Sean Jacobs's Blog, page 236
December 19, 2018
Why western donors love authoritarian leaders
Abiy Ahmed Ali. Image credit Odaw via Wikimedia Commons.
���Rwanda has turned out to be an incredible partner,��� the philanthropist Howard Buffett��said��at a World Economic Forum event in Kigali in 2016. ���When we show up in this country, we know that we can do what we need to do, we know we can meet with who we need to meet with.�����For a generation, British Prime Minister Theresa May��said��in August, her fellow citizens only thought of famine when they thought of Ethiopia. But now the country ���is fast becoming an��industrialised��nation, creating a huge number of jobs and establishing itself as a global destination for investment.���
Western governments and philanthropists have matched their rhetoric with money. In recent years, Rwanda and Ethiopia have been some of the largest recipients of aid money from the UK and US governments, as well as some of the West���s leading philanthropies, including the Gates Foundation. To justify these lavish contributions, Western leaders have repeated versions of a story, that regimes in these countries are undergoing a state of transition, and that democratic governance will have to wait until it develops some more. But where does this story come from?
To state the obvious, Western governments have often contradicted their officially pro-democracy positions to back authoritarian regimes they considered useful. At the end of the colonial era, and the start of the Cold War, European and American leaders invoked a fear���real or imagined���of a world succumbing to communism to explain why they occasionally needed to cast aside principles in the realm of foreign policy. Democracy was nice, even ideal, but only if the ���right conditions��� were met, and the chosen leaders were inclined to uphold the Western-led international order. In the meantime, allied strong-men were a more than adequate substitute.
But as the Cold War gave way to a world where commerce was the organizing principle of the day, Western governments justified their alliances with authoritarians with new stories. To understand where those stories came from, it helps to look at China. As the journalist James Mann details in his 2007 book,��The China Fantasy, under President Nixon, US leaders accepted China as a ���card��� to play against the Soviet Union, and gradually relaxed trade barriers to bring it more closely to the West. With the end of the Cold War, however, US leaders were wondering aloud if it was worth maintaining the special arrangement any longer.
In 1991, Bill Clinton ran for president arguing that any trade agreement with China had to be tied to ���specific, tangible improvements in human rights,��� in Mann���s words. The position was popular with voters, many of whom had��watched��Chinese troops murder the pro-democracy demonstrators of Tiananmen Square on TV a few years earlier. But as president, Clinton had to contend with American business leaders who saw his emphasis on human rights as a hindrance to their investments in a country that was just beginning a period of rapid growth.
In 1994, Clinton dropped the demand for tangible improvements from his trade proposal, replacing it with a package of human rights and pro-democracy gestures, like asking American businesses to draft codes of conduct before investing in China. To the surprise of almost no one, what Clinton called a ���new human rights strategy��� achieved nothing. But even a predictable failure needed a cover story. Near the end of his first term, Clinton adjusted his stance once more. Instead of combining free trade with some pro-democracy gestures, the US would merely allow free trade. Trade, and the growing economy that resulted, Clinton said, would��force��democratic change in China– somehow, someday, inevitably. Since political freedom would be a natural outcome of free trade, there was no reason to compel China to reform itself. Politics couldn���t shape China���s economy, in this telling. Its politics would be shaped by its economy.
Clinton���s story was irrational, a neoliberal myth that made a bald effort to give American companies an advantage abroad sound intellectually sophisticated and morally upright. But Clinton held to it through the end of his presidency. Campaigning for China to join the World Trade Organization, Clinton said membership was ���likely to have a profound impact on human rights and political liberty.���
It did not. Since 2000, the Chinese government has not only become��more��authoritarian, it has become a model for authoritarian regimes around the world. And yet, the notion that free trade makes people free persists, not just in the global elite���s comments on China, but, more recently, in their comments on African regimes which aspire to fit the Chinese mold.
In an��interview��this November with��Ezra Klein,��of explainer site Vox,��Bill Gates made a robust defense of authoritarian regimes in Africa. People intent on helping the world���s poor could not afford to work exclusively with democratic countries. ���If you wait, usually you only get really good governance once a country is middle-income,��� he said. And besides, there was no need to wait. As examples, he cited his two favorite countries in Africa. ���When you have a leader like [Paul] Kagame in Rwanda who appoints good people and really cares about these results, it���s a fantastic thing,��� he said. ���Neither Ethiopia [nor] Rwanda checks every box of excellent government. It���s likely that those countries,��until they get to middle-income status, won���t have all those characteristics.���
When Klein pressed Gates on the governance issue, Gates was more blunt. ���It���s important to separate out the economic model of development from that political model,��� he said. The most important changes governments can make were to adopt ���market-based pricing��� and ���invest��� in citizens by bolstering sectors like health and education, he added. Any government could make these changes, even an authoritarian one.
Just like Clinton a generation before, Gates is telling a story about the nature of a nation���s economy.��An economy, he says,��is shaped not by politics, but by policy.��Politics is complicated, but policy is simple: either it���s good (market-based), or bad (something else). The economy���s possibilities are accordingly easy to comprehend as well: either it grows because of good policy, or it doesn���t grow, for the opposite reason. With a robust economy, the many wants of a people���even freedom itself���are possible. Without it, very little is.
But Gates��� telling also represents an evolution from Clinton���s original fable. Not only might economic growth lead to greater freedom,��he says,��authoritarian regimes could��even be good for their nation���s economies���better, even, than democratic ones.
���There���s never been as strong a coupling between economic growth and democratic freedoms as we���d all like,��� Gates said later, this time with a new example to make his point. ���China grew dramatically faster than India did.��� (India is a democracy.) ���Now, India���s a very good story��� But it���s not even close to what happened in China��� The human freedom argument is going to have to be made on its own.���
Elsewhere in that interview, Gates ponders whether China,��having��now achieved middle-income status, will become more democratic. ���Will their political model progress or not?��� he asks rhetorically. ���That���s a valid question.”
The economy comes first, though in Gates��� telling of the story, democracy is no longer inevitable.
Fortunately for their Western supporters, leaders in these countries are willing to maintain the democratic ritual. In August 2017, Kagame won a third term as president of Rwanda, in an election that observers from the East African Community��called�����really successful��� and generally in line with international standards.
And yet there were numerous reasons to be suspicious. To begin with, Kagame won with 99 percent of the vote. Three opposing candidates had been disqualified before the election. When Frank��Habineza, one of the two candidates allowed on the ballot, held rallies in the northern districts of Rwanda, Human Rights Watch reported that Kagame���s security forces went house-to-house intimidating voters into staying at home.
With the election over, Kagame has resumed his position on the world stage. Earlier this month, Kagame was��rallying��a crowd at the Global Citizen Festival in Johannesburg, a fundraiser for aid organizations on the occasion of Nelson Mandela���s 100th birthday. Kagame���s security forces have been caught��assassinating Rwandan dissidents��in South Africa since Kagame���s rise to power, but nothing so controversial came up in the president���s address.
���Tonight, I join you to pay tribute to Nelson Mandela,��� he said to cheers. ���He never gave up on Africa. He believed African children can achieve anything. It���s in our responsibility to continue building on Mandela���s legacy.���
December 18, 2018
The battles over land in Namibia
Image credit Thomas Becker via Flickr.
Thirty��years of German settler colonialism in South West Africa (1884 to 1914) paved the way for continued white minority rule under South African control. The primary resistance against the foreign invasion triggered��the first genocide of the 20th��century among the��Ovaherero, Nama and other groups. As main occupants of the eastern, central and southern regions of the country, they were forced from their land into so-called native reserves.
Since then, the land (dis-)possession continued. The South African Apartheid regime���s administration provided Afrikaans-speaking poor whites a new existence as farmers in the occupied so-called fifth province. Land appropriations and resettlements took place until the 1960s also as part of the Bantustan policy, which was transplanted under��the so-called Odendaal Plan.
The limits to liberation
Independence did not bring any decisive changes to the skewed patterns of colonial land distribution created. The negotiated transition to sovereignty in 1990��entrenched the structural discrepancies. In turn for occupying the political commanding heights of the state, the national liberation movement-turned-state��SWAPO accepted the material inequalities existing without any major debate. Rather, controlled change��resulted in changed control.
Essential clauses seeking to maintain the economic status quo��in Namibia���s Constitution��were drafted already in the early 1980s as an integral part and precondition by a Western Contact Group, representing three of the five permanent members of the UN Security Council,��initiating a��negotiated decolonization. It was up to SWAPO to propose the adoption of these constitutional principles in the Constitutional Assembly as the final step towards sovereignty. Articles 5 to 25 in chapter 3 (���Fundamental Human Rights and Freedoms���), cannot be changed. As stated in article 25(1): ���Parliament or any subordinate legislative authority shall not make any law, and the Executive and the agencies of Government shall not take any action which abolishes or abridges the fundamental rights and freedoms conferred by this chapter.�����Next to civil and political rights, article 16 includes the freedom and protection of property:
All persons shall have the right in any part of Namibia to acquire, own and dispose of all forms of immovable and movable property individually or in association with others and to bequeath their property to their heirs or legatees: provided that Parliament may be legislation prohibit or regulate as it deems expedient the right to acquire property by persons who are not Namibian citizens.
The State or a competent body or organ authorised by law may expropriate property in the public interest subject to the payment of just compensation, in accordance with requirements and procedures��to be determined by Act of Parliament.
As a consequence, existing socio-economic inequalities were officially recognized. Private owned freehold land, amounting to 48% of the territory, remained in the hands of less than 5,000 mainly white farmers, while over 70% of the population nowadays close to 2.5 million Namibians remained directly or indirectly dependent upon the 35% communal land (the remaining 17% are state owned and to a large extent nature reserves). As recently��summarized: ���The pattern of land distribution and ownership reflects class inequality and perpetuates racial inequalities.���
The first land conference���promises undelivered
Since independence, the question of land���not surprisingly���remained a hotly contested issue. Already in 1991,��a major National Land Reform Conference��took place. It��recommended:
redistribution of commercial farmland, mainly on the basis of willing seller-willing buyer, with��government having preferential rights to purchase farmland for resettlement purposes;
introduction of a land tax;
reallocation of underutilised land;
limits to the size and number of farms of private owned land;
elimination of foreign owned land and absentee landlordism.
In the communal areas (the former reserves), situated mainly in the Northern regions and offering the minimum rainfall to cultivate the land, ���the landless and those without adequate land for subsistence��� should be given priority. Disadvantaged communities (in particular the San) ���should receive special protection of their land rights.��� However,�����given the complexities in redressing ancestral land claims, restitution in full is impossible.���
As a result, meaningful restitution was not implemented at all. As early as the mid-1990s, disappointed��locals already held the view that the land reform had been completed. After all, almost every member of cabinet had by then acquired a private farm with state support under preferential conditions. For many, this also explained why the land tax remained��a “work��in progress” for decades to come instead of being implemented as a means to enhance rural transformation.
While the most marginalized battling for survival in the communal areas were supposed to be protected, their de facto expropriation became in parallel the order of the day. Local headmen and chiefs in cahoots with the new political and administrative elite transferred the exclusive individual right of utilization of land and resources to the latter in the higher echelons of state power. This often included their access to and control over water and boreholes (at times state-financed as drought-relief measures). By illegally fencing the allocated land, the beneficiaries de facto privatized the prey as personal property as��a form of elite land grabbing.
Failed resettlement policies
Despite the declared policy and the institutionalization of a separate Ministry of Lands, Resettlement and Rehabilitation (nowadays the Ministry for Land Reform), purchasing of farm land was slow and inefficient. The Ministry did not even spend the annual budgetary��allocations for the purchase of land, despite many farms on the market. Rather, what emerged was a rhetorical policy on land lacking any��meaningful land policy. Where farms were used for resettlement purposes, beneficiaries were often simply dumped but not enabled to utilize the land due to lack of capital and know-how.
In a prominent case, farm��Ongombo��West near the capital Windhoek made good business in exporting cut flowers to the European market. It was expropriated after a long legal battle. Handed over to landless people, the production collapsed and the infrastructure deteriorated. Occupants are unable to make a living, as documented in��a televised news clip.��Ironically so, on��a recent state visit to Kenya, Namibian President Hage Geingob praised the cut flower industry there as��a good example��for economic development.
In southern Namibia, the farms Neue��Haribes��and adjacent��Baumgartsbrunn��were once with a combined size of 80,000 hectares, the country���s biggest private farming unit. The carrying capacity of 12,000 karakul sheep indicated the limits under the dry climate. The enterprise owned by a locally operating German company provided a meagre income for close to a hundred farm workers and their families mainly from the vicinity and had a school for their children. When Persian lamb furs were in less demand the farm became uneconomical. In 2010, the state purchased 50,000 hectares from the Swedish absentee landlords. Now the left overs are in total shambles. The residents have no means of income and��depend on food aid.
Such examples make one wonder if state policy was eager to create a self-fulfilling prophecy that resettlement schemes do not work. But the failed policy only testifies to the incompetence and lack of political will beyond the hunger and greed to own land among the new elites. There are many good but hitherto��largely ignored recommendations��how best to provide resettlement farmers with meaningful��opportunities��to make a living.
In addition, the allocation of land to members of communities from other regions of the country became a growing bone of contention. Beneficiaries were often historically from the northern parts of the country. The land in their home regions was never seized under colonialism. The new mobility��unlocked by political independence now provided access to land in other parts of the country. Those whose ancestors were robbed of their land by German and South African colonialism, however, remained on the margins and witnessed the new redistribution often as another means of marginalization and discrimination.
Furthermore, while classified as ���previously disadvantaged,��� many of the beneficiaries were anything but still disadvantaged. Members of the political and bureaucratic elite received preferential treatment. Subsidized by taxpayers��� money��they became weekend or hobby farmers. Trying to investigate the mounting complaints, Namibia���s Ombudsman demanded in May 2018��access to the list of resettlement farms and their beneficiaries. It took the Ministry several months to finally hand it over, only after the Ombudsman had threatened��to take legal action. By then the second land conference was over. A widely demanded proper land audit is still missing.
In late 2016/early 2017��a fall out��between the Deputy Minister for Land Reform and his Minister (a son of Namibia���s first president Sam Nujoma) led to the former���s dismissal first from office and later from Parliament and SWAPO. A Landless People���s Movement (LPM) was subsequently founded, which��submitted��its registration as a political party in September 2018.
Access to scarce and costly urban land had also emerged as a political issue, pushed by activists from the SWAPO Youth League. Their formation��of an Alternative Repositioning (AR) with regard to urban plots in 2015 has since then��become another political factor.
At a SWAPO Central Committee meeting towards the end of August 2018, President Geingob took a swipe against those mobilizing around the issue of land. For him, these were ���failed politicians��� merely looking for personal gains. He accused them of tribalism,��playing with people���s emotions, and warned that��they could��instigate civil war.
The second land conference���more promises
After several postponements, the second land conference���announced with much fanfare���finally came and went during the first week of October 2018. The Namibian government invited more than 800 participants and allocated N$15 million (a million US$) for the five-day event. Given the overwhelming dominance of state authorities and other official institutions as well as indications that SWAPO tried to hijack the agenda, civil society organizations��threatened to boycott. At the end, most of them participated, if only to make use of the opportunity to voice their frustrations.
As President Geingob��stressed��in his opening speech:
As the head of this Namibian House, I am committed to ensuring that the basic needs of all inhabitants are met. I believe that each and every Namibian should live a dignified life. I feel the pain of the landless. I feel the pain of the dispossessed. I feel the pain of the��hungry and impoverished.
The Ministry for Land Reform provided access to��most of the documents submitted, including those of the first Land Conference. Compared with the 24 resolutions adopted but hardly implemented then, many matters in the now��40 resolutions��were��a modified follow up.
A significant new addition was the issue of urban land and informal settlements. It recognized the demands of urban squatters, estimated at almost a million people���40%��of Namibia���s��total population���to affordable housing. The capital Windhoek is��a tale of two cities.
Notably, the issues of communal and of ancestral land also received more prominence and a greater willingness to consider interventions��by the state. These included a resolution stressing the need for the protection of tenure rights mainly in the interest of the poorest as victims of illegal land occupation and the condemnation of the ongoing privatization of communal land by members of the new elites.
While it was pointed out in 1991 that ���restitution in full is impossible,��� during the 27 years since then no serious efforts were made for meaningful restitution at all. Now the recommendations were in stark contrast to the earlier insults by Namibia���s President as quoted above in response to such demands. Significantly, a Presidential Commission of Inquiry on Ancestral Land should be tasked to offer further advice.
Overall, the local responses to the final document adopted were based on previous experiences��where��not much happened after similar such conferences. ���The proof of the pudding is in the eating,��� concluded a columnist in the state-owned newspaper. ���Placing one��or two plasters on the stump of an amputated leg, is not a cure,��� remarked��an editorial��in��The Observer,��a weekly paper.
The meaning of land���beyond economy
What complicates matters is that land is not merely an economic affair. Only about 8%��of the over 825,000 square��kilometers��of��land, mainly situated in the Northern communal areas, are suitable for dry land cropping. Its size shrinks due to the effects of climate change. Droughts have become a regular feature, and chronic water shortage makes��farming even more difficult. Two-thirds of the country are semi-arid, another quarter is arid. Some 60% of the freehold agricultural land receives on average less than 300 mm rainfall annually. The means of income among commercial farmers���with the exception of some big cattle ranchers and farms producing maize and other crops under irrigation���have considerably shifted towards guest farms and trophy hunting to benefit from tourism as the current most important economic growth sector.
Beyond economic matters, however, the land issue is also a matter of identity; for those who own it as much as for those who feel it should be theirs. Colonialism went along with and remains associated with violent land theft. Therefore, the current distribution of land in Namibia is a constant reminder that colonialism has not ended with independence. It continues as long as restorative justice is��.
But as legitimate as these claims are, the restitution of land is confronted with a dilemma. What��King Louis XVIII���s advisor��Talleyrand reportedly told��the king��applies for land restitution too: ���treason is merely a matter of dates.��� Nando���s controversial��TV ad of 2012,��taken off the air��by the South African state broadcaster��on the grounds��that it is xenophobic,��makes the point: going back long enough, legitimate land claims would rest solely with the descendants of the San (Bushmen) as the only indigenous people roaming Southern Africa.
History cannot be fully reversed. The structural legacies created under Apartheid and the long-term demographic impact of the genocide have left irreversible marks on Namibian society. However, what seems a feasible compromise is to offer the San communities access to and protection in the parts of��Namibia, which have remained their home. At the same time, the forced removal from land on record since the early times of white settler��encroachment would be a widely-accepted reference point.
Some of the festering wounds can be treated. The Land Conference stated on ���ancestral land rights and claims��� in resolution 38 that, ���measures to restore social justice and ensure economic empowerment of the affected communities��� should be identified. And it suggests to ���use the reparations from the former colonial powers for such purpose.��� This might offer a way out of the current stagnation in the negotiations��between the Namibian and German governments. The latest return of human remains documented no breakthrough in coming to terms with the shared past as regards��a somewhat adequate compensation��for the crimes committed.
As part of the long overdue consequences, Germany should fork out the necessary funds for a just expropriation of commercial farmers, whose land was utilized by the indigenous communities and where their ancestors are buried. The German state should also finance the necessary investments���both in terms of infrastructure as well as know-how���that empowers local communities to fully benefit from resettlement and access to land under the conditions��of climate change adaptation. The Namibian government would have to accept resettlement��for the��descendants of those robbed of the land. This would be a wise investment by both governments into true reconciliation towards a peaceful future for all people who want to continue living in Namibia. After all, as a local commentator observed ���the land issue is the most divisive issue of all that Namibia has experienced since independence.���
Land grab 2.0���class matters
But such brokerage requires honesty to obtain legitimacy and credibility. Ten days after the Land Conference, some disturbing news made the rounds.��Rashid��Sardarov, a��Russian oligarch, since 2013 in possession of three farms, added another four farms to his Namibian empire��in a rather dubious transaction. The shady deal with the Land Reform Ministry was sealed a week before the Land Conference. Meanwhile, conference resolution 21 stated ���no land should be sold to Foreign Nationals.��� And a sub-clause under resolution 2 ominously proclaimed ���Implement the Principle of ���One Namibian One Farm���������whatever its unexplained meaning might be. After all, the close to two and a half million Namibians are hardly able to have one farm each. Presumably, the meaning of the resolution links to earlier recommendations that farmers should limit property to one farm only.
With the latest ���billionaire playground�����of��Sardarov��getting the green light, it seems that foreigners are at greater liberty to benefit from exceptions decided on a political level. The deal was justified by the government with the argument that it is a major investment into development. The oligarch purchased the farms and donated them to the state in exchange for a 99-year lease. The lawyer tasked with the transaction for ���the King of Dordabis�����(the area in one of the country���s best farming locations about an hour���s drive from both Windhoek and its international airport) is also frequently acting for the government. He negotiated the agreement with his private partner acting in the capacity as conveyancer of the land deal.
Not surprisingly, the public outcry was massive. After all, following the logic of such arguments could there then also be a tentative “solution” to the land issue once and for all: commercial farmers not willing to vacate their land in return for a just compensation could simply donate their property to the state in a similar deal for a 99-year lease in return. Then the state would be the owner of all commercial farming land, which is utilized for a century to come by the previous owners���almost as long a period since the land was originally appropriated. And given the effects of climate change, the issue of an investment is hardly of any value until or rather by 2117. In response to the outburst of public criticism, the Prime Minister vowed to defend the deal in court. As she��declared: “All requirements of all the laws of the state have been followed.��The government��made use of the legal expertise within government to make sure that it��was��done��properly.”
However, such dubious legal argument overlooks the moral dimensions of such deals. It only documents the ignorance���or rather arrogance���of those in power.���Some 1,200 landless people dumped in a small corridor at��Dordabis,��feel very differently��about the deal than the political office bearers do.
The contrast could have hardly been bigger comparing this transaction, which had the explicit approval of cabinet, with��the closing speech��at the Land Conference by President Geingob. He then, days after the deal had been done, urged: “we need to ensure that we are living in a just and fair society, a society in which the mantra of ���No Namibian must feel left out��� permeates every facet of our coexistence.”
But the landless dumped since years at the margins of the new empire��created at Dordabis, feel exactly left out and betrayed. Their story differs from the populist rhetoric, which is nothing else than the cosmetics trying to cover up an elite pact. People are not fooled when feeling the effects daily. As a commentator in the state-owned newspaper��put it: “the saga of the four Russian farms seems to be the tip of the iceberg��� we��must call upon the Namibian government to institute a forensic audit into the management of land.”
By diagnosing that the ���inaccurate characterization of the land issue is a smokescreen to cover-up continued elite control over not just the land, but all income-generating natural resources in Namibia,�����an editorial in The Observer��managed to put the battles for land in the overall current context:
If an accurate look at who is receiving the resettlement farms, EPLs, fishing quotas, affirmative action farm loans and other natural resource allocations is ever possible, we are convinced it will reveal not necessarily one ethnic group reaping all benefits but one socio-economic class gathering wealth.
December 17, 2018
The politics of reforming traditional land in South Africa
Image credit Maarten Elings via Flickr.
���They want to sell us.���
Those are the haunting words of an elderly woman��in the���48-minute narrative documentary,���This���Land��(2017), about the struggle of���rural people for protection of their rights and accountability on communal land���in rural KwaZulu-Natal. Her words and expression, well-worn hands covering her face, capture the painful controversy of the democratic government���s undemocratic approach to land reform in rural South Africa.
Who are������they��� who want to sell poor, rural people like this woman?���In short, traditional leaders in cahoots with the government.
This woman was describing the reality that��former President��Kgalema��Motlanthe��later acknowledged after hearing hundreds���of rural people across South Africa give testimony on their experiences of land confiscations, insecurity, and destitution, especially in mineral-rich areas such as the Platinum Belt in the northern provinces and land under the jurisdiction of the��Ingonyama��Trust Board in KwaZulu-Natal.�����Motlanthe���was a member���of President Cyril��Ramaphosa���s���task team meant to “clear existing confusion” on the ruling African National Congress���s position on “the land question;��� i.e. the imperative to embark on large scale land reform to right racial imbalances in land ownership and access.
As��Motlanthe��said of the��Ingonyama��Trust Board,��which is appointed by the Minister of Rural Development and Land Reform to administer the public land held in trust for the Zulu people and controlled by��the Zulu royal family��who manage ordinary��people���s access to that land��through traditional leaders:�����People who have lived there for generations must pay the��Ingonyama��Trust Board R1,000 rent which escalates yearly by 10%.���
Specifically, the Trust approaches and advertises to poor, rural people under its jurisdiction that they have insecure tenure in the form of PTO certificates��(an apartheid-era certificate that is upgradeable to ownership in terms��of the Upgrading of Land Tenure Rights Act of 1991)��or no documented right to occupy the land they have inhabited, in many instances, for generations. It tells them that, they can������upgrade������their land rights by��entering into long-term leases���with���the Trust so that they can have proof of residence to register to vote, open bank accounts, register cell phones, or obtain rural allowances from employers.
These are people who typically have���either���PTO certificates or informal land rights (established by long-term occupation that are likely to be considered customary ownership and thus entitling them to compensation under the Interim Protection of Informal Land Rights Act of 1996). The���Trust,���having gotten these people to unknowingly trade in their rights that are more akin to ownership for the status of tenants, then extorts these���escalating���annual rental fees from them.
The���Trust continues to issue this solicitation via its Facebook and Twitter accounts and advertisements despite the fact that, in March, the��parliamentary chair of the��Portfolio Committee on Rural Development and Land Reform���directed the trust to stop this practice, and a senior official of the��responsible government��department confirmed that the Trust’s income-generating scheme is unauthorized��and��violates both the Constitution and the Public Finance Management Act.
Motlanthe��was���quoted���as concluding:
Some traditional leaders support the ANC, but the majority of them are acting like village tin-pot dictators to the people there. The people had high hopes the ANC would liberate them from these confines of the homeland systems, but��clearly��we are the ones who are saying the land must go to traditional leaders and not the people.
Unsurprisingly, the comment attracted a lot of criticism of the former president, particularly��from traditional leaders��and other insiders and allies��such as��Mangosuthu��Buthelezi, who heads the��Inkatha��Freedom Party, a party close to the Zulu king and traditional leaders in KwaZulu-Natal.
But is what��Motlanthe��said really unwarranted?
The core debate is about who owns the land:��whether the traditional leaders and/or kings or the people who have lived on the land,���burying their ancestors, grazing their cattle, fetching grass, wood and water there. The essential challenge is one of reconciling a global and local political economy that centers���on individual and exclusive forms of ownership with the customary system of nested, overlapping and relative rights coexisting at multiple levels of social organization from the strongest family level rights to the weakest community level rights.
The��Ingonyana��Trust has proceeded on the argument that the Zulu King owns the land and rents it to the people��who live on the land.���The King has therefore interpreted the��High��Level��Panel report produced under��Motlanthe���s��chairmanship as an attack on Zulu land and sovereignty, and has mobilized��amabutho���(warriors) to do as necessary to protect them, including���threatening���secession.
In May��2018, Deputy President David��Mabuza��told��the National Assembly that insecure��land��tenure sometimes emanates from the ���false view��� that������land under traditional leadership is owned by traditional leaders.��� He continued, ���In terms of custom it is the people who own the land; traditional leaders are only custodians of the people���s land.���
Unfortunately, this language of ���custodianship��� does not settle the issue. It is slippery language that the ANC has used for decades to justify allowing traditional leaders control of customary land on behalf of their ���people��� (read: subjects).
Faust,��in the eponymous��legend,�����traded his soul to the devil in exchange for knowledge. To ‘strike a���Faustian bargain’ is to be willing to sacrifice anything to satisfy a limitless desire for knowledge or power.������In short, a “Faustian bargain” is the proverbial deal with the devil.
Before any misunderstandings arise: I am NOT calling traditional leaders and institutions the devil. I am not at all equating traditional governance arrangements with evil.���The deal with the devil that I described��here��is the compact that the ANC has made to perpetuate the fictitious structures that the oppressive regimes of our country’s dirty past created and branded������tribal” in the Native Administration Act of 1927 and Bantu Authorities Act of 1951.
If you do��not believe that the structures that the ANC is perpetuating are indeed an apartheid construct, perhaps you will believe the founding fathers of the ANC. These were their strong responses to the creation of these structures��by��the Bantu Authorities Act.
Here���s Albert Luthuli, himself a Zulu chief in Natal��and onetime ANC President, on this system in 1962:
The modes of government proposed are a caricature. They are neither democratic nor African. The Act makes our chiefs, quite straightforwardly and simply, into minor puppets and agents of the Big Dictator. They are answerable to him and to him only, never to their people. The whites have made a mockery of the type of rule we knew. Their attempts to substitute dictatorship for what they have efficiently destroyed do not deceive us.
And Nelson Mandela,��then leader of the ANC in Transvaal,��writing in 1959:
[I]n South Africa, we all know full well that no Chief can retain his post unless he submits to Verwoerd, and many Chiefs who sought the interest of their people before position and self-advancement have, like President��Lutuli, been deposed…������Thus, the proposed Bantu Authorities will not be, in any sense of the term, representative or democratic.
In 1964,��Govan��Mbeki, who would be sentenced to life imprisonment along with��Mandela that year, and who had done extensive research on and participated in peasant uprisings in the Eastern Cape:
Many Chiefs and headmen found that once they had committed themselves to supporting Bantu Authorities, an immense chasm developed between them and the people. Gone was the old give-and-take of tribal consultation, and in its��place��there was now the autocratic power bestowed on the more ambitious Chiefs, who became arrogant in the knowledge that government might was behind them.
In essence, they rejected what the ANC has embraced in the Traditional Leadership and Governance��Franework��Act of 2013 (TLGFA) when it says in section 28:
Any traditional leader who was appointed as such in terms of applicable provincial legislation and was still��recognised��as a traditional leader immediately before the commencement of this Act, is deemed to have been��recognised��as such in terms of section 9 or 11, subject to a decision of the Commission in terms of section 26.
Section 28(3):
���any ������tribe��� that, immediately before the commencement of this Act, had been established and was still��recognised��as such is deemed to be a traditional community contemplated in section 2.
And��Section 28(4):
…any tribal authority that, immediately before the commencement of this Act, had been established and was still��recognised��as such, is deemed to be a traditional council���
The technical change that the TLGFA Amendment makes then is to give these apartheid constructs of “tribal” governance an extended life in our democracy as “traditional” governance institutions. By this, the government would like us to believe that those institutions that are���to quote Nelson Mandela���not�����in any sense of the term��� so,��have suddenly become traditional.
But they haven’t.
Firstly, not once does the TLGFA provide for recognition of “traditional” structures to be dependent upon consultation with the people who are to be governed by them. And, 15 years after the legislation was initially passed, the elections of 40% of traditional council members that it provides for,��have yet to be seriously carried out in most of the country. ���In case you are wondering: the other 60% is to be appointed by the traditional leader whose own recognition is not at all contingent upon acceptance and recognition by his/her people.
By the government’s own admission, elections have been held for few traditional councils and there are contests and disputes with respect to the overwhelming majority of traditional communities and the institutions of traditional leadership recognized over them.
In the meantime, the government is also processing the Traditional and Khoisan Leadership Bill (TKLB), under which the deal with the devil of apartheid will be fully realized. This Bill would���fully revive separate territorial enclaves in which poor, black people are stripped of their citizenship rights (such as the right to speak for themselves) but are instead forced to be governed as subjects by imposed authorities that the government names “traditional” as it gives these authorities un-traditional and un-democratic “roles, functions and power” to wholly speak on “their people’s” behalf as so-called “custodians of our culture” and “custodians of our land.���
As��summarized��by then-Chief Justice��Sandile��Ngcobo, on behalf of the Constitutional Court, in a��2010��case implicating the TLGFA:
Under apartheid, these steps were a necessary prelude to the assignment of African people to ethnically-based homelands��� According to this plan, there would be no African people in South Africa, as all would assume citizenship of one or other of the newly created homelands���
Amidst the sensational deliberations about “expropriation without compensation��� of white-owned land, it is hard for the public to remain vigilant against all Faustian deals made by our government. But I would appeal to all to pay keen attention to that of the politics of reforming traditional land in South Africa,��for it renews the very foundations on which apartheid was built.
December 16, 2018
The slave holders on the border
Child refugees in Madagali, northern Nigeria, near where Boko Haram displaced people. Image by Immanuel Afolabi via Conflict & Development at Texas A&M Flickr.
The Mandara Mountains, on the border between Nigeria and northern Cameroon, are among the regions that have most suffered from attacks by��Boko Haram.��However, for the inhabitants of this area, this situation is not new;��they instantly recognize in the Boko Haram��leader, Abubakar Shekau, another dreaded enemy from the past���Hamman Yaji.��Yaji��was an early 20th-century Fulani chief and slave trader in the same areas of northern Cameroon and north-eastern Nigeria where Boko Haram operates today. For twenty years, he raided throughout the area, capturing slaves and killing those who resisted him.
Today, non-Muslims living along the border between Cameroon and Nigeria refer to Boko Haram as hamaji, a term derived from their memory of��Yaji’s��depredations. We will not detail here the story of Boko Haram, which has been the subject of many publications. Rather, we seek to understand why people today refer to Boko Haram in terms reminiscent of the��period of slavery: why do they use the term hamaji��to describe Boko Haram, and why do they compare Shekau to��Yaji?
Hamman��Yaji��and��Aboubakar��Shekau
The colonial presence in northern Cameroon and north-eastern Nigeria was marked by the persistence of systems of enslavement, which lasted until at least the 1940s and in diluted forms until even more recently. The primary sources shedding light on this reality are, first, oral traditions collected by anthropologists, and second the German, French and English colonial archives.
The third source for our understanding of 20th century slave-trading is atypical:��a diary dictated between 1912 and 1927 by the most important slave-raider in the southern Lake Chad Basin, Hamman Yaji. His main base was in��Madagali, a settlement west of the Mandara Mountains and now in Nigeria, near the international border with Cameroon. In his autobiographical journal,��Yaji��mentions about a hundred raids directed against settlements in the Mandara Mountains, in which 1600 slaves were captured and more than 150 people killed.
People in Mandara communities still remember��Yaji��as a monster who committed enormous crimes. The Dutch anthropologist Walter van Beek reports, for example,��in��the words of��Vandu��Zra��T��, a local historian whom he interviewed in 1989:
Hamman��Yaji��used people as money. He asked a��Fulbe��woman for a pounding stick and paid with a slave. He bought a mat, and paid with a slave. To buy a calabash, or a stick, he paid with people. Even a jar with��shikwedi��(a crop for the sauce [for food���SM/MC]) he paid with a slave. That is what he did.
Extraordinary characters may often generate significant myths. This seems to be the case with��Yaji, who for Mandara people became a symbol of war and atrocities. Today, the Boko Haram leader Shekau is developing a similar mythology. In almost every local commentary on Boko Haram and Shekau,��Yaji���s��name��emerges: ���Shekau is no different from Hamman��Yaji. Both love women; both kill without��mercy; both drink water from men���s skulls.���
For locals, the Fulani leader was the epitome of danger, absolute evil, and brutal slavery, and it is this��pillager��who they perceive has returned in the person of the Boko Haram���s��Shekau: ���For me, Shekau, he is the same as the chief in��Madagali��who used to send his troops��to capture girls.���
Time does not really seem to have changed the memory of the ravages of the Fulani raiders, constantly evoked in local conversations about Boko Haram: ���Slavery is now back, and it is��everywhere, even in the mountains,��� laments one informant.
At the same time, the differences between the situations of��Yaji��and Shekau are obvious: modern life, with much wider networks of relations within and beyond Nigeria, rooted in state functions and��beyond; the presence of the internet and a global radical Islam;��the use of video and news technologies by Boko Haram;��the use of motorcycles as a means of mobility��� all this provides context that distinguishes these two figures and the processes that they embody, slavery and Boko Haram.
Despite all this, the analogies between��Yaji��and Shekau remain striking, especially for the inhabitants of the��Mandara��Mountains: extreme violence, the evocation of the slave market, the idea of being invested with a divine mission, the production of quasi-apocalyptic discourses, the division of the world into ���believers” and “unbelievers,��� and the inspiration drawn from Islam are as easily recognizable in the earlier historical moment as they are today.
I will sell (the Chibok girls) in the market
Perhaps the most striking analogy between these two actors is the fact that girls and women are the main targets of kidnapping.��Yaji���s��targeting of young women permeates his diary. For example, he reports the following attacks during a short period in mid-1913:
May 21: �����I sent soldiers to��Hudgudur��and they captured 20 girl slaves.
June 11:�� �����I sent��Barde��to��Wula, and they captured six girl slaves and ten cattle, and killed three men.
June 25: ��� I sent my people to the pagans of��Midiri��and Bula and they captured 48 slave girls and 26 cattle and we killed five people.
July 6: ��� I sent my people to��Sina��and they captured 30 cattle and six slave girls.
Enslaved young women were taken in other ways as well: On August 26, 1917,��Yaji��writes ������I fixed the penalty for each slave who leaves me without cause at four slave girls and, if he is a poor man 200 lashes.���
What did��Yaji��do with the many hundreds of slaves captured between 1902 and 1920? This question is particularly pertinent since, by that time, the pre-colonial slave markets in the region had already been abolished by the British. It seems likely that��Yaji��never made any significant monetary profit on his slaves. However, his diary indicates that he used young enslaved women as a kind of human currency in themselves, trading them for horses and other goods. His diary also states that he gave them as gifts to his supporters in recognition of their allegiance.
The parallels here with Boko Haram are striking.��Madagali, capital of��Hamman��Yaji, is only 80 kilometres from Chibok, where, in April 2014,��Boko Haram kidnapped 276 girls in a government secondary school. The Chibok girls were probably of about the same age as the girls who were the target of the��Yaji��raids. Shekau did not keep a diary, but��in 2014,��he boasted of selling the girls from Chibok: ���I will sell them on the market, in the name of Allah. There is a market where they sell human beings […]. A 12-year-old girl, I would give her in marriage, even a 9-year-old girl, I would do it.���
What slave market was Shekau talking about? Such markets do not exist today, just as they did not in the days of��Yaji. What, then, is the motivation behind these kidnappings of girls? We need to remember that the Chibok kidnapping is not the only such kidnapping of young women undertaken by Boko Haram; it is merely the most famous. Young women have very frequently been the target of kidnappings.
While some women have voluntarily joined Boko Haram, the fates of women who were kidnapped and forcibly married, and of those who voluntarily joined Boko Haram, were very different.��While the latter benefited from better treatment within the organization���some of those women described their husbands as well-off and generous���the former were subjected to sexual and non-sexual violence by the kidnappers. Women who joined Boko Haram voluntarily and married members of the group often remained in��purdah, sheltered from public contacts, where they take care of domestic tasks. Kidnapped women, on the other hand, were used as sources of forced labor���they were, in fact, enslaved.
A number of the Chibok girls who were released reported rape and other forms of inhuman and degrading treatment. In particular, they were subjected to forced marriages (sexual slavery, in other words) to lower-ranked members of Boko Haram, as a reward and incitement to fidelity for Shekau���s followers.
This instrumental use of women precisely parallels the actions of��Yaji��at the beginning of the 20th century: while girls and women captured by force suffered all kinds of sexual and non-sexual violence, those who voluntarily joined the ranks of slavers were treated with more moderation. They had rights and privileges that other categories of slaves did not have access to: right to food, clothing, and sometimes to education.
These advantages led some of these women to value their new lives��as concubines, as illustrated by the words of this former concubine one of us met in��Madagali��in 2007: ���I will not go back to the mountains, because I do not want to eat dog meat and drink sorghum beer��any��more.���
Even given the absence of slave markets, the servitude of young women would be very useful for warlords like��Yaji��and Shekau. Such young women were an extremely effective recruitment mechanism for young men, if they were to be given out as sexual partners. Such young men would normally have difficulty accumulating the wealth necessary to pay the dowry of their wives and thus becoming a��baaba��sare���in Fulani, head of the household. In that case, without the possibility of marriage, they would be trapped in a perpetual adolescence, because they could not be accepted as adults even as grown men.
Why is this important?
Now back to our original question: why do local people refer to Boko Haram as hamaji? Is this merely a repetition of older stories?
The European colonies of a century ago are not the same as today’s postcolonial states of Cameroon and Nigeria, the reports of kidnaping by��Yaji��are now done through social media and video by��Shekau and his followers. This means that the context is undoubtedly different. But Boko Haram���s banditry is still a means of existence, a way of life, as were��Yaji���s��raids. In both cases, women constitute an extremely important spoil of war, evoking the sale of enslaved women in markets that exist in the imaginaries of��modern jihadists. This is not a replication of history but rather its continuity, because violence���and perhaps especially gendered violence���has never ceased to be a reality in this border zone of the Lake Chad Basin.
This conclusion has something to teach us in our search for a sustainable solution to Boko Haram. Instead of treating the symptoms, why should we not determine the origin and nature of the disease? In other words, why not take into account the��historical context of Boko Haram, in order to think effectively about how to combat forms of violence that have never really disappeared in this area?
Local interpretations are informative: they indicate that the actions of Boko Haram are not a mysterious and unprecedented eruption of violence and savagery. Certainly, important elements of Boko Haram���s ideology are imported from beyond the Lake Chad Basin. At the same time, their speeches and actions derive their legitimacy from endogenous doctrinal and historical resources���even if their media productions frequently borrow elements from those of the jihadist groups of the��Middle East.
December 15, 2018
The creation of black criminality in South Africa
The abandoned site of an old reformatory in Cape Town, South Africa. Image credit Mallix via Flickr.
��� Stephen Dillon, 2016[T]he prison is more than an institution composed of cages, corridors, and guard towers; it is also a system of affects, desires, discourses, and ideas that make the prison possible��� The prison could disappear tomorrow and the types of power that give rise to its reign could live on in other forms such as the regimes we call freedom, rights, and the state.
There is an intimate relationship between the prison and concepts of freedom, as Stephen Dillon observes. Operating on dual levels, as both confinement and the basis for freedom, the institution of incarceration has an ambivalent presence. ���The prison is present in our lives and at the same time, the prison is absent in our lives,�����argued Angela Davis. This oscillating presence/absence masks the ideological function that the prison serves, as ���a site into which undesirables are deposited, relieving us of the responsibility of thinking about the real problems that afflict the communities from which prisoners are drawn.��� It exists, in other��words, to produce and naturalize the category of ���undesirables.���
The prison has a strikingly prominent place in South African history. As Michel Foucault argues through the concept of the carceral, the prison operates not only as a physical space but as a powerful social formation. In South Africa, colonial discourses of African disposability and unfitness for owning land operated alongside laws that created new forms of criminality. Because the colonial and apartheid states saw themselves��as bastions of civilization in a sea of African barbarity, they used the instrument of the law to generate new forms of criminality and to transform black people into carceral bodies��by definition. These bodies were also expediently made available for exploitation as cheap labor. The proliferating use of the pass laws (first passed under British colonial rule in 1809 and only abolished towards the end of apartheid in 1988) and the Masters and Servants Act (1841 and 1856, and only abolished in 1974) eventually created the largest imprisoned population on the continent. Such laws created widespread African illegality at a scale ���as industrial as making cars.��� At the level of discourse, they generated the notion that black bodies are inherently criminal, deviant, and dangerous.��That is, following Angela Davis and��Katherine McKittrick���s formulation, they��naturalized��the ���undesirability��� of African subjects.
What explains the long hold of the prison on notions of state governance from the colonial to the apartheid and even post-apartheid periods? The laws that cast a widening net of criminalization over Africans remained in place for nearly 180 years and became built into the very structure of the South African state. In fact, after the South African war ended in 1902, the state and the mining industry became increasingly reliant on the labor of incarcerated Africans. There was a direct correlation between laws that increased levels of imprisonment and the labor needs of the state and the agricultural and mining industries. As Charles van��Onselen��notes, this��mutual reliance on prison labor reflected a ���deeper circular logic��� of an ���economy��� heavily reliant on labour-repressive institutions and instruments such as compounds, prisons and pass laws.���
The infinitely painful pass laws terrorized black South Africans by making their presence in their own country a crime. During apartheid, any black South Africans who did not have approved employment and was caught outside the Bantustans was immediately charged with a crime. This ensured that to be African in South Africa was to be criminal. The Bantustans were created by the apartheid state in order to remove black��people���s��South African citizenship and simultaneously acted as impoverished labor reserves with an endless supply of vulnerable workers, always either imprisoned or about to be imprisoned. Indeed, during apartheid, ���the pass laws ensured the constant flow of men into and out of prisons��� (per Van��Onselen). These laws tied the state to the mining industry through a system of continual imprisonment of black people.
The South African prison system developed alongside and in parallel with the mine compound. De Beers operated both mining compounds and the earliest private prisons in South Africa. The explicit relationship between the mining industry and the industrial scale of state incarceration became clear by the end of the South African War. ���The mining company ��� paid the state for the use of their prison��labour. By the end of the 19th century, the De Beers Diamond Mining Company was using over 10,000 prison��labourers��daily.��� Through its penal policies, the state in effect became a channel of cheap��labor��to the mines. K.C.��Goyer��notes��that ���convict labor was integral to the growing South African mining industry until as recently as 1952��� and was only abolished in 1959. Even after��the legal ending of prison labor, policies such as the ���teaching of skills��� and the recommendation of “useful and healthy outdoor work” for short-term prisoners nonetheless ensured that the state continued��to benefit from penal labor.��The relationship between the South African and the mining industry exemplified the cynical conclusion that ���[e]very system of production tends to discover punishments which correspond to its productive relationships.���
The colonial prison system thus shaped the creation of a modern industrial labor force in South Africa through the production of a constant source of imprisoned labor. This closed machine for manufacturing systematic African criminality would govern the colonial and apartheid economies for over a century and a half. By the early twentieth century, the system of incarceration had become an ���accelerating motion of an engine of oppression.�����From 1902 to 1936, there was ���a huge increase in the numbers sentenced and imprisoned. Very nearly all were black men prosecuted under the taxation, pass and masters and servants laws.��� Much of the modern South African landscape was built through forced��labor. This is obvious on slave-built farm estates, but��prison��labor was also used to build public roads constructed during the 1840s and 1850s, as well as��the breakwater that forms the harbor of Cape Town.
Criminalization��is therefore��central to the history of labor in South Africa. The dangerous connection posited between poverty and moral degradation was given a particular racial taint in South Africa. The political threat posed by racial mixing, especially among the poor, drove an elite project to separate black and white workers under the guise of the ���moral threat��� of racial mixing. The criminalization of black workers served to divide workers along race. In effect, just as Pumla Dineo Gqola��argues that ���rape creates race,��� the development of the working class in South Africa was profoundly shaped by incarceration.
The normativity of racialized incarceration transformed black men into prison material whose confinement was seen as necessary both for their own rehabilitation, and for ordinary society��to function safely and effectively. The imprisonment of African and formerly enslaved people therefore became naturalized and even insidiously viewed as beneficial. In the 1930s, the South African government created programs to address ���coloured��poverty��� that took the form of the ���teaching of skills��� through the��increasing use of prison labor��for road-building and farming. Through these policies, African and coloured��bodies were emptied of all meaning other than��carcerality, and marked by the taint of criminality as ���waste��� bodies which could only be redeemed by useful (imprisoned) labor. This turned black people into objects of fear and simultaneously obscured the crimes that they themselves experienced. Reviewing South African practices of incarceration in the mid-twentieth century, Gail Super��concludes��that ���coloured��and black men were disproportionately criminalized under apartheid [while]��coloured��and black crime victims were largely ignored��by white South Africans.���
Post-apartheid incarceration
The use of incarceration as a state policy continued��untrammeled��from the colonial to the apartheid periods. Worryingly, the post-apartheid period also shows clear continuities with colonial and apartheid policies.��Lukas��Muntingh��notes��that ���the rate at which South Africans are currently arrested rivals the situation experienced during apartheid.��� In fact,��Super��concludes that ���in South Africa today, imprisonment forms a central plank of the government���s crime policies.���
I wish to introduce a further factor into this analysis���while black people as a whole have suffered grievously from a century and a half of mass incarceration in South Africa, the industrial scale of criminalization and confinement takes particular force among a specific group of black people���the descendants of enslaved people, who were known after emancipation as ���coloureds.��� There are clear continuities between ���black��� (at first termed ���native��� in apartheid legislation) and ���coloured��� identities, though these were created as separate racial identities through apartheid���s Population Registration Act of��1950, and black people were placed at the bottom of the racial hierarchy. Despite apartheid���s targeted violence against black people, incarceration figures show that��coloured��men are imprisoned at twelve times the rate of white men, and��twice the rate of black men. This striking phenomenon of disproportionate levels of incarceration has continued from the colonial period to apartheid and even into the post-apartheid period.
How does one explain the contradiction between apartheid���s racial theory and its practice of punishment, manifested in the continuing mass imprisonment of formerly enslaved (i.e.��coloured) people and their descendants? The answer, I argue, lies in the foundational role of 176 years of slavery in South Africa, which has acted as a hidden force in the country���s political culture since emancipation. These numbers suggest that the slave-based system in the Cape Colony generated a code of disposability that continues to shape how formerly enslaved people were viewed after emancipation, that is, as deviant, criminal and in need of control and repair. This formulation of inherent deviance and infinite reparability is evident in the notion that incarceration is actually a��benevolent��state policy. Government programs in the 1930s that led to the increasing use of prison labor for road-building and on farms were described as addressing��coloured��poverty through the ���teaching of skills.����� These laws therefore acted as a means to produce exploitable labor and embedded apartheid-era capitalism in a longer history of slavery and colonialism. The history of the post-emancipation period in South Africa shows an increasing reliance by both public and��private capital on prison labor and discourses of criminality, intoxication, and physical malaise were used to naturalize the resulting epidemic levels of incarceration.
Today, this infrastructure of widespread incarceration has attached a discourse of moral failure and physical contamination to black and��coloured��neighborhoods. The association of such subjects with notions of crime, gangsterism, alcohol and drug abuse, dependency, lassitude and sexual deviancy has created a category of people who appear to deserve and even��need��punishment.
Intimate and industrial punishment
The system of corporal punishment, based on the Masters and Servants Acts, imposed the brutal, degrading and intimate punitive act of whipping on prisoners. James Midgley���s study shows that the widespread use of corporal punishment began immediately after emancipation and continued into the 1970s of corporal punishment, suggesting that the stain of disposability remained attached to emancipated bodies. As the history of punishment in court documents reveal, the severity of such whippings (often more than 100 lashes) has led to severe injury and even death. Despite this brutal history, more than 34,000 young offenders were subjected to whipping as recently as 1970 and its application was explicitly racialized. Originally, in fact, whipping could be enacted solely against black convicts,��a policy which only changed in 1880. By 1952-1954, state figures of corporal punishment against juvenile offenders showed ���an orgy of whipping.��� Reviewing such sentencing in 1970,��James��Midgley��shows��that ���[t]he great majority of children who were sentenced to corporal punishment were��coloured.��� Moreover, he finds that ���while sixty percent of all coloured��offenders were whipped, corporal punishment��was imposed on only twelve percent of white offenders.��� Midgley observes that about fifty percent of black men who appeared before the Cape Court were subjected to whipping. This revealing figure, as well as the fact that even during apartheid, with its focused violence against black people,��coloured��men were imprisoned at twice the rate of black men, indicates that the taint of disposability and criminality associated with enslaved bodies has shaped rates of incarceration both before 1994 and into the present.
Could the reason for the repeated use of the intimate punishment of whipping during and after slavery be that the enslaved (and, later,��coloured) body, in contrast to Khoisan and Nguni bodies, was viewed as both infinitely broken and infinitely repairable? Was the enslaved body nearer to that of the slave-owner and therefore potentially nearer human, if disciplined, compared to indigenous bodies, which were seen as inaccessible and incorrigible? Could the nearness of slave bodies hold both a threat and a promise to repair the flaw of race?
The text below allows me to explore further this apparently oscillating view of��coloureds��as impaired and in need of fixing. In December 2011, a controversial public service advertisement to discourage drunk driving called ���Papa Wag��Vir��Jou��� (���Daddy���s Waiting for You��� in Afrikaans) appeared on South African television. In the advert, a series of men appear on screen one by one to describe their ideal partner. The lines spoken by successive men were ���I���m looking for that special person;��� ���Someone who can handle heavy situations with a smile;��� ���These hands will never let you go;��� and ���I���m quite demanding physically.��� Gradually the lines become more sexually overt and are expressed with more loaded meaning. Only at the end of the advertisement does the camera pull back to reveal that the men are in prison uniforms, surrounded by a crowd of other men clad only in their underwear. While the earlier lines are all in English, the final line of the series, ���Papa Wag��Vir��Jou,��� is delivered in Afrikaans. In retrospect, the sequence of the lines and the tone of weighted intimacy in later lines, especially ���Daddy���s Waiting for You,��� makes clear that the basis of advert���s appeal not to drink and drive was the implicit threat of male rape in prison. The advertisement was reported to the Advertising Standards Authority of South Africa for racism and homophobia, but the ASA dismissed these objections.
The literary scholar Bernard Fortuin��has compellingly��analyzed��the advertisement��in his doctoral research��on a queered history of homosexuality in South African institutions, but��I wish to point to its naturalization of who��belongs��in prison. Behind its public appeal to reduce drunk driving, the advertisement signaled that some people are��at home��in prison while others do not belong. The former act as a warning to the public. The bodies who most clearly signal that they belong inside prison are black and��coloured��men, whose familiarity with the place���their��at-homeness there���is signaled by their tattoos, their at-ease bodies and their casual hand gestures. In contrast, a white man at the beginning is stiff and nervous and a second white man laughs self-consciously. The third man in the sequence is African and he looks intently at the camera. In contrast, the loose delivery of the three��coloured��men who follow him makes the implied threat of rape at the end even more blatant. As��Fortuin��notes, their treacherously sexual brown bodies suggest their familiarity with prison and its intricate hierarchies, violence and power, which is��shockingly clear in the advert. The��sexualization��and commodification of transgressive��coloured��bodies can be seen here and also in the songs and music videos of the white South African music group ���Die��Antwoord.��� Fortuin��points out��how such men���s bodies are simultaneously ���threatening and sexually alluring to the South African public,��� arguing that part of the advert���s effect comes from the fact that the ���prison has been confounded with homosexuality in the South African context.���
The ���Papa Wag��Vir��Jou��� video relies on the implicit threat of prison rape to deter people from drunk driving. Its larger effect, however, is even more disturbing���which is to entrench the putative link between black and��coloured��men and criminality. The history of carceral bodies outlined above allows us to revisit this unremarked association of diverse black masculinities with a sense of at-home-ness in prison. In the visual narrative of ���Papa Wag��Vir��Jou,��� these bodies do not strike me as repairable, but rather, they are��naturalized��in the setting of prison. Instead of being redeemable, the��coloured��bodies arrayed in the prison are portrayed as duplicitous and threatening. In fact, the assumption at first that the men are innocently referring to their ideal partner is revealed as dangerously na��ve. Especially the men who appear toward the end of the advert cannot be trusted. The prison could well be the space of abjection for the putative drunk driver who may end up among the men in the advert, facing the threat of rape. But instead of fulfilling the promise to repair the ���flaw��� of race, the men who are at home there reveal themselves to be irredeemably and inherently ���dirty.��� And that is why they��belong��in prison.
December 14, 2018
The struggle for a minimum wage in Nigeria
Oil workers in Port Hartcourt, Nigeria. Image credit Cristiano Zingale via Flickr.
On Tuesday November 6th, the Nigerian Labour Congress (NLC) called off a general strike after agreeing with the government to increase the national minimum salary by 67% to 30,000 Naira (US$ 83). In typical fashion, Bloomberg, the American business news service,��couldn���t help��pointing out that ���Nigerian��labor��is flexing its muscle before an election, winning a large increase in the minimum wage despite investor concerns about the oil-exporting nation���s deteriorating budget balance.��� The wage increase has been described by the usual dial-a-quote anti-labor��experts as a populist move that will distort the state economy and further fuel inflation. Another example from��Reuters: ���Economists say the new minimum wage risks stoking inflation, which is currently above the central bank���s single digit target thereby creating a new headache for the bank as it defends the currency hit by lower oil prices.���
Contrary to the wisdom of these “experts,” the process is better seen as a��key fora��for democracy at work, the minimum wage being neither fair nor enough for a decent living.��And what should be clear is that Nigerian workers on minimum salary are not to be blamed for��an overspending by public officials.
The new proposed minimum wage is a compromise agreement between workers, employers and the government. Such tripartite negotiations are a sign of democracy at work, founded in the ILO conventions of rights to collective bargaining (ILO core convention #98) and on minimum wage machinery (ILO #26), both to which Nigeria���s��government is a signatory. Minimum salaries should be adjusted on a regular basis to keep up with inflation, and according to Nigerian law, it should be negotiated at least��every five years. The Nigerian negotiations were way overdue given that the last Nigerian minimum wage agreement was in 2011.
In 2011, the minimum wage of 18,000 Naira was equivalent to about US$110, today it is worth less than US$50. This is below the��poverty line, and the NLC claimed it was the��lowest minimum wage on the continent.��It is a far cry from what Lagosians���the inhabitants of Nigeria���s crowded commercial capital���estimate��they needed to make ends meet. Stuck in economic crisis since 2014, the country���s external debts��have doubled in three years��(only a decade after the ���watershed�����debt relief��in 2005), the middle class with stable income is shrinking and the numbers of working poor are expanding. At the same time, the costs of living��is��fast increasing with inflation, illustrated by the fact that��foodstuff like cereals, cooking oil and even spices, are now sold in daily portions.
Though a 67% increased minimum wage sounds formidable, the new minimum wage of 30,000 Naira (US$83) is in real terms it lower than the 2011 minimum wage at the time of agreement (US$110).�� Workers were represented at the tripartite negotiations through NLC, the Trade union congress (TUC) and United Labour Congress (ULC). The (original demand of the NLC and TUC was 66,500 Naira (US$181), while the ULC (which is not recognized by the federal government) demanded 96,000 Naira (US$264). By comparison, the 1981 minimum wage of 125 Naira was worth US$200.
With labor rights under pressure, and an ever expanding share of labor being precarious, even some of the so-called ���privileged���oil��workers “work 12-hours-a-day, six-days-a-week for monthly salaries ranging from US $137 to US $257.�����As one oil worker in Port Harcourt, told a visiting delegation of American oil workers:�����We work like an elephant and eat like an ant. Our salary at (contractor)��Plantgeria��is about 95,000 Naira (US$257). In Nigeria today, you can���t do anything on that. You can���t pay your children���s school fees. You can���t eat well. You can���t do anything better for yourself.�����In my own��work in the Niger Delta, I have met contract workers in oil pipeline security earning wages as low as 20,000 Naira (who had also not been paid for months).
When the ruling APC party called the tripartite forum���consisting of representatives of workers, employers and the state���for minimum wage negotiations at the of December 2017, it was long overdue. It also came after continuous calls from the unions. Nevertheless, the process has been stalling. The��three negotiating��union��centers��NLC, TUC and ULC have been frustrated by the government, and threatened strike on several occasions. The government has held back the conclusion, not only because ���they cannot afford��� an increase, but allegedly also to conclude the deal as close to the national elections in early 2019 as possible in order to gain popular support.
After the tripartite��forum concluded on November 6th, the opposition presidential candidate, Atiku Abubakar (PDP) promised workers�� a��33.000 Naira minimum salary��in his private businesses and a��living wage��if elected. (Atiku���s claim to employ 100,000 workers has been hotly contested on social media.)
Although the Nigerian unions are under deep pressure, they have been able to mobilize and shut down the economy, as demonstrated in January 2012 during the Occupy Nigeria protests. The increase in minimum salary is popular, as it will improve the purchasing power of a large majority of Nigerians.
Formally, the minimum wage agreement is a recommendation to Parliament, which has to pass it into law. The parliamentarians that will vote��are among the richest of the world. While using private salaries to support patronage networks is not necessarily illegal, using private or public funds to stay in political positions through vote buying is corrupt. Nigerian political corruption is well-known, vast and systemic, and politicians��� misuse of public funds for personal and political support tend to increase in the run-up to elections (as in now), and it is particularly strong at state levels.
Nigeria has 36 states. They are key public sector employers. Despite the fact that the Governors Forum, representing the governors of these states, had six representatives at the tripartite forum, they��refuse to accept the new minimum wage��and have threatened to sack workers because they��cannot pay the bill.
In addition to many of them not implementing minimum wage rules, 33 out of 36 states are��late in paying workers. The��Chairman of the Nigerian Governors’ Forum,��Abdulaziz��Yari, told��reporters:�����the problem of state is the capacity to pay what is agreed. As we are talking today, we are struggling with N18,000. Some of the states are paying 35 per cent, some 50 per cent and still some states have salary arrears. So, it is not about only reviewing it but how we are going to get the resources to cater for it.���
Recently the NLC��urged:
We propose that since a few political office holders are bent on enslaving Nigerian workers with peanuts��mislabeled��as salaries, we urge such elected public officials to subject their humongous salaries and allowances, reputed to be among the highest in the world, pro rata with the minimum wage they want to force down the throats of Nigerian workers.
Azubuike��Azubuike, chairman of the��Petroleum and Natural Gas Senior Staff Association of Nigeria (PENGASSAN), based in the oil capital Port Harcourt,��goes further and suggests��that if governors cannot pay, it is a sign of their failure to build a viable economy and their incompetence to govern, and they should resign.
The public explanations of this ���culture��� of not paying workers, endemic in the public sector but not uncommon in the private, ���range from the non-existent to the hollow.�����One explanation is simply that they do not need to pay. Workers turn up without pay as they are desperate to keep their jobs in a sea of unemployment. In addition, politicians��� dependence on the electorate���as in workers and users of public goods���is limited for their political legitimacy and electoral chances.
Instead, the Nigerian state and its politicians depend economically on oil rent, not from income taxes. Since the 1970s, about 70% of Nigerian state income comes from this sector. With oil rents, there are little incentives to build a productive economy. Only Lagos has an economic base relatively independent of oil rent. Elections are more about��about��elite compromises of power-sharing than about giving the political leaders a popular mandate.
To further complicate matters, non-payment of workers is ���the other side of the coin to Nigeria���s notorious ���ghost worker��� problem.�����Ghost workers are people who are on the public payroll, but are not to be found in the public offices, either because they are dead, retired or have better things to do. They are found at both the federal and state level. Earlier this year, the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) claimed there were��62,000 ghost workers��on the federal payroll. The NLC has fought such practices at the national and��state levels.
According to former Minister of Finance,��Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, economic incompetence and corruption��makes��budgeting ���hell.��� Though some politicians may truly fight corruption, few politicians support the workers��� struggle, or labor rights.
Take for instance Presidential candidate,��Oby Ezekwesili,��former Federal Minister of Education (2006-2007), who is acclaimed internationally for her promotion of girls��� rights both in education and as part of the ���Bring Back our Girls��� campaign. While in Oslo during a talk on education and peace, I had the opportunity to have an informal conversation with her. I am interested in the role of trade unions, so��I��asked her if she had discussed her then educational reform plans with the Nigerian Union of Teachers (NUT).��Her response was: “Imagine that, the teachers in Nigeria want to negotiate a collective agreement!” Trying to refer to the ILO convention of��the right��to bargain, and the fact that we were in a country where that is taken for granted even for police and army staff���and where unions are considered professional partners in issues of quality of education, she simply said ���You and I will never agree.���
The private sector��are��as much to blame for corruption, and for breaking labor rights. And international economists are not alone in arguing against increased salaries. Former Nigerian President, Olusegun Obasanjo, is currently touring to promote his��Making Africa Work ��� a Handbook. Promoted as a handbook for African leaders, focusing on how to attract investments for growth and job creation, it��it��is basically a neoliberal manifesto. Former President of Malawi, Joyce Banda is quoted in a blurb: ���I wish I had this handbook when I was president of Malawi. It not only offers convincing arguments on what to do, but practical examples and steps on how to get things done.��� I think workers in Malawi should be happy she did not have that book.��The book explicitly advocates low wages as a comparative advantage for African states to attract foreign investments, and implicitly promotes fragmented and flexible labor organizations and collective bargaining. In other words: weakening the unions.
When Obasanjo and his co-author, the South African Greg Mills, launched the book in Norway, I asked them about how we could ensure that the assumed investments would over time improve the conditions of the African working poor, when minimum salaries in Ethiopia, Nigeria and South Africa are reported to be below the poverty line. Mills gave a long answer, focused on how difficult it was to attract investments and create jobs, but without any plan or idea on how to ensure��decent work and working conditions��for the working poor, short or long term. He did not even try a��trickle down��argument, but ���reminded me��� that the alternative to low wages is no wages, or lower income in the informal sector. An answer that��is both arrogant and ignorant.��According to him, African workers are to be grateful for jobs with wages that cannot support their basic housing and food needs.
Promoting job creation without decent wages and labor rights, is like a promoting democracy without freedom of speech and political parties.��Furthermore, minimum wages actually apply to the informal sector. Counter to common assumptions, sociologist Jimi Adesina (1994) found that after the expansive growth of informal sector during the liberalization of the structural adjustments in��the��1980s and 1990s, many informal sector workers earned more than formal sector workers. Though Adesina���s numbers are outdated (I have not been able to find updated and trustworthy numbers), there is no reason to believe this is not the case today.
Even in a country like Nigeria, without (historically) or with a limited democracy (presently), where politicians only partly rely on a popular mandate, no ruler can stay in power without a certain level of support. Nigerian unions have voiced popular concerns, and been able to mobilize beyond their members by linking workers��� issues to broader bread-and-butter issues and democracy struggles.��Unions��� roles in promoting democracy in the 1980s and 1990s��is well documented. Since 1999, the unions have cushioned labor law reforms;��mediated between political institutions (strengthened the role of parliament against the executive) and between the��state and citizens; resisted deregulations of the oil industry and protected the purchasing power of poor people and workers through minimum wages and resisting fuel subsidy removal. The unions have challenged the Nigerian political elites, primarily by exposing and fighting corruption, but also by promoting leftist politics.
Nigerian political leaders have tried to break the popular power of the Nigerian trade unions throughout the country���s history, and Nigeria continues to be one of the worst countries in the world for workers, with ���no guarantee of labor rights.��� In addition to the direct repression of the most brutal military dictators, President Obasanjo tried to break the unions through the law. In 1978, by military decree, he tried to control the unions from above by allowing only one labor��center��(the NLC) and one union per industry. This largely failed, though it made the unions vulnerable. The union members at the grassroots ensured union militancy and independence, even when the NLC leadership was in the government���s pockets (such as during the��democracy struggles in the 1990s). In 2005, President Obasanjo tried to reverse and liberalize the��labor��law in a blatant attempt to curtail��labor��power though fragmentation.
The NLC was able to resist this. While Obasanjo wanted any two unions to be able to form a��labor��center, the National Assembly ensured that 12 unions that did not already belong to a��center were needed to form a new��center. The ULC, formed in 2015 as a splinter union by disgruntled leaders from the NLC congress, has not been registered because��their members already belong to NLC and TUC. (The 2005 law also opened for the registration of TUC, organizing white collar workers that were not allowed to organize into trade unions until then).��ULC have��accused��NLC of obstructing their freedom of association. It is true that it does not follow freedom of association standards, at the same time the law continues to ensure trade union unity (as since 1978). From not being on talking terms, the fact the ULC has been included in the tripartite fora alongside NLC, raises the hope for reunification of the Nigerian union movement.
The unions��� ability to organize and mobilize, and to put pressure on political and economic elites through strike actions and negotiations, has relied on unity but also on a strong militancy at the workplace and close alliances with civil society allies.
This workplace strength��has been concentrated in key private sectors such as textile and oil. Following the 1978��labor��law, and obligatory union membership and the automatic deduction of dues, public sector unions have largely neglected grassroots organization. (With some important exceptions). Deindustrialization (of textile) and outsourcing, casualization and export processing zones (as in the��oil sector)��structurally challenge the grassroots organization in the private sector. The withering of a well-organized and militant grassroots was also caused by a��long time��neglect of traditional organizing, in particular recruitment and training.
The Nigerian left (as discussed��here) and��therefore��unions��� driving ideological basis lost momentum after 1990, contributing to unfocused union strategies. The recent��attempt��to��revitalize��the Nigerian left,��should include a clear place for the unions. While the unions need��comprehensive��ideas to build their unity and strength from the grassroots by attracting the youth,��the left��will depend on the unions�����structures��and mobilizing potential.
Alliance politics have contributed to the unions��� social, economic and political significance at the workplace and beyond. Civil society allies have supported the unions in minimum wage and pension struggles. In 2005, the formation of LASCO (Labour and Civil Society Coalition) formalized this alliance between ���labor friendly��� civil society organizations, TUC and NLC. Whereas during the repressive years of the 1980s and 1990s, few organizations had the strength and capacity to take leading public roles.��With the opened spaces policy started in 1999, there is now increased��contestation of popular representation. This was particularly clear during the controversies over the NLC���s role in the Occupy Nigeria movement. Unions lost control and were challenged by political actors as well other civil society actors in their claim to represent ���voices of the poor.���
The unions��� popularity never translated to a sustained political power, although they have several times since the 1960s tried to establish or revitalize a Labour Party (LP). This can be explained by people acting according to short term interests��(in��having ���their man in power���) against their long-term ideals (anti-corruption, redistribution). Unionists who entered politics have also not found the LP as an interesting��party��ticket, as there is little money in it. Former president of NLC (1999-2007), Adams��Oshiomole, ran on an All Progressive Congress (APC) ticket as governor of Edo state (2008-2016). He is now National chairman of the APC.��Although his electoral support was based on his background and popularity from his time in the unions,��Oshiomole��is not seen as a representative of��labor��in politics.��Oshiomole��led massive strikes against Obasanjo���s attempts to remove the fuel subsidies��in the early 2000s, which lead to��his��arrest as well as the 2005 labor law reform. During Occupy Nigeria in 2012,��Oshiomole��wanted to��do away with the fuel subsidy��and lobbied the unions to call off the fuel subsidy strike.
The minimum salary negotiations��have again put the Nigerian unions where they belong: at the forefront of the struggle for poor people. Nigerian unions and unionists are not free of corruption and political manipulation, and some are likened to a ���mafia.��� However, in the larger picture, the unions play a formalizing role, a challenge to corruption and an actor in and for democratic processes. Despite their own problems and limitations, without the collective power of the unions, there are few political forces that poor Nigerian workers can lean on. Signing agreements ���is the simple issue, implementation has always been the bane of policies in Nigeria.��� And the NLC, one of Africa���s biggest unions, says they still stand by to strike should implementation of the new wage drag.
December 13, 2018
Looking for my religion
Cristo Negro, Portobelo, Panama. Image credit Adam Jones via Flickr.
When I was growing up in rural Kenya, my father, a Seventh-day Adventist (SDA) imposed Adventism upon us like a colonial identity card. My father got it from his mother. We had to carry it around to show that we were better than others���mostly, Catholics and non-believers. We were being taught denominational politics���that even though we were worshipping the same God as Catholics, the latter had their shortcomings. Unlike them, our bodies were free from the impurities of tobacco and alcohol. Alcohol was prohibited. Coke and coffee were prohibited while soybean was touted as the best alternative. Soybean was alien to us at this point. It was always imported and sold in shops in Nairobi. Coffee and tea were abundantly available from local farmers.
My mother protested SDA and its restrictions. Having grown in a big traditional family where religion was a pastime and not a primary way of life, she was ambivalent about religion. My dad should have also protested, long ago. My uncle too. The church never accepted them the same way they accepted the church. Both are polygamists. As a teenager, while I could partake in Holy Communion��in the SDA, my grandfather, father and my uncle could not. They joined other males, mostly polygamous men in grudgingly walking out of the church during Holy Communion. I was too young to understand this form of punishment from an all loving God. I have since come to understand that this was a form of rigidity with which foreign religions and cultures arm-twisted cultures they perceive as inferior into subjugation.
Deeply entrenched polygamy in our community was the elephant in the room at our local church. Most men seated in the pews were heads of polygamous families. By depicting polygamy as barbaric, the church imported foreign values to our community as well as created tension within families through emotional blackmail of polygamous males. Of course, many women like my grandmother found polygamy an oppressive institution and missions such as the SDA that prohibited polygamy, gave women an alternative to build nuclear families and a safe space for personal development. Nonetheless, I continue to wonder why dad continued with this church, later embarking on a project to build a big church closer to home. Also, what motivates communities in Africa to continue with churches that deeply conflicted with their ways of life?
In the early 80s and 90s, during the early era of HIV/AIDS, there was a visible rise in televangelism and miracle healing. There was also a corresponding increase in the number and prominence of traditional healers and medicine men. While prayers are made in public for all these throngs of young and women dying of these incurable diseases, privately, African traditional medicine men and women were sought to appease whatever spirits that had brought this curse to the people. Mainstream churches blind to the reality of HIV/AIDS continued��preaching against contraceptives and abstinence while in the dead of the night, when the church had fallen asleep, traditional healers were brought to prescribe final rites for the dead. I remember attending public gatherings where community leaders accompanied by health practitioners would discourage people from my community from performing any rites involving sexual practices to the dead in an effort to curb the spread of HIV.
This perpetual conflict between traditional spiritual practices and Christianity has always been a source of both personal and communal conflict. I remember when my uncle Ben was sick, strangers would visit ostensibly to pray for him. I knew these people were not Catholics or Seventh-day Adventists. I could tell they were traditional medicine men and women. Sometimes they would stay for days and I would hear my grandmother telling her fellow women from the church that these medicine men were distant relations who were visiting. I could tell she appreciated the inadequacy of the Christian God in these difficult situations. I could also sense her personal struggles with it. The guilt in resorting to traditional medicine when she had lost faith in the ability of Christianity to heal my uncle Ben. We were deep in rural Africa, yet she did not feel free to follow the practices of her people.
One of the enduring impacts of Christianity in my life was the image of the white savior. This image was thrust on my young mind through the powerful sermons on Saturday by our local pastor. He always ended his sermons by commanding us to ���fall at the feet of the cross��� and ���obey.��� Obedience would ensure blessings and prosperity. This image of falling at the image of a white male has always overwhelmed me���especially in the United States where white superiority is always hanging over black and brown people���s head like a dark cloud.
I recently made a trip to Southeast Asia and had a chance to experience a deity that wasn���t in the image of a white savior. I was overcome by the power of massive statues of Buddha that resembled the local people. They were in all shades of brown, dark brown and sometimes black. Having lived in the US for almost four years now, I was puzzled by the free uncensored color continuum of Buddha statues. I made note of this and asked my hosts and friends, who were surprised by my observation, about it. They have never made similar observations. The differences, they said came down to design and material used to make the statues of Buddha. There were no subliminal racial messages of superiority and inferiority in these statues. I apologized and let them know that I live in an environment where race permeates every fabric of the society.
This experience introduced me to a unique reality that most Africans who are Christians have never had. The reality and the power of having a God who resembled the locals, who looked like the local rickshaw driver, beggar, teacher and local doctor hit me with a very strong wave of reality. It brought back memories of the many times my father struggled to contort reasons to reassure me and my siblings that as much as the Christian God had very explicit white features, inside, he looked like us, Africans. And that before this God, all races were equal. I was always confused by this halfhearted assertion. I felt like we were always struggling too hard to impress the Christian God and would always all fall short. We felt different.
I have started thinking of how powerful and relatable it would be to have a God whose image members of my community would easily relate to. This would empower and inspire many people��like myself, and the challenges I face introducing my son to religion in this race charged environment. How can I find a balance in the bible, a book full of inspiration to challenge and overcome oppression, when the same book has been used as a tool to brainwash and control my people for generations? This has been my biggest dilemma, and I believe it is shared by other young pan-Africanists seeking to find a god who looks like us. I have struggled with thoughts of taking my son to my grandmother���s church in Kenya. I cannot discount the importance of this church to my family and community, but I also know that this church continues to pass judgment on older males in my community���changing practices in my community.
Again, I have to ask myself, “who is this all powerful, African deity I am seeking? Where is this deity?” Is it possible to reconstruct and empower all the traditional African deities destroyed by colonizers and missionaries? Moreover, can communities be empowered to find strength in their old ways of thinking?��This is the space and personal conflict that Christianity has imposed on me and my community.��Sometimes the presence of the Seventh-day Adventist church in my community feels like domination. Sometimes it looks like a space that offered my grandmother sanctuary and gave her a purpose to life. I wish there was a middle ground, a space of acceptance without any preconditions. I also recognize that my community and I, as well as many communities across Africa hold no vote in reshaping any practices brought to Africa by missionaries, even in instances where we feel they do not align to the traditional values of our communities. We need something else, a god who looks like us.
December 12, 2018
The silences in academia about capitalism in Africa
Iron ore loaded trains at the Saldanha terminal, South Africa. Image credit JB via Flickr.
African Studies has a significant problem to engage collectively, explicitly, and critically with the thing that is ever more a point of discussion around the world: capitalism, more specifically with capitalism as a social phenomenon, topic and concept.
There is a significant shortage at the heart (and top) of the African Studies community in Western Europe, and arguably across the entire Global North, of an explicit, focused, sustained, large-scale collective exploration, about the many, multifaceted features of contemporary capitalism on the continent, and about characteristics of African��societies��as capitalist societies.
I first made the argument��about��the��under-utilization of capitalism as an analytical category��in 2016.��I subsequently��organized a roundtable titled ���African capitalist society�����at that year���s��African Studies Association of the UK (ASAUK) annual conference, and started a blog series on��the Review of African Political Economy���s��blog��titled��Capitalism in Africa��(CiA) a few weeks later.
Here,��I want to continue this line of enquiry and basically��to��make two points. The first is to present some actual data concerning conference titles of major African Studies conferences��in the Global North. The second point is to make an argument in favor of one of the positions that is at the heart of the��CiA��series on roape.net: that many African countries are by now capitalist societies and analytically need to be treated as such. In other words, that a number of social phenomena in several African countries can be seen to be typical of a capitalist society, and thus are comparable to similar phenomena in other capitalist countries, across the world, including the��Global��North.
For example, in countries such as Uganda and Kenya, and especially in their major cities, one can find plenty of social phenomena that are typical of contemporary capitalist society across the world. Whether they occur in the Global North���London, Berlin, Paris���or in Africa���Pretoria, Nairobi, Kampala���the mix��and type��of similar phenomena��is striking: social media (Twitter, Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram, influencers, followers, twitter shit storm; fake news debates);��dating apps (Tinder);��marketing and advertisement;��the entertainment industry (comedy; music; lotteries;��commercial TV including shows��with a focus on��investment, property, jackpots,��dating,��cultural competitions [best voice, comedian etc.], and formats such as��reality��TV [e.g.��Big Brother]��or��we-change-your-life-in-an-instant [e.g. house improvements in poor neighbourhoods]);��urban transport (Uber,��Taxify);��shopping arcades;��corporate sponsorship of social events and initiatives (education, health, culture, sports);��books present/advertised about individual success, wealth, happiness, turn-around-your-life and thinking-like-the-successful;��privatizations��and public-private partnerships;��commercialized education��and��health��sectors;��the presence of powerful TNCs (in banking,��business consulting, communication, security, transport and logistics, tourism, real estate,��food & beverages,��hospitality,��etc.);��gated communities;��evictions;��gig/night/24-7-moneyneversleeps economy;��jobless growth;��precarity;��under-/unemployment;��poverty wages;��fraud and corruption; economic��inequality;��luxury��and��opulence;��4��4;��VIPs and celebrities;��sugar daddies;��betting;��loan offers (via TV, radio, newspapers, billboards);��personal indebtedness;��mental illnesses;��protesters vs. riot police battles,��surveillance technology,��public debates about an economic, political and moral crisis,��etcetera. In short, to the question can some African countries be regarded as capitalist countries from the point of view of observable social phenomena in everyday life, in the big cities, then the answer I would give is an emphatic yes, of course. What else do you think these examples point to: pre-capitalist, feudal? But I will get to this second point later.
First, some statistics: an incident earlier this year made me curious about the usage of the word “capitalism” in titles of European African Studies conferences. I started my search with the titles of past European Conferences on African Studies (ECAS) and guess what? Nothing. Not a single reference to capitalism or imperialism. However, I realized I needed to get more data to see if ECAS was the norm or an outlier. So,��I asked my long-term research collaborator,��Nataliya Mykhalchenko, to extend the search to include other major Northern conferences from the last decade. This sort of ad-hoc, rough, time-pressed analysis of the conference titles of some of the major African Studies gatherings in the Global North gives clear���yet what some might all ���anecdotal������evidence of a very peculiar relationship of the discipline with Capitalism-as-social phenomenon and Capitalism-as-analytical-frame. At the minimum, the overview of conference titles shows that the term has hardly ever made it into any main- or sub-title of an African Studies conference for years.
So, we have compiled the conference titles for the following: ECAS (2005-19; 8 entries), African Studies Association Germany (VAD, 2008-18, 6), Canadian Association of African Studies (CAAS, 2009-2018, 10), African Studies Association (ASA in the��United States of America) (called annual meetings; 2008-18, 11) and African Studies in Italy (ASAI, 2010-18, 4 entries with titles). Out of 39 entries then, exactly 1 entry (or 2.56%) had capitalism in the conference title. The��VAD 2016 Berlin had the title “Africa in a capitalist world”; though note that for various reasons, this 2016 gathering was an unusual, shortened mini-VAD conference, with only one main conference day, instead of the usual three. If we include in the sample other regular major African studies gatherings in Western Europe���the Nordic Africa Day (2007-18, 8 entries), and the gatherings organized by the Netherlands Association for Africa Studies (NVAS; lately called NVAS Africa Day) (2006-18, 13 entries)���the ratio goes up to 1/60 (1.67%).��We have also��checked��the titles for the African Studies Association of Australasia and the Pacific (AFSAAP, 2008-2018, 11 entries)��given that��Australia��is regarded to be part of the Global North and��seems to be major if not dominant actor in the Association.��Nothing, still. So, ECAS was not an outlier after all, quite the opposite.
What does this data indicate?
I don���t want to speculate about the cognitive or political dimensions of the process of title setting here. But everybody who has ever been part of a conference (or workshop) knows that titles���as well as conference blurbs, programs,��panels, roundtables,��catalogue of abstracts��etc.���are typically products of a longer collective process of deliberation, laying out and weighing the options,��(de-)selecting,��drafting, editing etc. So, it is evident that “capitalism” as a conference theme has not won the day very often, and this must be weighed against a background of a widening public debate across several countries in the North on capitalism-as-point-of-discussion. Yet, capitalism has not been deemed suitable to headline these large important, days-long scholarly gatherings across Europe (and North America) that actually, in one way or another, shape the intellectual framing and priorities of a significant number of the hundreds of attending scholars, students and researchers and related publications down the line.
Of course, some might argue that conference titles are very general and surely conferences that have transformations, inequality, and so on in the title are discussing capitalism and/or its current variant neoliberalism. Still, there is a difference here between a theme being implied or explicit, in the blub or in the title. So again, we can ask the question, why did capitalism-as-a-scholarly-theme lose out, while other themes carried the day and were crowned with a conference title? I could easily end the��analysis��with this question, but let���s carry on a bit.
First, there are of course occasionally panels and even streams in these very big African Studies conferences that directly refer to “capitalism” in the title and of course, there are workshops or other scholarly gatherings in the North that are dedicated in one way or another to the analysis of capitalism in Africa. In addition, of course, there are plenty of African Studies conference panels that neither have capitalism in their title nor blurb, but discuss some of the many issues on the continent that are shaped by capitalism, whether explicitly acknowledged and analyzed by paper presenters or not: think of panels, papers and workshops on extraction, poverty, hunger, conflict, inequality, tradition, migration, and so on. And, of course, articles get published that deal with capitalism more or less head-on and extensively. And finally: There are discussions in African Studies that explore, in one way or the other, aspects of the��CiA��theme. Relevant discussions run under different headings such as production, (fair) trade, industrialization, agrarian change, labour markets/relations, employment, urbanization, middle class, youth, informal economy, entrepreneurship, hustling,��futurity��etc. But this is not the point.
What I am talking here about is the place of the capitalism-theme in the overall analytical landscape of the discipline. The titles of major conference are important; they play a special role in shaping political and intellectual debate. They signal intellectual relevance and urgency and are set-up against alternative themes. They indicate the play of forces concerning (i) analytical and thus also political priorities (and frames), and therefore (ii) set the agenda for the discipline as a whole. There is a difference, one would expect, between keynote speeches about, say, Capitalist Africa-Capitalist Africans vs. Urban Africa-Urban Africans (the theme of ECAS 2017).
So again, at this point I can conclude: there is a long-standing pattern here of those who have the power to set major-conference agendas in the North���via selecting particular titles and keynote speakers, and, consciously or not, de-selecting other possibilities���to not choose “capitalism” as a conference title. In other words, conference organizers across the North have for years, possibly decades, pursued other framings for major conferences and appear for unknown reasons uninterested, reluctant, or whatever in using capitalism as a core frame of��conference discussion. There seems to be something particular then about the way African Studies engages with capitalism, as a social phenomenon, theme and concept.
Still unconvinced? Go to the conference theme text of ECAS 2019. The conference title is “Africa: Connections and Disruptions.” While many past and present analysts of the global economy and society regard capitalism���i.e., “the system,” “the machine,” this particular form of social order���to be the mother of disrupters, does capitalism get a mention in the conference blurb? Is it not a fairly established analytical insight of the social sciences that capitalism brings relentless change, often very radical, turbulent, disruptive and tragic? Isn���t the African continent a major example of this core global feature of capitalism? And yet, the theme blurb of seven-hundred and fourteen words makes no reference to capitalism as a force of change and, surely, this cannot be an issue of limited space. Yet the blurb refers to amongst other things, North-South interventions, finance, financialization, financial inclusion, global economy, global value chains, transaction, consumer markets, economic and debt relations, etc., but not a word on capitalism, imperialism, class, TNC/corporation/firm. I used the search engine repeatedly to make sure I had captured the data correctly but there were no matches. Why is capitalism not mentioned even though reference to it could have been made easily and appropriately? To press the point: Why does capitalism in Africa not get a bullet point of its own? Maybe I am splitting hairs, yet, equally, perhaps this blurb is an excellent exemplar of my overall point, with all my disclaimers.
Just for comparison: earlier this year I attended the Mwalimu Nyerere Intellectual Festival at the University of Dar es Salaam. The festival theme was the following: “The Second Scramble for Africa: The Quest for Socio-Economic Liberation of the Majority Poor.” Although not using the C-word directly, the use of the term “scramble” is a very direct reference to the topic of imperialism on the continent, and therefore to a major general phenomenon in capitalist political economy. The political difference between this gathering���s title and the typical titles of European conferences that I have encountered over the years (headlined with words such as mobility, connections, flows, engagement, creativity, transformation,��past-present��etc.) was striking.
With my curiosity on this topic of conference titles and blurbs still running high, I��recently��looked at the program of the ASA (US) 2018, a gathering, according to ASA website information, of “about 2000 scientists and professionals,” with “more than 300 panels and roundtables.” I had very limited time at hand, so I searched the program document only for the following: capitalism (3 entries, one of it a roundtable, titled: “Capitalism and African history: A conversation”), “capitalist” (1), “class” (5), “class conflict” (0), “class struggle” (0). Neither the title (“Energies: Power, creativity and afro-futures”) nor the��CfP��blurb (or list of “Themes and chairs”) makes reference to “capitalism” or “capitalist.” There is one reference to “class” in the��CfP��(“How have hierarchical systems along axes of age, gender or social class been reproduced or contested in reference to the management of mobilities and��labor?”). The quick check confirms the earlier finding:��CiA��is a fringe topic in major African Studies conferences in the North.��Notably, there is another Area Studies field that has, for historical reasons amongst others, a particular relationship with the capitalism concept as well: Eastern European studies.
This state of affairs has of course consequences concerning what gets analyzed��and��how, what gets (mis-)represented, marginalized, left out etc. For example, concerning one of my own area of interests, corporate crime, very few academic studies exist on this topic that are��exploring an African case study. Thus, the available global literature on corporate crime, the respective criminological theories and conceptual tool sets (crimes of the powerful, state-corporate crime, etc.) are hardly mobilized for the study of��CiA.��Roughly the same, as far as I can see, can be said about the investigation of many other political-economic and socio-cultural phenomena of capitalist society; corporate lobbying and spin, for example. If one breaks it down to particular countries, the literature on capitalism in contemporary Uganda for instance is sparse. The scholarly situation is not much different in neighboring Kenya.��I regard South Africa as an exception in this regard. We could also extend this discussion to the��issue��of the��many��political-economic, social��and��cultural aspects of imperialism in Africa as well.��In my view, there are major deficits and gaps here too.
Before I conclude, I want to share with you one final bit of data we assembled. Conference titles are one thing, but what about African Studies journals? Does capitalism get some significant analytical attention in the published work? To start with, how about the top-ranked journal: African Affairs? Let���s find out.��This is how my collaborator Nataliya summed up her research and analysis:
Through some basic word searching I counted how many research articles had a term (at least) once in either title or abstract in the last five years (2013 ��� 2017). I focused on words “capitalism,” “capital,” “neo-liberal/neoliberalism,” “class” and “market.” In the leading African Studies journal African Affairs, the word “capitalism” appears in two articles in this period: one by��Alex Beresford in 2015��and the other one��by Anne Pitcher��in 2017. This amounts to about 1.77% out of all the one-hundred and thirteen studied articles. The related concept of “capital” appears in four articles, so does the word “class.” “Neoliberalism/neo-liberal/neo-liberalization” has seven articles and the word “market” six. The Journal of Modern African Studies contains two articles that mention “capitalism” (one of which is “green capitalism”); two with “capital”; five with “class”; one with “neo-liberal”; and seven with “market” (total of��one-hundred and nineteen��articles).��The Review of African Political Economy��has nine articles with “capitalism” (plus one with “philanthrocapitalism”); nineteen with “capital”; seventeen with “class”; fifteen with “neoliberal/neoliberalism”; sixteen with “market” out of a total of one-hundred and sixty-six articles. The Journal of Southern African Studies has three articles with “capitalism”; ten articles with word “capital”; ten with “class”; eight with “neo-liberalism”; and twenty with “market” out of a total of three-hundred and five articles.
So, to pick out just one figure for the purpose of analytical narrative: the rate of capitalism for African Affairs speaks to the earlier finding coming out of the conference analysis, capitalism���as a phenomenon, theme, or concept���is peripheral, at least in the vital title and abstract section. Which term then is the top-term in this top-journal? Today, we have no time for that important question.��And, in this text I can also not analyze relevant conferences that are taking place on the African continent or relevant journals produced in Africa.
Finally, let me repeat the key points: First, many social phenomena in a range of African countries can be regarded as social phenomena of capitalist society, and that this has implications for the debate about and study of (Ci) Africa. Second,��CiA��is a fringe topic in African Studies (and African Studies has, for various reasons, a very peculiar analytical relationship with capitalism). African Studies only studies a rather limited range of the many social phenomena of��CiA.��The collected and analyzed��CiA��data is rather minimal given the size and diversity of the phenomena. In short,��CiA��doesn���t get the analytical attention it deserves.��In other words, yes, there is scholarship on��CiA; yet, as of now, it is too little.
Importantly, this observation and argument seems to be applicable beyond the academic community. The issue seems to be similar when it comes to government officials and public servants/technocrats, both in Europe and Africa: they rarely use the C-word in their public analyses, speeches or statements regarding specific affairs on the continent/in particular countries. You may want to check for donors, NGO staff, and public commentators too. All in all then, while so much of the Africa related analysis we see is framed around matters of development, security, poverty, democracy, ethnicity, policy, agency and so on, a considerable amount of these writings, does not acknowledge or make much of the fact that the phenomenon occurs in a capitalist context, which is both global and local (Graham Harrison made a related point a while ago when he observed that scholars of development regularly do not acknowledge that what they actually study, namely��capitalist��development).
A few final questions then: Can anyone please point me to the��state of the art��article on contemporary��CiA? Or point me to information about, say, just a handful of large scale, well-funded, years-long research projects that explored, via critical analysis, one of the themes of��CiA��head-on and produced a website, tweets, blogs, news feeds, web discussions, working papers, multiple workshops, special issues etc., i.e. the range of output formats that are common for (the most) well-funded, visible, less fringy topics in African/development studies? Did we already have a collective discussion about whether some of the African countries can indeed be regarded as capitalist societies, and what sort of analytical implications follow from whatever one���s position might be on this topic? Or is this not a relevant discussion to have?��What has the here discussed state of affairs in African Studies concerning��CiA have to do with processes of academic knowledge production in the capitalist Global North?
Against this background, I argue the case for (the analytical usefulness of) a substantial expansion and intensification of both analysis and debate on��CiA���a de-fringing of��CiA��in African Studies. This is a call for a scholarship that pays considerably more attention and is much better equipped to analyze the varieties, complexities and dynamics of��CiA��in the contemporary period.
I end with one closing thought: if indeed capitalism is in town, then the status quo, the business as usual in��African Studies concerning��CiA��is, in analytical terms, with every passing day ever more inadequate, for capturing this fast-moving empirical reality: the expansion and intensification of capitalism in the cities and beyond. Much of what goes on regarding capitalism in countries like Uganda��or Kenya��remains unstudied. As the history and science of capitalism tells us it is a system that constantly expands and permeates, throughout the globe. Welcome to Capitalist Africa, then! And, African Studies, let���s talk���
In the journal analysis,��(i)��only research articles were included (not editorials, briefings, reviews); (ii) some of word combinations included: capital market, labour market, drug market, social capital, human capital, middle-class, working class and others (all of which were counted separately); (iii) ���keywords/tags��� that are often included alongside articles were not included.��After the first publication of this data on roape.net Nataliya also searched for the word ���capitalist��� in African Affairs and ended with two results: one in the referenced��article by Anne Pitcher from 2017, and the other by Sonia��Languille��(2016) in reference to ���capitalist class��� (an article that we captured already under ���class���).
December 11, 2018
The most powerful currency today
Image credit Megan Eaves via Flickr.
Many years ago, at Kuala Lumpur International Airport, I remember seeing the world���s hierarchies clearly defined with three distinct divisions at immigration: a visa on arrival section, temporary detention cells, and the everyday immigration queue. Brown South Asian citizens lined up for a rare opportunity at obtaining a visa on arrival, meanwhile mainly black��Africans filled the detention cells, and westerners, presumably carrying their exalted passports, filled the seamless immigration queues. Malaysia offers visa-free access to more African countries than most, and yet suspicion was reserved for holders of wretched papers.��Observing this, it was clear that cemented hierarchies of access based on nationality were stark and crystal clear.
Passport privilege remains an entirely unaddressed, unsustainable inequity, and the most consistently overlooked factor that defines every single immigration debate and�����crisis�����of movement and migration. Those soaked in the warm, comfortable balm of a privileged passport���freely traveling the world, subject to no scrutiny or suspicion, waltzing through immigration points with a 90-day entry stamp and a��smile, moving and settling at a moment���s notice, protected from presenting an ocean of evidence to justify your legitimacy as a decent human being���are often completely oblivious to the rare power they possess.
A very tiny minority enjoys this blissful ignorance��without recourse, this regal deference. That���s not how it works for the rest.
A small spotlight has finally been shed on an injustice suffered by nearly four-fifths of humanity. The music and literature industries in Britain and the United��States have made public the vast denial of visas to celebrated musicians and authors from across the Global South, with citizens of African countries scheduled to attend cultural festivals particularly hard hit. But it is the seemingly nefarious activity of the UK Home Office that has rightfully drawn the most ire.
Sorie��Koroma, an elderly, blind virtuoso of��Kondi��music from Sierra Leone (he is known as��Sorie��Kondi), was scheduled to perform last year in��the UK, Europe and had the hope of carving a new market for African acts in key cities in East Asia. With tour dates confirmed,��Koroma��applied for a UK visa in Freetown, Sierra Leone���s capital, through a third-party service, to which British and European embassies condescendingly outsource the handling of visa��applications.��Management��via local proxy��is a tried and tested colonial method.
Koroma��received an email stating that his visa type is usually settled in 15 days, and even less if an expensive priority service is purchased. However, the email added:�����unfortunately, the��processing of your application has not been��straightforward and we will be unable to decide your application within our customer service targets.���
Koroma��had performed in the UK before and repeat visitors are usually cleared quicker. After 60 days,��Koroma���s��passport was still held by the UK with��no explanation or option to rescind the application. He subsequently missed his tours everywhere.
Ghana���s legendary��King��Ayisoba��was in a���similar scandalous limbo, but his passport was returned in time. In many instances, British embassies or the main visa processing center in Sheffield have held onto applicants�����passports longer than the officially stated processing times, causing artists to be trapped for weeks, if not months, missing their shows worldwide. Incompetence and bureaucracy are not the menace. A pattern of holding passports hostage, and Europe���s insistence on���effectively moving���its southern border to the Sahel, reveal what can only be an official policy to police black and brown movement.
The loss of income is but one travesty; the indignity cuts far deeper.
This behavior came as a shock to many. Outrage on social media has been directed at embassies, immigration policy, corruption, the west���s sharp turn to the right, fascism, bigotry���the usual 2018 culprits. Directors of��major international festivals in Britain���jointly signed���a call to action for substantial policy changes to demystify a deliberately opaque process.
But the anger is amusing and long overdue. No one on the other side of the west���s gates are surprised. For us, there has always been three borders: the western embassy on our own soil dictating our mobility, intimidating immigration agents waiting on the��skybridge��just as the plane parks, and the final immigration and customs section.
Western visa regimes, conceived at the deathbed of empire���the British Empire at its peak allowed for varying degrees of free movement within the colonies���have long been about fortification, limiting freedom of movement, of privileging westerners at every conceivable economic, social, and political opportunity.
It���s why there are almost no Nigerian or Indian freelance journalists condemning corruption and investigating the monarchy in London,��but freelancers with British, EU and American passports can be found in numbers building their careers overseas.
It���s why in some of the best paying job markets in the world, like the tax-free income societies of pliant Gulf states,���salaries are determined by nationality, with unwritten laws guaranteeing western passport holders higher pay. In global financial centers, be it Singapore, Dubai, or Hong Kong, drowning in the hierarchies of capitalism,��western passports are the top of the food chain.
Citizenship is the most powerful currency today, often superseding race. It���s why a British citizen of Pakistani origin feels���entitled to slap���an Indonesian immigration officer after being told��she owes $4,000 for overstaying her entry by 160 days���a relatively paltry punishment for violating immigration law.
Passports are a hot commodity, and countries like Mauritius, boasting one of the best African passports, are���joining the marketplace���for�����citizenship planning�����that comes at six to seven��figure sums for more favorable papers.
Visa applications are largely an exercise in indignity, as anyone who has put together a meticulous visa application and been subject to the treatment of consular officials can attest. Valhalla���s gates apparently require a notarized, six-month bank statement with a sufficient average monthly balance, a 10-year travel history with evidence, signatures that match exactly on dozens of forms, and, on occasion, a clean health and police report. Western arrogance cannot fathom that many of us have absolutely zero intention of abandoning content lives to smuggle ourselves illegally into societies that are steadily depreciating in value.
Some nationalities suffer more than others. Citizens of African countries have nearly���50 percent���of all applications denied just in the UK, compared to just eight percent in the Middle East and 13 percent in South Asia.
Students accepted to top tier universities are routinely denied visas. This is a well-known reality for Haitians. Job seekers with sponsorship letters are not guaranteed employment. This is a reality for Indians. Elderly family members are often unable to visit their children. This is a reality for Lebanese. Tourists looking to simply holiday and contribute to ailing economies are not spared. This is a reality for Thai citizens, who graciously open their doors to all and sundry, but are not repaid the favor. Several African countries need a visa to merely��transit���yes, transit to catch a connecting flight���through the UK or some EU countries.
The trauma of lives, education, and careers dramatically interrupted because of inherently discriminatory visa policies is untold. A western passport liberates its holder to pursue ambitions while the rest must make the attainment of a western passport their end goal. Life choices are arduously shaped to guarantee new citizenship for themselves, and most importantly, their children.
Those that perish in the Mediterranean are condemned to the cruelest of fates because they lack the correct passports, and know all too well the futility of an extortionate visa application. There���s really little else to it. Were, say, Malian citizens able to engage in�����visa runs������leaving and returning to a country to gain a fresh entry stamp every few weeks, or how westerners often illegally migrate elsewhere���they would not be prey to slavers and human traffickers. Just think about that. Africans being shifted through the Sahel would rather pay tens of thousands of euros to the most sinister characters than even attempt to pay the two or three figure visa fees.
Once a successful career and corresponding documents demonstrating one���s financial standing were enough to secure a western��visa. As a literary festival in Scotland found out, too much money is���now grounds for denial, which is odd, because visa regimes are, at their core, a cash cow enterprise, simply another looting scheme to drain former colonies. Non-refundable visa��fees generated millions in revenue just last year. Over a million visas were���denied by the EU���in 2017. At the base��rate of 60 euros for a standard short visit visa, do the math.
One might say that class plays a role as wealthy elites enjoy more straightforward border controls. But even Russian billionaire Roman��Abramovich���recently discovered that his endless wealth and vast ownership of British assets was no panacea. As western power recedes, its ability to reign death from��the skies and its barbed wire visa approach are what remains of its grip of this world, and it will cling onto these remaining outlets of might as its five centuries of global domination gradually dissipates.
So why bother or persist? Because western visas are so powerful that their mere presence in a passport can waive the need for a visa to several other countries, like Turkey and Mexico, and grant the holder a legitimacy that even a globally acclaimed lifetime���s body of work cannot.
Indeed, western countries are not the sole privileged passport holders. Visa-free travel is afforded to countries with small populations, like Caribbean Islands, where Antiguan passports for instance are readily available for sale, or well-off societies that are anchors for��global capitalism, like Singapore or Mauritius. The arguments peddled to maintain visas revolve around poverty, a propensity for illegal migration, trade agreements, historic ties, and a host of other largely irrelevant factors.
Ultimately, visa regimes��come down to racism. It���s why several Latin American countries, thanks to European blood, are free to travel to the UK or Europe without a visa, while Asian countries with similar per capita incomes and population sizes are not. It���s why countries like Brazil and Colombia, despite a rich African ancestry, maintain stringent visas requirements modeled after Europe.
It���s why Australia considered���fast-track visas���for white South African farmers, subscribing to the white nationalist myth of a white genocide spurred by land reform policy.
The outrage in western cultural circles is justified and commendable as they stand up for African artists. But it���s perplexing, and revealing, how deeply the west is held as the exclusive domain for the world���s best acts. Indeed, fan bases in Europe for African musicians are sizable and, as record sales go, Europe is still the leading audience for African music. Losing steady access to the British market would have untold financial consequences, but perhaps it���s about time the indie music industry in the West caught up with the rest of the world, where several industries of all sizes see Europe or the UK as��less likely viable long-term markets. No business can survive without seeking new pastures.
This coordinated outrage did not exist when black and brown lives were irreparably damaged by the millions, but only when western audiences were denied summer entertainment. Only when western pleasures are jeopardized does one take notice of the gross injustices of access.
Western embassies and western immigration policy are not to blame. Neither is Brexit. Outrage should be directed at the root of the issue: an imbalanced, unsustainable, racist system of global movement. How much longer can this unequal arrangement survive when a tiny minority of the��world can travel visa-free to all corners of the Earth while the vast majority���s freedom of aspiration is determined within opaque consular walls.
Most western countries must still���follow Australia���s lead���in banning the travel of pedophiles,��who outrageously have greater mobility and access than respected African artists and professionals with spotless records. It is simply not sustainable.
What are the solutions? Reciprocity means little to the west. Many in the Global South will argue that��the west only understands the language it speaks to the rest of the world: force and strength. Are we to begin slapping intolerable visa restrictions on western citizens, starving our economies of multiple avenues of income? Are we to transform our embassies in western capitals into garrisons of indignity? Are we to follow the west���s toxic approach of fettering the human compulsion to migrate to brighter futures? Even if we took such extreme action, the response would undoubtedly be punitive.
From simply��the vantage point of music and culture, perhaps we can draw opportunity from a difficult moment. It���s time to cultivate new markets. Much of the west is closed. Why force the issue while hungry, young,��hyperconnected, touring markets like Asia, Latin America, and Africa await, eager to immerse in the global exchange, with an inevitable future helming the forefront.
It���s about time���no, far��overdue���that the majority of humanity, afflicted by the same fetters of movement, are blessed to experience the endless dynamism of live bands from across the African continent, rather than just the fortunate few in the west.
Writer��Kanishk��Tharoor���argues���that�����the privileges and restrictions of nationality loom as the apartheid��of the 21st century.�����Like all forms of apartheid, it comes with an inevitable expiry date.
The tyranny of good intentions
UN headquarters in Monrovia. Image via Wikimedia Commons.
In��July��2011, I found myself in the office of Ellen Margrethe���Loj, a Danish diplomat who was��then the top official in charge of the UN peacekeeping mission��in Liberia,��which was then less than a decade removed from its civil war. I was a member of a small team of graduate students��from Columbia University��who���d been assigned��to carry out research into��the���impact of a���massive post-war influx of foreign capital into natural resource extraction���there. Towering above the grit and hustle of Monrovia in her glass-paneled office, we delivered our findings.
Across the country, the new projects were causing chaos.���Multi-billion-dollar mining and plantation ventures���owned by the Chinese,���British, Russians, and everyone in between���were creating bitter land disputes, marginalizing increasingly frustrated forest communities, and fostering rampant corruption among local officials. There had been minor riots in some areas, and in nearly every region we���d���visited, the anger was palpable. It was, we warned, a volatile situation that could easily erupt into violence.
Throughout our presentation,���Loj���sat in her chair, listening intently with a dour���expression.���When we finished, she looked at us���from above her glasses, and said, ���Thank you for this, but���I expect you���ll hold off on publishing until after the election. You wouldn���t want to be known as the students who brought conflict back to Liberia, would you?������It was just a few months before Liberians���were scheduled to���head to the polls, where they���d decide��in November��whether to give a second term to���then-President Ellen Johnson���Sirleaf, darling of the international���donor���community.
Young, inexperienced, and not really in charge, we deferred to her request��despite our reservations.��Sirleaf��was subsequently re-elected in a runoff. And during her second term,���much of what we’d worried���about came to pass. There were��bloody riots at the palm oil plantations��and���iron mines��we visited,���clashes between security forces and villagers, and��only a fraction of the jobs and social services promised by the companies��ever appeared.
The report we wrote��was covered by the media��when��it was released a few months later, but I���ve always been uncomfortable with the decision to hold it until after the��charged election period, when it might have been used by the local press to force��Sirleaf��to answer tough questions about the impact of her economic policies. Whatever reception it might have gotten, why did���Loj���think it was appropriate to keep information from Liberians that might have helped them hold their leaders accountable in a rare moment when they had some leverage?
I���ve been contemplating this moment, which marked the beginning of nearly five years I spent working in and reporting on Liberia, since reading��ProPublica���s��investigation of a US-based charity called More���Than Me in October.��The investigation��detailed how the organization��failed to protect dozens of young Liberian girls at a school it operated from being sexually abused by a staff member. I knew���More Than Me���well.��I lived just a few blocks from the school for a���stretch��and��I first met Katie���Meyler, its founder, years before she won a million-dollar grant from JP Morgan Chase.���The awful story has rightfully provoked outrage and calls for accountability both inside and outside of Liberia. But it���s been instructive to note where the boundaries of those calls seem to have fallen.
ProPublica���s��investigation has largely been received as a cautionary tale about the archetype that��Meyler��represents: white saviors. And it���s understandable why. More Than��Me���s��portrayal of the girls in its school was exploitative and crude from the beginning, selling an absurdly simplistic and depoliticized solution to the problem of girls��� education in West Point.��Pitching donors on the idea that��a little bit of elbow grease and American optimism could work as a substitute for strong institutions in Liberia,��Meyler��often seemed like she���d emerged from a Hollywood casting call for white saviors in Africa. (The joke in Monrovia for years was that More Than Me really did seem to have a lot of “Me” in it.)
But the��cringeworthy��aesthetics of white��saviorism��aren���t the great offense here���the harm done to the young girls is���and in this, the focus on��Meyler��herself��obscures��rather than illuminates��the deeper lessons of the scandal.
A great deal��of commentary about the��ProPublica��story has explained the abuses as a result of��Meyler���s��amateurism, framing her as an unqualified intruder into the world of aid work.��Vox, for example,��pointed to her ���inexperience,�����arguing that the tragedy would have been avoided had she left the complexities of humanitarianism to the cadre of trained professionals who found her so distasteful for so many years in Liberia. ���Altruism that isn���t fortified by rigor or metrics can lead to disastrous results,�����writes Abigail Higgins.
The problem with this��analysis��is that it��completely contradicts��everything we know��about the aid and development��industry. The UN peacekeeping mission in South Sudan had more than its share of ���rigor,��� but that didn���t prevent its peacekeepers from��sexually abusing minors, nor were Oxfam���s ���metrics��� a firewall against its staff��hiring local sex workers��for orgies in Haiti. Glittering resumes at the WHO didn���t keep top officials��from looking the other way��while the Guinean government downplayed its Ebola epidemic in order to keep investors in the country, and it didn���t stop the UN from��causing a cholera outbreak in Haiti. In fact, scandals very much like��More Than��Me���s��are common in even the most elite aid organizations.
This obviously doesn���t let More Than Me or��Meyler��off the hook���the calls for accountability in Liberia are loud for good reason. But it should tell us that��Meyler���s��lack of credentials isn���t an adequate explanation for the scandal, and that if we want to understand what went wrong and why, we have to go beyond a simplistic critique of white savior figures. If the harm that More Than Me caused in Liberia is our focus rather than how we feel about��Meyler��herself, it means we have to think critically about other forms of harm that the aid and development industry cause in places like Liberia���and how they might be connected to what happened to those girls.
Liberia is��a complex nation,��and no��quick��sound bite��can��do it justice.��But��it���s fair to say that there are reasons to be concerned right now.��The economy��is in free-fall, with��skyrocketing inflation��at least partially linked to an��ongoing exodus of investors and aid workers��who���ve departed in��droves over the past few years along with the dollars they brought with them. Agriculture and education��remain��largely dysfunctional, and��corruption is so pervasive that over a hundred million dollars in currency appears to have simply��vanished from the port���with an official investigation offering the dubious explanation that it was��simply��never there in the first place.��It would be wise for the world to take a moment now and evaluate what the impact of fifteen years of intensive aid���which included one of the most expensive peacekeeping missions in history���actually accomplished.
Liberia is often touted as an aid and peacekeeping ���success story.��� But is it? Billions of dollars were spent on the reconstruction effort during the post-war period. Through its control over these funds, the international community exercised vast influence in the��Sirleaf��administration, shaping and guiding the country���s post-war economic strategy and playing an outsized role in��its��present trajectory. This generational effort had its successes���nobody would deny Liberia is in better shape now than in 2004���but it would be hard to argue that it produced the kind of lasting systemic change that most Liberians��were hoping for. Certainly, it should have more to show than an��economy in shambles along with health care, education, and agricultural systems that continue to rank among the worst on earth.
The architects of this effort had every degree, pedigree, and piece of resume candy on offer in the Western world.��But while they may have outclassed��Meyler��on credentials, what they��shared in��common with her were good intentions.��Like��Meyler,��most of those in charge of aid efforts��believed��they were improving��the lives of long-suffering Liberians. But good intentions are tricky. They can absolve us of the responsibility to engage in critical self-examination and provide cover for us to downplay or brush off our failures. And more importantly, they often serve to mask the ideology that underlies our efforts to ���help,�����blinding us to how conditioned those efforts are by our view of who we are��and whether our solutions are, in fact, the right ones…
In the��documentary��that accompanied the��ProPublica��investigation, one of the only Liberians involved in��the management of More Than Me��presents a��profound insight into the mentality of the charity���s funders���one which����cuts directly to the heart of philanthropy and aid��work.�����The customer for More Than Me isn���t the children, it���s the donor,�����he says. ���And our customer has no idea what���s going on with the kids in Liberia, nor do they really care.��� For More Than��Me���s��funders,��being able to celebrate a successful project was the priority. Whether that project was the best option for girls in West Point was an afterthought, as was any critical examination of whether it fit into a coherent vision of Liberia���s future.
The impulse to help is never value-neutral. Without exception, it is guided by ideology and��shaped by power.��More Than Me had a vision of change for young girls in West Point that��reflected��the��ideology��of��its��wealthy��US donors,��following a well-worn script for philanthropy that prioritizes the narcissism of Western elites over any kind of meaningful systemic change.��Those donors could easily, for example,��have demanded that the charity���s��day-to-day��management team included��Liberians with a working knowledge of West Point and the country���s education system,��structuring More Than Me to��embed��local staff at all levels of decision-making��and operations. Instead they��allowed��Meyler��to��wield near-absolute administrative power,��and to select��her local partners with the sole criteria��being��how useful they were to��her agenda���and��thus,��theirs.
But for��donors to have made such a demand,��their priority would have to have been finding local knowledge to support lasting change in Liberia rather than being able to celebrate their undeserved status as the gatekeepers of altruism.��There were��good intentions behind��More Than Me, but they were channeled through��a belief��that the��role of Liberians��should simply be to��help��Meyler��and her board implement��their��project, which existed to serve their egos as much as the lives of the girls they said they wanted to help. This is why there were no Liberians��in the room��at More Than Me��with the power to say�����something isn���t��right here��� without having to fear for their livelihood.
But��this��flawed approach isn���t the sole province of white savior figures like��Meyler��and their pool of��na��ve��donors. In fact, it��was mirrored in nearly every aid initiative implemented in Liberia during the post-war period,��including the overall economic plan��favored��by Western donors as the centerpiece of reconstruction. This model���auction��off��Liberia���s��land and��natural resources,��turn the country into a one-dimensional rentier state, and hope a domestic private sector emerged from the mist���was written in Western capitals and��pushed��by��development professionals��who were��myopically unwilling to��address��any criticism of its logic,��and��who are now��escaping accountability for��what looks a lot like��its collapse.
It���s fair to point out��that this strategy was not entirely imposed on Liberia.��Sirleaf��was a former World Bank director, and she��and her closest advisors��shared the ideology of the donors who footed much of its bill. But��had her ideas for change deviated significantly from��the interests��and economic ideology��of��those��donors, it���s hard to imagine she would have had the carte blanche support from the international community that she enjoyed for her two terms. It seemed clear during much of that period that they���d thrown their weight behind��Sirleaf��largely��because��they felt��she could be trusted as a custodian of their vision for��Liberia���s future.
This, I think, is why��Loj��asked us to bury our report until it couldn���t present a risk to��Sirleaf���s��electoral prospects. When presented with evidence that her implementation of the world���s��dogmatic��reconstruction agenda in Liberia was causing harm, the impulse was to protect the project���and her���rather than deal head-on with the harm. In this, there are some parallels to how��Meyler��related with the suggestion that Macintosh Johnson, a staff member at More Than Me,��might have been abusing young girls. Johnson was integral to��Meyler���s��ability to carry out her vision and fulfill the needs of More Than��Me���s�����customers,��� just as��Sirleaf��was for the powerful donors��financing��Liberia���s development. And thus, it wasn���t in the UN���s interest to disrupt their partnership or place her at risk.
Liberia often seemed to reflect��all��the worst��dynamics��of aid delivery��at once. On one hand, the imposition of a dubious top-down economic plan was placed entirely in the hands of��Sirleaf��and her advisors, with no effort to��create space for��dissenting voices��to participate in��planning or oversight. Reformers and watchdogs both in and out of��government who grasped that the plan was breeding corruption and elite capture of resources��were generally ignored so as to not disrupt high-level partnerships.��Simultaneously, most on-the-ground aid organizations��operated��in a very similar fashion to More Than Me,��implementing expensive pet projects with little coordination��amongst themselves��or meaningful guidance from Liberians��who wanted lasting change.
What���s striking about More Than Me is how the organization encapsulated both of those��dynamics at once,��establishing��its version of change��with little to no local input or oversight, and then��selecting its��partners based on how well they���d follow the script rather than any��genuine��desire for guidance. It���s here, in the charity���s flawed��approach��to ���helping��� where we see the crucial lessons of the scandal,��not��in a critique of��white savior amateurism��that���s��ultimately��pinned to��reverence for��credentials���a��particularly��absurd��response��given the state of the world we live in and who���s��been��in charge of it.
It���s far more helpful to think about the abuses that took place at More Than Me in terms of what might have prevented them. That framing should��lead us to examine��how input into aid projects is solicited, who���s brought to the tables of power, and how we can keep good intentions from becoming a channel for self-interest. At the core of the tragedy is the way we conceptualize what it means to ���help��� people in faraway places. Are we doing our due diligence to create partnerships that include accountability and bottom-up oversight, or are we swooping in with the blueprints already written and insulating ourselves from any critique of the solutions we���ve decided to invest ourselves in? If it���s the latter, harm will continue to occur, and not just at the hands of��small��charities like More Than Me.
The scandal is a call for us all to be��extremely cautious in how we translate our good intentions into action. Aid and philanthropy have become such an ingrained element of the flow of power in the world that we rarely stop to consider just how disruptive they can be.��Structural disadvantages in countries like Liberia make disbursal of aid a life-or-death matter for people and the form it takes can shape politics, sideline��or empower��talented reformers,��and exert far-reaching influence on the lives of those it affects.��Rather than recklessly bulldozing ahead out of an impulse to��do something��about poverty or injustice, we have to start��by��seeing aid for what it should be���a shared project in which we sit at eye level with people working towards change in the societies we want to help, and whose guidance and oversight��are necessary��if we want to be of any use to their future.
This requires a different���and far more subversive���form of generosity than��we���ve been conditioned to adopt:��the willingness to��abdicate and��meaningfully share the��very power that allowed us to be there in the first place,��and not just with those who we deem useful in carrying out our agenda.
In the wake of ProPublica���s investigation, the brilliant Kenyan writer��Nanjala Nyabola��tweeted a famous quote by Lilla Watson, an indigenous Australian activist: ���If you have come here to help me, you are wasting your time. But if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together.��� This call to humility and collective action is one that we���d all do well to bear in mind.��Meyler��and More Than Me are facing their reckoning, but accountability is not a finite resource, and the scandal is a call for us all to honestly examine the consequences of our good intentions, in Liberia as well as the many other countries that have felt their sting.
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