Sean Jacobs's Blog, page 279

The perenial dictator

Rwanda’s President Paul Kagame had promised to step down before this year’s election. “Those who seek a third term seek a fourth and then a fifth term,” Kagame said after winning Rwanda’s vote in 2010 against no real challengers. He had promised to find a successor.

Instead, with Rwanda’s next election fewer than two months away, Kagame’s new female presidential challenger, Diane Rwigara, has found herself the target of misogynist smears. Nude pictures of her are circulating in the country. An opposition politician was killed, nearly beheaded and his eyes gouged out after he criticized government agricultural policies. A Ugandan gay rights activist was arrested and deported after she called Kagame a dictator. And Kagame insists that this will be his last term as president.

Rwanda’s constitution was changed last year to allow Kagame to stay in power until 2034. Like many authoritarian leaders – in Iraq, Libya and Syria, as well as the Rwandan regime leading up to the 1994 genocide – Kagame justifies his rule with statistics about how many schools and hospitals his government has built and the pace of his country’s economic growth. Like many of those dictators, Kagame is praised for maintaining stability in Rwanda.

But each year that Kagame stays in power more Rwandan politicians are killed, jailed or forced into exile. Journalists are murdered and imprisoned. And institutions essential for long-term peace, such as an independent parliament and judiciary, are corrupted. His political party all but controls the economy, seizing businesses at will and monopolizing sectors. Kagame allows no rivals to his power. He has not even engineered a “Putin”, by installing a puppet president at this year’s election. And as he clings to power he raises the likelihood of violence in Rwanda.

Yet, Kagame pontificates on leadership, democracy and good governance at Davos, Yale [here’s Dan Magaziner’s write-up of that talk–Ed] and Harvard. World leaders and global corporations seem enamored by Kagame’s narrative of Rwanda’s rise from the ashes of genocide to become a democratic nation, a global leader in women’s rights, and an attractive destination for foreign investment.

It is Kagame’s near-total control of Rwanda, achieved through violence and repression, which allows him to extend his power to elite venues abroad. Foreign praise is vital to Kagame. He revels in citing such praise in his speeches in Rwanda. And his anger is palpable when he is criticized.

Rwanda’s government produces reams of statistics about the country’s progress for Kagame to cite. But researchers in Rwanda must obtain government approval before publishing any statistics that contradict the official figures. World Bank researchers in Rwanda were forced to destroy their data after it became clear that they were willing to contradict Kagame’s narrative of improving life and reducing poverty in Rwanda. Rwandans interviewed by these researchers were later interrogated by government officials to determine whether they had contradicted the government. A Rwandan journalist who alleged Kagame’s family was involved in corrupt deals was shot dead. A Transparency International researcher investigating Rwandan police corruption was murdered.

So the statistics about Rwanda’s economic growth published by the World Bank, and then by most media outlets, are based largely on a single source: the Rwandan government. Few Rwandan journalists, economists or analysts dare to question the government. This is how the government’s statistics become the truth, in Rwanda and abroad. Such statistics are supported by images of Chinese-made buildings in Kigali, and Transparency International surveys of Rwandans who say that their president and government are not corrupt.

This past year saw warnings of famine across East Africa, including in Rwanda, linked to El Niño. After an initial famine alert in Rwandan media reports, the Rwandan press has mostly been silent. It mirrors a famine outbreak declared a decade ago in Burundi, on its border with Rwanda. On the Rwandan side of the border, in the same climactic zone, to this day there was officially no famine. The official Rwandan line is that food shortage is not an issue in the country.

Meanwhile, Kagame exhorts visitors to Rwanda to ask the Rwandan people what they think of him and his government.

It means Kagame can only be criticized from abroad. And Kagame accuses such critics of racism against Africans. He stresses his “African solutions” for African development. And, as Kagame recently said to the Wall Street Journal’s chief editor Gerard Baker, after commenting on what other African countries could learn from Rwanda, “My satisfaction lies in the fact that we haven’t been involved in doing anything wrong against our people. We are developing our country.”

The West’s culpability in North Africa and the Middle East

President al Sisi and US Secretary of State Kerry. Image via Wikicommons.

There seems to be no limit to Europe’s and USA’s willingness to accept and even support autocrats in North Africa and the Middle East.

Consider the case of Egypt, Africa’s third most populous country. Since Egypt’s military seized power in a coup and thus ended a brief experiment with real democratization in July 2013, the Western media euphoria of the Arab Spring has been replaced by polite lack of interest in the country’s development.

Egypt’s ex-general and current president Abdel Fattah al-Sisi has taken full advantage of this media fatigue. Since the summer of 2013 he has steadily tightened the noose on the media and the civil society sector. At one point, only China bested Egypt in terms of absolute figures of imprisoned journalists – before Turkey’s president Erdogan outdid them both by a wide margin after the coup attempt in 2016. Currently, Egypt holds on to a respectable third rank with 25 imprisoned journalists. The crowning achievements of this policy occurred very recently. On May 24, Egypt blocked most of the few remaining independent news outlets in the country, including the tiny, but high-quality electronic newspaper Mada Masr. A few days later, on May 29, Al-Sisi ratified a new NGO law that spells catastrophe for the country’s already hard-pressed civil society. From now on, NGOs may only engage in social and development work, and activists face up to five years in jail for not complying with the law. This, and a new, forbiddingly bureaucratic regime for receiving donations makes it almost impossible for any NGO to function effectively. One of Egypt’s respected human rights activists, Gamal Eid, stated simply that the law “eliminates civil society in Egypt, whether human rights or development organizations.”

What is the US and European response to the authoritarian strangulation of the Arab Spring spirit? President Trump made a point of not wanting to “lecture” his colleagues in Egypt and Saudi Arabia, and proceeded to join Al-Sisi and Saudi Arabia’s King Salman for a happy group photo that almost defies description. But it is not only Trump that wants to stay friendly with the Arab autocrats. Under Obama, the policy of giving more than USD1.4 billion in annual aid to Egypt (of which $1.3 billion is military aid) continued unabated, even after the military coup in 2013 – and despite the fact that the Egyptian regime harasses American NGOs that work in the country. As for the EU, it too continues to support Egypt in such areas as “poverty alleviation” and “governance and transparency.” This, while the regime consistently pursues policies that increase inequality, co-opt or crush political institutions and decrease transparency. Seemingly oblivious to the irony, the EU issued only some concerned noises when news of the NGO law broke.

Al-Sisi’s authoritarian rule is not without historical precedent, of course. Gamal Abdel Nasser instituted complete corporatism in Egypt and ruthlessly crushed the opposition, particularly the Islamists in the Muslim Brotherhood. His repression of the Islamists contributed to the radicalization that spawned local and later global jihadism (it wasn’t the only factor, of course, but it contributed). Al-Sisi’s repression is comparable to Nasser’s, however Nasser at least had a political project beyond staying in power – and he was opposed by the West. Today, it is difficult for young Egyptians and other Arabs to avoid the conclusion that their oppressors are supported by Europe and the United States.

The implications are obvious, but as the Financial Times international affairs editor David Gardner concluded his book about the West’s Middle East policy, Last Chance:

[D]o not howl in incredulous outrage when forces incubated by [your choices] – however alien and evil – fly airliners into your buildings, bomb your resorts and hotels, your train systems and your embassies, your churches and your synagogues. Above all, do not when this happens keep insisting that ‘they hate us for our freedoms’ or that ‘the world has changed.’ It has not, precisely because you have chosen not to change it.

That was written in 2009. Western governments have since squandered their chances of making amends during the Arab Spring, and it seems that nothing can set them on a different course. For the West, short-term stability seems to take precedence over long-term security and human dignity.

The liberating power of transgressive film genres

In his latest feature, Naked Reality (2016), which unfolds 150 years into the future, Cameroonian filmmaker Jean-Pierre Bekolo uses sci-fi to reimagine African potential just like he did in his 2005 film, The Bleeders (Les Saignantes). Imagination, in this context is synonymous with the ability to envision a state (in both senses of the word), where humans have learned to ask the questions that will grant us access to the limitless answers waiting to be unearthed.

Like Bekolo, the American film director Jordan Peele – in his immensely popular debut feature Get Out – also uses a transcending genre to overcome oppression and limitation. Both filmmakers seem inspired by the kind of forward-looking patriotism that Guardian columnist Gary Younge wrote in 2012: “Just as Martin Luther King’s dream was ‘deeply rooted in the American dream,’ so the African-American challenge to the national polity has long been for it to live up to its promise, rather than to live down its past.”

Get Out is the sleeper hit of 2017. It has already made US$229 million since its debut at the Sundance Film Festival in January, encouraging countless memes and GIFs and being inserted into political debates.  And just like Key & Peele, the successful sketch comedy TV show of which Peele was part, the film tackles a nation of diversity, bigotry, contradiction and inequality.

Get Out’s protagonist Chris (played by British actor of Ugandan origin, Daniel Kaluuya, whose casting, was briefly controversial), is a young successful photographer. As the film begins, Chris is about to meet his white girlfriend’s family for the first time.  Arriving at the doorstep of Rose’s (Allison Williams) liberal wealthy parents’ secluded home, the pair does not even make it inside before things start to go as badly as Chris had feared and his TSA-agent friend Rod (Lil Rel Howery) predicted.

Rose’s father – a neurosurgeon – treats Chris with awkward familiarity and swears by Barack Obama. Her mother – a psychiatrist specializing in hypnosis – is inappropriately nosy and treats the family’s black housekeeper, Georgina (Betty Gabriel), with kind condescension. Both Georgina and the family’s black caretaker Walter (Marcus Henderson), distance themselves from the kind of blackness that Peele has Chris represent and instead seem insanely dedicated to Rose’s family and their version of whiteness.

As the weekend progresses, the family members’ lack of boundaries weighs increasingly heavily on Chris. The guests at an annual function, hosted by the parents during their stay, offer no relief either, as Chris is bombarded with awkward references to black celebrities and fantasies revolving around blackness, in addition to research questions aimed at pinning the entire black community down. Chris experiences one sole moment of meaningful exchange in a brief conversation with a blind art dealer, who is familiar with Chris’s artistic work and envies his gaze. When Chris decides that he has had enough, the movie takes a radical turn. Real inclinations and intentions are revealed, with dire consequences.

Get Out unfolds in a suspenseful twilight zone between Obama and Donald Trump’s Americas, whose major difference lies in which self-image to project. This zone is one of hypocrisy, lies and arrogance, but also of lucidity, solidarity and a heightened vision of community and justice. The potential for both great comedy and horror, needless to say, is colossal.

If Peele pulled a winning ticket in terms of the timing of his first film, he gives back in the form of a masterful and topical horror movie. With a remarkable cocktail of terror and delight, he also offers stress-release through a film peppered with old-school horror elements.

It is precisely the liberating potential of these transgressive genres – comedy and horror – which makes Get Out outstanding. Peele’s sharp contemporary analysis helps too.

Like a balloon bending clown at a children’s party, the director tweaks and plays around with everyday situations and concepts like assimilation, appropriation, wokeness and respectability. Get Out unfolds at a level where those who believe that they are down with contemporary culture, popular-sociology and psychology, still are likely to be caught off guard by the film’s nuances and sudden twists. What is more, in a time when self-righteousness is rife, it is liberating that none of the film’s characters are immune to inconsistency or self-deception.

The hero and sympathetic underdog Chris makes a good living from producing the kind of raw artistic documentary photography in urban settings, which tend to speak to the tastes and prejudices and fantasies of the wealthy. And Chris, who seems to have undertaken a class-journey, enjoys the perks of the same gentrification process, which forces others to leave their homes. Dating Rose seems part of Chris’s aspirational project, even if not consciously. Rod, in this context, is not just Chris’s ally or a mere horror film device. He is also a clear-sighted and frank guide for viewers witnessing Chris’s journey down the rabbit hole. There, at the Sunken Place as Peele calls it, the director invites us to explore Chris’ role as a passive observer and accomplice, and if we are up to it, our own too.

Rod is not immune to the lure of respectability either, as he keeps referring to the kinship between TSA agents and detectives, who in his view are both guardians of safety and security. Never mind the fact, which Get Out also alludes to, that one of the most dangerous situations a black person in the United States can be subjected to, is standing face-to-face with armed police.

Girlfriend Rose’s uber-confident approach to life is an unequivocal illustration of unconscious privilege, including the freedom from fear. Similarly, the rest of her family and the guests at the party serve as textbook-examples of the same bold claims to right of interpretation, freedom of movement and total control. There is also the possibility, however, that what comes across as supremacy instead are strategies to conceal and overcome fears, inadequacy and impotence, partly caused by unearned privilege and historically unsettled bills.

Get Out belongs to the same tradition, which has seen several versions of Stepford Wives and Frankenstein-depictions too. Both tales deal with the kind of social engineering and interventions aimed at enhancing society and humankind, such as free dental care and education, but also of sterilization and lobotomy programs. Each era has its own ideals and definitions of improvement. It is an essentialist and elitist view of human kind, which allows for both glorification and contempt, that sets the agenda in Get Out.

More broadly, the film can be seen in light of the Afrofuturism genre, to which many count the author Octavia Butler, which in short, offers physical and mental liberation through supernatural or non-realistic means. In John Sayle’s film, The Brother from Another Planet (1984), Joe Morton finds refuge from slavery at home on planet Earth. Although his life in New York is far from perfect, Harlem becomes the place where he can live up to his full potential. Afrofuturism thus offers an arena for emancipation, without the restrictions imposed by physical laws and human capacity. The disadvantage is that those seeking to enslave and repress based on race in the case of Sayle and both race and gender in the case of Butler, play by the same rules.

And where Peele focuses on the U.S., Bekolo’s sharp and unmitigated critique is not limited by national borders, but extends to leaders (and followers) whose words and actions hinder African development and self-realization.

The splatter scene in Get Out, in addition to fulfilling the requirements of the genre, serves the same purpose as Obama’s anger-translator in Key & Peele’s recurring sketch; to free up the physical and mental space needed to reimagine the world and our role in it, as well as enabling the entirely or partly subdued to reach our fullest potential.

Similarly, answers awaiting questions, dreams waiting to be released and potential to unleash are recurring themes in Bekolo’s oeuvre as a filmmaker, author, social commentator and provocateur. It is only natural then that Bekolo turns to sci-fi and the supernatural to bypass natural obstacles such as budgets, state repression and centuries of still ongoing Afrophobic bullying. And it makes sense that Peele, whether or not he has watched or read Octavia Butler and Jean-Pierre Bekolo, does the same in Hollywood.

* This is an edited version of an article that was first published online in Swedish by the Swedish film journal, FLM.

The great opus of “Small Bobby”

Miriam with Sonny’s family. Kally, 1959.

In the 1950s and 1960s, the South African magazine Drum gained an international reputation for innovatively revealing black urban life as told, in the main, by black writers and photographers. Ranjith Kally’s pictures and stories of the people of Durban, a city on South Africa’s east coast, were part of those circulated nationally, on the continent and beyond.

Nigerian curator Okwui Enwezor wrote on the reach of Drum in his exhibition catalogue In/Sight: African Photographers, 1940 to the Present:

Bailey expanded the parameters of Drum so that it became a quasi-continental organ. Added in succession were editions in Nigeria (1953), Ghana (1954), East Africa (1957), and Central Africa (1966)… At the height of its popularity, Drum enjoyed enormous readership. Even a North American and West Indian edition was distributed. The magazine’s circulation per issue stood at 450,000 copies, reaching far into many literate, cosmopolitan areas of Africa.

Ranjith Kally passed away on June 6. At the time of his death, Kally was based in Durban with his daughter Pavitra Pillay. He passed away while visiting his other daughter Jyoti Michael in Johannesburg. He was 91 years old. Born in Isipingo in 1925, Kally – whose family traced their history to indenture on the Natal sugarcane farms – left school at the age of fourteen to work at the R. Faulks & Company shoe factory in Durban’s Gale Street to supplement his family’s income. When he was 21, Kally discovered a small Kodak Postcard camera in a jumble sale, which he bought for sixpence. He soon became consumed by his newly found interest and spent almost all his free time photographing social events on weekends for The Leader newspaper Panorama reported in 1996. He told the journalist Nirode Bramdaw in that interview:

I remember doing my first enlargement in a makeshift darkroom in Plowright Lane, not far from The Leader offices in Pine Street, Durban. We got under way at 8pm and at 4am we were cursing as the sun began rising, jeopardising our print. In the early days we had to envisage a whole host of diverse criteria before pressing the shutter. But modern photography has taken the sting out of photography…

Papwa received at Curries. Kally, 1959.

Kally joined Golden City Post and Drum magazine, where he worked from 1956-1965 and again from 1968-1985, some 26 years at the famed sister publications. It was during these years that he produced some of his best pictures, working alongside the Drum bureau chief for Durban and fellow photographer, G.R. Naidoo. He recalled the atmosphere at the Durban office to me one day:

There was Bobby Haripersadh, Ismail ‘I.A.’ Khan, George Mahabeer, Duke Ngcobo and Dolly Hassim. The stories and pictures were often used for both Golden City Post and Drum. G.R. initially did all of the photographs for the stories. When I came in we shared the photographic work and I sometimes accompanied him on stories and took the pictures. It was a very cordial atmosphere.

Two of Kally’s photographs from that period were included in Enwezor’s 1996 landmark exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum in New York. The images from 1957 challenge the racial stereotypes of the Apartheid era. One depicts two older white men drinking in a shebeen in Cato Manor – a predominantly lower working class African and Indian area at that time. The other captures former motorcycle rider Tommy Chetty and his stunt partner, Amaranee Naidoo, riding the “Wall of Death”. Described in the caption as “a shy and attractive young girl who was at one time too nervous to ride a bicycle, [Naidoo] has won fame throughout Natal, South Africa, by her daring escapades on the Wall of Death. And while other girls of her age are wondering who their next ‘date’ will be, she often wonders if she will be alive for another date.”

Amaranee Naidoo with bike. Kally, 1957.

Kally’s assignments saw him photograph political leaders like Monty Naicker, Yusuf Dadoo and Nelson Mandela at the Rivonia Treason Trial; Goonam Naidoo on resistance politics and women’s rights; Oliver Tambo at the funeral in Lesotho in 1982 when ANC members were massacred by the South African Defence Force; Alan Paton and Sushila Gandhi in a quiet moment together at Phoenix Settlement (built by Mahatma Gandhi); and ANC leader Chief Albert Luthuli under house arrest and receiving news on winning the Nobel Peace Prize in 1960. He photographed Durban’s rival gangs – the Crimson League and the Salots – and the court case surrounding local gangster Michael John’s brutal death at his home, which captured the imagination of a generation. He often told the story of how he smuggled a camera into court under his shirt – for that tricky mission – and illicitly took pictures by clicking a pen at the same time as he snapped the photos, without anyone being any the wiser. He pictured hundreds of football matches at Curries Fountain stadium and took like a fish to water to the pin-up girl assignments. His coverage of the jazz and music scene at the Goodwill Lounge jazz club in the 1950s and 1960s – owned by Pumpy Naidoo and his brother Nammy – added a lens of glamour during those difficult times and featured the likes of local singers Miriam Makeba and Sonny Pillay and international acts such as Tony Scott and Jazz West Coast.  In 2004, whilst preparing for his first solo exhibition entitled Ranjith Kally: 60 Years in Black and White at the Goodman Gallery in Johannesburg, the 78-year-old Kally reflected to me:

Of all the people I’ve photographed, Chief Luthuli has been the highlight of my career. He was such a jovial, humble person and would pose in any way that you asked of him. While Luthuli was under house arrest, the special branch would watch the front of the house and we would sneak in through the back. At the time I worked with Bobby Haripersadh and Mrs Luthuli would refer to me as ‘Small Bobby’. We had a great relationship with him [Luthuli].

Goodwill Lounge. Kally, 1960.

Renowned South African photographer David Goldblatt was at the exhibition opening and said that he was ashamed that he hadn’t heard of Kally until then. “I thought I knew most photographers in the country working in that period… I found his work very warm and a breath of fresh air that, over this long period, has retained particular senses and values,” Goldblatt remarked to journalist Penny Sukhraj at the time. “The picture of Chief Luthuli is a very personal response. It is a very appealing picture of a great man,” added Goldblatt, who bought a print of Kally’s portrait of Albert Luthuli standing at the shop window in Groutville. Many museums and public collections such as the Johannesburg Art Gallery, the Durban Art Gallery, the South African National Gallery, the Durban Local History Museum, SABC, among others, added Kally’s opus to their collections from that exhibition.

Prior to that however, Kally was on the margins in Durban, “while others were making the front page,” reported Sukhraj, who likened Kally to the fifth Beatle. The tributes on Drum from the late 1980s – international exhibitions, catalogues, theatre plays, books and PhD research topics – focused on the Johannesburg office and the stories from Sophiatown.

Kally was taken aback by the flood of media attention he received in 2004 and pleasantly surprised by the prices bestowed on his work by the art world. He charmed all and sundry with his humble demeanor and lucid accounts of his experiences and finally graced a number of national front pages too.

Pataan. Kally, 1958.

In using the example of Malek Alloula’s Le Harem Colonial, a study of early 20th-century postcards and photographs of Algerian harem women, Edward Said explains that Alloula “sees his own fragmented history in the pictures” and in revisiting the images “we have the recovery of a history hitherto either misrepresented or rendered invisible. Stereotypes of the Other have always been connected to political actualities of one sort or another, just as the truth of lived communal (or personal) experience has often been totally sublimated in official narratives, institutions and ideologies.” Kally’s photos contribute to the “restoration of the lived historical memory” and the “unofficial” stories of “experiences of the Other” – they are as much about a collective memory of a community as they are about his exceptional ability.

I was working at the Durban Art Gallery in 1998 when I first met Kally, who approached me to assist in getting his photographs exhibited. It was a few years later that I curated Kally’s first solo exhibition which took place at the Goodman Gallery in Johannesburg (2004) and a retrospective exhibition at the Durban Art Gallery later that year, an edited version of which travelled to the Bamako Encounters photo biennale in Mali (2005), where Kally received a Liftetime Achievement Award. The exhibition also traveled to the Kunsthalle Wien in Austria (2006), the Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona in Spain (2006), and Espace Jeumon (Cité des Arts) in Reunion Island, France (2007).

Kally’s work has been included in some local and international group exhibitions and related catalogues such as The Finest Photos in Old Drum (1987), Sof’town Blues (1994), Margins to Mainstream: Lost South African Photographers (1994) and more recently The Indian in DRUM magazine in the 1950s (2008), among other. Linda Givon – the founder of the Goodman Gallery, who took the decision to show Kally’s photos there – was quoted by the Sunday Times Lifestyle in 2004, “His work is historically extraordinary, because we think we know about the past but then realise we have never really been exposed to this community that has been living in Durban for so many decades…”

Rita Lazarus – Miss Durban. Kally, 1960.

His images are an invaluable archive of the social history of the South African Indian community from 1948-1994 and were used extensively in books such as Portrait of Indian South Africans (1969) by Fatima Meer – focusing on the market gardeners and the “Tin Town” community that lived in wood-and-iron shacks in Springfield Flats – and From Canefields to Freedom: A Documentary on Indian South African Life (2000) by Uma Duphelia-Mesthrie. He published The Struggle, 60 Years in Focus: Ranjith Kally (2004) and a recent survey of his work published by Quiver Tree Publications is entitled Memory Against Forgetting (2014).

In 1952 Kally came third out of 150,000 entries in an international photo competition held in Japan and in 1967 he was selected for membership to the Royal Photographic Society in London. Kally was awarded an Honorary Doctorate from the University of KwaZulu-Natal in 2013 and earned the Living Legends title awarded by the eThekwini Municipality (City of Durban) the same year.

Reflecting on his career in 2004, Kally said that he had “no regrets and no grudges. Apartheid was tough on me like most black people. As far as photography is concerned, there is no other profession in the world like it. I tried capturing emotion in my pictures and I have been successful some of the time. But I will take pictures all of the time.”

Nobel Luthuli & Family. Kally, 1960.

The values of David Goldblatt

David Goldblatt. Image via Goodman Gallery.

Inseparable from the photographic images of world-renowned South African photographer David Goldblatt, are values. Values, like waves of light, are in some ways absorbed as the social information of a photograph, and in others reflected back at the viewer. Goldblatt, whose imagework blurs the lines between documentary and fine art, frequently speaks of values in his public commentary. This mantra of values comes from the lifetime he has spent photographing the ways in which values are woven into the fabric of South African society. In contemplating his legacy, a new film, Goldblatt, turns the lens around to reveal and interrogate the values embodied by the photographer himself. Directed by Daniel Zimbler, a South African filmmaker who lives and works in New York City, Goldblatt presents the life and career of the legendary photographer through a decade of filming him at work and through interviews with art critics and fellow visual artists.

In the film, we see that Goldblatt is getting on in years – he is in his mid-80s – but still making images. Over the course of his career, Goldblatt has produced many significant bodies of work that depict uniquely South African social environments. Known for capturing the conditions that led to historic events rather than the events themselves, the film acts in part as a retrospective for Goldblatt’s major projects, showcasing his signature meditative approach to the documenting of declining mining towns, Apartheid-era Afrikaner communities, suburban Johannesburg architecture, township living and the dusty landscapes of the Karoo. Rich with resonant luminance, Goldblatt’s images have a way of highlighting the lines of contrast visible when highly racialized cultures envelop a society’s people, structures and landscapes. Through the photographing of mundane moments lasting fractions of a second, Goldblatt’s collections of images collectively carry the charge of haunting moments in history that seem both far away and very near at the same time.

In telling the story of Goldblatts’s photographic life, the film drives with him in camper van across South Africa in search of images, and explores his studio where he digs through old keepsakes including snapshots from his school days in the 1940s and a heavily scratched mining helmet. As Goldblatt reflects on his work, he offers insights into his personal philosophies of image-making; he doesn’t shoot for a particular audience, he aims to be uncaring as a photographer, and he’s not swayed by being considered an important photographer. Yet, the film does well to reveal that these attitudes are complicated within his psyche. We see that Goldblatt mistrusts the ability of non-South Africans to read the coded language of his images, he refers to himself as an “international artist” when he wants something done for him, and his dispassionate approach has led him to ultimately feel that his work has been “partial and superficial.”

It is Goldblatt’s approach to his photography work that informs his personal politics, and the film picks up its pace as Goldblatt’s relationship to politics comes under scrutiny, especially the Apartheid years. Concerned with compromising his photographic vision, Goldblatt never documented overtly political events and operated with a general rule of never allowing his images to be used for political purposes. He speaks of being sympathetic to the anti-Apartheid cause, though kept his distance. A range of art figures are asked in the film what this distance has meant for Goldblatt’s life and legacy. Mostly white, they include the artist William Kentridge, novelist Marlene van Niekerk, writer Sean O’Toole and curator Hans Ulrich-Obrist.  Marlene van Niekerk covers for Goldblatt: “I think involvement through the lens was what he protected by not becoming politically more involved.” Black photographers are inconspicuous in this debate. Zanele Muholi, who represents a younger generation, speaks kindly of Goldblatt at the start of the film, though her contribution is brief and seems tagged on.

The most directly critical voice is that of Omar Badsha, a photographer identified variously with black consciousness, trade unions and the mass democratic movement in his long career as a “social documentary photographer.” Badsha, with whom Goldblatt has collaborated on several projects over the years, is less flattering of Goldblatt’s political neutrality: “David’s work never challenged the state. David’s work doesn’t question the system of racism in [South Africa], because if you question it, there is no difference between the Afrikaner and English-speaking South Africans.” For Badsha, Goldblatt is a “white liberal;” a group derided for declaring opposition to Apartheid, but who often refused to take part in protest or boycott. The film notes that during the cultural boycott (when the liberation groups discouraged South African artists, especially whites, from exhibiting their work overseas), Goldblatt had a show in London in 1985, which was criticized by liberation groups. Goldblatt deemed it censorship. Badsha thinks the decision to hold the London exhibition was “naïve.”

The transition to a democratic South Africa, brought new freedoms, but it did not dismantle social and economic power disparities that have allowed white capitalist patriarchy to live on. This context is compounded in the practice of photography by the already fraught power relationship between photographer and those who appear in their images. A telling contemporary scene in the film lets us observe Goldblatt’s process for shooting in a township. The scene begins with him tracking down a woman he had photographed in the 1970s. With the help of a fixer and some community members, he locates the woman. Goldblatt greets her cordially in Afrikaans, shows her the old photograph he had taken and asks to take a new one. The woman politely inquires as to what he does with all the photographs he takes. Goldblatt grins and proudly mentions exhibiting them in Europe and South Africa. She responds, without missing a beat: “But you take our photos, you give us nothing – we’re lying hungry here man.” They eventually agree on compensation – it is unclear how much – and he suggests she sit in the kitchen for the portrait to mimic the image of her taken years earlier. She tries to object to the location because of a broken stove, but he insists on the kitchen and when it’s time to take the shot he tells her how to look. The interaction reveals the dominance of a polite, but layered power in Goldblatt’s method as well as the dubiousness of veracity in the documentary tradition.

Later on in the film, in a moment of reflective melancholy, the voice of the artist William Kentridge notes that a photograph is really about the person who makes it. This in an important reminder from the film’s producers that Goldblatt’s photographs, with their masterful composition of quiet social topography, have always responded to his own vision of life in South Africa. He has been fortunate that for many years his vision has carried a legibility that resonated with information power brokers in South Africa and beyond.

However, the landscape of information distribution and consumption is shifting and there are new voices bringing different dimensions to the story of the South Africa’s evolution. Many of those photographic voices, like that of Muholi, have been trained at the Market Photo Workshop, a project Goldblatt helped found in 1989. What began as a short-term training course has grown into a serious photography school and exhibition space that targets students from diverse lower income backgrounds. Market Photo has been a way for Goldblatt to share his passion for images through fellowship and is an important part of his legacy, though the institution is strangely not mentioned in the film.

By displaying Goldblatt’s controversial pursuit of a dispassionate photographic vision and the revelation that he has a collection of never-before exhibited nude images, the film highlights that he is often self-limiting in what it means to be Goldblatt, or what qualifies something as a Goldblatt image. In acknowledging these limitations, he speaks to the consequences of isolation and loneliness that he has experienced over the years, admitting that he wishes he could go deeper in his connections, but doesn’t know how. Hinted at in the film, though not fully explored, are the costs of his itinerant obsession felt by family. Goldblatt’s wife, Lily, expresses she would have preferred he had a more stable career (their are never heard from). In the aesthetic realm, Goldblatt laments that in South Africa he can never just photograph a landscape as a landscape, though he’s aware that the question of values in such contested space can never be escaped. The values he so often gestures at in the people and places in South Africa are projected from him as well.

Zimbler’s film is effective in traversing multiple dimensions of Goldblatt’s life and legacy. Goldblatt’s technical mastery of his tools and the insightfulness of his observant eye imbue his images with a historical importance that is difficult to deny. Still fevered by the pursuit of his vision, recognizing a shift in the tonality of the social landscape, Goldblatt even documented the recent removal of the colonial Cecil Rhodes statue at the University of Cape Town campus that was a result of the student-driven #RhodesMustFall movement. In Goldblatt’s momentous image of the statue’s removal, he captures a wide angle of Rhodes being hoisted by a crane, surrounded by students with their arms raised, cell phone cameras in hand. In the film, Goldblatt jokes that the students were so busy raising their arms in this strange “ritual” that nobody was actually looking at the event. Yet, as the only one supposedly looking, he forgets that it was the students who brought Rhodes down.

*This review is part of our round up of the films screened at Encounters International Documentary Festival, which took place in Cape Town and Johannesburg from 1-11 June.

The legacy of Biafra and the idea of being Nigerian

Otodo Gbame demolition. Image via Justice and empowerment initiatives-Nigeria Flickr.

I’ve spent most of my life in Nigeria, but lately I’ve been wondering if holding a Nigerian passport and living a substantial number of years in a country are sufficient to stake a claim over it. I’ve also wondered what it means to be Nigerian.

I grew up in the Rivers State capital of Port Harcourt, the oil rich city nestled in the southernmost region of the country, but the de facto indigene-settler mentality promoted by politicians and accepted by Nigerians has meant Rivers State can’t adopt me in the way Chicago adopted Hawaiian native Barack Obama, who served as a senator for Illinois. I can’t access state scholarships, can’t head any state schools and definitely can’t hold political office because my forebears hailed from towns beyond the state’s border. And yet, the Rivers State had no scruples taxing my salary as a resident of Port Harcourt.

In Nigeria, your father’s origin dictates yours. In my case, with both parents from Oguta, a small clannish town in Southeast Nigeria, I’m Oguta even though my connection to the place is limited to the few weeks I visited during Christmas and Easters holidays as a kid and teenager.

Following the Nigeria-Biafra war, the federal government built public secondary schools known as unity schools in an attempt to foster peace and feelings of patriotism among students from different tribes and socioeconomic backgrounds.

As an alumna of a unity school, I can attest the idea is a noble one and could have worked if Nigerians weren’t perpetually being reminded that the demonym Nigerian is an airy ideal subservient to the flawed reality of tribal affiliations, be it in application forms for government jobs, wherein you’re forced to declare your state and local government area, or by landlords who only rent to people of their own tribe.

Nigeria as a country remains a mirage, which is why every Christmas cities and towns across Nigeria empty out as Igbos, whose calls for secession fifty years ago resulted in the Nigeria-Biafra civil war, travel home to their ancestral lands in southeastern Nigeria. Jokes abound of the yearly mass migration, but beneath these jests is a less humorous motive. For the Igbos, traveling home means establishing roots and reconnecting with their ancestral homes, an insurance against Nigeria’s uncertain future as a united country.

When Nigeria gained its independence from the British in 1960, Igbos dispersed across the country like dust in the wind, with some venturing as far as northern Nigeria to pitch their tents. Language was only a temporary barrier for the Igbos as they quickly learned foreign tongues for the purpose of conducting business and getting on with life.

But then came the 1966 coup, led mostly by Igbo officers, which saw the deaths of many northerners, including then prime minister Tafawa Balewa and the premier Ahmadu Bello. In the counter-coup that followed, Igbos were targeted and killed by civilians and military officers in an anti-Igbo pogrom the North, and those lucky to be alive fled home to Igbo enclaves in the Southeast. It was this event that precipitated the declaration of the independent nation of Biafra and underscored a bitter truth: The name “Nigerian” is a mythical invention and “home” can only be your ancestral land.

Arguably, Nigeria’s crude oil wealth has been the motivating factor behind the ruling elite’s fight to preserve Nigeria in its current disposition. Year after year, the nation’s coffers are looted by government officials who are more interested in securing their profligate lifestyle than getting different factions to work together to build Nigeria into a real country. The ruling elite’s insatiable appetite, its desire to gorge off the fat of the land are to blame for the Boko Haram insurgency in the Northeast and militancy in the Niger Delta, symptoms of abuse, neglect and underinvestment.

If the name Nigeria meant anything, then a long-term resident of Rivers State from northern Nigeria should be able to represent the state at the National Assembly. If being Nigerian meant anything, the presidency wouldn’t be rotated every eight years between the North and South or along tribal lines. If we as Nigerians were serious about keeping Nigeria whole, then we would set tribal allegiances aside and select the best candidates to run the country. If Nigeria meant anything, that would be our first and only priority.

Weekend Special, No. 9975

Image by Lucie Diondet, via Flickr.

First Things First (excuse the pun): Put on “Gang Signs & Prayer,” the debut studio album of Stormzy (Government Name: Michael Ebenazer Kwadjo Omari Owuo, Jr.), as this is  going to be a long Weekend Special. 20 items deep.

(1) Respect. Namibian freedom fighter Andimba Toivo ya Toivo passed away last week. So did the famed South African photographer Ranjit Kally. They were both 92 years old. (We’ll hopefully have longer tributes to Kally and Toivo ya Toivo later this week.)

(2) This is what Zambian political debate has become? I finally watched the AJ Stream (Al Jazeera) “debate” on “Is Zambia’s democracy in danger?” In summary: It is a shitstorm of people shouting over each other. By the end, or no one else, was none the wiser on what is going on in Zambia. It was exhausting just listening to these. Laura Miti was an exception, but even she could not compete with the spin. Predictably, Jeffrey Smith and his consultancy made an appearance. Where there’s “political crisis”… And these people were just party operatives and “social commentators.” I can’t even imagine what it would be like if the actual political leaders went on air. As someone said on Twitter: “Zambians don’t deserve their self serving politicians.”

Is Zambia’s democracy in danger?

(3) The US outsourced some parts of its occupation in Iraq to private security companies… who in turn hired former child soldiers. Yes.

Because they’re cheap; it keep overheads low: USD$250 per soldier. That’s after Peruvians, Colombians and Ugandans — seemingly the usual “soldiers for hire” — were deemed too expensive:

The child soldiers who fought in Iraq.

(4) The band Radiohead is embarking on a “World Tour.” For some bizarre reason they’ll start in Apartheid Israel. Thom Yorke, the band’s leader, has resisted requests he cancel the trip to Apartheid Israel and that he join the cultural boycott. He said, among others, he knows about Palestinian suffering because the wife of one his band members is Israeli. SMH. Nevertheless, Yorke’s prevarications reminds me of Paul Simon’s explanations for breaking the cultural boycott against apartheid South Africa to make his Graceland album.

(5) Who is behind the slick Mawazo Institute, and why are they secretive about who funds this? Meanwhile, I am also anticipating the “this is decolonizing education in Africa” tweets and op-eds, something like the free advertising The Conversation Africa gave the private African Leadership University.

(6) There is a new film out about Winnie Mandela, Winnie. Reviewing the film, Sisonke Msimang wrote what is probably the best thing you going read about Winnie Mandela in a long while. Not to be outdone, Huffington Post South Africa went an interviewed the Mother of the Nation. Their salacious headline about Nelson Mandela’s many extra-marital children (by now anyone who still thinks the old man was some sort of saint — Fallists deem him a sellout — must have been living under a rock) takes away attention from what else Winnie Mandela has to say on more substantive politics (though, why Winnie Mandela repeats unsubstantiated and slanderous claims that it was ANC people who killed Chris Hani, I don’t know).

(7) The best reaction on Twitter to Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour Party’s gains in British elections (despite the media and the pollsters), came from Kitila Mkumbo, Permanent Secretary in the Ministry of Water and Irrigation of Tanzania: “Long live Socialism and leftism!”

(8) Some parts of what passes for the Left in the US (mimicked elsewhere) suffer from “vague autoimmune disease”:

Just as Trump remade politics as television, we’ve allowed political action to mimic the spiteful, futile patterns of online bickering: our fellow anti-capitalists betray us all by enjoying or creating the wrong art, reading the wrong articles, championing the wrong theories, or even laughing at the wrong jokes. The Left is at once flailing and sclerotic. Afflicted by a vague autoimmune disorder, we cannot even retain what little power we have, nor do we have any institutions capable of doing so; thus, we are able to smack only those within arm’s reach of us — ourselves. Meanwhile, the bigger and stronger the right gets, the more insular we become, single-mindedly obsessed with purifying our own ranks and weeding out the problematic among us.

This is a spot-on diagnosis.

(9) Apart from a Youtube channel, which Vice.com sporadically updates, why is Vice News’s daily television news bulletin only on premier cable HBO? That’s a shame, because it is really good.

(10) Contributor Omolade Adunbi ‘s book Oil Wealth and Insurgency in Nigeria (published by Indiana University Press) wins The Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland’s Amaury Talbot Prize for African Anthropology.

(11) I finally got to see The Fall, Daniel Gordon’s documentary film about the 1984 Olympics 3000 meters final between between Zola Budd and the world’s best runner at the time, the American Mary Decker. Budd, then 18, went from running in all white races in South Africa before she was taken by the Daily Mail (as a publicity stunt to up its circulation) to the UK to compete for Great Britain. (South Africa was banned by the IOC because of Apartheid.) The result of the race is known — Decker fell; at the time she blamed Budd; the crowd and the media took that line too — but I’ve never seen Budd talk about it at length on camera. One thing I was dying to hear/see Budd talk about is apartheid. The film, which is self-indulgent at length, includes some great footage of the anti-apartheid protests in Western Europe against Budd. At the time, Budd couldn’t get herself to say Apartheid was wrong, because “sports and politics don’t mix.” What the film reveals, however, is that 30 odd years later, she still defends that position and that she was the victim; not an unusual one for many white South Africans of her generation. (BTW, Budd also comments on her father  being bisexual/gay: “He was different” SMH.)

(12) “Sembene!,” the documentary film about the great Senegalese Marxist filmmaker and former dockworker, Ousmane Sembene, (“the father of African cinema) can be viewed for free till tonight. A while back Noah Tsika reviewed it for us. Watch it here.

(13) South Africa’s new Deputy Chief Justice Raymond Zondo and the man who helped him get there, Solly Bux, are both working class heroes. (Click on the hyperlinks for the full story.)

(14) Nigeria’s elites are in a class of their own. The President is in London on “medical leave” again. Since January, he has spent more than SEVENTY DAYS there (on two trips). An investment consultant told the Wall Street Journal: “Will he survive this year? I doubt it. You look at him, you know he’s terminally ill.” Vice President Oluyemi Osinbajo basically runs the country, but everyone has to keep up appearances. Osinbajo is a Southerner and since the advent of democracy, northern and southern elites have passed their presidency between them. It is now the North’s turn, though, like with President Umaru Musa Yar’Adua, the North feels it may be shortchanged if Buhari too dies in office. So, “there are those who are prepared to work hard to make [Mr. Buhari] stay on as president, even if he is a vegetable.”

Meanwhile, it emerged last week that between them 55 top businesspeople and government officials stole US$4.4 billion from the Nigerian state since the advent of democratic rule. And remember that story of US$43 million and another UK£27,800 cash lying around an apartment in In Lagos, Nigeria. The apartment happened to be owned by the wife of the Director-General of the National Intelligence Agency, who is being investigated for corruption. Now the government claims “no one has come forward to claim” the money so wants to keep it. Should we even trust them?

(15) In South Africa, where the government continues its murderous assault against black people, a two-week-old baby dies during housing protests in Durban, South Africa; she inhaled tear gas fired by police.

(16) The Gupta family, the corrupt benefactors of South Africa’s President, turns out to be racist against black people too. Here’s from workers at a wedding the family threw: “…Workers at Sun City reported that Gupta security personnel ordered black waiters to wash themselves before they could serve the wedding guests. ‘This blatantly means that black people smell and the Gupta guests would not be served by smelly black people,’ a resort employee was quoted as saying by City Press. The paper said bodyguards and butlers hired for the wedding were white.” The Guptas identify the problem in South Africa as one of “white monopoly capital.”

(17) I’m just going to leave this here: A Ghanaian church in Accra held a Thanksgiving service for Chelsea FC supporters (the club won the English Premier League). Everyone came decked out in new replica shirts. The pastor is an Arsenal fan. Not to be outdone, a Nigerian state government used public money to celebrate Real Madrid’s UEFA Champions League title win (that’s that game after which Juventus manager said about Cristiano Ronaldo: “What are you going to do? He looks like he is napping all game and then he pops up and scores two goals.”).

(18) Here’s quick quiz: “Just compare the number of pictures of fallen trees in driveways with SUVs with the number of pictures of flooded shacks. See if there are more stories of foam on the Sea Point promenade than interviews with those injured and left homeless, and see if you can find any hard questions posed to the [Western Cape provincial government or the City of Cape Town] about what has been done since previous winters, and you’ll have your answer.” That’s my friend (and AIAC contributor) Herman Wasserman responding to my question whether media coverage of the damage caused by rainstorms in Cape Town (especially on the Cape Flats where most of its black residents live) have gotten any better since Ron Krabill and I did this mid-2000s study.

(19) BTW, long before people got woke to “ghetto tourism,” we told you about “township tourism.

(20) Finally, the Ivorian footballer Cheikh Tiote collapsed on his Chinese club’s training field and died. Tiote won an African Cup of Nations with Cote d’Ivoire, but played his best football for Newcastle in England’s Premier League, where he scored this goal to tie the score against Arsenal in 2011.

Weekend Special, Sunday June 11, 2017

Image by Lucie Diondet, via Flickr.

First Things First (excuse the pun): Put on “Gang Signs & Prayer,” the debut studio album of Stormzy (Government Name: Michael Ebenazer Kwadjo Omari Owuo, Jr.), as this is  going to be a long Weekend Special. 20 items deep.

(1) Respect. Namibian freedom fighter Andimba Toivo ya Toivo passed away last week. So did the famed South African photographer Ranjit Kally.  They were both 92 years old.  (We’ll hopefully have longer tributes to Kally and Toivo ya Toivo later this week.)

(2) This is what Zambian political debate has become? I finally watched the AJ Stream (Al Jazeera) “debate” on “Is Zambia’s democracy in danger?” In summary: It is a shitstorm of people shouting over each other. By the end, or no one else, was none the wiser on what is going on in Zambia. It was exhausting just listening to these. Laura Miti was an exception, but even she could not compete with the spin. Predictably, Jeffrey Smith and his consultancy made an appearance. Where there’s “political crisis” … And these people were just party operatives and “social commentators.” I can’t even imagine what it would be like if the actual political leaders went on air. As someone said on Twitter: “Zambians don’t deserve their self serving politicians.”

(3) The US outsourced some parts of its occupation in Iraq to private security companies … who in turn hired former child soldiers. Yes.

Because they’re cheap; it keep overheads low: US$250 per soldier. That’s after Peruvians, Colombians and Ugandans–seemingly the usual ‘soldiers for hire’–were deemed too expensive:

(4) The band Radiohead is embarking on a “World Tour.” For some bizarre reason they’ll start in Apartheid Israel. Thom Yorke, the band’s leader, has resisted requests he cancel the trip to Apartheid Israel and that he join the cultural boycott. He said, among others, he knows about Palestinian suffering because the wife of one his band members is Israeli. SMH. Nevertheless, Yorke’s prevarications reminds me of Paul Simon’s explanations for breaking the cultural boycott against apartheid South Africa to make his ‘Graceland’ album.

(5) Who is behind the slick Mawazo Institute, and why are they secretive about who funds this? Meanwhile, I am also anticipating the “this is decolonizing education in Africa” tweets and op-eds, something like the free advertising The Conversation Africa gave the private African Leadership University.

(6) There is a new film out about Winnie Mandela, “Winnie.” Reviewing the film, Sisonke Msimang wrote what is probably the best thing you going read about Winnie Mandela in a long while. Not to be outdone, Huffington Post South Africa went an interviewed the Mother of the Nation. Their  salacious headline about Nelson Mandela’s many extra-marital children (by now anyone who still thinks the old man was some sort of saint–Fallists deem him a sellout–must have been living under a rock) takes away attention from what else Winnie Mandela has to say on more substantive politics (though, why Winnie Mandela repeats unsubstantiated and slanderous claims that it was ANC people who killed Chris Hani, I don’t know).

(7) The best reaction on Twitter to Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour Party’s gains in British elections (despite the media and the pollsters), came from Kitila Mkumbo, Permanent Secretary in the Ministry of Water and Irrigation of Tanzania: “Long live Socialism and leftism!”

(8) What passes for some parts of the Left in the US (mimicked elsewhere) suffer from ‘vague autoimmune disease’:

Just as Trump remade politics as television, we’ve allowed political action to mimic the spiteful, futile patterns of online bickering: our fellow anti-capitalists betray us all by enjoying or creating the wrong art, reading the wrong articles, championing the wrong theories, or even laughing at the wrong jokes. The left is at once flailing and sclerotic. Afflicted by a vague autoimmune disorder, we cannot even retain what little power we have, nor do we have any institutions capable of doing so; thus, we are able to smack only those within arm’s reach of us—ourselves. Meanwhile, the bigger and stronger the right gets, the more insular we become, single-mindedly obsessed with purifying our own ranks and weeding out the problematic among us.

This is a spot-on diagnosis.

(9) Apart from a Youtube channel, which Vice.com sporadically updates, why is Vice News’s daily television news bulletin only on premier cable HBO? That’s a shame, because it is really good.

(10) Contributor Omolade Adunbi ‘s book ‘Oil Wealth and Insurgency in Nigeria’ (published by Indiana University Press) wins The Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland’s Amaury Talbot Prize for African Anthropology.

(11) I finally got to see “The Fall,” Daniel Gordon’s documentary film about the 1984 Olympics 3000 meters final between between Zola Budd and the world’s best runner at the time, the American Mary Decker. Budd, then 18, went from running in all white races in South Africa before she was taken by the Daily Mail (as a publicity stunt to up its circulation) to the UK to compete for Great Britain. (South Africa was banned by the IOC because of Apartheid.) The result of the race is known–Decker fell; at the time she blamed Budd; the crowd and the media took that line too–but I’ve never seen Budd talk about it at length on camera.   One thing I was dying to hear/see Budd talk about is apartheid. The film, which is self-indulgent at length, includes some great footage of the antiapartheid protests in Western Europe against Budd. At the time, Budd couldn’t get herself to say Apartheid was wrong, because “sports and politics don’t mix “What the film reveals, however, is that 30 odd years later, she still defends that position and that she was the victim; not an unusual one for many white South Africans of her generation.  (BTW, Budd also comments on her father  being bisexual/gay: “He was different” SMH.)

(12) “Sembene!,” the documentary film about the great Senegalese Marxist filmmaker and former dockworker, Ousmane Sembene, (“the father of African cinema) can be viewed for free till tonight. A while back Noah Tsika reviewed it for us. Watch it here.

(13) South Africa’s new Deputy Chief Justice Raymond Zondo and the man who helped him get there, Solly Bux, are both working class heroes. (Click on the hyperlinks for the full story.)

(14) Nigeria’s elites are in a class of their own. The President is in London on “medical leave” again. Since January, he has spent more than SEVENTY DAYS there (on two trips).  An investment consultant told the Wall Street Journal: “Will he survive this year? I doubt it. You look at him, you know he’s terminally ill.”   Vice President Oluyemi Osinbajo basically runs the country, but everyone has to keep up appearances. Osinbajo is a southerner and since the advent of democracy, northern and southern elites have passed their presidency between them. It is now the north’s turn, though, like with President Umaru Musa Yar’Adua, the north feels it may shortchanged if Buhari too dies in office. So, “there are those who are prepared to work hard to make [Mr. Buhari] stay on as president, even if he is a vegetable.”

Meanwhile, it emerged last week that between them 55 top businesspeople and government officials stole US$4.4 billion from the Nigerian state since the advent of democratic rule.  And remember that story of US$43 million and another UK£27,800 cash lying around an apartment in In Lagos, Nigeria. The apartment happened to be owned by the wife of the Director-General of the National Intelligence Agency, who is being investigated for corruption. Now the government claims “no one has come forward to claim” the money so wants to keep it. Should we even trust them?

(15) In South Africa, where the government continues its murderous assault against black people, a two-week-old baby dies during housing protests in Durban, South Africa; she inhaled tear gas fired by police.

(16) The Gupta family, the corrupt benefactors of South Africa’s President, turns out to be racist against black people too. Here’s from workers at a wedding the family threw: “… Workers at Sun City reported that Gupta security personnel ordered black waiters to wash themselves before they could serve the wedding guests. ‘This blatantly means that black people smell and the Gupta guests would not be served by smelly black people,’ a resort employee was quoted as saying by City Press. The paper said bodyguards and butlers hired for the wedding were white.’ The Guptas identify the problem in South Africa as one of “white monopoly capital.”

(17) I’m just going to leave this here: A Ghanaian church in Accra held a Thanksgiving service for Chelsea FC supporters (the club won the English Premier League). Everyone came decked out in new replica shirts. The pastor is an Arsenal fan. Not to be outdone, a Nigerian state government used public money to celebrate Real Madrid’s UEFA Champions League title win (that’s that game after which Juventus manager said  about Cristiano Ronaldo: “What are you going to do? He looks like he is napping all game and then he pops up and scores two goals.”).

(18) Here’s quick quiz: “Just compare the number of pictures of fallen trees in driveways with SUVs with the number of pictures of flooded shacks. See if there are more stories of foam on the Sea Point promenade than interviews with those injured and left homeless, and see if you can find any hard questions posed to the [Western Cape provincial government or the City of Cape Town] about what has been done since previous winters, and you’ll have your answer.” That’s my friend (and AIAC contributor) Herman Wasserman responding to my question whether media coverage of the damage caused by rainstorms in Cape Town (especially on the Cape Flats where most of its black residents live) have gotten any better since Ron Krabill and I did this mid-2000s study.

(19) BTW, long before people got woke to “ghetto tourism,” we told you about “township tourism.

(20) Finally, the Ivorian footballer Cheikh Tiote collapsed on his Chinese club’s training field and died. Tiote won an African Cup of Nations with Cote d’Ivoire, but played his best football for Newcastle in England’s Premier League, where he scored this goal to tie the score against Arsenal in 2011.

The leader whose time has come

Image by Andy Miah. Via Flickr.

In today’s British election, the Labour Party increased its vote by 3 million votes and by 10% of the vote (from 30 to 40% overall). No political party in Britain has seen its vote rise this sharply in any other election since 1945.

To say that the result confounds expectations is to understate the shock that people here are feeling here. When Prime Minister Theresa May announced the election, just seven weeks ago, she was ahead by 26% in the polls. By election day, that lead had been reduced to just two percent.

Attention focuses on Jeremy Corbyn, who has led his party since 2015. There is no one else in British politics remotely like Corbyn. Modest, unambitious and principled, he is a long-term Labour backbench MP who has made his reputation through decades of taking up campaigns which previous leaders of his party ignored. Observing elections in the Democratic Republic of Congo in 2006, speaking in New York on behalf of Guatanamo detainee Shaker Aamer, attending countless events for a free Palestine.

During the long hegemony that the Blairites had over the Labour Party, Corbyn was seen as an inconvenience and an irritant. The old, right-wing Labour Party was notorious for the extent to which it disciplined its members, requiring them to possess pagers (this was before mobile phones were commonplace) so that their contacts with the media could be centrally controlled. Fifteen years ago, I recall Corbyn telling a meeting of local activists. “I don’t understand what the fuss is about. No-one tells me what to say.” Previous Labour leaders didn’t because the leadership had given up on Corbyn as uncorruptable and uninterested in the normal promises of ministerial promotion.

Journalists here seem to have some difficulty explaining why Labour has done so well, but the answer is simple. It wasn’t the unpopularity of Theresa May, nor even the stupidity of the Tory manifesto, although the proposals in the latter included a so-called “dementia tax” requiring middle class families to give up the value in their homes to pay for the social care of the elderly – a duff move for a political right which usually treats homeownership as sacrosanct.

If it had just been these factors then the vote could easily have gone to the Liberal Democrats who most pollsters expected to surge and didn’t. It was because Labour was so left-wing. Its manifesto offered voters, especially young and non-voters, the policies they wanted. Free higher education, increased taxes on the rich. The manifesto broke through the neoliberal idea that all any of us can do is wait and suffer.

But there was a second side to this. In the big cities with large remain majorities, people projected onto Corbyn a position that actually there in his manifesto – one of active opposition to Brexit, especially hard Brexit. So Labour did very much better than expected in Newcastle (a large city which had voted against Brexit), and only a little better than feared in Sunderland (the neighbouring city, pro-exit in last year’s referendum).

Through the last year, politics internationally has been shaped by the knock-on effects of the Brexit vote, with its message of economic nationalism giving impetus to the campaigns of Donald Trump in America and then Marine Le Pen in France.

It seemed as if the energy was all with the racist right.

But the closer Brexit comes to reality, the more that centrist voters have rebelled against the idea that last year’s 52-48 majority for exit justifies a complete break from Europe and its model of social liberalism.

Brexit is *not* the principal reason for Corbyn’s success. He has done well because of a manifesto which promised redistribution and renationalisation, and because of a turnout by young voters engaged by Corbyn’s record and his relaxed, personal style.

But it has helped to neutralise the attacks against him. Brexit’s irrationality, its unpopularity with young voters, and its premise that what the country needs is to restrict the migration of foreigners: these have helped Corbyn – in contrast to the autocratic-seeming Theresa May – to look like the leader whose time has come.

Days of our lives: Kenya 2017 elections edition

Though we are not exactly sure what legitimacy they have to ride on, Uhuruto (that’s the coupling of Kenya’s President and Vice President, Uhuru Kenyatta and William Ruto) are definitely running again and want to keep it so until, at least, 2022. They are also strangely confident about their ability to keep their positions come elections on August 8th, 2017, in spite of the many scandals their government is consistently embroiled in (maybe they got the Russians on their side as well?).

We are still reeling from: the National Youth Service (NYS) scandal that is now said to amount to 1.8 billion Kenya Shillings (US$17 million); the Eurobond scandal of 2014 where the question, really, is whether the money from a commercial loan Kenya borrowed for recurrent and development expenditure was eaten before it arrived in Kenya or after; the endemic cartelization of government tenders that facilitated Uhuru’s sister and cousin’s company to be in receipt of 200 million allocated for health functions; the fraught standard gauge railway process that despite billions spent to “modernize” the railway actually looks like a dinosaur; and the fact that the usually blood sucking World Bank actually warned Kenya about its debt levels.

Unfortunately, this is just brief register of the bold face impunity that we have seen over the last four years, and that has allowed for what John Githongo — the former, frustrated government anticorruption investigator — calls the most corrupt government the country has ever seen.

But worse than all of this, in my view, is that these characters would manipulate the supply of unga (maizemeal), as part of a campaign strategy, and then play the hero by importing maize from Mexico (yes Mexico) that arrived in Kenya via ship in three days. And then amidst scheming what is effectively the systemic starvation of Kenyans the dude makes a dance video asking you to go out and vote for him?

Evidently, empathy was not part of their 2013 campaign pledges – the majority of which remained unfulfilled.

Away from Jubilee, the opposition coalition party now called the National Super Alliance -NASA (yes like the space agency), while having more than enough reason to call the government’s record into question, is also embroiled in its own fraught ethnic and leadership negotiations. Headed by Raila Odinga, the alliance appears to be just a recycling of figures who have been circumnavigating and creating political parties over the last two decades, seemingly with no real commitment to 45 million struggling Kenyans. Not to diminish the political struggles Raila suffered for in the 1980s and 1990s, but it is pretty crazy that if they win NASA will create a government that will have as part of the coalition power sharing agreement a president, vice president, premier cabinet secretary and two deputy prime ministers.

This scene is starting to look like an overburdened African bridal party. At the country-level the soap opera continues. Jubilee cancelled party primaries in all of the 21 counties it was to hold them in. No doubt drawn to the plush benefits attendant to being a politician in Kenya (even the president suggested that they should get a pay cut!), when these primaries were finally held the party had to find space for 6,568 aspirants.

Strangely, NASA had the opposite problem of much fewer aspirants and poor turnout for their primaries.

In Nairobi, one gubernatorial aspirant was detained for destroying ballot boxes and the likely next governor of the city once carted youth to the Hague just to demonstrate against the ICC.

But beyond these banana republic theatrics, as in any soap opera there are always glimmers of hope – unexpected twists. Increasingly young and committed activists are aspiring candidates for various positions, though sadly very few are women. Youth are also coming together in informal and formal ways to collectively chart their roles and desires for the nation. And infamous politicians like Kabogo (who once said that single women cause many “problems” and are unfit for public office) lost at the party primary level.

What’s more, the entrance of the Thirdway Alliance is providing another (better?) option beyond the habitual two-horse election race between Jubilee and NASA. Could it be the obligatory poor but sexy character who wins all in every soap opera?

The elections are a little more than two months away. Hopefully Kenyans on Twitter (KOT) (always quick to call out random white people on CNN who insult Kenya) will move beyond the virtual space and take part in grounded mobilizations to shape a more just and equal nation.

People are tired of the drama, and are hungry, job insecure, live under the threat of police bullets, and likely still pissed off at the doctor’s strike that the government allowed to continue for 100 days.

If this is the soap opera we are living, we hope that the entrance of a new alliance and the increasing and incremental actions to “take back Kenya” will render some unexpected and much needed twists.

Anything would be better than this Jubilee melodrama.