Sean Jacobs's Blog, page 451

Blitz the Ambassador: The Warm Up

Shortly before the release of Ghana-born emcee Blitz the Ambassador’s “The Warm Up” EP, we reached out to him to discuss his career and the aspects involved in the making of the album. He described the EP as a a teaser for what is to come on “Afropolitan Dreams”, his third offering since 2009′s “Stereotype” and 2011′s “Native Sun” (which made it onto our end-of-year list). We thought to share bits of the interview seeing that he’s performing at the Webster Hall tonight (heads up to all our New York people). Our man Boima is also on the line-up.

On why he made the EP readily available…

I think that music today is synonymous with an audio flyer. I don’t think that music has the same purpose that it had 20 years ago. I think that now what it is, is an advantage for people to sample you and to see if you are in fact the kind of artist that they will like. A lot of people will argue it’s not the smartest business move to release music for free. I think that it’s only not a smart business move if you cannot attract return customers. I feel like if you have music that is good enough, that will make people return and become fans, then it’s in your best interest to make that music as available as possible. I did a test of that when I released “Native Sun” in 2011; I put the entire album on YouTube for free. I got a bunch of e-mails and everywhere I went people wanted to know why I’d do that, [that] it makes no sense. In about a year I realised that, one, people started coming to my concerts knowing the music already, knowing the words to the music and being absorbed in the music because it’s YouTube, they could just play the entire thing without pause; two, it encouraged them to purchase the physical copy, it encouraged them to purchase the merchandise, like t-shirts and other things, because they had already heard the music. So I feel like I was vindicated in that process of making the music readily available and for free because it ended up creating a fanbase that would probably not have had the chance to sample my work and become fans of my work. I’m doing the same with “The Warm Up” EP, which is a prelude to “Afropolitan Dreamss”. In my opinion, I think that giving it away for free only raises the anticipation for “Afropolitan Dreams”.

On the topics discussed on “The Warm Up” EP…

[I put out my last album] in 2011. For a lot of people, it’s been a while. Some people have never heard of me. “The Warm Up” is really just to get people interested and excited about “Afropolitan Dreams”, which is really the story. What I was able to do on this EP was to give people sample ideas of where “Afropolitan Dreams” is going — whether it’s sonic, or whether it’s lyrical. Everything that you’re hearing on “The Warm Up” EP is part and parcel of “Afropolitan Dreams”; pretty much an extension, a prelude.

‘African in New York’ is the arrival into this city, which most of us have had to go through; of trying to figure out where you fit, and where your culture fits in all of this. Lyrically, it’s self-explanatory. A song like ‘Bisa’ is also something that’s very typical among expats who are trying to go home. It’s almost like you become a self-appointed conduit between the rest of the world and where you’re from. Some of what we go through back home has to almost be explained to the rest of the world. Most people back home may not have the platform or even the analysis. The thing is, a lot of us living overseas have the privilege of time, and the fact that we’re not necessarily living hand-to-mouth. We’re able to absorb these ideas and interpret them in a better way, just because we have more time. If I was back home, I doubt that I would have as much time to analyse, because my life would be much faster-paced; it would be based solely on another level of survival. That’s why it’s so important that those living overseas — or even when you’re home but you have a better situation that allows you the time — it’s our jobs to be the analyzers, to be the ones who try to create this dialogue. So ‘Bisa’ was an example [of that]. That’s why Nneka makes so much sense, that’s why TY makes so much sense. When I link with Nneka, that’s all we talk about. We’re talking about ‘how do we go back home?’, ‘how do we go back properly?’, ‘how do we connect with the local [crew] that’s been building for [a while] and be able to encourage what we’ve done with what’s happening locally?’

On performing live…

I’ve never had a musical director, I’ve always directed my own music. Maybe it’s just the control freak in me. But more importantly, I just feel like I have a vision, I know where I want this vision to go, and I don’t stop until I get that vision. If you’re an independent artist, I don’t think you have much else in terms of your investment. What is the first point of contact with the audience? It’s often almost live; that’s the only time that they’re gonna go ‘I believe in you!’ Any other time they have a choice, you’re not in control. The only time you’re in control of [whether] people like you is when you’re on stage. I’ve always spent so much time and so much effort into creating such an amazing show, because I found out really quickly — especially when I started touring — that it doesn’t matter if you have hits! For an hour or an hour and thirty minutes, that’s my sales pitch, that is my ‘you’ve GOT to love me!’ You cannot leave without picking up the t-shirt, without finding out what my facebook is so that you can check me out later. That effort is extreme, almost to the point of obsession! That’s why I watch so many live shows; to me it’s critical that my live show is on par with not these guys today, but [with] when live shows were live shows. Everything else was an addition. To me, I don’t think you’ll find [anyone] better than a Michael Jackson, a Prince, a James Brown, a Fela. In terms of what I try to convey, one thing I figured out early is that the best way to keep people interest in anything you do, and this goes beyond a live show, is when you’re telling a story. A story is the only time you can have my attention from beginning to end.

Tonight at The Studio at Webster Hall: Blitz The Ambassador, Old Money, Boima and Caktuz.

Listen to the “The Warm Up” below.

Zimbabwe’s Forgotten 20%

Zimbabwe makes a good story for western writers and readers. The staggering racism of the Rhodesian whites, the heroic liberation uprising, and Mugabe; a freedom fighter not unlike Nelson Mandela, who having spent more than a decade in prison, won the first democratic election and immediately called for racial reconciliation. Then, from the late ‘90s, the story turned to economic catastrophe, with inflation so extreme that it was difficult to comprehend. Mugabe’s transformation from liberation leader to mad dictator is satisfying in its starkness, whilst the struggles of Tsvangirai’s opposition party, and the victimisation of hard-working white farmers, driven from their land by vengeful war vets easily evoke horrified sympathy. Since 2000, Land Reform has been central to how the world understands the state of contemporary Zimbabwe, and recently a new, more nuanced narrative about the effects of Mugabe’s Land Reform has emerged. What is bitterly disappointing about this new analysis is that it seems to have inherited the disregard that its predecessors showed for the sector of Zimbabwe’s society whose lives are most affected by the programme.

The black farm-worker communities who – under white employment – provided the sweat and toil which has driven the nation’s agriculture (and, hence, its economy) since the 1900s, make up nearly 20% of Zimbabwe’s population. Despite this, those farm-workers have accounted for less than 7% of the beneficiaries of land redistribution. Moreover, those workers suffered by far the worst of the violence and abuses committed during farm invasions – a suffering which was woefully underreported given the severity of abuses and size of the group affected. The fact that even recent writings about the Land Reform programme fail to give the black commercial farm-workers the attention they deserve is inexplicable. A little-seen statement from the Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions this Sunday (15/09/2013), which reported the continuing harassment of GAPWUZ officials (the union representing black farm-workers) should serve as a reminder that this group continues to suffer abuses and that their exclusion from the conversation about Land Reform is unacceptable.

The suffering of Zimbabwe’s white farmers under Land Reform was well recognised by international media, especially after the release of the film Mugabe and the White African, and those who are now promoting a more positive view of Land Reform have not ignored the abuses that they suffered. Authors tend to highlight the large number of black Zimbabweans who have gained land, compared to the relatively small number of whites who lost it (245,000 compared to 6,000 according to one recent publication). Unfortunately, the workers whose livelihoods were lost alongside their white employers were both largely ignored by the media at the time of the invasions, and even now rarely get the attention they deserve. In fact, an estimated 300,000 workers, with a staggering 1.5 million dependents had lost their livelihoods by 2012, far outnumbering the new beneficiaries. Moreover, of over 82,000 human rights violations recorded by GAPWUZ in an 8-year period, 97.2% were suffered by the black employees, who were all but ignored by the press. The impact of international media attention had a significance beyond simply awareness-raising. The attention and associated threat of external intervention made ZANU-PF nervous of adding to the ‘victims’ image that white farmers held. As a result, although they experienced theft, beatings, and intimidation, actual murders of white farmers were relatively small in number. By contrast, their black farm workers had no equivalent protection and so bore the brunt of the abuse. In the international media, those workers who were murdered tended, at most, to appear as part of a statistic within stories of their employers’ suffering. No doubt, the international links that many white farmers hold helped them to gain the attention and sympathies of the international press. But the west – especially Britain – should recognise a responsibility towards the farm-worker population, whose original formation and persisting vulnerability were a direct result of the colonial regime.

The distinct population of ‘commercial farm-workers’ was created in the 1900s in response to the needs for cheap labour on the new white settlers’ plantations. The regime chose to recruit workers from neighbouring countries rather than within Zimbabwe, which meant that the new workforce was distinctively ‘foreign’. Isolated on the farms, away from the rest of Zimbabwean society these worker communities developed as ‘separate’ from the rest of the country. The workers’ unequal treatment under Rhodesian employment law in the 1950s entrenched their dependence on their employers, meaning that they were seen as inextricably linked them to the loathed white land-owners.

The workers’ enforced dependence on their white employers persisted after independence, and explains why, in contemporary Zimbabwean discourse, they are represented as ‘undeserving’ and ‘unpatriotic’. In the dualistic paradigm of native verses settler which dominated Zimbabwe from the start of Land Reform, farm-workers were in a precarious position; dependent on the loathed remnants of colonialism, they were targets by association, but lacked the same international sympathy or safety-net of wealth that their employers have. The abuses which GAPWUZ reported, and called ‘the very definition of crimes against humanity’, included 782 cases of torture as well as 54% of respondents claiming to have received death threats, and 10% knowing a fellow-worker who was murdered. The psychological torture also includes 43% reporting having been forced to watch beatings, and 29% whose children were forced to watch as well. Whilst the lack of outcry in Zimbabwe over these abuses can be explained (although not excused) by the unfavourable position farm works hold in national discourse, the lack of international attention is harder to understand.

The uniquely vulnerable position of the farm-worker population, lacking ancestral homes or any alternative stake in the country other than as commercial farm workers leaves them with few options. The majority have either remained as squatters on the abandoned farms, or joined informal settlements where conditions are desperate. The FCTZ reported deaths from starvation in many provinces and an inability to manage HIV. Many now work for the new settlers, for little or no wages and in conditions widely claimed to be considerably worse than in the past. GAPWUZ reports that salaries aren’t currently enough for most workers to sustain their families. The lack of interest in this group means that up-to-date information on their situation is difficult to find. But to exclude these farm-workers from the debates over their livelihoods is to allow the continuation of the colonial attitudes which first entrenched the group’s division from wider Zimbabwe. Without giving proper attention to this crucial population – Zimbabwe’s forgotten 20% – commentators cannot ever hope to truly understand the impact of Land Reform.

Elections and Ethnicity in Guinea

The traffic along the Route de Fidel Castro, the main thoroughfare that runs through Conakry, was among the lightest I’d ever seen Monday evening. Usually, the infamous embouteillage (literally, “bottle-neck”) of Conakry has vehicles inching along as crowds of people weave through the streets on their way to and from work, or take advantage of stranded customers by offering products of every imaginable variety for sale through your car window. On Monday, however, the massive, bustling market of Madina was closed, as were shops and businesses throughout the city, as rumors of violent clashes in the areas of Avaria and Boussoura spread unease and even fear.

The clashes, as it transpires, were minor and short-lived. The atmosphere of tension, however, was not unfounded. Guinea’s legislative elections on Tuesday, September 24th will be the first to be remotely “free and fair” in the country’s history, and the last two years of negotiations and delays have resulted in dozens of violent and deadly clashes throughout the country. 

Guinea is a state of more than 11 million people and is home to over two dozen ethnic groups including the Fulani (French, Peul) at over 40% of the population, the Malinké (or Mandingo) at approximately 30%, and the Soussou at 20%. It was part of the great Malian Empire from the 13th to 15th centuries, is the source of both the Niger and Senegal Rivers, has some of the world’s largest reserves of bauxite and iron-ore in its Nimba Mountains, and, in 1958, was the first French colony south of the Sahara to gain independence.

Despite independence leader Sekou Touré’s idealistic speeches about Pan-Africanism, equality, and respect for diversity, he was a callous autocrat who ruled the country until his death in 1984. His successor, Lansana Conté, was a member of the Soussou ethnic group who ruled until 2008. For fifty years, the political norm was one of frequently jailing and occasionally publicly hanging political opponents, stealing from the state coffers while letting existing infrastructure crumble, and, most importantly, activating ethnic cleavages .

After Lansana Conté’s death in 2008, a military coup brought the crazed Captain Dadis Camara to power. On September 28, 2009, a pro-democracy protest in Conakry’s soccer stadium ended when the military opened fire, killing over 157 people and raping an estimated 300 women. In December of 2009, Captain Dadis was shot, and in the ensuing void, a provisional government was established that wrote a constitution and organized the country’s first legitimate presidential elections in 2010.

Each of Guinea’s three dictators had made a habit of providing posts and contracts to members of their own ethnic group while ensuring more investment in their home region; Captain Dadis, of the Guerze ethnicity who hails from the Forest Region, is still beloved there for bringing better roads, social services, and electricity during his brief tenure. The elections of 2010, rather than break from this ethnocratic past, exploited it. In the first round of the elections, the Fulani presidential candidate, Cellou Dalein Diallo, won 44% of the vote, while his next closest opponent, the Malinké candidate Alpha Condé, won just 18%. Opponents of President Condé claim he rigged the final vote, which he won with 52%, but from election slogans and the prevalence of ethnic-based voting, it is clear that Condé’s success was based on a uniting of other ethnic groups against the Fulani.

Condé is now three years into his five-year presidential term. There are a number of Soussou and a scattering of Fulani members of Condé’s government, but the RPG-Arc-en-Ciel (Rally of the Guinean People-Rainbow Party) is overwhelmingly Malinké and Soussou, while the main opposition party, the UFDG (Union of Democratic Forces of Guinea), still led by Diallo, is overwhelmingly Fulani. There is an idea that can be heard throughout the Fulani community of Guinea that, “after over 60 years, it should finally be our turn to rule.” Malinké and Soussou communities respond that, as Fulanis are overall wealthier and more prosperous, “they already run the economy, so don’t give them political power too.”

embouteillage in Matam, Conakry

The tendency, including in the paragraphs above, to describe African politics in terms of ethnic groups is not so very far removed from the exoticizing and imperialist view of “warring tribes” that once pervaded Western constructs of the continent. Even the horrors of Rwanda, Eastern Congo, and Nigeria, indisputably ethnic in nature, are not typically examined by main-stream media through the frame of differing economic interests. It is simpler for many to assume that these people hate one another because of their differences in language and culture, and ethnic conflict becomes almost congruent to racism in the minds of many in the West. “Ethnic Clashes Kill Five in Conakry” read the headlines last Spring, while “More than 100 Killed in Ethnic Clashes” was the common title for the violence (unrelated to the elections, but rather over land-rights and economic interests) that plagued N’zérékoré in July. In 500 words or less, with reporters either not in Guinea, poorly translating from French-language sources, or flying into the country for a week to investigate, and with readers who hardly know where Guinea is located, let alone the country’s complex history and political or socio-economic environment, these articles do little justice to the situation at hand.

Democracy in Guinea is not so very different than, for example, Belgium. In Belgium, the Flemish majority and the Walloon (French-speaking) minority live mostly in different regions, with the Walloon area being less economically prosperous. Political crisis in Belgium has meant government formation talks often ended in deadlock in recent years, and there is prejudice and suspicion on both sides of the divide. It is in no way unique for politicians from certain geographical regions or cultural traditions to favor their own constituents — is that not how reelection occurs in a representative democracy? Just as Dadis brought better infrastructure and business to the Forest Region, would not a President Diallo bring investment to the Fouta Djallon? For a Fulani resident of Labé to vote for UFDG rather than RPG, under this analysis, would seem a wise choice, not at all motivated by prejudice.

This is a difficult space to navigate, however, because one cannot avoid the fact that, unlike Belgium, Guinea has experienced ethnic based violence in recent years that it would be foolish to conflate with a model of solely economic interests. In the fall of 2012 and the spring of 2013, mobs of either Malinké or Fulani youth would stop cars, demand the occupants speak, and if the wrong language was spoken, the result could vary from threats, to theft, to torched vehicles, to bodily harm. Gangs of Fulani youth would separate themselves from scheduled UFDG marches to throw stones and Molotov cocktails at the (predominantly Malinké) gendarmes, who would in turn respond with tear gas, water cannons, and occasionally bullets. In reaction, Malinké gangs of youth went into Madina market to loot and burn Fulani stalls and gendarmes entered Fulani homes, stealing cell phones and other valuables. Continuing the cycle, groups of Fulani youth burned at least two gendarmeries. Each time there are deaths, public funerals are held to honor the “martyrs”, which can be foci of even further clashes.

To the astute observer, the word “youth” will have emerged as an important detail of these patterns of violence. More than 60% of Guinea’s population is under the age of 24, with a median age of 19. The literacy rate is less than 50%, and a meaningful unemployment rate would be impossible to calculate because of how few Guineans participate in the formal economy. Indicators such as GDP or HDI (Human Development Index) are notoriously poor for painting an accurate picture of states in the developing world, but it is difficult to deny the statistics that place Guinea among the worst in the world for health, education, job opportunities, and overall standard of living. People are angry — especially the youth.

Young Guineans talk wistfully of neighboring Senegal, where there is electricity all the time, high speed internet access, shopping malls, and fast food. Sierra Leonean youth whose families immigrated during the war now talk of longing to go back permanently to Freetown, where everything is so much cleaner and more advanced than in Conakry. Three years into this democratic experiment has not delivered the salvation they were promised, and that disappointment and anger has found an outlet in political activism-turned-violent.

Older, educated, and professional Guineans show very few signs of ethnic prejudice and, if anything, demonstrate exhaustion with their country’s constant turmoil. They talk about the gangs of youth using a French term that roughly translates as “hooligans”, and give excuses for the violence by saying the young people are drunk, on drugs, without anything to do, and therefore make trouble not for political purposes, but for fun. “If only those young men would go to school,” I’ve heard said, “then none of this would be happening.” What this attitude belies, however, is the very real disenfranchisement that many Guineans, especially the youth, feel within the nascent democracy and the ethnic cleavages that have indeed been stoked since the time of Sekou Touré.

The streets in Conakry are adorned in political posters and the radio and television stations crammed with candidates recommending themselves. Yellow streamers (the color of the president’s RPG-Arc-en-Ciel) hang across some streets and shops while on others, giant green banners (the color of UFDG) with Dalein Diallo’s face declare “La Rupture — C’est Maintenant!” (The Break — It’s Now!). These are by no means the only political parties whose candidates are vying for election on Tuesday. Blue UFR (Union of Republican Forces) posters declare they are “La Solution!”, while the PUP (Unity and Progress Party) has banners that read “Votez PUP C’est de Refuser l’Ethnocentrisme Sous Toutes ses Forms” (Voting PUP is Rejecting Ethnocentrism in All Forms). Much as the side-lining of third parties in the United States, however, these other small parties are not the main event.

Fulani people from both wealthy and educated backgrounds and otherwise have expressed their certainty that UFDG will win the parliamentary elections unless President Condé rigs the vote. Malinké and Soussou residents of Conakry note how the president has started building a hydroelectric dam and has promised to provide more funding to hospitals (in giant billboards all around town) and argue that Alpha Condé and the RPG are leading Guinea in the right direction, and are sure to win. With the compromising of last spring holding, parades of supporters from opposing parties marched through the streets unhindered throughout August and the first two weeks of September, and hopes were high that the calm would remain.

As the strangely empty streets on Monday indicated, however, the next few days may be less-than peaceful. Diallo, as the leader of the coalition of opposition parties, announced on Sunday that there would be a protest today, Thursday, because the government has not published voter lists with sufficient time for them to be reviewed. Diallo claimed to have evidence of people being registered to vote in multiple districts and other massive errors, and is calling foul on the ruling party already, but on Tuesday evening, agreed to put off the protest to give election inspectors a chance to survey the situation.

At the time of this writing, this Conakry resident has no predictions of what will happen in the coming days. I would like to believe that cooler heads will prevail, and the silent-majority of Guineans who want peace, development, and a say in their government will overcome the minority of disaffected youth who have been played by politicians into their ethnic trenches. Guinea does need real activism to steer it away from its ethnocentric past and cycle of bad governance, but death, destruction of property, and further division of the Guinean people may be too high a price to pay.

*

Further Reading:

In English:

- Guinea poised to complete transition to civilian rule – IRIN

- Focus on Guinea’s Media as Legislative Poll Nears – VOA News

- Guinea: Ethnicity, Democracy and Opposition – Think Africa Press

In French:

- La Guinée, otage de la guerre des ego – Le Pays

- Guinée: l’opposition accepte d’annuler son appel à manifester – RFI

- Tension en Guinée – GuineeNews

Kibwe Tavares’ short film “Jonah”

I have been trying to attend as many of The Future Weird’s (see here, as well) screenings as possible in recent months. The Future Weird is a monthly series focused on films by directors from Africa and the global south. The series foregrounds films which imagine the future from a non-Western perspective. It is organized by Okayafrica’s Derica Shields and Africa is a Country’s Megan Eardley. The most recent installment was entitled “Black Atlantis” and featured a number of shorts that were linked by the common theme of water. The short that stood out the most for me was British architect-turned-filmmaker, Kibwe Tavares’ Jonah.

“Jonah” explores the effects of tourism, globalization, and commercialization in Zanzibar. The synopsis is as follows:

Mbwana and his best friend Juma are two young men with big dreams. These dreams become reality when they photograph a gigantic fish leaping out of the sea and their small town blossoms into a tourist hot-spot as a result. But for Mbwana, the reality isn’t what he dreamed – and when he meets the fish again, both of them forgotten, ruined and old, he decides only one of them can survive. Jonah is a big fish story about the old and the new, and the links and the distances between them.

Here’s the film:

With solid cinematography, dazzling visual effects, and intermittent humor, “Jonah” shows us a Zanzibar of the near-future that has become a “seedy, capitalist tourist trap.” The short was in part inspired by Hemmingway’s “The Old Man and the Sea,” as well as a trip Tavares took to East Africa (the film was originally supposed to be set in Lamu, Kenya). The filmmaker’s previous short, “Robots of Brixton,” was about a similarly dystopic future and acts as a kind of re-contextualization of the 1981 Brixton Riots. The short film took home the Special Jury Award for Animation Direction from Sundance in 2012 and is certainly worth watching. Kibwe Tavares is one of the leaders of the UK-based film and animation studio, Factory Fifteen.

“They beg to be called refugees, but Israel calls them infiltrators”

Since February 2011, Meron Estefanos has acted as an interpreter, negotiator and kind of lifeline for Eritrean refugees held hostage in the Sinai desert.

Meron’s story recently appeared on This American Life, the Chicago based radio program. As the show documented in a one-hour episode on August 9 (you can still download and listen to the podcast), Meron randomly began receiving calls over two years ago from Eritrean hostages and their kidnappers in the Sinai.

The hostages are refugees, kidnapped by Bedouin gang networks when crossing the border from Eritrea to Sudan or from refugee camps inside Sudan. The hostages are transported to underground cells in Egypt, tortured and forced to call Eritreans abroad for ransom money; the requested sum typically ranges from $20,000 – $40,000.

Meron estimates at least 500 people, the majority Eritreans, are currently being held in underground prisons in the Sinai. The number could be much larger – Meron has pieced together the estimate from the information she receives personally from hostages as well as other Eritreans abroad who receive the ransom calls. Meron spoke with Africa is a Country via Skype about the impact of the This American Life program, her ongoing work to free the hostages, and her recent trip to Israel where some of the freed hostages now live in difficult conditions as unrecognized refugees.

A bit of background first about Meron: she emigrated from Eritrea to Sweden when she was 14, shortly before Eritrea’s independence from Ethiopia. Her father was already living in Sweden; Meron and her brother arrived as Swedish citizens. Meron became a youth activist, joining a movement of Eritrean student exiles named the Eritrean Movement for Democracy and Human Rights. The group promoted non-violent resistance to Eritrea’s increasingly repressive Isaias Afwerki-led regime, and Meron ran a radio program about Eritrean issues that traveled over short-wave into Eritrea. Since then, she has worked as a journalist in Sweden and as a continued human rights activist. Currently she is a member of Freedom Fridays, a loose collective which encourages Eritreans to stay home from work on Fridays to protest the Afwerki regime.

How her number originally became circulated among the hostages is unclear, but likely is because she’s a public figure in the Eritrean exile community. But despite increased media attention over the past year worldwide about the Eritrean hostage crisis, Egypt has not intervened to find and arrest the gangs in the Sinai. Egypt alternates between conveniently claiming there is no problem and that they do not have the capacity to find and remove the gangs; the latter despite their ongoing military crackdowns in the Sinai after militants targeted and killed Egyptian soldiers stationed there. The African Union has attempted to raise the issue, but without success; talks have been stalled with Egypt after the recent military coup.

What has the reception been like once the This American Life episode aired? Do you think it increased the visibility of the issue among an American audience?

Meron Estefanos: It seems like Americans just woke up the issue in general. I was shocked when the Wall Street Journal covered it on the front page last year. The New York Times also covered it last year, and CNN has made two documentaries on the situation in the Sinai. So I was surprised by how big an impact the radio had – I’m receiving 30 – 40 emails a day and people are donating small donations from $5 to $500 [to support my work]. Since This American Life aired the episode, I’ve raised $3,000 in additional funds.

Did anything surprise you about the way they covered your story? What about the survivors interviewed in the episode – did anything surprise them?

They excluded a lot – we’ve been working on this for over six months. But I have so much material – whether it’s 1 hour or 10 hours, it’s not enough. Their original plan was to only do a 30-minute story, but then there was so much material that they decided to go with one hour.

One survivor has heard it, from the first group who contacted me. He understands English, and he was happy with it. It took him back to those times when he was desperate; he said he felt like it was happening right now.

Shegerab Refugee Camp in Sudan

Given Egypt’s currently political turmoil, the chance of getting Egypt to take action in the Sinai region where the hostage camps are seems even more unlikely. Meanwhile, other nations claim it’s not their problem. What do you think can be done?

Every country says it’s not our problem. But you have to understand: 2,000 Eritrean Americans have been affected by the Sinai tragedies, and have paid ransom money. If they have paid $30,000 each, that means it’s American money going to these criminals – we don’t even know if they’re [also] terrorists. In Sweden, 500 Eritreams have paid ransom, and it’s the same in Norway. I believe countries should follow that up.

We are responsible for every human being – it shouldn’t matter what color or nationality they are. Americans were kidnapped in the Sinai recently and they were out within 24 hours. To me, it’s all about race. If those people were white it wouldn’t last this long – it would be over in a week.

What does it mean for countries to be signatory of UN [human rights] conventions if you can’t even protect other people?

The This American Life episode mentions Eritreans are kidnapped from refugee camps in Sudan. Can you tell us more about how this process normally occurs? Do you think there are contacts for the kidnappers inside the refugee camps?

3,000 to 5,000 people flee every month from Eritrea because we have the most repressive regime in the world. They flee every month to Sudan or Ethiopia – at the border of Sudan people start taking advantage of them.

As soon as you reach Sudan, the first people you see are soldiers guarding the border. The Eritreans ask for asylum – but instead of taking them to the refugee camp, some of the soldiers sell them to the [gang networks of] Bedouins.

At the refugee camp, the soldiers who are supposed to secure the camp are corrupted. People are kidnapped in daylight while everyone is watching; they wait on Sundays outside the church.

I just returned from Israel on Monday where I spoke to a young Eritrean man, 28 years old. He had suffered for three months; they hung his hands from the ceiling on a hook like a slaughtered beast. When they finally took him down four days later, his limbs have gone dead. He will never feel his fingers again.

The money I’m collecting now is to get him an artificial hand – but for him to have the necessary operations will cost $200,000. There is a deposit of $50,000 just to get a visa from Israel to the US where they can do the operation.

Once some of the Eritreans do make it to Israel, they face tremendous challenges trying to re-build their life with no support from the Israeli government. How do they cope with these challenges?

Every time I go to Israel I get angry, it takes me three weeks to calm down. These are people who have nothing – you think they would be received with open arms. Instead; you can live but not work, and you can’t access medical treatment. If you’re lucky, you know people, and you have a place to stay – if not, you sleep in the park. There are some small NGOs helping but it’s not enough – if you need an operation, they can’t help you. Most of them are suffering mentally and there are no mental health services.

In Israel, being given the status of refugee is a commodity – the Eritreans beg to be called refugees, instead they are called infiltrators.

So even though these are people who fled their country, were kidnapped, tortured, and released somewhere in the desert between Egypt and Israel, Israel refuses to recognize them as refugees? What does that mean for their chance of being re-settled in another country?

Yes exactly – Israel refuses to recognize them. The UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR, the main UN agency facilitating refugee re-settlement) is in Israel, but UNHCR cannot do anything – if Israel does not accept these people as refugees, then UNHCR cannot process them and re-settle them somewhere else.

Israel also passed a new law in July 2012, known as the “anti-infiltration law” – it says that anyone who enters Israel illegally [aka including through the Sinai] can be held for a minimum of three years in jail. And for those who are in imprisoned in Israel, every day someone comes and tells you you’ll be in prison the rest of your life – or you can sign this “voluntary form” to return to your country. Fourteen Eritreans just “voluntary returned” – people think, if I’m going to be in prison, it’s better I’m in prison with my own people.

Israel’s Sinai Border Fence

What happens to these Eritreans when they’re returned to Eritrea?

Usually you get arrested as soon as you arrive. Israel is the only country refusing to accept Eritreans as political asylum seekers – in Sweden, 95 percent of Eritreans get asylum within 2 weeks of arrival.

Eritreans living outside their country have become increasingly aware of and affected by this issue. Yet the episode mentioned some members of the expat community refuse to believe this is happening. How has the community’s views changed on this issue in the past year as more media has reported on it?

I don’t know any Eritrean that hasn’t been affected – my own cousin was kidnapped and I paid the ransom – everyone knows someone – it could be your neighbor. But at the same time in the West there are many regime supporters that are afraid to acknowledge this issue – the moment they start acknowledging it people will discuss the root cause , which is why are so many young people fleeing Eritrea?

As a journalist, how has becoming an activist affected the way you see journalism and its effectiveness as a force for positive change in society?

To me as a journalist, it’s our responsibility to cover issues no one covers – now it’s the other way around. Unless someone else covers it, no one wants it. Some issues will go on for a long time because they don’t think it would sell.

In the beginning you talk about your frustration in convincing Swedish colleagues that it was a story worth covering, one that would appeal to Swedish audiences. Can you say more about the challenges of covering diaspora / immigrant communities, especially Africans, in Western Europe?

I found many journalists who were interested, but many of their bosses would block them. The media unfairness is unbelievable – if you remember [the news story] when 16 Egyptian soldiers were killed in Sinai, I was shocked to hear that no journalists managed to ask the question, ‘while you are in sinai, are you going to free the African hostages?’

Norway is the only country that was covering the Sinai hostage issues almost two years ago – it was on the front page, TV, radio, everything.

The criminal gangs seem to have contacts around the world that facilitate the exchange of money for hostages. Has there been progress in tracking them in countries like Sweden?

The Bedouins have contacts everywhere. I was extorted to pay ransom for a hostage I used to interview, and they wanted me to pay the ransom in Sweden – I called the police, and they wiretapped the phones – the [Bedouin affiliates in Sweden] got arrested and convicted in June – but one person just got probation and the second person received just one month.

Now we are appealing.

Meron has set up a PayPal account to collect donations to help the families of Eritrean hostages in Sinai. To donate, go to PayPal.com and transfer to the account soscare@yahoo.com, or email Meron for more information at: meron.estefanos@gmail.com

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The story of how the most famous portrait of a young Chinua Achebe was taken

When the great Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe died this April, one of the photographs used repeatedly to illustrate stories or obituaries was a portrait taken of him in 1959 by the American photographer Eliot Elisofon.

It is useful to unpack the image, a conventional portrait of Achebe leaning on a desk with two copies of Things Fall Apart in front of him. A photograph, a snapshot, the filtering of the lost moment, is always more than the visual graphics and the intended ‘message’ it proffers to mediate.

Elisofon’s photograph has come to be beloved among Achebe’s readers, perhaps because it provokes a certain nostalgia for the optimism of the 1950s and 1960s — the prodigiously talented young novelist appears glamorous, diligent, and ready to embrace the promise of the new Nigerian nation that was about to come into being. But the story of how the image came to be taken reveals a very much more complicated history.

In total Elisofon took a series of eight photographs of Achebe. The full series are held by the Eliot Elisofon Photographic Archives at the National Museum of African Art (NMAfA) and can be viewed online via the Smithsonian Institution Research Information System.

But how did Elisofon get to photograph Achebe?

By 1959 Elisofon was a famous photojournalist with a background as a war correspondent in Morocco and Tunisia as well as earlier in Scandinavia during the World War II, as a color expert for John Huston’s location shooting of the colonial film “The African Queen” starring Laureen Bacall, Humphrey Bogart, and Katherine Hepburn and for climbing the Rwenzori Mountains (on the Uganda-DRC border) to take the very first color pictures of the wet fauna in the heath region (published in LIFE magazine in 1953).

His commission for LIFE Magazine in 1959, which meant another opportunity to travel to Africa, had two purposes, each of which impinges on my reading of the Achebe photographs: The first concerns the project to produce a re-affirmation of mythological Africa through combining western literature of the continent with fresh photographs, as mesmerized by visual cliché-mongering and stereotyping as their literary counterparts. So Elisofon’s travel (August 18 to December 20) was a quest to, on one hand, identify “African” settings that would harmonize with extracts from writers such as Joyce Cary, Winston Churchill, Ernest Hemingway, Henry M. Stanley, and Joseph Conrad.

It is the Conrad photo that interests me (above; in LIFE 1961, page 72). The caption reads: “An old Warega tribesman of Congo [who] squats under a tree.” The description is only spatially true, as the photographer’s guidance was far more precise. Following the Conradian script (a collage of lines from Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness that contains the well-known episode about the hungry slave carrying the mysterious sign, “from beyond the seas”) Elisofon had theatrically wrapped a strip of white cloth around the anonymous and miserably looking Lega man’s neck.

Only a few weeks later, he was to meet Achebe in his home in Enugu, about 2570 km from where Elisofon had portrayed the ‘Conradian’ man discussed above, but given Achebe’s well-known and aggressive rejection of Conrad and Elisofon’s veneration of the same (not to mention of Stanley) and his obvious disregarding of Things Fall Apart, the real distance between them can only be measured in murky, racial moon years.

Elisofon’s library of literature (fiction, travelogues) of about one hundred titles that were selected to represent ‘literary’ Africa, and from where the fourteen qualified writers were culled for the racist essay, did not accommodate Achebe’s novel. And we are thankful for that. It was no doubt too close for contact; ‘savages’ do not write novels! Yet, we have to ask, why did Elisofon bother to photograph him at all?

The reason is related to the second part of his LIFE commission, the documentation of an African country in transition or of Nigeria’s route from dependency to independence, the medial peak of which was Elisofon’s coverage of the electoral campaign (rigged, some think, by the British) for the December 1959 election, which would usher in independence the next year (October 1, 1960). He portrayed legendary political leaders such as Samuel L. Akintola of the Action Group and the nationalists Michael Ihemukara Okpara and Nnamdi Azikiwe. Azikiwe, “the Zik of Africa,” who would become the country’s first president. If we only look at his photos from southeastern Nigeria and the Enugu State region, apart from meeting Achebe, Elisofon photographed workers at Ekulu coal mine and steel workers at the Oji River Power Station (west of Enugu). But it was the masqueraders at the Onwa Asaa (yam) festival in Ugwuoba (between Awka and Enugu) that triggered his interest to a maximum; the Washington archive holds around one hundred photographs emanating from his frantic day-long work following the Igbo dancers. The LIFE photo-essay was called “The Hopeful Launching of a Proud and Free Nigeria” (LIFE 1960).

The photographs of Achebe were all in color. Four of them picture the writer in profile sitting at a table, writing; two introduce Achebe facing the camera; and the last show him exhibiting the British and the American editions of the novel. As if by accidence or conceit (Achebe’s choice), a third book (anonymous for the viewers) but still visible, occupies the back stage. It is the OED, Oxford English dictionary, another authority in pain. I hear Achebe pronouncing: “First you have to learn Queen’s English, then you can break all her rules.”

Elisofon’s ‘Achebe’ integrates both with the literary-photographic work on the myths of Africa and the documentation of the transition’s impact on Nigerian economy, education and culture. In this extended format I have used, the photograph reads as a cautionary tale. The myth mongering, the LIFE 1961 essay, was paradoxically more political and conclusive than its factual counterpart, the structured documentation of transitory Nigeria from within the traditional dichotomy of the ‘new,’ the ‘modern,’ the ‘international’ versus the risky sadness of the bygone. Young writer Achebe on the photo, with the pen in his hand, connotes energy and dauntlessness (as do the images of the miners and the steel workers). But these qualities are benumbed by the romance of the yam festival and the phantoms of colonialism. In 1960s’ American Cold War ideology and concurrent LIFE magazine rhetoric, the ‘white cloth’ around the neck of the African would not be unlaced.

The creator of Things Fall Apart has now returned to Enugu and Odigi for his last rest and this cautionary tale is mere history. Or is it?

Photographs of Chinua Achebe at his house in Enugu, Nigeria (1959) courtesy of the Eliot Elisofon Photographic Archives (National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institution).

Eliot Elisofon’s famous portraits of a young Chinua Achebe

When the great Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe died this April, one of the photographs used repeatedly to illustrate stories or obituaries was a portrait taken of him in 1959 by the American photographer Eliot Elisofon.

It is useful to unpack the image, a conventional portrait of Achebe leaning on a desk with two copies of Things Fall Apart in front of him. A photograph, a snapshot, the filtering of the lost moment, is always more than the visual graphics and the intended ‘message’ it proffers to mediate.

Elisofon’s photograph has come to be beloved among Achebe’s readers, perhaps because it provokes a certain nostalgia for the optimism of the 1950s and 1960s — the prodigiously talented young novelist appears glamorous, diligent, and ready to embrace the promise of the new Nigerian nation that was about to come into being. But the story of how the image came to be taken reveals a very much more complicated history.

In total Elisofon took a series of eight photographs of Achebe. The full series are held by the Eliot Elisofon Photographic Archives at the National Museum of African Art (NMAfA) and can be viewed online via the Smithsonian Institution Research Information System.

But how did Elisofon get to photograph Achebe?

By 1959 Elisofon was a famous photojournalist with a background as a war correspondent in Morocco and Tunisia as well as earlier in Scandinavia during the World War II, as a color expert for John Huston’s location shooting of the colonial film “The African Queen” starring Laureen Bacall, Humphrey Bogart, and Katherine Hepburn and for climbing the Rwenzori Mountains (on the Uganda-DRC border) to take the very first color pictures of the wet fauna in the heath region (published in LIFE magazine in 1953).

His commission for LIFE Magazine in 1959, which meant another opportunity to travel to Africa, had two purposes, each of which impinges on my reading of the Achebe photographs: The first concerns the project to produce a re-affirmation of mythological Africa through combining western literature of the continent with fresh photographs, as mesmerized by visual cliché-mongering and stereotyping as their literary counterparts. So Elisofon’s travel (August 18 to December 20) was a quest to, on one hand, identify “African” settings that would harmonize with extracts from writers such as Joyce Cary, Winston Churchill, Ernest Hemingway, Henry M. Stanley, and Joseph Conrad.

It is the Conrad photo that interests me (above; in LIFE 1961, page 72).  The caption reads: “An old Warega tribesman of Congo [who] squats under a tree.” The description is only spatially true, as the photographer’s guidance was far more precise. Following the Conradian script (a collage of lines from Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness that contains the well-known episode about the hungry slave carrying the mysterious sign, “from beyond the seas”) Elisofon had theatrically wrapped a strip of white cloth around the anonymous and miserably looking Lega man’s neck.

Only a few weeks later, he was to meet Achebe in his home in Enugu, about 2570 km from where Elisofon had portrayed the ‘Conradian’ man discussed above, but given Achebe’s well-known and aggressive rejection of Conrad and Elisofon’s veneration of the same (not to mention of Stanley) and his obvious disregarding of Things Fall Apart, the real distance between them can only be measured in murky, racial moon years.

Elisofon’s library of literature (fiction, travelogues) of about one hundred titles that were selected to represent ‘literary’ Africa, and from where the fourteen qualified writers were culled for the racist essay, did not accommodate Achebe’s novel. And we are thankful for that. It was no doubt too close for contact; ‘savages’ do not write novels! Yet, we have to ask, why did Elisofon bother to photograph him at all?

The reason is related to the second part of his LIFE commission, the documentation of an African country in transition or of Nigeria’s route from dependency to independence, the medial peak of which was Elisofon’s coverage of the electoral campaign (rigged, some think, by the British) for the December 1959 election, which would usher in independence the next year (October 1, 1960). He portrayed legendary political leaders such as Samuel L. Akintola of the Action Group and the nationalists Michael Ihemukara Okpara and Nnamdi Azikiwe. Azikiwe, “the Zik of Africa,” who would become the country’s first president. If we only look at his photos from southeastern Nigeria and the Enugu State region, apart from meeting Achebe, Elisofon photographed workers at Ekulu coal mine and steel workers at the Oji River Power Station (west of Enugu). But it was the masqueraders at the Onwa Asaa (yam) festival in Ugwuoba (between Awka and Enugu) that triggered his interest to a maximum; the Washington archive holds around one hundred photographs emanating from his frantic day-long work following the Igbo dancers. The LIFE photo-essay was called “The Hopeful Launching of a Proud and Free Nigeria” (LIFE 1960).

The photographs of Achebe were all in color. Four of them picture the writer in profile sitting at a table, writing; two introduce Achebe facing the camera; and the last show him exhibiting the British and the American editions of the novel. As if by accidence or conceit (Achebe’s choice), a third book (anonymous for the viewers) but still visible, occupies the back stage. It is the OED, Oxford English dictionary, another authority in pain. I hear Achebe pronouncing: “First you have to learn Queen’s English, then you can break all her rules.”

Elisofon’s ‘Achebe’ integrates both with the literary-photographic work on the myths of Africa and the documentation of the transition’s impact on Nigerian economy, education and culture. In this extended format I have used, the photograph reads as a cautionary tale. The myth mongering, the LIFE 1961 essay, was paradoxically more political and conclusive than its factual counterpart, the structured documentation of transitory Nigeria from within the traditional dichotomy of the ‘new,’ the ‘modern,’ the ‘international’ versus the risky sadness of the bygone. Young writer Achebe on the photo, with the pen in his hand, connotes energy and dauntlessness (as do the images of the miners and the steel workers). But these qualities are benumbed by the romance of the yam festival and the phantoms of colonialism. In 1960s’ American Cold War ideology and concurrent LIFE magazine rhetoric, the ‘white cloth’ around the neck of the African would not be unlaced.

The creator of Things Fall Apart has now returned to Enugu and Odigi for his last rest and this cautionary tale is mere history. Or is it?

The “exceptional” kaffirs and the love of sunshine journalism on race

Last Friday, South Africa’s leading liberal newspaper, the Mail & Guardian, ran an article about the racist abuse hurled at black members of the rugby team at Ben Vorster High, a former Afrikaans-only school for whites in Tzaneen, Limpopo. The abuse includes (present tense, because it’s possibly still going on) opposing teams and possibly fans (because the article fails to clearly give the who) calling these teenage boys ”dogs” and “kaffir”, a racist slur used by whites against blacks in southern Africa.

“When their opponents in lily-white rugby teams start calling the black Ben Vorster High players “kaffirs” during matches,” went the article’s opening salvo, “their response is always the same: Just look at the scoreboard.”

Invariably the scoreboard showed that the school’s more racially representative team (9 of the first team’s starting 15 are black and mostly from poorer, working-class families) was winning. But, the article hastily points out, they don’t win “because they’re black tokens in the sport or because someone felt sorry for them”. No siree, bob. They win because they worked for it.

Gauging from reactions on Twitter – at least my feed and in the searches I did – the article was well received by white audiences. To them it was “good news”, “inspiring”, “a lovely, earthy story”, or some variation thereof. But there were grumblings of dissatisfaction and anger among black readers, myself included.

Firstly, and purely from a news perspective, it was an inexplicable editorial choice to write in the racist hecklers as an amorphous, inscrutable body of white racism, and to leave unsaid what the schools, parents and teachers were doing to make the rugby field a safer, racism-free environment. Compare this approach to some of the recent coverage and responses to racist heckling in football in Europe, or another recent racist incident in school rugby at Paarl Gimnasium, a school in the Western Cape province. The second report isn’t perfect, but it at least presents the racism not as the students’ problem, but as something that school administrators should root out. Given that school is generally a place where greater vigilance against bullying, sexism, homophobia and racism is expected of administrators, it’s strange that Mail & Guardian gave no treatment whatsoever to this aspect of the story.

The paper opted instead to present the racist abuse as though it were one of the many ordinary, immutable challenges that the average school boy faces. Even Andre Hay, the first team coach for the past 13 years, is said to tell the boys to just ignore the racist taunts and focus on the game instead. Hay is also portrayed as though he doesn’t see a role for himself, other coaches or the schools in putting an end to the racism, as any sane adult might want to do.

The other aspect to this article that I, and I suspect others, found most enraging was that it relies on the myth that South Africa is a meritocracy in order to subtly cast these boys, who are obviously talented and working hard, like many other rugby players, into the racist trope of the “exceptional Negro” — or, in this case, the “exceptional Kaffir”. This centuries-old racist trope holds that these black people here — for their intellect, sporting prowess, fortitude, willingness to work hard, accent, or any number of traits not determined by race — aren’t like these here other black people. They’re more like us white people, the trope holds. They work hard and don’t expect things to be handed to them. In a generally racialised society and in a sport with a history of racism, which race quotas are attempting to undo, apparently “controversially”, the article holds the boys up as different from the black players who “rely” on quotas to make the team. And the difference between them, the article says, boils down to how hard they work. Like Quentin Tarantino’s Django, the black boys in Ben Vorster High’s rugby teams are the one kaffir in ten thousand, according to the article’s narrative arch.

The other iffy things in the article — such as the fallacious Rainbow Nationalism blindness to race and the uninterrogated, unironic white-saviour complex of the members of the “traditional school community” who offer a “helping hand” to black students, whose parents are “mineworkers and domestic workers, or are unemployed” — punctuate what is an example of the kind of media narratives South African could really do without. And this is what the liberal press is publishing, and it was well received by much of the, dare I say, liberal white audience. Imagine what appears in the conservative press.

To be clear, Ben Vorster High, from other news reports and reports on its website (Afrikaans only), seems to be getting many things right. The school doesn’t appear to be like schools in the Free State province, where it’s said that racism is rife and a Human Rights Commission investigation is under way into the situation. That’s anyway a low standard. What really went wrong here was mostly a lack of social awareness by Mail & Guardian’s editorial team. They didn’t tackle the story with the appropriate frame of reference and they didn’t report on the aspects of the story that would have given pause to those reading it as a good-news story. This was a disservice to the school, teachers, parents and pupils of Ben Vorster High, as well as the newspaper’s readers, many of whom seem comfortable enough in their obliviousness to readily accept sunshine journalism about race in South Africa.

Fok Your Hood

As someone who has lived in the Bay Area in California for over a half decade now, you don’t have to tell me about corny neighborhood renaming schemes spearheaded by property developers. After a year or so of living in an apartment on the border of North and West Oakland, banners began to appear on the lampposts reading “KONO,” apparently short for Koreatown-North Oakland. Aren’t these agents of gentrification supposed to be thecreative class? Seriously, that’s the best they could come up with? Then there’s the two or three blocks along Telegraph Avenue downtown renamed “Uptown.” See, former mayor Jerry Brown was involved in the building of an all-inclusive apartment complex, complete with gym and hideously incongruous signage over the past couple of years, and it’s only fair that we reimagine these blocks as a “neighborhood.”

What’s with this obsession with pretending parts of the central business district qualify as a neighborhood or community? Ask Cape Town’s creative class, as this city is Richard Florida’s fantasyland. As I was leaving one of my favorite bookstores today, I noticed some new window decals across the street at the mock Portuguese coffee chain Vida e Caffè. (At the risk of pedantry, someone needs to tell the genius behind the name that caffè is Italian; the Portuguese is café.) Across the sliding glass doors, a number of names were listed along with an injunction to “name this hood” by going to .

The options are awful: Roodehek or Buitenkant after nearby roads; Soro, or South of Roeland Street; Hamro after the triangle between Hatfield, Mill, and Roeland; a couple of names after nearby shopping centers; Little Gardens, even though this area is across the City Bowl from Gardens itself; and a half dozen others. One of the potential names is La Guma, after a novelist once imprisoned in the neighborhood. By far the worst is “Creative Quarter,” currently tied with La Guma for second place, behind Little Gardens.

Who’s behind this endeavor? According to the , the committee includes “journalists, historians, designers and entrepreneurs.” But once you click to see who’s actually involved, the “historian” is actually the director of the Jewish Museum, who received an undergraduate degree in history, but went on to get an MBA. The “journalists” all appear to be radio hosts, and every other person on the list works either for the City, or more likely, is in business. In short, hardly a diverse group representing the “stakeholders” in this project, this is a textbook instance of growth machine-style urban politics. And I’d be remiss not to mention that close to 60 percent of the panel is white.

Lest you leave this blog thinking you’re going to have to call a chunk of District Six the “Creative Quarter” in the near future, the plot thickens. Another business-driven coalition, the Cape Town Partnership (CTP), is simultaneously behind the drive to rename roughly the same area “The Fringe.” While formally registered as a non-profit, the CTP is the chief force behind Cape Town’s City Improvement District (CID) model of urban development. One recent academic paper describes the CTP as “a bilateral partnership between the City and the business owners of the CBD.” The same authors describe the objectives of the CTP as twofold: “to respond to the needs of large companies, and to the international tourism industry in the CBD by fostering urban regeneration.”

So again, we see textbook growth machine politics, complete with City Improvement Districts, subsidies for business to remain in the area, and an emphasis on “creativity,” with that word standing in for what used to be called entrepreneurship. Seriously though, for a City that still calls District Six “Zonnebloem” – the post-removals whitened name, Afrikaans for “sunflower” – you’d think there’d be a bit more sensitivity. After all, the District Six Museum isn’t but a block or two from the aforementioned Vida e Caffè. But no, these ouens insist on calling this place “The Fringe.”

Why a fringe? Is this the barrier between the CBD and the parts of Woodstock that can’t be fully gentrified? Perhaps this is the fringe of the CBD itself, the last stop on the way to leaving the confines of “improvement.” Or else perhaps I have it backward. Maybe this is the fringe as the outer reaches, the periphery, that which is beyond the norm. Is this growth coalition serious then, calling central District Six a “fringe”? It was only fifty years ago – less in some areas – that this was the center of so-called Colored life in Cape Town. There’s a veritable industry of memorialization surrounding the place, and the best they could come up with is something that peripheralizes the area and doubles as a signifier of its bohemian nature?

The erasure of District Six from popular memory almost seems to be a coordinated program for these people. The Name Your Hood campaign was distributing brochures in the area, and it included a brief history of the neighborhood. Unsurprisingly, it begins with Dutch heritage in the 18th and 19th centuries, and then immediately jumps to the 1960s (one mention) and 1980s (one mention). The only sign even suggesting that something foul went down here is the concluding mention of Alex la Guma and Dulcie September, though it’s simply mentioned that they were imprisoned here as anti-apartheid activists. The history conveniently skips the fact that all Colored people were forcibly removed from the area over the course of two decades, with District Six renamed “Zonnebloem” and an all-white Technikon constructed down the road.

This is all part of Cape Town as World Design Capital 2014. A couple of years ago, Cape Town was voted World Design Capital by the International Council of Societies of Industrial Design (ICSID), which, despite the misleading name, is essentially a PR operation for industrial design firms. Indeed, ICSID’s own website describes itself as “a non-profit organisation that protects and promotes the interests of the profession of industrial design.” Funny enough, the WDC2014 offices – a “pop up” office in their own jargon – are located in the “Fringe District.”

Next time you see deceptive billboards advertising Cape Town as the “World Design Capital” or seemingly innocuous campaigns that purport to foster a sense of community, know these operations for what they are. Far from a conspiracy theory, this is straightforward City Improvement District (CID) politics, public-private partnerships, and urban boosterism: textbook neoliberal urban policy. The CID concept has long gone hand in hand with removing “crime and grime” from the central business district, both in Cape Town (since 2000) and in Johannesburg (since 1992), and attracting businesses by any means necessary. In practice, this has meant the reproduction of the apartheid city and augmented repressive apparatus, all under the banner of “improvement,” “design,” and “creativity.”

Marx describes this phenomenon well in The German Ideology: “For each new class which puts itself in the place of one ruling before it, is compelled, merely in order to carry through its aim, to represent its interest as the common interest of all the members of society, that is, expressed in ideal form: it has to give its ideas the form of universality, and represent them as the only rational, universally valid ones.”

If you were to criticize someone from the CTP, or anyone from the City really, as representing the narrow interests of property developers and design firms, you can be sure you’ll catch some confused stares. They’ve been so successful in promoting this World Design Capital nonsense – the concept is so hegemonic –  that most people in Cape Town seem to think it’s a prestigious design award, as opposed to a scheme originating in the heart of businessland.

* Photo credit: Barry Christiansson.

Belafonte and Scorsese plan TV series on Leopold II’s Brutal Rule in Congo

By now, a lot has been written on the history of Belgian King Leopold II’s deadly reign over his own private colony, Congo Free State from 1885-1908 (after which it became a formal Belgian colony and was renamed Belgian Congo). Strangely though, there is not much in the way of films or TV series–well in English at least–of Leopold II’s brutal rule of what is now the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Some of the most famous literary examples being Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Crime of the Congo, and more recently, Adam Hochschild’s King Leopold’s Ghost. Under the guise of humanitarianism and philanthropy, the king (and the companies he contracted large tracts of land out to as concessions) began plundering the country’s vast supplies of ivory, rubber, and minerals. In the process, anywhere from 5 to 10 million Congolese were killed, with the failure to meet hefty rubber collection quotas being punishable by death.

A made-for-TV documentary on the subject called ”Congo: White King, Red Rubber, Black Death” was released back in 2003 and is available to watch in its entirety on YouTube. It is by no means a great film, but it does provide a reasonable amount of information, so much so that the Belgian government got upset. Then there’s a 2006 documentary film King Leopold’s Ghost, marketed as based on Hochschild’s book. In Belgium, a number of films have appeared (some that we have covered before): several colonial films, Un Congolais qui dérange, Mémoire belge au Congo, and the recent series Bonjour Congo.

Now Deadline.com is reporting that Martin Scorsese and Harry Belafonte plan on joining forces to produce a miniseries that takes on Leopold II’s notoriously brutal rule over the country now known as the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). Deadline reports that Scorcese and Belafonte are “gathering source material and interviewing writers, with Scorsese planning to direct the first installment and secure top talent to helm the rest.” And that the project was born out of Belafonte’s own interest in the horrific history of King Leopold II’s involvement in Congo’s rubber trade. (Belafonte, if you remember, has a long association with African anti-colonial, nationalist and antiapartheid movements.)

We have a sense Scorsese and  Belafonte will do a better job with their miniseries.