Sean Jacobs's Blog, page 430

How a coup d’état drove a scholar to social media

Call me a curmudgeon, but I had never really understood the value of social media. I didn’t see the point of mundane tweets and posts on the lives of the glitterati, or the need to share personal views in a public medium. A coup d’état in Mali in March of 2012 rocked this perception and led me to view social media in a different light. No longer would I perceive these forums as vapid echo chambers, but as critical spaces for news, dialogue and even social change.

I’ve been working and researching in Mali for over 25 years now. Most of my scholarship deals with agriculture, food security and resource management issues. For years I collected information from traditional sources: my own field work first and foremost, but also scholarly publications and traditional news reports. Until recently, Mali almost never made the international press, making the need to speedily access news seemingly unnecessary.

The pace and fluidity of events in Mali since March 2012 would change the way I operate as a scholar.

A coup d’état was staged by disgruntled military personnel that month, putting an end to nearly 20 years of procedural democracy. The weak state apparatus then lost control of the northern two-thirds of the country to a variety of rebel groups with different agendas, including Tuareg separatists, Islamists, drug traffickers, and al-Qaeda affiliates. With rebel groups pushing south in January 2013, the French military intervened, eventually reclaiming the major northern cities for the Malian state. Elections were held this past July/August, followed most recently by continuing attacks in the North and the government’s detention of the coup leader, Amadou Sanogo.

I am a geographer, and not a scholar of politics, but the unrest of 2012-2013 was impacting the issues I study, most notably food security in the northern parts of the country. I also analyze natural resource management and agricultural issues within a broader political economic context, making an understanding of policy and politics essential. Finally, I have a non-ivory tower tendency to share what I learn with policy and lay audiences – often expressed in pieces I write for Al Jazeera, the New York Times or the Washington Post. As such, the policy orientation of my applied writing doubles the need to stay on top of politics.

To make a long story short, in early 2012 I found that my shunning of social media was limiting my ability to exchange ideas with others who knew the country well, and impacting my capacity to stay abreast of the quickly evolving post-coup situation in Mali. To complicate matters further, I was based in Botswana that year and didn’t have as ready access to information. Finally, because of security concerns, and the fact that I had described the coup leader as a ‘thug’ in one of my columns, I knew it just wasn’t wise to travel to Mali during the peak of the unrest.

I initially turned to email listservs as a place to exchange information and ideas about Mali. Alas, I quickly learned that these had become passé; they were the provincial backwaters of the modern digital era. Some moderated email forums were slow and clunky, while others were bereft of chatter as many users had long since moved on.

Facebook, twitter and the blogosphere were the places where the most current information could be found, the most intense debates had, and some of the more interesting and novel perspectives aired. I was neither the first nor the last, but, catalyzed by crisis, was part of a mass migration of Mali and West Africanist scholars to social media.

Several facebook groups devoted exclusively to Mali, as well numerous tweeter feeds, served as excellent curations of stories from a vast array of traditional news outlets, e.g., All Mali, All the Time or or Americans and Friends of Mali. Many news reporters (see Peter Tinti or Bate Felix) would also tweet information between stories – allowing for an unprecedented exchange of ideas between some in the media and Mali scholars. Others took to the blogosphere where timely insights on the unfolding crisis could be aired without the interference of gatekeepers. See, for example, anthropologist Bruce Whitehouse’s Bridges from Bamako blog, or those of Boukary Konaté and Tommy Miles. This medium changed who we interacted with, often broadening the community, and increased the frequency with which we interacted with each other.

Some scholars and traditional journalists bemoan the rise of social media, decrying a loss of quality control. To be sure, there is a lot of misinformation, rumor and innuendo circulating in the various dimensions of social media. Clearly, now more than ever, consumers of information need the skills and background to critically evaluate what they are reading and its sources.

But the pros outweigh the cons when we leverage the strengths of social media. Despite fears to the contrary, traditional news sources and scholarly publications remain the primary sources of content for many social media exchanges. Add to this mix the more timely blogs by established scholars, as well as the critical dialogue capacity provided by social media, and you have a winning combination.

Never before have scholars, journalists and policymakers been in such active dialogue, never before have the barriers between these separate professional communities been so porous. Many of the major political candidates in Mali’s election this summer had their own Twitter feeds. Even the Malian presidency has its own Twitter account manned by tech savvy Malian media relations staff. More importantly, the nature of tweets exchanged suggests that there is a growing transnational space interested in Malian politics and affairs.

Mali clearly has many problems that lie ahead of it, most notably the simmering situation in the north of the country that has yet to be resolved. I, like others, am deeply troubled by the intolerance articulated on both sides of the divide and by emerging news of past atrocities committed over the past two years.

But I see a new interdisciplinary, cross-sectoral, transnational and inter-ethnic community emerging in the social media sphere which has the ability to influence thinking amongst Malian elites and within the Malian political sphere. While I tend to be suspicious of the ability of technology to solve social ills, and I understand that social media is largely restricted to privileged Africans, I do find hope in this new space for exchange. Call me an optimist, but my hope is that this space will create an opening for, and foster a much needed dialogue on, reconciliation.

Photo by Boukary Konaté.

Boss Player

The BBC news presenter Komla Dumor, who passed away this weekend from cardiac arrest, was an exceptional broadcaster; read Nigerian writer Chimamanda Adichie’s obit here. Everyone loved him. He was probably the most stylish newscaster also, and was well on his way to becoming the first globally recognized superstar news presenter originating from the continent. Dumor took journalism seriously. Just watch his last big interview where he took on Rwanda’s Ambassador to the UK about that country’s habit of murdering opposition figures. Dumor, known as Boss Player, also loved sport, basketball (he had skills), and, above all, the beautiful game. He especially loved his Ghana’s Black Stars.

Like here during the 2010 World Cup in South Africa, when Superman style, he ripped his shirt open to reveal his true identity:

Or last November when he celebrated Ghana’s qualification for Brazil 2014 by donning a lekarapa. And he seemed genuinely happy–like a fan–around footballers; like when he met Victor Moses (Liverpool and Nigeria) or thanked Sulley Muntari (AC Milan and Ghana) for the signed shirt for his son.

But it is this video, below–when Peter Okwoche, the BBC Focus on Africa sports presenter, challenged Komla to a game of keepie-uppie–that is my favorite memory of the Boss Player:

RIP Boss Player.

I am a homosexual, mum

(A lost chapter from One Day I Will Write About This Place)

11 July, 2000.

This is not the right version of events.

Hey mum. I was putting my head on her shoulder, that last afternoon before she died. She was lying on her hospital bed. Kenyatta. Intensive Care. Critical Care. There. Because this time I will not be away in South Africa, fucking things up in that chaotic way of mine. I will arrive on time, and be there when she dies. My heart arrives on time. I am holding my dying mother’s hand. I am lifting her hand. Her hand will be swollen with diabetes. Her organs are failing. Hey mum. Ooooh. My mind sighs. My heart! I am whispering in her ear. She is awake, listening, soft calm loving, with my head right inside in her breathspace. She is so big – my mother, in this world, near the next world, each breath slow, but steady, as it should be. Inhale. She can carry everything. I will whisper, louder, in my minds-breath. To hers. She will listen, even if she doesn’t hear. Can she?

Mum. I will say. Muum? I will say. It grooves so easy, a breath, a noise out of my mouth, mixed up with her breath, and she exhales. My heart gasps sharp and now my mind screams, sharp, so so hurt so so angry.

“I have never thrown my heart at you mum. You have never asked me to.”

Only my mind says. This. Not my mouth. But surely the jerk of my breath and heart, there next to hers, has been registered? Is she letting me in?

Nobody, nobody, ever in my life has heard this. Never, mum. I did not trust you, mum. And. I. Pulled air hard and balled it down into my navel, and let it out slow and firm, clean and without bumps out of my mouth, loud and clear over a shoulder, into her ear.

“I am a homosexual, mum.”

July, 2000.

This is the right version of events.

I am living in South Africa, without having seen my mother for five years, even though she is sick, because I am afraid and ashamed, and because I will be thirty years old and possibly without a visa to return here if I leave. I am hurricaning to move my life so I can see her. But she is in Nakuru, collapsing, and they will be rushing her kidneys to Kenyatta Hospital in Nairobi, where there will be a dialysis machine and a tropical storm of experts awaiting her.

Relatives will rush to see her and, organs will collapse, and machines will kick into action. I am rushing, winding up everything to leave South Africa. It will take two more days for me to leave, to fly out, when, in the morning of 11 July 2000, my uncle calls me to ask if I am sitting down.

“She’s gone, Ken.”

I will call my Auntie Grace in that family gathering nanosecond to find a way to cry urgently inside Baba, but they say he is crying and thundering and lightning in his 505 car around Nairobi because his wife is dead and nobody can find him for hours. Three days ago, he told me it was too late to come to see her. He told me to not risk losing my ability to return to South Africa by coming home for the funeral. I should not be travelling carelessly in that artist way of mine, without papers. Kenneth! He frowns on the phone. I cannot risk illegal deportation, he says, and losing everything. But it is my mother.

I am twenty nine. It is 11 July, 2000. I, Binyavanga Wainaina, quite honestly swear I have known I am a homosexual since I was five. I have never touched a man sexually. I have slept with three women in my life. One woman, successfully. Only once with her. It was amazing. But the next day, I was not able to.

It will take me five years after my mother’s death to find a man who will give me a massage and some brief, paid-for love. In Earl’s Court, London. And I will be freed, and tell my best friend, who will surprise me by understanding, without understanding. I will tell him what I did, but not tell him I am gay. I cannot say the word gay until I am thirty nine, four years after that brief massage encounter. Today, it is 18 January 2013, and I am forty three.

Anyway. It will not be a hurricane of diabetes that kills mum inside Kenyatta Hospital Critical Care, before I have taken four steps to get on a plane to sit by her side.

Somebody.

Nurse?

Will leave a small window open the night before she dies, in the July Kenyatta Hospital cold.

It is my birthday today. 18 January 2013. Two years ago, on 11 July 2011, my father had a massive stroke and was brain dead in minutes. Exactly eleven years to the day my mother died. His heart beat for four days, but there was nothing to tell him.

I am five years old.

He stood there, in overalls, awkward, his chest a railway track of sweaty bumps, and little hard beads of hair. Everything about him is smooth-slow. Bits of brown on a cracked tooth, that endless long smile. A good thing for me the slow way he moves, because I am transparent to people’s patterns, and can trip so easily and fall into snarls and fear with jerky people. A long easy smile, he lifts me in the air and swings. He smells of diesel, and the world of all other people’s movements has disappeared. I am away from everybody for the first time in my life, and it is glorious, and then it is a tunnel of fear. There are no creaks in him, like a tractor he will climb any hill, steadily. If he walks away, now, with me, I will go with him forever. I know if he puts me down my legs will not move again. I am so ashamed, I stop myself from clinging. I jump away from him and avoid him forever. For twentysomething years, I even hug men awkwardly.

There will be this feeling again. Stronger, firmer now. Aged maybe seven. Once with another slow easy golfer at Nakuru Golf Club, and I am shaking because he shook my hand. Then I am crying alone in the toilet because the repeat of this feeling has made me suddenly ripped apart and lonely. The feeling is not sexual. It is certain. It is overwhelming. It wants to make a home. It comes every few months like a bout of malaria and leaves me shaken for days, and confused for months. I do nothing about it.

I am five when I close my self into a vague happiness that asks for nothing much from anybody. Absent-minded. Sweet. I am grateful for all love. I give it more than I receive it, often. I can be selfish. I masturbate a lot, and never allow myself to crack and grow my heart. I touch no men. I read books. I love my dad so much, my heart is learning to stretch.

I am a homosexual.

Weekend Music Break 65

There’s plenty to choose from what musicians have been releasing during the holidays. So here’s a first selection of ten new videos that we’ve found in our inbox. First up, a new release from Akwaaba: Joey le Soldat, like his man Art Melody, raps on Burkina Faso’s ills:

This one by Stromae from late last year we have on repeat:

Another Belgian artist you might remember from last year is Coely, who released a new single this week:

Ghostpoet joined the latest Africa Express, and returned with the most interesting collaboration of that lot, with thanks to talking drum band Doucoura:

Jovi and Reniss shot a video in Douala and Yaoundé for their most recent collaboration:

There’s Pitso Rah Makhula, from Maseru, Lesotho, with a short reminder of what’s good in the country’s hip-hop landscape:

From Senegal, we have Alibeta who sings about migration:

Summer vibes in this video by The Reminders:

Tinariwen’s new sounds appear to be a lot more subdued than their previous work:

And the day after Mandela died, Peruvians Novalima dedicated this song from their KCRW session to him:

#Breaking: New York Times discovers African artists use the Internets

The New York Times’ printing press is still radiating from January 8th, 2014 when the newspaper’s East Africa correspondent Nicholas Kulish published a story (with accompanying video) about how the presence of African artists on the Internet represents a cultural revolution.

The viral music videos from Kenyan group Just a Band are presented as exhibit A. Finally, insinuates Kulish in the Times article, artists from African countries are learning how to use YouTube. He then begins to flail wildly, making vague statements about democracy and mentioning any creative African artist or project he has ever heard of, from Fela Kuti to Ngugi wa Thiong’o to Chimurenga Magazine as evidence that Africans are beginning to figure out how to be creative.

Kulish seems to feel as though he is presenting innovative African creative production to the world as breaking news, banking on the philosophy that once something is published in the New York Times it becomes true or real. What he is actually demonstrating however, is just how out of touch the New York Times can be. Just a Band’s impressive music videos started coming out in 2008 and went viral with a largely East African audience. Literary journals such as the Nairobi-based Kwani? and Cape Town-based Chimurenga have each been contributing to the evolution of the publishing game for more than a decade.

Beneath the surface, the ironic trend being reported here is not that African arts are new or innovative, it is that mainstream Western media outlets are only now learning to recognize and value diverse and creative African phenomena that have thrived for years. In effect, the New York Times and its peers are having schizophrenic conversations with themselves. Just a Band and their fans don’t need to be convinced of any kind of African cultural revolution, they are the revolution. The incipient change, the cultural awakening, is occurring in the minds of those that have embraced and promoted, sometimes subconsciously, the narrative of African backwardness.

All this brings to mind the age-old philosophical question: If a Kenyan DJ uploads a mixtape to soundcloud and the New York Times isn’t around to hear it, does it make a sound?

Delicious Skin Lightener

Skin lighteners in Africa have a long history – so the appearance of Whitenicious skin lightening cream isn’t that surprising. What’s new is that the model used in the advert (heavily photoshopped) not only has a “lighter” skin tone, but has the sort of pinky-white skin usually only seen in the Caucus region, and her entire body is shown to be similarly bleached (usually, we see the model’s face and neck, and sometimes the arms and hands). The text next to her image tells us that we can “Say goodbye to pigmentation and spots forever!” This incredible Barbie is Camaroonian pop-star Dencia.

One can purchase Whitenicious for “dark knuckles, knees and elbows” (large for $150; small for $80), and for “dark spots” ($90). But are you “shopping for someone else but not sure what to give them?” Why not “give them the gift of choice with a whiteniciousbydencia Gift Card?” (Don’t do this unless you want a woman to throw a jar of tastefully packaged Whitenicious by Dencia at your head.)

We learn, on the product info page (which tells us nothing of the chemical composition), that:

People with dark spots, acne, hyper pigmentation, dark knuckles and knees (all of which can leave your skin looking uneven) have endured decades of neglect among established international cosmetic companies. The continued marginalization of African descended men and women in the world market of cosmetics led to the inspiration of Pop Singer Dencia who later partnered with a renowned chemist to establish the highly innovative Whitenicious line.

In the world of cosmetic procedures and skin lightening products, “pigmentation” or “hyperpigmentation” is used to signify darker spots on one’s face and hands – not the general colour of the vast majority of one’s skin. So it appears that these clever people are just telling us to remove a few pesky spots. But looking at the model/pop star, who appears to be an African woman with the skin of a woman from the Caucasus draped over her, we get the point: we’re supposed to use Whitenicious as a general skin lightener.

So why is the company referring to pigmentation/spot removal? No matter how ever-present, skin-lightening is still a dirty word—we all know that those who resort to using these damaging creams are those who had too big a dose of colonial/present day white-skin-(and “European” features in general) is-the-standard-by-which-beauty-must-be-judged myth. But new products attempt to skirt the self-hate inherent in bleaching skin with a few clever rhetorical tricks. They claim to “remove dark spots,” “discolouration,” “age spots” or even “freckles.”

I know all about this because my high-society cousins try to get me to “do something” about my unfortunate freckles (thank you Portuguese ancestor and too much swimming outdoors) every year they see me. The new products – and the beauticians and cosmetic procedure clinics that proffer these products – masquerade themselves as part of the “healthcare” industry: evolutionarily speaking, clear skin means that you are youthful and free of some horrible, disfiguring disease. So rather than come out and say: “Here, bleach your skin, dark, ugly girl. If you were ‘fair’ then the marriage proposals will come in,” they now say, “Ah, discolouration. Spots. This cream will give you smooth, youthful, seamless skin.”

In the US and Europe, Clinique offers similar products (and they are not cheap), usually marketed to clients of European descent (also to Japanese and Chinese consumers). They contain also the same mix of compounds meant to bleach pigment.

And while I was doing research on cosmetic procedures and cosmetic surgery in Cape Town, I saw clinical-strength products claiming to remove spots (though product composition info was scarce). There’s a former kwaito singer, Nomasonto “Mshoza” Mnisi – who achieved some minor success – who was very public about skin bleaching (as well as other cosmetic surgeries). And it’s becoming acceptable in Nollywood, too: Tonto Dikeh has spoken candidly about “enhancing” her already fair skin here.

No matter where they are sold, and no matter how they are marketed, the chemicals have the same effect: they may remove some of the pigmentation temporarily, but expose yourself to sun, and the pigment returns. After all, that’s what nature intended, as protection. The chemicals also remove the protective upper layers of skin and make it more sensitive, so one’s skin is more prone to damage from even benign amounts of sun (so the Clinique “clinicians” stress the use of high SPF sunscreen). Repetitive use leaves patchy, damaged skin.

One last point: attempting to transform one’s skin in order to display status is not just the realm of deluded African and Asian women. Paleness, once the realm of the wealthy in Europe and in parts of India/South East Asia in general (paleness denoted that one did not have to be in the sun, labouring outdoors), became, during the duration of the twentieth century, the sign of un-wealth among white Europeans, and those of European descent. That was because at the turn of the twentieth century, those who stayed indoors were the poor, who had to leave their farms and go into factories—it was the great exodus of the European Industrial Revolution. Only the wealthy could then be outdoors, going to St. Tropez and the south of France for the winter. A tan eventually became associated with a display of good “health”: being outdoors, exercising, enjoying leisure time – signs of power in the late 20th century and the early 21st. Ask any young, white woman why she burns her kin, and the answer will be that a tan makes her look “look better” or “healthy.”

Check out: Lynn M. Thomas’ “The Modern Girl And Racial RespectabiIity in 1930s South Africa,” in Journal of African History, 47 (2006).

 

The Prisoner and his Pin-up Girl

The National Geographic issue of July 1975 is as delightful a time capsule as you would expect from the magazine that dictated our understanding of the world. On the very first page is an advertisement for Iran Air—against a backdrop of the Manhattan skyline. “Now fly to New York five times a week,” the copy cheerfully proclaims, four years before a revolution and a hostage crisis resulted in the US government tossing the airline out of its airspace. There’s plenty of the usual stuff—bleak Malthusian stories on the hunger games of that decade, and despatches from Cape Cod, the Ozarks, and Philadelphia. In the middle of them all, bookended by ads for a Datsun sports car and the Beechcraft Baron—“You don’t have to live near the water to live near the water”—is a gem of a feature on living near the water, “The Last Andaman Islanders”, written and photographed by the late Raghubir Singh.

Singh documents the Jarawas, or what was left of them, with élan. These “brutish idolaters” who, in Marco Polo’s account, “killed and ate every outsider they could lay their hands on,” treated him quite sweetly. He realised their famous hostility was simply a survival strategy. His crew was plied with drink, taken on a memorable hunt for “wild screaming pigs,” and fondled by muscular tribesmen. The words in the feature are fine, but it is the photographs that leap off the page. One photograph in particular: a Jarawa woman, dancing in an “explosion of merriment” that accompanied the crew’s arrival on shore, according to the caption—which curmudgeonly goes on to add that some Jarawas still distrust strangers and will therefore attack and kill them.

This volcanic little piece of joy, of course, ended up in a prison cell thousands of miles west—in another penal colony, on another remote island, designed by another European occupier. The Dutch turned Robben Island into a holding facility in the 1600s; the English brought civilization to the Andaman and Nicobar islands by setting up a prison there in the 1700s. For the apartheid-era correctional system, National Geographic was presumably a gesture of cultural benevolence; to Nelson Mandela, who knew better, it was porn. He named her Nolitha.

“My dearest Winnie, Your beautiful photo still stands about two feet above my left shoulder as I write this note. I dust it carefully every morning, for to do so gives me the pleasant feeling that I’m caressing you as in the old days. I even touch your nose with mine to recapture the electric current that used to flush through my blood whenever I did so. Nolitha stands on the table directly opposite me. How can my spirits ever be down when I enjoy the fond attentions of such wonderful ladies?”

You don’t have to be serving time to see her appeal. There she is, unabashed, naked, dancing on the seashore, radiant in the sun, every bit of her throbbing with sexual energy.

Prison did not diminish Mandela’s keen interest in the body. When his daughter Zindzi expressed hesitation at attending her sister Zenani’s wedding—Zenani was marrying a Swazi prince, and Zindzi was worried she would have to go bare-breasted to the ceremony—Mandela wrote her a charming note of encouragement.

“The beauty of a woman lies as much in her face as in her body. Your breasts should be as hard as apples and as dangerous as cannon balls. You can proudly and honourably display them when occasion demands.”

In fact, the prisoner and his pin-up girl had more in common than they might have been aware of. Both of them were thorns in the side of their states. Despite Jawaharlal Nehru’s public exhortations on behalf of India’s tribal people—“…a people who sing and dance and try to enjoy life; not people who sit in stock exchanges, shout at each other, and think themselves civilised”—his state blundered into their lives and continues to confound them to this day. Both of them were endlessly romanticized, though they would have probably preferred to do a little romanticizing themselves (we know at least one of the two found that opportunity in the pages of a magazine). More significantly, regardless of their different physical predicaments— and this is what made them inexplicable to authority—both of them knew they were free.

***

I learnt of Nolitha on Mandela’s 86th birthday in Johannesburg. The year was 2004, Thabo Mbeki’s second term as president of South Africa had just commenced, and the struggle veteran Mac Maharaj had been left out in the cold. He shrewdly used his time to remind the grand old man of his lost love (Maharaj has since been rehabilitated, and currently serves as President Jacob Zuma’s spokesperson). The Sunday Times carried a picture: a beaming Mandela, holding a framed copy of the photograph, with his archivist Verne Harris and assistant Zelda la Grange standing by. This is what I heard. Mandela received the present at a public function, and toyed with Maharaj by insinuating his pipe was likely to be stocked with something stronger than tobacco. Some time later, after Harris unwrapped the present and discovered what it was, he took it straight to his employer, who was thrilled to be reunited with the image (the original photograph had been discarded with other detritus of his prison cell, years ago). Mandela considered Nolitha wistfully, and voiced a heartfelt concern. Women these days, he felt, wore far too many clothes. He looked up at his staff for affirmation, and they collapsed with laughter.

In Celebrity, an unremarkable Woody Allen film, a character played by Charlize Theron and identified only as the “supermodel” has a remarkable problem. The problem, by way of Sigmund Freud and Allen’s enduring obsession with psychoanalysis, is that she is polymorphously perverse. “It’s not a flaw, it’s just a weakness,” she offers, tentatively. “Every part of my body gives me sexual pleasure.” The character who hears her confession is Lee Simon, a failed middle-aged writer played by Kenneth Branagh, who is broken enough to appreciate what he has found. After he strokes her hand into near-orgasm, Simon feverishly thanks the Lord. “…And that was just her hand!”

I can’t say I’ve ever encountered this problem—watching Silk Smitha unfurl in Sadma might be the closest I’ll ever get —but I think I recognize the broad sentiment. I’m old enough to know it’s a blessing, a retrospective reward for a childhood spent futilely banging on the windows of the world to be let in. And I will admit to being unreasonably excited by Mandela’s choice of stimulation on Robben Island; it sounded like the left-handed reading habits of my import-substituted middle-class youth. When things are scarce, the whole world becomes perversely polymorphous. Every third-world child of a certain vintage knows this. When pleasure is out of reach, it’s waiting in plain sight to be discovered; it’s in Margaret Mead’s Coming of Age in Samoa, it’s in Masters & Johnson, it is, somewhat oddly, in the Thai Ramayana, and it is absolutely and definitely in the pages of the National Geographic, a publication that has thoughtfully featured naked women in my skin tone all the way since 1896.

You could dismiss my pulchritude and call it names; exploitation, or tourism, or, worse, anthropology. I suppose you could even call it poverty porn. A cute put-down, sure, but spare a thought for those of us who didn’t have the luxury of consuming enough porn to casually throw it away as a metaphor (and a negative one at that). It’s like brother Oscar said: A cynic is a man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.

While it is widely acknowledged that Mandela left the details of the presidency to his deputy, Mbeki, it isn’t impossible to imagine that some part of the cosmic force he brought to the ambassadorial role he assumed—the indefatigable smile, the fragile political handling, the constant travel, the fund-raising, the pitch-perfect symbolism of his every action, the scrupulous care given to all his millions of social interactions—came from having nowhere to go and not much to do for decades on end.

Mandela was acutely aware of the redeeming value of scarcity, and carried it all the way into his wealthy sunset. He said as much when asked how he kept himself fit. On Robben Island, he explained, he ate brown bread, porridge and lean meat, and was consigned to hard labour. A punishment—for paler prisoners got whiter bread, fatter meat and softer work; and yet, also deliverance—for the enforced restraint preserved his perfect frame all the way to the end.

***

I know we’re supposed to be grateful to Mandela keeping South Africa “stable”—which, in the language of racial double-speak roughly translates to “Thanks for not messing with the nice white overclass who messed with you all your life.” But however standard the revenge-as-reconciliation model might be in our neighbourhood and other broken parts of the world, it is still a ridiculously low standard to apply to any human being in any part of the world. (Is there any one else on earth who will ever be thanked so much for what he didn’t do?) And it’s hardly like Mandela solved all of South Africa’s problems. Survey after survey shows in the period after 1994, of all the races that make the country, white people and Indians saw the biggest rises in their income, while black people and so-called “coloureds”—a collective 90% of the population—did not benefit anywhere nearly as much. Plenty of activists in South Africa think he didn’t go far enough with land redistribution, especially in comparison to Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe; they chafe at the “St. Mandela/Mad Bob” formulation that sets land reform up as something only a deranged dictator would do.

On the other side of the fence, the Wall Street Journal put forth a theory suggesting he is loved because he had the foresight to become what the American nation in general, meaning the Wall Street Journal editorial board in particular, wanted: an enthusiastic capitalist who saw the light and “transcended his party’s history of Marxism, tribalism and violence.”

The cold-warriors responsible for this last assessment received a splendid smackdown from the race-warrior Rev. Al Sharpton. “I think it is a betrayal of history to act as if…as Nelson Mandela evolved, the world embraced him,” he said on the American network MSNBC. “Let’s remember, the ANC, they were pursuing freedom,” he continued. “Many of the Communist nations embraced them, this country did not. It was not like they were born Marxist; they were born people seeking to be free… We chose sides. We chose the wrong side.”

Sharpton was echoing a point Mandela himself had made in an unusually heated interview with American television anchor Ted Koppel during his first visit to the US, shortly after his release from prison in 1990. Chided for his support of Yasser Arafat’s PLO and Fidel Castro’s Cuba, Mandela stood his ground, defending the ANC’s right to be loyal to old friends, reminding Koppel of the many Jewish people who were integral to the liberation struggle in South Africa.

This much is true: Mandela bent the world to fall at his feet. He wasn’t interested in turning into the person we wanted him to be; he trained us to embrace him for who he was. He had a striking fashion sense and recognized the irresistibility of his image early on. He put this power to good use in 1962, after his arrest, when he wore the traditional outfit of a Xhosa chief to his arraignment, an animal-skin cloak draped over one shoulder, the other bare, his body crowned by a bead necklace. He continued the tradition in sharp suits through the 1990s—he really rocked those suits—and with flamboyant floral shirts that became his trademark. He was funny and warm and a wicked flirt, and neither made any effort to hide these feelings, nor bothered to disguise all the other pesky human traits that made him vivid and real. In prison, he was “fixated” with Pantene hair oil, his fellow Robben Island inmate, Ahmed Kathrada told the New York Times. During one prolonged period of unavailability—dubbed “The Pantene Crisis”—he enlisted every influential visitor who came his way into this struggle.

“When Mandela dies,” the Johannesburg-based political theorist Achille Mbembe wrote in a stirring piece for Le Monde diplomatique this August, “we will be entitled to declare the 20th century is over.” Mbembe was referring to the wave of anti-colonial and racial justice movements that swept the last century, which themselves emerged out of the churn of abolitionist movements in the 19th century, a long and dramatic continuum of which Mandela was our last significant link. If the future is now open, let’s place on record just how unusual a third-world hero he was. In an arena where tropical leaders—the good ones at least—are seemingly required by law to be dour revolutionaries or dull technocrats, all of them carefully scrubbed of any trace of humanity, here was a man who was interested in fashion, sex, and humour, a man who had no trouble being fierce and dignified while wearing his heart on his sleeve. For the better part of a century, Mandela spun humanity right round, and now, it seems only fair that the world stop spinning for him.

A version of this piece first appeared in Mint Lounge on December 21.

The Tenor from Abidjan

The Tenor from Abidjan follows Landry Assokoly, a young man from Côte d’Ivoire, as he follows his dream to become a famous opera singer. Landry’s hope is to study at a top-tier music academy, and ultimately, to be seen and heard on stage as a world renowned opera singer. 

Director Taneisha Berg’s film is organised around the familiar tropes of a heroic journey, where the protagonist overcomes seemingly impossible adversities: a young man sets about transforming his ambition from dreamscape to reality. He knows that this dream cannot come to fruition without a physical dislocation – the 24 year old Assokoly, who has no formal training, must journey to Europe, where he can get training, mentorship, and connections unavailable to him in Abidjan. And Europe certainly puts up its many roadblocks for Assokoly: as might be expected, the visa application process for Africans who want to travel to Europe is fraught. Berg recently spoke to Landry, and he told her that he is still struggling to get even a tourist visa. Apparently, “the agent at the embassy essentially implied that Assokoly would have no reason to return to Abidjan once in Europe, that he could not guarantee that he would respect the terms of his visa, and so the embassy would probably not issue a visa.”

How did Berg hear about Assokoly?

Martial Landry Kouakou Assokoly Yao – Landry for short – fell out of my sky on a cloudy afternoon in a small fishing village outside of Accra, Ghana. I heard him before I saw him: who was listening to the Opera at 2pm on a weekday in the middle of the tropics? I asked myself. I hit the main road to see him coming towards me singing in his powerful tenor voice. I chased down the road after him and breathlessly asked why he was singing Opera. He laughed a little. Perhaps thrown off by my rude interruption, he answered simply, “Because I love it.”

A couple of things here are revealing: first Berg thought she was listening to a recording – because, of course, an African “in the tropics” couldn’t possibly be singing opera. They might be singing in church, but an aria? She also asks him why he is singing opera (because, well, that’s what most people, who will think that African singer/opera is an incongruent juxtaposition, will generally ask). And his answer is just as telling: it is about love. It is because the music resonates in him. And he wants to resonate back for the art form that means so much to him.

On the mundane and obvious level, Berg’s film is the story of an African singer – with some obvious talent for singing – from a provincial city who wants to do something that is typically associated with high-class Europeans in funny costumes who sing notes that annoy and baffle the average joe. We can ask why this young man from Abidjan wants to sing opera: is this about Assokoly wanting to be “European”? Is this about the fact that Europe exercises so much influence over the black imaginary that what we consider “high art” (or that we even look for such things as “high art”) is still dictated by European art forms? Is this just about a deluded Assokoly, trying to escape the ordinaryness of his life – one that is filled with the practicalities outlined in his Human Resources textbooks and the requirements for a Business Admin degree for which he is trying to study?

But we cannot reduce Assokoly’s ambition to a caricatured journey that would make a post-colonial scholar cringe. Berg captures, through Assokoly’s voice, something of why opera is more than an art form that is typically associated with the elite, and with Europe. We see why the note, carried to its most impossible outer limits can be transporting and transformative. It is why we can close our eyes, and have Leontyne Price’s, Simon Estes’, or Kiri te Kanawa’s voice take us to meditative spaces that elevate us from the everyday.

In any case, Africa’s association with fine voices and singing is hardly unknown – in fact, it’s almost a stereotype: Africans can sing (and dance). But usually, that singing is not associated with “high” art – somehow, while Europeans can achieve, at the highest echelons, things that are considered “technically difficult” (that is, things requiring practice, discipline, and something to do with intellectual ability), Africans are only permitted to achieve on the level of “innate ability.” That stereotype is true of everything from football to singing. But lately, opera singers from Africa have been transfixing audiences: listen to Serge Kakudji (a Belgian team made this documentary about him last year).

Assokoly’s story is a little different from that of Kakudji: he has not been admitted to a school. His tourist visa to the Netherlands has not yet come through. Berg informed me that he “asked at the embassy if an invitation will suffice and they did not seem to think it was enough,” even though he has a “full guarantor in the Netherlands.” Berg has also put him “in contact with a few renowned opera singers and they are going to lend a hand in this process as well.” Knowing that regulations surrounding visa applications to European countries are stringent to the point of being racist, attempting to go on a tourist visa may not be the wisest course of action—because, as the person at the embassy told Assokoly (using, I’m sure, that dismissive/smug rhetoric that many of us travelling on Third World passports have encountered), if he has “no reason to return” (that is, they expect that he will violate his visa dates and stay), the embassy will deny him admission.

Assokoly – like many opera singers who eventually achieve legendary status – begins in a location that is not only geographically but also psychologically removed from the privileged locations in which opera is practiced. However, something in him – and not just his physical ability with his remarkable voice – harmonises with what an aria can do when it is at its transfigurative best. But those of us from places that do not have the resources to support our ambitions know all about the difficult journey that is part of realising those ambitions – and the barriers posed not just by the rigours of academia or training processes, but by the petty gatekeepers who mind the borders. Getting past them may be Assokoly’s biggest hurdle.

See the kickstarter page for the project for more info. Berg says that within a week, they were already at 46%, but still need the rest.

“Somalis on Ice”

Goodbye Eric The Eel! Shuffle over, Jamaican bobsleigh team of 1988! There’s a new team in town: The Somalia national bandy team. And of course, the media is all over it.

For those uninitiated in this rather marginal sport, it’s similar to ice hockey except with football-sized fields and goals, more players and a ball instead of a puck. According to the official story, the Somalia national team was formed as an integration project in Borlänge, Sweden, and is aiming for this year’s world championships in Irkutsk, Russia. They’ve even managed to recruit notorious hardman and troublemaker Pelle Fosshaug to coach them. And none of the players have been part of a bandy team before!

Isn’t it a fantastically heartwarming story, though? The underdogs, struggling to affirm our shared humanity? “A bit crazy, lovely, picturesque,” as Fosshaug says? The media certainly seems to think so. Literally every single large-sized media institution in Sweden has covered the story, as have Norwegian and Finnish media, and Reuters, and the Wall Street Journal, and the BBC, twice. (They’ve also contributed our “delightful” post title.) Now film crews from bandy non-entities France, Holland and Britain are following the team as they fight to obtain visas in time for their big show.

Why the huge interest, from media that normally write no bandy articles at all? Clearly, the story structure itself trumps any other concerns. Inscrutably paradoxical media logic dictates that the best way to show humanity and uniqueness is to reduce people to clichéd archetypes, individuals co-opted into symbols. Stories from Africa or convering Africans are never really about people, of course; they’re about images, ideas, stereotypes of people. The Unlikely Sports Heroes are just another iteration, and one that partially serves to reinforce the image of inferiority. Because Unlikely Sports Heroes never actually win anything.

And these stories have another irresistible media quality: the contrarian story, the “man bites dog,” the news that they claim goes against the norm. “Somalis playing bandy” is but a slight twist to that seemingly endless trope, “non-white people skateboarding,” in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Haiti, Uganda, wherever. Or what sometimes seems to be the most-filmed story cliché about Africa in the past few years, the heavy metal music scenes in Mozambique, Angola, Botswana or Soweto. And even though it is told again and again, the story is always presented as unexpected, that this is something that “goes against the image” of Africa. Thus, in its very exceptionality, reinforcing that stereotypical image rather than shaking it.

And the thing is, of course, that marketers know what kind of double stereotypes the media crave. Planting a story by making it appealing to the press is a time-honoured tactic, and in an era where proper journalism is increasingly scarce it has become an ever-more-common and ever blurrier generator of news. At the apex, the news, the marketing and the spectacle all get mixed up into semi-fictional events without a clear source or instigator, into what columnist Rob Walker once dubbed murketing — marketing for its own sake, promotion without an obvious promotee. Here in Sweden, infamous PR Agency Studio Total has had a politician burn money, dropped teddy bears over Belarus, faked bloggers and pretended technology could interpret dog thoughts, all eagerly lapped up by the international media.

So what about this story? Is it murketing? Alarm bells should probably start ringing when you realise that there was a film project in conjunction with a major television channel before there even was a team:

In cooperation with the Swedish television profiles Filip and Fredrik, production companies Mexico Media and Thelma/Louise and Channel 5, a feature film will be made to depict the project. The film will be shown in 2014.

Consultants are brought in to manage every aspect of the team’s image; even the Somali IOC delegate Daqa Niamkey (interviewed by the project) talks about it as “an opportunity to change the image” of Somalia more than a potential sports feat. However much the individual team members are fighting for success (and good luck to them!) the whole project doesn’t really seem to be about them at all.

The question is, in whose eyes is that “image” supposed to be changing? There’s been a significant discussion in Sweden this autumn about whether the whole idea of trying to “change the image” of various immigrant groups is bunk, because it shifts the supposed problem to those who are at the receiving end of a “bad image” which, let’s be clear about this, is quite literally a synonym for racist prejudice. Putting the impetus on Somalis to “integrate,” as this project supposedly does, ignores the horrible reality of a Sweden where hate crimes against Somali people are on the rise, where 76% of the population perceives ethnic discrimination to be widespread, where the gap in average level of employment between Somalis and the entire population is 52 whole percentage units, three times as large as the UK or the US. Perhaps, instead of trying to “change the image” of Somalia through “integration” and murketing spectacles, Sweden should take a long hard look at its own structural racism instead.

Mali (and France) a year later

A year ago, on January 11, 2013, France launched Operation Serval, sending 4000 troops into Mali. At the time, many supported this intervention. According to one poll, as many as 96% of Malians initially supported the French intervention. A year later, the ‘world’ has largely moved on. The global media is more interested in Hollande’s sleeping arrangements than in France’s African designs.

A survey conducted just before the French intervention found that everyone was distressed by the crises taking place, both in the north and in the government. Malians had long expressed a belief in the importance [a] of ‘democratic government’ and [b] of democratically held elections as key to that government. “In 2012, fully 82 percent continued to favor ‘choosing leaders through regular, open and honest elections’ rather than some ‘other method.’”

The survey’s findings concerning the way forward bear citing:

Asked about solutions to ‘the current crisis,’ they express ambivalent views. In December 2012, a plurality (38 percent) wanted ‘war against the armed groups in the North’ though, within this group, twice as many preferred that any retaliatory strike be led by the Malian army rather than by ECOWAS (the survey did not ask about France). On the other hand, 29 percent preferred ‘dialogue’ between combatants. And 12 percent called for a return to ‘a strong state.’ A related question asked, ‘What is the best way to move beyond a regime that is corrupt and incompetent?’ Clearer answers emerge here. Almost half of all survey respondents (48 percent) opt for elections. And 15 percent want ‘respect for the Constitution.’ Only 7 percent recommend a military coup.

According to another survey, in 2012, poverty became the leading issue for Malians. Food security and hunger, access to clean water and to health care, and general instability and insecurity preoccupied Malians in 2012.

In a new book, La gloire des imposteurs: lettres sur le Mali et l’Afrique, Malian writer, activist, former member of government Aminata Traoré and renowned Senegalese journalist, screenwriter and novelist Boubacar Boris Diop try to look past the glory and the imposture to articulate what happened in Mali … and in France.

In preparation for the book launch, Traoré and Diop gave a three-part interview to Politis, the anti-capitalist French news agency. Traoré and Diop discuss the sense of having been betrayed; the relationship of Mali, and of the Central African Republic, to the ‘Arab Spring’; and the progress made by Malians and others, despite the ‘protection’ of European and American military forces.

The two see the French incursion into Mali as yet another part of the ongoing French ‘African adventure’, and, in broader terms, as yet another chapter of European and American imperialism on the continent.

In all three interviews, Diop and Traoré decry an exclusively political narrative that forbids any mention of the economic. Where’s the French, and global, concern for massive unemployment and deepening poverty, especially among youth, in Mali? If France, and the world, is so interested in ‘promoting democracy’, where was the consultation prior to Operation Serval?

Diop and Traoré say it’s time the French thought about their engagement in Africa. As Diop notes, England never sent troops to post-independence Kenya, Nigeria, or Zimbabwe; Portugal never sent troops to any of its former colonies. With Operation Sangaris, in the Central African Republic, France has sent troops five times to intervene in former colonies. Why? As Traoré notes, Sarkozy’s war in Libya destabilized the entire Sahel region, and Mali is only the first to pay the price.

For Traoré, the takeaway is that Mali, and Africa more generally, is not apart. It is intimately and integrally part of the world, and that world must stop segregating it, on the rare occasion that it pays attention.

Diop has the last word, part of which is, paraphrasing,

Each country has to learn as well to think through its own dynamics and its own reality. For example, Mali and Senegal are like twins, in that they have identical forces and issues, but at the same time, they are extremely different, and must address their own particularities. We must stop thinking that ‘Africa’ must either progress together or stagnate. Each country has its own story, its own sovereignty.

Africa is not an island, alone unto itself, nor is it a country.