Sean Jacobs's Blog, page 261

The New South Africa’s original ’State Capture’

Nelson Mandela in London in 1999 meeting with Julian Ogilvy Thompson, Harry Oppenheimer and Nicky Oppenheimer of De Beers. Photo Credit: De Beers.

The ideological shifts that took place in the ANC’s economic views from 1990 can only be described as breathtaking: from an explicitly socialist, redistributive approach towards embracing the American ideologies of neoliberal globalism and market fundamentalism. 

 From 1990 Nelson Mandela and Harry Oppenheimer met regularly for lunch or dinner and the main corporations of the Minerals Energy Complex (MEC) met regularly with a leadership core of the ANC at Little Brenthurst, Oppenheimer’s estate. When other corporate leaders joined the secret negotiations on the future of the economic policy of South Africa, the meetings were shifted to the Development Bank of Southern Africa during the night. 

 Although I was involved in the ‘talks about talks’ from 1987 until 1989, I did not take part in the 1990-94 negotiation process. I have been told that at the time senior individuals attached to the Sanlam Group of corporations were very much against my involvemen because of my preference for social-democratic capitalism.

 During these meetings an elite compromise gradually emerged between white politicians and capitalists under the leadership of the MEC, a leadership core of the ANC, and American and British pressure groups. 

From February 1990 until early 1992, all the ANC policy documents emphasised the need for ‘growth through redistribution’. But when a reworked economic document of the ANC entitled ‘Ready to Govern’ was published in May 1992, the phrase ‘growth through redistribution’ was conspicuously omitted. Since then the ANC has never again emphasized the need for a comprehensive redistribution policy. 

The secret negotiations reached a climax in November 1993. At that stage South Africa was preparing for interim government by the Transitional Executive Council (TEC), which decided that South Africa needed a loan of $850 million from the International Monetary Fund (IMF). The ‘statement on economic policies’ in the IMF deal committed the TEC to neoliberalism and market fundamentalism. 

There can be little doubt that the secret negotiations between the MEC and a leadership core of the ANC were mainly responsible for the party’s ideological somersault. It was, however, not the influence of the MEC alone. There was also pressure and persuasion from Western governments, and from the IMF and World Bank, and global corporations. A large group of leading ANC figures received ideological training at American universities and international banks. 

In the years after the Soviet Union imploded in 1991, an atmosphere of triumphalism reigned supreme in American political and economic circles: the ‘American economic model’ triumphed and every country in the world could only survive and prosper if it adapted as quickly and completely as possible to anti-statism, deregulation, privatisation, fiscal austerity, market fundamentalism and free trade. 

Promises were made to the ANC that as soon as the new government had implemented this model, conditions would be conducive to a large influx of foreign direct investment, higher growth rates, higher employment and a trickle-down effect to alleviate poverty. The role of the American pressure group was, however, not restricted to exaggerated promises, but also included subtle threats that the US had the ability (and the inclination) to disrupt the South African economy if the ANC should be recalcitrant and not prepared to cooperate. 

With the adoption of the Growth, Employment and Redistribution programme (GEAR) in 1996, the ANC and the American pressure group succeeded in Americanising the South African economy. In biblical idiom, we have every reason to lament the fact that the ANC was deceived on such a massive scale by false prophets who led South Africa, not to the promised land, but into a desert in which the poorer part of the population was doomed to live permanently in a systemic condition of abject poverty. 

On 11 February 1990, the day of Nelson Mandela’s release from prison, he made the following statement: “The white monopoly of political power must be ended, and we need a fundamental restructuring of our political and economic systems to address the inequalities of apartheid and create a genuine democratic South Africa.”

But the new politico-economic system turned out to be highly dysfunctional. a neoliberal politico-economic system was institutionalised to serve the narrow interests of the old white elite and the emerging black elite. The enabling conditions of the new system were moulded in such a way that the imperial aspirations of the American-led neoliberal empire would be satisfied. 

The quid pro quo between the corporate sectors and the ANC leadership core was that lucrative opportunities would be created for the emerging ANC elite to join the white capitalist elite to become rich enough to maintain the same consumerist lifestyle as the white elite.

The elite compromise emphatically excluded the possibility of a comprehensive redistribution policy, which was regarded as unaffordable after preference was given to addressing the interests of the old white corporate elite and the emerging black elite, and after the conditionalities prescribed by the American-led neoliberal empire were accepted. The fact that taxation and expenditure were fixed by the elite compromise deprived the ANC government of the ability to implement a comprehensive redistributive policy.

The most harmful consequence has been the de-industrialisation through South Africa’s obligation to implement a free-trade policy. This has had a devastating effect on many industries that operated for decades behind tariff walls. Clothing, textile and footwear were almost destroyed by the import of cheap products. But while the free-trade policy was harmful for manufacturing, it was to the advantage of the MEC. These corporations were later given the additional privilege of shifting their main listings to London and New York, and to become independent transnational corporations.

While the ANC operated on the moral high ground during the anti-apartheid struggle, since 1994 they have slipped into a sleazy underworld where corruption, nepotism and money squandering are the order of the day, so that South Africa could become a neocolonial satellite of the American-led neoliberal empire. Although the ANC has been the government of South Africa since 1994, we could allege that it is still not ‘ready to govern’. 

* This is an excerpt from Terreblanche’s book, Lost in Transformation. A conference on Terreblanche’s intellectual contribution to South African political economy studies will be held at the University of Johannesburg on Monday, 29 January.

When Tiffany Haddish visited her father’s country, Eritrea

Tiffany Haddish in a still from “Girls Trip” (2017).

The comedian Tiffany Haddish has been hailed by Vanity Fair as “the funniest person alive right now.” She was also the first black female stand-up comedian to host Saturday Night Live; an American television institution. Just recently, Haddish presented at the ceremony for the announcement of The Oscar Award nominees, which, like everything else she does, endeared her even more to her fans. Her breakout role came in the 2017 ensemble comedy Girls Trip with Queen Latifah, Jada Pinkett Smith and Regina Hall where she stole every scene she was in. That earned her a Best Supporting Actress Award from the New York Film Critics Circle.

One more little known fact about her is that she is also half Eritrean. She recently visited the country for the first time, and this American rising star’s visit to one of Africa’s most repressive states presented all kinds of political minefields.

Her father, Tsehaye Haddish — from whom she was estranged and finally met in his final days — was originally from Eritrea. He had migrated to Los Angeles, where he met her mother. When Haddish was about three years old, her parents drifted apart. What followed was a traumatic childhood, as she bounced between foster families and living with her maternal grandmother. In August last year (in an interview with a celebrity “medium”) Haddish spoke about eventually finding her dad who had been living in Philadelphia: “My whole point to meet my father was just to know genetically what do I have to expect? And where the hell your ass been? Where the hell yo’ ass was at when I was out here living in the streets?”

This month she traveled to Eritrea for the first time. In what she described as a fulfilling and exciting experience, Haddish paid her respects to her father, buried his remains and met her relatives. On social media (starting from when she boarded the plane in LA) and in interviews on Eritrean state television, she mainly experienced the trip as a healing process that put to rest her lifetime search for meaning. On arrival, she immediately felt connected with her family members whom she had been hearing about from her father. As she described it to the Eritrean media, her trip gave meaning to her existence.     

The question for those closely following political events in the country, was whether Haddish could handle Eritrea’s complicated politics and whether her visit would be used by the government for propaganda. For the long suffering opposition whose sole unifying factor is rage against the regime, any sign of Haddish endorsing the government, would be pounced upon. Whether Haddish was au fait with these tensions, didn’t matter to either side. For better or worse, both wanted to claim Tiffany.

Of course, this tradition of claiming celebrities or public figures with Eritrean backgrounds for either side of the political divide, and then unjustifiably attacking them for perceived missteps, is old hat. In 2014, Eritrean-American athlete and Olympic medalist Meb Keflezghi, won the historic Boston Marathon. A few days after the race, he visited the Eritrean embassy where staff took a picture with him. It was widely circulated on the social media, where Keflezghi — who has not publicly expressed his political preference — was quickly condemned and ostracized by the opposition as an accomplice and stooge of the regime. Something similar greeted West Coast rapper Nipsey Hussle (government name: Ermias Asghedom) — his father is Eritrean — when on 24 May 2014 he excitedly tweeted his celebration of Eritrean Independence Day: “… to my country Eritrea. To come from such a beautiful struggle is inspirational.” Responses on social media to Nipsey’s declaration of patriotism, also included: “but remember to be a voices to voiceless pls call to end dictatorship too” or “@NipseyHussle happy Eritrean independence day, but Eritrea is not free yet be voice for more than 10000 prisoners.”

Tiffany Haddish doesn’t shy away from expressing herself on the political aspects of American life — including the persistent racism in comedy — but hasn’t felt the need to comment on Eritrean politics. She could hardly be faulted for that, after all, her only link with Eritrea was her father whom she hardly knew.

Despite her vocation, Haddish did not get to meet any aspiring Eritrean artists or comedians on her trip. Rather, she was greeted, hosted and feted by the country’s political leadership at every turn; the very same people who are denying Eritreans the liberty to laugh and the use arts as means of self-expression.

Images of Haddish posing with senior government officials quickly drew strong responses online from within the opposition camp — gaining attention from no less than Meron Estafanos, the Swedish-Eritrean journalist who tirelessly covers the dangerous journeys of Eritrean migrants fleeing the country (Eritrea is infamous for the numbers of people who would risk death to leave rather than stay at home). She called Haddish “a disgrace.”

This may be one reason why Haddish’s American friends and manager, who accompanied her to Eritrea, would soon delete photos posing with government officials from their social media accounts. One of them, a hairstylist Precious Jackson, was criticized online for posting images meeting with President Isaias Afwerki on his farm. In her post, Jackson praised Afwerki as a most loved and humble president who led the country since independence. Jackson later removed all posts referencing encounters with state officials. An Eritrean site reports Jackson’s praise of Afwerki here.

In the same interview, Dwayn Martin, the husband of Tiffany’s best friend praised President Afwerki and compared him to George Washington: “We met the President of Eritrea in the dam this morning. He is humble and down to earth. I had nothing but respect for him because I like people who do things in front and not behind the computer. To me, he definitely seemed like someone who’s out there no matter what. He grabbed my heart as a person. I am honored to have met him. I can tell even the people around him have great love and respect for him. It was unspoken. He is like a George Washington. A living legend. And it’s sad that not a lot of people know about your country, history, your people and government.”

An interview Haddish did with state TV was introduced with images of her visit. These included photographs of her posing on beaches, eating food and meeting relatives. However, the image reel also confirmed that she received the compulsory tours to the tank graveyard (from the independence war with Ethiopia) and the martyrs’ cemetery that has been designed for international journalists covering Eritrea.

Of course, Haddish had to meet with the country’s president, Isaias Afwerki — on his laboratory farm. Recently, Afwerki’s main obsession is to portray himself as selfless and modest and yet visionary leader with the simplest dress style. Since 2016, Afwerki has moved his office to the outskirts of Asmara in Adi-Halo. Hagos Ghebrehiwet and Yemane Ghebreab (who posed with Haddish) along with General Filipos Woldeyohannes, Army chief of staff, practically run the country. Afwerki has taken on a number of odd titles: initially as site manager for a dam construction, and later conducting odd pursuits such as breeding cattle, designing a national park, and conducting experiments. It is not clear whether Afwerki shared any of these experiences with Haddish. What is clear is that Afwerki appreciates any kind of publicity that makes him look good, and if he can be photographed with any visiting celebrity (or even academic) it can counter the public view of him as being isolated. (During their meeting, there was a humorous moment when Haddish asked Afwerki not to be stingy with the salad. Some Eritreans on social media tried to read more into it – that Haddish, without knowing, was critiquing his style of government.)

Whether the regime benefits from her visit is unclear at this stage. At best, she appeared to be patriotic — a virtue claimed by both the government and the opposition — and polite. She also appeared to make a genuine connection with a part of herself that she felt was missing. She is someone who grew up hard in an unforgiving American city, the lost child of an immigrant to the United States. It just happens this immigrant came from a country where feuding groups make passionate claims to her for their cause. We are not yet sure how aware she was of this dynamic. In interviews, Haddish promised to visit Eritrea more often. If true, how she approaches those visits will be interesting to watch.

Hugh Masekela’s musical modernism

Hugh Masekela in 2012. Image credit Mário Pires via Flickr.

Hugh Masekela was one of the last great jazz men of the twentieth century. Both his life and music were shaped by transatlantic political and cultural currents that ebbed their way through the slums of Johannesburg and the jazz dives of Harlem. His death has produced two broad depictions of the man: Masekela the founder of the South African Jazz sound, and Masekela the activist who used music to raise attention to the injustices of apartheid. Neither of these are inaccurate, but they do little to capture the complexity of the man or his music. For many years Masekela struggled to craft a sound that avoided “world music” caricature while not simply mimicking the American Bebop he was so enamored of. He was a reluctant activist, only dedicating himself to the anti-apartheid struggle in the 1980s, years after people like Miriam Makeba had condemned the regime on the global stage.

Masekela lived in exile for thirty years of his life. It was during this time that his life revolved around an exile diaspora composed of fellow artists and activists who had fled the continent, as well as African American jazz musicians who looked to the continent for inspiration. The historian Robin D.G. Kelley has described jazz in these years as the product of transnational encounters. Jazz was, “a path to the future, a vehicle for both Africans and African Americans to articulate and realize their own distinctive modernity while critiquing its western variant.” For African-American Jazz musicians, Africa was a modernizing force in the midst of Cold War rivalries and their songs referenced the achievements of leaders like Nkrumah and Nyerere. For African Jazz musicians, America promised a cosmopolitan global citizenship and, for Masekela, an escape from racist rule. This produced not only new musical directions, but political and cultural identities that connected boycotts and marches from Soweto to Selma.

Masekela entered these transnational currents in 1960 when, barely 20, he left South Africa on a scholarship to London and then New York. The previous year he had participated in the staging of South Africa’s first jazz musical, “King Kong,” the story of a boxer in Sophiatown set against the background of the Treason Trial and the eventual razing of the township. The musical featured some of South Africa’s greatest jazz talents, Miriam Makeba, Kippie Moeketsi, Todd Matshikiza and Letta Mbulu. The musical highlighted the transgressive potential of interracial artistic collaboration, but it also generated swift response from the apartheid government (Nelson Mandela was in attendance at the first performance) and many musicians, including Masekela soon found themselves of interest to the apartheid special branch. 

Exile for Masekela was an opportunity to rub shoulders with the jazz greats he had admired since childhood. He suddenly found himself in the company of Thelonius Monk, John Coltrane and Dizzy Gillespie and befriended by musician/activists like Harry Belafonte. It was during this period that he struggled to craft a sound that was his own. His previous work with the Jazz Epistles had drawn on traditional South African rhythms moored in the Bebop of Monk and Dizzy. The result was more of an incorporation of musical elements than a distinctive sound. 

His time in exile became a period of self-discovery and reinvention. His first album released in the US, Trumpet Africaine, was not a success, largely due to his attempt at imitating American jazz musicians. It was Harry Belafonte that recommended he “play music from home.”

The music he created, however, was not simply a bebop adaptation of South African Kwela and Mbaqanga (genres of South African music that had their roots in the country’s migrant worker culture), but a hybrid ensemble of the sounds he encountered in New York:

All our songs were a hybrid of traditional and ethnic chants, township dance, and Caribbean, calypso-like grooves mixed with jazz and Brazilian sambas. It was a potpourri of the music of the African diaspora. All kinds of jazz critics and music experts have tried to categorize it, but have been unable to pin it down. I haven’t either. One thing for sure, it has gotten me where I am today.

Masekela was one of the few great jazz instrumentalists who was also an incisive lyricist. He was not only interested in mbaqanga structure and rhythms, but the fact that this musical style was brought to urban areas by rural migrants. Growing up in Witbank’s townships, about 90 miles from Johannesburg, his grandmother ran a shebeen (a public drinking house) which served migrant workers who had come from across Southern Africa to work on the mines. It was here that he encountered stories of migration, displacement, the longing for home, exile and the indignities of colonialism and apartheid. These are reflected in well-known songs like “Stimela” where a train rumbles through the rural villages Southern Africa carrying men to the mines, “deep, deep, deep down in the belly of the earth; Where they are digging and drilling that mighty evasive stone.”

This preoccupation with mobility is hardly surprising given that colonialism and apartheid were spatial engineering projects aimed at controlling not just the movement of labor but the intimacies of everyday life. The young men that he encountered in his grandmother’s shebeen told stories of migration and loneliness, but also of resilience, struggle and the possibilities that urban life might offer.

It was this romance associated with the urban that left a marked impression on a young Masekela. He would have undoubtedly read Drum magazine, launched in 1951 and aimed at an urban African audience, which reviewed the latest American Jazz albums next to images of the Chicago and New York skylines. His decision to become a trumpet player was, in fact, cemented when he snuck into the Harlem Cinema in Sophiatown to watch Young Man with a Horn with Kirk Douglas: “My resolve there and then was to become a trumpet player… I wanted this with all my heart and being — nothing else would do.”

Hugh Masekela in 2012. Image credit Mário Pires via Flickr.

American Jazz was emblematic of not only urban modernity but a spirit of freedom that was hard to locate in the segregated confines of apartheid-era Johannesburg. While Jim Crow racism was alive and well in America, the sound emanating from New York City and Chicago seemed to capture the possibilities of a freedom that Black South Africans were struggling for. As Kelley has noted, African and African American musicians were drawn to jazz as an idiomatic expression of Black modernity that linked ancient pasts, present struggles and the possibility of future freedom.

Masekela’s New York period was formative but tumultuous. His marriage to Miriam Makeba soon fell apart and this was followed by a three-month marriage to jazz singer Chris Calloway. In his memoirs, Masekela describes a period of “forty years of sex, drugs and alcohol addiction” that began in the clubs of New York. The 1960s ended with commercial success in the form of Grazing in the Grass but also the release of his most political album, Masekela, which features homages to Pan-Africanist leader Robert Sobukwe and “Gold” the story of a Venda mineworker. The album captures both Masekela’s abiding interest in themes of migration and colonial violence but also the loneliness of exile:

And if I’ll be strong enough to finish my story

You will see just what a movie this has been

There are brothers and sisters who think how you look is all it is

There are cities where people never say hello

It was his attempt to once again reinvent himself and his sound that saw him return to the continent in the early 1970s at the invitation of Fela Kuti. In 1972 he arrived in Conakry, Guinea and went on to travel through Nigeria and Ghana. His former wife was living as a guest of Sekou Toure in Guinea with her husband, the black power activist Stokely Carmichael. Jamming with Fela and finally working with the Ghanaian group Hedzoleh Soundz, he produced the album Hugh Masekela Introducing Hedzoleh Soundz and later I Am Not Afraid and The Boy’s Doin’ It, albums which melded Afro-American Jazz sensibilities with West African Afrobeat and Highlife.

Holding a Ghanian passport, he returned to Southern Africa in 1980 for a concert in Lesotho. The concert allowed him to connect with musicians who had remained in South Africa as well as to visit family members, including his ninety-year-old grandmother. His exile had taken a toll on his family. He had been prevented from attending his mother’s funeral and his sister Barbara was in exile, working with Oliver Tambo on international anti-apartheid efforts. According the South African literary scholar Sam Raditlhalo it was these factors that caused him to ultimately settle in Botswana. A birthday card from Mandela, smuggled from prison, caused him to take activism seriously for the first time.

In Gaborone he was surrounded by other exile artists, notably the writer Wally Mongane Serote and his former colleague from the Jazz Epistles Jonas Gwangwa, who, at the time, was leader of the ANC’s cultural ensemble Amandla. Gaborone was also home to the Medu Art Ensemble, a collective of cultural workers in exile who produced anti-apartheid posters and pamphlets that were smuggled into the country. His time in Botswana coincided with a global campaign calling for the release of Nelson Mandela, which led to the song “Bring Him Back Home,” which became a standard at mass rallies in Europe and the US calling for Mandela and other South African political prisoners’ release. The situation in Gabarone soon became untenable after raids by South African troops left a number of exiles, including some associated with Medu, dead.

Masekela was allowed back into South Africa in 1990 but soon left on the Graceland and Sarafina tours and afterwards returned to the US for a time, partly in an attempt to recover from the alcohol and drug addiction that had followed him his whole life. Exile was hard but returning home, it seemed, was no easy transition. As the Palestinian intellectual Edward Said has written of exile, “both the old and the new environments are vivid, actual, occurring contrapuntally.”  How to rebuild a culture and identity in a society that had cast you out and then, on return, asked you to forgive it?

While Masekela is frequently cited as a pioneer of South African Jazz, it is perhaps better to understand his work as part of a global sound shaped by transatlantic encounters. As Kelley has argued, we should perhaps no longer speak of jazz as an American art form but part of a diasporic conversation or what the academic Paul Gilroy has termed the Black Atlantic. Masekela, South African Jazz and, arguably, political parties like the ANC, are products of these transatlantic geographies.

The sound Masekela created does not belong to South Africa alone, to suggest it does is to fall prey to a narrow cultural nationalism that ignores the Black Atlantic as a modern and diasporic cultural space, that was neither specifically African, American, European or Caribbean. Parsing Masekela’s music does not reveal any attempt at creating an authentic South African sound but rather of overcoming national particularity in the pursuit of a modernity that was both liberating and joyful. Frantz Fanon captured this well when, describing the reinvention of jazz by African American artists after World War 2, he noted, “As soon as the Negro comes to an understanding of himself, and understands the rest of the world differently, when he gives birth to hope and forces back the racist universe, it is clear that his trumpet sounds more clearly and his voice less hoarsely.”

Two Salafi clerics visit London. It sparks debate on modernity and morality in Northern Nigeria

The innocuous photos of two Nigerian Islamic clerics in suits shopping and relaxing in London circulated in Northern Nigerian social media communities in early December, 2017. The photos sparked immediate debate. The debate in turn opens a window onto an ongoing but little noticed ideological struggle over modernity, morality, and piety in Muslim-majority Northern Nigeria, which is in the throes of Islamist group, Boko Haram’s violent insurgency.

Why were the images so controversial, and why did they become touchstones for contestations in online communities of western-educated Northern Nigerian Muslim men and women? In a Muslim-majority region in which Islamic clerics seek to define the boundaries of private and public morality as well as Muslims’ engagements with modernity and western goods, there is a ever-present cloud of judgmental scrutiny on the conduct of the clerics themselves.

This reverse judgmental gaze is sharpened by the fact that the clerics routinely espouse a neat moral binary between supposedly Muslim and western ways of life, leaving themselves open to accusations of hypocrisy when they appear to make choices perceived to contradict their teachings.

Salafi clerics in particular have come to wield an outsized influence over the body of Northern Nigerian Muslims, and to act as enforcers of an increasingly puritan religious order. It is thus understandable that the sartorial choices of the two clerics — they were wearing what in Northern Nigeria are considered western clothes — touched off disputations between Muslim youths who long resented the growing intrusions of the clerics into their lives and those who continue to look upon the religious figures as revered exemplars of piety.

The sectarian affiliation of the two clerics exacerbated the controversy. Sheikh Kabiru Gombe and his mentor, Sheikh Bala Lau, are Salafi clerics belonging to the Izala sect. This fact carries much significance in a region in which the puritanical Wahhabi-Salafi literalist creed of Islam is on the ascendance at the expense of the traditional Sufi brotherhoods, an ideological confrontation in a volatile religious marketplace that plays out in several arenas and has now traveled online to social media, blogs and web forums.

Sheikh Gombe in particular is known for his ultra-radical Salafi theological positions and pronouncements. He is one of many Salafi clerics who have captured the imagination of some Muslim youths in Northern Nigeria with a blend of populist interventions in local and global sociopolitical debates and an edgy, rejectionist theology of puritan Muslim living. A staple of their teachings is hostility towards a plethora of western institutions, practices and goods considered capable of polluting the piety of Muslims.

Northern Nigeria’s Salafi Islamic wave, as I call it in my ongoing research project on the historical antecedents of Boko Haram, began with the slow but well-funded entry of Wahhabism into Northern Nigeria in the 1980s and 1990s. The Wahhabi-Salafi wave’s most visible face was and still is the Izala sect, with which Sheikh Gombe and Lau are associated. The sect was founded in 1978 by followers of the late Sheikh Abubakar Gumi, who declared the movement’s commitment to the task of eradicating what they regarded as sacrilegious innovations.

Gumi had been a critic of the region’s Sufi brotherhoods in the 1960s and 1970s, and an advocate for a return to what he considered the puritan fundaments of the faith: the Qur’an, the Sunnah, or prophetic example, and the examples of the first generation of Muslims, the al-Salaf. Gumi rejected existing Sunni Muslim organizations as infected by syncretism bid’ah (heretical innovations) and subsequently led his anti-Sufi reformist Izala insurgents through an explosion in their followership.

The Izala group set up schools, whose graduates were shepherded through multiple layers of Islamic instruction. The best graduates of these schools were then sent, on generous Saudi Arabian scholarships, to the University of Medina for advanced study of Islam under a Wahhabi curriculum grounded in an ultra-radical Salafi theology.

In the 1990s, Sheikh Ja’afar Adam, who mentored Boko Haram founder, Muhammad Yusuf, before the two fell out over doctrinal differences, returned to Nigeria upon the completion of his studies, along with several other Saudi scholarship recipients. Equipped with a radical reformist agenda, the University of Medina graduates inaugurated a new Salafi era in Northern Nigerian Islam.

In the 2000s, Medina-trained Salafi clerics, backed by Saudi Arabian money and patronage, succeeded in ideologically upstaging the old Izala clerical order and Sufi clerics through a mix of youthful charisma, theological novelty and populism. These clerics also began to reproduce themselves, taking on and mentoring students. The current proliferation of Salafi clericalism in Northern Nigeria, and the vocal domination of the Northern Nigerian Islamic public sphere by Salafi clerics and their theology are products of that ideological moment.

Along with the dominance of Salafi puritan and literalist theologies came an insistence on the private and public implementation of a strict moral code conforming to the Islamic Sharia law. Although unevenly and sporadically implemented, the Sharia criminal codes adopted by several Northern Nigerian states in the 2000s further polarized the society, deepened sectarian fissures, and, paradoxically, caused clerics who accused politicians of lacking a commitment to the Sharia to clamor for further reforms.

The mainstreaming of Salafism in Northern Nigeria has proven to be suffocating to Muslim youth desirous of a more pragmatic engagement with the West, whose cultural products saturate the region, conveyed by ubiquitous satellite television, western music, dance fads, the educational curriculum and sartorial trends. Many youths believe that these accouterments of modern global youth culture can be reconciled to their Islamic devotion. Salafi clerics and their followers often disagree and see no acceptable compromise. This disagreement sets the stage for ideological friction and for debate.

Increasingly, a determined group of Salafi clerics has occupied the public arena of morality, reaching into the intimate domains of individual life and dictating the limits of personal moral and bodily conduct. The Salafi clerics routinely condemn conducts that they associate with a decadent, permissive western modernity. Notably, this regime of morality has extended to the arena of dress, with Salafi clerics and their followers pronouncing with certitude and righteous indignation on what Northern Nigerian Muslims are wearing, how they are wearing it, or what they are not wearing.

In 2016, Hausa movie actress, Rahama Sadau, received a ban from the Hausa movies section of the Motion Picture Practitioners of Nigeria (MOPPAN) for “indecent” dressing and for hugging a Hausa pop music artist in a music video. The ban was instituted to mollify online critics, mostly followers of influential Salafi clerics, who argued that Sadau had insulted the Islamic values of Northern Nigeria. Prior to that incident, Kannywood, as the Nigerian Hausa movie industry is known, had been routinely criticized by Salafi clerics for debasing Islamic values. In Kano state, a catchall censorship regime banned films with secular and romantic themes and also went after nightclubs, games centers and other forms of entertainment that the enforcers attributed to the corrupting influence of western modernity.

In the context of this new, Salafi-mediated anti-western moral imagination, the sight of Sheikhs Gombe and Lau in western sartorial ensembles smiling giddily to the camera in London’s recreational spaces was a seminal, revealing visual for many Northern Nigerian Muslim youths. For some, the pictures capture a karmic moment that reveals the clerics to be hypocrites who preached an anti-western creed, only to embrace the West and the physical and symbolic accessories of its modernity.

The contentious conversation that the photos triggered was not a trivial one about dress and the recreational choices of two Salafi clerics. The photos were loaded with symbolism and irony, both of which online interlocutors mobilized in their interventions to make polemical claims, to critique or excuse the perceived tyranny and hypocrisy of a powerful Salafi establishment, and to express personal anxieties.

The democratic and relatively anonymous character of the internet has given a platform to supporters of Salafi clerics and their moral agenda, as well as to opponents of the clerics’ moral intrusions and prescriptions. This is the reason that the debate about modernity, Islam and morality has migrated largely to online platforms.

The ongoing ideological struggle in Northern Nigerian Islam, which this debate encapsulates, is partly one between those entrenched in a modernist ethos and thus defensive of it and those suspicious of modernity and the unmediated influence of western education and culture. The direction in which this tension is resolved will have profound implications for the struggle against Boko Haram, a violent anti-modern, anti-Sufi jihadi-Salafi group that thrives on opposition to western education and secular institutions.

Why Salafi clerics’ London visit sparked a debate on modernity and morality in Northern Nigeria

Image via hutudole.com (circulated via Facebook)

The innocuous photos of two Nigerian Islamic clerics in suits shopping and relaxing in London circulated in Northern Nigerian social media communities in early December, 2017. The photos sparked immediate debate. The debate in turn opens a window onto an ongoing but little noticed ideological struggle over modernity, morality, and piety in Muslim-majority Northern Nigeria, which is in the throes of Islamist group, Boko Haram’s violent insurgency.

Why were the images so controversial, and why did they become touchstones for contestations in online communities of western-educated Northern Nigerian Muslim men and women? In a Muslim-majority region in which Islamic clerics seek to define the boundaries of private and public morality as well as Muslims’ engagements with modernity and western goods, there is a ever-present cloud of judgmental scrutiny on the conduct of the clerics themselves.

This reverse judgmental gaze is sharpened by the fact that the clerics routinely espouse a neat moral binary between supposedly Muslim and western ways of life, leaving themselves open to accusations of hypocrisy when they appear to make choices perceived to contradict their teachings.

Salafi clerics in particular have come to wield an outsized influence over the body of Northern Nigerian Muslims, and to act as enforcers of an increasingly puritan religious order. It is thus understandable that the sartorial choices of the two clerics — they were wearing what in Northern Nigeria are considered western clothes — touched off disputations between Muslim youths who long resented the growing intrusions of the clerics into their lives and those who continue to look upon the religious figures as revered exemplars of piety.

The sectarian affiliation of the two clerics exacerbated the controversy. Sheikh Kabiru Gombe and his mentor, Sheikh Bala Lau, are Salafi clerics belonging to the Izala sect. This fact carries much significance in a region in which the puritanical Wahhabi-Salafi literalist creed of Islam is on the ascendance at the expense of the traditional Sufi brotherhoods, an ideological confrontation in a volatile religious marketplace that plays out in several arenas and has now traveled online to social media, blogs and web forums.

Sheikh Gombe in particular is known for his ultra-radical Salafi theological positions and pronouncements. He is one of many Salafi clerics who have captured the imagination of some Muslim youths in Northern Nigeria with a blend of populist interventions in local and global sociopolitical debates and an edgy, rejectionist theology of puritan Muslim living. A staple of their teachings is hostility towards a plethora of western institutions, practices and goods considered capable of polluting the piety of Muslims.

Northern Nigeria’s Salafi Islamic wave, as I call it in my ongoing research project on the historical antecedents of Boko Haram, began with the slow but well-funded entry of Wahhabism into Northern Nigeria in the 1980s and 1990s. The Wahhabi-Salafi wave’s most visible face was and still is the Izala sect, with which Sheikh Gombe and Lau are associated. The sect was founded in 1978 by followers of the late Sheikh Abubakar Gumi, who declared the movement’s commitment to the task of eradicating what they regarded as sacrilegious innovations.

Gumi had been a critic of the region’s Sufi brotherhoods in the 1960s and 1970s, and an advocate for a return to what he considered the puritan fundaments of the faith: the Qur’an, the Sunnah, or prophetic example, and the examples of the first generation of Muslims, the al-Salaf. Gumi rejected existing Sunni Muslim organizations as infected by syncretism bid’ah (heretical innovations) and subsequently led his anti-Sufi reformist Izala insurgents through an explosion in their followership.

The Izala group set up schools, whose graduates were shepherded through multiple layers of Islamic instruction. The best graduates of these schools were then sent, on generous Saudi Arabian scholarships, to the University of Medina for advanced study of Islam under a Wahhabi curriculum grounded in an ultra-radical Salafi theology.

In the 1990s, Sheikh Ja’afar Adam, who mentored Boko Haram founder, Muhammad Yusuf, before the two fell out over doctrinal differences, returned to Nigeria upon the completion of his studies, along with several other Saudi scholarship recipients. Equipped with a radical reformist agenda, the University of Medina graduates inaugurated a new Salafi era in Northern Nigerian Islam.

In the 2000s, Medina-trained Salafi clerics, backed by Saudi Arabian money and patronage, succeeded in ideologically upstaging the old Izala clerical order and Sufi clerics through a mix of youthful charisma, theological novelty and populism. These clerics also began to reproduce themselves, taking on and mentoring students. The current proliferation of Salafi clericalism in Northern Nigeria, and the vocal domination of the Northern Nigerian Islamic public sphere by Salafi clerics and their theology are products of that ideological moment.

Along with the dominance of Salafi puritan and literalist theologies came an insistence on the private and public implementation of a strict moral code conforming to the Islamic Sharia law. Although unevenly and sporadically implemented, the Sharia criminal codes adopted by several Northern Nigerian states in the 2000s further polarized the society, deepened sectarian fissures, and, paradoxically, caused clerics who accused politicians of lacking a commitment to the Sharia to clamor for further reforms.

The mainstreaming of Salafism in Northern Nigeria has proven to be suffocating to Muslim youth desirous of a more pragmatic engagement with the West, whose cultural products saturate the region, conveyed by ubiquitous satellite television, western music, dance fads, the educational curriculum and sartorial trends. Many youths believe that these accouterments of modern global youth culture can be reconciled to their Islamic devotion. Salafi clerics and their followers often disagree and see no acceptable compromise. This disagreement sets the stage for ideological friction and for debate.

Increasingly, a determined group of Salafi clerics has occupied the public arena of morality, reaching into the intimate domains of individual life and dictating the limits of personal moral and bodily conduct. The Salafi clerics routinely condemn conducts that they associate with a decadent, permissive western modernity. Notably, this regime of morality has extended to the arena of dress, with Salafi clerics and their followers pronouncing with certitude and righteous indignation on what Northern Nigerian Muslims are wearing, how they are wearing it, or what they are not wearing.

In 2016, Hausa movie actress, Rahama Sadau, received a ban from the Hausa movies section of the Motion Picture Practitioners of Nigeria (MOPPAN) for “indecent” dressing and for hugging a Hausa pop music artist in a music video. The ban was instituted to mollify online critics, mostly followers of influential Salafi clerics, who argued that Sadau had insulted the Islamic values of Northern Nigeria. Prior to that incident, Kannywood, as the Nigerian Hausa movie industry is known, had been routinely criticized by Salafi clerics for debasing Islamic values. In Kano state, a catchall censorship regime banned films with secular and romantic themes and also went after nightclubs, games centers and other forms of entertainment that the enforcers attributed to the corrupting influence of western modernity.

In the context of this new, Salafi-mediated anti-western moral imagination, the sight of Sheikhs Gombe and Lau in western sartorial ensembles smiling giddily to the camera in London’s recreational spaces was a seminal, revealing visual for many Northern Nigerian Muslim youths. For some, the pictures capture a karmic moment that reveals the clerics to be hypocrites who preached an anti-western creed, only to embrace the West and the physical and symbolic accessories of its modernity.

The contentious conversation that the photos triggered was not a trivial one about dress and the recreational choices of two Salafi clerics. The photos were loaded with symbolism and irony, both of which online interlocutors mobilized in their interventions to make polemical claims, to critique or excuse the perceived tyranny and hypocrisy of a powerful Salafi establishment, and to express personal anxieties.

The democratic and relatively anonymous character of the internet has given a platform to supporters of Salafi clerics and their moral agenda, as well as to opponents of the clerics’ moral intrusions and prescriptions. This is the reason that the debate about modernity, Islam and morality has migrated largely to online platforms.

The ongoing ideological struggle in Northern Nigerian Islam, which this debate encapsulates, is partly one between those entrenched in a modernist ethos and thus defensive of it and those suspicious of modernity and the unmediated influence of western education and culture. The direction in which this tension is resolved will have profound implications for the struggle against Boko Haram, a violent anti-modern, anti-Sufi jihadi-Salafi group that thrives on opposition to western education and secular institutions.

In Praise of Keorapetse Kgositsile–Lion Among Men

Image of author with Keorapetse Kgositsile. Credit Kelly Writers House via Flickr.

I first learned of Keorapetse Kgsotsile’s work when I was writing my doctoral dissertation, which eventually became the book Africa in Stereo: Modernism, Music and Pan-African Solidarity, and traced links between Africans and African Americans enacted through Black music. A few weeks after I arrived in Cape Town to do research in 2006 I was thrilled to read that Bra Willie, as he was affectionately known, had been named poet laureate of South Africa. It was a fitting moment of acknowledgment for a man who used his words to fight for freedom throughout his life, paying the cost in the currency of exile when the ANC commissioned him to leave in 1962, not knowing he would not be able to return physically until six months after Nelson Mandela’s release and the unbanning of the ANC in 1990.  

During the years in exile, Keorapetse sojourned in Tanzania, the U.S., Botswana and elsewhere. As a result he was deeply involved in the Black Arts Movement in the United States (he is credited with giving The Last Poets their name), as well as being a friend and protégé of that magnificent bridge figure, Gwendolyn Brooks, who, although older than most of the BAM writers embraced and supported their turn to a more explicit political engagement and new experiments with vernacular language and typography. Brooks once said of Kgositsile:  “I would say that he is a ‘master’, if it were not for my belief that no one ‘masters’ anything, that each finds or makes his candle, then tries to see by the guttering light. Willie has made a good candle. And Willie has good eyes.”

What drew me to Kgositsile’s work, initially, were the many poems that paid tribute to music’s power to move and motivate the spiritual courage necessary for political and ethical action. Whether in poems that praised specific artists from South Africa and the U.S. (people like Jonas Gwangwa, Hugh Masekela, Nina Simone and in later years, Cassandra Wilson), or in poems that used music as a metaphor for the power to travel through time and convert visions of transformation into improvisations of freedom, Kgositsile was the best of listeners and the sweetest of singers. As he taught us, music has real power: 

The blues have a long arm

Lean muscular as that of the worker

With more power than memory

And desire. (“When Rain Clouds Gather”) 

A poet devoted to listening could mine that power, as he did in his tribute to Cassandra Wilson: 

Let me sense the chaos

I will respond

with a song

why else

was I born. (“Cassandra Wilson Will Sing”) 

However, as I read more broadly, it was his genius with language, the ability to avoid “obscurantism” and yet employ the clear, clean, lexicon of words of few syllables and much symbolism to goad the lurking complicities in even the most committed visions that came to strike me. His poetic vision was that of a gatherer, in the great tradition of those first Tswana writers like Solomon Tshekiso Plaatje, who transformed seTswana into a literary language by collecting ancient classical proverbs, translating Shakespeare, and writing English fiction suffused with the idioms and ethical values of Tswana culture. Although his banning had made his poetry difficult to access in South Africa before the 1990s, a number of post-transition publications by Kwela, Snail Press, and his long-time U.S. publisher, Third World Press, facilitated his work’s circulation and embrace by younger South African page and performance poets.

As a Zimbabwean writer, I was deeply moved by his critique of anti-African xenophobia in South Africa, drawing on the seTswana word moagi, meaning resident, in order to call for an ethics of neighborliness and hospitality that has resonance far beyond the Limpopo. I had the privilege to get to know him personally over the years, and treasure the memory of our last conversation, in the lobby of the UN Millennium Plaza Hotel, at the end of a week in August 2016, where African poets had gathered for a reading celebrating the thriving new African Poetry Book Fund (brainchild of Kwame Dawes). 

After the reading, the novelist and poet Chris Abani had reminded Bra Willie that the last time they had been together was during a writers outreach visit to a maximum security prison in South Africa. After a while there, Chris noticed he hadn’t seen the elder for some minutes. He found him seated, as physically close as possible and clasping hands with a man convicted of heinous violence: but Willie’s work was to find the humanity in the bleakest of places, and that was what he was about. 

Chatting in the lobby before we parted, Bra Willie gifted me with a set of CDs drawing on the music we both loved, and this week it’s Bheki Mseleku and Abdullah Ibrahim who have been comforting me as I remember this brilliant, loving man, taking comfort in the many tributes I’ve read online, that tell me we are all grieving, and celebrating, a life well-lived and an example that will inspire generations.

Tsemaya sentle, dear Bra Willie. May you dance among the ancestors and continue to speak to us from where you are now. I close with a praise poem in your honor.

 

“Willie, Our Own Lion”

for Bra’ Willie, Keorapetse Kgsoitsile

Well, sweet bean eater, you have come into your own.

Your new den is a chamber of light, thiefed

off of fat cats and liberated from the party magnates

with a prophet’s right. With you there now, it is streaming

with the plenty that has always been enough. 

We see you, sauntering among the lions and lionesses

nodding into each other’s Solomonic eyes as you lay down

to watch us from your dearly-won sanctuary. None

this side of ever will hold a candle to your pride.

But what you have given us: pride, paën, praise song,   

such words must now arm us with the miracle of future memory.

We know how you be tonight, so we busy ourselves with your tasks:

clasping hands with prisoners, kissing cheeks of madmen,

spitting in the face of butchers, and dancing revolutions with Nina,

with Archie, with Jonas, A.B., Cassandra, Hugh, and Pharoah. 

O Brother Willie, our own great lion: can you hear us

roaring in sorrow and rage at time’s cruel trade?:

to have known you, only to lose you,

only to gain your all-powerful ancestral embrace,

our endless nobility, our most humble kin.

Davos Blues

World Bank President Jim Yong Kim. Image Credit World Bank Photo Collective via Flickr.

During a side event of its annual meeting in October last year in Washington DC, the World Bank quietly made an announcement that seemed tacitly to acknowledge that some of its private sector investments have gone awry. It turns out the Bank has been piloting a new Anticipated Impact Measurement and Monitoring (AIMM) system to oversee the activities of the International Finance Corporation (IFC), the private investment arm of the World Bank. The official purpose of the IFC is “to create opportunity for people to escape poverty and improve their lives by catalyzing the means for inclusive and sustainable growth.”

While it is welcome that the Bank is finally waking up to the lapses of its subsidiary, for many victims of the IFC’s misguided investments, the move is far too little, far too late. Through poor judgement, poor oversight, and negligence this powerful arm of the World Bank too often appears to be doing more harm than good.

We in South Africa have seen this first-hand. The IFC invested US$50

million ostensibly to support Lonmin, a British mining company with its flagship operation in Marikana, North West province. Part of the money was meant for a “large-scale community development program.”

As part of the deal and to comply with its own commitments, Lonmin was

to build 5,500 houses for its workers by 2011. Only three materialized. A year later, housing was a contributing factor in the mineworker protest which, after police intervened, ultimately left 44 people dead and a

community shattered.

The IFC also invested $107m in a company called Net1 UEPS in April 2016. Net1 is the parent company of Cash Paymaster Services (CPS) which, according to the Constitutional Court, was unlawfully contracted by the South African government to distribute social grants. The same company was found by Black Sash, a South African human rights organization, to have behaved unethically by abusing its access to the personal information of social grant recipients to profit from the program. By making the investment after these details were known, the IFC implicated itself in these predatory practices.

And it’s not just in South Africa where the IFC has made questionable decisions. Across the developing world it has invested in efforts that seek to privatize education systems rather than strengthening the public service and profiteered from land grabs elsewhere in Africa. Like in Guinea where the Societe AngloGold Ashanti de Guinee (SAG), a subsidiary of South African gold-mining giant AngloGold Ashanti, involuntary resettled hundreds of households. Despite the company’s claims that consent was given, serious allegations of villagers being intimidated into giving up their land emerged.

One of the backers for the project was a South African bank, Nedbank, which received $140 million for “cross-border lending across Africa, including capital-intensive projects.” Through this financial relationship, from which the IFC benefited in the form of interest from the loans, SAG was able to undertake the operation.

But the challenges to the IFC are beginning to mount. Consumer watchdog SumOfUs is calling for the IFC to divest from a destructive gold mine in Mina la India, Nicaragua, operated by Condor Gold. The local community fiercely opposed the project, saying the mine would damage their ground water supply, displace hundreds of people and destroy livelihoods. Earlier this year the intimidation escalated when those who protested the project were sued by Condor Gold. Fortunately, the pressure from the community and its supporters led to the charges being dropped. But IFC remains the second biggest investor in the project which is a potential violation of its own environmental and social performance standards.

As far back as seven years ago concerns were being raised, even inside the World Bank. A 2011 review by the bank’s own internal watchdog, the Independent Evaluation Group, found that the majority of the investments it studied did not always adhere to the IFC’s own development mission.

By 2016 very little had changed, affirmed by an Oxfam briefing note that states “beyond the steps already taken, the IFC needs to do much more to improve accountability and ensure that World Bank Groups’ funds are not flowing to harmful projects.”

Some will argue that development is a long and messy business, so these kinds of things are inevitable. This view of development is cover for an approach that doesn’t address what can be life or death concerns. At worst, it is premised on a notion that some lives have less value. At best, it’s short-sighted and dangerous. We cannot accept the horrific consequences of the IFC’s failures as inevitable.

The Evaluation Group’s findings at least showed that the Bank was willing to scrutinize IFC investments and that there is some oversight mechanism. But there doesn’t appear to be any sanction or change in behavior. Will the new AIMM system be any different?

The IFC urgently needs to get its house in order and act according to its true mission and mandate. One way of doing this would be to put a moratorium on all investments being opposed by affected communities, until it can ensure that these do no harm and meet the IFC’s own performance standards. And if this can’t be done, its current investment model should be scrapped altogether. There has been enough harm done already, with the price paid by those whose lives the IFC claims to be improving.

Future so bright

Image of gas flares at night outshining everything else in the Niger River. Image: NASA

By now, longtime readers are used to us taking a break at this time of the year–from around before Christmas until a few days into the new year. So the radio silence well beyond the first two weeks of January is not unusual to them. As one contributor, Abraham Zere, wondered: “Where’s the usual “On Safari’ post?” Like this and this from years past. Well, instead of that, this year we ended with “Asante Sana“–this one a real Robert Mugabe Quote–on the end of the Mugabe dynasty only to be replaced by a new version of the one-party state in Zimbabwe. The plan was to come back in the new year with the launch of our a newly designed website. This new site will be the first public manifestation of our partnership with the Jacobin Foundation. We tried to hold back the date we start publishing again until the new site was finished, but some technical glitches with the launch meant that we can’t wait any longer. All things equal, we should have a new website within the next couple of weeks.

If you’re wondering if the eventual website change will mean we are abandoning our core mission, that is: in the main asking our contributors to translate scholarly debates and high-level political and cultural analyses into accessible language, the answer is no. However, there are some things we’ll aim to do more of. First we hope to offer more timely commentary on the political, social and economic issues of the day (our old bread and butter).

Secondly, as Africa Is a Country becomes an online hub for African public scholarship and writing, we want to make sure it continues to act as progressive, alternative force within debates on development, governance, public policy, intellectual thought and culture on the continent. We will continue to bring you the work of luminaries like Mahmood Mamdani, Issa Shivji, Sisonke Msimang (who is a contributing editor) and Achille Mbembe, as well as provide more space for younger African writers and intellectuals, many who already publish in publications on the continent, but whose voices are mostly absent in debates about policies that effect them directly. 

And yes, we’re aware that we can’t expect people to work for free. So in 2018, fundraising is a big thing around here. We are working on a number of strategies–in fact I have just been awarded a fellowship by the Ford Foundation (under the title #AfricaNoFilter)–to go about more systematically to bring you the work of more Africa-based writers and scholars.

Finally, I will also take this opportunity to announce a group of our longtime contributors as contributing editors. They are: Anakwa Dwamena, Benjamin Fogel, Samar Al-Bulushi, Lina Benabdullah, Maria Hengeveld, George Kibala Bauer, Sarah El-Shaarawi and Noah Tsika. They join Sisonke Msimang and Grieve Chelwa who are already on the roster. Also, we want to announce Oumar Ba, currently a contributing editor and assistant professor of political science at Morehouse College, to become a member of our Editorial Board. Thank you very much, we look very much forward to the new horizons.

Let’s get to work.

Asante Sana

It has been an emotional few weeks: I lived through a not coup d’etat.

November 21, 2017. 11:11am in New York City, 6:11pm in Harare: Ten minutes ago, as I emerged from the subway, my phone burst into a staccato of beeps, and a mosaic of alerts populated the screen. BEEP. “Did He Resign?” asks a cousin. BEEP. “What just happened?” a Zimbabwean friend in Australia asks. BEEP. “It’s on the radio!!!!!!” This one, from London.

BEEP. “IT HAPPENED!!!” Dallas, this time.

I check Twitter (the Twitterati usually know everything before anyone else). Nothing, yet. On Facebook (almost always the last to know) my friend Palesa in Zimbabwe has broken the news. Her latest status update is a bunting of Zimbabwean flags punctuated with an excess of exclamation points. I need more. On the Al Jazeera English livestream, my most trusted Zimbabwean reporter, Haru Mutasa, is live, interviewing a crowd of jubilant Zimbabweans. She confirms it, and I weep, right there on the crowded Fifth Avenue sidewalk.

Mugabe is gone.

This morning, when I woke up, WhatsApp (the undisputed public sphere for Zimbabweans) was abuzz with screenshots of the press statement by exiled former Vice President, Emmerson D. Mnangagwa (or ED, as he is known in the Zimbabwean WhatsApp world). There was hardly any commentary — since the government started arresting people for “cyber crimes” (which included speaking negatively about President Mugabe), Zimbabweans, already wary about speaking publicly about politics, were uncharacteristically cautious on social media too. Twitter users, however, were unbothered. The #Zimbabwe #NotCoup discussion was alight with fearless analysis. It was unsurprising to me that today, seven long days after this rollercoaster began, virtually everyone in the discussion was still calling for patience, for calm. Optimism is the weakness and the strength of the Zimbabwean disposition. Optimism kept us at home all these years, instead of marching in the streets, and optimism kept us out of a war this week. And so, despite ED’s statement, in which he “confirmed” some facts, “declined” an offer, “appealed” to the President, “promised” future action, “looked forward” to other events but said nothing concrete, what I heard from Zimbabweans was frustration, and still, hope. And that hope would be rewarded only a few hours later. Mugabe is gone.

Tuesday, November 14, at 7:03am (New York time): my dad got a missed call from me, followed closely by a single, frantic WhatsApp message (in fact, assume all messages are WhatsApp unless otherwise stated): “You ok?”

Dad (8:31am): Stereki [Very]. Going fishing tomorrow. Were you spooked by something?

Me (9:47am): Unconfirmed reports that the military has taken over ZBC offices. If that’s true, this is a coup in action.

To back up my concern, I sent him a barrage of Twitter and Facebook screenshots — anonymous nobodies who claimed to know somebodies who knew somebody in the know — were reporting that something was happening. The same three videos of military troops being driven into the city were circulating in a frenzied loop on every social media platform I subscribe to. I panicked.

The ubiquity of smartphones and social media has meant that even though I left home, it was only in the physical sense. I have lived every crisis, familial and social, as though I was still there, except everything happened half a day late in my world. When my mother went in for surgery last year, I was in the pre-operation room with the family, listening to the conversation while staring at the ceiling (I guess someone put the phone down and didn’t think to prop “me” up). I was there immediately post-op, getting live updates on her condition at 5am. When the generator at home died, I knew about it almost immediately, and brainstormed ways to send money home to help fix it (in a society with a cash shortage and underdeveloped electronic banking infrastructure, everyday things like international bank transfers become logistical nightmares). I live birthdays, and power cuts, deaths, and fuel shortages, and the minor nuisances of daily life with my family, and yet I have not lived at home in over fifteen years.

Being in the diaspora means, for the most part, physically living away while emotionally, financially, and politically being an active, vocal member of my native society. When the Zimbabwean government introduced the new ministry of cyber crimes, I, in New York, modified my online behavior. I have plans to visit home, and worried about an arrest at the airport over a throwaway tweet. If I made a political comment that might be considered subversive, I make sure to advise the recipient in Zimbabwe to delete it, lest their phone be searched. I am cautious about what I retweet, who I quote online. I considered using a pseudonym for this article. You see, apart from my body, I still live in Zimbabwe.

My dad, like my friends at home, laughed at my panic. “I drove into town and didn’t see a single tank,” he said, chuckling. My anger heightened. What was he doing in town? Why would he even go there? He had every intention of making his fishing trip the next morning. My cousin seemed just as unperturbed. She had a business trip the next day, and had no plans to cancel. I thought they were insane, and insanely irresponsible. Glued to my phone, I was among the first in my family (the others were in the diaspora, too) to report the news that that the ZBC (the state broadcaster, Zimbabwe Broadcasting Corporation) headquarters were under the control of the military; the UK and US embassies were advising their personnel to stay home the next day; the airport was now closed (then not closed, but heavily guarded, then closed again).

While my family slept, the diaspora in London, Sydney, California, kept up with the news: someone’s friend could hear a firefight in Borrowdale, where the President’s personal residence (known as “Blue Roof”) was; a circulating voice note advised that the First Lady, Dr. Amai Grace Mugabe (“Dr.,” because she had been awarded a PhD after 2 months of study; “Amai” as an honorific for “mother of the nation”) had left the country “at 3pm” and “was in exile in Nairobi.” Someone else said some ministers had been arrested. ZBC was playing war songs, according to someone who knew someone still up and watching local TV in Zim. Eventually, my day ended, and I had done nothing else. I slept.

I awoke to more beeping — the soundtrack to revolution. Timezones meant that I was playing social media watch tag with my Australian fellow diaspora. At 6am NY time, my shift began. It was 10PM in Australia, and my friend tagged out — she had work in the morning, but updated me on what I had missed: The Head of the ZDF (Zimbabwe Defense Forces), General Joseph Moyo appeared on ZBC to announce what was being called a #NotCoup on Twitter. The President was under house arrest, ministers had indeed been detained, and others were still on the run. I promised her updates while she slept.

At home, Zimbabweans reacted as they always do, with humor. The memes were swift to come, biting in their sarcastic hilarity. “Time for tea and coup cakes in #Zimbabwe. This just got properly weird,” wrote Twitter user @edwardcropley, captioning an image of Commander Chiwenga and the President shaking hands, released by the military as proof of the President’s wellbeing under their care. #Coupcakes became the first in a series of defining memes this week. Another one, #GeneralBae, would emerge during the #SolidarityMarch organized by the (Chimurenga) war veterans. Young women, wrapped in Zimbabwe flags, would stop soldiers in tanks on the street and take selfies — they may as well have whisper-sighed “my hero.” It was a heady, topsy-turvy day. #MusojaBae (for Soldier Bae) was born, and of course, as the man in charge, Commander Chiwenga was knighted #GeneralBae, bringer of liberation.

I’m getting ahead of myself. Events unfolded too quickly, and not quickly enough. In those first few days, it was expected the President would resign. An “announcement coming soon,” message made its way around the world every 80 minutes, and sleep, like the pending resignation, was elusive. I had lived 32 of the 37 years of Mr Mugabe’s rule; I wasn’t about to miss this moment for something as trivial as sleep. One day turned into two, and then three. Real news was scarce, rumor abundant. Whole theses were sent around, copied and pasted into the body of the message to avoid the expense associated with downloading documents (Zimbabwe has some of the most expensive data charges on the continent). The military assured us all was well, that in a #notcoup, the constitution matters, and must be abided by.

The leaders of the continent, organized in the African Union, floundered. The South African President made a vague statement, and then sent an envoy to Zimbabwe to meet with the military and the President. WhatsApp said the South African envoy was declined entry at the airport, but the next day he appeared (wearing much-commented-on colorful socks) in the ubiquitous staged photographs of meetings at Blue Roof. There was a suggestion that the regional organization of states, the SADC (Southern African Development Community), would need to interfere. This was met by a resounding “NO” from across Zimbabwean social media. We didn’t want international intervention, which we feared would lead to a war; we were going to wait this out. Apparently, the outside world had already intervened. Reports came out suggesting the #notcoup was planned in China, with the knowledge and conditional approval of the Chinese government, and a diplomatic shrug from the Americans. Still, “no SADC,” we said.

Think pieces were written. Nobody quite knew what to say, and we certainly didn’t know what to think. Is it a coup if it goes on for days, and nobody gets summarily executed? Is it a coup if the President is under house arrest, but free to preside over (and nap at) a university graduation ceremony, in which he conferred a degree to the wife of his captor? Is it a coup if the assumed ascending leader is in exile, and holds no political office or party position?

Western media certainly could not understand it, and so resorted to profiles of Mugabe. The anticipatory post-mortem of his presidency had begun.

Still, for now, we had a President, and he was refusing to resign. The War Veterans came out and condemned him, and his ambitious wife, who, until that fateful day, had been vying to succeed her husband — now, she was either in exile, or under house arrest at Blue Roof, too, depending on which social media platform you favored. On November 18th, we marched. At home, in Zimbabwe, we marched. My family sent surreal photos, posing with armored tanks, with soldiers, with each other. The streets were jubilant, they said, “electric.” It felt like a celebration. Videos of dancing, singing, joyful Zimbabweans marching to State House — State House, where, in years gone by, one would get shot at before questioning, for slowing down — to demand the resignation of the President. This was unheard of, unprecedented. You cannot do that in Zimbabwe. It is illegal to speak against the President, as Martha O’Donovan, an American living in Zimbabwe, found out two weeks before this upheaval — she was arrested for calling the president a “sick man” on Twitter, and released with a $1000 bail. Yet we marched. We at home marched to State House and to Blue Roof, and we in the diaspora marched in London, in Australia, in Washington DC, in New York, in the Netherlands — a rolling wave of preemptive celebration across time zones. I listened to the Zimbabwean national anthem on repeat on my way to the protest at the Zimbabwean Mission to the United Nations in New York. I cried tears of joy, of relief, of a reborn hope for a home I had not lived in for almost half my life. “Happy Independence Day,” we said in greeting. Everyone was smiling. We danced, we sang, we spoke. This was freedom: Mugabe was going. Or so we thought.

“Announcement coming soon” started circulating almost immediately when I woke up on November 19th. Confident in the power of our collective demonstration, we believed the President had no choice but to resign. By midday, a photo of ZBC trucks outside State House served as proof that our hopes were about to come to fruition. My Australian counterparts were asleep, but in the US and the UK we were awake. I hadn’t slept well in days, but I was determined to watch this speech. I scoured social media for information, but it was mostly conjecture, nothing validated. I tuned into Al Jazeera English, where Haru Mutasa was on the ground, doing interviews, giving analysis. I watched that segment three times over the next three hours, and still, nothing. I turned the volume up so I wouldn’t fall asleep, and decided to rest my eyes.

Three hours later, I woke up in a panic. I had missed it! Thank God.“What did I just watch?” a friend on Facebook asked nobody in particular. “I don’t get it. So he didn’t resign?” my cousin asked in the chat group. “???????,” wrote a friend in South Africa. “#NotCoup, #NotResignation,” another friend wrote. I had slept through it, but not the “it” I was waiting for. I’m glad I didn’t watch the speech—it would have broken my heart. “The President woke up the nation, and all he said was goodnight,” a friend in Zimbabwe wrote. #AsanteSana was trending; apparently, he ended his speech in Swahili.

The conspiracy theories started immediately. Messages started coming (I got the same one from my cousin, my mother, my brother, and my friend) about how this was a master stroke, and definitely planned by the military because of some constitutional clause. I didn’t understand it, but I wanted it to be true. Another person had zoomed in on someone’s hands holding a folded stack of papers and putting them under their seat, “obviously” hiding evidence of something. “He read the wrong speech,” was a Twitter consensus position, as was “The Old Man outplayed the generals” by somehow reading a meandering non speech instead of his “real one,” in which he was supposed to resign. The Twittersphere blamed him; Whatsapp blamed President Zuma of South Africa. Apparently, Zuma had called the President, who was willing to resign two days ago, and convinced him not to. The rationale behind this theory was unclear (something about the African Union and SADC being bound by treaty to interfere if he could just but hold on until Monday), but it was circulating as fact. I later regurgitated that piece of information to curious non-Zimbabweans asking me what was going on. In reality, I had no idea. Not many of us did.

We were deflated. Monday (20th November) came, and social media agreed there was only one way forward. The Party would have to expel him, as was the rumored next step in this #notcoup. To understand the significance of this, you have to know that the ruling party in Zimbabwe, ZANU PF, is synonymous with the President. To imagine a Party without him was impossible only one week ago. And yet, with disingenuous speeches decrying the corruption and many abuses of the President and “certain people around him” (read: Mrs Mugabe and her supporters in the Party), by people who profited for years from those “abuses,” the President was removed as head of the Party (and Mrs Mugabe and her allies were removed from the Party altogether). After the vote, the room erupted in cheer, and with but a few seconds time delay, Zimbabweans joined them with a digital chorus of celebration. We would overlook the hypocrisy, if only to achieve our primary goal: Mugabe must go.

Consensus between my favored social media pseudo intelligence officers was that the pressure was too intense, and the chess master was running out of moves. He would resign. He didn’t. He called ED home, out of exile in South Africa, to talk. ED declined, and released a statement. President Mugabe called for a meeting of the cabinet, and Twitter says they declined to attend. Still, he remained in power.

And today, at the same time that the Parliament sat and a motion to impeach the President was put forward, seconded, and was in the midst of debate, I happened to step out of the subway station. I stopped in the middle of the sidewalk on Fifth Avenue (as any New Yorker will tell you, that’s a major faux pas) and streamed Al Jazeera. Haru Mutasa’s analysis was drowned out by the celebrating crowd behind her, and then, they played the clip of the Speaker of the House Jacob Mudenda reading the resignation letter:

In terms of the provisions of Section 96, Sub-Section 1, of the Constitution of Zimbabwe, amendment number 20, 2013.

Following my verbal communication with the Speaker of the National Assembly, Advocate Jacob Mudenda at 13:53 hours, 21st November, 2017 intimating my intention to resign as the President of the Republic of Zimbabwe, I, Robert Gabriel Mugabe, in terms of Section 96, Sub-Section 1 of the Constitution of Zimbabwe, hereby formally tender my resignation as the President of the Republic of Zimbabwe with immediate effect.

My decision to resign is voluntary on my part and arises from my concern for the welfare of the people of Zimbabwe and my desire to ensure a smooth, peaceful and non-violent transfer of power that underpins national security, peace and stability.

Kindly give public notice of my resignation as soon as possible as required by Section 96, Sub-Section 1 of the Constitution of Zimbabwe.

Yours faithfully,

Robert Gabriel Mugabe, President of the Republic of Zimbabwe.

The Black Pacific

Cuban members of the Afro Razones crew. Image credit Eli Jacobs-Fantauzzi.

INTL BLK comes back to Dublab in Los Angeles for its 2nd episode (with mic that’s a bit too hot, sorry!). This time we dive a bit into the Black Pacific, and take a deeper look at the contemporary Cuban Hip Hop scene with guest Luna Olavarria Gallegos, one of the producers of the Afro Razones project. Stream below and subscribe to the Africa Is a Radio channel on Mixcloud.