Sean Jacobs's Blog, page 364

Why in 2015 would the New York Times want to recycle Paul Bowles’ racist fantasies of Morocco?

“The temperature was easily 90 degrees as Mohamed wrapped my head with a long blue chech…” begins a recent New York Times travel piece on Morocco by Paris-based journalist Seth Sherwood. Just a few paragraphs in, Sherwood reverently cites Paul Bowles, the American expatriate writer who dominates Western literary imagination of Morocco. Sherwood cites Bowles to set up a passage about the “silence” of the Sahara as the entry point for his narrative. Throughout the piece, it is as though the Morocco Bowles wrote about decades ago was frozen in time and place. “At nearly every stop,” writes Sherwood, “I encountered the ghost of Bowles himself.” He even openly discloses to a local that he came to Morocco only because of Bowles’ novel The Sheltering Sky.

The Saharan winds first blew through my life 20 years ago when I was in graduate school. They stirred from the pages of “The Sheltering Sky,” Paul Bowles’s existential 1940s novel of the unraveling lives of three Americans traveling in the North African desert … In the succeeding years, I nurtured the same dream as the sheltered mountain girls whose tale forms the thematic filament of “The Sheltering Sky”: to visit the desert, to climb the highest dune, to drink tea in the Sahara.

Since around World War II, Morocco became the window into the “Orient” in the dominant American discourse, which translated into other forms of knowledge production, including literature. Brian Edwards argues, “Since the late nineteenth century, the Maghreb has been one of the most familiar locations of the American exotic and one of the places to which filmmakers and novelists turned often for tales of ‘Oriental’ splendor and decadence.” 

Bowles is no fresh voice: he first traveled to Morocco in the 1930s, before returning to the country in 1947 and deciding to settle there as a long-term resident, years before Morocco would gain independence from France. After Morocco attained independence, Bowles became the most prominent US citizen living in Morocco, and someone whose statements were widely circulated and repeated as insight.  In his New York Times travel piece, Sherwood misses a unique opportunity to critique and juxtapose Bowles’ construction of Morocco during the late twentieth century with the Morocco of today.

In his writings, Bowles recycled a number of Cold War and racist tropes about Morocco; whether politics (gullible to Soviet Communism) or hygiene (“The Moroccan, educated or otherwise, simply does not believe in germs”), among others, so it is shocking to see him uncritically act as lodestar for Sherwood.

Instead, Sherwood perpetuates Bowles’ fantasy of Morocco by recycling old clichés and treating Morocco and its inhabitants as if the only major change that took place over the past few decades is a greater Hollywood presence (Morocco is a sought after stand-in movie location) and a wider gastronomical selection in restaurants. Rather than letting the Morocco that was and is guide Sherwood, he spends his time actively seeking the Morocco that existed in Bowles’ mind and writings.

And much like Bowles’ own writings were widely circulated, Sherwood uses the New York Times as a platform to reduce Morocco to a “kaleidoscope of centuries-old souks, dusty colonial-era outposts, livestock markets, and luxury restaurants.” Besides this massive historical abbreviation, he highlights a town where he “found a strange cinematic world of biblical episodes, Buddhist masters and James Bond villains.” And there, Morocco is confounded, both in space and time, to nothing more than a reification of the distant past and the hyper-reality of Hollywood productions.

Sherwood’s slightest attempts at nuance are also lost in the factual blunders, such as his conflation between djellabas and caftans. For example, he describes “Berbers” as “the fair-skinned inhabitants of North Africa who predate the seventh-century Arab invaders and still compose most of southern Morocco’s population.” While it has been widely agreed upon that the term “Berbers” is derogatory and Amazigh is the more accepted term to identify the indigenous inhabitants of North Africa, the racial description of Imazighen as “fair-skinned” is flat out wrong and racist. This statement completely disregards the history and presence of black Imazighen who have not only inhabited Morocco for centuries but the whole region, including Mauritania, Western Sahara, Mali, Algeria, Libya, and Tunisia.

Finally, the Orientalist fixation on the desert is a major theme in Bowles’ writing, something that Sherwood constantly cites as a reference. Bowles wrote in Travels: “The Sahara is a continent within a continent – a skeleton, if you like, but still a separate entity from the rest of Africa which surrounds it (126).” The characterization of the desert as a “separate entity” attempts to delineate non-existent rigid borders and transcribe an abstract Orientalist imagination unto reality, which resonates with General Lyautey’s colonial urban planning policies in Morocco’s major cities.

The most worrying aspect of Sherwood’s piece is that even in 2015, years after Bowles’ racist and Orientalist quips have been published he remains a source and guiding voice for travelers to Morocco.  That and that the New York Times thought it would be okay publishing this sort of thing.

Why aren’t Africans living on the continent part of the UN’s “International Decade for People of African Descent?”

The UN has named 2015-2024 the International Decade for People of African Descent: Recognition, Justice, and Development , to recognize “that people of African descent represent a distinct group whose human rights must be promoted and protected.” In so doing, the UN follows in the footsteps of black internationalists who, over the last hundred years, have leveraged international laws and supranational institutions to protect people of African descent the world over. What sets the Decades project apart from this tradition, however, is that it excludes continental Africans from those people of ‘African descent’ it pledges to promote. This is especially ironic, because continental peoples of ‘African descent’ have a long tradition of living with and advocating through international institutions like the UN.

Black activists, lawyers, intellectuals, and everyday people in Africa and throughout the Diaspora have long used international bodies to protest against systems of racial, political and economic discrimination: W. E. B. DuBois, on behalf of the Pan-African Congress to the Versailles Peace Conference in 1919. Marcus Garvey, on behalf of United Negro Improvement Assocation, to the League of Nations in 1924. Joseph Bell, on behalf of the Duala of Cameroon, to the League of Nations in 1926. Kue Agbota Gaba, on behalf of the Anecho of Togo, to the League of Nations in 1931. Haile Selassie, on behalf of Ethiopia , at the League of Nations in 1936. W. E. B. DuBois, this time on behalf of the NAACP petitioning for African Americans, to the UN General Assembly in 1947. Paul Robeson, on behalf of the Civil Rights Congress petitioning for African Americans, to the UN General Assembly in 1951. Mrs. Lydia Dopo, on behalf of women farmers of Cameroon, to the UN Trusteeship Council in 1954. Lesley McFadden and Michael Brown, Sr., on behalf of the Ferguson community of St. Louis, Missouri, to the UN Committee Against Torture in 2014.

Ralph Bunche, the first African American to earn a PhD in Political Science at Harvard University in 1934, was the one most committed, professionally and politically, to championing change, redress and justice for Africans and descendants of Africa through international institutions. Bunche’s dissertation compared the French colonial administration of Dahomey with that of the neighboring League of Nations mandate territory, French Togoland. Bunche concluded that the administrations of French Togoland and Dahomey were nearly the same, despite the fact that the Mandate system had been designed to do to bring these territories into the “family of nations” as sovereign states. He identified three primary problems: the League’s supervisory Permanent Mandates Commission lacked oversight; the inhabitants of mandate territories had no possibility to participate in their administration; and the French, British, Belgian, and South African administrations were not held accountable.

Thirteen years later, Bunche drew on this analysis  in his contributions to the drafting of the UN Charter and as leader ofthe UN trusteeship system. That system built participation, oversight and accountability into the Trusteeship Council’s structure in a way that Bunch believed would ensure trust territory inhabitants’ preparation for self-governance. The Trusteeship Agreements signed between territorial administrators and the UN would be legally binding, allowing for international intervention in the event of their violation. The UN would send Visiting Missions into the trust territories to verify that administrative practices were compatible with the UN Charter. The trusteeship system would give voice to inhabitants to petition the UN directly unlike in the era of the League. And petition they did – in the thousands. But oversight and accountability still remained a problem. In all of Africa’s trust territories, the administering authorities – France, Great Britain, Belgium, Italy, and South Africa – violated the Trusteeship Agreements, and the UN was unable to enforce what should have been the most implementable system of supranational governance ever conceived.

The story of Ralph Bunche serves as a reminder that, while the black internationalist tradition is not hegemonic, fixed, or unidirectional,  it has historically rested upon the inclusion  continental Africans.

Since the publication, in 1915, of Du Bois’s The Negroes, , which mapped the “Distribution of Negro Blood, Ancient and Modern,” Africans have been understood as integral  to the black international community on whose behalf activists have lobbied.  Yet continental Africans are decidedly absent from the International Decade of People of African Descent as the UN portrays it on its website.  Absent, too, is another characteristic of the black internationalist tradition: the retrieval of an African history before the Trans-Atlantic slave trade. The Decade project begins with the story of the enslaved en route to and in the New World. The unstated yet apparent separation of Africa-descended populations from their ancestral homeland – past and present – is a faultline in the project. I think Ralph Bunche would find this curious, to say the least.

To be sure, there are aspects of the Decade that a pragmatist such as Bunche might applaud. While much of it is legally un-implementable, as are most UN projects, it does prescribe comprehensive reviews of domestic legislation in order to abolish provisions that entail discrimination against people of African descent; it strengthens national mechanisms to implement policies to combat racism; and it pledges to gather information to monitor the situation of people of African descent. While the dedication of the International Decade of Peoples of African Descent, like the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, is not legally binding, it offers a blueprint for activists – and that blueprint, like the Trusteeship System that Bunche designed, is founded on participation, oversight, and the ongoing need to hold member states accountable for their treatment of people of African descent. Would that African member states and their citizens were imagined as participants in  the achievement of these laudable goals.

Are Corporations Colonizing the UN?

One of the UN’s challenges in the coming months is to ensure that the new global development agenda –the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) –- singles out the best priorities to guide trillions of development dollars over the next fifteen years.

One priority, as recently reported by The Guardian, concerns the role of businesses in solving poverty. Paloma Durán, head of the UN’s Sustainable Development Fund, explained why the UN is bent on freeing up some seats for corporations at the development table over the next fifteen years. According to Durán, it’s not just about attracting their cash to finance the implementation of the SDGs; the UN wants the corporate sector to get involved in every stage of development; from policy creation to the implementation (and undoubtedly, albeit not mentioned, evaluation) of programs. Durán’s wish to grant businesses more power in the SDGs follows leadership by UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon, who has expressed his support for private sector partnerships many times, as early as 2007. Evidence of this trend can be found in recently released UN documents like this, this, this and this.

Corporations, these texts tell us, have come to realize that promoting global equality is in their own interest and is also ‘the right thing’ to do. One way to tap this partnership potential, the logic goes, is to engage corporations more closely in training and educating people who live in poverty, particularly those who are young and unemployed. In other words, the route to equality for low-income youth is to fuel the dominant capitalist market.

The logic undergirding this call for business-focused education initiatives is that to fight poverty and youth unemployment, young people need skills to either find jobs in the private sector or become self-sufficient entrepreneurs. It’s not a new idea. Corporate partnerships with educational ministries and institutions have proliferated over the past few years. Examples are Pricewater House Cooper’s program to integrate financial literacy and entrepreneurship in Belize’s public school curriculum and JP.Morgan’s partnerships with Education Ministries in Saudi-Arabia, Egypt, Lebanon and Bahrain. According to this book, the World Economic Forum, The World Bank and consulting corporations such as Booz Allen and McKinsey are also working with educational institutions to make curricula more business-friendly. Financial literacy and entrepreneurship training programs, similarly envisioned as cures for unemployment, have bourgeoned. Some examples are the US Government’s Young African Leaders Program, the World Bank’s Youth Entrepreneurship Programs, the ILO’s Women Entrepreneurship Programme, Nike’s Girl Effect programs , Mastercard’s financial literacy programs and IPA’s savings classes in Uganda.

All of these programs operate with the same conviction: that poor young people are capable of making the system work for them (without, say, expecting support, entitlements, accountability or public sector jobs from their governments), if they only learn how to save, access credit and connect themselves with financial institutions.

Now, apart from the fact that saving skills are rather futile without an income, and credit should only be encouraged with some sort of governmental safety net, the UN is right; financial literacy, credit, and entrepreneurial trainings hold transformative potential for those who want to pursue business. (Nevermind those young African entrepreneurs who –mistaken for illegal immigrants- were blocked from attending Silicon Valley conferences.)

But young people should also have the option to learn a more critical type of literacy (proposed by education scholars such as Chris Arthur) that would enable them to reflect on the current economic system and global production and trade relations more broadly. What current business-led education efforts promote are not just skills, but also ideology; the neo-liberal belief system (some call it market fundamentalism) that naturalizes capitalism, mystifies alternatives and renders all other professions or ambitions (especially those that may lead to questioning power norms and issues of justice) less relevant. If market-focused empowerment becomes the norm in development, who will want to learn about politics, research, art – or find out why their countries are poor in the first place?

“The Wizard of Zim”–a film about meeting Robert Mugabe

When South African filmmaker Samora Sekhukhune asked her father what he wanted for his 70th birthday, he replied, “I want to meet President Robert Mugabe”.

Amused at first, Sekhukhune realised that she did not know much about her father, who saw, in the controversial leader, a reflection of African ancestors fighting for their land. Her father’s perception, radically different from how the president of 35 years is represented in mainstream media, prompted the filmmaker to think, not only about what she considers to be one-sided representations of Mugabe, but also of African fathers as authoritarian and abusive.

And so it came that she identified the birthday as an opportunity to impress her father by making his wish come true, and to delve further into the complexities of their relationship, as well as that between mainstream media and ordinary people.

More times than she Sekhukhune can remember, people have urged her to “show both sides of the story”. “I think we have seen ‘the other side’ already, and it doesn’t strike me as very balanced”, she says, and continues, “I want to put forward a fresh viewpoint, both about the land reforms and about how African families are portrayed”.

“A quirky yet thought-provoking road movie” is how Samora describes her documentary, which she calls Wizard of Zim. Despite still being a work in progress, it has enjoyed plenty of recognition and support. Samora was a Hot Docs Blue Ice Fellow last year, received development funding from South Africa’s National Film and Video Foundation and has won pitching competitions hosted by Zimbabwe International Film Festival.

The filmmaking process, Samora says, is as a continuation of a relationship she has had with her father for decades. “We’ve always discussed politics, and now we’ll do it on camera.”

The advantage of filming a close family member, the director/daughter reckons, is that her access to exclusive background information will allow her to dig deeper. On the flip side, she will have to guard against being too protective of her subject. “Remember,” she says, “every documentary is actually about the filmmaker in some way, and when the relationship between filmmaker and subject is this close, the fear of pursuing uncomfortable ground can have an inhibiting effect.”

It is in February that Samora and her father will leave Limpopo, South Africa to meet Mugabe in Zimbabwe. While the recent word from the Presidency confirming the appointment was a relief, it quickly became a source of concern as well. “The challenge I’m currently facing, with the visit only a couple of weeks away, is really about timing. We will receive financial support from other funders and broadcasters, but those things take time that we don’t have right now.”

So Samora Sekhukhune decided to do what every self-respecting filmmaker – first-time filmmakers as well as experienced ones, like the Coen Brothers and Spike Lee – would do in the same situation. To beg! If you want to learn more and perhaps even help her out, visit the film’s Facebook-page.

Maybe-meeting Mugabe, a quirky film in progress

When South African filmmaker Samora Sekhukhune asked her father what he wanted for his 70th birthday, he replied, “I want to meet President Robert Mugabe”.

Amused at first, Sekhukhune realised that she did not know much about her father, who saw, in the controversial leader, a reflection of African ancestors fighting for their land. Her father’s perception, radically different from how the president of 35 years is represented in mainstream media, prompted the filmmaker to think, not only about what she considers to be one-sided representations of Mugabe, but also of African fathers as authoritarian and abusive.

And so it came that she identified the birthday as an opportunity to impress her father by making his wish come true, and to delve further into the complexities of their relationship, as well as that between mainstream media and ordinary people.

More times than she Sekhukhune can remember, people have urged her to “show both sides of the story”. “I think we have seen ‘the other side’ already, and it doesn’t strike me as very balanced”, she says, and continues, “I want to put forward a fresh viewpoint, both about the land reforms and about how African families are portrayed”.

“A quirky yet thought-provoking road movie” is how Samora describes her documentary, which she calls Wizard of Zim. Despite still being a work in progress, it has enjoyed plenty of recognition and support. Samora was a Hot Docs Blue Ice Fellow last year, received development funding from South Africa’s National Film and Video Foundation and has won pitching competitions hosted by Zimbabwe International Film Festival.

The filmmaking process, Samora says, is as a continuation of a relationship she has had with her father for decades. “We’ve always discussed politics, and now we’ll do it on camera.”

The advantage of filming a close family member, the director/daughter reckons, is that her access to exclusive background information will allow her to dig deeper. On the flip side, she will have to guard against being too protective of her subject. “Remember,” she says, “every documentary is actually about the filmmaker in some way, and when the relationship between filmmaker and subject is this close, the fear of pursuing uncomfortable ground can have an inhibiting effect.”

It is in February that Samora and her father will leave Limpopo, South Africa to meet Mugabe in Zimbabwe. While the recent word from the Presidency confirming the appointment was a relief, it quickly became a source of concern as well. “The challenge I’m currently facing, with the visit only a couple of weeks away, is really about timing. We will receive financial support from other funders and broadcasters, but those things take time that we don’t have right now.”

So Samora Sekhukhune decided to do what every self-respecting filmmaker – first-time filmmakers as well as experienced ones, like the Coen Brothers and Spike Lee – would do in the same situation. To beg! If you want to learn more and perhaps even help her out, visit the film’s Facebook-page.

Abderrahmane Sissako’s Oscar nominated ‘Timbuktu’ transcends the present

Timbuktu, a new film from acclaimed Mauritanian director Abderrahmane Sissako has won a  string of international awards , is nominated for a foreign-language Oscar, and is a firm favorite to take the best film award at FESPACO . We decided to publish a few reviews of this momentous film. This is the second review we’ve published on the film. The first was by Andrew Hernann. 

Early on in Abderrahmane Sissako’s Timbuktu, a jihadist gets off a motorcycle in a city street and announces over a loudspeaker that from now on smoking is forbidden, music is haram, and women must cover up. The jihadists have taken over, and life is about to change for Timbuktu’s inhabitants. The rest of the film traces the way in which those words become a deadly reality. At the center of the film is Kidane (played by Ibrahim Ahmed), a Tuareg herdsman who gets caught up, along with his family, in the jihadists’ net after a fatal accident by the river one day.

Timbuktu is the first film by an African-born black filmmaker to be nominated for the best foreign language film Oscar in this year’s Academy Awards. Its director, Sissako, who is half-Mauritanian and half-Malian, was inspired to make the film after the real-life takeover of Timbuktu by Ansar Dine, a jihadist group that briefly occupied the famed ancient city in Mali in 2012.

In the wake of the Boko Haram massacre in Nigeria and the Charlie Hebdo terrorist attacks in Paris in recent times, the film is relevant to the present moment for obvious reasons. But Sissako’s achievement transcends the present moment.

For one thing, it’s a film that makes magic out of the stark landscape of the desert, and its visual symbolism—from the image of dust rising out of the mouth of an indigenous figurine shot up by jihadists to a wide shot of Kidane crossing a river not only to the other bank, but into a new, tragic fate—is both beautiful and provocative.

“Timbuktu” is not without its flaws; certain scenes drag, and some of the actors are more convincing than others. The plot moves abruptly at times, but the film more than makes up for these flaws through its visual shrewdness.

Perhaps the most stunning scene in the film is the one depicting a football game. The jihadists ban sports in the town and balls are confiscated. Still, the town’s young men get together to play a football game—with an invisible ball. It’s a scene that perfectly captures, as some critics have noted, the absurdity of the jihadists’ project. More than that, it’s a beautiful vision of resistance.

The film is also impressive in its multilingualism. Bambara, Tamasheq, French, Arabic and English are all spoken by the characters. The relationship between language and religion is important; just as the film presents multiple versions of Islam, so the multiple languages remind us that the religion can’t be reduced to one viewpoint, one cultural or personal perspective. Long scenes depict characters translating to, or for, other characters. Sometimes a character translating will misinterpret or change the speaker’s original words. At other times characters are unable to understand one other. “Your Arabic is terrible,” a senior jihadist tells one of his juniors. “Speak in English.” This in itself gets at the heart of the battle over Islam, which is a battle over translation or interpretation. How do the jihadists translate this religion? How do the millions of ordinary Muslims who live and breathe Islam on a daily basis translate it? Is there one interpretation that’s more valid than the rest?

What is refreshing is that Westerners—and Westerners’ views on Islam—are notably side-lined in this film. “Timbuktu” shows us Muslim characters grappling with Islam. In a Q&A after a screening of the film at the Film Forum in New York on February 7th, Sissako made the point that it’s necessary for Muslims to engage in more debate within their own communities about the religion. The film dramatizes this idea. The imam of the local mosque argues over the meaning of jihad with the newly-arrived fundamentalists; two jihadists disagree about whether Kidane, the hero, is a good Muslim; a woman fish-seller confronts the “Islamic Police” about the impracticalities of their injunction that women wear gloves. She’s fish-seller: how can she wash her fish with gloves on?

The film has been criticized by some for “humanizing” the jihadists. After the Charlie Hebdo attacks one mayor of a Paris suburb went so far as to ban it from cinemas (though he later backpedalled). But the representation of the jihadists is not that simple. Visually, the jihadists are often presented as shadowy figures, lurking on rooftops, stalking alleyways, bursting in on the privacy of people’s homes: spooks in the night. But these shots of dark, gun-wielding spooks are contrasted with the close-ups that we get of their faces, of their wrinkles, eyes, smiles. There are two sides to the coin. The spooks who stone a woman and a man to death for adultery are the same people who can be charming and funny and charismatic.

The film’s most subversive achievement is not that it humanizes the jihadists, but that it humanizes all Muslims. There is no one monolithic Islam and no one monolithic Muslim identity. This may seem self-evident, but it’s a fact that’s often forgotten in the “clash of civilizations” rhetoric used to talk about Islam and terrorism post-9/11.

“Timbuktu” is a testament to what art does best, treading the line between the universal and the specific. The film gives us a universal vision of Islam, which is also specific, particular to the individual stories and characters that it depicts. We can only begin to have a broader picture of the religion through those individual stories, and it is stories like these which make any easy generalization impossible.

Are quirky white people with thriving, trendy careers in New York City, the only ones to find love?

Having grown up in a Yoruba home, I know first hand that the ideas of affection and romance that are seen in run-of-the-mill western sitcoms is more foreign than bug-eyed green men from Mars. For most Nigerian parents, love and affection are hardly ever shown with the traditional actions that come to mind when these words are brought up, but instead are presented in the form of accolades for good grades (because there’s no such thing as great grades in Nigerian homes) and accomplishments; even the dreaded scolding, equip with comparisons to other children and cousins, is to be interpreted as affection.

While our parents and elders believed that their constant berating was affection, we knew that there was more to it. Could it be that only quirky white people with thriving trendy careers in New York City were the only ones who could find love? Or were we exempt because we weren’t the sassy African American women with trust issues that would soon find her Morris Chestnut-Esq lover at a black professional mixer? Was that kind of love for the average Yoruba girl or was it something that had to be purchased in the form of lavish weddings and expensive foreign homes?

I did not grow up in Nigeria, I grew up in Brooklyn, New York in a very Nigerian home where a week did not go by without white rice and stew for lunch, and Christmas was impossible without jollof rice and goat meat. Growing up with a single mom, I quickly learned that for Nigerian women, love had very much to do with who snags who up first. There is very little care for romance as long as a woman could brag that she had a husband or a boyfriend or even some small boy that keeps bothering her to let him court her. I remember being a teenager in church, looking at the old married couples who behaved more like roommates than they did soul mates and thinking, “why bother?” My only ideas of love came from the glimpses of my mom’s romance novels with covers donned with a gorgeously sculpted white man with luscious hair, clutching an unbelievably gorgeous white woman to his chest as his rippling muscles protrude under the title.

Needless to say that my idea, and that of many of my African contemporaries, of romance is a bit warped. We have had very little exposure to any literature that had any characters that even slightly resemble us Instead, they were filled with European romantics committing suicide, incest and a host of other debaucheries in the name of love. And of course, not knowing anything better, we gobbled it up like fried rice at a 50th birthday (there’s nothing like it). So it’s pretty obvious that we, the African youth, are very much in the need of romantic literature that we can actually see ourselves in. Enters, Ankara Press.

The beautifully written pieces by these women that look like me and my mother and my cousins and the countless African youths wondering what romance is, are more than a breath of fresh air. These novels tell stories that vividly bring Nigeria to life, at a time when it may seem like it is imploding and withering away, and show that romance lives, no, thrives in the streets of Nigeria. A spark lit up in me as my mind was filled with amalgamated images of the Nigeria I remember and the Nigeria I see in Nollywood movies. I fell in love with characters in a way that I had never done before because these characters were so close to me. The stories of these novels are making African romance more than something that is hooked up by nosy church aunties who are scared that your time will soon pass. They present an alternative way of thinking that none of us probably thought was possible. However, my new crush Dominic, from Amara Okolo’s Black Sparkle Romance elegantly put it into words when he said “live free… Life is too short to bother about work alone…there are many beautiful things to see and enjoy” (39). Our parents have made work and success the bane of our existence by making their accolades and scoldings the only forms of affection we’ve ever known. But believe it or not, there is more affection in the world than that and it can easily be found in the beautiful novels of Ankara Press.

Are quirky white people with thriving trendy careers in New York City, the only ones to find love?

Having grown up in a Yoruba home, I know first hand that the ideas of affection and romance that are seen in run-of-the-mill western sitcoms is more foreign than bug-eyed green men from Mars. For most Nigerian parents, love and affection are hardly ever shown with the traditional actions that come to mind when these words are brought up, but instead are presented in the form of accolades for good grades (because there’s no such thing as great grades in Nigerian homes) and accomplishments; even the dreaded scolding, equip with comparisons to other children and cousins, is to be interpreted as affection.

While our parents and elders believed that their constant berating was affection, we knew that there was more to it. Could it be that only quirky white people with thriving trendy careers in New York City were the only ones who could find love? Or were we exempt because we weren’t the sassy African American women with trust issues that would soon find her Morris Chestnut-Esq lover at a black professional mixer? Was that kind of love for the average Yoruba girl or was it something that had to be purchased in the form of lavish weddings and expensive foreign homes?

I did not grow up in Nigeria, I grew up in Brooklyn, New York in a very Nigerian home where a week did not go by without white rice and stew for lunch, and Christmas was impossible without jollof rice and goat meat. Growing up with a single mom, I quickly learned that for Nigerian women, love had very much to do with who snags who up first. There is very little care for romance as long as a woman could brag that she had a husband or a boyfriend or even some small boy that keeps bothering her to let him court her. I remember being a teenager in church, looking at the old married couples who behaved more like roommates than they did soul mates and thinking, “why bother?” My only ideas of love came from the glimpses of my mom’s romance novels with covers donned with a gorgeously sculpted white man with luscious hair, clutching an unbelievably gorgeous white woman to his chest as his rippling muscles protrude under the title.

Needless to say that my idea, and that of many of my African contemporaries, of romance is a bit warped. We have had very little exposure to any literature that had any characters that even slightly resemble us Instead, they were filled with European romantics committing suicide, incest and a host of other debaucheries in the name of love. And of course, not knowing anything better, we gobbled it up like fried rice at a 50th birthday (there’s nothing like it). So it’s pretty obvious that we, the African youth, are very much in the need of romantic literature that we can actually see ourselves in. Enters, Ankara Press.

The beautifully written pieces by these women that look like me and my mother and my cousins and the countless African youths wondering what romance is, are more than a breath of fresh air. These novels tell stories that vividly bring Nigeria to life, at a time when it may seem like it is imploding and withering away, and show that romance lives, no, thrives in the streets of Nigeria. A spark lit up in me as my mind was filled with amalgamated images of the Nigeria I remember and the Nigeria I see in Nollywood movies. I fell in love with characters in a way that I had never done before because these characters were so close to me. The stories of these novels are making African romance more than something that is hooked up by nosy church aunties who are scared that your time will soon pass. They present an alternative way of thinking that none of us probably thought was possible. However, my new crush Dominic, from Amara Okolo’s Black Sparkle Romance elegantly put it into words when he said “live free… Life is too short to bother about work alone…there are many beautiful things to see and enjoy” (39). Our parents have made work and success the bane of our existence by making their accolades and scoldings the only forms of affection we’ve ever known. But believe it or not, there is more affection in the world than that and it can easily be found in the beautiful novels of Ankara Press.

The average person in Kampala knows a lot about the Canadian Prairies

I used to find some consolation in the fact that the average person in Kampala knows much more about North America than I knew about east Africa for most of my life.

“Which part of Canada are you from? The Prairies? Or from out east, near Toronto?” is a regular question. “Can you really go to the doctor for free in Canada?” my neighbor’s 7-year old daughter asked me yesterday. And Sam, a local boda driver’s self-appointed mission is to educate me on the gamut of Canadian music after deeming my knowledge on the topic to be painfully insufficient. (To date, our playlist on the drive to work has ranged from Joni Mitchell to Broken Social Scene.)

These kinds of interactions led me to initially believe that contrary to prevailing ideas about “the state of education in Africa,” Uganda’s education system and media were far superior to those back home, which regularly feature such riveting and politically important issues as local owl sightings.

But when you delve into why the Canadian Prairies receive as much attention as the Sahel in geography class here, a number of troubling explanations emerge. The first is an out-dated school curriculum shaped by the legacies of colonialism and its buddy, Eurocentrism (encompassing North America).

Although some efforts have been made to “decolonize” the primary school syllabus, the secondary school curriculum has stagnated for decades. As the head of secondary education at the National Curriculum Development Centre rightfully states, “we still talk of the prairies of Canada. This is outdated. We need to localise.” A reform process has been underway since 2012 to make the curriculum more relevant, but it is unlikely to be implemented until at least 2016.

Added to this is the formal classroom-based education system itself being a colonial inheritance, which many critics argue was and still is unsuited to local cultures, values, and livelihoods. For example, while agriculture still employs the majority of the population, it is only an optional course in most secondary schools, and remains highly theoretical. The proof? The highest grades in agriculture are achieved in schools which have no teaching gardens.

In Uganda, where 78% of the population is under the age of 30, an educational system which equips graduates with employable skills is vital requirement – but is far from the current reality. Eunice, a geography teacher in one of Kampala’s public secondary schools, explains: “what we teach in schools – and how we teach it – does not give students concrete skills or knowledge which they can use in jobs. And companies know this, so they do not hire young people, preferring those with actual work experience.” This is certainly one reason why the current youth unemployment rate stands at a whopping 64%.

The lack of employment opportunities is closely tied to the second explanation for the average person in Kampala being well-versed about “the West”: the desire to emigrate there, driven by a vision of the West as a “fantastic cosmopolis” of economic opportunity and freedom. This is of course fed by large-scale imports into east Africa of Western culture and ideas, ranging from American television and pop culture to economic aid.

The current obsession with the West stands in stark contrast to the days following independence in the 1960s, when Uganda was considered not only to have a better education system than its neighbors, but was also a hub for the pan-Africanism and African intellectualism movements. But dictatorship, first by Amin and then Museveni, crushed critical intellectual voices at the same time as opening the door to neo-colonialism by the West: after all, it was institutions such as the World Bank and the IMF who were keen to see their visions of “an educated Africa” realized were the ones who provided the resources to build the current educational system. And although President Museveni might not have agreed with this vision, he certainly was not going to object and ruin his long-standing mutual love affair with Western donors.

As a result, Ugandans today are confronted by a cultural and political paradigm which pushes a preference for Western lives and lifestyles from multiple angles. Of course, this comes at the unmeasured cost of all of the history, art, debate and news from Uganda – and Africa more widely – which remain un-recorded, un-published, un-taught, un-learned, and un-discussed.

I hate SPUR!

I hate SPUR! Assuming that there are those who do not know, SPUR Steak Ranches is a restaurant chain themed around Native North American culture very popular in South Africa. Its branches have names such as ‘Texas Spur’, ‘Red Hawk Spur’, ‘Silver Mountain Spur’ etc.

The idea being to give you an authentic Native American experience through its menu that consists of spicy beef strips, calamari, nachos Mexicana, cheesy chicken quesadillas. If you feel like a warrior you can take on their famous pork ribs and a variety of steaks. There is even a “secret tribe” your child can join and enjoy various benefits like a birthday meal and a free soda every time you visit one of their franchises. As you can see nothing about SPUR is Native North American except for its use of a Native American chief-like figure on its logo and Native American-esque names and themes. In truth, rather than Native American experience or culture, the imagery used by SPUR is that of the frontier US West and Southwest. Spurs are what cowboys wore and it was the conquest of Native American land, the making them subaltern, which is subsumed in the image of the Native American warrior image in the brand (a brand also largely of Hollywood’s making).

It’s disgusting. An entire people with multiple histories of struggle, multiple ethnic groups with unique lifestyles, languages, cultural symbols and social systems are used to sell chicken-schnitzels.

The erasure of black and other minorities through the removal of cultural meaning and rendering of cultural symbols into one dimensional products or dumbification through commercialization is a staple of the corporate world. However, this racist cultural appropriation by corporations in their advertising is something we rarely explore in South Africa. By erasure I don’t mean absence, I mean symbolic annihilation. Symbolic annihilation is the process of erasure under or misrepresentation of some group of people in the media, this is usually based on race, socio-economic status or religion. A particularly egregious form is erasure through the portrayal of harmful stereotypes and/or invisibilisation through the reduction of history and culture into products or commodities that are then used for profit. This form of erasure is astoundingly offensive as it minimises entire histories and cultures rich with meaning and legacy, rendering them one-dimensional caricatures.  This is by no means incidental but part of a system which is inherently racist and which maintains inequality through locating and concentrating privilege in whiteness. Wealth enables those at the top of the hierarchy to continue this system of racial inequality by recreating and perpetuating images of minorities that confirm ideas justifying oppression.

This makes sense of course, if an oppressor can maintain the idea that those they oppress are deserving of their oppression then it becomes difficult for the oppressed to mobilise against them. It reallocates the blame onto the oppressed and allows the oppressor to take comfort in the idea that their privilege is deserved. A collorary is that it allows the oppressor to engender a seraphic image of themselves in the imagination of the oppressed. Centring only them as capable of expressing complexity – a central aspect of being human. The act of dehumanization needs a parallel act of humanization in order to root its legitimacy.

Junot Diaz, author of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao articulates it best when he says “if you want to make a human being a monster, deny them, at the cultural level, any reflection of themselves.” You might be inclined to dismiss this as “only advertising.” But the advertising world is particularly dogmatic in its insistence on being present in every aspect of our lives. You cannot opt out, you have no choice whether you see them or not – this is precisely their goal.

The images we see are symptomatic of the capitalist-racist culture of South Africa. In such a society everything is a potential product, everything can be commodified. Nothing must stand in the way of the drive towards wealth accumulation.

Within the South African context, we see this in the imagery of dancing, happy blacks in adverts and the use of singular cultural representations. For instance, a particular vernacular word such as AYOBA or a textile design such astraditional prints.Cultural icons as marking gimmicks either to speak to the ‘emerging markets’ or act to spice up high end designs. The latter example uses a cultural symbol in order to add ‘authenticity’ to a product in order to make its target – white people – feel they are part of the rainbow nation. This creates a sense of cultural cohesion where there is none. SPUR Steak Ranches is a great example of this. A beautiful composite of capitalist-racist cultural mis/appropriation, it is truly disgusting and South Africans love it. The joy South Africans take in U.S. racist tropes and cowboy dramas displaces the hard work of dealing with our own racist past.

Perhaps I disagree with Diaz slightly, to render a people monsters on a cultural level, deprivation of cultural reflections is not through denial alone but through symbolic detachment – caricaturising them and making them complicit in it. It is to invisibilize and caricature them to an extent where their annihilation becomes their pleasure. In the case of Spur, this happens for South Africans at one remove, in another place’s history. It is also, increasingly, happens as a form of abstraction.

Racism is disconnected from the body. Complicity then is about the pleasures of consumption, some purported equality in the marketplace. Previously racist-capitalism was focused directly on the black body and mind as the primary sites of violence and/or exploited labour now that that avenue is unavailable it has morphed.  Racist cultural appropriation has slipped into the daily routines of normalcy and sediment into our cultural psych. The normalcy of racist mis/appropriation has made us complicit in our continued oppression. It is important we are constantly critical of the things we consume and patronise in South Africa.

Of course SPUR is not the only one to do this, OUTsurance did it with Ashley Taylor, who can forget “All Zee flavours Mochachos” offers and retailer Woolworths has a TV advert, a tribute to Nelson Mandela, with blacks singing ‘Asimbonanga.’ BTW, I love when black people sing; I have enjoyed church songs even though I am a reluctant atheist but the imagery of black workers singing whilst an appreciative white audience enjoys specticalized blackness makes me very uncomfortable. Within the capitalist-racist context of South Africa these images continue to reinforce the ideas which sustain systematic racial inequality. When you do not reflect alternative narratives of a people you often justify their continued oppression. Anyone who buys from Spur is – even if unwittingly – complicit in this.

* Thank you to Lihle Asante Ngcobozi for her contribution to this piece through critique and supportive advice and debate.