Sean Jacobs's Blog, page 317

Against the corruption of hip hop in Burkina Faso

With his gravely flow, gliding over foreboding beats, Art Melody has always been one of the more commanding voices out of, and for West African Hip Hop. And with his latest “Wagare hip hop” off of his recent album Moogho, this tone serves to deliver his message well. However, this time the message isn’t the explicit political messaging we’re used to from Burkinabe MCs. That’s because Art Melody is tired of politics. He just wants to talk about music. But as things go in Burkina Faso, a political strain isn’t too far behind any message, perhaps especially when it comes to music.

“Wagare hip hop,” explicitly sends out a message to fraudulent music producers in Burkina Faso, who try to take advantage of “the movement” for their own monetary gain. The chorus says, “Park my hip hop if you don’t have a license to drive it,” and the verses serve as a warning to those who use hip hop solely to make money or garner fame. For Art Melody, hip hop is a philosophy, one that can’t be sold out for fame, money, or even politics.

A contact in West Africa told me that in Burkina Faso, an unfortunate trend has developed where artists, producers, and promoters are all ready to snatch funding without providing any overall vision or plan to further the cause of the people, the youth, or the movement. So the fact that this message against corruption in the music industry is coming from an artist, from a country where hip hop is intertwined with national politics, one could infer a thing or two about the state of things on the ground. On the recent revolution in his home country, Art Melody states:

I am very proud of my Burkinabè people. A lot has changed, the recent elections are a complete novelty for practically all of us in Burkina Faso, and it went incredibly smoothly. For this I am so proud of my people. But we must remain vigilant, particularly because those who won the elections are familiar faces. I will talk about change when I see a real change in the way people act, when all the bad habits left behind the Compaoré system start to dissolve, all the bribes, the self-censorship.

It is this exact relationship between music and politics that creates a difficult conundrum for the revolutionary artist in Burkina, and for just an ordinary citizen.

Does the Gates Foundation do more harm than good?

In July 2010, I attended the International AIDS Conference in Vienna, Austria. Representatives of the Gates Foundation’s HIV team set-up shop inside the venue with a private conference room. For those of us working for civil society organizations, a meeting with the Gates Foundation was highly coveted yet illusive – you had to know someone who knew someone. A friend secured an appointment and labored for days over how, in her five minute allotted slot, she could present her nonprofit. I waited for her anxiously outside the venue, knowing this was a make or break meeting for her small organization, which seeded activism around HIV and human rights worldwide. “How did it go?,” I asked when she emerged. “No idea,” she replied. “They asked me what our competitive advantage was; I don’t think they understood what we actually do.”

In a new book, No Such Thing as a Free Gift: The Gates Foundation and the Price of Philanthropy, the sociologist Linsey McGoey traces the evolution of private philanthropy’s ‘father knows best’ approach to giving. As McGoey explains, foundations used to have a hands off approach to their grantees, with the understanding that those working closely on social issues best understood how to affect change. Now, most foundations are intimately involved in trying to shape their grantees’ methods, including the Gates Foundation.  “The question is whether the practices associated with the new philanthropy – such as tighter control of grantee decision-making; a demand for swifter indicators of project success – might be stifling ingenuity and progress rather than engendering it.”

The first half of the book approaches philanthropy from both a philosophical and historical perspective, questioning the power imbalance implicit in giving and charity, then interrogating the rise of foundations in the U.S. McGoey reveals that the new religion of ‘philanthrocapitalism’ – applying business models to giving – is nothing new. What is different though is the scale of private giving and the power philanthropists now wield over governments. The second half of the book focuses on the Gates Foundation in particular because of their endowment and the lack of independent analysis about their impact.

McGoey reviews available literature and conducts interviews around three of the Gates Foundation’s major areas of investment – education in the U.S., global health and agriculture –to paint a loose picture of the Foundation’s portfolio and highlight areas where the Foundation’s performance needs independent appraisal (less time is devoted to the Foundation’s successes, although some are briefly mentioned). She questions whether Bill Gates’s methods are in line with his aims – for example, the Foundation wants to end AIDS, yet also believes in upholding the intellectual property regimes of pharmaceutical companies which then prevents access to affordable HIV treatment for millions of people.

When you have as much money as the Gates Foundation, it turns out you can buy your way into some pretty powerful places – Bill and Melinda Gates regularly advise world leaders on everything from global warming to family planning, despite having no prior background on these issues. They are also essentially unaccountable, reporting only to their trustees – themselves, plus Warren Buffett. McGoey wants us to understand the danger in having private individuals, no matter how good their intentions are, influencing policy decisions. (In a recent interview, Melinda Gates defended her new role as a self-appointed global ambassador for women’s issues. “I considered other women leaders. But I couldn’t find the one who embodied to me the voice of women around the world. And so I thought, ‘If I’m the one, then I just need to do it. I have to have courage and not worry.”)

In addition, McGoey raises critical questions about how the Gates Foundation approaches its work. An emphasis on human rights has long been noticeably absent from the Gates Foundation’s methods; one of the most alarming examples in the book concerns the Gates Foundation’s support for HPV trials in India. The Gates Foundation funded PATH – a Seattle based health and technology organization that it frequently partners with – to conduct the HPV trials on thousands of girls aged 10-14 in Gujarat and Andhra Pradesh, India. The Indian government halted the trials mid-way through over concerns of improper conduct – turns out PATH had violated a number of ethical protocols, like not getting witness signatures on consent forms and not providing health insurance to the girls during the trial. The Gates Foundation press office told McGoey it was a problem of misinformation and that she should speak to PATH (but they did not respond to her inquiries).

McGoey’s book does not attempt to thoroughly assess the full impact of Gates’s giving. Rather, it lays out a blueprint for future work that is urgently needed to answer a set of interrelated questions: what are the harms caused by the Gates Foundation and what are the true benefits? And can the Gates Foundation ever achieve its lofty aims without first admitting its own role in perpetuating structural inequality and then investing in political organizing to overturn it?

Recently, one of the Gates Foundation’s fellow philanthropic institutions, the Ford Foundation, announced after some soul searching a major shift in its strategic direction: Ford will now do everything possible to address economic inequality. It remains to be seen how this vision will play out in funding decisions, but on the surface it is an interesting move from a Foundation that used to be a champion of the business approach to philanthropy. Wrote Ford Foundation President Darren Walker in an e-letter earlier this year,

We foundations need to reject inherited, assumed, paternalist instincts—an impulse to put grant-making rather than change making at the center of our worldview… we need to interrogate the fundamental root causes of inequality, even, and especially, when it means that we ourselves will be implicated.

So, what could the Gates Foundation do differently? It could start by engaging publicly and reflectively on the questions asked in McGoey’s book. Bill Gates was just in Paris for the climate change negotiations, where he told French President Francis Hollande what heads of state should do differently and launched a new fund. Outside the nexus of power, people who have worked on climate change for decades protested around the world before and after the summit because they want more than investing in companies to solve climate change, they want climate justice. Sometime, it would be nice to see Bill and Melinda out there on the streets marching, learning from people who are not just the recipients of programs or in thrall to their millions but politically organized, already aware of appropriate solutions for their communities. Bill and Melinda just might learn something.

*No such thing as a free gift: the Gates Foundation and the price of philanthropy (2015) by Linsey McGoey is published by Verso Books.

The renewed focus on the struggle for Latin American Afrodescendant rights

In the short span since its inception, the Latin American Afrodescendant movement has had an extraordinary impact on the formulation of anti-racism policy in Latin America and beyond. Its origins date back to the December 2000 “Latin American Regional Conference Against Racism in Santiago de Chile,” convened to articulate the region’s agenda in advance of the World Conference against Racism to be held in Durban, South Africa the following year.

It was at the Santiago Conference that the category “Afrodescendant” was coined and obtained regional endorsement. The term identified people born in Latin America whose ethnic ancestors were Africans, and who face economic, political and cultural exclusion and inequality. This new category allowed an international movement to emerge and demand recognition and protection of collective economic, political and cultural rights.

In response, Latin American governments and international institutions have introduced a remarkable number of anti-racist policies that acknowledge Afrodescendants and attempt to address their specific needs. To this end, almost every country in the region has adopted significant constitutional reforms.  Some countries – like Brazil, Ecuador, Uruguay, Peru and Colombia – have gone further, taking steps to put these principles in practice by creating affirmative action policies, specialized anti-racism institutions and school curricula.

A recent symposium at Harvard University took advantage of the 15th anniversary of the Santiago Conference to reflect on the achievements, lessons and challenges of the Afrodescendant movement. In terms of the former, participants took stock of the organizational, institutional and normative transformations that have taken place since the year 2000.

Referring to challenges, the conversation–between representatives of governments, funders and activists–focused on the existence of ideological disagreements between the so called “left-” and “right-wing” branches of the movement, especially on the issue of building alliances with governments, intergovernmental entities and funding agencies. Participants also dedicated time to exploring how governments and human rights agencies are addressing the Afrodescendants’ continued situation of social inequality. This included a discussion of the current funding allocation practices of multilateral and donor agencies.

Concerns were raised that the lack of proper and effective access to financial resources is debilitating the movement. Finally, the Symposium facilitated a fertile dialogue on movement leadership models. In particular, it is worth highlighting the presentation made by the delegation from Cuba, a newcomer to the movement, recounting a fascinating experience of grassroots social mobilization and leadership in the absence of support from domestic and international public and private agencies.

The Harvard Symposium represented the first meeting of its kind in that Afrodescendant leaders and policy makers convened to engage in a well-rounded and focused reflection on the movement itself. By facilitating this kind of dialogue between a wide-range of actors, this meeting opened up a conversation grounded in real life problems.

This conversation will continue next year at a second meeting, to be held at the University of Cartagena de Indias in Colombia. The Cartagena meeting will invite activists and scholars to explore policy strategies that respond to some of the challenges identified at the Harvard Symposium.

*“Afrodescendants: Fifteen Years after Santiago. Achievements and Challenges” took place from December 4th to 5th at the Afro-Latin American Research Institute of the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University.

The struggle for Afrodescendant rights

In the short span since its inception, the Latin American Afrodescendant movement has had an extraordinary impact on the formulation of anti-racism policy in Latin America and beyond. Its origins date back to the December 2000 “Latin American Regional Conference Against Racism in Santiago de Chile,” convened to articulate the region’s agenda in advance of the World Conference against Racism to be held in Durban, South Africa the following year.

It was at the Santiago Conference that the category “Afrodescendant” was coined and obtained regional endorsement. The term identified people born in Latin America whose ethnic ancestors were Africans, and who face economic, political and cultural exclusion and inequality. This new category allowed an international movement to emerge and demand recognition and protection of collective economic, political and cultural rights.

In response, Latin American governments and international institutions have introduced a remarkable number of anti-racist policies that acknowledge Afrodescendants and attempt to address their specific needs. To this end, almost every country in the region has adopted significant constitutional reforms.  Some countries – like Brazil, Ecuador, Uruguay, Peru and Colombia – have gone further, taking steps to put these principles in practice by creating affirmative action policies, specialized anti-racism institutions and school curricula.

A recent symposium at Harvard University took advantage of the 15th anniversary of the Santiago Conference to reflect on the achievements, lessons and challenges of the Afrodescendant movement. In terms of the former, participants took stock of the organizational, institutional and normative transformations that have taken place since the year 2000.

Referring to challenges, the conversation–between representatives of governments, funders and activists–focused on the existence of ideological disagreements between the so called “left-” and “right-wing” branches of the movement, especially on the issue of building alliances with governments, intergovernmental entities and funding agencies. Participants also dedicated time to exploring how governments and human rights agencies are addressing the Afrodescendants’ continued situation of social inequality. This included a discussion of the current funding allocation practices of multilateral and donor agencies.

Concerns were raised that the lack of proper and effective access to financial resources is debilitating the movement. Finally, the Symposium facilitated a fertile dialogue on movement leadership models. In particular, it is worth highlighting the presentation made by the delegation from Cuba, a newcomer to the movement, recounting a fascinating experience of grassroots social mobilization and leadership in the absence of support from domestic and international public and private agencies.

The Harvard Symposium represented the first meeting of its kind in that Afrodescendant leaders and policy makers convened to engage in a well-rounded and focused reflection on the movement itself. By facilitating this kind of dialogue between a wide-range of actors, this meeting opened up a conversation grounded in real life problems.

This conversation will continue next year at a second meeting, to be held at the University of Cartagena de Indias in Colombia. The Cartagena meeting will invite activists and scholars to explore policy strategies that respond to some of the challenges identified at the Harvard Symposium.

*“Afrodescendants: Fifteen Years after Santiago. Achievements and Challenges” took place from December 4th to 5th at the Afro-Latin American Research Institute of the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University.

Anti-racism in Latin America discussion arrives at Harvard

A Symposium entitled “Afrodescendants: Fifteen Years after Santiago. Achievements and Challenges” recently took place from December 4th to 5th at the Afro-Latin American Research Institute of the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University.

Activists from twelve Latin American countries attended the Harvard Symposium together with representatives from the Ford Foundation, the Inter-American Development Bank, the World Bank, the United Nations Committee for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination and the Organization of American States.

In the short span since its inception, the Latin American Afrodescendant movement has had an extraordinary impact on the formulation of anti-racism policy in Latin America and beyond. Its origins date back to the December, 2000, Latin American Regional Conference Against Racism in Santiago de Chile, convened to articulate the region’s agenda in advance of the World Conference against Racism to be held in Durban, South Africa the following year.

It was at the Santiago Conference that the category “Afrodescendant” was coined and obtained regional endorsement. The term identified people born in Latin America whose ethnic ancestors were Africans, and who face economic, political and cultural exclusion and inequality. This new category allowed an international movement to emerge and demand recognition and protection of collective economic, political and cultural rights.

In response, Latin American governments and international institutions have introduced a remarkable number of anti-racist policies that acknowledge Afrodescendants and attempt to address their specific needs. To this end, almost every country in the region has adopted significant constitutional reforms.  Some countries – like Brazil, Ecuador, Uruguay, Peru and Colombia – have gone further, taking steps to put these principles in practice by creating affirmative action policies, specialized anti-racism institutions and school curricula.

The recent Harvard Symposium took advantage of the 15th anniversary of the Santiago Conference to reflect on the achievements, lessons and challenges of the Afrodescendant movement. In terms of the former, participants took stock of the organizational, institutional and normative transformations that have taken place since the year 2000.

Referring to challenges, the conversation focused on the existence of ideological disagreements between the so called “left-” and “right-wing” branches of the movement, especially on the issue of building alliances with governments, intergovernmental entities and funding agencies. Participants also dedicated time to exploring how governments and human rights agencies are addressing the Afrodescendants’ continued situation of social inequality. This included a discussion of the current funding allocation practices of multilateral and donor agencies.

Concerns were raised that the lack of proper and effective access to financial resources is debilitating the movement. Finally, the Symposium facilitated a fertile dialogue on movement leadership models. In particular, it is worth highlighting the presentation made by the delegation from Cuba, a newcomer to the movement, recounting a fascinating experience of grassroots social mobilization and leadership in the absence of support from domestic and international public and private agencies.

The Harvard Symposium represented the first meeting of its kind in that Afrodescendant leaders and policy makers convened to engage in a well-rounded and focused reflection on the movement itself. By facilitating this kind of dialogue between a wide-range of actors, this meeting opened up a conversation grounded in real life problems.

This conversation will continue next year at a second meeting, to be held at the University of Cartagena de Indias in Colombia. The Cartagena meeting will invite activists and scholars to explore policy strategies that respond to some of the challenges identified at the Harvard Symposium.

Remembering Zambia’s Lucy Sichone, conscience of the nation

Yesterday Zambians woke to the delightful news that the late Lucy Sichone had become the first female Rhodes Scholar to have a portrait in Rhodes House. This is the result of work by Kelsey Murrell, herself a recent Rhodes Scholar, who was disturbed to learn there wasn’t a portrait of a woman in Rhodes House, in spite of the many women who’ve received the scholarship and gone on to do great things.

We certainly have our qualms about the likes of Lucy Sichone being associated with John Cecil Rhodes’ terrible legacy, and this site has written quite a lot about that (I have also contributed to the debate here). But given that there isn’t a Wikipedia page up yet for Lucy and the fact that this gesture by Rhodes House will posthumously catapult her into the global limelight, I thought this would be a perfect opportunity to write a few words about her and what she stood for.

Lucy Sichone was born in the Zambian mining town of Kitwe in 1954. She was born at a time when it was greatly frowned upon for a girl to attend school. To get around this societal sanction, Lucy’s parents shaved her head bald to make it easier for her to attend school. Perhaps this way, she could pass for a boy and face less ridicule. And this, according to her daughter, fomented within Lucy a bold, no fear spirit that would typify her in later life.  In 1978, she became the first Zambian woman to receive a Rhodes scholarship and went on to read for a BA in Politics, Philosophy and Economics at Oxford. She was one of a handful women in her course.

Upon finishing her studies, Ms. Sichone returned to Zambia where she embarked upon a career as a lawyer focused on human rights issues. She represented people in the village whose land had been grabbed from them either by the State or by private citizens. She represented widows who had their property grabbed upon the passing away of their husbands – herself having earlier been a victim of this type of injustice. She represented people who had their rights violated by the State. Most of this she did for free.

In 1993, during the pivotal period when Zambia had just reverted to multiparty democracy and the ruling class were still using one-party strategies to stifle dissent, Lucy Sichone formed the Zambia Civic Education Association (ZCEA). ZCEA’s aim was to spread the gospel of human and democratic rights and to remind Zambians that it was not enough to have democracy on paper. We also had to make the demand, every minute and every hour, for our rights. ZCEA formed civic education clubs within secondary schools – her idea was to capture the imagination of the young whilst they could still dream. I am a beneficiary of Lucy’s dream having joined the civic education club at Munali Secondary School in Lusaka and later serving as Vice President of the club at David Kaunda Secondary School in 2001.

Perhaps because Lucy Sichone was never content with just idling by and watching the politicians desecrate the constitution, she decided to go into politics. The kind of person that Lucy was can be gleaned from the political party she decided to join. When everyone else was running towards the Movement for Multiparty Democracy (MMD), the party that had just won the momentous 1991 elections that removed Kenneth Kaunda, Ms. Sichone decided to join the United National Independence Party (UNIP). UNIP, having ruled Zambia for 27 years, had lost the 1991 elections and its political fortunes were in decline. But for Lucy, political office was not the aim. Her calculus was probably that an association with UNIP would help spread her message about safe guarding human rights and holding politicians accountable. After all, civil society organizations at that time did not have much of a following. Everyone looked up to politicians. But as expected, Lucy’s no compromise attitude unnerved people within UNIP’s inner circle. She left UNIP in 1994.

Next she took her message to the newspapers and joined the then Weekly Post as a columnist. It was during her time at the Post that two memorable events happened that thrust her into the limelight and confirmed her position as the conscience of the nation. In February 1996, Ms. Sichone wrote an article titled “Miyanda has forgotten about need for justice”. Godfrey Miyanda was then Vice President and leader of government business in parliament. An order to arrest Ms. Sichone along with the newspaper’s managing editor and chief editor was issued. The three immediately went into hiding with the latter two eventually giving themselves up. But Ms. Sichone refused to do so and continued to write ever more scathing columns whilst in hiding. In one of them she emphatically declared, “the freedoms enshrined in the Bill of Rights make it a sacred duty for me to defend them to the death.”

She eventually gave herself up and a sort of truce existed between her and the authorities. But this truce was momentary. In August of 1997, Kenneth Kaunda, the former president and leader of UNIP was shot at by the police while attempting to address a rally in the town of Kabwe. Many were arrested and injured during the fracas that ensued. All this happened while the president, Frederick Chiluba, was on a foreign trip and upon his return, Lucy Sichone snuck into the international airport and flashed the president a placard which read “Welcome to Zambia, Our Own Sharpeville Massacre”. This was in reference to the Sharpeville Massacre incident in South Africa in 1960. Needless to say that the president was not pleased.

Lucy Sichone died on August 24 in 1998. She was only 44. When she died, the Weekly Post newspaper ran the headline “Zambia mourns Sichone” and the following weeks followed with articles and columns memorializing her from across the country. The civil society movement tried to petition the government to accord her a state funeral but, as expected, the authorities declined. We are all left to wonder what other brave and inspiring things she would have done had she lived longer.

I had the rare privilege of meeting Lucy Sichone in 1998, the year she died, during a prize giving ceremony for students who had done a lot to advance civic education at their schools. She gave me a certificate carrying her immortal signature and asked all the recipients that day to carry her dream even further.

The portrait of Lucy Banda Sichone by Deirdre Saunder

Bringing Brazil’s Northeastern culture to the world

I’ve never been to the Northeast of Brazil, but I have paid R$5 to walk through the doors of the Feria Nordestina in Rio de Janeiro’s North Zone. And doing so, one clearly realizes they’ve entered a new world. It is a world that in the United States or Europe would represent an ethnic immigrant neighborhood, with all the trappings of a distant home, foreign to the land a people have chosen to congregate in search of a better future. The food, the knick-knacks, the clothes, and above all, the music all instantly transport one to a new place, a familiar unfamiliarity for both tourists and for second-generation Southeastern Brazilians whose parents want to give them a taste of their roots!

This is the place where you can get access to musica nordestina without fail any time of the year in the Southern capital. There are hundreds of music venues, from the two big stages on either side of the fair grounds, to the impromptu freestyle sessions of Repente in the center, to the reggae sound system of Maranhão roots that wouldn’t be out of place in Kingston, Jamaica, save for that the language they call for wheel ups in is Brazilian Portuguese.

And this is all immediately what I think of when I listen to Kafundo Vol. 3: Electronic Roots from Northeastern Brazil. Rio de Janeiro with its samba, bossa nova, and funk sounds, exported to the world have claimed a Monopoly on Brazilian national identity for too long. And it is the young globally plugged in and hip electronic music producers that may be the ones to develop a take on Northeastern rhythms that might just supplant a conservative Rio de Janeiro cultural scene.

Coco, Forro, Brega, Carimbó are the names of the Brazil do futuro, even if most Brazilians are yet to catch on to this reality. Kafundó records’ intention to focus on Northern and North-Eastern Brazil, a region with a large Afro-descendant, indigenous, and mestizo population, and a music scene that is heavily influenced by Caribbean sounds, will only speed this process along, as they expose these exciting new/old sounds coming from Brazil’s too long underrepresented cultural North.

Kafundó Records Vol. 3 is out this week at all your favorite digital stores. This is the latest post in our music series Liner Notes.

Bamako Diaries I

Never in my wildest dreams did I imagine that I would find myself in Malick Sidibé’s iconic studio space – at Porte 632 on Rue 508 in Bamako’s Bagadaji district, on the north side of the Niger river – getting my portrait taken by his son. But there I was, during the first week of November, gawking at the rows and rows of cameras collecting dust on the shelves, the props that he used again and again in his photographs: there was the bouquet of ragged, artificial flowers, the back and white checkered backdrop announcing itself loudly as a departure from the woven blankets historically used to line walls in Mali.

There was the little radio that so many hands held to illustrate, for their friends, that they were part of the flows of modernity: Sidibé could remake or highlight your persona, aligning it with the youthful world of cool music, dancing, and big city dreams. The photograph that his son took of me, decked out in a lollipop orange and gold silk-chiffon sari bought in Madras is not the flawless image for which I’d hoped: my sari was askew, and the photograph was taken from too low an angle. There’s too much grey – the contrast is not great, and the Sidibé magic is not there.

But I didn’t care. None of that mattered.

In 2015, the tenth edition of the Encounters Biennale of African Photography (popularly known as Bamako Encounters) promised to return big – but innovative and experimental. It is young enough to take brash risks – whilst still maintaining its eye on Mali’s photographic heritage; it went international and inclusive of the African Diaspora – but retained its relevance to the locality in which it was firmly situated. Olabisi Silva, Independent curator and founder of the Centre for Contemporary Art (CCLA) in Lagos, Nigeria, recognised the significance of this event as a definitive moment for Mali – a re-coming out party if you will – meant to restore local, continental, and international confidence in the country’s return to stability. Silva noted, in Contemporary&, “This notion of telling is a gerund: it’s not ‘tell’, it’s ‘telling’, because it’s continuous from the past to the present and into the future”; given the events of the past year – Ebola epidemic ravaging Liberia and Sierra Leone, Boko Haram in Nigeria, uprisings that ousted firmly seated dictators, Silva “wanted to reflect on what it meant to live today. So I thought that ‘Telling Time’ was really a perfect way to begin to articulate different levels of stories, of narratives.”

In order to set the tone for this grand return, Silva sent an open call over Twitter and Facebook to all photographers to send in their work for a wall of contemporary work that will re-imagine what it means to visualize being “African” in this moment. Part of the curatorial impetus for Silva and her team – which includes Ivorian-born architect Issa Diabaté (who is focusing on the biennale exhibition’s design), and associate curators Yves Chatap and Antawan Byrd – was to go beyond paying ceremonial homage to local history, only to go on to overwhelm a decorative reference to locale with a flashy list of international invitees. So as to actually imbed the local into the fabric of an international event, and to ensure that it has resonance in the local landscape of image-making well beyond the scope of the Biennale’s lifespan, Silva spent a significant amount of time developing relationships with different photographic associations in the city of Bamako, and in the country as a whole: in the same interview, she noted earnestly, “Every single Malian photographer has a responsibility to become invested in the Biennale and believe in the ownership of the event.” In a way, as curator of photography in a politically crucial time in a nation that is already home to a proud photographic history that it can call its own, she had to become a nation-builder extraordinaire, too.

Knowing that the overarching theme of the Biennale was “Telling Time” meant that we focused our attention on the invisible presence of temporality in photographs. This relationship between time and photographs, highlighted and visualized by several artists included in the main exhibition spaces, emphasized photography’s ability to conjure up traces of the past, to realize that past in the present, and perhaps that the present is also evident in a co-existent past. To that end, Silva and her team selected a range of lens-based artists who had experience in documentary, performative, and conceptual photographic practices. The thirty-nine artists whose work is shown in Bamako work in all the innovative possibilities that the technology of photography and lens-based artwork offers us today, from old-school developed film, digitally manipulated collages, video work juxtaposed with still frames, stills from re-enactments of iconic Hollywood films, and fantasy vistas projecting Afro-futures. As might be expected, there were studies – or anthropological excavations, if you will – of the photographic specialty for which this part of the world is renowned: studio photography. Senegalese photographer Ibrahima Thiam’s “Clichés d’hier” (“Photographs of yesterday”) re-positions images from his own family’s albums among collected photographs from other individuals – some intended for identity cards required by the state, and some for personal pleasure. All of them are neatly arranged in a performative stage that mimics the black and white checkered cosmos of the ’60s studio.

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Ibrahima Thiam’s “Clichés d’hier”

Thiam’s imperative to collect studio photographs began when he was a child, beginning with images from his family’s albums; today, he has 350 photographs: an archive of portrait photography from Senegal, including those by pioneers of Senegalese photography, like Meïssa Gaye, Mama Casset and Salla Casset, Doudou Diop, and Julien Lopez. When we walked into the small, three-walled alcove, we were re-viewing and re-enacting both state and family histories, immersing ourselves into stories that told of ambitions, desires, hopes, loves withheld and loves given generously. Standing in this reconstructed studio space, we were telling time, telling story, telling life.

No doubt, the memory of Mali’s immediate past was in evidence, subtle though it may have been at times, layered over the inscrutable present. At the hotel, armed guards always checked under the car for bombs using one of those circular mirrors attached to a long pole. Sometimes, they asked the driver to open the boot and bonnet. An armed guard checked our handbags at the front entrance to the hotel. These measures are, in many ways, ceremonial, meant to display an air of security and control – no different from the airport security in the U.S., however tight. At one point, after our car was permitted into the hotel compound, one curator said, “we could have been hiding guns under our feet.”

Credit: ‘kola

On the streets, the military was omnipresent, but not obnoxiously so. Guards in military fatigues sat under canopy in front of the Institut Français buildings, in which artists from Niger had their work displayed, boiling water for tea. But the French were paranoid; on the plane from Casablanca, we heard that at least two French journalists in “junior” positions were sent because their superior thought it too unsafe to travel to Bamako. “Stupid her, lucky you!” I joked with one. We all made fun of all the poor French journalists, who were required by the French Embassy to travel from hotel to art venues in one bus, with an armed guard present at all times. At one point, we saw one of the French journalists had escaped the hotel’s confines: she was walking to a restaurant a few meters away, but even then, the armed guard accompanied her discretely. “You didn’t see me,” she mouthed playfully to my French friend. But it would have been a mistake to think that the city’s inhabitants were laissez-faire about the military’s presence. During a taxi ride to a hair braider’s salon, we heard loud honking and flashing headlights: a open military truck filled to the brim with soldiers in fatigues, barreling down the road wanted to get past. Everyone quietly moved to the side of the road and let them pass.

Despite the unmistakable presence of military men – local and foreign – leaving one with an impression that this was, in many ways, an occupied city, the air was clear and sweet with motorbike fumes, dust from traffic, midday heat, fruit, and grilling fish, and conversation between photographers, writers, and curators from all corners of the African diaspora – Parisian Madagascarians, itinerant Kenyans with footholds in Dakar and Cape Town, South Africans who didn’t feel at home in their country, and to top it off, Afro-Brazilians from Bahía who arrived in Bamako International Airport without a visa for Mali, “as if they were returning home, to the motherland,” joked someone. (Samuel Sidibé, the Director of the National Museum of Mali who is largely responsible for running the biennale, reportedly went to the airport in the wee hours to “negotiate” with immigration officials and get permission for the Brazilians to enter.)

When the writers, curators, and photographers attending the Biennale settled into those easy conversations that happen by the second and third days of close proximity to each other, we swapped stories about the UN soldiers stomping through hotel hallways and the foreign personnel crowding the hotel bar, here to instruct Malians on decentralisation. The artists were staying at the Azalai Hotel near the Musée National de Bamako, and the curators and journalists were staying mostly at Hotel Onomo. One night, some of the artists noticed that there were gigantic armed guards on each floor; they learned through the grapevine that a many-starred general was staying there.

But none of that mattered.

What mattered was that Malian women were zooming past on motorbikes – that they were driving them, not simply content to be propped on the backseat whilst some paramour took the handlebars to direct her down the road. There they were, almost clichés of beauty and style, decked out in their ordinary best: figure-hugging skirt and blouse ensembles, tailored to suit their every curve, head-wraps in complementing or contrasting colors. Everyone attending the Biennale (all the foreign visitors, that is, including those from neighboring Senegal and Nigeria) remarked on the motorcycle sirens – so self-assured, so practical, weaving about the traffic with a sister, a friend, a youngster on the back-seat. We gawked at them without shame. If Sidibé was still photographing, no doubt these women would be on his list.

What mattered was that it is lush here, an ordinary, everyday, wide-leaf abundance, easy-going camaraderie, and fertility of imagination and intellect. I could walk into some out of the way little restaurant with my two new friends, Mekbib Tadesse and Aaron Simeneh, young Ethiopian photographers trained in Aida Muluneh’s studio, order the grilled fish and rice, and a government minister washed his hands at the same bowl as ours – bending down to the floor like any peasant. Naturally, he struck up a conversation about Samuel Fosso and Malik Sidibé.

What mattered was that after years of having twitter sass-offs with a mysterious Nigerian contributor to Africa is a Country, he shows up with a gin and tonic at the hotel pool, dipping his toned calf muscles into the water whilst immersing himself in and out of conversations about this or that photographer’s work, making politically incorrect asides about the Mauritanians seated on the back patio space checking out my backside, packed inside an electric blue Speedo. And him? Yes, my friend’s own beauty was in evidence, and someone was there to admire it, too. But those glances were so painfully elegant – and the recipient so willfully ignorant – that I couldn’t make fun of this moment. I only wished that I hadn’t lost my camera in a surfing accident years ago, and that I was still making images. This, here, was something I wouldn’t be able to get across with words alone.

The Great Question in Dar es Salaam

The Great Question in Dar es Salaam is always: incompetence… or conspiracy? The question was first introduced to me by a tired-looking campaign adviser before the October 25th general elections. “Incompetence or conspiracy?” said he, shaking his head sadly. Incompetence or conspiracy? You never, never know.

When the fundi fixing your car door, whom you argued over prices with, has the misfortune to smash your back window in the process: incompetence or conspiracy?

When you are trying to get something done in an office and you yell and get angry and the lady at the desk tells you sit down and two hours later she is still talking to her friend in the other room about hair weaves: incompetence or conspiracy? It’s the Great Question in business, and the Great Question in public offices. When you show up with your correct forms and permits and sweaty wad of money and they say:

– Ah you know…my boss, Mr. Accountability, he is very busy. Very busy. Ok let me call him. Ok he´s coming now. No, that one. He has gone, the other one is coming. M-m, the managing director supervisor is busy, but the supervising managing general assistant director he is coming. You are going? But you can come back later? Or you can text him? Here´s his number. Here´s his other number. Here´s his other other number. But I don´t think he has airtime.

That’s just the way it is. Yet when bigger things are going on, like the most highly-competitive elections the country has ever held in the most heated and muddled political climate, with the new constitution and the future of the country at stake, systemic failure is not so funny anymore.

I was lucky enough to be in Dar es Salaam during the elections. I met with many people who had not been able to cast their vote on election day because of mistakes and paperwork run-arounds. At one point I was shown a list of close to five-hundred people at a single polling station who had not been able to vote. They had been told all manner of things: “There was a problem with the ‘machines.’ It was their own faults, they hadn´t followed procedures correctly. Overseeing officials were on their way, just wait. Call this number, if no one picks up, try again later.”

Most agree that generally the elections were well-organized. However there are still gaps in the system too wide to be ignored. And at the back of everyone´s mind there is always the Great Question: incompetence or conspiracy?

So many more great things could have been achieved in this country, but every step of development is being tripped up by first having to wade through the circus of bureaucracy. On top of that every new player is automatically signed up to take part in the great power game. It is a soft and clever way to confuse, distract, isolate and frustrate.

That is, if you are the type to believe in conspiracy. It might just be incompetence.

The Roots of Africa’s Present Condition

Today sees the relaunch of the famed Review of African Political Economy, this time on the web. We are happy to report that we will partner with ROAPE and the editor of the website, Leo Zeilig (who has contributed here before) on this new journey. Below Leo, and the ROAPE Editorial Working Group, lay out the vision with the site and provide some needed historical context for the continent’s current crisis.

The Review of African Political Economy was established in 1974, with the aim to “examine the roots of Africa’s present condition” and problems such as inequality and dependency. Yet, the Review did not seek to promote scholarly research for its own sake, but instead sought to engage with the actions required for transformation. The aim, in short, was to provide a space to help sharpen understandings and analysis of developments in order to equip movements and activists to revolutionise the continent. Empty academic research without political action, plans and projects were shunned. However the Review would not, so the original editorial stated, propose tactics and strategy that could only be answered in the actual struggles taking place on the continent. Rather it would become a forum which could sharpened analysis and help facilitate meaningful practice.

What was happening on the continent when the Review was founded? 1974 was a key moment. The first wave of independence in Africa had already passed and the countries that had become independent offered little real liberation. As the South Africa revolutionary Ruth First, one of the first editors of the Review, had already stated, decolonization had been a “bargaining process with cooperative African elites …The former colonial governments guarded its options and … the careerist heirs to independence preoccupied themselves with an ‘Africanisation’ of the administration.”

New movements were now challenging both Portugal’s colonies and the white minority regimes of Southern Africa and the limitations of the first wave of independence. Exciting political formations were on the verge of taking power in Mozambique, Angola and Guinea Bissau. The Review wanted to interrogate these revolutionary projects as part of the second wave of critical decolonisation. It also sought to understand the patterns of power and economic control that had been developing across the continent since the late 1950s.

As a fraternal voice of the new movements that were sweeping the continent the Review attempted to analyse the progressive politics of the new forces of liberation that were emerging and interrogate those radical projects that already existed.

Some of the scholar-activists involved in founding RoAPE, including the late Lionel Cliffe, whose idea it was, had recently returned from Tanzania where they had been involved in the experiments in socialist development in the country, critically supporting, mainly through teaching, writing and influencing local activists and policymakers, Julius Nyerere’s attempts to break the colonial legacy of underdevelopment. They were joined by others who had worked elsewhere in Africa, including most notably Ruth First. They were based in the UK, but often in transit, moving between the continent and the UK. The first generation involved in RoAPE were scholar-activists not career academics, they were a committed (and diverse) political community seeking to assist the continent’s radical transformation (1).

However, in the 1980s the desired change – and eventual move – crashed on the rocks of structural adjustment, globalisation and authoritarian state-led development. The Review remained committed to providing radical analysis of the continent’s transforming political economy through the 1980s and 1990s. Whilst it remains based in the UK, its Contributing Editors span the continent and it is sustains a growing programme of workshops and conferences in Africa.

The new website seeks to help reinvigorate scholar activism in and about Africa, and to involve new communities on the continent and elsewhere in a host of ROAPE activities, projects, conferences and events. The aim is to develop a new audience for the Review, to generate material for both the website and for the print issue, and to build deeper and sustainable connections with scholars, students, activists and institutions who work in and on Africa.

The site holds videos of conferences, interviews with scholars and activists, regular conference reports, a blog, details about ROAPE bursaries, on-going ROAPE projects, reviews, longer online articles and free access through the publisher Taylor and Francis to our Briefings & Debates. We have a close connection to the French language site Afriques en Lutte who have many years’ experience covering social movements and uprisings in Francophone Africa, and will provide coverage of developments and struggles taking place across French speaking Africa, events that are frequently invisible to an increasingly Anglophone world.

Towards these new objectives ROAPE is working with the Society, Work and Development Institute (SWOP) at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg. SWOP’s work is entirely compatible with ROAPE, the community of researchers and students within the institute and university and the activist orientation of many of the activities and research conducted by the institute. Johannesburg is also a unique African hub for visiting researchers from the continent, with a thriving radical community of activists and scholars. ROAPE hopes to develop these connections with SWOP through a number of initiatives – ROAPE/SWOP workshops, conferences and events, seminars and launches.

These connections and partnerships build on existing relationships that ROAPE has established. ROAPE collaborates with Third World Network-Africa (TWN), a pan-African research and advocacy organization based in Accra, Ghana. With ROAPE member Yao Graham, co-ordinator of TWN, we organize conferences and workshops and collaborate on the African Initiative on Mining, Environment and Society (AIMS).

We want to develop the website to become a leading online resource for radical political economy in Africa. The 1974 editorial explained that it is to “the task of understanding, and countering the debilitating consequences of a capitalism which stems from external domination and is combined with internal underdevelopment and equally exploitative structures that this review is dedicated.” This project remains ours today.

(1) Initially the people who got the Review off the ground in addition to Lionel and Ruth, were Gavin Williams, Robin Cohen, Katherine Levine (now Salahi), Manfred Bienefeld and Peter Lawrence.