Sean Jacobs's Blog, page 289

Pan-Africanism was Peter Abrahams’ Country

On January 18, the world lost an icon. Only much of the world did not know it. South African-Jamaican writer Peter Abrahams died at 97 in Jamaica, where he has been living for more than 60 years. Abrahams was prolific, insightful, and poignant. Unfortunately, he is also largely overlooked and often forgotten, especially in the country of his birth.

The son of a miner (who died when Abrahams was a child) and a domestic worker, Abrahams’ life could have easily been confined to poverty, his hometown of Johannesburg, and his coloured neighborhood, Vrededorp.  However, his mother along with his “skokiaan” (illegal liquor) brewing aunt (whom Abrahams described as the family’s “cornerstone”) worked and sacrificed to insure that Abrahams could attend school. There he thrived and dreamt of a world away from Vrededorp.

Ezekiel Mphahlele, Abraham’s friend and another notable South African author, met Abrahams in 1935 when the two attended St. Peter’s School, an elite black school located in a white Johannesburg suburb. At the onset, Abrahams was set on intertwining both literature and pan-Africanism:

I remember him vividly talking about Marcus Garvey, taking it for granted we must know about him. And dreamily he said what a wonderful thing it would be if all the negroes in the world came back to Africa…  I admired [his writings] because here was a boy writing something like the collection of English poetry we were learning as a set book in school.  I remember now how morose the verse was: straining to justify and glorify the dark complexion with the I’m-black-and-proud-of-it theme.

Even then, Abrahams “was always yearning for far-away places” with a desire “to show the white man that he was equal to him.” By age 19, he had not only published a collection of poetry, A Black Man Speaks of Freedom, but also relocated to England. Abrahams was a complex character: He found inspiration from Garvey but relocated to the heart of the British Empire, rejected Garvey’s disdain for Communism, married a white woman, and befriended George Padmore, a Trinidadian pan-Africanist who was one of Garvey’s fiercest critics.

In London, Abrahams linked up with the burgeoning pan-Africanist circles. Alongside the likes of Padmore, Kwame Nkrumah, Jomo Kenyatta, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Ras Makonnen, he helped organize the 1945 Manchester pan-Africanist Congress. As director of publicity for the event, Abrahams helped insure that the energies inspired by Garvey could embolden black liberation movements across the globe. Informally, at home, he hosted countless numbers of Caribbean and African students and exiles “in of a few hours of congenial warmth in an otherwise cold and lonely place.” In Britain, Abrahams put pan-Africanism into action.

During this period, Abrahams also published the novels Song of the City (1943), Mine Boy (1946), which became a classic, The Path of Thunder (1948) and Wild Conquest (1951) all while reporting for the BBC and other media outlets. His writing was unapologetically black, railed against notions of racial inferiority, and promoted racial uplift through education, work ethic and pan-African solidarity. Despite being away from South Africa for 14 years, he used his personal experiences, memories and family history to flesh out compelling stories of what it meant to be black in South Africa. These books made him a recognized author both at home and abroad. Writing in Phylon in 1949, the preeminent African American scholar Alain Locke noted that Path of Thunder possessed “epochal significance” and was “the strongest and most objective portrayal we have yet had of love transcending the color line.”

His writing inspired the writers of the Drum generation in 1950s Sophiatown, as well as the blooming talent from Cape Town’s District Six. When Abrahams briefly returned to South Africa in 1952, Drum magazine’s staff gave him a hero’s welcome. However, this return was bittersweet. On this trip, Abrahams witnessed the conditions of black South Africa with new eyes. He saw firsthand how damaging Apartheid was, but he also grew disenchanted with black South Africa’s apparent acceptance of the system. According to Drum editor Anthony Sampson, at a 200-person banquet thrown in Abraham’s honor by the Coloured Garment Workers’ Union, the writer laid into the crowd:

“Why do you waste money on a banquet for me, when you could give a scholarship to make another writer? And why haven’t you brought your wives? What’s the good of talking about liberation if you haven’t even liberated your own women?”

Abrahams left South Africa further alienated from his birthplace. This distance prevented him, as well as work, from receiving the recognition and adulation he enjoyed elsewhere.

In some ways, Abrahams’s story is a “what if.”  Path of Thunder was released to critical acclaim, making it on the New York Times bestseller list only to be overshadowed by Alan Paton’s Cry, The Beloved Country.  “There had not been a novel out of Africa for a very long time and my US publishers thought they were on to a winner,” Abrahams wrote later in his 2000 memoir, The Coyaba Chronicles: Reflections on the Black Experience in the 20th Century. “But though I did reasonably well, Paton was the winner.”

The white liberal Paton went onto international fame as a vocal critic of Apartheid. For Abrahams, the experience denied him the limelight that he deserved and he soured on “the commercial, money-making aspect” of publishing overseas. His Tell Freedom (1954), a memoir recounting his childhood in Johannesburg during the 1920s and 1930s, stands as one of the best South African autobiographies ever, yet it hardly commands the attention of those who study South Africa.

Throughout the 1950s, Abrahams bounced between Britain, France and the African continent. In France, Abrahams and his second wife started a family. Here he also befriended American authors such as Richard Wright and James Baldwin as well as fellow South African, painter Gerard Sekoto, whose friendship grew as the two shared memories of “the same Johannesburg.” In France, Abrahams also encountered overt racism and began to sense xenophobia sweeping across Europe. In reporting on Africa, Abrahams’ understanding of African independence and the ability of African leaders to implement pan-African ideals was challenged. He grew critical of his friends Nkrumah, Kenyatta and Hastings Banda, who he saw as losing touch with their constituents or corrupted by global capitalism in Ghana, Kenya and Malawi. His novel, Wreath for Udomo (1956), offers a scathing critique of this generation of African leaders to which Nkrumah sent, according to Abrahams, “his disturbed appreciation.”

He offered even more critiques in later years, which further alienated him from many pan-Africanists. When he visited a newly independent Kenya in 1965, Abrahams did not come away bounding with optimism:

The President had ceased to be my friend, Jomo, the man of the people who had shared their struggles and suffering with them. Now, every business house, every store, every office I visited had the obligatory picture of the President hanging on the wall…  The new Bwana Kubwa was the former freedom fighter…  Somewhere along the road to freedom, the leaders of our freedom struggle had become like those they had fought against. We had become like our enemies, cloaked in the trapping of our enemies – only, more glaringly so.

In 1956, Abrahams relocated with his family to Jamaica, where he had been offered work. There, he found liberation:

“In the South Africa of my childhood and youth, I had to be against the system as an affirmation of my humanity. In Europe I had to be anti-colonialist, anti-imperialist.  =In the Jamaica of my adoption I affirmed my humanity by becoming part of the process of the building of a nation.”

While South African exiles typically waxed nostalgic for home, Abrahams did not share that longing. Much of his impact came outside of South Africa, and physically but also emotionally he drifted away. In Jamaica, he published Jamaica: An Island Mosaic (1957), A Night of Their Own (1965), This Island Now (1966), The View from Coyaba (1985), and The Coyaba Chronicles (2000).  Only one, A Night of Their Own, was specifically about South Africa.  Discussing South Africa with a fellow exile, Abrahams remembered:

“I had been in Jamaica a long time, I spoke daily to Jamaicans on radio. I had become part of the Jamaican landscape. Because he was still the South African in exile, he expected me to also be a South African still in exile. He found it hard to accept that I had long ceased to be in exile. I had sunk new roots; I was accepted as Jamaican; became only ‘that damn South African’ when my enemies wanted to curse me.”

In adopting Jamaica, Abrahams’ place in South African popular memory faded. He did not pour his energies exclusively into the anti-Apartheid struggle. He was not one of the many, many exiles enticed back to South Africa after the fall of Apartheid. He never became a famous celebrity lauded for returning to the land of his birth (though he received the Order of Ikhamanga from the South African government in 2008).  Abrahams not only championed pan-Africanism, he lived it, but also remained brave enough to challenge those within it.

Weekend Music Break No.105 – Songs from banned countries: Somalia edition

Chino’o from Malitia MaliMob

For this weekend’s music break, we’ll have a second edition of “Songs from banned countries.” This time we go to Somalia via Seattle — which is a fitting connection because the judge who ordered Trump’s country ban illegal is based in Seattle. So, in the spirit of The United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit’s opposition to Trump’s xenophobic policy, we are proud to present Malitia MaliMob and their selection for “Songs from banned countries: Somalia edition.”

On this edition of “Songs from banned countries,” we decided to give you the ins & outs of Somali music, culture and lifestyle. We, Malitia MaliMob, are Somali-Americans who fled a civil war, and came to Seattle where we became a product of our environment. The selection of songs we have chosen intertwine both cultures — something that might be seen as taboo by some in our community — however, even though we are now Americans, it is important for us to maintain the culture of the land where we were born.

This past month, the administration of President Donald Trump decided that Somali people should not be allowed to enter the United States. In contrast to this regression, back home in Somalia our people have answered with progress. That is because this past Wednesday, February 8th, we elected our new President Mohamed Farmaajo. For the first time in nearly 30 years, Somali people have realized that we need each other more than ever, and that we have to work together for a better future for Somalia.

In our selection of songs and videos, we included clips that show traditional music, as well as the rebuilding of infrastructure in Somalia. We want to show the beauty in our culture & what we have to offer the world. We want to show that contrary to what many people outside of Somalia perceive, our country is full of life.

Somali National Anthem (somali museum)

Malitia Malimob – “Perception”

Somali infrastructure

Malitia Malimob – “Physical World”

DIRGAAX – “JIGJIGA Dhaanto”

Malitia Malimob – “Wake up call”

illkacase- “Isqabooji”

K’naan – “Soobax”

Malitia Malimob – “Mayflower”

Malitia Malimob – “I am James Foley”

Unusable Nigerians

Workers subcontracted by Shell Oil clean up an oil spill in Oloibiri, Niger Delta. Image Credit: Ed Kashi/VII

Oloibiri is a town located a few kilometers away from the city of Port Harcourt in Rivers State, Nigeria. It is known for sharing the same local government, of Ogbia, as the town of Otuoke where Nigeria’s former president Goodluck Jonathan was born. Perhaps more noteworthy is that the small Niger Delta town of Oloibiri is also widely cited as the birthplace of the country’s oil story. The significance of Oloibiri to the development of Nigeria’s modern economy cannot be overemphasized.

Between 1907 and 1956, colonial Nigeria was engulfed in a frantic search for Black Gold. First, these efforts were led by the Nigerian Bitumen Corporation, a subsidiary of a German company. Soon, the industry was dominated by Shell D’Arcy — a precursor to what is now the Shell Petroleum Development Company of Nigeria.

It wasn’t until 1956, however, that oil was discovered in commercial quantities in Oloibiri. In 1958, Nigeria made its first shipment of oil to international markets. What began with a production of 5,000 barrels of crude oil a day was transformed to a two million barrel-a-day oil industry within just two short decades. The growth of that industry is one on which the Nigerian economy remains precariously and detrimentally dependent.

That oil and the people of the Niger Delta have contributed immensely to the development of modern Nigeria is not a contestable question. Yet, if the now used-up and discarded town of Oloibiri is any example — Oloibiri only lasted from 1958 to 1978 when its oil wells dried up and ended the town’s importance to Nigeria’s ruling elite — the Nigerian people are merely resources to be used up and eventually discarded.

Today, Oloibiri has become a metaphor for what is wrong with Nigeria. As James Ferguson once noted, there is a “usable Africa” and an “unusable Africa.” Usable Africa constitutes those territories with immense natural resource deposits such as oil, limestone, diamond, gold, coltan, and the like. Unusable Africa constitutes the rest of the continent and its people.

The very recent history of Oloibiri suggests that the Nigerian situation is not far removed from Ferguson’s examination. Once a “usable” part of Nigeria, Oloibiri has today become an unusable space. This has been the sad, but unsurprising, result of economic and environmental plunder by Nigeria’s ruling elite and its multinational collaborators, including Shell, Chevron, ExxonMobil and TotalFinaElf.

During Oloibiri’s 20-year life span (1958-1978), the town’s oil wells produced approximately 20 million barrels of oil that generated millions of dollars for the Nigerian government. Today, Oloibiri is a desolate town with nothing to show for the fortune it generated for the Nigerian state. Water pollution, soil erosion, and abandoned oil infrastructure are all that remain from the town’s era of oil production.

The poverty levels in Oloibiri today are comparable to the levels found throughout Nigeria as a whole, in which over 50% of the population was living on less than $2 per day in 2012. The people of Oloibiri, however, did not used to be poor. The farming and fishing industries once thrived, leading to a relatively prosperous community of people with a wide variety of occupations and diverse economic opportunities. The unpleasant irony, of course, is that the prosperity brought to Nigeria’s ruling elite by Oloibiri’s oil led to the degradation of the natural land and marine resources that had once allowed this town to flourish.

While Oloibiri has since been abandoned by the Nigerian government and its allies among the various international oil companies, ordinary people have had to bear the brunt of environmental degradation, high poverty levels, impassable roads, and lack of access to education and quality health services. Life expectancy in the Niger Delta averages just 40 years, compared to 53-55 within Nigeria as a whole.

In response to the persistent neglect and pillaging of resources throughout the Niger Delta, several militant youth movements have arisen to claim control of the region’s resources, often through violent means. Since 2005, multiple organizations, including the Movement for the Emancipation of Niger Delta (MEND) and the newer Niger Delta Avengers (NDA), have enacted an insurgency against the state and multinational corporations operating in the region. These groups make various claims about fighting for the rights of the people of the Niger Delta.

While the Nigerian state and the multinational corporations operating in the Niger Delta have largely dismissed these youths as criminals, they have ignored the fundamental issues underlying the insurgency. They have refused to address the historical process that led from a “usable” Niger Delta of the 1950s, to a current population of unemployed, “unusable” youths castigated to the margins of Nigerian society.

The absence of critical infrastructure such as schools, healthcare facilities, roads, electricity, clean air and water, and the availability of economic opportunities for these youths and their families are rarely at the forefront of official state and oil corporation discussions concerning the Niger Delta.

Even when the federal government does dare to focus on such urgent issues of infrastructure development across the Niger Delta, more attention is given to large corporate and government projects than to the actual grievances of local communities. For example, much attention is given to the Niger Delta Development Corporation (NDDC), a partnership of Shell, Chevron, and other corporations with the Nigerian state, that seeks to “facilitate the rapid, even, and sustainable development of the Niger Delta.” Unfortunately, such agencies have become a conduit for cronies of the ruling elite to continue the cycles of corruption and exploitation within the region. Top personnel within NDCC, for instance, were recently accused of misusing public funds in what the Nigerian newspaper Vanguard News called a “cesspool of corruption.”

Today, when the “unusable” youths see their “usable” environment benefitting others without providing any assistance to their own communities, they resort to violent advocacy. The bleak landscape of Oloibiri epitomizes their worst fears for the Niger Delta. On one hand, the Niger Delta is rendered usable through the extraction of millions of barrels of black gold that account for 80 percent of Nigeria’s government revenue and 40 percent of gross domestic product. On the other hand, the landscape of the Niger Delta is devastated, and the inhabitants must wake up every day in abject poverty to see the oil industry operating all around them, never helping their communities.

The boom and bust of Oloibiri reveals the extent to which the Nigerian government views most Nigerians as nothing more than one out of many useable resources to be exploited and discarded. The Niger Delta embodies the contrived neglect of the majority of Nigerians by a state that continues to fail in its responsibilities towards its citizens.

This is a failure of responsibility that is apparent towards the people and communities of the Niger Delta in particular, and towards all Nigerians in general. It is a failure of responsibility that has reduced the bulk of the Nigerian citizenry to a disposable commodity of usable and unusable objects.

* This is an edited version of an essay that first appeared in Political Matter and is reprinted here with kind permission from the editors.

Unusable Nigerians in the Niger Delta

Oloibiri is a town located a few kilometers away from the city of Port Harcourt in Rivers State, Nigeria. It is known for sharing the same local government, of Ogbia, as the town of Otuoke where Nigeria’s former president Goodluck Jonathan was born. Perhaps more noteworthy is that the small Niger Delta town of Oloibiri is also widely cited as the birthplace of the country’s oil story. The significance of Oloibiri to the development of Nigeria’s modern economy cannot be overemphasized.

Between 1907 and 1956, colonial Nigeria was engulfed in a frantic search for Black Gold. First, these efforts were led by the Nigerian Bitumen Corporation, a subsidiary of a German company. Soon, the industry was dominated by Shell D’Arcy — a precursor to what is now the Shell Petroleum Development Company of Nigeria.

It wasn’t until 1956, however, that oil was discovered in commercial quantities in Oloibiri. In 1958, Nigeria made its first shipment of oil to international markets. What began with a production of 5,000 barrels of crude oil a day was transformed to a two million barrel-a-day oil industry within just two short decades. The growth of that industry is one on which the Nigerian economy remains precariously and detrimentally dependent.

That oil and the people of the Niger Delta have contributed immensely to the development of modern Nigeria is not a contestable question. Yet, if the now used-up and discarded town of Oloibiri is any example — Oloibiri only lasted from 1958 to 1978 when its oil wells dried up and ended the town’s importance to Nigeria’s ruling elite — the Nigerian people are merely resources to be used up and eventually discarded.

Today, Oloibiri has become a metaphor for what is wrong with Nigeria. As James Ferguson once noted, there is a “usable Africa” and an “unusable Africa.” Usable Africa constitutes those territories with immense natural resource deposits such as oil, limestone, diamond, gold, coltan, and the like. Unusable Africa constitutes the rest of the continent and its people.

The very recent history of Oloibiri suggests that the Nigerian situation is not far removed from Ferguson’s examination. Once a “usable” part of Nigeria, Oloibiri has today become an unusable space. This has been the sad, but unsurprising, result of economic and environmental plunder by Nigeria’s ruling elite and its multinational collaborators, including Shell, Chevron, ExxonMobil and TotalFinaElf.

During Oloibiri’s 20-year life span (1958-1978), the town’s oil wells produced approximately 20 million barrels of oil that generated millions of dollars for the Nigerian government. Today, Oloibiri is a desolate town with nothing to show for the fortune it generated for the Nigerian state. Water pollution, soil erosion, and abandoned oil infrastructure are all that remain from the town’s era of oil production.

The poverty levels in Oloibiri today are comparable to the levels found throughout Nigeria as a whole, in which over 50% of the population was living on less than $2 per day in 2012. The people of Oloibiri, however, did not used to be poor. The farming and fishing industries once thrived, leading to a relatively prosperous community of people with a wide variety of occupations and diverse economic opportunities. The unpleasant irony, of course, is that the prosperity brought to Nigeria’s ruling elite by Oloibiri’s oil led to the degradation of the natural land and marine resources that had once allowed this town to flourish.

While Oloibiri has since been abandoned by the Nigerian government and its allies among the various international oil companies, ordinary people have had to bear the brunt of environmental degradation, high poverty levels, impassable roads, and lack of access to education and quality health services. Life expectancy in the Niger Delta averages just 40 years, compared to 53-55 within Nigeria as a whole.

In response to the persistent neglect and pillaging of resources throughout the Niger Delta, several militant youth movements have arisen to claim control of the region’s resources, often through violent means. Since 2005, multiple organizations, including the Movement for the Emancipation of Niger Delta (MEND) and the newer Niger Delta Avengers (NDA), have enacted an insurgency against the state and multinational corporations operating in the region. These groups make various claims about fighting for the rights of the people of the Niger Delta.

While the Nigerian state and the multinational corporations operating in the Niger Delta have largely dismissed these youths as criminals, they have ignored the fundamental issues underlying the insurgency. They have refused to address the historical process that led from a “usable” Niger Delta of the 1950s, to a current population of unemployed, “unusable” youths castigated to the margins of Nigerian society.

The absence of critical infrastructure such as schools, healthcare facilities, roads, electricity, clean air and water, and the availability of economic opportunities for these youths and their families are rarely at the forefront of official state and oil corporation discussions concerning the Niger Delta.

Even when the federal government does dare to focus on such urgent issues of infrastructure development across the Niger Delta, more attention is given to large corporate and government projects than to the actual grievances of local communities. For example, much attention is given to the Niger Delta Development Corporation (NDDC), a partnership of Shell, Chevron, and other corporations with the Nigerian state, that seeks to “facilitate the rapid, even, and sustainable development of the Niger Delta.” Unfortunately, such agencies have become a conduit for cronies of the ruling elite to continue the cycles of corruption and exploitation within the region. Top personnel within NDCC, for instance, were recently accused of misusing public funds in what the Nigerian newspaper Vanguard News called a “cesspool of corruption.”

Today, when the “unusable” youths see their “usable” environment benefitting others without providing any assistance to their own communities, they resort to violent advocacy. The bleak landscape of Oloibiri epitomizes their worst fears for the Niger Delta. On one hand, the Niger Delta is rendered usable through the extraction of millions of barrels of black gold that account for 80 percent of Nigeria’s government revenue and 40 percent of gross domestic product. On the other hand, the landscape of the Niger Delta is devastated, and the inhabitants must wake up every day in abject poverty to see the oil industry operating all around them, never helping their communities.

The boom and bust of Oloibiri reveals the extent to which the Nigerian government views most Nigerians as nothing more than one out of many useable resources to be exploited and discarded. The Niger Delta embodies the contrived neglect of the majority of Nigerians by a state that continues to fail in its responsibilities towards its citizens.

This is a failure of responsibility that is apparent towards the people and communities of the Niger Delta in particular, and towards all Nigerians in general. It is a failure of responsibility that has reduced the bulk of the Nigerian citizenry to a disposable commodity of usable and unusable objects.

* This is an edited version of an essay that first appeared in Political Matter and is reprinted here with kind permission from the editors.

Regarding Marxism and Islam in Africa

This excerpt below is from an interview with Souleymane Bachir Diagne, a Senegalese philosopher who is currently Professor in the Department’s of Philosophy, French and Romance Languages at Columbia University in New York. The interview forms part of a larger project to “both archive and to think the present in relation to the lineages and genealogies of critical thought in and about Africa.” The immediate context is debates about the decolonization of knowledge in the South African academy where Pillay is based at the University of the Western Cape and where Fernandes was on a postdoctoral fellowship at the same university. The idea is to make connections to earlier, similar debates in the colonized world. Diagne was an ideal candidate to kick off the series, according to Pillay and Fernandes. Diagne has taught in his native country (at the famed Cheikh Anta Diop University in Dakar) and the United States and did his higher education in France. Diagne’s field of research includes history of logic, history of philosophy, Islamic philosophy, African philosophy and literature.  His book Bergson postcolonial. L’élan vital dans la pensée de Senghor et de Mohamed Iqbal (2011 Paris: Editions du CNRS) was awarded the Dagnan-Bouveret prize by the French Academy of Moral and Political Sciences for 2011.  In that same year he received the Edouard Glissant Prize. In the full interview, Diagne talks about his family history, his studies in France, debates amongst African philosophers over Marx and Marxism, Leopold Senghor and the Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa (CODESRIA), where Diagne had a front row seat to academic disputes in the late 1980s and early 1990s. In the excerpt below, Diagne revisits debates among African, including Muslim, philosophers over Karl Marx’s ideas about religion. The excerpt starts with Pillay asking Daigne about how he came to start the first Islamic philosophy course at Cheikh Anta Diop University. The full interview appears in the latest issue of Social Dynamics, which you can access here (for some, unfortunately, the full article will be behind a paywall)—Editor.

Suren Pillay (SP): You were saying in the conversation the other day that the decision to offer the course that you designed on Islamic philosophy came out of a response to a particular situation?

Souleymane Bachir Diagne (SBD): I was hired in 1982 by University Cheikh Anta Diop; this was three years after the Iranian revolution, after which we started seeing women on campus wearing the hijab, or religious scarf and even one wearing the black, Iranian type chador. So Islam came onto the campus as some form of political statement about being Muslim. We thought it was our responsibility, as a department of philosophy in a predominantly Muslim country, to teach also the tradition of philosophy in Islam; to teach the history of philosophy in Islam; to teach this tradition of rationalism, skepticism, free thinking that was characteristic of Islamic philosophers. So that is how the decision was made, as a response.

SP: The existing canon would be more in the French tradition of philosophical thought?

SBD: Yes. You know, the history of philosophy has been Greek philosophy, medieval philosophy, mainly Christian, Latin Christian philosophy; not even the Greek parts, the Orthodox part, let alone the Islamic aspect of medieval philosophy or the Jewish tradition of medieval philosophy. Now, in France you have many historians of philosophy who are increasingly saying you cannot truly understand medieval philosophy if you do not re-constitute what the intellectual conversation was; the fact that these philosophers were in conversation with Muslim philosophers, Jewish philosophers and also if you do not take into account the other side of Christianity, which is Orthodox Christianity. Take the philosopher Thomas Aquinas, for example. Before he became St. Thomas, Aquinas was accused of heresy, and in the particular of being an Averroelist. Averroes was a Muslim philosopher whom Aquinas read and he read Aristotle through the commentaries of Averroes; so one should not be reading Thomas Aquinas without reading Averroes. This is a particular case in which you see how truncated our understanding of medieval philosophy is. But that reconstitution of the history of philosophy as a[n] exclusively European affair was really a fabrication of 19th century philosophy. Hegel, for example, considered that the history of philosophy and the history of the absolute spirit was an exclusively European affair starting with the Greek miracle; and it is convenient to call it a miracle because a miracle has no prior origin. It’s a miracle and then it went through Europe and it ended there, so it is really the destination of a particular continent and particular European humanity. We thought that we needed to go against that reconstitution of the history of philosophy, and as a philosophy department in a Muslim country make it more relevant. So in the same way that we had a teacher in African philosophy we decided to have a teacher in the history of Islam.

I was a product of the French system at its highest level. I followed the path that I had followed and, re-invented myself also as a specialist of Islamic philosophy and a philosopher of Islam. Given the circumstances, one has to take care of the religion, in Islam; the geopolitics today of Islam is such that if you are a Muslim intellectual, you have to say something about Islam. I had that aspect of my training, I still do. I’ve continued to write in the field of logic and the field of history of philosophy and so on, but I have more and more written in the field of Islamic philosophy and African philosophy, because those were the debates on the ground; those were the African debates; the African philosophy side. Islamic philosophy is still not really present, but that is something I think is important. I would like to see CODESRIA take religion more seriously, as a topic of study, because circumstances are such that religion has become important in Africa and elsewhere.

SP: And at the same time you’ve spoken about having a relationship or coming out of a certain kind of left tradition in Senegal, so I’m curious about what that relationship was to that political tradition?

SBD:  As a student I constituted myself as Maoist, although I never actually belonged to a political party. I was just a member of a union while I was in France and that union had that kind of political correlation and this is why Althusser was also very important for me. Althusser was a member of the French Communist party, although he was a dissident member obviously, but he influenced many generations of normalér.  I mean the École Normale Supérieure was known at one point as a location for extreme left thought; so my intellectual trajectory met that political trajectory as well. I was really part of that thinking, that Maoist approach.

SP: Was that a movement of any sort of scale in Senegal? I know East Africa had a Maoist movement of some scale, at least among university intellectuals.

SBD: There was quite a significant tradition of Maoists in Senegal. The events of 1968 were very important in Senegal, so my generation came after that. We were not veterans of 1968, we were too young to participate; but we sort of lived the consequences of 1968. So my heroes were the students who led the strikes, the movement, and it was easier for me because one of those heroes was my cousin, Alioune Sall Paloma. He actually lives in South Africa, where he is the head of the African Futures Institute, which was highly supported by Thabo Mbeki.

Paloma was a good friend of another Senegalese who was a normalér of École Normale, Omar Blondin Diop, and they were also good friends of the French leader of that 1968 movement. Their trajectory is interesting because both of them were well known in the Senegalese left in general were arrested in the early 1970s and put in jail. Omar Blondin Diop died in prison. So that was one of the tragedies of the extreme left and something that Senghor was very much blamed for; he was even accused, at one point, of having planned that, but that’s crazy. Senghor is known for having really wept when he heard that Omar had died. By the way, he was kicked out of France after 1968 by the French authorities, he was not French. Senghor used his friendship with Georges Pompidou to have the ban lifted so that Omar Blondin Diop could go back. He admired the fact that Omar Blondin Diop was a normalér at Saint-Cloud and so on, and a philosopher and so on, but that tragedy happened afterwards. Omar Blondin, by the way, is the young Senegalese student who appears in Jean Luc Godard’s movie, La Chinoise.

SP: That’s interesting.

SBD: Yeah, he is in that movie, he is the one who comes and explains a book on Marxism.

SP: Which is where I was going; the debate on Marxism that happens in that context, in that context of relevance as you put it. Whether teaching Islamic philosophy or African philosophy I’m curious how that debate unfolds in that moment for yourself and others.

SBD: Well, it is true that the Marxist left was not very keen on even African philosophy. The critique of ethno-philosophy was coming from the left and their idea was that this was not true philosophy, looking at African conceptions, religious conception, and so on; because the idea of philosophy was really about philosophy being class struggle in theory. Paulin Hountondji, who is a main philosopher against ethno-philosophy, says as much: “ok, what Tempels did and followers of Tempels wrote was not truly philosophy.” He was very Althusserian saying that. So, my interest in Senghor’s thought was already a break from that that position coming from orthodox Marxism about what philosophy is and what philosophy should be. The weapons of criticism would be what philosophy is about, and not this exploration of African philosophy let alone Islamic philosophy because that was idealism, was religion, spirituality and not philosophy at all. You can find that kind of very strong position in Cameroonian philosopher Marcien Towa, who is the ultimate orthodox Marxist; who thinks that anything having to do with religion cannot be philosophy. You had this very narrow understanding of philosophy as following Marx’s Eleventh Thesis on Feuerbach. Philosophers have until now interpreted the world, the point is to transform it. So everything in philosophy that leads to that transformation is real, “true philosophy.” So, we all had that conception at one point and I, having started working in the field in which I was working, had departed from that. And when it comes to religion, even when I considered myself a Maoist, a Marxist, I have never actually been materialist in the sense of being atheist. Islam has always been somehow my interiority, coming from the background that I did. I’ve never departed from religion at all.

SP:  I know you place some importance now on the distinction between the young Marx and later Marx, and how that enables thinking the two together without a rigid line?

SBD: Exactly! Exactly!

SP: Was that present there, did you have that conception at that time?

SBD: At that time I did not have that conception, I was not trying to reconcile actually my spiritual traditions, the spiritual traditions I really felt that I had, and my political commitment; but I could understand how this were the case for someone like Senghor, for example, and it has become the case for me as well. Senghor thought that the early Marx was really a Marx that spoke to a Catholic like him, being a Socialist; and alienation having this precise meaning, about estrangement – where human feeling is estranged from his own humanity, from his fellow humans and from his own work. “Work” is sucking his blood instead of being the fullest expression of his humanity. That way of thinking in Marx was something that spoke to a spiritual man such as Senghor and it explains, why in the French tradition – and, I believe, in the European tradition in general of Christians, for leftist Christians – that Marx also was important. It is interesting to see how many priests on the left in France had written on Marxist humanism, following the rediscovery of those early writings of Marx that spoke to them more than Capital would speak to them. Senghor belonged to that tradition. He wrote a very important essay entitled “Marxism and Humanism” in 1948 after World War Two. In it he looks at that Marx and feels “ok, this is the true Marx, the Marx who is more positivist, more scientific so to say, has been betrayed, this true Marx,” and he believed that whatever Marx had said about religion actually could be considered a religious reaction or a spiritual reaction to what religion had become. So, he considered that this was a criticism that should be made against a kind of petrified religion that had forgotten the social message of religion. So that Marx could be used by people who felt that they were fighting for social justice, and at the same time were deeply religious. Something akin to Liberation Theology; Senghor might not have really used the expression, but he was very much in that movement of Liberation Theology.

Souleymane Bachir Diagne is currently Professor in the Departments of Philosophy, French and Romance Languages at Columbia University in New York.

African Cup of Nations’ failures mirror Gabon’s sorry state

Gabriel Bouys (AFP/Getty Images).

Sometimes, a photo from a football match can reflect a lot more than just the game itself. Sometimes, a photo (above) from a football match can reflect huge and complicated processes of a country.

This year’s African Cup of Nations is now over, with Cameroon taking the title after a victory over Egypt in the final. The lasting moment of this tournament, however, took place on Sunday, 22 January, when, after another draw (their third in a row), the hosts Gabon were eliminated. They became the fourth team ever to host the tournament and not qualify from the group stage, and the first to do so since Tunisia in 1994.

Local fans abandoned the team minutes before the final whistle, when the score from the other group match showed that Burkina Faso lead Guinea-Bissau 2-0, and it was clear that Gabon would not continue in the competition. Some of the players were crying, some were laying silent, and only Pierre-Emeric Aubameyang (Gabon’s best player contracted to German club Borussia Dortmund) walked alone, quietly and without talking to anyone, straight to dressing room.

There are professional explanations for the failure of Gabon. Some say that Aubameyang did not take on enough beyond scoring. Others say that the squad of Gabon (ranked 134 in the world) is just not good enough. Some blame the new coach. But the story of Gabon in this championship is actually a lot bigger. It is film material. To understand it, one needs to keep track of the characteristics of the state of Gabon, and the political and social role and context of the 2017 Africa Cup of Nations.

Gabon is home to only 1.5 million people. It is one of Africa’s largest oil exporters. Yet, about one-third of the population lives in extreme poverty. Since independence from France in 1960, three presidents ruled Gabon, two of them from the same family: the Bongos. When the first president, Leon M’Ba, died in 1967, he was succeeded by his deputy, Omar Bongo. The latter ruled for more than four decades, and maintained close bonds with France, under a very simple formula, Francafrique. Francafrique is a well-known concept in post-colonial African politics. The local ruler receives military and political support, and in return he spoils the colonial master with good business opportunities in the host country. Crude oil and minerals like candy. France maintains this kind of relationship with various leaders in the continent.

Relations between France and Gabon changed in 2009 when Omar Bongo died in a hospital in Barcelona, Spain, and his son, Ali Bongo, won an election to succeed him. Ali did not automatically give the French all the treats they wanted, and actually cooled relations with them. Ali had new partners: the Chinese. Chinese and Gabonese relations have grown from the millennium, but a series of transactions and agreements with Ali Bongo gained the Asian country a stronger foothold in the oil empire. France, in return, decided that it would demand an international investigation by the United Nations, the IMF and the World Bank, regarding corruption in the country.

One year ago, Aubameyang won the African Player of the Year award. He was the first Gabonese player to do so. Aubameyang, Dortmund’s biggest star and an idol in Gabon, dedicated his award to his family and friends, the Gabonese people, and, crucially, the President, Ali Bongo. This statement was not for nothing. In August 2016, the country held presidential elections, and the first time in years, Bongo faced a very strong opposition candidate, Jean Ping.

Ping, a Gabonese diplomat who had served in both Omar and Ali Bongo’s cabinet, lost the elections by a small margin according to the official count. He claimed that he won the election and that the election was rigged and corrupt. Ping’s supporters took to the streets. Riots and clashes between opposition supporters and the police lit the capital, where 1,000 people were arrested and another five were killed. Things got out of hand and the authorities shut down the internet in the capital, Libreville. Eventually the police took control, and Ali Bongo remained as President.

Despite Ping’s appeals and the resignation of ministers and MPs, Ali has not vacated the chair. Instead, he launched massive infrastructure projects, including four giant football stadiums ahead of this year’s African Cup of Nations. The stadiums, built by the Chinese, are very impressive from the outside, but do not make sense for a modest football nation like Gabon. It won’t be able to fill them once the tournament is over. One of these stadiums, in Port Gentil, is next to an abandoned residential project planned for those left homeless by its construction. ESPN FC described it as “resembling the haunted, concrete shells of a ghost village.” In general, the investment in this AFCON has been astounding – around USD4 billion. Meanwhile, many Gabonese lack the basics, such as electricity, water and shelter.

As AFCON began, opposition activists launched a major campaign against the tournament. Black and red posters of the players were hung around Libreville and Franceville, with the tagline, “You are not the team of the Gabonese people but the team of the dictator.” A hashtag was launched for the protest, #CAN17WeCANnot. In many games along the tournament, the stadiums were half empty, as many of the locals refused to attend the matches. The atmosphere at majority of the matches was silent and depressing.

If that was not enough, in December last year, the Spaniard Antonio Camacho was signed as a coach of the national team. The announcement came from Ali Bongo’s office. At first, it was said Camacho’s contract was worth USD2 million per year, but after protests it was claimed to be about USD800,000 per year for the entire team staff. The arrival of the Spaniard raised more criticism when it was discovered that his last job was as coach of the Chinese national team.

Gavin Barker (EPA).

The conditions for Gabon’s tournament were set: Under the eyes of a nervous ruler, with the pressure of the new coach and a staff, a lone mega star with everything on his shoulders, and a lot of political tension inside the dressing room.

It was clear from the first game that Gabon is not at the level of the other teams who qualified for AFCON. The draws with Guinea-Bissau, and later with Burkina Faso raised the level of stress in the host country to new heights. “It is clear that the political situation has affected our preparations for this championship,” said goalkeeper Didier Ovono in a press conference before the last group game with Cameroon. “We started badly. Something is happening here, and it’s not a simple situation,” he concluded.

And there lies the failure of Gabon’s AFCON campaign. The political situation in the country had a large influence on what happened to the team during the tournament, especially in terms of the relationships between the players. Unlike Aubameyang, not all players support the president. According to reports, clashes between supporters of Ali Bongo (led by Aubameyang) and opposition supporters (reportedly goalkeeper Didier Ovono and Mario Lamina) tore the dressing room apart. Moreover, the Panthers, as the national team is known, did not enjoy the support of the home crowd. The fans were as divided as the players.

The image of Aubameyang, descending alone from the field, tells the whole story.

By the light of the arrivals gate

Still from Black Out.

For more than a decade, night-time arrivals at Gbessia International Airport in Conakry, Guinea, were greeted by dozens and sometimes hundreds of secondary school students studying in the parking lot. A foreign visitor’s bemusement would quickly evaporate, however, as they noticed that beyond the bright lights of the partially French-owned and operated airport, block after block of the city of two million people was completely dark. Without electricity at home and needing to study page upon page of handwritten lecture notes, many young Guineans made nightly pilgrimages to public spaces, such as the airport or hotel parking lots and gas stations where costly diesel generators kept the lights on.

Witnessing this phenomenon inspired film-maker Eva Weber’s documentary Black Out, shot in mid-2011 and released in November 2012 to international acclaim. The film is concise and artfully composed. As a former Conakry resident, I appreciated Weber’s beautiful portrait of this complex city, and that the entire story is told by Guineans, with the sole foreign voices coming from occasional audio clips of news broadcasts.

Beyond simply a “look at this sad situation” documentary, the story of students driven to succeed in the face of adversity is the starting point from which Weber subtly explores political and economic dynamics in Guinea.

It is certainly refreshing in a documentary on the challenges of an African country to not have the a westerner presenting the narrative. Black Out opens with clips of English-language news broadcasts contextualizing the state of Guinea in early 2011 – having just experienced its first democratic presidential election and struggling to manage competing foreign claims for its vast mineral wealth.

Moving forward, an unobtrusive and serious musical score weaves together interviews and accounts of Guinean secondary students, a teacher, and a worker at Conakry’s main power plant, Tombo, as they discuss their hopes and frustrations about their country’s development. Footage of everyday life in the roundabouts, neighborhoods, and markets of Conakry conveys the city’s bustling commercial atmosphere, which persists despite the challenges of weak infrastructure. This is neither war-torn hellscape nor poverty-stricken desperation, but rather capable, intelligent and ambitious people who feel they are being held back by forces out of their control.

“How does one prepare lessons without light?” the teacher asks, and I feel his pain, having spent many a night in Conakry straining my eyes as I graded papers or planned lessons by the light of a battery-powered lantern. Students read from their notes on topics from microbiology to Carthaginian history, information that must be memorized to pass their French-style school exams, but the terrible inconvenience and danger of staying out until 3am to study is only the beginning. The chronic lack of electricity in Guinea is a symptom of a much larger issue – an economy that struggles to produce formal employment and offers few career opportunities for high-school or university-educated Guineans.

Weber’s critiques the neocolonial economic situation. Train-loads of Guinea’s rust-colored bauxite is shown rolling through the city to the coastal port, where it will be shipped off and turned into aluminum for the profit of foreign-owned companies. “All Guineans understand that Guinea is rich,” the power-plant worker explains, and he is right. The students in Conakry lament that their country’s bauxite, iron-ore, diamond, gold and uranium resources are all being exploited by foreigners, and that poorly negotiated terms by unstable governments have thus far left the Guinean people with nothing to show for it. It is infuriating to hear young men and women proclaim that their best chances for success would be to leave Guinea. Or to hear the school teacher say that he didn’t have a chance to be a respected intellectual because he stayed in Guinea. The unfulfilled promises of politicians are lamented and highlight how domestic and international policy failures reverberate into every aspect of a citizen’s life.

Still from Black Out.

This commentary is what gives Black Out staying power. Conakry’s airport parking lot hasn’t been much of a study hall lately, as a new hydroelectric dam about two hours north of the city has tripled Guinea’s electricity output since 2015. The Kaléta dam cost USD446 million, 75 percent of which was paid for by China International Water and Electric Corporation (CWE), with the state covering the remaining 25 percent. While it has not been a panacea for Guinea’s power problems, there is now electricity in most of Conakry, most of the time, and CWE is now in negotiations with the Guinean government to build another, bigger hydroelectric dam.

The Chinese were not moved by the plight of Conakry’s students to help light-up Guinea, which faced a major economic downturn in 2014 due to the Ebola epidemic and is still struggling to achieve political stability. Chinese banks and corporations have been drastically increasing their investment in Guinea’s bauxite and iron-ore mining operations, including a take-over of Rio Tinto’s massive Simandou project last year..

Black Out aired for the first time on American public television recently. Although and the premise of the film no longer exists, the themes continue to be valid. Most students in Conakry can now study at home, but unless growth in the mining sectors fosters more diverse economic development, or the government of newly appointed African Union chair President Alpha Condé can implement policies that create much-needed jobs, Guineans will remain frustrated.

* The film screens tonight at 8pm EST in the US

Weekend Music Break No.104 – Songs from banned countries: Sudan edition

We’re returning to the older format of Weekend Music Break (a series of embeds rather than a playlist) for this very special guest selection from proud Sudanese-American Ahmed “Sinkane” Gallab. We reached out to Ahmed to give us a selection of tunes from his parents’ homeland, one of the seven countries on US President Donald Trump’s visa ban list.

Sinkane.

It’s been a trying couple weeks for our global community, particularly for those of us who understand (and enjoy the benefits of) an interconnected world. We understand that the current form of globalization’s ills stem from the twinned trends of freedom for money and limits for people.

We thought an attempt to humanize Sudan and Sudanese people, by experiencing their folk, youth and online culture (freedom for information), would allow some folks to understand a bit of what’s at stake when borders are hardened for people. We don’t imagine Africa Is a Country readers are amongst the population who don’t understand this, but remember 49% of American support the ban, so share this post widely on social media!

We also want to do our part to assuage some of the panic going on via the mainstream media, so for those of us who don’t need such perspective as above, this perhaps can be just a bit of an escape from the deluge of negative news and tweets.

Check out Ahmed’s selection of classic and new Sudanese sounds below and preview his new album “Life & Livin’ It” which he is currently on the road supporting.

1 ) Sammany – “Dyarom”

2 ) Salah Mohamed Al-bashir

3) JVLS – “Enemies”

4) Qurashi & Salah Mohamed Al-Bashir

5) MaMan – “Brain Wars”

6) Ibrahim Awad

7) Rainy Day feat. Rotation – “All Night, All Summer”

8) Salah Bin Al-Badia

9) Rotation – “Rota$ion”

10) Sufyn – “Moon Dance”

11) Bonez, Skripter, SP a.k.a Sporadic – “All I Can”

Weekend Music Break No.104 – Songs from banned countries: Sinkane’s Sudan edition

We’re returning to the older format of Weekend Music Break (a series of embeds rather than a playlist) for this very special guest selection from proud Sudanese-American Ahmed “Sinkane” Gallab. We reached out to Ahmed to give us a selection of tunes from his parents’ homeland, one of the seven countries on US President Donald Trump’s visa ban list.

Sinkane.

It’s been a trying couple weeks for our global community, particularly for those of us who understand (and enjoy the benefits of) an interconnected world. We understand that the current form of globalization’s ills stem from the twinned trends of freedom for money and limits for people.

We thought an attempt to humanize Sudan and Sudanese people, by experiencing their folk, youth and online culture (freedom for information), would allow some folks to understand a bit of what’s at stake when borders are hardened for people. We don’t imagine Africa Is a Country readers are amongst the population who don’t understand this, but remember 49% of American support the ban, so share this post widely on social media!

We also want to do our part to assuage some of the panic going on via the mainstream media, so for those of us who don’t need such perspective as above, this perhaps can be just a bit of an escape from the deluge of negative news and tweets.

Check out Ahmed’s selection of classic and new Sudanese sounds below and preview his new album “Life & Livin’ It” which he is currently on the road supporting.

1 ) Sammany – “Dyarom”

2 ) Salat Mohamed Al-bashir

3) JVLS – “Enemies”

4) Lasha Ur & Salat Mohamed Al-Bashir

5) MaMan – “Brain Wars”

6) Al Fanan Abr Ahaeem au Din – “Tinkar Wazeez”

7) Rainy Day feat. Rotation – “All Night, All Summer”

8) Salat bin Albadia – “Washoushnee Alabeer”

9) Rotation – “Rota$ion”

10) Sufyn – “Moon Dance”

11) Bonez, Skripter, SP a.k.a Sporadic – “All I Can”

Crime in South Africa

Gang Town cover

The cover and title of the journalist Don Pinnock’s Gang Town seem to promise a sensational tour of meth dens and children caught in the crossfire.  Instead, the book patiently explains something far more grim: what happens when the legacy of South Africa’s 1950 Group Areas Act, and decades of impoverishing and alienating policies, meet an unprecedented increase in youth population.

Pinnock, who is also a criminologist, draws on 30 years of research and journalism to conduct a survey of the many roots causes and contributing factors that come together in Cape Town’s gang phenomenon. He traces the history of the city’s gangs, from their origins as vigilante groups in District Six – a mixed, mostly coloured, neighborhood that was razed to the ground when its desirable inner city land was proclaimed to be for whites only – to their evolution into more violent and more organized entities in the far-flung, anonymous Cape Flats suburbs that the city’s black and coloured populations were relocated to.

The array of issues this tackles along the way – including 80 years of history, reflections on rites of passage and masculinity, and academic studies dealing with the link between early childhood development and aggression, to the structures and tactics of transnational organized crime – seem daunting. But what Pinnock does especially well is tell this story without losing the reader, or the complexity.

Gang Town’s focus on Cape Town’s longue durée corruption of the social fabric of working class communities is a sobering complement to high-pitched debates about the criminal acts of those in power. The book sketches a city that has repeatedly deformed and destroyed social institutions that would otherwise channel the natural rebellions of young people away from gangs, drug abuse and violence. In a particularly insightful passage Pinnocks describes how forced removals under the Group Areas Act ripped up “networks of streets, houses, corner shops and shebeens, but also social webs of kin, friendship, neighborhood and work. They were a mix of rights and obligations, intimacies and distances, providing a sense of solidarity, local loyalties and traditions.” Gang Town gets down to the nuts and bolts of how such policies turned neighborhoods toxic and families violent.

Pinnock is not gloomy. The final chapters suggest solutions and provide resources for parents, teachers and community workers.

The Street: Exposing a World of Cops, Bribes and Drug Dealers is written by Paul McNally, a radio journalist and the Director of the Citizen’s Justice Network, a community radio project. The Street is an investigation of the drug trade on one street on the west side of Johannesburg, the three degenerating police stations in its vicinity, and the symbiosis between them. We follow this story through several characters on Ontdekkers Road, each waging a different battle against police corruption. Raymond, a sound-system dealer documents the bribes he sees policemen take from dealers outside his store and implores police management to act against them. Khaba, a painfully honest lieutenant colonial at the local police station, tries to reform the police force from within and is despised by his colleagues for it. And Wendy, a police reservist, attempts to gather evidence on her own colleague’s crimes. A complex but fascinating narrative emerges from minute observation of characters in their environments, interwoven with interviews and anecdotes from local gangsters, Community Policy Forum volunteers, and expert opinion.

Over the course of two years, we watch these people be frustrated and painfully disappointed, with sporadic, tenuous, moments of success. But The Street is not, ultimately, a story of vindication. This is a story of South Africans in humble settings who try to change the systems around them, mostly fail, and are forced, instead, to recalibrate their own morality in order to stay sane and safe and solvent in a world in which graft and impunity have become more powerful organizing logics than rule of law.

For McNally, meaning is found in his character’s capacity for adaptation and survival. But the question of what these adaptations cost society remains an uncomfortable one. Considering what it means that Raymond has found a way to be at ease with the drug trade around his business, McNally comments: “The atmosphere on this patch is calmer too, although I can’t decide if this leaves a deadness on Ontdekkers or whether I am hearing a machine, finally functioning, giving a satisfied hum.” Following Raymond’s journey from crusader to capitulator, one can’t help but consider the multiplier effect of such transformations, on thousands of unobserved street corners.

In a year dominated, more than usual, with tales of big men and their corrupt politics, these books tell complex and illuminating stories of how crime and corruption play out at the street level. Neither of these books is fatalistic, but each offers insights and conclusions that often make the reader wince. Both are suggested reading for understanding the challenges that remain, no matter who gets hired or fired.