Sean Jacobs's Blog, page 272

Alex La Guma (in the words of Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o)

Alex La Guma and his son, Barto, in London in 1972. Image by George Hallett.

He was not there in person — he was under house arrest back in apartheid South Africa — but Alex La Guma dominated the literary discussions at the 1962 Conference of African Writers of English Expression, held at Makerere University in Kampala, Uganda. Among the attendants were some of the leading writers of the continent, and they included Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka, and Christopher Okigbo from Nigeria, Kofi Awoonor of Ghana, and a group of exiled South African writers, among them Es’kia Mphahlele, Lewis Nkosi, Arthur Maimane, and Bloke Mod-isane. La Guma’s book A Walk in the Night had just been released by the Mbari Writers Club in Nigeria, founded by Ulli Beier among others. La Guma’s realism was often compared and contrasted with that of Chinua Achebe’s, whose novel Things Fall Apart had been published by Heinemann in 1958. It’s interesting that both novels had titles drawn from English literature — Shakespeare in the case of La Guma, and Yeats in the case of Chinua Achebe — reflecting the dominance of English literature in the education of the writers present. But the two texts were seen as mapping new directions in African literature in English, heralding the Africa emerging from colonial domination. Alex La Guma spoke to me and to this emergent Africa from the place of his house arrest through his words.

I met Alex La Guma in person for the very first time in Sweden at the 1967 Afro-Scandinavian Writers’ Conference held at Hässelby Castle, Stockholm. Those attending included Wole Soyinka (Nigeria), Albert Memmi (Tunisia), Kateb Yacine (Algeria), Tchicaya U Tam’si (Congo), and Dan Jacobson (South Africa). In the course of delivering the opening lecture “The Writer in Modern Africa,” Soyinka made a reference to the African writer in some independent African country and who, in despair, was reduced to carrying guns and holding up radio stations.

It was of course a reference to himself, but it was Alex La Guma’s response that raised the whole question of the role of violence in revolutionary change. As a South African, he said he was prepared to run guns and hold up radio stations, because, whether as writers or common laborers, the situation called for fundamental change. I was struck by his coupling of writers and workers and by his speaking on behalf of the working class in apartheid South Africa. For him, the writer was a worker with a pen. In person, he dominated the discussion in Sweden much as his text A Walk in the Night had done at Makerere five years earlier.

La Guma was tall, serious, and focused, but once I did see another side of him. It was at a party held for us at some house in Stockholm. When some jazz music was put on, I saw Alex La Guma, on the floor, jiving. Yes, he could jive! He was free, the picture of one who loved life.

Six years later in September 1973, he and I would meet again, this time in Moscow on our way to the Fifth Conference of Afro-Asian Writers at Alma-Ata in Kazakhstan, then part of the Soviet Union. This meeting followed previous ones held in other capitals including New Delhi, Tashkent, and Cairo. Among those attending were Okot p’Bitek (Uganda), David Rubadiri (Malawi), and Lenrie Peters (Gambia). Our guide was the late Victor Ramzes who had done so much to translate African writing into Russian. It was during this visit that discussions began about La Guma returning to tour the Soviet Union and write whatever he wanted to write about it. I was also asked if I, too, would come back and do the same. The invitations were out there.

I never took up the offer, or rather, when eventually I did in 1975, it was not to tour the Soviet Union, but to go to Chekhov’s house in the Caucasus mountains overlooking Yalta to complete my novel, Petals of Blood. That was also the last time I met Alex La Guma, but in a hospital in Moscow.

The last time I heard of him he was the ANC representative in Cuba, and then the loss, in October 1985. He never lived long enough to see post-apartheid South Africa, but he had no doubt that it would come to be, or rather he had seen and predicted it in his novel In the Fog of the Seasons’ End.

I felt his loss in a very personal way. I always felt him to be a kindred spirit. His spirit of hope lives on in the books he left us. He is a central figure alongside Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka, and others in the making and consolidation of modern African literature.

But I will always carry the image of the Alex La Guma whom I once saw jiving the night away in Stockholm, a year after his exile from the South Africa he loved. In his life and books, he struggled for a society in which all people could find their humanity. Joy in life was part of that humanity, and it comes through in his novels and memoir.

* The above is the foreword for the new edition of A Soviet Journey (2017) by the South African writer and activist, Alex La Guma (1925-1985). First published by Progress Publishers in Moscow in 1978, A Soviet Journey is today one of the longest accounts of the USSR by an African writer. La Guma was a lifelong member of the South African Communist Party (SACP), and his father James (“Jimmy”) La Guma was a founder of its earlier version, the Communist Party of South Africa (CPSA), during the 1920s. A Soviet Journey consequently points to the longevity and intergenerational nature of leftist politics in South Africa, as well as the global political and intellectual engagements of South African writing during the anti-apartheid years. The book is an aspirational work, viewing the Soviet system as having achieved political and economic justice and, thus, providing a paradigm for a future South Africa. Both La Guma and Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o published in the famed African Writers Series edited by Chinua Achebe, resulting in the eventual canonization of their work. Ngũgĩ here reflects on this early period of postcolonial African literature and his friendship with La Guma. —Christopher J. Lee

Voting in Angola

On the morning of August 23rd, I voted for the first time in my life.

It was an anti-climactic affair; none of the clichéd long winding lines stretching into the African bush, full of people who had walked for miles under a scorching sun; I had simply gotten into my car, driven 3-5 minutes under a drab, cloudy cacimbo morning to a nearby private school and cast my vote. After an eleven-year wait to vote in my own country, I was in and out of the polling station in less than 3 minutes.

I left Angola as a young child and was raised in the United States, where I lived for the better part of 20 years. My education – primary school through college – was steeped in the virtues of democracy and rule of law. As a teenager I was very much involved in the country’s democratic process, participating in student government, leadership programs in the US Capitol, and volunteering for John Kerry’s campaign in Northern Virginia. The rather comic twist, however, was that I couldn’t vote because I’m not an American citizen.

Angola has less frequent elections than the US. As a war-ravaged, single-party Marxist-Leninist state until 1992, our first multi-party elections were only held that year. UNITA, one of the warring parties, and the MPLA never contested the second round of the intensely contested presidential election and the country descended into a final, 10 year war that lasted until the death of Jonas Savimbi in battle on February 2002. It marked the first time Angola began to experience a definitive peace since before its independence. It also marked a return of regular elections.

In 2008 Angola held its first ever elections since the end of the war; I was unable to vote because of school commitments, and the Angolan government refuses to grant Angolans living abroad the right to vote. MPLA, the ruling party, won by these legislative landslide with 82% of the vote. Between 2008 and 2010, the MPLA became drunk with power and wealth. Oil was hovering around $100 a barrel and we were producing over a million barrels per day.

People in the party and those connected to them became richer than they ever thought possible. Institutional Corruption flourished. Not content with its absolute control of the government, in 2010 MPLA changed the constitution (the opposition boycotted the vote) and abolished direct presidential elections. From then on, the first person in the list of candidates of the winning political party automatically becomes president; the second person on that list becomes vice-president.

By the time the 2012 elections came around, in which I again couldn’t vote because of work commitments in the US, many Angolans had grown disillusioned with the MPLA, the rampant corruption and the inability of the government to deliver on their promises of redistribution of wealth, job creation and better access to basic goods. Nonetheless, MPLA won with 72% of the vote, such was their control on the press, the public coffers, and civil society.

In 2013 I drank the proverbial Kool Aid and moved back to Angola, thinking that, despite ample evidence to the contrary, the country was poised for sustainable growth.

I was wrong.

People here like to joke that the country’s true opposition party is the price of oil. In 2015 the oil prices collapsed, and so did Angola’s completely oil-dependent economy. The MPLA’s gross mismanagement was exposed for all to see: corruption scandals flourished on a weekly basis, banks failed under the weight of bad loans to the party’s nomenclature, hospitals had no syringes, gloves, or medicine, numerous state companies stopped paying salaries infrastructure development ground to a halt. The hundreds of kilometers of roads built in the preceding decade began to crumble, in yet another example of government mismanagement and misuse of public funds. Over the next two years, Angolans began to realize that our economic development wasn’t such a miracle after all. It was simply a matter of high oil prices.

For the MPLA, the 2017 elections couldn’t possibly have come at a worse time. For many of us future voters, here was an opportunity to finally demonstrate to the ruling regime that we were fed up with their mismanagement, their corruption, their inability to diversify our economy, their incapacity to truly respect democracy, the rule of law, and individual freedoms. These elections, and the run up to them, finally offered us an outlet to vent, to let it all out. But we wanted to do it right and make it count. We knew we had to combat electoral fraud, a fundamentally and unapologetically biased press, controlled by the ruling party, and an Electoral Commission that was simply an extension of the same party, with only less than half of it made up of members from other parties.

Several of my friends and family members had grown disillusioned with Angola’s election process, saying (and rightly so) that the playing field was inherently unfair, unbalanced and deeply favored the ruling party. Many more, however, were raring to vote. It felt that the MPLA would finally get a proper challenge. Yes, they were expected to win – it would be hard for them, as all-powerful incumbents, not to do so – but the opposition was empowered. Their rallies attracted thousands of people throughout the country, but perhaps the biggest crowds appeared right here in Luanda.

Unlike the ruling party, which orders public servants to attend, trucks people in like cattle from surrounding villages and closes schools, state businesses and provincial governments to make sure their rallies are well attended, opposition parties rely on their supporter’s free will.

Although elections in Angola are still lacking in many aspects seen in more advanced African democracies, such as vigorous debate (João Lourenço, number one on MPLA’s list, refused to participate in one) and ample discussion on the merits and shortcomings of each party’s government manifesto, campaigns here are reduce to littering the street’s with their political flags, 5 minutes of state-mandated airtime on television and 10 minutes on the radio. Credit however must be given to the two main opposition parties – UNITA and CASA-CE – for doing their best in conveying their hopes for Angola in that short amount of time.

In the run-up to the elections, the ruling party, short on cash and resources but knowing for certain that their popularity had decreased substantially since the last polls, began a relentless, all-encompassing media campaign to hammer home their message. In 2120 TV and radio minutes monitored by Jiku, an election monitoring platform of which I am a volunteer, 1215 of those minutes, or 79.5%, were dedicated to the MPLA. During the last few days of the campaign, all pretense was tossed aside and our only two television stations aired documentaries about the Angolan civil war, tacitly implying that a vote against the MPLA was a vote in confusão.

Despite the negative rhetoric, people turned out to vote all throughout Angola. Abstention rates, so high in 2012 (37%) due in part to the purposeful incompetence of the Electoral Comission, dropped substantially this year. Most polling stations in downtown Luanda had little to no lines, there were delegates present from most competing parties, and the entire process seemed organized.

I had my mind set on who I was going to vote for several days before I drove to my station, presented my voting card and was pointed towards my voting booth. Voting for a party other than the MPLA felt liberating. A small, insignificant act of rebellion, alone in a voting booth made up of cardboard boxes, heart pounding, hand steady, trying to do something about this postponed dream of a country. I picked my party, folded the paper, and put it in the ballot box; someone gently grabbed my hand and dabbed my finger in the indelible paint. Vote cast, I went home. It was over. For me and millions of other Angolans throughout the day.

As I type this, there are still no official, definitive results as to who won the elections. Thinking that the vote tallying would start that night, my girlfriend and I hosted a little get-together at our house so that we could watch the incoming results with our friends. CASA-CE even set up a website where the results were updated in real-time, as soon as their delegates in each voting station sent official numbers to party headquarters.

The website lasted about an hour until it succumbed to traffic overload; it was later taken off air. The next day, an MPLA spokesperson claimed, on national radio and television, that his party had obtained a qualified majority. A few hours later, the National Electoral Commission (NEC) mirrored his statement. The opposition cried foul, because according to our Electoral Law, the Commission can only release provisional results after receiving them from each Provincial Electoral Commission.

Astoundingly, not a single province had sent their results to the NEC in Luanda. No-one knew where the numbers came from. The next day, seven members of the Electoral Commission called a public press conference and distanced themselves from the NEC’s provisional results, saying that contrary to the law they did not have access to any official vote tallies, had not received a single result from the provinces, and had no idea where the NEC had gotten its numbers. Once again, Angola’s institutions betrayed the people they were meant to serve.

Today, seven days after the vote, we still don’t have official results accepted by all parties.

The dark and white side of conservation in Kenya

Image credit Regina Hart via Flickr

Conflict between pastoralists and white landowners in recent months has brought the Laikipia region of Kenya to the attention of international audiences. News coverage of these conflicts reached an apex in April with the shooting of renowned landowner and memoirist Kuki Gallmann. In previous weeks, Gallmann’s safari lodge had been burned by vandals, and her neighbor, Tristan Voorspuy, had been shot and killed. Speaking to journalist Tristan McConnell for a piece featured in The Guardian on June 18, Gallmann assured the world that she is “unbowed” and pledged to “outlast” land invaders. The article featured photos of Gallmann sulking next to the corpse of an elephant, and grinning smugly in her hospital bed displaying her casted arm.

Though international media outlets face pressure to make content relatable to Euro-American audiences, the Laikipia crisis has exposed how easily white landowners in Kenya can utilize the trope of the maddened land invader to conjure global support for a land system that deprives millions of pastoralists from accessing vital subsistence resources. As McConnell’s June article achieved wide readership around the globe, African Affairs blogger Samira Sawlani stated “[I] really really want to see more Kenyan journalists’ views on this in the intl media.” The following week, New York Times East Africa bureau chief Jeffrey Gettleman penned a feature pinning the Laikipia crisis on the “loss of fertile land” in Kenya, claiming the little rainfall Laikipia now receives is as useless as “a hose spraying a driveway.” Not only does Gettleman withhold the fact that Laikipia has never been auspicious to cultivation, but grants preferential space to white ranchers and foreign conservationists with a vested interest in seeing Kenya’s pastoral lands enclosed.

White Kenyans own a disproportionate amount of land and tourism infrastructure in Laikipia, and are also, says anthropologist Janet McIntosh, “disproportionally symbolic” of the benefits that wildlife conservation can provide. Today, throughout Africa, nature conservation and safari tourism remain sectors where citizens of European descent hold a drastic edge over African competitors. Since the colonial period, wildlife conservation has been a leading occupation for many of Kenya’s most recognizable white figures. Gettleman, McConnell and other international journalists have drawn on the celebrity of such figures to help sell their stories to Western audiences.

In the wake of Gallmann’s shooting, international media sources referred to her unequivocally as a “conservationist,” without regard for political nature of that title. Even among some of Kenya’s most conservative white landowners, Gallmann has a reputation for being unaccommodating of African neighbors, and of justifying her exclusionary land management approach using racialized rhetoric revealed in her autobiography, I Dreamed of Africa. Made into a high-budget Hollywood film in 2000, the book is Gallmann’s testimony to the sacrifices she has endured in protecting her ranch. Gallmann’s writings have been controversial for depicting Africans as profligate land stewards, “polluted by alien religions, by poverty, and a lack of worthy goals.” In the process, white Kenyan landowners like Gallmann have advanced the narrative that they are the only ones qualified to conserve Kenya’s land and wildlife. Following the killing of Voorspuy, journalist and white rancher Aidan Hartley described him in The Spectator as having turned his ranch from a “dustbowl […] into a very successful tourism and ranching enterprise, full of game, employing hundreds [and] paying lashings of tax.”

Though Kuki Gallmann has become an icon of white landownership in Kenya, she is in fact a relative latecomer to Laikipia, which was settled by Europeans in the early 1900s. Through a series of deceitful agreements with Maasai, British authorities pushed pastoralists to the margins of Laikipia to make room for European settlement. In the 1990s, many white Kenyans saw their wealth grow as community-based conservation became a policy paradigm in East Africa. In recent decades, international conservation groups (with support from the U.S. Government) have made significant funding available to landowners like Gallmann who are positioned to pursue conservation outside national parks.

Though Laikipia received unprecedented numbers of foreign tourists in recent years, community members complain that tourists only visit white-owned ranches, providing meager economic benefit for local people. Laikipia’s former governor Joshua Irungu often expressed concern that white landowners violated Kenya tax laws by failing to declare the profits of tourism. He highlighted the fact that many tourists arrive to white ranches aboard private airplanes, challenging the ability of authorities to enforce tax laws. White-owned safari lodges in Laikipia feature some of highest bed-rates on the continent, with a single night for one guest costing upwards of USD1,000.

To further sell their stories to Western, urban and largely white audiences, Gettleman and other journalists have attempted to draw similarities between the Laikipia crisis and the occupation of white-owned farms in Zimbabwe in the early 2000s. While the land crisis in Zimbabwe was catalyzed by the divisive rhetoric of the country’s politicians, white landowners in Kenya enjoy a more amiable relationship with African leaders. In fact, Kenya’s president Uhuru Kenyatta is known to be the wealthiest landowner in Kenya, and has opposed all large-scale land reform in the country. Kenyatta’s re-election in August 2017 comes as welcome news to Laikipia’s white community.

Despite the efforts of activists and academics to warn the public not to the take the benefits of conservation at face value, mainstream news coverage of the recent land conflicts in Kenya show that conservative, Malthusian, and racist approaches to land stewardship remain the most accessible way for the global media to engage with audiences on African topics. In using the conflict in Laikipia to convince audiences of Africa’s larger “land problems,” Gettleman and other journalists lend the credibility of the world’s leading media outlets to the notion that Kenya’s future rests in the hands of white landowners. Gettleman, to his merit, states that conflict in Laikipia reveals only “the tip of the iceberg” of land inequality in Africa. If that is the case, it is time for the international journalism community to pursue this issue at more challenging depths.

 

Uganda’s Bonfire Youth turning tradition on its head

Still from “Somebody clap for me.”

There might be only little room for political dissent in Uganda, but there is no limit to the creativity of the country’s youth as they continually engage the three-decade-old grip on power of Yoweri Museveni and his National Resistance Movement (NRM). 

This, at least, is the conclusion one reaches after watching Luciana Farah’s new film, Somebody Clap for Me. Set in Kampala, the nation’s capital, the film highlights how a group of young people are employing poetry and storytelling to speak out against state repression, corruption and abuse of power – its title drawn from a satirical rendering by one of the youths of President Museveni’s campaign promises.

At the center of their initiative is an eye-catching concept, the bonfire. An ancient village arrangement, this is where elders and young people met around an evening fire for poetry, storytelling and discussions. It becomes the rallying point for these urban young people, who seek to confront the curtailment of freedom of speech and other democratic freedoms by the Museveni regime.

Appealing to tradition to highlight the need for a conversation between generations about national issues, the young artists are powerfully rebutting the contemporary state ideology in Uganda. Past statements by Museveni and other high-ranking government officials, for instance, have glorified the “historicals” – the former 1981-1986 bush war fighters who currently constitute the ruling class – for their supposed experience and wisdom, while dismissing young people for their “lack of ideology.” It is not uncommon for public officials, when confronted with questions about the succession plans of the aging president, to sweep them under the carpet by calling upon the youth to “respect their elders” as traditional customs supposedly dictate.

However, Somebody Clap for Me explores how progressive youth are rejecting the silencing of dissent in the name of tradition and, instead, are reclaiming the concept for emancipatory purposes through bonfire poems and stories. Through an adroit weaving of the personal profiles of some of the youths, the film also tells the story of their struggles with questions of race, poverty and life in exile. Accompanied by a soundtrack featuring indigenous and Afro-pop Ugandan music the movie presents the individual stories of Roshan, Abbas Ugly Amin, Jungle De Maneater, among others, as a microcosm of the country’s young generation and its efforts to get a say in the running of the country.

Yet, for all its merits, the movie overlooks some key questions concerning the practicality of the bonfire project in the context of liberation politics in the country. For instance, considering the fact that quasi-democratic regimes like Uganda’s survive in power more by their military muscle than by popular legitimacy, how effective is poetry, storytelling and the arts at large in prompting democratic reform?

Relatedly, contrary to what the film presents, freedom of speech in Uganda appears less threatened than the right to organize. As the government’s cruel response to the 2011 Walk-to-Work campaign demonstrated, popular protest – not merely free speech – constitutes the real threat to the NRM. Public debates, media campaigns and even artistic initiatives like the bonfire are normally left free to thrive, so long as they don’t morph into powerful social movements capable of challenging state power.

The film should therefore have probed the wider implications of the bonfire project in terms of what it hopes to achieve beyond the already largely guaranteed freedom of speech. Nevertheless, Somebody Clap for Me remains a must-watch for anyone interested in youth, civil society and the quest for political reform in sub-Saharan Africa.

‘Despacito’ Will Not Save Us

Puerto Rico, 2017. Image by Sofia Maldonado.

When we ran the post “Cultural appropriation and sugar drinks,” by our managing editor Boima Tucker, he concluded it with nod to Natalia Linares, a cultural activist originally from Staten Island, New York, who is doing a lot of good work to help create alternative infrastructures for artists in the music industry. Here she is with Francisco Perez for this Sunday’s read, with a reflection of her own on the current state of music and cultural industries–The Editor.

Daddy Yankee and Luis Fonsi’s “Despacito” is now the world’s most streamed song ever. Many view this as a triumph for Afro-Latino culture. We disagree. Sure, the production is flawless, the hook is catchy, the bass gets your body moving no matter if you’re in the club or the car. However, for us it reflects everything that is wrong with the music industry and how it exploits the cultural production of communities of color.

Originally stigmatized, reggaeton is a genre that emerged in the 1990s in Afro Latino communities located across the Caribbean and its diaspora. Thousands of Latino artists of African descent, from Panama’s West Indian communities and Puerto Rico’s caseríos, to urban immigrant enclaves in the US Northeast, worked hard to sustain the genre, eventually bringing it into the Latin American mainstream. “Despacito” was built on the backs of these artists and their communities.

Today, the only people who really profit from the success of reggaeton’s global appeal are a handful of superstars like Daddy Yankee, or white and middle class “safe” artists like Luis Fonsi, J Balvin, or Enrique Iglesias and the large media monopolies like Universal, Sony and Warner who dominate the industry. Artists like DJ Playero, Los Rakas, Munchi and many others have toiled for years to popularize this sound yet receive no credit, and have to struggle at the margins of the industry to earn enough to live. What’s more, in recent years non-Latino artists like Justin Bieber and Diplo have helped boost their global appeal by appropriating Afro-Latino and other African Diasporic musical genres. It is the perfect example of the gentrification of a culture. It is the insult to the injury of the fact that the genre’s nominal birthplace, Puerto Rico, is suffering from imperialist-imposed austerity that has pushed 10% of the population out in the last decade and promises another decade of pain.

For millennia, music has entertained, moved and inspired people. Many societies included special castes of musicians and artists, like the griots of West Africa. Culture, inherently, belongs to a collective of people, to a society at large. It is an essential element of human expression. Music in much of the West, however, has stopped being the collective expression of a group of people, and has become a product to be bought and sold by corporations for profit. Today that means the emergence of lifestyle brands who use music and its surrounding culture to sell sugary, over-caffeinated beverages or gas-guzzling cars.

What’s wrong with a little corporate money entering into the music scene? It’s just another way for artists to get paid right? Well, recently on this site, Chief Boima provided one example in the New York-based Latin-oriented electronic music party Que Bajo!?:

Money troubles eventually led to in fighting and we realized that the temporary influx of capital only served to draw a wedge between members of our community rather than uplift it.

Jay-Z in (the aptly titled) “Moment of Clarity” describes the pressures that artists face well:

I dumb down for my audience and double my dollars

They criticize me for it yet they all yell “Holla”

If skills sold truth be told

I’d probably be lyrically Talib Kweli

Truthfully I want to rhyme like Common Sense (But I did five Mil)

I ain’t been rhyming like Common since

When your sense got that much in common

And you been hustling since, your inception, fuck perception

Go with what makes sense

Since I know what I’m up against

More recently, Trinidadian-Dominican New York breakout star Cardi B gets even more direct as her bilingual versions of ‘Bodak Yellow’ climb the charts:

You gotta follow the trends, it is what it is. At the end of the day, you need to be with what sells. Sometimes it kinda crushes me because I wanna do music like how I like, but if it’s not selling and it’s not gonna work, then I’ll change my sound.

Ultimately, the music industry rewards excellent sales not thought provoking lyrics; it aims for great profits not great art. It takes; it doesn’t build.

Like many sectors of our capitalist economy, the music industry is an oligopoly where three companies dominate the market. These companies keep the majority of the profits from selling music, while the producers get less than 20% on average. The same top-heavy structure present in the distribution of music is also replicated in its production. The little bit of the pie that does go to artists goes only to a small number of superstars, 77% of earnings go to the top 1% of musicians. So a small group of artists and corporations “privatize” a music and its surrounding culture, they turn it into capital – money trying to become more money – for a small group of owners, while the rest of us, are essentially dispossessed.

The commodification of music is put into the greatest relief when we remember that much of the highest earning forms of cultural production today, have their origin in economically and politically marginalized communities. However, the system is designed to do this, and has been doing this for centuries. The origins of capitalism are in the taking of resources that belong to the collective, like land (see: Native Americans in the US) and turns them into private property. The music industry engages in a constant process of enclosing the cultural and spiritual commons.

Which brings us back to Despacito. The success of its remix featuring Justin Bieber is a perfect example of all the “big-word” problems we have been discussing: commodification, monopoly, gentrification and appropriation. And sure enough, Jesus Lopez, head of Universal Music Group’s Latin America and Iberia division assures us that “The song would never have been as big a hit without Bieber.”

Bieber belongs to a tragically long history of white artists stealing black music. Not only does he make reggaetón songs without attribution to Latino culture or artists, but the one time he does do a collaboration with Latinos, he cannot even remember the lyrics and instead ridicules the people and culture that have helped make him a millionaire.

As Remezcla Music Editor Isabelia Herrera explains,

When Bieber mocks the song, he’s showing us that he can capitalize on Latinidad without actually experiencing any of the oppression that comes along with that identity. He doesn’t have to live in a culture of fear, be treated as a second-class citizen, or experience exotification.”

So, “Despacito” will not save us. But wait! Isn’t it great that amidst the racism and xenophobia of the Trump era, people all over the world (including more than a few Trump voters) are shaking their butts to Despacito? Fonsi told NPR that:

The timing is quite perfect, you know, in this environment we live in… I don’t want to turn this song into a political environment, because it’s not. It’s a great song to make us feel good. But in the times that we live, where some people want to divide and want to build walls — we’re going through a lot of change, so it’s quite lovely that a Spanish song is No. 1 right now.

Except there’s this little thing called history, and it tends to repeat itself. The Mambo craze of the 1950s that sent many Cuban songs to the top of the charts did not end racism and poverty so why should we expect the current moment to be any different? Neither did the Latin explosion of 1999. Despacito, and the imitators that it will inspire, will do nothing to improve the cultural, political or economic status of Afro-Latinos. As Jezebel Culture Editor, Julianne Escobedo warns, “Don’t let Bieber play you!”

What is the point of decrying the many ways the music industry exploits Afro-Latinos when nothing can be done (and we haven’t even touched on the obvious problems of sexism in reggaetón and the music industry)? Capitalism is so entrenched, you may as well be tilting at windmills. Except, there is a growing movement to build a new, more democratic economy that empowers producers, including cultural producers, to control their production. Groups like Sol Collective in Sacramento and Rhythm Conspiracy in New Orleans are experimenting with cooperatives and other forms that allow artists to cut the middlemen, the gatekeeper publicists and the record labels. This means they fully own their music; from its production, to how it gets distributed and promoted. Resonate is building an artist-owned streaming service to give artists a much better deal than the current oligopoly in music streaming — dominated by Apple, Tidal and Spotify. Listen to this interview with Noémi Giszpenc of the Cooperative Development Institute if you want to learn more about these efforts.

Music is a public good like education and healthcare, which is why capitalist markets do such a terrible job of providing the world with great music. Therefore, we should defend current forms of public funding for the arts like the National Endowment for the Arts that are currently under attack. But we should also explore more innovative proposals for public arts funding, like Artistic Freedom Vouchers, where individuals get to direct government money to their favorite artists. Let’s work towards a more democratic and equitable music economy that ensures that artists get paid, and Diasporic communities can own their cultures and their spirits.

Algeria’s Black Fear

Image via Magharebia Flickr.

Until recently, the Sahara desert has never been a destination for black African migrants, but as trans-Saharan travel from Niger to Algeria has increased due to closures of other migration routes to Europe, Algerian desert towns and cities have become the new landing spots for many black migrants. The influx of black migrants into the Sahara has sparked racial tensions between them and Arab North Africans, with numerous attacks by Arabs against black migrants occurring throughout Algeria. Anti-migration efforts have focused on the Sahara desert, the new path to Europe, deporting thousands of black African migrants from Algeria and “repatriating” or dumping them in Niger each year. Since Niger allowed Algerian authorities to cross into its territory to repatriate migrants in 2015, many black migrants have reported racist treatment from Algerian security forces during deportation, including theft and violence. In addition to direct police action against black migrants, Algerian officials have deployed xenophobic attacks against migrants in the press to drum up anti-migrant sentiment.

Displaying a cruel irony, the president of the Algerian National Commission of the Promotion of Human Rights, Farouk Ksentini, justified a sudden mass expulsion of black African migrants from Algiers in December 2016 by saying to a national newspaper “the presence of African migrants and refugees in several localities of the country could cause problems for the Algerians, notably the spread of AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases… Hence, the decision of the Algerian authorities to expel them in order to avoid a catastrophe.” In another xenophobic statement from a leader of a humanitarian organization, Saïda Benhabylès, the president of the Algerian Red Cross, said to an Algerian daily last year, “The presence of the African migrants and refugees in several places of the country could cause problems for the Algerians, notably the proliferation of AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases… From where, the decision of the Algerian authorities to expel them in order to avoid a catastrophe.” The leaders of groups that purport to protect human rights and provide humanitarian aid to all peoples blatantly treat black migrants as if they are unworthy of defense for their own human rights. Occupying the savage slot, the black migrant cannot embody human rights or receive humanitarian aid, as these “defenders” of human rights and “humanitarians” treat black migrants as if they are not human.

This pathologization of black Africans as disease carriers who threaten the livelihoods of Algerians is based on racial prejudices, and is part and parcel of the larger structure of anti-black racism in the Sahara. Such disease discourse naturalizes the idea that blacks are associated with disease, rendering the decision to allow blacks into Algeria matter of life and death. This xenophobic rhetoric has been adopted by Algerians online, with some saying that migrants “must be exterminated like rats” and “they are violating and spreading AIDS in our cities,” using the social media hashtag #NoToAfricansInAlgeria.

Such rhetoric feeds the xenophobia and racism towards black African migrants in Algeria but the insistence that black Africans are diseases evokes a biological racism that not only condemns blacks as inferior to Arabs, but also equates blacks with death. The presence of blacks in Algeria portends imminent death for Algerians, susceptible to the purported diseases of “blacks.” Even the categorization of Arabs and Africans demonstrates this differential logic, with Algerians referring to blacks as Africans, as if Algeria is on a different continent. This geographical slight actually promotes a destructive ideology; that disease in Africa is geographically located in the lands of black Africans, or the metonym Algerians use to denote black origin, “le subsaharien.” Sub-Saharans bring disease to North Africa and Algeria, so therefore, Sub-Saharan or Black Africa is the source of disease. By simply claiming black migrants to be disease carriers and harbingers of pathogenic disaster for Arabs, Algerians have turned marginalized peoples into biological weapons. Treated as less than human, black migrants in Algeria cannot be diseased, however, to the scores of people advancing this racist disease-discourse in the media, black African migrants are actual diseases.

Speaking to the newspaper d’Ennahar on the topic of black migrants in Algeria, Ahmed Ouyahia, the Minister of the State and cabinet director to Algerian president Abdelaziz Bouteflika, declared that migrants residing illegally in Algeria are “the source of crime, drugs and disease.” The new president of the Algerian National Commission of the Promotion of Human Rights, Noureddine Benissad, condemned the words of Ouyahia, stating that a migrant is “neither a delinquent nor a criminal or transmitter of disease,” signaling a strong shift away from the rhetoric of her predecessor. Many other Algerians have decried this racism and xenophobia, and there are substantive efforts in place to improve legal status for migrants, including issuing temporary work permits to migrants in the country.

However, this pathologization of black migrants has not stopped, with this disease-discourse criminalizing black Africans’ existence, both in Algeria and beyond. It fortifies the fictive border between North Africa and Sub-Saharan or Black Africa, with a clean, virgin North Africa needing to protect itself from a vile, infectious black Africa. Thus, black migrants’ existence becomes synonymous with the diseases they are said to bring to Algeria, and this fear of a blackening of Algeria is supported by the public campaign to keep blacks out of Algeria. Hopefully the organizations and people supporting migrant rights will hold the Algerian government accountable for its poor actions towards black migrants and pressure it to squarely address the treatment and conditions of migrants in Algeria.

Jeffrey Gettleman’s tired tome

Africa has often served as a laboratory of self-discovery for privileged outsiders. Since the era of colonial adventurers, as Nadifa Mohamed notes, the continent has been a site “for dreams and nightmares,” a foil and mirror for many a Western traveler.

This is the tradition/trap into which Jeffrey Gettleman falls. Gettleman, a Pulitzer-prize-winning journalist known for his lurid coverage of war, was until recently the East Africa correspondent for The New York Times. His journey from middle-class suburbia to the halls of one of the country’s most prestigious papers is detailed in his newly published memoir: Love, Africa.

Gettleman’s first forays into Africa are as a young undergraduate, when he visits the late photojournalist Dan Eldon, who becomes a friend and older-brother figure. Together, they drive from Nairobi to the Malawi/Mozambique border on a mission to aid refugees. One can forgive a sheltered young American for romanticizing a part of the world that has been so profoundly misrepresented in the U.S. (He describes East Africa as “visceral,” real, the people inexplicably happy despite their poverty.) Yet that same adolescent voice carries throughout the book. Gettleman may experience interpersonal growth as he ages (he stops cheating, settles down, starts a family). But his intellectual growth (and his understanding of the continent he claims to love) feel profoundly stunted.

The first half of the book is devoted to the path that brings Gettleman back to East Africa as a seasoned reporter. He begins his journalism career at a small paper, the St. Petersburg Times, in the working-class town of Brooksville in Central Florida. He views the locals much as he sees East Africans. He is friendly and sympathetic, but his perceptions are also tinged with a kind of liberal, middle-class condescension. After a big scoop that helps convict a child-murderer, Gettleman lands a job as a correspondent for the LA Times and later a coveted position at The New York Times. He does stints in Afghanistan and Iraq, where he loses track of how many bombings he has covered. A theme emerges: Gettleman becomes the journalistic equivalent of an ambulance chaser, following the stories with the most thrill and bloodshed and also the biggest pay-off.

His narrative is replete with drama and machismo: flings with local women in Florida; a brief romance with a colleague; a kidnapping in Iraq; fights and make-up sessions with his then-girlfriend/now-wife, Courtenay. (His fraught but intense relationship with Courtenay serves, throughout the memoir, as a highly gendered metaphor for his relationship with Africa). His romantic escapades and trials feel trivial against the background of war and violence.

Finally, he lands his dream job: Times correspondent for the East Africa desk. In the second half of the book, Gettleman relies on many of the same tired, recycled tropes that appear in his reporting for the NYT. Modernity vs. tradition. Ethnic conflict. Malthusian concerns with overgrazing and population growth. Death, especially of the exotic variety.

At times, one gets glimpses of the reporter Gettleman could have been. He is critical of American interventionism, citing examples of US blundering and criminal behavior in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Somalia. His views of al-Shabaab (when it was part of the Islamic Courts Union and enjoyed popular support) are surprisingly nuanced. And, given his track record for reporting in conflict zones, one can hardly accuse him of being an “armchair journalist.” Though in often hackneyed and self-affirming ways, Gettleman acknowledges the privilege he enjoys, the inter-personal and professional mistakes he has made, as well as the socio-economic disparities that enable his very career and lifestyle in Nairobi.

Yet reckoning with his guilt and reciting the critiques he perhaps anticipates does not seem to lead to more serious reflection on his journalistic practice. Africa remains a sounding board, a site for self-discovery. Passionate about the region, Gettleman is capable of a great deal of sympathy and admiration for the people he interacts with and interviews. But rarely do Africans appear in his memoir as equals.

Under different circumstances, Gettleman might have been a better, more responsible reporter. If only he had received the right editorial guidance from the NYT. If only he had freed himself from the pressures of an industry intent on chasing blood and mayhem, willing to apply different standards of ethics and quality to its coverage of Africa. If only he had seriously engaged with the many excellent reporters and analysts from East Africa, such as Abdullahi Boru, Charles Onyango-Obbo, and Murithi Mutiga, to name only a few. (African journalists are conspicuously absent from his memoir).

But it is likely that a more self-aware, self-critical version of Gettleman would not have come to occupy such a plum position within the hallowed halls of journalism. Gettleman is a great story teller. His prose is light and engaging. Handsome and photogenic, he is able to tell seductively simple stories about a continent that seems so overwhelming to most Americans. There will always be an audience for this type of work.

Which brings us to the question of professional ethics. To be clear, academia (my own field) is riddled with similar moral and political quandaries as journalism. How one should best negotiate power dynamics is not always obvious. With a platform like The New York Times, however, the stakes feel much higher. Unfortunately, Gettlemen reduces these dilemmas to a base choice. Before he leaves for his position in Nairobi, a Times editor cautions Gettleman to “not get too ooga-booga out there.” He is given contrary advice from another veteran reporter: “Don’t forget the ooga-booga. It’s what makes Africa Africa.” Surely there are better ways to understand the moral ambiguities of one’s profession than to view it (in his words) as an “ooga-booga tug-of-war.”

To be fair, Gettleman also grapples more sincerely with the stakes of his profession. He justifies his lurid choice of subject matter by arguing that “sinking time into a lighter story” would have been irresponsible for a Times reporter. “A story on our pages,” he writes, “really does have the power to put pressure on governments to adjust their policies or the United Nations to send in more peacekeepers…or a nonprofit to divert more of its resources to a specific area of need.” To some extent, this may be true. And there is certainly an argument to be made for “bearing witness” to atrocities and human rights abuses. Yet there are also obvious limits to such an approach. Especially when poorly contextualized and undertheorized, his style of reporting becomes parasitic, doing more to feed into public fantasies of Africa than to encourage any kind of meaningful intervention.

Gettleman, after all, is no mere observer. In reporting on conflicts, he also inserts himself into them. His boldness and naiveté sometimes work to his subjects’ benefit. In Afghanistan, he helps rescue a young Taliban solider being tortured by American allies (though, as he notes, the implications of publically fundraising to pay ransom are far from clear). At other times, by blundering into conflicts whose scope he does not fully comprehend, he leaves behind a more damaging trail. In Ethiopia, he is arrested by soldiers who confiscate his notebook. His sloppy note-taking, by his own admission, appears to lead them to the whereabouts of the Ogaden rebels he had earlier befriended.

What emerges is a tale of a very storied life and gilded career. But it is far from clear how Gettleman remains accountable to the people he is representing.

Since the publication of his memoir, Gettleman has stepped down from the East Africa desk. One can only hope that “the paper of record”—which has lagged behind a number of African newspapers in its coverage of the region—will take their responsibilities for reporting on East Africa more seriously.

When Cape Jazz found a perfect mix with R&B, fusion and pop

Pacific Express. Image courtesy Matsuli Music.

The band Pacific Express was Cape Town’s “answer to Earth Wind and Fire.” In 1976 they released the watershed album, Black Fire, the first successful confluence of Cape Jazz with R&B, fusion and pop. Reissued in 2017, Black Fire is clearly music for dancing, and even the more extended improvisations of trumpeter Robbie Jansen, saxophonist Basil Coetzee and pianist – and chief composer/arranger – Chris Schilder (Ebrahim Khalil Shihab) keep that in mind. The appealing voice of Zayn Adam, Issy Ariefdien’s guitar, Paul Abrahams’ bass and Jack Momple’s drums complete a musically skillful and innovative adventure.

Black Fire is also significant as it marks a specific point on the trajectory of jazz in the Western Cape: a moment that still influences the unique ways many Capetonians use the word today.

“The double beat that people dance to,” reflected the late reedman Robbie Jansen, “[here] they call that jazz: ‘I’m going to jazz tonight’ – that’s got nothing to do with real jazz!”

Jansen’s comment captures the complex meanings that jazz carries for Cape Town fans. On the one hand, the city has a rich heritage of the improvised music which genre fundis call jazz. It was, after all, the home of jazz pioneers such as reedman Christopher Columbus Ngcukana and pianist Abdullah Ibrahim. On the other hand, there’s a vibrant club dance tradition, particularly among the communities apartheid classified as “coloured,” which its enthusiasts also refer to as “jazz.” That jazzing tradition has, among multiple influences, some ancestry in the city’s ballroom dancing style (“langarm”) some in the hop-step choreography of Khoisan tradition, and some in tickey draai (“spin on a sixpence”: the whirling popular dances of the mine camps). It solidified into a unique style distinct from all of these in the mid-1970s. “Jazz is a culture here, almost like the Kaapse Klopse – it’s part of our history … it’s in our blood,” a research interviewee told dance scholar Jade Gibson.

And one band, better than any other, represents the historic nexus between jazz and jazzing; between instrumental improvisation and dancing and between musical lives of club gigs at night and challenging jazz studio recordings in the morning. That band is Pacific Express.

Black Fire by Pacific Express

By the time the band laid down this album in 1976, they’d been around for a while, having been brought together by bass player Paul Abrahams and guitarist Issy Ariefdien in the early 1970s (initially as The Pacifics) to work as a pop and cover band. The band built a strong reputation among clubgoers, so that when a new club, the Sherwood Lounge, was planned for the suburb of Manenberg in 1975, Pacific Express was invited to open it.

“And then they came to me,” remembers pianist Shihab, “and asked if I would join them. At the time, I was leading another band, but because they had this big gig coming up, they wanted somebody who could bring a bit more musically. They persuaded me – they said nobody else would be appropriate.”

Shihab comes from the musically prolific Schilder family. He was previously known as Chris, his mother was a church composer and pianist, and his late brothers, bassist Phillip and pianist Tony, also went on to achieve national, jazz recognition. He describes his musical education as initially “stealing with my eyes” from family members and schoolmates and then trying to replicate what he saw and heard. By the age of 14, he was working at the Normandy nightclub in Rondebosch, scoring what he calls “a huge tip” when he demonstrated the complex changes of All the Things You Are in response to a patron’s challenge, purely from memory.

As he entered his twenties, his reputation built demand for his skills as sideman, composer and leader. His voracious musical appetite took him into classical music and American jazz, as well as the popular sounds that (barely) put bread on the table. Like others among his peers who wanted to take even popular music in a more adventurous direction, he was already experimenting with free sounds in the late 1960s and by the mid-70s he’d started listening to the jazz-rock of Santana, Blood, Sweat and Tears, Chicago and Earth, Wind and Fire.

At that early point in his career, Jansen would not have called himself a jazz musician. By contrast, Shihab was already active and admired on the bop, post-bop and free Cape Town jazz scenes, as is shown by his many recordings in the Ian Bruce Huntley archive. But both of them were equally compelled to listen to what Jansen called “more complicated sounds, more sophisticated compared to the easy, bubblegum pop… We had to tune into LM Radio and catch a little snatch of a song and learn it. Tomorrow, maybe, we would hear the other half and by the weekend we could play the stuff before it was on the {South African} hit parade.” Before 1975, when it was nationalized by Frelimo, LM (Lourenco Marques) Radio based in Mozambique had been one of only a few accessible stations catering to those seeking contemporary pop sounds not showcased by South Africa’s segregated, censored state broadcaster, the SABC.

The coloured township of Manenberg – about 20km away from Cape Town city center, and cut off from the black settlements of Gugulethu and Nyanga by a railway track – had been officially established in 1966, based on the apartheid regime’s belief that what they defined as different “racial groups” could not live harmoniously together. (Mixed communities in Cape Town – such as District Six – and elsewhere had flourished before the advent of advent of apartheid, and often struggled to stay together despite harsh new laws.) Manenberg began life as a very basic settlement, dusty and bare of almost all amenities. Its first houses and flats had no finished ceilings, inside water or internal doors. Residents had been uprooted and trucked in from the suburbs of Constantia, District Six, Cape Town, the Bo-Kaap, Wynberg, Crawford, Sea Point, and Lansdowne and now had to learn to live together under these disadvantages.

As a consequence it was, Shihab reflects “quite a rough place.  But the Sherwood Lounge was located close to the highway, so people could come in without getting mixed up in whatever was a happening on the streets. And once we opened – people flocked.”

The Sherwood Lounge joined a constellation of busy Cape Town music venues in every kind of district. There was the Naaz, in Woodstock, the Ambassador in District Six, the Goldfinger Lounge in Athlone, the Vortex Coffee Bar in the City’s Long Street and the Mermaid seafood and jazz restaurant in Sea Point. By 1978, they had been joined by the long-lived Club Galaxy in Rylands, still flourishing well into the 2000s.

As Shihab began developing more sophisticated music for Pacific Express, the band’s routines also became more sophisticated. There was less grabbing sounds from the radio, and more intensive workshopping. “We didn’t mix much with non-musicians,” Shihab remembers. “We’d go to somebody’s parlour and jam… (guitarist) Issy Ariefdien, (vocalist) Zayn Adam, (drummer) Jack Momple and (bassist) Paul Abrahams were the nucleus of the band, and they were all so talented we could just feed off one another’s ideas.”

“Our music was jazz-rock,” Shihab explains. “At the start, I was the only jazz improviser. I listened a lot to Chicago. The other guys were more into pop music. For me, the appeal of jazz-rock was it allowed me to explore in those directions, and I introduced the guys to those improvisations. Meanwhile, I was also learning in that process; the collaboration was beautiful. So before we even introduced my compositions, we were already jamming on the pop tunes we were playing and learning how our different ideas complemented one another.

“The kids who came to the Sherwood were all interested in dancing – they were very good dancers, and they had a kind of style – dancing, dressing – to go with the music. So, the kids were hip, the club was new, and we all agreed that, as well as being interesting, the music has to suit dancing. At that time Robbie [Jansen] had other gigs, but as we became very popular we invited him, and he and Basil (reedman ‘Manenberg’ Coetzee) came in and out when they could, Basil more often.”

The reputation of the band and the Sherwood Lounge soared. “There was just a lot happening there,” remembers Cape Town pianist Gary Hendrickse. One of Gibson’s respondents recalls: “‘I was at this place, and they put a Santana record on, and suddenly all these people were dancing in couples, swaying from side to side … I’d never seen it before … I thought, “What is this?”

But despite audience support, steady jobs like the Sherwood gig were scarce, as racial zoning made venues increasingly hard to sustain and unrest and tough policing impeded movement. Shihab lived and composed in a single room, crammed with piano, cot, baby and spouse. Jansen remembered that sometimes he played “for five rand a gig… I got R25 a week when I played with Pacific Express when I got married, and that was playing every night, seven nights a week… a hundred rand a month: that was good money.”

The intensive workshopping paid off when the opportunity to record Black Fire at Volker Miros’s UCA Studios arrived. A year earlier, in June 1974, those studios had been the setting for the Abdullah Ibrahim (then Dollar Brand) recording “Mannenberg Is Where it’s Happening.” Executive producer Patrick Lee-Thorp was responsible for organizing and managing all of Pacific Express’s recording sessions and the post production. “Oh, we were all very excited,” Shihab remembers. “And not just the band. Our fans – all the people who were into our band – also got excited.”

The session itself, he says, was not quite so exciting. “It was the usual thing of budget constraints on recording time. It’s a good job we were so well-rehearsed, because when we got to the studio, we had to sit down and just get through the tunes quickly. And we were able to do that.”

Shihab still listens to those tracks with affection. Black Fire, the title track, is one of the few explicitly political allusions in the music of Pacific Express. “All our lives were affected by [apartheid],” says Shihab. “It was there all the time, even when you didn’t talk or sing about it; you couldn’t escape it.” Pacific Express lived resistance by frequently operating as a racially mixed outfit with black and white as well as coloured players. This led, for example, to police warning them they could not perform on the segregated stage during Australian singer John Paul Young’s 1977 South African tour. “What I was seeing at the time was that because of those circumstances,” says Shihab, “black musicians had more of a certain kind of fire in us. Black Fire gave me scope to express that energy.”

His other favorite track is “Sky Ride 2,” and the reasons there are musical, not societal. Although Jansen at that time felt he was still an apprentice in jazz, for Shihab it’s Jansen’s flute solo that stays in his memory. “It’s not a simple melody, even though it has a relaxed, easy feel to it,” says Shihab. “But when I listened to Robbie’s solo that comes at the end, it knocked me off my feet. The way he interpreted that melody, against the rhythm section behind us, it was everything I wanted to say with that song.”

Pacific Express recorded two more albums, Expressions and On Time. Shihab eventually took on hotel work on a circuit in the Middle East to provide a steadier income. But he never stopped exploring and composing and has released a solo piano outing of his own music, as well as leading a Cape Town International Festival concert, and a Pacific Express revival performance. Robbie Jansen continued straddling the divide between jazz and jazzing until his death in 2010, releasing multiple albums as leader that combined vibrant dance rhythms and challenging improvisation.

But perhaps most emblematic of that jazz/jazzing relationship is what happened to the Sherwood Lounge. It later became Club Montreal, Cape Town’s most famous dance venue, memorialized in the song At Montreal, composed by Shihab’s brother Tony, and sung by another world-famous musician who passed through the ranks of Pacific Express: Jonathan Butler.

* This slightly edited version of the sleeve notes for Black Fire is reprinted here with the kind permission of Matsuli Music and Gwen Ansell. The album can be purchased on most streaming services and the vinyl here.

New ways of being Nigerian

Nigerian singer Flavour performing at the FOMO party. Image via Wikicommons.

There is a worrisome, undue accent on ethnic and sub-ethnic affiliations deserving scrutiny in Nigeria. Until the day when an Igbo ceases to be a visitor or stranger in Lagos and the growing number of northerners in Igboland become more than outsiders, secessionist agitations and their associated conflicts will remain components of the Nigerian ensemble. I repeat, no Nigerian should be an outsider anywhere within the territorial bounds of the country.

Below the politics of ethnic affiliation exists other micro-identities that equally complicate discourses of belonging in Nigeria. Take the case of the ongoing crisis in the Catholic Diocese of Ahiara, where a collective of priests and the laity have rejected the appointment of a bishop from neighboring Anambra state. This is an Igbo bishop being rejected because he is not from Ahiara. Imagine the response if the Pope appointed a Yoruba man to this vacant position. As I write, not even the Pope’s decree that the priests apologize to the Vatican and accept their bishop has done much to quell the crisis. So while economic restructuring need to be taken seriously as Omolade Adunbi argued on this site recently, Nigeria’s identarian politics, in all its layers of complexity, deserves recalibration. Until then, Biafra and similar agitations will remain constant presences in our national discourse.

For clues to actualizing this recalibration, we can turn to Nigerian popular culture, where there are instances of Nigerians transcending ethnicity. We see this transcendence in the glorious days of Nigeria’s soccer teams especially in the 1990s. The soccer players that donned Nigeria’s jersey at the World Cup in 1994 and the Atlanta Olympics in 1996 were Nigerians first. With the successes of these teams, it didn’t matter where the players came from or whether the team was comprised of players from the same geographical region. The same indifference to locality of origin applied to the fans especially in multiethnic cities like Lagos. When they hugged as they celebrated the victory of the soccer teams, it didn’t matter where they came from. Nigeria became the common denominator, the thing that binds.

In contemporary Nigeria, with a successful music industry, musicians such as Davido and Flavour draw their fan base from across the country. Flavour’s “Ada Ada,” for instance, can headline a Yoruba wedding just as much as an Igbo one. Flavour’s melodious tune and his powerful (often Igbo) lyrics appeal to people of all stripes. You can make a similar claim for the works of Yoruba artists such as Davido and Wizkid, who are as popular in Owerri as they are in Ondo. My point is we can extend such celebration of excellence to other spheres of our national life so that it matters less where the candidate for an elective position, political appointment or a job comes from.

Rather than function as instruments of ethnic violence for politicians and ethnic chauvinists, young Nigerians as primary producers and consumers of popular culture can be at the forefront of this national re-orientation. As 21st century citizens of a global world, youth in Nigeria can channel their energy, education and digital literacies to bring about this change. This pan-Nigerian sensibility was on display during the brief Occupy Nigeria protests concerning the removal of subsidy and increase in the price of petroleum products by the Goodluck Jonathan administration in January 2012. Young Nigerians were at the forefront of this struggle and utilized social media platforms to coordinate the various protests. In protesting against the government’s New Year gift, aggrieved citizens shut down roads and businesses, paralyzing economic activities. Occupy Nigeria has both critics and admirers, but the social movement is striking for demonstrating the possibility of a Nigerian collective against tyranny and exploitation. It was clear that the hardship introduced by the new fuel price would affect Nigerians across ethnic and religious lines, and thus the mobilization transcended those parochial cleavages as evident in the protests across the country and abroad too.

As I write, a new social movement, Our Mumu Don Do (roughly translates as “our stupidity is enough” – championed by the controversial musician, Charles Oputa (Charley Boy – is staging protests in Abuja over the long absence of President Muhammadu Buhari from office. In articulating its demand that President Buhari return to Nigeria or resign his position, the group is putting the wellbeing of Nigeria at the forefront. I am particularly struck by the resort to pidgin, arguably the quintessential Nigerian language, in the group’s naming as well as the multi-ethnic composition of its leadership and sympathizers.

Social movements such as Occupy Nigeria and Our Mumu Don Do provide an antidote to the sectarian agitations across Nigeria even as they remain the condition of possibility for the Nigeria of our dreams. In the Nigeria we should all work to bring about, ethnicity will be consequential for its cultural heritage and values, but it will have to give way as the determiner of our social and political relationships. In its place, our Nigerianness and humanness will be sufficient grounds for constituting new modes of belonging, premised on ethical consideration of the other.

How the Nigerian Left imploded

Image credit Goya Bauwens via Flickr.

In the history of democratic transitions in Africa – whether from military, one-party, civilian or multi-party rule – Nigeria’s experience presents an interesting dimension. First, the military regime of General Ibrahim Babangida handpicked the parties that would contest the first democratic elections on June 12th, 1993 after many years of dictatorship. Second, with the exception of Algeria (where the election of the Islamic Salvation Front (FIS) was annulled by the military in 1991), Nigeria was the only other African country at that time to have her democratic election annulled by the military almost two weeks after elections. Finally, while it took blood and sweat to put down the FIS in Algeria, the parties in Nigeria simply folded their mats and went home, offering no challenge to the military dictatorship.

The political crisis triggered by this resulted in the formation of the Campaign for Democracy (CD), probably the most viable umbrella pro-democracy group in Nigeria at that time. The CD stepped into the political void left by the two elite parties, the Social Democratic Party (SDP) and National Republican Convention (NRC). It was the CD that publicly challenged the annulment of the June 12th election. The CD was also the key actor in the campaign of Chief M.K.O. Abiola, the winner of that election.

This period brought my generation of the Nigerian Left into active contestation for political spaces in Nigeria’s democratic project.

I revisit those fateful events in a new book, June 12 Election: Campaign for Democracy & the Implosion of the Nigerian Left, published here in Nigeria.

One of the key conclusions of the book is that while the CD’s eventual fate was dependent on external factors, internal contradictions hastened its decline. These contradictions include issues of perspective, and the political tendencies of the collaborating groups (particularly the left groups). On the politics of tendencies, two left groups that participated in the CD were the Socialist Congress of Nigeria (SC) and Socialist Revolutionary Vanguard (SRV) and in the course of their work, the SRV sided with the right wing within the CD. For instance, on the issue of whether Dr. Beko Ransome Kuti (one of Fela’s brothers) would remain the president of the CD, the SRV sided with the rightwing group of Ransome Kuti.

Also at issue was the Expanded Secretariat. Though a loose structure, the secretariat was like a war council which because of the nature of the CD became an organ that allowed a large percentage of cadres to be part of the CD. Some of the cadres did not belong to the main left groups that functioned in the background of the CD. Although originally not an established structure within the CD, the secretariat attracted cadres such Chima Ubani and Abiodun Aremu. who impacted the work of the CD during this period. But the secretariat became a problem as it could not be pigeon-holed into the bureaucratic structure of the CD. A good example of this was the sanctioning of neighborhood rallies in September 1993. The CD leadership did not approve of these rallies, believing they would jeopardize the rapprochement between the military leadership and Chief M.K.O. Abiola towards a negotiated restoration of his mandate.

Quite decisive in the decline of the Left, was the emergent human rights philosophy of the late 1980s, the advent of which affected the traditional mode of most left groups fronting as NGO’s. Groups like the Civil Liberties Organization (CLO) and Committee for Defense of Human Rights (CDHR tended to accommodate persons from the left and the right within their structures. Cadres working in these organizations took on board right wing thoughts and practices. They were expected to or assumed they had to tow the lines of donor organizations. Also, crucially, during this period, the CD leadership extended little favors to some cadres – such as foreign trips to western countries for training – which blurred their interpretation of the interplay of forces at work within the Nigerian political spectrum.

The collapse of the CD had long-term effects on the prospects of the Nigerian left and impaired its capacity to be active in political transition initiated by the General Abdulsalam Abubakar in 1998-1999. Here again, Nigerian politics achieved a first, as it became the only time a pro-democratic group that championed and struggled for the end to military rule found itself unable to be part of the power process at the restoration of democratic rule.

In summary, the book examined the impact of the pro-democracy movement on the Nigerian Left, particularly between 1990 and 1999. This period had a profound effect on the fate of left groupings in contemporary Nigeria. As a result of the acrimonies of the period in question, there is a deepened mutual suspicion among the members of the left groups in Nigeria. It is such that as we write, it is difficult to find a credible left political party or tendency within or outside the existing mainstream political structure in Nigeria.