Sean Jacobs's Blog, page 411

20 Years of Freedom: The post-1994 power brokers and black liberation

On May 7th South Africans go to the polls to vote for national and provincial representatives (the majority party gets to pick the President and the Cabinet). In the lead up to the election, we’ll carry a few pieces. The series starts today, the 20th anniversary of the April 1994 elections–the country’s first democratic elections in which blacks could vote. The first instalment is by Thapelo Tselapedi. 

The democratic breakthrough combined with the legacy of Apartheid has left post-1994 South Africa with a number of key powerbrokers that determines its present and political future. Chief among these are: the ruling African National Congress (ANC), purportedly representing the aspirations of the black majority; the Democratic Alliance (DA), representing white and middle class interests and the custodians (some wrongly claim) of liberal politics; mainstream NGO’s which actually represent liberal politics;  corporate South Africa; the courts; and, finally, the “Fourth Estate,” i.e. the chunk of popular, mainstream media.

The refrain that the ANC-led government is at the center of a perceived malaise in South Africa, hides the very real and (sometimes inadvertent) sinister agendas by these other players.

In simple terms, the South African government (also now associated with Marikana, evictions, police brutality, callousness towards black school children, etcetera) cannot alone be the primary class opponent against the poor. These other power-brokers also wield powerful influence and have vested interests that are not always easy for government to manage.

Let’s begin with the obvious: The ANC has no hegemony in South Africa as its politics has not permeated throughout society, but it is a powerful socio-political force that oversees an incredibly tenuous ‘nation.’ And the current contestations within the ANC and government have meant that the movement is unable to impose any sort of real social discipline on its constituency or harness those energies to effect meaningful social change.

Let me qualify this statement: be it ‘service delivery protests’ or ‘struggles for control over development,’ the ANC has thus far been unable to grapple with the opportunities presented by the political economy of South Africa. In fact, the growing partisanship that currently characterizes the party is evidence of its inability to manage or exploit these very same socio-political forces.

The ANC’s growing partisanship has sharpened all sorts of socio-economic differences and has been accompanied by an anomaly: While the center-left ANC and the centre-right DA are poles apart politically, there’s a convergence around economic policy between them.

This has no doubt given the DA the opportunity to swim in the same policy pool as that of the ANC and therefore to attract more black and working class voters. The emerging picture is one of differences mainly in posture and the level at which policies are pitched. Consequently, the political center (status quo) is not holding for the majority poor.

But outside the ANC, the picture is bleak too.

COSATU, the main trade union federation, is crippled by infighting partly due to its excessive attention to the organizational politics of the ANC. Hemorrhaged by nepotism and tender politics, the ANC has become unstable. And this has been costly for the already compromised COSATU. From service delivery protests to provincial and national political infighting over tenders and positions, the party has been transformed into a black hole. The fallout from Nkandla is just symptomatic of the directionless drift that has gradually been growing for a numbers of years now.

Then there’s the liberal current: the South African media, corporate South Africa, the courts and mainstream NGO’s that support the rather weak grassroots mobilization efforts around service delivery, together have become a force to be reckoned with. They wield economic power and have incredible influence over public opinion (albeit with no electoral implications), setting the tone and agenda of many debates in the public square.

For example, the media’s focus on President Jacob Zuma as the singular problem for what seems to be government’s unbridled corruption is one of the many ways in which the Fourth Estate has shaped the country’s politics, sometimes in very colonial rhetoric.

For example, big business continues to go unabated in their pursuits for super-profits either through labor exploitation or price hikes. Think of the mining houses and telecommunications companies, among many, as the latest industries to receive attention. So too the tyre, bread and the construction industries (essentially monopolies dating back to Apartheid) that have had their fair share of discipline from the Competition Commission.

The continued existence of these monopolies does, in part, confirm that the political economy of South Africa has not been fundamentally altered. It has been one of inclusion and not transformation. The social groupings that have sought to check-mate the political centre have done so within the confines of the status quo. The result is that while the political centre is challenged, white monopoly capital has simply remained intact.

Where does this leave the majority of largely poor, black and unskilled people affected by the competing interests of powerful groups?

The EFF, which basically represents the extremist impulses in the political sphere, vying to capture and represent the majority victims of these powerful interests, cannot, as yet, be considered to be a substantive oppositional left formation–this is because what is becoming clear is that many people intend to use the EFF as the big stick that could punish the ANC for its indiscretions. However, the presence of the EFF onto the political stage has brought back the lost debate about Black empowerment, deeper then the narrow, legalistic BEE definition. And, most importantly, the EFF has substantively pitched the transformation debate from redistribution and opening up industries to articulating a freedom no different from what Pixley ka Isaka Seme argued for in the Regeneration of Africa speech he made in April 1906. Accordingly, what is at stake now, beyond these elections, is Black liberation.

 

#SouthAfricaVotes: The post-1994 power brokers and black liberation

On May 7th South Africans go to the polls to vote for national and provincial representatives (the majority party gets to pick the President and the Cabinet). In the lead up to the election, we’ll carry a few pieces. The series starts today, the 20th anniversary of the April 1994 elections–the country’s first democratic elections in which blacks could vote. The first instalment is by Thapelo Tselapedi. 

The democratic breakthrough combined with the legacy of Apartheid has left post-1994 South Africa with a number of key powerbrokers that determines its present and political future. Chief among these are: the ruling African National Congress (ANC), purportedly representing the aspirations of the black majority; the Democratic Alliance (DA), representing white and middle class interests and the custodians (some wrongly claim) of liberal politics; mainstream NGO’s which actually represent liberal politics;  corporate South Africa; the courts; and, finally, the “Fourth Estate,” i.e. the chunk of popular, mainstream media.

The refrain that the ANC-led government is at the center of a perceived malaise in South Africa, hides the very real and (sometimes inadvertent) sinister agendas by these other players.

In simple terms, the South African government (also now associated with Marikana, evictions, police brutality, callousness towards black school children, etcetera) cannot alone be the primary class opponent against the poor. These other power-brokers also wield powerful influence and have vested interests that are not always easy for government to manage.

Let’s begin with the obvious: The ANC has no hegemony in South Africa as its politics has not permeated throughout society, but it is a powerful socio-political force that oversees an incredibly tenuous ‘nation.’ And the current contestations within the ANC and government have meant that the movement is unable to impose any sort of real social discipline on its constituency or harness those energies to effect meaningful social change.

Let me qualify this statement: be it ‘service delivery protests’ or ‘struggles for control over development,’ the ANC has thus far been unable to grapple with the opportunities presented by the political economy of South Africa. In fact, the growing partisanship that currently characterizes the party is evidence of its inability to manage or exploit these very same socio-political forces.

The ANC’s growing partisanship has sharpened all sorts of socio-economic differences and has been accompanied by an anomaly: While the center-left ANC and the centre-right DA are poles apart politically, there’s a convergence around economic policy between them.

This has no doubt given the DA the opportunity to swim in the same policy pool as that of the ANC and therefore to attract more black and working class voters. The emerging picture is one of differences mainly in posture and the level at which policies are pitched. Consequently, the political center (status quo) is not holding for the majority poor.

But outside the ANC, the picture is bleak too.

COSATU, the main trade union federation, is crippled by infighting partly due to its excessive attention to the organizational politics of the ANC. Hemorrhaged by nepotism and tender politics, the ANC has become unstable. And this has been costly for the already compromised COSATU. From service delivery protests to provincial and national political infighting over tenders and positions, the party has been transformed into a black hole. The fallout from Nkandla is just symptomatic of the directionless drift that has gradually been growing for a numbers of years now.

Then there’s the liberal current: the South African media, corporate South Africa, the courts and mainstream NGO’s that support the rather weak grassroots mobilization efforts around service delivery, together have become a force to be reckoned with. They wield economic power and have incredible influence over public opinion (albeit with no electoral implications), setting the tone and agenda of many debates in the public square.

For example, the media’s focus on President Jacob Zuma as the singular problem for what seems to be government’s unbridled corruption is one of the many ways in which the Fourth Estate has shaped the country’s politics, sometimes in very colonial rhetoric.

For example, big business continues to go unabated in their pursuits for super-profits either through labor exploitation or price hikes. Think of the mining houses and telecommunications companies, among many, as the latest industries to receive attention. So too the tyre, bread and the construction industries (essentially monopolies dating back to Apartheid) that have had their fair share of discipline from the Competition Commission.

The continued existence of these monopolies does, in part, confirm that the political economy of South Africa has not been fundamentally altered. It has been one of inclusion and not transformation. The social groupings that have sought to check-mate the political centre have done so within the confines of the status quo. The result is that while the political centre is challenged, white monopoly capital has simply remained intact.

Where does this leave the majority of largely poor, black and unskilled people affected by the competing interests of powerful groups?

The EFF, which basically represents the extremist impulses in the political sphere, vying to capture and represent the majority victims of these powerful interests, cannot, as yet, be considered to be a substantive oppositional left formation–this is because what is becoming clear is that many people intend to use the EFF as the big stick that could punish the ANC for its indiscretions. However, the presence of the EFF onto the political stage has brought back the lost debate about Black empowerment, deeper then the narrow, legalistic BEE definition. And, most importantly, the EFF has substantively pitched the transformation debate from redistribution and opening up industries to articulating a freedom no different from what Pixley ka Isaka Seme argued for in the Regeneration of Africa speech he made in April 1906. Accordingly, what is at stake now, beyond these elections, is Black liberation.

 

News from Nigeria

I told my son that he would get his first sense of things as soon as we boarded the flight. Planes bound for Lagos, I told him, were filled with black people and not just in economy but in first and business class too. Lagos, capital of the Black Atlantic and megacity of nearly twenty million people, was loud and theatrical with a noisescape of musical car horns and danfo bus drivers shouting out their destinations like racehorse commentators. He was going to see some crazy traffic, feel the sweltering heat, and experience the perpetual on-off-on-off of Nigeria’s power supply. He would also meet writers and artists, for I was returning to Lagos this time in my capacity as book juror for Africa’s first pan-African prize for debut fiction. In a nice twist of symmetry I had left Nigeria at the age of fourteen, which was now the age at which my son was visiting for the first time. I warned him that not every experience would be enjoyable, but I promised him a memorable visit. 

Then, shortly before we were to leave, came the New York Times Sunday Edition with its front-page article about President Goodluck Jonathan signing a bill banning same-sex relations. “Nigeria Tries to ‘Sanitize’ Itself of Gays,” read the headline, and my heart sunk as I picked up the paper from our doorstep. An accompanying photograph showed a smiling bailiff lifting his whip to punish the condemned. My immediate response was anger and shame for Nigeria. Shame at the injustice of this law and anger that in a nation riddled with corruption and the related infrastructural, employment and educational failures, this so-called “gay issue” had strangely become a government priority. I was further outraged that those most targeted by the law lived in the north close to my home city of Jos, a city now blighted by ongoing ethno-religious fighting.

I grew up, the daughter of a pastor, to a British mother and a Nigerian father in post-colonial Northern Nigeria. At the time, as is still the case, homosexuality was viewed as a depraved way of behaving and deemed alien to African cultures. The only place in Africa where homosexuality was ever even acknowledged was in South Africa and there it was blamed on the large presence of white people, the majority of whom were already deemed reprehensible for their participation in apartheid. While my upbringing was religiously and culturally diverse, the only acceptable sexuality was heterosexuality. As a child I believed what I was taught about homosexuality and continued to hold to these views into adulthood. It would take me several years to overcome my prejudices and of this I am not proud.

A few days before boarding my flight to Lagos, I was sitting in a fashionable restaurant in San Francisco. It was Valentine’s Day and I overheard two couples lambasting Nigeria for its backwardness in passing the Same Sex Marriage Prohibition Law. They were proposing an end to all direct flights from Newark to Lagos. In spite of my abhorrence for Nigeria’s new law, I found myself feeling irritated and defensive. The couples spoke of Nigerians as “those people,” as if we were all one homogenous bad lot. How easy, I thought, for these four men to sit in the comfort of tolerant San Francisco eating fancy fries and sipping oysters while excoriating other parts of the world for their backwardness. Were they forgetting that the same homophobic mentality still existed in many parts of America? That, as recently as 2003, same sex relations could be punished in some American states by life imprisonment and hard labor and that many states still carried laws criminalizing gay sex? Did they know that homophobia had been exported to Africa through colonialism and missionary teachings and most recently, via televangelists?

As my departure date drew closer, more stories emerged with graphic details of gay people being attacked and beaten. My earlier irritation now seemed almost immaterial and I felt a sense of emotional confusion made worse when I thought of what to tell my son. I didn’t expect him to fall in love with Nigeria but I wanted him to have a balanced understanding of the country. I didn’t want him to arrive and hear all about corruption and gay people being attacked and then decide to have nothing to do with his mother’s country. We would only be in Lagos for four days, which wasn’t long enough to experience much of the city, let alone the rest of Nigeria. Nevertheless I still hoped that from the little he would see he might take pride in his heritage even as my own pride in Nigeria was waning.

En route to Lagos we stopped in London where I saw family and expressed my concern over the news from Nigeria. I was cautious with them though, especially my father, who still does not accept homosexuality as being normal. I was surprised, therefore, when my father told me that on his last trip to Nigeria he’d faced criticism for stating that whatever Christians might think about homosexuality, gay people should not be criminalized. It was not a statement in support of homosexuality, but it nevertheless put my father at odds with many Christians in Nigeria. And this was not insignificant for a retired Vicar who these days felt more appreciated in the warmth of his motherland than in cold, youth-centered London where he now lives.

When we landed at Lagos’ Murtala Mohammed airport, the air was humid and sticky and other passengers unabashedly pushed us out of the way in their impatience with my son’s slow, loping way of moving. He was oblivious to the queues that might await and did not realize the privilege of being met by Daniel, a protocol officer, who ushered us through customs. Daniel, in contrast to those who previously pushed us aside, was warm and welcoming and when he heard that this was my son’s first visit to Nigeria he was ecstatic. “Welcome to the motherland,” he kept repeating. This contrasting reception – being pushed out of the way and being welcomed seemed, in retrospect, to be the perfect metaphor for the complexities into which we had just stepped. And certainly as we drove from the airport over Lagos’ modern bridges past sprawling slum dwellings and onto our luxurious hotel, I could see by watching my son’s face that he was beginning to perceive some of Lagos’ contradictions.

The day after we arrived I met with friends in our hotel lobby where we ate suya, drank red wine, and complimented each other on how well we all looked. But quickly, after the niceties, conversation turned to politics and in hushed tones my friends discussed Nigeria’s breaking news: Mallam Sanusi Lamido, Nigeria’s Central Bank Governor, had been suspended after exposing 20 billion US dollars missing from the state-run Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation. Oil wealth going astray is a familiar story to Nigerians so nobody doubted Mallam Sanusi’s allegations, but it was a question of strategy, my friends were saying. Was this the right moment for Sanusi to have revealed what everyone already knew or suspected, just one year before the general election?

As my friends spoke of strategy I found myself thinking of strategies to discuss the gay law that had been the main news coming out of Nigeria as far as Americans were concerned. Under the new law, anyone seen siding with the gay community could be imprisoned so I did not push my friends to discuss this law in the public space of the hotel lobby. Yet I was brimming with questions – how had things been? What did they think? What was being done to protest the law? I didn’t have to wait long before they brought it up themselves, and when they did their tone was something I hadn’t expected. “You know Sarah,” one explained, “This gay thing is just another tactic of distraction. Soon everyone will forget it and there will be more laws, new laws to distract.” Then they told me that most of those attacked were not artists and intellectuals as I had imagined, but poor people more like roadside bread and akara sellers. The artists, they explained, usually had ways of fleeing the country. Another friend went on to list what he described as “gotcha,” rules created to catch people out, in particular the poor, while the most corrupt and those in power, “some of whom are even sleeping with men,” he added, were left alone. So the gay issue came down to strategies and tactics.

By the time the prize-giving night that had brought us to Lagos arrived, “Sanusigate” as it had become known, had taken another turn – Mallam Sanusi’s passport had been seized and there were rumours of a possible assassination. “Life is cheap here Sarah,” said the friend recently held at gunpoint in an armed robbery attempt. “Cheap.” And as she spoke, my thoughts returned to the so-called “gay law.” Was it really just another effort by government to distract people from the sort of corruption Sanusi was trying to expose? And could I possibly offer this as an explanation to outraged liberal American friends upon my return to the U.S.?

Then came the award ceremony itself, which was a spectacular event. A red carpet was rolled out and the fashions on display far outdid any of the Oscar outfits I would look upon two weeks later back in America. Youssou N’dour performed live and as he sang Bob Marley’s “Redemption Song,” everyone rocked to the lyrics of freedom. The first-prize winner, NoViolet Bulawayo, spoke with passion of an “excellent and necessary” prize. By the end of the night, in spite of all that deeply saddened and troubled me about Nigeria, I was feeling more hopeful.

I did not ask my son what he understood about the passing of Nigeria’s anti-gay law until we were back in America. I was surprised when his first response was to remind me that it wasn’t just Nigeria that had such a law but Uganda, too. I was worried that he would now dismiss the whole continent as so much of the world already did. But I should have given him more credit. They were studying civil rights at his school and glancing up from his textbooks he said, quite matter of fact, “Well the world itself is quite homophobic.” Gathering pencils and paper, he reflected for a moment on how some countries were just moving forward more quickly than others. Then he paused and proudly added, “and America is like at the fore of that.” I waited for him to say more, to expand, but he had said his piece and left me pondering our brief conversation. I realized then that he had answered more than the question first asked. I had been curious about his feelings for Nigeria and its anti-gay law, but he went beyond Nigeria to the rest of the world, to the bigger picture. He was not torn by family or national allegiances but looked squarely at the issues, as they deserved to be understood. It was not complicated for him. Nor did it need to be for me.

* Images by Victor Ehikhamenor

Rwanda and the NY Times: On those images by Pieter Hugo pairing perpetrators and victims of the 1994 Genocide

“Portraits of Reconciliation,”–the photo-essay commemorating the 20th anniversary of the Rwandan Genocide–published recently in the New York Times, is a deeply disturbing piece of journalism.  Profoundly banal, the subtitle states, “20 years after the genocide in Rwanda, reconciliation still happens one encounter at a time.” Repetitive and reductive,  the narrative reduces violence to a set of meaningless outbursts, while it simultaneously fashions forgiveness in the Christian vision of redemption. A self-assured narrative of reconciliation, forgiveness and transformation, the photo-essay depicts a world organized around binary preoccupation: Hutu and Tutsi, Good and Evil, Victim and Perpetrator, and Redemption and Liberation.

It’s impulse locates core Rwandan identity in the archetypal biblical figures of a forgiving-victim and a perpetrator in search of redemption. There is one “overarching identity” that gathers all the fractured identities into some narrative thread. In its most sinister form, this documentary drive serves to enforce dominant power structures in society.

How could the trauma be spoken of through one photograph, one voice? How can a range of contradictory and irreconcilable emotions of loss be explained through one narrative, one self?  While photography is capable of opening up questions about power and authority, which are silenced, this essay adheres to frequently circulated and authoritative discursive practices. There is no critical enquiry of the premise that demands and dictates reconciliation; instead it de-facto buys into the assumptions.

Without language, pictures get handcuffed in what Walter Benjamin famously called “the approximate.” The approximate is a liability, at times even intellectually incomplete and has to be remedied by means of language and thought. While the entire piece provokes momentary horror and an illusion of human resilience, it largely leaves the spectator ignorant. The text similarly refuses to venture into areas of moral ambiguities where victim become perpetrators, or critique the political demands placed on the survivors of genocide by the Rwandan State.  Consequently it fails to grapple with the problem of the political.

Since Marx’s critique of Hegel, reconciliation is seen as a concept that always casts social conflict in the service of the state. It immediately dilutes the fundamental contradictions at the heart of conflict, the consciousness of which would radically call into question the very basis of the State and automatically denies the possibility of living with irresolvable conflicts. As an ideology, reconciliation immediately becomes complicit in the exercise of various forms of structural violence in its appeal to an idea of commonality to legitimate a social hierarchy.

Thus reconciliation is not just a personal act, it has come to function as an organizing category that disciplines conflict and renders subjects disagreement resolvable in terms agreeable with the new post-genocide state. But more crucially it is conditioning the way in which Rwanda’s history is being rewritten as the history of violence (victim’s history) and a history of Hutu guilt,  rather than one of exploitation, power, resistance and the unthinkable violence, whose genealogy is deeply intertwined with the history of colonization.  .

Rwanda is a living museum of genocide. Signs with the word “Jenoside’ is plastered throughout the country. These signs mark the sites of massacres and mass graves. Other larger signs repeatedly proclaimed, “Never Again.” Ntarama and Nyamata Churches locatednsouth of Kigali are horrifying reminders of violence that took place during the genocide are now genocide memorial sites. The floor of the Church at Ntarama, bloodstains, bones, blood soaked clothing, shoes, and personal artifacts from the massacre remain scattered on the floor. At Murambi genocide memorial site, mummified bodily remains of men, women and infants are displayed. Seeing these bodies, frozen in the positions in which they met their gruesome fates, one can hear an “extraordinary scream pass through nature”.

These corpses are a testimony to the genocide. A physical manifestation of Tito Rutaremara’s proclamation that, “the genocide must live on.” A constant physical reminder is still deemed imperative to fight against any future “genocidal tendencies”. These artifacts of political violence, shrines and memorials perform another function, they are a constant affirmation of Hutu atrocity and guilt.

When you refuse to bury the dead, when the memory of violence lingers in every street corner, when does mourning end, and where does forgiveness begins? What are the Rwandans to reconcile themselves to?

No one can say with certainty how many were killed in those 100 days of terror.  The estimates vary between ten and fifty thousand Hutu, and close to a million Tutsi. Hutu’s were killed due to political opposition, others for refusing to partake in the violence. Both men and women participated. Some women played prominent political roles, while others killed. Some assisted killers by preparing the meals, delivering food to check posts and others even cheered them on. On the streets, these women became informants calling out hiding spots, refusing to hide their Tutsi neighbors and stealing from the dead. Women partook, because many genuinely believed that Tutsi’s need to be killed.   In one remarkable story, a Tutsi woman wore military uniform on during the genocide, to get through the roadblocks to save her Tutsi niece who had been attacked. When subsequently caught by the Interahamwe trying to hide the girl, she offered herself as a sex slave (femme de viol) to the local Interahamwe leader in order to protect the girl, and others, from rape. Later she used her “rape-husbands” help to travel to Butare in search of her other family, all the while witnessing her “husbands” atrocities. There remains a reluctance to acknowledge the complex realities of women’s lives during the genocide, beyond the gendered imagery.

The unsettling reality is that everybody participated. The Genocide then, was not merely the State project of annihilation; it was social and populist, with “popular” agency. It was carried out by hundreds of thousands of men and women.   The Photo-essay remains oblivious to the other kind of history, the Rwandan state’s persistent refusal to prosecute alleged war crimes committed by the (then rebel) Rwandan Patriotic Army (RPA) before and during the genocide, reprisal killings by RPA soldiers and other individuals during and after the genocide, and the massacre of thousands of Hutu perpetrated by the RPA – for instance, the attack on the Kibeho camp for Internally Displaced Persons in 1995 and in eastern Zaire/Democratic Republic of Congo.

Nobel Laureate Wole Soyinka, writing in May 1994, stated that Rwanda is clinically dead as a nation. The Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) under President Kagame used nothing short of brute force and war, and a new foundational myth to breathe life back to the Rwandan State. Once in government, Mr Kagame, who first served as Rwanda’s defence minister and vice-president, backed the rebellion in neighbouring Democratic Republic of Congo to overthrow President Mobutu Seso Seko’s regime, that started the First Congo War.

Similarly, the genocide gave birth to Tutsi Power in Rwanda. Rwandan political power remains in the hands of a few men, who grew up as refugees in Uganda, and are former RPF officers. This process of accumulation of power in the hands of a small inner circle is masked by the government enforced ‘version’ of history.  A history constantly validated by stories of reconciliation. The memory of the genocide is instrumentalized to stifle dissent and international criticism. The act of reconciliation, predominantly through gacaca courts, although sometimes genuinely participatory, has been manipulated to intimidate Kagame’s political opponents and consolidate power.

Rwandan identity today, is inexplicably shaped as the identity of surviving the genocide. As the Genocide lives on, there are living breathing bodies, who closely escaped annihilation, who live amongst men and women who perpetrated and made these deaths possible. Everyday, they encounter the memory of violence, death and loss. It is these lives from whom we demand forgiveness and extract reconciliation, for the sake of the State. The reconciliation process can achieve nothing because it does not promise justice and there can be no justice without a reorganization of power.

The photographs by Pieter Hugo perpetuate a different kind of violence. First, it silences and misrepresents the history of the survivors, both Tutsis and Hutus. Second, it re-enforces the collective stigmatization of all Hutu as génocidaires. Despite periodic chastising of President Kagame and his government, the general admiration for him and a consistent refusal to demand a prosecution of RPA for its war crimes remain a standard Western practise. Rwandan government’s consistent use of illegitimate force outside the border of its own state, progressive march towards authoritarianism, misuse of the judicial process of reconciliation to consolidate power, and even the simple recognition that Kagame went into [DR] Congo with American support and started two wars to consolidate the Rwandan state authority, remains written out of these narratives.

If this is the status quo, these stories and storytellers, then, act as useful idiots in the service of the Rwandan state, and reaffirm the broader western consensus. Our quiet encouragement and support in perpetuating this narrative makes us complicit bystanders to the perpetrators of yesterday.

Rwanda: “The Genocide must live on …”

“Portraits of Reconciliation,”–the photo-essay commemorating the 20th anniversary of the Rwandan Genocide–published recently in the New York Times, is a deeply disturbing piece of journalism.  Profoundly banal, the subtitle states, “20 years after the genocide in Rwanda, reconciliation still happens one encounter at a time.” Repetitive and reductive,  the narrative reduces violence to a set of meaningless outbursts, while it simultaneously fashions forgiveness in the Christian vision of redemption. A self-assured narrative of reconciliation, forgiveness and transformation, the photo-essay depicts a world organized around binary preoccupation: Hutu and Tutsi, Good and Evil, Victim and Perpetrator, and Redemption and Liberation.

It’s impulse locates core Rwandan identity in the archetypal biblical figures of a forgiving-victim and a perpetrator in search of redemption. There is one “overarching identity” that gathers all the fractured identities into some narrative thread. In its most sinister form, this documentary drive serves to enforce dominant power structures in society.

How could the trauma be spoken of through one photograph, one voice? How can a range of contradictory and irreconcilable emotions of loss be explained through one narrative, one self?  While photography is capable of opening up questions about power and authority, which are silenced, this essay adheres to frequently circulated and authoritative discursive practices. There is no critical enquiry of the premise that demands and dictates reconciliation; instead it de-facto buys into the assumptions.

Without language, pictures get handcuffed in what Walter Benjamin famously called “the approximate.” The approximate is a liability, at times even intellectually incomplete and has to be remedied by means of language and thought. While the entire piece provokes momentary horror and an illusion of human resilience, it largely leaves the spectator ignorant. The text similarly refuses to venture into areas of moral ambiguities where victim become perpetrators, or critique the political demands placed on the survivors of genocide by the Rwandan State.  Consequently it fails to grapple with the problem of the political.

Since Marx’s critique of Hegel, reconciliation is seen as a concept that always casts social conflict in the service of the state. It immediately dilutes the fundamental contradictions at the heart of conflict, the consciousness of which would radically call into question the very basis of the State and automatically denies the possibility of living with irresolvable conflicts. As an ideology, reconciliation immediately becomes complicit in the exercise of various forms of structural violence in its appeal to an idea of commonality to legitimate a social hierarchy.

Thus reconciliation is not just a personal act, it has come to function as an organizing category that disciplines conflict and renders subjects disagreement resolvable in terms agreeable with the new post-genocide state. But more crucially it is conditioning the way in which Rwanda’s history is being rewritten as the history of violence (victim’s history) and a history of Hutu guilt,  rather than one of exploitation, power, resistance and the unthinkable violence, whose genealogy is deeply intertwined with the history of colonization.  .

Rwanda is a living museum of genocide. Signs with the word “Jenoside’ is plastered throughout the country. These signs mark the sites of massacres and mass graves. Other larger signs repeatedly proclaimed, “Never Again.” Ntarama and Nyamata Churches locatednsouth of Kigali are horrifying reminders of violence that took place during the genocide are now genocide memorial sites. The floor of the Church at Ntarama, bloodstains, bones, blood soaked clothing, shoes, and personal artifacts from the massacre remain scattered on the floor. At Murambi genocide memorial site, mummified bodily remains of men, women and infants are displayed. Seeing these bodies, frozen in the positions in which they met their gruesome fates, one can hear an “extraordinary scream pass through nature”.

These corpses are a testimony to the genocide. A physical manifestation of Tito Rutaremara’s proclamation that, “the genocide must live on.” A constant physical reminder is still deemed imperative to fight against any future “genocidal tendencies”. These artifacts of political violence, shrines and memorials perform another function, they are a constant affirmation of Hutu atrocity and guilt.

When you refuse to bury the dead, when the memory of violence lingers in every street corner, when does mourning end, and where does forgiveness begins? What are the Rwandans to reconcile themselves to?

No one can say with certainty how many were killed in those 100 days of terror.  The estimates vary between ten and fifty thousand Hutu, and close to a million Tutsi. Hutu’s were killed due to political opposition, others for refusing to partake in the violence. Both men and women participated. Some women played prominent political roles, while others killed. Some assisted killers by preparing the meals, delivering food to check posts and others even cheered them on. On the streets, these women became informants calling out hiding spots, refusing to hide their Tutsi neighbors and stealing from the dead. Women partook, because many genuinely believed that Tutsi’s need to be killed.   In one remarkable story, a Tutsi woman wore military uniform on during the genocide, to get through the roadblocks to save her Tutsi niece who had been attacked. When subsequently caught by the Interahamwe trying to hide the girl, she offered herself as a sex slave (femme de viol) to the local Interahamwe leader in order to protect the girl, and others, from rape. Later she used her “rape-husbands” help to travel to Butare in search of her other family, all the while witnessing her “husbands” atrocities. There remains a reluctance to acknowledge the complex realities of women’s lives during the genocide, beyond the gendered imagery.

The unsettling reality is that everybody participated. The Genocide then, was not merely the State project of annihilation; it was social and populist, with “popular” agency. It was carried out by hundreds of thousands of men and women.   The Photo-essay remains oblivious to the other kind of history, the Rwandan state’s persistent refusal to prosecute alleged war crimes committed by the (then rebel) Rwandan Patriotic Army (RPA) before and during the genocide, reprisal killings by RPA soldiers and other individuals during and after the genocide, and the massacre of thousands of Hutu perpetrated by the RPA – for instance, the attack on the Kibeho camp for Internally Displaced Persons in 1995 and in eastern Zaire/Democratic Republic of Congo.

Nobel Laureate Wole Soyinka, writing in May 1994, stated that Rwanda is clinically dead as a nation. The Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) under President Kagame used nothing short of brute force and war, and a new foundational myth to breathe life back to the Rwandan State. Once in government, Mr Kagame, who first served as Rwanda’s defence minister and vice-president, backed the rebellion in neighbouring Democratic Republic of Congo to overthrow President Mobutu Seso Seko’s regime, that started the First Congo War.

Similarly, the genocide gave birth to Tutsi Power in Rwanda. Rwandan political power remains in the hands of a few men, who grew up as refugees in Uganda, and are former RPF officers. This process of accumulation of power in the hands of a small inner circle is masked by the government enforced ‘version’ of history.  A history constantly validated by stories of reconciliation. The memory of the genocide is instrumentalized to stifle dissent and international criticism. The act of reconciliation, predominantly through gacaca courts, although sometimes genuinely participatory, has been manipulated to intimidate Kagame’s political opponents and consolidate power.

Rwandan identity today, is inexplicably shaped as the identity of surviving the genocide. As the Genocide lives on, there are living breathing bodies, who closely escaped annihilation, who live amongst men and women who perpetrated and made these deaths possible. Everyday, they encounter the memory of violence, death and loss. It is these lives from whom we demand forgiveness and extract reconciliation, for the sake of the State. The reconciliation process can achieve nothing because it does not promise justice and there can be no justice without a reorganization of power.

The photographs by Pieter Hugo perpetuate a different kind of violence. First, it silences and misrepresents the history of the survivors, both Tutsis and Hutus. Second, it re-enforces the collective stigmatization of all Hutu as génocidaires. Despite periodic chastising of President Kagame and his government, the general admiration for him and a consistent refusal to demand a prosecution of RPA for its war crimes remain a standard Western practise. Rwandan government’s consistent use of illegitimate force outside the border of its own state, progressive march towards authoritarianism, misuse of the judicial process of reconciliation to consolidate power, and even the simple recognition that Kagame went into [DR] Congo with American support and started two wars to consolidate the Rwandan state authority, remains written out of these narratives.

If this is the status quo, these stories and storytellers, then, act as useful idiots in the service of the Rwandan state, and reaffirm the broader western consensus. Our quiet encouragement and support in perpetuating this narrative makes us complicit bystanders to the perpetrators of yesterday.

#GEJPOSE: When Goodluck Jonathan got the hashtag treatment

It baffles us why politicians and public agencies–especially unpopular ones–think they can still control their images in the age of social media. Take the New York Police Department’s @NYPDNews account on Twitter to #MyNYPD campaign to solicit members of the public for photos they took with officers. Instead, Twitter users hijacked the hashtag with photos of wrongful arrests and police brutality. There are also occasions when some genius invents a hashtag to mock a politician. Like last week when Nigeria’s President Goodluck Jonathan visited victims of the Abuja bomb blast and managed to strike the same “deeply-concerned-chin-stroking” pose in every single photo.



When he wasn’t doing a crap job of pretending to be concerned for the cameras, Jonathan spent the week of the bombing dancing, no doubt playing Fruit Ninja on one of the golden iPhones handed out to guests at his daughter’s wedding the day before the blast (this was not even his first order of gold iPhones, how many does he need?), and doing precisely nothing to protect Nigerians and resolve the Boko Haram crisis.

Right after the news of the bombing broke, what did Jonathan say to his grief-stricken nation? “We’ll get over it.” Easy to say when you’ve got several gold-plated iPhones to play with. Who is advising this man? Answer: a medium-sized army of highly paid “special advisers”.

The images of Jonathan struggling to feign sympathy for wounded people bleeding in hospital beds confirmed what everyone already knew from Jonathan’s abysmal record in government: he simply doesn’t care about ordinary Nigerians.

It wasn’t long before Nigerians on Twitter mocked their dear leader with the hashtag #GEJPOSE. Below we posted our favorite ones:

 

@naf_iu and @mohammed69 doing the #GEJPOSE cc @C_SPEC @omojuwa @barr_maryam lol pic.twitter.com/OfUlBS3qMH — Captain Moh (@mohammed69) April 16, 2014

#GEJPose pic.twitter.com/mcqfay6jMG — tolu ogunlesi (@toluogunlesi) April 17, 2014

Don’t know if Girls are included #GEJPOSE pic.twitter.com/Ca17tiCMBT — I♥SpongeBob (@Mss_Spongie) April 17, 2014

#GEJPOSE with my friend @callmidjremedy pic.twitter.com/1LXbEjozsF — Abuobakar Evuti (@Ngugievuti) April 16, 2014

#Nigeria‘s #GEJPose Cc @ayosogunro @Ayourb @ogundamisi @Bar_Baric @MusadiqZ @Nedunaija @Oddy4real @InfoNubia pic.twitter.com/EocGsUCFuw — The Tope Ibironke (@TopeIbironke) April 21, 2014

‘Township’ is a planet for aliens

A few days ago, Bizcommmunity, an online platform for writings about, amongst other things, content about media, PR and advertising in South Africa (though you wouldn’t say by the 1996-era site design) published an article riddled with stereotypes. “The township is no longer a foreign land far away and its story is no longer one of the haves and have-nots,” writes one Danette Breitenbach. But the narrative Ms Breitenbach weaves here is not hers alone.

Her opening sentence is an odd one: it attempts to debunk stereotypes about what she calls ‘the township’, as opposed to townships in plural form and not as one thing and yet she also propagates the stereotype. The latter part of that sentence is not at all incorrect, given of course that one is referring to townships in the sense of topography and not economy. Townships were designed as such that they are far away from cities and suburbs where white people lived during the Apartheid years. The other problematic issue here is the expression ‘The Township’. She quantifies a million people into a single place, as if, the township is a planet that only has one person. South Africa has many townships; yes they have similarities, a fact true for cities and suburbs, yet people talk of cities and suburbs and not the city or the suburb when referring to them.

The article was about findings by a company called Ask Afrika, which conducted research to understand township consumers. ‘Township consumers’ is another problematic wording. Many advertising agencies have held the view that there is one consumer living in townships, that people in the townships have the same buying habits. Findings by Ask Africa enlighten the advertising industry that there is actually no such thing. To conduct research to come to the realization that townships are as dynamic as cities and suburbs is redundant. When the Group Areas of 1950 became effective and forced removal became priority of the Apartheid government, the very people that were being moved were dynamic; to then investigate if they are dynamic in 2014 is ridiculous.

To begin with the thinking that townships need investigating to be understood is problematic.

“Township consumers are savvy in a different way in that when making a purchase, they look from a cultural perspective at what they buy,” writes Danette. WTF? She has clearly never lived in a township.

It is this systematic pigeon-holing of an entire community that is problematic.

But of course, the people who know that there is not one township and not one giant citizen roaming around there, cannot spend their time educating ignorant people like Danette and Ask Africa’s commercial director, Paida Mugudubi. Narratives about townships that only exist to correct wrongs that persist because of ignorance and nothing else are themselves doing townships a disservice. We should tell our own stories, our complexities instead.

There are places in townships that are interested in attracting people outside of townships. Branding themselves as ‘giving you the township experience’. But they always appear to miss the point. They always conform to the discomforts of the outsiders. The Department of Coffee in Khayelitsha is a perfect example of this. One of their monthly events in association with Metrorail is aimed at attracting outsiders to go to Khayelitsha and experience it. They are transported in special metrorail trains and not the commuter trains that people from Khayelitsha use. They also get police to guard and escort the visitors. How is this promoting Khayelitsha? It does not, being the short answer.

The solution is simple and perhaps, radical; it’s imbedded in Pharaohe Monch’s song “Simon says”, it is ‘get the fuck out”: “Get the fuck out” of the townships if you only visit them to confirm your prejudices and not to experience them the way they are, the way they have always been, dynamic and complex.

* Image Credit: Still from “District 9″

Lupita Nyong’o and the Mexicans

“How much does the Oscar belong to Mexico?” a reporter asked actress Lupita Nyong’o the day after the 2014 Academy Awards. Her answer “It all belongs to me.” A few months earlier, when “12 Years a Slave” premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival, she was more diplomatic. She explained that she was born in Mexico, that her family moved back Kenya when she was merely one years old and that she returned to Mexico at 16 to learn Spanish. “Of course I have this special place for Mexico in my heart. It was my birthplace.” Pushed to identify with either country, she joked: “I’m a Mexi-Kenyan”:

But if anything, at least in what passes for the Mexican online sphere, attempts to claim Lupita’s win for Mexico (here’s a list of other Mexican Oscar winners), was quickly displaced by a more pressing debate:  Why should Lupita owe the golden statue to Mexico, a country with such high levels of racism?

During the Oscars, both the presidents of Mexico and Kenya ran to tweet about Lupita’s win (see the tweets here and here). In both countries, this was followed by a great number of news reports that highlighted Lupita as a symbol of national pride. But online debate on the topic took a turn the day after the Oscars, when Lupita echoed what she said in Toronto: that she “had seen the fight over her nationality. I am Kenyan and Mexican at the same time.”

Online news portal SDPnoticias.com noted: “After winning the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress, Lupita Nyong’o, who earlier reportedly had expressed her pride of being Mexican-born, chose to not share this recognition with the Mexicans.” You can read those stories about her statement here and here. Subsequently, several users commented on these stories, taking the rejection personal.  Some became defensive, suggesting Lupita bought a misguided view of Mexico as racist to blacks or people of African descent. Jose, a reader of Sinembargo.mx wrote in:  “In Mexico we are too racist for her to even say hi to us.” And another, Beto, wrote in elmanana.com.mx: “We did not know anything about her. Nobody was paying attention to her, let alone how racist we are in Mexico” You can read the full thread of comments (in Spanish) here and here.

But not everyone bought this line.

Renown Mexican blogger and journalist Alberto Buitre tweeted “It is curious that a country deeply racist such as Mexico claims Lupita’s award”. (See the tweet in Spanish here). In blogdeizquierda.com, Victor Hernández asked: what does she owe to Mexico? Nothing. Come On. Televisa (the Mexican private channel) would never have given her a leading role in a soap opera. In the racist Mexican television industry those roles are reserved to white actresses or blondes. (The full post here) In this same line of thought, Jerry Ph wrote on Tv Notas:

Lupita’s triumph is only hers. Now Televisa will hire her for one of its shows? Her role would probably be as a maid or a nanny of a blond rich. Though it hurts, this is the truth.

Televisa is the largest broadcasting company in Mexico and also exports soap operas to other countries in the region. Research shows that most Mexican soap operas present perpetuate racial stereotypes, regardless of the target market.

Mainstream media coverage about Lupita can give us some hints about racism in Mexico. So, for example, in late February Nyongo’o told the Black Women in Hollywood Awards that as a teenager she often dreamed about having a lighter skin color, but when she saw the South Sudanese model Alek Wek, Lupita accepted the diversity in beauty standards.   The newspaper El Pionero published the following news summary “The Oscar winner revealed that she would love to be a White woman”. El Pionero emphasized this was her “present wish”, despite the fact that Lupita made clear this was a past hope. One can only wonder what was behind the mistake behind the news summary?

Prior to the Oscars, the Sunday magazine of El Universal, one of Mexico’s largest newspapers, featured a profile of Lupita. The journalist, Mario Szekely, wrote that “she gave the impression of being an African panther ready to jump on its prey at any moment.”

But some news outlets and its readers were honest about the racism surrounding Lupita across online discussions. The news site Alto Nivel reported that what was “ugly” about the Oscars night was the “terrible and racist comments in social media related to the triumph of the actress. Unforgivable.”

Latin America, the country–through Gabo’s eyes

Nobel laureate Gabriel García Márquez–known affectionately as Gabo to his readers–died last week in Mexico City. The Colombian novelist wrote the famous book ‘A 100 years of solitude’ and is remembered as the father of magical realism, a literary genre in which everyday scenes and magical acts merge.  A prolific writer that has been compared to William Faulkner, his celebrated novel is considered as important as Miguel de Cervantes’‘Don Quixote.’

García Márquez might not have appreciated that comparison, even if he himself was a Faulkner’s fan. A speech he delivered in 1995–called Latin America exists–exposes Gabo’s life commitment to fighting cultural, political or social forms of neocolonialism. Or even more, to counter that everything in Latin America, or the world of the Caribbean, can not be understood through European or North American lenses. He said:

About the Caribbean, I think its area is not very well determined, because it should not be geographic but cultural. It should start at the South of the United States and extend until the north of Brazil. Central America, that we assume Pacific, is really not and its culture is Caribbean. This legitimate claim would have at least the advantage that Faulkner and all the greatest writers of the south of the United States would make part of magical realism. Also, around the 1940’s, Giovanni Papini declared that Latin America had not provided anything to humanity, not even a saint, as if that was not good enough. He was wrong, because we did have Santa Rosa de Lima, but he didn’t count her, maybe because she was a woman. His assertion illustrated precisely the idea that Europeans have always shared about us: that all that is not done the way they do it is a mistake, and they make everything to correct it, their way, as the United States does. Simón Bolívar, desperate to hear advises and impositions, demanded one day: “Let us make our own Middle Ages.”

Gabo finished that 1995 speech condemning the privatization of education, and stating that despite being “battered and scattered, still unfinished and always looking for an ethical life, Latin America exists.”

In the coming weeks and months, Gabo’s work should be explained in the coming days beyond the comparisons to William Faulkner or Cervantes. His worlds not only challenged poetry, but demanded political and social change. Gabo’s writing style is not separated to his political convictions, because he knew how to use prose or poetry to critique Washington’s policies on The War on Drugs, the CIA intervention in Chile in 1973 to the overthrow President Allende, or to challenge mainstream media (both in the US and in Latin America) of Hugo Chavez as Latin America’s worse threat.

* Gabo’s family has decided that he will have a private funeral, but there will be a public tribute in Mexico City tonight with the presence of the Colombian and Mexican presidents. So, it is Latin America’s right-wing presidents that will say goodbye to such an important author from the left.

Nene Leakes’ ‘African tribal dance’

Whenever “The Real Housewives of Atlanta,” comes on, we look away. But sometimes we can’t. Like the time they went to “Africa.” It was really just South Africa and they stayed in air conditioned hotels (they called the Ghanaian president for advice before they left). Then there’s the ongoing saga of the “African prince” which one of the housewives, Kenya Moore — or is it Portia Williams? — claims to date (on Instagram, she posts pics of the swag he supposedly gives her, but no pics of him, or of them together).  There was a rumor that the alleged boyfriend was Teodoro Obiang. Of course, we know Teodoro is a sort of prince in that his corrupt family runs Equatorial Guinea like it their kingdom. Others said it was D’Banj. Then the other housewives claimed Moore paid D’Banj to play her boyfriend. Yes, we’re tired of all this nonsense, too, what with the TV network that produces the “Housewives” franchise, Bravo, milking the “African prince” story for all its worth as can be seen from this video from a few days ago. But sometimes, the housewives skip the dating/man/catfight-centered plotlines and branch out (they’re celebrities and “talent” now) and actually try to do other things. Like when Nene Leakes (just google her) did an “African tribal dance” on the current season of “Dancing with the Stars.” During a recent episode, Nene and Derek Hough, her dance partner (not her regular one; something about a “switch up”) decided to do a jazz number. This became an “African, tribal dance.” Because, as everyone knows, jazz dancing is tribal and came from the jungles. Of Harlem. So here’s Nene explaining to E!Online how they came up with the “African tribal dance” theme:

He said, ‘Hunni nobody can do this, you’re the only person here who can do this. You’re always the queen bee, and fabulous, and over the top, so there’s nobody else here who can do an African tribal dance. You’re the only black girl here.’ I thought that was creative and awesome and I was like whaaaat?! I’ve only been to Africa one time I don’t know what they do over there, but let’s try it!

Despite the fact that Nene has no more knowledge of Africa and its tribals than the producers and Derek Hough, they still did their African tribal dance. Her costume and the dancing — a mix between a bad Bollywood number,  an extra on ‘The Lion King’ musical, and a terrible version of Josephine Baker’s banana dance — are eyewateringly painful to behold. We don’t know if the producers were knowingly having fun at Nene’s expense, or are truly that ignorant and racist. And here’s the evidence. Send small children out of the room: