Sean Jacobs's Blog, page 253

Brazil is Haiti���s national football team

Most teams have 12 starting players ��� 11 on the field and a roaring chorus in the stands. Brazil���s national side will always have 13.





Brazilian national team players Neymar and William. Image Credit: Wiki Commons.

On a balmy evening in Port au Prince in 2013, I was on my way to meet folks from Radio Metropole, Haiti���s historic radio station, to begin the groundwork on a compilation of Haitian music largely recorded under Papa Doc Duvalier���s reign. It was a weekday, just before rush hour which meant bottlenecked traffic jockeying for road space with UN armored vehicles, yet the streets were dead silent. Normally bursting with sounds of school children and faint fragrances of scotch bonnet peppers and griot pork, the silence could be mistaken for an arbitrary curfew.��

The eerie emptiness had only one culprit: Brazil���s national football team. It was merely an international friendly match to prepare for the World Cup a year later, hosted in Brazil. Host nations qualify automatically, so international friendlies are necessary for tactical experimentation, team cohesion, and fitness, but�� entirely inconsequential affairs.

Yet it brought Haiti to a standstill.

I asked one man huddled around a TV with poor reception at half time in the little Kreyol I had picked up: ���Poukisa Brazil (Why Brazil)?��� He placed his two index fingers parallel, pointing and motioning in the same direction. ���Brezil, Ayiti,��� he said.

Brazilian football has won hearts and minds across the Global South. They perhaps offer a vision to some countries in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, whose below par national teams stagnate from one failed qualifying campaign to another; of what a country tormented by colonization���s spiritual and physical legacies can achieve in one of the few major global gatherings where political and economic power offer little guarantee of success. More importantly, Brazilian football offers parts of the world not in control of their own stories or image what scintillating, trophy-winning football can do for a country���s global image, a key determinant of national esteem.

In Haiti, it runs even deeper. Brazil is, in many ways, Haiti���s national side.

After Brazil���s labored 2-0 win against Costa Rica, a video shared on Twitter showed crowds, akin to carnival troupes, celebrating in the streets of J��r��mie, a town in far western Haiti. It���s not Brazil���s style of play, an endearing feature of iconic Brazilian sides, nor their penchant for outrageous displays of skill, charming characters, or lovable nicknames that won Haiti, nor is it football alone that sustains a complicated solidarity.

Latin America���s brief but impactful 21st century flirtation with leftist politics, an audacious democratic attempt to stifle U.S. tampering, had its winners and losers. Haiti came out on top. Brazil���s Lula da Silva internationalized its foreign policy, focusing on Global South solidarity, as did Hugo Chavez. Both turned their sights to Haiti. Chavez provided Haiti with 90 percent of its oil products at cut rates with favorable financing terms and no strings attached. When I roamed around Haiti in 2013, stickers and murals of his face were plentiful. Lula���s face was almost nowhere to be seen, but Brazil���s presence in Haiti is no less profound.��

Under Lula, Brazilian peacekeepers led the UN stabilization mission to Haiti. ���Brazilian engagement in Haiti,��� writes Leonardo Miguel Alles in Brazilian Foreign Policy and Non-Indifference: An Analysis of the Lula Years, ���represents the most complete example of diplomatic activities base on solidarity.�����

When the earthquake struck in 2010, Brazil was the first country to pledge money ��� U.S. $55 million ��� to the Haiti Reconstruction Fund, and kept its troops in the country.��

Thousands of Haitian refugees fleeing the earthquake���s devastation sought a new home in Brazil. Paulo Sergio de Almeida, then the president of Brazil’s national immigration council, said in an interview with Global Post in 2012 that ���it was the first time��� Brazil had dealt with Haitian migration. ���The Brazilian military presence in Haiti had contributed to Brazil���s reputation as a welcoming, opportunity-filled country.��� Welcoming countries are in high demand and short supply.

Perhaps Lula saw his overtures to Haiti as the culmination of Brazil���s internationalist dream of the early 1960s, in the wake up of the Non-Aligned Movement, to foster strong ties with a decolonizing Africa, as detailed in Jerry D��vila���s fascinating work: Hotel Tr��pico: Brazil and the Challenge of African Decolonization. Haiti, the first black republic hard-won while slavery persisted across the Americas, unsuccessfully applied for membership to the African Union.

I first remember seeing glimpses of Haiti and Brazil���s bonds working at a global news desk, where photo correspondents��� packages in the earthquake���s aftermath showed children with Brazilian flags painted on their skin, adorned almost solely in Brazil���s yellow and green kit. Brazil���s footballers have arguably always been their country���s greatest ambassadors. Brazil���s government caressed Haiti in its time of need, and Haitians repay the gesture by aligning national joy with, say, a sweet strike from Carioca playmaker Philippe Coutinho.

The Brazilian-led peacekeeping mission departed Haiti just last year, leaving behind a bittersweet legacy. Initial, genuine goodwill gave way to a cholera outbreak and sexual abuses by a multinational peacekeeping force under Brazil���s watch.��

Once-welcomed soldiers began to resemble an occupation force. In a major road artery in Port au Prince, Brazilian peacekeepers took it upon themselves to become traffic cops. ���Nobody wants to do what they say,��� my friend Samuel told me while in the driver���s seat. The peacekeeper directing traffic looked more a matador taunting Haitian motorists with his illegitimacy. Another time, I saw a peacekeeper hanging off an infantry vehicle thrust his boot to kick a bystander out of the way. Samuel and I were once held up in traffic because Brazilian blue helmets were cat-calling Haitian women from their vehicle.

Yet Haiti still celebrates with Brazil, even in remote towns like J��r��mie.��

Haitian memories are longer than a 13-year UN force. Brazil and Haiti���s bond is sustained by a deep cultural linkage spanning the modern history of the Atlantic. Both received large numbers of enslaved peoples from what is today Benin. Dahomey Vodoun religious and cultural traditions are embedded deeply within Haitian society and Brazil���s northeast state of Bahia. The processions, deities, dress, and rhythms of Haitian Vodou and Brazilian Candombl�� are nearly identical. The Nago, a Yoruba speaking people from the Bight of Benin, left their mark on both Haitian and Brazilian culture well into the 20th century. Nago became a measured Haitian Vodou rhythm, revived and used by golden era orchestras of the 1960s and ���70s. ���Nag����� is also a gorgeous Candombl�� hymn, reworked in the early ���70s by legendary Sao Paolo band, Trio Mocoto.��

When Haitian broadcasting infrastructure modernized after the Second World War, the first batch of songs on the airwaves were from the Dominican Republic and Brazil. Many of the beloved Haitian musicians and singers I met with often pointed to Brazilian music as a source of learning and inspiration. Some of the best bands from Papa Doc Duvalier���s era, like Tabou Combo, performed at major music expos in Rio de Janeiro.��

The years leading up to the 2014 World Cup and 2016 Olympics in Brazil brought a huge demand for Haitian labor to construct sporting venues and expand infrastructure. Lured by a cemented impression of fairness and openness, Haitian workers found themselves trapped in what Sao Paolo���s own Labour attorney general office called ���slave-like conditions.���

That treatment and Brazil���s downward economic spiral in 2016, its worst economic recession since the 1980s, made some Haitian expatriates rethink and relocate to the United States. But even as Brazil���s economy suffered, it maintained its monthly allocation of 2000 humanitarian visas to Haitians, visa program that has survived even the austere, right wing presidency of Michel Temer. In total, about 85,000 Haitians had been allowed to resettle in Brazil, but by 2016, The Miami Times reported that 35 percent of Haitians left Brazil.

And yet, Haiti still celebrates with Brazil, a bond sealed eternally by the Atlantic and shaped by the politics of solidarity within the Global South. In Brazilian football, Haiti sees the best reflection of the Brazil they know ��� the Brazil whose door and hand is always open. In Brazil, Haiti sees a stillwater reflection of itself, united by a paralleled past, and in the hope of a similar trajectory. Through abuse and exploitation, Haiti and Brazil���s kinship appears unconditional.��

This was the scene after Brazil beat Serbia at the end of the first round of games. Most teams have 12 starting players ��� 11 on the field and a roaring chorus in the stands. Brazil���s national side, whatever the outcome, will always have thirteen.

Brazil–Haiti���s national football team

Most teams have 12 starting players ��� 11 on the field and a roaring chorus in the stands. Brazil���s national side will always have 13.





Brazilian national team players Neymar and William. Image Credit: Wiki Commons.

On a balmy evening in Port au Prince in 2013, I was on my way to meet folks from Radio Metropole, Haiti���s historic radio station, to begin the groundwork on a compilation of Haitian music largely recorded under Papa Doc Duvalier���s reign. It was a weekday, just before rush hour which meant bottlenecked traffic jockeying for road space with UN armored vehicles, yet the streets were dead silent. Normally bursting with sounds of school children and faint fragrances of scotch bonnet peppers and griot pork, the silence could be mistaken for an arbitrary curfew.��

The eerie emptiness had only one culprit: Brazil���s national football team. It was merely an international friendly match to prepare for the World Cup a year later, hosted in Brazil. Host nations qualify automatically, so international friendlies are necessary for tactical experimentation, team cohesion, and fitness, but�� entirely inconsequential affairs.

Yet it brought Haiti to a standstill.

I asked one man huddled around a TV with poor reception at half time in the little Kreyol I had picked up: ���Poukisa Brazil (Why Brazil)?��� He placed his two index fingers parallel, pointing and motioning in the same direction. ���Brezil, Ayiti,��� he said.

Brazilian football has won hearts and minds across the Global South. They perhaps offer a vision to some countries in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, whose below par national teams��� stagnate from one failed qualifying campaign to another, of what a country tormented by colonization���s spiritual and physical legacies can achieve in one of the few major global gatherings where political and economic power offer little guarantee of success. More importantly, Brazilian football offers parts of the world not in control of their own stories or image what scintillating, trophy-winning football can do for a country���s global image, a key determinant of national esteem.

In Haiti, it runs even deeper. Brazil is, in many ways, Haiti���s national side.

After Brazil���s labored 2-0 win against Costa Rica, a video shared on Twitter showed crowds, akin to carnival troupes, celebrating in the streets of J��r��mie, a town in far western Haiti. It���s not Brazil���s style of play, an endearing feature of iconic Brazilian sides, nor their penchant for outrageous displays of skill, charming characters, or lovable nicknames that won Haiti, nor is it football alone that sustains a complicated solidarity.

Latin America���s brief but impactful 21st century flirtation with leftist politics, an audacious democratic attempt to stifle U.S. tampering, had its winners and losers. Haiti came out on top. Brazil���s Lula da Silva internationalized its foreign policy, focusing on Global South solidarity, as did Hugo Chavez. Both turned their sights to Haiti. Chavez provided Haiti with 90 percent of its oil products at cut rates with favorable financing terms and no strings attached. When I roamed around Haiti in 2013, stickers and murals of his face were plentiful. Lula���s face was almost nowhere to be seen, but Brazil���s presence in Haiti is no less profound.��

Under Lula, Brazilian peacekeepers led the UN stabilization mission to Haiti. ���Brazilian engagement in Haiti,��� writes Leonardo Miguel Alles in Brazilian Foreign Policy and Non-Indifference: An Analysis of the Lula Years, ���represents the most complete example of diplomatic activities base on solidarity.�����

When the earthquake struck in 2010, Brazil was the first country to pledge money ��� U.S. $55 million ��� to the Haiti Reconstruction Fund, and kept its troops in the country.��

Thousands of Haitian refugees fleeing the earthquake���s devastation sought a new home in Brazil. Paulo Sergio de Almeida, then the president of Brazil’s national immigration council, said in an interview with Global Post in 2012 that ���it was the first time��� Brazil had dealt with Haitian migration. ���The Brazilian military presence in Haiti had contributed to Brazil���s reputation as a welcoming, opportunity-filled country.��� Welcoming countries are in high demand and short supply.

Perhaps Lula saw his overtures to Haiti as the culmination of Brazil���s internationalist dream of the early 1960s, in the wake up of the Non-Aligned Movement, to foster strong ties with a decolonizing Africa, as detailed in Jerry D��vila���s fascinating work: Hotel Tr��pico: Brazil and the Challenge of African Decolonization. Haiti, the first black republic hard-won while slavery persisted across the Americas, unsuccessfully applied for membership to the African Union.

I first remember seeing glimpses of Haiti and Brazil���s bonds working at a global news desk, where photo correspondents��� packages in the earthquake���s aftermath showed children with Brazilian flags painted on their skin, adorned almost solely in Brazil���s yellow and green kit. Brazil���s footballers have arguably always been their country���s greatest ambassadors. Brazil���s government caressed Haiti in its time of need, and Haitians repay the gesture by aligning national joy with, say, a sweet strike from Carioca playmaker Philippe Coutinho.

The Brazilian-led peacekeeping mission departed Haiti just last year, leaving behind a bittersweet legacy. Initial, genuine goodwill gave way to a cholera outbreak and sexual abuses by a multinational peacekeeping force under Brazil���s watch.��

Once-welcomed soldiers began to resemble an occupation force. In a major road artery in Port au Prince, Brazil peacekeepers took it upon themselves to become traffic cops. ���Nobody wants to do what they say,��� my friend Samuel told me while in the driver���s seat. The peacekeeper directing traffic looked more a matador taunting Haitian motorists with his illegitimacy. Another time, I saw a peacekeeper hanging off an infantry vehicle thrust his boot to kick a bystander out of the way. Samuel and I were once held up in traffic because Brazilian blue helmets were cat-calling Haitian women from their vehicle.

Yet Haiti still celebrates with Brazil, even in remote towns like J��r��mie.��

Haitian memories are longer than a 13-year UN force. Brazil and Haiti���s bond is sustained by a deep cultural linkage spanning the modern history of the Atlantic. Both received large numbers of enslaved peoples from what is today Benin. Dahomey Vodoun religious and cultural traditions are embedded deeply within Haitian society and Brazil���s northeast state of Bahia. The processions, deities, dress, and rhythms of Haitian Vodou and Brazilian Candombl�� are nearly identical. The Nago, a Yoruba speaking people from the Bight of Benin, left their mark on both Haitian and Brazilian culture well into the 20th century. Nago became a measured Haitian Vodou rhythm, revived and used by golden era orchestras of the 1960s and ���70s. ���Nag����� is also a gorgeous Candombl�� hymn, reworked in the early ���70s by legendary Sao Paolo band, Trio Mocoto.��

When Haitian broadcasting infrastructure modernized after the Second World War, the first batch of songs on the airwaves were from the Dominican Republic and Brazil. Many of the beloved Haitian musicians and singers I met with often pointed to Brazilian music as a source of learning and inspiration. Some of the best bands from Papa Doc Duvalier���s era, like Tabou Combo, performed at major music expos in Rio de Janeiro.��

The years leading up to the 2014 World Cup and 2016 Olympics in Brazil brought a huge demand for Haitian labor to construct sporting venues and expand infrastructure. Lured by a cemented impression of fairness and openness, Haitian workers found themselves trapped in what Sao Paolo���s own Labour attorney general office called ���slave-like conditions.���

That treatment and Brazil���s downward economic spiral in 2016, its worst economic recession since the 1980s, made some Haitian expatriates rethink and relocate to the United States. But even as Brazil���s economy suffered, it maintained its monthly allocation of 2000 humanitarian visas to Haitians, visa program that has survived even the austere, right wing presidency of Michel Temer. In total, about 85,000 Haitians had been allowed to resettle in Brazil, but by 2016, The Miami Times reported that 35 percent of Haitians left Brazil.

And yet, Haiti still celebrates with Brazil, a bond sealed eternally by the Atlantic and shaped by the politics of solidarity within the Global South. In Brazilian football, Haiti sees the best reflection of the Brazil they know ��� the Brazil whose door and hand is always open. In Brazil, Haiti sees a stillwater reflection of itself, united by a paralleled past, and in the hope of a similar trajectory. Through abuse and exploitation, Haiti and Brazil���s kinship appears unconditional.��

This was the scene after Brazil beat Serbia at the end of the first round of games. Most teams have 12 starting players ��� 11 on the field and a roaring chorus in the stands. Brazil���s national side, whatever the outcome, will always have thirteen.

Algeria and the American Black Panther Party

In the 1970s, Algiers served as refuge to African Americans who confronted US racism with force and had to flee the country. Some Panthers hijacked planes.





Eldridge Cleaver and wife Kathleen Cleaver, Algiers 1969. Image: Bruno Barbey/Magnum.

As airline travel became more common in the 1950s and 1960s, hijacking planes also became a common practice. By the early 1970s, nearly 160 high jacking incidents occurred.

The book ���The Skies Belong to Us��� by the American writer, Brendan Koerner, charts some of this history of the golden age of airplane highjacking and connects it to the activities of the Black Panther Party and the party���s international office in Algiers.

Koerner���s account of skyjackings in the US in the 1960s and 1970s is nothing short of surreal. In that unimaginable world, passengers did not undergo TSA screenings, there were no scanners, did not even have to show boarding passes or IDs, and sometimes even paid for their tickets after reaching their destination. Skyjacking was not even illegal in the 50s and high-jacking airplanes had very little to do with political cause. One of Koerner���s most entertaining examples, a man who diverted a plane to Cuba because he was missing his mom���s style frijoles.

To think that there was a time when riding an airplane in the US was almost as easy as getting on a bus is almost as phantasmic as thinking about Algiers as once the refuge to African Americans who confronted US racism with force and had to flee.

Algeria was one of the favorite destinations for hijackers, beside Cuba.

Newly independent Algeria had a deep flair for revolutionaries. Houari Boum��di��ne, Algeria���s second president and revolutionary leader, showed unconditional support of the Palestinian cause and Western Sahara, had close ties with Nelson Mandela (and the South African liberation movement), Yasser Arafat and the PLO, Fidel Castro and the Cuban revolution, and authorized actions such as welcoming the international section of the Black Panther Party and the Canary Islands Independence Movement (MPAIAC) – which aired their radio station from Algiers. Boum��di��ne���s solidarity with revolutionary movements across the globe earned the country a reputation of being a revolutionary heaven, a Mecca of sorts of revolutions.

One side effect was that Boum��di��ne���s internationalism also turned Algiers into a popular destination for politically-motivated highjacked airplanes. In fact, in 1975 Venezuela���s Ilich Ramirez Sanchez and his 42 hostages landed in Algiers putting Abdelaziz Bouteflika (then-minister of foreign affairs; now the President) in the negotiator���s seat. In 1977 leftist Japanese Red Army guerrillas landed their high-jacked plane and surrendered in Algiers, and in 1970 when 40 ���Brazilian political prisoners were exchanged for the kidnapped West German Ambassador,��� they requested to land in Algiers where they were welcomed with cigarettes.

But perhaps one of the most dramatic stories of planes highjacked to Algiers had to be the two airplanes highjacked by Black Panther members Roger Holder and George Wright and commandeered to Algiers in 1972. By then the Black Panther Party had opened an international chapter in Algiers led by Eldridge Cleaver who decided to seek exile in Algeria once Cuba did not look safe enough. Eldridge was in the company of several Black Panther Party members who were very active from the Panther offices in Algiers. Indeed, Donald Cox, Pete O���Neal, and Kathleen Cleaver were based there, and it made sense for Holder to set Algiers as the destination of his highjacked plane.

On June 2 1972, Western Airlines Flight 701 with 98 passengers and a seven-member crew was hijacked in Los Angeles by Holder and Catherine Marie Kerkew. The flight was on its way to Seattle when Holder executed his long-planned ���Operation Sisyphus.���

Holder was a US army veteran, toured Vietnam four times, but on his third tour of Vietnam got arrested for possessing marijuana in Saigon. His time in jail made him not only experience firsthand race oppression of African Americans within the U.S. military, but also made him deeply reflect on the war effort and the injustices he experienced both as a perpetrator and a victim of the war machine. Holder���s traumatic memories of his friends killed in action and his disillusionment with the Vietnam War haunted him for the rest of his life. He planned the skyjacking as a way to get out of the feeling of guilt he felt for both participating in the war and surviving it. He also wanted to put pressure on authorities to free Angela Davis who was then standing trial for murder.

Kerkew was Holder���s companion, accomplice, and lover. She came from Coos Bay in Oregon, randomly met Holder in January of 1972 when he knocked on her San Diego apartment���s door looking for her roommate. Kerkow���s involvement with the Black Panthers did not come across as a commitment on her part to the cause but a result of her rebellious personality.

Holder and Kerkew dropped half of the passengers in Los Angeles and the other half in New York, where the plane refueled before taking off for Algiers without any passengers. In Algiers and Roger and Cathy secured their $500,000 ransom. Holder, however, was not enamored by what he experienced in Algiers.

Upon Holder���s arrival with Kerkew, Algerian government officials quarantined the couple and their ransom. After long interviews and investigations with security services, Cathy and Roger were released to the Black Panthers but the money stayed in the custody of the Algerian state until a meeting with President Boumediene was arranged. Boumediene was on an official visit to Senegal. When he returned, he summoned the couple to the presidential palace. Koerner documents that despite Holder���s deep struggles with racial injustices in the US military, the President quickly dismissed him and Cathy as pedestrian trouble-makers rather than visionaries. The cash ransom was sent back to the US, but US requests to extradite the couple were rejected, and political asylum was granted to both of them.

Eldridge Cleaver was revolted that Boumediene took away the money that belonged to the revolution. This frustration was further escalated by a similar event, when a Detroit-based group commandeered Delta Airlines Flight 84 along with a one million dollars ransom to Algiers on July 31, 1972. Cleaver tried to beat Algerian security officials to the Maison Blanche Airport (now named after Houari Boumediene), aiming, to no avail, at instructing the highjackers to not part with the cash. The money was once again returned to the US.

Cleaver, frustrated, decides to address ���Comrade Boumediene��� in an open letter presented at a press conference despite his second-in-command Pete O���Neal advising him not to. Cleaver insisted that ���the Afro-American people are not asking the Algerian people to fight our battles for us. What we are asking is that the Algerian government not fight the battles of the American government.��� Boumediene was, as O���Neal feared, insulted by Cleaver���s words and responded not only by having dozens of soldiers raid the International Sector residence and haul away telephones, typewriters and AK-47s, but also by asking Cleaver to step down as head of the International Section.

From Boumediene���s perspective, the Algerian government was a generous host to the Black Panther Party. It allowed it to operate openly and freely, supported it politically and financially (disbursed monthly stipends thanks to petro-dinars), and ran the risk of severing its business (gas and oil) deals with (among others) American companies. From this point of view, the Black Panther Party had to demonstrate, in action, what it said it was there to do. Earning the money needed for the mission (rather than relying on skyjacked ransoms) was a necessary if basic step.

Yet, the Algerian government was not alone in its disenchantment with the Panthers��� International Section leadership. Indeed, when Cleaver accepted to step down as leader of the party and turn it over to O���Neal under the ultimatum presented by Algerian authorities, Holder was aghast and loathed Cleaver for this for a long time. Shortly after, O���Neal and his wife left Algeria to find greener pastures in Tanzania. (O���Neal, incidentally, would go on to gain some minor celebrity as the subject of his time in Tanzania, ���A Panther in Africa.���) O���Neal named Roger Holder as the head of the International Section who eventually also left with Cathy for France.

Kerkew���s whereabouts remains a mystery. The couple seems to have separated in Paris where Cathy abandoned the Black Panther cause in favor of living a bourgeois life among French artists and celebrities. To this day, it is not clear what had become of her. Brendan Koerner closes the book imagining her in Paris living the kind of American Dream that could only be lived if America was left behind.

Algeria���s legacy for supporting international revolutionary causes can still be seen today in the country���s continued stand on the Palestinian cause and on Western Sahara. Yet its record on questions of race and attitudes towards blackness, especially as manifested in its practices with regards to migrants and refugees from neighboring Mali and Niger, is so poor it���s hard to imagine a time when Black Panthers roaming the Casbah or the spirit of the famous Pan-African festival of 1969 filling the streets of Algiers were a common thing.

The Seattle Afrikan Premier League

Going in search of the African world ��� making the game global in Seattle, Washington.





Waiting for the start of play. Images: Danny Hoffman

June 2018. The Black Stars dominated possession and seemed the far more threatening side.���� Then a sudden precision counter sliced through their defense, and a scintillating finish left them down a goal, less than ten minutes into the match. Against the run of play, the Black Stars faced a deficit. And while the ball continued to seem happier in the Black Star���s offensive half, two more counter attacks and a successful penalty kick sealed their fate over 90 minutes.

Despite the famous name, this match did not involve the men���s national team of Ghana. The location was a small park in a Seattle suburb, just after the weekly girls��� U-10 matches. This was not the World Cup, or even a national friendly between two teams outside the Cup looking in. It was, rather, the finals of the second season of the Seattle Afrikan Premiere League (SAPL). The Black Stars��� opponent, FC Juba, took home the championship – and with it a team trophy, individual medals, a $500 cash purse, and bragging rights for a team of East African men between the ages of 17 and 45.

The SAPL���s second season climax occurred just days before the opening of the 2018 FIFA World Cup in Russia ��� a World Cup at which neither the United States nor Ghana, neither South Sudan nor Somalia are represented. Adding insult to injury, the local Major League Soccer franchise, the Seattle Sounders, are struggling, gaining only their third win of the season at about the time FC Juba lifted their SAPL hardware. Seattle is more soccer mad than most American cities, so these absences matter.�� As they do every four years, fans here are repeating the usual truisms and clich��s about the pathetic state of football in America.

Seattleites��� calls to find US national football respectability are undoubtedly more globalist than nationalist.�� This is, after all, a liberal West Coast enclave with world city pretensions.�� And there is truth in Kanishk Taroor���s argument that the World Cup complicates the false binary of globalism and nativism.�� But in the United States at this moment, national boosterism of any kind feels risky.�� Even the most innocent calls to make American football great carry a taint, an uncomfortable hint of xenophobia and menace.

So, for this World Cup, we opt out of the mediated mourning over the pitiful state of US soccer. We accept that we won���t find local football on the world stage. We���ve set out instead to find world soccer on the local pitch.�� We���re collecting stories that highlight the world ��� the African world, in our case ��� making the Seattle game global. Call it, for now, The African Game in Seattle project.

We want to know why the Sounders hope three Cameroonian teenagers can help salvage a difficult season, and what the Ghanaian women���s national team captain, recently signed to the NWSL Seattle Reign, thinks of the Black Queens��� chances in the November CAF Cup. We���re more interested in how many African players have worn the colors of the University of Washington Huskies, and whether white missionaries in the 1970s factored in footballing skills when they offered young African men scholarships to the region���s parochial colleges. For now, we think understanding American soccer rests more on the question of whether the Afro Kings FC���s strong forwards could have fared better than the Black Stars against FC Juba in the SAPL final.

 

Adama Kante, originally from Mali, juggles in the final minutes before the Seattle Afrikan Premiere League (SAPL) finals on 8 June 2018.

 

FC Juba warms up for the finals at Petrovitsky Park in Renton, just south of Seattle.

 

FC Juba warms up for the finals at Petrovitsky Park in Renton, just south of Seattle.

 

FC Juba players break from pre-game warm-ups for prayer. The majority of the squad come from immigrant communities originating in the Horn of Africa, some of the largest African diasporic communities in the Seattle region and across the Pacific Northwest.

 

Black Stars FC���s Christian Obioma walks the FC Juba greeting line.

 

SAPL founder and Black Stars FC coach Issah Agyeman (in maroon) addresses his squad. Agyeman founded SAPL after several seasons playing in local Latinx leagues, saying that it was time that African players have ���our own thing.���

 

The Black Stars��� Eric Sheshe attempts to break through the Juba defenses. Both teams included players ranging in age from high schoolers to men in their 40s.

 

Though the flow of play generally favored the Black Stars, strong defense and quick counter-attacks from FC Juba produced a lopsided finish.

 

Obioma goes down after a hard tackle. Fights are not uncommon in the city���s competitive adult leagues.

 

FC Juba goalkeeper Abdullahi Abdullahi sets his defense before a Black Stars corner kick.

 

Frustrated with the lack of recognition for the winners of other club leagues, Agyeman promised trophies, medals and a cash prize to the winning teams in the SAPL.

 

Black Stars FC���s Yannick just after the final whistle and his club���s loss.

 

The FC Juba players film their celebration for social media.

 

Agyeman���s daughter, Princess Hajara Yaa Asantewaa Agyeman, holds the second-place trophy while her parents wrap up after the post-game medal ceremony.

Why do Argentineans blame Messi when they lose

Argentina crashed out of the 2018 World Cup. It's not Messi's fault.





Lionel Messi.

For days now I have been thinking about how to sum up the passion that football represents in Argentina. The World Cup usually increases this and it is normal to hear: ���It doesn���t count if you only watch football on the World Cup.��� Meaning: you are not a true fan if you do not support a team, or a player the rest of the year.

It is difficult to represent that passion in a country where every time Boca Juniors or River Plate wins on a Sunday, the average daily newspaper sale is 20% higher on a Monday; where the president started his public life as a president of a football club (the same Boca); where away fans were banned from��attending matches for three years; and where hooligans are involved in politics. That’s just a few peculiarities of Argentine football.

And suddenly, out of the blue, it dawned on me that we, as a society, judge our men���s national football team the same way we judge the political management of our country. In each case, the scrutiny come every four years and the one to take the blame is the charismatic leader.

Football is really teamwork, but we blame or praise one player for a loss or a win. The same happens with governance. Whenever the charismatic leader appears, he or she acts as a messianic agent, who is seen as the only natural leader, with the right to rule and the only one qualified to govern and save the team or the country. When they fail, the people shout for their head.

However, nobody considers that behind that person there is a system, with its own actors, mechanisms, failures and histories. Nobody in a government take all the decisions, but we blame the president. Nobody in a team competition take all the decisions, but we blame Lionel Messi.

In Argentina that system has not worked for a long time, whether in politics and in football.

For one, the people running football in Argentina are not ���new��� or reformers. For a long time the national football association, the AFA, was run by Julio Grondona. He also��served as��FIFA finance committee chairman��during Sepp Blatter���s corrupt administration there. In 2014, Grondona passed away. His successor was��ousted when he was charged with fraud. The subsequent��election of a new AFA president in 2015 ended in controversy when it emerged an extra vote was cast by those present. The eventual winner, Claudio Tapia, is the son-in-law of Hugo Moyano, the president of one of the country���s largest trade unions. Moyano just happens to be the AFA treasurer. Then, our best players play for European (or Chinese) clubs, winning club championships there, but they don���t know each other as a team. A combination of violence, money, politics and sport diplomacy has a lot to do with Argentina being knocked out of 2018 World Cup. But we blame Messi.

How I met your mother

The author relives his greatest World Cup moment.





Zinedine Zidane, 2006.

It was not love at first sight.

She was cheering on the Azzurri. I was for Les Bleus.�� That she���s not Italian and I���m not French, did not matter. We teased each other as if we were.

We met for the first time in that crowded, boisterous movie theater just outside of Washington D.C. A mutual friend invited us both to watch the World Cup final in 2006.

Seven months later, we had a romantic spark, during another unplanned meeting at the now-defunct DC club, Agua Ardiente.�� We danced like Zidane in the Brazilian midfield.

Now we���re married and have been for 9 years. Each World Cup final has become an unofficial anniversary for us, marking the occasion when which we first met.

During the years between World Cups, Sharen tolerates me watching league play. She occasionally complains that I spend too much time, especially when I���m still in front of the screen after my precious Arsenal has played.�� Sometimes she sits down with me, and finding herself bored, requests I change the channel.�� I name a few of the other games I have recorded.�� ���Let���s see, how about Napoli versus Inter instead?��� She usually laughs.

The World Cup is different, however.�� It is shared.�� We screamed about Egypt���s heart-breaking loss to Uruguay, and were saddened when a young Moroccan player scored an own-goal against Iran. We reveled over Nacho���s stunning goal and studied the replays of Ronaldo���s free kick in that riveting Spain-Portugal contest.�� When she woke up Saturday morning, she poked her head into our living room. Squinting her eyes, she asked me if France was beating Australia.

I happened to be in Oxford for a two week-long workshop. The participants were from all over, and many were from countries actually in the knockout stages of the 2010 World Cup.

An Italian scholar and I befriended a Catalan who worked for the provincial government.�� Javier became our case study in the contortions of nationalism.�� Early on in the workshop, he claimed Catalonia should have its own team with FIFA.�� We joked that all the other countries would welcome splitting Spain���s first team.�� As Spain advanced to the final by beating Germany, his elation started to overwhelm his sub-national pride. His rationalization: ���Half the team are Catalans!���

The tightness of that team���s play ��� from the fierce defense personified by a flying, shrieking Carlos Puyol, to the fluid passing and movement by the hive mind of Iniesta, Xavi and Fabregas ��� excluded the possibility of divisiveness at that time.

We crammed into a student center on Oxford���s campus to watch the final. We started off sitting on the floor, but we were soon standing. Spain were too much for the Dutch that day in South Africa, but they needed an extra time goal to seal their fate. Javier ran around kissing and hugging everyone he could.

I am not very good at soccer, but I love to play it.�� One of my greatest pick-up soccer performances was immediately after the 2014 World Cup final.�� I took in the match at a local sports bar, and then headed over for a pre-arranged game at the field where I regularly play.�� I���m not sure if I was inspired by Die Mannschaft or if it were the several beers in me that made me a fearless goal machine. No one but me remembers that I played better than Higuain that day.

What small glories will this World Cup still produce?

Uruguay is playing for you

Uruguay is often neglected in talk of the Global South, yet its history and its people's character and resilience, may be instructive.





Uruguay vs Costa Rica, 2014 World Cup in Brazil. Credit: Wiki Commons.

The knock came at four in morning on Sunday, April 15, 1984. ��Dr. Vladimir Roslik of San Javier was informed by an officer of Uruguay���s 9th Cavalry Regiment that he was being arrested for questioning. ��The next day Roslik���s wife was advised to collect her husband’s body from the Fray Bentos Hospital.

Roslik, who attained his medical degree from Patrice Lumumba University in Moscow in 1969 was to be the last victim of Uruguay���s military dictatorship. ��

A station wagon adorned in red and yellow flowers carried Dr. Roslik���s coffin to the San Javier cemetery. ��A cort��ge followed, the descendants of the three hundred Russian families who founded the town along Uruguay River in 1913. ��As Vladimir Roslik was laid to rest, one could imagine the sunflowers of San Javier ��� famously introduced to Uruguay by Russian immigrants ��� turning away from the Autumnal sun. ��

In subsequent independent autopsies all attending physicians agreed Roslik’s lungs contained water and presented signs of asphyxia resulting from immersion, consistent with water boarding or what is known in the region as ���the submarine,��� what Apartheid South Africa���s torturers used to call ���tubing��� or ���water bagging.���

Roslik���s corpse also showed signs of having been subjected to various forms of intense violence. ��This almost seven years after the brutal beating to death in custody of South African Black Consciousness activist and anti apartheid campaigner, Steve Biko. ��While Biko���s death attracted some global attention, the same couldn���t be said for Roslik. South America remained under the shadow of Operation Condor, a US Central Intelligence Agency program designed to stamp out Soviet influence and communism.

Military juntas financed by the CIA and emboldened by Henry Kissinger (first US national security advisor and then Secretary of State for much of the 1970s) carried on disappearing their opposition, kidnapping babies, and committing torture and murder. ��French military advisers posted to the region in the 1970s by President Val��ry Giscard d���Estaing ensured torture techniques first tested in the Battle of Algiers were carried out with deadly efficiency by their colleagues in Argentina, Chile and Uruguay.

Uruguay confronted this past, eventually, but not without protracted legislative and legal wrangling that continues to this day. ��The Ley de Caducidad or Expiry Law of 1985, which granted amnesty to military and security personnel for human rights abuses committed during the dictatorship was only overturned in 2011. ��Gregorio ��lvarez, the Uruguayan Army General who served as de facto President of Uruguay from 1981 to 1985 was eventually convicted on 37 counts of murder and Human Rights abuses. He died in prison in 2016, aged 91. ��A majority of cases, however, remain open and many of those who bear responsibility remain free.

The Vladimir Roslik FC team banner on Vladimir Roslik Plaza.

In recent years, local municipal government and civil society have also attempted to reconcile with the horrors of the dictatorship. ��There is now a brass plaque dedicated to Vladimir Roslik on the wall of the Uruguayan Army barracks in Fray Bentos. It is dressed with sunflowers every April 16 when the Mayor of Fray Bentos holds a ceremony to honour Vladimir Roslik. ��The city of Montevideo donated one of her finest neoclassical buildings to the establishment of Museo de La Memoria. ��It is dedicated to nearly 10% of the population who fled the country, the thousands who were jailed and the hundreds who were disappeared and killed during the dictatorship.

A foundation started by Roslik���s widow, Maria Zavalkin, has been established to carry on the work of Dr. Vladimir Roslik in San Javier. ��It supports a clinic and children’s��� day care centre, as well as providing home care for elderly.

Less well known, but an equally inspiring tribute to Vladimir Roslik can be found in the barrio of Cord��n in Montevideo. ��Cord��n sits between Barrio Sur and Palermo ��� were Isabelino Grad��n was raised, the black forward whose goals helped Uruguay win the inaugural Copa America in 1916 ��� and the barrio of Tres Cruces ��� were Luis Su��rez spent his childhood mastering the geometry, philosophy and other traditions of Uruguayan football. ��

The intersection between Frugoni, Yani and Charr��a Streets in Cord��n has now been named Plaza Vladimir Roslik. ��In 2013, locals formed VLADIMIR ROSLIK FC to honour his memory and those in the neighbourhood whose commitment to their community mirror that of Dr. Vladimir Roslik. ��Murals have been painted on the pavement and walls and the plaza is now a playground for children and meeting place for all team members or ���Vladimires.��� Here on Sundays you will also see the fire tuning of drums and hear the Llamada or Call ��� the invitation to all the black barrios to march together through the streets of Montevideo.

The Vladimir Roslik FC team. Image by Nichol��s Marone.

The experience of this obscure Russian community in Uruguay presents a salutary lesson for our time, both for those with more liberal credentials than the Uruguayan Junta of 1970s and 80s who are gripped by Russia hysteria and those who peddle in xenophobia and fear of immigrants. ��Vladimir Roslik was subjected to cruel torture and death purely on the basis of his ethnicity. The Uruguayan military dictatorship conflated Russians and communists and set about persecuting a whole village, accusing them of collaborating with the Soviet Union, eventually murdering an upstanding member of that community. ��

Uruguay is often neglected in talk of the Global South, yet the resilience found in the people of San Javier and those from communities like Cord��n, geographically underpin the whole idea of the nation. ��With no African teams remaining in the World Cup and for those who have issues supporting Western European teams, take a look at the team photo of Vladimir Rostik FC and their maths teacher coach, Nicol��s Marone, and remember Uruguay (also coached by a teacher, El Maestro Tab��rez) are playing for them, their African slave ancestors, the immigrants, the tortured and desaparecidos and doing so in the spirit of the native Charr��a, and that���s means Uruguay is also playing for many of you.

A World Cup for the people

The Africans, already underrepresented, withered away during the Group stage. Even VAR, invented to clean up the game, could not save them.





Nigerian forward, Ahmed Musa.













The FIFA World Cup of neo-liberalism is living up to its expectations

What is it that dampened my enthusiasm about the FIFA World Cup? I need more and more time and money to follow the game as it is getting out of reach, being standardized, sanitized, and controlled by a few for global consumption. Tickets and travel cost more; TV the same, with increased fees under the guise of customization. Probably not just one thing. I watch the same players all year round. The media hype them up and raise our expectations for FIFA World Cup, and they offer nothing excitingly creative. The players are exhausted from long seasons ruled by results and big capital.

Shall I say it is football fatigue? The same praises for the same stars who shuffle from super club to super club to win ���trophies��� like Robin Van Persie or Raheem Sterling. It is never officially to ���win more money.��� Well-connected agents move them to super clubs owned by tycoons who cannot reveal the source of their wealth. The brutal truth is that only a few clubs win trophies these days. Those super clubs are champions as soon as their leagues start or keep winning many years in a row (Juventus, Paris St-Germain, Bayern Munich, Glasgow Celtic, FC Barcelona or Real Madrid, etc.). In much the same fashion, the FIFA World Cup has been magically won by the same club of 5 ���deserving��� countries: Germany, Italy, Brazil, Argentina and Uruguay (ages ago). France, Spain and England have been invited to the club once. No surprise in Russia; two weeks into the tournament, 10 out of the 16 countries at the knockout phase are European, 5 from Latin America and 1 from Asia. The ���other��� dogs, especially the Africans, already underrepresented, withered away. Even VAR, invented to clean up the game, could not save Nigeria. An ���invisible��� hand has kept Messi and Argentina in again. The FIFA World Cup of neo-liberalism is living up to its expectations. For ���other��� dogs, participating remains the dream and the ceiling.

African football needs to regenerate itself

The Algeria of Belloumi, Madjer and Assad seduced the world in 1982. In our days, no surprise any more (except for the ���calamity��� of the elimination of Germany at the group stage as if a divine order was disrupted), no flair, no art, no risk-taking; results are money, like time. African teams, this time again, have won no trophy. They were a little unlucky, not pathetic, but Africans would have been happy with some genius and style. No cultivation of unique philosophies. Africa seeks the quick fix, the quick result for the pleasure of politicians and federations active under the table. African football imitates fruitlessly, feeds leagues around the world and forgets their own, like their raw materials. It refuses to think, design and create. No Cruyff or Guardiola type to focus on long-term development of a recognizable style, personality or identity. Too arduous, and maybe excruciatingly painful.

African football needs to regenerate itself and ���reinvent their wheel.��� Performances like Musa, Morocco���s Amrabat or Salah���s must abound, but the field is dominated by athletic and unimaginative defensive midfielders, and other ���belly��� players (to use Jean-Fran��ois Bayart���s famous expression for politicians). Laurent Blanc, the former French coach allegedly remarked in 2011, that France were producing only athletic big, and strong players (alluding to black players who had taken over the French team), and not producing enough skilled players. Such statements are interpreted as racist, given the almost automatic emphasis on black athletes��� athleticism, speed, power, and not on their intelligence and hard work. In Russia, the French team comprises 16 players of African descent (of whom two are Algerian and Moroccan descent, and the rest Black) among the most skilled. There���s also one player of Filipino descent, one of Spanish descent, and the remaining 5 probably of French roots. The blood of Jean-Marie Le Pen, founder of the National Front, is probably boiling. This is the new face of Europe and the world. Is it reverse immigration (millions of Europeans took and settled in other lands and are holding on to them), or repopulation of the world but without guns, war ships and planes, and massacres? Some fans call the French team the sixth African team.

When will the people recover their game?

Those are some of the reasons why I am losing interest. All about the 1% who play and win more of everything they already have in abundance (money, fame and popularity, endorsements, material benefits and other types of social benefits) whereas the majority of players can hardly make a decent living. Common people love and play the game, but dividends go to a small elite of managers and players.

I have played football all my life. I am still in and could not ignore the competition, for the tradition, the history, the camaraderie and the hope for brilliance. Beautiful goals (Ronaldo, and Nacho in Spain-Portugal, Musa against Iceland. Coutinho, Son Heung-Min and Cherishev), or collective beauties like Tunisia���s first goal against Panama excite me. I had forgotten the chants, the dancing, the drama, the magic of the game, the conversations it inspires, the new friendships it creates, the emotions, the tears (fake or real) and all that jazz, nicely taken advantage of by large corporations.

When will the people recover their game? Maybe an illusion or a delusion on my part, but in Saint Petersburg, Russia, a group of young activists and social entrepreneurs, in a campaign called ���Cup for the People,��� bring the game closer to the people. They attempt, in the words of one of their members Arsene Konnov, ���to show Saint Petersburg beyond the tourist clich��s, and [show] that problems in most countries ��� the relationship between citizens and the state, corruption, megaprojects��� influence on urban life, our contemporary perception of history, social inequality and discrimination ��� are similar to those in our country in the eyes of locals who are trying to improve society.��� Football is not whole, without its beauty and the people.

David Goldblatt 1930-2018

The South African photographer has left us. He was one of the most significant artists of his time.





David Goldblatt.

The South African photographer David Goldblatt has left us. Like many others, I’ve paused to mourn his passing and to reflect on his legacy. He was, of course, one of the most significant artists of his time. But he will also be remembered as a mentor to several generations of younger photographers and as a founder of Johannesburg’s Market Photo Workshop. Over the last three decades, the Workshop’s classes, exhibitions, and publications have made it one of the world’s most influential centers for photography.

Yet Goldblatt’s photos are little known in the United States, except for the relatively small group of people who have noticed that people outside of Europe and North America use cameras to make pictures. In 2013, when the International Center of Photography, in New York, presented him with the Cornell Cape Lifetime Achievement Award, I wrote a short essay for an online publication which drew most of its readers from the photo industry and arts community. In it I directly addressed my fellow American’s photographic blindspot. That essay has since disappeared from the internet, and I’m grateful for the opportunity to republish it. I’ve lightly edited the version below.

Imagine photos by Robert Frank and Henri Cartier-Bresson. Wait a moment. Now think of a few by Diane Arbus and others by Sebastian Salgado. Good. Being the sort of person who reads this blog, it’s likely that a dozen or more vividly remembered images just popped into your head.

Now imagine a photo by David Goldblatt. Thought so. Unless you’re a South African or one of his fans, you probably drew a blank. The work of one of the world’s most honored living photographers is little known in the United States. It’s a scandal.

On Wednesday evening, when the International Center of Photography [ICP] confers on him its Cornell Capa Lifetime Achievement Award, Goldblatt will collect yet another prestigious award. He’ll add it to his resume, right above the 2006 Hasselblad Award, 2009 Henri Cartier-Bresson Award, and the 2010 Lucie Award for Lifetime Achievement.

As prestigious as these honors surely are, they’re little more than the icing on a magnificent cake. Over a 50-year career, Goldblatt has been the subject of exhibitions major museums Europe, Africa, and North America, including solo shows at the Museum of Modern Art, in 1998, and the Jewish Museum, in New York, in 2010. Leading publishers of photography have produced a at least a dozen books devoted his work.

It’s an impressive list of accomplishments by any measure. So, why aren’t Goldblatt’s photos as well known as his name? And what’s his photography all about anyway? Answering the second question will point us toward a solution to the first.

People who try to explain Goldblatt to American audiences often compare him to Walker Evans. Up to a point, it makes a certain amount of sense. Just as the true subjects of Evans’ greatest and most lasting work were the American people and the society they created, Goldblatt’s subject has been South Africa and South Africans. His goal, as he once put it, was to make photographs “that were … penetrating of that time and the circumstances in which we lived …”

The defining feature of that time was apartheid, the notorious system of racial oppression that shaped the nation during the second half of the twentieth century. It was the desire to understand apartheid that made him a photographer. “If we had been a democracy from the beginning,” he once wrote, “I’m not sure that I would have become a photographer. …Apartheid sharpened my wish and need to probe with a camera.”

The quality of their vision — the uncanny ability to see below the surface of things — also links Goldblatt and Evans. Goldblatt, like Evans, is drawn, in his own words, “to the quiet and commonplace where nothing ‘happened’ and yet all was contained and immanent.” This explains why he’s been at least as interested in apartheid’s vernacular architecture as he is in its monuments. In the same way, the people in his photographs are more likely to be whites who were complicit with apartheid than those who designed and perpetuated it. And he made many more photos of blacks who endured its horrors than those who fought in the streets against them.

Finally, Goldblatt and Evans also share a photographic sensibility. In both there is a sense of distance, of an analytical step backward, that, in Goldblatt’s case, never threatens to become disinterest. There is also, in both photographers, an instinct to make understated images that refuse to draw attention to themselves, images that are much more about the subject than about the man behind the lens.

The comparison between Goldblatt and Evans can take us only so far, however.�� Goldblatt’s photos are political in a way that Evans’ never were. Underlying everything he did, Goldblatt has said, “was an intense hatred or dislike of apartheid and of the whole system that had been built up around it and my work was a critique of that.” This doesn’t mean that politics entered his images overtly. That rarely happened. Instead, his approached politics obliquely, never feeling that “every time that I went out with a camera that I had to do something that was going to knock another nail in the coffin of apartheid.”

If we want to get a sense of the scale of Goldblatt’s achievement, we’ll compare him not to other photographers, but to novelists, to a Toni Morrison or a Nadine Gordimer, the latter a Nobel Prize-winning South African novelist with whom he collaborated on two of his most important books. Like these writers, he finds his deepest meanings in ordinary people and things. He approaches them with compassion, but without sentimentality. Like Morrison and Gordimer, he discovers the universal in the particular, which is why his photography will resonate for a very long time.

All of this makes it strange that Goldblatt’s photos, many of which have become iconic in South Africa, haven’t entered the popular consciousness outside of his native land. There are several reasons for this. First, it reflects the marginalization of African photography in the rest of the world. Photography from Africa just isn’t on the radars screens of many people elsewhere.

Second, Goldblatt, being white and Jewish, isn’t seen as African enough on those still-too-rare occasions when African photography is shown and discussed. This way of thinking is simply wrong, as everything I’ve said so far should make clear, but it’s shaped the way his work has been received.

Most importantly, the very strengths of Goldblatt’s photography make it unfashionable in the photographic world of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. His understatement and complexity place considerable demands on his viewers. His lack of flash denies them instant gratification. It’s slow photography in a fast food world.

The ICP has made a brilliant choice.�� Goldblatt���s body of work is perhaps the finest contemporary example of the greatness that photography can achieve.

The Contradictions of Boko Haram

Boko Haram capitalized on the problems women face in Northern Nigeria to attract some of them willingly, while violently forcing others into bondage.





Refugee from Borno State in Niger, 2014. Photo: UNHCR.

The abduction of 276 schoolgirls at Chibok in April 2014 may have struck outsiders as a horrific new turn in the war in Nigeria���s north, but women in northeastern Nigeria have long faced systematic oppression, leading many to seek refuge with Boko Haram. Its promise of education, material support, protection, ironically, and respectful treatment of women as outlined in the Qur���an has garnered support even from abductees, a revelation that may surprise many readers of a new book.

Women and the War on Boko Haram, by political scientist Hilary Matfess, offers a different perspective on the war, exploring this contradiction and other revelations from women themselves. Matfess���s goal is to ���convey the myriad ways in which women have shaped the development and course of the Boko Haram insurgency��� itself, as well as the efforts by the Nigerian government and international community to wage ���war��� on the group (as the title suggests). Matfess, clearly speaking to those who have not appreciated the many dimensions of Nigerian women���s experiences, concludes ���the international community must revise its shallow conceptualization of women��� (224).

Probably many readers of Africa is a Country do not see themselves as embracing a shallow view of the war. We have questioned the media coverage and the West���s approach (or lack thereof) to Boko Haram and the ways in which both the group and humanitarians have used the female victims. I am one of those skeptics, based on my own experience researching religion and social dynamics in Northern Nigeria. Residing in Kano���s old city, I experienced shari���a implementation as a confusing and ambivalent experience. Many women, Christian and Muslim, held some hope that shari���a, though condemned by the West, might provide an antidote to corruption. I also questioned the Western media���s heroic narrative of Nigerian government anti-terrorism efforts, which have produced enormous suffering for women and men in northeastern Nigeria.

So readers like me will be gratified that Matfess undertook this research but not necessarily surprised by it. Along with high-placed political authorities, humanitarian workers, and NGO staffers, she interviewed more than 50 women who were internally displaced and living in informal settlements and purpose-built camps and 30 male and female vigilantes who fought alongside the Nigerian government forces. She combines these interviews with gray literature on Boko Haram to highlight a number of issues that are critical for understanding the particular problems of women in Northern Nigeria and the ways in which Boko Haram capitalized on them to attract willing women while forcing others into their fold by violence. The lack of educational opportunities for women, the high cost of marriage, the rate of divorce that disadvantages women in polygynous Muslim households, and the poverty that has produced horrifically high rates of malnutrition, maternal and child morality and morbidity have all conditioned rural Northern Nigerians��� lives. Matfess shows how Boko Haram���s founder Muhammad Yusuf advocated for Qur���anic education for girls, reform of marriage customs, and proper care of families, albeit by patriarchal male heads of households. Matfess also shows that the control by parents over children in matters of marriage has driven scores of young women and men to Boko Haram, where they, paradoxically, may have more choice over their partnerships.

While Matfess has put her finger on these overlooked but vitally important factors in the gendered development of Boko Haram that can only be revealed from the inside out, rather than the outside in, she slips at times into a presentist and Western gaze, all the while arguing that Boko Haram ���is undeniably a product of its historical context��� (44). For instance, she mentions but does not address the long history of dissent in this region that was part of powerful Islamic states (Borno and the Hausa city-states) for centuries. Using the work of Murray Last and others, she notes that the ideology of the Sokoto Caliphate founded in the nineteenth century bears important resemblances to Boko Haram, including the focus on women���s comportment and their treatment, but goes no deeper. This is not just the gripe of a historian. History shows jihadi women reformers who fought for the establishment of the Caliphate and would have given Matfess good material to discuss gendered class polarization two centuries ago as a possible root for poor Muslims��� antipathy towards elites. Elite Muslim women since then have had access to the trappings of Islamic respectability, which go beyond veiling and purdah, and include female Islamic education, the ability to perform the pilgrimage, and access to the material and ideological developments in the wider Muslim world. All we get on the background to women in Northern Nigeria is UN statistics.

Christian women in Northern Nigeria receive no attention as distinct from Muslim women in their experiences, aspirations, or prospects for recovery after abduction by Boko Haram. Women���s civil society organizations are characterized as underdeveloped, and there is no sense, beyond FOMWAN, that informal church or Islamic women���s groups might offer hope or that humanitarian work among women in Southern Nigeria, with long traditions of gender activism, has any bearing in the North. Matfess suggests that the South has been unaffected by Boko Haram, a claim that is debatable. Cross-regional and interreligious women���s organizations, however unknown to outsiders, have existed for many decades, organizing around issues like shari���a and the education of women on their rights.

I am also troubled by the conceptualization of masculinity in this book. The discussion of polygyny as an expression of male power is not incorrect but seems to take a prurient interest in Islamic sexuality. By contrast, there is little discussion of masculinity in the military or other institutional or ideological contexts. Many scholars argue that Christianity, too, has engendered patriarchy in Nigeria and other parts of the continent. There is a very short discussion of the ���fragility of masculinity��� (199) that certainly could have come earlier and been more robust, considering the research of many feminist historians suggesting that colonialism and postcolonial nationalisms have produced new practices of patriarchy that defy the notion of the onward march of progress. Certainly in Northern Nigeria the British were partly responsible for stymying girls��� education. The British protected the Northern Nigerian aristocracy against dissent and prevented major social changes, like women���s participation in public life. The West is embedded in Northern Nigerian gender politics, not only in the education that Boko Haram attacks.

Matfess makes excellent suggestions and observations in the latter half of the book about how to move forward, using examples from Rwanda, Sierra Leone, and other conflict-affected countries. Underlying her prescriptions for transitional justice measures, stigma reduction for Boko Haram���s rape survivors and former militants, and greater inclusion of women in politics, she notes the need to address to see women as ideological actors. Many joined Boko Haram, seeking ���a sense of identity��� (224). I am not sure that the international community, on whom Matfess places a great of responsibility, can or should fill this apparent void for Northern Nigerian women, but she has made an important intervention to address identity as a pressing issue of post-conflict humanitarianism.

On a final note, Matfess seems to accept international intervention in Nigeria uncritically, but the humanitarian complex is a beast of its own, generating corruption and competition. Maybe if a brigade of women, armed with techniques in trauma counseling and large sums of money for microfinancing, went in, we could change not only the conceptualization of women but also of international aid.