Sean Jacobs's Blog, page 381

The whole ‘Zambia has a white president’ meme

When Zambian President Michael Sata died in London last week after being sick for some time, Western media (and some on Twitter) spent little time reflecting on his rule (basically a neoliberal disaster coupled with economic nationalism, out and out xenophobia towards Chinese and a massive temper). Instead, people who never write about Africa or who couldn’t locate Zambia on a map were more interested in Guy Scott, Sata’s vice president and the stand-in leader till the next presidential elections early next year. (Buzzfeed, not known for writing about acting presidents, cut and pasted his various sayings like he is Barack Obama.) What of course interested the media (especially British media; they were after all the former colonisers there) most, is that Guy Scott was white.

CNN declared “Zambia’s Guy Scott makes history as white president in sub-Saharan Africa.”  In any case, as AIAC’s Neelika Jayawardane reminded Al Jazeera America readers, Scott is not the first white leader of a democratic African country. For example, Paul Berenger, a white Mauritian of French descent, served as the island’s first non-Hindu prime minister from 2003 to 2005. (For apologists of Apartheid or UDI in Rhodesia, your various racist white dictators don’t count.) Meanwhile, The UK’s Telegraph decided Scott was elected; something that came as a surprise to Zambians. Asked  @MissBwalya on Twitter: ‘

“I’m Africa’s First White Democratic Leader.” – Guy Scott according to the UK Telegraph. Uhm, did I miss the election? #Zambia

Even the BBC jumped on the bandwagon, with the story being the top headline simultaneously on BBC News Africa, BBC News and BBC worldwide.

South African political scientist and newspaper columnist Steven Friedman wondered on Facebook: “”I keep on reading and hearing from local and European media that acting Zambian President Guy Scott is ‘Africa’s first white President in 20 years’. Can someone help me–how many black Presidents or heads of government has Europe had in the last 20 years? In the last 500 years?”

In any case, Scott may not qualify to become President. Zambia’s constitution (changed on the behest of its first post-1990 president Frederick Chiluba) mandates that only people whose parents were born in Zambia can run for president. (Though below Aaron Leaf suggests that’s not so cut and dried.)

In any case, Guy Scott has some interesting political views, with a mix of populist (we’re sure a lot of people chuckled at how he characterized South Africans) and some backward views (see what he thinks of gay rights, for example). And, he wasn’t even in the job a few days, when he incited a riot over firing an official of the ruling party (he was trying to get rid of a political rival.)

But we need analysis. We still trying to get together a few Zambia experts to write something on Sata’s rule (something like we did with debating the future of trade union-led political movenments in South Africa). Meanwhile we suggest reading Laura Miti’s essay on 50 years of Zambian independence (celebrated last month) and these essays by AIAC’ers Neelika Jayawardane (on Al Jazeera America) and Aaron Leaf (on Quartz) on the “Guy Scott is white and that’s important” meme. Here’s excerpts from Neelika and Aaron’s pieces.

Aaron:

… Scott’s whiteness has never been as big a deal to Zambians as it has to outsiders. At an election rally in 2008, I watched Scott take the stage in front of 10,000 rowdy supporters and launch into a passionate speech in fluent Nyanja and Bemba, Zambia’s most common indigenous languages, ending it by doing the signature dance of his party, the Patriotic Front. He was a crowd favorite—more so, it seemed, than Sata himself.

… Despite having a Cambridge degree, as every article likes to point out, Scott is politically much like Sata, his longtime mentor—a proponent of both higher foreign direct investment and higher mining royalties with a populist streak that earns him support among Lusaka’s youth. Scott has been a fixture in Zambian politics since the early nineties and is always at pains to display his African-nationalist bonafides: a close professional relationship with Robert Mugabe (whom he reveres), and strong words regarding Chinese business practices in the country.

Another truism in the press is that Scott is ineligible to become president of Zambia because of the fact that his parents, who emigrated from Scotland before independence, were not born in the country. But while Scott himself has stated that he is ineligible, Elias Munshya, a trained lawyer who has written extensively about the Zambian constitution, believes his candidacy should not be a problem: according to him, if Scott’s candidacy were to go in front of the Zambian Supreme Court, they would very likely give him the go ahead. According to Munshya, because there was no concept of citizenship in Zambia under British colonization “residents of Zambia at independence became Zambian.” This puts Scott’s candidacy claims, says Munshya, on equal footing with anyone else whose parents were born before 1964.

But Scott’s chances of getting elected are much harder to predict. “It could go either way,” says Munshya. “The Patriotic Front is divided at the moment. If the party rallies behind him and the supreme court rules on his candidacy, he stands a chance to win.”

And here’s Neelika:

Scott was seen as the man Sata scored in order to create spectacle and distraction during the 2011 elections. In fact, Scott has long been ridiculed because he is a somewhat bumbling figure who lacks statesmanship and authority.

… The debate about his heritage aside, Scott’s short time leading Zambia is not a big deal. “Uncle Scotty” is as Zambian as a Zambian can get. He’s able to deal with a little derision as long as his largely ceremonial position of authority protects him. He is famous for making undiplomatic, ill-thought-out statements, and the list of his faux pas is as long as Zambians’ legendary patience with its elderly patriarchs. He’s a little fearful of anything too new and different, as exemplified by his public expressions of worry about gay people who ask for the right to safety and happiness. In addition, his economic views are rather conservative. There’s going to be none of that free education and free health care, as was the dream during Kenneth Kaunda’s heady years.

In the short time since Sata’s passing, Scott fired Zambia’s Minister of Defence and the ruling Patriotic Front party’s secretary-general, Edgar Lungu. A few people took to the streets and burnt a few things – it looked like a minor bonfire, not a riot. (I wondered why there was no protest when ministers sacked country of riches.) In any case, amid outcry, Lungu has been reinstated to his party post.

All this minor trauma-drama should tell us: the second white man to head a democratic African nation is not going to change a thing. Relax, people.

Music Revue, No.3: Sodade

I’ve been listen a lot to Cesaria Evora lately (sparked by a conversation with someone over the weekend.) I was watching a Youtube video of her show at the Grand Rex in Paris back in April 2004. There was one song in particular that really got me. It’s called “Sodade” which I learned translates to “longing” or something approximate. I don’t know a word of Portuguese but I’ve listened this song over and over again. There’s something amazing about not being able to understand lyrics but still being able to comprehend what a song means. I really can’t say if this has anything to do with my upcoming trip to Liberia and thinking about the emotions I might confront by being so close to the suffering there, but the song always leaves me with an immense feeling of sadness.

MSF doctor writes about her experience working in Ebola zone in Sierra Leone

Before arriving in an Ebola project, most MSF expatriates have to go through two days of intensive training. An important part of this is putting on the full personal protective equipment (PPE). Dressing up for the first time is incredibly uncomfortable, essentially covering your entire body in plastic, tying a waterproof hood around your head, with an N95 respirator mask that protects your mouth protruding through a slit in the mask of the hood. Only your eyes are exposed and then you wear goggles. On top of the yellow suit is a thick waterproof apron and your feet are covered in heavy rubber boots that protect against penetration inside the high risk area. All of these items have to be of a certain standard to ensure a high degree of protection and minimize the risk of infection. Depending on the environmental temperature at the training centre, you start perspiring inside the PPE and begin to feel your green cotton scrubs become damp underneath the suit. This is all part of the initiation and no one enjoys their first experience. You’re told that you will get used to it, and after ten days be quite comfortable in PPE but I think that has more to do with a mental shift that takes place in order to continue working and fulfill responsibilities inside the high risk area than a physical adaptation.

Field conditions are often much more challenging. For one, the environment is extremely humid and you are already perspiring before putting on the PPE. The first item is a pair of latex gloves and you must get used to the feeling of latex clinging to your damp hands so that you can continue dressing. The last item is the goggles, you want to spare as much time, even if only a few minutes, before putting it on because it mists up inside, obstructing your vision so that high risk procedures such as drawing blood for routine tests or administering intravenous fluids become almost impossible. The longer you stay inside the PPE, the more you sweat and on some days it feels as if you’ve lost up to 2 liters of fluid as your scrubs are drenched when you undress. To prevent people collapsing with exhaustion, no one is permitted to be inside for longer than an hour, but the discomfort starts long before this. You start feeling sweat running down your body, the respirator gradually becomes soaked and is sucked into your mouth as you inhale.

Since the face protection in not breathable or absorbent, sweat runs down your face and bending forward can cause droplets to drip off your eyelashes onto the goggles. If water collects in the respirator it also feels as if you’re exhaling underwater. At some point, the top tie of the hood becomes a tourniquet around your head and it hurts. It takes a few rounds of PPE before you silence the voice in your head telling to you rip off the goggles. In fact, you have to consciously remind yourself not to touch your face while in PPE inside the high risk area to avoid contamination. But all of this is bearable if you know why you’re in it, so going in with a purpose helps. Another big motivation to put on PPE and make sure it’s on properly are the stories of how vulnerable health care workers got infected with Ebola and died. Many didn’t know what they were dealing with until it was too late and others were simply not adequately protected.

Musa Kenie, a 24 year old community health officer from Kailahun, Sierra Leone working at MSF’s Ebola case management centre (CMC) in the district says the country has suffered a huge loss of health care workers, especially amongst those who were community-based, such as nurses trained in maternal and child health. In a country where the maternal mortality rate is one of the highest in the world, this is devastating. Musa tells me about his first encounter with a patient suspected of having Ebola at Kailahun Government Hospital on the 17th of May this year, “My colleague mentioned that there were rumours of an Ebola outbreak in Koindu, the border town near to Liberia and Guinea, and this is where the patient came from but we did not suspect Ebola even though she had a high fever, postpartum bleeding and was confused.” The only protective equipment Musa and his colleagues had at the time were elbow-length obstetric gloves, no face masks, no goggles, no apron, no rubber boots. He attempted to insert an intravenous cannula in the patient’s arm while going through all the possible causes of postpartum bleeding, trying to find a diagnosis but Ebola was still not on the list of differential diagnoses when the woman died more than 12 hours later.

On the 20th of May, Musa was sent to train under a senior colleague for six months in Buedu, a town 17 miles away from Koindu, before being posted to his own catchment area. But in Buedu community health centre he found four patients isolated in the maternity ward with the same symptoms: fever, vomiting and diarrhoea. “Now we were thinking of cholera,” he says. Within a day of his arrival, surveillance officers from the Ministry of Health and Sanitation arrived to take blood samples from the four patients. This time they wore aprons, face masks and gloves. Musa was informed of similar cases in Koindu and that blood samples from there would also be sent to the Haemorhagic Viruses laboratory in Kenema. If the results were positive, he was told the government would declare an Ebola outbreak in Sierra Leone. And shortly thereafter, that’s what happened. Almost six months later, we stand in a clearing in the forest used to bury those who died of Ebola at the Kailahun CMC. It’s a field of unmarked graves containing bodies of people from different parts of the country. Most of them died alone and were buried before their families could identify them. One grave is marked by a wooden sign board with the words “RIP Rosaline Kamara” handwritten in red paint. Rosaline was a friend of Musa’s and a maternal and child health nurse aide who was admitted to the CMC but didn’t survive. Making the sign board was Musa’s way of honouring her memory beyond the statistics in the wake of Ebola’s indiscriminate attack.

Its true that nothing I read about Ebola or heard from my colleagues in the field could prepare me for the reality of it. Even when I’m certain that my PPE will protect me from being infected by the virus, I cannot escape being affected by the pain, loss, helplessness and unfairness of it all. It’s not the wide-scale effects that ultimately penetrate one’s illusion of separateness, not dead bodies or death rates or sick people falling out of an ambulance at the entrance of the CMC. It’s the more subtle experiences of having to isolate family members when someone tests positive and the others are negative, then witnessing their grief and anxiety when they’re separated from each other. It’s in the profound sadness we feel for children who refuse to eat or speak as an expression of their acute despair after seeing one or both of their parents die in adjacent beds. It’s the cold precision with which infection control measures are enforced and the way in which these violate what makes us human, like barring a mother from breast feeding her baby or denying those left behind much needed closure of funeral rites for their dead relatives. And sometimes it’s a hopelessness and loss for words when we find out that another healthcare worker has died.

Poverty, underdevelopment and weak health systems are amongst the reasons this outbreak has claimed so many lives, so it makes sense that in the absence of any radical treatment the care that MSF provides to Ebola patients is centered on oral rehydration, nutrition, hygiene and a standard course of antibiotics and antimalarials. With this regimen we’ve seen a greater than 40% cure rate at the Kailahun CMC, which is truly inspiring. I’ve been here for four weeks so far and despite hearing rumours and having expectations, I’ve not seen any Cuban doctors or American troops come to help where we are. While we impose restrictions and militantly implement universal precautions to secure our borders, West Africans in Sierra Leone, Liberia and Guinea are trying to make sense of the decimation and find a way to move forward after so much of the little that they had to begin with has been taken away. Not enough was done by the international community to avert the disaster and prevent the spread of Ebola at the epicenter of the outbreak. Six months later, with an increasingly punitive and fearful approach towards quarantine of those who’ve chosen to help, it appears as if the world’s response is still shamefully off the mark.

Novelist Taiye Selasi doesn’t like passports or nations.

The videos of the TED Global 2014 lecture series are not out yet. But if the follow-up blogposts are anything to go by, we can anticipate what Taiye Selasi will tell us in her presentation.

As far as I can tell from Thu-Huong Ha’s quick summary of her talk, Selasi sang the same song she’s been singing for the past few years: “Our passports don’t define us.”

She claims that countries are ephemeral things. Nations can “be born, die, expand and contract.” For that reason, they ought not to define who we are. “History is real,” she insists, “cultures are real, but countries are invented.”

My guess is that Selasi has read books such as Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities. Perhaps this is why she speaks of nations as imaginary or invented things. She is right. Nations are not “naturally occurring things.” They are invented. But, then, as Anderson himself would agree, countries are no less “real” just because they are invented.

Selasi concluded her TED talk with the question: “How can I come from a nation? How can a human being come from a concept?” Does she really think that nations are merely concepts?

Nations are invented. But they are also legal, political, and historical entities. They are not things we can wish away like a bad dream. Our nation, our passports do define our lives, our access to resources, and our ability to circulate in the global landscape. To the powers that be, the powers that decide on the distribution of the resources on which our lives depend, we are never simply humans. We are, first and foremost, passport-holders.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m all for critiquing the nation as a form of legal and political identity—especially in the ways it fosters global forms of inequality. But a solid critique of the nation demands that we understand its significance, its power, its history, what is useful about it but also what is dangerous about it. Wishing away the nation as ephemeral and dispensable is itself a dangerous position to take for the simple reason that it completely misunderstands what nations are and why, despite their glaring shortcomings, they continue to exist and define individual life and global relations.

At some point in the talk, Selasi quips: “You can take away my passport, but you can’t take away my experience”—a variation on the “our-passports-don’t-define-us” statement. She also points that what matters is not your country but where “shopkeepers know your face” or what locality “shapes your weekly emotional experience.” Let us be frank here and admit that there is something disturbingly hollow about these kinds of statements. It sounds like some new age political mysticism. Let’s just throw all our passports into the bonfire and dance about in our naked humanity.

But here is where the problem lies.

Selasi hates the “Where are you from” question. It complains that it fails to acknowledge that her identity is multiple. After all, she “was born in the UK and grew up in the US, with an English-born mother raised in Nigeria and an Australian-born father raised in Ghana who has been living in Saudi Arabia for the past thirty years.”

But these are just biographical details. The mere fact that Selasi has a mixed heritage, grew up in different countries, and now has apartments in three different continents proves nothing, least of all that passports—as a legal document—don’t define us. She is confusing biographical quirks for legal status. She doesn’t seem to realize that there is a difference between identity as a subjective, biographical problem and identity as a legal and political reality—two very different issues with different genealogies and, therefore, requiring different kinds of critiques. One does not cancel out the other.

Image Credit: TED Talks.

The Spear of the People

In September this year, Inkosi Mhlabunzima Maphumulo would have turned 65 years old. But on February 25, 1991, an apartheid hit squad murdered the traditional leader and Contralesa president as he pulled into the driveway of his home. Maphumulo’s assassination sent shockwaves across the Pietermaritzburg communities that had come to know him as the “peace chief” for his efforts to quell KwaZulu-Natal’s political violence.

During the last decade of apartheid, Pietermaritzburg was the scene of some of South Africa’s deadliest violence as a state-fueled civil war wracked its townships and countryside. Pietermaritzburg is the city where Nelson Mandela gave his last speech before his 1962 arrest. It is the birthplace of the ANC’s fiery and controversial Harry Gwala and the Liberal Party leader and novelist Alan Paton.

Despite this, the KwaZulu-Natal Midlands and its capital city, Pietermaritzburg, have a bit of a reputation as a “sleepy hollow.” But a group of local artists, activists, and business people are working to change that perception. The people working to promote Pietermaritzburg’s history and arts are a diverse group, forming a partnership between business people, local government, and artists. I sat down with two of them, businesswoman Amanda Xaba and the playwright Mzi Mngadi, to discuss the fruit of their collaboration, the stage production Umkhonto Wabantu.

Amanda Xaba started a communications company in 2006 and named it after her grandfather, local struggle hero Anton “Mfenendala” Xaba. In 2012, the company formed a trust to manage his legacy and launched a corporate magazine. Besides local business coverage and lifestyle advice, each issue features one of Pietermaritzburg’s struggle heroes, starting with her grandfather and including Maphumulo, Gwala, Jabu Ndlovu, and Chota Motala. In one issue, Xaba described the impetus for promoting Pietermaritzburg’s history: “When I asked my son who or what Moses Mabhida was he answered, ‘the stadium in Durban.’”

They also launched the Mfenendala Cultural Arts Group, adopting the Pietermaritzburg Artists Association with financial support in order to educate more people about the role of Pietermaritzburg in the liberation struggle.

The Pietermaritzburg Artists Association, formerly known as “Die Bafanas” was founded by Sipho Mthembu, Khaba Mkhize, and Muzi Mthembu in the 1980s as a black community theatre with a focus on political education. They also performed several of Mkhize’s plays, including Hobo the Man, Pity Maritzburg!, and Ubuntu. The Association’s current director, Nelson Thulani Mngadi, grew up steeped in the city’s theatre. Die Bafanas used to practice at his house. He remembers watching: “I think maybe I was about seven years old seeing those veterans on stage. Most of them were my role models and mentors. I admired everything about them and learnt a lot. The old Sobantu generation was very talented and passionate about stage plays, musical, theatre and sports.”

Die Bafana’s community education mission continues in the association’s partnership with Mfenendala for Umkhonto Wabantu. Mfenendala reached out to the association and the Sobantu school teacher, poet, novelist, and three-time Comrades race medalist, Mzi Mngadi. They gave Mzi the magazine articles on local struggle heroes and the accompanying research… and asked for a story.

Mzi’s Umkhonto Wabantu highlights the history of KwaZulu-Natal Midlands, carefully covering a tumultuous era of South Africa’s past while celebrating the region’s liberation heritage without hagiography. The first day of the production was reserved for high school and tertiary learners, whose tickets were covered by some funding from the National Heritage Council. I attended the second showing on 27 June 2014. The Winston Churchill Theatre filled with local dignitaries, university faculty and students, heritage representatives, and the families of those featured.

Umkhonto Wabantu dealt emotively with the tragic moments of KwaZulu-Natal’s history. When I brought up the range of emotions evoked by the drama, Mzi called it a “salad,” echoing the sentiment that Khaba Mkhize offered up 20 years earlier to describe another Pietermaritzburg community theatre production, his Pity Maritzburg!

Pity Maritzburg was written by the events, not me. It was like a fruit salad. You take the apple, slice it, put it there, you take paw-paw, y’know.” – Khaba Mkhize in “Natal Cockroaches Fly”

While the events and characters may have written Umkhonto Wabantu, Mzi gave it beautiful form. He used Zulu storytellers to set up each scene. Thami Gumede paced the stage as an imbongi and even in English mimicked the pace of a Zulu praise singer. Winile Madlala, in her MK uniform, was much more reserved but equally powerful. The chorus animated the theatre with its performances of the songs of the liberation struggle.

With Umkhonto Wabantu Mzi told the region’s history as the families of those portrayed sat in the front row. Mngadi expressed his concerns about the audience: “I had fears about that before the play. It’s not easy to unleash or construct something that is about people with relatives still living.” But there was nary a dry eye as four soldiers pushed the coffin of Victoria Mxenge, draped in an ANC flag, across the stage and violence ensued. I sat next to Inkosi Maphumulo’s daughter as Siphamandla Ngcobo strode confidently across the stage as the late chief. All knew immediately who it was – not necessarily because of the head ring denoting his leadership status, but on account of his infamous leather jacket. Buyi chuckled and whispered, “they got that right!”

There were other laughs too. By far the evening’s lightest moments surrounded Mandla Mbuyisa’s portrayal of Harry Gwala, wearing the signature neck brace and thick glasses. Mbuyisa would bellow, “viva, ANC, viva!” and the crowd erupted. The audience also loved Phumlani Madlala as PACSA’s Peter Kerchoff – though the playwright may have taken some liberties with Kerchoff’s politics.

As Umkhonto Wabantu remembers these local struggle heroes—the late peace chief, comrade Gwala, and Mfenendala—it reminds that the sleepy hollow isn’t so sleepy.

* Top Image Credit: Die Bafanas perform from a truck outside Jan Smuts cricket stadium demonstrating against rebel English tour 1990 (photo – Rafs Mayet, Africa South Art Initiative Culture and Working Life Project)

Those iconic Nigerian hairstyles from the ’60s

Long before Chris Rock wondered what was up with black women’s hair (“Good Hair” 2009), black women in Africa were busy engaging in acts of self-fashioning that married their political sensibilities and their aesthetic leanings in ways that defied limitations of imagination and gravity. And photographer J. D. ‘Okhai Ojeikere was there to document that passing moment, showing us that hair was always political – reflecting not only one’s personal aesthetic position within global currents, but those of one’s nation, as well.

In the first of the BBC World Service’s new video series, Bisi Silva from the Centre for Contemporary Art in Lagos explains that one hairstyle – much like today’s styles associated with celebrity (like the “Farah Fawcett”, or the “Rachel”) – was even given a name: “Onile Gogoro” – Yoruba for “tall house” or “standing tall”. But this was not a style associated with any ordinary human celebrity; it was the embodiment of aspirations and euphoria of a nation at independence. Variations of these hairstyles were all over – I remember them in Zambia as late as the ’80s, before the “wet look” (known as the Jheri Curl in the US – BTW, the creator of that look, Comer Cottrell, just died this year) and hair straighteners took over.

Back in the ’60s, photographers were busy documenting the men of Africa, the patriarchs in their horn-rimmed spectacles, contending with the men of Europe, who wanted to maintain their control.

But Ojeikere documented how the ordinary person felt – how women in Nigerian urban scenes responded to independence, unleashing their poetic aspirations through style – their hair, clothing, walk, and body language. This hair stood tall on a solid structure, allowing one to reach higher than one’s physical limitations permitted. It captured the swirl in a wave that would otherwise only last a few moments in the ocean.

What a lovely imaginative leap, to go from thinking lofty thoughts about what independence offered us, to thinking…how shall I fashion myself – my living, physical body – to reflect my political desires, the euphoria that my fellow citizens feel?

When I see Ojeikere’s photographs today, I think of the same narratives I hear about New York’s first skyscrapers, built at the turn of the twentieth century: of the mythologies surrounding the Flatiron Building (1902) and the Chrysler Center (1930). Each of these grand buildings was imagined at a seminal historical moment of great hope and impossible-possibility. Into their construction went the desire to both show off and contain virility. So too, this hair.

Today, when one walks the avenues of Manhattan, one can easily pass by those powerful dreams that produced iconic buildings. We could easily forget those potent episodes in our histories. Ojeikere’s photographs remind us of such a wild moment – a moment that produced quintessentially Nigerian personifications of “freedom”, “modernity”, and sexual, creative, and generative power.

Photo Credits: J.D. Okhai Ojeikere & CCA Lagos

5 Questions for a filmmaker… Philippa Ndisi-Herrmann

Born in Bonn in 1985, Philippa Ndisi-Herrmann is a Kenyan and German photographer and filmmaker. She is intrigued by the invisible boundary between individual and collective identities, and fascinated by the influence of ancestral memory, living space and culture on our understanding of ourselves. She is drawn to Lamu, an Island in the Indian Ocean, where The Donkey that Carried the Cloud on its Back an ongoingfeature-length documentary project, originates. She lives in Nairobi, Kenya where she writes, cooks, paints, shoots, makes jokes, reads Rumi, and falls in love.  Here’s a teaser for “The Donkey that Carried the Cloud on its Back”

What is your first film memory?

It was The Bear by Jean-Jacques Annaud. I was maybe five. My mum had returned from the UK bearing gifts and brought me back the video. I watched it alone, captivated. The forest was entrancing and the silent bears mystifying. I cried. I watched it a few times, not many, but that was the first time I was moved by a film – and perhaps the first time I understood a feeling, in this case, the feeling of separation, of loss and aloneness through the film medium.

Why did you decide to become a filmmaker?

In my late teens, I realised that one of my purposes in this life was to plug myself into our greater understanding of human kind, by contributing and conveying sentiments, feelings and moments. I knew I was an artist – but I felt the media that I knew, words and drawings, did not suffice; film felt like a multi-sensory medium to convey a feeling. Film was tangible; you could hear, you could see, you could feel – it was real, the human story could be told and understood. Film to me is one of the strongest and most powerful tools to create compassion. If only for a brief period, you can live another’s life – and this experience can deepen and change your perspective and understanding of life. More compassion is what the world needs, and film is a way of positively contributing to the greater human experience.

Which film do you wish you had made?

Many of Bergman’s, because he is genius and perhaps Walter Salles’s Central Station (1998) or Half-Nelson by Ryan Fleck.

However I will say I wish I made Biutiful because it is poetry and spiritualism. To me, the film explores the memory other’s have left behind and the memories we leave behind. Is it the love we have for others or is it our memory and moments with them that make up our “souvenir” of them? I also liked the clash of antiquity and the real world. A wonderful film. After I saw it, I used to fall asleep to that film for many a night. It made me even more inspired to make films!

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

I will say Out of the Furnace. It is exquisitely directed – we always know the character’s motivation and the director Scott Cooper explores the complexities of conflict so well.

Paradise Love ( as well. I admire the film because of how Director Siedl seems to have observed the most minute details and presented them in such a way that is so strong and clear. The place where the film takes place is very familiar to me, it is a seaside resort town that I have been to many times as a child and adult. The dynamics of relationships between young local guys and middle-aged European women has been a source of fascination for me so I appreciate how he explored this. What I liked about the film is how Siedl explores the everchanging power play between the two characters and of course the way in which “power” and lack of power affects self-esteem.

I also like how Paradise Love touches on imperialism and addresses hangover of sex and colonialism. Oh and I love the way Siedl designs his shots. Most of his scenes are just one shot, sometimes only one take. Often locked off. Many of his shots are full of visual contrasts and each shot is like a photographic portrait. The dialogue is crazy too, very real but crazy.

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

“Which are your favourite film scene(s)?”

I will tell you two, off the top of my head, but from my heart; one from the perspective of a filmmaker and the other from the perspective of a romantic, starting with the latter:

When Édith Piaf and Marcel go on their first date in a fancy restaurant in Olivier Dahan’s La Vie en Rose and fall in love at that table. I love the dialogue and editing; I love the way the filmmaker hold certain shots and the way the scene is told through Edith recounting the story to her best friend.  Dahan later references this scene toward the end of the film when Edith in her old age, is interviewed by a young woman. Sublime and beautiful; touching and romantic!

From a filmmaker’s point of view I pick the prologue to Biutiful; the scene in the white forest with Uxbal and the young man – everything in it is perfect and moving; the owl’s feathers blowing in the wind, the dialogue, the images, the intimacy and spiritual relevance.

* The ‘5 Questions for a Filmmaker …’ series is archived here.

How Frelimo rehabilitated Renamo in time for Mozambique’s Elections

Mozambique’s October 15 elections demonstrated how “divided” the country is. Frelimo, the party in power since independence in 1975, won the elections with 57 per cent of the vote for its presidential candidate Filipe Nyusi and 144 of 250 seats in parliament, but the results in the provinces and severe irregularities on voting day and during the vote count paint a more complicated picture. Nyusi won more than two thirds of the votes in traditional Frelimo strongholds—the southern provinces and the northern-most province of Cabo Delgado, while the opposition parties gained more than 60 per cent in the Renamo strongholds of Zambézia and Sofala provinces. Many instances of ballot box stuffing and a disorganized process of the tabulation of results have been documented, but the National Election Commission (CNE) approved the results on November 1.

Overall, Renamo gained 37 per cent—an increase of more than 20 percentage points in comparison to 2009. Renamo’s success in the elections was remarkable, as the party was weak and disorganized after boycotting last year’s municipal elections and Renamo-affiliated armed groups had frequently clashed with government soldiers over the last two years (we wrote about this here). Negotiations with the administration of President Guebuza about changes in the electoral law and equal representation in the security forces lead to a last-minute deal in early September. Dhlakama, after being absent from Maputo for several years, returned to the political scene and attracted a large number of curious voters wherever he traveled during his campaign for the presidency. In contrast, the relatively new opposition party, MDM, a winner of last year’s municipal elections, did not live up to the expectations.

We talked to political scientist Domingos Manuel de Rosário, researcher and professor at the Universidade Eduardo Mondlane in Maputo, about the elections and Dhlakama’s surprising success:

After the 2009 elections, many commentators thought that Renamo was too weak and divided to ever win a large share of the vote again. Why was Dhlakama able to mobilize so many voters after his long absence from Maputo (and politics) and the violence by Renamo-affiliated groups over the last two years?

It was [President] Armando Emílio Guebuza’s style of governance that politically rehabilitated Dhlakama. Guebuza’s governance style—exclusionary and arrogant—marginalized most of the Mozambican population. Dhlakama was greeted as a hero [when he came back from hiding] because he was the only valid alternative to confront the Frelimo government and its president who was considered one of those responsible for the social ills of our sick country.

Guebuza’s state-building model—even the process of decentralization—only included those who were close to Guebuza and left others marginalized. These were large segments of the population, and this created important factions, even within the Frelimo party. So when Dhlakama appeared, he was perceived as the only one who could confront Guebuza, especially since Dhlakama’s political discourse had ceased to be aggressive and had become a [political] alternative to the dictatorship of Frelimo’s parliamentary majority in the Assembly of the Republic.

There is also the perception that the [recent] war was started by the Frelimo state by ordering the attack on the headquarters of Renamo [in Nampula in March 2012.] Dhlakama only moved to Nampula city and then to Maringue [his base in in Sofala province] and never attacked the population. It is also clear to the people who traveled [in the areas in which violence occurred] and published [their views] on social media that Renamo only attacked buses, trains, and trucks that carried soldiers and never those vehicles that only carried civilians. Don’t forget that Mozambicans experienced the worst trauma of the 16-year war (the civil war, 1976-1992) and when the clashes erupted and the one responsible could be identified, it contributed to Dhlakama being perceived as a hero, as the Messiah and as the Savior of the Mozambican people.

Who do you think voted for Renamo? Who does Dhlakama attract?

In urban areas such as Maputo and Matola, Dhlakama received the largest number of votes since [the first multiparty elections in] 1994 because these are cities with a large number of young people who have access to social media. Young people who completed their university education in the various public and private universities of low quality have trouble finding jobs. In addition, corruption and bribery means less access to jobs in both the public and private sector, and professional qualifications for a job have taken a backseat to being known or having a family member who occupies a higher position.

So it’s new voters, young, old—a bit of all social categories of the Mozambican people. Particularly the demobilized of the civil war who were never socially reintegrated; young “marginalized” without jobs, without prospects of life in rural areas and whose future is uncertain, who are willing to do anything and who are without fear of losing whatever they have because they don’t have anything.

What do you think about the new president, Filipe Nyusi? Is he Guebuza’s puppet, as some have suggested?

Of course he is Guebuza’s puppet, yes. The great question is whether he will continue Guebuza’s work or whether he will distance himself and introduce a new form of governance. We will see when he forms his new administration whether this will be a Guebuza administration headed by Nyusi or a Nyusi administration that represents a rupture with the past and recent present. The latter is what Nyusi promised during the campaign. However, there are many doubts whether he can do this since he does not control the party. So his ability to form alliances within the party will be important to control the party, a very important mechanism for its political governance. It is also necessary to remember that he is a descendant of the military wing of FRELIMO (the liberation front). So there is a confluence of economic and political interests. And we also shouldn’t forget that Guebuza left a great burden for him—the creation of a fund for social reintegration of the “residual forces of Renamo.” Where will he find the money? And who belongs to these residual forces? What about those who were never reintegrated after the 16 year-war? And what about the Mozambicans who are politically and economically marginalized? When will they be integrated into society? Will it be necessary to either belong to the military or having fought [during the war] to receive one’s place in Mozambique? And in addition to these points, remember that the elections are considered problematic and not transparent.

What do you think is the future of the relatively new opposition party MDM that won three of the country’s four largest cities in the 2013 local elections, but whose presidential candidate, the mayor of the second largest city Beira, Daviz Simango, only received 6 per cent of the vote?

MDM’s results don’t surprise me. What is it that MDM did politically in recent years? MDM will be the victim of its own “supposed” success. Success is the result of [political] work. Yet MDM never did this work and provided political alternatives. Moreover, MDM’s mobilization is a big nightmare. Finally, the rise of the figure of Manuel de Araújo [mayor of Zambézia’s province of Quelimane] created a dual structure, as two prominent figures, Araújo and Simango, now dominate the party, which can pose major problems to the MDM in the coming years. MDM will have major problems to become the main opposition party. These elections showed well that Daviz Simando is strong in elections of local officials, but in elections of national officials, Simango becomes irrelevant and insignificant. He can’t compete to become president. More so because he was competing against a great charismatic leader (Dhlakama) and a strong party machine (Frelimo and Nyusi).

What is your overall assessment of the elections?

These were the most problematic elections in Mozambique since 1999. Many irregularities were registered. The Technical Secretariat for Electoral Administration (STAE) is the major culprit of this situation. It’s a highly politicized structure, which hasn’t evolved over time so that the forces that have influenced it have been almost the same since 1994.

Domingos Manuel de Rosário just finished a project on decentralization reform and public service provision and currently works on a book project about the civil war in Mozambique (1976-1992). Interview translated from Portuguese by author.

Image credit: eNews Africa

Oscar Pistorius and the Judge

South Africa is a divided society with a vile history of injustice. Injustice runs along very bright lines: black versus white, women versus men, the rich versus the poor, government versus the people. For a long time, there wasn’t much debate about whom the law favoured: white, rich males, usually wielding the political power of government.

Since democracy, South Africa has been locked in a different kind of struggle. While the bright-lines have disappeared (at least in law), the people are still attuned to them. Our biggest fear as South Africans is that the Beast of Apartheid may not be dead; it may be living in the shadows of the rainbow nation.

Oscar Pistorius’ murder trial was bound to rub us all the wrong way. In many ways, Pistorius is a poster child for the old South Africa: a rich (spoilt) white male who wields unearned privilege and believes that the country owes him a favour. Oscar splits South African society in all ways possible.

To some whites, Pistorius is a victim of rampant black-on-white crime. His fear of the ubiquitous black criminal forced him to shoot the love of his life in cold blood. To most blacks, he represents gun-wielding whites who see a criminal in every black person.

To the poor, Pistorius represents the rich who buy and sell justice—jumping queues with expedited trials while poor folk rot in jail, even before they have had a day in court.

To some women, Pistorius is a domestic-abuser-turned-“victim”. His case was beyond pale, just like the millions of other domestic abusers who bash women and then drench the public in tears begging for forgiveness.

Judge Masipa convicted Pistorius on one count of culpable homicide (manslaughter) and on one gun-related charge. She sentenced him to an effective five years in prison, although he will be entitled to apply for parole in 10 months. Masipa has been publicly vilified for both her conviction and sentence. Billionaire Donald Trump – that true beacon of intelligence – commented on the sentence: “Oscar Pistorius will likely only serve 10 months for the cold blooded murder of his girlfriend. Another [O.J. Simpson] travesty. The judge is a moron!”

Pistorius’ case was the hardest possible judicial assignment for any judge on the post-apartheid bench. Justice meant, ultimately, whatever one’s ideology and sense of history demanded. Masipa’s verdict and sentence, whichever direction she decided, were about more than justice for Reeva Steenkamp; she had to comment on the state of the Republic.

After 16 months of a grueling trial, how did Judge Masipa do? To answer this question, we must take a detour to a similarly difficult time in South African history: 1990.

In 1990, after centuries of brutal violence and wrenching oppression, South Africans were about to build a new country. All that the country had as a point of reference was a very recent history of repression, brutality and a biased, rotting judiciary.

The biggest question, then, was justice for apartheid victims. What would justice look like for those whose families were torn apart, for those who lost life and limb fighting for freedom? Mandela and his comrades knew that the problem of justice needed a cunning long-term solution. They crafted one: a constitution quite like no other!

The aspiration for the crafters of the Constitution, as Mandela explained later, was to ensure that, “Never, never and never again shall it be that [this] beautiful land will again experience the oppression of one by another and suffer the indignity of being the skunk of the world.”

The Constitution declared that its purpose was to ‘Lay the foundations for a democratic and open society in which government is based on the will of the people and every citizen is equally protected by law.’ (Preamble) The new South Africa would be founded on the values of ‘Human dignity, the achievement of equality and the advancement of human rights and freedoms… Supremacy of the constitution and the rule of law.’ (§ 1)

The Constitution entrenches in our society certain inalienable rights. Everyone – including an accused or convicted criminal like Pistorius – is equal before the law and entitled to have his or her dignity respected and protected. (§ 9 and 10)

Most of all, the Constitution is ‘the supreme law of the Republic; law or conduct inconsistent with it is invalid, and the obligations imposed by it must be fulfilled.’ (§ 2) To this end, ‘The courts are independent and subject only to the Constitution and the law, which they must apply impartially and without fear, favour or prejudice.’ (§ 165)

Judge President Mlambo, who is perhaps responsible for assigning Judge Masipa to the Pistorius trial, noted the broader justice questions posed by the case. He said:

‘[In] a country like ours where democracy is still somewhat young and the perceptions that continue to persist in the larger section of South African society, particularly those who are poor and who have found it difficult to access the justice system…. I have taken judicial notice of the fact that part of the perception that I allude to is the fact that the justice system is still perceived as treating the rich and famous with kid [gloves] whilst being harsh on the poor and vulnerable.’

The challenge facing Judge Masipa was heightened in two ways. First, the facts were hardly in dispute. It was not in dispute that Pistorius shot and killed Steenkamp. The mixed question of fact and law was about Pistorius’ intention when he shot Steenkamp. Pistorius’ guilt or innocence hinged only on his state of mind. The difficulty is: only Pistorius knows his state of mind when he committed the offence—a bitter pill for the public to swallow.

Second, Judge Masipa had to answer a bigger question about the meaning of justice in post-apartheid South Africa. This question is fashioned along the bright-lines I outline above and it is subject to intense public opinion. She was being asked whether the law still favours rich white males over the poor, women and blacks?

She handled the task quite remarkably. She and the judiciary saw the Pistorius trial as an opportunity to teach the nation and the world about South Africa’s constitutional compact. The lesson: In South Africans, justice means what the Constitution says it does. The Constitution says justice means treating the accused with dignity, fairness and legal restraint whilst punishing him or her for proven facts. Many will ask: what does justice mean for Reeva Steenkamp?

John Rawls wrote in A Theory of Justice that, “The main idea [of justice] is that society is rightly ordered, and therefore just, when its major institutions are arranged so as to achieve the greatest net balance of satisfaction summed over all the individuals belonging to it.” In South Africa, we have created such institutions through the Constitution.

Institutionally, the State has formidable public resources (money, police, specialists etc.) to discover facts. The State employs gifted lawyers to place those facts lucidly and forcefully before a judge. The accused is punished for those facts proven by the State beyond a reasonable doubt. The judge must ignore public opinion and personal idiosyncrasies in order to be the arbiter of fact, ‘without fear, favour or prejudice.’ For the victim, justice means punishing the accused for wrongs in accordance with institutions of law. Justice is the rule of law.

The punishment must be preponderant to the nature of the crime, the offender and the interests of society. According to Professor Snyman Criminal Law, ‘the court [must] weigh the accused’s personal circumstances against the nature of the crime and the interests of society. The [accused’s] personal circumstances constitute mitigating circumstances, whereas the nature of the crime and the interests of society amount to aggravating circumstances.’

These were the principle guiding Judge Masipa’s decision, and she remained true to them. Despite considerable public opinion, Masipa did what the Constitution demanded of her. We could all speculate about how Oscar committed a different crime or how he deserved a harsher sentence. Speculating is the easy part. Adhering to a binding social contract – the Constitution – is much, much harder!

John Rawls explains that: ‘From the standpoint of the theory of justice, the most important natural duty is that to support and to further just institutions. This duty has two parts: first, we are to comply with and to do our share in just institutions when they exist and apply to us; and second, we are to assist in the establishment of just arrangements when they do not exist […].’

All of us are a single stupid decision away from a jail cell. Should we ever make such a stupid decision, we all want the justice of fairness and restraint shown by the court in the Pistorius trial.

The trial highlights some worrying trends about wealth and justice in South Africa. The rich and famous can afford the most expensive legal counsel, which improves their experience in the justice system. This is an important issue. We should all support Chief Justice Mogoeng’s efforts to promote access to justice for everyone by bridging the gap for indigent accused. However, these are questions of policy and they should be kept out of the courtroom!

Some people remark that ‘South Africa will never see another Nelson Mandela.’ People like Judge Masipa, and painful events like Reeva Steenkamp’s killing, remind us why we do not need another Mandela. As a country, we will survive through our commitment to values of dignity and human rights. Even if those values also work, quite uncomfortably, for the benefit of criminals like Oscar Pistorius.

Image via The Telegraph

Every Man Gotta Right to Decide His Own Destiny: 35 Years of Bob Marley’s Survival

This past September, Rolling Stone reported that Bob Marley’s Legend, his posthumous greatest hits collection, had reached the top bracket in the Billboard 200 weekly music chart of album sales—Marley’s first appearance in the top ten since 1976. As is the frequent custom these days, this spike in sales was not due to any palpable cultural shift, but instead the result of a sales marketing ploy (cheap music downloads for a limited time) on the part of Google Play for Google Play, with Marley a surprise beneficiary.

It has been thirty years since Legend’s 1984 release, only three years after Marley’s early, tragic death from cancer at the age of 36 (a striking coincidence with Frantz Fanon, who also died at 36 from cancer). And I might have entitled this piece thirty years of Legend, except for the raw fact that the album largely, if not completely, erases Marley’s political legacy. Containing most of his charted hits with his backing band the Wailers, it is primarily an apolitical affair, though inclusions such as “I Shot the Sheriff” and “Get Up, Stand Up”—both originally from 1973’s Burnin’—provide a sense of the irreverence found in his back catalog. “Buffalo Soldier” (from the posthumous album Confrontation released in 1983) and “Redemption Song” (from his final album, Uprising, released in 1981) similarly invoke histories of black empowerment and resistance, the latter song drawing in part from Marcus Garvey (Garvey is considered a prophet by Rastafarians). But the trouble with Legend, as with most retrospective compilations, is that it upends the album concept—the sound recording as a problem-space, to borrow an expression from Columbia University anthropologist David Scott, who also happens to be from Jamaica.

 

Survival is an album with a purpose. Released in 1979, it is arguably Marley’s most political recording, forming part of a trilogy with Uprising and Confrontation. While the titles themselves signal this tenor, historical context is also important: Jamaica was hit hard economically during the 1970s (similar to many countries in Africa and elsewhere in the “developing” world), different civil rights movements in the Americas appeared to be reaching uncertain denouements, and, not least, political struggles remained, particularly in southern Africa. Marley himself was a victim of the political violence that had gripped Jamaica, surviving an assassination attempt in 1976.

Reflecting these uncertainties, Marley unapologetically revives a pan-African spirit in Survival, with a front cover that looks like the ultimate flag quiz—representation from 48 African countries, plus the album title overwriting a version of the infamous “Brookes” slave ship diagram. The back cover resembles a BlackPowerPoint slide from an African history 101 class (Rasta style), including a photograph of Emperor Haile Selassie of Ethiopia operating a machine gun juxtaposed with a quote by Marcus Garvey: “A people without the knowledge of their past history, origin, and culture is like a tree without roots.”

Among the tracks themselves, “Zimbabwe” is the most famous, a recording that signaled the right to self-determination (“every man gotta right to decide his own destiny”) specific to the Second Chimurenga then occurring against white minority rule in Rhodesia—an act of solidarity that would further manifest in Marley and the Wailers performance in Zimbabwe as part of its independence celebrations in April 1980. (Read Tsitsi Jaji’s recent, wonderful book, Africa in Stereo, for a recollection of the importance of this moment.) But tracks such as “Africa Unite,” “Survival,” “Babylon System”—“Babylon” being Marley’s preferred Rasta expression for Western (neo) colonialism (“Babylon system is the vampire, yeah!”)—and “So Much Trouble in the World” also sing/shout Marley’s political concerns. Survival was banned in South Africa by the apartheid government. And none of its tracks, it should be noted, show up on Legend either.

That Marley’s politics have been minimized by the music industry is not necessarily surprising. Furthermore, his pedagogy is decidedly different from that of, say, the urban feel of Public Enemy, the confessional dislocation of Earl Sweatshirt, or the broken, art-rap lyrics of Death Grips. Marley’s rage comes with backup singers. And you can dance to it. Yet, as part of a long-standing tradition of insurgent thought and political resistance emanating from the Caribbean, Marley and his album Survival contributed to his political time and place, enabling a recurrent sense of continuity from Garvey to the present, as only recorded music can.