Sean Jacobs's Blog, page 433

To Be Young, Angry and Black

The finality of death means that we can never know how Mandela would have liked to have been remembered. His mortal remains, lowered to the ground at Qunu, will become a symbol of contested memory. Growing up in post-94 South Africa, I have seen how chestnuts are traded in the national discourse. Hurriedly, the proverbial elephant in the room is allocated an illusory tag – to mask the discomfort of lived reality; to invoke alarm; and ultimately, to conceal the truth.

A key lesson in Mandela’s life is that he – the man, not the myth – rarely had the opportunity to sketch himself. The world did this for him. Mandela’s mediated life was filled with tags: “rabble-rouser” when he was younger, “black pimpernel” and “terrorist” (thanks, Cameron, Reagan et al) when political urgency found him. When the sun finally shone on him, the world projected its hopes onto him, recasting Mandela as a “global icon”, “South Africa’s liberator” and “talisman”.

Mandela’s South Africa suffers from a similar queasiness. Contemporary issues – some contentious, some not – are tagged by convenience. Our national discourse is polluted with signals; their tone ranging from Rainbow Nation-ism to crude denialism. In youthful naivety you ask: “What is a “born free”, when real opportunity still has a hue attached to it?”; “Who are these ‘young, angry and black’ people you refer to?”; “Why is it that the language of reconciliation has trumped more substantive ideals like social justice?”

Three weeks ago, I stood in a packed room at Cape Town’s indie bookshop, the Book Lounge. Wannabe politician, and former black consciousness activist, Mamphela Ramphele was there to launch her autobiography, A Passion for Freedom. After the dull questions were asked, Mamphela shared an interesting anecdote:

I was in Rustenburg this past weekend. One of Malema’s supporters took off his beret and greeted me with respect. This proves to me that these young people need acknowledgement. The young man was really decent to me.

As Ramphele narrates, the young man was from a small, forgotten community in Rustenburg. He is unemployed, young and black; a reality in post-94 South Africa. He is a member of the Economic Freedom Fighters, the latest democratic-left ensemble advocating for ‘radical change’, led by Julius Malema. The party attracts the “young, angry and black and angry” tag at whim.

Scores of young people, aged 15-34 are unemployed and looking for work in South Africa. The media tags them as “young, angry and black”. We are told that they are the faces behind “service delivery protests”. The ethereal term “service delivery”, itself, reducing the plight of poor South Africans to something less knotty: the provision of, and access to, basic services; disguising and invalidating the quest for true dignity.

The face of the EFF is young-ish and black. Their “redistribute now” missive has earned both valid and lazy criticism. Their tone is perceived by many to be “dangerous” and “irrational”. For Ramphele, the red-beret clad young man from Rustenburg should have been less respectful towards her. For he is “young, angry and black”. The faceless trope deprives him of agency; he is driven by dangerous impulses and anger; he is one within an uncontrollable mass, predestined to produce instability. He is a threat. In a country that oscillates between the haze of Rainbow Nation-ism and the reality of economic exclusion – “young, angry and black” is a good scarecrow.

In South Africa, the threatening discourse has more obvious roots. Under the old order, the politics of fear projected imagined threats to make sense of false adversaries. Remember Mandela the terrorist? Think swart gevaar (black danger) – used by PW Botha and his ilk. The anxiety of swart gevaar sprung far beyond the fear that black people would take over the country. At its root was the imagined fear of the ferocious native – unable to control irrational “anger” and “impulse”.

There are other more colorful tags in Mandela’s South Africa. The Rainbow Nation also gave birth to fuzzy and illusive tags like “born free”. These chestnuts represent a failure of imagination. We believe that there are three standard responses to our pressing challenges: the mysticism of Mandela’s South Africa, senseless alarmism, and myth-making.

As a young South African, Mandela’s legacy leaves me conflicted. I do not doubt the significance of the collective achievement made possible by Madiba and his compatriots. My conflict stems from a recognition that we have not moved beyond the glorious moment of 1994. It is why political leaders like Mamphela Ramphele, big business and the media can downplay the lived realities of the vast majority of South Africans. They deploy tags like ‘young, angry and black’ to mask their lack of imagination.

The day after Mandela’s burial also happened to be Reconciliation Day. Reconciliation – also to be filed under popular South African tags – is a reminder that sometimes, altruistic ideals can be deployed as an opiate.

Now that the 10-day long gedoente is done, our reality will re-etch itself. For many young South Africans, the country we have inherited is littered with contradictions. Mandela, the great statesman our parents told us about, straddled South Africa’s great divide with charm. Yet our divisions have never been bridged. As youth, we now find ourselves in an in-between space: the significance of liberation is chanted aloud, while our lived reality rings a different tune.

Vecinos. Neighbours. A Short Film on African Migrants in Barcelona

The short film below was part of a residency I completed at Jiwar, Creation and Society based in Gracia, Barcelona, funded by The Africa Centre and the Spanish Embassy of South Africa. I focus my artistic practice on memory, place, and home making with a strong focus on migration. Spending the past five weeks in Barcelona I forged a small path through the city, and made this film:

I am intrigued by how people who are a minority, such as African “migrants” in Barcelona, navigate the city. What is their experience of it? What happens after one survives the treacherous crossing by boat or how has the experience changed after living here for twenty years, like Xumo Nunjo who works as a musician/artist.

Xumo Nunjo, originally from Cameroon:

I am from the planet Earth, born in Africa, I have lived in Europe for the past twenty years. You can never lose your African roots — they are too strong, but you have to be universal, you have to be planetary. Home is the cosmos. Home is this planet. Don’t accept anything else.

How does one hold on to a deeply rooted sense of self, a cultural identity, and make new paths whereby lines of ethnicity, race, and nationality begin to shift and become malleable in order to adapt and make new forms of home?

Armed with a complex position, a great deal of curiosity, and a wealth of questions, this project needed to be multi-layered. Thus Vecinos is a multidisciplinary project. I worked in different modes: from documentary portraiture to participatory photography, whereby people took pictures on disposable cameras of what they wanted to show of Barcelona in terms of their experience of navigating and negotiating the city, thus “neighbourhood making”. These images were exhibited in Spain and will be exhibited in South Africa in 2014.

Some people I met are very rooted within Barcelona, surrounded by friends, studies, dreams, their lives are lived in the present – home being where they are, and this is what they chose to photograph. Yet they also keep strong connections to home, running NGOs to educate youth at home in Senegal like Mamadou Dia, who has also written 3052, a book about his experiences.

Mamadou Dia has been living in Europe for the past eight years, he came to Spain by boat from Senegal:

The term neighbor in my country is a sacred thing. In fact we always urge people to consider them, the neighbors are an extension of the family. I was lucky to live a short time in Barcelona and to become friends with my neighbors. We always recommend to look at the community where we live, a mother, a father, brothers and friends, so it will feel protected as a family and people can live in harmony.

Based on my five weeks of hanging out with various Africa migrants living in Barcelona, the short film above reflects the experiences of how people have come to Barcelona and have made the strange familiar, and how certain things, such as a sense of European individualism, continue to remain unfamiliarly strange. Gelia Barila Angri is the last interviewee to feature in the film:

She says:

I’m 24 years, and I’m from Equatorial Guinea. I came to live in Barcelona when I was 16. So I’ve been here eight years … For me, a home is where you make your home, where you feel comfortable. No matter where you are born. For me personally my home is here, but I always remember my roots, I never forget where I come from.

Somali author Diriye Osman’s “Fairytales for Lost Children”

In a dark couple of weeks for LGBT rights, the Indian government’s supreme court has re-criminalised gay sex, ensuring men and women now face police harassment and potential life imprisonment, stating gay sex is “unnatural, immoral and a reflection of a perverse mind.” While in Australia the first same-sex marriage law was revoked by the high court just days after being passed, annulling marriages that had already taken place. This retraction of LGBT rights has come in the wake of Vladimir Putin’s recent bill, so vaguely defined, that he has implemented a draconian governmental stance in a country where violent attacks on the LGBT community are normalised and commonplace.

Diriye Osman, author of the short story collection Fairytales for Lost Children explains in his piece for TimeOut London: “countries like Nigeria and Uganda are crawling with covertly US fundamentalist-backed Christian missionaries clamouring to promote anti-gay hatred as a vital component of religious salvation.” There are still 57 countries that have signed a statement opposing LGBT rights, some holding onto the right to exercise the death penalty. In Osman’s country of birth Somalia, the maximum sentence being life in prison.

The German philosopher Theodor Adorno once claimed “Every piece of art is an uncommitted crime”. In consideration to Fairytails for Lost Children, such an expression is sonorous. Osman has orchestrated a melodic world that is alive and effervescent in the pulp of the pages. The collection of narratives oscillate around a common nucleus, exploring a myriad of identities and gender-sexual spectrums, the result of what feels like delicate inward expeditions. Whether the protagonist is a “hard-boiled, six-foot Somali tranny” working in a mental hospital; or a femme boy trying on lingerie for a conflicted “masculine, active man” with a wife. We are allowed entry into each characters internal psychology, intimately hovering in the blind spot of their consciousness.

Describing himself as “Somali first, Muslim second, gay third,” Osman has employed the structures and syntax of children’s stories — albeit nocturnal lullabies, more akin to the Brothers Grimm tales — or folktales. At his most flamboyant, the prose vibrates with a restless immediacy, riffing like a syncopate jazz trumpet, or with the liquid roll of a hip-hop canter, flecked with Somali and Sheng. “Bwoy had moves. Toes tightened into corkscrews. He fucked with his body’s limits, bending, flexing until he broke through. Attitude and Arabesque became pop, lock, drop. No sweat. Such control is dangerous. I know this dance. It is ours.” Not an isolated example of Osman’s ability to depict sex with a lightness and visceral poetry, sex that is inherent, not merely flesh hung over a skeletal story or moment, but human and holistic.

Each character is progressively aged in each story, which generously bares differing perspectives and ideas in time, as well as in a number of environments: Peckham, Nairobi, Bosaaso. But despite this linearity there lies in the narratives and character portrayals, a coexistence of polarities. One of them subterranean tides, undertows of torment and pain, the other, a buoyancy of wonder, optimism and profound resistance. It is within this reverberating field that a tension moves, bringing the narration to breathe, and nourishes the work. In the opening of ‘Shoga’, based in Kenya, a grandson is having his hair braided by his Grandmother, that as an image is a delicate and tender scene between close family, yet soon this is fiercely reconfigured to a taut conflict.

‘…this business of me braiding your hair has to stop! You’re a boy not a lady-boy!’ ‘You know you love me,’ I smiled. ‘Besides, what’s wrong with being a lady-boy? It’s a good look.’ She pulled my hair and said, ‘Waryaa, if you grow up to be gay, walaahi I will do saar.’ ‘Saar’ was a brand of Somali exorcism.

Such a collision is enlarged to a dramatic horror in the short memoir piece ‘Your Silence Will Not Protect You‘ in which Osman recounts revealing much he had kept hidden to his family, who subsequently disowned him. Made even more harrowing by it unfolding in increments. “I had always thought of family as a fixed, all-powerful entity. I was raised in a culture where family was the most important thing. But as a young gay man I had to learn that nothing in life is fixed, especially family.”

Although the stories are populated by rejection and loneliness ‘Earthling’ introduces Zeytun, a character that is never alone. Suffering with aural hallucinations, interrupting and in a persecutory form, these voices rob her of the capacity for stillness. While the majority of memoir or fictional accounts of mental illness document either the frenetic energy of a soul detonating, or the bleak, crowded darkness of depression. We are here exposed to the unromantic, unsentimental reality of mental ill health — in this case psychosis — and the possibility of oppression being internalised.

Each of Osman’s characters has been written into emancipation, whether it be erupting, a gentle acceptance, or falling quietly — like snow in fog. This book is also a record of the physical, mental and emotional effects of conservative power, pressure and prejudice on his richly resistant and defiant characters. In totality we are presented with an exhibition of loss: innocence, fear, family, shame, virginity, love and belonging. But what is lost leaves the space for something more precious, sacred and transformative. Something necessary. The freedom to explore your own ways of being with ownership — that as the last line of the collection states — “We own our bodies. We own our lives.”

How can we move on from this dark story about “the Congo”?

Imagine that a TV director asks you to produce a documentary of European history in 59 minutes. “Impossible,” would probably be your reaction — well, Dan Snow took on this impossible task to show us in about an hour the “history of Congo,” a country as large as Europe.

Back in October, BBC4 aired Dan Snow’s 1-hour length History of Congo. (A “Fan of BBC” uploaded it to YouTube.) The documentary reveals once again how difficult it is to bring a visual narrative about an African region without constantly turning the gaze to Europe.

According to Snow, Congolese history begins when the Portuguese arrived in Congo in the 15th century. The initial scenes are shot in Mwanda, “where people have been fishing for over centuries unaware of the rest of the world.” Apparently without being aware of his own contradiction, the film immediately moves on to the history of colonization and slavery. Places and events are selected according to their significance in world history: Boma was the city where Stanley arrived; Mbandaka is visited because of its place in the rubber production; Katanga is shown because of its copper; Goma ultimately gets some space because of gold mining.

Snow’s Congo is reduced to a space of resources, with significance for far-away economies (Western industrial economy, contemporary emergence of Chinese and Indian economies), as a locale for wars in the northern hemisphere (Congolese soldiers fighting in the two world wars for the allies; its positioning within the Cold War) or involved in conflicts between African countries.

Such a representation of Congo reduces it to a country without any agency, without any history before Western arrival, and without any local pasts, heroes, domestic economy and politics.

Where are the legendary kings of the Lunda, Luba and Kongo Kingdoms? Where is the rumba music, often claimed to be Congo’s most important export product? What about the Congolese soccer players that figure so prominently in Europe, the United Kingdom included? Such figures unsettle the familiar narrative of Africa as a society in need of Europe’s aid; as Africa without its own pride or achievements.

In such narrative, usually much weight is given to the “white man” as a savior of those in need. Snow equally falls into the trap of staging himself as a hero. Each change of locale is accompanied by an indication of the dangerous, horrific or impossible task he is undertaking. Snow apparently dares to go where no one else has gone before. This all might seem innocent. Yet, repeating phrases like “deep in the Congolese jungle”, or indicating that no one (but obviously with the exception of himself) talks about the rape, displacement and fear that governs in the east of the Congo due to rebellious attacks, and visiting the M23 rebel group briefly interviewing its military spokesperson weave an image of Congo as a dark, impenetrable and horrific region.

The question is in how far spectators will actually grasp something from, for example, the complex war episode in the East or the experience of colonization, based on Snow’s rapid visit to the country.

This documentary presses us to ask if it is desirable for European film producers to narrate African pasts without reducing these to European historical developments. Ultimately, the documentary does not offer us “the history of Congo”, but rather “Congo within Western history”.

There is obviously an audience for this. Christopher Hows in The Telegraph rated the documentary 4 out of 5 stars, and acclaims Snow for not showing the horror too overtly. The Guardian picked it as a must see on October 9. Yet, there have also been some critical comments in the UK media. On IMDB.com, a British reviewer shares similar critical remarks as mentioned above, and calls it “a failure of a documentary.” His title “riding the post-colonial guilt train in Africa…” is telling. The NGO International Alerts regrets the “insufficient emphasis on the domestic governance problems.” I totally agree.

How can we move on from this dark story about “the Congo”? Probably this narrative will be told and retold for decades to come. I am not arguing for romanticized narratives; yet, there are so many tales to be told, apart from “the horror” and “the suffering” in Congo, which, ultimately, do not help the Congolese nor the West. All Snow’s documentary does, is victimizing the Congolese once again and feeding Afro-pessimism.

File under: #SMH Mandela Moments

Out of courtesy for Nelson Mandela’s memory (and the movement that he represented), we decided to hold any posts of #SMH (that’s Shake My Head) moments (basically occasions when you simply ask yourself “Why?”), till after the South African leader was buried. So we collected a ton of odd (including flat out racist and objectionable) media that circulated on social media and in the press in the last 10 days. Tomorrow we’ll publish a separate list of ridiculous things written by commentators about Mandela, but here’s a first list of SMH moments.

1. Mandela’s death coincided with the celebration of Sinterklaas (Saint Nicholas) in the Netherlands (where I live) and Belgium. As we’ve blogged here before, Sinterklaas contains blackface (read here and here) and a sizable section of the Dutch population and its diaspora defend their right to blackface. In probably the most racist reference to Mandela (well we did not check South African right-wing sites for prophecies of “the Night of the Long Knives”), the photoshopped image of Madiba in Zwarte Piet attire with the caption “R.I.P Anti-Apartheid Piet Nelson Mandela,” circulated on Twitter in the Dutch Twittersphere. Some Dutch people thought it was funny.

2. An editor or journalist at Dutch tabloid newspaper De Telegraaf for some unknown reason thought it was ‘funny’ to make a connection between Zwarte Piet and Mandela by writing that not only abroad, but “also in the Netherlands people reacted to the death of Nelson Mandela who died on Sinterklaas evening (with Zwarte Piet).” You can see a screenshot of the article (in Dutch) here. After a backlash on social media, the editor in chief issued a sort of apology saying that De Telegraaf made “a tasteless connection between the death of Mandela and the end of Sinterklaas.”

3. Still in the Netherlands, some people thought the death of the former statesman was the right moment to hang a banner on the Mandela Bridge in Utrecht saying: Moordenaarsbrug (translated as Killer’s Bridge in English). According to regional media those responsible are a right-wing extremist group bothered by the positive way Dutch national media are portraying Mandela and say he’s was a criminal and a terrorist.

4. Then there were those who tried to cash in on his association with Mandela. One such person is the last leader of the apartheid regime F.W. de Klerk, who has been quoted in, or interviewed by about every news program around the globe like he is some kind of moral authority. We can be short about F.W. De Klerk: he was part of a undemocratic racist regime that committed gross human rights violations and many of these crimes have gone unpunished in the name of “reconciliation.” De Klerk was anything but a friend to Mandela. Read what Mandela thought of de Klerk. As recent as last year (in an interview with CNN’s Christiane Amanpour) he still made excuses for Apartheid. But there he was, all over BBC and CNN.

5. Political leaders like former U.S. president Bill Clinton who tweeted his condolences, only to be reminded he did nothing to have Mandela removed from the US terrorist watch list while he was president. Ironically it was George W Bush who got Mandela removed from the list in 2008.

6. Then there’s the tweet that decided Mandela had to die, because actor Paul Walker did.

7. Yes, FIFA President Sepp Blatter (Mandela’s “friend”) had to make this list. During the FIFA 2014 World Cup draw in Brazil–not even 24 hours after Mandela’s death was announced–Blatter called for one minute of silence to pay homage to Mandela. Barely 10 seconds into the the minute of silence, Blatter disrespected his own command with some awkward statement about humanity and Mandela. Someone on YouTube had the good sense to post a video with a clock of that awkward moment.

8. Then there’s the journalists who went in search of the “rainbow nation,” basically posting shots of whites and blacks embracing. In some instances the same white people pop up in multiple media shot by different photographers. (Like the young white man hugging an older black woman in front of Mandela’s house.) This tweet by BBC journalist @Kelvinbrown’s (embedded below) of a meaningless photo of a black girl sitting on a white man’s shoulders says it all. It was according to Brown “a sign of the ‘rainbow nation’”.

Spotted this white man with a black girl on his shoulders at #Mandela‘s house, a sign of the rainbow nation. pic.twitter.com/Ve0u7y6hEm

— Kelvin Brown (@kelvinnews) December 6, 2013

9. Apart from taking photos every time a white person embraced a random black person, foreign media had a tendency to interview mostly white South Africans about Mandela. (A fellow guest on the American network MSNBC wanted to know from Sean Jacobs why there so few black South Africans being interviewed about Mandela on some networks.) In one instance, the BBC cut away from the official memorial service in Soweto to interview Mandela’s bodyguard. But no interview is as crazy as that of Gary Player talking to ESPN’s Mike and Mike in the Morning. Player goes on about how Mandela is a special kind of black leader bla bla and how he kissed Mandela’s feet etcetera. This of course is Gary Player who acknowledging one of his British Open victories, said South Africa’s sporting achievements are impressive indeed considering ‘we have only three million people.’ Just listen to the ESPN interview.

10. Finally, there’s this. During Sunday’s funeral, President Jacob Zuma led the crowd in singing the song “Thina Sizwe.” A lot of people agreed he did a good job at the funeral, including his critics (including those who supported the booing in Soweto on Tuesday). Sung like a dirge in churches and at funerals by black people, the song laments the large-scale land theft by whites and the state during colonialism and Apartheid. In the live clip below from the funeral, CNN’s Isha Sesay shows how much she knows about South Africa when she declares the song “controversial.” As Ann Eleveth wrote on Facebook: “Here’s how it probably happened: CNN knows that there was “a song” sung in a local language that caused a stir some time ago, so now, upon hearing another song sung in a local language while also hearing booing of the president, of course the only conclusion is that this song is the site of controversy. 1+2=3, therefore 2+3=4….” What is worse that Kehla Shubane, the South African commentator who is providing context to CNN at the time (and who was also imprisoned on Robben Island), didn’t correct her. But at least YouTube commenters set her straight:

To Come Back from Qunu

I do not have a background in the struggle. Unlike the many people who over the past week shared their stories of their personal interactions with Nelson Mandela during the struggle, my only brief meeting with Mandela was as a journalist for the Afrikaans newspaper Die Burger, which he visited despite the editor, Ebbe Dommisse’s ongoing demonization of the ANC and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. As a white South African I have lived with the shame that it was the White State that imprisoned Nelson Mandela. I grew up in the illusion of white suburbia while the country burned around us, and was taught to fear the threat of the Other. As a child, I wasn’t told about Nelson Mandela, yet his movement changed our lives and the future of my children. Which is why, Sunday morning at 5 a.m., my wife and I woke our children, put them in the car and made the four hour journey to Qunu.

Of course we did not have accreditation to attend the main funeral event, so we headed for one of the public viewing areas. We expected throngs of people, traffic jams, people wrestling to find space. What we found was a small gathering of people around a big screen. Now and again a small group would stand up and join the singing, like when Jacob Zuma led with Thina Sizwe.

But, overall, there was a quietness about the day. People strolled slowly from their homes towards the viewing area, goats and cattle grazed around, some hopeful entrepreneurs tried to flog a can of Coke, a T-shirt or a cap with Mandela’s image. There were almost as many journalists roaming around in search of a quote as there were viewers sitting on the plastic chairs around the screen.

Almost immediately after we arrived, however, we were pounced upon by journalists – from Telesur to France 24 to CNBC Africa– asking us to explain ourselves. Why did we come all the way from Grahamstown and not just watch the event at home? How do we feel as white South Africans about Mandela? Do we see ourselves as victims in a way? What does Mandela mean to our children? Can you speak to the camera in Afrikaans?

We wanted to watch the ceremony, wanted to be a part of the group of mourners, to give tribute to a leader who also freed his jailors, to paraphrase Barack Obama’s speech at the Johannesburg memorial service. But we do not yet live in that ordinary country, and perhaps today that was the testimony we were called upon to give – that, thanks to Madiba, it is all of us that are free. That the history we look back upon is not only the history of the ANC, the history of black South Africans, or the history of the banished and the imprisoned. The history we came here to be a part of, belongs to all of us.

As the ceremony ended, my kids couldn’t contain themselves anymore, and wandered off to go and play some distance away from the viewing area, spontaneously making friends with two black kids that were just as bored as they were. They ran around on the green grass, behind them the spectacular backdrop of the green valley and the big white marquee where Nelson Mandela’s body was being carried out to his last resting place. And for a moment I found the meaning of Mandela in this ordinariness, the laughter of children, the grazing of cattle, the chatter of people from the village.

As we walked back through the dusty streets of Qunu after the service, the familiar sight of rural poverty was around us, and the contrast between the modest dwellings and the rented cars and expensive 4×4’s parked on the sidewalks outside them was an example of the stark inequalities that continue to characterize South African society. And it reminded us that, despite the victim discourse of many whites (and not only the crazy rightwingers who believed that Mandela’s passing would unleash a mass killing of whites), white South Africans by and large still find ourselves on the affluent side of that gulf between the rich and the poor. We have benefited greatly from the transition to democracy.

It is precisely because their lives have remained comfortable that many whites could make a cuddly patron of Mandela without confronting the revolutionary part of his legacy. It is true that Mandela’s almost unbelievable capacity to forgive ensured that racial reconciliation is the legacy he will be remembered for. But for too many whites this became a get-out-of-jail card that absolved them of the responsibility to find ways of contributing to the eradication of apartheid’s enduring legacies. This is the humbling power of forgiveness that caused – in the historian Albert Grundlingh’s words – a ‘traffic jam on the road to Damascus’ among many white South Africans. But too often Mandela has been reduced to a fridge magnet saint, a T-shirt hero that did not pose a challenge to business as usual. This is the sanitized version of Mandela that made possible the corporate arrogance of Woolworths to dress singers as shelf packers to stage a flash mob while singing Johnny Clegg’s anthem Asimbonanga. (And why many of those that shared the clip on Facebook would probably not know as much about Steve Biko, Victoria Mxenge and Neil Aggett who the original song also pays homage to.) This reduction of a revolutionary to a safe, cuddly saint is why newspapers over the past week were brimming with advertisements of big corporates paying tribute to Mandela, in a country where mine workers get killed for demanding a living wage.

And yet, and yet, I find it difficult to agree with overly negative assessments like those of Slavoj Zizek. There is no doubting the sea of poverty and inequality in which so many South Africans remain adrift. But as we critique the pernicious effects of neoliberalism and attack the current ANC for moral insolvency, let us not forget that the country my children are growing up in is vastly different from the one in which I became an adult. They now live in a country whose founding principles are that of freedom, human dignity, and equality, instead of fear, conflict and hate. They don’t know war, bombs or uniforms. At school they share classrooms with children whose parents I would not have been allowed to play with forty years ago. They can paint the South African flag on their faces and cheer for the Boks, the Proteas or Bafana without thinking about it twice. To invert a cliché: the present is a different country.

But it is not different enough yet. At school my children are still more likely to learn to care about the dangers facing the rhino than seeing for themselves the precariousness of life for children on the other side of town. They may live in a country that is now formally non-racial, have a few black friends and they may know the words of Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrika, but they remain ensconced in the comforts of a life where education, health care and security are privatized. In some ways, theirs is light years away from my childhood. But in many other ways, twenty years after democracy, it is not.

Nelson Mandela’s funeral service reminded me of how little Xhosa I can understand, how little I know about Xhosa burial rituals, how much I still have to learn about the history of a struggle that is too often presented as that of black South Africans and too seldom understood by white South Africans as the trajectory that led to our own liberation from prejudice, hatred and fear. White South Africans like us will have to challenge ourselves (and be challenged by the media) to cross the many divides that still mark South African society, learn to listen to different stories, speak other languages and participate in social and political life rather than emigrate inwards to our suburban homes.

Driving back through the heartbreakingly beautiful green hills around Qunu, past the awe-inspiring Amathola mountains, I hoped that one day my children will just live in an ordinary South Africa. One in which white children attending a funeral in Qunu won’t be newsworthy enough for TV cameras. But I know that for this to happen, we will have to move beyond reconciliation, wonderful as it is, to social justice, to equality in all its dimensions. There are many rivers still to cross. I am asking myself again: what can I do, what can I contribute? And as they grow up, I will encourage my children to ask the same question of themselves.

We are all islands/till comes the day/we cross that burning river

On 15 December 2014, we came back from Qunu. The next day, 16 December, was Reconciliation Day. Soon enough, however, this season will pass – and then we will need to get back to work.

An interview with Ghanaian artist Sarkodie in the lead-up to his new album

Few rappers on the continent have been as prolific as Sarkodie this year. The Ghanaian emcee has released a steady stream of songs and videos, all in the lead-up to his album which will be titled Sarkology. So we found it necessary to touch base with him during a video shoot in Johannesburg for “Pon Da Thing”, his collaborative song with Nigeria’s Banky W. This is how the chop-up went.

I sort of feel that your last album didn’t get the type of push it deserved, despite the GOOD Music link-up. Why do you think that was?

Sarkodie: I think rap is a bit hard to break to international markets. Rap is a subset of music; it’s more of an option. But music is more of singing, no matter what the genre is, the moment the vocal comes in you need to sing. Rap is the only different thing in music; it’s a bit more of what people like. If someone doesn’t like hip-hop, they don’t want to listen to you. It’s a bit hard for every African rapper, not just me. We’re all trying our best to take it out there. But I’m not that content of a human being, I don’t go with ‘I’ve done the best already!’ That album was dope, but I think there are doper things about to happen, I believe in that. There’s nothing going to waste, it’s more of a preparation towards bigger things. Rapperholic was my previous album. To me it was really dope, and it made some waves across Africa. We have a new structure for the new album. I’m still looking at my fifth or sixth album to do the magic that I want to do. I normally don’t release my album without expectations that ‘oh, this year I want to be the best artist in the whole world!’ But I think it takes time. You don’t wanna miss that journey of going from nothing to something; you don’t wanna cut it short. You’re gonna be nervous, you’re gonna be disappointed…you don’t wanna miss that. I think that was a start from Sarkodie.

Is there a circuit which enables you to tour as a musician in Ghana?

That’s what we do after every release, or even before a release. Big ups to D-Black, he was the first person to do that. I was on board with him. We were brainwashed into believing that you’re supposed to have a big company doing a show before you can fill up a stadium anywhere. But one thing we forget is that the fans like you even more than the companies do. So why don’t you do it yourself? So for now, I’ve been doing tours back in Ghana. I’m still on the Rapperholic tour. When I go back I still have some shows to do. It’s pretty cool doing tours back in Ghana, and I do it.

The Ghanaian rap scene seems to be in a good state at the moment. Where do you see it headed?

I have a plan. I don’t know about others, but for me, it’s about staying original and trying to be yourself and trying to make people accept you for who you are. I started rapping in English, and I can really rap in English. But I feel like when you rap with these Americans, that’s where you can see the gap, and I don’t want that. I want to be a king in my own zone. When I meet you, we’re doing a king-king thing, we’re not doing like ‘I’m helping Sarkodie.’ No, it’s not gonna be that way. The hip-hop scene back in Ghana has a future, there are a couple of guys coming up. I was scared because I was not hearing people rapping again. I didn’t have time to really sit down and think about it, but when I had a moment, I tried to point out rappers back in Ghana, and there were none! Everybody was shifting to singing because that was what was making it across borders. As I told you, rap is really hard to cut across. So everybody stopped rapping, and it was just me and I think Adam, he’s really dope! But now we have some people coming in, people like Kofi Kinaata, you need to check him out, and he’s dope! And we have T-Flow…

What about a crew like Bradez?

They’re like my old school mates, we started together. They’ve been there since I started, so Bradez is old school. I’m talking about the new cats who are taking the Ghanaian hip-hop to the next level.

What was the thinking behind starting your own clothing label?

There was a point in time where I felt like fans were really appreciating my music, not just my music but me as a person. People were just making clothes without informing me, and just wearing them — just to have my face on the clothes, which was touching. So it was good timing: at least move away from the music and do something a bit personal. They wanna live Sarkodie; they wanna wear something like what Sarkodie’s wearing; they want good business partners to come in, so that’s what we started doing.

Why should I buy your new album when it comes out?

I can see you’re a hip-hop fan, you’re gonna love this album! I forgot to mention Joey B; he’s a dope rapper from Ghana and he’s on the album as well. (Listen to ‘Tonga’ here.) The album is called Sarkology. Trust me, a lot went into the album. It’s thirty tracks, you can’t go wrong! Of course I needed dance music, like the one you’ve just heard with me and Banky, that’s more for the ladies. But you know me, I like to go hard, so I have dope songs! “Illuminati” (video above) is on the album as well. It’s crazy, I don’t even have a word for it. It’s dope!

Lastly, how do you write your raps? Do you come up with the melody/flow first, or do the words take precedence?

First I was more focused on what I was saying. That was when I was limited to Ghana because they understand what I’m saying. So don’t need a style, I just have to say…when I have a beat, I’ll just say whatever I have to say. If it’s funny, then people will laugh. But then I started to attract people from outside of Ghana, so I had to change my style. That’s when you go with the skill. So when you have a beat going beatboxes — a mean 4/4 pattern — when you put that down and you put the words in it, you have a dope rap right there.

Martin Scorsese digitally restores Djibril Diop Mambéty’s masterpiece Touki Bouki

The Criterion Collection has just released a new box set and it’s a big one. Martin Scorsese’s World Cinema Project collector’s set brings together six classic films from around the world. Among them is Senegalese filmmaker Djibril Diop Mambéty’s 1973 masterpiece Touki Bouki. The other films making up the collection include Emilio Gómez Muriel and Fred Zinnemann’s Redes (Mexico, 1936), Ritwik Ghatak’s A River Called Titas (Bangladesh, 1973), Metin Erksan’s Dry Summer (Turkey, 1964), Ahmed El Maânouni’s Trances (Morocco, 1981), and Kim Ki-young’s The Housemaid (South Korea, 1960). On top of digitally restorations of the six films, the set also includes an introduction from Martin Scorsese, as well as several interviews with pivotal figures in contemporary world cinema on many of the films in the collection. The two that stand out most to me are Abderrahmane Sissako’s (La Vie Sur Terre, Bamako, et al.) interview on Mambéty and Touki Bouki and Metin Erksan and Fatih Akin’s (Head-On, The Edge of Heaven, et al.) conversation around Dry Summer.

The Criterion Collection’s website describes Martin Scorsese’s World Cinema Project itself as follows:

Established by Martin Scorsese in 2007, the World Cinema Project expands the horizons of moviegoers everywhere. The mission of the WCP is to preserve and present marginalized and infrequently screened films from regions generally ill equipped to preserve their own cinema history.

For those who have never seen or heard of Touki Bouki, it is an eccentric film that draws on avant-garde and French New Wave film traditions, all the while remaining completely unique. It tells of the antics of a wayward couple in Dakar who dream of one day making it to Paris. The film was recently featured on Sight & Sound magazine’s Top 100 list of the greatest films of all time. Read Basia’s review here. Here’s the trailer:

Mambéty only ever released one other feature-length film, called Hyènes in 1992. Although, Touki Bouki is often considered Mambéty’s best and most important film, Hyènes and his various short films are all brilliant. Hyènes — which was an adaptation of Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s play, The Visit – was intended to be a sort of continuation of Touki Bouki. Meanwhile, at the time of his death, Djibril Diop Mambéty had been working on a trilogy of short films (only two of which were actually made, as Mambéty died of lung cancer in 1998 before getting to the third) called Contes/Histoires des Petites Gens (Tales of the Little People). The first of the shorts in the trilogy, Le Franc, was released in 1994 and the second in the series, La Petite Vendeuse de Soleil (The Little Girl Who Sold the Sun), was released posthumously in 1999. His other works include Contras City, Badou Boy, and Parlons Grandmère.

The Donkey that Carried the Cloud on its Back

This is just a short post to give everyone a heads up on a crowd funding campaign for a new documentary on the construction of Africa’s largest port on the island of Lamu, Kenya. The film will be directed by Nairobi-based German-Kenyan photographer, filmmaker, and AIAC citizen, Philippa Ndisi-Herrmann (remember the ‘My Favorite Photographs‘ post she did for us last year). Here’s a short teaser for the project:

The film seeks to explore the question: in order to evolve, what part of ourselves do we keep and what part do we leave behind? According to the film’s crowd funding page,

“The Donkey that Carried the Cloud on its Back” is a quirky and impressionist film about an island which appears not to change yet a looming cloud is approaching and breaking the steadiness and surety of the island’s constant way of life.

Bracketed by the two monsoon rains, the film follows Fatuma as she prepares to begin a new life and get married and concludes as she leaves her parents’ house to be wed. The documentary returns again and again to public spaces that feel the coming port; the main, sleepy square, the port site and the beach that no one visits.

It definitely seems like it has potential and with touches of magic realism embedded within the narrative and imagery, it will hopefully be quite original. With only a little over a week left to raise funds (the crowd funding campaign ends on December 22), the filmmaker and producer are slightly more than halfway to their fundraising goal of €8,500. So be sure to check out the film’s crowd funding site and support an interesting documentary film project.

It definitely seems like it has potential and with touches of magic realism embedded within the narrative and imagery, it will hopefully be quite original. With only a little over a week left to raise funds (the crowd funding campaign ends on December 22), the filmmaker and producer are slightly more than halfway to their fundraising goal of €8,500. So be sure to check out the film’s crowd funding site and support an interesting documentary film project.

Nelson Mandela and the Dutch

Shortly after his release from prison, Nelson Mandela embarked on a six week tour across Europe. As the Dutch newspaper NRC mentioned last week, he initially declined the invitation to include the Netherlands in this tour, this to the great dismay of Wim Kok, who was the Dutch Finance Minister at the time. Hadn’t the Netherlands been a staunch supporter of the liberation movement? Well, it is a bit more complicated.

Due to its historical and kinship ties–the Dutch were the first colonizers of the Cape and imported slavery there; it would lose the Cape to the French at the end of the 18th century; Afrikaners are partly descended from the Dutch, with some leaders like Hendrik Verwoerd born in the Netherlands–the nation of South Africa has always mattered a lot to the Netherlands. Five years after Apartheid was implemented in its official form in 1948, in the middle of a new wave of Dutch emigration to South Africa, Prime Minister Drees described South Africa as “The Netherlands’ adult daughter.” But when Mandela was imprisoned in 1964, it barely generated attention in Dutch political circles.

Over the course of the next few decades, Apartheid would become one of the most (and perhaps even the single most) heated human rights issue to be discussed in the Dutch parliament. Twice did the issue result in a near-cabinet collapse.

So how, then, did the government of the Netherlands deal with Apartheid?

Overall, it might be best summed up as a whole lot of fondness for moral condemnation, but a reluctance to act. At the U.N., the Netherlands preferred to use its finger for pointing rather than signing. And so it never signed the 2 Anti-Apartheid Conventions and abstained or opposed many of the resolutions that came up in the General Assembly. Fearful of economic loss and overstepping the U.N.’s mandate by interfering in its adult daughter’s domestic affairs, their lack of support was largely driven by realist anxieties.

Of course they framed it differently. In 1982, for example, the Netherlands voted against a General Assembly Resolution because of the way it categorized apartheid’s actors. You see, the document framed the African National Congress and the Pan-African Congress of Azania as ‘liberation movements.’ But to the Dutch, this did not make sense. Only if South Africa were under colonial control would the label ‘liberation movement’ be accurate. But since there was no such thing going on, calling the ANC and Mandela liberators would miss the point. (The ANC did refer to South Africa as “colonialism of a special type” of course; because the colonizers also identified as South Africans.) More suitable, they argued, would it be to call them anti-apartheid organizations. And on 5 December 1983 (exactly 30 years before Mandela would pass away) they were one of the few who abstained from yet another resolution (one which also criticized Israel’s continued support for the apartheid state).

The economic costs of actually, rather than rhetorically, condemning Apartheid, and interfering in South Africa’s domestic affairs were just a tad too pricy. Surely the oil deals must have had a lot to do with this. When Mobil decided to withdraw, Royal Dutch Shell, for example, defended their continued presence by saying that it listened “to the voice of black South Africa, thereby conveniently forgetting to add the “as far as apartheid legislation permits” part (as pointed out by Erik van den Bergh). In fact, if we are to believe the Guardian, Shell still profits from its apartheid-deals to this very day.

So when the issue of oil trade came up in the General Assembly, the Netherlands once posed that it would only prohibit oil sales domestically if the Security Council would actually impose an embargo on South Africa, a scenario that the veto power of the United Kingdom and the United States would prevent anyway.

For the VVD, the party who currently governs the Netherlands in coalition with the Labour Party, the issue of sanctions was a matter of pragmatism. They simply didn’t expect that isolating South Africa would be all that effective in ending apartheid.

Dutch ambassador to South Africa Scheltema might capture this Dutch ambivalence towards apartheid best when, back in 1980, he proclaimed that “we do not wish to prescribe how South African society is to be organized … But violations of human rights in the political, economic and social fields are matters of rightful concern to the international community, wherever they take place.” As massive violations in all those three fields were clearly going on, one would reckon that a self-perceived human rights pioneer as the Netherlands would not let any opportunity go by to defend its human rights ideals. And in a way they indeed didn’t. As Scheltema’s quote shows, they certainly condemned it, and not just that one time. That did not, however, mean that they were actually gonna do something about it.

Apartheid surely was a bad, bad thing. But so was a loss of trade. And so the profits usually ended up trumping the atrocities. Declaring apartheid a domestic matter that transcended the U.N.’s mandate was overall more convenient (just like the Netherlands’ own situation with its former colony Indonesia was a domestic matter, a position for which they needed South African support). As a result, of the many anti-apartheid resolutions that came up in the General Assembly and the Security Council, it usually simply abstained. Seemingly deaf to the calls of Dutch activists and NGOs, it continuously refused to align its rhetoric with actions. The one initiative they did take up was the proposal of a voluntary arms embargo in the Security Council, the impact of which is said to have been negligible.

When apartheid slowly drew to a close, and the stakes of the seemingly zero-sum game of realpolitik tumbled, its reticence slowly vanished, culminating in a façade of ANC championship once Mandela was finally released from prison.

After his initial rejection, Mandela decided to accept the Dutch invite. Accompanied by Winnie Mandela, he was welcomed to the Netherlands on June 16th 1990.