Sean Jacobs's Blog, page 259

In defense of the Anglophones

Patrice Nganang leaving court. Image supplied by author.

December 27, 2017 

Declaration made to the Criminal Court in Yaoundé 

Your Honor,

Thank you for allowing me to address the court at this historic moment when writing is on trial. The case is all the more historic given that several times in the past writing has been on trial in Cameroon without the presence of a writer. Our country does have the infamous reputation of being the African country that has persecuted writers the most, from Njoya, who was imprisoned in Mantoum in 1921 and who died in exile in Nsimeyong—right here in Yaoundé—to Mongo Beti, the last Cameroonian writer, who also died here, after forty years of exile. Here we have made a habit of speaking together about a house without input from an architect, each of us believing we know more about walls than any mason. We speak about the State without considering the citizen, even though every constitution is written. But this time this is not the case, and I thank you for that. I stand before you accused of three things that are clearly linked to writing, by which I mean the use of the alphabet to make meaning, for in the end, I used nothing more than twenty-six letters to write the contested text. Nothing more. So, I will prove to you in my statement that those twenty-six letters, such as I employed them, cannot in any way constitute a threat to the Head of State, nor an affront against “whomsoever”; they were set in motion in order to defend our armed forces—not to lie, defame, or affront them. And finally, I will prove to you that the alphabet—the writer’s one and only tool, which the State in its wisdom obliges us to teach to our children—could not ever be an instrument of violence, as it is the very sign of non-violence.

First, the question of a threat (Article 301 of the Penal Code).

The structure of the contested text, one short paragraph, is clear. It is comprised of three parts, the first stating that which I am not. In short, I am not a member of the opposition. I am a Cameroonian citizen. I am an intellectual. By that I mean that I use my intellect to speak truth, and I do so in writing. The Concierge of the Republic: I say what I see and have seen. What I have experienced. The second part then states the truth, which it is my duty to speak: Biya does not exist for me. He is outside of the limits of my field of perception. The government’s prosecutor seems to concur as he has replaced that name with “whomsoever”. I thank him for that, because it is something we agree on. His absence—Biya’s absence—is manifest, not just for me alone, but for all of us Cameroonians, much more so than his presence. He is in fact what the Bangangté call Fam—what doesn’t exist at all. Thus, the third part of the paragraph, which pertains to the threat, the primary accusation against the writer, actually concerns something that does not exist, and that the prosecutor rightly replaced by “whomsoever”. Is it possible to threaten something that does not exist? That is the question that brings us together here. The evident response is: no. And even less so because this part of my text is framed upon a radical impossibility. “If I had a rifle,” is the requisite condition, the sine qua non of the situation, and even then, it is meaningless unless I know how to use one—which is not the case.  If I stand before Biya who, let me repeat, does not exist. And even if he did, it is contingent upon the possibility that I stand before him. For that to happen would require that the Presidential Guard no longer exist, that the security searches at the presidential palace, le Palais d’Unité, be stopped, and that the President of the Republic meet me, by which I mean that he agree to do so. And finally, it would require that he bare his brow before me for the hand-to-hand battle imagined by my text to take place. Of course, this is all predicated on the first condition—that he have already begun to exist—which is not the case. One cannot threaten to kill a Fam, your Honor. Thus, my text presents one cardinal impossibility, supported by an infinite number of probabilities, all absurd, all impossible; therefore, in the end, it cannot be taken as a threat, neither in letter nor in spirit. I have no money. If I had seven hundred francs, I’d buy you an ice-cold Guinness; this is not an offer to buy you a Guinness but a straightforward refusal. To say that if I were free, I would be with my family means that I am a prisoner, the condition expressed through antiphrasis.

Let’s now move on to the affront. In what way does my text constitute an affront to the Armed Forces? [Article 152; 154]. I have thought long and hard about this; I suppose that is what being held without charges is for, because I have been cut off from all communication; and I suppose that is what prison is for, because I have here been forced to introspection. Well, I have thought and I have realized that, in the end, this is a contradiction in terms: by use of periphrasis, what I actually do is defend our Armed Forces. I want them to be strong, I want them to be grand, powerful; so strong, so grand and so powerful, in fact, that they would win a war against the US army, the army of the country where I live and whose actions the prosecutor—not me—qualifies as “murders”; by that he means the execution of Gaddafi by a Franco-American coalition, the execution of Saddam Hussein by the American army. Yet, if you have traveled around the Anglophone regions during this time of war, as I did before I wrote my text, you know that as you make your way through the Kumba forest, you will find some Cameroonian soldiers who are corruptible. Can you even imagine an American soldier asking for a tchoko, for strangers to buy him a drink in the forests of New Jersey? But if you have been on the unpaved route that leads from Tombel to Nyasoso, as I have been, then you know that isolated soldiers posted in the forest stretch a cord across the road in front of their feet in order to stop and search the peasants, who are all armed with machetes. If you have traveled the road between Bamenda to Mamfé, as I have, you know that the fifteen check-points there function according to what you are wearing: those in suits are not searched, nor are private cars—by which I mean to say that I was not searched once along that road. And what’s worse, you know that cars registered in the Francophone Central region are systematically not searched, even when they are headed to Akwaya. If you have led campaigns to secure the freedom of writers, as I have, and have been allowed into the Ministry of the Defense several times without being searched, putting that in writing is just telling the truth. Rather than punishing those who have seen and experienced these serious professional lapses on the part of the Cameroonian Army, your Honor, the State should instead punish the offending soldiers, professionalize the Army–for unlike the American Army, ours is made up of career soldiers—and maintain the discipline of the aptly named guardians of the peace. One does not arrest a writer for revealing the nation’s weaknesses. The primary weakness of our thirsty people is beer. Offering a beer to a Cameroonian, whether a soldier or not, is a sign of politeness where we come from, not of corruption. But saying so isn’t lying, for writing is truth filtered by a temperament.

Your Honor, my temperament requires me to feel indignation when faced with a soldier who sits and drinks by the side of the road. How can one not be indignant at the failings of these military men, the very same who ask strangers for tchoko, and whom I have seen sitting along the road between Foumbot and Bamendjing, alone in the middle of the forest, with a beer by their feet, covered in the dust of motorcycle taxis we call bend-skin, their rifle lying on the ground, even as the official press informs us that soldiers are “assassinated”, “poisoned” by the people? By now you have understood the mother of my text is indignation. For how can one not be indignant at the fate of the long-suffering people who are pushed to assassinate the soldiers sent by the State into their villages to protect them, peasants who—by virtue of their poverty—for just where could they find the money for the continuous flow of tchoko?—are turned into the soldiers’ enemies? Were the president of this country to exist he would know that young, thirty-year old peasants from Tombel look as though they’re fifty, because their health has been ruined by the cocoa plantations and finished off by the kitoko. He would know that the women, already weakened by successive pregnancies, still carry four bunches of bananas in baskets suspended by a cord around their forehead, just as they did in the 15th century, yes, he would know that. And also that it takes two days to go from Kumba to Nyasoso, which are a mere 45 minutes apart, because you have to go through Bonaberi, Mbanga, and Loum! Were he to exist he would have known that the Anglophone public school in Nlohe, a collection of dilapidated shacks with sheet-metal roofs, built on pilons, houses 450 students, or 70 per class! Saying these things that I saw and experienced is just telling the truth, and no true citizen would remain indifferent in the face of such systematically planned misery inflicted on a region where the black earth attests to the wealth of its topsoil and the layers below.

But again, let’s move on. [Article 267]

The third point concerns violence, for it is obvious that saying what I saw with my own two eyes can be neither defamatory nor insulting, and that one cannot threaten that which does not exist. Violence is a means, a way of doing things. The soldier is violent because his rifle lends itself to violence; but the writer is non-violent because the alphabet requires him to be so. That a text describing real historic situations—the end of Gaddafi’s regime, the end of Mugabe’s, the end of Saddam Hussein’s—could be seen to excuse “murder”, as the prosecutor claims, still baffles me. Especially since it is impossible to both excuse the Armed Forces and at the same time commit an affront against them. Its illogical. An affront is a lie, an insult, a threat; whereas an excuse is a defense. The armies in question in my text are American, Zimbabwean, French. They are, then, both Western and African. It is impossible to excuse their means of ridding themselves of a tyrant and bringing a regime to an end—to justify violence—and at the same time commit an affront against the Armed Forces as the prosecutor claims I have done. For my text respects well both the State’s exclusive monopoly on violence and its violent right arm, which is to say, the Armed Forces. I have thought long and hard, your Honor; I have called on the wisdom of those I teach and those who have taught me; and I always come to the same conclusion: never did I suggest in my text that any person besides a soldier make use of violence or its instruments, rifles. Is the soldiers’ violence murder? Are soldiers murderers? Does the prosecutor mean that the Armed Forces are murderers? Does he mean that the Cameroonian Armed Forces should be charged with murder for the deaths that took place in the Anglophone regions on September 22 and the October 1, 2017, under Article 275 of the Penal Code? That makes no sense to me, because the clearest defense I have articulated, my greatest excuse, then, was made for the Armed Forces; what I ultimately did was describe an absurd situation, something that in the practice of writing, in literature, we call fiction. Press a rifle against the skull of a Fam, of something that does not exist. I do not see how that constitutes a crime, because one cannot kill something that does not exist, especially since the instrument I used to say this is the very alphabet that the State requires that we teach our children, and what’s more, I do not know how to use a rifle!

Your Honor, my trial makes no sense. It is absurd and I understand it all the less because in 2012 I had a proposal for a law submitted to the National Assembly by the SDF, specifically by the Deputy Jean-Michel Nintcheu, calling for the immunity of the President of the Republic be lifted, in order that he be prosecuted for the deaths of the victims of the infamous “Commandement oppérationnel”, for the deaths that took place in 2008, and others, and that he find himself in the 11th Section of Kondengui Prison where I preceded him and where I am currently being held. The goal was to abolish Article 53, which affords him absolute immunity, the likes of which exists in no other country on this planet. And well, this legislative proposal was not even discussed, even though it had been duly and properly submitted. The members of our Parliament had then deemed it absurd. In 2013, I again submitted, by the intermediary of lawyers and jurists, but with my own notarized signature, an accusation of High Treason against the President of the Republic. And for that the penalty would have been a death sentence for him, just as it was in 1984 for Ahidjo. And yet the federal prosecutor did not then press charges against me for “threats to whomsoever”, nor did he have me arrested for “affronts”, even though all of my activities were featured on the front page of the daily papers. Just as with the legislative proposal, I had come in person to present my accusation to the Supreme Court, delivering it myself to the court’s mail room, where it was received and duly stamped by the staff member on duty, who stood and removed his hat when he did so. “Courage, my son,” he said. That accusation was certainly also deemed absurd since nothing ever came of it. Why does the Cameroonian State that declared absurd these two cases, although they were in line with juridical norms and procedures, now press charges against me for what is clearly fictional? Why does it press charges against me when I tell the truth about what I experienced, about the experiences of soldiers and, I might add, of peasants, teachers, students and other government entities? Why does the State press charges against me, a citizen?

The answer is clear.

It’s because of the Anglophone crisis. That’s what is making the Cameroonian state lose its mind. And the photo that illustrates my contested text speaks volumes about this because it was taken in the Buea Social Club at the end of my Anglophone tour; it shows me with Agbor Nkongho, the Anglophone leader who later stood up for my defense. So, it’s because my indignation was born of the several weeks I spent in the villages and cities of the South-West and North-West that I now stand here before the court in Yaoundé, as have hundreds of the Anglophones whose experiences I described, your Honor. Those who gave me a standing ovation when I arrived in prison, and who visit me each day of my incarceration are not mistaken. Unlike the Secretaries General of the Commonwealth, of the Francophone Community, and of the European Union, I went to Bamenda, where I danced in a club until curfew; to the military hospital in Kumba, where I saw wounded soldiers; to schools in Mamfé and Kumba—all closed now—where I spoke with the administrators; to the market in Buéa where I got a haircut. I ate with families in Tombel and had lunch with the people of Nyasoso, including their chief. I went everywhere, everywhere, really, to speak with my compatriots, even as far as Kupe-Tombel, yes, in order to understand them. That’s why I am here, your Honor; that’s why I am in prison. Because I wrote about what I saw, experienced, and understood.

To conclude on a positive note, let me say this: one day the Cameroonian Nation will have as its foundation the will of the Cameroonian people who, by a great majority, oppose this war against the Anglophones and who vote by sending their children—the majority of Francophone children—to Anglophone schools. One day, then, this country will be Anglophone, according to the will of each parent who sends their Francophone child to an Anglophone school.

One day, yes, the Cameroonian State will stop taking the tax money of the peasants of Ngomedzap, who have no roads, and using it to kill those of Santa, who don’t have any either.

One day we will be Anglophones.

All of us.

And from that day on, the President of the Republic will need to speak annually to both Chambers of our Parliament, the Senate and the National Assembly, as part of the on-going dialog with the people that the State of the Union will become. This will replace the current speech given on December 31, which is drowned in the festive ambiance that only partially conceals that it commemorates January 1, 1960, date of the independence of Eastern Cameroon, of Francophone Cameroon. Then, at last, the State of the Union will sanctify the federation that our grandparents bequeathed us when they formed one State, stipulating that this state, a federation, not be called into question. The State of the Union will be given in order to reassure each member of the large family we comprise, and to remind us that we are all brothers and sisters. Because the shedding of blood to prevent the celebrations of October 1, which mark the independence of Western Cameroon, cannot reasonably be justified given the celebrations that mark January 1, and which culminate in the speech we all know, the State of the Union will emerge as a moment of consensus, the palaver of a people joined voluntarily in a federation of equals. May 18, the date when the Fumban Accords were signed, will be the best date for the new commemoration. Once the people are in charge of their own affairs, and able to hold accountable the governors, prefects, sub-prefects, judges, and all other leaders responsible for their misfortunes, they will be less likely to fall into the generalized misery I have seen in our villages, especially in the South-West and North-West, which now also suffer from the curfew, the internet shut-down, and the closing of the Nigerian border, which is their economic lifeline. After all, people who govern themselves cultivate their prosperity.

Your honor, you certainly have now understood that I am entirely innocent of the three charges brought against me, and that, on the contrary, it is out of my love for my country and to make amends, so that no writer, no Cameroonian citizen, will ever be persecuted because he or she spoke the truth, that I respectfully submit to you a logical and constructive suggestion for our collective, federal and Anglophone future, and that I commit myself, once freed, to work for its realization, in the framework of a Consortium for Civil Society, founded here today.

I give you my word as Concierge of the Republic.

Thank you.

* Translation by Amy B. Reid (Jan 27, 2018).

Was Juan Goytisolo really an anti-orientalist?

Cafe Tingis in the medina of Tangier, 1953. Image credit Mirrorpix/The Image Works.

On June 5 last year, the Spanish novelist Juan Goytisolo was buried in the Spanish cemetery of Larache in northern Morocco, his tomb overlooking the Atlantic Ocean and right next to that of Jean Genet. Spanish and Moroccan officials, and local writers and artists, paid homage to the Spanish author, reading extracts of his work. An outpouring in the Moroccan media paid homage to the novelist who had made known to the world that the “spirit of al-Andalus [Islamic Spain]” was alive in Morocco, and who had mobilized renowned intellectuals in his (successful) campaign to have Jamaa El Fna, Marrakesh’s famous public square, declared a UNESCO World Heritage site.

For over a half-century, Goytisolo was a fixture in Tangier’s cafés, some of his greatest work inspired by the northern city’s coffeehouses. It was at the storied Café Hafa, on the cliffs overlooking the Straits of Gibraltar, where in 1965 he imagined a Moorish (re)conquest of Franco’s Spain, resulting in his classic novel Don Julian (1971). It was in the medina’s cafetinés where he immersed himself in North African music, drank mint tea with crumbled hash and tried to “shed his Spanish skin.” Of the myriad writers and artists who have settled in Morocco over the last century, Goytisolo was clearly the most familiar to Moroccans. In 2003, he was inducted into the Moroccan Writers Union, the only foreigner ever to be granted that status. No expatriate writer tried as assiduously to integrate into Moroccan society, learning the local vernacular, leading conservationist efforts, even adopting Moroccan children. Yet since his death the Moroccan press and social media have been abuzz with debate about his relationship to his adopted homeland.

Goytisolo settled in Tangier after breaking with the Algerian and Cuban revolutions. The Spanish novelist had thrown in his lot with Fidel Castro’s revolution in hopes of seeing a more egalitarian Cuba, and to purge the guilt he felt over his family’s role in Cuban slavery. By the mid-1960s, though, Goytisolo had begun to distance himself from Castro because of the revolutionary government’s suppression of Afro-Cuban religions (the Abakuás and Lukumi, in particular) and persecution of homosexuals. Fidel, Goytisolo would write, had turned the “ex-paradise” of Cuba “into a silent and lugubrious floating concentration camp.” Havana was thus a paradise twice lost. The Spanish novelist would depart Algiers for similar reasons. Both pre-1959 Havana and colonial Algiers were playgrounds for European and American aristocrats, racketeers, artists and writers, with alarming rates of sex tourism and prostitution. And in both Cuba and Algeria, the nationalist movement would denounce sexual exploitation by white settlers, and crack down on prostitutes and homosexuals upon assuming power. Goytisolo would quit Algiers — for Tangier — shortly after Ahmed Ben Bella, the founding president of Algeria, was deposed in a coup by Gen. Houari Boumedienne in 1965, who began backing a conservative Islamist discourse.

The Strait of Gibraltar, seen from Cafe Hafa. Tangier, Morocco, 1985. Image credit Pierre Olivier Deschamps for Agence Vu Redux.

And so Goytisolo settled in Tangier. “Tangier is one of the world’s few remaining pleasure cities: and no questions asked,” quips the narrator of Don Julian. With their endless beaches, flashy casinos and weak, pro-Western governments who rarely enforced the law on non-natives, Tangier and Havana had both long captivated writers, anarchists, mobsters and the Western jet set. “[P]robably next to Tangiers, Habana was the vice capital of the world,” wrote Amiri Baraka in 1955 when he landed in Cuba.

Goytisolo arrived in Tangier with the Cold War well underway, and relations between Cuba and Morocco deteriorating. Radio Havana was beaming Communist propaganda directly to Tangier in an effort to liberate northern Morocco and Spain from Franco. (The US had set up a Voice of America relay station in Tangier in 1949.) As border disputes broke out between Morocco and newly independent Algeria, Cuba would back the revolutionary republic. Amidst the intrigue, Goytisolo seemed to be still searching for the Havana of his boyhood reveries, hoping the North African town would be the paradise he had lost. Places in Tangier evoked the Cuban capital. In his early writing about Tangier, he moves poignantly across the Atlantic, interweaving the two cities, moving from Havana’s malecon to Tangier’s Avenida de Playa, from Verdado to the Hotel de Cuba just off the medina. He would invite prominent Cuban writers, such as Guillermo Cabrera Infante and Severo Sarduy, to Tangier. The blend of Spanish colonial and mudejar architecture (the amalgam of Islamic, Gothic and Romanesque styles that emerged in twelfth century Iberia), the religious and musical syncretism, the constant hum of Spanish radio all reminded him of Havana. 

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, when I was in my teens, Goytisolo spoke often at local bookstores and the Instituto Cervantes in Tangier. Terse, soft-spoken, poker-faced, he would move from topic to topic, book to book, and then tell a joke — and the audience would sit quietly, until he would inform them, “C’etait une blague” then people would laugh. “I have always believed that the role of the intellectual is the critique of ‘your own,’ and the respect of the ‘other,’” he would say, “and that is the opposite of nationalism, which is about promoting ‘us’ and rejecting the ‘other’ — and if that is treason, then so be it, que así sea.” From these appearances we learned fascinating detail about Tangier’s Spanish past. To us, Ali Bey was just another dirt-poor, mud-caked street in the south of town, until Goytisolo explained that it was named after Ali Bey (né Domingo Badia), the famed Spanish Arabist and explorer who had traveled to Mecca, and that a statue of Badia had stood in the neighborhood until the 1930s, until it was knocked down by the Istiqlal party, when it was discovered that he had worked as a spy for France. From “Si Juan,” we also learned that the Catalan architect Antoni Gaudí had come to Tangier in 1892 and drew up plans to build a majestic, multi-spiraled religious building named the Catholic Missions of Africa — similar to La Sagrada Familia in Barcelona — but it was never realized because an insurrection in Melilla, the Spanish enclave in northeastern Morocco, disrupted Spanish-Moroccan relations.

Goytisolo was a larger-than-life figure in 1980s and 1990s Tangier. Many expatriate writers had made Tangier their home, but few sat in the cafés with locals. Often, we did not understand what he was talking about (“always view your language in light of other languages”), but we admired him for his vast erudition, humility and taciturn nature. He was so solidly pro-Muslim, so invested in the legacy of Moorish Spain. He saw al-Andalus, particularly in its later years, as a metaphor for the human self – fluid, fragile, kaleidoscopic. Unlike most Westerners studying Arabic, he had taken the time to learn our Hispano-Arabic-Berber vernacular, probably the most looked-down upon of dialects in the Arab world. And he was keenly aware of our precarity. We absorbed Spain daily through television and radio, and dreamed of crossing the Strait, but needed a laissez passé to enter the Spanish enclave of Ceuta an hour east of Tangier, a visa to enter Tarifa, and two visas — one Spanish and one British — to reach Gibraltar, eight miles across the water.

Juan Goytisolo with Spain’s King Felipe and Queen Letizia, after they awarded Goytisolo the Premio Cervantes literary award, 2015. Image credit Sergio Perez for Reuters.

If one had to distill Goytisolo’s large corpus of work into three words, it would be: mudejarism, periphery and anti-orthodoxy. “I have the periphery under my skin,” he would say to explain his obsession with the international periphery – the “Third World” – which he saw, with its polyglot, heterogeneous societies, as an antidote to the white West. He was also fascinated with Europe and America’s diverse and chaotic “urban periphery” – the ghetto, the barrio, the banlieue. He coined the verb medinear to describe his border crossing, his meandering through the ghettos and banlieues of New York, Barcelona and Paris — the “medinas of the West,” as he called them. Goytisolo was one of the first to write about what we now call “global cities” and “transnationalism,” claiming that the cultural and human flow from the Third World and the subsequent “babelization” of Western cities was “the sign of unmistakable modernity.” In 1982, 25 years before Michel Houellebecq’s Submission (2015), Goytisolo published his absurdist Landscapes After the Battle (1982), imagining his own neighborhood in Paris taken over by Turks and Arabs.

In his masterpiece Don Julian, Muslim hordes will overrun Spain, everything turns to green and Arabic overwhelms Spanish. The sounds of Arabic will then thunder across the Atlantic to Latin America everywhere that Hispanic caudillismo reigns — “in the pulque-bars of Lagunilla in Mexico City, in the Calle de Corrientes of Buenos Aires, in the Jesús María district of Havana.” An Islamic reconquista, Goytisolo believed, would pull Spain out of its “prehistoric” place and cure its general cultural and demographic anomie. The Moors would sack la España sagrada, but first they would storm the “cavern” of the fair-skinned Isabel the Catholic. The Moors will repeat this act of sexual aggression “on a national scale” across the peninsula. And throughout this massive bacchanal of violence, women are mute. The women of Spain, whose reproductive organs are invariably described as “grottos,” “mires” and “abysses,” are portrayed as silent housewives “shitting” babies here and there. In the early 1970s, Goytisolo’s silencing of women — and recurrent negative references to women as cavernous plants, spiders spinning lethal webs, foul stepmothers with a “mire” or “abyss” between their legs — began to draw criticism. By the 1980s, critics were asking why femininity is almost always portrayed negatively in Goytisolo’s fiction — whether it is through “feminine” Catholic Spain, wild Moroccan prostitutes or overweight American women roaming North Africa.

In 1981, Goytisolo published Saracen Chronicles, a volume of essays on Spanish and Latin American Orientalism, intended as a sequel to Edward Said’s Orientalism (1979), which had not addressed Hispanic Orientalism. Goytisolo had befriended Said while teaching at NYU in the 1970s. The resultant book was a tour de force, exploring literary mudéjarism in Latin America, and tracing the influence of Cervantes on authors from Quevedo in Spain to the Mexican and Cuban writers Carlos Fuentes and José Lezama Lima, and authors of the Latin American literary boom of 1960s. Yet the book was also a preemptive move: Orientalism had become a political issue in American and Spanish academe, with scholars increasingly noting Goytisolo’s rather cliché representations of the Orient as a world of liberating chaos and carnality. The charge of Orientalism against Goytisolo never went away; but it also never stuck. In 2006, the New York Times Magazine ran a cover story about the novelist titled “The Anti-Orientalist.”

Goytisolo’s linking of sexual aggression with liberation suppresses women but also does no service to Muslim men. Critics would see his depictions of Moroccan men as “savaged untamed warriors,” “instinctively cruel Arabs” “horsemen with coarse lips, jugular veins” with “savage Arab virility” – as perpetuating the worse stereotypes at a time of mounting hostility in Spain and Europe to North African migration. His satire was lost on many. While Goytisolo may have been defending the rights of Moroccan migrants in Spain in his El Pais columns, his fiction was giving fodder to more nefarious currents in Spain.

Goytisolo lived in Tangier as the Moroccan regime tightened its grip upon the formerly Spanish provinces of the north and the formerly Spanish Sahara, and as Tangier went from a Latin city to an Arab city. He closely followed the repression in Morocco and Cuba. In March 1971, Goytisolo, Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa and Argentine novelist Julio Cortázar launched the quarterly magazine Libré in Paris to promote writers banned in Latin America, particularly Cuba; the first issue contained pieces by Octavio Paz, Mario Vargas Llosa, Carlos Fuentes and Che Guevara. Yet the Spanish novelist was very circumspect in dealing with Arab authoritarianism. Saracen Chronicles concludes with a survey of countries in Latin America and the Soviet bloc where literature can constitute a crime, and where authors can face death and imprisonment, yet oddly there is no mention of the same phenomenon in the Arabic-speaking world.

On an official visit, Cuban Prime Minister Fidel Castro walks with Algerian Colonel Boumediene in Algiers, 1972. Keystone-France/Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images.

Goytisolo arrived in Tangier at the beginning of the “years of lead,” a period of attempted coups and horrific state violence against dissidents, as Hassan II imprisoned leftists, burying opponents and their children in the notorious underground prison of Tazmamart. Yet for Goytisolo, right up until his death, Morocco was always represented as a hybrid, diverse, sexually tolerant country, juxtaposed to a parochial, historically stuck Spain. Like his idol Cervantes, he praised the “Orient” for being diverse and polyglot, a reverse image of the modern West where nation-states had extirpated minorities from their midst and imposed a dominant language and identity. Goytisolo, however, lived and traveled in an Arab world undergoing a violent process of war and state formation, with regimes cracking down routinely on minorities and imposing Arabic on non-Arabic speaking populations, all in the name of nationalism. Yet even as the Moroccan state killed off dissidents, oppressed Amazigh movements, criminalized homosexuality, the brutality of state formation rarely figured into his writing, as he continued to quixotically portray the Orient as better. It is not clear if Goytisolo was simply over-generalizing from his privileged status as a regime-approved European writer living in Marrakesh, or if his idea of Spain remained messianically stuck in Queen Isabelle-qua-Franco’s era, just as his description of North Africa remained anchored in the fifteenth-century epoch (hailed by Cervantes), or perhaps the mythical 1950s Tangier (when foreigners enjoyed extra-territoriality).

Ironically, Goytisolo passed away during a period of protests in Morocco which had started in the Rif region and spread down south, and when talk of the “betrayal of the intellectuals” was in the air. As the regime cracked down, arresting bloggers, artists and youth activists en masse, journalists pondered which of the celebrity intellectuals who lived in Morocco would back the hirak movement — and a stocktaking of Goytisolo’s career began. Goytisolo’s detractors pointed out that in his many decades in the kingdom, he rarely called out the Moroccan authorities. His silence throughout 2011, as protests rocked the kingdom, and his failure to support that year’s February 20 movement also struck many as calculated and “deliberate.”

Why did this lover of freedom not raise his voice for the freedom of his adopted homeland? It is hard to avoid the conclusion that like the other celebrity intellectuals who “love” Morocco and reside there — Bernard Henri Levi, Dominique Strauss Kahn and Tariq Ramadan, all shrill proponents of freedom, albeit from disparate ideological positions — Goytisolo had made a bargain with the Moroccan regime. As long as he described the makhzen as “tolerant,” they would view him as “moderate.” The Moroccan regime has a nonpareil capacity to coopt intellectual firebrands, with a combination of intimidation and lavish treatment (riads, tajines, chauffeurs) — and to welcome writers who are admired around the world but are quietly resented in the kingdom. By the early 1990s, Goytisolo had — wittingly or unwittingly — become part of a coalition of actors (domestic and international) that portrayed Morocco as “tolerant,” “forward-looking,” “a feast for the senses,” a model of reform. The writer who built his reputation lashing the mythology of fascist Spain was now burnishing the image of another authoritarian regime. He found freedom in Tangier — and Morocco, more broadly — but was silent about our unfreedom so as not to jeopardize his. It is hard to shake the impression that Goytisolo’s liberty and eminence in effect rested on our disenfranchisement.

* For a longer version of this essay, including footnotes, on Juan Goytisolo, see “Juan Goytisolo: Tangier, Havana and the Treasonous Intellectual.”

Was the Spanish novelist Juan Goytisolo really an anti-orientalist?

Cafe Tingis in the medina of Tangier, 1953. Image credit Mirrorpix/The Image Works.

On June 5 last year, the Spanish novelist Juan Goytisolo was buried in the Spanish cemetery of Larache in northern Morocco, his tomb overlooking the Atlantic Ocean and right next to that of Jean Genet. Spanish and Moroccan officials, and local writers and artists, paid homage to the Spanish author, reading extracts of his work. An outpouring in the Moroccan media paid homage to the novelist who had made known to the world that the “spirit of al-Andalus [Islamic Spain]” was alive in Morocco, and who had mobilized renowned intellectuals in his (successful) campaign to have Jamaa El Fna, Marrakesh’s famous public square, declared a UNESCO World Heritage site.

For over a half-century, Goytisolo was a fixture in Tangier’s cafés, some of his greatest work inspired by the northern city’s coffeehouses. It was at the storied Café Hafa, on the cliffs overlooking the Straits of Gibraltar, where in 1965 he imagined a Moorish (re)conquest of Franco’s Spain, resulting in his classic novel Don Julian (1971). It was in the medina’s cafetinés where he immersed himself in North African music, drank mint tea with crumbled hash and tried to “shed his Spanish skin.” Of the myriad writers and artists who have settled in Morocco over the last century, Goytisolo was clearly the most familiar to Moroccans. In 2003, he was inducted into the Moroccan Writers Union, the only foreigner ever to be granted that status. No expatriate writer tried as assiduously to integrate into Moroccan society, learning the local vernacular, leading conservationist efforts, even adopting Moroccan children. Yet since his death the Moroccan press and social media have been abuzz with debate about his relationship to his adopted homeland.

Goytisolo settled in Tangier after breaking with the Algerian and Cuban revolutions. The Spanish novelist had thrown in his lot with Fidel Castro’s revolution in hopes of seeing a more egalitarian Cuba, and to purge the guilt he felt over his family’s role in Cuban slavery. By the mid-1960s, though, Goytisolo had begun to distance himself from Castro because of the revolutionary government’s suppression of Afro-Cuban religions (the Abakuás and Lukumi, in particular) and persecution of homosexuals. Fidel, Goytisolo would write, had turned the “ex-paradise” of Cuba “into a silent and lugubrious floating concentration camp.” Havana was thus a paradise twice lost. The Spanish novelist would depart Algiers for similar reasons. Both pre-1959 Havana and colonial Algiers were playgrounds for European and American aristocrats, racketeers, artists and writers, with alarming rates of sex tourism and prostitution. And in both Cuba and Algeria, the nationalist movement would denounce sexual exploitation by white settlers, and crack down on prostitutes and homosexuals upon assuming power. Goytisolo would quit Algiers — for Tangier — shortly after Ahmed Ben Bella, the founding president of Algeria, was deposed in a coup by Gen. Houari Boumedienne in 1965, who began backing a conservative Islamist discourse.

The Strait of Gibraltar, seen from Cafe Hafa. Tangier, Morocco, 1985. Image credit Pierre Olivier Deschamps for Agence Vu Redux.

And so Goytisolo settled in Tangier. “Tangier is one of the world’s few remaining pleasure cities: and no questions asked,” quips the narrator of Don Julian. With their endless beaches, flashy casinos and weak, pro-Western governments who rarely enforced the law on non-natives, Tangier and Havana had both long captivated writers, anarchists, mobsters and the Western jet set. “[P]robably next to Tangiers, Habana was the vice capital of the world,” wrote Amiri Baraka in 1955 when he landed in Cuba.

Goytisolo arrived in Tangier with the Cold War well underway, and relations between Cuba and Morocco deteriorating. Radio Havana was beaming Communist propaganda directly to Tangier in an effort to liberate northern Morocco and Spain from Franco. (The US had set up a Voice of America relay station in Tangier in 1949.) As border disputes broke out between Morocco and newly independent Algeria, Cuba would back the revolutionary republic. Amidst the intrigue, Goytisolo seemed to be still searching for the Havana of his boyhood reveries, hoping the North African town would be the paradise he had lost. Places in Tangier evoked the Cuban capital. In his early writing about Tangier, he moves poignantly across the Atlantic, interweaving the two cities, moving from Havana’s malecon to Tangier’s Avenida de Playa, from Verdado to the Hotel de Cuba just off the medina. He would invite prominent Cuban writers, such as Guillermo Cabrera Infante and Severo Sarduy, to Tangier. The blend of Spanish colonial and mudejar architecture (the amalgam of Islamic, Gothic and Romanesque styles that emerged in twelfth century Iberia), the religious and musical syncretism, the constant hum of Spanish radio all reminded him of Havana. 

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, when I was in my teens, Goytisolo spoke often at local bookstores and the Instituto Cervantes in Tangier. Terse, soft-spoken, poker-faced, he would move from topic to topic, book to book, and then tell a joke — and the audience would sit quietly, until he would inform them, “C’etait une blague” then people would laugh. “I have always believed that the role of the intellectual is the critique of ‘your own,’ and the respect of the ‘other,’” he would say, “and that is the opposite of nationalism, which is about promoting ‘us’ and rejecting the ‘other’ — and if that is treason, then so be it, que así sea.” From these appearances we learned fascinating detail about Tangier’s Spanish past. To us, Ali Bey was just another dirt-poor, mud-caked street in the south of town, until Goytisolo explained that it was named after Ali Bey (né Domingo Badia), the famed Spanish Arabist and explorer who had traveled to Mecca, and that a statue of Badia had stood in the neighborhood until the 1930s, until it was knocked down by the Istiqlal party, when it was discovered that he had worked as a spy for France. From “Si Juan,” we also learned that the Catalan architect Antoni Gaudí had come to Tangier in 1892 and drew up plans to build a majestic, multi-spiraled religious building named the Catholic Missions of Africa — similar to La Sagrada Familia in Barcelona — but it was never realized because an insurrection in Melilla, the Spanish enclave in northeastern Morocco, disrupted Spanish-Moroccan relations.

Goytisolo was a larger-than-life figure in 1980s and 1990s Tangier. Many expatriate writers had made Tangier their home, but few sat in the cafés with locals. Often, we did not understand what he was talking about (“always view your language in light of other languages”), but we admired him for his vast erudition, humility and taciturn nature. He was so solidly pro-Muslim, so invested in the legacy of Moorish Spain. He saw al-Andalus, particularly in its later years, as a metaphor for the human self – fluid, fragile, kaleidoscopic. Unlike most Westerners studying Arabic, he had taken the time to learn our Hispano-Arabic-Berber vernacular, probably the most looked-down upon of dialects in the Arab world. And he was keenly aware of our precarity. We absorbed Spain daily through television and radio, and dreamed of crossing the Strait, but needed a laissez passé to enter the Spanish enclave of Ceuta an hour east of Tangier, a visa to enter Tarifa, and two visas — one Spanish and one British — to reach Gibraltar, eight miles across the water.

Juan Goytisolo with Spain’s King Felipe and Queen Letizia, after they awarded Goytisolo the Premio Cervantes literary award, 2015. Image credit Sergio Perez for Reuters.

If one had to distill Goytisolo’s large corpus of work into three words, it would be: mudejarism, periphery and anti-orthodoxy. “I have the periphery under my skin,” he would say to explain his obsession with the international periphery – the “Third World” – which he saw, with its polyglot, heterogeneous societies, as an antidote to the white West. He was also fascinated with Europe and America’s diverse and chaotic “urban periphery” – the ghetto, the barrio, the banlieue. He coined the verb medinear to describe his border crossing, his meandering through the ghettos and banlieues of New York, Barcelona and Paris — the “medinas of the West,” as he called them. Goytisolo was one of the first to write about what we now call “global cities” and “transnationalism,” claiming that the cultural and human flow from the Third World and the subsequent “babelization” of Western cities was “the sign of unmistakable modernity.” In 1982, 25 years before Michel Houellebecq’s Submission (2015), Goytisolo published his absurdist Landscapes After the Battle (1982), imagining his own neighborhood in Paris taken over by Turks and Arabs.

In his masterpiece Don Julian, Muslim hordes will overrun Spain, everything turns to green and Arabic overwhelms Spanish. The sounds of Arabic will then thunder across the Atlantic to Latin America everywhere that Hispanic caudillismo reigns — “in the pulque-bars of Lagunilla in Mexico City, in the Calle de Corrientes of Buenos Aires, in the Jesús María district of Havana.” An Islamic reconquista, Goytisolo believed, would pull Spain out of its “prehistoric” place and cure its general cultural and demographic anomie. The Moors would sack la España sagrada, but first they would storm the “cavern” of the fair-skinned Isabel the Catholic. The Moors will repeat this act of sexual aggression “on a national scale” across the peninsula. And throughout this massive bacchanal of violence, women are mute. The women of Spain, whose reproductive organs are invariably described as “grottos,” “mires” and “abysses,” are portrayed as silent housewives “shitting” babies here and there. In the early 1970s, Goytisolo’s silencing of women — and recurrent negative references to women as cavernous plants, spiders spinning lethal webs, foul stepmothers with a “mire” or “abyss” between their legs — began to draw criticism. By the 1980s, critics were asking why femininity is almost always portrayed negatively in Goytisolo’s fiction — whether it is through “feminine” Catholic Spain, wild Moroccan prostitutes or overweight American women roaming North Africa.

In 1981, Goytisolo published Saracen Chronicles, a volume of essays on Spanish and Latin American Orientalism, intended as a sequel to Edward Said’s Orientalism (1979), which had not addressed Hispanic Orientalism. Goytisolo had befriended Said while teaching at NYU in the 1970s. The resultant book was a tour de force, exploring literary mudéjarism in Latin America, and tracing the influence of Cervantes on authors from Quevedo in Spain to the Mexican and Cuban writers Carlos Fuentes and José Lezama Lima, and authors of the Latin American literary boom of 1960s. Yet the book was also a preemptive move: Orientalism had become a political issue in American and Spanish academe, with scholars increasingly noting Goytisolo’s rather cliché representations of the Orient as a world of liberating chaos and carnality. The charge of Orientalism against Goytisolo never went away; but it also never stuck. In 2006, the New York Times Magazine ran a cover story about the novelist titled “The Anti-Orientalist.”

Goytisolo’s linking of sexual aggression with liberation suppresses women but also does no service to Muslim men. Critics would see his depictions of Moroccan men as “savaged untamed warriors,” “instinctively cruel Arabs” “horsemen with coarse lips, jugular veins” with “savage Arab virility” – as perpetuating the worse stereotypes at a time of mounting hostility in Spain and Europe to North African migration. His satire was lost on many. While Goytisolo may have been defending the rights of Moroccan migrants in Spain in his El Pais columns, his fiction was giving fodder to more nefarious currents in Spain.

Goytisolo lived in Tangier as the Moroccan regime tightened its grip upon the formerly Spanish provinces of the north and the formerly Spanish Sahara, and as Tangier went from a Latin city to an Arab city. He closely followed the repression in Morocco and Cuba. In March 1971, Goytisolo, Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa and Argentine novelist Julio Cortázar launched the quarterly magazine Libré in Paris to promote writers banned in Latin America, particularly Cuba; the first issue contained pieces by Octavio Paz, Mario Vargas Llosa, Carlos Fuentes and Che Guevara. Yet the Spanish novelist was very circumspect in dealing with Arab authoritarianism. Saracen Chronicles concludes with a survey of countries in Latin America and the Soviet bloc where literature can constitute a crime, and where authors can face death and imprisonment, yet oddly there is no mention of the same phenomenon in the Arabic-speaking world.

On an official visit, Cuban Prime Minister Fidel Castro walks with Algerian Colonel Boumediene in Algiers, 1972. Keystone-France/Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images.

Goytisolo arrived in Tangier at the beginning of the “years of lead,” a period of attempted coups and horrific state violence against dissidents, as Hassan II imprisoned leftists, burying opponents and their children in the notorious underground prison of Tazmamart. Yet for Goytisolo, right up until his death, Morocco was always represented as a hybrid, diverse, sexually tolerant country, juxtaposed to a parochial, historically stuck Spain. Like his idol Cervantes, he praised the “Orient” for being diverse and polyglot, a reverse image of the modern West where nation-states had extirpated minorities from their midst and imposed a dominant language and identity. Goytisolo, however, lived and traveled in an Arab world undergoing a violent process of war and state formation, with regimes cracking down routinely on minorities and imposing Arabic on non-Arabic speaking populations, all in the name of nationalism. Yet even as the Moroccan state killed off dissidents, oppressed Amazigh movements, criminalized homosexuality, the brutality of state formation rarely figured into his writing, as he continued to quixotically portray the Orient as better. It is not clear if Goytisolo was simply over-generalizing from his privileged status as a regime-approved European writer living in Marrakesh, or if his idea of Spain remained messianically stuck in Queen Isabelle-qua-Franco’s era, just as his description of North Africa remained anchored in the fifteenth-century epoch (hailed by Cervantes), or perhaps the mythical 1950s Tangier (when foreigners enjoyed extra-territoriality).

Ironically, Goytisolo passed away during a period of protests in Morocco which had started in the Rif region and spread down south, and when talk of the “betrayal of the intellectuals” was in the air. As the regime cracked down, arresting bloggers, artists and youth activists en masse, journalists pondered which of the celebrity intellectuals who lived in Morocco would back the hirak movement — and a stocktaking of Goytisolo’s career began. Goytisolo’s detractors pointed out that in his many decades in the kingdom, he rarely called out the Moroccan authorities. His silence throughout 2011, as protests rocked the kingdom, and his failure to support that year’s February 20 movement also struck many as calculated and “deliberate.”

Why did this lover of freedom not raise his voice for the freedom of his adopted homeland? It is hard to avoid the conclusion that like the other celebrity intellectuals who “love” Morocco and reside there — Bernard Henri Levi, Dominique Strauss Kahn and Tariq Ramadan, all shrill proponents of freedom, albeit from disparate ideological positions — Goytisolo had made a bargain with the Moroccan regime. As long as he described the makhzen as “tolerant,” they would view him as “moderate.” The Moroccan regime has a nonpareil capacity to coopt intellectual firebrands, with a combination of intimidation and lavish treatment (riads, tajines, chauffeurs) — and to welcome writers who are admired around the world but are quietly resented in the kingdom. By the early 1990s, Goytisolo had — wittingly or unwittingly — become part of a coalition of actors (domestic and international) that portrayed Morocco as “tolerant,” “forward-looking,” “a feast for the senses,” a model of reform. The writer who built his reputation lashing the mythology of fascist Spain was now burnishing the image of another authoritarian regime. He found freedom in Tangier — and Morocco, more broadly — but was silent about our unfreedom so as not to jeopardize his. It is hard to shake the impression that Goytisolo’s liberty and eminence in effect rested on our disenfranchisement.

* For a longer version of this essay on Juan Goytisolo, see “Juan Goytisolo: Tangier, Havana and the Treasonous Intellectual.”

The boy who grew up being called Hugh because he loved the trumpet

Lesedi Ntsane.

I was only four years old when I made a lifetime partnership with music and the trumpet. Music was what my family was known for; classical music on my mother’s side (the Tshosanes), and jazz on my father’s.

My grandfather, Jacob Ntsane, founded the Merry Makers’ Orchestra in the 1930s in Payneville, a suburb of Springs, a coal and mining town east of Johannesburg. This was before my grandparents were forcibly moved from Payneville to Kwa-Thema, a black township, by the apartheid government, because, as some locals say, substantial amounts of gold reserves were discovered in the Payneville area.

After my grandfather’s passing, my father’s oldest brother, Peter, took over the orchestra. That’s when giants such as Elijah Nkwanyana and Banzi Bangane played in the Merry Makers’ Orchestra trumpet section.

That’s also when the great South African trumpeter, Hugh Masekela, who passed away last month, played for the Merry Makers’ Orchestra. As Masekela recalls in his autobiography, that early jazz education with Peter Ntsane shaped his later career. He mentions playing with my grandfather’s Orchestra: “For me, School holidays were no longer boring. I looked forward to spending them in Springs, where through my uncle Kenneth’s hustling, I got to play with Peter Ntsane Merry Makers’ Orchestra.”

In an interview with MTV News, Masekela had particular praise for the Merry Makers and specifically Nkwanyama and Bangane: “They were my first idols, especially Elijah.”

Kwa-Thema is still blessed with great musicians and you won’t struggle to find an exceptional trumpet player: Prince Lengoasa, his father and his brothers Hloks and Thapelo, my cousin Tefo Tshosane, and other notable trumpeters. Makhosonke Mrubata, the brothers Mdu, Sipho Qwabe and Thabiso Mogotsi, among others, are all from Springs and are just phenomenal. When we started the Kwatsaduza Orchestra in 2016, a band of musicians from around the East Rand of Johannesburg, we had more trumpet players than anything else.

My own path would eventually cross with that of Hugh Masekela and last year I would get to stand in for him.

After graduating high school, I was derailed by the economics of the New but still Old South Africa. Like most black children who grew up in the townships, which more resemble concentration camps, I chose to pursue a field that would guarantee financial security and in the process eradicate any reminiscence of poverty in our family, So, I studied accountancy. My choice was also influenced by the perception, still prevalent today, that artistic interests are not feasible career paths, and that the highest paying jobs are considered to be in finance. 

After finishing an equivalent of an associate’s degree, I realized that it had actually drawn me closer to music, so I enrolled for a music diploma at the Tshwane University of Technology (TUT) in the country’s capital.

I heard Masekela’s work throughout my life: at weddings, parties and funerals.  His music was also more than accompaniment for celebrations. As Africans we considered his music to be the sound of liberty, the manifestation of actual freedom. As the writer Sisonke Msimang wrote last week:  “… through his decision to pick up that horn and through his ability to move through the world and occupy it like a boss — [Hugh Masekela] managed to accomplish that rarest of feats. He was at once formidable and fearless. And, above all, Bra Hugh — our beloved, most feisty dlozi — was utterly, triumphantly, unapologetically free.”

If you play the trumpet, like I did, you are likely to be called “Hugh.”

In 2010, after graduating with a music degree from TUT, I shared a bill with Masekela at the Tshwane Jazz Festival. For me, Masekela was more like an elder, a grandfather, as I had never actually met my own grandfather, and Masekela had played in his band. Masekela was very vital source of information, and every chance I got to be around him I had a thousand questions for him. I was cautious not to be a nuisance.

In 2011 I came to study at The New School’s Jazz Program. Where I had the privilege of studying under the tutelage of Jimmy Owens, Charles Tolliver, Bobby Sanabria, Cecil Bridgewater, Billy Harper Marcus Printup and others, whilst tapping into a significant pool of musicians from all over the world. This really expanded my scope of music in general.

Last Spring, Hugh Masekela was scheduled to play at Town Hall, a storied venue in midtown Manhattan, with Abdullah Ibrahim. This was part of a series of concerts to celebrate the Jazz Epistles, the iconic late 1950s and early 1960s band that launched the careers of Masekela, Ibrahim (then known as Dollar Brand), trombonist Jonas Gwangwa, saxophonist Kippie Moeketsi, drummer Makaya Ntshoko and bassist Johnny Gertze.

Masekela, Ibrahim and Gwangwa left South Africa soon after they recorded an album of bebop music in 1959. They all went on to celebrated careers, especially Masekela and Ibrahim. (Moeketsi died in 1983.)  The idea of the Town Hall concert was to play the music from the album. Ibrahim’s band Ekhaya would accompany the musicians. (Gwangwa was not part of the concert.) Given both Masekela and Ibrahim’s connections to New York City — both studied and worked as musicians here, on and off for two decades or more — there was a lot of expectation and excitement around the performance.

I had planned to be in the audience and getting tickets, I felt it was possible this would be the last time these two giants of jazz — not just South African music — would be on the same stage at the same time, so I became a proponent of its historical experience. Ibrahim was 82 at the time, Masekela 77.

Four days prior to the concert, I received a phone call asking me to take Masekela’s place. He had suffered a fall on tour and would be unable to appear.

I couldn’t believe the magnitude of that moment. I went through many complex emotions at the same time. I was puzzled, because Dr. Masekela was one of the most defiant figures of our times and so full of life, and I was very concerned about what could keep him from making this important appearance. It was only after he released a video statement explaining why he couldn’t make the performance, saying further I would take his place (“the young Lesedi Ntsane … is just an amazing musician that I very much respect and that he would very much fill the space that I will be missing), that everything within me settled. After the performance, Jazz Times’s reviewer declared: “Trumpeter Lesedi Ntsane, standing in as an eleventh hour replacement for an injured Masekela, proved to be a breakout star in this climate, blending brash displays with thoughtful gestures.” Giovanni Russonelli writing in The New York Times characterized my playing as resembling “… a thick, smoky lassitude and pulling against the hopped-up swing.”

Jacob Ntsane’s grandson and the kid who grew up being called Hugh because he loved the trumpet, now had to take the stage that was set for him by his ancestors, and tell the story of his people.

What we know about Trump’s policy aims in Africa

Save for President Donald Trump’s outbursts about “shithole” countries, telling African leaders at a United Nations luncheon that he has many friends going to the continent to “get rich” or when the deaths of two U.S. soldiers in Niger blows the lid somewhat on the extent of US military missions on the continent — we don’t know much about Trump’s “Africa” policy.

Donald Yamamoto, Acting Assistant Secretary for African Affairs (the most senior African official in the US State Department) provided us with a peak behind the curtain when he went on NPR on January 2, 2018, to talk about the Trump administration’s position on a range of perceived challenges on the African continent. These seem to be Yamamoto’s first public comments outside of congressional hearings, and they are eye-opening. In the context of Trump’s continuing comments about African immigration, they’re worth listening to. Yamamoto’s comments suggest that there is more than ignorance or racism behind the inflammatory public statements.

In labeling Africa “the final frontier for opportunities,” Yamamoto began the interview articulating what seemed to be a clear theme in the Trump administration’s Africa policies. YALI – the Young African Leaders Initiative – has trained 300,000 young people who are working in communities throughout the continent to mobilize and develop the capacities of the continent’s overwhelming youth population. These same millennials are looking for jobs – jobs that US companies can and should be providing through investment. Those investments, Yamamoto argued, have been profitable for companies like Proctor & Gamble, which found West African markets primed to consume their products. They made huge profits (“millions and billions”, according to Yamamoto) because family members living in the US and Europe had created a demand for these products back home. The undersecretary encourages small US businesses to follow the lead of large companies like Proctor & Gamble and Boeing to seek out opportunities in these untapped African markets – opportunities that would create jobs in the US and in Africa. If we don’t do it, of course, others will – North Korea, Iran, Russia, and China are seeking out minerals in Congo to produce missiles and high-grade drill bits. Those are not only opportunities that we are missing out on, they are opportunities that are benefitting our geopolitical competitors and undermining American interests on the global stage, argued Yamamoto.

It all sounds eerily similar to colonial propaganda programs in the early 20th century. It appears that we’re in the midst of a 21st century “Scramble for Africa.”

There are many issues of concern here – the US State Department providing military training and building military capacity in African countries, over-confident negotiations over leadership and human rights in Ethiopia, homogenizing discourses about the continent, and proxy conflicts over African resources with new “enemies” like North Korea and Iran, among others. But the blatant misrepresentations and seemingly willful historical amnesia should raise huge red flags. In Congo, “we’re not extracting; we’re developing wealth,” Yamamoto argued. Pushing back on questions about the motivations behind US economic investment, Yamamoto insists that “we work with Africa as partners and in that partnership is what we can help them achieve on their own accord [sic]. It’s not something that we are dictating. We’re not. It’s something that they want, that they desire, and that we’re going to help them [achieve].”

Researchers and people living on the continent know this is not true – or at least it’s not as straightforward as Yamamoto makes it seem. The vast mineral wealth of the Congo has not led to “development” or democracy, but rather to extraordinary, privatized regimes of violence, marginalization, exploitation, and environmental degradation. While the US government may not have a direct hand in the violence of places like the Congo today, US-backed trade deals and financial interventions meant to support the interests of US corporations in Silicon Valley and elsewhere have certainly created the conditions for it to thrive. Yamamoto likewise blamed the persistent poverty of oil-producing countries like Nigeria on corruption while ignoring the exploitative contracts and unfair trade conditions imposed by corporations and the long history of resource extraction for the benefit of western industrial development and wealth generation. And then, with a strong mix of hypocrisy and hubris, Yamamoto warns China not to re-indebt African countries because the US just fixed that problem with Heavily Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC). Such claims seem particularly galling after even IMF economists publicly acknowledged that the austerity policies pushed through international financial institutions based on US policy models since the 1980s not only failed to produce promised development but also further exacerbated income inequalities.

I don’t know if Yamamoto actually believes the line he’s selling, but as its highest ranking official in charge of African affairs, he is articulating the policies of the Trump/Tillerson State Department. The State Department’s Africa policy rhetoric, which claims to want to empower the continent’s people to address persistent challenges, seems to be disconnected from the reality of craven neoliberal self-interest. The good news? The veil between the two is so thin now that criticisms from scholars and activists on and off the continent no longer seem exaggerated or politically motivated but mere good sense and solid research. The bad news? That doesn’t seem to be deterring anyone.

‘Let them occupy!’–the struggle for housing in Brazil and South Africa

Humble but colorful houses. Image credit Marcus Vinicius Russo Roberto via @vinirusso Flickr.

In 1991, South Africa’s African National Congress (ANC) convened a housing policy conference in Johannesburg. The organization had only been unbanned by the apartheid government the year before. Alongside negotiations for democratic elections and a new constitution, the ANC and its allies were deep in the throes of policy deliberations to prepare to take power. Thozamile Botha, a previously exiled trade unionist, was the convener of the party’s department of local and regional government planning. He delivered a stem-winder of a speech.

“In many former colonial countries, the post-independence trends are that only the Black elite is able to move to the city center or former white only areas,” he warned. “The people who have been in the forefront of the liberation struggle are easily forgotten. It is essential that the state should ensure that the benefits of freedom are enjoyed by all its citizens.”

The “internal” struggle against Apartheid — made up a wide range of associations and movements within the country while the ANC was in exile — was a big tent. It included the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU), which grew into the largest union federation on the continent, and the United Democratic Front (UDF), the latter comprised of neighborhood associations, urban social movements, and cultural and religious organizations. Housing, basic services, and public transportation were common complaints.

Almost three decades later, the ANC-led government has built approximately 3 million houses. But the geographies of South Africa’s cities are as divided as ever. In Johannesburg, the country’s economic and, arguably, political heartland, racial segregation has diminished slightly, while class segregation is as persistent as ever, according to one analysis of census data. Related work in Cape Town, has found a similar trajectory in the nature of residential segregation since the end of Apartheid. Furthermore, the percent of the national households in informal settlements has barely budged, declining from 13.6% in 2002 to 13.1% in 2014. Despite the quantitative gains in housing delivery, many may rightly ask if Botha’s warning from 1991 has become reality.

Over the past 15 years, regular demonstrations in peripheral, poor neighborhoods in South Africa’s large cities has led many to dub the country “the protest capital of the world.” Yet these protests retain a distinctly atomized character, rarely moving beyond a single neighborhood. South Africa’s democratic era has witnessed primarily two types of housing movements. Some have carved out limited space to access funds for community-led, self-build projects in formal housing programs, and informal settlement upgrading programs for community-led approaches that minimize displacement from new development. A second set of movements have been more overtly militant, focusing on fights against evictions. However, it is rare to see housing movements move the policy agenda and priorities in South Africa’s major cities.

***

In order to understand why this is the case, one approach is to look elsewhere for comparative insights. Brazil is a good context to help us to understand the limits of the possible in South Africa. Brazil’s process of democratization in the mid-to-late 1980s, was fueled by a similar alliance of trade unions, housing movements, religious and cultural groups, intellectuals, and a political party of the left, the Workers’ Party (known by its Portuguese initials, PT).

In 1989, the PT swept to power in a number of key municipalities, though, unlike the ANC in South Africa, it would take until 2002 for the PT to first take national power. The PT had begun experimenting with municipal power beginning in 1982, when it began taking power in small municipalities outside São Paulo, the country’s largest city. However, it was only in 1989, a year after the passage of a new Federal Constitution, that the metropolis, now home to 12 million people, would be first run by the PT.

São Paulo’s first PT mayor, Luiza Erundina, had a long history working with housing movements and neighborhood associations as a social worker in the eastern zone of the city. The Erundina administration included key bureaucratic officials that had experience working with housing movements to fight evictions and to design and plan self-build housing projects. Though municipal finances were constrained in a period of national economic crisis, the Erundina administration was able to funnel significant resources to movements for self-build initiatives. This established a strong tie between the PT and a first generation of housing movements in the city’s new democratic era.

In the late 1990s, after at least a decade of disinvestment in São Paulo’s city center, a new generation of housing movements emerged with a much stronger focus on occupying abandoned downtown buildings. This younger generation had roots in the older movements that grew in the city’s periphery.

When a second PT mayoral administration took power in 2000 under Marta Suplicy, it was unsurprising to see the administration introduce a new social housing policy focused on the city center. New planning instruments introduced in the city’s master plan also made it possible for the city to declare areas of the city “special zones of social interest” to enable this policy. Such planning instruments helped achieve significant material gains for city residents. Access to basic sanitation for households in informal settlements has almost tripled in São Paulo since democratization. In Johannesburg, it has grown by only 30%.

As the PT gained national strength, and two generations of housing and workers’ movements gained institutional legitimation and acceptance, a breakaway from the more rural-focused Landless People’s Movement (MST) began occupying large tracts of land in the outskirts of São Paulo, mostly in neighboring municipalities. The MST was one of the key movements in the “social movement unionist” alliance that animated Brazil’s democratic transition and eventually brought the PT to national power. It had focused for decades on the struggle to redistribute the large landholdings of traditional elites to smallholder farmers and co-operatives. The MST’s urban breakaway, the Homeless Workers’ Movement (MTST), introduced a new radical element to housing politics in São Paulo and, increasingly in many other cities across the country. The MTST declined to participate in institutionalized spaces for public participation, and generally opted for a more confrontational style of movement politics. This may have helped it maintain a mass base as the PT became increasingly enmeshed in the traditions and alliances of the political establishment the longer it was in power.

Even as the MTST grew, older movements maintained a solid core of support. These older movements mixed strategies of participation in institutional spaces to influence policy, using subsidies for community-led housing projects under the national housing program introduced by the PT in 2009, and continued occupations. These movements, often linked to the Front for the Housing Struggle (FLM) and the Federation of Housing Movements (UMM), continued to occupy land in peripheries and abandoned buildings in disinvested, now gentrifying inner cities across the country.

Once right-wing parties in Congress began to initiate impeachment proceedings against PT president Dilma Rousseff in 2015, with dubious justification, these movements were central protagonists in the creation of two allied fronts to defend Dilma. The MTST formed the People Without Fear (PSM), and the UMM and FLM were part of the Popular Brazilian Front (FBP). While the FBP was more closely aligned with the PT, both participated and organized numerous joint protests during and after the process to impeach Dilma. These efforts were too sporadic to provide an effective popular bulwark against the traditional political elite’s “parliamentary coup” against the elected PT national executive. Furthermore, they came amidst a general public disaffection with the entire political class due to spiraling corruption investigations that have implicated leading politicians in all parties, including current president Michel Temer, whose approval rating hovers in single digits.

Brazil is currently roiled by politicized corruption investigations. Traditional elites seem unable to find a political standard-bearer to represent their interests effectively in upcoming elections in October. The PT is now the only programmatic party on the left or right that remains in mainstream politics.

Late last month, an appeals court in the southeastern city of Porto Alegre upheld a conviction of former president Luiz Inácio “Lula” da Silva of the PT. The three-judge panel acknowledged that it had no direct proof that he had ever had possession of the apartment he is accused of receiving as a bribe. Conviction was based almost exclusively on plea bargain testimony of a disgraced corporate executive imprisoned for bribing a number of politicians. Massive protests organized by unions and housing movements in Porto Alegre and São Paulo greeted Lula as he moved between the two cities after the ruling.

The evening after the ruling, Lula appeared at a rally in Praça República in central São Paulo, alongside MTST leader Guilherme Boulos. “If it’s mine, then even Boulos could send someone to occupy this apartment. Let them occupy!” he joked, referring to the apartment he is alleged to have received as a bribe. While the recent politicization of the judiciary threatens to undermine Brazilian democracy, the defense of the inclusionary gains of the PT years and the deepening of democratic institutions will fall to mass mobilization by housing movements.

***

Contrast this to the absence of housing movements as protagonists in South Africa’s ongoing democratic crisis. No national housing movement in the post-Apartheid era has found a way to have independent, lasting influence in the formal political arena. The absorption of non-union antiapartheid movements into the South African National Civics Organization (SANCO), entailed, to a significant degree, a capitulation to the directives of the ANC at the level of national politics. COSATU, SANCO, and the South African Communist Party comprised the most significant base of Zuma’s rise to power in the mid-2000s. But none of these organizations raised serious protest as Zuma mounted a patronage network across key institutions of the state, and some leaders were absorbed into this network. By the time a serious challenge to Zuma emerged within the ANC in the form of former trade unionist and more recent business tycoon Cyril Ramaphosa, COSATU was a shadow of its former self, having split in two, and not a word was heard from urban housing movements.

In December in Johannesburg, a day after Ramaphosa was elected the new leader of the ANC, Enoch Godongwana, the party’s head of policy (a former unionist himself), stood on a podium and delivered the much-contested resolutions of the ANC’s policy committee on land. For South Africa’s urban majority, the silence was deafening.

For years, commentators and political activists have expended significant energy on the proposal of “expropriation without compensation”. This was an animating idea behind the “radical economic transformation” platform of Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma’s bid for party president. For years, Dikgang Moseneke, now the former Deputy Chief Justice of the Constitutional Court, has noted that no state institution has been willing to bring a case to court to test the relevant constitutional provisions for land expropriation.

In December 2017, Godongwana announced that the ANC would now pursue precisely such an agenda on land. This announcement underscored at least two ironies. First, it remains unclear what actually needs to be amended in a constitution that already provides for expropriation without compensation in cases of historical redress. Second, the resolution has nothing to say about the administration of urban land. A rigid land tenure regime in cities has slowed upgrading of informal settlements and made it difficult for poor people in cities to access a formally recognized home.

Ultimately, the prospect of realizing rights in the city remains a political question that cannot be solved through legal means alone. That the policy debate on land is so far removed from some of the most pressing needs for the future of South Africa’s working class and entire economy suggests that something has gone wrong in the social politics of its cities. Post-Apartheid South Africa has witnessed a growing gulf between urban housing movements and the formal political sphere.

The link between urban housing activism and challenges to still new democratic institutions has become clear in recent years in both South Africa and Brazil. In South Africa, a fightback against “state capture” under Zuma has been led by a class of professional elites, including dedicated civil servants, some business leaders, and intellectuals. Ramaphosa’s recent victory for the post of ANC party president represents the early fruits of this still ongoing struggle. But the absence of grassroots actors suggests that the programmatic basis of party and state reform will not necessarily be responsive to South Africa’s social majority, especially in its cities.

In Brazil, urban housing movements have been able to use the formal political sphere, especially through power realized at the municipal level, to build a dynamic ecosystem of housing-based activism. This has been relatively sustained despite similarities between the PT and the ANC in tending towards what German political scientist Robert Michels described over a century ago as “the iron law of oligarchy.”

On 31 October of last year, the MTST mobilized an estimated 25,000 activists occupying land across the São Paulo region to march 27 kilometers to the palace of the state governor to demand the release of land for housing. And on the day Brazilians learned of Lula’s failed appeal of his conviction, the banners of MTST joined with older generations of still vibrant housing movements in defense of democracy in Brazil. The mobilization of these activists may yet bring Brazil back from the democratic abyss that otherwise faces the country if Lula is unable to run for president in October this year. The defense of democratic institutions in South Africa remains without an organized urban working class protagonist.

‘Let them occupy!’

Humble but colorful houses. Image credit Marcus Vinicius Russo Roberto via @vinirusso Flickr.

In 1991, South Africa’s African National Congress (ANC) convened a housing policy conference in Johannesburg. The organization had only been unbanned by the apartheid government the year before. Alongside negotiations for democratic elections and a new constitution, the ANC and its allies were deep in the throes of policy deliberations to prepare to take power. Thozamile Botha, a previously exiled trade unionist, was the convener of the party’s department of local and regional government planning. He delivered a stem-winder of a speech.

“In many former colonial countries, the post-independence trends are that only the Black elite is able to move to the city center or former white only areas,” he warned. “The people who have been in the forefront of the liberation struggle are easily forgotten. It is essential that the state should ensure that the benefits of freedom are enjoyed by all its citizens.”

The “internal” struggle against Apartheid — made up a wide range of associations and movements within the country while the ANC was in exile — was a big tent. It included the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU), which grew into the largest union federation on the continent, and the United Democratic Front (UDF), the latter comprised of neighborhood associations, urban social movements, and cultural and religious organizations. Housing, basic services, and public transportation were common complaints.

Almost three decades later, the ANC-led government has built approximately 3 million houses. But the geographies of South Africa’s cities are as divided as ever. In Johannesburg, the country’s economic and, arguably, political heartland, racial segregation has diminished slightly, while class segregation is as persistent as ever, according to one analysis of census data. Related work in Cape Town, has found a similar trajectory in the nature of residential segregation since the end of Apartheid. Furthermore, the percent of the national households in informal settlements has barely budged, declining from 13.6% in 2002 to 13.1% in 2014. Despite the quantitative gains in housing delivery, many may rightly ask if Botha’s warning from 1991 has become reality.

Over the past 15 years, regular demonstrations in peripheral, poor neighborhoods in South Africa’s large cities has led many to dub the country “the protest capital of the world.” Yet these protests retain a distinctly atomized character, rarely moving beyond a single neighborhood. South Africa’s democratic era has witnessed primarily two types of housing movements. Some have carved out limited space to access funds for community-led, self-build projects in formal housing programs, and informal settlement upgrading programs for community-led approaches that minimize displacement from new development. A second set of movements have been more overtly militant, focusing on fights against evictions. However, it is rare to see housing movements move the policy agenda and priorities in South Africa’s major cities.

***

In order to understand why this is the case, one approach is to look elsewhere for comparative insights. Brazil is a good context to help us to understand the limits of the possible in South Africa. Brazil’s process of democratization in the mid-to-late 1980s, was fueled by a similar alliance of trade unions, housing movements, religious and cultural groups, intellectuals, and a political party of the left, the Workers’ Party (known by its Portuguese initials, PT).

In 1989, the PT swept to power in a number of key municipalities, though, unlike the ANC in South Africa, it would take until 2002 for the PT to first take national power. The PT had begun experimenting with municipal power beginning in 1982, when it began taking power in small municipalities outside São Paulo, the country’s largest city. However, it was only in 1989, a year after the passage of a new Federal Constitution, that the metropolis, now home to 12 million people, would be first run by the PT.

São Paulo’s first PT mayor, Luiza Erundina, had a long history working with housing movements and neighborhood associations as a social worker in the eastern zone of the city. The Erundina administration included key bureaucratic officials that had experience working with housing movements to fight evictions and to design and plan self-build housing projects. Though municipal finances were constrained in a period of national economic crisis, the Erundina administration was able to funnel significant resources to movements for self-build initiatives. This established a strong tie between the PT and a first generation of housing movements in the city’s new democratic era.

In the late 1990s, after at least a decade of disinvestment in São Paulo’s city center, a new generation of housing movements emerged with a much stronger focus on occupying abandoned downtown buildings. This younger generation had roots in the older movements that grew in the city’s periphery.

When a second PT mayoral administration took power in 2000 under Marta Suplicy, it was unsurprising to see the administration introduce a new social housing policy focused on the city center. New planning instruments introduced in the city’s master plan also made it possible for the city to declare areas of the city “special zones of social interest” to enable this policy. Such planning instruments helped achieve significant material gains for city residents. Access to basic sanitation for households in informal settlements has almost tripled in São Paulo since democratization. In Johannesburg, it has grown by only 30%.

As the PT gained national strength, and two generations of housing and workers’ movements gained institutional legitimation and acceptance, a breakaway from the more rural-focused Landless People’s Movement (MST) began occupying large tracts of land in the outskirts of São Paulo, mostly in neighboring municipalities. The MST was one of the key movements in the “social movement unionist” alliance that animated Brazil’s democratic transition and eventually brought the PT to national power. It had focused for decades on the struggle to redistribute the large landholdings of traditional elites to smallholder farmers and co-operatives. The MST’s urban breakaway, the Homeless Workers’ Movement (MTST), introduced a new radical element to housing politics in São Paulo and, increasingly in many other cities across the country. The MTST declined to participate in institutionalized spaces for public participation, and generally opted for a more confrontational style of movement politics. This may have helped it maintain a mass base as the PT became increasingly enmeshed in the traditions and alliances of the political establishment the longer it was in power.

Even as the MTST grew, older movements maintained a solid core of support. These older movements mixed strategies of participation in institutional spaces to influence policy, using subsidies for community-led housing projects under the national housing program introduced by the PT in 2009, and continued occupations. These movements, often linked to the Front for the Housing Struggle (FLM) and the Federation of Housing Movements (UMM), continued to occupy land in peripheries and abandoned buildings in disinvested, now gentrifying inner cities across the country.

Once right-wing parties in Congress began to initiate impeachment proceedings against PT president Dilma Rousseff in 2015, with dubious justification, these movements were central protagonists in the creation of two allied fronts to defend Dilma. The MTST formed the People Without Fear (PSM), and the UMM and FLM were part of the Popular Brazilian Front (FBP). While the FBP was more closely aligned with the PT, both participated and organized numerous joint protests during and after the process to impeach Dilma. These efforts were too sporadic to provide an effective popular bulwark against the traditional political elite’s “parliamentary coup” against the elected PT national executive. Furthermore, they came amidst a general public disaffection with the entire political class due to spiraling corruption investigations that have implicated leading politicians in all parties, including current president Michel Temer, whose approval rating hovers in single digits.

Brazil is currently roiled by politicized corruption investigations. Traditional elites seem unable to find a political standard-bearer to represent their interests effectively in upcoming elections in October. The PT is now the only programmatic party on the left or right that remains in mainstream politics.

Late last month, an appeals court in the southeastern city of Porto Alegre upheld a conviction of former president Luiz Inácio “Lula” da Silva of the PT. The three-judge panel acknowledged that it had no direct proof that he had ever had possession of the apartment he is accused of receiving as a bribe. Conviction was based almost exclusively on plea bargain testimony of a disgraced corporate executive imprisoned for bribing a number of politicians. Massive protests organized by unions and housing movements in Porto Alegre and São Paulo greeted Lula as he moved between the two cities after the ruling.

The evening after the ruling, Lula appeared at a rally in Praça República in central São Paulo, alongside MTST leader Guilherme Boulos. “If it’s mine, then even Boulos could send someone to occupy this apartment. Let them occupy!” he joked, referring to the apartment he is alleged to have received as a bribe. While the recent politicization of the judiciary threatens to undermine Brazilian democracy, the defense of the inclusionary gains of the PT years and the deepening of democratic institutions will fall to mass mobilization by housing movements.

***

Contrast this to the absence of housing movements as protagonists in South Africa’s ongoing democratic crisis. No national housing movement in the post-Apartheid era has found a way to have independent, lasting influence in the formal political arena. The absorption of non-union antiapartheid movements into the South African National Civics Organization (SANCO), entailed, to a significant degree, a capitulation to the directives of the ANC at the level of national politics. COSATU, SANCO, and the South African Communist Party comprised the most significant base of Zuma’s rise to power in the mid-2000s. But none of these organizations raised serious protest as Zuma mounted a patronage network across key institutions of the state, and some leaders were absorbed into this network. By the time a serious challenge to Zuma emerged within the ANC in the form of former trade unionist and more recent business tycoon Cyril Ramaphosa, COSATU was a shadow of its former self, having split in two, and not a word was heard from urban housing movements.

In December in Johannesburg, a day after Ramaphosa was elected the new leader of the ANC, Enoch Godongwana, the party’s head of policy (a former unionist himself), stood on a podium and delivered the much-contested resolutions of the ANC’s policy committee on land. For South Africa’s urban majority, the silence was deafening.

For years, commentators and political activists have expended significant energy on the proposal of “expropriation without compensation”. This was an animating idea behind the “radical economic transformation” platform of Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma’s bid for party president. For years, Dikgang Moseneke, now the former Deputy Chief Justice of the Constitutional Court, has noted that no state institution has been willing to bring a case to court to test the relevant constitutional provisions for land expropriation.

In December 2017, Godongwana announced that the ANC would now pursue precisely such an agenda on land. This announcement underscored at least two ironies. First, it remains unclear what actually needs to be amended in a constitution that already provides for expropriation without compensation in cases of historical redress. Second, the resolution has nothing to say about the administration of urban land. A rigid land tenure regime in cities has slowed upgrading of informal settlements and made it difficult for poor people in cities to access a formally recognized home.

Ultimately, the prospect of realizing rights in the city remains a political question that cannot be solved through legal means alone. That the policy debate on land is so far removed from some of the most pressing needs for the future of South Africa’s working class and entire economy suggests that something has gone wrong in the social politics of its cities. Post-Apartheid South Africa has witnessed a growing gulf between urban housing movements and the formal political sphere.

The link between urban housing activism and challenges to still new democratic institutions has become clear in recent years in both South Africa and Brazil. In South Africa, a fightback against “state capture” under Zuma has been led by a class of professional elites, including dedicated civil servants, some business leaders, and intellectuals. Ramaphosa’s recent victory for the post of ANC party president represents the early fruits of this still ongoing struggle. But the absence of grassroots actors suggests that the programmatic basis of party and state reform will not necessarily be responsive to South Africa’s social majority, especially in its cities.

In Brazil, urban housing movements have been able to use the formal political sphere, especially through power realized at the municipal level, to build a dynamic ecosystem of housing-based activism. This has been relatively sustained despite similarities between the PT and the ANC in tending towards what German political scientist Robert Michels described over a century ago as “the iron law of oligarchy.”

On 31 October of last year, the MTST mobilized an estimated 25,000 activists occupying land across the São Paulo region to march 27 kilometers to the palace of the state governor to demand the release of land for housing. And on the day Brazilians learned of Lula’s failed appeal of his conviction, the banners of MTST joined with older generations of still vibrant housing movements in defense of democracy in Brazil. The mobilization of these activists may yet bring Brazil back from the democratic abyss that otherwise faces the country if Lula is unable to run for president in October this year. The defense of democratic institutions in South Africa remains without an organized urban working class protagonist.

The art of community in Haiti’s Carnival

A colorful procession of masks and creations of local artists took over the streets of the coastal city of Jacmel — Haiti’s arts capital — on Sunday. It was a chance for the artists of the region to show their innovative creations. All images credit Jean Marc Herve Abelard.

Hundreds of people wearing a colorful and vibrant display of elaborate masks depicting animals, women and voodoo figures, the vibrant work of this city’s renowned artisans, took over the streets of Jacmel on Sunday, a coastal city in the south of Haiti. This is the center of Haiti’s world-famous Carnival and one of the most beautiful spots in this country, which is the poorest in the Western Hemisphere and where many Haitians struggle just to survive.

In a country where in most days, problems and dysfunctions define the lives of Haitians, Carnival is a time to forget it all, as thousands of tourists and Haitians flood the city to celebrate the joy of living. It’s also a time to reflect on the country’s history of political upheaval, and natural disasters, most recently the 2010 earthquake which killed over 200,000 people.

Women dressed in the colors of the Haitian flag represents the country chained and exploited by the rest of the world.

The theme of this year’s Carnival is “change,” reflecting the people’s strong desire for an improvement in their lives.

“It is a way for people to express their Haitian identity in a way that honors their culture,” said Guerry Naissant, 34, an illustrator and sketch artist based in Jacmel.” It is also an opportunity for artists to show what they’re worth.”

Today’s procession of spectacular figures in papier-mâché masks, dancing along to marching bands, are the focus of Jacmel’s Carnival, which is considered to be one of the best-managed and well-organized events in the country. These fantastic masks are a local treasure and what has made this region’s art world-famous. The city’s artisans work meticulously for weeks to create their masterpieces.

“This is an artist town, it’s a free spirited city where you can express yourself with less social pressure,” Naissant who attended the parade added.

Papier-mâché creations of Elie Blaise, a prominent artisan in Jacmel. They represent rural women and their contributions to the country’s economy and a tribute to their hard work.

In this region full of artists, many have become very good at showing their work, which can fetch high prices from tourists who flock to Carnival. Some artists with good connections get government support for their work. Others take out high-interest loans in hopes of recouping their investment. Many have become skillful at presenting themselves — carrying banners that shows the name of their studios and also seeking funding from major companies like the beer local producer “Prestige,” and Digicel, a Haitian cell phone company.

A group at the Jacmel Carnival dressed like in the movie Avatar.

In his studio right near the beach, Elie Blaise, 35, a prominent artisan who also runs the Blaisart studio with his brother, decided this year to pay tribute to rural women. He made a collection of big costumes that were part of the procession on Sunday.

“These women work hard, raise kids, and earn money,” he said. “They should get the recognition that they deserve.”

On Saint-Anne street, in downtown Jacmel where most of the art studios are located, Mario Charles, 50, has been working with papier-mâché for over 30 years made extravagant sea creatures with a message.

“People must stop polluting the waters, and respect the environment,” he said.

According to him, this carnival is an opportunity for all these artists to make some money but still, many of them suffer from getting massively copied by other artists. Whenever he creates a piece, Charles says, hundreds of copies appear in Jacmel’s outdoor market at a cheaper price.

“Many artisans were not able to live from their art so they had to close their studios,” said Charles. “It’s hard.”

* Michel Joseph contributed reporting. This story was produced in association with Round Earth Media.

The water point

Cape Town suburbs. Image credit Bertrand Duperrin via Flickr (@beberonline).

A row of cars, wheels half-hanging from the pavement, has become a fixture on this once-quiet, treed road. The chain of vehicles stretches up the hill, as bodies shuffle from the water point, loaded with however much water can be carried. The containers vary as much as their carriers: battered old bottles, handle-less buckets that have seen better days, and expensive jerry-cans ready-and-waiting for end-of-days scenarios. It certainly feels like it: eruptions of anger at the public water spring are increasingly common, water in 5 liter bottles are sold-out at most stores, while neighbors monitor one another to see whose grass remains stubbornly green, in this once-in-a-century drought.   

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Cape Town. The home town to which I returned late last year might soon become the world’s first major city to run out of water, or this is the language being employed to describe this potentially catastrophic event that is a probable consequence of global climate change. At some point, early in April (the city has now adjusted that date to mid-May), the dams will likely dip beneath usable levels of 13.5%, and so, piped water, glorious modern invention as well as a fundamental human right, will fall out of easy reach. Right now, all residents are restricted to 50 liters of water per day in an effort to thwart the moment when taps run dry entirely, and is the reason that a procession of people play their part in this sudden dystopia, all day and night, so they can build their rations of free available water while they can. (The water from the Newlands public spring streams down the mountain and would ordinarily flow towards the sea, were it not for the constant presence of bottles, buckets and jerry-cans these days).

More astounding than the sight of people queueing to collect water is the location of this frenzied water gathering: Newlands. In parts of the city — certain black and coloured neighborhoods with informal housing — this remains a norm, with one water point servicing multiple families that have neither piped water nor access to electricity.

But this is Newlands, a lush and prosperous suburb given its high rainfall and proximity to the mountain — the eastern slopes of Table Mountain, in walking distance. The grid of roads surrounding the spring is filled with contemporary conversions of old row or standalone houses. Ancient oaks abound. At the corner is the area’s hub of cosmopolitan eateries serving Parisian pastries, aged steaks, designer coffee concoctions and very fine wine. The restaurants are always packed. How noticeable that the patrons are not the people who come in their droves to the spring to collect water. The patrons are almost always white, while the water collectors largely come from afar and are mostly coloured, sometimes black (these apartheid classifications continue to largely reflect demographics of suburb and income). The jolt of their sudden presence is visible in the many disagreements about where they may or may not park or during tense negotiations as expensive German sedans or four by fours creep past rusty old Fords, hatchbacks and pickup trucks. Tempers rise. Tensions mount.

There is a crossing of worlds here — more — a disruption. I should know now that I am a resident of Newlands and part of this enclave. Up to a point, at least. Like the water collectors, perhaps I too might be considered an interloper — a blackish Capetonian who has some ability to choose where to live in the city of my birth.

And yet, the matter of who is and who is not interloping, peaked during a stand-off one morning outside the spring, before it had even turned 8am. A towering, white man leapt out of his expensive sports car to shout at a couple blocking traffic close to the water point. In turn a small coloured woman propelled herself out of their bakkie and heated words were exchanged:

“Go back to where you come from,” shouted the man.  

“Go to hell, this is where I’m from … Newlands is exactly where I grew up.” 

“You’re stupid, he shouted before climbing into his car and speeding away”.

Like so many other places, most notably District Six, Newlands — like many of the now predominantly white suburbs on this side of the mountain, from the city center to Simon’s Town — is rooted in the history of the city and country with its forced removals. Black and coloured families were expelled from Newlands after apartheid was legislated in 1948 (via the 1950 Group Areas Act) and draconian laws were enforced to evict families from their homes, dispersing them in townships, peripheral to the city’s economic and cultural activity. 

While many parts of Cape Town remain greatly segregated today, Newlands strikes me as one of the worst offenders and is still stubbornly shut to the idea of post-apartheid restitution and any significant inclusion. Anthropologist Catherine Besteman claims in her book, Transforming Cape Town, that residents of Newlands repeatedly stymied efforts at such restitution by insisting that “…its [Newlands] history as a rural estate and the special character of the neighborhood must be respected.”

Today homes, places of business and schools in Newlands rarely reflect the city’s mixed race and black heritage or, that of the suburb. The St. Andrews’s church in the area erected a small wooden cross in 1994, commemorating the exodus of the majority of their congregation with the forced removals. But there is little else in Newlands to acknowledge or heal the past.

Last year my son was offered a place at a school close to the public spring. On the day that we were invited to visit the school, it became apparent that we were to be the only people of color amongst eight families or so. I felt dismayed. When the bell rang signaling interval, perhaps a hundred fair-headed children emerged out of the classes with only a sprinkling of children of color amongst these. The following week, I sent the principal an email asking how she planned to become more inclusive given the school’s obvious lack of diversity. Her reply was terse and she suggested that either I wanted the place or I did not. I did not, and chose instead to send my son to a school further away and less convenient, but one that is both diverse and egalitarian. I learned afterwards that my aunt had taught in that exact location (at the Newlands school several decades earlier, when it operated under a different name). 

*** 

The matter of why so few area locals line-up for water says something else about the situation and what it means for the most vulnerable. Many of those who can afford to, had months ago planted pricey plastic water tanks in their back yards to collect rain water. Several have pools on stand-by, filled with chlorinated water — good enough for flushing at least, or they have had the financial wherewithal to stock pile 5 liter water bottles for some time. It is the majority of the city, its poor that will be left to the care of authorities who have proven themselves riven, and intransigent in allowing the situation to become quite so perilous. As always, the poor are inevitably people of color: black and coloured families who remain in the shadow of apartheid’s economic and spatial legacy. For us all, the city has promised some 200 water points where water will have to be collected and carried home should the dreaded day of zero water arrive. The logistics seem iffy. 

I pass by the public water spring two or three times each day as I drop and collect my children from school, and, to see what if anything has changed. There are always people there. More these days, including wealthier residents and their black porters, or entrepreneurs plucked from the city’s homeless, who have made a business of appropriating retailer’s trollies and with these deliver several bottles of water to cars for a small fee. I hear the city authorities are planning to divert the water spring to someplace less likely to create such disruption and inconvenience, which is an unsurprising pity for the disturbance has been the most honest and defining moment the place has seen in decades. Historic amnesia defied.

For now, the spring is constantly patrolled. The line of cars and bakkies still arrive, its hapless owners ready to collect as much water as they can carry, before the city runs dry completely.

Deliver us from cholera

Morning communte in Lusaka. Image credit @rebecca_m via Flickr.

At the beginning of last October, the Zambian Ministry of Health declared a cholera outbreak in the capital Lusaka, many did not anticipate that come January 2018 the country would have a full blown epidemic to contend with. That first confirmed case turned out to be the harbinger of more than two thousand reported cases, concentrated within Lusaka and spreading to a few towns outside the capital. 

By mid-January 2018 Ministry of Health statistics indicated that 3,260 cases had been recorded, with 3,089 of these recorded in Lusaka. Seventy-four deaths had been recorded, which included a significant number of already dead bodies being brought into hospitals and morgues. 

In addition to the regrettable loss of life as a result of cholera, there was a significant shock to the economy as the government announced and implemented a number of measures to try and contain the spread of the disease. These measures included deferring the re-opening of schools, colleges and universities, closing markets, clearing cities of all street vendors and carrying a massive cleaning and drainage unblocking exercise using the country’s defence forces. A media campaign was launched featuring a motley assortment of comedians and opinion makers giving public health advice aimed at stemming the spread of cholera. Church and other group gatherings were suspended, a move which did not go down well with some of the more prominent denominations. 

Of all the measures announced by the government, perhaps the most intriguing was when a “Day of National Prayer and Fasting” was declared with the aim of petitioning God to intervene in the cholera epidemic. Then a week was set aside in which Minister of Religion and National Guidance, Godfridah Sumaili, encouraged Christians to observe thirty minutes of prayer each day in view of the cholera situation in the country. Those with an eye for irony among the Christian fraternity, were quick to point out the fact that the same churches that had been suspended from holding services, were now being called upon to observe a fast and make petitions before God on behalf of the country. The week of prayer culminated in a thanksgiving prayer service, where ironically everyone was required to use hand sanitiser before entering the prayer hall.  

Recent Zambian governments and in particular the ruling Patriotic Front (PF) have a history of reaching out to Christianity to manage crises. In fact, the dabbling of religion in public policy is increasingly becoming mainstream public policy in Zambia. Even before a Ministry of Religion and National Guidance had been created, it was clear that the government intended to make religion the cornerstone of its public policy. 

For example, founder of the ruling PF the late Michael Sata was on record affirming that he was going to govern according to the biblical Ten Commandments once elected president. His successor as party leader, and current Zambian president, Edgar Lungu, has equally gone to great lengths to encourage and entrench the public persona of a “god-fearing” deeply pious man with roots firmly steeped in Christianity. Every once in a while mainstream media carries pictures of him either in reverent reflective pose in church or attending a prayer meeting at a prominent church looking so pious as to turn The Pope green with envy. 

During the 2015 African Freedom Day celebrations at State House, founding republican president Kenneth Kaunda was arraigned before the public like a prized trophy. His duty was to read out a number of pronouncements that purported to release the country from all manner of curses and evil powers, to the obvious satisfaction of a number of “men of god” who had been invited to add clout to the event.  

“I release the nation, its people and the presidency from every negative forces made against Zambia. I submit the souls now living and prosperity and also its presidency to the salvation and lordship of our Lord Jesus Christ and the Father” read the pronouncement in part, to veritable jubilation. 

Either the higher powers didn’t get the memo or they were meting out one of those ubiquitous tests of faith, because the following year, the country would suffer a devastating army worm attack that threatened to cripple the nation’s staple crop, maize. In addition, there was significant volatility experienced in the foreign exchange market, coupled with suppressed economic activity which necessitated the downward revision of GDP growth rate projections. 

The government responded by declaring a day of National Prayer and fasting at which event the strength of the national currency was prayed for. The same day was turned into a national holiday and a commitment made by the government to build a National House of Prayer. A smattering of influential Pentecostal Bishops was organized into a board to oversee the construction of the National House of Prayer, although to date very little actual construction work has taken place, save for a few high-profile fundraising efforts. Some of these efforts have bordered on desperation such as the reported auctioning of a Lionel Messi shirt by the National House of Prayer Board Chairperson Bishop Joshua Banda. It hasn’t stopped the euphoria, flamboyant preaching and Bible-thumping that has now become a mainstay of the National Day of Prayer and fasting.  

Many have however questioned the wisdom, let alone sustainability of such an approach to public policy. For example, the Ministry of Religion and National Guidance is often derided for having no clear mandate and verifiable terms of reference. To date the ministry’s most high profile achievement has been the barring of certain ostensibly dubious, equally flamboyant “Men of God” from entering the country. “Men of God” Eubert Angel and Shepherd Bushiri were probably the most-high profile casualties.  

While all this is going on, Zambia is in the midst of a public health crisis in addition to its other long term developmental challenges. Though a call to prayer might provide a short-term and extremely fickle rallying point, the country will need much more workable and sustainable solutions as opposed to days of fasting and national prayer.