Sean Jacobs's Blog, page 473

Africa is a Country’s New Logo

You may have noticed a new logo lurking around Africa is a Country headquarters. When Sean put out the call for a design upgrade last year, I immediately thought of Diego Guttierez, an amazing graphic designer I’ve had the luck to work closely with in recent months. I met Diego a couple years ago when he was hanging with the Mex and the City folks. At the end of last year he signed on as the Art Director for Dutty Artz, the artist collective I belong to in Brooklyn, and has done an amazing job upgrading our visual identity. Now he’s agreed to help do the same for Africa is a Country. Check out the rest of his work here: http://talacha.net

Afropolitan Dreams in Brooklyn

Relevant for our purposes, Blitz the Ambassador is throwing a block party in Brooklyn this Saturday. Les Nubians are singing, Rimarkable and myself are DJing, and Restless City is screening. MoCADA is the host and co-sponsor.

What better way to sum up our unique New York spin on Afropolitanism?!

Apparently (and fittingly) Blitz is taking the party around the world. I’m especially interested to what goes down in Sao Paolo as I will be making a move in the vicinity in the near future. In the meantime, see you on Saturday!

In Search of the “African Middle Class”

“The Other Africa.” Image by Philippe Sibelly

Guest Post by Jacques Enaudeau

“Africa Rising” stories have become old news in English-speaking media, so much so that Africa is a Country called them a meme not long ago. But only a few have run in French news outlets, and one such op-ed [fr] recently made it to the pages of the well-respected daily newspaper Le Monde. The piece has a specific flavor for a couple of reasons: a condescending and prescriptive tone, also known as the Françafrique touch, as its title trumpeting that “Africa is on the right tracks” (L’Afrique est bien partie) makes clear; an emphasis on the rise of the “African middle class”, portrayed as the cornerstone of the “African economic revolution”, whose origins are to be found in “diversifying and emancipating economies”, enabling “endogenous growth” that is free of the “dependency on raw materials exports” because it is “driven by consumption”. Such a nice Cinderella story! Who would guess that a little over a decade ago Africa was mostly described as “the hopeless continent”?

Cape of Good Hope

This rosy picture can be traced back to the strategic briefs and equity research notes published from 2010 onwards by Boston Consulting Group, McKinsey, Goldman Sachs (pdf) or Deloitte (pdf), advertising “the new African consumer”, finally in a position to spend some cash in brand new supermarkets. In a time when growth rates of industrialized countries stutter and when the Chinese and Indian engines of the global economy are somewhat slowing down, financial analysts and investment consultants can’t get enough of the one thing that they have dismissed for so long: Africa.

[image error]

Why France doesn’t want to let Aminata Traoré in and Germany allowed her only inside Berlin’s city limits

Malian writer, activist, former member of government Aminata Traoré is unwelcome in France, and, thanks to the ‘open borders’ of the Schengen Area, she is persona non grata in pretty much all of Europe. Another dialogue is possible? Not if you irk les autorités. Traoré was invited to speak at a conference last week, in Berlin. From there she was to go on to France, to participate in public forums in Paris and Lille. She had had a four-year Schengen visa, which allows for ‘free movement’ around the continent …except, of course, when it doesn’t. Much to her surprise, the German Consulate rejected Traoré’s application. Finally, at the last minute, she was given a three-day safe-conduct for Berlin and only Berlin. Since France wouldn’t allow her to transit through, she had to go through Istanbul and Dakar, which extended her return flight to 26 some hours.

Who is Aminata Traoré, and what makes her so ‘special’? On one hand, in the general fog at the season’s end of the universal Foreign Service, one almost never discovers the reasons for rejection. You’re in or you’re out. Deal with it.

On the other hand, Aminata Traoré is a fairly prominent public figure and activist intellectual. In the late 1990s, she was Mali’s Minister of Culture and Tourism. She’s a writer, perhaps best known for Le Viol de l’imaginaire and L’Afrique humiliée. Both works powerfully address the global, some would say the imperial, aspirations, policies and practices of multinational corporations as well as of former and present colonial national powers. Traoré was one of the lead organizers of the Bamako Social Forum in 2002. At each instance, her work focuses on structures of power, both imposed and resistant, at all levels, including consciousness, and the possibilities of real democracy.

Given we’re talking about Mali, not surprisingly France figures prominently. Traoré is a leader of African, and of African women’s, anti- and counter-globalization movements. At the same time, in writings and political engagements and popular education and theater, Traoré has spent the last decades challenging the common sense of expulsion, specifically of French expulsion of Malians back to Mali. Repeatedly, Traoré has challenged the common sense of development that relies on experts and the annihilation of indigenous knowledge, and she has called out development agencies for their acts and programs of violence, always, of course, ‘in the name of love.’ In particular, Traoré criticized multinational ‘developers’ for the viciousness of their policies and practices when it comes to Malian women, and African women more generally.

Most recently, Traoré has been a prominent critic of the French military intervention in northern Mali. Again, she was particularly pointed in her critique of the impact of French military intervention on Malian women’s rights as well as well being.

Why has Traoré been denied a visa? I don’t know. But I do know that, outside of the Francophone press, neither do you, if you rely on the English-language media. Where is The New York Times, who once, sixteen years ago, relied on Traoré’s views on democracy to help ‘explain’ Mali? Where’s the BBC, who, eleven years ago, featured her work, organizing the 2002 poor people’s summit, where she criticized, and organized against, the G8, NEPAD, and so much more? Where are they all today, when Traoré is denied freedom of movement across the ‘borderless’ expanses of Europe? Silent. Let’s hope another world is possible … soon.

Nollywood Week in Paris

Even though Nigeria didn’t get much love at this year’s FESPACO film festival, some Parisian organizers believe that the francophone world has been ready for Naija cinema. Nollywood, the world’s second largest film industry, produces over 2000 films annually, and now, seven of its best will be screened at France’s first ever NollywoodWeek Paris (and we’re wholeheartedly endorsing this).  From May 30 to June 2, 2013, the L’Arlequin Theatre in Saint-Germain-des-Prés will host the festival, which is to include a VIP cocktail with the filmmakers, panel discussions and a crafts marketplace. Here’s the festival trailer:

Nollywood already has some popularity in France. A new channel, Nollywood TV, has launched. A walk through Barbès and Château Rouge in Paris reveals shops chock full of films from around West Africa. Nollywood still doesn’t have much access to mainstream France however, something the organizers of the film festival are hoping to change. NollywoodWeek is preparing to be an annual event, in order to “foster distribution opportunities in this untapped market.” Instead of popcorn, expect to be served beignets and Nigerian meat pies.

The festival’s film line-up features stars like Genevieve Nnaji in “Ijé” and Hakeem Kae-Kazim in “Last flight to Abuja.” Two of the films that are scheduled for screening we’ve reviewed here previously: Man on Ground (here) and Maami (here). Here are the five other films that made the cut:

Phone Swap by Kunle Afolayan (Director will be present)

Akin and Mary accidentally bump into each other and mistakenly swap their identical phones, leading to a destination mix up. Akin is now at Mary’s destination and visa versa which is where they discover that their phones were swapped. Still determined to make each of their travel’s a success, each must carry out the other’s mission which soon proves to not be an easy task! The result? Hilarious situations and unexpected outcomes.

Inalé by Jeta Amata and Keke Bongos

Inalé is the beautiful daughter of the great King Oche, of the Idoma people in Idomaland, Nigeria. Her beloved Odeh must win the wrestling tournament to win her hand in marriage. A stranger appears, that challenges not only the tradition of the village but the strength of Odeh and Inalé’s true love.

Ijé (The Journey) by Chineze Anyaene

When Anya, the eldest of the two, vows to chase her dreams of glamour in the Hollywood Hills, her younger sister, Chioma, warns her of the dark side of the American Dream. Now, years later, and in a world away from the life she knew, Anya is charged with the murder of three men, one of them her powerful husband. Chioma travels from Nigeria to Los Angeles and, with the help of a young, unproven attorney, discovers that the dark secret her sister wants to keep hidden might be the only thing that can win her freedom.

Tango With Me by Mahmood Ali-Balogun

Lola and Uzo are the perfect couple, their newly married life in front of them. All is well until the happiest day of their lives became the worst.

Last Flight to Abuja by Obi Emelonya

Based on true events. A set of everyday Nigerian travelers board the last Flamingo Airways flight scheduled to fly from Lagos to Abuja on a fateful Friday night in 2006. The plane cruises at 30,000 feet on schedule but like a bolt out of the blue, through a mixture of human error and technical failure, the plane rapidly spirals towards a disastrous end. As the pilots try to get a handle on the situation, a series of flashbacks unravel the twists, turns and leaps of fate that put each passenger on the fateful flight. Young lovers, an elderly couple, a corporate party, a sportsman on the threshold of greatness; all contemplating the final moments of their lives. All… except one.

The founders of the festival have organized an indiegogo campaign to gather some last minute funds here. Here’s the event’s website, and here’s the trailer.

Freedom Day

Guest Post by Duane Jethro*

Today marks the 19th anniversary of Freedom Day in South Africa. It is an occasion to reflect on the recent and distant past. This is significant because in recent weeks the past has re-emerged as a category of political and public debate. Here, the past refers to the recent 20th century past, the past of Apartheid. That said, the past never really wanes out of public discourse as the question of understanding the present socio-political conditions in South Africa are always hooked onto some historical reference. And it is Nelson Mandela, the symbol and referent of one transition from that past, that has come to be the focus of these recent debates about the qualitative substance of that past. In this brief post, however, I would like to reflect on the ways in which Mandela’s image as a referent of that past has been appropriated, signified and transformed into material form as commemoration, in an attempt to understand what it says about post-apartheid South Africans’ relations to a particular past and the significance of those practises for material commemorations post-apartheid.

Over the last weekend of March, Nelson Mandela was admitted to hospital for the second time since the start of 2013. Naturally, his admission attracted intense media attention, with focus being drawn to the status of the aging statesman’s health. In the wake of the public speculation that again enveloped Mandela and his family, and the questions asked about the morality of the enterprise, the acclaimed South African cartoonist Zapiro weighed in with a cartoon that called for South Africans to start accepting Mandela’s frail, ordinary mortality and let him go. Instead of letting go, however, South Africans sought to affirm their connection with and support for Mandela in seemingly ordinary yet culturally extraordinary ways, by, for example, laying stones of support outside his Houghton home while he was hospitalized. It was reported that members of the public embellished these lithic markers with messages such as “Get well we love you” and “I wish you many more b-days to come”. These Madiba Rocks therefore affirmed Mandela’s continued resonance in the public psyche as a national patriarch and reaffirmed the public’s ethereally real bond with him. More significantly, however, in affirming their affinity for Mandela through the laying of stones at his front door, South Africans were generating a spontaneous memorial, a humble form of commemoration with powerful cultural and historical significance.

Variably referred to as spontaneous shrines, roadside shrines or simply grassroots memorials, memorials like these are generated across the world when material markers and messages of support quickly accumulate at sites related to death and tragedy. As far as it relates to celebrities, it can be traced to the outpouring of public grief after the violent death of Princess Diana, and the enormous floral tribute that bloomed at the gates of Kensington Palace. Another iconic spontaneous memorial sprang up at St Pauls Trinity Church in downtown New York immediately after the 9/11 terror attacks. Survivors, loved ones and friends transformed the church boundary fence into a rich, refulgent tapestry of grief and solidarity, embellishing it with a material culture of fabrics, photographs, flags and hand-written notes for the departed. Collected, curated and preserved inside the church space, the assemblage endures not as ephemera but as an amalgam of broken-hearted interpretations of a national tragedy.

Materially, spontaneous memorials manifest in particular ways, and their material forms speak to the very substance of their cultural and historical significance. Alluring, yes, but also annoying, as in the case of residents of Port Shepstone in Kwazulu-Natal province’s complaints about Bury Stander’s spontaneous memorial, or the awful conundrum faced by residents of Newtown, Connecticut, wondering about how to deal with the material piled up after the spontaneous commemoration of the Sandy Hook massacre. This agony about the basic reality of emergent public commemorations affirms the significance of their very materiality as a key to understanding them as heritage place-makers.

To return to the growing pile of stones outside Nelson Mandela’s home, we can see links to the practise of leaving stones at the graveside of the deceased in Judaism. Closer to home, however, we can situate this spontaneous memorial to the indigenous African custom of the cairn, mounds of stones left by passers-by out of respect to the ancestors laid to rest at a particular place. It resonates with the stones that have been erected at South Africa’s official post-apartheid commemorative space, at Isivivane at Freedom Park in Pretoria. A symbolic burial ground, commemorating all those who died in the struggles for freedom and humanity, Isivivane was sacralised through the authentic indigenous religious knowledge provided by local experts. Sanusi Credo Mutwa, “visionary, historian, seer, prophet, sculptor, painter and unique individual with an uncanny ability to clearly understand the universe, the world and humanity” confirmed the significance of stone in African indigenous knowledge, as lithic registers of time immemorial, as vessels that networked ancient African knowledge.

Nelson Mandela’s connection to the site was more than theoretical. Tourists developed a close association between the figure and the site, often probing tour guides about whether it was being prepared as his final resting place. In that case, it appeared that a range of commemorative practises whether material or merely speculative where already taking place while Mandela was alive or, more specifically on the cusp of passing away. This suggested that there was a transformation in public perception in relation to his place in the South African past as heritage and his frailty as a mere mortal.

Beyond references to statue cults and grandiose representations of figures of esteem, through which the Mandela narrative has also been interpreted, it has also been circulated, recirculated, digitized, electrified, commodified, monetized, globalized and ultimately immortalized. Sjhoe … this excess of cultural and capitalist labour invested in cycling his image through public culture suggests that arguably, South Africans have been dwelling in what Ciraj Rassool has called the biographical complex, a play on Tony Bennet’s notion of the exhibitionary complex, a post-apartheid temporal dimension framed by his biography. Nevertheless, returning to the growing rockery outside Mandela’s home, commemorations such as these raise questions about his future place in the post-apartheid commemorative space and how we attend to the past that he so evocatively represents. What are appropriate means to commemorate him and his legacy, and who decides on what that is supposed to mean? More significantly, we can relate his failing health and the call to appreciate his mortality to the frailty of the romantic post-1994 narrative that he so powerfully represents. Perhaps in laying stones outside his home, South Africans are indeed learning to let go.

* South African Duane Jethro, is a PhD student in social and cultural anthropology at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam.

Weekend Music Break

South African kwaito group Mafikizolo underscored their comeback this week with the release of the video for “Khona” off their new album, Reunited. The video which also features vocals from Uhuru and Mapiano, takes the group back to the village with brightly colored Ndebele wall paintings, Basotho blankets and flamboyant dancing. Since its debut in December, Khona has already become a global club hit and this video will further prove that Nhlanhla Nciza and Theo Kgosinkwe still got it:

Nostalgia for returning to the traditional village life in South Africa must be widespread amidst neoliberal disenchantment because DJ Ganyani and FB also return to their Tsonga roots in the video for “Xigubu”.

Nigerians Show Dem Camp, with Poe and Boj, give us a laid back song for the summer in “Feel Alright”. Ha!!!!!

More proof that high-energy kuduro music is designed for all ages comes from Angola where Gege Kuya Bwe and company live the kuduro life in the video “Batata”. With trademark Angolan style, this dance-heavy video likely doesn’t feature anyone over the age of 7.

Sinkane drops another stellar video from his impressive Mars album with the song “Warm Spell”. In this retro-feeling video, an entrancing guitar riff is overlaid with even more entrancing visuals of lithe, graceful women and flowers. Legendary painter Georgia O’Keefe would certainly approve.

In their video for “That Lazy Song” rising stars Black Motion demonstrate what makes South African house music so unique. Its well crafted beat is infused perfectly with smooth jazz rhythms and hypnotic vocals. Perfect for the impeccably dressed to get down.

Meanwhile in The Gambia… hip hop crew S.T. Da Gambian Dream use their Mandinka flows as a vehicle to express the frustrations of youth in the country and while they’re at it, talk a little shit.

There’s a new video for French rapper Fababy (real name: Fabrice Ayékoué):

Jazz band Stone Ground Souls, which features members from Zimbabwe, South Africa and the United States, performed this past week in Lesotho. In this live video for the song “Roots Grown Deep”, the group’s resident sand-painter Tawanda Mhandu creates an ever-evolving masterpiece amidst the wailing of brass. They call their style “Musical-Visual Synthesis”.

And staying in the jazz vein, Alissa Sanders croons “Dindi” in a video shot by the Nigerian-British artist Zina Saro-Wiwa. The daughter of the Ogoni activist/writer Ken Saro-Wiwa, who was executed by Nigeria’s Abacha regime, Zina has been paving her own artistic path for awhile now. She recently completed a fascinating three-part video installation called Eaten by the Heart that was commissioned by the Menil Collection for their exhibition The Progress of Love.

5 New Films to Watch, N°25

The Supreme Price is ambitious both in its scope and its intentions: “Following the annulment of her father’s — Moshood Abiola — victory in Nigeria’s 1993 Presidential Election and her mother’s – Alhaja Kudirat Abiola — assassination by agents of the military dictatorship, Hafsat Abiola faces the challenge of transforming a corrupt culture of governance into a democracy capable of serving Nigeria’s most marginalized population: women,” plugging her organization along the way. Produced and directed by Joanna Lipper, the film comes with some high-profile backers (MacArthur Foundation, Ford Foundation/Just Films, ITVS, etc). The extended trailer below was commissioned by Gucci to launch their “global Chime for Change Campaign”. We’ll have to watch it.

A second film to watch out for is Tu seras mon allié (“You will be my ally”) by Cameroonian director Rosine Mfetgo Mbakam (remember her portrait of Congolese artist Freddy Tsimba from a while back). The short tells the story of a woman from Gabon, played by Bwanga Pilipili, who gets stopped at the airport upon her entry to Belgium, and on what happens next. The cast further includes Gael Maleux and Isabelle Anciaux:

The Secret Capital is the second joint production by Mukhtar Shehata and Samuli Schielke — after their “The Other Side“ (2010). Set in Egypt, the question it asks is a complicated one: Was there a revolution? “Two years after the beginning of the January 25 Revolution,” they write, “many Egyptians ask themselves this question. The answer is not to be found on Tahrir Square, but in the villages of countryside, the secret capital of Egypt.” The filmmakers follow the struggles, hopes and frustrations among people from Shehata’s home village who between February 2011 and December 2012 tried to bring the revolution to their village in northern Egypt:

Angolan director Pocas Pascoal’s first feature film Por Aqui Tudo Bem (“All is well”) won the European Union Award at FESPACO earlier this year. Synopsis: “In the late summer of 1980, Alda and her sister Maria, at the age of 16 and 17, arrive in Lisbon to escape the civil war in Angola. Left to themselves, they must learn to survive in a foreign city.”

And The Capacity of Capcity is director Sara Chitambo’s story* on the rise, demise, and “imminent revival” of Pretoria’s hip hop scene. The documentary features interviews with a broad range of key stakeholders, from producers such as Nyambz and Thirteen, to emcees such as Maliq and Damola, and fringe observers such as Hype magazine editor Simone Harris and DJ Kenzhero.

* File this one under “shameless self-promotion” since Ts’eliso helped out with the editing. The film will premiere on 27th April at the Back to the City Festival (Newton, South Africa). For future screening dates, keep an eye on the film’s Tumblr.

Joyce Banda has bigger problems than Madonna

The historian Margery Perham once wrote that “the basic difficulty” with the British colonial technique of indirect rule, of which she was a major architect, was “the great gap between the culture of rulers and ruled.” “People do not understand what we want them to do,” she wrote, “or, if they understand, do not want to do it.” The only thing for it, according to Perham, was “to instruct the leaders of the people in the objects of our policy, in the hope that they will, by their natural authority, at once diffuse the instruction and exact the necessary obedience.”

The International Monetary Fund are back in Malawi pursuing their long-running project of structural adjustment, and their head, Christine Lagarde, may have felt something like Perham’s frustration earlier this year when she visited the country for the first time. Malawi’s president, Joyce Banda, is more or less quiescent to the urgings of Western technocrats like Lagarde, but the people Banda must try to rule are not impressed. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.

After years of being frozen out by Bingu wa Mutharika’s administration, Joyce Banda has restored the IMF to the top table of Malawian policy-making and has pushed through a sweeping program of reforms at their behest, principally a massive devaluation of the kwacha and the removal of major subsidies on fuel and other commodities, all in the name of attracting foreign investment. The immediate prize was a three-year loan of $157 million. These funds had been withheld from the recalcitrant Mutharika, along with an $80 million credit facility, but were restored in June last year as a reward for Banda’s currency devaluation.

It should be noted that the UK government is very much involved in forcing the Malawian government into line with the IMF agenda. Weepy British chancellor George Osborne has no intention whatsoever of following IMF advice himself — just this week Lagarde told him again that he is pushing his so-called “austerity” agenda of public sector cuts much too far — yet the UK has nonetheless been active as part of a bloc of donors (including Norway, Germany, the EU and the World Bank) that has insisted that Malawi has no alternative but to obey the IMF, and made their budget support conditional on this. The IMF only knows best for some countries, it seems.

The Malawian economy has not responded well to the IMF program. Bloomberg recently reported that the kwacha is now the worst performing unit in Africa. A Malawian research organisation, the Centre for Social Concern, puts the rise in the cost of living for the average low-income urban family at 20 percent for 2012 (h/t Jimmy Kainja), with inflation above 30 per cent, food shortages spreading, and the cost of fuel and other commodities rocketing since the devaluation. Last November the cost of petrol rose from K539 per litre to K606, and another price hike in early February saw it rise yet further to K704.30. Two years ago, an increase from K256 to K290 was considered unsustainable.

Malawians reacted to the latest fare hikes by staging public protests in January, and then again in February. Civil servants and teachers went on strike, demanding a 67 per cent pay rise. After two weeks without lessons, Blantyre’s school children decided they had had enough and organised their own demonstration across the city in support of their teachers. Dressed in bright blue and green school uniforms, they marched on Sanjika Palace before staging a sit-down protest on the road right outside the Malawian stock exchange. Stones were thrown at the Joyce Banda Foundation school, where classes were unaffected by the strike action, and angry pupils chanted their demands for equal provision across private and public schools.

This extraordinary collective action by Blantyre’s schoolchildren went scandalously unreported internationally. The Western media doesn’t know “empowerment” when it sees it, because it’s learned so well the old lie that the African poor (especially women and children) are waiting to have this thing called empowerment brought to them by Western NGOs.

The strike, irresistible as it was, was called off only when government conceded to a remarkable 61 per cent salary increase for the lowest-paid civil servants, saying they would find the money from somewhere. Lessons resumed around Malawi and the schoolchildren had got their way. So much for the IMF’s big plans and patronising soundbites.

“The IMF is in panic mode,” says Professor Thandika Mkandawire, a development economist at London School of Economics. “The social consequences of the policies are dire. The IMF is blaming this on poor implementation of social measures, whatever that means.”

Lagarde acknowledges that things haven’t gone to plan, but she still flew to Lilongwe in January and ordered Banda to persevere with the IMF agenda. Lagarde left Malawi with a statement offering “congratulations” to Joyce Banda for her “bold” economic policies, and urging her to “stay the course”. Demonstrators in Blantyre, Lilongwe and Mzuzu took to the streets and sung songs insisting Lagarde is unwelcome in Malawi, and accusing Banda of having sold the country to the IMF.

Banda is a compelling and contradictory figure. She’s now a fixture on international power-lists and she gets to hang out with whoever she wants in Washington DC, but at home she faces a cocktail of misogyny and class snobbery from jealous opponents who still mock her as “mayi wa mandasi” (the woman who sells fritters). The chauvinism of Malawi’s political elite doesn’t trouble her, but if she’s not careful the pleasures of fostering her international popularity might prove to be her undoing at home.

Banda has found herself leading her country at a particularly puzzling historical conjuncture, but if she’s not careful she may not last long in State House. It was inside the very first month of her presidency that Banda made the decision that will surely define her tenure, rushing through a devaluation of the kwacha that saw it drop 50 per cent against the dollar. It looked a bold move at the time, but to many observers the devaluation seemed the only plausible option in engineering a general rapprochement with an international community that had had enough of the irascible Mutharika and withdrawn budget support.

Banda’s feet were just fresh under the desk, mere weeks after the sudden death of Bingu wa Mutharika and the brief but highly-charged stand-off which followed had yielded up one of the most dizzying political turnarounds in modern Southern African political history. Utterly cast out of the Lilongwe political machine, Banda had founded the People’s Party, whose members were so few in number that their bright orange uniforms seemed at that time to bespeak an optimism verging on the harebrained.

There are two questions worth asking of this intriguing moment. The first concerns the balance of Malawi’s electoral calculus. In plain terms: will Joyce Banda lose the election in 2014 if she follows through with what the IMF are demanding of her, and what if anything would a defeat of that kind mean for the way global economic institutions go about their business in the Third World? The second question is to try to think through the broader historical and economic currents that underlie the current Malawian situation. In particular, how is it that for just $157 million, the Bretton Woods institutions can still dictate the fiscal policy of a country like Malawi in 2013? The question of Malawi’s reliance on global financial institutions has not always been so perplexing, but things were supposed to be changing.

The country’s much-vaunted relationship with China, fostered over the past decade or so, is plainly not sufficient to allow Malawi to ignore IMF directives. A grand new parliament building has sprung up in Lilongwe, a national stadium is on the way, and while Joyce Banda doesn’t go as far as her predecessor did in wearing a Chinese-collared shirt, relations appear to remain very cordial. But whatever China is getting from Malawi, Malawi isn’t gaining much in the way of hard financial clout. In his second term, Mutharika ruled as though the only international relationship Malawi needed was with China. Western donors withdrew, and ordinary Malawians soon found themselves suffering a nationwide shortage of foreign exchange, fuel, and medical supplies.

What about Malawi’s natural resources? While the country seems to have discovered considerable energy resources and mineral wealth, (tensions with Tanzania over the oil apparently to be found beneath Lake Malawi notwithstanding,) and has done so at precisely the right moment, just when economists around the world were scratching their heads over how Malawi’s economy would function when the world tobacco market finally peters out, still, it will likely be a number of years before the Malawian treasury takes in its first petro-kwacha.

Until then, Joyce Banda has to govern with whatever funds are available to her. Late last year she spoke to an audience of Malawians in the diaspora at the plush Waldorf Astoria hotel in Manhattan. One of the first things she did after taking office was to examine the national finances as Mutharika had left them. These, she told us, were comparable to the numbers one might expect to find in the current account of an ordinary private individual in the United States.

It’s a striking claim, and one that certainly helps explain why Banda was willing to take such a sizeable political gamble in order to get hold of the IMF’s $157 million, but it also gets to the heart of one of the defining contradictions of Banda’s presidential style: that she is a gender rights activist who is constantly trying to sound like a saleswoman, and that she attempts to perform both these roles on the international stage at the same time. She has learned to speak in the public relations-style language of the business school circuit, in which Malawi is to be sold as an attractive investment opportunity, a place to do business. This is no incidental concern, since encouraging FDI is the fundamental objective of the IMF reforms. Yet in the very same Western capitals, Banda is feted wherever she goes as a pioneer for the rural poor and women’s rights, and it’s when she offers Malawi as a sob story that she convinces.

The two lenses through which Banda depicts Malawi — near basket-case on the one hand, confident emerging market on the other — simply don’t make sense when offered together. Ordinary Malawians are telling her that they have had enough of “donor-fearing” politics.

A version of this article first appeared with the title “Malawi: mind the gap” in Africa in Fact, the monthly newsletter of Good Governance Africa, a South Africa-based think-tank. It’s republished here with thanks.

VICE and the “new journalism model”*

The business of journalism as we know it is in trouble and there’s a scramble for a “new journalism model,” with VICE.com held up as the latest prototype (see here, here and here). I am not so sure VICE is the new journalism–its partnership with “old media” (CNN, HBO) is old fashioned, it mostly produces sponsored content (nothing new there), owns an advertising agency and makes nice with Rupert Murdoch. Of course, VICE’s style represents something fresh. With its diversity of topics and irreverence, it is a vast improvement on the talking heads of cable news. But, there is also much to dislike about VICE.

There’s its cheap headlines, sensationalism, vulgarity, misogyny, the way it ridicules mostly non-Western people, and its very white, male, Anglo-American look.

On balance, VICE’s Africa coverage is more bad than good, even when they try not to—whether they cover cyber-fraud in Ghana, embark on “Guides” to Liberia and the Democratic Republic of Congo that resemble “Heart of Darkness” or exaggerate alcohol abuse in Uganda.

Basically they’re just another ambitious media company (Shane Smith, one of the founders, refers to VICE as “the Time Warner of the Streets”) interested in market share, synergy and branding. So, yes, they may be introducing a whole lot of young people to international affairs, but in the process they also work very hard to undermine their own credibility.

* This is a slightly edited version of what I wrote down when Al Jazeera English contacted me about a 60-second comment for  a feature they ran on VICE on the channel’s media program, “The Listening Post.” Start watching the Listening Post feature at 13:52. My short comment was for “Global Village Voices,” a regular, short segment on “Listening Voices” that are usually included at the end of features like the VICE story. A very condensed cut of my comment–to fit into the program’s format; nothing malicious–made it onto the final version of the episode.