Sean Jacobs's Blog, page 356

The University of Cape Town is Paralyzed with Fear of the Past

Those who know history in textured detail, not just in sweeping generalisations or in the sanitising and glorifying terms of jingoism (whether imperialist or nationalist) which enable and encourage reinvention and mis-memory, are better equipped to imagine the future in ways which neither repeat nor reinstate the past and its exigencies. Nuanced understanding of what went before allows people to resist the paralysis which reactionaries want to induce with their misreading of the past. Careful, subtle readers of the historical record also realise that they do not have to accommodate themselves to the shortcomings of the present to avoid repeating history’s mistakes.

In 1990, when I began undergraduate studies at the University of Cape Town, the statue of Cecil John Rhodes struck me as absurd. By 1994, when I was running tutorials in analysis as a teaching assistant, the statue, and much else about the university’s possessive investment in aggrandized colonial history, struck me as obscene. It was during this period that anti-apartheid graffiti was systematically removed from the campus, while none of the repellent symbols of colonial violence and violation, mis-remembered by many as the symbols of civilisation, remained. Even at the time, as I shared an office with another graduate teaching assistant, we marvelled at this spectacular ‘white-washing’ of recent history.

In 1997, during a seminar by Noam Chomsky, the most cited living thinker, a man who identified himself as a retired professor of economics, harangued Chomsky and the audience with a homily about how the post office on campus, called “Rhodes’ Gift”, symbolised what “white civilisation” had brought to a “disorganised tribal people”. The discussants, Martin Legassick and Mahmood Mamdani, seemed both bemused and embarrassed. At the end of the twentieth century there were still esteemed people who believed in old racist myths about colonialism and the nobility of the imperial mission; in 2015, it seems, there are still people who insist on denying historiographical evidence.

The same Mahmood Mamdani, appointed to the Chair of African Studies, was then attempting to change the curriculum in a specific course (“Introduction to Africa”) by opening up a debate on how ‘African Studies’ is taught to African students in Africa, and which scholarship is used in such instruction. He was suspended from the course, and an unpleasant public exchange ensued in the press, with the university management, headed by Dr. Mamphela Ramphele as vice-chancellor, coming across as both unnecessarily arrogant (an accusation they flung at Mamdani himself) and shockingly ignorant of the long history of intellectual engagement in Africa, by Africans. No doubt the University has a more palatable account of the episode.

But this should have shocked many of us less than it did. The University of Cape Town, having accommodated itself to apartheid era National Party diktat, refused to appoint Archie Mafeje to a teaching post in 1968; 600 students occupied the Bremner building then, in protest at the University’s capitulation. In the mid-1990s, having held senior research and teaching positions around the world, Mafeje returned to South Africa, and the University under-offered him a senior lectureship, which he justly rejected as an insult. He was, at the time, one of the most cited living African scholars. Between 1968 and the end of the millennium, little seemed to have changed.

In 1999, and again in 2008, I co-taught a course on “race”, class, gender, and employment equity in organisational transformation with a leading sociologist at the same university. The statistics on transformation were tragic in 1999; they were farcical by 2008. Reading Dr Siona O’Connell’s work recently on the topic, I was pained, but not surprised. Three younger relatives had had to negotiate the University of Cape Town as undergraduates in three different faculties in the fin-de-siècle, and they reported more reactionary racism than even I had experienced a decade earlier, from both fellow students and staff members.

At the end of 2014, an African-American friend who had also done graduate work at the University of Cape Town in the late-1990s, returned to South Africa for the first time in sixteen years. As part of revisiting old haunts, she wanted to go back to the campus of the University of Cape Town. The visit was disturbing; memories of old horrors were triggered, we left very quickly. Twenty-five years after Nelson Mandela’s short walk to freedom from Victor Verster Prison began the long drag of all of South Africa out of its violent and violating twentieth century history, the University of Cape Town’s campus remained festooned with the symbols of nineteenth century British colonial violence and violations: Rhodes himself, and his close associate, Leander Starr Jameson, he of the illegal ‘Jameson Raid’, and for whom the hall at the centre of so much of the pomp and ceremony of ‘UCT’ is named.

I have been puzzled by many aspects of the so-called debate about the Rhodes statue. The unfinished business of decolonising higher education in South Africa features only as a side-issue for many of those who speak up and out. Some senior university academics and administrators insist that there is a need to ‘debate’ the meaning of the statue. Not for the first time, it struck me that among the students, in their various views, were thinkers ahead of those who were responsible for teaching them. Max Price’s remarks last year, in the wake of reports implicating students at the University in racist attacks off campus, revealed his strangely dated grasp of the meanings of ‘race’, the dynamics of racism, and the work of anti-racism in post-apartheid South Africa.

Those who wish to defend Rhodes either chose to ignore the historical record, or choose to sanitise it for convenience. Even in his time, Cecil John Rhodes was a controversial figure, loathed by many for his political and economic thuggery and skulduggery, and among these was Olive Schreiner. The novelist William Boyd covers some of this ugly history in his review of Geoffrey Wheatcroft’s “The Randlords” from “The London Review of Books” in 1985. Paul Maylam, a former professor of History at Rhodes University, has written a critical biography of the man and his legacy. But such details are countered by invoking his ‘legacy’: scholarships, gifts, bequests.

Some of the more mediocre contributions in the ‘Rhodes debate’ have suggested that removing the colonial symbols and statues would be to erase history. Firstly, some of us do not need statues to be reminded of colonial conquest and violation; the landscape bears the traces of that violence. Secondly, removing statues from public spaces does not require their destruction; museums are places where such statues can be kept in curated exhibitions which provide context for those who wish to see them. Thirdly, for twenty years many people have walked past statues like Rhodes, and not remembered the violent history commemorated; and those of us pained, viscerally upset by such constant glorification of genocidal megalomaniacs are told to stop overreacting, to develop thicker skins, and ‘get on with it’. One hopes such people have a greater capacity for empathy in their private lives.

The discussion around the Rhodes statue and its symbolic anchoring of the University of Cape Town’s relationship with its colonial history, needs to be elevated beyond misinformed and crude accusatory gestures. The way in which many cling to the University’s ‘heritage’, and insist that there is nothing that needs to be contested, slipping into inaccurate misreading of the past, serves as evidence of a larger failure to decolonise apartheid higher education, and in many significant senses, other social and political institutions in post-apartheid South Africa.

The vitriol spewed onto the internet by individuals who see themselves on opposite sides of the false debate – keep the statue or lose historical memory; lose the statue and overhaul society – reveals yet more unfinished business which was sutured over during the 1990s. The choice, of course, is neither between whether to destroy the statue or to keep it, nor is it between respecting history by doing the former, or erasing it by doing the latter. Conflations of heritage and history, of memory and monument, of debate and polemic, reveal the depth of the mediocrity engendered by colonial education systems.

Also, one wonders, again, as J.M. Coetzee did in the late 1980s, what price white South Africans are willing to pay for fraternity with Black South Africans, given the ineluctable connections between such fraternity, and equality and liberty in a democracy. One also wonders, given the ugliness those trying to reach across perceived divisions of ‘race’ and class are subjected to, some of them by bullies who identify themselves by name and employment status as managers of brand-name furniture stores and banks, whether there is indeed a widespread desire for fraternity among post-apartheid white South Africans living in a majority-Black country.

What the whole Rhodes fracas has revealed, quite spectacularly, is how colonial worldviews have taken root in South Africa’s higher education sector, and in the minds of its graduates. What can also be traced in both the tone and the lack of substance in much of the antagonism, is the wider insistence on misreading ‘race’ as a biological, phenotypical reality, a fundamental, scientific misunderstanding seemingly shared by some of the most educated South Africans. But worst, and most depressingly, this historical moment has unveiled the casual racism that lurks beneath the polite surfaces of everyday smiles in the tax-funded organisations dedicated to higher learning.

There is no doubt in my mind that the statue must go. The discomfort and rage some folks professed at seeing swastikas on their campus is like the discomfort and rage many of us have felt having to walk past symbols glorifying the extermination of people like us, at the same time as walking corridors, sitting in meetings and classes with people who not only actively wished we were not there, but had no shame or reservation about telling us so. To recall a white South African professor who continues to be held in esteem by others, “We already have [Fatima]; we cannot have too many of you around.”

We must refuse the debased and fallacious terms of engagement set by those who suggest that to take the symbols which glorify colonial violence and violation from public spaces and placing them in museums is to ‘whitewash’ history (the irony!), or to risk taking South Africa down a path towards the ‘horror’ of the rest of postcolonial Africa (yet another ironic moment of South African exceptionalism). Would they have said the same thing to a German Jew in Berlin, 1965? Would they say the same thing to a French resistance fighter’s children and grandchildren? Again, one hopes such people display a greater capacity for empathy in their private lives.

In the age of the Internet and social media, everybody and their cousin seems to have felt entitled to air an opinion, however ill-informed, on Rhodes, his place in history, the substance and texture of colonialism in South Africa, its legacy in our social and political institutions, and the risk we run of repeating the past mistakes of others if we do not quietly accept the present and accommodate ourselves to its inequalities, inequities, and unfair distribution of resources. In such circumstances, in these times, we must apply critical literacy and separate polemic from historiography, and distinguish between argument and diatribe.

Also, perhaps, as we reflect on the history of higher education in South Africa, especially at places like the University of Cape Town, we would do well to read or reread the work of people like Saul Dubow, who traces the relationship between ‘science, sensibility, and white South Africa’ from 1820 to 2000 in “A Commonwealth of Knowledge” (2006). Many, especially the vice chancellors of local universities, would do well to read or reread George Lipsitz’s “The Possessive Investment in Whiteness” (1998), and J.M. Coetzee’s “White Writing” (1991). To invoke the latter, too many of our institutions seem to be “no longer European, not yet African”. We cannot afford to ignore a generation of scholarship in our responses to issues of racism and the articulation of ‘race’ in this moment in history just to suture over individuals’ discomfort.

The dystopian past need not be the reason to accept the dystopian present in order to avoid a dystopian future; ‘utopia’ is indeed ‘no place’, but our humanity and decency may be measured by the determination with which we strive towards it.

*A version of this piece has been published on http://www.enca.com

Liner Notes, No.7: Nigeria meets Brazil in the U.K.

Nigeria and Brazil have a long and intimate historical connection. Nigerian culture has provided a central reference point in the formation of many Afro-Brazilian cultural groups and religious beliefs. And Brazil has also made its mark in Nigeria throughout history. So it may come as little surprise that there continue to be strong cultural affinities between the two nations.

So that’s why, when Afrobeat-inspired Bahian rap band OQuadro joined the cultural exchange project linking UK and Bahian Bass culture, it perhaps was only natural that they link with the one of the UK’s most charismatic rappers of Nigerian ancestry, Afrikan Boy! This is the result of their collaboration: a slinking rap anthem that puts in work to represent both sides of the Atlantic.

Can the Somali Speak? #CadaanStudies

When Oxford anthropologist I.M Lewis arrived in British Somaliland in 1955 for fieldwork that would lead to the foundational texts of Somali Studies, he did so with support of the British Somaliland Protectorate administration and a fellowship from the Colonial Social Science Research Council. It’s a familiar story across African Studies — the broader academic field to which Somali Studies belongs — and the discipline of anthropology, and an anecdote which captures the world in which anthropology and Somali Studies emerged: the European colonial encounter with the African, and the twinning of academic knowledge production with the colonial project. Inextricably linked to the new regimes of control and power governing the Somali territories were its new social scientist experts, meticulously documenting every aspect of Somali life. The production of cultural and historical information about Somalis was tied to the expansion of European power.

While recent decades have seen more and more Somali social scientists, knowledge production about Somalis remains largely in the hands of European and American academics. It’s a field that has never subjected itself to the self-critique and self-reflection anthropology was forced to do when confronted by its colonial heritage in a postcolonial world. It has not rethought the ways in which colonial dynamics reinscribe themselves in non-Somali scholarship on Somalia, nor has it critically interrogated the power dynamics embedded in the Western researcher’s position vis a vis his Somali subject. It has not questioned its overwhelming whiteness, and at its most violent, marginalized contributions of Somali scholars and writers and rendered them invisible.

Earlier this week, an academic journal was brought to my attention: the Somaliland Journal of African Studies, which published its inaugural issue in February. It describes itself as a journal “covering African affairs at large, but with a particular focus on East Africa and the Horn” and “put together with students at scholars of the Institute of Peace and Conflict Studies of the University of Hargeisa.” Missing from the journal’s editorial board, board of advisors, and authors were said Somali students and scholars. Not one Somali from outside of UofH, either. Instead, the editorial and advisory boards were made up of nine European and US based academics (as well as two PhD student editors) and three Ethiopian academics affiliated with Addis Ababa University.

On my Facebook page, I called for a Twitter conversation on March 25th under the hashtag #CadaanStudies:

As a public post shared widely, many Somalis participated in the Facebook thread to critique the journal. The tone shifted completely when one of SJAS’ advisory board members, German anthropologist Markus Hoehne, entered the thread with comments so patronizing many of us were left wondering if we had encountered a real-life early 20th century anthropologist caricature. His defense of SJAS and “cadaan” domination of Somali Studies: Somali social scientists do not exist, and non-Somali academics will continue to dominate the field until you Somalis dislodge us:

The back-and-forth on Facebook between Hoehne and over 30 educated young Somalis ended spectacularly when he was asked to leave the thread, and responded in broken Somali translating to: “Fine, I will go. You and your friends can talk about a stupid white man who is colonizing you, but I think that when you are finished talking about colonialism, you will go back to your Somali tribalism.” His words only proved the point of the critique of SJAS, knowledge production about Somalis and whiteness, and at 6pm, we hit Twitter.

He basically labelled all #Somalis as unintelligent and lazy in his response. Please tell me how he's even writing about us #CadaanStudies

— gabay iyo gabarnimo (@gabarnimo) March 25, 2015

Somalis have endured 4 colonial powers, cold war, civil war, neocolonialism.But the violence of Western 'experts' harm us too #CadaanStudies

— safia aidid (@SafiaA) March 25, 2015

An academic journal on somalis with no somalis: the same colonial logic of only the whites know best how to use ideas. #CadaanStudies

— Rinaldo Walcott (@blacklikewho) March 25, 2015

Thinking about knowledge practices that privilege the academy & "expertise', discounting lived experience & other production #CadaanStudies

— basil (@basilfarooqi) March 25, 2015

When an East African panel looks like this #Experts #CadaanStudies pic.twitter.com/Dl5O0dnyIc

— ells ✨ (@itselhan) March 25, 2015

Too busy pirating & joining al-shabab to be involved in academic discourse re our country, history & culture. Please save us #CadaanStudies

— yung vivian banks (@_hudahassan) March 25, 2015

The new face of cultural imperialism. It kind of looks like the old face but what do I know. #CadaanStudies pic.twitter.com/HXIAHA3ypg

— Mo. Ali (@MuzzleMad) March 26, 2015

My prof published a book that argued British colonial policy in Somaliland was perfect for the warlike Somali nature #CadaanStudies

— sura. (@TheClapbackKid) March 26, 2015

The day an cadaan PhD student wanted to document the death of my dying mother and subsequent burial because it was exotic #CadaanStudies

— Fadumo Dayib (@fqdayib) March 26, 2015

The #CadaanStudies hashtag has exemplified a need to deconstruct the Eurocentric framework, narrative and discourse of Somali Studies.

— Lost Nomad (@CamelHerdersSon) March 26, 2015

Days later, the hashtag is still going strong. As for Markus Hoehne? He had a few words to add on another Somali Facebook page following the hashtag conversation:

 We have responded with an open letter.

#WhiteHistoryMonth: The FBI’s obsession with African-American Literature

In today’s installment of #WhiteHistoryMonth scholar and novelist Jacinda Townsend reviews William Maxwell’s new book, F.B. Eyes: How J. Edgar Hoover’s Ghostreaders Framed African American Literature (2015)

“That old FB eye/Tied a bell to my bed stall,” begins the Richard Wright poem that fronts this comprehensive history of the FBI’s decades-long engagement with African-American literature. And truly, readers will be stunned–though not shocked–at the level of awareness that African-American writers had about their status as the subjects of state surveillance, even as far back as the Harlem Renaissance. Writers such as Dudley Randall, the Detroit poet and publisher of the Broadside Press, have even gone so far as to disseminate the “Informer Poem,” minor verses conceived with the idea of “letting the Bureau know that you know.”

But readers should also prepare to marvel at the level of awareness FBI agents, particularly the “G-men” of the J. Edgar Hoover era, held about African-American literature. Maxwell posits that the FBI was African-American literature’s “most dedicated and influential critic,” and in one chapter recounts a four-page critique of Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun, written by a Philadelphia-based special agent who was in the audience at the play’s initial run at the Walnut Theater. “A mysterious Philadelphia FBI agent,” Maxwell writes, “may thus have been among the first to understand the play’s budding black internationalism.”

Maxwell, armed with years of Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests, has engaged in an impressively systematic discovery process that yields pages upon partially redacted pages of information on a dazzling list of names both familiar and less so, from Renaissance giant Claude McKay to Andy Razaf, the lyricist of “(What Did I Do to Be So) Black and Blue”; from poet Georgia Douglas Johnson, who engaged in “perhaps the pettiest of wartime literary crimes” by sponsoring a social letter club for unmarried black soldiers and the women who would be their sweethearts, to James Baldwin, whose FBI file is a magnificent 1,884 pages long. The FBI, Maxwell writes, has been threatened by such writers almost since the inception of the agency itself: “The Bureau acted on a tenacious suspicion… that authoring Afro-modernism and jeopardizing national security were one and the same… Hoover specified that there was little more dangerous than supplying the rhetoric of racial parity to a racially diverse public.”

Unable to make his own FOIA requests for living writers, Maxwell has nonetheless relied on the self-discovery of files from writers such as Ishmael Reed and Nikki Giovanni to help produce a portrait of an FBI that continues to remain in “hot and literate pursuit” of the African-American writer.

As our legislatures provide continued sanction to a government that edges ever more towards Hoover-era secrecy–as we witness a presidential administration that calls itself “the most transparent ever” nonetheless issue an executive order exempting itself from FOIA requests–this book comes at an important moment in the United States’ intelligence history. But the book’s triumph is beyond this moment, for it is a rare examination of the documents birthed by an agency that used its intelligence and counterintelligence powers to hinder a movement.

And as a comprehensive examination of such, it is also the story of the Bureau’s using its power to hinder not just other movements but the coalition of such movements. F.B. Eyes: How J. Edgar Hoover’s Ghostreaders Framed African American Literature is, then, an important contribution not just to the history of African American literature but to all of American history.

#WhiteHistoryMonth: Was Cecil Rhodes really an entrepreneurial genius? Zambia says no

We owe a great deal of gratitude to the students at the University of Cape Town whose #RhodesMustFall campaign has forced us to reengage and debate, in a new and invigorated manner, the legacy of Cecil John Rhodes. Because of their brave and spirited campaign, a lot more people now know a little more about Rhodes than they did before. That in itself is quite an achievement. 

Parsing the online conversations around Rhodes’ legacy, one sees the claim advanced that Rhodes was an entrepreneurial genius. The proof of this assertion is seen in the wealth that Rhodes accumulated over his lifetime: So much wealth could only ever have been amassed by a Captain of industry. The claim is often made by those pushing for a “bigger picture” appraisal of Rhodes’ legacy: Being a Captain of industry is an achievement worthy of memorials of one type or the other. But I have also noticed that even those who, on the whole, are critical of Rhodes’ legacy tend to concede, perhaps implicitly, the point about Rhodes’ entrepreneurial genius and choose instead to focus on other aspects of his life in making their case.

But was Rhodes really an entrepreneurial genius? Perhaps we can gain some insight into Rhodes’ alleged entrepreneurial abilities by studying the actions of his British South Africa Company (BSAC) in present day Zambia starting about 1890. The BSAC was put together by Rhodes to facilitate his acquisition of mining rights across Southern Africa. It also “administered” the territories of Northern Rhodesia and Southern Rhodesia for close to 30 years from around the 1890s to the 1920s. (This is akin to, say, Royal Dutch Shell running a country today!). David Posner, in his highly insightful book on ethnicity in Zambia, Institutions and Ethnic Politics in Africa, describes the activities of the BSAC thus (emphasis mine):

“The BSAC took over the administration of the territory that later became Zambia in 1894. The company sought to administer the territory with two goals in mind: First, it sought to extract labour from the local population to sustain its mining efforts and satisfy the demands of its white settler population for African workers. Second, it sought to minimize costs. Taxation was embraced from the beginning as the key vehicle for achieving both of these goals. It not only generated revenue but, because taxes were payable in cash only, it induced large numbers of African men to take up wage employment for Europeans…[T]axation quickly became the heart and soul of Company government in Northern Rhodesia.” (p26 – 27).

In administering the tax, the company faced manpower constraints and therefore devised a system whereby indigenous chiefs would be the local tax collecting “agents” of the BSAC. In exchange, the chief’s position as local leader would be guaranteed in addition to receiving a commission for collecting taxes. To ensure that this system worked efficiently, “the BSAC implemented a series of administrative actions to bolster the authority of existing chiefs and to create new chiefs where they did not exist but would be administratively helpful. [These administrative actions] gave the company the power to appoint and dismiss chiefs as it saw fit and provided for the fining and imprisonment of subjects who failed to carry out their chief’s orders.” (p.28 – 29)

Posner then talks about the profound long-term impacts that these policies had on the structure of Zambian society:

“The decision to use chiefs as agents of rural tax collection, and the policies employed to solve the various problems that arose as a consequence of this decision, had important implications for the structure of [Zambian] society and for the nature of post-colonial identities. These policies transformed chiefs from embodiments of customary authority into agents of European administration, and tribes from communities with fluid boundaries and varying degrees of internal cohesion into entities that, while not entirely fixed or uniform, were far more territory bound and standardized in their social and political organization than in the past”. (p30).

In other words, the selfish actions of the BSAC had the impact of driving a wedge between chiefs and their subjects as well as making ethnicity a salient feature of Zambian society. The worrying levels of ethnic mistrust in contemporary Zambia might be attributable in part to the actions of Rhodes’ BSAC in these early days. 

The use of the “hut tax” to extract cheap African labour was not a tactic used exclusively in Northern Rhodesia. It was the modus operandi of Rhodes and his BSAC over much of Southern Africa. It was used to much success in Southern Rhodesia. Charles Feinstein in his authoritative book on South African economic history, An Economic History of South Africa: Conquest, Discrimination, and Development, credits the tax in enabling the take-off of South Africa’s mining sector in the 19th Century. And Rhodes had significant interests in South Africa’s gold and diamond mines. 

So whatever fairy tales we like to tell about Rhodes’ entrepreneurial genius should include stories of how cheap African labour, which was forcibly obtained, was a cornerstone of his enterprise. It hardly takes a genius to make a lot of money under those circumstances. I suppose I too would have a scholarship named after me had I employed to perfection Rhodes’ blueprint to riches.

So What Happens #AfterRhodesFalls?

“My brother, please come and join us.” These were Chumani Maxwele’s disarming words that drew me in from being a curious observer of the student action at the statue of Cecil John Rhodes, one hot afternoon in mid-March. A week or so before, Maxwele made headlines for dousing this same statue in generous lashings of human faeces, protesting against this symbol of the University of Cape Town’s colonial heritage. Here, he approached me holding a black bag and cellotape, inviting me to join students in putting together a makeshift quilt from bags usually reserved for garbage.

I stepped forward, knelt down and joined a group of other mostly black students who collectively and calmly went about the business of piecing together the crinkled, jet black sheet. I was seized by the power of this simple action, of communally patching together a covering in the mid-afternoon sun as security and members of the media looked on.

Once it had been pieced together, some brave, wiry students ascended the granite plinth, and working in careful synergy, balancing precariously, they drew the fluttering, black plastic sheet over the weather-beaten Rhodes. You heard the creaky-squeak of reams of cellotape that were unfurled in long, dark ribbons that were slung around and around the effigy, as they sealed it in the thin, dark plastic shroud. Wrapped in cheap material reserved for waste, the once magisterial Rhodes was left looking like a sad bergie, a homeless drunk, shabbily covered, shamefully alone.

Later that evening I returned to the statue wondering whether the wrapping had been removed. I was surprised to find the statue still covered and some workmen were busy grinding and hammering away at some structures nearby. That they told me these would be the ‘comments kiosks’ for students to express their feelings about the goings on. At that time, more than a week into the on-going protests, UCT had finally woken up to the idea that they needed to address the roiling public sentiment. Of course it was already long past time for public comment and debate.

Standing at the statue, in the crackling light of the workmen’s grinders, I noticed a car pull up and halt while a young student of colour hopped in. The car paused for a second while the student pointed to the statue, probably telling his father about the day’s action. I realised then that Rhodes was more than a just an offensive symbol to black students; he was the face of UCT, situated at the very gateway of traffic between this prestigious institution and the wider world. Now it had been thoroughly soiled.

At one time UCT responded to the #RhodesMustFall campaign by trying to control the public narrative, to defend the university’s image, to defend Brand UCT. But already by then, when that student sat pointing, showing and telling about the fight against institutional racism, the #RhodesMustFall campaign had moved beyond anything public relations people could try spin.

It is now almost certain that Rhodes will fall (Ed: it might take a while what with all the committees to vote on it), and carried away still covered in rubbish bags. UCT says its listening and acting fast to have the statue moved. But as the on-going, powerful student actions have shown, this was never about a statue, about a brooding colonial Rhodes.

And when he goes, what will remain? How will his passing be marked? By mandatory courses on “White Privilege” for all first years, the renaming of its student residences which similarly honour figures offensive to the black majority like “Smuts Residence” and “Jameson Hall” or maybe a moratorium on the appointment of white academics to accelerate the rate of transformation? (Ed: One of the most scandalous statistics is that “by 2013, only three percent of academic staff at U.C.T. were black, and there are only two full professors who are black in the faculty of Humanities.”) How indeed will the dumping of Rhodes on the trash-heap of history ripple into a new and different future? These are interesting times.

The Unexpected Popularity of Dire Straits in North African Tuareg Communities

This post is the inauguration of a new partnership between Africa is a Country, and Afropop Worldwide. They recently ran a documentary called Accounting for Taste that explores unexpected musical influences of North American musical traditions on various national sub-cultures in Africa.  What becomes evident while listening to the show is that for better or worse, music in the United States often seems to have a specific racial or cultural connotation connected to it — highlighting divisions in a deeply divided multi-ethnic society. However, these lines, once transposed across national boundaries sometimes become blurred in interesting ways as people map the sounds on to their own social context. Afropop’s Sam Backer will do a two-part post digging deeper into the subject here, and some of the surprises that come about in these transpositions. The first one explores the popularity of Dire Straits in the Tuareg communities of North Africa.

When Tinariwen released the critically acclaimed album Amassakoul in 2003, they gave the wider world its first taste of Tuareg popular music. Dominated by electric guitars and driven by a hypnotically repetitive groove, the group held an obvious appeal to audiences raised on rock. The album’s filigreed, interlocking riffs and hoarsely passionate vocals — not to mention the boogie-like rumble the band attained at its most feverish moments — were seemingly cousins to the American musical tradition; close enough to feel familiar but different enough to excite.

For a band from the isolated desert regions of the Sahel to attain this kind of success, it’s vital to have a powerful narrative for the press. And to Tinariwen’s credit, they’ve managed this aspect of their career brilliantly, leaving a trail of articles about the “raw roots of rock” and “desert freedom fighters” in their wake. None of this is wrong per se, but if you read it enough times, it can become difficult to separate the hype from what is inevitably a more complex reality. And that’s why the Dire Straits name checking was such a remarkable detail.

Pretty much any time a journalist asked either a member Tinariwen or one of the many other Tuareg groups that followed in its wake about their influences, they would mention the obvious legends (usually Jimi Hendrix and Bob Marley) and then Dire Straits. Like “Sultans of Swing,” “I-Want-My-MTV” Dire Straits. Which didn’t seem to make any sense. Roughly 100 percent of the people who have ever picked up a guitar claim to be influenced by Jimi Hendrix, and basically everyone born after 1970 loves Bob Marley. But these Tuareg groups are the only African musicians I’d ever heard even mention Dire Straits, let alone describe them as a primary influence. And yet there it was, in interview after interview. What was going on? To understand, it’s necessary to go back to the beginnings of Tuareg popular music.

Tinariwen, Tamikrest, Toumast, Terakaft, Bombino, Tartit, Amanar, Mdou Moctar… Given the number of Tuareg groups currently performing on stages around the world, you’d be forgiven for thinking that the nomads who live in the vast northern regions of Mali, Niger and Burkina Faso have long had a tradition of guitar-based music. Surprisingly, nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, go back to the early 1990s, and you’d be hard pressed to find more than a handful of Tuareg guitarists, let alone a thriving scene of bands.

Traditionally, Tuareg culture is a matrilineal (a holdover from pre-Islamic times), and their music is no exception. While the men would sometimes sing hunting or herding songs, for the most part, music-making was a female responsibility. This began to change as events in surrounding areas began to transform the Tuareg way of life.

When the nations of West Africa gained independence in the 1960s, the traditional homeland of the Tuaregs was split among the new countries. The nomads were now citizens, subject to laws passed in far-off capitals, and their migrations were border-crossings, many of them illegal. Dissatisfied, and hoping to win a nation of their own, the Tuaregs living in Mali revolted against the new government in 1962. The attempted revolution put down harshly, and the Malian military was often brutal, killing livestock and displacing families. As a result, thousands of Tuaregs fled north across the desert to Libya and Algeria. This movement was accelerated by the droughts that began to ravage the Sahel in the ‘70s and ‘80s.

The combination of politics and climate forced a generation of Tuareg men north and west in a desperate search for employment and safety. While the Tuareg had always been nomads, this movement was new. Breaking and blending the lines of tribal affiliation, the harsh border crossing (many would walk across hundreds of kilometers of desert with only a five-liter can of water for sustenance) brought the Tuaregs forcefully into a new world, one in which they had become a politically marginalized minority on the outskirts of settled society.

Paradoxically, it was this brutal period of diaspora that allowed for the creation of Tuareg popular music. Living in shantytowns or ghettos on the outskirts of cities, sometimes without any women around, Tuareg men began to actively perform music. At the same time, the experience of violent dislocation began to create a new form of Tuareg nationalism, as a revolutionary movement began to bubble through the camps.

The earliest incarnation of Tinariwen was directly tied to this new political consciousness. Using music to spread revolutionary propaganda (in the form of poetry), the group’s earliest cassettes would sometimes start with a member reciting the text without accompaniment, just so listeners couldn’t possibly miss the point. When fighting broke out again in the 1990s, the music of Tinariwen, copied from tape to tape, was its inescapable soundtrack

Then, almost by accident, politics created the space for pop. Where there had previously been only traditional music, there was now an entire genre connected to youth culture. When a fitful peace was reached in the mid-’90s, a new generation of musicians sprang up to follow the example of Tinariwen.

And this seems to be the crucial moment when Dire Straits became the touchstone for a rapidly developing music. As a result of increased movement during the ‘80s and ‘90s, a steady stream of guitars and tapes had begun to flow into the desert. And while the young Tuareg may have wanted to listen to their own music, Tinariwen was really the only band to have any recorded material. So, musicians and fans had to look beyond their borders for sounds. And what they found were the superstars, the bands so popular that their tapes had made it to the Sahara. That’s Marley, Hendrix, and… Dire Straits, who had absolutely dominated the European rock market in the 1980s. Five years in either direction, and their music wouldn’t have mattered. But as it was, it became essential.

With a style simpler and less-distorted than Hendrix’s, Mark Knopfler, the lead guitarist for the band, became the single biggest foreign influence on the development of Tuareg ishumar (or “desert blues”) music. His lightning-fast licks and precise, biting articulation linked perfectly with the swirling modal playing that defined the lute styles that the new bands had already begun to adapt for electric guitar. While it’s hard to prove definitively, it seems as if the popularity of groups like Dire Straits did a great deal to move Tuareg music away from genres like rai and towards a harder, more rock-influenced sound. The sound of Tuareg music was a choice, the creation of composers deliberately picking between competing influences in an effort to reshape their traditions to meet their current needs. While it may be heartfelt, there is nothing “primal” about it. Time-wise? It’s been around about a decade less than hip-hop.

These days, younger Tuareg musicians don’t listen to much Dire Straits anymore — they don’t need to. At this point, there are more than enough Tuareg groups to keep them satisfied. But that older generation still bears unmistakable DNA from the sultans of swing. And maybe that’s another reason why Tuareg groups like Tinariwen are so popular in the West. In their guitar playing, we hear rock music adapted, transformed, and then transmitted back to us. But the critics have it wrong — we aren’t hearing ancient echoes, but rather a distinctly modern interpretation.

Nakhane Toure’s Violent Streak

Nakhane Touré’s itching to make some noise. His acoustic guitar-strumming fingers are ready to shred some shrewd chords on the electric. He wants to scare sixteen year olds and piss off conservatives who use “authenticity” as a cubicle for their ignorance. He wants to forge forward, not so much a revolution, but a rebellion against any (pre-)conceptions of what his ‘sound’ is.

Nakhane’s ready for a change.

The immediate plan is to release an EP, Violent Measures. It’s a collection of songs which riff off of Frantz Fanon’s pages, using the seminal Afro-French thinker’s seminal essay Concerning Violence as a sparring partner. “The first song on the EP is called ‘Violent Measures.’ When I was listening to a demo version of the EP I realized that each song concerns itself – partially or wholly – with some act of violence. Whether it’s physical or psychological, it has many different facets – positive or negative. Some violence is good, some isn’t,” he says. Then, with a cheeky streak, adds: “You’ll just have to find out when you listen to the EP whether it is good or not!”

Before a live show at the Bannister Hotel in Braamfontein, Johannesburg recently — where he called kindred Eastern Cape spirit Bongeziwe Mabandla along for the ride — Nakhane set aside a few moments to break bread regarding the way forward. He was quick to clarify that the EP’s no less important than the album; that it serves as a bridge between Brave Confusion, the debut LP which won him a SAMA award in 2014, and his currently untitled sophomore release.

Describing Nakhane as a “SAMA Award-Winning” artist feels like a cop-out; like one is giving in to laziness and refusing to engage with the person by treading well-worn tropes instead of being the vessel through which the music, Nakhane’s music, reverberates. With Violent Measures, Nakhane seems hopeful to make enough noise to turn even the emptiest of vessels into agents of change. His change!

*This article first appeared here. Nakhane Touré plays a show with Nomisupasta on Thursday in Johannesburg. Go here for details, and check out our video profile on Nomisupasta here.

Karim Wade, Senegal’s “Mister 15%” Goes to Jail

Monday 23 March 2015 was set to be the day of reckoning in Senegal. The presiding judge of the Court for Repression of Illicit Enrichment (CREI) delivered the verdict on the trial of Karim Wade, the son of former Senegal’s president Abdoulaye Wade, charged with illegally amassing a fortune of US$240 million, embezzlement, and corruption. His sentence: 6 years in prison and US$228 million in fines.

It’s hard to believe that 15 years ago, Senegal euphorically elected Abdoulaye Wade as president, ending the 40-year rule of the Parti Socialiste. The year 2000 consecrated the end of the patrimonial post-independence Senegalese state; it marked the dawn of a new social contract between the people and the state. But Abdoulaye Wade’s monumentally misplaced priorities, his compulsive attempts at altering the constitution, and his folie de grandeur plunged Senegal into a dozen years of malaise. Add to that mix his corruption scandals, like handing a suitcase full of cash to a departing IMF representative. The presidential palace was like one giant ATM.

And then there was Karim Wade, a hair in the Senegalese soup.

Karim Wade was nowhere to be seen in Senegalese streets during the struggles that helped elect his father. He was a banker in London, we’re told, who decided to come home to lend his talent to his father’s administration in 2000. Rumor has it that’s when he acquired his Senegalese passport.

From the informal position of adviser to his daddy-president, Karim Wade started eying the prize. He entered the political arena when he ran in local mayoral elections in Dakar in 2009. But he lost miserably. In fact, he didn’t even the win the neighborhood polling station where he cast his vote. Lesson not learned.

Abdoulaye Wade has always believed that he was a genius – have you heard of the Wade Formula? Therefore, his son Karim must be one too. So Karim Wade entered the government as a minister, and at some point held the ridiculous title of Minister of State, Minister of International Cooperation, of Air Transport, of Infrastructures, and of Energy. As his father said at the time, “only Karim is able to handle 4 government positions merged into one.” Speaking ironically, the Senegalese people nicknamed Karim Wade the “Minister of Heaven and Earth.”

While Karim toured the world aboard his leased private jet, rubbing shoulders with heads of states and wealthy sheikhs in the Gulf, the Senegalese people grew frustrated at the father’s attempt to groom the son as the next president. The blow came in 2011 when Wade proposed a change of the constitution that would lower the threshold required to win the presidential elections on the first round from 51 to only 25%, and introduced a presidential ticket system. The populations besieged the National Assembly the day that the members of the parliament were set to pass the legislation, and Wade eventually abandoned the proposal.

Wade’s attempt at leaving his legacy – literally – on Senegalese political history would have succeeded had it not been foiled by the fact that 65% of Senegalese voters dragged him out of office in 2012 replacing him with his former protégé, Macky Sall. That’s an enormous margin of loss for an incumbent president. Welcome to Senegal.

When Macky Sall became president in 2012, he reactivated the CREI – a special court aimed at fighting illicit enrichment of the elites, embezzlement and corruption. Karim Wade then had to justify the origins of his assets (valued at $240 million). Many of these assets were traced to bank accounts in Monaco and Singapore, and offshore companies in Panama and the British Virgin Islands. Karim Wade maintains that all his assets are gifts from his father and other friends. What we know for sure is that in a Wikileaked diplomatic cable, then-US Ambassador to Senegal Marcia Bernicat referred to Karim Wade as “Mister 15%”, hinting at his share in all big contracts in Senegal. 

His wealth is not the only problem. Ambassador Bernicat added, “Karim Wade is a master at being concurrently out of the spotlight and ever-present. Ministers are scared of him, business people are cowed by him, and major policy decisions are vetted by him. He is, by all accounts, charming and smart… But, his influence is pervasive, and, in our view, largely insalubrious.”

Karim Wade’s lawyers claim that he is a political prisoner, the CREI being the political arm of President Macky Sall in an attempt to disqualify a potential adversary for the 2017 presidential elections. But there is no plausible scenario in which a majority of Senegalese voters would cast their votes for him. That doesn’t stop Abdoulaye Wade from his desperate attempts at setting his son free. Last week, three days before the verdict was set to be delivered, Abdoulaye Wade and his party, the PDS, nominated Karim Wade as their candidate for the 2017 presidential elections. 

Running for office from a prison cell might be the next episode in this political drama. Or not.  After all, Abdoulaye Wade may be the only one thinking that Karim is a viable candidate. What matters for the Senegalese people is: What’s next?

Soon after the verdict, the Minister of Justice announced that the CREI will continue its work, pursuing the investigations and prosecuting all those who have illegally amassed fortunes. Such a course of action would not only restore faith in state institutions, but also ease the worries of those who think that Karim Wade should not be the only one having to face justice. Moreover, those currently serving in the administration should be paying attention.

In the meantime, Wade and his party will continue to press for Karim Wade’s release, although it is unlikely that they will succeed. It remains to be seen whether the PDS will pick another candidate for the 2017 or boycott the elections. Either way, as Abdoulaye Wade leads the “liberation movement” to set Prince Karim free, the people are only hoping that the CREI will liberate them from corrupt and inept political entrepreneurs.

Nigeria: What is to be done?

This Saturday, March 28, Nigerians vote again. What is at stake? And what happens after the elections? We brought together a group of scholars to explore some of these issues–an assessment of President Goodluck Jonathan, the nature of opposition party politics, religion, ethnic politics, security, among others–in a new, free ebook, “Nigeria: What is to be done?.” Below we publish the introduction.

Since Nigeria returned to civil rule in May 1999, every election has been labeled by scholars and general observers as the most pivotal and most momentous in the country’s history. Yet, irrespective of their outcomes, the country has hobbled along, poised, all too familiarly, between the potentiality of glory and the probability of disaster. Nigeria has not exactly flourished, but it has not disintegrated either, even if Boko Haram, with its sworn determination to impose a semblance of a Paleolithic political order, has bitten off a not insignificant chunk of territory. Whatever it is then that throws the commentariat into regular panic every four years, it is most certainly not just a fear of possible physical collapse, but something definitely deeper. It is, one suspects, a philosophical regret that, perhaps with every electoral cycle that produces the ‘wrong’ victor, the country drifts further away from the possibility of genuine political renaissance.

True to form, the March 28 presidential election is being billed as a make-or-break affair, the last opportunity for Nigerians to liberate their country from the clutches of those who have held it to ransom for fifty odd years and some, and who continue to milk it for the exclusive gratification of a small elite. It is a tantalizing prospect, when you think of it—get this one election right, and all else shall be added unto you. Except that when you are dealing with a country so complex and troubled, and so marinated in its own contradictions like Nigeria, it is going to require more than a single election—or elections in toto for that matter—to have a shot at getting things right.

This is not to diminish the significance of March 28. For one, it offers an opportunity to take the country back, if we can call it that, from an incumbent who is not known for being cerebral, and whose sheer maladroitness has come as a real shock to Nigerians, many of whom, it should be remembered, have been conditioned to expect a basic level of incompetence from their leaders. For another, there is a real chance to upstage the ruling People’s Democratic Party (PDP), winner by all means necessary of all presidential elections since 1999, if only for the symbolism of leveling the playing field and keeping honest a ruling coalition that, with the passing of every electoral cycle, grows in entitlement and diminishes in moral stature and social responsibility.

Yet, and not for the first time in Nigeria’s political history, the alternative is not so easy to embrace. Indeed, in matters of political substance and strategic vision, it is hardly an alternative at all. If, on the one hand, the incumbent, President Goodluck Jonathan seems incapable of communicating the most basic ideas about political goods and social justice without falling over, General Buhari on the other treats the past and any suggestion of moral reckoning as anathema. At a critical historical moment, therefore, when the yearning of millions of Nigerians for a leader of some distinction could not be more palpable, circumstances have conspired- once again- to saddle Nigeria with two perfectly unacceptable candidates.

Why does a nation in desperate need of bounty almost invariably have to be content with such thin gruel? How, for instance, does one account for President Goodluck Jonathan, complete with his flagrant intellectual limitations, in a country brimming with such extraordinary talent, both at home and in the diaspora? And why General Buhari (again!) thirty years after he laid waste to common decorum and decency, plunged the Fourth Estate into corporate misery, and oversaw arguably the most one-sided persecution of a political class in the history of postcolonial Africa?

There are no easy answers. But whatever explanations are advanced, there is no escaping the sober reality that Nigeria’s current fate is, shall we say, not a matter of coincidence, but a perfectly logical accumulation of the political ‘work’ that has been several decades in the making, and whose dynamic continues unabated. Nigerian scholars and scholars of Nigeria agree that these dynamics were incubated and unleashed long before the birth of Nigeria as an independent country in 1960. This means that any attempt to understand, say, Boko Haram’s medieval fury, the dissoluteness of the political class, the moral culpability of the theocratic elite, and the apparent impotence of the mass of the citizenry, must be cognizant of the layout of the Nigerian political arena, and its frustrating synthesis of constraints and possibilities.

Whether collectively or individually, the essays in this collection assume this analytic stance. While they take the March 28 elections as their immediate empirical provocation, each contribution is located within a broader ambiance of intellectual debates and conversations about the overall Nigerian political process. For example, Said Adejumobi, whilst immediately agitated about the threat the Boko Haram insurgency poses to the territorial integrity of the Nigerian state, is, in the long run, more worried about the Islamist group as a cipher for state failure in Nigeria. In his reading, Boko Haram offers a timely lens into problems of state incapacity, deterritorialization, and the diminution of state sovereignty, problems which increasingly confront states, and not just their postcolonial African variant. Perhaps finding little by way of substance, Akin Adesokan takes aim at President Jonathan’s style, and concludes, having mobilized several examples, that “The president’s style is to opt for the commonplace: do the needful, stretch nothing, be seen to have done what is necessary.” Should the president be held to account for this signal flaw? Adesokan has no doubt. After all, he (President Jonathan) “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.”

In grappling with the moral economy of power sharing as it affects the 2015 elections, Brandon Kendhammer attributes the relative stability of the Fourth Republic to the success of the ruling PDP in using “the incentive structures of Nigeria’s post-civil war power sharing systems to its advantage.” For him, “By adhering to a rigid but highly transparent system that rotated key positions and appointments across ethnic, regional, and religious lines, the PDP effectively monopolized access to the political resources necessary under the power sharing requirements to compete in national elections.” Kendhammer argues that whatever the outcome of these elections, the power sharing “big umbrella” formula perfected by the PDP is unlikely to lose its luster. Moses Ochonu’s essay thematically complements Kendhammer’s. Whilst Kendhammer is interested in accounting for the PDP’s tenacity despite its programmatic poverty, Ochonu offers a coruscating assessment of the oppositional landscape. Although he agrees with a majority of scholars that the PDP’s “cozy dalliance with corruption and the corrupt” may well be its undoing, Ochonu argues that the opposition All Progressive Congress (APC) forfeits what should have been a moral high ground by embracing “the pragmatic politically effective strategy of courting former members of the PDP and corrupt but influential political actors.”

Asonzeh Ukah’s contribution analyses the deeply troubling twinning of religion and politics in contemporary Nigeria, and the role of an increasingly powerful religious elite in politics and political claim-making. In the context of the struggle to win over what he calls a “Pentecostal electorate,” Ukah shows how “The power to religiously define Buhari and shape public perception of him has become an electoral resource for the ruling political party.” On the whole Ukah offers a succinct reminder of the pivotal, if destabilizing, role of religion in electoral engineering, and how, for desperate political candidates, “the ability to mobilize large congregants is an electoral resource.”

The March 28 presidential election features a northern Muslim candidate against a southern Christian minority incumbent, hence the enhanced role of religion against a general backdrop of pervasive Pentecotalization. But as Godwin Onuoha argues, (these) elections are also about other issues throbbing just below the surface. The example he addresses is Igbo politics and the, so far, elusive quest of the Igbo for presidential power. Onuoha contends that although the idea of “power rotation” is implicitly embedded in the structure of power relations within most political parties,” “the Igbos have not profited…in a manner that will enable them attain the highest office” in the land. Having provided a snapshot of the distinct phases in post-civil war Igbo politics, Onuoha concludes, very much against the grain, that “the Igbo Presidency Project and demand for incorporation is basically an invention of the Igbo faction of the ruling elite, and is not necessarily emancipatory.”

With the dominant focus of the majority of the contributions on ‘high politics,’ Rudi Gaudio’s emphasis on the realm of ‘low politics,’ the everyday domain where Nigerians of all stripes meet, hate and love, enacting quotidian dramas of selfhood in which the state is largely distinguished by its absence, is a crucial change of gear. For Gaudio, it is important to articulate these dramas, not just because they often confound scholarly hypotheses, but because they help to expose “simplifications that mask the nation’s actual problems, as well as its actual and potential synergies and opportunities.” While, all too often, divisions at the level of ‘high politics’ appear firmly set in stone, Gaudio provides an excellent portrait of a parallel universe in which political allegiances are fickle, not because people are incapable of loyalty, but because they feel connected and committed to one another as human beings first and foremost.

This collection is, if nothing else, an intellectual tribute to this ecumenical spirit. It registers the fervent desire by Nigerians to live and work together in harmony, and to create and nourish a properly democratic space where all can enjoy a sense of belonging. That spirit endures, over and above the overpowering din of a single election, and the problems that appear to smother it and hinder its flourishing will have to be engaged, long after a winner and a loser has emerged.

But how will this engagement be done, and through what forms of agency? One answer to the first part of the question is that this will have to involve exactly the same kind of trans-ethnic and pan-religious sensibility that, Gaudio reassures us, is already a fact of life across various Nigerian communities. The power of such a coalition was in robust evidence in January 2012 when the Occupy movement, galvanized by a combination of local disaffection and external example, extracted concrete concessions from the Jonathan government. The problem with Occupy, as with similar examples of spontaneous people power in Nigerian history with which it invites comparison, is that the original rage is hardly ever canalized into enduring civic institutions.

For that to change—and here we come to the second part of the question—a conscious effort must be made, mustering the country’s considerable human capital at home and in the diaspora- to build alternative structures of political engagement. Primarily, such structures will provide a focal point for those who wish to influence the system without being necessarily involved in the pull and shove of everyday politics. In the long run though, they, i.e. the structures, will serve as generators of socially usable ideas for a country badly in need of them.

If, ultimately, the essays here are adjudged as preparing the groundwork for this kind of alternative politics, they will have fulfilled their objective.