Sean Jacobs's Blog, page 251
July 11, 2018
Dambisa Moyo is wrong about the global economy – here’s why
Dambisa Moyo, 2011.
Credit: Herve Cortinat/OECD (Creative Commons)
Dambisa Moyo has a lot of fans these days.�� When she appeared at a recent Oxford Debate the crowd was packed with admiring students eager to take her side.�� I get it. ��She���s a compelling figure, and commands international stages with her bold confidence and cool style. ��But as heroes go, she���s a strange choice ��� a millionaire who sits on the boards of major Western banks and extractive companies, including Barclays, Chevron, and Barrick Gold.�� Peel away the slick image and you find that her ideas stray little from the dusty old neoliberal mantras so endlessly recycled by establishment elites in the US and Europe. ��Yet the Western media can���t seem to get enough of her ��� and perhaps that���s precisely why.
Moyo���s new book, Edge of Chaos: Why Democracy is Failing to Deliver Economic Growth, is a perfect case in point.�� If you���ve heard of it, it���s probably because of the controversy over her outrageous idea that we should ���fix��� democracy by introducing a system of weighted voting, whereby the votes of people who have specific qualifications and higher levels of education would count more than the votes of those who don���t.�� Maybe it was always just a PR gimmick ��� a way to get media attention. But while critics obsess over the voting thing, the rest of Moyo���s book has gone unchallenged.�� And that���s where the real trouble lies.
Moyo wrote The Edge of Chaos because she���s worried about the backlash against globalization and the rise of political movements ��� on the left and right alike ��� that want to regulate markets for the social good.�� Indeed, this is why she proposes weighted voting: because she thinks these ordinary folks don���t know what���s best for them, and we can���t trust them to decide on important matters of economics.�� What they���re asking for ��� more state intervention in the economy ��� is too short-termist, she says.
Now, Moyo acknowledges that globalization hasn���t worked for everybody and admits that inequality has been getting worse, with the rich accumulating eye-watering piles of wealth while real wages stagnate and social mobility collapses.�� But while scholars see inequality as a consequence of neoliberalism since the 1980s, Moyo argues that it���s because we haven���t been neoliberal enough.�� The solution, she says, is more free-market ideology, not less.
In this sense, the book feels wildly out of step with the times.�� It has a kind of desperate tenor to it ��� a frantic defense of an economic paradigm that is hemorrhaging credibility. Right now the world is scrambling for ways to make our economy fairer: better wages, stronger unions, progressive taxation, universal basic income, fairer trade rules, an end to illicit financial flows.�� But Moyo doesn���t truck in such sensible reforms, presumably because it would mean interfering with the almighty hand of the Free Market.�� And ��� for devout capitalists like Moyo ��� that is simply not allowed.
Moyo offers no evidence for her claim that more neoliberalism would help matters.�� The only argument we get is that it would be good for growth.�� And growth, she says, is what all those angry people who have been hurt by globalization secretly want.�� No joke, Moyo literally claims that the major social movements that have erupted over the past few years ��� the Arab Spring, the Gezi Park uprising in Turkey, anti-World Cup protests in Brazil, anti-TTIP marches across Europe, Trumpism in the United States and Brexit in Britain ��� are driven by a demand for higher rates of economic growth.�� And if they want growth, Moyo says, then what they need is neoliberalism.
It���s a strange claim, and Moyo provides not a shred of evidence to back it up.�� Never mind that literally all of these movements have explicitly said they are against neoliberalism, and indeed in many cases have rejected precisely the things that politicians promised would bring more growth: like TTIP, or EU membership, or the World Cup.�� What these people say they want is a fairer economy ��� one not captured by elite interests.�� But Moyo inexplicably recruits them nonetheless for her own hyper-capitalist agenda, as if the protestors had everything in common with the old boys over at Barclays and Chevron.
If Moyo���s analysis of social movements is eerily fact-free, so too is her claim about neoliberalism bringing more growth.�� Indeed, exactly the opposite is true.�� During the bad old days of Keynesian policy, per capita GDP growth rates in the OECD averaged 3.5% per year.�� By contrast, the neoliberal reforms that were imposed beginning in the 1980s slashed growth rates down to 2% per year.�� The shift was even more dramatic across the global South.�� During the 1960s and 70s, global South governments used tariffs, subsidies, price controls, capital controls, and land reforms to brilliant effect, growing GDP per capita by 3.2% per year.�� This came crashing to an end during the 1980s and 90s, as free-market principles were forcibly imposed by the IMF and World Bank.�� Growth rates collapsed to 0.7% during the neoliberal period.�� Sub-Saharan Africa was hit particularly hard, and its average real income is only now recovering 1970s levels.
The historical record is clear: neoliberalism has been bad for growth.�� But it���s been great for the incomes of the rich, which have soared as a result.�� Indeed, one can argue ��� as David Harvey does ��� that this was always the point.�� Either way, it���s no surprise that Moyo and the Barclays set are so keen to keep this arrangement in place.
But all of this begs the question: is more growth really what we need right now?�� The bizarre thing about Moyo���s book is that it feels like it was written last century, before anyone was talking about things like climate change and ecological breakdown.�� Her call for aggressive growth at all costs simply makes no sense in today���s world of carbon budgets and all the new research on planetary boundaries and ecological overshoot.
Of course, growth may be necessary in poorer nations in order to raise living standards.�� But much of Moyo���s book is about how we need more growth in rich nations, where per capita resource consumption already exceeds safe levels by a factor of four, and carbon emissions exceed safe levels by a factor of twenty.�� Indeed, virtually all of our ecological overshoot is being driven by overconsumption in rich nations. How does Moyo reconcile this with her demand for growth?�� She doesn���t even try.�� The book is striking in its refusal to engage with this problem.�� All we get is a vague reference to ���green growth��� ��� the idea that technology will help us decouple GDP from resource use and emissions.�� But, again, Moyo offers not a shred of actual evidence for this.�� If she had taken time to read the literature she would find that all of the available data shows that green growth is not a thing.�� Study after study concludes that continued economic expansion in rich nations is incompatible with ecological sustainability.
Moyo says we need more growth in order to improve people���s lives.�� But is this true?�� Again, she provides no evidence for the claim.�� But consider this: in the United States today average real wages are lower than they were in the 1970s, and the poverty rate is higher, despite a doubling of GDP per capita.�� Meanwhile Europe has better social indicators than the US across the board, despite 40% less GDP per capita. ��The truth is that there is no automatic correlation between GDP and human well-being ��� it all depends on how the yields of our economy are distributed.�� It is inequality that matters, precisely as those protestors have been saying.�� Once we grasp this fact, it becomes clear that we can improve people���s lives right now, without any growth at all, simply by distributing existing income more fairly and investing in universal public services.�� Our Earth is an abundant place and already provides more than enough for everyone; if we share what we already have, we won’t need to plunder the planet for more.
So why are Moyo and the Barclays boys so desperate for more growth?�� Here���s one possibility: because the benefits of growth accrue almost exclusively to the rich.�� Roughly 90% of new income from global growth goes to the richest 1%.�� Meanwhile, only 5% trickles down to the poorest 60% of humanity.�� This is why people are angry. ��It is obscene to pretend that more growth is somehow magically going to solve the violent inequities of growth.�� At the present rate of trickle-down, it will take more than 200 years to lift everyone above the poverty line of $5 per day, and we���ll have to expand the global economy to 175 times its present size.�� That���s 175 times more extraction and production and consumption than we���re already doing, which, in a context of ecological emergency, is clearly insane.
But the strangest move is yet to come.�� While Moyo frames the book as a battle cry for market liberalism, she suddenly switches gears halfway through and plumps for precisely the opposite ideology, heaping praise on China as a paragon of sound economic policy.�� Why?�� Because China���s government manages the economy for the long term, in the interests of long-term growth.�� Of course, she���s right ��� China���s economic success is due precisely to the fact that it was not subjected to neoliberal structural adjustment, unlike most of the rest of the South. ��But this is a dizzying about-face from her opening position, and the internal incoherence makes it difficult to take the book seriously.
Moyo needs this pivot to set up her next big argument.�� She says the reason China does so well on economics is because its government isn���t beholden to the short-termist pressures of democracy.�� Democracy, she concludes, is an obstacle to growth (as the subtitle of her book implies).�� Suddenly we���re in completely new terrain.�� Moyo has temporarily dispensed with her earlier argument about neoliberalism being the Only Way, and discarded all her worries about those pesky protestors who are clamoring for more state intervention in the economy.�� Now the good guy is state-led capitalism, and the bad guy is ��� democracy.
Having lashed herself to this mast, Moyo has no choice but to downplay all the nastier sides of Chinese policy: the authoritarianism, the surveillance, the violent clampdowns on dissent.�� All of this is tolerable, she says, because it���s a small price to pay for rapid growth.�� And we must have growth at all costs. ��What���s dangerous here is that Moyo is going around promoting this as a reasonable path forward for developing countries.�� Focus on growth first, she says: do democracy later.
This is a completely false dichotomy.�� There are plenty of state-regulated economies that are also robustly democratic.�� Just think of the New Deal in the post-war United States, which Moyo herself cites approvingly.�� Franklin Roosevelt, the architect of the New Deal, was democratically elected ��� four times ��� by a landslide.�� He was one of the most popular American presidents ever.�� But there���s also virtually all of Western Europe: the social democracies of Scandinavia, and the post-war Labour government of the United Kingdom, which built that country���s economy on the back of nationalization, social housing, and free public healthcare (the National Health Service remains Britain���s most popular institution).�� Indeed, these radical interventions were only possible because of democracy ��� because ordinary people intervened to harness capitalism for the social good.
But it���s not just the global North.�� During the South���s post-colonial decades, those successful Keynesian policies I mentioned earlier were rolled out by democratically-elected governments: Nkrumah in Ghana, Mossadegh in Iran, Arbenz in Guatemala, Allende in Chile, and many more.�� This legacy of progressive economics was destroyed by neoliberal structural adjustment, which worked only because it effectively shifted power over macroeconomic policy from the national parliaments of Southern countries to bankers and technocrats in Washington, New York and London.�� There was no democratic consent for neoliberalization.�� It was imposed from above ��� against a tsunami of popular riots.
The real issue with this book is that Moyo fundamentally misdiagnoses the problem.�� She accuses democracy of being short-termist.�� But it���s not democracy that���s short-termist ��� it���s capitalism.�� The logic of capitalism is to seek short-term gains at the expense of more important things: workers��� welfare, people���s health, the ecosystems on which we depend.�� Austerity, privatization, fracking, deforestation, cuts to wages and public services ��� all of this is conducted in the name of short-term growth. ��At the altar of capital, all that is sacred is profaned.�� Moyo���s book adds just one more log to the sacrificial pyre: if democracy stands in the way of capitalist growth, then it too has to go.
These are uncertain times.�� Young people are turning away from capitalism in their millions, across the world, eager to build a fairer, more ecological system that has a chance of seeing us through the 21st century. ��But just when we most need fresh thinking, Moyo urges us to double down on the status quo. Meanwhile, the voices of real thinkers across the African continent ��� from Liepollo Pheko to Nnimmo Bassey ��� never find a platform in the global media.�� As we seek inspiration for the future, we���ll need to look beyond the shiny millionaires that are handed down to us from the corporate boardrooms of the West.�� Real heroes aren���t found on primetime TV.�� They���re working in real communities, with dirt under their fingernails, raising up a new world from within the cracks of the old.
July 10, 2018
The Coming-Out of the African Same-Sex Novel
Uzodinma Iweala by Caroline Cuse/Harper Collins.
Uzodinma Iweala���s second novel, Speak No Evil, begins by offering a familiar yet beautifully told coming out story. Niru, a teenage boy in Washington, D.C. with successful Nigerian immigrant parents, faces up to his gay sexuality thanks to a failed seduction on the part of his white female best friend, Meredith. She puts the dating apps grindr and tinder on his phone, propelling him into an attempt at a first date with a boy, which is promptly discovered by his parents: drama ensues, including a trip to Nigeria to be spiritually cleansed, and Niru then secretly beginning a relationship with an African-American boy, Damien.
Speak No Evil has been widely reviewed, but discussions of the novel haven���t yet placed it in the context of a burgeoning African���and specifically Nigerian���literary attention to same-sex sexuality. Jude Dibia���s 2005 novel Walking with Shadows was the first Nigerian take on the coming out novel, eventually followed by Chinelo Okparanta���s 2015 Under the Udala Trees, which combines the story of an adolescent lesbian awakening during the Biafran War with a long struggle to get free from a loveless heterosexual marriage during the subsequent ���peace.��� In between those two novels, Chimamanda Ngozie Adichie, Chris Abani, and Nnedi Okorafor, among others, have written multiple same-sex loving and gender-queering characters. Speak No Evil coincides with the publication of the first gay Nigerian memoir���Chike Frankie Edozien���s Lives of Great Men: Living and Loving as an African Gay Man, and Unoma Azuah���s edited collection Mounting the Moon: Queer Nigerian Poetry. Meanwhile, young male writers in Nigeria, including the poet Romeo Oriogun, the short story writer Arinze Ifeakandu, and the essayist Chibuihe Obi, are increasingly publishing works in African-curated online venues such as Brittle Paper that speak with a new level of frankness and fearlessness about gay sexuality, and many of them are writing about their own lives and identities.
American readers might not know about the urgent diasporic African literary conversation about sexuality that Iweala���s novel steps into, but from an African perspective the coming out novel is a politically and aesthetically complex genre, one that Iweala seems to be both adopting and transforming. The coming out narrative can be important and inspiring for queer Africans who often feel compelled to publicly claim their identities in environments where homosexuality is increasingly criminalized, as it has been in Nigeria since the passage of the draconian Same-Sex Marriage Prohibition Act of 2014, which goes so far as to mandate a penalty of ten years in prison for anyone found to ���witness, abet and aid the solemnization of same-sex marriage or union,��� or who ���supports the registration, operation, and sustenance of gay clubs, societies, organization, processions or meetings.���
And yet, as many queer African thinkers have noted, the very idea of being ���gay��� and the narrative models for that identity come primarily from the Global North and therefore threaten to erase alternative local modes of queer existence.
Speak No Evil does not so much offer a clear critique of the coming out narrative as it does a redirection: about two thirds of the way through the novel, it abruptly interrupts its own coming out arc.��Niru has just finished winning his final race in high school with his personal best time.��After the race, his proud father decides to let his son drive his prized Range Rover. But as they are driving, Damien keeps buzzing Niru���s phone, making both father and son anxious. When his father reaches for the phone, Niru swerves, then pulls over to hand the wheel back to his father.��But rather than getting back into the Range Rover, now tellingly under his father���s control, Niru decides to run away.����Describing his urge to flee, Niru says, ���My chest burns, but I don���t stop. Just keep breathing, I tell myself. It gets better.�����What should happen next, what the ���it gets better��� narrative promises, is a happy coming out story. By referencing the project that advice columnist Dan Savage began in order to reassure gay youth that there is a light at the end of the tunnel, that their homophobic home lives will soon be forgotten for a brave, new queer world, the narrative implies that Niru is running towards a brighter future. Niru will find love, maybe with Damien, maybe with another man; he will live his life on his own terms; he will find success in his own way; he will tell his story in the way that he alone sees fit.��His father calls after him but Niru keeps running, side-stepping a potential coming-out moment, and noting that ���there is nothing left to say.���
The line ���there is nothing left to say��� is in fact Niru���s last line in the novel.����At this point, Meredith���s voice takes over the narration.��The second part of the novel flashes forward six years when she returns to D.C., a D.C. clearly under the pall of the Trump administration, to help her parents pack their home.��We learn from Meredith that it���s to her house that Niru ran after the altercation with his father. When he appears at her doorstep, Niru is distraught, wanting to ���disappear,��� but he convinces her to go to a club near where Damien lives.��From there, events spiral out of control and a fight between Meredith and Niru is misread by bystanders and the police.��While the first two thirds of the novel deftly and compellingly follow the ups and downs of Niru���s coming out, the last section cuts this narrative short, turning away from questions of sexuality, and focusing instead on race politics in the United States.
This boldly abrupt switch in narrative voice, like the final paragraph of Things Fall Apart, highlights the importance of telling one���s own story���specifically, here, the story of a queer young Nigerian in America. The coming out narrative is cut short, and paradoxically the character who pushed Niru to come out is the voice that takes over the narrative, and we become immersed, whether we want to or not, in her emotional landscape. This move seems to call into question the white liberal drive for a coming out narrative as the story that must be told, even as Iweala makes the reader mourn its disappearance. When Niru���s emotionally distraught father appears on Meredith���s doorstep after the events at the club, Meredith is given a shot at redemption, an opportunity to make up for her role in the trouble that befalls Niru.��But instead, Meredith doubles down and makes her help conditional on publicly outing Niru. Ultimately, how one reads this exchange will determine how one views the novel���s relationship to traditional coming out narratives.��Many readers might indeed stand behind Meredith, but other readers, including queer readers, might find themselves relating more to Niru���s father, the strict and homophobic patriarch whose love for his son is painfully evident in this last section of the novel. This tension suggests that��Speak No Evil��is interested in modes of privacy and publicness that are more complex than ���out��� or ���closeted, but that are unavailable to these characters. At the end of the day, the hijacking of Niru���s coming out story by racism and white liberal obliviousness is both emotionally devastating for the reader���it does not get better for black queer boys in America���and a thought-provoking breaking of the conventions of the genre.
July 9, 2018
#TousEnsemble
Everyone in the room was screaming, Neymar had fallen down again and for a second it looked like he might get a penalty. Belgium was ahead 2-1 and after the Japan game we all knew the match could turn quickly. We where in Molenbeek, the often vilified “hell hole”��or “breading ground for ISIS recruits.” The room was filled with Afro-Belgians from all kinds of backgrounds: Moroccan, Tunisian, Senegalese, Congolese and every shade in between. On the screen we saw a national team that represented (almost) everyone in that room, and they where winning. We���re not used to winning. There���s even an op-ed in the New York Times that explores how Belgium wouldn���t know what to be if we win the World Cup. Those of us in that hot and overcrowded room weren’t even used to seeing ourselves represented on any screen, let alone in a successful and collaborative light. #Tousensemble is therefore a very apt battle cry.
Not everyone is together though.
The New Flemish Alliance or NVA, the largest political party in Belgium and the dominant partner in the current governing coalition, have yet to say anything positive about the national team’s success. This is the party that has spawned such outbursts as “Congolese and Moroccan immigration have not benefited the country” (via its minister of migration, Theo Francken). And the mayor of Antwerp, Bart de Wever, also a NV-A politician, defended himself thus: “Racism is relative. Asians don���t seem to have a problem.”�� When Belgium played Brazil in the quarterfinals of the World Cup, one could not help noticing that De Wever had hung a Flemish nationalist flag instead of the Belgian flag from one of the windows at his house. De Wever had a ready excuse (he claimed to have hung it before he went on holiday to Singapore before the World Cup started). But, we all know why he did it on purpose.
What this team and its success represent is very harmful to De Wever and the NVA’s agenda. How can you argue for a zero tolerance immigration policy when some of the most successful players in the national team do not fit your preferred color scheme for Belgium? How can you argue for Flemish independence when a large part of the national team come from Brussels? Difficult questions for the NV-A to answer, so they don���t say anything at all.
Even on the pro-Red Devils side, something isn���t quite right. One of the team’s stars, Romelu Lukaku, recently denounced the different kinds of treatment he gets in the Belgian media depending on his performance:
When things were going well, I was reading newspapers articles and they were calling me Romelu Lukaku, the Belgian striker.
When things weren���t going well, they were calling me Romelu Lukaku, the Belgian striker of Congolese descent.
Lukaku’s point is one worth repeating, because the love we have for the players in our team is more conditional for some, than for others. When Kevin De Bruyne isn���t performing to expectations, he���s having a bad day. When Michy Batshuayi isn���t, it���s down to his playfulness, lack of focus or downright stupidity.
This kind of analyses is not exceptional when it comes to athletes, but in Belgium there is little to no self-reflection when it comes to essentializing players. In a recent column in quality newspaper,��De Standaard, its editor Steven de Foer compared Vincent Kompany to a chocolate, “black on the outside but white on the inside��� when discussing to his leadership skills and intelligence. De Foer also included this: ���[Kompany is] still African when it comes to being late to practice” (Alleen zijn stiptheid is nog steeds ���Afrikaans���). De Foer’s article was supposed to be an in-depth analyses to figure out why this diverse team of players worked so well together as a team. Instead of saying something interesting about the diversity in Belgium’s national team or doing some real analyses about the skills of the players, he went the route of a 19th century anthropologist. Comparing a black player to a candy bar, deciding that another star, Eden Hazard, is kind of African because he likes a joke or making it the mixed players’ job to be a ���bridge between cultures.���
This ���golden generation��� of players didn���t just appear. After the success of France’s ���black-blanc-beur��� model (beur refers to people of Arabic or North African descent) in the 1990���s, Belgium’s FA overhauled its youth program. Players like Hazard, Lukaku and Marouane Fellaini are the result of this overhaul. Their success is now used to counter the growing pro-white, anti-immigration and Islamophobic rhetoric in the country. We are saying: ���Look at us, we���re playing together, winning together and celebrating together.��� But like in France after the 1998 World Cup, this new unity has seen a rise in right wing populism and is not sustainable. When mistakes are made the star player becomes the stupid Congolese guy. Only six days ago a woman was attacked, stripped and mutilated for wearing a headscarf. Maybe because we hadn���t beaten Brazil by then, the attackers weren���t convinced yet.
Cette ��quipe tue les fascistes
Kylian Mbappe. (Via Twitter).
Je suis n�� �� Metz �� la fin des ann��es 70 d���une m��re martiniquaise et d���un p��re lorrain. J���ai toujours ��t�� conscient que la France est plus que blanche, plus qu���europ��enne, plus que ce pays blanc, et chr��tien qu���on imagine par d��faut. Pour expliquer l���existence de ma propre famille je me suis tr��s t��t tourn�� vers l���histoire, et l���histoire que j���ai trouv�� est faite d���exploitation, d���esclavage, d���abus, inconnus ou ignor��s de la plupart des fran��ais. ��tre fran��ais dans ces circonstances pouvait ��tre ��trange��; mais ��tre patriote��? Dans les ann��es 80, il y avait peu d���endroits o�� le drapeau fran��ais ��tait acceptable : en gros, les b��timents officiels, les ��v��nements sportifs, et les meetings fascistes et de droite. Pour un fran��ais d���origine antillaise comme moi, le drapeau ��tait une source de col��re : j���ai vite compris que je pourrais bien parler et ��crire, souscrire aux valeurs fran��aise de libert��, ��galit�� et fraternit��, ��tre attach�� �� la culture, peu importerait: il y aurait toujours des fran��ais pour me frotter leur drapeau tricolore dans la face et me rappeler que pour eux, et contre toutes les valeurs cit��es plus haut, je ne serais jamais vraiment fran��ais. Pendant les matchs de football, ces sentiments ��taient �� la fois sublim��s et exacerb��s��: sur le terrain, des joueurs de couleur ��taient plus visibles que nulle part ailleurs et adul��s par des supporters susceptibles de leur cracher des insultes racistes en-dehors du stade.
Et donc la Coupe du Monde 1998 fut un peu bizarre. J���ai ��vit�� les foules et regard�� �� la maison.
Je n�����tais pas particuli��rement fier d�����tre fran��ais, mais je n���avais aussi jamais eu l���opportunit�� de revendiquer une autre identit��. Mes liens avec la Martinique ne font pas de moi un Martiniquais. Je suis n�� et ai grandi dans un pays qui a du mal �� me faire de la place. Comme la plupart des fran��ais d���origine afro-antillaise, je suis comme qui dirait un conscrit de la francit�����pour paraphraser l���expression de David Scott conscrit de la modernit�� (Conscripts of Modernity) qu���il utilise pour d��crire les relations d��licates qui liaient Toussaint Louverture et les r��volutionnaires ha��tiens �� la R��volution Fran��aise et ses valeurs av��r��es. Le football occupe une position unique dans ma relation �� la France��; il fait partie de mon ��ducation��: j���ai commenc�� �� jouer �� 7 ans et n���ai jamais arr��t��. Le football est li�� �� la politique, la morale et l���histoire r��elles, mais forme aussi un monde parall��le. Les all��geances footballistiques ne suivent pas parfaitement les cartes et les fronti��res��; elles r��v��lent plut��t une g��opolitique individuelle. Je soutiens le FC Metz���l�����quipe de ma ville natale��; je suis Arsenal����� tout jamais l�����quipe de Petit, Pir��s, Kanu, Overmars, Bergkamp, Wiltord, Vieira, et Henry, amen (et je ne mentionne pas combien d���anciens et futurs messins)��; je me m��fie du PSG, de Chelsea et de la Lazio, des ��quipes que je lie, �� tort ou �� raison, �� leurs supporters fascistes pass��s et pr��sents��; je soutiens toutes les ��quipes africaines parce que je veux qu���elle donnent une le��on au monde entier, et je c��l��bre la beaut�� en football partout o�� elle appara��t, ne serait-ce qu���un instant. Et je soutiens aussi la France (l�����quipe) malgr�� la France (le pays), pour le drapeau imaginaire que la premi��re brandit �� la face de la seconde.
En r��sum����: Je supporte la France, mais la France m���insupporte.
En 1999, j���ai quitt�� la France pour les Etats-Unis, d���abord pour un an, et finalement pour de bon. Pas que les relations raciales soient meilleures aux Etats-Unis qu���en France��; mais l��-bas, au moins, je serais v��ritablement un ��tranger.
Je suis r��cemment devenu citoyen am��ricain. Du coup, je suis ce qu���on appellerait probablement ici un Franco-Am��ricain. Mais les choses sont un peu plus compliqu��es que cela��: je suis peut-��tre Antillo-Franco-Am��ricain, ou Afranco-Am��ricain. Je ne plaisante pas��: les mots sont importants, et ces marqueurs d���identit�� ethnique et nationale le sont tout sp��cialement pour moi. Durant mes ann��es pass��es hors de France, j���ai���ainsi que nombre d���autres fran��ais de la diaspora africaine, j���imagine���utilis�� ma francit�� comme un outil relativiste��: je l���emm��ne partout avec moi, dans ma poche, je la sors de temps en temps pour assommer des bigots insouciants, des fascistes, des gens de gauche malavis��s, mais g��n��ralement je m���assieds dessus. Elle fait un coussin plut��t confortable.
La France et les Etats-Unis ne sont pas si diff��rents. Les deux pays revendiquent des valeurs universalistes et une ouverture que contredisent leurs histoires et leurs politiques. Traditionnellement et par morale r��publicaine, na��tre sur le sol fran��ais fait de vous un fran��ais, d���o�� que viennent vos parents, peu importe pourquoi, comment, ou quand. Le droit du sol a ��t�� s��rieusement attaqu�� ces derni��res d��cennies, mais malgr�� tout le principe existe toujours. Mais en France la tradition n���est pas au trait d���union��: bien qu���on ne cache pas ses origines, elles sont cens��es s���incliner face �� la francit��. L���id��e n���est pas mauvaise en soi, sauf que malgr�� cet universalisme h��rit�� de la R��volution fran��aise, l���id��e que la francit�� passe par le sang vit toujours dans les ��go��ts de l���esprit fran��ais. Ces derniers temps, les ��go��ts coulent �� ciel ouvert et leur puanteur est devenue une composante in��vitable de l���atmosph��re politique fran��aise.
C���est peut-��tre une nouveaut�� pour certains, mais d���autres parmi nous sont n��s avec cette puanteur dans les narines. Il y a vingt-cinq ans, Paul Gilroy disait d��j�����avec un sourire en coin, j���imagine���dans L���Atlantique Noir��: ����S’��verture �� ��tre �� la fois europ��en et noir requiert des formes particuli��res de double conscience.���� La coupe du monde 2018 comme dans d���autres avant elle me pousse �� r��fl��chir au paradoxe de soutenir la France alors que la France ne me soutient pas. Devrais-je ��tre content, en tant que fran��ais de couleur, de voir les gens qui m���ont insult�� dans la rue, qui ont dout�� de ma francit��, qui m���ont sugg��r�� de retourner dans mon pays, c��l��brer maintenant les r��ussites de joueurs qui me ressemblent et dont les origines sont semblables aux miennes? Y a-t-il plus que de la schadenfreude �� voir la France noire gagner pour un pays de plus en plus d��fini par son racisme et sa mesquinerie? Cette d��lectation n���est-elle pas une forme insidieuse de patriotisme? De quoi est-ce que je me r��jouis quand je c��l��bre les victoires de la France?
Je me r��jouis des vid��os et posts sur internet qui rappellent r��guli��rement que les meilleurs joueurs de l�����quipe ont des racines au Mali, au S��n��gal, au Cameroun, en Alg��rie, au Maroc, au Congo, en Guin��e, en Angola, aux Antilles, en Ha��ti. Moi aussi, j���ai soulign�� le fait que nos meilleurs joueurs sont noirs. Je m���en suis vant��. Je comprends bien que les joueurs noirs de l�����quipe de France jouent aussi pour le monde noir tout entier. Rappeler au monde les racines africaines de ces joueurs est une mani��re de mettre en perspective les victoires que s���approprie une population qui profite toujours des crimes commis par la France contre ces m��mes pays et leurs habitants. Mais la multiplication de tweets et memes r��duisant des si��cles d���histoire �� quelques bons mots me met mal �� l���aise, notamment lorsqu���ils sont ��crits par des anglo-saxons blancs sans doute pleins de bonne volont��. Je me sens encore moins bien quand je constate que ni Jean-Marie Le Pen, ni Alain Finkielkraut, ni Dieudonn�� ne renieraient ces blagues. Volontairement ou non, elles renforcent l���id��e qu�����tre noir en France est n��cessairement ne pas ��tre compl��tement fran��ais. Mais la France est noire depuis des si��cles. Si l���on doit voir quelque chose dans cette ��quipe de France, c���est peut-��tre qu���on ne peut plus laisser la France revendiquer aussi cavali��rement s��paration et distinction avec l���Afrique, parce que la France doit tout �� l���Afrique. Pas simplement les ressources qu���elle continue �� piller, pas la main d�����uvre qu���elle continue �� exploiter sans scrupules, ni l���art qu���elle s���approprie depuis des si��cles��: la France doit son ��me �� l���Afrique.
L���histoire esclavagiste et coloniale de la France est longue et immonde, et elle a longtemps ��t�� gard��e sous silence. Mais cette histoire vit dans les corps que l���on voit ��voluer sur les terrains de football russes ce mois-ci, ainsi que ceux que l���on aper��oit quand les cam��ras nous montrent les sc��nes de liesse dans ces m��mes banlieues parisiennes o�� ont grandi tellement de joueurs fran��ais. Nous savons que dans ces moments, quand les joueurs sont sur la plus grande sc��ne du monde, l���image donn��e de la France est bien meilleure que sa r��alit����; on croirait qu���elle est vraiment capable de tenir les promesses qu���elle foule aux pieds quotidiennement. Personne ne conna��t la France comme nous la connaissons. Personne n���est la France comme nous la sommes. Vous voulez troller les fascistes��? Dites-leur la v��rit����: en ce moment, le plus fran��ais de tous les fran��ais est un gamin noir d���origine alg��rienne et camerounaise nomm�� Kylian Mbapp��. Et comme le disait l�����ternel Aim�� C��saire��: n���allez pas le r��p��ter, mais ce n��gre vous emmerde.
In french in the text.
The Pan-Africanist roots of football in Ghana
Ghana vs Uruguay, Quarterfinal 2010 World Cup. Via Wiki Commons.
With the disappointing showing by African sides at the 2018 World Cup, many soccer fans are looking back to Cameroon in 1990, Senegal in 2002, and more recently, Ghana���s memorable performances at the 2010 tournament. After a win over Serbia, a draw with Australia, and a narrow loss against Germany, Asamoah Gyan led the Black Stars to a thrilling victory over the United States and a place in the quarter-finals.
Facing Uruguay, the Ghanaian team scored first with a long-distance strike. The lead did not last long. Early in the second half, Diego Forl��n sent a swerving free kick into Ghana���s net and leveled the game. After 90 minutes, the teams remained deadlocked, and so they continued into extra-time. Then, amidst a goalmouth scramble in the final seconds, Dominic Adiyiah launched a header past the Uruguayan keeper and appeared destined to send Ghana through to the semi-final. His attempt was denied, however, by the infamous hand of Luis Su��rez. (Not to be confused with his infamous teeth.) Gyan missed the subsequent penalty kick, and Uruguay claimed victory in the shootout. Ghana���s run was over.
Less well-known are the origins of soccer in Ghana. In most parts of Africa, the game arrived with European missionaries, soldiers, merchants, and colonial officials, but in Ghana, this history also had a Caribbean influence. According to Stephen Borquaye, in his 1968 biography of the legendary Accra Hearts of Oak Sporting Club, soccer came to Ghana with ���a Jamaican educationist, a Mr. Briton, who was headmaster of the Government Boys School at Cape Coast.��� ���Mr. Briton,��� Borquaye explained, was an ���all-round sportsman.��� He taught his students to play cricket and lawn tennis and then in 1903, soccer. Interest in the game quickly spread beyond the school grounds and then through towns all along the coast.
Yet ���Mr. Briton,��� better known as Joseph Augustus Britton, was not from Jamaica. He was born in Demerara, then part of British Guiana. He was also not solely responsible for introducing soccer to Ghana, though he was a prominent figure. From 1886 until 1912, he taught at the government boys schools of Accra and Cape Coast. He was a friend of Joseph Casely Hayford, and he consistently extolled a belief in racial uplift. Among his students were Frederick Nanka-Bruce, one of the first African doctors in the Gold Coast; Vidal Buckle, a lawyer and the father of radical communist and Pan-Africanist Desmond Buckle; and Josiah Spio-Garbrah, who became a teacher himself and even named a son after his mentor. This son, Britton Spio-Garbrah, served as a foreign diplomat for the Kwame Nkrumah government and was also a close friend of Ivor Wilks.
Borquaye���s slippage in describing Joseph Britton as Jamaican reveals some of the threads between soccer, history, and politics in postcolonial Ghana. For newly independent African countries in the 1960s, soccer teams were important symbols of national unity. In Ghana, however, the national team was also an important symbol of Pan-African unity. In 1966, for example, Nkrumah led an African boycott of the World Cup. Moreover, Ghana���s team, the Black Stars, carried the same name as Marcus Garvey���s shipping line.
Writing in the wake of Nkrumahism, Borquaye was unconcerned with recording the precise history of soccer���s arrival in Ghana or with determining Britton���s birthplace. Instead, he braided together the history of soccer in Ghana with the memory of a black Caribbean teacher. He tapped into the popular symbolism of soccer, Garvey, and Jamaica and created a powerful Pan-Africanist narrative. Like many others, he used the language of the game to tell a larger story.
Unemployment and the Rise of Neoliberalism in Ghana
Workers at thermal power station in Takoradi, Ghana. (Photo by Jonathan Ernst, World Bank)
Since the early 2000s, more and more graduates in Ghana can’t find work. That’s according to the Institute of Statistical, Social and Economic Research at the University of Ghana. As of 2017 only 10% of graduates in Ghana secured jobs after their first year of completing school. Ghanaian youth disproportionately face unemployment�� compared to adults, according to the��International Labour Organization). The ILO report reveals that ���the problem of rising unemployment, underemployment and informalization of employment is the low attention paid to employment creation in the national development discourse.��� Increasingly, Ghanaian graduates who are unable to find employment migrate to other countries to look for jobs.
Most unemployed graduates are organized in the Unemployed Graduates Association of Ghana. It has since changed its name to the Association of Graduates in Skills Development. The association has increasingly been ridiculed by citizens and public officials for what they believe is a paradoxical situation since graduates of tertiary institutions are supposed to be equipped with employable skills to navigate the increasingly capitalist Ghanaian economy.
The criticism of unemployed graduates has taken a neoliberalist turn where they are framed as lazy, not interested in entrepreneurship and self-help. On several occasions, the humanities and liberal arts have been blamed for the unemployability of graduates since many believe that they do not present graduates with ���practical��� job skills.�� The President of the Heritage Christian College, Dr. Samuel Twumasi-Ankrah, believes that entrepreneurship is the ultimate solution to Ghana���s unemployment problem. According to him, the college is ���taking real and concrete steps to train ethical entrepreneurs who will create jobs to stem the tide of graduate unemployment in our dear continent of Africa.���
Poverty and unemployment discourses generally do not consider Ghana���s increasingly capitalist economic system where employees are disposable, the income inequality gap is quickly widening, and young and poor people are generally blamed for their inability to secure jobs.
This neoliberalist approach to (un)employment discourse has been quickly reinscribed in the public sphere through media framing of news around unemployment, the mainstreaming of individualism and the prosperity gospel from evangelical churches, public officials constantly blaming poverty and unemployment on citizens among others. This discursive shift does not take cognizance of the ways in which an individual���s various identities; class, ethnicity, education, sexuality, ability, religion etc. collectively shape their lived experience. This neoliberalist discourse favors the problematic notion that ���poor people are poor because they are lazy��� instead of examining systemic conditions that keep them in the cycle of poverty.
Just like generational wealth which has been conveniently attributed to ���God���s grace and blessings��� has sustained much of Ghana���s upper/middle class for generations, being born into poverty is an impossible cycle to break out of. People born into generational wealth have cultural capital and can use these connections to leverage harsh socio-economic conditions, and or climb higher on the economic ladder. Poor people almost always have no way of breaking out of the cycle. It is interesting, however, that poor people who ���break out��� of the cycle of poverty are held up as tokens or examples of the possibility of class mobility.
To address Ghana���s unemployment problem, many entrepreneurs and ���labor experts��� have presented volunteerism as the ticket out of poverty and unemployment. At various job fairs and motivational talk workshops, young people are constantly encouraged to volunteer and chided for their disinterest in volunteering. They are told that volunteering opens doors to steady employment which is ironic because many young people who do their National Service (which some might consider as a form of volunteering for about one year) after tertiary education are usually not retained by the organizations they work for.
What many of these experts fail to consider is that contrary to popular opinion, volunteering is not cheap. For many, volunteering is financial suicide since they will run an economic loss doing unpaid labor. To volunteer, the individual has to have money for basic survival: transportation to and from ���work,��� and some chop money because man for chop. For their families, their choice to volunteer takes a toll on finances since not only are they not contributing financially to the home, they are taking away the little income the family is making. Therefore, volunteering in the conventional sense is a luxury for many Ghanaians.
Another alternative has been presented to young people through the commodification of motivational speaking. Since Albert and Comfort Ocran���s Legacy & Legacy stylized as a human capital development agency, began national tours to organize job fairs and inspire young people in the early 2000s, motivational speaking has become a hot commodity among Ghanaian youth. Motivational speaking much like organized religion which has taken on capitalist undertones recently, preys on poor unemployed people who are looking for a glimmer of hope. Speakers charge fees to have people hear them speak about their rags to riches stories which are usually embellished to be packaged for sale to poor vulnerable people who don���t even have enough money to give away to begin with. Although motivational speaking may support the emotional and psychological wellbeing of individuals, it very seldom changes their socio-economic status.
Framing of conversations around wealth where wealth acquisition is attributed to divine grace means that poor Ghanaians are constantly demonized by the upper/middle class and blamed for their economic situation. Instead of addressing systemic inequality and keeping leaders accountable, access to facilities and resources that support a decent economic lifestyle are placed squarely on the shoulders of the individual.
It���s time to shift conversations on unemployment towards addressing the failed system that we live in rather than blaming marginalized people for their inability to climb the steep ladder that is mired in corruption and the failure of the state to explore sustainable solutions to poverty and unemployment.
July 8, 2018
No Country for Yes Men
Ngugi Wa'Thiong'o reading at the University of Hawaii at Manoa in 2008. Via Flickr
In the late 1970s the Kenyan writer, Ng��g�� wa��� Thiong���o, was imprisoned for the unorthodox crime of writing a play. Ngaahika Ndeenda, or I Will Marry When I Want, was an incendiary work about land deprivation, collectively produced by peasants and workers from Kam��r��th�� village. Banned within six weeks of its first showing, the play landed Ng��g�� in Kam��t�� maximum security prison, where he would spend a whole year, and this experience inspires his latest memoir, Wrestling with the Devil, published in March 2018. Ng��g�����s latest book, despite its prison theme, is not simply a memoir of that time, but envisions the emotive and intellectual lineage of political imprisonment, exploring in individual and social terms the relation between writer and prison.
The subtitle is a misnomer: Wrestling with the Devil is less a personal account than a meditation on the imprint prison has left on Kenya���s psychological and political landscape. Partitioned into short sections, the chapters shift from personal interactions with ambivalent guards and fellow prisoners to the history of anti-oppressive struggle in colonial and postcolonial Kenya. This movement from the one to the many empowers Ng��g�����s aesthetic project. He imagines the political prisoner anew, not as a figure cut off from society but as the member of a unique historical community, one amassed from the persistent solidarity of unrelenting prisoners across time. In Wrestling with the Devil, Ng��g�� has revised and pared down Detained, his 1981 memoir of the same experience, to hone in on what is essential: the historical dimension of political imprisonment, and its relation to artistic production. He forsakes Detained���s excessive narrative detail, and its many appended documents, to produce a memoir demonstrative of the literary work���s ability to both reflect and reflect upon social life.
Ng��g�� ventures that colonial and neo-colonial rule cannot survive without the work prisons perform. By abetting a ���reactionary culture of silence and fear,��� prisons secure complicity or domination as required. In the chapter ���Colonial Lazarus Rises from the Dead,��� Ng��g�� shares the stories of Ngunju wa Gakere, Waiyaki wa Hinga, and Me Katilili���only some in a long line of recalcitrant rebels whom the colonial state subdued with substantial prison sentences. More effective than detention, though, was the complicity extracted from men like Harry Thuku and Jomo Kenyatta, who entered prison as staunch anti-colonial activists, but left with a more ambivalent politics toward the colonial enterprise. Prison created a new Kenyatta, who ���finally said yes to the colonial culture of fear,��� and who would later use his presidency over an independent Kenya to mould national politics in the erstwhile colonial state���s image. Supported by laws for censorship and public control that persisted into the supposedly postcolonial period, Kenyatta���s political career shows how prisons nurture the practical and ideological continuities that help form a neo-colonial state. It was precisely this kind of state, after all, that could possess the legal framework for imprisoning Ng��g�� on the basis of his categorization as a threat to public security.
The fortunes of past political prisoners form the memoir���s intellectual fodder: from Jomo Kenyatta to Barsirian��Arap Manyei (possibly Kenya’s longest imprisoned political prisoner), Ng��g�� writes their history. He considers their lives in light of their status as public symbols and alongside the despondency they faced alone in the prison cell, assailed by the whole gamut of state institutions from the consensual to the coercive. Around these men and women, Wrestling with the Devil wills a moral universe into being. The state demands the captive be complicit, that they reject the very political commitment which warranted their arrest. This locks prison and captive in willful struggle. The devil, chief negotiator, arrives in thoughts of surrender and in the gentle pleas of state officials. ���Yes. No. Ndio. La.��� To say yes is to be transformed, saved even. But to say no is to hold ���submissive acquiescence��� at bay. Ng��g�� thoughtfully recounts the desperation of imprisoned life, even validating the advantages of capitulation to authority. Yet his memoir insists on the moral choice each prisoner must make, which in the end is always a dichotomy: in electing to say yes or no, to be willingly transformed or not, one chooses ���a particular world and a particular future.���
In his book On Evil, the literary critic Terry Eagleton understands the study of ethics as essential to scholarship and politics since it resolves questions of what is to be valued, how, and by how much. This mutually-affirming relationship between ethics, history, and political praxis inspires the seemingly simplistic yes/no dichotomy in Wrestling with the Devil. When Ng��g�� concludes that the entire complexity of the political prisoner���s situation is effectively a decision between a yes and a no, he simplifies the problem without being reductive. Showing that colonialism depends on the exploitation of native bodies and that it cannot but be rooted in racial supremacy, Ng��g�� understands colonialism as a ���world,��� a whole practical and philosophical system of exploitation. It is this complete system of thinking and doing which the prisoner either accepts or rejects, and to which a neo-colonial state becomes party in its deployment of the culture of fear.
In creating an image of the colonial world, Ng��g�����s yes/no metaphor also encapsulates two opposed attitudes towards it, whose acceptance or rejection becomes the test of the prisoner under duress. Under these conditions, Ng��g�� insists the prisoner never cow to oppressive authority because doing so makes them an ideological and practical accomplice to this world and its debasement of others. In Discourse on Colonialism, the author Aim�� C��saire writes that colonial conquest ���inevitably tends to change him who undertakes it.��� Becoming party to this system, even out of self-preservation, changes the colonizer and his collaborator: ���he gets into the habit of seeing the other man as an animal, accustoms himself to treating him like an animal, and tends objectively to transform himself into an animal.��� This transformation is precisely why Ng��g�� makes the ethical demand that the prisoner never concede. In saying no to repressive colonial and neo-colonial tactics, and yes to safeguarding peoples��� sovereignty, the individual preserves himself spiritually and politically. This spiritual and political preservation, Ng��g�� suggests, dialectically feeds off and builds upon the prisoner���s bodily health.
Ng��g�����s memoir is timely. As defences of colonial practices re-emerge under the guise of nuance and putatively objective cost-benefit analyses, Ng��g�� stakes out a politics of refusal that is not the antithesis of intellectual debate, but rather a critical position that synthesizes sound historical inquiry with a genuine ethical praxis. Contrary to the likes of Bruce Gilley and Nigel Biggar, who think the supposed benefits of colonialism can actually outweigh its moral failings, Ng��g�����s framework holds human dignity king and will not sacrifice it. He gives no quarter to apologia for colonialism since the latter���s debasement of the human disqualifies it from being a positive force. Such moral and intellectual certainty is refreshing and necessary as educational and cultural institutions continue leaving their doors ajar to discrimination thinly veiled behind jargon and claims to academic rigour.
The history of colonialism is littered with splendidly sordid and racist texts, such as Thomas Carlyle���s ���Discourse on the Negro Question,��� whose author writes that art, politics, and social development have value only for ���[white] men��� and not for the ���pigs with pumpkins��� that were the native West Indians. In some ways typically postcolonial, Wrestling with the Devil writes back to the literature of empire, broadening its scope beyond the prison to explore the prejudices of colonial settlers. With the chapter ���Parasites in Paradise,��� Ng��g�� undercuts colonial images of the stupid and bestial native by writing a similar history of the white settler in Kenya. The phrase ���a colonial affair��� is suggestive: with unadorned playfulness, Ng��g�� layers the many meanings of the word ���affair,��� sexual and otherwise, to link the debauchery of colonial officers with their construction of the Kenyan landscape as a white man���s paradise. Showing how colonial settlers spent their time ���drugging themselves into sexual fantasies��� and how they ���produced little. No art, no literature, no culture���,��� the memoir is a sardonic inversion of racist colonial tracts like Carlyle���s. Ng��g�����s playful but seething criticism shows how seemingly objective disciplines such as history, which was itself once thought scientific, may actively serve the cause of dehumanization.
The real possibility of social change inspires Ng��g�����s work. He transforms the Sisyphus myth by changing its narrative focus. Moving against conventional wisdom, Ng��g�� notes that while Sisyphus��� stone rolls down repeatedly, it is also ceaselessly rolled back up. This is not the original Greek Sisyphus auguring failure, but his new, hopeful, and African incarnation, one that speaks to the ���creative fightback culture��� of the Kenyan people and to Africa under colonialism. A learned book, Ng��g�����s memoir is highly intertextual: he appropriates the world���s imagination as his own, integrating mythology, Sylvia Plath, and Wole Soyinka among others into his broad humanistic vision.
Wrestling with the Devil retains the expressive simplicity and clarity of purpose one expects from the well-seasoned Ng��g�� wa��� Thiong���o. The author of over forty works of fiction, criticism, drama, and memoir, Ng��g�� has delivered another provocative and enjoyable book. Incredibly instructive, Ng��g�����s memoir shines with the deftness of his touch and the surety of his conviction. It is deserving of a wide, long-lasting readership.
The Gall of the West–On State Visits to Nigeria
Image via Twitter (Akinwunmi Ambode, Governor of Lagos State)
During a recent state visit to Nigeria, French president Emmanuel Macron managed to tweet a series of remarks that, though flamboyantly tone-deaf, only echoed the rhetoric of so many other Western politicians who have traveled to the country, and who, like the smiling Macron, have taken it upon themselves to attempt to ���inspire��� the local population. Ostensibly motivated by the current refugee crisis, Macron���s trip to Africa���s most populous country pivoted around the French government���s growing commitment to ���containing��� that crisis, including by ���supporting��� African economies in ways that will allegedly create jobs and thus obviate the need for Africans to flee to Europe in search of better, more solvent lives.
Macron���s tweets from Nigeria (identified as such by Twitter���s GPS-dependent Location Services, which the French president enabled for his African expedition) were initially relatively innocuous, with Macron offering such embarrassingly impoverished capitalist claims as ���Helping Africa to succeed is good for Europe and France��� and the Nike-inspired ���Just do it��� (Macron���s smug advice to ���young African entrepreneurs,��� whom he enjoined to avoid ���listen[ing] to people who are telling [them] to wait,��� as though patience–an individual personality trait–could possibly explain a fatal absence of startup capital, or an inability to survive the anti-competitive practices of multinational corporations that exercise monopoly power in so many sectors, especially in Nigeria).
Then came the reference to Steve Jobs. Tweeting from Lagos, Macron told what he apparently takes to be the universally inspirational story of a white-passing man whose ���father was a Syrian refugee,��� but who nevertheless managed to transcend nationality (and associated prejudices) in order to become a legendary business success. ���It would seem,��� Macron tweeted with strategic obtuseness, ���that nationality has nothing to do with the ability to succeed. If you think that being a Nigerian means you can���t succeed, then you won���t. If you fight and you do succeed, you will be a role model!���
Macron���s message was clear, and it inevitably recalled U.S. president Barack Obama���s remarks (delivered in the wake of a state visit to Senegal, South Africa, and Tanzania) regarding the putative need for Africans to ���get over��� colonialism–finger-wagging, ahistorical rhetoric shared by then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton: ���Africa should stop blaming history for its economic problems,��� Obama declared, advising Africans to ���stop making excuses��� for what was simply, in the president���s typically neoliberal telling, a series of individual failures of nerve and initiative. (For her part, Clinton cried, ���For goodness��� sakes, this is the 21st century! We���ve got to get over what happened 50, 100, 200 years ago, and let���s make money for everybody! That���s the best way to try to create some new energy and some new growth in Africa.���)
When Macron went on to tweet about the alleged exoticism of so ���ancient��� a practice as colonialism, then, he was very much in the company of Clinton and Obama, plainly taking a page from their neoliberal playbook. Macron���s own colonialism-themed tweet reads, ���60% of the Nigerian population is aged under 25. That���s 60% of the population which, like me, did not witness colonisation. We are the new generation. We are going to dispel prejudice by rebuilding a new future through culture.���
Macron���s words are, of course, even worse than those of his American counterparts, in that they insist on an equivalence between European and African, white and black, based solely upon generational factors–on, specifically, Macron���s having been born in 1977. False, racially insensitive equivalences aside, Macron���s tweet is outrageous for the way in which it elides the actual history of decolonization: Zimbabwe, for instance, did not achieve internationally recognized independence from Britain until 1980, three years after Macron���s birth. The notion that Macron was born into a world without European colonialism is thus multiply false–and, of course, multiply offensive. That he feels free to tweet such flagrant historical inaccuracies speaks to the sheer disrespect that continues to be accorded Africa and Africans, and that is clearly rooted in the assumption that no one knows or cares about the continent���s actual past. Periodizing African history is admittedly challenging, and it is an endeavor best left to those of us who are not European heads of government.
Shamelessly insulting, Macron���s tweets throw into sharp relief the long and ignoble history of self-serving (and often nakedly oil-hungry) Western state visits to Nigeria, and they evoke, as well, the country���s complicated ties to France. In 1963, just three years into the First Republic, Tafawa Balewa���s government was forced to sever diplomatic ties to France over the latter country���s decision to test nuclear weapons in the Sahara. In response, a miffed French government breezily, in self-exculpating rhetoric that anticipated Macron���s own, dismissed Nigerian concerns about nuclear fallout, purporting to ���teach��� geography to Nigerians by pointing out the vastness of the Sahara, and claiming that nuclear testing there posed no threat to them, despite considerable evidence to the contrary.
Cheerfully assuming Nigerian ignorance has been a theme of Western state visits to the country ever since. Of all U.S. presidential administrations, those of Kennedy, Carter, and George W. Bush have arguably been the friendliest to Nigeria, though Bush���s father, when he was vice president, extended his own state-sanctioned olive branch by visiting the country in 1982, on the pretext of assisting the president of Nigeria���s Second Republic, Shehu Shagari, in his Green Revolution agricultural policy, but essentially in order to ascertain Nigeria���s capacity to continue to meet America���s growing oil needs amid Reagan���s unprecedented military buildup. Thus if Macron feels the need to deflect attention away from, say, France���s reliance on Nigeria���s huge reserves of crude oil and liquefied gas, or from the fact that France continues to collect colonial-era taxes from African countries, he is undoubtedly in a long tradition of diversionary state visits by Western politicians who condescendingly trumpet the ���drive��� of ���everyday Nigerians.��� The only new variable here is Twitter.
July 7, 2018
Fear of a Black France
Kylian Mbappe. Image FIFA.
I was born in the late 70s of a mother from Martinique and a father from Lorraine region in Eastern continental France: I was always aware that, for good and bad, France was more than white, more than Europe, more than what most thought and took for granted. I looked to history to make sense of the very existence of my family, and the history I found was a history of exploitation, slavery, abuse ignored by most French people.
Growing up in the 1980s, there were few places where French flags were acceptable: government buildings, sporting events, right-wing and fascist meetings. And that was about it. For lefties like me, waving the flag was an act of political aggression. For a Frenchman of West Indian descent like me, waving the flag was also source of special ire, because I���d grown to know that no matter how French I actually was, no matter how well I knew French history, how well I spoke or wrote, how beholden to French values of libert��, ��galit��, fraternit��, how connected to culture I was, there would be Frenchmen to fly the Drapeau tricolore in my face as a reminder that for them, against all aforementioned values, my skin alone was proof that I would never quite be French. All of this was both sublimated and exacerbated in football games where black and brown people were especially visible and worshipped by fans who would just as soon spit racial slurs at them.
So 1998 was a bit odd. I shunned crowds and watched at home.
I had no special pride in being French, but then there wasn���t really anything else for me to be. My ties to Martinique do not make me Martinican. I was born and raised in a country that often struggles to fit me in. Like most Frenchmen of African descent, I���m a conscript of Frenchness���to riff on Conscripts of Modernity, David Scott���s reflection on Haitian revolutionaries��� vexed relation to revolutionary France and its averred values. Football occupies a unique and peculiar role in this relationship: I started playing at seven and never stopped. Football is tied to real world politics, morals and history, but it is also its own parallel world. Football allegiances do not seamlessly fit maps or borders. Football allegiances reveal individual geopolitics. ��I support FC Metz–my hometown team; I support Arsenal FC���Petit, Pir��s, Kanu, Overmars, Bergkamp, Wiltord, Vieira and Henry���s team forever and ever, amen; I don���t trust PSG, Chelsea, Lazio which, rationally or not, I connect to their once and future fascist fans; I support all African teams, because I want them to teach the world a lesson, and I support football beauty wherever and whenever it appears, however fleetingly. I also support France (the team) in spite of France (the country), and for the imagined, alternative flag it flaunts in the face of France.
Have it in French: Je supporte la France, mais la France m���insupporte.
In 1999, I left the country for a year, and eventually for good. Not that racial matters in the US are any better; but I figured it might feel a bit different to actually be a foreigner.
I was naturalized recently, which I suppose makes me French-American. Things are a bit more complex: I���m Antillo-French-American, or maybe African-French-American. I���m not being flippant: these things matter, and have defined me. ��In years I���ve spent away from France, I���as I suspect many other French people of African descent���have used Frenchness as a relativist tool: I take it everywhere, often keep it in my pocket, sometimes pull it out to use as a bludgeon on unsuspecting bigots, racists, misguided liberals, and more often than not I just sit on it. It makes for a decent pillow.
France and the US are not so different. They make similar claims for values of universalism and openness that are belied by their histories and politics. By law and values, if you���re born on French soil you are a French citizen, no matter where your parents came from, why, how, or when. The right of soil has been attacked in recent decades, but still, it remains. But in France, we do not hyphenate: origins are known and often discussed but they���re expected to bow down to Frenchness. Not such an awful idea, except that for all of France���s Revolution-fed universalism, the idea that Frenchness passes through blood still wallows in the sewers of the French psyche. Lately, more of these sewers have been opened and their stench have become an unavoidable component of the French political atmosphere.
But see, some of us were born with that smell in our nostrils. 25 years ago, Paul Gilroy famously wrote���with a wry smile, I imagine���in The Black Atlantic: ���Striving to be both European and black requires some specific forms of double consciousness.��� ��
In this World Cup as in others before, I am left to reflect on the dilemmas that come with rooting for France when France does not quite root for me. Should I be glad as a Frenchman of color to see the same people who once insulted me on the street, questioned my Frenchness, suggested I go back to my country, now revel in the achievements of people who look much like me, whose roots aren���t unlike mine? Can there be more than schadenfreude in seeing darkest France win it for a country increasingly defined by its racism and pettiness? Is it schadenfreude or a peculiar form of backdoor patriotism? What am I rooting for?
I found joy in reminders that some of France���s best players have close roots in Mali, S��n��gal, Cameroon, Morocco, Congo, Guinea, Algeria, Angola. I also gleefully pointed out the blackness of our best players. I flaunted it. I get it: the black players of France are also black players for the entire black world. Reminding the world of the players��� African roots is a way to bring perspective to victories claimed by people who still profit from France���s crimes against these very countries and their people. Yet I could not help but feel a little queasy at the multiplication of tweets���many by probably well-meaning white Anglos���summarizing centuries of history into witty tidbits French fascist Jean-Marie Le Pen would not have frowned upon. Many of these, whether they mean to or not, reinforce the notion that blackness in France is necessarily not-quite-French. But France has been black for centuries. If a point must be made by way of this team, maybe it is that France should not be allowed to claim distinction and separation from Africa so casually, because France owes Africa everything. Not just the resources it continues to pillage, not just the labor force it shamelessly taps into, not just the art it appropriates as it has for centuries: France owes Africa its very soul.
France���s history of slavery and colonialism is long and vile, and France has a long record of silencing it. But it lives in these bodies on Russian soccer fields and in those we only catch glimpses of when cameras cut to crowd scenes in those Parisian suburbs most of the players grew up in. And we know in moments like these, on the greatest stage in the world, we can make France look better than it is, we can make it look like it actually delivers on promises it tramples under feet on the daily. No one knows France like we do. No one is France like we are. You want to troll French fascists? Tell them the truth: the most French man in the world right now is a black kid called Kylian Mbapp��. And in the eternal words of Aim�� C��saire: n���allez pas le r��p��ter, mais le n��gre vous emmerde. En fran��ais.
July 6, 2018
The header that rocked the world
In 1990, we were one of a handful of Anglophone families in Yaound�����s Nsam neighborhood. ��Situated on the flanks of the Yaound��-Douala highway, our fenced pink house–like other such new homes popping up in Nsam–must have seemed like symbols of the steady encroachment of Cameroon’s French-speaking capital city into the turf of the Ewondo-speaking indigenes of the neighboring villages.
1990 was the first February 11th, National Youth Day, I spent in boarding school. ��Dressed in our white shirts and black pants, we were walking in small groups on the dusty road that linked our manicured campus to the festive grounds when we heard the news of Nelson Mandela���s release.
But I also remember 1990 as very schizophrenic year���even for Cameroon. ��It was the year Bamenda���s City Chemist Junction was renamed Liberty Square after six civilians were shot by Cameroon���s security forces during the launch of the Social Democratic Front (SDF), the first post one-party rule opposition party. ��It was the year Petit Pays released his third album, ‘Trouver la vie.’
It was also in 1990 at the World Cup in Italy where Cameroon faced reigning World Cup champions Argentina in the opening game of the tournament; a match that remains one of the biggest upsets in the tournament���s history. ��
Leading up to the tournament, rumors of discord in the Lion���s den pitting the team���s star goalkeepers, FC Girondins de Bordeaux based Joseph Antoine Bell and RCD Espa��ol based Thomas N���kono had kept fans on edge. ��
For us, it did not matter that President Paul Biya had made a last minute personal call to Roger Milla pleading with the veteran striker to end his international retirement and join the squad heading to Italy.
Just months earlier, we had watched the Indomitable Lions, defending champions, eliminated from the group stage of the 17the edition of the African Cup of Nations hosted in Algeria. Drawn in Group B with Kenya, Senegal and Zambia, the Lions only win came at the expense of Kenya���s Harambee Stars.
If Milla���s return was meant to calm the nerves of the country���s hardened football heads, it did not. Instead it reinforced the notion in the minds of some fans that the squad���s early elimination in Algeria was a prelude to their faceoff with the Argentinian juggernaut. In the minds of even the most diehard fans, the outcome of the showdown against the Diego Maradona-led squad was a foregone conclusion. One could only hope they didn���t trounce us. ��
While I waited for opening game on June 8th, my eleven year old mind lingered to the late-night meetings my father hosted in our house with other founders of the Social Democratic Front a few days before the start of the World Cup, on May 26th, also a day on which security forces in Bamenda killed six civilians attending the launch.
On game day, once my older brother flicked the record button, I found a spot on the rug closest to the TV set. As the anthem played, even as I watched the poise on veteran defender Emmanuel Kunde���s face, the hunger in N���Kono���s eyes, the calm resolve projected by team captain Stephen Tataw, I could not imagine the Lions could draw the game. ��
I hadn���t forgotten how Maradona had broken through the Belgian and English defenses in the 1986 Mexico World Cup like he was invisible. And if the occasion called for it, I knew he could always summon the hand of god like he did in his mid-air faceoff with English goalie Peter Shilton.
After the coin toss and ceremonial handshake between captains Maradona and Tataw, I watched the Argentinian striker pull the ball from the center mark with his left foot and let it bounce on his right foot back to his left foot. Then, I watched him juggle it once, lift it to his left shoulder, and let it bounce a four times to the elation of spectators inside Milan���s Giuseppe Meazza stadium.
Within the first minutes of the game, after the Argentines lost possession to the Lions, the latter kept it sufficiently enough to reveal hints of a coherent and confident squad. ��About twenty-minutes or so minutes into the game, the Lions had come close once to scoring once; defender Ndip Akem seeing Maradona leading a counter offensive run, ran towards the moving ball, lifted his right foot and planted his studs on Maradona���s chest, earning him the game���s first yellow card.
For fans watching from home, the defender���s kick was at once a warning shot to the star striker and us that this game was bigger than football. ��And it was.
After a goalless first half, the lions entered the second half with the swagger of a team that had deciphered its opponent���s codes. Suddenly the Argentines seemed to have lost their invisibility.
Then at the sixty-seventh minute of the game, barely minutes after his older brother Kana Biyik had been sent out with a red card for fouling Claudio Caniggia, striker Fran��ois Omam-Biyik elevated himself almost five feet up to nod in the ball past Pumpido���s cage, from a Cyrille Makanaky���s flick from Emmanuel Kunde���s set-piece cross.
Before Biyik���s actual goal could register, not to talk of its magnitude, my cousin had already run out of the front door, jumped down ourveranda staircase, opened the gate, and joined the rest of the neighborhood in screaming their lungs away. ��
���Buttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttt.���
I was so blinded with joy that as clear as of other events of that day appear, my reaction at that moment remains lost in my vault of forgotten stupors. ��However, I remember not being able to sleep because the game���s highlights kept replaying like a movie reel in my mind.
Despite losing defender Benjamin Massing to another red card, the Lions ended the game without conceding a goal thereby denying the Argentines even an honorific draw. ��
Nsam, Yaound��, and the entire country will erupt in joy. ��A few days later, the Lions will walk over a solid Romanian team (thanks to Milla���s timely entry), fall to Russia, and then proceed to the second round to face a much favored Colombia. ��
Though Milla���s legend as a world class striker will be sealed after the Colombia encounter���after all who can forget the steal he made from goalie Jos�� Ren�� Higuita ���and the dance that followed each goal, it was Omam���s goal against Argentina that sealed Cameroon���s place in the pantheon of great football nations.
1990 was the year the Lions stood on the biggest stage in world football facing a formidable foe with the world���s greatest player in its side and did not flinch. ��It was the year when the notion that the lions were indomitable was reinforced. It was also the year the pledge of lifelong devotion was made by some of the team���s fans.
I hesitate to consider what would have happened to the Cameroon football or the country for that matter if Biyik hadn���t propelled himself as high as he did, met that ball in midair, and headed in the goal.
For the rest of the world, while Omam���s header might have seemed like an underdog���s triumph, for us back home, it was more than a game won, it was a gift for a country in mourning of six; it was the precursor for the validation a football loving continent needed.
It was always bigger than the game.
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