Sean Jacobs's Blog, page 258

Colouring in the All Blacks

A line-out during the Stormers vs Crusaders match at Newlands. Image credit Adrian Bischoff via Flickr.

In a few weeks, The Stormers, one of the more popular South African rugby franchises in the Super Rugby championship, kicks off their 2018 campaign at Newlands, the team’s leafy grounds in the suburbs of Cape Town. The Super Rugby championship in its current iteration involves the top 13 teams from South Africa, Australia and New Zealand, with one each from Argentina and Japan. Most local supporters back their local teams, but anyone in the stadium watching The Stormers might not help to notice the incongruity of a vocal group of local fans in the stands whose allegiance will be not to the home team. Rather than attired in the blue and white hooped “streeptruie” (striped) jerseys that representative rugby teams from Cape Town have worn for over a century, they will be there to cheer on the Canterbury Crusaders from New Zealand.

Known as the Cape Crusaders, these fans also happen to be mostly Coloured, which is why they baffle people so. But given the history of rugby in South Africa, and particularly in the Western Cape, the incongruity has a clear logic. The Cape Crusaders don’t confine their activities to New Zealand provincial sides alone. They have also been known to rapturously welcome the New Zealand All Black national team.

So offended was Bryan Habana, one of the outstanding Black players of the post-Apartheid era (he jointly holds the record for most tries scored in test rugby and was voted the world’s best player in 2007), by their behavior in 2013 – when he was still playing for the Stormers – that he tweeted: “I highly doubt there’s any place in the world where you get booed off your bus, at your home stadium, by your ‘fellow’ countrymen.”

From one perspective, the Cape Crusaders are an anachronism: they are employing a strategy of political provocation developed decades ago to bring Apartheid governments down, and which subverted the sport most cherished by Apartheid’s most ardent supporters, by rooting for the opposition. Equally, though, their allegiance to non-South African teams has contemporary relevance: close to 25 years since the establishment of non-racial sports bodies (i.e. combining the former whites only and black associations), black representation in rugby is not even close to reflecting South Africa’s demographics.

But does this provocation serve a constructive purpose in South African rugby’s long overdue transformation?

Rugby passion, political provocation

There are many reasons why these South Africans support New Zealand and the Crusanders. These include a preference for New Zealand teams’ “ball in hand” style of play or what was once derogatorily referred to as “bushie rugby,” i.e. a style favored by Coloured rugby players);  supporting a winner (the Crusaders have been Super Rugby champions eight times since the competition was established in 1996 and are the favorites to win this year’s competition), but there may be more political reasons. The heavy representation of Pacific Islanders and Maoris in franchise teams and the All Blacks make it easier to identify with those teams than with South African teams, which they still perceive to be representative of the Apartheid past. New Zealand team members appear more representative of most people in the Western Cape.

The Cape Crusader phenomenon has its roots in a longstanding tradition of a passionate embrace of the game of rugby that dates back to the end of the 19th century. The first rugby associations were established in the Cape Colony at that time. The South African Council on Sports (SACOS) — which called for a sports boycott of South Africa — with its South African Rugby Union (SARU) affiliate, founded in 1966, grew out of this. Recent Springbok coaches Peter de Villiers and Allister Coetzee — both brilliant scrumhalves in their day — played their rugby in SARU. The SARU and SACOS rejected any contact with white sports, especially the whites-only South African Rugby Board (SARB) which operated as an extension of Afrikaner nationalism. The SARU members boycotted Newlands (home of Cape Town rugby) and its segregated stands. And if a visiting team came to play tests against the Springboks, they shouted for the opposition from the Coloureds-only section.

In addition to the SARB, SARU members especially had it in for the South African Rugby Federation (SARF), a racially-based, Coloureds-only “collaborationist league,” which operated as an extension of the whites-only SARB. The Federation was the brainchild of SARB’s paternalistic president Danie ‘Doc’ Craven, a former Springbok himself. The SARU’s decision to play and organize competitive rugby on their own terms, was thus an act of political defiance.

The SARU and SACOS were also staunch proponents of a sports boycott against South Africa. Though the boycott kicked off in the early 1970s in Australia and the UK, things came to a head in 1981 in New Zealand where the Springboks went on tour. New Zealand had sent a team to South Africa in 1976 – the year of the Soweto uprising – the last by a major team there. By 1981 the sports boycott had resulted in most major test nations (the Britain, Ireland and France) reluctant to host the South Africans.

Craven reasoned that the inclusion of a Coloured Federation player, Errol Tobias, in the touring squad to New Zealand would deter calls for exclusion of the rugby Springboks from international competition. Tobias was never accepted by white conservative supporters or, with few exceptions, by his own teammates.

Tobias also proved to be somewhat politically naïve. As a result, SARU and SACOS players and supporters deemed him a collaborator and “Uncle Tom.” (Incidentally, Tobias played for the Springboks in the last IRB-sanctioned test against a visiting nation, in this case England, in 1984 before a blanket ban was instituted against the Springboks. Watching footage of that match now, it is striking to see the reaction by his team mates after Tobias scored a try against England in that test series. With few exceptions, they don’t even acknowledge him.)

By collaborating with segregated sport, Errol Tobias worked to protract Apartheid rule, not hasten its gradual demise, non-racial sports bodies held. The Springboks were met by large crowds of protesters wherever they went in New Zealand and their games were disrupted. Craven’s strategy did not succeed. Instead, the isolation of South African sports – and rugby in particular – became a powerful emotional force in bringing home for white South Africans the repercussions of sustaining Apartheid.

International opposition, domestic mobilization

Springboks teams were barred from international competition not only because the team was by definition exclusively white (with a few notable exceptions of three or four Federation players in the 1980s included in the team), but also because the South African government demanded that opposing teams, even in their home countries, field no players of color.

There was another reason: If the All Blacks included players of Maori or Polynesian descent, or if the Australian Wallabies selected the Aboriginal Ella brothers (Mark and Glen) and performed well against the Springboks, then the “natives” in South Africa might get the wrong idea of their place in the racial hierarchy. Bizarely, if the New Zealand and Australia players were willing to sign a document attesting that they were “honorary whites,” they could play in South Africa – as the Samoan-born Bryan Williams and Maori Syd Going did in the 1970s.

Unfortunately for successive Apartheid governments, this demand had in fact the opposite effect: the weak-kneed response from administrators both in Australia and New Zealand brought wider attention to their domestic issues of social injustice, and galvanized broader opposition to racism. In New Zealand, the Halt All Racist Tour movement, founded in 1969, became a national political force that helped to raise consciousness about Maori rights and racial equality and were decisive in disrupting the 1981 Springbok tour there. It may be this history of solidarity that appeals to the Cape Crusaders.

But they may also be buoyed by recent developments in New Zealand. Although New Zealand still struggles with issues of national identity, lingering poverty and social exclusion of both Maoris and Pacific Islander communities, the All Blacks team has progressively included more players of color. The impact of South Africa’s actions decades ago, has ironically helped to set in motion a greater awareness of racial inequality and a greater appreciation of indigenous culture in New Zealand. Official accounts of the evolution of the haka — the Maori challenge dance performed by the All Blacks before an international game — may be cringe-worthy, but what is clear is that the haka has become more elaborate, more faithful to the tradition and the players more invested in its symbolism.

To further understand the motivations and passions of the Cape Crusaders, though, we also have to revisit the politics of an earlier era that predates SACOS and reflects old schisms within black anti-apartheid movements, especially among Coloureds. It involves the Non-European Unity Movement, NEUM, which is by and large a footnote in the history of South African struggle politics, but one to which sports as resistance owes its heritage and to some extent lives on – even inadvertently – in the Cape Crusaders.

The unity movement: a spent force, an enduring legacy in non-racial sport

The NEUM was developed in the 1940s among teachers, university students and the intellectual elite in Cape Town’s Coloured community. It was a response to the formation of a separate “Coloured Affairs” department by a National Party gearing to implement Apartheid. The NEUM also took a more radical stance than “Congress” (as the loose coalition of political bodies affiliated with the African National Congress were referred to at the time). While the ANC affiliates – which included the South African Coloured Peoples’ Organization – focused on redistribution of resources, NEUM framed the struggle to end Apartheid as a part and parcel of the fight for destruction of global capitalism. The NEUM, with its roots in the Workers Party of South Africa, remained Trotskyite; by contrast, the ANC and its partners, took the Soviet line. The Unity Movement (as NEUM became known) gradually faded from the national landscape, with official disbandment in 1959, to the obvious glee of rivals in the Congress movement.

But even as the Unity Movement itself faded away, many of the principles and its supporters channeled their efforts into building non-racial sporting bodies, including figures such as Dennis Brutus, who would lead the sports boycott movement against Apartheid South Africa. Other Unity Movement figures (Frank van der Horst, Hassan Howa), would go onto lead SACOS and its many sporting affiliates. National political figures such as Trevor Manuel, Cheryl Carolus and Danny Jordaan, cut their teeth in SACOS affiliates as officials, administrators and players in non-racial sporting bodies. (Manuel, you may remember, while Finance Minister under Mandela, famously said he supported the All Blacks over the Springboks because the national team selectors in 1996 played Henry Tromp, who had been convicted of manslaughter for beating a black farm worker to death.) 

But as the political climate shifted, and the South African regime began to consider a negotiated settlement to the end of Apartheid, SACOS was outflanked by the National Sports Council (NSC), led by ANC politicians (many of whom happened to hail from black rugby’s other heartland – the Eastern Cape and included Steve Tshwete, Ncgconde Balfour and the Rev Arnold Stofile). By portraying SACOS as ineffective and dogmatic, and working toward dictating the terms of sporting unity – such as shutting down the Mike Gatting-led England “rebel” cricket tour –  the NSC won popular support as the champion of non-racial sports and altered material conditions before SACOS officials could mount an effective response.

The writing was already on the wall for SACOS when Doc Craven and the Trumpian figure of Louis Luyt defied the government and met with ANC officials in 1988 (some 18 months before Nelson Mandela was released from prison) to discuss a unified rugby body. FW De Klerk, later State President, but then still Education Minister, responded to news of the meeting thus: “I must warn sportsmen that they should not allow themselves to be abused by the ANC with a view to advancing its objectives.” 

The argument for the Cape Crusaders 

As self-appointed custodians of the spirit of non-racial rugby, the Cape Crusaders have plenty of room to argue that there was never a sincere commitment to transformation by the rugby establishment. There was never a real reckoning of the toll of Apartheid on rugby talent or a real understanding of the systemic inequity that still stands in the way of players reaching their potential if they can’t make it to a private school, or prestigious (formerly white) public school.

Although unity in 1992 between the establishment SARB and the non-racial SARU, which confusingly resulted in the current governing body being called SARU, was predicated on the loosely defined commitment to “transformation,” the immediate aftermath was devastation for non-racial rugby. The economic legacy of Apartheid (including disinvestment in black sport), the absence of sponsorship and the timing of unification at a point when rugby as a sport moved from a nominally amateur to a fully professional model, meant that few former SACOS clubs were in a position to remain competitive. While politicians focused on representation at the highest level of the game, investment and attention to building grassroots youth rugby, resources and training were low priorities for the new SARU administrators.

Non-racial clubs and unions that had persevered for decades folded in a matter of a few years, or merged with others to survive (such as Tygerberg in the Western Cape, Raiders in Johannesburg and Progress in the Eastern Cape). Certainly, some have held on in the traditional black rugby heartlands of the Western Cape and Eastern Cape, and have started to recover and attract new players over the course of the last few years. Still, of the 20 clubs competing in the SARU Gold Cup, designed explicitly to cultivate community rugby, roughly one-third have roots in non-racial rugby.

Some 22 years after formal unification, SARU was still required to formulate what it calls the Strategic Performance Plan, with the objective to improve representation of black players at all levels. Allocated a budget of R32 million in 2016 (compared with overall operating expenses of R1.2 billion and 18 million for the office of the SARU CEO), the initiative is both admirable, but also an admission that the body has never lived up to its end of the bargain it made to re-enter international competition.

There’s also plenty of evidence that white South African rugby supporters still need convincing that players of color can be selected on merit, not just by the quota system. Until fairly recently that included the Springbok coach, Heyneke Meyer, who largely lost his position because, in a charitable assessment of his motivations, he failed to make transformation a meaningful part of his approach. Instead, his teams were known by many as the All Whites.

Some white rugby supporters and writers blame South Africa’s steady decline in the world rankings to the “distraction” of transformation and its related quota system. It is probably more accurate to blame the financial enticements of playing overseas, and the weak and ineffectual administration that has failed to come to terms with the professionalization of the sport across the globe, or to make long-term investments in training, expertise and facilities.

The latest episode is the recent sacking of Coetzee under acrimonious circumstances. In a leaked letter written to the South African Rugby Board, Coetzee alleged that:

A strategy was developed to use me as a Coloured person to conceal the end goal – by offering me the job as Bok coach – but to not equip me with the necessary resources to adequately perform my tasks. It would lead to me vacating my position earlier in order for Rassie [Erasmus, the interim coach [who happens to be white] to eventually be appointed.

The case against the Cape Crusaders

In the immediate aftermath of Coetzee’s fraught tenure and acrimonious departure from the Springbok coaching job (after his spectacular success with, ironically, The Stormers), it’s difficult not to find justification for the Cape Crusaders’ rationale. In fact, for the Cape Crusaders the treatment of Coetzee was further evidence of why they don’t support South African teams.

In the 1950s, the Unity Movement’s ANC critics accused it of “the use of the most militant language as a smoke-screen for complete political in-activity.” Some claim the Cape Crusaders suffer from the same condition.

There is plenty of work to be done in righting the wrongs of Apartheid, and plenty of potential to cultivate rugby talent, but supporting the Canterbury Crusaders and the All Blacks just doesn’t seem to be the most effective way to do so. More effective would be to leverage high performance players to change perceptions, and for competitive representative teams to reflect non-racial rugby’s legacy.

Truthfully, there may have been times when clubs and rugby administrators acted more in line with the Federation’s motto of “take what we can to get what we want” when in the earlier years of formal unity, SARU played favorites in strategically investing in clubhouses and facilities to keep dissent to a minimum. Also, it’s glaringly obvious that South Africans continue to live in an abnormal society, and by implication that normal sport is still a mirage.

Also, as courageous as the fight to subvert rugby was in the context of political repression, it was imperfect. In the non-racial rugby world – or at least my experience of it as part of a university team playing in a non-racial league in the early 1990s – divisions persisted between Coloureds and Africans, with teams reflecting the residential and social segregation resulting from Apartheid’s divide and rule policies.

In the Coloured community itself, teams were largely Muslim or Christian, reflected social class which neatly coincided with divisions between English or Afrikaans-speakers; the latter seen as lower class. The divisions between SARU and Federation teams were also impacted by rural and urban divides. The opposition of the Cape Crusaders is built on that tradition and incorporates its flaws. 

Provocation with a Purpose? 

Maintaining the tradition of resistance is not just an admirable, but also a deeply personal one. However, the support for the All Blacks and Crusaders is a symbolic but empty gesture, if it’s only serving as an act of provocation.

There are signs of hope, not least the success of the Blitzbokke Sevens team. It has none of the freighted baggage of the 15-man game and has managed to operate outside of the more conservative structure of SA Rugby (if still referred to paternalistically as a team with more “diverse backgrounds”). And, along with the revival of community rugby in the form of the Gold Cup, changes in the representation at the school level are steps in the right direction to transform Springbok rugby. So too the attitude of new SARU president Mark Alexander, who played his rugby at the Bill Jardine Stadium in Johannesburg’s Coloured township of Coronationville.

Do the Cape Crusaders have a legitimate set of grievances? Are they keeping alive a unique tradition of political resistance? Is there intent to change perceptions? Yes, but supporting the All Blacks does not alter material conditions, or advance the debate for many who continue to be ambivalent at best about supporting the Springboks. It’s South African Rugby that needs the support to change, not the Crusaders.

America’s Wakanda

Still from Black Panther.

The African American entertainment industry is one of the things I’m most proud of as an American. I grew up in the US in the 1980s and 1990s, and as the child of an African immigrant, the “black culture” I was exposed to at home was different than that of most of my peers. So, African American popular culture, such as hip hop and the blaxploitation films of the day, became centers for the formation of my American identity. Movies like Do The Right Thing, New Jack City or Juice were cultural touchstones that I could enjoy with friends who shared in the not always positive experience of growing up as a black youth in America.

However, I also remember being called out as ethnic other by African American peers for my Sierra Leonean cultural background. I was called “African booty scratcher” and asked if my relatives lived in trees, had my first name constantly butchered and was asked whether or not I was a prince where my family had come from. Hip hop did celebrate afrocentricity and older movements like the Black Panthers and Black Power made positive connections to the continent. Nevertheless, I found the haphazard employment of the dashiki, djembe drums, Kente cloth and Kwanzaa, by some African Americans awkward in the absence of a more complex understanding of the contemporary realities “back home.” (This period happened to coincide with Sierra Leone’s devastating 10 year civil war, which was almost never acknowledged outside of my family and our community of exiles and immigrants.)

My experience is not that unique as any immigrant to the US might be able to tell you. And save for some embarrassment as an adolescent, I came out okay in the end (some have had it tougher, see: here, here, here). However, all these experiences have informed my work as a musician and cultural critic, and for the past decade or so, I have been dedicated to pushing a more diverse representation of the black American experience into the popular cultural sphere.

With the arrival of Black Panther, we a witnessing a resurgence of an unbridled enthusiasm for Africa in black America, and it dovetails perfectly with the Afrofuturist moment that comes to occupy the space that Afrocentricity did 25 years ago. The moment at which the film arrives is also a moment in which Africans and black immigrants have become common at the center of the American entertainment industry. Top billed actors in the film like Lupita Nyongo (whose father was a government minister in Kenya), Daniel Kaluuya (who grew up working class in London, the son of Ugandan immigrants) and Danai Gurira (Zimbabwean-American, born and raised in Iowa) are proof of that. Afropop, topping the charts in the UK, is popping up in the ambit of North American pop stars like Drake. And, American rappers of African immigrant background like Wale and French Montana are finally making the connections to their homelands public and explicit.

That’s not to say that the children of distant homelands are always being welcomed with open arms. Just last year, Samuel Jackson caused a stir when he insisted Kaluuya was the wrong person to play the lead in “Get Out” because he didn’t live the African American experience.

It’s too soon to tell if this specific cultural moment has done anything to bring African Americans closer to Africans on the continent and its many other diasporas. It doesn’t help that Black Panther’s depiction of the actual African continent is not any more complex than any other in the history of Hollywood. True, in the film African cultures are represented and depicted positively. We have come a long way from Birth of a Nation. However, those cultures are also used piecemeal, cut-and-paste and without context. The only time we see the Wakandans visit another African country it is of course to fight militant Islamists who are kidnapping children. The Africa of Wakanda resembles more an undifferentiated African stew floating in the red, black and green universe somewhere between Kwanza and Kente.

Black Panther fans will counter that African immigrants in the West, black Latin Americans and even Africans on the continent are caught up in the Black Panther hype. But that may be less a byproduct of political Pan-Africanism, than the identity politics of an expanding middle class on the continent and in other parts of the Americas. It is also a consequence of the flattening of global popular culture via shiny new shopping malls and cable television.

The United States does an excellent job at exporting cultural blackness (for various purposes), and African American culture today is like a global cultural currency, employed to do everything from ensuring dictators stay in power in Angola or Gabon to fighting racial discrimination in Brazil. Anybody with access to Facebook or Youtube can connect to and feel empowered by a cultural blackness that transcends history, geography and language. And it is not just black people. Korean teenagers are tapping into American blackness just as much as black youth in Johannesburg, Paris, Lagos and São Paulo.

The thing about Black Panther though, is that it, more than any other film that I can think of in recent times, has become a vehicle through which to imagine a community of blackness.

At its best, Black Panther fever is inspiring a new generation of African Americans and Africans to feel proud of their heritage, and learn more about the place that heritage comes from. In a context where black people’s lives are denigrated, this should be celebrated. At its worst, the Black Panther fever emboldens the divisiveness or isolationism that are at the center of conflict in the film.

All the contradictions within the characters of Black Panther have parallels in black history. Like Wakanda, we may revere the political and economic autonomy of historic black communities like the Jamaican Maroons or Buffalo Soldiers. We should also try to understand their contradictory need to collaborate with slave owners or carry out genocide on behalf of an imperialist state. Like Killmonger, we may revere the anti imperialist stance of a Fidel Castro or Robert Mugabe. We must also understand that their authoritarian rule was at the expense of what most Americans consider basic human rights. For me, the metaphorical borders of an isolationist Wakanda work best when applied to all different forms of privilege, whether it be class, gender, geography, access to resources or technology. But, it is important to not ever forget the shifting borders of privilege when we are empowered to enact social change. That is ultimately what brought Killmonger, and almost every revolutionary movement of the past 100 years to their demise.

So what’s at stake? This is after all just a movie, right?

Black Panther’s success itself is proof that African Americans have the largest economic footprint of any black population in the world, and a significant political influence in the most powerful country in the world. But it is a complicated and compromised power. It is still a community that faces the contradictions of any oppressed community, manifest in the need to proclaim “black lives matter” while being able to put a president that looks like you into power. Being told to “shut up and dribble” on the same weekend that a mainstream Hollywood studio is catering to your cultural preferences.

The arrival of Black Panther arrives at a time when black America is diversifying. But it also happens to be a time where the US itself is becoming more isolationist. I know from personal experience that it is not beyond many in the African American community to reflect nativist tendencies. In private conversations, I have heard African Americans say things like “The Muslim-ban protest isn’t my fight” or “What does DACA have to do with me?”

In a perfect world, Black Panther fever would lead more African Americans down a path of knowledge that would inform them that African migrants are crossing oceans, deserts and jungles on foot to get in to the US. That Haitians and African migrants are flooding the Canadian border out of fear of being deported by a xenophobic Trump administration. That Black Lives Matter applies to a mudslide in Sierra Leone or miners killed by police in South Africa. That there is a real life ethno-nationalist, technologically advanced isolationist dictatorship, in Paul Kagame’s Rwanda. That their tax dollars are going to build a giant drone base in Niger. That this knowledge would help open them to a Pan-African political project.

But alas, it’s just a movie, after all.

The war on smugglers

Hundreds of refugees from Libya line up for food at a transit camp near the Tunisia-Libya border. Image via UN Photo Flickr.

At the end of January, a tweet by Leonard Doyle, spokesperson of the International Organization for Migration (IOM), was doing the rounds on the Internet. In it, William Swing, head of the IOM, congratulates Becky Anderson, a CNN host, for the cable news network’s “courage” in “confirming the IOM’s report of migrants sold as slaves in Libya with video” and for effecting “a coalition of the AU and EU to help bring thousands home to safety.” By “home,” Swing and Doyle meant back to their countries in Africa.

The praised CNN “video,” titled “People for sale: Where lives are auctioned for $400,” went viral last November and shows a grainy clip of twelve Africans (said to be from Niger) being “sold” by an unseen Arab auctioneer through a megaphone. CNN did not film the scene, they merely edited the video purchased from or provided by a “local contact”, as the field crew says in a subsequent CNN studio interview (titled “Libya’s migrant slaves wanted their stories told”).

The story itself is a few months old as we showed before. This scandal was already public knowledge in April 2017 and reported by the BBC and Quartz Africa (the latter basically recycled the BBC report).

The “discovery” of the video has ignited the press and a consuming public in need of symbolism and scapegoats, a long-standing orientalist trope of Arab slave auctions, which European and African policy makers are now making work for their own objectives. The EU’s primary means to end the “migration crisis” remains an imperial, pink, ham-fisted attempt to militarily disrupt smuggling networks or what they call, Reagan-style, the “war on smugglers.” Watch the not-so-subtle encouragement in this direction apparent in this more recent CNN piece, reporting on France’s “urgent” demand to the UN to consider “sanctions,” and failing that, a more forceful intervention to stop migrants “being sold between human trafficking gangs.”

To intervene (again), the European branch of NATO needs to plug into a narrative that can find legitimacy in the western press and a sub-section of first world and global middle classes. The revived “slave auctions” being stomped out through a new western moral and military show of force is a tried and tested avenue for this — a cathartic one popularized amongst others by the irrelevant tweeting of aging rapper LL Cool J (“Remove the slave holders by force”).

Doyle ends his tweet by announcing that at Davos he and others were now planning “a coalition of the AU and EU to help bring thousands home to safety” — presumably considered to be a type of evacuation before any co-ordinated militarized intervention can proceed. Vast sums of money are currently being leveraged and released to have African states “take back” their citizens. The IOM is undertaking these new logistics and they are finding their recruits primarily amongst those held for months or longer in the state-sanctioned detention centers in Libya, and who are having their hearts, hopes and health crushed.

In another surreal turn in what writer Teju Cole calls the “White Savior Industrial Complex,” the closest any foreign journalist or researcher has come to a continuous abortion of circumstance from the bottom up in Libya, is a one-hour special by Ross Kemp. Kemp is a strikingly bald, British working-class soap opera star turned professional TV show survivalist, who lacks the white middle class and “Oprah” sentimentalism that Cole put his sharp finger on. Instead, Kemp has pioneered a kind of Gung-ho version of a Vice magazine “white balls complex” — deep reconnaissance and irredeemable. Kemp’s TV travelogue, Ross Kemp: Libya’s Migrant Hell, is from early 2017 and there he singlehandedly outdoes every major international news agency in sincerity and insight by traveling and chatting for weeks side by side with West African migrants throughout their free entry, thwarted exit and subsequent detention in Libya.

The West African press is more discerning and less inclined to peddle easily confused and strictly binary narratives. A recent article in the most widely read Nigerian newspaper, gives returnees a chance to elaborately explain their experience in Libya. They recount the interweaving of a shocking territorial militia kidnapping for ransom, with the desperate gathering of enough funds to pay smugglers for the next leg of the journey. “Anyone is the police in Libya. They all have arms. They catch you and tell you that you have to pay money or else you will never get out,” a Gambian migrant who was held for ransom a few years ago told Amnesty International. He was not referring to his smugglers whom he eventually paid to get out and reach Italy.

Smugglers are the only ticket out of the country for the estimated half a million Nigerian migrants “stranded” in Libya and its detention centers. Except the IOM itself, a UN organization funded largely by the EU, whose renewed mission is to deflect the route to Europe by offering up anything from 400 to 7000 euros to any illegal “economic” migrants willing to be repatriated or return. This counter-payment ecosystem has even led to the rise of scammers posing as the IOM, promising “visa facilitation and transportation assistance, resettlement opportunities as well as job openings and recruitment abroad,” which in the eyes of most migrants is a better try than going back home broke with nothing to show. It also explains why more people have opted for the service of smugglers — and probably fallen for these scams — than have taken up the IOM’s offer of repatriation. 

The economic situation in Nigeria has gotten worse over the past year. As The Other News, the Nigerian satirical news program modeled on Comedy Central’s The Daily Show, says in its review of 2017, a year of harmful currency devaluations, severe inflations in the price of basic goods and fuel shortages, the “year has been so bad.” Even Okey Bakassi, the Trevor Noah-like host, joked he was “considering escaping through Libya.” In Nigeria, having little money or no way of making new money, or having one’s wealth shrunk and destabilized through structural economic factors, means not only a reduction of a material standard of living, but also a degradation of the means of social existence and rights. As an article from Stears, a think tank gathering many of Nigeria’s exceptional young economists says, this is because in Nigeria “your poverty does not just exclude you from material goods, but from everything else – political power, healthcare, justice. Those who can afford to will buy their access to these rights, those that can’t get no rights.” 

A prominent figure of “Nigerian twitter” tweeted a Facebook post (a much more popular and less elite-laden platform in Nigeria than Twitter) written by one Ephraim Okonkwo, who  reminds everyone: “If you want to help Libya slaves/immigrants, don’t bring them back home. Help them reach their destination in Europe. There’s a very good reason they left home in the first place.” The tweet is followed by a provocation of the avatar Nigerian Troll: “Please run away. Don’t let this Libya propaganda discourage you.” This is a common sentiment I encountered on the streets of Lagos and elsewhere in West Africa: “Of course I want to go to Europe,” “You must suffer for greener pastures,” “Libya is bad but not that bad,” “One merely must pass through quickly.” 

As almost no long-term, independent investigations have been possible in Libya in recent years, it is not clear if conditions have worsened. I believe my impressions from 2015 (also here) are still valid, and so is the new academic research of Paolo Campana. His research is based on the wiretapped mobile phone of heterogeneous smugglers who used the Libya route in 2013-2014. He suggests that that there is solid empirical evidence that there is a “clear separation between actors involved in the provision of smuggling services” from those involved “in kidnapping for ransom and in the ‘management’ of detention centres.” This “goes against narratives that conflate these separate sets of activities.”

I have a problem with Black Panther

Still from Black Panther.

Black Panther has become a cultural phenomenon unparalleled by any other in recent memory. Rapturous audiences have all but deified the blockbuster film, a remake of a comic book tale about a superhero from the mythical African nation of Wakanda.

Viewing the movie has proven especially cathartic for those sweltering under America’s racial politics. With white nationalists on the march and government agencies seemingly conspiring to exacerbate the suffering of people of color, Black Panther’s spectacle of ebony elegance offers more than entertainment; it is a fountain of sweet tea in a searing desert.

Given the dearth of affirming black images in popular media, the impulse to lionize the film is understandable. But Black Panther is more than a celebration of black dignity and sophistication. It is also a discourse on freedom, a dreamscape that draws on black traditions of imagining and seeking to build ideal societies beyond the reach of white supremacy.

Black Panther demands critical examination because utopian visions are unavoidably political; they are among the tools with which oppressed people attempt to draft a just future. Unfortunately, anyone committed to an expansive concept of Pan-African liberation — one designed to free African and African-descended people throughout the world — must regard Black Panther as a counterrevolutionary picture.

That claim may seem unfair, even blasphemous, to fans of the film. After all, Black Panther features a cast of regal and complex black characters. (In a society obsessed with light complexion, it is worth noting that the movie supplies a sumptuous parade of gleaming, mahogany skin.)

Wakanda, moreover, is a model of black self-determination. Blessed with an inexhaustible supply of a wonder mineral known as vibranium, the nation has thrived for generations, escaping colonization and other corrupt influences while shielded beneath a magic dome that conceals the kingdom from the outside world.

Wakanda is technologically advanced and populated by proud and loyal citizens, including a regiment of formidable women warriors.

The problem, from a progressive standpoint, lies in Wakanda’s conservative nationalism. Rulers of the state reject suggestions that they use their technological might to empower other black people across the African continent and around the world. Wakandan leaders maintain a stubborn isolationism, dispatching secret agents on occasional, benevolent missions in foreign lands but eschewing any meaningful program of international solidarity.

This is a stunningly narrow policy. For in the movie, as in real life, those black people not fortunate enough to possess a fantastical energy source endure centuries of slavery, colonialism, imperialism, and subjugation. They are systematically underdeveloped and brutalized, even as their labor enriches their oppressors. Yet through it all the Wakandans remain detached, surrounded by luxury and comfort in what amounts to an enormous gated community. In other words, they behave like any other modern capitalist elite.

In the film, the character most resentful of Wakanda’s insularity is Killmonger, the African-American son of a slain Wakandan expatriate. Raised in a tough Oakland, California, neighborhood, Killmonger is a dark soul, a troubled child of the diaspora who vows to return to the land of his forebears, seize power, and distribute Wakanda’s unrivaled military weapons to oppressed black people across the globe.

In short, Killmonger is a revolutionary. The fact that he is presented as a sociopath is one of the most problematic aspects of the film.

On a superficial level, Killmonger serves as foil to Black Panther’s titular protagonist. As a political device, however, he plays a much larger role, for his character exists to discredit radical internationalism. In fact, Killmonger is the mechanism through which Black Panther reproduces a host of disturbing tropes.

Trope Number One: African and African American Estrangement

Killmonger embodies the old adage “you can’t go home again.” His quest to “return” to the soil of his ancestors (a place he has never been) is portrayed as tragic and unattainable. Yet there is a great deal of history behind that emigrationist impulse.

For centuries, African Americans and other members of the African Diaspora have sought “repatriation” to the Mother Continent. This yearning for reunification and restoration of kinship bonds is a byproduct of the historical experience of dispersal. Dispossessed and exploited throughout the globe, generations of black folk have craved a land base where they might find security, prosperity, and power. Often they have looked to Africa for such a foundation.

After World War Two, however, the US Cold War establishment sought to disavow any form of grassroots black internationalism. Pundits argued that “the Negro” was exclusively American, that African Americans and Africans were strangers, and that Pan Africanism was a futile and dangerous fantasy.

But Black Americans never abandoned the effort to reclaim African ties. The objective inspired largely symbolic activities in the 1960s and 70s, including the embrace of African cultural garb, hairstyles, and names. Yet it also helped revive a revolutionary consciousness, a belief that the process of decolonization could uproot western imperialism and liberate not only Africans, but African Americans and other subjugated people.

This was not just a black ideal. It was the animating principle of the Nonaligned Movement, a struggle for Third World autonomy and power endorsed by the “Afro-Asian” conference at Bandung, Indonesia, in 1955. The spiritual heirs of Bandung, including Malcolm X, rejected the United States’s self-proclaimed status as “leader of the free world.” They viewed the US as a violent empire and they insisted that “the darker nations” must acquire the power—military and otherwise—to resist American aggression.

Killmonger, it seems, is a fictional grandson of Bandung, though he has clearly failed to digest the movement’s emphasis on peace and human rights as alternatives to expansionism. However, the real American power structure still fears any global alliance that might present an ideological counterforce to US hegemony. So Killmonger is depicted as deranged and his plot to arm those Frantz Fanon called “the wretched of the earth” is cast as a bitter crusade for vengeance rather than as a rational response to the horrors of white supremacy and imperialism.

In this manner, defenders of empire are able to distort the historical project of the Third World left while equating with terrorism any vision of globalization not managed by US capitalism and its allies.

Trope Number Two: African American Pathology

Portraying Killmonger as demented does not merely smear radicalism. It also recycles racist themes of black corruption and immorality. Ironically, this aspect of Black Panther has been largely ignored amid delight over the film’s more auspicious representations of blackness. In truth, though, the flattering depictions are uneven. Black Panther sets African virtue against African-American vice.

The juxtaposition is pernicious. For assertions of black degeneracy often accompany narratives of cultural decline, including the idea that the traumas of slavery or urban life permanently damaged African Americans. As the historian Daryl Scott has shown, such myths have long generated contempt and pity for black America. What they have never done is honor the resilience that enabled black folk to survive the nightmares of the New World.

Cloistered and provincial, Wakanda lacks a revolutionary heritage that might help shape its social institutions or foreign relations. Oakland, on the other hand, possesses a legacy of radical struggle enriched by the irrepressible spirit of African Americans.

Trope Number Three: The White Savior

If Black Panther rehashes ugly images of African Americans, it also reaffirms the white savior type. In an especially grotesque twist (spoiler alert), the role is filled by a CIA operative who is brought to Wakanda for medical treatment but winds up helping the kingdom defeat Killmonger. The ironies here are legion. One strains to identify a greater foe of the African masses than the CIA, the agency that helped assassinate or subvert some of the continent’s brightest lights, from the Congo’s Patrice Lumumba to South Africa’s Nelson Mandela.

Framing America as a guardian of African interests camouflages the conglomeration of western forces, from global banks to multinational corporations, that have continued to leech Africa’s wealth long after the formal end of colonialism. It also masks the stunning extent to which US militarism has penetrated the continent on behalf of a ceaseless “War on Terror.”

If the Wakandans had read the Martinican theorist Aimé Césaire, they might recognize American imperialism as “the only domination from which one never recovers.” Instead the closing scenes of Black Panther suggest that further collaboration between the kingdom and the global superpower lies ahead.

Black Panther contains other vexing elements. It is curious, for example, that a society as advanced as Wakanda has not renounced monarchical government. (Perhaps creators of the movie share Afrocentrism’s romantic preoccupation with potentates.)

However, the disavowal of radical internationalism may be the film’s greatest sin. For by caricaturing the philosophy, Black Panther repudiates the global consciousness that remains essential to combatting war, domination, and exploitation in Africa, America, and beyond.

Solidarity does not mean unanimity. Stereotype and suspicion continue to color many African encounters with the Diaspora. Yet mutuality based on shared principles can trump both alienation and the condescending uplift mentality that drives Wakanda, by the end of the film, to propose the installation of an outreach center in Oakland.

Black Panther has captured our attention. But it cannot constrain our imagination. We must transcend the film’s conceptual boundaries, restoring a politics that valorizes all black life while demanding the salvation of oppressed people everywhere.

The ghosts of Adwa

The Battle of Adwa, painting by an unknown. Ethiopian artist.

On 1 March 1896, the First Italo-Ethiopian War reached its dramatic climax at Adwa, a decisive battle that secured Ethiopia’s independence and soundly defeated Italian colonial designs for an expansive East African empire. At the moment in which European powers scrambled for the Horn of Africa and France, Britain, and Italy each competed for and claimed their respective territories, Ethiopia — or Abyssinia, as it was typically known at the time — managed to evade European colonial rule.

It is a battle of legendary status in the collective memory of many Ethiopians, inscribed and re-inscribed through stories and commemorative acts of the state; it is also an episode that figures heavily in the imagination of the African diaspora. The heroics of Ethiopian emperor Menelik II and the imagery of an Ethiopian army overpowering an Italian invading one reverberated across the globe, while the successful defense of Ethiopia’s external sovereignty enabled the emperor’s control and consolidation of central state power at home, in what he saw as the restoration of the Solomonic dynasty’s ancient glory. In Ethiopian art depicting the battle, Saint George hovers over their soldiers, offering divine assistance as the patron saint of Ethiopia, of God’s chosen country.

For the black diaspora, Adwa seemed to confirm Biblical prophesy that “Ethiopia shall stretch forth her hands unto God” (Psalms 68:31), a verse that took on unique significance in black religious traditions forged in a context of enslavement, racial oppression, and disenfranchisement and emphasized black liberation and emancipation. Though in classical texts, Ethiopia stood in for Africa is a whole, Adwa fused this symbolic Ethiopia with the contemporary Ethiopian state in the minds and hearts of the African diaspora. It produced and proliferated a particular idea of Ethiopia in Pan-Africanist thought, one that saw Ethiopia as the vestige of black freedom in a world where black people – whether in the Americas, Europe, or Africa – were subject to racial domination and exploitation. Indeed, at the first Pan-African Conference in 1900 – where W.E.B. Du Bois uttered his famous statement that “the problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line,” delegates declared the Ethiopian emperor a “Great Protector” of African peoples everywhere.

As Michel-Rolph Trouillot powerfully argued in Silencing the Past, historical narratives are structured by power, and the very process of historical production creates “a particular bundle of silences” for the historian to deconstruct or unearth. The idea of Ethiopia as a symbol of African independence and sovereignty that circulated in the Ethiopian nationalism and the Pan-Africanist imagination is a narrative structured by power, marshaled by the Ethiopian state following the Second World War and wielded against self-determination claims by the peoples who came under its rule. The fundamental paradox of Adwa is this: the very Ethiopia that inscribed with anti-colonial meanings after its victory over European colonialism was a colonizing state itself. 

There is another way to tell the story of Adwa and its silences. This narrative could begin in the battlefield on that very day in 1896, when Menelik’s army of 100,000 men stood in wait with modern rifles – accumulated through strategic dealings with the competing European powers in the Horn – as an unsuspecting Italian force of less than 20,000 made their way from Mount Eticho towards Adwa. It could begin years prior, when Menelik moved southward beyond his Shewa kingdom, and by 1886 created a capital for his new empire that his wife Taytul named Addis Ababa, carved out of the land the conquered Oromo called Finfinne. It could start with the east, with the defeat and flight of the last Emir from Harar in 1887 and the emperor’s army poised to occupy the city and enter its ancient gates, the first opening to the rich, grazing lowlands of the Somali peninsula that Ethiopian armies would claim after Adwa in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. This is the narrative of the making of modern Ethiopia, a process by which the state expanded south and southeast beyond its traditional northern highlands, doubling Ethiopia in size by the turn of the 20th century and into its current shape.

Contemporary Ethiopian politics can be analyzed in terms of historical narrative. It can be understood through the historical claims and historical grievances of the many peoples of the former Ethiopian Empire, each with their own stories, each with wrongs not addressed or rectified in the transition to an imperfect ethnic federalism and nominal democracy after 1991. As I write this, Ethiopian prime minister Hailemariam Desalegn offered his resignation to the ruling party, in the midst of unprecedented state concessions in response to sustained protests mainly by the Oromo – the largest ethnic group in the country – that began in November 2015. The trigger then was the Addis Ababa Master Plan that would have seen the growing city expand its administrative and territorial limits into the surrounding Oromia region, but the protests swelled into a movement calling into question the very workings of Ethiopian statehood – a state in which federalism is said to govern, but power remains, as it has in its entire modern history, concentrated in the hands of a few.

At stake in this movement is not simply political reform, but the histories of disenfranchisement and systematic exclusion of the Oromo and many other historically dominated ethnic groups by successive Ethiopian regimes, a narrative that exists in the collective consciousness of protesters today. Though it is too early to know what transformations are yet to come, it seems as though we are in a moment in which the ghosts of Adwa may finally be put to rest.

From Zuma to Ramaphosa

Ramaphosa and Zuma. Image credit Government of South Africa via Flickr.

On Valentine’s Day, Jacob Zuma announced that he would resign as South Africa’s President. Earlier that day Zuma gave a surreal, rambling speech disguised as an interview, where he maintained that he had done nothing wrong in his nine years as president. If Zuma’s aim was to project an air of defiance, watching the speech live on Youtube he came across as pitiful, alone and sad. This was a far cry from his reputation as a Machiavellian strategic operator who had repeatedly defied public opinion and his party. Zuma survived eight motions of no confidences in Parliament, including one last year, where some ANC members broke with tradition and voted with opposition parties in a secret ballot. In the end, however, Zuma resigned so as not to subject himself to humiliation the next day in Parliament where ANC MP’s, were planning to vote overwhelmingly along with the opposition to throw him out.

Some, wary of the many premature obituaries written about Zuma’s political career were worried he might pull one last stunt. In that TV interview, he had made vague threats of violence and days earlier pathetic, shadowy groups like Hands of Zuma and Black First Land First, the latter implicated in professional trolling on behalf of Zuma, held marches declaring him some kind of radical figure who was only being persecuted because he was leading a vaguely defined struggle for something called “Radical Economic Transformation” against  “White Monopoly Capital” and neoliberalism.

By Friday morning South Africa had a new President, Cyril Ramaphosa, who that night delivered his first “State of the Nation” address. The positive reception given Ramaphosa — even by the usually combative Economic Freedom Front, who regularly disrupted Zuma’s visits to Parliament — was evidence that very few South Africans would mourn Zuma departure. During his nearly two terms, Zuma managed to accomplish a rather remarkable feat: uniting South Africans in their shared disapproval. One poll taken a few months ago measured his approval rating at 18 percent.

Zuma nearly decade long regime will go down as the worst presidency of the post-apartheid order. Nelson Mandela, South Africa’s first democratic president, cemented a reputation as the great unifier; a father of the nation. As a result, even Mandela’s harshest critics tone down the effects of his economic policies or the failure of his regime to tackle head-on the legacies of South Africa’s racist past in favor of reconciliation.

Mandela’s successor, Thabo Mbeki, was loved by business elites and birthed South Africa’s now thriving black middle class (including the black students who fronted #FeesMustFall and #RhodesMustFall in 2015 and 2016). Mbeki’s government, however, set records for the number of street protests against it over the privatization of water, electricity, housing evictions, and, crucially, his unforgivable denialist response to South Africa’s HIV/AIDS crisis.

Zuma was a flawed figure from the start; ANC, trade union and communist leaders such as Ronnie Kasrils (who served as a government minister under Mandela, Mbeki and Zuma), had long questioned his leadership qualities and Zuma had been implicated in widespread corruption and survived a rape trial (he was accused of raping the daughter of his former Robben Island prison cell mate). In 2005, Mbeki fired Zuma, the then-deputy president, over corruption charges. The anti-Mbeki forces including most of the left such as the South African Communist Party (SACP) and largest trade union federation, the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU), coalesced around Zuma claiming that he was the victim of a political conspiracy. It helped that Zuma came across as humble with the common touch, something the aloof Mbeki lacked. While hired mobs burned effigies of the woman he was accused of raping and chanted “burn the bitch,” the left — including COSATU’s then general secretary, Zwelinzima Vavi — declared that Zuma would reverse neoliberalism in South Africa. 

When the ANC’s national elective conference in the city of Polokwane (held every five years) came around in 2007, Zuma was swept into power. Mbeki was forced to retire as the country’s president one year later and in 2009, on the back of an improved ANC showing at the polls, Zuma was elected South Africa’s President. If the poor expected respite from the global recession or the negative effects of neoliberal policies from Zuma, what they got instead was increased repression and state violence, politicization of key institutions of the South African state (to settle political disputes within the ANC), widespread incompetence (for example, temporary chaos in making welfare payments to desperate poor people) and extensive political influence peddling; what South Africans call “State Capture.” The latter refers to a particular type of corrupt relationship between the state and outside interests usually capitalists, in which private interests take control of key elements of the state and are directly able to influence, guide and shape policy. South Africa has a long history of state capture; alliances and collusions between various white regimes and white business facilitated the super exploitation of the black majority during colonialism and Apartheid. In its post-apartheid version, the Guptas, an Indian business clan close to Zuma, were able to hire and fire ministers, guide state appropriation policy and even manage to change official affirmative action policy to include them as naturalized black South Africans. 

Zuma broke South Africa’s left. In August 2012, police gunned down, in broad daylight, 34 miners in Marikana, in South Africa’s North West Province. The ANC government and their allies in COSATU and the SACP claimed that the murdered workers were “criminals” who, aided by potions, charged the police in a suicidal frenzy and thus deserved to die. Evidence later emerged that the police had been placed under political pressure by ANC politicians including Ramaphosa to intervene in the strike and that the massacre was not some sort of tragic accident, but a deliberate premeditated act. As a member of the mine’s board Ramaphosa sent an email saying the strike was “dastardly criminal and must be characterized as such.” As a result, “… in line with this characterization, there needs to be concomitant action to address this situation.” 

Zuma later established a public commission of inquiry into Marikana, but this turned out to be a paper tiger as no one was charged or none of his ministers or even the police commissioner resigned; no one paid any political price for Marikana. This was to be expected: The post-apartheid epoch has largely meant violence, exclusion and degradation for South Africa’s black poor.

As the ANC took over the South African state, in a country where economic opportunities up to then had been closed off to black South Africans, the ANC transitioned not just to a political party, but also became a way to earn a decent salary for a lot of people. Competition for political office in the ANC, especially at local level, has increasingly became the be-all and end-all because it meant access to lucrative state contracts and the ability to accumulate wealth. Higher up in the party, access to the state through the ANC became the way to get rich quick. It also bred a new class of politicians who acted like old style warlords. Violence became inescapable to South African politics, especially in Kwazulu-Natal, Zuma’s home province. Between January 2016 and mid-September 2017, at least 35 people were murdered in political violence related to ANC rivalries there. The ANC itself counted 80 of its political representatives killed between 2011 and 2017. At one men’s hostel in Durban, the largest city in the province, 89 people were murdered between March 2014 and July 2017 in political violence. Almost no arrests have been made.

Zuma’s departure from the presidency, signals the end of outright looting in the South Africa state. It is no coincidence that the same day Zuma resigned, police raided the Guptas house in a rich suburb of Johannesburg. The brothers, evading arrest, have been on the run (along with one of Zuma’s sons) ever since. Ramaphosa’s election hopefully means an end to the parasitic corruption that has become endemic to state-owned enterprises (SOE’s) like Eskom (which supplies electricity); PRASA (rail services); and SAA (the national airline), that were heavily indebted and barely functioning.

Zuma’s regime was also characterized by instability. He hired and fired ministers at regular intervals (he averaged one finance minister every year) and kept on ministers who caused harm and despair.

Zuma governed in a highly personalized manner. He simultaneously spoke about his reign as if he were an outside observer who had no power to solve major problems or had no hand in causing them. At the same time, he used state power to hollow out or capture any part of the state that might threaten his interests, those of his vast family or the Guptas.

Everyone was expendable to Zuma; his closest allies in his journey to the presidency such as Vavi, or Blade Nzimande, former general-secretary of the SACP, and, crucially, Julius Malema, former ANC Youth League firebrand, would also become Zuma’s greatest enemies.

By the end of his presidency few South Africans cared that Zuma was a liberation hero, someone who served a decade on Robben Island prison or was key to ending violence between the ANC and a Zulu nationalist grouping — the latter acted as apartheid’s proxy in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Rather, Zuma will be remembered as someone who brought down a 105 year-old liberation movement and broke the South African left.

Zuma was able to hijack the left’s critique of South Africa’s racial and class inequalities in order to mask his own parasitic political project, rising to power through the left. For the majority of Zuma’s presidency, the left defended his every outrage. At various points they declared that Zuma would initiate a “Lula moment” in his second term or that all criticism of Zuma was the product of imperialist conspiracies against BRICS. Zuma was meant to be the left leader the country desperately needed, but perhaps if there is any consistent paradigm in the post-apartheid political order, it is that politics has been defined by a desperate search for a messianic leader who will lead the country out of its malaise, and when this leader turns out to be a failure, the search begins anew of their replacement as the way out of the new crisis.

At last December’s ANC’s national elective conference, Zuma tried to stop Ramaphosa, then his party deputy, from succeeding him. Zuma favored his ex wife, Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma, a former foreign minister and, more recently, head of the African Union.

Though Zuma’s faction in the ANC ended up with half of the top six positions in the ANC, he could not halt the election of Ramaphosa as ANC President. When the result was announced, Zuma appeared shocked; the life seemed drained from his tired face. The ANC was now left with a conundrum. Elections were only scheduled for mid-2019 and Zuma was draining them votes (in local elections in 2013, largely because of Zuma’s performance, it lost the metros of Johannesburg, Pretoria and Port Elizabeth to the liberal Democratic Alliance). To hasten his departure, they pulled an old trick: When Zuma engineered a putsch against Mbeki in 2007, his backers claimed having two different people as ANC President and as president of the country, resulted in “two centers of powers.” They forced Mbeki to resign. Zuma was now in Mbeki’s position. But unlike Mbeki, who went quietly, Zuma seemed determined to stay out his term. The problem for Zuma was that Ramaphosa had been strategizing against him; turning even Zuma’s own allies against him and using them to damn Zuma publicly.

Ramaphosa is now President. He is being touted in editorial opinions, on social media and in ANC propaganda as the anti-Zuma. He is educated, articulate, technocratic and smooth, able to comfortably move from the boardroom to the mass rally, a man in other words capable of forging a social pact in favor of capital. He is seen as a competent, stable politician able to appeal to the same middle class voters who deserted the ANC en masse because of Zuma. Ramaphosa, who comes across as warm and reassuring, an excellent speaker (Zuma was none of the sort), and conciliatory, is already getting the glowing résumé.

The bar was of course very low.

A certain euphoria has accompanied Ramaphosa’s swift swearing in as the country’s President on Thursday night. Even those in social movements and human rights organizations who fought Zuma and the ANC government over substandard education, lack of affordable housing or nonexistent health services, are willing to give him a chance or are openly cheering on his presidency. Indeed the mood seems to almost mirror the fuzzy Rainbow Nation hubris of the mid-to-late 1990s, with references to the fact that, “we are all in this together” replete with ANC members suddenly quoting Mandela at the end of every speech in parliament.

While Ramaphosa is certainly preferable to Zuma and if he accomplishes his stated goals of stabilizing the economy, purging the state of its parasitic elements and restoring broken institutions to operational readiness it will be to the benefit of all South Africa, but that does not mean the left should not make a strong critique of Ramaphosa.

Ramaphosa once led South Africa’s then largest union, the National Union of Mineworkers, through the most violent and politically unstable period in South Africa’s history. He faced off against a murderous racist government, but he traded all the political capital he earned from the worker’s struggle for actual capital to become filthy rich. Ramaphosa has a personal fortune estimated at over $450 million. His defenders trot out the old line, “because he is rich already, he can’t be bought,” but the examples of Donald Trump, Silvio Berlusconi, Mauricio Macri and many others show this is sort of logic is pathetic fantasy. Indeed his rise to immense wealth wasn’t so much due to his abilities as a businessman, but rather because the ANC “deployed” him to the private sector and South Africa’s white captains of industry decided he was a man they could do business with. As a result he was catapulted into the boardrooms of such mega corporations as McDonalds and Coca-Cola. His coziness with such interests are cause for concern. While Ramaphosa might not introduce the same sort of parasitic approach to governance as Zuma, he is unlikely to prove himself to be a friend to workers and the poor.

His involvement in the Marikana Massacre is either downplayed — “he just sent an email” — or ignored altogether. His own relative silence over the last few years over Zuma’s worst excesses has been excused as just politicking.

Ramaphosa’s calling card is his anti-corruption agenda. Many South Africans disgusted by Zuma’s open corruption and the assembly line of stooges he brought into government have been swayed by Ramaphosa’s anti-corruption promises. In his State of the Nation address, Ramaphosa promised to fire the corrupt and incompetent Zuma lackeys and establish commissions investigating state capture.

His economic platform so far doesn’t depart from the policy legacy established by Mbeki and largely continued by Zuma — despite the latter’s rhetoric about Radical Economic Transformation. In his State of the Nation speech, Ramaphosa put forward such textbook neoliberal measures as special economic zones and public-private partnerships. This may be all “to restore confidence and prevent an investment downgrade” by ratings agencies, common under Zuma. But he is also aware of his base. At the same time, Ramaphosa promised to “expropriate land without compensation” for agriculture, introducing a national minimum wage and free higher education for those whose families make less than R350,000 a year. Ramaphosa will be seen as a reliable partner by global capital and there will be some uptake in terms of Foreign Direct Investment, but not enough to create the sort of jobs South Africa badly needs. For all his smoothness, neither Ramaphosa or any of the opposition parties have an economic vision that can restore South Africa to a healthy growth rate, reduce unemployment and tackle South Africa’s horrific structural inequality.

What Ramaphosa represents at one level is a return to the classic ANC model of social compact, putting forward a collective vision that favors developmental capitalism, collective aspiration and social harmony, but at the expense of the working class’ interests. Indeed, while COSATU and the SACP supported Ramaphosa’s campaign, Zuma broke the back of these once proud organizations. Ramaphosa will most likely be able to pass pro-business policy without facing any real opposition from the left.

Perhaps the biggest losers from Ramaphosa’s rise to power will be South Africa’s opposition parties, both the center-right Democratic Alliance and to a lesser extent the populist-nationalist EFF. Both centered their political strategy over the last few years on fighting corruption and removing Zuma. With Zuma gone and a slick operator like Ramaphosa in power, the opposition needs to radically reconfigure its political strategy. The DA doesn’t offer a dramatically different policy vision to the ANC, and indeed much of their appeal has been based on their supposed claim to be better managers of the state. They generally promote the same policies as the ANC; with the party’s bungling of Cape Town’s historic water crisis, combined with the widespread infighting and the shallow superficial TED talk style of their national leader Mmusi Maimane, the DA will potentially lose most of their new voters to Ramaphosa’s slick new ANC. The EFF might be better placed to hold their ground, due to the fact they actually have a dramatically different political platform to the ANC, and are prepared to bring up the new president’s darker past, in particular Marikana. (Outside the ANC, the EFF perhaps, along with the country’s media, deserve most of the credit for swaying public opinion against Zuma.)

One narrative you will for sure read in the next few days will be that “this is the beginning of ANC renewal.” “That the ANC is reformed.” That the Guptas are getting arrested and that Zuma allies in the ANC seems nervous and disorientated (and seeming under threat of arrest), are supposed signs of this. But this is an old narrative. It usually buys the ANC time. And they will probably win the next election. In the meantime, the ANC will make excuses and promises.

Such a reading of the ANC underestimates how the last decade or so damaged the ANC internally, or how much the ANC is still in the same mess it was under Zuma. Many of Zuma’s cronies and abetters can still be found across the party. (What has been remarkable is the lack of introspection or contrition on the part of the ANC. The only reason given for Zuma’s departure is the convenient “two centers of power” argument.) The plain truth is that the ANC doesn’t offer a new vision for the country.

Part of the appeal of the renewal narrative is the pathetic state of South Africa’s opposition parties and the rapid decline of the left. Without a credible opposition either in parliament or on the streets — in the form of a strong, independent trade union movement — the ANC once again appears to many as the only game in town. Ramaphosa is the main player. Ramaphosa’s political prospects seem rosy, he will in our opinion win next year’s election and recover many of the votes lost by Zuma. However, South Africa’s economic and social problems will prove a tough challenge. The current post-Zuma euphoria and renewed optimism in the ANC reflects not the strength of the party and Ramaphosa’s political platform, but rather the relative weakness of the almost non-existent left and an opposition who have lost their main calling card –– Zuma.

The folly of ‘wait-and-see’ politics in Zimbabwe

Zimbabwe’s President Emmerson Mnangagwa, at his inauguration ceremony in Harare. Image credit Ben Curtis (AP Photo).

Robert Mugabe’s face was a common feature in our household. To this day there’s an election sticker of Mugabe’s once youthful face (despite it having been used for the 2013 elections), stuck onto the side of our garage door. I peel a little of it off every time I go home, but it won’t come off without leaving a bit of a mess. It seems as stubborn as Mugabe was, in power from 1980 to December 2017.

Mugabe’s face was also boldly printed on the hideous shirts that my late father, Amos Midzi, a top official, wore to every major party event. He served as a senior government minister and as Zimbabwe’s Ambassador to the United States and, earlier, Cuba.

My father’s favorite response to questions on when exactly things would change for the better for Zimbabwe was, “let’s wait and see.” His default sentiment was that at its core, the Zimbabwe African National Union – Patriotic Front (Zanu-PF) was a revolutionary party that had the people at heart and was worth fighting for.

President Mugabe left behind a legacy of negligent leadership, and cyclical political, economic and social violence. Emmerson Mnangagwa, sacked as Mugabe’s deputy only weeks before, took over as the new president before Christmas 2017. While I’m always hopeful for a better future, I’m acutely aware of the collective pain we all need to heal from.

Appearance in my father’s party was everything. The party spent a great deal of time and resources on regalia, media coverage and creating a narrative that depicted them, particularly Mugabe, as visionaries and the only sensible choice for leadership of any office, public institution or electoral position. But the cosmetic has always been their specialty – billows of seemingly successful smokescreens hid years of incompetence and violence. My shame about this particular part of my father’s life never goes away.

Membership cards were a way to keep track of Zanu-PF members and often acted as an access card to patronage and other benefits. From being prioritized during food aid distributions in drought-stricken areas of the country, to being allowed to sell your produce at some of the informal markets in the city, to being physically assaulted during election season by hired Zanu thugs for not having one – the card giveth and taketh away, all the while working in the favor of those who possess it.  

Ironically, my father was reduced to what was called an ordinary card-carrying member before his death. In early 2015, he was suspended from the party, accused of supporting former Vice President Joice Mujuru in planning to overthrow Mugabe. Former Information Minister Jonathan Moyo once said, “It’s cold outside Zanu” – he was right. So cold, that Zanu members my father had known for years refused to attend his funeral for fear of being associated with the outsiders who had been kicked out of the party. Our new president was one of them. So deep were the divisions in Zanu-PF, that even the funeral of a close and generally well-liked top official wasn’t enough to bring them together. In state where patronage links ran deeper than the Zambezi, Amos was the ordinary card-carrying member whose life and sacrifices for the party suddenly meant nothing.  

Zanu’s internal violence spilled over into the state, and Mugabe’s regime will forever be remembered for it: there was the rounding up of unaccompanied women accused of prostitution in 1983, named Operation Chinyavada; the Gukurahundi massacre of an estimated 20,000 largely isiNdebele speaking people also suspected supporters of the opposition ZAPU that was led by Joshua Nkomo in the western and southern regions of the country. Then, one of the more shameful memories associated with my father, there was the demolition of informal housing and businesses in Murambatsvina; followed by the election violence in 2008; and what has become the systematic forced removal of vendors in city centers year after year. Murambatsvina, depicted as a way of “cleaning up” the “filth” of informality in urban areas, was swift and brutal; carried out in the height of the winter cold, rendering hundreds of thousands homeless and desperate. Amos was pictured in one of the local newspapers in a white dust-coat, holding a broom and sweeping away the remains of people’s make-shift structures. I remember staring at the picture of him sweeping away the livelihoods of the people him and his colleagues implied were “filth”. The opposition party, MDC, argued that the operation was an intimidation tactic to rid urban cities of its supporters at a time when more and more Zimbabweans were looking to an alternative political leadership. I believe them.  

To date, millions of dollars have been lost to corruption and mismanagement – resulting in a failing healthcare system, a struggling education system, a cash shortage and a leadership unbothered by the plight of our people. It is these collective memories that many of us revert to when thinking of our future.  

But as we end an era of repression and poor leadership, we enter one led by the very same people who served alongside the man that so many feared and loathed for so long. Recently, Mnangagwa has spoken of “a New Dispensation” – signaling his desire to break from Mugabe’s style of leadership. But as the dust settled after my people danced in the streets when Mugabe stepped down, it is apparent that the fight for true transformation has only just begun.  

While there are those who use the memories of violence to hold our new(ish) leaders to account, there are others who weaponize them against anyone who is seen to be critical of Mnangagwa. The new president has recently been on a charm offensive, conducting multiple interviews with western media organizations – “re-engaging the world” after Zimbabwe’s isolation from world powers under Mugabe.  

From interviews with the Financial Times, to Mnangagwa’s appearance at the World Economic Forum in Davos 2018, the message is the same: perhaps we should give him a chance. Mnangagwa’s favorite phrase has been: “Zimbabwe is open for business.” Its target audience isn’t Zimbabweans, however, but foreign investors. He has spoken boldly about the need for economic recovery, his commitment to seeing it through, and a much-needed shift in the way government operates. Before anyone could say “asante sana” (Mugabe’s infamous parting shot during his aborted resignation speech), Mnangagwa has threatened corrupt officials with jail time and demanded that members of Cabinet and heads of parastatals declare their assets publicly. It is no doubt that he is working hard to counter the incompetence and mediocrity that had engulfed Zanu’s leadership, but is it enough?  

There are glaring social issues that Mnangagwa has yet to address, one of the biggest being an apology for his complicity in Gukurahundi – the “moment of madness” (as said by his predecessor) that has left deep wounds on our society. While he has acknowledged the need for healing and has tasked his deputy to head a commission regarding this, his role in carrying out the horrific violent crimes against what were called “dissidents” at the time, requires more action.  

Mnangagwa has also kept many a minister in government who has been accused of corruption, violence and other crimes, casting doubt on the chance for a ‘clean slate’ for Zimbabwe. Minister Obert Mpofu has been accused of, amongst other crimes, taking a $10 million bribe in return for mining concessions during his time as Mines minister; Health Minister David Parirenyatwa was accused of entertaining a conflict of interest by accepting a $100,000 payment from a health insurance company that was struggling to stay afloat, affecting its members’ ability to access the most basic health services. The changes needed for true transformation include an overhaul of the kind of leadership that has landed Zimbabwe here in the first place, and this is unlikely to happen now.  

Unlike my father, my default sentiment is this: there is a continued violence that Zanu-PF seems to never stop engaging in; a refusal to fully and truly engage with their culpability. I recognized it in my father, and I recognize it in our president and leaders now. Some people might say that we need to give Mnangagwa a chance – give him the benefit of the doubt and stop being so quick to criticize:

It is often said that one's vote is their secret.To me It's not.I will vote for ED Mnangagwa to give a chance to demonstrate his potential in economic rehabilitation of the country.We are just coming of a disaster of Mugabe's rule that has destroyed everything

— MURIPIWA (@Gonyora1) December 20, 2017

I would say that this is what got us into trouble in the first place, and that where criticism is deserved, it should be accepted, confronted and addressed adequately. After all, he said that we should “judge him from day one.” My day one started with his legacy in a party that has largely been the cause for the country’s decline. It’s time that we see true transformation in Zimbabwe, and that the cosmetic actions of the past are shunned and replaced by meaningful actions towards a better country.

A man of the people: Morgan Tsvangirai

Morgan Tsvangirai. Image credit Steve Punter via Wikimedia Commons.

“Come hell; come storm; come rains; come fire: please just go ahead and do things as we resolved here. Do not look back.” These words were said to Morgan Tsvangirai by his trade union colleague, Timothy Kondo, in 1999 when civic leaders decided to found the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC). The new party was to challenge Robert Mugabe and ZANU-PF’s nineteen-year rule of Zimbabwe, which by then had begun an unpopular program of economic liberalization and had a history of violently crushing its rivals.

If Kondo’s words were meant to rally Tsvangirai and the new party’s followers, they also foretold the MDC’s rise and struggle against a brutal, 13-year campaign of violence waged by ZANU-PF that marshaled the architecture of the state and its considerable party apparatus to retain its hold on power.

During these years of struggle, Morgan Tsvangirai was the charismatic leader of the MDC. More recently, he was plagued by ill-health and had to watch as the party’s influence wane after the 2013 election, which ZANU(PF) won. In 2016, opposition politics was unpopular and seemed to have been eclipsed by a hashtag movement, #ThisFlag. By the end of last year, Mugabe was pushed out of power by the military because of internal conflict over succession within ZANU-PF. Since Emmerson Mnangagwa took over as the country’s President, Tsvangirai made some brief, intermittent, appearances at MDC rallies with an eye on the 2018 elections. Last Wednesday, Tsvangirai died of colon cancer in South Africa at the age of 65.

These more recent events should not eclipse the magnitude of Tsvangirai and the MDC’s achievements. During the 2000s, he and other MDC party leaders, activists and supporters were labelled Western-sponsored “sell-outs” and traitors by ZANU-PF leaders and faced arbitrary arrests, torture, beatings and assassination attempts at the hands of state security services and ZANU-PF-aligned militias. Tsvangirai was a central target in these campaigns. He was imprisoned and charged with treason twice, in 2000 and 2002, and in 2007 he was arrested and tortured in a military barracks that led to his hospitalization in intensive care. (Mugabe later bragged of this last event at a party rally in 2007, saying that Tsvangirai ‘deserved it… I told the police to beat him.’)

Despite ZANU-PF’s brutal campaigns, the Tsvangirai-led MDC remained a sustained electoral threat throughout the 2000s. Winning 57 of the 120 parliamentary seats in the first election that it contested in 2000, the party went on to challenge ZANU-PF as the party of government and Mugabe as the nation’s president in five elections. In 2008, Tsvangirai won the first round of a presidential election by a margin much wider than the official results claimed. The suspected official result forced a presidential run-off in which ZANU-PF unleashed its most brutal campaign of violence against the opposition and anyone perceived to be supporting it, forcing Tsvangirai to withdraw from the election and flee to neighboring Botswana. The outcome of this crisis was a deal mediated by then-South African president, Thabo Mbeki, which brought the MDC into a power-sharing government with ZANU-PF.  Tsvangirai was made Prime Minister and Mugabe stayed on as President. The limited gains of its time in government caused disillusionment in the MDC and in the 2013 elections ZANU-PF won a clear victory.

As a political leader, Tsvangirai had a rare gift in Zimbabwean politics: the common touch. Unlike Mugabe, who was said to visit rural farms wearing a three-piece suit and whose favorite sport was cricket, Tsvangirai shunned these markers of social distinction. His politics instead emerged from his years of trade unionist organizing where he enjoyed listening to peoples’ concerns over ‘an after-word drink and a cigarette.’ Having grown up in rural Buhera in the south of the country, Tsvangirai spent much of the war of liberation working in textiles and then mining in Mutare and Bindura. After independence in 1980, he continued his union organizing and became the full-time Secretary General of the Zimbabwean Congress of Trade Unions (ZCTU) in 1988.

Unlike nationalist leaders that rested on their liberation war credentials and academic achievements as their justifications for political leadership, Tsvangirai’s legitimacy was born out of his trusted representation of workers’ interests and the charismatic force of his personality. In his ZCTU role, he gained his first personal experience of the repressive features of ZANU-PF’s rule. In 1989, after student leaders at the University of Zimbabwe were imprisoned for leading demonstrations against ZANU-PF’s attempts to institute a one-party state, Tsvangirai wrote a public letter in support of the students. The state’s response was to imprison him without charge for six weeks, after which he was charged with treason (which was later dropped). This ability to endure state repression enhanced Tsvangirai’s man-of-the-people legitimacy. The event also marked the beginning of a confrontational relationship between Tsvangirai and Mugabe, which would deepen in the late 1990s as the country’s economy declined under ZANU(PF)’s structural adjustment policies and ZCTU took a leading role organizing mass demonstrations and worker stay-aways. In this moment of heightened unrest, Tsvangirai’s ability to bring groups together became evident. In 1997, a grouping of civil society organizations and professional individuals, many of whom were lawyers, formed the National Constitutional Assembly (NCA) which sought to press the government into reforming the constitution, with Tsvangirai as its chairman. Out of the NCA’s activities, the idea of forming a party to challenge ZANU-PF gained quick momentum amongst many of the coalition. Tsvangirai and his inclusive style of leadership, his common touch and proven endurance became its obvious leader.

Yet, Tsvangirai’s ‘big tent’ politics brought with its own challenges. In attempting to unite a disparate group of trade unionists, civic society professionals and white farming capital, the party struggled to consolidate any extensive ideological platform beyond the cause of removing ZANU-PF from office and a commitment to vague notions of ‘democracy’. Under the extreme pressures of challenging ZANU-PF in the 2000s, Tsvangirai became increasingly controlling over party process and violent internal party rivalries emerged within the party. In 2005, the party split after the party’s Secretary General, the law professor Welshman Ncube, attacked Tsvangirai for overriding a decision of the National Executive to run in the 2005 Senate elections. The ‘big tent’ coalition split even further after the party chose to go into government with ZANU-PF in 2008. Whilst the unity government did manage to get a new constitution passed, much of the party’s support base that had believed Tsvangirai would come good on the slogan ‘Mugabe Must Go!’ became disillusioned with the party. A disastrous political campaign in 2013 saw the party thrown out of government, and it split again as many of its key figures, such as Tendai Biti and Elton Mangoma, blamed Tsvangirai’s authoritarian style of leadership for their electoral losses.

With the MDC marginalised and splintering, between 2013 and 2017 Zimbabwean politics was dominated by ZANU-PF’s internal battles over Mugabe’s succession. Throughout this time Tsvangirai maintained that he was the man who could lead an effective opposition, and from 2015 began to reach out and form a complex coalition of opposition parties – what became known as the ‘MDC Alliance’ – which included Biti and Ncube. For a moment, it looked as if the 2018 election would be another Tsvangirai-Mugabe choice. However, with the military’s removal of Mugabe last November and Tsvangirai’s passing last week, in the election this year we will have two electorally untested presidential candidates. The favorite to face Mnangagwa for the presidency is the MDC’s ambitious young Vice-President, Nelson Chamisa, who controversially seized his opportunity over the weekend to have himself named as the party’s interim leader, over its Deputy-President, Thokozani Khupe. After cutting his teeth in student politics at Harare Polytechnic in the late 1990s, Chamisa rose through the party as a ruthlessly ambitious and charismatic leader who performs an evangelical preacher-style politics. His rise even earned the praise from former President Mugabe as being ‘a very charismatic young man.’ As such, he represents a formidable if untested political threat to the equally untested Mnangagwa presidency, which has the benefits of a well-funded, disciplined party machinery that has been able to control the rural vote. (Unlike in South Africa, rural votes alone can win elections in Zimbabwe). Whilst Tsvangirai’s name and memory will feature prominently in the MDC’s election strategy, a Chamisa-led party is a different proposition to Tsvangirai and the trade unionist-inspired politics that he represented. Tsvangirai was a man of the people, despite his faults, and he will be missed in all corners of Zimbabwe’s opposition politics.

The strange history of an imperial skirmish in Niger

The US Africa Command (AFRICOM) is soon expected to release a series of reports on the October 4, 2017, skirmish in Niger that claimed the lives five Nigeriens and four US soldiers. In the meantime, the New York Times has just published its own lengthy autopsy of the event. The 8,000 word piece not only provides new details on the events in Niger, it attempts to place the murky firefight into a broader context so as to draw out its wider political implications.

But the way the Times historically frames the event can only reproduce the very thing that the article is attempting to address: collective national ignorance that surrounds, what Senator Lindsey Graham rightfully called, “an endless war without boundaries, no limitation on time or geography.” The very war that led to the firefight in Niger.

Even more disturbing is the racial subtext of event’s ostensible political implications, which is never called into question by the Times. Indeed, the Times’ article leans heavily on this subtext to pursue its angle on the story. When a Navy SEAL is killed in a botched raid in Yemen during the first month of the Trump presidency, the political outrage is predictably and expediently aimed at an inexperienced and disorganized White House, criticisms being leveled by wounded media institutions seeking to draw blood where it hurts Republicans the most — national security. But when four special operators are killed in “Africa” months later, probing questions are raised as to whether or not US forces should even be there in the first place. As with the 1993 Mogadishu battle, the loss of US soldiers in Niger does what no other zone of conflict is able to do: it calls into question the very rationale that drives the projection of US military force around the world. As the Times’ reporters claim, “[T]he deaths [in Niger] have reignited a longstanding argument in Washington over the sprawling and often opaque war being fought by American troops around the world.”

What the war in Iraq and the endless occupation of Afghanistan could not accomplish, low-level US counterterrorism assistance in the Sahel could: initiate a sense of buyer’s remorse regarding the Global War on Terror. In other words, Africa is not worth it. From T.E. Lawrence’s Seven Pillars of Wisdom to today, we understand that the Middle East glorifies empire. From Conrad’s Heart of Darkness to the present, we understand that Africa debases it.

We have always been at war with Eastasia

The Times’ genealogy of the Niger ambush is partially rooted in the congressional authorization allowing the US president to use force against those involved in the September 11, 2001, attacks. As the Times explains, this act of congress has had far reaching consequences:

It is a war with sometimes murky legal authority, one that began in the embers of the Sept. 11 attacks and traveled to Afghanistan and Pakistan. It was expanded to Yemen, Somalia and Libya before arriving in Niger, a place few Americans ever think of, let alone view as a threat.

Of equal historical importance to the Times’ narrative is the August 7, 1998, bombings in Tanzania and Kenya targeting US embassies, events that seem to function as the inception date of Islamist militancy in Africa. That said, the article works hard to establish the US presence in Niger as primarily an Obama era policy, one that aggressively enhanced previously existing programs following the 2012 coup in Mali and the subsequent declaration of an Islamic state based in Timbuktu.

But the Times’ description of this war’s unfolding geography makes no sense. Involvement in Libya began as a humanitarian intervention in 2011 with no connection to the war on terror, apart from secret renditions of prisoners to Libya for torture by the Gaddafi regime. Indeed, the US knowingly supported Al-Qa‘idah linked rebels in their struggle to overthrow the Gaddafi regime in 2011. Following the 2012 attacks on US diplomatic and intelligence compounds in Benghazi, US counterterrorism involvement in Libya was highly circumscribed as the country descended back into civil war by 2014. Only in mid-2016 did US ground forces begin to participate in the fight against the Islamic State during the long siege of Sirte.

By contrast, US training and security cooperation initiatives in the Sahel region were already well underway. Some are in fact extensions of programs that even predate the 9/11 attacks (e.g., the annual African Lion exercise in Morocco). The first major pan-Sahel training exercise involving Nigerien troops, “Flintlock,” was in 2005, a year before Ethiopia’s intervention in Somalia that resulted in the creation of Al-Shabaab. Where the Times paints US involvement in trans-Saharan security as the latest stage in the global war on terror, it in fact began in 2002.

Making this narrative all the more bewildering is the absence of other fundamental developments in the region from the Times’ history. No mention is made of the civil war in Algeria in the 1990s, from which today’s Saharan “terrorist” organizations directly descend (notably the 2003 kidnapping of tourists in Algeria, which the Times thoroughly re-examined in 2014). Nor is there any discussion at all of the 2011 intervention into Libya’s civil war by NATO and the Arab League, which helped to destroy the Gaddafi regime, unleashing untold volumes of light weapons into trade networks across the Sahara and creating the conditions for the Islamic State to take root in Libya. Nor does the Times’ account even bother to mention by name the half-billion dollar counterterrorism initiative launched by the Bush administration in 2005, which enhanced already existing military aid and training programs that had been active in the Sahel region since 2002, well before there was any visible threat or even presence from Islamist insurgents in the region.

A 2005 report from the International Crisis Group raised serious questions as to why the US government appeared to be spending millions of dollars on a terrorist threat in the Sahel that no one was sure even existed. Visiting one of these programs in 2005 in Niger, The Atlantic’s Robert Kaplan was at least “realist” enough to admit the extent to which the largely preventative nature of US military intervention in the Sahel was driven as much by concerns about oil production in North and West Africa as anything else.

That said, describing early US security initiatives in the Sahel as proactive and prescient obscures the fact that they played a significant role in the destabilization of the region. As will be described below, securitizing the Sahel helped to reinforce the deep socio-economic precariousness of the region. It furthermore allied US policy to regimes with historically antagonistic relations with communities in their Saharan hinterlands.

Needless to say, none of this is examined in the Times’ dissection of the 2017 attack in Niger. We get imperial handwringing, intimate portraits of the fallen US soldiers, and a blow-by-blow account of the attack itself. But what is truly concerning about the Times’ narrative of US involvement in the Sahel is not its blind spots. It is the fact that the narrative is vague and disorienting. Islamist terrorism in the Sahel seems to emerge from nowhere, coalesce without explanation, and metastasize uncontrollably. Africa is a land without an intelligible history and terrorism is a violence without a discernible political economy.

Self-fulfilling prophecies

As noted above, US counterterrorism activities in the Sahel region began soon after 9/11. Their rationalization was uniquely geographical. It wasn’t the presence of any viable terrorist threat that was motivating US interest in the region. It was the region’s alleged susceptibility to terrorism that frightened policy makers in Washington, planners in the Pentagon, and agents in Langley. The frightening equation was poverty, weak governments, and vast empty spaces. As with Afghanistan, it was the threat of the unknown, visualized and rationalized as a geography of ungoverned spaces and terrorist safe havens, that drove Washington to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on Saharan security during the George W. Bush administration. In 2007, Scholar E. Ann McDougall noted that these developments fit within a broader pattern of European constructions of “emptiness” in the Sahara-Sahel region. That is, a pathology whereby North Atlantic states displace and project their own internal political crisis to regions that have little chance of mounting an effective resistance against this epistemic and imperial violence.

With the collapse of the state in the north of Mali in 2012, the Sahara-Sahel region finally saw the fulfillment of the prophecy that had been outlined by the US government ten years beforehand in the Pan-Sahel Initiative. What “terrorism” had existed in the Sahara-Sahel region circa 2001-2002 was mainly the remnants of a shattered Islamist insurgency from Algeria. Just as Fanon had seen strategic value in the Sahara for the FLN in its struggle against the French, so too had the Groupe salafiste pour la prédication et le combat (GSPC), which began using the Sahara as a means to finance and organize a new phase of resistance against the Algerian state. Much of this funding would come from European hostages, though there was also involvement in trade and smuggling. A high profile 2003 kidnapping of several dozen tourists in the Algerian Sahara brought widespread attention to the Group and retroactively justified the US security initiatives already underway.

Over the course of the next decade, the GSPC built up a war chest of several millions of dollars in ransoms and eventually allied itself to Al-Qa‘idah, though its connections to the Algerian intelligence services were strongly alleged by informed observers. To what end would the Algerian regime seek to destabilize its oil producing and southern border regions was never clear, though as with many things in Algeria, the most plausible explanation was likely inter-factional fighting within the ruling elites (e.g., the Presidency and the intelligence services). The 2012 coup in Mali and the 2013 attack on a natural gas facility in eastern Algeria seems to have galvanized the Algerian regime, though historically tense relations with France, the former colonial power, and the United States, as a result of the Cold War, have complicated international efforts to manage the terrorism threat in the region in a concerted way.

More importantly, the US-led securitization of the Sahel during the first decade of the 2000s dramatically destabilized the region by robing Saharan communities of tourism revenues. While there were some in the US government, notably the State Department, who wanted to use the Trans-Saharan Counter Terrorism Initiative (later Partnership) funds for preventative development-oriented programs, almost no attention was paid to the fact that the livelihoods of people who actually live in the Sahara, notably Tuareg communities in Mali, Algeria, and Niger, were being ravaged by the discourse of terrorism now framing the region’s security challenges.

To make matters worse, one of last places for Tuaregs to seek jobs and housing, Libya, soon became hostile to their presence given their historical association with the Gaddafi regime. The 2011 revolution in Libya was not only a tragedy for many Tuaregs but for the wider region as a whole. The collapse of the Libyan state in 2011 flooded the Sahara with seemingly unlimited quantities of light arms that soon found their way to a renewed Tuareg nationalist uprising in northern Mali in 2012. When Tuareg rebels succeeded in driving state security forces out of northern Mali, these forces turned on their government, ousting the president in a coup. The coup leader, as the Times notes, had received training from the US military.

The four US soldiers who were killed in Niger in 2017 died because they were cleaning up a mess left behind by the Bush administration. The policies of the Obama administration, particularly in Libya, had only made matters worse. The increasing focus on Niger, as the lynchpin of trans-Saharan security, has as much to do with the crisis in Mali (Mali was the original golden child of US Saharan security assistance prior to 2012) as with the collapse of Libya’s transitional government and the emergence of an Islamic State franchise in Sirte in 2015.

The US role in the unmaking of Libya needs no introduction but is worth recapping. Rather than seek a negotiated solution to the Libyan civil war of 2011 in concert with the African Union, the US government opted to pursue a policy of forced regime change with the Gulf-dominated Arab League as its “local” counterpart. By 2016, Obama at least realized that the North Atlantic powers had turned Libya — with all of its light weapons — into a “shit show.” At the same time, French, British and US special forces worked with various Libyan counterparts to help confront the Al-Qa‘idah and Islamic State presence in Libya, driving the latter from Sirte in 2016.

Naturally, as every security and terrorism expert assumed, Libya’s Islamic State would do what its Algerian predecessors had done almost two decades beforehand: hide in the Sahara. Though little evidence exists of this strategy, all eyes were on Niger as the likely victim of the Islamic State’s post-Sirte operations. In reality, the Islamic State in Sirte had never numbered more than a few hundred hardcore activists; most were likely killed by Misratan militias during the Sirte battle or have been picked off by US airstrikes. Those that remain are a nuisance whose prestige as jihadis is only increased by the fact that the US military is willing to fly B2 bombers from Missouri to kill them.

The extent to which the US military is willing to recognize its prevalent role in the tragedy of trans-Saharan security and the sequence of events that led to the deadly skirmish in Niger will likely be revealed in the forthcoming reports from AFRICOM. It will be unlikely, however, that these reports will recognize that terrorism in the region could be a monster of our own making. Indeed, a former State Department official told me last fall that the greatest regret of AFRICOM commanders in the wake of Mali’s 2012 civil war was that the Trans-Saharan Counterterrorism Partnership had not included enough human rights training for its African pupils. Mission civilisatrice, indeed.

Yet what these partnerships had actually done was far more devastating. They had empowered the regimes and security forces of states whose relations to populations in their Saharan hinterlands have been historically contentious. Whether the relationship between Tuaregs and the Malian and Nigerien states or the ongoing conflict between Morocco and Sahrawi nationalists, the cumulative effect of US counterterrorism assistance was to disenfranchise Saharan communities from their own security. In effect, these state-centered security measures were structurally designed to produce more, not less, insecurity. But such is the nature of institutions to find ways of reproducing the conditions of their own necessity, military institutions being no different.

In his studies of French imperialism in the Sahara, Douglas Porch makes the argument that expansion of European empires was not always driven by the needs of the state or of capital. More Weberian logics of careerism within professional soldier classes and the institutional peculiarities of modern military bureaucracies were also driving late imperialism. Enterprising colonial officers, whose territorial forays and pacification operations occurred with little oversight or guidance from the metropole, were often the real agents of imperialism.

In some ways, this thesis of imperialism tells us something interesting about the dramatic expansion of AFRICOM and our collective ignorance of this fact. Following the revelation of the attack in Niger late last year, the US media, politicians, and public “discovered” a vast network of special forces operations in the Sahel. Our surprise and demand for answers reminds me of several anecdotes in Porch’s work, such as the shock expressed by French officials in the early twentieth century when they were informed that the French empire was now in possession of strategic oases along the Moroccan-Algerian border despite there being no political mandate to seize them.

A Wild Fig Grows in Rowan Street

Professor Sampie Terreblanche is always swimming against the tide. “At the moment I am a very unpopular man in Stellenbosc­h. Around here, there’s a group of people that find me terribly annoying. There is an irrigation canal running through our neighborhood and some of the people have enclosed it, claiming it forms part of their properties. I wrote a letter to the Eikestad News [a local weekly newspaper] suggesting the council proclaim the canal as public property. Now, the people with homes bordering the canal are all mad at me, because they want to include it as part of their properties. But I say, no, it shouldn’t be allowed, it should be public property.”

Prof Sampie doesn’t look too perturbed. After all, this is not the first time that he has taken an unpopular stance. When you enter his house in Rowan Street, a framed picture on the cupboard catches your eye: Prof Sampie in conversation with the late President Nelson Mandela. Together with Willie Esterhuyse, Marinus Wiechers and other white Afrikaner academics, Sampie held clandestine meetings with ANC  leaders like Jacob Zuma and Essop Pahad in the 1980s, when it was unpopular, long before the ban on the ANC was lifted in 1990. In his testimony to the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission in 1997, Sampie advocated for a wealth tax. For this he received fierce criticism. And, perhaps the worst sin of all, for someone living in the Stellenbosch Winelands: He prefers gin over wine.

“Jislaaik?, people love to talk about wine! Unbelievable. In that sense I am an outsider. I cannot evaluate all that wine talk; I know nothing about wine.”

The fight over the irrigation canal is more than a small-town tiff. For someone who devoted his life to questions about inequality and social justice, questions about property, wealth and the public good lie at the centre of being human. It is about the question of how one lives an ethical life.

“How should things be? Jislaaik, this is very difficult. But it is the question we should be asking continuously. It goes through my head at night before I go to bed. When I was a child, I sat in church and asked myself questions like “where did it all begin?” “How did everything begin?” And still I wonder: ‘How should we organise life?’”

This, obviously, is a question of interest to an economist. The question about inequality has been central to his work for many years – it is the topic of 12 books and a host of journal articles and book chapters. But although Prof Sampie holds three honorary doctorates in economics related subjects, he locates his own work  primarily in the humanities. “I am not an economist. I am a political economist. There is a world of difference between them. An economist is someone who busies himself with how to make money. A political economist does the household economics of the state. Or the people’s household economy. Isn’t that a nice way of looking at it?  One who asks how the nation’s household  economy should be organised.”

For Sampie this is not merely an academic question. It is a question about the meaning of being here, one that presented itself again recently when he read the latest book by his friend and fellow Stellenbosch professor, Anton van Niekerk, about death and the meaning of life.

“Why are we here? It is to make this place a better place, a morally better place. Are we succeeding, in the midst of all this snobbery and arrogance? This is quite an important question. Are we using our talents and opportunities in an ethically correct manner? This is the question we should be grappling with.”

It is also, especially, a question for someone facing his own mortality.

‘“I received some bad news a few months ago. I have been diagnosed with brain cancer. It has not had any effect at all; I still feel completely healthy. According to the doctors it could take six months, or two years. They do not know at all.”

So the time has come to look back. Prof Sampie looks at the voice recorder on the table. “I bought myself one like this too. I want to put stories on it. My memories, to see if I can do something with it. I cannot do serious work anymore. Over the years I thought I had a good memory. I remember dates. I have given many lectures.”

That’s no exaggeration. He still casually drops names of specific students, anecdotes, special moments. What were the highlights?

“There are so many. I’ve taught here in Stellenbosch for 52 years. Probably to about 10,000 students. I must say I enjoyed it very much. The majority of students were women and I must admit that had I only taught male students, the whole experience would have been much less pleasant. I suppose I was more successful in persuading women. If a student smiles, and you can see she understands, she gets what it is about … that is quite an experience.”

In 1951 Prof Sampie was himself a first year student at Stellenbosch. Then there were 3,000 students, now there are close to 30,000. The university became “an unbelievably better place” over the years as it developed into a prominent research university. “The standard improved a great deal, it is incomparable.”

Nevertheless, there are many lamentations about the university, especially about its language policy, as it has been moving away from Afrikaans as a language of instruction.

“There is now a battle raging about English and Afrikaans. Now, I failed English at school in the Free State – it was the only subject I ever failed in my life. Afrikaans is important to me, but I am not going to wage war for it. For me the biggest issue in this country is the question of poverty, especially among black people. It is terribly bad.”

His empathy for the poor is linked to a political awakening in the 1970s, when he investigated poverty among Coloureds as a member of a government commission, the Erika Theron Commission. That work changed him irrevocably.

“The exposure to poverty touched me. I wasn’t the same person anymore after that Commission.”

But it is still the same Professor Sampie. Only recently, in November last year, he wrote a column for Media24’s newspapers titled “What are we to do?”: “In the one corner, the white elite lives in undeserved luxury and extravagance. In a second corner, the black elite also lives in luxury and extravagance. In the third corner, the black majority lives in inhumane poverty and squalor. The question is: What are we going to do about it?”

Reactions to his article were not exactly positive.

Are things going to get better?

In response to this question, he gets up to fetch a print-out of a graph that compares inequality in South Africa with that of other countries. He points to a red dot halfway on the page, far above Brazil and India.

“We are completely out of step. What is needed, is that we move this dot down. But I don’t know how we are going to do that. It grips your heart.”

Another graph shows how white South Africans became more prosperous after the arrival of democracy in 1994. “Actually, white people have done incredibly well for themselves. They enjoy life. They have access to private health care and tertiary education that compares with the best in the world. White people have never had it as good as in the past 20 years. But do they complain!”

In Stellenbosch he is confronted on a daily basis with the contrast between rich and poor.

Stellenbosch is a town for the wealthy; a wealth cult. I don’t think there is another town of this size in the country with so many rich people. Linked to this wealth, of course, there is snobbery. The snobbery of the people of Stellenbosch is unbearable.  They think they are terribly smart. But there is also no doubt that there are some very interesting people here. The level of schooling is of course very high. Actually, it is a fantastic place. To have lived here for 52 years is a big privilege, no doubt about it.”

In this modest house he lived, worked, and thought. In this town he broadened the minds of generations of students. But he also realises: after he goes, the bulldozers will come.

“It is incredibly how many old homes here in the neighborhood of Mostertsdrift have been knocked down in order to build new ones. When I kick the bucket in a year’s time or so, this house will also be knocked down. And it is such a nice home, such a nice place to live in. The old character of the town has disappeared.”

Before I leave, Prof Sampie takes me to his back garden, green despite the drought gripping the Cape. He wants to show me the wild fig tree in the yard.

“This is an incredibly big tree, I planted him myself in 1964. He is gigantic. We can use water from the irrigation canal, you see, this is why he grew so very big.”

There, against the fence, the wild fig tree towers above us. Branches gesturing like swinging arms, bearded leaves hanging down to the ground. And at the bottom of the knotty trunk, the roots are visible, there were they anchor the old giant in the Stellenbosch soil.

Professor Sampie Terreblanche, aged 84, passed away on February 17, 2018, in Stellenbosch, South Africa. This is an edited translation of what turned out to be  Professor Terreblanche’s last media interview. It is edited translation from the original Afrikaans, first published in Stellenbosch Visio.