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Africa is a Country Recommends: Books of 2015

Back by popular demand after last year’s blockbuster, we’ve surveyed our trove of editors, contributors and co-conspirators to bring you a round-up of the books we most savored in 2015. Some people love end-of-year book lists, others hate them. Our is here to offer a small corrective to the tide of Big Media lists that champion a small and predictable group of authors who together give at best a limited Eurocentric view of our world. For example, the UK Guardian’s dismal list features just one African author, and multiple recommendations for the usual crusty Important White Male suspects: Jonathan Franzen (who wrote a famously terrible book this year), Julian Barnes, Michel Houellebecq etc. Even TS Eliot got in, and he’s been dead for yonks.

So here’s our alternative list, which we hope can broaden those horizons a little. Enjoy, and don’t forget to check out Africa is a Country’s very first print book (not the last though!): Apartheid Israel: The Politics of an Analogy.

Neelika Jayawardane

Tendai Huchu – The Hairdresser of Harare, was first published in 2010, but only became available in the US this year, courtesy of Ohio University Press. The action takes place in a hair salon, frequented by Harare’s female politicians and male politicians’ mistresses alike. The narrator is Vimbai, a young mother who is financially and socially on her own. Zimbabwe is a country that requires help from extended family and connections in order make everything from a bottle of cooking oil to petrol to materialise itself. Enter Dumisani, the well-heeled son of a wealthy, politically connected family – not as a customer, but as a fellow hair stylist. Although Huchu does not overtly critique the easy paths that Dumi opens for Vimbai, there are other social strictures that his writing addresses, albeit subtly. Hairdresser was a perfect end of summer read; my book was sticky from sweat and sugary from bubbling peaches that went into the pies and preserves I was making – a delicious hair-salon-gossip kind of novel about minding, mending and maintaining social mores. It is a novel about hearbreak, but more seriously, it is also about the inevitable breaks that happen in one’s psyche, sometimes accompanied by injury to the physical body, when one’s community disciplines in order to reinforce its social and sexual expectations.

Aditi Surie von Czechowski

Marlon James, A Brief History of Seven Killings. I won’t do James the injustice of calling A Brief History “brave,” but it is indeed epic. It deserves all the blurb-y praise, but more

importantly it deserves to recognized for its serious political engagement and for making other worlds imaginable and relatable. And by the way, it’s way less violent than American TV.

Noosim Naimasiah

I especially enjoyed reading Kintu – the novel by Ugandan writer Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi. She seams together shredded pieces of tragedies into the larger motif of an old curse that has plagued a Ganda family for several generations. It was great to read a new novel that seemed old (it reminded me of Ben Okri’s – Famished Road) in its style and intentions. To tell a story that is so particular to a certain place and therefore whose audience was not global, that is not painfully committed to the labours of whatever new writing styles that take over the actual story telling, that took as real a curse without defending why, and that remained poetic, beautiful, harrowing and even politically important in understanding uganda today.

Duane Jethro

I have flicked through What Will People Say (2015) by Rehana Rousouw and could see from the terse, yet vivid and humorous prose why it is getting great reviews. Set in the Cape Flats in the late 1980’s its a great reflection of the period.

A little late on this one, After Freedom: the rise of the post-apartheid generation in democratic South Africa, (2014) by de Lannoy and Newman was a great, wide, anthropological/socio-logical reflection on different circumstances of young people growing up in the democratic period. 

Jacob Dlamini’s Askari (2014) was by far the most challenging, riveting book I have read all year. Cast from sparse prose, the book circles vertiginously around questions of morality, loyalty and truth without ever really going over the edge. An unsettling, rewarding read.

Some bias here, but I am reading my supervisor Birgit Meyer’s latest book, Sensational Movies: Video, Vision and Christianity in Ghana, (2015) which was just released by California. It looks at the workings of religion in the Ghanaian domestic film industry, its transformations, near death and recovery in the period of neoliberal democracy. Great book for anyone working on the anthropology of film and those looking for a foil to material on Nigeria.  

Grieve Chelwa

The one book that stood out for me this year was Sven Beckert’s Empire of Cotton: A Global History. The book makes the very compelling argument that the rise of capitalism in the West was aided in no small way by the cotton industry — plantations in the American South and processing plants in Britain. Prof. Beckert shows how cotton, the 19th Century’s equivalent of oil, was grown largely for free by about a million African slaves at its height and then shipped right across the world to the cotton processing plants of Manchester. After reading the book, you are left to wonder why popular accounts of the rise of the West leave out this rather important fact. 

Wangui Kimari

While I give many sweet potato offerings to the ancestors for Isabel Allende’s Island beneath the Sea and Ngugi wa Thiongo’s Matigari  the book that really warmed my heart is Karen Lord’s Redemption in Indigo. It is at once Senegalese folklore, mixed up temporalities, tricksters, Caribbean idiosyncrasies and Saki-like English. Pure magic.

Ishtiyaq Shukri

Gilead by Marilynne Robinson. At the end of his life, Reverend Ames composes a letter to his son. I don’t know how this novel came to my shelf. I frowned when I found it there. But I savoured this portrait of life, faith and death. It has lingered with me ever since.

Boima Tucker

I read Fran Ross’ Oreo this year (as part of DJ /rupture’s book club) and loved it. It came out in the 70’s, however in the current climate of the online identity politics wars and real life facist cells sprouting up around the world, it’s particularly biting and relevant. Fran Ross was a writer on the short lived Richard Pryor show, and only wrote this one novel. Written from the perspective a Black-Jewish teenager from Philadelphia, It takes the piss out of everyone and everything, and makes all conservative identity politicians seem like a bunch of bickering adolescents.

Dan Magaziner

Category: academic. Postcolonial Modernism by Chika Okeke-Agulu, an art historian at Princeton. Okeke-Agulu’s book is published by Duke University Press and it’s BEAUTIFUL – well over 100 full color images, with equally luminous text exploring the evolution of a particular variant of modernism among a small group of artists during the late 1950s until the mid-1960s. Just a great and in many ways a tragic story. 

Category: everything else. Lagoon by Nnedi Okorafor asks what would happen is first contact with aliens came in Lagos. A rollicking good sci-fi read, with a cast including a Pentecostal preacher, a marine biologist, a Ghanaian hip-hop star, an incorruptible soldier and a heroic turn by the president of Nigeria. 

Imran Garda

I only read classics this year! And my fave was Fahrenheit 451. Not only because it’s a very defensive formation with a stacked midfield, but because Bradbury made me restless to start writing again with his simple and ordered yet explosively creative off-the-cuff style. So, like 451, with one player in a free role. Also, there’s an empty decadence to our modern lives that he prophesied in the book. Maybe we’re already living in someone else’s dystopia?

Abdi Latif Ega

Hisham Aidi’s Rebel Music is a dazzling study of the Afro-diasporan music and its political impact around the world; this book spans the globe from Sao Paulo to Algiers to Pakistan – looking at impact of jazz, hip hop, gnawa, etc; and most interestingly how the Black Muslim archive as the author calls it is today inspiring new art forms and cultural movements among the urban beleauguered — from Europe’s ethnic enclaves to South America’s favela – among various marginalized groups – Afro-Latinos, indigenous, but especially among young Muslims caught between surveillance states and xenophobic movement. This book offers the soundtrack of our era!

Jesse Shipley

Anne Maria Makhulu’s Making Freedom: Apartheid, Squatter Politics, and the Struggle for Home. This work is based on long-term field work by Makhulu in formal and informal settlements around Cape Town, South Africa. It examines how black South Africans have navigated the violence and inequalities of apartheid and post-apartheid life by focusing on how people creatively navigate the built environment. It is beautifully written, elegantly embedding theoretical concerns with land and labor and a critique of liberalism within a broader historical geography of Cape Town.  

[Plug! This year Jesse published his own book, highly recommended: Trickster Theatre: The Poetics of Freedom in Urban Africa — Editor]

Sean Jacobs

In 2015 I really went hard exploring the graphic novel genre. I also stepped out of my comfort zone. My 10 year old, Rosa, has a great collection and I borrowed some of her good ones. I particularly liked, Ghostopolis, about a boy who has to find his way home from the spirit world. A few others get a notable mention:  Verso Books’ new Red Rosa the “graphic biography” of the early 20th century Polish radical, is an education; the older Skim by the cousins Mariko and Jillian Tanaki about teenage troubles in Toronto suburbs (I think Camilla Houeland got me onto this one); and, finally, March, Book One and March Book Two, about the early life of civil rights leader and veteran US congressman John Lewis. 

Musa Okwonga

Roxane Gay’s Bad Feminist. Passionate, engaging, deeply personal and precise analysis of modern feminism and its place within pop culture.

Laurent Dubois

My favorite book this year is a brilliant short book by Negar Mottahedeh called #iranelection: Hashtag Solidarity & the Transformation of Online Life. It is at once a riveting account of the 2009 pro-democracy protests in Iran and an analysis of the ecology of social media and online life. Highly recommended!

Natacha Nsabimana

The Secret Lives of Baba Segi’s Wives by Lola Shoneyin. Beautifully written. Powerful. Shoneyin manages to tell the difficult story of the subjugation of women under oppressive patriarchy with humour and most importantly without ever losing sight of the socio-political circumstances—financial stability, abuse, social status—which bring the wives (Iya Segi, Iya Tope, Iya Femi and Bolanle) to patriarch Baba Segi. The result is a rich complex tale of betrayal, lies, negotiations, strategic alliances and love. A must read.

Jon Soske

Freedom Time: Negritude, Decolonization, and the Future of the World, Gary Wilder. Along with the work of philosopher Souleymane Bachir Diagne, Gary Wilder’s Freedom Time has helped revolutionized our understanding of Négritude, especially the thinking of Léopold Sédar Senghor. Long buried under one-liners extracted from Sartre and Soyinka, Senghor’s thinking emerges here as a pioneering effort to unify ethical collectivity, planetary life, and aesthetic practice. Most importantly, Senghor’s work created a space for thinking self-determination apart from and against the logic of state sovereignty that triumphed at the moment of decolonization. Flawed, inherently fragmentary, and of its time, Négritude–in Wilder’s account–remains a powerful invitation to develop a postcolonial African political philosophy.      

Camila Osorio

Listen Yankee: Why Cuba Matters by Tom Hayden. This is a good book to learn many unknown facts about the relations between the U.S. and Cuba, and why these two countries started talking again. For example, Hayden writes about Castro’s meeting with Malcolm X in New York, and the importance of the Cuban revolution among American intellectuals like poets Allen Ginsberg, LeRoi Jones, and CLR James. He also goes into the details on how right wing Cubans living in the U.S. spoiled relations with Cuba during the Clinton years. Obama is not getting now as much opposition from U.S. Cubans according to Hayden, since the Cuban diaspora has significantly changed with the arrival of working class black Cubans. But the new opposition now comes from right wing Venezuelans in the United States. If you want to learn more, here is a review I wrote for The Huffington Post in this book. Very fun read, I highly recommend it.  

Jill Kelly

Nkosinathi Sithole’s Hunger Eats a Man is a beautiful and devastating statement on contemporary South Africa. It is a novel of family, generation, class, and community—of relationships between Father Gumede and his talented son Sandile, between white farmers and black laborers, between the poor and the black middle class, and between neighbors of the village of Ndlalidlindoda. Sithole’s depiction of everyday love, life, and dignity in rural KwaZulu-Natal rivals that of Lauretta Ngcobo.

Chika Unigwe

Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking. I tend to re-read books I love, and so even though I had read TYOMT before this year, I re-discovered it on my shelf this year and read it several times. It is a passionate, honest account of love and loss and grief.It is also utterly brilliant! 

Oumar Ba

The book that captivated me this past year is Between the World and Me, by Ta-Nehisi Coates. Coates’ book is a small bundle of fiery power. It is refreshing to read an author who rises and says I’m a black man in America. I don’t have the power to secure the safety of my black body. But I have the power to say to America, you won’t enroll me in this lie that is the Dream, you won’t make me part of it.

My critique of Coates is his romanticization of Paris, which has a long history of being viewed as a redeeming place for African American cultural icons, from Baldwin to Nina Simone, and now to Coates. Hopefully in the future Coates will realize that the struggle of US racial minorities must be linked to that of the globally disenfranchised. Baldwin must meet Fanon.

Lina Benabdallah

I did not read Binyavanga Wainaina’s One Day I will Write about this Place; I saw it. Wainaina’s memoir turns his characters, encounters, family and friends alive and then parades his memories with them in the reader’s imagination. As Wainaina narrated, I watched.

The narrator’s confessed deep addiction to reading is contagious to his readership. Once picked up, the autobiography takes the reader to several places, Uganda, Kenya, South Africa, and weaves in several stages of Wainaina’s quest to be who he is. The novel tells a complex story with several layers of complications but it tells it in a straightforward, sometimes even raw, way. For word-lovers, Wainaina’s writing satisfies every crave; humor, complexity, and wittiness. At an early point in the novel, Wainaina says that words “must be concrete things.” They truly are concrete in this novel. I picked up his book as I migrated back to my hometown for the summer after my academic year ended. Somehow in my journey between the two impossibly parallel places, I felt in the right place reading Wainaina’s memoir.

Emmanuel Iduma

I read Ben Okri’s Dangerous Love only last week. In detailing the improbable, tragic love affair between a young artist and a married teenager, Okri is a master observer of the poverty of body and spirit. The setting is a ghetto in a Nigerian city. I couldn’t—still can’t—shake off the intense desperation of the protagonists, the “infinite permutations of resilience and suffering.” Yet in their despair, all hope is not lost. 

Elliot Ross

I spent the early months of the year reading through Saidiya Hartman’s work: her scholarly study Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America, numerous excellent critical essays, and her memoir Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route, which is probably the book I’ve recommended to friends more than any other this year. I also followed Julianne Okot Bitek’s recommendation on last year’s edition of this very list, and read Yvonne Owuor’s debut novel, Dust. Actually, I read it three times and then interviewed Owuor herself! Finally, a word for Cedric Nunn’s Unsettled: The 100 Years War of Resistance By Xhosa Against Boer and British, a photo book which introduced me to the genre of “deep aftermath” photography and helped me begin to imagine that massive anti-colonial struggle visually, through Nunn’s lens, a nice alternative to narrative history written from the archive.

It has become customary to discuss Mali while simultaneously ignoring Mali

On Nov. 20 this year, 20 people were killed in a terror attack in Bamako. In hindsight, the casualties were low compared to the hundreds of Malian and foreign victims the conflict in Mali has claimed in 2015. Yet this specific attack received widespread media coverage. In fact, it was in 2013 that my country first made a blaring entrance onto the global media scene, as France launched a military intervention there.

Much of the international coverage of the conflict has been surprisingly cut off from the actual situation on the ground. It has become customary to discuss Mali (the site of Western or terrorist intervention) while simultaneously ignoring Mali (a country with a specific history, politics, and culture).

This has caused voices from Paris, Washington and Benghazi to hold more analytical weight in international conversations around the conflict than voices from Douentza, Konna or Aguelhoc. This analytical trend in current affairs fits right into and old historical narrative: one that emphasizes the West as the main shaping agent in African history, as opposed to Africans themselves.

In the case of the international coverage of the Malian conflict, the evidence falls into one of three categories: (a) a very low representation of Malian voices (b) numerous factual errors on Mali from news outlets and (c) writers deliberately erasing the Malian context from their analysis while using Mali as an example to bolster their stance.

The Backdrop

March 22, 2012. It was way passed 8:15pm GMT, the usual start of the Malian public television prime time news, but for the past few hours, the screen had remained frozen on one live feed reading: “in one moment, a statement from the military”. At dawn, images of the TV studio invaded by a group of soldiers appeared on the screen. They were struggling to read a statement announcing they had ousted the president, were cancelling the upcoming elections, and closing the national borders. Meanwhile, Bamako was filled with gunshots.

For most Malians, what ensued in the following months actually pushed the developments of that night way low on the scale of traumatizing events. These included: armed groups conquering a sizeable chunk of the country; sharia law imposed in Mali’s northern regions (Mali is Muslim country with a secular constitution); little girls raped, couples stoned, people having their limbs cut off, reports of atrocities both inflicted upon and committed by the Malian army, and refugees filling up camps in neighboring countries.

By January, as the UN attempted to put together an African-led intervention to be launched in the next few months, heavily armed Jihadi troops found themselves just miles away from the city of Mopti, only a 7 hours ride away from Bamako. The Malian president resorted to make an appeal for immediate military intervention to his French counterpart. By then my main concern, along with that of an overwhelming majority of Malians, was: “What is going to happen to my family and friends, and how do we, as a country, get out of this alive?”

Concerning dissonance

It quickly appeared the main concern of a number of analysts, politicians and commentators in Western, Middle Eastern, and African capitals, was: “What are France’s neocolonial pursuits in bombing Muslims in Africa, and how do oil and uranium play into this?” It struck me then that few of these commentators seemed to demonstrate an actual interest in Mali. Rather, they were interested in Western imperialism, the successes and pitfalls of the global war on terror, the lack of solidarity amongst African nations, the meanings of Islam, and so on.

To be clear: those are all crucial themes to investigate in order to understand the current situation in Mali. A critique of France role and interests in the conflict, for instance, is warranted. But in order to be credible, such a critique must necessarily be grounded in the perspective of those most affected: Malian citizens.

This has seldom been the case. In 2013, a documentary on the war in Mali featured a grand total of zero Malian interviewees. Analyst Glenn Greenwald, scholar Tariq Ramadan, as well as Mohamed Morsi and Dilma Rousseff all strongly opposed the French intervention, calling it a Western aggression on Muslims in a helpless former colony, thus blissfully ignoring the fact that the Malian public was then overwhelmingly supportive of the intervention (Senegalese academic Bakari Sambe wrote an important rebuttal of Ramadan’s claims). Another way in which the specific Malian context was ignored was through Mali’s inclusion in the newly discovered world regions of Sahelistan and Africanistan (for counterarguments, see Gregory Mann and Andrew Lebovich).

Empire state of mind

By placing Western agenda at the center of their analysis while dismissing Malian citizens’ opinions, Greenwald, Ramadan, and others, demonstrated an ‘empire’ state of mind startlingly similar to that of the imperialistic French state they were denouncing. In displaying such contempt for Malian voices, they were thus operating from the very intellectual framework they claimed to be fighting against.

This past November, as the attack in Bamako’s Radisson Blu hotel were being covered in international media, a number of foreign commentators again displayed a lack of interest or knowledge in the specificities of Mali’s local context.

The attack was labeled an “instant blowback from the shocking events in Paris”, and “another attack against France”. A news report described one of the groups having claimed the attacks, the Macina Liberation Front (MLF), as Mali’s Boko Haram. Forget about the centuries of Malian history and politics that might have contributed to the MLF’s emergence, as former Malian foreign affairs minister Tiébilé Dramé argued. A major French TV channel introduced Mali’s former prime minister as being a mere spokesperson for the Bamako city hall. A pundit on the same network allegedly explained the failures of the security system at the Radisson hotel by claiming: “the African man does not have the required professionalism.” Meanwhile, CNN had a correspondent report on the situation in Bamako from “neighboring Nairobi”.

Can the Malians speak?

Earlier this year, Somali academic Safia Aidid demonstrated how Eurocentrism shaped current knowledge production in Somali studies. The same can be said of the international coverage of the Malian conflict. One easy way to reverse this pattern is to focus on the voices of those most affected. The Malians can speak.

The university of Bamako has a number of professors, such as Issa N’Diaye, Naffet Keita, or Isaie Dougnon. Journalists Adam Thiam, Baba Ahmed, Adama Diarra, or websites Sahelien.com and Studio Tamani are excellent news sources. Useful coverage in English of the recent attacks have included pieces by Jaimie Bleck, Abdoulaye Dembele and Sidiki Guindo, Susanna Wing, Peter Tinti, Rida Lyammouri, Joe Penney, Gregory Mann and Andrew Lebovich. Strolling through any Malian city, one will inevitably run into a Grin: a group of youngsters engaging in futile discussions and/or heated debates, while sipping on hot tea. Malians on Twitter such as @SySawane, @Fasokan, @PouloDebo, @Abdou_Diarra, @Babtwitter, @Aiseta_B, @Mousdiak, @Nenesatsy, @Abdou_Dra, @BocaryGuindo, @Balfaumar, to cite very few, are an excellent resource to keep up with events Mali. We go by #Grin223.

The Unrest in Ethiopia

At least 75 people have been killed in weeks of student-led protests across Ethiopia’s Oromia region and federal authorities have imposed curfews in several towns and deployed troops in what looks like a state of emergency. In a statement on Friday, the U.S. State Department urged Ethiopian authorities to “permit peaceful protest and commit to a constructive dialogue to address legitimate grievances.”

The protests started on Nov. 12 in Ginci town, about 50 miles out of Addis Ababa, by elementary and high school students demanding a halt to a controversial Master Plan, which seeks to incorporate vast swathes of small Oromo towns and rural farming villages into Ethiopia’s sprawling capital, which doubles as the seat of the federal and Oromia state governments.

Fueled by longstanding grievances at being marginalized, repressed and displaced in the name of development, the incident in Ginci quickly grew into a state-wide popular uprising unprecedented in the country’s history, the 1974 revolution excepted. Since imposition of martial law, the unrest has intensified and several rural districts have slid out of central control.

Although Ethiopia has registered modest economic growth over the last decade, there is growing resentment about access to the opportunities promised by the country’s improving fortunes.

Whereas the bloated public service sector is the leading employer after agriculture, even the lowest paying jobs require party membership or ruling party connections. The massive rural-to-urban migration, fueled by lack of rural job creation and matched by high urban youth unemployment, has not helped matters in a country where 71 percent of the population is under the age of 30.

With significant donor support, the government built over 30 public universities during the last decade and a half, but these could accommodate only 6 percent of Ethiopia’s college-age youth. To make matters worse, education quality has plummeted greatly heightened by an ill-conceived focus on expansion. This means that most cannot compete in an increasingly globalized economy or attain viable employment after graduation.

With the adoption in 1995 of the country’s language-based federation, age-old Oromo grievances, of being forced to learn in Amharic, for long the only official language and currently the only official working language of the federal government, has been stemmed. While the Oromo youth are now educated in their native tongue, this has limited their participation inside the federal bureaucracy to merely 12 percent.

That is one of the ways in which Addis Ababa’s expansion through the proposed Master Plan becomes significant. Like the federal government, the capital’s official working language is Amharic. While Oromo youth fear being excluded from job opportunities there, they are also frightened that their parents and compatriots will be displaced from their ancestral lands to make room for the expansion without proper compensation and due process of law.

The complication does not end there. Article 49 of Ethiopia’s constitution stipulates that Oromia will have special interests, particularly in relation to social services, natural resources and joint administrative matters, to the capital by the virtue of the capital being located inside its territory. However, the federal government has passed no enabling law to accommodate this special interest to date. In fact, the federal government in 2003 forced the Oromia state government to relocate its state capital from Addis Ababa to Adama, 75 miles to the east. The move triggered student protests and deaths and was reversed only after the debacle of the 2005 national elections.

The last time the Master Plan was tabled for discussion in 2014, it triggered weeks of protests in which dozens of students were killed and many wounded and hundreds more remain imprisoned.

Moreover, the regime in Addis Ababa follows a developmental state model, which focuses on public-funded mega hydroelectric and infrastructural projects, concentrated around the capital and adjacent districts displacing a large number of Oromo farmers and forcing them to become day laborers or resort to beggary.

Oromo grievance, however, is not confined to the economic realm. Neither is it limited to the status of Addis Ababa, which the Oromo call Finfinne, nor to youth concerns. It is indeed true that the majority of the protesters are youth enraged at the government for ignoring their voices and equating their dissent with treason. However, in town after town where protests erupted over the last month, the youth were joined by urban as well as rural folk.

Ethiopia is a federation on paper, but in reality, the country is still, as it has always been, highly centralized, a fact resented by the Oromo, who for ages have sought greater autonomy.

In short, Ethiopia’s much-celebrated economic uptick came at the cost of human rights and loss of civil liberties— costs and benefits inequitably distributed. The ruling Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF), which assumed power in 1991, is manhandled by the Tigrean People’s Liberation Front (TPLF), whose members and associates dominate the commanding heights of the economy as well as national institutions such as the military and the security services. With last May’s 100 percent electoral victory, EPRDF is slated to govern at least until 2020 without a single opposition member in parliament.

Protests are rare in Ethiopia; people are not even allowed to organize peaceful demonstrations—although freedom of assembly is a constitutionally guaranteed right. The state maintains media monopoly. Opposition and civil society face severe restrictions. This has been the story of Ethiopia for over two decades. But not anymore: Although all dissent, especially by the Oromo, is highly criminalized, a relatively more educated cadre of youth emboldened by improved access to mobile and social media is fighting to hold the government accountable and respect their human rights.

Frustrated at always being ignored and marginalized, a huge mass of angry youth seems to be saying enough. They want a voice in key decisions affecting their future and a place in the society. Few buy into incessant propaganda about development. Demands for an end to corruption and cronyism that deny equal access to basic public services is gaining traction not just in Oromia but in Amhara region as well where tensions have been building for months.

Given these complexities, the government’s ill-tempered insistence on dealing with the protests solely with the security forces will ensure continued unrest and dissatisfaction.

Unless authorities heed calls for redress of historical grievances and allow genuine federalism and pluralist democracy to flourish — calls the Ethiopian authorities are disinclined to heed — the doors are left wide open to more unrests. This is likely to reverse Ethiopia’s prospects, already threatened by a worst drought in decades, and further destabilize an already volatile Horn of Africa region.

The Return of Winnie Mandela

On October 22, a week after the #FeesMustFall student protests began to surge across South Africa, Winnie Madikizela-Mandela told the public to expect her arrival. “I will be joining my children in Protest at Wits [University] today. Rhodes Tommorrow (sic) and NMMU [Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University in Port Elizabeth] on Friday,” she wrote on Facebook. Then, with her characteristic audacity, she added, “Let us see if the police will shoot with me in the front line. I dare them to.”

Nomzamo Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, the beautiful wife of Nelson Mandela during his 27 years in prison, has always polarized the public. Those who love her call her Mama Winnie or Mother of the Nation; they admire her charisma and revolutionary will. Forced into the political spotlight when her husband was arrested, Madikizela-Mandela stoked the flames of anti-apartheid resistance while many ANC members were imprisoned or exiled. But many others fear and vilify her. In 1997, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission found Madikizela-Mandela guilty of multiple counts of torture, kidnapping, and murder. Her name was most tarnished by the death of Stompie Seipei, the 14-year-old boy killed by her bodyguards. Madikizela-Mandela’s erasure as a leader corresponded with her husband’s elevation as a saint. While Nelson Mandela’s image was printed on t-shirts and bank notes, his message of peace disseminated in biopics and memoirs, Madikizela-Mandela’s brand of justice was too controversial to market. In her, some people (especially in the mainstream white press) saw a woman whose politics were fueled by hate, and as such she had no place in the mythology of a rainbow South Africa—a nation that had, by all official accounts, reconciled with its past.

During the student protests that have shaken post-apartheid South Africa, Winnie Madikizela-Mandela’s name was once again on people’s lips. At the University of the Witswatersrand in mid-October, a young black woman was photographed holding a placard that said, “Children of Winnie.” On Twitter, a demonstrator wrote of her leader: “This Hlatswayo girl from #Wits is a new version of mama #WinnieMandela in our generation.”  On October 19, students at Stellenbosch University near Cape Town staged an occupation of the Admin B building. Students inside quickly covered up the school crest with a makeshift poster declaring the building’s new title: Winnie Mandela House.

A spring is coming to South Africa, and the protests for free education were only its opening gestures. “Decolonization” is in the works: the struggle to eradicate the economic, cultural, and epistemological logics of colonialism, all of which endured after the end of apartheid. An American transplant to Cape Town the same age as these so-called “born-frees,” I’ve spent the past weeks straddling the line between participant and outsider, listening as my peers narrated and dissected the decolonization process in real-time. On every platform, from the streets to social media, young black South Africans urged society to reinterpret the ideas and symbols whose meanings had ossified over the past decades. Old icons were discarded. Nelson Mandela’s name is sacred no longer—today, to “Mandela-ize” a movement is to attempt to bargain with white power, to sell one’s people short through compromise and false integration. And Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, adored by the youth of Soweto in the 1980s, has gained traction in the activist imagination once more. In today’s black student movement, her historical meaning is being renewed in service of a new political warfare —one that embraces militancy and recognizes the logic of madness, that topples discourses of ‘the past’ to usher in a yet-unimaginable future.

***

“I said I was not going to bask in his shadow and be known as Mandela’s wife, they were going to know me as Zanyiwe Madikizela. I fought for that. I said, I will never even bask in his politics. I am going to form my own identity because I never did bask in his ideas.”

The story of South Africa’s liberation struggle tells the story of the black man. Black women fought for freedom, but they could only move, speak, and act within the patriarchal culture upheld by most resistance groups. This dynamic was crystallized in the Black Consciousness Movement of the 1960s. Mamphela Ramphele, a BCM activist (and later postapartheid liberal politician), noted that few women held leadership positions in resistance movements, with the exception of a handful considered “honorary men.” Most women, Ramphele wrote, participated as an “extension of their role[s] as mothers, wives, and significant others of their male colleagues, rather than in their capacity as individual citizens.”

For Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, the guidelines of female conduct were drawn even more rigidly. Because she was the wife of an imprisoned hero, society expected her to remain faithful. Yet Madikizela-Mandela’s sexual charisma was no secret: the media loved reporting on her multiple love affairs. As a woman, she was expected to wait for the men to bring liberation. But in their absence, Madikizela-Mandela acted as the driving force of the banned ANC—defiant, outspoken, and courageous. Her own party tried to cast her as a domestic trope (a “wife of-”, the “mother of the nation”), but Madikizela-Mandela chose to lead in her own right.

In speaking of Madikizela-Mandela today, students invoke a black female leader who bucked the definitions that her racist, patriarchal society assigned to her. In 2015, black women stood at the front of South Africa’s student uprising. They did so while expressing queer, trans, and non-binary identities—subverting in mind and body the patriarchal logics that govern black power movements and South African society at large. Gone are the days that women acquiesced to fighting for the men’s agenda while subordinating their own desires. At the University of Cape Town, students have been discussing black feminism—a framework that sees racism, capitalist exploitation, and patriarchy as interlocking forces, all of which must be overhauled for decolonisation to be complete. The #FeesMustFall protests carved out spaces in which young South Africans could put these ideologies into practice, modeling new ways of being in the world and, inevitably, of relating to one another.

But it was often within the demonstrations’ internal workings that the microphysics of patriarchy emerged most starkly. Reporting from the four-day occupation at Wits University, journalist Pontsho Pilane observed moments in which demonstrators snubbed their two elected women leaders, gravitating instead towards two male students who had placed themselves at the front. Separately, in an op-ed entitled “You cannot ask women to be vocal in public and silent in private,” Kagure Mugo writes,

Women are some of the loudest and most powerful voices [of the protests]… But what the cameras, interviews and sound bites do not show are the moments when women try and speak within the private political spaces and are hit back with phrases such as ‘this feminism is counter-revolutionary, comrade’.

One trans- woman, Mugo adds, was told by a fellow protestor that discussions around identity were too “expensive” for the movement—that ending racial oppression ought to be the foremost goal.

In mid-November, a young woman from UCT was sexually assaulted by a fellow student at Azania Hall, the source and center of the movement’s intersectional politics. The rape was an expression of patriarchy in its most intimate, most unspeakable form. The event, too, captured the particular double-burden carried by black women leaders in South Africa. As Madikizela-Mandela’s spotlight years demonstrated, the black woman must answer to both the brutality dealt by the public sphere (police tactics, government oppression), as well as the violence that is mirrored or enacted in her private corners (house raids in the middle of the night, silencing and abuse by those she calls her own). “We are the women who have seen in a physical sense the horrors of apartheid,” Madikizela-Mandela told an American journalist in 1990:

We are the women who collected the bodies of our children in 1976. We are the women the government has brutalized year in and year out… The atrocities that have been committed by Pretoria just arise in every mother such bitterness which you cannot put in words.

***

“Together, hand in hand, with our boxes of matches and our necklaces we shall liberate our country.” 

Winnie Mandela gave her most famous speech on April 13, 1986, to a packed hall in Munsieville, a township in Gauteng. “We shall use the same language the Boers are using against us,” she declared, “We have no guns. We have only stones, boxes of matches and petrol.” Traitors would be necklaced, a form of execution in which a gasoline-soaked tire is draped around the victim’s neck and set alight. Even as the country began to transition out of apartheid and other leaders (including her husband) began discussing peace, Madikizela-Mandela stood by her militant position. Negotiating with the enemy, she suspected, could douse the flames of true revolution.

To protest is to speak en masse, and Madikizela-Mandela has re-emerged just as a new revolutionary vernacular is being crafted. In #FeesMustFall, the language of petrol and matches returned with a renewed eloquence. For weeks, students sealed off entrances to their universities with burning tires and forced the schools to close. At the Union Buildings on October 23, protestors in Pretoria set aflame a row of portable toilets. And in mid-November, a month after #FeesMustFall began, students at Stellenbosch, the Tswhane University of Technology, and the University of the Western Cape kept the fires lit, burning debris, buildings, and other campus properties.

More forcefully than any memorandum, the fires expressed this generation’s urgency to tear down the structures in place—to expose, in the process, the violence and absurdity that undergird the visage of South Africa’s “normal and functioning” society. Take, for example, the events that took place on October 19 at the University of Cape Town. That evening, a small crowd of students was occupying an administrative office when the state police arrived to evict them. The officers, clad in riot gear, opened stun grenades and tear gas canisters; they’d been summoned by university management to use whatever means necessary. The violence normalized by the state was mirrored in the reactions of individuals. The first morning that students blockaded entrances to UCT, a white professor, angered by the inconvenience, climbed out of his car and unleashed a stream of expletives on the young, mostly black protestors (including the words “selfish fucking cunts”).

Media outlets interpreted the fires, the stones, and the barricades as hooliganism. They missed the argument. In calling for everything to be decolonized, this generation of protestors is rejecting colonial modes of speaking to power. They’re uprooting Enlightenment ideals of civil and rational discourse; they’re giving the finger to rules of respectability. As the writer and columnist Sisonke Msimang succinctly phrased it, the young ones simply have no fucks left to give. This contempt for state-approved forms of expression has created the space for the return of Madikizela-Mandela: a figure who, throughout her life, voiced her anger loudly, publicly, and without restraint. When asked to confess her crimes at the Truth Commission in 1997, Madikizela-Mandela kept her responses brief, her expression aloof. Against the backdrop of a jubilatory nation, her refusal to participate in forgiveness exercises sealed her reputation as morally bankrupt and mad. But today, armed with the understanding that reconciliation is meaningless without justice, we read her conduct much differently. We see in Madikizela-Mandela a leader who refused to adapt her rage to the formats set forth by those in power.

***

Throughout the protests, whenever the Mandela name arose, I’d ask people what they thought of Winnie Mandela. To one UCT student, the Mandela couple represented the Janus-faced decision that South Africa had to make in 1994. While Nelson Mandela stood for reconciliation, Madikizela-Mandela stood for retribution—the road that should’ve been taken. “Winnie Mandela, now she’s a fighter!” somebody else said, swinging his fist into the air, “She did all the dirty work while her husband was gone.” Another protestor corrected me, saying, “No, her name is Winnie Madikizela. She must get rid of the ‘Mandela’.”

On October 22, the day Madikizela-Mandela was supposed to appear, 15,000 protestors in Johannesburg marched across the Nelson Mandela Bridge to Luthuli House, the headquarters of the African National Congress. But a few hours after the Facebook post (quoted at the outset of this post) began to attract attention, the Mandela Legacy issued a statement: Madikizela-Mandela didn’t have a Facebook profile, and she wasn’t even in town at the time. The profile was a hoax.

Though Madikizela-Mandela never showed up to the protests, she had, in another sense, already arrived—resuming her rightful place among the South African youth. 21 years ago, the country didn’t know what to make of her. But today, it’s precisely the unintelligibility of Winnie Mandela’s image that captures the dizzying contradictions of life as a born-free. She is, all at once, a public figure electrifying but evasive; a consciousness vacillating between psychosis and lucidity; and a soldier eager, after too many years of waiting, to carry the revolution to its conclusion.

Weekend Music Break No.90

To wrap things up for 2015, next week Africa is a Country will have a few best of lists and long form posts for you to ponder into the New Year (as we take our annual December break). But for now let’s have a briefer interlude with our weekly music break, the last one for this year.

Our selection of tunes this week is honestly a bit of a (holiday work party?) grab bag, but at Africa is a Country we only deal in quality. You won’t be disappointed.

Kicking things off we have Badi and Youssoupha’s ode to the Congo of many names, peoples, and political geographies, so appropriately they just use the telephone country code 243 to signify exactly where and what they mean; To follow up we have the grandmaster of Ndombolo style of the rumba-soukous-decale axis, Kofi Olomide, who proves he can be relevant in the social media age with “Selfie”; Mr. Jayvic brings us uptempo dance vibes from Ghana; and then, Yungsal brings us nice Ghana-inspired downtempo vibes from Sierra Leone; Philadelphia, USA’s Doelife turns up for their squad with “Moment”; and then as promised in a previous music break, we said when the clip arrives we’d once again share Scotland’s Young Fathers’ “Old Rock N Roll”, live from Malawi; Boyzn Bucks members Cassper Nyovest and Riky Rick turn in a dark Cape Town tale with “Le Mpitse”; Afro Lisboa’s Black Sea Não Maya crew releases one of the few videos coming out of that scene, hopefully many more to come; And finally, we take a holiday pan-African turn to the Caribbean with some Trinidadian-Venezuelan Parang-Soca and Puerto Rican Parranda-Salsa vibes. Happy holidays, and see you at the next music break in 2016!

The Legend of John Chilembwe

2015 marks a centenary after the Chilembwe uprising against imperial Britain – an activity that is believed to have influenced, in some way, Marcus Garvey. Reverend John Chilembwe was born circa 1870 in the then ‘nameless’ enclave that later became British Central Africa before mutating into Nyasaland (land of the lake), now Malawi. In 1892, initiative led him to knock on the door of the radical missionary Joseph Booth, whose famous dictum was ‘Africa for Africans’.

In 1897, Chilembwe and Booth, headed for the United States of America, via London and Liverpool. In the US, Chilembwe was encouraged by African Americans to part with the now penniless Booth. Chilembwe, with the help of the Negro Baptist Convention, attended the Virginia Theological College. The failure of the Reconstruction period and the reaction of the Baptists to the Jim Crow laws would have an impact on Chilembwe. In the US, he also met other future African leaders including John Dube, who later became president of South Africa Native Congress, later the African National Congress (ANC).

In 1900, an ordained Chilembwe was back in Malawi, with the backing of the National Baptist Convention. He was a new man and very keen to show it, drawing complaints of ‘natives living beyond their station’ from the settler community. He soon became the vocal mouthpiece of the disfranchised Africans, from women’s rights to equality based on Christian values, from the virtues of educating the African to concerns over land tenure. In 1903, when Africans were sent by the British to fight the Ya Asantewa in present Ghana, Chilembwe complained loudly.

In 1859, famed Scottish missionary David Livingstone ‘discovered’ Lake Malawi and the east African slave trade. Back home in Britain, he campaigned for the introduction of Christianity and formal commerce to counter slavery. Early attempts resulted in disaster as the first missionaries out of Oxford and Cambridge ran into trouble against some Yao chiefs, then slave agents of the Swahili traders.

Attempts were made again after the much publicised burial of Livingstone at Westminster Abbey, resulting in the establishment, in 1876, of Blantyre (now Malawi’s commercial city), a tribute to Livingstone’s birth place. Closely following on the missionaries’ heels were businessmen and speculators and, before long, the alienation of land through mainly nefarious means.

Chilembwe bought land and set up his industrial mission in Blantyre’s neighbouring district of Chiladzulo, adjacent to the vast Bruce Estates, owned by none other than Livingstone’s own daughter Anne and run by William Jarvis Livingstone, a distant relation, and a man who was to embody for Chilembwe everything that was wrong with the white settlers. For Jarvis, Chilembwe was the archetypical ‘native above his station’. The laborers at the Bruce Estate, mostly of Yao and Nguru stock, the latter having migrated from present Mozambique after freeing famine and harsh Portuguese rule, looked to Chilembwe for a patron figure.

Chilembwe accused Livingstone of, among other things, burning his churches and schools. When the colonial government turned a deaf ear, Chilembwe is reported to have suggested taking matters in his own hands.

By 1913, Chilembwe was in a tight corner: funding was hard to come by, he owed money for his very impressive cathedral, his gun licence for commercial ivory hunting was revoked, the famine of 1913 pushed more Africans towards him for help, and his poor health (asthma and failing eyesight) and the death of his daughter compounded his burdens. But the proverbial straw was the start of the Great War in August 1914 which saw his audience decrease as Africans were conscripted in large numbers to fight against German East Africa (now Tanzania). In November 1914, Chilembwe penned a scathing letter admonishing the government:

…In times of peace, everything for Europeans only…But in time of war [we] are needed to share hardships and shed blood in equality…

On Saturday 23 January 1915 he started an uprising. Chilembwe plotted to kill all white men in the protectorate, save for a few missionaries sympathetic to his cause, to bring about a new order in the region. The first casualty was Jarvis Livingstone, his severed head a prized trophy by Chilembwe’s men. Others were sent to Blantyre–in the true fashion of John Brown of Harper’s Ferry–to break into the armoury and steal guns and ammunition. This mission was a failure of sorts with the supposed leader, John Gray Kufa, deserting and an accidental alarm being raised by Chilembwe’s men. Legend has it that Chilembwe preached the next day’s church service with the head of Livingstone next to the pulpit where he is reputed to have said the words: ‘Let us strike a blow and die for Africa’.

A few skirmishes with government and volunteer forces ensued but, by Tuesday 26 January, his whole mission had been abandoned. His impressive cathedral was then demolished with explosives. The uprising was quelled by 3 February 1915 when its leader was shot while trying to cross into Mozambique. In the aftermath, his fellow conspirators were either hanged or shot on a firing line.

The uprising, though short-lived, left an indelible mark. George Shepperson, Cambridge don and foremost scholar of Chilembwe, later summarised the uprising thus:

[His] ideas may have been utopian…borne their format in action dictated by despairing frustration. But at their heart was a solid matter of fact element that was constructively forward looking, and kept for the most part within the bounds of practical, if remote, possibility.

Since Nyasalanders had no myths like those of the old Ghana to inspire communal confidence, said Shepperson, Chilembwe’s name could be utilized. In 1958, Kamuzu Banda, Malawi’s first president, inserted himself in the Chilembwe narrative as the one prophetized about by Chilembwe himself to free Malawi from white rule. In 1994, Bakili Muluzi, Kamuzu’s predecessor, inserted Chilembwe on all bank notes (example above). Surprisingly, not much has been done by the current Malawian government in the 100th year of his uprising. Still, to most Malawians, Chilembwe’s memory lives on as a symbol of courage and sacrifice.

If you want to read more on Chilembwe, I can highly recommend George Shepperson’s Independent African: John Chilembwe and the Nyasaland Rising of 1915 (Edinburgh University Press, 1958).

Bamako Diaries II

Africa is a Country culture editor Neelika Jayawardane visited Bamako for this year’s Encounters Biennale of African Photography . This is part 2 of her roundup, read part 1 here.

Any photographer can tell you that the strictures of being successful – or trying to get there – include near-constant travel, jet-lag, aloneness: residencies, promotional talks, openings at galleries, art shows, festivals. One lives out-of-place, and out of time, performing a presentable, palatable version of self. Given these disjunctures in modern photographers’ lives, I wondered what might mean for them to be engaged in “telling” time, Bamako Encounters’ theme, using a medium that is, essentially, about distilling time into a “still”. In stilling a moment in time through recording it in an image, we are engaging in a form of melancholia – an inability to let go of a past as time moves on. Our longing for that past is strong enough that it appears in our mirrors sometimes, and in frames of photography and film – uncanny visitors from histories we cannot untie from the threads of our present.

Some work at Bamako Encounters remarked on the way that past attachments stay ever-present, using deeply personal reflections; they meditated on the way that time – and the geographical, political, and genetic locations through which we have passed – keeps telling and retelling itself on our psyches and our bodies. Mimi Cherono’s collage of photographs, the first to greet the visitor in the cool, white tent, comments on that relationship with time in a way that was more indicative of melancholic presence – an inability to let go of a past that insistently wounded one’s present. Cherono’s work, “Do You Miss Me? Sometimes, Not Always” is an invitation, a secret garden of jewel greens overlapped by darkness and dappled light. “Do You Miss Me” consists of a selection of photographs taken in Kigali, Abidjan, Kampala and Nairobi, images of both cityscapes and suburban loneliness. They were taken during six months of travel, subsequent to the passing of one of Cherono’s close friends, South African photographer Thabiso Sekgala. These studies tell us stories of cities built by architects influenced by poor-man’s Bauhaus and post-colonial practicalities: minimalist, concrete, easily replicable. But Cherono also bookmarks structures that hope to escape that mediocrity, aspiring to something to do with indicating affluence: a white home with a double peaked roof, its white columns holding up twin stories, accompanied by an immaculate, close-cropped green lawn. In another photograph, a red brick wall shows us the perimeter of a property and the limits of its inhabitants’ freedom; an ornate, russet settee, devoid of a sitter, tells one just how uncomfortable this aspired-to comfort is. Shoes – heeled court shoes, kiddies’ sandals, and some fashion-conscious youth’s sneakers with Velcro tongues – are piled up at an entryway – waiting their owners’ return. A wide avenue where a red sports car barrels down, past sleepy conifers and hedges, is reminiscent of Americana; a seashore, where a distant couple is walking could be a postcard: one of them is wearing a red shirt, and the other is in dark clothes, and their feet are catching the silver web of saltwater lapping the strand. The largest image in this collage is a close up of banana leaves – broken and battered by rainstorms, some ragged by age, others being choked by undergrowth. There is an abandoned, dirty white pony figurine – once part of a carousel, perhaps? – poking its unlikely head out. In the middle of that refulgent foliage and decaying objects, Cherono has imbedded a small, blurry, black and white image: it is a photograph of a man, who is either just waking up, or he is a little tired, because it is late at night. The small shadow by his elbow tells me that it is probably night, because the light is artificial. His slim body is lounging comfortably on a sofa, elbow placed along the top of a cushion, his head resting on his right hand. He smiles from some far away place, already part of a history we are forgetting. But that smile-that-is-not-a-smile, more haunting and mysterious than any European Renaissance beauty can offer, keeps shadowing us.

Many photographers who came to this Biennale knew that Sekgala ended his life only a year prior. Mimi and he were friends and collaborators on photographic projects; in fact, it was through Mimi that I learned of Thabiso’s death in October, 2014. But already, in a year, the memory of him has become a garden that is not well-maintained. Seeing this image of him, so slim, so small, already blurring into the undergrowth of a badly maintained garden, I wondered about the effectiveness of imperatives admonishing us to remember the past as an elixir against forgetting.

South African Lebohang Kganye’s “Her Story & “Heir Story” are family stories, imbedded into the narrative of South Africa. She reflects, like Cherono, on the way that a beloved figure can insert herself into present narratives for which she is no longer present. But Kganye also actively orchestrates her return to the past, maintaining history as part of her living present. Unlike the melancholy evident in Cherono’s work, the tone that comes across here is sweet and tender in some instances, and fall-down funny in others.

In “Her-Story,” a series of digitally edited photographs, Kganye overlays images of her late mother with a second set of images, in which she has re-enacted the same scene, dressing and posing in the same manner as her mother.

“Her Story” by Lebo Kganye

The two images – one from the past, and one from the more recent present – shadow each other, reminding us, simultaneously, of our demise and our ever-presence. This is a loving homage to a parent gone too soon from one’s life, a longing for a presence to which one cannot return. But instead of melancholy – a wounding from which one is unable to recover – we see that this is a mourning that allows Kganye to lovingly celebrate her mother’s life. We see that she isn’t overshadowed by her mother’s omnipresence or her loss; instead, she accompanies her daughter in the bittersweet present, in the absence of her mortal self.

In the second set of images, “Heir-Story,” Kganye costumed herself as her late grandfather – a larger-than life figure legendary for the way he brought one after the other of his family members from apartheid “homeland” in the Free State to the city of Johannesburg in Transvaal Province. Kganye then embodies the role played by the Pied Piper of the family – also famous for his comical drunken episodes – re-enacting her grandfather’s exploits, including one escapade where he had to be brought back home in a wheelbarrow.

“The Pied Piper” by Lebo Kganye

To tell this story, she re-invents the apartheid stage – placing life-sized cutouts of relatives among props that recreate the city, township, and domestic spaces as her grandmother described them; in so doing, once again, she attempts to inhabit a past that is no longer available to her and her age-mates – those who are part of the so-called “Born-Free” generation of South Africans who came of age after 1994. Yet, we also know that past is very much a part of the present – that though the visible structures Kganye recreates and bookmarks as part of the apartheid past were erased or discarded, the less visible structures remain, shaping her generation’s life. In her reenactment, Kganye goes a step further, by making a stop-animation film using the life-sized cutouts of family members and rolling dollies to move the scenery.

“Wheelbarrow” by Lebo Kganye

The result is a historical narrative that “tells the nation” and tells the personal, intertwining the effect of colonial and apartheid-era land dispossessions, Group Areas acts, and liquor laws. We see the determination of one man and his family to survive this politically orchestrated tragedy, the impossibility of making it in this heartbreaking country, and the comedic eye-roll in Kganye’s re-telling. How else can one behave in the face of a history – one intended to make us break down and weep – but tell and tell again, whilst laughing?

The ANC Women’s League is Dead

In October this year, South African artist Ayanda Mabulu unveiled a painting of the country’s President, Jacob Zuma, “The Pornography of Power.” In the graphic painting, Zuma, inside a circus tent, laughs while a women, tied with a rope, gives him oral sex. The women is raped by a hyena. The backdrop is the logo of the ruling African National Congress. Mabulu said he wanted to depict how the country (represented by the young woman) was being “molested” by the Zuma and the ANC. Mabulu courts controversy: In 2010, he painted Zuma, along with Nelson Mandela, Desmond Tutu and Barack Obama, naked at a banquet. That painting, however, received little reaction in contrast to the now infamous 2012 Brett Murray rendition of Zuma, penis exposed in Lenin pose, which led to charges of racism (Murray is white) and debates about freedom of expression.

This time around Mabulu, who is black, stands alone. Now the ANC Women’s League (ANCWL) announced it would march against Mabulu’s latest effort for depicting the embattled Zuma “in a despicable manner that seeks to undermine his character and leadership of the country.” The Women’s League went on: “We stand behind our president and will protect him from any form of unwarranted attack on his character and leadership. Protecting our president is protecting our country.”

Contrary to some, I did not have an issue with the idea of marching against Mabulu’s painting. If they were protesting against the disgusting depiction of the black woman in the painting and how we as black women are tired of seeing ourselves beaten, raped, and brutalised in the name of male artists’ social commentary I would have been okay with it. The degrading way in which Jacob Zuma was depicted could have even featured as a secondary issue. But Jacob Zuma’s degradation was the only issue the march focused on. Once again, black women, whose pain and suffering is treated so carelessly by male artists such as Mabulu, did not feature, even in a conversation started by other black women. The ANCWL, which dates back to the 1930s and played a lead role in anti-Apartheid  resistance, is simply now an echo chamber for the ANC and its misogynist views.

It is not all terribly surprising. These days, the organisation’s silence is often more powerful than their statements and actions. The ANCWL has been noticeably absent when brazen misogyny has reared its ugly head within the ANC party ranging from serious incidences, such as the Jacob Zuma rape trial of 2006, to the misogynistic comments often made by leaders of the ANC, including calling women dirty panties, attacking the weight and clothing choices of female parliamentary speakers, and referring to single women as deformities.

Image Credit: Eyewitness News

Most disturbingly, even when the ANCWL does tackle gender issues, many of their efforts still seem to miss the mark. The most recent example would have to be their stance on virginity testing and ukuthwala. The ANCWL rightfully condemned ukuthwala, the bastardized Xhosa practice of kidnapping young girls in order to force them into marriages with older men often for her family’s profit. But they retracted their earlier condemnation of virginity testing by stating that it is a valid method of preventing HIV infection and teenage pregnancy, and that as a “pro-choice” organisation, they believe that if a girl wants to participate in virginity testing then she should be supported in her decision.

This stance is problematic for a number of reasons. It seems to completely ignore the fact that the areas with the lowest rates of HIV infections and teen pregnancy are areas where comprehensive sex education and reliable birth control are wildly available. It places the onus of preventing HIV infections and teenage pregnancy on the girl’s ability to keep her legs closed and not also on the boy who shares half the responsibility. It also fails to problematize virginity testing as a whole as well as the mechanisms at play surrounding a girl’s consent. For example, if I am not comfortable with virginity testing but I know I will be branded a slut and ostracised if I don’t participate in it, one must question how much of a choice I really have. If one can safely say that this sort of slut shaming does not happen in communities where virginity testing is common in reaction to those who do not to participate in it, then, and only then, can one really speak of a woman’s choice in the matter.

While the ANC has some of the most progressive gender policies, there is a serious disconnect between what the party’s stance on gender is on paper and what its leaders are saying in public.

It is disappointing to say that the ANCWL in 2015 is a far cry from the anti-Apartheid organisation that earned its place in history under the leadership of women such as Lilian Ngoyi, Albertina Sisulu, and Winnie Madikizela-Mandela. Of  late, the organisation has failed time and time again to check misogyny within the ANC and has made shallow attempts at best to check misogyny outside of it. If the ANCWL is going to be more than a hollow echo chamber for the party’s leaders, they need to go back to basics. But even that may be too late.

That time an African team played in Spain’s La Liga

The all-time Spanish Primera División table holds in it remarkable stories of Spanish football history. The standings unearth past epochs of preeminence and point to many of the shifts in power to occur over the course of La Liga history since the league was established in 1922. Athletic Bilbao’s fourth place position is an apt reminder of the force the Basque club was in the 1980s under Javier Clemente. Villareal, who are now considered a permanent member of the Spanish top-flight, sit in a surprising 21st place beneath five clubs currently competing in the Segunda, including ninth place Real Zaragoza. And while Atlético Madrid are currently capable of giving anyone across Europe a game, a comfortable points margin continues to distance the club from first and second place Real Madrid and Barcelona.

But there is also romance near the bottom of Spain’s all-time table. Second from last with 5,308 points separating them from Real Madrid is Atlético Tetuán, whose time in La Liga is an overlooked yet fascinating tale in Spanish football and colonial history. The club was founded in 1922 in the Moroccan Rif Mountains in the city of Tetouan by a group of Basque Atlético Madrid supporters residing in the North African colonial protectorate. Atlético Tetuán’s stint in Spanish football would be short lived, splitting in 1956 following Morocco’s independence to form AD Ceuta and Moghreb Tetouan. Today, Moghreb Tetouan remains the only African club ever to hold a spot in a top-flight European football league.

The club enjoyed a solitary season in the Primera División in 1951-52 after nearly three decades of lower division play. It was a season overshadowed by one of Barcelona’s most successful and legendary sides: the forward pair of László Kubala and  César Rodríguez Álvarez helped haul in five trophies for the Catalonian club, including the Primera title. Tetuán would lose both of their meetings with Barca 5-2 and 3-2 and suffer relegation after finishing bottom of the table with a mere 19 points. The club’s away form was utterly dreadful: Tetuán lost 14 of their 15 away trips, including an 8-0 battering to Atlético Madrid and a 7-0 loss to Celta Vigo. Tetuán would only capture away points to RC Deportivo, winning 3-2 and featuring goals by Chicha, Moreno, and Patricio.

Tetuán’s home ground in contrast proved to be a stubborn setting for mainland clubs visiting North Africa. The club avenged their loss to brother club Atlético Madrid by netting four goals to one. Real Madrid’s only visit to Tetuán would end in a 3-3 draw after the hosts led at halftime 3-1 thanks to a brace from midfielder Julian Garcia. Tetuán would concede a goal on the 89th minute mark and flounder their chance in securing a historic victory. Real Madrid star Pahiño, who would capture one of his two Zichichi trophies in the 1952 season, was however kept quiet and off the scoresheet.

The stalemate with Real Madrid continues to occupy a special place in Moghreb Tetouan lore. The Moroccan side nearly came within reach of settling the draw in last year’s Club World Cup until they were eliminated in the tournament’s playoff round. The rematch would have made for a particularly testy affair: Tetouan continues to play in red and white stripes and blue shorts, and the city still boasts a strong support for Los Colchoneros. With the club recently winning Moroccan Botola titles in 2012 and 2014 and competing in the CAF Champions League, Moghreb Tetouan continue to aim for a decisive encounter with Real Madrid to settle the longstanding deadlock.

*Note: Tetuan is the Spanish transliteration of Tetouan. The club’s name changed to Moghreb Athletic Tetouan in 1956. Use of the latter refers to the present-day Moroccan club.

Nicki Minaj’s Angola

Nicki Minaj’s decision to go play a concert in the Angolan capital, Luanda this coming weekend,* has refocused the spotlight again (particularly in the United States, where Angola rarely features in the media) on the trial of the “15+2” and on general political repression there. The Angolan state accuses these seventeen civil society activists – fifteen arrested in late June and jailed since then and two accused but not detained by the state – of organizing acts of rebellion against the state (planning a coup, in other words) and an attempt against the President. The trial is now in its fifth week.

If this is the first you’ve heard of this trial, we suggest you do some reading. We have covered the arrest and the social protest around it here, here, and here. Others have written about here, here, and here. For an analysis of the trial here is makaangola’s take.

Africa is a Country asked a group of writers and thinkers what they think the trial means for contemporary Angola, which celebrated 40 years of independence on November 11, 2015. Here is what they had to say to each other and to us.

Dum Spiro Spero

In 2002, the Angolan civil war ended after three decades of bloodshed, famine, destruction of infrastructure and rupture of the social fabric. In the same year, Malcolm Gladwell published Tipping Point: How Small Things Can Make a Big Difference. In the book, Gladwell defines the tipping point as being that “magic moment when an idea, tendency, or social behavior crosses a threshold, tips and spreads like fire.” Mohamed Bouazizi’s self-immolation in Tunis in December 2010 which led to the Jasmine Revolution and, arguably, to the wider-scale phenomenon known today as the Arab Spring, is one fitting example.

If we believe Gladwell, then perhaps it is fair to say that Angola has just witnessed its first tipping point – finally, at age 40! In a society where the voices of dissent are often stifled (if not completely silenced), the national outcry generated around the infamous case of the 15+2 activists currently under arrest – and the parallel wave of international support for their unconditional release – is no small feat.

What remains to be seen, however, is if the upcoming trial of these young men and women will be a harbinger for true, tangible change in Angola. The outcome of their trial could represent a quantum leap in the way the Angolan regime is viewed from within. A fair trial could be interpreted as a sign of better things to come. Angola desperately needs less uniform thinking in order to make progress on all fronts. This includes the mammoth task of uplifting the living standards of at least two thirds of its citizens who have yet to benefit from the much-vaunted economic growth reported over the last decade. Angola also needs more tolerance towards non-conformists like these activists who probably represent many other muffled voices and minds. An unfair or bogus trial, on the other hand, will only consolidate the label that the Angolan regime has had for several years: an African state with muscle and “attitude”.

In a BBC survey conducted in 2008, a small majority of Angolans claimed to trust the country’s legal system. After many weeks of this trial, will their opinion change at this pivotal moment of Angola’s modern history?

Claudio Silva (@caiplounge)

The unprecedented wave of national and international support generated around the case of the 15+2 political prisoners is certainly a tipping point in Angola’s recent history. But I’d say it’s the first of several that will come our way during the next decade or more.

It’s clear that Angola has a long way to go in its nation-building process. History hasn’t been kind to us – from slavery to colonialism to civil war, we’ve been a constantly fractured society that has often found it difficult to agree on who should govern the country and how. But when the civil war ended in 2002 we finally had the chance to govern ourselves without the violence and destruction of war.

Unfortunately, I feel that we haven’t taken the best advantage of our newfound peace and our newfound wealth. In a decade of unparalleled economic growth (11% average annual growth over the past 10 years), we were unable to address the country’s most pressing social needs, such as our sky-high infant mortality rate, our woeful education system, our completely inadequate health system and our access to drinking water. We were unable to diversify our economy. Instead, we made some politically-linked Angolans extremely wealthy and widened the gap between rich and poor. Most tellingly, we were unable to use our wealth for the benefit of most Angolans.

On top of this, we’ve made sure to consolidate MPLA’s hegemony over society. Civil liberties and the rule of law continue to be blatantly disrespected. And so it is that in the year we are celebrating our 40th independence, we’re also decrying a police force that beats up the mothers of the 15+2 detainees in the streets of Luanda in broad daylight and a government that finds it necessary not only to threaten a peaceful vigil with water cannons and anti-riot police but also to declare vigils illegal.

What kind of country will we have when we celebrate 50 years of independence?

Lara Pawson (@larapawson)

I don’t entirely trust Malcolm Gladwell. That said, the Canadian journalist’s most recent book also has uncanny echoes with the trial taking place in Luanda since November 16. It’s called David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants.

I believe that the stone has been hurtling towards Goliath’s head ever since the 27 February 2011, when rapper Luaty Beirão stood on a stage in Luanda and bellowed, ‘Ti Zé Tira o Pé: Tô Prazo Expirou Há Bwé!’ In lyrical slang, he was telling President José Eduardo dos Santos to step down from power – to loud applause from the audience.1

Thinking about this trial, and the 15 men who have been detained since June, accused of allegedly plotting to overthrow the president, I’ve been reflecting on the thoughts of Agostinho Neto, Angola’s first president. I’ve been re-reading his poetry, including Aqui no cárcere (Here in prison), which was written in a Luanda prison cell in 1960. Ponder these final lines:

Here in prison

rage contained in my breast

I patiently wait

for the clouds to gather

blown by the wind of History

No one

can stop the rain.

They could have been written for this very moment. Their poignancy encourages me to feel deeply optimistic for Angola. In 1960, the battle for liberation from Portugal’s fascist regime was beginning. Neto knew that Portuguese colonials would be the losers, just as the courageous and inspiring men and women on trial these last weeks know that the winds of history are blowing in their favour. It has not been easy and it will not be quick, but as Amílcar Cabral insisted, the ‘seed that has long lain waiting’ will eventually spring forth.

Justin Pearce (@DrJustinPearce)

I wish I could be optimistic.

It’s nice to think that a few heroes might stop a behemoth regime. But think back ten years or so, when people were saying every month that the Mugabe regime had reached its tipping point. It wasn’t just that Zimbabwe was out of cash and producing nothing except new crops of zeroes on the national currency. Zimbabwe also seemed to have an alternative: an alliance (albeit unholy) between organised labour, indigenous business interests and civil society, with credibility at home and abroad. This alliance was associated with a political party which, for all its internal contradictions, had established an institutional foothold using the opportunities offered by a constituency-based elections and decentralised local government.

Mugabe faced down his opposition with the boot and the baton. He doesn’t look like he’s leaving any time soon.

Compare Angola. The decline in the price of petroleum has caused a foreign exchange crisis, but Angola still has a functioning economy: the world will always want oil, even if it’s paying less for it. Angola has no labour movement to speak of. Indigenous business exists only by the grace of the presidency. Civil society is bolder than it was, but isolated. The main opposition party has given voice to some popular concerns but it struggles to break out of its wartime self-regard as a quasi-state answerable to its own devotees, rather than a political alternative able to reshape the current order. A centralised political system ensures that no one outside the MPLA gets anywhere near a position of influence. The palace’s control of the cash flow restricts opportunities to a still smaller circle.

The Dos Santos regime is stronger than the Mugabe regime ever was. The most striking similarity between Zimbabwe and Angola is the regime’s eager return to the boot and the baton. Angola has the cash and the institutional culture for more boots and batons to come.

Paulo Inglês

Contrary to what has been said by the government media, there is no order (produced by the Government) versus a disturbance or disorder produced by the Revú Movement. Instead, we have a different perception of orders. The Revú Movement challenged the order that has been dominant in the last ten years. An order which, some claim, did not offer a real break with a political culture characterized by a sort of soft authoritarianism.

Where the government sees an incipient democracy, with some failures but still a democracy, the Revú Movement sees authoritarianism, even with elections. The Revú movement wants to change this “status quo” and go a bit further in the democratisation process.

The trial is not, in this regard, the scenario of judicial disputation, but a “stage” of political disputation. The Benfica court is a kind of new Parliament, the place of hope, dreams and desires of an entire people, but also a place of loss and frustration.

The trial is still slow, sometimes annoying and almost endless, and the society, represented by the 17 respondents, keeps waiting stoically. At the end it is a disputation between political obstinacy and common sense and I hope the latter will prevail, whatever the dramatic situation of the moment and the coming days, tipping point, or step along the path.

Minaj is only the next in a long line of pop stars who played for dictators (on Angola, Mariah Carey has been to Luanda to play for the Dos Santoses too). See here, here and here for some background.