Sean Jacobs's Blog, page 239

Pride, prejudice and blackface

A Dutch woman of Ugandan descent reflects on growing up with Zwarte Piet.





Image credit Gerard Stolk via Flickr.

I am probably one of the few people of color who,��as a child,��was not offended by the Dutch (and Belgian) character,��Zwarte��Piet��(or Black Pete), celebrated every year on December 5th.��Zwarte��Piet is of course the�����helper��� to��Saint��Nicolaas��(or��Sinterklaas), the patron saint of children.��The ���folklore��� around��Sinterklaas��is aimed at teaching children moral lessons. The role of executioner and punisher falls on Black Pete.��The latter is a blackface character.

Basically, a��lot of white Dutch people dress up as��Zwarte��Piet in blackface and��see no problem with it.

Growing up,��I never related��Zwarte��Pieten to people of color. For me, Black Pete was an object, an alien, and not a human being. And while I was also raised in a predominantly white environment, I was never exposed to negative conditioning��regarding��the African, specifically��Acholi, part of my heritage.

My naivety, as some may call it, reminds me of��a letter written by Bayard Rustin, the American civil rights leader,��to one Charles McCracken, a resident of Los Angeles,��in 1951 about the harm caused by Minstrel shows. Rustin argues that social practices are far more influential in��the��development of children���s moral character then are moral lessons taught by parents, teachers and others. If people see black people in inferior positions, whatever adults close to them may tell them otherwise, they associate blacks with inferior work and positions in society.��If black people were completely accepted in the social, political and economic life of the United States, then,��Rustin��argues, he��would not have to be offended by a Minstrel Show. The opposite��is true, so��it makes sense to be opposed to forms of entertainment��that��do harm,��that��hurt other people, and��that��create social��division.

I encountered my fair share of open racism in my formative years in Berlin in the 1980s. Germany���s history��of��racism and fascism is well documented, so is its xenophobia. Between 1990 and 2010 more than 149 people were��murdered��in racist violence there.

Although��I learned about racism in Germany, I��was��not��exposed to caricature such as Black Pete until we moved to the Netherlands in 1992. Every year���from mid-November through the 5th of December���Sinterklaas��(who resembles Father Christmas, but in 16th century noblemen���s costume) and Black Pete, would be everywhere: on��television, posters, in music and other��merchandise.

Luckily in my progressive primary school,��Dr. E.��Boekmanschool,��Black Pete was not a being of dark skin: instead he was made out the primary colors found in a cheap drugstore makeup palette. The philosophy of��Dr. E.��Boekmanschool��is based on awareness, mutual respect,��independence and creativity.��The��school board, in partnership with the parent body,��introduced a number of revisions in��how students at the school would celebrate��Sinterklaas��and how Black Pete would be portrayed.��The emphasis was on��respect and inclusivity.

In 2010, long after I had graduated from the Dr. E.��Boekmanschool, I was living in Kampala, Uganda. A Dutch friend asked me to join in the Saint��Nikolaas��celebration at the Embassy of the Netherlands along with a couple Black��Petes. I did not participate in the event,��but��it was at that moment I realized the cognitive dissonance��and of the ignorance of��modern colonialism within the Dutch culture. It made me question my role within a marginalized community.

It is��that��time of the year again and like��most��social media users in the Netherlands or with Dutch connections, my newsfeed is full of articles related to the debate��around Black Pete. Many comments are derogatory��towards��foreigners��and/or brimming with�����pride��� for Dutch culture and for Black Pete.

That said, in recent years there has been some progress to rid the festival of its racism, including smaller, inclusive�� initiatives, such as��De��nieuwe��Sint, but these are uncommon outside urban areas of the country.

The��movement ���Zwarte��Piet is��Racisme�����(Black Pete is Racism)��and the reactionary backlash against it��revealed another side of the Netherlands.��Denial, racism and disrespect are at the core of arguments��defending the holiday festival and its racist��charicature���from ordinary Dutch citizens to��the country���s Prime Minister������This is a tradition������; ���it is a children’s holiday���;�����Black Pete is black��because of��the chimney.�����Any attempts to dismantle the ���tradition�����are��seen as��irreverant��and undermining Dutch culture.

An enduring European tradition

An interview with Berlin-based Sierra Leonean electronic musician Lamin Fofana on Europe's longtime fascination with African culture.





Lamin Fofana. Image credit Taliesin Gilkes-Bower

Lamin��Fofana is a Sierra Leonean DJ and electronic music producer currently living and working out of Berlin, Germany. He runs the record label Sci-fi��& Fantasy, and has a new solo album out on German label��Hundebiss��called��Brancusi sculpting��Beyonce.

Having moved to the US from Freetown in the late 1990s he is an artist with vast range of experiences that have been shaped by international migration. It���s thus no surprise that��mobility��has long been a part of his artistic exploration. His previous work, completed while living��and working��in New York��City, referenced contemporary headlines around migration. However, after moving to Europe he���s finding there is a fatigue around reporting about the Mediterranean amongst Europeans. So��he���s decided to take a long view on human movement around the world, looking back to the past since as he says, ���we���ve all been moving around forever.���

Brancusi sculpting��Beyonce��is based on a Mike Ladd song from the album��Negrophilia, a name itself borrowed from a book that explores the co-optation of African cultural artifacts by 1920s modernist European artists such as��Pablo��Picasso.��Fofana���s��interest in this legacy comes from his direct participation in the contemporary European art scene, and also having to navigate a not always comfortable existence as an African living in Germany and traveling throughout the European continent.��Recently,��I spoke with��Fofana��about his work and experiences.��We covered a number of topics, but this excerpt focuses on the current popularity of African music in Europe.��The interview is edited for clarity.��(Listen to a longer excerpt of��the conversation on the latest��episode of INTL BLK Radio.)

Boima Tucker

Lets talk a little about the stage for African music in Europe, so we can kind of reflect on the��negrophilia��conversation a bit more. So, Europe currently is the largest [foreign] market for what���s being called��Afrobeats��of Afro-trap, you know, contemporary��Afropop��coming out of whether it���s Lagos, Paris, London, or Accra. This is this moment where Africa has reached the European stage���it���s coming to the rest of the world, especially the Caribbean���but Europe is a particularly interesting case because of a lot of what we talked about: the racial politics, the history, the proximity to Africa, the economic imbalance, the history of colonialism, so what is your take?

Lamin Fofana

My view is a lot more work than the average producer, because I���m thinking about the connections between calypso from Trinidad and Sierra Leone and all of that exchange that was happening way back… Before people thought Afrobeat��and they only thought of Fela, but they think now of��MHD,��Wizkid��and��Davido. It has bubbled to a mainstream frenzy, and there is a European / American fascination with it. But from how I see it, I have a bit of suspicion with the mainstream fascination. I think people talk about��Afrobeats, and its the current iteration of it, and it���s something to them just because Drake or��Beyonce��did a song or Diplo did a remix or something.��Afrobeats��will be here after that.

Boima Tucker

So you see that we���re in a moment [where] it���s a trend among the mainstream.

Lamin Fofana

We���re in a moment! Yes! That���s what I���m trying to say. And no disrespect to all of those people. Especially,��Davido��and��Wizkid��who are amazing, MHD too. They might be here longer. But in the sense of this current fascination,��I think it���s the same way the world is into K-Pop right now or something.

By the way, I like those people,��but that���s not where I go����� you know, [there are those] looking for what���s fresh in Ghana to exploit, or what���s fresh in Accra, or in Freetown or in Lagos. And that music is interesting, I love it, but like I said, I have my suspicion. Because I know, when I listen to like, oh even the stuff that���s coming out of London, like the��Afrowave, so many other subgenres of��Afrobeats, it���s nice. I like the house-y ones. I like all of them, but I���m just trying to say, brand new subgenres, that���s where it frustrates��me a little bit, because I know it���s nothing new, it was there. It was there, we were doing it, we���re still doing it!

Boima Tucker

People are making a lot of money off it now though.

Lamin Fofana

Well good for them.

Boima Tucker

(laughs)

Lamin Fofana

One of my favorite recent projects is from��Benjamin Lebrave who runs the��Akwaaba��label in Accra, with the producer called��Jowaa, and they���re producing house and techno out of Accra. That���s interesting to me, until the mainstream finds it and calls it something new.

And also, when you say people are profiting of it, people are really making tons of money off of this, because even outside of Africa, the people that are making it in New York, or in London, or Paris, these are African immigrant children and people from a working class��background.

So when mainstream fascination comes and it���s being played on the radio, you celebrate the few that make money, but once people are collaborating with Drake and some international DJs, I don���t know, we should not embrace it as a success��� you��know this is great but they���ll move on to the next thing very soon.

Boima Tucker

So you don���t feel like it���s bringing any political bridges or changing the reality on the ground for Africans in Europe. Some of the experiences you���ve had you don���t think it���s changing���

Lamin Fofana

If you want to check out an��Afrobeats��night, there are spaces where you can go, and clubs are booking African artists, people from Africa are coming through and playing European clubs and touring the world.��In that��sense it���s good that the culture is being celebrated. But at the same time, you have to really examine it. Not just, ���yeah nice��Wizkid��is doing his thing, I like his clothing line!��� or something. It���s deeper than that. And that���s at its peak right now.

Boima Tucker

You don���t think it���s challenging… maybe not politics, but I think for me one of the most important political decisions any migrant has to make when you reach a new land, is the question of assimilation. They say�����do as the Romans do,�����but you know the tension is always, what do you retain from home, and what are the ways [you act here], and so do you think that the popularization of African culture or at least making Africa cool amongst young European people of all races is changing ideas of assimilation?

Lamin Fofana

Yes! I mean, I don���t know about ideas of assimilation, but I think yes it���s celebrating African culture. As we say in the US it’s ���Black Joy,�����it���s beautiful!��And I mean creating spaces where people can express themselves is great thing.

Boima Tucker

A new way of��belonging to German society���

Lamin Fofana

Yes, absolutely! I think especially in a society that feels hostile to you all the time, that in itself is great! But I can���t say that and not say that the mainstream fascination with the current��Afrobeats��phase and craze���

Boima Tucker

There���s more at stake.

Lamin Fofana

There���s more at stake! What are people taking and who���s walking home with the loot? That���s just where I���m at. And it���s important, it���s the reason why this festival thing that I curated that you guys played last year, people��were struggling to try and get visas for some of the artists. And it���s kind of like, you have to do the work, or else I cannot just be up there playing this music all the time, I have to contribute somehow, a little bit. As much as I can.

Boima Tucker

So you are, I would say, an African��diasporan, you���re a member of the diaspora, you have a US passport, you���ve traveled and you have all these experiences, like myself, and people like us are largely the ones who are able to direct international conversations about the continent, if not even maybe shift them here and there back home. What does this cultural frame then say about��diapsora, and maybe a little bit deeper what does it say about democracy, to you?

Lamin Fofana

I think it���s a��� it���s a fucked up imbalance. I think one of my favorite compilations, that has the most ironic title, from awhile back, I think it was from Ghana, titled�����Songs about Leaving Africa�����I don���t know if you remember that?

It has this character on it, and he���s suited up, and he���s got his shades on, and he���s got his suitcase, that���s what this question makes me think about. Like the constant looking over here sometimes.

And then, the thing about the current��Afrobeats��phase is that music from Africa, current fresh happening music from Africa is being played in New York nightclubs, in Berlin nightclubs. That���s pushing against this constant one sided dialogue.

In the independent music industry there���s also a constant reaching for something that���s ���more authentic��� to the point where they can���t even find the authentic anymore, they just have to go and dig up old��vinyls��and reissue them. [The authentic] is right in front of��us, it���s the music that���s being played by the kids over there now, by the kids in Freetown, by the kids in Accra.

What it says about democracy? Like I said, it���s a fucked up imbalance, and I think the current situation or the current popular fascination with��Afrobeats��at the same time is a double-edged sword.

Boima Tucker

So you mentioned��Jowaa��and so I guess I want to know what other scenes you are looking at or inspired by. Let���s talk a little bit about the��alternative take on this��Afrobeats��thing, this more Afro-alternative [sound] coming out of Lisbon, or��Jowaa, or even out of Uganda with��Nyege��Nyege��Tapes, which is also a music festival. Could you talk a little bit about what your observations on those scenes��are?

Lamin Fofana

I think I saw the Ugandan label, at��Berghain��some weeks back, no some months back, awhile ago. They absolutely destroyed it.

It���s interesting because the person who put out,��Hundebiss, who put out this release that we���re talking��about is actually in Kampala right now because they invited him for a residency over there.��

If people are producing fresh, happening music, that is children of African descent, it���s great. But I think the���

Boima Tucker

Do you think this is a positive development,��do you think it���s more empowering to have these alternatives than just the mainstream��Afrobeats, or do you think it���s the same kind of��negrophilia��that the cubists participated in.

Lamin Fofana

Whenever African music gets out of Africa, there���s a level of that to��it.��Negrophlia,��fetishization, exoticism���

Boima Tucker

Are those scenes kind of like an antidote for��Afrobeats?

Lamin Fofana

I mean, to be honest I prefer those scenes. If anything when we talk about techno, the most exciting electronic music is coming out of Lisbon and��going [under]heard.

Boima Tucker

But the audiences aren���t necessarily��� well maybe locally it���s empowering, but internationally, the audiences aren���t necessarily the African kid in London, working class, with immigrant parents���

Lamin Fofana

But, these labels, in this current space, they do have a strong connection, especially in Lisbon, to the idea of neighborhood. The community is strong there, so it doesn���t feel like its something being removed and put on display.

The same thing that we were talking about, all the current iterations of��Afrobeats��happening in London and in Paris are things that African kids in Europe want to hear.

So my thing would be, the labels that have these infrastructures, that have these distribution networks, that are constantly going to dig up this obscure funk and soul to reissue them, there���s a market for it so there’s that, but I think for what it is, that is a lot more problematic than labels putting out fresh new��music.

I kind of lost touch with��Benjamin recently but when I first got to Berlin he was visiting and we sat down and talked for a bit, and we talked about��Jowaa because I think they were getting into the idea for the project then. But��we were talking about certain kinds of music that were popular in West Africa that kind of slip under the radar. Basically, the mainstream attention goes up and down. Afrobeats��too is a thing that could be a big wave, but it���s not immune from something else capturing the imagination.

Boima Tucker

Well I think maybe another case study that has a bit more of a lifetime that we can analyze is��gqom��music. Where it went from a kind of underground scene in Durban, then it got attention in London, some labels in Europe started releasing it. Then it went a little more mainstream back home in South Africa, and then it became the sound of South Africa, then it was in the Black Panther soundtrack, and now Nigerians are making it. Right?

Lamin Fofana

Ohh��mannn��� Extreme iterations, I don���t know.

Boima Tucker

Is it more empowering to have these independent labels that are searching for new fresh sounds, is it more empowering for African creatives or is it recreating���

Lamin Fofana

An imbalance? Yes! It does, that’s why I���m trying to point out the people with infrastructure. People like DJ Lag tour, but I wish that people like that would get more attention.

This is not pitting��Afrobeats��against underground independent[s], because I think the��attention and the frenzy with��gqom��went away a bit. And that’s because things in the global underground electronic music scene move faster. The distribution system is definitely inherently flawed, like the way things flow.

You can imagine, [you���re] a kid growing up in Durban or somebody growing up in Accra, and you’re making this obscure music that people appreciate in your neighborhood�����

Boima Tucker

Or maybe don���t appreciate in your neighborhood.

Lamin Fofana

Even worse, yeah.

And then you get this opportunity or get this email, you put something up on��Soundcloud��and some random person wants to release it and book you on a fifteen date European tour. That���s great!

Boima Tucker

But what would be better?

Lamin Fofana

(Laughing) The question you���re asking, it requires like a fundamental rethinking of the global trade system and everything! I know it���s fucked up, but the way these systems are, it���s so entrenched.

Is it too much to ask for an independent musician, for us to create a fair distribution network, which can be heard from Durban or Johannesburg, Accra or Freetown and [someone can] show up and play��five shows by booking a flight from Freetown?

Boima Tucker

We still live in an uneven world.

Lamin Fofana

Yeah it���s so much more fucked up, this��question you���re asking. If you think about the historical depth (laughs). When you think about these small independent music scenes, it’s like a tiny spec on the sensor of this shit!

Boima Tucker

Maybe we shouldn���t care so much and just enjoy the music?

Lamin Fofana

No no no! I���m not saying that, I���m trying not to say that, but I���m also trying to say��� it���s the struggle, basically why I���m running around in a pretzel���

Boima Tucker

Di money��dey��na��Europe (The money is in Europe).

Lamin Fofana

Di money��dey��na��Europe. It���s the fundamental bind that our parents were in��when they moved to Europe. You talk about opportunity, I ask myself this question and try not to get too far into [my] head, but people move to places, but the newness of those places, like my mom moving to��New York City��in the late��1980s���

Boima Tucker

We���re just figuring it out and you want us to question the trip?��(laughs)

Lamin Fofana

Right yes, the newness of those places wears out really fast. And then you start to begin to save because you want to move back.

I have to come up with formulations to express this kind of… it���s really much much deeper than what an obscure electronic music producer can give you.��(laughs)

The state of the Afropean union

INTL BLK radio is back with a border crossing mix of Afrobeats and Zouk, as well as an interview with Sierra Leonean electronic music producer Lamin Fofana.





Le Vieux Mila, Brussels, Belgium. Image credit Boima Tucker.

We’re back with INTL BLK radio after a few months hiatus. This episode opens with a mix of Afrobeats and Zouk, and then we review some of the musical cross-overs happening across the Black Atlantic. In the 2nd hour we have an interview with Lamin Fofana, electronic music producer and DJ of Sierra Leonean descent based in Berlin. We discuss his latest album Brancusi Sculpting Beyonce, the phenomenon of negrophilia in 1920s European modernist art, and what’s behind the current moment of the popularity of African culture in Europe.

Listen below or on��iTunes, Google Play and��Stitcher.

What the Jair Bolsonaro regime in Brazil means for Africa

Brazil's new President is committed to American-style bilateralism and the violent undoing of the Workers Party's legacy. The consequences for Africa are bleak.





President-elect of Brazil, Jair Bolsonaro. Image credit Geraldo Magela via Ag��ncia Senado Flickr.

As the country with the largest��Afro-descendent population���53��percent of Brazil���s total population of 210 million���Brazil has always attached particular importance to Africa. Brazil both embraces and represses its African heritage. The official ideology of�����racial democracy������the idea that all Brazilians descend from miscegenation and that racism as such cannot exist���operates with the reality of social exclusion and brutal violence that the country���s��Afro-descendent population disproportionately suffer. With the election of Jair Bolsonaro, an avowed racist who promises to unleash a wave of violence to�����clean up the country�����that will see thousands of black Brazilians murdered by security forces, it is worth examining what Bolsonaro will mean for Africa both culturally and politically and what Africa means for Bolsonaro.

Afro-Brazilian culture and religion from samba to capoeira and Candombl�� have all been repressed by the state at various points during the country���s history. Despite the rhetoric of racial democracy,��Afro-Brazilian culture has often been criminalized. However, in one of the many paradoxes that define Brazilian history���it��has also been officially adopted as defining national identity. Samba is the official musical genre, Carnival the cultural expression, and most of Brazil���s footballing heroes are��Afro-descendants. But knitted into this is a paternalistic racism: Brazil is a country where a white elite Brazilian,��such as��former president Fernando Henrique Cardoso,��claims to�����have one foot in the kitchen�����referring to black ancestry and Bolsonaro���s vice-president General Mour��o boasts of how handsome his grandson is because of ���the whitening of the race.���

Brazil is defined by a particular type of�����informal apartheid.�����Although��official legal racism did not exist in the same way it did in South Africa and the United States, Brazilian society continues to be defined by a system of social exclusion in which the poorer and blacker sections of the population are kept in line through force and excluded from the public sphere. Young Afro-descendant Brazilian men form the majority of��the 64,000 persons murdered last year,��particularly, the 5,000 of whom were killed by the police. Police violence has always been employed as a tool by Brazil���s elite to keep the population in line, especially the��Afro-descended.

Following 14 years of center-left governance that sought to expand social citizenship,��Bolsonaro represents the return of reactionary racist elites to power. His supporters include those who view��Afro-Brazilian cultural expressions as an embarrassment, who view Brazil���s��African heritage as a cultural and genetic defect and who openly fantasize about a Brazil without�����samba, Caipirinha and Carnival.�����The desire of many on the right to�����Americanize�����Brazil (by which they mean remaking it into a white American, rabid capitalist country)��is based��partly��in a sense of shame and hatred��of��Brazil���s��African heritage.

Beyond��what lays in wait for��Afro-descendant Brazilians with the election of Bolsonaro, what does his victory mean for Africa?

The PT and Africa

Until the election of Lula da Silva in 2002, social mobility was very limited in Brazil. Lula himself hailed from Brazil’s Northeast and from a population group regarded as second class citizens in the richer more prosperous��south-east and��south of the country where he moved as a child. He rose to power��in an era after military dictatorship���which afforded more space to social and political institutions, such as unions to mobilize. Yet, historically, access to resources, wealth and the state was mediated through ���the favor��� or a personal appeal to elites to intervene on behalf of the lower classes. In this way personal relationships rather than institutions have functioned as a means of control throughout Brazil.

One of the legacies of the Worker���s Party��(PT)��time in government was their expansion of social citizenship��through the��introduction��of��quotas at Brazil���s elite universities,��and rapidly expanding access to higher education through the construction of new federal universities in the poorest regions of the country. Afro-descendents excluded from the public sphere became an increasingly prominent and confident��presence��in public life, politics, media and academia.��Of��the few stories to cheer during this election��were��the successful campaigns of numerous black women following the murder of the��black��socialist Rio city councillor Marielle Franco in March��2018.��The reactionary tide that swept Bolsonaro to power can be partially explained by backlash��of the upper middle class��to this broadening of social citizenship.

Under Lula, Brazil became a respected international actor and the foreign policy of his and his successor Dilma Rousseff���s governments paid particular attention to Africa.��By the end of Lula���s second term Brazil had 37 diplomatic mission in Africa the most after the United States, France, Russia and China, while��Brazil���s African trade rose from $4 Billion to $24 Billion.��Brazil��played a leading role in the establishment in 2009 of the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa), the association of five large, very powerful emerging economies.

This went beyond��South-South��rhetoric and included��efforts at diplomacy and the promotion of the expansion of Brazilian business interests on the continent. While some of these activities, especially the promotion of Brazilian construction giant Oderbrecht���s interests in Angola involved corruption,��both in Brazil and Angola, these moves should not be viewed as solely opportunistic partnership between capital and the state to drive foreign policy.��Rather, they were��expressions��of the PT���s developmental model, which involved the promotion of Brazilian capital abroad and the expansion of Brazil���s presence in new regions, even in in places where Brazil lacked diplomatic infrastructure.

Lula also motivated the study of African history and culture��in general (a rich exchange between writers from the continent and Brazil was one result)��and of Brazil���s African descended population. Africa-focused universities brought African and Africanist academics and students together with Brazilian professors and students to promote Africa-centered curricula and research.

What will Bolsonaro do in Africa?

Bolsonaro, who seeks to undo the entirety of the PT���s legacy in power, will likely seek to do the same with Brazil���s foreign policy. Bolsonaro��denounced the PT���s foreign policy for years as being ���driven by the��leftist ideology of the Workers��� Party.��� In concrete terms this means a repudiation of the multilateralism promoted by the PT in favor of a new America-centric bilateralism. For example, Bolsonaro famously declared: ���If I���m elected president, I will leave the UN.�����His victory signals Brazil���s��membership of the��international club of rightwing demagogues who reject international law and human rights, sharing the table with Trump, Netanyhu, Duterte, Modi and Erdogan.��Bolsonaro���s vision of Brazilian power is a depraved reboot of the Cold War,��in which Brazil will join Trump and Netanyahu in standing up to the “globalists” seeking to spread cultural Marxism.

For Africa this means ignorance and neglect (in Latin America, Brazil will play an active reactionary role). Bolsonaro will continue with the course set by his illegitimate predecessor Michel Temer���the most unpopular leader in the history of polling. Temer, who seized power in a constitutional coup against Rousseff, had a��foreign policy that was as much as a disaster as the rest of his government. Famously, Temer���s Foreign Minister Jos�� Serra was unable to name all the members of BRICS when asked by a journalist at his first press conference. The traditional oligarchical elite of Brazil has always been uninterested in the rest of the world, caring little for even the rhetoric of Brazilian international power. During his two disastrous years in power Temer,��besides attempting to undermine Venezuela and sucking up to foreign capital,��neglected, ignored or attempted to reverse the foreign policy gains made under Lula.

At the very least we can expect more of this from Bolsonaro, whose anti-African racism is more explicit that the oligarchs and gangsters who formed the Temer government.��For instance, during the campaign Bolsonaro��remarked about Brazil���s legacy of slavery: ���What debt of slavery? I never enslaved anyone in my life… Look, if you really look at history, the Portuguese didn���t even step foot in Africa. The blacks themselves turned over the slaves.��� Another highlight was��a��piece of fake news spread by Bolsonaro���s weaponized Whatsapp operation,��claiming��the PT���s electoral campaign was funded by the�����dictator of Africa.�����The neglect in Africa stems in part from the racist repudiation or distancing from Brazil���s African heritage outlined earlier and the idea that Brazil is fundamentally part of the “West” or “Global North” rather than Global South. As such, the South-South co-operation rhetoric of the PT is seen as an expression of backwardness, globalism or even communism.

Africa and the Generals

Bolsonaro is a creature birthed and reared by the worst elements of Brazil���s dictatorship, which governed from 1964 to 1985. However, Bolsonaro is best understood in terms of how he differs from the��generals, who sought to promote themselves as merely non-ideological bureaucrats working for the national interest. Bolsonaro openly embraces torture and extrajudicial murder as heroic and good rather than necessary evils in the fight against communism.

While the 1964��military��coup was supported by the United States, and in most part Brazil was a loyal ally in the Cold War playing a key role in such low points as Operation Condor (the��US funded program to undermine democracy in South America), the��dictatorship at least had a vision of Brazil as an independent power. This included an expanded role for Brazil in Africa, particularly in Lusophone Africa; Brazil for instance was the first country to recognize Angolan and Mozambican independence and while it would be a stretch to say it played a major role in the anti-Apartheid movement, it did condemn��Apartheid South Africa. By contrast, the dictatorships in��neighboring Argentina and Chile��enjoyed close relations with��the��pariah state.��Bolsonaro on the other hand seems to lack an independent��foreign��policy vision or indeed much of a political vision beyond shooting his way through Brazil���s political and economic crisis.

A few��lessons

More than Bolsonaro���s ���Africa policy,��� are the����several lessons about contemporary global politics and populism to be drawn from Bolsonaro���s election.

Keeping in mind the significant differences between Brazil and most African countries,��Bolsonaro���s brand of ���shoot your way through your problems��� politics has resonance. Nostalgia for a mythologized dictatorial (recent) past,��where everyone��knew��their places and those who didn���t were forcibly corrected, already played a role in Nigeria���s last election, where the country elected its former military��dictator��Muhammadu Buhari on a anti-corruption platform. Some��Nigerian��voters had nostalgia for��Buhari���s mid-1980s rule��when soldiers would go around ���with whips to enforce traffic regulations and ensure commuters formed orderly queues at bus stops. Civil servants arriving late to offices were forced to perform frog squats.��� The regime also imprisoned��more than��500 high profile people on charges of corruption,��and drug traffickers were executed. This was coupled with the arrest and indefinite detention without trial of dissidents and Buhari���s critics.��Yet,��as elected president, Buhari proved ineffective. His government has been characterized by inaction (he has failed to solve the economic problems and ensure people���s safety) and his military���notorious for abuses against civilians���serves the US���s ���War on Terror��� aims in the region.

The second lesson from Brazil is the growing political power of evangelical churches. Perhaps the key factor in Bolsonaro���s victory was the support of Brazil���s rapidly growing evangelical��population, who overwhelmingly voted for��him. Brazil���s powerful and growing evangelical bloc moved to endorse him in the last week of the��first��round of the��election. Its media outlets promoted him and churches served as mobilizing points. Of particular importance was the support of the�����Billionaire Bishop,�����Edir Macedo. Macedo���s church, The Universal Church of God,��is expanding across the African continent. (Incidentally, the church has had run ins with authorities in Angola, Madagascar and Zambia.)��Across much of the Third World evangelical��Christianity is a growing political force finding roots in both the desperate who seek salvation in the next life in lieu of a lack of opportunities or political options in this one, and a new middle class who��is drawn to��the�����Jesus wants you to be rich�����prosperity gospel. Whether in��Nigeria��or��South Africa,��it��plays��increasing roles in politics.

Evangelicals are not merely a religious group.��They are well organized politically, well funded and a powerful international social movement that has organized a political bloc promoting anti-gay, anti-women and anti-abortion policies. An example of the power of Brazilian evangelicals can be found in the Escola Sem Partido (School without��Party) movement,��which��promotes itself as a non-ideological movement concerned with the ideological indoctrination of Brazilian school children by leftist teachers. In actuality��it��seeks��to undermine critical thinking and the study of history promoting instead a evangelical anti-gay curriculum that celebrates the��dictatorship and��creationism.��Escola��Sem��Partido��had a��welcome��candidate��in��Bolsonaro.

In Africa, scapegoating homosexuality or feminism and��violent crackdowns��LGBTQ are��used to channel or distract popular anger away from governance failures. Uganda and more recently Tanzania are examples.��Meanwhile,��South Africa���s evangelical��movement is burgeoning, with more than a quarter of the��population��subscribing in some way. Leading politicians of all parties and political��ideologies belong to evangelical churches,��and the particular evangelical variant of public godliness is increasingly common in South African politics.��However, the evangelicals have yet to really construct a political bloc. It is rather easy to imagine the formation of an evangelical bloc organized around social issues becoming a powerful political force in the near future.

Black bodies will fall in Brazil

What does the election of far-right President Jair Bolsonaro mean for Brazilians of African descent?



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Cabaret of RRRRRace, Vila Velha Theater, Salvador de Bahia. Image credit Jo��o Milet Meirelles via Flickr.

With the��recent��election of Jair��Bolsonaro��as��President of Brazil, one of the darkest periods in the country���s history has begun. We don���t know if it will last only the four years of��Bolsonaro���s��term, or if it signals a whole new era of repressive dictatorship.

Bolsonaro���s��election represents a serious political rupture, unlike��any��other��in Brazil���s chaotic history. Supported by the Brazilian military��and��evangelicals (particularly the neo-pentecostal��crowd), and protected by the legal system and media, the election of��Bolsonaro��is��a severe threat to democracy. It is,��in effect,��the institutionalization of barbarism. It will see the��repeal��of important social rights��introduced��during the administrations of Luiz��Inacio��Lula da Silva (2003-2010) and Dilma Rousseff (2011-2016), especially for Afro-descendants and indigenous Brazilians.

In Brazil, poor, black and illiterate were and are to an extent attributes that are synonymous. As a result, there was��little��distinction between economic plunder, racial discrimination and socially imposed ignorance.��The Constitution of 1988 affirmed a precarious social pact that��slowly��permitted fundamental��land��rights to these populations, previously trapped in terrible living conditions and social misery.

The Lula and Dilma governments��expanded��on this and��brought dignity to tens of millions of poor Brazilians, including the majority of Afro-descendants. This was done by increasing the minimum wage and spending on social programs such as the ���Bolsa��Fam��lia��� (a basic income grant) and ���Minha��Casa��Minha��Vida��� (a��housing program aimed at low-income��Brazilians).

However, actions aimed at the African descendant majority would have political repercussions. The PT governments, despite their many mistakes in governance, affirmed��basic��human rights��through myriad legislation and programs, including��the Constitutional Amendment Project (PEC) of domestic employees (mostly black), granting them the same rights as other workers;��The National Pact to Combat Violence against Women, the Women Living Without Violence Program and the Maria da Penha Law (to combat domestic violence against women). All��were historical milestones in the struggle of��mainly black Brazilian��women against violence��and employment inequities. The Racial Equality Statute, passed by the PT, imposed restrictions on Brazil���s culture of racial slurs and apologia for racism. Fundamental reforms were also implemented in education, such as the compulsory education of African Brazilian and African history and culture in basic education.��The�����Juventude��Viva��� program, for example,��sought to address the genocide of��black youth in Brazil. According to UN figures for November 2017, 23,000 young black men are killed each year in Brazil.��Finally, one of the most important advances was the Quotas Law, which ensured that the university network and federal institutes filled��half their��vacancies with students from public schools, with differentiated access for low-income, black and indigenous students. The quotas and funding programs increased access to higher education for black Brazilians by 268��percent.

The governments of��Lula and��Rousseff��awakened a�����sleeping giant�����in the heart of the Brazilian elite, which in turn roused the ghost of Brazil���s history of slavery and colonialism.

The rise of Bolsonaro

Bolsonaro��is the chief representative of the most extreme faction of the Brazilian right wing. The rise of his political group to power might seem like Berlusconi’s opera-buffa in Italy,��but��as some political analysts are already suggesting,��in��reality��it is much closer to the government of the bloodthirsty Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet (1974-1990).

Inevitably, there is a narrative highlighting the similarity between the election of��Bolsonaro��and that of Donald Trump in the United States. Nobel Peace laureate Jos�� Ramos-Horta��has argued��that�����Donald Trump���s US election was partly a reaction from conservatives to the election of a black man, Barack Obama. The��Bolsonaro��phenomenon is a reaction of the conservative, racist Brazilian elite.”

However, the difference between the US and Brazil lies��in the fact that Brazil is an underdeveloped country. The��Constitution is under threat following the impeachment of��Rousseff��in 2016 and a significant proportion of the population��have no��particular fondness for democracy, whereas in the United States democracy has more solid support.

It is also alleged that the phenomenon in Brazil occurred because of a tendency of�����democratic��fatigue,�����to quote the analysis of the European Commissioner for Economic Affairs, Pierre Moscovici. Moscovici argued��that what��happened in Brazil is part of a trend of�����backtracking�����in liberal democracies�����around the world,�����caused by economic crises and increased social inequality.

Be that as it may,��Bolsonaro���s��election took place in the context of the intensifying class struggle in Brazilian society. According to��Jo��o��Pedro��Stedile, one of the leaders of the most important social movement in the country, MST (Movement of Landless Workers), Brazilian society is divided. The electoral result made it clear that the main��supporters of��Workers��� Party (PT) candidate, Fernando Haddad were the poorest, low-income workers. The��wealthiest (and whitest)��of Brazilians��voted for��Bolsonaro.

Stedile��also��argues that��the left wing was not defeated in the elections:��that 46 million people had voted for Haddad, against��Bolsonaro���s��58 million votes. And that a record number of ballots���31 million���were ruled absent or voided. That���s a total of 76 million Brazilians who did not vote for��Bolsonaro.

Stedile��also draws attention to the clear geographic electoral division in which Haddad defeated��Bolsonaro��across the Northeast, the country’s poorest region:

We have 12 progressive candidates from the popular camp elected state governors, in the region that goes from the state of Par�� [North] to��Esp��rito��Santo [Southeast]. The Northeast and that part of the Amazon are a pole of geographical resistance that clearly demonstrates that this population does not want to follow the direction of the��Bolsonaro��fascist project.

As for Afro-descendant Brazilians, who make up the majority (53 percent) of the population,��Bolsonaro��repeatedly voiced���during his term as a federal deputy and in the electoral campaign���his contempt for the black race and their rights to reparation��for the historical injustices of slavery and racial discrimination. In one of his most virulent speeches against African descendants, he said, after visiting a��quilombola��territory:�����I went to a quilombo. The lighter Afro-Brazilians there weighed seven arrobas. They do not do anything in life. I do not think that they serve even for procreating.���

“Arroba��� is a Brazilian measure of weight used specifically to weigh cattle, equivalent to 15kg. ���Quilombola��� is the inhabitant of a ���quilombo,��� the name given to territories where escaped slaves hid during in colonial Brazil. Remnants of��quilombos��that still inhabit these territories received the right of legitimate possession to these lands under the PT.

In a recent analysis of��Bolsonaro���s��vocabulary and language, journalist��Fernando Barros observes:

Cleaning, cleansing, bandits, thugs,��petralhada��[pejorative term for militants of the PT],��cachaceiro,��[from��cacha��a,��a strong��Brazilian��liquor���right-wingers often claim that Lula is a drunk],��lombo��[meaning the��back of an animal], rot in prison. Jair��Bolsonaro���s��vocabulary transparently mirrors his intentions and his personality. He speaks the language of torture, the language of extermination, the language of punishment. Do I exaggerate if I say that the word ���lombo��� refers to the tortures inflicted on black people during the time of slavery?

Barros also details the newly elected president���s intentions identified through his campaign speeches:

Intimidation, physical assaults, beatings, and death threats began to pop up around the country on the internet and on the streets. Blacks, gays, transvestites, northeasterners, PT activists, feminist women’s��� campaigns exhibiting #EleN��o��(#NotHim) stickers and posters, artists, intellectuals, human rights activists���the spectrum of people insulted, beaten or terrified is immense. And it includes, as you know, journalists.

The #EleN��o��movement mobilized more than 500,000 women in 360 cities across Brazil during the election campaign.

From the murder of Marielle Franco to solitary revenge

On March 14, 2018, in the pre-election campaign, female councilor Marielle Franco, 38,��a��black, bisexual, slum dweller��and��human rights defender, elected by the left-wing��Partido��Socialismo��e Liberdade���PSOL (Socialist and Freedom Party), was murdered in Rio de Janeiro. Her driver and fellow PSOL activist,��Anderson Gomes,��was also killed in the attack. All indications are that their killers have links��to��the security forces, whether they are off duty police officers or former police officers and members of militias (paramilitary mafialike groups composed of ex/off-duty cops and firemen that control��25��percent of Rio���s metropolitan area). During the electoral campaign, it was clear that almost the entirety of Brazil���s security forces and militias were enthusiastic��Bolsonaro��supporters.

The wave of indignation and outcry from Afro-descendants��and their allies was profound. Hundreds of thousands went into the streets to demonstrate against the murder of Marielle Franco and her death was met with international condemnation.��However, at the time of writing, the official investigation has not come close to identifying the perpetrators of this crime.

On September 6, during the electoral campaign, presidential candidate Jair��Bolsonaro��was stabbed during a rally in��the city of Juiz de Fora��in��Minas��Gerais. His attacker,��Adelio��Bispo��de Oliveira, 40, an��Afro-descendant, confessed to the attack, stating that he�����acted at God���s command�����after being personally offended by��Bolsonaro’s��speech about��quilombolas��at the beginning of the year. According to his lawyer, the candidate���s speech�����overwhelmingly shook the psyche�����of the aggressor. Everything indicates that Oliveira was a kind of avenger, a ���kamikaze��� or ���jihadist��� who decided to try to stop��Bolsonaro��when faced with��the prospective victory of the candidate.

The stabbing seriously injured��Bolsonaro, who underwent��two surgeries. The convalescence spared��him the pressures of responding to��press and public opinion��and from making��explicit his proposals��or��participating in��televised��debates. The attack resulted in popular public sympathy for his candidacy.

More��blacks murdered

On the day after the first round of the elections, October 8, Mestre Moa do��Katend����was assassinated with twelve stab wounds in the back, in the city of Salvador (in the state of Bahia, northeast of the country). Mestre Moa do��Katend��, was a black man, composer, percussionist, educator and��capoeirista. Considered one of the greatest capoeira masters in the country, Mestre Moa was in a bar when he declared his vote for PT���s Fernando Haddad. One of��Bolsonaro’s��supporters at the bar thought this was enough to kill Mestre Moa.

On October 25, a 33-year-old university student was raped in the city of Fortaleza��in��Cear�� (a state in the Northeast). The crime occurred near the campus where she was studying.��In the weeks leading up to the��assault, she suffered racist threats from her assailant:

This is not a place for you, it���s not a place for slaves and��blacks. After��Bolsonaro��wins�����we���re going to do a clean-up of the university and take your people out. There is no place for your people here�����you dirty monkey. I know what I���m going to do to you. I will put you in your place, the place of slave. And you know what we do with a slave? We rape them.

Despite filing a complaint with the police, no precautionary measures were taken.

Two days later, on October 27,��Charlione��Lessa��Albuquerque, 23, who was taking part in a caravan in support of Fernando Haddad (PT), was shot dead in Fortaleza. The young black man was in a car with his mother, a leader of a national workers�����union, who said in an official note: ���After the shooting, the killer proudly called��Bolsonaro���s��name.���

Despite these violent attacks, the elections brought to power��numerous�����Marielles�����as��federal and state deputies. Together they make up a new power��bloc��of��mainly black women���the largest��and most oppressed��population group in the country.��In Rio de Janeiro, three former advisors to Marielle Franco��and PSOL candidates���Renata Souza,��M��nica��Francisco and Daniela Monteiro���were elected state representatives.��Also��elected��was��federal deputy��Tal��ria��Petrone, a close friend and comrade of Marielle and, like her, elected in 2016��as��councilwoman in the neighboring city of��Niter��i.��Benedita��da Silva (PT), the first black woman to hold the position of governor of the state of Rio de Janeiro��(2002), was reelected as a federal deputy.��In Minas Gerais, Aurea Carolina (PSOL), a contemporary and friend of Marielle was elected federal deputy.��Andr��ia��de��Jesus (PSOL) and��Leninha��(PT), black and feminist, were also elected state deputies.��In Bahia, the teacher and militant of the��black women���s movement,��Ol��via��Santana,��was elected state deputy for the Communist Party of Brazil (PCdoB). In Pernambuco, five women, three of them black, launched a collective candidacy under the codename “Juntas” (Together), formalizing the registration of one of them to overcome restrictions of the electoral law.��In S��o Paulo, Erica��Malunguinho, a black transsexual, was elected state deputy. The singer��Leci��Brand��o��(PCdoB), feminist and black, was re-elected for the third time as state deputy. A collective candidacy registered under the name�����M��nica��da��Bancada��Ativista�����brought together nine partners, men and women, among them a��black woman and a��black transsexual.��

Despite the immense underrepresentation of��black women in Brazilian politics, the quality of��these young, feminist and anti-racist��candidates��points to the beginning of perhaps the most profound transformation that can occur in Brazilian society and the only one that can separate it from its tragic past, and the immediate future under��Bolsonaro.

In the words of,��Dan����Sosaba, a 29-year-old��black��militant:

Jair��Bolsonaro��has been democratically elected president of Brazil��� That is democracy. Democracy foresees and allows��Bolsonaro. Our mistake, black people, is that we have not yet foreseen democracy. We are afraid because we are not prepared, because we are not organized. We are afraid because we trust our protection on the losing left, and precisely because we have trusted them with our protection for too long now. I’m not saying that one shouldn���t have voted for Fernando Haddad… I’m saying that if we are not organized, no matter what the election results are, we will be trusting the voting ballots with our lives. And that���s a problem.

The rightwing is partially��correct��when they say that the��black movement victimizes itself. Our speeches are mostly directed��at��appealing to whites: ���our lives matter!��� Well,��Bolsonaro��certainly thinks they do not. And yet we beg.��Bolsonaro��thinks that what really matters for the development of a better country is the piling up of our corpses.

Presidential power and the Museveni state in Uganda

Caricatures aside, how do President Yoweri Museveni���after 31 years���and the ruling National Revolutionary Movement keep power?





President��Yoweri��Museveni at a UK government event in 2012.��Image credit Russell Watkins via DFID Flickr.

Recent weeks have seen increased global media attention to Uganda following the incidents surrounding the arrest of popular musician and legislator,��Bobi��Wine; emblematic events that have marked the shrinking democratic space in Uganda and the growing popular struggles for political change in the country.

The spotlight is also informed by wider trends across the continent over the past few years���particularly the unanticipated fall of veteran autocrats Muammar Gaddafi in Libya, Hosni Mubarak in Egypt, Yaya��Jammeh��in Gambia, and most recently Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe���which led to speculation about whether Yoweri Museveni, in power in Uganda since 1986, might��be the��next��to��exit this shrinking club of Africa���s strongmen.

Yet the��Museveni state, and the immense presidential power that is its defining characteristic, has received far less attention, thus obscuring some of the issues at hand. Comprehending its dynamics requires paying attention to at-least three turning points in the National Resistance Movement���s��history,��which��resulted in a gradual weeding-out of Museveni���s contemporaries and potential opponents from the NRM, then the��mobilization of military conflict to shore up regime legitimacy, and��the policing of urban spaces to contain the increasingly frequent signals of potential revolution. Together, these dynamics crystallized presidential power in Uganda, run down key state institutions, and set the stage for the recent tensions and likely many more to come.

The purge

From the late 1990s, there has been a gradual weeding out the old guard in the NRM, which through an informal “succession queue,” had posed an internal challenge to the continuity of Museveni���s rule. It all started amidst the heated debates in the late 1990s over the reform of the then decaying Movement system; debates that pitted a younger club of reformists against an older group. The resultant split led to the exit of many critical voices from the NRM���s ranks, and began to bolster Museveni���s grip on power in a manner that was unprecedented. It also opened the lid on official corruption and the abuse of public offices.

Over the years, the purge also got rid of many political and military elites���the so-called ���historicals������many of whom shared Museveni���s sense of entitlement to political office rooted in their contribution to the 1980-1985 liberation war, and some of whom probably had an eye on his seat.

By 2005 the purge was at its peak; that year the constitutional amendment that removed presidential term limits���passed after a bribe to every legislator���saw almost all insiders that were opposed to it, summarily dismissed. As many of them joined the ranks of the opposition, Museveni���s inner circle was left with mainly sycophants whose loyalty was more hinged on patronage than anything else. Questioning the president or harboring presidential ambitions within the NRM had become tantamount to a crime.

By 2011 the process was almost complete, with the dismissal of��Vice��President Gilbert��Bukenya, whose growing popularity among rural farmers was interpreted as a nascent presidential bid, resulting in his firing.

One man remained standing, Museveni���s long-time friend��Amama��Mbabazi. His friendship with Museveni had long fueled rumors that he would succeed “the big man” at some point. In 2015, however, his attempt to run against Museveni in the ruling party primaries also earned him an expulsion from both the secretary general position of the ruling party as well as the prime ministerial office.

The departure of��Mbabazi��marked the end of any pretensions to a succession plan within the NRM. He was unpopular, with a record tainted by corruption scandals and complicity in Museveni���s authoritarianism, but his status as a�����president-in-waiting�����had given the NRM at��least the semblance of an institution that could survive beyond Museveni���s tenure, which his firing effectively ended.

What is left now is perhaps only the�����Muhoozi��project,�����a supposed plan by Museveni to have his son��Muhoozi��Kainerugaba��succeed him. Lately��it��has been��given credence by the��son���s��rapid��rise��to commanding positions��in��elite sections of the Ugandan military. But with an increasingly insecure Museveni heavily reliant on familial relationships and patronage networks, even the��Muhoozi��project appears very unlikely. What is clear, though, is that the over time, the presidency has essentially become Museveni���s property.

Exporting peace?

Fundamental to Museveni���s personalization of power also has been the role of military conflict, both local and regional. First was the rebellion by Joseph��Kony���s��Lord���s Resistance Army��in northern Uganda, which over its two-decade span enabled a continuation of the military ethos of the NRM. The war���s dynamics were indeed complex, and rooted in a longer history that predated even the NRM government, but undoubtedly it provided a ready excuse for the various shades of authoritarianism that came to define Museveni���s rule.

With war ongoing in the north, any challenge to Museveni���s rule was easily constructed as a threat to the peace already secured in the rest of the country, providing an absurd logic for clamping down on political opposition. More importantly, the emergency state born of it, frequently provided a justification for the president to side-step democratic institutions and processes, while at the same time rationalizing the government���s disproportionate expenditure on the military. It also fed into Museveni���s self-perception as a “freedom fighter,” buttressed the personality cult around him, and empowered him to further undermine any checks on his power.

By the late 2000s the LRA war was coming to an end���but another war had taken over its function just in time. From the early 2000s, Uganda���s participation in a regional security project in the context of the War on Terror, particularly in the Somalian conflict, rehabilitated��the regime���s international image and provided cover for the narrowing political space at home, as well as facilitating a further entrenchment of Museveni���s rule.

As post-9/11 Western foreign policy began to prioritize stability over political reform, Museveni increasingly postured as the regional peacemaker, endearing himself to donors while further sweeping the calls for democratic change at home under the carpet���and earning big from it.

It is easy to overlook the impact of these military engagements, but the point is that together they accentuated the role of the military in Ugandan politics and further entrenched Museveni���s power to degrees that perhaps even the NRM���s own roots in a guerrilla movement could never have reached.

Policing protest

The expulsion of powerful elites from the ruling circles and the politicization of military conflict had just started to cement��Musevenism, when a new threat emerged on the horizon. It involved not the usual antagonists���gun-toting rebels or ruling party elites���but ordinary protesters. And they were challenging the NRM on an unfamiliar battleground���not in the jungles, but on the streets:��the��2011�����Walk-to-Work��� protests,��rejecting the��rising fuel and food prices,��were��unprecedented.

But there is another reason the protests constituted a new threat. For long the NRM had mastered the art of winning elections. The majority constituencies were rural, and allegedly strongholds of the regime. The electoral commission itself was largely answerable to Museveni. With rural constituencies in one hand and the electoral body in the other, the NRM could safely ignore the minority opposition-dominated urban constituencies. Electoral defeat thus never constituted a threat to the NRM, at least at parliamentary and presidential levels.

But now the protesters had turned the tables, and were challenging the regime immediately after one of its landslide victories. The streets could not be rigged. In a moment, they had shifted the locus of Ugandan politics from the rural to the urban, and from institutional to informal spaces. And they were picking lessons from a strange source:��North Africa. There,��where Museveni���s old friend Gaddafi, among others, was facing a sudden exit under pressure from similar struggles. Things could quickly get out of hand. A strategic response was urgent.

The regime went into overdrive. The 2011 protests were snuffed out, and from then, the policing of urban spaces became central to the logic and working of the Museveni state. Draconian laws on public assembly and free speech came into effect, enacted by a rubber-stamp parliament that was already firmly in Museveni���s hands. Police partnered with criminal gangs, notably the��Boda��Boda��2010, to curb what was called�����public disorder������really the official name for peaceful protest. As police���s mandate expanded to include the pursuit of regime critics, its budget ballooned, and its chief, General Kale��Kayihura, became the most powerful person after Museveni���before his recent dismissal.

For a while, the regime seemed triumphant. Organizing and protest became virtually impossible, as urban areas came under 24/7 surveillance. Moreover,��key state institutions���the parliament, electoral commission, judiciary, military and now the police���were all in the service of the NRM, and all voices of dissent had been effectively silenced. In time, the constitution would be��amended again, by��the��NRM-dominated house,��this time to remove the��presidential age limit���the last obstacle to Museveni���s life presidency���followed by��a new tax on social media, to curb�����gossip.�����Museveni was now truly invincible. Or so it seemed.

But the dreams of “walk-to-work”���the nightmare for the Museveni state���had never really disappeared, and behind the tightly-patrolled streets always lay the simmering quest for change. That is how we arrived at the present moment, with a popstar representing the widespread aspiration for better government, and a seemingly all-powerful president suddenly struggling for legitimacy. Whatever direction the current popular struggles ultimately take, what is certain is that they are learning well from history, and are a harbinger of many more to come.

Mandela’s dreams

Inspired by Nelson Mandela's dreams, media studies scholar Sharon Sliwinski asks whether dreaming can be recast as a vital form of resistance to political violence.





Mandela statue at Southbank Centre in London. Image credit Paul Simpson via Flickr.

In��Mandela���s Dark Years: A Political Theory of Dreaming, Sharon��Sliwinski��contemplates the ways in which��freedom fighter and later South Africa���s first democratic President,��Nelson Mandela���s dream-life left an impression on his waking politics. In positing dreams as a form of thinking in ���dark times,�����Sliwinski��takes Sigmund Freud���s��The Interpretation of Dreams��as a point of departure. Freud famously interpreted dreams as wish fulfillments. Ultimately, dreams, for Freud, satisfy the wish to sleep, insofar as they provide hallucinatory gratification of the wishes that would disturb us, wake us up. It is in this sense that Freud calls dreams the guardians of sleep. The Freudian ���royal road��� has been used by numerous postcolonial critics. The novelty of��Sliwinski���s��intervention is to put Freud, and a post-Freudian school of thought for which dreams are the guardians not of sleep but of thought, into dialogue with Immanuel Kant���s��Critique of Judgment��via Hannah Arendt���s��Lectures on Kant���s Political Philosophy.

Sliwinski���s��filtering of psychoanalysis through Arendt allows for a rereading of Freud that walks a path between learning from his vacillating analytic rhythm and following compliantly in his footsteps. It is a kind of fidelity to Freud that��can come only from a betrayal of the letter of psychoanalysis properly psychoanalytic in spirit.��Sliwinski��does theory rather than applies it, allows it to emerge by bringing different texts into an encounter. To her great credit, Mandela emerges here not��so much an object of analysis as a philosophical accomplice in forging what��Sliwinski��calls, in her subtitle,��A Political Theory of Dreaming.

One of��Sliwinski���s��central claims is that Mandela demonstrated in his political thought what Kant calls, in the��Critique of Judgment, ���enlarged thought,��� a process, as Kant formulates it, integral to the capacity for judgment that transcends ���subjective private conditions.��� One of Mandela���s key political contributions to the world,��Sliwinski��suggests, was to imagine��it from beyond the cell of his own subjectivity. And for��Sliwinski, Mandela���s dream-life is not unrelated to this capacity. Alongside this claim,��Sliwinski��invokes Mandela���s politics of the sublime. It is not the first time the claim has been made. Rita Barnard does much the same in the��Cambridge Companion to Nelson Mandela. The sublime bears, of course, like enlarged thought, the stamp of Kant.

To posit Mandela as an exemplar of enlarged thought and sublimity, of Enlightenment, is far from straightforward. There is nothing especially unusual in scholars utilizing Enlightenment concepts in the critique of apartheid. However, Kant���s Eurocentrism, if not outright racism, is no secret, and these are not mere passing remarks, as many scholars have noted, but��integral to his critical philosophy.��Sliwinski���s��wager, then, is considerable.

There were, as��Sliwinski��notes, severe restrictions placed on prisoners at Robben Island, who were permitted a single visitor every six months. If a letter can, indeed, always��not arrive at its destination, this assumed a very literal meaning on Robben Island, and if a letter did arrive, it was always highly censored���Mandela���s prison letters are filled with such complaints.

It was under such conditions that Mandela endured the��passing of his mother and his eldest son. It was also under such conditions that he dreamed variations of the following, repeatedly:

In the dream, I had just been released from prison���only it was not Robben Island, but a jail in Johannesburg. I walked outside the gates into the city and found no one there to meet me. In fact, there was no one there at all, no people, no cars, no taxis. I would then set out on foot toward Soweto. I walked for many hours before arriving in Orlando West, and then turned the��corner toward 8115. Finally, I would see my home, but it turned out to be empty, a ghost house, with all the doors and windows open, but no one at all there (Mandela cited in��Sliwinski).

Sliwinski��takes this particular nightmare on which Mandela reflects��in��Long Walk to Freedom��as a point of focus. Why would he dream of such devastating isolation, such desolation? What purpose could such a nightmare serve for his political thought?

Drawing on Freud���s notion of the transposition of dream-thoughts into dream images,��Sliwinski��notes: ���Dreams��think, Freud insists, even if this unconscious mode of thought bears little affinity to the conscious forms of reasoning ��� the dreamer��experiences��her thoughts rather than ���thinks��� them in concepts.��� The objective, then, for��Sliwinski, is to read the thought encrypted in the dream images, following the passage from images back to thoughts that can never be fully recovered, in the reverse direction.

As this relates to Mandela���s dream,��Sliwinski��writes, it ���visually staged the sense of alienation and��unfreedom��that the incarceration inflicted ��� achingly dramatized what a life separated from one���s loved ones felt like for the dreamer.��� In this way,��Sliwinski��continues, ���Mandela���s nightmare allowed him to articulate and to work through the emotional impact of his juridical sentence, rendering its impact in his own terms.��� Mandela���s dream,��Sliwinski��thus argues, allowed him to transcend apartheid���s��unfreedom��insofar as it ���opened an interior landscape in which he had space��to think about the terms of his political condition rather than be directly equated with it ��� enabling him to turn his political condition into a figure for thought.��� To represent his condition, to reflect��upon the total control of his own waking life, but��also���and this becomes a crucial point���that of all living under apartheid. Instead of a book about sovereignty, there is a dream of��unfreedom.

In writing of ���alienation��� and ���unfreedom��� as being ���staged��� and ���dramatized��� in Mandela���s dream,��Sliwinski��invokes what Arendt underlines in her reading of Kant, that judgment takes place from the perspective of the ���spectator��� who is able to imaginatively occupy all the perspectives of the actors onstage, so as to come to an ���impartial��� judgment, transcend the limits of both one���s own position and those of all individual actors whose perspectives remain ���partial,��� allowing one to assume the ���proper distance��� necessary for reflection. If the feeling produced by the dream was, for Mandela, one of desolation, reflecting on this from the perspective of everyone, his judgment of apartheid assumed a dimension, in Kantian terms, of general validity, universality: apartheid as a kind of desolation not only affecting him, but everyone.

Whereas the shortcomings of the 1994��transition in South Africa are routinely reckoned by subsuming the particulars of everyday post-apartheid life under��pregiven, normative concepts,��Sliwinski���s��provocation is to read into Mandela���s political thought a concept of the post-apartheid that was��produced in his encounter with such particulars as they were staged in his dreams, a concept of post-apartheid derived, that is to say, in Kantian terms, through reflective rather than determinative judgment. Apartheid is judged as universally evil not against any existing concept of human freedom, but upon the grounds of a subjective feeling, which is reflected upon from the standpoint of everyone. Mandela���s dream-life, the suggestion seems to be, allowed him to come to a universal, objective judgment, and allowed him to��produce the criteria according which apartheid can be judged.

Mandela���s Dark Years, it should be noted, makes only a brief, almost passing invocation of the sublime. As Kant elaborates it, the sublime relates not to an object perceived but to the feeling in the subject as it apprehends the��unrepresentable, the incommunicable. In the sublime, the imagination, incapable of referring to the understanding of any visualized design, gives itself over to reason under whose dominion there is derived, for the subject, what Kant calls a ���negative pleasure,��� an experience which ���may be compared with a shaking.��� If the beautiful directly furthers what Kant calls ���the feeling of life,��� the sublime promotes this feeling through the circuitous route of its initial hindrance. The sublime is, thus, ���a pleasure that is only possible by means of a displeasure.��� It is, above all, for Kant, the triumph of reason over the matter of nature to which, ultimately, the human is subject and powerless. In short, the sublime is reason���s assertion of its ���supremacy over sensibility.���

One has to assume that reason is maintained despite the overwhelming pain of Mandela���s apprehension of apartheid as it is staged in his dream, giving him what Arendt calls the ���proper distance��� for reflection. But it is not Enlightenment reason,��Sliwinski��suggests, but another reason, at least another form of thought, that rises above such terror. And it is not in relation to nature, ���its chaos, or,��� as Kant writes, ���its wildest and most irregular disorder and desolation,��� that Mandela stands overwhelmed but ultimately triumphant; it��is the order of apartheid he apprehends, which is the horrifying disorder to which life is subject���certain lives more severely, violently subject, but all nonetheless���and over which another form of reason ascends. And instead of��taking the sublime as a part of the conceptual conditions according to which colonial rule was established and maintained���the standard postcolonial reading of Kant���the sublime is mobilized, by��Sliwinski, as a mode through which to transcend, to triumph over that order of disorder.

The formulation, taking on some aspects of Kant���s critical philosophy, leaving aside others���hoping that this portion will stay left aside���comes with enormous risks. Kant asserts that moral fortitude is required for the sublime,��indeed that the sublime is a civilizational accomplishment, the name of which is culture. Not all people are capable, in Kant���s view, of sublime experience. Without ���moral ideas,��� Kant writes, the sublime ���merely strikes the untutored individual as terrifying.��� Which is a moderation of his earlier claim that blacks are incapable of sublime experience. It seems needless to say that it is insufficient to cast Mandela as an exemplary figure of the triumph of reason over sensibility. Put in the bluntest of terms, one simply renders him a reasoning black man, which, according to Kant���s infamous essay on race, would make him white. However,��Sliwinski��leaves open the possibility, never fully stated, that��Mandela���s sublime object, what produces in him a feeling of��painful powerlessness and, then, pleasurable independence,��is precisely the horror of what Kant���s work made possible. The sublime, in other words, is marshaled against itself.

At this particular moment of decolonization fever, of resounding calls for the��Africanization��of the university, a genealogy that places Mandela into a kinship with the Enlightenment, from which he does deviate���this departure named by the Enlightenment���but to which his political thought is, also, related, will not sit well with everyone. What��Mandela���s Dark Years��suggests, in the face of a monstrous wager, is that Mandela���s political thought intervenes into injustices that have their conditions of possibility not merely in a system that emerged in 1948 in South Africa, but in a formation, which reaches back at least to the world of the eighteenth century. In the now mountainous literature on Mandela,��Sliwinski���s��little book takes an obscure angle to make an important contribution: if it is often said that Mandela made compromises it should also be noted that he inhabited the discourse of the oppressor so as to overturn it. Indeed, he did this in his sleep.

Homophobic liberals

In Malawi, artists, especially poets, usually associated with progressivism and intellectualism, are the vanguard of a new homophobia.





Students studying in��Balaka. Image credit Book Aid International via Flickr.

Homophobia in Africa is conventionally explained with reference to two issues or��to��some combination of both. On one hand is the insistence that homosexuality is alien to African culture, a position that often comes with a patriarchal view on what proper gender relations should look like. On the other is the influence of Pentecostal and��Evangelical pastors, some of whom have made it their business to condemn homosexuality as��unChristian.

What if some recent expressions of homophobia arise from neither of these positions,��but resemble, in their��liberalism, the ideas and values advocated by progressive activists and intellectuals? What if, moreover,��it is artists, especially poets, who are the vanguard of this new homophobia? Will their arguments be as easily dismissed by progressives as those based on cultural or religious bigotry?

Take��Malawi���s new movement for vernacular spoken-word poetry, for example. For ten years now, youthful poets, writing mostly in Chichewa, have taken their verse to popular venues where musicians used to be the main attractions. Instead of publishing their work in print, they have also distributed poems through��websites, social media, radio and CDs.

Fame has��visited some of them��who��address��issues of everyday concern, including the campaign for gay rights following Malawi���s well-publicized ���first gay wedding��� in 2009. Robert��Chiwamba��and Evelyn��Pangani, two of the trailblazers in the vernacular poetry movement, wrote independently of each other poems��sharply critical of the campaign.

At first sight, these poems carry unmistakeably homophobic messages, some of which the poets have lifted from the malice available on the internet. Dirt and filth are central themes, as in these lines in my literal rather than literary translation from Chichewa:�����Men involved in homosexuality have to wear diapers��/��Some of the diapers they put into a suitcase when traveling, for feces will��flow like a fountain.�����The lines belong to��Pangani���s��poem entitled��Ndalama��za��nyansi��sitikuzifuna,��(We don���t want dirty money).��Chiwamba���s��Takana��mathanyula��(We refuse homosexuality)��also affirms that ���everyone is saying that homosexuality disgusts them like the pig���s phlegm.���

As spoken-word verse��goes, both poems are long,��more than��70 lines each. The��bulk of��the language��addresses issues��of��free speech, human rights and democracy��and not specifically��homosexuality, so��their nature as hate speech looks less obvious when other than these shockingly offensive lines are considered.

The pressing question for both poets is freedom. Far from being critical of Malawi���s new-found freedoms as such, they want to��question the prerogative of foreign donors and Malawian activists to define what those freedoms are. Referring to Malawi���s constitutional changes in the early 1990s, both poets assert their right to voice what they claim to hear among the ordinary people.

Pangani��writes that ���in today���s Malawi the poor have something to say / As you said, democracy is government��where��the people do what they want.�����Chiwamba��elaborates:

Was is not you who came the other day to tell us

We should follow democracy

The rule of the majority?

Today the majority is speaking

It is saying that we refuse homosexuality.

Just as in classical liberal thinking free speech is valued because of the competing ideas and information it makes available, so too do these poets recognize the importance of public argument and deliberation. Debate is written into��Chiwamba���s��poem, such as when he counters the claim that heterosexual Malawians are by no means purified of unsavory transgressions:

When did you hear that we want our witchcraft to be regarded as freedom?

I am saying when was it you heard of us wanting our robberies and prostitution to be accepted as freedom?

When was it that you heard us wanting the freedom of speaking in swear words?

The legacies of being ���unfree��� are��evoked in both poems to drive home their unflinching commitment to the idea of liberty.��For��Pangani, the current campaign for gay rights brings to mind European colonialism:

Time to refuse being forced to do things

Has now come

Despite difficulties we shall be able

To remove the handcuffs of being ruled by white people.

Particularly striking is the image of slavery as a preferred option in��Chiwamba���s��poem: ���I swear, if homosexuality is freedom / All of us Malawians choose to return to slavery in Egypt.���

Both��Pangani��and��Chiwamba��are public figures in Malawi��and��they have written and performed verse to support campaigns against gender-based violence and the discrimination of albinos.��Their love poems, moreover, have challenged misogyny��in��Malawi���s public culture.��Both are known also for their sensual and egalitarian love poems.��When contrasted with their��obvious��homophobia,��these love poems reveal��Pangani��and��Chiwamba��as capable of imagining new possibilities in��intimate relationships.

The paradox presented by homophobic liberals is a paradox common to all liberal polities.��Various exclusionary ideas and practices have always accompanied the expansion of liberties.��Chiwamba��and��Pangani��are in no need of re-education��on liberal values. Patronizing gestures must give way to a dialogue across the��divides of contemporary liberalism.

Surely it would be convenient to continue explaining homophobia in Africa as cultural or religious bigotry. What these poets demand, in contrast, is to be taken seriously as liberals who are as committed to the idea of liberty as are those who have made its advancement their mission.

Sudan in Berlin

"Berlin isn't Germany. Just like that website you write for���it's really its own country." ���Sudanese restaurant owner, Mohamed Jebella.





Image credit Caitlin L Chandler.

There are fourteen Sudanese restaurants in Berlin. The newest of these, a��caf�� called��Kush, opened a few weeks ago on��Afrikanerstrasse, in a neighborhood known as the African��Quarter���Afrikanisches��Viertel. The location was unintentional, according to Sudanese business partners Asa��El-Dishoni��and Mohamed��Jebella.

Afrikanisches��Viertel��derives its name from the 19th century, when ���animal trader��� Karl��Hegenbeck��proposed the area host a permanent zoo exhibiting African people and animals.��Hegenbeck��had already trafficked Sudanese people and displayed them in moving exhibitions across Europe. (He later died after a snake bite slowly poisoned him).

Inside Kush, which serves up��modern��Sudanese street food,��El-Dishoni��and��Jebella hope that focusing Berliners on Sudanese culture can educate them to the broader region���s history. The��caf����gets its name from the ancient kingdom��that��extended from Sudan into Egypt.��Mero��, the��former capital��(300 BCE���300CE)��is in present-day Sudan and the site of more than 200 pyramids. ���Many foods���like wheat and millet���started from this time in Kush and we���re still eating them today,�����says��El-Dishoni��as she��pours��us cups of steaming cinnamon tea. ���Sudanese food is incredibly diverse���it has Turkish, Arabic and African influences.���

The restaurant is decorated with large-scale wooden carvings created by the Sudanese artist��Samreen��Syliman. Kush crafts all its sauces��(peanut, sesame, eggplant)��from scratch��and fish is on the menu��one day a week, rubbed in chopped herbs and grilled.��There is a satisfying crunch to the��tamiya, the Sudanese version of falafel, the outside shell��hiding��a crumbling interior flecked with coriander. The hummus is creamy and tangy��with plenty of��crushed garlic. The perfectly grilled��kofta��still smells slightly of smoke.

El-Dishoni was born in Sudan, but her parents moved to East Germany when she was�� two months old. Her father, a professor of agriculture, taught in Leipzig and then later around the world���Eritrea, Algeria and Yemen. Her mother, who worked as a dental technician, stayed with El-Dishoni and her siblings in Leipzig. El-Dishoni studied business administration and then managed the financial departments at several embassies in Berlin.

Jeballa came to Germany some 28 years ago for a degree in applied physics after finishing high school in Khartoum. He later obtained a masters in laser technology, and then worked for various German and American companies until he and El-Dishoni met through mutual friends. They decided to start a medical supply business five years ago; Kush is their first food venture. Eventually, they say they’d like to open a larger Sudanese restaurant in Berlin with a more extensive menu.

As we talk, men stream in on their lunch break wearing bomber jackets and sweatshirts.��The restaurant is located in the working-class neighborhood of Wedding, where a recent movement has fought to re-name several streets that honored German colonizers to African leaders. While the street names will��symbolically change, German politicians are scaling-up measures to control migration from the Middle East and Africa. Most recently, some centrist and far-right political leaders have called for Germany to shun international migration agreements���turning the signing of a United Nations pact into political��grandstanding.

There is no political grandstanding at Kush, just good food and a welcoming��vibe, because�����Berlin isn���t Germany,�����says Jebella. ���Just like that website you write for���it���s��really its own country.��� When they opened, members of the Sudanese community distributed flyers in the mailboxes of all the nearby houses.�����Kush isn���t business,��adds Jebella. ���It���s love.���

Kush is located at:��M��llerstra��e��97, 13349 Berlin. On��Facebook.

The rebirth of the Nigerian left?

What has the world's Mo��t drinking capital and a world leader in global indices of private jet ownership to do with left politics?





Dr. Ibrahim��Muazzam, Ismail��Auwal��and���Zainab��Mutkthar��delegates at the ���Capitalism, Imperialism, & Revolutions in the 21st Century��� conference held recently at��Nasarawa��State University.

Even as a phrase, ���The Nigerian left��� might sound paradoxical. What has the world���s��Mo��t drinking capital��and a world leader in global indices of private jet ownership to do with lefty politics? In fact, when I recently tweeted about an academic project I am pursuing entitled ���What���s left of Nigeria���s left?��� I was not��surprised��to be greeted by a number of comically skeptical responses from��Naija��Twitter��including:

Though amusing, such a view is inaccurate, as I got to see for myself while attending the conference on�����Capitalism, Imperialism, & Revolutions in the 21st Century�����held��recently��at��Nasarawa��State University��(NSU).

The��two-day��meeting��was put together by the Nigerian Committee for the Advancement of Working Class Solidarity���constituted��of��former radical activists and now the leading lights of Nigeria���s NGO sector���in collaboration with the Nigerian Political Science Association and the Social Sciences Faculty at��NSU.��As a student of political ideology in contemporary Africa (and a Nigerian), it was a privilege to attend the first gathering of this sort.

The deeper paradox, however, was that the conference was��inaugurated�� after��17 years of democracy: though the left was the engine of anti-colonial and pro-democracy struggle,��it has suffered decline in the Fourth Republic. The weight of this history gave the gathering an air that was both momentous and marginal. Held in the literal margins of Nigeria���s capital, the gathering felt modest, barely receiving coverage in the local press. Yet��this is��precisely��what��gave the conference a welcoming and inclusive tone.

It was also a thoroughly Nigerian affair in ways that sometimes sat uncomfortably with its radical aims. Classically, the conference began by ���observing protocols,��� the Nigerian euphemism for paying respects to the highest authorities in the vicinity���in this case the��vice chancellor��of the��university. That a presidential portrait of Muhammadu��Buhari��remained affixed to the wall behind the stage looking down at the audience throughout proceedings was similarly not without irony.��In��classic (though pleasantly) Nigerian form, we were served meat-pie and��kola-nut at tea breaks,��jollof��rice and pounded yam at lunch,��and the conference had its own custom made souvenirs���even its own Ankara uniform.

Conference participants.

Less characteristic for the context was that several presentations on radical feminism,��which profoundly questioned gendered norms and the family,��were welcomed by the audience, triggering neither convulsions from male delegates nor extensive quotations of scriptural justifications for patriarchy.

Delegates to the conference included senior academics, veteran labor activists, feminist intellectuals and advocates, as well as delegations of undergraduates, many of whom were encountering��Marxist��theories for the first time. Some of the veterans included��Dr. Amina��Salihu, Professor Dung Pam Sha, Professor��Jibrin��Ibrahim, Comrades Ibrahim��Muazzam,��Issa��Aremu,��Ene��Obi and many other former student activists.

A notable absence was that of the counter-culture��and artistic left, which were central��to��revolutionary gatherings in earlier periods of Nigerian history. A similar ���All Nigerian Socialist Conference��� held in��Ahmadu��Bello University in 1977 was attended by non-other than��Fela��Kuti��himself, along with the full contingent of his band and dancers, who according to mathematician and��left-wing��journalist��Edwin��Madunagu�����insisted on sitting on the floor!��� The day may yet come when��Seun��Kuti��opens up a Nigerian Socialist Conference, but that was not to be in��Keffi. Another missed opportunity was��the absence��of�����informal��� working class organizations including market women���s unions, street cleaners�����associations and artisans and traders�����organizations,��many of whom play a critical role in electoral politics (as we saw in the recent��Lagos State APC Governorship primaries in which a sitting governor was defeated��in part because he annoyed the��Association of Waste Managers).

Presentations��covered��the anti-colonial��Aba Women���s War of 1929; the collapse of the Soviet Union; and why the teaching of Marxist theories has declined in Nigerian universities (yes, this was once a thing!). At one point during a Q&A session, an earnest engineering student suggested that the left should consider changing its name to the�����Right�����for him a synonym for ���correct��� and the more marketable direction overall. ���How you brand yourself is very important,��� he added, as many audience members looked on in a mix of incredulity and anguish. There was also at least one shouting-match sparked by a presentation on whether the Nigerian left should pursue ���entryism�����by seeking to infiltrate mainstream political parties to move them in a radical direction.

Our deliberations inevitably had certain blind-spots. There was little discussion, for instance, about what the Nigerian left might learn from the resurgence of socialism in America and Britain following the��delegitimization��of neoliberal and “third-way” politics in much of the West. The conversation could also have been enriched had some presentations offered a left perspective on pressing economic issues, including��diversification from oil, social security��and the weaknesses of Nigerian Federalism.

However, despite this, the conference accomplished some important feats, the most significant was the fact that it actually happened.��Promisingly,��the organizers also pledged to set up a steering committee to��develop Marxists ideas and politics in Nigeria in a number of ways. These included commitments to host regular conferences, improve upon the teaching of Marxism within the trade union movement, publish classic Marxist scholarship locally, and support comrades who are running for public offices on credible progressive platforms.

It was also encouraging to observe the students and the youth.��In sparking a wide-ranging and inter-generational conversation about alternative political futures, the gathering succeeded in escaping blind partisanship and defeatist cynicism, both of which have come to set the boundaries of�����intellectual�����debate in contemporary Nigerian politics.