Sean Jacobs's Blog, page 297

Education in Africa profits billionaire bleeding hearts

Mark Zuckerberg, image via Wikipedia.

Microsoft’s Bill Gates and Facebook founder and CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, who both double as billionaire philanthropists, have had their eyes on African schools for a while.

“We live in a world where talent is evenly distributed, but opportunity is not,” Zuckerberg wrote on his timeline a month or two ago. And the “gap between talent and opportunity,” he noted, “is among the greatest in Africa.” Around the same time, Gates expressed similar sentiments in a message to a UN conference on science, technology and innovation, declaring that, in order to solve poverty, “it’s important that we invest in the bright minds and bold ideas that can deliver the next generation of solutions to people, everywhere.”

Around the same time, the CEO of The Gates Foundation offered a mea-culpa of some sort for getting it wrong on education reform in the US. But it hasn’t resulted in any hubris when it comes to Africa. Gates and Zuckerberg are major investors in Bridge International Academies, an American education corporation, which targets the world’s “700 million families who live on less than $2 USD per day” with, what they call the “highest-quality education products.” So far, Bridge (who tweet here) are serving around 100,000 students in Uganda, Kenya and Nigeria, and are hoping to expand to Liberia as well as to some 4,000 schools in the state of Andhra Pradesh in India in the near future.

Bridge has made the headlines – mostly not favorable – a few times this year. First, in March, the Liberian government announced it may entrust its entire primary education to the company. As widely reported at the time, Liberia’s interest in Bridge didn’t go down well with the UN’s Special Rapporteur on the Right to Education, Kishore Singh, who called it “ironic that Liberia does not have resources to meet its core obligations to provide a free primary education to every child, but [can] find huge sum to subcontract a private company to do so on its behalf.” To Singh, (and others) the move symbolizes the extent to which “public schools and their teachers, and the concept of education as a public good are under attack.”

Then last May, Bridge had a Canadian education researcher, Curtis Riep, (a PhD student who focuses on for-profit education), arrested in Kampala, Uganda. Bridge it turned out was anxious about Riep’s less than flattering findings on the quality of its schools there. Bridge even published a wanted ad for Riep in a Ugandan newspaper a few days before the arrest.

The accusations that Bridge leveled at Riep – which came to nought during the investigation – included criminal trespassing and impersonation. The incident put Bridge back into the news.

Driven by the desire to expand its operations and profit, and desperate to avoid any negative press, Bridge’s campaign to intimidate and discredit Riep isn’t surprising. And as Bridge has admitted, the deal with Liberia depended, in part, on how well things were going in Uganda and Kenya. Criticism, then, can be costly.

But Riep isn’t the only one to challenge Bridge’s “win-win” narrative. He’s part of a growing coalition of human rights professionals, who seek to halt the transnational corporate education reform movement. Education International (EI), the world’s largest federation of teachers unions, and ActionAid International, an international development organization with its secretariat based in Johannesburg, South Africa are at the forefront of this push back. To Angelo Gavrielatos, who leads EI’s campaign against the commercialization of education, and Tanvir Muntasim, the international policy manager for education at ActionAid, Riep’s arrest illustrates the extents to which Bridge will go to safeguard its “market share” in Africa. I asked them to tell us a little bit more about Bridge’s business model.

Let’s begin with the basics: who is backing and investing in Bridge International Academies?



Tanvir Muntasim (TM): Bridge has been in Kenya since 2009 and gets it funding from a curious mix of investors, including the International Finance Corporation (IFC), the World Bank’s private sector investment wing and bilaterals like the United Kingdom’s Department for International Development (DfID). Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg and Pierre Omidyar are major investors as well. In 2014, the IFC invested US$10 million in Bridge in Kenya. This is in stark contrast to the fact that at the same time, the Kenyan government received no funding to enhance the provision of education. Combined with Pearson [the biggest  education company in the world], Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg and Pierre Omidyar, Bridge has received over US$100 million in recent years. A for-profit organization like Bridge receiving development aid is questionable and doesn’t sit comfortably with human rights obligations, as recently seen in concerns expressed by both the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) and UN Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (UNESCR).

Is it the external funding that makes them low-cost? What’s the business model here?

Angelo Gavrielatos (AG): They’re only low-cost in name. It’s part of the marketing spin associated with Bridge and the like. They like to create the impression that they’re catering for the poor, providing access to out-of -school children. There is nothing low-cost nor affordable about the fees they charge. The fees can be up to 40% or more of the daily income of the poorest. They present themselves as caring companies, philanthropists, concerned with education and children, but if this were true, they would work with the education community and teachers to strengthen public education, but they don’t. The business-model of such for-profit chains is built on driving down teachers’ costs and creating economies of scale through standardizing curriculum development and delivery. The largest single budget line in schools is teacher salaries. For-profit school chains maximize their profit by either employing fewer teachers, underqualified unlicensed teachers or unqualified staff paid at a fraction of qualified teachers. In the case of Bridge, it employs high school graduates who receive a few weeks of training. The curriculum used in these for-profit chains is standardized and scripted unqualified staff deliver lessons by literally reading word for word from a tablet. The material downloaded onto the tablets, instruct staff exactly what to say, what to do, what to teach, and how to teach it. Activities are pre-set and scripted including instructing teachers when to ‘Pause’ when to ‘Circulate for 30 seconds’ when to ‘Rub the board’ and when to tell pupils to ‘Close your textbooks.’

For-profit chains also cut down on costs, by teaching in spaces that are not fit for the purpose. There are examples of vacated, unused office spaces being used as schools. These spaces often lack the most basic materials needed for effective teaching and learning. In many instances, they don’t have playgrounds, nor libraries, nor other necessary school facilities.

The business model used by for-profit chains like Bridge is such that they seek to either exploit loopholes or neglect legislative requirements with respect to the adherence of minimum standards required for the provision of schooling. In Kenya, for example, it argues that it is an ‘informal’ school operation and therefore it should not have to comply with government regulations applicable to schools insofar as the employment of qualified staff and adherence to the national curriculum is concerned. When the government announced last year that it would require half of its staff to be qualified, Bridge actually protested, because it considered such a regulation an infringement on its business. So much for the right of every child to be taught by a qualified teacher delivering an engaging curriculum!

In Uganda, the authorities put a halt to the expansion of Bridge’s activities, because it failed to meet regulatory requirements applicable to schools. In a statement to Parliament last August, the Education Minister (and First Lady), Janet Kataha Museveni, announced the closure of Bridge International Academies for failing to operate in accordance with national requirements with respect to the provision of education. A technical inspection report had found that, among other things, “poor hygiene and sanitation [in these schools] put the life and safety of school children at risk”. The Uganda National Teachers Union welcomed the announcement and called on the Government to remain steadfast in demanding compliance to minimum education standards.

TM: Until last January, none of Bridge’s schools in Kenya were registered with the government. Kenya has now passed regulation on the alternative provision of basic education and training institutions (APBET) and Bridge is attempting to register its schools. But the decision of the Ugandan government to shut down Bridge schools there is affecting their acceptability. The Liberian government has also decided not to let BIA run all the schools in the pilot and has invited other education providers to participate in the pilot, so the monopoly, along with the volume of government funding that they expected and which could have let them cut down costs further isn’t likely going to happen.

How do Bridge and other corporate education reformers defend these practices? Is there any evidence of success?

TM: Just last year, the World Bank President Jim Yong Kim claimed that Bridge schools are producing better learning outcomes than public schools for only US$6 a month. In a statement that we issued with other organizations, we pointed out that there is no evidence that supports this claim, apart from biased data that Bridge has produced itself. In reality, the costs are much higher than $6 a month. In Kenya, for example, when you add the costs of meals, uniforms, exam fees and text books, one child’s education can cost as much as USD$16 to $20 a month. That’s nearly 70 per cent of the monthly income of many people. And even if it were only $6 a month, it would still interfere with the food security of people in the poorest neighborhoods. We have raised these concerns with the World Bank multiple times, but we have seen little effect in their funding practices thus far, apart from the fact that Mr Kim has stopped citing it as a good example.

AG: There is no evidence at all to support the claims of these companies that it improves the quality of education. At the same time, there is plenty of evidence that shows that if you apply market principles to the provision of education, you deepen inequality and segregation. And that is what is happening with these schools.

Children are the first losers in this story, because with any corporation, the interests of Bridge and others lie with satisfying their profit motives and/or their shareholders. In education, where the profit motive prevails, the first losers are students, their teachers and the communities they serve. After health, education is the last frontier for venture capitalists. Just think about it, education and children are the most sustainable resources in the world. They will always be there. We should be challenging those individuals and corporations pushing this grotesque commercialization and privatization of education, which reduces students to nothing more than an economic unit. They should be asked a couple of very simple questions. ‘Do you support the right of every child to be taught by a qualified teacher, an engaging curriculum in a safe environment that is fit for its purpose? Would you volunteer your own child to be taught by unqualified staff with a scripted curriculum in a vacant office building?’ If their actions are anything to go by, the answer to these questions would be ‘no’. If it’s not good enough for their own children, it’s not good enough for other people’s children.

What needs to happen or be done to get these corporations out of the education space? And what role do governments play in protecting children from such profiteering?

TM: Hundreds of human rights organizations and teachers unions are confronting governments with the fact that they are shirking their responsibility (of providing free, quality education), and urging the World Bank to stop investing in these companies, to stop basing their views on self-produced evaluations and to support public education systems instead.  However, in Kenya we say that the World Bank has recently invested US$10 million in Bridge and none in public education. Even when Bridge resorted to the grossly unethical scare tactics to get an education researcher arrested and harassed in Uganda, we haven’t seen any formal reaction from the investors in Bridge. A few months ago, The UN Committee on the Rights of the Child said it was concerned that UK aid money was going to private education providers and called on the UK government to refrain from such financing. The UK government is being drawn into the dispute after investing £15 million in the venture fund, Novastar, to support the latter’s investment in Bridge International Academies.  We believe that if good quality public education is provided, the demand for such private schools will fall. The question we often ask community members is ‘if you could choose between good quality free public education and good quality private education, where would you send your children?’ The answer, invariably, is good quality public education. So that’s what we are fighting for.

AG: Quite frankly, what could be a higher order priority for a government than the provision of quality education, noting how key it is to the educational well-being of its children and a nation’s future productivity and therefore prosperity? Governments must implement and enforce a legislative and financing framework that ensures the achievement of Sustainable Development Goal 4, (inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all) and to protect and recognize the professional judgment of teachers and educators on questions of methodology, pedagogy, curriculum, assessment and reporting. Where non-state actors are involved in the provision of schooling, they must conform to minimum standards, follow national curricula, employ qualified teachers and use classrooms that are fit for the purpose. Companies must be required to adhere to strict financial regulations, including independent auditing and regulations to monitor how government funds are spent. And, where they are in receipt of any government funding, directly or non-directly, they must be not-for profit. The profit motive has no place in dictating what is taught, how it’s taught nor how our schools are organized.

Why is South Africa withdrawing from the International Criminal Court? And why now?

Last Friday, South Africa stunned the world when it announced it has officially initiated the process of withdrawing from the International Criminal Court (ICC).  The idea of a mass pullout of African states from the Court has been hanging in the air for a few years now.  The main point of contention has been the perceived bias of the Court which has made Africa front and center of its work. To date, all the ICC investigations are located on the African continent and all the individuals indicted by the Court are Africans.

There is one exception to the ICC’s apparent targeting of African perpetrators of atrocity crimes: an ICC investigation that opened earlier this year into war crimes committed between 1 July and 10 October 2008 during Georgia’s attempts to control a breakaway region. But that’s one exception.

Although the African Union has been critical of the ICC and has called on its members not to cooperate with the Court until these issues are resolved, it has stopped short of endorsing a collective withdrawal.

No state had formally taken the steps to withdraw from the Court, until now. All it takes to withdraw from the court is to send a letter to UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, and the withdrawal takes effect a year later. Given how easy this is, some African states’ threats to leave the court over the years were viewed by many observers as empty rhetoric.

But all eyes had been on Burundi lately, whose president just signed a decree to leave the ICC.  As far as we know, he has not notified Ban Ki-moon yet. Burundi’s steps to withdraw from the ICC comes after the ICC Prosecutor announced last April that she would initiate a preliminary examination of the situation there in which political violence (largely caused by the President’s decision to defy the constitution and run for a third term) has killed hundreds of people.

Burundi, a small central African state, however, is not South Africa, one of the most powerful states on the continent.

In its Instrument of Withdrawal sent to the UN Secretary General, South Africa’s foreign minister argues her country’s commitment to peaceful resolution of conflicts is “incompatible” with the Court’s interpretation of states’ obligations under the Rome Statue.

But one may ask, why South Africa? And why now?

South Africa’s withdrawal comes on the heels of the controversy that surrounded its failure to arrest the ICC-wanted President Omar al Bashir last year when he attended an AU summit there. South African civil society groups have taken President Jacob Zuma’s government to court over the issue.  Given that the Rome Statute had been domesticated in South Africa’s national laws, the Supreme Court of Appeals ruled that the government had violated national laws and its international obligations for not having arrested Bashir and surrendered him to the ICC.  The government’s claim that Bashir was protected by sovereign immunity under international customary law did not stand.

It is likely that the South African government will run into trouble at home again, because as Justice Richard Goldstone argues the move to withdraw from the ICC may be illegal because the executive branch did not allow the parliament to vote on the issue. But this will likely have no bearing over the effectiveness of South Africa leaving the ICC.

So, now what?

South Africa’s leaving the ICC may have a domino effect, the extent to which is unknown at this point. Africa constitutes the largest regional bloc in the Court’s membership. Without a doubt, African states pulling out will be a major blow to the project of ‘ending impunity’ for atrocity crimes, which is the primary goal of the ICC, as stated in the preamble of the Rome Statute. Now all eyes are on Kenya, Uganda, and Namibia, which could very well be the next states to jump off the ICC wagon.

It is evident that the most powerful states – and their clients – in the world are outside of the reach of the ICC. (In fact, the United States is not even a member. Neither are China and Russia). And for the court to be truly international and legitimate, it must be an institution where the rule of law applies equally to all individuals and states.  On the other hand, however, we should not fall for the simplistic narrative of the Court unfairly targeting Africans.  In fact, the ICC is involved in many African states only because those states have specifically requested an ICC’s intervention: Uganda, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Central African Republic (twice), Côte d’Ivoire, Mali, and just last month, Gabon. The fact that some African states have viewed the Court as a useful instrument to dispose of rebels or political opponents should not simply be swept under the rug.

On the brink of peace

Afro Colombians in Cali. Image credit: Maria Claudia via Wikipedia.

It seems as if Gabriel García Márquez, by divination, foresaw what would happen in Colombia this month, when he wrote in his seminal work, One Hundred Years of Solitude: “It was as if God had decided to put to the test every capacity for surprise and was keeping the inhabitants of Macondo in a permanent alternation between excitement and disappointment, doubt and revelation, to such an extreme that no one knew for certain where the limits of reality lay.”

This could indeed be a succinct summary of what has happened in Colombia recently, wherein the space of one week: 1) a peace agreement between the Colombian government and the main rebel group, the FARC-EP was rejected in a national plebiscite, bringing the peace process to a grinding halt; 2) the campaign manager of the main party opposing the peace agreement acknowledged the use of misleading advertisement; and, 3) the Colombian President, Juan Manuel Santos, was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

Colombia, where I’m from, is a country of contradictions, where peace and war inhabit the same nation. This has been the case for decades. It is a country with levels of inequality comparable to South Africa, where I’m based. It is a country where the presence of the state follows the wealth of the citizens. To think of Colombia now, is similar to thinking of South Africa in 1994; where uncertainties of moving towards peace are met with fears that are manipulated by politicians. The terror of the “Swart Gevaar” is paralleled by the fear-mongering anti-peace agreement campaign led by Senator (and former president) Uribe and his party, the Democratic Center.

People who voted “no” to the agreements voted so for a mix of reasons. These include: concerns regarding the possibility of impunity for the guerrillas; the fear of the expropriation of land; concerns regarding the political participation of guerrillas in politics; the fear of a pro-gay agenda hidden within the agreements (an untrue claim reproduced by some Christian churches in Colombia); and a deep distrust of the intentions of the FARC-EP, informed by their actions in the failed negotiations between 1998 and 2002.

Some Colombians now claim that the mechanisms of representation don’t in fact work in Colombian democracy. This is, however, false; the fact that representation does work is proven by the government, and the country’s electoral commission recognizing the votes of Colombians in spite of the negative consequences for the peace process. Remarkably, both the FARC-EP and the government recognized the results of the plebiscite, which means the peace deal must be renegotiated, but pleaded to maintain a ceasefire across the country. Representation is working well. What is failing is the capacity to inform citizens, not manipulate them. The latter speaks to, and gives evidence of, the opportunistic nature of the politics taking place in Colombia. Another challenge lies in the participation of citizens; one can justify citizens voting for or against the agreement out of valid concern for the future of the country, but how does one interpret absenteeism of 63% in a vote to ratify a peace agreement?

Communities and victims in conflict areas have been left in dismay and uncertainty, and a deep fear of what might happen next. The outcome of the voting has left millions of Colombians in disbelief, as if their future has been defined by the lies and manipulation of those politicians campaigning against the peace agreements, in the belief that a “better deal” could be struck. The results of the plebiscite embody the same influences that have brought about the Duterte presidency in the Philippines, Brexit in the UK, and the rise of Donald Trump in the United States; presenting a challenge to democracy itself and showing how the necessity to distinguish information from data, truth from Facebook posts, and arguments from tweets is vital to keep democracy away from fascism. Technology has changed the way we relate to information and democracy.

It cannot be ignored that the negotiations of the peace agreements were an elite-elite conversation between the leadership of the FARC-EP and the Colombian government. Ownership by civil society of the peace process was left for later. One could attribute the failure to communicate accurately the agreements and their implications not only to the terror campaign deployed by the party of Uribe, but also to the fact that civil society and those who would benefit the most from the agreements were not included as instrumental actors.

In spite of this, the reaction of civil society has been more than inspiring. In those rural communities where civilians have been victims of massacres and assassinations amidst the violence unleashed by the different armed actors in the war, civilians have come to the fore once more to ask for an agreement now; offering forgiveness and leading hope for the country. The reaction of these groups has inspired other movements in the urban areas who are now organizing themselves in something that could be described as the Colombian awakening for peace, or the Colombian spring. Campaigns under the slogans #AcuerdoYa (agreements now) and #PazALaCalle (to the streets for peace) are mobilizing those who want agreements for peace.

In addition, the “extra time” of the peace process has exposed a series of opportunities to build a more comprehensive peace; with the promising possibility that other rebel groups, such as the ELN, who were not part of the negotiation between the FARC-EP and the government, might join a wider peace process (not necessarily under the same agreement) as it has been announced the formal start of negotiations by the end of October in Ecuador. Ownership for peace can now be given to citizens, civil society organizations and grassroots organizations.

This is where the symbolic power of awarding the Nobel Peace Prize to President Santos is giving Colombia and its leaders a second chance; one that can bring minor changes in the agreements, the inclusion of other actors and the acknowledgement of the concerns of some Colombians calling for a wider agreement that allays fears and surpasses the skills of warmongers.

Some of the politicians negotiating a new peace deal are the same ones that used lies in their campaigns against the agreements. In fact, they are looking to extend the negotiations as long as possible so they can profit in the parliamentary elections set to take place in 2017, and the presidential elections of 2018. This is an attempt to sequestrate and veto peace for political reasons. The award of the Nobel Peace Prize leverages the negotiations for peace, but the veto power of some of these actors is still latent. As long as agreements do not benefit them or their cadres, they won’t support a broader peace for Colombians.

It is in this space where encouragement and support from overseas is necessary. Colombia needs to be able to envision another country beyond the reincarnation of our memories of war; where we can learn that hope and peace is achievable.

African Women on the big screen, in more ways than one

Lupita Nyong’o at San Diego Comic Con. Image credit Gage Skidmore via Flickr

When it comes to African women on the big screen, the Kenyan actress Lupita Nyong’o, is currently the signifier for how far black African women have traveled in big budget film. Nyong’o won an Academy Award for her debut film 12 Years a Slave, starred in the reboot of the Star Wars series (The Force Awakens) and her new film, Queen of Katwe, about a chess prodigy in Uganda, recently opened “nationwide” in US commercial cinemas. Basically, Nyong’o has achieved bona fide Hollywood stardom – unprecedented for an African actress. Of Queen of Katwe  Nyong’o has said: “This is a view of Africa told with Africans front and center. It’s their narrative, whereas in most films where you see Africa or the Africans, it’s told from a foreign perspective.”

With credit due to Nyong’o’s individual achievements and the Queen of Katwe’s hype, these may obscure the number of recent, small budget films doing the festival rounds  that give great insight into African women as actors, characters and filmmakers. When women make films about women, at least we know they no longer stand on the sidelines – there are well-developed characters, who the audiences can identify with.

Films made by Africans initially emerged in the 1960s as colonized countries gradually attained independence. Senegalese director and writer Ousmane Sembene (celebrated in a new documentary film) produced the first feature film by an African in 1966, La noire de … The first film by a female director, Kaddu Beykat by Safi Faye, also came from Senegal. West Africa has generally had a very vibrant film-making culture, and works from Algeria and Egypt films have also garnered international attention over years. At Burkina Faso’s renowned Fespaco Film Festival, a woman has never won the award for best film, but the last edition of the festival, in 2013, the runner-up prize for best documentary went to Nadia El Fani from Tunisia for Meme pas mal, and best African diaspora film to Mariette Monpierre from Guadeloupe, for Le bonheur d’Elza. And at the African Movie Academy Awards in Nigeria, Kenyan director Wanuri Kahiu won best film in 2009 with From a whisper. Filmmakers from the sub-Saharan region have enjoyed less of the international spotlight, with the exception of a handful of South Africans.

From a selection of films shown at the African Film Festival, Cologne, which this year focused on African women in cinema, there was no particular typecast in the films by female directors. Tunisian filmmaker Leyla Bouzid’s first feature film A peine j’ouvre les yeux (2015), has toured several film festivals and won the awards at the Venice Days of the Venice Film Festival, as well as, as best fiction film at the Dubai International Film Festival. It revolves around 18 year old Farrah, a rebellious young woman who would rather perform subversive rock music and be critical of the regime of the Ben Ali, than accept her admission to medical school. And although Farah is pressured by her family, society and the regime, she dares to dream, has her first sexual experiences, and pushes boundaries like any other teenager.

As I Open My Eyes (2015)

Bouzid noted that Young Tunisians, Egyptians, Moroccans identified with Farrah: “‘That’s us, that’s how we are’, they said”. As she told U.S. website Fusion: “It’s important that they see that young Arab people are exactly the same, like anywhere else. They have hopes, they have desires, they want to be free, they want to express sexuality.”

W.a.k.a (2013) by Cameroonian filmmaker Francoise Ellong, is another courageous film. It tells the story of a young mother, who turns to sex work to fend for herself and her son. While the film over-explains at times and the characters are perhaps a bit too polished for the milieu they work in, it nevertheless draws you in and manages to tell the story of the main character as she strives to separate her two lives. W.a.k.a breaks the taboos and highlights the issue of prostitution in a way that makes it more accessible and digestible, than for instance, the Congolese film Viva Riva!, which is deserving of strong praise, but delves deeply into Kinshasa’s crime scene and does not make for easy viewing. We see the lighter side of life in short films like Soko Sonko from Ekwa Msangis, as it pokes fun at “male and female roles” – will the father, who would rather be at a football match make it through the jungle of hairdressers in time for his daughter’s first day at school?

A welcome offering from Southern Africa is Sara Blecher’s film, Ayanda (2015). Set in Johannesburg, it revolves around a young woman who decides to revamp the auto-mechanic shop she inherits from her father. Blecher manages to balance light-hearted romance, family dynamics and the struggle of the youth to gain a foothold in modern-day South Africa. Blecher herself compared the film to Juno, the comic drama — set in the American Midwest — about a suburban teenager coping with an unplanned pregnancy. But critics say that Ayanda falls short of dealing with the deeper emotional aspects of the story. However, the work caught the attention of acclaimed filmmaker Ava DuVernay (Selma, 13th) and is now being distributed in the US by her company.

Ayanda (2015)

Diversifying the image of Africa on the screen is of course not limited to African women, but as Kenyan filmmaker Judy Kibinge (Something Necessary, 2013) puts it, the film industry on the continent is still young and “women aren’t a rare species.” New technology has made it easier to produce home-made or low-budget films and for filmmakers to distribute their content independently. This means that many young people are trying their hand at the craft that many Africans traditionally had less access to – and African women are no exception.

Filmmaking however remains a difficult terrain says Kibinge. It’s become easier to make films, in the age of Netflix, but actually making money from the work remains a huge problem. Through her company Docubox, Kibinge now supports young documentary filmmakers by running workshops, finding funds and providing a platform for them.

“Every film”, she says, “is still a labor of love by the filmmaker.”

‘This is Lara Pawson reporting for the BBC …’

Bullet marked building in Huambo, Angola. Image via Wikipedia.

The first cigarette I smoked was a Marlboro. I was twenty-one. I didn’t feel sick and I didn’t feel dizzy and I was on ten or fifteen a day for the rest of my twenties. Living in Luanda, quite a stressy place, I could smoke two packs a day. My preferred brand was YES. They came in a gold box marked with a red dot like those stickers art galleries use to indicate that a painting has been sold. At some stage, I had to go to the medical centre because I was finding it so hard to breath. A Cuban doctor examined me. He told me that unless I wanted to die young I should give up immediately. During the consultation he sucked on a cigar. If anything, this made me take him more seriously.

I still think smoking looks cool. I still miss it. And I kid myself that smoking may have saved my life. Cigarettes are a useful negotiating tool at checkpoints. I’ve never met a soldier who wouldn’t accept a cigarette.

Now, in my head, I see grass as tall as I am and a red road stretching into the distance. Far ahead, we can see the explosion expanding into the sky. Another ambush. A coach-load of young army conscripts. I’d watched them loading up the day before, so cocky and excited about the prospect of fighting, boasting that they would be the ones to kill Jonas Savimbi. When we heard the landmine detonate, I saw my father sitting in a deckchair beside a swimming pool in Provence. He was wearing a straw hat and taking notes from a book with a gold fountain pen. There was an abundance of bushes of pink fragrant flowers.

Colette and Violette were sisters. They were short, although not unusually so for Mediterranean women of a certain age. Colette was the worker. She was also the teacher. With patience, she helped me get to grips with the subjonctif. She also trusted me with the key to the door to the wine cellar. Violette did very little apart from grind fresh meat for the cat each morning. She also kept an eye on the pet tortoise, and would encourage me to feed it the remains of the day’s vegetables. When the sisters took me on special day trips, for example to the beach, it was always Violette who drove. In second gear. The whole way! But although they had very different personalities, they were in absolute agreement about the young Algerian man I’d met in town. He was not allowed to visit the auberge ever again. You could call this a turning point in my life.

The man who told me I was a natural, was made for telly and would go far, instigated another major turning point. It was a BBC training session at White City. I was learning how to make news packages for the screen. I ended my little report on Ivory Coast’s war with a shot of two women walking barefoot away from the camera. On their backs, they were each carrying a heavy stack of wood. “Far from the bureaucracy of United Nations negotiations, ordinary Ivorians continue to be weighed down by war. This is Lara Pawson reporting for the BBC.” The cliché was what he really admired. I knew I had to leave.

I wear a yellow badge with the words We Are All Migrants printed in blue. A barista in Salisbury pointed at it and laughed. A man in Finsbury Park station saw it and thanked me. A third person, someone close to me, said he hates badges like that: It might as well say We Are All Monkeys.

One of my regrets is that I didn’t take more photographs. Although I was based in Angola for over two years, and have since travelled there for months on end, I hardly have any pictures. I don’t remember taking any in Ivory Coast either, or Mali or Ethiopia or Niger or Burkina Faso. I did take a few in Ghana, but I sold them to a glossy inflight magazine. I didn’t take any of the French sisters either, or all those men who helped transport us from London to Budapest. I tell myself it doesn’t matter because memories of moments fill my head. But would I have more accurate memories if I had more photographs?

I only learned how to truly sit on a horse when I was told to keep my eyes closed. I was living in a hamlet in Somerset with an old man we called The Major. Every morning, starting before seven, we’d take turns to train on top of one of his thoroughbreds. The horse that really taught me how to use my weight and balance and breath was a blind stallion.

Yesterday, I was with a very dear friend. She said, without hesitation, I think I am losing my sight in one eye.

One night in the town of Ndalatando, we were invited to attend a dance. We spent most of the evening seated at a table at the edge of the concrete floor. We drank beer and talked quietly and followed the silhouettes of young couples dancing kizomba. There was no electricity. A few disco lights ran off a small generator. Shortly before midnight, for the final dance, the young women came to the floor holding red carnations. The flowers were a symbol of love, we were told, given to the boys the night before battle. But I have it in my head that they were flowers for the grave.

Where have all the flowers gone? We used to sing that at school, my sister and I. It was the seventies and that was a seventies song.

By the early eighties, when we were teenagers, I used to be able to make my sister laugh so much she’d wet her knickers. Sometimes, on the way home from school, I’d start making her laugh just as we got off the bus, to see if she could make it all the way up one road then the next without losing control. If I tried really hard, I could probably still make my sister wet her knickers from laughing today, but I don’t see her enough and when I do, I forget to try.

*This is a second excerpt from Lara Pawson’s new book This is The Place to Be (read the first published here last week). It can be purchased here.

This is Lara Pawson reporting for the BBC

Bullet marked building in Huambo, Angola. Image via Wikipedia.

The first cigarette I smoked was a Marlboro. I was twenty-one. I didn’t feel sick and I didn’t feel dizzy and I was on ten or fifteen a day for the rest of my twenties. Living in Luanda, quite a stressy place, I could smoke two packs a day. My preferred brand was YES. They came in a gold box marked with a red dot like those stickers art galleries use to indicate that a painting has been sold. At some stage, I had to go to the medical centre because I was finding it so hard to breath. A Cuban doctor examined me. He told me that unless I wanted to die young I should give up immediately. During the consultation he sucked on a cigar. If anything, this made me take him more seriously.

I still think smoking looks cool. I still miss it. And I kid myself that smoking may have saved my life. Cigarettes are a useful negotiating tool at checkpoints. I’ve never met a soldier who wouldn’t accept a cigarette.

Now, in my head, I see grass as tall as I am and a red road stretching into the distance. Far ahead, we can see the explosion expanding into the sky. Another ambush. A coach-load of young army conscripts. I’d watched them loading up the day before, so cocky and excited about the prospect of fighting, boasting that they would be the ones to kill Jonas Savimbi. When we heard the landmine detonate, I saw my father sitting in a deckchair beside a swimming pool in Provence. He was wearing a straw hat and taking notes from a book with a gold fountain pen. There was an abundance of bushes of pink fragrant flowers.

Colette and Violette were sisters. They were short, although not unusually so for Mediterranean women of a certain age. Colette was the worker. She was also the teacher. With patience, she helped me get to grips with the subjonctif. She also trusted me with the key to the door to the wine cellar. Violette did very little apart from grind fresh meat for the cat each morning. She also kept an eye on the pet tortoise, and would encourage me to feed it the remains of the day’s vegetables. When the sisters took me on special day trips, for example to the beach, it was always Violette who drove. In second gear. The whole way! But although they had very different personalities, they were in absolute agreement about the young Algerian man I’d met in town. He was not allowed to visit the auberge ever again. You could call this a turning point in my life.

The man who told me I was a natural, was made for telly and would go far, instigated another major turning point. It was a BBC training session at White City. I was learning how to make news packages for the screen. I ended my little report on Ivory Coast’s war with a shot of two women walking barefoot away from the camera. On their backs, they were each carrying a heavy stack of wood. “Far from the bureaucracy of United Nations negotiations, ordinary Ivorians continue to be weighed down by war. This is Lara Pawson reporting for the BBC.” The cliché was what he really admired. I knew I had to leave.

I wear a yellow badge with the words We Are All Migrants printed in blue. A barista in Salisbury pointed at it and laughed. A man in Finsbury Park station saw it and thanked me. A third person, someone close to me, said he hates badges like that: It might as well say We Are All Monkeys.

One of my regrets is that I didn’t take more photographs. Although I was based in Angola for over two years, and have since travelled there for months on end, I hardly have any pictures. I don’t remember taking any in Ivory Coast either, or Mali or Ethiopia or Niger or Burkina Faso. I did take a few in Ghana, but I sold them to a glossy inflight magazine. I didn’t take any of the French sisters either, or all those men who helped transport us from London to Budapest. I tell myself it doesn’t matter because memories of moments fill my head. But would I have more accurate memories if I had more photographs?

I only learned how to truly sit on a horse when I was told to keep my eyes closed. I was living in a hamlet in Somerset with an old man we called The Major. Every morning, starting before seven, we’d take turns to train on top of one of his thoroughbreds. The horse that really taught me how to use my weight and balance and breath was a blind stallion.

Yesterday, I was with a very dear friend. She said, without hesitation, I think I am losing my sight in one eye.

One night in the town of Ndalatando, we were invited to attend a dance. We spent most of the evening seated at a table at the edge of the concrete floor. We drank beer and talked quietly and followed the silhouettes of young couples dancing kizomba. There was no electricity. A few disco lights ran off a small generator. Shortly before midnight, for the final dance, the young women came to the floor holding red carnations. The flowers were a symbol of love, we were told, given to the boys the night before battle. But I have it in my head that they were flowers for the grave.

Where have all the flowers gone? We used to sing that at school, my sister and I. It was the seventies and that was a seventies song.

By the early eighties, when we were teenagers, I used to be able to make my sister laugh so much she’d wet her knickers. Sometimes, on the way home from school, I’d start making her laugh just as we got off the bus, to see if she could make it all the way up one road then the next without losing control. If I tried really hard, I could probably still make my sister wet her knickers from laughing today, but I don’t see her enough and when I do, I forget to try.

*This is a second excerpt from Lara Pawson’s new book This is The Place to Be (read the first published here last week). It can be purchased here.

Barack Obama–The ‘HalfAfrican’ President

Obama with family in Kenya. Image via Wikipedia.

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump gained an unexpected endorsement from Kenya in the summer of 2016. Malik Obama, President Obama’s Kenyan half-brother, declared his support for the Republican nominee. Trump, the proud vanguard of the Birther movement, praised the endorsement, while Malik, who had been the best man at Obama’s wedding, complained to the Kenyan press that his brother, “has neglected his African heritage and wants nothing to do with it despite campaigning on a platform that he will help transform Africa.”

Malik’s comments reflect many Africans’ discontent with Obama’s foreign policy and the disappointment that an anticipated “special relationship” between Kenya and the US did not come to pass. But Malik’s views and their eager acceptance by Trump are also relevant to American politics, playing to the substantial segment of the American Right that has made politicized gossip and racial and religious innuendo about the president’s roots – gone viral in the internet age – central to its platform of identity politics and obstructionism.

Studying the Obama and Kenya saga for more than a decade, we have observed that stories about Obama’s Kenyan heritage consistently provide clickbait for a range of parties, from liberal partisans in the US and supporters across Africa who have celebrated the Obama-Kenya connection, to the lurking conspiracy theorists who have decried Obama’s Kenyan heritage. While trying to make sense of the competing streams of Birtherist condemnation and pan-Africanist celebration will undoubtedly challenge scholars and politicos for the foreseeable future, certain trajectories and their significance to Kenyan, American, and global politics are clear.

Obama’s inauguration day in Kogelo, Kenya (2009). Image credit Zoriah via Flickr.

Obama’s Luo heritage made him a celebrated figure in Kenya well before he achieved fame at home. Early in 2004, as we were conducting research in Western Kenya not far from Kogelo, where the Obama family’s dala, or ancestral homestead, is situated, we kept fielding questions and hearing stories about that “Luo” running for the U.S. Senate. By the time Obama gave his life-changing address at the Democratic convention and then sailed to victory in the Illinois Senate race, it was evident that Kenyans were reading Obama’s ascendancy through the lens of Kenya’s patrimonial politics.

By 2006, when Senator Obama made his first official visit to Kenya, his “homecoming” was celebrated by thousands of Kenyans who lined the streets from Nairobi to his grandmother’s modest home in Nyanza. Kenyans expressed their enthusiasm for Obama, sporting commemorative t-shirts and kanga (wraps), and toasting him with the newly renamed “Senator” beer. But at the same time, Kenyans, and Luo in particular, made their patronage expectations of Obama increasingly overt. As one resident of Luoland confidently asserted, “We will get support from America, as Africans, as Kenyans and particularly as Luo.”

Image by Matt Carotenuto

Viewing Obama’s ascendancy through Western Kenya’s long histories of political marginalization and developmental disparities and through an ethnic identity constituted in migration, Luo people reached eagerly into the global, Luo diaspora to claim Obama as their “son” and patron. They were, however, quickly disappointed. In his remarks and speeches during the 2006 visit, Obama turned patrimonial politics on its head, arguing forcefully before a gathering of Kenya’s political and intellectual elite that (ethnic) patronage was a barrier to growth and both an incentive to and symptom of corruption.

Two years later, Obamamania swept the globe as Obama was elected president. For Obama’s supporters at home and abroad, his biracial background and cosmopolitan upbringing were cause for celebration, markers of a new, more tolerant and inclusive global age. Yet, the 2008 campaign had been hard-fought, with Obama’s political opponents consistently drawing on the new president’s Kenyan descent as evidence of his dangerous Otherness and lack of “belonging.” Indeed, while Trump pushed for Obama to produce his birth certificate, a proliferation of books, blogs and bluster asserted that Obama was truly a “son of the soil” of Western Kenya and thus legally ineligible to be president; Obama (and his administration) were not merely un-American, but illegitimate.

Throughout his administration and again after his 2012 victory, Obama’s relationship to Kenya has been profoundly constrained by the American Right’s consistent use of his Kenyan heritage to indict him as “foreign” and “untrustworthy.” These attacks characterized Kenya’s past inaccurately through western idioms of crisis, reading Kenya’s infamous anti-colonial rebellion (Mau Mau) as “anti-white” and contemporary politics through the ethnocentric prisms of “tribalism” and “radical Islam.” Although scholars and left-leaning pundits often casually dismissed these revisionist attacks as the overwrought ramblings of the Far Right, this discourse demonstrates the power of using corrupted versions Kenya’s past as political tools, fueling the rise of Donald Trump (whose grassroots campaign was propelled by claims over Obama’s supposed Kenyan-ness)  and stoking the colonial nostalgia of Boris Johnson, Britain’s post-Brexit Foreign Secretary.

Obama refrained from visiting Kenya until summer 2015. Even then he faced criticism from the Right – ignorant of Kenya’s status both as the United States’ chief counter-terrorism partner in Africa and as an emerging economic powerhouse on the continent –accused of squandering Americans’ tax dollars on a pointless visit “home.”

Obama Matatu. Image credit Cordelia Persen via Flickr

In the 2016 presidential race, the question of the sitting president’s “American-ness” remains a critical topic. A simple Google search of the phrase “Obama and Kenya” provides a jarring lens into the profoundly racist character of the Alt-Right’s conspiracy theories about Obama’s “Kenyan-ness,” amplified in the current electoral cycle by Trump’s tacit support. More generally, polls consistently indicate that more than 50% of Trump supporters believe Obama was born abroad. (According to an NBC News poll released in August, 72% of Republicans doubt that Obama was born in the United States.)

While Trump has recently – and rather disingenuously – endeavored to consign Birtherism to the dustbin of history, the significance of the president’s Kenyan heritage has operated as an important engine to propel the Trump campaign’s anti-immigration (and anti-Muslim) message and a space for the Clinton campaign to challenge Trumps racial bona fides.

As Obama’s presidency draws to a close, conjecture has already begun about what his connection to Kenya will ultimately yield and how his tenure as the first American president of African descent will shape U.S. politics, particularly in the arenas of foreign policy and race relations. During his 2015 visit Obama told Kenyans, “the next time I’m back here I may not be wearing a suit,” giving rise to speculation the Obama Foundation would make Kenya a priority. If the last 12 years offer any insight into the future, Obama’s legacy will be shaped by contested histories and the politics of belonging.

The paradoxes of soft dictatorship

The Obamas and Bongos in August 2014. Image Credit: US Department of State.

For the second time in seven years, violent unrest has followed the presidential election in the small country of Gabon in West Equatorial Africa. The crisis started on August 28, when the candidate of the united opposition, Jean Ping (age 73), declared himself the winner of the presidential election. In the country’s capital, Libreville, people retreated into an anxious pause. Three days later, on August 31, the incumbent president, Ali Bongo (age 57), endorsed the official result announced by the National Electoral Commission (Commission électorale nationale autonome et permanente, or Cénap). Bongo had made a small advance: 49.8% of the votes against 48.2% for Jean Ping, equivalent to 5,594 votes out of a registered total of 627,805.

At the announcement of Bongo’s victory, the streets of Gabon went up in flames. Protesters erected roadblocks and set fire to the National Assembly. The police and the army were dispatched. While the international community multiplied calls for peace and for a recounting of the votes, the UN and the EU encouraged Ping to agree to an official intervention of Gabon’s constitutional court, an institution staffed by judges devoted to Ali Bongo. A delegation headed by the President of Chad, Idriss Déby (himself implicated in electoral corruption) arrived in Libreville on September 21 to help the court’s vote-checking.

On September 24, the constitutional court completed the recount and confirmed Bongo’s victory (with a slightly larger majority: 50.6 % for Bongo to 47.2 % for Ping). Despite the protest of Federica Mogherini, the High Representative for the External Affairs of the European Union, UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon soberly “noted” the decision of the court and the election of Ali Bongo.

Gabon is a small country located in the equatorial rainforest, with a population of 1.6 million. Endowed with rich natural resources (oil, manganese, uranium, and lumber), it has proved a bastion of stability in a region undermined by war, violence and social upheaval. Since independence (1960), the country has nurtured strong economic and diplomatic links with France, the former colonial ruler.

In 2009, French president Nicolas Sarkozy made it known that he supported Ali Bongo’s candidacy. Recent scandals, from revelations about the real-estate properties of Gabonese politicians in France to the “ritual crimes” allegedly performed to sustain the influence of selfsame politicians, seem to have strengthened rather than weakened this historical association between the two ruling classes. But, many other Western democracies have also continued, year in and year out, to support the regime in place. Gabon has indeed remained a “soft” dictatorship based on popular politics of regional equilibrium and a fairly successful system of redistribution of national wealth. Both have spared the country from the bloody ethnic conflicts of its neighbours, and tempered the rapacity of the local political class.

Under Omar Bongo (1967-2009), Ali’s late father, the relationship between Gabonese politics and the electorate was built on a flexible system of co-optation called “Union nationale” [national unity], inaugurated in the 1960s by the first president of Gabon, Léon Mba.  Mba surrounded himself with cabinet ministers composed of representatives of all ethnic groups and provinces in the country.  In 1967, Omar Bongo, who succeeded Mba, embraced “Union nationale.” A native of a minority ethnic group (Téké) located in the eastern corner of the country, Bongo’s system of proportional government reassured the public that the only group with a relative demographic advantage, the Fang (approximately 35% of the population), would not monopolize power. To this, he added new forms of political patronage for opponents to his regime, cajoling them into lucrative positions in the government or the administration.

The longevity of the Gabonese political system also lies in the many channels of redistribution that connect politicians (known colloquially as “les Grands”) to ordinary citizens. Even if they siphon off most of the national income, les Grands feed a pyramid of allies, dependents and voters with money, protection and gifts of basic necessities, such as food, clothes, small appliances and medicine. These “donations” tether the Gabonese to the whims of an ostentatious political class that remains firmly in control of the national revenue.

Since the 1950s, the state has maintained tight control on electoral process. The ruling party, the Parti démocratique gabonais (PDG) functions like a well-oiled machine.  In 2016, for example, the Cénap announced the date of the election only eight weeks before the vote. It then restricted the official opening of the election campaign until August 13, fourteen days before the vote. The central government also conducts the census of voters and prints all the voting cards. This year, it took a mere three weeks, from August 8 to August 25, to manufacture and distribute 628,124 cards. One can only imagine the opportunities to discard less compliant voters. Last, but not least, close allies of the president staff appeal courts and arbitration institutions.  For instance, Marie-Madeleine Mborantsuo – a former lover of Omar Bongo – has been at the helm of the constitutional court for many years.

Ali Bongo suffers a poor reputation among ordinary Gabonese: many refer to him as “le Diable” (the Devil), and see him as an intruder.  Rumors among the population suggest that he was born of unknown parents in Nigeria, then adopted and raised by Omar Bongo and his wife. The public shuns Ali’s obscure origins, his long military training in Morocco and his friendship with foreign experts, referring to his connections to the “Foreign Legion,” – a term specifically applied to leaders and implying they are controlled by powerful and evil outsiders. Covertly, the public gossips that Ali is a closeted homosexual, a status linked in this part of Africa to sinful behavior and witchcraft.

More importantly, Ali Bongo’s coming to power in 2009 imposed a dynastic logic that broke away from traditional political patronage and ethnic equilibrium. Ali set aside the ethnic patronage of his predecessors to rely on a circle of right-hand men, whose loyalty he has tested during his long years of relative anonymity.  By contrast, Jean Ping’s slogan C’est dosé (“A Right Dosage”) nods to the political tradition of ethnic and national balance. The son of a Chinese businessman and a woman from Ombooué (south Gabon), Ping is of an ethnic minority, and thus well placed to restore the balance of power between the regions of Gabon. Active during the 1990s, a decade of economic prosperity in Gabon, Ping embodies a return to a more prosperous economic era. The fact that he belongs to Ali Bongo’s close family (in the 1990s, he was the companion of Pascaline, Ali Bongo’s sister, with whom he has two children) does not seem to discourage his supporters.  On the contrary, it guarantees that he has a deep knowledge of the local state, and that he will be able to govern.

The lukewarm reactions to the constitutional court’s declaration of Bongo’s victory on September 24 suggest that international actors have accepted the outcome of the elections. In Gabon itself, it is not clear whether the elite slighted by Bongo has enough popular backing to confront the heavily armed, well-organized president and ordinary Gabonese face ruthless retaliation. The opposition in Gabon is thus historically weak, poorly organized and ready to collude with those in power. Since 1960, no movement in Gabon has been able to propose a political alternative. Any attempts to shift the status quo meet with strong repression. In 1964, a coup attempt against Léon Mba was put down with the support of the French army. In 1990-1991, when pressures for the liberalization of politics ended single-party rule, the stamina of the opposition proved short-lived: with the help of France, then-president Omar Bongo quickly contained and crushed its leaders, before coopting some into government positions.

Gabonese like to mock that theirs is a country “where nothing ever happens.” However, at the time of writing, foreign observers were reporting that roadblocks obstructed the main roads in Libreville, while fighter jets flew low over the city. In times of soft dictatorship, there can always be surprises.

The paradoxes of a soft dictatorship

The Obamas and Bongos in August 2014. Image Credit: US Department of State.

For the second time in seven years, violent unrest has followed the presidential election in the small country of Gabon in West Equatorial Africa. The crisis started on August 28, when the candidate of the united opposition, Jean Ping (age 73), declared himself the winner of the presidential election. In the country’s capital, Libreville, people retreated into an anxious pause. Three days later, on August 31, the incumbent president, Ali Bongo (age 57), endorsed the official result announced by the National Electoral Commission (Commission électorale nationale autonome et permanente, or Cénap). Bongo had made a small advance: 49.8% of the votes against 48.2% for Jean Ping, equivalent to 5,594 votes out of a registered total of 627,805.

At the announcement of Bongo’s victory, the streets of Gabon went up in flames. Protesters erected roadblocks and set fire to the National Assembly. The police and the army were dispatched. While the international community multiplied calls for peace and for a recounting of the votes, the UN and the EU encouraged Ping to agree to an official intervention of Gabon’s constitutional court, an institution staffed by judges devoted to Ali Bongo. A delegation headed by the President of Chad, Idriss Déby (himself implicated in electoral corruption) arrived in Libreville on September 21 to help the court’s vote-checking.

On September 24, the constitutional court completed the recount and confirmed Bongo’s victory (with a slightly larger majority: 50.6 % for Bongo to 47.2 % for Ping). Despite the protest of Federica Mogherini, the High Representative for the External Affairs of the European Union, UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon soberly “noted” the decision of the court and the election of Ali Bongo.

Gabon is a small country located in the equatorial rainforest, with a population of 1.6 million. Endowed with rich natural resources (oil, manganese, uranium, and lumber), it has proved a bastion of stability in a region undermined by war, violence and social upheaval. Since independence (1960), the country has nurtured strong economic and diplomatic links with France, the former colonial ruler.

In 2009, French president Nicolas Sarkozy made it known that he supported Ali Bongo’s candidacy. Recent scandals, from revelations about the real-estate properties of Gabonese politicians in France to the “ritual crimes” allegedly performed to sustain the influence of selfsame politicians, seem to have strengthened rather than weakened this historical association between the two ruling classes. But, many other Western democracies have also continued, year in and year out, to support the regime in place. Gabon has indeed remained a “soft” dictatorship based on popular politics of regional equilibrium and a fairly successful system of redistribution of national wealth. Both have spared the country from the bloody ethnic conflicts of its neighbours, and tempered the rapacity of the local political class.

Under Omar Bongo (1967-2009), Ali’s late father, the relationship between Gabonese politics and the electorate was built on a flexible system of co-optation called “Union nationale” [national unity], inaugurated in the 1960s by the first president of Gabon, Léon Mba.  Mba surrounded himself with cabinet ministers composed of representatives of all ethnic groups and provinces in the country.  In 1967, Omar Bongo, who succeeded Mba, embraced “Union nationale.” A native of a minority ethnic group (Téké) located in the eastern corner of the country, Bongo’s system of proportional government reassured the public that the only group with a relative demographic advantage, the Fang (approximately 35% of the population), would not monopolize power. To this, he added new forms of political patronage for opponents to his regime, cajoling them into lucrative positions in the government or the administration.

The longevity of the Gabonese political system also lies in the many channels of redistribution that connect politicians (known colloquially as “les Grands”) to ordinary citizens. Even if they siphon off most of the national income, les Grands feed a pyramid of allies, dependents and voters with money, protection and gifts of basic necessities, such as food, clothes, small appliances and medicine. These “donations” tether the Gabonese to the whims of an ostentatious political class that remains firmly in control of the national revenue.

Since the 1950s, the state has maintained tight control on electoral process. The ruling party, the Parti démocratique gabonais (PDG) functions like a well-oiled machine.  In 2016, for example, the Cénap announced the date of the election only eight weeks before the vote. It then restricted the official opening of the election campaign until August 13, fourteen days before the vote. The central government also conducts the census of voters and prints all the voting cards. This year, it took a mere three weeks, from August 8 to August 25, to manufacture and distribute 628,124 cards. One can only imagine the opportunities to discard less compliant voters. Last, but not least, close allies of the president staff appeal courts and arbitration institutions.  For instance, Marie-Madeleine Mborantsuo – a former lover of Omar Bongo – has been at the helm of the constitutional court for many years.

Ali Bongo suffers a poor reputation among ordinary Gabonese: many refer to him as “le Diable” (the Devil), and see him as an intruder.  Rumors among the population suggest that he was born of unknown parents in Nigeria, then adopted and raised by Omar Bongo and his wife. The public shuns Ali’s obscure origins, his long military training in Morocco and his friendship with foreign experts, referring to his connections to the “Foreign Legion,” – a term specifically applied to leaders and implying they are controlled by powerful and evil outsiders. Covertly, the public gossips that Ali is a closeted homosexual, a status linked in this part of Africa to sinful behavior and witchcraft.

More importantly, Ali Bongo’s coming to power in 2009 imposed a dynastic logic that broke away from traditional political patronage and ethnic equilibrium. Ali set aside the ethnic patronage of his predecessors to rely on a circle of right-hand men, whose loyalty he has tested during his long years of relative anonymity.  By contrast, Jean Ping’s slogan C’est dosé (“A Right Dosage”) nods to the political tradition of ethnic and national balance. The son of a Chinese businessman and a woman from Ombooué (south Gabon), Ping is of an ethnic minority, and thus well placed to restore the balance of power between the regions of Gabon. Active during the 1990s, a decade of economic prosperity in Gabon, Ping embodies a return to a more prosperous economic era. The fact that he belongs to Ali Bongo’s close family (in the 1990s, he was the companion of Pascaline, Ali Bongo’s sister, with whom he has two children) does not seem to discourage his supporters.  On the contrary, it guarantees that he has a deep knowledge of the local state, and that he will be able to govern.

The lukewarm reactions to the constitutional court’s declaration of Bongo’s victory on September 24 suggest that international actors have accepted the outcome of the elections. In Gabon itself, it is not clear whether the elite slighted by Bongo has enough popular backing to confront the heavily armed, well-organized president and ordinary Gabonese face ruthless retaliation. The opposition in Gabon is thus historically weak, poorly organized and ready to collude with those in power. Since 1960, no movement in Gabon has been able to propose a political alternative. Any attempts to shift the status quo meet with strong repression. In 1964, a coup attempt against Léon Mba was put down with the support of the French army. In 1990-1991, when pressures for the liberalization of politics ended single-party rule, the stamina of the opposition proved short-lived: with the help of France, then-president Omar Bongo quickly contained and crushed its leaders, before coopting some into government positions.

Gabonese like to mock that theirs is a country “where nothing ever happens.” However, at the time of writing, foreign observers were reporting that roadblocks obstructed the main roads in Libreville, while fighter jets flew low over the city. In times of soft dictatorship, there can always be surprises.

Colonial Sahara

Image courtesy of Life is Waiting filmmakers

Western Sahara serves as a powerful and timely reminder to the world that colonialism has not ended in Africa. It continues in the form of what the Sahrawi (the indigenous people of Western Sahara) activist Maty Mohamed-Fadel referred to as “the global shame” that is the Moroccan occupation of Western Sahara.

The majority of Western Sahara has been under occupation by Morocco for decades, following incomplete decolonization by Spain in 1975 when the territory was split between Morocco and Mauritania. A bitter war between the Polisario (the Sahrawi resistance movement) and Moroccan and Mauritanian forces ended in a ceasefire in 1991, and left Morocco in control of most of the territory. Polisario controls a small liberated zone, while hundreds of thousands of Sahrawi refugees live in camps in neighboring Algeria. Life for the Sahrawi people has effectively been on hold since then, as they continue waiting for their right to self-determination through a referendum on independence that was meant to take place in 1992.

Despite the ongoing, and often brutal Moroccan occupation, and the lack of international attention paid to the situation, the Sahrawi are not idly waiting for things to change. A new documentary film, Life is Waiting, directed by Iara Lee, is a celebration of Sahrawi strength and resistance, which is clearly alive and well amongst those living in Western Sahara and those in the refugee camps or in exile in other parts of the world.

The film opens with vibrant scenes of exiled Sahrawi engaging in an annual nonviolent demonstration in Madrid, Spain intercut with an overview of the history of the territory. It then goes on to vividly portray the constant struggle of the Sahrawi to assert their identity in the face of the everyday violence of the occupation.

We see Sahrawi poets, musicians, dancers, singers, media activists, athletes, and filmmakers all engaging in non-violent acts of resistance from graffiti, raising the Western Sahara flag (which is illegal), and watch as Lee covertly films police brutality in the occupied territory. Refugees also host an international marathon, international art festival, and an international film festival in the camps. Popular Sahrawi singer, Mariem Hassan (to whom the film is dedicated), describes the importance of using art to show the strength of the Sahrawi people. Even the structure of the refugee camps in Algeria is a symbolic act of resistance, with different areas deliberately named after parts of the occupied territory in order to reproduce and sustain the connection to it.

Lee largely eschews the use of narration and the opportunity to interview officials from the United Nations, Morocco, or even the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic (SADR), which controls the liberated territory. Instead she simply lets the Sahrawi people tell their story in their own voices (although some international activists are also interviewed). This gives a platform to the ordinary, perhaps the extraordinary people who are directly affected by the occupation, and the highlights variety of ways in which they continue to resist it.

The chance to be at the center of the narrative is one that the Sahrawi rarely get. Despite the fact that no state recognizes Moroccan sovereignty over Western Sahara and more than 80 states have at various times recognized SADR’s claims to the territory, the world continues to remain largely indifferent to the situation. As Mohamed Laabied, director of RASD-TV, the Sahrawi TV station headquartered in the refugee camps laments: the lack of attention paid to the occupation by international media and Moroccan censorship efforts “hurts, it really hurts … without the media there is nothing.”

The dangers of international indifference and the perpetuation of the status quo, which one Sahrawi describes as a “situation of neither war nor peace,” are evident in the film when a number of young Sahrawi, who have grown up knowing only occupation or exile, raise the possibility of a return to war, saying that it cannot be worse than a life of exile or living in a refugee camp. But the overwhelming majority of Sahrawi in the film, young and old, are in favor of using non-violent resistance and talk of their songs or films as the new weapons in the struggle.

Recently, the Polisario has warned that tensions with Morocco are coming close to devolving into a military confrontation. This highlights how unsustainable the current situation is. Watching this film serves as a timely reminder that it should not take a return to war to bring attention to the issue. The ongoing failure to advance a political solution and the warning from the Polisario makes the Sahrawi commitment to non-violent resistance even more remarkable. Towards the end of the film, the British human rights activist, Keith Lomax, emphasizes the need to find peaceful ways to give visibility to the conflict. The Sahrawi people are clearly doing this already and it is up to the rest of the world to do its part.

Watching and sharing Life is Waiting is an excellent start. Another step, as Lomax points out, is to support the boycott, divestment, and sanctions campaign against companies complicit in the Moroccan occupation (for instance through the exploitation of Western Sahara’s natural resources) like the one that targeted apartheid South Africa or the one targeting Israel for its violation of international law and Palestinian rights.