Sean Jacobs's Blog, page 273

What about human rights for ‘non-humans’

Human rights is an anthropocentric discourse that centers the “human” in its articulation of various rights claims. Human rights is therefore often described as rights that all humans possess inherently because they are human, or as rights that can be claimed by humans through various legal mechanisms that give effect to these rights.

But what about the non-human; an entity, often a black body, that takes on human characteristics but is not recognized as human? Can human rights comprehend the non-human?

The non-human, which sometimes exists in the form of the “savage” and is referred to in various ways including “kaffir,” “sand nigger.” “faggot,” “cunt,” and “retard” is a creation of the human. Humanness therefore coexists with the dehumanized non-human.

Does invoking the idea of the non-human, perpetuate dehumanization? Perhaps. But the awfulness and reality of the term “non-human” is nothing compared to the miserable existence of non-humans. The capture and killing of black bodies in the United States for instance, through the extermination of indigenous peoples, slavery, racism, mass incarceration, and more recently, legally sanctioned killings by police officers, exemplifies this existence. The term’s ugliness and awkwardness is therefore deliberate. 

The “non” and the “human,” held together by the fragility of a hyphen, is always defined in relation to the human. Humanness is therefore relative to the subjugation of the non-human. This violent suppression is not only existential, it is also epistemological; it repudiates non-human knowledge and ideas.

Furthermore, the non-human is not quite the same as property despite connections between slavery and non-humanness. Slave owners – historically white European and American men – took particular care of their property, such as ships, houses, land, cattle and horses. Since property has value, it is usually looked after. Slaves on the other hand were beaten, raped and murdered, and were therefore treated differently to property, including animals.

The non-human savage is therefore not only less than human, but also less than property and animals.

If the non-human entity therefore exists, to what extent can human rights facilitate the humanization of the non-human? Genealogically, human rights emerged from the ashes of war and violence, particularly in the aftermath of the Second World War. Its origins are therefore intrinsically connected to the violence of the holocaust and attempts by Euro-American liberals to humanize the survivors of the genocide and to put in place a framework to prevent this dehumanization from recurring.

Consequently, the universal human rights framework is largely formulated by white Euro-Americans for white Euro-Americans. Its foundational philosophy is centered on liberalism, individualism and rights claims aimed at humanizing particular survivors of the holocaust. The universal human rights project has been largely successful in Euro-America because European values are vernacularized as universal human rights values. In some ways, the continued marginalization, after the introduction of universal human rights, of holocaust survivors who were Roma, queer people and people with disabilities supports this argument. 

As a result, human rights cannot offer a framework for humanizing the non-human savage. It is incapable of engaging the non-human black body because it is not designed to do so. In order for human rights to engage the non-human, the clergy who worship at the altar of universal human rights, have to excommunicate the “human” from “human rights.” Is this even possible? And if so, how will the process of excommunication change the nature, language and symbolism associated with human rights discourse?

It seems unlikely that human rights discourse is innovative or creative enough to engage the non-human. And so consequently, the non-human often has to exist and operate outside of human rights and its legal, declarationist framework, employing disruption as an alternative mechanism of engagement. The non-human’s struggle for liberation can be seen as a continuation of the interminable decolonial struggle. But it is also a struggle that is often contradictory, taking on eclectic forms and meanings in different spaces. It is an emergent struggle.

Human rights therefore appears ill-suited to deal with the contradictory, emergent, radical non-human. It cannot comprehend the messiness, the ugliness, the complete and utter brokenness of non-human existence. Recognizing the inadequacy of human rights, is it time for a new emancipatory framework?

Next time you see the Mediterranean

Image by unicellular. Via Flickr.

Next time you see the Mediterranean think of all these bodies brown and black, declared dead or missing in its waters.

So far this year, 2,405 migrants have drowned in the Mediterranean. Last year, the number of migrants declared dead or missing reached 5,143. In 2015, 3,771 deaths were documented. Between 1993 and 2012, according to the UNITED for Intercultural Action (UNITED), a total of 14,600 “border deaths” (a death which occurred during the sea passage) were recorded. The number of African migrants who have lost their lives in the Mediterranean is a tragedy, shamefully under-discussed and analyzed over the past 20 years. The number of those missing or unaccounted for is unknown.

Next time you see the Mediterranean, think of the trauma and the abuse that African migrants endure in their search for a better life.

Marie Rajablat’s “Les naufragés de l’enfer” (The Shipwrecked of Hell), is a collection of testimonies she gathered from rescued migrants during eight weeks on board of the Aquarius, an SOS MEDITERRANEE vessel. These stories of journeying to death register how the Mediterranean has always been a Black Mediterranean. On a perilous journey through Niger and to Libya, African migrants are abused physically and psychologically, kidnapped, raped, and enslaved by numerous militias and armed groups that infest the Sahara. A recent report by the United Nations Support Mission in Libya (UNSMIL) outlines terrible conditions of “summary executions and other unlawful killings; arbitrary deprivations of liberty; and torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment.” By the time they are embarked on their dinghies, these migrants have already sacrificed the most.

Next time you see the Mediterranean, think of Abi and Enzo.

Abi, 18, recalls that she feared for her life when she refused to prostitute herself, “As I refused to sleep with him, he [one of the smugglers] pushed me to the ground, beat me with his belt and then kicked me everywhere … He took out a knife and he slashed my breasts … Later, he raped me … I stayed there for several days but I do not know exactly for how long … But, I know when he leaves and when he comes back … I could hear the door … I know he came in me but I did not feel anything anymore … He returned with other men … I think I fainted … I do not know how long it lasted … when I woke up, and for a few seconds, I did not know if I was dead or alive … I realized I was in hell … I cried … I wished to go home, to see my Mother … But at the same time, I knew at that time that there was no return possible. I also understood what had happened to my sister and why she did not give me a number to join her.”

Enzo remembers, “In Ghadames, we were locked in a warehouse for four days. We could only get out to go to work escorted by armed guards and with nothing to eat and just a little salty water to drink. People were beaten, sometimes to death. Sometimes, you hear the people-smugglers say, “There is a new important arrival of “merchandise”, in reference to a new group of migrants. Only then, we were able to leave.”

During the sea crossings, when their dinghies are not capsized off the promised land of Lampedusa, these migrants are voluntarily thrown to their deaths into the sea by the people-smugglers in charge of the vessels. The decision about who gets thrown first is based on the migrant’s skin color. Black migrants, seen as inferior because of their blackness, are always chosen first.

Next time you see the Mediterranean, think of it as the Black Mediterranean.

The Mediterranean migrant crisis cannot only be understood and negotiated within a rhetoric of humanitarian intervention and institutional crisis management. The Black Mediterranean shows how mobility, instead of work, becomes a distinct concept and experience around which Europe’s capitalism and Africa’s neocolonialism can be understood. Strikingly, the same absolutist conversations on race, nationalism and modernity that Paul Gilroy’s “The Black Atlantic” criticized as “fatal mistakes” continue to mediate the debates and analyses on the Mediterranean crisis.

The Black Mediterranean is not this empty liquid space that separates a neocolonial and impoverished south from a post-empire and fractured north. It is a hybrid and discursive space through which both Europeans and Africans have defined themselves and their project of modernity. As a result of a long history of violence and war, that far exceeds that of the Black Atlantic, this space can only be mediated, for now, through the negative.

Next time you see the Mediterranean, think of how Europe’s institutional and political responses have turned the migrant crisis into an enduring tragedy.

Three moments are important here to understand how, in times of crisis, Europe does not know what to do with itself and lets loose its repressed, violent self. Ode to Joy turns into The Robbers.

First, there is European Union-Turkey Refugee Agreement signed in March 2016 with the declared objective of finding “a way to prevent unchecked arrivals into the European Union”. It involves Greece returning newly arrived refugees migrants to Turkey, and in return, the EU guarantees that asylum seekers in Turkey will be resettled in Europe. This deal ensures that “the problem has once again been squeezed elsewhere rather than resolved.” Eventually, the only loser is the refugee. Despite a strong backlash from such organizations as the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) and Amnesty International, the agreement is still in effect and refugees and migrants are indirectly forced to find new routes to escape violence and abuse. After Spain’s bilateral agreements with Morocco, Senegal, and Mauritania, the only route for “unchecked” migrants is through the Central Mediterranean, linking Libya and Tunisia to Italy. A deadly sea route.

Second, The Schengen Agreement, which came into effect in 1995, ensures that the EU provides few directives on issues of migration, refugees and asylum seekers. The Dublin regulation adds another layer of control on mobility by dictating that the country of arrival is responsible for the registration and processing of migrants and refugees alike. With the surge of the number of new arrivals, things spiral out of control. And Europe’s colonial self resurfaces.

In response to the crisis, persistent calls to close borders and reinstate checkpoints reflect a rhetoric of the empire’s anxiety of “never again.” The Dutch prime minister, Mark Rutte, a liberal, offers an interesting comparison with the decline and fall of the Roman empire: “Big empires go down if the external borders are not well-protected.” The toxic metaphors of “swarms, floods and marauders” used by British and European politicians reinforce this trope of invasion. It is within this understanding that the French President Emmanuel Macron put forth his delusional suggestions to “clear migrants off streets by the end of the year” and to “create “hot spots” in Libya this summer.” “Disturbing” was the epithet used Human Rights Watch (HRW) and a number of NGOs to qualify his proposal.

Third, in response to the surge in the number of migrants and asylum seekers coming from Libya and Tunisia, Europe came up with a new Marshall plan for these unruly countries. Italy’s Prime Minister, Paolo Gentiloni, a center-leftist, formulated “a plan to send Italian warships into Libyan territorial waters to combat smugglers.” In Tunisia, President Béji Caid Essebsi was forced into a “bilateral agreement” during his recent visit to Germany’s chancellor Angela Merkel with that would. The agreement ensures the repatriation of 1,500 Tunisian asylum seekers through a process local organizations in Tunisia deemed coercive.

These far-right policies have driven stronger populist and xenophobic reactions from Europeans. After Petra László, the Hungarian journalist who kicked refugees felling police, after onlookers verbally abused  Pateh Sabally, a 22-year-old Gambian, as he drowned in Venice’s Grand Canal, and after Italian Coast Guard ignored a call from a sinking vessel and let 250 migrants drown, the European far-right has moved from isolated individual actions to a more organized and technology-based movement. Crowdfunding and 4chan threads are the latest trends among far-right activists.

The C-Star, a ship chartered by the far-right and anti-immigration French-based group Génération identitaire (GI – The Identitarian Generation), tracks SOS Mediterranée’s Aquarius in order to hinder its search and rescue efforts. The GI’s mission, titled “Defend Europe”, is to force “the closing of the Mediterranean route as the only way to Defend Europe and save lives.”

At the same time, left-wing activism is problematic. An excellent argument on the Black Mediterranean by Ida Danewid challenges a rhetoric of solidarity, endemic to both left-wing activism and academic debate, that reproduce “the foundational assumptions of the far right” and removes “from view the many afterlives of historical and ongoing colonialism.”

Next time you see the Mediterranean, think of how these migrants’ decision to migrate to Europe through the help and guidance of people-smugglers is never a choice.

The motives for African migrants to flee their home countries are various and complex. They are not necessarily motivated by the fleeing from political and sexual violence in South Sudan or driven by economic interests, such as a better life than in Senegal or Ivory Coast.

Extreme vetting conditions in Europe and the U.S. make it difficult for a large number of African migrants to apply for a work visa and force many to opt for illegal immigration. As the Canadian journalist Geoffrey York clarifies, “New restrictions within Africa and opaque deals between European countries and African regimes [have produced] a much more dramatic effect.”  For instance, the largest numbers of African migrants in the flow to Italy are not from Eritrea or Somalia, but Nigeria, Africa’s second biggest economy.

Next time you see the Mediterranean, think of Chemseddine Marzoug.

Marzoug, a retired Tunisian fisherman and a Red Crescent volunteer, spends most of his days burying the drowned bodies he finds on the littoral area of Zarzis, in the south east of Tunisia and close to the Libyan coast. For Marzoug, a death toll of 23 announces another ordinary week of burial of the drowned. And there are all the others who will never reach the coast.

“They lived through hell in Libya. We showed them little respect when they were alive. The least we can do is to show them respect in death… It’s too much.”

With little help, he routinely buries the corpses in an ad-hoc cemetery hastily laid out on a municipal dump. There is no coffin or tombstone, just cones of sand that indicate a mortuary presence.

#SundayRead: Next time you see the Mediterranean

Image by unicellular. Via Flickr.

Next time you see the Mediterranean think of all these bodies brown and black, declared dead or missing in its waters.

So far this year, 2,405 migrants have drowned in the Mediterranean. Last year, the number of migrants declared dead or missing reached 5,143. In 2015, 3,771 deaths were documented. Between 1993 and 2012, according to the UNITED for Intercultural Action (UNITED), a total of 14,600 “border deaths” (a death which occurred during the sea passage) were recorded. The number of African migrants who have lost their lives in the Mediterranean is a tragedy, shamefully under-discussed and analyzed over the past 20 years. The number of those missing or unaccounted for is unknown.

Next time you see the Mediterranean, think of the trauma and the abuse that African migrants endure in their search for a better life.

Marie Rajablat’s “Les naufragés de l’enfer” (The Shipwrecked of Hell), is a collection of testimonies she gathered from rescued migrants during eight weeks on board of the Aquarius, an SOS MEDITERRANEE vessel. These stories of journeying to death register how the Mediterranean has always been a Black Mediterranean. On a perilous journey through Niger and to Libya, African migrants are abused physically and psychologically, kidnapped, raped, and enslaved by numerous militias and armed groups that infest the Sahara. A recent report by the United Nations Support Mission in Libya (UNSMIL) outlines terrible conditions of “summary executions and other unlawful killings; arbitrary deprivations of liberty; and torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment.” By the time they are embarked on their dinghies, these migrants have already sacrificed the most.

Next time you see the Mediterranean, think of Abi and Enzo.

Abi, 18, recalls that she feared for her life when she refused to prostitute herself, “As I refused to sleep with him, he [one of the smugglers] pushed me to the ground, beat me with his belt and then kicked me everywhere … He took out a knife and he slashed my breasts … Later, he raped me … I stayed there for several days but I do not know exactly for how long … But, I know when he leaves and when he comes back … I could hear the door … I know he came in me but I did not feel anything anymore … He returned with other men … I think I fainted … I do not know how long it lasted … when I woke up, and for a few seconds, I did not know if I was dead or alive … I realized I was in hell … I cried … I wished to go home, to see my Mother … But at the same time, I knew at that time that there was no return possible. I also understood what had happened to my sister and why she did not give me a number to join her.”

Enzo remembers, “In Ghadames, we were locked in a warehouse for four days. We could only get out to go to work escorted by armed guards and with nothing to eat and just a little salty water to drink. People were beaten, sometimes to death. Sometimes, you hear the people-smugglers say, “There is a new important arrival of “merchandise”, in reference to a new group of migrants. Only then, we were able to leave.”

During the sea crossings, when their dinghies are not capsized off the promised land of Lampedusa, these migrants are voluntarily thrown to their deaths into the sea by the people-smugglers in charge of the vessels. The decision about who gets thrown first is based on the migrant’s skin color. Black migrants, seen as inferior because of their blackness, are always chosen first.

Next time you see the Mediterranean, think of it as the Black Mediterranean.

The Mediterranean migrant crisis cannot only be understood and negotiated within a rhetoric of humanitarian intervention and institutional crisis management. The Black Mediterranean shows how mobility, instead of work, becomes a distinct concept and experience around which Europe’s capitalism and Africa’s neocolonialism can be understood. Strikingly, the same absolutist conversations on race, nationalism and modernity that Paul Gilroy’s “The Black Atlantic” criticized as “fatal mistakes” continue to mediate the debates and analyses on the Mediterranean crisis.

The Black Mediterranean is not this empty liquid space that separates a neocolonial and impoverished south from a post-empire and fractured north. It is a hybrid and discursive space through which both Europeans and Africans have defined themselves and their project of modernity. As a result of a long history of violence and war, that far exceeds that of the Black Atlantic, this space can only be mediated, for now, through the negative.

Next time you see the Mediterranean, think of how Europe’s institutional and political responses have turned the migrant crisis into an enduring tragedy.

Three moments are important here to understand how, in times of crisis, Europe does not know what to do with itself and lets loose its repressed, violent self. Ode to Joy turns into The Robbers.

First, there is European Union-Turkey Refugee Agreement signed in March 2016 with the declared objective of finding “a way to prevent unchecked arrivals into the European Union”. It involves Greece returning newly arrived refugees migrants to Turkey, and in return, the EU guarantees that asylum seekers in Turkey will be resettled in Europe. This deal ensures that “the problem has once again been squeezed elsewhere rather than resolved.” Eventually, the only loser is the refugee. Despite a strong backlash from such organizations as the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) and Amnesty International, the agreement is still in effect and refugees and migrants are indirectly forced to find new routes to escape violence and abuse. After Spain’s bilateral agreements with Morocco, Senegal, and Mauritania, the only route for “unchecked” migrants is through the Central Mediterranean, linking Libya and Tunisia to Italy. A deadly sea route.

Second, The Schengen Agreement, which came into effect in 1995, ensures that the EU provides few directives on issues of migration, refugees and asylum seekers. The Dublin regulation adds another layer of control on mobility by dictating that the country of arrival is responsible for the registration and processing of migrants and refugees alike. With the surge of the number of new arrivals, things spiral out of control. And Europe’s colonial self resurfaces.

In response to the crisis, persistent calls to close borders and reinstate checkpoints reflect a rhetoric of the empire’s anxiety of “never again.” The Dutch prime minister, Mark Rutte, a liberal, offers an interesting comparison with the decline and fall of the Roman empire: “Big empires go down if the external borders are not well-protected.” The toxic metaphors of “swarms, floods and marauders” used by British and European politicians reinforce this trope of invasion. It is within this understanding that the French President Emmanuel Macron put forth his delusional suggestions to “clear migrants off streets by the end of the year” and to “create “hot spots” in Libya this summer.” “Disturbing” was the epithet used Human Rights Watch (HRW) and a number of NGOs to qualify his proposal.

Third, in response to the surge in the number of migrants and asylum seekers coming from Libya and Tunisia, Europe came up with a new Marshall plan for these unruly countries. Italy’s Prime Minister, Paolo Gentiloni, a center-leftist, formulated “a plan to send Italian warships into Libyan territorial waters to combat smugglers.” In Tunisia, President Béji Caid Essebsi was forced into a “bilateral agreement” during his recent visit to Germany’s chancellor Angela Merkel with that would. The agreement ensures the repatriation of 1,500 Tunisian asylum seekers through a process local organizations in Tunisia deemed coercive.

These far-right policies have driven stronger populist and xenophobic reactions from Europeans. After Petra László, the Hungarian journalist who kicked refugees felling police, after onlookers verbally abused  Pateh Sabally, a 22-year-old Gambian, as he drowned in Venice’s Grand Canal, and after Italian Coast Guard ignored a call from a sinking vessel and let 250 migrants drown, the European far-right has moved from isolated individual actions to a more organized and technology-based movement. Crowdfunding and 4chan threads are the latest trends among far-right activists.

The C-Star, a ship chartered by the far-right and anti-immigration French-based group Génération identitaire (GI – The Identitarian Generation), tracks SOS Mediterranée’s Aquarius in order to hinder its search and rescue efforts. The GI’s mission, titled “Defend Europe”, is to force “the closing of the Mediterranean route as the only way to Defend Europe and save lives.”

At the same time, left-wing activism is problematic. An excellent argument on the Black Mediterranean by Ida Danewid challenges a rhetoric of solidarity, endemic to both left-wing activism and academic debate, that reproduce “the foundational assumptions of the far right” and removes “from view the many afterlives of historical and ongoing colonialism.”

Next time you see the Mediterranean, think of how these migrants’ decision to migrate to Europe through the help and guidance of people-smugglers is never a choice.

The motives for African migrants to flee their home countries are various and complex. They are not necessarily motivated by the fleeing from political and sexual violence in South Sudan or driven by economic interests, such as a better life than in Senegal or Ivory Coast.

Extreme vetting conditions in Europe and the U.S. make it difficult for a large number of African migrants to apply for a work visa and force many to opt for illegal immigration. As the Canadian journalist Geoffrey York clarifies, “New restrictions within Africa and opaque deals between European countries and African regimes [have produced] a much more dramatic effect.”  For instance, the largest numbers of African migrants in the flow to Italy are not from Eritrea or Somalia, but Nigeria, Africa’s second biggest economy.

Next time you see the Mediterranean, think of Chemseddine Marzoug.

Marzoug, a retired Tunisian fisherman and a Red Crescent volunteer, spends most of his days burying the drowned bodies he finds on the littoral area of Zarzis, in the south east of Tunisia and close to the Libyan coast. For Marzoug, a death toll of 23 announces another ordinary week of burial of the drowned. And there are all the others who will never reach the coast.

“They lived through hell in Libya. We showed them little respect when they were alive. The least we can do is to show them respect in death… It’s too much.”

With little help, he routinely buries the corpses in an ad-hoc cemetery hastily laid out on a municipal dump. There is no coffin or tombstone, just cones of sand that indicate a mortuary presence.

Kenya after the elections: Will amnesia and impunity continue?

As Kenyans process the re-election of President Uhuru Kenyatta, competing narratives of resistance vs peace, and protest vs compliance are still dominating popular political discourse. Here’s what’s official: Opposition candidate Raila Odinga has lost the presidential election for the fourth time by a margin of roughly 1.4 million votes with a turnout of 79%. The opposition disputes the official tally, have compiled alternative totals and boycotted the official declaration. How their supporters and perhaps the Kenyan judiciary will respond to their controversial claims, is still in question. Challenges and protests of the results at the county and national levels are likely as leading opposition spokesperson James Orengo vowed to “take legitimate constitutional action to remedy what has happened.”

Kenyans are now attempting to resume normal life after a tense campaign and election season. The relative peace and calm in Kenya throughout the process is certainly something to praise. Tensions remain, but international election observers have released preliminary claims backing the election as relatively free and fair. Election narratives praise Kenyans for voting out powerful incumbents and elect women and relative newcomers to local and provincial positions.

Concerns over potential unrest are real. The last three incumbent presidential races (1992, 1997 and 2007) have all seen high levels of political violence. 2017 appears on the road to breaking this violent cycle, but the memory of these traumatic episodes have politicized public calls for peace and unity moving forward.

During this moment of cautious celebration it is important not to forget the past and reflect on the variety of issues that motivated millions of Kenyans to vote. Peace narratives were a prominent part of political and public campaigns, and helped subvert hate speech and the rapid proliferation of fake news. But just as citizens and the media widely preached Kenya ni sisi (Kenya is us), there was less acknowledgement that this discourse is also linked to a long history of wielding “peace” as a tool of both unity and repression in Kenya.

A Campaign Season Reminder

On May 9th 2016, while walking home from a day of research at the Kenya National Archives in Nairobi, my eyes started to well up with tears. Unfortunately I was not overcome with emotion at some wonderful scholarly breakthrough that day. Instead, I was struck like many pedestrians crossing University Way, with the fallout of the latest political protest.

In response to an opposition rally staged earlier that day to protest alleged corruption within Kenya’s electoral commission, the police descended on a crowd of protestors donning placards, chants and speeches, with Chinese imported water-cannons, tear gas, shields and batons. From video and social media, this state sponsored violence was wielded with disproportionately brutal force and fulfilled a promise made by the Nairobi police commander Japheth Koome. In an interview with the Kenya press the day before the planned protest Koome almost goaded the political opposition claiming in the name of ensuring safety that “We have the strength and capacity to stop any protests and ensure law and order is maintained. If they attempt to demonstrate tomorrow, they shall regret it.”

Since my brief encounter with police tear gas in the name of maintaining “law and order,” I have been struck by the notion that public calls for “peace” have long been used a strategic political weapon in Kenya and across many other autocratic regimes. From the days of Jomo Kenyatta’s regime to the Presidency of his son Uhuru, Kenya’s five decades of independence have been marked by wide ranging uses of “peace” to silence more messy notions of reconciliation and political change.

Silencing Memory and Dissent with “Law and Order”

When Kenya emerged from colonial rule it was a divided nation. In the 1950s, Mau Mau pitted radical freedom fighters against white and black colonial loyalists bent on maintaining their privileged positions within racial and class based colonial hierarchies. As a culmination of decades of colonial protest, Mau Mau was a war of liberation from within Kenyan society with 10,000s of casualties. Emerging from colonial rule with fresh memories of long term racial and class tensions, Kenyan needs of reconciliation went far beyond the removal of the Union Jack.

Kenya’s first president Jomo Kenyatta set an early example of how peace and the hope of future prosperity, was used as a weapon to silence the skeletons of the past. The Kenyatta regime made distinctive efforts to remake the narrative of Mau Mau from a divisive class struggle to a simple, unified independence movement. Even before independence, peace narratives were used to silence the lingering domestic critics of decolonization. Responding to rural claims of renewing the Mau Mau struggle for land after independence, in September of 1962 Jomo Kenyatta dismissed his critics and declared “we are determined to have independence in peace, and we shall not allow hooligans to rule Kenya.”

After independence, Kenyatta’s reign is often characterized as one guided by the policy to “forgive and forget,” with the messy internal tensions of decolonization deemed inconsequential to notions of progress. As Kenyatta claimed simply at the 1964 national holiday celebrating the independence struggle, “it is the future, my friends, that is living, the past is dead.”  

By 1966 though, historical cracks and infighting within the Kenyatta administration led to the formation of a new opposition party, the Kenya People’s Union (KPU). Led by Oginga Odinga, father of presidential candidate Raila Odinga, much of KPU’s public rhetoric pointed to the need to reconcile with and continue the struggles of the past. Land reform and Kenya’s growing inequality were just two of the topics debated within the global context of the disappointments of decolonization and rising Cold War tensions. These issues have remained a consistent critique from the political opposition ever since.

Instead of letting these debates play out on the floor of parliament, the policy of historical amnesia employed “peace” as a weapon to silence the opposition. From 1966-1969, opposition KPU members were publically harassed by the ruling KANU regime as agents of disunity and disorder. This led to a violent crackdown of KPU supporters following the high profile political assassination of Tom Mboya and subsequent protests of the Kenyatta regime in the KPU stronghold of Kisumu. KPU was officially banned in 1969 using a repackaged colonial law called the Preservation of Public Security Act which gave the President wide ranging powers to detain political dissents without trial.

From 1969-1991 Kenya was a one-party state with political detentions and even assassination used to silence dissent. “Peace and Order” narratives were often employed to justify crackdowns, with Kenyatta’s successor Daniel Arap Moi using many of the same tactics. Popular memory of this era is often one of fear, corruption and impunity for all state crimes committed in the name of political control.

By the early 1990s, internal protests, economic downturn and international pressure forced Moi to concede to multiparty elections. However even after the end of KANU’s one-party state, the ruling regime justified its marginalization of political protests using the old language of peace and security. During the initial widespread protests for multiparty rule in 1990, a former editor at the Daily Nation received a call from the Office of the President with a clear and threatening message, “cover the protests and it will contribute to the violence, you need to promote peace.”

With state sponsored violence, voter and press intimidation widely cited in Moi’s controversial re-elections in 1992 and 1997, the long term autocrat often responded to public calls for political change with silencing decrees. When violence first hit the Rift Valley during the campaign season for the 1992 elections, the state used their own complicity in the political unrest as a pretext to shut down peaceful calls for change with Presidential statements such as, “there will be no politics and no public meetings until law and order is restored.”

Why History Matters

 

As the sons of Kenya’s first President and Vice President squared off again in a tight race for the presidency it is important to acknowledge the impact of the past. The landscape of Kenyan politics has certainly changed dramatically since the 1960s. Kenyans fought hard to win their “second liberation” from one party rule in the 1990s. The opposition won a widely celebrated election in 2002, ending KANU’s 40 year political supremacy and delivered a new and progressive constitution in 2010 aimed particularly at checking the historic power of the presidency.  

However, the cast of characters in Kenya’s current election cycle are born out of the unresolved ideological struggles of decolonization and KANU’s 40 year grip on power. On both sides of the political divide, all the major players in the NASA and Jubilee coalition were members of KANU at one point in their career and benefited from the patronage of Daniel Arap Moi. Some were also victims of KANU’s repressive crackdown on dissent. In fact, the divide between Raila and Uhuru points directly to Moi’s choice to pick Uhuru and not Raila succeed him as the KANU presidential candidate in 2002.

Then relatively unknown outside of his presidential heritage, Uhuru positioned himself as the candidate representing the next generation of political leadership as opposed to the more senior Mwai Kibaki. However, Uhuru’s failed 2002 campaign vision offers a window into the influence of his father’s legacy as well as contemporary critiques of his government’s failure to deal with the crimes of the past. Unveiling his KANU vision of the future in October 2002, he spoke in a way that calmed fears of retribution among political elites and worried those advocating for change in the post Moi era.

We have to forget the past, however bitter we may be, and forge a common front to be able to overcome our emotions. We must therefore seek unity of purpose, learn to forgive and forget and march forward as a single battalion with one common goal of reconstructing our country for the betterment of all. (Uhuru Kenyatta 2002)

Peace without Justice

In 2013, when then ICC indicted politicians Uhuru Kenyatta and William Ruto won the popular vote, public calls for peace helped quell tensions and direct protests from the streets to the judiciary at a time when thousands of Kenyans were still displaced by the violence of 2008. Similar public calls are being made today. However, as Kenya’s controversial former anti-corruption czar John Githongo lamented after the 2013 elections “the tyranny of peace messaging has led many to feel Kenya slaughtered justice at the altar of a temporary and deeply uneasy apparent calm.”

Since 2013, the ICC cases against Uhuru and Ruto have been dropped as evidence was nearly impossible to gather with limited cooperation from a government some deemed the “alliance of the accused.” While the Jubilee government has improved access to basic civil services and completed large scale infrastructure projects, the forward looking agenda of economic development at all costs is often critiqued as ignoring the crimes of the past.

For much of Kenya’s postcolonial history, state response to political violence and historical injustice has been to form commissions of inquiry and produce reports of little consequence or action. After 2008, the state pledged a different approach and formed the most ambitious of these committees with the Truth Justice and Reconciliation Commission (TJRC).Charged with the investigation of human rights abuses and other crimes of historical injustice committed from 1963 to 2008, many saw this as a bold step towards ending the culture of impunity. Delivering their final report in 2013, the TJRC’s wide ranging recommendations were quickly tabled in parliament, and as recently as July 2017, Deputy President Ruto claimed implementing the TJRC would simply divide Kenyans and re-open old wounds.

Kenya’s authoritarian past is an important reminder of the historical burden everyday wananchi (citizens) carried with them to the polls. For many Kenyans I speak with, an election devoid of violence is not a universal marker of success or progress. Civil society groups, activists and those most vocal about the need for change in Kenya have rallied around the increasingly loud cry that “peace without justice” is just a way for the status quo of historical amnesia and political impunity to continue.  

Kenya has the tools to deal with the crimes of the past. The bigger question is, can Kenya’s political institutions and civil society check the lack of political and public will to implement change at the top. Raila campaigned in part on a platform to address historical injustices and implement the TJRC. On August 8th however, the majority of Kenyans rejected this vision and chose to bet on incumbency to deliver economic development and combat regional security on a policy to forgive and forget.

“Peace at all costs” won the day on August 8th and the international press will likely move onto the next “hotspot” if peace prevails. Having framed most of their pre-election narratives with the fears of “tribal” violence, Kenya’s more contested past and future is in danger of fading from global view. With the opposition still disputing the election, it is important to remember that peace narratives also cover up complex needs to address historical injustice and end a culture of impunity dating back to the days of Kenya’s first President Jomo Kenyatta, and have yet to be fully resolved by the re-election of his son Uhuru Kenyatta.

Kenya after the elections: will amnesia and impunity continue?

As Kenya processes the re-election of President Uhuru Kenyatta in the 2017 election, competing narratives of resistance vs peace, and protest vs compliance are still dominating popular political discourse. Raila Odinga now seems set to lose the presidential election for the fourth time by a margin of roughly 1.4 million votes with a turnout of 79%. The opposition disputes this tally, compiled alternative totals and boycotted the official declaration. How their supporters and perhaps the Kenyan judiciary will respond to their controversial claims, is still in question. Challenges and protests of the results at the county and national levels are likely as leading opposition spokesperson James Orengo vowed to “take legitimate constitutional action to remedy what has happened.”

Kenyan are now attempting to resume normal life after a tense campaign and election season. The relative peace and calm in Kenya throughout the process is certainly something to praise. Tensions remain, but international election observers have released preliminary claims backing the election as relatively free and fair. And election narratives warrant praise over Kenyan willingness to vote out powerful incumbents and elect women and relative newcomers to local and national positions.

Concerns over potential unrest are real. The last three incumbent presidential races (1992, 1997 and 2007) have all seen high levels of political violence. 2017 appears on the road to breaking this violent cycle, but the memory of these traumatic episodes have politicized public calls for peace and unity moving forward.

During this moment of cautious celebration it is important not to forget the past and reflect on the variety of issues that motivated millions of Kenyans to vote. Peace narratives were a prominent part of political and public campaigns, and helped subvert hate speech and the rapid proliferation of fake news. But just as citizens and the media widely preached Kenya ni sisi (Kenya is us), there was less acknowledgement that this discourse is also linked to a long history of wielding “peace” as a tool of both unity and repression in Kenya.

A Campaign Season Reminder

On May 9th 2016, while walking home from a day of research at the Kenya National Archives in Nairobi, my eyes started to well up with tears. Unfortunately I was not overcome with emotion at some wonderful scholarly breakthrough that day. Instead, I was struck like many pedestrians crossing University Way, with the fallout of the latest political protest.

In response to an opposition rally staged earlier that day to protest alleged corruption within Kenya’s electoral commission, the police descended on a crowd of protestors donning placards, chants and speeches, with Chinese imported water-cannons, tear gas, shields and batons. From video and social media, this state sponsored violence was wielded with disproportionately brutal force and fulfilled a promise made by the Nairobi police commander Japheth Koome. In an interview with the Kenya press the day before the planned protest Koome almost goaded the political opposition claiming in the name of ensuring safety that “We have the strength and capacity to stop any protests and ensure law and order is maintained. If they attempt to demonstrate tomorrow, they shall regret it.”

Since my brief encounter with police tear gas in the name of maintaining “law and order,” I have been struck by the notion that public calls for “peace” have long been used a strategic political weapon in Kenya and across many other autocratic regimes. From the days of Jomo Kenyatta’s regime to the Presidency of his son Uhuru, Kenya’s five decades of independence have been marked by wide ranging uses of “peace” to silence more messy notions of reconciliation and political change.

Silencing Memory and Dissent with “Law and Order”

When Kenya emerged from colonial rule it was a divided nation. In the 1950s, Mau Mau pitted radical freedom fighters against white and black colonial loyalists bent on maintaining their privileged positions within racial and class based colonial hierarchies. As a culmination of decades of colonial protest, Mau Mau was a war of liberation from within Kenyan society with 10,000s of casualties. Emerging from colonial rule with fresh memories of long term racial and class tensions, Kenyan needs of reconciliation went far beyond the removal of the Union Jack.

Kenya’s first president Jomo Kenyatta set an early example of how peace and the hope of future prosperity, was used as a weapon to silence the skeletons of the past. The Kenyatta regime made distinctive efforts to remake the narrative of Mau Mau from a divisive class struggle to a simple, unified independence movement. Even before independence, peace narratives were used to silence the lingering domestic critics of decolonization. Responding to rural claims of renewing the Mau Mau struggle for land after independence, in September of 1962 Jomo Kenyatta dismissed his critics and declared “we are determined to have independence in peace, and we shall not allow hooligans to rule Kenya.”

After independence, Kenyatta’s reign is often characterized as one guided by the policy to “forgive and forget,” with the messy internal tensions of decolonization deemed inconsequential to notions of progress. As Kenyatta claimed simply at the 1964 national holiday celebrating the independence struggle, “it is the future, my friends, that is living, the past is dead.”  

By 1966 though, historical cracks and infighting within the Kenyatta administration led to the formation of a new opposition party, the Kenya People’s Union (KPU). Led by Oginga Odinga, father of presidential candidate Raila Odinga, much of KPU’s public rhetoric pointed to the need to reconcile with and continue the struggles of the past. Land reform and Kenya’s growing inequality were just two of the topics debated within the global context of the disappointments of decolonization and rising Cold War tensions. These issues have remained a consistent critique from the political opposition ever since.

Instead of letting these debates play out on the floor of parliament, the policy of historical amnesia employed “peace” as a weapon to silence the opposition. From 1966-1969, opposition KPU members were publically harassed by the ruling KANU regime as agents of disunity and disorder. This led to a violent crackdown of KPU supporters following the high profile political assassination of Tom Mboya and subsequent protests of the Kenyatta regime in the KPU stronghold of Kisumu. KPU was officially banned in 1969 using a repackaged colonial law called the Preservation of Public Security Act which gave the President wide ranging powers to detain political dissents without trial.

From 1969-1991 Kenya was a one-party state with political detentions and even assassination used to silence dissent. “Peace and Order” narratives were often employed to justify crackdowns, with Kenyatta’s successor Daniel Arap Moi using many of the same tactics. Popular memory of this era is often one of fear, corruption and impunity for all state crimes committed in the name of political control.

By the early 1990s, internal protests, economic downturn and international pressure forced Moi to concede to multiparty elections. However even after the end of KANU’s one-party state, the ruling regime justified its marginalization of political protests using the old language of peace and security. During the initial widespread protests for multiparty rule in 1990, a former editor at the Daily Nation received a call from the Office of the President with a clear and threatening message, “cover the protests and it will contribute to the violence, you need to promote peace.”

With state sponsored violence, voter and press intimidation widely cited in Moi’s controversial re-elections in 1992 and 1997, the long term autocrat often responded to public calls for political change with silencing decrees. When violence first hit the Rift Valley during the campaign season for the 1992 elections, the state used their own complicity in the political unrest as a pretext to shut down peaceful calls for change with Presidential statements such as, “there will be no politics and no public meetings until law and order is restored.”

Why History Matters

(Historical comparisons of Uhuru Kenyatta to his father Jomo and initial political patron Daniel Arap Moi by political cartoonists Alphonce Omondi (Ozone) and Patrick Gathara—via Twitter)

As the sons of Kenya’s first President and Vice President squared off again in a tight race for the presidency it is important to acknowledge the impact of the past. The landscape of Kenyan politics has certainly changed dramatically since the 1960s. Kenyans fought hard to win their “second liberation” from one party rule in the 1990s. The opposition won a widely celebrated election in 2002, ending KANU’s 40 year political supremacy and delivered a new and progressive constitution in 2010 aimed particularly at checking the historic power of the presidency.  

However, the cast of characters in Kenya’s current election cycle are born out of the unresolved ideological struggles of decolonization and KANU’s 40 year grip on power. On both sides of the political divide, all the major players in the NASA and Jubilee coalition were members of KANU at one point in their career and benefited from the patronage of Daniel Arap Moi. Some were also victims of KANU’s repressive crackdown on dissent. In fact, the divide between Raila and Uhuru points directly to Moi’s choice to pick Uhuru and not Raila succeed him as the KANU presidential candidate in 2002.

Then relatively unknown outside of his presidential heritage, Uhuru positioned himself as the candidate representing the next generation of political leadership as opposed to the more senior Mwai Kibaki. However, Uhuru’s failed 2002 campaign vision offers a window into the influence of his father’s legacy as well as contemporary critiques of his government’s failure to deal with the crimes of the past. Unveiling his KANU vision of the future in October 2002, he spoke in a way that calmed fears of retribution among political elites and worried those advocating for change in the post Moi era.

We have to forget the past, however bitter we may be, and forge a common front to be able to overcome our emotions. We must therefore seek unity of purpose, learn to forgive and forget and march forward as a single battalion with one common goal of reconstructing our country for the betterment of all. (Uhuru Kenyatta 2002)

Peace without Justice

In 2013, when then ICC indicted politicians Uhuru Kenyatta and William Ruto won the popular vote, public calls for peace helped quell tensions and direct protests from the streets to the judiciary at a time when thousands of Kenyans were still displaced by the violence of 2008. Similar public calls are being made today. However, as Kenya’s controversial former anti-corruption czar John Githongo lamented after the 2013 elections “the tyranny of peace messaging has led many to feel Kenya slaughtered justice at the altar of a temporary and deeply uneasy apparent calm.”

Since 2013, the ICC cases against Uhuru and Ruto have been dropped as evidence was nearly impossible to gather with limited cooperation from a government some deemed the “alliance of the accused.” While the Jubilee government has improved access to basic civil services and completed large scale infrastructure projects, the forward looking agenda of economic development at all costs is often critiqued as ignoring the crimes of the past.

For much of Kenya’s postcolonial history, state response to political violence and historical injustice has been to form commissions of inquiry and produce reports of little consequence or action. After 2008, the state pledged a different approach and formed the most ambitious of these committees with the Truth Justice and Reconciliation Commission (TJRC).Charged with the investigation of human rights abuses and other crimes of historical injustice committed from 1963 to 2008, many saw this as a bold step towards ending the culture of impunity. Delivering their final report in 2013, the TJRC’s wide ranging recommendations were quickly tabled in parliament, and as recently as July 2017, Deputy President Ruto claimed implementing the TJRC would simply divide Kenyans and re-open old wounds.

Kenya’s authoritarian past is an important reminder of the historical burden everyday wananchi (citizens) carried with them to the polls. For many Kenyans I speak with, an election devoid of violence is not a universal marker of success or progress. Civil society groups, activists and those most vocal about the need for change in Kenya have rallied around the increasingly loud cry that “peace without justice” is just a way for the status quo of historical amnesia and political impunity to continue.  

Kenya has the tools to deal with the crimes of the past. The bigger question is, can Kenya’s political institutions and civil society check the lack of political and public will to implement change at the top. Raila campaigned in part on a platform to address historical injustices and implement the TJRC. On August 8th however, the majority of Kenyans rejected this vision and chose to bet on incumbency to deliver economic development and combat regional security on a policy to forgive and forget.

“Peace at all costs” won the day on August 8th and the international press will likely move onto the next “hotspot” if peace prevails. Having framed most of their pre-election narratives with the fears of “tribal” violence, Kenya’s more contested past and future is in danger of fading from global view. With the opposition still disputing the election, it is important to remember that peace narratives also cover up complex needs to address historical injustice and end a culture of impunity dating back to the days of Kenya’s first President Jomo Kenyatta, and have yet to be fully resolved by the re-election of his son Uhuru Kenyatta.

The winner takes all

Kagame in crowd. Image via Wikicommons.

Paul Kagame won last Friday’s presidential election in a landslide with 99 percent of the vote. The outcome is unsurprising. Before Rwandans cast their ballots, analysts were calling the vote a coronation.

The president campaigned on his record of delivering economic growth and national security. Since the ruling Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) took office in 1994, Rwandans now live in harmony and prosperity. Ethnic labels of being Hutu, Tutsi or Twa are a thing of the past, a relic of previous regimes who manipulated ethnicity for their own selfish political goals. Discipline and focus define contemporary Rwanda, where good citizens work tirelessly to promote national development, an impressive accomplishment given the intimacy, scale, and sheer brutality of the 1994 genocide.

In just 100 days, Hutu militias led the murder of at least 500,000 ethnic Tutsi. The genocide was a deliberate policy of a power-hungry Hutu elite who feared, after nearly four years of civil war, that power-sharing with the then Rwandan Patriotic Front rebels would diminish their ability to enrich themselves at the expense of the general population. The murders started in Kigali on the evening of April 6, 1994, spreading throughout much of Rwanda within the week. By the time the RPF stopped the civil war and genocide in July 1994, the country had experienced the most concentrated episode of mass political violence since the Holocaust.

With the moral and financial support of countries including the United States and Britain, Kagame has ruled since the genocide ended, first as vice president, defense minister, and de facto ruler until 2000, and since then as president with some 90 percent of the vote in three successive presidential elections (2003, 2010 and 2017).

The president is the head and heart of the Rwandan body politic, where thinking and dreaming big is rewarded.

Thinking big is, according to Kagame, the sole path to undoing Rwanda’s legacy of violence, while producing impressive economic growth, private investment, poverty reduction, and gender equality. Critics who seek to diminish these accomplishments by alluding to Kagame’s blood-soaked path to power are told to mind their own business. On this point, the President’s response to his detractors is unequivocal, “We suffered genocide, you did not.”  Outsiders who question Kagame are quickly labeled as racists, unwilling to recognize an African success story when they see one. Those who question or challenge RPF policy directives soon find themselves in trouble, either as agitators or people who are not committed to ethnic unity.

The RPF’s oft-repeated narrative of success is one of development, financed by economic growth averaging eight percent per annum since 1994, funded in large part by foreign donors. The benefits are unfairly distributed, accruing to a relatively wealthy, educated and English-speaking urban elite who came to live in Rwanda only since 1994. The majority of Rwandans, both today and before 1994, live in rural areas, eking out a living as subsistence farmers. Most are poor, living on less than two dollars per day, surviving on what they can produce. Poverty makes them risk adverse, putting how they live at odds with RPF policies to quickly upgrade their lives in the name of ethnic unity and development. The capital, Kigali, gives the appearance of prosperity, while the average rural household of nine people struggles with food insecurity and malnutrition rooted in land disputes.

The rural majority has always been subject to the self-serving decisions of political elites, whether Tutsi or Hutu. Throughout Rwandan history, winner-take-all politics has been culturally rooted in a system of dominance of the ruling group over the rest of society. The RPF leadership is no different from its postcolonial predecessors in this regard. The party has long used the institutional and administrative capacities of the state to organize Rwandan social and political life. The RPF’s Rwanda lacks strong public institutions to check or balance the power of President Kagame and his cronies. There is no reliable mechanism to allow for the peaceful transition of power to another leader, let alone a different political model. All powerful elements of the Rwandan state are under the president’s command — the police, the armed forces, the judiciary and government officials go along with his designs. If Rwandans feel uninspired by Kagame’s visionary leadership, they stand aside in the name of self-preservation rather than obedience.

Others, namely rural Rwandans, struggling to make ends meet under the economic and national unity policies of the RPF, know that powerful people make choices rooted in self-preservation without due regard for the rural majority. They also know that political and military elites use the machinery of the state to their own ends. They shellac their endorsement of their president with a paste of resignation and fear.

Kagame is not one to shy away from hard work, kowtow to critics at home or abroad, or worry about the harsh realities of rural Rwandans. His third mandate is premised on average annual growth rate of 10 percent. His RPF will continue to grow the economy, promising to make Rwanda an upper middle-income country by 2035 (which happens to be one year after his right to run for president runs out) and a high income one by 2050.

Reaching this near-unattainable goal will fall on the backs of rural farmers, as local officials do all they can to get as much as they can out of an already exhausted population. Doing more with less is a public virtue in contemporary Rwanda, even as the government stands accused of manipulating poverty-reduction data to rationalize its hard line on economic growth. For the time being, the government seems more interested in producing impressive statistics over investing in a diversified pro-poor economy.

Grandiose planning may prove the downfall of Rwanda’s charismatic president. The idea that tiny, land-locked, resource-poor Rwanda can harness a largely agrarian economy to propel the country to high-income status in three decades seems unlikely, given the vicissitudes of history and the country’s socio-political legacy. Rwanda’s past points to waves of mass violence, occurring every 40 years or so, when the ruling class fractures and ordinary people become the targets of physical, ethnically motivated violence. The ambitious, talented, and heavy-handed RPF shows few signs of bucking this trend.

Encountering the promised land: Rastafari in Ethiopia and Shashamane

Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie would have been 125 this year. Perhaps coincidentally — and indeed meaningfully for Rastafari repatriates in Ethiopia — the government just announced a decision to issue identification cards to foreigners who have contributed to the country’s development, Israelis of Ethiopian descent and Rastafari.

According to news agency AFP, a foreign ministry spokesperson discussed how this card would allow residence and many legal rights—such as the ability to come and go without a visa. “There were questions for them to recognise their presence in the country, so that is what the government did.”. In a separate report, the AP reported that though the cards allow for residency, this does not mean that Rastafari repatriates are yet considered Ethiopian citizens: “Thousands of people who will be issued the new identity cards still cannot take part in elections or engage in the country’s security and defense sectors.”

The new documentary film, “Shashamane: On the Trail of the Promised Land,” by director Giulia Amati documentary (screening on Afridocs, online or on BET on satellite TV), takes on a particular importance given these recent events. The film tells the story of the Rastafari repatriate community who have moved to their promised land of Ethiopia, specifically land that was granted by Haile Selassie in the late 1950s as thanks to the pan-African community for support during the Italian occupation. Amati’s documentary demonstrates the connections that Shashemene has to other places and other periods of history. Here’s the trailer:

 

The film is  a nuanced portrait of a community, but also a range of individuals who are connected to Shashemene. As someone who researched the Ethiopian perception of the Rastafari movement [and wrote a book about it–Ed], and has spent time in Shashemene, I was interested in speaking to her about the film and the way that she portrays and represents repatriation.

Can you talk a bit about this film? How did you get to Shashemene? 

The idea of starting to work on the story of Shashemene started from my previous project, a documentary entitled This is my land…Hebron. And it’s a movie that took me three years to make and was quite successful. What really attracted me to the story of Hebron was the underlying fight or search for identity through a piece of land. That was very interesting for me and I wanted to work on that topic. When I came to Hebron I was literally shocked. How come nobody is getting this information out–at least the way I’ve seen it? For Shashemene it was very different. I just started by going on the internet to find a new project: searching “identity,” “promised land” and other keywords. I came across Shashemene. But there wasn’t very much information. Then the book written by Giulia Bonacci, Exodus. Her approach is historical, which gave me a chance to tell the story of Shashemene as one that covers 400 years on at least three different continents. At the time Giulia was in Ethiopia doing research and  about to organize a Reggae Festival in Addis Ababa to which she invited elders and community members from Shashemene. She invited me along to get the chance to meet some of the elders and then eventually ask them to go down to Shashememe together. That was the beginning of this journey.

My research was about the Ethiopian perception of the repatriate community and the way that it has developed over time. But while doing that research I also fell upon Derek Bishton’s photographs and in your film his work sort of acts as a bridge. It demonstrates the history of the people and makes that connection to the past. 

At the time when I met Giulia we started doing some brainstorming and asked her about archival material that was out there. The first pioneers were very poor people they didn’t have cameras. So there is very little that documents this incredible story. But when she was about to publish her book she heard about [Derek] who had come in the 80s to document the story of the journey of some of the first pioneers. She gave me his email. When I met him, he told me, listen, I have just retired, and you came into my life in a moment when I am recollecting some of the key events on my life and trying to write a book. So what I am doing is also going through the pictures that I took during my journey in Shashemene and my project is to develop some of the pictures in a big format and eventually go back and see who of those pioneers have survived and what happened to their children.

I said wow, our timing really is good. About six months later I went to Shashemene to really start the filming, and I spent four months. At the end Derek came to Shashemene so we were able to coordinate. I knew when he was coming, but I didn’t tell the community because we wanted to preserve the genuineness of the significance of him bringing back a piece of history and giving the community the opportunity to see, through a small exposition, their history. It’s not just a family album, but a history that they have made through their journey and their life choices. It was quite moving to see how people from the community reacted because I felt that they were perceiving the bigger meaning that was behind those pictures. 

The film is obviously in three parts, three spaces: Ethiopia, the UK and Jamaica. Within those three you speak to a number of people, but the central person in Ethiopia is Ras Mweya, in the UK, Derek and in Jamaica, Ivan Coore. Obviously from what you have described, there is a reason for Derek, in that his experience in Shashemene thirty years previous made him an obvious choice, but can you talk about the other figures in the film? 

First, I think it was important to film in three continents for two different reasons. One is the functioning of the slave trade which links all three. The other reason was also to understand the journey and the hardship. This is where the key figures came in: one, a person who settled in Shashemene who was determined and stayed; and one who repatriated but had to leave. Derek is in England, but also in terms of imagery, that helped to created a contrast with the kind of society a lot of the people in Shashemene had escaped from.

And when I came to Shashemene it wasn’t easy, as it often is when you enter a community: to find your space, to create trust and to be truly welcomed by people. I needed to understand the community. It is quite complex. I try not to be naive, so I tried to give myself time to understand the inner dynamic. I didn’t want a narrow perspective. So I spent time understanding the people who allowed me to describe and have access to the community in a broader perspective. I wanted to give everybody’s point of view; it is why I made a choral portrait of the community.

With Ras Mweya — it was personal. We recognized in each other that there was a personal journey that we could do together. At the same time I also felt that his spiritual journey was deep and honest, and I think that really linked us. I grew up a lot by spending time with him, trying to understand the community through his eyes. At the end what happened is that one day he told me, listen, now it is time for you to decide the house where you want to stay. That was really the beginning of our interaction and it is really the beginning of the film. Because once I went to his house, I felt that I was safe, that I could start to put my energy into the filming process. Ras Mweya passed away just a month before I was able to bring the movie back to Shashemene. That was one of the most sad events that happened because he really wanted to see the final result of our work and it was very important for me to bring it back to him. I understood that Ras Mweya had the vision to know that through the movie, in a way, his legacy survived.

When I saw Ivan  Coore  speak in the film, it was very moving. Having interviewed him previously, I know how much he has wanted to tell his story. Could you talk about him a little?

Jamaica was the most difficult part to organize in terms of filming and production because in Ethiopia I spent a lot of time–six months in the community over three trips. England was easy. But in Jamaica I had very few contacts. I didn’t know what to do. And then, two weeks before I was about to leave, I finally received an email from Ivan Coore saying “I’m sorry, I rarely check my emails, and I saw yours and it is fantastic, I would love to meet you. Let’s talk.”

He was the man the wanted! A man who could tell a personal experience about Shashemene–not really a historical perspective, but personal. You could tell he was a man who really wanted to tell his story. At one point in your life you start to see your personal story as an element of a bigger history, and I think I was lucky enough to meet Ivan in this moment of his life. I think the story of Shashemene is what attracted me the most. This is the story of an incredible dream. Few people have the strength to try to turn their dreams into reality. When each of us dares to do that, each of us has to face how challenging it is to do this and how many compromises have to happen. So, as human beings, we often find ourselves in that place where we try to deny some the things that really didn’t work out. Because it is hard for us to accept that turning things into a reality can be hard and don’t work all the time the way we had envisioned and then there is a moment where you are able to see things in perspective: to see the good, the bad and to really analyse what happened and what you did. Ivan told the truth about his journey. 

I don’t know if you read Emily Roboteau’s book Searching for Zion, but it also looks at repatriation, and one of the powerful elements of the book, and I think your film also captures this, is this sense that repatriation is not an A to B process. Repatriation is not a journey that erases or exits the history of colonialism, the history of slavery, of what continues and impacts people to this day. Everything exists at the same time. It is about moving from one space to another, but it also is a journey that is more than that. It forces us to see the way in which history functions in the present. 

Repatriation is complex. I was fascinated by the search for identity of Black people who have decided to move back to Shashemene. It is linked to a physically journey, and the story of the place goes beyond that. It is not just a physical journey. I think at the end of the movie what I came to realize is that Shashemene represents a kind of a metaphor. The people have physically moved there and they find themselves in a sort of limbo: not at home in the west, going back to Africa and reconnect to roots, but even there not really being at home, welcome. In a way, it is a metaphor of how this process of emancipation is still going on. People in Shashemene are still fighting for the right to have citizenship. Considering the repatriation movement and the reparation movement, the pioneers went there without any help and they stayed there and they are a symbol of a demand that is bigger than Shashemene. They stand as a metaphor of a bigger process that is still going on. 

It is a very beautiful film. From a visual perspective, in terms of representing space, it looks like  Shashemene . You focus very much  on the community so you get a sense of how it looks and feels to be in that space. The same with Jamaica and the UK. Earlier, you talked about this concept of a “choral portrait” of the community. In many documentaries you have people named as they appear . Your film provides the names at the end of the film. Can you talk a little bit about this decision? How do you think it affects the representation of the space of  Shashemene ?

It was a conscious decision–I thought about it a lot. Because I knew how important names are for Rastafari and many people. Ras Mweya Masimba changed his name–renounced his birth name, the name that he inherited from a slave master to have an African name. I was aware of how important this was. At the same time, I wanted to be faithful to the experience and what I wanted to do is have the audience enter into Shashemene the way that I did. 

I didn’t meet or interview people because I had a list of people; I was knocking, door by door and listening to people’s stories. Little by little, by doing a sort of patchwork of different people’s testimony, I was able to create my own relationship and to trust people and I wanted people to get this experience about Shashemene. Not to make assumptions and decide on importance based on names and roles. I wanted people to share that sense of listening, and trust just by faces, expressions and stories. It was a bit of challenge to do that because audiences get nervous when you don’t give them a map of how to read things. So I the end I thought it was more valuable for the community to give that representation of history in this way. The editing is very slow–if you want to listen to the story, you have to sit down and wait. There are no short cuts. Of course, the names are in the credits. 

I figured that there was a reason. It functions as a documentary, but also as a portrait. It shows a community. Given the Rastafari theology of “I and I”, community is always a part of Rastafari. It’s a significant choice. The reality is that no figures in the movie are named: all are treated the same way. From Dr. Clinton Hutton at the University of the West Indies, to Ras Mweya in Shashemene, to Derek Bishton in the UK. What has been the reaction of people to the film? 

I’ve done screenings in Italy, Greece, England, South Africa, Egypt, Ethiopia and America. The audience reaction is very different, because of course this is a story that depends on who you are and the history you can grasp. For example, in England the premiere was at the Brixton and the audience was prepared. That was their history. And then in other places people connect more with the human story. Each of us is fighting to find who we are, what is home, and can identify with struggle, with people who have been abused and are fighting to restore pride and identity.

I went to Shashemene in November 2016 and the political situation was quite tense. I tried to get some support from the Italian Cultural Institute, but they said forget about it, we are not going to take any responsibility, we are not going to drive you down there. Then I thought, ok, I will need to organize myself on my own and again, Giulia Bonacci came on the scene and she was so supportive in terms of getting in contact with people in Shashemene, and had people helping out to get a room ready with a projector and so on. 50 people from the community showed up–which is a lot. Imagine, Raw Mweya has just passed away a month before so there was a feeling in the room. People were shouting with joy during the screening. After the screening there were a couple of people with whom I got closer during the making of the movie, very close friends of Ras Mweya. They hugged me and said, “hen you came here, you were a person we mostly trusted, I don’t think there had ever been someone we trusted so much, but that trust was 98 percen . There was still that two percent. We were wondering what is she going to do with us, with our history. But now after the movie, that trust is one thousand percent.” I feel like there was this recognition that we had done a piece of the journey together. And that is one of the most powerful feelings you can have as a filmmaker and as a human being–to see that you have done a journey with other people.

What about those Kenyans who can’t vote today?

Refugee camp in Kenya. Image credit Zoriah via Flickr.

Today Kenyans go to the polls to elect a new President. The campaign has focused on corruption, major infrastructure projects, and spiraling costs of living, while international media interest has focused squarely on the prospect of electoral violence.

The issue of the hundreds of thousands of refugees in Kenya has received limited attention, yet much has changed since the last election in March 2013. Refugees have become a red-button issue and the results on Tuesday will have important consequence for those seeking refuge in Kenya. 

The most immediate issue faced by refugees, in common with others, is the risk of violence. The violence following the December 2007 election has cast a long shadow. With over 1,000 dead and over 600,000 displaced, 2007-2008 marked the worst electoral violence in recent Kenyan history, although it was far from unique. 

Tensions remain high as voting approaches. The torture and murder of Chris Msando, a senior employee of the Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission (IEBC), has shaken the country, and follows the break-in by a gunman to Deputy President William Ruto home last week. Preparing for the worst, the National Police Service has marshaled 180,000 personnel from other agencies in advance of Tuesday’s vote.

On Friday, the office of the opposition, the National Super Alliance (NASA), was raided. With polls indicating a close contest between President Uhuru Kenyatta and former Vice President Raila Odinga, a narrow defeat for either candidate could lead to accusations of voter fraud and a “stolen” election.

Odinga, who lost the 2007 election by a narrow margin, has recently given assurances there will be no violence if the elections are conducted in a free and fair manner. Recent events raise concerns over whether the campaign or election can be characterised as either free or fair.

Kenyan politics have become increasingly security-focused since the last election, with refugees amongst those targeted. The attacks by al Shabaab on the Westgate Mall in Nairobi in September 2013 saw 67 people die, while the Garissa University attack in April 2015 was the country’s deadliest since the 1998 bombing of the United States’ embassy.

Operation Usalama Watch, a 2014 counterterrorism operation, scapegoated refugees living in Nairobi. In the years since, 65,000 refugees have been repatriated to Somalia, with many returned involuntarily to unsafe parts of the country.

Refugees, particularly in Kenya’s cities, remain vulnerable to violence. Recent attacks in South Africa have shown how anti-migrant protests can quickly descend into xenophobic violence, while in Germany there are around 10 attacks on refugees every day.

If violence erupts in the wake of Kenya’s elections, refugees could be at the receiving end of similar attacks. In Nairobi’s informal settlements, where refugees from nearby African countries live alongside Kenyans, police protection can be scarce, while in neighborhoods such as Eastleigh, well known for its high density of Somalis, refugees have been targeted previously.

The election will have longer-term implications for refugees in Kenya. President Kenyatta, currently leading in polls, has been clear in stating he wants the number of refugees in the country drastically reduced. Earlier this year he reiterated publicly his plans to close Dadaab, one of the largest refugee camps in the world, despite opposition from Kenya’s High Court.

Kenyatta’s running mate, William Ruto, has previously called Dadaab a “centre of radicalisation” and “terrorist training” ground. Kenyatta’s victory could be seen as further support for the closure of the camp and the repatriation of refugees to Somalia.

Odinga has spoken of Kenya’s obligation to assist refugees. Last year he criticized the government’s plans to close Dadaab and return large numbers of refugees.

If elected, however, Odinga is unlikely to halt repatriation efforts. He may eschew some of the scapegoating that has become commonplace and step back from promises to swiftly close Dadaab, but he has previously proposed establishing camps within Somalia to stem the movement of would-be refugees. 

Kenya’s role as a major refugee-hosting country is unlikely to abate in the near future. Though efforts might intensify to repatriate refugees to Somalia, continued conflict will likely result in new arrivals in the country. The 73,242 South Sudanese who have arrived in Kenya since December 2013 are likely to be joined by others, as conflict continues, and strain on resources in Uganda sees yet more move on.

Whoever wins the election, a focus must be placed on upholding Kenya’s obligations to protect refugees, with such protection needed from both forced repatriation by the state and spontaneous attacks under the cover of electoral violence.

The crisis of the party-state in South Africa

Image by Paul Saad. Via Flickr.com

Left critics often cast South Africa’s ruling African National Congress (ANC) as an organization under the thrall of a homogenous elite, wedded to neoliberalism and the old economic structure.  Recent events have blown this interpretation open. The ANC elite is in fact sharply divided, and one faction seems largely impervious to corporate South Africa’s immense economic power.

A better understanding of the ANC’s incumbency can be gleaned from political scientist Roger Southall’s notion of a “party-state” which pinpoints how the ANC’s tenure in government has transformed it into a sort of machine through which different class forces and interest groups attempt to secure access to public sector jobs, contracts and other resources.

The party-state has empowered a ‘state elite’ who occupy cabinet positions and directorships in SOEs (State-Owned Enterprises, like ESKOM, Transnet, Denel and PetroSA), but it also been the vehicle for a much wider process of class formation, argues South in his book, “Liberation Movements in Power” (now also available in paperback).  Equity stipulations adopted by the public sector and the ANC’s fulsome embrace of political rather than merit-based appointment have turned it into the primary site for the creation of a new black middle class.

Two other groups have gained most from the ANC’s time in government. The first Southall terms the “corporate black bourgeoisie”–black businesspeople who succeeded in penetrating the boardrooms and share structures of corporate South Africa, many rising up in the initial waves of Black Economic Empowerment (BEE) in which white business energetically sought to recruit political allies.

The second are a more diffuse class of capitalists who don’t enjoy such strong connections with the corporate economy. They are reliant instead on the ever burgeoning procurement spend of the state, which now comprises 42% of the total public budget ($372,9 billion) according to one report.

The current conflict is defined by the principal opposition of these two groups, with the rest of the party-state aligning according to different interests, ideologies and contingencies. The faction formed around current President Jacob Zuma is stronger in the provinces, where former Bantustan administrations that were sequestered into the new state have continued uninterrupted traditions of clientelism and cronyism.

But Zuma also draws wide support from individuals defending little fiefs of patronage throughout the party-state as well as middle class elements that are most alienated from the white dominated corporate sector and receptive to radical transformation.

The biggest drawcard for the camp of Zuma’s main rival, his deputy Cyril Ramaphosa, meanwhile is a generalized fear of electoral defeat which would jeopardize the viability of the party-state altogether. This is most felt in areas where patronage politics is less ingrained, although even the Zuma faction is not immune – witness the recent vacillation and possible defection of David Mabuza, premier of Mpumalanga province and formerly a key backer of the president.

Ramaphosa’s main support is rooted in regions of the party-state that have preserved credible institutions and elements of the Alliance where at least a measure of grassroots pressure is still felt, but he is also joined by individuals motivated by principle and wanting to arrest the decline of a once-proud organization.

Debating Anti-Corruption Politics 

Two positions on how civil society and the left should engage these developments, and the wider crisis of state capture, have dominated. One argues that working people simply have no dog in inter-elite conflicts: we lose with whichever faction is in power, so we’re better off not getting involved at all.

A second sees the fight against corruption as preeminent, and urges us to forge as broad a coalition as possible by suppressing our separate demands: making the fight solely about corruption and nothing else.

The veteran activist Zackie Achmat, on behalf of the #UniteBehind campaign, has defined a different, and I think more sensible approach. He acknowledges that different elites stand to win whichever way the conflict pans out, but doesn’t view the result as neutral for workers. Among other things, the Zuma faction is the far greater threat to democracy, and its perseverance promises a renewed slide towards the securitization of politics and abuse of the judicial independence.

Achmat is right – if the Zuma and the Guptas are unimpeded, the political environment will become much more hostile to efforts to build countervailing power against whichever faction of the elite happens to hold sway.

However, I think #UniteBehind was mistaken to have given the main platform to former Deputy Finance Minister, Mcebisi Jonas, at its march Monday ahead of the no-confidence vote in Parliament today.  The left should work with all who oppose state capture, but we urgently need to imprint our own politics on the movement – we can’t afford to allow corporate South Africa and its allies to continue to pose as the main enemies of corruption.

The policies pursued by the National Treasury and strongly supported by large-scale capital haven’t just been bad for working people because they destroy jobs and lower wages. They also produce the conditions in which patronage has taken root.

Patronage and Transformation

The party-state thesis encourages us to see the ANC and its 1,2 million members not as a narrow organization welded to one or another ideology, but as a larger social field shaped by the cleavages of a post-colonial society.

We need to emphasize this: cronyism and parasitism haven’t beset the ANC simply as a corollary of its own arrogance or through the influence of one or many nefarious individuals. They are intimately a product of the social landscape in which the party is embedded, and have festered most where the wounds of colonialism and its successors are deepest.

When the formal economy has most failed to create avenues for social mobility, the demands on the party-state—and the returns to patronage—have been greatest. This is so in areas left largely untouched by the corporate sector: destitute rural communities and townships where an incredible scarcity of employment intensifies the pressure on public functionaries to distribute jobs and resources to personal networks, greatly enriching those willing to do so.

It’s so in areas where the corporate economy is very much present, yet closed to new entrants. When black professionals experience an inability to advance because of a hostile corporate culture, because of old-boy networks, or simply because of a lack of new openings, they harden their attachment to the party-state. They become more sympathetic to any project that widens the domain of the state or directs its resources more forcefully to enrichment.

More widely, when new entrepreneurs experience an inability to grow because of entrenched monopolies or a poor economic outlook, they are more likely to pursue expansion through tenders and to invest in political relationships rather than innovation. They are more likely to excuse corruption as “transformation” and less likely to share large-scale capital’s concern with delimiting the authority of the state and guarding the independence of its institutions.

Patronage, in other words, flourishes where transformation flounders.

Conversely of course, new middle and upper classes are more likely to espouse capitalism’s supposed affinity for Weberian bureaucracy and state neutrality when they have a greater stake in the formal economy. When the corporate sector is not a world closed to them, when they share in its wealth and gain from its growth, they will root for a state that husbands enterprise and defends itself from takeover by sectional interests.

White capitalists understood this on some level – that’s why they worked so quickly to inculcate a network of political allies through share transfers as democracy was dawning. Ultimately this was an elitist strategy designed to forestall real transformation rather than further it.

It was transformation on the cheap. New black capitalists grew fabulously wealthy but remained few in number. Many slipped the leash somewhat by pushing for a slightly more assertive BEE policy, but ultimately they acted faithfully to defend big businesses’ core concern of keeping capital mobile and state regulation and spending confined.

The Treasury provided the greatest service to capital’s ability to resist transformation by exposing South Africa to the full discipline of financial markets. So whenever the transformation agenda threatened to escape the bounds of a gradualist and market driven framework, capital responded vociferously – like in 2002 when R2 billion was wiped off mining shares following the leak of a draft charter on mining transformation.

The Rise of the Patronage Faction

As Southall’s extensive scholarship shows, for all its various amendments, BEE has been tethered to the pace of the market. It spurts when asset markets and growth go up and reverses when they come down.

Thus the stock market boom of the late 1990s created the first tranche of black millionaires, then subsequently wiped many of them out when the East Asian crisis triggered a collapse. Most indexes of transformation floundered for several years after, but then lit up as SA experienced its only brief phase of high growth on the back of the global headwinds that ultimately ended in the 2008 crash.

The data on transformation since then is scandalous and under remarked in public debates. The one figure which has received wide circulation is share ownership, which the Johannesburg Stock Exchange (JSE) puts around 17% and Zuma puts around 3%, with the difference largely made up of indirect share ownership through pension funds.

Data from a black empowerment consultancy shows that black directorships on the JSE grew by 48% between 2006 and 2008 from 485 to 714 during BEE’s short bull phase. Between 2009 and 2012 they grew by less than 10%. In the four following years, according to the consultancy Who Owns Whom, there was virtually zero net growth in number of black directorships on the JSE – which numbered only 1043 in 2016 (the number of actual individuals who hold directorships is smaller since many hold more than one). Only around 15% of these directors have held executive positions in any given year.

The Commission for Employment Equity’s 2008 report found that non-white South Africans comprised only 23,3% of top management positions in the private sector (blacks made up 12,5%). In 2016 non-whites comprised 24,4% (with the black share shrinking to 10,7%).

There has been, in other words, virtually no diversification at the highest level of the private sector over the last eight years, and the trend in other managerial occupational grades is more or less the same.

Static proportions can always conceal changing absolutes, but in this case they mostly don’t. The reason that transformation has stagnated is that South African conglomerates have largely directed their attention abroad since the 2008 crash ended our debt and housing-driven growth spurt.

The meager growth that was sustained came only because the state was willing to pick up some of the slack, running constant deficits of around 3,4% of GDP and continuing to create jobs where the private sector has retreated. At a macroeconomic level the consequence has been a looming public debt crisis, a grave threat to the party-state machine which the new finance minister Malusi Gigaba is desperately trying to head off with (radically transformative) firesales of public assets.

At a political level the consequence has been a revanchist patrimonialism, aggrandizing those in the party-state who have no truck with the private sector, who support any project to use state power to crack open white dominance of the economy, no matter how dubious its protagonists. Lobbyists of black professionals and tenderpreneurs made their split with white business early when the Black Management Forum left the Business Unity South Africa in 2011 – since then they have become important backers of Zuma and Gupterization.

Other sections of the alliance that brought Zuma to power on the other hand, those with a popular base, have been weathered by the effects of the economic crisis and the contradictions of fighting for working class gains within a party beholden to middle- and upper-class interests. The famous slogan of Zwelinzima Vavi, former general secretary of the country’s largest trade union (in an alliance with the ANC), of a “Lula Moment” demanded that Zuma ditch his business backers and pivot to the workers and communists that brought him to power. Instead, he’s done the opposite.

The Treasury’s macroeconomic policies shaped the context in which these shifts occurred. That’s why we can’t afford to stave our critiques of them and other groups even as we march in the same demonstrations.

Fighting corruption is a precondition for improving socio-economic conditions, as Achmat points out. But improving socio-economic conditions may also be a precondition for fighting corruption. We need a movement that builds power for both struggles at the same time. The #UniteBehind initiative seems as good a place to start as any.

The world of photographer Osaretin Ugiagbe

Since he was ten years old back in Lagos, Osaretin Ugiagbe had been casually taking pictures. Using the family camera he would capture scenes from day-to-day life in the house, the neighborhood and thought nothing much of it. But from 2011 as a painter, and now living in the Bronx, he began feeling a yearning to make photographs. He started taking photos of friends; strangers on the streets and to document life around him. It was a 2012 trip to the Gordon Parks exhibition at the Schomburg that would serve as a catalyst into deliberate a photography practice.

“I remember seeing that exhibition and it all clicked” he said “the kids playing by the fire hydrant or by a fountain, and the natural composition had a very vivid, and very life-like effect. I found it to be very profound and moving. That is when it all started to click and I thought this is possible; this is what I can do.”

A collection of his photography and painted works are part of a show “Unbelonging,” at the Bronx Documentary Center on view until August 13th. “It is a diaspora feeling,” Ugiagbe explains about the show’s title, “it is a befitting title with the way things are going politically. Yet it also transcends race, gender, religion and politics.”

There tends to be a motion about the figures in his photos, even though they are static. “There is something I am looking for, something that I want to invoke or that I want to portray in these images even though I like them to be documentary. So while I am not controlling what is happening, the photographs I get the most fun out of are the ones where it is almost like I am using my mind to tell people what to do or painting with my imagination.”

They are also in black and white, something he attributes to the influence of old masters like Gordon Parks, Vivienne Maier and Malick Sidibe, and the timelessness and simplicity of the format.

“It cuts through the noise and takes you straight to the point without any distractions you can get from color. So with black and white I find it is much easier for one to convey using space, light and shadows.”

Ugiagbe spoke to Africa Is A Country about some of his own favorite photos.

This park is nearby my house in the Bronx, in Soundview. That was my first time meeting that kid and he was called Country. All the other kids kept calling him Country because apparently he just came from the South. So here is a country kid in South Bronx, New York. I would be around the basketball court trying to make a photograph with him and he would just give me these insane, very strong defiant poses. I asked why do they call you Country? And another kid answered “because he is from the country fool.” With images like this, I often find myself in my subject. That power, here is a young man who among his peers is the shortest – and we can see him flexing that little muscle – yet there is still this larger than life personality to him. And something very defiant about his gaze. He wants to portray that he is more than just a young man. That is something most people can relate to, and something I certainly feel I can relate to also. I didn’t have to ask him to pose for me or anything. It was just me with a camera and him just pretty much making images.

This is Jenesis Scott. It is a photo I feel says so much about her. For the fact that her name is Genesis, I would always joke with her, call her Exodus. She used to come around the Bronx Documentary Center (BDC). She is a good friend of mine, the neighborhood and the BDC. When I made this photograph  I had no idea what it would turn out to be, but she was caught in the moment and what I really liked was just the way it is composed: the deli at the back; her expression, I like the fact that her chest is there but you are not really seeing it. Because I feel like at times photographing women can be quite difficult. Because usually photographers tend to want to show something sexual. And for me I am okay with the idea of portraying women as just themselves, and or without inciting any kind of sexual innuendos. Just looking at a picture of a young lady and just looking at it for the sake of just the image itself. Which is why I personally like this image. There is a bit of a timelessness to it too, with the necklace and the scarf. But if you ask her I bet she will say, “Oh I didn’t have any makeup and didn’t put myself together” but to me it is pure, almost like a state of mind. The little knot on the shoulder I like as well. It could be a wrapper, it could be an African cloth. I think about West Africa, just seeing that little knot there, because I did that a lot. As kids we would put money in the African wax fabric and tie it. So these recognitions even if you don’t know how they seem to appear, do find a way of coming into the images of one’s practice.

This was taken from inside a bus. It is a great example of what really goes into making an image with regards to composition. I also picked this because I can connect it to the next image which gives a sense of being in Lagos in a car. But here we are in New York city in a bus and the image tells so much about life in the Bronx. I had just gotten onto the bus and here a few people were waiting to get on as well. I had no idea this is what I would make, until later when I got back onto my seat and looked back into the camera and saw it with the tilt and it was perfect. But I knew it was the time to use the camera. I felt like this was a great moment because I am on a bus and can see outside, and usually I like to photograph that particular wall with the life-line. Because it is by a bus stop, there are tons of people that usually stand around. The pose of the lady with the glasses for instance, I mean both of them and their gestures says so much. There is a gesture of wanting to survive I feel like, or insistence that we are here.

Apart from just the aesthetics of it, the reflections also in the image itself and that sense of unbelonging, or being somewhere and being the other are present. First of all you are wondering where the photographer is: it could be a train, it could be a bus, it could be a lot of things and this feeling of looking out, looking through.  

I didn’t do any post-production so far as tilting. And even the little detail at the very top; you can still see the little grey stains from water on the glass itself, the little white space on the very top corner and the black line also make it for me. It addresses a lot about being in a place, having to look through a lot and gazing at the other.

The previous photo was taken on a bus in the Bronx, and in this one I am back in Nigeria almost doing the same thing. You could see my traveling bag as well in the frame which says “hey I just arrived.” We are in a taxi in Lagos, just after having arrived. There were a bunch of okada guys driving through and it had this magic look, like a movie, with everyone frozen in time. Here the car and the rider are close, but it was great to see the wider scene of motorcycles on the street. There are tons of images I made, just from the back seat and you can see life happening, outside from the taxi window. But with this specifically the composition again is important. It contains the anxiety I felt about everyday life and being back home. Before this, at the airport it was quite interesting seeing folks want to help with your bag. I did document all those things. They are carrying your bag and you think to yourself “oh who are these faces”? They asked why I was taking photos of them and I said I was documenting life. They said “yes, yes take this back to America.” Even without knowingly doing so, this photo and the previous one are speaking to each other. In the Bronx and Lagos.

They call themselves the Johnsons. I was at the bus stop when I saw this group of kids with a guardian. The kid with the mask and the Bronx shirt caught my attention and they were all just full of energy. So I asked the guardian for permission if I could photograph them and she said yeah sure why not. When I faced the kids, they were so intelligent and full of life, they said, “Sir, Sir, is that a camera?” and I said yes it is a camera. “Are you going to take our pictures?” and I said yeah I am going to take your pictures. “Sir, Sir, can you make us famous?” and I said “I don’t know if I can do that but I will try.” They said, “yeah we are the Johnsons, we want to be famous so that way we can show our friends how famous we are.” And they just kept talking about fame. They are Bam Bam (mask), Sincere (arms folded), Najahpier (hat) and Jahray. Since I was like them once, black boys and African boys growing up in the Bronx, I’m drawn to making images of them knowing that they have their own unique stories and there is so much to learn from them. To keep hearing them talk about how they want to be famous and exuding so much life with all this great wisdom and personality was great. I mean look at them. They are a pack of personalities. A few days after this was made I saw them on the bus, and they kept screaming to their mom “Mom, mom, mom that’s the guy, that’s the photographer.” They came up to me and said “Hey mister, hey mister did you make us famous?” I had to speak to their mom and explain that I am a photographer. Because it was very awkward. When I had met them previously they were with a different guardian. So I ended up showing the photograph to mom and she smiled. I saw them a few times during that summer but haven’t seen the Johnsons since.

This is back in Lagos, my neighborhood around Arufa Street before you get to the major highway. This is something I had no idea I made; I was shooting from the hip obviously and this was in the evening while the sun was down. Almost feels out of place. I just wanted to shoot my neighborhood and there was a lady with a veil — I’m not sure exactly what kind – but something magical. There is some dose of mystery to it. It almost feels like she was cut and placed there. Almost feels like she emerged from somewhere. There is something very spirit-like in that image, very angelic in itself. It’s something that when I look at I can’t even put my finger to. It could be an Angel, it could be a spirit, I don’t even know. And obviously the wires, the electrical wires are such a reminder of life in Lagos. This photo is a gift: even though I made it, I feel like it was given to me in a sense.

“Unbelonging,” at the Bronx Documentary Center runs till August 13th.