Sean Jacobs's Blog, page 434

Mandela was the Last Founding Father in Africa’s Decolonization

The death of Nelson Mandela has provoked an outpouring of mourning, celebration, and commentary around the world that is unprecedented for an African leader. Glowing tributes have gushed from world leaders and major magazines and newspapers have carried special features on his extraordinary life and legacy. He has been showered with lavish praise as a great man, titan, colossus and conscience of his nation and the world for his magnanimity, moral courage, and dignity; for his resilience, patience, and passion; for his charisma, charm, regal countenance and common touch; for his humility, visionary and political brilliance; and above all, for his spirit of forgiveness and reconciliation, believed to be the driving force behind the South African “miracle” that steered the beloved country from the abyss of a racial bloodbath. Several countries including Nigeria, Kenya, and Tanzania have declared three days of mourning, and in several European countries and the United States flags were flown at half-mast as part of national mourning for Mandela.

Everyone, it seems, seeks to bask in Mandela’s reflected glory, including many African leaders who compare quite unfavourably with him for their mendacity, self-aggrandisement, and dictatorial tendencies. But there are critics, including some in South Africa and among the African left, who accuse Mandela of having failed to dismantle the South African apartheid economy that has left millions of black people especially the unemployed youth in grinding poverty. Reconciliation, they argue, rescued whites from seriously reckoning with apartheid’s past and its legacies and deprived blacks of restitution. Mandela’s death forces South Africans to reflect on the post-apartheid state he helped create. Deprived of Mandela’s aura, some believe, the ANC’s monopoly of power will continue to erode. Such critical assessments of Mandela’s legacy can only be expected to grow, but for now they are drowned by outflows of endearment.

It is hard to remember that Mandela was once widely reviled in much of Euroamerica as a terrorist as he was revered in Africa and the progressive world as a revolutionary figure. He is now everyone’s venerated hero, the man sanitised into a transcendent myth; his place in African history stripped of its messy contexts and multiple meanings; his life and legacy of protracted struggle morphed into a universal redemptive tale of reconciliation. His iconic image of lofty leadership satiates a world mired in pettiness; it is a resounding reproach to the small-minded leaders most countries are currently cursed with. The various Mandelas being commemorated offer different opportunities to people, politicians and pundits in the North and in the South—absolution from the barbarous crimes of imperialism for the former and affirmation of their humanity for the latter and a reminder of the heady dreams of independence.

As with the day he was released from prison in 1990, many will remember where they were when they heard the news of Mandela’s death. I remember February 11, 1990 as if it were yesterday. I sat glued to the television with bated breath for the live broadcast of Mandela’s release. I told my then six-year-old daughter this was one of the most memorable days for my generation and she would live to remember it, too. I choked with tears of joy, anger, sadness, pride, anticipation and other bewildering emotions as we watched the tall, smiling, dashing, and unbowed Mandela walking out of Victor Verster Prison beside his wife, Winnie, a militant in her own right who had suffered so much and done a lot to keep his memory alive. They walked with defiant dignity, holding hands, their other arms raised with clenched fists. The announcement of his death, although long anticipated because of his age and grave illness, came more unceremoniously. It arrived as a news alert on my iPad as I was working on some memo in my office. But it was no less momentous for it marked the end of an era, of Africa’s long 20th century.

Predictably, the traditional media and social media have been awash with tributes, reminiscences, and verdicts on Mandela the person, the politician, and the symbol. In the United States and Britain, politicians, pundits, and celebrities have been falling all over themselves to find the most laudatory words to describe Mandela as the epitome of global moral authority, of humanity at its best, the last in the hallowed canon of twentieth century saintly liberators from Mahatma Gandhi to Martin Luther King. Such encomiums are to be expected for a world hungry for goodness, forgiveness, trust, and optimism that Mandela exuded so masterfully. Conveniently forgotten is the fact the British and American governments upheld the apartheid regime for decades and condemned Mandela’s African National Congress as a terrorist organisation. We all remember Ronald Reagan’s and Margaret Thatcher’s resolute defense of the apartheid regime and fierce condemnation of the ANC and its leaders including Mandela. In the United States, ANC leaders were officially regarded as terrorists until 2008!

The sanctified portrait of Mandela hollows out the exceedingly complex and contradictory man and historical figure that Mandela was and the true measure of his life and legacy. Anyone who has ever read Mandela’s two-volume autobiography, Long Walk to Freedom, and the equally voluminous biographies including Anthony Sampson, Mandela: The Authorized Biography and Meredith Martin’s Mandela: A Biography, knows he was not the caricatured figure of the popular media who rose from clan royalty to the South African presidency and global political celebrity, appropriately purified by 27 years of imprisonment. Rather, his greatness arose from the very complexities and contradictions of his life and times and how he embodied them, experienced them, articulated them, learned from them, manipulated them, deployed them, and tried to transcend them. He was not much of a father for his children, but he became a beloved father of the nation; he had several failed marriages but the public was seduced by his warm embrace; he was a ruthless political operator as much as he was a self-effacing leader; and his deep sense of empathy cultivated out of the very texture of daily life and struggle under apartheid allowed him to effectively deal with his jailors and negotiate with his Afrikaner opponents in the transition from apartheid to democracy.

Moreover, Mandela’s unflinching loyalty to his comrades in the liberation movement sometimes blinded him to their limitations with adverse consequences as exemplified by his two immediate successors; and there was the loyalty he exhibited to the unsavoury leaders of states that had supported the anti-apartheid struggle such as Libya’s Moammar Gadhafi and Nigeria’s Sani Abacha. The early Mandela was known for being impetuous and boisterous; the later Mandela could be fiercely stern, coldly calculating, and compellingly charming to seize opportunities and advance his aspirations. At age 33, he declared that he would be South Africa’s first black president, but when he did achieve this goal at 76 he forswore the grandiosity of office so beloved by many leaders in Africa and elsewhere. However, there were constants in his life, too. He remained supremely proud and confident of himself and his African heritage, and his commitment to South Africa’s liberation struggle was steadfast.

Many have remarked on Mandela’s remarkable understanding of the nature of politics and the performance of power that enabled him to embody the nation better than many of his fellow founding fathers of African nations and his two successors. Above all, he is praised for his lack of bitterness after spending 27 years in jail and his embrace of forgiveness and reconciliation. The manner in which this issue is discussed often serves to advance the redemptive narrative of Mandela’s road to political sainthood. Only he and his closest confidants of course know how he truly felt. Post-apartheid reconciliation may or may not have been a romantic attribute of Mandela the man; it was certainly a pragmatic imperative for Mandela the nationalist leader. Mandela’s life and legacy cannot be fully understood through the psychologising and symbolic discourses preferred in the popular media and hagiographies. It could be argued that he and his comrades were able to sublimate their personal anger and bitterness because the liberation struggle was too complex, too costly, too demanding, too protracted, and too important to do otherwise. Reconciliation was both a tactic and a necessity because of the dynamics of the liberation struggle in South Africa.

This is to suggest that like all great historical figures, Mandela can best be understood through the prism of his times and the political, economic, social, and cultural dynamics and conditions that structured it. Mandela changed much in his long life but it was a life defined by the vicissitudes of African nationalism. For those who don’t know much about African history, or are wedded to exceptionalist notions of South African history they would be surprised to learn the parallels Mandela shares with the founding fathers of many other independent African nations, in whose rarefied company he belongs. In fact, his historic significance, and the eruption of grief over his death and gratitude for his life in the Pan-African world and elsewhere can partly be explained by the fact that he is Africa’s last founding father.

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The decolonisation drama started in Egypt in 1922 with the restoration of the monarchy and limited internal self-government and finally ended in 1994 with the demise of apartheid in South Africa. In the long interregnum, decolonisation unfolded across the continent, reaching a crescendo in the 1950s and 1960s; in 1960 alone, often dubbed the year of African independence, 17 countries achieved their independence. The colonial dominoes began falling from North Africa (Libya 1951) to West Africa (Ghana 1957) to East Africa (Tanzania 1961) before reaching Southern Africa (Zambia and Malawi 1964). The settler laagers of Southern Africa were the last to fall starting with the Portuguese settler colonies of Angola and Mozambique in 1974, followed by Rhodesia in 1980, and Namibia in 1990. South Africa, the largest and mightiest of them all, finally met its rendezvous with African history in 1994. Nelson Mandela is cherished because of his and his country’s long walk with African history.

Mandela embodied all the key phases, dynamics and ideologies of African nationalism from the period of elite nationalism before the Second World War when the nationalists made reformist demands on the colonial regimes, to the era of militant mass nationalism after the war when they demanded independence, to the phase of armed liberation struggle. Many countries achieved independence during the second phase through peaceful struggle. Others were forced to wage protracted armed struggle. The variations in the development and trajectories of nationalism were marked by the way each individual colony was acquired and administered; the traditions of resistance in each colony; the presence or absence of European settlers; the social composition of the nationalist movement; and the nature and ideologies of the leadership. Similarly, there were different ideological orientations and emphases. Some nationalists espoused secular or religious ideologies; among the former there were competing liberal, socialist, and Marxist ideologies that would later frame postcolonial development agendas.

All along, African nationalism unfolded in a rapidly changing world. Most critical were the effects of the Great Depression and the Second World War; the emergence of the Superpowers and the Third World; and the growth of Pan-Africanism and civil rights struggles in the Diaspora. Independence marked the triumph of the first out of the five humanistic and historic objectives of African nationalism, namely, decolonisation. The other four objectives included nation-building, development, democracy, and regional integration. In so much as contemporary Africa is largely a product of struggles for independence and their complex, changing, and contradictory intersections with colonialism, imperialism, and globalisation, Mandela’s life and legacy as a historic figure are conditioned by the contexts and imperatives of nationalism. Like many of Africa’s founding fathers, Mandela’s life spanned much of South Africa’s existence as a nation, traversed the various phases of the country’s nationalist movement, and embodied the trajectories of postcolonial Africa.

Mandela was born in 1918, a mere eight years after the founding of South Africa as a nation out of four separate settler colonies and an assortment of conquered African states and societies, and six years after the formation of the African National Congress. He was thirty when the country’s racist settler regime gave way to the uncompromising racial barbarity of apartheid in 1948. In the early 1940s he was one of the founders of the ANC Youth League that sought to radicalise and rescue the ANC from its reformist politics. When the ANC adopted the Program of Action in response to the establishment of apartheid, he became the leader of the Defiance Campaign in the early 1950s. In 1955 he was among 156 activists who were tried in one of the largest political trials in South African history that lasted from 1956 to 1961. Following the Sharpeville Massacre in March 1960, the liberation movement decided to shift to armed struggle and Mandela was charged with the formation of the ANC’s Umkhontho we Sizwe (Spear of the Nation).

In 1963 Mandela and nine other leaders including Walter Sisulu, his mentor, and Govan Mbeki, the father of future President Thabo Mbeki, were charged with sabotage at the infamous Rivonia Trial. During the trial, on April 20, 1964, Mandela uttered his immortal words from the dock: “I have fought against white domination and I have fought against black domination. I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons live together in harmony and with equal opportunities. It is an ideal I hope to live for and to achieve. But if needs be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die.” Thus Mandela was not an advocate of Gandhi’s or King’s non-violent resistance, not because he was not a man of peace, but because he correctly understood that in the South African context, fighting against an obdurate racist settler regime required all available tactics from mass protest to armed resistance. For him multiple tactics had to serve the overall strategy of achieving national liberation. In short, as a freedom fighter he was simultaneously a political leader and a guerrilla leader. Under the ANC’s broad and tolerant political umbrella he worked with traditionalists, liberals, socialists, communists, and Black Consciousness activists, both before and after his long incarceration.

Mandela outlived apartheid by nearly twenty years. His story can be told of other African nationalists. Some progressed from peaceful protest to armed liberation struggle. They included the nationalists of Algeria, Kenya, Mozambique, Angola, Guinea Bissau and Zimbabwe. Many of those who led their countries to independence were also born either just before or after their countries were colonised. Examples include Jomo Kenyatta, Kenya’s first President, born at least six years before Kenya became a British colony in 1895, who outlived colonialism by 15 years by the time he died in 1978; Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana born in 1909 who also outlived colonialism by 15 years; Félix Houphouët-Boigny the first President of Cote d’Ivoire who was born in 1905 and died in 1993, thirty three years after the end of French colonial rule; Léopold Sédar Senghor, Senegal’s first president who ruled for twenty years, was born in 1906 and died in 2001, outliving colonialism by forty one years; and in my own homeland, Hastings Kamuzu Banda who was reportedly born in 1898, a few years after the country was colonized, lived to rule Malawi for thirty years between 1964-1994 and died in 1997.

The long and large lives of many of Africa’s founding fathers including Nelson Mandela represents a historic rebuke to the destructive conceits of European colonialism. In the notorious words of Ian Smith, the Prime Minister of the settler colony of Southern Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe, the European colonists believed colonialism would last at least a thousand years. Set against many of his fellow founding fathers, Mandela stands out for his singular contribution to democratic politics. He relinquished power after only one five-year term in office. Many others were overthrown in coups like Nkrumah or died in office like Kenyatta and Boigny. Before Mandela, the only other African leaders to voluntarily leave office were Senghor of Senegal and Nyerere, the founding President of Tanzania.

Mandela’s example shines all the brighter when compared to his nemesis in Zimbabwe, Robert Mugabe, once a widely admired liberation hero who remains president 33 years after independence. Mugabe together with the likes of President Yoweri Museveni of Uganda now in power for 27 years, the same number of years Mandela spent in apartheid jails, and still going, represent the dinosaurs of African politics in a continent that has been undergoing various forms of democratic renewal since the turn of the 1990s, in part influenced by the demonstration effect of South Africa’s transition to democracy and Mandela’s enlightened exit from office after only five years.

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The lateness of South Africa’s decolonisation, it can be argued, helped compress the sequentiality, as it turned out for the early independent states, of the five objectives of African nationalism. While the latter achieved decolonisation, they struggled hard to build unified nations out of the territorial contraptions of colonialism which enjoyed statehood without nationhood. They came to independence in an era when development, democracy, and regional integration were compromised by weak national bourgeoisies, relatively small middle classes, and the Cold War machinations of the two Superpowers, the United States and the former Soviet Union.

Mandela’s South Africa benefited from both the positive and negative experiences of postcolonial Africa, the existence of a highly organised and vociferous civil society, and the end of the Cold War, which gave ample space for the growth of democratic governance and the rule of law. But the new post-apartheid state was held hostage to the dictates of the negotiated settlement between the ANC and the apartheid regime arising of out of the strategic stalemate between the two sides–by 1990 South Africa had become ungovernable, but the apartheid state was not vanquished as happened in Angola and Mozambique. This, combined with the global triumph of neo-liberalism in the post-Cold War era, guaranteed the powerful interests of capital in general and the white bourgeoisie in particular against any serious economic restructuring despite the great expectations of the masses and the ambitions of successive development plans by the new government from the Reconstruction and Development Program to Growth Employment and Redistribution to the Accelerated and Shared Growth Initiative.

Nevertheless, the post-apartheid state achieved much faster growth than the apartheid regime ever did. The country witnessed massive expansion of the black middle class and the ANC government fostered the growth of a black bourgeoisie through the black economic empowerment program much as the apartheid regime before it had cultivated the Afrikaner bourgeoisie through apartheid affirmative action. There was also some reduction in poverty, although huge challenges remain in terms of high levels unemployment and deepening inequality. Interestingly, South Africa now lags behind much of the continent in terms of rates of economic growth, in part because of the lingering structural deformities of the apartheid economy in which the peasantry was virtually destroyed, the labour absorptive capacity of the economy is limited by its high cost structures, and South Africa suffers from relatively low levels of skill formation for an economy of its size because of the apartheid legacy of poor black education. It is expected that South Africa will soon be overtaken by Nigeria as Africa’s largest economy. The continent’s rapid growth, reminiscent of the immediate post-independence years, which has been dubbed by the world’s financial press with the moniker of a ‘rising Africa,’ has given rekindled hopes for the establishment of democratic developmental states that might realise the remaining goals of African nationalism.

Thus, Mandela’s political life and legacy resemble in significant ways that of other African founding fathers, and South Africa’s trajectory mirrors that of other African countries, notwithstanding the differences of national historical and geopolitical contexts. It is worth remembering Mandela’s rhetoric of reconciliation was a staple among many African founding presidents in the immediate post-independence years. Jomo Kenyatta used to preach reconciliation, urging Kenyans to forgive but not forget the ills of the past as a way of keeping the European settlers and building his nation fractured by the racial and ethnic divisions of colonialism. Even Mugabe in the euphoric days after independence urged reconciliation between white and black Zimbabweans before domestic political challenges forced him to refurbish his revolutionary credentials by adopting radical land reform and rhetoric.

Reconciliation was such a powerful motif in the political discourses of transition to independence among some African leaders because of the imperatives of nation building, the second goal of African nationalism. It was also a rhetorical response to the irrational and self-serving fears of imperial racism that since Africans were supposedly eternal wards of whites and incapable of ruling themselves, independence would unleash the atavistic violence of “intertribal warfare” from which colonialism had saved the benighted continent, and in the post-settler colonies, the retributive cataclysm of white massacres. Instead of comprehensive accountability for apartheid and its normative institutional violence, which engendered “crimes against humanity”, post-apartheid South pursued “truth and reconciliation” that individualised both the victims and perpetrators and shifted the logic of crime and punishment of the Nuremberg Trials for the logic of crime and confession, justified tendentiously in the name of “Ubuntu.”

Mandela bookends Nkrumah in Africa’s independence struggles. Nkrumah fired the Pan-African imagination, Mandela gave it its most memorable consummation. The former was a key architect of Pan-Africanism, a cosmopolitan intellectual activist whose Diaspora associates included W.E.B. Dubois, George Padmore and C.L.R. James, while the latter was largely a home grown pragmatic revolutionary whose long incarceration and struggles revitalised the intricate Pan-African connections between the continent and its Diaspora.

In the United States, the anti-apartheid struggle offered the civil rights movement its most powerful and successful intervention in American foreign policy. The Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) that emerged in the mid-1970s out of growing black political representation, together with TransAfrica, spearheaded the anti-apartheid sanctions campaign which galvanised the country from churches to college campuses. Over the past two centuries, African American mobilisation over Africa has been greatest where the intersection of imperialism and whiteness as concrete and symbolic constructs, national and international projects and policies, have been most pronounced and where Africa advocacy is likely to yield significant domestic dividends.

For the CBC passing anti-apartheid legislation was imperative not only because this was a popular cause in the black community, and increasingly throughout the country, it offered them an opportunity to demonstrate and raise their power and profile in the halls of Congress, which would enable them to advance their domestic agenda. So widespread and powerful did the movement become that Democratic and even Republican politicians scurried to prove their anti-apartheid credentials. In 1986, after nearly two decades of black Congressional representatives sponsoring sanctions bills, the CBC registered a historic victory, when it succeeded in getting the Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act passed over President Ronald Reagan’s veto. That marked the apotheosis of African American influence on US policy towards Africa, which was not to be repeated any time soon. Mandela’s release in 1990 and subsequent visits to the United States were widely celebrated as the return of a native son. This was true in other parts of the Diaspora from the Caribbean to Latin America, Europe to Asia.

It is therefore easy to understand the iconic status of Mandela and the overflow of emotion his death has provoked in the Pan-African world. The fact that President Obama started his politics as a student at an anti-apartheid rally, and his acknowledged indebtedness to Mandela’s exemplary life and struggle, offers a poignant thread in the thick ties that bind Africa and the Diaspora in the struggle for emancipation from racial tyranny and dehumanisation. For the rest of the world Mandela’s life and legacy resonate deeply because his progressive nationalism was fundamentally a struggle for human freedom and dignity, for social justice and equality. It is not hard to see why that would be universally appealing to a world rocked by the horrendous devastations of the twentieth century, a century of emancipatory, ambiguous and destructive mass movements, of mass culture, mass consumption, mass education and mass media, as well as mass war and mass murder. The first part of this long century was dominated by the genocidal regimes of Hitler and Stalin and the overlords of imperial Europe, while during the second half the long arc of history swung towards the liberators from the South such as Gandhi and Mandela and from the imperial heartlands themselves such as Martin Luther King. That, I would submit, is Mandela’s global historical significance–he was a major player in the most important political movement of the 20th century, decolonisation. And for that his place in history is assured.

* This essay was first published on the LSE blog and is republished here with permission of the author.

Burying Comrade Nelson Mandela

I attended two official commemoration events in Cape Town this week to mark the passing of Nelson Mandela. The first was a religious gathering on Friday past outside the city hall of Cape Town, symbolically significant as the place where he gave his first speech upon release from prison in 1990. The second was the widely celebrated official city memorial at the Cape Town stadium. For many, these events were an important opportunity to commemorate the Nelson Mandela that has become dear to so many South Africans in a manner that sublimely transcends his particular political affiliations or history. There was music and much joyousness and much to be moved by. Particularly in the musical and poetic orations of a generation born after 1994, who have come to hold such a charming affection for the white- haired ‘old man’ with the infectious smile, that they call Tata Madiba.

At all the official state and city-organized events, curiously there were two soundtracks, sometimes in discordant cacophony. Music emanated from the stage. And singing emanated from sections of the crowd. There was music from the podium on the one hand, and a singing from the stands on the other. I am not referring to noise as such–the much talked about booing of the President at the Soweto event. I am talking about the constant singing from the crowds. A singing that remained sometimes just a faint humming and sometimes rising and bursting through; uncontainable and irrepressible despite the gentle and sometimes stern remonstrations from the podium. Some have written about this as a failure of the event organizers. I am not so sure. The official State events are in that ironic restriction of protocol that they must be seen to be devoid of politics. They are not supposed to appear as events that support a particular party. Yet, whatever it might indicate, I also think it might be that there is a ritual of mourning and celebration that many South Africans are still to have for Nelson Mandela, and that is the ritual of burying a comrade.

Nelson Mandela’s legacy is such that there are sufficient elements of his life to celebrate in a manner that does and can transcend his party affiliation and his political history. There is the Nelson Mandela of our negotiated settlement, the astute political agent and visionary of a future where we all could belong in political equality for the first time in the history of this settler colony. Then there is the Nelson Mandela in his post presidential life; the Nelson Mandela of a deep ethics of care for the vulnerable and marginalized, from the officially disputed HIV/Aids sufferer to the invisible children of rural areas. A seemingly infinite amount of stories are surfacing of ordinary acts of kindness experienced by ordinary people, from the chance encounter to his famous ability to remember names and faces and greet everyone regardless of hierarchy or stature.

There is tomorrow, Sunday, the official State funeral. It is here that Nelson Mandela will be welcomed by his elders, proclaiming Aah Dalibhunga!, as he begins the process of going to his new home among the ancestors, marked by the ritual of umkhapo, the slaughtering of an unblemished white goat or in his case, an ox. He is after all a chief of the ama-Thembu clan of the Xhosa, by blood and custom. So it is by blood and custom that he commences his journey to his new home among his ancestors, among them his father Nkosi Mphakanyiswa Gadla Mandela, and the Thembu regent Jongintaba Dalindyebo. In the official events, and the long lines of people who paid their respects, in the funeral on Sunday, these rituals allow a community to grieve, to attend to the loss of a head of state, and the head of a clan.

The third ritual that seems to be needed is one that perhaps cannot be—it responds the feeling that I have encountered at the official state events. It is an as yet unnamed sensation, perhaps of incompleteness, registering as disappointment even, that leaves one coming away having partaken in an act of community that did not produce entirely the solidarity that a ritual enacts. It is this unnamed sense of incompleteness that I think speaks to the need for a third form of ritual that attends the figure of someone like Nelson Mandela, that the opportunity to grieve and bury a comrade, a maqabane, still has to take place properly. A place and time where the songs that were erupting from the crowd can be taken up and sang from the podium. The songs that emanated from sections of the crowds were songs that placed, we might say sought to restore, Nelson Mandela to his place within a political community. I have heard the song of the ANC’s military wing, Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK), on the lips of many in the crowds. We remember it last so poignantly sang at the funeral of the assassinated leader of MK, Chris Hani, in the midst of the political negotiations:

Hamba kahle Umkhonto weSizwe

Thina Thina bantu sizimisele

ukuwabulala wona amabhulu

(Go well dear comrade / member of the spear of the nation

We as members of Umkhonto we Sizwe are prepared to kill the boers)

When they are sang in these contexts today these songs are not calls for a return to violence. But they are the songs of the rituals that came to define the anti-apartheid struggle inside the country. Among these rituals of struggle was the political funeral. These funerals, under the State of Emergency of the 1980’s in particular, displaced grief and were reconstituted as the space for political sentiments repressed.

Where funeral orations mixed the theological and the subversive to the chagrin of a state bent on quarantining political rancor. It is not so much that our state rituals now seek to expunge the political, in as much that the ritual of state performs a different function, that it requires transcending the partisan nature of the political in order to create a ‘people’, or found a ‘nation’. The result, less by design than by effect, has been to leave many with a feeling that the rituals have not attended to the entire range of communities that need to grieve. If the nation and the clan are having the opportunity to grieve, it feels like the comrades across the country have not had a chance to grieve, properly. These being the survivors of the Defiance Campaign of the 1950’s, where Mandela was chief volunteer, or the veterans of the military wing of the ANC, where Mandela was founding Commander-in-Chief, or the generation of the 1973 worker’s strikes, or the 1983 United Democratic Front civic organizers. Or the student activists of 1976, 1981 and that generation of ’85 that I count myself among. Although each was formed within a particular generational cohort, they learnt to sing the same songs while also adding their own. It feels like the comrades still have rituals to perform. They still have their songs to sing. They are now ‘free to sing their own songs’, yet in this moment of grieving they cannot sing them from the official podiums of state ritual.

Part of the difficulty of organizing this ritual is this: nearly 20 years after apartheid we are scattered generations with diverse fates. We have lived long enough after 1994 to not only be the oppressed. We also now include both the beneficiaries and the losers. We are both the celebrators and the cynics. We are the unemployed and we are also the new business elite. We are the party officials, the parliamentarians, the bureaucrats; but we are also the most vocal critical dissidents and leaders of new social movements. We are the ruling party and we are also the opposition. We are the committed and we are the disinterested, the disappointed and the eternally optimistic. In this moment, where Rolihlahla Dalibhunga Nelson Mandela was also above all, the name of a comrade among those on the Island and in exile, we are all reminded of shared generational births into a political community. It is these generations who want to sing their political songs , their songs of longing, defiance and fighting, to laugh and smile and cry together. Grief has that effect of re-uniting the dispersed– even if ever so briefly.

The Mandela Legacy

Lighting candles amid the growing memorial of flowers outside South Africa House on London’s Trafalgar Square last Friday evening, I thought about some of the day’s news coverage. I recalled Barack Obama’s anecdote that Mandela once disavowed praise in typically humble and self-deprecating fashion: “I’m not a saint unless you think of a saint as a sinner who keeps on trying.” It reminded me of a comment someone once made of praise I’d given someone else I deeply admired and respected, for –among other qualities–their example of humility and forgiveness: “It’s easy to be humble when you’re a guru”, they’d said. But Mandela wasn’t always a guru or a saint. Before Mandela the reconciler, peacemaker, and unifier, there was Mandela the lawyer, intellectual, and freedom fighter.

I thought of Oliver Tambo, the ANC president who escaped South Africa after the ANC was banned in 1960 and who regularly addressed anti-apartheid gatherings on Trafalgar Square throughout the three decades of his exile. Tambo had, along with Mandela, Ashley Mda, Anton Lembede and Walter Sisulu, been a founding member of the ANC Youth League in 1944. Mentored by Lembede (who would die unexpectedly in 1947), the Young Lions were staunch nationalists, and the ANCYL’s founding manifesto outlined a strident critique of the failings of the parent organisation in which promoting “African self-determination” became the organising principle of resistance to (white) government oppression.

Amid all the sadness and celebration of an accomplished life so fully lived, it’s easy to forget that the leadership, humility, forgiveness and reconciliation for which Mandela is celebrated began with a withering analysis of white supremacy and how to defeat it. That analysis evolved with time as Mandela’s thinking developed from his Youth League days through his experiences of debating with his ANC comrades, arguing and eventually forging alliances with communists, many of whom were white, with activists from the Indian community, particularly in and around the metropolitan centres of Durban and Johannesburg, and with the women’s movement whose 20,000-strong march on Pretoria’s Union Buildings in August 1956 showed that they too were a force to be reckoned with. It received its most eloquent, forthright, and forceful iteration in June 1964 when Mandela addressed the trial court at the opening of his defence against charges of treason. Mandela was unequivocal:

The lack of human dignity experienced by Africans is the direct result of the policy of white supremacy. White supremacy implies black inferiority. Legislation designed to preserve white supremacy entrenches this notion. Menial tasks in South Africa are invariably performed by Africans. When anything has to be carried or cleaned the white man will look around for an African to do it for him, whether the African is employed by him or not. Because of this sort of attitude, whites tend to regard Africans as a separate breed. They do not look upon them as people with families of their own; they do not realize that they have emotions – that they fall in love like white people do; that they want to be with their wives and children like white people want to be with theirs; that they want to earn enough money to support their families properly, to feed and clothe them and send them to school. And what ‘house-boy’ or ‘garden-boy’ or labourer can ever hope to do this?

Madiba’s example of forgiveness, reconciliation, and humility are inseparable from his unwavering commitment to combat white supremacy, and promote equality and justice. That commitment, conveyed in his leadership, provided a beacon to the negotiations to replace apartheid with democracy. We saw it flash bright at CODESA after De Klerk used his closing remarks on the opening day of the CODESA negotiations to complain that the ANC had not abandoned its armed struggle, even as the parties were now gathered around the negotiating table. Mandela had already given his closing remarks and De Klerk was to have been the last speaker of the day. But an incensed Mandela insisted on returning to the podium where he castigated De Klerk so vehemently that two decades later De Klerk is still licking his wounds: “Even the head of an illegitimate, discredited, minority regime as his, has certain moral standards to uphold … he has abused his position because he hoped that I would not reply. He was completely mistaken.” Mandela went on to remind the audience that the armed struggle was suspended to give negotiations a chance and that it was one of the agenda points for the negotiations begun that day.

Those negotiations would ultimately fail and violence would flare across the country for another 18 months before parties returned to the table, an agreement reached in late 1993 and an interim constitution adopted.

In the early 1990s, reports emerged that the ANC had tortured and abused detainees in its military camps in the frontline states. Although these rumours had circulated before, the South African establishment media seized on them to portray the ANC as no better than the regime’s torturers and assassins, or even worse than the regime because the ANC, unlike the regime, held itself to higher standards of human rights. The ANC ordered an inquiry and when the Motsuenyane Commission duly reported to the ANC National Executive, the committee chaired by Mandela was deeply divided. The Commission found that detainees had been badly abused, with incidents reported in several camps over several years. Some argued vociferously that the report should be made public; the ANC should come clean and acknowledge its failings to protect its moral standing. Others sensed the danger and argued equally forcefully that releasing the report would severely compromise the ANC’s position at the negotiating table because De Klerk’s National Party and several other parties too would seize on it to discredit the ANC. They argued that the ANC should not permit a circumstance where abuses in camps could be equated to what the National Party had inflicted on South Africa for decades.

The debate went on for hours until Kader Asmal stood up and proposed a compromise: South Africa should have a truth commission in which the full extent of crimes perpetrated by all parties to the South African conflict would be revealed. A human rights lawyer by training and member of the ANC’s Constitutional Committee, Asmal was a founding member of first the British and then the Irish Anti-Apartheid Movements. He had spent three decades exiled in Ireland where he eventually became a professor of human rights law at Trinity College, Dublin. Asmal argued that declaring human rights abuses by ANC agents was necessary to preserve the ANC’s human rights mantle, and that simultaneously compelling the regime to do the same would demonstrate in the fullest possible manner the criminality of apartheid white supremacy. The ANC’s crimes were in no way equivalent to the regimes’ (although the TRC would later take issue with that claim) and the ANC’s historical argument, which Mandela also outlined in his statement from the dock, would hold: white supremacy was the root cause of violence in South Africa, was by definition a profound violence against human dignity and worth. Asmal’s proposal found backers and ultimately became the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

Albie Sachs, who told me this account and which I have corroborated with another NEC member present, did not say where Mandela stood during the fractious NEC debate about Motsuenyane’s report. However, that Asmal’s proposal was accepted and a post-amble hastily added to the 1993 constitution suggests he was persuaded by the proposal’s ability to reweave principle and politics when the two seemed in danger of coming undone.

The Truth and Reconciliation Commission, as it became known when enabling legislation was finally adopted in 1995, is one of the most celebrated accomplishments of South Africa’s political transition and set a new standard for restorative justice the world over. But the TRC was not only an innovative mechanism to promote reconciliation, it was the seal on the peace that finally ended white supremacy in South Africa (at least in its legislated and institutionalized form).

Which returns me to my point. Mandela the forgiver, reconciler and peacemaker tells us a comforting and warming story about a champion of racial equality and justice. But that is only half the story. The other half is a story about Mandela the astute leader whose actions and decisions are grounded by a profound commitment to democracy, social harmony and equal opportunities. As he famously told his trial, “It is an ideal which I hope to live for and to achieve. But if needs be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die.” The world is thankful that he lived. But we should not underestimate the strength of that conviction nor the awesome potential of anyone innervated by it. That for me is Madiba’s legacy and the profound example we celebrate today.

Playlist: South African Jazz for Nelson Mandela

Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela, the man that so many South Africans have come to love, even those who grew up being taught that he was a communist and a terrorist when communism was portrayed as a great evil. He achieved so much in his life, but what he achieved was for the people of South Africa–not for himself. Nelson Mandela, in his biography A Long Walk To Freedom says “It is music and dancing that make me at peace with the world.” Many jazz artists have paid tribute to Nelson Mandela over the years, and I felt it fitting to dedicate one of my radio shows to this music as a tribute.

My JazzE radio show only plays jazz from South African artists and so I compiled a playlist of songs that can be related to Nelson Mandela for a special tribute edition. Here is that playlist, and some background on each of the songs selected. Where available I’m providing a link. Full show is embedded at the end.

Moses Khumalo – Meadowlands. Meadowlands, a song written by Strike Vilakazi to protest the forced removal of residents of Sophiatown in 1955. Sophiatown was seen by the apartheid government as a threat, and it was in Freedom Square, Sophiatown that Mandela first alluded to armed resistance as a legitimate tool for change. The area where the black residents were removed to was Meadowlands, Soweto.

Bheki Mseleku – Home At Last. Bheki Mseleku lived in exile in London for many years. This song was composed on his return to South Africa. Although not specifically directed or in honour of Nelson Mandela, I included this tune not only to remind us of Mandela’s return home after 27 years in prison, but also of his return to his eternal home on Thursday 5 December 2013.

Eghard Volschenk – Kwela For Mandela. Namibian born jazz guitarist Eghard Volschenk wrote this song for Mandela, he said many years ago. This kwela song has a sound that has strong Cape jazz influences. Listen to it here.

Allou April – Madiba’s Jive. Sticking to sounds that are typically South African, this time from Allou April with an upbeat jive number, one that we can certainly imagine Mandela doing his ‘Madiba Jive’ to:

Linda Kekana – A Song For Madiba. A beautiful song composed by Linda and Ephraim Kekana, and recorded by acclaimed jazz vocalist and South African Music Award winner Linda Kekana, this is a touching tribute.

Zim Ngqawana – Long Waltz To Freedom. Zim Ngqawana has two entries in this playlist, the first is this, Long Waltz To Freedom, an obvious reference to Mandela’s biography ‘Long Walk To Freedom’. Zim Ngqawana was musical director for Nelson Mandela’s Inauguration on 10 May 1994, he passed away on the anniversary of this day in 2011. Listen to it here.

Ological Studies – At Peace. This song was selected, both for Mandela’s contribution to peace, but also the fact that he is now at peace. Ological Studies will be performing on the line up at the Cape Town International Jazz Festival 2014. This is a band that has performed alongside the legendary Zim Ngqawana mentioned above.

Winston Mankunku Ngozi – Give Peace A Chance. This composition off his 2003 album Abantwana Be Afrika was chosen as a song that aligned itself well with Mandela’s ideals. The song was released 9 years into our new democracy and well into Thabo Mbeki’s first term as president.

Abdullah Ibrahim – Mandela. Abdullah Ibrahim had two recordings smuggled onto Robben Island, “Peace: Salam” and “Mannenberg”. Mandela described “Peace: Salam” as a song that could be used amongst prisoners as a “cohesive force to create stability.” This recording of “Mandela” is one of many, this one by Abdullah Ibrahim and a big band, off the album Bombella:

Kevin Clark – Sikelele uMandela. Kevin Clark is from New Zealand, so an exception on this list. The album has strong South African influences and was released in both New Zealand and South Africa. This song “Sikelele uMandela” (Bless Mandela) is a fitting tribute.

Ismael GTX Xaba – Dr Nelson Mandela Iqhawa. Another direct tribute to Nelson Mandela, this time by Ismael GTX Xaba, the internationally renowned pianist who learned to play by sneaking in through a church window to practice on the piano inside.

The next three songs were chosen because of Madiba’s love of children.

Voice – Children In The Rain. Voice is a quintet formed by some contemporary greats. Marcus Wyatt, Andile Yenana, Herbie Tsoaeli, Sydney Ace Mnisi and Lulu Gontsana.

Mankunku – Abantwana Be Afrika. “Children of Afrika,” again chosen for the significance of Children in Mandela’s life. During the struggle he was unable to be a father to his own children, but he has shown his love for children throughout his life.

Harry Miller’s Isipingo – Children At Play. Harry Miller, another South African artist who lived and died in exile. This song is the third and final song chosen to celebrate Nelson Mandela’s love for children.

Zim Ngqawana – Anthem. This final song on the show playlist is based on Enoch Sontonga’s Nkosi Sikelele iAfrika (God Bless Africa) the anthem of the African National Congress, the party to which Nelson Mandela belonged. It also forms a major part of the national anthem of the Republic of South Africa since it achieved true democracy in 1994. Please see entry on ‘Long Waltz To Freedom’ for some background on Zim Ngqawana:

Two tunes that were left off the radio show playlist due to them being rather predictable choices are:

Hugh Masekela – Mandela (Bring Him Back Home). Watch this tribute video of a song which became a struggle anthem here:

…and Jonathan Butler – Mandela Bay. This is another popular tribute to Nelson Mandela by Jonathan Butler:

(Look at some of the other YouTube suggestions, there are may great live performances available to watch.)

The radio show which prompted this post is available on mixcloud (in two parts) if you wish to listen to all of the tracks listed above:

JazzE – The Nelson Mandela Tribute Episode – Part 1 by Jazze on Mixcloud

JazzE – The Nelson Mandela Tribute Episode – Part 2 by Jazze on Mixcloud

The two mutually irreconcilable Nelson Mandelas

Nelson Mandela’s post-presidency saw the rise of a larger-than-life caricature of himself, one that somehow managed to be smaller than both the real accomplishments of the man as revolutionary and politician, and an apolitical, often commercial, valorization of the failures of a lengthy transition to democracy that never seems to amount to liberation.

Readers in the United States will be familiar with the fate of Martin Luther King Jnr., a great hero of human rights and the struggle against racial segregation and apartheid who become a potent symbol of right-wing spokespeople for what anthropologists have termed “color-blind racism.” Martin Luther King Day, despite being contested as a federal holiday as late as 2000, and which is still celebrated simultaneously as Martin Luther King Day/Confederate Heroes’ Day in Texas, becomes an annual opportunity for conservative pundits to rail against positive discrimination and affirmative action using King’s “content of their character” line from the “I Have a Dream” speech, a line that has become ubiquitous.

Less remembered is that King was martyred while supporting striking garbage men in Memphis; his declaration that the United States is the “greatest purveyor of violence” in the world today; his opposition to the Vietnam War; or his unfulfilled dream to have millions in his Poor People’s Campaign occupy the nations’ capital. Undoubtedly, King would have objected to these uses and abuses of his legacy, and were he alive, would have drawn attention to the continued asymmetrical antagonisms of American life, from drone warfare to increasingly radicalized disparities in wealth, housing discrimination, and massive increases in income inequality. Instead, the misuses of King’s legacy, serve as distraction from and excuse for all that was left unaccomplished after his death.

Tragically, it must be said of Nelson Mandela, that he willingly played a similar symbolic role in South African—and global—politics while he was still alive, and perhaps, even that he cultivated an image that could function this way.

Mandela is universally loved in a nation, and a planet, still deeply divided by racism. Like the Texas MLK/Confederate Heroes’ Day, Mandela is celebrated in two mutually irreconcilable ways.

On the one hand, for the majority of poor, racially marginalized South Africans, Mandela is remembered as a freedom fighter, who founded UMkhonto we Sizwe, the armed wing of the African National Congress (ANC) and who sacrificed 27 years of his life to a prison term on Robben Island. He is lionized as the man who individually symbolized the possibilities of national liberation as he walked out of the prison gates and into his one term as the first democratically elected president of a new Rainbow Nation.

But to many South African whites and the global elite, Nelson Mandela is an empty symbol of an even emptier politics of racial harmony—and in order to maintain this construction of Mandela’s meaning, the facts of his life are frequently twisted.

Though one of many who sacrificed much in a struggle defined by the notion of Ubuntu (collective humanity), Mandela’s story has been primarily told through an individualist lens. His rise from boyish cowherd in the Transkei to towering global figure has morphed into a tale with more ready-made appeal for motivational speakers than utility for future generations of freedom fighters.

This happened, not least, because this is the way Mandela himself articulated his own journey in his autobiography Long Walk To Freedom, but the distortion has taken on a life of its own. With Mandela listed on a terrorist watch list drawn up by the US government as late as 2008, the centrality of political violence to the Mandela story has been so whitewashed and forgotten that after Mandela died, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, called Mandela “a man of vision, a fighter for freedom who rejected violence,” grandiosely ignoring the obvious parallels between South African apartheid and the occupation of Israel/Palestine.

Both Mandela’s historical role in the South African transition to democracy and his own management of his legacy paved the way for such vacuous treatments of his life. Despite the Hallmark hollowing of his nearly three decades in prison, and constant affirmations of the greatness of his personal character, it is neither his sacrifice nor his rhetorical skill nor his political acumen for which he has been most remembered. If it were, Zimbabwe’s aged and seemingly eternal President Robert Mugabe, who also did his time as a political prisoner, and wowed international audiences in the early eighties, might be equally still considered a global icon rather than an international pariah.

Instead, the significant aspect of his legacy is Mandela’s role as the Great Negotiator and the living symbol of Reconciliation. He is a symbol of unity in a country where unity remains almost entirely elusive. His death will change little about this symbolic role, except to perhaps heighten the possibilities for fabrication in the service of perfecting Mandela as a symbol that is most serviceable to the ruling elite. The canonical image of peace-loving, nationally unifying Mandela is, for the historically-minded, the moment when he accepted a Nobel Peace Prize with apartheid executive F.W. De Klerk; for Hollywood, it’s the moment where Mandela donned a Springbok Jersey and reached out to the mostly rabidly racist white fans of the nation’s rugby team, memorialized in “Invictus.”

But the greatness of such moments of reconciliation remains contested for a sizable number of Mandela’s own struggle-generation comrades from the anti-apartheid movement as well as for many of the younger Born Free Generation that remain economically excluded and socially marginal. His critical ex-wife Winnie Mandela has, since his death, identified the Peace Prize as an unforgivable betrayal. In popular representations of this historic compromise, it too often goes unstated that Mandela’s only bargaining chip was the social and economic power of a massive people’s movement born of strikes in Durban in 1973, the student uprising three years later, and the rise of Steve Biko’s Black Consciousness Movement. Or that the negotiations themselves were a secret affair, hidden, it’s been recently revealed even from even the top leadership of the ANC and uMkhonto we Sizwe.

The deal he negotiated on behalf of many others who suffered and sacrificed was essentially this: in exchange for one-person-one-vote, both the accumulated wealth of South Africa’s apartheid rulers and global investors would remain untouched, as would rules and conditions of future accumulation. No redistribution, no land reform, and in place of an overhaul of the capitalist system, the ANC government, in coalition with the South African Communist Party (SACP) (an organization that has retrospectively claimed Mandela as a member) and the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) would seek, to establish a “national democratic revolution.” All of this was decided before a single South African set foot in a voting booth in 1994. Subsequent battles over housing, health, and economic policy under Presidents Thabo Mbeki and Jacob Zuma have been shaped and fundamentally limited by the terms of this agreement.

But this pact—and its symbolic hegemony—in the form of the ascendance of Hollywood’s image of Nelson-Mandela-as-Morgan-Freeman—has recently hit a few bumps in the road. As Mandela faded from public view in August 2012, the national police embarked on the premeditated slaughter of 34 striking miners at Marikana. In the intervening year, with Mandela on life-support and vultures descending to pick over his bones, the murder of Marikana, Cyril Rampahosa has completed an upward trajectory from struggle-era leader of the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM), to board member at mining giant Lonmin, and now to Deputy President of the ANC. The consequences of Mandela’s negotiated transition have been laid bare as a pile of bodies at the foot of a small hill, with literal bullets in their backs.

The shakeout of this epochal moment in South African history remains unclear. NUM, the central support beam of COSATU, itself the popular base of the ruling alliance, has been deposed as the industrial representative of South Africa’s miners, who in the years since the end of apartheid have moved from the much-hated prison-like hostels of the mining camps to living in informal, dangerous, and degraded shack settlements around the mines. It seems likely that the first political party with a viable chance of challenging tripartite rule has emerged, led by the erstwhile leader of the ANC Youth League Julius Malema. Malema’s Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) enjoys widespread youth appeal that is rooted in a call to finally “nationalize” the mines.

Malema’s wit, humor, and political facility recall the charisma of youthful black-and-white-news-reel Mandela, whose knowing smile and bold rhetoric inspired a generation. In those days, young freedom-fighters were aiming not merely for the vote and an end to the formal vestiges of colonialism on the African continent, but envisioned a South African nation that could be “for all who live in it,” a goal enshrined in the political and economic rights enumerated in the Freedom Charter, yet which remains unfulfilled. Today’s youth, still desperate, may settle for something less in the name of hope.

True to the old dictum about tragedy and farce, and despite his enunciated allegiance to the legacy of monk-like Thomas Sankara, Malema is perhaps the real inheritor of the tensions of Mandela’s legacy. Rather than dress up the contradictions as a matter of complex and heroic personal evolution, Malema’s inconsistencies are simultaneous and transparent for all to see. His allegiance to personal wealth and his commitment to the fundamentals of capitalist accumulation are accessories he wears on his sleeve while calling for economic democracy. They are accessories which do not seem to detract from—and likely enhance—his populist appeal to a young generation embittered by economic exile, who yet aspire to the consumer trappings of “success.” To them, perhaps, such open hypocrisy seems one step further on the “long walk” to freedom in a political landscape where the new non-racialism seems much like the old racism, and where symbols have long substituted for substantive change.

Consuming Woolworths’ Tribute to Nelson Mandela

As a heritage studies scholar, I have been absorbed observing the unfolding of commemorations around Nelson Mandela’s passing. The kinds of tributes paid by corporate entities and companies have especially caught my attention. This phenomenon is a feature of public commemoration globally, with corporate entities sponsoring messages of tribute following sudden national tragedies, the death of celebrities or public figures of esteem.

In South Africa, big brands such as Coca-Cola, Boeing and Sasol have, for example, claimed large tracts of advertising real estate as they have staked out their tributes to Madiba. These kinds of tributes are fascinating because they pose difficult questions about the lines between commemorations and marketing activity; between sentiment and self-interest. Are corporate entities really well intentioned in celebrating Mandela the freedom fighter or are they merely using these tributes to position their brands on the right side of history?’

Nelson Mandela presents a complex, complicated, even contradictory set of public images that have been cycled and recycled in ways that allow many stakeholders to appropriate and mobilise his legacy. Of course corporate entities do not have a responsibility to uphold civic values; but that does not mean we cannot engage in a case-by-case scrutiny of how – and in what ways – these mediated projects seek to pay heed to the core values and ideals Nelson Mandela stood for, when they pay tribute to him. As an example, I want to look at one popular, well-intentioned and well-received South African corporate sponsored tribute dedicated by the South African retail chain, Woolworths. This tribute is framed as a flash-mob of singers from the Soweto Gospel Choir singing the struggle anthem Asimbonanga inside a Woolworths store.

It opens with a series of candid camera style shots depicting the store and a series of predominantly white customers. This choice of cinematic style immediately situates the video in the visual tradition established by the master of South African candid camera, Leon Schuster, who is known for black-face parody of subalterns in his films and movies that continue to attract large audiences in South Africa.

The singing then ensues having been initiated by one worker who appears to be working a counter area. He wearily wipes the counter top and slowly but resonantly starts singing the lines of the anthem…

…which is then echoed by other ‘workers’ in the store. Indeed, the singers are all black, and are portrayed predominantly as Woolworths employees: as shelf-packers, cashiers and staff who manage the day-to-day operations that uphold the trade in high-end goods to a predominantly white South African public. And so, we enter into the image of the happy, singing, black South African labourer who toils away at soul destroying work with a sense of self-denial but who also find sustenance in a “vernacular tradition” of singing that sooths the struggle of hard labour. This is the image of the backbreaking black labour that built up apartheid, which is poetically captured by Gerard Sekoto in his vivid, evocative painting, The Song of the Pick.

Shots then feature customers first looking concerned and a little anxious as black workers start gathering together in song. 34 seconds into the video we cut to a shot from a surveillance camera.

This serves as a form of reassurance against the background of disturbance in so far as it asserts the primacy of a dominant, authoritarian white gaze. This is the Benthamite, Panoptic gaze. It is the gaze of the prison and the prison warder, which can be paralleled with the uniformed workers, like uniformed prisoners, labouring in this tribute. The entire video is shot in the confines of a Woolworths store, suggesting that the retail store can be construed as a kind of post-apartheid total institution. Nevertheless, the image of the uniformed workers strikes an immediate contrast with the iconic uniformed prisoner who is Mandela. It also enables an image of workers as dangerous, workers who harbour criminal intentions and who need to be closely monitored. This is the image of contained, domesticated worker unrest, which forms a striking contrast to Marikana.

As the singing continues, the audience anxiety transforms into curiosity and excitement. The workers gather together in formation in the fruit and veg section singing before what is now a mixed crowd of customers holding their cellular phones aloft trying to capture the scene. We see one black worker shuffling in between shots smilingly serving snacks to the audience. Another ‘singing black customer’ hands out roses.

The middle sequence features a number of shots of black customers ogling the singers, eagerly capturing their compatriots rousing performance. This reinforces an image of the apparent diversity of the chain’s customers.

Watery-eyed smiles accumulate rapidly towards the end of the video when the singing is most resonant. The audience observes silently, or captures the performance on their phones but refrain from singing along. This suggests a kind of class divide between the cultural life of the working classes and the middle and upper classes who are entertained by such public theatrics.

The singing concludes with the choir members throwing up their fists signalling the struggle heritage of the anthem.

This is met with voluble applause from the crowd of customers, some of whom are shown to be wiping away tears. There are many surveillance camera shots packed into the concluding scenes.

The singers disperse quietly and an image is created that, very quickly, business returns to normal, suggesting a return to normality, a return to Woolworths operations, the stasis of order, of black labour and white and wealthy consumption, that Mandela may have died but Woolworths is still there. A message of tribute then flashes onto the screen in Woolworths branded typeface concluding the 3 minute long video.

What to make of this? Judging by the comments on YouTube, many South Africans would not have read the tribute in this way. Who can judge public mourning? But that does not detract from the reality that this well-intended, well-meaning tribute presents itself as a basket of unintended narratives that are hard to associate with what Nelson Mandela struggled for. Indeed, it is a supreme irony that this video reproduces some of the very injustices Nelson Mandela struggled against and re-presents them as a tribute to him.

How can we judge the ways in which such commemorations are framed and the ways in which South Africans go about consuming tributes? There are many such hypocritical, contradictory commemorations circulating in the South African media space at the moment. Such mediations offer a stark representation of the contradictions that structure post-apartheid South African society. But they also present a serious indictment on how far we’ve come in relation to the apartheid past, the transition, and the kinds of post-apartheid futures mediated commemorations like this enable. It appears we still have a long struggle going forward after we’ve wept and laid the past to rest.

The ‘Fake Interpreter’

A few days ago, when the story of the “fake interpreter” broke in the South African media, the ANC denied any knowledge of who he was and how he got to be on the podium, signing while world leader after world leader gave inane speeches intended to tell the world that “Yes, I more than anyone, I was close to Madiba; we had dinner together once, and he paid special attention to me. Furthermore, his saintliness is the reason why I, too, should be close to the same beatification treatment.” (Yes, Drone President, I’m looking at you.) That would have been a tough job for any veteran of sign language, who must not only convey the words, but also the emotional impact and context through a mixture of physical movements and psychological engagement with both speaker and audience. It is translation—and like translation between any two languages, it has all the attendant complexities of signs never adequately meeting the requirements of the signifier—but with an added layer of physicality essential to convey the speaker’s intended tone.

When I saw Thamsanqa Jantjie, the sign interpreter, animatedly engaged in conveying Obama’s much touted speech, I, like millions of others who cannot speak sign language, read his gestures as authentic, partly because I am ignorant, but also because his performance read “real.” When I saw, on my South African friend’s Facebook page, that the same interpreter had already worked at the ANC’s centenary celebrations, I thought that the ANC’s strategy—deny first, be accountable only if forced when faced with yet another scandal—was clearly not going to last as a viable excuse. Pretending that there was “no trace” of this man was a terrible charade—when any idiot with an Internet connection could track his presence to other events. I thought, surely, someone had complained before, especially since South African has a deaf Member of Parliament—Wilma Newhoudt-Druchen. In fact, it turns out that she had tweeted, during the memorial: “ANC-linked interpreter on the stage with dep president of ANC is signing rubbish. He cannot sign. Please get him off.”

Pretending that there was “no trace” of this man was a terrible charade—when any idiot with an Internet connection could track his presence to other events. And all they needed to do was ask Luthuli House to figure out how this man got to be there, at one of the most publicised events of the century. Besides that, hearing impaired persons had made complaints—only no one paid attention, leading to charges (mostly by white hearing impaired people, who are historically privileged enough in a place like South Africa to have access to a full education in sign language, and to subsequently register a complaint) about how marginalised they are in South Africa.

The whole thing became part of the farce that this supposedly dignified final farewell to Nelson Mandela was supposed to be—along with world leaders who acted like bored American teenagers taking selfies at funerals. It was also fast becoming a significant part of the west’s two-pronged narrative about Banana Republic Dystopia—a narrative shared on News24 comment sections and some suburban enclaves of South Africa. This time, the story wasn’t about how banana republics are filled with bloodthirsty savages who destroy all goodness and western civ, but about how banana republics are ridiculous and incompetent—so much so that even when given or trained to use tools invented by white people (like democracy and sign language), the whole thing will go pear-shaped. This narrative was not aided by Hendrietta Bogopane-Zulu, Deputy Minister of Women, Children, and People with Disabilities (yes, such a ministry that places fully grown women and those with physical disabilities with babies exists), who explained everything away by saying that this was first time she had received complaints about the interpreter. She added, “I don’t think it would be accurate for me to stand here and say we are embarrassed” and “A mistake happened while we were trying…. We try to improve.”

Enter Fake Sign Interpreter, stage left. I watched and re-watched him in inevitable spoofs (in one gif, he’s making balloon animals next to Obama – and bad balloon animals at that). In another place, where he signs a Drake song, I thought that he was just an incredible performance artist—with the confidence that comes from having played a part for so long and so well that he wilfully sprouts gonads. People have been known to do that before—and those men (and a few women) he accompanied on the podium are the first people who might be able to identify with the performative nature of power on stage: how it gets away from them, a red hot race car driven ever faster by expectation, and steered only by the knowledge that if they do not continue, there will be a fiery crash. But often, that crash comes because the speed at which the performance artist finds himself being propelled is too fast to steer.

Like many around the world, I laughed about this with my AIAC comrades. We were at an incredible memorial service at Riverside Church in Harlem on Wednesday—a memorial that actually did the job of honoring Mandela without spotlighting the fame of the orators chosen to speak about him. Afterwards, perhaps unable or incompetent to deal with how we were all moved and humbled by this church—and this city’s long commitment to South Africa’s liberation struggle—we shouted jokes about Fake Interpreter in the sub zero wind, gusting in from the steel grey of the Hudson river. Mostly, the punchlines were knowing winks at the very dystopia that banana republics are prone to veer towards: (a) The Good Reasons/Capitalist Might Care but We Have Greater Obligations punchline: “Come on man, he has to eat. He has children who has to eat.” Then there was (b) The Family Ties Reason: “I know how he got that job. He’s someone’s cousin” (met with mock cries of “That’s RA-cist!”).

Our silly joking was a way to laugh off the runaway train that stories of this nature take—becoming bigger and bigger, till the ridiculous turns into something more sinister, and truly threatening. Stories with speed like this never stop at the slip-and-fall-banana-peel-banana-republic punchline. They inevitably go to the Dark Continent place. And of course, it did. Last night, revelations that Fake Interpreter was schizophrenic, and perhaps taking medication. Inevitably, the American pundits made this about Us. And the danger that Our Great Leader was put in, having to stand next to a dangerous fake. This storyline pitted the authenticity of the West (never mind that half the people in the newsroom/in the US hate Obama and think he’s incompetent) against the danger of the shifting, untrustworthy, incompetency of the Dark Continent under black rule—especially now that the Honorary White figure of Mandela was gone. One interviewer tried to get the Fake Interpreter to do some sign language on camera (they’d ferreted him out). He sat on the sofa, unperturbed, with his child as a support prop next to him, and replied, “Let’s be realistic.”

Today, I woke to this: Fake Interpreter may have attempted to kill someone. In fact, he’s been accused of rape, theft, and a slew of crimes. He was acquitted on charges of rape, but convicted of theft. He’s heavily medicated, and spent time at the Sterkfontein Psychiatric Hospital. Reports Karyn Maughan of eNCA:

[In] the 2003 murder, attempted murder and kidnapping case against Jantjie and other people, was referred to the South Gauteng High Court in 2004. It was finalised in November 2006, but the court file for the case is empty.

Jantjie has refused to comment on what happened to the case – and eNCA is unable to confirm claims that it was dropped because he was declared mentally unfit to stand trial. The National Prosecuting Authority says it can’t confirm or deny the existence of charges against Jantjie.

I don’t know how this will end. But clearly, Jantjie’s story—and life—will have nowhere but the darkest spaces to go now. He will become a chapter in that book of Third World infamy, where some local figure—who has thus far got by in the interstices of enormous socio-political shifts—suddenly finds themselves in the spotlight when the shadow of a powerful Western figure—someone who functions as a “civilized” double—falls on their Othered selves, revealing their shortcomings. That such figures get caught up in Western (and local) media frenzies, become distorted beyond recognition in the process and end up being ciphers for the entire system’s failings is inevitable.

Why aren’t we discussing Mandela’s Politics?

Now that the first week after Mandela’s death is coming to a close, we’re finally beginning to see more critical obituaries, or at the very least nuanced accounts, and a gradual abandonment of hagiography. Of course, idealistic elements will remain for quite a while (if not forever), and even that vainglorious cynic Slavoj Žižek can’t help but reference “his doubtless moral and political greatness.” Still, at least Žižek rightly observes that Mandela’s universal appeal belies a lack of politics, or at the very least, a lack of politics in the representation of Mandela with which we’ve all been inundated. The fact that he’s universally beloved by world leaders, businessmen, and activists alike means that the name “Mandela” has become something of an empty signifier, representing freedom, justice, triumph, and a whole slew of other positive abstractions ripped from their historical context.

Unfortunately, the bulk of Žižek’s argument is contained in his title – “If Nelson Mandela really had won, he wouldn’t be seen as a universal hero” – and the more he tries to write, the more he undermines his own attempt to critique this well-intentioned hero worship. By the end of the piece, he’s only reinforced the notion that Mandela stands in for “the good,” as opposed to, say, “Mugabe”:

At this precise conjuncture, radical emancipatory politics faces its greatest challenge: how to push things further after the first enthusiastic stage is over, how to make the next step without succumbing to the catastrophe of the “totalitarian” temptation – in short, how to move further from Mandela without becoming Mugabe.

While I like the thrust of his closing line (“His universal glory is also a sign that he really didn’t disturb the global order of power”) there’s a way in which Žižek only reinscribes the notion that Mandela is some kind of Weberian charismatic authority in overdrive. More importantly, there are so many digressions in the piece that there’s an excursus on Ayn Rand, but no substantial support for the claim advanced in the title and final sentence.

How then to transcend the Mandela of the global elite, the empty signifier worn like a gaudy tie clip by the likes of Barack Obama, David Cameron, and Benjamin Netanyahu? For starters, writers could dispense with the patronizing wonderment, instead critically engaging the thing that made Mandela famous in the first place: his politics. Instead of this ridiculous notion that one man lifted his people out of apartheid by means of his unparalleled leadership and correct program, we might instead ask what his politics actually were. This is not the place for a full treatment of his political trajectory, but the man was hardly alone in the multi-decade struggle against the apartheid regime. Indeed, it was the Pan-African Congress that played the central part in the early 1960s struggles after Sharpeville, and it was Black Consciousness militants and unaffiliated students who rose up in Soweto in 1976; the ANC only claims credit for both uprisings in revisionist accounts. And neither the civic associations nor the unions that played such a decisive role in bringing down the National Party were initially aligned with the ANC. The point is – and this can’t be said often or loudly enough – Mandela and the ANC did not bring down the apartheid regime. A thirty-year cycle of struggle by community organizations, students, unions, and independent workers secured victory. Mandela was of course a part of this history, and this is precisely why we need to understand how his politics and leadership fit in with the broader trajectory of organized militancy at the time of the transition.

Of all the writers I’d expect to give a decent preliminary account, I have to say, I’m blown away that Andrew Ross Sorkin tops the list, at least as far as major news outlets are concerned. Sorkin, the precocious business journalist and author of Too Big To Fail, has written such paeans to nepotism as “Hiring the Well-Connected Isn’t Always a Scandal.” While his argument (on “DealBook,” the New York Times’ financial news service site) is far from original – you can find a nearly three year-old version here for example – it’s also virtually alone in the first batch of Madiba reflections in its treatment of concrete political positions and their consequences, especially for what matters: macro-economic policy.

As Sorkin points out, for the 35 years between the drafting of the Freedom Charter and his release from prison, Mandela was a staunch proponent of nationalization. The Charter itself, the founding document of the Congress Alliance, contains the following lines, though it of course does not use the word “nationalize”:

The national wealth of our country, the heritage of South Africans, shall be restored to the people;

The mineral wealth beneath the soil, the Banks and monopoly industry shall be transferred to the ownership of the people as a whole;

All other industry and trade shall be controlled to assist the wellbeing of the people;

All people shall have equal rights to trade where they choose, to manufacture and to enter all trades, crafts and professions.

Political theorists Martin O’Neill and Thad Williamson, writing together on Al Jazeera America, are quick to point out that the Freedom Charter doesn’t really advocate nationalization in the sense in which you’d expect, insisting, “this step was to be achieved within the context of a mixed economy, without comprehensive central planning.” The only supporting evidence they provide is a line from Mandela’s own biography, of course published after he’d already begun to express ambivalence about nationalization himself. It’s hard to take their account seriously at all though, given that their entire argument is that Mandela was a Rawlsian this entire time, but just didn’t know it. (Given that the pair co-edited a book on John Rawls and property, one wonders if this is more of an opportunistic pitch for their own work than a serious analysis of Mandela’s politics.) With concluding platitudes like, “Mandela stood for the end of economic marginalization and the broad advance of equality of opportunity,” we are left wanting something, anything really, that moves us beyond the myth and toward the political operator.

And this is where Sorkin is at his best. He reproduces the famous line on nationalization from one of Mandela’s first post-prison speeches in 1990:

The nationalization of the mines, banks and monopoly industries is the policy of the ANC and a change or modification of our views in this regard is inconceivable.

This emphasis on inconceivability recurs throughout Mandela’s speeches over the years. Here’s another widely cited line from a 1956 speech:

It is true that in demanding the nationalization of the banks, the gold mines and the land the [Freedom] Charter strikes a fatal blow at the financial and gold-mining monopolies and farming interests that have for centuries plundered the country and condemned its people to servitude. But such a step is absolutely imperative and necessary because the realization of the Charter is inconceivable, in fact impossible, unless and until these monopolies are first smashed up and the national wealth of the country turned over to the people.

Sorkin identifies the less than two years between Mandela’s release from prison and his visit to the World Economic Forum at Davos as the decisive turning point on this question. He writes,

Two years later, however, Mr. Mandela changed his mind, embracing capitalism, and charted a new economic course for his country.

The story of Mr. Mandela’s evolving economic view is eye-opening: It happened in January 1992 during a trip to Davos, Switzerland, for the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum. Mr. Mandela was persuaded to support an economic framework for South Africa based on capitalism and globalization after a series of conversations with other world leaders.

“They changed my views altogether,” Mr. Mandela told Anthony Sampson, his friend and the author of Mandela: The Authorized Biography. “I came home to say: ‘Chaps, we have to choose. We either keep nationalization and get no investment, or we modify our own attitude and get investment.”

But here’s the part that gets me. Remember, this is Andrew Ross Sorkin, not South African political economist Hein Marais or CUNY’s resident Marxologist David Harvey we’re talking about. He points out,

But for all of Mr. Mandela’s embrace of capitalism and free markets, as demonstrated though his policy called GEAR (Growth, Employment and Redistribution), the results raise more questions than answers about its success.

South Africa has certainly grown, but at an annual 3.2 percent clip from 1993 to 2012, far below other emerging countries like China and India. And the gap between the haves and have-nots is now higher than it was when Mr. Mandela became president. Inequality in South Africa is a real and growing issue.

Of course, the narrative is not as simple as one man’s political preferences, and the origins of South African neoliberalism are observable as early as the late 1970s. As much as austerity and privatization were imposed on Mandela by Davos and on the ANC by the IMF, they were equally the product of South African economic thought. Rather than unwitting gulls being conned by the multilaterals, the ANC knew exactly what they were doing, and it’s no coincidence that they adopted many late NP policies whole cloth.

That said, it is to Sorkin’s credit that he breaks the ridiculous taboo on discussing the content of Mandela’s politics, rather than treating him as some kind of deity. Here are his closing lines:

Mr. Mandela may have ended apartheid and years of awful violence, but his dream of creating a country that, as he said, is “a democratic and free society in which all persons live together in harmony and with equal opportunities” may still remain a dream that capitalism and free markets have yet to solve.

And he’s hit the nail on the head. As much as the world – and above all, the non-African world – wants to deify Mandela, to do so in the abstract with no reference to his actual politics is absurd. The man was famous for being a political operator, so why aren’t we discussing his politics? Why have we been subjected to bumbling idiocy about moral authority in Invictus, but not to an analysis of the political debates that led Mandela’s ANC to attain hegemony over rival tendencies? Unless we agree with these hagiographers that South Africans are too dumb to take politics seriously and that these mindless dupes were all blinded by Mandela’s halo, let’s discuss what it was about his program that was so appealing, and above all, what worked and what turned out to be limited.

As far as the Times goes, hopefully Thomas Friedman will be locked up on Robben Island for writing this embarrassing nonsense, Bill Keller will never be allowed to pontificate on South Africa again, and someone will overnight the three volumes of Capital to Sorkin stat, or at the very least get him started with Harvey’s lectures on volume one.

Posters that Challenged Apartheid

Many of us who were active in the international anti-apartheid movement are recalling our shared history as we reflect on Nelson Mandela’s passing. Here are some of our favorite graphic images from the struggle years, selected from the African Activist Archive Project.

This poster above, created in 1964 by the Anti-Apartheid Movement in London, was part of a worldwide campaign to prevent South Africa from imposing the death penalty on Walter Sisulu, Nelson Mandela, and the other eight members of the African National Congress (ANC) who were charged with sabotage in the Rivonia Trial. Demonstrations were organized in the U.S. as well.

This next poster produced by the in Brookline, Massachusetts in the early 1970s conveyed a crystal clear message: “There are but two sides in a war – she fights on the side of African freedom – Gulf finances the other.”

The U.S. government was also on the side of the Portuguese colonial regime and the other white minority regimes in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), South Africa, and Namibia, so progressive Americans had a responsibility to both support the liberation struggle and oppose the policies of the U.S. government and multinational corporations. The iconic photograph was taken by Boubaker Adjali, an Algerian journalist and filmmaker.

The Massachusetts Coalition for Divestment from South Africa (MASS Divest) created this poster below in 1981 to support Senate Bill 1138 requiring the state pension fund to sell stocks invested in companies doing business in South Africa.

This multi-racial coalition, working with Representative Mel King and Senator Jack Backman, succeeded in making Massachusetts the first state to adopt total divestment of its public employee pension fund. This poster conveyed not only opposition to apartheid and its system of cheap, migrant labor but also a call for jobs and access to mortgages for people in Massachusetts. MASS DIVEST wrote a case study of their campaign that was published by the . Today, climate justice activists in Massachusetts are building support for a parallel bill focused on fossil fuel companies.

The (AFSC) office in Atlanta, Georgia produced this boycott Coca-Cola poster:

The boycott was initiated in October 1985 at the Midwest Anti-Apartheid Conference held in Chicago; the AFSC and brought it to Coca-Cola’s doorstep in Atlanta. The Atlanta AFSC effort was led by Thandi Gcabashe, the daughter of Chief Albert Luthuli who was President of the ANC from 1972 to 1967 and the first African to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

The Labor Desk worked with U.S. unions to forge direct “union-to-union” links with affiliates of the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) and to expand U.S. union activism on sanctions campaigns, including divestment by the multi-billion dollar public employee pension funds. Activist artist Sarah Hodgson designed this poster to bolster work with a national network of municipal and statewide labor committees against apartheid, including the and the ; national unions including the , the and the Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers Union; and pan-union organizations like the and Black Workers for Justice in the U.S. South.

The poster was printed in 1992 by Inkworks Press, which produced hundreds of posters for progressive movements. One of our favorite buttons advocating labor solidarity is “I worked an hour for freedom in South Africa,” which was produced by the United Public Employees Local 790 of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) in San Francisco in solidarity with the South African Municipal Workers Union.

This last poster, created by the in East Lansing, Michigan, celebrated the 1994 first democratic election in South Africa with the joyful slogan, “The Sun Shall Rise.”

The poster design incorporated ten hand-made buttons from campaigns SALC had undertaken over the course of its 20 years of solidarity work. Among these campaigns were divestment by Michigan State University (1978), removing the McGoff name from a performing arts center in 1984 (Michigan newspaper publisher John McGoff clandestinely cooperated with the South African Department of Information), the Coke Boycott campaign (1986), and a material aid campaign for the ANC’s Solomon Mahlangu Freedom College (SOMAFCO) in Tanzania.

The African Activist Archive Project website contains more than 7,200 freely accessible documents, photographs, buttons, T-shirts, posters, and video and audio recordings from the African solidarity movement from the 1950s to the 1990s. We thank the more than 90 activists who have contributed materials to this collection. We have been adding about 1,200 items per year, and we are eager to hear from people who have kept organizing materials from this struggle. Contact us at rvknight@earthlink.net or follow us on Facebook.

Note: These posters are used by permission of the organizations that created them or former members of those organizations that no longer exist. The photo at the top of this post shows Oliver Tambo at a solidarity event in the U.S. He is shown here with Little Steven van Zandt, Harry Belafonte and Tilden LeMelle at a reception organized by the American Committee on Africa in 1987.

My Favorite Photographs: Justine Brabant

Since the mid-1990s, the North and South Kivu provinces of the Democratic Republic of Congo have become battlefields for a myriad of armed groups, a mix of well-organized rebel groups (such as the M23, who surrendered a month ago) confronting the national army, local “autodefense” groups describing themselves as patriotic opponents to theses rebellions, or constituted around some very local issues: land disputes, struggles for customary power and such.

I have been studying armed groups in eastern DRC since 2011, first as part of my political science course, and today as an independent researcher and journalist. I started taking photos incidentally. I was initially reluctant to snap fighters, thinking they would be at best reluctant, if not suspicious and violent – as a white person investigating armed groups, one frequently is suspected of being a spy or some investigator from the International Criminal Court.

But one day some asked me to do so and I gradually discovered that, except in some very rare cases, most of them were rather proud to pose for me as a souvenir at the end of interviews. These fighters are proud because, whatever their group, they sincerely think they fight for a just cause: the protection of their family, of their village, of their country. This pride and this sense of dignity have been a constant subject of questioning since I started researching armed groups. There is no erasing the (sometimes particularly horrific) violence they wage, but maybe it prompts to think beyond the quick descriptors applied to “conflict in Eastern DRC”, a tale of perpetual oppression of civilians by enraged and drunk militiamen.

Zabuloni Rubaruba (center in the first photograph above), is one of the most famous Maï-Maï leaders in South Kivu, and among the first commanders I met. He started fighting against the “Rwandan invasion” in the mid-1990s, and eventually joined the Congolese army as a colonel in 2003. I took this photo in the family house in Bukavu (South Kivu), after an interview with him and his sons in January this year – at that time, I was conducting academic research on “autodefense” armed groups of South Kivu. During the interview, he wore training outfits and looked very tired (he was nearly 80), but for the photo he insisted on wearing his Congolese army uniform and stripes and on standing up. Despite this symbolic recognition, he and his family were manifestly in a precarious financial situation – as a colonel, he earned roughly $80 a month. Of course, some Congolese families struggle to live with less than that, but Zabuloni felt humiliated by his situation in comparison to the public figure he used to be.

I encountered this strong feeling of injustice again when discussing with many other Congolese armed group members, who think that they were never compensated for their “sacrifice” to their country, and don’t understand why the people they fought against (Rwanda-backed rebellions such as RCD and CNDP, seen as “aggressors”) were given better treatments than them in the national army.

The men surrounding Zabuloni include two of his sons, Imany and Sawasawa, respectively meaning “Peace” and “It’s okay” in Swahili. They are not fighters but wanted to pose wearing some of their father military uniforms. Zabuloni said to me he lost seven sons on the battlefield. He died himself two months after I took this picture. The family struggled to find money to pay for the funeral. The Congolese State stopped paying the rent of their Bukavu house, and they had to move to a smaller one. Today, most of his sons are unemployed, and some had to leave university to take up day-to-day jobs with security firms.

One of them, Fujo (“disorder” in Swahili), is still in the bush, leading his own Maï-Maï group. I met him last February, somewhere on the hills overhanging the Plaine de la Ruzizi, a vast plain along the border with Burundi. I arrived at his military camp after sunset, after a 4-hour walk, or should I say run, trying to follow the young men guiding me over these little paths of slippery mud. The arrival at the camp generated a moment of nervousness, with members of Fujo’s escort checking our degree of inoffensiveness by insistently pointing their torches to our faces.

Because of a problem with his phone, Fujo had no idea of my arrival. I was saved by the photo of his father, Zabuloni Rubaruba, that I had taken a few weeks before and that I showed him on my camera. I was also carrying a video message from Zabuloni asking Fujo to leave the bush and come to Bukavu live with the whole family.

Fujo’s Men – Hauts Plateaux de Runingu (South Kivu), DRC. April 2013.

Ordinarily I try not to meddle in armed group affairs, but I wasn’t able to decline the request of an old man longing for his family to be reunited. I remember Fujo looked very moved when watching it as he had not seen his father for a couple of years. Before leaving the camp the day after, I took the above photo of some of Fujo’s troops. This picture is a souvenir of this episode, but it also encapsulates features of Maï-Maï groups, often recruiting among the very young and the very old with limited financial means – which is not to say that they are not violent when clashing with their enemies.

Today, Fujo and his men are waiting for negotiations with the Congolese government in order to integrate into the national army.

Numerous Maï-Maï groups practice cattle-raiding. They operate during the transhumance, the seasonal movement of cows from the Mitumba mountain range to the edges of Lake Tanganyika. Cattle-raiding is an important source of funding for armed groups in South Kivu: a cow can sell for up to $500, whereas the gross national income per capita in DRC is $220 per year (according to 2012 World Bank statistics).

In response to attacks against their cattle, some herders of South Kivu created their own local “autodefense groups”. Masomo (meaning “school” in Swahili, a name he was given because he was born on the day the school year started) was the leader of one of these groups between 2008 and 2011.

Masomo – Hauts Plateaux de Minembwe (South Kivu), DRC. April 2012.

I met him in 2012 when I was conducting research about agro-pastoral conflicts for a NGO called Life & Peace Institute. We were on the Hauts Plateaux de Minembwe, an important place of livestock farming. Masomo himself used to own cows. All of his stock died of disease but he still walks with his shepherd’s stick. I took this picture of him as we were resting after a long walk in the Minembwe hills, where we met some ex-members of his group. I like the quietness he gives off here. I don’t think this quietness is misleading, I think it simply means we have to admit that, most of the time, armed groups leaders are not dreadful psychopaths but rather ordinary people who decided to take up arms for some reason, and that we (researchers, journalists, and others) have to figure out those reasons.

The Alliance des Patriotes Pour un Congo Libre et Souverain (APCLS), led by Janvier Bwingo, is very different from Masomo’s or Fujo’s groups: more troops, with more substantial equipment, and a sophisticated organization. I met with them last November in their headquarter in Masisi territory, North Kivu. The bridge in the picture below marks the entry into Lukweti, the village where most of their commanders are stationed.

The Bridge – Lukweti (North Kivu), DRC. November 2013.

I was crossing over, thinking something about the cleverness of the guys who built it and the beauty produced by the local know-how, when Augustin, the APCLS colonel seen in the background, told me: “During the last attack of the Nduma Defense of Congo [an other Congolese armed group, regularly fighting against APCLS], dozens of children died, drowned in the river, because of this damned unsteady bridge. Can we even call that a bridge?”

This picture is a silent reminder to myself not to be overly enthusiastic about “typical” or “traditional” things. Even if they trigger some salutary questioning about the society we come from, and often turn out great in pictures, the unquestioning celebration of those artifacts can lead to ignoring the claims of decent standards of life.

After meeting the APCLS leader “General” Janvier and some of his men, I decided to go to Pinga, the stronghold of the NDC, their main enemy, to interview their fighters and commanders too. Pinga is a town located 100 kilometers north of Goma, the capital city of the North Kivu province. If you’re a humanitarian worker or a researcher, you can negotiate a seat in one of the MONUSCO (the UN peacekeeping mission in DRC) helicopters flying from Goma to Pinga once or twice a week. I decided to go by road instead, in order to see how life was in the peripheral areas controlled by the NDC. It is always interesting to meet smaller-time commanders — staying far from headquarters — whose biographical backgrounds, motives, discourses and behaviors often differ from their superiors’.

I took the road with Bayomba, a school director, and Françoise, a nurse from Pinga hospital who had to flee to Goma with all her family last August because of heavy fighting between APCLS and NDC. Life in Goma was too hard without a salary (she tried in vain to find a job in one of the Goma hospitals), and she was full of hope, repeating: “I want to go back to our house in Pinga, I’ve been told that it wasn’t burnt down during the war, that’s a good thing.”

The idea was to walk three days in the Walikale forest in order to bypass the most active area of conflict. But on the first day, in the afternoon, we heard the sound of a mortar explosion somewhere in the green hills. It was too late to go back to our starting point; we had no choice but to continue to the next village, Kimba, in order to find out what was going down. In Kimba we met people coming the opposite way than us, fleeing, and telling us that five villages were abandoned by their inhabitants. They heard that NDC troops left Pinga because of rumors of the MONUSCO’s Force Intervention Brigade (FIB) attacking them soon, and these civilians were scared to be caught in fights between the NDC, the APCLS, the Congolese army, the MONUSCO and possibly the Rwandan FDLR (said to stay only 10 kilometers from Pinga). We were there, sitting with Bayomba and Françoise, quite exhausted by our long walk, wondering and debating the different options (the local NDC commander offered us to be escorted by three of his men), and at one point, Françoise sighed: “War is coming back to Pinga. I don’t want to deal with war anymore. I know that too well.” We decided to go back to Goma.

I took this last picture below of Françoise walking through the forest on our way back, the day after. Humanitarian organizations estimate internally displaced persons in the North and South Kivu provinces to number 1,6 million. I hope this kind of photographs helps to imagine a little bit more concretely what theses figures means.

Kilometer 38 – Kibua (North Kivu), DRC. November 2013.

This is the 19th installment in our “5 Favorite Photographs” series in which we ask photographers to select five of their favorite photographs and to describe what brought them to make the image, and what they were trying to convey. Previous features here. More photographs by Justine Brabant here.