Sean Jacobs's Blog, page 344

The Adventures Of Uno July

Have a conversation with any hip hop head about Cape Town duo, Ill Skillz and it’s likely to devolve into a comparison between Uno July and Jimmy Flexx’s potential on the mic. Yes, we all know Flexx is a god of some sort but just like Big Boi from Outkast, Uno’s efforts often get overlooked. He has also played the duo’s spokesperson, and if I may frontman, which has seen them performing abroad and embarking on innovative ventures such as their two 24-hour albums and being part of the Ill Beings showcase, among others. Uno and Flexx have been rocking as Ill Skillz (Ill-Literate Skill) for the past 10 years.

On his first solo offering, the seven-track Best Kept Secret EP which precedes an album due for release on July 1 2015, Uno wasn’t trying to prove a point, even though he’s still hungry. He was making music he would enjoy listening to, he says. Apart from producer Maloon’s jazzy embellishment of Nas’ “The World Is Yours,” the beats on the EP aren’t what you’d typically expect from Ill Skillz.

The duo updated their sound while managing to keep their traditional boom bap sensibilities on their sophomore album Notes From The Native Yards in 2013. The sound on Best Kept Secret, on the other hand, consists of ethereal pads creeping under pulsating basslines and pattering 808s provided by J-oNE, and of course some beats were borrowed from the interwebs. Uno zones out about sneakers, the rap game and life from his personal point of view.  

Ill Skillz has, over the years, remained mavericks of the hip hop artform. Their peers – the likes of AKA and Reason – have become superstars over the past decade while the duo remains tucked away in the pregnant serenity of The Mother City. A move to Johannesburg, where the South African music industry is monopolized, could have “exposed” the duo more. According to Uno, after they had made that joint decision to move to The City of Gold, Jimmy Flexx became a parent and was also busy with academics. Uno, a teetotaler of note, is also not a fan of the fast-paced Jo’burg lifestyle – you know, “sipping champagne like it’s Kool-Aid” and thinking about JC Le Roux sitting up in his room.

The emcee is openly bitter about how Ill SKillz is slept on. About two years ago, flanking Mos Def (now Yasiin Bey) as Ill Skillz at a meet-and-greet in Cape Town, he expressed how they have faced gatekeepers especially when it comes to the duo getting their shit played on radio. He expressed his disappointment in us the fans. “Do you guys know Ill SKillz had a ballerina on a music video before Kanye West did?” he said to the crowd of hip hop heads and cool kids who were just excited to be in the same room as Yasiin Bey.

His main focus, after a 12-year long relationship with hip hop, is still the music in its purest and most personal form. According to him, Ill SKillz has turned down mainstream artists for collabos because the duo didn’t resonate with the current soundscape. “My life could have changed a long time ago,” he says and admits that many times he has pondered succumbing to the industry’s invitation to “dumb it down”. But his passion for the artform is deeper than the desire to blow up. And the road to blowing up takes more than just good music. Ill Skillz had solid singles from their sophomore album Notes From The Native Yards in the form of “To The Beat Y’all (TTBY)”, “7’s Clash” and “Hip Hop Jones”. “”Hip Hop Jones” got played on Channel O,” Uno says. “It [also] got played on MTV Base [but only] once, because we didn’t have that brown envelope and it wasn’t a party song. That’s just how it is, you can’t defeat those things.”

As I converse with him during the third outbreak of xenophobic attacks in South Africa, he reminds me poignantly that Driemanskap made a song about xenophobia in 2008 but nobody gave a fuck. In short, we are sleeping on our own.

Uno wore his heart on his sleeve on Notes Fom The Native Yards. He bled over their new-found producer, J-oNE’s jazz-influenced keys and atmospheric pads. His personal frustrations seemed to be the focal point of his lyrics. He appeared to be dealing with a mother who’s questioning if rap’s going to bring him some money, a South African hip hop audience that seems to blatantly ignore Ill Skillz’ craft and a country that just seems to be suffering from the ugly repercussions of its oppressive history. He reveals to me that the biggest source of his frustration is that he has daddy issues, “serious, serious daddy issues,” he emphasizes, lowering the pitch of his normally sonorous voice. The emcee never met his dad – who was part of Umkhonto Wesizwe (the armed wing of the ANC during apartheid) – until Uno was 20 years old. On The Best Kept Secret, he’s slowly coming out of his woeful phase and experiencing happiness again. And nothing seems to make him happy more than music does. Uno is a music lover of note. His Twitter timeline is always flooded with quotes and references from rap songs, both old and new. And he’s a regular attender of gigs around the city even when Ill Skillz is not on the bill. Last year, he started the Fxck Your Day Job monthly series of parties, a move which earned him a King of The Western Cape nomination at the South African Hip Hop Awards. Ill Skillz, however, never got any nomination for their music.

Apart from releasing the album in July, he’s relocating to New York. “I’m no longer in a relationship,” he reveals. “All I do is just music. I chill in studio and just record all the damn time. I’m taking this EP with me and shopping it around. So I can get the fuck outta here and rep the Native Yards abroad because Jo’burg doesn’t give a fuck!”

Some facts about Uno

1. His real name is Unathi July. Uno is short for Unathi. Even his mother calls him Uno.

2. The only rapper he looks up to is MF Doom.

3. He is a die-hard sneaker head, which is why he doesn’t have kids yet. He couldn’t pay rent for two months after buying the Kanye West Louis Vuitton Dons which went for R8000.

4. Mawe2’s “Saved by the Music” is one of Uno’s favorite South African hip hop songs.

5. He was a solo emcee for two years before he became a member of Ill Skillz.

The Chronic Sketches “A New Cartography”

The latest issue of the Chronic, a quarterly gazette offshoot of the “project-based mutable object” that is Chimurenga, states its thesis on its cover, which, in the digital version, looks like a network of chalky cartographical scrawls across a dark expanse. The drawings evoke colonial discourse of  “blank spaces” and “the dark continent,” reminding readers that such constructions are as arbitrary and temporary as chalk dust, wiped away by whoever takes control of the board next. However, the real value in this issue, titled “A New Cartography,” is how quickly it dispenses with its critique of colonial cartographies and contributes explicitly to a project that has been implicit in much recent African writing: the creation of dynamic, disjunctive spaces that undermine the premise of the map as stable and representative.

The two opening pieces in the issue serve as a statement of purpose and a theoretical grounding that orient readers to its primary agenda: offering graphic, literary, and longform texts that do not so much claim to represent the continent as to explore the possibilities of “Africa” across space and time. First, in an interview with Bregtje van der Haak, Achille Mbembe declares that, “the densification of all kinds of networks, both human and technological, will reshape the entire African spatial map.” Stacy Hardy’s “A Brief History of Mapping” then provides a precis of the major moments in critical cartography, reminding readers of the Berlin Conference, Jorge Luis Borges’ “On Exactitude in Science,” and Nikolaj Cyon’s projection of what the continent would look like had it never been colonized by Europeans.

From there, the contributors tackle everything from Muammar Qaddhafi’s continental political strategizing to African celebrity culture to “Islamish” memory in America, simultaneously mapping overlooked phenomena and unmapping conventional wisdom. Readers looking for a way in to some of the denser pieces might start with Agri Ismail’s “The Power of Green Crayons.” Ismail writes of growing up Kurdish during a period when Kurdistan was erased from official maps. He recalls searching for antique maps to convince himself of his country’s existence, until, observing a young nephew draw the country onto a current map, he realizes, “I needn’t have scoured the earth for ancient maps at all. I could just have drawn them myself.”

Ismail’s young cartographer evokes the protagonist of Nuruddin Farah’s Maps (1986), who draws maps of the Horn of Africa as he tries to make sense of border disputes around the Ogaden region. Maps contains a critique of the nationalism that many early independence-era novels were committed to, effectively attempting to reassert control over the spatial narrative of the continent by working within an externally-imposed framework. More recently, however, novels like Moses Isegawa’s Abyssinian Chronicles (1998), Dinaw Mengestu’s The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears (2007), and Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani’s I Do Not Come to You by Chance (2010) subvert the cartographical impulse by emphasizing shifting landscapes, mobile subjects, and digital networks.

With this collection of writing and images, the editors of the Chronic have enabled such grassroots, narrative cartography. Throughout, the visual language of the publication is provocatively in tension with the very notion of mapping: the legends are hand-written; the graphite sketches look almost like doodles, divested of institutional authority but made credible by their awareness of their own ephemerality.

The limits of debunking only the pseudoscience of race

All human societies, whether tacitly or overtly, assume that nature has ordained their social arrangements. Or, to put it another way, part of what human beings understand by the word “nature” is the sense of inevitability that gradually becomes attached to a predictable, repetitive social routine.

– Barbara Fields, Slavery, Race and Ideology in the United States of America

The lights were off. Load shedding. But London-based writer and university lecturer Gavin Evans was back home in South Africa for the launch of his latest book, Black Brain, White Brain: Is Intelligence Skin Deep? A thickly referenced treatise debunking the scientific racism of the past five centuries, Brains is a timely book given the reemergence of “race realism” among geneticists, biologists, and others in the life sciences and beyond.

The Troyeville Hotel, the venue for the launch, had a generator going. In the smoky bar area groups of young black men shot pool and drank at the bar while three older white guys sat on stools around a bar table and watched cricket on a TV mounted in the corner. In another corner four white women who showed interest in neither pool nor cricket dined by candlelight.

The launch itself was held in the candlelit dining area next door, where wait staff made up entirely of black people, most of them women, tended tables where there sat a mostly white audience that’d come to hear Evans in conversation with Keith Breckenridge, the deputy director of the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research.

The whole arrangement echoed what writer Thando Mgqolozana described as the abnormalities of South Africa’s white literary system. It was also an affirmation of what several studies show: South Africans live together apart.

The divisions, however, go beyond beliefs in unscientific ideas about the supposed links between genes, race, intelligence and behavior, the subject of Evans book, and extend into the intersecting ideologies and related arrangements that hold the unjust stratification of societies in place. This points to what is perhaps lacking in this otherwise good book, which, over the course of 300 well-written and accessible pages, answers its own subtitle in the negative. Intelligence is definitely not a matter of skin tone, hair texture or any of the other phenotypical features used to classify human beings into race groups.

Brains might nonetheless have benefited from spending more time on the whys of the ideology of race. This might have led to an exposition on the ways in which the arrangements of old, such as colonialism and apartheid, which scientific racism sought to justify, have mutated and in many ways continued to persist – even that night at the launch of a book decrying them.

Such an expectation might be unfair. The book after all is primarily on the what of racist science. Evans drew inspiration for it from the resurgence in scientific racism such that typified by the popularity of a widely criticised book by Nicholas Wade, a former science writer for the New York Times, on the supposed biological realities and linked behavioral determinism of race. And Evans does get into some of the whys in so far as challenging the idea proposed by twenty-first century sociobiologists such as Richard Dawkins that racism as a human behavior has biological explanations.

However, as the mostly white audience quaffed wine and the all-black servers cleared plates from the R209 (US$18) per person dinner [Disclosure: The Troyeville Hotel comped the writer’s dinner], and the mostly black suburb of Troyeville lurked outside in a state of urban decay, it was hard not to feel uneasy. It was hard, but if there was disquiet in among the wait staff, audience and panelists that night it was muted. And something beyond only a belief in race determining, at the biological level, that all of this was the natural order of things was making it so.

After all, the people who attended the launch and those likely to want to read the book probably consider themselves progressive and enlightened. One audience member even took to the microphone during the question and answer session to berate the “evangelical tone” of Brains and to declare that they were already familiar with much of what was contained in the book.

That may be so. But how, then, was everyone comfortable that a book on this topic would launch to a room full of whites waited on by blacks? How were we all comfortable playing our respective roles in a hierarchical social arrangement that in many explicit and implicit ways unfairly set the deserving apart from the undeserving; the included from the excluded? The metal gate at the entrance manned by two burly black men in suits, the price tag to attend the launch and even the R246 (US$21) price of the book were part of set of agreements we’d either bought or been coerced into to uphold a social order we’ve come to accept as natural – if not natural then inevitable and inescapable within our lifetimes.

“There will always be inequality: it is the natural state. People are born with different attributes and abilities,” goes the popular yet bogus refrain.

It bears repeating. Expecting that this book in its content, production and marketing ought to unsettle such beliefs and the unjust social arrangements they engender and dissimulate, including the arrangements at the launch that night, might be unfair. But then are books like Brains not self-serving, and possibly dangerous, if they allow readers to self-congratulate for not buying into race yet do not challenge their belief and participation in the ideologies and unjust arrangements that intersect?

Thoughts on Xenophobia from a South African in Mozambique

When you spend time in another country, you don’t expect news from home on the local television channels every night for a month. The surprise of receiving such news is not always pleasant, particularly when you’re a South African in Mozambique at the moment. News bulletins here have featured vox pops on Durban streets saying that foreigners shouldn’t necessarily be harmed, but should go home. There has been sinister footage of impis: the kind of thing that European camera crews loved in the early 1990s but which reflects a stereotype of Zulus that resonates also in Mozambique and elsewhere in southern Africa. TV viewers have seen hours of tents, food queues and emergency repatriations: a home-grown variant of the disaster journalism more often associated with global media coverage of African crises. A reporter spoke of Mozambicans receiving assistance from “South Africans of good will” (this wasn’t in English, so the unfortunate pun on the name of the Zulu monarch Goodwill Zwelethini is to be found only in translation). And we have had ample coverage of the marches against xenophobia in South Africa, a comforting (for us) reminder that we are not all bad.

Watching Mozambican news, talking to Mozambicans and following as best I can the media debates back home have given me cause to think about how we as neighbours regard each other. This is a society whose intellectual elite gets more airtime than is the case in South Africa. So everyone with access to a TV knows about writer Mia Couto’s letter to Jacob Zuma in which he describes the violence as an “attack against the Rainbow Nation”.

Couto understands South Africa better than most South Africans understand Mozambique, but I can’t help thinking that if he’d spent much time in South Africa these last few years, he’d have realised that the “rainbow nation” idea no longer carries much currency. We have heard Zuma’s response to Couto, and Mozambican pundits’ response to the response: one academic interviewed on TV opined that Zuma’s letter was intended “for internal consumption”, a point of view that it is hard to disagree with. TV viewers here have also heard a lot from Tomaz Salomão, the Mozambican former secretary general of the Southern African Development Community (SADC).  Particularly striking was Salomão’s ominous warning: “Next it will be those blacks who have some [money], then the Indians who dominate the economy, and then the whites. And imagine the implications of that.”

Quite apart from his misperception that Indians dominate the South African economy, Salomão doesn’t seem to get that white South Africans have the means to look after ourselves if necessary, not least because as Cawo Abdi pointed out, we share very few spaces either with black foreigners or with poor black South Africans.

I couldn’t help but contrast Tomaz Salomão’s prediction with the point of view of Fred Khumalo, a South African journalist whose article includes an interesting and critical take on the baggage that goes with his own Zulu identity: for Khumalo, next in line are not whites or Indians or the black bourgeoisie, but South Africa’s indigenous black minorities.

Taking this line of reasoning a stage further, an “open letter to outraged, middle-class South Africans” from an anonymous “friend in Alexandra” pointed out the hypocrisy of those privileged South Africans who rush to the support of stricken foreign nationals while ignoring the daily violence experienced by the poorest black South Africans.

This article does not explain or offer excuses for the violence, but it shines a harsh light on the category of people whom that Mozambican journalist lumped together as “South Africans of good will”. Those South Africans were from a range of classes and racial origins, and no act of good will should be sneered at. But in its critique of white people’s particular concern with the migrants’ plight, that anonymous article broaches a rather obvious topic that seldom gets discussed publicly: the way which the unease that typifies white attitudes towards black South Africans is absent where our interaction with non-South African Africans is concerned.

This is a theme that I’ve heard over the years in conversations across the social and geographical range of white South Africa: from fruit farmers in the Limpopo Valley (migrants are good because they will work for less) all the way to Cape Town suburbanites (Malawians are so respectful, Zimbabweans are so well-spoken). While in Mozambique, I’ve been reading Olive Schreiner’s A Story of an African Farm for no other reason than that it was available as a free download. In a novel in which most of the black characters are nameless, voiceless and identified by words beginning with K, N and H, one minor character stands out: a “Mozambiquer” hired to nurse an ailing white woman in a Transvaal hotel is the only black person in the book who utters a sentence or – in resigning her job – takes a decision. The white South African deference towards Africans from across the border has a history. (Pursuing that tangent further for a moment, I find myself thinking of Zelda le Grange’s memoir, in which, through the figure of Graça Machel, the nice-foreigners white discourse merges with the white appropriation of Nelson Mandela’s legacy. But that’s a thought for another day.)

While observing South Africa this past month through the lens of Mozambican television, I have thought back to what friends and family in South Africa have had to say about my current and previous sojourns in Mozambique. I have been asked to help locate property for them to buy, or to recommend holiday destinations. I’ve been told “we’re coming down to Maputo, see you there?” (I am currently about 800 km from Maputo). People are surprised to hear me talk of drought where I am, because they had heard of floods (believe me, Mozambique is plenty big enough to accommodate all flavours of inclement weather). The people whose remarks I paraphrase here are mostly well educated and on the left end of politics. They are the kind of people who would cringe at the mention of “respectful” Malawians or “well spoken” Zimbabweans. But where Mozambique is concerned, it’s as if we don’t even have the slightest clue how stereotype the people, so it’s all about the environment: the beaches and the prawns. I’m not going to make a spurious connection between holding such attitudes and setting people on fire. But the expressions of support and acts of charity would appear that much more sincere if the well-meaning people behind them did not insist on regarding Mozambique as a coastal suburb of Nelspruit.

Mozambicans have their stereotypes of us too. South Africa is “a terra do Rand” – the land of the Rand. Here in rural Sofala province, a house built of bricks and tin rather than mud and thatch is likely to represent years of South African pay packets, and recollections of time in South Africa are more likely to include reminiscences about white bosses than about black neighbours. One former migrant spoke of starting out in “a zona negra de Soweto” (the black zone of Soweto) before graduating, as it were, to a job in Johannesburg’s northern suburbs.

Watching Mozambican TV you could come away with the impression of a South Africa divided simply between the people of good will with their pots of rice, and the people of Goodwill with their knobkieries and pangas: a view that is as oblivious to our own tempestuous politics of class and identity as we are typically blind to Mozambique’s own internal variety and variances. Recently I got a lift with some civil servants who when they heard where I was from, expressed the same outrage at the events of the last few weeks that I have heard from every Mozambican I have spoken to. Once again I could offer little in response other than to agree that events have shamed South Africa: it would have seemed ungracious in the circumstances to start picking over the complexities that have been discussed in South African media and which say more about South Africa than about Mozambique. My travel companions generously made clear that they didn’t hold me responsible for the killings.

*An edited version of this article was previously published on the Daily Maverick.

When Akala called out Britain’s racism on Frankie Boyle’s show

The comedian Frankie Boyle is one of the few performers currently on UK television worth listening to. He insists on pointing out the complicity of the UK establishment with mass child abuse. He talks about the crimes and exploitation of the British empire, and links that to the ongoing debate around “immigration.” He criticizes Israel (and Britain’s complicity in supporting Israeli apartheid). He makes the wrong kind of jokes about American military aggression. He protests against Guantanamo Bay. And he refuses to talk about poverty and corruption using the BBC’s customary euphemisms (mainly because unlike almost everyone else who works for the BBC, Boyle is working class).

All this means that when Boyle is allowed to make a TV show, it doesn’t actually go on TV. Instead it goes online only, where the BBC hope it won’t get seen by the swivel-eyed right wing press.

This week, he put out Frankie Boyle’s Election Autopsy, an unapologetically frank assessment of the UK’s suicidal re-election of the Conservative Party.

Boyle had the excellent rapper and writer Akala on to comment on the proposition that “Britain is racist to the core.” His answer was so good he even convinced the audience. Watch, learn and share:

This is what happens when broadcasters allow thoughtful, serious people to talk about important things on TV. No wonder it’s so rare. Instead the British media is dominated by an entrenched cast of mediocre old white guys who are either constantly trolling or else too complacent to bother — presenters like Jeremy Paxman, David Dimbleby, and Andrew Neil; “historians” like the crusty old racist David Starkey.

We covered the UK election, and particularly the depressing debate around “immigration,” quite a bit over the past month or so. Check the podcast we did with Musa Okwonga where he gave us his insights on the UK election and the refugee crisis in the Mediterranean. We also wrote about a documentary that showed on Channel 4, Britain’s Racist Election, to get some longer context on racism and electoral politics.

Perhaps we spend too long interrogating British jingoism and its destructive effects. For some reason, we still expect better from the UK than racist old codgers like Jeremy Clarkson (as TO Molefe wrote last year) and we still think it’s worth objecting when the poorest and most marginalized in British society are targeted for vilification by the state itself (something we’re likely to see much more of under the current government).

It was the Eurovision song contest last night, which everyone in the UK loves. This year, Australia was invited. Eurovision indeed.

The only #Eurovision we care about is the kind that means European governments won't acknowledge humanity of migrants pic.twitter.com/EJys7YRVV6

— AFRICA IS A COUNTRY (@AfricasaCountry) May 23, 2015

For those unsure about Australia's position in Europe this map proves its just off the coast of Portugal #Eurovision pic.twitter.com/8k631T5mPx

— Callum Mccrae (@callummccrae1) May 23, 2015

Weekend Music Break No.75

Here’s your weekend selection for May 23rd, 2015. To kick things off, just stop what you’re doing, watch and listen to this by Wanlov…

A message from Sierra Leone to South Africa (to the World) — relevant to many of the posts going up on this site as of late — Kao Denero asks, “Why?”…

A song is so good, it kind of hurts… Nneka channels the spirit of Bob Marley in “Book of Job”…

Also in the “conscious” vein, a sax-backed message from Togo’s Elom 20ce…

Continuing the rap section of today’s selection, Pappy Kojo teams up with Sarkodie on “Ay3 Late”…

South African rap duo Gods on Drugs sent us this video for their track “Garage Dragon”…

Switching gears a bit, Djeff turns in a high-energy video for his mind-blowing “Ser Kazukuta” track!

Wunmi shows us how to keep a “Fit Body”…

Going through the Africa is a Country email archives we ran into this from Boston based Kina Zoré…

And finally, an interesting artifact from the Okayplayer family, Questlove goes to Cuba…

Digital Archive No. 18 – Badilisha Poetry X-Change

So, my brief hiatus turned into a bit bigger of a break than I was planning.  But I’m back!  And I’m excited to introduce y’all to some more digital projects that you may or may not know about!  And our first project back is Badilisha Poetry X-Change!

Back in 2011, Badilisha Poetry was previously featured on this platform with a spotlight on its podcast, Badilisha Poetry Radio.  But there is a lot more to Badilisha than just the podcast.  This is a digital poetry archive, preserving African poetry in both its written and oral forms.  This dynamic archive is managed by Linda Kaoma (a poet in her own right) and is a product of the Cape Town-based Africa Centre, a pan-Africanist collective that aims to use culture as a means for social change (some other projects from Africa Centre that you might have come across include the Infecting the City festival and WikiAfrica).

Badilisha is rare, in a sense, because it is completely funded by South African donors, including the National Lottery, the National Arts Council of South Africa, and Spier Wine Farm.  If you look back through most of the Digital Archive posts, the majority of African digital projects are either based in the U.S/Europe or funded by backers from these regions.  But this is an African project, aiming to broaden the access to African poets for Africans in particular who, without a forum such as this, have limited ability to be “inspired and influenced by their own writers and poets – negatively impacting their personal growth, identity, development and sense of place.”  The initiative is also intended to bring African authors’ work to a wider audience, which it most certainly does.

Though this is a South African-based project, it’s content certainly isn’t limited to South Africa.  Content comes from around the world, from the United Kingdom to Senegal to Sri Lanka to Zimbabwe.  You can also search for poets by language, with poems in major European languages (like English, French, German, and Portuguese) as well as African languages (like Xhosa, Zulu, Pedi, Venda, and Swahili, to name a few).  You can also navigate the nearly work of the over 350 poets by theme and emotion.  I lost myself in the History-themed poems for quite a while, especially “Things Fall Apart” by Hector Kunene.

Follow Badilisha on Facebook and Twitter.  Explore this awesome collection and let us know what you think in the comments below.  As always, feel free to send me suggestions in the comments or via Twitter of sites you might like to see covered in future editions of The Digital Archive!

The oil giants are coming to Tanzania

International oil giants are bearing down on East Africa. Off the coast of Tanzania, the discovery of 46.5 trillion cubic feet of natural gas reserves has put the country on the world energy map. The number is expected to rise to 200 trillion cubic feet in the next two years, and eventually transform Tanzania into a middle-income country.

Companies like Exxon Mobil, BG Group and Norway´s Statoil are working with the Tanzanian Petroleum Development Corp (TPDC) in exploration, building infrastructure and construction. However, the real issue is the profit-sharing contracts currently being negotiated between the big oil companies and the government.

The Production-Sharing Agreements (PSA) between the international firms and the TPDC are confidential. However, the draft of a contract with Statoil has leaked. Instead of the expected 50-75%, Tanzania would only be getting 30-50% of the “profit gas.” The government has little to no leverage but everyone knows the country needs the investment big oil could bring.

With elections coming up this year, the oil and gas question is a hot topic. For a politician trying to gain traction it is heaven-sent. From independence until his retirement in 1985 the country was lead by the great Julius Nyerere, whose ideology was socialist and has been called communist. The communitarian mindset lead to many great things and is still tangible in political discourses. However, it also lends itself to misuse.

The pre-election debate on the natural gas question for instance is full of flaming protectionist rhetoric. Here-comes-the-imperialist-west-again-we-must-protect-our-interests-so-vote-for-me-ism seems popular, especially with ruling party CCM. It simplifies things nicely, takes the attention away from failing schools and hospitals and reminds everybody that the problem is, really, external.

In this spirit parliament has just approved the Non-Citizens Employment Regulation Bill making it much harder for foreigners to work in the country. Partnership with various multinational oil giants will certainly see an increase in the number of foreign workers, never-mind the Chinese. Actually, do mind the Chinese, but somebody else can write about that. Ensuring that the ordinary worker gets a piece of the sloppy oil cake is very important, although it remains debatable whether this bill is the most effective way to go about it. One could argue that it discourages investment and that it forces companies to weasel their way around state legislation. Another problem is the lack of skilled workers, especially for managerial positions. Statoil has some great academic exchange and partnership programs, for instance with the University of Dar es Salaam, but is it enough?

Then there is the issue of corruption and lack of transparency. New money is flooding in, especially to the largest city, Dar es Salaam. Although some money ends up in the right hands and is used for the right things there is a definite partiality in Dar to making money vanish. Valiant efforts have and are being made to fight corruption, but corruption penetrates nearly ever aspect of society at all levels. The ecosystem of corruption is deep and old, very old, so old it should have its own museum, celebrating a long, creative and colorful history of soda-buying, palm-greasing and generally being up to something.

Will we see the oil and gas turn Dar into another Lagos? A widening gap between rich and poor could lead to a more divided society, higher crime rates and more violent crimes, even violent conflict. There has already been violence in the Southern Mtwara district over the building of a pipe-line to Dar es Salaam.

I think it is safe to say that for East Africa as a region, the development of the oil sector cannot be seen as only a blessing or only a curse. But over the coming years there will be some pretty rude changes to the region’s geo-politics in which the discoveries of oil and natural gas are a major factor.

The important thing for us mortals is not to loose interest and to continue to apply pressure on the various actors involved. For instance, if oil giants like Statoil are serious about supporting sustainable long-term development they must invest heavily and whole-heartedly in training and succession programs, and they must assist with strong legal support for the governments they are negotiating with, fair fight, fair play. Similarly, politicians who are serious about protecting national interest must think beyond party-interest and short-term political gain in the things that they say and the papers they sign. The situation warrants an appeal to the highest sense of public duty.

As observers, both in the global South and North, it is our job to engage ourselves in the processes, blow whistles and put pressure on decision-makers. What happens in the next few years will determine the fate of the region for at least the next fifty if not beyond.

*Thanks to Maria and Jonas Njau for help and thoughts for this article.

Liberating ourselves from our liberators

Yes, April was the cruelest month in South Africa in recent history. In the mid weeks of the month, too many pictures stirred up bad memories. A black man in his late twenties kissing a sparkly machete. A young man crouching by the side of a wall, holding a sharp knife, ready to use. A group of angry black men brandishing hatchets. Three white policemen pointing their guns at a bloodthirsty mob. If a picture is worth a thousand words, the last one is a dictionary. Three white policemen ready to shoot black men, who were after other black men in South Africa. There can be no greater irony. You can hear Queen Victoria saying: I told you so. These people needed to be protected from themselves.

But it would be wrong for Queen Victoria to celebrate, wherever she might be. Nothing can ever justify violence and looting. And so, I imagine what I, a Nigerian man, would have done if I were found between angry, hatchet-wielding youths and policemen with guns. Would I have run to the descendants of those who massacred innocent demonstrators at Sharpeville, or those whom I was taught in my Pan-African and Black Consciousness classes to love and be in solidarity with because we all are blacks? And having run to the white policemen for refuge, how can I not redefine who my neighbor is? This question applies in Johannesburg as it does in Lagos, Nairobi or Chicago. Who is my neighbor? Who deserves my empathy? Do I have empathy at all? Is blackness still a moral imperative?

The truth of our global age is that autochthony, nativism, or heritage no longer define us exclusively. Whereas they may have helped us Africans to challenge European imperialism in the past, they are now injurious to our humanity. It is time to rethink the moral conditions of not just our solidarity, but, indeed, our existence. If we are incapable of responding to the pain of the other, regardless of who that other is, then the fault might be in our humanity, not in our economic deprivation. But that’s precisely the issue. We have instinctively promoted victimhood to sainthood, and we are morally the poorer for that.

Solidarity based on phenotype or heritage is dangerous. He who loves you because of your skin color can hate you for the same reason. The love is literally only skin deep. It is a given in our history that in our pan-African love fest we failed to advance our moral horizon just as the Afrikaners who constructed their solidarity on race did not. The Pan-Africanism and Black Consciousness on which my generation of Africans was suckled, ended up being at best the means through which we Africans put off the fire burning on the continent. And now we seem to have become mere fire fighters, not ready to go beyond emergency response to reality.

Could it then be that our self-perception and our moral world got stuck in the perceived dignity of difference to white people and in the supposed inviolability of our culture? How else could Jacob Zuma have taken recourse to his Zulu culture as a justification for sleeping with a woman against her will? Perhaps it is not a stretch to suggest that all over Africa the proverbial chickens are coming home to roost. As the Nigerian cultural critic, Denis Ekpo suggests, it is time we liberated ourselves from our liberators and their jaded ideas of Africa. It is time we imagined a more profound, universal, moral world, in tune with the global age which Africa is undoubtedly part of. Where do we look for answers? Achille Mbembe analyzes the mind of those blacks who went after other blacks: “To kill ‘these foreigners’, we need to be as close as possible to their body which we then set in flames or dissect, each blow opening a huge wound that can never be healed. Or if it is healed at all, it must leave on ‘these foreigners’ the kinds of scars that can never be erased.”

The issue then is not that the other black body stands in the way of your progress; rather, it is a case of an infernal hatred of this other body, performed in a macabre ritualistic glee. This is more than ordinary xenophobia can explain. Explanation has to be sought in the realm of psychology: how has the black man developed such an aversion for his fellow black man, for what looks like him? Perhaps we could look for explanation in the realm of ethics: did black people learn to hate the historical enemy (the colonialists) more than they knew how to love themselves? Their bodies?

What is the black body to me? What is the body in pain to me? Until we sufficiently answer these questions, or at least think deeply about them, violence will keep spreading all over Africa. Today the Zulus go after Zimbabweans. Tomorrow, they will go after Xhosas. This is not a prophecy. It is the unavoidable arc of nativism and bigotry. Those who start out attacking others, on the basis of difference, end up attacking their own people on the basis of … well, difference. Fanon said it a while ago; Mbembe reframed it today: “It does not stop with ‘these foreigners’. It is in its DNA to end up turning onto itself in a dramatic gesture of inversion.” There can be no greater challenge for us all.

How the Dutch government polices unwanted black bodies

An estimated 1,700 refugees have died this year in the Mediterranean trying to reach Western Europe. One of the consequences of the increased media attention, is that shifted focus onto the immigration regimes of European countries. Take the Dutch for example.

While activists, critics and the European Committee of Social Rights (ECSR) criticize the Netherlands’ asylum laws, most Dutch people don’t care about this xenophobic apparatus. The regime ignores European guidelines with regards to medical assistance, shelter and detention plus it lends its signature to violent deportations executed by KLM, the country’s state airline. So why aren’t refugees included in the national narratives about institutionalized wars against The Other?

Often championed as a human rights defender, the Netherlands continuously fails miserably in politically protecting and socially including refugees. The Universal Convention of Human Rights states, undocumented people are entitled to the basic right to protection. Amnesty International, Kerk in Actie (Church in Action) and The Netherlands Institute for Human Rights spoke out against the unsafe living conditions many undocumented people face. On April 22, 2015 the Dutch government agreed on a shelter program for those whose asylum applications were denied. Philip Alston, the UN’s special reporter on human rights, condemned the agreement and labelled it “an infringement of human rights.” The deal also confirmed that Dutch politicians fail to acknowledge that many governments refuse to “take back” those who escaped their regimes. Against EU-regulations, the Dutch government only wanted to offer shelter to those who’re “willing” to return. Those who “refuse” are portrayed as disobedient exploiters of white citizen’s tax money.    

Throughout the Netherlands, undocumented people live in precarious conditions with little, if any support to deal with the posttraumatic stress and trauma that many endure. Debates on migration should consider the socio-political and economic dimension of forced migration, but propaganda trumps facts and figures. Most Dutch politicians rebuke the idea that Europe’s colonialism, imperialism and all other exploitive greeds that spring from that are connected to the current streams of forced migration. We must continue to ask ourselves why people are moving and why some bodies are allowed to pass borders and others are not. Borders, visible and invisible, remain a fundamental issue within fort Europe and continue to dehumanise Black bodies.

The Dutch media is king in villainizing undocumented people as invaders of supposed neutral or safe but always white spaces. Newspapers portray images of people abusing the safe haven of tolerance. Such sentiments were exhaustedly expressed by Dutch folk in response to the fatal Mediterranean shipwreck. Without reiterating the recent racist responses of the Dutch to Black bodies dying at the hands of white supremacy here, let us question why we are not looking at the role of the Dutch government who continuously keeps institutionalised racism in check. There is a privileged obliviousness about the humanity of thousands of people who’re living on the streets, in squatted buildings or in isolated centers where their assumed mobility depends on the villagers’Afrophobia.



In October 2014, 1400 men, women and children who’d apply for asylum would be placed in a town called Oranje. Named after the color that, at least in the Netherlands, is synonymous for all things Dutch, the small and rather isolated village has approximately 140 residents. Oranje’s stance on opening the village doors to Black people reminds us of Orania, the South-African white-only town in Northern Cape. They are, indeed, namesakes.

The group was said to consist of Syrian families but 200 of them were… Eritrean men. Most of those whose mere existence broke the colonial rules of being Black in a white space, were escorted out of town. Even more problematic than their exodus, is the hardships of the East African* people who stayed or arrived after they were gone. When this happened and as it continues to happen throughout the country, there is little attention paid to the government structures policing unwanted bodies. 

Oranje and its villagers are no exception to the nation’s ideas about the humanity and mobility of the Black, undocumented Other. In the wake of unceasing State violence, undocumented people rise up against the supposed beacon of liberalism, tolerance and whiteness that is the Netherlands.

*Check the hashtag #UndocumentedNL on Twitter to read more updates from and about the undocumented members of NL-based communities. Salute to our Comrade Nasir for translating and helping us contextualize our intuition. To protect the people’s privacy and not negatively affect their current asylum procedures, we chose not to mention their names and/or specify their countries of origin.