Sean Jacobs's Blog, page 243

South African labor federation, Cosatu, limps towards irrelevance

How can Cosatu remain relevant in the face of declining membership and a failing formal economy?





Roadworkers undertaking repairs in South Africa's Northern Cape. Image by Trevor Samson via Flickr.

The 13th national congress of South African��labor��federation,��Cosatu, has just ended in��Midrand��near Johannesburg. But it���s not a happy time for South Africa���s��formerly��triumphant labor movement. Led for the first time by a woman president,��Zingiswa��Losi, formerly a leader of the now expelled National Union of Metal Workers (Numsa), the once powerful and radical labor federation looks in pretty poor shape.

Cosatu��has never really recovered from the departure of��Numsa��and other unions,��which left over relations with the ruling African National Congress and membership of its��tripartite��alliance.��The union���s��expulsion initially arose from its decision not to support the ANC in the general elections, which went against��Cosatu���s��constitution.��It��subsequently proposed the establishment of a new��United Front��to co-ordinate struggles in the workplace and in communities, playing a role similar to that of the 1980s��United Democratic Front. The task of this front would be to fight for the implementation of the 1960s��Freedom Charter��and to be an��organizational��weapon against��neoliberal��policies,��such as��contained in��the��National Development Plan. Side by side with the establishment of the��United Front would be an exploration of the establishment of a��movement��for��socialism, as��Numsa��argued that the working class needed a political organization committed to a socialist South Africa. While this has yet to generate a new workers party or a new wave of��working class��mobilization it has had severe��repercussions��for��Cosatu.

The union federation��faces financial difficulties,��due to its declining membership and collapsing affiliates.��The start of the congress was marred by protests by disgruntled South African Municipal Workers Union (Samwu) members, excluded for ���not being in good standing�����(due to outstanding affiliation fees).��Citing longstanding ���organizational challenges,��� Cosatu��formed a��task team to intervene in the troubled��Samwu, as well as in the South African Transport and Allied Workers Union (Satawu) and the Chemical, Energy, Paper, Printing, Wood and Allied Workers��� Union (Ceppwawu). In its organizational report to Congress,��Cosatu��leadership lamented serious membership losses:��Satawu��has��lost over 100,000 members and��Samwu��about 30,000. To compound this crisis the federation has experienced a serious hemorrhage of industrial workers, becoming increasingly reliant on recruitment among��white collar public sector��workers.

Admitting his responsibility for some of��Cosatu���s��troubles, outgoing president��S���dumo��Dlamini��claimed that the greed of some leaders��has�����sucked blood��� out of the federation. He admitted that since 2015 they had lost almost 320,000 members, a number significantly more than the total membership of their biggest affiliate, the National Education, Health and Allied Workers’ Union��(Nehawu), which claims 275,000. Given notoriously unreliable union membership figures, the real losses could��be��even��bigger. However, the real reasons for��Cosatu���s��decline are a bit more complicated.

Cosatu��has its origins in the struggle against��Apartheid. With its roots in militant strikes in Durban in 1973, resurgent��organized��labor led an unprecedented��wave of action against��Apartheid��employers between 1973 and 1985. A new federation,��Fosatu, was formed in 1979 and later��Cosatu��in 1985. The federation became a major force in the��1980s��and��1990s. In 1986 for instance, more than 1.5 million workers, joined by community structures, observed��its call for an illegal stay��away on May Day. It regularly contested social and economic policies under ANC governments.

Cosatu��was a powerful force in the post-1994 ruling��tripartite��alliance, mobilizing the movement���s big battalions for elections and acting for some time as an important countervailing force against rightward government policy shifts under Mandela, Mbeki and finally Jacob Zuma. But much of its leadership had begun to view the federation as a mere conveyor belt to positions in government. It���s ambivalence over the massacre of striking miners at��Marikana��in August 2012, the most lethal use of force by South African security forces against civilians since 1960, and the vote��in 2016��by its��central��executive��committee��to expel 340,000 members��Numsa (Cosatu’s most militant affiliate), marked new low points.

Conditions for organized labor are now particularly difficult given the rapid economic decline. The ANC government��intends to introduce legislation that will make ���legal��� strikes a lot more difficult to organize��and��the labor movement remains deeply divided. Despite organizing a��worker��summit��that aimed to rejuvenate the movement, and the��United Front��as the basis for a new��working class��movement, unions grouped around the more radical, independent��Numsa��faction, reorganized as the South African Federation of Trade unions (SAFTU), have also found��the��going quite tough given near recessionary conditions and significant job losses in the manufacturing sector where��Numsa��mainly organizes.

While��Cosatu���s��founders saw organized labor, based in the workplace, as the foundation for a new progressive social system, South Africa is today characterized by growing numbers of informal dwellers in cities with struggling economies. Levels of unionization have fallen, and the role of organized labor has declined. Work is now often outsourced and��casualized. Many unions have become more like staff associations with managers and workers in one structure.

The informal sector has grown in South Africa and this has led to the sub-division of existing jobs rather than job creation. Formal jobs and organized workers are in decline and the active��proletarianization��of informal workers and slum-dwellers once foreseen by the left, is not happening. Instead, there has been a wide range of other responses to declining living standards. These include the growth of charismatic churches (ironically, often in buildings that once housed productive industry); a resurgence of traditionalism and superstition; the growth of criminal street gangs; and xenophobic movements blaming foreigners for the country���s troubles.

In the light of all this, organized labor faces some tough questions.��Is it��responding adequately to the changing shape of the working class? Can��it��build new alliances between unions, communities,��casualized��workers, youth, women, foreign workers and the unemployed? And what new forms of solidarity are possible in a changing global context?

Such questions are difficult to answer except through new forms of organization and political work on the ground. But, firmly situated, as it is, in the camp of conservative and pro-business President Cyril��Ramaphosa, it seems unlikely that the creaking remnants of old��Cosatu��will have much of a role.

The South African labor federation, Cosatu, limps towards irrelevance

How can Cosatu remain relevant in the face of declining membership and a failing formal economy?





Roadworkers undertaking repairs in South Africa's Northern Cape. Image by Trevor Samson via Flickr.

The 13th national congress of South African��labor��federation,��Cosatu, has just ended in��Midrand��near Johannesburg. But it���s not a happy time for South Africa���s��formerly��triumphant labor movement. Led for the first time by a woman president,��Zingiswa��Losi, formerly a leader of the now expelled National Union of Metal Workers (Numsa), the once powerful and radical labor federation looks in pretty poor shape.

Cosatu��has never really recovered from the departure of��Numsa��and other unions,��which left over relations with the ruling African National Congress and membership of its��tripartite��alliance.��The union���s��expulsion initially arose from its decision not to support the ANC in the general elections, which went against��Cosatu���s��constitution.��It��subsequently proposed the establishment of a new��United Front��to co-ordinate struggles in the workplace and in communities, playing a role similar to that of the 1980s��United Democratic Front. The task of this front would be to fight for the implementation of the 1960s��Freedom Charter��and to be an��organizational��weapon against��neoliberal��policies,��such as��contained in��the��National Development Plan. Side by side with the establishment of the��United Front would be an exploration of the establishment of a��movement��for��socialism, as��Numsa��argued that the working class needed a political organization committed to a socialist South Africa. While this has yet to generate a new workers party or a new wave of��working class��mobilization it has had severe��repercussions��for��Cosatu.

The union federation��faces financial difficulties,��due to its declining membership and collapsing affiliates.��The start of the congress was marred by protests by disgruntled SA Municipal Workers Union (Samwu) members, excluded for ���not being in good standing�����(due to outstanding affiliation fees).��Citing longstanding ���organizational challenges,��� Cosatu��formed a��task team to intervene in the troubled��Samwu, as well as in the SA Transport and Allied Workers Union (Satawu) and the Chemical, Energy, Paper, Printing, Wood and Allied Workers��� Union (Ceppwawu). In its organizational report to Congress,��Cosatu��leadership lamented serious membership losses:��Satawu��has��lost over 100,000 members and��Samwu��about 30,000. To compound this crisis the federation has experienced a serious hemorrhage of industrial workers, becoming increasingly reliant on recruitment among��white collar public sector��workers.

Admitting his responsibility for some of��Cosatu���s��troubles, outgoing president��S���dumo��Dlamini��claimed that the greed of some leaders��has�����sucked blood��� out of federation. He admitted that since 2015 they had lost almost 320,000 members, a number significantly more than the total membership of their biggest affiliate, the National Education, Health and Allied Workers’ Union��(Nehawu), which claims 275,000. Given notoriously unreliable union membership figures, the real losses could��be��even��bigger. However, the real reasons for��Cosatu���s��decline are a bit more complicated.

Cosatu��has its origins in the struggle against��Apartheid. With its roots in militant strikes in Durban in 1973, resurgent��organized��labor led an unprecedented��wave of action against��Apartheid��employers between 1973 and 1985. A new federation,��Fosatu, was formed in 1979 and later��Cosatu��in 1985. The federation became a major force in the��1980s��and��1990s. In 1986 for instance, more than 1.5 million workers, joined by community structures, observed��its call for an illegal stay��away on May Day. It regularly contested social and economic policies under ANC governments.

Cosatu��was a powerful force in the post-1994 ruling��tripartite��alliance, mobilizing the movement���s big battalions for elections and acting for some time as an important countervailing force against rightward government policy shifts under Mandela, Mbeki and finally Jacob Zuma. But much of its leadership had begun to view the federation as a mere conveyor belt to positions in government. It���s ambivalence over the massacre of striking miners at��Marikana��in August 2012, the most lethal use of force by South African security forces against civilians since 1960, and the vote��in 2016��by its��central��executive��committee��to expel 340,000 members��Numsa,��its most militant affiliate, marked new low points.

Conditions for organized labor are now particularly difficult given the rapid economic decline. The ANC government��intends to introduce legislation that will make ���legal��� strikes a lot more difficult to organize��and��the labor movement remains deeply divided. Despite organizing a��worker��summit��that aimed to rejuvenate the movement, and the��United Front��as the basis for a new��working class��movement, unions grouped around the more radical, independent��Numsa��faction, reorganized as the South African federation of Trade unions (SAFTU), have also found��the��going quite tough given near recessionary conditions and significant job losses in the manufacturing sector where��Numsa��mainly organizes.

While��Cosatu���s��founders saw organized labor, based in the workplace, as the foundation for a new progressive social system, South Africa is today characterized by growing numbers of informal dwellers in cities with struggling economies. Levels of unionization have fallen, and the role of organized labor has declined. Work is now often outsourced and��casualized. Many unions have become more like staff associations with managers and workers in one structure.

The informal sector has grown in South Africa and this has led to the sub-division of existing jobs rather than job creation. Formal jobs and organized workers are in decline and the active��proletarianization��of informal workers and slum-dwellers once foreseen by the left, is not happening. Instead, there has been a wide range of other responses to declining living standards. These include the growth of charismatic churches (ironically, often in buildings that once housed productive industry); a resurgence of traditionalism and superstition; the growth of criminal street gangs; and xenophobic movements blaming foreigners for the country���s troubles.

In the light of all this, organized labor faces some tough questions.��Is it��responding adequately to the changing shape of the working class? Can��it��build new alliances between unions, communities,��casualized��workers, youth, women, foreign workers and the unemployed? And what new forms of solidarity are possible in a changing global context?

Such questions are difficult to answer except through new forms of organization and political work on the ground. But, firmly situated, as it is, in the camp of conservative and pro-business President Cyril��Ramaphosa, it seems unlikely that the creaking remnants of old��Cosatu��will have much of a role.

The South African labor federation Cosatu limps towards irrelevance

How can Cosatu remain releveant in the face of declining membership and a failing formal economy?





Roadworkers undertaking repairs in South Africa's Northern Cape. Image by Trevor Samson via Flickr.

The 13th national congress of South African��labor��federation,��Cosatu, has just ended in��Midrand��near Johannesburg. But it���s not a happy time for South Africa���s��formerly��triumphant labor movement. Led for the first time by a woman president,��Zingiswa��Losi, formerly a leader of the now expelled National Union of Metal Workers (Numsa), the once powerful and radical labor federation looks in pretty poor shape.

Cosatu��has never really recovered from the departure of��Numsa��and other unions,��which left over relations with the ruling African National Congress and membership of its��tripartite��alliance.��The union���s��expulsion initially arose from its decision not to support the ANC in the general elections, which went against��Cosatu���s��constitution.��It��subsequently proposed the establishment of a new��United Front��to co-ordinate struggles in the workplace and in communities, playing a role similar to that of the 1980s��United Democratic Front. The task of this front would be to fight for the implementation of the 1960s��Freedom Charter��and to be an��organizational��weapon against��neoliberal��policies,��such as��contained in��the��National Development Plan. Side by side with the establishment of the��United Front would be an exploration of the establishment of a��movement��for��socialism, as��Numsa��argued that the working class needed a political organization committed to a socialist South Africa. While this has yet to generate a new workers party or a new wave of��working class��mobilization it has had severe��repercussions��for��Cosatu.

The union federation��faces financial difficulties,��due to its declining membership and collapsing affiliates.��The start of the congress was marred by protests by disgruntled SA Municipal Workers Union (Samwu) members, excluded for ���not being in good standing�����(due to outstanding affiliation fees).��Citing longstanding ���organizational challenges,��� Cosatu��formed a��task team to intervene in the troubled��Samwu, as well as in the SA Transport and Allied Workers Union (Satawu) and the Chemical, Energy, Paper, Printing, Wood and Allied Workers��� Union (Ceppwawu). In its organizational report to Congress,��Cosatu��leadership lamented serious membership losses:��Satawu��has��lost over 100,000 members and��Samwu��about 30,000. To compound this crisis the federation has experienced a serious hemorrhage of industrial workers, becoming increasingly reliant on recruitment among��white collar public sector��workers.

Admitting his responsibility for some of��Cosatu���s��troubles, outgoing president��S���dumo��Dlamini��claimed that the greed of some leaders��has�����sucked blood��� out of federation. He admitted that since 2015 they had lost almost 320,000 members, a number significantly more than the total membership of their biggest affiliate, the National Education, Health and Allied Workers’ Union��(Nehawu), which claims 275,000. Given notoriously unreliable union membership figures, the real losses could��be��even��bigger. However, the real reasons for��Cosatu���s��decline are a bit more complicated.

Cosatu��has its origins in the struggle against��Apartheid. With its roots in militant strikes in Durban in 1973, resurgent��organized��labor led an unprecedented��wave of action against��Apartheid��employers between 1973 and 1985. A new federation,��Fosatu, was formed in 1979 and later��Cosatu��in 1985. The federation became a major force in the��1980s��and��1990s. In 1986 for instance, more than 1.5 million workers, joined by community structures, observed��its call for an illegal stay��away on May Day. It regularly contested social and economic policies under ANC governments.

Cosatu��was a powerful force in the post-1994 ruling��tripartite��alliance, mobilizing the movement���s big battalions for elections and acting for some time as an important countervailing force against rightward government policy shifts under Mandela, Mbeki and finally Jacob Zuma. But much of its leadership had begun to view the federation as a mere conveyor belt to positions in government. It���s ambivalence over the massacre of striking miners at��Marikana��in August 2012, the most lethal use of force by South African security forces against civilians since 1960, and the vote��in 2016��by its��central��executive��committee��to expel 340,000 members��Numsa,��its most militant affiliate, marked new low points.

Conditions for organized labor are now particularly difficult given the rapid economic decline. The ANC government��intends to introduce legislation that will make ���legal��� strikes a lot more difficult to organize��and��the labor movement remains deeply divided. Despite organizing a��worker��summit��that aimed to rejuvenate the movement, and the��United Front��as the basis for a new��working class��movement, unions grouped around the more radical, independent��Numsa��faction, reorganized as the South African federation of Trade unions (SAFTU), have also found��the��going quite tough given near recessionary conditions and significant job losses in the manufacturing sector where��Numsa��mainly organizes.

While��Cosatu���s��founders saw organized labor, based in the workplace, as the foundation for a new progressive social system, South Africa is today characterized by growing numbers of informal dwellers in cities with struggling economies. Levels of unionization have fallen, and the role of organized labor has declined. Work is now often outsourced and��casualized. Many unions have become more like staff associations with managers and workers in one structure.

The informal sector has grown in South Africa and this has led to the sub-division of existing jobs rather than job creation. Formal jobs and organized workers are in decline and the active��proletarianization��of informal workers and slum-dwellers once foreseen by the left, is not happening. Instead, there has been a wide range of other responses to declining living standards. These include the growth of charismatic churches (ironically, often in buildings that once housed productive industry); a resurgence of traditionalism and superstition; the growth of criminal street gangs; and xenophobic movements blaming foreigners for the country���s troubles.

In the light of all this, organized labor faces some tough questions.��Is it��responding adequately to the changing shape of the working class? Can��it��build new alliances between unions, communities,��casualized��workers, youth, women, foreign workers and the unemployed? And what new forms of solidarity are possible in a changing global context?

Such questions are difficult to answer except through new forms of organization and political work on the ground. But, firmly situated, as it is, in the camp of conservative and pro-business President Cyril��Ramaphosa, it seems unlikely that the creaking remnants of old��Cosatu��will have much of a role.

Antiblack excellence

In Ghana, political leaders, religious leaders and leading rappers all have one thing in common.





Image credit Sarkodie managment via Twitter.

Within the space of forty-eight hours, in the last week of August 2018, two prominent Ghanaian men had something to say, one on a song, the other in a tweet, about black people.

The latter of the messages was from Kwaku��Sintim-Misa, a satirist and media personality popularly known as KSM. He tweeted, in the very early hours of Wednesday, August 29, suggesting that ���God should recall black people and fix our defect.��� (�� la��vehicle manufacturers doing a recall to fix defected cars.)

Two��days earlier, Sarkodie, one of the continent���s biggest music artistes, had made his own comments about black people on��his latest single, ���Black Excellence.��� The insidiousness of KSM’s remark is symptomatic of internalized antiblackness in Ghanaian society, among all classes of citizens; a condition woefully under discussed in national conversations, if at all.

Sarkodie���s Black Excellence starts out as a well-intentioned litany of advice to ���the young ones��� (though we realize early in the song that he���s really addressing young men, warning them against superficial women, among other things), which plunges into a harangue about black people���s thoughtless ostentation vis a vis the imitable frugality of white people.

Actually, it gets more facile. In the second verse, which is incidentally preceded by a clip from��this (in)famous speech by Ghana���s president, Nana Akufo-Addo, who implored Africans to develop themselves and not expect anything from their erstwhile colonisers, the Europeans, Sarkodie squarely attributes Africa���s chronic retrogression not to centuries of exploitation and onslaught of every imaginable kind by imperial powers, and, yes, Africa���s political elite, but to our attitude.���A line from the song translates from Akan as: ���it���s laziness that���ll kill black people, we don���t like to work.��� A sentiment as absurd as this is familiar. (Did the musician��Brymo��not tweet the same thing only two years ago, about black people being ���lazy and illogical?���) And it is this attitude of laziness that Sarkodie sets down all of Africa���s problems. This attitude falls right in line with the inclination of the economically privileged to ascribe people’s (economic) disenfranchisement to laziness, lack of self-belief, and negative mindsets. It is unfortunately typical that the effects of hostile, anti-people economic systems are conveniently pinned on such neoliberal tropes���classed Ghanaians,��from former president John Agyekum Kufuor of years ago, all through to��many other recent voices, have sung and still continue to sing this grating song.

After his woeful misdiagnosing of Africa���s condition, Sarkodie goes on, in Black Excellence, to admonish black people for constantly blaming their issues on white folks. His fault? Partly. For, those who know, know that all of this is merely a regurgitation of racist, colonial nonsense about black people. Although much heralded as one of Ghana���s “conscious” artistes,��Sarkodie is not entirely new to spewing neoliberal dogma. There is a rather instructive part of the song where he admiringly name-drops Steve Jobs and Warren Buffet; and then offers curious buzzwords like “hard work,” “dedication” and “discipline” as exemplary characteristics.

That Sarkodie offers two ultra-rich men���whose��exploitative and abusive practices��are well-documented���as models to aspire to, illustrates the uncritical manner in which these aforementioned ideas are received���and spread. (Perhaps, we should be grateful that Donald Trump was not mentioned together with the other two wealthy white men; for, altogether, they form, for many a Ghanaian motivational speaker and their adherents, a trio of the go-to individuals for an embodiment of the hard-work-and-dedication-and-discipline-leads-to-success platitude.) Further, it is also emblematic of how self-appointed pundits���like KSM and Sarkodie���offer rather glib views as hot takes; failing, in these particular instances, to consider the historical contexts of the things they speak about.

It is beyond alarming for such dangerous utterances to go unchallenged, especially coming from an artiste with such clout as Sarkodie. As if our black wings aren���t already being clipped everyday, everywhere, by everyone, including our own big men. Thankfully, however, two things in all of this add up to provide some hope: Sarkodie tells us in the song���s intro that he hasn���t got it entirely figured out; and somewhere in the second verse, he raps that ���what you wear doesn���t matter, what you feed the brain is worth��more.��� What��hope? Hope that in his quest to get things figured out, he also feeds his brain with material beyond the genre of Rhonda Byrne���s��The Secret���which he posted a picture of himself reading, a few days prior to the release of Black Excellence. Inferring that he hasn���t yet read it, I���d suggest, for starters, Walter Rodney���s��How Europe Underdeveloped Africa.

Barack Obama, Nelson Mandela and the limits of liberalism

Obama's speech in South Africa, marking the late Mandela's 100th birthday, is more liberal white washing of radical social movements of the past.





Barack Obama (third from the left) at the 2018 Nelson Mandela Annual Lecture, with Mpho Makhura, Cyril Ramaphosa and David Makhura. Via Flickr.

Barack Obama���s��recent speech for the 2nd Nelson Mandela Annual Lecture in South Africa,��lauded by many mainstream publishing outlets, demonstrates American liberals��� continued refusal to engage seriously with the global collapse of��the postwar liberal order. It was an excellent case study of American liberalism���s blind spots, specifically its unwillingness to confront capitalism and American imperialism and its ignorance of how democratic politics operate.��It is��ironic that the��occasion of such a speech would be to celebrate the��100th��birthday of a socialist revolutionary,��who was a member of the South African Communist Party and��of��Mkhonto��we��Sizwe,��the armed wing of the African National Congress.��Yet,��it���s also appropriate given liberals��� long history of sanitizing leftist leaders��� pasts.

Obama began his speech by briefly reflecting on the state of affairs in the imperialist past. He described the social movements of the first half of the 1900s with a series of passive, actor-free clauses that obscure the direct link between capitalism and the many problems it created:

In those nations with market-based economies, suddenly union movements developed, and health and safety and commercial regulations were instituted, and access to public education was expanded, and social welfare systems emerged, all with the aim of constraining the excesses of capitalism and enhancing its ability to provide opportunity not just to some but to all people.

The liberal view of��social movements Obama voices erases the connection between domestic and international injustice, the reality of class conflict, activists��� agency in��effecting��social change, and oppressive social structures which reproduce themselves via the��protective mechanisms of social inertia and enormous power inequities. It treats movements as the inevitable response of a beneficent system to its own deficiencies. It also refuses to confront the massive violence and repression that capitalist elites,��often using militaries and police, deployed against social movements within the metropole and against colonial subjects in the global South.

Every domestic regulation and law curbing capital, every aspect of the social safety net, every expansion of public education and the franchise, had to be fought for tooth and nail, and most of these did not extend to American and European colonial possessions���a reflection of the shamefully incomplete concept of solidarity that most��western��social-democratic parties had at the time. Workers and activists literally died for the sake of social democracy, and capitalist exploitation and imperialist divide-and-conquer strategies of domination wreaked havoc on large swathes of the global South, resulting in suffering and death on a scale��that��dwarfed the misery suffered in the global North. Obama serenely passes over the immense cost��that��organizing under��19th- and��20th-��century capitalism exacted. In so doing, his speech��illustrates a major weakness of liberalism: the absence of a real theory of social change.

Instead of an accurate account of social progress, one which regards collective movements and transformations of society���s basic economic and political power relations as the engines of historical change, liberalism substitutes individual leaders��� personalities and dismisses the lasting��impact of material inequalities. Obama���s discussion of Mandela���s accomplishments illustrates this to a tee:

Do you remember that feeling? It seemed as if the forces of progress were on the march, that they were inexorable. Each step he took, you felt this is the moment when the old structures of violence and repression and ancient hatreds that had so long stunted people���s lives and confined the human spirit���that all that was crumbling before our eyes. Then, as��Madiba��guided this nation through negotiation painstakingly, reconciliation, its first fair and free elections, as we all witnessed the grace and the generosity with which he embraced former enemies, the wisdom for him to step away from power once he felt his job was complete, we understood that���we understood it was not just the subjugated, the oppressed who were being freed from the shackles of the past. The subjugator was being��offered a gift, being given a chance to see in a new way, being given a chance to participate in the work of building a better world.

���Forces of progress��� (seemingly ���inexorable���) motivate history: the anti-apartheid movement���a movement which encountered violent suppression within South Africa and considerable hostility outside of it���is barely mentioned. The ���old structures of violence and repression,��� Obama suggests, can melt away without being concretely dismantled; in his telling, the oppressed black majority was liberated from ���the shackles of the past��� despite the absence of policies to correct immense socioeconomic inequalities that resulted from centuries of deprivation. The undeniable force of Mandela���s ���grace��� and ���generosity��� was enough to do��the trick������reconciliation��� could ostensibly occur on an elevated spiritual and interpersonal plane without the transformation of the South African economy and political system. It wasn���t necessary to enact the Freedom Charter���s economic and social planks; Obama presents ���fair and free elections��� and psychological reconciliation between the races as the epitome of liberation. The deeply��rooted legacy of South Africa���s painful history, in this telling, was banished simply through an act of will and��the statesmanship of an admittedly brilliant leader, albeit one��who��presided over the ANC���s gradual drift away from its revolutionary roots and towards neoliberalism.

Obama���s discussion of decolonization more broadly suffers from a similar myopia and refusal to connect the dots between the colonial, capitalist past and the neocolonial, capitalist present:

A respect for human rights and the rule of law, enumerated in a declaration by the United Nations, became the guiding norm for the majority of nations,��even in places where the reality fell far short of the ideal. Even when those human rights were violated, those who violated human rights were on the defensive.

With these geopolitical changes came sweeping economic changes. The introduction of market-based principles, in which previously closed economies, along with the forces of global integration powered by new technologies, suddenly unleashed entrepreneurial talents to those that once had been relegated to the periphery of the world economy, who hadn���t��counted. Suddenly they counted. They had some power. They had the possibilities of doing business. And then came scientific breakthroughs and new infrastructure and the reduction of armed conflicts.

Decolonization occurred only after much trauma and bloodshed. This is an inconvenient fact with long-lasting consequences, and one which Obama largely elides. Whether such violence was prosecuted by��western��imperial powers seeking to maintain their empires (as in Algeria, Vietnam, or Kenya) or erupted��as a consequence of poorly drawn maps and the old colonial divide-and-rule strategy (as in Nigeria, Rwanda, the Indian subcontinent��and Eritrea), the past isn���t so easily swept aside in a mystical surge of ���entrepreneurial talents.��� The suggestion that ���market-based principles��� have empowered people in the global South, rather than having been��western��imperialist powers��� original motivation to annex and exploit most of Africa and Asia and the source of intra-national and international inequality today, is remarkable in its audacity.��To��name just a few US-backed dictators���Somalia���s��Siad��Barre and the Democratic Republic of the Congo���s Joseph-D��sir����Mobutu���didn���t seem particularly good at exercising ���respect for human rights and the rule��of law.��� What���s more, the notion that human rights discourse���s ineffectuality may be no accident,��but rather a consequence of inbuilt defects in conceptions of human rights which��sideline economic and social rights��doesn���t seem to cross Obama���s mind.

Obama���s proposed solution hasn���t evolved, nor has it grappled with any of the contradictions it entails. He envisions ���an inclusive capitalism,��� adding that ���we have to get past the charity mindset. We���ve got to bring more resources to the forgotten pockets of the world through investment and entrepreneurship, because there is talent everywhere in the world if given an opportunity.��� No consideration of the centuries of exploitation, imperialism, and colonialism and concomitant underdevelopment of the global��South; no consideration of the contradiction inherent in the notion of ���inclusive capitalism���; no consideration of the continued exploitation of the global South���s land and labor. Why are some pockets of the world forgotten and not others? Why are there immense wealth inequalities between nations? On these questions, Obama is silent.

Obama does not offer a vision of how the world he envisions���timid though it is���will be brought into being. He does, however, seize the opportunity to criticize the confrontational mode of politics that offends his sensibility of compromise and civility and likely represents our only hope for real change:

So, those who traffic in absolutes when it comes to policy, whether it���s on the left or the right, they make democracy unworkable. You can���t expect to get a hundred per cent of what you want all the time; sometimes you have to compromise.

As has become quite clear over the past��30��years, the American Right and capitalists worldwide are entirely uninterested in compromise. Setting aside Obama���s dubious assumption that American formal democracy has ever produced genuinely democratic outcomes, the presumption that it���s possible to bargain in good faith with today���s Republicans (and their reactionary ilk globally) is��dangerously na��ve���just as it was throughout Obama���s presidency. But absent a robust understanding of social movements��� role in achieving political change, Obama and liberals in his image are forced to fall back on vague appeals to discourse and deliberation instead of advocating a politics that speaks truth to power and embraces productive polarization as a means of achieving real change. As Mandela himself put it,�����[H]istory��progresses through struggle and change occurs in revolutionary jumps.”

Obamian��liberalism continues to exhibit an astonishing rigidity given the dire circumstances in which we find ourselves: lip service paid to market failure; an unwillingness to connect colonialism, imperialism��and capitalism; the refusal to connect the past with the present; and the continued failure to comprehend the need for constructive antagonism in politics. Perhaps it would be better to take a page out of Mandela���s book. In his autobiography, he described��tribal South African society before colonization,��writing: ���There were no classes, no rich or poor and no exploitation of man by man. All men were free and equal and this was the foundation of government��� [I]n such a society are contained the seeds of revolutionary democracy in which none will be held in slavery or servitude, and in which poverty, want, and insecurity shall be no more.���

Such a vision should be our rallying cry today.

Obama, Mandela and the limits of liberalism

Barack Obama's speech in South Africa, marking Nelson Mandela's 100 year birthday, was part of a continued trend of liberal white washing of social movements of the past.





Premier David Makhura and spouse with former President Obama and President Cyril Ramaphosa at the 16th Nelson Mandela Annual Lecture. Image credit Government of South Africa via Flickr.

Barack Obama���s��recent speech in South Africa,��lauded by many mainstream publishing outlets, demonstrates American liberals��� continued refusal to engage seriously with the global collapse of��the postwar liberal order. It was an excellent case study of American liberalism���s blind spots, specifically its unwillingness to confront capitalism and American imperialism and its ignorance of how democratic politics operate.��It is��ironic that the��occasion of such a speech would be to celebrate the��100th��birthday of a socialist revolutionary,��who was a member of the South African Communist Party and��of��Mkhonto��we��Sizwe,��the armed wing of the African National Congress.��Yet,��it���s also appropriate given liberals��� long history of sanitizing leftist leaders��� pasts.

Obama began his speech by briefly reflecting on the state of affairs in the imperialist past. He described the social movements of the first half of the 1900s with a series of passive, actor-free clauses that obscure the direct link between capitalism and the many problems it created:

In those nations with market-based economies, suddenly union movements developed, and health and safety and commercial regulations were instituted, and access to public education was expanded, and social welfare systems emerged, all with the aim of constraining the excesses of capitalism and enhancing its ability to provide opportunity not just to some but to all people.

The liberal view of��social movements Obama voices erases the connection between domestic and international injustice, the reality of class conflict, activists��� agency in��effecting��social change, and oppressive social structures which reproduce themselves via the��protective mechanisms of social inertia and enormous power inequities. It treats movements as the inevitable response of a beneficent system to its own deficiencies. It also refuses to confront the massive violence and repression that capitalist elites,��often using militaries and police, deployed against social movements within the metropole and against colonial subjects in the global South.

Every domestic regulation and law curbing capital, every aspect of the social safety net, every expansion of public education and the franchise, had to be fought for tooth and nail, and most of these did not extend to American and European colonial possessions���a reflection of the shamefully incomplete concept of solidarity that most��western��social-democratic parties had at the time. Workers and activists literally died for the sake of social democracy, and capitalist exploitation and imperialist divide-and-conquer strategies of domination wreaked havoc on large swathes of the global South, resulting in suffering and death on a scale��that��dwarfed the misery suffered in the global North. Obama serenely passes over the immense cost��that��organizing under��19th- and��20th-��century capitalism exacted. In so doing, his speech��illustrates a major weakness of liberalism: the absence of a real theory of social change.

Instead of an accurate account of social progress, one which regards collective movements and transformations of society���s basic economic and political power relations as the engines of historical change, liberalism substitutes individual leaders��� personalities and dismisses the lasting��impact of material inequalities. Obama���s discussion of Mandela���s accomplishments illustrates this to a tee:

Do you remember that feeling? It seemed as if the forces of progress were on the march, that they were inexorable. Each step he took, you felt this is the moment when the old structures of violence and repression and ancient hatreds that had so long stunted people���s lives and confined the human spirit���that all that was crumbling before our eyes. Then, as��Madiba��guided this nation through negotiation painstakingly, reconciliation, its first fair and free elections, as we all witnessed the grace and the generosity with which he embraced former enemies, the wisdom for him to step away from power once he felt his job was complete, we understood that���we understood it was not just the subjugated, the oppressed who were being freed from the shackles of the past. The subjugator was being��offered a gift, being given a chance to see in a new way, being given a chance to participate in the work of building a better world.

���Forces of progress��� (seemingly ���inexorable���) motivate history: the anti-apartheid movement���a movement which encountered violent suppression within South Africa and considerable hostility outside of it���is barely mentioned. The ���old structures of violence and repression,��� Obama suggests, can melt away without being concretely dismantled; in his telling, the oppressed black majority was liberated from ���the shackles of the past��� despite the absence of policies to correct immense socioeconomic inequalities that resulted from centuries of deprivation. The undeniable force of Mandela���s ���grace��� and ���generosity��� was enough to do��the trick������reconciliation��� could ostensibly occur on an elevated spiritual and interpersonal plane without the transformation of the South African economy and political system. It wasn���t necessary to enact the Freedom Charter���s economic and social planks; Obama presents ���fair and free elections��� and psychological reconciliation between the races as the epitome of liberation. The deeply��rooted legacy of South Africa���s painful history, in this telling, was banished simply through an act of will and��the statesmanship of an admittedly brilliant leader, albeit one��who��presided over the ANC���s gradual drift away from its revolutionary roots and towards neoliberalism.

Obama���s discussion of decolonization more broadly suffers from a similar myopia and refusal to connect the dots between the colonial, capitalist past and the neocolonial, capitalist present:

A respect for human rights and the rule of law, enumerated in a declaration by the United Nations, became the guiding norm for the majority of nations,��even in places where the reality fell far short of the ideal. Even when those human rights were violated, those who violated human rights were on the defensive.

With these geopolitical changes came sweeping economic changes. The introduction of market-based principles, in which previously closed economies, along with the forces of global integration powered by new technologies, suddenly unleashed entrepreneurial talents to those that once had been relegated to the periphery of the world economy, who hadn���t��counted. Suddenly they counted. They had some power. They had the possibilities of doing business. And then came scientific breakthroughs and new infrastructure and the reduction of armed conflicts.

Decolonization occurred only after much trauma and bloodshed. This is an inconvenient fact with long-lasting consequences, and one which Obama largely elides. Whether such violence was prosecuted by��western��imperial powers seeking to maintain their empires (as in Algeria, Vietnam, or Kenya) or erupted��as a consequence of poorly drawn maps and the old colonial divide-and-rule strategy (as in Nigeria, Rwanda, the Indian subcontinent��and Eritrea), the past isn���t so easily swept aside in a mystical surge of ���entrepreneurial talents.��� The suggestion that ���market-based principles��� have empowered people in the global South, rather than having been��western��imperialist powers��� original motivation to annex and exploit most of Africa and Asia and the source of intra-national and international inequality today, is remarkable in its audacity.��To��name just a few US-backed dictators���Somalia���s��Siad��Barre and the Democratic Republic of the Congo���s Joseph-D��sir����Mobutu���didn���t seem particularly good at exercising ���respect for human rights and the rule��of law.��� What���s more, the notion that human rights discourse���s ineffectuality may be no accident,��but rather a consequence of inbuilt defects in conceptions of human rights which��sideline economic and social rights��doesn���t seem to cross Obama���s mind.

Obama���s proposed solution hasn���t evolved, nor has it grappled with any of the contradictions it entails. He envisions ���an inclusive capitalism,��� adding that ���we have to get past the charity mindset. We���ve got to bring more resources to the forgotten pockets of the world through investment and entrepreneurship, because there is talent everywhere in the world if given an opportunity.��� No consideration of the centuries of exploitation, imperialism, and colonialism and concomitant underdevelopment of the global��South; no consideration of the contradiction inherent in the notion of ���inclusive capitalism���; no consideration of the continued exploitation of the global South���s land and labor. Why are some pockets of the world forgotten and not others? Why are there immense wealth inequalities between nations? On these questions, Obama is silent.

Obama does not offer a vision of how the world he envisions���timid though it is���will be brought into being. He does, however, seize the opportunity to criticize the confrontational mode of politics that offends his sensibility of compromise and civility and likely represents our only hope for real change:

So, those who traffic in absolutes when it comes to policy, whether it���s on the left or the right, they make democracy unworkable. You can���t expect to get a hundred per cent of what you want all the time; sometimes you have to compromise.

As has become quite clear over the past��30��years, the American Right and capitalists worldwide are entirely uninterested in compromise. Setting aside Obama���s dubious assumption that American formal democracy has ever produced genuinely democratic outcomes, the presumption that it���s possible to bargain in good faith with today���s Republicans (and their reactionary ilk globally) is��dangerously na��ve���just as it was throughout Obama���s presidency. But absent a robust understanding of social movements��� role in achieving political change, Obama and liberals in his image are forced to fall back on vague appeals to discourse and deliberation instead of advocating a politics that speaks truth to power and embraces productive polarization as a means of achieving real change. As Mandela himself put it,�����[H]istory��progresses through struggle and change occurs in revolutionary jumps.”

Obamian��liberalism continues to exhibit an astonishing rigidity given the dire circumstances in which we find ourselves: lip service paid to market failure; an unwillingness to connect colonialism, imperialism��and capitalism; the refusal to connect the past with the present; and the continued failure to comprehend the need for constructive antagonism in politics. Perhaps it would be better to take a page out of Mandela���s book. In his autobiography, he described��tribal South African society before colonization,��writing: ���There were no classes, no rich or poor and no exploitation of man by man. All men were free and equal and this was the foundation of government��� [I]n such a society are contained the seeds of revolutionary democracy in which none will be held in slavery or servitude, and in which poverty, want, and insecurity shall be no more.���

Such a vision should be our rallying cry today.

A new look at gay life in Senegal

Mohamed��Mbougar��Sarr's De purs hommes is a refreshing take on a controversial and dangerous subject for Senegal.





Saint-Louis, Senegal. Image credit T.K. Naliaka via Wikimedia Commons.

Homosexuality continues to be a dangerous topic in Senegal. There, as in much of the African continent, heteronormative behavior is enforced with violence. In his new novel,��De purs hommes��(Pure Men), published in French in a collaboration between French and Senegalese publishers, Mohamed��Mbougar��Sarr launches an attack on these prevailing mores with rare audacity. The protagonist is a young professor,��Nd��n����Gueye, whose feelings of disgust at a video of gruesome homophobic violence cause him to rebel against the hypocrisy of his compatriots. Someone���s cellphone has captured a grisly postmortem lynching of a suspected gay man buried in the Muslim cemetery. A furious crowd digs up and desecrates his corpse.��Moved��by��horror and pity,��Nd��n����searches for the victim���s identity, only to be accused of homosexuality himself.

The reader discovers with��Nd��n����how Senegalese society���s pious rebukes of so-called��western��debauchery only serve to mask its own neuroses. Postcolonial resentments and barely repressed sexual frustrations fester not only among the urban masses, but among the clerical class of Muslim religious leaders or marabouts.��The result: a frightening need to blame a scapegoat.

Perhaps surprisingly, the novel does not seem to pander to a��western��audience so much as it tries to unsettle a Senegalese one���the kind of reader who remembers the��real�����moral panic�����of 2008-10��that��shook Dakar and the whole country.��The plot unfolds in those years, when a series of scandals linked to accusations of homosexuality exploded in the national media.��Amid the ensuing backlash, hastily filmed scenes of retaliatory exhumations circulated on social media and on DVDs in the market.��After chronicling some of these real-life incidents, the novel adds, in a sad wink to the reader, a fictitious conclusion to the scandals by recounting the publication of a�����pro-gay�����novel whose author commits suicide.

Indeed, the author recognizes the danger he is courting by speaking so openly on this topic, even 10 years after the frenzy last hit fever pitch: ���Let them cover me in spit,�����declares the narrator,�����let them rip me to shreds with their teeth, let them break my bones and drag me naked through the streets, let them pour insults on me and my deceased mother, [���] let them lynch me and abandon my body to the elements, guts to the sky, like rotting carrion�����(my translation).��To be clear, it is not the suspect found guilty of sodomy who is exposed to this grotesque fate, but the person who is merely��accused. The devastating effects of accusation and rumor are, far more than the lurid details of sexual intimacy���which are not absent in the text���the novel���s main focus.

There is no doubt that this book is an indictment of Senegalese homophobia.��Yet,��its attention to the specificities��of local context does��not allow us to lump it in��or dismiss it��as pro-western��or pro-LGBT hype.��Indeed, its attention to nuance is so careful that it sometimes borders on pedantic. Some readers will see through the didactic tone of passages,��which juxtapose opposing points of view on homosexuality via dialogues between characters.��Progressive voices (Rama and Angela) oppose reactionary ones (imams, students),��as well as relatively lenient ones, which seek to tolerate the existence of��g��or-jig��en��(men-women) while reducing them to silence.��This sense of a sociological or pedagogical mission stands out when the novel expounds on the ambiguity of the term��g��or-jig��en, which can refer to cross-dressing and/or any sexual orientation outside of normative heterosexuality.�����But all that technical language is useless in this country�����(my translation).

By combining documentary and fictional modes, this approach calls the reader to move past simple binaries like��good vs. bad��or��human rights vs. fanaticism.��The novel refuses to rehash the slogans of any particular orthodoxy, including the international LGBT agenda.��The critique of the excesses of Senegalese collective paranoia never goes so far as to demand decriminalization of gay sex, let alone a��pride parade��or��marriage equality��on African soil.��The text even invites us to see��certain rationality behind the insanity of public��lynchings:�����All this might seem cruel, inhuman, but there is nothing more human,�����explains the narrator���s father, an imam. ���To remove those who offend, with violence if necessary���nothing is more human than that�����(my translation).��Alongside its call for Senegalese hearts to become more tolerant, this book is also a call for all readers to understand that things are complicated.��The homophobe, like the homosexual, is still human, after all.

In sum, the composure with which��Sarr has dared raise his voice in this novel is remarkable. While a few researchers and NGOs have published specialized studies of homosexuality in Senegal, it is a rare artist who is willing to shock the wider public���s mores with such force. Readers might remember the��scandal��caused by the film��Karmen��Ge����(2001), whose star actress��publicly regretted��her role in depicting a libertine bisexual��femme fatale. If��De��purs��hommes��is read in��Sunu��gaal��(���our boat,�����a Wolof nickname for the nation), it will certainly make waves.

Sex crimes, evangelism and the collective guilt of American intervention in Africa

Mathew Lane Durham's sexual abuse of orphans in Kenya exposes a deeper disfunction with American voluntourism and Christian outreach in Africa.



[image error]

Matthew Lane Durham at Upendo Children's Home in Nairobi. Image via Facebook.

On August 29, the U.S. Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals��affirmed the 2015 conviction of Matthew Lane Durham, a 24-year old former missionary from Oklahoma��convicted of��sexually abusing��Kenyan orphans.

Most��onlookers��applaud the Court���s decision,��confident��that a man found guilty of heinous crimes will remain��in prison. A closer look at the case, however, suggests that not all who are culpable are��behind bars. Americans have bought into and perpetuate a set of fictions about Africa, about aid, and about the inherent good of Western intervention.��Over centuries, these stereotypes produced a context in which a troubled young man with no discernible skills��was convicted of abusing��vulnerable children in Kenya.

In June, 2014,��a worker at the��Upendo��Children���s Home in��Juja, Kenya��accused Durham of serially molesting children at the Home. This was Durham���s fourth mission trip to��Upendo, where he and other American team members taught, cared for, and (as they say in Oklahoma evangelical circles) generally ���loved on��� the children. When workers initially confronted Durham with these allegations, he denied them. He later suggested that his inability to recall assaulting the children was the result of being possessed by a demon.

After��he returned to the States,��federal��prosecutors filed charges: eight counts of ���interstate travel with intent to engage in a sexual act with a child��� and eight counts of ���traveling in foreign commerce and engaging in illicit sexual conduct with a minor.���

Even before the 2015 trial began, the judge declared this ���among the most rancorous cases over which [he] has presided in nearly thirty-four years on the bench.��� The whole affair was certainly unusual. For instance, defense counsel���the same man who defended the Oklahoma City Bomber, Timothy McVeigh���suggested to the press that Durham was the object of ���pseudo-tribal psychological voodoo.��� In another instance, federal prosecutors suggested that Durham���s ���struggles��� (their word) with homosexuality were proof of pedophilia. Despite being based on outdated and dangerous assumptions, these two highly prejudicial suggestions seemed to resonate with the jury.

The sometimes-circus-like proceedings should not distract from the very troubling events at the heart of this case. Instead,��its��sensational��elements highlight the set of fictions that underwrite the��case.

Take, for example,��Upendo���s��fixation��on�����orphans.��� Upendo belongs to a category of Western aid organizations founded on the Judeo-Christian imperative to minister to orphans and widows, the likes of which drive��thousands of Americans each year to the continent to serve��people imagined as the��world���s most vulnerable (and, less charitably, to curry favor with their churches, with God, and with college admissions boards).

Yet, the concept of ���orphan��� to which��many��ascribe, is itself a fiction. In East Africa, at least, children��officially��classified as ���orphans�����are��rarely��destitute children without parents��who��lack access to social or kin networks. In fact, the concept of ���orphan��� is not an indigenous category at all, but an outgrowth of Western intervention in Africa. My research suggests that for a century and a half, East African children have been subject to the whims of colonial and evangelical rhetoric that ignored and obscured indigenous strategies for child care and protection.��Western activists��� efforts��to normalize the category of orphan have resulted in an increased number of vulnerable children���what some scholars have termed the ���orphan industrial complex.���

Another fiction at the heart of this case is the idea that short-term missions, such as Durham���s, and ���voluntourism�����more generally��are wholly positive endeavors.��But��research has shown��that rather than benefiting the local community in long-term, sustainable ways, these trips tend to do more harm than good. When unskilled and inattentive high school students paint schools in Uganda, local craftsmen are left without work. Key-hole gardens fail to produce when untrained locals mix meat scraps with their vegetable compost, and��fish in donated aquaponic systems die��when the community can no longer afford proper fish food.��Sadly, the presence of orphanage volunteers��tends to worsen��known impacts of institutional care on vulnerable young children.

In the most literal sense, there is no one responsible for Durham���s actions other than himself. But some share of his guilt must be borne by those who uphold the fictions that produced the context in which Durham was accused and convicted of these crimes. The guilt must be borne by Oklahomans who bought into stereotypes about spirituality in Africa and ���deviant��� sexuality in the Midwest. The guilt must be borne by pastors who organize short-term missions trips and by U.S.-based organizations that promote voluntourism. And it must be borne by charity workers who persist in the misrepresentation of ���orphans��� and by Americans who argue for the supremacy of ���good intentions��� over outcomes. The conviction is Durham���s alone, but the guilt is for many to bear.

Winnie Madikizela-Mandela and the historians

Given her status in 20th��century South African history, historians have surprisingly said little about Winnie��Madikizela-Mandela, before or since her April 2018 passing.





Nelson Mandela and Winnie��Madikizela-Mandela in Montreal, 1990. Image via Montreal Archives Flickr.

It may come as a surprise that despite her outsized influence on twentieth century South African politics and within the African diaspora, Winnie��Madikizela-Mandela has��not received much attention from historians.��She has rather been the subject of biographies by journalists and political friends (Nancy Harrison��in��1985; Emma��Gilbey��in��1993;��Ann����Mari����du��Preez��Bezdrob��in��2003;��critiqued��here��and��here), fiction (Njabulo��Ndebele, 2003), documentary and dramatic film (Peter Davis, 1986; Darrell��Roodt, 2011;��and, most recently,��Pascale��Lamche, 2017), and even a��2011 opera. These must be considered in the historical-political context in which they were created, and the sources upon which they rely must be carefully interpreted.��Especially as��Madikizela-Mandela was the subject of intense scrutiny and misinformation in the years of Nelson Mandela���s imprisonment and beyond.

Many of her chroniclers failed to consult��Madikizela-Mandela, or to foreground her own words���a disrespect that she protested.��The apartheid state, political activists, and commentators all projected upon her images ranging from��Mother of the��Nation��or��Penelope, to fallen woman��or��Lady��Macbeth.

Why have depictions of��Madikizela-Mandela been so limited? It is true that in the face of interrogation, state-sponsored media that sought to vilify her, and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission,��Madikizela-Mandela chose what historian��Ntombizikhona��Valela��describes as a ���deliberate silence,�����as a��weapon of resistance.

Charting her political life has been challenging, because of the contingent nature of��Madikizela-Mandela���s archive. She has no collection of personal papers that historians can access. In this respect, she is similar to other activist women: almost no black women activists have prominent collections of papers in South African archives (Phyllis Naidoo, an underground anti-apartheid activist, lawyer,��and teacher from Kwazulu-Natal,��is an important��exception). The dangers of keeping personal papers in a time of incredible surveillance contributes to this, certainly, but the collections of Nelson Mandela, O.R. Tambo, Yusuf��Dadoo, Ronnie��Kasrils, Ruth First, Helen Joseph, and Hilda Bernstein are just a few that historians can access to examine the lives of activists and the larger anti-apartheid struggle. Even in the post-apartheid context when we might expect��Madikizela-Mandela to elaborate upon her life, she deflected to others as she did when she recalled her underground work helping cadres infiltrate South Africa: ���These are people who are generals in the South African army today who hold the highest offices in government but they must tell that story themselves��� (Madikizela-Mandela, 2013). To a far greater extent than most activist women, however,��Madikizela-Mandela has also left a rich public record of speaking for herself���in spite of surveillance and successive banning orders.

Still, talking about herself often meant talking about her husband���in part because of her conscious decision to ensure Mandela remained in the public eye. Her 1985 memoirs, aimed at an international solidarity movement, were called��Part of My Soul Went with Him;��when her prison diaries from 1969-1970 were published as��491 Days��(Madikizela-Mandela, 2013), they were compiled with much correspondence from and to Nelson Mandela. And of course, as��Madikizela-Mandela became the face of township political violence, Mandela became the face of reconciliation.

Interpretations of her life have thus inevitably become statements about the contributions and limitations of her (ex-)husband. For instance,��Njabulo��Ndebele���s fictional conversation between four women-in-waiting and��Madikizela-Mandela,��The Cry of Winnie Mandela,��sensitively characterizes her as the subject of constant public attention, but also makes her an icon of waiting for a heroic man. In contrast, Pascale��Lamche���s��documentary, which includes extensive interviews with��Madikizela-Mandela,�����places the foibles and insecurities of men firmly at its center.�����Madikizela-Mandela represents the possibilities for radical transformation that were lost during the male-dominated negotiated transition.

Feminist scholars have begun to explore��Madikizela-Mandela���s challenging public archive, to highlight her as an activist and intellectual in her own right. In articles and MA theses, historians���most notably,��Ntombizikhona��Valela,��Emily Bridger, and��Helena��Pohlandt-McCormick���have examined how��Madikizela-Mandela adroitly crafted her public image to push the anti-apartheid movement toward greater militancy. Similarly, in the wake of her passing, political scientist��Shireen��Hassim,��historian��Vashna��Jagarnath, and journalist��Sisonke��Msimang��have all highlighted the complexity of��Madikizela-Mandela���s politics, and their roots in her personal history. We can���t wait for��Msimang���s��new book,��The Resurrection of Winnie Mandela,��forthcoming in October 2018.

Since both Winnie and Nelson have passed, they have both been too easily caricatured���respectively emblematizing violence vs. peace, or the revolutionary spirit of the masses vs. the compromises of their leaders. Historians have already presented ample corrections to this simplistic narrative of Nelson Mandela: historiographic��debates��thrive, as new revelations of his complexities continue to unfold. Historians mostly need to work on extending these debates more fully into public��discourse.

Yet��Madikizela-Mandela���s life remains sketchily treated in standard histories of South Africa. Robert Ross�����A Concise History of South Africa��(2003) mentions her on only one page: discussing the late 1980s, when ���her personal rule in part of Soweto had turned murderous��� (175). Other familiar classroom textbooks give her slightly more space, but only depict her from the 1970s on, as Mandela���s wife-turned-militant (Beinart, 2001; Ross,��Mager, and��Nasson, eds., 2011; MacKinnon, 2012;��Dubow, 2014).

Here, we aim to present a more complex narrative of the whole arc of��Madikizela-Mandela���s activist life, drawing on recent��historical��scholarship.��This narrative is intended for a broad public audience,��which feminist histories��reach too rarely, both in South Africa and in the United States, where we teach.��She knew this failure well, lamenting that Fatima Meer had not received��the recognition she deserved because ���ours is still a patriarchal society, in which men are more recognized than women. I hope that we will correct that situation with all our might as women.��� She was certainly talking about more than just Meer���s history��and legacy.

The archive��Madikizela-Mandela has left behind has been defined by her role in two families: first, in the proud anti-colonial family into which she was born, and then in the First Family of the anti-apartheid movement. In these families, she had a sharp sense that she was a historical subject, in both senses of the word. From childhood, she saw herself as inheriting a political mission, subject to the unfinished historical struggles of her ancestors; in adulthood, she saw herself as a protagonist, bringing a new South Africa into being. Her life was violent because her formation as an historical subject was violent. Through��Madikizela-Mandela���s life, we therefore see the complex ways that structural and political violence were deeply personal, and gendered.

 

Madikizela-Mandela as��a Political��Daughter, Wife, Sister,��and��Mother

Feminist scholars��� recent work on��Madikizela-Mandela has importantly highlighted that she was a political thinker long before meeting Nelson Mandela. They have shown that she was politicized first by her family,��Mpondo��royalty. Her family had struggled against colonial land expropriation, and her paternal grandparents held onto some land on which they farmed and ran a trading post. Her parents were both teachers: her mother was the first domestic science teacher in Bizana, and her father ran the community school, where he taught the region���s history far beyond the narratives in government textbooks. Her paternal grandmother���her��Makhulu, named��Seyina���was reluctant to convert to Christianity and critical of her daughter-in-law���s devout Methodism.��Valela��suggests��that in the struggles between��Madikizela-Mandela���s mother and grandmother over the��Madikizela��children���s upbringing, ���we can see��Makhulu���s��continued resistance against colonial assimilation, the home being the final frontier of that battle.��� Significantly,��Madikizela-Mandela referred to herself as��Makhulu��during her interview with��Valela, ���styling herself as an institution of historical and political knowledge.���

���Taught by her grandmother that the source of black suffering was white power, her framing of politics was defined completely by the ways in which her family understood the relations of colonialism,�����Hassim maintains. The context in which��Madikizela-Mandela learned these family lessons���the Transkei of the 1940s and 1950s���was embroiled in political debates, leading to the��Mpondo��revolts.��The Trotskyist Non-European Unity Movement (NEUM) was influential in the region.

When��Madikizela-Mandela left home at 17 to study at Johannesburg���s Jan��Hofmeyr��School of Social Work, she was therefore far from politically na��ve. Yet 1953 Johannesburg was a new political landscape, where the Defiance Campaign had just made the African National Congress a mass organization.��Though historians know too little about student politics at the��Hofmeyr��School, the first institution specifically for the training of black social workers in the country,��it must have been a complex space of debate. Founded by the paternalistic liberal and American Congregationalist minister Ray Phillips in 1941, the��Hofmeyr��School soon became an incubator of activist social workers, who grew deeply aware of inequality through rural and urban��fieldwork. Students would become leaders in liberation movements across the region: for instance, Joshua Nkomo of Zimbabwe and Eduardo��Mondlane��of Mozambique preceded��Madikizela-Mandela, and the South African activist Ellen��Kuzwayo��was her classmate. Nelson Mandela was the school���s patron.

In 1956,��Madikizela-Mandela landed a coveted position, as the first black social worker at Soweto���s Baragwanath Hospital. As historian��Simonne��Horwitz��has shown, the hospital was then undergoing considerable growth, underpinned by the work of a growing force of black woman nurses. Among these nurses was��Madikizela-Mandela���s roommate Adelaide��Tshukudu. As members of a profession that was both prestigious and politicizing, black women health workers were often sought-after by politically-prominent men.��Tshukudu, for instance, would soon marry Oliver Tambo, Nelson Mandela���s partner in South Africa���s first black-run law firm.

Madikizela-Mandela and Mandela began dating in 1957, after he was smitten upon seeing her at a bus stop. Nearly forty years old, he was going through a��divorce and��beginning his multi-year stand on the Treason Trial.��She was in her early twenties, appearing often in the local press, a noted beauty with a promising career.��They married soon after his divorce was finalized, in 1958; their bridal car was adorned in ANC regalia.��Their time together was always limited, but they had two daughters and built a home by the time he was arrested in 1962 and went on trial for his life.

Mandela���s account of their romance, in��Long Walk to Freedom��(1994), suggests that he was moved by her freshness: ���her spirit, her passion, her youth, her courage, her willfulness���I felt all of these things the moment I saw her��� (p. 215). He recalled:

[S]he came to meetings and political discussions; I was both courting her and politicizing her. As a student, Winnie had been attracted to the Non-European Unity Movement, for she had a brother who was involved with that party. In later years, I would tease her about this early allegiance, telling her that had she not met me, she would have married a leader of the NEUM (p. 215).

Madikizela-Mandela in fact quickly became a serious ANC activist, losing her job at Baragwanath after her arrest for anti-pass activism with the ANC Women���s League in 1958. Mandela worried about her readiness to face imprisonment���a position that was perhaps understandable, as she was then pregnant. Less understandable was the attitude shown in Mandela���s response to his wife���s visit after his 1962 arrest, as��Madikizela-Mandela chided him in a 1970 letter:

Do you remember what you said at the Fort when I visited you for the first time after your arrest? You thundered at me, ���This is not the woman I married, you have become so ugly,��� and then you sent me a magazine on the ���Reigning Beauties of the World-the Women and the Power behind politically successful men.��� Most of them were the wives of the independent heads of Black States. I was furious���I had taken such a lot of trouble to look nice that day! (26 October 1970 letter,��491 Days,��p. 215).

In contrast to Mandela���s recollection of his political tutelage of his wife,��Madikizela-Mandela later recalled her marriage as a challenge to the proud political identity with which she had been raised. In the epilogue to��491 Days,��written in 2012,��she described her shock at how suddenly:

[E]verything I did was as ���Mandela���s wife.��� I lost my individuality: ���Mandela���s wife said this,��� ���Mandela���s wife was arrested.��� It did not matter who the hell I was; it did not matter that I was a��Madikizela; it did not matter that I was a human being. And it was understandable to the��oppressor that whatever they did to Mandela���s wife, she deserved it. So I thought, ���My goodness I���ve grown up a princess in my own home; I come from the Royal House of��Pondoland; and suddenly I���ve lost my identity because of this struggle. I am going to fix them. I will fight them and I will establish my own identity��� (p. 237).

In this spirit,��Madikizela-Mandela arrived at the��Rivonia��Trial in��Mpondo��finery, against official orders. After Mandela was sent to Robben Island, his image and words banned, she became an increasingly prominent activist, visibly supporting the banned ANC and covertly working for its military wing Umkhonto we Sizwe in Soweto. Reclaiming a political identity of her own meant deepening her leadership of collective struggles for black liberation.

When apartheid officials detained her from 1969-1970 on charges of sabotage and terrorism, she suffered solitary confinement and torture. Her prison diaries, published in��491 Days,��reveal that this experience heightened her militancy and sent her family into crisis, as she struggled to learn what had happened to her daughters after her arrest. Her letters in��491 Days��also reveal how her activism changed her marriage. As she was pending trial for sabotage, Mandela switched his salutation from ���My Darling��� to ���Dade��Wethu��� [my sister]. He explained:

In the past I have addressed you in affectionate terms for then I was speaking to��Nobandla, wife of��Ama-Dlomo��[their clan names]. But on this occasion, I can claim no such prerogatives because in this freedom struggle we are all equals and your responsibility is as great as mine. We stand in the relationship, not of husband and wife, but of sister and brother (16 November 1969 letter, p. 141).

They continued to address each other as sibling-comrades through her long detention, a salutation that suited��Madikizela-Mandela���s demands for equal recognition and respect.

After her release,��Madikizela-Mandela would increasingly engage in politics as ���Mama Winnie.��� Historians of South Africa have neglected the potent role of��public motherhood��throughout the long liberation struggle. Her life has much to teach us about the power over collective action that women claimed by appealing to literal and symbolic forms of maternal authority. She was a founder, with Fatima Meer, of the Black Women���s Federation, the constitution of which stressed ���the need to present a united front and to re-direct the status of motherhood towards the fulfillment of the Black people���s social, cultural, economic, and political aspirations��� (1975, in the Helen Joseph Papers, University of the Witwatersrand). She admitted, in the foreword to Meer���s autobiography, that they struggled to be valued as intellectuals and activists. She was a public ally to the budding Black Consciousness movement, keeping Mandela appraised of developments at universities and high schools. After the 1976 Soweto students��� uprising, she was a leader of the Black Parents��� Association, bridging younger and older generations of activists.

Madikizela-Mandela���s home in Soweto was central to this activism. Mama Winnie���s role in the community at the heart of the anti-apartheid struggle drove apartheid officials to cruelly banish her to the remote Free State town of��Brandfort��in 1977. By this point, she was being persecuted not only as ���Mandela���s wife,��� but as a representative of a broad culture of grassroots anti-apartheid activism. She took on this role with pride. In��Part of My Soul Went with Him,��she emphasized:

When they send me into exile, it���s not me as an individual they are sending. They think that with me they can also ban the political ideas��� What I stand for is what they want to banish. I couldn���t think of a greater��honour (p. 26).

While she mourned her loss of individuality��as a wife, she celebrated her social influence as a mother in the community, a distinction that endured throughout her life. She applied her social work training in the impoverished town, launching community gardens, a soup kitchen, a day care center, and a health clinic. ���I was never as active as I was in��Brandfort,��� she maintained. ���I recruited [for Umkhonto we Sizwe] from the Free State like you have never known��� (2012 epilogue,��491 Days,��p. 238). Despite her banning order, she also attracted continuing national attention, through bold photographs and statements. Security police retaliated brutally,��burning her��Brandfort��house down��in August 1985.

It was then that she returned permanently to Soweto, in defiance of her banning order. As her daughter��Zindzi��recently told documentary filmmaker Pascale��Lamche, this was not her first trip back. When��Zindzi��read Mandela���s affirmation of his commitment to the liberation struggle to a cheering crowd at a United Democratic Front rally in February 1985,��Madikizela-Mandela had been there: among her people, disguised as a domestic worker, she passed as an ordinary working-class mother.

 

Gendered��Violence during Apartheid

Madikizela-Mandela returned to a Soweto at war, against apartheid and with itself, and in the midst of a State of Emergency. She had been banished to��Brandfort��as P.W. Botha���s 1977��Defence��white paper outlined a total strategy to combat a perceived ���total onslaught��� of international communism. The white paper went beyond the military, including control of information and strategic industries.��Hennie van Vuuren��called this white paper the beginnings of South Africa���s military-industrial complex.

A secretive Special��Defence��Account funded not only arms, but also covert activities and propaganda. Vic McPherson, former head of��Stratcom��(the propaganda arm of the security police) and operative Paul Erasmus��testified��to the TRC regarding��Stratcom���s��disinformation campaigns to discredit��Madikizela-Mandela (Operation Romulus), the ANC, and other anti-apartheid individuals such as Archbishop Desmond Tutu and Alex��Boraine. The state had already targeted her reputation in its��investigation��of the 1976 Soweto Uprising.��Casspir��military vehicles in the streets, the disappearance and murders of activists, propaganda campaigns, and the infiltration of��iimpimpi��and��askaris��fueled these internal conflicts and legitimate paranoia. Conservative estimates suggest that nearly 20,000 people died between 1985 and 1996 in South Africa.

It is in this context of state violence and personal betrayals that��Madikizela-Mandela embraced violence. Commentators and biographers often present��Madikizela-Mandela as na��ve and trusting, never quite cognizant of the informers surrounding her. This is na��ve itself. The defense of violence and targeting of perceived��iimpimpi��within the United Democratic Front (UDF) in the 1980s suggests many were aware.��Madikizela-Mandela should not be excluded from this recognition, especially in the wake of her detention and torture in 1969-1970, when she realized how some of her seeming comrades had informed on her and how police turned other prisoners into informers. Her prison diaries speak with��admiration of comrades who refused to give��evidence under interrogation: ���Only a person who has been through solitary confinement would��realise��the amount of sacrifice��� required to remain silent (491 Days,��pp. 13-14).

Recognizing��Madikizela-Mandela as a political thinker in her own right, with firsthand experience of the brutality of the state, requires us to strike a balance between her agency, intellectual thought, and mental and emotional impacts of the structural and personal violence she endured.��Valela��points out��Madikizela-Mandela���s intellectual justification for violence against an oppressor that only knows the language of violence: ���It was as if she was in dialogue with the decolonial philosopher Frantz Fanon.���

Often when citing��Madikizela-Mandela���s now infamous April 13, 1986 speech about liberating the country with ���boxes of matches and petrol������a reference to the practice of ���necklacing,��� or killing suspected police informers by lighting tires around their necks���commentators leave out what preceded those words������We shall use the same language the Boers are using against us.��� She explained her own shift in her��interview��with journalist Anne Benjamin in 1985:

Before I went into solitary confinement, I must tell you the truth, I made pronouncements on platforms and said things I hadn���t tested myself on. I was a social worker, I was a mother; I knew that even though I was in a violent situation, if I was myself given a gun and told to go into a battlefield and shoot, I knew I wouldn���t be able to do it. Deep down in my heart, I was a social worker and that instinct to preserve human life was there, not only from a professional point of view���it was the��centre��of my person.

What happened during my detention was quite extraordinary. Now if the man I���m dealing with appeared carrying a gun���in��defence��of my principles I know I would fire. That is what they have taught me. I could never have achieved that alone.

She clearly articulated her belief that��apartheid officials��would only respond to violent action: ���That is the bitterness they create in us. You want to put a stop to it. And if need be, you will use their own methods, because that is the language they understand��� (p. 127).

Violence in the name of nations is gendered; cultural notions regarding warfare maintain a gendered construct in which men go to war to uphold a social order symbolized by what political scientist��Cynthia Enloe��has described as ���womenandchildren.�����Madikizela-Mandela���s relationship to violence thus disgusted many as she burst out of this position.��Valela���s��work unpacks the double standard of this ���fallen woman,��� the ���mother of the nation��� who failed her children by associating herself with violence.

Madikizela-Mandela and women more generally are not as easily absolved of atrocities committed in the name of revolution. Historian��Riedwaan��Moosage��points out��that many ANC and UDF leaders condemn such atrocities with much more vehemence in retrospect than they did at the time.��Moosage��characterizes the ANC and UDF stance historically as a ���prose of ambivalence��� when it came to necklacing and the murders of suspected collaborators���a move not just tactical but also embedded in a liberation binary of resistance and oppression.

Here it important to consider violence perpetrated or justified by others within the ambit of the liberation movements more broadly to place��Madikizela-Mandela in her historical moment���particularly because the relationship between resistance and oppression is much more complex than the liberation binary. The African National Congress�����submission��to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission���widely criticized for not going far enough���detailed torture and death in the exile camps and the necklacing of suspected informants in South Africa but made clear those behaviors were not ANC policy. In other words���the words Archbishop Tutu and��Madikizela-Mandela would use to describe the atrocities of the Mandela United Football Club���”things went horribly wrong.��� Well before the submission, Thabo Mbeki and others��sought��to have ANC leaders get their statements approved by the ANC before approaching the TRC. In the section of the ANC submission on human rights violations in the mass democratic movement of the 1980s, the ANC asked that the TRC understand the context:

The ANC has never sought to condone all cases of violence of this nature, nor to disregard the suffering of those targeted for such retribution. Yet we call on the Commission to consider the cases of those accused of criminal activities such as�����necklacing���,��informers, criminals or�����vigilantes�����with a full understanding of the highly abnormal circumstances in which such acts took place, the level of state-sponsored��violence afflicting communities during this period, and of the��consequences��flowing from the refusal by agencies of law and order to act impartially.

The TRC would ultimately��grant amnesty��to��37 ANC members��as a form of ���collective responsibility��� for actions undertaken by ANC members more generally.��Those 37 are a who���s who of the liberation movement, granted amnesty for their moral and political accountability��for human rights violations.��Chris Hani��remains untainted in memory,��despite��having himself��understood��necklacing as ���a weapon devised by the oppressed themselves to remove this cancer from our society, the cancer of collaboration of the puppets.���

It is��Madikizela-Mandela���s alleged connections with particular violence���the deaths, in late 1988 and early 1989, of 14-year old activist��Stompie��Seipei, the young Umkhonto we��Sizwe��member��Lolo��Sono, and��Dr. Abu Baker��Asvat���that most tinge her��legacy. By the late 1980s, political violence unfolded alongside and intertwined with more personal and criminal forms of violence.��Madikizela-Mandela surrounded herself with young men of the Mandela United Football Club (MUFC). The MUFC played little football, styled themselves as her bodyguards, and committed acts of violence beyond the political. As an example, in 1988 students from��Daliwonga��High School burnt down��Madikizela-Mandela���s Soweto home in the midst of an escalating dispute between students and the MUFC.

In late December 1988, the MUFC abducted and assaulted four young people who were staying with Methodist minister Paul��Verryn��in the wake of detention. The MUFC���s coach was Jerry Richardson���who was paid to root out suspected informers under��Madikizela-Mandela���s instruction, but who ultimately��claimed��he killed��Seipei��to stop��Seipei��from revealing Richardson���s��own��identity as a police informer. That Richardson had been a paid informer during his leadership of��Madikizela-Mandela���s club was��revealed in TRC hearings. Security Branch��policeman Paul Erasmus claims Richardson was not the only spy, recently��suggesting that the MUFC was filled with police informers. Erasmus also named��Xoliswa��Fati, a former��Madikizela-Mandela friend, and��Katiza��Cebukhulu, whose inconsistency-laden TRC��testimony��fueled doubts about his trustworthiness and whose book was allegedly inspired by��Stratcom.

Community members and liberation figures acted to end the abductions, stem the MUFC, and distance themselves from��Madikizela-Mandela. Nelson Mandela requested the establishment of a crisis committed to investigate the abduction. Comprised of community, church, and union leaders, the committee forced��Madikizela-Mandela to release the three held hostages, and the body of��Seipei��was found in January 1989. The UDF publicly denounced��Madikizela-Mandela���s actions and the MUFC.��Asvat, the��Azanian��People���s Organization leader and ���people���s doctor��� who had examined one of the four youth, was gunned down later that month, in an assassination made to look like a robbery.

As ���Mother of the��Nation,��� Mama Winnie was expected to uphold particular motherly norms of peace and support.��But as the feminist scholars cited here have explored,��Madikizela-Mandela thought in terms of a militant motherhood and family:

I cannot pretend that today I wouldn���t gladly go and water that tree of liberation with my own blood, if it means that the children I am bringing up under these conditions will not lead my kind of life. I do not want anyone else to lead it. I would love to think that I belong to the last generation that will experience what we have gone through (Part of My Soul,��p.��126).

Winnie was��not alone��in her intellectual defense of militant motherhood. But many in her community condemned her association with the Mandela United Football Club as maternal violence misdirected and taken too far. She infamously claimed that the MUFC had abducted the young activists in late 1988 to protect them from molestation by the anti-apartheid minister and community activist Paul��Verryn, who is gay and white. This claim of maternal protection evinced��another kind of violence, generating a homophobic public discourse that racialized sexual orientation and conflated homosexuality with child sexual abuse.

In 1991, she��was found guilty on charges of��kidnapping and being an accessory to assault. In 1997, the��TRC��found her politically and morally accountable, responsible by omission��for violations of human rights. The commission could not find anything more conclusive.

Historians cannot make a conclusive statement about��Madikizela-Mandela���s��life and legacy���and indeed, we should not race��to conclusions, as too many��“Euro-American pundits or obituary writers”��have sought to do��since her passing.��We should rather dwell on��what��Madikizela-Mandela���s complex position tells us about the complex world in which she lived: a world where family life was political, and violence was gendered.��We must��recognize��her agency, her intellectual justifications for violence, and the constraints of the trauma and violence she��experienced personally and witnessed daily.��She��was��not a myth, but��a human seeking��to change��an inhumane��world, a South Africa��built on structural violence.

Hope and resilience in the time of Ebola

Sierra Leoneans take center stage as storytellers and active witnesses in a new documentary about the Ebola outbreak.





Still from Survivors���Hope and Resilience in the Time of Ebola.

Survivors���Hope and Resilience in the Time of Ebola, opens with Mohamed B. Bangura, a senior ambulance driver in Freetown, Sierra Leone, who is not shy about his heroism. Peering into the camera, he tells us that fear, from the onset of the Ebola outbreak, held everyone hostage. Even the film crew��didn���t have the courage to come and interview him when the outbreak started. Mohamed is followed by Arthur Pratt, a pastor and the director of the film, who is frank, yet also a comforting and compassionate advocate and guide.��He pulls us into a constellation of characters and stories, insists the audience consider a new perspective to what really happened in the time of Ebola.

The film centers on the complications that accompany fear and the abrupt disruption that threatens to destroy the very foundation of the community���s social contract: trust. It is a test of people���s faith, depicting the heart of Sierra Leonean culture, its diverse religious beliefs and tolerance. The acts of faith are made more poignant when a woman describes her mother���s embrace after she was declared Ebola free: ���even love does not fear death.���

The film interweaves the personal and the political, as it attempts to piece many moving and complicated pieces together. It interrogates the notion of survival and surviving. Foday Koroma, a 12-year-old boy living in the streets of Freetown, invites us to explore life at the intersection of poverty and resilience, mirroring the landscape that enables Ebola to thrive. We get a glimpse into another world of survivors���children living in abject poverty and lacking social support at the height of an epidemic. Foday and his friends navigate a city on the edge of fear.

Arthur���s own story is brought to the center as he and his wife reminisce about how they fell in love���despite their current fears over her high-risk pregnancy. His story resonates with many who struggled to access health care services during the outbreak, especially pregnant women. His wife is lucky; she delivers a healthy baby boy. Yet, later we see a mother hand over her 18-month old Ebola-positive baby. The mother gasps for air before breaking into tears as she watches her sick baby enter the ambulance. In that scene, we become witnesses to deep anguish.

Margaret Sesay, the nurse at the Ebola Treatment Center (ETC) brings the commitment and compassion of health care workers to the heart of the film. She prays for every patient she tends to, breaking off a piece of faith to share as generously as possible. Not everyone is like Margaret though, and this is what brings nuance to the film. A nurse refuses to tend to a pregnant woman at a community health center because she is not registered in that area. We see disagreements among Sierra Leoneans when a patient is brought to Connaught Hospital. The tension rises as the call for a white health worker is made. Later in the film, white responders become the outsiders who arrogantly make decisions at the expense of local nurses, ambulance drivers and others on the response teams. This unearthing of power-dynamics provides depth without over-explanation.

The film���s strongest feature is its centering of Sierra Leonean voices. The only time we hear a non-Sierra Leonean voice is towards the end of the film when the 18-month old boy Ibrahim, survives Ebola and his father cries for joy as he clings to his son. We see the compassion and dedication of both local and international actors. Even when the non-Sierra Leonean doctor speaks, she re-directs attention to the strength and resilience of Ibrahim, the baby boy who brought joy and hope to the Ebola Treatment Center.

This film brings to life the raw honest humane story of Ebola in Sierra Leone from those hardest hit, its people. I cried throughout the film, because just like Arthur, Foday, Mohamed and Margaret, I was there. I remember how hands remained out stretched���to help, to hold, to comfort���despite the risks. We lived on shared faith.

The film sends a resounding message by repositioning its storytellers not only as proactive actors, but also as active witnesses to the crisis; ushering us to move past any assumption that Sierra Leoneans were passive recipients of structural, human or financial support. Rather, the interwoven narratives of Mohamed Bangura, Foday Koroma and Nurse Margaret Sesay, pull us into a world colored by the grace and resilience of ordinary people surviving extraordinary circumstances.