Sean Jacobs's Blog, page 422

Nigerians in Space

Few government agencies have ever inspired confidence in the state, or scientific progress, like NASA did in the 1960s. So when the end of its space shuttle program was announced back in 2010, the agency celebrated the end of its life quietly. NASA’s current administrator, Major General Charles F. Bolden Jr., tactfully ignored the anti-Communist vitriol that put the first man on the moon, and everyone forgot why the CIA was concerned with space exploration in the first place. Almost everyone. There are stories involving secret military space programs today that can make your head spin.

Among its classified materials, NASA keeps a bag of rocks that Neil Armstrong collected during the first moonwalk. The rocks have no scientific value; the bag wasn’t sealed properly, and the sample was contaminated by regular earth dust in the landing craft. They are an unlikely target in an elaborate conspiracy to undermine the American imperial project. But then again, they’ve been sitting in Houston for decades, reminding young scientists of a time when lunar colonies were just a few years away. As the novelist Deji Olukotun sees it in his new novel, Nigerians in Space, these moon rocks are souvenirs of the future, amulets inscribed with all of the pride, wonder, and anxiety it takes to keep an idea alive. “NASA wanted the astronauts to leave with something no matter what in order to justify the expense” (62).

In Olukotun’s new novel, a Nigerian scientist stuck as a mid-level employee in the Houston laboratories finds himself with an opportunity to rip into the space-time continuum, to reclaim personal and national honor by returning the rocks to the moon “on behalf of all colonized people.” Equipped with such material, Olukotun would hardly ignore classic science fiction experiments and clichés. Nigerians in Space captures the cocksure attitude and dignified clip of the 1950s radio play, with more mischievous and macabre elements that reflect the frustration of anti-colonial and Pan-African politics. As we follow the Nigerian program (codename Brain Gain) from its launch in 1993 to an amorphous present day, cross-generational conflicts give us plenty of time to reflect on changing methods for handling security, national identity, and charisma. But Olukotun doesn’t dwell on the technology that has been developed. More alarmingly—as one generation’s faith in its dreams becomes signs of ill health to the next—he asks us what we believe is possible.

* Nigerians in Space launches tonight at 7 pm at WORD Bookstores’ Brooklyn book store. The red dots in the image above, by the NASA Earth Observatory, is of the non-stop flaring lights in the Niger Delta.

The other news from Uganda this week

Here’s the ‘other’ news from Uganda this week. Dateline: Kampala: “Police have warned the public against undressing women whom they perceive to be indecently dressed, saying the Anti-Pornography law is not operational yet.” Yet.

Ever since Simon Lokodo, State Minister for Ethics and Integrity and lead proponent for a ban on miniskirts (that’s him above), announced that the Anti-Pornography Bill had been signed into law, women have faced violence, especially in taxi ranks. According to Lokodo, “If your miniskirt falls within the ambit of this definition then I am afraid you will be caught up by the law.”

Except that, despite Lokodo’s most fervent efforts, the miniskirt ban actually never made it into the final legislation. Women across Uganda shut it down. From #SaveTheMiniSkirt online campaigns to Save the Miniskirt parties to formal lobbying to organizing in the streets and off, women shut it down. Women understood that the issue of their clothing was nothing more or less than an attack on women’s autonomy. For Rita Aciro Lakor, the executive director of Uganda Women’s Network (Uwonet), “It’s about going back to controlling women. They’ll start with clothes. The next time they’re going to remove the little provisions in the law that promote and protect women’s rights.”

Control. Protection. These are familiar terms to women who have struggled against the State’s attempt to rein them in, from New York to Jakarta to Kampala and beyond. The discreteness of the discourse serves to cover up the heart and soul of the operation, which is violence and terror, all in the name of protecting women.

So here is the reality of the Anti-Pornography Law 2014. There is no ban on miniskirts. Yet women university students are raped and murdered. Yet women across the country are brutally assaulted in public by crowds of men, stripped, sometimes naked, and then further assaulted. And a nation, and a world, asking, “Why are Ugandans killing, undressing” their daughters and sisters? And the police warn the law is not operational yet.

Yet.

Bloomberg Africa evokes Reagan’s “welfare queen” stereotype for poor South Africans

Former New York mayor Michael Bloomberg was in South Africa this month to launch the Bloomberg Media Initiative, a $10-million project to build capacity in business and financial journalism across the continent (starting first in Kenya, Nigeria and South Africa—which is a questionable choice of countries). But he should probably also invest some of his billions closer to home, too; at Bloomberg Africa, the Africa-focused overlay of his New York-based Bloomberg News agency.

In an article published Tuesday, the agency elided details and invoked shades of Ronald Reagan’s “welfare queen” stereotype to argue that South Africa has a welfare addiction.

The article transports the reader to the economically depressed town of Brandvlei, in the Northern Cape, South Africa’s most sparsely populated region, to bring us the image of a 72-year-old coloured grandmother, Eva Matthys, instructing her 13-year-old granddaughter on how to cook ground lamb for the family of 12′s supper that night. (That’s Ms Mathys sitting in front of the window  in the image above that accompanied the story.) But, wait for it, this is scandalous, because the family didn’t dance for their supper, which the writer appears galled to realise includes side dishes as ornate and lavish as macaroni and Bolognese sauce.

This was paid for by South African taxpayers, Bloomberg Africa notes in wide-eyed disbelief.

“Welfare dependency, a problem across the developed world, has reached a danger level in South Africa. More people receive aid than have jobs, and the ratio has been worsening for five years,” it says, before going downhill from there, repeating words like “dependency”, “welfare addition”, and the irrelevant statistic that South Africa spends more than Mexico and South Korea on its social program as a buttress against the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development’s statistic that this spending is nonetheless less than the developed-world average.

In short, the article uses a poor family as a foil to write an unconscionable hatchet job on the country’s social grants program. The things it gets wrong are numerous, the most significant of which are:

1. “Only one of the 12 [members of the Matthys family] works”: Uh, yes, but only three are of working age. Four of the family members are children, two more are barely 17 (and should be in school), and the remaining two adults are 72 and 78, well into retirement age.

2. The $400 figure in the headline and body copy is approximately $1.50 per day for each of the nine members of the family receiving the grants, barely above the World Bank’s poverty line of $1.25 per day and below the $2 per day the South African government uses. Despite Bloomberg Africa’s best attempt to convince us otherwise, this family is not living large off the taxpayer’s buck.

3. The article repeats that the unemployed working-age members of the family (including school-aged kids) would look for work if they weren’t earning social grants, as though the grants are the cause of their unemployment. In South Africa, unemployment is structural and is not from indolence or the lack of trying on the part of the unemployed.

17-year-old Christoline — Eva’s granddaughter, who dropped out of high school when she gave birth to a daughter at 16 — suggests that she’d travel the 370 miles to Cape Town to look for work if she weren’t receiving a grant, because Brandvlei has no jobs prospects and a 90% unemployment rate.

But don’t mistake the desperate situation taking away the social grants would create for her as just the thing she, and her family, need to get jobs. If you know and understand the country’s history of racist land dispossessions and forced removals, and the destructive social effects of the migratory labor system on the communities supplying workers to the country’s economic centres like Cape Town and Johannesburg, you’ll know that it is a good and just thing that the social grants are stopping Christoline from leaving behind her one-year-old baby, family support network, and the possibility of returning to school in order to chase the faint promise of a job hundreds of miles away. It’s precisely this reason that the Human Sciences Research Council recently proposed that countries in sub-Saharan Africa should expand their social grants program to include a grant that aims to keep families together, even if they do decide to relocate to more economically prosperous areas.

But for some reason, this zombie myth about social grants causing unemployment will not die. This despite studies that showing that there is no evidence of a dependency culture, and micro-economic evidence showing that social grants provide recipients with the means to look for jobs and that little evidence exists that they discourage job seeking.

Like Reagan’s welfare queen, I suspect the persistence of this myth has a lot to do with racial prejudice.

4. Social grants fuel alcohol abuse: Like the myth linking teenage pregnancies and child support grants and the unsubstantiated claim that women in the Eastern Cape were drinking heavily while pregnant to claim disability grants for the child who’d be born disabled, an immortal trope exists that social grants fuel alcohol abuse. The Bloomberg article quotes a community worker who points to a group of young men stumbling toward a liquor store. But the drinking age in South Africa is 18, which is also the last year a teenager qualifies for the child support grant. That should have been the first clue for Bloomberg that this was dangerous and, at best, circumstantial anecdote, especially when compared to the evidence of the good social grants do for teens in communities like Brandvlei. And had Bloomberg Africa done a little more work, they would have known that the vast majority of social grants are spent on food and education, not alcohol.

5. Lamb for 12 paid for by South African taxpayers: The tax system in South Africa is progressive in some ways and regressive in others. While only working people earning above a certain threshold pay tax calculated on rates that escalate with income, sales tax is a flat 14% paid by everybody on most (basic food stuff and other items are zero rated) household goods. Even though it has a disproportionate effect on their ability to provide for themselves, the Matthys family pays sales tax on items that are not zero-rated. They, too, are taxpayers.

As a friend commented on my Facebook wall, “I never thought the day would come that I’d read an article that lambasts a poor family for eating a nice family meal — but I guess that day is here.”

All this said, an equal amount of scrutiny over this article should be directed to the South African Institute of Race Relations, which has been issuing policy briefs and media statements for a few years now to sound the warning that social grants program is too extensive and using that to qualify the positive effects social grants have had on the lives of recipients. The institute’s Lerato Moloi is quoted in the Bloomberg article doing just that.

For the thoughtful, the research on the impacts of social grants does not raise sustainability as the program’s primary, or even secondary, conundrum; the research points to the likelihood that the grants are barely enough to keep millions of South Africans out of abject poverty, but not enough to allow them the freedom to do much else beyond stay alive.

* Written with contributions from Michelle Solomon (@mishsolomon).

Know your Dutch history

Twenty years ago, Teun van Dijk published the book Elite Discourse and Racism, in which he discusses the subtle ways that racial discrimination pervaded Dutch society at the time. To van Dijk it appeared that, as pivotal socializing agents, Dutch families, schools, politicians and media had a great deal of influence on how children came to perceive and interact with ‘other’ people, such as Dutch nationals and immigrants that were not white (many from the former colonies) and people from ‘The Third World’. In an attempt to illuminate these relationships a bit further, van Dijk decided to take a look at how Dutch school curricula dealt with these ‘others’. What emerged from the elaborate study of schoolbooks that followed was that the general portrayal of ‘The Third World’ as well as minorities of color in the country itself was, well, rather incomplete.

Immigrants, for example, were discussed solely as an issue of integration and assimilation. Positive contributions by, or even backgrounds of these people, glared in absence. Centuries of slavery in the former Dutch colonies did not take up all too many pages either.

On the topic of sub-Saharan Africa, van Dijk found that the continent was largely framed as one of poverty, victims, hopelessness and illiteracy (with creepy witch doctors) and juxtaposed against our own modern and wealthy society (with, you know, real doctors). The power dynamics and imperial histories that underpinned contemporary global inequality and poverty seemed of little interest. The global wealth pie, as Dutch history seemed to have it, just happened to have unequal chunks and taste(s) a bit richer in the West. Whoever sliced the sweet thing in our advantage, and with what instruments, failed to make it into the books.

It wasn’t like Dutch imperial history was ignored altogether. But the ways in which the overseas adventures and ‘native encounters’ of the past were selected and represented were just a bit ominous. Though already pretty outdated and charged at the time, terms like “negroes,” “bushmen” and “natives” were pretty common in the curricula. Worse, some books presented the resistance by those who were enslaved or colonized even in negative, disapproving terms. After critically analyzing the types of histories that teachers fed their classes, one of van Dijk’s conclusions was that “Dutch children are not trained to identify and challenge racist attitudes.”

Twenty years since, the country may have introduced a New Canon of Dutch history (2006), but children can still order Bush Negro customs online (until Serginho wrote a post about it), read how to dress up like a “n****bitch” in fashion magazines (until the rest of the world said this was not OK) and rest assured that at least 18% of their population will defend their annual Blackface tradition of Zwarte Piet (and fiercely so).

If there is indeed a direct connection to schools’ history curricula on the one hand and race relations on the other, the question on how far schools and teachers have come in these past twenty years seems a compelling one to ask.

And so we did. We decided to direct it to Maria Reinders-Karg, who has worked as both former school teacher as well as an education specialist at NiNsee (the National Institute for the Study of Dutch Slavery History and its Legacy). In a creative and inventive response to the government’s severe funding cuts for NiNsee, Maria recently founded the educational organization MiraKa.

Particularly focused on primary and secondary schools, MiraKa offers class activities, lesson plans and participatory workshops that deal with those pages of Dutch heritage that may not inspire the utmost of national pride but deserve to be part of class dialogues.

Not surprising given Maria’s background and expertise, slavery and colonialism (as well as contemporary slavery) are central themes in MiraKa’s work. This is because in the Netherlands, Maria says, the sense of resistance against this side of national history has indeed persisted. According to her “it’s a process of acceptance, which we, as a country, are not yet ready for.” “For many school teachers,” Maria explains, “who haven’t been trained to tell these sensitive histories themselves, it remains a difficult story to tell.” And although the new Canon of Dutch History offers a somewhat more balanced view of Dutch heritage, and at least pays some attention to slavery and resistance (in English, it looks like this), most people will have to either purchase this material themselves or go look for it online and in museums, as they are no basic staple in schools.

But the stories of how the Netherlands built itself, where its glorious international adventures have taken it throughout the centuries, and whom it oppressed, enslaved and brutalized in the process deserve to be part of the staple. According to Maria, “it is important that the Dutch slavery history gets anchored in history curriculums the same way that the Second World War is,” so that it will become a ‘shared’ history, carried by all. “In the Netherlands, we are all a product of this history,” she says. (Despite the fact that no other country handed over as many Jewish people as rapidly as the Netherlands, Dutch cooperation with the Nazis is often neglected in a simplified narrative of bad Germans versus good Dutch people.)

MiraKa is one of the organizations that constructively, positively and pro-actively works towards making this legacy a shared one. For more information about MiraKa’s activities, programs, readings and heritage tours (for both children and adults), take a look at the website.

The Congolization Movement

On January 17th, a group of local artists (Pitcho Womba Konga, Fredy Massamba, Badi Ndeka, Caroline Dujardin, Kamanda Milele, Lety Kangaka, Jack Rémy, Karim Kalonji, Christian Levo, Malkia Mutiri and myself) pulled off “the Action” in L’Horloge Du Sud, better known as the Afro-European cultural spot in the center of Brussels. The date was chosen carefully to launch the “Congolization” artistic movement while remembering the assassination of Patrice Lumumba (he was murdered by a conspiracy of the Belgian and American governments along with General Mobutu). Pitcho Womba Konga, myself and all our cultural partners wanted to promote more than ever spaces where artists related to the Congolese diaspora could freely tell their side of the story.

Three main attractions were in place :

1. The photo exhibition “Faits Divers, from Leopoldville to Kinshasa” with mixed photos from my selection and from the Royal Museum for Central Africa’s collection to help Belgo-Congolese communities deal with their past and move forward.

2. While remembering the 53rd anniversary of Patrice Lumumba’s assassination, we celebrated in our own way his universal legacy with a vibrant actualised version of Lumumba’s famous June 30th, 1960 independence speech. The words of that speech were personified by black, white and mixed-race actors. We concluded the “new” speech by paying homage to Nelson Mandela and all the freedom fighters with the call and response “Amandla !”, “Awethu!” Watch a video of “The Action”:

3. Afterwards, Badi Banx and Fredy Massamba moved the crowded L’Horloge Du sud with their thematic related songs. In the video “The Action” (above), beside extracts from the speech, you can hear Fredy’s call for “Unity” in Africa. The N.G.O. Coopération Education Culture (CEC) had installed an audio system with many headphones allowing anyone to listen to extracts from books recently written by Africans or/and about Africa.

“Congolisation” is a movement that joins forces with Africans and Europeans interested in allowing each one to tell freely her/his version of a story. In other words, The Action that took place on January 17, 2014 at L’Horloge Du Sud marked the importance of shining a cultural new light on the African diaspora in general and the Congolese diaspora in particular.

“Congo Dialogues.” Alice Seeley Harris and Sammy Baloji on exhibit in London

The London gallery Autograph ABP is currently exhibiting Alice Seeley Harris’ well-known 1904 Congo Reform Association photographs, together, or in some form of juxtaposition, with new commissioned photographic and video work by contemporary young Congolese artist Sammy Baloji. This choice is either bold or inexplicable.

English missionary Alice Seeley Harris’ famously shocking and sensational images of the atrocities committed by European officers and their African sentries in fin-de-siècle Congo Free State (1885-1908) are being exhibited to the public for the first time since 1904. Harris was among the most active members of The Congo Reform Association, which, as Sharon Sliwinski writes, was both the largest human rights movement of its time and the first to use photography as a means of mobilizing public outcry against the Leopoldian regime’s atrocities in Central Africa. Believing that there was a “right way” and a “wrong way” to colonize Africa, Anglo-American protestant missionaries were also taking their anti-Leopoldian crusade to a religious, moral, cultural, and political terrain where contestation of the idea of “right” in opposition to power and tyranny, became a multi-layered affair marshaling public relations machines in Belgium, Britain, and the United States.

When Congo’s “red rubber” scandal broke in Europe and North America in the early twentieth century, it was largely due to the efforts of the Congo Reform Association (CRA) led by the shipping clerk and finance journalist Edmund Morel, in association with then British Consul to the Congo Free State (CFS) Roger Casement. Key to revealing and circulating what the CRA presented as incontrovertible visual evidence of ongoing atrocities in the Congo were a series of photographs taken by the British missionary, Alice Seeley Harris, who, together with her husband John Harris some years earlier, had traveled to the Leopoldian State in search of “heathens” to convert and civilize. The Congo Free State was an internationally recognized sovereign state under the authority of King Leopold II of Belgium, who became the Reform Association’s main target. The “Congo State” was run with great brutality by the field officers of concessionary companies with financial ties to the Crown and to Belgian political and financial circles.

The foundational moment of her activism, as Harris recalls it, was the appearance of a man named Nsala on her doorstep. Nsala arrived at the mission one day carrying a small bundle of leaves in which were wrapped the hands and feet of his daughter, who, together with her mother, had been mutilated and killed by ABIR (Anglo-Belgian India Rubber Company) sentries in retaliation for Nsala’s failure to meet his rubber quota. One can only imagine the horror of such a moment, yet Harris kept her head and asked Nsala to pose for a photograph with the child’s severed hand and foot. (Image below) She went on to further document the abuses and produced a well-known series of photographs that were circulated as lantern slides in illustration of lectures and presentations given in Churches across Protestant Britain and North America.

The portrait of Nsala with his daughter’s remains is perhaps the most arresting image of the collection. How can one even begin to talk about such an image? Sliwinski remarks on its “calmness,” which I think is another way of saying that it defies language and signals “the horror,” for which there can be no words clearer than the rantings of a madman.

Sammy Baloji is a Congolese artist from Katanga, Congo’s “copper” province, whose work explores postcoloniality and themes of memory, decay, colonial violence and its legacies, as well as history and silencing. While many of Harris’ photographs are filled with the energy of rage and sorrow of their “now,” much of Baloji’s work is silent and mournful, somewhat like the photograph of Nsala above, except that Baloji’s work does not employ the same classic formality in composition.

Baloji has often worked through juxtaposition, imprinting colonial images upon contemporary settings, and sometimes placing ruined colonial landscapes as backdrops for an interrogation of a ruined postcolonial present. His falsely anodyne panoramas bear traces of their past in greater or lesser degrees of visibility. At other moments his backdrops are more clearly defined by the presence of accumulated “imperial debris,” which has piled up and become sediment over the last 50 years. His are landscapes, figurative snapshots of colonial and postcolonial modernity, which appear as both sites and matrixes of what Ann Stoler calls “ruination.” For Baloji, juxtaposing a colonial-era image of barefoot Force Publique soldiers holding up for the camera a large bird, which some European officer just shot, collaged on a photograph of a contemporary refugee camp (see top image), provides a direct route to the entanglements of colonial oppression, environmental degradation, and postcolonial violence.

In the current exhibition, Harris’ images have been placed on the ground floor – and are to be viewed first – while Baloji’s photographs are located on the floor above. The genealogy of “first Harris’ images, then Baloji’s work,” implied by the exhibition’s promotional materials and through this placement is an interesting choice.

Baloji’s work has often sought hybridity in photographic representation as he confronts how he sees contemporary Congo to the ways colonial photography saw the Belgian Congo. According to the APB press release, “Like Harris, Baloji uses photography as a medium to interrogate current political concerns with reference to the past.” While this is undeniably the case for Baloji, the description does not quite fit Harris’ work or her purpose in 1904. Creating conceptual relationships between Harris and Baloji seems curious, as Baloji’s work is not very directly or very obviously in dialogue with Harris’ strongly and disturbingly militant images. On the other hand, images of men, women, and children with severed hands and feet – whether actually seen, or known about and imagined – have been imprinted on the unconscious of generations of Congolese. As Nancy Hunt suggests, these images’ iconicity has become deeply internalized.

A strong trace and a manifestation of deep postcolonial sorrow, the influence of Harris’ images is perhaps to be sensed in Baloji’s work.

*

The exhibition’s website offers a downloadable 12-page PDF pamphlet featuring Sharon Sliwinski’s article “The Kodak on the Congo. The Childhood of Human Rights,” which was originally published in 2006 in the Journal of Visual Culture. Some installation views here.

When Harmony went to Hell. Congo Dialogues: Alice Seeley Harris and Sammy Baloji runs at the London gallery ABP Autograph until 7 March 2014. The Harris photographs can also be seen at Liverpool’s International Slavery Museum until 7 September, 2014.

Debate: The future of the workers’ movement in South Africa

In May this year, South Africa will host its 5th general election since the advent of democracy in 1994. The ruling African National Congress have dominated these elections until now (62.6% of the vote in 1994, 66.3% in 1999, 69.6% in 2004 and 65% in 2009) and are poised to get a majority again, though there are questions about the size of that majority given widespread discontent and disillusionment with the current ANC leadership. Yet, opposition parties have failed to take advantage of this, with most offering up media stunts and tepid criticism of the ANC’s economic policies. The result is that most voters hold their noses and vote ANC or stay at home. Unfortunately, the media don’t help. Nevertheless, there are signs of a shift in South African politics outside “parliamentary politics.” One such development was the decision in December 2013 by the country’s largest union, the National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa (Numsa), to formally break from the “tripartite alliance” the ANC maintains with the trade unions and the South African Communist Party (SACP) and that has been going on for at least more than 2 decades now. NUMSA also announced that it would begin the process of building a left political alternative to the tripartite alliance. Below we re-publish a piece (originally published in The Con Mag) by AIAC’s Ben Fogel (he is also an editor at Amandla Magazine and a contributor at Jacobin Magazine) on the significance of this break. But we also asked a number of labor commentators–trade unionist and political economist Peter Dwyer, sociologist Sakhela Buhlungu, historian Alex Lichtenstein and former trade unionist and political scientist Steven Friedman–to send us short comments on Ben’s piece to get the debate started. All that good stuff is below. Let’s debate. 

***

Benjamin Fogel:

In January 1973, dockworkers in Durban embarked on a wave of wildcat strikes against low wages. In total, some 61 000 workers took part. What became known as the “Durban Moment” not only broke the industrial relations framework that had been established after black trade unions had been smashed by the apartheid state in the 50s and 60s, but also led to the rebirth of the black trade union movement, which saw the establishment of the Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu) in 1985.

A similar moment took place on August 17 2012, the day after 34 workers were shot and killed at Marikana in the North West. Workers, rather than ending the strike after the massacre, continued their attempt to secure a new wage of R12 500. They were soon joined by tens of thousands other workers from across the platinum belt. The strike lasted another 90 days. Cosatu’s biggest affiliate at the time, the Nation Union of Mineworkers (NUM), leaked tens of thousands of members as it failed to support workers’ demands. In many cases, it sided with management against striking workers.

This led to a third moment, which took place between December 17 and 20 2013, as Cosatu’s largest affiliate – and the largest union in African history – the National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa (Numsa), held a special national congress to decide on the future of its relationship with the trade union federation and its alliance partners, the African National Congress (ANC) and South African Communist Party (SACP). At the end of the congress, Numsa decided it would formally break away from the tripartite alliance after being in it for more than 20 years. It set its sights on expanding its scope to other sectors, including the mining industry, and declared open war against the faction led by Cosatu president Sdumo Dlamini, which is dominating the union’s leadership. Most significantly, it began the process of building a left political alternative to the tripartite alliance.

The key moment of the Numsa congress didn’t take place in some back room meeting of its elite or in the commissions that debated and decided on Numsa’s resolutions; it took place on the first night of the conference when Rehad Desai’s documentary on Marikana, Miners Shot Down, was screened to more than 1 000 delegates, guests and journalists. The proceedings of the next day began when delegates marched into the venue clutching R100 rand notes singing, “Who killed Mambush at Marikana? Zuma must resign. Phiyega must resign. Ramaphosa must resign.”

At that moment, it became apparent that Numsa, would break with the alliance and this would initiate what a delegate described as “the post-Mandela period” in South African political history. In the words of its new president, Andrew Chirwa, “The state of the working class is in shambles. The working class is leaderless.” Perhaps stepping into that void, Numsa gave R350 000 it had raised to some of the Marikana worker-leaders and their family members. A worker-leader wearing an Association of Mineworkers and Construction Union (Amcu) T-shirt began singing to a Numsa delegation that had been told repeatedly by Cosatu’s leadership that Amcu is a homicidal vigilante union intent on undermining the unity of the working class for the benefit of its bosses. Later that evening, a Limpopo delegate said, “We can’t vote for an ANC that kills workers with taxpayers’ money.” He added: “This is the worst thing the ANC has done since 1994 … It wouldn’t have happened under Mandela.”

Why is Numsa splitting from the tripartite alliance? These reasons are pretty straightforward: Despite numerous attempts, Cosatu has been unable to influence the policy direction of the ANC since 1994 and has consistently moved in a neoliberal direction, first through the adoption of the Growth, Employment and Redistribution programme (Gear) in 1996 and now more recently with the adoption of the National Development Plan (NDP). As Numsa general secretary Irvin Jim admitted at the congress, “the strategy of swelling the ranks of the SACP and ANC has failed.” The ANC remains, as its leaders like to point, out a “multi-class formation”, but the unions and left-leaning sections of the alliance are becoming increasingly politically marginal and the SACP has transformed into a reactionary clique that uses Stalinist jargon to defend the president at all costs. Or, as Jim put it: “We want a vanguard party, not Blade’s fish and chips,” in reference to SACP secretary-general Blade Nzimande’s single-minded determination to liquidate whatever the SACP once stood for into unconditional defense of President Jacob Zuma.

The last attempt to force the ANC left was at Polokwane, in which the alliance’s left made a Faustian pact with Zuma, his shady backers and various disparates to come into power and break with “the ’96 class project” and remove its representative in chief, former president Thabo Mbeki. But this, ultimately, would prove fatal for the left. Their mistake was twofold: Firstly, in thinking that they could call the shots and control Zuma, and secondly in individualising the political struggle within the alliance through the figure of Mbeki. The supposed leftward turn of the ANC after Polokwane never came, and the much-vaunted “Lula moment” proved to be phantasmagoric. The working class has been rewarded for bringing Zuma to power with e-tolls, the youth wage subsidy, the NDP and, of course, Marikana.

The Numsa congress saw a break not only with the figure of Zuma, but the idea of the ANC as a vehicle for pursuing the interests of the working class. The SACP was the object of so much scorn that the possibility of winning it back wasn’t even considered. This signifies a change in political consciousness. Whereas before the ANC could never be wrong, merely the people in charge of it, Numsa argued that the ANC viewed workers as voting fodder that could be ignored between elections. As the final declaration put it: “There is no chance of winning back the alliance to what it was originally formed for, which was to drive a revolutionary programme for fundamental transformation of the country.” And with these words, Numsa broke with the ANC. “Numsa as an organisation will neither endorse nor support the ANC or any other political party in 2014.”

Following this, it declared: “Numsa calls on Cosatu to break from the alliance. The time for looking for an alternative has arrived.” Numsa sees part of its mission to attempt to fulfill that leadership vacuum both in terms of the “leaderless” working class and in terms of the left in South Africa more broadly. It seeks this in the face of the disintegration of the alliance’s left, the continued irrelevance of much of the molecular independent left and the collapse of social movements in the past five years or so.

The media expected Numsa to announce it would form a mass workers party with immediate effect to compete in the 2014 elections or announce its merger with the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) or something along those lines. But the trade union chose to pursue a strategy of building a united front with left-leaning elements of civil society, other unions and community organisations before it moves towards the stage of building a party. There have been suggestions that Numsa and the EFF are natural allies, but both Numsa membership and leadership were highly critical of the EFF during the conference. It was asserted that the EFF was anti-capitalist rather than being socialist, meaning that it was not committed to workers’ control as a principle of economic transformation. Furthermore, Numsa regards EFF leaders as undemocratic and is highly suspicious of Malema and his cohorts’ previous history “as capitalists”. All of this is clearly outlined in the report given at the congress by Jim.

What type of party Numsa would evolve into is still very much an open-ended question. It could be a broad mass workers party or it could be another vanguard party. But, like the “Durban Moment” in 1973, this Numsa moment marks a new direction in the trajectory of the workers movement in South Africa.

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RESPONSES

Sakhela Buhlungu:

It has taken more than 20 years for the dominant current of South Africa’s labour movement to begin to emerge from stasis resulting from its embeddedness within the ruling political block led by the African National Congress. The massacre of mineworkers at Marikana and the subsequent organisational implosion of the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) are emblematic of the desire by COSATU workers to find an alternative voice, on the one hand, and of the determination of tripartite leaders to maintain their hegemonic position in the labour movement, on the other. It therefore natural that many left-leaning activists will find the NUMSA’s rebellion against the ANC, the SACP and the conservative block within COSATU a welcome development to be applauded and celebrated. After all, many of them have long argued that the “swelling the ranks of the ANC” approach does not, and will not work. Like them, I find it so refreshing to see NUMSA activists and their allies show up ANC, SACP and some COSATU leaders for being shallow, dishonest and, in some cases, irredeemably corrupt.

Having said that, I find some of the celebratory support for the wave of militant mobilisation, whether in the form of AMCU or NUMSA, unhelpful and myopic. It is not good enough to stand on the sidelines and cheer the new wave of activist unionism. We should also help them think through the pitfalls they will face along the way and some of the implications of the decisions they take. I think it is extremely shortsighted any union, NUMSA included, to make an individual (Vavi) the focus of their campaign just as it was for Cosatu to give unconditional support for Zuma in 2005. After all, Vavi is not an angel in the current contestation. There are many who will say that he is getting a dose of the medicine that he administered on many of his opponents in the past.

The general thrust of the campaign for socialism is attractive. But all we have at present at present are slogans and dogma. In the absence of detail and political clarity it is very easy for a well-meaning campaign to be hijacked by demagogues and charlatans who thrive in conditions of political and confusion and absence of clarity.

The reality of the current situation is that COSATU has collapsed. Whatever remains of it will be a shadow of the former ‘giant’ whose birth Cyril Ramaphosa so eloquently proclaimed in December 1985. Anything that is to take its place will have to break the mould and adopt a new paradigm. In some respects NUMSA is doing this, for example by moving organizing towards value chains. But even here, it is not clear if the goal is to have one super general union. I also find their brand of Marxism archaic and often crude. A basic reading of Marx’s biographies will show any reader that he would have opposed many of the strategic choices being made by invoking his name. After all, it was Marx himself who once chastised his son-in-law, Paul Larfargue, for being too Marxist than Marx himself.

 ***

Peter Dwyer:

I fully agree that the decision by NUMSA to break from the ANC and also its call for COSATU to break from the Alliance will go down as a turning point in the history of the South African working class. I would have included the ‘Polokwane moment’ as important point on the timeline that has been unfolding since 1999. I have long argued that many on the Left outside of the Alliance underplayed the importance of the Left inside the Alliance replacing Mbeki with Zuma. What I am more circumspect about is Benjamin’s implicit assertion that the NUMSA moment represents a more generalised change in political consciousness. We don’t yet fully know how this move has gone down at the rank and file level who make up the bulk of NUMSA’s 340,000 members. Call me an old fashioned empiricist but we need to hear more of their voice and those in and around the Alliance, in COSATU and the SACP.  Whilst Jim and others are no longer welcome in the SACP, we should not underestimate the continuing importance of the SACP leadership acting as a political glue to hold the Alliance together, particularly the trade unions through the structures of COSATU. The failure of FOSATU during apartheid was to build an independent working class party. The NUMSA leadership have prioritised this as an urgent ask. It will nonetheless still prove a formidable one.

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Steven Friedman:

To a long-time labour watcher, likening Numsa’s resolutions to the 1973 ‘Durban moment’ is jarring. On reflection, Fogel may have a point–but it is hardly sure that these decisions will do for workers what the 1973 strikes did.

For the first time, a major Cosatu union–the country’s biggest–has broken with the ANC alliance and is talking openly about an alternative. This could reshape electoral politics–if Numsa does form a party and it wins 10 percent or more, the ANC could lose its majority. And so there is a chance that Numsa will be the catalyst for ending the ANC’s electoral dominance by 2019–obviously a watershed event.

But there are many ‘ifs’ attached. Numsa may not opt for a party, preferring a civil society alliance: its post-conference declaration was not overly enthusiastic about entering party politics. And if it does choose a party, winning 10%  may be difficult: Numsa clearly suspects that many of its members still favor the ANC – why else say that they are free to campaign for it as long as they do this in their own time? – and it could be right. We are in uncharted territory and so we don’t know whether most union members are ready to ditch the governing party.

Numsa’s move may also do much more to change national politics than to improve worker leverage. Even if it does end the ANC’s majority, will that mean more influence for working people? Might it not simply trigger a new alliance across current party lines of interests unsympathetic to worker needs?

This is not an argument against Numsa’s position. Workers cannot remain within a nationalist alliance forever if they want their interests taken seriously. But organised workers are nowhere near a majority in this society and building a winning coalition of workers and the poor will be a long task with uncertain prospects.

Numsa’s decision may, therefore, yet enter history as a trigger to later possibilities rather than an immediate advance for worker interests.

***

Alex Lichtenstein:

In an address given to COSATU in September 2006, then Deputy-President Jacob Zuma said:

We can also never forget the role of trade unions in reviving our struggle during the 1972-73 Durban strikes. The strikes had a major impact in the revival of internal mass resistance to apartheid in the 1970′s. These strikes were led by amongst others, cadres who carried the political influence, of the revolutionary trade union federation, SACTU. This indicates the correctness of the approach of political revolutionary trade union movements, as distinguished from those union movements that concern themselves only with factory floor issues.

Like Benjamin Fogel, Zuma regarded the “Durban Moment” as the touchstone for the contribution of the workers’ movement to the liberation of South Africa. Unlike Fogel, however, in the interest of consolidating a nationalist interpretation of the history of the ANC-labor alliance, Zuma effectively wrote out of history the “workerist” perspective that did so much to shape South African trade unionism between 1973 and 1985.

Over the fifteen years I have been travelling to South Africa, on every visit I seem to encounter friends on the left who are sure that this is the moment that sections of COSATU will decide they have had their fill of a neo-liberal program dressed up in radical rhetoric, and will break with the ANC and the Alliance to form the nucleus of a workers’ party. While I have always shared their hopes, I have usually greeted these claims with skepticism. But I think this time might be different, in part because of my own reading of the history of the South African labour movement.

To put it concisely, NUMSA’s search for an alternative labour politics builds on a long tradition of workers’ control, shopfloor democracy, and struggle unionism that independent unions like its predecessor—MAWU—built during the 1970s. Denigrated then by the SACP and its allies in the ANC as “workerism” (meaning economism), this tradition never really went away, even while its most powerful vehicle, FOSATU, was absorbed into COSATU in the 1980s and then the Alliance after liberation.

Then, as now, the ANC and the SACP demanded that the labour movement subordinate what were regarded as its sectoral interests to the larger needs of the Struggle, the Transition, or the National Democratic Revolution. Then, as now, workers were expected to modify shopfloor militancy in the interest of larger strategic political goals. Then, as now, shopfloor democracy, the power of shopstewards who remained closely knit with comrades in the workplace, and the tradition of report-back and workers’ control, were expected to take a back seat to national-level collective bargaining, a growing class of union office-holders, and a labour federation that grew closer to management than to workers, replacing democracy with labour bureaucracy.

I do not want to exaggerate the degree to which this was the case immediately in 1985, with the formation of COSATU, a federation in which the power of shopfloor democracy remained, at least at first, quite strong. Because it was so central to the birth of the new unions in the 1970s, “Workerism” has remained a powerful, if buried, tendency within the South African labour movement to this day; the conflict on the Platinum Belt represents its rushing to the surface, like a dormant volcano coming to life. The effort on the part of the ANC and the SACP to suppress and overcome this tendency has been a long, drawn out struggle, and one hardly to unique to South Africa. Wherever working-class movements have joined with a national bourgeoisie in a revolutionary process, they have found that for them the struggle continues after liberation, and their former allies become their antagonists, if not their masters. The question is usually this: how long it will take the working class to see the writing on the wall? Marikana, it seems, was the revelation.

Chimamanda Adichie lines up the homophobic arguments and knocks them down one by one

We’ve seen a range of responses from African intellectuals to the crisis of homophobia, especially in states that are planning  oppressive anti-gay laws As well as Binyavanga Wainaina, several Nigerian intellectuals have also weighed in. Yesterday was Chimamanda Adichie’s turn, and she made a very important contribution.

The thing I like about the piece is her generosity. She confronts directly the confused and contradictory assortment of ideas which have become so influential in shaping homophobia and the language in which homophobia is now being expressed. She is frank and uncondescending, refusing to gloss over or euphemize the vulgarity of homophobic thinking. The hardest thing for an intellectual when speaking out against such crass, hateful ideology is to take it seriously enough as a way of thinking to which large numbers of people have become deeply attached. That’s what Adichie does here, and that’s one reason why this intervention might challenge people in a deep way.

Here are some key excerpts:

The new law that criminalizes homosexuality is popular among Nigerians. But it shows a failure of our democracy, because the mark of a true democracy is not in the rule of its majority but in the protection of its minority – otherwise mob justice would be considered democratic. The law is also unconstitutional, ambiguous, and a strange priority in a country with so many real problems. Above all else, however, it is unjust. Even if this was not a country of abysmal electricity supply where university graduates are barely literate and people die of easily-treatable causes and Boko Haram commits casual mass murders, this law would still be unjust. We cannot be a just society unless we are able to accommodate benign difference, accept benign difference, live and let live. We may not understand homosexuality, we may find it personally abhorrent but our response cannot be to criminalize it.

A crime is a crime for a reason. A crime has victims. A crime harms society. On what basis is homosexuality a crime? Adults do no harm to society in how they love and whom they love. This is a law that will not prevent crime, but will, instead, lead to crimes of violence: there are already, in different parts of Nigeria, attacks on people ‘suspected’ of being gay. Ours is a society where men are openly affectionate with one another. Men hold hands. Men hug each other. Shall we now arrest friends who share a hotel room, or who walk side by side? How do we determine the clunky expressions in the law – ‘mutually beneficial,’ ‘directly or indirectly?’

Many Nigerians support the law because they believe the Bible condemns homosexuality. The Bible can be a basis for how we choose to live our personal lives, but it cannot be a basis for the laws we pass, not only because the holy books of different religions do not have equal significance for all Nigerians but also because the holy books are read differently by different people. The Bible, for example, also condemns fornication and adultery and divorce, but they are not crimes.

For supporters of the law, there seems to be something about homosexuality that sets it apart. A sense that it is not ‘normal.’ If we are part of a majority group, we tend to think others in minority groups are abnormal, not because they have done anything wrong, but because we have defined normal to be what we are and since they are not like us, then they are abnormal. Supporters of the law want a certain semblance of human homogeneity. But we cannot legislate into existence a world that does not exist: the truth of our human condition is that we are a diverse, multi-faceted species. The measure of our humanity lies, in part, in how we think of those different from us. We cannot – should not – have empathy only for people who are like us.

Some supporters of the law have asked – what is next, a marriage between a man and a dog?’ Or ‘have you seen animals being gay?’ (Actually, studies show that there is homosexual behavior in many species of animals.) But, quite simply, people are not dogs, and to accept the premise – that a homosexual is comparable to an animal – is inhumane. We cannot reduce the humanity of our fellow men and women because of how and who they love. Some animals eat their own kind, others desert their young. Shall we follow those examples, too?

Other supporters suggest that gay men sexually abuse little boys. But pedophilia and homosexuality are two very different things. There are men who abuse little girls, and women who abuse little boys, and we do not presume that they do it because they are heterosexuals. Child molestation is an ugly crime that is committed by both straight and gay adults (this is why it is a crime: children, by virtue of being non-adults, require protection and are unable to give sexual consent).

There has also been some nationalist posturing among supporters of the law. Homosexuality is ‘unafrican,’ they say, and we will not become like the west. The west is not exactly a homosexual haven; acts of discrimination against homosexuals are not uncommon in the US and Europe. But it is the idea of ‘unafricanness’ that is truly insidious. Sochukwuma was born of Igbo parents and had Igbo grandparents and Igbo great-grandparents. He was born a person who would romantically love other men. Many Nigerians know somebody like him. The boy who behaved like a girl. The girl who behaved like a boy. The effeminate man. The unusual woman. These were people we knew, people like us, born and raised on African soil. How then are they ‘unafrican?’

If anything, it is the passage of the law itself that is ‘unafrican.’ It goes against the values of tolerance and ‘live and let live’ that are part of many African cultures. (In 1970s Igboland, Area Scatter was a popular musician, a man who dressed like a woman, wore makeup, plaited his hair. We don’t know if he was gay – I think he was – but if he performed today, he could conceivably be sentenced to fourteen years in prison. For being who he is.) And it is informed not by a home-grown debate but by a cynically borrowed one: we turned on CNN and heard western countries debating ‘same sex marriage’ and we decided that we, too, would pass a law banning same sex marriage. Where, in Nigeria, whose constitution defines marriage as being between a man and a woman, has any homosexual asked for same-sex marriage?

Read the whole post over at The Scoop.

Here’s a clip of Area Scatter, the performer Adichie refers to (h/t @kritzmoritz):

Seun Kuti also weighed in not long ago (don’t be put off by the odd headline).

What these critical interventions by Adichie and Kuti in the wake of Wainaina’s courageous stand suggests is that a certain obduracy is setting in against the nonsensical homophobic demand for the expulsion of LGBT people and those who refuse to persecute them. As Binyavanga Wainaina told the Guardian last week:

It’s like my father said, ‘When trouble comes you don’t put your worldly goods on a bicycle.’ This is my place. I am 43, I have bad knees, you know, diabetes. I could easily take another teaching gig in New York, hang out in Brooklyn, have some nice sex, write a funky book. But you know, that’s gone. I want to put a stake in the ground. My mum and dad are not here. It’s kind of my turn.

New Documentaries To Look Out For at the Luxor African Film Festival

The third edition of the Egyptian Luxor African Film Festival again has a wide-ranging programme scheduled for next month. Selected films will be showing in different competitions: Long Narrative, Short Narratives, Short Documentaries and Long Documentary. Below you’ll find a couple of the selected documentaries’ trailers (set in Togo, Senegal, Ghana, Somalia, South Africa, Tunisia, Algeria, Egypt and Angola) that were recently uploaded to YouTube and Vimeo, plus links to the films’ websites — where available.

Nana Benz (2012, 85 min, director Thomas Bölken) | Togo

Touba (2013, Chai Vasarhelyi) | Senegal

Lettres du Voyant (2013, Louis Henderson) is a documentary-fiction about spiritism and technology in contemporary Ghana, which attempts to uncover a mysterious practice called “Sakawa” – internet scams mixed with voodoo magic.

From the same filmmaker, Louis Henderson, also showing is Logical Revolts (2012) | Egypt

Angola Ano Zero (2013, Ever Miranda) | Angola

The River (2013, 86 min, Abdenour Zahzah). During a journey on foot along the Oued El Kebir River, Zahzah encounters mini-societies of people who give us a different picture of Algeria.

Ali’ens: Somalis in Transit (2013, 90 min, Paula Palacios) | Somalia

Emirs in Wonderland (2013, 75 min, Ahmed Jlassi) | Tunisia

Made in Gougou (2013, Latifa Doghri) | Tunisia

Light and Dark (2013, 45 min, Paulene Abrey), a biopic of South African artist Norman Catherine | South Africa

LAFF takes place from 16 March to 24 March. See the Festival’s website for more details.

The debate about the realism and violence in ’12 Years a Slave’

While showered with acclaim and awards, “12 Years a Slave” (2 nights ago it won 2 Bafta Awards-ed) has been criticised on a couple of counts. Film critic Armond White called it “torture porn” and accused McQueen of turning slavery into a “horror show”, and of confusing history with brutality, violence and misery. Another critic lamented the absence of heroes and resistance. Feminist scholar and cultural critic bell hooks accused McQueen of sentimentality and going for weeping instead of constructive outrage. Some feminist critics have objected to the violence inflicted on Patsie’s body, while others have celebrated McQueen for dealing with the complex relationship between black and white women, and the double oppression suffered by women of colour. Yet others have accused him of sugarcoating slavery by having a happy ending–and with white intervention–as well as for painting a too idyllic picture of the North. Judging from the criticism – some arguments harder to dismiss than others – Steve McQueen was damned if he made a realistic and violent film and damned if he didn’t.

To respond to criticism of the film, as some have, that Steve McQueen’s film is an adaptation of a true account is not a sufficient response. Filmmakers adapting existing stories make choices about what to include and ignore, what to emphasize and what to downplay. They make decisions about point of view and populate the world of their creation with whomever they want. In short, though Solomon Northup lived and wrote his story, Steve McQueen is the author of the film.

That black people all over the world are tired of representations of blackness lacking in nuance and finesse is not a secret. With few exceptions we are portrayed in mainstream cinema as victims or villains and rarely people of agency and innovation.  Time and time again, we end up as extras or props in narratives that aren’t about us, even when they pretend to be. Django Unchained, The Help (2011), The Intouchables (2011), Black Venus (2010), The Constant Gardener (2005), Cry Freedom (1987), Imitation of Life (1959) -the list is endless. The criticism is valid and should be repeated until the end of time, or until the stories and the circumstances shaping them change – whichever comes first.

While the concern about our constant misrepresentation is valid, denying that McQueen provided beautifully nuanced and sensitive portraits of black people, interpreted by a brilliant cast, is quite unfair. To suggest that being portrayed as ordinary people (in extraordinary circumstances), who are weak at times and stronger at others, is less dignifying than being portrayed as fantastical super-heroes, reflect the unfair expectation that McQueen use Northup’s account to appease our 21st century angst.

It is rare, in most films about slavery, to be confronted with black men, women and children with something to lose apart from their miserable lives. The flashbacks of Solomon at home in Saratoga with his family, and of Eliza entering the Washington slave-pen clad in a beautiful dress and in the company of her beloved children, function as crucial establishing shots. These images remind us that Solomon, Eliza and her children had everything to lose. That they bathed in the mornings, had supper in the evenings and went about their chores in between, until the day they were captured. Knowing what they were and what they had, and sharing their grief when all was lost makes it easier to identify with Solomon and Eliza. It also helps us remember what Patsey and the other slaves born into bondage, could have had and been had it not been for slavery. No one captures it like the abolitionist and author Frederick Douglass (himself a former slave), quoted in historian Ira Ira Berlin’s introduction to the latest version of Northup’s book:

Think of it. For thirty years a man with all a man’s hopes, fears and aspirations – with a wife and children to call him by endearing names of husband and father – with a home, humble it may be, but still a home… then for twelve years a thing, a chattel personal, classed with mules and horses…. It chills the blood.

By eliminating the violence from 12 Years a Slave McQueen would have eliminated the foundation on which slavery and the wealth of America was built. To avoid using violence for entertainment and shock-value is one thing. Shielding the audience from the violence inflicted on Solomon, Patsy and the others however, would make it more difficult to understand why they endured their suffering and consequently to identify with them. As for Armond White’s objection that history is turned into violence, we know that our past is violence in the form of colonialism, slavery and misogyny, and that today’s world is a product of this violence.

Steve McQueen and John Ridley’s representation of black women’s vulnerability is both important and problematic. On a couple of occasions the film deviates from the original story in ways that transfers the control of the female black body from white slavers to the hands of black men. In the film Eliza is about to be raped by a sailor on the boat to the South when Robert (), a mail detainee, attempts to protect her and gets killed in the process. In Northup’s memoir Robert dies from smallpox. Patsey never asks Solomon to kill her or allows him to flog her in the memoir. What is more, the scene where a light-skinned woman mounts Solomon for a silent and joyless sexual act is not in the book either. There is Celeste (who according to the film’s cast list is played by ) though–a light-skinned woman on the run, with whom Northup, shares his supper.

It is troubling that McQueen and Ridley include a fictitious sexualised woman while excluding a temporarily free black woman on the run, that they use fictional elements to emphasize the vulnerability of the already exposed Patsy, and that they use Eliza’s body to grant Robert a more dignified death. The weight of the double oppression of black women cannot be emphasised enough. The suspicion that we are being sexualised or made to suffer a tad more in order to boost the self-esteem of emasculated black men, however, sits uncomfortably with anyone who contests the hierarchy that puts black men at the bottom, and under them black women.

One of the most admirable qualities is the humility and courage to ask questions, another one the ability to separate values that are absolute and non-negotiable from topics that can be debated.  Visionary and frightened souls can argue until the cows come home about how many immigrants a nation can afford or whether a state should provide free health care or not. Whether gender, ethnicity, colour of skin, sexual orientation or religion should determine our human rights is not a subject for debate however, only for struggle. (Brad Pitt’s Bass puts it best in dialogue with Epps: “Laws change, but universal truths are constant, and it is a plain and simple fact that what is true and right, is true and right for all.”)

Steve McQueen, whose previous films are characterised by his trademark gentle, humble, and non-judgmental explorative approach, has made his first overtly political feature. It is a struggle-film of the best kind, made in the same spirit as the previous two (save for the non-judgmental approach). One that isn’t a pamphlet, but extends an invitation to cinemagoers to at least try to fathom the horrors of slavery and the injury it caused millions of men, women and children.

Steve McQueen’s aim was to tell a story about slavery in a way that would make his audience connect with the topic on a personal level. The idea of using a free man as a protagonist came before the decision to adapt 12 Years a Slave - a book he had never heard of before.

McQueen, who compares Solomon Northup’s epic to Anne Frank’s famous diary (published 96 years later, translated into 70 languages, sold in more than 30 million copies and adapted into numerous films, TV-series and stage plays), also made it his mission to make Northup’s memoir known to the entire world. (Though obscure in comparison, 12 Years a Slave haven’t been forgotten since its rediscovery in the 1960s. It is being read at schools and universities. In 1984  directed the TV-film Solomon Northup’s Odessey (a.k.a. Half Slave, Half Free) and the Solomon Northup-day has been celebrated in Saratoga City since 1999.)

In the editor’s essay, which precedes the 2013 edition of Northup’s memoir, Henry Louis Gates Jr. (who served as a historical consultant on the film) defines African American classics as texts that “reveal the human universal through the African American particular”. He continues “…[T]his is what ‘art’ is, a revelation of that which makes each of us sublimely human, rendered in the minute details of the actions and thoughts and feelings of a compelling character embedded in a time and place.”

Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s words  describes Steve McQueen’s film perfectly. Once again he has succeeded in bringing out the universally human in his characters and, through Solomon, Eliza and Patsie,  he is reminding us of the humanity of the millions of faceless and nameless victims of the transatlantic slave trade. In a non-sensationalist manner, without super-heroes and special effects, he has allowed us to not just be horrified, but to empathise too.

* This an edited extract from a longer post that first on Hedren’s own blog, here.