Sean Jacobs's Blog, page 454

Under Nelson Mandela Boulevard—A Story About Cape Town’s Tanzanian Stowaways—Fall 2011

It was mid-2011 when I first heard about the community of Tanzanian stowaways living under Nelson Mandela Boulevard at the foot of Cape Town, where the high rise buildings end and the docklands begin. David Southwood was the guy who knew about them, a local photographer with a penchant, to quote his writer friend Ivan Vladislavić, “for buggering around in places nobody else buggers around in.” He said he’d been visiting the underpasses for two years with a book of photographs in mind, and felt the time had come to begin collaborating with a writer. Was I interested?

I met him the next day where Christian Barnard Street, named for the city’s world famous heart surgeon, slips under the foreshore freeways and comes to an end at the port’s trident-spike palisade fence. It was Autumn and the hectare of landfill beneath the highway substructure had sprouted lurid green grass and oily puddles. As we clodded across it Dave pointed out a surface deposit of beer bottle shards and bone chip.

“Cow molars,” he said.

“Large groups of Tanzanians used to gather here every Sunday to boil cow heads, bought for R1 a pop from a Woodstock butchery.”

When we reached the far end Dave turned to his right and began climbing the flyover’s steep abutment wall, digging the toes of his boots into the stone facing and pointing out slogans written here and there in permanent marker and white paint.

The power of sea forever and ever

Seaman life no story only action

Today Africa Tomorrow Yurope

We paused by one inscrutable message—Aver Theang Isgoabe Orite—but then noticed the three young men sitting above us on the metal barrier of the bridge, their faces deeply submerged in their hoodies. At the top we collided with their knees and then milled awkwardly around in front of them, bounded by the dizzying drop down to the start of highway on the left, the sloping wall we’d just scrambled up and the cars flying by on the bridge to the right, rushing down to join the highway. Ahead lay a 100 metre slice of lopsided, downward sloping land which was grassed and broken up by three wild olives. Beneath the first of these three more men lay submerged in dirty blankets. At the sound of our voices one of the sleepers wriggled out of bed and pissed against the second tree, all the while squinting in our direction. Dave raised his hand.

“Haiyo Dave,” said the distant figure, zipping up his jeans and raising a hand in reply.

“Adam!”

“Yeah is me, Dave, I’ve been in Russia since I last saw you man, in Saint Petersburg.”

“No shit. What was it like?”

“Cold there in Russia, Dave.”

The obscure city ledge was exposed to the wind off the Atlantic and Adam, in a holey black T-shirt, was already shivering, clutching his hands together by his groin. He had a rough tattoo of a container ship all the way up his right forearm, and a much neater tattoo of a nautical wheel atop his left hand.

“You know, Dave, we beach boys call this place ‘The Freezer’ because it’s so fucking cold,” he said, a gold-plated incisor glinting in his grin.

Beach boys. Seamen. Seapower–these, I came to learn, were the names the bridge-dwelling Tanzanians had given themselves.

Skirting back around the knees of the three sitters Dave pointed at the alien-speak on the abutment wall–Aver Theang Isgoabe Orite.

“What does it mean?”

Adam laughed.

“Tha’s not Swahili, Dave, tha’s Bob Marley,” he said, in the tailings of what I’d have said was a Brummie accent if the likelihood of his having ever lived in Birmingham wasn’t so infinitesimally small.

“Baby don’t worry, about a thing. Because every lil thin, goabe orite,” he croaked, and the three gray sitters cracked wide grins.

While Dave and Adam caught up I absent-mindedly rolled an anvil-shaped rock under my foot, and then tipped it over. Beneath it, in a sweating plastic sleeve, were the emergency travel documents of one Kham’si Swaleh Kigomba. The ink had bled and the beach boys who gathered around to see said that Kigomba had possibly caught a ship, or had more likely been arrested and deported. Nobody could say for sure what had become of him.

“Take it, as a memory,” Adam advised, and I did want to get the find somewhere nicer, drier. In the end, though, I folded it up and put it back on the flattened yellow grass, next to a blanched snail shell, and placed the ship-shaped rock back on top.

*

The following week I arranged to meet Adam under the Edward VII statue at the southern end of the Grand Parade, where dozens of beach boys gather each day to play a game they call “last card”, betting with R1 coins. If Cape Town has a crucible of cultures then the Parade is it. Here the Italianate City Hall overlooks a market in which francophone immigrants display rip-off belts and handbags, alongside Rastafarians in sack cloth who put out tubers harvested from the slopes of Table Mountain, all for the interest of the commuters going to and fro between the railway station and the inner city. It is the perfect place to hide in plain sight if you happen to be foreign and undocumented and it is here that the beach boys make their living, either pushing the traders’ lockable trolleys to and from nearby warehouses for a R10 fee, or by pushing drugs behind the chip and salomie stalls at the square’s west end. Edward VII, hat in hand, a seagull almost always shitting down the imperial forehead, is something of a beach boy Christ the Redeemer, if only because the elevation of the statue’s stepped plinth makes it easy to spot police a long way off.

It was drizzling on the day I was supposed to meet Adam, however, and the statue steps were deserted, as was the square. I eventually found him by the toilet block at the northern end, where streams of piss crisscross the pavement, the toilet facility having been moth-balled years back. He was wearing an orange overall, and with his caramel skin, gold-plated incisors and home-made tattoos looked–on purpose, no doubt–like a prison gang general. The policeman frisking him completed the image quite nicely.

“Haiyo Sean, the police just searched me for drugs,” said Adam, sauntering over a moment later.

“I take it you’re not carrying?”

Adam opened his mouth and rolled a white plastic cube around with his tongue.

“Coke?”

“Heroin”

“Don’t swallow.”

“It’s no problem. I’ll just vomit it up later.”

Adam felt like a smoke so we headed for The Freezer via the chaotic taxi deck above the railway station, where he spent more time walking backwards than forwards, cursing people at the top of his voice and making enquiries about their narcotic wares. “You got Swazi? No don’t talk to me about Swazi, don’t ever talk to me about fucking Swazi!” Everyone seemed to be on something, or looking to get on. I’ve been up on the deck a hundred times and the people around me have always seemed like ordinary folks, on their way to jobs in Edgars, Shoprite or KFC. In Adam’s company it was an entirely different relational dimension, alive with criminal opportunity.

We descended to the foreshore, aiming at the port, and came once more below the Nelson Mandela Boulevard flyover, where he lifted a metal lid in the pavement and revealed a washing machine tumble of rags. “Tha’s my bed folded up in there. Tha’s my wardrobe.”

Up at The Freezer we ran into a 19 year old called Daniel-Peter, whose lips were so full they made his entire face look distended, until he smiled and his features claimed the golden ratio of facial beauty. Daniel-Peter had been staring intently at the harbour, and now pointed to a vessel with a flag of Jamaica painted on the smokestack. He said something to Adam in Swahili.

“The boy says it’s a good ship because it’s low in the water. That means it’s loaded and ready to go,” Adam explained.

“We’re going to try to stow that ship tonight, me and this boy. I love this boy,” he said paternally. “He’s not scared of anything. He’s a little boxer from Keko in Dar es Salaam. All these Keko boys are little boxers.”

Notebook against a knee, pen poised, I asked Adam for a short summary of his career as a stowaway.

He finished mulling his weed and quickly rolled a joint, which he lit and puffed on a few times before beginning theatrically in the third person:

“Adam is a outcast boy from Tanzania. His daddy, who he never knew, is from Greece. His poor mummy is a black girl from a place called Mbwera, where the people are all witches.”

My immediate thought was that I was being fobbed off by a canny wide boy, my over-eager pen fed a meaningless blend of myth and stereotype. But if it was Adam’s intention to hide himself behind the general he had not factored in his side-kick’s eagerness to please.

“His name is Memory Card,” Daniel-Peter broke in. “That is what we call him.”

Adam sighed—“that’s right’’–and like a family pariah playing to the hero-worship of younger cousins pulled off his shirt and pointed out where he’d had the nickname tattooed on a pectoral in crack-cocaine font.

“They call me Memory Card because I always remind the boys what is good and what is bad behaviour. I’m a peacemaker. I don’t like to see people fighting.”

“Who is Aniya?” I asked, pointing to a tattoo on his shoulder.

“Princess Aniya is me daughter,” he said, pronouncing it door-ah and putting the provenance of his accent—Birmingham—beyond doubt. He went on to relate the story of his passage to England, how he had entered through the Port of Hull in 2003 concealed in a Maltese bulk carrier called Global Victory, which he had boarded in the Port of Richard’s Bay on South Africa’s north coast. In his first months in the UK he had lived in Sheffield with a benevolent Cameroonian before bussing to Birmingham, where the Jamaican gangsters around Handsworth had permitted him to hustle small amounts of marijuana. Aniya’s mother, a second generation Jamaican immigrant, had tried to save him from the streets by convincing her own mother to take him in, but with no other way of making money Adam continued to hustle by day and was eventually done for dealing. He met Aniya for the first time in the visitors’ room in Winson Greene prison. Two months later he was put on a flight to Dar es Salaam.

I scratched it all down.

“Tell them,” said Adam, “that I’m fucken West Brom for life. Up the Baggies, yeah!”

As quickly as it had appeared the football hooligan in him receded behind plumes of blue smoke, and we talked about the thrill of stepping out into the unknown. I regaled him with short biographies for Ibn Battuta, Wilfred Thesiger, David Livingstone, and he said, “Tha’ Dave had the heart of a seaman, man.” Then he became broody.

“You know we rob the new boys, Sean? We do. We bring them some place like this and ask them questions. Where you from? What you doin here? Where’s your money? Then we search the guy. In ‘99 this Tanzanian boy came here, about Daniel-Peter’s age. Nobody knew him from before, so we took his clothes, his phone and his shoes. That night the guy stowed a ship. Three other guys stowed in the engine room of the same ship. The crew found those three guys after a few days but they only found the other guy when they opened the hold at the next port. The captain called those three guys and said ‘we have a dead body here, do you know him?’ The guys said they did not know him but then the one guy started to cry. You see Sean, that night when they stole the boy’s things, this one guy felt bad and took the clothes back to him. The dead person was wearing those clothes so he knew it was the same boy.”

I asked if he was the person who felt bad and he shook his head. “No, that was another guy.”

* This is the first part (“Fall 2011″) of four.

Immigrant, noun.

Threatening darker-skinned person from darker-skinned country, escaping poverty and persecution due to policies of lighter-skinned powers who finds residence in lighter-skinned country. Accused of taking job of native lighter-skinned person, who was once an immigrant, too–but did not take job of then native darker-skinned person. Preferred policy was to take entire country, and life of native too – thereby becoming the new native.

Photo Credit: Dulce Pinzon. This is reposted from Garda’s mainstreamisms tumblr.

The South African Compromise

At this week’s Open Book Festival in Cape Town, one of South Africa’s many literary events, one of the most anticipated non-fiction writers was Adam Habib. A veteran political scientist, erstwhile Trotskyist, and as of recently, vice chancellor (equal to an American college president) at the University of the Witwatersrand, Habib just released his new book South Africa’s Suspended Revolution. I picked up a copy last week but haven’t gotten around to reading it yet, and I was eager to see what he’d bring to the table. To be honest, I didn’t have particularly high hopes, as Habib’s recent writing has tended toward overuse of needlessly simplistic abstractions like “civil society” and the “corporate sector.” Still, I wasn’t prepared for what I witnessed. At this point, his take is closer to that of a corporate consultant than an academic, let alone a former leftist, and it was clear his audience had shifted altogether.

Let me substantiate my claim. The most compelling evidence in this particular talk was Habib’s penchant for referring to a generalized you, but of course he wasn’t talking to those in attendance. Rather, Habib’s you is the state-capital alliance; we might call it a state’s eye view, or possibly even the view from capital. Or as James Scott aptly puts it, this is “seeing like a state.” Just look at the following quotations that I hastily transcribed during his talk:

If you don’t do it [create a social compact], you’re going to lose the whole castle.

If you don’t deal with land redistribution …

You don’t give them skill sets, you don’t give them equipment …

How do you give poor people power?

Paying people 75 bucks [Rand] for farm work is unacceptable in this modern world. Instead you …

Who is this you? If it weren’t already obvious, Habib told the audience outright: “the business community” (his term) aligned with state administrators, though with capital always driving the alliance. “For most of my career,” he told us, “the only people who would listen to me were a bunch of lefties.” Throughout the talk, he made demeaning comments about his leftist past, occasionally referring to “my lefty comrades.” But now, he beamed, he meets regularly with bank CEOs and representatives of the “corporate sector.” In short, he’s become a consultant to the business world, relaying tales of “civil society” to executives.

Why? Ultimately Habib’s motivation is the promotion of a social compact, a compromise, and this is out of sheer necessity in his formulation. “If we don’t cut the deal, this country will burn,” he concluded. Note again his use of a first person pronoun to refer not to the people who will do the burning, but to those who have the most to lose from unrest.

So what is a compromise for Habib? He provided two empirical from recent South African history: the state provision of ARVs and the 2010 World Cup. Of course the latter is hardly an example of a compromise between capital and labor of the sort he’s describing, but this can be chalked up to a bit of conflation: political expediency on the one hand, with compromise on the other. In both cases, however, he made the tautological point that ARV provision and the World Cup were possible because they were promoted by political elites. Conversely, service delivery won’t see the light of day, as poor and working class people lack the political leverage to see it through. So in short, if South Africa’s underemployed working class can forge some kind of alliance with elites, they’ll get some service delivery; they just need to convince elites that this is in everyone’s (read: the “corporate sector’s”) interest.

And then the most telling moment came: Habib boasted of his support for the outsourcing of workers at Wits University. Of course the policy predates him, originating with another ex-Marxist, his predecessor Colin Bundy. Even a month ago, Habib was far more ambivalent. As he told one critic, “I wish I could [end the outsourcing], but I can’t. There are no reserves. I’m talking about Wits’s money. Wits doesn’t have money. If I start spending recklessly, then nine months from now Wits will be in trouble.” But in this context, to a packed auditorium in Cape Town, Habib reframed this outsourcing as a compromise: the workers get to keep their jobs, and Wits gets to keep its balance sheets in the clear.

He made a similar move with regard to the debates over the Youth Wage Subsidy (YWS), first proposed by the Democratic Alliance (DA) and subsequently advocated by the African National Congress (ANC). In Habib’s telling, the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) opposes the YWS out of a sense of sheer proprietorship; the unions are defending their older members against an influx of cheap (because subsidized) younger labor power. The state and capital, meanwhile, simply want to see the youth unemployment problem solved. What’s preventing compromise then, at least in this formulation, is stubborn unions defending the narrow interests of their membership as against the broader pool of potential employees. That’s certainly one way to frame it. Another is that the introduction of a two-tier labor market would pit workers who have decent jobs against a reserve army of younger labor. To attack COSATU for defending its members’ narrow interest is to effectively blame workers who have secured a union job for the lack of decent work for South Africa’s youth.

I admit to being absolutely shocked to hear this from Habib. I know that he and I have very different analyses of the post-apartheid developmental trajectory, but to hear him spout this sort of naked defense of austerity as in everyone’s best interest was far more than I expected. It wouldn’t have been as offensive if he didn’t pepper the rest of his talk with references to the bank CEOs he apparently meets with on a regular basis. But for him to openly advocate austerity and simultaneously refer to himself as an “activist” – and he did this multiple times during the event – is just disingenuous. How did Habib end up as a South African version of Thomas Friedman (albeit a far more intelligent and articulate version), condensing sociological analysis for “the business community”?

Office Talk No.1

Black Thought, Boots Riley (of the Coup), Jeru da Damaja, Dead Prez, Talib Kweli, and others at Pan African Market, Long Street, Cape Town, 2001 [Chimurenga].

Nairobi Governor Evans Kidero slaps Nairobi Women Rep Rachel Shebesh in front of cameras [Grafix TV]*

Jay Z: The African Way [DJ PAPERCUTT]

Making Tracks: Chicago Footwork  [Thump]

I’m an Alien [Rebel Diaz]

Born Free [Village Voice]

How the World Answered the March on Washington [PRI The World]

Follow that bird [Globe and Mail]

Moroccan Brides [African Digital Art]

A baffling silence on the long tail of Apartheid corruption [Business Day]

Liverpool fan left with red face after getting misspelled Kolo Toure tattoo [Metro]

Southie St. Patrick’s Day breakfast slugfest begins early [Boston Globe]

* Some Kenyans thought it would be funny to start a #SlapThemLikeKidero hashtag on Twitter.

Weekend Music Break 53

If you don’t know now you know. Weekend soon come. We got music from South Africa, Togo, Ghana, Senegal, Zambia, Kenya, Ireland and Belgium in this week’s music break. So let’s get started:

South African house producer Oskido is always on the hunt for new musical talent. He’s found it now in the energy and sound of Busiswa. Here’s their track with Uhuru called “Ngoku”:

Uniting Brussels (via Kinshasa) and Queens, emcees Aja Black and Big Samir are The Reminders. Check out their interview on the Sway show and see how they use words for ammunition in “If You Didn’t Know”:

Irish hip-hop musician Rejjie Snow returns with a lyrical story of his name in “Snow” and raises the bar for sonic production:

Togolese singer Papou has the formula for a solid dance joint with “AGO”:

A jazz singer from Ghana’s Volta region, Jojo Abot lived in Brooklyn before returning home to sing and act. “Hex” is her latest musical offering, with smooth vocals and dreamy black and white visuals. The return has been good to Jojo. She has performed at the Chale Wote Street Art Festival (which is happening again this weekend in Accra — we’ll have some impressions up on the blog next week) and she stars alongside legendary palmwine singer Koo Nimo in the new film Kwaku Ananse directed by Akosua Adoma Owusu.

One of the best male house singers in the South African game, Shota, presents the new track “Ben10” off his album THE WARRIOR. This one will do some damage on the floor, but too bad his girl in the video seems more attracted to a strange animated character than she is to him:

Senegalese chanteuse Coumba Gawlo, with Pape Thiopet at her side, will give you a taste of laamb wrestling and kola nuts in her latest mbalax jam “Lamb Dji”:

Young Kenyan rapper Cool Kid demonstrates he already has a taste for the mic in the track “Burn Cool” with Mtapa:

Ghanaian producer and talented vocalist Bisa Kdei keeps the momentum from his hit “Azonto Ghost” as he confronts his enemy with personal strength in “Metanfo” (“My enemy”):

And Zambian crew Zone Fam get into the language of the body with “Translate”:

Share your favorite new videos in the comments below.

Jeffrey Gettleman’s profile of Paul Kagame, “the global elite’s favorite strongman”

Jeffrey Gettleman, East Africa Bureau Chief for the New York Times, has written a feature article for the paper’s Sunday Magazine focusing on Rwanda’s long-standing president, Paul Kagame, and by extension the country. (The piece has been online since Monday.) While Gettleman has largely focused on covering stories of violence, war, and conflict in East and Central Africa, often making wide sweeping claims and generalizations about African politics (and erring on the side of “ethnographic porn” for Western audiences), this time he takes a slightly different direction.

The piece, in large part, is based on a three-hour interview with President Kagame himself. Gettleman is a bit short on Kagame’s biography, flattening the motivations behind his political ideology. In fact, this ideology was developed in concert with the likes of President Yoweri Museveni of Uganda. Both attended Ntare Boys School in Mbarara, Uganda and joined the Ugandan National Resistance Army (NRA) in order to envision a path national autonomy independent from neocolonial dynamics and post-colonial dictatorial regimes. Rather than analyzing Kagame as a social product of the historical dynamics of the region, Gettleman casts Kagame as an excluded and disaffected ethnic Tutsi who, like other African leaders in surrounding countries, has been co-opted into and/or succumbed to authoritarian practices after the revolution. In the process, Kagame has laid claim to a new, largely Tutsi-led dispensation: one that is ostensibly post-ethnic, technocratic and “developed.” The overall focus of the piece is the relationship between this new order and the personality quirks of Kagame himself, an anthropological foray into the Machiavellian tendencies of the New Millennium Kagame—a novel breed of African dictator characterized by a cold, calculated, and scientific methodological progressivism.

What is disconcerting is that while the history of violence in the region and the politics and aftermath of genocide loom large behind the essay—not to mention that whole colonialism thing—the ongoing cycles of violence in Rwanda and the region and ethnic and political identities, are under-theorized. Instead, Gettleman focuses on the two (most recent) ways in which Rwanda and the Rwandese (Banyarwanda) diaspora circulate in mainstream global discourses: vis à vis the cult of personality surrounding Kagame as a leader-manager who gets things accomplished, and Rwanda as the celebrated neoliberal economic development poster-child of the US and the IFIs (international finance institutions)—i.e., the other (not South African!) African exception.

In the process, Gettleman ends up reproducing these Rwandan global tropes for the Western reader. Indeed, Rwandese appear as nervous and zombified citizens: as blogger and researcher Sonja Uwimana (she’s an AIAC alum btw) quipped sarcastically on Twitter: “Rwandans tend to do what their leaders say, whether its hacking up their neighbors or stringing up mosquito nets.”

Once again, Mr. Gettleman provides Western audiences with much more on the directives of rulers rather than the complexities of governance itself and the agency of those who are ruled. In fact, the authoritarian, top-down approach to understanding contemporary governance in Rwanda, and the very dynamics of the genocide in April 1994 itself, have been critiqued time and again by countless scholars. In the New York Times Magazine feature, an exception to the Kagame-only focus might be one particularly disturbing foray when the journalist “researches” Rwandans’ apprehensions of their ethnic identities and of Kagame himself—he asks his informants to self-identify as Tutsi or Hutu. It might provide some representation of actual Rwandese voices, except that it’s so disturbing.

Despite the shortcomings of the piece, Gettleman does offer an evocative and well-written exploration of President Kagame, allowing the reader to attain a sort of intimacy with a political leader who often feels distant and difficult to know. He also makes a decent assessment of Rwanda-DRC border dynamics, challenging Kagame’s support of M23 rebels in Eastern Congo although he surely doesn’t push Kagame’s interventions in Rwanda and DRC enough. But we get some sense that Rwanda is not a completely exceptional nation-state in a vacuum, but a geographic space with populations intimately connected to the social, economic and political dynamics across its borders.

Finally, he makes two very important observations: first, the mode of governance via security politics (the promise of security of bodies in exchange for the compromise of other freedoms and rights) that has become the norm in post-conflict Rwanda and Uganda, for example. Secondly, he at least begins to nudge toward a critique of US-Rwanda relations—indeed, a critique of the development world’s strategic use of Rwanda as a “success story” in the context of increasingly insecure and precarious African economies.

In conclusion: If the essay had focused more on these dynamics rather than the usual tropes of (1) the eccentricity of the African leader/dictator and (2) the failure of African governments to democratize, perhaps Rwanda and its citizens would have had a real chance to be part of a new post-genocide story.

Katy Perry’s Roar

Been hearing this song nonstop on the radio on my drive to university. (Sean’s 7-year daughter has memorized the lyrics.) Today, while I was sweating it out at the YMCA, I saw the new “official” music video for “Roar” and it’s a send-up of Tarzan and Jungle Book, using some of the most tired old Mowgli and monkeys tropes:

Ah, I see. Her old-timey plane crashed. In the JUNGLE. And it’s sort of Indian-African jungle combo. Because it can’t be one or the other, surely – that’s too complicated to separate out our colonial jungle fantasies. Then she puts on a fruity loin-cover so that we see that she has transformed herself, via the magical strength that edenic places like the Indian jungle give white women with low self-esteem. Someone tell Katy’s makeup artist that using too much bronzer and dying her hair jet black does not a native make.

The rest of the time is spent roaring away, in a display of her new-found strength. At one point, she even roars away some stick-figure natives carrying bows and arrows (the scene employs cave-drawing aesthetics – because people in jungle are still drawing hunting scenes on cave walls). Maybe the stick figure hunters run away because she hadn’t brushed her teeth in the jungle, either. Then there are some cutesy hijinks of her pet monkey standing on her shoulder, sticking its arse in her face, etcetera.

I only wish that her personal life really reflected the lyrics, which begin with explaining how subservient she was to men:

“I used to bite my tongue and hold my breath / scared to rock the boat and make a mess,” etcetera. “I guess I forgot I had a choice / I let you push me past the breaking point …”

Then move towards expressing her intent to change all that:

“… But now you’re gonna hear me roar…”

Tell that to ex-husband and self-proclaimed sex addict Russell Brand (whom she claims hasn’t ”heard from him since he texted me saying he was divorcing me December 31, 2011″ and her  on-again-off-again man of the moment and serial dater John Mayer, who may not have got that memo from the jungle.

African Radio’s growing and enduring popularity

A few days ago, I overheard a BBC World Service presenter announce an on air discussion on media in Africa by saying that many young people “do away with radio and television” and get their news online and from each other instead.

But do they really? Have new media, such as internet, SMS, smart phones and social media platforms taken over radio’s role as news provider? With all those technologically savvy young people, browsing, downloading and discovering the online world in internet cafes, did radio indeed lose its relevance to young people in Africa?

Now, the meanings of both ‘Africa’ and ‘young’ vary, but if we take Africa in its Sub-Saharan shape and ‘young’ as a life stage somewhere between 15 and 30 (although it really depends on who you ask) the answer that emerges from some simple stats looks like a no.

Even with the improvements in internet access, only a small share of youth in Africa actually enjoys the privilege of steady and reliable connectivity. Access to broadband differs per country, but the realities of Africa’s current online capacity still restrict the majority of young people from fully entering the online world of 3G. And those who do have access to (reliable) 3G are usually the richer urban youth (Levi Obijiofor has written a great chapter on this topic in Herman Wasserman’s book Popular Media, Democracy and Development).

If we are to believe UNESCO, the proliferation of radio in Africa — a process which started when many of the airwaves opened up about 20 years ago — is alive and well today. Following some radio research carried out by Mary Myers, the medium’s growing and enduring popularity as a means of accessing news, information, entertainment and music seems all but fading.

No surprise, really, if you think about some of radio’s advantages. Readily available, immediate, pervasive and affordable, radio is the only reliable means for information and knowledge exchange in many communities where access to electricity, internet, telephones and television is not all that common. And unlike most other news outlets, especially online ones, radio does not discriminate against those who cannot read and write.

Of course, radio’s power and reach can and have of course been (mis)used to spread divisions and hate as well, but its high accessibility still renders it one of the most democratic forms of media. This accessibility can mean a lot of different things for different people. For those who look for ‘informed citizenship’, it might be most important to stay up to date about national or local political developments, when others might be more interested in radio’s ability to offer a window into the world beyond the boundaries of their own communities or countries.

Radios are also light, portable and affordable, which makes them easy to pick up and move around. And by being pretty straightforward to learn, radio is a great platform for young people to produce and create news as well, rather than simply consume it. At a time when ‘youth empowerment’ and ‘youth participation’ continue to buzz around political and development circles, radio might better be conceived as a medium of opportunity for young people in Africa, rather than something they are massively doing away with. The growing interest in youth-centered and youth-led radio shows in Africa attest to the medium’s continuing popularity.

Today, growing numbers of radio stations, across the continent, are training young people to deliver news to their peers themselves.

The fact that today, as a news medium, radio seems to trump online media in accessibility and therefore popularity doesn’t mean that the information revolution isn’t happening, though. It is, and it takes many different and exciting forms. But the improvements in ICTs and infrastructure in some areas don’t mean young people are ‘doing away with radio’ all over the continent. It’s not an either/or story: ‘old’ and ‘new’ media can converge as well; radio shows can be shared on the internet, videos can be played and shared with smart phones (by those who do have access to it) and listeners can use their mobile phones to participate in live TV or radio shows.

So yes, let’s celebrate new media and online news, but also keep in mind that revolutions tend to be slower than we’d sometimes like. It will take a while before the majority of young people in Africa will reap the new media fruits. Meanwhile, let’s also give it up for radio.

Morgan Tsvangirai and Opposition Politics in Zimbabwe

Zimbabwe’s nationwide elections passed without bloodshed last month, but they were not free from controversy. On July 29, citizens went to the polls to elect a president and parliamentary representatives in the first electoral contest since 2008, and the first since Zimbabwe introduced a new constitution earlier this year. The candidates for the nation’s highest office were the same as they were in 2008, when Morgan Tsvangirai, running on the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) ticket, squared off against the incumbent, Robert Mugabe of the ruling ZANU-PF (Zimbabwe African National Union-Political Front).

Five years ago, Tsvangirai narrowly edged out Mugabe in a three-way race for the presidency. Having failed to win an outright majority with 48 percent to Mugabe’s forty-three, however, Tsvangirai and the MDC were forced into a second round runoff. Before voters returned to the polls, the country witnessed violence and intimidation directed at opposition supporters. Hundreds of Zimbabweans were victimized by state-sponsored human rights abuses and threats against their lives. Hundreds more were rounded up by security forces and thrown into detention. Tsvangirai eventually pulled out of the race in the name of his constituents’ safety, and was ultimately named prime minister in a power sharing agreement brokered by South African President Thabo Mbeki.

The outcome this time around was decidedly different. Mugabe buried Tsvangirai, collecting 61 percent of the vote to the opposition candidate’s 34 percent. The parliamentary contests were equally stark. ZANU-PF took 160 seats in the assembly, while the MDC managed to win only forty-nine. A triumphant Mugabe didn’t mince words in his victory speech. “Those who were hurt by defeat can go hang if they so wish. If they die, even dogs will not sniff at their corpses…We are delivering democracy on a platter. We say take it or leave it, but the people have delivered democracy.”

The results were met with protest at home and abroad. Tsvangirai cried foul, accusing ZANU-PF of stealing the election, declaring it “null and void,” and initiating court proceedings to officially overturn the count. The United States echoed the opposition’s complaint, strongly condemning the results in a statement by Secretary of State John Kerry. Washington “does not believe,” wrote Kerry, “that the results announced today represent a credible expression of the will of the Zimbabwean people.” British Foreign Secretary William Hague also registered dismay, expressing “grave concerns” about the outcome. So did the European Union. In a public statement, the EU worried “about alleged irregularities and reports of incomplete participation, as well as the identified weaknesses in the electoral process and a lack of transparency.”

Despite these objections, the electoral results were endorsed by regional observers. The two African inter-governmental organizations who sent representatives to monitor voting—the SADC (Southern African Development Community), and the African Union (AU)—declared the elections, however imperfect, to be an expression of the will of the Zimbabwean people. In a statement released shortly after results were announced, the AU announced “that from a historical perspective and in comparison to the 2008 elections, Zimbabwe has made an important transition in the conduct of its elections.” The country’s constitutional court concurred, ruling on August 21 that the elections were free and fair. The next day, Mugabe was officially sworn in to office for his fifth consecutive term in power.

Western media on the whole didn’t offer much help in understanding what was going on. Instead, the New York Times, the BBC, Al-Jazeera and other media outfits offered similar fare, reminding audiences that Mugabe is a dinosaur who has ruled Zimbabwe for more than thirty years; that ZANU-PF won in a landslide, though credible reports had surfaced of widespread electoral fraud; that despite these issues, there was a general sense of relief that the country had avoided bloodshed at the ballot box; and so on. These conventional narratives, however, only tell part of the story.

In order to gain a deeper understanding of what took place in this last round of voting, it is helpful to move beyond the standard analysis that assumes only systemic corruption and an unfair vote. While allegations of irregularities and fraud are credible and cannot be dismissed, it is not clear that electoral malfeasance alone caused the MDC to lose. Other factors are also important, and demand consideration. Two are worth particular attention. First, ZANU-PF enjoys a solid base of support across the country—something often overlooked by western commentators. Second, while the MDC initially enjoyed large-scale support and a strong party structure, its popularity and institutional integrity have been seriously waning since 2008. The MDC’s strength as a political party and ability to contest elections against ZANU-PF—a disciplined opponent that is adept at winning elections through a variety of means, both legal and extra-legal—has declined since it shocked observers by almost winning a parliamentary majority in 2000, thereby establishing itself as the strongest opposition party since independence. Since then, the party has been plagued by in-fighting, especially pronounced since 2005, which led to a factional split the following year. Since then the two MDC parties, each substantially weakened by the schism, have battled one another, as well as ZANU-PF, in local elections. The result is often a split opposition the leaves ZANU-PF victorious, despite its earning fewer votes than the total number of the two MDCs added together.

Indeed, while many commentators pointed to the fact that ZANU-PF won many traditional MDC strongholds on July 29, such as Matabeleland South (where it won all thirteen districts) and Matabeleland North (where it won seven of thirteen districts) as evidence of obvious rigging, Mugabe’s success in many of those districts can actually be explained by the divided opposition. In eight Matabeleland South districts the number of opposition votes, if added together, exceed those won by the ruling party. In Matabeleland North, the same is true in all but two of the districts won by ZANU-PF. If the two MDC factions had joined forces as a unified front, they would have won.

The MDC also faces a popularity problem. Tsvangirai and his party have suffered waning support since both MDC groups joined the unity government in 2009. At issue is the perception that MDC representatives have been participating in the same kind of corruption as ZANU-PF, and that the party’s participation in government has caused them to change the way it operates, as well as its relationship to its base. The MDC developed and based its power on strong ties to labor union activism and local human rights organizations, and was initially able to mobilize support through these pre-existing organizational structures. At the same time, between 2002 and 2008, the party managed to build and strengthen its rural support networks—the secret to ZANU-PF’s striking loss, or failure to overwhelmingly win certain rural districts observers had considered Mugabe strongholds, in 2008.

The violence of the previous electoral cycle took a devastating toll on the MDC. Its rural party structures were decimated and its capacity to mobilize the once robust grassroots network that had previously bolstered party power were severely weakened. Nor has the MDC done itself any favors. Local commentators have noted that the party has been increasingly out of touch with its supporters. Take Manicaland, for example, where Tsvangiari expressed shocked disbelief at losing the majority of provinces. Widespread dissatisfaction with the MDC was felt when party leadership imposed their chosen candidates to contest elections instead of the more locally popular ones.

Two key pre-election polls, conducted by Freedom House and Afrobarometer, also reveal a weakened MDC. When asked who they would vote for if an election were held the next day, 31 percent of respondents in the Freedom House poll said they would vote for ZANU-PF compared to 19 percent for MDC. To be sure, these numbers must be taken with a grain of salt, since a full 40 percent declined to reveal their party preferences. Nevertheless, the poll confirms a significant decrease in support for MDC from the 55 percent reported in 2009, while ZANU-PF’s share increased by 12 percent in the same period. Susan Booysen, author of the Freedom House report, noted the she “heard people saying MDC is just not doing work in the constituencies and is spending too much time in the palace. They’re taking for granted they’re the crown princes. They are not capturing the desire for change. And there is still a desire for change among people.”

In contrast to the declining fortunes of the MDC, ZANU-PF began shoring up unity and discipline within the party well ahead of the elections. The party focused specifically on strengthening local rural party structures and patronage networks, which have always been central to its rural strength. Mugabe made sure that he campaigned heavily in rural areas, where rallies were well-attended and the party embarked on a massive voter registration drive. Not only that, but evidence increasingly suggests that not all of the ruling party’s policies have been the abject disaster commonly portrayed in the west.

ZANU-PF’s land redistribution program, prematurely declared a failure by many commentators, has enjoyed growing attention lately, largely due to its achievements. A number of recent scholarly studies have shown strong evidence that supports government claims that the policy has been a success. That the program produces actual beneficiaries, coupled with a symbolic and ideological resonance of the land issue, which was a central rallying cry during Zimbabwe’s liberation struggle, should not be underestimated. It is particularly salient in the rural areas, where 77 percent of Zimbabweans live.

None of this is to deny the seriousness of electoral malfeasance perpetrated in this most recent round of voting, nor the possibility that it adversely affected the results. The New York Times offered a good rundown of the issues plaguing the July elections in its reporting. Among other troubling problems, “The parties were not given a copy of the final voter rolls until the day before the election, and when it did arrive it was on paper, not in a digital format that could easily be analyzed to look for fraud. Many voters, particularly in urban areas where the challengers draw support, were not represented on the voter lists and were turned away from the polls, observers said.” In addition, electoral monitors reported “an unusually high number of voters [being] assisted in casting their ballots, another sign that they might have been pressured by the governing party to vote in Mr. Mugabe’s favor,” and that “far more ballots were printed than were actually needed.” What happened to those extra ballots after the polls closed remains a mystery.

Alongside the more unsavory forms of electoral manipulation, it bears remembering that many of the same standard electoral strategies found in any representative democracy were clearly at work in Zimbabwe. Questions of how to energize a party’s base, register and mobilize new voters, or exploit an opponent’s weaknesses, for example, were all central during the election.

In addition, as Percy Zvomuya points out in a recent piece, “Zimbabwe remains, for many, just a metaphor—not an actual physical terrain whose people have hopes, ambitions and fears.” For many northern commentators, Zimbabwe is simply a dysfunctional failing state led “from breadbasket to basket case” by an aging dictator, but not a place where debate happens in parliament, policy gets made, and ordinary people care about substantive issues that go beyond and cut across Mugabe’s presence in the state house.

To uncritically assume, therefore, that ZANU-PF’s victory resulted solely from the timeworn tactics of fraud and intimidation is a mistake. Much of the focus on ZANU’s unseemliness in northern media stems from the distaste with which Mugabe is held in the west. To be sure, there is plenty to criticize in the ruling party’s time in power. But there is no getting around the fact that ZANU-PF remains popular with many Zimbabweans, and that however bright the MDC’s prospects once were, the opposition’s potential has been weakened by infighting and elitist politics as usual in Harare. So long as the MDC remains at war with itself and disconnected from its base, its prospects for gains on the ground and in the voting booth will remain dim.

* This post was first published in Warscapes Magazine.

Dark Princess

Five years ago, Vogue asked to no one and to everyone in particular, “Is Fashion Racist?” Everyone was asked because it was an earnest question. Yet, it was for no one, truly, because according to a recent International Herald Tribune article (also here on nytimes.com which came with the striking graphic above), nothing since 2008 has changed. Industry wide, 88% of all models are white, with the amount of black models down from 8% to now only 6% in one season. Casting directors and fashion houses themselves stop short of blatantly denying models of color, with even Jourdan Dunn and Joan Smalls complaining about the treatment. Thus, even the most powerful fashion magazine in the world cannot persuade the waves of taste and aesthetic makers to switch course.

Yet, with the Mercedes Benz Fashion Week in New York starting today, some are not taking this challenge sitting down. Former model and agency founder, Bethann Hardison, is re-initiating her “Black Girls Coalition,” a panel series dedicated to stimulating conversations about race in the industry amongst models themselves. Hardison is also spearheading a social media campaign to out specific designers who aren’t using black models.

Perhaps the most outspoken advocate for Black models (the Tribune lamented some of her comments unprintable) is Iman. The Somalian born icon from the supermodel heydays says,‘‘We have a president and a first lady who are black… You would think things have changed, and then you realize that they have not. In fact, things have gone backward.’’ She’s aligning with Hardison to lambast designers not using black models and then boycotting them.

Some black designers, already hip to the homogenous culture of the fashion industry, have begun their own thing. Adama Paris has successfully begun Dakar, Montreal, and last year’s first ever Paris Black Fashion Week. Scores of black models and iconic designers like Niger’s Alphadi poured into a venue adjacent to Paris’ Opera, determined to celebrate black beauty and fashion in their own space. Yet, even here the idea of diversity was complex.

It was a joy seeing dark, ebony skin tucked under pale and bold prints. Natural and weaved hair bobbed to throbbing house music. Yet, even here, the varied amount of silhouettes found in black communities, all communities, weren’t represented. One designer noted that she always had an European silhouette and aesthetic in mind when arranging her collections. Thus, if the mainstream fashion showcases won’t open its doors to the “others” and black fashion showcases aren’t willing to show the breadth of silhouettes to potential clients, then there is much more at stake than not having a dark-hued covergirl.

The mainstream fashion industry doesn’t want us. Even with former models like Iman incensed, the problem still partly lies within the Black fashion community as well for even here, we keep a very prim aesthetic. No curvy models, forget about overweight. No variations in height. It’s a black carbon copy of what’s keeping us out, and is also losing a potential client base, if you want to talk about business. So, it’s not just the mainstream fashion industry, of which we are a part of and help to continue this aesthetic. It’s also within our own institutions.