Sean Jacobs's Blog, page 274

Sunday read: A place to call home

Table Mountain panorama. Image credit Damien du Toit via Flickr.

I recently traveled to Cape Town, where I was born. On this trip, I spent most of my time hunting for a place of my own when I eventually retire. I will most likely end up living one of those neighborhoods that were declared “white group areas” during apartheid.

On this trip, I decided to stay in three different Airbnbs in the city center. My last Airbnb was an apartment in Sea Point, a seaside neighborhood on the edge of downtown. My host was a “friendly” white woman who exchanged carefully probing pleasantries with me in an attempt to assess my brief tenancy in her apartment. She asked where I worked and whether I knew Sea Point. When I responded that I spend my childhood in Sea Point, with my mother in the back room of an apartment block like hers, she looked at me with a hint of alarm as if I had just told her “No, I don’t want chicken, I want land!” But I had a good stay, and after three Airbnb experiences I will certainly book through them again.

How many times, growing up, had I looked with intense longing and yearning to live in one of those big homes that were reserved for white people? One of my earliest memories is playing quietly on the back stairs of the flat where my mother and I were staying as live-in help. It was in the then whites-only, mostly Jewish, Sea Point. My mother worked for, what seemed to me, an ancient white Jewish woman, who would endlessly call her name in a whining voice for yet another errand of fetching, or carrying or complaining. “Katy! Why do you leave me alone? Can’t that brat of yours see that I need you?” By that time I had learned to be quiet, play quiet, act quiet, become a little shadow, because that live-in job was the only thing that stood between us and being homeless and destitute.

We called my mother’s employer ou merrem (old madam), and to me she seemed like the oldest, loneliest women in the world. No one visited. But, she still got fully dressed every day as if she was expecting company. She would line her tired, wrinkly eyes with eyeliner and mascara, her lips a brilliant slash of red lipstick that bled into the many wrinkles around her mouth. Her thinning hair was coaxed into a little grey helmet by a hairdresser once a week, and her face was caked with a powder that made her look like the movie version of Ms. Havisham. She insisted on having toast with marmalade every morning, and long after my mother left her employ, my mother would still ask me to buy her marmalade for her own toast. My guess is that she probably sneaked marmalade for her own bread during that time, and acquired a taste for it. I tried marmalade myself much later, but its sweet bitterness made me gag. I equated it with a constant ssshhh from my mother, who wanted me to swallow my laughter and my tears in case it disturbed ou merrem. It tasted like mouth-without-tongue. I still cannot stand marmalade.

One thing I did learn from watching and living silently as a shadow close to ou merrem, was compassion for a lonely old women. She was abandoned by her own family, and spent her last days with a women who served her loyally, but with a reluctance borne out of living on the racial margins of an apartheid South Africa.

Many years later, I chaired a panel of gender activists from South Africa at Simmons College in Boston, Massachusetts where I had a visiting research fellowship. One of the panel members, a white women, recalled her own childhood relationship with her black nanny by remarking that she was raised “on the back of a black women’s pain.” She sensed the resentful duty of her nanny who had to leave her own children in the blacks-only homelands to raise a white women’s child. That unexpected disclosure in that polite gathering of American academia caused a zebra reaction in the room: the white academics self-conscious with embarrassed memory, and the black women conflicted about this disclosure in a space where they were used to keeping the personal at a dispassionate academic distance.

That brings me back to the last two weeks in Cape Town and my house hunting. Like other black South Africans with post-apartheid gains, armed with options, I decided to cast my net wide in search for a house. This meant considering previously whites-only areas. Of course, my search was happening in circumstances other than I had imagined as an activist in apartheid South Africa. Our “revolution” was televised, but it happened around a negotiating table, and so, our present is quite different to how I had imagined the future then.

Back then, my dream house was picked out in the previously whites only area, perched against the slopes of Cape Town’s Table Mountain with the ocean lapping at its feet. I imagined I would live out my days in a space that I chose freely, in a non-racial South Africa where race and class were not a determinant of where and how you could live.

Today however, history, work, activism and study have provided me with experiences and competencies that privileges me in a context of inequality. This context remains our biggest challenge as a nation.

How strange it has become to go into the homes of white folks and find, behind all of that history and its evidence of the gains of exclusion, that they were, so… well, ordinary. Yes, there were kitchens and living and eating spaces on a different scale than I had known growing up. However, instead of candles, they had light switches with dimmers. Instead of Primus stoves, a Smeg oven. Instead of a pot to boil water for coffee, a Nespresso machine. They had all of the mundane, sometimes banal items we use in our homes — the same function, different form. I don’t know what I had expected, when all I could catch during the apartheid years was glimpses of white lives. The contours of our homes were the same, and shaped by the same basic needs: shelter, security, rest, sustenance. And yet.

One of the towns the estate agent took me to was in beautiful Hout Bay, on the southern edge of the city. Do towns have a personality? If so, Hout Bay always seemed to me as if it was enveloped in a little bubble of smug complacency. Of white privilege existing alongside the black margins of exclusion. I recall some years ago, most of Hout Bay’s inhabitants drove around with stickers that proudly proclaimed, “Republic of Houtbay.” Those of us, who lived in the impoverished townships of the Cape Flats and the poor black communities of Imizamo Yethu (Hout Bay’s resident squatter camp), were not amused. There was talk that they would eventually introduce visas for outsiders who wanted to visit. The stark inequality between rich and poor remains cleaved around race. Months after a devastating fire destroyed homes in Imizamo Yethu, families are still living in a sprawling refugee camp-like community of flimsy zinc structures. Many of the houses that I was taken to looked out over this camp where families have to contend with the cold Cape Town winter and its many storms. It is our very own Tale of Two Cities.

What astonished me was that so many of the homeowners that I met spoke with great disparagement and angry resentment about the service delivery protests raging against the City of Cape Town. At the same time these same people have the largest collections of art depicting quaint scenes of “township life” on their walls: women carrying water on their heads white chatting and smiling, children (piccaninnies?) playing with each other, African masks, framed posters of Tin Tin in Africa in boys’ bedrooms and Mandela busts. Is this what is meant by bringing the outside inside? All that was still needed was a rendition of “The Lion Sleeps tonight.” I just couldn’t understand the disjuncture between Africa as aesthetic and an expressed sensibility that was distinctly, well — let’s just say unsympathetic. I can’t whitewash this attitude, one quite frankly dismissive of the destitute plight of their black neighbors. I felt as if I had entered a parallel universe.

If change truly fixes the past, while transformation creates the future, then how do we reduce the lived reality of black lives only into art on a wall? What happens when change becomes symbolism “framed” through art and objects, instead of a frame breaking through transformation? I love Hout Bay, and some of the homes were truly spectacular, but I couldn’t stand Hout Bay’s ingrained culture of white privilege and white entitlement; its smug air of complacency. And I love, love that area. If and when art and life collides, what is a girl to do who is looking for a quiet scenic place to retire to and write for the remainder of her days? We all want ‘n plekkie in die son (a place in the sun), for all of us, not just for some of us.

And yes, these are ice cream problems. Middle class problems, but I think I’m going to keep searching. I want to find my village and my tribe, and I want them to be non-racial, non-sexist and non-discriminatory. I need to find my own plekkie, but not in a way or a space that creates shadows for others. So I guess I won’t be packing up just yet.

As for Cape Town, it stills feels as if it’s a place where race remains far more important than class. So best to stop trying to reach an invisible, unattainable benchmark that shifts from the right brand of clothes or car to area to live, and just do you. Live in a democracy, not a self-declared republic. And if you do live there, do your bit. Break the frame.

Joseph Kabila’s special relationship with South Africa

Jacob Zuma and Joseph Kabila. Image via Government of South Africa Flickr.

On June 25 this year, president Joseph Kabila travelled to Pretoria for the annual bi-national council between the Democratic Republic of Congo and South Africa (basically a regular cabinet-level meeting between two countries). Kabila is known for rarely leaving the country (aka his presidential residence). Some argue that it is due to fears surrounding his unpopularity for overstaying his presidential mandate, which officially ended last December. As a result, his eloquent foreign minister She Okitundu, one of the co-founders of the ruling PPRD, tours capitals for crisis-and donor-diplomacy on his behalf. But when it comes to South Africa, things are a bit different.

South Africa may be Kabila’s closest bilateral ally and represents a key lifeline for his continued grip on power. A key to preserving this lifeline has been Kabila’s close personal relationship with South African counterpart Jacob Zuma, and his “business partners.”

South Africa-DRC relations not only highlight the emerging moral bankruptcy of the African National Congress (ANC), but also serve as an embodiment of the malaise facing South African political life as a whole. In a recent podcast, Jason Stearns of the Congo Research Institute (he has published on this site too), and Stephanie Wolters of the Institute for Security Studies in the UK, emphasized that South African policy towards the DRC is increasingly monopolized in the South African presidency, while the South African Ministry of Foreign Affairs and its embassies are largely sidelined. This leads to a peculiar dynamic in which instead of pursuing South Africa’s national interests in the DRC, Zuma legitimizes the DRC’s government’s poor explanations for delaying elections, and tolerates increasing instability in the DRC.

Following the end of Apartheid, South Africa had somewhat successfully cultivated a moral high ground in intra-African affairs, which made it a preferred mediator in intra-African peace accords. This especially applies to the Great Lakes Region. Nelson Mandela and Thabo Mbeki were heavily involved in the negotiation and signature of the Arusha Peace and Reconciliation Agreement in 2000, and in the signature of the Global Ceasefire Agreement between Burundi and the CNDD-FDD in 2003. A useful footnote is that at that time Jacob Zuma was South Africa’s Deputy President, and chief facilitator of the ceasefire negotiations. South Africa also played a key role in the facilitation of the Inter Congolese Dialogue (ICD), which cumulated in the signature of the Sun City Agreement (named after the infamous South African luxury casino resort), and paved the way for the DRC’s historic 2006 elections. Additionally, the South African National Defence Force (SANDF) has more than 1000 troops stationed in the eastern DRC as part of the Force Intervention Brigade (FIB), which operates as part of MONUSCO. Given its legacy as mediator and contributor of peacekeeping troops, one would assume that South Africa has an immediate interest in promoting peaceful democratic transitions, and the rule of law. Yet, South Africa’s foreign policy in the region has increasingly facilitated the opposite. 

Following the discovery of mass graves and the displacement of 1.3 million people in the DRC’s Kasai region, South Africa watered down a strong call by the United Nations Human Rights Commission for an “international investigation”, and in effect legitimized the Congolese government’s opposition to such an investigation. Similarly, South Africa has allowed the South African Development Community (SADC) to take a hands-off approach on the Congolese electoral delay, but given the SADC’s poor track record in enforcing democratic accountability among member states, this should not come as a surprise.

With regards to the delay of elections in the DRC (that, according to the constitution were supposed to be held before December 2016), South Africa has given legitimacy to Kabila’s instrumentalization of political dialogues to fracture political opposition and buy time. This coincides with other major partners, such as the US and the EU implementing targeted sanctions against Kabila’s entourage, and key bilateral allies such as Angola openly criticizing the Kabila administration. Which may partly explain why Sindika Dokolo, the son-in-law of Angolan President Jose Dos Santos, was recently sentenced in absentia in a property dispute, a ruling which is widely seen as politically motivated following his vocal criticism of Kabila’s continued grip on power.

Along with its political involvement in the DRC, South Africa also has substantial economic interest and leverage in the country. Take the Grand Inga III project, whose timeline was recently pushed back further by the DRC government: South Africa is earmarked for 2,500MW of the project’s total expected production capacity of 4,800MW. South African mining firms also have a substantial presence in the mining of copper, cobalt and gold ore. In terms of economic leverage, South Africa is the largest exporter in goods and services to the DRC, providing 30% of total imports according to the Johannesburg-based South African Institute of International Affairs (SAIIA). The SAIIA also points out that South Africa’s government is the third-largest donor to the DRC in absolute terms, and leads donors in terms of development assistance as a percentage of GNI.

But similar to South Africa’s domestic economic policy making, national economic welfare can take a backseat to cronyism. Six months after a bilateral summit between Kabila and Zuma in 2010, Kabila awarded Zuma’s nephew Khulubuse Zuma two oilfield licenses in Lake Albert via a presidential decree. Though the extent to which Zuma personally benefitted from the arrangement is disputed, a City Press investigation has suggested that Zuma played a crucial role in bringing about the presidential decree. The licenses are linked to two firms in the British Virgin Islands, and are associated with the controversial Israeli Dan Gertler, as recently revealed in the Panama Papers, and a subsequent US investigation. Ironically, a presidential decree in 2008 initially awarded one of the oil licences to Divine Inspiration Group, a venture  linked to business partners of Thabo Mbeki. This confirms the view that the rot in the ANC goes beyond “Zuptazation”, and is rather rooted in a long-term dynamic of institutionalizing cronyism in the party. 

South Africa’s foreign policy towards the continent, or more specifically the DRC, was never benign, but always a mixture of sometimes contradicting economic, political, and moral commitments and interests. However, those hoping that the ANC would at least be partly inspired by its revolutionary legacy should be more disappointed than ever.

While South Africa’s recent policy towards the DRC shines a light on the political economy of cronyism in South Africa as a whole, the real victims of South Africa’s emerging moral bankruptcy are those brave women and men struggling for the first peaceful democratic transfer of power in the DRC. The number of displaced people in the DRC is the highest of any country on the continent and at a record high of 3.7 million, while elections continue to be out of sight.

It is disheartening that South Africa legitimizes its foreign policy through the rhetoric of “sovereign political development” vis-à-vis “Western interventionism” when it was intra-African solidarity for democracy and majority representation that helped bring about the end of Apartheid.

Hey VICE! Put some respeck on Nollywood’s name

Still from promo for Vice on HBO.

Though VICE has, in some ways, improved its Africa coverage — see, for instance, its reporting on the political crises in the Central African Republic —it continues to offer some familiar, adventurist, Tarzanist tricks. Think of the infamous “cannibals”-in-Liberia episode, which prompted the late New York Times reporter David Carr to pillory VICE executives for their exoticizing methods. Those affiliated with VICE appear to have learned little from Carr’s blistering critique. 

Among the worst offenders is its correspondent Thomas Morton.

Take VICE’s recent television segment on Nollywood — the second half of an episode that HBO first broadcast in April, and that remains available through HBO’s streaming services. Having presented filmmaking in Uganda as a wild jaunt reflective merely of a devil-may-care masculinism (not the first time VICE employed this approach in its coverage of the country), the company has now, through Morton, turned to Nigeria as a further source of wonder for white correspondents and, it is strongly and repeatedly implied, for white audiences (whom the segment’s white host addresses with a conspiratorial “you”). Thus if “you” don’t recognize the names Genevieve Nnaji and Ramsey Nouah, then “you” must not be African. (For the uninitiated: They are Nollywood stars — Ed.)

Introducing the segment, VICE CEO Shane Smith (incidentally, he reported the Liberia cannibal episode) offers a strikingly dubious assertion: “For nearly 100 years, Hollywood has essentially had a monopoly on the movie business.” This is not an auspicious beginning, relying as it does upon a number of galling generalizations — the stuff of a film historian’s nightmares. But it also portends the episode’s presentation of a broadly defined, hegemonic Hollywood as the center of global media production — the “norm” against which all filmmakers are necessarily judged.

No mention is made of cinematic traditions — including nontheatrical distribution — that have long flourished irrespective of Hollywood’s efforts, or that have actively contested the industry’s export power through quota systems and other regulatory mechanisms. Nor is any mention made of the multiple film industries that operate in Nigeria alone. Thus we have, once again, the erroneous assertion that Nollywood is the Nigerian national film industry, rather than a geographically and even ethnically specific enterprise that is, in fundamental ways, unrelated to its counterparts in the north — including the Hausa-language film industry dubbed “Kannywood.” Rooted in the Islamicate cultures of Kano and Kaduna, Kannywood is, as usual, entirely effaced through VICE’s emphasis on Nollywood. (A casual nod to the diversity of filmmaking practices in Nigeria, at the very least, would have been nice.)

A familiar fallacy — that, because Nollywood equals Nigeria, there are no alternatives in this allegedly totalized and totalizing country — leads to the misplaced assertion that Nollywood is “the second biggest ‘-ollywood’ in the world, after Bollywood.” That VICE is still peddling a 2009 UNESCO report that has long since been discredited by scholars — not to mention complicated beyond recognition by industrial practices in the intervening years — is hardly surprising. And yet Morton, the segment’s host, repeatedly mispronounces “Lagos” as only an American can, initially reporting from the Lagos Civic Center premiere of Pascal Atuma’s Bloodlines (2014).

Proceeding to identify Nollywood’s emergence with the 1992 production of Living in Bondage, Morton makes at least two rookie mistakes that speak to the broader problems with VICE’s take on Nollywood: not only does he fail to mention either the film’s producer, Kenneth Nnebue, or its director, Chris Obi Rapu — a courtesy that would surely have been extended to any Hollywood filmmaker — but he also further obscures the men’s influential achievement by suggesting that one can only discern the conditions of the film’s production through recourse to “legend”: Living in Bondage was “made, according to legend, by an electronics merchant.” Simply put, that is like saying that Citizen Kane was made, according to legend, by a former theater director. Suggesting that “legend” — that national-cultural hearsay — is required to explicate the origins of Nollywood is patently offensive. It ignores the growing number of carefully researched scholarly accounts of Nollywood while perpetuating the racist myth of Africa as a “dark continent” where basic facts prove stubbornly elusive and altogether impossible to “prove.”

That Nollywood is extensively consumed in the diaspora is implicitly denied in the episode, which claims that the industry’s reach is merely “Africa-wide.” Things get considerably worse, however, as Morton decides to try his hand at acting. “With dreams of making it as a genuine Nollywood movie star, I set out for Alaba,” he declares with colonialist panache. Since “there are auditions for numerous Nollywood films every day,” he expects to book a job, even though he is careful to avoid those who “charge a dubious audition fee.”

“You’d think that there’d basically be roles for just about everybody,” Morton proclaims. What he doesn’t mention is that open-call auditions, though numerous, are typically only for small roles and are further conditioned by Nollywood’s sophisticated star system as well as by the Actors Guild of Nigeria (formerly operating out of the National Theatre and now dispersed in offices throughout the country). In her valuable book Nollywood Central, Jade L. Miller details the various guilds and trade organizations that structure Nollywood, offering an important counterpoint to the sort of portrayal that VICE provides.

There is a telling moment when Morton, ensconced in his spacious hotel room, puts up Nollywood posters and announces, in voice-over, “I’ve never given much thought to acting. I think that getting into Hollywood just always seemed off-limits. But maybe I’ll have a shot [in Nollywood]. I can be, if not the Elijah Wood of Nigeria, maybe it’s Pat Morita.”

Morton’s monologue thus perpetuates a condescending perception of Nollywood as Hollywood’s “lesser,” more “accessible” African counterpart — a lowly industry that even someone with no experience can breezily “infiltrate.” If Morton thinks that it’s easy to “break into” Nollywood as an actor, he would do well to read any number of biographical accounts of the industry’s top stars, the vast majority of whom toiled for years, in a dizzying number of capacities, before becoming household names. What’s more, in her remarkable 2012 memoir Looking for Transwonderland: Travels in Nigeria, the writer Noo Saro-Wiwa debunks the fanciful, tempting notion that Nollywood is somehow able to accommodate anyone who makes it to Lagos. But it is Morton’s reference to Noriyuki “Pat” Morita, the Oscar-nominated star of John G. Avildsen’s The Karate Kid (1984), that is perhaps most instructive. For if Morton believes, however ironically, that he can “be” Pat Morita, he also, apparently, believes that he can “be” Nigerian — at least in an audition in which, wearing fur and wielding a cow’s skull, he rants and raves, spouting “African” gibberish in a manner that would make even Rachel Dolezal’s jaw drop. 

Morton seems eager to emphasize the “excessive” style of Nollywood acting (perhaps in an effort to excuse his own histrionics). Comparing it to Kabuki theater (!), he complains that he’s accustomed to the more “natural” acting that, in his inescapably ethnocentric view, is characteristic of American movies. It falls to the accomplished Nigerian actor Gregory Ojefua to calmly explain to Morton that, quite simply, what appears “abnormal” to him may appear “normal” to someone else — and that Hollywood acting is as stylized, in its own ways, as Nollywood acting (which, in any case, can seem hyperrealist from a Nigerian perspective). Like Ojefua, the Nigerian filmmakers Cyril Jackson and Victor Okpala manage to put Morton in his place — Jackson by briskly rejecting his pathetic audition, and Okpala by asking him to try out for the role of “terrorist” (a request that forces Morton to scrunch his face in comic disbelief — a cute, bespectacled, boat-shoed white boy as a deadly terrorist!). Portraying a man who comes to confront the terrorist, one Nigerian actor delivers a line that could well apply to Morton himself, and to the entire VICE enterprise: “You think you can come to this country and destabilize everything?!”

Morton’s next stop is an audition for the legendary filmmaker Lancelot Oduwa Imasuen, who reluctantly hires the American hipster to portray a Catholic priest in his film Love Upon the Hills, which shoots on location in Benin City. One gets the impression that Imasuen was compelled to include Morton, and by extension VICE, in the production of this film. That is not to suggest that Imasuen lacks agency — that he could not have said no. It is simply to indicate that the entreaties of a heavily capitalized, wide-reaching media producer like VICE would be difficult for anyone to resist. Imasuen may well have recognized the importance of publicizing his work, and that of the broader Nollywood industry of which he has long been a celebrated part, for HBO’s massive global audience. 

While Morton continues to characterize Nollywood in offensive terms, claiming that it “came to ape the West” in terms of “quality of [film] production” — and describing iROKOtv (which he mispronounces) as “your basic African Netflix” — the eloquent Imasuen has an opportunity to describe the industry in his own words, with an insight born of experience, passion and, above all, respect.

Hey VICE! Put some respeck on Nollywood’s name!

Still from promo for Vice on HBO.

Though VICE has, in some ways, improved its Africa coverage — see, for instance, its reporting on the political crises in the Central African Republic —it continues to offer some familiar, adventurist, Tarzanist tricks. Think of the infamous “cannibals”-in-Liberia episode, which prompted the late New York Times reporter David Carr to pillory VICE executives for their exoticizing methods. Those affiliated with VICE appear to have learned little from Carr’s blistering critique. 

Among the worst offenders is its correspondent Thomas Morton.

Take VICE’s recent television segment on Nollywood — the second half of an episode that HBO first broadcast in April, and that remains available through HBO’s streaming services. Having presented filmmaking in Uganda as a wild jaunt reflective merely of a devil-may-care masculinism (not the first time VICE employed this approach in its coverage of the country), the company has now, through Morton, turned to Nigeria as a further source of wonder for white correspondents and, it is strongly and repeatedly implied, for white audiences (whom the segment’s white host addresses with a conspiratorial “you”). Thus if “you” don’t recognize the names Genevieve Nnaji and Ramsey Nouah, then “you” must not be African. (For the uninitiated: They are Nollywood stars — Ed.)

Introducing the segment, VICE CEO Shane Smith (incidentally, he reported the Liberia cannibal episode) offers a strikingly dubious assertion: “For nearly 100 years, Hollywood has essentially had a monopoly on the movie business.” This is not an auspicious beginning, relying as it does upon a number of galling generalizations — the stuff of a film historian’s nightmares. But it also portends the episode’s presentation of a broadly defined, hegemonic Hollywood as the center of global media production — the “norm” against which all filmmakers are necessarily judged.

No mention is made of cinematic traditions — including nontheatrical distribution — that have long flourished irrespective of Hollywood’s efforts, or that have actively contested the industry’s export power through quota systems and other regulatory mechanisms. Nor is any mention made of the multiple film industries that operate in Nigeria alone. Thus we have, once again, the erroneous assertion that Nollywood is the Nigerian national film industry, rather than a geographically and even ethnically specific enterprise that is, in fundamental ways, unrelated to its counterparts in the north — including the Hausa-language film industry dubbed “Kannywood.” Rooted in the Islamicate cultures of Kano and Kaduna, Kannywood is, as usual, entirely effaced through VICE’s emphasis on Nollywood. (A casual nod to the diversity of filmmaking practices in Nigeria, at the very least, would have been nice.)

A familiar fallacy — that, because Nollywood equals Nigeria, there are no alternatives in this allegedly totalized and totalizing country — leads to the misplaced assertion that Nollywood is “the second biggest ‘-ollywood’ in the world, after Bollywood.” That VICE is still peddling a 2009 UNESCO report that has long since been discredited by scholars — not to mention complicated beyond recognition by industrial practices in the intervening years — is hardly surprising. And yet Morton, the segment’s host, repeatedly mispronounces “Lagos” as only an American can, initially reporting from the Lagos Civic Center premiere of Pascal Atuma’s Bloodlines (2014).

Proceeding to identify Nollywood’s emergence with the 1992 production of Living in Bondage, Morton makes at least two rookie mistakes that speak to the broader problems with VICE’s take on Nollywood: not only does he fail to mention either the film’s producer, Kenneth Nnebue, or its director, Chris Obi Rapu — a courtesy that would surely have been extended to any Hollywood filmmaker — but he also further obscures the men’s influential achievement by suggesting that one can only discern the conditions of the film’s production through recourse to “legend”: Living in Bondage was “made, according to legend, by an electronics merchant.” Simply put, that is like saying that Citizen Kane was made, according to legend, by a former theater director. Suggesting that “legend” — that national-cultural hearsay — is required to explicate the origins of Nollywood is patently offensive. It ignores the growing number of carefully researched scholarly accounts of Nollywood while perpetuating the racist myth of Africa as a “dark continent” where basic facts prove stubbornly elusive and altogether impossible to “prove.”

That Nollywood is extensively consumed in the diaspora is implicitly denied in the episode, which claims that the industry’s reach is merely “Africa-wide.” Things get considerably worse, however, as Morton decides to try his hand at acting. “With dreams of making it as a genuine Nollywood movie star, I set out for Alaba,” he declares with colonialist panache. Since “there are auditions for numerous Nollywood films every day,” he expects to book a job, even though he is careful to avoid those who “charge a dubious audition fee.”

“You’d think that there’d basically be roles for just about everybody,” Morton proclaims. What he doesn’t mention is that open-call auditions, though numerous, are typically only for small roles and are further conditioned by Nollywood’s sophisticated star system as well as by the Actors Guild of Nigeria (formerly operating out of the National Theatre and now dispersed in offices throughout the country). In her valuable book Nollywood Central, Jade L. Miller details the various guilds and trade organizations that structure Nollywood, offering an important counterpoint to the sort of portrayal that VICE provides.

There is a telling moment when Morton, ensconced in his spacious hotel room, puts up Nollywood posters and announces, in voice-over, “I’ve never given much thought to acting. I think that getting into Hollywood just always seemed off-limits. But maybe I’ll have a shot [in Nollywood]. I can be, if not the Elijah Wood of Nigeria, maybe it’s Pat Morita.”

Morton’s monologue thus perpetuates a condescending perception of Nollywood as Hollywood’s “lesser,” more “accessible” African counterpart — a lowly industry that even someone with no experience can breezily “infiltrate.” If Morton thinks that it’s easy to “break into” Nollywood as an actor, he would do well to read any number of biographical accounts of the industry’s top stars, the vast majority of whom toiled for years, in a dizzying number of capacities, before becoming household names. What’s more, in her remarkable 2012 memoir Looking for Transwonderland: Travels in Nigeria, the writer Noo Saro-Wiwa debunks the fanciful, tempting notion that Nollywood is somehow able to accommodate anyone who makes it to Lagos. But it is Morton’s reference to Noriyuki “Pat” Morita, the Oscar-nominated star of John G. Avildsen’s The Karate Kid (1984), that is perhaps most instructive. For if Morton believes, however ironically, that he can “be” Pat Morita, he also, apparently, believes that he can “be” Nigerian — at least in an audition in which, wearing fur and wielding a cow’s skull, he rants and raves, spouting “African” gibberish in a manner that would make even Rachel Dolezal’s jaw drop. 

Morton seems eager to emphasize the “excessive” style of Nollywood acting (perhaps in an effort to excuse his own histrionics). Comparing it to Kabuki theater (!), he complains that he’s accustomed to the more “natural” acting that, in his inescapably ethnocentric view, is characteristic of American movies. It falls to the accomplished Nigerian actor Gregory Ojefua to calmly explain to Morton that, quite simply, what appears “abnormal” to him may appear “normal” to someone else — and that Hollywood acting is as stylized, in its own ways, as Nollywood acting (which, in any case, can seem hyperrealist from a Nigerian perspective). Like Ojefua, the Nigerian filmmakers Cyril Jackson and Victor Okpala manage to put Morton in his place — Jackson by briskly rejecting his pathetic audition, and Okpala by asking him to try out for the role of “terrorist” (a request that forces Morton to scrunch his face in comic disbelief — a cute, bespectacled, boat-shoed white boy as a deadly terrorist!). Portraying a man who comes to confront the terrorist, one Nigerian actor delivers a line that could well apply to Morton himself, and to the entire VICE enterprise: “You think you can come to this country and destabilize everything?!”

Morton’s next stop is an audition for the legendary filmmaker Lancelot Oduwa Imasuen, who reluctantly hires the American hipster to portray a Catholic priest in his film Love Upon the Hills, which shoots on location in Benin City. One gets the impression that Imasuen was compelled to include Morton, and by extension VICE, in the production of this film. That is not to suggest that Imasuen lacks agency — that he could not have said no. It is simply to indicate that the entreaties of a heavily capitalized, wide-reaching media producer like VICE would be difficult for anyone to resist. Imasuen may well have recognized the importance of publicizing his work, and that of the broader Nollywood industry of which he has long been a celebrated part, for HBO’s massive global audience. 

While Morton continues to characterize Nollywood in offensive terms, claiming that it “came to ape the West” in terms of “quality of [film] production” — and describing iROKOtv (which he mispronounces) as “your basic African Netflix” — the eloquent Imasuen has an opportunity to describe the industry in his own words, with an insight born of experience, passion and, above all, respect.

What’s bad for America’s children deemed good for others: Riposte to Nick Kristoff

Liberian school children. Image via UN Photo Flickr.

Writing in The New York Times about the growth of privately run for-profit schools in Liberia, the paper’s columnist Nicholas Kristof praises the turnover of a significant number of public schools in Liberia to Bridge International Academies, a US-based for-profit education company. That same company that has been ordered to close its schools in Uganda and Kenya for its neglect and disregard of national educational standards.

Kristof claims that those who oppose the commercialization of education in Liberia and elsewhere, including Education International, are driven by ideological motives rather than the interests of children. This is incorrect. Around the world, the teaching profession is the most outspoken advocate of children’s right to quality schooling. That right is to be realized by governments. And where public authorities fail to make their public schools work, they need to be held accountable and pressured to do better rather than permitted to wheel in the marketeers to do the job they were elected to do in the first place.

Kristof believes that Americans are grown up enough to handle their own education system, but without a shred of evidence he offers that the “solution” for Liberia is to turn their schools over to a foreign, US based corporation.

Liberia experienced two civil wars, the first from 1989 to 1997 and the second from 1999 to 2003, followed by a transition to democracy and elections in 2005. The destruction of those wars left the population vulnerable to the Ebola virus in 2014 and 2015. That catastrophe inflicted serious damage on the economy and education.

Education is a public service that enables people to listen, sows the seeds of tolerance, heals wounds and develops critical thinking. It is a building process that contributes to development, good governance and decent societies.

On the other hand, education that limits such progress, restricts discussion, and focuses exclusively on a few narrow skills fails children and society. Bringing in private education operators, particularly in relative obscurity, is not an example of good governance. Handing over Liberia’s primary and pre-primary education system to a foreign for-profit company like Bridge is as bad for Liberian education as it is for the country’s democracy.

It is of deep concern that deals between the government of Liberia and the education privateers have been so opaque and that independent research and evaluation have been dismissed. Despite the promise that any significant expansion of the privatization project would depend on some rigorous evaluation six months into the trial, the Ministry of Education decided to double the number of schools in the project’s second year.

This earned the Minister a public rebuke from the government appointed evaluation team and the criticism  of the international academic community. Suppressing independent research and evaluation and precipitous action are linked. Both have the effect of limiting governance by chilling or blocking informed, public discussion.

The current situation in Liberia is best summed up by Mary Mulbah, the President of the National Teachers’ Association of Liberia (NTAL), who wrote on Africa is a Country last week:

Ultimately the key question is this: why is our own government so incapable of managing this critical public service that it must give the keys to our children’s future over to foreign companies and charities who often seem to have little to no understanding of our country and culture?

As teachers, we have a profound interest in seeing a well-financed, responsibly managed, modern school system that grants all of our students the best chance to succeed in difficult circumstances. But we believe this is best achieved through robust public investment, better administrative management, and stronger accountability for teachers as well as the ministry officials that supervise them.

Noting “successive studies,” Kristof himself acknowledges that for-profit schools “hurt children” in the US. Yet, without missing a beat, he proclaims that they are good for Liberian children.

In the US, as in Liberia, support for the privatization of education systems is not based on objective information, evidence or informed debate. It is, rather, driven by ideology; by the dogma that private must be better than public. It is only recently that much of the American public has realized that they have been victims of exaggeration, empty promises and deception.

Liberians should not be guinea pigs in an experiment to transform the noble mission of public education into a market opportunity for foreign capital.

So, a plea to Nicholas Kristoff: let’s not wish upon other people’s children that which we would not accept for our own.

* This text was first submitted to the New York Times as an oped response to Kristof. The paper informed us that it does not “run response pieces as op-eds.”

The popping sound of rubber bullets

Still from film Metalepsis in Black

The first, unsettling moment in director Aryan Kaganof’s “Metalepsis in Black” comes early as the film depicts academics and student activists strolling into an anonymous conference room to prepare for a meeting while the familiar noise of a student protest, chanting, screaming and rubber bullets, is overlain like a soundtrack.

The camera, in black and white, fixes on a dreary patch carpet.

“She shot me, for no fucking reason!” cries a woman in the audio.

The camera cuts to a man sitting, waiting for the meeting to start, breathes in and exhales. 

“You do not understand our pain! Our black pain!” a faceless man shouts.

An older woman opens a newspaper while a younger one scans her phone.

“Are you going to shoot us now!” and an answer in the popping sound of rubber bullets. 

After more than two years of media coverage these sounds are now familiar to anyone following closely the South African student movement known as Fees Must Fall. 

For the uninitiated, Fees Must Fall, also known by the hashtag #FessMustFall, arguably began in March 2015 at the University of Cape Town as Rhodes Must Fall, a campaign to decolonize the university that was centered around a statue of Southern Africa’s apex colonialist, Cecil John Rhodes, erected in a place of honor at the top of UCT’s campus.

Still from film Metalepsis in Black

Later the same year, in October, protests against fee increases broke out at the University of Witwatersrand and other universities, culminating in a march to the Union Buildings. While fires burned and students faced off with policy outside, South Africa’s government capitulated, with President Jacob Zuma promising no fee increases for the next academic year with funding from the state to make up the universities’ budget shortfall.

(As an aside, student protest has been going on in post-Apartheid South Africa since there was a “post” to the “Apartheid”, much, though not all, of this student protest has been confined in the country’s poorer, black universities. Why Fees Must Fall was different in the attention it received and its success is probably in no small part due to it’s association with historically white universities such as the UCT and Wits or “proximity to whiteness,” as the students might themselves say.)

Metalepsis in Black is a discordant film, attempting to incorporate a multiplicity of thoughts and views around one unifying idea, the decolonization of universities in particular and of South Africa in general. Like Fees Must Fall itself, it also describes itself as “intersectional” a term used, mostly in academe and progressive social movements since the late 1980s, but resurrected by Black Lives Matter to describing how different marginalized identities can intersect within one person or a group and how that can create a particular kind of discrimination.

Intersectionality has been key to Fees Must Fall from the beginning with many of the activists at Rhodes Must Fall not just identifying themselves as black students, but as black female or black queer students. Later, at Wits, female leaders began to self-identify as such by wearing doeks around their heads.

These political statements were not made without challenges from fellow activists, usually with accusations of factionalism, often from men. The result can be cacophonous, with contrary, marginalized identities butting into each other. Yet, it is difficult to imagine both Fees Must Fall, or this film, without it and hard to justify why one more marginalized identity should be sidelined for unity with another. 

There have been few protests in South Africa’s post-Apartheid history that are as documented, with videos, with articles and on social media, two books and one documentary as Fees Must Fall. In that context, it’s hard to think of how these images and ideas can bring the same visceral shock, having already played again and again.

Still from film Metalepsis in Black

However Kaganof does manage the feat in “Metalepsis in Black”, by taking the familiar and rearranging it. Those same images of police rubber bullets, nyalas, students throwing rocks, and the explosion of shock grenades are juxtaposed with another well-known setting: a meeting, utilitarian furniture, the passionate yet respectful tones of the academy and those small, cylindrical tea cups that are so ubiquitous in conference rooms. 

The film is not easy to access. Talking heads appear on screen without textual introductions or necessarily clear context. Early on, black consciousness theologian and Fees Must Fall critic Barney Pityana appears upside down, the video of him inverted. The film gives the viewer the impression of happening into a conversation half way through. The film could be accused of being insular, with the terminology used likely alienating to viewers not already versed in the language of the academy, intersectionality and activism.

The purpose of the documentary is ostensibly to discuss the role of the intellectuals in Fees Must Fall or, rather, their relative absence. This is framed in part as the charge that South Africa’s intellectuals, many linked to the country’s prominent foundations or universities, have largely either abstained from supporting Fees Must Fall or have limited their role to critique, tut-tutting about the student movement’s lack of underpinning theory.

This reminds me of an old joke about a pair of philosophers, one a British empiricist and the other a French rationalist, I think. Arguing over some point, the exasperated Frenchman half-concedes the point but asks: “Yes, yes, I agree it works in practice but what about theory?”

It was hard not to think of joke when hearing the accusation that FMF lacks theoretical underpinnings. Fees Must Fall was probably the widest-scale protest in the past 20 years, it was probably the most disruptive, especially in the context of the “white spaces” of South Africa’s historically white universities and it was on the surface the most immediately successful. It’s also changed the country’s nomenclature, the relatively anodyne calls for “transformation” in public discourse have been replaced by the headier demands for “decolonialization.”

Still from film Metalepsis in Black

But two young people in the film attempt to answer the question, “Where is your theory?”, with not a little frustration. In a sort of interlude on a minibus, student journalist Julia Fish in a discussion with other students references regular meetings to create a framework about what Fees Must Fall should be about.

As part of the meeting which opens the film, writer Sizwe Mpofu-Walsh notes that the lessons learned during Fees Must Fall are now spreading to protest in Europe and the United States and students themselves are creating the theory as they go along. Fish has a related thought, arguing “in that chaos of the momentum of moving this forward is where I think the answers are. But instead of embracing that chaos we’re constantly trying to shut it down.”

Likewise, positionality plays a role in understanding why black students at elite, formerly white universities found themselves in a relatively privileged space when compared to their compatriots at formerly black universities. And it is an early way of framing the role of the intellectual and academic at universities early in the film. 

Through a recording, a speaker accuses the academy of being characterized by whites studying and “exploiting black pain” in townships for their own career advancement. There is some truth here. Whites are still heavily represented in the academy and social sciences, while the poor in South Africa and political movements studied are almost exclusively black. Angelo Fick, one of the more recognizable public intellectuals in the documentary (he is a resident political analyst on South Africa’s most popular 24-hour news channel), uses an anecdote about a multi-racial group of nurses using three languages, including African ones, to communicate, a scene that would be difficult to imagine replicated in a university department meeting where discussions are likely to be conducted in English or possibly Afrikaans.

So part of the challenge of Metalepsis in Black is whether intellectuals and academics can move beyond this and contribute something positive towards the decolonialization of not only higher education, but also South Africa as a whole. The answer appears to be mixed. In the film, individuals are treated as complicit in their privilege. This includes the filmmaker himself, who with text in the film suggests the possibility of his own potential as a perpetrator of sexual violence. Positionality itself can also suggest that intellectual’s role is flawed to begin with.

Still from film Metalepsis in Black

These issues are usually framed as students vs. intellectuals. Though some students might be surprised to learn how many of their lecturers are themselves still completing their postgraduate degrees or are poorly paid. Positionality can be useful but when as essentialist scripture, it can place persons, in this case academics and intellectuals, in a difficult position.

Do academics treat #FeesMustFall as just another a subject to be scrutinized and critiqued while whistling past the tear-gas scented graveyard? Or should they become involved in a movement where their motives will be unflaggingly, and possibly unfairly, interrogated by their own students? It’s a question much bigger than the academy itself, where some South Africans in some position of privilege are asking themselves, “How do I be good in this moment?” when the moment on some level requires them to take a back seat. 

Regardless of the answer, the note Kaganof ends on is a fitting one, with a young woman admonishing the academy and calling it to action. “It’s no longer good enough to write in the name of Fees Must Fall. It’s time to start taking bolder actions to start using our power to start using our privilege for this noble cause,” says the woman.

“Your silence has been painful. Your silence has been painful.”

Sunday read: Cultural appropriation and sugar drinks

Que Bajo?! performing at Red Bull Music Academy Culture Clash during the Red Bull Music Academy in New York, April 28 to May 30, 2013. Image credit Christelle de Castro via Red Bull

It’s the year of Bieberton. Drakeobeats. Sheerenhall. It’s also been five years since Okayplayer/Okayafrica had me sit down with Diplo, the DJ and producer, to talk about the ethics of appropriation in the global music industry. A lot has changed since then, and excuse the cliché, but unfortunately a lot has stayed the same.

In my personal life, I reached a milestone — a goal that grew in the back of my mind that day we sat in an exclusive corner room in Manhattan’s Ace Hotel, while Diplo did a swift job of acquitting himself of any blame in the formation of the problematic industry we now inhabit. I realized in the midst of that 6-hour conversation (only a snippet of which made it to publication), that perhaps instead of trying to dialogue about these issues (I felt we weren’t doing anything other than displaying Diplo’s impeccable media training), I would perhaps get further illustrating my point by making content that was exemplary of it. I have since come to that point, and am only now realizing the implications of what that meant for myself and for the projects I have decided to take on.

One of the things that I didn’t know then, and suspect now, is that perhaps the reason why Diplo agreed to do that joint interview, was because at that moment he was at the precipice of being untouchable in the music industry — one of the go to producers that gets called on to magically engineer global hits. However, at that time, something in my analysis of his practice had struck at the core of what was wrong with it. Maybe he felt that because of the position he was precariously coming in to, he needed to address that critique. But at the end of the day, I’m sure its because he didn’t want that fucking with his money.

Lo and behold, the following year, Diplo would be named as one of Forbes Magazine’s top 10 most paid DJs and earn upwards of $13 million as a DJ/producer/brand ambassador. As it turns out, during our conversation the elephant in the room was exactly that.

So, while he talked about throwing $40,000 a year down the money pit that was Mad Decent, a platform for promoting global musicians — often from marginalized communities, the reality was that less than one percent of his annual earnings were going to that venture. What would ultimately be a tiny bit of startup capital that would reap him huge dividends in the future (as a Hollywood super producer for projects with million dollar budgets), was not even a splash in his bucket.

What’s perhaps more frustrating for me, is that today many people focused only on the cultural appropriation aspect of my critique of Diplo (particularly those engaged in a certain kind of identity politics) and didn’t quite grasp that I wasn’t actually mad at Diplo for working with others or promoting other people’s cultures (which if we were all on even starting ground materially wouldn’t be as much a problem I believe). What I was mad at was that he turned cultural appropriation into a form of capitalism, the core critique of which is that wealth isn’t fairly distributed in proportion to the various parts’ input (labor).

As far as that personal goal that came up in the back of my mind that afternoon, that has manifest itself in a full length album called Salone. Salone is the name in the local language, Krio, for my father’s home country Sierra Leone. It is a collaboration with a blind street musician named Sorie Koroma, artist name Sorie Kondi. We are from different worlds, but for some reason our collaboration makes sense. Music writers and interviewers have been trying to wrestle with why. I don’t have a very clear answer for them. They often know me as the one who railed against cultural appropriation, for my pointing out neocolonialism in the African vinyl trade industry. How can I participate in another Western meets African musical collaboration without stinking of hypocrisy? But I fear that concentrating on those aspects of my critique is to miss out on the original point I was trying to put forward.

The current music industry landscape is one in which an artist needs capital in order to get heard. This capital often comes from corporate brands selling a variety of non-music related material, such as Red Bull, Heineken, Ray Ban, Levis, and an assortment of others. Essentially this has turned musicians, DJs, producers in to default advertising agents, just without the job security and benefits (healthcare, retirement savings, paychecks!) of their colleagues with full time jobs at the corporation. The freedom that freelancing allows you to create, set your own schedule, travel is seen as a fair trade off.

It is not.

As I write this, I’m sitting in London in one of my music partner’s dad’s flat (nice digs, but not a fancy Ace Hotel corner room by any means). I’m here because I’m on a promotional tour for the Kondi Band. Our label is based in London, and I know that Europe is a better place for us to tour this kind of music. They have tons of festivals, often funded by their national governments, that allow up and coming, experimental, underground, classic and lesser known acts to get their foot in the door or sustain a career. There’s one big problem: Sorie Kondi is not here since his travel has been put in limbo by the UK’s immigration agency. We have had several shows cancelled, even though we’ve offered an alternative set up that resembles more of a Jamaican Soundsystem-style show. So, we are losing money, and I’m stuck here waiting for my scheduled flight home (we don’t have enough money to change the flight.) I don’t know the future of the project because Sorie’s passport is also in limbo somewhere called Sheffield, and we don’t know if future tours will be put in jeopardy because of this situation. Add this to the fact that we are currently on a race against time to get enough attention to be able to justify the financing of the recording of a second album to our label and distributor. An international project like this needs infrastructure and capital to survive. The project as a whole is currently in several thousands of Euros debt, and after five years of hard work, it is in danger of falling apart.

Which explains my tweet tangent this morning:

This music industry is aboslutely infuriating.

— International Black (@intlblk) July 20, 2017

Musicians are stuck between the market and the state and neither are very kind to us.

— International Black (@intlblk) July 20, 2017

Even more so if you are poor or are from a poor country.

— International Black (@intlblk) July 20, 2017

I wonder if music fans understood how that really effects what even gets made, that the music industry itself would start to change.

— International Black (@intlblk) July 20, 2017

I know, I’m a touring DJ. However, I’m not the only one who will tell you that the glamorous life of a touring DJ is not all it seems on the outside. People have little patience for complaining over-worked DJs however, as evidenced by the popular Twitter account @djscomplaining. However, I am now in my mid 30s, have a new son, and have to deal with the life realities of adulthood that my 20-year old self (the age when I set off on this journey) hadn’t even considered. And this industry was not built for longevity for most people.

I chose to stick around. I don’t know why beyond a kind of lingering idealism. I originally saw this platform and my talents as one of the few ways I could affect some kind of change in the world.

However, the more I stick around the more disillusioned I become.

Perhaps another moment of truth for me was my participation in the Red Bull music academy in New York in May of 2013. I wasn’t an official participant, but because I was a Brooklyn resident involved in the local scene, the folks at the Red Bull Music Academy (some of whom I know from the underground scenes we came up in) got me involved. I got paid $2,000 to write an expose on African immigrant clubbing in New York. I remember sitting on the train the day it was published, gleaming with pride as I looked around at my fellow riders reading my cover story. While knowing at the time deep down that Red Bull Music Academy was problematic, I felt in many ways validated for that moment as a writer, DJ and cultural observer.

Friends of mine went even further with their engagement with Red Bull. The now defunct party Que Bajo participated in the Culture Sound Clash in Manhattan that year, and received $50,000 to put on a large show incorporating many members of our local community, and even flew in folks in that influenced the formation of it. It was a fun moment. However, it was very flash in the pan.

That Que Bajo is now defunct, is fairly indicative of the problems we are dealing with in the contemporary independent electronic music scene. Money troubles eventually led to in fighting and we realized that the temporary influx of capital only served to draw a wedge between members of our community rather than uplift it. It’s also a cliché that money causes more problems, but seeing it in action doesn’t make it any less painful. What I would chalk that up to ultimately, is that our expectations were temporarily raised, our potential temporarily realized, and when we could no longer live up to those moments our own self-worth was put into question.

I joke to friends that after leaving New York for Rio de Janeiro, I realized that everyone in New York City has the 2-steps-from-Kanye disease. Meaning you are suffering through paying the rent and trying to survive in this creatively stifling advertising industry and Wall Street driven city, but you’re only two steps away from Kanye so you won’t quit it. What that really means is that you’re in the center of capital. You can see it all around you, but like a mirage of an oasis in the desert you can’t actually touch any of it.

Five years after Diplo and I talked about appropriating underground New York queer culture (fyi, he currently has his sights set on Afropop). Queer electronic musicians are now central to the mainstream independent music media and New York scene. Some DJ friends (usually straight males) will joke: if you’re not a queer woman of color DJ in Brooklyn, you’re not getting booked in 2017. As I laid out in 2012, the industry like to focus on certain scenes as the flavor of the day. But, I also know many of the queer women of color DJs in Brooklyn and they’re just as frustrated. I imagine that is because even politically progressive identity politics can become fodder for corporate advertising agencies profit margins, eventually sewing the kind of internal community discord that I saw happen with Que Bajo. So, even with more representation for marginalized identities, something is still broken in the deeper system.

My Twitter rant continued:

In creative industries, investment capital is measured in likes and follows. Passively clicking is actually a form of market participation

— International Black (@intlblk) July 20, 2017

I even don't know a better forum for this info than Twitter, a corporate entity that deals in real estate speculation and gentrification

— International Black (@intlblk) July 20, 2017

So if you're a real human being, trying to live in the real world, you're damned if you do, and damned if you don't participate.

— International Black (@intlblk) July 20, 2017

Belgian producer collaborating with West African artists, Max LeDaron chimed in:

As I reach the final stages of my own record, some thoughts of selling out to the far right energy drink company crossed my mind

— Max le Daron (@maxledaron) July 20, 2017

and then I thought "nah let's struggle"

— Max le Daron (@maxledaron) July 20, 2017

@intlblk but seriously, funding on your own a proper mix and master + a few videos is nearly impossible, and I don't believe in crowdfunding

— Max le Daron (@maxledaron) July 20, 2017

Me:

The beauty of pre soundcloud touring big club internet celebrity naija oil money was that the shit didnt have to be perfect to get heard

— International Black (@intlblk) July 20, 2017

Kuduro was all over compressed and distorted

— International Black (@intlblk) July 20, 2017

Max:

yeah, I feel like today you NEED to have videos, you NEED to sound crisp, you NEED to hire a PR dude…

— Max le Daron (@maxledaron) July 20, 2017

Me:

We fucking drank the sugary juice and cut off our legs in the process

— International Black (@intlblk) July 20, 2017

Diabetes!!!

— International Black (@intlblk) July 20, 2017

And what Max is pointing to is an unfortunate reality of the contemporary creative world. We are dependent on the rightwing owned sugary drinks and jeans and sunglass companies to allow us to create. Our value as creatives in the USA at least, the largest national music industry in the world, is completely based on their patronage. Which is perhaps fine if you’re at the top of the food chain (capitalism is designed to have only a few people at the top). But, in reality, unless you own your own platform like Jay-Z, you really have no leverage, bargaining power or even really true creative autonomy (just ask Kanye).

Contrary to the utopian dreams of the early Internet, the idea of a more democratic communications space has given way to a system of capitalist exploitation. Anything that challenges the core of the system we create in is forced to eek out an existence on the margins, that is until it gains a million likes on youtube and Drake remixes it. And even if an entire community gets “put on,” ultimately all they want is the polished, likable, followable, palatable (sugary drink), exclusive-able content that will get these companies their virtual social capital, which only they can convert into cold hard cash.

And the truth is, even Jay-Z isn’t immune, since he has made deals with even bigger corporations like Samsung and Sprint to ensure his ability to create. Think about that. Even the richest creatives in the room are not completely free to create whatever they want. And it doesn’t matter what kind of politics you profess in the music, identity or otherwise, those corporations still get paid. (And I think Jay-Z and Beyonce’s actual politics of pseudo black nationalism and feminism as a cover for corporate capitalism is vapid and disgusting.)

I know this isn’t going to sink in with everyone who reads this. I feel like much of the point on cultural appropriation I was trying to make was lost in the flash and splendor of the social media driven media environment.

What I want however is for all individuals to really try and understand what’s happening in the current Internet-driven creative economy, to look at the kind of world we want to create, and invest in the positive humanistic aspects that make us feel more like humans in a healthy supportive community, and society as a whole.

There are many alternatives as my friend Nati Conrazon like to point out (follow her, and everyone she follows for some great music and culture related initiatives trying to bring the power back to all the people!).

As for me?

I'm gonna keep making records whether I have the capital or not.

— International Black (@intlblk) July 20, 2017

 

The bad immigrants

Abraham Paulos.

The last time Abraham Paulos was arrested by the NYPD was in the early morning hours of October 23, 2010. He was walking home around 2:30 a.m. from his late shift at Franklin Park Bar in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. On New York Ave. and Dean St., two blocks away from a robbery that had occurred on Nostrand and Pacific, he was stopped and interrogated by patrol officers. Paulos, now Director of Communications for the Black Alliance for Just Immigration (BAJI), was a graduate student at The New School, and recalls being preoccupied by his upcoming midterms at the time of the stop.

“What was really funny is that I could have been on that corner. So I’m like, well I’m really happy that I didn’t get robbed. But on the other end, now I’m being arrested for a robbery. I was confused,” he said. The victim identified him as possibly one of three assailants that had assaulted and robbed him.

Despite mentioning that he had proof of his clock-out time back at his workplace, and possible CCTV footage from a bodega up the street, he was handcuffed and informed he would have to go through the system. After almost a day at the New York Police Department’s 77th Precinct where he was fingerprinted, questioned by a detective, and informed of his charges — four felonies and two misdemeanors — he was taken some blocks away to Central Booking, a holding facility attached to the court where his arraignment took place.

At the time, immigration activists in the city and state were pushing then-Attorney General and Governor-elect, Andrew Cuomo not to implement Secure Communities — an Obama-era program that allowed the fingerprints taken from all bookings, regardless if you were charged or not, to be forwarded to the FBI and shared with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). ICE could then request local law enforcement to detain an arrested individual if there was any suspicion of an immigration violation.

“Had it been implemented, it is really a wonder if I would be here or not,” Paulos said, “because my fingerprints would have made it to immigration, my previous contacts from more than a decade ago would have come up and there would have been questions.” But it was in Central Booking that the question of where he was born first came up.

Like Paulos, few immigrants at the time made the connection between their immigration status and the potential for deportation if they came into contact with the criminal justice system. Although Paulos’ family came to the US legally as refugees from Eritrea, he was still just a permanent resident. Therefore, contact with the criminal justice system could have put him on ICE’s database and flagged for deportation.

At his hearing, Paulos’ public defender was confident he would be released on his own recognizance. But the judge ordered that he post bail after noting previous convictions on his record, including jumping a turnstile and stealing books from a public library in his teens. Unable to pay the bond, Paulos found himself on a bus to Rikers Island prison, which, like the precinct and Central Booking, was mostly full of black and brown people, or as Paulos describes it, “the immigrant makeup of New York.”

A fellow prisoner at Rikers, realizing Paulos was not a US citizen began to impress upon him the urgent need to get out of Rikers. “He’s like yeah you need to get out of here,” Paulos said, “And I responded, ‘clearly I need to get out of here for a myriad of reasons.’ But he insisted I needed to find a way to leave immediately because ICE is going to try and deport you.” “ICE? You mean INS?,” Paulos inquired, recalling many years of dealing with bureaucrats from the Immigration and Naturalization Services as a refugee. “No ICE. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.”

As an immigrant with a record who escaped the clutches of ICE at Rikers, Paulos is constantly reminded by immigration advocates of how lucky he is, and how unique; like an “albino rhino in the jungle,” he said. His roommates eventually raised $2,500 for his bond. As he was leaving Rikers he walked past two ICE officers coming into the building. After his release, he began to volunteer with Families for Freedom helping to inform and assist immigrants like himself who were caught up in the criminal justice system.

Paulos and his colleagues are dedicated to eradicating police practices such as racial profiling and broken windows — a policing philosophy that emphasizes prevention of low level violations in order to reduce overall crime rates. Critics of broken windows policing, which was embraced by the NYPD in the 1990s, have long-argued that it disproportionately impacts communities of color. Black and brown New Yorkers also still find themselves overwhelmingly the targets of stop and frisk policing, even though its use has been reduced in recent years.

As a result of these policies undocumented people of color in New York City have a higher chance of having contact with the criminal justice system and thus possible deportation. A 2016 report from BAJI and New York University Law School’s Immigrant Rights clinic showed that while Black immigrants comprise 5.4 per cent of the unauthorized population, between 2003 and 2015 they made up 10.6 percent of all immigrants in removal proceedings. In 2013 three quarters of the immigrants removed on criminal charges were black, compared to less than half of all immigrants overall.

Since Paulos was arrested some local and national reforms have been implemented in an attempt to limit the connection between the criminal justice and immigration systems. In November 2014 the Obama Administration introduced the Priority Enforcement Program (PEP), to replace Secure Communities. That same year, the New York City Council, as part of its sanctuary city policies, passed legislation removing ICE from Rikers Island, as well as legislation to not honor detainer requests from ICE. A detainer means that a person is held in jail after completing their sentence so that ICE has time to transfer them to another facility and begin deportation proceedings. The exception to this is that NYC honors detainer requests in cases where the charged individual has committed a violent and serious crime in the previous five years, and there is a warrant from a judge. According to the NYC Council, not honoring detainers has protected over 3,000 New Yorkers per year from deportation.

And yet the problem of information sharing with ICE still haunts sanctuary cities like New York. An arrest can put an immigrant who doesn’t hold citizenship on ICE’s radar because they are fingerprinted upon entering a police station — whether they are eventually charged or not. According to Connor Gleason from the Bronx Defenders, even without programs like Secure Communities these fingerprints that are sent to a FBI database can be accessed and scanned by ICE.

In 2015, when the legislation to remove ICE from Rikers Island was enacted, home raids went up in New York City since ICE no longer had a presence at Rikers from which to conduct operations. In general, about 950 out of 1250 ICE pick ups in a typical week in 2016 were from arrests by local police and sheriff departments through information sharing according to Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse. “So just to let people know exactly what New York City is really about,” Paulos said, “the NYPD and the police policies that are here have actually been the greatest incubator feeder into the deportation system.”

Law enforcement and city officials maintain it is more complicated than that. An NYPD-wide email from Police Commissioner James O’Neill emphasized the Department’s commitment to “maintaining a welcoming environment for immigrant communities while also maintaining public safety for all.”

The NYPD, attributes New York City’s historically low crime rates, in part to the success of practices such as broken windows policing. But critics of broken windows maintain that the increased potential for contact with the immigration enforcement system is one of the consequences of aggressive policing of low level infractions. Yet there is a hesitation to move away from a system that Mayor Bill de Blasio, a former public advocate, has embraced saying that it is “still the right approach.”

“The bottom line is do the New York police want to do the job of federal immigration officials or city police?” said Dennis Kenney, a professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. “If the latter, then how they relate to all communities is important — do the citizens in those communities trust the police and are they willing to engage with them?”

It’s an important question in a city where over half of the population is either immigrants or the children of immigrants and more than 500,000 undocumented immigrants live in the city.

The NYPD points out that it doesn’t inquire about the immigration status of people its officers interact with. “But from a city police effectiveness perspective, the police shouldn’t care where those citizens come from; only that they trust police enough to work with them and embrace a lawful culture,” Professor Kenney, asserts.

For Council Member Carlos Menchaca reforming the NYPD’s policies is one of several changes that are needed if New York is to achieve its stated goal of being a sanctuary for vulnerable immigrants.

“Just as broken windows isn’t one specific law or practice, sanctuary and criminal justice reform must be accomplished by several means,” said Menchaca who chairs the Council’s Committee on Immigration and represents Brooklyn’s 38th District. “Engineering sustainable change in New York City is a challenge that must be met with a combination of advocacy, protest, legislation, budget priorities and policy reform.”

For Abraham Paulos, New York is a sanctuary city for those who don’t have contact with the criminal justice system. “The thing about criminalization in New York City, and nationwide is that it is a process,” Paulos said, “You might not have a conviction today, but what about tomorrow? We are talking about a conviction machine that is on 24/7 and a lot of those who were “good immigrants” before, are now “bad immigrants” because they have had contact with the criminal system.”

Connor Gleason, from the Bronx Defenders, cautions against making assumptions about NYC’s sanctuary city status. “It is not as if when you cross the border into our city you are safe,” he said.

To create a more robust sanctuary city, members of the New York City Council have taken two related approaches aimed at reducing the number New Yorkers who are deported. One is to reduce the number of people who have contact with the criminal justice system, the other is to support people who have already had contact with police.

The first strategy, announced on June 13th 2017 as part of the Criminal Justice Reform Act is to make infractions such as public drinking, public urination, excessive noise, violations of park rules and carrying open containers of alcohol, civil tickets rather than criminal summonses. The City’s Office of Administrative Trials and Hearings anticipates this change will divert 100,000 people from criminal court each year. Likewise, the Manhattan District Attorney has announced his office will direct fare evasion cases — like Abraham Paulos’ original crime — into community service. The Brooklyn and Queens District Attorneys will monitor the Manhattan example, with an eye to implement similar programs. Last year the police arrested around 24-thousand people for fare evasion and issued over 67-thousand civil summons, sending the civil offenders to the Transit Adjudication Bureau to pay a $100 fine.

For the second strategy NYC has set up a publicly funded immigrant defense fund. The New York Immigrant Family Unity Project (NYIFUP), started in 2013 with $500,000 to provide immigrants with removal orders a public defender to enhance their fighting chance. According to Peter L. Markowitz, the director of the Immigrant Justice Center at Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law and one of the leaders of the initiative, the program has helped 2,348 detained immigrants.

This year, Mayor De Blasio  proposed $16.4 million to support the program, but with the catch that people convicted in the past five years of any of 170 serious crimes (including murder, rioting, rape, patronizing a prostitute, manslaughter, and possession of a controlled substance) would not be eligible. Numerous members of the City Council, including the Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito, opposed the carve-out. The Mayor’s office and the City Council are still negotiating the details of the program.

Of the 325 clients served by the NYIFUP from December 2016 to May 10, 2017, 63, or 19 percent, had convictions on the list of 170 crimes. The NYC Council is also working with the state, according to Council Member Vanessa Gibson, to address the presence of ICE agents outside courthouses — an issue outside the control of the Council since the courts fall under state jurisdiction.

Connor Gleason, among the first lawyers involved with the NYIFUP, believes it is an indispensable program, but maintains that the Council could do more to help people with convictions. “A lot of these convictions, many of them nonviolent, stem from many years ago and are a consequence of broken windows policing,” he said, “and the criminalization of low income members of our communities.”

The tools at the city’s disposal are the ability to, “work with the court system, fund programs for immigrants, and inform immigrants about their rights,” Council Member Gibson says. She argues that comprehensive immigration reform is what is ultimately necessary, but she doesn’t expect, “that is going to happen with this President.”

For Abraham Paulos, “it is about the preexisting pattern of criminalizing black and brown communities in general.”

“My biggest fear,” he adds, “is that we will not learn from (the last election). My fear is that we are just going to continue to do the same thing. And if we continue to do the same thing it is going to be a situation where I won’t be the only one with unnecessary fear in the community.”

* This story was originally published by Feet in 2 Worlds, an award-winning news site and journalism training organization based at The New School in New York. For the past 13 years, Feet in 2 Worlds has brought the work of journalists from a broad range of immigrant communities to public radio and the web.

Sudan–the second time as tragic farce

For six years rebel forces in Sudan’s South Kordofan and Blue Nile states (the Two Areas) have been battling the Sudanese government. Round after round of negotiations mediated by the African Union (AU) in Addis Ababa have failed to bring an end to what is a continuation of the second Sudanese civil war (1983-2005) fought by the Sudan People’s Liberation Army/Movement against the Sudanese government army. The 2005 peace agreement between the two sides culminated in an independent South Sudan, now consumed by its own civil war, but left behind the northern sector of the SPLA/M drawn predominantly from peoples of the Two Areas. Militarily in no position to pose a serious threat to Khartoum and politically susceptible to the chaining winds of regional politics the largest Sudanese rebel movement is now in the throes of a leadership dispute that is proving more pernicious than Khartoum’s counter-insurgency strategies.

Abd al-Aziz Adam al-Hilu, the undisputed leader of the Nuba insurgency in Sudan’s South Kordofan State, arrived on June  29 2017 in the mountainous terrain under the control of the rebel Sudan People’s Liberation Army/Movement in North Sudan (SPLA/M-N). Abd al-Aziz is a sturdy man inclined to silence but with an admirable will and perseverance. It is likely these qualities in addition to his quasi-Sufi rejection of worldly joys that has earned him the respect of the battle-hardened Nuba fighters still committed to the cause of liberation by the gun. Abd al-Aziz was received by senior commanders of the SPLA/M-N, including the rebel army’s current chief of staff, Jagod Mukwar and his deputy Izat Koko. Until 2015 it was Abd al-Aziz who occupied the position of chief of staff and he remained effectively top commander of the SPLA/M-N in absentia during his long withdrawal to Nairobi. With the decision of the two men to side with their patron the dispute over leadership in the SPLA/M-N was for all practical purposes settled. Al-Hilu’s supporters, organised in the Nuba Mountains Liberation Council (NMLC), and dismissed Malik Agar and Yasir Arman from their posts as chairman and secretary general of the SPLA/M-N respectively. The now army-less generals were left to vegetate on whatever international relations they still enjoyed. A loyal spokesman accompanied the two men to South Africa where they held meetings with acquaintances in the South African labor federation, COSATU, in mid-July and made news from an event of no consequence at all. The meeting with COSATU discussed the sacrifices of the Sudanese youth in the September 2013 riots and the civil disobedience campaigns  of last year, the spokesman said.

The leadership dispute within the SPLA/M-N erupted in the open last March when Abd al-Aziz made public a long-in-the-making letter of resignation. With this step, Abd al-Aziz was far from resigning, he was asking Nuba SPLA/M-N soldiers and cadres to make a choice between his leadership and the status quo, the triangular leadership structure that joined him and Malik Agar and Yasir Arman. This was a shrewd political move, particularly in a situation of absentee leadership. Agar and Arman were more at ease in East African and European capitals than in the rebel capital, Kauda, or the caves that shielded civilians in rebel-controlled areas from the Sudanese army’s aerial bombardment.

Since the resurgence of conflict between SPLA/M-N and the Sudanese government army in South Kordofan in June 2011, al-Hilu has been the hands-on leader of the rebellion. Although in Nairobi for a while for health related reasons as is alleged, al-Hilu cultivated a reputation as a tough commander who preferred the battlefield over the comfort of Addis Ababa hotels, where round after round of failed negotiations between the government and the SPLA/M-N have taken place. The politics of rebellion were the preferred terrain of Arman and Agar. They doubled as leaders of the short-lived alliance between the SPLA/M-N and the Darfur armed movements – the Sudan Revolutionary Front (SRF) – and were the main interlocutors of international envoys and African Union officials involved in the abortive efforts to achieve a peaceful settlement to the conflict. What the two men obviously did not account for are the growing ambitions of the pensive commander in the Mountains.

In contrast with al-Hilu who relies on an army, Arman and Agar rely on a divided constituency  and long-wasted base of support respectively. Agar can claim followers in the conflict areas of the Blue Nile State. He clinched the governorship of the state in Sudan’s April 2010 elections prior to the referendum that led to the independence of South Sudan,  hence his reluctance to take up arms again when the fighting resumed in South Kordofan. His ambiguous position towards armed struggle, as the way forward for the northern sector when the comrades in South Sudan opted for secession, hangs over him feeding the narrative that he is the more inclined to strike a deal with Khartoum. Arman, once John Garang’s spokesman, managed the SPLM’s affairs in northern Sudan during the interim period of the Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) that ended the war between the Garang’s SPLA/M and the government of Sudan in 2005. He was the speaker of the SPLM caucus in the national parliament and its presidential candidate in the April 2010 elections.

John Garang died in a helicopter crash on 30 July 2005, months after his inauguration as Sudan’s First Vice President. The deal he made he did not live to implement and with his death the main in-house obstacle to the primary ambition of the overwhelming majority of fighters under his command as well as his most senior commanders, namely an independent state of their own in southern Sudan, was removed. His second in command, Salva Kiir Mayardit, took over the reigns of the SPLA/M and assumed the position carved for the big man in the Sudanese presidency, steering southern Sudan clearly towards independence in 2011 and its fate beyond. The northern sector of the SPLA/M-N was the orphan on the table as it were. The ruling National Congress Party (NCP) of President Omar al-Bashir and Salva Kiir’s SPLA/M agreed on a trade-off whereby the NCP would allow southern Sudan to gain independence and the SPLA/M would refrain from competing with the NCP in northern Sudan. Arman allowed himself to be the exchange currency. After launching a high profile bid for the presidency under SPLM banners he withdrew his candidacy last minute and with it the grand idea of a ‘New Sudan’ for all the Sudanese, north and south. Committed supporters sobbed in anguish and even the most talented propagandists failed to deliver an argument that would redeem Arman in his moment of sacrifice. Arman explained his position by remaining silent on the issue and never really recovered his political credibility. Today, the situation is such that Arman and Agar are banned by order of the NMLC from entering areas under SPLA/M-N control in the Nuba Mountains. 

In his letter of resignation and in a subsequent explanation, Abd al-Aziz hinted at these shortcomings but did not name them. Instead he capitalised on the very failure of the rebellion he effectively led from the mountains, laying the blame squarely on Arman and Agar. Abd al-Aziz ridiculed Arman’s efforts to craft an alliance with northern Sudanese political forces to further the SPLA/M-N’s objective of reworking Garang’s bombastic ‘New Sudan’ ideology in the service of the rump northern Sudan. He even dropped the joint struggle with the insurgents of the Blue Nile under Agar to declare self-determination for the Nuba Mountains as the only worthwhile goal of the Nuba insurgency. These ideas did not hatch in Al-Hilu’s head overnight, it must be said. Why he chose this particular moment to declare them ripe to act upon is an open question. In their chaotic response to his torrent of accusations and leap to the leadership, Agar and Arman suggested a foreign hand in the game, in their words “parties that want to employ the SPLA/M-N as a subnational and not a national force in their predetermined projects.” 

An honest response Al-Hilu’s challenge would have required a critical confrontation with the legacy of the mother SPLA/M under Garang, probably too much to ask from men who matured into Garang’s politics and whose own careers are a function of his oversized persona. Paradoxically, while Arman and Agar claim fidelity to the lofty slogans of the ‘New Sudan’ it is Al-Hilu after all who is closest to its practice. Not unlike Garang, Al-Hilu seeks to win through the capture and intensive militarisation of the people ‘to be liberated.’ The valorisation of the gun he preaches extends to mythologisation of firearms as essential elements of Nuba being.

“The people of Nuba are the only people in the world who use rifles as dowry in marriage to appreciate their role and value in their continued existence,” he tells the readers of his resignation letter. Tied with the valorisation of the gun is the notion of the supremacy of military power and hence the carrier of that power, the army. Abd al-Aziz gave this belief expression in his demand to maintain the autonomy of his rebel army for at least 20 years in any future deal with Khartoum, in his mind until the implementation of any prospective agreement is achieved and ‘democratic transition’ is completed or kingdom come. The Nuba army that Al-Hilu commands is today very much a popular army with few of the predatory features that characterise the SPLA in southern and later South Sudan, possibly thanks to the intensive politicisation of the Nuba by generations of agitators and activists among them Abd al-Aziz himself. Contrary to this tradition, Abd al-Aziz is now inviting the Nuba army to embody a nativist notion of Nuba nationalism and very much like the SPLA in southern Sudan deliver the Nuba to a state under its authority. This could be an effective battle cry, and indeed copies the martial ideology of the mother SPLA’s soldiers, but its outcome is the evolution of the Nuba commanders of today into anything between paternalistic administrators of a coercive bend following colonial example to outright predators.

Malik Agar and Yasir Arman are today in a position to think through these dilemmas of armed rebellion in Sudan’s fractured hinterlands. They might not be able to strike political capital out of self-effacing reckoning with their own histories and the histories of their comrades, but they are well placed to draw conclusions from these histories about race and class in an African periphery and the about the requirements and limitations of armed struggle as a means to address the deep inequalities of the Sudans. As habits dictate or I suppose livelihoods, the two men will more likely spend their time calling on friends in COSATU and dictating irrelevant statements to complying spokesmen.

Sudan–the second time as farce

For six years rebel forces in Sudan’s South Kordofan and Blue Nile states (the Two Areas) have been battling the Sudanese government. Round after round of negotiations mediated by the African Union (AU) in Addis Ababa have failed to bring an end to what is a continuation of the second Sudanese civil war (1983-2005) fought by the Sudan People’s Liberation Army/Movement against the Sudanese government army. The 2005 peace agreement between the two sides culminated in an independent South Sudan, now consumed by its own civil war, but left behind the northern sector of the SPLA/M drawn predominantly from peoples of the Two Areas. Militarily in no position to pose a serious threat to Khartoum and politically susceptible to the chaining winds of regional politics the largest Sudanese rebel movement is now in the throes of a leadership dispute that is proving more pernicious than Khartoum’s counter-insurgency strategies.

Abd al-Aziz Adam al-Hilu, the undisputed leader of the Nuba insurgency in Sudan’s South Kordofan State, arrived on June  29 2017 in the mountainous terrain under the control of the rebel Sudan People’s Liberation Army/Movement in North Sudan (SPLA/M-N). Abd al-Aziz is a sturdy man inclined to silence but with an admirable will and perseverance. It is likely these qualities in addition to his quasi-Sufi rejection of worldly joys that has earned him the respect of the battle-hardened Nuba fighters still committed to the cause of liberation by the gun. Abd al-Aziz was received by senior commanders of the SPLA/M-N, including the rebel army’s current chief of staff, Jagod Mukwar and his deputy Izat Koko. Until 2015 it was Abd al-Aziz who occupied the position of chief of staff and he remained effectively top commander of the SPLA/M-N in absentia during his long withdrawal to Nairobi. With the decision of the two men to side with their patron the dispute over leadership in the SPLA/M-N was for all practical purposes settled. Al-Hilu’s supporters, organised in the Nuba Mountains Liberation Council (NMLC), and dismissed Malik Agar and Yasir Arman from their posts as chairman and secretary general of the SPLA/M-N respectively. The now army-less generals were left to vegetate on whatever international relations they still enjoyed. A loyal spokesman accompanied the two men to South Africa where they held meetings with acquaintances in the South African labor federation, COSATU, in mid-July and made news from an event of no consequence at all. The meeting with COSATU discussed the sacrifices of the Sudanese youth in the September 2013 riots and the civil disobedience campaigns  of last year, the spokesman said.

The leadership dispute within the SPLA/M-N erupted in the open last March when Abd al-Aziz made public a long-in-the-making letter of resignation. With this step, Abd al-Aziz was far from resigning, he was asking Nuba SPLA/M-N soldiers and cadres to make a choice between his leadership and the status quo, the triangular leadership structure that joined him and Malik Agar and Yasir Arman. This was a shrewd political move, particularly in a situation of absentee leadership. Agar and Arman were more at ease in East African and European capitals than in the rebel capital, Kauda, or the caves that shielded civilians in rebel-controlled areas from the Sudanese army’s aerial bombardment.

Since the resurgence of conflict between SPLA/M-N and the Sudanese government army in South Kordofan in June 2011, al-Hilu has been the hands-on leader of the rebellion. Although in Nairobi for a while for health related reasons as is alleged, al-Hilu cultivated a reputation as a tough commander who preferred the battlefield over the comfort of Addis Ababa hotels, where round after round of failed negotiations between the government and the SPLA/M-N have taken place. The politics of rebellion were the preferred terrain of Arman and Agar. They doubled as leaders of the short-lived alliance between the SPLA/M-N and the Darfur armed movements – the Sudan Revolutionary Front (SRF) – and were the main interlocutors of international envoys and African Union officials involved in the abortive efforts to achieve a peaceful settlement to the conflict. What the two men obviously did not account for are the growing ambitions of the pensive commander in the Mountains.

In contrast with al-Hilu who relies on an army, Arman and Agar rely on a divided constituency  and long-wasted base of support respectively. Agar can claim followers in the conflict areas of the Blue Nile State. He clinched the governorship of the state in Sudan’s April 2010 elections prior to the referendum that led to the independence of South Sudan,  hence his reluctance to take up arms again when the fighting resumed in South Kordofan. His ambiguous position towards armed struggle, as the way forward for the northern sector when the comrades in South Sudan opted for secession, hangs over him feeding the narrative that he is the more inclined to strike a deal with Khartoum. Arman, once John Garang’s spokesman, managed the SPLM’s affairs in northern Sudan during the interim period of the Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) that ended the war between the Garang’s SPLA/M and the government of Sudan in 2005. He was the speaker of the SPLM caucus in the national parliament and its presidential candidate in the April 2010 elections.

John Garang died in a helicopter crash on 30 July 2005, months after his inauguration as Sudan’s First Vice President. The deal he made he did not live to implement and with his death the main in-house obstacle to the primary ambition of the overwhelming majority of fighters under his command as well as his most senior commanders, namely an independent state of their own in southern Sudan, was removed. His second in command, Salva Kiir Mayardit, took over the reigns of the SPLA/M and assumed the position carved for the big man in the Sudanese presidency, steering southern Sudan clearly towards independence in 2011 and its fate beyond. The northern sector of the SPLA/M-N was the orphan on the table as it were. The ruling National Congress Party (NCP) of President Omar al-Bashir and Salva Kiir’s SPLA/M agreed on a trade-off whereby the NCP would allow southern Sudan to gain independence and the SPLA/M would refrain from competing with the NCP in northern Sudan. Arman allowed himself to be the exchange currency. After launching a high profile bid for the presidency under SPLM banners he withdrew his candidacy last minute and with it the grand idea of a ‘New Sudan’ for all the Sudanese, north and south. Committed supporters sobbed in anguish and even the most talented propagandists failed to deliver an argument that would redeem Arman in his moment of sacrifice. Arman explained his position by remaining silent on the issue and never really recovered his political credibility. Today, the situation is such that Arman and Agar are banned by order of the NMLC from entering areas under SPLA/M-N control in the Nuba Mountains. 

In his letter of resignation and in a subsequent explanation, Abd al-Aziz hinted at these shortcomings but did not name them. Instead he capitalised on the very failure of the rebellion he effectively led from the mountains, laying the blame squarely on Arman and Agar. Abd al-Aziz ridiculed Arman’s efforts to craft an alliance with northern Sudanese political forces to further the SPLA/M-N’s objective of reworking Garang’s bombastic ‘New Sudan’ ideology in the service of the rump northern Sudan. He even dropped the joint struggle with the insurgents of the Blue Nile under Agar to declare self-determination for the Nuba Mountains as the only worthwhile goal of the Nuba insurgency. These ideas did not hatch in Al-Hilu’s head overnight, it must be said. Why he chose this particular moment to declare them ripe to act upon is an open question. In their chaotic response to his torrent of accusations and leap to the leadership, Agar and Arman suggested a foreign hand in the game, in their words “parties that want to employ the SPLA/M-N as a subnational and not a national force in their predetermined projects.” 

An honest response Al-Hilu’s challenge would have required a critical confrontation with the legacy of the mother SPLA/M under Garang, probably too much to ask from men who matured into Garang’s politics and whose own careers are a function of his oversized persona. Paradoxically, while Arman and Agar claim fidelity to the lofty slogans of the ‘New Sudan’ it is Al-Hilu after all who is closest to its practice. Not unlike Garang, Al-Hilu seeks to win through the capture and intensive militarisation of the people ‘to be liberated.’ The valorisation of the gun he preaches extends to mythologisation of firearms as essential elements of Nuba being.

“The people of Nuba are the only people in the world who use rifles as dowry in marriage to appreciate their role and value in their continued existence,” he tells the readers of his resignation letter. Tied with the valorisation of the gun is the notion of the supremacy of military power and hence the carrier of that power, the army. Abd al-Aziz gave this belief expression in his demand to maintain the autonomy of his rebel army for at least 20 years in any future deal with Khartoum, in his mind until the implementation of any prospective agreement is achieved and ‘democratic transition’ is completed or kingdom come. The Nuba army that Al-Hilu commands is today very much a popular army with few of the predatory features that characterise the SPLA in southern and later South Sudan, possibly thanks to the intensive politicisation of the Nuba by generations of agitators and activists among them Abd al-Aziz himself. Contrary to this tradition, Abd al-Aziz is now inviting the Nuba army to embody a nativist notion of Nuba nationalism and very much like the SPLA in southern Sudan deliver the Nuba to a state under its authority. This could be an effective battle cry, and indeed copies the martial ideology of the mother SPLA’s soldiers, but its outcome is the evolution of the Nuba commanders of today into anything between paternalistic administrators of a coercive bend following colonial example to outright predators.

Malik Agar and Yasir Arman are today in a position to think through these dilemmas of armed rebellion in Sudan’s fractured hinterlands. They might not be able to strike political capital out of self-effacing reckoning with their own histories and the histories of their comrades, but they are well placed to draw conclusions from these histories about race and class in an African periphery and the about the requirements and limitations of armed struggle as a means to address the deep inequalities of the Sudans. As habits dictate or I suppose livelihoods, the two men will more likely spend their time calling on friends in COSATU and dictating irrelevant statements to complying spokesmen.