���so tactfully.