Sean Jacobs's Blog, page 238
December 3, 2018
The emperor has no clothes
King Goodwill Zwelithini kaBhekuzulu. Image: Wiki Commons.
On December 3, 2018, Goodwill Zwelithini kaBhekuzulu celebrates 47 years since his coronation as Isilo (King) of the Zulus of South Africa. Zwelithini (literally, ���What does the world have to say?���) was born on July 14, 1948, the eldest son of Paramount Chief Cyprian Bhekuzulu and his second wife, Thomozile Jezangani kaNdwandwe. Groomed to become king from a young age, Zwelithini was enrolled at Bhekuzulu College, the training institution for the sons of chiefs and headmen in Nongoma, and tutored in Zulu customs privately at the Khethomthandayo royal residence. Following his father���s death on September 17, 1968, Zwelithini went into hiding amid assassination threats. In his absence, the South African government installed his uncle, Prince Israel Mcwayizeni, as regent. Mcwayizeni served as regent until Zwelithini���s return to South Africa soon after his 21st birthday and marriage to his first wife. On December 3, 1971, Zwelithini was installed officially as Paramount Chief of the Zulus before 30,000 Zulus and a number of white administrators, including P.W. Botha (later Prime Minister and then State President under apartheid). Associated Press video footage from the event show a young man still in mourning for the father he never properly bid farewell to, struggling to keep his emotions in check at the mention of his father���s name. Watch:
From the moment of his installation, a pattern was established which would come to characterize Zwelithini���s reign, in which his political will was utilized to promote another���s end game. At the installation, it was M.C. Botha, the apartheid Minister of Bantu Administration (basically, the minister in charge of indirect rule), who used the occasion to remind the young king of his tenuous hold to power and his debt to the white authorities who allowed him to maintain his position.
In 1970, the KwaZulu Territorial Authority was established. In 1972, it got its own parliament, the KwaZulu Legislative Assembly (KZLA). Under the terms of the homeland���s new parliament, as defined by the Zulu Territorial Authority constitution and negotiated while Zwelithini remained in exile, the young king���s position remained ceremonial and the Zulu royal household remained alienated from the leadership of the new Bantustan. Mangosuthu Buthelezi, as chairman of the KZLA, emerged as the major authority and utilized his position to foster a Zulu nationalist movement. Buthelezi, who claimed familial ties to Zwelithini as well as a historical role for a member of his family (in this case, himself) as the king���s ���prime minister,��� named Zwelithini as the symbolic figurehead to promote his own agenda.�� On March 21, 1975, Buthelezi launched the Inkatha movement, paying homage in name to Inkatha Yenkululeko Yesizwe (Inkatha Freedom Nation), a cultural organization started by Zwelithini���s grandfather, King Solomon ka Dinuzulu in the 1920s. Inkatha ushered in a new era of Zulu nationalist politics. Ironically, the formation of the KwaZulu bantustan rested on an understanding on the part of apartheid���s rulers that Zwelithini would be easier to manipulate given his lack of experience in politics, as opposed to Buthelezi who represented a significant threat to white authorities��� plans for KwaZulu.
In the early years of his reign, Zwelithini occupied a subordinate position to Buthelezi, following his lead on matters of local politics and finding himself subject to the whims of the KZLA. Overtime, however, rumors of a feud between Buthelezi and Zwelithini escalated, gaining in intensity following the Isandlwana centenary celebrations in January 1979. (Isandlwana was an important battle between British colonial forces and Zulus ending which the latter won.) Although multiple news outlets published photos of the two leaders side-by-side, rumors spread that tensions were exposed when Zwelithini was excluded from making a speech during the day���s events. In reality, this tension had been festering since 1975, when Zwelithini became involved in the Inala party, a political organization spearheaded by Chief Mhlabunzima Maphumulo, with a more open hostility to apartheid and designed to oppose Inkatha. In reaction to this perceived slight, Buthelezi had been working to officially restrict Zwelithini���s power through his position in the KZLA. In the wake of the Isandlwana slight, Zwelithini refused to appear before the KZLA, at which point Buthelezi moved to lower his annual salary from R21,000 to R8,000. At this point, the king agreed to appear before the KZLA, only to be accused of unconstitutional conduct and to storm out of the session.
In 1980, news broke that Zwelithini had attempted to join the apartheid army, a move interpreted by many as a further challenge to Buthelezi. Buthelezi, as chairperson of the KZLA, rejected the king���s application. The ANC historian, Mzala, in the 1988 book Gatsha Buthelezi: Chief with a Double Agenda (a book Buthelezi has had banned), interpreted these events as symbolic of a new era in the kingship. ���Never before in the history of the Zulu had their king been subject to the control of a chief,��� he wrote, ���Yet the Bantustan system was able to make this possible.��� This moment made it clear that while Zwelithini enjoyed increased status under the bantustan system, it came at the expense of his autonomy; he was expected to support Inkatha and rail against its enemies, especially the ANC and other organizations involved in the armed struggle. (The Zulu royals and the KZLA���s relationship was a series of shifting alliances during the 1970s and 1980s, at least according to Buthelezi���s own telling.)
After the boycotts of the Tricameral Parliament elections (which granted voting rights to coloureds and Indians and local governments to blacks) of 1984 and the formation of the United Democratic Front (UDF), to oppose the reforms of Tricameralism, violence broke out which spun into a brutal civil war that lasted from 1985 to 1995, claiming 20,000 lives and displacing hundreds of thousands more. Inkatha supporters faced off against an alliance of UDF-ANC-South African Communist Party members who aimed to not only make South Africa ungovernable for the white minority government but also to punish those viewed as Apartheid sympathizers. The KwaZulu homeland by this point controlled most black people in the province���s lives ��� schools, health care, rental housing ��� and Buthelezi and the KZNLA was seen as an extension of apartheid. ��The violence between Inkatha also spread to areas around Johannesburg. It later emerged, via public commissions and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, that Inkatha had been supplied with weapons by the police and aided by government hit squads.
Throughout this period, Zwelithini attempted to maintain neutrality, but criticized the ANC at several critical junctures, which did little to endear him to a coalition who aimed to see the disbanding of traditional authorities once independence came. The leaders of the newly formed Congress of Traditional Leaders of South Africa (CONTRALESA) sought guarantees from the ANC that traditional authorities��� positions would be protected under the new dispensation; at a meeting in Lusaka in 1989, led by Zwelithini���s old ally Maphumulo, the ANC assured the leaders that they would protect traditional authorities. This guarantee from the ANC came just in time, as the government legalized the liberation movement in February 1990, signaling the final years of Apartheid. In response to the new presence of the ANC in South Africa as a legitimate power, Buthelezi transformed Inkatha into the Inkatha Freedom Party, intending it to mount a major challenge to the ANC���s political future in KwaZulu and South Africa more broadly.
The king and his ���prime minister��� enjoyed an uneasy peace into the early 1990s. As John Laband writes in the newly released biographical study of the eight Zulu kings, ���it seemed that the bullied monarch had decided to make the best of it,��� enjoying ���a lavish lifestyle paid for by the KwaZulu administration.���
At the Convention for a Democratic South Africa (CODESA), where the major parties negotiated South Africa���s political future, Zwelithini���s role emerged as a major point of contention between Buthelezi and the other CODESA delegates; Buthelezi refused to attend CODESA 2 (the second round of negotiations) in May 1992 in protest of the refusal by the ANC to clarify Zwelithini���s position. In 1993, the formation of the National House of Traditional Leaders secured Zwelithini���s future as the pre-eminent monarch of South Africa. Throughout this time, Zwelithini continued to struggle to find his place under Buthelezi���s regime, though he threw his support behind the Inkatha leader, pledging to protest the democratic elections if Inkatha was not allowed to participate. This presented one of the strangest alliances of the transition, with Zulu nationalists lined up next to two other unpopular homeland leaders (Gqozo in the Ciskei and Mangope of Bophuthatswana, who both refused the dissolution of their administrations as agreed at CODESA) as well as unrepentant white nationalists, to stop the elections.
In March 1994, armed Inkatha marched on the ANC headquarters in downtown Johannesburg. It ended in violence���it became known as the Shell House Massacre. Buthelezi and Zwelithini presented a united front. The newly elected South African President, Nelson Mandela, bypassed Buthelezi to foster a relationship with Zwelithini. Although Zwelithini���s position remained largely ceremonial in the final version of the Constitution (passed in 1996), President Mandela regularly included the Zulu monarch in decisions, both to maintain goodwill with the Zulu nation but also to bypass Buthelezi whom he found difficult to work with (to say the least).
In the new Kwazulu-Natal Province, which incorporated the KZN homeland, the IFP won the most votes (the election was marred by irregularities). One of the new Provincial Assembly���s first pieces of business, was to pass a provincial House of Traditional Leaders Act, designed to establish an advisory council of Zulu chiefs which virtually stripped the King of his authority as leader of all Zulu chiefs. The royal house issued an ultimatum that the IFP should repeal the Act or face the consequences, sentiments echoed by the ANC. The IFP passed the Act anyway, which was considered a blatant attack against the king. Though it was eventually repealed by presidential intervention, the die had been cast.
In September 1994, Zwelithini extended an invitation for newly elected President Mandela to join him for the annual Shaka Day celebrations (honoring the founder of the Zulu nation) in Stanger. Buthelezi responded to this news by boycotting the annual Reed Dance and inciting his supporters to storm a meeting between himself, Mandela and the king at the eNyokeni Palace. Attempting to calm tensions, Mandela agreed to not attend the celebrations, but the king cancelled that year���s Shaka Day festivities. Buthelezi and his supporters carried on with the events in the absence of the king. On the next day, Prince Sifiso Zulu, a member of the new advisory committee to the king, appeared on television to discuss the dispute and distance the royal family from Buthelezi. Buthelezi, in a nearby studio in the same facility, came on to the set and verbally attacked Zulu on camera before taking over the broadcast to present his version of events. After this outburst, the king���s legal adviser, S.S. Mathe, publicly denounced the events of that day as an insult to the king���s dignity and announced the severing of all ties between the Zwelithini and Buthelezi.
This rift came at an opportune time for the king, who no longer relied on Buthelezi for his financial security. Just before the transition in 1994, negotiations between the then ruling National Party and the Inkatha Freedom Party resulted in the formation of the Ingonyama Trust, a fund established to manage land owned by the KwaZulu government. These lands, representing approximately 2.8 million hectares of KZN���s 9 million-hectares, are vested under Zwelithini as a trustee. As Carolyn Hamilton notes in her book, Terrific Majesty (1998), ���With this transfer, Zwelithini was, for the first time in his reign, freed from direct financial dependence on the local authority headed by Buthelezi or his predecessors.���.
Under the administration of Mandela���s successor, Thabo Mbeki (1999-2008), the king continued to enjoy regular visits from the new president. At the same time, however, Mbeki depended on his deputy president, Jacob Zuma, to ameliorate relations between the ANC, the IFP, and the royal house. The journalist William Gumede argues that Zuma ���was more than able to match Buthelezi���s gift for using the symbols of Zulu culture for political ends,��� proving a ���natural at addressing traditional ceremonies in leopard-skin outfits, brandishing a shield and spear.��� Zuma���s adroit ability to bridge the gap between traditionalists and the ANC proved doubly important as he helped convince Zwelithini that he did not have to be an IFP loyalist in order to protect Zulu traditions.
Zwelithini also found increased security in both his position and his financial well-being under the Mbeki administration. The Nhlapo Commission, established by Mbeki under the Traditional Governance and Framework Act 41 of 2003, reaffirmed Zwelithini���s rights to rule, while also denying other claims to the Zulu kingship and rejecting applications for smaller kingdoms within KwaZulu-Natal. The confirmation of his status came with financial benefits. Zwelithini���s personal stipend from the provincial Department of Royal Affairs, a government body tasked with management of the royal household, has steadily increased in recent years. For the 2014/2015 fiscal year, the Department of Royal Affairs was granted a budget of R54.2 million; this sum proved to be too paltry as the royals returned to the KZN provincial government just a few months later to request a R5 million bailout following the acquisition of new cars for each of Zwelithini’s wives. The government also covered nearly R3-million in this same year for the king���s travel expenses.
Mail and Guardian journalist Alexander Riordan argued that the Zulu royal household is parasitic, while Zwelithini himself argues that he should be receiving more. His justification? ���Don���t Zulus pay tax? Am I not supposed to receive this tax from subjects? They [media] don���t understand how I live; I don���t live on that money, I work for myself. That budget you see doesn���t help me at all.��� He publicly announced, in September 2017, that he feels he is not being paid a salary ���fit for a king.��� In May 2018, KZN Premier Willies Mchunu announced an increase of R7-million per year for the king, bringing his annual budget to R65.8-million. Zwelithini is not the only royal figure to receive a government salary; the seven royal families recognized by the South African government (the Xhosa, Thembu, Venda, Ndebele, Mpondo and Bapedi ) also receive royal salaries, albeit only R1.3-million per year
The government stipend is not Zwelithini���s only source of wealth, however. In return for endorsing use of the controversial Tara Klamp device for the province���s medical male circumcision campaign, Ibrahim Yusuf, director of Intratek Properties, gifted Zwelithini a luxury vehicle (a Lexus ��valued at R1-million). In June 2015, the Isandlwana Heritage Project, under the management of the Ingonyama Trust, received R30-million from the National Lotteries Board to begin development on facilities to house the king and his royal amabutho on the occasion of celebrations at the site of the famed battle in 1879 in which the Zulu defeated British troops. Additionally, for each resident who holds a ���permission to occupy���-certificate, the Trust receives R100, in addition to R1000 for every lease agreement. Though these funds are allocated to the trust, as its sole trustee, Zwelithini benefits from the wealth generated. Recently, Zwelithini allegedly acquired and gifted a government house meant for poor families to his daughter, Nqobangothando Zulu, resulting in allegations of corruption.
Zwelithini’s role remains largely unthreatened, despite these financial concerns and various public pronouncements contrary to the spirit of the Constitution, including homophobic comments that resulted in an inquiry by the South African Human Rights Commission in 2012 and xenophobic sentiments expressed in a speech in 2015 that resulted in an outbreak of violence in the province,. Zwelithini’s substantial efforts to stem the spread of HIV/Aids in KZN, with the revival of many Zulu practices, including the controversial Umkhosi Womhlanga (Reed Dance) and the initiation of a voluntary medical male circumcision campaign, might explain why he enjoys high levels of financial support at both the provincial and national levels. However, the upward trend in�� HIV prevalence rates in the province suggest that his efforts have not made the impact hoped for.
Zwelithini relishes his role as king, as he demonstrated in an exclusive interview with Al Jazeera in 2016. Zwelithini stated that South Africans saw him as ���the king of all of KwaZulu-Natal,��� because he ���embrace[s] all of them . . . even the different religions . . . and different race groups are looking at me as their king . . . all political parties . . . they accept me as their monarch.��� In September 2016, he took this one step further publicly declaring that Zuma should step down so that he could rule the country, citing the ANC���s losses in the local elections as justification.
As Zuma���s popularity waned in the face of gross exploitation of public funds for construction on his personal residence at Nkandla and increasing evidence of state capture (how widespread corruption became known), the distance between Zuma and the king grew. Zwelithini regularly criticized Zuma���s leadership and the shifts in South African politics under his administration. At the Reed Dance in September 2016, Zwelithini directed his comments at Zuma: ���If you fail, step aside and allow us to lead the country. We can lead it very well. Anyway, God gave me powers to lead.��� When it became clear that Zuma���s time as president was nearing its conclusion, Zwelithini invited Zuma to come to Nongoma where he asked Zuma to consider stepping down. Following Zuma���s resignation, Zwelithini praised the former president as a ���hero.��� ���Only a fool would not appreciate that what he did ensured that our country is not plunged into crisis as it sometimes happens in other African countries,��� he proclaimed during a keynote address at the Royal Showgrounds in Pietermaritzburg.
Before Zuma���s resignation, Zwelithini was courted by the top candidates in the run-up to the ANC���s National Conference in December 2017. Then ANC secretary general Zweli Mkhize (a former KZN premier) joined Zwelithini at the annual Reed Dance in Nongoma, while former foreign affairs minister Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma (she is also Jacob Zuma���s ex wife and was favored by him) made a special visit to the king. The frontrunner, Cyril Ramaphosa, also paid a visit to the king, gifting him with cattle from his own herd and receiving a Zulu shield in return. Following his victory at the National Conference, Ramaphosa traveled to Nongoma with a contingent of newly elected officials to pay a visit to Zwelithini and gift him a number of his (Ramaphosa���s) prized Ankole cattle. The ANC leadership showed a deep understanding of the influence and impact the Zulu king maintains among his people.
In November 2017, former interim President Kgalema Motlanthe (he ran the country between Mbeki���s resignation in 2008 and Zuma���s election in 2009) assembled an independent panel to investigate the Ingonyama Trust based on many of the financial abuses listed above, finding that the Trust should be dissolved and the law establishing it be struck from the Constitution. The Panel reported that ���there is little evidence that the revenue generated by leases is used for the benefit of communities or their material well-being.��� Motlanthe also saw in the land issue larger concerns over the actions of traditional authorities, especially Zwelithini. ���The approach which confronts us as the ANC, must really be to understand that the ANC enjoys support from the people, not traditional leaders,��� Molanthe explained. ���The majority of them are acting as village tin-pot dictators to the people there in the villages.���
In response to this panel, Zwelithini threatened the secession of KwaZulu from South Africa. Traditional leaders, represented by Inkosi Phathisizwe Chiliza, threatened war if the ANC did not ���condemn Molanthe before it���s too late.��� Following this reaction, the ANC distanced itself from Motlanthe, claiming that ���Comrade Molanthe���s views are not the views of the ANC and if there is any apology that has to be offered to anybody, including the king, the ANC will do that of its own accord, led by its leadership,��� the ANC���s head of elections Fikile Mbalula explained. ���Everyone must disabuse themselves [of the idea] that the ANC is anti-Zulu king, and it wants to annex [the Zulu kingdom] or do anything in relation to this question based on the recommendation of Molanthe���s high-level panel.���
At the #ImbizoKaZulu in July 2018, Zwelithini railed against the intervention by the ANC into the Ingonyama Trust:
It is shameful that we live in a country and under a leadership who are activists for other people in other countries to have their land back, while here at home they want to take land that belongs to the Zulus ��� The issue of land is a very sensitive one for the Zulu people as it is more than just about land��� It is about food security, housing and political economy, among others, and it is for this reason that Zulus will not be pedestrians that will sit and watch while major decisions about their ancestral land are made���We must not be provoked��� I warned Mr. Ramaphosa . . . as the governing party, they must not make the mistake of taking away the land of the Zulus because all hell will break loose.
Zwelithini announced the formation of a new amabutho named Inqaba to protect the Ingonyama Trust. In a statement released following the Imbizo, Zwelithini connected the land issue with the well-being of his people. Following the Imbizo, Cyril Ramaphosa met privately with Zwelithini, assuring him ���that [neither the] government nor the ANC has any intention whatsoever to take the land from the Ingonyama Trust.�����
A few months later, during the Shaka Day celebrations in Durban, Zwelithini shocked audiences worldwide when he announced plans to partner with Afriforum, a white minority lobbying group recently brought to international attention by U.S. President Donald Trump. The group has spent huge amounts of time and capital attempting to convince the world of the existence of a murderous campaign targeting white farmers in South Africa. Although framed in terms of food security, the partnership between these unlikely bedfellows cannot be disentangled from the struggles over land. At the Shaka Day celebrations, Zwelithini called on Afriforum to ���come help us as they���ve introduced themselves to me that they are willing to work with me and my father���s people to uplift agriculture in our land in order to have food.��� Zwelithini had hinted at this partnership at the July 2018 Imbizo, commenting that just because the organization was led by Afrikaners ���doesn���t mean that I actually should not lend them my ear or time just like the rest of us.��� With the upcoming 2019 elections in mind, Zwelithini addressed the crowd, insisting that ���anyone who wants to be elected by us must come and kneel here and commit that [they] will never touch your land.���
In November 2018, Zwelithini was served a lawsuit by the Council for the Advancement of the South African Constitution (CASAC) and the Rural Women’s Network (RWN), challenging the conversion of Permission to Occupy (PTO) certificates and informal land rights to long-term lease agreements.
���Since 2007, the trust and board has been undermining the security of tenure of residents and occupiers of trust-held land in KwaZulu-Natal and extorting money from them by unlawfully compelling them to concluded these agreements and pay rent to the trust to continue living on the land,�����ASAC chairman Lawson��Naidoo��told The Citizen.
While Zwelithini has enlisted his subjects to contribute donations to fight any potential threats to the Ingonyama Trust in court, other tenants of Ingonyama Trust lands have called for the repayment of rents collected unlawfully over the past decade. Bongani Zikhali, a former policeman, told City Press, ���Isilo is our father and if need be that we have to take care of him, we can. But not by paying rent, as if we are foreigners in the land of our ancestors.���
Although on the surface Zwelithini���s stance in the continuing land claim saga seems strange, in hindsight, it is a logical move for the Zulu monarch, whose reign has long depended on his ability to work with powerful figures to advance his position and status.
December 1, 2018
Achille Mbembe’s Fanonian meditations
Image credit Heike Huslage-Koch via Wikimedia Commons.
���Achille��Mbembe,��Critique of Black Reason, translated by Laurent Dubois, Duke University Press (2017).For Fanon, the term ���Black��� is more a mechanism of attribution than of self-designation. I am not Black, Fanon declares, any more than I am a Black Man. Black is neither my first name nor my last name, even less my essence or my identity. I am a human being, and that is all��� I remain a complete human being no matter how violent are the efforts aimed at making me think that I am��not.
When Achille��Mbembe, arguably the most central postcolonial African intellectual, lands in Norway on his first ever visit to the country this December, it is in the context of almost six months of��heated debates about “decolonizing the academy” in Norway.
Mbembe���s��first ever visit to Norway is a result of an invitation to take part in��the annual Holberg Debate at the University of Bergen, on December 1, 2018.
The Holberg Debate takes its name after the famous Danish-Norwegian Enlightenment playwright, essayist and scholar��Ludvig��Holberg (1684-1754), who was born in Bergen on the West Coast of what was then the Kingdom of Denmark-Norway, and is held in connection with Holberg���s annual birth date in December. As a scholar, Holberg was an early Nordic proponent of the idea of natural rights and what he referred to in a scholarly work published in 1716 as�����the natural equality between all peoples.���
Mbembe��is also scheduled to appear at an event at the House of Literature in the Norwegian capital of Oslo��on December 4.
Mbembe���s��work is relatively unique for its ability to transcend and straddle the limitations of the Francophone and Anglo-Saxon academic and public spheres, not only in Africa, but also in Europe, from the vantage point of��Mbembe���s��adopted homeland South Africa.��Mbembe���s��background and training makes him uniquely positioned to do this. Born in��Ot��le��in Cameroon in 1957, he holds a PhD in history from the Sorbonne in Paris (1988), and held an associate professorship in history at Columbia University in New York before taking up the position of executive director at CODESRIA in Dakar, Senegal from 1996 to 2000, and then in the early 2000s moving to WISER at Wits University in South Africa. He has held visiting professorships at Yale, Duke and Harvard University, and is a member of the prestigious National Academy of Arts and Sciences in the USA. To straddle these worlds is no mean feat on��Mbembe���s��part, which he seems highly cognizant of in his own work,��requires engaging��with both the continental African, the Afro-American and the European African archive.
I first started reading��Mbembe��as a doctoral candidate working on Muslim communities in Cape Town in South Africa in the early 2000s. The English translation of��Mbembe���s��breakthrough monograph��On the Postcolony had by then started making its rounds in circles of scholars and students with an interest in postcolonial theory across the globe. I cannot now recall the experience of reading it for the first time, but do expect that I found��Mbembe���s��characterization of the theatrics and performativity of political power in post-colonial West Africa both fascinating and apt. In South Africa, one was still in the early and heady days of the presidency of Thabo Mbeki (1999-2008), who more than anything seemed to want to be known as a cerebral intellectual. Little did one know then that Mbeki���s presidency would pave the way for the theatrical and corrupt parody of African post-colonial leaders that Jacob G. Zuma (2008-2017) came to represent.
But what should be abundantly clear from any reader of��Mbembe��is that his work is written against the backdrop of the disillusionment generated by the crushing of the hopes and aspirations of the decolonizing movement in Africa in the 1950s and 60s. The spell has long since been broken, and there can be no turning back. The late Frantz Fanon (1925-61) of course sounded the warning about postcolonial elites turning into predators on their own societies already in his��A Dying Colonialism.
In��Mbembe���s��work, recognition of this very fact is an ontological and epistemological requirement. By failing to envision post-colonial alternatives to that of the nationalisms within which they had been molded by European colonialism, ���postwar African nationalism followed the tendencies of the moment by replacing the concept of civilization with that of progress. But this was simply a way to embrace the��teleologies��of the period,��� writes��Mbembe��insightfully in��Critique of Black Reason��(page 88). ���The problematic of the conquest of power dominated anticolonial nationalist thought and practices,��� so that once the conquest of power had been achieved (and, lest we forget,��from Cameroon��to��the Congo, often with more than a little assistance from the military and intelligence services of the former colonial powers, keen to install political leaders who were not openly antagonistic), power could be turned inwards towards oppression and subjugation of countervailing forces and personal enrichment.
Mbembe���s��Critique of Black Reason��is among other things an extensive personal meditation on the thought of Fanon and what it means for our analysis of the postcolonial present. It is a meditation which takes in reflections on a wide range of central intellectuals in the black Atlantic anti-colonial and anti-racist canon from Aim�� C��saire to Marcus Garvey as well as European poststructuralists such as Michel Foucault and Jacques Lacan. But the central figure in��Mbembe���s��panoply of thinkers in this monograph is undoubtedly Fanon. In his meditations on Fanon and his legacies,��Mbembe��positions himself as a critic of French colonial amnesia and aphasia���the very amnesia and aphasia which after the defeat of French colonialism in Algeria 1954-62 led France not only to suppress its colonial thought, but also the very name of Fanon, and places himself within postcolonial thought and critical race theory. For all their analytical differences and the radically different routes they would take politically (and C��saire was as Fanon���s most outstanding biographer David Macey��has noted, a crucially important early influence on Fanon)��Mbembe��considers it important that we re-read C��saire ���with Fanon.��� For��Mbembe, then, C��saire cannot be locked within ���a carceral conception of identity��� nor should his thought be relegated to ���a form of racial tribalism��� (page 157); C��saire and other��Negritudes��� ���concern for the Black Man makes sense only because it opens the way for a reimagining of the universal community��� of Man (page 158).��Fanon has in the Norwegian context, in spite of the efforts of Africanist scholars in Norway to properly situate and contextualize his work,��often been stereotyped��as a simple proponent of political violence in recent times.��Mbembe���s��central concern in his readings of Fanon is to resurrect Fanon���s quest for what Fanon himself referred to as ���a greater fraternity��� and a ���humanism made to the measure of the world��� (Critique of Black Reason, page 160). For in our current world of ���hierarchical division��� and of ���various forms of apartheid, marginalization, and structural destitution��� the idea of a ���common human condition��� and a ���universal humanism��� to which Fanon remained committed as a ���situated thinker��� is as��Mbembe��rightly notes, more often a matter of ���pious declarations��� rather than actual ���practice��� (page 161).��Mbembe���s��is a strong reminder that far from being an advocate of indiscriminate political violence, Fanon���s conceptualization of violence was conditioned by very specific historical conditions, namely those of the ���necropolitical��� and ���genocidal impulses” of European colonialism in its “founding, empirical and phenomenal” dimensions as these played out in the brutal Algerian war for independence from 1954 to 1962 (page 162-64). Much as Europeans, who no longer live on a continent that can consider itself “the center of gravity of the world” (page 1), would like to think that the world and wounds that made Fanon is one we have left behind for good, ���neo- and para-colonial wars are, after all, flourishing once again��� and marked by a ���mix of militarism, counterinsurgency, and the pillage of resources from a distance��� (page 170). As Dorothea��G��deke��has noted in a recent fine review of��Mbembe���s��three latest monographs, the wider epistemological project in which��Mbembe��is involved in, is one of “thinking the world from Africa.” It is as such, not entirely unrelated to the South African-born anthropologists John L. and Jean��Comaroff���s��long-standing engagement��with “Theory from the South,” in which postcolonial Africa is in many respects conceived of as a harbinger of developments in the Global North.
For��Mbembe, who in��Critique of Black Reason��retains a proverbial “optimism of the will” that appears to be much less prominent in his subsequent volume,��The Politics of Emnity��(2017),��struggle as a “praxis of liberation” for black people, for any people, ���will have to be carried out not with the goal of separating oneself from other humans but in solidarity with humanity itself��� (Critique of Black Reason, page 176.) It should never be taken to mean an evisceration of slavery and colonization and its linkages to the present fortification of Europe by means of bordering and exclusionary and discriminatory legislation, but entails an active will to ���escape the status of victimhood��� and to break with ���the denial of responsibility��� (pages 176-78). If there is a limitation in��Mbembe���s��charting of a way forward from the morass of decolonization, it is��Mbembe���s��lack of attention to class and social status: like in��Mbembe���s��Out of The Dark Night, African urban artists and intellectuals figure prominently as an avantgarde for the��Afropolitan��modernity that he envisions in��Critique of Black Reason. And yet for all their transnational and transcontinental imaginaries, prefigured by what Paul Gilroy have referred to as the “Black Atlantic,” theirs is of course a vision severely restricted in potential and application precisely by their social positionality��in the postcolony.
Nonetheless, there can be little doubt that Achille��Mbembe��is and remains one of the most profoundly original and wide-ranging postcolonial scholars and intellectuals of our times.
Double jeopardy
Image credit Droz Jean-Paul via Flickr.
I recently concluded optimistically that��Mauritanian exiles in Ohio,��who had arrived between the mid-1990s and early-2000s, are struggling to overcome histories of social and racial discord in their country of origin as they create a new, American identity. Their children, “the generation born in the United States” will live its future.
Thanks to Donald Trump and his monstrous Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency, there is not likely to be such a future���certainly not for the more than��80��Mauritanians already deported this year and probably not for the��40-or-so currently in detention or the��200��on “final” deportation lists. As for the several thousand living��in��and around Columbus and Cincinnati Ohio, all have good reason to fear they will soon appear��on��that list. The��American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee charges that: ���The targeting of this community serves no purpose and the spread of terror by ICE is unfathomable. We know that families are being separated, and the livelihood, health and wellbeing of our community members��� families are put at substantial risk.���
The question of community identity now pales into insignificance in the face of what��The Atlantic��calls “ethnic cleansing.” In a piece devoted to the “chill” of ICE���s history and mandate, attention is drawn to the fact that Mauritanians who made their homes in Ohio a generation ago, are being quietly identified, detained and deported. These particular deportees stand out among thousands of others because they are described as being sent into slavery.
Mauritania is known as a modern slave��nation: its laws only abolished slavery in 1980-1981 and punished those who practiced slavery in 2007. But few prosecutions are made and protests about government failure to respect its own laws are violently suppressed, their leaders repeatedly imprisoned. These include internationally recognized human rights advocate��Biram��Dah��Abeid��who provided a “Declaration” on the slavery issue��in Washington DC this past June. For many now suddenly aware of the deportations, his information is their primary context for framing activist and advocacy objections, and��there is��no shortage of credible��documentation to support it.
The problem is that the Mauritanians being deported and under threat of deportation are��not��those identified by Dah��Abeid��and Amnesty International (among others) as slaves. Even the��oft-cited 2011-12 CNN slavery documentary reporting on the exiles acknowledged that��those of��slave-descendant (haratine) were very few among them. The deportees of today (and tomorrow) were victims of a genocide targeting African Mauritanians (especially those of the��Halpulaar��ethnicity), which unfolded in Mauritania between 1989 and 1991. The irony of��their��them��being expelled from their chosen country of safety, for their ethnicity, is painful.
The��origins of the genocide��date back to 1968 when the��bidan���s��Hassaniya��Arabic became an official national language and struggles began to establish Mauritania as a��Maghrebian��rather��than��sub-Saharan African country. Cultural Arabization, downgrading the use of French, emphasizing the role of Islamic law (especially in land-reform), was an acknowledged policy throughout the 1980s; it came to fruition in the��1991 Constitution. African Mauritanians, who had used their French colonial education and rights to cultivatable riverine lands to be successful in their newly-independent country, were being side-lined.��Haratine,��on the other hand, shared their former masters��� culture and language. While their inferior social status generally kept them from prominent positions, their traditional role within the��bidan��world gave them access to benefits��increasingly denied to Francophone African Mauritanians.
By the mid-1980s, African Mauritanians politicized their frustration, calling for the overthrow of what they termed an�����Apartheid Government.��� Their��African Mauritanian Liberation Front��(FLAM) was forced underground and into exile in Senegal. Internal government purges of intellectuals and the military were inflamed by Senegal���s purported support for the FLAM. In spring of 1989 a��minor border dispute erupted into war. As Senegal forcibly returned home as many as 500,000 Mauritanians, Mauritania unleashed its police, army and own��haratine��on African Mauritanians. The ostensible reasons for arresting, torturing, raping and ultimately forcing into exile an estimated 70,000-80,000 black Mauritanians, were that they supported FLAM and were really Senegalese nationals without rights to Mauritanian property and/or citizenship. Both property and identify were taken from them: homes, lands and herds were confiscated���redistributed to��bidan��and��haratine; birth certificates and other official documents were destroyed. They became citizens of��UNHCR refugee camps in Senegal, where tens of thousands spent up to a decade as literal��prisoners of statelessness.
The fall-out from these initial����venements��continued through the end of 1991; thousands more were detained and tortured. At least 500 mysteriously disappeared in the process. On National Independence Day,��(November��28) in��1991, 28��African (Halpulaar) Mauritanian soldiers were publicly, symbolically hanged outside the northern town of��Inal��where they had been imprisoned. The “Martyrs of��Inal” are still remembered���both in Mauritania and in��Ohio.
This government-sanctioned violence against those of “African” ethnicity is what the majority of Ohio���s Mauritanians were fleeing when they sought asylum in the United States.
Forced return to Mauritania today presents them with a potential triple threat: One,��most��left their country illegally, many with accusations of treasonous associations with FLAM still following them. Although FLAM is now reconciled with the government, this does not negate the illegality of those early associations, which remain punishable with imprisonment.
Two,��African Mauritanians are distinct from��haratine��in their ethnicity (and in many��instances,��are still bitter about the role��haratine��played in the events that brought them to Ohio),��but��some have become politicized around��US-based Mauritanian anti-slavery��activism. To the extent that this is seen by the Mauritanian government as supporting activism declared illegal domestically, returnees are also likely to be arrested and detained.
And��Mauritanian prisons��have been internationally documented for the beatings and torture they routinely permit���and the basic human rights (visits by family, lawyers; treatment by doctors) that they do not.
Three, Mauritania undertook a��census registration��(2011���2013) that overrode all previous identity documentation. It necessitated birth/death confirmations that were complicated, and in practical terms, excluded thousands of African Mauritanians with the use of nationality- ���proving��� questions rooted in��bidan��culture. For those who were victims of ���1989-1991,��� this cultural exclusion will be compounded by the documentation and/or parental witness requirements that the killing of their families and the destruction of their��identity��documents render impossible. They will join the documented thousands of voluntary returnees from exile in Senegal who are still denied access to citizenship, the essential services of government and the right to vote.
The Mauritanian deportees will not be sent into slavery. But they will be made stateless���an internationally recognized crime.
The Mauritanian government is providing passes to allow these deportees to be returned.��Given��its failure to deliver papers even years later to refugees it has officially welcomed home, how likely is it that these pieces of paper will carry any weight beyond first-point-of-entry? A reported��anonymous case��from earlier this year, three��deportees named by Dah��Abeid�� and��the��the��experience of��Seyne��Malick��Diagne��give us some indication. All��were��imprisoned immediately upon return because they were undocumented.��Two we know of were able to bribe a jailer��to secure release; in��Diagne���s��case after having been beaten��for��several days.��Each of those has sought refuge in a third country���Diagne, ironically, in Senegal where he was first interned in��a UNHCR camp in 1989. Both are once again illegal, stateless and in need of asylum.
We do not know the fate of the other three. Or of the other��70-plus deported. Nor can we predict the fate of those who will follow in their wake, inevitably, unless some intervention has impact.
As well-meaning and passionate as advocates are,��asserting slavery to contest deportation is more a conflation of American sensitivities to its own past and racially-shaped politics than a credible legal argument which can be���and��must��be��firmly rooted in Mauritania���s history of genocide and contemporary practices of discrimination.
November 29, 2018
Resources and rape: The DRC’s (toxic) discursive complex
A patient at the health clinic in Bunyakiri, DRC. Image credit Morgana Wingard via USAID Flickr.
The recent award��to��Dr Denis��Mukwege��of the 2018��Nobel Peace Prize,��for his extraordinary efforts to end the use of sexual violence��as weapon of war,��anchors attention to sexual violence in conflict settings.��Yet,��it also provides an excellent opportunity to rethink how we lay claim to the links between the use of rape and resource extraction in the Democratic Republic of the Congo��(DRC).
The story we often hear on the Congolese conflict is that sexual violence is used as a weapon of war to access minerals (see��here��and��here). It is the rape��in��DRC��through women���s bodies and the rape��of��the��DRC��through plundering minerals/natural resources that has received widespread international attention. When the Enough Project released its strategy paper in 2009��Can You Hear Congo Now? Cell Phones, Conflict Minerals, and the Worst Sexual Violence in the World, it connected Congo���s mineral economy,��western consumers and the brutal and widespread use of sexual violence in the country. It��became��one of the most powerful and��dominant narratives��on the Congolese conflict to this day. In an upcoming article��(in the journal��African Studies Review),��we trace the emergence of this narrative and, drawing on wider��literature, delve deeper into how instances of sexual violence and mineral extraction are shaping and are shaped by the conflict.
Both rape and resource extraction have been recurring themes in the reporting of the Congo wars (1996-2003). The earliest publications by��Human Rights Watch (HRW) on violence in Congo/Zaire in��1996��and��1997��briefly emphasized the tactical use of rape within their reports. Rape featured prominently in their��2002 report,��which was the first HRW publication to focus solely on the widespread use of��sexual violence against women and girls in eastern DRC. Although the media as well as local and international human rights organizations (see��here) reported on the��wide prevalence of rape during and in the aftermath of the Congo wars, despite their efforts��the rapes��received��scant��international attention until 2007 with the launch of the��UN Stop Rape Now Campaign��and the adoption of��UN Security Council Resolution 1820��in 2008.
Contrary to this, the illegal exploitation of natural resources, especially in the second Congo War,��gained��international prominence early on in the conflict.��When the UN Panel of Experts in a series of reports��began documenting the wide involvement of companies, armed groups and individuals in the exploitation of��DRC���s��natural resources, they established an important link between resource exploitation and the continuation of the conflict. In these earlier UN reports, the exploitation of��coltan��was not singled out over other minerals and no link was made to sexual violence. Even reports drawing attention to��coltan��situated the exploitation of the mineral in a much broader context of economic and food security (see��Pole Institute���s 2002 report). In these earlier reports rape and resources stood relationally side by side rather than causally attributed to one another.
While the loose association between resources and sexual violence in these early reports sharpened with the publication of a��2003 humanitarian report by��Watchlist��and mainstream media articles (see��here), the Enough Project���s 2009 strategy paper directly connected Congo���s mineral economy,��western��consumers and the use of��sexual violence. Policies that were drawn in response to these publications were founded on the assumption that because armed groups draw on natural resources as source of funding and because there is a high prevalence of sexual violence, regulating the mineral trade and demilitarizing the mines will stop the rapes (for critiques on the�����conflict minerals�����campaign, see��here��and��here).
Yet, these considerations do not necessarily imply a direct causal relationship between��resource extraction and sexual violence. It is indeed tempting to focus on the most visible aspects: the rapes,��the physical destruction, the looting and pillaging of resources, the minerals used in our phone. However, the effects of this narrative are that it focuses on a narrow set of actors and spaces in��DRC���s��conflicts and roots each of those actors/spaces in��particular ways while obscuring the role of others.
First, as shown by researchers��Vogel and��Musamba, the focus on��artisanal��and small-scale mining (ASM)��sites in particular builds on a broader problematic narrative of artisanal mining as a space of criminality and illegality which overlooks the ���ambiguity��� of the mineral economy for men as well as women as spaces of opportunity as much as spaces of risk. In doing so it further roots the exercise of violence to armed (conflict) actors,��such as rebel groups and the military acting on their own directive and fails to consider (sexual) violence enacted by other actors associated with the extraction of minerals in the DRC,��such as corporate, government and state agents, and foreign NGO���s (including humanitarian staff and peacekeeping units), as well as civilian miners themselves. While��rape in mining sites tends to be specifically associated with armed men, a��2015 World Bank report��found that sexual predation by armed men was generally seen as less pressing of a concern than the everyday violence and abuse that women suffered from miners and other civilians.
Second, while instances of militarized mass rapes have occurred in the vicinity of mines, they do not necessarily present the greatest threat to those working in mining sites. Research shows that only focusing on rape in mining sites obscures specific gendered vulnerabilities in mining sites that go beyond conflict rape and rebel predation and are more related to access to employment, working conditions in the mines, prevalent gender norms and beliefs and weak political institutions.��It��further roots women to the position of victim disregarding the active role women voluntarily seek and play in mining, and in extractive communities in general (see��here,��here��and��here), even those controlled by armed groups.
Third, documented instances of rape show that rape very often accompanies a vast range of non-sexual abuse, in particular looting, killings and forced labor, which problematizes framings of sexual violence as��the��major form of violence that takes place in and outside of mining areas (see��here,��here,��here,��here,��and��here). Rather, it coincides with other forms of��coercion as a general pattern of civilian abuse. Reported cases of rape further illustrate that rapes occur as much as in fields, on the way to the market, when collecting water, at roadblocks, during prison visits, on patrols, at police stations, near military camps, and at homes, as in mining areas, which��complicate framings of mining sites as��the��major site of sexual violence (see��here,��here,��here,��here, and��here).
The narrative of rape as a weapon of war to access��minerals,��resonates with��western audiences because it establishes a clear victim-perpetrator setup: racialized��and gendered rebels and soldiers against a��terrorized��population. In this sense it gives clarity and simplicity to an otherwise very complex, multi-actored��and multi-layered conflict. While rape has indeed been used as part��of a military or political strategy and�����conflict minerals�����do play a role in the continuation of the armed conflict or at least partially fund some armed groups and state forces, nearly��10��years after the release of��Enough���s��paper, it remains crucial to��understand the construction of this narrative, its political work and what it hides.
A longer version of this article will appear in a forthcoming edition of the��African Studies Review.
November 28, 2018
‘Their champagne party will end’
Image credit Jabulani Newman.
The current historical moment is deeply troubled. Democratic institutions from Mozambique to��Mali seem fragile and flawed.��Equally distressing, authoritarian governments in Egypt or Zimbabwe have resisted efforts by civil society to bring about their demise. Likewise, in Angola, autocratic rule has survived a civil war, economic breakdown, growing calls for change,��and��the departure of a leader who had ruled continuously since 1979.
Regrettably, we only briefly realized the�����Brave New World,�����imagined by��Kenyan��historian��Bethwell��Ogot��on the election of Barack Obama in 2008: ��������which at once recognizes the diversity of humanity but which also rejects the categorization of peoples of the world into thinking and non-thinking human beings.���
The United States, too, is threatened by the authoritarian impulses that plague other countries.��The current US administration��under Donald Trump��lacks a coherent foreign policy with respect to African countries and displays a visceral contempt for Africa and the diaspora. The meagre provision of humanitarian aid following the mudslides in Sierra Leone, the mischaracterization of Nigeria as one of the countries affected by a�����horrifying Ebola outbreak,�����and the silence regarding the terrible bombing in Mogadishu are some examples of the current administration’s irresponsible and dangerous conduct.��Trump���s��base and derogatory depictions of African countries and Haiti are unworthy and unbecoming of a democratically elected leader.��Taken together, evolving policies and statements demonstrate that the US government has forfeited its global humanitarian obligations in favor of naked, narrow geopolitical pursuits and sheer prejudice towards Africa and the diaspora.
These developments remind us that the decline of democratic institutions can be debilitating. To maintain a commitment to the dissemination of knowledge about Africa,��and��to retain intellectual integrity, of course,��scholars��must continue to��conduct their research��and to engage in critical pedagogy.��But I want to suggest that as scholars of Africa���as teachers, policymakers, artists��and activists���we might engage in more politically meaningful and more risky forms of dissent in order to advocate for social justice, economic equality��and greater political participation.
What political repertoires, what lessons from the continent of Africa might guide us in this struggle? From the efforts by Kwame Nkrumah and others to build a Pan-African movement in the 1950s and��1960s to the collective protests currently mobilized through social media across the continent today, lessons from the insurgent south can embolden us to contest the abuse of power,��to re-imagine a more inclusive democracy��and to��navigate this illiberal age.
Let���s��take, for example,��the most recent��expressions��of activism on the��African��continent: the democratic transitions��of the early 1990s, the use of courts, and, finally,��the way��social media has��revolutionized protests.��What can we learn from them?
By the early 1990s, broad-based activism was forcing transitions to democracy across the continent of Africa. At a national convention in 1990, political activists in Benin demanded and achieved democratic reforms, catalyzing a decade of transitions across the African continent. Peace accords, protests, rallies��and conflict brought about regime change in Mozambique, Madagascar, Mali, South Africa and many other countries.
Most notably, women invoked��the symbolic power of the naked body��to demand change in Kenya.��Congregating��at Freedom Corner in Uhuru Park,��Nairobi��during��the early 1990s,��a��dozen poor rural women engaged in a hunger strike.��Their aim was��to free political prisoners being held by the authoritarian regime of Daniel��Arap��Moi��for participating in prodemocracy activities.��These women had not previously taken part directly in political activity themselves, but many of the political prisoners were their sons.��The motivation for the strike was that since��Section 2a of the��Kenyan Constitution mandating a one-party state��had��been��repealed, the legal basis for imprisonment no longer existed.��Four days into the strike,��which had attracted a crowd of thousands and was joined by the well-known environmental activist��Wangari��Maathai,��President��Moi��sent in the police. Three women responded by disrobing and running naked toward��the police, effectively thwarting their advance.
In this instance, public disrobing constituted a symbolic and locally meaningful repudiation of illegitimate state authority. The nurturing power of motherhood embodied in the display of the naked female form contrasted with the potential for state violence represented by the uniformed police and their weapons. For the nude, it was a bold statement of commitment to a cause.��For the police, it forced a reckoning with their own moral sensibilities regarding nakedness and motherhood.��Precisely because disrobing entailed a strategic and principled confrontation with the female body, this singular act was disruptive, unsettling, powerful��and��political. It contributed to the release of 51 political prisoners and, eventually, to the end of dictatorship in Kenya.
Like the unclothed body, the purposely clothed body also articulates powerful messages. In Charlottesville,��Virginia��in��the summer of 2017 we observed a deeply reactionary expression of political messaging through the wearing of clothes.��We saw pointed hats and white sheets that we��in the United States��recognize as symbols of white supremacy and reminders of the terror spread by the Ku Klux Klan.��We also witnessed attempts to make white power respectable with the wearing of�����ordinary�����polo shirts and khaki pants. Regarding the new look, one white supremacist stated: ���The core of marketing is aesthetic. We need to look appealing. We have to be hip and we have to be sexy.���
If white polo shirts now reflect the sexy aesthetic of white power��in the US, then I would say that we as Africanists are well placed to respond with an aesthetic of our own.��As the contributors to Jean Allman’s edited volume��Fashioning Africa: Power and the Politics of Dress��illustrate, dress and also non-dress have been forms of empowerment, subversion, and political praxis across Africa for decades.��Kangas,��panos,��capulanas,��agbadas,��babban��rigas,��kofias, and��diracs��have played their part in expressing the political preferences and the local subjectivities of those who wear them. My own��contribution would be this: to make internationalism fashionable by adorning the pussy hats that were worn at the many women���s marches all over the world last January with a diamond shaped pattern, which is a female signifier in Zulu basketry.��Alternatively,��we ought to make those hats with prints inspired or created by artists and weavers from Ghana, Mali, Nigeria, Congo and Mozambique.
Just as��activists��crafted extensive networks and employed innovative tactics to end apartheid in South Africa or to defeat authoritarianism in Kenya, more recently, they have devised new legal frameworks or looked to the courts to pursue their objectives.��The interplay between individual or collective participation and the legal system is particularly evident with respect to struggles for social transformation, human rights��and political freedoms on the African continent.��From grassroots justice to the use of the formal court system,�����litigation as participation�����has escalated since the late 1990s and early 2000s.
In Burkina Faso, the murder of��journalist��Norbert��Zongo��in 1997 was the main catalyst behind this change.��Zongo��founded an independent newspaper,��L���independent, in 1993 and used his pen to critique the corruption and the malfeasance of the longstanding��Blaise��Compaor����regime.��(Compaor����came to power after the state murder of Thomas��Sankara.)��Zongo��exposed land grabs by elites, shady business deals involving the president and his family, widespread embezzlement, and politically motivated assassinations.��In 1997, when the parliament overturned a two-term limit for the��presidency��and allowed��Compaor����to run again in upcoming elections,��Zongo��assailed the decision.��He also launched a blistering attack on the brutality of the President and his brother with respect to the death of��a presidential driver��David��Ou��draogo. Zongo��alleged that the security forces tortured and killed��Ou��draogo��for having stolen money from the President’s brother.
A year later,��Zongo���s��bullet riddled body��and��those of three others, including his brother, were found by passersby on the side of the road. All four bodies were burnt nearly beyond recognition. Following their deaths,��Zongo���s��wife, family, and friends, human rights activists, lawyers, and citizen advocates made repeated calls for justice.��After years of litigation, they eventually secured a ruling against the Burkinabe government by the African Court on Human and People���s Rights in 2014.��Women��then��took to the streets with spatulas and brooms to protest and ultimately topple��Compaor�����s��administration.
Although securing justice for Norbert��Zongo��and his colleagues took nearly��20��years, the process had unintended consequences:��it convinced ordinary citizens of their political power and mobilized them to resume the struggle against a dictatorial regime, and it strengthened legal guarantees regarding freedom of expression in Burkina Faso.��The recent conviction��for crimes against humanity��of��Hiss��ne��Habr��,��the��former dictator of Chad,��is another example��of��victims successfully��using��the courts to secure justice.
Finally, it is imperative to highlight social media as a technology of resistance.��It��contributed to toppling��regimes during the Arab Spring, and investigative journalists such as��Rafael Marques de��Morais��have relied on it to��challenge the ruling party in Angola with his courageous website,��Maka��Angola. In the tradition of Carlos Cardoso in Mozambique and Norbert��Zongo��in Burkina Faso, Marques de��Morais��has employed his��writing to expose the criminality of regime elites, the lack of democracy��and the abuse of human rights by the military.
One of social media���s greatest contributions is that it has reinvigorated broad-based, popular mobilization.��In South Africa,��Twitter,��Facebook, blogs and websites facilitated the demonstrations by students over fees at the University of the Witwatersrand and University of��Kwazulu-Natal, and the removal of the Cecil Rhodes statue in Cape��Town. Critics also took to social media to analyze the fault-lines and weaknesses of these same movements.��Such social media-driven protests are not only happening in South Africa. In the last��10��years, there have been��more than 100��documented popular protests in urban areas of Angola, Gabon, Guinea, Algeria and other African countries. In many cases, the use of social media was essential to bringing them about.
Protests have not always toppled oppressive regimes, secured jobs��or enhanced democracy in Africa. But as��political scientists��Adam Branch and Zachariah��Mampilly��illustrate in��their book,��Africa Uprising:�� Popular Protest and Political Change, protests help us to build networks.��They cultivate a sense of belonging and they allow us to imagine alternative public arenas. The celebrated historian,��Tiya��Miles, asserts that,�����When protesters insert their bodies into forbidden places or adopt poses unsanctioned for their station, they are engaging in blatant acts of refusal.�����With the existence of social media, the act of refusal occurs first as an individual political statement and second as a show of��collective defiance when it���s posted on��Instagram.
To refuse and to do so publicly for a just cause re-valorizes democracy from the grassroots.��Sheldon��Wolin, whose prescient work on inverted totalitarianism was largely ignored by the academy, wisely observed:��
To become a democrat is to change one���s self, to learn how to act collectively,��as��a demos. It requires that the individual go�����public�����and thereby help to constitute a�����public�����and an�����open��politics,�����in principle accessible for all to take part in it, and visible so that all might see or learn about the deliberations and decision making occurring in public agencies and institutions.
Although we have witnessed the ways in which social media can be used to undermine the integrity of elections or distort the truth, we are also able to find examples from South Africa, Tunisia, Nigeria or our own country to demonstrate that it can cultivate or sustain the practice of an open, critical, public��and participatory politics.��This is not a plea for all of us to engage in a barrage of tweets.��Rather,��it is��a recognition��of the power of websites or twitter handles such as��Africa Is A Country��or��the South African��#RhodesMustFall��movement,��respectively to democratize global knowledge production, to mock stereotypes, to build community across social and geographical barriers, to change the status quo.��Lastly, in this moment of despotic ascendancy, it���s reassuring to remember what the great satirist and poet��Bate��Besong��quipped about President��Paul��Biya��and his band of tyrants in Cameroon:�����their champagne party will end.”
These insights are based on��excerpts from��the Presidential Address given��by Pitcher��at the 60th Annual Meeting of the African Studies Association.��November, 2017��in����Chicago, Illinois and published��in��African Studies Review��in September 2018.
November 27, 2018
The architects of fantasy
Daniel��Anum��Jasper paints��a��lion palanquin at��Paa��Joe Coffin Works, Accra, Ghana. Image courtesy of author.
A pink fish, a fierce lion, an NBA basketball, or even an octopus. These are all potential shapes for the figurative coffins more popularly known as ���fantasy coffins��� that are made and used by the Ga people of Ghana. These colorful coffins and the artists that create them have increasingly become more widely known as��western circles of academics, museums, collectors, and popular media catch wind of the intriguing cultural practice. A quick scan of recent news articles reveals a focus on the ways these coffins and artists ���put the fun in funeral,��� ���celebrate death in style,��� or ���spruce up the pine box.��� In places like these, the phrase ���fantasy coffin��� conjures up feelings of unrestrained imagination, images of fantastic���almost unthinkable���shapes, and the sentiments of personal dreams. However, the use of the word ���fantasy��� to describe these coffins did not originate��with the Ga.
The Ga people used to refer to the coffins as��abebuu��adekai, which roughly translates as ���receptacles of proverbs��� or ���proverbial coffins.��� Put simply, coffins that are imbued with some sort of meaning. The practice of making and using figurative coffins arose��from��changing colonial and postcolonial policies towards the dead in Ghana���they facilitated (and still do) very public statements about familial identity, ancestral power and status in increasingly competitive environments. The cultural significance of their use has been documented in both popular media and scholarship (see��Bonetti��2012;��Tschumi��2008).��So, attaching��the qualifier ���fantasy��� to these coffins and the associated practices��lends��an overly simplistic��and unrealistic sentiment to death and funerals in Ga culture. They are, in fact,��highly emotional and complex.
However, within ���fantasy��coffins��� there��lies��imagination, creativity and��personalization�� coffins, the forms that they take and the people that make them. I discovered this for myself when I visited��Paa��Joe Coffin Works in Ghana��in��2017 to conduct preliminary research for an��exhibition of the coffins��at the Mathers Museum of World Cultures at Indiana University. There I met��Paa��Joe, one of the most widely known and respected figurative coffin artists,��along with��the group of artisans he collaborates��with. I witnessed and learned not only about the contemporary processes of making these coffins, but also their significance in an increasingly globalized marketplace.
The creation of��these coffins begins with the artists and the people that commission them. Once a shape has been decided upon, either by the deceased���s family, the artist themselves, or a collector, the artists begin to create. Imagination becomes an integral skill for the coffin maker as they consider how to materialize elaborate forms through simple wooden planks, nails, putty and paint. The artists of��Paa��Joe Coffin Works work primarily from photographs, and rarely sketch��out their designs. They rely upon intimate knowledge of materials, technical skill and many years of��apprenticing.
While certain forms,��such as the fish,��are more common and frequently created for both local use and��western��collection, other more elaborate forms still require careful consideration.��Paa��Joe��tells��me that��designs, such��as the large chameleon that sat in his showroom at the time, can keep him up at night thinking.
Paa��Joe and Samuel��Nahr��work frame a boat coffin. Image courtesy of author.These increasingly elaborate ���fantasy��� forms are most often created for collection and exhibition rather than burial. While I was at the workshop, the staff��was��working on a variety of projects including an ear of corn coffin for a farmer���s burial, lion palanquins for local chiefs, and a series of sea-themed coffins for an exhibition in Accra. These commissions, which are never intended to enter the ground, give the artists the opportunity to exhibit their skill to wider audiences.
The term ���fantasy��� does little to express the complex relationships, symbolism and practices associated with the use of these coffins by the Ga people. However, it does evoke the skill and imagination of the artists. Regardless of the academic temptation to focus only on the constructed ���authenticity��� of coffins for burial and use, the commission of coffins for western collectors and museums, along with overseas artist residencies, now comprises a large portion of the income as well as artistic practices of workshops such as��Paa��Joe Coffin Works.��Paa��Joe and his collaborators consider themselves artists. In the documentary��Paa��Joe and the Lion��(2016) that documents their work,��Paa��Joe states ���I can create an image of you out of wood so good that you will greet it in the morning. So yes, I see myself as an artist.���
Paa��Joe and his colleagues, together with the artists in other well-known coffin workshops in Ghana, are architects of fantasy who carry on the tradition of��abebuu��adekai��while popularizing coffins on a global scale.
November 26, 2018
Only the soil can free us
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Still from film.
Burkinab����Bounty: Agroecology in Burkina Faso��is��one of two films recently released by Brazilian��filmmaker��Iara��Lara.��The film was produced in association with��Slow Food,��an��organization that seeks to ���counteract the rise of fast life and combat people���s dwindling interest in the food they eat.���
During this short film, the viewer is transported to��Slow Food���s��Burkinab����partner organizations: to��Burkinab����farms,��where you meet a farmer who promises his yams��have aphrodisiac qualities; communities where��women���s��groups produce soap and��cakes made from��baobab powder; music venues where musicians speak forcefully of political mobilization and healing the land; and the streets of��Ouagadougou, where groups��gather to take��part��in��the worldwide March Against Monsanto.��(In 2018,��Monsanto was officially acquired by German pharmaceutical and life science company, Bayer, making it��one of the world���s largest agribusiness corporations.)
Images of, and interviews with, a wide range of��Burkinab����actors celebrating and advocating for self-sufficient��foodways��is a welcomed juxtaposition to discourses of African darkness and hunger that dominate US popular culture. Such discourses underline current��attempts by��development actors and financiers to carry out a ���new��� Green Revolution for Africa, wherein African farmers are expected largely to leave the sector (an ���agricultural exit,��� according to World Bank theory) and those who remain are to be integrated into national and international value chains, producing commercial and cash crops for markets first, food for family second.
Proponents of this change use charts and graphs and the language of economists and tech-preneurs, and hold large forums held in African financial centers of Kigali and Johannesburg, where they appear on stage with global elites such as Bill Gates, Tony Blair and��Akinwumi��Adesina��to��appeal to African governments��to create ���enabling environments��� to make way for private capital and make ���agriculture a business.���
But this ���new��� Green Revolution, like the last Green Revolution, is, at the end of the day, a grand experiment. An experiment wherein communities like those��featured��in��Burkinab����Bounty��are on the frontlines; the first to��be impacted��and��often��the last to be considered��in development planning.��Agricultural transformation is as social as it is political-economic, and one of the highlights of the film is learning about Burkina Faso��� most recent experiment with genetically modified cotton.
From 2008���2016,��Burkinab����cotton companies bought and distributed genetically modified cotton from Monsanto to their farmers. For years, yields were high and both��Burkinab����and Monsanto officials were pleased. But, as��Dr��Brian Dowd-Uribe has��carefully charted, this��arrangement quickly dissolved as officials discovered that the genetically modified��(GM)��cotton was producing inferior lint quality compared to previous conventional seeds, and in turn,��Burkinab����cotton companies were losing money on the international market.
���[They]��came��with their products and made promises, but people realized that they were empty promises,�����explained��Jean-Marie��Koalga��of��Slow Food Burkina Faso, one of the many NGO officials interviewed in��Burkinab����Bounty.��Scientists worked to find a solution, but remained stumped, and so the��Burkinab����companies decided to phase out GM cotton and return to conventional varieties.
In the film,��Blandine��Sankara��of��Association��Yelemani��describes GM��seeds as a ���David versus Goliath��� situation���a triple threat of former president Blaise��Compaore, major agribusiness giant Monsanto, and the US government. Indeed,��a leaked diplomatic cable from 2008��details��how the��then��US Ambassador to Burkina Faso interceded on behalf of Monsanto to negotiate��favorable��terms��of business.��Thus, for��the��Slow Food members��featured in the film, agricultural change is political change.
���[I���m encouraging] people to reconnect with the land,�����says��Burkinab����musician Art Melody, standing in a farm he runs with his two brothers, ���because only the soil can free us today.���
���We want agroecology so we can live with dignity,�����Koalga��tells the camera, ���as Thomas��Sankara��said, ���buy��Burkinab��, produce��Burkinab�����.���
While the film���s short interviews and incredible soundtrack do��inspire, the feature has a few shortcomings that deserve to be��addressed. The��first, and most obvious, is that though featured in the film���s title and multiple interviews, ���agroecology��� is never defined or explained.��This is a missed opportunity to provide a sorely needed central narrative for the film. Agroecology is both an agronomic science and a political theory.��Agronomically,��it is premised on the idea that��small, biodiverse��farms can produce sufficient yields with minimal chemical use.��Agroecology offers exciting possibilities for rehabilitating and strengthening soils that have suffered from extended chemical application,��prolonged drought and erratic weather.
Movements throughout Africa, including Slow Food in Burkina Faso and the continent-wide Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Africa, are advocating for investment into,��and promotion of,��agroecology.��To be sure,��NGO��officials��interviewed in the film talk forcefully of a future without chemicals on the farm and in food.��However, missing��from��Burkinab����Bounty are��interviews with farmers and women, and without��these voices, we are left to wonder what type of futures Burkinabe farmers envision for themselves.��Moreover, the film��misses��opportunities��to tie��Burkinab����struggles to��global movements, and at times��instead��re-inscribes��age-old boundaries of Africa��as��outside of��the world.��For instance,��the term��boisson��locale��(local beer)��is used to describe��a beer made out of sorghum,��leaving one to wonder how those who do not speak French or are not talking to a foreign film crew refer to the drink��(and, as it turns out, there are a variety of names for sorghum beer depending on the strength of the drink and location of the country one is drinking in).
In another instance, filmmakers interview an Italian woman who��describes��Burkinab����cooking as��slow compared to ���our��� fast paced life (presumably in Italy),��and, with a smile, says that she is reminded��to slow down. As anyone who has prepared Italian food, visited Italy, or just watched episode��1��of��Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat��will tell you,��the preparation of��Italian food��is often a laborious��task.The��point here is that discourse that marks African food as ���local��� or ���slow�����is��always a reflection of the speaker and not the actual object at hand. African food is not inherently slow compared to any other cuisine.��And��sorghum beer��is no more�����local�����or strange��compared to, let���s say,��Heineken.
African��issues are global issues, and global issues are African issues. Like Burkina Faso, communities��worldwide��are demanding that governments regulate agrochemicals,��agri-monopolies, and��animal-based��products, and are advocating for��agrecological��alternatives to industrial farming.��In Burkina Faso like many places, these movements are not new.��Though the film hints, at the end, of Thomas��Sankara���s��legacy,��producers��missed an opportunity to frame the film with this narrative.��Doing so would��highlight the��historical precedence��of food and political struggles in Burkina Faso,��and provide��a long view of the political project at hand that extends��beyond��the current moment��of international funding and excitement around agroecology.
With those suggestions in mind,��Burkinab����Bounty��offers a��good starting point for conversations around��the��nuances��of African cuisines and��foodways,��Burkinab����music, and the inextricability of food and agriculture from local, national and global politics.
Transitional justice’s glass ceiling
Image credit Bruce Strong for the Together Liberia Project via Flickr.
The spotlight on��gender-based��violence��(GBV)��has possibly never been brighter than in recent years. The United Nations has declared an annual��International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women, which is followed by its��16 Days of Activism Against Gender-Based Violence��campaign. Social movements like #MeToo��and #TotalShutdown��have shown that��GBV��has no borders and is perhaps the most globalized crime. Conflict-related��GBV��has been declared a��weapon of warfare��and it has finally become��recognized��as a��war crime.
It is unsurprising then, that��transitional justice��processes���which��aim to promote justice, reconciliation, accountability and peace��after conflict���have��also attempted to��address GBV.��These efforts have typically focused specifically on��GBV��against women. This focus has excluded women���s experiences��of other human rights violations in conflict and��GBV perpetrated against��other genders.��Consequently, there have been calls for transitional justice to expand its conception of a gender perspective within its processes.��This presents a challenge, however,��because��transitional justice processes notoriously set high expectations for what they can deliver, with little��empirical��evidence that this��agenda��is achievable.
There is a clear need to better understand what transitional justice measures are likely to assist with the��transformation��of gender relations in post-conflict societies.��The��Centre for the Study of Violence and Reconciliation��(CSVR)��explored the relationship between��transitional justice and state commitment to address��GBV��using data from 13 African transitional justice cases.��CSVR���s��study��suggests��that processes that included��a��gendered perspective,��that were free from��state��interference,��and/or emphasized repairing relationships were more likely to see improved��GBV��outcomes.
A number of countries tackled��GBV��very explicitly through truth commissions.��The Kenyan Truth, Justice, and Reconciliation Commission���s mandate��included a gender-sensitive definition of gross human rights violations that was not limited to physical violence alone.��Consequently, it was able to��show how gender, class, and politics interact and shape human rights violations.��Jane Karemi���s explanation for why she��was forced off her residential land��illustrates how gender prejudices can affect women���s socioeconomic rights:��������I was seen as a single lady; that was why they��did not give me my plot; I also did not have money to bribe them.���
Yet,��some��transitional justice processes��did not have a gender-inclusive mandate but��still��positively contributed��toward��addressing��GBV.��There are clearly��other ways to��also��promote gender justice goals.��Victims��� and human rights groups usually do not sit idly by while a transitional justice process unfolds. They��vocalize��discontent with the omissions in the mandate and advocate for changes.
Transitional justice processes��that��have sufficient freedom to respond to pressures��from these groups could impact positively on GBV outcomes even when their mandates are not explicitly gender-inclusive. For example, the��South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission��was designed with sufficient��independence to��initiate��women���s hearings��in response to civil society��advocacy.��This allowed women���s experiences of violence to��emerge, like��Winnie Makhubela���s: ���They started off by raping us. After they raped us, they threw us out of the window and they started shooting.���
Transitional justice processes that embrace a reparative approach also seem to provide a way to promote��GBV��outcomes. This approach prioritizes healing��and��reconciliation��for survivors and consequently encourage��survivor-centered��participatory processes.��Participatory processes��that allow victims to shape the agenda and narrative��can��in turn��shape the findings and recommendations of the��transitional justice��process. For example, women activists��helped��shape the��Liberian Truth and Reconciliation Commission��and��48 percent of the statements��given before the LTRC were��from women.��Consequently, the��GBV��committed��during the Liberian civil war��was found to be��a��systematic��and��gendered human rights violation committed by all warring factions��by the Commission.��The Liberian example illustrates how a participatory and survivor-centered processes can provide a space for gendered experiences that are often silenced and considered taboo to enter public discourse.
Of course, transitional justice processes are not always positive experiences. There are many ways that these processes can go awry and��negatively impact��upon survivors. The results from the CSVR study simply suggest that some aspects of transitional justice seem more likely to��contribute toward��positive��GBV��outcomes. The way that these positive outcomes are realized are very complex and often indirect.��It��also��seems that the potential positive impacts that transitional justice can make on��GBV��outcomes may depend somewhat on human rights groups in cases where the state has not explicitly prioritized��GBV��and gender justice.��Transitional justice could��potentially��contribute toward positive��GBV��outcomes,��but��this is not guaranteed.
Expanding transitional justice���s gender approach is important.��The full extent of gendered experiences of conflict-related human rights violations, including those of��gender non-conforming people��and��men,��should be investigated and redressed. But a delicate balance needs to be struck where survivors��� expectations are not unfairly raised and crushed by transitional justice processes that over-promise and under-deliver.
November 25, 2018
Postcolonial theory and the strong arm of identity
Image credit Nicholas Rawhani.
I have always been mistrustful of the rhetoric on decolonization.��Our difficulty deciding its meaning not only consigns it to a realm of needless obscurity but also frustrates our cause, which I understand to be the reimagining of the entire knowledge-making apparatus in the pursuit of a just, humane and equitable social order. The major problem with the term “decolonization” is its status as empty signifier.��My concern is that the radical potential of decolonization discourse���because of its indeterminacy���is always at risk of being co-opted by hegemonic political formations. We have witnessed such reversals already in the fate of the so-called African Renaissance, an idiom that was meant to signify continental rebirth but was converted instead into the ideological glue that rationalized former South African President Thabo Mbeki���s export of free-market economics across Africa. We also observe it in university life today with the relentless commodification of engaged scholarship into just another signpost on the road to tenure.
I would regard decolonization as being another one of those radical chic terms. Everyone who cares about the future of higher education in South Africa is talking about it, yet most admit they do not know what it actually means. It is no accident that the looseness of the term is consistent with the anti-foundationalist values of the intellectual tradition with which it is most closely associated, namely, postcolonial theory. Indeed, the postcolonial genre is itself difficult to master, being viewed in some quarters as not theory at all. It has been regarded, even, as a form of post-theory: criticize a postcolonial writer, Vivek Chibber warns, and you may be dismissed for having misunderstood.
But there is a second problem with the term decolonization: it seals us within a colonial imaginary in which the binaries of colonizer and colonized, white and black become impossible to displace. If we are committed to a nonracial future as enshrined in our constitution, it is difficult to imagine how that can ever be realized for as long as we continue to reify���and weaponize���certain highly contentious markers of social difference. I am of course speaking about race, for despite the common sense that it is a social construction, some of us continue to assert the value of strategic essentialism. It cannot be denied that racism remains an integral part of lived experience in South Africa, but it has to be distinguished from race, which, again, has no external referent.
Postcolonial theory proceeds from the premise of social difference, an insistence that underpins its trademark critiques of Eurocentrism, colonial ideology and economic determinism (Chibber, 2013). The result is an abiding suspicion of grand theory and a corresponding focus on marginality, alterity, and particularity instead. Inevitably, identity becomes the basis for political mobilization as the possibility for universal comradeship slowly disintegrates.
The influence of postcolonial theory on student movements in South Africa has been substantial. Unwilling to frame their struggle in terms of the universal values of dignity, security and equality, protestors have opted for the particulars of white privilege and black pain, practicing a form of identity politics that is unmistakably middle-class. Trapped in a self-referential form of protest, certain narcissism has set in, as self-styled radicals reveal a decidedly un-radical preoccupation with their own bourgeois destinies. Whereas the May 1968 generation pursued causes that extended far beyond the confines of the academy, to date our students have shown little interest in backing the causes of the South African majority���most of whom will never set foot inside a university. Young people who are functionally illiterate and virtually unemployable have no interest in decolonizing consciousness let alone in resurrecting the past glories of the color black.
I am not attempting to disavow or trivialize the lived experiences of protesting students. What they perceive more than anything is an acute sense of dislocation���a feeling of otherness that is the fate of anyone entering an institutional space that is deeply alienating.��But these psychological concerns must be recognized for what they are, namely, an emergent elite���s struggle for a coherent sense of self, rather than a movement for radical social change. The future of South Africa does not depend on the middle class���black or white. It depends on the millions of South Africans whose terminal state of wretchedness is both a necessary and sufficient condition for revolution.
The fact that decolonization discourse is saturated with bourgeois concerns also tells us that something is seriously wrong with the academy. The marketization of knowledge-making processes over the last four decades���and the gradual insertion of South African higher education institutions into that global landscape in the post-apartheid years���has resulted in the assembly-line production of graduates who are quickly assimilated into the well-oiled machineries of a market-friendly economy. Yet decolonization activists, by and large, do not seem to take issue with the instrumentalization of their education, directing all their energies towards the attainment of what they call ���free, quality, decolonized education.�����Instead of a materialist reading of the asymmetries of academic life, they support an agenda that centers on high-level abstractions, such as ���epistemic violence��� and the like.
There is another reason to question the decolonization agenda���specifically, its suggestion that the academic disciplines we have inherited remain suitable as disciplines in a society as historically contingent as ours. For example, it is one thing to question the topics and methods of a discipline such as psychology, but it is another matter entirely to question the existence of psychology altogether. Disciplines as they exist today do not represent, in the words of Plato, ���the carving of nature at its joints.��� They only exist because particular societies have deemed particular problems worthy of investigation. There is nothing given about a disciplinary order, which only emerges as a result of specific arrangements between knowledge-making communities and powerful interest groups. Approaching decolonization as an intellectual project that targets individual disciplines, therefore, is a nonstarter.
In the 1970s, the theorist Gayatri Spivak castigated French feminists for expressing solidarity with Vietnamese women. It was the first time in the history of the socialist left that someone from the Global South had questioned the possibility of universal comradeship. From there, postcolonial theory took off, its popularity in no small measure the result of the general disarray of the left. Today, internecine conflicts among academics and students���both in South Africa and internationally���find socialists and anti-racists being put down as conservative and racist. And that is perhaps the most pernicious effect of decolonization discourse: the now widespread belief that one���s identity constitutes an argument in and of itself, a belief that is surely antithetical to the very concept of a university. The idea that only black people may speak for black people, that only women may speak for women, that only disabled people may speak for disabled people, that only disabled black women may speak for disabled black women���in short, the idea that only the oppressed may speak for the oppressed, and only if they are identically oppressed���is one of the most absurd yet dangerous ideas in circulation today.
Postcolonial theory denies the possibility of empathy���of a shared humanity���and it is for that reason that it cannot provide the ethical vision we need now more than ever.
An extended version of this argument appeared in New Agenda, Vol 69.
November 22, 2018
Gods of Fiction: African writers and the fantasy of power
Image credit Wikipedia user Scartol via Wikimedia Commons.
���If I were God,��� Chinua Achebe writes in The Novelist as Teacher, ���I would regard as the very worst [sin] our acceptance���for whatever reason���of racial inferiority.��� Even though Achebe is not God, it doesn���t stop him from calling down fire on Africans he sees as accepting of racial inferiority. One of the victims of Achebe���s fury is a boy. Since we do not know his name, we will call him the Blasphemous Weather Boy or simply BWB.
BWB��is��a student of��Dr. Christiana��Chinwe��Achebe, the novelist’s wife. A month before Achebe drafted the essay in question, his wife had given her students a writing assignment. In his��writing, BWB uses the word ���winter��� even though he means to say the word ���harmattan.�����Harmattan��is a trade wind from the Sahara Desert. Between December and February, it��blows over the West African��coast and hinterlands,��bringing with it dust and dryness. The similarity BWB is suggesting between winter and��harmattan��comes from the fact that the��Harmattan��weather is slightly colder and occurs right around the same time of the year as winter. On probing the matter further, Achebe���s wife realizes that BWB writes down winter because he feels that using the word��harmattan��would make the other boys in the class call him a ���bushman.���
Seeing in BWB���s choice of words the manifestation of ���the disaster brought upon the African psyche in the period of subjection to alien races,��� Achebe responds: ���Now you wouldn���t have thought, would you, that there was something shameful in your weather? But apparently, we do. How can this great blasphemy be purged?���
Colonialism was a savagely violent power. It left behind traumas, both psychological and cultural, that we are still trying to understand to this day. Read up on Frantz Fanon���s clinical and political writings, and you���ll get the picture. Still, we can agree that Achebe���s example of racial inferiority as derived from colonialism is a bad example. Where Achebe sees racial inferiority, we could easily see a kid experimenting with language. BWB is in��an��experimental��phase��of��his life.��He is beginning to realize that words are complicated and confusing but that they also do very strange and illicit things. Through the word ���winter,��� he��imagines that he can��escape��the��perceived��humiliation of ���harmattan.��� That sounds messed up,��but it shows us a child getting a feel for the power that lies in words. Words have power and letting oneself fall under��its spell, no matter how improper the intentions, is the essence of creativity. Was BWB a heretic or was he simply being creative?����It is hard to tell. Frankly, the argument could go either way. What we do know is that Achebe believes BWB has crossed some line of orthodoxy and expresses his disapproval in terms that are worth questioning.
But all that is beside the point except that BWB���s alleged blasphemy is what Achebe states as justification for his role as a writer: ���I think it is part of my business as a writer to teach that boy that there is nothing disgraceful about the African weather, that the palm tree is fit subject for poetry.��� This makes one wonder: is this how Achebe imagined the people for whom he wrote his novels, that they carried within themselves imperfections so extreme that these imperfections needed to be ���purged?��� How does that way of imagining a reader��define��the writer���s aesthetic decisions? How do we write differently when we imagine that we are being read by a deeply broken people? What culture of reading does it foster? What fantasies about the novelist���s power does��it propagate?
The essay in question was��originally��published in the British magazine,��New Statesman��in 1965. Achebe set out to identity what was unique to African fiction by critiquing what he saw as��a��weakness of European artistic practice. In��seeking to protect��art from the assault of mass culture, European artists isolated themselves from the collective and, as a result, produced art without a cause, without skin in the game, art folded in upon itself like the proverbial ostrich, blind and deaf to the world, art that was essentially empty. What Achebe couldn���t quite swallow, and he was right, was the eagerness to make this farcical idea of art a gold standard for everyone. It was clearly a bad solution to a problem unique to Europe���s aesthetic history. African writers on the other hand, had a whole different set of concerns.
Against the absurdity of fiction without a cause, Achebe proposes that storytelling is ���essentially about education, in the��best sense of the term.��� He adds, ���art is important, but so is education of the kind I have in mind.�����For Achebe, art and education are��not in opposition. Education is simply the highest use to which art can aspire���its sublime essence. Education closes the gap between life and fiction so that artistic energies can be channeled into the nourishment of the collective. Our lives inspire our stories so that our stories can enrich our lives.
All of this sounds so beautifully moral and philanthropic��until we ask ourselves what kind of reader underlies this vision of art. As the title��of the essay, ���Novelist as Teacher,��� makes clear, the star of Achebe���s art-for-education philosophy is the novelist. But if the novelist is a teacher, what does it make��the reader? What does it say about the literary text?
It is odd to cast the novelist in the figure of the teacher. For one thing, the teacher conjures up a certain kind of melancholy associated with the labor of study and contemplation. The teacher as a��stentorian schoolmaster is confronted by the student as a sad, contemplative, serious, and absorbed figure. The teacher marks a space of life that excludes pleasure, play, love, passion, experimentation, unpredictability, risk, and so on. And if you are Nigerian and you went to school in the poor side of town, like I did, you probably also see the teacher as a figure of violence���all the beating and insults justified by the claim that it molds you into a better person.
Representing the novelist in the figure of the teacher does two things. First, it justifies a whole range of aesthetic considerations that frees the novelist from taking the reader���s pleasure into account even as it excludes the uses of the text from the domain of pleasure. The literary text in this worldview is the novel as guide, conduct manual, textbook, anthropological document, ethnographic record, and so on. This might account for the general air of dullness that clouds many African fiction. It certainly accounts for the undisguised moralistic intention that drives��pretty much every African fiction out there with the exception of The��Palmwine��Drinkard. It accounts for the pedantic language. It accounts for the obsession with overburdening fiction with��themes. It accounts for characters that are painted in such gigantic strokes just so they can model abstract themes. When you read some African novels, you feel ready to take an exam on corruption and extractive resources. Just as Virginia Woolf says about��certain early 20th��century novels, after reading certain African novels, you want to get out your check book and send a donation to a humanitarian organization. This cultural imaginary built on the novelist as teacher is joyless. It turns the act of reading into the study of social ills and moral virtue.
It also institutes a hierarchical relationship between the novelist and the reader. As students, African readers are placed in a developmental trajectory, always working their way up to becoming better people and better readers. The problem with this setup is that the novelist has no incentive to change his or her vision of the reader. A teacher is not a teacher without students, so if the African writer wants to stay in business, he or she has to keep readers in their status as students. Four decades after Achebe instituted his pedagogical regime of literature, Nadine Gordimer is still complaining that the African readership is at a ���primer-book and comic-book level.���
This idea of fiction, however good��the intentions that inspired it were, is based on problematic assumptions about the power of the storyteller and the kind of reader it saw as the object of its power. A quick survey of mid to late century writing on African literary culture���from Ezekiel��Mphahlele���s��Image of Africa to��Ngugi��wa��Thiongo���s��Decolonizing the Mind���share the common tone of condescension to the reader, coupled with an almost megalomaniac notion about the power of the fiction writer.
In the preface of��Decolonizing the Mind,��Ngugi��writes, ���a writer and a surgeon have something in common���a passion for truth. Prescription of the correct cure is dependent on a rigorous analysis of the reality. Writers are surgeons of the heart and souls of a community.��� What sort of reader is implied where a writer is considered to be the ���surgeon of the heart and souls of the community?��� Between Achebe and��Ngugi, African readers were either students or sick.
These are all metaphors, of course. But metaphors aren���t the cute little wordplays we��imagine them to be. They are sneaky little devices we use to say figuratively what we can���t say directly. What comes through from these images being used to explain what the writer does is power. The teacher and the surgeon are figures of power and knowledge. Writers who imagine themselves in these larger-than-life figurations������if I were god,��� writes Achebe���believed they had omniscient insight into the reader���s intention. They saw themselves as addressing a reader plagued by emotional battery, cognitive dissociation, racial inferiority complex, etc. The readers��� emotions, memories, perceptions, thoughts, fears, wishes were all defective due to the ���the��disaster brought upon the African psyche��� by colonization. Decolonization became this therapeutic���educative, regenerative, revitalizing��� project that could correct the broken psyche of the colonized as long as writers who saw themselves as experts of the imaginative arts were in control. Again, let me be clear. I am not saying that colonialism did not leave traumas. I am more interested in the ways in which African writers of this period imported the language of dysfunction into literature and used it as justification for arrogating to themselves and their writing a kind of sovereign power over the reader.
Tethering creative practice to the dysfunction in Africa ensures that the African writer is kept in business. There was colonialism. Then there was neocolonialism and the collapse of African states. Just when we thought it couldn���t get any worse, there was��HIV/AIDS in the midst of senseless wars. Through all this, there is the dutiful writer always present at the scene of crisis, ready to lend a hand. The idea of Africa in a perpetual state of emergency becomes ideological crutch for the writer who seems only to be able to justify his or her work as a response to crisis. Today, the new state of emergency is the crisis of representation propagated by western media, aptly referred to as ���the danger of the single story.��� 50 years ago, Achebe saw his ���business as a writer��� as teaching Africans how not to be shameful about their world. Today, African writers are in the business of teaching the world how not to write about Africa. Just thinking hypothetically here. What would African writers find to write about when we finally get to the promise land? What would they say to a readership they cannot prefigure as sad and broken?
To put it bluntly, Achebe���s generation was not in love with the reader. Catering to what they imagined to be the reader���s needs is not the��same thing as loving the reader as an equal, as a figure of inspiration, as flesh and blood with cravings and idiosyncrasies. They also did not know the reader because they could never see the reader beyond the��readers��ailments and defects.
Interrogating these underlying assumptions, which informed the foundations of modern African fiction, is not nitpicking. It is a way of asking authors to be honest about the kind of reader they imagine when they compose their work and how this imagined reader defines��the aesthetic decisions they make. If we are going to ask African writers today to take more risks with storytelling and stop rehearsing worn out themes and platitudes, we need to make sure they have the right kind of audience in mind and that they forge the right relationship with this audience.
I do understand what it means to be where we are today, to have something called African fiction to cherish and share with the world, all of which came about because people like Achebe,��Ngugi, Gordimer and that��whole generation fought hard to create a space where none had been granted us. But examining the tools they used to clear this space is the only way we can figure out what new tools we need to open up new frontiers.
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