Sean Jacobs's Blog, page 375

Chespirito: The Latin American Idol

Mexican actor Roberto Gómez Bolaños died last week, aged 85. Chespirito (which means “little Shakespeare” in Mexican Spanish), as he was known, created, scripted and starred on many successful TV sitcoms, such as “El Chavo del Ocho,” “Chespirito” and “El Chapulín Colorado.” These shows were broadcast throughout Latin America. Actually they were broadcast in every Spanish-speaking Latin American country (though only for a few days in Cuba), as well as in Brazil (dubbed into Portuguese).

Even though the bulk of the shows were taped in the 1970’s, and most of them had stopped production by the early 1990’s, most Latin American countries still have networks carrying reruns of the shows and they still return decent ratings. So, even though their characters are unmistakably Mexican–they speak with Mexican accents, use Mexican words, and joke about Mexican geography and popular culture–Chespirito’s shows are ingrained into the patchy and ill-defined “Latin American” identity.

Chances are that, if you grew up in Latin America in the past four decades, you watched Chespirito’s shows and you know–whether you like them or not–most of its jokes. Even if you didn’t pay particular attention to the show, you were bound to become familiar with its tropes somehow. Because the genius of Gómez Bolaños was that he was both simple and repetitive: his characters were practically cartoons, always wearing the same outfits, each with a distinct way of crying and a limited set of catchphrases. They were archetypical, which allowed Chespirito to turn his routine and his characters’ jokes into slang and common sayings throughout the region.

His characters were easily digested because they were  symbolic, representatives not of a person in particular, but of a social type found anywhere. There was Quico (played by Carlos Villagrán), the spoiled kid in the neighborhood; there was La Chilindrina (played by María Antonieta de las Nieves), the smartass brat; and there was Don Barriga (played by Édgar Vivar), the perpetual landlord who is fixated on collecting rent, but not on fixing broken things.

Granted, Gómez Bolaños’s most famous, and probably most beloved character, Chavo del Ocho (played by himself), had very peculiar circumstances: he was a young orphan who lived in apartment 8 of a building in a working-class neighborhood in Mexico City, but prefered to sleep inside a barrel in the communal patio, where he could meet other kids to play and find adults to ask them for food in exchange of menial jobs. “El Chavo” happened precisely at a time when many Latin American economies were moving from rural to urban, and when many newly arrived people from the country filled cities’ suburbs. It was the perfect scenario for him to become the proverbial poor kid trying to survive day by day, a hero from the slums for millions of children in similar situations.

Diego Armando Maradona, the Argentinian footballing legend, grew up in Villa Fiorito, Buenos Aires, which was, like Chavo’s neighborhood, a shantytown. In 2005, Maradona had Gómez Bolaños on his interview show (yes, Maradona had an interview show). There, Maradona declared Chespirito to be his idol, and he said he thought Gómez Bolaños’s humor was “clean, constructive and harmless.” Later, he confessed that “El Chavo” had helped him get through his addictions. He mentioned that even during bad moments in his life, when he watched ‘El Chavo’, he “felt relaxed and tranquil.”

This is a sentiment that is echoed throughout Latin American households. Networks air Chespirito’s shows because they are cheap (they have already preproduced), but also because people continue to watch, despite the fact that the jokes will always be the same. And people watch because they feel there is something of them in Chespirito’s characters (Don Ramón, played by Ramón Valdés, for example, perpetually owes 14 months of rent, but he can’t pay because first he has to make sure he and his daughter survive).

Chespirito, more than any sport or any cultural institution, can truly unite Latin American countries. But his death has reignited criticisms to his shows’ legacy, as well as to his own standing as the only truly Latin American celebrity. Yes, we all grew up with his shows. And yes, they have given us a rare common cultural reference. But was that a good thing?

First, most of his humor was based on physical violence, and in particular on physical violence towards children (characters who were children, played by adults, but still children in the eyes of many viewers). This can be problematic from a contemporary viewpoint, especially when many, if not all, Latin American countries have struggled with the issue of domestic violence.

Also, to some commentators, Chespirito’s shows are detrimental for social struggles. Poverty is accepted as an unfortunate, but ultimately immutable fate and any semblance of social mobility is depicted as a mere fantasy. As Mexican researcher Raúl Rojas Soriano puts it, “El Chavo” is “a dire reflection of societal problems, but the show made no effort to address these issues.” Nonetheless, it still remains debatable if the function of TV, or fiction in general, is to educate people on social, or ethical issues.

Others have chosen to focus on Chespirito’s brilliant repetitive narrative structures. This is the case of Colombian Carolina Sanín, who thinks that “watching ‘El Chavo del Ocho,’ which seems like a domestication process and a mnemonic technique, was always to remember it. And when I remember El Chavo, I feel I remember a memory.”

Of course, both things can be true: Chespirito’s shows, and “El Chavo” in particular, have fascinating narratives, with problematic contents. But perhaps more troublesome is Gómez Bolaños’s political stance. A convinced conservative, he appeared in ad campaigns against abortion and in favor of PAN (Mexico’s right-wing party) candidates and eventual presidents Vicente Fox and Felipe Calderón.

Also, during the height of his shows’ fame in the late 1970’s, he and his cast toured every Latin American country where his characters were broadcast, including Chile and Argentina, which had been very recently become dictatorships. In his autobiography, from 2005, Chespirito argued that he and his cast were unaware that Santiago’s Estadio Nacional, where they performed in 1978, had been used by Chilean dictator as a political prison just five years earlier. He also said that if they had known, they would still have performed, because the people wanted them there. Finally, he thought that, under that logic, nobody should be able to perform on El Zócalo (Mexico City’s main square), where hundreds died during the Mexican Revolution.

So, though disconnected from its social and political struggles, Chespirito and his characters remain Latin American icons, which is why many cities in different countries honored his life after his passing. Yet, while his life and political work will from now on be mentioned only briefly, his shows will still be running on Latin American TVs, with the same jokes repeating ever again, creating new common denominators between different countries and generations.

Hey Ridley Scott, ‘Mohamed so-and-so’ wants his job back

The controversy surrounding Ridley Scott’s casting in “Exodus: Gods and Kings” (it opens on December 12th) has reached a pinnacle of absurdity. As if the discussion had not become ridiculous enough, Rupert Murdoch’s decision to chime in with comments that were equal parts erroneous, hilarious and depressing, nudged the entire affair to a new level. But first here’s the trailer:

After months of criticism for frankly predictable whitewashed casting, the famed director decided to respond with a few choice words in an interview with film publication Variety. “I can’t mount a film of this budget, where I have to rely on tax rebates in Spain, and say that my lead actor is Mohammad so-and-so from such-and-such” Said Scott, “I’m just not going to get it financed.”

Scott Foundas, who wrote the Variety profile, lauded Scott for not making “any compromises” while making a film “in the most plausible historical terms possible.”

In his biting critique of the film for Medium, the writer and editor David Dennis Jr. calls “Exodus” lazy. This may be a fair assessment, but Scott’s argument about funding points to deeply rooted issues of bigotry and racism in Hollywood that are much larger than a single director; just ask Jack Shaheen. What is extraordinarily lazy is how Scott has chosen to address the backlash aimed at him.

Murdoch’s comments are certainly not helping Scott’s case. On November 29 he tweeted: “Moses film attacked on Twitter for all white cast. Since when are Egyptians not white? All I know are.” The expected Twitter explosion ensued, as did Murdoch’s successful bids at digging himself a deeper hole.

Scott’s argument that “Egypt was – as it is now – a confluence of cultures, as a result of being a crossroads geographically between Africa, the Middle East and Europe” is not technically inaccurate. However if we’re talking about ancient Egypt at the time of Moses, well then the validity of his statement becomes a little murkier.

Many moons ago, Egyptologist H.W. Fairman wrote about the often-ignored interconnectedness between Egyptology and African Studies, calling for increased collaboration between the two disciplines. In his words: “Ancient Egypt was a part of Africa. The earliest communities that we can trace in Egypt were African communities, of African origin, and it was early African social customs and religious beliefs that were the root and foundation of the Egyptian way of life…in the course of the millennia they changed…but in spite of time and all external influences, fundamentally and essentially Egyptian culture was African, and those African foundations endured.”

The external influences he’s talking about are Asian, initially from Sumerian Mesopotamia, followed by Semites from the same region, large swathes of what is now the Levant and Arabian Gulf. As more than one of my well-humored history professors used to put it: “At this time, most Europeans were still running around in the forest.” The exception were the Minoans, indigenous to Crete but originally from Anatolia (much of modern day Turkey and parts of the Middle East) who thrived during the Bronze Age and engaged in regional trade, and later the Greek Mycenaeans, who engaged in trade, but also warfare with their neighbors to the south.

As has been pointed out over the course of this very public controversy, there is debate around the origins of Ancient Egyptians, but Scott’s casting does not in any way reflect this debate. In fact, one major criticism in the study of Ancient Egyptian civilization has been the tendency for contemporary scholars to look at race and race relations through our modern conceptions of color, as evidence suggests social hierarchies were determined by different measures. An argument that supports Dennis’ observation that Scott’s casting is inherently racist, or as he puts it “cinematic colonialism.”

In defense of Scott, Foundas points out that the same case could be made for many other biblically themed films, including “Exodus” predecessor “The Ten Commandments”, the 1956 film that far surpassed it’s present-day counterpart for whitewashing. The film, to be fair, was made ten years before discourse like this nugget from Fairman was considered acceptable for publication in the peer-reviewed journal African Affairs:

Egyptian civilization as we know it, dynastic, historic Egypt, Egypt of the Pharaohs, was not the logical, automatic development of predynastic Egypt; it was the result of the intrusion…of people of superior cranial capacity and brain power…

Fairman’s eugenics invoking prose and his observations about the research gap enabled by the limited intellectual interaction between those scholars of “African Studies” and those of “Egyptology” shed light on an enduring divide between Egypt and the rest of the (particularly sub-Saharan) continent. This too is history distorted by contemporary notions of what it means to be Egyptian, Arab, and African – and what these identities mean to a British academic of yesteryear.

As for the casting, we can perhaps make the case to forgive “The Ten Commandments” as it was released prior to the great mainstream success of Omar Sharif in “Lawrence of Arabia” and “Doctor Zhivago”. But what’s the excuse today? There are several Arab and African actors who have been working on big budget Hollywood films in recent years. Egyptian Amr Waked famously played the lead opposite Scarlett Johansson in this year’s “Lucy”. The film cost a mere 40 million USD when compared to the exorbitant 140 million spent on “Exodus”. That last 100 million, it seems, was contingent on inaccurately representing historical figures.

#DeconstructingFerguson and lessons for black South Africa in black America

There were more people at Chumley’s sports bar during Saturday’s Ohio State University game against archival Michigan than there were days later at the Ohio Union nearby on Thursday night for #deconstructingferguson, a conversation and teach-in that centered around events in Ferguson, Missouri, in the United States. Don’t get me wrong. The turnout at the teach-in was tremendous; at least twice the number of people came than the organizers, the OSU history department, expected. It was also standing room only earlier in the week at a panel discussion on the same topic hosted by the university’s college of law.

But these numbers were a fraction of those at Chumley’s on Saturday, which, like the streets of the OSU campus, Columbus and probably every other city in the Buckeye state, even Beavercreek and Cleveland, was overflowing with mostly white revelers in scarlet and grey. It was hard not to get caught up in the revelry, despite being only a visitor.

All eyes were on nearby Ohio Stadium, filled with a record 108,610 people who witnessed OSU run out 42-28 winners, keeping their hopes of a Big-Ten championship alive. The victory was costly. Star quarterback J. T. Barrett broke his right ankle and will be out for the rest of the season. His plays up to that point had seen him billed as a potential Heisman trophy winner, but that dream is now deferred.

***

As I listened to people at the teach-in seated in circles of eight to ten people speak from experience and research of racial stereotyping, police brutality and the US justice system, my mind turned to Barrett and his black OSU teammates. The circle I was in had mostly black undergraduates, mere babies who each had a personal story to tell of their distrust of the police, experience of police brutality and lack of faith in the criminal justice system.

It was in particular a comment from a young woman next to me rejecting the idea that blacks should don on the military fatigues of and go to war for a country that does not care for them that made me think of Barrett.

He, too, no doubt, has his own stories of distrust and police brutality to tell. Yet majority of the hundreds of thousands who tune in to watch him put his body on the line for OSU tune out when his body is endangered by a system of policing that sees him, above all things, as a danger to society. But things are different when he’s on the field in scarlet and grey, aren’t they? Being on the field in scarlet and grey lets white folk and machinery of the state of Ohio and the City of Columbus care about what happens to him because, just for that moment, in their eyes, he stops being just another n—er.

Would Ronald Ritchie have called 911 to falsely report that “a black male, probably about 6ft tall” was pointing a gun at people in a Beavercreek Walmart, “probably to rob the place”, had John Crawford been Barrett in his scarlet and grey? Would the police who responded to the call in a state that has gun laws that allow people to carry openly have shot Crawford on sight? Probably not.

It’s likely, too, that had 12-year-old Tamir Rice had something to act as his scarlet and grey—a shield, albeit temporary, from the stereotype at the heart of white America, American institutions and the country’s criminal justice system that defines blackness as illicit—he might still be alive today. Instead, his family is in mourning. And in Cleveland, as it was in Missouri for Darren Wilson for the death of Mike Brown and New York City for Daniel Pantaleo for the death of Eric Garner, the blue wall of silence is converging with prosecutors’ dependence on future cooperation and electoral support from local police to conspire for the Cleveland police department and Timothy Loehmann, the unfit-for-duty cop who shot Rice on sight, to escape accountability.

Holding up a handwritten sign at a recent protest, University of Maryland wide receiver Deon Long asked America and its anti-black institutions: “Are we still thugs when you pay to watch us play sports? #blacklivesmatter”

Long probably knows the answer is no, America’s black football players are, for the most part, loved when on the field and in their jerseys. It’s another matter entirely when they’re not wearing them, as the death of Jonathan Ferrell at the smoking end of police officer Randall Kerrick’s gun illustrated. Sometimes, even putting life and limb on the line for team pride isn’t enough to escape the stereotype that black equals thug.

In a way, every black American has since the 17th century been striving for something they hope will take on the role of a permanent, impervious equivalent to Barrett’s scarlet and grey, something that makes their humanity visible through the shades of anti-blackness nestled on eyes in America. For essayist Kiese Laymon it could have been his Vasser College faculty ID, but it doesn’t always work and as it protects him and him alone, it is thoroughly useless for the general deliverance of blacks from American evil, although it provides that comforting illusion.

For New York attorney Lawrence Graham, as it is for many other black folk, the hope is that attaining status among the elite will protect from anti-blackness. But Graham, too, conceded that this does not work.

Surely even Michelle and Barack Obama must also concede this. When America’s first couple is alone and not performing to alleviate the symptoms of an ailing country built on the bodies of native Americans and people of color, and through an imperialist foreign policy agenda that puts the lives of certain Americans above all others, they, too, must accept that even the title President of the United States does not make a difference to people and institutions who refuse to see you and your kids as anything else but bunch of n—ers.

***

I confess envy. The ease, conviction and singleness of purpose with which the young black Americans in the circle was I in spoke about their social realities and the imperative for justice made me reflect on similar conversations I’d attempted with young black South Africans and my peers in the middle class.

While many of those I spoke to are able to break down the social realities of being black in a supposedly post-apartheid South Africa, many more are insular and believe assimilating into structures and practices forged in the country’s colonial history will protect from its inherent anti-black biases. Black America’s already learned, or is at least learning, that this is not true, and is conceptualizing ways to organize against it. Well, most of black American anyway, excepting for people like Pharrell, Bill Cosby and Don Lemon who preach respectability as the savior of blacks.

There will always be people like that. There were even two who spoke and their arguments rejected on Thursday night. It’s just that among middle-class black South Africans, there seem to be many more people who hold poor and working-class blacks in disregard if not disdain, and believe an unearned sense of entitlement, poorly worded resumes or self-doubt are what holds blacks back. In so doing, they turn the obligation of adopting a change in behavior on black people and not the structures and systems that disenfranchise and devalue them.

Thus when thinking of what troubles poor black people, middle-class blacks in South Africa would do well to heed Ta-Nahesi Coates channeling Steve Biko: “There’s nothing wrong with black people that the complete and total elimination of white supremacy would not fix.”

***

The #deconstructingFerguson circles came together later that night to propose solutions to the problems discussed. Everyone present was onboard with the idea that America is not post-racial, a nebulous term matched in emptiness by its South African equivalent, non-racial. Although both words propose a theoretical future where race is no longer a factor, they provide no means of imaging what the path there looks like and what actions will get us there. And in popular use, both terms have been captured by neoliberal projects that present this future as imminent, attainable and inevitable through the status quo when, in reality, such a future is possibly only through a radical departure from the current.

The solutions proposed were mostly good and centered on organizing and mobilizing around specific issues; special prosecutors in cases involving police, automatic indictment, community policing, reforming the selection and social-awareness training of police officers, turning greater attention to electing local and state representatives who stand in solidarity with the movement, supporting black businesses and targeted boycotts of those that back anti-black policies.

Also suggested was intersecting and working with other movements organized against the same system of oppression: imperialist white-supremacist capitalist heteropatriarchy.

I wanted to read out a contentious tweet sent to Coates, but I was reticent. The conversation intersected with mine, it’s true, but I was still an outsider, so I just listened. The tweet was sent by The National Memo’s Eric Kleefeld and it read: “The single greatest moment of social progress for black Americans was in violent, massive war [the American Civil War]. Worth pondering.”

I think it’s worth pondering because working toward a similar singular moment of social progress should be on the cards as a solution, too—not through war necessarily, but something major that forces America to reconstruct itself from the bottom up under a new, equitable ethos. The long slow grind of gradualist approaches can at times feel (and be) akin to mopping the fevered brow and lancing the boils of the patient that is America, suppurating from the inside out.

Adapting an argument from Coates about the merits of the American Civil War: those who fear that agitating for such a moment could lead to tragedy have likely chosen not to recognize the tragedy in their mid that falls disproportionately, if not exclusively, on poor people, people of color and native American communities, women, queer, transgender and intersex people, immigrants and refugees, and people with disabilities.

It is now up to black America to decide what its next big moment of social progress should be and what to do to make it happen.

In South Africa, in averting civil war, we had the negotiations to end apartheid, Truth and Reconciliation Commission and a Constitution that maintained the status quo with the promise of a better tomorrow for black folk. Theoretically, the approach was sound. But the process was captured by a neoliberal project that injected conservatism into just about every aspect of the transition to democracy and prized economic growth and profits over black lives, as the massacre in Marikana brought into sharp relief.

Through this white South Africa, the apartheid state, and its agents and lackeys were let off the hook. Apartheid corruption metastized into democracy, there were no reparations, restitution is achingly slow and contested doggedly, the effects of redistribution are massively oversold, racist attacks are on the rise, affirmative action is often decried as “reverse racism” or a baby killer (seriously), police protect property at the expense of poor black lives, and transforming the country’s institutions is often left to well-meaning but often clueless liberals. If that’s not enough, the appetite for interaction across the racial divide is waning and only 53% of white South Africans believe apartheid was a crime against humanity. The rest either disagree or have no thoughts on the matter.

There is nothing to suggest any of this will change except the false promise that staying the neoliberal course will birth the promised nonracial future. Thus, by my assessment, black America presently is in the throes of a conversation that, without a radical intervention, black South Africans will be having in another 20 to 30 years, maybe more.

God, Not Again: White People and an ‘Out of Africa’ Wedding in Kenya*

Oh no. Africa has “touched” someone “deeply” again. This time, it’s Melbourne-based wedding photographer Jonas Peterson, who has reportedly “shot brides and grooms in all sorts of beautiful places around the world,” but none like this infamous lothario of a continental landmass, which “sung to [him] in a way [he] didn’t know possible, found new chords and played on strings [he] didn’t know [he] had inside [him]”. Africa! You sure know how to make white men swoon.

Surely, Peterson knew what he was getting into when he went to photograph the wedding of Nina, “a wildlife photographer and senior marketing advisor to wild cat conservation organization Panthera – and her fiancé Sebastian” in Masaai Mara in Kenya. This is primal Africa central. White people go there, and bam! They get touched and their chords get strummed. Then they usually end up throwing themselves all over “tribal jewellery” given to them by their close and personal Masaai, dancing about some acacias, taking pictures with smiling African children, and the rest is history.

Peterson’s gushing commentary about the sexy power of Africa was was reported in the Huffington Post. It’s a photoshoot of some random wealthy white people’s destination wedding in Masaai Mara where Massai men are used as props to add interest to photographs. Basically HuffPost is providing free advertising for his photography company (and for Pantera), masquerading as “lifestyle” reportage. Only Twitter and Facebook produced any critique. We’ve said this before, white people. Stop using “Out of Africa” – a film based on a colonial fantasy. The film’s sweeping scenery, and poetic lines rekindle our desire to return to a good ole time, when whites were whites, servants were servants (clearly demarcated by their ridiculous uniforms), and tribesmen were tribesmen (differentiated by their cute, exotic jewellery and costumes). That fantasy still appeals to us because…you know, things were so nice with servants and unlimited power, and swathes of land one could take over whilst one also got to feel like the noble European Madam/Bwana who built a school or clinic and helped the natives get rid of illiteracy and rinderpest or something like that. I’m sure poor Robert Redford and Meryl Streep – and her terrible Danish aristocratic accent – never imagined that when they took on roles as a damaged adventurer and a ruined, lovelorn aristocrat (respectively), racist South Africans would plan weddings with the movie as the theme…only the “wedding theme” is really an excuse to look like tools posing with schlocky “Out of Africa” props, and to also use black/brown people as objects in a colonial fantasy.

But! you say, Wait! This bride, Nina, is not like that! She worked in Masaai Mara. On conservation (bona fide white people credentials for being a good person in Africa). She knew the Masaai so well that one brought her bridal jewellery intended for a Masaai bride. As Nina clearly informed the Huffington Post, “When I first told my closest friend in the Maasai community about our wedding, he came back to me with a necklace and bracelets as a special gift made for me by his family. The stick carried by Sebastian was also a gift from the local Maasai community.”

In case we doubt her exclusive claims on the Masaai, and her extensive Masaai knowledge, she adds, “The bride of the Maasai normally wear a lot of jewelry, and the necklace, called enkarewa, is especially important”. Nice. Good to know that these exotic people are especially exotic because their brides like to wear a lot of jewellery (unlike other brides?).

So I don’t want to waste my photography-analytical skills on these cutesy pics, but ok, fine, there’s a couple that are so hilariously staged that I just have to. There’s the acacia shot: he’s standing there, staring into the expanse of the savanna (existential angst, Denys Finch Hatton-style), and she is on the other side of the acacia, sort of lunging towards him in that white wedding dress and Masaai gear (tasteful, but still, c’mon) … looking forlorn, and all Baroness von Blixen.

Then, the wedding party (all white) poses on a fallen log. Guess who suddenly showed up but two Masaai in full, exotic, Masaai-ish gear?! (Yes, those red blankets came from Scottish missionaries back in the day, and now probably come from Mainland Chinese missionaries nowadays.)

The African as backdrop and prop to white fantasy continues: the couple walk through a double receiving line of Masaai warriors–and for some reason, they are carrying a small, white baby (is it theirs? A friends?).

Then they kiss against an ominous, rainy season storm sky, whilst a Masaai warrior stands around with a spear for no reason. Perhaps his cows ran away because they couldn’t face this charade.

Bride Nina also poses fetchingly, one hand chasing the errant end of her veil, whilst a handsome Masaai warrior stands next to her to offset her whiteness and difference. But, something in this fantasy doesn’t work – he’s intended to be there to be the noble savage, to offset her as “civilised” and “white”, and to accentuate her subjectivity (her passage into adulthood and marriage as a powerful, white woman who is rich enough to stage her wedding pictures here in Masaai Mara, and have the event captured by a photographer from Australia). But – bejeweled as he is in beads and an animal-hide wrap that looks so elegant that no European designer claiming to create “ethical” fashion inspired by African tribespeople could even dream of reproducing, and wearing rubber sandals that have a hint of peach in them – there is no one in this colonial fantasy as beautiful and elegant, and…modern as he. Doubtless, he can teach Nina more conservation skills than all of Panthera.

The one thing that remains a constant, reminding us that no matter where these savvy, marketing-minded, narcissistic people held their wedding, they would still be married to the history that produced this patriarchal and colonial fantasy? The bridesmaids’ dresses look terrible.

* We wanted to show you the images, but apparently Peterson doesn’t like criticism and is threatening to take our site down. The image above is not from the wedding, but a still from the “Out of Africa.” The Huffington Post liked the images, so he has no problem with their reproductions, here.

Digital Archive No. 5–Harvard’s African Sources of Knowledge Digital Library

Two weeks ago, I attended the African Studies Association Annual Meeting in Indianapolis, Indiana.  As Sean mentioned in a previous post, a bunch of folks from Africa Is A Country got to meet up and get to know each other outside of our usual digital constraints.  I also presented on a panel entitled “Digital African Studies: State of the Field” with some of my MSU professors, Walter Hawthorne and Ethan Watrall, as well as some digital scholars working at Harvard, Carla Martin and John Mugane.  Professor Mugane is the Director of the African Language program in the Department of African and African American Studies at Harvard, as well as the project director of African Sources of Knowledge Digital Library (ASK-DL).

The ASK-DL project is “a pioneering initiative in the identification, recovery, integration, consolidation, and dissemination of information contained in rare handwritten and out-of-print African language documents of non-latinate scripts.”  The site consists of three main sections: a digital collection, a library, and Odù Ifá, a Yoruba language preservation project incorporating video and text.

The document collection housed on ASK-DL is composed of mainly hand-written documents pulled from unpublished booklets, poetry, essays, private letters, and other documents in Amharic, Bamanankan, Pulaar, Swahili, Tifinagh, and Wolof scripts.  This section of the site also contains a few printed documents in non-latinate scripts, including some recent documentation on Ebola in Bamanankan.  Additional references on these endangered languages are found in the Catalog, which houses documentation and links to other texts on these highly specialized African languages.

In addition to these great resources, the ASK-DL project also works to preserve these languages in their spoken form.  The Odù Ifá sections contains videos of native Yoruba speakers reciting chapters from the Odù Ifá, a book of wisdom used within the Ifa sacred divination system.

These videos are great resources for scholars interested in the Odù Ifá itself, as well as for students aiming to learn Yoruba.  Hearing the language performed by native speakers, along with transcripts and translations, allows for a unique opportunity to combine aural and visual learning in language acquisition.  Let’s hope that ASK-DL continues to incorporate more projects of this type as they continue to develop this resource.

Check back next week for the first of a two-week series on digital slave trade datasets.

**Feel free to send me suggestions in the comments or via Twitter of sites you want us to cover in future editions of Digital Archive.**

How do we judge Nigeria’s Abiola family? New documentary film on the history of Nigeria democracy movement

The documentary film “The Supreme Price” by Joanna Lipper sets out to “trace the evolution of the pro-democracy movement in Nigeria and efforts to increase the participation of women in leadership roles.” It claims to do so through the stories of the Abiola family.

For much of the 1990s the Abiolas, along with the country’s generals, dominated Nigeria’s politics. The father, MKO Abiola, made his money in telecoms and won Nigeria’s first democratic elections after ten years of military rule on June 12, 1993. Those elections are acknowledged as the freest and fairest in the country’s history. However, 11 days later the military dictator, Ibrahim Babangida, annulled the elections. Political chaos and protests followed. An interim government was installed in August only to be overthrown by another military coup led by General Sani Abacha in November. Abiola continued to claim the Presidency, but was imprisoned in 1994. His wife, Kudirat, who campaigned for him, was assassinated in 1996. When Abacha died in 1998 and military rule was finally reaching an end, Abiola suddenly (or conveniently) died in prison, assumed poisoned. But the Aboila family’s story doesn’t end there. Their daughter Hafsat campaigned both for her father and mother as a young Harvard University student. She is now back in Nigeria, as a special adviser to the Ogun state government, one of Nigeria’s 36 states and as a campaigner for women’s rights. She is the star of “The Supreme Price.” Hafsat’s main platform is that men have overstayed their welcome as Nigeria’s leaders and it is women’s time. We are meant to think it is her time.

Here’s the trailer:

The film has another bold objective: to “provide a unprecedented look inside of Africa’s most populous nation, exposing the tumultuous, violent history of a deeply entrenched corrupt culture of governance where a tiny circle of political elites monopolize billions of dollars worth of oil revenue while the masses remain impoverished.”

The choice of the Abiolas as poster figures for Nigeria’s democracy movement is an interesting one; but the contradictions of that move are not sufficiently explored by Lipper and ultimately undermined the films claims.

MKO Abiola was a controversial figure. While MKO was alive he presented himself as a self-made man and the film dutifully repeats this script. The effect is that the film glosses over the fact that he made his immense fortune via contracts with a range of Nigerian dictators, not least through leading ITT (International Telephone and Telegraph) company. It’s that company and its corrupt dealings which inspired Fela Kuti to write the song “International Thief Thief (ITT),” about how international companies in consort with local elites exploited African resources: Fela sang of Abiola and General Olesegun Obasanjo, 1970s military ruler (and later an elected president), as “thieves” and “men of low mentality.”

Secondly, while MKO Abiola was famous for his philanthropy, he could not have run as president without the blessing of the sitting dictator, Ibrahim Babangida. Though a sense of this complex politics is hinted at, it is far from explicit and definitely not discussed. These connections are not secrets, and surely Hafsat Abiola has talked about them before. But the film does not explore them.

The film’s PR refers to Kudirat Abiola as someone “[who] took over the leadership of the pro-democracy movement, organizing strikes and marches and winning international attention for the Nigerian struggle”. This is a very controversial statement in Nigeria. Yes, she was a leader. For example, she did take initiatives, towards working with unions, civil society and the international community. However, she was not “the” leader of “the” movement. She did approach the oil workers union when her husband was arrested in 1994 to plead for them to go on strike for his release. She probably did this because NUPENG, the oil workers union for blue-collar workers had , had already staged a strike after the elections in 1993 to protests of the non-implementation of the results: NUPENG was a union deeply entrenched in the democracy movement, with a charismatic leader, Frank Kokori, and a committed membership. The strike in 1994 was led by the national federation, the NLC, but dominated by the two oil workers’ unions, NUPENG and PENGASSAN. The decision to go on strike was made by a joint leadership after due consultation with regions and members. Nigerian trade unions pride themselves on their political independence. The wife of a president-elect could and did not lead the workers’ strike.

The historian Bolanle Awe sums up Kudirat Abiola’s political role in the 1990s in this way: “She could not be called a the leader of women, per se, like her earlier counterparts; she did not appear to have been part of their efforts to ensure gender equity and fair play, yet she added tremendous momentum to the women’s movement and encouraged women to speak up for their rights.”

It is not just in specific instances that the film overestimates the role of the Abiolas. Missing from the film is the actual pro-democracy movement. To talk of a movement, it implies a variety of actors. I wish the film would have shown us more of these other actors, and discussed how they related to the Abiolas, both as President elect and the wife. I would have liked Lipper to talk to Hafsat about how Hafsat saw her mother: whether as a democracy or women’s activist or as both (Hafsat does talk candidly about her father’s personal failings).

In the same way the film misrepresents Kudirat and MKO Abiola’s political legacy, it hypes that of Hafsat. While Hafsat herself leads a women’s group, it doesn’t look like “a woman’s movement” per se but more like a small group of women meeting.

The idea to make a film about Nigeria’s pro-democracy movement as well as women’s political roles are both important and exciting topics, and could potentially fill gaps in our knowledge of Nigerian politics. Nigeria is conservative and patriarchal, and, with few exceptions, women and women’s stories are rarely part of public life, except as wives and mothers. (The two leading, and realistic, presidential candidates right now are both men.) Yet, despite this women have and continue to play important roles in Nigerian politics, if at times they court the same notoriety of their male counterparts (think Ngozi Okonjo Iweala, finance minister and the bane of subsidy protesters in 2012 or Stella Oduah-Ogiemwonyi, former minister of aviation implicated in corruption). So, the stories of the Abiola women seem to offer an antidote to this male-dominated political histories.

At another level the film, the film is an important historical document, especially in a country where history is not discussed openly; According to political scientist Jibrin Ibrahim Nigeria is “the only country in the world where the teaching of history has disappeared from the school system. Our children go through the whole school system without learning our origins and struggles as a nation-state.”

One of the probable reasons that history in Nigerian schools has disappeared, is the unsettled national question and conflicts between regions, ethnicities and religions. Nigerians hardly agree on how their history has unfolded, who the relevant actors are and what really happened. (Just take Biafra or current debates over why Boko Haram alludes security forces.) Further, the political and economic elites are so intertwined in history of corruption, political repression and dictatorship that telling any story about Nigeria encounter public disputes.

Though Hafsat Abiola is an intriguing, inspiring and strong character, she is also part of this history. And she would probably be willing to discuss it. But she doesn’t or doesn’t get to or we don’t get to see it because of Lipper’s choices. What we end up with is a story about a family represented as the story of Nigeria’s democracy movement. (Apart from Hafsat, one of M.K.O and Kudirat Abiola’s 6 other children also features; he represents an interesting contrast to Kudirat, which the director could have explored further; instead we only get his backward views on gender.)

In the end, the film amounts to a homage to the Abiolas. That is fair enough, and it is mainly a well-told story (with gaps) with vast historical footage. But it is not the story of the democracy movement, or of the women’s movement. It is a story. And it would be good if the filmmaker helped the viewer to understand what kind of story. Hafsat Abiola is a good choice of entry point, but the filmmaker seems to have been so infatuated, that she comes up with a story line ending in suggestions about her as a presidential candidate. The problem is Hafsat Abiola is not a prominent figure in Nigerian politics. There are suggestions that this is because she is a woman. This may be so, but I would have liked a discussion of the role and potential of women in Nigerian politics.

Visual Artist Anthony Bila’s Black History March

Since the early days of photographic image-making, the camera has been referred to as a “mirror with a memory,” reflecting what it sees and then recording decisive moments through the creation of images.

Anthony Bila, a multi-talented visual artist based in Johannesburg, is thus a creator of memories. In his Black History March series Bila uses his camera to produce memory-infused images of young creatives wearing vintage attire in the streets of Soweto. The two volumes of the series thus far have featured the style collective Khumbula together with Loux the Vintage Guru and more recently, the stylist duo The Sartists paired with arguably Joburg’s most captivating creative muse, Manthe Ribane.

The vintage clothing and weathered aesthetic of the images offer windows into both South Africa’s past and present. Through these windows presented by Bila we see the desire of young South Africans to connect with their heritage while paying homage to people and spaces that had been previously underrepresented.

The images of the Black History March series offer a clear challenge to Eurocentric notions of history. In doing so, they act to reclaim a greater share of history for black South Africans, which like land, has been distributed disproportionately in favor of South Africans of European ancestry.

In many of Bila’s images, the models look boldly at the camera. Their expressions are defiant, unapologetic and piercing, raising the crucial question asked in Santu Mofokeng’s powerful photobook The Black Photo Album – “Who is gazing?” Are we as viewers projecting our own perspectives onto the images or do Bila’s characters return their own set of demands in their eyes?

Following the recent release of his second volume of the Black History March series on his popular blog The Expressionist, we spoke to Anthony Bila to hear his take on South African history, the memory of an image and the cultural significance of the street.

AIAC: You just released your second Black History March collection, what is the concept behind the series?

AB: The Black History March series is project close to my heart in that it was and is inspired by African history particularly and the absurdity that the history of Africa and its diaspora should be commemorated one month every year. Thus, the idea was for me to purposefully launch this project every year succeeding or preceding “Black History Month” in February. I wanted to dispel the notion that Black History needs a ‘special month’, the shortest month of all no less, dedicated to it as commemoration and remembrance of the incredibly vast history of Africa and it’s peoples.

My thoughts about black history are that it should be remembered and recalled just as any other significant part of history is, at every given opportunity, at any point of the year, in fact it should be taught in the same vein European & American History is taught all around the world, all year round, always.

The images in the series resemble family portraits, snapshots and magazine pictures from an older era. What led to this conversation with archival material?

I wanted to reference a bygone time, not specific to a place and time necessarily, but to a feeling. We’re now more than ever bombarded with images of a “new black” and I wanted to remind many of my contemporaries of what has come before them. I plan to go deeper and further into Black History with the next installment and continue to surprise anyone I’m privileged to reach with my work. African History as vast as the ocean and what I’ve touched on is but a drop.

Manthe Ribane and The Sartists (Wanda Lephoto and Kabelo Kungwane) appear as ghostly figures from the past in this new collection. What does their disposition say about present-day South Africa’s relationship to its history?

I think these three are among the most interesting young creative minds to emerge from South Africa in a while, and like myself, given an opportunity to showcase what we’re capable of with resources, there isn’t a thing we could not accomplish. To answer your question, I wanted their disposition to do two things; 1. I wanted the images to serve as a reminder to the youth of the continent and particularly South Africa that we have come a far way from 20 years ago, but the road to true freedom and liberation is still perilous and long. We have not reached the Promised Land just yet, but we can see it beyond the horizon and we must soldier on to reach it. 2. I wanted the second installment in the series to really stimulate a sense of curiosity in young South Africans to interrogate the history of South Africa and the continent to discover and understand simple truths about Africa as a whole that have literally been buried.

For instance, did you know that in the 14th century the city of Timbuktu in West Africa was five times bigger than the city of London, and was the richest city in the world?

This is essentially a collection of black and white images, though they have been weathered with the color of time through smudges, stains and scratches. So they are black and white, but they are not. Can you speak to that?

The images are neither black nor white, but they are. The images like people carry with them memories good, bad and ugly. They have scars that have indelibly become part of their character. The images are also grey because often life is not as clear and dried as it initially seems. There are shades of grey to our history. Time leaves it’s mark on all of us, as individuals and more so as a people if you look at the history of the African continent and we need to more and more as time continues to unfold remember our roots, invest in our continent and tell the stories that the West refuses to. It’s imperative if Africa is to reclaim so semblance of its rich history that’s been suppressed for centuries.

Black History March is set in Soweto, where the landscape has a vibrant character of its own. Do the spaces you operate in influence your work?

The location of Soweto (if you’ll pardon the pun) was suggested by The Sartists as well as the enigmatic, abundantly talented, Manthe Ribane. I myself was born and raised in Tembisa township. The treatment of the images was to show how even with the passage of time, one can remain true to one’s roots and follow a route to self discovery by understand where you’ve come from. The space I operate in is largely influenced by the location and Soweto is one of the most historically rich areas in South Africa, it’s very existence is a testimony and indictment on a bygone regime that sought to thwart the vibrant space of Sophiatown. Yet the people of Soweto and other townships still thrive.

Many of your images are made in the streets. What is special about the street as a locus of urban youth culture in South Africa?

The streets are where authenticity is birthed, where inspiration, trends and creativity thrive under adverse conditions, as only the truest forms of self expression can. Revolutions are not born and bred in boardrooms or privileged suburbs or pseudo “city centres”, that’s where all those things I speak to go to die a ghastly death by culture vultures, those who appropriate youth culture for brands in a blatant and flagrant disregard for the essence and ethics of authenticity. I am currently venturing into studio photography, but street photography will still inform a large component of what I’m interested in capturing. If you really want to understand youth culture, visit any one of the many areas like Tembisa, Soweto and many, many more.

Your images are often layered and hyper-saturated. Are these vivid photographic worlds a reflection of your personal sensory experience as well?

They are, and as much as photography is often a verbatim reflection of the world we live in, I think that’s quite dull. I always want to capture a sensory experience with my photography, the one that I see in my mind’s eye. If you want reality, as it exists, then I’m more often than not the wrong artist to reference. I’m partially colour blind so I consciously compensate for that in the way I treat my images.

Considering you have already created a substantial body of work and the March series deals with the passage of time. What do you envision as your creative legacy?

I am only at the beginning. I plan to explore various other art forms in 2015. I am going to explore videography, scriptwriting, cinematography, fine art, illustration and music production to a deeper degree. I’m more or less better known for my photography and one thing that I despise is being boxed-in, stereotyped or categorised into being one thing. None of us are just one thing, so when someone refers to me as “just a photographer” or worse, “street style photographer”, I take exception to it. All I have ever wanted to do is create and the medium, style and form thereof will always change because I’m a creator. So in essence, my legacy, I hope one day is to be remembered as a modern day renaissance man or polymath of sorts. It’s ambitious, but it’s what I believe with every fibre of my being I’m meant to do and that is what I am working towards. I want the work I leave behind to inspire all kinds of people in all kinds of fields to exist and thrive outside of their comfort zones, to feel the fear and in spite of it to forge ahead.

An upcoming project of yours The BLK SRS, weaves together your talent in various creative disciplines including photography, videography, painting writing and music. How do you find synergy between these different artistic elements?

They’re often one in the same to me, it’s like asking me how do I find the energy to use all five (some say six) of my senses all at once. All I know is that I often feel impelled to create and the elements I use are as interchangeable as words are to a writer, I do it without thinking, and it’s instinctive. My ultimate dream is simply complicated; I want to produce a film in which I write, score, direct a story and exhibit the motion picture alongside paintings and illustrations. There is so much more I would also love to do but I feel that is my first point of call and from there, even the skies shouldn’t be a limit. My dream is for other African talents to be recognised and where opportunities are not present, we seize them.

 

Images: Anthony Bila

The University as a Place to Think?

I was recently asked to be on a panel with the theme of the role of the university, social justice and global change. When the invite came I was in the middle of teaching a course to graduate students, titled Violent Modernities. We were reading an article about the famous Debate at Valladolid between Las Casas and Sepulveda regarding the fate, as you will recall, of the native populations under Spanish Conquest about whether they were property or had souls available for salvation. In the course, we read about the first genocide of the 20th century of the Nama and Herero peoples in South West Africa the early 1900’s, under German Occupation. And we also read about the ways in which, after Napoleon’s military expedition to Egypt in 1798, the story of the Biblical Hamitic curse on the descendants of Noah, had to be changed to account for who might have produced the artifacts of Egyptian Pharanoic civilization. This story has a later life in Rwanda under German and then Belgian colonization. In all of these episodes it so happens that intellectuals , and Social Scientific and Humanistic inquiry, feature quite prominently.

The Debate at Valladolid, which took place in 1550 was held at the Collegio de San Gregorio, under the instruction of King Charles V, and brought contending arguments, reason and critical thought to bear on a pressing matter of concern of contemporary relevance. Las Casas was considered a ‘friend of the Indians’ advocating a form of social justice that was outraged at the treatment of the indigenous populations. But as a friend of the Natives he did not disagree with Sepulveda that the Indians, as such, could not be left to their own devices.

Moving on to Egypt: the expedition of Napoleon into Egypt remains interesting not only because Napoleon was not victorious, but because of the novelty of that expedition, which took with it among the military men, a column of some 400 scholars, archaeologists, historians, artists, and botanists and other natural scientists, to draw, map, record and classify. I was introduced to this in a graduate course with Mahmood Mamdani, when we read a classic text by Edith Sanders on the Egyptian excursion undertaken by Napoleon and the scholars he took with him. They produced a 10-volume study on the wonders of Egypt, which more or less helped to consolidate Egyptology as the study of a civilization in Africa but somehow not produced by Africans.

And when we read about the genocide of the Herero and Nama peoples, we encountered the Kaiser’s appointment there, Lieutenant-General Lothar von Trotha who said, ‘I wipe out rebellious tribes with streams of blood and streams of money. Only following this cleansing can something new emerge.’ But we also encountered there the figure of Eugen Fischer, who came to Namibia to conduct experiments in genetic theory in the camps where Herero and Nama were being held. Fischer went on to write a famous book on the subject in 1923, which Hitler read while in prison, and later Fischer was appointed the Rector of what is today known as Humboldt University in Berlin.

And just to round off this set of vignettes, it was of course the renewed “Hamitic Hypothesis” that suggested that Egypt was the product of a foreign civilizing European descendent race defined the Tutsi as a foreign race destined to rule over the Hutu majority, the former a race, the latter defined as an ethnic group, setting off a chain of resentments. When the sympathies of Belgian public opinion and the Catholic church shifted to a solidarity with the injustice that the Hutu majority faced, we know that Hutu power articulated its social justice by filling the national university in Rwanda with historians sympathetic to the suffering of the majority, and casting the Tutsi as foreign race forever scheming to re-establish its alien rule over the majority. We also know that this programme of social justice later took a genocidal form. I am of course truncating, being alarmist, and simplifying grossly. But you get my point. Asking about the role of the university, social justice and global change ‘from the standpoint’ as the late Eqbal Ahmad might say, ‘of its victims’, complicates things. And he was talking coincidently about the role of US Cold War intellectuals in counter urgency during that other war on Terror. Intellectuals can be pretty dangerous sometimes when we want to influence the world and make it better.

It is a reminder that almost every intervention that we now look back on as a colonial imposition and frown upon because of its excesses of violence and arrogance, had as its animating logic a good idea, and the desire to be doing good, saving people, saving women, and often in the case of colonies, saving them from themselves. When King Leopold invaded Congo in the late 1800’s it was supposedly to end Arab slavery and bring justice. So there was a very strong humanitarian and just impulse in many a civilizing atrocity. I draw attention to this of course because I come from a continent that continues to be defined as an object of such kind of intervention, differently articulated and differently understood, but where populations remain the beneficiaries of humanitarianism that is sometimes haunted by a future that looks a lot like its past.

That said, mindful of this grounds, if you like, there are ways that the university is always also a more ambiguous space, where its productive thought also encourages a subversive genealogy that works against hegemonic practices. I was reminded of this as I recently signed a petition of African scholars responding to the military coup that is attempting to take over and strangle the popular revolt in Burkina Faso, and in the words of a prominent university scholar Jean-Bernard Oudrago, ‘to return Blaise Campoare to power without Blaise Campaore.’

The modern university in Africa, as many of you know, is largely a postcolonial invention, and has gone through a number of iterations, from nationalist to developmental rationales and a lot in in between. The South African university landscape (where I work) is of course a complex and diverse one too- with both its share of complicity- apartheids intellectual architect Hendrik Verwoerd was the first ever and youngest Chair in Sociology at Stellenbosch University.

But it has its share of a counter-narrative too, if you think of the African nationalists, like Mandela and Mugabe who emerged from what is now Fort Hare University or figures like Dullah Omar at places like the University of the Western Cape; or in the growth of the independent trade union movement in the 1970’s and its relationship to the leftist-oriented philosophy and sociology departments at the largely white Natal University. Or Black Conciousness and its flourishing at that same university. Subversive traditions, all of them.

There are then ways to cultivate a different ethic of thought and conduct in the midst of something else. We are now thinking about that as we produce a new generation of scholars to enter the university, particularly in the humanities and social sciences. Demographically, institutionally and in terms of curriculum there is much that remains to be changed. There are questions about how to do that in a way that recognizes the inheritance of apartheid, that is oriented to our locality and geographical affinities—in other words is not the abstraction of placelessness and a kind of ahistorical cosmopolitanism dressed up in second hand modernity. But it should also not be inward, and insular or think that justice simply means that those at the bottom are now at the top.

So what might it mean to think about social justice and social change in a global world? Clearly, there are questions of who changes who, to what end? When we hosted the Senegalese philosopher Souleymane Bachir Diagne earlier this year at my university, he put to us the proposition of the university as being a space to offer the gift of a ‘truly universal universalism’. He is mindful of a distinction between being global, and the potentially imperial undertones of the hubris that underwrites that, and the aspiration towards a different kind of universalism, in which the horizon is not clearly marked out ahead of time. In the wake of the complicated present and past in the career of universities and global power, it would seem to me to be prudent and modest about how we harness knowledge to the ethical injunctions we uphold against marginality, pain or suffering, on a global scale. We might be mindful then also, that under certain circumstances, and in certain places, the mere time and space to think is in itself an increasingly subversive idea.

Image Credit: Twitter

5 Questions for a filmmaker–Teddy Goitom

Teddy Goitom is a Swedish-Ethiopian/Eritrean content producer and the founder of Stocktown (1998), “a cultural movement celebrating creativity and freedom of souls”, which includes a curated video magazine founded in 2011 as well as the Afripedia-series, which AIAC has covered here. Though his base is in Stockholm, this curious and hard-working creative is constantly shifting between times and places, producing documentaries and creative content online and elsewhere, together with an ever-growing network of creatives. Stocktown has created two TV-series, Stocktown – A Global Underground Journey and Stocktown Africa, and a feature length documentary will be produced in 2015.

What is your first film memory?

I was around seven years old when I found a VHS-tape with The good the bad and the ugly by . That summer I had the film on repeat and watched it several times a day. I was totally obsessed by it – the music, every scene – and I’d memorize every line and imitate every characters Though my mom used to force me to play outside, I’d always found a way to come back in and watch the film again, and discover something new in it every time.

Why did you decide to become a filmmaker?

I never decided to become a filmmaker and never went to film school. I’m actually still in the process of finding out if that’s what I am. I see myself more as a storyteller.

Ever since I started the Stocktown movement in 1998, I have been interested in building new platforms and finding new ways to broadcast untold and inspiring stories. Whether I produce music events, art exhibitions, documentaries or using new technology to stream stories to a broader audience doesn’t really matter. What matters is story.

Which film do you wish you had made and why?

Enter The Dragon with , and .

As a young kid, to see a black martial arts hero fighting on the same side as Bruce Lee was groundbreaking. Though we never really got to know Williams, who was played by Jim Kelly and who gets killed way too early, he was the reason I became interested in and started to explore the blaxplotation scene. In my remake, Williams’s story would get much more attention and obviously be much more interesting.

Name one of the films on your top-5 list and the reason why it is there.

Beat Street (1984) opened my eyes to the hiphop scene, which I immediately identified with and which inspired me. It was completely different to films like Saturday Night Fever, like a mix between a musical and a realistic portrayal – almost documentary like – of an underground culture scene that was fresh, dynamic  and transcending geographical and other borders. As I connected to it, I realised the enormous power of film.

Ask yourself any question you think I should have asked and answer it.

“What motivated you to make your last documentary series Afripedia?”

First and foremost: curiosity first and foremost, but also the realisation that there are so many contexts, perspectives and dimensions out there that no one has ever heard about. We put the spotlight on them and make sure that they become known to the world. Our audience consists of people across the world, who are interested in finding out about and connect to creativity regardless of where and how it appears.

Image Credit: Marguerite Seger.

Remembering Differently

The Haitian scholar Michel-Rolph Trouillot opens his remarkable work “Silencing the Past” by pointing to the ambiguity of the word ‘history’. History is both ‘what happened’ and ‘that which has been said to have happened’, with this duality containing both an ‘irreducible distinction’ and ‘equally irreducible overlap,’ writes Trouillot. In our participation in this process we are simultaneously actors and narrators, engaged in the act of making history, as action or event, and crafting a narrative that will leave an imprint for those who have yet to come. The power to control this story, what will appear as History proper, is a question that energises the work of scholars of the subaltern, who are intimately concerned with the overwhelming silences and distortions that serve the project of white supremacist capitalist patriarchy and Western hegemony.

The act of remembering, in the context of African history, is a complex task, where black histories have been relegated to the sidelines and often eviscerated from popular knowledge. We engage with the past ‘after the break’, as Stuart Hall argues, constructing the past ‘through memory, fantasy, narrative and myth’. And the Ghanaian intellectual Ato Sekyi-Otu writes, ‘all remembering is a political activity’, which requires us to ask: what does it mean to remember in this place, South Africa, for this people, and at this time? Venturing into the silences, working in and with the gaps in knowledge, directly engages the difficulties of memory and the demands of critical historical consciousness.

For a marginalised group, coloureds in South Africa, remembering is a central matter of identity: the act of drawing a map of and to the self that yields no easy routes as ancestral lines are remarkably abbreviated and subjectivities are poignantly absent. As literary scholar Grant Farred comments: ‘Coloured racial difference…registered differently from one historical moment to the next’. Thus thinking colouredness, for this moment, requires an acknowledgement that the identity and concept is palimpsetic in the way that it ‘registered differently’, with each moment leaving a mark for and on the next, which is revealed in encounters with the traces of the past. In this post-apartheid/post-colonial moment the question about what colouredness both delineates and means remains a spectre that haunts race, citizenship and redress, and makes the task of historical excavation salient and politically critical. However, like all marginalised groups, we have to contend with history that exists as fragments.

Writing on Saartjie Baartman, Pumla Gqola comments that despite the fact that she has been extensively written into popular memory, little is known of her subjectivity, and as such she has come to personify an ‘absent presence’. One can extend this critique to the entire battle with coloured memory, and the challenge of how to deal with the absent presence of slave histories and slave narratives in our context – which remains on the periphery of popular and institutional memory.

Two buildings in Cape Town, the District Six Museum and The Slave Lodge, stand as critical markers that allow the past to live in our context. The slave era in the Cape Colony served as the genesis of several founding myths about coloured people and ideas of miscegenation and hybridity, the birthplace of popular logic, and the first known attempts to group together heterogeneous people for political reasons in governance. As such, it is a fundamental site of coloured ontology. Venturing into this space, however, requires working with forgotten, unspoken, hidden, and discarded histories.

Conceptual artist Berni Searle’s work ‘Profile’ (2003) exemplifies this kind of imaginative and creative work required. It dialogues with this uneasy history, as her oeuvre challenges, engages, is frustrated with, expands, condenses and plays with ideas of colouredness, while refusing to be trapped by history and always gesturing towards new imaginings of the self. Using the notion of ‘the body as archive’, ‘Profile’ maps the body, engaging the difficulties of tracing coloured heritage. The work comprises a series of prints in which Searle uses a technique known as “blind embossing: to impress “into her cheek a range of objects loaded with cultural connotations”, which include a Christian Cross, Mulsim rakim, British imperial crown, an apartheid shield, Dutch windmill and African “love letter”. Through this she evidences how research into the archive of coloured history reveals ambiguities and absences, a limited archive that does not yield finite answers as the coloured body is rooted to all, yet tied to none.

Searle excavates a past that shows the complex relationship between colouredness and issues of belonging as the objects she uses denote multiple places of coloured belonging. By drawing attention to multiple roots, Profile bears an intertextual reference to the poet Arthur Nortje’s (1973) existential anguish, particularly a line from Dead Roots that reads: “He who belongs to nowhere/is to nothing/deeply attached.” The double meaning, being attached to the lack of a clear place of belonging or ambivalent to this fact, articulates the historical dilemma at the heart of coloured belonging that arises out of the mutedness of coloured history.

In the act of taking coloured, and greater African, history seriously we should ask ourselves: ‘where do we speak from, and with whose vocabulary?’ The grammar of history is embedded in a power structure, and the task of upending it demands a commitment to tell our own stories, in our own voices, while simultaneously critiquing the manufacturing and appropriation of these narratives. Our task is to ensure that contemporary histories are rescued from the current state that Gqola argues replicates the “sameness and anonymity” that oppressed people faced within “colonial epistemes”. It is not just asking that we remember, but that we remember differently, and in a way that allows the past, and our ancestries, to emerge with full humanity intact. We can take our genesis from Trouillot instructional statement that ‘History is the fruit of power, but power itself is never so transparent that its analysis becomes superfluous. The ultimate mark of power may be its invisibility; the ultimate challenge, the exposition of its roots.’

Our relationship with the past is a strange entanglement, a play with light and shadow, what is seen and unseen, there and yet frustratingly elusive. We undertake a mournful dance with memory as we ponder the terms and conditions of who we are and where we have come from. The act of engaging and wrestling with historical memory remains a fraught undertaking. But remember, we must.

* I take this title from a quote about Toni Morrison’s work by Paul Skenazy: “Her ability in that book to move across fantasy and the hard terms of black life; to turn folk stories into palpable mythologies that rule the everyday; to make a quest of forgotten, unspoken, hidden, and discarded history: These are beautifully entangled in that book.”

Image Credit: Flickr