Sean Jacobs's Blog, page 218

The falsification of history

The charge that Mohandas Gandhi was a racist is doing the rounds again. His stay in colonial South Africa fuels those claims.





Street art in Islington, London February 2017. Artist: Gnasher. Photo credit Maureen Barlin via Flickr.

The Indian historian��Ramachandra��Guha���s��Gandhi before India��published in 2013 was received with much consternation in South Africa. This was because��in��Guha���s��quest to��portray the South African Gandhi as a cosmopolitan anti-colonial fighter and apostle of non-racialism,��he��wrote out��of history��the brutal subjugation of Africans and the myriad resistances against the Imperial army��while turning��a blind-eye to��Gandhi���s anti-African��racism and��support for��the right of the white minority to hold political power.

Guha���s��argument is��that��because Indians were more adept at challenging white domination, the ruling class passed a myriad of laws that restricted their movement to trade,��going on to argue that given��that:

These restrictions were later extended more thoroughly to the��Africans,��the Indians should really be considered to be among apartheid���s first victims. And in so far as it was Gandhi who led the first protests against the racial laws, he should really be��recognised��as being among apartheid���s first��opponents.

This is a staggering claim��because at exactly the time when laws were passed against Indian traders,��the brutal system of migrant labor that wrenched Africans from their families, dragooning them into the mines of South Africa and housing them in a prison like compound system that controlled all aspects of their lives. In addition, numerous taxes were implemented that crippled African economic initiatives (a move endorsed by Gandhi to get the “lazy” natives to work) and a strict enforcement of curfews and pass laws curtailed their movement (Gandhi condoned this as long as long it did not apply to Indians).

Guha���s��book is littered��with��these chauvinist��assertions. He argues��for example��that�����Europeans wanted to claim it [South Africa] as their own, an objective to which-at the time [circa 1905]-the Indians, and the Indians alone, posed a serious challenge.��� Anyone with a rudimentary knowledge of South Africa history will tell you that the colonial archive is filled with the fear of African rebellion especially in Natal.��Witness that doyen of South African historians Jeff Guy writing about the aftermath of the��Bambatha��Rebellion of 1906:

The execution of those who it was said had murdered whites, the exile of chiefs said to be disloyal, over three thousand dead and three thousand in��gaol, the refusal to consider an��amnesty for those in hiding, the cattle seized, property looted and homesteads burnt were still, incredibly, not enough��� officials were planning further punishment and suppression��� The colonial dream of conquest, the creation of an African population both subservient to and appreciative of alien rule was��never-could never-be attained.

In many senses��Guha���s��cardboard cut-out figure��of Gandhi��that ���India gave us a Mohandas we (South Africa) gave them a Mahatma�����served as a lightning rod for a plethora of works that sought to balance the books as it were.

Now��Guha��returns to the fray��placing great��store��with��the��assertion that by Gandhi���s��mid-30s,��circa��1906,��Gandhi stopped being a racist. Just like��the racists Jan Smuts and Cecil John Rhodes,��who��might have said some nice things about Africans,��this��cannot be used to exculpate their racist ideology. So��for Gandhi. Unfortunately for��Guha��much after 1906 Gandhi continued to castigate and belittle Africans.��Among a host of examples,��in 1909 his activism, as��Isabel��Hofmeyr��shows, crystalized��in wanting Indians inside and outside prison�����not to be classed as native,�����holding that he had��made up his��mind�����to fight against the rule by which Indians are made to live with Kaffirs��and others.��� And��for��those Indians who enjoyed the company of�����natives,�����Gandhi pronounced that��they were�����addicted to bad habits.���

Let me illustrate how nonchalant��Guha��is about Gandhi���s��anti-Indian racism. In his book��Guha��quotes Gandhi��who argues that��the of carrying passes:

���presupposes that the Indian is a barbarian. There is very good reason for requiring registration of a native in that he is yet being taught dignity and the necessity of��labour. The Indian knows it and he is imported��because he knows it.

Guha��makes no comment on this crude racism and the way in which Gandhi could not countenance African refusal to work for the white colonists as a form of resistance.��Time and��time��again,��Guha��quotes but��doesn���t��reflect on Gandhi���s��racism,��making one wonder about��Guha���s��own orientation. Gandhi���s passive resistance comes imbued with a sense of Indian superiority and African inferiority.��Guha��quotes one of Gandhi���s lieutenants A.M. Cachalia from1908:�����Passive resistance is a matter of heart, of conscience, of trained understanding. The natives of South Africa need many generations of culture and development before they can hope to be passive resisters in the true sense of the term.��� Guha���s��response is that��Cachalia�����provided a compelling��defense��of non-violence as the most moral means of challenging injustice!���

Despite the weight of evidence,��Guha��argues��that�����Gandhi forged enduring friendships with individuals of ethnic and religious backgrounds different from his own��� As a London-trained lawyer, Mohandas Gandhi was the only Indian in Durban who bridged the gap between the races.�����Given Gandhi���s aversion to Africans this conclusion is patently untrue.

Guha���s��attempt to rescue a South African Gandhi elides his��racism, his lack of acknowledgement of African oppression and resistance, the long march of indenture which saw Indians transcend caste and confront a system that sought to reduce them to numbers.

But it is��Guha���s��own writing out of African history under colonialism and segregation that��is��really unpardonable. It leads him into the realms of��Brahmin chauvinism; Indians led the fight against discrimination and could be seen as the first anti-apartheid fighters. In��Guha���s��hands, the history of South Africa is told as a struggle between Indian traders and white racists. Africans are in the background, inert figures;��a people without history.

Is it any��wonder that��Guha��cannot see Gandhi���s��racism?

Why South Africa needs Democratic Socialism

South African politics urgently needs an injection of electoral energy from the left, that speaks in a language that resonates with voters, rejects chauvinism and embraces democracy.





The announcement of the 2019 election results by South Africa's Independent Electoral Commission. Image Credit: Siyabulela Duda / GovernmentZA.

After 25 years in power, one would expect that the African National Congress���the party that brought South Africans the Marikana massacre, 40% unemployment, 6-hour power cuts, systemic broken local governance, the corruption of Jacob Zuma and the Guptas and more���would be on the ropes, but for some reason the opposition has not been able to capitalize on this. When the results were announced, the ANC still won with a clear majority (57.60% of the national vote) and eight out of nine provinces. The opposition, despite the damage the ANC has inflicted on itself and the country, is still not a serious political threat, but why has a serious alternative to the ANC not emerged?

For 25 years, many on the left believed that building an alternative would require civil society, NGO���s and social movements to create a countervailing power outside the state to hold the ANC to account, but this hasn���t produced the desired results. The short answer is that South African politics urgently needs an injection of electoral energy from the left, something that speaks in a language that resonates with voters, rejects all forms of chauvinism and embraces democracy.

One of the main stories of this election is low turnout. Given the array of unpalatable options on the table, it is hard to blame anyone who couldn���t stomach voting. According to South Africa���s national electoral commission, the IEC, there are 36,5 million people who are eligible to vote, yet only 26,7 million registered. That means about 9,8 million South Africans that did not register to vote, as the South African Federations of Trade Unions (SAFTU) pointed out after the election. A further 9,7 million registered but decided not to vote. The IEC reported that more than one quarter of a million people spoiled their ballots.

The support of the second largest party, the Democratic Alliance (DA), managed to garner around 20.77 % of the votes (it got 22.23% in the last election in 2014), but failed to win any provinces outside of its Western Cape stronghold (an interesting statistic is that third of voters didn���t bother to vote in the province). The DA is even more moribund than the ANC and in the post-Jacob Zuma era can only offer vague rhetoric, cheap stunts and opportunism, such as its xenophobic ���secure our borders��� campaign.

The shock of the election was the DA���s loss of votes to the right-wing Afrikaner nationalist party, the Freedom Front Plus. The FF Plus opposes affirmative action, denies Apartheid���s effects and opposes land reform at all costs. Despite the DA���s origins in the liberal opposition to Apartheid (for years it was the only opposition party, sometimes with one MP, in the whites-only parliament), it based much of post-1994 electoral growth strategy on absorbing right wing voters who supported the old National Party. While it has attracted black votes, the party has struggled to transform itself into a party of governance and its first black leader, the platitudinous and weak Mmusi Maimane, has failed to provide a clear vision.

The Economic Freedom Fighters, the third largest party in parliament, has cause to celebrate after it increased its share of seats in parliament substantially from 25 to 44. While not enough to force coalition provincial governments, the EFF is now the official opposition in three provinces usually dominated by the ANC, namely North West, Mpumalanga and Limpopo.

The ANC might be beset by internal strife, but it remains the only game in town its alliance partners���the trade union federation, COSATU, and the South African Communist Party���which could have served as a check on ANC power���are shadows of their former selves clinging to life through aligning to incumbent President Cyril Ramaphosa. They, or other left-leaning forces close to the ANC, are unlikely to influence policy going forward. At the end of the day, the ANC is as out of ideas as everyone else and has been promising to renew itself for more than a decade. The best we can hope for is some economic growth and ongoing repair to some of our most damaged institutions.

Understanding South African politics

It is common for South African and international pundits to map South African politics onto a traditional left/right axis, with the ANC occupying the ground to the center-left, the DA the center-right, and the EFF and FF Plus occupying the left and right extremes respectively. The DA and the ANC are better understood as broad church parties encompassing an exotic array of different political currents in the same formation. For the ANC these include black nationalists, conservatives, neoliberals, unionists, social democrats and communists, while the DA unites libertarians, Thatcherites, liberals, Afrikaner conservatives, and coloured nationalists, among others. Parties such as the FF Plus and the nonagenarian former Bantustan leader, Mangosuthu Buthelezi���s Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP) are essentially ethnic nationalist parties. Their performance in this election is tied to rising sentiments among groups who perceive that their interests are no longer being served by broad church parties.

The EFF is a racial populist party that employs leftist rhetoric; its policy positions and support for struggles over land and economic rights means that a large part of its social base encompasses workers, students and social movement activists. The leadership of the EFF may be corrupt and opportunistic, but writing off the entirety of the party���s support would be effectively writing off a large section of a base for a left politics. The EFF mobilizes aggrieved sentiments on racial rather than class-based lines and its authoritarian leadership is best understood as another faction of the ANC���a competing church with a more charismatic and fierier message.

The much smaller players are mainly religious parties with a base in the church or one-person operations set up by veteran politicians, like Patricia de Lille (former DA Cape Town mayor), who leech off the energy required to remain in public office at all costs. Their comparative lack of success of church-based parties contrasts sharply with what���s been witnessed elsewhere, most notably Brazil, though it is clear the ANC and DA absorb these churches and their rapacious leaders for now.

The DA faces an uncertain future in the post-Zuma era. It has no cohering politics, its broad church, center-right appeal apparently no longer includes many conservative whites and it doesn���t have anything ideologically to distinguish itself from the pro-business, eloquent Cyril Ramaphosa. Shoddy opportunistic stunts and banalities are not enough to convince weary South Africans that the DA is really ready to govern. The infighting, the tantrums and the twitter barbs are annoying.

If the existing political parties are disappointing and politics stale, it is clear that South Africa needs an injection from the left. For too long the space for a left politics has been dominated by the idea that politics can only be built without contesting state power through social movements and NGOs. The left has to think electorally.

South Africans still believe in democracy, despite the disappointments of the last 25 years. The majority of voters opted for parties that uphold rather than reject the democratic settlement. Fringe parties, such as Black First Land First and its comical leader Andile Mngxitama���which claim that 1994 changed nothing and the South African people have been sold a pipe dream known as ���democracy,������were rejected soundly by the electorate. South Africans have little patience for militant rhetoric and promises of revolution distant from their material realities. Years of these hollow platitudes from the ANC, COSATU and SACP have left many workers weary.

The space for a left party this election was occupied by the newly formed Socialist Revolutionary Workers��� Party (SRWP). The SRWP is the brainchild of the National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa (NUMSA), the largest trade union in the country. In 2016, NUMSA broke from COSATU to help form the South African Federation of Trade Unions (SAFTU). The leader of the SRWP is Irvin Jim, also the secretary general of NUMSA. Bizarrely, SRWP only announced its manifesto two days before the elections after committing to elections only a month before the elections. In the end, SAFTU refused to endorse the SRWP and the party received a mere 24,439 votes.

Postelection, the SRWP blamed its poor showing on mass election fraud (though it didn���t provide any evidence) and imperialism. By running on a platform largely sourced from Brezhnev-era Soviet dogma (Irvin Jim is particularly guilty of this) and relying on Lenin quotes rather than speaking to South Africans where they are at, the SWRP managed in to alienate what few voters it could reach, including the majority of its membership. Democracy cannot be taken for granted, tired clich��s about the revolution and the state being an instrument of the capitalist class do little to help us understand the state of affairs or figure out a strategy. For instance, the SWRP���s attack on the country���s electoral commission, is not only opportunistic, it is anti-Marxist. Democracy has provided an open space to organize and build movements without facing the jackboot and the gun���even if South African protestors increasingly face police violence. Like it or not the majority of South African believe in democracy. Dismissing their belief as false consciousness and elections���which so many fought and died for���as a mere trick of the bourgeoisie, insults our struggle. Any future left project needs to begin with the premise that 1994 marked a victory for democracy and progressive forces, something that should be built upon rather than rejected or dismissed. (1994 may have been a negotiated settlement, but it was a victory compared to the alternative of civil war.)

It is clear that the space for a new kind of politics exists. Any politics to take on the effects of racial inequality and neoliberalism in South Africa, can only come from the left. It is estimated that counting stay-aways from the polls, spoilt ballots and low turnout, only 27 percent of adult of South Africans voted for the ANC.

Democracy provides a platform for mobilization and movement building and the majority still have some faith in it. We have seen in recent years a Democratic Socialist upsurge in Mexico, the United States and UK as figures such as AMLO, Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn champion a democratic alternative to fading dreams of revolution. In South Africa, we too need a platform to champion policies in favor of the vast majority. We need a politics rooted in struggles that oppose the big-man patronage politics endemic in political parties, social movements and trade unions; one that takes the struggle patriarchy seriously and rejects authoritarian posturing. The left cannot build an alternative through either nostalgia or revolutionary fantasies. We do not have a base, but that does not mean we cannot build one. The task going forward is to create a credible program that speaks to core issues: corruption, crime, jobs, and growth under a Ramaphosa presidency, without surrendering to the dogmas of the failed left or the liberal center. The next local government elections in 2021 present that opportunity.

South African homophobia goes to parliament

Are postapartheid norms against open homophobia in party politics eroding in South Africa?





Via Flickr.

A bully in my Standard 5 class used to mock me by calling me “sisi bhuti.” Although not fluent in Xhosa, it was obvious to me what the “sisi” in the phrase signified. The term���which evoked much laughter���meant “a boy who is a sissy.”

Interestingly, the bully never hit me. He didn���t need to���the verbal abuse was effective enough. It sent me to the music room during breaks. I would seek refuge there, staying away from further taunts on the playground.

This didn’t only happen at school. At home, if I cried, for whatever reason���as children do���some or other adult would also think it helpful to try stop the tears by saying something like “Hou op soos ‘n vrou aangaan!” (“Stop behaving like a woman!”), or hurling variations on that theme. So I learned very quickly that not being as strong, burly and athletic as the other boys, was a defect.

I would sometimes close the door in one of the rooms at home, and practice keeping my wrists straight, even though I desperately wanted them to just flap!

At school, there was a year in which ballet classes were on offer. A boy called Desmond opted to do ballet. Desmond was not effeminate and so he was not teased. I was secretly jealous of him. I wanted to sign up for ballet also but I didn���t because I knew it would just confirm what the bullies were saying. I signed up for piano instead, mainly because the lessons were private. I could practice the piano away from the gaze of bullies.

Almost every gay man I know has stories of this kind from his childhood. These tales are all too familiar.

The bully understood one thing very clearly. He knew that being compared to a woman���being reduced to a woman���was the ultimate insult a male could receive. As a gay teenager I internalized the belief that to be female, to be feminine, to be a woman was to be less than a man. Like so many other gay teenagers I prayed desperately for my voice to break, for my body to catch up to those of the bigger boys in our class. I did not want my body to be like that of a woman. I did not in any way want to be like a woman.

In this sense, the internalized homophobia of many gay men unites us with homophobic straight men. The glue that binds men���regardless of their sexual orientation���is disdain for women. This feeling often moves beyond disdain, into the terrain of (usually unacknowledged) hatred of women.

This is why you cannot, even today, assume that a gay man���s painful experiences of homophobia guarantee that he will be empathetic with women���s experiences of misogyny. Homophobia is dependent on misogyny; it feeds off it and relies on its key elements in order to survive. Women and gays are seen as essentially effeminate, representing the opposite of the ideal human who is always male, and often pale.

That constructed ideal attributes reason, steady emotion, strength and virtue to these men, contrasting that with an operating assumption that women and gays invariably lack reason, are hysterical, physically weak, and full of vice. That is why until very recently even our law regarded the testimony of women as no more believable than naughty children prone to myth making.

One of the democratic achievements of which I am most proud of as a South African, is the Bill of Rights in the Constitution. Thus far it is a document that has stood us in good stead even as we constantly need to mind the gap between lofty constitutional visions and bigoted daily realities. The constitution asserts, as a founding value that is inviolable, the inherent self-worth of every South African.

When politicians are elected as members of parliament, they pledge to uphold the Constitution and its values at all times. This includes social media which constitutes a critical part of real life in modern society. Political parties cannot be silent when violations of Constitutional rights and values happen. They must act���and be seen to act���swiftly and decisively, in the direction of justice.

We also need to go beyond legal definitions of harm and talk honestly about how we hurt each other in the public domain regardless of what the courts say about the legal threshold for hate speech or discrimination. The law is useful. It is also, however, imperfect when it comes to eliminating hateful ways of thinking and harmful ways of acting. To be sure, Twitter is probably not the best place to resolve these sorts of questions, but increasingly important public discussions are conducted on social media and so these spaces must become healthier.

As a broadcaster, I am often in conversation with various members of political parties. I have been openly gay for the duration of my professional life, and while I have faced homophobia, our main political parties have generally done well to buck the populist trend elsewhere.

For this reason, I was surprised when Ghaleb Cachalia, a member of parliament representing the Democratic Alliance (the DA is the official opposition party) referred to me in homophobic terms this week. In calling me ���a woman scorned,��� Cachalia departed from an important political consensus in South Africa. This consensus cannot be taken for granted by the way: former president Jacob Zuma once proudly recalled his childhood homophobia with no examination of how he might have chipped away at his own bigotry; the African Christian Democratic Party will have more seats in the next parliament; they think homosexuality is wrong and advocate for public policies that are socially conservative; and the Democratic Alliance itself infamously allowed their MPs a vote of conscience on whether gay people deserve full marital equality with heterosexual couples, thereby sacrificing the liberal ideal of substantive equality at the altar of pragmatism. It is crucial therefore that we be vigilant about the creep of illiberalism even as we celebrate our progressive jurisprudence on gay rights.

It bears remembering that homosexuality is illegal in two thirds of the countries on our continent, and is punishable by death in a handful.

South Africa prides itself in having defined itself on the opposite end of this spectrum. Cachalia���s comments then���and his subsequent defense of them���are a particularly sharp departure from the liberal ideal at heart of the DA���s political ideology.

The notion that I am a woman, or like a woman does not in itself offend me. How could it? I am very happy to be compared to women because women rock. Any group that has endured an ongoing global history of misogyny and has continued to survive and thrive is resilient�� and excellent. I should be so lucky to be compared to women, “scorned” or not.

So the mere comparison with women isn’t a problem. What is problematic is the purpose of the slur in terms of its socio-linguistic and political history. That matters. Cachalia is instinctively drawing from the old well of insults that aim to mock gay men by feminizing them. Cachalia, just like the bully who called me “sisi-bhuti”���is making his point by killing two birds with one stone.

Homophobia, like misogyny, is so normalized that Cachalia and many others will be baffled by this criticism. After all, wouldn���t you be baffled too if someone criticized you for something and, as far as you are concerned, what you had uttered was as uncontroversial as saying ���one plus one equal two?��� The naturalization of hatred against certain groups makes it especially hard to eliminate the hatred. This is exactly why normalized hatred���otherwise known as casual homophobia���needs to be pointed out and elevated when it happens.

Cachalia was roasted by a number of people who tried to engage him on Twitter. He dug in his toxic heels, pretending that he was being attacked for not being politically correct. This rejoinder, too, is revealing. When groups whose dignities are routinely trampled on push back against hatred, it is convenient to mislabel legitimate criticism, often by changing the subject. Cachalia was actually simply being asked, by those who criticized him, to be decent. But of course, “real men” do not self-examine, right? Real men stand their ground.

I expect better from elected public officials, and influential public figures. We have duties to consider and reconsider our speech acts. Being unintentionally hurtful is one thing; refusing to apologize for bigotry when it is pointed out simply reveals a vicious character at work.

I know many gay people who do not live openly. They are harmed by the burden of secrecy. Secrecy is a horrid choice for many in the face of public homophobia. Even among our political parties, including in the DA, there are men and women who are scared of the impact that homophobia might have on their careers, and personal and family life. I know several DA politicians who wish they could be as visible about their sexual orientation as me.

Bigotry like that tweeted by Cachalia, encourages secrecy and fear. I am glad I chose, early in my life, to not overthink the horror of homophobia. Attitudes like those displayed by Cachalia aren���t just horrible for me as an individual. When they happen in the public domain���as his did���they have a chilling effect. Many of his colleagues, and girls and boys in his family and friendship networks, are harmed by that kind of speech.

What does it say of a political party that it is prepared to entrust this kind of person with important positions of public power? The DA purports to value fairness. Its leaders speak often and eloquently about the need to protect the rights of individuals and minorities against the tyranny of the majority. The party surely should very quickly nip the tyranny of homophobia in the bud.

Despite the fact that Cachalia���s comments took place in public, on a platform in which many DA leaders are active and vocal, the party and its senior officials have maintained a strange public silence on this matter even as the story grows legs across the blogosphere.

Imagine if Cachalia had said that one Eusebius McKaiser was angry “like a darkie scorned���? The DA would have been forced to announce a disciplinary process even before a journalist made inquiries and many more people would have ensured he trended until he apologized, bathing him in necessary shame and regret.

Unfortunately, when it comes to women, and sexual minorities, cowardice sets in. Discrimination against gay people is either greeted with silence or is rationalized as “complex.��� Racism, on the other hand, is always black and white. We may struggle to eliminate hatred based on skin color, but we have no qualms naming it.

Cachalia���s attempt to play the school-yard bully was largely ignored by the most senior leaders of his party. Is the the DA truly committed to liberalism if it ignores speech acts that reduce freedom and undermine the right to dignity?

Our moral inconsistencies ultimately indict us all.

The resilience of culture

The film The Sound of Masks explores dance, memory and the meaning of life, ancestry, culture and political struggle in postcolonial Mozambique.





Still from film The Sound of Masks.

I am��Atan��sio��Cosme��Nyusi,

son of my father, healer without master

born on the Makonde plateau

where there are bridges without rivers

and the people believe in life after death

The Sound of Masks��is a visual meditation on the nature of memory in postcolonial societies ravaged by conflict, and a nonlinear biopic of a remarkable, if little-known, artist. This documentary tells the story of��Atan��sio��Cosme��Nyusi, dancer, choreographer, musician and researcher, following him through his quotidian perambulations across the urban spaces of Maputo, Mozambique���s capital. Walking wearily back and forth from his workplace, a dilapidated archive in the city���s downtown, to the theatre where he once performed as a professional, to his home filled with books and��sculptures, to the neighborhood where together with kinsmen and friends he perpetuates the ancestral tradition of��Mapiko��masking which gives the film its title,��Atan��sio��reminisces and ruminates aloud about the meaning of life, ancestry, culture and political struggle. Along the way he dialogues with comrades, colleagues and elders, as well as his son, interrogating��the meanings of a trajectory���his own���which time seems to have rendered opaque and elusive.��Atan��sio���s��presence is both radiant and wistful, his voice warm and wry, his mind inclined to eccentric imagery and philosophical provocation. The narrative is deftly punctuated by archival footage and dance performances, which work in counterpoint to evoke alternative memories of the country���s history.

If one were to stretch back into a straight line the life story told in this sinuous and spellbinding visual journey, it would go more or less as follows.��Atan��sio��was born in Tanzania as a child refugee of the war against Portuguese colonialism,��son of a guerrilla of the Front for the Liberation of Mozambique (Frelimo), nicknamed��Nantovson��of a Frelimo guerrilla nicknamed��Nantova��or, the deathless, for his arcane ability to transfer any battle wound to the nearest living being.

Still from film.

From his father��Atan��sio��inherited the passion and talent for the ancestral tradition of��Mapiko��masking, steeped in ritual secrecy and inclined to social satire. In 1978��Nantova��summoned his son, who was growing up wild in a returnee village of the northerly Cabo Delgado province, to join him in the country���s capital, two thousand kilometers south. There��Atan��sio��integrated the burgeoning National Company of Dance and Song and was projected into stardom, traveling on both sides of the Iron Curtain to perform��neotraditional��ballets inspired by the nationalist rhetoric of the socialist��state. Meanwhile he spearheaded a grassroots��Mapiko��group established by Makonde war veterans in the Military Zone, a neighborhood bestowed to them in recognition of the crucial role they played in the liberation struggle. Soon civil war and economic collapse would cast a looming��shadow on this upward trajectory. After performing the lead role in a ballet which celebrated the peace accords between Frelimo and the contras movement��Renamo, choreographed by his younger and more entrepreneurial brother, Atan��sio��gradually withdrew to the backstage. He was first charged to lead a research project on traditional dance located in the National Company, only to see the funds syphoned off and the equipment breaking down; then affected to tend after an archival collection on cultural heritage doomed to inevitable decay. There, among desolate metal bookshelves and desks, he shuffles his feet like one of the ghosts which his ancestral masks embody. The most poignant symbol of this alienation is a filing cabinet filled with cards that refer to books destroyed by flood, lost or misplaced. ���If it were for me,��� Atan��sio comments wryly to an intern, ���I���d sell it for scraps and eat the money.���

Still from film.

The fracture in memory which is the documentary���s central theme is most evident in the conversations that��Atan��sio��entertains with��Natepo, his teenage son, in which he belatedly tries to spark curiosity for a heritage which he has somewhat failed to transmit. Meanwhile, other characters discuss the possibility of eviction from the military neighborhood by the hand of money-hungry neoliberal elites, and the resilience of culture in the face of change. These dialogues are underscored by familiar images of refuse, ruination, and unbridled urban development. In the closing shots of the film,��Atan��sio��offers a pregnant allegory for this experience of mnemonic disconnection, through the myth of��Lipanyangule, a bogey who traverses unscathed centuries of war and mayhem, only to find himself unable to understand whether the unrelenting nightmares that plague his nights are dream or reality.

The point of resistance to the tendency to melancholic allegory which infuses the film are the titular masks, skillfully filmed live and in studio, which ambush the viewer with vibrancy, poise and the sudden surprise of a guerrilla assault. Ultimately, they remain��the film���s enigmatic protagonists. Bearded oldsters, revolutionary leaders, bejeweled women, deformed tricksters, and a gleaming skull carved by��Nantova��the deathless���all dance loud and colorful, dazzling, unpredictable, and ultimately indecipherable.

The resilience of culture in the face of change

The film The Sound of Masks by Sara CF de Gouveia explores dance, memory and the meaning of life, ancestry, culture and political struggle in postcolonial Mozambique.





Still from film The Sound of Masks.

I am��Atan��sio��Cosme��Nyusi,

son of my father, healer without master

born on the Makonde plateau

where there are bridges without rivers

and the people believe in life after death

The Sound of Masks��is a visual meditation on the nature of memory in postcolonial societies ravaged by conflict, and a nonlinear biopic of a remarkable, if little-known, artist. This documentary tells the story of��Atan��sio��Cosme��Nyusi, dancer, choreographer, musician and researcher, following him through his quotidian perambulations across the urban spaces of Maputo, Mozambique���s capital. Walking wearily back and forth from his workplace, a dilapidated archive in the city���s downtown, to the theatre where he once performed as a professional, to his home filled with books and��sculptures, to the neighborhood where together with kinsmen and friends he perpetuates the ancestral tradition of��Mapiko��masking which gives the film its title,��Atan��sio��reminisces and ruminates aloud about the meaning of life, ancestry, culture and political struggle. Along the way he dialogues with comrades, colleagues and elders, as well as his son, interrogating��the meanings of a trajectory���his own���which time seems to have rendered opaque and elusive.��Atan��sio���s��presence is both radiant and wistful, his voice warm and wry, his mind inclined to eccentric imagery and philosophical provocation. The narrative is deftly punctuated by archival footage and dance performances, which work in counterpoint to evoke alternative memories of the country���s history.

If one were to stretch back into a straight line the life story told in this sinuous and spellbinding visual journey, it would go more or less as follows.��Atan��sio��was born in Tanzania as a child refugee of the war against Portuguese colonialism,��son of a guerrilla of the Front for the Liberation of Mozambique (Frelimo), nicknamed��Nantovson��of a Frelimo guerrilla nicknamed��Nantova��or, the deathless, for his arcane ability to transfer any battle wound to the nearest living being.

Still from film.

From his father��Atan��sio��inherited the passion and talent for the ancestral tradition of��Mapiko��masking, steeped in ritual secrecy and inclined to social satire. In 1978��Nantova��summoned his son, who was growing up wild in a returnee village of the northerly Cabo Delgado province, to join him in the country���s capital, two thousand kilometers south. There��Atan��sio��integrated the burgeoning National Company of Dance and Song and was projected into stardom, traveling on both sides of the Iron Curtain to perform��neotraditional��ballets inspired by the nationalist rhetoric of the socialist��state. Meanwhile he spearheaded a grassroots��Mapiko��group established by Makonde war veterans in the Military Zone, a neighborhood bestowed to them in recognition of the crucial role they played in the liberation struggle. Soon civil war and economic collapse would cast a looming��shadow on this upward trajectory. After performing the lead role in a ballet which celebrated the peace accords between Frelimo and the contras movement��Renamo, choreographed by his younger and more entrepreneurial brother, Atan��sio��gradually withdrew to the backstage. He was first charged to lead a research project on traditional dance located in the National Company, only to see the funds syphoned off and the equipment breaking down; then affected to tend after an archival collection on cultural heritage doomed to inevitable decay. There, among desolate metal bookshelves and desks, he shuffles his feet like one of the ghosts which his ancestral masks embody. The most poignant symbol of this alienation is a filing cabinet filled with cards that refer to books destroyed by flood, lost or misplaced. ���If it were for me,��� Atan��sio comments wryly to an intern, ���I���d sell it for scraps and eat the money.���

Still from film.

The fracture in memory which is the documentary���s central theme is most evident in the conversations that��Atan��sio��entertains with��Natepo, his teenage son, in which he belatedly tries to spark curiosity for a heritage which he has somewhat failed to transmit. Meanwhile, other characters discuss the possibility of eviction from the military neighborhood by the hand of money-hungry neoliberal elites, and the resilience of culture in the face of change. These dialogues are underscored by familiar images of refuse, ruination, and unbridled urban development. In the closing shots of the film,��Atan��sio��offers a pregnant allegory for this experience of mnemonic disconnection, through the myth of��Lipanyangule, a bogey who traverses unscathed centuries of war and mayhem, only to find himself unable to understand whether the unrelenting nightmares that plague his nights are dream or reality.

The point of resistance to the tendency to melancholic allegory which infuses the film are the titular masks, skillfully filmed live and in studio, which ambush the viewer with vibrancy, poise and the sudden surprise of a guerrilla assault. Ultimately, they remain��the film���s enigmatic protagonists. Bearded oldsters, revolutionary leaders, bejeweled women, deformed tricksters, and a gleaming skull carved by��Nantova��the deathless���all dance loud and colorful, dazzling, unpredictable, and ultimately indecipherable.

New histories for an uncharted future in Sudan

The role of Islam in politics has re-emerged as a contested topic in post-Bashir Sudan, after its striking absence during much of the protests. Towards what sort of future might the protestors march?





Image credit Christopher Michel via Flickr (CC).

The protests that emerged from the northern Sudanese city of ‘Atbara in December 2018 represented an outpouring of anger at a regime that had attacked the social fabric of the country as much as it had decimated its economy. It was perhaps for this reason that the slogan that came to characterize it������tasqut��bas!��� (it should just fall!)���was not so much political (calling for a particular set of rights, reforms, or new modes of governance), as it was poetic, a raw and powerful expression of a desire for change, with exactly what that change would look like left in suspension.

That the protest movement came out of��the railway town of ���Atbara indexed the way that labor, a mode of belonging that transcends political, ethnic and religious divides, had a power to create a mass movement in Sudan in a way that traditional parties and identities were unable to muster. ���Laborer��� is an identity all shared���even if this movement, spearheaded by the Sudanese Professionals Association, emerged out of a particularly elite form thereof���and the disconnect between that labor and human flourishing had become obvious to all, regardless of persuasion.

Truncating the famous Arab Spring call of��al-sha���b��yurid��isqat��al-nizam!��(���The People want the fall of the system!���) to the economical two-word slogan ���tasqut��bas!��� (it should just fall!) protesters were engaging an apophatic politics, its solidity founded on a process of negation. ���The people want the fall of the regime��� was being cited, but without even ���the people��� to hold onto any longer, perhaps due to its implicit reference to the socialist and populist movements of Sudan���s past (al-haraka��al-sha���biyya,��al-mu���atamar��al-sha���bi, etc.).�� Though the professional umbrella model��has precedent in the 1964 and 1985 popular uprisings,����it is important to point out that today���s movement has relied not at all on the political forces, figures, and frames of Sudan���s recent history: left, right, or center, Islamist, secularist, or otherwise. It was as if a clearing-of-ground was necessary before anything new could be built. As one protester commented, as quoted by the New York Times,�����They led us to freedom but we don���t know anything about them.�����In the apropos phrasing, then, of��tasqut��bas,��not only alliances but even identity is intentionally left wide open, the future uncharted.

Since the resumption of the protests on April 6, however, and particularly following their successes on April 11, with the fall of ���Umar al-Bashir, the blank canvas the December protests laid out has begun to be filled, both of course with a clear set of political principles, as well as with a new and intriguing set of images that have come to frame its more civilizational demands. Remarkably, the movement has drawn on Sudan���s ancient Nubian past as a storehouse of resources meant to stabilize this most post-modern revolution. The contrast with the��popular Islamic histories of Sudan on which the previous regime was so fond of pulling��could not be starker. Neither Islamic nor secular, neither Arab nor African, the conflicting identities around which Sudanese politics has been constructed since the time of independence, at least, these Nubian images point to something else entirely.

A sign often photographed at the rallies��proclaims, ���My grandfather is��Tarhaqa��and my grandmother is a��kandaka,��� pulling a line from a poem that has been popular amongst protesters since the uprising of 2013, but only gained national prominence in recent weeks.��Tarhaqa��refers to a pharaoh from the 7th century BC who ruled over a wide swath of territory stretching from central Sudan to the Levant, remembered in the history as a great builder of temples and pyramids, and under whom a period of prosperity was inaugurated.��Kandaka, on the other hand, was the title of the Nubian queens of Kush in Northern Sudan from the 2nd century BCE to the 4th century AD.

As has been widely publicized,��the video still of 22 year-old Sudanese activist��Alaa��Salah, which is now referred to in the press as the�����kandaka��picture,�����references this history in all sorts of ways.��Though, as Nesrine Malik has pointed out,��drawing on��this��Nubian history could be read as once again celebrating a��people who have monopolized power in Sudan,��and thus as upstaging the very critiques the protests activated,��it is worth mentioning that��while��Northern Sudan��today may contain groups from which the elite are derived, the region is claimed��as origin��by Sudanese from many backgrounds: even South Sudan itself����(the appellation of the most prominent of the Nubian kingdoms)��on independence. Despite the difficulties in using this��history for presentist goals,��references to��the Nubian past��express��a desire to go back to the beginning (or at least the recorded beginning)��so as��to choose another path for Sudan���s still undetermined future.

Yet even though this image and the pasts it evokes have gained considerable press, what has received almost no attention is��what exactly��Alaa��Salah was saying��at that moment she was frozen in time;��words that reference a very different, and far more recent, Sudanese past. If one watches the videos of this moment, one can hear that she is reciting the now famous poem with the line depicted on the billboard. The poem, however, though it references Tarhaqa and��kandaka��at its conclusion, is in fact primarily not about Nubian history. Instead it is a commentary on the Islamization of the state for which the most recent Sudanese regime is famous. It goes like this:

���Oh mother,��my blood boils…when the country is agitated,

when these soldiers,��who distorted Islam��bring their��vanities.

They jailed us in the name of religion.

They��burned us��in the name of��religion.

They oppressed us in the name��of religion.

They killed us in the name of religion.

Religion is innocent, oh mother.

Religion says,��if one��lets��go of one���s right one dies.

You become a brother to the devil.

Religion says go out,��go out,��stand in opposition and face the rulers.

Religion says that if one sees an abominable wrong��not to shut up���

���My grandfather is��Tarhaqa.

My grandmother is a��kandaka��and (southern Sudanese nationalist activist of the 1920s) ���Abd al-Fadil��al-Maz, [all of them] brave knights.

Oh, mother, the youth live,��and I with silence��die.

The��popularity��of the poem��Alaa��Salah��recited is only one piece of evidence of��the return��of�����Islam�����to the��theater of debate��as the protest movement has progressed. The��emergence��of labor as the idiom of political action��in the current protests,��after a very long��period of��dormancy, has been truly remarkable. However, one wonders��now��if the increasing place of Islam��as a topic of contention is evidence of the lack of currency��that labor has��as��a language of dissent��for��both local and��international partners. Both protesters and the military regime��seek��to��solidify their support in different ways. In short, while the protest movement that began in December of 2018 engaged in��an apophatic politics,��an inclusive dialogue that sought to bring Sudanese together regardless of political color,��now, since the fall of��al-Bashir,��a discourse has emerged that has presented itself as very distinctly and loudly anti-Islamist, with both sides of the political divide jostling to present themselves as cognizant of the threat that��such a��politics poses.��While��the��desire to separate religion from the state is by no means universal among the opposition,��the most visible components of��both sides seem eager to express a commitment��to a political order free of ���Islamist��� involvement.

For the ���new�����military��regime in power in Sudan, the assurance to both protesters and the western powers that the specifically Islamist elements of the regime are being purged��seems a major component of its stability. However, which individuals��of the regime exactly count as ���Islamist��� and which do not,��and how that distinction will be made,��is another question entirely,��even if each day the press reports the fall of another ���Islamist��� figure��in the military council��as a concession to protesters.

In the meantime, it is worth mentioning that the most brutal example of a global proxy war based on���at least in part���a commitment to fight an Islamic menace, is the wide-scale military campaign taking place in Yemen with the use of Sudanese��ground troops��and pilots. Sudan’s involvement is assured to continue by the head of the military transitional council that now rules Sudan. ���Abd��al-Fatah Burhan, and his chief assistant Muhammad Hamdan Dalqu (Himaydti), head of the Rapid Support Security Force, have been instrumental to Sudanese-Saudi/Emirati cooperation on the Yemen front for many years. It is no surprise, then, that��the Saudis and Emiratis have��now��agreed to provide Sudan with US $3 billion, in cash and kind, to support the military junta���s stability. With this,��the military regime seems committed to sidelining its native Islamists at home (the Muslim Brothers who have been a thorn in the side of these Gulf states), while bombing others of another variety (the Houthi rebels understood to be proxies of Iran) abroad.��The military���s imposition of a freeze��on the planned march by the ���Victory of Shari���a Movement,��� even if��conceded by��the march���s organizers,��may not stay frozen forever, at which point it may have a very difficult decision to make.��Recent military assurances that��Shari���a��will remain��a��main source of legislation in the interim��seems carefully designed to head the ���Victory of��Shari���a��Movement��� off at the pass.

���Hey American Intelligence Agency: ���Abd��al-Hay Yusuf he is the one who planned the events of Sept 11��� (social media)

A different discourse around the place of Islam in Sudan���s uncharted future has emerged among the protesters in the street who are standing up to the military regime. While the protesters��have clearly rejected the meddling of Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the UAE,�����the Islamic��� has also appeared for them as both a frame and an object of their resistance. In regards to the latter, Islamists who were in the opposition, and played a considerable role in the protests (the Reform Now Movement, the Popular Congress youth particularly after the killing of one of their leaders in detention, etc.), are now complaining of exclusion from the groups that are planning Sudan���s political future, as a��recent��al-Jazeera��report outlines in detail.��The recent attack on the Popular Congress Party meeting, swiftly condemned by protest leaders, is indicative of the danger that this political purge of Islamist forces could turn into a physical one if not managed carefully. The same can be said about the��mobbing of Salafi��Shaykh��Muhammad Mustafa ���Abd��al-Qadir��at a spare parts store by a crowd of revolutionaries, following his��disparaging sermon about protesters��and��leading to an apologetic press conference��where he sought to remind the audience that he had been a vocal critic of the Muslim Brotherhood (and thus the regime) years before the uprising was ever imagined.

While this exclusion of the Islamists is directed across the spectrum, particular vitriol is reserved for those who were��close to the regime. A recent image circulating around social media���clearly photoshop and not��photo���depicts protesters at a rally marching behind a banner that reads�����Hey American Intelligence Agency: ���Abd��al-Hay Yusuf he is the one who planned the events of Sept 11��� flanked with the seal of the Sudanese Professionals Association. Shaykh ���Abd��al-Hay Yusuf is��a��religious scholar who flourished under��the regime, and��even now, post-coup,��delivers fiery sermons��arguing that�����the religion of God is��a��red line�����that the new rulers and their opponents must not��cross, no��matter Sudan���s political future.��Trying to distance him from the previous regime, his followers seek to��vindicate��him��as a neutral defender of Islam, speaking��truth to��the regime���s power, and��have produced slick��video montages��of��clips of his��sermons to this effect, with the sounds of the protests playing in the background.��For many among the protesters, however, figures like ���Abd��al-Hay��Yusuf are irredeemable, mere��relics��from the��past��when Sudan rightly earned a reputation��as a hotbed of extremism, and��thus��have no place in its future.

���About which Islam were the Salvationists speaking?��� (Social Media)

Notably, however, and parallel to the protesters��� critique of Islamists like ���Abd��al-Hay Yusuf, is an attempt to capture a role for Islam in a certain kind of resistance politics, as indicated in the��kandaka��poem I cited above, where (true) Islam was depicted as an inspiration to stand up against oppression, rather than solely the idiom of state oppression itself. Another related image that has been circulating a lot on social media is this one, which several of my Sudanese friends sent out over WhatsApp. It depicts a massive group of protesters praying, flanked by the words:

About which Islam were the Salvationists��[citing the self-appellation of the regime]��speaking?

This [referring to the picture of the lines of people praying]��is Islam and these are Muslims���

A��majestic scene of what exceeds two million Muslims in a gathering not in Mecca or ���Arafat, but in the heart of Khartoum.

The land of #the sit-in at the military headquarters.

The Islam of moderation is the Islam that glorifies its rituals and respects diversity and [other] religions. Islam of peace from the land of peace, freedom and justice, Sudan.

Sudanese have long waited to realize this dream of peace, freedom, and justice, and now, more than ever in recent memory, there seems to be an opportunity to do so. What��frames of resistance and resilience��will��be used��to craft such a future, and what��resources��will be drawn on to do so?��How can a movement that is as inclusive as it is forward-thinking emerge as Sudanese think together about��these��new beginnings?��Given the instability of��developments��as they are happening in real-time, the answer to these questions��remains��open. Yet,��as the struggle continues,��the unmistakable scent of��hope is in the air, a more just future visible right��over the horizon.

I thank��Nisrin��Elamin,��Magdi��el��Gizouli, Elizabeth Shakman Hurd, Sean Jacobs, and Jeremy Walton��for their extremely helpful comments and suggestions on this essay; Amel Gorani and��Dalil��Muhammad��Dalil��for helping me work through the��kandaka��poem; Muhammad Khalifa��Siddiq and��Dalil��Muhammad��Dalil��for going above and beyond in sending me much of the material on which this essay is based; and Rachel Cruz for the internet sleuthing.

The question of our time

Ending the capitalist war against nature begins with eco-socialist perspectives and actions.





Climate change rally in Durban, South Africa. Image credit Ainhoa Goma for Oxfam via Flickr.

Securing a future and overcoming the eco-cidal��logic of capitalism lies in a democratic eco-socialist nation-building project. Such a project has to confront the climate crisis through deep just transitions, grounded in radical non-racialism, mass transformative politics and the reclamation of our sovereignty to sustain life.

The eco-cide��question is the question of our time, for present and future generations and for human and non-human life forms. We cannot sustain life on planet��Earth, including South Africa, with runaway global warming and worsening ecological crises. This is not about catastrophism, eco-fatalism or end-of-times millenarianism. The doomsday clock is ticking but there is still time to act. A fundamental shift in planetary consciousness is required to deal with and overcome the logic of capitalist eco-cide.��Global leadership in multilateral institutions and in national states are not up to this task. Actually they have failed. In this regard,��crucial political imperatives have to be advanced and realized, noting that these imperatives are emerging from grassroots mass movements, radical intellectuals, progressive think tanks and activists engaged with the challenge of sustaining life. These imperatives include the following:

Embracing the science of climate change and other ecological crises.��Scientific evidence produced by the UN, NASA and the World Meteorological Organization, geologists and Earth scientists are compelling in enabling us to understand the scale, pace and current and prospective impacts of the climate crisis. This has to be the basis for understanding the eco-cide��question and has to be made understandable to all in the public sphere.

Planetary eco-cide��is about understanding how ecological relations have been��racialized, classed, gendered and imbricated in various forms of oppressions. It has been central to supremacist whiteness and is about understanding the political economy of 500 years of destruction of human and non-human life in the making of capitalism���s eco-cidal��logic. Genocides, slavery, species extinction, colonialism, industrial-scale violence,��Apartheid��and human brutalization are central to this history of the origins and making of capitalism. These relations can no longer be reified and ignored as part of capitalism���s ���endless accumulation��� logic. Moreover, with climate change, there are and will be disproportionate impacts on workers, the poor, indigenous peoples, black lives, women peasant farmers and more generally the poorer and darker nations of the world. Capital���s eco-cidal��logic is deeply racist and anti-life, more generally. Confronting planetary eco-cide��is also about confronting supremacist whiteness and advancing decolonization as part of radical non-racialism.

Radical non-racialism has to be re-engaged��as the basis for renewing and building mass people���s power to confront capitalism���s eco-cidal��logic. This means the anti-capitalism, anti-racism and��anti-oppression thrusts of radical non-racialism have to be harnessed to unite social forces, build alliances (of workers, the landless, peasants, women���s organizations, the permanently unemployed, radical intellectuals, students and middle classes) and advance movements to sustain life. These movements are already on the march at the frontlines of confronting carbon��extractivism, land grabs, protecting the water, seed and forest commons, protesting against nuclear energy, fighting for decent work and more. Such movements are engaged in finding transformative and systemic alternatives to the contradictions of eco-cidal��capitalism in local, national, regional and global spheres. The imperative is to bring out the best of humanity, including human consciousness, solidarity and collective endeavor to scale up these alternatives and sustain life in South Africa and beyond.

Deep,��just transitions and democratic eco-socialisms are the horizons and visionary concepts of anti-eco-cide��politics. The system change logic of systemic alternatives, such as food sovereignty, the solidarity economy, climate jobs, indigenous knowledge systems, rights of nature, socially owned renewable energy, mass renewable energy public transport, zero waste, universal basic income grants, water��commoning, democratic planning and more, are about deep just transitions beyond capitalism, from within and outside���about harnessing deep democracy at the household, community, village, town, city and country level to constitute transformative power from below. At the same time, such deep democracy practices assist with reclaiming, re-embedding and transforming the state, so the people can govern. It is about affirming an eco-centric ethics in our relationship with human and non-human life, while meeting human needs. Simply, the democratic eco-socialism project is about ending the capitalist war with nature and affirming human life, black and white, as part of renewing nation building in South Africa.

Morning yet on another day of indaba

A response to Panashe Chigumadzi���s essay, ���Why I���m No Longer Talking To Nigerians About Race."





Wole Soyinka. Image via Wiki Commons.

Reading Panashe Chigumadzi���s ���Why I���m No Longer Talking To Nigerians About Race,��� published on Africa is a Country on April 7, 2019, was quite a trip. Halfway through the essay, I was certain that I would join issues with it. Bold, piquant, exacting, yet strangely endearing, the writing staked out a particular challenge to Nigerians who, it seems, have a reputation on social media for not fighting shy of hot-and-heavy gauntlets. Most people have opinions about Nigerians, who have opinions about nearly everything on earth and in outer space, so Chigumadzi���s pin-point digital pre-indaba was a lucky strike. It immediately elicited a flurry of tweets, replies, and counterreplies, most of them approving. Typically, the impulse-engineered attention did not last.

For me, though, two things stood out in that altogether necessary challenge, and they were obvious in the two tweets I sent in sharing the hot link. First, I felt that the claim that Nigerians lacked sufficient political solidarity with (southern) Africans on the basis of race was debatable (a good thing), and that, second, placing the writer Wo��l�������o��yi��nka�� as the exemplary figure of that national lack of empathy could use a more considered appreciation of the writer���s involvements as a political personality.

It is true that a couple of other Nigerians came up for sharp censure in the essay, but none had ���o��yi��nka�����s standing, or provided enough straw on which to hang the argument. The first issue was the authors��� main beef, and she marshaled many points, some relying on personal observations and others distilled from quite impressive reading. ���If it is true,��� she wrote, ���that we of African descent have grown up in different households, that shape our experiences of��the world differently, how do we respond to the pain and yearnings of our sisters?��� I imagined addressing this question with a combination of historical details and actual examples of Nigerians��� commitment to racial solidarity that Chigumadzi might have missed. Then, parenthetically, I would add a long paragraph to offer a complex picture of ���o��yi��nka�����s racial politics, in art and in life.

In the meantime, I hoped someone else, another Nigerian or anyone from anywhere informed about ���o��yi��nka�����s work, would pick this gauntlet ���

Reflecting further on the task, however, it seems to me that building an argument around ���o��yi��nka�����s politics in relation to the black world, and to southern Africa in particular, is the more productive way to address my two quibbles with the essay. It presents an opportunity to put on record information about African literary culture that is not well-known, much less treasured. The prevalent attitudes among African creative artists, especially those who are socialized in digital culture, do not seem to sufficiently encourage habits that make confident creatures of sensibilities���curiosity, criticism and the eschewal of easy answers. It is to the benefit of Chigumadzi���s readers that they are made aware of the political exactions of writers like ���o��yi��nka�� and others, whether or not such readers are inclined to take literature as vocation. Writers also make our history, after all, and they do so in ways that give us cause for hope, for the most part. And who knows but that refreshing relevant parts of this history can foster (actually rekindle!) the solidarity that the author felt to be lacking.

Writing with Attitude

Chigumadzi wrote that ���o��yi��nka�������had been so unimpressed and impatient with the Negritude movement spearheaded by the Francophone writers of African descent that he famously dismissed them at the 1962��African Writers��� Conference held at��Makerere��University, quipping:�����A tiger does not proclaim his��tigritude, he pounces.�����At a conference in Berlin two years later,�����o��yi��nka����elaborated this:�����a tiger does not stand in the forest and say:�����I am a tiger.�����When you pass where the tiger has walked before, you see the skeleton of the duiker, you know that some��tigritude��has been emanated there.������ She added, subsequently, that ������o��yi��nka����was [not] the only one to critique��the Negritude movement. It was just that he was the loudest, and perhaps the most flippant, in his response.���

With the right context, ���o��yi��nka�����s attitude toward Negritude and toward racial politics in Africa and the world appears as two different, clearly justified, things. Yes, a lot has been written about that ���tigritude��� statement, and Chigumadzi���s summary was largely accurate. However, her interpretation of that statement as a ���flippant��� dismissal of Negritude, and thus of racial solidarity, was mistaken.

What ���o��yi��nka�� intended with the statement in Kampala was clear, and as soon as an opportunity for clarification appeared, (during the Berlin conference mentioned in Chigumadzi���s essay), he seized it: ���To quote what I said fully, I said ���A tiger does not proclaim his tigritude, he pounces ��� The distinction which I was making at this conference (in Kampala, Uganda, 1962) was purely a literary one: I was trying to distinguish between propaganda and true poetic creativity. I was saying in other words that what one expected from poetry was an intrinsic poetic quality, not a mere name-dropping.���

In an unpublished text tracing the history of the tigritude jive, the critic James Gibbs has observed that both the initial statement in Kampala and the clarification in Berlin ���did not come out of the blue. ���o��yi��nka�� had toyed with similar ideas and kindred images before. In ���The Future of West African Writing��� published in The Horn [a magazine at the University of Ibadan], he wrote: ���The duiker does not paint ���duiker��� on his beautiful back to proclaim his duikeritude���. [Y]ou���ll know him by his elegant leap.������ That essay came out in June 1960, two clear years before the Kampala meeting.

���o��yi��nka�� clearly wanted to take a stand. Here was a young writer taking it to the elders, Leopold Senghor and Aim�� C��saire in the main, eager to clear for himself a space from which to speak as an artist with his own mind. And he was hardly the only one. Kampala also provided the stage for the late Christopher Okigbo���s unforgettable declaration that he wrote his poetry only for poets. Such statements are prone to quotations, misquotations, paraphrases and outright decontextualization. These are understandable reactions; they come with the territory, and ���o��yi��nka�� must have issued enough rebuttals to bore himself to exasperated silence, the fate of the verbal magician trying to control the motions of a genie he���d not expected to grow legs as it slid out of the bottle. But silence is not his inclination. On the contrary, he is likelier to downplay his exactions.�� At another conference in Sweden in 1967, ���o��yi��nka�����s self-ironizing remarks about ���writers holding up radio stations��� elicited criticisms from Ngugi wa Thiong���o and Dennis Brutus, neither of whom was aware that the speaker had recently suffered detention and trial in Nigeria for such daring.

Readers of Myth, Literature and the African World might recall that ���o��yi��nka�� actually turned to endorsing certain of the principles of Negritude in the following decades, and he is known to have declared that Abibiman, the world of black peoples, was his primary sphere of artistic and political interest. As a work of intellectual accounting, that monograph offered much that ���o��yi��nka�� needed to put before the world concerning his views of the continent���s cultural unity, agreeing with the likes of Cheik Anta Diop and Chancellor Williams where evidence required it, and parting ways with them where necessary. No one who has carefully read the final chapter, ���Ideology and the Social Vision,��� can pretend to any doubts about where the writer stood on the issues. Ironically, in that book he made such a strong case against racist denigration of African experiences that, in mistaken appraisal of his premise, critics like Kwame Appiah took him to task for daring to speak of an African world!

Claims of a lack of racial solidarity are hardly tenable, then, in so far as ���o��yi��nka�� is concerned. In his work and activism, he has one of the strongest records among black writers of the modern era in taking on the racial question. As the Nigerian poet, Peter Akinlabi tweeted in response to AIAC���s post of Chigumadzi���s essay, The Invention, one of ���o��yi��nka�����s earliest plays written while he was still a student at Leeds University, was his first foray into the political and human costs of apartheid in South Africa. Around this time, he also joined a cadet corps in Leeds in preparation for a planned invasion of the apartheid enclave, and had close contacts with South African exiles in London (Gibbs, pers. comm.).

His collection of poems, Ogun Abibiman, is a creative deployment of the martial ethos of the deity Ogun in confronting racial subjection on the continent. It made its way into the world in the context of the military alliance against apartheid, spearheaded by the late Samora Machel, the founding president of Mozambique, and was subtitled ���an epic poem dedicated to the Fallen of Soweto.��� In 1975, with fellow writers Kofi Awonoor and Brutus, he founded the Union of Writers of the African Peoples, UWAP, and used that platform for his literary and political activities for several years. (In Los Angeles in the late 1990s, I hung out with the South African poet, Keorapetse Kgotsitsile (���Bra Willie���), whom Chigumadzi quoted in her essay. He spoke often and lovingly about the letters ���o��yi��nka�� wrote to him inquiring of the activities of South African exiles across the world, and of ways to be of help. Later, in the company of another South African, the writer and political activist Nomboniso Gasa, I tried to tease out further information from ���o��yi��nka�� about that episode, but he demurred, obviously unwilling to overemphasize his roles. At any rate, there are other records of this kind of commitment, including an important disclosure by Ngugi in Detained, his prison memoirs.)

Nigerians Making African History

All of this might come across as so much background information concerning an issue that Chigumadzi proffered only as an example of a contemporary trend among Nigerians who show scant attention to the racial complexities that black people in and outside the continent have to deal with. But it is necessary to know these things to better understand why some or even most Nigerians do not relate to racism the way a South African or a Namibian might do. Against the background of ���o��yi��nka�����s exemplary championing of the cause of black people everywhere (and he was not the only one to do this even in Nigeria), Nigeria���s own efforts in the political arena appear exceptional but evolving, and the reasons for the trend that Chigumadzi attacked are easier to appreciate.

Historians, anthropologists, literary critics and economic historians have pointed to the roles that different colonial models in west and southern Africa played in fostering ambiguous attitudes toward race or racial issues in the post-independence era. Wild conquest (to use the title of Peter Abrahams��� novel) of broad swathes of eastern and southern African societies brought about material dispossession of land and customary property in Rhodesia in a manner that could not be achieved in, say, Nigeria. Additional environmental factors such as climate and vegetation prevented the establishment of settler colonialism in West Africa, and the creation of apartheid as state policy in South Africa was the culmination of European racist ideologies for which the age of capital was suitable, give or take a few accidents of geography. But as Chigumadzi observed, the fact that Nigerians did not live in a country where racism was state policy does not mean that they cannot relate to the experience of those who did, and still do. That is empathy, a sentiment that humans are expected to extend to others.

She also does the important, detailed job of documenting Nigeria���s role in supporting anti-apartheid movements, groups, and initiatives during the long, dark night of that racist madness. Nigerian school children of my generation not only made monetary contributions to anti-apartheid relief funds, we were also taught something unforgettable: the left-hand corner of the blackboard in classrooms in Western Nigeria remained sacrosanct with the declaration: ���Apartheid is a crime against humanity.��� This message should not be wiped off the blackboard, under any circumstance. As recently as 2002, there were schools in Ibadan where the legend still spoke clearly, white chalk on a black background.�� In all likelihood, former pupils who took this message to heart also paid the ultimate price during the xenophobic violence exploding across South African cities in 2008, and reigniting periodically. What Nigerians viewed as a national duty with respect to the struggles against apartheid also existed in their music, from reggae, pop, to fuji, best exemplified in the career of the late Sonny Okosuns. This duty doubled in importance for the so-called ���frontline states��� in the mid-1970s, including Angola, Rhodesia (Zimbabwe), Mozambique, and Namibia. Support for liberation movements in the region became the centerpiece of Nigeria���s foreign policy, starting with the formal recognition and declaration of support for the MPLA, the anti-colonial party in Angola.

While different high-level political maneuverings shaped that diplomatic outcome, it is important to add that UWAP, the writers group coordinated by ���o��yi��nka��, played a major role in making the support for Angola count as more than a choice by the Nigerian government. At a symposium organized by President Senghor of Senegal, in 1976, all the writers and scholars, including the Trinidadian political thinker C. L. R. James, who gathered in the National Assembly in Dakar used the occasion of a plenary session to vote���unanimously���in support of the MPLA. ���o��yi��nka�� and Senghor had since mended fences over the ���tigritude��� diss, assuming any were considered broken, but he made UWAP stand on principle while Senghor, the generous host, had stated his preference for MPLA���s rivals.

To understand the evolving history of this political solidarity, readers need to appreciate the progressive character of the political society in Nigeria, a character that does not always coincide with the forms and practices of the Nigerian state or the habits of its citizens, whether highly placed or not. This means that the principal impulse in the nation that Nigerians worked to build, even long before they came to be identified as Nigerians, was for the betterment of human values, and that a primary identity as Africans was fundamental to stabilizing this impulse. There is no space here to explain these claims in detail, or discuss how this progressive politics developed. It should suffice to note, however, that Nigeria came into existence as a modern, black, African nation at a time when the intellectual values of the black world were coming together, from such unusual places as the writings and activities of Edward Blyden, James Johnson, and other forerunners of the nationalists of the 1920s and the 1930s, as well as the contradictions built into the economic antics of Pax Britannica.

At some point in her essay, Chigumadzi quotes Kwame Appiah to the effect that what ���race meant to the�����New Africans��������the generation of African intellectuals of the 1960s educated in the West such as��Jomo��Kenyatta, Kwame Nkrumah, Kenneth Kaunda and Julius��Nyerere����� was different to what race meant to�����educated blacks in the New World�����such as African-American, Afro-Caribbean and Black British people.���

Appiah arrived at this conclusion only in analysis, and a partial one at that. In practice, generations of political activists before ���o��yi��nka�� such as Hezekiah Davies, Nnamdi Azikiwe, Margaret Ekpo, Fu��nmila��y����� Ransome-Ku��ti��, and Nkrumah posed the question of anti-colonialism as Africans partly due to their experience of living and studying in the US and England, and partly because even in countries without policies of racial segregation, colonial prejudice often manifested itself in terms of racial hierarchies. Whites got paid more than their African counterparts who held the same or more demanding jobs, and Africans were unable to rise in the professions unless they obtained expensive degrees that were not available in the colonies. What these political figures did when or if they got into power might run counter to those principles, but it would be ahistorical to ignore the situations which shaped their radical politics and the courage with which they responded to those situations.

���At the End of the Small Hours������

This history does not always inform the way that contemporary Nigerians relate to issues of racism on the continent and in the world at large. The fact is that between the Pan-Africanist origins of modern Nigerian nationalism and the radical overtures to political struggles in southern Africa, a great variety of symptoms appeared in the body politic that entrenched bourgeois liberalism as the default social mode in the population���s self-apprehension, even though the political outlook could still remain largely progressive. Among these symptoms was the fact that the party which came to power after the 1959 elections intensely distrusted radical politics, and exacted heavy penalties from those who professed even a mild form of it within three years of self-government. Moreover, and perhaps as a consequence of the first symptom. a combination of ethnic, religious, class and linguistic differences catalyzed a climate of opportunism that made a fair game of needs considered extraneous in political terms. As examples of Pan-African solidarity, the support for the frontline states in 1975 and the establishment of the Technical Aids Corps (through which Nigerian professional expertise was distributed to African, Caribbean and Pacific countries) both occurred, irony of ironies, under military regimes.

Much later in the essay, Chigumadzi posed another question: ���Why are so��many of these [Nigerian] writers seemingly so apolitical around race politics and deliberately refuse to understand these basic ethics of solidarity and instead bask in the glory of individuated reward of model minority?��� The question became necessary because of the ���blame-the-victim��� standpoint of a Nigerian entrepreneur like Chika Onyeani, author of a bestselling book in South Africa (Capitalist Nigger), and other newly emergent writers. This question may be related to the main one about lack of empathy, but it is in fact different. It speaks to a particular condition among colonial and postcolonial intellectuals, especially those of African descent everywhere. It is informed, I think, by the opportunisms that go with pursuing an artistic/intellectual career in a world that is run by mostly white capitalists and that rewards those who are unwilling to ask difficult questions about economic and social injustices, or prefer to ask them only of Africans, the way an Onyeani would. It is a form of power grab; the Indian writer Arundhati Roy addresses an aspect of it in her book, Capitalism: A Ghost Story. Whether things would change if that world were to be run by black or brown capitalists is an open question, but we have provisional answers from the way the affairs of Nigeria and South Africa have been managed in the last two decades. Neither country, as far as I can see, places any real worth on the lives of its citizens.�� Chigumadzi shows a keen awareness of this problem when she writes of ���white racial capitalism and��coloniality��which is sophisticated enough not to need the presence of white bodies to function.��� We can be mindful of the records of British colonialism in Nigeria without thinking to hold Theresa May accountable for the genocidal level of poverty in Nigeria today.

The two questions are ever necessary, and we should be grateful to Chigumadzi for the courage and imagination to raise them. She speaks in a register that is familiar to those who are inclined to form their opinions through soundbites and short reads. Praises on social media of the brilliance of her analyses arrived in lockstep with complaints about the length of the essay. (There are other waters that the essay could have troubled. For example, do contemporary Ghanaians practice a better form of racial solidarity than Nigerians? When prominent politicians such as Ignatius Kutu Acheampong (Ghana), Frederick Chiluba (Zambia) and Alassane Ouattara (Ivory Coast) became victims of the nationality test, any surprises that Zimbabweans living bare lives in South Africa, or Nigerians in Libya, should suffer the fate of blacks in segregation-era Mississippi? But we can hope that such impressions are not lost on informed readers of the essay.) The passion with which Chigumadzi has connected a variety of global-black experiences, through literary and musical references, points to an intellectual sensibility that those interested in their place in the world would do well to cultivate. Chinua Achebe is right: to partisans of African occasions, it is morning yet on creation day.

I suspect that the title of the essay is used tongue-in-cheek. Even with the disposition toward ���stanning��� ���famzing��� and surface ���bants��� among folks on social media there are many people who may be prepared to work their way to genuine awareness if provided with information. This is a responsibility that falls to artists and writers, and they should do it wherever and whenever possible, in spite of the tendency among people on social media to take offense when corrected on points of fact, style or logic. Once at the University of Ibadan, I listened with horror as a student responded to a lecture by a visiting African American professor by dismissing him as a ���Negro���, not an African! The professor didn���t expect this, in Ibadan of all places, and so did not know how to respond. I issued a quick rejoinder, and after the lecture the person who���d made the offensive comment came up to me to apologize which, I sensed, was genuine.

These attitudes always have to be cultivated, lifelong, vigilant, unapologetic. Like Lewis Nkosi, Maryse Conde, Mongo Beti and Bessie Head, ���o��yi��nka�� appeared early to observers as an unusually gifted writer who displayed these qualities, but always in the guise of a citizen, and of a country that only happened to be Nigeria. A wonderful accident of birth, the gift of history as citizen of two countries scarred by racism, we hope, makes Chigumadzi another exemplary figure. Her essay is a strong sign of that irrevocable commitment to asking difficult questions, without which silence might be taken, falsely, scandalously again, as the response of sentient black people to the manifold conundrums of the world.

I am grateful to Martin Banham and James Gibbs for their assistance with references and clarifications that were useful in writing this essay.

Nollywood Tackles #MeToo

Director Dare Olaitan���s Knock Out Blessing (2018), is nothing less than a meditation on rape culture.





Ade Laoye plays Blessing in Knockout Blessing. Image credit the Film.

In an early sequence in��Knock Out Blessing���an immensely entertaining blend of action, comedy, and political critique���an inexperienced sex worker, Oby (Linda Ejiofor), bites a client after he refuses to use a condom and tries to take her by force. Her procurer, Madam Tina (Mary Kowo), is, however, characteristically unconcerned about Oby���s wellbeing; this madam cares only about money���about the client���s refusal to pay. In a nod to Zeb Ejiro���s Nollywood classic Domitilla: The Story of a Prostitute (1996), Olaitan shows a group of young sex workers sharing an apartment, their living quarters cramped but suffused by the high spirits that they maintain despite the oppressive, often punitive attentions of Madam Tina. In a subsequent scene, the put-upon Oby is forced to perform sexual favors at gunpoint, in an SUV full of various other weapons.

Enter Blessing (Ade Laoye): clad in shorts and a sleeveless T-shirt that shows off her muscular arms, the butch Blessing hears Oby���s screams and hastens to rescue this victim of sexual assault. The aptly named Blessing, with her impressive biceps, is thus introduced as a savior���a protector and avenger of victimized women. The film that bears her name is pervaded by cruel capitalist demands. ���When did prostitutes start having a closing time?��� asks a disgruntled man after a sex worker, Hannah (Meg Otanwa), tells him that she���s ���off the clock.�����Blessing��knocks him��out��when he gets rough with Hannah; the two women steal his car and drive to Hannah���s sister���s house. Married and militantly Christian, the sister doesn���t want them there���Hannah is, after all, a prostitute, her troubles the result (or so the sister self-righteously believes) of her having failed to find a husband. So the escapees flee to Hannah���s friend Dagogo (Bucci Franklin), a smuggler, who has carts upon carts of (stolen) Coca-Cola bottles in his office.��

Knock Out Blessing is set during election season, and Dagogo convinces the girls to rob those running for office���men who, while on the campaign trail, troll the streets for prostitutes. The plan works: Oby lures these politicians to her hotel room,��where the buff Blessing��materializes to knock them out. The women then take money, watches, and other items from these unconscious bodies���a grift that is at once a response to the sexual entitlement of ���big men��� and a means of obtaining what these political figures, with all their talk of ���giving back��� to local communities, actually owe their constituents.

Oby, Hannah, and Blessing do not, however, plan to rob politicians for the rest of their lives. Yet (in an amusing nod to the Hollywood crime films that partly inspired Olaitan, including The Godfather Part III), just as they are about to quit, Dagogo convinces them to pull off ���one last job������the most difficult and dangerous grift yet, but the one that stands to be by far the most profitable. (���After that, it���s America!��� Dagogo declares, invoking his earlier promise to turn the three women into wealthy expatriates.) This ���last job��� is a heist with unexpected political consequences, becoming a matter of national security: the women unwittingly gain possession of a drive containing footage of the (fictional) Nigerian president, Doherty (Kayode Freeman), visiting a native doctor (played by Charles Etubeibi), who forces the leader to fuck a goat in order to secure reelection. The president is thus caught on camera in a compromising position���with a goat! When an intrepid TV reporter gets her hands on the footage, she promptly uploads it and broadcasts it live.

Olaitan deftly interweaves overheard voices���an audio montage of television watchers responding to the broadcast. Some think it���s a hoax perpetrated by the president���s political enemies; others are concerned about the moral implications of the broadcast itself (one woman is heard saying, ���How dare you broadcast such a thing when children are watching? Don���t you understand that you are hurting these children���s minds?���); ���I thought it was a Nollywood movie,��� says one man; ���Haven���t you heard of Photoshop?��� asks another, questioning the footage���s legitimacy. This cacophony of contradictory reception practices holds considerable thematic weight: what begins as an apparent expression of faith in broadcast television���s capacity to effect political change���to provide a whistle-blowing function, to hold power to account���evolves into something far more cynical, as countless viewers question what they have seen, refusing to invest in the indexical promise of mediated images, skeptical of new technologies of recording, post-production, and playback, and all too aware of various high-profile hoaxes. (Others, such as the concerned parent, simply prefer to moralize by way of punishing the messenger.)

Like Olaitan���s previous film, the remarkable Ojukokoro (2016), Knock Out Blessing is a non-linear narrative, fractured in the manner of Pulp Fiction, one of the director���s touchstones. A segment of the film, entitled ���Blessing���s Story,��� tackles the titular character���s complex backstory. Blessing���s parents, it turns out, are entirely��out��of the picture; she doesn���t even know where they are. Luckily, she���s taken care of by her baba (or grandfather, played by Gbenga Titiloye), a former boxer who teaches her how to punch. (He even shows her grainy black-and-white footage of his old fights, offering an instructive play-by-play.) Blessing���s schoolmates often bully her; one accuses��her of being ���half boy, half girl���; another simply calls her ugly.��

Blessing��is almost raped by Akin (Abayomi Alvin), who bullies her mercilessly when surrounded by his rowdy friends but who, when alone with her, showers her with compliments. Blessing,��fighting back and escaping Akin���s sexual advances, eventually runs away. Her grandfather warns her, ���If you run away from men like that, they will just do it to somebody else. You have to teach them a lesson.��� But Blessing, having learned from the best, understands that her punch is potentially deadly. Nevertheless, her baba gives her permission to use it on Akin. Later, when the mercurial Akin pulls a knife on her, she evades the blade and punches him. Akin ends up in a coma, from which he does not recover; he eventually dies, and a vengeful gang murders baba, who has hidden Blessing. Before dying, the old man tells her to visit his former boxing partner, Abdul, for help getting her to the major boxing tournament for which Blessing has tirelessly trained. Fleeing the murderous mob, she arrives at Abdul���s address only to learn that he died earlier in the year. What follows is an odyssey of streetwalking���an homage of sorts to Old Nollywood���s penchant for depicting characters who pound the pavement in search of work, as in a famous long take in Chico Ejiro���s Shame (1996). Eventually, Blessing finds an unlocked car in which to sleep for the night, and it is at this point that she hears Oby���s screams���the very screams that open the film.

Knock Out Blessing represents a major leap forward for the talented director of Ojukokoro. There are marvelous comic touches: the man whose car the women steal���a self-styled ���big man������can���t handle the fact that he was knocked out by a ���mere��� girl, and comes comically apart. His wife, breathless, shows up at the police station, assuming that her husband has been beaten by men; when she learns that he was, in fact, the victim of ���a gang of women,��� she manages to read between the lines: she knows he���s been looking for prostitutes again.

Knock Out Blessing is also a visual marvel, boasting breathtaking cinematography by KC Obiajulu. Particularly impressive are the shots of Blessing in training, punching a bag under the bridge at Abeokuta, and the gorgeous panoramic shots of Owu Village. Seun Opabisi���s editing deftly intersperses past and present, culminating in a nail-biting climax that vividly demonstrates that Dare Olaitan remains a master of the cliffhanger ending.

Knock Out Blessing��screens at the prestigious film festival NollywoodWeek Paris on Saturday, May 11.

The revolution in Darfur

Achieving a lasting peace in Sudan's Darfur region, which especially suffered regime violence leaving 300,000 people dead and millions displaced, should be a priority for reform politics in the country.





Zam Zam camp for Internally Displaced People (IDP), North Darfur. Image credit Albert Gonzalez Farran for UNAMID via Flickr (CC).

Writing about the public���s potential to form uncontrollable,��non-heirarchal��resistance methods, the post-Marxist philosophers Antonio��Negri��and Michael��Hardt, compared the victorious multitude to an omnipotent demon. In��the��ongoing��mass protests in Sudan, which has already resulted in the fall of General Omar al-Bashir���s 30-year regime, digital democracy, as deployed through the medium of social media,��was key to the people���s victory. These new methods and mediums, mostly youth-centered, proved unique in their ability to attack and expose the core of the rotten political system in ways that traditional civil society and oppositional parties couldn���t, revealing the system���s weaknesses and stripping it of its proclaimed legitimacy.

Nevertheless, in-between fears of the old regime���s survival and aspirations to build a new political system, the challenges of achieving lasting peace in Darfur, a region in western Sudan, are��key. For almost two decades Darfur bore the brunt of the regime���s imbalanced policies culminating in 300,000 deaths and the displacement of millions facilitated still by chaotic tribalism and civil strife. Given this history, the prioritization of the region when constructing a new political system,��is a must.

While the region���s civil war heritage looms large, a genuine transition is confronted with the constraints of��dealing with the past. The regime���s divide and rule policy had demarcated society into Arab and African in a racially charged political discourse. This, in turn facilitated the replacement of a national identity with an ethnic one, which wouldn���t have been possible without employing the violent machinery of the state.

To make matters worse, historically, political transitions in the center have always reflected negatively on Darfur. The political elite, competing to win constituencies, do so through the polarization of tribes for political gain. Far from being an invention of Bashir���s National Congress Party (NCP), military and civil governments alike exploited the ethnicity factor for mass mobilization, one where political interests are expressed through socio-political conglomerates.

The fact that changes in central state authority affects stability in the peripheries is evident when one examines the political developments after the 1985 revolution. Darfur entered a four-year civil war where geo-strategic and ecological factors fueled further competition between political rivalries. These ended up being fought within and outside its borders. This trend continued when in 1989, after Bashir’s coup d�����tat toppled an elected civilian government, Darfur once again was invoked as one of the regime���s “salvation” objectives: ending the region���s tribal conflict. The mobilization of local leadership for reconciliation was nothing short of a ruse orchestrated to court wide sectors of society into political buy-in.

The aftermath of the NCP���s internal rift���the single most important development in the political theatre of post 1990s Sudan���further affected the region���s dynamics. The Darfuri Islamists, the region���s latest political elite and its front-liners who were expelled from party and governance, waged a rebellion against the central state they helped secure a decade earlier by acting as the first line of defense in the South Sudan war. A sense of lost confidence in access to authority and equal representation prompted them to adopt a marginalization line, its principles have since formulated the political vision upon which the resistance discourse against a dominant riverine elite holds sway. Thus, the roots of disunity between the North and West, mobilized through elite squabbles over state authority, were depicted as a war of racial supremacy where the state coaxed the Arab element against its African counterpart. The ensuing atrocities, nothing short of ethnic cleansing, placed Darfur on the international crisis map.

The realities of Darfur provide��for��an ideal situation to��test the application of development theories but only��if genuine political will is present.��It can be assumed that the country is being reconstituted from scratch following the dissolvent of its��utilitarian��mainstays: the��state and civil institutions, as well as the��military��whose loss of��monopoly over��violence��enabled��a popular push for change. The��three pillars that constitute the��functional modern state��and the elements of its previous dominance; the military, the bureaucracy and the political parties in their traditional sense,��have��all��been dismantled.

In response to the challenges faced in resolving the root causes of conflicts and in an effort to reconstruct the region���s social fabric, a new political theory modeled around similar African experiences that draw inspiration from truth and reconciliation commissions (the most prominent example being South Africa after Apartheid) should be explored. At this juncture, there is a present risk that the State will continue to be used as a tool to fuel social conflict unless the political discourse is redefined in the minds of the elite from a value of “stake in power and wealth” to a science of development that builds on local experiences of the relationship between identity and resource conflict. Political transition in Sudan requires nothing short of a paradigm shift that places civil society in a central peacebuilding and developmental role.