Sean Jacobs's Blog, page 410

Disgraced Abdoulaye Wade leaves behind “exile” in Versailles; returns to Dakar

Two years ago, Abdoulaye Wade, after 12 of years in power as Senegal’s President, lost his post in an election against his former Prime Minister, Macky Sall. Wade decamped to the wealthy Versailles suburb in Paris (his wife is French and he lived there during exile from Senghor’s regime). Last week he returned to Senegal. Given, the circumstances under which he left and subsequent events since his departure—dissatisfaction because of rising inequality, sustained unemployment, increasing corruption and lack of transparency, an electoral defeat after dragging the country into a period of pre-election unrest, the arrest of his son Karim Wade and other government officials for corruption, and decreasing popularity of his Senegalese Democratic party (PDS)—his controversial return to Dakar, is a triumph for him. It is also a wakeup call for Sall, given the level of media coverage and the number of PDS supporters who were out in full force.

The 2012 Presidential election season was the most controversial, hotly contested and violent in Senegal’s democratic history. In the lead up to the elections, then 85-year-old Wade proposed constitutional changes that would have ensured his success in the next elections by reducing the number of votes needed to win an election from 51 percent to 25 percent. He also sought to create the post of vice president for which many claim he intended to nominate his son thereby creating a path of succession to presidency. Citizens took to the streets en masse organized by the Y’en a Marre collective and M23, a coalition of civil society organizations, to say enough is enough. Wade eventually backed down and withdrew the amendment but he continued his controversial run for a third term. Ultimately, Wade was defeated and conceded after a second round runoff election.

After Wade’s departure, his son, Karim Wade and other former government officials were arrested on corruption charges. The younger Wade is accused of illicit enrichment for illegally amassing a $1.4 billion fortune and has been imprisoned for over a year. His trial is set to begin in June. In a recent interview with Le Monde in France, Wade claimed his son’s arrest was politically motivated with the goal of removing Karim as a future presidential opponent. Wade’s visit did not come without controversy. PDS supporters who wanted to hold a welcome rally from the airport into town were denied a permit. Officially they were told the planned march would disrupt traffic and that the rally might be infiltrated by individuals with bad intentions.

Mayoro Faye, the communications officer of the PDS steering committee, claims the ban indicates democratic backsliding. Fadel Barro, Coordinator of Y’en a Marre also noted that “the right to gather and protest is enshrined in the fundamental law of the country.” No one would have expected the PDS party and Y’en a Marre to be on the same side of any debate involving Wade, yet this shows that Senegalese citizens are able to look past the current situation in their attempt to safeguard democracy and citizen rights in their country.

At the end of the day, Wade supporters defied the ban and were at the airport and at his residence to welcome the former president. His peaceful and somewhat celebrated return is a welcome image on a continent that has often seen presidents flee their countries and unable to return. Yet, a lingering question that remains is, why has Abdoulaye Wade chosen to return now and why did he receive such a seemingly warm welcome when he left the country very much the villain?

Wade’s return after two years appears strategic as the government plans to move forward with the corruption trial in June against his son. His party also heads to local elections in June. While it is possible that Wade continues to enjoy popular support in Senegal, given the debate by local analysts, it is more likely that the country is witnessing the classic; the enemy of my enemy is my friend situation. Wade is also now back in his very comfortable position in the opposition, a space he occupied under both Presidents Leopold Senghor and Abdou Diouf.

Macky Sall is quite unpopular right now due to frustration with the government’s inability to lower unemployment or address the rising cost of living. This however is an unfair critique. Since coming into office two years ago the government has lowered taxes on wages, passed a rent reduction bill that forces landlords to reduce rent by up to 20 percent or face jail time, implemented free health insurance for everyone under 5, and launched the Programme national de bourses de sécurité familiale/ National Scholarship Program Family Safety (Pnbf) which provides quarterly grants to some of Senegal’s poorest families.

It seems that Sall should learn from his predecessor how to use the media more strategically. If he were able to better communicate his achievements to the Senegalese public perhaps it would have been more difficult for former president Wade to capitalize on the population’s frustration.

“Our hearts are bleeding. We are mothers.”

Last week, Guardian lead writer Anne Perkins wondered about the discrepancy between media coverage of the South Korean ferry tragedy and the abduction of 200 girls from a girls’ school in Chibok, in Borno State, in northeastern Nigeria. She asked why there was so much coverage of the Korean children who died in a ferry accident and so little of the Nigerian schoolgirls.

The coverage of both stories was never directly about the children, since, in both instances, the children were gone. The coverage was necessarily about the parents. And here’s where the absence of coverage by major, but not all, news media of the Nigerian parents’, and especially women’s, response is so telling. The Guardian has covered the story fairly regularly. In the United States, after the initial abduction of 200 to as many as 273 girls, the major news outlets, print and broadcast, have devoted little to no space to the Nigerian parents. For example, The New York Times ran one piece, soon after the abduction, and since then has been pretty much silent.

But the women of Nigeria have been anything but silent.

Nasirullahi Fathi Society of Nigeria (NASFAT), an Islamic women’s group, staged a peaceful protest in Ilorin, the capital of Kwara State, in the eastern part of Nigeria. They marched to the State, where Ummuhani Abdulrahman, the leader of the Ilorin branch of NASFAT, explained that they were protesting the Nyanya Municipal Motor Park killings in Abuja and the schoolgirls’ abduction in the northeast. She then presented a letter to the governor to be transmitted to the President: “Our hearts are bleeding. We are mothers. We know what it takes to lose a pregnancy how much more a child. We want these children to be recovered because they are our futures. They are what we depend on as mothers.”

Across Nigeria, women are speaking as mothers, as sisters and aunts and daughters, as students and educators, as women who were once girls. They are marching, writing, singing, and uniting.

Today, women of Chibok, dressed in black, marched on the National Assembly, in Abuja. They marched to protest the violence that took their daughters and the violence that followed, the silence from government: “Our daughters were carried away by the insurgents like cows into the wilderness. If they are dead; we want to see their corpses. For the past two weeks that the incident occurred, nobody has talked to us; has the government thrown away the bath water with the baby? We have come here to express our dismay, probably if the government sees us like this; it may ginger them to do what they are supposed to do. We want government to rescue our daughters from their abductors.”

There are plans for further actions:  there was a Million Woman March yesterday, in which women wore red; a Women United for Peace in Nigeria march today; other smaller actions and events across the country.

Across Nigeria, women are intensively mobilizing. Reading the American press, one is forced to ask, “Who cares?” Who cares about close to 300 Nigerian schoolgirls, abducted and now, according to one recent local report, ferried off to Chad or Cameroon, to be sold to the highest bidder? Who cares about hundreds of thousands of Nigerian women whose hearts are bleeding?

‘The incredible amount of similarities between Colombia and South Africa’

A small group of Colombians expatriates who have been living for several years in Johannesburg and Cape Town organized the first all-Colombian film festival in South Africa: SUR.

The festival’s name translates as ‘south’ in Spanish. According to their organizers, activist Marcela Guerrero and journalist Salym Fayad, this festival is an effort to show how much their native South American country and South Africa have in common. Both because both countries share similar political and social issues  (like inequality or house evictions), or because both countries are sometimes portrayed unfairly in international mainstream media.

Last week they held a number of screenings in Johannesburg. The festival moves to Cape Town next week.  Below is an interview with the organizers.

Why organize a Colombian film festival? Why not a Latin American one?

Salym: First, because Colombia is the country closest to us: SUR is a collective of four Colombians, two based in South Africa and two in Colombia. And we are trying to challenge many stereotypes that picture Latin America, but specifically Colombia, as a place only associated with drugs, terrorism, and violence. Latin America is a continent pictured in the media as if it was one closed entity. There are many people here in Johannesburg that approached me talking in Portuguese because they assume we all talk Portuguese. Or drink mojitos, or hear mariachis. Well, no.

Marcela: Right, because Latin America is not a country either. Latin America has multiple faces, it is a very a complex continent. Since we are Colombians, and we know our territory, part of the idea of this festival was to put a real face to Colombia.

And why choose old Colombian movies like The strategy of the snail (1993) or Vampires of Poverty (1971)? What do these movies have to do with South Africa?

Marcela: The strategy of the snail touches a very sensitive and complex problem in Johannesburg:  house evictions. We wanted to show how Colombia has also faced those challenges.

Salym: It is not only about house evictions, is also about gentrification. The strategy of the snail is a movie about people who don’t want to leave their houses; it is about their struggle, about their dignity.

Salym: The film Vampires of poverty also touches an issue that is very frequent in South Africa, that is ‘suffering-porn’: when the media sensationalize poverty, making a spectacle out of poverty when they show the African continent. That is something that, not only the media, but many people in general do. Even NGOs sometimes portray places in this way to get funding. This documentary mocks that simplistic view used in the media, that patronizing way of interacting with people that disrespects the complex situations people are living.  Colombia is also a victim of that, and that is what this documentary shows. The documentary is focusing on how German filmmakers portray poverty in Cali, a city that has a considerable afrocolombian population.

Here’s the trailer (with English subtitles):

So let’s talk about the movies that focus just on afrocolombian communities: Don Ca, La Playa DC (image at the top) and Palenque. Why these movies? How can South Africans relate to these films?

Salym: When we decided to organize this festival, a year ago, the first movie I though about first was Palenque. [San Basilio de Palenque is a small village situated on the Caribbean coast of Colombia. The name ‘Palenque’ was given to the communities founded by escaped slaves in the 17th century.]

This movie is about the influence of African music in Palenque. Here in South Africa, nobody knows how important African roots are in Latin American music, or in Colombian music. Many people do not know that there is a huge population from African descent, 25 per cent of Colombians.

Here’s the trailer

But Palenque is a pretty unique place in Colombia. What about all the afrocolombians in the cities?

La Playa DC is a movie that happens in Bogotá, Colombia’s capital. But, for the first 20 or 30 minutes of the movie, you could believe the main character, a young black kid, is walking trough Johannesburg, Nairobi, or Kinshasa. His story is the story of many people in those cities: the story about a young immigrant that had to leave a rural area and has to survive in a hostile and very racist city. That is the story that is going on in many places of Africa, a story of displacement. But the movie is also a story about young kids, and the reasons why they wear the hair the way they do, kids who listen to hip-hop. This movie is about their identity and their struggle in a city like Bogotá, after being displaced by the armed conflict.

Here’s the trailer:

What about comparing  Colombia’s complex armed conflict with the experience of violence South Africa lived during Apartheid?

Salym: More than making a parallel, we wanted to show how complex the Colombian armed conflict is by using different formats in films to portray all that violence.

Portrait of a Sea of Lies, for example, is like a road movie. The film starts in a city, and takes you all the way back to the rural area in the Caribbean coast where the main character was forcibly displaced. Viewers can see Colombia’s landscape in the film: the mountains, the weather, but also the paramilitaries dressed like civilians in small towns, or the military waving at cars on the highways. That’s Colombia.

Salym: The Colors of the Mountains is the film to understand the armed conflict trough the eyes of children. This is the story of kids who just want to get their soccer ball back, after the ball ended up in a field full of land mines. That is the story of many Colombian towns, but from a very different perspective, children’s perspective, that is not portrayed in mainstream media.

Marcela: For us the South African context does resonate a lot with the Colombian violent context. It is not about establishing parallels from an academic perspective. Trough all those artistic forms there are common themes, about those violent stories in both countries that are very difficult to explain, to narrate.

What about logistics? What kind of support did you get to make this festival?

Salym: To present these films we got support from The Bioscope, maybe the only independent cinema in Johannesburg that already has experience organizing festivals like this one. Next week we will be presenting the films at the Labia Theater in Cape Town.

Marcela: Unfortunately we were not able to bring any of the Colombian directors for the screenings; we had not funds to buy them plane tickets. We had to contact each of them in Colombia and ask their permission to screen their films in South Africa for free, since we could not afford to pay them any money. This festival has been organized with no funding, from scratch. We only got some help from the Colombian Embassy for posters. But we hope this will change in the future.

Why? Where are you going with this?

Marcela: We are hoping to organize a film festival in Colombia this year, screening South African films. Hopefully, we will start in Bogotá, but also hoping to screen in cities like Cartagena and Cali that are mostly afrocolombian cities and where it might be more relevant. The idea is to continue organizing this festival every year in Cape Town and Johannesburg too.

Salym: This is a long ongoing process. The more you live here, the more you realize the incredible amount of similarities between Colombia and South Africa. For example, how two monstrous cities like Bogotá and Johannesburg have so much in common. We just have a need to make these two countries talk to each other. Because they are so similar countries, but they are so ignorant about each other too.

To discover Stuart Hall …

To discover Hall is to discover the immense possibility of being different.

I first encountered Stuart Hall: on the radio. After a crisp introduction from the BBC presenter, Stuart Hall’s velvet voice and articulated conviction filled the room. For 45 minutes I listened captivated as Hall recounted his childhood in Jamaica and his time as a Rhodes scholar in Oxford, where he arrived escorted by his mother, an enormous steamer trunk, a felt hat and a checked winter coat. Always laced with nostalgia, he spoke of discovering modern Jazz through Miles Davis and Billie Holiday, dancing to Marvin Gaye, and the many complexities of Henry James’s Portrait of a Lady.

Hall was a skilled storyteller, who placed his memory, his deep sense of alienation, and his autobiography at the heart of his theory and politics. Once, when Heidegger was asked to articulate Aristotle’s life, he is said to have replied that “He was born, he thought, and he died. And all the rest is pure anecdote.” Contrary to this, for Hall, his theory was inexplicably linked to his story. Unlike the pure theoretical and philosophical traditions that discounted the empirical accidents of life, Hall almost always began from the personal, and regularly returned to his childhood experiences in colonial Jamaica and its formative impact on his intellectual preoccupation with class, race and identity. It is therefore impossible to fully divorce Hall’s theoretical contributions from his biography—impossible to encounter his work without encountering him.

Born in Kingston in 1932, Hall was born in family of mixed English, African, Indian, and Portuguese Jews, what he described as ‘a lower-middle class family… trying to be an English Victorian family’. Hall grew up in a society where race was the pivot to all human interactions. Colonial Jamaica was structured entirely around an intricate and often inflexible, if unofficial, racial caste system. People lived their lives based on classifications along color lines. Hall recalls that race was everywhere, “that’s just the air you breathe, and that’s how everyone saw and understood society”.

The experience of internalized colonialism within his family would both radicalize and shape Hall’s thinking. One story in particular informed his political commitments, a story that he would return to again and again. When his sister fell in love with a young doctor, a black Barbadian, the family intervened and stopped the relationship. The doctor’s “blackness” was against the family’s concept of what was appropriate. Shortly after, his sister suffered a tremendous nervous breakdown that re-occurred throughout her 20’s. Hall saw his sister as an “unconscious victim” of the entire colonial system. Since his sister refused to revolt, he revolted in her place, but he could never escape the “argument and frustration” that was built into him.

Hall arrived in England in 1951 a young man with impeccable intellectual faculties, deeply affected by the colonial experience. Wedded to his state of exile, he was astutely aware of his own position as being peripheral, displaced or marginalized. His politics were anti imperial and anti colonial—but those ideas were an immediate, almost knee-jerk intellectual response. They had not yet achieved the intellectual sophistication or intricacy that Hall is known for. After completing his BA, he began doctoral work on Henry James, at Oxford in 1953. But world events would drive Hall to abandon Henry James and focus his intellectual energies on the intersections of politics, resistance and culture.

In August of 1956 the British invaded the Suez, and in November the Soviet Union viciously repressed the Hungarian revolution. It was a moment of rupture: Britian decided to be Empire again and imperialism was again rearing its head in Africa, while events in Hungary showcased the utter putrefaction of actually existing socialism, and thousands left the British Communist Party in disgust. This political crisis was crucial to Hall’s intellectual trajectories and spawned the formation of the New Left, the intellectual precursor to Cultural studies. The New Left was a peculiarly un-British response to the changing world, taking place on British soil. It was being fashioned by young colonial intellectuals who were then studying in Britain. It was the impossibility, for these non-white non-English intellectuals, of ever breaking into the established, traditional spaces of the British left that produced the conditions of possibility of the New Left.

The moment of the New Left, would also mark Hall’s long contentious relationship with Marxism and his characteristic refusal to be theoretically essentialist or authoritative. Hall described himself as having come ‘into marxism backwards, against the Soviet tanks in Budapest’. A reluctant Marxist, he regularly critiqued its inadequacy in analyzing imperialism. Yet during this period, his work was firmly grounded in the work of Marxist Caribbean scholar C.L.R James and Antonio Gramsci. There were no intellectual fountain heads for Hall; no position continually defensible in the face of change. Hall instead tended to respond to the events of a particular moment, focusing on constantly changing political currents within culture through a fluid and promiscuous use of different thinkers like Anderson, Bhabha and Derrida.

In 1964, the infamous Smethwick by-election, brought the “question of race” directly into British politics. It was the first time a candidate from a major political party had stood on an explicitly racial ticket. Conservative Peter Griffiths defeated the sitting Labor candidate with the slogan ‘if you want a nigger for a neighbour, vote Liberal or Labour’. 1964 was also the year Stuart Hall married Catherine Barrett after a brief courtship.

In Birmingham, where they lived at the time, racism was oppressively overt and Hall recollects hateful slurs directed towards them in the streets for being a mixed race couple. Finding a place to live was a difficult and a traumatic experience. For Hall it was a terrible reckoning to be “externalized as the black and white couple”. The period following saw full-blown anti-racist politics, and powerful grassroots and community retaliation against racism. The racial issues that had dictated his place in Colonial Jamaica had finally ‘come home’ to Britain, and had a visceral impact on Hall’s life and writing. It was another rupture from which new kinds of questions about the “politics of culture” emerged. In the climate of open racism and fierce resistance, Hall’s set to work articulating emerging contradictions and what he calls the historical amnesia in the British society. For Hall, these contradictions were situated in the post war, post empire British society’s refusal to acknowledge and include in its national imagination, the narratives of the colonial other .

In his essay ‘Old and new identities’, Hall provocatively writes — “I am the sugar at the bottom of the English cup of tea. I am the sweet tooth, the sugar plantations that rotted generations of English children’s teeth.” English identity came symbolised with the cup of tea, but there exists no tea plantation within the United Kingdom. The sugar from West Indian plantations, the tea from Sri Lanka and India: if the cup of tea is the central symbol of Englishness, then Englishness is deeply, unchangeably colonial. Hall situates Englishness, and English history squarely within the “outside” history of the other –“There is no English history without that other history.” Hall’s cuppa tea worked to destabilize the category of ‘Englishness’, a concept increasingly central to the emerging politics of race and Thatcherism.

Hall’s formidable work, Policing the Crisis and his future work on the diaspora and representations of identity, are continuous with a long thread of concern with the politics of ‘race’ and the politics that succeeded by writing out the stories of the “other”. In writing Policing the Crisis, Hall witnessed the victory of racialized narratives about crime and marginality, and how they were deployed toward social control. Hall was a vocal and highly visible critic of the authoritarian forms of populism, from the mid-1970s onwards, that took hold in Britain. He defined this “populist auhoritarianism” as an appeal to being saved by a charismatic leader of the society, “who could get the work done”. He argues that, while not directly fascist, it makes the same emotional and political appeals that fascism does. A power that wins consent by building peoples’ fears, fantasies, and phobias into a model of society is a strategy he recognized from colonial administration. His intellectual labour was invariably connected to political intervention, to explore limitation, and the inherent contradictions of the society, to lead and win political arguments in public sphere, because it was here that he strongly believed the resistance to power and populist variations of authoritarianism was situated.

Yet his work was marked by a certain incompleteness that cannot demonstrate its own consistency. There is no, single grand theory, unifying thread or internally consistent ideas through which we can discern Hall. His work remains necessarily incomplete, a work in progress and full of contradictions. Hall thought and wrote about everything from the black diaspora, slavery, post colonialism, politics, power, Marxism, art, culture and literature. Hall preferred the form of the essay, but also articulated his eclectic views through the television interviews, prolific journalism and literary commentary, that allowed him to constantly revise, update, retract and elaborate upon his ideas and to intervene in current issues.

But this “weakness” is also Hall’s greatest legacy: in merging the theoretical, the critical and the personal in cultural and anti-colonial thinking. The details, the anecdotes, the lacerating experiences, the remarkable events of Hall’s life became intertwined with his analysis of culture and politics. Stuart Hall told his story of dislocation, migration and memory – the story of the black intellectual and the history of modern African migration to Britain. He was constantly staking claims, and clearing the ground to create a new space of in-betweens, and an intermediary position, both politically and intellectually. It is on the grounds he cleared, that many like myself stand with the ability, and perhaps the courage to define the discourses of our time. To discover Hall is to discover the immense possibility of being different it.

The art of Victor Ehikhamenor

Victor Ehikhamenor’s images always work as a proliferation of forms. It’s the sort of proliferation that explodes in your face, making the shapes and objects something other than shapes and objects. Too much is happening, which is the imperative for this transaction—no space is left uncontained. These images and objects embody forms; to uncover any inherence or indwelling in the work, you look at the operations of the forms. To be clear: “forms” here refer to figures, shapes or appearances. In other words, the way things appear or are shaped.

Shapes emerge because there’s a creator behind them, at least in this case. A number of the canvasses are folded into deliberate forms, becoming objects on display, personable items. A way to begin to look at Ehikhamenor’s work is to seek the fount of immanence where these forms arise. Once this question is asked shapes begin to become visible in the images; you see a panoply of heads in “The Whirlwind Dancers of Uwessan,” a hand pointing onwards in “The Messenger from Yesterday,” a cloaked head in “The Forgotten Memories We Carry.” Deliberateness, agreeably, is the first imperative for form. This does not to suggest that at the moment of painting, every painter has an image in mind (although some admit to occasionally do). It’s to propose that one can be drawn, instead, to the deliberate result of the painting process in canvasses by Ehikhamenor that are creased at the right spots.

According to Flusser, it’s impossible to be the designer and creator of the world and at the same time submit to it. The deliberateness you should consider is one that affirms the authorial prerogative of the painter. Each image is a world according to certain painterly virtues and obligations. If you think about the building bricks of this world, these images, they would be the shapes that emerge as folded canvasses and mythical figures layered on other mythical figures. Take “Struggle for Big Afro Mama” as an instance, where figures live within figures, a landscape of forms.

To think about Victor Ehikhamenor’s work, one returns to his artisanship. An artisan is a workman, someone who makes, and the idea of design and precision is central to his practice (“he” because, of course, the painter here is a man). At first, and on the surface level, might attribute the exactness of his lines and curves to his use of charcoal, a kind of pen that brings minutia into full visibility—take a look at “A Man of the People.” But diving deeper into the meaning of his artisanship, one finds a careful orchestration, a tapering narrative. This artisanship does not aim to create forms or objects for the sake of utility, unlike what a carpenter or mechanic would do. The lines have been made to fall in pleasurable places—you have to think of this artisan the same way you think of a master architect. The architect aims for a combination of esthetics and perfection; “architecture is frozen music,” Goethe is quoted to have said. You wouldn’t find a stray line, curve or figure in the artisan-architect’s drawing. Every inch covered becomes a perfect line, and when you take a look you’re reminded of a tone from a great song you can’t seem to get off your mind.

Artisanship implies exactness, and this in turn implies clarity. As visible objects, the forms in these images are clear enough. Yet they make additional claims. Out of this exactness emerge other possible clarities. Regardless of the pleasure you get from looking, the lines point you to a meaning within the images. “Not The First Time You Are Telling Me This Story” typifies this. Meaning wouldn’t suggest a definite idea, but the possibility of reflection. In other words, the images become exact and pleasurable in order to entertain the possibility of reflection. And reflection isn’t any logical act or process— in Not The First Time You Are Telling Me This Story”, where figures are layered on figures, if anything, follows the logic of a maze. Reflection is the condition that allows for the coexistence of ideas, stories, histories and personas.

There’s a way in which the use of color in the series “This Is Not a War Story” troubles the coherence of the other series in this exhibition. Nothing before has prepared you for color spreading across the paper, as though it’s the spill of blood or the annexation of territory or the discoloration of landscape. In the earlier images, color is used to illumine essence, to give quality to form. Here it antagonizes form, as though each paper has become a battleground. It’s an example of war that derides war—the blood flows freely now in Northern Nigeria, news that is no longer news. In putting colour upon colour the images demand a similar political virtue: perhaps, after all, there might be a way to tell the story of war as not war; to find that in a bloodied country there are traces of humanity, kindnesses that haven’t been smeared with violence.

All along this essay has offered a way to look at Ehikhamenor’s work as an immediate encounter with form. Yet now it becomes necessary to turn to overarching matters. From the outset, the images are implicated by their titles. Each presupposes that narratives and personas are within the forms and figures, and within these forms and figures are symbols and keys and entrances. Each title is the prompt with which you can navigate the mythical realities of the object’s worlds. “Floating In The City of Dreams” will hardly suggest nothing else but floating, and without doubt you notice a head, arms outstretched, legs afloat, legs sweeping over waves.

Turning to the idea of Ehikhamenor’s titles as prompts: “I Hope You Remember” is tied at two parts of the canvas, making the image a tripartite object. At once St. Augustine’s words become pertinent: “There are three times: a present of things past; a present of things present; and a present of things future.” It would seem that to deal with this sculptural object – and others that have similar titles, like “Tell Me What I Won’t Forget – you’ll have to consider presence as the shared ontology of the past, present and future. Images are always present; they live everlasting lives in the subconscious of their beholders. Yet it is not this kind of presentness that Ehikhamenor’s images give; it’s the presentness of history, the Augustinian presence of things that oscillates between past, present and future. In my mind, images have no past, present, or future. They stretch across time. And when the painter is moved to populate his images with presentness, like Ehikhamenor has done, the history that is embodied will stretch across time as well.

Regardless of how they’re rendered on the surface – by charcoal, acrylic, enamel, nail perforations – Ehikhamenor’s intent is that these images portend an enchanted world inspired by folktales and city life, by stories real and imagined. The painter is a storyteller, although an unreliable one. That is, unreliable if you what you’re seeking is for the image to bear chronological narratives. For instance, what time-chart could there be for “Samson and Jezebel in Lagos?” Already you have a title that says only what is sufficient: here are the figures of lovers in a big city, populated with the lines and curves of their desires. Nothing more can be said because within the image everything has been said, a complete instant. The perforated figures make this even clearer. It’s the crispness of their visages that make them powerful—each dot is covering additional ground until the painter-artisan comes full circle.

In sum, Victor Ehikhamenor’s images show a type of human body consistent with an enchanted world. The images, in fact, are dispersive chronicles of an enchanted world. In one sense, enchantment is suggestive of delight. No doubts can exist about the fact that Ehikhamenor paints with humour on one hand and wit on the other (take a look at “Waiting along the Hallway of Pleasure”: notice for starters the shapes, sizes and position of the heads, and notice the gestures of the hands). You shouldn’t undermine delight as a pathway to enchantment. These images have to work as a spell does, charming and drawing in, until each beholder has an alternate chronicle of enchantment.

* Top: “Adam and Eve waiting for a flight out of Eden.”

Survey: What do Nigerians really think and know about homosexuality?

In January this year, President Goodluck Jonathan signed the Anti-Same Sex Marriage Prohibition Act into law. According to a NOI Polls survey conducted in June 2013, 92% of Nigerians support the legislation, giving Nigeria the second-highest rate of non-acceptance of homosexuality out of 45 countries surveyed.  This apparent homophobia is at variance with Google analytics, which shows that Nigeria ranks in the top five in the world for searches for gay porn.  This shows the disconnection between private vice and public morality.

The interesting challenge posed to the NOI Poll is that there still remains 8% that do not support the legislation.  With a population of 170 million people, 8% amounts to 13.6 million people not supporting the legislation. If the poll is an effective reflection of true public opinion, this is significant number that cannot be ignored, amounting to a population of more than 10 small countries in Africa.

The Initiative for Equal Rights (TIERs) in partnership with the Solidarity Alliance for Human Rights in Nigeria (SAHR) is conducting a survey to find out about attitudes and perceptions towards homosexuality in Nigeria. The survey is aimed at Nigerians only and it is entirely anonymous. They would be very grateful if you could spend just a few minutes completing the form, and encourage you to share it among your fellow Nigerians.

Here.

Pax Kaffraria: An Interview with Artist Meleko Mokgosi

What is most pleasing about Meleko Mokgosi’s work is also what many find elusive in contemporary artwork, the combination of both technical mastery and thought provoking concept. Even as I look at his works as images on a screen, removed from the objects themselves, the rich colors, skillful draftsmanship, and inventive use of space are readily apparent. Mokgosi’s art is immersed in specific historical events that carry regional, national, and global significance. The paintings in his ongoing Pax Kaffraria series interrogate colonialism, politics, power, and identity in Botswana and Southern Africa.

Mokgosi’s monumental installations, which occupy vast walls and sometimes whole alcoves, allow the viewer to be engulfed by the experience of viewing much like at the cinema, or theatre. But unlike them, these still performances require an active viewer, and it is the artist’s work behind the canvas that provides us with the structure from which to draw our own conclusions from, conclusions that become less concrete and tailored the more we actively engage the work. Mokgosi’s use of the familiar language of cinema in his paintings (e.g. storyline, framing, fade-ins, movement through time) provides his viewers with the tools to begin their own dialogue with his art, reacting to the canvass’s physical presence, from which they can gather perceptions, share experiences, and learn through its sensory cues.

One gets a sense of the scope of his installations from this video from the Lyon Biennale:

Meleko Mokgosi (b. 1981) lives and works in New York City and holds a clinical assistant professorship at New York University’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study. I was lucky to have the chance to ask him a few questions over email, and he was gracious enough to respond.

Your art is concerned with issues of identity, history, memory, and perception, what formative experiences in your life compelled you to present these concepts in your art?

The work I make is concerned with southern African history and the constructed-ness of History less issues of identity, memory and perception; more so because categories such as identity and perception are philosophical and rather loose in some respects. My project-based installations deal with the relation between history and panting; and I try to deal with both terms as rigorously as I can. My schooling has been quite instrumental in formulating my position around these; more precisely, studying under the guidance of Ron Clarke at the Whitney Independent Study program.  Yet my project really came together and was formed when I was Mary Kelly’s student in the Interdisciplinary Studio Area at UCLA.  Kelly’s incredible mentorship allowed me to develop my conceptual framework and position myself effectively within a discursive field, and articulate the parameters that I think matched up with my project.

Why did cinema become an important influence on the conceptualization of your work?

Again, this was developed to allow me to position myself in relation to history painting. I have always believed that one can only transgress the medium by working within it.  Put another way, it is precisely the limits of painting that I find most productive.  And I think everyone finds this in whatever medium they work in.  Yes, you can throw sand at a painting or punch a hole in it, but these interventions will always be read against painting.  So I use cinematic tropes (specific shots, angles, scale, and inter-titles) to develop a visual language within the field of painting.  The use of cinema is also part of my methodology because I storyboard each frame and chapter, so as to formulate how I think the installation should be developed.  Therefore cinema, as you rightly point out, is an important frame of reference both conceptually and methodologically, in my work.

Why have you chosen to present your work in the genre of history paintings?

Because my project cannot take the form of any other medium. The medium is indelibly tied to my engagement with the discursive site.

Can you speak to the arrangement of your installations, using varying canvas sizes and wall spacing –what you want this to provoke visually and/or narratively for the viewer?

I cannot speak on the desires of an intended viewer, rather it is up to the viewer’s engagement with the material: his or her somatic response and ability to read.  As an artist, and I think many will agree with me, I can only hope for the attentive viewer, who will both see and read how the work is functioning.

As an international artist, who splits his time in both the US and Botswana, how has living within and between both cultures impacted the ideas you want to elicit through your art and the format with which you present it.

I think all artists are international in many respects, so I do not see myself as separate from the regular idea of an artist. And I would say the same thing about cultures, just like being bilingual, I dont not occupy a space that is in between cultures and languages; I am as American as anyone and as much a Motswana as any, so I do not consider myself hyphenated. Just attached.

What do you believe are the biggest challenges facing artists today in connecting to audiences in a meaningful way?

Producing effective art and having a sustainable and critical studio practice is enough of challenge I think. The viewer’s response cannot be spoken for because the viewer is always formed through a matrix that is coextensive yet exists outside of what the artist is producing.

What are you working on now?

I am in the final stages of completing Pax Kaffria, which I began in 2011.

Bonus: Here’s a video of Mokgosi talking about his work when he was an Artist-in-Residence at the Studio Museum in Harlem in 2011 and 2012:

* Image of Meleko Mokgosi courtesy Paul Mpagi Sepuya/The Hammer Museum. The second image is Ruse of Disavowal, 2013. For more images and information on the artist, visit his website.

#HistoryClass: Who sold Nigeria to the British for £865k in 1899?

Today we will be discussing the first oil war, which was fought in the 19th century, in the area that became Nigeria.

All through the 19th century, palm oil was highly sought-after by the British, for use as an industrial lubricant for machinery. Remember that Britain was the world’s first industrialised nation, so they needed resources such as palm oil to maintain that.

Palm oil of course, is a tropical plant, which is native to the Niger Delta. Malaysia’s dominance came a century later.

By 1870, palm oil had replaced slaves as the main export of the Niger Delta, the area which was once known as the Slave Coast. At first, most of the trade in the oil palm was uncoordinated, with natives selling to those who gave them the best deals. Native chiefs such as former slave, Jaja of Opobo became immensely wealthy because of oil palm. With wealth comes influence.

However, among the Europeans, there was competition for who would get preferential access to the lucrative oil palm trade. In 1879, George Goldie (1846 – 1925, pictured above) formed the United African Company, which was modeled on the former East India Company. Goldie effectively took control of the Lower Niger River. By 1884, his company had 30 trading posts along the Lower Niger. This monopoly gave the British a strong hand against the French and Germans in the 1884 Berlin Conference. The British got the area that the UAC operated in, included in their sphere of influence after the Berlin Conference.

When the Brits got the terms they wanted from other Europeans, they began to deal with the African chiefs. Within two years of 1886, Goldie had signed treaties with tribal chiefs along the Benue and Niger Rivers whilst also penetrating inland. This move inland was against the spirit of verbal agreements that had been made to restrict the organisation’s activities to coastal regions.

By 1886, the company name changed to “The National Africa Company” and was granted a royal charter (incorporated). The charter authorized the company to administer the Niger Delta and all lands around the banks of the Benue and Niger Rivers. Soon after, the company was again renamed. The new name was “Royal Niger Company”, which survives, as Unilever, till this day.

To local chiefs, the Royal Niger Company negotiators had pledged free trade in the region. Behind, they entered private contracts on their terms. Because the (deceitful) private contracts were often written in English and signed by the local chiefs, the British government enforced them. So for example, Jaja of Opobo, when he tried to export palm oil on his own, was forced into exile for “obstructing commerce”. As an aside, Jaja was “forgiven” in 1891 and allowed to return home, but he died on the way back, poisoned with a cup of tea.

Seeing what happened to Jaja, some other native rulers began to look more closely at the deals they were getting from the the Royal Nigeria Company. One of such kingdoms was Nembe, who’s king, Koko Mingi VIII, ascended the throne in 1889 after being a Christian schoolteacher. Koko Mingi VIII, King Koko for short, and like most rulers in the yard, was faced with the Royal Nigeria Company encroachment. He also resented the monopoly enjoyed by the the Royal Nigeria Company, and tried to seek out favourable trading terms, with particularly the Germans in Kamerun.

By 1894 the the Royal Nigeria Company increasingly dictated whom the natives could trade with, and denied them direct access to their former markets.

In late 1894, King Koko renounced Christianity, and tried to form an alliance with Bonny and Okpoma against the the Royal Nigeria Company to take back the trade. This is significant because while Okpoma joined up, Bonny refused. A harbinger of the successful “divide and rule” tactic.

On 29 January 1895, King Koko led an attack on the Royal Niger Company’s headquarters, which was in Akassa in today’s Bayelsa state. The pre-dawn raid had more than a thousand men involved. King Koko’s attack succeeded in capturing the base. Losing 40 of his men, King Koko captured 60 white men as hostages, as well as a lot of goods, ammunition and a Maxim gun. Koko then attempted to negotiate a release of the hostages in exchange for being allowed to chose his trading partners. The British refused to negotiate with Koko, and he had forty of the hostages killed. A British report claimed that the Nembe people ate them. On 20 February 1895, Britain’s Royal Navy, under Admiral Beford attacked Brass, and burned it to the ground. Many Nembe people died and smallpox finished off a lot of others.

By April 1895, business had returned to “normal”, normal being the conditions that the British wanted, and King Koko was on the run. Brass was fined £500 by the British, £26,825 in today’s money, and the looted weapons were returned as well as the surviving prisoners. After a British Parliamentary Commission sat, King Koko was offered terms of settlement by the British, which he rejected and disappeared. The British promptly declared him an outlaw and offered a reward of £200 (£10,730 today) for him. He committed suicide in exile in 1898.

About that time, another “recalcitrant King”, the Oba of Benin, was run out of town. The pacification of the Lower Niger was well and truly under way.

The immediate effect of the Brass Oil War was that public opinion in Britain turned against the the Royal Nigeria Company, so its charter was revoked in 1899. Following the revoking of its charter, the the Royal Niger Company sold its holdings to the British government for £865,000 (£46,407,250 today). That amount, £46,407,250 (NGN12,550,427,783.81 at today’s exchange rate) was effectively the price Britain paid, to buy the territory which was to become known as Nigeria.

* Cheta Nwanze committed to doing a #HistoryClass once a week as a response to Nigeria’s removal of history from its school curriculum. He tweets @Chxta

The African Hip-Hop Generation Arrives

I remember it like it was yesterday. My older brother had just returned from his freshman year of secondary school and the loud engine of my father’s old Nissan Stanza pulling into the compound had sent us all rushing to welcome him. Amidst my parents chatter about his grades and how he’d lost weight, my brother signaled me to follow him. He pulled out a Sony Walkman and told me he had a new dance to teach me. I can’t remember exactly what he called it, only that it was similar to the running man. The soundtrack to that dance was a sound I had never heard before: ‘Hip-Hop music.’ I spent the days that followed filled with immense curiosity, digging into this new sound. Years later, I would come to learn the names of the artists on that cassette tape: Big Daddy Kane, Rakim, KRS One, Salt & Pepa, and Public Enemy. This was my introduction to a culture that changed my life.

I’ve always wondered what made Hip-Hop so captivating. Was it the beat? Perhaps, it could’ve been the hypnotic samples looped into 16 bar arrangements. Or was it the lyrics? Honestly, between the thick American accents and heavy slang, very few of my peers understood a word that these rappers said. So it must have been the urgency with which Hip-Hop artists asserted their views, a stark contrast to the love themed Highlife tunes our parents listened to. Most young people found that content redundant and Hip-Hop music helped break the monotony.

With a wide array of socio-political commentary from Public Enemy and deep ’5 Percent Nation’ knowledge from Rakim laced over neck snapping beats, a majority of young Africans were spell bound by the sonic manifestation of the culture. I, however, was enthralled by the physical attributes of the culture, especially the fashion and style. Giant Africa medallions, dashikis and kufis were the core aesthetics of Hip-Hop of that period. In my twelve year-old brain, I interpreted all that Afrocentric style as a symbolic call and response from a distant relative. I heard the call loud and clear but how would I respond? Was Hip-Hop really interested in hearing about my struggles and appreciating my Ghanaian aesthetic? Did the culture really value its international roots? After all, the Godfather of the culture, DJ Kool Herc was himself an immigrant. His block parties were directly related to the sound system culture of his native homeland Jamaica. So the light bulb went off- maybe I had to journey to the Mecca of Hip-Hop, New York City. There my response would be heard much louder.

That journey took me from local talent shows in Ghana to graduating college in Ohio (I’m African, I had to do it for my parents) to numerous world tours and even sharing the stage with my personal heroes Public Enemy at NYC’s Summerstage. But somehow the response to the call didn’t seem adequate. It took a while to realize that the initial call I heard in Ghana was powerful because it came from a collective voice. Whether it was the Afrocentric era (Public Enemy, X -Clan, KRS One) or the Native Tongue era (Jungle Brother, A Tribe Called Quest, Queen Latifah, De La Soul) or the most recent Soulquarian era (The Roots, Erykah Badu, Talib Kweli, Common, Mos Def), it was clear that to make an impact you needed a definitive movement.

I started wondering: perhaps this idea of responding to Hip-Hop’s call rested not on me as an individual, but on a collective of young African voices. The more I searched, the more I found like-minded artists who were responding in their own way- from Somali-born MC, Knaan, to Belgian-based Congolese Rapper Baloji to Nigerian-German singer Nneka (the list goes on). We had all made inroads individually but had hit a similar brick wall collectively- being a solitary voice in the extremely territorial world of Hip-Hop. None of us could make enough noise to shift the paradigm, no matter how brilliant we were as individual artists.

So, some of us began a quest to help present a unified front- from collaborations to guest appearances to curating live shows and stalking the Facebook pages of some of our peers till they responded. We now understand that our power lies in our connectivity. To quote the brilliant scholar Frantz Fanon: “Each generation must discover its mission, fulfill it or betray it, in relative opacity.” I believe we are the next generation of Hip-Hop. A more globally focused generation, one that can bring back the same urgency we heard in our native countries when the culture first beckoned us. Thanks to the Internet, this movement continues to connect everyday. I believe there is nothing more powerful than an idea whose time has come. The time for Africa’s Hip-Hop generation to influence the culture that influenced it is now.

* Afropolitan Dreams–released today–is Blitz the Ambassador’s 3rd studio album and features Angelique Kidjo, Seun Kuti, Nneka, Oxmo Puccino and more. Buy on CD+Vinyl+MP3 as well as on iTunes in France and the U.S.  Photo Credit: Quazi King.

 

The Economist sees the bright side of Oscar Pistorius murder trial

A few days ago, The Economist explained why violence against women in South Africa is not as bad as we think. The magazine’s effort to set some inflated accounts of violence straight was stirred by (what else) the trial of the South African paralympic Oscar Pistorius who killed his girlfriend Reeva Steenkamp. While the trial itself is quite representative for what fuels violence against women in the country by illuminating Oscar’s apartheid-bred, dominating and violently possessive masculinity and by showing how much more value the criminal justice system accords to the lives of white women compared to black women, this is not what the Economist chose to pick up.

Instead, they use the trial to emphasize the rosier side of the story: Female homicide (perpetrated both by partners and non-partners) may still be around four times higher than the global average, the numbers have decreased significantly these past ten years, and therefore, The Economist infers, violence against women is not as bad as many think it is. Moreover, and I quote “South Africa’s violence is, if anything, more heavily skewed towards men than in most countries. Only 15% of victims are women.”

To be sure, it is high time that myths and popular misconceptions around violence get dispelled (the racist comments below the article are an awful case in point), but ‘explanations’ like this one are more likely to further blur, rather than reveal the facts. First of all, violence is more than murder. If you are assaulted (for example by your teacher), abused, battered, trafficked or sexually molested for being a girl, a woman or a lesbian, yet your attackers did not kill you; did you not suffer violence?

By conflating murder with violence, and neglecting the fact that the vast majority of perpetrators of violence are men, the Economist provides an embarrassing and painful testimony to the culture of impunity that surrounds domestic and sexual violence against women and girls. It’s unnoticed, overlooked, not taken seriously, and, as we see, not even worthy of the ‘violence’ label if it’s not lethal.  And it’s not just media outlets, such as The Economist who are this selective. Criminal justice systems (around the world) don’t take it all too serious either.

In the case of South Africa, this means that sexual violence against women may be estimated to exceed 500.000 cases a year (with an alarming increase of violence against lesbian women–not just in townships) but that only one out of twenty-five perpetrators is convicted. With regards to murder, men who kill white women are more likely to be convicted than those who kill black women (for domestic workers the rates are even lower). For women who were murdered by a man who was not their partner, the likelihood of conviction has even gone down with 30% between 1999 and 2009.

So for accurate, detailed and nuanced information about violence against women in South Africa,  instead of The Economist, check out this report, prepared by the Masimanyane Women’s Support Centre.

Meanwhile, some still think Pistorius is innocent, waiting for him with balloons on the days of his court appearances: