Sean Jacobs's Blog, page 354

Hisham Aidi’s ‘Rebel Music’ Remixes Race, Faith, and Geography

In his Discourse on Colonialism (1950), the French-Caribbean poet Aimé Césaire noted that after World War II, Europeans, culturally and politically devastated by war, began to renew themselves by absorbing African American culture – jazz, literature, art and so on.  In the prologue of Hisham Aidi’s brilliant and sprawling Rebel Music: Race, Empire and the New Muslim Youth Culture, he returns to Césaire’s observation, arguing that today it is Europe’s beleaguered racial minorities – its Muslim underclass, in particular – that are looking to the African American experience for uplift. Moving seamlessly across continents, languages and musical genres, Aidi details this cultural and political turn towards Black Atlantic cultures, and in so doing shows just how intertwined the idea of Pan-Africanism is with the history of Islam in the West.

Rebel Music opens with Aidi at a “park jam” in the Bronx in July 2003, talking to a trio of French rappers who have come to the Boogie Down to meet with some hip hop pioneers and activists. The author makes plain that the African American struggle has nourished and inspired marginalized communities worldwide – from the Dalit Panthers of South India to the more recent Pantrarna in Sweden. However, Aidi’s musical exploration is focused on the intersection of urbanism, Islam and global black cultural production; he argues that over the last decade it is Muslim youth, caught between surveillance states, xenophobic movements and Islamist groups, who have been jolted towards race activism and Black Atlantic cultures. (He refers to 9/11 as the Muslim immigrants’ “racial baptism.”)

In Salvador, Brazil, the author gets to hang out with Antônio Carlos Vovo, renowned activist and founder of the musical group Ilê Aiye, and talk about how War on Terror policies and cultural flows from the US have prompted Afro-Brazilian activists to revisit the country’s Muslim past. Aidi analyzes a remarkable manuscript written in 1865 by an Ottoman imam who spent a few months traveling in Brazil, and writing about Islam among the slave population. Today thanks to Lula’s 2003 law mandating that schools celebrate a “National Day of Black Consciousness,” there is a strong interest in Brazil’s Muslim history – especially in the Malê revolt of 1835, when Hausa slaves tried to overthrow the Portuguese master, an uprising that failed, but sent shock waves across the Atlantic and to antebellum America. The current political ferment is occurring, he shows, just as American diplomats are (unsuccessfully) pressing Brazilian authorities to monitor their Muslim citizens. Aidi’s discussion of Carnival and Latin American Orientalism is delightful, as is his claim that Shakira is simply the latest embodiment of the centuries-old Spanish-Portuguese fantasy of “the enchanted Mooress.”

Brazil – Latin America, more broadly – is actually held up as an outlier: he asks – why do Muslim communities in Europe and North America have strained relations with their governments and mainstream society, whereas Muslims in Latin America are politically quite comfortable and un-harassed?

The most tender parts of the book — for this reader, at least — are when Aidi, probing the relationship between jazz and Islam, goes to a national conference of Ahmadi Muslims in Milwaukee and sits down to chat with octogenarian African-American converts: jazzmen dressed in Nehru jackets and Jinnah fur caps who speak Urdu fluently. One of them, Rashid Ahmad, a classmate of Miles Davis and a one-time front-man for pianist Ahmad Jamal, recounts his travels in the Middle East in 1949 as he headed to study in Rabwa, Pakistan. Another elder, also in a collarless shirt and Nehru vest observes, “Jazz makes people think— that’s why jazz artists liked Islam, they were thinking of ways out.” The largest Muslim communities in America are African-American and Pakistani, and Aidi spends some time detailing the historic interactions between Black America and The Subcontinent. The cultural echoes of these early encounters are ongoing. For example, Aidi describes the Pakistani-American punk rock group, The Kominas, and their interest in the Moorish Science Temple, describing how these rockers would travel to Pakistan, and use the concepts and symbols of these heterodox African-American groups to protest state policy and religious fundamentalism.

In his tour of European and American cities, music proves to be a perfect lens for understanding tensions between various Muslim groups, and government efforts to promote Sufism as a “moderate” alternative. Music for state officials, Aidi shows, has become a quick and easy way to distinguish between “moderate” and “radical” Muslim. In London and Birmingham, we encounter former rastas who have cut their locks, and grown bushy Salafi beards. The author traces the circulation of Islamist ideas between England, the Caribbean, and East coast of the United States. In Philadelphia we meet legendary music producer Kenny Gamble (aka Luqman Abdul Haqq), and we see this “father of disco” trying to use art and faith for community building and urban renewal.

Parts of the book look at the cat-and-mouse game between governments and youth activists. After 9/11 – and 7/7 in London – Washington and Downing Street would try to create a “moderate Islam” by – rather foolishly, we now know — mobilizing Sufi groups against Salafi or Muslim Brotherhood-affiliated organizations. Aidi is at his best when he parses the political and moral dilemma facing young activists in impoverished European neighborhoods being wooed by the State Department, offered financial grants and tours of the US: to accept or not to accept? He notes the grand irony of how the American government spent years cracking down on black militancy, but is now using civil rights discourse and black protest for public diplomacy and propaganda purposes.

Aidi shows how young activists pushed back against “state-sponsored Sufism.” And in this regard the sections on Gnawa music, an Afro-Arab musical tradition, are fascinating. Gnawa, a Sufi culture, which drew the attention of Harlem Renaissance artists who visited Morocco (novelist Claude Mckay, painter Henry Ossawa Tanner, and poet Jessie Fauset all spent time in the Maghreb), before being picked up by American jazz artists – has now emerged as the political idiom of disenfranchised North African youth in Europe, used to protest racism and “Sufi policy” in Europe, and anti-black racism in the Maghreb. The chapters on Gnawa music substantiate a recurring argument in the book – and that it is Europe’s ghettoized Muslims who are the Black Powerites and pan-Africanists of our day.

One particularly engrossing chapter describes the burst of race activism among young Muslim Americans over this last decade. He shows young Pakistani-, Egyptian-, and Iranian-Americans leading green energy projects on Chicago’s Southside, organizing protests in Detroit, and lobbying the Census Bureau for “minority status.” These campaigns against “legal whiteness,” as Aidi shows, are taking place in Europe and North America. Unlike their parents, the children of North African, Middle Eastern and South Asian immigrants do not want to be categorized as ‘White.’ (Incidentally, in response to campaigns, the US Census Bureau is considering introducing a new Middle East and North Africa ethnic category on the census form.) The race activism that one now sees in Muslim America, says Aidi, shows that many young leaders believe that if political empowerment won’t occur through traditional party channels, it can occur through the civil rights movement and people of color coalitions. “By embracing race, the “immigrant” Muslim can become “indigenous,” writes Aidi.

Aidi’s discussion of Frantz Fanon and Muslims and Jews in France is heart-rending and ridiculously timely. Reviewing Arabic sources on Fanon, Aidi describes Fanon’s interest in Andalusian music, his study of the Arabic language, showing how the Martinican’s pan-Africanism was partly forged by his days as a French troop stationed in Casablanca. Fanon thought a lot about Muslim-Jewish relations in Algeria – and today his ideas are relevant to Muslim-Jewish relations in France, as is the Judeo-Arabic musical repertoire of North African Jews. Aidi follows the exiled Algerian-Jewish musicians – now in their late 80s – from gig to concert, as they perform and ponder their legacy. He profiles the Muslim “integrationists” who think reviving this repertoire can help heal Muslim-Jewish relations, and bring French Muslims into the political mainstream; and their political adversaries, groups like the Natives of the Republic (Les Indigènes de la République) who are inspired by the Black Power movement, and recall proudly the days when the Black Panthers were headquartered in Algiers, and Eldridge Cleaver and Malcolm X visited the city’s kasbah. Aidi predicts that as these transnational, pan-African tendencies gain force among youth in Europe and the US, and North African-descent activists reach out across the Saharan divide to ally with West African-descended communities, neo-conservative groups and right-wing Islamists will again try drive a wedge between North Africans and the rest of the continent.

The beauty of this book I would say is how the author remixes cultures and geography, bringing North Africa into the pan-African world, Latin America into the “Orient,” while positioning the American ghetto as the well-spring of American civilization. Rebel Music is a deliciously overstuffed lasagna, vividly written, brilliantly readable, and unapologetically pan-African.

“Manos Sucias” and the Colombian Movie Story

It has become a trope in Colombian cinema to deal with stories of violence, especially of drug-related violence. In 1998, La vendedora de rosas captured perfectly the destroyed lives of dealers and junkies in the slums of Medellín; La virgen de los sicarios and Rosario Tijeras (book adaptations from 2000 and 2005, respectively) dealt with the hitmen employed by cartels to do the dirty work; María Full of Grace (a Colombo-Ecuadorian-American production from 2004) showed the plight of mulas used to smuggle cocaine into the United States. And since then we’ve had many stories of drug lords, addicts, middlemen, and the gang violence created by the illegality of certain substances.

So, also, it has become a trope in Colombian cinema criticism to ask if we haven’t had enough already. If there aren’t other stories to tell in the country; if Colombians don’t also love and live and forget away from drugs and the businesses and violence associated to them. Don’t we have other problems? What about racism, elitism, abject poverty, state abandonment? What else can we say about drugs? Or even heartbreak, isolation and depression?

Many of us grew up safely in our modern, urban, middle-to-upper-class settings, away from the issues brought forth by things such as the Drug on Wars and Plan Colombia. And, from this perspective, it seems fair to ask “where are our stories? Can we see our country depicted as we’ve known it, devoid of this peripheral violence?”.

Certainly some films have addressed this–Gordo, calvo y bajito (2011), for example, is a story of annoying co-workers and pointless existence, Sofía y el terco (2012) is a story of love, loyalty and liberation–but their existence isn’t, or at least shouldn’t, be understood as a dichotomy between their “drug” films and “our” stories.

International laws and regulations regarding certain substances have, undeniably, shaped every aspect of Colombian life for the past four decades: our politics, our economy, our social interactions, our diplomacy, our way of understanding our own identity, and our way of relating to each other. Even if this doesn’t affect all of us directly, it is not something we can glance over, it is not something we can sweep under the rug.

Stories of drug-related violence are still commonplace in Colombian cinema not only because they are successful (this seems to be what international audiences–unfortunately still the measurement of Colombian films worth–want to see), but also because they are stories that are still shaping our country. These are the lives that many of our compatriots are living.

Yet, is there anything more to say? Any new angles? Any new stories? Manos sucias attempts just that. Directed by American Josek Wladyka and produced by his NYU professor Spike Lee, this is the story of two estranged brothers from Buenaventura who inadvertently meet again in a boat to smuggle drug towards the northern Colombian Pacific coast.

The movie is, in summary, the story of their eventful journey together, but, in essence, it is the story of a disenfranchised Colombia, of a country where many still feel that there is no other choice but to join these ranks.

Buenaventura is Colombia’s biggest city on the Pacific Ocean, and it is the country’s biggest port. Its industry and commerce brings in millions in revenue. But its position in a mostly underdeveloped, unregulated region of the country with great access to waterways, has meant that various illegal groups have sought and have been able to take control of it, and that the population there (which is 90% black) has rarely seen an increase in their quality of life.

The movie decides to humanize this daily struggle. Its characters are not stereotypical gangsters, even if their descriptions might seem so: Jacobo (Jarlin Martínez) is the older brother, who loves salsa, doesn’t understand young people’s “fads,” has been in the game for too long and dreams of saving enough to retire and move to Bogotá. Delio (Cristian Advíncula) is the younger brother, who is too inexperienced for this kind of job, wants to be a rapper, and is in it because he wants to provide for his wife and their young son.

Throughout the movie, it is revealed that they are, simply, typical Bonaverenses. In their conversations in the boat you can feel their dreams and heartbreaks, their stories of happiness and suffering, their shared love of soccer and their common understanding of their blackness. These are not two evil criminal men who want to defy law and authority. These are two guys who weren’t offered any other way. They are the first line of drug-crime violence: those who are easily sacrificed and forgotten, those who are not in it because of greed, but because they need it, but yet are not beyond hurting others to protect what little they have earned, because this is as much as they can get.

Manos sucias is a story of state abandonment and of good people trying to get by, even if that means becoming bad people. A story of grief and self-preservation. It is a Colombian story and a story of humans, and this point is advanced tremendously by the solid acting by Advíncula (who made his cinematic debut here) and Martínez.

The story feels authentic, even if it was originally scripted in English and then translated into Colombian-Pacific Spanish. Only a few minor mistranslations stand out (such as one of the characters calling people from the United States “americanos,” when most Colombians would simply say “gringos”), but they are lost in the sincere portrayal of Martínez and Advíncula, who are both from Buenaventura and understand perfectly who are they talking about and whom they are talking to.

Paramilitaries and guerrilleros appear on the film to, but they are not used to signify the state of the country, merely to explain the context of harshness these men have to live through. And it is true that a lot of aspects of the culture of Buenaventura–such as its soccer madness, its infatuation with salsa choke, or its incredible production of hip-hop artists–are only briefly mentioned. But this is not the point for now. This is a very brief and direct story, and for what it tries to do, it works perfectly.

Manos Sucias will be screened in the United States throughout April and May. Check here for the schedule. Watch the trailer below.

The Rise of a Post-colonial University

In the last two weeks, students belonging to the #RhodesMustFall collective have rechristened and remade of one of University of Cape Town’s key administrative building as ‘Azania House.’ They have been occupying the building since March 20and it has become a nodal point for the student led collective. At the end of one of the first teach-ins at Azania House, a UCT student and member of the collective, Ru Slayen, half-jokingly and half-seriously suggested instituting teach-ins like the one we had just had in a new summer school to be named the Post-colonial School of Cape Town.

Ru’s words might have been half-serious and half-joking but they also, as I grasp them, iterated a desire to institute and inhabit a university that in the first instance enables an understanding of the after-effects of colonialism and then reflects on how to ‘go beyond’ them, as Stuart Hall argued in 1996. Cecil John Rhodes’ statue is one such manifest symbol of colonialism and the students’ passionate calls for its removal are a reminder of the visceral ways in which history is experienced. But the visceral sting of colonial inheritances can be felt repeatedly and in many places. At Azania House students remind us of that experience through the posters that they have put up on its walls. Amongst the many that have come up in in the last two weeks, one announced that, “we are no longer at ease.” Several others bear printed copies of the many racist Facebook responses that the #RhodesMustFall page has received; these Facebook comments appear intent on hurting and demeaning the students who are part of the movement. Some of these racist comments are from fellow students, and others perhaps from members of the wider Cape Town and South African citizenry who disagree with the #RhodesMustFall collective’s cause and dispute its members’ position. On its part, the university administration has also had to deal with vicious outpourings. It had put up writing boards around the statue to invite comments from the university community on transformation issues but had to remove them because, according to a university missive, many of the comments penned there constituted ‘hate speech.’

At the university wide assembly on March 25, 2015, many black student speakers angrily, indignantly and poignantly called out such hurtful commentary and hateful speech. They gave the audience a taste of what they have been at the receiving end of in the last few weeks. Furthermore they drew attention to the hurtful milieu they live and study in—replete not just with colonial era statues and symbols but also with pedagogical and conversational modes that regard black students as deficient, necessarily lagging in the civilizational race, and with course content that tells their history and describes their African present as above all a site of failure and lack. 

Descriptions of this milieu and the complaints against it were articulated with passion and pain. Several students insisted that the symbolic redress of that pain through the removal of Rhodes statue could not be a matter of rational deliberation, discussion and debate. Their words complimented the remarks my colleague Xolela Mangcu’s made at the assembly and penned in a Cape Times article the day before. Passionate words articulated to signal profound desires are also a sign of dangerous politics for some (see for instance here and here; see Xolela Mangcu’s reaction to these here).

The humiliated possess the power to pollute the privileged and to horrify them. The political theorist Gopal Guru discusses the nature of that power while writing about Dalit politics and the so-called untouchables of India. At UCT all of us—students, faculty and staff members—had arrived at the large assembly in the wake of a movement triggered by Chumani Maxwele’s act of flinging excreta at the Rhodes statue; that act undermined and polluted historical privilege, and now perhaps some members of the university assembly and its public sphere were also horrified.

This is not the place to rehearse frequently analyzed blind spots of the Habermasian public sphere and the well-known critiques of the deliberative democracy model. But it is important to recall and understand the nature of prestige accorded to, what another social theorist Michael Warner calls, the “ideology of rational-critical discussion” or “parliamentary forensics” (2002:82). In a post-colonial university like the one I believe Ru asked for, social science disciplines will help students historicize this ideology, understand how parliamentary forensics emerged in the metropole and how they became reified as the normative democratic form. The university will help students understand how such democratic forms have determined their past and might determine the future of their societies.

Such a post-colonial university might indeed have to emerge from the ashes of what brand managers call a “world-class” one. But it might be one where the dominant “hierarchy of faculties” (on the top – reason; on the bottom – passion; Warner 2002: 84) and attendant political practices is questioned. Furthermore, to draw on Warner again, it might be one where we know our students not only through the practices of arguing, opining, discussing and deliberating but by putting ourselves in the line of their “corporeal expressivity” (2002: 82). To paraphrase Warner, what our students say to us might then be really sensible to us if we pay attention to not only to what they say but also to how they say it (2002: 83).

Students who passionately asked for Rhodes’ fall grounded their demands in history, in the description of their present context, and in a well-spring of historical and lived experience of hurt and pain caused by attempts to humiliate them. Coming from India where majoritarian enactments of such passions have been the source of grievous harm especially to minorities and to the very idea of a democratic, secular India, I am only too familiar with the dangers of such political practices. Hope of reasoned legislative and judicial deliberation has sometimes been the only recourse available to minorities and others under siege from majoritarian passions.

But then I am reminded of another formative post-colonial thinker, Stuart Hall, whose words are worth quoting at length here. Writing about the crisis that left politics has found itself in for the last few decades, Hall wrote

… isn’t the ubiquitous, the soul-searching, lesson of our times the fact that political binaries do not (do not any longer? Did they ever?) (reason and passion come to mind – my words) either stabilize the field of political antagonism in any permanent way or render it transparently intelligible? …. political positionalities are not fixed and do not repeat themselves for one historical situation to the next or from one theater of antagonism to another, ever ‘in place,’ in an endless iteration. Isn’t that the shift from politics as a ‘war of manoeuvre’ to politics as a ‘war of position,’ which Gramsci long ago and decisively charted?  And are we not all, in different ways, and through different conceptual spaces desperately trying to understand what making an ethical political choice and taking a political position in a necessarily open and contingent political field is like, what sort of ‘politics’ adds up to?(1996: 244)

The choice I believe black students at the university assembly made was not to enact a public that would abide by the ideology of parliamentary forensics, but what Warner and others have hailed as a counterpublic that literally speaks in many languages (note for instance the use of isiXhosa and Afrikaans by some students and speakers), switches codes, is impolite, conflictual, conscious of its minor and marginal location, and sets itself up against the dominant public genres and forces. In other instances, in their own meetings, meetings with Senate and other assemblies, the same students have and might chose the rational deliberative mode as the ethical political choice of the hour.  It is then perhaps the sign of an emerging post-colonial university that the #RhodesMustFall students are not beholden to one way of doing politics or the other. Instead they have been crafting what an ethical political position in a contingent field might be; they deliberate upon the choices available to them and act upon that choice—passionately and reflexively—to change the place we all work and live in.

The Eight Years of Jan van Riebeeck

April 6th used to be a public holiday in Apartheid South Africa. It was supposed to be the day that Jan Van Riebeeck arrived in South Africa in 1652 as the chief colonial administrator of the Dutch East India Company’s new colonial settlement to settle what is now Cape Town. Who of my generation does not know this? It was drilled into all our minds at primary (read: elementary) school. And even if we were not lucky enough to go to school, the mythology certainly did not pass us by. The version of history taught to us started with him. In fact if the old history books were to be believed, this was when the history of our country started.

After bringing major disruption to this part of the world, Van Riebeeck continues to be presented as one whom we should value. His statue occupies centre stage at the foot end of Adderley Street, the main street in the our city.

Who did he find at the Cape? The great leader Autshumato and his people today referred to as the Khoi. According to archeologists, human beings had lived here for more than a 100,000 years and as Khoi and San definitely for thousands of years.

Van Riebeeck spent eight years of his life on these shores and we hold him up as an example to our children who know nothing about Autshamayo, the great Khoi leader.

Autshamayo and his people lived along the southern and western coastal strips, where adequate grazing was to be found. Over time they spread out into the north, intermingled with the amaXhosa, enriching their language with their clicks. Today there are sixteen different clicks in the Xhosa language as a result of the influence of the Khoi and San whose languages were drawn from the sounds of nature.

When Autshamayo encountered the European delegation, he was cordial. He bartered with them and must have assumed that they were passing by as many others had done before. Instead, they had come to build a refreshment station to serve ships belonging to the Dutch East India Company.

Slowly a mutual animosity developed over access to pasteurs. Van Riebeeck and his men were settling down and pushing the KhoiSan away from adequate grazing land. The beauty of the Cape and its wealth of resources had begun to entice the visitors to stay and develop a settlement rather than just a transitory refreshment station.

The first substantial threat came after five years in 1657 when Van Riebeeck released nine men from their contracts and by royal decree granted them title deed to land along the Liesbeeck River. Each were granted 15 morgen of land in what is now known as Bishopscourt very close to the Anglican Archbishop Thabo Makgoba’s residence. Autshamayo did not take this lightly and so began their 150 year resistance to prevent the Europeans from taking their land.

In that same year, 1657, Van Riebeeck’s company imported the first slaves from the Indonesian Islands and India, bringing the skill and labour that built the Cape. From them flowed some of my ancestors. (As Sahistory.org.za notes, “between 1652 and the ending of the slave trade in 1807, about 60,000 slaves were imported into the Colony”) Anyone keen to know more about the 176 years of slavery at the Cape should visit the Iziko Slave Museum at the top end of Adderly Street in the city. Be prepared for your stomach to turn as you witness the cruelty.

In 1659, Van Riebeeck instructed the slaves to build a wooden fence, with watch towers, from the mouth of the Salt River, through Rondebosch to Kirstenbosch, using the deeper parts of the Liesbeeck River as part of the barrier. To finish the barrier quickly, a hedge of indigenous wild almond trees (Brabejum stellatifolium) and thorny shrubs was planted along the section between the river and Kirstenbosch.

It further locked out the natives from their grazing land and access to the Salt River, the Black River and the Liesbeeck River so named by the Dutch East India Comapany.

Van Riebeeck recorded an encounter where they confronted him about land rights and asked him “Who should rather in justice give way, the rightful owner or the foreign intruder?” In response to this demand to withdraw, van Riebeeck said that the territory had been won in battle and now belonged to the VOC. The Khoikhoi then asked for at least the right to collect “veldkos” (bush food), specifically wild almonds (Brabejum stellatifolium) from their traditional lands. Van Riebeeck denied this request as well. He needed the very same wild almond plants to form his barrier hedge to keep them out.

Efforts to protect the hedge began as soon as it was planted. Van Riebeeck issued a Plakaat (a posted law) forbidding everyone “not only from making passage through … the said hedge, but not even to break off from it the smallest twig, no matter what the reason is supposed to be, on pain of being banished in chains for 3 years” Today, there are only two surviving portions of van Riebeeck’s hedge, the Kirstenbosch section and another in Bishops Court.

By the time Van Riebeeck left in 1662, 250 European people lived in what was beginning to look like a developing colony marking clear exclusion of the native people. In just eight years at the Cape, he had sown the seeds of a division that continues to harm us till this day.

In Kirstenbosch, the botanical gardens on the slopes of Table Mountain, where a part of that hedge still grows, this story of exclusion is not mentioned in its official brochure.

It refers to an almond hedge known for its thorns as the remains of the original hedge named Van Riebeeck’s Hedge.

The brochure fails to explain its real purpose as outlined above and its effect of denying natives access to land and water they held to be sacred. From the settler point of view, the barrier was created to prevent them from raiding their livestock, often traded from the Khoisan.

Van Rieebeeck is constantly the subject of revision. His defenders among rightwing whites have even charged Jacob Zuma, the country’s President with hate speech at its Human Rights Commission for stating the obvious: “You must remember that a man called Jan van Riebeeck arrived here on 6 April 1652, and that was the start of the trouble in this country … What followed were numerous struggles and wars and deaths and the seizure of land and the deprivation of the indigenous peoples’ political and economic power … (Van Riebeeck’s arrival) disrupted South Africa’s social cohesion, repressed people and caused wars.”

Jan van Riebeeck was an employee of a marauding company not known for fair trade outside Europe. Not very different from some companies today who parachute into our country, strip us of our resources and then fly back from whence they come. Twenty years after democracy, we need to carefully consider how we want to do business with the world. Perhaps we have little room to choose because of the great unfairness of the world economic system. But let us be aware of those who are doing us harm both from amongst ourselves and from abroad and expose exploitation where ever we see it.

It is unfortunate that the City of Cape Town chooses not to teach us to value Autshumato and others like him who have done us no harm. Instead and . Failure to interrogate this attitude will only leave most citizens unsupported in making sense of their past and their present experiences.

Binyavanga Wainaina: “Kenya is not a nation if we can’t properly memorialize each and every citizen we lose”

I want to go to a place. A piece of ground, also a place online, where we can find the names of all those who have died for Kenya since 1963. I want to know their names. I want to walk and walk listen and witness know the lives of those no longer visible to me, but whose blood mattered. I want the children I may once have to go there and visit and walk through our stories. I want all schools to go there.

We are not a nation if we can’t properly and fully memorialize each and every citizen we lose. I want to see the names ages and photographs of those who died in Mpeketoni. Those killed during PEV. Stories. Forgetting is not good. It is in these acts, our public commons reawaken. The politics of saying we are not ready to face ourselves, the fullness of our pain, is the same politics that allows us to ignore it when a Kenyan strips the institution they are given to run, strips it dry, dry, and returns like a zombie, a plastic rubber-band zombie in some new form, to govern somewhere else again.

I want a public again. I want some random church choir knocking on my door at easter to sing at my door. I want to see three million Nairobians flood the streets to cry, and sing, and hug because our children have been killed. I want to stop feeling that we live inside mostly the private. I want never to hear the word self-empowerment again.

I am the product of a nation that empowered me. I am a child of Municipal Council schools, I am a child of Kenya National Library Services, of Provincial General hospital, Nakuru. I want thousands of names inscribed permanently in Uhuru Park. I want each name to have a story. I want to see the names. I want to see the names. Stories. I want to see the names. Photographs. It is not enough to send MPESA to Red Cross. I want to be a citizen of a nation that is not just Electoristan.

My heart is dull with pain, and I feel the pull to cover it all with that hard, now familiar Kenyan cynicism and move on, which really means suck the very remaining soul of it dry.

[Image credit: @Moon_Guy_K]

How to Govern Nigeria

“Too much of a sense of identity makes a man think he can do no wrong; too little does the same.”

–Djuna Barnes (quoted in James Baldwin, “Princes and Powers,” 1956)

I

Two issues dominated political discourse in Nigeria in 2006, the final full year of the presidency of Olusegun Obasanjo (1999- 2007), the first president in the Fourth Republic: the ‘third-term agenda’ and political violence in the Niger Delta. Obasanjo’s devious attempts at extending his tenure beyond two terms were defeated by a combination of mass opposition and the opportunistic grit of his political enemies, but the violence of hostage-taking in the delta was too heedless to be fought. The militants were armed, so the state had to negotiate. One outcome of the complex negotiations was the emergence as Vice-President in 2007 of Goodluck Jonathan, formerly a professor of Zoology at the University of Port Harcourt. Inside four years, as a result of the “Doctrine of Necessity” cobbled together to resolve the constitutional crisis arising from President Umaru Yar’Adua’s demise, a man who wished for nothing higher than the deputy governorship of Bayelsa State found himself at the helms in a country where everyone has an opinion, and wields it like a warden’s rod. A man from whom little is expected dances to the music of his station.

Here is the farce that is Jonathan’s presidency:

The piercing cry of marginalization which has defined the history of the country’s oil-bearing region since independence is now little more than the murmur of a short-sighted elite operating a virulent form of internal colonialism; by presenting Jonathan as its best-foot-forward the Niger Delta has frittered immense moral and an intellectual capital; the right-wing tactics of old Nigeria, routinely deployed by the People’s Democratic Party, PDP, have eaten through the progressive fabric of the nation’s body-politic, to the extent that an alliance of North and Southwest power blocs now presents itself through the All Progressive Congress, APC, as a viable alternative, compromising progressive politics immeasurably.

II

In the euphoric days following the end of military rule in 1999, with Obasanjo settled into his job as president and the specter of Shari’a governmentality still in the northern horizon, I agreed to review a new, non-commercial magazine published by the Nigerian chapter of a non-governmental organization interested in environmental issues. People at this NGO expected me to provide a “formal analysis” of the magazine, commenting on the layout, design, and the content of the occasional political opinion. They also invited a friendly political activist to chair the event, and I knew right away what was afoot—with “a literary person” you didn’t want to leave things to chance.

They got the obligatory review, but the context of my commentary was broader. The general elections in February of that year had convinced me that the popular struggle for democratic change peaking during the regime of General Sani Abacha had been usurped by the same forces it had meant to drive out. Political struggle in the Niger Delta had been historically prosecuted on the highest level of personal sacrifice. Yet the global scale of the struggle also ensured that issues of life-and-death faced by the ordinary people in the Niger Delta were now a matter of administrative convenience. In his closing remarks, the chair of the occasion essentially debunked all my claims, and with a touch of bad taste (or good, depending on how one sees it), commented on the cologne on my shirt as proof of my political outlook.  I was more amused than offended.

Perhaps the bureaucratization of the struggle for environmental rights in Nigeria was inevitable.  In Western Europe and North America, environmentalism was a rationalized part of political life, and much of the material support that Nigerian activists received was meant to reinforce the liberal view of politics as pragmatic negotiations between the sovereignty of power and the sovereignty of rights. Did this understanding of non-governmental patronage anticipate the militancy of the Movement for the Emancipation of Niger Delta, MEND, and other groups? What were the links between the militias and the groups that have occupied power in the South-South in the past decade and a half?

It is political naiveté to expect the swamp dwellers to forever hymn the wreck that had been their reality since Oloibiri. After all, power blocs rise and are consolidated from the resources that have impoverished the Niger Delta, the same blocs using the power thus gained to make the impoverishment a fact of life. If they wanted to live like that forever, there would be no point in struggling against the pervasively oppressive system to begin with.

Yet a close attention to the antagonism between President Jonathan and Governor Rotimi Amaechi of Rivers State in 2013, and in the historical context of the Niger Delta after 1990, revealed several things, the most disarming being the famed dictum about history repeating itself as farce. Why are those who have suffered so much due to the primitive exploitation of oil resources from the Delta so eager to continue with things as they are? Is it too much to expect that, with the balance of power in favor of the once-marginalized, greater concern for ethics would carry the day?

III

It is often said that President Jonathan, like his two predecessors in the Fourth Republic, is the product of a corrupt political process. Given the structural violence pervasive at all levels of society, a person of outstanding moral power could not have emerged as president in 2011. Jonathan’s political behavior during his first term indicated a below-ordinary level of a sense of responsibility, falling short of what his office demanded. Beyond his commendable rectitude in the face of a provocative open letter published by Obasanjo in February 2014, it is hard to find an instance in which the president has behaved with outstanding courage.

Nigerians expect a lot from their presidents; they expect a president to be powerful without being overbearing. The problem is that the Jonathan is an ordinary figure ruling a country of extraordinary expectations. What is expected is that he rises above the values of his milieu—negative for the most part—and become the one to cut the expectations to size. There is a problem here. Even with the best intentions, the president cannot fight above his weight. Add to this the peculiar experiments of the past twenty-five years (since the military formation of two political parties), which has led to the emergence of parties without distinguishing ideologies and of which the PDP is symptomatic. The result is a mismatch between the protocols of presidential power, civic expectations, and unpredictable events for which the president may not be held accountable but which he would accept as part of the turf if he had the right amount of political imagination.

This is why Jonathan as president hasn’t done much to demonstrate exceptional political will. The more controversial decisions of his presidency—the removal of putative petroleum subsidies in January 2012; the ghastly renaming of the University of Lagos as Moshood Abiola University in June 2012; the pardoning of former governor of Bayelsa State, Diepreye Alamieyeseigha; the still unaccounted-for disappearance of $20 billion in February 2014; the arms’ deal imbroglio in South Africa; the confoundingly shoddy handling of the Boko Haram menace–could have had serious consequences for Jonathan were Nigeria to be governed by transparent rules. The fuel subsidy scandal later revealed a level of corruption too high for legal probity; the failed renaming of UNILAG ran the government into a cul-de-sac, without the kind of escape route soldiers routinely created by simply shooting in the air and taking off in a cloud of dusts. Thus the president is left with only forgettable actions in the “transformational” vein. It is thus an empty PR slogan, before and during electioneering campaigns, that Jonathan’s is called the “transformational presidency.”

The president’s style is to opt for the commonplace: do the needful, stretch nothing, be seen to have done what is necessary.

Can one blame him for this? Yes, to the extent that he is an executive president and his office comes with a lot of discretionary powers. But he is an ordinary person, far from the risk-taker needing courage, loyalty or wisdom to act.

IV

Few actions generated as much anger and indignation during the first two years of Jonathan’s tenure as the controversial pardon of his former boss, Diepreye Alamieyeseigha, in April 2013. The removal of petroleum subsidy and the renaming of the University of Lagos by presidential fiat were quickly or eventually reversed because the president could not really afford to fritter his political capital on those relatively insignificant issues. The big game, second-term tenure at Aso Rock, was still at large, the more cynical of his advisers must have calculated, so why allow these civic matters to lay your trap to waste?

Having come to power against the wishes of the power bloc in the North, and not sure of continuing acceptance in the other power bloc in the Southwest, Jonathan’s best bet remained the emerging bloc called South-South, his own political base. But even that could not be taken for granted, politics being what it is, and Nigerian politics for that matter. In addition to an uncertain political climate, there was another bee in the bonnet. Henry Okah, an acknowledged leader of the Movement for the Emancipation of Niger Delta, MEND, remained unsullied by political horse-trading.

But Okah got into trouble as soon as Jonathan got into power, following his arrest and trial for the 50th independence anniversary explosions at Eagle Square in Abuja in October 2010. Some of his statements to the court were leaked to the press, which indicated that persons close to the president had allegedly tried to blackmail him, but there was no knowing how he stood with the people in the South-South, the political base he shared with the president. Only the president and his closest advisers knew this.

Here’s a plausible scenario:

The militancy in the Niger Delta which grew out of widespread state violence in the 1990s bred an astute sense of political awakening, which MEND did a lot to institutionalize. The emergence of politicians like Jonathan, Alamieyeseigha, Peter Odili, and many others can be traced to this political awakening.

The same process explained the indispensability of this geopolitical zone to the calculations of the People’s Democratic Party in the run-up to the 2007 general elections: the Vice-Presidency had to be zoned to the South-South. Jonathan, initially deputy to Alamieyeseigha until the latter was impeached, arrested, and convicted for money laundering charges, moved swiftly from that office to the governorship, then the Vice-Presidency, until circumstances thrust him into the President’s office.

Of these figures, only Okah remained outside official politics. Whatever his current travails, he was certainly not without his own constituency. Jonathan had benefited most from the political fortunes of the region, in actual terms. His ascent to the office of the president was a historic feat, and pointed to the legitimacy of the case for the redress of the imbalances in Nigerian politics, especially as far as the Niger Delta was concerned.

On the national stage, the menace of Boko Haram and the fallout of wrangling within the ruling party seemed to be weakening the president’s hold on the party’s bridle. His desire to contest the forthcoming election was heading for a dead-end. Okah’s trial looked likely to end in at least a conviction, and if this happened without a counterbalancing development, the hold on power would be weaker still, his influence in the Delta eroded.

The rehabilitation of Alamieyeseigha came to the rescue. The former governor was reputedly influential among the leadership of the disarmed militant groups. When he returned to his base after jumping bail in 2006, he was warmly welcomed by his people. He was not a suspect in a criminal case; he was a victimized defender of their rights.

A more self-destructing politics of identity can hardly be imagined.

Postscript: March 31, 2015

Some of the best ideas that have been advanced about how to govern Nigeria as a just, inclusive and humane country, have been about federalism, the political principle in which governing power is shared between a central government and constitutive states. This is the form of government that Nigeria put into practice during the Second Republic, following the fiasco of the short-lived First, and has more or less stuck with since. I say more or less because when they’ve been able to get into power, which is not often (the Second Republic lasted four years, the Third never really took off), civilians have operated a constitution in which the ideals of federalism remain just that—ideals, and without idealism. That explains why calls for “sovereign national conference” have dogged every government, civilian or military, since 1990.

Last year, the government of Goodluck Jonathan constituted a conference that was, so the script went, aimed at responding definitively to such calls. It would be inclusive and its recommendations would be acted upon. By and large, however, the members were handpicked by the government, and it seemed to me (at least) like a nefarious form of patronage—with the forthcoming elections in view. In the run up to the elections, supporters of (now) out-going president had many field days proclaiming that talkfest as a supreme achievement.

But there was a problem: the most fulsome of these songs of praise rested on ideas of federalism as indistinguishable from regionalism. The federal principle was intended to address issues of inequality among the regions of the country, but when the People’s Democratic Party, the ruling party post-1999, made “zoning-formula” its primary article of faith, it turned what was an aspirant principle into fate. In the writings of staunch federalists like Obafemi Awolowo and Ken Saro-Wiwa, federalism is hobbled by the inchoate thought, a debatable proposition, that a presidential aspirant will come from a region! The constitutional fact, however, is that Nigeria is made up of states, not regions. It is still a long way to that cherished day when this flawed understanding of federalism will go the way of all junk. But the historic change that happened with the election of General Muhammadu Buhari (rtd) has hopefully set the country on that way.

Just hope, though: what else is there for those who can feed forever on cynicism?

*This essay originally appeared in the Africa is a Country ebook, Nigeria: What is to be done? published before last weekend’s elections. The postscript was added Thursday.

We’ve Resurrected Weekend Music Break. Here’s No.68

Keeping with the weekend’s theme, we’ve decided to resurrect the Weekend Music Break with number 68! For those who forgot (or who are new to the site), this is the place to highlight music that has caught our eye, or landed in our inboxes this week. Enjoy this edition’s selections in no particular order:

First, the video for Rocky Dawuni’s lead single “African Thriller” has been out for awhile, but his new full lenth album Branches of the Same Tree was released just last week:

 

Next we have Kenyan-Dutch musician and filmmaker Festus with a dub reggae track, and video documenting a trip home to Nairobi and Kisumu. It’s beautifully shot glance at the East African landscape and its people (despite a bit of the persistent African Kids music video theme). The track is out last week via his own label Turtleville:

 

Ghanian Hiplife/Azonto star Atumpan moves on from the small girls to focus on the baby mamas with a rural village themed video:

 

UK-based South African DJ and producer Moroka put out a groovy edit of Senyaka Kekana’s early-Kwaito single “Go Away,” as a tribute to the recently passed singer:

 

Finally, BBC1xtra had their annual Destination Africa event this past month. For it, they sent UK-based artists Stormzy, Jay Vades, and New York-based singer JoJo Abot home to Accra to record a collaborative record called, “Mievado”. This week’s release of the song was accompanied by an interactive video that gives you little closer taste of each artists’ perspectives on the city.

 

How to make sense of the #GarissaAttack in Kenya (you may want to switch off television news)

To make sense of the attack by Al Shabaab on Garissa University near Kenya’s border with Somalia (official count of fatalities are 148; others say closer to 200), you may want to switch off television news. Especially since CNN is moving Nairobi to Nigeria and Tanzania to Uganda. Crucial will be how these attacks will be framed in the next few hours and especially how the Kenyan state will respond (already they’ve blamed the judiciary and in the past they’ve round up Somalis despite little evidence). Equally important is public opinion. So, like we did at the time of the attack by Al Shabaab on the Westgate Mall in Kenya’s capital Nairobi, we’ve compiled a bunch of links, including some twitter accounts, we suggest you read or follow.

Here you go …

Poet Shailja Patel‘s “The Road to Garissa” on The New Inquiry.

Criminologist Mwenda Kailendia in The Guardian, “Kenya attacks: Brute force isn’t enough to beat the terrorists”

Karen Rothmeyer in The Nation: “Horrifying blowback in Kenya.”

Anthropologist Samar Al-Bulushi‘s “The Politics of Spectacular Violence”

Novelist Abdi Latif Ega’s “What’s it like to be Somali in Kenya”

International Relations scholar Stig Jarle Hansen,”Al-Shabaab is failing in Somalia, but Kenya’s chaotic response could keep it alive” on The Conversation.

Journalist Caroline Hellyer reporting for Al Jazeera English: “Recent ISIL communications show attempts to secure influence in East Africa – the stronghold of al-Shabab and al-Qaeda.”

Harry Misiko, “How Kenya made itself vulnerable to terror,” on the Washington Post’s WorldViews blog.

Maina Kiai in Kenya’s Daily Nation,”To eliminate insecurity, we must not be tempted to take unlawful decisions”

Political science graduate student Ken Opalo on his blog about “Five Things About Al-Shabaab and the Somalia Question.”

Historian Matt Carotenuto on “Terrorism and Violence in Kenya: Balancing a Global vs Local View”

Samira Salwani, “Corruption and Terror: Somali Community in Kenya Caught in the Crossfire”

This documentary made 2 years ago by Al Jazeera reporter Mohammed Adow (you would recognize him his recent reporting on Nigeria’s general election) about Garissa, which also happens to be his hometown. The film, which is very personal, also gives a good history of state violence in Kenya’s North Eastern Province, where Garissa is located. The North Eastern Province is  “the country’s third-largest region, borders Somalia and is exclusively inhabited by ethnic Somalis.”

Al Jazeera English just published this piece by Adow: “Why al-Shabab has gained foothold in Kenya.”

We’d also suggest streaming the Kenyan channels NTV, Citizen TV and KTN.

And follow these twitter accounts: @AlinoorMB @robynleekriel @HarunMaruf @Daudoo and @KenyanPundit.

* We’ll continue to add to and update to this post. So keep checking in.

How to make sense of the #GarissaAttack in Kenya

To make sense of the attack by Al Shabaab on Garissa University near Kenya’s border with Somalia (official count of fatalities are 148; others say closer to 200), you may want to switch off television news. Especially since CNN is moving Nairobi to Nigeria and Tanzania to Uganda. Crucial will be how these attacks will be framed in the next few hours and especially how the Kenyan state will respond (already they’ve blamed the judiciary and in the past they’ve round up Somalis despite little evidence). Equally important is public opinion. So, like we did at the time of the attack by Al Shabaab on the Westgate Mall in Kenya’s capital Nairobi, we’ve compiled a bunch of links, including some twitter accounts, we suggest you read or follow.

Here you go …

Poet Shailja Patel‘s “The Road to Garissa” on The New Inquiry.

Criminologist Mwenda Kailendia in The Guardian, “Kenya attacks: Brute force isn’t enough to beat the terrorists”

Karen Rothmeyer in The Nation: “Horrifying blowback in Kenya.”

Anthropologist Samar Al-Bulushi‘s “The Politics of Spectacular Violence”

Novelist Abdi Latif Ega’s “What’s it like to be Somali in Kenya”

International Relations scholar Stig Jarle Hansen,”Al-Shabaab is failing in Somalia, but Kenya’s chaotic response could keep it alive” on The Conversation.

Journalist Caroline Hellyer reporting for Al Jazeera English: “Recent ISIL communications show attempts to secure influence in East Africa – the stronghold of al-Shabab and al-Qaeda.”

Harry Misiko, “How Kenya made itself vulnerable to terror,” on the Washington Post’s WorldViews blog.

Maina Kiai in Kenya’s Daily Nation,”To eliminate insecurity, we must not be tempted to take unlawful decisions”

Political science graduate student Ken Opalo on his blog about “Five Things About Al-Shabaab and the Somalia Question.”

Historian Matt Carotenuto on “Terrorism and Violence in Kenya: Balancing a Global vs Local View”

Samira Salwani, “Corruption and Terror: Somali Community in Kenya Caught in the Crossfire”

This documentary made 2 years ago by Al Jazeera reporter Mohammed Adow he reported on Nigeria’s recent election) about Garissa, which happens to also be his hometown. The film, which is very personal, also gives a good history of state violence in Kenya’s North Eastern Province where Garissa is located. The North Eastern Province is  “the country’s third-largest region, borders Somalia and is exclusively inhabited by ethnic Somalis.”

We’d also suggest streaming the Kenyan channels NTV, Citizen TV and KTN.

And follow these twitter accounts: @AlinoorMB @robynleekriel @HarunMaruf @Daudoo and @KenyanPundit.

* We’ll continue to add to and update to this post. So keep checking in.

Jonathan Runs Out of Goodluck

In the end, nothing could save President Goodluck Jonathan. Neither the belated effort, using foreign troops and mercenaries, to roll back Boko Haram’s military gains. Nor the last minute ‘cash and carry’ offensive which saw his aides distribute staggering amounts of cash to traditional rulers and allied political patrons in different parts of the country. Not even, as it turns out, the postponement of the ballot from February 14 to March 28, a six-week extension framed in terms of military necessity, but all too clearly a last ditch attempt to derail the opposition All Progressives Congress (APC). To be sure, the postponement allowed the president to make significant adjustments to his campaign, and without doubt the already cash-strapped opposition lost some momentum as it struggled to match the President Jonathan’s determined financial onslaught. But it was all too little too late, and not even his famous good luck could save Jonathan from becoming the first incumbent president in the country’s history to lose to the opposition.

There will be enough time in the months ahead to pick over the bones of what happened in Nigeria last week; why a population so enamored of the president’s ‘by his bootstraps- village boy made good’ story turned so decisively against him. Mention will be made of his handling of the case of the Chibok girls, whose whereabouts, incidentally, one year on, remain unknown. For several weeks after the attack on the village, the president stuck to his improbable story that the reports had been made up by the opposition to denigrate his regime. Fair or not, the entire episode gave the distinct impression that the president underestimated the severity of the insurgency, and had no military or political strategy for combating it.

Mention too will be made of his lethargy in dealing with corruption, or worse still, in a lot of cases, appearing to condone it. Under President Jonathan, the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) was effectively stripped of its powers. Whilst, in the Obasanjo era, the EFCC at least went after the president’s political enemies, both real and perceived, under Goodluck Jonathan, the anti-corruption campaign was more or less abandoned, and things turned completely farcical after the president openly sought to distinguish between actual corruption and politicians ‘merely’ stealing public money. Suffice to say: it is disingenuous to blame any single person, let alone a one-term president, for all of Nigeria’s corruption woes. The problem is not going to go away anytime soon. Besides, it goes beyond official larceny, historically salient as it no doubt it. Nevertheless, in failing to apprehend, let alone articulate its profundity and dimensions, President Jonathan gave ammunition to those who had always doubted his sincerity of purpose.

Nor will anyone forget First Lady Patience Jonathan in a hurry. Mrs. Jonathan, not unlike her predecessors, took her role as her husband’s first line of defense seriously — perhaps too seriously at times. But unlike previous first ladies, Mrs. Jonathan did not always a draw a line between legitimate defense of the man she is married to, and outright assumption of his official prerogatives. Not exactly blessed with the gift of verbal delicacy, Mrs. Jonathan stuck her foot in her mouth on more than a few occasions, and in the process probably turned a lot of people against her husband. In mitigation, Mrs. Jonathan only went as far as her husband allowed her, and her gaucheries say more about what Nigerians have allowed the office (sic) of the First Lady to become, than it does about Mrs. Jonathan as an individual.

But the capstone impression from the Jonathan years is bound to be about the president himself. Policy fumbles and a trying spouse aside, the fact of the matter is that, ultimately, the president flattered to deceive. Permanently projecting an air of insecurity, not least in matters of diction, President Jonathan was the classic anti-president. He was never quite sure of himself, never really convinced, only fleetingly presidential; a reminder of the painful truth that he only came to power through a series of fortunate events, and lacked the preparation that would have put him in good stead to navigate the rigors of such a powerful office. Which makes the unstinting solidarity of ‘Niger Deltans’ all the more intriguing. It was obvious from the start that President Jonathan was ill-prepared for the presidency at the very moment when the opportunity fell on his laps, and the people of the oil producing states must now rue the strategy of putting all their eggs in the basket of his failed presidency.

If Niger Deltans must regret sacrificing a legitimate political cause on the altar of identity politics, Nigerians in general have every reason to be queasy about the president-elect. That General Buhari means very well for the country is beyond doubt. But it is troubling that, over the course of a long campaign season, he never succeeded in articulating a clear socio-economic program, let alone one capable of launching the country into the twenty-first century. Beyond vague promises about eradicating corruption and enthroning social discipline, the general is yet to explain, for instance, how he proposes to tackle a youth unemployment crisis that is one of the worst in the world.

General Buhari has a mandate to govern, and will have Nigerians’ continued support, especially if he, early on in his presidency, manages to extirpate Boko Haram’s barbarous insurgency. But it is also clear that the country is going to need more than that. The economy, dysfunctional for so long, and practically immobilized by falling oil prices, will have to be revived. At the same time, the faith of majority of Nigerians in the Nigerian project itself will have to be renewed. If, at the beginning, the new president takes too many steps in the wrong direction, the fragile and not particularly progressive coalition that has managed to deliver him the presidency may start to unravel. In that eventuality, what happens next is anyone’s guess.