Sean Jacobs's Blog, page 391

‘This Ewe Boy’

New video for ‘Hope,’ by Ghanaian rapper Abladzo Kwame, off his EP ‘This Ewe Boy.’

‘This Ewe Boy’: The Music of Ghana’s Abladzo Kwame

New video for ‘Hope,’ by Ghanaian rapper Abladzo Kwame, off his EP ‘This Ewe Boy.’

The Independent African Republic of Scotland

Nelson Mandela speaks to the crowds in George Square, Glasgow, 1993. He received the Freedom of Glasgow bestowed on him 12 years previously, when Margaret Thatcher regarded him and the ANC as terrorists. Watch clips from his visit to Scotland here. Scotland (including Andy Murray) votes today in a referendum for its independence from the United Kingdom and posh men in expensive shirts. 

While you wait for the result, we can recommend the following sources: the @Africans4Indy twitter account; this good history courtesy of the BCC; everything by Gerry Hassan, like this; John Harris’ report for The Guardian; this Tommy Sheridan interview; Rachel Hamada on the shifting political landscape there; this Tom Devine piece and Africa is a Country’s own Elliot Ross on Al Jazeera America. Finally, read AFKInsider and Nathan Chiume (on Africa is a Country) on which Africans are watching the Scottish referendum closely.

Africa is a Radio: Epsiode #6

Africa is a Radio went on break last month along with Africa is a Country, so I’m just now able to get to posting July’s show here. This episode focuses on South African Hip Hop, both commercial and underground with a special report from Pretoria by Ts’eliso Mohaneng. Enjoy, and look out for September’s Episode on Groovalizacion soon!

What is the matter with … TB Joshua

Last week a building that was part of the complex that is the Synagogue Church of All Nations in Lagos, Nigeria (‘pastor’: TB Joshua) collapsed. When the story was first reported on Friday, the death toll stood at 3 people.  Then yesterday, the South African President Jacob Zuma announced that “at least 67 South Africans were killed.” Nigerian rescue workers, according to the BBC, have now upped the total number of bodies pulled from the rubble at 70 people.  Some may wonder why it took so long (five days) for that information about 67 more victims to emerge.  The short answer is that the South African government had little control over that process: TB Joshua’s church has a reputation for acting outside the law (his church is usually off limits to Nigerian security forces and local authorities who struggled to get access to the site since the building collapse and the church most probably flouted building regulations. Apart from some tepid press statements, Joshua’s bizarre explanations for the building collapse was to blame the devil, a plane that sprayed a mysterious substance over the building and Boko Haram. But even more than that, some may wonder what so many South Africans were doing at Joshua’s church (at the time of the collapse, South African media reported that 5 South African church groups were visiting Joshua’s church).  There’s been some good coverage and comments about Nigerian preachers on Nigerian Twitter (see Elnathan John)  and on sites with a Nigerian focus, like Sahara Reporters (like this, here,

But back to TB Joshua, who represents a wider trend on the continent. Back in December 2011, Sean Jacobs wrote a post about TB Joshua (known for his outlandish claims about the future and who has Julius Malema among his fans) and his appeal, including, especially to South Africans. We’ve reproduced that post below:

Nigeria’s Pastor

By now you’ve probably watched the (British) Channel 4 TV documentary film about Nigeria’s millionaire preachers–the fake healings, buckets full of money collected by church leaders (“tithes”), police escorts, mall openings as well as all that flash. This all against a background of grinding poverty. I watched it last night. Most Nigerian blogs not surprisingly (many of them are believers of some sort), have focused on theological debates thrown up by the documentary. One of the preachers, Dr Fireman, when quizzed about his ostentatious show of wealth, responds to Channel 4′s journalist: “Jesus was rich and had an accountant who followed him around.” No one’s surprised that with low confidence in political parties and the state, people gravitate toward fast-money preachers promising eternal salvation, financial and physical health. However, it appears the filmmakers could only get to the B-List preachers since we didn’t see any of the really rich preachers. Those preachers, compiled in a list by a Forbes blogger earlier this Fall, include David Oyedepo (estimated net worth of $150m), Chris Oyakhilome ($30-50m) and TB Joshua ($10-15m).  Of all these men, it is perhaps Joshua is the most interesting (there’s even a TB Joshua Watch online).

TB Joshua claims to heal HIV/AIDS, cancer and paralysis at his Synagogue Church of All Nations in Lagos. More significantly, he has also found a willing audience among African elites, especially its political class and leading sporting personalities.

But first to his claims as a healer.

Joshua serves as an advisor to many of Nigerian leading sports people. They  thank him profusely for their good health. But it is not just his country’s sports people who have put their trust in Joshua’s healing powers. In one celebrated case, Jaco van der Westhuyzen, a top rugby player from South Africa traveled to Lagos with a knee injury and claimed to have been healed by TB Joshua. Two fellow Springbok team members, who had cancer, also traveled to Lagos to see Joshua and promptly stopped their treatments.  Two of Van der Westhyzen’s teammates, Ruben Kruger andWuim Basson, also went to see TB Joshua. He claimed to heal them too, but they died of their cancers. Consistent with evangelical Christianity’s teachings, Kruger and Basson’s failure to get well were rationalized as their lack of faith. (In Basson’s case, Joshua even claimed to communicate with him beyond the grave.)

South African television has reported stories of especially white South Africans traveling in large groups to Joshua’s church for healing.

As for the politically connected who travel to see and hear Joshua in Nigeria, they include Ghanaian president John Atta Mills, of whom it is claimed that “… Joshua had prophesied his victory in the Ghanaian polls, specifying there would be three elections and the results would be released in January.” Atta Mills has described Joshua as a mentor.

Separately, a Zimbabwean newspaper reported that prime minister Morgan Tsvangirai visited Joshua’s church in September. So have other leaders of Tsvangirai’s MDC movement as well as Mugabe’s ZANU-PF. Some were hoping it would give them an edge in party political contests.

The same newspaper mentioned a few other high profile guests: former presidents Frederick Chiluba (Zambia), Pascal Lissouba (Congo-Brazzaville), André Kolimba (Central African Republic), Omar Bongo (Gabon) and Zulu King Goodwill Zwelithini (who came to testify about his “daughter’s healing from epilepsy”). The president of Zimbabwe’s football association Cuthbert Dube also claimed to be healed by Joshua.

Not all governing elites are as welcoming of TB Joshua and his healings (and predictions–he claims to foresee plane crashes, natural disasters, though critics point out that the videos where he apparently makes such predictions are cleverly edited). In fact, Cameroon has banned Joshua.

But the most curious recent guest at Joshua’s church has been Winnie Mandela, seen in this recent video, below, with Joshua’s Emmanuel TV, referring to herself as “the grandmother of Africa,” blamed everything that’s wrong on the continent on modernity (except Christianity of course) and who suggested Africa needs “democracy of a special type”:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ZXZF...

BTW, we keep wondering why do South Africans travel to Nigeria, when they have their ownmiracle-making farmer at home?

New film, “Beats of the Antonov,” unlike anything I have ever seen

Every now and then, its seems as if there is nothing new out there. Everything seems derivative, repetitive or just plain bland. As a filmmaker, I sometimes go through moments of extreme lack of inspiration; and even question my choice of career. And then an unexpected spark happens to light the way. Beats of the Antonov, a new documentary from Sudanese filmmaker Hajooj Kuka, is such a spark. The film premiered last week at Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF), and is by Kuka’s account possibly the first film by a Sudanese filmmaker to screen there. I wasn’t surprised when last night the film won the People’s Choice Documentary Award at the TIFF.

Kuka paints a beautiful picture of music, war and identity in the Blue Nile and Nuba regions, and the film is unlike anything I have ever seen.

Here’s the trailer:

The Antonov of the title comes from the Russian planes that are used by Omar Al-Bashir’s regime to bomb villages in Sudan. Instead of a dry journalistic account of the ongoing Sudanese conflict however, the film is a deep exploration of a nation in an identity crisis, with its ruling elite pushing an Arab nationalist identity onto a diverse African citizenry. The title of the film makes a correlation between the bombs of oppression and the resilience of culture, the music of a people and the suffering they endure.

The film uses a non-linear narrative style, not following any particular series of events, but rather is a collection of vignettes, many of which spring from spontaneous jam sessions in refugee camps. Kuka, who has also been a war reporter, caught the inspiration for the film while spending time in one of the refugee camps in the Blue Nile region. “The music sounded different than any other Sudanese music I had ever heard before, because they were made from found objects in the refugee camp,” Kuka told me over a coffee in Cape Town, where he finished post-production on the film, working with Big World Cinema producer Steven Markovitz and editor Khalid Shamis. “They created this contraption where they connected home made instruments to an old radio. They had created a new sound. It was amazing, and this is why I made the film; I fell in love with the music. It’s Sudanese music, but it’s a unique mixture of Sudanese traditional music that was born in a refugee camp. I was afraid that they didn’t realize how amazing this music was.”

In addition to head bopping jam sessions with instruments made of pipes, plates and old tires, some of the most compelling music in the film is the genre of “girl’s music” sung by the young women in the region. They are both oral history and snapshots of modern life. One of the songs deals with young men who are really just teenagers being sent to fight in the Sudanese Liberation Army, with haunting lyrics like “those boots are too big for you.”

The film also takes a long hard look at what it means to be Sudanese today, and confronts the Arabization of Sudanese identity, an ideological displacement running as an undercurrent to the physical displacement of the refugees in Sudan. “Bashir himself is not that identity he wants to be,” Kuka says, and explains that with his long dreads and afro-centric mindset, he gets flack for not fitting the prescribed national identity. “Very few people fit this image of what is Sudanese. You have this fake image and 5% of the population fit it, and then you have 95% of people who are trying to fit it.”

One of the characters in the film is a young musician and ethnomusicologist named Alsara, named by Addis Rumble as “the princess of Nubian pop and Sudanese retro.” Alsarah, now based in Brooklyn, New York , has returned to Sudan to do field recordings and research in the Nuba region. In a traditional narrative documentary, it would have been an obvious choice to follow her on her journey to record the music and bring it to the West, however Kuka avoided making her or any single interviewee the subject of the film. “It’s normal for us to meet a lot of people in real life, so you meet a lot of people in this film. You don’t need one-character-driven stories. It’s not my style and I don’t think it’s needed… talking to a lot of people and talking to them in a way that’s less definitive will give you the experience of living this.”

The film succeeds in this endeavor, instead of telling you what to think about the Sudanese conflict, it gives you a sense of the realities on the ground, a feeling for the place, and the kinds of issues which people are thinking through. A person I know who saw the film said you had to experience the film with your heart, and not your head. Beats of the Antonov and its infectious music stayed with me for days after viewing it. Rather than giving any answers in this film, Hajooj Kuka asks a lot of important questions. “At the end what I want people to leave with is this complex idea of Sudan, rather than the simplified notion that the media gives you.” Kuka plans to expand into features in the future, and is excited about developing a unique voice and style. With more films like this coming from African directors, we could be witnessing the start of a new canon of African film.

What Binyavanga Wainaina thinks of the Caine Prize

This is Africa is prone to tabloid headlines (they’ve been running tons of sex related posts lately), but Nigerian journalist Chiagozie Nwonwu‘s interview with Binyavanga Wainaina (writer, commentator, rights defender “a public figure, not D’Banj, but with enough people”) is worth all the sensationalism. In the interview, Binyavanga covers a lot of ground: Nigerians moving to Nairobi, the reaction in both Nigeria and Kenya to his coming out last year (“my gay drama”), that he has “three per cent Nigerianness in my body,” the impact of Chocolate City, P-Square, Victoria Kimani, Wazobia, and, most explosively, the Caine Prize for African Short Story Writing. We’ve tweeted from the piece earlier today, but felt it would be better to just embed Binyavanga’s answer to a question about Kenyan and Nigerian rivalries about who has won more Caine Prizes:

I am going to take this first to another road because I think all you Nigerian literati are way too addicted to the Caine Prize. I give the Caine Prize its due credit, but it just isn’t our institution. All these young people who are ending up in that place were built up by many people’s work.  If there was no Saraba, if there was no Farafina workshop, if there was no Cassava Republic, if there was no Tolu Ogunlesi meeting Nick in South Africa and then workshoping stories, if there was no Ivor Hartmann, if there were no thirty thousand Facebook groups that I know off or don’t know, there will be no Okwiri, there will be no Elnathan, etc. What is  happening is you people are allowing the Caine Prize to receive funding and build itself as a brand and make money and people’s career there in London while the vast majority of these institutions are vastly underfunded and vastly ungrown, and they are the ones who create the ground that is building these new writers. Why do I have to  sit in interviews with Nigerian journalists who want to help Caine Prize get more money in the sixth richest country in the world?

I want people to say, Okwiri, who won the Caine Prize, is the founder of Jalada, an online magazine that has won five prizes in the last year and published, I think, the most exciting fiction I’ve seen in ten years. Just that magazine, has more excitement than many known ones, but they are invisible. Seven years ago, I came here (Nigeria) and I felt nothing is going on in the online community in Kenya. Then Dami Ajayi and Emmanuel Iduma went and started Saraba. People there in Kenya smelled Saraba, made their own and that was it. Now, writers in America and approaching writers published in Saraba and these online magazines to give them fellowships abroad. Okwiri made her name long before the Caine prize. I picked her for a long list of under-20 writers. I didn’t even know her then. Because the ecosystem is so big that you don’t even know each other anymore. Up until now, I’ve not met her and if I have, we bumped into each other. I know she wrote a review of my book launch, but I don’t remember meeting her. The idea that she won the Caine Prize and journalists now want to feed the fact that she was made by the Caine Prize is unmaking her. You ask any smart Kenyan writer who is in the game, they tell you Okwiri is the new be. And we are talking two years ago. We must lose this s**t. Give due credit but don’t go giving free money and free legitimacy. Because the Caine Prize right now needs your legitimacy to get money. They take press clipping from all Nigerian media and use that to source for funding. We need to focus on how we can grow our own ecosystem.

Source.

Scotland’s referendum is significant for people that want to secede. Like Zanzibaris

“Should Scotland be an independent country?” That is the question Scots will be asked when they go to the polls on September 18th. The outcome of the vote will have a significant impact on the future of Scotland and the rest of the United Kingdom. More interestingly, this referendum is being closely watched in a seemingly unlikely corner of the world: the Zanzibar archipelagos in East Africa.

Zanzibar is a semi-autonomous region of Tanzania. The islands are famous as a tourist destination, boasting beautiful white sandy beaches and narrow streets of Stone Town.  Scottish explorer, David Livingstone, began and ended many of his journeys in Zanzibar. For hundreds of years, the islands have served as the center of Kiswahili culture and remain proud of their past glory as the epicenter of trade and wealth in East and Central Africa, with links to the Middle East and Asia that go as far back as 7th century.

More recently, the islands have been a hotbed of political tension with roots emerging from 1950s rivalries between nationalist movements, mainly Africans and Arabs, during the struggle for independence from Britain. The rivalry led to a violent revolution in January 1964 carried out by Africans against Arabs, killing many and forcing others to flee the islands. Few months later in April 1964, the islands formed a union with the then Republic of Tanganyika to form one sovereign United Republic of Tanzania. Under the arrangement, Zanzibar was allowed to retain a small degree of autonomy under its own island government dealing with local affairs, while major issues such as foreign affairs, defense, immigration and currency were placed under the Union government. This “two tier” union structure was conceived in order to ensure that Zanzibar won’t get “swallowed” by its much larger partner, and so Tanganyika (nowadays referred to as Mainland Tanzania) won’t bare the substantial burden of running both the Tanganyika government and the Union government.

Historical specificities aside, the structure of the Union of Tanzania is quite similar to that of the United Kingdom. England’s government ceased to exist in 1707 when it merged with Scotland to form the UK; much the same way Tanganyika ceased to exist after the Union with Zanzibar to form Tanzania. England does not have its own government, with her affairs being managed within the UK’s central government; much the same way Mainland Tanzania’s local affairs are managed within the Union government. Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland enjoy devolved powers from the central government the same way Zanzibar does. Whether or not Julius Nyerere, co-founder of the Union of Tanzania (who incidentally studied British History and Constitutional Law at University of Edinburgh), was inspired by the structure of union he saw in Scotland and decided to adopt it back home, is debatable.

While the UK was born out of conquests and suppression of Scottish language, religion and culture for many years, Tanzania was born out of Pan-African ideas and the African independence movement. The calculated need for self-preservation within the unstable new regime in Zanzibar after the revolution also played a role in bringing about, and later on, preserving the Union. Global geopolitical concerns which were heightened by the Cold War simultaneously accelerated the formation of the Union. There is also strong suggestions of the CIA nudging the formation of the Union to prevent Zanzibar from becoming a communist heaven.

Despite tensions and discontents from both sides, the Union has survived for 50 years, with the Mainland providing much needed stability to the islands. Constant demands for larger autonomy for Zanzibar, and periodic calls for full secession from the Union, have come up throughout the life of the union. Today, many political observers admit to a resurgent and united “Zanzibari Nationalism” that has united elements of the ruling Chama Cha Mapinduzi  (CCM) in Zanzibar with the opposition Civic Union Front party.

In the same way there is an undercurrent of resentment by the Scottish towards the English and vice versa, there is similar degree of resentment, although not deep seated, between Zanzibaris and Mainlanders. For the most part, people from both sides of Tanzania do intermarry, do resettle and trade among each other as they have done for generations without any problems.

Zanzibari nationalists lament the gradual increase by the union government of the so-called “Union Matters” from the initial 11 to the current 22 issues, which further erodes the little sovereignty they had. They want the Union government to remove the “Tanganyika jacket” by creating a separate entity to run Mainland affairs. On the other hand, there have been persistent demands by some mainlanders for the restoration of Tanganyika government because they feel they have been carrying most of the weight in servicing the Union compared to Zanzibaris.

The referendum in Scotland is a significant event for states that want to secede.  There is a sense that an independent Scotland could indeed set a precedent or provide inspiration for entities like Zanzibar. According to a Tanzanian diplomat in London, “both sides of the divide in Zanzibar are following the debate in Scotland and are awaiting the outcome of the referendum with apprehension.” Each side will be able to use the arguments and outcome to advance or vindicate their position. While there are no known formal links between the two “separatist” movements, Rachel Hamada, a non-partisan journalist who has spent the last decade between Scotland and Zanzibar, says she is aware of many Zanzibaris who support secession “who have been observing events in Scotland with great interest. If Scotland does go its own way, undoubtedly pro-separation campaigners from Zanzibar will want to investigate the path to such a vote.”

Tanzania’s ruling CCM have resisted calls for a special referendum on the structure of the union. There’s also the question of who deserves to be asked to vote in such a referendum: Zanzibaris only (population of 1.3 million), mainlanders only (population of 43 million) or both? 3 years ago they agreed to rewrite the entire Union Constitution that will be followed by a referendum to adopt it. The commission that drafted the new constitution presented a “three-tier” structure, which CCM as a majority block in the Constituent Assembly objected to. This led to a walkout this past April by the opposition. Last week, the constitutional process officially stalled, and efforts are currently underway to find ways to resume it after next year’s general elections. The plan was hinted earlier in July by Mr. January Makamba, a pro-Union and reformist politician from CCM, when he said, “If there is a need to postpone the current constitutional process, let us do it so that we get a better constitution which has the consensus from all sides. Since the structure of the union is a highly contentious issue, it should be sent back to the people to decide via a referendum before the constitutional process resumes after the 2015 general election.”

Supporters of three-tier government structure in Tanzania argue the ruling party CCM is using fear-mongering to claim that the three-tier structure as proposed in the draft constitution will lead to the break-up of the Union. CCM believes the proposed structure would leave the Union government weak and dependent because it will be stripped-off its economic power base. They are in favor of more devolution of powers within the current two-tier structure, but they are yet to present specific proposals. Similar accusations of fear-mongering has been leveled towards the “No” campaign in Scotland (known as “Better Together”), with observation that their public messaging on behalf of the UK has been poor, lacking best content creativity and social media savviness needed to convince the public. The same can be said with pro-union Tanzanians, who for many years have been slow to react to the arguments presented by Zanzibaris, to the extent the latter have been able to create a dominant narrative.

Generally, pro-union factions in both Scotland and Zanzibar have been portrayed by their local opponents as “stubborn conservatives” who are unwilling to change and insist on unworkable structures that won’t preserve the unions for long-term. There is a strong feeling in Zanzibar that pro-union supporters are mostly political elites in the current Union government and ruling party CCM. According to Evarist Chahali, a Tanzanian journalist and columnist living in Glasgow, a similar perception has frequently been heard among the pro-Scotland independence supporters that, “the whole ‘Better Together’ thing is about preserving the status quo for some Scottish politicians at Westminster.” The feeling in both “separatist” movements is that despite a good degree of political devolution and autonomy, they are each subjected to a union ruling class which doesn’t understand or care about their local issues. This partly explains why the rest of UK is run by parties that have been rejected in Scotland. Conversely, the opposition CUF is stronger in Zanzibar compared to mainland Tanzania where its support declined in the last elections.

Interestingly, Scotland is said to be home to a substantial number of Zanzibaris who went there to seek asylum after the 2001 post-election violence at home. These foreign born asylum seekers and refugees from Commonwealth countries like Tanzania are eligible to vote in the referendum, and will form one of the strongest polling block for the “Yes Scotland” independence camp. These exiled Zanzibaris are known to be opposition supporters and generally are against the Union. However, it remains to be seen whether their role in helping Scotland secure its independence could translate into encouraging the same to happen in their homeland.

Despite the recent drop in numbers of undecided voters, it’s still hard to predict the outcome of the Scottish referendum. For a while, most polls suggested that the “Better Together” camp would prevail, but recent the polls have been tightening, meaning the outcome could go either way. If the results are for “Yes Scotland”, there will be a long period of negotiation on the terms of separation, involving issues such as the division of the national debt, the division of oil revenue, Scotland’s membership of the EU, her retention of the Queen as head of state and continual usage of the Pound Sterling, as well as terms of any future bailouts from UK. All will be hard fought, as journalist Rachel Hamada adds: “Even with devolution in the late nineties, which had widespread political support, the negotiations were fierce, so we can expect they would be ferocious this time round”. The divorce will be long and bitter, and Tanzanians should expect the same should a similar situation happen to them. Analysts agree that if “No” vote wins, it will be because the “Yes” vote for independence did not make a compelling and reassuring case to provide a knockout punch to convince the Scottish that they will be better off independent. Either way, most observers agree that the result will be close and thus there will be consequence. UK will have to consider measures to give Scotland greater powers. The Union could prevail due to the simple fact that it is the devil the Scottish people know.

The whole of UK is an island with Scotland as part of it, while Zanzibar is an island disconnected from her partner in the mainland. Yet, an important common denominator between Scotland and Zanzibar is oil resources. Although Scotland has a finite supply of oil in the North Sea, the “Yes Scotland” campaign has based much of their argument on the ability of this resource to sustain and propel an independent Scotland. Zanzibar is yet to discover oil near its Indian Ocean waters, but has campaigned hard to remove oil and gas from Union Matters so that they can manage the resource locally. The Union government quietly agreed, and last year Zanzibar signed an agreement with Shell to do exploration in their waters. “There is a perception that potential for oil in the islands boosted the desire for the Zanzibaris to go solo,” observes Chahali. Many opposition supporters in Zanzibar believe that oil will transform the islands to their past glory, and they add this argument alongside the restoration of national pride and the need for greater links with the Islamic world as key arguments for full autonomy.

Perhaps the main lesson to Tanzania has been how ‘civilized’ the Scottish referendum process has been so far. While emotions on both sides have been running high, there have been very few incidences of violence or threats to derail the process. Once UK government approved the referendum, it made it clear that they would honor whatever outcome from the vote. Party politics have been kept at bay, with “Better Together” campaign being led by Alistair Darling, a Labour politician who is campaigning on behalf of the UK government led by the Conservative Party. On the other hand, the “Yes Scotland” camp led by First Minister Alex Salmond has tried to make the issue of independence that of the Scottish people rather than his Scottish Nationalist Party.

Many agree that the way forward for Tanzania is for more devolution or greater identity and autonomy for Zanzibar, with Union retaining big issues such as defense and economy. The Union President Jakaya Kikwete admits to long-running political “fault lines” in Zanzibar which necessitated a power sharing agreement in 2010 between the two major parties in the isles. But Kikwete recently played down any notion of a strong “separatist movement” in Zanzibar, saying it wasn’t a big issue that needed to be blown out of proportion. He believes it can be contained: “We will always be able to manage them and I don’t think they will be able to wreck the country,” he assured. However, many observers believe it was partly due to such fears of secession that compelled the President to see the wisdom of initiating a rewrite of the Union Constitution in order to preempt violent demands for more autonomy in Zanzibar and to guarantee survival of the Union “for the next 50 years”. Tanzania and the Cameroon, remain the two longest surviving and most successful unions in modern day Africa after the collapse of Ghana-Guinea Union, the Senegambia and United Arab Republic (UAR). No other examples remain of independent Africa countries that decided on own volition to unite.

The Resurrection of Nat Nakasa

“This is Simply a Personal Statement from Me to You”

On August 18th I attended the memorial service for Nat Nakasa at the Broadway Presbyterian Church in Harlem.  What began as a somber event quickly turned joyous as we celebrated the South African writer and editor’s long overdue trip home. With isiZulu songs echoing off the church walls, it was truly a moving experience.  The only trouble was, had it not been for the life-sized photographs of Nakasa flanking the altar, I might not have recognized who we were there celebrating.  Words like “stalwart” were used to recall South Africa’s long struggle against white supremacy and Nakasa was described as ‘the voice’ of his long suffering community. The keynote address by Minister of Arts and Culture Nathi Mthethwa related him to Pixley ka Isaka Seme, the ANC founding father who had attended nearby Columbia University at the turn of the 20th century.

I am a historian, who researches and writes on South African literary history.  I first came to know Nakasa through his literary journal, The Classic.  I was writing a MA thesis about four South African journals/magazines; Drum, The Classic, New Classic, and Staffrider. I was introduced to Nakasa in a thoroughly historicized fashion.  Which is to say: I came to know him as the product of his social context, a writer embedded in a set of institutions and personal relationships that conditioned his voice.  I completed my MA thesis in 2010 and turned my attention to other aspects of South African writing and reading (you can read it here).  Over the past few years, I have read with fascination as biographers, journalists, and politicians reanimated the writer I had met in the archive.  In the last few months, however, the Nakasa I knew has become almost unrecognizable.  My growing sense of unease reached a crescendo in Harlem, for to memorialize or commemorate a person generally means ripping them from their historical context and cramming them into whatever present space is vacant and useful.  This is what it means to do violence to memory, forgetting the past while forcing it to do work.

“What happens to the writings of a man when he is dead and gone?” Nakasa once asked Essop Patel, who later published a collection of Nakasa’s work.  This poignant depiction of a young man grasping for validation of his time on Earth was recalled at the memorial service as a way to remind us all that Nakasa lives on in his written legacy.  Yet if one were to peruse the numerous articles written since MinisterMthethwa’s announcement that Nakasa was coming home (and often enough before that too) it would be difficult to make the claim that this legacy has been honored.

Nakasa was a writer, and his writing offers us the best historical evidence available.  Nakasa’s archive primarily consists of his published writings, various collections of correspondence (mostly at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, a bit in Austin, TX, USA), official documents (U.S.A. and R.S.A government files), and personal anecdotes and recollections.  All of this material has been available to be considered by anyone interested, yet for decades Nakasa’s legacy remained largely a matter of academic interest, if that.  That began to change in the late 1990s, however, when a prestigious South African journalism award was named after him.  By the time I was researching my thesis in 2008 – 2009, his was a bigger name, due in no small part to the Office of the President awarding him the Order of Ikhamanga in Silver in the late 2000s. In the wake of this celebrity revival, people began to take a greater interest in Nakasa. Ryan Brown, an American freelance journalist won a Fulbright Fellowship in 2011 to research his life (she wrote about her project on AIAC in 2012).Interest in Nakasa has since abounded – resulting in, among other coverage, the American journalist Danny Massey’s expansive New York Times piece on Nakasa’s American exile, which drew liberally from published and unpublished academic research.

One thing all of these accounts share is a general feeling of unease with the ambiguity that Nakasa proposes as subject. His was not a life that fit many of the preconceived narratives through which we grasp black South African existence. I and other students of Nakasa acknowledge the liminal nature of his experiences through well-worn references to “fringe country” or the space between two worlds, but too many of us inevitably gravitate toward rigid categorical evaluations of who he was, what he did, and why it mattered. The temptation to make him ‘count’ in the way that South Africans are supposed to ‘count’ is too great. We want him to be a hero in the most recognizable sense of the word.

Why else would it be suggested at this man’s memorial service that he was a people’s champion of the struggle?  A cursory review of his portfolio should make it abundantly clear how inappropriate this is.  In the first issue of The Classic, his own magazine, he chose to reprint one of his speeches in which he opened with a disclaimer rejecting the responsibility to represent Africans or “anybody at all” (The Classic 1, no. 1 (1963): 56). “This is simply a personal statement from me to you,” he explained.  Obviously this has been a difficult concept to take seriously.

Conflicts over representation are nothing new when it comes to Nakasa though.  It is quite clear from his published works that he was having a difficult time figuring himself out and finding his place in the world.  Those who followed him have an an equally difficult time fixing a definition on this writer.  In her 2008 thesis, Heather Margaret Acott provides perhaps the best accounting of how Nakasa’s fortune rose and fell in the press during the 1990s according to the need for “’rainbow nation’ icons.”

I would suggest, however, that what has been happening in the press recently reflects something slightly different.  In the early 2000s, South African art and culture critic, Sandile Memela wrote two articles castigating the liberal white media establishment and Nakasa as their “darling” (see “The Man who was at Odds with his Identity” City Press, 9 September 2001). “Because he was a major hit in white liberal circles,” Memela explained, “he has been exhumed from the grave and made an icon of black journalism.” Memela has surely revised his opinion because he made the trip to New York to act as host of the memorial service for Nakasa’s actual exhumation.

Let me be clear: the problem is not that Memela changed his mind. There is nothing pernicious about people’s interpretation of evidence changing with time.  What troubles me is that Memela’s change of heart illustrates the fickle ways in which he and others continue to police the past, to pick and choose what lives and perspectives are worthy of remembrance and celebration. At one time Nakasa was out of bounds because he had the temerity to write to white audiences, which disqualified him from serious consideration as a representative of the people. Now, before my eyes, he was and is repositioned, first as a misunderstood prophet of the ‘rainbow nation,’ and now as the anti-apartheid voice of black communities.

It is astonishing to watch Nakasa himself being shaped to fit today’s needs.  He is being unmoored from his own life, the issues that concerned him, the evidence that is his writing, and the context that motivated that work.

Why was Nakasa’s body met at King Shaka by an MK honor guard?  I understand the need for spectacle and ceremony, but neither MK – nor, to be clear, the broad-based struggle against apartheid – was his life.  Are the trappings of the struggle the best way to remember this writer –  or are they simply the only way?  Howard University Law Professor Harold McDougall, who knew Nakasa at Harvard, spoke at the ceremony in New York; he described a mentoring program he had developed and urged South African officials to consider establishing such a program for young journalists in Nakasa’s memory. At Wits you can read a letter Nakasa wrote to Lewis Nkosi expressing his hope that The Classic might inspire four new township writers per year. This is how we should celebrate Nakasa.This fits.

In the discipline of history, as well as contemporary politics, the struggle has exerted an enormous gravitational pull for years.  Rightly so: the dismantling of apartheid was an incredible victory worthy of study and celebration.  The greatness of this victory is matched only by the terribleness of the system; indeed, it is theawfulness that makes the victory great.  Yet what Nakasa’s recent treatment reveals is that the awfulness and greatness have become disconnected somehow.  This week’s celebration demands that Nakasa fit into an easily recognizable role in that victory; writing through that awfulness is no longer enough.

The Johannesburg journalist Neo Maditla recently wrote that Nakasa was “unremarkable.” Nakasa was not unlike most South Africans who survived apartheid oppression just “trying to make it to the next day.”  This feat (occasionally known as life) only appears unremarkable within the framework of an oppression-resistance binary, which has the effect of flattening the amazing texture of so many lives, including Nakasa’s.  The insistence that only struggle lives are worth remembering and celebrating is the policing of the past.  It leaves the vast majority of South Africans, those who did their best to get by and to leave something behind for future generations, on the outside looking in, marginalized for their failure adequately to ‘struggle.’  In 1986, South African writer Njabulo Ndebele cautioned South Africa’s writers against allowing spectacle to dominate their collective literary imagination and extolled attention to the mundane, the ordinary.  Perhaps Nakasa should inspire us to rediscover the unremarkable?  For if the struggle against white supremacy is the only story worth acknowledging, than that oppressive system has truly retained its grip on authority in mockery of all that was sacrificed in the name of the future.

While Nakasa was quite remarkable in a number of ways, to enumerate these would take us down another path over which his failure to ‘struggle’ would loom.  So I conclude with this notion that he was unremarkable.  On Saturday President Zuma will preside over Nakasa’s reburial.  Will he allow Nat to speak through his own words?  Who will be returning to Chesterville, a prodigal son or a triumphant hero?  Is it even possible to celebrate a black South African who lived in the second half of the twentieth-century without making reference to the struggle?  Do we have the vocabulary for such a celebration?

After the memorial service I briefly spoke with a South African reporter for her radio program.  She asked how I, as someone who has done some scholarly work on the subject, think about and remember Nakasa?  I replied that as I’ve lived with Nakasa my thoughts on him have changed, running the gamut from struggle writer to CIA stooge, but recently I’ve decided that I like thinking of him best as a young man just trying to find his way in the world by writing.  She was not impressed and quickly went off, presumably to find someone willing to say something about fringe life or rainbows.

I like my image of Nakasa as a young man writing and living. I think we’re just out of practice understanding that as something worth celebrating.

The Economist magazine has had a “Slavery Problem” since 1843

The Economist has a slavery problem, as Greg Grandin has recently called it. Grandin’s wonderful article is a response to a series of lamentable book reviews published by The Economist that deal with the topic of slavery: Grandin’s own The Empire of Necessity, and more recently Edward Baptist’s The Half Has NeverBeen Told. The list goes on, as Grandin reports. But, as he continues, this slavery problem is old, well pedigreed even. During the U.S. Civil War, he notes, The Economist “stood nearly alone in supporting the Confederacy against the Union.” If cheap cotton was blood cotton, so be it. Summarizing this long running slavery problem, Grandin concludes: “The Economist seems committed to making sure that white people aren’t taken for total villains and darker-skinned folks held accountable for their share of world’s inequities. It also seems dedicated to make sure the economic system created by slavery [i.e., capitalism] is denied its parentage, and on insisting that the miseries that continue to be produced by neoliberal capitalism can only be cured by more neoliberal capitalism.”

Indeed. The Economist’s “slavery problem” is even older than Grandin suggests, though. It dates back to the very first issue of the paper itself.

It’s almost certainly a coincidence, to be sure, but a suggestive one, that The Economist’s first issue was published on 1 August 1843. That is, on the ninth (or fifth, to account for the end of Apprenticeship in 1838) anniversary of Emancipation Day. The anniversary was celebrated throughout the Atlantic world. Emerson and Douglass gave speeches on it; US abolitionists held picnics—and of course gave speeches too—to mark it. In the British West Indies, shops shut down, holidays were granted. Newly freed folk prayed in church and celebrated with whatever means were available to them; the better off feasted and drank (with plenty of toasts to Victoria and the Empire). Creole newspapers would go all prolix on the event, taking the anniversary as a chance to reflect on the beneficence of empire as well as the work still to be done to secure a meaningful (or, for the plantocracy, sustainable and profitable) freedom. And so, given the liberal bent of The Economist, given its belief in the glorious mission of Britain in this our fallen world, one would imagine that it too would participate in the convention of mouthing a “Glory be to Empire!” or toasting Wilberforce on the anniversary of emancipation. It was simply what Britons did.

Nope. Not a word. It’s not that the West Indies don’t make an appearance, though, in the august prospectus heralding the emancipation of the market. They do. But as refuse to be jettisoned.

It all has to do with The Economist’s guiding principles. Simply put, The Economist was founded as a pressure rag for free-trade agitators. Its first issue offers a lengthy essay that details both the economic problems derived from Britain’s “restrictive system” of mercantilist tariffs and the glories that awaited a free-trade Britain. Sound familiar? Like something you might have read in it yesterday? The Economist is literally the most ideologically consistent publication to have ever existed.

For The Economist, two commodities in particular figured the irrationality of the “restrictive system” of mercantilism: corn (i.e., cereal grains, in particular wheat) and “the greatest foreign article of consumption, and therefore of exchangeable ability, SUGAR.” Together, corn and sugar accounted for most of the caloric intake of your average Briton. For this reason, the price of corn and sugar was understood as having a strong determining effect on wages, and so the costs of production, and so the costs of goods, and so the costs of production, and so on and on. The cheaper these primary goods, the lower the cost of production, the greater would be the abundance of Britain. The problem, though, was that tariff walls favoring British farmers on one hand and West Indian sugar planters on the other kept the prices of these goods high.

Quite high. Sugar production in the British West Indies didn’t totally collapse after emancipation—it’s a debated topic, anyhow—but it dropped. It had been dropping for years, as an effect of the abolition of the slave trade in 1807, soil exhaustion, bad cultivation technique, the collapse of estates due to impossible debts, the quotidian resistance of the enslaved, and so on. With the end of slavery, many more plantations went bust, free people worked out multiple arrangements with plantations that invariably entailed a diminished production of sugar, and no British capitalists were really willing to sink much into most of the islands. Free trade agitation, too, affected the capitalization of the islands; it was widely understood that it was only the restrictive tariffs that kept the West Indies afloat, and few capitalists were willing to risk the investment when the tariff walls were starting to come down. And so the situation: More Britons were consuming sugar, but the supply was inadequate, and so expensive.

The West Indies and their protected markets were thus a primary target of The Economist, the best example that one could find to describe the idiocy of anything but liberalized markets. (It’s always a shame to me, when reading The Great Transformation, that Polanyi so absorbed the Little Englandish imaginary of free-trade liberals that he can’t think sugar with corn, his primary example.) And so the solution: liberalize sugar markets. “We must be willing to take,” The Economist’s first issue declares,  “the sugar and coffee of Brazil, Cuba, and Java,” “to avail ourselves of the vast and rich productiveness of Brazil, Cuba, Java, &c.”

Of course, the “rich productiveness” of Brazil and Cuba owed everything to slavery. The Economist didn’t agitate for the resumption of slavery in the British Empire, no; it simply demanded what amounted to its externalization. On a day when about a million emancipated humans celebrated their freedom, The Economist agitated for a position that would intensify slavery elsewhere. When news reached Cuba that an act to liberalize sugar markets was passed in 1846, the slaveholding elite reportedly partied well into the night: they now had access to the biggest sugar market in the world. British capital poured into Cuba and Brazil—it had been for some time—and so too did enslaved humans captured in Africa. (Following Engels on the late re-constitution of serfdom in Eastern Europe, Dale Tomich with good reason calls the period following liberalization the “second slavery.”)

In one of the weirdest about-face alliances in British political history, some antislavery activists joined with the West Indian plantocracy to protest liberalization—but not many. By the 1840s, free-trade activism absorbed much of the utopian impulses of antislavery organization; free-traders cribbed antislavery organizational practices to boot. Friendships were shattered, groups dissolved, and all because there was a simple choice: free trade in “slave sugar” or moral trade in “free sugar.” Free trade activists with prior antislavery connections such as Richard Cobden insisted that slavery could only be abolished through free trade, when rational, liberalized markets would reward the best, most rational form of production, which was always taken by liberals (with good evidence to the contrary) to be free-labor production. Freedom meant cheapness; cheapness meant freedom. Or, as The Economist put it in its first issue, “we seriously believe that FREE TRADE, free intercourse, will do more than any other visible agent to extend civilization and morality throughout the world—yes, to extinguish slavery itself.”

By opening British markets to “slave sugar,” Britain effectively guaranteed the hyper-underdevelopment of the islands. Indeed, if just a decade earlier, abolitionists insisted that enslaved humans were just like any other British subject, entitled to the same rights and protections, liberalization cut into this flickering moral geography, decisively constituting at the politico-economic level an inner Britain and an outer one. The postemancipation world was rendered institutionally foreign and so not as deserving of British care regarding its level of economic development—or, really, much care at all. In practice, then, liberalization entailed the economic and political abandonment of the islands. As Disraeli later asserted, the “wretched” colonies had been a “millstone” about Britain’s collective neck; he tore the millstone away. (He didn’t, and it’s weird that he, an arch-protectionist, should say he did, but free trade had become so ideologically hegemonic that down was up.) It became common to compare creoles’ resistance to emendations of tariff protections with Luddites’ destruction of machinery—with the implication, of course, that machines won out in the end. Nature following its course, Providence providencing. (Marx would absorb this figuring of the West Indies in his remarks on free trade, but only to insist that flows of capital and distributions of commodity production are not natural.) Still, plenty of liberals fantasized that the islands would simply sink into the sea. “[I]f we could,” Anthony Trollope writes in his West Indies and the Spanish Main, “we would fain forget Jamaica altogether. But there it is,” he lamented. Indeed. Brontë’s Rochester responded to the inconvenient presence of the West Indies in manorial Britain by locking his mad creole wife Bertha in the attic. Just think about how some Yanks think of Detroit.

The result of liberalization, then, was not simply to intensify slavery throughout the Americas or to more fully saturate British markets with slave produce. Nor was the result simply to decimate an already decimated West Indian economy, although it did that too. Most importantly, the result of liberalization was to reduce Britain’s relationship to the West Indies, and to West Indians, to a market rationality, and one wherein the market directed Britain’s attention from subjects who just a decade earlier had been the focus of Britons’ intense political and moral concern. (As Eric Williams half-melancholically, half-sarcastically put it, echoing Burke, “The age of empire was dead; that of free traders, economists, and calculators had succeeded, and the glory of the West Indies was extinguished forever.”) That is, of course, not how the emancipated understood their relationship, not normatively. Not when they offered letters of thanks to Victoria for their emancipation, not when they wrote petitions to Victoria soliciting economic assistance for the islands, not when they declared themselves British subjects and so entitled to all the rights and privileges attaching to that quality. It’s hard for us to read such documents now, with our postcolonial eyes, and see anything but imperial hegemony. But in such supplications we gain quotidian access to what emancipation, at least in part, meant for creoles: freedom to transact with Britain, to be included in an expansive polity, and to possess a legibility there that differed from the logic of the market.

The Economist has a slavery problem then, to be sure. But it has another one, too, and a bigger one. Call it a freedom problem. It’s partly, as Grandin suggests, that The Economist offers the same (neo)liberal solution to every (neo)liberal problem: more freedom (for capital). And yet, were The Economist to recognize the complicity of its ideology in the production and persistence of slavery, I’m not sure much would change. After all, the publication was quite conscious that cheaper sugar purchased on liberalized markets entailed, in the short run, intensified slavery abroad. One lesson here, one I wish people effusing over new studies of capitalism and slavery or the new capitalism studies stuff, is that we need to stop thinking that somehow naming capitalism’s imbrication in slavery in any way constitutes a radical act, an emancipatory gesture. Capitalism already knows how shitty it is. It doesn’t care.

The Economist’s freedom problem runs deeper than its willingness to capitalize on a form of production premised on freedom’s negation. It is rather that its monochromatic definition of freedom as market freedom rendered it incapable of hearing the other kind of freedom articulated both as a demand and as a gift in each black creole missive of gratitude or supplicatory petition to the queen. In composing freedom in the economy, as the economy, The Economist rendered itself, and its liberal readers, and a liberalized Britain, incapable of hearing the aneconomy that inheres in every demand for black freedom. To be a person, not a thing; to be described in print as a British West Indian, not metonymized as sugar; to be a subject one hangs around with, celebrates emancipation with, and even after the cane juice isn’t worth the squeeze. Indeed, sticking around when there’s no good reason to do so is probably the basis of any politics worth sticking with; such a practice entails a collective fracture of social necessity that originates (as) anything I’d call freedom. The rebels of Morant Bay didn’t get going because their economic prospects were bleak; they were always like that. They got going because the queen told them to fuck off.

And so let’s say this: If The Economist’s slavery problem consists in its abandoning ideological responsibility for capitalism’s deep ties to slavery, its freedom problem consists in its redefinition of freedom as the capacity to abandon. Ex-slaves were the first, and foundational, victims of this freedom.

This article first appeared on Of CLR James, Chris Taylor’s excellent blog (well worth reading through the rest of his posts). Chris Taylor tweets @ChrisJudeTaylor