Sean Jacobs's Blog, page 349

Conversations with Photographers: Eric Gottesman

Meeting Eric Gottesman was foundational to my training as an art critic. In late 2011 he advised me to apply to study with David Levi Strauss. When I eventually came around to looking at his photographic work two years later, I found him an exceptionally curious artist, patient with his subjects, and deliberate with his intentions. A week after we had this conversation over Google Chat he arrived New York for a meeting. I hadn’t seen him since December 2011. But it struck me that not once in our meal did we have the awkward pause of strangers.

In looking over our transcript I realized the many talking points left unaddressed. I hope readers would not consider his work finished, regardless of the intensity with which he has worked, and continues to work.

Eric Gottesman is a photographic artist and organizer. Central to his practice is collaboration. He uses photography, writing and film as vehicles to engage others in conversation and critical thought about the social structures that surround them, and him. He works slowly, often spending a long time in a community, and exhibits work locally first, to an audience determined by the co-creators of the work.

Gottesman studied politics and economics and, later, art. In 2003, he was named one of the top 25 young American photographers. He has earned a Fulbright Fellowship in art as well as awards from the Magnum Foundation, Artadia, the Aaron Siskind Foundation, apexart, the Open Society Foundation and the Massachusetts Cultural Council. His work is in various collections including the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. His first book, Sudden Flowers, was published in 2014. He was named a 2015 Creative Capital Artist.

He is currently a Faculty Fellow at Colby College and has taught at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design, Amherst College, the International Center for Photography, the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston and conducted workshops in Lebanon, Jordan and Ethiopia.

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Emmanuel Iduma: Let’s start with biographical details. How did you begin to work in Ethiopia?

Eric Gottesman: I graduated from Duke University and thought I was going into a career in law and human rights. Having been born just after the 1960s and the American Civil Rights Movement, I had this strong sense of having missed out on an important time in my own country’s struggle with justice. I thought law might be a vehicle for me to engage in that struggle. I went to work at the Supreme Court of the United States in Washington DC. I was working as a researcher in the Chief Justice’s office when a former professor of mine called and asked if I wanted to go on a photography fellowship (I only took one photography class in undergrad…otherwise it was political science and history mostly).

I was interested in the ways photography allows you to be physically present with the person you are photographing, so you are forced/able to form a relationship with that person. So I jumped at the chance. The options were Guatemala, South Africa, Philadelphia (strangely enough) or Ethiopia. I knew nothing about Ethiopia except what I learned in my youth in America from the media and from commercials from organizations trying to raise money to alleviate famine… I don’t even know if I knew Ethiopia was in Africa then. But it was far away and so I decided to go there.

EI: How much time did it take you to come to terms with Ethiopia? When I met you there in 2011 I remember thinking—especially sitting in your gorgeous tiny car—that you didn’t seem like a foreigner.

EG: I am still of course coming to terms with it but during those first six months after I arrived in 1999, I really struggled with what it meant for me to be there. I was an outsider, a white American male photographer with no special talent or real justifiable reason to be there. I was just interested (and maybe that is enough). It took me many months to actually pick up my camera and feel comfortable taking pictures. Although at the beginning, I was sent by the organization I was teamed up with to document famine in the east of the country… that was a very weird experience.

Later, though, I think I started to build real relationships and eventually came to know the language and the culture and the geography of the place and began to feel more comfortable being there.

Some of my best friends in the world—my second family really—live there now. I met my wife there. I go back and forth often and will forever. It doesn’t make any real sense really… my connection. But it exists. Perhaps I just let myself fall in love with the place.

I forget which car I had then, by the way. I always get cars from the most random places.

General is Kissing the Girl, pigment print, 2004, from “Sudden Flowers.”

EI: I see this in your photographs. The impulsive connection you spend a long time accounting for.

EG: How so, I wonder?

EI: Well, Sudden Flowers contains photographs that show a deep empathy. I think empathy is immediate. Then you spend more than a decade collaborating with the children, you get to know them, and they are comfortable to photograph and be photographed. But that empathy has been there all along. Would you agree?

EG: It is actually kind of a tricky question. I want to be clear here: I am pro-empathy. And of course I want to say yes, empathy, a desire to understand and feel for other people, was part of the process that led to these pictures…because I do feel real emotions for these people in real life and people in real life generally think of me as empathetic. But empathy in real life is different than photographic empathy. Those organizations that made those commercials about famine… they aimed for photographic empathy too. They want the viewer to feel something and then, as a result, to do something (write a check, etc.). This kind of equation is still around in different forms and it seems okay, but in fact, it risks reinforcing a kind of stereotype and power structure.

EI: I’m thinking about your work in this way, also, because it’s been collaborative. The power structure is turned on its head because it’s a combination of what the viewer can feel and what the subject has experienced. In fact, I believe it is more about what the subject has experienced.

EG: Yes, exactly.

That is ultimately what I hope is subversive in that project, that the historical dynamics of power intrinsic in the relationship between photographer and subject are revealed, flipped, blurred and eventually irrelevant.

And that that process can lead to a new set of voices and a new paradigm of image making. And that singular authorship is in question…so many of the things that you and Invisible Borders are questioning as well.

Hiwot, 2000, from “If I Could See Your Face, I Would Not Need Food.”

 

EI: It was fascinating to me when I read that after the first person with HIV allowed you to take a photograph of her face, you considered If I Could See Your Face completed. And this made me think of the photographer’s instinct—something we talk about in Invisible Borders a lot. We should be willing to test the fitness of our own instincts.

EG: I like that idea a lot. The camera can be a reflex and the editing process a reflection on what that reflex means. Just as the painter makes a mark and stands back from the canvas to see how it looks. The camera can also be used more intentionally, taking into account the conditions under which the photograph is made, and when it is, it can be a way to break the viewer’s expectation of belief that we still cling to when we look at photographs. Through breaking these expectations of belief, there arises an opportunity to “confuse” or shift the viewer’s position in relation to the subject. So with that series of pictures, my reflex was to make “Day in the life” pictures of people with HIV, who at that time were highly stigmatized in Ethiopia. That didn’t work because the subjects were too afraid of the consequences of showing their faces in relation to the disease. So upon reflection, I made pictures that look like the kinds of pictures that a documentary photographer might make about a topic like HIV/AIDS in Africa and added this one thing—concealment—that was introduced by the subjects themselves. That led me to think about how much creativity is demanded to find ways to include the subject in the creation of the image about them.

EI: I’m drawn to Beletu’s portrait especially because of the concealment of the eye. Then I wonder if it isn’t this concealment that gives it the kind of amplitude it does. You remember what Walter Benjamin said about the “amplitude that information lacks”?

EG: No, remind me.

EI: Oh, in “The Storyteller” he makes a distinction between information and stories. Information aspires to prompt verification. But not stories. They are not necessarily explanatory, and yet they possess an amplitude.

EG: Yes. Many of these pictures have a “punctum” that are also “anti-punctums.” Right when you expect to be told something, they hold back. Just like my interactions with those people at that time. I usually display these pictures with the text of interviews that I conducted with the subjects. So when the viewers are left feeling empty or adrift, they have something to contextualize the pictures. Often foreign photojournalists use visual symbols to connote suffering in pictures: flies in the eyes, distended bellies, the gruesomeness of violence…I decided to use words instead and not just any words but the words of the subjects.

EI: Yes, your captions are some of my favorite things in your work—they depict the patience of a listener. This is also a good segue to another question: why do you spend much time on projects?

EG: I don’t know really. I think I see the work as an unraveling exploration of an idea or a place or, in some cases, of an individual. I want to go deep in understanding the complexities of each project. That takes me time. And I think new questions arise when I allow myself the freedom to just “hang out” in a place and be open to what comes up. I think this is very much connected to listening; a sort of openness and observation.

Or maybe I am just not that much into dating and more into long-term relationships.

EI: Yes, and with long-term relationships, once there is commitment, the relationship—with the partner, situation, place—becomes more fragile. Heartbreak becomes even more expensive.

Salaam Dressed Traditionally, silver print, 2000, from “Sudden Flowers.”

 

EG: So true. And it becomes more difficult to build up momentum and invest in something new. Not that it is hard… it is actually quite exciting.

EI: Certainly. Momentum is exciting. Let’s return to something you mentioned earlier – placing the text of interviews while exhibiting them for context. Is there something the text does to the viewing of the photographs that might not have occurred otherwise?

EG: The relationship of the written word to images is a glorious abyss. In my work, words can be an anchor to the context in which images are created and later seen. Images transmit feeling, not knowledge, and words can inform. They can fill in a gap between what we know or don’t know or they can alter how an image makes us feel. Often photographers use visual symbols to let faraway viewers know something about what is going on in the picture (in Ethiopia, for instance, “flies in the eyes” has connoted “suffering exists here”). But these symbols are often inadequate, and sometimes they are so reductive that they prevent a viewer from a more complex understanding of an image. Words (which can be more precise, versatile and robust) can replace symbols to intensify the narrative and affective impact of an image.

EI: Tell me about your work with the growing photography scene in Addis. I assume you were there when the Addis Foto Fest began.

EG: I began exhibiting and making work in Addis in 1999. Back then, there were only a few photographers in town outside of the studio/wedding photography scene. There were very few photo exhibitions in Addis then. In the early 2000s, a few galleries opened—Zoma, Makush, Wedat, St. George’s, which was already open I think—but showed mostly painters. Most artists working in Ethiopia then (and still now) are influenced by the country’s long history of painting. I had worked with a few young photographers and filmmakers and tried to meet as many people as I could; I had also heard of photographers Antonio Fiorente, Geta Mekonnen who was making a few photographs, and Michael Tsegaye—we both showed at Gallery Wedat, a small gallery that has since closed—and of course Aida Muluneh and a few others. When Aida moved back to Addis I guess about a decade ago, we were in touch but we didn’t really get to know each other until about five or six years ago. What she is building there is focused on the long-term, making sure to get buy-in from institutional partners as well as artistic communities. I was involved in the previous Fest and have been an informal advisor of Aida’s for years, but I wish I could say I was more involved than that. I have been more of an observer of the scene than anything else.

The Last Days of Baalu Girma, 2012/2013, from the Oromaye Project

 

EI: This is very useful history, thank you. I know the Oromaye Project, which explores the life and legacy of writer Baalu Girma, is ongoing. How much longer do you think you’ll work on it?

EG: I have a plan to finish it by September 2016 in its current form, which is a series of collaborative workshops that reimagine the novel in the form of staged photographs that draw inspiration from the novel itself. I will produce these photographs with actors, artists and writers in Ethiopia and, if possible, in Eritrea. This process will be documented in an accompanying film.

EI: I like this project because it enacts the conversation I think photography can have with fiction and with history. Do you think the project would bring new audiences to the book? Is this important to you?

EG: I think this project has already brought new audiences not only to the book but to Amharic literature. We published the first chapter in English in an American academic journal a couple years ago (only the second piece of Amharic literature published in English). Multiple publishers have approached me and the Girma family with offers to publish and translate into English. Also Ethiopian film producers have approached the family to try to adapt the book into a film. I am very excited that we are opening up the book to new audiences outside of Ethiopia as well as to young audiences within Ethiopia whose parents and grandparents certainly read the book, but who do not necessarily even know who Baalu Girma is.

Placing this kind of emphasis on existing cultural forms of production within Ethiopia is very important to me. I believe that Ethiopian culture has suffered from a lot of misrepresentation and that the global canon for art and literature has somehow passed over the place for various reasons, historical, political and cultural. Now there is a lot of work compensating for these omissions, but there is still much to be done.

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To see more of Eric Gottesman’s work visit his website. 

Xenophobia and Border Imperialism

The recent wave of Afrophobic attacks on individuals deemed to be foreigners in downtown Durban and Johannesburg reminded me of my home Canada. We have been in a persistent state of Galtungian ‘negative peace’: a peace that forcefully rinses from present day policy the historical imperative for decolonization and reparative policymaking. The recurrence of xenophobic violence is a reminder that negative peace is in fact material and symbolic warfare that the most vulnerable are repeatedly forced to fight in complex and fractured ways.

Canada and South Africa are bound historically. Canada’s reservations systems were a source of inspiration for Apartheid’s architects.

I was born into a Canada that has yet to redress colonialism and enter into a thoughtful and necessary reckoning with the ever-present persistence of settler dominance. In the absence of a true reckoning, the country continues to suffer from the effects of revisionist history. This form of revisionist history is what Canadian artist Shad calls “soft collagen lips on race politics”. First Peoples continue to be forcefully and coercively disenfranchised while the voices and stories of settler populations of all colors and origins are used to pave success and progress narratives over the consistent calls for reparative justice.

The every day violence of the Canadian state is exacted directly and indirectly on First Peoples’ lives while enlisting settler and newcomers in the celebration of a national narrative that speaks of pride, progress, and prosperity.

A “border” is not, has never been, and can never be just a border in either country. In both instances borders were violently established along the lines of race and ethnicity for the purposes of colonial progress and imperial gain. The origins of our borders are violent, the history too deep, and the politics too pronounced. When we inherit the borders we inherit their history. Borders often have a much more complex function in the modern state.

In Undoing border Imperialism Harsha Walia writes “Border imperialism works to extend and externalize the universalization of western formations beyond its own boundaries through settler colonialism and military occupation, as well as through globalization of capitalism by imposing financial agreements and exploiting human and natural resources.” South Africa’s imperial history of racialized land dispossession was a precursor for the construction of a modern capitalist state as it was in Canada. By Walia’s account, borders etch this imperialism into the physical and psychological topography of a country. The Afrophobic attacks in South Africa rise out of bordered psychologies that pit economically displaced men and women constructed as “migrants” against historically dispossessed “nationals”.    

By legislatively and politically maintaining and protecting borders as they stand in South Africa and beyond we come to embody what these borders represented and continue to represent today. Dehumanization in the name of imperial prosperity and accumulation lie at the foundation of the modern South African and Canadian border and so they will continue to lie at the root of our psyches. The recent attacks in Durban and Johannesburg remind us that borders can occupy as much territory in our communal and personal psyches as they do physical territory. The recent attacks remind us that we can all be enlisted in protecting and fortifying the negative peace our borders perpetuate. Scapegoating, misdirected anger, political paralysis, and or simple disengagement serve a bordered world.

When the conflict subsides attention will turn to legislation and legalities but legislative reform alone will not deconstruct borders of the mind. This period calls on all of us living within the confines of borders both physical and psychological to assume the herculean task of unearthing the violent in the mundane. It is the only way to resect our collective willingness to accept negative peace as fact from our societal fabric. Beginning with the deconstruction of border politics and acknowledging the colonial inheritance the border represents is the beginning. As the UCT student #RhodesMustFall movement continues to envision new possibilities for the institution after Rhodes falling there is another structure that is as intimately tied to Rhodes legacy that must be deconstructed, and in time, symbolically fall.

Borders are the beginning.

That moment when Senegalese writer Fatou Diome kicked European Union butt

Lately, images of migrant boats capsizing in the Mediterranean Sea and bodies washing up on beaches have shocked the European Union’s moral conscience–that is if one assumes that the EU had a moral conscience to begin with. In its desperate attempt to find a villain, European authorities have decided to turn their wrath on the smugglers, pledging to bomb potential vessels out of existence.

But of course Europe is in many ways at least partially responsible for this crisis, from NATO-bombing Libya into a lawless piece of land, to implementing the “Let Them All Drown Policy” to deter would-be refugees and migrants from showing up at its shores.

Amidst this soul searching and blame game, the francophone media has been abuzz with a badass video of Senegalese writer Fatou Diome, who kicked the EU’s ass and dropped the mic. In Diome ‘s 2003 debut novel Le Ventre de l’Atlantique (translated in English as The Belly of the Atlantic) addressed the topic of immigration.

Here’s the video in French:

And here are some translations in English of Diome’s punchlines:

These people whose bodies are washing up on these shores, – and I carefully choose my words – if they were Whites, the whole Earth should be shaking now. Instead, it’s Blacks and Arabs who are dying and their lives are cheaper.

The European Union, with its navy and war fleet can rescue the migrants in the Atlantic and the Mediterranean Sea if they want to, but they sit and wait till the migrants die. It’s as if letting them drown is used as a deterrent to prevent migrants from coming to Europe. But let me tell you something: that doesn’t deter anyone…because the individual who is migrating as a survival instinct, who believes that the life they are living isn’t worth much, he’s not afraid of death.

Sir, you guys will not remain like little goldfish in the European fortress. The current crisis tell us that much. Europe can no longer close itself as long as there are conflicts elsewhere around the world. Europe can no longer live in opulence where there are so much unmet needs around the world. We live in a global society where an Indian makes a living in Dakar, someone from Dakar makes a living in New York, and a Gabonese makes a living in Paris. Whether you like it or not, this process is irreversible.

When you are a White Canadian or an Argentine and you come to live in France, you are an expat… But if you are African, or Indian, or Afghan, and you come to France or Germany, you are in immigrant, no matter the circumstances. It is the representation that Europe does to the Other that feeds xenophobia.

And the Schengen visa that you speak of – You will let me finish!—this visa gives me the opportunity to be invited to give talks in your universities if you find my brains convenient and profitable, but it bothers you that my brother, who may not have the degrees that I have, but who may want to maybe come to Europe and work in construction, that idea makes your countries schizophrenic. You cannot divide the migrants between the useful ones and the poisonous ones.

Also, you see on the headline the flow of African migrants arriving in Europe but you don’t speak of the Europeans going in Africa. That’s the free flow of the powerful, the ones who have the money, and the right kind of passports. You go to Senegal, to Mali, to any country around the world… Anywhere I go, I meet French people, Germans, and Dutch. I see them everywhere around the world, because they have the right passport. With your passport, you go anywhere around the world, and act like you run those place, with your pretentious demeanor. Stop the hypocrisy. We will all be rich together, or perish together.

Binyavanga on how Nollywood can save African Literature

Nollywood may be, for Wole Soyinka, an “unprepossessing monstrosity” or a sordid “thrill of the grotesque,” but for Binyavanga Wainaina it represents a powerful revolutionary impulse much needed in contemporary African literary culture. In a recent video posted by Writers Center Norwich, Binyavanga makes the claim that the salvation of African literary publishing lies in getting Africans hooked on African fiction. Nollywood may be trashy, “diabolically melodramatic thrillers,” but Africans are hooked on it.

African writers produce in literary prose — a language and cultural ethos in which they do not live. Nollywood, on the other hand, produce stories in the languages in which Nigerian life is transacted. They produce stories that are relevant to Africans, stories that capture the urgency of the African moment. “Chimamanda’s books are not going to build industries,” Binyavanga insists. “What will build industries are having thousands and thousands of romance books, of kids’ fantasy books, of transporting our children away, getting them hooked on these things…like Nollywood.”

Cultural movements like Nollywood and the Nigerian music industry are, therefore, the ones “creating the revolution.” Not African literature. They constitute the “avant-garde?” Not African novelists. They are the ones creating new markets, new content, and tapping into forms and archetypes that are genuinely relevant to African life.

African critics, writers, and publishers have to move away from the “ridiculous, complaining position of saying that there are no novels” and begin to mobilize African readers around fiction that captivates their imagination. Binyavanga concludes: “I’m not part of this sentimental, nostalgic, where-did-literature-go, loving-the-smell-of-books, proust-proust nonsense. I want to be part of the new world.” And this world, he argues, lies in the path already paved by Nollywood and other pop-culture movements on the continent.

Here’s a transcript  of the video (lightly edited for easy reading):

What is Nollywood?

Not even ten years have passed before this thing properly explodes into the world. People with cheap cameras, not even digital yet making movies in a week, hundreds and hundreds of movies and throwing them down this pipeline of rivers, roads, trains, ideas, bicycles, all over Nigeria, primarily in pidgin English, or English or in Yoruba.

From the day it started, people bought, they bought and bought, then they bought again.

It has multiplied so many times no one even knows. They say it’s the second largest film industry in the world, no one knows ‘cause more keeps coming.

Nollywood films right now are on digital networks, which is to say on-the-service middle class paid tv channels in less than ten years.

You have an industry not owned by anybody, not Apple Corporation. No one can buy in ‘cause they can’t even get into the tangle of networks, relationships. As a decolonizing act, you can’t get better than hollywood.

You can put your copyright law or do whatever you want to. Copyright to protect what?

Someone is making relevant content, relevant just for the cheap thrills that it produces, relevant for the idea that it just was Africans kissing Africans, talking to Africans, marrying Africans, diabolically manipulating other Africans in diabolically melodramatic thrillers.

I got hooked. Me with all my hifalutin, read-Proust, and whatever. I keep watching them. This woman who converts people into a cell phone. How better can you get than that?

My contention really is first that the writers of my generation and the writers in English writing out of Africa are generally the product of a publishing industry. They are people who loved to read. They were one of a hundred people in their primary school and their primary school was an elite primary school of bright, young anglo-educated or anglo-facing Africans who learnt to know what a Penguin book looks like, what good prose looks like in English and so on and so forth.

 [They] have some idea that they can contend—and I believe I can—with those cool writers in New York and those cool writers in London for the same edge of a market place— your edgy, your different, your cool, your socially concerned.

But really the majority of the cash money—for these African writers— comes because of people in the West. George, Dave, Matilda in the West who are the buyers. That is the primary place that all English-speaking publishing faces ultimately.That’s where people get book deals. They get contracts and everything else. That those novels may end up being on a reading list in an educational system in Africa is only a byproduct of the fact that they had been bought for the West.

So my question is: who is avant-garde? Who is the person creating the revolution? And the revolution really is the necessity for books. The necessity for books at this point just means something bound, pounded, and cheaply available to a mass audience and because we are not binding anymore— ‘cause you don’t have to bind, you don’t have to build bookstores, you don’t have to transport books up and down the middle of nowhere, it’s going to be a digital revolution. It’s going to be a digital revolution simply because it can be, simply because the platforms are there to buy, sell, distribute, download in minutes.

Now my book which I love, which I loved producing is never going to be a mass book. What my book can do is not save African literature. It has its own esoteric audience. It will continue to. It won’t pay my rent. It will pay nobody’s rent. It will build no industries. None of these books are going to build industries. Chimamanda’s books are not going to build industries.

What will build industries are having thousands and thousands of romance books, of kids’ fantasy books, of transporting our children away, getting them hooked on these things…like Nollywood, you want that initial spurt, which really needs money, real investment to pay writers something and to be able to purchase the time to get talent to produce large amounts of work and sell them…

[In Africa] we are talking about the platforms within which people live, where people call community. It can be twenty million people. It can be 200 people. Their manner of engagement, their manner of politics and everything else, all these are things still in formation. There is no agreed platform yet, and because there is no agreed platform yet, there is not only work to do but also adventures to be had in terms of creating. The making of the platforms is interesting, but it is not about making digital platforms. The digital platforms are there, in their hundreds, easy ones to make, easy ones to monetize and so on an so forth. It’s about throwing the diversity of stories into these platforms and selling them.

We’ve seen the Nollywood industry grow and explode. Kenya has Riverwood, making films. Ghana has a film industry.

We’ve also seen the Nigerian pop music industry explode…You have rappers rapping in Yoruba…[They] get the lime light on digital paid TV network ten times more than any Chimamanda or any other person simply because they can, simply because they have that mass audience, simply because they produced for it.

It was not even a matter of asking what does the audience want? At some point it was just really a matter of why doesn’t anybody sing songs in yoruba that are relevant to my life? So that just the fact of somebody [rapping in Yoruba] becomes a revolutionary act, the fact of somebody ennobling pidgin becomes a revolutionary act. You transact in pidgin, you live in pidgin, millions and tens of millions of you [whereas] nobody, even me, live in the language of the prose which I produce.

There are novelists in Nigeria who sell 30 thousand copies in ten years. That’s true, but that’s not the creation of a market place.

I’m very interested in being that generation of people who own the wealth of our continent.

At this point, these [digital] platforms have been made. They can digest enormous amounts of content. My phone can digest as many novels as I want, [yet] we are in this kind of ridiculous, complaining position of saying that there are no novels…

[As for me], I’m not part of this sentimental, nostalgic, where-did-literature-go, loving-the-smell-of-books, proust-proust nonsense.

I want to be part of the new world.

The romanticism of history, and the (Afro)future of Brazil’s quilombos

Brazil imported more African slaves than any other country in the Western Hemisphere. With over four million enslaved brought to its shores, the former Portuguese colony accounts for over 40% of all slaves brought to the Americas. It was also the last country to abolish slavery when it finally did so in 1888. With a long coastline, undeveloped interior, and Portuguese tradition of clustering in small trading ports, Brazil also became prime territory for slaves to run away from captivity. Maroon communities established themselves throughout Brazil, just like in Colombia, the Guyanas, and the Caribbean.

Brazilian quilombos (from the Kimbundo kilombo), as maroon communities were called, represent a complex heritage. On the one hand they were undeniably places of resistance to slavery. On the other hand, historical documentation confirms that some quilombos – like Jamaican maroons – had closed their ranks to newcomers and would return runaways to plantations, or even kept slaves themselves, as part of an uneasy peace with European colonists.

Ultimately, the quilombo legacy suffers from both romanticism and a spotty historical record but has persisted to the present as a potent social and cultural symbol, especially the Quilombo dos Palmares. Palmares, the longest lasting quilombo, was established in Pernambuco around 1600. Estimates of its peak population vary between 11,000 and 20,000, with estimates of its land area suggesting it encompassed a territory as large as Portugal.

Repeated Portuguese military expeditions failed to conquer the increasingly organized parallel state under its final leader, Zumbi. Finally, in 1694, the capital of Palmares fell and Zumbi fled. He was captured and beheaded on November 20, 1695.

If Palmares the place became the symbol of African resistance to Portuguese rule, then Zumbi the person became its hero. The growing movimento negro (black movement) began commemorating his assassination in the 1960s. By the 2000s, they had successfully petitioned for states, municipalities, and the national government to adopt November 20 as the Day of Zumbi and Black Consciousness. Nowadays, the whole month of November is treated similarly to February’s Black History Month in the US.

Meanwhile, remnants of quilombo communities persisted into the contemporary era as Afro-Brazilians continue to live on their ancestral lands in both the countryside and dense urban areas. In some places, like Rio de Janeiro’s Floresta da Tijuca, the mountainous rainforest region in the center of the city, yesterday’s quilombos gave way to today’s favelas.

The situation changed dramatically in 1988, when Brazil’s current constitution was adopted. It explicitly recognized the rights of quilombo communities and their descendents, leading to the modern quilombo movement. Today, almost 2,000 such communities are officially recognized by the state. 1988 also saw the establishment of the publicly run Fundação Cultural Palmares, a branch of the federal Ministry of Culture that promotes Afro-Brazilian history and identity.

If this seems like a happy ending of historical justice, the reality is more complicated. On the eve of Black Consciousness Day in 2013, the Institute of Applied Economic Research published an empirical study that concluded black Brazilians are twice as likely to be homicide victims as non-black Brazilians. While certainly intended as a sobering clarion call, it read like a perverse celebration of the holiday, which after all commemorates the homicide of a black Brazilian. Alagoas, the present home state of the Palmares historical monument, was singled out as one of the worst states in the country, with 17.4 blacks killed for every one non-black.

And yet, the quilombo idea of freedom and an alternative to oppression persists in Brazilian myth-making. A leftist NGO in Porto Alegre, Guayí, that promotes “democracy, participation, and solidarity” won a Ministry of Culture grant and established a physical space for workshops and performances on Afro-Brazilian culture in Brazil’s least African-influenced region that they call the Quilombo do Sopapo.

For DJ/producer Maga Bo, it was an inspiration for his 2012 album drawing on Afro-Brazilian rhythms, Quilombo do Futuro, whose title gestures not only to the quilombo’s cultural symbolism but also to notions of Afro-futurism – a philosophy with far fewer artistic adherents in Brazil than in the Anglophone world.

Maga Bo’s production style incorporates the deep, voluminous bass and sonically suggestive techniques of loops and samples that digital technology provides without overwhelming the richness of acoustic instrumentation and talented vocalists. With an omnivorous approach to his adopted country’s music, Maga Bo crisscrosses the musical geography of Brazil, but as the title of the album suggests, he draws on many of the same styles that contemporary quilombos embrace. In his artistic conception, the quilombo is both a wellspring of acoustic historical memory and a launch pad for a bass-heavy digital music future.

The quilombo’s cultural symbolism and challenging socio-political reality will serve as the fodder for a two-part discussion at Columbia University’s Center for Brazilian Studies and NYU’s Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies this week. On Wednesday, April 29, Columbia hosts José Maurício Arruti of the Universidade Estadual de Campinas to talk about political and territorial issues affecting quilombos. On Thursday, April 30, NYU hosts Maga Bo, vocalist BNegão, and visiting scholar Mariléa de Almeida to talk about social and cultural resonances of quilombos. Later that night, Maga Bo and BNegão – who will perform live at NYU – take their Afro-Brazilian collaboration to Nublu in the East Village for the Quilombo do Futuro afterparty.

The arrogance of apartheid-denialism at Stellenbosch University

The management of Stellenbosch University has announced that they will remove the plaque honoring H F Verwoerd, President of South Africa from 1958 until 1966, when he was assassinated. The management clearly intends to use this act to show that they are transforming the university and that this is linked to the appointment of the new Rector and Vice Chancellor, Wim de Villiers, who will be inaugurated next week. As Nic Spaull observed last year, questions about the university’s failure to transform cannot be so easily swept under the carpet. Spaull writes of Stellenbosch as “the crucible for Afrikaner Nationalist thought in the 20th century” and notes that, “Between 1919 and 1978, every single prime minister of our country hailed from Stellenbosch University – Jan Smuts, JBM Hertzog, Malan, JG Strijdom, Verwoerd and BJ Vorster – whether as students, professors or chancellors. They then went on to become the architects and implementers of the oppressive apartheid regime of legislated racial exclusivity.”

Between 1964 and 1970 people who were classified as coloured and as black were forcibly removed from the area in Stellenbosch known as Die Vlakte. Their homes and livelihoods were destroyed. The building at Stellenbosch University, now called the Arts and Social Sciences Building, was erected in 1974 on the site of what once were people’s homes. Until 2002 the building bore the name of one of the most iniquitous proponents of apartheid, BJ Vorster. Students at the university still refer to the building as ‘the BJ’, many of them without knowing why.

Everybody knows that the university is an important site for Afrikaners, and that the university remains a key site where Afrikaner history and culture are preserved. The sense of white ownership of the space is clear. What is also clear is that many young white people, along with most of the faculty and management, do not see this as a problem. This is connected to the widespread ignorance and willful blindness about what really happened during apartheid. Everyone admits the university played a central part in the production of apartheid ideology but no one admits responsibility for this. No one wants to acknowledge how the injustices committed in the past are connected to injustices in the present.

On the 22nd of April 2015 Open Stellenbosch, a collective of students, staff and faculty at the University of Stellenbosch who are challenging the institution to confront the legacy of apartheid, held a mass meeting to call for justice for the people of Die Vlakte. The gathering took place outside of the Arts and Social Sciences building and was addressed by community leaders who had lived in the area during the time of forced removals, and who spoke of the ongoing psychic and material harm caused by the destruction of their homes. Sheikh Yusuf, the Imam of the Stellenbosch mosque, spoke of how the area had once been his playground, a vibrant neighborhood where his friends all stayed. He spoke of the effects the forced removals had at the time and about how the children of those who were forcibly removed remain excluded from the university today. He spoke of the central role Luckhoff School played in the life of the community and of how it was appropriated by the university. “The university should pay for what it has taken from us.”

After the Imam spoke a young white man in the audience asked a question: “If the university pays for bursaries for these people you are talking about, how do we know that the money would go to the right people?”

The Imam replied that the bursaries would go to the descendants of the people of Die Vlakte.

The man asked again, aggressively, “But do you know these people personally? How will we know that the money will go to the right people?”

The arrogant and callous response of this student at a site of racial injury, in the presence of those who were subject to this particular act of violence, is not an aberration. Young white people in Stellenbosch behave as though Apartheid never happened. They behave as though they have nothing to apologize for or to be ashamed about. Their position is one that is authorized by the management and faculty of the institution of which they form part.

The ignorance and blatant racism of students at Stellenbosch University is an indictment of those who teach there who, for the most part, affirm rather than challenge racist thought and behavior. This was evidenced clearly when three black students were attacked by seven white men in what the university referred to as an “allegedly racist incident” in February 2015. The students who were attacked were told: “You don’t belong here, you don’t speak Afrikaans.” In spite of the fact this was reported on the front page of the daily newspaper, the Cape Times, not a single faculty member wrote to the paper to condemn racist violence and exclusion at the institution. Failing to speak out against racism is to be complicit with its violent effects.

The Open Stellenbosch collective have identified Afrikaner nationalism as the means through which the persistent racism at Stellenbosch is advanced. There is a growing number of white students and staff who are complicit in sustaining white supremacy in the university. This complicity is in the form of their approval for the approach on language, by invoking the history of Afrikaans, which therefore necessitates its ‘preservation’ at all costs. When those who espouse that we ought to protect Stellenbosch as an Afrikaans University, and then proceed to invoke the history of the place as a reason for this protection, we should shudder. This call to preserve the privileged status of Afrikaans speaks directly to the appointment of a Stellenbosch alumnus, whose father was the Dean of Law at Stellenbosch University during apartheid, being appointed as the Rector and Vice Chancellor. 

While the Dean of Humanities, Professor Johan Hattingh, has publicly supported the call for bursaries for descendants of those forcibly removed from Die Vlakte, broader faculty support for the Open Stellenbosch collective has been slow in coming.

Apartheid denialism reigns at Stellenbosch University where the official rhetoric asks us to forget the injuries of a fifty-year political configuration based on racist hatred that was incubated and nurtured at the institution, and continues to be celebrated rather than condemned. We should remember that in 1959 Verwoerd passed the Extension of University Education Act that created separate universities for those classified as Coloured, Indian and Black. Undoing this legacy takes far more than removing a plaque.

This post was written by Open Stellenbosch, a collective of students, staff, and faculty interested in purging the oppressive remnants of apartheid in pursuit of a truly African University. They will be hosting a mass meeting on Stellenbosch campus called Confronting White Supremacy this Wednesday at 12:30pm.

STRIKE ACTION: Why Are Colombian Teachers Protesting the Government?

Last year, still riding the hype of his reelection, Colombian president Juan Manuel Santos stated as a national goal that Colombia would be Latin America’s ‘Most educated country’ by 2025. Around six months later, in April 27th, 2015, the streets in Colombia’s main cities were flooded by thousands of public school teachers, in their fifth day of national, indefinite strike. What has brought about this strike? What are its main implications?

Traditionally, schoolteachers have been significant political actors in the Colombian context. Their closeness to communities turns them into attractive targets for political actors in order to spread agendas and collect voters’ support. However, this has also endangered teachers, as they become targets of armed groups through threats, intimidation and murder. And this, of course, is a bigger problem in regions particularly hit by conflict, as was the case with Antioquia and Cesar throughout the 90s.

These two regions, turned into laboratories for the paramilitary project, saw the figures of murders and threats to teachers skyrocket to an alarming total of 737 combined incidents in Antioquia and 522 in Cesar between the years of 1997 to 2002, according to a report released by Mario Novelli and Education International in 2009. As a result, relations between FECODE, the country’s teachers union, and the government have been traditionally conflictive.

In the current strike, heralded by FECODE and the regional teachers’ unions, their demands are centered around three points: improvements to their healthcare provider, salary raises and a revamp of teacher evaluation schemes. The historically low wages teachers collect in the country, and their heavy workloads have led to a somewhat poor representation of the profession in society, going so far as to creating the term ‘pobresor,’ a portmanteau of the words ‘pobre’ (poor) and ‘profesor’.

Low wages have also been cited as one of the reasons for poor quality in teaching, as the prospect of low wages does not attract top high school graduates into the country’s schools of education. And, while there is a consensus on the need for raising these wages, the government’s proposals have not satisfied teachers, or even the private sector. A report released by the Compartir Foundation last year demanded a pay raise of at least 18%, well above president Santos and minister of education Gina Parody’s proposed 10% increase.

Payment raises are also involved in the second most contentious point of the strike, as the government seeks to develop means to improve the quality of education. Teacher evaluation has been constantly discussed in the last 15 years as the preexisting legal framework, established in 1979, did little to foster professional development of teachers, conditioning pay grade advancement to seniority.

In this quest for educational improvement, minister Parody has slowly rolled out measures that closely resemble the ones provided by the No Child Left Behind policy of the United States: conditioning bonuses and incentives for schools to students’ performance in standardized tests. This is a situation that, if left unsupervised, might lead to scenarios as the one reported by The New Yorker in Atlanta, leading to a culture of ‘teaching for the test’ at best, and a well-oiled, school-wide test cheating operation involving principals and faculty at worst.

In the broad picture, the ongoing strike in Colombia reflects the consequences of implementing an unchecked, technocratic approach to education policy, where teachers are regarded as voiceless technicians with little say on policy implementation and development.

While a degree of accountability is necessary and demanded in order to raise education results and quality, contextual variables must be acknowledged and accounted for. Not doing this will exacerbate the current situation and create a lose-lose scenario where government, teachers, parents and students are harmed.

The problem with the word “genocide”

A century ago, Turkish forces slaughtered more than one million Armenian children, women, and men. This weekend, public conversations during the event’s centenary centered around the politics of deploying the “g-word”—genocide–as descriptor. Since World War II, this term has been laden with political obligations regarding international intervention, but categorization of atrocities as genocide may enable post-conflict legal recourse and provide some public recognition for survivors. Ultimately, however, the term’s deployment is problematic. This is particularly true of atrocities committed before the word’s widespread use in the mid-twentieth century. Tragically, the politics of public memory remain as troubling as the politics of initial recognition.

During the commemorations’ lead up, Pope Francis called Armenia “the twentieth-century’s first genocide.” #AfricanTwitter quickly responded, pointing out that Germany’s 1904 slaughter of around 100,000 Nama and Herero preceded Armenia by a decade. The great-granddaughter of a slain Armenian called for public discourse to recognize Namibia. Historian David Olusoga wrote an open letter to the pope, questioning whether he misspoke intentionally or ignorantly. The Washington Post’s Monkey Cage Blog provided a vivid, detailed primer; AIAC, of course, published its own reminder. Many of these efforts centered around the idea that the German slaughter of more than half of Namibia’s Nama population and three-quarters of its Hereros had been “forgotten.” Not mentioning Africa, it seemed, might reflect a brief memory lapse.

But “forgotten” is not the right word. The genocide of Namibians remains well known. Additionally, Westerners remember Rwanda. They remember Mobutu. They remember Idi Amin. They will likely remember the horrific images emanating from South Africa during the past few weeks. And they should. These are disturbing and significant. But a public remembrance of genocide in Africa and the world must go far beyond these to include other forms of violence that are less frequently considered.

An Economist piece last Thursday attempted to explain the term genocide’s deployment, discussing the 1948 UN convention that stipulated genocide be recognized as racially — or ethnically-based mass killing, rather than atrocities directed at political enemies. It cites Rwanda’s 1994 slaughters as “not in question” — despite the fact that as they unfolded two decades ago, Western officials intent on non-intervention did put categorization of the killings into question, actively choosing to eschew use of the “g-word.” Curiously, the Economist also excludes Namibia — along with its contemporaries such as Belgian rubber plantations in the Congo, British concentration camps during the South African War, and French settlers’ efforts to wipe out southern Algeria’s population.

These campaigns laid the groundwork for the twentieth-century carnage that the pope and others selectively recall. We must remember that genocide was not a twentieth-century invention, but that its twentieth-century iterations came after centuries of European practice in colonial societies, from the Americas to Equatorial and Southern Africa and Australasia. Genocide, in the form of settler conquest and violence, laid the groundwork for western civilization’s development. The killing of Africans — whether through mass round ups and shootings, intentional poisoning of cattle, or trans-oceanic trade — was fundamental to colonialism, not incidental. It followed on the heel of societal destruction through methods such as smallpox blankets and re-homing of Aboriginal children. Through subsequent burning of archives and desecration or re-claiming of pre-colonial structures, colonial agents attempted not only to wipe out people, but also to destroy any record of them. Nefariously, European creation of political structures based upon “race” and “tribe” laid the groundwork for Rwanda and Sudan, both of which, as we have seen, the Economist addresses. While both of those genocides took place within the immediate context of African agency, they followed a long historical trajectory of European identity construction; again, far from being antithetical to colonialism, they reflected its large-scale violence.

Denial of the brutal, genocidal nature of colonialism and enslavement continues to be the West’s statement that African lives — that black lives — don’t matter.  Within the context of Armenia, political leaders (such as, significantly US president Barrack Obama) have avoided retroactive use of the word genocide in an effort to maintain relations with Turkey. The politics of memory are complicated, but they are not inconsequential. “. . . (W)hen recognition is withheld,” the Economist explains, “whether because of a technicality or political expediency, it can feel like the final insult.” This, ironically, included the publication’s own incomplete chart.

In an African context, this final insult remains. In light of a world built upon colonial settlement, where genocide became structural as well as incidental, full public recognition will elude us.  Until it occurs, however, charts explaining the “g-word” will remain incomplete.

Will the new African Centres for Disease Control really be an African CDC?

In 2013, Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone were hit with the worst global public health crisis in their respective histories. The Ebola epidemic was a national and regional crisis. The international community rallied, despite numerous issues, to raise funds and send technical support to tackle this monumental challenge. The African Union sought a lead role in the assistance process, which led to the 1st Meeting of African Ministers of Health in Luanda, Angola in April 2014, where it was agreed that they would establish an African Center for Disease Control. On April 13, 2015, this commitment became a reality with a landmark agreement signed by the African Union and the U.S. Department of State. With this Memorandum of Cooperation, the United States committed to supporting the AU in the creation of a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Africa and “provide expert technical help to support a surveillance and response unit and an emergency operations center as well as provide fellowships for African epidemiologists who will provide their services to the new center in Addis Ababa”.

The establishment of such a center in Africa is not a particularly new idea; talks on the need for more effective means to combat epidemics on the continent were held in July 2013 at the Special Summit of the African Union on HIV/AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria, in Abuja, Nigeria.

In her opening remarks at that meeting, AU Chairwoman Dr. Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma emphasized the need for the AU to act and for “the final push” to tackle HIV/AIDS, TB and Malaria. These sentiments echoed those made at previous meetings on the matter. The fact that this was not the first time this issue has been discussed at such a high level, raised doubts as to the ability of the African Union to undertake such an endeavor.

Two main, and related, reasons for these doubts are the AU’s current financial capacity and the political will of its member nations. It is common knowledge that the AU faces significant funding challenges, compounded by the fact that many member states continuously fail to pay their annual contributions. This inability to contribute to the AU’s operating budget casts doubt on member state willingness to prioritize AU activities while facing their own domestic, often economic, challenges. Such reservations are what made the joint announcement by the AU and the U.S. Department of State, notable. With the signing of this memorandum, for the first time there is a tangible commitment to a center that the continent has been in dire need of for decades.

This announcement came at the start of the AU-U.S. High Level Summit, held in Washington, D.C. The Summit focused on four areas: economic growth and investment, opportunity and development, democracy and governance, and peace and security. U.S. Secretary of State Kerry emphasized that this was an AU initiative, and that the AU had a key role to play in addressing the current economic and political challenges facing the continent. “We have learned that diplomatic and peace-making initiatives in Africa work best when they are African-led,” he said. At the same time, there was no mistaking the role the international community is to play, especially the U.S.. It was noted that the U.S. alone contributed over 1 billion dollars to combatting the Ebola crisis.

It is for this reason that, although it may not have been the intention, this support for an African CDC comes across as more of a conditional agreement than a true partnership, in the sense that one side clearly has the upper hand. The continued reliance on U.S. aid highlights the AU’s lack of capacity in tackling continental issues. Will this African CDC really be an African CDC? Will African governments truly be able to set its agenda?

The Center is set to open in June 2015 but again, considering the significant need for Western support (despite efforts to move away from this reliance), and the failure to address the highly flawed elections in Sudan, the persistent conflicts in the Central African Republic, Libya, Somalia, and others, the question of whether or not the AU is really ready to take the reins remains. And yet, in spite of these reservations, this development is a major step in the right direction and, if managed correctly, this institute could redefine approaches to public health challenges in Africa.

Weekend Music Break No.71

Boima is on vacation this week, so the rest of us scanned the music pages. We can’t promise it will be as eclectic as Boima’s choices. But here we go in short sentences. First up, the Kenyan-Australian singer Okenyo has a new video for her song “Just a Story.”

Fashawn, who sounds like Kanye West, loves his daughter:

De La Soul is working on a new album. While prepping, they just come up with new music, with special guest Nas. It just happens to them like that:

This is just a video of Youssoupha (son of Tabu Ley Rochereau) promoting his big concert in November in Paris:

Then there’s South African rapper Khuli Chana’s “Mahamba Yedwa/Mo Tsipe”:

Then there’s Kenyan singer Fena Gitu and her upbeat lyrics about her “African Jack Bauer” (no politics here):

Finally, The Kyle Shepherd Trio wants to fly without leaving the ground.

* Goodbye to John Shoes Moshoeu, Peter Makurube, Christopher Kindo and our friend Cristina Villeresi. We will always remember you.