Sean Jacobs's Blog, page 467
June 28, 2013
Autonomy in Barcelona: the Mount Zion community
Between the 19th and early 20th century, Barcelona’s Poblenou neighborhood became the site of a fascinating transformation. Factories, processing plants and small stores blossomed as industrialization turned the swampy marshes on the banks of the Besòs River into a densely populated hub, centered on the textile industry. They also poisoned that river, and the living conditions suffered by the new inhabitants were highly toxic.
Defenseless in the anomic void of structural exclusion, the workers who had migrated from Barcelona, Aragon and Valencia to find work in the previously unpopulated area had built their own shanty houses. Hygiene was a problem, and frequent epidemics of typhoid, cholera and smallpox produced an atrocious mortality rate. Their working conditions included unthinkably long hours, low wages, insufficient meals and exposure to harmful waste. Yet those same workers overcame these conditions through mutual aid and solidarity, using their autonomy to organize into cooperatives and associations, as well as under the flag of one of the most storied unions in the history of the labor movement: the anarcho-syndicalist Confederación Nacional del Trabajo (CNT).
Today, the Poblenou neighborhood remains pocked by many of those historic factories, now abandoned and waiting to be demolished in order to make way for the lumbering 22@ project, a massive urban-planning model intended to bring “innovation” to an antiquated productive base by handing over 3.2 million square meters of floor space to major construction, logistics, IT and weapons firms. Yet, just a stroll away from the shores of the Besòs, one of those factories is far from empty. It is known as Mount Zion, and it is currently the home and workplace of a community of roughly 800 immigrant workers.
Although there are people from all over the world living there, the Mount Zion community is largely made up of West African men who work collecting scrap metal all over Barcelona. Others are artists, musicians or intermittent temporary workers in sectors ranging from agriculture to construction. Just two years ago, most had precarious but formal employment, rented homes, and their documents in order. Some were even enrolled in universities. But the collapse of the housing bubble and the economic crisis that it caused ruined all of this.
“The situation of the migrants living in Poblenou is abominable,” says Mutuma Ruteere, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on contemporary forms of racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance. “The conditions there are inhumane and degrading. The hundreds of immigrants who live there have no access to the most basic services, such as heating, clean water or health care facilities. The conditions are clearly not suited for housing people.”
The living conditions endured by the Mount Zion community are not the only aspect of their situation that resonates with Poblenou’s history. People are also coming together through a network of autonomous and local institutions, in a collective effort to defend the rights of all members of the community, regardless of their documentation status. Local assemblies, neighborhood associations and even some left-wing city council members have been collaborating through the Xarxa de Suport als Assentaments (the Settlements’ Support Network) to put pressure on the city government to find a fair solution.
The most striking examples of mutual aid and solidarity are the actions being taken by the Mount Zion community itself. While it is no secret that an undocumented status (whether it is due to undocumented entry or having expired papers) can force people to rely on the riskier work that characterizes the informal or illegal economy for sustenance, the workers who live at Mount Zion have taken a different route. In addition to the work they do collecting scrap metal throughout the city, they have started a glass recycling project. And while many of the artists in the community use the objects they collect in their art, others are musicians in Barcelona’s vibrant dub, reggae, dancehall and African music scene. All of the work they do is organized horizontally, cooperatively, and they are currently taking steps to legalize their economic activity by forming an Integrated Cooperative. They have also expressed that they would be willing to rent the space at a reduced rate.
“There is a political blockade, a marginalization being carried out by the institutions,” says Sharif, one of the current inhabitants of Mount Zion, “The citizens support us, but the politicians want to turn us into delinquents.” Until now, while the city government currently run by the right-wing nationalist Convergència i Unió party (CiU) has resorted to a soft, appeasing rhetorical style to discuss the Mount Zion community, the actual responses by public institutions have been ambiguous at best, and hostile at worst. In a recent court hearing about the future of Mount Zion, fifty residents were forced to wait outside as the judge stated that, despite the “humanitarian crisis that an eviction would create”, she must rule in favor of the owner’s right to own private property.
Meanwhile the Endesa power company, in collaboration with the Catalan police, made their contribution to the process by cutting off the power to the building, in a clear effort to pressure the residents to abandon the only shelter available to them. Finally, the CiU government rejected Mount Zion’s original proposal, offering a job-training program and 40 day stays in local shelters instead.
Mount Zion is scheduled to be evicted on July 18th. It seems hard to believe that, having seen the positive steps taken by the community and their neighbors in Poblenou, the City of Barcelona will suddenly put 800 people out on the street. The Depression-level magnitude of the economic crisis affecting Southern Europe is proving too overwhelming for both public and private social protection services, and even the mini-Guantanamos that are Spain’s Immigrant Internment Centers are incapable of dealing with such a massive influx of people.
An eviction of this magnitude would not only be a massive violation of human rights and the suppression of a tremendously commendable exercise of worker autonomy and self-management; it would also constitute the political fabrication of a social time-bomb. By blocking the institutional path towards a fair solution, an entire community of people would be forced to rely on the noxious dynamics of the underground economy.
One would think it wise for the City of Barcelona to examine the way its history still resonates in places like Poblenou.
* This guest post by Carlos Delclós is cross-posted with Roarmag, photography via Ground Press. Also, check out Carlos’ post on some of the music coming out of the Mt. Zion community at Dutty Artz. AIAC’s Boima Tucker facilitated the post.
A History of Violence
While South African men seem to increasingly realize that it is their responsibility to do something about the endemic levels of violence against girls and women, the resulting initiatives have often taken the form of symbolic gestures, such as marches and protests. A telling example is the Real Men March, organized by the conservative Christian Family Policy Institute, which was held a while ago, on April 16th. Carrying angry banners, about 2,000 men protested against rape by marching the streets of Cape Town.
De-normalizing rape and sexual harassment is a crucial step in making the country safer for girls and women. But that doesn’t mean that all steps taken in the name of men are necessarily well-guided. And in the case of the Real Men, their banners suggest that their strategy might not be of the most effective kind. Worse, they might inflict more harm than good.
Why? For starters, their calls to end violence against “our women and children” and to “be strong, be men” do little for the deconstruction of the rigid gender-roles that lie at the heart of the problem. Moreover, their appeals for “men of courage” to “respect your wives” raises the impression that not all ‘Real Men’ were too concerned about the often excessively brutal and even fatal rapes that lesbians in the country face. Undoubtedly largely well-intentioned, the march attested to the complexity of masculinities in South Africa and revealed how deeply ingrained and hetero-normative the notion of women as property remains today.
In order to understand how ideas of women as property relate to the misogynist violence that molest women and girls today, we have to look at the nation’s history of violence and try to understand how this has shaped and bred the masculinities that underlie both the violence as well as (misguided) protection efforts. Realizing that, historically, South Africa has produced enough institutionalized violence to fill a proper number of volumes per decennium, we will only lift out a few broad (but influential) trends.
As we know, the seeds of the nation’s violence were sown throughout the past centuries; from pre-colonial times, slavery and colonialism to apartheid and the resistance struggles. Apartheid, which as we all know ended in 1994, was a particularly brutal episode, and subjected many black South Africans to horrifying levels of state violence and humiliations. Resistance movements, such as the Africa National Congress (ANC), trained black men to use violence as a noble cause for liberation. Meanwhile, white boys and men were trained to coercively, militantly and violently maintain white domination.
Although located at the other end of the power spectrum, white and black men were exposed to excessive levels of violence. In addition to the daily brutalities, the white apartheid government introduced the Group Areas Act in 1950. This act forced coloured and African South Africans to move from their homes into racially segregated areas, outside the cities. These new and unsafe areas were particularly challenging in terms of social control and new social norms, which in some areas fuelled gang activity.
Forcibly turned into low-wage laborers under colonial and apartheid capitalism and mandated to live in overcrowded townships, existing black masculinities changed along the lines of labor. Today, as an outsider, you can still come across a thirty year old white “boss” that refers to his fifty year old black employee as a “boy”, alluding to the level of humiliations black men underwent and still endure from the apartheid workplace. The ruling class consisted mainly of Afrikaans speaking white men. Dr. Robert Morrell, whose research for the University of Cape Town focuses on issues of masculinity, describes the masculinities of this group of Afrikaans men as (having been) shaped by “puritan protestant austerity and strictness” and being “authoritarian, unforgiving and apologetic. For those white men of British descent, ‘imperial masculinities’, which glorified violence in the context of combat, the normalization of corporal punishment and the perceived need to protect their families from black men had been influential in their conception of manhood and growing ‘macho values’ over the decades. Moreover, white fears of ‘Black Peril’ (the imagined black sexual thirst for white women’s flesh) had instilled a deep ‘protector’ masculinity in many white settlers men.
Fast forwarding to 2013, as divided South African men may be by race and class, two things they have in common is the patriarchal dividend and their responsibility for the violence in their communities. Men urging other men to keep their “hands off our women” are indicative of how deeply ingrained the notion of women as property remains across all divides. In a severely counterproductive way, those men who so loudly insist on protecting “their women”, invoke the very same masculine norms that (shaped by the nation’s violent history) are at the heart of the violence today.
This does not, however, mean that all men adhere to exactly the same masculine ideals. On the contrary, masculinities in South Africa are complex; their nuances will still differ across communities. Rural Xhosa masculinities, for example, will be different from that of coloured urban boys. Zulu masculinity models itself around different heroes than white capitalist masculinities and the identities of those who grow up in gang ridden areas take shape differently from that of an Afrikaner farm boy outside Stellenbosch. The nuances of masculinities will therefore differ, no doubt. But the dominant ideas around toughness, male superiority and ‘women as possessions’ that fuel the rapes, murders, harassments and terror of women transcend these divisions. The unfortunate irony of invoking ‘protector masculinities’ to tackle the violence reveals the many levels on which these transformations need to happen. For those men who take their responsibility seriously, a task much larger than marching is waiting for them to take on.
Understanding what does not work, however, does not answer the question ‘what can men do?’ But there are NGOs who made it their daily business to figure this out. In the final post in this series I will post these and other questions to representatives of the Sonke Gender Justice, an NGO that “supports men and boys in taking action to promote gender equality, prevent domestic and sexual violence, and reduce the spread and impact of HIV and AIDS.”
* This is the second in a 3 part series of posts on sexual violence against women.
June 27, 2013
The ZAM Chronicle: an online investigative magazine on and from Africa
This month sees the launch of The ZAM Chronicle, a new monthly online investigative magazine with a highly ambitious mission: “to be a platform for grassroots, crowd-sourced observations on and from the African continent.” The ZAM Chronicle is born out of the Netherlands-based ZAM Magazine, which Africa is a Country readers will remember for its exciting and beautifully edited features on African artists, writers, opinion makers and journalism in general.
In The ZAM Chronicle’s first issue we find a collection of stellar in-depth reports on wide-ranging topics: Theophilus Abbah gives an overview of recent developments in Northern Nigeria, taking a close look at the deadly stand-off between the Nigerian state and the sectarian Boko Haram; Benon Herbert Oluka analyses the success of a community campaign in Uganda which did what ‘Stop Kony 2012′ and US$ 2 billion aid money did not; Kassim Mohamed writes about the Kafka-esque world of Somali refugees in Europe; Benon Herbert Oluka reports on the “The no-go zones of the Ugandan President”; and much more.
Here is the link to The ZAM Chronicle’s brand new website; to receive The ZAM Chronicle subscribe to their mailing list.
Photo Credit: Radio Netherlands
ZAM Chronicle: an online investigative magazine on and from Africa
This month sees the launch of The ZAM Chronicle, a new monthly online investigative magazine with a highly ambitious mission: “to be a platform for grassroots, crowd-sourced observations on and from the African continent.” The ZAM Chronicle is born out of the Netherlands-based ZAM Magazine, which Africa is a Country readers will remember for its exciting and beautifully edited features on African artists, writers, opinion makers and journalism in general.
In The ZAM Chronicle’s first issue we find a collection of stellar in-depth reports on wide-ranging topics: Theophilus Abbah gives an overview of recent developments in Northern Nigeria, taking a close look at the deadly stand-off between the Nigerian state and the sectarian Boko Haram; Benon Herbert Oluka analyses the success of a community campaign in Uganda which did what ‘Stop Kony 2012′ and US$ 2 billion aid money did not; Kassim Mohamed writes about the Kafka-esque world of Somali refugees in Europe; Benon Herbert Oluka reports on the “The no-go zones of the Ugandan President”; and much more.
Here is the link to The ZAM Chronicle’s brand new website; to receive The ZAM Chronicle subscribe to their mailing list.
Photo Credit: Radio Netherlands
June 26, 2013
Is violence against women too common, too ordinary to qualify as interesting?
Back in February gender-based violence dominated media and public talk when South Africans declared themselves woken up, disgusted, outraged and horrified after the rape and murder of working class, black Anene Booysen and the murder of middle class, white Reeva Steenkamp (both by their boyfriends; though Reeva more than Anene). Yet, by the time International Women’s Day announced itself on March 8th, the media seemed to have pretty much moved on. Overall, barely four months after Anene and Reeva’s deaths, the surge of media attention for South Africa’s gender-based violence crisis appears to have wound down. Looking back, it barely lasted two months.
Judging by the relatively limited coverage the stories got, the rape, disembowelment and murder of the 14 year old Thandeka Madonsela and the gang rape of a 6 year old girl in Limpopo in early April barely qualified as news. Then mid-April, a videotaped gang rape had the social media abuzz, but appears to have left few traces in mainstream online media. And around the same time we read a few reports about political commitments on the issue (such as implemented budget increases, the Protection from Harassment Act and the government’s failure to produce a political champion for the cause), students of the University of Witwatersrand came out with allegations of sexual harassment by their very own professors, which got a bit of coverage here and there (we also tried to play our part by tweeting about it a few times). You’d think that the release of one of the two men charged with the murder of Anene would reinvigorate this charged and emotional public debate, or that the 14-year old Nontobeko Zandile Mgobhozi, who was both raped and murdered by her father a little over a week ago, would get into the headlines again. Otherwise, perhaps the rape of a patient by a male nurse might be enough to maintain some degree of outrage.
Does that mean that violence against women has returned to its status of being too common, too ordinary to qualify as interesting? Were the reservoirs of anger, emotion and disgust in places like South Africa drained after February’s media surge? While the number ‘one in four’ seemed etched on everyone’s conscience only four months ago, the media’s interest in the problem feels like a distant memory.
Promising attempts to uncover the underlying masculine ideals of male superiority, toughness, physical strength and how these intersect with other socio-economic factors also largely died down after February. That’s a pity, because we’re not even close to comprehending the intersections between violence and masculinities. In fact, if we take a step back on the timeline and realize that the recent discussions on this topic merely represent one chapter in a story that begun ages ago, we see a rather racialized narrative emerge. Despite the fact that dominant masculine ideals and the violence that they breed affect South Africans of all races, the national and international media have worked both hard and long to suggest otherwise. By conflating the nation’s violent patriarchal character with race and presenting the crisis of gender-based violence as a black affair, the common narrative continues to present white violence as an exception. The Pistorius spectacle–a story about a fallen hero, rather than a woman who lost her life–represents a case in point.
Hardly a new phenomenon, these representations are part of a centuries-old tradition of racist images of hypersexual, uncontrollable and instinctually driven ‘natives’. The demographical fact that 80% of South African men are black seduces many of into thinking that rape, abuse and femicide is a black thing. Especially when popular ideas around the emasculatory effect of unemployment in a capitalist society are coupled with the fact that unemployment and poverty predominantly affects the black population, violent masculinities seem to intersect with race, class and violence in an all too obvious way. In the picture that emerges, the white man doesn’t matter all that much. The oft-circulated story goes: the black unemployed man experiences emasculatory frustration due to his failure to provide the daily bread and therefore tries to compensate for his tainted manhood by displaying his male toughness; women and children are the ones onto whom this compensatory aggression is projected.
But wealth and the ability to provide doesn’t keep men from brutalizing women; white men do matter. A 2006 study on rape perpetration, in which over 1,700 men from all racial groups were interviewed, showed that rather than the poor and unemployed men, it was their economically and educationally more advantaged counterparts who were more likely to rape. Another reason to question the link between (black) poverty and (emasculatory) violence against women is the fact that in surrounding countries, with comparable levels of unemployment, there reported incidences of violence against women is lower. In addition, anecdotal evidence from (rape) hotline counselors suggests that white middle class women are by no means excepted. Yes, white man rape and beat too.
The reason why Oscar’s case made worldwide headlines was obviously due to his fame, which he acquired through his success as a disabled yet successful sportsman. Reeva’s death at the hands of this famous, upper-middle class white star, attests to the fact that violence against women is not confined to the black underclass. Especially now that the veil has been lifted from Oscar’s aggressive streaks and gun obsession, it should be clear that masculine violence cuts across all racial, classed or cultural groups within the borders of the state. The possible role that his disability played in his macho bravado and how this might have driven him to overcompensate with hyper-masculine behaviour, is unclear. Yet by emphasizing the exceptionality of his position, we risk obscuring the fundamental ideas about manhood he shares with most of his countrymen; ideas that continue to fuel the assaults. Until women and girls are safe from rape, harassment and violence, the media should pay attention.
* This is the first in a 3-part series of blog posts on sexual violence.
Will Barack Obama get a frosty reception when he visits South Africa this weekend?
In a way, Cape Town mayor Patricia de Lille’s decision to award US president Barack Obama and first lady Michelle Obama the Freedom of the City (Cape Town’s highest honor), sort of makes sense, if you stretch your imagination. The thinking behind it is captured in that iconic photo from 2009 of President Obama bending over in the Oval Office to allow five-year-old Jacob Philadelphia to touch his hair. The story goes that little Jacob wanted to know if the president’s hair felt like his own and Obama obliged by lowering his head for the five-year-old to check for himself. “Yes, it does feel the same,” Jacob is reported to have said. He left the White House that day believing, like millions of other black American kids, perhaps for the first time ever, that he could realistically one day become president because someone like him had beaten the odds and made it there.
When De Lille announced the award last year, she said Cape Town (and the rest of South Africa) was on a journey from a racially exclusionary past to a future of equality and justice for all. She said the Obamas, for their success despite the prejudicial odds, are symbolic of the hope that this kind of future is possible.
But instead of uniting Cape Town, the award has divided it, with parts of the Muslim community saying president Obama is unworthy of an award whose previous recipients include former president Nelson Mandela and archbishop emeritus Desmond Tutu. They’ve taken umbrage at bestowing the honor to someone who they say has continued the American tradition of handling the Israeli-Palestinian conflict with American interests, not justice, in mind. They also cite the civilian casualties and destabilizing effects of the Obama administration’s use of drone strikes in Pakistan, Afghanistan and Yemen as another reason why Obama did not deserve the accolade.
It’s no surprise then that plans are afoot to organize protests when the Obamas arrives in South Africa on Saturday as part of their three-nation whistle-stop tour of Africa (his trip starts with a 2-day visit to Senegal, then on to South Africa before he ends the visit in Tanzania on Monday and Tuesday).
In South Africa, this could be a quite different reception from when Obama first visited there in 2006 as a young Senator.
South Africa’s Muslim community is not alone in opposing attempts to award accolades to Obama. Students and staff at the University of Johannesburg (UJ), where Obama is scheduled to hold an interactive town hall with “young African leaders”, are resisting the university’s bid to award him an honorary law doctorate. They say Obama, through America’s foreign policy, supports supremacist ideals and perpetuates the kind of dominance of one group by another that South Africans bled and died to end. To them, the university awarding him an honorary doctorate is offensive. Students at the nearby University of the Witwaterstand have voiced solidarity with their peers at UJ.
The African National Congress, the majority party in Parliament, also brushed off a request by Lindiwe Mazibuko, the parliamentary leader of De Lille’s party, the Democratic Alliance, to call Parliament from its mid-year recess to allow Obama to address a joint sitting of both Houses. The rebuff reflects in part the strong opposition to American foreign policy from within the ANC’s ranks and those of its alliance partners, particularly the influential Congress of South African Trade Unions. The trade union federation recently issued an appeal for all workers and South Africans to join the protests during Obama’s visit to demand a new foreign policy based on justice.
This change in sentiment is a marked turn from how Obama was viewed when he was first elected. Like Jacob Philadelphia, many South Africans imagined that Obama’s presidency, because of his race and African ancestry, signalled the end of an era of inequality and injustice. They thought that more than any other American president before him, Obama would be the one to change a global dynamic where American lives are considered the most valuable of all and American interests supersede others, no matter the cost.
Instead Obama has carried on from where his predecessors left off, leaving many of South Africans asking, as some black Americans are beginning to do with regard to their own struggle for equal opportunities, where is this change Obama promised?
It was under Obama’s administration last year that the United States, along with Canada and Israel, stood as the only real global power broker to oppose Palestine’s application for nonmember-observer status at the UN when an overwhelming majority of other countries supported it. Although not entirely his doing, it was under Obama’s watch that the US Congress struck back at Unesco for a majority-vote decision to accept Palestine as a full member by withholding funding, severely limiting the organization’s ability to promote democracy, gender equality and freedom of expression.
The Obama administration also closely follows Israel’s lead in withholding funds to strong-arm Palestine into agreeing to Israel’s terms in the conflict.
Despite years of promises, the Obama administration has done precious little to close the Guantanamo Bay detention camp where 46 of the current inmates are being held indefinitely, without trial or court-admissible evidence of wrongdoing, under the shifting terms of the United States war on terror. All that the medical ethics crisis triggered by the inmates’ recent hunger strike has done is usher in a new wave of promises from Obama that he will redouble his efforts to close the camp.
Then there are the drone strikes, particularly the so-called “signature strikes”, that, beyond their ambiguous scope and questionable legality, regularly kill civilians. Obama says that these civilian deaths will haunt him and others in chain of command for the rest of their lives. But the families and loved ones of civilians killed by drones, I suspect, likely experience much greater distress and carry deeper, more permanent scars than a drone jockey sitting in Nevada or New Mexico, or a busy president bustling about Washington DC and the world.
The civilian deaths and terror caused by drone strikes also sow the kind of virulent hatred of the United States that the war on terror purports to root out, as Yemini writer Farea Al-Muslimi explained to a senate hearing in April this year. “What radicals had previously failed to achieve in my village,” he said, “one drone strike accomplished in an instant: there is now an intense anger and growing hatred of America.”
Many South Africans care about these issues because when this country was subjected to over half a decade of state-sponsored oppression and injustice in the form of apartheid and centuries of colonialism, global powers equivocated while others actively supported the apartheid government.
Like black America, we’ve realized that a change in figurehead to someone who looks like he might better understand our struggles does not equate to a substantive change for the better. This is why as Americans grapple with how to effect systemic justice and equality within their nation’s borders, so too must they do a better job of holding their representatives to account for their nation’s actions abroad.
* The image is of a younger Senator Obama, peering through Nelson Mandela’s prison cell when he traveled to South Africa in 2006. That trip also included stops in Kenya, Djibouti and Chad.
Angola’s Biennale
On June 1st, a Sub-Saharan African country won a top prize Leone d’Or/Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale the first time in 118 years. In all the excitement surrounding “Africa’s triumph” and the way Venice is “Going Global” it has been harder to find critics asking what Edson Chagas’s winning work does, the context through which it was produced, or the social conditions it draws attention to.
The Venice Biennale is where the crème-de-la-crème of the art world goes to be on display. The competition is so ambitiously global and complex that lesser beings have described it as “the Art Olympics”. Plus both events were established in the spirit of a little national competition that struck Europe in the later part of the nineteenth century. Every two years since 1895, competing countries have sent artists to display their work in national pavilions that are either hosted in a central park, or tucked into other pockets of the city, depending on when the country started competing. As you may have suspected, European pavilions are the most tightly clustered and have bagged the most Golden Lions awards.
This year, the Biennale’s organizers asked artists to consider their origins in all the madness of the Enlightenment. The main exhibition, “Encyclopedic Palace,” curated by Massimiliano Gioni, reflects the last century’s jouissance, all-consuming desire to know and see everything. The compulsive piling and filing efforts of psychologists and taxidermists have been culled from the twentieth-century archive, while new contributions have been commissioned from 150 artists representing 38 countries. Pressed against this history, Gioni asks, “What room is left for internal images — for dreams, hallucinations and visions — in an era besieged by external ones?”
Enter Africa, the expert in European fantasies. At the Angolan pavilion, Edson Chagas has crafted an elegant response to the encyclopedic project, which begins with the title of his photographic series. “Found Not Taken,” thumbs its nose at the Europeans who cannot stop carting off the world’s knowledge to its curio shops, laboratories, and museums.
Chagas has roamed the streets of Luanda (as well as London and Newport) finding discarded chairs, pipes, and other artifacts of everyday life. Sometimes he records chance encounters with objects that are already well framed by the color or texture of a wall, sometimes he carries these things with him until he sees the right background, then sets them up again. In this slow and quiet way of documenting what has been abandoned Chagas invites the viewer to imagine the way a city moves.
While growing up in Luanda, everything was reutilised and it was special to me to see how the habits of consumerism were changing. I could find sofas and washing machines but also chairs, those were the most common, but also other objects. It was always about the object and how it interacted with the space around it. Also what I feel when I look at it. It’s a learning process of the city, its people and rhythm.
But there is the imaginary visit, and there is cultural diplomacy, and they begin to blur in the easy way that nation and pavilion represent each other. As one visitor told BBC Africa, “After they won the Venice Biennale everyone wanted to see Angola, and it was very much worth the wait.”
The Venice Biennale reinforces particular notions of the nation: the nomination system reaffirms the government’s authority to choose what the nation looks like, both to the international viewing public and within the country (especially through mass media coverage, which is increasingly condensed and as it reaches a larger audience). In Venice, and in Luanda, the institutions that govern the production of art capitalize on their own myopic vision.
“Luanda, Encyclopedic City” was commissioned by the Angolan Ministry of Culture.
Following the announcement of the pavilion’s award, Angola’s state new agency (Angop) published a press release from the Minister of Culture, affirming the government’s interest in sharing “its deeds and achievements with other countries.” It ends with this statement:
Para a governante neste momento muito particular que o país está a viver de renovação, de criação, de edificação de um país novo, é muito gratificante receber este reconhecimento do trabalho do executivo angolano.
[For the minister, in this very special moment in which the country is experiencing renewal, creation, building a new country, it is very gratifying to receive this recognition of the work of the Angolan executive government.]
In the same week that the government was accepting praise with its artists, it demolished close to five thousand houses in downtown Luanda, using military vehicles and violence to expel its residents. In the midst of this change, it is unsurprising that government representatives are sensitive about the way their city looks in pictures. Anyone who uses a camera on the streets of Luanda may be stopped and questioned by the police.
It can be difficult and risky for Angolan artists to be critical in public. The artists that gain access to these large platforms (i.e., Chagas’s peer group) mostly have connections to the MPLA, the ruling political party which has kept President José Eduardo Dos Santos in power for over 30 years. Some avow their connections, a few renounce them (Nástio Mosquito, and Luaty Beirão are well-known activists) but many try to work around them.
Chagas’s work, which claims to represent Luanda through the things it has rejected, exploits the tension between art and politics. His tight studio frames defer documentation of the city’s homes and the people who have lived there.
Of course, the aesthetic act is not contained within these images. Posters of the photographs have been stacked around the Angolan pavilion, which is decorated in the style of Portugal’s imperial halls. ”Luanda, Encyclopedic City” was built as a provocation to the main exhibition; it reminds us that the world’s knowledge cannot just be collected:
June 25, 2013
When Barack Obama traveled to South Africa
In a way, mayor Patricia de Lille’s decision to award US president Barack Obama and first lady Michelle Obama the Freedom of the City, Cape Town’s highest honor, sort of makes sense, if you stretch your imagination. The thinking behind it is captured in that iconic photo from 2009 of President Obama bending over in the Oval Office to allow five-year-old Jacob Philadelphia to touch his hair. The story goes that little Jacob wanted to know if the president’s hair felt like his own and Obama obliged by lowering his head for the five-year-old to check for himself. “Yes, it does feel the same,” Jacob is reported to have said. He left the White House that day believing, like millions of other black American kids, perhaps for the first time ever, that he could realistically one day become president because someone like him had beaten the odds and made it there.
When De Lille announced the award last year, she said Cape Town (and the rest of South Africa) was on a journey from a racially exclusionary past to a future of equality and justice for all. She said the Obamas, for their success despite the prejudicial odds, are symbolic of the hope that this kind of future is possible.
But instead of uniting Cape Town, the award has divided it, with parts of the Muslim community saying president Obama is unworthy of an award whose previous recipients include former president Nelson Mandela and archbishop emeritus Desmond Tutu. They’ve taken umbrage at bestowing the honor to someone who they say has continued the American tradition of handling the Israeli-Palestinian conflict with American interests, not justice, in mind. They also cite the civilian casualties and destabilizing effects of the Obama administration’s use of drone strikes in Pakistan, Afghanistan and Yemen as another reason why Obama did not deserve the accolade.
It’s no surprise then that plans are afoot to organize protests when the Obamas visit South Africa at the end of June as part of their three-nation whistle-stop tour of Africa.
South Africa’s Muslim community is not alone in opposing attempts to award accolades to Obama. Students and staff at the University of Johannesburg (UJ), where Obama is scheduled to hold an interactive town hall with “young African leaders”, are resisting the university’s bid to award him an honorary law doctorate. They say Obama, through America’s foreign policy, supports supremacist ideals and perpetuates the kind of dominance of one group by another that South Africans bled and died to end. To them, the university awarding him an honorary doctorate is offensive. Students at the nearby University of the Witwaterstand have voiced solidarity with their peers at UJ.
The African National Congress, the majority party in Parliament, also brushed off a request by Lindiwe Mazibuko, the parliamentary leader of De Lille’s party, the Democratic Alliance, to call Parliament from its mid-year recess to allow Obama to address a joint sitting of both Houses. The rebuff reflects in part the strong opposition to American foreign policy from within the ANC’s ranks and those of its alliance partners, particularly the influential Congress of South African Trade Unions. The trade union federation recently issued an appeal for all workers and South Africans to join the protests during Obama’s visit to demand a new foreign policy based on justice.
This change in sentiment is a marked turn from how Obama was viewed when he was first elected. Like Jacob Philadelphia, many South Africans imagined that Obama’s presidency, because of his race and African ancestry, signalled the end of an era of inequality and injustice. They though that more than any other American president before him, Obama would be the one to change a global dynamic where American lives are considered the most valuable of all and American interests supersede others, no matter the cost.
Instead Obama has carried on from where his predecessors left off, leaving many of South Africans asking, as some black Americans are beginning to do with regard to their own struggle for equal opportunities, where is this change Obama promised?
It was under Obama’s administration last year that the United States, along with Canada and Israel, stood as the only real global power broker to oppose Palestine’s application for nonmember-observer status at the UN when an overwhelming majority of other countries supported it. Although not entirely his doing, it was under Obama’s watch that the US Congress struck back at Unesco for a majority-vote decision to accept Palestine as a full member by withholding funding, severely limiting the organization’s ability to promote democracy, gender equality and freedom of expression.
The Obama administration also closely follows Israel’s lead in withholding funds to strong-arm Palestine into agreeing to Israel’s terms in the conflict.
Despite years of promises, the Obama administration has done precious little to close the Guantanamo Bay detention camp where 46 of the current inmates are being held indefinitely, without trial or court-admissible evidence of wrongdoing, under the shifting terms of the United States war on terror. All that the medical ethics crisis triggered by the inmates’ recent hunger strike has done is usher in a new wave of promises from Obama that he will redouble his efforts to close the camp.
Then there are the drone strikes, particularly the so-called “signature strikes”, that, beyond their ambiguous scope and questionable legality, regularly kill civilians. Obama says that these civilian deaths will haunt him and others in chain of commandfor the rest of their lives. But the families and loved ones of civilians killed by drones, I suspect, likely experience much greater distress and carry deeper, more permanent scars than a drone jockey sitting in Nevada or New Mexico, or a busy president bustling about Washington DC and the world.
The civilian deaths and terror caused by drone strikes also sow the kind of virulent hatred of the United States that the war on terror purports to root out, as Yemini writer Farea Al-Muslimi explained to a senate hearing in April this year.
“What radicals had previously failed to achieve in my village,” he said, “one drone strike accomplished in an instant: there is now an intense anger and growing hatred of America.”
Many South Africans care about these issues because when this country was subjected to over half a decade of state-sponsored oppression and injustice in the form of apartheid and centuries of colonialism, global powers equivocated while others actively supported the apartheid government.
Like black America, we’ve realized that a change in figurehead to someone who looks like he might better understand our struggles does not equate to a substantive change for the better. This is why as Americans grapple with how to effect systemic justice and equality within their nation’s borders, so too must they do a better job of holding their representatives to account for their nation’s actions abroad.
* The image is of a younger Senator Obama, peering through Nelson Mandela’s prison cell when he traveled to South Africa in 2006. That trip also included stops in Kenya, Djibouti and Chad.
After Mandela
I returned home to South Africa a few days before Nelson Mandela was readmitted to hospital. This is the fourth and longest period he has been under observation by doctors since last December, and many here are convinced this may be his final visit. Mandela has not been active in South African politics for at least a decade, but he remains a potent symbol of the promise of the “rainbow nation.” The anxiety is apparent—especially in the media: What will happen when Mandela goes? Andrew Mlangeni, who served more than two decades with Mandela on Robben Island prison, told a Sunday newspaper that South Africans had to release Mandela spiritually and let him go. Most ordinary South Africans have resigned themselves to that fact and are saying their goodbyes, though some wish he’d stay with us a bit longer. School children and clerics turn up at the hospital to pray for him and leave messages. Though some in the press wanted to turn the lack of detailed updates by government spokespeople on Mandela’s condition into a “press freedom” issue and a scandal, local TV and radio coverage is mostly somber.
Even as the vigil continues, South Africans debate Mandela’s legacy and the history he so powerfully embodies. For example, despite Mandela’s lifelong membership in the governing African National Congress, these days an opposition party, the Democratic Alliance (a largely white political party which governs Cape Town and the surrounding province and commands only 20 percent of the national vote) claims it—and not the ANC—is Mandela’s true heir. It has even released advertisements with Mandela’s image and have been pilloried for inventing history (though the campaign seemed to have galvanized their supporters). President Jacob Zuma, who is also the leader of the ANC, corrected them: “The way he is being portrayed by the DA is as if Madiba was born in 1994—there was no life before.”
But one can see why the DA cannot help but overreach. Mandela is the most recognizable figure in twentieth-century South African, and perhaps world, history. In the popular imagination, both at home and abroad, he is as close as our world gets to a saint. Mandela personifies the narrative of the righteous struggle against legal apartheid, as well as the supposed miracle of racial reconciliation at the twentieth century’s end. This is a tremendous story, and a good deal of it is true. South Africa today is dramatically different than the one Mandela re-entered from prison in 1990. It has a black government, a growing black middle class, vibrant media, stable and vital democratic freedoms (with three sets of free elections and counting) and a growing economy.
Mandela can take credit for convincing white South Africans of the virtues of liberal democracy, thus ensuring the economy’s stability in the wake of 1994, if at the cost of preserving the white population’s disproportionate wealth and influence. Subsequent presidents have continued in this vein. Despite an initially heavily armed white population (and the persistence of racist views among some whites), today race makes little political turbulence. To be sure, some whites gripe about discrimination and “reverse racism” and organize themselves in “civil society organizations” (like the Afrikaner-led organizations Afriforum and Solidarity, which, among other things, oppose renaming streets and affirmative action). But in general white South Africans have never been more prosperous, mobile and free.
A recent report by the South African Institute of Race Relations—a frequent critic of the ANC government—concluded that whites are actually doing way better than expected [1] since the end of apartheid. A separate study revealed that the majority of CEOs and managers are still white [2], and Africa Check [3], a South African version of factcheck.org, corrected inflated statistics about white poverty (touted by Afrikaner interest groups): “The claim that 400,000 whites are living in squatter camps is grossly inaccurate. If that were the case, it would mean that roughly 10% of South Africa’s 4.59-million whites were living in abject poverty. Census figures suggest that only a tiny fraction of the white population—as little as 7,754 households—are affected.” So white South Africans are doing very well in post-Mandela South Africa, and many are therefore anxious about what will happen to them when Madiba passes.
This anxiety is due in part to the realization that transformation has been slow to come to the vast majority of South Africans. Mandela excelled at the rhetoric of the rainbow and reconciliation that still pervades South African public discourse, but he presided over a disastrous economic policy for the country’s poor, black majority. The result is that South Africa remains one of the most unequal countries in the world today by most measures. Inequality is still defined by race, despite the fact that inequality amongst blacks has also expanded. Since 1994, the number of South Africans living on less than a dollar a day has doubled, but so has the number of South African millionaires .
Successive South African governments (starting with Mandela) have been reluctant to address South Africa’s fundamental historical inequalities, whether by implementing any meaningful land reform or tampering with racial residential patterns. Though the government should be credited for massive public housing construction, most new housing and suburbs are still built on land far away from city centers or constructed next to existing racially segregated townships. Almost 280,000 families countrywide lack basic sanitation. In Cape Town, where the opposition Democratic Alliance governs, some of the poor have desperately resorted to dumping feces at the doorsteps of the provincial parliament or on the bodies of public representatives.
The ANC’s market-friendly policies began under Mandela, even though many associate such policies with Mandela’s successor, Thabo Mbeki. It was Mandela who in mid-1996 presented the government’s neoliberal GEAR policy (Growth, Employment And Redistribution) as “non-negotiable.” Although there continues to be conflict over economic policy within the ANC, as well as with its alliance partners in the trade unions and the Communist Party, and there are traces of a “development state” (a national healthcare plan, social housing, massive AIDS roll-out since 2009 and welfare grants), government still prioritizes the interests of business.
The poor know this, and though the majority of South Africans revere Mandela and the ANC for defeating apartheid, many are realizing that true citizenship means taking on the ANC. For many, the ANC has come to represent a callous government whose police evict them from already cramped and substandard housing, shut off their water, lock them up or murder them when they protest. In the most extreme case, in August last year, police shot thirty-four striking miners in the Northwest province; people here just say “Marikana” when they talk about the killings. One year earlier, in broad daylight, police murdered an activist, Andries Tatane, who had led protests over bad services in his small town in the Free State province.
Dissatisfaction is not new. In the early 2000s, Mandela’s successor Thabo Mbeki was the focus of frequent protests over service delivery, unemployment, poverty and inequality. ANC members and others worked successfully to unseat Mbeki, who was praised by business interests for his management of the economy. Instead they got Jacob Zuma, who although more personable than Mbeki, is hobbled by a messy private life and charges of corruption. Storms swirl around Zuma, but on a macroeconomic level, little changed under him too. For a while, Julius Malema, a bombastic and brash ANC youth leader, held center stage and threatened to bring economic inequality to the center of attention. Yet he fell out with Zuma and his support fizzled as stories emerged detailing his own problems with corruption and excess.
Still, impatience with Zuma’s government is growing. Not all protests take an organized form or are sustained over time, but they are always there—one can’t miss the din of protest about housing and evictions, over water, electricity and education. These movements frequently invoke Mandela as a symbol, even as they chide his government’s legacy. He is both an obstacle and an inspiration. Many participants are very young—barely alive when Mandela came out of prison or when he was elected president. Take Abahlali baseMjondolo, a slumdwellers’ movement outside Durban that protested evictions at the hands of the ANC-led city council, as profiled in a new film Dear Mandela. In one scene, a teenage leader, Mazwi Nzimande, tries to fire up the crowd. Nzimande denounces people who discriminate against shack dwellers and criticizes political parties. When, however, he shouts: “Down with the ANC party, down!” he is greeted with silence. Mandela’s party still has a powerful hold over most black South Africans. For many, in spite of its failings, it is still seen as the only organization that will be able to fundamentally restructure South Africa’s political economy. In the film, Nzimande sits down, momentarily defeated.
Nzimande’s colleague, Mnikelo Ndabankulu (in his early 20s), takes a different approach. Speaking after a fire that destroyed 200 shacks in his neighborhood, he responds to criticism by ANC and government supporters: “They say, ‘Why are these people marching because these times [of oppression] have gone. We are in a democracy. What are they marching for?’ [However] the real motive behind our struggle is this thing [pointing to conditions in his squatter community]. It’s not a matter of disrespecting the authorities. It’s being serious about life. This is not life.”
Then, referring to Mandela’s steadfastness when he was sentenced to life in prison in 1964, Ndabankulu says: “You don’t need to be old to be wise. That is why we think we need to show our character while we are still young so that when your life ends, it must not be like a small obituary that said, ‘You were born, you ate, you go to school, you died.’ When you are dying you must die with credibility. People must talk about you saying good things, saying you were a man among men, not just an ordinary man.”
Sunday, June 16, was National Youth Day, commemorating the day in 1976, when black students in Soweto rose up to resist forced instruction in Afrikaans, but also to protest conditions in their schools (at the time government spent R644 a year on a white child’s education, but only R42 on a black child). The movement spread countrywide and combatted the repressive political environment of the time (most were inspired by the Black Consciousness movement whose leader, Steve Biko, would be murdered by police the next year). Much has changed since then. Public education is now free in principle, government spending does not discriminate by race and no one is forced to learn Afrikaans. However, little has been done to improve black schools that are characterized by overcrowding, no electricity or water supply and dilapidated infrastructure.
The next day (a public holiday), I joined a march by a few thousand school children to Parliament. Equal Education, a NGO that has taken the minister of education to court over the conditions of the schools that most black South Africans attend, organized the march. (Full disclosure: I have been sending groups of New School students to intern at Equal Education every summer since 2012.) At a rally in front of parliament, one of the Equal Education leaders reminded protesters that they were meeting on a solemn occasion “as Mandela, the father of our nation lay dying and as we commemorate the Soweto Uprising led by students.”
It was inevitable that he would then make a direct connection between the march and Mandela, who in the wake of Soweto 1976 wrote from prison: “That verdict is loud and clear: apartheid has failed. Our people remain unequivocal in its rejection…. They are a generation whose whole education has been under the diabolical design of the racists to poison the minds and brainwash our children into docile subjects of apartheid rule. But after more than twenty years of Bantu Education the circle is closed and nothing demonstrates the utter bankruptcy of apartheid as the revolt of our youth.”
I wondered what Mandela would make of these protesters for whom freedom has meant unequal education and who now see the government he was part of willing into being, as an obstacle to them enjoying their full rights in the new South Africa. Perhaps he would recognize himself in them.
* An edited version of this post first appeared on the website of the American publication, The Nation, earlier this week.
Jogo Bonito
“Tear gas is a magic potion,” writes Chris Gaffney from the streets of Rio. “Those who launch it are weakened while those forced to inhale it are strengthened.” For those of you interested in the politics of football in Brazil, his blog – as well as his excellent book on Stadia in Argentina and Brazil - is a key place to go to understand the ways in which preparations for the 2014 World Cup have served as a trigger for what may become a major political and social movement in Brazil. As is often the case, the state’s response to what were initially small protests has energized a movement that is tapping into a powerful vein of dissatisfaction in the country.
In Le Monde, Jean Hébrard, who co-directs a center for Brazilian studies at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris, has analyzed the role of the looming World Cup in the protests. There have been worries from the very beginning, he notes, that there would be “excessive spending” surrounding the tournament at a time when the population badly needs investment in other types of infrastructure. And there has also been anger and criticism about corruption, notably within the Brazilian Football Federation. The World Cup didn’t create the bigger problems, but it has served to “crystallize” the public debate because of the very obvious ways in which funds are being directed towards something that won’t benefit most Brazilians. Even if many, Hébrard notes, will still “love the World Cup” when it comes around, it presents an opportunity to call out political leaders and elites for mixed-up priorities.
The bigger story here is the intersection of the increasingly interventionist and heavy-handed management of the World Cup by FIFA and a potentially explosive mix of grievances percolating within Brazilian society. Especially since 2010 in South Africa, FIFA’s management of the event has become a de facto removal of national sovereignty in certain key domains, notably that of security and infrastructure. Why, you might ask, does a country like Brazil which is full of football stadia have to build new ones in order to host a tournament? Because FIFA has a wide range of specific stipulations about precisely how the stadia for the event need to be. And a big part of that is, as Chris Gaffney has described, transforming these stadia from spaces that are open to and integrated into local communities into fenced-off, highly-regulated spaces where only FIFA-approved products (including what at least in South Africa was an absurd and paltry menu of food centered around hot dogs and Budweiser). In other words, hosting a World Cup requires not just the transformation of urban space, but in many ways the transformation of the practice of traveling to and attending sporting events.
When a government tries to sell the advantages of hosting a World Cup to its population, one of the main arguments that is made is that the infrastructural investments that are necessary for the event will ultimately benefit the population in the long term. There were promises a few years ago that, in preparing for the World Cup, new public transportation lines would be built. This is something that did in fact happen in South Africa, where new trains, including a line through Soweto, were built.
Even when such projects are carried out, of course, they can end up not really serving the needs of the population as much as they should, since the organization of transportation for a major sporting event doesn’t necessarily line up with daily needs. In the Brazilian case, though, something worse has happened: these promises have simply not materialized. And now Brazilians are seeing the cost of their transportation increase, alongside many other daily costs, even as the government pours money into the construction of new stadia and the renovation of old ones into structures which will likely end up, as is the case all over the world, as “white elephants” after 2014 and the 2016 Olympics are over. In South Africa, even major sporting events have trouble filling the stadia built for 2010, though they have found a use for another, unexpected, form of mass event: evangelical rallies, which have taken place in the Cape Town stadium among others.
All governments have to essentially lie to their population when they promise that it’s good for everyday people to host a major sporting event. For politicians, the real drive for hosting these events is never the economic or infrastructural benefit they will bring, but the symbolic power gained by being, for a brief moment, at the center of the world. Business elites and politicians, of course, also stand to gain materially from all the contracts and construction that go on around these events. All of this always creates some amount of criticism, and sometimes protest, as was the case in South Africa. As we look forward to 2014, we should keep an eye on what happened in South Africa, where the various doomsayers who worried about a crime epidemic, failed infrastructure, and generalized chaos were chastened when the event was carried out extremely successfully. At the same time, it is certainly not clear whether, in the end, the massive investment in the World Cup really improved anything at all for South Africans as a whole, and many who have analyzed the question — notably those who contributed to an excellent recent collection called Africa’s World Cup (look out for Sean’s interview with the editors later this week) – have called attention to the fact that very few of the promised economic benefits really happened.
For all the debate in South Africa, however, there was never a mass political movement that developed to criticize the way the tournament was being organized. The Brazilian case seems, at least potentially, to be of a very different order. The direct confrontation on the part of larger numbers of demonstrators with police outside matches is something relatively new. When the police respond with violence to peaceful protests outside stadia, it will become even harder for the Brazilian government to convince critics that hosting the World Cup is something being done in the service of the people. The boosters for the 2014 World Cup in Brazil want people to imagine joyful, dancing, pretty, green and yellow clad fans: not lines of riot police firing tear gas. But FIFA and the World Cup are, and have always been, inherently political. What’s happening in Brazil is that protestors are attempting to re-shape the political meaning of the event, turning it into an opportunity to change Brazil according to their vision.
*This article is cross-posted between AIAC and Laurent’s excellent blog, Soccer Politics.
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