Sean Jacobs's Blog, page 407

‘Thinking About Genocide’ — An Extract from Mahmood Mamdani’s Seminal Book on Rwanda

I visited Rwanda roughly a year after the genocide. On July 22, 1995, I went to Ntarama, about an hour and a half by car from Kigali, on a dirt road going south toward the Burundi border. We arrived at a village church, made of brick and covered with iron sheets. Outside there was a wood and bamboo rack, bearing skulls. On the ground were assorted bones, collected and pressed together inside sacks, but sticking out of their torn cloth. The guard explained that the bones had been gathered from the neighborhood. A veteran of similar sites in the Luwero Triangle in Uganda roughly a decade ago, I felt a sense of déjá vu. Even if the numbers of skulls and sacks were greater in quantity than I had ever seen at any one site, I was not new to witnessing the artifacts of political violence.

The church was about twenty by sixty feet. Inside, wooden planks were placed on stones. I supposed they were meant as benches. I peered inside and saw a pile of belongings—shoulder sacks, tattered clothing, a towel, a wooden box, a suferia (cooking pot), plastic mugs and plates, straw mats and hats—the worldly goods of the poor. Then, amidst it all, I saw bones, and then entire skeletons, each caught in the posture in which it had died. Even a year after the genocide, I thought the air smelled of blood, mixed with that of bones, clothing, earth—a human mildew.

I scanned the walls with their gaping holes. The guide explained these were made by the Interahamwe (youth militia of the ruling party) so they could throw grenades into the building. He said that those in the church were lucky. They died, almost instantly. Those outside had a protracted, brutal death, in some cases drawn out over as long as a week, with one part of the body cut daily.

I raised my eyes, away from the skeletons, to look at the church wall. Much of it was still covered with some old posters. They read like exhortations common to radical regimes with a developmental agenda, regimes that I was familiar with and had lived under for decades. One read: “Journée Internationale de la Femme.” And below it, was another, this time in bold: “ÉGALITÉ—PAIX—DÉVELOPPEMENT.”

I was introduced to a man called Callixte, a survivor of the massacre in Ntarama. “On the 7th of April [1994], in the morning,” he explained, “they started burning houses over there and moving towards here. Only a few were killed. The burning pushed us to this place. Our group decided to run to this place. We thought this was God’s house, no one would attack us here. On the 7th, 8th, up to the 10th, we were fighting them. We were using stones. They had pangas (machetes), spears, hammers, grenades. On the 10th, their numbers were increased. On the 14th, we were being pushed inside the church. The church was attacked on the 14th and the 15th. The actual killing was on the 15th.

“On the 15th, they brought Presidential Guards. They were supporting Interahamwe, brought in from neighboring communes. I was not in the group here. Here, there were women, children, and old men. The men had formed defense units outside. I was outside. Most men died fighting. When our defense was broken through, they came and killed everyone here. After that, they started hunting for those hiding in the hills. I and others ran to the swamp.”

I asked about his secteur, about how many lived in it, how many Tutsi, how many Hutu, who participated in the killing. “In my secteur, Hutu were two-thirds, Tutsi one-third. There were about 5,000 in our secteur. Of the 3,500 Hutu, all the men participated. It was like an order, except there were prominent leaders who would command. The rest followed.”

I asked whether there were no intermarriages in the secteur. “Too many. About one-third of Tutsi daughters would be married to Hutu. But Hutu daughters married to Tutsi men were only 1 per cent: Hutu didn’t want to marry their daughters to Tutsi who were poor and it was risky. Because the Tutsi were discriminated against, they didn’t want to give their daughters where there was no education, no jobs . . . risky. Prospects were better for Tutsi daughters marrying Hutu men. They would get better opportunities.

“Tutsi women married to Hutu were killed. I know only one who survived. The administration forced Hutu men to kill their Tutsi wives before they go to kill anyone else—to prove they were true Interahamwe. One man tried to refuse. He was told he must choose between the wife and himself. He then chose to save his own life. Another Hutu man rebuked him for having killed his Tutsi wife. That man was also killed. Kallisa— the man who was forced to kill his wife—is in jail. After killing his wife, he became a convert. He began to distribute grenades all around.

“The killing was planned, because some were given guns. During the war with the RPF, many young men were taken in the reserves and trained and given guns. Those coming from training would disassociate themselves from Tutsi. Some of my friends received training. When they re- turned, they were busy mobilizing others. They never came to see me. I am fifty-seven. Even people in their sixties joined in the killing, though they were not trained. The trained were Senior 6 or Technical School leavers.” I asked how such killers could have been his friends. “I was a friend to their fathers. It was a father-son relationship. I think the fathers must have known.”

Who were the killers in Ntarama? Units of the Presidential Guard came from Kigali. The Interahamwe were brought in from neighboring communes. Youth who had been trained in self-defense units after the civil war began provided the local trained force. But the truth is that everybody participated, at least all men. And not only men, women, too: cheering their men, participating in auxiliary roles, like the second line in a street- to-street battle.

No one can say with certainty how many Tutsi were killed between March and July of 1994 in Rwanda. In the fateful one hundred days that followed the downing of the presidential plane—and the coup d’état thereafter—a section of the army and civilian leadership organized the Hutu majority to kill all Tutsi, even babies. In the process, they also killed not only the Hutu political opposition, but also many nonpolitical Hutu who showed reluctance to perform what was touted as a “national” duty. The estimates of those killed vary: between ten and fifty thousand Hutu, and between 500,000 and a million Tutsi.1 Whereas the Hutu were killed as individuals, the Tutsi were killed as a group, recalling German designs to extinguish the country’s Jewish population. This explicit goal is why the killings of Tutsi between March and July of 1994 must be termed “genocide.” This single fact underlines a crucial similarity between the Rwandan genocide and the Nazi Holocaust.

In the history of genocide, however, the Rwandan genocide raises a difficult political question. Unlike the Nazi Holocaust, the Rwandan genocide was not carried out from a distance, in remote concentration camps beyond national borders, in industrial killing camps operated by agents who often did no more than drop Zyklon B crystals into gas chambers from above. The Rwandan genocide was executed with the slash of machetes rather than the drop of crystals, with all the gruesome detail of a street murder rather than the bureaucratic efficiency of a mass extermination. The difference in technology is indicative of a more significant social difference. The technology of the holocaust allowed a few to kill many,but the machete had to be wielded by a single pair of hands. It required not one but many hacks of a machete to kill even one person. With a machete, killing was hard work, that is why there were often several killers for every single victim. Whereas Nazis made every attempt to separate victims from perpetrators, the Rwandan genocide was very much an intimate affair. It was carried out by hundreds of thousands, perhaps even more, and witnessed by millions. In a private conversation in 1997, a minister in the Rwanda Patriotic Front–led government contrasted the two horrors: “In Germany, the Jews were taken out of their residences, moved to distant far away locations, and killed there, almost anonymously. In Rwanda, the government did not kill. It prepared the population, enraged it and enticed it. Your neighbors killed you.” And then he added, “In Germany, if the population participated in the killing, it was not directly but indirectly. If the neighbor’s son killed, it is because he joined the army.”

The Rwandan genocide unfolded in just a hundred days. “It was not just a small group that killed and moved,” a political commissar in the police explained to me in Kigali in July 1995. “Because genocide was so extensive, there were killers in every locality—from ministers to peasants—for it to happen in so short a time and on such a large scale.” Opening the international conference on Genocide, Impunity and Accountability in Kigali in late 1995, the country’s president, Pasteur Bizimungu, spoke of “hundreds of thousands of criminals” evenly spread across the land:

Each village of this country has been affected by the tragedy, either because the whole population was mobilized to go and kill elsewhere, or because one section undertook or was pushed to hunt and kill their fellow villagers. The survey conducted in Kigali, Kibungo, Byumba, Gitarama and Butare Prefectures showed that genocide had been characterized by torture and utmost cruelty. About forty-eight methods of torture were used countrywide. They ranged from burying people alive in graves they had dug up themselves, to cutting and opening wombs of pregnant mothers. People were quartered, impaled or roasted to death.

On many occasions, death was the consequence of ablation of organs, such as the heart, from alive people. In some cases, victims had to pay fabulous amounts of money to the killers for a quick death. The brutality that characterised the genocide has been unprecedented.4

A political commissar in the army with whom I talked in July 1995 was one of the few willing to reflect over the moral dilemma involved in this situation. Puzzling over the difference between crimes committed by a minority of state functionaries and political violence by civilians, he recalled: “When we captured Kigali, we thought we would face criminals in the state; instead, we faced a criminal population.” And then, as if reflecting on the other side of the dilemma, he added, “Kigali was half empty when we arrived. It was as if the RPF was an army of occupation.” His sense of ambiguity was born of the true moral and political dilemma of the genocide. Just pointing at the leadership of the genocide left the truly troubling question unanswered: How could this tiny group convince the majority to kill, or to acquiesce in the killing of, the minority?

The violence of the genocide was the result of both planning and participation. The agenda imposed from above became a gruesome reality to the extent it resonated with perspectives from below. Rather than accent one or the other side of this relationship and thereby arrive at either a state-centered or a society-centered explanation, a complete picture of the genocide needs to take both sides into account. For this was neither just a conspiracy from above that only needed enough time and suitable circumstance to mature, nor was it a popular jacquerie gone berserk. If the violence from below could not have spread without cultivation and direction from above, it is equally true that the conspiracy of the tiny fragment of genocidaires could not have succeeded had it not found resonance from below. The design from above involved a tiny minority and is easier to understand. The response and initiative from below involved multitudes and presents the true moral dilemma of the Rwandan genocide.

In sum, the Rwandan genocide poses a set of deeply troubling questions. Why did hundreds of thousands, those who had never before killed, take part in mass slaughter? Why did such a disproportionate number of the educated—not just members of the political elite but, as we shall see, civic leaders such as doctors, nurses, judges, human rights activists, and so on—play a leading role in the genocide? Similarly, why did places of shelter where victims expected sanctuary—churches, hospitals, and schools—turn into slaughterhouses where innocents were murdered in the tens and hundreds, and sometimes even thousands?

 

Three Silences: A Starting Point

Accounts of the genocide, whether academic or popular, suffer from three silences. The first concerns the of genocide: many write as if genocide has no history and as if the Rwandan genocide had no precedent, even in this century replete with political violence. The Rwandan genocide thus appears as an anthropological oddity. For Africans, it turns into a Rwandan oddity; and for non-Africans, the aberration is Africa. For both,the temptation is to dismiss Rwanda as exceptional. The second silence concerns the of the genocide: academic writings, in particular, have highlighted the design from above in a one-sided manner. They hesitate to acknowledge, much less explain, the participation—even initiative— from below.5 When political analysis presents the genocide as exclusively a state project and ignores its subaltern and “popular” character, it tends to reduce the violence to a set of meaningless outbursts, ritualistic and bizarre, like some ancient primordial twitch come to life. The third silence concerns the of the genocide. Since the genocide happened within the boundaries of Rwanda, there is a widespread tendency to assume that it must also be an outcome of processes that unfolded within the same boundaries. A focus confined to Rwandan state boundaries inevitably translates into a silence about regional processes that fed the dynamic leading to the genocide.

We may agree that genocidal violence cannot be understood as rational; yet, we need to understand it as thinkable. Rather than run away from it, we need to realize that it is the “popularity” of the genocide that is its uniquely troubling aspect. In its social aspect, Hutu/Tutsi violence in the Rwandan genocide invites comparison with Hindu/Muslim violence at the time of the partition of colonial India. Neither can be explained as simply a state project. One shudders to put the words “popular” and “genocide” together, therefore I put “popularity” in quotation marks. And yet, one needs to explain the large-scale civilian involvement in the genocide. To do so is to contextualize it, to understand the logic of its development. My main objective in writing this book is to make the popular agency in the Rwandan genocide thinkable. To do so, I try to create a synthesis between history, geography, and politics. Instead of taking geography as a constant, as when one writes the history of a given geography, I let the thematic inquiry define its geographical scope at every step, even if this means shifting the geographical context from one historical period to another. By taking seriously the historical backdrop to political events, I hope to historicize both political choices and those who made these choices. If it is true that the choices were made from a historically limited menu, it is also the case that the identity of agents who made these choices was also forged within historically specific institutions. To benefit from a historically informed insight is not the same as to lapse into a politically irresponsible historicism. To explore the relationship between history and politics is to problematize the relationship between the historical legacy of colonialism and postcolonial politics. To those who think that I am thereby trying to have my cake while eating it too, I can only point out that it is not possible to define the scope—and not just the limits—of action without taking into account historical legacies.

 

Colonialism and Genocide

The genocidal impulse to eliminate an enemy may indeed be as old as organized power. Thus, God instructed his Old Testament disciples through Moses, saying:

Avenge the children of Israel of the Medianites: afterward shalt thou be gathered unto thy people. And Moses spake unto the people saying, Arm ye men from among you for the war, that they may go against Median, to execute the LORD’s vengeance on Median. . . . And they warred against Median, as the LORD commanded Moses, and they slew every male. . . . And the children of Israel took captive the women of Median and their little ones; and all their cattle, and all their flocks, and all their goods, they took for a prey. And all their cities in the places wherein they dwelt, and all their encampments, they burnt with fire. And they took all the spoil, and all the prey, both of man and of beast. . . . And Moses said unto them, Have you saved all the women alive? Behold, these caused the children of Israel, through the counsel of Balaam, to commit trespass against the LORD in the matter of Peor, and so the plague was among the congregation of the LORD. Now therefore kill every male among the little ones, and kill every woman that hath known man by lying with him. But all the women children that have not known man by lying with him, keep alive for yourselves.6

If the genocidal impulse is as old as the organization of power, one may be tempted to think that all that has changed through history is the technology of genocide. Yet, it is not simply the technology of genocide that has changed through history, but surely also how that impulse is organized and its target defined. Before you can try and eliminate an enemy, you must first define that enemy. The definition of the political self and the political other has varied through history. The history of that variation is the history of political identities, be these religious, national, racial, or otherwise.

I argue that the Rwandan genocide needs to be thought through within the logic of colonialism. The horror of colonialism led to two types of genocidal impulses. The first was the genocide of the native by the settler.

It became a reality where the violence of colonial pacification took on extreme proportions. The second was the native impulse to eliminate the settler. Whereas the former was obviously despicable, the latter was not. The very political character of native violence made it difficult to think of it as an impulse to genocide. Because it was derivative of settler violence, the natives’ violence appeared less of an outright aggression and more a self-defense in the face of continuing aggression. Faced with the violent denial of his humanity by the settler, the native’s violence began as a counter to violence. It even seemed more like the affirmation of the native’s humanity than the brutal extinction of life that it came to be. When the native killed the settler, it was violence by yesterday’s victims. More of a culmination of anticolonial resistance than a direct assault on life and freedom, this violence of victims-turned-perpetrators always provoked a greater moral ambiguity than did the settlers’ violence.

More than any other, two political theorists, Hannah Arendt and Frantz Fanon, have tried to think through these twin horrors of colonialism. We shall later see that when Hannah Arendt set out to understand the Nazi Holocaust, she put it in the context of a history of one kind of genocide: the settlers’ genocide of the native. When Frantz Fanon came face-to-face with native violence, he understood its logic as that of an eye for an eye, a response to a prior violence, and not an invitation to fresh violence. It was for Fanon the violence to end violence, more like a utopian wish to close the chapter on colonial violence in the hope of heralding a new humanism.

Settlers’ Genocide

It is more or less a rule of thumb that the more Western settlement a colony experienced, the greater was the violence unleashed against the native population. The reason was simple: settler colonization led to land deprivation. Whereas the prototype of settler violence in the history of modern colonialism is the near-extermination of Amerindians in the New World, the prototype of settler violence in the African colonies was the German annihilation of over 80 percent of the Herero population in the colony of German South West Africa in a single year, 1904.7 Its context was Herero resistance to land and cattle appropriation by German settlers and their Schutztruppe allies. Faced with continuing armed resistance by the Herero, German opinion divided between two points of views, one championed by General Theodor Leutwein, who commanded the army in the colony, and the other by General Lothar von Trotha, who took overthe military command when General Leutwein failed to put down native resistance. The difference between them illuminates the range of political choice in a colonial context.

General Trotha explained the difference in a letter:

Now I have to ask myself how to end the war with the Hereros. The views of the Governor and also a few old Africa hands [alte Afrikaner] on the one hand, and my views on the other, differ completely. The first wanted to negotiate for some time already and regard the Herero nation as necessary labour material for the future development of the country. I believe that the nation as such should be annihilated, or, if this was not possible by tactical measures, have to be expelled from the country by operative means and further detailed treatment. This will be possible if the water-holes from Grootfontein to Gobabis are occupied. The constant movement of our troops will enable us to find the small groups of the nation who have moved back westwards and destroy them gradually.

Equally illuminating is General Trotha’s rationale for the annihilation policy: “My intimate knowledge of many central African tribes (Bantu and others) has everywhere convinced me of the necessity that the Negro does not respect treaties but only brute force.”

The plan Trotha laid out in the letter is more or less the fate he meted to the Herero on the ground. To begin with, the army exterminated as many Herero as possible.9 For those who fled, all escape routes except the one southeast to the Omeheke, a waterless sandveld in the Kalahari Desert, were blocked. The fleeing Herero were forcibly separated from their cattle and denied access to water holes, leaving them with but one option: to cross the desert into Botswana, in reality a march to death. This, indeed, is how the majority of the Herero perished. It was a fate of which the German general staff was well aware, as is clear from the following gleeful entry in its official publication, Der Kampf: “No efforts, no hardships were spared in order to deprive the enemy of his last reserves of resistance; like a half-dead animal he was hunted from water-hole to water-hole until he became a lethargic victim of the nature of his own country. The waterless Omaheke was to complete the work of the German arms: the annihilation of the Herero people.”

Lest the reader be tempted to dismiss General Lothar von Trotha as an improbable character come to life from the lunatic fringe of the German officer corps, one given a free hand in a distant and unimportant colony, I hasten to point out that the general had a distinguished record in the annals of colonial conquest, indeed the most likely reason he was chosen to squash a protracted rebellion. Renowned for his brutal involvement in the suppression of the Chinese Boxer Rebellion in 1900, and a veteran of bloody suppression of African resistance to German occupation in Rwanda, Burundi, and Tanzania, General Trotha often enthused about his own methods of colonial warfare: “The exercise of violence with crass terrorism and even with gruesomeness was and is my policy. I destroy the African tribes with streams of blood and streams of money. Only following this cleansing can something new emerge, which will remain.”

Opposition to Trotha’s annihilation policy had come from two sources: colonial officials who looked at the Herero as potential labor, and church officials who saw them as potential converts.12 Eventually, the Herero who survived were gathered by the German army with the help of missionary societies and were put in concentration camps, also run by missionaries along with the German army. By 1908, inmates of these concentration camps were estimated at 15,000. Put to slave labor, overworked, hungry, and exposed to diseases such as typhoid and smallpox, more Herero men perished in these camps. Herero women, meanwhile, were turned into sex slaves. At the same time, those who survived were converted en masse to Christianity. When the camps were closed in 1908, the Herero were distributed as laborers among the settlers. Henceforth, all Herero over the age of seven were expected to carry around their necks a metal disk bearing their labor registration number.

The genocide of the Herero was the first genocide of the twentieth century. The links between it and the Holocaust go beyond the building of concentration camps and the execution of an annihilation policy and are worth exploring. It is surely of significance that when General Trotha wrote, as above, of destroying “African tribes with streams of blood,” he saw this as some kind of a Social Darwinist “cleansing” after which “something new” would “emerge.” It is also relevant that, when the general sought to distribute responsibility for the genocide, he accused the missions of inciting the Herero with images “of the bloodcurdling Jewish history of the Old Testament.”13 It was also among the Herero in the concentration camps that the German geneticist, Eugen Fischer, first came to do his medical experiments on race, for which he used both Herero and mulatto offspring of Herero women and German men. Fischer later became chancellor of the University of Berlin, where he taught medicine to Nazi physicians. One of his prominent students was Josef Mengele, the notorious doctor who did unsavory genetic experiments on Jewish children at Auschwitz.14 It seems to me that Hannah Arendt erred when she presumed a relatively uncomplicated relationship between settlers’genocide in the colonies and the Nazi Holocaust at home: When Nazis set out to annihilate Jews, it is far more likely that they thought of them- selves as natives, and Jews as settlers. Yet, there is a link that connects the genocide of the Herero and the Nazi Holocaust to the Rwandan genocide. That link is race branding, whereby it became possible not only to set a group apart as an enemy, but also to exterminate it with an easy conscience.

Natives’ Genocide

In the annals of colonial history, the natives’ genocide never became a historical reality. Yet, it always hovered on the horizon as a historical possibility. None sensed it better than Frantz Fanon, whose writings now read like a foreboding. For Fanon, the native’s violence was not life denying, but life affirming: “For he knows that he is not an animal; and it is precisely when he realizes his humanity that he begins to sharpen the weapons with which he will secure its victory.”15 What distinguished native violence from the violence of the settler, its saving grace, was that it was the violence of yesterday’s victims who have turned around and decided to cast aside their victimhood and become masters of their own lives. “He of whom they have never stopped saying that the only language he understands is that of force, decides to give utterance by force.” Indeed, “the argument the native chooses has been furnished by the settler, and by an ironic turning of the tables it is the native who now affirms that the colonialist understands nothing but force.”16 What affirmed the natives’ humanity for Fanon was not that they were willing to take the settler’s life, but that they were willing to risk their own: “The colonized man finds his freedom in and through violence.” If its outcome would be death, of settlers by natives, it would need to be understood as a derivative outcome, a result of a prior logic, the genocidal logic of colonial pacification and occupation infecting anticolonial resistance. “The settler’s work is to make even dreams of liberty impossible for the native. The native’s work is to imagine all possible methods for destroying the settler. . . . For the native, life can only spring up again out of the rotting corpse of the settler . . . for the colonized people, this violence, because it constitutes their only work, invests their character with positive and creative qualities. The practice of violence binds them together as a whole, since each individual forms a violent link in the great chain, a part of the great organism of violence which has surged upwards in reaction to the settler’s violence in the beginning.”

The great crime of colonialism went beyond expropriating the native, the name it gave to the indigenous population. The greater crime was to politicize indigeneity in the first place: first negatively, as a settler libel of the native; but then positively, as a native response, as a self-assertion. The dialectic of the settler and the native did not end with colonialism and political independence. To understand the logic of genocide, I argue, it is necessary to think through the political world that colonialism set into motion. This was the world of the settler and the native, a world organized around a binary preoccupation that was as compelling as it was confining. It is in this context that Tutsi, a group with a privileged relationship to power before colonialism, got constructed as a privileged alien settler presence, first by the great nativist revolution of 1959, and then by Hutu Power propaganda after 1990.

In its motivation and construction, I argue that the Rwandan genocide needs to be understood as a natives’ genocide. It was a genocide by those who saw themselves as sons—and daughters—of the soil, and their mission as one of clearing the soil of a threatening alien presence. This was not an “ethnic” but a “racial” cleansing, not a violence against one who is seen as a neighbor but against one who is seen as a foreigner; not a violence that targets a transgression across a boundary into home but one that seeks to eliminate a foreign presence from home soil, literally and physically. From this point of view, we need to distinguish between racial and ethnic violence: ethnic violence can result in massacres, but not genocide. Massacres are about transgressions, excess; genocide questions the very legitimacy of a presence as alien. For the Hutu who killed, the Tutsi was a settler, not a neighbor. Rather than take these identities as a given, as a starting point of analysis, I seek to ask: When and how was Hutu made into a native identity and Tutsi into a settler identity? The analytical challenge is to understand the historical dynamic through which Hutu and Tutsi came to be synonyms for native and settler. Before undertaking this analysis, however, I propose to discuss both how native and settler originated as political identities in the context of modern colonialism, and how the failure to transcend these identities is at the heart of the crisis of citizenship in postcolonial Africa.

* This excerpt from the “Introduction” of Mahmood Mamdani’s When Victims Become Killers: Colonialism, Nativism, and the Genocide in Rwanda (first published in 2002) is kindly reproduced here with permission from Princeton University Press. Image Credit: Wiki Commons.

James Baldwin at 90, Part 2: Toward a Writing “Immune to Bullshit”

In The Fire Next Time, James Baldwin frames the crux of his consideration of cultural and personal awareness: “It is the responsibility of free men to trust and to celebrate what is constant—birth, struggle, and death are constant, and so is love, though we may not think so—and to apprehend the nature of change” (Baldwin, Collected, p.339).  This is the core of his vision, the central purpose of his art and thought. In Baldwin’s thought, black musical assumptions directly inform the meaning of the key terms (constant and change). In short, blues distills the constants.

With its foundations in blues, in constants, in what Baldwin would simply call “Facts of Life,” clarified and distilled by blues lyricism, jazz searches options and charts viable changes (Baldwin Cross p.57). Baldwin drew on these black musical assumptions of key terms to shape a powerful, if idiosyncratic, language, one which engaged the evasions embedded in American writing and speech (evasions that took different forms—but bore similar results—in politics, media, and academia). Using “American” words the way Billie Holiday used a Broadway show tune, Baldwin shifted their meanings to engage a sense of experience he’d forged from black life, drawn from world art, and honed in his work and experience at home and abroad. Through these shifts, his work pursues what Le Roi Jones, in Black Music, termed, “the changing same” in the human condition, change engaged with, not in flight from, the facts of life (p.180).

Clarifying the notion of “change” in the previous passage, Baldwin notes the danger of mistaking American ephemera for the constants, the “Facts of Life,” themselves. In Baldwin’s thought, ephemera masquerading as constants become dangerous illusions, “chimeras,” that threaten one’s basic sense of self and life. Of course, as Baldwin’s insistence on the blues suggests, one’s basic sense of self and life is itself threatening, that’s what makes the blues the blues. Threats to this sense of self, then, often come across as palliative devices capable of mitigating the threats inherent in the facts of life themselves. In Baldwin’s mind, people can’t afford such devices, traffic with them is the road to bankruptcy:

I speak of change not on the surface but in the depths—change in the sense of renewal. But renewal becomes impossible if one supposes things to be constant that are not—safety, for example, or money, or power. One clings then to chimeras, by which one can only be betrayed, and the entire hope—the entire possibility—of freedom disappears. (Baldwin Collected, p.339)

Baldwin saw either calculated or compulsive clinging to chimeras as the source of a pervasive American evasion of experience. Enter, whiteness.

Baldwin’s most explicit engagement with the way black musical assumptions identify American chimeras occurs in his 1964 essay “The Uses of the Blues.” This essay associates whiteness directly with a thoroughly chimerical American dream and pursuit of happiness. These terms, for Baldwin, referred to people’s tendency to seek ephemera in the place of “change in the sense of renewal” precisely as a way of evading constants, the basic intensities—“birth, struggle, death, love”—of experience (Baldwin Cross, p.57). Signaling a possibility inherent in the black musical assumptions and otherwise absent from the American vocabulary, Baldwin points to a crucial surprise, joy, produced by lyrical blues confrontations with real constants (1). He then marks a stark distinction between joy and happiness in his musically inflected constant/change/chimera paradigm:

And I want to suggest that the acceptance of this anguish one finds in the blues, and the expression of it, creates also, however odd this may sound, a kind of joy. Now joy is a real state, it is a reality; it has nothing to do with what most people have in mind when they talk of happiness, which is not a real state and does not really exist. (Baldwin Cross p.57).

Joy becomes possible through engagement with the basic intensities of life. On the other hand, when pursued by attempting to elude the facts of life, happiness accrues in a register of experience that, for Baldwin, simply isn’t real. Baldwin’s guides were many, none more important than the basic, black blues impulse to engage rather than evade the most vexing facets of experience and the jazz impulse to endless improvisation within and around those themes (2). Improvisation? In “Of the Sorrow Songs,” in 1979, he wrote: “Go back to Miles, Max, Dizzy, Yardbird, Billie, Coltrane: who were not, as the striking—not to say quaint—European phrase would have it, ‘improvising’: who can afford to improvise, at those prices” (Baldwin Cross, p.121). Ok, lyricizing.

In his classic essay, “The Changing Same,” Le Roi Jones suggests that the blues in black music can best be understood as the “expression of the culture. . . immune to bullshit” (p180). As his nonfiction writings show, no other American writer engaged assumptions in pursuit of, let’s call it, a musical immunity to bullshit with Baldwin’s intense clarity of vision. Near the close of his 1979 speech in Berkeley he paused his remarks to add, ruefully, smiling momentarily if only to himself, “All this will be, well. . . contested” (3). In fact, every moment of Baldwin’s forty-year public engagement with these issues was contested. When the substance of Baldwin’s vision makes an appearance in our contemporary culture, it still is (4). On the public stage, in the role of the literary jazzman with one foot in the blues, functioning as what he called “a disturber of the peace,” (5) he sought to illuminate the durable, troubling constants deeply embedded in, and forging links between, the public and private life (6).

This skeletal sketch of Baldwin’s musical thought provides a unique vantage on contemporary art and life. Let’s try it out. First, what does Baldwin’s conception of black “style” add to what we see in a viral YouTube video featuring young black men dancing? And, what can be drawn from using Baldwin’s notion of change, constant and the dangerous chimeras that conflate the two reveal in President Obama’s performance at the White House Correspondent’s dinner on May 1, 2010? What’s changed, what hasn’t, what might, and what probably won’t?

 * * *

(1) I’m using lyrical and lyric in the general sense of forcing a reality absent from language into language, or for a performative expression of a previously inexpressible experience.

(2) In Take This Hammer, exemplifying such a sensibility in himself, Baldwin said: “I know the only way to get through life is to know the worst things about it.”

(3) Burch, Claire. The James Baldwin Anthology. Regent Press, 2009. DVD.

(4)  As the close of this essay will suggest, even Randall Kenan’s insightful and heartfelt “Introduction” to the latest release of Baldwin’s uncollected writing, The Cross of Redemption, can be seen to deflect the intransigently trenchant vision at the core of Baldwin’s work. At the close of his introduction, Kenan opines : “Barak Obama might not be presiding over a color-blind, gender-equal, economically fair, same-sex-love-affirming, environmentally clean, disease-cleansed, morally upright America—I’m sure even Baldwin would eschew that ultimate possibility as a bit too utopian—but I’m sure he’d believe that possibilities for his country were looking up. . .” (xxiii). The present writer, for one, doesn’t see evidence that Baldwin regarded any kind of blindness as a goal commensurate with his vision. And Baldwin would most certainly have been opposed to the shellac with which “American interests” have been defined and enforced by every American presidential administration since his death. Indeed, it seems he largely [and increasingly] saw such abstracted political authority, and the corporate interests it actually serves, as politically disastrous and morally irredeemable. Interestingly, in his last work (unpublished and incomplete at his death), “Re/Member This House: a memoir,” a personal biography of Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X and Medgar Evers, in relation to the contemporary American politics of the 1980s, Baldwin, touchingly, images Robert Kennedy as one among the pantheon of martyrs. Remembering the last time he saw Kennedy, at King’s funeral in Atlanta, he images him smiling, as if in a dream, standing on a hillside, wind in his hair, preparing to greet a crowd of black children running toward him who wanted to touch him. As for his audience, at least as early as No Name in the Street, he’d accepted that he “was condemned to make them uncomfortable” (Collected,  365).

(5) Many places including the conversation with Studs Terkel in 1961 (See: Conversations with James Baldwin) and in the Berkeley speech from April 19, 1979 (See: Burch DVD).

(6) As for revision of terms, as his letters and almost all of his public statements show, Baldwin used the term “jazz” itself most often as a synonym for “bullshit,” sardonically spitting out, “all that jazz” and “later for that jazz.” His deep respect for and friendship with many jazz musicians from Billie Holiday to Lonnie Levister to Miles Davis as well as his brilliant and near-constant use of the deep structure of the blues-jazz continuum, “the changing same,” makes it obvious that he knew the term meant far more than what it evoked in the popular mind.

Why you’ve got to love the way the tabloid Daily Sun reported Caster Semenya’s marriage

Despite its much lauded, progressive marriage equality laws, South Africa can be a shit place for gay people, especially black lesbians living in poor neighborhoods, but then this also happens there: Olympian Caster Semenya has announced that she wants to spend the rest of her life with her girlfriend. The news of the engagement (and her new relationship) seemed to have been ignored by other media outlets that got fat off of speculating about Semenya’s sexuality, levels of hormones, and general degradation at the hands of Olympic “gender testers.” But this happy news was reported by the tabloid Daily Sun, a local paper which is mostly often socially conservative and prone to sensationalism.

This is the Sun story’s first line: “Olympic silver medallist Caster Semenya has started the boldest race of her life! The golden girl of Mzansi has chosen her life partner–and paid lobola [bride price] for athlete Violet Raseboya.” (That’s them in the picture above.)

What follows is a sweet story about how Caster’s dad went to pay the bride price and neighbors and friends talking about Caster and Violet’s devotion to each other. Here’s a sample: “Caster’s dad, Ntate Jacob Semenya, was accompanied by other family members to negotiate lobola. Caster had made her intentions clear that she wanted to take Violet as her other half.” And: “Both families were happy to negotiate lobola and Caster’s family paid R25 000 to have Violet as their makoti.”’

There wasn’t even a to-do about the Exotic African Tribal Custom of lobola-payment, or a wink-wink about why it was Caster who was paying. What I loved most about the article was the matter of fact reporting by The Daily Sun, a paper not known for its progressive politics. But really, I should not be surprised. As my friend Herman Wasserman–who wrote a book on the explosion of tabloid media in postapartheid South Africa–reminded me: while The Daily Sun is socially conservative, it also tells stories you will never find in any other paper, and about people you won’t ever see in those papers. All this could be spoiled once the News24 commenters get hold of the story (if they have not already), but as a South African, I am really proud right now.

Source.

#Update: Via reader Mabel Thandi: In that grand tradition of tabloid news, Caster now denies the engagement. Still a nice story though.

Everybody needs good neighbours (except “those Nigerians”)

Vocativ, is what some trust for a news source in the United States. An American news-aggregator accessing the ‘deep web’ for information in a bid to report the world in slick packaging that uses dramatic music and oversized fonts to really DRIVE HOME A POINT. I get it. A bit like VICE. It is also the kind of site with headlines like “The Hard Truth About Girl-on-Guy Rape.” So, how could I miss it in the title for this one: “Tower of Trouble” about Ponte City Apartments and how drastically living conditions have changed inside Johannesburg’s most recognizable address. Watch the six minute video here first:

As the video shows, indeed, things have changed for Ponte’s residents. I’ve visited. It’s safe and clean and has made great use of the ground floor communal areas, including a recreational area for kids where they can hang out or do homework with the help of after-school supervisors.

The views are mesmerizing and I imagine it a special place to live taking into consideration its history and symbolism for the city.

The video does a good enough job of reporting the story except for the instances where it so obviously shows up the racial bias of the producers.

Whiteness equals normalcy for the people at Vocativ. In their reporting and framing of the story through interviews and narration they make a big deal of the fact that white people are now living in Ponte. Why?

Black life is just as worthy reporting as white life. What about all the people (black I bet) who’ve lived in Ponte throughout its upheavals, cleanups and restorations? Where are they? Floors 1 – 11? They must have great stories to tell of Ponte’s past and have opinions much more valuable for their commitment to the place than the newer neighbours?

The piece sketches Ponte’s latest metamorphosis with tight, advanced security measures and refurbishments. The rainbow nation ideals of a democratic South Africa cemented by the fact that whites are living here. It signals hope! One in which Ponte becomes ‘livable’ again. Vocativ’s view of Ponte posits a white experience as the experience of the place and the neighbourhood for that matter.

The narrator states: “Once the tourists leave it’s still fairly rare to see white people after dark.” Um, yes. This is South Africa. Our population’s majority are black South Africans. It is not rare to see very few white South Africans, if any at all, in some suburbs of the most densely populated city in the country. Actually, it makes a lot of sense.

White people living in Ponte is not a problem, it wouldn’t even be worth mentioning had this type of reportage not made it out into the world.

We can’t, as South Africans, keep allowing for stories to be authored in such a way that privileges a white experience over a black experience. Already the white experience is unwittingly accepted as the normative experience, and our own mediated in relation to and through that. Why else does the black gentleman joke about how he loves seeing friends’ reactions when he tells them his neighbours on his floor are white? “I brag about it, cos, it is something worth talking about. So who do you stay with at Ponte, well, my neighbours are all white (laughs)”.

Why is that laughable? Why is it a thing? Why does living nearby white people now make Ponte okay, impressive to friends? Why is your experience living there mediated and made good through the proximity to a particular race group? We need to interrogate these insidious ways apartheid’s legacy has kept white experience on top (read: it’s not inside, it’s on top! South Africans will know).

What’s more is that in explaining Ponte’s notoriety for drugs and criminal activity, Vocativ thinks it’s okay for one interviewee to put it all down to “those Nigerians”. What? Wait. That’s a xenophobic generalization that’s used far too often and the journalists did nothing to give evidence or refute that claim?

No man.

I say we start authoring our own stories. We cannot and should not remain entrenched in a white normative gaze around which we locate our own experience and yet we no longer have to.

As one interviewee says: “We’re all humans, let’s make this happen.”

* BTW, I made a short video experiment in response to xenophobic generalizations made in the video above. It starts of with those infamous words: “Those Nigerians!”

The music that changed my life

The Cape Town suburb of Observatory is known for being a small bohemian enclave, providing low cost housing for students, artists and ‘free spirits’ of all sorts. Walk down Lower Main Road past the quaint mini-Victorian houses and sushi restaurants, and you’ll find all the familiar student-town tropes: aging hippies, overpriced vintage clothing, and laptop-ridden coffee shops. In Obs, as the neighborhood is affectionately known, international “semester abroad” students blend in like sore thumbs, sticking together in a herd, just like the International Students Office told them to. This is Africa after all – safety in numbers.

Jokes aside, Observatory has always been one of Cape Town’s most important cultural hubs, and at one point the center of this hub was The Independent Armchair Theatre, a live music venue, no-frills bar and all-around cool hangout space.

The Armchair Theatre was the kind of place where you could meet your future spouse, or your future weed dealer. It had a “come as you are” attitude that attracted all walks of life, including a nerdy brown kid from Cape Town notoriously provincial Northern Suburbs (me.) The Armchair was where I played my first live gig with my first band and where I saw some of my musical heroes play live.

I’ll never forget watching Tiago from 340 ml play his unique brand of Mozambican dub guitar from about 10 centimeters away. Or taking my cousins to see afro-pop band Freshlyground when they were still an underground student act (they recently got a ‘shout-out’ from Barack Obama on his 2013 trip to Cape Town. Not so underground anymore.) The intimate venue was the perfect place for new bands to showcase their abilities, and for some bigger names to play to an intimate crowd.

As there weren’t that many options for live acts to play in Cape Town at the time (arguably there still aren’t), The Independent Armchair Theatre became a cornerstone of the local music scene, and it attracted some international attention as well: Scratch, beatboxer from the now world famous US hip hop band The Roots, performed a solo set there. Swedish folk revivalist Jose Gonzalez played there after releasing his sublime Veneer album, and Rodriguez (the focus of the film Searching for Sugarman)played there in 2005, during one of his many trips to Cape Town, once he had found out he was a superstar in South Africa.

The building itself was somewhat of a landmark. Painted blood red, the big square structure featured an actual armchair above the entrance. The décor inside The Armchair was minimal bohemian grunge, housing a couple of big leather couches; a well used foosball table, and some homely lamps. The stage itself was not very big, but the frayed Persian rug and colorful mood lighting made up for it. On Monday nights they had a special where you could get a pizza at Diva’s across the road and head back into the Armchair for a classic film screening, all for 30 rand, which is roughly 3 dollars. What’s not to like?

However, the Armchair for me represents not only an affordable and hip venue that I hung out at in my undergrad days. It also represents the first time I fully felt what it could mean to live in a post-racial society. Even during the last days of apartheid, Observatory was considered a “grey” neighborhood, where people of all races lived together in relatively close proximity, contrary to the laws of the time. It always occupied this alternative space in Cape Town’s collective imagination. Even though most of my time growing up was spent during post-apartheid era, I, like everyone I know, was still affected by its hangover. During most of my early schooling in previously White neighborhoods, I was the only person of color in the room. In Observatory, as a “brown” or “Coloured” kid from the suburbs, I was able to socialize with Black African kids from the townships, make music and create memories together. At the time we thought nothing of it, but in hindsight I realize that these were the seeds of the growth of the nation our parents fought for.

While the building still stands in the middle of Lower Main Rd, today The Independent Armchair Theatre is no more. Due to financial struggles, stifling noise laws and whining neighbors, the Armchair had to shut its doors in 2008. It reopened in 2006 as The Obviouzly (sic) Armchair Backpackers and Pub. Thankfully this gaudy name saved me the trouble of popping into my old haunt to see what the new owners have done with the place – some things are just better left unseen. I’d prefer to keep the memories intact as I walk past the big red square of a building; and imagine the foosball table, my friends, and the music that changed my life.

* Images of Observatory streetscenes by Barry Christianson.

James Baldwin at 90: Part 1 “Not the Country We’re Sitting in Now”

Everyone on the one hand is fundamentally capable of paying his dues. But no one pays their dues willingly. . . As long as you think there’s some way to get through life without paying your dues, you’re going to be bankrupt. . . And the very question now is precisely what we’ve got in the bank. (James Baldwin, Take This Hammer, 1963)

In a discourse with Baldwin, on a jet plane with no fear of fallin’. (Bilal, on Robert Glasper’s Black Radio, 2012)

Common knowledge say a U.S. President can’t save ya. (Georgia Anne Muldrow, Seeds, 2012)

By May, 1963, James Baldwin had become the most visible “spokesman”—a term he hated—for the Civil Rights Movement—a phrase he didn’t like much more. May was an intense month. In an inauspicious beginning, Harper’s published a set of his letters to his agent Bob Mills (1). Early in the month, going from San Francisco “to Sacramento, then to San Diego and Los Angeles and back to San Francisco,” Baldwin travelled with his “personal secretary,” Eddie Fales, and Time magazine correspondent Roger Stone on a tour of California sponsored by the Congress of Racial Equality (Time dispatches). Stone described the schedule as “bonejarring” and, signaling attitudes (in this case, relatively mild ones) that would inflect Baldwin’s life in uncountable ways, Baldwin as: “James Baldwin, an eloquent pixy with a sharp tongue.”

Climbing on and off planes, in and out of cars, moving between venues while snatching papers from newsstands to stay abreast of news coming out of Birmingham, and averaging more than two speeches per day, Baldwin sent a telegram to U.S. Attorney General Robert Kennedy on May 12th. The message blamed the violence in Birmingham, AL on the apathy of the federal government. Baldwin didn’t go to Birmingham during the tumult of that week, but he told Stone: “If I’m called, I will go. I don’t want to get castrated any more than anyone else. But I will go.” On May 17th, a week after the centennial anniversary of Emancipation, his portrait appeared on the cover of Time magazine. During that week, he filmed the documentary Take This Hammer in San Francisco (2).

On May 22nd, he traveled to Wesleyan University as guest of Kay Boyle, an engagement that lasted until 2:30 a.m. On Thursday May 23rd, after catching (barely!) the 7am shuttle from LaGuardia, he ate breakfast with Kennedy at the Kennedy home in McLean, Virginia. He returned to New York and spent the rest of the day attending to several business matters, contacting participants for the agreed upon meeting with Kennedy the following day, and then hosting an all-night dance party / planning session for the meeting.

A story titled “At a Crucial Time A Negro Talks Tough” about a recent, “hectic, two-day speaking tour to New Orleans for the Congress of Racial Equality ” in which Baldwin “gave five planned and three spontaneous talks,” appeared in Life magazine (3) on Friday, May 24th. That day, Baldwin led a group of friends and family (including Lena Horne, Lorraine Hansberry, Harry Belafonte, Rip Torn, his brother David, and freedom rider Jerome Smith) to a meeting with Robert Kennedy in their family’s apartment at 24 Central Park South in New York City.

Directly after that (by all accounts) disastrous attempt to communicate with the Attorney General of the United States, he went directly with Kenneth B. Clark to tape an interview with WGBH-TV in New York. On May 27, agents from the New York office of the F.B.I. attempted and failed to gain entry to Baldwin’s Horatio Street apartment in The Village, initiating intense surveillance that would continue until 1974 and amass a file nearing 2000 pages (4). A friction at the center of the month’s events offers a lens through which to clarify core tensions, nuances, and contradictions in Baldwin’s life and work. Such a point of view, twenty five years after Baldwin’s death, can also offer valuable points of view on our own lives and the cultural and political worlds around us. In short, Baldwin’s work offers a unique gauge for measuring who has how much, and of what, in the bank. At the end of the dispatch for Time, Stone concluded that “Baldwin has a face that could soon be forgotten, not so his lengthening shadow, as it steals across the nation.” What appears in that shadow can also be approached, by us, today, as a measure for who has what, and often of how much, in the bank.

The meeting with Kennedy in New York became famous as a flashpoint for the tension between mainstream liberal politics and the street-level realities of race and black consciousness in the early 60s. In his 1979 essay, “Lorraine Hansberry at the Summit,” Baldwin recalls Kennedy’s invocation of his own immigrant roots and his attempt to calm the group by saying that “a Negro could be president in 40 years” (p270). Baldwin adds: “He really didn’t know why black people were so offended by this attempt at reassurance” (p270). Of the gap between perspectives, he wrote, “the meeting took place in that panic stricken vacuum in which black and white, for the most part, meet in this country” (p269). Although the complexity of his response was lost on the vast majority of his original readers, the “panic stricken vacuum” Baldwin notes both does and doesn’t refer to meetings between people of different skin color. Baldwin’s prose is exact. The abstract situation, “when black and white, for the most part, meet in this country,” refers to individual people as well as racialized cultural codes that operate between and within people in American life. As he had begun to do with his earlier essays and as he would continue to do for the rest of his life, Baldwin portrayed meetings of “black and white” as meetings between persons and, more importantly, as intersections of racialized codes that played out on every level of our psychic and civic lives.

In his 1955 “Notes of a Native Son,” Baldwin associates this social / psychological collision with the metaphoric risks of “gangrene” and “amputation.” For him, gangrene results as a black American subject continues a negotiation with the “panic stricken vacuum” thereby absorbing the power, complacency, ignorance and innocence which characterize the white codes’ regard for the black ones. This is poisonous chemistry. Amputation is the term Baldwin uses to describe the attempt to cease the negotiation, compartmentalize the self to rid one’s black self of the contemptuous assumptions of its white image, and one’s “white” self of the contempt of the black one, in the mirror. Baldwin then sets his terms in motion in his most effective and terrifying mid-20th century portrait of what Du Bois had termed double-consciousness in 1903:

One is absolutely forced to make perpetual qualifications and one’s own reactions are always cancelling each other out. It is this, really, which has driven so many people mad, both white and black. One is always in the position of having to decide between amputation and gangrene. Amputation is swift but time may prove that the amputation was not necessary—or one may delay the amputation too long. Gangrene is slow, but it is impossible to be sure that one is reading one’s symptoms right. The idea of going through life as a cripple is more than one can bear, and equally unbearable is the risk of swelling up slowly, in agony, with poison (p.83).

In Baldwin’s mind, there are power dynamics to take into account, but no American escapes these impossible negotiations between amputation and gangrene imposed upon them by the way in which the components of the social/psychological terrain of American life that are coded white relate to those coded black and vice versa. No matter the level of consciousness and / or the relative pressure at which that panic stricken drama plays out, Baldwin knew that every American faced the dilemma that “the trouble, finally, is that the risks are real even if the choices don’t exist” (p.83). Appearances, however, at the surface of behavior and in the way American culture regards itself seemed to belie Baldwin’s insight. For the most part, at the time of the meeting between Kennedy and Baldwin’s group, most mainstream white Americans claimed not to know much about this at all. Whiteness understood, still understands, itself as a kind of privilege that allowed people to avoid dues of the gangrene/amputation dilemmas in the American inheritance. Baldwin knew better, knew, no matter the income bracket, the result of such avoidance was bankruptcy.

In his biography of Baldwin, about the meeting in New York City, David Leeming writes that it was Kennedy’s 1963 quip about the presidency that brought Baldwin out of his silence to say, in anger, that “the point was, a Kennedy could already be president while the black man was. . . ‘still required to supplicate and beg you for justice’” (p.224). Baldwin had been in rhetorical territory surprisingly similar to Kennedy’s earlier that same month, May 1963. Just before leaving California to return east, Baldwin had participated in a film documentary titled Take This Hammer in which he talked with different groups of black people about their experiences in San Francisco. In one meeting, a young black man in his late teens or early twenties says, “There’ll never be a Negro president in this country.” When Baldwin, responding to the man’s attempts at amputation, asks why he believes that, the man responds, “We can’t get jobs how we gonna be a president?” By which he meant, in a sense, why carry the poison of impossible and abstract ambition around in one’s body? To which Baldwin answers, “You got me. But, I want you to think about this. There will be a Negro president of this country. But it will not be the country we’re sitting in now. . . It’s not important really, you know, whether or not there’s a Negro president. I mean, in that way.” Now in a rhetorical position similar to Kennedy’s, Baldwin’s struggles to suggest a tolerance for the risks of gangrene fall on palpably skeptical ears. While he makes his attempt, one of the two men he’s facing, with a thoroughly stylized theatricality, carefully puts on his sunglasses. Be cool.[vi] “What’s important,” Baldwin concluded, “is that you should realize that you can, that you can become the president. There’s nothing anybody can do that you can’t do.”

In his biography, Leeming, noting Baldwin’s spokesman status, describes his role in Take This Hammer: “he walked through the city commenting in a guru-like manner on its possibilities and its inequities” (p221).(8) Indeed, Baldwin’s monologues in the film take on a kind of oracular if not “gurulike” effect. But, Leeming’s account of the documentary misconstrues the complexity of Baldwin’s position, neither stable nor as self-assured as Leeming implies, in the conversations it chronicles. Often, Baldwin positions himself on an untrustworthy bridge between the anger of young black people in San Francisco and the liberal audience of KQED public television in the Bay Area. At one point in the film, Baldwin stands in front of a construction project that has displaced black residents and will result in high-rise apartments at prices no black former resident of the neighborhood could afford. Addressing the role of such gentrification in the American narrative of progress, Baldwin translates the rage that results in (if it doesn’t require) amputations in the minds and lives of the black community. In the film, a working class black man addresses the racially coded role of nepotism in San Francisco: “you got to know somebody in San Francisco to get somewhere, and by knowing somebody it got to somebody with authority and nobody in San Francisco, no colored man got no authority.” Immediately afterward, the film cuts to Baldwin in front of the construction site where he says:

Even the least damaged of those kids would have to, to put it as mildly as it can be put at the moment, would have to be a little sardonic, a little sardonic about the, um, the things he sees on television and what the president says and all those movies about being a good American and all that jazz and he’ll look at this, look over there and look up here and he will despise the people, you know, who are able to have such a tremendous gap between their performance and their profession. But the more damaged kids will simply feel like blowing it up, simply feel like blowing it up. Speaking for myself I feel a little sardonic and I’m civilized, I think, but there was a time in my life when I would have felt like blowing it up. . . how do you get through to the least damaged kids. . . I don’t know what I would say that would make any sense to them, because in fact this doesn’t make any sense. [The people who will live in a building like this] will walk down the street and wonder why the first Negro boy they see looks at them like he wants to kill them and if he gets a chance tries. . . he has no ground to stand here the cat said yesterday “I’ve got no country I’ve got no flag. . .” and it isn’t because he was born paranoiac that he said that, it’s because the performance of the country for his 18 years on Earth has proven that to him. . . I’ll tell you something about that building. It has absolutely no foundation. It really does not have any foundation. It’s going to come down, one way or another. Either we will correct what’s wrong or it will be corrected for us. . .

Baldwin and Kennedy’s positions in these exchanges are in no way identical. His position with the young men and his comments do, however, echo into a vacuum similar to the one over which Robert Kennedy, days later, offered his naïve reassurance to Baldwin and his group. All the parties in both meetings are connected, and none of them can communicate. That language didn’t exist. It still doesn’t. Baldwin’s obsession with revising the basic terms of American conversations targets these vacuums. He knew that the American vocabulary was designed to thwart such conversations. Without question, an echo of the insufficiency of his own assurance to the men in Take This Hammer about the future of a black presidency was part of what made Baldwin so angry at Kennedy. Baldwin was a connoisseur of ironies, the always-angular relationships between conceptual, at times, political, identity and lived reality, lives, as well as the necessary, if partial, disjunction between private and public life. He also understood that ironic angularity must inform, not prevent, sense being made, communicated, and lived out privately and publicly in a world people share. These demonstrated facets of his work and consciousness confirm that he was certainly aware of the vacuum he, in fact, shared with Kennedy in that moment in New York City on Friday, May 24th 1963. The friction in that vacuum fired his rhetorical precision, “supplicate and beg” he charged, and his rage.

We don’t know what happened to the young people with whom Baldwin spoke in San Francisco. But, we do know that Baldwin and Kennedy were both right. November, 2008 proved it. Or did it? Kennedy’s easy assumption about the future was off by five years, a few months longer than he, at the time age 38, had to live when he met with Baldwin and his delegation. But, what of Baldwin’s idea that the country that elects a black president “won’t be the country” in which he sat with those young men in San Francisco? Certainly massive shifts have occurred in what “black and white” mean to themselves, each other as well as in the contours of the vacuum (panic stricken or not) between them. Just as certainly, the dialectics of amputation and gangrene still propel dangerous racialized codes that operate between and within people.

The questions which connect Baldwin’s meetings with Kennedy and with the people on the streets of San Francisco are still unasked. The American idiom to ask and answer them in still eludes us. Today, huge numbers of people assume they can avoid—are clueless as to how connect to—such questions. Post-Racialists. Others, trapped inside the questions, can’t afford to suspect they don’t know the answers. Racial essentialists. The result is widespread dues unpaid as much American experience occurs in denied territory, being uncharted within and un-communicated between people. Panic stricken vacuums abound. What changes, what constants and what illusions made the United States the place that elects a black President? What does black President actually mean? And, for whom does what change, exactly? And, what then? No one engaged these questions and sought terms that would force still deeper ones more intensely than James Baldwin. If we’re serious about what Baldwin’s work can mean in the contemporary world—and evidence mounts indicating that we aren’t[ix]—the place to begin is with a brief look at the structure of the constant changes and changing constants in the musically inflected dimensions of Baldwin’s thought. After that, we’ll examine a few moments in the contemporary culture: a viral Youtube film of street dancers in East Oakland and President Obama’s joking comments about his Predator Drone campaign in the war on terror.

* Editor: This is the first in a series of posts by Ed Pavlic to commemorate James Baldwin’s 90th year. The next instalment will appear on Wednesday.

* * *

(1) The letters portray Baldwin as a sensitive, reflective and above all international literary and political sensibility. In the five-page piece, Baldwin posts letters to Mills from France, Switzerland, Israel, Turkey and discusses impending engagements in Dakar, Brazzaville, Monterey, Mallorca, Ghana, Nigeria, and Kenya.

(2) In the televised interview with Kenneth B. Clark on May 24, 1963 Baldwin, referring to the filming of Take This Hammer, said “A boy last week, he was sixteen, in San Francisco, told me on television—thank God we got him to talk. . . He said, ‘I got no country, I got no flag. . .’”. That’s the best date I’ve been able to come up with for the filming. See Conversations with James Baldwin, 42.

(3) Of the many photos in the Life magazine story taken with kids on the streets of New Orleans, in homes, and at a party in New York with Geraldine Page and Rip Torn, one shows a young “Negro girl” in New York thrusting her finger in Baldwin’s face and saying “You’re not my spokesman, James Baldwin!” Baldwin looks surprised by the confrontation but ready to engage.

(4) See Baldwin biographies : Fern Eckman’s The Furious Passage of James Baldwin (Lippincott, 1966), David Leeming’s James Baldwin : A Biography (Knopf, 1994), James Campbell’s Talking at the Gates: A Life of James Baldwin (U. CA Press, 1991) and James Weatherby’s James Baldwin: Artist on Fire (Donald I. Fine, 1989).

(5) Photo: Baldwin with young people in opening credits of Take This Hammer.

(6) Langston Hughes marked this amputative wisdom in his 1951 poem “Children’s Rhymes”: “By what sends / the white kids / I ain’t sent: / I know I can’t / be president” (390).

(7) Photo: Young man listening, skeptically, to Baldwin in Take This Hammer.

(8) Baldwin’s other biographers make no mention of the film.

(9) Evidence such as James Campbell’s dismissive review of The Cross of Redemption, “Sorrow Wears and Uses Us,” in The New York Times Sept 12, 2010. Campbell avoids any engagement with Baldwin’s political vision and dismisses the importance of much of the material in The Cross of Redemption. See: Ed Pavlic’s, “‘do something’: A Review of James Campbell’s Review of James Baldwin’s The Cross of Redemption: Uncollected Writings.”

The Naija Podcast, Episode 3: Featuring photographer Glenna Gordon

Glenna Gordon is a freelance photographer based in Brooklyn. She takes evocative pictures of everyday life in Nigeria, showing a special interest in Northern Nigeria. In this interview, Glenna opens up on misconceptions of the north, what drives her as a photographer and storyteller, the ways in which she captures intimate moments and her most recent project – photographing belongings from the abducted Chibok school girls.  She shows, in her words and in her work how invested she is in the lives of her subjects- not just some passing foreign journalist looking for a third world photo. Elnathan speaks to her in Abuja.

* The images are from Glenna Gordon’s series, “Nigeria, Ever After.”

#HistoryClass With Cheta: The balkanization of Nigeria

There have been growing calls for the balkanisation of Nigeria by various groups, so we want to look at what led to Yugoslavia.

The South Slavs are a subgroup of the Slavic people. They inhabit the Balkan Peninsula, southern Pannonia and the eastern Alps. In language and customs, these peoples, Bosniaks, Bulgarians, Croats, Macedonians, Montenegrins, Serbs, & Slovenes are all related. The word “Yugoslavia”, is an amalgam of “Jug” (South) & “Sloveni” (Slav) in ALL of their languages, showing how close they are. That they are all related is significant because we are comparing to Nigeria. It proves that even similar peoples can fight each other if there is a “need” to.

The idea of a country for South Slavs was first pushed by the Illyrian Movement which started in Zagreb early 19th century. Prior to that, South Slavs had been under the rule of the Russians, Ottoman Turks, and most importantly, the Austrian Empire. However, the Illyrian Movement was more or less dead by the 1850s when the Austrian Emperor, Francis Joseph banned all dissent. Their ideas however lived on for years.

Meanwhile, in 1867, the Austrian Empire was succeeded by the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy. During this time, another great empire, Ottoman Turkey, was in decline. The Turks had always laid claim to the Balkans because of the Bosniaks, who are Muslim, and the Ottomans styled themselves as protectors of all things Muslim. Yet another empire, the Russian Empire, saw itself as the protector of the Serbs, the Orthodox Christians in the Balkans, and laid its claim because of that. The Austrians styled themselves as protectors of the largely Catholic Croats.

The point of showing these influences is to show that small,  countries are always at the whims of their larger neighbours. These empires largely did not much for the common man in the Balkans, and had their own interests. Russia and Turkey went to war in 1877, Russia won. 1878′s Berlin Conference gave Serbia and Montenegro a sort of independence. However, being a small, ineffectual state, Serbia and Montenegro soon fell under the influence of Austria-Hungary, and nationalist movements within Serbia fought Austria until 1914. Austria-Hungary itself lasted until 1918, then ceased to exist because they were on the losing side of World War I. After World War I, Austria-Hungary was broken up into nine countries, one of which was the State of Slovenes, Croats and Serbs. In 1929, this new country, the State of the Croats, Serbs and Slovenes, was formally renamed to the Kingdom of Yugoslavia.

This preamble was done to show that unlike Nigeria, Yugoslavia was created according to the wishes of the people in the area, not according to the whims of some far off empire. However, even countries created by the people, can fall apart. Yugoslavia did.

During World War II, Yugoslavia was invaded by Germany. It was the only country that liberated itself without outside help. The Yugoslav resistance to the Germans was led by one of the most charismatic leaders ever, a chap called Josip Broz Tito. Josip Tito was a Croato-Slovene, his father was Croat, his mother was Slovenian, and he became dictator at the end of the war. Seen as a benevolent dictator, Titoruled with success, both political and economic, and was seen by all as a unifying symbol. Tito allowed the various republics that made up Yugoslavia, some degree of autonomy. Each one ran their area as they saw fit. Josip Tito died in 1980, at the age of 87. His death was mourned by all the peoples of Yugoslavia. He was that loved.

This in itself is important. Nigeria has never had a leader that’s seen as a unifier by most of the population, and has been successful both politically and economically. We’ve also never had a ruler who will take the bull by the horns and allow regions develop at their pace. What Tito achieved in Yugoslavia is similar to what we will achieve if each part of the country has resource control, and is allowed to run its own economy.

After Tito’s death, the Yugoslav presidency became a collective one, each of the regions/provinces sending its leader to serve. Collective presidency has been suggested by some for Nigeria, a “presidential committee”. Yugoslavia showed how it can be messed up as will be explained soon.

You see, tensions had begun to appear between the different regions and peoples in the 1970s. The cause of these tensions were largely economic. As Tito’s health failed, in 1974, a new constitution was born, which attempted to limit the autonomy of the various republics. The most economically developed republics, Croatia and Slovenia rejected this new constitution because they felt it was too centrist and would limit their growth opportunities. However, the Serbs and Montenegrins kept insisting on constitutional reform. These arguments led to a rise in ethnic nationalism. In Slovenia, public opinion began to move towards independence because they felt that they were better off than the rest of the country, and did not see they should be held back by people who were not “progressive”.

Kosovo on their part, insisted either the new constitution or independence. They were the least developed part of the country. By the time of Tito’s death, Kosovo’s GDP was 27% of the national average, and the protests there for changes were intense. In today’s Nigeria EVERY ONE of our north-eastern states has a lower than national average GDP. This comparison is significant.

By the mid-80s, the 1974 constitution had been pushed through with all sorts of compromises. Everyone was unhappy with it. The Serbs for example, were unhappy that autonomy was still a part of the constitution because they wanted more control over Kosovo.

As protests grew, members of the elite began to redirect the protests from economic failures to protests against “the others”. The Slovenian academia on their part, told crowds that the Serbs wanted to economically exploit Slovenia, and suppress Slovenian culture. In 1986, the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts published a memorandum which inflamed tensions against the Albanians. Slobodan Milosevic in Serbia, used the opportunity created by all this chaos to consolidate his own position by demonising the Albanians in Serbia. In Bosnia and Croatia, regional governments at first refused to go the ethnic route, then lost elections almost simultaneously. The result of this, was that the various regional governments survived, but the unity of Yugoslavia was severely compromised.

By 1990, the Croats, led by Stipe Suvar and Ivica Racan walked out of the collective presidency and the communist assembly. This Croatian walk out effectively dissolved the central government, and nationalist parties won elections in their homelands. Back in Croatia, the Croatian Democratic Union (HDZ) won the election and promised to “defend Croatia from Milosevic and the Serbs”. Now, as of 1990, each region had a significant number of people from other regions resident for generations, who knew no other home. For example, the very large Serbian minority in Croatia, did not find the HDV’s declaration about Serbs funny at all. So at the end of 1990, the Serbs in Croatia began to demand their own homeland within Croatia. They called it Krajina. Milosevic gave support to the Croatian-Serbs, both material and financial, and in another part of the country, people panicked. Slovenia, voted to secede from Yugoslavia on December 23, 1990, and declared independence on June 25, 1991. Croatia also declared independence on the same day.

The very next day, the Yugoslav Army, dominated by Serbs at the time, moved towards Slovenia from Croatia to end the secession. The first shot was fired on June 27, but the Slovenians were ready. They controlled their border, so had access to weapons coming in from the outside world, most notably Hungary and Italy. The EU stepped in and asked Slovenia and Croatia to put their independence on hold for three months so the Army could withdraw. Milosevic refused the EU’s plan and claimed that the EU had no right to dissolve Yugoslavia. But, the horse had already bolted.

While all the jaw-jaw was happening, clashes were breaking out between various ethnic groups within the republics. All out war started in February 1992. The Yugoslav Wars were a conglomerate of ethnic conflicts – Slovenia, Croatian War of Independence, Bosnian War and Kosovo War. There is no point in describing the war in detail, so is this where I begin to preach and make a few more comparisons with our Nigeria?

There are a lot of differences between Nigeria and Yugoslavia, but there are a lot of similarities. We can learn from them.

First, each region had selfish leaders who, in furtherance of their own ends, painted other regions black. And people listened.

Next, when the economy is healthy, people forget their differences. This happened under Tito between 1945 and 1965. As Tito aged, the economy declined. People began to look for reasons why things were going bad, and well, blamed the next man. Even in Western countries, as “open” as they are, when the economy tanks, people remember Johnny Foreigner. This matters.

Next. The regions which were doing well under Yugoslavia, are still the ones, as countries, doing well now. Croatia and Slovenia. Those that weren’t doing so well, Bosnia, Serbia, Kosovo, Macedonia, Montenegro have per capita GDPs comparable with African countries. This tells me that as long as people’s mindsets don’t change, breaking up Nigeria will change nothing in the new countries.

Most importantly to me, is that none of these six countries, is really capable of pulling any influence internationally. Each one of the six is under the influence of one bigger nation, or regional blocs. They have no true self determination. International influence is something that comes with what you have to offer, all natural superpowers have size, ALL.

History tells us that the current era of world peace will not last too long. This means these small countries will disappear. They will once again, as is happening in Ukraine, be the subject to great power whims and caprices. The only small country that has largely survived unscathed by its larger neighbours for much of recent history is Switzerland. The reason for Switzerland’s survival is simple: they have everyone’s money. No one is going to come open an account in Biafra.

For those who want us to balkanise, try being a small, ineffectual African country. Try being Togo and see if you like it. That, is the big lesson that a country like Nigeria should draw. United we stand. With size, there is strength. All the time. Divided, well, we become Djibouti.

So, an Israeli company made fun of a mentally ill person to promote its product

When Thamsanqa Jantjie first burst onto the international scene he caused a media frenzy. A fraudulent sign language interpreter who swindled his way into Mandela’s funeral and rubbed shoulders with world leaders in an event that was at the center of the world stage – newsroom high fives all round. Even more tantalizing were the stories that later emerged: multiple criminal charges of robbery, assault and rape; and apparent schizophrenia. Once the string of public apologies and bizarre interviews had died down, it seemed that Jantjie would be forgotten forever, his memory relegated to the dust heap of history. Until this week that is. An Israeli startup called LiveLens pulled Jantjie out of psychiatric care and employed him to appear in a bizarre new advert for their mobile app.

In the advert, Jantjie introduces himself as “Thamsanqa Jantjie from Nelson Mandela’s funeral” while a female voice over translates his fake sign language. When he gives a scripted apology, the voice translates him as saying “Me famous celebrity.” When he says, “Now I want to make it up to the whole world,” it’s translated as “Now I do campaigns for money.”  In this unfunny self-reflexive joke, the ad agency plays up the fact that Jantjie is exploiting his notoriety for financial gain. However it fails to highlight LiveLens’ exploitation of a mentally ill person for money. Here, watch for yourself:

How did they get Jantjie to do the ad? According to the American network NBC, a “Zulu-speaking journalist” was sent to the psychiatric hospital where Jantjie has been since December. The journalist swindled the hospital staff into believing that Jantjie had to be released for a “family event.” Weirder than that, the Israeli company not only failed to see anything morally questionable about sneaking a mentally ill person out of hospital to shoot a commercial, they actually see this as something positive.  Marketing manager Shefi Shaked told NBC: “At the end of the day, a schizophrenic guy got paid and did a nice campaign … We see it as sort of a sad story with a happy ending.” Say whaaat!?

Don’t get me wrong – I found Jantjie’s appearance and performance at Nelson Mandela’s funeral hilarious. I loved the parodies and the mashups, like the version of him fake signing to a Drake song and the obligatory Saturday Night Live skit. It was some much needed comic relief during a moment of global grief. However, Jantjie’s act deprived deaf people around the world from participating in the memorial of the most important leader of our time. Don’t get it twisted. Jantjie should not be allowed to profit from his criminal trespasses, and neither should a commercial entity profit from him. Their ad is nothing short of the worst kind of minstrelsy, literally making a black man dance on camera for his money (watch to the end of the video – if you can). This ad revels in the African male stereotype: corrupt, incompetent and dancing their way to the bank.

When Jantjie first entered the world stage, Slovenian philosopher Slavok Zizek wrote in The Guardian that Jantjie’s “fake” sign language authentically reflected the meaninglessness of the self-serving dignitaries’ speeches at Mandela’s memorial. Jantjie “translated them into what they effectively were: nonsense.” In this sense, what does Jantjie’s LiveLens episode translate about the way the world works? In neoliberal global capitalism, anything can be monetized, even the criminal exploits of a marginal schizophrenic. As long as we find humor in Jantjie’s extended 15 minutes, he will continue to exploit and be exploited. It’s time to stop laughing.

Erykah Badu and hero worship in the times of Twitter

On April 24, style icon and queen of neo-soul, Erykah Badu performed for King Mswati III–the absolute ruler of Swaziland since 1986 when, at 18, he succeeded his father King Sobhuza III–at his birthday party.

When the word got out, Badu was met with criticism from two US-based human rights organisations on the democratic, but often out-of-control, social media platform Twitter.

On April 10, Thor Halvorssen from the Human Rights Foundation (who called out Mariah Carey for performing for the Angolan President last Christmas) accused Badu of having sold her soul. She responded by claiming political ignorance.

On the same day Jeffrey Smith from the Robert F. Kennedy Center for Justice & Human Rights asked if Badu would do it again after learning about the state of democracy about Swaziland. “unfair question”, she replied.

It could have ended here: The Twitterati had been informed and entertained. The human rights activists had taken the superstar to task in addition to successfully addressing Swaziland’s dismal human rights record, including the arrests of journalist Bheki Makubu and lawyer Thulani Maseko for questioning the independence of Swaziland’s judiciary.

Erykah Badu could have rejoiced in having learned something new about Africa (whose children she has visited according to the sketchy website of her non-profit organisation B.L.I.N.D.)

It didn’t though. Maybe because of the lack of manners caused by the lack of eye contact on Twitter. Maybe the pressure to perform for one’s stakeholders and fans also contributed to the escalation of the spat.

While some of Erykah Badu’s fans abused or threatened her critics, others bent over backwards to assure her that everything was fine.* The superstar on her side, alternated between exchanging sweet nothings with her fans and elaborating on her defence.

In a vocabulary of fairy tales, she claimed in an interview that that her performance fee had been given to the king’s “servants” (so that they could eat that day, she added on Twitter). She also waxed lyrical about the “ancient” and “uncontaminated” Swazi culture.

Badu’s answer to Sipho Dube, a Johannesburg-based Swazi, who introduced himself as a victim of King Mswati’s oppression, read: “U on twitter tho, oppressing me”. To Colombian-born activist Pedro Pizano, who suggested that the King’s 28 years in power wasn’t a sign of a healthy democracy, she simply replied: “I think that’s how KINGDOMS twerk.”

Not long after Badu took the discussion to new lows by asking Pizano if he was gay. The reason, she claimed, was to find out if he knew “how it feels to be ostracized for only being YOURSELF.” Pizano and many others however, suspected homophobia.

In hindsight, maybe the professional human rights activists could have cut the professional singer some slack, at least in terms of their tone of tweets at the beginning of their exchange with Badu. Though arrogant and ignorant to the maximum, part of Badu’s aggressive response may well have been triggered by what she, not without reason, perceived as a group of white men talking down to her.

Regardless of whether one thinks that Twitter contributes to democracy or idiocy, we have to admit that we would know less about the true opinions, phobias and prejudice of our heroes without it.

If Twitter hadn’t existed, we wouldn’t know how Helen Zille (the leader of the Democratic Alliance, South Africa’s biggest opposition party) feels about white female progressive journalists. We wouldn’t know how Kenyan tweeters feel about South Africa without the enlightening Twitter-campaign #SomeoneTellSouthAfrica (caused by South African Minister for Sports Fikile Mbalula’s offensive comment about Kenyan swimmers). Lastly, had Twitter not existed we would also still be unaware that Erykah Badu’s doesn’t hesitate to flirt with homophobia, and that her love for Africa is as shallow as her knowledge about the continent.

* For the record, it wasn’t just diehard fans on Twitter who temporarily switched off parts of their brains to blindly defend Badu. Clutch Magazine Online (which according to its Facebook page offers “commentary, critique and analysis… through the eyes of forward-thinking black women”) forgot its mandate and published an account of the events which ended “One of these days people are going to stop looking at entertainers as side activists and just listen to their music and keep it moving.”

Equally starstruck it seems, was the website OkayAfrica, described in its Twitter-bio as a “cultural guide to all the latest music/culture/politics coming from Africa and the Diaspora”. In a confusing article it’s admitted that Swaziland is not a democracy and that King Mswati indeed is a dictator. Having acknowledged this, OkayAfrica still accuses Badu’s detractors of opportunism, and somehow comes to the conclusion that it shouldn’t be assumed that artists performing for dictators are endorsing them.

* Image by Ignatius Mokone.