Sean Jacobs's Blog, page 257

Sex work on the other side of the sea

Refugees on a boat crossing the Mediterranean sea, heading from Turkish coast to the northeastern Greek island of Lesbos, 29 January 2016. Image via Wikimedia Commons.

A few months ago, 26 young Nigerian women were buried in Italy. The women had drowned in the Mediterranean on their way from Libya. Two of the women were identified; two were pregnant.

Never before has a funeral for migrants received such massive media coverage. The funeral was attended by sex workers in Italy, NGOs, journalists and local politicians. A Nigerian woman sent me a photo of the rows of brown caskets decorated with white flowers paid for by the Italian authorities. These photos from the funeral went viral.

It is likely that at least some of the 26 Nigerian women who drowned were headed to Europe to become sex workers. While research shows that most of them are aware that they might have to sell sex, they arrive with very little knowledge about the realities of living in Europe as an undocumented migrant.

The press described the women as sex slaves — victims of trafficking — on their way to Europe. Migrant women rarely catch our attention unless — as was the case here — the Mediterranean claims their lives in large numbers, or when they are called sex slaves or when they sell sex in the red-light districts near where we live.

However, behind the sad and dramatic images of drowned women lies a reality in which more and more women from Africa and Asia migrate alone and engage in sex work upon arrival.

Despite major information campaigns in countries of origin and millions of euros spent by Europe and elsewhere in the fight against human trafficking, the number of Nigerian women crossing the Mediterranean is greater than ever. The IOM estimates that the number of Nigerian women that arrived in Italy by boat has increased from around 400 to 11,000 within the past two years alone.

Why are anti-trafficking campaigns and other efforts not working? One reason is that these campaigns and related programs do not focus on these women’s obvious and very fundamental problem: They need jobs and money. 

As an anthropologist, I’ve spent the past fifteen years working with two of the largest groups of migrant sex workers in Europe: Nigerian women who cross the ocean from Libya and Thai women who arrive by airplane. I’ve conducted field work in Nigeria, Thailand and Sicily, in various red-light districts and at brothels in rural areas in Denmark.

One thing is clear, due to increased border controls at all points of their journey, these women now arrive with greater debts via more dangerous routes, and live more vulnerable lives forced to survive under the radar. Yet, they still migrate.

The women finance their journey from their home country by taking up loans of between €5,500 Euros and €60,000 to pay for false documents, transport, and for some of them, with the promise that someone will be there to receive them and provide them with a job. Nigerian women owe the highest amounts. 

Because of Europe’s tightened borders, undocumented migrant women arrive with a significant debt that they have to pay off. The harder it is to get into Europe, the more debt these women arrive with — and the more vulnerable they are to those who profit from the EU’s strict migration policies.

At a worn down brothel in Lagos, Nigeria’s largest city, women earn around €2 per client. In transit in Libya, they earn around €4-5 per client. If they sell sex from refugee camps in Sicily, they earn around €10 per client. However, the unemployment for migrants in Italy is high. Most of the women quickly travel further north, to places like Copenhagen, where they earn around €80 per client. 

Nigerian women have worked as sex workers in Europe for many years. Before the migration crisis they were older when they arrived, had been in Italy for a long time before traveling further north, and some of them obtained legal residence.

Thai women used to arrive on a long-term tourist visa and typically went back home when the visa expired. Now, they travel via Eastern Europe on an eight-day visa, stay for longer, and travel onward to work alone at the increasing number of rural brothels.

These women are not passive victims. Typically, it is women who mediate loans, find brothels, and arrange documents, transport and travel itineraries for other women. Often, they have been in a similar situation as those they now assist. I’m meeting ever more women who finance their own migration by recruiting or being involved in the migration of others. Who is the victim and who is the villain? 

The Nigerian women say that they migrate because of unemployment, falling oil prices, unemployed male providers, and — for the younger women in particular — because of the migrant crisis itself. The more women that leave, the more that follow in their footsteps. “We’re leaving now, because so many others are going too,” one young woman explained to me.

They do not blame Europe, traffickers or the demand for sex among European sex clients. According to these women, the reason to leave Nigeria is that “God forgot about Nigeria long ago.” They say: “Nigeria’s economy is poor, no one takes care of us, we have to take care of ourselves.” One of the more experienced women, who herself also recruits women to Europe, said: “My solution is women’s built-in ATM machine.”

The problem with the sensationalist headlines about sex slaves and stop-gap solutions in Europe is that they make us blind to the real issues: Unemployment and shortage of money at home. Campaigns to warn women in Nigeria and Thailand about the trafficking-risks of migration make little sense if there is no good alternative in their home country. 

As a result, migrant women often run away from crisis centers and refugee camps in order to make money. They are afraid of deportation and evade authorities. It is often difficult to find witnesses willing to testify against the men and women taking the women to Europe, and there are very few convictions. Nor do the women go to the police when they have been exposed to violence, mainly because they are afraid of being sent back home with only debt and broken illusions.

Of course, there are no quick fixes. But since money is their biggest problem, Europe should focus on debt reduction, job creation for the entire family, and better and more innovative financing possibilities to start small businesses. Such work is obviously also the responsibility of home countries like Nigeria and Thailand, as the women themselves point out. 

It would also be helpful if the women were granted longer temporary residence in Europe so that they could work while solving their situation, rather than running from those who seek to rescue them.

Rather than repeating headings of sex slavery, Europe, in collaboration with the women’s home countries, has to focus on these women’s financial situation. If not, the consequence is ever increasing numbers of indebted, vulnerable, traveling women migrants and sex workers who live under the radar in European red-light districts and across European borders.

‘Habitus eines Kolonialherren’ – German colonialism and the recognition of genocide

Herero women, Opuwo, Northern Namibia. Image credit Carsten ten Brink via Flickr.

What ideologies and interests motivated German colonialism? What were Germans’ perceptions about colonialism? How was the German colonial administration organized? How should the crimes of the German colonialism be contextualized? What are the politics of colonial memory in Germany?

In a recently published essay collection (so far only in German), historians Horst Gründer and Hermann Hiery, seek to provide a response to these questions. German colonialism remains a tremendously under-researched field, and receives even less attention in German societal discourse or within the German education system. Given German history, the importance of grappling with a difficult past (in German “Aufarbeitung”) is recognized, and there is considerable awareness about the dangers of nationalist conceptions of “past.” Yet, the failure to face Germany’s relatively short-lived, but yet brutal, colonial history, and the politics of its memorialization continue to haunt Germany in the present. Germany’s colonial empire in Africa from roughly 1884-1919 is known to include German East Africa, including Tanganyika, Burundi, Rwanda, Witu (part of present-day Kenya), as well as parts of present-day Tanzania and Mozambique; German South West Africa (Namibia, and parts of present-day Botswana); and German West Africa (Cameroon and Togo). The legacy of “German empire” can, however, be traced back earlier to Prussia.

Gründer and Hiery’s work sheds light onto the long “journey” to German colonialism. Historian Ulrich van der Hayen outlines Prussia’s initial imperial ambitions, and how they were subsequently memorialized and strategically deployed. Prussia’s then emperor Friedrich Wilhelm (1620-88) and a range of Dutch merchant interests, forcefully co-opted local leaders in what is now Ghana to establish the colony of ‘Groß Friedrichsburg’ (also known as ‘Brandenburg Gold Coast’). Subsequently, the ‘Brandenburg-Afrikanische Kompanie’, mirroring the Dutch East India Company, was set up in order to merge commercial, geopolitical, and imperial interests. Though ‘Großfriedrichsburg’ was eventually “sold” to the Dutch in 1721 (having only been “acquired” in 1683), both the interest groups behind the renewed colonial enthusiasm of the 1870s-1880s, and the Third Reich, which named Friedrich Wilhelm the “creator” of the first German empire, deployed a romanticized narrative of Friedrich Wilhelm and ‘Großfriedrichsburg’ in order to (re-) legitimize imperialism within German society. Winfrid Baumgart’s contribution on the motivations of Germany’s renewed colonial ambitions in the late 19th century focuses on Bismarck, who famously stated that his “map of Africa was in Europe.” It argues that Bismarck’s personal motivations for supporting German colonialism and the hosting of notorious “Berlin conference” (1884-85), were not so much motivated by commercial or civilizational interests, but rather, driven by his disdain for the British Gladstone administration, and domestic political rivalries in the context of Bismarck’s uncertain political future in Germany after Wilhelm I.

Despite these contributions, the book falls short of critically examining the legacy of German colonialism. The six chapters dealing with “every-day colonial life” normalize extraction and violence by framing it in purely functional terms, and one can clearly depict an overcompensating strand throughout the book, which seeks to underline themes beyond “resistance and violence” instead of situating the “every-day” within the context of dominance and exploitation.

Though Gründer and Hiery rightly criticize the myth of the “good German colonizer” and his “loyal natives”, which was constructed to highlight ‘German superiority’ vis-à-vis other European colonial powers (frequently utilized) during the NS-regime, and somehow continues to be a popular myth, the book could have done more to confront this myth head on.

Hilke Thoda-Arora’s chapter on ‘colonial exhibitions’ (Völkerschauen), which were very popular in Germany and Belgium, is in an interesting account of how these exhibitions evoked a sense of “civilizational superiority”, which fueled “colonial adventurism” among spectators. Yet, the chapter, and the book-at large, fail to show how the legacy of Völkerschauen and “othering” more broadly, which are closely linked to German intellectuals’ heavy involvement in the creation of race science and craniology, continue to influence German’s present conception of Africans, and other people of color. These more ambitious questions would have not only made the book more accessible beyond the academy, but would have also allowed readers to realize that the origins of the politics of nostalgia shaping right-wing populism can to some extent be traced to Germany’s (and the West’s at large) unresolved colonial pasts.

Though the book mentions important contemporary debates surrounding remembrance in the context of monuments, , and children’s books, which have gained some attention in German media recently as well, there are deeper intellectual and societal questions to grapple with. The public discourse following the exceptional “wave” of migrants and refugees to Germany, which has de-facto normalized highly problematic if not racist points of view in mainstream discourse, and the subsequent rise of far-right violence demonstrate this. The continuation of empire nostalgia and racism aren’t monopolized by the AFD, which continues to poll at around 14%. One just has to listen to some members of the center-right’s (CDU) Bavarian sister party CSU (the former German development (!) minister said that all African men spend their money on is alcohol and drugs, the current (!) Bavarian interior minister referred to a black German singer with the N-word and the party at large continues to frame migrants and refugees as a danger) to understand that these ideas also influence the “mainstream.”  

Controversially, Winfried Streitkamp’s chapter on warfare, resistance, and use of force questions whether the genocide against the Herero and Nama should be referred to as such, and whether it should be understood within the wider context of a history of genocides perpetrated by Germany. Without elaborating on the ample historical evidence, (If interested read this book by Prof. Jürgen Zimmerer) just consider the “extinction command” by German commanding officer Lothar von Trotha who ordered in 1904: 

Within the German border, every Herero is to be shot with or without rifle, with or without cattle, I will not take in any more women or children, drive them back to their people or shoot them.

The denialist account articulated in the book, is especially relevant given the contemporary hypocritical and deeply troubling approach of the German government’s recognition of the genocide. After former speaker of parliament Norbert Lammert called on Germany to acknowledge the genocide in 2015, the German government initially committed to recognition, and there was some hope that Germany would find a resolution with Namibia, as well as individual Herero and Nama victims and activists. Yet since, Germany has refrained from utilizing the term “genocide” within the context of ongoing bilateral negotiations with Namibia, since fall 2015. Feeling excluded from the state-to-state talks, Herero and Nama representatives have separately filed for a class action lawsuit against Germany in the New York’s Southern District Court seeking reparations. Judges are currently deliberating on the admissibility of the case. Part of Germany’s defense strategy in the deliberation hearings included the repulsive argument that the international obligations under the 1948 definition of the term “genocide” cannot be retrospective. Meanwhile, German government envoy for Namibia Ruprecht Polenz (CDU) has ruled out personal preparations. In the context of continuous denial, and failure to speak with the victims directly, Germany not also fails the Herero and Nama, but also loses considerable moral authority in international affairs. In the context of the recognition of the Armenian genocide by the German parliament in 2016, and the subsequent appeal to Turkey to recognize the “dark sides” of its history, Germany’s moral authority to lecture any country on the politics of memory is greatly diminished.

Returning to Gründer and Hiery’s work, it is shocking that a book that seeks to provide a “comprehensive and scholarly perspective on German colonialism” did not include any perspectives from historians from former German colonies. As Jürgen Zimmerer’s and Namibian Vitjitua Ndjiharine’s ongoing photo project “Visual History of Colonial Genocide” show, these collaborations unearth important insights and contest a memorialization of German colonialism, which remains to be decolonized and urgently needs to engage scholars from former colonies. As T.S. Elliott writes in his poem Four Quartets:

Time present and time past. Are both perhaps present in time future. And time future contained in time past. If all time is eternally present  All time is unredeemable. What might have been is an abstraction. Remaining a perpetual possibility. Only in a world of speculation. What might have been and what has been. Point to one end, which is always present.

* If you are interested in initiatives that attempt to grapple with German colonial history? Follow Koloniales Erbe, Mapping Postkolonial, and Berlin Postcolonial.  (On the topic of contemporary racism in Germany consider reading Mohamed Amjahid’s book Unter Weißen) .

When is a coup a coup?

Image credit Philimon Bulawayo (Reuters).

In recent times when militaries in Burkina Faso, Egypt, Madagascar and Mali suspended civilian rule, they were subsequently suspended by regional actors. From a continental standpoint, these suspensions were in line with the African Union’s (AU) mandate to challenge unconstitutional transitions of power. Then came Zimbabwe.

On November 21st, 2017, President Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe stepped down from the presidency after 37 years in power, a landmark moment for Zimbabwe. The events leading up to his ouster, had all the hallmarks of a classic coup d’état. Though Mugabe’s regime had been in crisis for a while, the events of late 2017 were instigated by the Zimbabwean military. Tanks filled the streets and soldiers took over policing as the military commandeered the state broadcaster. Mugabe was held under house arrest. At one point, Mugabe flanked by generals read out a statement which was supposed to be his resignation. What was striking, however, was military spokespeople appearing on television to assure the population that it “was not a military takeover,” during this period of uncertainty. Not surprisingly, it left many to scratch their heads. “Zimbabwe’s military takeover was the world’s strangest coup,” read a headline on CNN. On the Washington Post, an “explainer” by one of its reporters tried to explain “when a coup is not a coup.”

One institution whose response remained under-analyzed was the AU.

Considering that the AU is legally bound to support member state governments in such situations, why did it not intervene in Zimbabwe even when the Chairperson of the Commission, Moussa Faki Mahamat, expressed concern at the situation and the Head of the AU, Alpha Condé, stated that the crisis “seem[ed] like a coup”? One reason may be that there was a difference of opinion among AU bureaucrats. The AU’s Commissioner for Peace and Security, Smail Chergui, pronounced that what had transpired was “not a coup according to African Union rules.” Chergui further stated that the situation in Zimbabwe, with its lack of violence and Mugabe having “left in honor”, did not qualify as a crisis or an extraordinary situation. Namely, the transition was seen as the outcome of political dialogue that did not warrant AU intervention.

Still, the AU’s Constitutive Act, expresses the organization’s “condemnation and rejection of unconstitutional changes of governments” and it is clear that concerns were raised regarding the military’s role in this transition. Therefore, even if the organization chose not to categorize this “guardian coup” as an unconstitutional change of government, despite what is mandated in Zimbabwe’s constitution, the lack of conversation surrounding this change in power is worrying.

The initial reaction harkens to the privileged position that Mugabe held within the AU, but the lack of action on the AU’s part, suggests an implicit support for a military that was able to do what the AU has been unable, or unwilling, to on multiple occasions in the past.

As alluded to earlier, the August election in Kenya was problematic but considered relatively credible and fair according to a number of international election observers, including the AU and its more established counterpart, the EU. While the AU is often challenged on its positions regarding elections due to its purported biases in support of fellow member states, the EU is often recognized for its objectivity in election observation missions. Still, both organizations, considered the election to be in line with accepted electoral protocols. However, soon after it was held, the election was nullified by the Kenyan Supreme Court calling attention to the failed nature of the process. Its familiarity with the Kenyan situation should have given the AU a substantial edge over its Western counterparts and enabled it to call attention to irregularities in the process rather than endorse an election that was clearly not up to par. But the AU did not.

Both the Kenyan election and the Zimbabwean ‘non-coup’ raise questions as to the AU’s role in supporting democratic processes the continent. The AU is acutely aware of the fragility of its position and has expressed the need for reform if the organization is to succeed in undertaking its mandate. In January 2017, a Report on the Proposed Recommendations for the Institutional Reform of the African Union prepared by Rwanda’s President Paul Kagame highlighted that the AU’s inability to consistently implement its decisions, along with the issues at the leadership level, has led to “a dysfunctional organization in which member states see limited value, global partners find little credibility, and our citizens have no trust.” So, while the acknowledgment of these shortcomings is laudable, such efforts are overshadowed by the failure to act on crucial political matters. The AU’s inability to undertake its current commitments raises concerns regarding its ability to reform. The handling of the events that transpired in Kenya and Zimbabwe contribute to the lack of trust in the AU’s capacity to ensure that African countries are truly able to speak with one voice.  One problem with the advice is that the messenger himself, Paul Kagame, bended rules himself to stay in power for a long time; in his case probably till 2034.

Cape Town’s water woes are the norm for the city’s black residents

Image via Wikimedia Commons.

If you are someone who likes to stand under the shower for more than two minutes, Cape Town, South Africa’s tourist hub, is not for you. With the city’s dams at record low levels, Capetonians are preparing for what has dramatically been called “Day Zero” (now postponed to mid-May) – the day when the taps run dry and army and police patrol designated water collection points. In the imaginations of many, desperate residents will battle in a post-apocalyptic scenario for access to their 25 liters of water per day. Capetonians are being told that desalinization plants will be ready by March. Although these will provide some measure of relief, Cape Town will continue to face water restrictions.

By all accounts the situation in the city is dire and South Africa’s politics make it even more difficult. With Cape Town being run by the opposition DA (Democratic Alliance), there is little doubt that the ruling ANC (African National Congress) must be enjoying watching its nemesis squirm. The DA is blaming the ANC for the crisis. The ANC, of course, blames the DA. The back and forth, however, is more than a “he said, she said,” it is an acrimonious struggle over the DA’s attempt to maintain its image as the party that represents “good governance.” Since the DA won Cape Town’s local elections in 2006, it has staked its political reputation on portraying itself as a less corrupt and more efficient city manager than the ANC. These claims have been continually dogged by accusations that its “efficiency” is reserved for the wealthy (predominantly white) areas of the city, while the Black poor continue to suffer discrimination. The DA is accused of creating a “First World” mirage for the (white) wealthy off the back of inadequate services for the poor and Black. It is the Cape Town of sparkling beaches, cable car rides and international chefs that is marketed to the rest of the world as the proof of the DA’s record, and it is this representation which is gradually imploding as the DA finds itself scrambling to hold the falling pieces together. Black Cape Town is emerging as the DA’s true representation.

The questions of identity and race run deeper, however, than the DA. The panic over “Day Zero” reveals South Africa’s ongoing refusal to look north of the border in imagining its position in the world. While the press is going wild over the day that the taps will run dry, it turns out that most of Africa’s urban residents do not have access to piped water in their homes. Day Zero, minus the army, would make Cape Town part of the norm, rather than the exception in urban Africa. In most African cities, the large majority queue for their water at public water points and carry it back to homes in buckets and jerry cans. People buy water tanks, install filtration systems, and pay tankers to come and provide this scarce commodity. While the problem in many of these places might be poor infrastructure and governance rather than the lack of water per se, the everyday experience is very similar. To describe Cape Town then as being the first city to “run out of water” is in some sense, incorrect. It will perhaps be one of the first cities where those accustomed to easy access face life-changing restrictions.

In a city which previously had flowing water and functional indoor plumbing, it is fair to panic at its demise. The panic, however, is arguably not only about the water shortage. Cape Town’s water crisis threatens to reveal Khayelitsha as more representative of the city than Camps Bay. It threatens to force South Africans to realize that their cities might in fact be more comparable to Luanda and Nairobi than to New York and London. In imploding the DA good governance myth it also signals to wealthy, especially white South Africans, that not even their favorite political party can place a separation between them and the conditions of the Black majority. For in fact, the Cape Town water crisis is not just about repositioning South African cities to the rest of the continent, but towards the conditions of the majority. 

The water crisis forces not only Cape Town but all South Africa’s cities, to face one of their foundational facts: not everyone has always had (or even has) functional indoor plumbing. South Africa’s cities were never made for everyone. They have also never been the bastions of Global North modernity that wealthy residents like to imagine they are. Poorer, usually Black South Africans, have been dealing with water scarcity for decades. What is new is for the wealthy to have to realize that they are not living in the Global North; that their lush lifestyles cannot cushion them from the realities that they choose to ignore: that South African cities’ modernity is built on a myth that masks the everyday challenges that the majority face. Those cities in South Africa and across the world that have been ignoring the realities of global urban racialized inequality might have to accept that as many scholars are increasingly suggesting, African urbanism is the norm, not the exception.

Cape Town’s water woes are the norm for urban black Africans

If you are someone who likes to stand under the shower for more than two minutes, Cape Town, South Africa’s tourist hub, is not for you. With the city’s dams at record low levels, Capetonians are preparing for what has dramatically been called “Day Zero” (now postponed to mid-May) – the day when the taps run dry and army and police patrol designated water collection points. In the imaginations of many, desperate residents will battle in a post-apocalyptic scenario for access to their 25 liters of water per day. Capetonians are being told that desalinization plants will be ready by March. Although these will provide some measure of relief, Cape Town will continue to face water restrictions.

By all accounts the situation in the city is dire and South Africa’s politics make it even more difficult. With Cape Town being run by the opposition DA (Democratic Alliance), there is little doubt that the ruling ANC (African National Congress) must be enjoying watching its nemesis squirm. The DA is blaming the ANC for the crisis. The ANC, of course, blames the DA. The back and forth, however, is more than a “he said, she said,” it is an acrimonious struggle over the DA’s attempt to maintain its image as the party that represents “good governance.” Since the DA won Cape Town’s local elections in 2006, it has staked its political reputation on portraying itself as a less corrupt and more efficient city manager than the ANC. These claims have been continually dogged by accusations that its “efficiency” is reserved for the wealthy (predominantly white) areas of the city, while the Black poor continue to suffer discrimination. The DA is accused of creating a “First World” mirage for the (white) wealthy off the back of inadequate services for the poor and Black. It is the Cape Town of sparkling beaches, cable car rides and international chefs that is marketed to the rest of the world as the proof of the DA’s record, and it is this representation which is gradually imploding as the DA finds itself scrambling to hold the falling pieces together. Black Cape Town is emerging as the DA’s true representation.

The questions of identity and race run deeper, however, than the DA. The panic over “Day Zero” reveals South Africa’s ongoing refusal to look north of the border in imagining its position in the world. While the press is going wild over the day that the taps will run dry, it turns out that most of Africa’s urban residents do not have access to piped water in their homes. Day Zero, minus the army, would make Cape Town part of the norm, rather than the exception in urban Africa. In most African cities, the large majority queue for their water at public water points and carry it back to homes in buckets and jerry cans. People buy water tanks, install filtration systems, and pay tankers to come and provide this scarce commodity. While the problem in many of these places might be poor infrastructure and governance rather than the lack of water per se, the everyday experience is very similar. To describe Cape Town then as being the first city to “run out of water” is in some sense, incorrect. It will perhaps be one of the first cities where those accustomed to easy access face life-changing restrictions.

In a city which previously had flowing water and functional indoor plumbing, it is fair to panic at its demise. The panic, however, is arguably not only about the water shortage. Cape Town’s water crisis threatens to reveal Khayelitsha as more representative of the city than Camps Bay. It threatens to force South Africans to realize that their cities might in fact be more comparable to Luanda and Nairobi than to New York and London. In imploding the DA good governance myth it also signals to wealthy, especially white South Africans, that not even their favorite political party can place a separation between them and the conditions of the Black majority. For in fact, the Cape Town water crisis is not just about repositioning South African cities to the rest of the continent, but towards the conditions of the majority. 

The water crisis forces not only Cape Town but all South Africa’s cities, to face one of their foundational facts: not everyone has always had (or even has) functional indoor plumbing. South Africa’s cities were never made for everyone. They have also never been the bastions of Global North modernity that wealthy residents like to imagine they are. Poorer, usually Black South Africans, have been dealing with water scarcity for decades. What is new is for the wealthy to have to realize that they are not living in the Global North; that their lush lifestyles cannot cushion them from the realities that they choose to ignore: that South African cities’ modernity is built on a myth that masks the everyday challenges that the majority face. Those cities in South Africa and across the world that have been ignoring the realities of global urban racialized inequality might have to accept that as many scholars are increasingly suggesting, African urbanism is the norm, not the exception.

Doing the Ramaphosa Shuffle

The momentum of the post-Zuma renewal and the alacrity with which South African institutions have fought back against their tormentors has been heartening and unexpected. All South Africans are entitled to a great deal of relief at the developments of the last few weeks, and more than a measure of satisfaction at the dramatic defenestration of Zuma and the Guptas.

But there are dangers in getting too swept up in the current mood and its attendant faith in the promise of a competent state and a buoyant investor class.

The optimism has been carried most forcefully by those who tend to blame every unfulfilled promise of the liberalized economy on the failure of previous governments to truly win the approval of business. Purveyors of this theory are agog because if there is any politician that can break the trend and ignite the animal spirits of investors in droves, it’s South Africa’s new President, Cyril Ramaphosa. Accordingly, provided that his clean-up operation is allowed to proceed unhindered, we need only sit back and let the free market whirl us out of the economic malaise of the last two decades.

Unfortunately, there is very to recommend this theory, as either diagnosis or prescription.

The Mbeki administration bent over backwards to assuage the concerns of a skittish business class. In the National Treasury and a few other agencies it built pockets of efficient bureaucracy which ensured that the government’s overall mandate stayed within the bounds set by financial markets and overseas investors. Extensive liberalization allowed South African corporates to remodel themselves, pursuing narrow specialization on “core competencies” through global alliances and acquisitions. This enabled many companies like Sasol, Naspers and Standard Bank, to develop into highly successful, internationally competitive firms that have returned enormous value to their shareholders.

Unfortunately, Mbeki’s liberalizing reforms did not help the country in any way towards the kind of industrial restructuring needed to find jobs for the 36% of the workforce who have been searching in vain, or giving up entirely. Only for a very brief period prior to the 2008 crash, lifted by swells of local and global assets, did private investment creep above 15% of GDP. In the early years of the Zuma administration it ticked back down to Mbeki-era levels of around 12,5%, and has since sunk below that. For workers, the economic outlook over the last decade has been exceedingly dire, but corporates have found a way to remain highly profitable— largely by migrating their operations overseas.

Corporate fortunes have become significantly detached from domestic economic conditions. Ensuring the short-term confidence of the business community in this environment turns entirely on demonstrating that the state will not interfere with globalizing dynamics, and that its spending plans wont create macroeconomic imbalances. Winning favor in this way may lead to one or two new investment projects at the margin, but it has proved utterly hopeless as a strategy for generating the deep changes in industrial structure that are required.

Anyone who has looked at the issue without ideological blinkers understands that South Africa’s economic crisis is structural, not conjunctural, and its untangling requires radical economic transformation of some kind or other. Unfortunately, the variant offered up by Zuma in his autumn years offers little to inspire. Its main thrust is diverting state procurement budgets more overtly towards the nurturing of black capitalists. The underlying assumption is presumably the same that crops up repeatedly in ANC strategic documents, namely that black capitalists can be expected to behave differently, and more patriotically, than their white counterparts.

I can think of no better refutation of that theory than Ramaphosa’s own recent biography. Shanduka, the company through which he built his fortune, was recently named in the Paradise Papers for its offshore tax havens, which are likely to represent only a fraction of the profit shifting in which he is implicated through various subsidiary holdings like MTN and Lonmin. As a major shareholder and director of the latter, Ramaphosa displayed precious little patriotic sentiment in 2012, when he leaned on a provincial police chief to break up striking workers who he labelled as ‘criminals’. His complicity, direct or indirect, in the ensuing massacre of 34 mineworkers by police — generally known as the Marikana Massacre — has haunted him since. (Last week in Parliament Ramaphosa offered up “healing and atonement” for what he reduced to a “tragedy.”  The widows of the murdered miners said they’ve heard his empty promises before.)

Ultimately, if South Africa is to shift out of the minerals- and energy-dependent industrial formation that carries such a sordid history, it will have to rely on the only proven means of late industrialization: a strong, mission-oriented state capable of guiding and allocating capital independently of clientelistic interests. Radical economic transformation of the Zuma variety should be resisted if only because it forecloses on this path to development by once again diluting the boundaries of the state, allowing patronage to supplant planning.

To deliver on the enormous hope South Africans have invested in him, and to construct the instruments necessary for development, Ramaphosa can’t rest at renewing the state that Mbeki built – he has to radically restructure it. Critical to this will be displacing the National Treasury from the apex of inter-governmental power. It’s enormous authority and corporate efficiency have been a crucial check on corruption, but have also been deployed at holding back every modest challenge to economic orthodoxy that has issued to date. The trick for reformers will be in retaining its internal policing functions while repealing Treasury’s ability to dictate strategic policy. Broader changes must also target the social networks in which the economic cluster of the state operates. High-level Treasury functionaries have tended to go on to executive jobs in finance following their service. This brings to mind Japan’s famous “descent from heaven,” in which bureaucrats from elite pilot agencies took up post-retirement positions in the industrial sector, strengthening collaborative relationships between the state and business—except that in South Africa’s case the result has not been to build coherence around productive upgrading, but to make policy more sensitive to rentier interests.

In a developmental state, history teaches, macroeconomic ‘prudence’ can no longer reign supreme, it must be subjected to the demands of industrial policy. Power and capacity will therefore have to be redirected toward industrial planning boards – away from economists and in favor of engineers.

As long as the decision over when and how much to invest remains in private hands, ‘business confidence’ of some kind will be a necessary element of any successful economy. But if structural change is the goal, it will have to be a confidence of a different kind, achieved on radically different terms, underpinned by a different calculus of power. The promise of profits and cheap capital from participation in state-orchestrated industrial programs should be undergirded by punitive measures against firms which don’t comply or which abuse subsidies. Downsizing and financialized business strategies should be deterred with strict controls and regulations. Transformation and racial diversification in the corporate sector should be pursued, not simply as an end in itself, but as a concomitant of this strategy of reconfiguring the terms of state-capital relations.

In Korea’s famous industrialization drive, those found guilty of capital flight received extremely harsh jail sentences. Ramaphosa’s South Africa would do well to adopt the same (although the president may have to issue himself a pardon before signing this into effect).

Unfortunately, pursuing the development of a strong disciplinary apparatus will always be a path of high resistance. South African capitalists see even the most innocuous impulse of state planning as a stalking horse for expropriation and socialism. The country’s deep entanglement in global financial markets and the advanced internationalization of the domestic corporate sector have provided powerful tools and incentives for conservative interests to resist economic change.

Even in the absence of these challenges, nothing whatsoever in Ramaphosa’s personal history or political orbit suggests that he would voluntarily opt for the difficult path of reorganizing the state. If his rise to power was not dependent on the largesse of the corporate class, he certainly counts on their backing as a vital element of his coalition. His own political instincts have no doubt been realigned through his two-decade stint as one of South Africa’s richest black businessmen (he started his political life as a founder of the National Unions of Mineworkers). Within the party, his most high-profile allies are avowed centrists, and those who may differ with him on economic policy, like the SACP, have shown little capacity for getting their way.

If nothing in his background portends an ambitious agenda, little in the immediate conjuncture looks set to push him there either. The sheer despondency of the Zuma years has granted Ramaphosa unprecedented leeway. Even if he makes no move on underlying structural issues, he stands to yield enormous goodwill from the relatively easier and more immediate task of cleansing and normalizing state bodies. The disaster of the Zuma years, in other words, has adjusted the expectations of the South African electorate so far downwards that Ramaphosa could successfully claim a mantle of renewal by expunging the worst excesses of his predecessor, but doing little else. There can be little doubt Ramaphosa will try to ride out this grace period as far as possible, feeding off the atmosphere of hope to delay deeper challenges.

If there was ever an indication that some glimmer of the former unionist survives, and that Ramaphosa may depart slightly from a strictly market-sanctioned program, it was his sponsorship of a national minimum wage during his Deputy Presidency. Unfortunately, the subsequent history of that legislation augurs badly for any such hopes. Conceived initially by COSATU policy thinkers as a ‘springboard’ for lifting wages across the economy (and not simply as a bulwark against destitution), it has since been transformed beyond recognition. Its latest instantiation comes with exclusions for the most vulnerable workers and looks set to pare existing sectoral determinations downwards rather securing a basis for higher demands. It’s also packaged with a raft of anti-union laws that will drastically contain the disruptive power of workers.

The afterlife of a brief spell of radicalism which Zuma opportunistically allowed into the party may force Ramaphosa into a few progressive platforms. The prospects of more assertive land redistribution, free tertiary education, and national health insurance are significant and highly welcome. But every other indication suggests that aside from these, Ramaphosa will revert to an old method of dressing neoliberal fundamentals in tokenistic social policy. The signs point to the same kind of stabilized dysfunction that existed under Mbeki, in which a more competent state keeps the economy on life support but defers any hope of recovery.

Historically, strong developmental institutions in catch-up countries, like those that lifted the Asian Tigers into high-income status, have only emerged in highly particular conditions where external circumstances aligned the interests of state and capital, and forced elites on a path of economic upgrading. We cannot will these conditions into existence in contemporary South Africa, and Ramaphosa certainly won’t bring them about for us. Any pressure that forces his administration up from a low road of state renewal onto the higher path of state reconstruction will have to arise from below. The most effective means of generating that pressure is by leveling wage and income claims that can’t be met within the existing productive structure, with business’ existing expectations of profit. Only at the prospect of serious social unrest and the loss of electoral support will the government take strong measures to make capital’s profitability contingent on delivering jobs and high investment. Forging developmentalism through worker’s power is also the only means of avoiding the usual zero-sum trade offs between growth and ecological and social concerns.

It’s for this reason that the left can’t afford to heed the injunction, heard regularly these days, to ‘grant Ramaphosa the space to govern’. Any space he is given now will be used to further legitimize a program limited to restoring the status quo ante, in which the relief and hopefulness of the moment will be used to inure the public against demands for radical redress. Difficult as it may be to agitate in such conditions, the urgent task of Ramaphosa’s critics on the left will be to remind us that purging the Gupta shadow state, welcome as it is, is not enough.

Resisting the backsliding on the national minimum wage, and turning it once again into a vehicle for deep redistribution, presents a promising site on which to revive a struggle for more meaningful change. A joint campaign for a minimum wage built on principles of justice rather than economic expediency could provide a platform for uniting trade union federations and radical parties – ensuring the left finds its feet and isn’t left spellbound by the “Cyril effect”.

After Morgan Tsvangirai — the future for opposition politics in Zimbabwe

Zimbabweans will soon vote for who will be their president for the next five years. There is no date set, but it looks like an election will take place “in four to five months.” One striking characteristic of this upcoming poll is that neither of the two figures who dominated the country’s politics for the last two decades — Robert Mugabe and Morgan Tsvangirai — will be in the running. In November 2017, Mugabe was removed from power by the military and Tsvangirai sadly passed away nearly two weeks ago.

Mugabe’s departure after 37 years in power, represented a change in Zimbabwean party leadership, even if not in political leadership. For the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) the passing of Tsvangirai does the same. The analyses of the legacies of the respective leaders have been markedly different. With the exception of hardcore Mugabeists, ZANU-PF partisans were happy to see the president go. Tsvangirai’s life, however, was  celebrated; his accomplishments as a trade unionist, hero of the people and opposition leader, dominated headlines.

In the collective memory of Zimbabweans everywhere, Tsvangirai will be the brave face of opposition, an unlikely yet tenacious adversary to Mugabe. That Tsvangirai was an icon is indisputable. He will forever be enshrined in the public’s consciousness. Tributes keep pouring in, from close friends and colleagues to politicians around Africa and the world. Even Zimbabwean President Emmerson Mnangagwa, who at one point was accused of coordinating state-sanctioned intimidation during the contested 2008 presidential elections in which Tsvangirai opposed Mugabe, noted: “When we write the history of this country, we cannot leave out the participation and role that the former prime minister played in the effort to entrench democratic values in this country.”

But while we should honor him, it is equally important to assess his legacies especially given the current environment of political uncertainty in the run-up to the elections.

Tsvangirai’s rise to prominence, first as the Secretary General of the Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions (ZCTU), and then in 1999, as the head of the largest grassroots opposition movement and political party (the MDC), was characterized by courage and determination. By 2000, ordinary Zimbabweans, emboldened by Tsvangirai and the MDC, began to participate in a new era of resistance politics, taking on the repressive Mugabe regime at the ballot box and on the streets. In the years after the formation of the MDC, Tsvangirai continued to inspire. Pastor Evan Mawarire, whose #ThisFlag movement at one point appeared to capture more opposition energies than MDC, noted that his own courage to face the Mugabe regime came on the shoulders of Tsvangirai and his initial cohort of stalwarts. Mawarire argued that without Tsvangirai’s persistent defiance over the decades, the broader democracy movement in Zimbabwe would have long floundered. In this vein, perhaps Tsvangirai’s most profound and long-lasting legacy is spurring the people into political participation, by showing that an alternative collective social imaginary and political future were possible.

But Tsvangirai was also a controversial figure within opposition politics. He had his detractors. Early on, senior party members noted their concern with his increasingly dictatorial style, and the MDC split into factions. These fractures never healed. Like many Zimbabwean opposition politicians before him, Tsvangirai made a series of strategic blunders, including vetoing a 2005 MDC national council vote to nominate candidates for election in that year’s senate vote, failing to capitalize the gains made by the MDC during its years as part of the government of national unity (2009-2013), and installing not one but three Vice Presidents to contend for the party presidency upon his death.

In the days preceding and immediately after Tsvangirai’s death, a succession battle ensued. Nelson Chamisa, one of the MDC’s three previous vice presidents has prevailed as party leader for the next 12 months, after his installation at an emergency national executive council meeting. But his ascension remains contested. Tsvangirai’s funeral was marred by reports of violence perpetrated against Thokozani Khupe, the sole MDC vice president actually elected by the party congress to that position. Chamisa reportedly used Tsvangirai’s burial for political rallying purposes, stating that his ascension to head of the party fell within the constitutional guidelines of the MDC and that those who oppose him could easily be expelled from the party. A splintered MDC party in the mid-2000s and again in 2013 was easily out-maneuvered by a politically savvy ZANU-PF. Amid the current machinations, the party appears poised to fall prey to the same fate.

The discord within the MDC could also negatively impact the potential for coalition agreements and given the harsh reality that the MDC remains the only opposition party large enough to truly be in contention means that President Mnangagwa and ZANU-PF will go into the election season largely unchallenged. To many moderates, while ZANU-PF still represents the old-guard, it no longer embodies the repression and detritus of that old-guard. Rather, surprisingly, it represents stability and perhaps even progress, a claim that a year ago would have seemed impossible to make.

Searching for white genocide in South Africa

South African Football fans in Soweto during the World Cup in 2010. Image via Wikimedia Commons.

“I’m going to South Africa,” far-right UK media personality Katie Hopkins announced in January 2018, to cover the “racial war waged by black extremists who are systematically murdering white farmers.” Recently hired as a correspondent by the Rebel Media, Canada’s far-right website akin to Breitbart, Hopkins promised her feature length documentary about the “ethnic cleansing of white farmers” in South Africa would be the “first of its kind.”

This promise was immediately undercut, however, by competition from several other alt-right media personalities who also announced their own travel plans to the country at the start of this year. In the race to be the first to produce the definitive documentary on “white genocide” in South Africa, Hopkins was joined by Lauren Southern and Faith Goldy, both of whom were star contributors to the Rebel until last year. In South Africa, Southern also met up with Jonas Nilsson, the Swedish author of “Anarcho-Fascism: Nature Reborn” who is working on an identical film project. In the end, Goldy — who was recently fired from the Rebel after appearing on a neo-Nazi podcast — cancelled her trip at the last minute, citing unknown “outside interference” and a “failure of guaranteed security on the ground.” (Southern and Hopkins both had successful trips, although Hopkins claims that she was detained prior to departure for “spreading racial hatred”).

It should be noted that Rebel Media — clearly a major player in promoting this agenda — is deeply connected to the core of the Canadian conservative movement. Only after Goldy’s sympathetic coverage of the white supremacist rally in Charlottesville did the party begin to distance itself from the Rebel under its current “editorial direction,” and one of its founding directors, Hamish Marshall, ran the leadership campaign for the current Conservative leader Andrew Scheer, and has been  to run the party’s campaign in the next general election.

The plight of white South Africans has clearly become, in Goldy’s words, “the flavor of the month” on the far-right. While it is a remarkable coincidence that these media personalities all decided to undertake the same project both independently and simultaneously, attention to this issue had been growing in alt-right circles throughout 2017, with articles appearing in Breitbart, the Rebel, and on conservative video blogs. In the image of the beleaguered Afrikaner, it appears that these online commentators — whose work is predominantly obsessed with fear-mongering attacks on Muslims and refugees — have finally found a supposedly persecuted minority they can get behind.

What has sparked the attention of the far-right in particular are the high rates of violent burglaries against white farmers in South Africa, what Afrikaners call plaasmoorde or “farm murders.” Drawing primarily on interviews with survivors of violent attacks, Southern and Hopkins have both utilized the format of short, provocative videos uploaded to YouTube to deploy a narrative that these incidents are not regular burglaries, but rather systematic and politically-motivated acts of ethnic cleansing, approved by the South African government, and deliberately ignored by the international media. 

As the alt-right descends upon South Africa in search of white genocide, it is obvious that their concern-trolling for white South Africans is motivated, above all, by a domestic anti-immigration agenda. Deeply fearful of what happens when North American demographics shift and white people become a minority, what the alt-right really wants is a harrowing story about whites being “hunted to extinction” by a black majority which can be used to bolster the case for white supremacy at home.

Why white people? 

In their reporting, the alt-right portrays white South Africans as facing patterns of marginalization and violence which constitute a unique threat to their very existence as a people. In a video titled “Why White People?” Southern tries to explain why she has decided to focus on whites when violent crime is a problem faced by all South Africans. White people in South Africa face “actual discrimination,” she asserts, “and not in the SJW sense” of minorities in North America (Social Justice Warrior or SJW is a pejorative and dismissive alt-right term for left-wing activist). In Nilsson’s documentary The Boer Project, South Africa’s Black Economic Empowerment program — its affirmative action policies meant to address centuries of racial segregation and oppression — is referred to as “reverse apartheid.” Multiple segments linger on “white refugee camps,” as if the vast black shanty towns and slums did not also exist.

As for the violent crimes against white farmers, which are described in meticulously grisly, horrifying detail, the alt-right insists on characterizing them in terms of genocide and ethnic cleansing, suggesting that political forces are deliberately deploying violence to force white people off of their land — people tell Hopkins that within fifty to seventy years there will be no more white people in South Africa. The alt-right speculates that somebody must be training and funding the killers, and they suggest the possible complicity of the South African government, the African National Congress (ANC), and/or the police forces, who may be providing the murderers with “tacit support.”

One possible motive for the farm murders, the audience is intended to believe, is to advance the land redistribution agenda of the ANC, which threatens to eat away at the concentration of land under white control. Southern, appalled by the idea of taking away someone’s land based on their “skin color,” features a couple of interviews with black political representatives on this topic, including the ANC and Black First Land First, an outspoken yet marginal group whose sole function seems to be to defend the Guptas and the Zuma faction of the ANC. Southern later describes how in order to meet with these organizations she had to pretend to be a “self-hating SJW white person.”

The real target of the alt-right, however, is the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF), a populist left-wing party led by former ANC Youth leader Julius Malema, whose menacing image is featured prominently in most of these videos, along with images of EFF members singing and dancing in their characteristic red jumpsuits at political rallies. Not only is Malema a communist, we are warned, but the EFF is “inciting a new generation of young, disenfranchised black South Africans to fight back with violence.”

The central piece of evidence leveled against the EFF is their continued use of a popular anti-apartheid era protest song “Ayesaba Amagwala” which features lyrics typically translated as “Kill the boer, kill the farmer.” Afrikaner groups have complained that the song constitutes hate speech, but the song’s proponents have insisted that this interpretation is “vulgarized,” and that the lyrics target the system of apartheid, not white people. In 2012 the ANC agreed that it would no longer sing the song, but this move was likely motivated by Zuma’s attempts to isolate his rival Malema who was publicly associated with it. Not interested in context, Hopkins points to the song to conclude that the EFF’s rallying call is “the white man, he must die.”

This claim that the EFF is broadcasting its genocidal intentions through song takes on an even more conspiratorial note in an interview with one of Hopkin’s sources, Dr. Johan Burger. He estimates that “nationally, EFF members make up 30%—35% of the police force,” and that when the EFF sing “kill the boer,” its supporters “inside the police force understand that they have a political mandate to disregard — even facilitate — certain crimes, including the butchering of whites.” Dr. Burger even claims to have multiple sources tell him that the South African police force is “actively arming and facilitating farm attacks,” which Hopkins accepts as explosive evidence. Hoping to interrogate Malema about these claims in person, Hopkins has been taunting him on Twitter: “a big black man like you, afraid of a little white woman like me?”

With the spike in violent “hate crimes” against whites, and the looming threat of the South African government violently dispossessing white farmers of everything they have, the alt-right paints a picture of a beleaguered, God-fearing community “preparing for civil war.” It’s not surprising, then, to see that Southern’s trip was assisted by Suidlanders, a fringe Afrikaner civil defense group which has emergency plans “to prepare a Protestant Christian South African Minority for a coming violent revolution.” Suidlanders’ Simone Roche has made frequent appearances in alt-right media, including speaking to Faith Goldy for the Rebel, and has repeatedly appeared on Alex Jones’ conspiracy theorist website Infowars.

During her travels, Southern also visited with frequent far-right commentator Dan Roodt, the founder of the Pro-Afrikaans Action Group (which fights “for the rights of all Afrikaners and other people of European descent in South Africa”). Roodt is also the former deputy leader of the Front Nasionaal (National Front), a fringe white separatist party that lobbies for Afrikaner self-determination. In 2010 he was mocked by the Daily Show’s John Oliver for his “vintage bigotry,” and on South African television in 2015 he defended a petition calling for white South Africans’ “right of return” to Europe. 

Apartheid n ostalgia

Throughout their reporting, alt-right personalities appear to be fighting an inner impulse to praise the former apartheid system. Breaking with this pattern is Faith Goldy, who tweeted that she is “sincerely praying whites in South Africa can one day secede to live in peace amongst themselves, in a state they can call their own.” Partition into separate white and black states, of course, was the explicit objective of the architects of apartheid. For good measure, Goldy added “PS: Mandela was a commi and a terrorist xo.”

The alt-right rarely expresses similar outright support for apartheid, but this is complicated by their nostalgic disposition towards a supposedly better past. Southern, for example, refers to South Africa as “one of the world’s one-time greatest nations,” without specifying exactly when that descriptor applied. Later, letting her guard down in an interview with Canadian podcaster Stefan Molyneux, Southern says: “I know I’m not allowed to say it because of my complexion, but I’ll just quote what my black security guard outside my hotel told me, he literally told me [he] preferred living under apartheid.” 

Hopkins, on the other hand, writes that “apartheid ended more than 25 years ago,” before somewhat unconvincingly adding, “and that’s a good thing.” Constantly, however, her remarks veer into racist territory, as when she reflects upon the “violent lives in black settlements, where one man’s life is worth so little it is not even counted when it ends.” Worst of all is Hopkins’ video proudly demonstrating that white farmers and their black farmworkers can get along quite well, so long as the blacks “follow the rules” and there is no “outside interference” — a sociological analysis that seems remarkably similar to apologetics for slavery or apartheid.

It is in Southern’s interview with Molyneux, however, where the worst racism underlying the alt-right’s obsession with South Africa is truly revealed. It is there where Molyneux brings up the supposed “IQ problem” — he explained that the IQ difference between Sub-Saharan blacks and European whites is “absolutely enormous,” and therefore the demographics in South Africa creates a huge problem “when it comes to running a functional complex first world society,” and why “one-person-one-vote” might not be appropriate there. Southern not only agreed with all of this, but offered her own thoughts on how South Africa is governed by tribal Zulus who believe in witch doctors, and who are fundamentally different from African-Americans, declaring: “this is not a situation of highly assimilated top-of-the-population Africans.” During apartheid, this was a common racist argument used to deny black Africans voting rights. Every old propagandistic device in support of apartheid can be found here anew.

South Africa as the future of the West

Ultimately, the alt-right’s white nationalist field trip to South Africa is not really about Africa, but shoring up a domestic policy agenda which is anti-immigrant, anti-refugee, and anti-Muslim. This is evident from the start of Southern’s interview with Molyneux, who immediately describes her reporting as a “possible glimpse [into] what happens when whites slide into the minority” in the West. In the same interview, Southern suggests that the current government of South Africa is an example of what would happen if “SJWs” and Black Lives Matter were to be in power in North America. This is a view which is promoted by far-right Afrikaners as well; on the Suidlanders website, alongside videos fear-mongering about African and Muslim migrants in Europe, is a statement declaring that “South Africa’s present is the west’s future if it continues down its current path.”

Whether explicitly and implicitly, the defense of white supremacy at home is the ideological thread that underlines the entire alt-right attention to South African whites. Nobody wants the “Rainbow Nation” to fail more than these people do. The problem of violent crime in South Africa is real, but its victims deserve better than to be used as cynical props in a Canadian agenda of hate.

Africa is a Country in Wakanda

Wakanda is not a country in Africa, it is Africa. What this means is that Wakanda is not simply located in the center of Africa, as the map points out right at the start of Black Panther, but that it is shown to be a cumulative product of the entire African continent’s histories, politics, aesthetics, cultures and landscapes.

Afro-futurism is what emerges when we seek the meaning of the future in blackness. The form of utopian politics hard-wired into this view of the world is not hard to identify when we look at Black Panther, as well as at Nnedi Okorafor’s Lagoon and Who Fears Death, and Nisi Shawl’s Everfair. What these works have in common is the notion that the future of the globe depends on a becoming-black of the world. They situate global networks of black worlds as the center around which a new global or planetary order can be assembled.

Black Panther has left no stone unturned when it comes to incorporating the extraordinary geography that the continent is home to, as well as cultural elements such as clothing, hair, jewelry, body art and make-up. A Somali blogger beautifully deconstructed Black Panther’s fashion by illustrating the ways in which every single character’s look had been crafted in great detail based on painstaking and detailed research by Ruth Carter on various groups across the continent — Mursi lip plates from Ethiopia, hair woven with otijze paste in the style of Namibia’s Himba women, Kente scarves from Ghana and Basotho blankets from Lesotho, among dozens and dozens of such stunning details.

There is a kind of euphoria in seeing these appropriated, misrepresented and marginalized cultures come alive on the screen. But for us, it also raises some questions: If Wakanda is an isolated and hidden country that has successfully invented a dizzying array of technological implements and has a fiercely nationalist mentality, why have they not managed to generate their own unique culture? Why is it so easy, in spite of all the dressing up, to mistake Wakanda for Africa?

Why is Wakandan cultural life so devoid of its own, special brand of artifacts, fashion and language? In Wakanda, highly detailed and realistic renditions of ethno-aesthetic, sartorial elements from African countries geographically and culturally distant from each other co-exist despite Wakanda’s centuries long isolation from the rest of the continent, as well as the planet.

There are several reasons why Wakandan culture is so derivative.

Firstly, the Africa in Black Panther is all too familiar. Apart from the typical Hollywood futuristic gizmo, the world in the film is much too recognizable. Director and cowriter Ryan Coogler assembles a delightfully mixed bag of contemporary African iconographies touched up with the usual Hollywood futuristic sheen and tells us it is what a futuristic Africa looks like. But Wakanda is not futuristic enough. It is too rooted in an Africa we already know and inhabit and, thus, does not manage to really take flight into the imaginary.

At the end of Black Panther, T’Challa dreams of a new world order led by Wakanda. Like other global imaginaries built around blackness, his vision presupposes a tectonic power shift and a redrawing of the maps of global power. In a way, Black Panther exemplifies the ways in which Afro-futurism renders blackness as what is at stake in the future of the globe. And precisely for that reason, the utopian politics that are at the heart of the film are easy to grasp and endlessly exciting. But the same cannot be said for its aesthetics. What we find is that, while the film’s politics are beautifully utopian, its aesthetic is typically “anthropological.” The idea of Wakanda is radically utopian, but the formal way in which the film is designed is far from utopian.

In the Global North, Africa never seems to inspire radically new terms of representation. Africa  always presents itself as an entity grounded in a kind of anthropological reality. That is why, in his attempt to imagine a futuristic Africa, Coogler is content to simply reproduce Africa as it exists. He forgets that Africa as the subject of art, and Africa as what is artistically represented, are two different things, and that the gap between the two is where the imagination can soar.

How is it that in a futuristic Africa, a Himba woman looks similar to how she appears in National Geographic magazine? In Coogler’s mind, as in the minds of many writers and artists, there is really no difference between the Himba woman as a ethnographic fact of the African world  and the form in which she is artistically represented as a figure of the future. A truly utopian gesture would have been to be a bit more inventive. The fetish for “tribal” culture, nativism and indigeneity is also illustrated in the design elements for the all-female Wakandan warriors, known as Dora Milaje. Senior visual development illustrator Anthony Francisco said that these women’s look was inspired by a Filipino tribe called Ifuego.

More evidence of an archetypal anthropological imaginary are the bare-bodied duels on top of a waterfall, the long traditional ceremonies involving drinking panther blood, the making of life-giving potions with a mortar and pestle, the encounters with ancestors under the obligatory acacia tree, and the oddly herbal nature of vibranium. Oh yes, the glowing, throbbing purple vibranium is squeezed out of a really exotic African flower. The Jabari tribe, who exist autonomously in Wakanda and are also quite wealthy, have descended from gorillas and use barking as their war cry and decorate their palace with twine and twig art.

 The essence of science fiction and fantasy is invention in its most radical sense. There is a distinct pleasure that comes from seeing familiar iconographies reinvented to the point of being unrecognizable. There is a place in fiction, a border point, where our knowledge of a place intersects with a completely reimagined version of that place. It is from this threshold that the futuristic derives its power, and it is this threshold that separates Wakanda from Africa. To let Wakanda fulfill its utopian function, we cannot allow it to coincide with Africa, which is what the movie does. It suggests that Wakanda is nothing but the sum total of Africa’s existing cultural artifacts and practices. A truly utopian aesthetic would remind us not to mistake Wakanda for Africa by maintaining a distance between the two, where something mindblowingly imaginative can take place. Even though we see Africa in Wakanda, it should be an Africa that is so completely re-imagined that it suspends everything we thought we knew of Africa.

But an ethnographically diverse, United Nations of Africa-type of scenario is what Wakandan culture seems to be about. The language being spoken is Xhosa, which is absurd because the Black Panther budget could surely have whipped up several linguistics experts to create a new Wakandan language for the scant number of scenes it’s spoken in. In the history of sci-fi/ fantasy, the invention of language has always been a generative element of world building. Think Tolkien’s Elvish, with its complete linguistic archive, or Dothraki in George R. R. Martin’s Game of Thrones. It would have been a real treat to hear Wakandans speak a whole new language, in part, because a utopian Africa on film deserves a new language. That would have been the futuristic thing to do.

Secondly, Wakanda is bizarrely and inexplicably postcolonial!

Wakandans seem to come armed with all kinds of intellectual discourse opposing colonialism. In postcolonial literature, authors will often write back against centuries of Western “othering” of colonized people and their culture. Several postcolonial novels will have white or European characters who are depicted as exotic or strange or comical, and their culture is mocked and rendered somewhat absurd. In Black Panther, plenty of othering jokes abound. Okoye says, “Guns, so primitive,” and Shuri gets the big laughs when she calls CIA Agent Ross a “colonizer.”

Why are Wakandas so fluent in a postcolonial comedic sensibility when they have never even experienced colonialism? Teaching white students in the West about the legacy of colonialism is like pulling teeth. There is neither empathy nor interest. In Wakanda, however, there is no one living with colonial conquest or its aftermaths. Why, then, do they sound so postcolonial? It seems that when Wakandans Netflix and chill, they are binging on Battle of Algiers and 12 Years a Slave. In their curriculum, there is perhaps an overload of Edward Said, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Chinua Achebe and Paul Gilroy.

This oppositional postcolonial politics constantly reinforces existing stereotypes about Africa and Africans. Reversing the dynamics of others, rejecting racist or nativist stereotypes, is part of the comedic underlayer of Black Panther. Jabari threatens Agent Ross with cannibalism, and then bursts out laughing because Ross falls for it; Jabari then informs him that his kids are actually vegetarian. This is similar to Okoye using the word “primitive” to typecast the white world. By implanting these reversals, these lines only highlight and perform their presence. We weren’t really thinking of Wakanda or even Africans as being either primitive or cannibalistic, but suddenly the jokes circle around it, reminding us that, actually, these things are indeed still a cross to bear for Africans everywhere.

The truth is that Black Panther, at the end of day, emerges from a very American imagination. To the extent that it aims to express the natal rupture experienced by African-Americans and the perpetual legacy of traumatic uprooting that is brought upon them, Black Panther beautifully evokes it. It fills the heart to see the loss that an unmoored and orphaned Eric feels, and the sense of solidarity he has with his black brothers who continue to suffer worldwide. Cooger and team have been heavily criticized for depicting Eric as an aggressive, toxic, woman-murdering war veteran but the Wakandans have been depicted somewhat unfairly too, even though they stand in for a powerful African utopia that is meant to reshape the global black experience.

Africans are imagined in the most Western way possible in this film. Wakanda’s tribalist, isolationist, ethno-nationalist, lineage-obsessed mentality makes them insensitive and tone-deaf to the need for a true black solidarity. The long-standing rift between the Africans and the African-Americans has been raised to a fever pitch in the film. In a way, this insensitivity is blamed on the Wakandan’s old-school ways, an assertion that could have been mitigated and reframed had the utopia that is Wakanda been rooted in a less anthropological imaginary. It feels disappointing in the end to realize that, no matter how cerebral and illuminated the filmmakers are in terms of history and politics, they end up falling into the trap of showing us an Africa of the Western imagination.

Comic book adaptations continue to evolve and mature over time. Often, they completely reinvent their imagery and aesthetic approaches. We can only hope that the Black Panther franchise can fully embrace an Afro-futurist vision. Kodwo Eshun reminds us that not all science fiction is utopian. To be truly utopian, a narrative must move beyond simply re-assigning the present to a future time. For Black Panther, this would mean beginning from a utopian archive. It would mean fashioning a radically new African world from a backcloth that is itself utopian and not merely anthropologically available.

“Wakanda,” Lupita Nyongo says on the American TV talk show, The View, “is special because it was never colonized,” and thus “a reimagining of what could have been possible had Africa been allowed to realize itself for itself.” To push its utopian vision as far as Lupita’s comment suggests, Black Panther has to begin from an African world that has successfully rendered both the colonial experience and the postcolonial response to it superfluous.

That said, #WakandaForever? Absolutely!

The young Walter Rodney

Still from ‘The Past is not Our Future”

Seminal is a word frequently used to describe How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, Walter Rodney’s opus that swiftly extended itself far beyond its academic crucible when published in 1972. Not since Frantz Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth had a writer so widely transformed how Africa was seen and researched. Rodney’s gift was his ability to synthesize centuries of history around a truism stated clearly early on in the book: “For the greater part of Africa’s history…the changes have been gradual rather than revolutionary;” the result of centuries of outside exploitation.

Changes in Rodney’s own life were anything but gradual. A gifted scholar born in what was then called British Guiana in 1942, he ascended to the top of a highly competitive school system based on outstanding ability. Even as he developed wide interests, Rodney was always on a course towards an intellectual life. He won a scholarship to the University College of the West Indies (now the University of the West Indies) in Jamaica in 1960.

In a new film I directed, The Past is Not Our Future: Walter Rodney’s Student Years, I explore these early intellectual foundations of Rodney, to eventually produce How Europe Underdeveloped Africa.

The film details the story of how since UCWI was the principal university in the English-speaking Caribbean, it attracted the brightest minds from across the region. Rodney arrived at a time when the university and the country it was located in, Jamaica, were both transitioning from British rule toward independence. His generation was inspired by the voices of their age: Eric Williams, Prime Minister of Trinidad and Tobago (himself a professional historian), Trinidadian writer and Marxist C.L.R. James, and Norman Manley (leader of the Jamaican political party, the People’s National Party). The intergenerational struggle for meaning in independence was palpable. A burgeoning sense of “Caribbeanness” was always at the centre of the intense student discussions and with it a debate over the place and relevance of the African heritage of the majority of people in the Caribbean.

The film documents this early period in the life of the young revolutionary. It places Rodney the student, the brilliant idealist whose restlessness was his greatest motivator, in the context of a Caribbean in flux. When Jamaica shifted finally to full independence in 1962, Rodney was already exploring other models on which the Caribbean’s future could be based. A student visit to Cuba impacted him greatly. So did the silences which he had to confront in his education. African History seldom evolved in the curriculum beyond the trans-Atlantic slave trade and even then its coverage tended toward the prosaic accounting of region and numbers. The ancient history and the contemporary release from the formal grip of colonialism on the continent, were concerns of the peripatetic undergraduate who also visited the U.S, England, and Russia between 1960 and 1963. Dissatisfied with the answers to his questions, Rodney started answering them for himself.

This path to intellectual self-discovery and revolutionary awakening is the soul of the film. Rodney serves as narrator of his own journey, through the creative use of several rarely seen essays penned more than fifty years ago during his student years and recovered during the research for the film. The concerns he expressed in them—the importance of Caribbean unity; the admonitions on improper application of independence; the attraction to Cuban-style communism; the disappointment with his peers; the insistence on knowledge of Africa to the burgeoning sense of Caribbean identity—offer revealing clues of the process of his intellectual evolution.

Through previously unseen photographs, archival footage, captivating shots of the UWI campus, interviews with those who knew him as a student, and closer attention to the social and political context, the film aims to bring the viewer closer into Rodney’s life during this period of revolutionary gestation.

By the time Rodney set about work on How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, the young man of the film had matured tremendously. His Caribbean experience and the type of exposure he received during his student years, gave him with the focus he needed to get through his graduate studies in England. An interlude at the newly formed University of Dar es Salaam was followed with a brief and controversial return to his alma mater in Jamaica in 1968 to take up a position in African History where he was banned by the government for his radicalism. He passed more years in Tanzania where he left a profound impression and where he worked on his masterpiece.

Rodney’s final return to the Caribbean in the mid -1970s was to take up the struggle for equality in Guyana where he would be assassinated in 1980.  In life and even more in death he enjoyed iconic status, revered as much for his courage as his scholarly works.

Rodney exemplified the life of the revolutionary intellectual that as a student became his fundamental commitment. The Past is Not Our Future helps us understand the yearning that produced it.