Sean Jacobs's Blog, page 429

How to come out as an African (in the social media age)

In an interview with NPR, Binyavanga Wainaina (“I am a homosexual, mum”) explained to host Celeste Heedlee why he did not include the fact that he was gay in his 2011 memoir One Day I Will Write About This Place: he didn’t think “my language is ready or lyrical enough to start talking about – you know, that sort of thing.” As for why he, no stranger to the media, made the announcement the way he did (it was first published simultaneously on Chimurenga and Africa is a Country and he made a 6-part YouTube video on “What I Have to Say About Being Gay”), he explained it this way:

 I’m a writer, and I’m an imaginative person. And I think I kind of had a feeling, having been in the media before, that the media kind of deals in sort of, you know, nice things, but bullet points, you know. In the heart of gay homophobia darkness in Africa, Binyavanga writes of peace. Binyavanga explained how homophobia in Africa works. And then you’re like, oh, gosh. Now how do I do that in 17 seconds?

So it was very important to me that first, that these things – I didn’t want this story published in The New Yorker or in some magazine abroad or anything. I wanted to put it out for people to share. I wanted to generate a conversation among Africans. I wanted to put up a documentary the day before – just talk around the issues in a certain way. So it’s a kind of, like, a little bit less our issue than – you know, I sometimes get the sense that it’s this thing of, my God, you Africans are very homophobic. I’m going to go and report it to the West. That sort of thing. I didn’t want that much of that. And I think that, you know, it did provoke – it did provoke a healthy conversation and a lot – a huge, huge amount of love and support. Like, I’ll be answering DM’s and e-mails and all kinds of things for months.

Listen here.

Blame it on Botswana

Spain’s monarchy is apparently having a hard time–in the latest round of scandals, one of the princesses is accused of public corruption along with her husband. But where did it all start to go wrong for the House of Bourbon? Not, writes Spanish journalist Miguel-Anxo Murado in The New York Times, with Juan Carlos’s long ago collusion with General Francisco Franco to the point that Franco named him (Juan Carlos) his personal successor, his open support for conservative parties or talking down to Latin American leaders, but with a trip to Botswana in April 2012 to hunt elephants:

The country learned that the king had broken his hip while hunting elephants in Botswana, reportedly as the guest of a Syrian-born Saudi magnate. He was also — unusually, for a private trip — unaccompanied by the queen. The affair opened a Pandora’s box of awkward questions — from the state of the royal marriage to the nature of the king’s business dealings.

Above all, people were livid at the insensitivity of his shooting of pachyderms while the country was reeling under harsh austerity. The fact that the king was also a patron of the World Wildlife Fund did not help. (Soon after, the conservation group unceremoniously sacked the monarch.) To this day, the mere mention of an elephant in Spain sends people into an uproar over the king.

The irony is that Juan Carlos had been hunting and doing business around the world all his life. Most people simply didn’t know. The king and his family were shielded from criticism by an informal media covenant, their sources of income kept secret in part.

With hindsight, this proved to have been a mistake. The sudden contrast between image and reality only made disclosure all the more embarrassing. Now, thanks to the scandal, there is more transparency in the royal household, but probably not enough. Its official budget approved by Parliament is known to be around 8 million euros, but this is widely believed to represent a small part of the family’s total worth.

To his credit, the king apologized for his ill-fated safari. Yet he lacked experience in apologizing — and his people, in forgiving. It was simply awkward, and it’s become increasingly awkward as the king seeks to regain the favor of his subjects by multiplying his public appearances in spite of a series of surgeries from which he has not fully recovered.

When the Fokn Bois visited a picturesque Dutch village

I have to be honest; I had to Google Map the village of Lieshout to see where it exactly lays. And as a matter of fact I, as a Dutch person, never even knew that it’s the hometown of beer brand Bavaria, which is a pretty popular beer here (the brand also has Charlie Sheen do ads for them and got into trouble at the 2010 World Cup for its “ambush marketing“). So thanks to the Fokn Bois, I’ve learned something about my own country.

In this six minute video (below) we see the two rappers from Ghana visiting the town of their, I presume, sponsor. It’s a nice introductory video for those unfamiliar with the two. You can read one of our earlier blogs on them here. Even after watching the interview more than once, it’s still not clear, apart from the brand name being mentioned, what’s so special about the two being in Lieshout.

Winnie Mandela on the South African exceptionalism embodied by Nelson Mandela

The French journalist Stephen Smith recently wrote about Winnie Madikizela Mandela that “… if any one person can stand in for the country, it’s surely Winnie, half ‘mother of the nation’ and half township gangsta, deeply ambiguous, scarred and disfigured by the struggle.” Winnie Mandela also told Smith what she thinks about the hero worship of her former husband (in the London Review of Books):

Mandela was extricated from the masses. He was made an idol, almost Jesus Christ! This is nonsense, a lot of nonsense. The freedom of this country was attained by the masses of this country. It was attained by the children who gave their lives in 1976, who faced machine guns with stones and dustbin lids. It was attained by women who were left to fend for their families. They fought the enemy! We are the ones who fought the enemy physically, who went out to face their bullets. The leaders were cushioned behind bars. They don’t know. They never engaged the enemy on the battlefield …

* BTW, the photo at the top of this post is of Winnie Madikizela Mandela at a memorial service (at Khotso House in Johannesburg) on October 18, 1985 with Pauline Moloise (left), the mother of Benjamin Moloise, a poet and worker activist who had been hanged earlier that morning (Gill de Vlieg).

#Watch Binyavanga’s brilliant YouTube documentary calling out the BS behind “African” homophobia

We’ve been looking forward to this one. When our friends at the Guardian and BBC (and plenty of other outlets) finally reported on Binyavanga Wainaina’s wonderful essay yesterday, we learned that he had a documentary up his sleeve as well. And here it is, in six witty, moving, thoughtful, hilarious, essential, truthful parts — “We Must Free Our Imaginations,” or as he called it on Twitter last night, “What I Have to Say About Being Gay”. There are too many highlights to quote all of them here (like the bit about “the politician” who promises to dig a well but chooses to fight lesbianism instead, and yes, he gets to Nigeria’s new homophobic law). Add your favorites to the comments. Share it widely, share it well.

Why I’m Not An Afropolitan

Last summer, I was invited to take part in a discussion, ‘Fantasy or Reality? Afropolitan Narratives of the 21st Century’, as part of Africa Writes 2013 Festival. I was joined on the panel by Minna “Ms Afropolitan” Salami and the journalist Nana Ocran. Professor Paul Gilroy was the Chair. 

At the time I was researching my piece I found little written about Afropolitanism beyond the celebratory (notable exceptions the Bosch Santana critique Exorcizing Afropolitanism and Afropolitanism – Africa without Africans by Okwunodu Ogbechi, both of which are referred to below). However, in the months since I published my critique, the voices of dissent seemed to swell in volume and frequency; from the insightful in which Brian Bwesigye reads Helon Habila’s review of NoViolet Bulawayo’s We Need New Names through the truncated version of Afropolitanism that he argues Habila represents, to Marta Tveit’s The Afropolitan Must Go, which side-lines the issue of commodification that I develop as one of the central challenges to Afropolitanism, to focus instead on a critique of the term and its relationship to identity politics.

Unlike Tveit, when I first heard “Afropolitan” I was excited. I am always looking for language that expresses my position as an Irish/Nigerian woman who is deeply connected to her Nigerianness. I’d rather refrain as describing myself as half anything, and I detest the word mixed-race. I thought perhaps Afropolitan presented an alternative to this terminology and, interestingly, positioned me with others through a shared cultural and aesthetic leaning rather than a perceived racial classification. Further, the term identified that you could be black or African without having to subscribe to the depressingly limited identities widely perceived as being authentic.

The enduring insights of Afropolitanism as interpreted by Achille Mbembe should be its promise of vacating the seduction of pernicious racialised thinking, its recognition of African identities as fluid, and the notion that the African past is characterised by mixing, blending and superimposing. In opposition to custom, Mbembe insists the idea of ‘tradition’ never really existed and reminds us there is a pre-colonial African modernity that has not been taken into account in contemporary creativity.

As Minna Salami writes on her blog Africans should be as free to have multiple subcultures as anyone else, but the problem with Afropolitism to me is that the insights on race, modernity and identity appear to be increasingly sidelined in sacrifice to the consumerism Mbembe also identifies as part of the Afropolitan assemblage. The dominance of fashion and lifestyle in Afropolitanism is worthy of note due to the relationship between these industries, consumption and consumerism.

The rapacious consumerism of the African elites claimed to make up the ranks of the Afropolitans is well documented. Frantz Fanon’s prophetic words once again resonate. In the foreword to the 2004 edition of Wretched of the Earth, Homi Bhabha asks: “what might be saved from Fanon’s ethics and politics of decolonization to help us reflect on contemporary manifestations of globalization.” He reminds us that the economic landscape engineered by the IMF and the World Bank continues to support the compartmentalised societies identified by Fanon. No matter how much wealth exists in pockets, “a dual economy is not a developed economy,” writes Fanon. It is largely in the pockets of the mobile Afropolitan class that much of the wealth is held.

What I want to ask is in what way does Afropolitanism go about challenging the enduring problematics of duality and compartmentalised society, identified by Fanon as one of the major stumbling blocks to African post-colonial independence?

To be honest, when I look at the launch of OK Magazine Nigeria (although I don’t know whether Afropolitans would claim OK magazine — I’m not sure it’s chic enough), or hear about palm wine mojitos and fashion shows at the Afropolitan V&A event, it leaves me feeling somewhat depressed.

Our value is not determined by our ability to produce African flavoured versions of Western convention and form. Such an approach will surely only ever leave us playing catch-up in a game the rules of which we did not write. That whole lifestyle of Sex And The City feminism, cocktails, designer clothes, handbags and shoes is not particularly liberating in an Anglo-American context, so I see no reason why we should transfer such models to Africa and declare it progress. I’m not saying there’s no place for such activities in the African context but it represents less of a departure from the behaviour of post-colonial elites than a repetition of same as it ever was.

In an era such as ours, characterised by the chilling commodification of all walks of life — including the commodification of dissent — we should be especially vigilant about any movement that embraces commodification to the extent that Afropolitanism does.

In her eloquent piece “Exorcizing Afropolitanism” Bosch Santana outlines Binyavanga Wainaina’s “attempt to rid African literary and cultural studies of the ghost of Afropolitanism” in his plenary lecture entitled I am a Pan-Africanist, not an Afropolitan. Bosch Santana explores the way in which Afropolitanism has become “a phenomenon increasingly product driven, design focused, and potentially funded by the West.” She recognises that “style, in and of itself, is not really the issue” but fears rather that it’s “the attempt to begin with style, and then infuse it with substantive political consciousness that is problematic.”

In a response to “Exorcizing Afropolitanism” Salami argues that Bosch Santana is taking umbrage at African agency. She frames the debate as a choice between African victimisation and Afropolitanism, asking ironically, “how dare Africans not simply be victims, but also shapers of globalisation and all its inherent contestations? How dare we market our cultures as well as our political transformations?”

I would argue that our options are not reduced to one or the other (nor does Bosch Santana suggest they are). However, in countering Salami’s interpretation of the debate: I challenge a position wherein defining ourselves as Afropolitan is presented as the only alternative to the Afro-pessimism narrative. Furthermore, I harbour serious reservations that the duality identified by Fanon is challenged by a small group of Africans who are in a position to be able to “market their cultures”. Salami herself admits that Afropolitanism possibly goes “overboard in commodifying African culture”. This should not be a throw-away comment. It is a cause for concern. The centrality of capitalism and the importance of commodification is confirmed when one searches Afropolitan on Google and here. See what’s comes up? Online shops, and aspirational luxury lifestyle magazines. There is lots of African-y stuff: jewellery, art and ankara toys. Such items are recognisable from Fanon too, who writes: “The bourgeoisie’s idea of a national economy is one based on what we can call local products. Grandiloquent speeches are made about local crafts.” With the exception of a few well-positioned individuals of African origin, who now have a larger market to who they can ‘sell’ this image of Africa, whom are really the beneficiaries?

Paul Gilroy has argued that commodity culture has resulted in the sacrifice — to the service of corporate interests — the loss of much of what was wonderful about black culture. Afropolitanism can be seen as the latest manifestation of planetary commerce in blackness. It seems as though having consumed so much of black American culture, there is now a demand for more authentic, virgin, black culture to consume. Demand turns to the continent where a fresh source is ripe for the picking.

Personally, I need to position myself with a more radical, counter-cultural movement. For me Afropolitanism is too polite, corporate, glossy – it reeks of sponsorship and big business with all the attendant limitations.

Should we be taking comfort in the fact that the world’s eyes are again on Africa? Headlines decree “Africa is the world’s fastest growing continent” and the ‘hottest frontier’ for investments. Time magazine’s cover of Africa Rising announces “it is the world’s next economic powerhouse,” While The Wall Street Journal is dubbing it “a new gold rush.” Here’s one of my own: “The Scramble for Africa.”

It’s no surprise the Western media is supportive of Afropolitanism. As Fanon reminds us – “In its decadent aspect the national bourgeoisie, gets considerable help from the Western bourgeoisie who happen to be tourists enamoured with exoticism.” Afropolitanism is the handmaiden of the Africa Rising narrative and I suspect its championing by the Western media, runs the risk of leading us ever further astray from the “disreputable, angry places,” noted by Gilroy, “where the political interests of racialised minorities might be identified and worked upon without being encumbered by an affected liberal innocence.”

Africa Rising and its cohorts should not be allowed to obscure the fact that Africa has lost $1.2 to 1.4 trillion in illicit financial outflows…more than three times the total amount of foreign aid received. Africa gives more to the rest of the world than it receives and is in fact a net creditor through illicit means.

The danger of Afropolitanism becoming the voice of Africa can be likened to the criticisms levelled against second wave feminists who failed to identify their privilege as white and middle class while claiming to speak for all women. Because while we may all be Africans, there is a huge gap between my African experience and my father’s houseboys.

The term Afropolitan is also increasingly used in the art world. Similar concerns to mine are raised on the Aachronym African arts blog — in a blog post Afropolitanism — Africa without Africans, Okwunodu Ogbechi questions the art world’s championing of Afropolitanism, arguing it supports a bias that only views African artists working in the west as relevant, while the artists, living and working on the continent remain largely ignored. He reminds us that, despite the international lifestyle enjoyed by the Afropolitan, most Africans have almost absolute immobility in a contemporary global world that works very hard to keep Africans in their place on the African continent. They point out there is no immigration policy anywhere in the Western world that welcomes Africans, while a major bias against African global mobility abounds in international media. Most African-based artists would find it difficult to impossible to get a visa to visit Western museums or to show their works abroad!

We are now well versed in the danger of the single story. While Afropolitanism may appear to offer an alternative to the single story, we run the danger of this becoming the dominant narrative for African success.

The traditional Afro-pessimistic narratives, while obsessed with poverty, denied the poor any voice. While Afropolitanism may go some way in redressing the balance concerning Africans speaking for themselves, the problem lies in the fact that we still don’t hear the narratives of Africans who are not privileged.

The problem is not that Afropolitans are privileged per se — rather it is that at a time when poverty remains endemic for millions, the narratives of a privileged few telling us how great everything is, how much opportunity and potential is available may drown out the voices of a majority who remain denied basic life chances.

While Afropolitans talk and talk about what it means to be young, cool and African, are many of them concerned with addressing the world beyond their own social realities, to the issues that concern other Africans?

Illustrating the above argument is the recent case of the security bonds being introduced for UK visitors declared ‘high-risk’ such as Nigerians and Ghanaians. This has huge consequences for Africans not from monied backgrounds yet hasn’t received much Afropolitan air space. Rather it has been ignored in favour of topics more relevant to the social realities of the international jet set.

I think maybe we need to have more consensus on what constitutes Afropolitanism. Salami says in the comments section of her response to the “Exorcizing Afropolitanism” piece that Afropolitanism means “being African without detouring through whiteness” which seems somewhat at odds with Mbembe’s vision. For him Afropolitanism is a way of being African that is ‘open to difference’, and is conceived of as transcending race.

In a recent Guardian interview, Taiye Selasie’s, who popularised the term in her 2005 essay ByeBye Barbar or What is an Afropolitan? presents an image of an Instagram-friendly Africa. Her interpretation of Afropolitanism goes beyond being ‘open to difference’ to something resembling African versions of American or European cities. Afropolitanism it appears is grounded in the ability to engage in the same pastimes one could expect to enjoy in a Western capital.

In Burkina Faso she danced until 5am in a western-themed club & watched movies at a feminist film festival. Adama, her charming host, is an ‘Afropolitan of the highest order’: by virtue of his Viennese wife, and the fact he is studying German at the Goethe Institute. To her Togo was a seaside treat: which she likens to Malibu with motorini, later she gushes about hanging out on the beach with hundreds of super-cool Togolese hipsters.

Such an itinerary would be acceptable to any self respecting inhabitant of hipster capitals Hackney or Williamsburg and it’s wonderful that you can now have the Hipster Africa Experience, but I fail to see how this represents anything particularly progressive. It seems again that African progress is measured by the extent to which it can reproduce a Western lifestyle, now without having to physically be in the West. This doesn’t appear to signal any particular departure from the elites enduring love affair with achieving the lifestyles of their former masters. It seems that increasingly many who define themselves as Afropolitan seem to have evacuated much of the rich potentiality the term might once have suggested.

The Year the Blackface Tradition in the Netherlands Hit the Big Time

In 2013, the world was introduced to the Dutch December tradition of Zwarte Piet (“Black Pete”)—the blackfaced sidekick to Sinterklaas. Though a letter complaining of the racism inherent in the practice was sent to the Office of the United Nation High Commissioner for Human Rights way back in January of last year, and there have been annual protests for some time (not to mention a documentary in the works), it wasn’t until late fall that Black Pete hit the big time and people from Australia to Germany to India the UK to the US to Zimbabwe — and just about everywhere in between—really caught wind of the seriously problematic practice.

Verene Shepherd, University of the West Indies professor and Chair-Rapporteur of the Working Group on people of African descent, was but one of four signatories, however she bore the brunt of the Black Pete backlash after appearing on Dutch television. A majority in the Netherlands hold Black Pete dear (“66% of almost 10,000 people polled said there could be no Saint Nicholas festival without Black Pete”), but there are some who acknowledge the need to think about the figure from a context that takes into account the realities of colonial history. Here at Africa is a Country, Chandra Frank and Serginho Roosblad provided a rundown of the debate in November and Shepherd was kind enough to answer some questions about the issue.

How did you hear of the practice of Zwarte Piet?

Colleagues from the Netherlands brought this custom to the attention of the Working Group of Experts on People of African Descent from the very formation of the group; and I had heard about it before from Dutch members of the Association of Caribbean Historians.

There has been much talk in the Dutch (and other) press about the letter signed by yourself, Farida Shaheed, Izsak Rita, and Mutuma Ruteere. Can you talk a little about the events that led to your writing of this letter?

Yes; I know the media is really interested in this. We were approached by concerned groups in the Netherlands. We respond to complaints and public information about matters of concern to our constituents. We were asked to react as independent experts with particular U.N. mandates that relate to the concerns of minorities, groups that claim that they are discriminated against and people of African descent.

On Dutch television, you stated objections to the Zwarte Piet tradition and there was an outcry. Why do you think that the Dutch are so attached to this particular tradition?

From the feedback we have received, it would appear that this tradition is seen as harmless and an inoffensive children’s tradition. But the public debate, if carried out in a civil and respectful manner, could result in greater understanding among supporters and opponents; and explain why the description of “racist” has been attached to it in recent years.

I can’t find any information that suggests Zwarte Piet’s appearance was anything other than rooted in colonialism. He began to be depicted as black during the 19th Century. Can you talk a little about the relationship between this practice and colonialism?

This is a really good question. The appearance and behaviour of Black Pete represent stereotypes and caricatures of people of African descent. Historically, Blacks have been used as servants by colonialists; and even those that did not use them as such, developed negative stereotypes about them, rooted in colonial attitudes towards Black people as the “other”. These stereotypes still exist today and find expression in the image of Black Pete. Those who oppose – not Sinterklaas, let me hasten to add – but his Black Pete, argue that the image of Black Pete and the behaviour of Black Pete (as silly and dressed in Moorish clothes) are, in the 21st century, offensive.

In Canada and the United States, there has been much recent discussion about the racist naming of sports teams. The arguments for keeping racist names range from insisting on tradition, viewing the depiction of first nations people as positive, to demonstrating that the name isn’t offensive to many first nations people themselves. These arguments seem similar to those made supporting the Zwarte Piet tradition. Why do you think that this happens?

Our view is that no group should be stereotyped and disrespected in any part of the world when it comes to the use of names, practices and traditions. When this happens, we see the outcry against them. We have seen this in the opposition to blackface in the USA and the UK, opposition that led to the banning of the practice. In any event, when those affected (First Nation people, people of African descent, women, etc) tell us that they are offended, we should listen and make changes where possible. Culture is not static.

Nearing the end of 2013, there was a report of a politician who had attended a Dutch Christmas party in Nova Scotia and was photographed with a “Black Pete”. He insisted there was “no malicious intent”, much like how other recent instances of black face have met with a discussion of intention. Can you talk a little about this argument of intention?

Change takes time. Lack of awareness and lack of respect for others cause these kinds of behaviours and we need to find common ground and improve our relations with each other if we are to live in peace in our multicultural societies. This can come through intercultural dialogue.

The response in the Netherlands by those who see nothing wrong with Zwarte Piet and the hate mail unleashed on those of us who have opened the debate testify to the work that we still have to do in promoting culturally sensitive education and in eliminating racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance.

France is no longer needed

Pratt Institute professor Ellery Washington writing in The New York Times:

In the spring of 1984, during an interview for The Paris Review, a nearly 60-year-old Baldwin was asked why he had chosen to live in France, to which he replied: “It wasn’t so much a matter of choosing France — it was a matter of getting out of America.” The problem of racism in America was for Baldwin so consuming and, to his mind, deadly that he feared he wouldn’t have survived it if he’d stayed, let alone been able to isolate himself enough to write. And yet upon arriving in France, he had no illusions that Paris was among the “most civilized of cities,” nor did he consider the French among the “least primitive of peoples.” During those early years he stayed in France because, as a black man, he perceived that the ruling-class whites there simply left him alone, unlike those in America, and that’s what allowed him to develop as a writer.

… Baldwin himself pointed out the changes in French feeling toward all minorities after the furious battle of Dien Bien Phu, signaling the loss of colonial Vietnam, and the brutal Algerian war. Over the years this change has grown in step with the influx of blacks and North Africans from France’s former colonies and outer departments, including Guadeloupe and Martinique.

As the French historian Michel Fabre noted in his book “From Harlem to Paris (Black American Writers in France, 1840-1980),” France may have served as “a place of shelter from what Baldwin called, ‘the American madness,’ ” but that time has clearly passed. No longer a haven for American blacks, France is no longer needed.

* The image, from the All Things Baldwin tumblr, is from Baldwin’s extended stay in Turkey between 1961 and 1971.

Jean-Marie Teno’s new film lays bare the affective costs of public silence in Cameroon

Filmmaker Jean-Marie Teno doesn’t pull his punches. His 1992 film Afrique, je te plumerai became a classroom staple for the thoughtful and unsparing way it tied postcolonial problems to colonial practices. Une Feuille dans le Vent (A Leaf in the Wind) is Teno’s newest release. Like most of his other films, it too sits at the troubled border of the colonial and postcolonial, worries and wonders about power.

Ernestine Ouandié was the daughter of Ernest Ouandié, a Cameroonian independence leader of the UPC, executed by the Ahidjo government in 1971, whom she never met. Teno had known of her for many years and finally met Ernestine in 2004 on a return visit to Cameroon. She began to tell him her life story. In a brief interview Teno said: “I was so amazed by what she was telling me about her life. So I brought the camera from my car and she started telling me the story again. It’s almost like she threw her life on me. But I am not a psychologist. So I spent a few years thinking about it.”

Ernestine’s mother was Ghanaian and she was born, she says in the trailer’s opening (below), in Yaba, Nigeria. This marks her story as part of the Pan-Africanist history of Cameroonian nationalism, a history powerfully told by Meredith Terretta in Nation of Outlaws, State of Violence: Nationalism, Grassfields Tradition, and State Building in Cameroon (Ohio University Press, 2013).

In 2009, while living in the US, Teno learned that she had taken her own life. Teno returned to the interview, three hours in length, to see what justice could be wrought from tragedy: “This is still part of the trauma of colonial history. And she is a perfect example – the daughter of someone who is really one of the most important people of Cameroon’s history, and because of the silence surrounding the sacrifices her father did for this country…it was too painful. She couldn’t live with that.”

Watch the trailer:

The film’s title comes from something Ernestine Ouandié says to Teno in their conversation: “How do you expect a leaf taken from a tree to survive?” Teno asks this question to Cameroonians and to Africans. He asks: “How can we continue to live without understanding what has happened?” And: “What do we learn about human nature when we see that this woman’s childhood was so miserable? The abuse she endured at the hands of her relatives was like the abuse in the colonial period, the very things her father fought against.”

The film is disarmingly simple: a recorded conversation. Interspersed are a few images of a tree in the courtyard, pen and ink drawings Teno commissioned, and archival footage. If the film’s style is spare it is a simplicity that is the product of tireless work and a keen filmic sensibility. It lays bare the affective costs of public silence. It indicts the public and heroic with the domestic and interior. Pushing further in that direction, I can’t help but wonder if her story might not have been different if Ernestine had been Ernest Jr.

Known for his first person narratives, Teno here cedes narrative primacy to Ernestine. His characteristic practice — documentary as interrogative of power — loses nothing in the exchange.

***

Teno screened this film in July 2013 in Marseilles and in mid-October 2013 at the workshop “Digital Paradox: Piracy, Ownership, and the Constraints of African Screen Media,” held at Indiana University, Bloomington, where I had the opportunity to speak with him. It screened in late October 2013 at DOC Lisboa, at the RIDM in Montreal, the Festival dei Popoli in Florence, and the Rencontres Documentaires de Libreville in November 2013. In March 2014 it will screen at the Colours of the Nile Festival in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia and at Louxor, Palais du Cinema in Paris, France.

What will people say?

How does one come out and say it when a global audience believes it knows the terrain of one’s life story—all the fissures and intimacies that there are to know—already? How does one tell of that thing which one held close—and tell it in a whisper to one’s mum, to one’s Baba—while letting go of that tight-fisted secrecy into the air for others to breathe in and take away as if it were theirs to own and consume? Here, on the Internet, a world will imagine that this whisper is an invitation to bring cars around to the back of the house, where carefully tended thickets camouflage things one did not, in fact, know how to reveal to the most beloved figures in one’s life. It will not be obvious to many that the thicket is still one’s own, that one simply said what should have been just known, not asked about, or inquired into with prurient inquisitiveness.

My mother used to sing this comical song, in the sing-songy mock-English of the “Lansi” – the mongrel coastals of Sri Lanka: “Peeping through the window, darling/People what would say?/Come in through the doorway darling/Come in proper way!”

On Saturday, his 43rd birthday, Biyavanga Wainaina, hardcore comic, announcer of the ugly-obvious to nice liberals with imperial ambitions, and memoirist, asked a few select online publications (Africa’s a Country, Kwani?, and Chimurenga) to post a piece that will make people say things. But in a way, he’s also said, “Stop peeping through the window. Come in proper way.”

In a way, he said something that we know. (Have you read his memoir? You a fan that doesn’t read his tweets or FB page?) And this isn’t something that he needs to say to any of us. But he does anyway. To write himself real, to speak himself true.

So the world may be blown away. And if the virulence of personal attacks on anyone who dared to say, in the past week, that Nigeria’s anti-homosexuality law is actually about patriarchy, political power, and violence—and not about what’s “African” (no more than church and Jesus)—is any sign of what Wainaina will face, we know the risk he took. But one takes risks as dangerous as this because to live without revelation is to bury oneself alive.

Binyavanga Wainanina is stretching, playing with, and mocking the limits of memoir, and the conventions of writing one’s life story. We think he told us about himself in his memoir, One Day I’ll Write About This Place, published by Greywolf Press in September 2012. Memoirs are supposed to be the public forum on which one gives people the “true” account of one’s life. We think memoirs are locations of revelation. Where one “fixes” the truth in print. And one’s version of the story is meant to be incontestable—as long as one maintains the bond of trust with the reader: a dance that is fraught with tension. So we believe he’s told us all there is. Why would a memoirist hold back? To do so would be to break that bond, to let one’s dancing partner fall.

But Wainaina was never conventional, even in print. In his memoir, his words create a shadow-dapple like leaves, moving, rustling, changing. We’ve never been able to fix him. And on a perfectly slow Sunday morning, a year and a few months after his memoir was published on crisp paper and respectable hardback, he contests the very parameters of print, and of memoir in print. He adds to his memoir. No, he challenges memory—our memory of him.

This confession—this unruly addition to his memoir—isn’t addressed, “Dear World, I am a homosexual.” He tells his mum, “I am a homosexual.” He adds to her memory. Had visa, temperament, material success made it possible, we imagine that he would have been there, telling her. Had failure—as he imagined it—and shame from not having achieved not prevented him. Maybe. So that she would know her son in his full revelation. So that he would never had to break her step as she danced with him. But he doesn’t get to try out that version of his life.

Wainaina, has, to some extent, been held in that eternal moment, whirring his tyres in the mud and mire of not having given his mum and Baba an invitation to enter the intimate spaces of a home in which he feared they would not be comfortable. So he tells her now. He tells her as her organs fail, and as she parts through the hospital window, leaving an open invitation to her husband. He tells his Baba, who joins her eleven years later. But here, in this place of possibility, this imagined space, Wainaina’s story—confined until now in the spaces reserved for the sick and dying—escapes through an open window. Perhaps a careless nurse left it open.