Sean Jacobs's Blog, page 264

Respecting the specificity of the past while activating the present

Screen Shot from film Let Us Die Like Brothers.

In February 1917 the SS Mendi, a South African warship, sank off the English channel after a Royal Mail ship, the SS Darro, plowed into it in foggy weather. The ship was carrying 648 soldiers — primarily black soldiers, members of the South African Native Labour Corps. The men all drown.

The SS Darro sustained minor damages. Many of these lives would have been saved if Captain Harry Stump of the SS Darro had sent boats to their rescue, instead of reportedly standing and watching the men drown and die of hypothermia. An investigation found Captain Stump wholly responsible for the tragedy, as he was moving too fast; and did not sound the customary whistle in the fog. For his fatal negligence, the captain was punished: his license was suspended for a year.

Christina Sharpe’s In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (2016) meditates on another ship, carrying other Africans whose deaths preceded the Mendi fatalities: the slave ship, Zorgue. En route to Jamaica in 1781 with twice its legal capacity, Sharpe writes, the Zorgue overshot its destination due to navigational errors. Worried about dwindling supplies, but reassured by the insurance taken out against accidental loss of “the cargo,” the captain and crew decided to throw about 142 of the captive Africans overboard, to ensure the survival of the rest, and secure the insurance pay-out. It is instructive here that, as Sharpe reminds us, this case “was committed to historical memory first as the insurance claim in the case of Gregson vs Gilbert, and only later as murders,” because it was the court’s considered opinion that this was “the throwing overboard of goods [and] the case was a simple one of maritime insurance.”  In the face of an impossibly long history of anti-blackness that not only joins the SS Mendi and the Zorgue, but casts its shadow further to contemporary South Africa, the commemoration of the Mendi tragedy is self-explanatory. 

This year marked the first centennial of the Mendi tragedy; and among the projects commemorating this historic disaster is South African author and journalist, Fred Khumalo’s historical novel, Dancing the Death Drill.

Discussing the tensions between literature and history, South African literary critic Michael Green considers the two disciplines to be “antagonists in a civil war all the more bitter for their – often repressed — affiliation.” Yet, if as Green suggests, historical fiction in South African literary history closely correlates with the emergence of various nationalisms, then Dancing the Death Drill stretches the horizons of this relationship in fascinating ways that mirror the ever-receding horizons that daily rose to meet the men aboard the SS Mendi in 1917. By weaving a riveting tapestry of the Anglo-Boer War as experienced by Africans, the British and the Afrikaners on the one hand; and World War I as seen through the eyes of the South African troops and the French; the novel excavates narrative’s capacity to imagine a range of identity tensions and possibilities. This tapestry evocatively resonates with contemporary modes of relating in South Africa, capturing what Green might call “the historicity of the present” (130), at a time when the mythical rainbow nation project is simultaneously leaking and brightening its constituent strips in ambiguous ways. In many respects, the appeal of Khumalo’s novel partly lies in its presentness; in the ways it confronts Frederic Jameson’s challenge of respecting the specificity of the past while activating the resonances of its passions, experiences and struggles with those of the present.  

Fred Khumalo shares some of the thinking behind his novel with me. 

Why did you choose to engage with the  Mendi tragedy  in the format of a novel ; and why now?

Initially, I thought I should write the book as a work of non-fiction. Sadly, all the veterans from the South African Native Labour Contingent (the black troops who survived) had already died when I had the wherewithal to interview them and write about their experiences, so, I resorted to fiction. It is pertinent to tell this story now because February 2017 marked the centenary of the sinking of the SS Mendi. It is also important that we start telling stories that have long been reduced to footnotes in our history books.

The title  Dancing the Death Drill  is intriguing. What is the thinking behind it ? 

According to oral tradition, as the SS Mendi was going down, having been rammed on the side by the SS Darro, and while some of the men were throwing themselves overboard, while others were writhing in futility trapped in the very dark holds of the ship, which were already water-logged, some members stood on the upper-deck, under the command of Reverend Isaac Wauchope Dyobha, a chaplain on the ship. Oral tradition tells us that Dyobha, in a dramatic display of bravery in the face of calamity, suddenly cried out for the men to stand in formation. They obeyed. Then he proceeded to say,

Be quiet and calm, my countrymen, for what is taking place now is exactly what you came to do. You are going to die, but that is what you came to do. Brothers, we are drilling the drill of death. I, a Xhosa, say you are all my brothers, Zulus, Swazis, Pondos, Basutos, we die like brothers. We are the sons of Africa. Raise your cries, brothers, for though they made us leave our weapons at our home, our voices are left with our bodies!

The men took off their boots and started gyrating, dancing a macabre drill of death, defying death, challenging death, daring death.

Why have you turned to historical fiction at this point in your career? 

When I set out to write Dancing the Death Drill, I was not driven by this compulsion to write a historical novel. It is just that the story of the Mendi was crying out to be told. However, after writing the novel, I was struck by the sheer range of tantalizing pockets of hidden history in South Africa. Some of these histories have been kept alive through oral traditions, while others have only received passing mention in our history books. I am currently drawn to these pockets of histories.

To what extent are you using fiction and the past to respond to contemporary South Africa? Or are you motivated by something else entirely?

I was trying to address, among other concerns, the issue of land. Many of the men who enlisted to go and serve in Europe did so because they were financially desperate, thanks to the Native Land Act of 1913, which had robbed them of their land and livelihood. In telling the story of the Mendi, I am trying to create a historical context to the current debate on land reform and reported acts of violence over land in some parts of the country. I wanted to remind the reader how the struggle over land started; how the migrant labour system led to the breakdown of Black families, from one generation to the next. Today we are living with the legacy of those broken families. It is what Zimbabwean novelist Shimmer Chinodya would call ‘a harvest of thorns.’ That is my motivation. But let’s be honest, there is also the commercial imperative; not many local writers have shown an inclination for historical fiction. I thought I should carve myself a niche in this less cluttered genre. Admittedly, historical fiction involves a lot of research, which is a turn-off for many of my writer friends. However, being a repository of “useless information,” I thought, for once, let me put this useless historical information I have been imbibing over the years to good use. I also think there is a growing interest — at least from a readers’ perspective — in historical fiction. You just have to look at the current “hot” writers and see that it is their historical fiction that has set the public imagination on fire: Colson Whitehead (The Underground Railroad); Marlon James (A Brief History of Seven Killings); Hillary Mantel (Wolf Hall); Sebastian Barry (Days without End); and of course, the historical novelist’s novelist, Toni Morrison (Beloved).

The novel   inter weave s   B lack histories of the Mendi tragedy with British and Afrikaner histories of the Anglo-Boer  W ar, and subsequently World War I.  What  did you intend with this  tapestry of histories?

Dancing the Death Drill is fiction and should be read as such. As much as I tried my best to be loyal to historical facts, I have exercised poetic license to re-imagine some aspects of the story through the lives of my characters. While many of them are totally fictional, they still interact with real-life, historical figures such as Reverend Isaac Wauchope Dyobha and King George V of England. History is, as someone said, a certainty reached at a point where the unreliability of our memory converges with the inadequacy of documentation. The characters are a manifestation of this discomfort, this restlessness. This story is about conflict, and as a writer I stretch the motif of conflict until it is so unbearably taut and stretched out it can snap any time. And in snapping no one knows who it will hurt, who the victim will be. In an editorial comment on the role of historical fiction in modern society, The Guardian noted: “The best historical novels do not pretend to provide a faithful record. When you read one, [Hillary] Mantel said, you are not buying a replica, or even a faithful photographic reproduction – you are buying a painting with the brush strokes left in.”

There is a recurrent motif of courage and cowardice and men deserting wars, children or their colleagues .    Is this central to your thinking about that historical moment?

Most of our “formal” published histories tell the narrative of war through the mouths and eyes of the generals and commanders; the ordinary person is given short shrifts. Their humanity is never acknowledged, or celebrated. The idea behind bringing in notions of cowardice and doubt was to imbue history with real human emotions and frailties. Not all of us are courageous. Not all of us are paragons of morality.

You seem to have a close relationship to jazz in your writing. Your previous writing references jazz as well; and here, we meet Miles Davis already in the first  three pages; and one of the musical soundtracks is Duke Ellington’s “Mood Indigo”. What is jazz to you and your writing?

When I write, there’s invariably some music playing in the background. I might not be actively listening, but it will be there; it becomes a creative bubble in which I lose myself as I embark on my own creative process. It buoys me, so to speak, keeps me afloat. It is just the way it is. Fiction, like jazz, is an artistic form that is forever searching, always on a quest. Unlike classical music which has to be scored in order to be played, jazz is more flexible, more challenging. The best recordings of jazz are live improvisations rather than studio pieces – rehearsed and rehearsed to death. Fiction writing – at least how I practice it – is also an act of improvisation. It is breathlessly unpredictable; which is why it is fraught with risks. Danger, disappointment (or surprise) are always around the corner. When you are writing a piece of fiction, as when you are performing a jazz piece, you are carrying a candle, and you’re entering a cave. You don’t know what to expect in there. Sometimes you don’t even know what you’re looking for. A monster? A child in distress? A princess running away from a forced marriage? You never know. And, carrying the candle itself is not free of pain. The wax will slide down and burn your hand. Guaranteed. You might also drop the candle by mistake. It might accidentally fall on a piece of kindling, and the whole cave might catch fire, and you’re a goner! That’s jazz. That’s fiction. Risky business.

What was the greatest challenge about writing this novel?  

The greatest challenge was that even though this is based on and inspired by some chunks of our history, there was virtually no archival material on the sinking of the SS Mendi – especially about the men who were on board. Who were they? Where had they come from? What had motivated them? It was scary for me not to have an archive as a crutch. But once I got into the groove I realized how liberating it was – to my imagination. I was not hindered or fettered by too much documentation viewed, undoubtedly, from the perspective of those who were in charge. 

W hat’s the next project?

I have just finished the first draft of another historical novel. It is based on and inspired by a little-known slice of history of black involvement in the Anglo-Boer War. Just weeks before the war broke it, it suddenly occurred to the authorities that there were tens of thousands of black people stuck in Johannesburg – with no means of leaving the city. The trains had stopped running. The Brits were on the march from Natal and the rest of the country towards the Transvaal. The Boers had also embarked on a march, to meet the enemy on the Natal border. In the midst of this we had these tens of thousands of black people (mainly men, desperate to leave the city). Then a group of them, 7 000 Zulus, started marching from Johannesburg to Natal. The march took them 10 days of sleeping in the open, exposed to the elements; on occasion being commandeered by Boer troops and forced at gunpoint to perform whatever physical tasks needed manpower (pushing cannons up steep hills, driving ox wagons, etc.). I am telling this story through the eyes of a woman who was part of this march (though there were some women and children in the march, my character is a complete fabrication). The working title for the book is A Love Supreme. Like John Coltrane’s seminal musical suite, the book takes the form of four movements (parts).

Ghana’s President and what the West wants to hear

A video clip widely shared on social media purportedly shows Ghana’s president Nana Akufo-Addo making “controversial” comments and “shocking” to his guest, French president Emmanuel Macron, during a joint press conference in Accra last week. Here’s the problem: There was absolutely nothing controversial or shocking about Akufo-Addo’s words. In fact, he said exactly what the West wants to hear: Africa is poor today because of its dependency on foreign aid but really appreciates Europe’s help.

In the clip, after a reporter’s harmless question about ties between Africa and France, the Ghanaian president launched into a short speech with the preface: “I hope these comments that I’m about to make will not offend the questioner too much and some people around here.”

What does Akufo-Addo acutally say? He simply asserts that Ghana and Africa should “charter a path which is about how we can develop our nations ourselves.” What is controversial or shocking about that supposed insight? African leaders have insisted on economic and political autonomy as far back as when Europeans occupied and exploited the continent not more than half a century ago in most places (and even less in southern Africa).

It speaks to the lack of understanding of the workings of capitalism and the theory and practice of resistance to neo-imperialism that many social media users have construed Akufo-Addo’s words as somehow being radical. It should strike viewers that the French president nodded with approval throughout Akufo-Addo’s pathetic remarks. Moreover, the Ghanaian president ingratiated himself by clarifying that Africans are “not going to look a gifthorse in the mouth” but should not rely on “the generosity and charity of European taxpayers.” He peppered his little speech with the buzzwords of austerity – such as the need for African “accountability” instead of “begging” – that surely delighted Macron. And, in a final sad disclaimer, Akufo-Addo reassured the audience that “I am, as you know, a strong friend of France. I’m Francophile!”

Who is Nana Akufo-Addo? His affinity for France may have been cemented in the 1970s when he worked for an international law firm in Paris. After a long career in law and politics, and losing two previous polls, Akufo-Addo was elected president of Ghana last December as leader of the right-wing New Patriotic Party (NPP).  The NPP is the descendant of various incarnations of elitist and ethnocentric political parties with a despicable history of lobbying to postpone independence in the 1950s, resisting the Pan-Africanist policies of Kwame Nkrumah in the 1960s, and re-establishing diplomatic relations with apartheid South Africa in the early 1970s. Today, it embraces the politics and economics of neo-liberalism and models itself after the “business-friendly” conservative parties of Europe. In short, Akufo-Addo is no radical: he has more in common with French presidents than Ghanaian farmers.

As a historian, I cannot resist contrasting the Akufo-Addo/Macron press conference with a far more significant interaction between French-speaking African and European leaders 57 years ago in what is today Kinshasa. At the independence day celebrations on July 4, Congo’s first prime minister, Patrice Lumumba, delivered a truly controversial speech that really shocked his guest, the Belgian king, Baudouin, when he said: “No Congolese will ever forget that independence was won in struggle, a persevering and inspired struggle carried on from day to day, a struggle, in which we were undaunted by privation or suffering and stinted neither strength nor blood.”

No one disputes that Africans must determine their own destiny but Akufo-Addo was simply excusing the responsibility of Macron and France and the West for Africa’s predicament. It would have been more controversial and shocking if Akufo-Addo had taken the opportunity to confront Macron about France’s debt to Africa for the slave trade and colonization; its history of arming and defending dictators like Mobutu Sese Seko and Blaise Compaoré; and the complicity of French companies in everyday corruption. In a world without Thomas Sankara and Fidel Castro – genuine anti-imperialists who demanded reparations from Europe and forged autonomous economic development policies – it is depressing that the harmless and counterproductive utterances of Akufo-Addo are misinterpreted as “controversial” or “shocking.” If only Walter Rodney were still with us to school the Ghanaian president on how Europe underdeveloped Africa.

Reading Frantz Fanon

Frantz Fanon, the Martinique-born, African nationalist and champion for the liberation of Algeria, died on this day in 1961 in a hospital in Bethesda, Maryland in the USA. Recently Fanon’s life work has received quite some attention from the academic world. After earlier biographies, such as David Macey’s Frantz Fanon and edited volumes like the one put together by Nigel Gibson’s Rethinking Fanon: The Continuing Legacy, one might think that everything on the subject has been said. However, this is not the case as recent writing on the subject demonstrates, namely Leo Zeilig’s Militant Philosopher of the Third World Revolution, Christopher Lee’s Frantz Fanon Toward a Revolutionary Humanism, and the monumental Jean Khalfa and Robert Young’s collection of writings by Fanon Écrits sur l’Aliénation e la Liberté.

In different ways, and departing from engagements with the available materials, these books offer new understandings on Fanon. They achieve it either by interpreting Fanon’s insights under new theoretical lenses, by enlarging the contextual framework to explain Fanon’s intellectual maturation, or, simply, by proposing fresh readings of Fanon that take into account recently found writings by him.

Zeilig’s starting point is a critique of the scholarship on Fanon. He contends that in academia, the adoption of “radical thinkers is always a sanitising process, turning revolutionary action into passive reflection, analysis into academic pontification.” After discussing the major trends on the scholarship on Fanon, Zeilig explains that his book “does not fall neatly into any of these categories; it is a biography that seeks to provide a total picture of Fanon’s life and work, while not pretending to be definite or final.” In doing so, he is only slightly interested in the historical context. His main preoccupation is to provide a fair description of the political-philosophical milieu Fanon was part of. Part of his effort, then, is to extricate Fanon from a European Marxist tradition, even if he recognizes that Fanon came to terms with his approach to Marxism in such an environment. Put differently, Zeilig is interested in tackling Fanon’s non-eurocentric Marxism. In the end, though, one is left to wonder what the problem with scholarship on Fanon is. Or if the problem with the sanitization of Fanon he alludes to lies precisely in the decanting of Marxism from his writing. Finally, Zeilig also says that his book is not a hagiography of Fanon. But the more negative side of Fanon is rarely discussed. Although this book is absolutely worth reading, the author dedicates a considerable amount of his attention either to defend Fanon or to castigate those who have criticized him.

Lee’s book, Toward a Revolutionary Humanism is an attempt to “humanize” Fanon, by engaging with a historical formation and an epistemological imperative, namely, the “rise of the third world” and the need to “deconstruct colonial legacies that still impact the present” (ideas also discussed in two other book projects of the author). Lee is not interested in writing a biography, on the contrary, he explains that biographies tend to start with the subject and then proceed to give the necessary background in order to situate the subject in the context. So he takes the other way around, providing the context and then situating the subject, in this case Fanon, therein.

As a cultural historian, Lee has been able to unearth contextual facts crucial to understand who Fanon was and how he came to embrace certain ways of thinking. However, this option produces two problems. The first one is that sometimes Fanon is subsumed in the profusion of historical events. Second, there is a suggestion that these historical events were instrumental to Fanon’s trajectory. In the last section, the author discusses the need to engage with Fanon today, with what he describes as “radical empathy.” Or, “politics of recognition and solidarity with communities beyond one’s own immediate experience.” What looms large in such a discussion is the question of violence. Lee seems to suggest that an understanding of Fanon’s context may help dilute his appeal to violence. I wonder if our concern with Fanon’s advocacy of violence is not an indication of the temporal rift that separates him from us. David Scott (in Conscripts of Modernity) has written about this epistemological problem, by arguing that part of this difficulty lies in having to write on questions outside our problem-space. Justifying Fanon’s call for violence does not help understanding the challenges he went through in theorizing his own time.

Khalfa and Young’ Écrits sur l’Aliénation e la Liberté is part of a larger project whose goal is to publish Fanon’s complete works. Previous books pay scant attention to what has been written on Fanon in French. This problem is at the core of postcolonial studies, particularly when it comes to the Francophone side of this debate. Fanon has written in French, but he is for the most part marginalized in French postcolonial studies. He is a major figure in the Anglophone academic world, particularly in the United States, where postcolonial critics have been able to read and discuss his work without paying too much attention to the context he was writing from.

Khalfa and Young’s book provides the possibility of reading Fanon outside the academic interpretations his work has been submitted to. The first section is about theatre, with two plays written by Fanon at an early age. Engaging with these early writings is important not only to make one aware of Fanon’s intellectual trajectory, but also because they are infused with major Fanonian themes, such as alienation and freedom, which he would later in his life address in different genres and forms. Secondly, one also sees that the influence of Sartre on Fanon goes beyond their camaraderie that led the former to sign the preface to the Wretched of the Earth. Fanon’s plays are deeply influenced by Sartre’s existentialism. By this logic, his later work too.

In the second section, the book introduces Fanon’s psychiatric work. The paramount aspect here is not just how one understands the ways in which Fanon dealt with his own practice. It goes beyond scholarly fixation on Fanon’s linking of mental alienation and colonial oppression. Fanon was charting and operating on new epistemological territories. His point of departure was  that mental pathologies cannot be separated from the social environment, to the extent that research done on mental diseases in western societies was not useful to explain the Arab or the African mentality. The psychiatric work of Fanon is fundamentally epistemological, since it forced him to deal with the articulation of questions in the context in which there was no literature or research.

However, this section also touches on questions of authorship. For the most part, Fanon co-signs these pieces, which shows the collaborative nature of his intellectual work. More interestingly, the methodology for his revolutionary writing, particularly the pieces for the El Moujahid, followed similarly. Most of the articles for this Algerian journal were not published under his name, because his revolutionary thinking was part of a larger project, the national liberation movement.

Together these writings are major contributions for understanding Fanon, particularly for reading Fanon through the challenges of our present. But they also reveal the extent to which reading Fanon today is not such a straightforward operation.

* Books reviewed here: Leo Zeilig. Frantz Fanon: The Militant Philosopher of the Third World Revolution. I.B. Tauris, 2016; Cristopher Lee. Frantz Fanon: Toward a Revolutionary Humanism. Ohio University Press, 2015; and Jean Khalfa, Jean and Robert Young. Frantz Fanon: Écrits sur l’Aliénation et la Liberté. Édition la Découverte, 2015.

Musical chairs in Angola

Image credit Joost de Raeymaeker/Lusa via Eu Sou João Lourenço Flickr.

The last years of former President Jose Eduardo Dos Santos nearly 4-decade long rule over Angola were particularly pathetic. They were the last, ignominious sighs of an obviously decaying regime withering away unceremoniously before our very eyes. Known as the “architect of peace,” the only thing he surely built was his children’s fortunes.

In particular, the blasé manner in which he casually signed over the country’s wealth to his family by decree – installing Isabel dos Santos, his daughter, as head of the once all-powerful Sonangol, Angola’s state oil company and our biggest national corporation – was galling. The fact that Isabel stuffed Sonangol’s corridors with Portuguese consultants fresh out of college and surrounded herself with Portuguese lawyers and aides certainly didn’t do much for her plummeting popularity. Her brother, Zenu dos Santos, was in charge of Angola’s Sovereign Wealth Fund. 

When taken into context with the absurd jailing of sixteen youths in July 2015 for reading a book, his lack of obvious, public compassion in the face of the deadly yellow fever epidemic that gripped the capital Luanda, the steady, steep decline of our economy, numerous corruption scandals, each more nefarious than the last, and the repugnant rise of the “bajus” — educated men and women who fed his pervasive cult of personality – it’s easy to see why Dos Santos was so unpopular during his last days in office.

Dos Santos’s hand-picked successor, President João Lourenço, went through the motions of a deeply-flawed election process, displaying his lack of charisma, strategy and any sort of break from the past. Sure, he said all the right things in his monotone voice, but people were tired of empty promises. He was simply repeating what his predecessor had said before. When the MPLA, Lourenço’s party, won the elections with 61% of the vote (they’ve won every election since indepedence), no celebrations broke out in the streets. The consensus was that Lourenço would merely be Dos Santos’ puppet, acting on the whims of Angola’s former president who, it bears pointing out, is still the MPLA’s president.

So imagine the shock that within 60 days of taking office, Lourenço fires Isabel dos Santos along with the rest of Sonangol’s board, dismantles her sibling’s monopolistic stranglehold over the national television station, openly threatens their business interests, and exonerates several ministers appointed by Dos Santos in key political and economic sectors. As if that wasn’t enough (it wasn’t), he also gets rid of the inexperienced Central Bank Governor appointed by Dos Santos, exonerates the board of the state diamond company, changes leadership in every single public news organization, and replaces the heads of military intelligence and the police.

Some of these leaderships were locked in for another five years by Dos Santos in a flurry of Presidential decrees signed during his last days in office. João Lourenço did not care.

The celebrations that followed were no surprise. WhatsApp is king in Luanda and we have a healthy relationship with memes. Within hours of the statement announcing Isabel’s sacking, our phones were flooded with hilarious memes praising Lourenço and deriding Isabel. Many called for the removal of Zenu dos Santos at the Angola’s Sovereign Wealth Fund and involved in a series of corruption scandals, the latest of which was released in the Paradise Papers leak.

Lourenço hadn’t just sacked someone; he had dared fire a Dos Santos, one of the untouchables, those who may not be questioned or criticized. It sent a powerful, clear message to Angolans in and out of government: that Lourenço is not afraid of using the full extent of his power as president of the republic. It’s safe to say that Angolans had not seen such a direct challenge to Dos Santos in many years, and the running joke here in Luanda was the Lourenço was acting as if he was a member of an opposition party. In fact, people are asking where the opposition is, such is Lourenço’s ability to usurp their narrative.

But the apparent changes underway in Angola aren’t merely political. State media, for decades under the firm control of the darkest impulses of the ruling party, suddenly seemed to remember how to do journalism again. People actually want to watch the nightly news on the state media channel, either for the almost daily announcements of another exoneration or just because journalism has stopped force-feeding us propaganda.

Provincial governors suddenly got Twitter accounts and started posting Obama-style images of themselves cleaning public roads, visiting local street markets and using the internet on their phones (“they’re just like us!”). The attorney general, for years completely useless in the fight against corruption and himself accused of gross acts of misconduct, has suddenly realized he has a job and is actively prosecuting low-hanging fruit in the state apparatus.

Perhaps most importantly, there’s a palpable sense of less fear in the air. Ondjango Feminista, a local organization promoting, among other things, gender equality, held two marches in its recent history: one in the last months of the Dos Santos regime, and another last weekend. The first was against the criminalization of abortion, a new law that had recently been introduced in parliament and then was hastily taken down once the scale of the opposition became clear. That march was organized and held in an environment of some fear, as local police have a shoddy, bloody history of recognizing our right to protest. The second march, held to protest violence against women, was notable for its rather celebratory atmosphere and minimal police presence, so much so that organizers had to often act as makeshift traffic officers. Fear has seemingly evaporated. 

So where’s the catch? As euphoria mounted, several Angolans started calling for calm. While cracks started to publicly appear within the MPLA – after all, Lourenço was taking on entrenched, vested interests in the party, on people that directly profited from Angola’s corruption – others maintained that sacking ministers was nowhere near enough. They wanted those responsible for the widespread corruption to be charged and taken to court. Angolans have a term for this content changing of ministers and governors: we call it the “dança das cadeiras,” which roughly translates to musical chairs. What’s the point of sacking ministers if their successors are going to be just as corrupt? This is certainly a conversation that we need to have.

For all the apparent changes we’ve seen, it’s worth pointing out the obvious: João Lourenço is an MPLA man. The regime hasn’t changed. The main actors have, and their initial signs are encouraging, but we’re not even done with the first act yet. The man has been in power for a little over two months. Considerable reform of our judicial sector is paramount – we need to create a judiciary system that has the tools to effectively go after corruption at all levels of state government. Our police force requires urgent reform. Central Angola and Maka Angola have exposed the ongoing practices of extra-judicial killings. It remains to be seen whether the current government will finally give health and education the attention, funding and forward-thinking planning they deserve.

João Lourenço has talked the talk, but the question is whether he can back it up with concrete action. The MPLA is a master manipulator and a wily survivor. The party is has consolidated near absolute political and economic power in the country it has ruled since independence. As a result of a severe economic crisis brought about primarily by rampant corruption and gross mismanagement, the party was acutely aware that its popularity was at an all-time low and, had they kept Dos Santos in charge, would have done much worse in the recent elections even with all the blatant irregularities.

Many Angolans argue that these initial actions are necessary for the MPLA to shore up much needed internal support while sending a message to external investors that they are willing to curb corruption in return for foreign direct investment and currency. At this point, reviving the economy is of the utmost importance. Even if you have to sacrifice a few entitled, wealthy offspring of the former president.

Angola is a battered country let down by its leadership again and again. But it’s now a battered country willing and able to dream again. I share in this feeling of cautious optimism, aware of the long road ahead but capable of giving this new leadership the benefit of the doubt.

João Lourenço first announced his intention to be president back in 2003, falling for one of Dos Santos’ mind games. Dos Santos had publicly stated that he wouldn’t run again in the next general elections; Lourenço took the bait and said that Dos Santos was a man of his word, would step down, and that he himself was ready to step in and lead. Lourenço was sidelined from any meaningful work for the next 11 years.

Today, Lourenço finds himself as President of Angola and with a level of public support not seen since Dos Santos “won” the war against Savimbi in 2002. If he does well, Lourenço has the chance to be remembered for much more than those 11 years.

The United States, Uganda, and the War on Terror

A US Army member trains members of the Ugandan Army in Kasenyi, Uganda. Image via US Army Flickr.

Over the past three decades, the conflicts in northern Uganda, Sudan, South Sudan, Rwanda, Congo, and Somalia have had one common denominator: Uganda’s president Yoweri Museveni. In Another Fine Mess: America, Uganda, and the War on Terror, the journalist and researcher Helen Epstein chronicles how the United States and Western donors enabled Museveni’s policy of destabilization in East and Central Africa, while at the same time he plunged his own country into the depths of poverty, and high rates of illiteracy and mortality. Adopting a façade of democracy, Museveni asserts his power through patronage, brutality, and terror, that continues to this day, as his party, the National Resistance Movement, is attempting to overturn the constitutional clause that imposed an age-limit on presidential candidates. The president can’t be older than 75. The next election is in 2021. By then Museveni, who has governed since 1986, will be 76. The book highlights how “Western support for dictators in the name of the War on Terror” had led to six wars in Africa and millions of deaths. This very accessible account and richly detailed book is published by Columbia University in the Columbia Global Reports series, which caters to “curious and busy readers.” We caught up recently with Epstein and asked her a few questions via email.

Why is your book  called  “Another Fine Mess”?

The title refers to a film by the 1930s slapstick comedy duo Laurel and Hardy.  They were always getting in trouble. If there was a rug, Laurel would slip on it; if Hardy tried to close a set of drapes, he’d get flustered and yank them off the wall so they’d collapse in a heap on the floor.

That’s what US policy in the Horn and Great Lakes of Africa has been like since the end of the Cold War. I don’t think there were bad intentions, but Washington created a real mess, and it actually isn’t funny.

When We stern audiences  think of  Uganda  at all , they  usually  think of   warlord  Joseph  Kony’s  brutality and laws against homosexuality.  Wh y did you write this book?

Very few Americans know the true story of Uganda. The nation’s leader Yoweri Museveni seized power in 1986 and quickly became Washington’s close military ally. Since then, his deep security relationship with the Pentagon has earned him more than $20 Billion in development assistance, $4 Billion in debt relief, an unknown amount of classified military aid and impunity for warmongering and human rights abuses that have devastated eastern and central Africa.

The resulting conflagrations — the Rwanda genocide, the Congo wars, the Sudanese civil war, Joseph Kony’s massacres in northern Uganda, the gruesome Sharia amputations in Somalia and the millions of refugees scattered by the ongoing South Sudan civil war — must seem to most Americans like distant storms having nothing to do with us. But under the pretext of fighting Islamic terrorism, US advisers and military officials have been involved in much of this violence, at times arming one side against the other, at times doing nothing until tensions built up and then downplaying abuses by our allies, especially Museveni.

Your book describe s  Uganda as a militarized dictatorship with a democra tic  face. What does that mean?

Museveni has used American and European taxpayers’ money to create a paramilitary state that looks democratic on the surface — Uganda has a Parliament, a court system, a lively press, and a pyramidal elected governance structure at the village, district, and regional levels. But these institutions operate at the mercy of a far more powerful paramilitary structure of Museveni-appointed Resident District Administrators, District Internal Security officers, Village Defense Committees, and a shadowy network of unofficial security organs that control their own arsenals, override the decisions of elected officials, and close NGOs, newspapers, and radio stations deemed unfriendly to the regime. Another Fine Mess describes numerous cases of torture, illegal detention, threats against critical journalists and their children and probable targeted killings.

But the World Bank claims Uganda is an economic development success story. Is that true?

No. The World Bank has been touting Uganda as an economic success story since the late 1980s, in lockstep with America’s warming security relationship with Museveni. Many multinational companies took the bait and began doing business there in the 1990s and 2000s. Many have since pulled out, upon realizing that Uganda’s middle class is tiny and most people remain very poor. Supermarket chains, cellphone companies and banks have closed in recent years. Even British Airways, flagship of Uganda’s former colonial master, stopped flying there in 2015.

According to the World Bank’s own surveys, two-thirds of the population still survives on subsistence agriculture, fewer than 20 percent have electricity, and roughly half live at least a ten-minute walk from the nearest water source. Uganda’s children are among the least likely in the world to complete primary school and eighty percent of their teachers can’t read English, the official language of government. That’s how bad it is. Meanwhile, Museveni’s henchmen routinely loot donor funds intended to fight AIDS, vaccinate children, assist war victims and carry out development programs. Just this month, his Foreign Minister was implicated in a massive bribery scam involving a Chinese energy company.

Is America’s  support  for  “strong m a n rule” in Africa Museveni’s recipe for longevity?

Definitely. No matter how brutal and corrupt Museveni’s regime is, Washington and Europe continue to shrug off his abuses and the Western media largely ignores them too.  Right now, there’s a heroic movement to stop Museveni from changing the constitution so he can further extend his grip on power. It’s called Togikwatako, which means “Don’t dare touch it!” — referring to a clause in Uganda’s constitution barring anyone 75 or older from running for president. Museveni, who says he’s 73, wants to continue in power past elections scheduled for 2021. In September, Museveni sent his brutal special forces into Parliament to beat up and arrest lawmakers who were trying to filibuster the Age-Limit Amendment bill. Several opposition leaders were injured, including Betty Nambooze, who has been fighting for years to defend peasants against state sanctioned land-grabbers. Her back was broken during the fracas, requiring a 8-hour operation in India in which metal braces were implanted to stabilize her vertebrae. The reaction of American and European diplomats to this atrocity has been strangely mild and military and development aid continues to flow into Museveni’s coffers.

Many people know about Joseph Kony, the vicious warlord who kidnapped children and terrorized the people of northern Uganda for nearly twenty years.  But few know that Museveni’s army also committed atrocities during that war, including massacres and cattle raids and the herding of millions of people into concentration camps where thousands died from hunger and disease and became sitting ducks for Kony’s attacks.   When I was in northern Uganda two years ago, I was told that Museveni himself deliberately prolonged that conflict.  What did Museveni gain from this?

It does seem that Museveni deliberately prolonged the war. When Kony offered to surrender, Museveni let him go.  When Museveni’s own cabinet minister organized peace talks, Museveni sabotaged them; when Catholic leaders tried to revive the peace talks, Museveni’s soldiers attacked them.  When locals warned Museveni’s soldiers that Kony was about to strike, the soldiers withdrew. 
 
Only Museveni knows why his army did these things, but it’s worth remembering that the government army he overthrew in 1986 was dominated by people from northern Uganda, and when his own army was taking over, it was particularly brutal in that part of the country.  Some locals, including Kony, mobilized to fight back. It seems that Museveni then punished these dissident forces by pummeling entire ethnic groups—particularly the Acholi and Teso people, so they would never think of challenging him again. 
 
The international community let Museveni get away with this because the war had geostrategic dimensions.  Central Africa is really where the world economy begins.  It’s home to rich supplies of gold and diamonds, the tantalum in cellphones, the cobalt and nickel in jet engines and car batteries, the copper in bathroom pipes, the uranium in atom bombs, the iron in everything.  During the Cold War, the West could rely on the dictator Marshall Mobutu Sese Seko of Zaire and Apartheid South Africa, to keep this loot out of the hands of the Soviets and other enemies.  
 
But after the Berlin Wall fell, the kaleidoscope of US alliances shifted.  South Africa became democratic, and Mobutu became increasingly erratic and unreliable. Most worrying, Uganda’s neighbor Sudan, once our Cold War friend, was now fostering Islamic radicalism, and playing host to militants such as Osama Bin Laden and Jihadist groups bent on toppling our ally Hosni Mubarak in Egypt, and undoing Egypt’s deal with Israel, which America wanted very much to preserve.  Most worrying of all, in the early 1990s, Sudan’s Islamist leaders began forming an alliance with Mobutu against Museveni, raising the frightening possibility that central Africa’s loot might fall into the Islamists’ hands. 
 
Museveni, whose ragtag rebels had outsmarted Uganda’s much stronger national army, was a ray of hope for Washington.  He was old friends with the leader of a Sudanese rebel group that had been fighting the government for decades because of discrimination. Until the late 1980s, these rebels had been backed by Soviet-allied Ethiopia, and America saw them as enemies. But now that the Soviets were departing, America decided it liked the Sudanese rebels and we began quietly funneling weapons to them, via Uganda, in order to destabilize Sudan’s Islamist government. 
 
The leaders of Sudan, got wind of what Uganda and America were doing and began supporting various Ugandan rebel groups, including Kony.  Then Museveni let the war continue until finally chasing Kony out of the country in 2006.

You first became interested in Uganda through its fascinating medical history. Tell us more about that and describe Uganda’s health system today. 

Well before colonial times, the Baganda, as Uganda’s largest tribe is known, had their own gods to distinguish plague from smallpox, and performed Caesarian sections, operations considered too difficult and dangerous by Europeans at the time. In 1878, a British missionary doctor named Robert Felkin witnessed a Muganda traditional surgeon perform one on a woman who had been in labor for two days and would almost certainly have died without intervention. After smearing her belly with banana wine and ensuring she was quite drunk on the same substance, the Muganda surgeon sliced her open with a sharp knife, extracted the baby and afterbirth, and closed the wound with iron nails tied around with reeds. When Felkin visited mother and baby a week later, both were well.

The first medical school opened in British colonial Uganda in the 1920s, and competition for a place was so tough that “to get in you had to be a genius,” according to one young aspirant. Ugandan scientists helped pioneer treatment for childhood cancers and malnutrition and the mass immunization campaigns that UNICEF would later promote throughout the developing world. When Singapore was looking to reform its own health care system in the 1960s, it sent a delegation to Uganda.

Today, bats, snakes, and other wildlife have taken up residence in Uganda’s once-functioning rural clinics. I have seen fecal material rain down from the crumbling ceilings of operating theaters. Power cuts and water shortages in hospitals kill thousands of patients each year, and emergency operations on pregnant women are sometimes carried out by the light of torches made from burning grass. The salaries of government doctors, a mere $350 per month, are a third or less of those of their counterparts in much poorer neighboring countries such as Rwanda. As a result, only half of Uganda’s health workers show up to work on any given day, and nearly half of those are so ill-qualified they can’t even diagnose pneumonia. In 2012, a senior physician who oversees the World Bank’s own health projects told me that women at Uganda’s main referral hospital are now seven times more likely to die than they were when he started working there in the 1970s, when Idi Amin was president.

Meanwhile, Museveni’s State House spends $150 million a year flying the president and his cronies out of the country when they need health care.

Your  book  uses the life story of  Lawrence   Nsereko  to  channel  Uganda’s political history under Museveni .  Tell us more about  him .

Lawrence Nsereko is a Ugandan journalist, activist and former political prisoner, now living in exile in the US. During the 1980s and 1990s, he covered Museveni’s early moves as he began making war, first in northern Uganda, then in Rwanda, and finally in Congo.  When Lawrence first told me his story, I wasn’t sure whether to believe it. I’d met many Ugandans with stories about Museveni, some true, some not, and I’d spent considerable energy chasing up false leads. Lawrence’s old newspaper, The Citizen is long out of print, and most copies have been destroyed, but I eventually managed to track down old copies and verified what he told me. By now there have been many scholarly studies of these wars that also corroborate Lawrence’s story.

Lawrence’s wife and child are still in Uganda, unable to leave, so there is a Dr. Zhivago-type love story running through the book.

What do you think it will take for a political transition in Uganda? 

The international community needs to recognize that in eastern and central Africa, the so-called War on Terror has become itself a cause of terror. That’s why I wrote the book. It’s meant to be read quickly, and it’s already in paperback—just $10.39 on Amazon!  I hope readers like it and learn from it.

Why do so many Western Leftists defend Robert Mugabe?

Why do so many Western Leftists feel the need to defend a counter-revolutionary, kleptocratic despot like Robert Mugabe? Is it because a country like Zimbabwe and its struggles only matters for them to score points against their interlocutors in the United States or Europe?

Mugabe is almost universally reviled among his own people. His corrupt authoritarian regime was about as far from any desirable socialist project as one could possible imagine and he hijacked a popular movement performing actual land reform in order to save his stumbling autocracy.

He remains a harsh social conservative who advocates legal action against LGTIQ persons. Gays are “worse than dogs and pigs,” he once said.

 

Mugabe was a neoliberal stooge up until the 2000s and far from being a Pan-Africanist hero sent his army to intervene in the most rapacious war in Africa’s history in the Congo, where the army committed major war crimes and seized diamond mines from the DRC in order funnel billions of the illicit proceeds stemming from “blood diamonds” into the coffers of Zimbabwe’s ruling elite, including new president, Emmerson Mnangagwa.  

I would love to see some of Mugabe’s apologists explain away his son’s comments made while turnt up at an exclusive club in Johannesburg a few weeks before the coup, “60k (USD of course) on my wrist, because my daddy runs the country.”

The historical record shows that Mugabe only did away with his rivals (through “car accidents” and “suicides”), many of whom played a greater role in the struggle against the Rhodesian apartheid tyranny than he did, and unleashed a genocidal campaign against his own people shortly after coming to power in order to secure his own power base; at least 20,000 people were indiscriminately murdered by a special army unit in 1983 and 1984. The Zimbabwean trade union movement and its socialist left have both been major victims of Zanu-PF’s authoritarian rule.

In the end China replaced the West as the major power with interests in Zimbabwe, far from the coup being an imperialist project, it is likely that China put pressure on Zanu-PF to remove the aging and increasingly unreliable despot. As the Financial Times—which cautioned against exaggerating the role of China in the coup—concluded: “Beijing didn’t stand in the way … Mugabe clearly lost China’s favor.” (The FT also suggested there’s a lesson in the events for other African autocrats long supported by China: “Might your opponents persuade China to look the other way as you are pushed out the door?”)

 

It should be remembered that it was Mugabe who championed the IMF’s structural adjustment policies in Zimbabwe, and oversaw decades of disastrous economic policies that deindustrialized the country before land reform took off. Zimbabwe according to some estimates has an unemployment rate of 91%. Only five percent of Zimbabweans are in formal employment. The country’s economy has halved since 2000. Zimbabwe’s people suffer why the spoiled failsons of the elite floss on the ’gram.

Zimbabwe is also compared with Venezuela. But this is not Venezuela. A socialism based on an almost entirely informal economy, kleptocratic state, and the wholesale transfer of raw materials to China at knock-off prices only makes socialists, and those of us like myself who strongly supported Chavez’s project in Venezuela look like the dupes of cheap rhetoric emanating from a cynical one-party state. No Zimbabwean is delusional enough to take Zanu-PF’s propaganda seriously, but it seems more than a few Westerners are prepared to believe the lazy spin emanating from jaded hacks like the odious Jonathan Moyo to depicted Mugabe as a socialist revolutionary.

Zimbabwe’s tragedy is not one of a socialist dream falling under its own contradictions, it was always a tale of an authoritarian and self-interested elite crushing democracy and impoverishing its people. Mugabe unlike Gaddafi (who at least built a semi-decent welfare state for Libyans) wasn’t removed through Western military intervention, the current political conjuncture in Zimbabwe arises from Zanu’s own failings rather than some diabolical Western plot.

One can even defend Zimbabwean land reform without supporting Mugabe, who hijacked the project ensuring his family and their cronies made of with the prime land. Critiquing an aging despot does not make you an apologist for the despicable Rhodesian regime, which remains a stain on human history, one can even claim that Mugabe and Zanu-PF betrayed the National Liberation struggle. You can also rightly criticize the British lies and failures when it comes to their promise to fund Zimbabwean land reform, but the people who poured out on the streets of Harare after Mugabe was toppled were not the dupes of Western Imperialist, but joyous outpouring from a population who has known untold suffering over the last few decades, a people who had given up hope of any real political change before the old man died.

It is even possible to be skeptical of supporting a coup led by the most repressive and corrupt elements of the Zimbabwean ruling class, while appreciating the real joy, and sense of hope that has returned to the Zimbabwean people after so many years where they were robbed of the ability to dream of a better future, or even a future at all. This remains Mugabe’s greatest crime: the terror and powerlessness that comes from decades of personalized rule which inflict psychic damage on a people for generations.

Zimbabwe despite the immense damage done by Mugabe to its universities and intellectual culture, still has many fine intellectuals (most of whom are in exile). Read their takes, appreciate their work and follow their lead, not the soundbytes and tweets from those simply looking to score points over other western socialists. For instance, a recent Africa is a Country (an African publication) article by a black Zimbabwean scholar on Mugabe’s legacy was adapted by Jacobin magazine. On Facebook and Twitter the article and its message was dubbed part of a social democratic/racist socialist conspiracy against black socialist leaders. What could be a greater colonial erasure of African intellectual culture?

Those who use Zimbabwe simply as a weapon to batter away against their rivals on the left in the United States, mirror the despicable conservatives who use Zimbabwe as rhetorical machine gun to spray against any who dares speak about radical land reform or the heroic legacy of national liberation struggles. As Fanon wrote so many years ago: “No leader, however valuable he may be, can substitute himself for the popular will; and the national government, before concerning itself about international prestige, ought first to give back their dignity to all citizens, fill their minds and feast their eyes with human things, and create a prospect that is human because conscious and sovereign men dwell therein.” What is so ‘imperialist’ about not celebrating reactionary authoritarian regimes and the geriatric despots that loot impoverished countries to pay for their failsons instagram lifestyles?

Thomas Sankara Boulevard and other Weekend Specials

The late Thomas Sankara, part-subject of the French’s President “Africa speech” and the name of a new street in Ouagadougou.

First up: There is outrage all over the continent and in the diaspora in reaction to the CNN’s reporting on Libya’s slave trade. But this level of racism in Libya and the Maghreb is old news. Libya is only one stop on a treacherous journey that finds thousands of migrants without power over their own lives. Meanwhile, Blackwater is pitching itself to the European Union for an Afghanistan-style private police to patrol Libya’s southern border.

(2) The African Union hasn’t looked good in any of this, particularly in the last two weeks. From its lack of awareness and measured action concerning the dangers of the migrant route to its dilemma over what to do during in the non-coup coup in Zimbabwe. An old piece about the African Union’s role in Libya is a helpful read. How did we get here?

(3) All eyes are on Musevini in Uganda, who most have been watching the unfolding events in Zimbabwe perhaps more closely than usual. Last week he decided to decorate a number of Army officers out of the blue.

(4) There is, rightly, so much comment and reflection on the ongoing upheavals in Zimbabwe. Here are a couple we thought you shouldn’t miss:

Pettina Gappah’s essay on growing up in the early years of Mugabe’s rule.

A summary of Mugabe’s exit package (Arsenal fans will do well to take note)

A list of cultural mainstays that are as old as Mugabe’s presidency

If you looking to go down a more literary route to learn more about Zimbabwe in general, the great novelist Sarah Ladipo Manyika has put together a list of the best books of the Mugabe years.

(5) The Nigerian government is planning on turning the home of Yusuf Mohammed, founder of Boko Haram, into a museum. Critics point out that rather than serving the intended purpose of reminding posterity of this scourge, it might serve to immortalize him.

(7) Youth in Burkina Faso Charles DeGaule Avenue to Thomas Sankara Avenue, after the murdered president, on the day the French President Macron delivered his “Africa” speech in Ouagadougou. There was little new Macron said on his visit, outside of a promise to declassify the documents related to the assassination of President Sankara. Oumar Ba directs our attention not to the speech, but to the nature of the students interaction with Macron as the real insight to be gleaned from this visit contrasting African leaders’ relation to their citizens and former colonial leaders.

(8) The journalism educator Frankie Edozien comments on the agony and joy of being a gay African compares progress as well as obstacles remaining from our highest institutions on the continent to local communities.

 

Seeing is Believing — reassessing Angola’s ‘Implacable Exonerator’

Image via Eu sou João Lourenço Flickr.

When Angolans went to the polls in late August, many observers felt wary and jaded about the results. Even though President José Eduardo dos Santos was stepping down after 38 years in power, how much could we realistically expect to change? Dos Santos would remain the head of the ruling MPLA party, potentially until 2022, and his appointed successor, João Lourenço, appeared like an unlikely driver of change given his past as party cadre, Defense Minister, and dos Santos loyalist. Especially when the results proclaimed by the National Electoral Commission that gave the MPLA an overall 61% majority seemed fabricated out of thin air (despite notable, officially confirmed opposition gains in Luanda and Cabinda), many, including myself, expected more of the same.

The re-appointment of key figures in the state security services and the executive by dos Santos just before the elections, the initial composition of the cabinet, as well as the continued control of the dos Santos family over key sectors of the Angolan economy led many to believe that the new president, João Lourenço, had little leeway or interest to emancipate himself from the shadow of dos Santos. It would take more than a change of the figure at the top to seriously change the system, the current political and economic dispensation that was put into place by the MPLA in its decades of political dominance. 

However, three months after the elections, I spent nearly four weeks on new fieldwork in the capital, Luanda, and the northern province of Uíge, and from my conversations and observations a slightly different, more optimistic picture has begun to emerge.

Many people I talked to were positively swooning over “JLo” — how he was nicknamed during the election campaign — and his “simplicity” and “humility.” While dos Santos would bring the city to a standstill when his motorcade rushed through, blocking all street corners with heavily armed Presidential Guards and army soldiers, JLo now travels with one or two cars and one motorcycle outrider only — “and he even ordered his convoy to stop at the red light!” He also, so I was told in a mixture of wonder and glee, queued at the KFC, and made a private visit to a friend who was in hospital, driving his own car and entering the premises of the hospital unguarded, and only in the company of his wife.

At first, this all seemed like purely symbolic politics. But the importance of such symbols should not be underestimated. “O Angolano quer ver para crer” (Angolans want to see to believe), I was repeatedly told, “We need to see some improvements to our lives, otherwise why bother with elections? And I think João Lourenço has made a clear analysis of the situation, and he knows that he has to listen to the people in the current situation, otherwise the people will go out and protest. That’s why he’s acting closer to the people, more humbly — if he has the backing of the population, then the MPLA will not be able to oppose his plans. Conversely, if he listens to the MPLA and not the people, it will be very bad. The people will turn against the MPLA saying ‘let the man work!’”

Lourenço had campaigned under the motto “correct what is bad, improve what is good,” and while the “bad” things were never concretely identified during the campaign, his inaugural State of the Nation speech deliberately targeted the ills he wanted to correct — not naming individual figures, but still leaving little doubt to Angolans, trained over decades to read between the lines, who was meant. And thus the effects of the practice of preemptively obeying the infamous, unwritten “higher instructions” (orientações superiores) started showing. However, this time there were unexpected openings, such as when Lourenço stated that the public media should be at the service of Angolans and not the ruling party. This led to the front-page publication of negative news in Jornal de Angola, the state-run daily newspaper hitherto mainly known for its increasingly absurdist denial of reality. Weeks later Lourenço formally replaced the boards of directors at the Jornal and the public television channels, but the change had already been set in motion.

This echoes what a friend working for an oil multinational told me: “even if he’s not a real reformer, there are so many people like us everywhere, willing to seize whichever small space they are granted by new laws, regulations, or simply a new ‘spirit’ (cue the public press) that the change cannot be undone.” This has also opened up spaces for people, including party loyalists, to openly criticize dos Santos for his failings over the past ten years: “Esse camarada assegurou a paz, muito bem. Mas a factura ficou muito pesada…” (This Comrade secured peace, alright. But the bill was very hefty.)

In the week leading up to Independence Day (11 November) Lourenço visited the restive province of Cabinda — “and he slept in the province, can you imagine? The Old Man never did that in 38 years — if he went to the provinces, he would stay for 3 to 4 hours maximum, and then quickly escape back to his palace!” The official celebrations of Dipanda were then staged in the municipality of Matala, in the southern province of Huíla. When Lourenço’s plane touched down in the provincial capital, Lubango, a welcome committee of MPLA, OMA (Organização da Mulher Angolana, the MPLA’s women’s wing) and OPA (Organização Pioneiros Agostinho Neto, the youth/pioneer movement of the party) were waiting for him, waving party flags. Allegedly Lourenço refused to leave the plane until they all had left, saying he was here as president for the entire country, not of the party.

The week after his return, he then dismissed Isabel dos Santos from her post as President of the Board of state oil company Sonangol. Isabel dos Santos had been appointed in mid-2016 by her father, officially on the strength of her track record as “Africa’s first woman billionaire” to restructure the company that, following the drop in world oil prices, was in crisis. Not only did she fail to turn around Sonangol, continuing to milk its revenues for the profits of her own business empire, the appointment also proved deeply unpopular among the population and the ranks of the MPLA. This further bolsters Lourenço’s popularity, now much higher than before the elections, and raises hopes that the new team at Sonangol will help address the country’s most pressing economic problems. In addition, Lourenço also rescinded an existing contract between the public TV channel TPA2 and the regime-affiliated, private channel Zimbo and Semba Communications, a production company owned by two other children of dos Santos, that until now provided most of the content of the two broadcasters. As such, only José Filomeno “Zénú” dos Santos remains untouched of the former president’s children — for now — continuing at the head of the controversial US$5bn Sovereign Wealth Fund. This, together with a string of dismissals over the past few weeks, earned President Lourenço the nickname “implacable exonerator,” and indicates changes that go beyond mere cosmetics.

It is probably too early to speak of an “Angolan Perestroika.” It remains, for example, doubtful whether Vice-President Bornito de Sousa will truly push for the holding of local elections — as several people euphorically ensured me he would — given his track record as Minister of Territorial Administration, where he successfully delayed local elections for the past seven years since they were enshrined in the new constitution. And the dos Santos family were certainly the most visible, but by far not the only beneficiaries of the system, and it is for from certain that Lourenço will attack the monopolies of the army’s “business generals” with the same zeal as he appears to tackle the interests of the dos Santos. The long-promised “diversification of the economy” will also take more than just the removal of Isabel dos Santos to happen.

Still, the potency of these highly symbolic changes is evident, and Lourenço seems willing to use the near-absolute powers the 2010 constitution gives the president. While central elements of Angolan political culture — the deference to hierarchy, the importance of family links, the weight of history, and the manifest destiny of the MPLA (in its own perception) to lead the country — are likely to be more durable than just the next electoral cycle, JLo for many now incarnates the possibility of change from within the ruling party. After 38 years of ditadura dos kotas (dictatorship of the elders) this has raised justified hopes amongst Angolans that o poder (“power”) might just become a little more responsive to their everyday needs.

Whose awareness is raised on World AIDS Day?

Matunduzi School, Girls Education Support Initiative, Malawi 2012. Image credit Erik Törner via IM Swedish Development Partner Flickr.

He repeated his question, “Why won’t you list the names of everyone who tests positive?” He went on, suggesting the list could be kept by a respected elder in the village who would advise others on how to avoid infection. Glory, my Tanzanian teaching partner, retranslated the question, trying even simpler English words the second time to convey what the mzee at this community meeting in a rural village in Arumeru District was asking.

But I understood his question perfectly the first time he asked it. My silence was not because I did not understand the question. My silence was a manifestation of my not understanding how we had failed to convince the most powerful people in this community of the importance of confidentiality in HIV testing.

After completing my first year in graduate school in 2004, I volunteered with a now-defunct NGO that coordinated partnerships between American university students and recent graduates of Tanzanian secondary schools to provide HIV awareness education in schools and at large community gatherings. The village meeting where this mzee asked his question was a culmination of our efforts in the area following weeks of working in the local schools teaching HIV epidemiology and the current best practices for avoiding infection.

Previous volunteers were positive about these village meetings, characterizing them as celebrations marked with community acceptance of the knowledge imparted by well-trained volunteers. Of course, it is easy today to see the warts of this NGO’s approach to HIV/AIDS intervention and the naïveté of its volunteers, myself included.

The mzee’s question that day has stayed with me. For a long time, I regarded it as a failure: we had failed to change the minds of men and women in Arumeru to match our own ideas about how to respond to AIDS. Only after some learning and thinking did I take a new lesson from his question. In asking that the HIV status of villagers be publicized, he was offering a public health solution that could prevent the spread of HIV.

Our rejection of the mzee’s proposal in Arumeru, Tanzania in 2004 is consistent with many AIDS interventions I have witnessed and studied over the last decade: interventions are often funded from afar and rarely engage influential people at the grassroots in designing the intervention.

In short, the people navigating the AIDS epidemic are objects to whom interventions are targeted. What this mzee was trying to demonstrate to me was that people navigating the AIDS epidemic also had ideas for intervention design. More simply, they had opinions on AIDS interventions.

Today the world commemorates the thirtieth World AIDS Day, an effort to raise awareness of the AIDS pandemic. Readers of this blog likely know that the African continent has shouldered much of the burden of AIDS; it is where 70 percent of the world’s HIV-infected population live. In the last twenty-five years, more than 26 million people in Africa have died of AIDS.

While there have been some important steps forward in the fight against AIDS in Africa, there have been many more failures. Take for example awareness raising – what World AIDS Day is primarily about. International NGOs funded many AIDS awareness campaigns on the continent after researchers had already learned in the late 1990s that adults living in African countries with mature epidemics were “acutely aware of the high levels of AIDS-related illness and death” and recommended anti-AIDS efforts focus on implementing control measures over awareness-raising.

Looking at failures in the fight against AIDS can help us formulate better strategies and approaches going forward. But as my experience with the mzee in 2004 should show, we must also ask and listen to the opinions and priorities of an intervention’s intended beneficiaries.

Knowing the opinions and priorities of ordinary citizens has become easier since the advent of Afrobarometer, a pan-African research network that conducts public attitude surveys in more than 35 African countries. Fifteen years ago, Afrobarometer data showed us that while southern Africans were aware of the AIDS epidemic and willing to talk about it, very few of them thought AIDS should be a priority for their governments to address.

My own research in Malawi – one of the countries hardest hit by AIDS – has been consistent with the Afrobarometer results, showing that ordinary citizens generally give lower priority to AIDS when compared to other pressing development issues. While HIV-positive Malawians ranked AIDS interventions higher on their priority list than HIV-negative Malawians, AIDS was not as pressing an issue for people living with HIV as issues like clean water and agricultural development. 

When I teach about this research, my students often invoke “awareness” as the problem and education as the solution. And I both agree and disagree with them. The data are clear that the problem is not that Malawians or southern Africans more broadly are unaware of the dangers of AIDS. They don’t need a World AIDS Day or its local equivalent to “raise their awareness.” The awareness problem is in the West, where many imagine Africa as a place suffering from AIDS. If we want to use World AIDS Day to raise awareness, we should raise awareness about the many issues citizens in Africa face and their priorities for what needs attention – not just AIDS.

* This essay is an adapted excerpt from Kim Yi Dionne’s new book, Doomed Interventions: The Failure of Global Responses to AIDS in Africa, published by Cambridge University Press.

The uncertain future for transitional justice in Zimbabwe

Emmerson Mnangagwa, then Vice-President and Minister of Justice, speaking at the UN Human Rights Council in 2016. Image Credit: UN Geneva

Emmerson Mnangagwa, Zimbabwe’s newly inaugurated President, suggests that Zimbabwe is “witnessing the beginning of a new and unfolding democracy”. Many Zimbabweans, and those with an interest in the country, wonder whether that would include openness and some degree of truth and justice for political violence suffered under the 37 year regime of Mnangagwa’s predecessor, Robert Mugabe, and in which the army and ZANU-PF, now recast as “reformers,” were implicated.

The “reformers” are alleged to have been involved in heinous acts over the past four decades, including unlawful detention and torture of political opponents, purging and killing white farmers and political assassinations. The 1979 automobile death of then-presidential favorite Josiah Tongogara was one early attempt to consolidate the Mugabe’s power. Similar “car accidents” became a regime signature, designed to intimidate, if not eliminate, rivals such as Eddison Zvobgo and Morgan Tsvangirai. But, chief among all episodes of political violence perpetrated in Zimbabwe since Independence in 1980 is Gukurahundi – Mugabe and collaborators’ campaign to repress “dissidents” in the Ndebele-majority region of Matabeleland, killing an estimated 20,000 people.

Gukurahundi – loosely, “the rain which clears the chaff from the wheat” – though framed as subduing an insurgency was ethnic cleansing by any other name. In an open letter to Mugabe in 1983, exiled ZAPU opposition party leader, Joshua Nkomo, who also survived an assassination attempt, charged that the extent and routinization of political violence under the regime exceeded even that of the former Rhodesian government. Avoiding truth and justice was equally routinized.

One mechanism by which states can address abuses perpetrated under authoritarian government, or during conflict, is a truth commission. Generally, truth commissions aim to identify responsibility, support accountability, facilitate reconciliation between perpetrators and victims, and legitimize new governments. Truth-seeking is one mechanism of transitional justice. Others include criminal accountability, reparations, and institutional reform. Transitional justice is inherently imperfect: it is often attempted when “judicial systems are barely functioning or very weak, or are corrupt and politically biased, and prospects for serious prosecutions are slim.”

Somewhat surprisingly, Zimbabwe once attempted transitional justice, establishing a truth commission in 1985 to account for Gukurahundi. Curiously, the Zimbabwe Commission of Inquiry’s report was never released to the public. Why? The government argued that releasing the report would trigger ethnic violence. There was never a formal recognition of the killings and victims’ families never received reparations. As a consequence, whole segments of Zimbabwean society feel marginalized, discriminated against, and ever-suspicious of ZANU-PF.

Over the past few years, Mnangagwa strategically distanced himself from Mugabe, perhaps most strikingly with respect to Gukurahundi. Mnangagwa claims that he did not play an active role in the atrocities and assigns blame to Mugabe, Sidney Sekeramayi, and other military commanders. Yet Mnangagwa – then serving as Minister of State Security and leading the Central Intelligence Organisation — was involved, as has been reported by journalists, human rights lawyers, the Catholic Commission for Justice and Peace in Zimbabwe (CCJP), and NGOs such as Human Rights Watch. During Gukurahundi, Mnangagwa argued that “the campaign against dissidents [could] only succeed if the infrastructure that nurture[d] them [was] destroyed.” He also confirmed that the army came to Matabeleland to “cleans[e] the area of the dissident menace” (The Chronicle, April 5, 1983). In the same statement, he even parodied Scriptures, pronouncing:

Blessed are they who will follow the path of the Government laws, for their days on earth shall be increased. But woe unto those who will choose the path of collaboration with dissidents for we will certainly shorten their stay on the earth.

The strength of the case against Mnangagwa is undeniable.

So, what future for Zimbabwe? Structural barriers make accountability for violence suffered before, after, and since Independence very unlikely. First, the Constitution provides for presidential immunity, a provision which the military has honored for Mugabe. By extension, it is unlikely that there will be trials or personnel reforms for former regime insiders, and certainly not for those aligned with Mnangagwa. What’s more, it is the Constitution, coupled with ZANU-PF party dominance, that provided the basis for then-vice president Mnangagwa to assume the presidency. In practical terms, this means that he, too, will enjoy immunity should he ever resign or be removed from office, and his successors thereafter. If truth, justice, reparation, and institutional reform rely on those who benefit without them, their implementation is scarcely conceivable. And, if 1985 serves as a signal, this next missed opportunity for transitional justice will be to a devastating effect.