Sean Jacobs's Blog, page 348

Whip it Good: Artist Jeanette Ehlers is using the white man’s tools to strike back

Jeannette Ehlers’ ‘Whip it Good’ seeks to create poetry between aesthetics and the brutality of the creation of an artwork with a whip. The performance consists of a white canvas, a whip rubbed in charcoal and an audience. Her timely and poignant work deals with power structures in society through an interactive performance art piece. Danish-Trinidadian artist Ehlers uses the white canvas as a representation of hegemonic whiteness and juxtapositions this with the use of white body paint and dress from Haitian and African cultures. Her work, commissioned in 2013 by Alanna Lockward (read about Lockward’s work here and here), speaks to broader narratives of slavery, colonialism and gender. Rivington Place in London is hosting Ehlers’ first solo show in the United Kingdom, kicked off by seven days of performing and followed by a seven-week exhibition.

On the last night of the performance, Rivington Place is packed. There is a permeable tension in the gallery when Ehlers picks up the whip and strikes it against the canvas over and over again. After about ten minutes in she asks the audience to please finish the painting. The tension rises. Ehlers looks around whilst almost summoning people with her look and posture to take over the whip. There is a tangible violence in the repetitive sound of the whip against the white canvas. Every time the whip strikes the canvas hard there is a visceral reaction from both the audience as well as the artist. There is no telling who will stand up and whip the canvas next. The silence in between is powerful and creates a sense of unknowingness and hyper awareness. In the course of seven days, Ehlers created seven different canvasses all representing different experiences and narratives. The canvasses will be part of the exhibition shown at the gallery represented by Autograph ABP.

Ehler in conversation with guest curator Karen Alexander explains in a Q&A, after the final performance, one of the most important experiences of the work lies in who holds the whip. The power dynamics are embedded in who strikes and why. There is a clear difference in a Black woman holding the whip and a white man holding the whip. And there is a different bodily response to a white man taking up the whip. It is here where the complexity of the performance art piece lies. Another complexity lies in the interesting interplay between the aesthetics and poetry of the performance and the sheer violence of the creation of the canvas.

Who strikes back at whom? The artist explains the whip is used to, “strike back with the white men’s tools”. Ehler strikes back in many ways. She strikes back at the violent history of slavery and colonialism. As a Black woman artist she strikes back against the dominance of white male art and patriarchal structures. At the same time, her work stands in solidarity with the continuous violence reenacted against Black lives. Violence from Baltimore to Lampedusa informs her work and makes her angry enough to whip it good. Some days she doesn’t necessarily feel anything, and just is. The participation of the audience in her work tells us something interesting about collective consciousness and its relationship to violence. How aware are we of the legacies of colonial violence? When the performance was conducted in South Africa, no white people would hold the whip. In Denmark, a country with a contested history of slave trade, white people were eager to participate in the performance.

Ultimately, Ehlers work questions how aware we are of the reenactment of continuing colonial violence and how willing or unwilling we are in partaking in the performance of it.

We review Afripedia, “a visual guide to contemporary urban culture on the continent”

“When Africa is changing, when the world is changing and the perspective is shifting, the image of Africa and Africans needs to change too,” believes Teddy Goitom, Swedish-Ethiopian/Eritrean content producer. Goitom is founder of Stocktown, a “cultural movement” whose mission is to document urban culture throughout the world via their online video magazine and through their production company, Stocktown Films. Over the past few years they have spent a lot of time traveling across Africa, profiling artists for their ongoing Afripedia documentary project. Afripedia seeks to be a visual guide to contemporary urban culture on the continent. Each half hour documentary film presents an Africa that is hip and new, in a state of constant self-discovery. The characters featured are well chosen and could have each been the subject of their own documentary. However, as “outsiders,” are Stocktown Films able to capture these cultural scenes authentically? We got a few of our resident contributors to review the Afripedia documentary shot in the countries they call home. –Dylan Valley

Ghana—Wanlov The Kubolor

I am sad because I just watched a powerful and inspiring documentary that the majority of the youth in Ghana will never get to see; as fast, steady and affordable internet access is still a privilege here. The new generation of Ghanaian artists in various disciplines that intrigue me have been represented in this documentary. This may merely be an exciting, well-made documentary to many, but to the Ghanaian youth this is a very needed artistic boost and needs to be shown on all Ghanaian TV networks.

Serge Attukwei Clottey is an artist making art out of his polluted environment. Abrokwah, Computer Man & Black Fire are street boys who have managed to become the most sought after bicycle circus. Jojo Abot the afro funky singer/fashionista recycles old clothes into chic vintage fashion. And Noella Wiyaala an unannounced feminist singer/performer comes across as a Angelique Kidjo/ Grace Jones hybrid. All these artists are somehow linked to the Professor Xavier & Jean Grae of Ghana’s alternative creative scene, namely Mantse Aryeequaye & Dr. Sionne Neely of ACCRA dot ALT, Talk Party Series, Sabolai Radio & Chalewote Street Festival.

I must point out that I was not totally sold on Noella till I watched this documentary and heard her back-story as tears streamed down her resilient cheeks. Much respect to Stocktown for this very relevant contribution.

Angola — Marissa Moorman

Stocktown’s deft work brings a welcome focus to some of Angola’s most compelling and challenging young talent: Nástio Mosquito, Titica, and MC Sacerdote’s crew and collaborators at Circuito Fechado. Their conditions of production couldn’t be more different, as we see in this short film. And Mosquito is a charming guide full of biting critiques and insights. I love the clarity of the shots and the sense of being in the space with the artists. But that sense of transparency and the limitless possibilities of technology to connect us across and despite borders, languages, and politics bothers me too. What this short fails to show us is how difficult it is to do precisely this kind of production in Angola unless you are well connected. Nástio Mosquito and the producers of Geração 80 are the children of elites. While their work often cuts against the virulent accumulation and divisions of those elites, their connections grease the wheels of bureaucracy and make the work of Stocktown possible. Seeing the whole apparatus of cinematic production would open up the complex workings of music and artistic production in Angola.

Kenya — Philippa Ndisi-Herrmann

What happens, when our father, concerned with other affairs leaves us in our bedroom with a cocktail of passion, toys and dreams?

We create; for our pleasure and then we transmit our creations to the outer space of the World Wide Web. Perhaps if we hadn’t glimpsed the domestic terror of post-election violence, we would not have retreated to the comfort of our mind’s bedroom. You don’t need Dad to travel there, nor coins for a bus ticket. Now we have returned home, bearing souvenirs from the farthest reaches of our imagination, “I didn’t know they make stuff like this in Africa,” is the demonstrative response.

Featuring Bob Muchiri, Just-a-Band, and Andrew Kaggia and other young ambassadors of creative cool, Afripedia Kenya highlights curious and impressive works that tickle stereotypes.

How refreshing to see exciting work from where you are from. Creating art about ourselves is like a surprise glimpse of our reflection, “Wow, is that me? How brilliant and strong I am, is that a pot belly, perhaps I need to work on that!” So yes, we create to double take, reflect and regroup our troops, how far have we come, where are we going, are we learning something new about ourselves? Whatever the answer, it does not matter, as long as we keep along this path, reaching and pushing, because now the creation is beyond our bedroom. May we remember our bedroom beginnings; we created such work independent of our father, with no fear to express our thoughts and feelings and in this same way, may we continue. 

South Africa — Mpho Moshe Matheolane

The beginning of the documentary introduces Xander Ferreira and Nick Matthews AKA DJ Invizable (of electro group Gazelle) standing on the beach in Clifton, Cape Town. They are dressed in their usual eccentric performance attire and talk animatedly about their work. The documentary, with this introduction, hints at its subject – the wave of unbridled creativity that surges through a young democratic South Africa.

It also subtly hints at the seemingly unchanged reality of things as well as the confusion that permeates this young democratic country dealing with its “new” freedom and identity issues. Ferreira is the perfect example of this cultural landscape – a white musician, trying to create something new and yet borrowing to create his aesthetic approach, which looks like a concoction of black popular and African cultural imagery. Immediately one asks, what is he selling?

But this is merely one part of the documentary. In Gauteng, young black musicians pursue what would be considered an unconventional and white sound in the form of hard rock. Strange as it appears, it is a sound whose influence goes far back in South African music history, groovy black rockers illustrating that rock is a genre that refuses exclusivity, not even in the township. Indeed, the township is alive with youngsters who see themselves as more than what their circumstances dictate. A young photographer, Musa N. Nxumalo, captures its scene. Enter the Smarteez. Fashion-Afro-futurists, not so much because they are reinventing the wheel but rather because they are infusing their unique sense of identity into what they create. Out of the confusion that dogs South Africa some are forging new ways of being seen, and go figure, it is the youth. Back in Cape Town, in a location other than Clifton beach, a rap duo with a love for arcade games, Die Getuies, makes music that expresses their joyful obsession. There is meaning in all of this. As Ferreira says at one point, “you’ve got to do something for yourself or do something yourself” – that’s fitting – it’s exactly what the documentary captures.

Senegal — Ricci Shryock

The film opens by spotlighting some of Senegal’s most thriving and well-known artists, such as photographer Omar Viktor Diop and Selly Raby Kane. I was glad to see Ken Aicha Sy, a cultural activist and blogger, featured as she’s an integral part of the scene here in Dakar and dedicates herself consistently to promoting both the bigger talents and the lesser-known, underground artists. The cinematography was lovely and did a fantastic job of showing off the beautiful spots of Dakar. What I find especially cool about Senegal’s arts and culture is that the artists integrate the newest styles of hip-hop, fashion, etc. with traditional Senegalese style in such an innovative way. This film captured that well – whether it was showing off Diop’s unique photographic process or Khoudia Toure‘s dance circle that showcased both b-boy and Sabar dancers. I would add I didn’t like the use of subtitles. The artists who spoke English expressed themselves perfectly well enough to not need the text. It not only distracted from the great visuals but I also found it condescending to the artists to imply their English wasn’t understandable. All in all though, a great mini-doc that shows a slice of Dakar not always recognized on the global scene.

Contributors:

Wanlov The Kubolor is a Ghanaian artist and musician; and one half of the rap group or self-proclaimed “Gospel Porn duo” The FOKN BOIS .

Marissa Moorman is a historian of Southern Africa and on the editorial committee of Africa is a Country. She is the author of Intonations: a Social History of Music and Nation in Luanda, Angola, 1945-Recent Times (2008). 

Philippa Ndisi-Herrmann is a Kenyan/German filmmaker and photographer based in Nairobi.

Mpho Moshe Matheolane is an art historian, lecturer and writer. He is currently working towards a PhD focusing on the politics of land and landscape. On most days he runs and listens to jazz as a form of meditation.

Ricci Shryock is an independent photographer and video journalist based in West Africa.

*Stocktown is currently working on compiling Afripedia into a full length documentary film. Until then, follow them on their tumblr and check out Afripedia.com

The people smugglers of the Mediterranean

The death toll on the Mediterranean in the last few weeks has been the equivalent to a sinking of a Titanic. There are no pictures of a sea of floating bodies. A composite image of the death toll of the past two decades would show tens of thousands of corpses in its water, amassed on the surface of the Mediterranean Sea.

The smugglers who arrange for the voyages have been called ‘slave drivers’ of the 21st century by Matteo Renzi. David Cameron similarly calls them ‘criminal human traffickers’ who conduct ‘this trade in human life. ’

European ministers of ‘security’, ‘defence’, the ‘interior’, etc. are intent on propagating the myth of the human trafficker. The British foreign secretary said: ‘We must target the traffickers who are responsible for so many people dying at sea and prevent their innocent victims from being tricked or forced into making these perilous journeys.’ The EU’s has now decided to administer an expanding blockade and to ‘capture and destroy vessels used by the smugglers’. This will be an uphill battle against Libyan coastal cities and an unlimited supply of inflatable rubber dinghies. As a smuggler from Zuwara in western Libya says: ‘Anyone here who has no money can sell their apartment, buy a boat, and organise a smuggling trip. It’s a very easy formula.’

Smugglers are said to purchase old fishing vessels with indifference, and to oversell tickets with a mild kind of sadism. The smugglers, a reckless motley crew of bribed Libyan coastguards, established kingpins, former fisherman, and a small crew of skippers and touts—who are usually hopeful migrants themselves—are congealed into a venal and fictive generic middleman, who ‘tricks’ innocent travellers embarking on and gambling with their own fate.

But smugglers are in most cases merely the “poor man’s” agent; a deregulated, brazen, relatively cheap and lucrative travel agency for refugees and people sans papiers. Unseaworthy vessels, bought by smugglers for a one-time use, sink and capsize whether they are overcrowded or not, whether a Mare Nostrum is there to intervene at the last minute or not. If the EU actually wanted to save lives, they could donate their fleet of FRONTEX ships to the smugglers—instead of indulging in false indignation and a predictable humanitarianism that proverbially always arrives too late.

People on the move being represented as easy prey for unspecified bands of ruthless traffickers is also a colonial script. This script assumes that migrants are ignorant and passive rather than clear-headed and strategic. Arriving in Europe with a temporary visa—the route for the vast majority of the EU’s ‘irregular’ migrants and ‘unauthorized’ refugees—can be prohibitively expensive. Waiting for or purchasing sundry documentation—applications, forged certificates and the like—is a matter of routine, but also of extravagant unofficial commissions. As most “boat people” in Spain, Italy or Libya will tell you, they could not afford a papered passage or the safer, longer and more expensive land routes through Turkey. Apart from the devastating rise of refugees from Syria and EritreaSyria and Eritrea, most people who have crossed the Mediterranean in the past decade have been, for example, graduates from Nigeria, mechanics from Senegal, tailors from Bangladesh, or dropouts from Tunisian universities. Before ‘heading out to sea, they have already crossed the Sahara – a journey that may kill more travellers than the Mediterranean’. People are not only fleeing conflict and poverty, ‘they are in revolt: against injustice, indignity, impunity and institutionalised corruption.’

Akpan Udo Afia, a Nigerian migrant, wrote his local colonial officer in 1934 requesting a permit needed to move in and out of the colonially divided borders established within West Africa: ‘At the beams of your light we are protected to travel into any part of the Globe for purpose of livelyhood […] oblige our unlimited desire.’ Afia’s request for a travel permit was denied, but as the self-evident tone of his demand suggests, he took off anyway, on a small stretch that was ‘part of the Globe’. He paid his way through customs offices and hired the services of canoe smugglers in Eastern Nigeria. Afia’s ‘unlimited desire’ was a spiraling quest to make ends meet, to survive and to try to thrive by bypassing colonial border regimes. Colonial bureaucrats, like those in the EU, responded principally by installing a monstrous transnational chain of jails or ‘detention centers’. Expectations and itineraries, like Afia’s, were made possible by imperial history, and are now a reality arranged by a whole spectrum of unofficial travel agents who will keep the ‘world inexorably on the move.’

The Long History of the Garissa Attacks

April. The month of the long rains was upon us, and with its compulsive deluge flowed memories of an old hate. In Kenya, a cycle of violence enduring since the colonial period has been re-stoked, oblivious to the 21 years of “Never Agains” since the Rwandan genocide. As the horror of the massacre of 148 student from Garissa University College on April 2 gives in to raw mourning and endless fear, old protagonists like the Kenyan government and new actors like al-Shabaab recycle hatreds and recreate the enemy for the purposes of consolidating their power in a politics and economics of fear.

This is my attempt to place the recent Garissa atrocity in the context of a longer history. Many foreign reporters have expressed confusion that the al-Shabaab attackers at Garissa were Kenyan nationals. In part, this is because they aren’t able to connect the recent atrocity with the history of Kenya’s Northern Frontier District.

For al-Shabaab, the enemy is the non-Muslim. Survivors of the Garissa massacre and other terrorist attacks in Kenya have testified that they were asked to recite a Muslim prayer; those that could not do so were killed. The infidel has been cited by al-Shabaab as the cause of ineffable violence against the victimized Ummah, both locally and globally. 

For the Kenyan government, the enemy is al-Shabaab. This “al-Shabaab” is imagined as a young man who is a Somali, or a Muslim, or a refugee, or all of the above.

Both rely on the American discourse of the “War on Terror” to legitimate their violence. Both obfuscate local histories that show how they created this war in the first place. A picture of the Garissa attacks that has been emptied of proper historical context conceals the economy of this war; a war whose cyclic demand for vengeance ensures profits from the coal trade in Kismayu are reaped on a large scale by both al-Shabaab and the Kenyan government.

In Garissa, this scale of violence is not new. For, 35 years ago, in the very same Garissa, in a place that was named Bulla Kartasi, at least 3000 people were murdered. The whole village was burned, women were raped, many were killed and others starved to death in a concentration camp at Garissa Primary School — all at the hands of Kenyan government security forces.

It must have reeked then, of loss, pain and hatred, new precarities; new enemies. The reason? Six government officials murdered in Garissa town by a Kenyan-Somali nicknamed ‘Madhobe’ who cited the reason for his revenge murders as the continued persecution of Kenyan Somalis through political oppression and economic exclusion by the Kenyan government.

Shrill echoes from the colonial past provide an explanation. Ahmed Issack Hassan, (in his paper “Legal Impediments to Development in Northern Kenya,”) writes of how, in 1902, the colonial government of Kenya enacted the Outlying District Ordinance that proclaimed the closure of the Northern Frontier District (which now constitutes Garissa, Moyale, Mandera, Ijara, Wajir, Marsabit and Isiolo), Samburu, Tana River, Lamu and Kajiado. This made movement possible only through a special pass, in a bid to contain the ‘hostile pastoralist tribes’ who were dominant in these regions. This political quarantine was complemented by economic exclusion and racial othering that continues to this day, and helped produce a strong popular sense of a distinct political community that was not Kenyan and needed a different political anchor within a nation. This state of affairs would persist until 1960 when the people of NFD formed the Northern Province People’s Progressive Party (NPPPP) in a bid to secede from Kenya and be reunited with Somalia where culture and racism would not be used to exclude and marginalize. 

However the newly independent Kenyan state, claiming its territorial sovereignty, rejected the bid for secession; a move that had been heavily supported by most people in the region and which the colonial government had alluded to legally implementing before independence. The conflict that ensued resulted in the ‘Shifta’ war in 1963 where a state of emergency was declared by the North Eastern Province and Contiguous District Regulations that lasted nearly 30 years. The Kenyan government named the war Shifta, (a Somali word for bandit) a propaganda move which sought to equate the predominantly ethnic Somali peoples of the NFD with banditry. By amending, repealing or subsuming legislation for the purposes of national security, the State legalized deeply inhumane conditions that are usually permissible only in the event of a full-on war and, in the course of three years, perpetuated the mass killing of 4000 Northern Frontier District people, mainly non-combatants. It was not a war against Islam, as al-Shabaab would now like to claim. It was a secessionist war; a colonial war created, like other structures of colonial rule, around racist and ethnic constructions that artificially and violently matched fabricated identities with territories for the purposes of their rule. 

In 1984, Kenyan state forces carried out the Wagalla massacre, in which male members of the Degodia Somali clan were summarily executed, starved to death and tortured at the Wagalla airstrip. 5,000 people were killed. The government claimed it had sought to quell a clan war. It did not mention that it was following in the footsteps of its colonial predecessor by abandoning people in the North Eastern province, cutting off state service provision and painting a section of the national populace as anti-government bandits.

It is therefore true that many grievances abound in the North Eastern Province. However, these grievances were never historically founded on a war against Islam, as al-Shabaab insist. What al-Shabaab are trying to superimpose is a global anti-Islam discourse that has a very particular (and not really global) history that is not related to the history of violence in North Eastern Kenya. This violence had everything to do with the colonial and post colonial governments of Kenya justifying their political oppression, economic neglect and racial discrimination of the North Eastern Province, by equating these peoples to violent criminals, anti-government militia and now, with the War on Terror, as terrorists. Both the government and al-Shabaab are using this war to justify their political agendas

When Mr. Aden Duale, the Garissa Township MP and leader of majority in the national assembly so noxiously called for the immediate and involuntary repatriation of the 462,970 Somali refugees, many of whom ran from a highly perilous South Central Region in Somalia, he fed into the ‘victimization of the global ummah’ rhetoric that al-Shabaab are viciously peddling. Further marginalizing those already hanging precariously at the edge of the periphery of the national community can only serve to radicalize even more people. 

Instead of creating new forms of vulnerability and cycles of terror, it would instead be politically productive to address older conditions of precarity. This would include actually looking at the TJRC (Truth Justice and Reconciliation Commission) report which was handed, after four years of work, to President Uhuru Kenyatta on May 21, 2013. It would also include a civil and judicial enquiry into the political sabotage of the report by its some of its commissioners, as well as politicians and the office of the president. The report called for a presidential apology for the State’s perpetration of many massacres, the release of official government records on these atrocities, the prevention of any of the perpetrators from having any public office, the reallocation of massive tracts of community land that was grabbed by government officials, as well as reparations for its victims.

Instead, the measures being proposed will only make matters worse, far worse. 

The idea of building a wall at the border of Kenya and Somalia is not only reminiscent of the inhumane Israeli ‘security-wall’ against Palestine (Israel is currently exchanging Eritrean and Sudanese asylum-seekers for money with Rwanda!) but will also further drain an emaciated public budget that is bleeding out Sh74.1 billion ($861million) to the defense department. Worse still, the UN Somalia-Eritrea Monitoring Group has revealed that coal worth at least Sh22 billion ($250 million) was shipped by al-Shabaab from the port of Kismayu which is controlled by the KDF (Kenya Defence Forces) and Ras Kamboni militia of the Interim Jubba administration

The profits of the trade are then shared between these three forces. This trade is a major income stream for al-Shabaab that facilitates their terror activities, and also helps bankroll the Kenya Defence Forces resident in Somalia, and the Somalia RasKamboni forces. The coal trade has therefore created a massive economic incentive for the continuation of the war on both sides. Domestically, the fear that this war has produced has been translated into a mushrooming of private security firms as well as security equipment. Fear is being produced for sale. The hatred and precarity cyclically produced by this war is not only used to justify historical and contemporary injustices, but also sustains a coal and security industry that only exists because this war continues unabated.

The terrible anguish of loss cannot be alleviated, or made sense of, by history. However, our notions of the enemy should be historically redefined in order to avert a cycle of violence — a war against terror that was created to be infinite. Only then can we start to generate a different, and more humane, form of politics.

Baltimore Blues

A few blocks from the Mondawmin Mall, the epicenter of the April 27th Baltimore riots, my sister teaches chemistry at a vocational high school. Her school, in a poor black neighborhood, is only staffed at about 70% and on any given day attendance in her classes is also at about 70%. Some of her students are moms who often have to miss class to take care of their babies and some of her students will miss school for weeks or months at a time. The kids my sister teaches are incredibly funny and creative. A handful of them make good use of their vocational training and wind up with nice careers as EMTs, nurses assistants, or medical technicians. But mostly, she sees a story familiar in poor, urban school districts in the US: most of her students don’t see the benefit of succeeding at school and, as they expressed to her after the riots, don’t imagine a life different than the one they have. They don’t have friends who go off to four-year colleges, med school, or law school, so those don’t seem like logical goals. But they do know lots of people who go off to prison, and many have incarcerated family members.

My partner is an ophthalmologist who works every Friday in prisons around Baltimore. She sees men who have glaucoma but who do not reliably receive the medications they need to prevent them from going blind. She has patients who need cataract surgery for both eyes, but the policy is to only approve surgery for one eye per person. This leaves the men with blurry or no vision in one of their eyes and, consequently, without good peripheral vision, they can bump into other inmates and get into fights they didn’t mean to start. When she operates on the prisoners, at a local hospital a few blocks from where my sister teaches, a surgery that should take 30 minutes can take two hours because of the disorganization. And yet all of this takes place only a handful of blocks from Johns Hopkins, a world-class medical center that is part of an entirely different universe.

My sister’s school and the prisons and hospital where my partner works are part of a constellation. They are institutions that feed into each other like prep schools feed into elite colleges that feed into Wall Street. And the kids who were at the center of the riots know this even if they haven’t been given the language to call it what it is. When my sister asked her students what the phrases “white privilege” or “systemic violence” meant, they hadn’t even heard of such things, and maybe if they had they would have found another way of expressing their anger. But they know the effects of those structures intimately and viscerally on their bodies and psyches. They know that what we have in this country is a system of apartheid where one America is systematically dismissed by the institutions that the other America takes for granted. I’m not saying that America is the same as South Africa under apartheid – the differences are far too numerous and obvious to list. What I am saying is that in America, we have developed a particular brand of apartheid, one that’s so well hidden in particular geographical locations, and reserved for certain categories of human beings (yes, it’s the same categories that the US once used for building its wealth, and similar to those that South African Apartheid disenfranchised and marginalized) that the privileged can still speak about liberty and freedom for all without feeling like they are being ironic.

But rather than spending money to fix these inequalities, our country has decided to spend money on militarizing the police, incarcerating black youth, and bolstering police violence. As Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote in his brilliant Atlantic piece, Baltimore could have built a beautiful new rec center or 30 playgrounds with the money it has spent settling law suits with victims of police brutality. Rather than staffing after school programs or providing free day care for moms, our government has backed a police force that has constantly said to the people they are supposed to protect, I’m sorry, but the only language you understand is violence. I will handle this situation with brute force. This is not to say that police officers are evil – many, of course, have the best of intentions – but it does seem quite obvious that they are part of a culture of policing that condones and often supports excessive force.

At the end of the school day on Monday, April 27th many of my sister’s students found themselves at Mondawmin Mall. This was not necessarily because they had planned to go riot. On the contrary, many of them expressed fear and concern for their safety. But the mall is located right across from their bus stop, the only way they had to get from school to home. And when they got to their bus stop, what they heard were the people saying to the police, I’m sorry, but the only language you understand is violence. I will handle this situation with brute force. So a few of them stayed to speak the language that gets heard, the language that gets broadcast on every single news channel when peaceful protests go woefully unreported. Or maybe they stayed just to grab a new pair of sneakers. But many, the bulk in fact, went home. They received admonishing texts from their parents who did not want them to be the next Freddie Gray. None of this makes it okay to hurl bricks at fire fighters or burn down stores and senior centers, but things, after all, are not okay. The kids are not alright.

The Life and Times of Mr Peter Buckton: Forty four years of walking past Cecil John Rhodes’ Statue

On Friday, April 10th Mr Peter Buckton walked from the bus station up to his office at the University of Cape Town. For the first time in 44 years of this daily journey, he did not have to pass the statue of Cecil John Rhodes on the university’s upper campus. There was no brass band, no media, just a quietly victorious white-haired man on his way to work. He breathes a slow sigh, and describes the feeling.

“Actually on Friday it was good, it was a good feeling. It prickles the brain when you go past there, especially if you are informed about history and what he stood for. It’s like he’s talking to you: ‘Hey, I’ve got you, I’m watching you!’”

The #RhodesMustFall movement at UCT has been in the headlines since the protest was initiated by the defacement of the statue on March 9th. Intense weeks of protest by the students culminated in the University’s removal of the statue on Thursday April 9th. Debate has swirled around the statue, the means of protest that led to its removal, and what it says about contemporary South Africa. Mr Buckton has been working at UCT since 1971, and has observed the struggle for transformation over the decades. The voices coming out of UCT have been either those of the protesting students, or Vice Chancellor Max Price and the University authorities. Mr Buckton’s story emerges from four decades spent working at the middle levels of UCT – a perspective that enriches and contextualises the present debate.

 

44 years at UCT: cleaner, lab assistant, sports co-ordinator, student, historian

I visit UCT on the Monday after the statue fell, coincidentally also Mr Buckton’s 62nd birthday. We sit in the boardroom of the sports building for three hours, him folding and unfolding his long legs, folding and unfolding his story and that of the campus and the country. It overlooks the rugby fields and the UCT buildings beyond. The curtains are closed, except for a chink. Wintery sunshine pours through, illuminating Mr Buckton’s face. You wouldn’t know he’s 62 except for the hair and the beard: white wizened curls, framing a lined face. His eyebrows have refused to go grey, remaining young, along with his eyes – intense and curious, hiding a laugh. He begins by describing how he left school before matriculating and started a job as a cleaner here in 1971. He became a lab attendant and worked in the microbiology department for 25 years, before his current post as a sports co-ordinator. Mr Buckton is an institution himself, always referred to as Mr Buckton, not Peter, and now I understand why. I ask why he has stayed so long.

“I liked the university atmosphere, the academic atmosphere at UCT, and all the young people. UCT has such a vast strata of society, different people from different backgrounds, and so many internationals.” He talks with the vitality of a young person and the pauses and cadences of an old person. Mr Buckton is a UCT graduate. He made the journey from cleaner to history student, against the backdrop of the white UCT of the 1970s and 1980s. “Coming from an environment where we were at the forefront of experiencing apartheid laws and the brutality of the apartheid system, it was tough coming up to UCT, which was then perceived as a white institution.” He reclines, reciting his history with rolling ‘r’s. Mr Buckton is a veteran sports coach. He switches between a low conspiratorial half-time murmur and a booming authoritative voice.

“I used to go to lunchtime debates and talks and I became more conscientized. That was the beauty of being at this intellectual institution. I was working for Prof Jack de Wet, the Dean of Science. He had a big bookshelf, and I had a penchant for reading. One day he was chatting to me, I was sitting in his office, which you wouldn’t expect, him being a white professor.” Mr Buckton looks into the middle distance, searching for the names of authors of books. “He asked where I went to school, I told him I was interested in science and evolution and that my intention was to finish my matric. He supported and funded me. Then I decided to do my BA degree, over six years. History and Biblical Studies: I had been an atheist since the age of 13, but I wanted to understand why religion is such a big thing in society, and the effect it has on people.” He graduated in 1992 at the age of 40.

Books and atheism have remained: Mr Buckton still reads constantly, spending hours in the library and online. His sports admin office is plastered with evidence for evolution instead of religion, pics of chimpanzees and the history of homo sapiens, and slogans like “There are no gods or spirits so relax and get on with your life!” That and the lyrics to John Lennon’s Imagine. Mr Buckton says he likes to listen to the rebels: Marley, Lennon, Dylan, revolutionary lyrics. He hums me a line.

 

Protests, police, and water-bombs

Mr Buckton has plenty of time to talk, and he pays it out word by word, a ball of string slowly unwinding between then and now. His forehead furrows as he thinks back over the years. The wrinkles are deep. After a pause, “I’ve seen a lot of things at UCT, the protests in the 1970s, how things have changed. The protests sort of died down after 1994 but now it’s reared its head again, reminds me of the 1970s.” I ask what it was like to work here at the time, something that is difficult for present-day students to imagine.

“It was at times turbulent. But UCT was a cauldron, or melting pot, at that time as well. There were people from different parts of Africa, South Africa. The SRC was very, very vocal in their anti-apartheid stance, and that angered the government a lot, and UCT’s subsidies were cut.

UCT was known as ‘Little Moscow on the Hill.’ There were always police here. The cops would park their trucks on University Avenue and chase the students, who were always protesting – you know at that time long hair was still cool, for the men. It was still the hippy era, the peace era, and they would be pulled by their hair and thrown around, thrown down Jammie steps with their bicycles. And sometimes the staff members were caught in the melee: the police didn’t discriminate: if you were at UCT you were the rooi gevaar [red threat], a communist!”

Mr Buckton gleefully recalls creating waterbombs from plastic bags and pelting the police with them from on top of the Chemistry building, and the police firing tear gas into the library. The glee vanishes. “It got hectic. The police used to really beat up the students and they were very brutal. Those were turbulent times. And…and it waned after 1994; UCT became very mild in their protest. But once more lately the students are standing up for their rights and for what they believe in.”

 

Transformation at UCT: why the statue has become the focal point

A statue may not be an immediately obvious target, but the presence of Rhodes has come to stand for a complacent institutional attitude to transformation. Mr Buckton’s view is one of slow change and non-change living alongside each other, at UCT and in the country.

“This has been a perennial issue, the issue of transformation at UCT. There’s been talk about the academic staff and professors, and the demographics not being representative of the country. If that is so the university must address that. Although the university is doing a lot of good things, people don’t really notice that. It’s how people have seen it and how it’s changed. Staff find they aren’t being promoted, or getting remunerated for what they do. It’s not only the students with the perception that white people always get the jobs.”

He leans forward, explaining, the frustration of years in his voice. “There’s been protest about the outsourcing of the cleaning and grounds staff. The university professes to be a democratic place that practices equality, but the people that work here, are not treated equally. The University must address those issues. How, I don’t know. That is what the council must find. I hope these pressures will speed it up, the process of change, and that we don’t wait for the next protest and the next statue to go.”

The Rhodes statue has catalysed actions and debates that have spread across untransformed institutions and campuses. Statues and symbols, which visibly reinforce the persistence of inequality and indignity, have provoked latent dissatisfaction and frustration with the state of South Africa in general.

For Mr Buckton, #RhodesMustFall and South Africa’s failed transition are of the same origin.

Speaking slowly and softly about his disappointments, he traces history. “I think… I think the whole process was totally wrong. This country is still so race-based: the vocabulary: white, black. The whole conversation is race. But it’s a contradiction, because in the constitution we want to build and develop a non-racial society.”

Mr Buckton’s leather-sandaled foot comes down on the floor, his hands are at the cross purposes of contradiction. That’s the tip of the iceberg for Mr Buckton. The failure of BEE, the economy that has remained in the grip of big capital and penalised the poor through rising prices, the crisis of education, and untransformed residential areas, are a few of the things on his list – an index finger poking pointedly onto the table as he numbers the problems. UCT is a microcosm of our society, he explains, and students bring their experiences onto the campus.

“And we haven’t solved the racial organisation of our residential areas. Although you get some people from poorer areas moving into more affluent areas… but the movement is always to the one side. Even at UCT: students coming from township areas must sort-of acclimatise or develop, for the lack of a better term, “European”, culture, and even the accent. We now talk about the UCT accent. But it’s not reversed.”

Questions about funding and access have also been raised by the #RhodesMustFall students.

Mr Buckton links this to broader struggles, service delivery protests and poor material conditions. His tone is bleak. He strokes his beard, frowning. “My view is that eventually we are going to have a revolution or a civil war in this county…These little things [protests]: people are saying something. At UCT we must address this, not wait for a statue to fall or something to explode. Then it’s too late.” He mentions the Russian revolution, explaining the historical conditions of revolution.

His focus shifts back into the room, to UCT and the immediate problems, looking at me with far-seeing eyes. “They always say we’re looking into it, we’re looking into it, it’s in the pipeline. But they never take note, unless you really stand up or do something drastic. There’s probably a huge conservative block that don’t want the university changed, that still see it as a white institution for the privileged, you know. I personally think that the university must be shown to address these issues.” His tone is stern, not bitter.

 

It matters that the statue is gone: memory, pain, monuments

Is it significant that the statue is down if it’s about everything else too?, I ask. Mr Buckton leans back, closes his eyes, remembering the statue being painted red and blue in the 1970s by angry students. He raises his eyebrows, looks up, speaks with a weary certainty. “The statue isn’t new. There were always students protesting about this big capitalist sitting there looking down at you, saying “Hey, I’ve got you.” He wags his finger, imitating the imperialist Rhodes. “I think it’s important. I’m not one for statues because they glorify individuals. Statues are invariably generals or queens or kings. The statue must go. All colonial statues must go. If Mr X wants to see the statue he should be able to go and see it, but we don’t need it there because it offends people. Especially people that have experienced apartheid.” He pauses, the difference between then-pain and now-pain hanging in the air.

“A lot of the youth today, they haven’t experienced apartheid. They don’t know how brutal it was. My memory is still fresh – we were thrown out of our house. My grandmother’s house is still standing there but it’s occupied by other people. We were just thrown out of the house – we had to move. Our whole family structure was disrupted. Just: go! And nobody came to our rescue or said sorry. We had to rebuild. They haven’t experienced the brutality of apartheid.” Mr Buckton’s voice fills with anger at this forgetting.

“We fought against apartheid, the perpetrators should not be honoured in public, and removing the statues will do no harm,” he says. I ask what it was like returning to UCT after the statue was removed amidst the furore of the evening before.

“It’s gone. The sun still came up, the buildings are still there, people are still standing in a queue for sandwiches – nothing has changed. There’s just an open space there.”

The statue’s removal is one victory in the context of the uncompleted national transition, South Africa’s deferred new dawn. He says his big disappointment is with the ANC, who haven’t carried out what they were tasked with. “That’s why the ANC is losing support, you know.” He raises a weathered fist, his voice fiery, a freedom fighter again. “In the struggle we said ‘Amandla, Awethu! The ANC is going to change everything.”

In the face of a stunted and faltering change to ‘everything,’ colonial symbols are a visceral reminder of the recalcitrant past, an everyday wound to those who are forced to encounter them in public. Their removal matters.

 

After the fall of Rhodes: what next, UCT?

At the time of the interview the statue had been removed for three days, and a core group of students were still occupying the Bremner building. Mr Buckton scratches the side of his head, considering the disturbance of University colleagues. A life of participating in and witnessing struggle and a life of intellectual curiosity merge in his approach: clear principles tempered with a willingness to consider different perspectives.

“Some say students should be in class and they should make good use of their time and their parents’ money. Those people forget that students are part of the whole of society. They are growing up and seeing this: in their mind it’s wrong, and people should respect that. That’s what democracy is about.”

Over the weeks of protest the movement became about a much broader list of demands aimed at decolonising UCT – the names of buildings and spaces, the curriculum, and the demographic of academic staff. Race, class and gender politics have been melded together with strong Black Consciousness influences.

I ask if this is UCT’s radical rebirth, whether it is retaking its place on the frontlines of struggle? Mr Buckton pauses, leaning back in his chair, drawing his eyebrows together. “I don’t know, I am observing. The statue is gone: what is the next step? People are still in Bremner. I’m not sure what the purpose is. What do they want transformed? Access to funding, the demographic of academics, the curriculum?”

He remembers his time as a student, in the late 1980s and early 1990s. “When I was doing history I always asked: why so many European historians, in the main? What about the African historians? Whose history, and who writes the history?”

He stops speaking for a moment and lunchtime conversation filters into the room. “I’m not sure what #RhodesMustFall will demand in the final analysis. I was always part of this anticolonial thing.” He looks out over the sunlit fields, at the unchanged façade of the university. “I mean look at Smuts. How colonial can you get, né? You can’t get more colonial.”

 

On nation-building and the importance of symbols

The momentum behind the #RhodesMustFall movement points to the toxicity of colonial symbols and the effect of their inclusion in the post-apartheid nation-building project. South Africa retained some of the symbols of the previous regime as a gesture of inclusivity during the time of the transition. Today these symbols may not be overtly offensive to those who didn’t experience apartheid directly, but Mr Buckton remembers, and his embodied memories complicate contemporary amnesia.

Part of Die Stem, the South African national anthem under apartheid, is retained in our current anthem. He speaks quietly. “We take things that have oppressed us, like the anthem, and expect people like me to sing it, parts of it. Because I mean, I can’t. We were forced to sing the anthem that oppressed us. At school the police were there every morning. They raised the flag, we didn’t want that flag because we couldn’t relate to the government at the time. We said no that’s nonsense, we rejected it, and then we were given six lashes. The police would come in and put the fear into you that you would be arrested, they would phone your mother who would say you must sing. It had a tremendous psychological effect on us as young people.”

The anthem is only one aspect – the Springbok has remained the emblem of the South African rugby team. During apartheid all sports were ‘Springbok’, and black and coloured people could not be Springbokke. They had to play for their own teams. Yet the Springbok remains. Mr Buckton shakes his head. “They are still pushing something exclusive, and imposing it on people. Why can’t we take something else and make it our national anthem? So why don’t they get new colours for our teams and one badge, so we can identify? We haven’t addressed those things.”

The afternoon sun has heated the room, and Mr Buckton’s smiling colleague enters and passes him the keys to his empty office. He thanks him, adjusts his position and continues, one leg crossed over the other. “As people will say, you can’t brush history away. Cecil John Rhodes will always be part of our history. Apartheid, Paul Kruger, the colonial government since 1652, the British and the Dutch. But we must forge a new history, a South African history, not an ‘us and them’ history.” He gathers steam, the vision alive again. “That’s the only way we’re going to move forward. We must say fine!” – he chops the edge of his palm on the table – “that was the past, let’s start anew. But we’re still stuck: Afriforum has got their monuments, the ANC has theirs, everybody! We will never move forward, there will always be conflict. If you want a new thing, you must take all the things that are a hindrance to progress.” His right foot pedals the air on important words. “We want to create a new UCT that will incorporate everybody, that will unite us, which we identify with.”

The ramifications of the fall of the Rhodes statue have been public acts of defacement and public acts of protection of various monuments, highlighting South Africa’s contested history. This has brought the symbolic, material elements of nation-making back into the public debate. The question of whether a unified South African identity and history can exist, or whether this is always an act of silencing and only an “us and them” history can be true, is burning fiercely again.

 

Movements, ideologies, and othering: back to the roots of it all

Mr Buckton is firm in his belief that a unified, non-racial South Africa can exist. He is wary of ideologies and leaders that essentialize: “These are invariably the people that end up on statues and horses,” he says wryly. He is concerned about the racialized politics of the student protest, arguing that ‘black’ and ‘white’ are colonial concepts in the first place. He complicates the narrative of exclusively black suffering, drawing on the history of white students both fighting apartheid and suffering direct consequences for doing so. “Ivan Toms was locked up for how many years? People must recognise that, he was a South African, he was a fighter, we mustn’t look at his pigmentation.”

Mr Buckton believes that through processes of becoming conscious, all people can stand up against injustices that are not directly their own. “They [whites or people of other races] are affected, they read about it, they are exposed to it, their consciousness is awakened by it. People in a struggle for justice will stand up and say no, even if they pay the ultimate price.” His hands are working with invisible materials: he expands time, divides people into groups, and folds them back together, a seasoned illustrator of dynamics and movements. “We need to grapple with that, and not see things as ‘I am a black person, and the only one with the right to speak on this, I am the only one that can write the history of South Africa’, which is not true. It should be all South Africans and what you can contribute, what you stand for: you the person.” He feels that we no longer know each other, and that this a primary cause of othering and conflict, historically and today.

Mr Buckton digs into history, going back to the arrival of the first white people at the Cape. “When the colonialists came here and saw people in the Cape they thought: heathens, savages! But they never knew each other. That’s why people became slaves: because they became the other.” He mimics the voice of frightened imperialism: “‘They are different, aliens, not human!’ That’s how racism developed over the years. ‘They are different.’ That was the basis of apartheid.” He argues that dialogue and genuine engagement make othering impossible, and that we urgently need to start talking, or else history will be repeated. He mentions the xenophobic attacks, frowning again. “A lot of people don’t go out to talk to people, especially South Africans. We want to go to Europe, not Africa, to see how other people live. You must go there and talk to people man! Say how are you, howzit, sit down, they’ll make some food and you try it. But we don’t talk to each other.”

Mr Buckton is bothered by this. He has 62 years of hindsight. “We don’t learn from the past, but history is supposed to teach you that. That’s why I love history, it teaches me. We need to talk about our history.”

 

Change, evolutionary time, and the role of universities

In spite of everything, Mr Buckton is not without hope. His voice lifts as he describes the power of universities to change mindsets and trajectories, and the role students can play in unsticking our process of change. “UCT has a huge role to play… UCT has produced fantastic academics who have done tremendous work in society. Not only UCT but all academic institutions have a responsibility: this is where intellectuals should come from. If you’re an intellectual you can think, resolve our problems, logically work things out. That’s why you’re here, not just for your degree.” He is an advocate of reading and reading widely, to develop a non-dogmatic view of the world. “Education is about opening your mind, so that you see you’re not the only one in the circle of reason.”

The conversation has carried us far, through the decades, and hours have passed. Mr Buckton picks up a birthday chocolate; it’s a Tex. “If this is a millennium – a thousand years – we are here.” He pinches the flimsy edge of the wrapping between his thumb and forefinger, a tiny fraction of the length of the Tex, 1994 to 2015. “We can’t change this country like that! People say, ‘oh it’s been 21 years,’ but that’s nothing. Evolution works in thousands and hundreds and millions of years!” He illustrates: the pressed together palms of prayer separated by an aeon. “I believe everything evolves, not only your DNA. Life is evolution. And this, this 21 years, we haven’t even touched what we are supposed to do.”

Weekend Music Break No.72

Kicking things off this week, South Africa’s BoysnBucks collective show off their “Umswenko” in a new video for “Mswenkofontein”:

A bit of Afrobeats from Sierra Leone, Lady Matto brings a nice London-shot video for her uptempo dance track “Oba”:

Nigerien Afro-Rock group Tal National released an album this week. Shabazz Palaces member, and AIAC contributor Tendai Maraire offered up a remix to celebrate the occasion:

DJ Simón de la Onda sent over a couple videos from Guinea and Angola, just as I was putting together this list!

First up Les Jumeaux Damaro bless us with “To Mara Fanyi”:

… and some Angolan Kizomba from Marceny to give a little romance to your Saturday!

Get it while it’s hot! DJeff offers up a free download of his track “Ser Kazukuta” featuring Yuri da Cunha and BZB:

São Paulo’s MC Bin Laden is Brazil’s craziest videoclip maker:

Back to Sierra Leone via Idris Elba and his Krio rapping on Ghanian super group VVIP’s remix for “Selfie”

A bit of shameless self-promotion in the form of a new remix that I released last week. This one fuses the Afro-Bolivian Saya tradition with pan-African rhymes delivered by Mexican rapper Bocafloja:

And finally, in honor of the “fight of the century” tonight (#TeamManny!), Wax Poetics offers up the most memorable boxing entrances. Let’s see if Manny and Floyd’s entrances can live up to the standard set by “Mr. Unbeatable” Roy Jones Jr.:

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

Hipster’s Don’t Dance are back with their chart for April 2015. Enjoy this round of tunes, and remember to visit the HDD blog for all their great up-to-the-time-ness out of London!

Patoranking x Daniella Whine



VP’s record making dancehall stars is impressive, hopefully they will be able to do the same with Patoranking. This 90’s dancehall-esque video by Clarence Peters is really good.

Hagan x Gold Coast EP

We couldn’t choose which one to focus on put Hagan is really putting together something special. Crafting a uk club sound with flourishes of African club music. Afrohouse is growing in the uk and hopefully this can help.

Dotorado x African Scream



So the video for this potentially seminal track just dropped but more important Annie Mac, the Uk Queen of all music, had this playing on her show. Granted it was Benji’s B pick but still it’s the start of this great undergorund track getting uk exposure.

Major Notes x Nu African Disco

This month is leaning very house heavy but we would be remiss to not mention this EP as well. After the amazing track 419 from last year Major Notes is back with a further exploration of “Nu African Disco”.

Shatta Wale x Reality

Granted this is very much a rip off a Popcaan but Shatta is gaining quite a bit of momentum at the moment so this could be the launch of something big. After the success of Patoranking why not him next.

What’s at stake when Ethiopians vote next month

The tragic but fleeting headlines about the plight of Ethiopian migrants in Libya, Yemen and South Africa have shadowed another more consequential event: Ethiopia’s parliamentary elections, slated to take place in less than a month on May 24.

This will be Ethiopia’s first vote without Meles Zenawi, the country’s leader of two decades, who died in 2012. Zenawi’s ruling party, the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF), “won” the last four elections, including a whopping 99.6 percent of parliamentary seats in the 2010 polls.

This year’s election comes at a crucial juncture for the Horn of Africa nation of 94 million people. Touting the country’s improved economic fortunes, the ruling party is all but certain to continue with its “winning” streak. To the party’s credit, once a country with extreme famine, poverty and underdevelopment and a subject of Bob Geldof’s live-aid concerts, under EPRDF’s rule Ethiopia has seen relative economic gains and improved access to basic education and basic health care in rural areas.

Hailed as one of Africa’s fastest growing non-oil economies by neoliberal organizations and western “experts,” Ethiopia has emerged as an attractive destination for investment capital. Global agribusinesses, garment industry moguls and retail chain operators looking for greener pastures have begun to eye the country, thanks to its cheap raw materials, an abundant workforce, a growing consumer class and lax labor laws and the government’s ability to seize land in southern Ethiopia to “gift” to big agribusiness.

Western countries are also increasingly looking to Ethiopia to help tackle key regional issues, including U.S. counterterrorism efforts against Somali militants, civil war in neighboring South Sudan and most recently the Ebola pandemic in West Africa. Ethiopia sent 187 health workers to West Africa as part of the AU mission to help combat the deadly Ebola outbreak.

This picture of Ethiopia gives a portrait of a nation emerging out of the doldrums and taking its rightful place as a regional powerhouse. That is certainly the thinking in Addis Ababa. Even as Ethiopian leaders look east — to emulate the success of state-led development in East Asia — some in the West view Ethiopia as a model for donor-funded development and neoliberal economic reforms. Ethiopian government operatives have been successfully feeding this feel-good, “Ethiopia rising” story to foreign diplomats and the western media, with notable success.

This is however an incomplete, not to mention a clichéd, picture of Ethiopia. Even if one acknowledges modest economic gains, the beneficiaries have not crossed the narrow circle of the well-connected upper business class and associates of the ruling party. Beneath the headlines about massive investment in infrastructure and mega hydroelectric dams financed by the government and rosy forecasts by multinational financial institutions lies a burgeoning and increasingly repressive police state.

That’s not all. Unemployment among urban youth hovers above 50 percent. In a country where 60 percent of the population is aged 30 and below, it is no wonder that the regime is intolerant of any form of dissent, imprisoning journalists and bloggers, including for comments on social media. One of the top ten worst jailers of journalists in the world, along with China, Iran and North Korea, Ethiopia has locked up, forced into exile, or cowed nearly all of the country’s independent journalists into silence using a sweeping anti-terrorism law widely being used to muzzle the press.

Media watchdog groups, international human rights organizations, and the U.S. State Department’s annual country report have all documented pervasive and ongoing human rights abuses. As authorities in Addis Ababa prepare for yet another sham election, the fifth such circus since the EPRDF took power in 1991, a lot of questions remain unanswered.

Even by Ethiopia’s own standard, the 2015 elections appear to be far less competitive than the last two polls. The country’s one-time vocal opposition is all but decimated, in part because of their own undoing but largely due to the ever-tightening political space and the lack of freedom to organize.

The upcoming polls are crucial for other reasons as well. Ethiopia has witnessed some interesting, if unsurprising, developments in the intervening years since the last election. For example, from late 2011 to early 2013 the country’s restive Muslim population held sustained, peaceful and highly disciplined protests opposing the government’s interference in religious affairs. In response, the government jailed the 17-member committee, which was elected to represent protesters in talks with the government, using its draconian anti-terrorism law. There are reports that the sit-ins and Friday protests at mosques around the country that distinguished the Let Our Voices be Heard movement, which organized Muslim protests, are likely to return as the campaign season heats up.

Within the shaky ruling EPRDF coalition itself, reports of internal discontent abound. Competing groups and rival centers of power battle for influence exposing the country’s enduring ethnic fault lines. The EPRDF is made up of four major parties representing ethnic Tigrean, Amhara, Oromo, and Southern nations and nationalities. Zenawi’s untimely death elevated Hailemariam Desalegn, an unlikely choice from one of the mishmash of southern nations and nationalities, to prime minister, the highest office in the land. But other coalition partners, including some from among the southern nations and nationalities, have not always viewed his elevation favorably.

A few months into his stormy term of office, Desalegn appointed three deputies. While to some this was meant to project a semblance of ethnic balance, to many others it raised the specter of collective leadership, a euphemism for a state within a state. Despite what was then billed as a major shakeup, the reins of power still rest with the dominant Tigrean elites who control the country’s expansive military and behemoth security apparatus.

Tension between the motley of urban-based opposition groups, mainly hailing from the Amhara ethnic group, Ethiopia’s previous rulers, and the Tigrean oligarchy have been ratcheted up in the prelude to the May elections. The electoral board, accused rightly as an extension of the ruling party, has disqualified on flimsy grounds the participation of Andinet – the only opposition party represented in the outgoing parliament.

Ethnic Oromos, who constitute half of the country — both in terms of landmass and population — loathe their continued marginal status. A convergence of recent events is now testing this long-held patience.

A generation of Oromo has come of age under the current regime, learning in their native Oromo language, for the first time as per the dictates of the country’s ethnic federalism. Incensed by the feebleness of the Oromo People’s Democratic Organization, the Oromo coalition partner in the ruling EPRDF, to press for a meaningful participation of the Oromo in the federal government, young people are increasingly vocal about its call for a robust and meaningful regional autonomy. The advent of social media and the Internet has helped bridge communication gaps between local activists and the vocal Oromo diaspora. This is giving way to resurgent and assertive narratives that utilize social media to agitate for the advancement of democracy and human rights and an end to one-party rule. In April and May 2014, student protests opposing Addis Ababa’s expansion into surrounding Oromia towns touched off a deadly standoff with security forces, leaving scores dead and many wounded and imprisoned.

In October 2014, the London-based Amnesty International released a damning report on rampant human rights violations in Ethiopia targeting the Oromo. According to the report, upwards of 5,000 Oromo nationals languish in detention since 2011 on the bases of real and imagined opposition to the central government — sometimes for simply wearing traditional clothes adorned with Oromo nationalist symbols. Amnesty’s report, which Oromo activists say underestimates the actual number of those incarcerated, offers a rare insight into the overreach characteristic of paranoid police states.

The unaddressed Oromo question and Addis Ababa’s reluctance to fully implement the country’s constitution raise series questions about Ethiopia’s future. The absence of competitive, free, and fair elections does not offer the populace a venue for the public to vent its frustrations, let alone a means to find durable solutions for the countries mounting problems. While the urban-based opposition blame ethnic polarization as the mother of Ethiopia’s growing political ills, the ruling party casts ethnic federalism as the only glue holding the country together. Others, like the Oromo, who in principle support the ethnic federal formula, lament the ruling party’s practice of instituting a highly centralized and repressive polity in the guise of federalism and democracy.

Ethiopia’s current political dispensation was the result of a violent reaction to the same highly centralized and repressive rule, that of the previous communist military junta known as the Dergue. The Dergue’s strongman leader of 17 years, Col. Mengistu Hailemariam, was finally forced to flee the country after he was squeezed from all directions by a loosely aligned group of ethnic guerrilla fighters, including the Tigrean People’s Liberation Front (TPLF), the kingmakers in EPRDF, the Eritrean People’s Liberation Front (today’s rulers of the breakaway state of Eritrea), and the Oromo Liberation Front. Mengistu fled to Zimbabwe, where he still lives under Mugabe’s protection.

The 1991 transitional government, set up following Mengistu’s demise, drafted the current constitution as a compromise solution among the victorious hodgepodge of ethnic liberation fronts. That consensus has since melted away under 23 years of rule by the TPLF-dominated EPRDF coalition.

By all measures, the current status quo in Ethiopia is unsustainable. The May 2015 elections will do little to help subside rising tensions. In fact, many Ethiopia watchers fear that it may lead to the kind of instability that erupted in the aftermath of the 2005 elections, after the opposition scored a smashing victory in the polls only to be snatched away at the barrel of the gun. Tensions are already starting to show. On April 22, thousands of people marched through Addis Ababa condemning the killings of nearly 30 Ethiopian Christians by the Libyan branch of Islamic State. The protesters also voiced their frustrations over the lack of economic opportunities and political freedom, which pushes many a youth to make perilous journeys to Europe or the Middle East. Authorities responded as they always do: By beating and arresting protesters.

Touting the improved economic outlook and various infrastructure projects as a mandate, the EPRDF openly vows to rule the country indefinitely. The opposition has no chance to organize a protest, let alone emerge as a credible alternative to the regime. Learning from its debacle of 2005, the ruling party has considerably narrowed the political space as to preclude any such surprises. By so doing, it might have raised the specter of instability that has marred Ethiopia throughout its history putting the country’s recent modest economic gains in grave jeopardy. Ethiopia’s Western allies, particularly the U.S., continue to ignore the writing on the wall and look the other way in the face of entrenching authoritarianism, in large part thanks to the country’s outward projection of stability in the deeply troubled Horn of Africa.

In Pictures: These are the Faces of the Caravana 43 for the Disappeared Students of Ayotzinapa, Mexico

The Caravana 43, as we explained here, is a collective of the family members and friends of the 43 disappeared students from Ayotzinapa, Mexico. For over a month, they toured throughout most of the United States. They did so to spread awareness about their plight: their sons are still missing, but the official (and most likely false) narrative of the Mexican government says that they are dead. Thus, no official effort is being made to find them and their parents are being told to “let it go.”

The Caravana 43 culminated las Sunday in New York City, where about 1,500 people marched from Washington Square to the U.N. headquarters in Manhattan, explaining their reasons to march to anyone interested along the way.

We went there with photographer Alejandro Jaramillo, who took these shots of the faces of the protestors.