Sean Jacobs's Blog, page 440

Remember the name: Keita Baldé Diao

SS Lazio is a club with a long history of fascism. Currently their biggest talent is Spanish-born Senegalese player Keita Baldé Diao. Remember the name.

Who gets the last laugh, again?

I enjoy seeing a smug, bearded white supremacist get his comeuppance as much as the next guy. (Though the joy of the exuberant lady sitting next to this one is hard to match. And reason enough to watch this video more than once.) In any event, I get why this video of Craig Cobb, the would-be founder of an all-white town in North Dakota, finding out on a TV show that a DNA test indicates that he is “14% sub-Saharan African” has gone viral.

At the same time, the talk-showification of molecular biology is really never a good thing, especially when that molecular biology is supposed to tell us things about “race.” (And let’s face it, “race” is pretty much the only way molecular biologists get any pop-culture shine.) Problem is, the idea that Cobb is 14% African rests on the assumption that there is such a thing as 100% “African,” or 100% “European.”

As NYU’s Troy Duster explains, the reference point that the ancestry testing industry uses for this imagined purity is the frequency of certain genetic markers in small samples of contemporary populations from various regions. That is, the companies that market these ancestry tests go looking for something called African-ness, or European-ness, or Asian-ness, which they assume can be found in the samples they collect. And because populations that live nearer to one another are, on average, more genetically similar than populations that are more distant, the researchers find differences between the samples—differences that are then magically translated into African-ness, European-ness, or Asian-ness, or some other category. The degree to which you share certain genetic markers with those sample populations becomes the degree to which you are European, African, Asian, etc. Your “race,” a folk category neatly translated into hard, cold numbers. (For more, read Jonathan Marks and Duana Fulwilley.)

This reification—the idea that there is something out there that we can identify as “really” European (read, “white”) or “really” African (read, “black”)—is essentially what the ancestry testing industry is selling. And business is good. Think of companies like African Ancestry who have gotten publicity from “revealing” the country of origin and “ancestral tribe” of various American musicians and actors.

So yes, the numbers they produce can be affirming for people, or good for talk-show laughs. But the fantasy of racial purity has never been benign, and it’s at the heart of both the affirmation and the joke. That fantasy, along with the one in which our genes can tell us something meaningful about our identities, is the bread and butter of the ancestry testing industry. They are also the bread and butter of white supremacy.

Who gets the last laugh, again?

‘Tribal’ Reality Television 2.0

There was this sincere hope that we had seen the end of the so-called ‘tribal reality shows;’ that is television programs where groups of westerners spend some time with one of the ‘last remaining’ or ‘authentic tribes’ in the world. Namibia or the South Pacific is a favorite destination. A sort of kitsch version of what National Geographic used to be up to (and what John Marshall used to critique in his films). Every time it’s the same script: first there is shock and disbelieve; how ‘these people’ can still live like ‘this’? But gradually a mutual understanding grows, creating a ‘bond for life.’ In an effort to get the most out of the series, a recap usually follows in the weeks after. The ‘tribe’ visits the family they hosted, making for even more comedic television. Like people being afraid of escalators or not understanding the notion of a train.

Now the Dutch, the people that brought you reality television programs such as the Big Brother franchise and revamped talent shows by introducing ‘The Voice,’ have decided to put a spin on these ‘tribal shows’ and present you the show, ‘Welkom bij de Kamara’s’ (English: ‘Welcome to the Kamara’).

As the description reads on the website of SBS6, the channel that broadcasts the show, in ‘Welcome to the Kamara’ we get “nine Dutch celebrities going to Africa to experience how it is to be part of a real tribe.” And as if this description is not enough to make you resent the program by default, there’s a twist: “What the celebrities are unaware of is that they are part of the biggest ‘open camera’ jokes on Dutch television.” Basically the celebrities are being set up. Here’s a trailer for the show.

Everything about this show is fake: the name of the tribe, their way of living and most importantly, the tribe members the celebs mainly interact with, such as the chief and the medicine man, are actors. And the celebs are unaware of this.

Of course, the program is nothing more than just sheer entertainment, whilst the contestants are immersed in a fake experience; poking fun at those we usually marvel at on the red carpet and in gossip magazines magazines. And to be fair, it is pretty funny to see how some of the participants quasi-philosophically reflect on the “meeting of two worlds” in this candid camera show 2.0. But at the same time the show is pretty problematic.

As the title of the program suggests, the ‘tribe’ in question is named the Kamara. If the contestants did some Googling before they left for Namibia, where the show is set, they would have noticed there’s no such “tribe” or “ethnic group” there. The group that is hosting the contestants are actually the Damara who do live in Namibia. The only Kamara in Africa is a tiny minority living in northern Ghana. It is not entirely clear why the producers decided to change the name of the Damara. One reason for doing so is that the people might not want to entirely be identified with how the ‘tribe’ is portrayed. It might also be because Namibians–specifically some Himba who felt used by a German reality TV program–are complaining. However that does not do any justice to the actual Kamara in Northern Ghana.

On the other hand, the producers cherry-picked what they saw fit to use in the program, based on Damara culture and habits. And as the majority of daily life that is being portrayed in the show does reflect how the Damara used to live, naming them something else in the name of entertainment, does to a certain degree constitute as stripping them of a part of their identity.

In the behind-the-scenes footage online we see that many Damara today live in a so-called ‘living museum’ where they entertain tourists by showing them their ‘traditional’ ways of living. It appears that the makers of the show visited this museum and on their way out decided to buy up the whole souvenir shop including its ‘staff’ to later use in the production of the program.

What we need to keep reminding ourselves of is that the show is produced from a western perspective. All the rituals in the show for example are fictional. They are made-up in such a way to be appealing to the audience and to poke fun at the contestants. These fabricated ‘rituals’ are based on what Westerners ‘expect’ from a ‘primitive African tribe.’ Thus the producers determine what is ‘primitive’ and therefore what is or might not be funny.

It also evokes an idea that the western modern world of today and the ‘African tribes’ are the furthest extremes possible: The cavemen of Europe is too long time ago, but primitivism can still be found in far away places such as Africa. Therefore it is the perfect décor for a TV-show like ‘Welcome to the Kamara.’ And because, as stated on the program’s website, the Damara today do not completely live traditional, the production crew had to hurry to make use of their most essential prop’s ‘authenticity,’ in order to make the whole thing possible. Whether or not the show is fake or not, the Damara proof to be the essential link to primitivism we so badly desire in the ‘other’ in order to place them and ourselves on a linear timeline of modernity.

The Damara were good enough to have their culture and history used as inspiration to get some folks to laugh. But apparently they were not good enough to be in on the joke. It was therefore up to black Dutch actors to fool the celebs. By being neither Damara nor Namibian, but posing as such while acting out a stereotypical caricature of an African tribe in order to fool the celebrities and getting people to laugh, the actors actually engage in a form of Blackface, ticking off another problematic box.

Here one of the black Dutch actors talks about the experience:

The Damara might have had the power to negotiate the terms and conditions for their participation in this show. Some might even have returned to their normal everyday life job, be it in a ‘living museum.’ Although it is not the aim of the program, placing nine westerners in a setting such as in ‘Welcome to the Kamara’ does showcase how engrained the stereotypical image of ‘African noble savage’ is; the exotic ‘other’ who lives closer to nature, uncorrupted by civilization as ‘we’ know it. The show contributes to the reproduction of the stereotypical image of African ‘tribes’ and therewith Africa. In a situation where facts and fiction are intertwined and where people are being put in a setting that to a large degree is based on their actual (former) ways of living, it is practically impossible for the audience to get a true image of the props that are used for their entertainment.

Fragments of the show here, here (introducing Dutch “traditions”), here and here. Another interview with all Dutch actors here.

The Dust Bowl

Sean Jacobs took this picture, enhanced by Instagram, in Fort Greene Park, Brooklyn, yesterday. This is a regular pickup game that’s been in existence for as long as Sean can remember. Here, btw, is how Elliot Ross described it in a piece for Al Jazeera America (about whether committed New York soccer fans will ever take an American team seriously): 

For as long as any of the players can remember, there has been a game of soccer in Fort Greene Park in Brooklyn in the hours just before sunset. The field is the small patch of flattish ground on the park’s southeast slope known to locals as the Dust Bowl, and on a fine day the game draws a decent number of spectators — moms and nannies resting on park benches with their strollers, lone dog walkers pausing for thought, students peering up from their books, elderly men shouting instructions to the players. The pitch is cramped and rutted, and on a good day you can find 40 or more guys, ages anywhere from 14 to 50, charging around a field not much more than 30 meters long, with faded traffic cones forming narrow goals at each end. There are plenty of Spanish curses if you listen closely, but by far the most common is the Jamaican expletive “bumba claat!” which punctuates the game with every error or near miss. There’s a wide array of replica shirts on display, a characteristic of informal football and pickup games wherever they’re played in the world. On a recent summer evening, there were players wearing the jerseys of Manchester United, Barcelona, Hertha Berlin, the Belgian club Anderlecht, Colombia, Côte d’Ivoire, England, Mozambique, South Africa and Sweden.

Source.

Steven Taylor is another No-nonsense (Racist) English Centre-Half

Those of us who follow Newcastle United have long known that our now fourth-choice centre back has a penchant for the crushingly stupid. It was no surprise, then, when Steven Taylor yesterday did the most Steven Taylor thing Steven Taylor has ever done. 

Responding to a tweet from his defensive partner Massadio Haïdara, in which Haïdara poked fun at ‘Tayls’ for his abortive efforts to learn French, Taylor tweeted this.

Perhaps it was an unorthodox, last-ditch attempt to gain a place in the England squad, what with Roy ‘Space Monkey’ Hodgson in charge, “Brave” John Terry a recent captain, and Jack ‘England for the English’ Wilshere in midfield. Or perhaps Taylor is just being racist. On balance, the latter’s probably more likely.

It doesn’t take a genius to work out why the tweet was problematic: a white man mocking four black men (‘you guys’), unprompted, with obscene blackface caricatures is, to use the common parlance, Not OK. But even more troubling has been the reaction.

Taylor himself apologised, though it was an apology of the mealy-mouthed, ‘sorry if I offended anybody’ variety. The media, though broadly condemnatory, have echoed the very stereotypes Taylor evoked in the first place: the Telegraph report speaks of an ‘African tribesman’, and the Guardian, bizarrely, references ‘African tribal clothes.’ And on Twitter, football fans queue up to justify the tweet in the name of that ultimate catchall excuse: banter. No doubt when Newcastle striker Papiss Cisse was subjected to racist abuse on Facebook after he initially refused to wear the logo of a loan-shark company on his shirt, that too was just good banter.

The English press joke that Newcastle have signed so many “French” players in the past couple of years that they should be renamed “Nouveau Château United”, but in fact many of those players are Francophone Africans: Haïdara, Cisse, Yanga-Mbiwa, Tiote, Bigirimana, Sissoko. If Steven Taylor’s tweet is what passes for “banter,” the Newcastle dressing room must be a miserable place.

Oh, and if you really want to experience the crushingly stupid, check this out.

Come on, football, you’re better than this.

Weekend Music Break 61

Your weekly collection of new tunes and videos — this week from Zambia, Ghana, Jamaica, Mali, South Africa and the Netherlands, but first: Congo. This year’s Salaam Kivu International Film Festival (SKIFF), which took place in Goma in July, had as its theme “Agizo ya Lumumba — Justice”. The festival’s program included film screenings and dance/media/music workshops around the Justice theme and the following video by the same title, featuring Doris, Dak2, Black Man, DMD, BIN-G, Babu, Wanny S-king, Dj Couleur, M-Chris, Nathan, Jobson Madibo, Darsana, Fal-G, Gaius Kowene and Willy Ston, is a great product of that:

PAP-G is an artist from Mali who raps and sings over a layer of Diabatéba-produced music in ‘Favéla’:

Sarkodie teamed up with London azonto stars FuseODG. The video was directed by Moe Musa (check his YouTube channel for more goodies):

It’s been exciting to follow Stones Throw’s (the label) recent moves into the dub scene. This one features Roman soldiers, Marcus Garvey, and a fiery Little Harry:

“Le Cube” & Liam Farrell (aka “Doctor L”) are working on a new project, the LP “We Got Lost”, some other tracks of which you can see and hear here. Below is ‘Negro P’:

Block Kids on the New (yeh) is a Hip-Hop duo from Pretoria, South Africa:

Another track off the Red Hot + Fela record to get a video — remember Baloji’s –, this one for Spoek. (We’re looking forward to seeing what the Kronos Quartet / Kyp Malone / Tunde Adebimpe collaboration will look like on video!)

Jazzy ‘Beyond Of You’ is the first single off Dutch singer Joya Mooi’s upcoming album Crystal Growth. She talks about her South African dad and the play she has created about her parents here; you’ll find more music by her here.

A new song, ‘Too Much/Happens’, by Sampha Sisay (Sierra Leone to the UK) that deserves your full attention:

And to end, a short musical film by Zambian artist Mumba Yachi, which he dedicates to former First Lady Betty Kaunda:

The Curious Tale of Victor Vinnetou

Mbuyisa Makhubo was the teenager captured in Sam Nzima’s iconic photo of June 16, 1976 — fleeing the bullets of the apartheid police on a street in Soweto, South Africa and carrying the murdered Hector Peterson in his arms, with the latter’s sister, Antoinette, running alongside. The faces in the photo are frightened, evidence of the trauma of that day and the brutality of those times. They are also the faces of brave children who, in the midst of the chaos and carnage, cared enough to take the dying Hector Peterson with them.

Nzima’s photo was seminal in mobilizing international opinion against apartheid. It also changed the life of Mbuyisa. He became the potent symbol that galvanized millions to decry the ongoing crimes against humanity in South Africa. He also became a target for the wrath of the security police. Their consistent harassment forced him into exile. The last his mother heard from him was in 1978, when he was apparently in Nigeria. More than a decade and a half later, she asked the Truth and Reconciliation Commission to find her son. To no avail. Mbuyisa’s mother passed away in 2004, carrying with her the painful mystery of her son’s whereabouts.

Another decade on and we still don’t know what happened to him. Or do we? The Toronto Star this week reported on the story of a missing South African hero. In 1988, a man by the name of Victor Vinnetou arrived in Canada from Germany and applied for refugee status. He had named himself “Victor” as an aspiration and “Vinnetou”, apparently after the hero of a 1980s German TV show. While maneuvering through the refugee system, he disappeared into the fabric of Toronto, where he made a life, albeit a precarious one. Vinnetou was arrested almost 10 years ago for being undocumented. Toronto police routinely frisk black men — their presence seemingly always suspicious. He has since been held in indefinite detention while various states seek to define him.

A few months ago, rumours began circulating that Vinnetou was not only South African, but the missing Mbuyisa Makhubo. The South African government very quietly dispatched a team to investigate. The South African media picked up the story when it became clear that DNA samples were being drawn to establish if indeed Victor was the long lost Mbuyisa. Family members of the latter seemed to be firm in their resolve that their relative had been found. But when DNA samples failed to produce a match, the South Africans declined to confirm him Victor as a national. The article in The Toronto Star implies that there is considerable disagreement about the DNA test and continued insistence from family members that Victor is Mbuyisa and should be returned home.

Wherever the truth lies, the brutality of exile, of undocumented status, indeed of statelessness is the enduring story. The bureaucratic impulse to render superfluous those who are not politically or economically valuable is a legacy of the apartheid of Mbuyisa’s childhood and the continuing injustices of a global system of class and race oppression under which millions suffer. In Canada, the paperless, among others, can be indefinitely detained under arguably draconian legislation, and in less than appropriate circumstances, as in the case of Victor Vinnetou and nearly 200 people awaiting resolution of their immigration hearings, in the rural outpost of Lindsay, Ontario, two hours from access to pro bono legal assistance and from others who can advocate on their behalf. The cost to the state for detaining the ‘illegal’ is $239 per day. This is considerably more than the state pays to sustain the average welfare recipient. And as prison complexes grow, welfare budgets shrink.

Perhaps there is a bigger question about costs, then? What is the cost for the state to incorporate the undocumented into the realm of citizenship? For people who have migrated, been here and there, and for polities that are supposedly more multi-cultural, how does the state identify who belongs and who does not? What are the marks on Victor Vinnetou’s body, in his accent, in his memory that discount him as South African and worthy of return? They are clearly also not the same marks as Dr. Shock and Brandon Huntley who are deemed worthy to stay in Canada.

One wonders as this story continues to unfold whether the life of Victor/Mbuyisa will force us to re-imagine community or continue to institutionalize superfluity as a growing condition of neo-liberal life.

Trailer Takedown No.1: Mr. Pip, Captain Phillips and 12 Years A Slave

I like watching movie trailers. They are basically mini-movies, delivering all the punch lines while zipping through the lead-up. You can enjoy the good bits without the dredge that makes up most of the running time of a film. Recently, YouTube did me a favor and clustered together a few trailers of particular interest: Mr. Pip, in which Hugh Laurie is a teacher in Papua New Guinea when civil conflict erupts; Captain Phillips (previewed here before), in which Tom Hanks is pitted against Somali pirates; and 12 Years A Slave (you must live under a rock if you haven’t heard about it; and watch out for a longer piece on its significance here). So here we go.

Mr. Pip

I’m thinking this film combines the inspirational-teacher-with-something-to-learn angle of Dangerous Minds with Johnny Mad Dog’s heart-string-tugging depictions of children in war, infused with literature-frees-you-and-gets-you-in-trouble theme of Dead Poets Society. If the trailer is accurate, this all adds up to a highly unoriginal white saviour story. Hugh Laurie saves somewhere in Africa (turns out it’s Papua New Guinea) from the Bad Warlord and Poverty with Hope. Hope is derived from a book written by another British bloke and the Bad Warlord just doesn’t get it. There’s a Poor Black Girl who really gets what the Hope is all about. Also, Imagination.

The biggest hint that Mr. Pip may not be completely reducible to these tropes is that they credit the lead actress, Xzannjah, in the trailer itself, alongside Hugh Laurie. It’s hard to tell if it’s just tokenism; ditto with the fact that the actress is from the country portrayed. Naming the young woman, however, does go a long way towards distinguishing the actress from her character, highlighting the fictitious, creative and representational nature of film. It acknowledges that not all young women from Papua New Guinea are victims of poverty and violence, but that young women from Papua New Guinea have the agency and artistry to portray one.

If this film is worth a damn, the trailer exaggerates the centrality of Laurie’s character in order to pull in an audience. If it’s good, it will follow through on the trailer’s hints of a post-colonial reading of Great Expectations. I have no hope that the civil conflict angle won’t turn this into a shallow tear-jerker.

Maybe one YouTube commenter had the best idea of where this could go:

House high as fu*** teaches children about Dickens and shi*

Circumstances under which I would see it: If someone else insisted.

Captain Phillips

If you haven’t already heard why the trailer’s title card “Based on a True Story” accepts a loose definition of the word “true,” read here.

As for the trailer, it would seem that the film is more concerned with conforming to its genre – pseudo-political action-thriller (the director is also responsible for two of the Bourne movies) – than it is with telling us about what happened in the real-life version of these events. This is not always a bad thing. Though always problematic, imaginative interpretations of true events can be done well enough that the fictional version takes on a life of its own; it accomplishes that expansion of mind that comes from good storytelling. If the trailer is any indication, Captain Phillips does the opposite: it rigidly works within a heroic masculinist framework, tries to pass off prejudices as characters and relies on ingrained geo-racial stereotypes to make sense of what happened. Because the film does make claims to being a “true story”, and in doing so asks its audience to view the film as an accurate depiction of reality, Captain Phillips might be as irresponsible as the title character was in real life.

A few years ago, Vanity Fair published an article about contemporary piracy that described the pirates’ language as gibberish. I would not be surprised if, watching this film with subtitles, any time the pirates talk to each other, the subtitles read [GIBBERISH]. The trailer sells it as that kind of movie.

Circumstances under which I would see it: If I was an undergrad and needed a really easy target for a paper about issues of representation. I would give it a proper academic title that would loosely translate to Why Is This Kind Of Bullshit Still On Screen?!

12 Years a Slave

One of the issues I take with scholarship on slavery has been its inability to explain how any human being could survive it. In an effort to convey the scale of horror experienced by slaves, slaves have become an inhuman mass, reiterating the slave trade’s original basis of dehumanization. Saidiya Hartman, in her otherwise deeply problematic book Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route, works in the opposite direction by sensitively describing the torture of one individual woman aboard a slave ship. In doing so, Hartman puts that torture on a human scale. She humanizes the suffering.

The trailer for 12 Years A Slave conveys a similar project by portraying the story of one man who had the education and perspective to tell his own story over 150 years ago in a memoir by the same name. The trailer made me wary of the film: Would Solomon be the only character credited with a past? What would scenes of brutality look like (it’s sometimes a thin line between “taking an unflinching look” and torture porn)? Will it glorify the American North as a bastion of freedom and equality? How will slavery as an institution be understood in the context of an individual’s story? Will slavery be reduced to a battle of Good Guys vs. Bad Guys?

Based on a handful of reviews, 12 Years A Slave seems worth watching because, whatever answers it gives, the film allows those questions to be asked.

Circumstances under which I would see it: ASAP.

Julius Malema’s Economic Freedom Fighters and the South African Left

In geographer Gillian Hart’s excellent Rethinking the South African Crisis, she points to a rather curious phenomenon as part of her engagement with the figure of one Julius Malema and the ‘populist’ turn he represents. She notes that for a change the far left and liberal right’s politics converge in the sense that they both share the same critique of the ex-Youth League president and current commander-in-chief of the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF).

It is not often that analysts of such diametrically opposed ideological tastes as Terry Bell and Gareth van Onselen agree, one being a left-leaning labour analyst and the other being a die-hard freemarket liberal, but they do in the case of Malema. Both Bell and van Onselen have made the case that Malema and the politics he espouses can be broadly categorised as ‘fascist’ or ‘fascistic’ in character. Mamphela Ramphele went as far as to compare Malema to Hitler in a public statement, a sure-fire way to justify ignoring both the tone, form and content of an opponent’s politics.

Their argument can be boiled down to this: The composition of social forces assembled behind Malema and the Economic Freedom Fighters is a mix of ‘lumpen’ or young unemployed voters. These ‘born frees are attracted to his militant rhetoric amidst a hopeless situation’. In effect both the images of masculinity and militarism are summoned in both the aesthetic and rhetorical strategies utilized by Malema.

Secondly the contention is that the calls for nationalization and other perceived ‘radicalism’ made by the EFF represent in effect the demands of a certain fraction of the emergent BEE-linked bourgeoisie, who want a bail out after their mining ventures failed miserably. Together they fit a definition of fascism as an alliance between the lumpen proletariat and an alienated faction of the bourgeoisie.

Some also add that the EFF’s position on Mugabe and Zimbabwe also disqualifies them from being ‘on the left’. The EFF professes open support for Mugabe’s Zanu-PF and in particular their land-reform program. One of the central items of the EFF’s agenda being the expropriation of land without compensation and the symbolism of land occupations, given the history of dispossession in South Africa, making such open support for Mugabe and Zanu-PF is unsurprising.

Leaving aside the complexities of Zimbabwean politics, one can hardly argue that the EFF is not ‘left’ because it supports a position they disagree with. Most of these people would hardly deny the late Hugo Chávez the right to be left — despite the fact he was an open supporter of Mugabe. The more serious case to answer is the ‘composition’ argument.

There is not a single historical example or paradigm of a fascist movement or party describing itself as ‘Marxist-Leninist-Fanonian’. A movement which has set out a manifesto closer to an old Trotskyist transitional programme, instead of barely coherent ramblings about national purity or vast international Judeo-Bolshevik conspiracies. In describing the above as Fascistic one essentially either claims that all this Marxist talk is part of a conspiracy to hide the fascistic tendencies of the EFF or one ignores all the written statements of the EFF altogether.

Fascism is a notoriously difficult concept to define and through frequent misuse its power and meaning has dwindled. It is often used to slander one’s political opponents rather than in a precise analytical fashion, from the Republican party labeling Barack Obama as akin to Hitler or those on the liberal left describing George Bush’s republican party as fascist.

The definition of fascism used to attack the EFF emerges out of debates on the origin of fascism in Europe, but whether this definition can be applied in a postcolonial context is not at all dealt with in these critiques of the EFF.

This critique doesn’t engage whether the models or definition of fascism, which emerged from a specifically European historical context, can be applied elsewhere in a country like post-apartheid South Africa – which doesn’t resemble the Weimar Republic or pre-Mussolini Italy, in which fascism arose in the context of the ruling classes’ fear of a strong international communist movement, or to put down a militant trade union movement after a devastating war.

Furthermore it makes no attempt to grapple with the complexities and nuances of South African nationalism or postcolonial nationalism in general, in which a number of movements and leaders from elements of Zanu-PF to Sankara in Burkina Faso have championed very similar programmes and used very similar rhetoric to Malema and the EFF. Surely such movements represent a paradigm closer to the EFF rather than copying and pasting what is already a loosely defined concept in the current South African political context?

There is hardly an established historical paradigm of fascism emerging in a post-colonial context from a ‘radical’ split from the ruling nationalist party. The closest to a ‘fascistic’ split one can locate is of a politics based on ethnic or religious identity. EFF clearly doesn’t fit into that paradigm with its appeals to pan-Africanism, and loosely speaking taking up the BC definition of black as an identity which moves beyond ethnicity.

The liberal right position makes sense; of course, liberals would want to delegitimize all left forces that could potentially either channel political energy away from certain liberal civil society projects or that great liberal party known as the DA. Van Onselen, himself an ex-DA official, has a vested stake in attempting to portray the EFF as a potentially murderous and reactionary force, preventing the DA from leaking actual or potential voters to the EFF.

The far left position also seeks to delegitimize the EFF, but for what reason? It is due to either a fear of having the ‘radical space’ in the South African political scene seized by a collective of corrupt opportunists or, less charitably, a fear of the left space that certain careerists on the left have sought to monopolize on their being seized by a group of upstarts.

The worst thing about this argument is that it labels the dispossessed black unemployed youth – or in other words those who have been worse affected by South Africa’s neoliberal trajectory – as an essentially reactionary social bloc that is full of ‘fascistic tendencies’ or as lumpen, surplus or criminal in nature. This position is often racialized to the extent that it reads as the middle-class terror of the ungovernable, unwashed and uncouth young black masses demanding such things as the nationalization of key industries, radical land reform and ‘economic freedom’. All things which, it should be noted, the left traditionally supports. One would also think that the left views this grouping as a potential base rather than a threat.

The significance of EFF is that it marks a break from the current political consensus, both in terms of our established political parties and the lobbying and legalistic strategies currently pervasive through ‘civil society’, which it has with such venomous opposition. The EFF marks a break with the established consensus because they explicitly reject the rhetoric of ‘social cohesion’; they reject the line that we need a social compact based on wage suppression to ward off a forthcoming apocalypse and the panacea of Foreign Direct Investment as the solution to our economic woes.

Whatever the case, to claim the EFF is not left and is some sort of proto-fascist grouping doesn’t stand up to any analytic scrutiny. This doesn’t mean that it should be immune from criticism from the left; there are a number of issues one could call the EFF out on ranging from its leaders’ less than commendable stance on women’s rights in the past to the questionable finances of its other leaders and rather xenophobic comments directed towards those of Indian descent. This does not mean that the EFF cannot be another form of left sounding; opportunism, bad political choices and corruption are by no means the monopoly of the right and centre. Those on the left can also make mistakes and be in politics for less than commendable reasons, but these criticisms do not undermine the significance of the EFF as a whole.

In essence, they mark a break with the fuzzy hangover of sentiment emanating from what’s left of the rainbow nation nationalism of times past. They claim to be the authentic representatives of the ‘radical Freedom Charter’ rather than the current dominant liberal reading – a Freedom Charter which outlays the beginnings of a socialistic or statist economic program.

The other strength (and potential weakness) of the EFF is that they mark a reconstitution of the two dominant black political traditions on the left in South Africa – namely Chartism and Black Consciousness. They have successfully managed to incorporate both BC and Chartists under the same political roof, potentially opening up the space for a birth of a new form of black radical politics. Whether or not they can succeed in keeping this alliance together after next year’s elections remains to be seen and perhaps marks the biggest internal political challenge for the movement.

It is this that has enabled EFF to find traction amongst a not insignificant segment of the population. Exactly how much traction they have remains to be seen. It is also because of this traction that the independent left will have to drop their own sectarianism and seriously engage with the EFF and its members as fellow travelers rather than unwelcome intruders. Whether it is to point out the limitations of the EFF or to attempt to influence their political line, such engagement should be done in a comradely fashion rather than joining the liberal right in attempting to delegitimize the EFF as a political project.

* This is an edited version of an article that appears in the latest issue of Amandla! Magazine.

George Clooney’s Bullshit Politics

You know how the typical fawning lad magazine interview with male celebrity goes: “He’s incredibly handsome and chicks dig him. And he’s also so rich, and because of that, he has cool gadgets. And cars. Also he parties with an elite set of friends.” The George Clooney profile in the December issue of Esquire is a checklist of all things that position him above the typical A-lister: not only does he have great cars, but he has carefully chosen three cars that speak to his eliteness. Not only does he lives in cool, expensive houses, but ones with Hollywood pedigrees. And does he ever have friends. In fact, his requirements for how cool his friends have to be are outta control: so cool that they have to be “unreachable.” Clooney praises fellow actor Bill Murray, for instance, “Because you can’t get to him. You can’t get him on the phone, he won’t answer your e-mails.” He denigrates those who take to Twitter to reveal personal likes and dislikes, or give People magazine fodder for internal celebrity feuds. We learn he’s still mad at Russell Crowe about some obscure diss, which he blames Crowe for publicizing; oddly, Clooney then reveals details and the inner workings of the feud, as well as other personal friendships with actors who prioritize maintaining their privacy.

Another thing that puts Clooney on the Top Shelf: he’s not only a liberal politics supporter, but a maker of politics. We learn, after a lot of other stuff about how Clooney’s lower and upper eyelashes are the same length,

At his villa on Lake Como, he has had, as his houseguests, everyone from Al Gore to Walter Cronkite to Kofi Annan, and still he insists that ‘at dinner, everyone put the phones away. And so there are not a lot of photos of our times there. Because I want us to live them.’

Yeah. I can just hear him saying, “No no, Kofi! Turn off that satellite phone. The conflict in Darfur can wait. I want us to live these times. Really live them.”

And that brings us to the confluence that Clooney created between his celebrity and Darfur. It is the final thing on the checklist that makes an A-Lister sit several steps removed: doing good work in Africa. And not only does he go for a day or two and dish out mielie porridge to the hungry (Christina Aguilera, we’re looking at you), but he makes the politics in Africa. Yes, it’s an opportunity for him to pose by picturesque rivers and colorful Sudanese, wearing pale, well-pressed khaki, but he’s deeply involved in the Hollywood machine that decided, for whatever reason, to focus on Darfur (rather than, say, the Congo).

Clooney creates enough press about his concern for Darfur that “John Bolton, George Bush’s ambassador to the United Nations, asked Clooney to come to New York and address a special session of the Security Council on the subject of Darfur,” writes Tom Junod. But Clooney was apprehensive enough about the invite to ring his famously no-bullshit broadcaster father. Why was he being asked by the Bush Administration to speak to the UN Security Council? Pappa Clooney broke it down for him: “Because you’re the liberal who’s gonna chastise the UN, that’s why.”

Invite an American celeb to chastise the UN security Council? Yes, it was the Bush Admin’s calculated way to get the security council mad. So Clooney becomes the Bush Admin’s patsy. But he doesn’t think it’s bad to be used in such a manner, because it’s an “opportunity”…and of course he likes that the Bush-appointed ambassador is ‘nice’ to him. (Esquire begins the whole story with an oft-repeated fable that instructs us about Clooney’s ability to get people to like him/get his way: once, Clooney rubs himself with turkey bacon all over in order to get a rescue dog to like him, and so that the lady from the dog rescue place knows that the dog will be with someone it really loves. The dog goes crazy for him, and Clooney gets to own it.)

In any case, the Security Council was upset enough that certain political heavy hitters walk out. Cloons is upset that other nations don’t have as much a cult of arse-kissing celebs as the US. Here’s the description:

He went, and had no problems with Bolton. It was the other members of the Security Council who were offended by the fact that an actor had been dispatched to address them. “Very heavy stuff. I’m sitting with Elie Wiesel, and the Chinese ambassadors walked out, and the Russian ambassadors walked out, because they don’t want to let an actor speak. And the Qatar ambassador starts off by going, ‘I have to post my protest that we would allow a very fine actor in here to speak.’ He’s speaking in Arabic, and he just keeps on going: ‘How dare he come in, and who does he think he is?’ He just goes on and on. And then the British ambassador goes, ‘Well, I have to let Mr. Clooney respond.’ And believe me, I was very nervous doing this, but I just went, ‘You know, my translation cut out after I heard “very fine actor,” if you’d like to repeat it.’ And my dad was sitting behind me and kicks me under the table. And I was nervous doing it, but you know, there’s that moment where you go, ‘Well, are you gonna do it?’ And then you go, ‘Well, fuck it.’

Esquire reporter’s intrepid followup question? Whether Clooney got “a laugh” out of the experience. Of course he did. He got a “huge laugh,” and enjoys himself thoroughly — that is, he performs well on stage. “You know, they pull you up onstage and they say, ‘Do this.’ I’ve always found a way to say, ‘I can take a breath and I can do it.’” So he treats the US security council as a two-bit local theatre stage (which isn’t necessarily a terrible way to look at it). And gets to own it (the British Ambassador portion of it, at any rate) like a slobbering rescue dog.

When he responds somewhat sarcastically to the Qatari ambassador, his father (of course his father comes along) kicks him under the table. To remind him: this is not the time and place.

Moral of the story: having a father who you can worship means it’s a rough start to life, but that you can rely on him to keep your ego in check and do good work for Africa. Cloons says childhood was hard  because Papa Clooney  made him earn pocket money to buy presents for the poorest family in town at Christmastime. And now, his father is still shaping his ego. In the Esquire reporter’s bizarre psychoanalytical estimation, celebrity is Clooney’s superego; I think that’s an erroneous assessment. Cloons, from this description, and like many celebs, has always feared that he will not be ‘liked’; for instance, he worried that there would be public backlash because he didn’t support the invasion of Iraq (goody for him on that). He calls his father, who chastises him, and tells him to grow up, take responsibility for his views, and deal with whatever comes.

Celebrity clearly informs Cloons’ ego. His father remains his superego. Too bad that superego didn’t tell his son to read up better on Darfur, do work quietly, humbly, and meaningfully, and not buy into the idea that celebrity “can make a difference.”