Sean Jacobs's Blog, page 417

The trouble with #WhiteHistoryMonth is that it is not history

Here’s John Pilger, writing as late as Friday, March 21, on Guardian.com on the continued theft of Aboriginal children in Australia: 

… Up to the 1970s, thousands of mixed-race children were stolen from their mothers by welfare officials. The children were given to institutions as cheap or slave labour; many were abused.

Described by a chief protector of Aborigines as “breeding out the colour”, the policy was known as assimilation. It was influenced by the same eugenics movement that inspired the Nazis. In 1997 a landmark report, Bringing Them Home, disclosed that as many 50,000 children and their mothers had endured “the humiliation, the degradation and sheer brutality of the act of forced separation … the product of the deliberate, calculated policies of the state”. The report called this genocide.

Assimilation remains Australian government policy in all but name. Euphemisms such as “reconciliation” and “Stronger Futures” cover similar social engineering and an enduring, insidious racism in the political elite, the bureaucracy and wider Australian society. When in 2008 prime minister Kevin Rudd apologised for the stolen generation, he added: “I want to be blunt about this. There will be no compensation.” The Sydney Morning Herald congratulated Rudd on a “shrewd manoeuvre” that “cleared away a piece of political wreckage in a way that responds to some of its own supporters’ emotional needs, yet changes nothing”.

Today, the theft of Aboriginal children – including babies taken from the birth table – is now more widespread than at any time during the last century. As of June last year, almost 14,000 Aboriginal children had been “removed”. This is five times the number when Bringing Them Home was written. More than a third of all removed children are Aboriginal – from 3% of the population. At the present rate, this mass removal of Aboriginal children will result in a stolen generation of more than 3,300 children in the Northern Territory alone.

Image Credit: Wiki Commons

#WhiteHistoryMonth: Counter-Revolutionary Agents in Apartheid South Africa

The covert nature of the apartheid regime’s “total strategy” to combat revolution rendered much of South Africa’s deadliest years of history in the passive voice. Griffiths Mxenge: discovered dead by the side of the road. Sizwe Khondile: disappeared. The Cradock Four: burnt bodies found. Inkosi Mhlabunzima Maphumulo: murdered by “persons unknown.”

To justify repressive measures against growing anti-apartheid resistance, South Africa under then State President P.W. Botha adopted a “total strategy” to counter the “total onslaught” of international communism. Botha declared that the South African Communist Party (SACP) was using the African National Congress (ANC) as a front for communist penetration, comparing the situation to Mozambique and Angola. All radical opposition was put down as furthering the aims of communism as South Africa set out on a campaign of “low-intensity conflict.”

According to Jackie Dugard, a researcher then with the Community Agency for Social Enquiry (CASE) that monitored South Africa’s political violence, low-intensity conflict pursued by the regime in South Africa was characterized by the use of covert action and non-conventional methods of warfare that served to spread fear, insecurity, and internal divisions among target populations. This type of warfare had the benefit of being cost effective and less internationally visible than conventional war.

The apartheid government effected repression through bannings, detentions, assassinations, kidnappings, and torture and included forming pacts with dissatisfied and marginalized elements of society that resulted in hit squads and vigilante groups.

But the work of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (however incomplete), the investigative journalism of Jacques Pauw and his then-Vrye Weekblad Max du Preez, and other research in the last twenty years or earlier (the revelations published in The New Nation, for example) has begun to identify the agents of this violent history. More often, these sources identify lower level foot soldiers of the apartheid regime. In most cases, the TRC struggled to bring those giving the orders before the commission and officials such as P.W. Botha refused to appear.

Perhaps best known of the apartheid’s counter-revolutionary agents are Dirk Coetzee and Eugene de Kock, former commanders of Vlakplaas. Coetzee, Jan Viktor and Jac Buchner (later transferred to the KwaZulu Police) founded a paramilitary team that operated from the Vlakplaas farm. Coetzee led the Vlakplaas squads that murdered prominent ANC activist and attorney Griffiths Mxenge, Vuyani Mavuso (an ANC member captured by the Apartheid South African Defense Force in the Matola Raid), and Sizwe Khondile, among others.

When Coetzee turned to share his story with Jacques Pauw and the ANC, the Security Branch targeted him for removal. Colonel Waal du Toit gave the order and Japie F. Kok and Captain Kobus Kok, employees of the technical division of the Security Branch, constructed the bomb, which they mailed to him in London. Coetzee believed it to be a bomb and ordered it returned to “sender.” The Security Branch had labeled the package as being sent by Bheki Mlangeni, ANC activist and lawyer. On 15 February 1991, the Koks’ bomb exploded at the Soweto home of Mlangeni. The TRC granted these men amnesty, as well as Eugene de Kock, Kobus Klopper, Izak Daniel Bosch, Wybrand Andreas Lodewicus, Williem Riaan Bellingan, and Simon Makopo Radebe, for the killing of Mlangeni.

Eugene de Kock, a veteran of the Special Air Services in the Rhodesian war and of the Koevoet Police Counter-Insurgency Unit in Namibia, took over as Coetzee’s successor at Vlakplaas.  Minister of Law and Order Adriaan Vlok and Chief of Security Branch Velde van der Merwe ordered de Kock to render COSATU House in Johannesburg (where the main trade unions were based) unusable. De Kock also orchestrated the bombing of Khotso House, the headquarters of the South African Council of Churches, in 1988. In his TRC testimonies and interviews with Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela, a TRC commissioner, De Kock declares himself the scapegoat for the apartheid officials who previously sought him out as a counterinsurgency strategist.

In the Eastern Cape, security officials targeted activists known as the PEBCO Three and Cradock Four in 1985. At the TRC, security officers Johannes Martin Van Zyl, Lieutenant Gideon Nieuwoudt, Sergeant Gerhardus Lotz, Harold Snyman, Gerhardus Beeslaar, Johannes Koole, Kimani Mogai and Hermanus du Plessis took responsibility for the drugging and murder of Sipho Hashe, Champion Galela and Qaqawuli Godolozi of the Port Elizabeth Black Civic Organization before burning their bodies. According to Terry Bell and Dumisa Ntsebeza (who co-authored the book, Unfinished Business), the killers burned the men’s bodies on makeshift pyres while roasting their dinner and consuming beer (see page 170 of Unfinished Business).

Two months after the murder of the PEBCO 3 (activists from Port Elizabeth in the Eastern Cape), several of these same security officers plus Eric Alexander, Nicolaas Janse van Rensburg, and Eugene de Kock orchestrated the deaths of the Cradock Four. The security men kidnapped, stabbed, and burnt to death Matthew Goniwe, Fort Calata, Sparrow Mkonto, and Sicelo Mhlauli. The security officers kidnapped the Cradock Four and designed their deaths to look like a vigilante attack. They stabbed the four activists and burnt their bodies and van.

Another death squad included Warrant Officer Paul Jacobus Jansen van Vurren, “the electrician,” Captain Jacques Hechter and the notorious Joe Mamasela, who had earlier worked at Vlakplaas. Van Vuuren boasted to Jacques Pauw that this death squad might have killed more people than any other security unit. Van Vuuren and his team brutally murdered ANC members Andrew Makupe, Jackson Maake, and Harold Sefola in 1987. Van Vurren allowed Sefola to sing “Nkosi Sikilel I’Afrika” before his team electrocuted him. Van Vurren, Brigadier Jack Cronje, and Captain James Hector applied for amnesty at the TRC for the murder of more 40 people between 1985 and 1988, but van Vurren made clear their applications could not be considered full confessions. They had killed too many to keep track (Into the Heart of Darkness, page 181-185).

Members of the Civil Cooperation Bureau (CCB) of the South African Defence Force (SADF) also wrecked destruction across southern Africa. Pieter Botes, a senior member of the CCB, ordered the planting of the bomb that exploded in ANC activist Albie Sachs’ car in Maputo in 1988. He later boasted he made “mincemeat” out of the future Constitutional Court judge’s right arm (Pauw, 221). He also received orders from the CCB to assassinate SWAPO officials Hidipo Hamutenya and Danny Tsjongerero but the plans fell through and Botes turned to SWAPO member Anton Lubowski. Ferdi Barnard, Calla Botha and Chappies Maree hired an Irish hitman to assassinate Lubowski in Windhoek in 1989. CCB operative Abram van Zyl hung the foetus of an ape in a tree at the home of Archbishop Desmond Tutu (Pauw, 225). Ferdi Bernard, who Jacques Pauw has described as “one of apartheid’s most infamous hoodlums, a Rambo-esque killer who moved between the criminal underworld of drug dealing, prostitution, and diamond smuggling, and South Africa’s official business in the government’s dirty tricks units and deaths squads,” assassinated anti-apartheid activist David Webster in 1989 and attempted to murder Dullah Omar.

In KwaZulu-Natal, the apartheid government fueled violence between the ethnic nationalist Inkatha and the ANC/UDF. While the media described violence on the ground as “black on black,” white South Africans of the military and police played an active role. The Directorate of Military Intelligence spearheaded Operation Marion to provide military support for Inkatha against ANC aligned organizations. Recent research by Jabulani Sithole suggests Minister of Defence Magnus Malan and Chief of the SADF General J.J. Geldenhuys attended a 1985 State Security Council meeting that discussed using Inkatha as a third force. Geldenhuys joined Deputy Minister of Defence and Law and Order Adriaan Vlok, Commissioner of Police General P.J. Coetzee, and Secretary of State Security Council Lt. General P.W. van der Westhuizen on the Third Force Working Committee that began working with Inkatha on preparations for military training in 1986. Perhaps most importantly, Sithole’s research places then Minister of National Education and later President F.W. de Klerk, who has always maintained his “clean hands,” at a meeting that approved the plan (Sithole in SADET v. 6, 851).

As a result of the cooperation, the SADF Military Intelligence directed 18 weeks of paramilitary training in the Caprivi Strip for Inkatha recruits as part of Operation Marion beginning in April 1986. Major Johan Pieter Opperman gave testimony that he took part in this top secret training of an Inkatha army alongside Major Jakes Jacobs, Colonel Jan Breytenbach, and a Colonel Blaauw (Sithole, 854). The SADF deliberately mislead the Inkatha trainees to think they were being trained by a private company in Israel to take part in the struggle against the ANC and communism.

The returned Caprivians were deployed to local Inkatha leaders and chiefs across KwaZulu-Natal in “contra-mobilization” squads, defensive groups, offensive teams, and VIP protection units. The contra-mobilization squads served as Inkatha field organizers and recruiters and also identified local UDF leaders. An offensive squad, located at Port Dunfort under Opperman and Colonel Jan van der Merwe, undertook ambushes, abductions, and assassinations. SAP security branch member Rolf Warber, among others, supplied weapons in the Pietermaritzburg area. The TRC found the SADF-trained Caprivians responsible for many of the most infamous and deadly incidents, including instigation of violence in Mpumalanga and Clermont townships, the Sarmcol shopsteward murders, the KwaMakhutha massacre of 1987, the Midlands War in Edendale and Vulindlela, and the 1990 Seven Days War.

The rural Table Mountain area east of Pietermaritzburg serves as an example in which SADF-trained Caprivians and biased policing fueled civil war. TRC and oral history testimonies related the presence of Inkatha strongman Philip Powell, who received weapons from Vlakplaas’ de Kock and fled South Africa on the eve of arrest in 2000, before and after massacres. The TRC testimony of officer William Basil Harrington of Riot Unit 8 reveals the manner in which the police would selectively involve themselves in the civil war. He explains the police presence occurred:

to prevent [the UDF-aligned] Chief Maphumulo’s people launching an attack on the other [Inkatha aligned] area. Whilst we were having our braai and drinking beer [with Inkatha members] an Inkatha group came around the hillside unseen and launched a new attack on the ANC area. We were assured by the group that were [sic] providing the meat and the beer that they were Inkatha people and we had nothing to fear regarding the attack. According to them it also wouldn’t last for very long. After the valley had been burnt we then fired 1000 feet flares for two reasons, namely, firstly to see whether any groups were moving in the direction of the koppie to attack people in the Inkatha area, and secondly, to prove to the ANC people that we were present in the area…

In addition to the biased policing of weapons and attacks, SADF-trained Caprivians took responsibility for the murder of one of Table Mountain’s traditional leaders, the United Democratic Front-aligned Inkosi Mhlabunzima Maphumulo.

This is just a sampling of the apartheid agents worthy of White History Month. It is also a testimony to the investigative reporters and TRC investigators who helped to make this history known. To learn more, check out:

* Terry Bell and Dumisa Ntsebeza, Unfinished Business

* Jacques Pauw, Into the Heart of Darkness and In the Heart of the Whore

* De Wet Potgieter, Total Onslaught   Potgieter’s interviews are available online with African Oral Narratives

* James Sanders, Apartheid’s Friends

* Jabulani Sithole, “The Inkatha Freedom Party and the Multiparty Negotiations,” in The Road to Democracy in South Africa v. 6

Chinua Achebe Revisiting Sweden

In October-November 1988, Chinua Achebe travelled through Scandinavia to launch the translations of his novel Anthills of the Savannah into Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish, and to meet readers, writers and academics, most of them well-known with his works, some not at all. He treated each group with the same respect and with inquisitive curiosity. ‘Why do you think so?’– ‘Yes, interesting, I never thought about that.’ The talks and the conversations that they generated are now available for a larger audience.

Re-reading the booklet Travelling: Chinua Achebe in Scandinavia, Swedish Writers in Africa that I did almost a quarter of a century ago (1990), it strikes me not only that the topics we discussed in those days with Achebe are still here, but that they were then more unabashedly direct and bona-fide. And also with what remarkable intuitive presence he communicates his thoughts. Meeting him in this text is listening to him; a voice captive, humorous, interactive, intelligent. I thank my university library (Umeå) for consenting to digitalize this bygone text. You can download it here (pdf). It is Achebe revisiting Sweden, and all of us!

The second part of the book, a sketchy overview of Swedish travel writers with both imperial, self-reflexive and oppositional perspectives of Africa, serves as a narrative foil for the first part with Achebe negotiating and mediating his views to the listeners.

Photo: Chinua Achebe on a bench in Umeå, Sweden, on 19 October 1988. Photographer: Roland Berggren, Västerbotten-Kuriren.

The Story of Ill Skillz: Notes From The Native Yards

It’s no surprise we on the rise / been on the grind since ‘05 / birds of the same feather flock together to the sky – Uno, ‘Confusion’

When they founded Ill Skillz in 2005, Uno July and Lukhona Sitole couldn’t have anticipated that, just one year shy of a decade later, they would’ve experienced the departure of three crew members. Their deejay, Nick Knucklez, relocated to a different country and their fourth member Macho left some time later. DJ ID (short for Intelligent Dezign), joined the group for a stint, but then he too migrated to a different city.

With time, Uno (July) and Jimmy Flexx (Sitole) solidified the working partnership they’d struck with Pumlani Mtiti and Sibusiso Dlamini, known collectively as the jazz outfit Ological Studies. They performed their free-form blend of jazz and hip-hop in front of moderately-sized audiences around Cape Town.

That they’d one day showcase their music at the Cape Town International Jazz Festival was, if anything, a mere pipe dream at that point.

Akio Kawahito (DJ ID) is an International Relations graduate who left his job at the Hague to get involved with Conscious Connectionz, a grassroots community development program which used hip-hop to rehabilitate at-risk youth in Cape Town. When the recession hit in 2008, ID decided to pursue the craft of deejaying full-time.

He started doing the odd club gig with Ill Skillz in Cape Town, becoming an official member in 2009. As a trio, their profile rose somewhat: they (Uno and Flexx, specifically) were the original brand ambassadors for the urban clothing label Head Honcho. they produced outstanding videos on minimal budget and they extended their footprint beyond Cape Town to cities such as Johannesburg and London. Having ID on board proved to have multiple benefits, partly because of his affiliation to Kool Out Live, the independent events company he’d helped found in 2008 and now runs, along with partners, in Johannesburg.

While still situated in Cape Town, Kool Out regularly promoted events which featured reputable non-mainstream hip-hop artists, mostly from Europe and America. Inevitably, Ill Skillz would be on the bill, an opportunity which afforded them the ability to build a larger, more varied following. Cross-continental satellite television stations such as MTV Base and Channel 0 took notice, the group’s profile rising to the point where even the fashion publication Elle did a double-page spread on them, while Rolling Stone South Africa Magazine gave them a multiple-page feature.

However, without ID’s constant presence to help fortify the unit and collectively negotiate their moves through the maze that is independent musicianship, Ill Skillz’s momentum slowed down considerably. Life also happened; Uno moved back to the hood in Gugulethu, the place that gave him life, music, and taught him the value of resilience.

Notes From The Native Yards (or NFTNY), Ill Skillz’s most recent album, is their musical joy-ride through the good, the bad, and the nostalgic. It’s also their most focused effort to date. The album is their fifth release in a discography which includes an LP (Off The Radar in 2009) and three EPs – Another Day Another Rhyme (2005); Skillz That Pay Da Billz (2010); and Skillz That Pay Da Billz II (2012).

NFTNY draws liberally from an impressive range of influences: 90s rap and RnB arm-wrestle with early-to-mid-2000s production sensibilities while first-person-perspective hood narratives provide dark hues and warm shades, adding murky hues to their thick-textured music. Traces of jazz music are not far from reach.

The album is a rap nerd’s wet dream! Anyone can literally play spot-the-influence on every song; traces of Common (‘To the beat y’all’), KRS-One (‘Back to the streets’), and Heltah Skeltah (‘Yesterday’) are peppered throughout with the decadent splendour of now-ness. It’s revisionist, but it’s also modern; behind, but ahead at the same time.

But why “Native Yards,” an inherently apartheid construct which initiatives like Name Your Hood have done little to address? Ill Skillz would know: they’ve just played me songs off the album – unreleased at the time – at a roadside restaurant. We’re in Rondebosch, very near to where they come from, yet miles apart in terms of people’s living conditions.

“Now there’s that name-change thing,” begins Flexx, often the most vocal of the two, while Uno listens intently, chiming in whenever he sees fit. “They changed NY1 to Steven Biko drive, but people still call it NY1 regardless,” he states, then goes on to wax philosophical about the significance of not only the album title, but the location where the album was recorded – SAE Studios which was, until recently, located at Church Square.

“There’s a spot, which is still there, where they used to trade slaves. They’d put them on this pedestal and sell them like goods; like an auction. Just with that backdrop, the content of the album that we speak on stretches from very far; it goes very deep. It’s not just immediate; whatever social ills, whatever stuff you talk about, whatever the condition in the environment is – it’s actually a culmination of many decades.”

With Ill Skillz, the personal is political.

A conversation about them should have at its core a full appreciation of their make-up. They are two Xhosa men born and bred in Gugulethu, 80s babies who came of age in the 90s, imbibing all the attendant features of that era, RnB and rap music notwithstanding. They went through the Gugs school of musical knowledge, and are as fond of a McCoy Mrubata or Ringo Madlingozi as they are of, say, Gugs reggae legend Zoro. Or Crosby. Or Korianda, co-founder of the Gugulethu Sports Complex Park Jams at which Ill Skillz have performed many a times.

The conversation should acknowledge their rap music headspace – more Def Jux/Rawkus than Bad Boy/Def Jam. They’re spawns of a loose collective of similar-minded emcees known collectively as Groundworkx, mostly active during the 90s and early 2000s.

*

Jabu Lephoma’s story mirrors that of many rappers who took up music production so that they’d have beats to rap along to. “At some point, my older brother showed me Fruity Loops,” says Jabu over a Skype call, referencing the beatmaking software which set him on his current path. As J-One, Jabu is the chief architect behind an impressive arsenal of music on NFTNY. He composes audio cinema to massage the contours of the mind.

In high school, J-One would write frequently on a rap forum about his experiences at the now-defunct indie label Outrageous Records. He’d pay attention as artists such as Zubz and producer Hoodlum worked on music, noting down the more refined points of music production.

J-One met Uno in 2011.

“He came up to me during that whole jazz period,” says Uno, referring to their being selected to perform at the Cape Town International Jazz Festival. “Everyone was just crazy about us, saying ‘yo, you guys made it to the jazz fest!’”

“J-One told me he’s a jazz musician; I think that was his way of selling himself. But then he played me this one beat, and I [was] like ‘dude, this is a very decent jazz song!’ It was in two parts; it was a very dope beat! If you remember…” continues Uno among the mutterings of the student population as he motions towards Flexx. “It might’ve been the first song that we declared that ‘hey, we’re actually working on a new album’. Sonically, it was the way to go; at that time, it was quite relevant.”

J-One details how he got on board as producer: “Around the time when I met Uno, he was just collecting beats. I wasn’t quite sure what he was doing; I think I knew he was doing an album, but it wasn’t really my concern at the time.” After a brief stint away, he returned to Cape Town, and met with Uno who then expressed his desire to formalise their working relationship. J-one agreed.

Jimmy Flexx, who met him a while later, describes J-One as a “young cat of probably about 18,” whose beats got better with every batch he produced. The album’s creation followed a similar, organic trajectory. It was essential for J-One to become familiar with the group’s history and background. Uno made J-One listen to their old songs; he took him to their shows; he introduced him to their friends.

In turn, J-One immersed himself in those influences and translated the most striking parts into music – big drums, thumping basslines, and cinematic synth flourishes. What started off as a casual exchange of beats became a commitment from both parties to oversee the album’s direction.

Renegade regiment in spirit and form / see the agents are long gone / long gone / far gone, far gone / far gone, long gon e/ but the seeds grow from concrete and fertilized soil / and life once again prospers…

Increasingly, a conversation with – Ill Skillz eventually leads to ‘the Joburg question.’ Why not migrate to the city of dreams like everyone else?

On Skillz To Pay Da Billz part 2, Uno has a verse which goes: “Cape Town pioneers and veterans left us for Joburg / seemingly it was for greener pastures.”

He begins by commenting on the verse in question: “That was the problem then. Now things have shaped up differently. I think we’re here of our personal choices,” he says. “I’ve heard this line so many times: You. Guys. Need. To. Move. To. Jo’burg!,” adds Uno, emphasising the ‘moving to Joburg’ part, pausing after every one of the seven words for effect.

It boils down to personal choices, and – especially in Jimmy Flexx’s case – responsibilities. “Also,” Flexx begins, finishing off his partner’s trail of thought, “you can’t just uproot yourself. As you can see,” he says while gazing at his daughter who’s just a few feet away, “we’ve got responsibilities.”

Ah yes, that word again! It’s what happens when the business of rap music is in hibernation; the days in-between club dates and festival appearances; the hours before and after recording sessions. It’s the break-ups with long-term partners; the having to move back to the hood in order to recuperate from that experience.

But responsibilities can stretch beyond the mere acts of existence. They become more than having to worry about the rising cost of fuel – paraffin, petrol, diesel – extending, as these things do, into concerns about our collective living conditions. It’s something both of them are passionate and vocal about. This awareness, however, doesn’t cloud that of their relatively privileged standing within their own communities.

It’s easy to dismiss Ill Skillz as being unauthentic. They’ll be the first to admit these ironies; these extenuating factors which always place them at the edge of scathing criticism. Throughout their career, they’ve learnt to embrace each and every one of these influences while imbibing new ones, allowing each one space to percolate and develop at its own pace.

We resort to support[ing] individuals instead of ideas / what if the worst comes out of em, that’s just my fear – Uno on ‘Deliver me’

In 2009, Jacob Zuma was elected president. Julius Malema hadn’t been declared persona non-grata by the ANC – ‘kill for zuma’ was still a thing, and ‘tjatjarag’ had yet to form the cornerstone of national dialogue among politically-astute youth. Ill Skillz were preparing to release their first full length album Off The Radar. It seems like many lifetimes ago.

Since we last spoke, on the eve of their Cape Town Jazz Festival appearance, the Secrecy Bill got passed, Nkandla happened, as did Marikana, the latter a key-point which Jimmy Flexx breaks into a monologue about, ending with the true and definitive “People will never forget it. Even in centuries [to come], people will refer back to that time.”

It’s a strange collection, a weird twist of shared memories and happy accidents, this musical marriage. Ill Skillz used to promote a series of monthly events called Ill Skillz Exclusives. They gave Reason his first performance in the city through that platform. ID currently manages and performs with the rapper who, if his monthly freestyles are anything to go by, will be the biggest rapper in South Africa when his sophomore album on Motif Records gets released this year.

There is a charm about Ill Skillz which makes them easy to gravitate towards. They are underdogs; the odds are stacked so highly against them that you want them to win. Every small step becomes a mini-victory worth celebrating. For their cancelled trip to New York (they had been invited to perform, but Flexx had his visa application denied), there’s sharing the stage with Zaki Ibrahim, Lebo Mashile, Whosane and Yasiin Bey (formerly Mos Def) on New Year’s eve, or opening for Kendrick Lamar during the Cape Town leg of his South African tour. The fluidity of life dictates these changes, and Ill Skillz is the by-product of that process – of uncertainties, of commitments, of strife.

History has not been kind to trailblazers who decided to go against convention. They don’t get to tell their story. Instead, the true narrative is filtered, re-packaged, and sold as rarified myths, or even worse, sequestered by the annals of time and banished to the edges of existence. Will Ill Skillz be remembered as the dastardly ingrates who were too wise for their own good (what Helen Zille calls “Professional Blacks”), or staunch believers in the power of collective action – as espoused by their efforts to integrate with all sectors in Cape Town’s creative scene, from Bitches Must Know to Native Yards mainstays (and Diggin Deep counterparts) Driemanskap; to their association with the Beatbangaz, Redbull Studios, Kool Out Live, and various Cape Town-based initiatives?

It’s hard to say. For now, rather grab a bottle kop, fill it up with two dope boys, and ponder upon the teachings of these underground jazz cats.

An Afropean Journey

A few years ago, on a snowy January evening, a stranger mistook me for someone he had seen the previous week, aboard an evening train heading to Frankfurt. The moment lasted seconds, but our brief encounter would serve as a catalyst for what became a lifelong journey of (self-)discovery.

As a mixed race teenager growing up on a council estate in the north of England, it was the first time I contemplated a self-image tied with any sort of elegance. Who knows what this other mixed race guy with an afro was like, or why he was going to Frankfurt, or where he came from. For me it was the notion that a stranger stopped me on the street that day, because he thought it was plausible I was a black European traveller. One minute racing through the wintry German evening on a train, the next walking down a street in Sheffield. It seemed to offer a glimmer of a new, positive identity, and ever since I’ve been searching for that person on the 7.30 train to Frankfurt, within and without.

Until that moment I’d spent much of my teenage years divided, existing in the strange liminal terrain between the parochial white, working class north of England, and ghettoised African American Hip-Hop culture.

Growing up in Sheffield, England’s third largest district, I got the sense that Britain had just about come to terms with calling black people British, and a lot of the racism I witnessed was now being directed towards Asian communities. Inevitably though, I knew I was always on the fringes of British national identity. If there was an argument or a fight in the school playground, words like nigger or wog would rear their ugly heads again. I sensed that prejudice still lurked in the white British subconscious.

Things became more subtle: I was sort of English, almost British, kind of European and because of this, I started to seek out answers about my European identity in relation to my black experience. The problem was that nothing around me resonated, really. Black Britain was still largely seen as Caribbean, despite the fact that the mixed race community was the fastest growing ethnic group in the country, and African migrants began their steady rise to becoming the predominant black presence in Britain by 2011. More than that though, where I grew up it seemed the black community used the aesthetics of gangsta rap as a way of glamorising the destitution, the alienation, and the ugliness of their reality.

I wondered if, perhaps, we might attempt to stamp out a unifying identity together on this old, stubborn continent: strength in numbers, so to speak.

I dabbled for a while too. I would dream of getting shot like 2Pac, and then surviving, wearing my bullet scars as a badge of honour. It was no surprise to me when Sheffield, and other cities across the UK, witnessed what became known as ‘post-code wars’ which seemed to mimic the geographic East Coast / West Coast Hip-Hop feud that would ultimately claim two of the genre’s biggest stars. My area, S5, was at war with the nearby S3 district, and a lot of my childhood friends got caught up in it; either murdered, or put in jail. Very often these street wars started because somebody looked at someone else in the wrong way and things would spiral out of control. It wasn’t always about drugs and yet it was very definitely a tribal issue of territory.

Long before this all happened I knew I wanted to transcend this territory, and expand my horizons. Initially I thought the way to do this would be to get versed in civil rights literature and African American culture – I read Marcus Garvey, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, and so on. It was an enriching experience, but at some point I started to realise that my reality wasn’t America in the 1960s, but Europe, now. That’s why this imagery of the man with the Afro on a train to Frankfurt was so powerful to me – it was the first time it occurred to me to look for an identity outside the boundaries of my council estate, outside of a Black Britain still so heavily geared towards its colonial Caribbean heritage and also of notions of blackness that America was forcing down my neck. I wanted to be part of a network of individuals who, in the words of Caryl Phillips, felt of, and not of Europe.

I hadn’t found a sense of self in my corner of black Britain, so I started to wonder if there was a collective consciousness on the continent.

With the birth of the single currency and the Eurozone in the late ‘90s, Continental black Europeans had very real, economic reasons for understanding themselves as just that – black Europeans, rather than simply black French, or Afro German. But as someone from the UK – a small island both physically and spiritually adrift from mainland Europe – I simply found comfort in the idea of diasporic unity, and being able to connect with other pockets of black communities facing similar issues of identity and alienation. I wondered if, perhaps, we might attempt to stamp out a unifying identity together on this old, stubborn continent: strength in numbers, so to speak.

I first started to search for the person on the 7.30 to Frankfurt in the arts, particularly music, later becoming a music journalist. It would be through music that I would have my first encounter with the word ‘Afropean’.

If you listen to black music emanating out of Europe in the ‘90s and ‘00s, you can hear the sounds of the last wave of generation x coming of age; of true multiculturalism. There was a subtle shift into an age of fusion, of Acid Jazz, Jungle, Drum N Bass, Trip-Hop, UK Hip-Hop, Garage and Grime, of French Hip-Hop, Swedish Soul and German reggae. These are styles that really are a musical melange of influences and experiences, that aren’t merely referencing either black or white culture, but had been born out of an organic union of the two.

There were mixtures before of course — Mods found new meaning in Ska, working class northerners connected with soul. I myself am a Northern Soul child — my mum, a white Sheffielder, met my African American father when he was on tour with his group The Fantastics. But these unions seemed to be about celebrating difference, rather than being amalgamations.

That’s why I chose to use this rather new word that was born in the early ‘90s when these musical mixtures were being born. Afropean is a term that I felt reflected new identities on the continent and seemed appropriate for a number of reasons. Firstly it hints at cultural influence, rather than simply racial identification, and secondly, for the first time in my life it is a word I’ve been able to use to describe myself that sounds cohesive and whole — isn’t mixed this or half that or hyphenated in any way. Rather, it’s a portmanteau — something whole but born of duality.

Another reason the word interested me, is that it wasn’t invented on the desk of an anthropologist, but by the coming together of two brilliant artistic minds. The first time I know of it appearing was when David Byrne of The Talking Heads teamed with up with Marie Daulne (Zap Mama) to come up with a term to describe her music. Of Belgian and Congolese descent, Daulne grew up in what might be described as the Afropean capital of the world: Matonge in Brussels, and named Zap Mama’s first album after their self title debut ‘Adventures in Afropea’. This was on the verge of an explosion of Afropean music. IAM, the Hip-Hop crew from Marseille were going platinum, Jamiroquai broke records off the back of the Acid Jazz scene, and multicultural Bristol gave birth to Massive Attack and Portishead which would ultimately spawn the Trip-Hop inflected Afropean anthem ’7 Seconds’ by Neneh Cherry and Youssou N’Dour. An aesthetic was starting to develop too, which seemed to take sophisticated influences from black and European culture. Stephen Simmonds from Stockholm, Les Nubians from Paris, Tasha’s World from Amsterdam, Joy Denalane from Berlin, Lynden David Hall from London and of course Zap Mama from Belgium all personified what I perceived to be this new ‘post- postcolonial’ Afropean style.

Similar to the cultural transactions that took place in the 1920s and 1930s of négritude in Paris, some of these artists are also a direct product of liberal 1960s attitudes in Europe. There was a call for African and African American musicians across the continent, particularly in Sweden, Holland, France and Britain. Neneh Cherry, for instance, is the daughter of African American trumpeter Don Cherry; Stephen Simmonds, the son of a Jamaican musician touring Sweden at the time. The influence of black musicians on tour in the ‘60s and ‘70s may explain why many of these artists who were embracing this Afropean style were also connected with a genre of music that a record executive called Kedar Massenburg named ‘Neo Soul’. There was an organic texture to the instrumentation, references to Pan-Africanism, head wraps, earthy colours, Rastafarian knitwear all mixed with European sensibilities, streamlined English tailoring, French berets, Italian suits.

In fact I’d always perceived African American Neo Soul artists like Maxwell, Erykah Badu, Amel Larrieux, Meshell Ndegeocello and so on, as being very Afropean themselves, certainly what they were doing was very different from other African American styles at the time. This has, I think, something to do with the British soul revival scene of the late 1980s that included Omar, Soul 2 Soul, Sade, The Young Disciples, etc., who took classic American soul, brought it to Europe and added their own colours to the mix, which then travelled back to America and became what we know of as Neo Soul. With these musical migrations, fashion and lifestyle choices got picked up along the way too.

Nowhere was this Afropean and Neo Soul aesthetic explored more than in Claude Grunitsky’s Trace Magazine. ‘Transcultural styles and ideas’ was its tagline and Grunitsky, its founder, was born in Togo, raised in Paris, lived in London, and eventually moved to New York. The magazine reflected his own migratory path.

I started to see the term as not only speaking of an Afro-European experience, but of travel — of the voluntary movement and connection of black people rather than the usual black travel narratives of up-rooting, fleeing, survival and immigration.

It was in this spirit of travel, for travel’s sake, that I decided it was time to experience some of this Afropean culture for myself. After being mistaken for the guy with an afro on the 7.30 to Frankfurt, I’d unveiled a whole Afropean world of possibility, but it was just that, possibility — stuff I’d seen in magazines, heard on the radio, caught a whiff of in music videos.

Finally, one cold October morning I left for Europe to embark on a five month voyage, with the idea of writing about the people I met, and my own experience of travelling through the ‘white continent’ as a black backpacker. Initially I imagined myself heading to cool parties, checking out gigs, meeting fashionistas who’d managed to articulate their Afropean culture fluently. I wanted to provide a positive view of black people on the continent, rather than the usual depictions of disenfranchised immigrants and gangsters, or of a kind of mindless vibrancy and two-dimensional exoticism I feel white photographers so often search for in black communities.

Certainly, I tried to avoid clichés, but I was naïve to think Europe would show me only a convenient view that suited my hopes of what being Afro-European was about.

Europe, in the grip of its worst recession since World War II, was in a mess when I travelled around its major cities, and during the period in which I wrote up my notes. The single currency was trembling, there were major budget cuts, increased student fees and only two of the thirteen cities I visited didn’t have some sort of major protest going on whilst I was there. Anders Breivik murdered 77 people in a bid to ‘annihilate multiculturalism’ in Norway, the streets of Britain were being looted after Mark Duggan, a young black man, was shot and killed by police. For the first time in the country’s history the nationalist Swedish democrat movement in Sweden got seats in parliament, Neo-Nazism was on the rise across Eastern Europe, and the Neo-Fascist ‘Golden Dawn Party’ acquired unprecedented national support in Greece. Paris banned the burqa, and the city was reeling from recent comments by French perfumier Jean-Paul Guerlain who called black people ‘niggers’ on national TV.

Though I met and photographed a lot of talented and fashionable Afropeans, success stories so to speak, I realised, through chance encounters, that I would be doing a disservice to the black diaspora by presenting only a superficial view of their, or rather our, experience.

I found that in search of black Europe I was often led to the periphery — Clichy Sous Bois in Paris, the Cape Verdean favela Cova Da Moura in Lisbon, the largely Muslim area of Rinkeby in Stockholm. Areas of Europe not presented in the tourist literature of its great cities, not in the fashionable scenes of a music video. Here were communities living on the fringes of society, culturally and geographically, who had a very different story to share. Some of these areas were depressing and dangerous, and spoke of failed integration. But there was also a different kind of dynamism to be found in what the author Doug Saunders calls ‘Arrival Cities’, where people, sometimes from African villages, begin to learn how to create a life as a European urbanite. These hinterlands were the first steps for the Afropean, where African traditions merged or sometimes clashed with big city Europe. Where the battle of transition was being fought, and where stories in the margins were edging their way into the pages of national narratives.

When I returned home I realised that the area I’m from — Firth Park in Sheffield — was one of these places, and I saw a fresh dynamism, where before there was only death and stagnation.

Paul Theroux once said, after writing a kind of polarized book to my own about his travels as a white man in Africa, that “you go away for a long time and return a different person — you never come all the way back.”

When I returned home after travelling as a black man in Europe, I too had changed. I came back with thousands of photographs, over one hundred and fifty thousand words worth of tatty notebooks and a fuller idea of what it meant to juggle the ‘double consciousness’ W. E. B. DuBois spoke of.

So how did I feel about this term ‘Afropean’ after my travels? I decided that it was a personal relationship I had with the word that had ultimately encouraged an existential experience of blackness. That it had allowed me, to quote Michael Eric Dyson, ‘to be rooted in, but not restricted by, my Blackness’.

Whilst the word can’t be confined to the fashionable elite, like perhaps ‘Afropolitanism’ is, I’m happy that the imagery it evokes for me is still one of optimism, of hybridity and integration, of newness and movement, rather than the violence and destitution black communities seem so often to be paired with.

Perhaps, since the word was born in the realm of music and popular culture, that’s where the word can thrive — as a cultural movement and a platform to encourage dialogue amongst various black communities living in and influenced by Europe and also with white Europeans interested in black and African culture.

I finished my first draft this year, and am currently knocking it into shape to be released as a book in 2015. But there was something that I didn’t include in my notes that I felt was too random and opaque an idea for the narrative. Leaving Amsterdam, on the way to Stockholm, I had to stop off in Cologne, where I’d catch an overnight sleeper train through Scandinavia. But I didn’t get on that train. Instead I decided to make a quick detour, and found myself in possession of a big smile, as a mixed race guy with an afro, who had finally boarded the 7.30 train to Frankfurt.

This essay was originally a talk at the Afro European conference held at Senate House in 2013. It was first published on the recently launched on-line journal AFRØPEAN.

What if you witness a revolution but things get worse?

Last week “Arij – Scent of Revolution” had its Egyptian premiere during the Goethe Film Week in Cairo. After an understated introduction, director Viola Shafik slipped to the back of the smallish screening room as the lights dimmed. I can say unequivocally that “Scent of Revolution” is a powerful documentary. In her brief introduction, Shafik gave the audience warning; just as the film had been difficult to make, it too would be difficult to watch. She did not disappoint.

The film documents a portion of the Egyptian experience, from the vantage point of four different individuals. Safwat Samaan, a Coptic political activist; Francis Amin Mohareb, owner of the largest collection of historical negatives in Egypt (both based in Luxor); Alaa El-Dib, a socialist writer; and Awatef Mahmoud, a 3-D designer (both based in Cairo). Shafik began the process of making the film prior to the 2011 revolution. Her initial intention was to document the rampant corruption and destruction of Luxor, and the impact it was having on the city’s population. When the revolution occurred this path was diverted. As the initial euphoria gave way to disillusionment and tragedy for many, Shafik felt compelled to pour the frustration into her work. As she explains, “The four protagonists and their stories reflect my own development from hope to depression, up to finding new means to cope with failed expectations or – in other words – with the fading fragrance of revolution.”

Here’s an extended trailer:

The separate narratives played out in the movie are vastly different yet fundamentally interconnected. It is this fact that makes the film so powerful, and what compelled me to write this post. Following the screening, I was so taken aback by the film that I immediately went home to garner as much information as I could on the production, director, and story. What I found was a review of the film from its Berlin Film Festival premiere published in Variety. Reviewer Jay Weissberg offers the film great praise, yet is critical of Shafik’s failure to make the disparate narratives coalesce. This critique struck me, because for me, as for my fellow moviegoer, it was precisely the nuanced connections that made the film so impactful.

For myself as for many others, in the years leading up to the revolution, there was a constant and underlying sense that something had to give. Each time violent events occurred, such as the Nag Hammadi massacre of early 2010, which is addressed in the film, this sense was heightened. By documenting these and other, less publicized issues and events, Shafik paints a multilayered picture of why the revolution occurred in a way that also helps articulate why things have unfolded as they have in the last three years.

Since the 2011 revolution, there has been a tremendous amount of content created reflecting the events, but “Scent of Revolution” offers something new, including parts of the story, it seems, not known by many Egyptians. Take for example the work of activist Safwat Samaan, who has long been documenting forced evictions and rights violations in the Luxor area. Samaan shows amateur video of cranes destroying buildings; the residents panicked as they watch their homes, still containing their possessions, crumble to the group. This is a phenomenon that has occurred en masse for luxury development projects such as the Golden Triangle (the promotional video, set to ominous music, and rather ironically stating the project is “Beyond Civilization” is worth a watch):

The events documented in Luxor are a stark example of the kind of injustice, corruption, and inequality that lead to mass uprising, and the lesser-known examples provide more context, both for Egyptians as well as for outside audiences.

The film also reflects upon things unchanged, and lessons unlearned. In this vein, Alaa El-Dib provides compelling anecdotes and insightful commentary. However, perhaps the most striking example of this is police brutality before and after the revolution, as the same tactic of targeting the eyes of civilians is shown in Luxor in 2009, and on Mohamed Mahmoud Street in Cairo’s downtown core in November 2011. The film shows footage of officers being commended for successfully hitting their target, an illustration of just how deeply ingrained these attitudes are among law enforcement.

Each character and event in the film contributes to providing a holistic yet personalized description of how Egypt has arrived at its present juncture. It was clearly uncomfortable for much of the audience, as graphic footage and tragic events still fresh in the collective consciousness were depicted. The film felt distinctly cathartic for the director, and perhaps for the audience as well. In fact this was Shafik’s intention. As she explains: “This documentary is a way to deal with my own sadness through a sort of collective grief.” Shafik has done just that, in a thoughtful and poetic way.

Zanele Muholi’s new work mourns and celebrates South African queer lives

A powerful installation hits you upon entering Zanele Muholi’s current solo exhibition at Stevenson’s in Johannesburg: a glass coffin in the centre of the room, filled with flowers, and a framed self-portrait of the photographer. Muholi tells me that she had it custom-made, and on the opening night of the exhibition, she lay in it. Muholi’s exhibition, entitled Of Love & Loss, depicts the lives of lesbians, gays and transgender people, by exploring the binaries of joy and sadness, acceptance and intolerance, life and death. Like most of Muholi’s previous work, Of Love & Loss puts lesbians (particularly black lesbians), who are subjected to murder and ‘corrective’ rapes in South Africa’s townships, into sharp focus.

Of Love & Loss, Installation view, 2014. Image © Zanele Muholi. Courtesy of Stevenson, Cape Town and Johannesburg

According to Muholi, the coffin alludes to the fact that lesbian funerals become ‘state’ funerals; when a lesbian is murdered and this news gets to the media, the act of mourning essentially becomes the property of the state. “Every media house wants to document that murder,” she adds, “there is nothing private about these funerals.”

She expands on why she chose a glass coffin, as opposed to a wooden, sealed one: “We’re talking transparently about these hate crimes but there’s never any solutions; we talk openly about the Constitution but there are ongoing hate crimes in this country. We talk openly about ‘curative’ rapes in this country but how do we talk about love-making between women?”

Most of Muholi’s work centers on making the private public, and she is well aware that power for change lies in doing so. Essentially, she wants her images to act as a “photo album inside a gallery.” Not only do her photographs focus on loss and mourning, but they also highlight love and celebration, both of which, she believes, should not be hidden and kept behind closed doors.

According to Muholi, the overall project is about the events that are taking place in South African townships today: from weddings to funerals, relationships, love and family, and how the queer community – gays, lesbians and transgender people in particular–is perceived by South African society at large. “I like the juxtaposition between love and pain and playing with the binaries. I’m talking about love but I also want to acknowledge the fact that young black lesbians are being murdered in Thokoza.”

Not only does Muholi’s work speak of the persecution that black lesbians are subjected to in the townships, but it also highlights the great contradiction that lies at the heart of this issue: the fact that gays and lesbians can legally marry in South Africa, yet, at the same time, certain segments of this community are being raped and murdered based on their sexual orientation, and how race definitely plays a part.

“We, as lesbians, have been given the right to express our love yet there is ongoing persecution. [I’m] thinking back to the history [of apartheid], how people were vilified and degraded and persecuted for being in inter-racial relationships – today we are fighting a different kind of war where we have to deal with hate crimes that persist. All the hate connects because history informs who we are today.”

Muholi’s series entitled ZaVa focuses on her relationship with her white partner, and brings the notion of making the private public to the fore. The images show the two of them sharing intimate moments in hotel rooms in various states of undress. The images are soft and gentle, and the viewer is able to get a sense of their relationship, their love for each other, in a deeply connected and meaningful way – not in a detached, voyeuristic sense.

ZaVa I. Paris, 2013. Image © Zanele Muholi. Courtesy of Stevenson, Cape Town and Johannesburg

“Some of these were taken by Valérie [Muholi’s partner]. I wanted to create a love-story; a cinematic feel which is part of social documentary, but not everyone gets the opportunity to document themselves [in this way]. I didn’t want a third-party, orgy feel – I wanted us to have something that we could call ours which is autobiographical.”

Muholi tells me that these images were taken in different cities, namely Paris, Venice and Bordeaux, and that they, although very intimate, convey a “sense of loss” – which, I take to mean, refers to the Constitution contradiction: that although Muholi (and other lesbian couples) are able to freely express their love in whatever manner they choose, there are still those who cannot – there are still those whom we mourn for, both in the literal and metaphorical sense.

Many of the images in Of Love & Loss depict the celebration of black gay and lesbian weddings. She tells me about Ayanda Moremi’s marriage to Nhlanhla in Katlehong, Johannesburg, in November last year. Ayanda, a lesbian mother who lives in Vosloorus, was at the forefront of Duduzile Zozo’s funeral. Zozo, a butch lesbian, was brutally murdered in Thokoza township a few months before Ayanda’s wedding. According to Muholi, the whole community, as well as friends and relatives, came out to support Ayanda and Nhlanhla’s wedding, with “not a trace of homophobia on the day.”

“It was the first lesbian wedding in that space … yet a few months earlier Dudu was brutally murdered. I can’t explain it: the community embraces queerness but at the same time there is extreme hatred.”

She adds that Nhlanhla’s mother supported the wedding and respected the fact that Ayanda is a bride to her daughter, who is a lesbian – but is regarded as a man. In the video installation [which was taken during the wedding], Nhlanhla’s mother talks about how her daughter became a ‘man’ on her wedding day:

An interesting point comes up at this juncture: not only does Muholi’s work deal with sexual orientation, but also with that of gender identity. I mention this, and Muholi says that during her documentation of lesbian weddings, there is a marked distinction between ‘butch’ and ‘femme’: “[These weddings have] a lot to do with masculinities and gender binaries: there is a bride, and a groom. I noticed that with most of the same-sex marriages that I hardly see femme and femme getting married or butch and butch. The ‘butchness’ and femininity is so well-defined and pronounced. It is gender within gender.”

It’s also no coincidence that most victims of ‘corrective’ rapes and murders in the townships were masculine-identified. “Some survivors have said their male attackers told them they’d make them pregnant; that they’d prove to them they’re not a man, they’re a woman. It threatens and destabilises their male power.”

Muholi sees her image-making as not only an act of activism, but also as archive creation. She says that the reason she specifically documents the black gay, lesbian and transgender community is to contest its so-called ‘un-Africanness’: “We live in a time when we don’t know what is African anymore – who is African and who decides what is African? We, as black communities, have not had our histories documented properly.”

Ziningi & Delisile Ndlela’s wedding IV. Chesterville, Durban, 15 June 2013. Image © Zanele Muholi. Courtesy of Stevenson, Cape Town and Johannesburg

Let’s be very clear: Muholi is not only a photographer who documents people’s stories – she is an art activist, and activism is her life; she does not merely give lip service to it. I tell her that even though her images are powerful and moving, being a white queer woman, I feel a sense of disconnect – these rapes and murders are happening ‘out there’, not to me or those I love. I mourn an imagined loss; a loss, because I’m not directly affected, is distant and somewhat detached – a reality that could be mine, but isn’t. I tell her that I often feel hopeless, not knowing how to change this disturbing situation.

“During apartheid some people didn’t want to participate in an unjust system and they denounced racism – even if they weren’t directly affected by it. Writing, blogging and denouncing all are forms of activism … We can learn from each other and come up with a different form of socialisation because society is divided.”

She urges me – and those like me – to go into the townships and “destabilize” the notion that they are dangerous; she urges white South Africans to get to know the townships “just like we [black people] know the suburbs.” She tells me to engage with people and question what I don’t understand. According to her, only by making an individual effort can we begin to break down the multiple stigmas of racism and homophobia. Muholi believes that we can do things differently, that we can make a difference – but it depends on what each of us is willing to do. “It is my duty to pave the way for others to see that it’s possible. How do we embrace each other and mix without faking it? The new South Africa I long for is where people collaborate, beyond races, and where queer people can make a difference in other people’s lives.”

* Of Love & Loss is currently on at Stevenson, 62 Juta Street, Braamfontein, until 4 April. A separate body of her work, entitled (Mo(u)rning) is also currently on view at the Wits Art Museum in Johannesburg; it forms part of the Queer and Trans Art-iculations exhibition and is jointly exhibited with Gabrielle Le Roux’s Proudly African & Transgender and Proudly Trans in Turkey until 30 March.

How To Kill The Nigerian Publishing Industry

The general collapse of education in Nigeria is hardly news. However, any attempt to address the issue is of interest to those trying to improve the hapless lot of Nigerian students. There was therefore a purr of approval on Twitter yesterday that this year’s Nigerian Economic Summit Group (NESG) event would focus on “Transforming Education Through Partnerships For Global Competitiveness.” The NESG is Nigeria’s premier think tank on private sector development and is best known for its annual conference in Abuja, which brings industrialists and entrepreneurs together with government figures to discuss Nigerian private sector concerns. At last, people felt there might be a commercial solution to a sector in terminal decline.

It was ironic therefore that yesterday was the day it became widely known that the Minister of Finance, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, has imposed a 62.5% tariff (a mix of levies, duties and VAT) on imported printed books, where previously there has been none. The tariff was approved in a ministry circular on the 28th February but applies from the 1st January 2014. Needless to say, Nigerian publishers had not been consulted. For six decades, Nigeria has kept to a UNESCO agreement (signed in 1950) “on the Importation of Educational, Scientific and Cultural Materials” which in its first Article states that signatory countries will not impose customs duties or other charges on importing books, publications, educational, scientific and cultural materials.” Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala therefore has the distinction of being the first Nigerian Finance Minister in over sixty years to break this convention.

An outsider’s devil’s-advocate response to the news might be, “well, this might contravene a UN agreement, but ultimately it’s good news that Nigeria protects a sector that it wants to develop. Nigeria should try to stimulate the production of its own books in country.”

The main problem with this view is that it confuses printing with publishing, a blurred perception common in Nigeria, perhaps due to the collapse of the publishing sector during 1980s structural adjustment. Publishing in Nigeria is nowadays often thought of as a guy with a press and little else besides. However, from a serious Nigerian publisher’s perspective, it’s just not possible to print books locally to a consistent level of quality and at a price that would make the books affordable to Nigerian readers. We experienced this problem directly when we printed locally 10,000 copies each of our first two books at the very beginning of Cassava Republic in 2006. The sample copies supplied by the printer bore no resemblance to the pallets of books eventually delivered. The books were so poorly put together, with thin sludge-grey paper that they were unsellable. We had to throw them away, with no hope of compensation. Our business was nearly killed off before it had begun.

The reality is, Nigerian publishers who wish to sell good quality books at an affordable price are forced to print overseas. There’s nothing particularly innovative or unusual in this: many Western publishers now print in Asia too. Cheap electricity and labour, access to international paper markets as well as technical know-how limit globally competitive print facilities to a small group of countries. Nigeria has no hope of competing with these countries any time soon. A wiser alternative policy decision would be to not even try. Nigerian paper mill and printing companies catering to local (non-book) printing needs can be supported through tax breaks and subsidies to nurture market development, without the need for protectionism. The lesson learnt from other sectors in Nigeria (such as textiles), is surely that tariffs and import bans stimulate piracy, rather than local market development. It is therefore also likely that book pirates may benefit from the punitive tariff. In other words, authors as well as Nigerian publishers will suffer.

The sad unintended-consequence of the UN-defying tariff is that Nigerian schoolchildren will no longer have any access to lovingly created and well-made books from around the world (or those published by Nigerian companies using international printers). Even those who wish to donate books to Nigeria will no longer be able to do so without additional (and prohibitive) costs. When Nigerian children do have access to books – which will be far from always – they will be in black and white, printed on shoddy paper and with a diluted glue binding, on a limited range of subjects. They will grow up not considering books as possessions to be treasured for life. The quality of the books will not be a subliminal inducement to learn to read and love reading, as elsewhere.

For policymakers focused on education, the new tariff is therefore a disaster. On their website, NESG explains the focus of this year’s gathering thus: “At present, our adult literacy rate of 61% as well as the low level of tertiary enrollment portends a threat to the ability of Nigeria to become the 20th largest economy in the world by 2020.”

Despite the good intentions behind the policy, the draconian imposition of a 62.5% tariff on imported books will only limit access to reading materials and can only lower the literacy rate in Nigeria.

The additional consequence of the Minister of Finance’s protectionist policy is that life as a small publisher in Nigeria will from now on be close to impossible. Being forced to use Nigerian printers means that we will not be able to maintain the quality and pricing points of our books. Nigerian readers of all ages will suffer. They will have access to a limited range of books at a higher price. Not for Nigerians anymore the literatures of elsewhere. Not for Nigerians anymore children’s picture books which will stimulate a love of learning. Protectionism for the printing industry will help close the lid on young Nigerian minds. It will effectively kill-off any hope of local knowledge production in Nigeria from now on.

The reaction on the twittersphere was general dismay – as if Nigeria doesn’t have enough bad news just now. Teju Cole’s response to the announcement was simply, “It’s insane.” Ebi Atawodi, organizer of Africa’s first literary prize for debut fiction, commented that, “this duty may unfortunately do the same to the publishing industry as loading an already struggling mule with more luggage would. It will only make the journey we have embarked upon longer.” But let’s leave the last word to our fellow Nigerian publisher. Eghosa Imasuen, Chief Operating Officer of Kachifo, expresses well the effect the Finance Minister’s decision will have on the Nigerian publishing industry:

So now, the company I run, with a shipment in port, and several more coming in, has just incurred a 300% increase in clearing costs. This will translate to a doubling of the price of these books in the market. The printers in Nigeria cannot match the efficiency or quality or cost of the printers in India, Turkey, Dubai and China. Even European publishers print in these countries. In a situation where you cannot impose a levy on its competitors, then you award subsidies and grants to local printers, you remove all duties on paper, on printing material, you pull in technical know-how. And you wait, and hope that the industry picks up.

What you do not do is – in a single line of bureaucratese – throw out sixty years of precedence by instituting a 62.5%  tariff on books. It is mind-bogglingly inconceivable that anyone would do that. You do not kill your publishing industry to save your printing industry.

#WhiteHistoryMonth: Sherlock Holmes, a racist?

I’m obsessed with the Sherlock Holmes books. Love them all. But sometimes when I’m reading one of the little stories I go: wait hang on …that was … kind of …

Like in The Sign of Four, a thrilling tale of treasure, murder and a far away land called India. There is a small, evil Indian villain with a monkey in the story, who climbs buildings and shoots people with poison arrows through a pea-shooter. His name is Tonga; he is from the Andaman Islands and his people are described as follows:

they are naturally hideous, having large, misshapen heads, small fierce eyes and distorted features [....] They have always been a terror to shipwrecked crews, braining the survivors with their stone-headed clubs, or shooting them with their poisoned arrows. These massacres are invariably concluded by a cannibal feast.

In The Adventure of the Three Gables Holmes meets a man called Steve Dixie, a former slave:

“The door had flown open and a huge negro had burst into the room. He would have been a comic figure if he had not been terrific[…]

“I won’t ask you to sit down, for I don’t like the smell of you, but aren’t you Steve Dixie, the bruiser?”

“That’s my name, Masser Holmes, and you’ll get put through it for sure if you give me any lip.”

“It is certainly the last thing you need,” said Holmes, staring at our visitor’s hideous mouth.”

That’s some racist bullshit Holmes, I ejaculated.

The real question is of course about Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1849-1930), author of the Sherlock Holmes stories. He was an interesting man. It is hard to gauge his actual views of the world from his actions or even his words. I usually end up with the idea of a man who was deep-down quite impressionable, in the best sense. He was a proponent of the South African war against the Dutch (he meant Boers), but seemingly more for nationalistic reasons than anything else. He built a friendship with Oscar Wilde, but was conservative in most fundamental ways. Then, in his later years he became a proponent and fervent believer in Spiritualism and the Occult. Whatever one reads into that.

What must be remembered is of course the context and time of Doyle’s authorship. There is ample evidence of British late-victorian attitudes, also in Doyle’s other texts, for instance in The Lost World (incidentally the inspiration for Jurassic Park). As we all know, late-Victorian British aristocracy do not go down in history for their open-minded attitudes to people of other colors than white. Or other nationalities for that matter. Or other classes. Or the Irish.

Furthermore, I would say that a good deal of Doyle’s writing is actually extremely progressive for the time. For instance in The Five Orange Pips, Holmes battles it out with the Ku Klux Klan (KKK), and there is a definite tone of condemnation throughout.

The most interesting case is the story of The Yellow Face. It is, literally, an image of Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks. A man keeps seeing a creepy, yellow, expressionless face in the neighbor’s house. He thinks it is a ghost, and suspects his wife to have something to do with it. Turns out the wife has been married before, and had a child by her first husband, a child she couldn’t leave behind when she moved from America to England. And that child …

I leave you now with the climax of The Yellow Face, and to judge Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s work. Progressively liberal or obscurely racist?

It was a cosy, well-furnished apartment, with two candles burning upon the table and two upon the mantelpiece. In the corner, stooping over a desk, there sat what appeared to be a little girl. Her face was turned away as we entered, but we could see that she was dressed in a red frock, and that she had long white gloves on. As she whisked round to us, I gave a cry of surprise and horror.

The face which she turned towards us was of the strangest livid tint, and the features were absolutely devoid of any expression. An instant later the mystery was explained. Holmes, with a laugh, passed his hand behind the child’s ear, a mask peeled off from her countenance, and there was a little coal-black negress, with all her white teeth flashing in amusement at our amazed faces. I burst out laughing, out of sympathy with her merriment; but Grant Munro stood staring, with his hand clutching his throat.

* Image Credit: Still from the movie “Sherlock Holmes” starring Robert Downey Jnr (as Holmes) and Jude Law (as Watson). And, no, this is not about the movie.

The everyday lives of African immigrants in South Africa

The experience of African immigrants living in South Africa has previously been portrayed through images of violence, deportation and police brutality. Local photographer, Sydelle Willow Smith, attempts to challenge these visual stereotypes in her exhibition Soft Walls (the show runs till April 2nd at The Market Photo Workshop in Johannesburg), by depicting everyday scenes that, seemingly, we should all be able to relate to.

T’seliso Monaheng and I went to the opening and shot this video with Smith:

Xenophobic attacks began in May 2008, in an informal settlement in northern Johannesburg, and quickly spread to impoverished communities throughout the country. The homes of foreign nationals were destroyed, their shops were looted and over sixty people were killed, prompting neighboring countries such as Zimbabwe, Mozambique and Malawi to provide emergency transport services for those wanting to escape the threats of violence. Political analysts attributed the attacks to factors including poverty, unemployment, high crime rates, police corruption and poor service delivery.

“I wanted to do a project that offered an alternative lens on migration stories that are often ignored in the mainstream media,” says Smith (we’ve featured her before on Africa is a Country). “I cannot ignore the social life I am surrounded by in South Africa and in Cape Town.”

The visual exploration of how immigrants create “home” in South Africa includes: a family on a shopping excursion (above), two girls watching an afternoon soap opera, an elderly man posing beside the pool he cleans for a privileged family in Camps Bay. True, Smith’s images represent the commonplace experiences of her subjects. But by shooting around the scars we end up with a disjoined figure of the larger narrative that encompasses the migrant experience in South Africa. Nevertheless, the exhibition offers space for a different conversation about the experience of being foreign.

* BTW, this also marks my debut on Africa is a Country.