Sean Jacobs's Blog, page 414

Europeans ‘rescuing’ African art from obscurity again

On April 1st, the Saatchi Gallery in London held a private preview for its new exhibition, Pangaea: New Art from Africa and Latin America, ahead of the five-month long show. Attendees remarked at the variety of art on display and the event was described by many as a resounding success. Following the opening, this article written by Colin Gleadell was published the UK’s Telegraph newspaper in which the author begins with hostility:

Visitors to the Saatchi Gallery hoping to spot the next big thing in the art market as seen through the great collector’s eyes should take care. So many of the shows, upstairs particularly, are not of works in his collection or that he has bought. These are exhibitions taking place under his roof in order to pay the rent.

Gleadell goes on to suggest that in holding this exhibition Saatchi has become a philanthropist in his support of poor artists.

But this show reveals a philanthropical side to his activities. In the African art section are a number of works by the Ivory Coast painter, Aboudia, and by Boris Nzebo, a painter from Cameroon. Both artists were living in poverty when Saatchi bought their work.

Is this to say that the artists are lucky to get handouts? The implication also disregards the desire of those artists who create to inspire and educate through their passion, and not simply for financial gain.

Gleadell then describes Jack Bell, a young Australian gallerist based in London, as some sort of saviour of African art- rescuing artists from the deep dark pits of oblivion since 2010.

Portraying Bell as a valiant redeemer is nothing short of a spit in the face of the many gallerists, curators and writers whose efforts in supporting, mentoring and opening doors for artists have been unwavering.

For years Bisi Silva, Nana Oforiatta-Ayim, Koyo Kouoh and Elvira Dyangani Ose, to name a few, have been active players in the art world.

Why are they being written out of the story? What about the work of Paula Nascimento who contributed to success of the Angola pavilion at the Venice Biennial last year? And that of David Adjaye?

Or the artists with long-spanning careers, El Anatsui, Malick Sidibe and the late Gerard Sekoto, can they not take any credit for their great work that has also helped put other African artists in the limelight?

The matter goes beyond Jack Bell.

These actors do not deserve to have the wide-range of opportunists past and present, who flock to the continent to “discover Africa”, ride on their coat-tails.

I don’t know whether Bell is aware of or had any input into Gleadell’s article but I sincerely hope not. It is sad that he is being shown in this light.

The article is disgraceful and I urge participants in the art world in Africa and Latin America to shun and rally against this neo-colonial narrative and reclaim their work for themselves.

Do so before the “cultural vultures” (as Oforiatta-Ayim succinctly put it) pick it apart, gobble it up and leave both continents with nothing but bare bones.

Image: “Peace (The Zionist series)” (2010) by Mário Macilau.

Jazz in Cape Town

In Cape Town jazz here is not just jazz. It’s a whole lot more. For one, it is a dance style that continues to be the predominant feature of successive generations of Cape Flats families. Almost similar to what is called salsa in the Latino communities, jazzing on the Cape Flats is now somewhat of a tradition. And I use tradition in a deliberate way, to think about inheritances of practices that are shared, dynamic and made and remade anew, but always defined also by what is continued as it is passed down. Tradition is also useful I think as a description, because it plays with what we most often consider tradition: traditions refer to things before the modern in some peoples minds.

South Africa is of course a place where its not that easy to speak in the singular of a South African tradition. We might have some age old traditions, but in a society that has been produced by keeping things and people apart for so long, traditions are fragmented and particular most of the time. There are few “shared” traditions in a place where races and ethnicities were prescribed to think apart, live apart, make their cultural artefacts apart, and play sport apart. For that reason, it is an interesting phenomena that jazz has become the cultural genre that has come the closest to creating audiences that crossed these boundaries. Given the rapid forced migration of African’s from the country side into cities by white industrialists, many older bonds and ties where strained and eviscerated in the 20th century. A very urbanised society, in contrast to the rest of sub-Saharan Africa, the townships of South African cities threw people into a melting pot where ethnic traditions were reshaped and remoulded in urban settings, and where new subjectivities emerged.

New musical forms like marabi, emerged in this moment. As many of the musicians of that period would describe it, the formative influences of marabi were drawn from African American popular culture, and from the swing and bebop jazz eras. Many of the early bands were local instantiations of their American role models, with the music being judged on how close they could imitate their idols in sartorial elegance and virtuosity. Even the names, like Manhattan Brothers, Jazz Epistles recalled these influences.

Even though it seemed derivate as a style, it later, displayed the particularity of its African origins. There is a wonderful moment, when as Hugh Masekela describes it, he goes to study in New York, through a scholarship arranged by Miriam Makeba via Harry Belafonte. He quickly learns the American song book. But having left the country, Masekela and other artists, find themselves in exile from the country of their birth, and faced with the prospects of being working musicians in North America and Europe. They realise that they needed to tap into their particularity if they were going to offer something distinct, and this encouraged the accentuation of those traditions that were there in marabi music, that plaited the vernacular forms of African ethnic cultural production into the generality that had become jazz.

The gift of this pain, we might say, is that if we are too think of what might be a distinctive modern South African sound, a soundtrack to a future imagined out of divided past, then it is jazz. It was jazz musicians who played in small clubs to mixed subversive audiences in the country at the height of the State of Emergency. Jazz musicians were the main attraction of meetings billed as cultural events, happy to serve as alibis for anti-apartheid organizing when political meetings were banned.

Figures like the late Basil Coetzee was one such persona, along with Robbie Jansen, in the Cape. These two chose not to go into exile, but both had also been given great prominence by the international attention that the other genius of this distinctive jazz style, Abdullah Ibrahim had achieved. They had both played saxophone with Ibrahim, at various points, and Basil Coetzee was known by the moniker Basil ‘Manenberg’ Coetzee, because of his searing saxophone solo on Ibrahim’s classic composition, which was also the title track to the album, ‘Manenberg’. It referred to a working class “coloured” group area on the Cape Flats where communities who were removed from areas like District Six, were thrown into after the Group Areas Act designated these areas white.

Coetzee and Jansen were remarkable artists whose fates and fortunes waxed and waned when they chose home over exile. For many years Coetzee worked as cobbler, repairing shoes, when the political repression made living as a jazz musician financially disastrous for black musicians who had little access to main stream commercial prospects – no radio time, no official recognition, and few recognised clubs to play to paying audiences in a way that could sustain a life. But they did, in the ways that made the life of jazz musicians precarious and closer to and often times, beyond the edge.

Both Coetzee and Jansen are now late; the toll of lives lived in difficult times made bearable by hard living and its associated pleasures and perils. Ibrahim’s conversion to Islam in the 1970’s perhaps offered him a gentler mode of absorbing the heartbreak of exile, A daily regime of yoga and martial arts also finds metaphor in his music, as he has learnt to discipline time and sound. As a stereotype, many people will tell you that those of us who grew up on the Cape Flats talk very fast, as if you have to get all your words in before being cut off by your fellow conversationalists. Fast, quick and loud. Ibrahim is slow, deliberate and silent. He rarely ever speaks publicly. He does not editorialise much, or express opinions loudly. He is a certain kind of enigmatic figure, elliptical and opaque, made more complex by simplicity.

Which is why the picture that I like that I have taken of him performing is the one I have included here: a silhouetted figure. Known in form, recognisable in profile. But impenetrable to a certain kind of knowing or becoming intimate with him. We never really “know”, we always will be surprised, we cannot anticipate the minds work, or how it will translate into the pianists fingers. When he sits down to play, particularly at his solo concerts, he will greet with a Salaam, play for an hour or so, without breaks, and end with a Salaam and walk off the stage.

Then there is his disciplining of Time. The deliberateness of the pauses between his notes. The yogic practices of breathing. Even when there are frenetic moments, it’s a controlled cacophony, it goes out and returns to structure, in the best way that jazz gives the illusion of improvisation. And as always, there are the particularities. The names of albums and songs are rarely generic. Place and time seem always to mark them. There are the beats, the sound of the goema drum, the drum of the free slaves of the Malay descendants.

In his rendition the goema beat is faint, distilled, abstracted into its purest and simplest elements, made to weave between and within, so that the familiar and the strange, that which we recognise and that which we are learning to know, are conjoined contrapuntally.

Perhaps I have too romantic a rendition of this art form. Yet when you join the audiences that South African jazz gives birth to, you are reminded of where the wellsprings of possibility always lived in the darkest moments of apartheid repression, and even in the most somber moments of our growing postapartheid depression. Traditions are ironic that way, because they always produce something new. And that’s a reserve of sanguinity.

* This is an edited version of a piece that first appeared on the Economics and Politics Weekly blog. It is republished here with the permission of the author. The image of Basil Coetzee performing in downtown Cape Town is by Pillay.

What’s it like to be Somali in Kenya

Twitter is abuzz and Somalis are trending in Kenya, not for reasons of their own, but rather impositions beyond their capacity. There is quite a lot of outrage from all corners that Kenyans venture, from the passionately human to the average reactionary comments in “ full support” (“remove them”) of the state.  The police chief has dubbed this “operation sanitize” and the media as usual in Kenya has a penchant for rather crude and unconscionable fascist statements towards Somali, Somalia and everything Somali, Kenyan ethnicity notwithstanding. Chime in the police who have dubbed Somalis ATM machines.

The Kenyan Defense Force is in Somalia exerting its right to military voyeurism; the current vogue in Africa as usual at the behest of America’s Africa Command. Ask anyone in Eastleigh, the densely Somali populated area, if they can remember any year before or after the collapse of Somalia where there has not been a Musako (mass arrest). They will most likely say it has just been intensified from 1991 onwards.

Naturally, Eastleigh a historic Somali residential area (circa early 20th century), became host to their kith and kin from across the border. Their citizenship then and now has always been treacherous. However, the rather astonishing enterprise of these “refugees” has transformed this quiet residential area into a strategic business hub for the entire East Africa and beyond. Real estate prices rival the choice downtown areas of the city. Looking at the massive buildings, hotels and malls in contrast to the moonlike crater impassable roads gives one the quick impression that the private sector has outstripped the stagnant public one. Somali enterprise post-collapse is also ascribed to a rather rabid islamophobic interpretation by the media bordering on the fantastic, rather than lauding original African do-for-self initiatives.

At the 1945 Pan African Congress in Manchester, the father of current Kenyan president Uhuru Kenyatta, Jomo Kenyatta, sat during the proceedings representing the Kikuyu Central Association and not what became Kenya later. By 1963 he had become the first president of Kenya, foremost within his rhetorical arsenal was the eradication of the colonial pass (Kipande). Ironically today the pass, now called national ID is alive and well. It is the cherished ATM card too access money from the Somali and others, by the police.

Within this new African nation state was the Northern Frontier District, bundling over the ethically Somali region and people into this new entity, what became one of the largest regions of Kenya. This region is predominantly ethnically Somali. The region has been the primary exercise ground for internal repression by every means. The Wagala massacre being of note, it remains dismally barren in many things  normalized in the rest of Kenya, including violent repression from their own military of Kenya. The state of emergency, although lifted in paper in 1992, continues to govern relations to this day. Years later, after Somalia’s 1991 collapse, Dadaab, the now well known refugee camp, is located here. This camp, secluded from the rest of Kenyan areas, were born a generation who never knew Somalia, nor were they educated in anything other than the normal Kenyan school curriculum (which does not go beyond secondary school at Dadaab). To this camp and another in Kakuma, all “bonafide” refugees are confined. Simply, you were either part of and included in the rolls of these two camps, or you were in limbo.

From 1991 to the present crisis where thousands of Somalis, (disproportionately) the poor, including women and children, were and are currently interned at the city soccer stadium are part of this continued status limbo – neither citizen, refugee or human. The current arrest is yet another one of the numerous onslaughts from the day they set ground in urban areas to the current situation. With a nod from the UNHCR and international/local NGOS, the police have shown complete impunity on Somali refugees from their first arrival, and earlier on the indigenous Somali inhabitants of Eastleigh, where naturally the multitudes who legally under international refugee sanction came in search of safety and a better livelihood. Eastleigh a historically Somali residential area dating as far back as the beginnings of Nairobi, a colonial city established as a half way point for a railway from the coast to Uganda. Somalis are part of the formative landscape of this city from the late 19th century. The current Kenyan imaginary, hard driven by the media, is that Eastleigh is just another country at our door step, the barbarians at the gate. Somalis, being Muslims, have an added denigration in a country where another religious fundamentalism is very much alive and unscrutinized. Kenyan presidents attend mass on Sundays publicized on national television.

Those arrested and put in what is being called #KassaraniConcentrationCamp on Twitter, despite the outrage, has been the general condition of the urban and hinterland Somali in Kenya. Kassarani is a newer version of Dadaab, a generational concentration camp.  Dabaab, despite being home to a generation born after Somalia’s collapse, is a law unto itself, it defies the laws of nature. It is a place that interns Somalis with the great endorsement of the UNHCR, as a perpetual Somalia. The governments of Somalia, Kenya, and the UNHCR have recently signed a tri-partite agreement to “repatriate” Somalis born in Dadaab and other camps, but back to where? Of course there is the rhetorical fine print which unequivocally states that it is by one’s own volition. Amnesty International and others have clearly stated their reservations, not critiquing the plausibility of repatriation, but rather the guarantee of safety and livelihood. On the other hand, the refugees themselves have decided living in Somalia without safety is perhaps a better preposition than living in the shadows of urban Eastleigh.

Looking back at the arrests, pillage and rape of Somalis in the urban setting through the years, it has been endorsed through silence and the UNHCR’s collusion – that one who is not confined to a perpetual and abstract Somalia is indeed in a state of limbo.  Here there is no protection from the very same perpetual limbo. The government is saying today, “not in camp,” not anywhere, despite the charter allowing for movement and seeking a better livelihood beyond even one country. This despite the apparent dynamism of the “refugee,” who has done wonders in mainstream Kenya.

All of this has returned the Somali to a key figure, or an othered African personality, the terrorist, since the Westgate incident and numerous threats and the recent exploitation in Eastleigh. The Kenyan government has very much suspended, through the rule of exception, the rights of Kenyan Muslims. There have been running battles between the historically disenfranchised Muslim citizens who inhabit the coastal region, and the state security apparatus, such as the extrajudicial killings by mysterious death squads, violent forays into mosques in Mombasa, and the ransacking of Eastleigh. The marquee terrorist lurking within an otherwise pristine Kenyan landscape are all of Kenya’s Muslim inhabitants. The reactionary islamphobia targeting Muslims by the government, with either tacit silence or vociferous approval similar to post-9/11 America’s unrelenting patriotic jingoism and xenophobia, became the unquestionable position for everyone, especially the forth estate.

The hold over image of the pirate from the War on Terror is the media’s very own mythology, this latter day anachronistic African figure in the form of a Somali. Add to this the frequent usage of the terms terrorist and warlord, all serving to make it difficult to even extricate the human from the Somali refugee, in a land that is fraught with overly deterministic mythologies about ethnicities in general. The media is aware of its part in the reportage of these very same ethnic mythologies and the part this played in the violent post-2008 election mayhem in Kenya, and all agreed to be extremely cautious when it came to the very same mythologies. However, in the case of their fellow citizens who are Somali, it seems this does not apply. The unfortunate and often dehumanizing myths predicated on grouping an entire people as one of these three things are entirely opportune to render the Somali without any form of humanity. The Somali is curiously at best an unfathomable entity, with important office bearers somehow detached and othered from their Somali ethnicity. For their own political expedience, they are often government stalwarts and career politicians with a seemingly hostage constituency. Hostage because it defeats logic when you historically elect an official that vigorously maintains the status quo when your region remains entirely out of it.

The almost twenty plus years of persecution and imposed limbo status of both the citizenship and refugee condition of Somalis in Kenya is in itself a crime against human dignity. The UNHCR policy of ghetto camps in perpetuity defies its own mantra, which allows for the freedom of movement outside these internment camps the world over. A better way is to learn and adapt to the realities of refugees rather than impositions that are thoughtless and contradict what is human.

Image by Brian Inganga. More here.

Sunday night on Twitter with Binyavanga Wainaina

We sometimes joke that often when we’re online the only other person who’s consistently awake and on Twitter (no matter where he is in the world) is Binyavanga Wainaina. It’s like, if you blink, you miss out on some pronouncement by him. Though he has been an active social media user for a while now, it was really after he came out on January 18th that he went into overdrive. And you can’t look away. There is no one else addressing Africa, Africans and their relations to the West in such blistering form right now. Take Sunday night when–from a hotel balcony in Dakar where he was sampling some fine cheeses (he was in town on assignment for Chimurenga’s Chronic) –he  went on Twitter to tweet out what amounts to an essay on development workers, Nairobi and Dakar’s middle classes, terrorism, Uhuru Kenyatta and books (with digressions into other stuff, including a memorable recording of a Kenyan “Elvis” performing “Don’t Think Twice It’s Alright” at the Goat Derby at Ngong Racecourse in Nairobi: “Ngai. Holy Shit! this is great! the goat race! the music!). Because at some point we had to go to bed, we asked if someone could storify the tweets. Aaron Leaf, an Africa is a Country contributor, kindly indulged us, for which we are very grateful. We’ve embedded the tweets below — Binyavanga, from his balcony in Dakar, to the world. Read, enjoy, retweet liberally.

Photo Credit: Ben Curtis

[View the story "Sunday Night on Twitter with Binyavanga Wainaina" on Storify]

Africa is a Country Video: George Khosi’s Hillbrow Boxing Club

It used to be an old gas station. In the area where car owners once filled their tanks an elevated boxing ring now stands. Fraying rope holds the still sturdy structure together as George Khosi instructs his student on the correct way to dodge and jab. “One two, one two,” he counts. Outside the ring, a bright green punching bag sways gently in response to blows delivered by a little boy with missing teeth and mismatched boxing gloves. The 44-year-old coach does not seem to mind, he would rather the boy box than wander the streets.

Khosi, known in the community as ‘George the Brick’, founded the Hillbrow Boxing Club in 2004. He trains amateurs and professionals, charging R100 (about $10) per one-hour session for those starting out and R100 per month for use of the gym. He opened the club to keep local kids off the streets, the dangers of which he knows all too well.

Khosi grew up in Hillbrow, the most notorious suburb of Johannesburg. Just one square kilometer large the area is known for population density, unemployment and poverty. Police corruption is rife and organized crime thrives. It was a designated ‘whites only’ area during the apartheid era, however the political unrest that came with the 80s saw investors and middle class residents flee to the suburbs of Johannesburg, leaving Hillbrow to slowly decay into an inner city slum.

Dilapidated apartment blocks surround the open-air boxing ring, bordered by a spiked metal fence and barbed wire. The space that once accompanied the petrol station as a convenience store now serves as a dimly lit gym. Sunlight filters through broken windows onto ageing equipment and teenage boys who watch their flexing muscles in shattered mirrors. An elderly man, hat drawn over his eyes, dozes off on a single couch on the far side of the room, his snooze undisturbed by the house music blasting from the speakers beside him. The boys lift to the beat. A young man’s face contorts as the numbers climb, air fills his cheeks large as balloons and he lets out a gush of air as the his weighs clank heavily onto the cement floor.

The sound travels to the area outside, where Khosi sits on the edge of the ring and smiles as he recalls his first fight in Brixton at the age of 15. He knocked out his opponent in the first round. That was back in 1985, when he was well on his way to becoming a professional boxer. All that changed abruptly the night he was shot.

Almost 17 years ago, Khosi was attacked in his home. His assailants shot him in both legs and in the right eye. Believing him to be dead, they took him to a hilltop in Yeoville and left his body in an abandoned concrete structure. He regained consciousness two days later. The traumatic incident left him with and a milky eye, and a limp.

Khosi says he has seen the ‘other side’, but still has work to do before heading to the bright lights. He has his hands full with over 80 students consisting of men, women and children, as well as 12 promising champions. The Hillbrow Boxing Club has become a place where kids can go after school and where those who are serious about their sport can escape the pretentious atmospheres so often found in city fitness centers. From an abandoned gas station in one of the most dangerous suburbs in Johannesburg, Khosi now produces the professionals he once dreamt of becoming.

Old Money’s Mothership Is Here to Save Us All

Dutty Artz, the New York-based record label I run and release music with, just put out a new EP by Old Money. This morning I put my remix of the title track ’Mothership’ on Soundcloud, and for a limited time it is available for free download. To get the rest of the EP, which includes a fire remix from Pretoria’s DJ Spoko, head to any of your favorite digital stores.

Old Money is a Black Atlantronic rap group based in Brooklyn. I met them several years ago after having first moved to New York, but had known of their work on popular blogs such as Palms Out Sounds and Attorney Street for some years. I first met them when they hired me to DJ at an art gallery in Manhattan for a party they were starting called Van Sertima. Their naming of the party was my introduction to the black liberationist philosopher, and thus my introduction to the philosophical side of Old Money.

The group came into the more esoteric side of North American black liberationist theory after becoming disillusioned post-grads in Manhattan. Coming from working class neighborhoods in the outer boroughs, they had both received degrees from prestigious East Coast universities in the U.S. However, these degrees didn’t magically change the social conditions of their city, and forging a righteous path to independence and adulthood remained difficult for two young black men in the city. They looked around their immediate surrounding for inspiration and answers, and instead of walking past the corner preachers from groups like the Moorish Science Temple of America and the Nuwaubians in their neighborhoods, they stopped and listened.

The Mothership EP is firmly in the tradition of the black liberationist thought that informs such groups. The mothership Old Money speaks of is a cornerstone of the preachings of everyone from Marcus Garvey, to the Nation of Islam, to Sun Ra. Some call it Afro-futurism, because of the science fiction element. But more than anything it sums up the needs and desires of the past and present generations of people of African descent in the Americas – from any cultural, national, or language background.

What sets Old Money apart from this history, is their relationship and access to the greater Atlantic world. The last mainstream wave of Afrocentricity in the U.S. died out in the early 1990′s. Old Money is part of a new wave that is less outwardly political, but more rooted in an awareness of contemporary Africa. They are just as inspired by Kwaito, Kuduro, South African House, and Grime, as they are by pan-Africanist leaders of past generations. By engaging with elements of contemporary Africa they are enacting a new pan-Africanism, a fresh and exciting one that I still have yet to completely wrap my head around. By collaborating with myself and DJ Spoko they are manifesting the potential contained with the idea of the mothership, and perhaps setting the pace for a new idea of liberation for people of African descent in the Americas.

This new American pan-Africanism might not always be explicit. It is summed up by the appearance of a South Bronx-raised Moroccan-born gangster rapper, a pair of Seattle-bred Somali-pirate-trap rappers, of a couple of Azonto-ing Jamaican Dancehall superstars, and an Afrobeats-ing Trinidadian Soca monarch. It’s the pan-Africanism of Yasiin Bey and Young Guru in Capetown, of Rick Ross in Nigeria, of Beyonce and Chimamanda’s feminism, of Kanye West and D-Banj’s Oliver Twist, and of Solange’s everything. It is that essay on Afropolitanism, and all the ones refuting it. It is returnees, and ‘just comes’, and heritage tourists, and DNA tests. It’s mediated through capitalism, and immigration, and the Internet, and young people, and style and fashion. Many actors in this new pan-Africanism may not claim their place in it, however by not acknowledging it, it is left open to become a vessel for anyone else to insert a political pan-Africanism inside. BBC1xtra DJ Seani B did just this in the description of his recent Afrobeats vs. Dancehall mashup mix by saying, “I like to think of this mix as bringing the dancehall Artist back home to Africa…” These days buying them a plane ticket, is the same as putting them in a mix and posting it on the Internet. That’s magic, African magic, Science fiction and Afro-fantasy. This magic is the ship that brought Africans into bondage in the Americas in the first place, and is the new ship that has come to save us all. And like Binyavanga, these possibilities are what excite me most about our contemporary world.

[top photo from District 9]

Weekend in Stellenbosch

Interesting that Africa’s a Country published a piece on Stellenbosch, since I just went out to stay there last weekend. To be honest, I did not like the piece, but I do think it touched on things that I also observed. The generalisations regarding the race dynamics and the monochrome casting of the population groups living in the town were a little stark. But they were also starkly true, and, in broad strokes, they captured the weird, discomforting social undertones that shape life in the town So, here’s my own take on why I found Stellenbosch so strange, so interesting and also so very sad.

We checked out the Slow Market at Oude Libertas, one of the more popular places on the hipster artisanal food circuit. Peter our car guard ushered us into a parking bay and we were off. The market was great, with all the delicious delights and craft goodies that you would expect. There were also many, young Afrikaner boys manning the stalls, selling all kinds of things. My girlfriend remarked that many of them were so confident and self-assured going about their business.

Confidence is a quality that stands one in good stead. The feeling of being free and assured about the ability to grab opportunities in the world is remarkably powerful. It’s the kind of feeling that does not pervade the lives of black men like Peter, a middle-aged man living in the township of Khayamandi, out of eye-sight of the lush green Stellenbosch valley, where the daily reality of exclusion, marginalisation and poverty often inspire feelings of anxiety. I had a bit of confidence, taking the opportunity to ring the Slave Bell to signal the end of the day’s trade. Strangely, it felt kind of liberating.

On Sunday, walking past the Exclusive Books store, it was interesting to see Kees van der Waal’s new edited text, Winelands, Work and Wealth: Transformations in the Dwars Valley prominently displayed in the window. I found it striking because it brought to the fore something that is so obvious but so well hidden in Stellenbosch town. Walking through the oak lined streets steeped in Cape Dutch vintage, it’s hard to tell that all of it was built up by the sweat of black slaves and workers over roughly 3 centuries. I could not find a slave or workers monument in the town, despite noticing how rich the public art culture was.

Later, we went into a Café that, from the number of people queuing outside, looked very popular. Schoon de Companje is compelling when you first walk in. It has a barnhouse feel of rough wood and rusted, worn metal and stocks everything from meats to bread, coffee, wine, cheese. Slowly, as we worked through our way through the store it dawned on us the theme was not a barnhouse, but a colonial goods store. Specifically, a Dutch East India Company (VoC) colonial goods store, since the walls were emblazoned with the Dutch flag embossed the VoC logo, images of Dutch maritime corporate imperialism, leading Dutch historical figures, and maps of the Cape Dutch period. Here Dutch colonial history is celebrated. The irony of such a stylised, easily consumable Dutch Imperial history in relation to questions of slavery, land dispossession and labour reform in the contemporary agri-economy is of course very bitter.

Stellenbosch is a fascinating place and it’s clear that Afrikaner folk are doing well preserving its heritage as a pristine, privileged centre of knowledge and culture. We had a good time there otherwise, and found some new and interesting places and met interesting people. But in saying that, the town undeniably represents one exclusive part of the larger post-apartheid story that I still find very difficult to come to terms with.

History Class: On Nigeria’s standing as Africa’s “biggest” economy

It took centuries before capitalism’s survival and future growth depended on an increase of the standards of living among the general population. This was reflected in the living standards of the people in the capitalist West. They were dirt poor as recently as the 1930s. From the early 20th century, and until the 1990s, the world was immersed in a struggle between Capitalism and Socialism. While one of these systems, capitalism, serves the interests of the bourgeois, socialism, aims to serve the proletariat.

This was best  described by Yevgraf Zhivago, from Boris Pasternak’s novel Dr. Zhivago:

In bourgeois terms, it was a war between the Allies and Germany, in Bolshevik terms, it was a war between the Allied and German upper classes.

Unfortunately, a perversion of socialism, called Communism, and eventually, Stalinism, achieved prominence and eventually failed.

Today’s piece is about economic systems, the World Bank and the IMF, and whether they have they helped Nigeria or not. The reason I chose this particular topic for today is because of our new economic standing as Africa’s “biggest” economy.

The World Bank and IMF were created at the Bretton Woods Conference in 1944. Present at the conference were the 44 allies of World War II. The United States attended in its own right. Remember that the US was the only country which emerged from World War II richer than it was before the war. Britain, also a victor from that war attended in its own right. But being the owner of a lot of dominions, including Nigeria at the time, represented those dominions. The main aims of the Bretton Woods Conference were to develop a post-war economic order that would survive the test of time. However, the discussions were dominated by both the US and Britain, represented by Harry White and John Keynes respectively.

Keynes was dead set against the idea of currency liquidity across national boundaries that thing which we call “globalization.”

Both White and Keynes, were among the greatest economists ever, Keynesian theory is still the bedrock of most teachings till today. At this point, I must note that some of Keynes’s ideas have been discarded. By the time of the Bretton Woods meet, Keynes was a dying man. He died two years later in 1946.

With people such as Keynes and White, it is no surprise that the outcome of the negotiations heavily favoured, in economic terms, the Western Allies.

Both bodies, the World Bank and the IMF, have in the 70 years since, done their bit to preserve the world order as defined in 1944. Given their very structure, both bodies are very much holden to the existing world order, and will fight to save it. After Word War II, in the capitalist societies of Europe, there was a ready market to exploit. People, devastated by the war, were dirt poor and had not much choice but to do what capitalist wanted in order to put bread on their tables. But the capitalists had their reasons, unlike in previous generations, for letting wealth be more equitably distributed. At the time, capitalist societies were engaged with the Stalinist Soviet Union in ideological warfare, so they needed to prove to the world that their system was better. Which is why living standards rose dramatically in the West post-World War II.

This ended in the mid 1970s when growth stagnated, profits plummeted, and the social structures built after World War II fell apart. To maintain the bubble of increasing prosperity, countries of the global south began to look more attractive as a source of cheap labour. Prior to that, the global south had always been a source of cheap resources, but their newly “independent status” was a threat to that mode of doing business.

Make no mistakes about it, the world has returned to the predatory laissez-faire capitalism that immiserated millions before the 20th century. This return began during the reigns of Ronald Reagan in the US, and Margaret Thatcher in the UK with regulations passed that unduly favoured capitalists and their businesses. Can someone explain to me, in real terms, what “deregulation” really is?

Since the world had started to change towards the tail end of the 1980s, and force, the preferred means of enforcing will had become a last resort, sponsoring a coup, as was done in Brazil and Chile in the 1960s and 1970s would no longer work as effectively as before. So, from the middle of the 1980s, a novel idea was developed, and that has been refined and perfected ever since. Debt bondage.

Debt bondge was initially pushed through via methods such as “structural adjustment”, ergo Babangida in Nigeria, in the 1980s. But as awareness has increased among previously ignorant populations, it has become increasingly difficult to impose. So the new method, which I must admit, is proving quite effective, of imposing debt bondage, is to get the countries to impose “structural adjustment” on themselves.

Since the Reagan-Thatcher tango in the 1980s, the dominant world order, has been what is known as neoliberalism.

But before we go on, what is Neoliberalism? It is both a political philosophy and an economic philosphy. It advocates free trade and open markets, privatization, deregulation, and private sector dominance. And these buzzwords, are what make it rather easy to convince client countries to impose it on their populace.

So, how do you get client countries to go ahead & impose neoliberalism on themselves? That’s where IMF and World Bank come in. Ukraine, for example is in trouble. Starting from Viktor Yushchenko, then Yulia Tymoshenko, then Victor Yanukovich, their leaders have been crooks. When you consider the fact that they have a huge neighbour that supplies almost all their energy needs, they need money. So, the IMF comes in, with the money, but with killer conditions, which in the long term will destroy the country, but will make a lot of people in the bourgeois stupendously rich. Oh, and a lot of people on the other side of the planet.

That’s just one example. And that example involves the IMF. What about the World Bank? Since 2003, the World Bank has published the Ease of doing business Index which ranks countries based on the “ease of doing business” in them. This Index is now the World Bank’s most influential publication and has driven 25% of all economic policy changes since it started. It measures how easy it is to start a business in a country, deal with construction permits, get electricity, register property, get credit, protect investors, pay tax, trade across borders, enforce contracts and resolve insolvency in various countries

It is on these 10 subsets that the index ostensibly relies, but the question is “how” does it rely on them?

The “pay tax” indicator as an example, punishes countries for having all sorts of tax, which to be honest are the best way governments to raise money. This will in a roundabout way, encourage more countries to become abberations like Nigeria, where the government does not depend on the people for income. In my view, tax is needed to be government’s main source of income, so it will force the issue of accountability. Since this “pay tax” indicator became a part of the Index, more countries have become tax havens, making it easier for the elite to hide money.

The “protect investors” indicator, ostensibly means to protect people who put their money in your economy. But it does nothing to prevent them from making money from your economy, and leaving you high and dry. Hence, most of the “foreign investment” that comes to Nigeria as an example since we started taking part in the jamborees simply stops in one location: Our stock market. Once they make a profit, or once there is a sign of trouble, they carry their money and go. Simply put, we are not attracting the right kind of foreign investment, we are attracting “fly-by-night investors” who are not here for the long term.

The “get credit” indicator sounds good on paper. As an entrepreneur of sorts, I can tell you that it’s best to use credit for business. But this indicator in reality rewards countries that make it easier to liquidate defaulters and punishes countries that try to protect people who have gone bankrupt. It also rewards countries that publishes more information about their citizens’ credit histories. A fine way to make people more subservient since all their time will be spent trying to stay financially solvent.

The “trade across borders” indicator punishes countries which try to protect their growing markets. This is why as good a policy as trying to protect our farmers may be, it will always be met with resistance because we are being protectionist. Witness how the rice wars in Ghana are still being fought, with the Ghanaians losing.

It is always interesting to see how we, the South, are expected to take all IMF recommendations, hook, line, sinker and hand. But countries of the North are free to reject those they feel like rejecting, and no, when I say north, I don’t mean Greece. As an example, in April 2012, the IMF warned George Osborne that he was “playing with fire” when the UK rejected its recommendations. Only the same IMF, six months later, to tone down its rhetoric, and double its growth forecast for the UK to 1.4%. UK growth rates in fact went up to 1.9%, which serves as a lesson to banana republics such as Nigeria.

For our country to grow, we MUST always try and work in the interest of their own population, and take our own circumstance into consideration.

So are “free trade”, “open markets”, “deregulation” the best ways to go for a developing economy such as Nigeria?

For me, the answer to that is a resounding “NO”. Nigeria needs something between a Scandinavian style welfare state, and FDR’s America.

The neoliberalist policies pursued by the World Bank and IMF, by default need markets to exploit, so their policies WILL ALWAYS try to keep us down. The extent to which capitalism is capable of maintaining constant rates of growth remains highly debatable. Bottomline, is if we in the global south ever become truly independent, for the corporations of the global north, there will be no more worlds left to exploit.

Cheta Nwanze tweets @Chxta

No, we have not forgotten that it was Bra Hugh Masekela’s 75th birthday today

It’s Bra Hugh’s birthday today. Well into his seventies, Hughie as his friend Dizzy Gillepsie used to call him, demonstrates no interest in laying off from touring. To celebrate, we’ll bump a bit of “I Am Not Afraid“; or maybe tap into his Hedzoleh Sounds era; or perhaps go buckwild to some Union Of South Africa (alongside Caiphus Semenya and Jonas Gwangwa). Who knows, we might even cruise past his electronic stuff in the eighties; Techno Bush maybe. By the time Sunday comes, we’ll be cold chilling with him and his old buddy Larry Willis on their “Friends” album.

As a bonus, here’s a video, released 2 days ago, of Bra Hugh performing a Bob Dylan cover for his departed friend, the photographer Alf Kumalo (the man who took that iconic photograph of “a young 16-year old Hugh Masekela leaping in the air, clutching the trumpet that had been sent to him by Louis Armstrong”):

Happy birthday Bra Hughie!

#Watch: The online premiere of Shola Amoo’s short film “Touch”

As the credits rolled on “Touch,” a short film by the young director Shola Amoo, someone in the audience packed into Brooklyn’s Spectacle Theater (for the Future Weird screening) exhaled “that was bomb!” With a small three-person cast including singer-turned actress Tanya Fear, “Touch” asks some big questions, of technology, and of human experience, in a way that is delicate and open-ended. How can bodily experiences be shared, and how much can be transmitted between us?

The film also probes the paradox of our engagement with technological apparatus, which can open us to strangers while at same time foreclosing shared bodily experience. Now the London-based director has released the full thirteen-minute film online. Watch it here (below) and look out for Amoo’s debut feature “A Moving Image,” a film about becoming “a 21st century creative in a rapidly gentrifying city”:

Nina wants to create the perfect piece of art – but her creative juices aren’t flowing. Whilst she searches for inspiration, she forms a three-way relationship with an Actor called Mickey and a Performance Artist called Ayo.

The three bond during a sweaty summer spent on rooftops, parks and art spaces in South London, as they each strive to find an artistic niche and circumvent their burgeoning mid twenties crisis. Nina discovers her creative spark between both men – but this, and their triangular relationship, is threatened when she is forced to make a choice.

You can follow the progress of “A Moving Image” on Twitter, Facebook and the film’s website.

Now watch “Touch”: