Sean Jacobs's Blog, page 269

Weekend Special No.1958

Image Credit: AMISOM Public Information, via Flickr.com, 2014.

(1) A big talking point last week has been the lack of media coverage given to the blast in Somalia and its victims. Less discussed has been the unsurprising role of Somalians the world over giving immediate support, especially young tech people. 

(2) Joseph Duo, a former fighter in Liberia’s civil wars is running for one of the 73 open legislature seats and is symbolic of the transformations the country have undergone in the past decades

(3) On the long walks to freedom beat, a sequel to Nelson Mandela’s popular book is out. Some early reviews are already in (like this one in the Guardian by Gillian Slovo, daughter of Mandela confidante, Joe Slovo), while the South African Eyewitness News published an extract on its website. It will be interesting to see his reflection on his years in power (he only served one term as president from 1994 to 1999 before retiring) at a time when eyes are especially trained on the happenings around South Africa’s executive branch, particularly its current leader, Jacob Zuma.

(4) Remembering the generation that fought empire in Uganda and Mozambique’s “East German Africans.”  

(5) It will come as no shock to any woman who has been there that Cairo is ranked the worst city for women, in the world. 

(6) Large-scale farming and agribusiness is being touted as a path forward in Africa, but there are still many concerns. Here is one example of displacements in Zambia. 

(7) Labor costs in Africa is evidently “too high” for the continent to become the next China.

(8) Much has been made of Africans leapfrogging when it comes to tech access on the globe. This week, for instance, it was revealed that more than 2 million people have used Airbnb in Africa. Yet the fact that many of the new innovations have no anchor on the continent means that we don’t keep much of the money here.

(9) Thinking about home-cooked solutions, watch a Ted talk on how Africans can use traditional knowledge to make progress. 

(10) Finally, listen to Mwalimu, and future Nobel Prize Winner (we can dream) Ngugi Wa Thiongo, talk about Shakespeare’s impact on East African culture and literature. 

Wobblies — A new history of a radical union that profoundly impacted Southern African politics

In the early 20th century, the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) organized on every continent and dozens of countries, including in southern Africa. It would grow to become the largest African and coloured resistance movement in pre-World War II South Africa, also spreading into Namibia, Zambia and Zimbabwe. This month, Pluto Press published Wobblies of the World: A Global History of the IWW. This book breaks new ground, with contributors treating this revolutionary union as the global labor union it intended to be, was, and still is.

Though not widely known, the IWW greatly impacted southern Africa in the 1910s and 1920s. In 1910, a local IWW became the first white-majority union to actively fight racism on the Witwatersrand. In 1917, the Industrial Workers of Africa (IWA) the first union for black African workers, formed — explicitly modeled on the IWW. The IWW influenced early socialists along with other unions of black African, mixed race (“coloured”), and Indian workers across southern Africa. Through the IWA, it even influenced the early African National Congress (ANC).

Initiated in Chicago in 1905, the IWW committed itself to overthrowing capitalism, a system dedicated to private profit, under which working and poor people suffered. Within five years, it spread worldwide, influencing millions. Its members, known as Wobblies, wanted to replace capitalism and governments with a bottom-up socialism run by ordinary people. But they were not Communists. The IWW, located in Left traditions like anarchism and syndicalism, insisted mainstream parties and all governments served the rich. Instead of parliament, it wanted One Big Union of all workers – even the unemployed. The greatest power of ordinary people was in the workplace. Through revolutionary unions, education, democratic organizing, and direct action, a new society would emerge through a global General Strike.

The IWW was global in aim and reality, but scholars have neglected studying it as a global movement. Historians generally focus on individual countries. A global history requires money and time for research in many countries and faces language barriers.

However, there is expertise worldwide on the IWW and this new anthology takes a first step towards a global IWW history. It brings together cutting-edge work from ten countries using sources in as many languages.

As elsewhere, sailors and immigrant workers, often from the UK, brought Wobbly thought, examples, and skills to southern Africa. As everywhere, these were adapted to, and enriched by, local circumstances. Wars and capitalist revolution were reshaping the region and entrenching massive inequality, yet most early unions were whites-only — some opposed capitalism envisaged socialism as whites-only as well: “White Laborism.” This ignored the reality that most workers and people in southern Africa were not white.

The IWW swam against the current, starting among radical white workers. It connected up with the local anti-racist anarchist and syndicalist tradition, expressed in papers like the weekly Voice of Labour. Here, the anarchist Henry Glasse of Port Elizabeth insisted on One Big Union: “For a white worker … to pretend he can successfully fight his battle independent of the coloured wage slaves—the majority—is … simple idiocy.”

By 1912, Wobblies had actively campaigned against White Laborism, founded a local IWW union, led strikes by white Johannesburg tramway workers, recruited at Pretoria’s railyards, and organized in Durban.

This early union faltered by 1913, but from 1915 IWW ideas profoundly influenced the International Socialist League (ISL), forerunner of the South African Communist Party (SACP). ISL activists formed the IWA, as well as unions among Indian and coloured workers in Durban and Kimberley, and promoted One Big Union in the white unions as well. While the ISL started among white workers, it soon included militants like the IWA’s Fred Cetiwe and Hamilton Kraai, Kimberley’s Johnny Gomas, and Durban’s Bernard Sigamoney.  A separate Industrial Socialist League organized black African and coloured workers in Cape Town. In 1918, the ISL, IWA, and ANC organized an abortive general strike on the Witwatersrand. In 1919, the IWA organized a mass strike on the Cape Town docks with a new union, the Industrial and Commercial Workers Union of Africa (ICU). Cetiwe and Kraai, meanwhile, tried to push the ANC leftwards.

In 1920, the IWA merged into the ICU, led by Clements Kadalie. Both ICU and Kadalie were influenced by IWW ideas– the ICU even adopted the IWW Preamble. Although the ICU never was a syndicalist, IWW union, it became the largest African and coloured resistance movement in pre-World War II South Africa, also spreading into Namibia, Zambia and Zimbabwe. The early SACP, which incorporated the ISL, also retained IWW influences.

The IWW is part of the story of southern African union and resistance history. As contributors to Wobblies of the World demonstrate, the IWW also proved integral to working class and civil rights struggles in the Americas, Australasia, the Caribbean, and Europe.

Wobblies–A new history of a radical union that profoundly impacted Southern African politics

In the early 20th century, the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) organized on every continent and dozens of countries, including in southern Africa. It would grow to become the largest African and coloured resistance movement in pre-World War II South Africa, also spreading into Namibia, Zambia and Zimbabwe. This month, Pluto Press published Wobblies of the World: A Global History of the IWW. This book breaks new ground, with contributors treating this revolutionary union as the global labor union it intended to be, was, and still is.

Though not widely known, the IWW greatly impacted southern Africa in the 1910s and 1920s. In 1910, a local IWW became the first white-majority union to actively fight racism on the Witwatersrand. In 1917, the Industrial Workers of Africa (IWA) the first union for black African workers, formed—explicitly modeled on the IWW. The IWW influenced early socialists along with other unions of black African, mixed race (“coloured”), and Indian workers across southern Africa. Through the IWA, it even influenced the early African National Congress (ANC).

Initiated in Chicago in 1905, the IWW committed itself to overthrowing capitalism, a system dedicated to private profit, under which working and poor people suffered. Within five years, it spread worldwide, influencing millions. Its members, known as Wobblies, wanted to replace capitalism and governments with a bottom-up socialism run by ordinary people. But they were not Communists. The IWW, located in Left traditions like anarchism and syndicalism, insisted mainstream parties and all governments served the rich. Instead of parliament, it wanted One Big Union of all workers – even the unemployed. The greatest power of ordinary people was in the workplace. Through revolutionary unions, education, democratic organizing, and direct action, a new society would emerge through a global General Strike.

The IWW was global in aim and reality, but scholars have neglected studying it as a global movement. Historians generally focus on individual countries. A global history requires money and time for research in many countries and faces language barriers.

However, there is expertise worldwide on the IWW and this new anthology takes a first step towards a global IWW history. It brings together cutting-edge work from ten countries using sources in as many languages.

As elsewhere, sailors and immigrant workers, often from the UK, brought Wobbly thought, examples, and skills to southern Africa. As everywhere, these were adapted to, and enriched by, local circumstances. Wars and capitalist revolution were reshaping the region and entrenching massive inequality, yet most early unions were whites-only—some opposed capitalism envisaged socialism as whites-only as well: “White Laborism.” This ignored the reality that most workers and people in southern Africa were not white.

The IWW swam against the current, starting among radical white workers. It connected up with the local anti-racist anarchist and syndicalist tradition, expressed in papers like the weekly Voice of Labour. Here, the anarchist Henry Glasse of Port Elizabeth insisted on One Big Union: “For a white worker … to pretend he can successfully fight his battle independent of the coloured wage slaves—the majority—is … simple idiocy.”

By 1912, Wobblies had actively campaigned against White Laborism, founded a local IWW union, led strikes by white Johannesburg tramway workers, recruited at Pretoria’s railyards, and organized in Durban.

This early union faltered by 1913, but from 1915 IWW ideas profoundly influenced the International Socialist League (ISL), forerunner of the South African Communist Party (SACP). ISL activists formed the IWA, as well as unions among Indian and coloured workers in Durban and Kimberley, and promoted One Big Union in the white unions as well. While the ISL started among white workers, it soon included militants like the IWA’s Fred Cetiwe and Hamilton Kraai, Kimberley’s Johnny Gomas, and Durban’s Bernard Sigamoney.  A separate Industrial Socialist League organized black African and coloured workers in Cape Town. In 1918, the ISL, IWA, and ANC organized an abortive general strike on the Witwatersrand. In 1919, the IWA organized a mass strike on the Cape Town docks with a new union, the Industrial and Commercial Workers Union of Africa (ICU). Cetiwe and Kraai, meanwhile, tried to push the ANC leftwards.

In 1920, the IWA merged into the ICU, led by Clements Kadalie. Both ICU and Kadalie were influenced by IWW ideas– the ICU even adopted the IWW Preamble. Although the ICU never was a syndicalist, IWW union, it became the largest African and coloured resistance movement in pre-World War II South Africa, also spreading into Namibia, Zambia and Zimbabwe. The early SACP, which incorporated the ISL, also retained IWW influences.

The IWW is part of the story of southern African union and resistance history. As contributors to Wobblies of the World demonstrate, the IWW also proved integral to working class and civil rights struggles in the Americas, Australasia, the Caribbean, and Europe.

#StandwithSomalia?

Image credit Tobin Jones via Wikicommons.

In the wake of last Saturday’s horrific bombing in Mogadishu, social media commentators have been quick to point out the hypocrisy in the international response to the devastation. Much like the outcry following the Garissa University attacks in Kenya in 2015, Twitter users on and off the continent have deployed the hashtags #AfricanLivesMatter, #JeSuisMogadishu, and #StandwithSomalia to demand the same levels of compassion and mourning for Black African life that emerged for White European life following attacks in France and elsewhere. Meanwhile, others have observed with appreciation the steps taken by governments that acknowledged the humanity of the victims: on October 17, for example, the lights of the Eiffel Tower in Paris were switched off to honor the lives lost in Mogadishu a few days prior. “Some should not be more equal than others. Pain is pain. Human is human,” read one tweet.

By specifically invoking #AfricanLivesMatter and #BlackLivesMatter in relation to Somalia, some commentators have simultaneously sought to make connections between Africa and the movement in defense of Black life in the United States. Yet the US-based #BlackLivesMatter is grounded in the recognition of difference rather than commonality, relying on hard data and historical record to illustrate that black lives matter less than white lives in the American criminal justice system. To stand in solidarity with #BlackLivesMatter is to recognize white supremacy and black oppression as systemic phenomenon requiring dismantling. It is to recognize that mere invocations of empathy, humanity, and equality are not enough.

What does it mean, then, to appeal to a common humanity in the context of Somalia? What does this appeal obscure? For one, there is considerably less sustained outcry on social media about African life in relation to ongoing forms of structural violence that may be more mundane but just as deadly, enabled by states and their corporate donor partners. Nor, for that matter, is there much talk about the expanding forms of militarism, surveillance, and police brutality that are legitimized under the guise of security. It is worth reflecting on the fact that it is precisely the appeal to a shared humanity that has permitted the emergence of policies that are equally designed to punish and control, with the Responsibility to Protect being the most notable. The now decade-long military occupation of Somalia by foreign forces continues to be rationalized in similar language, as national and international policymakers engage in a delicate dance between illustrating progress made towards stability, all the while insisting that more work remains to be done. As analyst Abukar Arman has observed, this dance leads to “a never-ending process of transitioning out of transition, bloodshed and perpetual dependency.” What, then, does it mean to #StandwithSomalia? Do Somali live matter when the US military drops bombs, when security forces sell arms on the black market to Al-Shabaab, or when young Somali men are held indefinitely in secret prisons and rehabilitation centers in Mogadishu?

While empathy in the aftermath of tragedy has its place, the uncritical embrace of the notion of a shared humanity may work to depoliticize and mask difference and political complexity rather than address it. What kinds of imaginings are possible when we open up the very idea of “solidarity” for scrutiny and create spaces for historically and politically informed conversations about injustice, anti-blackness and internationalism today?

The African churches of South Delhi

Nigerian migrant in Khirkee Village, South Delhi. Image credit Malini Kochupillai.

On any given Sunday in one of South Delhi’s dozens of Pentecostal African church services occurring in various, stuffy rented halls, you might see the following: a Nigerian lady dressed in a bright pink sari; an Indian lady cuddling a curly-haired baby fathered by her Nigerian husband; a small cluster of Indians trying to sing a hymn in Igbo or a tall Nigerian man dressed in a spotless white agbada speaking Hindi. At climactic moments in the pastor’s sermon, the entire congregation shouts in unison, “Amen my faddah, amen my faddah, amen my faddah.”

Every Sunday and even on weekdays, when there are pastors visiting from Nigeria, thousands of Africans living in India’s National Capital Region (NCR) head to these “charismatic” church services lasting three to four hours. The majority of the congregants hail from Nigeria, but in attendance are also Congolese, Ugandans, Tanzanians and various other African nationals, along with Indians, especially from the Northeastern region.

These churches are part of a wider transnational phenomenon. They were born in the USA but are increasingly popular in many African countries and other developing nations afflicted by the brutal inequities produced by global capitalism. In India, however, they also provide Africans with a refuge.

Africans, especially Nigerians, have a bad reputation in India as criminals and drug dealers. In recent years, they have become victims of numerous violent, sometimes deadly, xenophobic attacks. 

“Nigerian Tied To Post, Thrashed By Mob In Delhi, Nobody Helped” reads one typical headline.

Despite the hostile environment or because of it, many African migrants seek comfort in church communities. One Nigerian student I interviewed told me he did not attend church when he lived in Nigeria but does in India because he sees it as “a nation of idol worshippers.” He is also lonely and finds it difficult to integrate into the lower-middle class neighborhood he lives in because of negative stereotypes about Africans.

Of course, the majority of Africans in India are not criminals. They arrive in India on business and student visas and often end up staying years, settling down, marrying, having children, exporting Indian products to their home countries and importing their home foodstuffs, fabrics, and of course, cultural practices such as going to church.

One congregant of the Shiloh Global Worship Centre (AKA Chapel of Possibilities) in Delhi’s southern suburb of Saket has found success as a fashion designer with showrooms in Lagos and Delhi.

Once settled, African migrants bring other family members over for medical treatment because India offers sophisticated care at relatively cheap cost. One Nigerian student who was charmed into coming to India by Bollywood films brought her elderly mother over for a course of treatment that lasted months. This dignified woman always wears traditional Nigerian dress with an elegant head wrap. One day, when she was walking through Khirkee Village’s narrow, winding alleys, someone threw food scraps at her. This experience radicalized her daughter, who laments the fact that Indians are treated so well in Nigeria while Africans suffer such indignities in India.

India is a complex environment. The African experience is over-determined by the country’s general obsession with lighter skin.  As usual, white foreigners enjoy extraordinary privilege. The reverse is true for darker skinned people, those who are associated with being “low caste.” Indians, especially those with less exposure and education, look down on Africans. Many middle-class Africans find themselves living amongst Indians who are less cosmopolitan than those who live in South Delhi’s more upper-class “colonies.”

Dark-skinned Africans and single-lidded Northeastern Indians whom locals describe as looking “Nepali” or “Chinese” are both marginalized groups in the NCR. Both Africans and Northeasterners often experience difficulty finding housing because of xenophobic prejudice and hence, both end up living together in Delhi’s lower middle-class, less regulated, “urban villages” like Munirka, Khirkee, Chattarpur, and Safdarjung Enclave’s Arjuna Nagar.

Hence, a large network of churches has grown up in and around these areas. Ironically, these “born again”-style churches can end up causing even more anti-African antagonism in an environment where Hindu nationalism is on the rise and producing greater intolerance towards India’s large Muslim population and much smaller Christian population.

Like Africans in India, Africans on the continent are turning more and more to these churches. Ironically they may be doing so for the same reasons as African migrants in Delhi: to seek solace from the hostile environment engendered by the endemic failures of African governments to provide adequate opportunity and decent quality of life for their citizens. Which is the reason so many move to India in the first place.

In a film about war, can you leave the politics out?

Still from film The Train of Salt and Sugar

The film The Train of Salt and Sugar, set in 1988 during Mozambique’s civil war, depicts a journey by rail from the city of Nampula, in the northeast of the country, to Cuamba, near the Malawi border. The train’s travelers tell a variety of stories; there are traders hoping to make good money selling salt from the coast for sugar, a rarity during the war; while others are hoping to be reunited with family. Then there is Rosa, a nurse who is on her way to her new job. The travelers are accompanied by a military battalion that is there to protect the train, its passengers and the merchandise. Yet these soldiers turn out to be as dangerous and violent as the combatants who are hidden in the bush.

The film is a Mozambican production, based on a book written by Licínio Azevedo who also directed the film. It is also the first Mozambican submission to Hollywood’s Academy Awards. Following his film, “Virgin Margarida” (2012), about the post-independence re-education camps, Azevedo takes up another controversial topic in Mozambique: the civil war.

The civil war was fought within the context of the Cold War and lasted from 1976, shortly after independence, until a peace agreement in 1992 between the then Marxist-Leninist FRELIMO government and RENAMO, a rebel movement supported first by Rhodesia’s white minority government and then apartheid South Africa, both Mozambique’s neighbors.

The violence of that war is generally silenced. Very little of the war’s history has been written down. Azevedo tells one of these stories, or many in one. At the same time, he manages to turn the movie into a captivating Mozambican western, including a duel and a tragic romance.

The film’s pace is slow, as excruciatingly slow and suspenseful as the pace of the train on its dangerous journey during which, the viewer immediately understands, confrontations with an enigmatic enemy are inevitable. The soundtrack consists mostly of the whistling and rhythmic sounds of the train. The camera lingers on the tense faces of the passengers and moves along through the desolate as well as breathtaking landscapes. The quiet travel scenes are alternated by intervals of sudden shoot-outs with a largely faceless enemy. 

The Train of Salt and Sugar highlights RENAMO’s terror tactics, the military’s brutal treatment of alleged collaborators, the abuse of women by soldiers and the magic of war. The fact that the commander of the “enemy” is able to transform himself into a monkey makes a very topical analogy with the alleged abilities of RENAMO’s leader Alfonso Dhlakama to turn into a bird. The movie’s military commander, “Seven Ways,” seems to have some similar tricks on his sleeve.

Yet politics is left out of the movie. The warring parties, representing the armed forces of the FRELIMO government and the rebels of RENAMO, are not mentioned by name. “Brothers against brothers, not knowing why they fight,” one of the lead characters says at a certain point. This illustrates the film’s message about war as the pointless destruction of life and dreams. It is, as most a film about war or an anti-war film. It shows how both sides are violent, corrupt, and eventually losing, and how the civilians who cross their paths lose even more. 

Yet, while avoiding the politics of war in Mozambique, the film was released last year at a time when the country finds itself at war again. Once more trains have been under attack by armed combatants of RENAMO. This time it is not trains of salt and sugar that are under siege, but the coal trains running from the mines — carrying minerals for multinational corporations — in the center of the country to the coastal ports. This rapid economic and social change in Mozambique comes with poverty, corruption and exclusion, creating new struggles along the “old” lines of unresolved conflicts. This is the larger tragedy of The Train of Salt and Sugar: whereas for some Mozambicans the film is about a distant past, for other Mozambicans it relates a much more recent reality.

Weekend Special No.1957*

See item No. 6 below.

(1) Egypt has more problems to worry about than the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam. Commentators have read the ability of Ethiopia to push through such a project as a sign of Egypt’s declining power in the region, especially as contrasted with that of Ethiopia. But a journey down Africa’s longest river shows how a combination of climate change, war, and encroaching cities threatens the livelihood millions across countries who depend on it. 

(2) If Egyptians’ thought they caught a break when their men’s national soccer team qualified for the 2018 World Cup— the first time in 27 years. Not so, the military-run government has decided to extend the State of Emergency for another 3 months. 

(3) A new report builds on the revelations from the Panama Papers to reveal the extent of corruption by African leaders, and their links to tax havens. 

(4) People all over the world have been celebrating the memory of Argentine guerrilla and revolutionary Che Guevara. [Remember his adventure in the Congo–ed.] Today, October 15th, marks the 30th anniversary of the murder of “African Che” Thomas Sankara by one of his closest lieutenants. You can read about his violent death and the impact of his work and ideas in our archive; here, here and here. Of Sankara’s many legacies, his push for Burkinabes to wear their local attires (Dan Fani) is making a comeback, popularized in part by current president Roch Marc Christian Kabore.  

(5) On the surface, Raila Odinga’s decision to withdraw from the October 26th Kenyan elections, and rerun triggered by his appeals to the supreme court, looks like political suicide. Yet a closer look at Kenyan electoral law shows it could be a smart long-term plan that would force new elections and allow for additional candidates and parties to be considered.

(6) Liberia, and the rest of the world (especially the footballing world) seem eager to coronate George Weah, Africa’s only winner of the World Player of the Year award [and probably the greatest player the continent produced–Editor], was leading in the voting polls in the first of two rounds of the first election that would see a democratic handing over of power in Liberia since 1944.

(7) As more African countries do away with the need for visas for other African nationals, what would it take to rethink the mental borders we work with—and address the issues of xenophobia prevalent in many of our countries 

(8) South African politician Helen Zille has called for militiary intervention, a la Rio in Brazil, to address the problem of gangs in Capetown. Does the comparison hold? 

(9) Prophet Shepherd, reputedly one of the 15 wealthiest men in Malawi, runs a ministry in Pretoria, South Africa. As preachers wield more influence outside of the church, it is fascinating to see how they see view their role in addressing big political issues. 

(10) One of the paradoxes of globalization is that wealthy countries practically beg for borders to be open so they and their corporations can access land, cheap labor and bring in their capital to invest for profit. And yet when people from these very countries immigrate in search of a better land, offering their labor to gain some capital to send home there is resistance. Canada is the latest example, targeting Guinean asylum seekers, while simultaneously uniquely benefiting from that country’s minerals (bauxite) and contributing to some of the very problems that cause people to leave in the first place. 

Contributor Anakwa Dwamena takes over from me as regular compiler of this list. For more on Anakwa, read his Africa is a Country archive here, follow him on Twitter, or check out other samples of his work here, here and here. And why start at No.1957. It is to commemorate the year of Ghanaian independence.–Editor.

Everyone in Eritrea is desperate to flee, including the President’s son

Image Credit: Joseph Bautista via Flickr Creative Commons

In today’s Eritrea, there is no difference between the jailer and the jailed. The political culture is so violent and desperate that the president’s own son attempted to escape the country.

President Isaias Afwerki’s erratic and mercurial temperament – he has been the head of a one-party dictatorship since independence in 1993 – has culminated in a profoundly dysfunctional nation. A “hit and run” style has replaced any thoughtful long-term planning. Not being able to count on any stable or secure future, many public servants place their energy into amassing as much capital as possible, by any available means. 

The distinctive political culture of Eritrea suffers from an unclear boundary between the abuser and the victim. A guard can switch places with his/her captive at any moment. Some of the most notorious prison commanders and security chiefs who terrorized the nation with unchecked power end up in the harshest dungeons; many of them in prison facilities they have had commanded. Such perilous uncertainty enables the president to keep his subordinates guessing.

In the current Eritrean political landscape, officials are usually promoted to key posts only after being humiliated and pacified through an intricate web of control designed by Afwerki.

For example, Brigadier Gen. Eyob “Halibay” Fessahaye was among the first of the army’s command officers to be incarcerated for alleged corruption in the early 1990s. President Afwerki announced and read the charges against Halibay in a public seminar. Halibay was a sacrificial lamb and his incarceration a warning to the other officers. Shocked at this severe reversal of fortune just as he was preparing to take a new post as internal security chief, Halibay attempted to commit suicide twice while in jail. Later, after his release, in a bizarre twist Afwerki gave him an important post as head of a commission in charge of privatizing government houses.

Having gone through the compulsory dehumanization process, Halibay now commands the Special Forces, the elite commandos. Friends who visited him during his incarceration were later rewarded bountifully after he gained power. Of course, Halibay still has no freedom; he was denied an exit visa for a medical checkup in 2016.

Nesredin Bekhit is another example of the president’s tactic of cutting a rising official down to size and then rehabilitating them as a way to secure his fear-based loyalty. In the mid-1990s, Bekhit was imprisoned on corruption charges that were publicized in the national media. In 2014, after his degradation and release, he became the minister of trade and industry. 

Unlike other ministers, Bekhit spends his time now on the border with the Sudan, Ali-ghider, where he runs the ruling party’s contraband business. While all imports have been outlawed to regular citizens since 2003, Mr. Bekhit can grant import permits to his close associates and former inmates. He has turned some of his friends into overnight millionaires. 

Corruption among select high-ranking officials, mainly in the army, is not only allowed but encouraged. The president can use knowledge of their corrupt activities as leverage, to ensure their loyalty. With the implicit support of Afwerki, army commanders are protected in their corruption, including involvement in the complex racket of human trafficking, as long as they remain loyal.

Among others, General Filipos Woldeyohannes, the chief of staff and de facto minister of defense, and others such as Brigadier Gen. Tekle “Manjus” Kiflay have the green light from the president to pursue personal gain.

Most organs of the ruling party and the government collaborate in organized corruption, mainly by using intimidation and bankruptcy to control and ruin businesspeople. Yet it’s not easy to keep track of when exactly someone runs out of favor with the president. That happened recently to Mr. Yemane Tesfai, the former manager of the Commercial Bank of Eritrea, who ended up in jail for enabling various forms of corruption.

Another way that President Afwerki maintains and wields power is by fomenting feuds among his subordinates. He keeps close watch on any animosity between military commanders as a primary means of fortifying his own position. It’s no secret among observant citizens that all the top military commanders and most influential government ministers bear deep animosity against one another.

A grievous misreading of the president’s psyche cost Ms. Luel Ghebreab, the former chair of the National Union of Eritrean Women, her job. She mistakenly assumed it was safe to mediate a life-long feud between her husband, Major Gen. Teklai Habteselassie and the late Major Gen. Gebregziabher “Wuchu” Andemariam, when General Wuchu was bed-ridden. After Ms. Ghebreab mediated the dispute, the news quickly reached the president. He called and intimidated her, asking who had delegated her this responsibility. Then he instructed her to immediately conduct congress and vacate her post. Of course, nobody would question such orders from the head of state. Having gone through this public humiliation and left jobless for more than three years, this past July was Ghebreab reinstated as minister of labor and human welfare.

The president’s application of fear and terror are manifested in different forms. He verbally and physically abuses most of his subordinates including ministers and celebrities. For example, in 2010 Afwerki granted a rare interview with Al-Jazeera English. The presenter, the South African Jane Dutton, proceeded to openly challenge Afwerki about state abuses and authoritarianism in Eritrea. Irritated by her questions, the president called the journalist “insane.” (Watch) Post-interview Afwerki struck his information minister, Ali Abdu, who had arranged the interview, in front of his staff. Abdu was once Afwerki’s mentee, whom the president treated like his son. Among the most privileged and close associates of the president, he in turn terrorized the nation’s art community and state news media into abject compliance for a decade. Yet, despite closely following Afwerki’s template of terror and repression in the Ministry of Information, he decided in 2012 that he had to flee for his own safety and sought political asylum in Australia. 

As a management practice, Afwerki employs physical assault to derail confidence and instill insecurity in top government officials. This practice can become life threatening at times. About a year before his imprisonment with an alleged role in the January 2013 military mutiny, Abdella Jabir, the former head of Organizational Affairs and one of the top five executives of the ruling party (People’s Front for Democracy and Justice), was violently ambushed in the capital, Asmara, by supposedly “unidentified” assailants. Never publicized, this assault was neither a robbery nor an attack by political dissidents. Having recovered from his assault, Jabir continued his normal functions in the party until his eventual arrest. 

The president treats family members as he treats his subordinates. He routinely belittles and ridicules his eldest son, Abraham, and reportedly has stopped communications with his youngest son, Berhane, over the last four years. Frustrated with the dysfunctional, corrupt system and his father’s abusive treatment, Berhane Isaias Afwerki attempted to flee the country illegally in 2015. He was intercepted by border patrols while preparing to be smuggled out from the border town of Tessenei. Initially the border security who discovered him were not aware that he was the president’s son. 

It is this complex and enigmatic nature of President Afwerki that has rendered de facto the political culture of today’s Eritrea. The long-term consequences of a new nation with such political culture is not difficult to guess.

* Editors’ note: Sources for this post have not been named for their protection.

With friends like these… how did South Sudan come to this?

Few places in the world have taken a beating like South Sudan. How did it come to this?

At the end of May, the fourth ceasefire in as many years was declared in the South Sudanese civil war. President Salva Kiir, head of the ruling Sudan People’s Liberation Movement (SPLM), promised a unilateral end to hostilities and guaranteed the release of all political prisoners.

A little over a month earlier, the Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA), the military wing of the SPLM, had sent its notorious Lion Brigade, under the command of Santino Deng Wol, to the town of Pajok. 17 civilians were shot dead and thousands more were driven from their homes. UN peacekeepers were denied access to the area in the aftermath.

On October 4th, fighting between opposition and government forces broke out in Bieh state. The numbers are conflicting, but it appears that hundreds may have died. The violence, it seems, continues.

“The Dinkas are the only people who liberated South Sudan,” Minister of Defence Kuol Manyang is reported to have told a meeting of senior officers last year. It won’t surprise you to learn that Manyang is himself a Dinka, as is Kiir. The people of Pajok, to their detriment, were Acholi.

Pajok and its Acholi citizens are another casualty in the decades-old struggle between the SPLM and SPLM-iO (in opposition), rival incarnations of the same idea. They are acronyms—like IGAD, ARCSS, IGAD-PLUS, and UNMISS—that rule over millions of lives.

The entire country is now a food crisis zone. Reports of war crimes continue to flood in, pushing the boundaries of the grotesque by leaps and bounds. It was reported earlier this year that 1.8 million people had been displaced since fighting began in 2013. Worse, the will of local and international actors to broker an end to the violence has vanished completely. The guns on the ground hold sway, and with increasing boldness, as aid workers are shot and the government in Juba denies further expansion of the UN’s peacekeeping mission.

We have to look to the SPLM and its rival claimants for an answer to this crisis. The SPLM has been the face of South Sudan’s struggle for self-determination since its founding in 1983. After the 2005 helicopter crash that killed John Garang, the charismatic, American-backed (and autocratic) head of South Sudan’s liberation movement, violent factionalism has more-or-less replaced an earlier rhetoric of unitary, national progress. The men who’ve come up behind him—Kiir is 66, Machar, 64—are long-time vanguards of a crude, ethnic sectarianism. Their scores have waited a long time to be settled.

And those scores have a real urgency to them, because for the victor there will be spoils. The problem in this, one of the world’s poorest countries, is that there is a lot of money to be made. When George H.W.Bush—then America’s ambassador to the UN—let it be known to Colonel Gaafar Muhammad al-Nimeiry, Sudan’s president in the early 1970’s, that US satellite images showed evidence of oil in the Upper Nile, he was delivering the first words of a monstrous tragedy. At least 3.75 billion barrels are known to be untapped, and potential reserves could be much higher. Never mind that war has temporarily turned the taps off; with that much crude in the ground, everyone has an incentive to get them open again.

For the time being, Kiir seems to have convinced the world that he’s their man. The flagship petroleum companies of China, Malaysia, and India all returned to the job this year. And in March, Nigeria’s Oranto, a subsidiary of Dubai-based Atlas Petroleum, scored exploration rights to 25 thousand square kilometers of Block B, the largest unexploited reserve in the country. There they will join France’s Total, already hard at work.

Kiir isn’t wrong to feel bold. Since the collapse last year of 2015’s ARCSS—the IGAD-authored and US-sponsored Agreement to Resolve the Conflict in South Sudan—Machar’s star has been waning. Festus Mogae, former President of Botswana and chairman of the UN’s Joint Monitoring & Evaluation Commission, recommended in a January interview with the BBC that Machar be prevented from re-entering the country. He has been in hiding since fleeing Juba in a hail of bullets after talks broke down in July, first in the DRC, then South Africa. In November of last year, he was stopped in Addis Ababa’s airport while on his way to Sudan for medical treatment and told to turn around. “‘The Ethiopians told him there were two planes sitting on the tarmac – one heading to Juba and the other to Joburg,’” a diplomatic source told Reuters. This was a huge blow to the SPLM/A-iO, because Ethiopia has been one of its traditional safe havens. 228,000 Nuer (the group to which Machar belongs) live in Ethiopia’s Gambella Region along the South Sudanese border.

The problem is that the international community is impatient with the peace process. Comprehensive, multilateral agreements have done nothing but create one of the world’s worst disaster zones. Consensus has gone by the wayside, replaced by bilateral negotiation and the calculation of national interest. Instability reigns and exacerbates the situation on the ground, with no side’s position remaining clear. Machar and Ethiopia’s foreign minister were smiling and shaking hands together for a photograph only a few days into October.

The problem is as always that instability is hugely profitable. Weapons of considerable sophistication have poured into the country from all sides. The SPLA are using Russian Mi-24 military gunships (origin unknown) to attack SPLA-iO positions, even crossing the border into the Congo in August. In 2014, the UN security council revealed a receipt from Chinese defense contractor Norinco for $20 million worth of small arms. That was after the press broke a $38 million contract—Chinese officials claim it was signed before the outbreak of war in 2013—between Beijing and Juba, and the Chinese made a public declaration to arm neither side.

There is evidence to suggest that the SPLA-iO have been searching far and wide for the means to redress these imbalances, and that they’ve found a sympathetic ear in the West. Right now, most of what they’ve got to work with is old Sudanese Kalashnikovs. But in a 2014 report, UK-based Conflict Armaments Research observed two US-made recoilless rifle rounds in their original boxes in a cache of captured SPLM/A-iO weapons. The date at which they entered the conflict is still indeterminate, though their condition suggests that they may have been recent acquisitions. Naturally, a request for comment from the US permanent mission to the United Nations returned nothing.

The fact that these are American guns is important. No country has been more heavily involved in South Sudan over the past half-century than the US. Americans are hardly aware of this, of course—we’ve paid very little attention to the area since the days of Bush the younger, when resistance groups battling Khartoum’s heavy hand were an American cause célébre. But G.W.’s interest in the country was just another thing he inherited from his father. George Clooney may have got to Darfur in 2006, sure, but Chevron beat him there by about thirty years.

Garang was a graduate of American infantry school and had a degree in agriculture from Iowa State. He was a natural with American audiences, playing up the predominance of Christianity in Sudan’s south to great effect: American money poured in, even after his death. From 2005 to 2015, South Sudan, first as part of Sudan and then on its own, was the third-largest recipient of US humanitarian aid, behind only Iraq and Afghanistan.

When the country declared independence in 2011, the moment was celebrated by American observers with great optimism. “We know that southern Sudanese have claimed their sovereignty, and shown that neither their dignity nor their dream of self-determination can be denied,” Barack Obama said at the country’s ribbon cutting six years ago. But as with so many of the Obama era’s assumptions about the impacts of American foreign policy, there seemed to be no sense of history. When civil war flared up just two years later, the White House sounded as if it were regarding it through a telescope from the other side of the universe. “Now is the time for South Sudan’s leaders to show courage and leadership, to reaffirm their commitment to peace, to unity, and to a better future for their people,” a statement put out on December 20th, 2013 read.

Even to the end of its days, the Obama administration continued to behave as if they were outside of history, even their own. “It is the people of South Sudan who will pay an unbearable price,” then US ambassador to the UN, Samantha Power told the Security Council after it failed to ratify a US-backed arms embargo in December of last year. If American foreign policy experts had a sense of irony, it should have gone off when an Obama administration official waxed sanctimonious about an arms ban. After all, it was Obama himself who, in 2012, lifted US restrictions on weapons sales to South Sudan.

It was rumored that John Kerry’s State Department took a hard stance on Kiir. If so, there seems to be continuity in the attitude of the new administration. Trump renewed Obama’s 2012 order designating the country a national emergency, which put restrictions on some Sudanese high officials. And in April this year, Trump’s UN ambassador, Nikki Haley, appearing before the security council, openly blamed Kiir for exacerbating the famine, and called for another vote on an arms embargo.

That may only last as long as the personnel on the ground remain the same. Mary McPhee, sworn in as ambassador in 2015, just as ARCSS was put on the table, has a few months of her three-year FSO turn left. But the appearance of US weapons in SPLM-iO stockpiles may be a sign of things to come. The Trump administration is about to lift sanctions on Sudan, another Obama-era policy. Khartoum is no friend of Kiir. If the US is taking aim at Juba, the SPLM won’t go down lightly. Any attempt to swing the balance of forces in the country can only balloon the war’s already appalling human cost.

“No significant trade with South Sudan”: that’s the State Department’s terse statement on America’s interest in South Sudan. It may be the most telling sign of the US’s willingness to close the book on a war that for nearly half a century it has been the enthusiastic author of. “The United States will remain a steady partner of the South Sudanese people,” Obama told the country in 2013, just as Kiir and Machar’s men began tearing Juba to pieces. If the twentieth century has taught the world anything, it’s that our good intentions often come at a tremendous cost. With friends like these…

Weekend Music Break No. 111 – #DefendPuertoRico edition

Puerto Rico has been in the news because of the recent humanitarian crisis that has become quite politicized by the government of Donald Trump. While many sources have already done good analysis on the political sideshow accompanying the crisis, of particular interest to Africa Is a Country readers may be the fact that the island is one of the hubs of African culture in the Americas. So, to continue the recent trend of humanizing the headlines with Weekend Music Break, we decided to put together a playlist that draws attention to Puerto Rico’s African heritage, its contemporary sounds, as well as its impact on contemporary global popular culture.

If you’d like to assist in Puerto Rico’s recovery efforts, we suggest to visit Defend Puerto Rico, a multimedia “designed to document and celebrate Puerto Rican creativity, resilience, and resistance.”

Enjoy this weekend’s music break dedicated to the isla del encancto:

Weekend Music Break No.111

Tracklist: 1) Bomba y plena live at Loíza. 2) Hector Lavoe y Willie Colon – Aguanile. 3) `IFÉ – 3 Mujeres (Iború Iboya Ibosheshé). 4) El Gran Combo – Mi Isla. 5) India – Dimelo. 6) Tego Calderon – Pa que se lo gozen. 7) Ivy Queen – Yo quiero bailar.  8) Don Omar – Bandolero feat. Tego Calderon. 9) Calma Carmona – 100 Vidas. 10) Big Pun – 100%