Sean Jacobs's Blog, page 271

The end of the Eyadéma Dynasty in Togo?

Image via UN Photo Flickr.

The latest installment of the Republic of Togo’s on-again off-again political crisis appears to have a little more heft than usual. Over the past several weeks, tensions have escalated between the government and a coalition of opposition parties and activists. Large-scale rallies, marches and gatherings have sprung up in a number of cities around the country. With the internet and cellular technology suspended by the Ministry of Information, signs suggest that this may be blossoming into a serious threat to the half-century-long Eyadéma dynasty.

Several historical markers point provide some context for this simmering tension. The first elected regime of Sylvanus Olympio ignored many issues affecting Togolese beyond those of interest to its southern Ewe ethnic stronghold, and quickly devolved into authoritarianism. Olympio’s government was the first sub-Saharan nation to fall victim to a military coup d’état, and from 1967 the military presidency of Gnassingbé Eyadéma and his in a one-party state under the Rassemblement du Peuple Togolais (RPT) became a loyal western satellite. Under Eyadéma, political dissidence was brutally suppressed; tens of thousands were summarily executed or “disappeared” by rigidly loyal Kabyé ethnic kinsmen and their allies. Many hundreds of thousands fled abroad, creating large exile communities who continue to fund opposition activities. The short-lived democratic multiparty experiment in the early 1990s collapsed in further bloodshed. And after Eyadéma’s son Faure assumed power, he maintained the fiercely faithful ethnic superstructure of the economic and political realms inherited after his father’s death in 2005. He even elevated his father’s chief of security, the notorious brutal torturer Lieutenant Colonel Yark Damehame, to the role of Ministre de la Sécurité.

The current unrest began in mid-August when a new coalition of opposition activists declared a joint national protest action. Unlike previous demonstrations — planned, permitted, spontaneous or otherwise confined to the south and to known opposition strongholds — this particular action involved events in more urban locales, Sokodé, Kara, Bafilé, Anie, and the capital and largest city, Lomé. The new protests explicitly demanded term limits on the presidency and an end to the “Gnassingbé dynasty.” These events quickly overwhelmed the police, who along with pro-government militias used lethal force to disperse demonstrators in Sokodé, with as many as seven or more killed. Police and gendarmes also injured and arrested many others, including Sama Kossi, the secretary general of the relatively marginal opposition Pan African National Party.

Researchers often use Togo’s political history as a template for understanding post-independence African political instability. A north-south tension was coopted by Eyadéma; he appealed to ethnic and clan allegiance in times of crisis, but smoothed it over when national unity was his goal. The ethnic divisions in terms of economic, political, educational, and security apparatuses are palpable. Political power and the security apparatus have long been dominated by the RPT and Eyadéma loyalists; while educational and economic privileges have remained the domain of southerners. And even after the father to son delegation of power resulted in a certain relaxation on the part of the more oppressive paramilitary entities, Fauré’s reshaped RPT, the Union pour la République (UNIR) continues to maintain a stranglehold on government. 

The death of protesters is hardly news in Togo. Several were killed in Lomé in February 2017, and a number of others shot dead in Mangu in 2016. Not a single Togolese policeman, soldier, or gendarme has ever been charged with, let alone prosecuted for extrajudicial killing. Amnesty International and other NGOs have long decried the culture of complete impunity that operated under Eyadéma’s dictatorship and continues today under that of Faure. The UN Special Rapporteur on Extrajudicial killings, Manfred Nowak, condemned Faure’s utter reluctance to address criminal actions by Togolese government forces; and Togo has admitted it tortures before the UN Human Rights Council. But this particular massacre appears to have dramatically recast the opposition’s platform by thrusting Tikpi Atchadam, President of the Pan African National Party, to national prominence. Whereas until now, Jean-Pierre Fabre, the head of the Alliance Nationale pour le Changement (ANC), was the titular lead of the national coalition opposition, the rise of Atchadam forecloses criticism that this unrest is simply sponsored by the disgruntled southern Ewe community.

A second unusual component of the unrest is the platform of demands. Protesters marching in the streets have long demanded the “démission” of Faure, just as they did his father. But the call for the re-imposition of term limits is a marked departure. Term limits were introduced in Togo during the National Conference in 1991-92, which briefly saw Eyadéma relinquish power, only to violently return in 1994. Eyadéma pretended to adhere to term limits, but then had them stripped from the constitution (by a single supermajority vote in the single-chamber assembly his party controlled with 95% of the seats). When French President Jacques Chirac visited Togo, he extracted a public concession to abide by term limits; Chirac himself was remaking the French constitution, and questions were raised about his own intentions too. So it was no surprise when Eyadéma reneged on his pledge. When his son seized power, he copied the actions and attempted actions of many of his neighbors, such as the former presidents of Burkina Faso, Senegal, and Benin.

Faure is now in the second year of a third term. His UNIR party has drafted a constitutional change re-imposing limits. But it may be a case of too little too late. Faure may find himself emulating Burkina Faso’s presidential transition more closely than he planned, and much earlier than he thought possible.

Kenya’s return to despotism

“If you are unhappy with the election results, take your grievances to court,” Kenya’s President Uhuru Kenyatta chastised Raila Odinga, his main challenger in the August 8 presidential elections and the National Super Alliance political coalition (NASA)’s flag bearer. Kenyatta had won, so it seemed, by a significant margin of ten percent (54%-44%), and was busy directing his inauguration team to begin the swearing in process. On his part, Odinga took the President’s advice and filed a petition challenging the results and the electoral system. Asking the country’s Supreme Court to nullify the presidential results, Odinga argued that the Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission (IEBC), a regulatory agency responsible for supervising elections in Kenya, conducted a sham election that violated the Constitution. Siding with Odinga, the justices nullified the results and ordered the IEBC to conduct fresh elections in sixty days. The IEBC complied and set October 17 as the new date when Kenyans would go back to the polls. These two incidences — the Supreme Court’s history-making decision for Kenya and Africa, and the IEBC’s new date — rattled the country’s political establishment and engendered corrosive bitterness on the President’s part, which, if left unchecked, would mutate into a chimera set to consume Kenya after October.         

In the months leading up to August 8, David Murathe, the President’s advisor, hinted that Kenyatta’s second term “[would] be lethal, brutal and ruthless.” Very few Kenyans paid attention to the ominous warning, perhaps because they believed, rather erroneously, that Kenyatta would not singlehandedly return the country back to its darker days under Daniel Moi’s tenure (1978-2002). They gloated on social media about how Kenya had made significant progress, citing as examples the new and progressive Constitution limiting presidential terms, decentralized political and economic infrastructures, the bicameral legislative body, and, above all, the independent Supreme Court.  

Only a few hours after the Court nullified Kenyatta’s victory, a seemingly rattled President, who had advised his challenger to seek redress in court, organized an impromptu roadside meeting at the Burma Market in Nairobi and censured the very Court whose outcome he had earlier promised to respect. Echoing Murathe’s words, Kenyatta promised to “fix” the Court in his second term. Specifically, he raised a finger of contempt at David Kenani Maraga, the Chief Justice and President of the Supreme Court of Kenya, and belittled him and the other justices as wakora (crooks/thugs). Without equivocating, Kenyatta promised to nyorosha (straighten up) the Supreme Court and threatened to do the same to his political detractors. He laid down his marker, and Kenyans should bear in mind that he who lifts up a finger at others with contempt will surely do the same to you.  

Whether or not Kenyatta was sober during the Burma Market speech (his detractors insinuate that he was inebriated), he meant what he said, and he did not back down even after his wakora slur angered most Kenyans. In any case, Kenyatta knew his Jubilee Party (JP) had secured a comfortable majority in Parliament and Senate, and he exuded confidence in passing legislations favoring his agenda. In making the infamous Burma Market statements against the Judiciary, Kenyatta probably read — if reading was his forte — Article 163 (9) of the country’s Constitution, which, among other things, permits Parliament to “make further provision for the operation of the Supreme Court.” Although the Constitution leaves open the meaning and interpretation of what constitutes “operation,” it does not authorize the President to interfere with the Court’s everyday operation, but Kenyatta will undoubtedly use his party’s majority in Parliament to “fix” things and throw out “crook” judges. After all, Constitutions in sub-Saharan Africa hold no sway to men exhibiting despotic traits.   

Cheering for Kenyatta from the sidelines are his vocal sycophants in the legal and political spheres, who continue to float a dangerous proposition suggesting that the executive branch is under attack from the Judiciary. They have argued in recent past that the Executive must be protected from the Judiciary, yet they seem to have forgotten that between the two branches of the government, the former wields the immense political and economic power necessary to impugn the latter.       

If anything, despotic regimes in sub-Saharan Africa espouse similar patterns undergirding their manifestation and identity. First, they cast themselves as the victims of judicial tyranny. Then they vilify the Judiciary, in particular, and intellectuals, in general, a strategy that shortens the complicated process of expunging judges and critical college professors. Secondly, they curb the freedom of speech and artistic forms of expression to harness national cohesion. Under this category, slight laughter against the regime is considered “hate” speech. Recently, Kenya’s National Cohesion and Integration Commission (NCIC), a government agency created to facilitate and promote a Kenyan society whose values are harmonious and non-discriminatory for peaceful co-existence and integration, published names of individuals it hopes to charge for spewing hate on social media, and the Kenya Film and Classification Board (KFCB), a state corporation that regulates media content, is pushing a bill in Parliament to empower its board officers and police officers to raid, search, and seize film equipment or materials from organizations perceived to be producing or exhibiting materials that they deem to have questionable content. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, despotic regimes tend to control the supply of essential commodities and consumer goods, then pretend to be working around the clock to ensure a steady supply. When I visited Kenya in May and June for research, retail stores throughout the country did not carry cornmeal, and ordinary Kenyans were unable to afford a kilogram of sugar; yet Kenya is the main producer and exporter of maize and sugar in East Africa. I finally found the cornmeal after four weeks, but the store owner allowed only two packets per buyer.

Moi perfected the aforementioned strategies, then Kenyatta employed them in the months leading to the general election and has promised to extend and complete them in his second term. It is not trivial to add that Moi is Kenyatta’s political mentor, and the two leaders have reversed the socio-economic and political gains Kenyans have made since the country gained independence in 1963. Kenyans were divided under Moi, and they are divided today under his protégé. Like a married couple in a bitter divorce, a section of the country is agitating for cession. It is unclear, however, how long the cession drumbeat will hold, but it is clear that Kenya has turned the progressive clock backwards.

Checkpoint Babylon

“Checkpoint Babylon.” That’s what one man dressed in white and carrying a conch shell horn kept repeating over and over as we inched forward in a line on Flatbush Avenue, Brooklyn at 6 am on Monday morning. “We living in Trenchtown,” a woman next to him with a Jamaican flag bandana wrapped around her hair responded. The police patted us down, checked our bags, asked us if we had any weapons or alcohol, and confiscated any drinks – even bottled water. It felt like going through a TSA checkpoint at the airport. At least we kept our shoes on.

Image credit Dauwd El.

The scene was incongruous for the wee hours of Labor Day in Brooklyn, but may become the depressing new norm for J’Ouvert, one of the most vibrant grassroots cultural traditions in the immigrant metropolis of New York City, and one that New York City government and the police department are crushing under the weight of onerous restrictions.

For decades, those few hours have been transformed by this Caribbean cultural practice, a patois contraction of the French jour ouvert, to open the day. A spiritual descendent of the Trinidadian 19th century tradition canboulay (another patois for cannes brûlées, burnt canes), J’Ouvert is the wild and free midnight cousin to the increasingly safe and sanitized (no matter how sexualized) daytime Carnivals in the streets of Port of Spain and elsewhere throughout the Caribbean diaspora.

Image credit Dauwd El.

For fleeting precious hours before daybreak on Carnival Monday morning, revelers parade in the streets, dance to the rhythm sections of steeldrum bands and other percussion styles like tamboo bamboo and tasso, and cover each other with paint, mud, and oil. It’s a messy affair, no doubt, but also a prime time for masqueraders to come out on the street dressed up as characters from Caribbean folklore, like jab jabs (devils) or dame lorraines (exaggerated satires of plantation mistresses), so-called “ole mas,” a contrast to the bikinis-and-feathers “pretty mas” that dominates the daytime Carnival processions.

With such a large immigrant population living overseas, Trinidadian Carnival is absolutely a transnational affair, as one scholar has called it, and Brooklyn’s version has actually become more traditional than the homeland. While sound trucks blasting high-decibel soca are now a fixture on the streets of Port of Spain at 3 am during J’Ouvert parties, the Brooklyn version retains a live percussion only policy. Unique J’Ouvert bands representing specific islands start out from different “mas camps” – empty lots, local restaurants and bars, or rented event halls temporarily dedicated to the purpose of prepping for Carnival – throughout central Brooklyn. Under cover of darkness, they wind their way through residential neighborhoods, slowly building a momentum of rhythm until they converge on the wide expanse of Eastern Avenue, Grand Army Plaza, and Flatbush Avenue – the kinds of monumental boulevards and plazas dreamed up by 19th century city planners and perfect for a parade of this magnitude.

Image credit Dauwd El.

For years, Brooklyn J’Ouvert has been marred by an association with violence. It seemed like every time there was a holiday weekend shooting within 20 blocks of the parade route, it was deemed a J’Ouvert-related incident. That correlation was sketchy at best, but sadly the last two years saw high-profile gun crimes very much in the midst of the J’Ouvert revelry. In 2015, Carey Gabay, a Jamaican-American lawyer and aide to New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, got caught in crossfire and died a few days later. Last year, a female college student was shot and killed after refusing the aggressive wining of a male reveler.

In response, neighborhood cultural boosters Caribbeing hosted a street fair to counter negative perceptions of Caribbean cultural celebrations. Last month, they held an artist residency at the Brooklyn Museum where they organized a public forum, think J’Ouvert 101, and a panel discusion on consent during Carnival.

But following the media firestorm after the last two years’ gun crime incidents the city cracked down hard. They established checkpoints for anyone wishing to enter the main parade route, banned alcohol (while open container is illegal, cops have typically looked the other way), and most damningly, pushed the start time back from 4 am to 6 am.

Image credit Dauwd El.

“The idea of greeting the sun as it rises is therefore lost,” Michael Manswell, artistic director of Caribbean arts collective Something Positive told me before J’Ouvert. “It’s the idea of illuminating the darkness, shining a light on what can be a mysterious kind of process.”

Something Positive provided this year’s performance element – elaborate costumes of balancing scales, cross-dressing dame lorraines, and larger-than-life puppets – for Pagwah, a Brooklyn-based J’Ouvert band that celebrated its tenth annual run this year. I played with Pagwah, joining them as we set out from a party hall in a rapidly gentrifying corner of Brooklyn at around 4:30 am. The sky was already beginning to lighten as we marched to the rhythm of a tasso band, passing signs for luxury condominiums, Swedish espresso, and artisan ice cream. I wondered how many new residents to the neighborhood unaware of its Caribbean history called the city’s info line to register noise complaints, a classic dilemma for everything from street parades to music venues in the changing demographics of global cities like New York.

Image credit Dauwd El.

To that extent, the city’s J’Ouvert crackdown had at least one victim. For several years I had watched the wildest and craziest J’Ouvert band emerge blackened and oil-soaked on Eastern Parkway. The Greenhouse Jab Jabs are a Grenadian crew who play Jab mas. In 2014, I joined them for a midnight procession through Crown Heights that was nothing short of chaos, bodies crammed into narrow blocks, black paint everywhere, and a feverish non-stop rhythm section playing from the back of a truck. The cops followed with a close eye and occasionally an NYPD helicopter flew overhead to shine its floodlights on us. But the masses didn’t seem to care – painting or wining up on a police car was greeted with a shrug by the uniformed blue.

But this year, the Jab Jabs retreated indoors. They threw a J’Ouvert fete inside an East Williamsburg warehouse – a serious change of venue and scenery for a group that usually parades through the friendly streets of its own neighborhood. As a private event, they avoided police trouble and were able to spend a few solid hours drinking rum and splashing oil all over the concrete floors and each other while wining down to hits like Charly Black’s Party Animal, Konshens’ Bruk Off Yuh Back, JW & Blaze’s Palance, and the ultimate jab jab anthem – Skinny Banton’s Soak It Good. It was a damn good party and playing J’Ouvert with an ear-splitting sound system was a treat for a Caribbean dance music aficionado like myself, but it didn’t compare to the transgressive act of actually taking the streets. For me, the magic of Carnival has always been the idea of temporarily subverting the normal function of the city. Streets normally used for car traffic and commerce are given over to revelry and music.

Image credit Dauwd El.

While I heard reports of some renegade bands like a Haitian crew that sounded its way through Prospect Leffert Gardens, and of course Pagwah marched loudly and proudly the several blocks from its home base to the official parade route, once on Flatbush, the overwhelming police presence was a serious vibe killer. Electronic road signs flashing “Lower Music” and then “No Music” were anathema to an event that runs on rhythm, and by the time costumed and painted up revelers subjected themselves to the humiliating experience of a stop-and-frisk pat down on the one night of the year that was supposed to offer liberation from daily life in the city, many looked defeated. The crowds were vastly diminished from years past now that the sunrise no longer served as the climax after hours of street parties.

Band leaders have pledged that they will continue J’Ouvert whatever conditions are imposed upon them. This year’s lack of violence along the route is a good start to beginning a conversation with the city in order to negotiate more relaxed rules that will allow the event to recapture its spirit. I want to remain optimistic but having just finished reading Vanishing New York, which easily could have dedicated a chapter to the J’Ouvert saga in its chronicle of how neoliberalism is destroying every cultural fiber of the city, it’s difficult.

Around 3 am, I took a stroll out from Pagwah mas camp and hung out for a bit on Nostrand Avenue with a half-dozen middle aged guys outside of a store selling Caribbean flags, t-shirts, and other apparel – the kinds of accessories nearly everyone sports on Labor Day. They had a small boombox playing this year’s Carnival Road March on repeat: Ultimate Rejects’ “Full Extreme.”

Image credit Dauwd El.

The chorus, “We jammin’ still,” was a fitting repartee to the city’s crackdown. As the group danced and sang on the sidewalk, blasting an airhorn, a cop sauntered over. He told them they could keep the music on but they had to cut the horn. It was these minor indignities that made this year’s J’Ouvert feel like death by a thousand cuts. But the crew soldiered on, put away the horn, and kept singing: “We jammin’ still”, adding, sotto voce, “officer!”

What’s the fate of Brooklyn’s Caribbean Carnival?

“Checkpoint Babylon.” That’s what one man dressed in white and carrying a conch shell horn kept repeating over and over as we inched forward in a line on Flatbush Avenue, Brooklyn at 6 am on Monday morning. “We living in Trenchtown,” a woman next to him with a Jamaican flag bandana wrapped around her hair responded. The police patted us down, checked our bags, asked us if we had any weapons or alcohol, and confiscated any drinks – even bottled water. It felt like going through a TSA checkpoint at the airport. At least we kept our shoes on.

Image credit Dauwd El.

The scene was incongruous for the wee hours of Labor Day in Brooklyn, but may become the depressing new norm for J’Ouvert, one of the most vibrant grassroots cultural traditions in the immigrant metropolis of New York City, and one that New York City government and the police department are crushing under the weight of onerous restrictions.

For decades, those few hours have been transformed by this Caribbean cultural practice, a patois contraction of the French jour ouvert, to open the day. A spiritual descendent of the Trinidadian 19th century tradition canboulay (another patois for cannes brûlées, burnt canes), J’Ouvert is the wild and free midnight cousin to the increasingly safe and sanitized (no matter how sexualized) daytime Carnivals in the streets of Port of Spain and elsewhere throughout the Caribbean diaspora.

Image credit Dauwd El.

For fleeting precious hours before daybreak on Carnival Monday morning, revelers parade in the streets, dance to the rhythm sections of steeldrum bands and other percussion styles like tamboo bamboo and tasso, and cover each other with paint, mud, and oil. It’s a messy affair, no doubt, but also a prime time for masqueraders to come out on the street dressed up as characters from Caribbean folklore, like jab jabs (devils) or dame lorraines (exaggerated satires of plantation mistresses), so-called “ole mas,” a contrast to the bikinis-and-feathers “pretty mas” that dominates the daytime Carnival processions.

With such a large immigrant population living overseas, Trinidadian Carnival is absolutely a transnational affair, as one scholar has called it, and Brooklyn’s version has actually become more traditional than the homeland. While sound trucks blasting high-decibel soca are now a fixture on the streets of Port of Spain at 3 am during J’Ouvert parties, the Brooklyn version retains a live percussion only policy. Unique J’Ouvert bands representing specific islands start out from different “mas camps” – empty lots, local restaurants and bars, or rented event halls temporarily dedicated to the purpose of prepping for Carnival – throughout central Brooklyn. Under cover of darkness, they wind their way through residential neighborhoods, slowly building a momentum of rhythm until they converge on the wide expanse of Eastern Avenue, Grand Army Plaza, and Flatbush Avenue – the kinds of monumental boulevards and plazas dreamed up by 19th century city planners and perfect for a parade of this magnitude.

Image credit Dauwd El.

For years, Brooklyn J’Ouvert has been marred by an association with violence. It seemed like every time there was a holiday weekend shooting within 20 blocks of the parade route, it was deemed a J’Ouvert-related incident. That correlation was sketchy at best, but sadly the last two years saw high-profile gun crimes very much in the midst of the J’Ouvert revelry. In 2015, Carey Gabay, a Jamaican-American lawyer and aide to New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, got caught in crossfire and died a few days later. Last year, a female college student was shot and killed after refusing the aggressive wining of a male reveler.

In response, neighborhood cultural boosters Caribbeing hosted a street fair to counter negative perceptions of Caribbean cultural celebrations. Last month, they held an artist residency at the Brooklyn Museum where they organized a public forum, think J’Ouvert 101, and a panel discusion on consent during Carnival.

But following the media firestorm after the last two years’ gun crime incidents the city cracked down hard. They established checkpoints for anyone wishing to enter the main parade route, banned alcohol (while open container is illegal, cops have typically looked the other way), and most damningly, pushed the start time back from 4 am to 6 am.

Image credit Dauwd El.

“The idea of greeting the sun as it rises is therefore lost,” Michael Manswell, artistic director of Caribbean arts collective Something Positive told me before J’Ouvert. “It’s the idea of illuminating the darkness, shining a light on what can be a mysterious kind of process.”

Something Positive provided this year’s performance element – elaborate costumes of balancing scales, cross-dressing dame lorraines, and larger-than-life puppets – for Pagwah, a Brooklyn-based J’Ouvert band that celebrated its tenth annual run this year. I played with Pagwah, joining them as we set out from a party hall in a rapidly gentrifying corner of Brooklyn at around 4:30 am. The sky was already beginning to lighten as we marched to the rhythm of a tasso band, passing signs for luxury condominiums, Swedish espresso, and artisan ice cream. I wondered how many new residents to the neighborhood unaware of its Caribbean history called the city’s info line to register noise complaints, a classic dilemma for everything from street parades to music venues in the changing demographics of global cities like New York.

Image credit Dauwd El.

To that extent, the city’s J’Ouvert crackdown had at least one victim. For several years I had watched the wildest and craziest J’Ouvert band emerge blackened and oil-soaked on Eastern Parkway. The Greenhouse Jab Jabs are a Grenadian crew who play Jab mas. In 2014, I joined them for a midnight procession through Crown Heights that was nothing short of chaos, bodies crammed into narrow blocks, black paint everywhere, and a feverish non-stop rhythm section playing from the back of a truck. The cops followed with a close eye and occasionally an NYPD helicopter flew overhead to shine its floodlights on us. But the masses didn’t seem to care – painting or wining up on a police car was greeted with a shrug by the uniformed blue.

But this year, the Jab Jabs retreated indoors. They threw a J’Ouvert fete inside an East Williamsburg warehouse – a serious change of venue and scenery for a group that usually parades through the friendly streets of its own neighborhood. As a private event, they avoided police trouble and were able to spend a few solid hours drinking rum and splashing oil all over the concrete floors and each other while wining down to hits like Charly Black’s Party Animal, Konshens’ Bruk Off Yuh Back, JW & Blaze’s Palance, and the ultimate jab jab anthem – Skinny Banton’s Soak It Good. It was a damn good party and playing J’Ouvert with an ear-splitting sound system was a treat for a Caribbean dance music aficionado like myself, but it didn’t compare to the transgressive act of actually taking the streets. For me, the magic of Carnival has always been the idea of temporarily subverting the normal function of the city. Streets normally used for car traffic and commerce are given over to revelry and music.

Image credit Dauwd El.

While I heard reports of some renegade bands like a Haitian crew that sounded its way through Prospect Leffert Gardens, and of course Pagwah marched loudly and proudly the several blocks from its home base to the official parade route, once on Flatbush, the overwhelming police presence was a serious vibe killer. Electronic road signs flashing “Lower Music” and then “No Music” were anathema to an event that runs on rhythm, and by the time costumed and painted up revelers subjected themselves to the humiliating experience of a stop-and-frisk pat down on the one night of the year that was supposed to offer liberation from daily life in the city, many looked defeated. The crowds were vastly diminished from years past now that the sunrise no longer served as the climax after hours of street parties.

Band leaders have pledged that they will continue J’Ouvert whatever conditions are imposed upon them. This year’s lack of violence along the route is a good start to beginning a conversation with the city in order to negotiate more relaxed rules that will allow the event to recapture its spirit. I want to remain optimistic but having just finished reading Vanishing New York, which easily could have dedicated a chapter to the J’Ouvert saga in its chronicle of how neoliberalism is destroying every cultural fiber of the city, it’s difficult.

Around 3 am, I took a stroll out from Pagwah mas camp and hung out for a bit on Nostrand Avenue with a half-dozen middle aged guys outside of a store selling Caribbean flags, t-shirts, and other apparel – the kinds of accessories nearly everyone sports on Labor Day. They had a small boombox playing this year’s Carnival Road March on repeat: Ultimate Rejects’ “Full Extreme.”

Image credit Dauwd El.

The chorus, “We jammin’ still,” was a fitting repartee to the city’s crackdown. As the group danced and sang on the sidewalk, blasting an airhorn, a cop sauntered over. He told them they could keep the music on but they had to cut the horn. It was these minor indignities that made this year’s J’Ouvert feel like death by a thousand cuts. But the crew soldiered on, put away the horn, and kept singing: “We jammin’ still”, adding, sotto voce, “officer!”

Africa Is a Radio presents #INTLBLK Episode 1

DJ Tomi Tribe

It has been awhile since our last Africa Is a Radio episode. More than a year in fact! Being busy is no excuse, so I’m going to say that the real reason is we’ve been holding back so that we can bring bring you bigger and better things!

So, in the next few months Africa Is a Radio will be expanding! We will now present Africa Is a Radio as a channel with a variety of shows in content and length.

The music will still be with us, and I’m happy to premiere today the first music show, under a new name, from a new location. This is International Black Radio from Los Angeles hosted by myself, DJ Chief Boima and INTL BLK collaborator Nora Rahimian. This episode was a preview for our INTL BLK event last Sunday at the Ace Hotel in downtown LA. It featured a guest mix and interview with Nigerian-Angelino Tomi Tribe, and a guest mix from Afro-Panamanian-Angelina Francesca Harding. Enjoy!

Unequal scenes as educational tools

Vukuzenzele / Sweet Home

On my first trip to Cape Town, South Africa in 2014, Renfrew Christie, recently retried university administrator, offered to give me a tour of the city. We climbed high up into Bishopscourt, a rich suburb on Table Mountain’s edge, where Renfrew informed that our tour would be like peeling back the layers of an onion. I didn’t understand what he meant, but by the time we reached the Cape Flats, the vast sandy expanse of working class neighborhoods in the city, I did. Traveling through the neighborhoods of Cape Town is like peeling back the layers of an onion because each neighborhood, from Bishopscourt down to the Cape Flats, is racially and economically stratified from the one that comes before it. Although I knew these divisions existed, seeing them unfold in real time as we drove through the city opened my eyes in ways that reading about these areas never could.

Unequal Scenes, a new project of aerial photographs by the anthropologist Johnny Miller, chronicles these geographic stratifications in South Africa and beyond. I first discovered Miller’s efforts to show the stratification between the rich and the poor in countries around the world in a piece he had written for the UK Guardian. Miller began this piece with one simple thought: “It’s surprising how looking at something from a new angle can change people’s perspectives.”

 

While Miller’s project includes major international cities including Nairobi and Mexico City, the majority of the the photos feature South African cities, as that country and its fractured landscape was the initial focus of Unequal Scenes. So far, Miller has posted photos from cities throughout South Africa, featuring not only large urban centers such as Johannesburg, Durban, and Cape Town, but also smaller places like Stellenbosch and Pietermaritzburg. Looking down from above (from what Miller terms the “nadir zone”), he uses his imagery to argue that the segregation of urban South Africa is much clearer than the perspective on the ground. He explicitly connects his contemporary imagery to the historical trajectory of Apartheid. Miller writes:

Looking straight down from a height of several hundred meters, incredible scenes of inequality emerge. Some communities have been expressly designed with separation in mind, and some have grown more or less organically. During apartheid, segregation of urban spaces was instituted as policy. Roads, rivers, “buffer zones” of empty land, and other barriers were constructed and modified to keep people separate. 22 years after the end of apartheid, many of these barriers, and the inequalities they have engendered, still exist. Oftentimes, communities of extreme wealth and privilege will exist just meters from squalid conditions and shack dwellings… By providing a new perspective on an old problem, I hope to provoke a dialogue which can begin to address the issues of inequality and disenfranchisement in a constructive and peaceful way.

So as schools and universities come back in session here in the United States, it’s useful to think about how these images could be used as educational tools in our collective classrooms. These images could and indeed should be used in these spaces to challenge the preconceptions that students have when studying Africa. Certainly those who know even very little about South African history know that these stratifications exist, but to see them rendered visually is powerful. These images also serve to challenge images of Africa as monolithic and impoverished.

Hout Bay / Imizamo Yethu

You can follow the Unequal Scenes project on Twitter  and on Facebook. Feel free to send me suggestions via  Twitter  (or use the hashtag  #DigitalArchive) of sites you might like to see covered in future editions of The Digital Archive.

For future disaster preparedness, Sierra Leone could look to Cuba

Magazine Wharf. Image via Wikicommons.

On August 14th, Mudslides in Freetown, Sierra Leone killed 1,000 people, mostly inhabitants of the urban slums in the hills above the capital. Despite its portrayal as a natural disaster caused by days of heavy rain, “the tragedy was entirely man-made,” as writer Lansana Gberie states bluntly. The result of environmental degradation, lack of disaster preparedness and substandard housing for the poor, these deaths could have been avoided.

Much like the Ebola epidemic that killed 4,000 Sierra Leoneans in 2014, the deep roots of this disaster are the neocolonial structures and neoliberal policies that govern Sierra Leone. They assure, as Joshua Lew McDermott, the President of the African Socialist Movement International Support Committee, argues in Jacobin: that “… the levers of the Sierra Leonean state that could have checked the wealth extraction and bolstered domestic industries and social services were done away with in the name of fiscal austerity, debt repayment, and incentivizing foreign investment.”

While poverty constrains the resources available for disaster response, not all governments in poor countries are equally ineffective. The difference in government response is highlighted every time there is a major hurricane in the Caribbean, and many more die in Haiti than in Cuba. For example, Hurricane Matthew killed 546 in Haiti and only four in Cuba despite being of similar intensity in both locations (it also killed 47 Americans).

The government of Cuba, unlike Haiti’s, invests in meteorology, with dozens of weather stations to monitor, predict and track incoming storms. The victims in Sierra Leone sadly had no similar warning system. In Cuba, there are annual preparations and drills in May at the beginning of hurricane season. The military and police make plans for evacuations. In “areas identified as vulnerable,” authorities provide “electrical generators, drinking water and additional medical personnel in advance of the storm’s approach, as members of the community are bestowed with the responsibility of providing such essential services.” Furthermore, the Cuban government provides its citizens with health care and education. “Compared to their Caribbean neighbors, Cubans are far better prepared for emergencies. Not only do they benefit from better infrastructure and housing, as well as a highly effective risk communication system, but more importantly, Cuba is populated by the most educated population in the developing world.” A more educated population better understands the risks posed by hurricanes and how to respond to them.

Although many dismiss Cuba’s success at minimizing the number of deaths due to hurricanes and other natural disasters as possible only in one-party state, “there’s little about its hurricane program that rests on authoritarianism.” While, “the hurricane response may be directed from the top down… it’s carried out by ordinary Cubans in their local communities, building on the regular training they receive.” There is no technical reason why Sierra Leone could not follow such a model of “total mobilization.” The problem is political will.

The real impediment is that neocolonialism and neoliberalism deprive the Sierra Leonean government of the fiscal capacity and policy space to solve the problems of substandard housing and lack of disaster preparedness. Many NGOs are doing an admirable job of replying to the crisis, but disaster relief is a core government function and the Sierra Leonean government is simply too small and disorganized to handle such crises.

One major reason the government is so small is because it deprives itself of necessary tax revenue offering massive tax exemptions to foreign mining companies such as African Minerals and London Mining and agribusinesses such as Addax BioEnergy. As a result, Sierra Leone’s government captures less than 10% of GDP in taxes. Christian Aid estimates “that the government lost revenues from customs duty and Goods and Services Tax exemptions alone worth Le (Sierra Leonean Leone) 966.6bn (US$224m) in 2012, amounting to an enormous 8.3 per cent of GDP. In 2011, losses were even higher – 13.7% of GDP. The annual average loss over the three years 2010-2012 was Le 840.1bn (US$199m).” Even the IMF agrees that Sierra Leone needs to improve tax collection. Yet, the World Bank and IMF insist that Sierra Leone’s development depends on attracting more foreign investment, and implementing more contractionary fiscal and monetary policies – the very same policies that led to the current predicament.

Unchecked development in the hills surrounding Freetown has been “raising fears of landslides and other calamities” for years. But fiscal austerity means there is little money for building adequate housing and enforcing the housing code so that people do not build in areas vulnerable to flooding. For 2016-2018 the Sierra Leonean government has only allocated 4.386 billion Leones a year (less than US$600,000 at the current exchange rate) or about 0.4% of its budget to housing. This figure excludes salaries of about Le 4b for the Ministry of Works, Housing and Infrastructure.

The Sierra Leonean government needs to engage its citizens in regular disaster preparations like those in Cuba. It also needs a national policy for slum upgrading and resettlement. The Sierra Leone Urban Research Centre recommends the government support the construction of housing cooperatives like Our Lady of Charity Housing Cooperative in Uganda as a sustainable, affordable housing solution. We should support activist organizations such as the African Socialist Movement, which work to build a more democratic, egalitarian and accountable Sierra Leone government; one capable of enforcing environmental and housing regulations, building dignified housing and mobilizing citizens to prevent the next disaster.

The Youths

Students march to the Union Buildings in October 2015. Image by Nicholas Rawhani.

When I was a youth, each January 8, the African National Congress, then the dominant liberation movement against apartheid, issued a statement to commemorate its founding and embolden its followers. They were a big deal. Every statement came with a theme in which they dedicated the year to some group (women, the “comrades”, the generic “people”).  A few times they may have declared “The Year of the Youth.”  South Africans were up against the apartheid state and needed all the help it could get. While the ANC was winning the propaganda war abroad, at home with most of our parents brow-beaten or too afraid of apartheid’s power, it was young people–in schools, on campuses—and with nothing to lose – who stepped up. Other liberation movements competed for youth loyalties with the ANC, but the Charterists–as ANC aligned movements were collectively known–captured young people’s imaginations most thoroughly.

Many years later, we are free. Though some of those who were youth leaders have withdrawn from politics, a good many have settled into government jobs as ministerial advisors, spokespersons, party apparatchiks or tenderpreneurs. The ANC Youth League is now led by politically connected businessmen in their late 30s or by party loyalists; captured by the Guptas or deployed in increasingly factional and aggressive ANC succession battles.

For a long time, most observers of South African public life dismissed the cohort of young people who were born in the 1990s – the “born-frees”.  There was a sense that they  lacked political consciousness because they were born into a society in which they no longer needed to fight so viscerally for their basic rights.

As the years flew by after 1994, the ANC still issued January 8 statements, but nobody read them. As poor communities suffered at the hands of an ANC government whose police evicted them from already cramped and substandard housing, shut off their water, locked them up or murdered or shot at them when they protested, many people assumed that most young people simply wanted to shop.  Celebrity culture and consumer capitalism had replaced militancy. Or so it seemed.

Then came Marikana in August 2012. Police killed thirty-four striking miners in the Northwest province; the media captured the scene and replayed it nightly on the news. Some expected mass protests or a revitalization of worker-led movements in response. This was not forthcoming. But, Marikana changed things. Instead of a Workers’ Party (which has disappointingly proved to be a non-starter), the enduring legacy of Marikana is the Economic Freedom Fighters, a party of young people formed in the wake of the tragedy. Its leader Julius Malema came from the ANC Youth League. Brash and opinionated, he had earlier pledged to kill to keep the country’s unpopular and corrupt President, Jacob Zuma, in power. But Malema had been expelled from the ANC, partly for publicly embarrassing President Zuma and the ANC’s national executive committee over the lack of racial and economic transformation and the violence of Marikana. Though some have derided the EFF and Malema for shock tactics and publicity stunts, inside Parliament (and for television and Youtube viewers) the EFF has emerged as a formidable foe for the ANC. The EFF clearly operates in the idiom of working class young people; its protests and putdowns of the ruling party are made for the social media age. Its red overalls are photogenic and Instagrammable and EFF MP’s quips funny and shareable. The EFF has also revitalized youth politics and may have signaled to young people–most with no memory of apartheid and for whom a black government equals power–to exercise their citizenship.

Though protests are common in postapartheid South Africa–think the social movements around housing, water, electricity and, most significantly, AIDS that started in the late 1990s–it would be around higher education where the impetus for a new democratic politics would take form. Until university, public education is free in principle and government spending does not discriminate by race. However, little has been done to improve black primary and high schools schools characterized by overcrowding, no electricity or water supply and dilapidated infrastructure. Black high school students organized by organisations such as  Equal Education, have done much to shame the Minister of Basic Education and remind the government of its obligation. Though their campaigns have been creative, Equal Education never defined the mainstream news cycle in the way some of their older brothers and sisters at South Africa’s twenty-one universities would do in 2015 and 2016.

University students not only made the connections between the ways colonialism and apartheid reproduce racial and class inequalities in South Africa, laid bare the ANC’s broken promises and exposed the negative effects of neoliberalism, but also magnified class differences and the failures of university administrations and curriculums to racially transform.  Ironically of course it took a rise in political organizing on formerly white universities to push these issues into the public domain – for years activists on mainly black campuses had been raising similar complaints. Still, the students were able to make vital connections to outsourcing on campuses and, crucially, began to agitate for free, public higher education.

In what has since taken on mythical proportions, university students disrupted campuses, invented new vocabularies (“decolonization” for one) and opened debates about the nature, extent and compromises which characterized the political transition from apartheid. In the process, they became the most significant national, social movement since the end of apartheid. But also the first middle class black grouping to openly challenge the government and white business on a grand scale.  By the end of 2015, the country’s president Jacob Zuma caved in when he announced (at least temporarily) no future fee increases. The movement has since stalled due to a mix of political factors and reflecting the general stasis in South African politics, but its impact is still felt widely.

I have followed much of this from afar–I have been living in the United States for the last 16 years–and noticed the changes on annual visits to South Africa and in interviews and interactions with some of these young leaders and activists.  (In mid-2015, for example, I was fortunate enough to interview some leaders of Rhodes Must Fall and Open Stellenbosch in Cape Town.) On my most recent visit to South Africa this year, I tagged along with my wife, a professor of politics at Marymount Manhattan College in New York City, her colleague, and a group of her students on a study tour. The American students had studied South Africa’s early 1990s constitutional negotiations; for the South African students their protests attempt to undo what they consider the limits put on decolonization by those negotiations.

Between visiting political landmarks in Cape Town and Johannesburg like the Apartheid Museum, the District 6 Museum and Robben Island, we also met with small groups of student activists in both places. The visiting students hung out socially with young people in Soweto, Braamfontein and central Cape Town. Some of the American students were involved with student government and anti-Trump protests back in New York City. I wanted to know what they made of South African young people.

Like all of them, Maria Andrews, a dancer who also studied political science, was particularly taken by the South African experience and youth politics. Afterwards I asked her what she remembers about her interactions with South African young people. In her telling, the South Africans she met come across as decidedly postapartheid people. For them apartheid is ancient history. As far as they are concerned, the ANC shapes the reality that they confront. “My experiences with young South Africans revealed how aware they are of injustices and how vocal they are about the lack of social rights. Political rights have been given to all, but the social rights and deep institutional change is yet to come to fruition. Young South Africans are looking for something new in the political landscape and many of them are demanding change now in places very personal to them.”

What Maria was describing was the opportunities and challenges presented by the crisis of postnationalist politics: what comes after the ANC and its alliance, now that their politics have run its course. The question is whether young South Africans  are up for it. It’s not yet clear to what extent these young people are still in thrall to the ANC’s  power (even the EFF flirts publicly with “returning” to the ANC, and many student leaders understandably find whites’ criticism of Zuma hard to stomach). Even for those quick to challenge the whiteness  of capital or the whiteness of universities, it can be hard to confront the fact that it is the ANC which has controlled the state for the last two decades. Despite the fact that the ANC haven’t done enough to use that power to improve the lives of the black majority, instead squandering it to enrich a small, politically connected clique and to implement neoliberal economic policies, the ANC “brand” still compels. And though some parlayed their experiences with Fees Must Fall into off-campus struggles (take Reclaim the City or Ndifuna Ukwazi’s housing struggles in Cape Town or putting violence against women and patriarchy firmly on the agenda), very few youth leaders can fully interrogate the relevance of their symbolic struggles to the wider population.  Finally, in their rush to adopt and mimic popular, overtly racialized discourses from elsewhere (especially the United States), they risk missing the rich vein of possibility to be mined from South Africa’s own history of building cross-class, cross-race and mass-based movements.

The kids could still be alright.  Maybe.

 

* An edited version of this post appeared in the South African newspaper, City Press, as part of a partnership with Thought We Had Something Going.

The Arab Left at an Impasse

Ten years after the financial crisis and subsequent global recession, the decades-old grip of neoliberal ideology is coming loose in the political and economic center of the system built under its auspices.

Though the crisis and recession were quite obviously global in scale, they produced a particular political outcome in the Arab world; that of regime-destabilizing mass movements. The Arab Spring uprisings and the most recent political repudiations of neoliberalism in the First World – part of the same wider ongoing process in which the international economic and political order of the past 40 years, characterized by American political dominance internationally and neoliberal ideological hegemony – may be coming to end.

In 2011, the mass of people in the Arab world made their demands explicitly in these terms; they called for the fall of their countries’ regimes and economic systems. The Arab political scene had been revitalized after decades of stagnation.

Many on the left saw great potential in these developments and hoped that achieving liberal democracy would be a first step towards materializing those demands; that, given the chance, the mass of people would vote to dismantle the structures that were maintaining American dominance in the Arab world and reverse the neoliberal economic policies that so characterizes its economies.

The setbacks suffered by Arab revolution since then are undeniably deep. Seven years into the revolution, that fiery articulation of political and economic demands has been subsumed by the same ideological binary that characterized the Arab states before the revolutions; that of secular authoritarianism and its Islamist critique.

That the revolutions ultimately failed to transcend this decades-old political stagnation is the central tragedy – not only a product of the social and economic problems caused by neoliberalism, as many have argued, but of the way neoliberalism functions as an ideology.

 

Neoliberalism and Modernity

Far more than an empty epithet, as those on the right maintain, neoliberalism is also more than a set of economic policies. Neoliberals not only maintain that there is no alternative to the market, but that such a position is apolitical. Any attempt to posit an alternative brings the subjectivity of politics into the clean, technical and objective realm of economic questions, producing distortions. When put into practice through the policies of powerful states and international financial institutions, neoliberalism’s central claim – that a very specific conception of the boundary between the market and state is not only superior to all others, but actually beyond political contestation – necessarily circumscribes political possibilities.

This claim is both a product of the economic and political conditions in which neoliberalism ascended to hegemonic status in the late 1970s, and an ideological feature that has helped maintain that hegemony since the international economic order established after World War II – its ideological underpinnings, characterized by Keynesianism in the West and its socialist challenger – began unraveling in the wake of a series of economic and political crises.

This unraveling had significance far beyond the fate of specific economic theories or political projects. The crises of the 1970s facilitated a general disillusionment. Long-held assumptions about the nature and possibilities of modernity itself were brought into question, as “the ideology of the modern lost its nerve, its self-confidence, its interventionist logic and expansive spirit, and became dégonflé and insipid.”

As the American Marxist philosopher Marshal Berman put it, “The great economic boom that had gone on beyond all expectations, for a quarter of century after the Second World War, was coming to a close…. Horizons for expansion and growth abruptly shrank…”

Postmodern subjectivism emerged from the ashes of the “grand narratives” that were central to project of modernity. The idea of an objective understanding of politics or economics, even in aspiration, became passé, rubbished by intellectuals, most vehemently by those that would become the postmodern left. Emphasis shifted from the object and the empirical to the subject and to discourse. Much of the left discarded the class analysis that was once the core of its project, as yet another grand narrative to be critiqued. Identity politics, with its atomized conception of oppression has its origin in this reaction against modernity.

As the international economic landscape shifted, it became less favorable to Keynesianism and Soviet socialism, and these alternatives to liberalism became less and less viable. Economic questions were relegated to the “technical expertise” of right-wing economists and removed from the sphere of political contestation.

In the Third World, the economic crises of the 1970s also undermined the long-held belief that industrialization and economic modernization could be achieved through controlling the state. After all, the Soviet Union, champion of this of model, was reeling and beginning its disintegration. The idea that the Third World could “catch up” to the former colonial masters through industrialization was no longer viable. Structural adjustment programs, made up of sharp cuts to social spending and the public sector, were pushed onto Third World states by international financial institutions.

 “Exit from History”

In the Arab world, this disillusionment preceded the collapse of Bretton Woods. A surprise attack initiated by Israel completely decimated the Arab armies in 1967 and severely undermined the discourse of pan-Arab nationalism, which was at the height of its power in the late 1960s. The “New Men” who came to power in the early 1950s sought to erase the Arab world they inherited and build it anew, embracing scientific progress, republicanism, and socialism. They posited themselves as the vanguards of modernity, defined against the backwardness that had lost everything in the first half of the century, had been exposed as failures.

Faisal Darraj, in the forward to a reprint of Sadik Al-Azm’s seminal interrogation of the state of the Arab world after the war, 1967: Self Criticism After the Defeat, quotes Egyptian economist Dr. Fawzy Mansour, who captured the long-term effect of the defeat perfectly as “the exit of Arabs from history.”

This condition is not relegated to the past. As Nadya Sbaiti, co-founder of Jadiliyyah put it,

the legacies of 1967 envelop us and permeate everyday life in Lebanon. Daily we elbow our way through their viscosity, wondering why movement and breath and vision are limited. We take comfort in the invisibility of these legacies, convince ourselves that we have escaped, even as we have spent fifty years wiping the gelatinous tendrils from our very selves.”

Hesham Sallam, co-editor of the same outlet agrees:

somehow in the year 2017, the [1967 war]… for Egypt is not merely a legacy of the past or a distant memory that reemerges as its anniversary nears. While regime forces initially coined the term naksa (setback) to minimize the defeat, in everyday practice and use it has come to mean a broad-ranging defeat. Today, the naksa in Egypt epitomizes a lived reality, one in which defeat is experienced daily. It also captures the state of fear that many Egyptians confront as they contemplate imminent threats that could affect their daily lives. In the Egypt of Abdel-Fattah Al-Sisi, every day is 1967.

 

The Economy of Defeatism

Politically and military defeated, the Egyptian regime pivoted hard to the right in terms of economic policy after Nasser died in 1970. Anwar Sadat’s infitah, or economic opening, paved the way for other Arab governments to follow suit. In Latin America, the 1980s became known as the “lost decade,” but the Arab states actually experienced worse economic growth performance than Latin America did during the 1980s.

Throughout this period, Arab regimes from Morocco to Jordan implemented economic reforms that constituted neoliberal restructuring, including the reduction of subsidies on food and other consumer goods, reduction of government expenditures in general and reduced public investment, which caused workers and peasant families to bear the brunt of austerity. International lending to Arab states also increased dramatically during the 1970s and remained very high well into the 1980s. In response to austerity, food riots exploded in Egypt in 1977, Morocco in 1981, Tunisia in 1983, and Jordan in 1989, and Algeria experienced the near toppling of the government in the late 1980s, which led to civil war in the 1990s. “Sudan in 1979/1980, Morocco in 1983, Tunisia and Egypt in 1987, and Jordan in 1989 all turned to the IMF and World Bank for financial and technical assistance. Algeria, Yemen, and Lebanon followed suit during the 1990s.”

While the state-led model put into practice by the Arab nationalist regimes ultimately succumbed to its own economic contradictions, it at least produced coherent systems with a clear set of social goals. In that sense, statism in the Arab world was a modern endeavor par excellence, guided by the assumption that, through policy, the power of the state could be harnessed to erase the backwardness of the past and build society anew. The grand narrative of the Arab nationalists – that through the revolutions of the young military officers, the Arab masses could transcend the defeat and division of the first half of the 20th century – was dealt a fatal blow in just six days, the narrative that came to replace it put the task of reversing the defeats of the past even deeper into another plane.

 

Islamism as Critique

Placing Islamism into this context is essential to understanding its contemporary popular appeal. The region-wide pivot away from statism and the abandonment of confrontation with Israel stripped the Arab nationalist regimes of their legitimating tenants: socialism and anti-imperialism. The “social contract” that Arab regimes built themselves around disintegrated. The gains of the modern era were reversed through austerity that evolved into full-blown, neoliberal economic restructuring.

This was fertile ground for the articulation of the Islamist discourse, which posited the political and economic crises in the Arab world in culturalist terms. Islamists understood the failure of Arab nationalism not as a result of the limits of authoritarian state-capitalist development, but the failure of a foreign conception of modernity, itself in crisis globally.

The discourse of development itself is vulnerable to these culturalist critiques. It is, of course, a Eurocentric discourse, that makes it impossible to contemplate a future in which the rest of the world does not resemble Europe socially and economically; the process of development was understood as “the diffusion of the superior model” – the European model, to the rest of the world.

For Islamists, the conception of modernity posited by Arab nationalist regimes was nothing more than an attempt to reshape Arab society in the image of Europe, at the expense of all that was authentically Islamic. The 1967 period and the decline of the Arab nationalist project was explained in simple and devastatingly appealing terms by the Islamists; “The Arabs renounced their faith in God, and God renounced them,” in the words of Islamic Studies scholar Salah al-Din al Munajjid.

As the ailing Arab nationalist regimes abandoned their social commitments in favor of austerity and debt repayments, and embraced deeply unpopular alliances with the United States, Islamism served as a powerful and all-encompassing critique of the status quo.

Stripped of their raison d’être, the regimes had no response to this ideological challenge. Increasingly unpopular and authoritarian, their discourses were reduced to little more than a negation of Islamism. The United States and its newly oil-rich allies in the Gulf poured in military and political support for these regimes in order to secure a favorable and durable regional order. At the same time, the credibility of the left had been decimated by the defeat of 1967 and the decline of the Soviet Union.

By 2011, after decades of dropping trade barriers, lowering wages and privatizing industries, Arab governments had reduced the social protections necessary for their populations of to cope with the increases in unemployment and commodity prices and the stagnation in wages that were characteristic of the global recession. The gutting of state industry and the opening of trade policy paid dividends for those who were well connected to the state bourgeoisie that had developed during the state-capitalist period in many countries. But these changes left the mass of people more vulnerable to international economic crises and reeling from a deepening sense of social inequality, which increased significantly from 1985 to 2009, and very high youth unemployment.

The political opening that uprisings carved out gave Islamist parties the chance to turn their popular support into political power after years of exclusion. In Egypt and Tunisia, electoral victories by Islamists, and poor showings by the attered or coopted left set the stage for the resurgence of the old regimes. The Islamists’ brief stints in power demonstrated the hollowness of that program and gave the remnants of the old regimes the opportunity to stage a massive and crushing comeback. The battle between the old regime and the Islamic State, where it was able to take hold, epitomized the wider crisis in the Arab world today. From Morocco to Syria, the Islamists and regimes  reinforce each other at every turn.

 

The Left, the Right, and the Counter Revolution

As the revolution developed into a battle between the old regimes and the Islamists, comparisons to the Algerian Civil War are more and more fitting. As Jean Pierre Filiu argues in his 2015 book, From Deep State to Islamic State: The Arab Counter-Revolution and its Jihadi Legacy, the Algerian experience had a deep impact on the region:

This is how this ‘Arab counter-revolution’ was conceived: not as a paradoxical sequel, but as a study of the repressive dynamics designed to crush any hope of democratic change, through the association of any revolutionary experience with the worst collective nightmare.

Filiu argues that Arab regimes developed a symbiotic relationship with Islamists in the 1980s and 1990s, as they leveraged the threat of Islamism to get political and military support from Western powers, while using the specter of Islamism to dismiss any calls for political openings from their own populations.

This is most clearly at play in Egypt and Syria, where leaders El-Sisi and Assad respectively have come to define themselves against Islamism. As Flilu explains, “Assad’s regime needed the jihadi threat both to exist and to be controlled, since ‘key component of its [the regime’s] survival stems from the comparison he [Assad] nurtures abroad with a worse threat than himself.” To that end, Assad has even released known jihadists from prison “to quickly radicalize the opposition, discrediting it in the process.” The strategy, which many Assad supporters on the Western left and the far right have bought into, is a reproduction of the discourse of the War on Terror, that the only way to contain the threat of Islamism, which is understood as an inherit  feature of Arab society, is through authoritarianism and military force.

 

The Left and Islamism in Egypt and Tunisia

Even in Tunisa and Egypt, left-wing parties and politicians have folded to this type of thinking.

Egypt may have a rich tradition of grass-roots socialist politics, but it was Hamdeen Sabahi, who narrowly missed the runoff round of the 2012 presidential elections, who was the only major political figure of the left to emerge in the post-revolution landscape. Running on a campaign platform informed by the legacy of Gamal Abdel Nasser, Sabahi maintained that the solution to Egypt’s woes was neither the Islamism of Mohammed Morsi, nor the return to the status quo ante, represented by his other opponent, Ahmed Shafik, but, a refocused economic policy geared toward generating employment at home and reducing inequality.

Mohamed Morsi’s victory and the discontent that boiled over under his brief rule, led Sabahi to throw his lot in with the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces and support the 2013 coup d’état that eventually put El-Sisi into power. Sabahi expended all of his political capital, which was substantial at the time, on supporting the discourse of the old regime; that secular authoritarianism is the only way to counter the threat posed by Islamism. Sabahi has since declared opposition to El-Sisi’s authoritarianism and vicious austerity, but it’s difficult to imagine his political recovery.

In Tunisia, the trajectory of Ennehda, the major Islamist party, and the remnants of the old regime also highlight their respective inability to deal with the problems that sparked the revolution. Ennehda achieved a legislative election victory in 2012, but its government was racked by instability, which culminated in the assassination of two prominent leftists in 2013. Amidst the ensuing crisis, mass protests pressured Ennehda to step down, a decision that likely saved Tunisia from going down the Egyptian route. Mohamed Beji Caid Essebsi, an old regime figure in his late 80s, hastily formed the Nidda Tounes party in opposition to Ennehda and won the next round of legislative elections and the presidency. His party “founded precisely in opposition to the Islamist party” capitalizing on the rising unpopularity of Ennehda, fear over Islamist violence, and the ouster of Mohammed Morsi.

Like El-Sisi in Egypt, the platform of Essebsi and his party is nothing more than the negation of Islamism. On economic questions, there is little to differentiate Essebsi from Ben Ali or even from Ennehda itself. Nidda Tunis’ lack of program is further demonstrated by the recent decision of Essebsi to name his son as the next party leader.

Unable to form a majority government without Ennehda, Nidda Tounes invited their former rivals into a coalition government, much to the shock and dismay of their respective voter bases. Meanwhile, the Tunisian left has been warming to Assad. The General Union of Tunisian Workers (UGTT), which the main union in the country sent a delegation to meet with the Assad regime last week and encouraged the resumption of diplomatic ties, which were cut in 2012.

The unstable coalition deal may have saved the political process in Tunisia, but it exposes another of the central tragedies of the Arab revolution so far; underneath the battle of discourses and questions of identity, Islamists and their old regime adversaries largely agree on economic issues. While politics in Tunisia and Egypt remain subsumed by the same ideological binary that has dominated the Arab world since the 1970s, both countries have signed fresh structural adjustment agreements with the International Monetary Fund.

The setbacks faced by the Arab revolution demonstrate that neither Islamism nor a return to secular authoritarianism – whether it purports to be anti-imperialist or not – is equipped to address the political and economic problems the Arab world is facing. The Arab left needs to be more than the negation of Islamism, it needs to offer an alternative to the economic and political models that have impoverished the Arab world, it needs to chart a path out of the impasse.

The low bar for African elections

João Lourenço in Lubango. Image credit Francisco Bernardo (JAImagens) via ‘Eu sou João Lorenço’ Flickr.

Voting is a low bar for measuring democracy. Shenanigans in recent US elections, not to mention low voter turn-out, ought to be enough to make us question just how useful a metric they are. But let someone declare African elections “free and fair” and announce a clear winner and Western countries scramble to congratulate the new leader and proclaim the country democratic. Not Rwanda. More like Kenya in mid-August or the latest: Angola. 

Angola’s MPLA came to power after a messy decolonization and the country tipped into a civil war fanned by the Cold War. In 1975 they waited for recognition. That is no longer the case. Then as now, Western endorsement of MPLA rule is more an index of Western interests than of Angolan democracy.

Angolans voted last Wednesday, August 23, 2017 for the fourth time since 1992. The next day the National Electoral Commission (CNE) announced preliminary results that gave the MPLA a victory. On Facebook, some Angolans decried the numbers as oddly similar to elections results from 2012. By Friday, opposition party UNITA and CASA-CE members of the CNE contested those results as illegal (they were not based on a count of votes from voting commissions in municipalities and provinces as the law dictates). Later that day, the CNE announced revised numbers. Opposition parties undertook a parallel counting process using voting returns from polling stations. As of today, no final total vote counts have come out. But you can read the preliminary results here from the CNE.

The international press, despite widespread formal and informal contestation in Angola, has announced the CNE’s Thursday results as if they were true and good. Portuguese President Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa went so far as to congratulate João Lourenço on his victory. This gesture made the watchdog blog makaangola balk. The New York Times reported the results and had a small piece on the opposition’s refusal to confirm them. The rest of the English language press only reported the CNE’s announcement. For most of the world and the international press, MPLA victory was a foregone conclusion. This was evident in the questions journalists asked in e-mails and live radio interviews. And it reflects the interests of Western countries in the economy and regarding regional and global security.

Under Ronald Reagan, the US supported Jonas Savimbi’s UNITA. But since recognizing MPLA government in 1993 under the Clinton administration, the U.S. has maintained good relations with the MPLA. Despite tensions around the question of money laundering, a fact which has kept US banks from selling American dollars to Angolan banks, diplomacy and business have gone well.

In May 2017 then Minister of Defense and MPLA presidential candidate João Lourenço visited Washington DC. Read this transcript from the public announcement of the MOU signed between Angola and the US Department of Defense. It sounds to me like General Mattis is counting on and hoping for Lourenço’s victory. And this interview with the Washington Post (two days before the vote) treated him as the obvious winner in last week’s elections. I could find no similar interviews with opposition party candidates Isaias Samakuva (UNITA) or Abel Chivukuvuku (CASA-CE), both of whom speak excellent English, by the way (not a prerequisite, just an interesting fact).

Rubber stamping the MPLA results is perhaps not surprising for governments whose interests in business and security top the diplomatic agenda. But it is disappointing to see the major wire services and newspapers only echoing that move. In fact, the contestation of the results that has made the CNE backtrack and actually count the votes, public comments by UNITA generals discussing the gravity of war in the face of MPLA threats that disputing results means taking the country back to war, the close electoral monitoring by new civil society organizations like Jiku, and the preliminary results that have come back that show the MPLA losing in Cabinda and with less than 50% of the vote in Luanda is, in fact, big news. And it is the greatest evidence of democracy, i.e. a vibrant and vocal civil society demanding dialogue from the state.