Sean Jacobs's Blog, page 314

Africa is still front and center at The Hague

2016 is off to a very busy start for the ICC. And yes, Africa is still front and center at The Hague. Here are a few developments to help you stay updated on what’s happening.

Last December, the ICC finally moved into its permanent headquarters, leaving the small space that they had rented since it was created in 1998. Long gone now are the tiny IKEA courtrooms, or “the Swedish sauna,” as one lawyer once called them. Moving into new offices on the shores of the North Sea that have costed 204 million euros is certainly an indication that the ICC isn’t going anywhere anytime soon. It is a permanent feature of international justice – and of international politics, regardless of what its officials say.

The trial of former Ivorian President Laurent Gbagbo – along his ally Charles Blé Goudé, has just started, four years after Gbagbo was transferred to The Hague. This is the first time in history that a former head of state stands trial before the ICC (the charges against Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta were dropped before they reached the trial phase). Gbagbo and Blé Goudé are each charged with four counts of crimes again humanity, in relation to the political violence that erupted in Côte d’Ivoire after the 2010 elections.

The confirmation of charges for former Lord Resistance Army commander Dominic Ongwen have just concluded. (The confirmation of charges is a procedure at the ICC where the prosecutor presents to the pre-trial chamber the preliminary evidence that it has; the judges then issue a ruling whether the evidence is satisfactory enough to move to the trial phase or not.) Ongwen is charged with 70 counts of war crimes and crimes against humanity.

Abducted by the LRA at age 9, Ongwen was a child soldier who later moved up the ranks of the LRA command structure. As such, Ongwen’s case is both one of a victim and an alleged perpetrator, blurring the lines between the two, as British journalist Michela Wrong has documented.

The confirmation of charges against the Malian Ahmad Al Faqi Al Mahdi will start soon. It is argued that during the Islamist takeover of Northern Mali, Al Mahdi participated in the destruction of religious monuments, notably Sufi shrines, in Timbuktu. This is the first time someone is pursued by the ICC on charges of war crimes related to the destruction of religious symbols. The prosecution of these types of crimes is still lagging in international law, following the destruction of the Buddhas of Bamiyan by the Taliban in 2001, and the ransacking of Palmyra by the ISIS last year.

The case against Al Mahdi, also known by his nom de guerre Abu Turab, is one to watch very closely for many reasons, as Mark Kersten has written here. To complicate the matters further, Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) has abducted the Swiss Béatrice Stockly in Timbuktu last month, and they just released a video featuring her and requesting among other things that the ICC let Al Mahdi go.

The trial of former Congolese rebel leader Bosco Ntaganda opened last September and is still ongoing. In 2014, Ntaganda walked into the US embassy in Kigali and asked to be taken to The Hague. He was the deputy chief of staff of the Patriotic Forces for the Liberation of Congo (FPLC). His group was active in the Ituri province of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). Ntaganda is charged with 18 accounts of war crimes and crimes against humanity.

Last December, Thomas Lubanga and Germain Katanga, whose trials had been complete at The Hague, were transferred to the DRC – their home country – to serve their prison sentences. Lubanga has been sentenced to 14 years of prison after being found guilty of recruiting child soldiers. Given that he had been in ICC custody since 2006, he has to serve four more years. Katanga should have been freed a couple weeks ago, after having served 2/3 of his 12-year sentence. But the Congolese government has expressed the intention to prosecute him and keep him in jail, which, of course, raises a host of questions.

Finally, is it possible that the ICC is at last seriously setting its eyes outside of Africa? Last week, Pre-Trial Chamber I gave the Prosecutor the green light to open a full investigation on crimes allegedly committed in Georgia during the Russia-Georgia war of 2008. This will be the first full investigation outside of Africa. Other situations under preliminary examination – which have not reached the investigation phase yet – include Afghanistan, Colombia, Nigeria, Guinea, Iraq, Ukraine, and Palestine.

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Published on February 08, 2016 03:00

Weekend Music Break No.91

We’re back with the first Weekend Music Break of 2016. A series of videos for you to enjoy as you ease into relax (or catchup) mode:

Our selection this weekend starts off with a video directed by AIAC film editor Dylan Valley — Niko10Long hips us to the real Politrix going down in Cape Town, South Africa; Brooklyn staple with Guyanese roots, Jahdan Blakkamore ushers in an upliftment anthem to end all sufferation; The multi-talented, Boston-based Sierra Leonean scientist/rapper David Moinina Sengeh brings a positive Afrobeat jam and video; Mozambican-Canadian singer Samito releases a dance art video for his epic Tiku la hina; Keeping it in the Mozambique realm, Spoek Mathambo reveals Batuk, his new partnership with Aero Manyelo, a deep house project inspired by the Afro-luso house scene based out of Maputo; Daniel Haaksman proposes to Rename the Streets in the former colonial capitals (his being Berlin) to not celebrate the war criminals and crimes of the nation’s past, #NamesMustFall — respect Daniel; Stephen Marley celebrates the great innovations from African history, alongside Wale and the cast from the Fela! musical; Renown coreographer Maimouna and Les Ambianceuses out of Paris call for all women to take their power back via a little “Booty Therapy”; Christain Scott aTunde Adjuah brings us back to an age where Jazz and politics were one, via an integral #BLM lens, at NPR’s Tiny Desk concert series; and finally, Seattle based Zimbabwe-DRC crew Chimurenga Renaissance reveal their new EP Girlz with Gunz via a beautifully executed thematic streaming video.

Have a great weekend, and enjoy!

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Published on February 05, 2016 11:00

How to make and find theaters to show your movie if you’re a black filmmaker in South Africa

It is telling that the four top-grossing South African movies of all time are all films in which the actor and director Leon Schuster (who made a career out of doing broad slapstick candid camera movies) wears blackface. Also telling is the fact that South African critics barely notice this as an offense (for example, check this reviewer.) It’s no secret that what passes for South African cinema is not representative of the population. (“South African film” effectively exists on television.) In reality, the South African film industry mostly exists as a cheap location for Hollywood and Euro budget films and commercials. Nevertheless, once a black filmmaker enters the system and gets past the money phase, they need to get their films seen. But apart from festival screenings, it is still hard to crack the distribution dilemma. Visit any South African multiplex on any given weekend and look for the local content. Usually not much, unless it is set in an English boarding school or its an Afrikaans musical comedy (mostly thinly disguised rip offs of Hollywood musicals), and you won’t find dramas exploring the social world of the country’s black majority. The rationale is usually “there wasn’t an audience for black South African films.” Last year the South African filmmaker Akin Omotoso–on his previous output, see here–set out to challenge this status quo when he released his romantic comedy, ‘Tell Me Sweet Something.’ The film was a departure for Omotoso, who is known for the hard-hitting social realism of ‘God is African’ and ‘Man on Ground.’ In this feature, a refreshing take on Johannesburg as a place of romance, Omotoso takes a page out of the rom-com playbook and aims for a wide South African audience. Here’s what happened. Below we republish Akin’s public letter on his experience followed by a profile of Akin by Danielle Bowler who has contributed here before–Dylan Valley, Sean Jacobs.

***

Open Letter by Akin Omotoso

Dear Stakeholders,

I am writing this email to bring you up to speed on the situation regarding the movie Tell Me Sweet Something currently in cinemas.

Please permit me a bit of background. In the process of raising funds for this romantic comedy, we are constantly told there wasn’t an audience for black South African films. Our response was, we don’t think the right kind of films are being made for black audiences. Instead of the constant problematizing of black lives we wanted to give audience a positive experience a film about successful, handsome black people falling in love in Joburg, a Joburg re-imagined as a city of love. In other words we set out to disprove this myth.

Tell Me Sweet Something opened on the 4th of September on 47 screens and in five days had reached the million Rand mark and was the number three ranked film by screen average. This article by Destiny testifies to its success. As does this article that first appeared in City Press on Sunday 20th of September.

Films traditionally drop about 40/50% in their second weekend. Tell Me Sweet Something dropped by 23% and finished at no. 5.

Having made the economic case for films like Tell Me Sweet Something, we found ourselves reduced from 47 screens in our third week to 27 screens. Despite this drop in the number of screens Tell Me Sweet Something remained in the Top 10 at no. 10 and still performed better than some of the new titles.

The exhibitor states that it was taken out of sites where the film was not performing and this is totally understandable. However it has now started to be taken out of key sites such as Gateway and Sandton, where the film is performing extremely well, this will have a big impact on the films bottom line. When asked why it was being taken out of site, this was the reply from Mr. Clive Fisher the GM of AcquisitIons and Scheduling replied,

I understand the film is still performing at Sandton, however with only 10 screens and the amount of titles releasing every week we do not have space for the title anymore.

I had another look to try and see if we could load a few shows for the film but unfortunately there is no space.

Sorry.

Thanks

So I’m writing this letter to you to highlight the struggle local films face when trying to build economic arguments. What is the point of an Emerging Filmmaker’s Initiative to boost the industry if this is the response to a film that is performing well? What is the point of local filmmakers growing audiences for our content when the decision to move successful films from key sites is treated like this? What is the point of all the effort the team from Tell Me Sweet Something have put into filling cinemas, when this is the response we get.

This action perpetuates the myth that black films do not do well. What Tell Me Sweet Something began to demonstrate in its first two weeks was that this is not in fact the case.

We need your help to get the exhibitors to re-think their decisions to remove the film from its well performing sites, and to not just treat this as another film, but to contribute to the advancement of South African film in general and to give Black films a fair chance in particular.

What we‘re appealing for is a change in attitude. We will not have economic success if the exhibitor does not change its attitude to black films that are performing well, to understand that it’s the responsibility of us all Filmmakers and Exhibitors to transform the cinema landscape in this country.

***

“Akin Omotoso’s Hustle” by Danielle Bowler

Akin Omotoso is standing at the top of the escalators.

I gather my cool, calm my inner stan, and prepare to walk past him. It’s Monday night in Johannesburg and I’m at Rosebank’s The Zone cinema to watch his new film Tell Me Sweet Something, starring Maps Maponyane and Nomzamo Mbatha. A cloud of hype has surrounded the film, and I am curious about whether it will envelop me in its excited air, or merely dissipate the moment my eyes make contact with the colossal screen.

In that moment, however, my eyes are locked on the five-inch screen of my Samsung S4, as I try to find something to avert my attention from the fact that Khaya Motene, Akin’s Generations alter-ego, is a few meters away from where I’m standing.

Aimlessly pacing and waiting for my friends to arrive, I sink into my oversize army-green jacket, observing Akin from a distance. My cool is disrespectfully deserting me, because, my brain is constantly repeating one refrain: “Akin Omotoso is at the top of the escalators,” like the exasperating chorus of a paint-by-numbers Top 40 song that I can’t ignore.

To every passing person, he calls out variations of one question: “What film are you watching? Are you watching my film? ‘Are you watching Tell Me Sweet Something?,” in that familiar baritone. Someone hesitantly responds that they are about to see the feted Southpaw, a story of a troubled boxer trying to get his life and career back on track. Akin responds: “Jake Gyllenhall doesn’t need your money.” I laugh, and fire off a text to my tardy friends.

And it’s true. To date, the globally released Southpaw has grossed $52,169,310 so far, shown in thousands of theatres. A dizzying number. Jake Gyllenhall doesn’t need our money. In South Africa, it has apparently taken $119,313 at the box office, while the same site claims Tell Me Sweet Something has seen a $157,391 return. Its open weekend grossed over close to R1 million, with the film currently closing in on the R2 million mark.

But it’s been cut to 19 screens, from an initial 47.

This week discussions about the local film industry and the structures that support it, or rather don’t, have erupted, spurred on by conversations around Omotoso’s film and concerns about it being removed from cinemas where it was performing well, particularly in Johannesburg’s Sandton and Durban’s Gateway shopping centers.

Ster Kinekor representatives have allegedly countered this claim over email to Omotoso, claiming the film was only removed from cinemas where it was not performing well, with a representative saying: “I understand the film is still performing in Sandton, however with only 10 screens and the amount of titles releasing every week, we do not have space for the title anymore. I had another look to try and see if we could load a few shows for the film, but unfortunately there is no space. Sorry. Thanks.” Support for the film and the local industry, from a distributor’s perspective, seem to be driven by business concerns. “Sorry. Thanks” seems an indifferent synonym for a resolutely delivered “shem for you.”

Frank Ocean lyrics ricochet through my head as a kind of internal rallying call, as I read those words: “Please recondition yourself / It’s not just money.” I start to wonder about how we are sometimes blind to things that are beyond our perspective or the world we move in, which so comfortably accommodates the few it is built for. Frank croons through my consciousness, philosophizing: “why see the world, when you got the beach, and the sweet life.” I nod my head in agreement.

This is what we mean when we say that things are structural, which can often sound like academese – that language spoken solely by the academy, which is insular and exclusionary, even if it’s an unintended consequence. The structures that are designed to support or run various industries, cemented over centuries, cannot address what would be involved in truly developing, growing and taking seriously the local film industry and audiences, if they run on the idea that they operate in a meritocracy. When they assume local and international films exist in the same world and environment, able to stand side-by-side and succeeding on the same terms and conditions, they miss how the scales are unequally weighted. These films cannot be treated equally, in an environment where Jake Gyllenhall and the makers of Southpaw and other economic centres of the global industry don’t need our money, but Akin Omotoso and others really do.

The familiar, vanilla centre still holds, and we move to its beat, trying to attune it to the rhythms of our frenetic dance. But it was never calibrated to hear the frequencies we operate on.

Kagiso Lediga and Refilwe Modiselle are standing outside the cinema, ready to interact with the exiting audience, as we step outside our cinematic sojourn, into the stark lights of the Cinema Prestige foyer. Seeing the two supporting thespians appear before me, as if they apparated from the celluloid world to reality in a split-second creates a strange kind of pleasurable dissonance. Another one of Akin’s unique marketing strategies. It’s hyperreal. They interact with the viewers, takes pictures with us and discuss our opinions on the film, inviting both critique and praise. We share our views, punctuated by the haze of having just viewed it and it only having partially condensed in our minds.

The film did not reinvent the rom-com genre, but operated within its neatly scripted confines, albeit in stunning high-definition, centralizing Joburg’s gentrified inner-city areas of Maboneng and Braamfontein. Nomzamo Mbatha has a natural ease to the way she performs, filling the role of the moody writer, Moratiwa, trying to write “the great African love story” like slipping into a second skin. But I’m caught up in Thomas Gumede’s scene-stealing performance as the hilarious side-kick Gordon, Thembi Seete’s on-screen effervescence as Lola: a foil to Moratiwa’s seriousness and Thishiwe Ziqubu’s extreme comfort and believability on camera as Moratiwa’s best friend Tshaka – not to mention arresting beauty.

The musician in me, however, is preoccupied with how Omotoso centralised South African music in the film, and I comment on how much I enjoyed hearing Shekinah Donnell and Kyle Deutsch playing through the standard emotional climax of the rom-com. Akin smiles and nods.

There is a silent, inner dance of delight at seeing familiar surroundings and hearing familiar voices on screen, as well as watching a narrative about love headed up by black characters play out. As I think about it, it reminds me of an article about US television in an unprecedented era punctuated by Lee Daniels’ Empire and Shonda Rhyme’s well, everything, which commented on a time gone by “When You Had To Flip To The Back Page Of ‘Jet’ To Find Black People On TV.” Some things are shifting, but many are remaining the same, particularly the rules of the game in our location, which keep Jake Gyllenhaal and people who look like him and have similar GPS coordinates rolling in cinematic cash dollar.

Akin explains the politics involved in making the film later, at the bottom of another set of escalators. It’s past 11pm, and we have been talking for over an hour. He talks us through the creative ways he sourced funding for the film, how Theodore Witcher’s Love Jones is embedded in its inception, animatedly taking us through the process of rehearsals and improvisation and providing a backdrop to the one hour and thirty minutes of cinema that we just viewed. We laugh about his unorthodox, hustler approach to getting people to see his film, as he tells us that he personally attends many screenings, trying to drive sales. My cool is slowly returning, but I’m a little in awe of that dedication, which colours how I start to see the film – as a necessary and important intervention, even if positioned in a comfortable, money-spinning genre and not flaw-free.

*This post is part of a new regular series on Africa is a Country called #MovieNight

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Published on February 03, 2016 03:30

The militant philosopher of Third World liberation

In 1953 Fanon moved to Algeria to work in the small town of Blida, about 50 miles from the capital Algiers. He applied for a position as a psychiatrist, having recently qualified. Fanon did not leave France for Algeria because he predicted the future publishing success of The Wretched of the Earth, or that a war and revolution against France was about to break out. Algeria transformed Fanon. At the large hospital in Blida he experimented with therapies that he had seen at Saint Alban and developed with the Spanish revolutionary psychiatrist François Tosquelles. After 1954 the hospital was quickly drawn into the war.

The Hospital at the Time of the Revolution

The hospital that had been for a brief period a sanctuary for those physically and psychologically injured was sucked into the maelstrom. Members of Fanon’s staff were arrested, some beaten, others had joined in the strike action called by the Front de Libération National; others went to fight in the mountains. As Fanon’s colleague Alice Cherki remembers, ‘the hospital was considered to be a veritable nest of fellaghas. Fanon was certainly a target … a sweep up was being prepared.’ There was no neutrality. A repressive noose was tightening around Blida’s hospital.

Fanon’s working life was also overturned. His was now seeing patients who were suffering from torture, or inflicting it. Despite Fanon’s post-1961 image as an apostle of violence, he treated, with great humanity French-Algerian torturers – some of these stories appear as case notes in the final chapter of his last book. Both torturer and tortured in Fanon’s psychiatric practice were victims of the Algerian war.

One story illustrates the Fanon’s humanity. A patient, a policeman, was referred to Fanon. He complained that he could not sleep at night. Each time he fell asleep he was woken by the sound of screaming. Each scream, he explained to Fanon, he recognised as the screams of a man beaten up, hung from his wrists for two hours, and the final highest pitch was the scream as a person was being electrocuted. Fanon helped to secure the policeman sick leave after which he returned to France. In the middle of one consultation Fanon was called out. Josie, his wife, suggested to the policeman that he wait in their house inside the hospital grounds. Instead the policeman decided to walk in the hospital grounds. A short time later Fanon saw the patient doubled over dripping with sweat. He had passed one of his victims in the hospital. Fanon gave him a sedative and calmed him down. Fanon then went in search of the tortured Algerian. Eventually he was discovered cowering in a toilet, terrified that the police had been called and he would be arrested and tortured again. Finally, Fanon convinced him that he was mistaken and that he had not just seen the policeman.

Such was the work of this apostle of violence. After leaving Algeria in 1957 Fanon and his wife Josie move to Tunisia. Tunis had recently become one of the bases for the FLN (National Liberation Front) outside Algeria as militants and cadres were forced to flee the country with the defeat of the Battle of Algiers. Increasingly Fanon was absorbed in his work for the FLN and focused on building support and practical solidarity for the Algerian cause in sub-Saharan Africa. He also developed lasting links with other militants in national liberation organisations on the continent. Frequently Fanon championed the FLN way of doing things: an insurrection followed quickly by an escalation to the armed struggle. In this respect Fanon shared a naive belief in the ‘armed’ route to liberation with Guevara.

Dangerous Voluntarism

While there is much to distinguish Fanon from Che Guevara; Fanon’s understanding of revolutionary transformation, his sophisticated grasp of national liberation, but in his advocacy of the armed struggle (no matter what), the two men were remarkably and tragically similar. In Guevara’s laughable and tragic – though courageous – attempts to export the Cuban model to the Congo in 1965 and Bolivia in 1967, he made the same mistakes as Fanon. Both men shared a dangerous voluntarism that saw action and armed revolutionary struggle as a simple act of will. Fanon was a far more sophisticated thinker and theorist than Guevara but he shared many of the Argentinians belief in the heroic guerrilla. As Guevara sought a simple exporting of guerrilla war in the mid and late 1960s, so Fanon had earlier.

Yet Fanon would not have subscribed to Guevara’s belief that it was the duty of a revolutionary to make revolution, that became a rallying cry of many ‘true’ revolutionaries in 1960s and 1970s, but he did slip disastrously into a similar voluntarism with his fervour for the Algerian model. Still the differences between the men need to be restated, in case there is any confusion. While Guevara celebrated small bands of guerrilla fights, Fanon saw mass involvement of ordinary people essential for making the revolution and remaking – recerebralising – the people themselves. Revolution as an act of self-emancipation resides deeply in Fanon’s revolutionary thinking, but is not present in any meaningful sense in Guevara’s writing or practice.

As we have seen, Ghana in the late 1950s was a place of exciting meetings and possibilities. Accra was both host to pan-African conferences and a HQ for nationalist leaders and parties. Fanon loved it. He met other men – sadly mostly men – as driven and possessed as himself. Fanon did not like people who held themselves back, went to bed early instead of talking and arguing through the night. Before and after the diagnosis of Leukaemia, Fanon would repeatedly state that he did not like people who limited themselves – in French ‘s’economiser’ – literally ‘economised’ on their output of energy, conserving and limiting their activity and engagement. He criticised Simone de Beauvoir, after he had met her with Jean-Paul Sartre in Rome in July 1961. De Beauvoir was, according to Fanon, ‘one of those people’ who held themselves back. He knew and understood this side to himself, describing such exuberance, his total commitment to life as ‘doing a Fanon.’ In Ghana he met many such ‘Fanon’s’ but none with his penetrating and unyielding vision.

Liberate the north from the south

In late 1960 Fanon received authorisation to carry out a reconnaissance of a possible West African supply route into southern Algeria, but also an entry point for an African Legion to attack the French from the south. ALN troops needed to be supplied with extra forces and armaments. Supplies were cut off by the French but ALN troops fighting the French in the south could, hypothetically, be reached from sub-Saharan Africa. Fanon set out to prove this could be done.

The mission revealed a basic historical and geographical fact about the continent: at no point was the desert an impenetrable divider of the continent separating the civilised north from the barbaric south. The view that sub-Saharan Africa was populated by savages dominated the European thought throughout the 19th and much of the 20th century. In reality there had existed for many millennia a continual flow of goods and people between the Maghreb and sub-Saharan Africa. Gold travelled north, as certain handicrafts, salt and meats travelled south in a vibrant trade that crisscrossed the expanse of desert.

Fanon wanted to find out if a route could be used by the African Legion to replenish combatants in Wilaya V and VI. In October 1960 Fanon set out. He kept a field journal that he intended to use when he returned to write a report for the FLN leadership on the prospects for a Southern Front. What is remarkable about the report – which is found in his posthumous collection of writings Pour la Revolution Africaine – is that although these were rough notes written in the difficult circumstances of an uncomfortable and clandestine trip across 2000 miles, the language was powerful and passages beautiful. It seems Fanon was incapable of writing plain prose. The journal starts with a series of bullet points, ‘To put Africa in motion, to cooperate in its organisation, in its regroupment, behind revolutionary principles. To participate in the ordered movement of a continent – this was really the work I had chosen.’ He then gives a continental survey: Mali was ‘ready for anything’ offering a ‘bridgehead’ to ‘precious perspectives.’ The Congo ‘which constituted the second landing beach for revolutionary ideas’ but is now caught up in an ‘inextricable network of sterile contradictions.’ He then stresses the need, though now delayed, to ‘besiege the colonialist’s citadels known as Angola, Mozambique, Kenya and the Union of South Africa.’

The field journal expresses Fanon’s commitment to African unity distinct from the hollow sloganising from much of the nationalist movement on the continent. Fanon’s Africa was not the continent ‘of the poets, the Africa that is sleeping, but the Africa that stops you sleeping because the people are impatient to be doing something, to speak and to play.’ Fanon states the objectives of his mission – a declaration of determined will, ‘We must immediately take the war to the enemy, leave him no rest, harass him, cut off his breath. Let’s go. Our mission: to open up the Southern Front. To bring in arms and munitions from Bamako. Stir up the population of the Sahara; infiltrate our way into the high plains of Algeria. Having taken Algeria to the four corners of Africa, we have to go back with the whole of Africa to African Algeria, towards the north; towards the continental city of Algiers. That is what I want; great lives … cross the desert. To wear out the desert, to deny it, to bring together Africa and to create the continent … take the absurd … the impossible, rub it up the wrong way and hurl a continent into the assault.

Fanon’s contribution

For Fanon it was not enough to celebrate the achievements of decolonization, it was necessary to educate, to strain at the limits of national freedom and to provoke and generate debate. The All-African Peoples Conference in 1958 in Ghana was the place to do this, and to learn about the movements on the continent. Ghana was both a sub-Saharan headquarters for movements on the continent still reaching towards independence and a laboratory for real-existing nationhood and independence. The country was already a collection of vivid and painful contradictions. Many white people had stayed on to assist the new government. Even the Ghanaian army was run by British officers who were on lease to the new country until its own officers had been trained. At the same time the Nkrumah was an outspoken advocate for pan-Africanism. For a generation of young militants he was a figure to emulate. Fanon would learn much from his temporary posting in Ghana.

Three years later, in 1961, recently diagnosed with leukaemia and understanding severity of the prognosis, with life ebbing from him Fanon dictated his masterwork, The Wretched of the Earth to his wife, friends and secretaries. When he seemed to recover temporarily and find some strength after a new round of treatment he travelled to the Tunisian/Algerian border (Ghardimaou in Tunisia) and spoke to the assembled troops of the Armée de Libération Nationale (ALN). Many were illiterate, readying themselves to fight the French (and enter a free Algeria). He spoke to them from his recently drafted and now most famous chapter in The Wretched of the Earth about the pitfalls of national consciousness. He described how the national bourgeoisie after independence is only too happy to accept crumbs thrown to it from the departing colonial powers. Without social reform, without political and economic transformation, national liberation would be an empty shell. Fanon’s parting gesture in his last public appearance was a warning to militants of the anti-colonial struggle: make this independence for yourselves, ensure that the self-organisation and confidence you have developed in the fight against the French becomes a sustained and continuous programme of revolutionary transformation after the Algerian flag is raised. On the threshold of victory Fanon said be warned of your leaders, ‘No leader, however valuable he may be, can substitute himself for the popular will; and the national government … ought first to give back their dignity to all citizens, fill their minds and feast their eyes with human things, and create a prospect that is human because conscious and sovereign men dwell therein.’ Fanon’s final act was to the revolutionary movement that he devoted the last and most important years of his life, but he was also subversive of that revolution.

After Fanon’s final and exhausting resurrection from his terminal sickness he accepted treatment in the United States and flew there in October 1961 from his exiled Tunisian home. Fanon had stubbornly refuse treatment in the United States, condemning the country for its lynching and discrimination of black people. He crossed the Atlantic for the last time, but to no avail. On 6 December 1961 he died. He was 36 years old.

* Leo Zeilig’s biography of Frantz Fanon, The Militant Philosopher of Third World Liberation, has just been published by I B Tauris.

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Published on February 02, 2016 03:00

Why did French Justice Minister Christiane Taubira resign?

Last week, France’s Minister of Justice, Christine Taubira (known for introducing the 2013 same-sex marriage law in France) resigned from the government, contesting French President François Hollande’s new ‘terrorist law.”

Shortly after the Paris attacks, French President François Hollande, along with the Prime Minister Manuel Valls, pledged to conduct legal reforms that would allow taking away the citizenship from convicted terrorists with dual nationality. Hollande’s proposal to ‘loosen’ the laws on revoking citizenship is to be reviewed by the National Assembly this coming Wednesday and is part of a package of security measures the government proposed after the November attacks.

The proposed law (known as the “loss of nationality”) has been criticized mainly on the grounds that it would create a two-tier state in which citizenship is precarious for some, a privilege that can be taken away.

Taubira highlighted the dangers associated with creating categories of sub-citizens within the French Republic and resigned from her role in the Government in protest. On her Twitter account she announced, “Sometimes you remain in place to resist. Sometimes resisting means you go.” (She’s also been posting quotations by Aimé Césaire.)

Hollande’s “loss of nationality” policy is only the latest episode in France’s identity crisis. Citizenship- or it’s revocation- has been a tool used by the French state to delineate the boundaries of it’s national identity. Marine Le-Pen of the French extreme right-wing party the National Front also advocated for similar policies over the years, asking to strip dual citizens of French nationality. Former French president Nicolas Sarkozy also expressed his support for such policies in his 2010 speech in Grenoble, during the 2010 riots in the French banlieues, threatening to revoke the citizenship of rioters. Sarkozy stated that ‘immigrants’ who put the lives of police officers in danger should not longer enjoy the privileges that come with being a French citizen. While his announcements never turned into laws, on the grounds that they were unconstitutional, Hollande seeks to enshrine conditions for ‘loss of nationality’ into the Constitution itself.

It is estimated that there are currently 3.3 million French citizens who are dual-nationals, many of which are citizens of North African countries and other former French colonies. Behind the security discourse that dominates the new proposal lies the message that citizenship is now conditional, and that certain identity markers (such as being recent immigrants, or second generation immigrants) might prevent you not only from enjoying certain rights, but from bearing the duties and responsibilities that come with being a citizen. Hannah Arendt famously argued that citizenship is “the right to have rights”, a legal-political framework which allows the person to access his rights and duties and to belong to a community. Denationalization, Arendt argues, prevents the individuals from belonging to a framework “where one is judged by one’s actions and opinions.”

The new ‘loss of nationality” policy, while presented as a security measure, should be viewed as part of France’s struggle to address a long history of failed integration policies. If citizenship is meant to protect from attempts to impose divisions on social groups, taking it away removes the obligation to treat individuals as equals before the law, or as Arendt argues, as part of the community. By revoking the citizenship of convicted terrorists, France also removes its responsibility of addressing urgent social issues within its borders. There will no longer be a need to ask what causes individuals – French nationals – to engage in terrorist acts because they will simply no longer be part, at least legally, of French society.

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Published on February 01, 2016 04:30

In honor of Rose Lomathinda Chibambo

(8 September 1928 to 12 January 2016)

In a sense, the fate of Rose Lomathinda Chibambo is that of the perpetual female outsider, always encroaching into male enclaves, white and black alike. In 1952, she starts organising women in Zomba, the then capital of Malawi, to protest against the colonial government because the men via the Nyasaland African Congress (NAC, later Malawi Congress Party), including husband Edwin, are not highlighting their plight in the struggle. In 1953, just before the imposition of the much hated Federation which brings under white rule Malawi, Zambia and Zimbabwe, she encroaches into a meeting between chiefs and pro-Federation agents. She protests before she is told of the place of the woman.

Later, two Malawians are put into the Federal Parliament in Salisbury (today’s Harare) to ‘represent’ the interests of Malawians back home. Rose is a vocal critic, calling for their removal, when she is not agitating for the secession of Malawi out of the Federation. As Treasurer of the Nyasaland African Congress – Blantyre branch, she rightly points out that some of the ‘moderates’ leading NAC are still under the Chilembwe shadow, hence their reluctance to remove the two Federal MPs. Chilembwe led the abortive uprising of 1915 against imperial Britain. The response from the latter was harsh.

Five years into the fight against the Federation, Kamuzu Banda is brought back to Malawi to lead the fight for independence. Rose is now in charge of what was to eventually morph into the powerful Women’s League in post-independence days. NAC travels the length of Malawi denouncing ‘the stupid Federation’. Things get out of control and rumours fly that the colonial government is plotting to kill Kamuzu.

In January 1959, NAC calls a secret conference (now called the Bush Meeting) and typically, Rose is the only woman there. After the meet, there is panic in the white settler community because of a rumour to kill all whites if Kamuzu is taken out. The country is ungovernable.

Governor Robert Armitage declares a state of emergency on the 3rd of March 1959 as armoured trucks make their way into the country from Rhodesia. Thousands of arrests follow. Kamuzu is picked up in his pyjamas and driven to the airport where he is given his suit before being flown to Gweru prison in Zimbabwe. Rose is spared because she is heavily pregnant. Still, she continues the fight, visiting political prisoners and plotting.

On the 23rd of March, Rose delivers a baby at a mission hospital in Thyolo District. The next day, her husband Edwin is arrested at home. Two days later, Rose is paid a visit by two white officials, a man and a woman. She collects her belongings and her two-day old baby girl and they are thrown into a jeep. Four jeeps are in front, five are at the back, all full of soldiers brandishing their guns. She is driven to Zomba Prison, where she is joined by two other women, Mrs Mthenda who led NAC activities in Zomba and Mrs Mdeza from Thyolo. She names her baby Gadi (guard) due to her prison circumstances. Kamuzu later names the baby Mtamayani, after his sister. A Good Samaritan, Mrs Kayes, brings Rose baby food and clothes throughout her 13 months stay. Back in the British Parliament, her arrest is highlighted by the Labour Party. She is released when negotiations for independence start in 1961.

Malawi is independent in July 1964, Kamuzu is the prime minister and Rose Chibambo serves as the only woman member of parliament and the parliamentary secretary to Kamuzu in his role as minister of several portfolios. Two months later, she is a backbencher, fighting to defend her name against the same Kamuzu in the now famous Malawi’s Cabinet Crisis of 1964.

Kamuzu was invited back to Malawi by young radical politicians like Masauko Chipembere and Kanyama Chiume who needed a father-figure to rally Malawians behind NAC’s goals. Kamuzu’s conservatism was bound to clash with his young emissaries. It was all a matter of time. Post-independence, pragmatic Kamuzu makes alliances that are anathema to his young cadres: diplomatic relations with apartheid South Africa, who pay Malawi handsomely by, among other things, building the capital of Lilongwe; recognises Portugal, ‘owners’ of neighbouring Mozambique; and recognises Formosa (Taiwan) instead of Peking (Red China). The breaking point becomes the ‘tickey’, a three-pence payment Kamuzu introduces in the public hospitals and reduced perks for some civil servants. Kamuzu is confronted by his young Ministers, threatening to resign in the process. He then calls for an emergency parliament sitting where he gets the vote of confidence. Rose Chibambo finds herself a casualty of this crisis, hearing the news of her dismissal as parliamentary secretary via the radio.

The next day in Parliament, on her birthday, she tries to clear her name (“I was Rose Chibambo before [Kamuzu]” came here) in a speech punctured with rude commentary from her male counterparts. When she tries to raise her voice, the speaker of parliament reminds her that she “cannot shout. This is our House”. Again, that encroaching business.

Soon she, like other freedom fighters on the wrong side of Kamuzu, flees with her family to Zambia, only to return 30 years later after Kamuzu is dethroned. Largely ignored in democratic Malawi, Bingu wa Mutharika, Malawi’s third president, rekindles her memory by, among other things, inserting her face on the MK200 note, the third powerful bank note after the MK1000 (Kamuzu Banda) and the MK500 (John Chilembwe). Three male faces come after her including, ironically, her Inkosi ya Makosi (Chief of chiefs) the late M’Mbelwa 2.

When news of her death breaks, the youth, mainly in social media, connect with her as “that pretty face on our bank note”, nothing more. In one of the last interviews she gave, ironically to a local youth radio, she lamented how freedom fighters are side-lined in key government events, highlighting the 50-Year Independence celebrations in 2014; inevitably, the 50th anniversary of the cabinet crisis.

Thanks to the legacy of Rose Chibambo, Malawi boasts, in Joyce Banda, Africa’s second female president who pays a tribute. Rose has been buried at the recently established Heroes Acre, in the north of Malawi, in Mzuzu. For once, other heroes will find themselves budging into her enclave. Talk is that Chakufwa Chihana, the freedom fighter who invited Rose back to Malawi in 1994, will be reburied there.

As a Malawian born in freedom (a born free, to borrow Kamuzu’s term) I can but raise a fist to her courage and her legacy.

*Featured image via

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Published on January 29, 2016 08:30

The trials of Jelili Atiku

In early December last year, the performance artist Jelili Atiku was conferred with a Prince Claus Award in Amsterdam in the The Netherlands. The citation by the jury lauded Atiku for his “… provocative spectacles use striking attire, unsettling body language and unusual props to open up dialogue and influence popular attitudes.” Atiku, they continued, “drops himself right into the heart of Lagos [Nigeria’s commercial capital], into the realities of the streets, of densely populated, poor areas, and entices people to interact and respond to his visual presentations.” His subject matter “… include commentary on Nigerian human rights … politically charged critiques of the ruling class and Boko Haram; site-specific interventions on climate change, e-waste and fuel subsidies.”

This may all have been a bit too much for some Nigerian political and economic elites, because last week (on January 18th) he, along with some performers and audience members, were arrested in Lagos on the order of a local traditional leader.

It seemed a performance of his most recent creation, “Aragamago Will Rid This Land of Terrorism,” four days earlier near his home in Ejigbo rankled the traditional ruler of the town, the Elejigbo of Ejigbo, Oba Morufu Ojoola. The king felt that the performance was targeted at him, and promptly got Jelili, four of his aides and audience members arrested (they were violently manhandled by police) and thrown in jail.

Aragamago Will Rid This Land Off Terrorism”

This is the video documentation of my performance that led to my (and five others’) incarceration in Kirikiri Medium Security Prison in Lagos, Nigeria. The performance, titled “Aragamago Will Rid This Land Off Terrorism” was enacted on Thursday January 14 2016 at Ejigbo.

Posted by Jelili Atiku on Monday, January 25, 2016

This is the video documentation of my performance that led to my (and five others’) incarceration in Kirikiri Medium Security Prison in Lagos, Nigeria. The performance, titled “Aragamago Will Rid This Land Off Terrorism” was enacted on Thursday January 14 2016 at Ejigbo.

The performers, especially Jelili, were accused of “conspiring with four other persons to commit felony to wit public disturbance.” The King complained the performance was conceived and staged “… to disseminate information that could lead to negative public opinion about his control of the community’s resources.”

Atiku’s arrest and then brutalization, was greeted with wide disbelief in the arts community and raised anxiety and panic about possibilities of rising repression of freedom of creative expression.

There’s of course a local context to the king’s outsize reaction and abuse of power. As Jelili detailed in a press statement, the Oba and Jelili both belong to different royal families of the town and they have had a long, sustained conflict over the land and material resources of the community. Jelili, a member of the Ifoshi royal family and the eldest grandson of the late regent of the town, has been at the forefront of clamor by his lineage to reclaim perceived “unjust usurpation of the family land” by the traditional ruler. The Oba didn’t spare Jelili’s family. When Jelili’s case trended on social media, a militia group known as Oodua People’s Congress (OPC), reportedly acting on the order of the traditional ruler, went to Jelili’s house and terrorized members of his family. Rofiat Azeez, his 13-year old niece, and others were brutalised.

A key factor that led to Jelili’s release on bail three days after his arrest (the hearing is set for February 1st), was pressure on social media and campaigns by CORA/Arterial Network Nigeria (the local arm of the pan-African Arterial Network, which launched an online petition with 10,000 signatures) and the Society of Nigerian Artists.

In the current dispensation, the peoples of Nigeria (including artists), who had endured over three-decades of military regimes, including the maximum dictatorship of the late General Sani Abacha (1993-1998), ought to be enjoying dividends of democracy. But this has not been the case as a number of instances of repression of artistic freedom proves.

For example, on December 15, Nenghi IIlagha, a writer based in Port Harcourt in the south of Nigeria, was arrested and subjected to a kangaroo court-style trail, without the right to appeal — and summarily sentenced to the gallows. Incidentally, Ilagha’s accuser is another powerful traditional ruler, the king of Nembe town, who claimed that a section of the writer’s latest book injured his interests. The Bayelsa State government, where the writer had once served as a Senior Information technocrat, has not intervened. Appeals by the family, friends and executives of the National Association of Nigerian Authors (ANA) to get the king to withdraw the case and free the writer has not yielded any effect.

And just as the agitated artists community were breathing some relief from the frenetic campaign to get reprieve for Jelili Atiku, news broke on Saturday, January 23 that the famous Artists’ Village located in a section of the National Theatre complex in Iganmu, Lagos had been levelled. The general manager of the Theatre, Kabiru Yussuf (who claimed to be acting on the order of Lai Mohammed, the Federal Minister of Information and Culture) ordered and supervised the demolition. With bulldozers and armed policemen, he and his gang invaded the Village at 5am, when he was sure most of the artists would not be there to salvage their properties. The action led to destruction of artistic materials and properties worth several millions of Naira. The Minister of Information and Culture, whom the General Manager claimed directed him, has since denied and denounced the claim; he has visited the Village to commiserate with the artists, promising to pay compensations. The General Manager of the theatre, Kabiru Yussuf, had been persistent in his attempts to sell off the lucrative landmass surrounding the theatre building to businessmen from Dubai, who had visited the country on several occasions in pursuit of purchasing the land with an eye towards “developing” it. Whatever the truth behind who actually ordered the demolishment, the actions were a clear case of vendetta against the community of artists, who had stood stoutly against the sale of the land.

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Published on January 29, 2016 04:30

Rapper Elom 20ce aims to bring his politics to the masses

I can’t think of many rappers anywhere on this planet who pick their references as meticulously as Togolese rapper Elom 20ce. In every medium he works, he sprinkles numerous historical and cultural references, laying out his political orientation. A quick glance at his videos shows that the references and symbols are multifaceted, from ceremonial masks and stilts to carefully chosen Kente patterns. The Lomé-based MC choses to rap in French to reach out to the broadest audience possible, and sees his work as a mission to pique the curiosity of Francophones around the globe, particularly those located in that swath of land sitting between Dakar and Antananarivo.

Being a rapper, the main canvas for his mission is his music. In a recent chat, he took time to break down the second verse from his new song Vodoo Sakpata, off of his new album Indigo, which helps to clarify his mission in general:

Can you explain: “couper la tête aux colons en véritable asrafo” (genuine asrafo cutting colonists’ heads)

Asrafo is a reference to warriors in Ewe tradition. They are said to hold mystic powers. We’re told that on the battlefield, “they have the power to have their enemies swallowed by the earth. When the head remains on the surface, they come to chop it off.”

“Couper la tête aux colons en véritable Asrafo” is a métaphore to say we need to put an end to those who humiliate and deplete Africa: the colonists.

Chilembwe, Kimathi: Can you tell me what they represent for you, and for your audience?

John Chilembwe was a Baptist educator and political leader who organized the uprising against British colonists in Nyassaland, today Malawi.

Dedan Kimathi was the Mau Mau leader, warriors who fought for Kenya’s independence.

They understood the importance of getting organized to fight against the system which oppressed them. They understood the importance of educating the masses. Chilimbwe created a network of African schools. They also understood that violence is necessary to liberate a people from systemic exploitation which itself uses violence. To rely on the colonists’ good conscience would be totally naïve.

Despite being both killed, their struggle contributed to the independence of both Kenya and Malawi.

Can you tell us what “Gnawoé, mila wô doakaka di la vôlé n’ti, élabéna, miabé djéna bé dô wom miélé” means?

The truth is we will accomplish our task efficiently, because our rights are at stake

Lomé, Ouaga, Conakry, Accra: besides the rime, why these particular cities?

Lomé because it is my home town. The other cities, because I am linked to other engaged artists there, working towards enhancing the conscious of their people. Besides, Ouaga because of Sankara and his heritage, Conakry because of Amilcar Cabral, Sékou Touré and their heirs, Accra because of Kwame Nkrumah and his legacy. At the time, they all worked together. Today, we have consumed and digested the balkanization of Africa. These cities to abolish the borders drawn in Germany during the Berlin conference.

Who do you mean by compadores? People working for major multinationals?

Not only. There are people working for multinationals who are not compradores, or at least not intentionally. I’m talking about those chosen by the imperialists, those they put in place to support their vision and handle the dirty work on the ground. Basically, relays of the imperialists among the oppressed population.

Gobineau, Ferry, Foccart: how do you see their role and impact on Africa?

They are all racists from different generations, who stole Africans like animals, who worked towards dehumanizing and destabilizing Africa.

Arthur de Gobineau wrote an essay about the inequality of human races in 1853. Apparently he inspired Hitler. Anthénor Firmin responded with his book about the equality of human races in 1885.

In 1885, Jules Ferry held a speech at the French National Assembly to defend colonization. I learned this from Kwame Knrumah’s book Africa Must Unite. Here’s an excerpt from his speech of July 28, 1885: “Colonies are an advantageous capital investment for rich countries […] For the crisis faced by all European industries, the foundation of a colony creates a new market. Gentlemen, we must speak louder and more truthfully! We must say openly that superior races have a right in regards to inferior races […] because they have an obligation to them. They must civilize the inferior races.”

Foccart was the man in the shadows for De Gaule, Pompidou and Chirac. He was the man behind the coups and other detabilizing operations in Francophone Africa, even in Angophone countries as well: during the Biafra war in Nigeria, the French backed Ojukwus and armed them via Omar Bongo’s Gabon and Houpouët Boigny’s Côte d’Ivoire.

“Crois-tu que je m’égare quand je dis que les miens sont pris pour cible? Regard Haiti” (Do you think I’m confused when I say my people are a target? Look at Haiti) – What link do you see with Haiti?

What I’m saying is imperialists are organized, and often work strategically so that Africa, and even the Caribbean islands, do not develop. I am using Haiti as an example because it is a country they tried to asphyxiate from birth. When it freed itself from its chains in 1804 after defeating Napoleon’s army, the cost for its independence became paying the “colonial debt”: in 1825, 21 years after independence, Charles X [then King and ruler of France] asked that Haiti pay a compensation of 150 million gold francs to be left alone. In other words, reimburse former colonists and guarantee privileged commercial trade with France. The country was born dead, and it’s no coincidence. If you say no to France, you become its enemy and it crushes you. I could have said in my lyrics, look at Guinea, in reference to Sékou saying no, and all of the operations of sabotage that followed. For instance the fake Guinean franc bills poured into the country to destabilize the Guinean currency. But I already mentioned Conakry earlier, and wanted to also insist on my opinion that Haiti is a part of Africa.

Sharpeville, Marikana: do you think most people in Togo, or elsewhere in Africa you’ve traveled to, are aware of these incidents, and do you think they impact their concerns and conversations?

Within a certain milieu, yes. Within pan-Africanist networks. Such events remind of Cabral’s speech, “Like a Fish in the water”: the enemy is not the white man, but the oppressor, no matter the color.

Can I ask you the same thing about Biko or Shaka Zulu?

Biko, Chilimbwe, Kimathi are not all that known in Lomé. But I am addressing my words to the entire world, not just to the Togolese. I’m referring to people who did a lot for Africa’s emancipation, yet who aren’t always so well known. We often hear about mandela, etc. There are others. My goal with these references is to tease people’s curiosity so they go and find out who they are. The title of the album, Indigo, is a reference to the seventh color of the rainbow, which is not actually visible to the naked eye. I want to make room for the unknowns. This explains the photo of my mother on the CD cover, and the image of the lady with a weapon in her hand and a rifle in the other on the CD itself.

Shaka Zulu however is known in Togo, thanks to a TV show directed by William Faure, which many African stations broadcasted in the late 1980s.

This is the latest post in our music series Liner Notes.

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Published on January 27, 2016 07:30

Elom 20ce aims to bring his politics to the masses