Sean Jacobs's Blog, page 326

When Thomas Piketty went to South Africa

Thomas Piketty, the French superstar economist and author of the immensely popular book Capital in the Twenty-First Century, visited South Africa recently to deliver the 13th Annual Nelson Mandela Lecture. His visit drew wide interest given that he starts off his 700 page book by referring to the unfortunate events at Marikana – a classic example of the sometimes violent struggle between labour and capital. Piketty almost didn’t make it because his travel documents weren’t in order. Then his first lecture at the University of Cape Town, via Skype (the organizers decided to go ahead with the lecture anyway), was commandeered by students from #RhodesMustFall, who were protesting outsourcing at UCT and the choice of Piketty’s interlocutor, South Africa’s former finance Trevor Manuel. The latter was a central figure in the government’s turn to market friendly economic policies. Piketty finally made it to the University of Johannesburg’s Soweto Campus where he lectured.

There’s been some reporting and analysis about Piketty’s Johannesburg audience. The journalist and commentator Angelo Fick described the lecture itself, named for Nelson Mandela, as “something out of V.S. Naipaul’s oeuvre, or the less palatable moments in the work of Evelyn Waugh.”  Fick noted the irony that the event was sponsored “… by several multinational corporations and organizations, some of which many in the audience must have known have less than exemplary records in relation to the people of the global South.”  The event was also “situated within sight of the very effects of the massive inequality of resource allocation and opportunity distribution in contemporary South Africa.”  He couldn’t help noticing that “the folks in attendance … were the 10% who hog 65% of the income, while the 89% beyond the gates make do with the rest, were the 1% of underpaid laborers who guarded us, and then picked up our litter and cleaned up after us.”

Bizarrely, for all the attention paid Piketty’s visit, we learned very little about what he actually said. So, what did Piketty tell his hosts?

The main thrust of Piketty’s lecture was to argue that equality in formal and basic civil rights, though absolutely necessary, was not sufficient on its own to bring about real equality in society. Sure, the ending of apartheid meant that all South Africans could live anywhere they wanted. But what good was this right if you couldn’t afford rent or housing to go where the jobs were? Sure, the ending of apartheid meant that all South Africans had the right to aspire to any occupation. But what good was this right if the skills needed to take-up most occupations remained the preserve of the few? For Piketty, real equality comes about when people have effective rights. That is, when formal rights can be actualized by all.

One measure of the absence of effective rights in a society is the level of income and/or wealth inequality — the level of income/wealth available to you determines, in no small way, the types of schools your children attend, the type of neighbourhood you reside in, the type of healthcare you receive and so on. Income inequality in South Africa has traditionally been reported in terms of the Gini coefficient. Running from 0 to 1, a Gini closer to 1 implies high inequality and South Africa’s Gini at around 0.70 tells us that income inequality is very high.

The Gini coefficient, on its own, does not tell who’s accruing what proportions. Further, the income data that has traditionally gone into the computation of South Africa’s Gini has largely been self-reported. That is, enumerators are sent round to ask a representative sample of households what their income is. And here we are immediately faced with two challenges. Firstly, most people, particularly high earners, tend to understate their incomes when surveyed. Secondly, and a particular challenge in South Africa, the response rate among whites is usually low. The combination of these factors suggests that we are missing out a big part of the inequality story in the country.

Piketty’s preferred approach is to use both household survey data and administrative tax data (obtained from the Revenue Authority) in computing inequality measures. Administrative tax data helps in correcting for the low response rates observed for certain groups. The income data so obtained is then presented, not in the form of a Gini coefficient, but in the form of a distribution table telling us what fractions of total income accrue to particular groups – much more informative than a single number. And the latest data available to Piketty presents a depressing picture for South Africa: the share of total income accruing to the top 10% of income earners is somewhere between 60% and 65% – really the highest share among countries for which Piketty and company have collected this type of data. In Brazil, the top 10% share is between 50% and 55%. In the US, this share is between 45% and 50%. In Europe, the top 10% share is between 30% and 35%.

For Piketty, the story often told that high unemployment explains South Africa’s unusual level of inequality is not entirely convincing. High unemployment is itself a symptom, and not a cause, of inequality as it points to the fact that skills are unequally distributed in society. Further, countries like Greece and Spain, with comparable unemployment rates, do not have South Africa’s alarming level of inequality. A more convincing story is the impact of history. The legacy of apartheid. And this can be seen in the racial composition of top income earners. According to Piketty, the top 1% to 5% of income earners are still predominantly white – the proportion of whites in this exclusive club is about 80%. This, in a country where whites make-up only 9% of the total population. History continues to cast a very long shadow on contemporary South Africa.

So what can be done to ensure that effective rights are realised for all South Africans?

Firstly, Piketty suggests that the country should introduce a national minimum wage as a way to protect low-skilled workers, particularly those who can’t migrate, from exploitation. And here, South Africa can learn from Brazil’s experience. More than half of the reduction in income inequality in Brazil over the last decade has been attributed to significant increases in the national minimum wage. This is according to research done by João Saboia, a professor at the Institute of Economics at the Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro.

Setting a national minimum wage will, however, not resolve the key problem of the inability to access high paying jobs for many South Africans. And here government needs to prioritise the provision of high quality education to the most disadvantaged groups in society. Current fee structures, where tuition fees are many orders of magnitude of annual income, determine who goes to university and in this way perpetuates historical inequality.

Piketty’s third recommendation is to be thought of as a direct attack on inequality, particularly wealth inequality. Little land reform has taken place in South Africa two decades after the official ending of apartheid. And Piketty does not find this fact particularly surprising given that there are no examples in history where land inequality has declined as a result of voluntary market transactions. This, according to him, also partly explains the very limited success of South Africa’s Black Economic Empowerment (BEE) strategies — these strategies were voluntary, after all. South Africa needs to have a more ambitious land reform programme. And tied to this, there is need to introduce an annual progressive tax on net wealth (after deducting debt). Such a tax, in addition to directly confronting a source of inequality, would help generate the information needed for a healthy and transparent debate about wealth inequality in the country. For example, we currently have sketchy data on the extent of land inequality 20 years into democracy.

Piketty’s last recommendation is a call for increased worker participation in the running of companies in South Africa. Sweden and Germany, both highly productive economies, are examples of countries where workers have significant representation on company boards (up to one-third in Sweden and up to one-half in Germany). Having worker representation on boards ensures that the long-term objective of improving the well-being of workers is not sacrificed at the altar of short-term profit maximization.

As we said on Twitter, very little of what Piketty said in his lecture would come as a surprise to most South Africans. Perhaps the elite will now listen.

* Sean Jacobs contributed to this post.

Where is “America”?

Last week marked the 523th anniversary of the day when Christopher Columbus (or Cristoforo Colombo, or Cristóbal Colón, depending on which biography you believe) and his Spanish ships arrived to America for the first time. And we heard, again, that we were celebrating the day in which “Columbus discovered America,” which makes no sense.

He, of course, didn’t discover anything. Columbus was stubbornly ignorant, had miscalculated the circumference of the Earth, and believed to his death that he had reached Asia. Before him, other Europeans had reached America. But, more importantly, before Columbus’ arrival, there were already millions of people living in America, who we could say had “discovered it” already.

Yet, the United States still officially calls this day “Columbus Day,” even though it celebrates a lost sailor and murderous tyrant who was responsible of starting one of the greatest genocides in human history.

Other countries in the American continent are already past this. Many Latin American countries (including Colombia, which is named after Columbus, no less) call October 12th “Día de la raza” (or “Race Day”), as a celebration of their mixed heritage (which brings its own problems). Venezuela calls it “Día de la resistencia indígena” (or “Day of Indigenous Resistance”), while many in the United States have been promoting an “Indigenous Peoples’ Day” instead.

A 1680 map of the New World (Norman B. Leventhal Map Center/Flickr)

So, on October 12th, 1492, nothing was discovered. And Columbus is not a character we should be celebrating. But let’s stop for a moment and think about that last part of the sentence: “Columbus discovered America,” because here we have another problem. What is that “America”?

Contemporary people from the United States of America (and from other English-speaking countries) use the word “America” to refer specifically to that North American country. But in other languages (particularly those derived from Latin), “America” is used to refer to a whole continent stretching from Alaska in the north to Patagonia in the south and usually including the islands of the Caribbean to the east. To complicate things further, in English, America— this landmass which is united in Romance languages — is split into two: the North American continent and the South American continent. (As a native Spanish speaker, I will continue to use the term “America” here to talk about a single continent, unless otherwise noted).

This might be confusing to people in the present-day United States, some of whom, if they don’t give this enough thought, might believe that “Columbus traveled to America” means that he arrived to a country that would only come to existence two centuries after his death. (By the way, he never set foot in what is now the modern-day United States, except for Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands).

There is much debate about who gets to be “American,” particularly in online forums where English speakers coexist with Spanish and Portuguese speakers. (When I am asked by an English speaker if I am “American,” being Colombian, I am tempted to reply “yes”).

This seems like a fruitless discussion. Will the rest of America accept that one country has appropriated the word for their continent? What different word can the United States people use to call themselves? If what follows doesn’t help to solve these questions, at least I hope it will bring some context to the use of this contested issue.

“America” was coined by Europeans as a word to designate the whole “New World,” all of that new landmass that, from the 16th century onwards, appeared in maps made in Europe: that place which Europeans were set to explore and exploit. So, when Columbus is associated with America, it is implied that the arrival of the admiral impacted all of the landmass we in Spanish, Portuguese or French (and others) call “America.”

German map that first used the name America in 1507 (Public Domain)

How exactly the word “America” came to be is still disputed. The most widely accepted theory is that the continent was named after Florentine explorer and Columbus’s friend Amerigo Vespucci. Between the end of the 15th century and the beginning of the 16th, Vespucci sailed around the area previously explored by Columbus, which we now call the Caribbean. With his annotations and his calculations regarding the circumference of the world, he realized that the landmasses he had navigated couldn’t be part of Asia, but rather had to be something “new” to him and his fellow Europeans.

Vespucci sent letters to Italy detailing his discoveries, some of which later were published in a tome titled Mundus Novus (or The New World). These letters arrived to the hands of a group of German scholars who, in 1507, published them in a book titled Cosmographiae Introductio (orIntroduction to Cosmography). In it, cartographer Martin Waldseemüller drew a map of the world, in which the “new world” is labeled “America” across what is now Brazil.

The authors of the book explained this decision:

But now these parts [Europe, Asia and Africa, the three continents of the Ptolemaic geography] have been extensively explored and a fourth part has been discovered by Americus Vespuccius [a Latin form of Vespucci’s name], as will be seen in the appendix: I do not see what right any one would have to object to calling this part after Americus, who discovered it and who is a man of intelligence, [and so to name it] Amerige, that is, the Land of Americus, or America: since both Europa and Asia got their names from women.

Another theory is that the word America comes from a mountain range in modern-day Nicaragua, which was called Amerrique or Americ by the native Mosquitos. This name, according to different theories, either influenced Vespucci to change his name from Alberigo to Americo, or was used by the Caribs in the Antilles to describe the mainland lying west of them.

One further theory, with less adepts, deals with an Italian sailor named Giovanni Caboto (or John Cabot). Caboto sailed for England, and in 1497 explored the eastern shore of what is now Canada. For this, the king of England gave Caboto a pension. This pension was paid by an official in Bristol: a Welshman named either Richard Ameryk, Ap Meryke, or Amerycke. America would have gotten its name from him, then.

But, regardless of its origin, the name America took a bit to stick around. In his letters from his voyages, Columbus referred to his whereabouts as “Indias” (or “Indies”), which was the customary name the Spanish gave to the Far East. This is why Native people from America were originally referred to as “indios,” why the current Colombian city of Cartagena was baptized “Cartagena de Indias,” why many isles in the Caribbean are known to be part of the “West Indies” and why books from explorers and conquistadores about the New World are known as “crónicas de indias.”

Eventually, the use of “America” spread throughout Europe and it became a word that designated both the “new” lands and its new inhabitants of European ancestry, who started to call themselves “americanos” in Spanish and portuguese, “americáins” in French and “American” in English. By 1538, the famed cartographer Gerardus Mercator was using “America” to refer to the continent and the islands in the Caribbean. Eventually, Spain referred to its colonial possessions in the American continent as “Spanish America,” and Portugal did similarly with “Portuguese America.”

The breaking point on what and where exactly is America happened later in the English portion of the land.

The United Kingdom first successfully established a colony in the American continent in Virginia in 1606. Eventually, the English officially called its possessions here “English America,” a term which first appeared in 1648, when Thomas Gage published the book The English-American: A New Survey of the West Indies in 1648. When Scotland joined England and Wales, and the Kingdom of Great Britain was formed in 1707, the new official name came for British colonies in America came to be “British America and the British West Indies,” or colloquially, “British America.”

A statue of Italian explorer and cartographer Amerigo Vespucci (Public Domain)

Similarly to Spanish America, British America covered land in different subdivisions of the American continent. The British portion included, up to 1776, the Thirteen Colonies that would later form the United States, parts of the current Mexican state of Yucatán, and the eastern provinces of modern-day Canada in North America; the eastern shore of Honduras and Belize in Central America; Guyana in South America; and Anguilla, Antigua and Barbuda, Bahamas, Barbados, Bermuda, the British Virgin Islands, the Cayman Islands, Dominica, Grenada, Jamaica, Montserrat, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Trinidad and Tobago, and Turks and Caicos in the Caribbean.

This was what was referred to as “America” in English, and the inhabitants of these lands were considered “Americans.” Nonetheless, in 1776, those aforementioned thirteen colonies in North America united and declared their independence, choosing the unfortunate name “United States of America” for their new country. Citizens of this new country were still named “Americans” as it was the only demonym that made sense in English (because, what on Earth is a “Unitedstatesian?”).

In English, then, it made sense to call the United States “America.” Much more so since, what is now Canada, became “British North America,” while the rest of British American possessions could be described as being in Jamaica and its dependencies, in the Leeward Islands, or in the British West Indies. In Spanish, we have the word estadounidense, which works pretty well, so there is no confusion there. But I say that this name was unfortunate because “American” was and is still a word used by people from other places to identify themselves.

This is particularly true of “Spanish Americans” and their descendants. By the 18th century, the idea of nationalism had risen in Europe, and Spanish Americans (who were called “criollos” by Spaniards from Spain) embraced the “American” name as a collective identity in their struggle for independence and post-colonial unity.

For example, legend has it that when the indigenous leader from Peru, Túpac Amarú II, led a rebellion against the Spanish crown in 1780, he was recognized as “king of America” even by indigenous people in eastern Nueva Granada, or what today would be the east of Colombia.

Later, in 1791, the Jesuit Juan Pablo Viscardo y Guzmán, who was born in the Viceroyalty of Peru, wrote a Carta a los españoles americanos (or Letter to American Spaniards). Viscardo, who was expelled from all Spanish territories with the rest of the Jesuits in 1767, wrote this letter inspired by the story of Túpac Amarú II and in an attempt to call Spanish Americans to unity and to fight for independence from the Spanish crown. In the letter, he said: “The New World is our homeland and its history is ours.”

Even later, in 1806, Venezuelan patriot Francisco de Miranda would print this letter (translated from the original French into Spanish) and then share it throughout South America, to boost morale for the independence cause. But, of course he was not the only Venezuelan to use “America” in a broad sense during the independence wars in the region.

Simón Bolívar, hailed as a liberator in Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador, Venezuela, Colombia and Panama, was prone to writing about his dream of uniting all of the peoples of America into a single, independent nation. In his Letter from Jamaica in 1815 (after a great deal of Spanish America had declared, but not necessarily gained, independence), Bolívar wrote: “The fate of America is irrevocably set; the bond which united it with Spain has been cut … it is less hard to unite both continents, than to reconcile the spirits of both countries.” In 1818 he also wrote: “The nation of all Americans must be one, since we have all had perfect unity.”

When, in 1810 the criollo elite of Santa Fe, Nueva Granada (modern-day Bogotá, Colombia) declared a new government which they, Spaniards born in America, could integrate alongside Spaniards from Spain, they wrote: “From the reciprocal union between Americans and Europeans must come public happiness.”

Also in 1810, slavery was formally abolished “in America” by the Mexican general Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla, who signed the resolution in Guadalajara as “El Generalísimo de América.” This text begins with: “From the happy moment in which the courageous American nation took up arms to get rid of the heavy bond…”

When U.S. President James Monroe launched his Monroe Doctrine, it was 1823 and the countries of Spanish and Portuguese America had just become independent, or were on the brink of it. The famous uttering of “America for the Americans” then was meant by Monroe as a reassurance to the rest of the American countries, that the United States would side with them against European powers.

Nonetheless, the difference of interpretations of what is America was clear even back then. Chilean politician Diego Portales, for example, wrote a letter to a friend expressing his distrust of Monroe: “We have to be very careful. For North Americans, the only Americans are themselves.”

Avenue of the Americas in New York City (Glyn Lowe/Flickr)

By 1896, Mexican writer Antonio Zaragoza y Escobar had perceived a deeper divide in the interpretation of America. He wrote in his book El “Monroism” y el general D. Porfirio Díaz:

We should not get our hopes up: the phrase ‘America for the Americans,’ which summarizes the doctrine of James Monroe has been read by the successors of the fifth president, from Quincy Adams to Cleveland, with very rare exceptions as an acquisition title of all America for North Americans who, according to themselves, are the original, the authentic, the legitimate, the best, the only Americans.

Evidently, identification with America continued after independence. New categorizations arose, like the one suggested in the 1830s by Frenchman Michel Chevalier, who created the concept of “Latin America.” But the new Latin Americans kept considering themselves Americans, part of America, and using the word America to talk about the whole continent.

Chilean poet Pablo Neruda, for example, wrote Canto General in 1950, a book of poems dedicated to the American Western Hemisphere. In it, one of his most famous poems begins: “América, no invoco tu nombre en vano” (“America, I do not invoke your name in vain”) in reference to the continent.

The identification with America continues even now, two centuries after the independence of the various former Spanish-American countries, as we are taught in school that we belong to the American continent, and as many politicians and social movements keep on calling for an “American Unity”. This is why we clash so often when people from the United States call themselves Americans.

The Real Academia de la Lengua Española, or RAE, the institution that regulates Spanish language and produces the most authoritative dictionaries of Spanish, offers this opinion on its entry for “Estados Unidos”: “The use of americano to refer exclusively to the inhabitants of the United States should be avoided, it is an abusive use explained by the fact thatestadounidenses often use the abbreviated name América to refer to their country. It should not be forgotten that América is the name of the whole continent and americanos are those who inhabit it.”

But, more than a technicality, for many in the rest of America, the appropriation of the term “America” by the United States is a political issue.

Legendary Argentinian ska band Los Fabulosos Cadillacs have a song, “V Centenario,” released in 1993 (and thus alluding to the 500 years after the arrival of Columbus), which criticizes the celebration of European colonists in America and begins: “I want to live in America / I want to die in America / I want to be free in America / They are going to kill me in America.”

The Chilean artist Alfredo Jaar staged an intervention in Times Square in New York in 1987. Then, the iconic big screens showed an outline of the map of the continental United States with the legend “This is not America.” He restaged it in the same place last year, saying:

Language is not innocent and reflects a geopolitical reality. The use of the word America in the U.S.A., erroneously referring only to the U.S.A. and not to the entire continent is a clear manifestation of the political, financial, and cultural domination of the U.S.A. of the rest of the continent.

This, of course, has a huge problem: that “America” was a word coined for people of European descent. Where do indigenous people stand in all of this? They were not only the original inhabitants of these lands, but are also, in this very moment, part of our population (and for many, also part of our heritage). Therefore, some indigenous organizations have proposed that, instead of “America,” we start talking about “Abya Yala.” This is an expression that comes from the Kuna, an indigenous group in what is now Colombia and Panama, which allegedly referred to the whole continent, even before the arrival of the Spaniards. This is not a proven fact, but so far it seems like the best alternative.

So just remember, if you call yourself American, whether you are from the United States, from the American continent, or from the originary people of the land, remember that your choice of words carries political weight.

This piece was originally published on Latino Rebels and is reposted here with permission .

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Dispatch from Berlin

In August 1992, a mob of neo-Nazis attacked a hostel for foreigners in the northern German city of Rostock, hurling stones and petrol bombs. The attack lasted for four days, encouraged by an estimated 3,000 cheering spectators. After two days, the police left the scene; the mob then set fire to a building housing Vietnamese workers and their families. The police watched the fire from an adjacent hill.

Over the weekend, a man wielding a jagged-edged knife stabbed German politician Henritte Reker in the neck, citing her pro-refugee policies. Police for now have arrested the suspect – a rare occurrence in Germany where hate crimes targeted at people of color occur frequently and typically end without arrests or prosecution. Last week, a firefighter who broke into a home for asylum seekers and sprayed the attic with gasoline before lighting it on fire walked free. The prosecutor said the firefighter hadn’t intended to hurt anyone.

As evidenced by the Rostock siege, such xenophobic violence is not new; a 2011 Human Rights Watch report noted that the government has recorded 500-650 violent hate crimes each year since 2005. Local organizations that monitor hate crimes and support survivors report much higher numbers. The German government does not publish how many of these cases result in prosecution, but Human Rights Watch found only two examples of successful prosecution of hate crimes during the period covered in the report.

In Berlin last week, I spoke with people seeking asylum from Syria, Eritrea and Cameroun, as well as advocates and organizers responding to the needs of refugees across the city. Those who had been in the country for a few months all decried one thing: Germany’s institutionalized racism and what they called its accompanying policies of humiliation.

While Angela Merkel has committed to receive significant numbers of Syrian refugees in Germany, effective government support has not followed suit. Media coverage depicts the German system as ‘overwhelmed’ and struggling to cope; yet Germany registered consistently high numbers of asylum applications months before the current “crisis”. (An article in Spiegel Online from August 2013 is titled, “Rage and Refuge: German Asylum System Hits Breaking Point.”) Germany has been slow to implement major reforms to reception policies or find real housing solutions, insisting most refugees stay in state-run camps that are crowded, lack safe spaces for women and prevent inhabitants from participating in society. Refugees in rural areas as well as urban centers fear racist attacks and reprisals.

Meanwhile, temperatures plunged in Berlin last week, leaving the hundreds of people waiting in line to register their asylum claim at the LaGeSo (Department for Health and Social Affairs) reception center outside in the bitter cold. While Syrian refugees are now granted an appointment number relatively quickly, a two-track system is quickly emerging where refugees from other countries do not receive a number for weeks.

All asylum-seekers face a Kafka-esque system where they are expected to complete paperwork in German and speak German when they meet with government officials. Germany does not provide translators at any stage of the asylum process, and as a result people cited a new black market that has sprung up with people charging fees of around 60 euros to accompany an asylum-seeker to government appointments. Refugees have no way of knowing whether their translator is competent – and determining asylum claims often depend on specific details and the consistency of a person’s story.

The German parliament passed a new law last Thursday reducing benefits for refugees, restricting their freedom of movement for up to six months in government designated refugee camps and declaring Albania, Kosovo and Montenegro ‘safe countries’ – making it nearly impossible for anyone from these places to receive asylum. In response, close to a thousand people in Berlin marched under a gray spitting sky from Potsdamer Platz past the parliament in protest, trailed by German police in riot gear. The marchers shouted the name of Oury Jalloh, an asylum seeker from Sierra Leone who was arrested one night in 2005 and burned to death in a police cell.

The Berlin Refugee Movement – a decentralized collective active since 2012 – just published a Refugee Guide to Berlin, aimed at providing recent arrivals with necessary information to be self-sufficient. The Guide covers where to find emergency food, shelter and medical care. It also asks, “What is the difference between refugees and ‘normal’ citizens besides the fact that the former had to flee from their homes? There is none.”

Weekend Music Break No.86 – The WOMEX (2015) Edition

The 15th edition of WOMEX, Europe’s premiere World Music trade show is happening next week in Budapest Hungary. As African music grows in popularity globally, it is events like WOMEX that serve as a first port of entry into the continent for many non-European artists; whether traditional, experimental, or pop. In light of this year’s headlines around European migration, the need for programs such as WOMEX that inherently celebrate the diversity of human experience, and thus a truer vision of contemporary Europe, has become all the more sharp. As for the interest of Africa is a Country specifically, this year’s showcases will host a series of artists with origins in the African continent. They will be putting their talents on display with the hopes of getting picked up by European record labels, touring agencies, and/or festival promoters. So, for this weekend’s music break, Africa is a Country is happy to team up with WOMEX to present all ten artists presenting at this year’s festival:

Blick Bassey brings us “One Love” from Cameroon, a Central African smooth jam with Cello, Trumpet, and Slide Guitar accompaniment, Moh Kuyate represents with Mandinka Rock from Guinea via France; The Sarabi Band from Kenya sings against political corruption in an uplifting Ndombolo-inflected pop tune; Pierre Kwenders gives us Congolese Soul-Rap via Montreal; Vaudou Game hits us with West African Funk from France, rooted in Togo and Benin; Aziza Brahim, a displaced person from Western Sahara currently living in Spain, sings for her land and people, while showing how African Flamenco really is; Senegalese Mbalakh innovator Cheikh Lo is receiving a lifetime achievement award at this year’s conference; Pat Thomas & The Kwashibu Area band revive classic Highlife for a new generation of audiences; Mamar Kassey from Niger a updates a repertoire descendant from the ancient Songhai empire, and is here performing it live in Amsterdam; and finally, Tarek Abdallah & Adel Shams El-Din perform Egyptian classical music on Oud and Riq, live in Montpellier, France.

Visit WOMEX’s website to see the full artist lineup, and read more on the artists featured above.

Cowries and Rice

Studies of China in Africa and vice versa have begun to proliferate in recent years. Journalist Howard W. French‘s China’s Second Continent (2015) has earned critical acclaim from both popular and academic circles, and he has had numerous stories featured in the pages of The New York Times and The Atlantic, to name but a few. Jamie Monson, the new director of the African Studies Center at Michigan State University, has published a study of Chinese involvement in the construction of the TAZARA railway between Tanzania and Zambia in the 1960’s, entitled Africa’s Freedom Railway (2011). There are also lots of great China-Africa digital projects available (We’ll be covering some of these in future installments of #DigitalArchive) like the China-Africa Knowledge Project acts as a “one-stop shop for researchers and practitioners working on the China-Africa relationship,” featuring conference announcements, recent book releases, and a database of researchers working on this important topic. There have also been a significant number of pieces on this topic posted to this very blog, available here. This brief collection of authors and resources only begins to scratch the surface of what’s available online, which makes the existence of projects like Cowries and Rice, this week’s featured project, all the more important.

Winslow Roberston, a specialist in Sino-African relations who holds an M.A. in West African history from Syracuse University, created Cowries and Rice to learn more about “how African countries and China have interacted” and communicate that knowledge to a wider audience throughout the world. The Cowries and Rice team uses podcasts and blogs to achieve these goals, bring much-needed attention to Sino-African relations from a variety of important perspectives. I first came across Cowries and Rice when my friend Hikabwa Chipande appeared on the podcast (his episode is linked below) to discuss the construction of football stadiums by Chinese companies in Zambia, connected to his dissertation research on the history of football in Zambia. When I first listened to his podcast, I began to explore the rest of project, being really excited about all of the information that was available that would normally be really difficult for me to access otherwise. Translation Tuesday is a particularly useful feature, where each week, translations are posted for stories originally published in Chinese. For Anglophone readers, this is an incredible resource that opens up new pathways for understanding Sino-African relations.

The podcast has covered a range of topics from Chinese migrants in Lesotho to the history of Chinese/South Sudan Relations to a guide for beginners interested in Chinese-African relations. For founder Winslow Robertson, one of his favorite series of podcasts was the month-long discussion of Asian women in Africa, including one episode totally in Mandarin. You can listen to one of the episodes from this series on below and find the full series here.

In the future, Robertson hopes to further diversify the project, envisioning a “Hausa, French, Arabic, and Chinese-language podcast… that not only looks at China-Africa scholarship and debates but also gives practical advice on how to navigate the China-Africa relationship.” He wants this blog to have true practical impact for those people who are impacted by Sino-African relations on a day-to-day basis, be it “Senegalese traders in Yiwu” or “Chinese shop-owners in Lesotho.” No doubt, the contributions of this project hold huge potential for changing the way that we can conceptualize both China in Africa and Africa in China, as well as the global impact of these exchanges and experiences.

Follow Winslow on Twittter: @winslow_r, you can find all of the podcasts on the Soundcloud.  Cowries and Rice would not exist without the support of a wide-range of partners: Dr. Nkemjika Kalu was his initial podcast co-host before moving back to Nigeria; and Laiyin Yuan; Zander Rounds, and Joe Webster were the primary translators for Translation Tuesday.

As always, feel free to send me suggestions via Twitter (or use the hashtag #DigitalArchive) of sites you might like to see covered in future editions of The Digital Archive!

*This post is No. 21 in our Digital Archive series covering African archives on the web.

The Murder of Thomas Sankara

To say that Thomas Sankara was isolated is a dreadful understatement. It was his very political exclusivity that generated the total separation from organisations, groups, parties and trade unions who could have supported his initiatives and defended the ‘revolution’ against the military. By 1987 Sankara was only really vulnerable to counter-coups from within the military. Opposition, under his instructions, had been marginalised or worse, and resistance inside the unions and among the broader radical left suppressed.

The counter-coup in October 1987 was ruthlessly planned and executed. Sankara’s was – with only a small militant core by his side – exceptionally exposed. In the morning of 15 October, 1987 he had discussed the situation facing the regime with Valère Somé, his advisor and comrade, at the presidential residence. His recent biographer Ernest Harsch takes up the story, ‘That afternoon, Sankara had a scheduled meeting with his small team of advisers. They gathered about 4:15 p.m. at the old Conseil de l’Entente headquarters, which for some time had served as an office of the National Conseil national de la révolution (CNR). The meeting was under way for only a brief time when shooting erupted in the small courtyard outside, around 4:30 p.m. or shortly after. Sankara’s driver and two of his bodyguards were the first to be killed. Upon hearing the gunfire, everyone in the meeting room quickly took cover. Sankara then got up and told his aides to stay inside for their own safety. “It’s me they want.” He left the room, hands raised, to face the assailants. He was shot several times, and died without saying anything more. If his exit from the room was intended to save his comrades inside, it failed. The gunmen, all in military uniform, entered the meeting room and sprayed it with automatic weapons fire. Everyone inside was killed, except for Alouna Traoré.’ Sankara’s brief unwavering ‘revolutionary’ moment was over.

Blaise Compaoré, Sankara’s comrade and murderer, quickly denied involvement, claiming he was at home and sick. He may not have actually pulled the trigger, but it was his men who did and they would not have acted without a clear order. By the evening of the assassination Compaoré was the new president.

Tens of thousands of Burkinabès were inspired by Sankara’s radical government, by their presidents sheer, restless commitment to a transformation that they also wanted to see. However there is a difficult truth about the regime which cannot be ignored. Sankara was terribly alone, apart from a few other leading militants; his project was delivered to Burkinabè society from above. Eventually Sankara even existed above the military hierarchy from which he had issued. Only Valère Somé and a few others stood beside him to the end.

The lack of any serious popular mobilisation against the counter-coup, expressed the tragic, confirmation of the fallen regimes isolation. Undoubtedly, thousands of Burkinabès were deeply distressed by Sankara’s murder and the sudden end to a project that contained many popular desires, but still their reaction, without organisational expression, was severely constrained. When Harsh describes how there were processions, ‘to the Dagnoën cemetery to pay their respects at his graveside’, these displays of public grief confirm the highly ambiguous space the regime occupied. ‘Some laid flowers and wept. Others left handwritten messages: “Long live the president of the poor.” “The jealous, power-hungry, and traitors murdered you.” “Mama Sankara, your son will be avenged. We are all Sankara.” “Is it possible to forget you?” “A hero never dies.” The new regime, under Compaoré, quickly undertook the project of normalisation and returned Burkina Faso to its place on the outer margins of global political-economy.

Reflections From Ghana’s Benpaali Film Festival

Heritage inspires content and art conjures thought. It is with this ethos in mind that Rebecca Oheneasah Hesse and I launched Bεnpaali Young Filmmakers Festival in Accra as a forum for young artists. A year before, we attended Legon International Film Event (LIFE), a gathering of mostly men from Ghana’s pioneering film industry. By day two, LIFE began to feel incredibly askew, like we were eavesdropping on a conversation at an exclusive men’s club. And while I learned about contemporary Ghanaian cinema, the bandwidth of divergent thinking was narrow. My point here is not to disparage LIFE, but to contextualize this question: What do we lose by underrepresenting young people in filmmaking?

Ben Okri challenges us to employ storytelling as liberation: “Nations and people are largely the stories they feed themselves. If they tell themselves stories that are lies, they will suffer the consequences of those lies. If they tell themselves stories that face their own truths, they will free their histories for future flowerings.” As NYC filmmaker Loira Limbal and Bεnpaali co-keynote specified, it matters who is telling the story. Luis J. Rodriguez writes, “there is probably no more powerful force for change in this uncertain and crisis-ridden world than young people and their art. It is the consciousness of the world breaking away from the strangle grip of an archaic social order.” Young people, whose nature is to deconstruct their intersecting identities attempting to make sense of themselves in the world, tend to live in a deviant contemplative state of rejecting oppressive ideologies and envisioning possibilities. Their sense of fugivity comes out in Dear Valentine by Fiona Worlanyo Ansah, a romantic tale turned indictment on the lack of indoor plumbing. And in Agorkokli, Francis Yushau Brown’s animated short about the self-titled Ewé legend depicting what co-keynote, Professsor Kodzo Gavua, describes as that which we value from the past and choose to project forward. And in the film Sophie by his son Fofo Gavua about a female prostitute and proselytizing lay minister, we get a real talk meditation on what it means to be human. Screened at Bεnpaali, these films express what is on young people’s minds: a quotidian frustration that should have been long solved, a creation story tying the present to the past, our human-ness.

Watching ‘Dear Valentine’

During the Q & A we asked the audience to allow younger participants have the first word. There were but a few moments of silence between the request and an elder taking the lead with commentary disguised as questions. Older folk, males, heterosexuals, those of us that too easily use our privilege to dominate communal spaces need to practice silence as an action, appreciating that transitory quietness is the pause needed for hazy thoughts to come into focus and that speaking unformed ideas aloud helps to refine perceptions. We need to offer young people both our experiences and uncertainties. Teaching youth digital photography when I had not yet switched to the format, I was afraid I would appear fraudulent until realizing I could teach them how to take photographs and they could teach me how to use the technology.

A young person kindled a discussion on why Hollywood (as in Ghallywood, Kumawood and Nollywood) is the lens for African cinema and what this means for how Africans construct storytelling. It touched on colonialism, production quality, and cultural preferences, drawing this conclusion: self-naming, self-knowledge and self-acceptance are crucial. Simply slapping the word “wood” on the end of a geographic location may be convenient shorthand but implies an aspiration or validation? Let us instead encourage young people to name their art like, yes, Bεnpaali (connoting a new dawn in the Buili language of Ghana’s north). Let us take the singer Wiyaala’s lead to do “our things, to trust it is powerful” and know that “Until we accept ourselves, it will always be difficult.” Let us be fed and freed by the stories of young artists.

Hipsters Don’t Dance Top World Carnival Tunes for September 2015

It’s been a while since we last did a chart; In news from our part of the world, Carnival passed (great as per usual), various African nations had their annual picnic in the park events in London (bigger and better each year), and Skepta took over the world. Here’s our chart for September 2015:

J Hus x Friendly



The Gambian MC recently ran into some trouble which we won’t get into. He is one of the most exciting new MC’s in the UK at the moment. By combining afrobeats with dancehall and well, UK road rap, he has definitely found his lane. This can work for the traditional dreary road rap or lighter things such as this track.

Frenchie x #Cele (Featuring Naira Marley)



This combination of Congo and Nigeria popped out of nowhere and it’s frankly great. Naira Marley hasn’t been on this sort of happy vibe in a while, so it’s great to see him really get to strut his stuff.

Big Nuz x Phaqa



Rip R. Mashesha. Incwadi Yothando is a classic and one of the few songs to actually make Hootie Who cry and skank at the same time.

Just wanted to take some time to point out that carnival is the one time of year that Afro/Caribbean promoters decide to all put on some mega acts on the same weekend. So we saw a Mafizokolo show on the same night as a Living Drumz Show in London. Hopefully these types of bookings will spread out more over the year as the genre grows bigger and better.

Fay-Ann Lyons x Block the Road (Feat. Stonebwoy)



More Afro/Caribbean link ups, this time Ghana and Trinidad. It seems as if Stonebwoy is working with everyone at the moment. This is one of the first fruits of those collaborations.

Heavy K x Therapy (Feat. Burna Boy)



Heavy K’s double disc LP came out earlier this month and features a who’s who of South African house music. Also on there is Burna Boy handling this uptempo beat with no problem. The more we listen to Burna Boy the more we see a tinge of Craig David but this is all him here.

Igiaba Scego’s novel ‘Adua’ intertwines Afro-Italy’s historic phases

The past year has thrown into sharp relief the complicated and power-laden connections between Italy and the African continent. Refugees fleeing violence and upheaval in countries from Eritrea to Nigeria add to the horrific tally of death in the Mediterranean or on the shores of Lampedusa. They are casualties of the replacement of the Italian navy’s maritime search-and-rescue Mare Nostrum program with the EU Frontex agency’s Triton border securitization initiative, and–more broadly–of a systematic devaluation of black and brown life in Fortress Europe. This summer, in fact, the Mediterranean has been dubbed by many analysts the deadliest sea in the world and the deadliest migrant crossing in the world.

In the Italian political sphere, a lengthy investigation into right-wing Lega Nord minister Roberto Calderoli’s 2013 comments comparing Cecile Kyenge (former Minister of Integration and the first Black cabinet member in Italy’s history) to an “orangutan” recently concluded that his remarks constituted defamation, but not racial discrimination. (Earlier this month, another Lega Nord politician was fined for a 2013 Facebook post in which said that Kyenge should “go back to the jungle.”) Kyenge was subject to a staggering number of racist attacks during her tenure in the Letta government, from thrown bananas to hanging nooses to calls for her rape.

Alongside these shockingly transparent examples of racism in Italy, at the time of writing the Italian Senate is considering landmark legislation that would grant Italian citizenship to many children of immigrants who were born or raised in Italy (members of this so-called “second generation” make up almost 10 percent of minors in Italy). This is a limited, yet important and arguably symbolic reform to the country’s restrictive jus sanguinis citizenship laws, the product of years of organizing by a multi-ethnic coalition including many Afro-Italians.

The complicated and contradictory events unfolding in contemporary Italy require a significant reconsideration of Italy’s relationship to Africa. This critical work has been undertaken by radical historians, postcolonial scholars, novelists, filmmakers, and others, linking the racialized economic and political subjugation of Southern Italy, Italy’s own colonial entanglements in Africa, and forms of exclusion, racism, and violence waged against immigrants in Italy since the 1970s. Some writers have begun to group these multifaceted interventions under the rubric of the Black Mediterranean–an homage to Robert Farris Thompson and Paul Gilroy that emphasizes the dense relations of cultural exchange (but also racial violence) linking Europe and Africa. Multiple generations of Black writers, from Pap Khouma to Gabriella Ghermandi, have been at the forefront of this movement by rethinking the boundaries of Italy and exploring the complex life-worlds of African and Afro-descendant communities in Italy through memoir and fiction.

Igiaba Scego is one of the most prominent voices of a new cohort of Black writers in Italy. Scego was born in Rome in 1974 to parents from Somalia; her father served as a high-ranking official in the Somali government before the 1969 Siad Barre coup d’etat. A prolific novelist, journalist, social commentator, and activist, Scego has won numerous awards for her writings on African-Italian identities and the legacies of Italian colonialism. Her newest book, Adua, released in Italy by Giunti this September, represents a welcome intervention into the diversity of Black experiences in Italy. Indeed, Adua can be read as an exploration of what Jacqueline Nassy Brown has termed “diaspora’s counter/parts”–relations among the African diaspora that are based not solely on affinity and sameness, but also on differences and antagonism.

Igiaba Scego in 2008. Image Credit: Lettera27, via Wikimedia Commons

Adua is told through two voices and over three historical moments, which Scego describes as “Italian colonialism, Somalia in the 1970s, and our current moment, when the Mediterranean has been transformed into an open-air tomb for migrants.” Zoppe is a polyglot Somali, descended from a family of soothsayers, who works as an interpreter in the 1930s under Italian fascism. In many ways an embodiment of the tragic maxim “translator as traitor,” Zoppe is torn between his struggle for survival and his deep sense of ethical obligation toward family and nation. A survivor of brutal racist attacks while in Rome, Zoppe’s translation work also affords him a terrifying window into the impending and bloody Italian re-invasion of Ethiopia.

Adua, Zoppe’s daughter and the book’s namesake, was born in Somalia but left for Rome at the age of seventeen. She is known as a “Vecchia Lira” (Old Lira), the irreverent term used by younger immigrants to describe women of the Somali diaspora who arrived in Italy during the 1970s. Adua’s young husband is a recent Somali refugee who came to Italy via Lampedusa escaping civil war; she calls him “Titanic” in reference to the precarious boat on which he arrived, and the two share an ambiguous relationship that oscillates from the maternal to the hostile.

Young Adua dreamed of becoming a movie starlet like Marilyn Monroe–her romantic images of Italy were shaped by the films she watched as a child in a theater built by the fascists. Yet after decades in Italy, she only has one title to her name: a humiliating and degrading erotic movie exploiting Italian stereotypes of Black female sexuality. Adua’s own tragic tale is belied by her triumphal name, bestowed by her father to represent the first African anti-imperialist victory.

Adua is deeply and thoroughly researched, a process Scego describes in the “Historical Note” after the epilogue. It is also a captivating read: the novel is sweeping in its geographical and temporal scope, yet Scego nonetheless renders her complex protagonists richly and lovingly. Adua makes two critical contributions. First, she centers Italian colonial history (particularly Italian colonization and occupation in East Africa) and its reverberations in the present through the lens of lived experience–the layers of intimacy and violence that characterize imperial entanglement. Contrary to the rabid rhetoric of ethno-nationalism, xenophobia, and border securitization in Italy today (seen in the aggressive taunts launched against the likes of Mario Balotelli that “there are no Black Italians”), Scego’s book underscores that “Africans” are not foreign Others intruding into bounded Italian space; rather, these intertwined histories predate Italy’s “official” transformation into a country of immigration during the 1970s, ‘80s and ‘90s.

And second, Scego dispels the notion that there is any sort of unitary Blackness in Italy. Her characters are colonial subjects and aspiring freedom fighters, migrants and refugees of multiple backgrounds and generations–in other words, Afro-Italians of many stripes and political valences. Scego has taken us beyond the all-too common invocation of subjects “trapped between two worlds,” instead portraying a range of experiences that–while still structured by racism, misogyny, and other axes of power–can do justice to the changing face of Italy today.

Adua is available in print via Giunti Editore, and can also be purchased as an ebook. While the novel is currently available only in Italian, Scego and her editor are hoping to eventually offer translations in multiple languages. In the meantime, you can read an English translation of Scego’s 2003 Eks&Tra prize-winning short story “Sausages” over at Warscapes.

 

President dos Santos and the MPLA: Scared of peace and quiet?

Last night a couple of hundred people gathered for the fourth night in a row in front of Sagrada Família church. Beneath the dusty blue neon lights, tilted, broken, and only half-illuminated, they were dressed all in white, candles in hand, there to hold a vigil in solidarity with the 15+1+2 political prisoners (15 in jail in Luanda, 1 Marcos Mavunga jailed for crimes against the state in separate case in Cabinda, +2 explained below) in Angola, among them Luaty Beirão, on his third week of a hunger strike, and Nelson Dibango, who had completed his third day.

The vigils began Thursday when folks began to get reports of Beirão’s failing health and came nary a week after charges were brought against the 15+2 (the two are Laurinda Gouveia and Rosa Conda, both indicted but who await trial in freedom). The state charges the 15+2 with “preparatory acts” pursuant to a coup d’etat. The state’s case is based on the evidence of gathering for a book club to read Gene Sharp’s “From Dictatorship to Democracy,” which the Prosecutor General’s office claims helped spur the Arab Spring, not exactly incontrovertible evidence.

Those gathering at the peaceful vigil intended first to meet at Largo 1º de Maio/Largo de Independência but found it closed to them by police that first night. They headed down the street to Sagrada Família. Once a monument to modernist development, its current derelict appearance symbolizes the oil soaked investments in new high-rises and the baroque churches that nestle against the presidential palace. For three nights, they sang, prayed, chanted, said the names of each prisoner and called out “Liberdade já!” (Freedom now!). It seemed that the state would ignore them, like it’s ignored the church there. Harmless enough – let them reclaim the Angolan anthem, sing songs, worry in public, and find solidarity in numbers. But no.

Last night they found themselves surrounded by PIR (Rapid Intervention Police) with canine units and water canons as if white wearing, candle-holding, praying, sometimes crying, sometimes smiling folks were a threat to public order on a Sunday night. A Sunday night when there is no traffic to disrupt, no commerce to disturb, and no public order to maintain here on Catholic Church property. In the finest tradition of civil disobedience, demonstrating their peaceful intent, they sat down and prayed silently. Police asked them to leave the premises. They did so peacefully, vowing to return tonight.

 

TPA (Angolan Popular Television) the state television, a public service, did the disservice of reporting that the vigil had been disbanded because it was an illegal protest. No sooner was this reported than vigil attendees began to post clips and screen shots and torrents of indignation: how is a peaceful vigil illegal? How is that when a wide swath of society gathers peacefully they are met with the state’s force? Our tax dollars used to frame us as terrorists? One longtime friend, who didn’t attend but followed events, who I’ve seen don MPLA party hats and T-shirts at campaign time, said — no, this is too much!

President dos Santos and the MPLA, it seems, are scared of peace and quiet. They have no one to blame but themselves. And if Luaty Beirão dies in jail on their watch, they will have a much bigger problem than “preparatory acts.” One vigil attendee’s sign read “15+1+2=24.3 million” (Angola’s total population). Last night’s police response is stirring that larger pot.