Sean Jacobs's Blog, page 390

Two filmmakers tackle sexual harassment in Egypt

Both domestically and abroad, the issue of sexual harassment has been called a sickness in Egyptian society. Abroad what had previously been framed mostly as an annoyance for female tourists was thrust into the spotlight in 2011 following now infamous and violent attacks on both foreign journalists and local woman during the protests that led to the ousting of then President Hosni Mubarak. As a brighter light shone on the ubiquity and severity of the problem, multiple new grass roots organizations sprung up locally to help protect women, support victims, identify perpetrators, and shift a mentality that has allowed harassment and attacks to continue with impunity.

More recently, a particularly violent attack was caught on video and circulated widely. The video, which purported to show an assault that took place in Tahrir Square during President Sisi’s inauguration (controversial as its content and sourcing was), had the positive impact of pulling the issue of sexual and gender based violence to the forefront of national discourse. Following the attack, nine men were sentenced to life in prison.

In one of his final acts, outgoing interim president Adly Mansour criminalized sexual harassment, at last instituting a long talked about law, which threatened harsh penalties for perpetrators. President Abdel Sisi’s public condemnation, and sporadic enforcement of the new law seems to have somewhat quelled harassment and more serious attacks, but as evidenced by the work of two filmmakers Colette Ghunim and Tinne Van Loon’s demonstrative video; it remains a serious problem.

The short video shot by Ghunim, who got the footage by pretending to talk on her iPhone using a headset, has gotten a tremendous amount of press. Capitalizing on hype surrounding it, the two decided to launch a Kickstarter campaign with the goal of raising $25 000 to improve the production value of their half-hour documentary The People’s Girls. At the time of writing the two have raised over US$18,000 with about 8 days to go.

Van Loon, who came up with the idea for the documentary, began collecting footage nearly a year ago. Her own experiences of harassment in Egypt, as well as the stories she heard from others, motivated her to do something to help maintain dialogue and public awareness around the issue. Last year Van Loon began conducting interviews. Setting up a website to help recruit participants, with the support of local rights groups she was quickly contacted by a substantial group of young women offering to share their stories and perspectives. A handful of men also volunteered, among them Mahmoud Othman, one of the founders of Tahrir Bodyguard.

Since the interviews were conducted the project has evolved substantially, with Ghunim and Van Loon joining forces. The final product is set to take the form of a narrative piece, inspired in part by Cairo 678, and documenting the lives and viewpoints of three disparate characters: A young activist, a tuk-tuk driver, and a lawyer working with a women’s rights organization.

So far the two have received mixed reviews for their preliminary efforts. The short viral video that runs 1:30 has exposed them to both praise and venom, and the substantial media attention it has garnered has been both reflective and misleading. Ghunim and Van Loon lament that several outlets have published articles on them and their work without their consultation. “Which is why I’m Egyptian now” Colette says laughing, “and I’m British” Tinne adds (both are American, of Palestinian/Mexican and Belgian descent respectively).

No Egyptian news outlet has contacted them, they explain, “Everything is wrong in the Egyptian media, and that’s why Egyptians are angry, it says I was just walking around with a camera, and of course people are going to stare at me. All of the information is available and they choose not to include anything.” To be fair, the journalistic integrity of some of these publications is regularly called into question. Youm7 for example, is the same paper that received pushback for publishing a shockingly racist headline a number of weeks ago.

It has not just been Egyptian outlets that have seized the opportunity to misrepresent. The opening line of an article that appeared on the website Inquisitr reads: “Women in Egypt feel sexually harassed while walking down the streets and two filmmakers decided to document what it is like to be a female, in this highly repressed African country.”

For their part, Ghunim and Van Loon are poignantly aware of the implications of two non-Egyptians making a film on sexual harassment, and have proactively called out those who misrepresent their work and goals. They engage with individuals who make racist or Islamaphobic comments, even those offering assistance for reasons they find ethically suspect. The film itself is to be entirely in Arabic, with a large part of the prospective Kickstarter money going toward proper translation.

The two remain slightly weary of the attention the short video has received. “When it first became popular, we weren’t sure if it was a good thing or a bad thing.” They explain that they are hoping to avoid local notoriety until the documentary has been completed. “The thing is,” says Van Loon “right now the only thing out there from us is the Creepers video, that’s not how we wanted to represent things. We don’t want to be known widely in Egypt until we have solid content.”

Clearly the popularity of the short video has been a mixed blessing for the two budding filmmakers, who have also noticed a slight reduction in the prevalence of sexual harassment on the streets of Cairo. As our interview naturally shifts to our own experiences, we discuss the increasingly common occurrence of men publicly warning other men against harassment; a phenomenon that seems to have become more widespread since the law took effect. Animated, Van Loon shares a story from earlier that day: For whatever reason the local laundryman had decided that this would be the day he would whistle at her suggestively. “When I told him that he was harassing me, my doorman high-fived me.” When it comes to this issue, a little solidarity goes a long way.

Hip Hop And Religion

Off the whim, I asked Kwanele Sosibo if he’d be interested in contributing to the series. He swung me this fascinating, unpublished piece about hip-hop and religion within a South African hip-hop context. Sosibo writes for the Mail and Guardian, and is one of the founding members of The Con–Tseliso Monaheng

“You are dealing with heaven, while you are walking through hell. When I say heaven, I don’t mean up in the clouds, because heaven is no higher than your head and hell is no lower than your feet.”

–Rakim, as told to journalist Harry Allen.

For a while, during our adolescence in the nineties, it felt like hip-hop could answer all of life’s questions for us.  While it evolved spontaneously, it was nurtured by healthy doses of street corner intellect and convergent esoterica to such an extent that relating to hip-hop has often felt like relating to an all-knowing, all-powerful being.

I had these thoughts dancing in my mind when I visited an old acquaintance in a Craighall complex the other day. I remembered once, almost ten years ago, riding wild in the streets of Joburg trying to decipher his copy of Ghostface Killah’s woozy classic Supreme Clientele. Ghostface, a proclaimed adherent of the Five Percent Nation’s beliefs (they believe that Allah is the physical black man – Arm, Leg, Leg, Arm, Head), took language to extreme heights by melding the “supreme alphabet” (a coded language based on ascribing meaning to each letter of the alphabet) to his already heady, psychedelic street poems. That album pretty much cemented his place as one of the culture’s premier lyricists, even though much of his subject matter tread worn ground.

Today, Mfundisi Dlungu is a self-employed architect. When we do reminisce about hip-hop’s importance, it is with the distance and objectivity of hindsight, and arguments about who is the “freshest” are underscored by an existential urgency.

Seated on opposite ends of a work desk in his lounge, Dlungu – an athletic figure in a pale yellow shirt, cream jeans and white cross-trainers – cues tracks on his iPad as we chew the fat on our favourite subject. “What made me check for it [hip-hop] was that they were saying that Islam was a religion for the black man, and not Christianity,” says Dlungu. Emerging from the kitchen, he places drinks on wooden coasters and continues. “But when I checked both of these religions, neither belonged to us. So how could we, as Africans, lay claim to something that is not ours?”

Dlungu, a “Christian by default” who never goes to church, adds that it was the mixed messages that led him to doubt hip-hop as a catalyst to spiritual awakening. “Even these cats who were representing that Five Percent thing, they were still about drinking 40 ounces [a measure of beer]. How are you gonna be a Muslim if you’re drinking and fucking whores?” he asks rhetorically. “There wasn’t consistency in what they were saying. In terms of spirituality, the only thing I found in hip-hop was “keeping it real”. Do you! That was the only thing more than the religious part of it because that was a mess…”

Today, the idea of keeping it real is something of a laughing stock in hip-hop. It is an antiquated concept based on keeping your subject matter congruous with your daily reality. Nevertheless, it did bestow on Dlungu a strong template for forming his own identity.  Today, he still speaks in “golden era” hip-hop slang laced with expletives but without the requisite accent as he dissects the culture’s sinister materialism.  “Who can relate to holding money and just throwing it out there, unless you are a stupid motherfucker,” he says in reference to a standard image in mainstream hip-hop videos. “Even if I was to make my money I still couldn’t relate to that. You can relate to Shaq saying ‘my biological didn’t bother’. It just inspired me to be an individual.”

To emphasise his point about “keeping it real”, Dlungu walks up to his DSTV decoder and cues a track by a Johannesburg group called the Skavenjas featuring Trezpas. From the plasma screen, images of two dreadlocked township friends arguing in dense tsotsitaal about a shared lover transfix me for a while. The beat is minimalistic, there just to provide a rhythmic guide to this real-time beef. “This is fresh, sbali. Nobody makes hip-hop like this anymore,” he says, exaggerating a little. I guzzle my drink, but before I leave, I borrow a rap magazine from his rack.

Later that day, I pass by Ritual Stores in Newtown, a nerve centre of Joburg’s hip-hop scene, to meet up with Osmic. I find him next door, at club O.S.T., which the nerdy, chubby Osmic co-owns with DJ Kenzhero. He is in a dark office huddled in front of a computer screen, preparing for the upcoming annual Back to the City festival, held outside his club and the adjacent Mary Fitzgerald Square every Freedom Day.

Back To The City Festival, 2014

Also raised a Christian, Osmic says hip-hop taught him to “think free and look beyond”. That curiosity led to a passion for astronomy and books, which in turn led to regular classes at the Wits Planetarium.

Osmic was about to enter high school when, in the late nineties, Gandhi Square (formerly Van Der Bijl Square) emerged as an informal crossroads for all things hip-hop, with kids exchanging piece books [books with graffiti-style drawings], beat-boxing and freestyling their journey to adulthood.

Then a wide-eyed 13-year-old, today he has emerged as an all-round entrepreneur. Osmic exudes a focus and business acumen belying his age as he relates how hip-hop led him to a deeper awareness of his surroundings, hence his strategically-placed position in the hip-hop industry. “Hip-hop started from junk. It was not planned. People go to school to learn the trumpet. You don’t have to go to school to learn hip-hop. In fact, when you go to school for it that’s when it isn’t not hip-hop. So you’re always searching for more.”

As a scholar and a businessman, he intrinsically embodies Rakim’s outlook of dealing with heaven while walking through hell.

It’s a view Tsakane Muabane echoes when he says that hip-hop was essentially about making a plan – innovation out of necessity. As a photographer and a writer for a leading South African hip-hop magazine, he saw first-hand that its innovative flame is unquenchable, but it only thrives in the culture’s proverbial underground.

By way of definition, Kanif, a Muslim MC and sound engineer, offers that the “underground” is the domain of artists existing outside of media control. The media’s control of hip-hop, says Kanife from his spacious, sparsely-furnished Yeoville flat, directly affects its spirituality. “Niggaz With Attitude (N.W.A.) was a prototype for black youth to “act on some gangsta shit.” And when white boys started acting on that gangsta tip, then they brought out Enimem,” he says, pausing to exhale smoke from a joint. “Eminem’s marketing team was bigger than Britney Spears. He had posters all over Yeoville, my man. He was marketed by big corporate companies, for white boys to have a prototype to act like Eminem is on some white boy shit, like ‘take mushrooms with your girlfriend’ or whatever. Hip-hop has long been used as a tool to control what people spend their money on, what they think and how they act – spiritually and intellectually.”

Kanif performing at an Iapetus records showcase

From his Yeoville flat, Kanife runs a production company named Iapetus Productions (named after Saturn’s unusually orbiting satelite). The internet-savvy crew has put out a string of high quality hip-hop, most notably Bravestarr’s Toy City (which explores man’s relationship with himself and his environment) and Hymphatic Thabs’ Age of Horus.

Typical productions are characterised by pounding basslines, hard drums and industrial-like sound effects sewn together by suspended strings and a constant hollow din which functions as a setting. The achieved effect is of a diminished earth-bound view in favour of a universal vantage point. The lyrics have an equally magnifying effect, re-imagining minds as entire universes.

“It’s the time of silent weapons snipers step inside your mind, make you clones take control and save your soul, yo it’s the time,” raps Thabs on Silent Weapons.

In person, Thabs exhibits a similarly intense personality to the persona of The Hymphatic Thabs. He is an associative thinker who leaves sentences stranded as he grasps at other streaming ideas. For the interview we go the Melville Koppies, where the diminutive award-winning video editor lights up an emaciated joint before waxing lyrical about hip-hop’s importance to his well-being.

“I got into hip-hop through what you would see on the TV and hear on the radio. When you go deeper and start discovering more, the TV type of hip-hop starts becoming more boring and less fulfilling because of its abundance and everything,” he says measuring his words carefully. “You start to want something more sacred. So you go more underground to find hip-hop that gives you some sort of spiritual release.  You listen to it and you feel good about yourself, you feel intelligent, worthy of life. So it helped me, through other people finding themselves, work out how it is I find myself and connect with my inner self.

“True spirituality does not follow a linear timeline,” he continues. “It’s not like you begin at a point where you did not know and then end where you know everything. There is a lot of information going into you a lot of the time and a lot of it is new and maybe old. The searching and finding is inner view.” Before we part ways, he tells me that his next ablum will be a more “chilled” experience titled “Centre of the Universe”.

Like Thabs, Kanife believes that in South Africa’s underground scene, hip-hop’s influence over its listeners has often been militant and spiritual. Overall, he says, it remains broad even though the media has an increasing chokehold over it.

A personification of this dichotomy is Zambian-born MC Zubz. Zubz came up in the underground, but his “more accessible” third album Cochlea – One Last Letta, yielded his most popular hit to date, “Part-time Lover Full-time Freak”. Somewhat of a departure from his more cerebral aesthetic, Zubz maintains that the music has never been at odds with his spirituality, as it is his spirituality that informs it.

As a kid, he remembers being drawn to the imagery of the words more than the notion of being part of a movement. “My ideas about the world and God were not so much shaped in the music. The music automatically became an extension of my ideas and my ideology. My first meeting with God and spirituality was with my mom at home. I was raised in a Christian home, so when the Gospel Gangstas (a Christian rap group) came out and started doing music, I liked it. It even inspired me to be a member of a Christian group when I was young.”

Growing up in Zimbabwe, Zubz saw a lot of friends who renounced Christianity as a direct result of hip-hop and gravitated towards Islam, Sufiism or Bhuddism.

I discovered the culture side of hip-hop later but I think they were introduced to it in its fullness. For them it was about life, perspective and spiritutality. At the time in hip-hop, there were a lot of Five Percenter perspectives on Islam. A lot of my friends converted after listening to Wu Tang Clan, and the teachings of Minister Louis Farrakhan.

Zubz remains a Christian today, although he maintains he has shed a lot of “gospel truths” and customised it to make more sense to him.

“I throw things out on the basis of conviction. Like for example, people take it as a literal thing for the Bible to talk about Jews as a chosen people, which I feel doesn’t resonate with the message of the Bible… The idea of hell, for example. We will get to a certain point where it’s a rapture and the apocalypse finally happens. The sky turns red and the bad people go to hell and the bad people go to heaven. That idea for me when I was growing up was cast in stone. Like, ‘be good or go to hell.’ But for me now a good life on earth is a heavenly one, and what happens after that is peaceful. So I don’t really see a fiery brimstone hell and I don’t see a beautiful Utopic heaven. I see the future of spirituality becoming very individualistic, customised and tolerant.”

While hip-hop is still capable of forging communion with the higher self, its mainstream-manipulated manifestations have necessitated that I pull it down from its pedestal and see it as a human not immune to failure. As a friend of mine recently put it, my first mistake was separating man from god.

* This article is part of Africasacountry’s series on South African Hip-Hop in 2014. You can follow the rest of the series here.

Travelling while black

It takes a while to blink the light out of my eyes. I’m sitting in the back of a songthaew headed for a bus to Bangkok from Chiang Mai when suddenly the world goes white before returning as an old Italian woman grinning at me from across a pile of backpacks as she admires the picture she’s just taken without any fuss about ‘please’ or ‘thank you’.

Most people I’ve encountered in Thailand and Malaysia ask. They ask me to take photographs with them, they ask me if I’m from Nigeria and an alarming number of their male population ask me how much I charge per hour simply because there’s a little more soot in my skin, that spark of Africa in my eyes and something strange between my thighs.

As a black African travelling abroad you always come with more baggage than what you packed and stowed on the flight over.

And, whether you realise it or not, assumptions, connotations and stereotypes about your dark skin and your strange accent swing from your arm like an invisible bag regardless of your past, peppered with private schools and paid leave or your flight in from hard times preceded by even harder knocks.

Abroad, your passport but more often your skin speaks even when you are silent and navigating through people’s reactions to this quiet conversation. This is precisely what I’m doing when I realise an Indian man is following me home on his scooter in broad daylight.

Slowing down and speeding up as I start running down Penang Road in George Town, Malaysia.

To him a black African woman abroad is a prostitute. And he acts on this assumption in the street despite the looks of fear I throw over my shoulder as he catches up and hisses “One night! 500 Ringgit right now for one night! What’s your room number?” just as I slip inside my hotel and scamper past the staff who are staring.

Though I hope he is the last, he is only the first but I try to forget them all as I hunt for wall art on Armenian Street, explore the clan jetties in Weld Quay and when I’m distracted by a tuk-tuk driver who fakes a coughing fit as I walk by under the lanterns on Soi Rambuttri in Bangkok.

At first I chalk it up to the fumes from his exhaust pipe and I think I’ve imagined him saying “No Ebola!” in an almost incomprehensible Thai accent but then two Thai teenagers outside Starbucks do the same thing.

They cough, they catch my eye and they burst out laughing just a few hours after a cabbie has stared at me apprehensively when I correct his mistake of assuming I’m American during a talk radio insert about Ebola a mere day before a Turkish youth glares at me in an Emirates queue at Suvarnabhumi International Airport the same way a middle-aged Russian woman eyeballs me in a bathroom in Dubai.

That’s when I realise that some people equate disease with any or all Africans. And that they will make their amusement or discomfort known despite the fact that you seem to be in a state of health arguably superior or at least on par with their own.

When not being reduced to dark and diseased, travelling while black and African simply means a little annoyance.

Like when you’re crossing Sadao’s overland border from Thailand into Malaysia in a minibus full of Malaysians and they zip through immigration in five minutes flat only for them to have to wait 20 minutes in the sweltering heat while you’re directed to the health office where you stand in the doorway, announce your home continent and send the health inspectors running into the next room in search of masks.

Or when you take an overnight sleeper train and try to cross the Thai border at Padang Besar only to be led into a room where an official asks you for your plane ticket home and your address in Malaysia before insisting you prove you can afford the trip by presenting US$500 in cash while American and European backpackers looking far rattier than you do are allowed entry without a second glance – based purely on their country of birth.

Sometimes this is just the way it goes when you’re a black African who feels there is more than the privilege of a desk and a day job.

When you are a black African who works hard and saves the same because you have it in your head that the world’s sights are meant to be seen whether you are born below them or not and despite something as silly as someone else’s fear of your skin.

As a black African travelling abroad, your travel companions will certainly be ignorance, racism and assumption and there will always be slurs disguised as coughs and men who have watched far too many hip-hop videos in-between drooling over National Geographics.

But, in Thailand and Malaysia, all this irks only when you aren’t being called “Beautiful! So beautiful!” five, six and seven times a day.

When a trishaw driver, a man on the street or a women slicing mangoes at Somphet Market isn’t admiring the rich brown and silky smoothness of your skin, the pride in your gait and the way your hair curls in the midday rain with nothing more than curiosity and appreciation because the Africa you come from can’t be seen on television, in newspapers, in magazines or on cinema screens.

Mostly there will be days in which you spend an afternoon discussing weave techniques at a salon in Koh Samui as a Thai woman with far less hair than your own has hers extended to well below her belly button and you giggle about vanity, dry scalp and how men should never, ever touch your hair whether you’re black, Thai or pre-op.

There will be the warmth of an instant sense of community with other Africans abroad who will smile and wave at you in the street before snatching you up and spiriting you away to an African salon where tiny Thai women are using real black products to maintain afros just as easily as they blow out Asian hair.

And there’ll be those glorious days when you meet a Thai person with a good command of English who giggles at the idea that sometimes it is hotter in Thailand than it is in Namibia.

Because they can’t quite believe that a climate much like their own could have baked you to such a dark hue amidst your salt pans and your lions and in that impossible place where the desert meets the ocean.

Then there’ll be the days when people don’t think you are African at all. Because you’ve been given a chance and you have taken it.

Because you are standing right in front of them while the news tells them you are sick and poor, savage and dying.

So they ask: “But you speak English so well. Are you from Obama?”

This because we are only beginning to see the world and the world is only beginning to see us.

Black Africans who travel on their own steam, with real hopes for themselves and their countries and who are more than willing to tell their stories to anyone who can see past the clichéd narrative of their skin.

Black Africans who didn’t necessarily set out to change minds or perceptions but who have found themselves as an instant ambassador of their country and their continent at large in places where the sight of black people prompts fear and disdain as easily as it ignites compliments and curiosity.

Black Africans who are not drug dealers or prostitutes, destitute or diseased and who defy stereotypes each day that they remain respectful of their host countries laws, cultures and customs in the hopes that visitors to their own countries will do the same.

Black Africans who know that travelling while African is a privilege beyond the financial means of many and so fly out with hearts full of the tolerance they hope to find in foreign places and minds sharp enough to engage with this strange speech of their skin.

In all its vibrant and vexing ventriloquism.

* This article was first published in The Namibian newspaper. It is reproduced here with the kind permission of the author and the publisher.

‘The Italian Joseph Conrad’

Described by the literary press as the “Italian Joseph Conrad” and “a 20th century Balzac”, Alessandro Spina–the pen name of Basili Shafik Khouzam–was a Syrian Maronite who was born in Benghazi in 1927 and died in Milan in 2013. Despite winning universal critical praise, Spina’s works were mostly ignored: nobody bought them, and nobody read them. The reason was simple: most Italians barely knew where Libya was, let alone what their parents and grandparents had done to it. In his diary, Spina remembers running into the Italian poet Vittorio Sereni at a theatre in Milan, sometime in the early 1980s. Sereni introduced Spina to his wife with the following: “Darling, this is Alessandro Spina, who is trying to make Italians feel guilty about their colonial crimes, all to no avail of course.” Not that Spina hadn’t been warned: when he’d sought Alberto Moravia’s advice about his project in 1960, Moravia had counselled him against it, saying that nobody in Italy would be interested due to their sheer ignorance – and indifference – of the country’s colonial past.

The eleven novels and short story collections that constitute Spina’s The Confines of the Shadow are a multi-generational epic that chronicles one of the bloodiest chapters in modern North African history and was written over the course of fifty years. The action takes place from 1911 to 1964 and is set in Benghazi. The first novel, The Young Maronite, opens in 1911 as the Italo-Turkish war draws to a close and the Italian tricolour is hoisted over Benghazi, leaving Italian soldiers to gaze into the vast, deserted land they claimed to own but knew nothing about. The subsequent components of Spina’s cycle – Omar’s Wedding, The Nocturnal Visitor, Officers’ Tales, Colonial Tales, The Psychological Comedy, Entry into Babylon, Cairo Nights and The Shore of the Lesser Life – take the reader on a whirlwind tour through the next half-century: the twenty year Libyan resistance to the Italian occupation, when tens of thousands were interned in concentration camps, the rise and fall of Italian Fascism and its effects on its nearest colony, the heady years of Libya’s independence in the 1950s, the looming spectre of Pan-Arab nationalism, and finally concludes with the discovery of large oil deposits, which triggered the momentous changes that still reverberate through the country today. Thanks to its commanding view of history, The Confines of the Shadow is one of the greatest indictments against colonialism and jingoism, as well as a moving tribute to the Mediterranean’s golden era of cosmopolitanism, a period few know much about.

Now Darf Publishers in London have commissioned the translation of Spina’s 1300-page epic and the first of three volumes of The Confines of the Shadow – which comprises The Young Maronite, The Marriage of Omar and The Nocturnal Visitor – will be released in February 2015. However, owing to the high production costs of translating and promoting this new work, they are also seeking additional funds from interested readers and patrons.

You can support the project here.

* Further reading: A long piece I did on Spina’s life and work for The Nation this past August.

The Afropeans are Coming

Over the next three days, a  group of artists, writers, filmmakers and cultural commentators will meet at Afropea Now!, a a symposium of film screenings, concerts, a workshop and an exhibition taking place at the cultural institution Stadtwerkstatt in Linz, Austria. I am the curator. Last week Africa is a Country asked me to get some of the participants to reflect on what an Afropean is. Here’s the result (edited by Dylan Valley):

The symposium creates an intellectual and emancipatory space for African-European transcultural realities in a society where the public consensus among the Austrian majority is shaped by a strong eurocentristic world view, which is also reflected in the mass media, where Africa often still is treated as a country and the whole continent and its population degraded to an unsolvable problem with reports about starvation, catastrophes and incurable diseases. People of African descent living in Austria (no matter if they are born here or recently migrated) have to fight many stereotypes and daily confronted with prejudice and rank racism.

So, Afropea Now! aims to form a counterpart to these preconceived ideas and prejudices, to promote a change in perceptions and to show an other, modern image of “Africa” and its Diaspora. It further encourages global African-European co-operations and networks in art and culture. With contributions from across Europe and Africa (Austria, Germany, Belgium, the UK, Sweden, Ghana, Senegal and the DR Congo, among others), Afropea Now! will concentrate on the social, cultural and artistic interaction of African and European cultures in a global world regardless of national boundaries.

Some highlights include: photographer Johny Pitts (he founded the site Afropean.com) on “On Afropean Culture;” curator and producer Nadia Denton on “Why the best of the Nigerian Filmindustry is Yet to Come!‘” Teddy Goitom on Afripedia, a new 5-part series of shorts about a new generation of African creatives challenging all preconceptions and stereotypes; Austrian Abdallah Salisou on “The Black Victim Complex And The White Savior Complex;” and the journalist Hannah Pool revisits her biography.

A number of films will also be screened. Like ‘Oya,’ directed by Nosa Igbinedion:

‘Robots of Brixton and ‘Jonah’ by Kibwe Tavares. Here’s the trailer for Jonah:

‘Drexiciya’ directed by Simon Rittmeier:

The full program is available here. Image Credit: Afropean Culture.

5 Questions for a filmmaker … Taghreed Elsanhouri

Taghreed Elsanhouri directed the first Sudanese film to be screened at the Toronto International Film Festival, “All about Darfur,” in 2005. That same year the film also won the Chairperson’s Prize at the Zanzibar International Film Festival (ZIFF). Her other credits include ‘Sudanna al Habib’ (2012) and ‘Mother Unknown‘ (2009). This interview is the second in a series. Archived here.

What is your first film memory?

My first film memory is the first film I saw on the big screen. It was an Arabic film called Laylat Alqabt Ala Fatima (The Night Fatima was Arrested), based on a novella by Egyptian journalist and writer, Sakina Fu’ad. She was part of a group of women who wrote about the role of women in a changing society.

Why did you decide to become a filmmaker?

At one point in my life, when I was still working in broadcasting, I suffered from a stint of writer’s block, which made me feel like The Little Mermaid. I felt as if I had lost my voice–that it had been sold or stolen somewhere along the way. Making films became my way to recover my voice.

Which already made film do you wish you had made?

I recently saw British/Ghanaian filmmaker and co-founder of the Black Audio Film Collective John Akomfrah’s exhibition ‘Hauntologies‘ in London and I’m grateful to him for this work, in particular for giving life, through visualization, to a black man and woman who appear in a 16th century painting. Although I do not feel comfortable wishing I had made already made works, I aspire to make films that recover lost voices as perfectly and beautifully as Akomfrah.

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

Babette’s Feast by Danish director Gabriel Axel, because it deals with the human impulse to give back, and the poetry of memory.

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

What was your motivation for making your latest film Our Beloved Sudan? I wanted the footprints of my country to appear in the history, and to tell a story about the partition of my country from a Sudanese perspective.

* The previous entry in this series is here.

Letter to Kenya

Dear Kenya,

My friends and family know I have been one of your biggest advocates and ambassadors. I love you. You are mine and I am yours.

I chose to leave the bright lights of the west to come home and use my craft towards building our vision of our self and transform the world’s vision of us. Whenever I was away from Nairobi I missed it.

Well, what to say, a few weeks ago I went away to Europe, a place where I had once lived and a place I chose to leave. This time, when away, I was struck many times how I hadn’t realized how badly the situation in Kenya had affected me.

“ How’s Kenya? ” People would ask.

Immediately I would shake my head. Not because I wanted to.

“ Well, last year we had the lengthy election situation where the high court had to decide who would be president, then our politicians demanded larger salaries, our airport burnt down, then we watched a saga for days as kilometers away people were brutally shot down in a mall, then we learnt our army looted the mall as they drank tusker beer, our government gave us no answers, then we had bombings on buses, markets and churches, and our police blindly arrested anyone that looked Somali and kept them in a cage, but all the government did was implement a law on drinking and driving, then we had the killings at the coast and blamed it on the opposition and so on and so forth and so it goes. ”

Friends I met wanted to come visit you, instinctively and strangely I discouraged them.

“ Don’t come, at least, not now. ”

Away, I saw and experienced things I had forgotten I longed for. Clean drinking water. Spontaneity. Stumbling upon a cafe, a bar. Art house movies in cinemas. Great music. Drinking and taking public transport home. Not having your bag searched. Historical architecture that was respected and not mowed down.

But more importantly. Walking. Alone. At night, as a woman. Freedom to talk about politics with anyone. Police you did not need to fear because they did their job and did not harass you. Demonstrations that were respected. Social security; free or affordable good healthcare. Being in a car and not having to lock the door. Sleeping in the countryside with no fences or gates or guards. Going to bed and not having to worry if I will be robbed or raped. One night in Berlin I heard fireworks and thought it was bombs.

Last night my taxi driver picked me up from the airport and as we drove through the night he said,

“ Philippa now there is a speed limit. 50 km is the limit. So be careful on the roads. ”

“ Oh, I said any thing else the government has imposed? ”

“ No. ”

“ Be careful which roads you take. They are really making money through bribery. ”

Don’t get me wrong, Kenya, we lose too many of our people to road accidents. I appreciate this gesture.

Yet speed limits, higher salaries and limits on drinking and driving against the backdrop of citizens living in fear of crime, terrorism and not having food to feed your children?

Gee whiz. Thanks.

I am not idolizing the west.

Kenya has an understanding of community that, I would like to believe, thousands of euros cannot buy. We laugh easy. Make jokes easily.

But you see dear Kenya, how much longer must we take everything with a pinch of salt or search for ways to laugh through the pain in our hearts? How much of our personal freedom and security do we have to sacrifice?

Dear Kenya, I have longed for you for so long. I have loved you for so long and that’s why I returned. We’ve had some breathtaking and fun moments together that made me love you more. I was so proud of you. But you have never seen me as your own and I feel I have finally realized my love is still not returned, not returned to me and not returned to anyone else besides those who understand the game of serving one’s best interests regardless of the anguish of others.

Dear Kenya, give me something, give me anything. Give back please. My commitment to our love is waning.

Thanks,

Yours,

Philippa Wacera Ndisi-Herrmann

The Contemporary Mark of Assata Shakur

This past July, icon of Black American activism Assata Shakur’s autobiography was re-pressed by Zed Books in London. At times thought to be dormant, black American activism has seen a resurgence in recent weeks across the United States after the killing of Mike Brown by police, and the suppression of protests in Ferguson, Missouri. In a timely guest post, Kwesi Shaddai reflects on Shakur’s relevance for today’s generation:

Despite repeated attempts by the U.S. government to “neutralise” her, Assata Shakur remains a powerful voice for the perennial voiceless throughout the world. Now considered to be the most wanted woman alive, her recent inclusion on the FBI’s Most Wanted Terrorists list reflects her status as one of the few cointelpro targets to evade life imprisonment, or death at the hands of the state. However, today’s activists who continue to fight the unresolved issues that she faced 40 years ago now also find themselves caught in the same crosshairs. Assata: An Autobiography by Shakur, republished this summer, underlines the extent to which she was targeted by the secret services as a leader of the Black Liberation Movement. As explained by Angela Davis, the latest move to now brand Assata as a terrorist is itself a reflection of terrorism, as it has clearly been intended to intimidate the next generation of activists into compliance.  

This is a salient point, as Assata’s influence across the globe continues to be both pervasive and inter-generational, and this reality poses a real threat to the establishment. For example, following the unsolved murder of Tupac Shakur, persistent rumours spread like wildfire that he had somehow evaded the authorities to seek political asylum in Cuba alongside his “auntie” Assata. Although this urban legend has grown to the extent that Obama’s speechwriters and CIA propagandists now “playfully” reference it, Assata’s real-life escape from the United States has always made the prospect of Tupac “sipping daiquiris” in self-imposed exile seem plausible, and this in itself highlights her continued relevance. 

Within contemporary hip hop culture, even the most apolitical of listeners is familiar with the historical struggle that underpins Tupac’s misappropriated and misunderstood concept of “T.H.U.G L.I.F.E”. As one of the most notorious figures of that era still breathing, Assata’s political legacy provides an ideological link between the potential activists of today and black liberation leaders of the past, like Tupac’s mother Afeni Shakur, his step-father Mutulu Shakur, and his godfather Geronimo Ji Jaga. With this in mind, by branding Assata a “domestic terrorist” and placing a $2 million bounty on her head, the FBI are essentially sending a veiled threat to anyone who believes that real hip hop culture is an informed movement of the masses. 

As an advocate for the power of hip hop and a self-described “runaway slave,” Assata has never compromised her message. In her own oft-quoted words, the civil rights movement never had a chance of succeeding, as “nobody in the world, nobody in history, has ever gotten their freedom by appealing to the moral sense of the people who were oppressing them”. Without doubt, institutional racism, structural inequality and the prison industrial complex are all still in existence today, and as disenfranchised people experience their own awakening to these facts, it is understandable that many eventually gravitate towards Assata’s politics. 

But having said that, it’s imperative that her personal journey towards self-empowerment is never lost in the shadow of her legacy. After all, there was a time when the main pages that Assata read in the newspapers were the comic strips and the horoscopes! Even when she first began questioning the plight of her community as a young college student, she still believed the propaganda that U.S. military intervention in Vietnam was a humanitarian effort to spread democracy. As she herself reveals her autobiography, her first realisation of how brainwashed she really was left her feeling like a “bona fide clown”, and this marked the beginning of a new chapter in her life.

Arguably, it’s just as important for young activists today to accept Assata’s early naivety as it is to learn about her later militancy. The soul-searching and self-reflection that she shares in her autobiography acts as a much-needed mirror held up to the lives of her readers. How else can we grasp the urgency of her message unless we use her example to first admit our own shortcomings? In many ways, acknowledging her ultimate transformation from Joanne Chesimard to Assata Shakur is just as fundamental as following the well-trodden journey of Malcolm Little from street hustler to Malik El Shabazz, as revealed in his autobiography. 

Tellingly, this natural evolution from disenfranchised apathy to self-empowered activism that we are all invited to make is the exact process that the establishment seek to attack by placing a $2 million bounty on Assata’s head. 

But herein lies the real issue – in our own way, we are all Joanne Chesimard. 

After all, how many people are incensed by the systematic injustice evident in the world today? How many of us are in a position to take steps – no matter how small – to right these wrongs? 

To be clear, suggesting that we are all Assata is not simply an acknowledgement of our collective subjection to an oppressive world order. Nor is it merely a nod to the “Assata Shakur Is Welcome Here” posters that plastered black communities across the United States and beyond when she first escaped from prison in 1979. 

Instead, it is a humble declaration of understanding and solidarity. Long before Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden were even born, Joanne was an unlikely hero who sought out the truth and became a government target for her newfound principles. 

In the five years prior to joining the Black Panther Party, she was a student and local activist who became gradually politicised by the murders of Malcolm X, MLK Jr, Bobby Hutton, Fred Hampton, Mark Clark and many other innocent activists. Throughout that time, the official objective of the FBI was to prevent the rise of a “black messiah” capable of leading Black America and the Diaspora towards self determination. 

When she was finally arrested as a founding member of the Black Liberation Army in 1973, she was shot twice while surrendering with her hands above her head, and left for dead. She then spent the next four years in custody awaiting trial – two of which were spent in solitary confinement in a men’s prison – before being wrongly convicted for murder and sentenced to life imprisonment plus 33 years. After being liberated from prison two years into her sentence, she went on the run for five years and resurfaced in Cuba as a political refugee in 1984. She has remained on the island ever since as the most wanted woman in the world.

With the benefit of hindsight, perhaps the question you should all be asking yourself now is, if you really were Joanne Chesimard in the mid-1960s, would you have ever dared to take the fateful steps to become Assata Shakur? 

To mark the occasion of the summer re-print of Assata Shakur’s Autobiography, Zed Books offered up a nice playlist of rap songs that illustrate the intimate connection between the activist and hip hop culture:

To Live and Die with Ebola in Liberia

Shaki Kamara was a 15-year-old Liberian boy who lived in Monrovia’s notorious and misunderstood neighborhood of West Point. He was one of the casualties of the awful Ebola epidemic that’s gripping Liberia, but he didn’t die of the virus. Shaki was shot by Liberian security forces in an altercation with residents of the neighborhood after they woke up to find that they’d been quarantined overnight by the government. After initially making the absurd claim that his injuries were caused by barbed wire, the government admitted that soldiers fired live rounds at scared members of the West Point community and ordered an inquiry into who gave the order to shoot.

In early September, West Point’s residents were subjected to a draconian and perplexing quarantine that was imposed after some members of its community raided an isolation facility and broke out suspected Ebola patients. According to reports, the raid was a result of anger in West Point over the presence of outsiders at the facility, and was accompanied by chants of “There is no Ebola!” For people who don’t have an intimate knowledge of Liberia, the incident must have seemed like the work of fools. For those who know the country well, it was a sad reflection of a dynamic of neglect that exists across Liberia.

On the streets of Monrovia and in the country’s small towns, Liberian society is seen as deeply exclusionary and built to service the needs of money rather than those of the poor. In the past few years, the Liberian government has gone on a string of house demolitions on behalf of moneyed elites, handed out huge chunks of communal land to foreign investors, banned motorcycle taxis that the poor use to go to and from work, and operated a police force that’s been sanctioned by rights groups for a deeply entrenched culture of corruption. In the country’s dysfunctional legislature, labor advocates have been unable to pass a “Decent Work Bill” because politicians fear that a minimum wage will cut into the profits of their private plantations.

Meanwhile, people from places like West Point sit in the hot sun for hours, hawking goods and dodging police raids while government bureaucrats and aid employees zip by in air conditioned trucks that cost more then they will see in a lifetime. They are looked down on by the country’s upper classes and barely engaged by a development sector that concerns itself with capacity building workshops and efforts to increase GDP and boost investment.

The development community and the Liberian government will have some self-reflecting to do in the wake of the outbreak. The idea that this has been a crisis only of the country’s health care systems is wrong. This has also been a crisis of governance. Liberians have refused to believe that Ebola is real because they see their government as relentlessly corrupt and unconcerned with the survival and health of the poor. This isn’t a shock to aid agencies; in fact, it’s an open secret that they discuss amongst themselves.

Once the outbreak is over, key questions will need to be asked and openly discussed. Namely, has the approach of relative silence in the face of anti-poor policies and entrenched corruption produced the results that Liberians deserve? How can bureaucracies that hop from one high-walled compound to the next hope to understand what’s bubbling underneath the surface outside the barbed wire? Discovering the right answers to these questions is vital. As we are seeing, getting it wrong can have tragic consequences.

Why are affected West African states so spectacularly ill-prepared to deal with Ebola

I was in Conakry when reports first surfaced of cases of the Ebola virus disease (Ebola) in the Forest Region of Guinea.  There had never been an Ebola outbreak outside of Central Africa before.  Initially, my colleagues and I were unconcerned about its ability to impact our lives. We joked about switching from handshakes to fist-bumps. We teased one colleague that he would now have to forego bushmeat for lunch.  When I returned home to Freetown in Sierra Leone later that month the customs officials asked for my yellow fever card and nothing else.

Since making flippant jokes about it in March, Ebola has spread to Liberia, Nigeria and Sierra Leone.  Since the epidemic started December 2013 and 14 September 2014, a total of 4507 cases were reported to the World Health Organization (WHO). At least 70% of these people are dead, by WHO estimates released earlier this week.   The WHO admits, however, that this is likely an underestimate as hundreds have probably died without seeking treatment, either because it was inaccessible or they perceived it as ineffectual or even dangerous.  And the WHO now claims that “… if control does not improve now, there will be more than 20,000 cases by Nov. 2, and the numbers of cases and deaths will continue increasing from hundreds to thousands per week for months to come.”  No one is laughing at Ebola now.

On July 31, President Ernest Bai Koroma of Sierra Leone declared a State of Emergency. On August 7, I left Freetown feeling unsettled and guilty—knowing that the US passport in my pocket meant I was one of the lucky few that could easily get out of harm’s way.  As my plane took off I wondered how Ebola had been able to spread so far so quickly and why the governments involved were so spectacularly ill-prepared to deal with this crisis.

With few exceptions (like this and this), most news reports so far have focused on Africans’ enduring ignorance as the main reason for the transmission of Ebola.  Little has been written about the political and economic structures that have shaped the rise and spread of Ebola.  Yet, the fundamental drivers of the Ebola epidemic—inadequate public health infrastructure, neglect of tropical diseases and environmental destruction facilitating the rise of new pathogens—are all symptoms of an even more fatal disease: neocolonialism.

Neocolonialism is that alliance between foreign governments and local elites that emerged after independence in the 1960s and 70s to perpetuate the exploitation of African labor and natural resources for the benefit of foreign investors.  Most Western politicians, scholars and journalists, of course, prefer to blame poverty exclusively on Africans themselves, on Africans or their leaders’ innate corruption. For example, at the recent US-Africa Summit, Vice President Joe Biden delivered the “familiar lecture from Western governments” to African leaders on the need to curb corruption to foster economic growth. This explanation conveniently ignores the role of Western governments and corporations in creating and perpetuating Africa’s poverty.  The US-Africa Summit itself just continues this ignoble tradition.

Neocolonialism robs African governments of the resources necessary to invest in social development.  First, there is a decided lack of transparency in the extractive industry which allows foreign companies to make sweetheart deals with corrupt local politicians where they pay obscenely low royalties and taxes. Second, African governments have spent too much money servicing debts that were often borrowed by authoritarian regimes.  Western banks are complicit in capital flight, helping African elites to conceal and protect their ill-gotten gains. Historically, Western governments have supported dictatorial governments as long as they are welcoming to Western investors (or, during the Cold War, in sync with Western interests). As a result, Africa is actually a net lender to the rest of the world. Instead of investing Africa’s economic surpluses in its productive base and in the health and education of its peoples, African and Western elites connive to transfer Africa’s savings to the West.

Neocolonialism also denies African governments the policy space to pursue autonomous economic development.  Since the 1980s, the World Bank and the IMF have forced African governments into neoliberal reforms through Structural Adjustment Programs (SAP). SAPs require countries to slash spending in public health and education and drop barriers to trade and foreign investment in exchange for debt refinancing and relief.  These “pro-market” reforms strangle infant industries in their cribs and preclude the industrial policies that have been necessary for economic development nearly everywhere else.

It’s true that religious beliefs, misinformation and superstition have aggravated the Ebola epidemic. However panic and misinformation typically accompany the rise of new, deadly, infectious diseases.  Let’s not forget the hysteria surrounding the appearance of AIDS in the US. Susan Sered argues that this misplaced focus on sorcery and superstition obscures the fact that longer life expectancy in the US and Europe is the result of government investment in public health infrastructure.  If Americans are healthier than West Africans, it is because we have better access to safe water and medical care, not because “we gave up our religious beliefs.”

The health systems in Sierra Leone, Guinea and Liberia are among the world’s worst.  Sierra Leone has the lowest life expectancy of 193 countries surveyed by the WHO. Initially there was only one health facility in the country (the Lassa Fever Ward at Kenema Government Hospital) that could provide appropriate treatment to Ebola patients. There was no hospital in Kailahun District where the outbreak first entered Sierra Leone from Guinea.  Health officials had to transport patients to the Kenema Government Hospital on a muddy road in the middle of the rainy season in makeshift ambulances.  Nurses have gone on strike  over having to work without personal protective equipment. Patients are now afraid to go to hospitals for other ailments out of fear that they may get infected with Ebola once there.  Nurses and doctors are abandoning their posts given the dangerous working conditions. The WHO warns that the number of Ebola cases could surpass 20,000 before the epidemic is contained.  The collapse of the health care systems in each country, however, threatens to kill far more West Africans of malaria and other endemic diseases than Ebola itself.

Western governments, and the international financial institutions they control, deserve much of the blame for the disastrous state of health systems in Sierra Leone, Guinea and Liberia. “In health,” the WHO states plainly, “SAPs have slowed down improvements in, or worsened, the health status of people in countries implementing them. The results reported include worse nutritional status of children, increased incidence of infectious diseases, and higher infant and maternal mortality rates” [emphasis mine].

Colonialism and neocolonialism are also the ultimate cause of the unprecedented emergence of Ebola in West Africa.  Although too many scientists think that the natural sciences are free of politics, zoonotic diseases like Ebola that spread from animals to humans do not operate in a context free of economics and politics.  Rob Wallace describes the process: “The more the remaining monkey and bats and other animals are collected from deeper in the forests increasingly pressured by logging and mining, the more likely [zoonotic] spillovers are to accrue.  And, by a growing, peri-urban transportation network, to spread.” Neoliberal economic policies and large multinational corporations’ operations have devastated West Africa’s ecosystems and communities through logging, mining and land grabs, creating new pathways for opportunistic pathogens to evolve and disperse.

To make matters worse, there is simply no desire on the part of Western pharmaceutical companies to invest in a vaccine or treatment for Ebola.  First, as Leigh Phillips explains, Big Pharma knows that treatment of chronic diseases is more profitable than a one-time vaccine so they refuse to invest in life-saving cures.  Second, they know that African markets are tiny; therefore “Ebola is a problem that is not being solved because there is almost no money to be made in solving it.” In short, “It’s an unprofitable disease.”

The people of Sierra Leone, Guinea, and Liberia have already had more than their fair share of suffering.  Sierra Leone and Liberia recently endured brutal civil wars including mass rape and mutilation and the recruitment of child soldiers (in both cases, the IMF/WB’s fiscal bloodletting certainly contributed to state collapse).  Kailahun District, the epicenter of the epidemic in Sierra Leone, has long been cursed by blood diamonds. In the short-term we need to pressure “donor” governments to step up and mobilize the necessary financial and human resources to contain the epidemic.  Even the head of the World Bank understands that if the Ebola epidemic had “struck Washington, New York or Boston, there is no doubt that the health systems in place could contain and then eliminate the disease.”  Why are West African lives any less valuable? The Onion’s sassy headline says it best: Experts: Ebola Vaccine at Least 50 White People Away.

But the people of West Africa deserve more than our sympathy, we must express our solidarity with the African activists and social movements fighting foreign corporations, international financial institutions and their own corrupt elites for greater democratic control of their governments and economies.  Only by curing the scourge of neocolonialism in Africa can we prevent the emergence and spread of more deadly epidemics.