Sean Jacobs's Blog, page 392
September 9, 2014
Sepp Blatter says sports boycotts don’t work. ‘Would Mandela agree?’
Earlier this week Sepp Blatter, defending FIFA’s decision to not rescind its decision to award Russia the World Cup in 2022, said “Boycotts in sport never has had any benefit.” Watch it here for yourself. As 101GreatGoals.com, a site not usually know for its progressive politics (they usually line up behind the worst aspects of US foreign policy) wondered: “Would Mandela agree?” In fact some Belgian fans thought the same over the summer when they pressured the Belgian FA to cancel last Sunday’s European qualifier against Israel in Jerusalem. In the end, the game was moved to Cyprus, but we don’t think that will be the end of calls for boycott of Israel’s football team. Meanwhile, it just so happens that on September 18th, Hlonipha Mokoena (Columbia University), Dan Magaziner (Yale University) and myself will revisit the legacy of the 1980s cultural boycott against white South Africa during a panel at The New School in New York City’s Greenwich Village.
Apart from the successful sports boycott white South Africa was subjected to, our discussion will include the events and complicated legacies of Paul Simon’s “Graceland” album, for which Simon defied the UN boycott, traveled to South Africa and recorded with local musicians. The larger context for September 18th’s public event is “… labor issues in the United Arab Emirates, funding structures of the Sydney Biennale or the current São Paulo Bienal, participation in this year’s Manifesta in Saint Petersburg, and calls to renew a cultural boycott of Israel.” In fact, other seminars in the series will look at some of these. Back to September 18th: Joe Berlinger’s documentary marking the 25th anniversary of “Graceland” album, will also be screened separately that day as part of the event. Here’s the trailer:
BTW, we may, or may not bring up, Stevie van Zandt’s view of Paul Simon (if the video doesn’t cue, fast forward to 19 minutes, 15 seconds:
All the details to the event at the link below. See you there.
September 8, 2014
Prayer in the time of Ebola
News of Ebola in West Africa immediately sent me back to the spring of 1974, when another highly contagious and deadly hemorrhagic virus known as Lassa fever swept through my hometown of Jos, Nigeria. All through that hot and dry season, people drove straight through my city with their car windows closed, even though they had no air conditioning, so as not to catch what they feared to be blowing in the wind. I was a young child at the time and as the daughter of a pastor, I prayed fervently for those suffering. I prayed that the afflicted would be cured, but in spite of my prayers, many people died. I was shaken by these deaths but nevertheless continued to pray for I took hope in the seemingly miraculous recovery of an American missionary nurse.
Nurse Lily Pinneo was the first Lassa fever patient dramatically airlifted out of West Africa to the United States, just like today’s first American Ebola patients, Dr. Kent Brantly and Nancy Writebol. Nurse Pinneo not only recovered from Lassa fever; she returned to Nigeria with her antibodies, which were then successfully used in the form of a serum to cure others. In light of the recent anxieties surrounding the arrival of Ebola patients in the U.S., it is hard to imagine that Nurse Pinneo was not transported in a specially outfitted medical evacuation plane. Instead she traveled in the first class section of a commercial flight with little more than a curtain separating her from the other passengers. It was a Pan American Airways Boeing 707 that stopped in Accra, Monrovia, and Dakar picking up new passengers at each point.
Now, some forty years later after the Lassa fever outbreak, I worry about Ebola and in particular about my friends and family who live in West Africa. “Please be careful,” I urged my brother in a recent email sent from where I live in San Francisco to where he works in Lagos. I was hoping he might reassure me by saying he was taking extra care, but instead he replied: “There’s nothing much one can do to be ‘careful’. Like everybody else in Nigeria, I will just have to rely on prayer.” I groaned when I read this for I’m not sure my brother believes in prayer and even if he does, his email reads like a vast over-reliance on prayer at a time when there are many more practical things that can and should be done. Except perhaps in a densely populated megacity with close to 21 million people living in the context of widespread poverty and a lack of awareness about disease. Here, the arrival of a pandemic such as Ebola could be catastrophic, even apocalyptic. What my brother’s response made me realize was that in places like Lagos where the healthcare system is inadequate and health workers are constantly on strike, this leaves people with little option but to rely on prayer.
While I no longer have the same unwavering belief in prayer that I had as a child, I continue to pray. At the start of the Ebola outbreak, Ling, my local dry cleaner, pointed to a photograph of her beloved Pope Francis and told me she was praying for those suffering from Ebola. I told her I was praying too. Several days later, in a conversation with my Palestinian neighbor, Mohammed, as we bemoaned the atrocities taking place in the Middle East, we both spoke of how we could do little but pray. So like my brother and many others in Nigeria, as well as those in the areas most affected by Ebola in Sierra Leone, Guinea, Liberia and now Senegal, I find myself, almost in spite of myself, relying on prayer. And yet prayer is undoubtedly a powerful way of fostering bonds between neighbours and friends. Prayer might even be powerful enough to bring about miracles, but it can never be a substitute for the alleviation of problems that require coordinated international efforts on matters of governance, regional security, healthcare and public services. Ultimately, what I pray for most urgently these days is for greater, concerted human effort to solve today’s most terrifying problems. Some things are simply beyond human control, but Ebola is not one of these.
Image Credit: Victor Ehikhamenor
August 1, 2014
We will be back tomorrow
Starting this morning, we begin our annual month-long break from this site (we’ll still be active on social media–Facebook and on Twitter and Twitter again). We’ll be back after Labor Day (the Americans’ poor excuse for May Day) at the start of September. In the meantime, this is a good time to revisit our greatest hits from the last year. Here’s 10 to start you off:
Kenya’s first mockumentary takes on the world.
Neymar and the Disappearing Donkey
What Paul Simon really thought of Nelson Mandela
Against the Gospel of “Africa Rising”
Tom Hanks, Captain Phillips and the “True Story” of Somali Piracy
The #BullshitFiles: Christina Aguilera feeds war-torn Rwanda
The Dangers of a Single Book Cover.
The #Bullshit Files: Mindy Budgor, ‘the first female Maasai warrior’
What’s wrong with the Germans.
When Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie met Sweden
The Cape Town company that designs and markets “slave ship” ironing boards and aprons
10 excuses most Dutch people make for racism
What they don’t tell you in the brochure about Stellenbosch
Belgium is an insular country. It lives like history happens outside of it.
Enough of the liberal pieties on Sochi and gay rights
In any case, feel free to read the whole archive.
We’ll be back on Monday, September 7th
Starting this morning, we begin our annual month-long break from this site (we’ll still be active on social media–Facebook and on Twitter and Twitter again). We’ll be back after Labor Day (the Americans’ poor excuse for May Day) at the start of September. In the meantime, this is a good time to revisit our greatest hits from the last year. Here’s 10 to start you off:
Kenya’s first mockumentary takes on the world.
Neymar and the Disappearing Donkey
Against the Gospel of “Africa Rising”
Tom Hanks, Captain Phillips and the “True Story” of Somali Piracy
The #BullshitFiles: Christina Aguilera feeds war-torn Rwanda
The Dangers of a Single Book Cover.
The #Bullshit Files: Mindy Budgor, ‘the first female Maasai warrior’
What’s wrong with the Germans.
When Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie met Sweden
The Cape Town company that designs and markets “slave ship” ironing boards and aprons
10 excuses most Dutch people make for racism
What they don’t tell you in the brochure about Stellenbosch
Belgium is an insular country. It lives like history happens outside of it.
On Safari
Starting this morning, we begin our annual month-long break from this site (we’ll still be active on social media–Facebook and on Twitter and Twitter again). We’ll be back after Labor Day (the Americans’ poor excuse for May Day) at the start of September. In the meantime, this is a good time to revisit our greatest hits from the last year. Here’s 10 to start you off:
Kenya’s first mockumentary takes on the world.
Neymar and the Disappearing Donkey
Against the Gospel of “Africa Rising”
Tom Hanks, Captain Phillips and the “True Story” of Somali Piracy
The #BullshitFiles: Christina Aguilera feeds war-torn Rwanda
The Dangers of a Single Book Cover.
The #Bullshit Files: Mindy Budgor, ‘the first female Maasai warrior’
What’s wrong with the Germans.
When Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie met Sweden
The Cape Town company that designs and markets “slave ship” ironing boards and aprons
10 excuses most Dutch people make for racism
What they don’t tell you in the brochure about Stellenbosch
Belgium is an insular country. It lives like history happens outside of it.
July 31, 2014
Telling “the African story”
We often hear political and business leaders and Africanists talk about the need to “tell the African story.” For us, “tell the African story” means nothing. In other words, it is a cliché of no value. We don’t know what it is supposed to mean. It may be that the idea of a definitive “African story” gains traction as a response to bigoted representations of the continent that have been influential in Western journalism and thinking. But like the idea of the need for “positive stories about Africa”, it’s facile and unhelpful. Our suspicion is that political and business leaders say that when they feel uncomfortable with airing real problems that ordinary Africans experience. The phrase also assumes–as our blog title mockingly suggests–that Africa is a Country.
African journalists rarely think or talk about their vocation in these terms. In most cases, they lack the continental consciousness to think or write in this way. The national trumps any continental solidarity or focus. So does the local. Their focus is very different from their counterparts in the West who report on “Africa.”
Journalists are also under stress and lack resources to travel between or report from elsewhere in Africa. News organizations mostly republish wire stories or cut and paste reports from Western media. In South Africa, for example, it is not unusual for prominent newspapers to take their “international” and continental coverage straight from Western publications, often ones that stereotype Africans. For example, the Independent Group’s newspapers republish copy from Britain’s rightwing “Daily Telegraph” and the tabloid “Daily Mirror.” The worst is the Sunday Independent, where copy from the New York Times and Washington Post make up whole sections and the Mail and Guardian which reposts UK Guardian copy in bulk on its world news pages with very little edits. There’s a few homegrown networks (e.g. SABC Africa, which may not be operating anymore) or subsidiaries of “global” or US networks-like CNBC Africa, ABN News-which attempt a continental bias, but can’t help themselves in parroting cookie-cutter Western storylines, tone or foci.
That said, most African journalists, like their counterparts in the West, are connected to social media which means there is now no limitation to their stories being read by Western mass audiences and elites alike. One thing to do, especially online, might be to talk back to Western media about these stereotypes. We see that space opening up more and more. We are reminded of a piece written a while back by a former New York Times correspondent in India writing at the end of his tenure about how he had to get used to the idea that the subjects of his reporting read what he wrote and could now write back in real time.
At the same time, it should be noted that most of the time a Western foreign correspondent’s articles are of almost no interest at all to people in the country he or she is reporting from. The domestic news agenda is completely different — so that domestic media scandals are completely ignored by foreign correspondents.
Western media organizations tend to assume that their foreign reporting is taken much more seriously overseas than it really is. Ask someone in an African country what they think about Nicholas Kristof’s reporting, and invariably the answer will be: “Who?”
So what should be the role or contribution of the African press in Africa’s transformation?
Report stories. Investigate malfeasance. Get out of the newsroom. Produce compelling media. Give readers proper historical context. No PR stories. Using the vernacular can be helpful for meaningful reporting.
Lots of the journalism in Africa is not properly edited or thought through.
Without being prescriptive, if a continental consciousness has to develop, it should be akin to a non-essentialist pan-Africanism that is suited to this time that challenges and broadens received wisdom about the African continent and its people in Western media, countering ahistorical and decontextualized images of the continent and its people. With the web that is now not that hard to do. Without doing “development” journalism, journalists need to reinvent the narrative and visual economy of their African locales.
Global media, with few exceptions, have shown themselves time and again to be utterly unable to cover the continent in the depth and detail it demands, still less with any appreciation for Africa as a site of astonishing cultural and artistic productiveness. The imperative of journalists in Africa should not be to produce patronizing ‘positive’ news stories or PR-style neoliberal boosterism, but sustained daily work of presenting and engaging critically with the cultural and political life of Africa and Africans wherever they are and, crucially with its diaspora, now only a click away.
People need to stop taking this “potential investors” mumbo jumbo seriously. Governments are accountable to citizens, not investors. The idea that “potential investors” will be scared off by accountability journalism exposing corrupt practices is ludicrous. Look at Angola and the work of Rafael Marques de Morais through his site Maka Angola.
Marques has exposed scandal after scandal, but big oil companies still seem to want that Angolan oil. Some of the world’s most notoriously corrupt countries are also the most attractive to investors — not that their investment is of much good to ordinary people. A major challenge for all journalists is to think independently of the very pervasive neoliberal ideology of institutions like the IMF and World Bank, and media like The Economist magazine, according to whom all government policy must be dictated by the needs of “potential investors”. As the Malawian researcher and writer Jimmy Kainja quipped to us presidents like to do this supposedly very important thing called “talking to investors,” but nobody’s ever quite sure what the result is.
The Naked Woman on Nelson Mandela Square
On Monday, a woman walked towards the giant Mandela statue at Nelson Mandela square in Sandton, Johannesburg and stripped naked until security guard came to remove her as demonstrated in the cellphone images that were captured and distributed on social media by bystanders. It is not clear who this woman is or why she did it but somebody on Twitter called her Braveheart and I must agree, there is something beautifully valiant in her statement. Some dim witted people on News 24 complained about the type of body she has, some have called it ”yuck” and that it would have been better to have a younger ”firmer” body instead. This type of thinking, not unlike some news reports that have insinuated that she is mentally unstable, is perhaps the type of thinking that Mystery Braveheart seeks to challenge about who we have become as a society.
A black African female body — something usually under duress in South Africa, constantly cleaning, carrying and wiping; the perpetual provider – caring, mothering, fathering, paying, praying; and always the recipient of various brands of a frightening South African masculinity – pursued, abused, sexualized and caressed in varying degrees of love and hate. This black African female body willfully walks to the towering figure of Nelson Mandela and disrobes. As visible as he is, presiding over an erect symbol of capital, she becomes visible.
In my eyes, the statement transcends her beautiful physical attributes, and becomes an embodiment of how many of us feel. In a world where nudity has become the smut that sells product and personality, hers is a pure human body, one that allows more people to see themselves in her shapely hips and breasts that look back at you. That we are unsure of the context of this act is in and of itself, pure.
As she leans in to place her head on the bronze knee of Mandela’s statue, I see a vulnerable woman in plain pain. She could have gone to any of the many places that are named after Mandela but she chose this one, a physical embodiment of South Africa’s neo-liberal agenda, one that prioritizes capital and not people, it is a building that represents all the wrong turns we’ve made to end up in a situation where 25% of South Africans are unemployed, where the majority are still poor and the poor are still black. It’s a building that represents our nation’s status as the dumping ground for Western Imperialism. An inference of the commodification of Mandela’s image, commoditized by the power that oppressed him, used to conciliate the South Africans into believing that nothing happened to them. She may be mentally unstable, would that be surprising? The real miracle in South Africa’s popular tale of reconciliation is how many of us have not reached a state of undress in pronouncement, no matter which side of the divide one falls. That she chose the powerful and now in his absence, changing image of Mandela is telling. The Mandela who placed the responsibility of morality into the hands of black South Africans, when immorality had ruled over them for 46 years, the Mandela who forgave the people but did not put on trial, the system that put him on trial, the Mandela who promised to not dislocate public life so that places like Sandton could continue being Sandton, unfortunately maintaining Alexandria as its unchanged appendage – that Mandela may be the one she is begging to, asking from and questioning.
She claims this space in response to the noise that pervades all available public space, especially in Sandton, all the noise that has facilitated the idea that nothing happened. What’s there to be angry about? What’s there to be sad about? Shop. Everything is okay. Whether it is art or not, her statement has allowed us to interrogate the state of unconsciousness that the country’s powerful are in when it comes to the needs of those whose power is exerted through their bodies, limited to their bodies or limited by their bodies. Her nudity wakes us up, either in protest or solidarity to the fact that everything is not okay.
Thank you Mystery Braveheart, if that’s what you were going for.
Let’s talk about racism in Colombia
Last week, a classified ad appeared in a Colombian newspaper. It read, in the broken language of pay-per-word ads:
A female surgeon doctor with college degree Internship in Clinic Inscription. 25-30 years old, of white skin. Needed, a personal interview Dr. Guarín, next July, 22nd, 10 A.m.
Soon every news outlet in the country, as well as social media (including the newspaper which originally published it, El País) got wind of it, writing stories. It was universally, and rightfully, condemned.
The day of its publishing, a small crowd gathered outside of Dr. Guarín’s office to protest the racism of the ad and at least one organization, the Fundación Chao Racismo, announced it would sue the physician for breaking the country’s anti-discrimination laws. The media backlash prompted the managers of the Farallones Clinic, where Dr. Guarín has his private practice, to distance themselves. They did so first by making it clear that the doctor merely rents a space there and is not affiliated with them, and then by asking him to stop renting it.
The whole ordeal was forgotten quickly, though, with Colombia’s relentless news cycle bringing a different scandal each day. Still, it was mildly refreshing that at least this small outburst could have happened in a country where racism is rampant, yet it rarely hits mainstream conversations, where it is easily disregarded and treated as a foreign ailment.
As with everything else in Colombia, our racism is also a problem of elitism. Black and native voices are often dismissed because they tend to come from the periphery. Freed black slaves in the middle of the 19th Century settled in their own neighborhoods or their own towns, away from their previous oppressors, while the native groups that preserved their cultures managed to do so, mainly, by staying away from the European settlers. People who belong to any of these two groups, then, tend to come from remote and depressed areas, forgotten by the government, where basic needs are unmet, public services are lacking and education is of low quality.
Therefore, from the “center”, from the main cities of the country where things are sometimes better, these people are seen as “inferiors.” For example, it is a common assumption among some Colombians that dark skinned people are poor, while fair skinned people are rich, or at least well off.
Of course, there is also the purely racial aspect of it. I have only mentioned “black” and “native” people in the last paragraphs, because those are the only “races” we can think about in Colombia. They are the ones that steer away from what is more common. Most of us (including myself) are mixed-race. We have a word in Spanish for it: “mestizo”. Even people whose skin is very pale declare themselves as “mestizos”. This is what we are taught in school: we are a “mixed” country; this is what the 1991 Constitution declares: we are a “multiethnic, pluricultural nation.”
The Spaniards originally used the word “mestizo” to describe a “half-white, half-indigenous person,” but it is likely that most of us have also black ancestry at some point, though it is hard to know, as often this fact would be hidden from family histories out of shame. Many have changed their names and obscured their lineage in hopes of looking more “European.” So for the majority of us it is hard to tell exactly where we come from and we simply decide to be part of the “raceless” bunch.
The most recent national census, done in 2005, asked about ethnicity, rather than about race. In it, 3.43% of the country’s population identified as “indigenous,” 10.62% as “afro-Colombian” and 85.94% as “without ethnicity” (and 0.01% as “Rom”, which is a whole other story). It is hard to speak about racism in such a place where “race” and “ethnicity” are, largely, not a concept. Modern Colombia lacks the vocabulary for it. “Race,” “ethnicity” and “racism” are things that only apply to others, to that periphery I mentioned before, to those who are not part of that “mixed country.”
It is telling that this ad was published in Cali, the third most populated city in the country and, among the top three (which includes Bogotá and Medellín), by far the one with the biggest black population. As it sits on the Western edge of the Colombian Andes, Cali is just a few hours drive from the country’s Pacific Coast, where most freed slaves decided to settle, and where most of Colombia’s black population is concentrated. It is the first choice for many young black people who want to get a college education, or a chance of a better job. This is somewhere in Colombia where the “mixed country” interacts daily with those people who have an “ethnicity”, where the phrase “white skin” makes some sense, where it means “not black”.
Also telling are the arguments used by Dr. Guarín for his defense. “I am not a racist”, he said, “I asked for those requirements because that is what my partners from Bogotá asked me to do”. We are supposed to disregard the fact that this doctor published a racist ad because people in Bogotá–where there is very little presence of both black and native people–told him to do it, and they don’t understand these things, you see?
He went on to say: “I even have friends who are ‘morenos’.” Not “black”, but “morenos.” It literally means “dark-skinned.” It is not a race or an ethnicity, but just a state of being. When you get tanned, for instance, you become a bit more “moreno.” Sure, you can call black people “morenos,” as they have dark skin, but calling them such devoids them of their racial identity, it places them in the “mixed country,” where racism is meaningless.
That the newsmedia of the country acknowledged that there was something wrong with this ad was a step forward into truly dealing with our discrimination. Nonetheless, El País didn’t hesitate to publish such a thing, nor did it acknowledged any wrongdoing while reporting the story. For now, it seems that the mainstream media (and therefore, the majority of the population) believes that racism is just a problem of a “few bad apples”.
Yet, as more and more black and native artists, musicians, actors, athletes and writers start to become part of the general consciousness, hopefully, we can find a way to truly talk about in the mainstream media about Colombia’s discrimination.
The Redemption Trope in South African Cinema
Come Back Africa (dir. Lionel Rogosin), Mapantsula (dir. Oliver Schmitz) and Tsotsi (dir. Gavin Hood) mark three distinct eras in South African cinema. The oldest of the three, Come Back Africa, shot secretly in the late 1950s, shows the routine violence of the apartheid state. The viewer experiences the monotony of social exclusion through the life of Zachariah, a man displaced by rural economic hardship and forced to find work in Johannesburg. The director, through his clandestine approach, captures the apartheid city functioning as intended. Surplus black labor swirls amidst menial jobs in mines, restaurants and luxurious homes. The white faces are appropriately villainous, spitting racial epithets and enjoying the social and economic privileges of apartheid rule. By the 1980s, the unmooring had begun. The Johannesburg of Mapantsula is more chaotic and uncertain. Viewers are introduced to Panic, a petty criminal, turned possible police informant. Apartheid is presented as untenable, as protests erupt in the townships and jails swell with political prisoners. If the fall of apartheid is anticipated in Mapantsula, the uncertainties of the post-apartheid state are captured in Tsotsi’s ambivalence about the new trajectory of the “rainbow nation.” In Tsotsi, black urban wealth exists alongside the poverty of black townships, and the gatekeepers of privilege are no longer exclusively white. While differences among these films abound, they are unified by tropes of redemption enacted through the figure of a black, male anti-hero. I conceive of redemption as a move toward personal salvation, attempting to right perceived wrongs or failings. In what follows, I demonstrate how concepts of redemption found in these films are implicated in the wider national history of South Africa.
Come Back Africa opens with a series of movements, bodies moving here and there, in and out of shadows. This opening is apt for the narrative arc of the film. The protagonist, Zachariah, embodies the perils of movement under apartheid. At the start of the film, Zachariah is forced by drought from his home in the countryside. He leaves his wife and children to find work in Johannesburg. This forced migration leads Zachariah to various jobs, including as a mine worker, a housekeeper and a waiter. Through a series of mishaps instigated by racial antagonism, Zachariah is forced to move from job to job. But the work is low paying and often hard to come by. Zachariah also lives in constant fear of being arrested for having insufficient working papers. Despite these events, Zachariah continues to see work as his path to salvation. Here, work is not merely about material survival—though that is important. Work emerges as a way to rationalize one’s position, and it is linked to ideas about redemption. Zachariah aims to redeem himself as the provider for his family through work, and he continues to promise his wife that life will be better once he finds a steady job. Indeed, Zachariah’s aversion to his wife taking a job reveals the way work acts as a means for him to redeem his masculinity. However, the mechanisms of apartheid have stacked the odds against him, and Zachariah’s attempts to find long-term employment are continually thwarted. Zachariah’s unrelenting faith in the redemptive power of work demonstrates how the processes of apartheid were rendered livable. In this environment, the daily grind of attempting to secure work routinizes life. Here, visions of salvation are contracted, as concerns about the next pay check transform into attachments to fleeting moments of stability. The black apartheid subject is redeemed by (making apartheid) work.
Historian and philosopher David Theo Goldberg describes aspects of this lived experience of apartheid in “A Political Theology of Race (On Racial Southafricanization).” Goldberg describes the period following the 1948 codification of apartheid laws as one of perceived triumph (“triomf”) for the Afrikaner regime (300).
The apartheid government succeeded in compartmentalizing nearly every aspect of black life and it rendered social exclusion commonsensical and livable. For Zachariah, the consummate 1950s black apartheid subject, redemption is ultimately elusive. Two scenes in the film underscore this point. The first moment occurs when Zachariah encounters a group of South African intellectuals and activists in a bar. Their conversation begins to broaden his understanding of the intricacies of life under apartheid. This scene is supposed to be a moment of politicization, where Zachariah discovers the merits of the struggle. However, the director does not take the obvious trajectory here. Zachariah does not join the would-be revolutionaries, and he does not dive headlong into the anti-apartheid movement. His response is more subtle and representative of the 1950s time period. Zachariah speaks of an innate feeling that activists’ words have resonance for his life. He says, “I don’t understand, but I like it.” The concluding scene of the film is where the trope of work as redemption is irrevocably severed. Zachariah’s wife is murdered after a violent altercation with a fellow township resident. When Zachariah returns home, he is distraught. His final cries of anguish, which conclude the film, reveal the pervasive cycles of violence birthed by apartheid—all are affected, even those who attempt to find avenues to make apartheid livable. Ultimately, Zachariah’s efforts to make apartheid work, to essentially play by the rules of the system, do little to protect his family. His vulnerabilities as an “everyman” are exposed as the film closes.
Mapantsula also shatters the image of apartheid as a workable system. Set in the late 1980s, the film follows Panic, an anti-hero engaged in a life of petty crime, while the city of Johannesburg and the surrounding townships convulse around him. Panic spends his days robbing white South Africans and his nights drinking in the local bars. His life is essentially adrift, with little purpose or direction. Yet, the residents of his township are growing increasingly militant, engaging in violent standoffs with police forces. Goldberg describes this period of apartheid’s denouement as one of widespread political action with growing support for the outlawed African National Congress. Mapantsula illustrates this moment in South African history. Temporally, the film is disjointed and it is told through flashbacks of Panic’s life. Eventually, the viewer learns that Panic has been arrested following a protest in the township. State police attempt to obtain information about the unrest from Panic because of his previous involvement as a police informant. Throughout the film, police officers alternate between cajoling and threatening Panic. Like Come Back Africa, the momentum of Mapantsula builds to its final scene. After unending torment, Panic refuses to cooperate with the police. This scene is by extension a refusal to honor the legitimacy of the apartheid state. Panic’s form of redemption is very different from Zachariah’s. Mapantsula’s anti-hero is redeemed through a commitment to the struggling collective. Unlike the wailing Zachariah, the Panic of Mapantsula’s final scene is stoic and resolved. He has left the petty-mindedness of temporary gain and has allied himself with a quest for liberation.
The reorientation of Panic is indicative of Goldberg’s assessment of how the changing political tide of the 1980s brought together groups of unlikely allies. The trope of redemption found in Mapantsula maps onto popular narratives about the nature of South Africa’s revolutionary struggle. The morality of the movement is positioned as so strong that it had the power to transform even the “amoral” characters in South African society. There is something faintly biblical about how the story of Panic is told, where the film’s protagonist emerges as the wayward son who eventually comes home to the nation. This narrative mirrors larger discourse about the ANC itself. In its decades long struggle to end apartheid, the ANC assumed a mythic character. It was positioned as the literal and figurative savior of South Africa. Similarities between the figure of Panic and ideas about the ANC are also linked to the subjective position of the criminal in South African historical memory. Prominent members of the ANC were jailed and declared criminals by the state, yet they were eventually absolved by the righteousness of their cause. Similarly, Panic’s previous sins are figuratively forgiven at the moment he decides to defy the state and support the cause of liberation. Thus, if Come Back Africa ends on a note of despair, then Mapantsula ends on a note of hopefulness. The path forward is presented as clear, and in Panic, the promise of the nation is represented by a black subject redeemed through political consciousness.
The political overtures of Tsotsi are more subdued than in the other two films. This is perhaps appropriate for a film that considers what Goldberg calls “apartheid’s afterlife.” The title character is a criminal, like Panic, however, unlike the latter, Tsotsi’s targets are primarily black. Set in the mid-2000s, the film highlights an era of black access following the disassembling of formal apartheid structures. But, as Goldberg’s characterization suggests, exclusion and social stratification live on. In the film, Tsotsi steals a car from a wealthy black couple and finds himself in possession of their infant son. Tsotsi soon grows attached to the child, which reminds him of his own tormented childhood. Tsotsi is eventually redeemed through his affection for the child, and he attempts to make amends with those he has wronged in life. Though the state is largely absent from this film, the narrative of the nation is once again told through the story of a black, male figure. The baby in Tsotsi’s care becomes a symbol for the promise of what the nation could be, and that discovery is what ultimately saves Tsotsi from his life of crime.
However, the onus for change in Tsotsi seems misplaced. If, as Goldberg argues, the structures of apartheid persist through institutions like healthcare, housing and employment, personal redemption is insufficient to stem the tide of dispossession. (Goldberg refers to this as the “spiraling apartheid of class.”) Tsotsi is somewhat successful in its representation of class fissures in contemporary South Africa. The world of the couple whose baby is taken is far removed from that of Tsotsi, his family and friends. Scenes of their large house replete with expensive wares and topnotch security are juxtaposed with imagery of Tsotsi’s small township shack. Yet, it is the latter, not the former, who must seek redemption and better himself. The narrative of the film suggests that waywardness of Tsotsi’s life is the product of mere circumstance and a structural critique is noticeably absent.
A type of liberal, self-help ethos is present throughout the film, and this is reflective of the current era in South Africa. In her article, “Liberal or Liberation Framework? The Contradictions of ANC Rule in South Africa,” political scientist Krista Johnson describes the post-apartheid environment as one dominated by forces of Western capital and hegemonic neoliberalism (200). The push toward privatization in many aspects of life also facilitates a climate of personal responsibility. Despite its strengths as a film, Tsotsi falls prey to this type of thinking. Thus, in the film’s climatic closing scene, Tsotsi returns to give the stolen baby back to the couple. He is scared and frightened, as police cars surround him. Yet, the sacrifice is portrayed as worth it. Tsotsi has seen the errors of his ways and he stands ready to accept whatever punishment is meted out by the state. For their part, the wealthy couple is largely silent. Again, their status and privilege is unquestioned in the film. Tsotsi is the one who must redeem his life. This disavowal of imbedded structures of power and privilege and the film’s unwillingness to engage questions of political circumstance weaken its overall effectiveness. However, both these weaknesses do much to locate the film within a very specific moment in South Africa, full of uncertainty about how to address the lingering apparitions of apartheid.
All three films contribute to a better understanding of South African history and politics. Viewing these films attuned to tropes of redemption further demonstrates how the nation has been conceptualized at different moments. During the 1950s of Come Back Africa, the state has consolidated power, marking the boundaries of social and political belonging, while also restricting the freedom of movement for certain populations. This moment of triumph for the apartheid regime is represented by the life of Zachariah, a displaced laborer. For Zachariah, work becomes the mechanism through which he can craft of life under the constraints of racial terror. For most of the film, his attachments do not extend beyond this limited scope of finding a job. Yet, the film’s conclusion demonstrates the folly of this thinking. The murder of Zachariah’s wife highlights the prevalence of violence, the unworkability of a system that demonizes people, robs them of their humanity and redirects animosity toward their fellow sufferers. For 1950s South Africa, redemption remains elusive. The world of Mapantsula in the 1980s is more hopeful, if also more chaotic. Apartheid is no longer able to function and the path toward liberation is increasingly clear. In this moment, even criminals are swept up in the fervor. Panic’s refusal to cooperate with state forces speaks to a local and global refusal of apartheid’s continuation. Thus, Panic emerges as a redeemed figure. He leaves a self-centered life of personal gain and becomes part of a collective uprising. The hopefulness was not meant to last, though. By the dawn of the 21st century, formal apartheid was gone, but vestiges remained. In Tsotsi, issues of class are brought to the forefront, with black comfort existing alongside black misery. However, the film falls into a cynical trap of liberal self-help. Tsotsi does not have a movement or a cause through which to discover a path toward redemption; all he has is a baby. The baby, as a representation of what the nation could be, leads Tsotsi to personal salvation but not liberation. South Africa is left as a nation of possibility with no clear path forward.
James Matthews being James Matthews
The film, Diaries of a Dissident Poet, follows poet James Matthews around Cape Town, tracking him during a year, from his 83rd to 84th birthday. It opens with a small celebration of his 83rd at the District Six Homecoming Centre in (downtown Cape Town) and moves on to scenes of him in conversation or banter with various people – among others, the journalist Roger Friedman at Oryx Multimedia, photographer George Hallett, and singer Melanie Scholtz, who has set some of Matthews’s poetry to music (Freedom’s Child, 2013). There are also scenes of him talking to camera and to the (off-screen) director at various locations–outside his house in Silvertown, Athlone or outside the house where he was born in the Bo-Kaap. We also see Matthews read poetry to pensioners at a church or walk down his street with a small bag of groceries.
In line with its title, the film is loosely structured and we follow the subject in his day-to-day activities: weight lifting in the mornings (Matthews, true to form, shows off that he can flex his pectoral muscles with the best of them), getting ready to attend a graduation ceremony at the University of the Western Cape where he will receive an honorary doctorate, listening along with Scholtz to pre-masters of their musical collaboration.
The film satisfies the observational demands of its diarist format in that it is generally set in intimate spaces. Not only are there shots tracking Matthews through his house or shots of him sunning himself bare-chested in his garden, but the banter between Matthews and Friedman, and between Matthews and Hallett, shows the poet at ease in familiar surroundings and what appears to be intimate social relationships (Hallett and Matthews know each other from at least the early 1960s).
James Matthews is a worthy subject for documentary film. His biography as an early Black Consciousness poet, with the distinction of authoring the first collection of poetry to be banned by apartheid censors (Cry Rage! co-authored with Gladys Thomas; published 1972, banned 1973); several following books banned, months-long detention in 1976; his endeavors, along Black Consciousness lines of self-reliance, to publish his and others’ writing himself with his founding of BLAC publishers; and opening an art gallery, etcetera, all this make him a subject worth exploring. And, in the popular imagination of those with an interest in South African culture, Matthews is a legend of sorts. A documentary film about him is thus welcome. But perhaps the film is overawed by that very legend and the diary or observational form leaves the viewer feeling that there is something missing.
The interest inherent in the diary form typically comes from the promise of revelation it holds for the viewer who may already be familiar with the subject. We hope that seeing the subject going about normal, day-to-day activities will reveal something about the subject not to be found in potted biographies or word-of-mouth legend. We hope, in short, to see the subject in a new light.
For anyone familiar with even just the touchstones of Matthews’s biography, Diaries unfortunately holds back. While Hallett and Friedman rag Matthews as a “sell-out” for accepting, respectively, an honorary doctorate and a government honor (the Order of Ikhamanga, Silver, 2004), this is only an intimacy of sorts – a familiarity – between friends. For those familiar with the Matthews legend, the kind of bantering between him and friends reveals nothing new about the character. We see James Matthews being James Matthews.
Where there is an opportunity to be properly diarist, the film holds back. Early on, Matthews is in a three-way conversation with the (off-screen) filmmaker and another man (rough cut, no subtitles) over the photograph of a woman, Elizabeth Bruce, a photograph presumably from a funeral program because it includes birth and death dates (1931-2004). The opening question is badly cut: “[Is jy nog] steeds lief vir haar?” ([Do you] still love her?). One presumes that Bruce was his wife or partner. Matthews clearly doesn’t want to talk about it in any specific detail. “Nee,” he says, “I tell you, what was done, is done. It took a lot of pain, but it’s done.” He repeats this disavowal seconds later when the third person contradicts him. And here I feel the film misses an opportunity, as diary, to go beyond popular legend and official literary biography. Was Elizabeth Bruce his wife? Did they have children? How long were they married? Was there a painful separation?
My sense is that, for those familiar with Matthews’s biography – whether intimately or only in broad strokes – the film works only in that we see what we already know. It doesn’t probe the subject, but remains at a respectful distance. When, for instance, Matthews insists that the honorary doctorate or the Order of Ikhamanga was awarded not “for the poetry as such… [but] for what I had done in the struggle”, he is not asked to elaborate. If it’s not for his poetry – and other cultural activities – what does he mean it’s for what he had done during the struggle. It’s an accepted literary commonplace that anti-apartheid cultural activity – writing a poem, designing a poster – contributed to “the struggle”. Anyone familiar with any of the poets of the 1970s and 1980s writing anti-apartheid poetry accepts that these writers fulfilled social and psychological roles. But it would be good to have a more specific sense of how one of these writers saw that contribution.
The overall effect is that the legend that is James Matthews does not appear in sharper relief, nor is it bolstered. Sometimes the legend is in fact undercut. When Matthews reflects on his younger days, during which, apparently, he was a hell-raiser, there is a sense of deflation: he and his friends go to a party, steal bread, cheese and wine, and leave. Another example is when he falls into a drunken sleep while appearing in a panel discussion at a literary event (Matthews has long ago stopped drinking). It may be true that at the time this behavior may have been considered “disastrous”, to use Matthews’s description, but it doesn’t appear particularly scandalous.
Roger Friedman refers to an occasion where Matthews was escorted from a venue for standing up and heckling or swearing at Abdullah Ibrahim at the latter legend’s homecoming concert. Here again I would have liked to find out more. Why was one Cape Town legend, for all intents and purposes on the same side of the anti-apartheid struggle as his target, heckling another? Was there personal animus behind the heckling? Or was it one motivated by a tension between exiles and those artists and activists who stayed in South Africa?
In addition to leaving the viewer curious, an unintended side effect is that Matthews fades from focus rather than being brought into more focus. A shot of him reading with cello accompaniment captures this when the camera pans from Matthews to the cellist while he is reading – we hear his voice, but he slides off the screen.
The diarist format of Diaries of a Dissident Poet is thus not exploited in the manner one expects and it becomes a film for insiders, who may be happy with seeing or recognizing the legend on the screen. (Matthews is a very photogenic subject.) For such viewers, vital moments in the film – heckling Abdullah Ibrahim, the place of Elizabeth Bruce – may need no explaining. For viewers with only a broad familiarity of Matthews through publications and word-of-mouth legend, the film falls short. No new knowledge or insights into the biography or character of the subject is on offer. And for viewers unfamiliar with Matthews or his work, the film does not explain its own interest: it does not provide a reason, say, as to why the film exists.
Barry intends the film as some form of archival work – that is, as archive creation. In I Am Woman (available on Youtube) she refers to her film on Matthews, in production at the time:
I’m more interested in being with my camera in an intimate space, telling the stories of artists. That’s what I’m interested in because it’s archive and it’s archive that we need to have; we need to remember our artists, they’re important, they’re our historians who see things through a different lens … I’m making … a film on the poet James Matthews …
Traditionally, archival material is a by-product of other activities – bureaucracy, a writer’s drafts, the rushes and rough cuts of a filmmaker. “Archive” is a label we apply retrospectively to documentation that we (might) find useful for other reasons long after the primary intentions for such documentation have disappeared. Material that has served its primary purpose may find a different use that is both secondary (to its original purpose) and primary (for a new purpose).
How does one intend something to be archival? In what way might this film be archival? Is it a primary or secondary document? How might a researcher, 50 years hence, look on it as primary archival source? How might this film, as archival source, serve to help us to remember our artists? What kind of memory might that be?
It may be that by setting her vision on some future, indefinable use of the film – by prospectively intending it as archive – the filmmaker has allowed a possible present and primary reason for its existence shift from view. That is, why should we remember and pay homage to Matthews. Why is it important to remember him?
While the answer to this question may be self-evident to insiders, it is not argued in the film. There is the commendation read at the graduation ceremony, but this too is short-hand and not an exposition by the film. The interest in Matthews is thus left unexplained; our reason for having to remember him is thus unavailable to that future researcher digging around our literary archive.
Photo Credit: Victor Dlamini.
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