Sean Jacobs's Blog, page 486

Searching for Redemption

I watched Searching for Sugar Man on a plane, which means I cried through parts of it. That doesn’t say much about the film. Movies on airplanes make me weep. Since it won the Oscar for best documentary, a lot of people have been writing about how Searching for Sugar Man doesn’t deserve the prize for any number of reasons: 

That other contenders like How to Survive a Plague were better journalism and had actual impacts.

That it falsely equates Rodriguez’s music with a growing anti-apartheid consciousness.

That it’s a glorified “VH1 Behind the Music” that leaves out many convenient facts.

But if you recognize the Oscars as a prize decided by a group of baby boomer white dudes in California then it makes sense that Sugar Man won, because, like every music doc ever, Searching For Sugar Man is a dad documentary.

It’s a story about middle class white men and their quest for self actualization masquerading as a story about a Mexican-American folk singer named Rodriguez.

The film begins with a former South African soldier, Stephen “Sugar” Segerman pondering an outlandish story about Rodriguez’s public suicide. This is followed by South African journalist Craig Bartholomew Strydom “investigating” Rodriguez, trying hard to figure out where in the world is this place called “Dearborn.” And while I realize this is happening before the era of Google Maps, at one point Strydom consults a globe.

If the documentary was actually about Rodriguez, it would start and finish with his story: Detroit, mental illness and addiction, his daughters, his music and the trouble with art and commercialization. Despite the long, beautiful shots of Rodriguez walking through his deteriorating Motor City neighborhood, viewers come away from the movie understanding little about the man the movie is ostensibly about.

It’s the same white-American baby boomer mythologizing that Bob Dylan and the Rolling Stones keep cashing in on, that made Hendrix, Marley and Janis Joplin martyrs and that would have us believing that racism and sexism were defeated by flower power.

But Sugar Man’s brand of classic-rock nostalgia, despite being Swedish in conception, has a uniquely white South African terroir. Instead of nonsense about ending the Vietnam War, it’s about how they, white South African liberals, ended apartheid while being the only people in the world to appreciate good music.

No doubt, Rodriguez’s South African fans are a big part of his story, but in Searching for Sugar Man, Rodriguez the man feels more like an awkward prop in a story of white redemption rather than the star of his own movie.

Swag, Swag, #Swag

I (Boima) have been a little silent lately here on AIAC. I’m gonna start posting more, although perhaps in briefer form (do visit duttyartz.com to see some of what I’ve been up to recently). For now I leave you with the White Mandingos:

While tapping into an Internet ethos which is totally unserious and trivializing (the Internet has turned us all punk?), there’s a maturity (introspection? sense of history?) in this that is lacking in most of the popular younger artists’ output (at least in my mind), making this better than 99% of American music released today. If you disagree, meet me in the comments section.

How does it feel to be an African asylum seeker in Europe

“Bon voyage” (“Have a nice trip”), a Swiss animated short movie by Fabio Friedli, seeks to convey how it feels to be an African asylum seeker in Switzerland, and it does so by capturing the experience in the simplest manner, with ballpoint pen and paper. Reactions to the movie show how divided the Swiss are about immigration and asylum laws, reflecting more general trends in Europe. However, although having won innumerable awards across Europe and marked a revival of the political film in Switzerland, the film’s critique about the Swiss asylum system is very subtle—maybe too subtle to contribute to meaningful change in thinking about asylum issues in Europe. 

The film starts with stick figures climbing a pick-up truck and expressing joy and excitement for the journey. When they arrive at the coast, they board a boat to Europe. On their way, joy turns into despair, as the travelers have to overcome many challenges—an overcrowded bus, a sinking boat, the arrogance of the smugglers who don’t care about the lives they take into their hands, cluelessness about the exact destination, and lastly the defense systems of the “Fortress Europe”. Many migrants die on the way, and only the hero of the story makes it, finally sitting in front of three immigration officers in Switzerland. This is the moment in which the animated film suddenly turns into a live action film. But here the actual adventure just begins, as the officers don’t seem to care about the refugee’s story and draw cartoons while listening to the refugee’s testimony—the very cartoon we just saw, imagining African migrants as stick figures without motive and history that die like flies.

The film was made at a time when Switzerland (and Europe more generally) had to deal with an increase in asylum seekers, rising by 45% from 2010 to 2011 to 22,551, which was largely attributed to the upheavals in North Africa and an operational migration route from Tunisia and Lybia to southern Italy. Asylum law is an issue exploited by the conservative Swiss people’s party (SVP), and the topic provokes strong emotional reactions, as immigrants and asylum seekers are thought to limit domestic employment opportunities and fundamentally change Swiss culture. In a previous project, Homeland (video below), Fabio Friedli and colleagues captured the angst over cultural change, which was most strongly expressed during the debate about the construction of minarets in Switzerland, which culminated in a referendum in 2009. This is why, since 2006, Switzerland has restricted immigration and asylum law greatly.

Today, Switzerland is one of the European countries with the most restricted asylum regulations and the longest wait times for asylum petitions, turning the Swiss asylum process into a “kafkaesque” experience.

“Bon voyage” works with those narratives with the greatest shock factor—the fatal journey across the Mediterranean Sea and an African asylum seeker in front of Swiss officers, and thus speaks to the dominant image of asylum seekers in the European media and public. Most irregular migrants and asylum seekers actually arrive via land in Europe (from Russia and the Balkans), and many come from the Near East rather than Africa. But the film does not clarify—it plays with existing stereotypes, in a manner that is too subtle to provoke a change in attitude among Europeans towards migrants. Most of the reactions to the film on media websites convey a deep racism and anxiety about immigrants’ danger to Swiss culture and the job market. These people don’t realize that contrary to their fears of waves of asylum seekers from Africa, only few arrive—in the film, only the hero of the story makes it. It’s a tragic hero, as in current European public discourse one is one too many.

VICE.com and Albinos in Tanzania

Guest Post by Kathleen Bomani

Vice.com has become a bit too predictable with their cheap alarmist headlines, and overly simplistic narratives of “other” people. Recently Vice published “The Fight to Stop Tanzanians Killing and Eating Albino People” which they have now changed to a more palatable (depending on your taste buds): “The Fight to Stop Tanzanians Butchering Albino People.” Vice, you are not off the hook. Who knows what inspired the editorial change? 

One may point to misleading and shoddy “reporting” on Vice’s end. “Dear world: Tanzanians do not eat Albinos.” This reductive and alarmist style of writing about the continent is not only outdated, but deplorable and contravenes responsible journalism. What baffles me most is how the article circulated in my Facebook feed without people questioning the heavy Joseph Conradesque tone it entailed (cannibalism in 2013, yes really this happened). And for the record, bamia is okra, kisamvu is cassava leaves, and mchicha is spinach not a peanut curry, where exactly was this Leke Sanusi eating? (Forget the fact that other national dishes are more popular than these arbitrary choices.)

Aside from the crude introduction, the rest of the interview was accurate. People with albinism, like people with disabilities all over the world, including Tanzania, face extreme hardship and discrimination. However, there are numerous organizations in Tanzania working with the albino community at large to address such issues. It is unfair and far from the truth to generalize and hold the acts of a few groups (Albino Killers) as a reflection of the whole nation. Tanzania is historically a very tolerant place, claiming that Albinos are a popular national dish is tantamount to saying mass shooting is a favorite pass time for Americans. Great strides have been made in recent years in Tanzania, including the election of an Albino Member of Parliament Salum Khalfani Barwani from an opposition party, and the appointment of Al-Shymaa Kway-Geer to the national assembly. I am not here to defend Tanzania or absolve it. I am here to refute amiss sensationalist stories.

Due to the same alarming reports of Albino killings in Tanzania that flooded US media outlets ala 20/20, ABC News, etc… as curator and Co-licensee of the inaugural 2010 TEDxDar conference in Tanzania, I worked hard to secure Babu Sikare – a talented Tanzanian Bongo Flava artist, actor and activist who happens to be an Albino – as a speaker to shed light on this national issue. Babu gave a poignant and self-reflective talk about the conditions of Albinos in Tanzania and his mission to change the ignorant mindset that persists. Babu mentioned the toting number figure of over “70 Albinos” killed. Such figures do nothing to help with the situation. He astutely pointed out that an average Albino in Tanzania lives to an age of between 30 to 35, and that the largest killer of Albinos in Tanzania (it’s safe to lump Africa here) is Cancer. The deficiency of melanin in people with albinism predisposes them to harmful effects of ultra-violet radiation exposure resulting in skin cancers. While stern action has to be taken in the face of Albino Killings,the plight of the Albino screams a need to adopt a holistic approach. Thank you to Mr. Mboya for pointing out that discrimination against people with albinism is not isolated to Tanzania, but it is a global issue (I won’t bring up the depiction of people with albinism in Hollywood: think The Da Vinci Code or 300).

What we are doing in Tanzania is collaborating between our vibrant civil society, advocacy groups, charitable entities, NGOs and the government to quell myths on albinism and remove the social stigma. Mchicha can’t be grown in a day! And the challenge is multifaceted.

To end this I’d like to introduce you to a two time Tanzanian Kili Award winning (as voted by cannibal Tanzanians) artist and one of my favorites Keisha and K-sher:

* You can follow Kathleen Bomani on Twitter.

Oil in the Angolan President’s Family: Keeping it Global

A few months late to this story, the Wall Street Journal published a piece last Wednesday entitled “Angola Wealth Fund is Family Affair.” This was widely reported in the international press back in the fall when the Fundo Soberano de Angola was officially announced. The Fund, started with $5 billion, now puts Angola in line with other OPEC nations, which also have funds to protect against oil price volatility, to secure the future when oil runs out, to build infrastructure, and/or to diversify the economy. Angola could use all these. According to one prominent member of the board, the emphasis will be on diversification and wealth creation. 

The FSDEA has a three person board, which includes José Filomeno de Sousa Santos, one of Angolan President José Eduardo dos Santos’s sons, known by his nickname Zenú. Zenú is 34 years old and was raised primarily in Switzerland and England. He has a Master’s degree in information management and finance from Westminster University in London and worked at the AAA insurance company in Luanda (currently in financial crisis), part of Sonangol’s network of companies.

FSDEA values include: transparency, accountability, commitment, and integrity. The Wall Street Journal quotes the World Bank economist Marcelo Giugale who says that “A sovereign-wealth fund is a huge signal of discipline.” Many Angolans and Angola observers have their doubts.

The local and international press have voiced some of those concerns. Mihaela Webba, a constitutional law specialist and advisor to opposition party UNITA president Isaias Samakuva, told Voice of America that the National Assembly is the only legitimate body to run such a fund and that the Fund’s creation was a violation of Angola’s Constitutional Law. Open Society director Elias Isaac launched a similar criticism to Deutsche Welle questioning whether such a fund could be created by presidential decree. And CASA-CE president Abel Chivukuvuku said he was skeptical that Zenú was the only person in the country qualified for the position. Makaangola did investigative work on the Swiss investment firm that will manage the Fund: Quantum Global and its Swiss-Angolan associate, and friend of Zenú, Jean-Claude Bastos Morais. Together Dos Santos and Morais started the investment bank Banco Kwanza Invest.

In the wake of Zenú’s appointment to the FSDEA board, rumors have begun to circulate that the President intends to tap him as a successor. Manuel Vicente, the current Vice President, was the head of Sonangol and his new political prominence already caused much grumbling in the MPLA party headquarters for the same reason. But succession is for monarchs and the concerns around the Sovereign Fund again recall the ways in which President dos Santos acts more like a sovereign than a popularly elected official. For example, he has centralized power in the executive branch with the 2010 Constitution that removed the Prime Minister, gave the President the power to appoint a Vice President, and made presidential election indirect via the party ticket. One jurist described the constitution’s Presidential powers as like those of Louis XIV. According to Freedom House, 90% of all legislation is initiated in the executive branch. And the President appoints and removes provincial governors at will. Much has already been said here and by others about the nepotistic mechanisms by which his children and especially his first-born daughter, Isabel dos Santos, have developed such robust and lucrative business portfolios.

We think there is something else to think about too. All of this sounds strangely familiar. All of this adds up to the pat equation: FSDEA + Zenú x Transparency International coefficient ÷ 100,000 barrels = oil curse.

But what about those of us who consume oil and petroleum products? And those of us who prop up governments that produce that oil? Anyone remember the story of the Cuban troops protecting U.S. oil installations from U.S. backed UNITA soldiers in Angola in the 1980s during the height of their civil war and the Cold War, for example?

Scholarly work by University of Houston historian Kairn Klieman on Nigeria (“U.S. Oil Companies, the Nigerian Civil War, and the Origins of Opacity in the Nigerian Oil Industry,” Journal of American History, June 2012) and Columbia University political theorist Timothy Mitchell’s recent book Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil (Verso 2011), suggests that the oil curse story is too one-sided. U.S. and other Western companies and governments that help produce and consume and often build infrastructure are also responsible for, and live the political consequences of, dependency on oil. Opacity in the Nigerian oil industry, Klieman argues, is a joint US-Nigerian co-production dating to the 1960s. Meanwhile, Mitchell asserts that in the late 19th century carbon provided the very basis for mass democratic movements while oil sets its limits in the 20th and 21st centuries. We are all implicated, in other words.

We ought to ask questions about Angola’s Sovereign Wealth Fund. But we ought also to ask questions about the history of Chevron, Exxon, and Conoco in Angola when the oil industry was being established in the 1960s and the U.S. airbase on the Azores kept us quiet about Portugal’s war in Angola. And we ought to wonder about current policy too.

Africa is a Country TV is back: We interview Kenyan supergroup Just a Band

Apart from seeing our logo superimposed on a building in downtown Johannesburg, this is a good way to celebrate AIAC TV’s return to Youtube. We (well Dylan Valley) attended STR.CRD in Johannesburg last year. STR.CRD is South Africa’s leading (and maybe only) street culture festival and expo. Dylan sat down with Kenyan “geek afro pop” supergroup Just a Band and chatted to them about playing in South Africa, engaging Kenyan politics (this is quite timely given today’s vote back in their homeland) and their plans for their new album.

How (not) to report on Kenya’s elections

Kenyans vote today (in some places voting have already started). And somehow, as in any election in any African country, the cliches are not far behind. “Will Kenya fall into mayhem after the results of the general elections are announced?” “Will one of (East) Africa’s most politically stable countries see a return of post-election violence that swept through the country five years ago?” “Has tribalism been eradicated in Kenya?” We can’t count how often international reporters have asked these questions in the past days. Like French soldiers in the northern Mali, journalist of every major international broadcaster and some even of tiny national news organizations have parachute landed in Kenya ahead of the general elections. Some of them, even if they won’t admit it, secretly hope to see a bit violence, albeit skirmishes. Some American outlets have taken six month old political violence and presented these as happening right now. Journalists love the rush and a little ‘war reporting’ most definitely won’t hurt the career; it looks good on a CV. Reporting ahead of Kenya’s election by the international media can basically be placed in two general categories: optimism and, of course, no surprise, pessimism. 

Both these have their ready-made storylines and characters: ‘Optimistic reporting’ looks at the dozens of grassroots peace initiatives such as the peace concert in Nairobi’s Uhuru Park. And a visit to Boniface Mwangi, Kenya’s young critical visual activist, should not be forgotten see here and here.

‘Pessimistic reporting’ tends to be more ‘serious’, or at least it’s journalists taking themselves serious. With reports by human rights organizations that predict violence in hand, they demand answers of government officials. Like when leaflets promoting hate speech was found in the western city of Kisumu. In the words of the international reporters, a city that was the epicenter of the violence five years ago. Or was it Eldoret? Or the entire Rift Valley? Either or, journalists went to the city on the banks of Lake Victoria demanding an explanation by the local authorities. But an own investigation into the origins of the pamphlets, seemed a bit far-fetched. Keep in mind, a warm meal and cold Tusker beer were waiting in the four star hotel.

Then there’s CNN’s decision to do a story on those threatening to commit acts of violence during the elections. At least on paper that is. On Thursday the global news organization posted a news report entitled: ‘Armed as Kenyan vote nears’ (link to the video). Reporter Nima Elbagir ventured to the hills of the Rift Valley where she met four men basically playing around in the bushes. It’s all presented like some kind of moral panic. Anyway, the reporter talks to the leader of this so-called Kikuyu tribal militia, whose face is covered with chalk and talks about preparing for war because they want peace. Do you get it? Elbagir then interviews another man, a farmer, who lost his property in the wake of the violence in 2007. He pledges, unlike the men in the bush, not to retaliate, because he has nothing to fight for. We then cut back to the militiamen rolling around in the bushes seemingly preparing for ‘war’.

Since the news report aired,  the reaction to the report has been negative — especially by Kenyans who have responded with fury at the CNN report, poking holes in the story: who do these men represent? Who are “the tribal leaders” Elbagir allegedly spoke to? And what report by Human Rights Watch is she quoting? Kenya’s online community has since revived a popular hashtag #SomeonTellCNN. And the reactions are not mild. For example, “CNN is a disgrace to professional journalism,” 3 maart 2013 ">@oxford92 tweeted. Someone else, 3 maart 2013 ">@HudsonJoel wondered whether it’s possible to have CNN banned from Kenya because he doesn’t want rubbish.

Others retweeted a picture of a toddler whose face is covered with chalk with the tag saying: ‘ready for CNN’.

The Kenyan government even thinks that the video was ‘stage managed’.

Since then,  saying it’s a well-sourced story and that the story has been placed in context as potential threat of violence has been well documented by Human Rights Watch and the Kenyan Police.

It is clear that the majority of Kenya’s online community stands up against the way international broadcasters report on their country. That’s a possible story CNN might chase after the elections. But then CNN has done this before.

The Guardian’s thoughtless interview with Kony2012 creator Jason Russell

The Guardian’s Sunday edition, The Observer, have run the puff-piece nobody else wanted, a lengthy tête-à-tête with Jason Russell of Invisible Children infamy. “Jason Russell: Kony 2012 and the fight for truth” (illustrated by the photograph above) is a dreadful, half-assed piece of reporting that seeks to help resuscitate Russell’s broken credibility. 

Russell found an unexpected ally in a newspaper that is usually noisily secularist, publishing all sorts of guff by Richard Dawkins and joining in the HuffPo-style liberal guffawing at America’s Christian right with great gusto every election season. Memo to reporter Carole Cadwalladr: Invisible Children are an evangelical organisation who are just the most publicity-hungry of the many right-wing American evangelical groups to have fixated on Uganda (and particularly Ugandan children) in recent years.

Here’s what we wrote last year on “The Invisible Christians of Kony2012″:

“We view ourselves as the Pixar of human rights stories”, Jason Russell told the New York Times last week. But when he spoke last year at convocation at Liberty University (founder: Reverend Jerry Falwell, current chancellor: Jerry Falwell Jr.) he offered a wholly different model: “We believe that Jesus Christ was the best storyteller”, he said. (Other luminaries on the Liberty convocation roster last year included Michele Bachmann, Rick Perry and Rick Warren, who obediently tweeted his support for Kony2012 having been picked out as one of IC’s key “Culture-Makers”.)

In a terrific report, B.E. Wilson at Alternet looked at IC’s tax filings and found that the group has been funded by a host of hard right Christian groups, including the National Christian Foundation and the Caster Family Foundation, one of the biggest backers of the campaign for the anti-gay Proposition 8 in California. (Although it is not straightforward: Wilson might also have pointed out that Rich McCullen, who sits on the IC’s all-white-male board of directors, is an openly gay pastor at Mission Gathering Christian Church in San Diego.)

… Jason Russell knows that presenting Invisible Children as an evangelical group will be bad for business. Like New Labour during the Blair years, Invisible Children have decided that for the purposes of their mass branding they “don’t do God.” During his address at Liberty University Russell explained:

“A lot of people fear Christians, they fear Liberty University, they fear Invisible Children – because they feel like we have an agenda. They see us and they go, ‘You want me to sign up for something, you want my money. You want, you want me to believe in your God.’ And it freaks them out.”

Filmmaker Roger Ross Williams recently put out a brilliant documentary, “God Loves Uganda,” which captures in detail the way in which American “missionaries” to Uganda and their obsession with homosexuality have brought deep and lasting harm to the country (the film has received significant press attention – for a taster see Williams’s “op-doc” for the New York Times here).

Kony2012 was plainly part of the same project, and continues to rely on the same constituency for its base support. The fact that Russell’s professed good intentions and trendy San Diego setting blind Cadwalladr to the deeper cultural implications of his organisation is pretty pathetic:

The sun is shining, the Pacific ocean is sparkling, there is fine artisanal fair-trade organic coffee to drink just steps away, and yet all these fresh-faced shiny people are spending their days worrying about a conflict so far removed from their own lives that it seems farcical. Or at the very least heroic. They not only care, they have achieved what is supposed to be impossible: they have made other people, ordinary Americans, care.

All very luvvy. Seduced by Southern California, by new media, by Americans who “care”, Cadwalladr gloriously misses the point.

There is nothing heroic about running a cushy, big-spending non-profit that works hand-in-glove with the CIA and the US military. Russell’s central proposition — parroted by Cadwalladr — that he has succeeded in making Joseph Kony famous, is completely absurd. The man has been the ICC’s most-wanted since 2005, and was globally notorious many years before that. As usual, there’s no mention of the fact that the US, alone among Western nations, still won’t ratify the Rome statute — why would that be relevant?

Critics of Kony2012 are caricatured and dismissed. Vicious online bullies of the well-intentioned chap who tried to organize America’s teenagers to take part in the world’s biggest manhunt. Cadwalladr hasn’t done a whole lot of thinking about Kony2012 and race, and she is clearly absolutely ignorant about Uganda. Teju Cole’s piece for The Atlantic, “The White-Savior Industrial Complex”, gets an unknowing shout-out by Russell himself (he seems to have been baffled by it and he preferred when Bono said he should get an Oscar), but Cole is dismissed by fellow-novelist Cadwalladr as “one Twitter commentator”.

There are no hard questions. Nothing, for example about why Invisible Children’s wonderfully hubristic “Move:DC” campaign was such a bust (for a media campaign, nobody reported on it and so it passed by unnoticed), just like their “Global Summit” of world leaders such as Harry Shum from Glee, and “Cover the Night” before that.

We’re used to the Guardian’s big weekend interviews not being great. Remember the last time Decca Aitkenhead met up with Christine Lagarde? If they’re serious about getting American readers, they have to stop with the puffy, single-sourced interviews and start carrying properly reported profiles.

Selected excerpts from the Jason Russell interview:

“On the one hand, there was Bono saying Jason Russell deserves an Oscar, and Oprah wants to fill stadiums for me, and Ryan Seacrest wants me on American Idol,” he says. “And on the other, there were people saying, ‘These people think they’re white saviours trying to save Africa’, and ‘the money goes to corrupt places’, and ‘there is a special place in hell for you’. They were so polar opposite. So extreme. And in my head, I wanted to reconcile them and I just couldn’t.”

“I opened up my laptop and the first article I read was all these terrible things. ‘Jason Russell … white saviour complex…military intervention … dubious finances … blond … yadda yadda yadda!’ And suddenly it was, wham, and I was right back in junior high.”

When I visited Invisible Children’s San Diego office last week, there were 60 staff members and 35 fresh-faced interns answering phones and plugged into computers in a cool, calm space. A year ago, says Chris Carver, the chief operations officer, it was another story.

“We had one PR person, Monica, who was an intern, a volunteer. She estimated there were never less than 4,000 emails in her inbox. In any one second, our website had 37,000 unique users. And we were taking hundreds of thousands of dollars of orders in our shop for the Kony2012 kits.”

“I hadn’t slept,” [Russell] tells me. “My mind was racing. I tried to relax and calm down. They said, ‘Take two days off’, so we [his family] went to Palm Springs. But we went to the pool and people recognised us and wanted to take photographs so we went and shut ourselves in the hotel room, closed all the windows and the doors, and just felt we were under attack.

“The next day was a bit better, we went out to see a movie, The Lorax, a Dr Seuss film. And I thought it was talking directly to me. I thought it was all about me. The character is wearing a stripy top like the one [his son] Gavin is wearing in the film and I was like, ‘That’s so weird!’ And the character is trying to protect these trees, and I thought it was me, and the trees were Rwandans.”

Weekend Music Break

Pretty much all of this week’s artist are regular guests on the blog. First up: Pitcho. Remember him. Second, lifted from his ‘Jama ko’ record, here’s a Mali-shot video for Bassekou Kouyate: 

There’s Anbuley’s “pushing African music” even further into the future:

Nuru Kane (born Papa Nouroudine Kane, in Dakar) has got a new record out:

New video for Ian Kamau as well:

Marques Toliver & The Sometimes in the studio:

Zakwe gets help from Danger and Zuluboy on ‘Bathi Ngiyachoma’:

And Danish duo Okapii sent us through their new video for ‘Don’t mind the rain’, recorded in Barbados:

So, has the media gotten anything right reporting the Pistorius murder case?

We’ve blogged here about what’s been wrong about the coverage of the murder of the relatively unknown model Reeva Steenkamp by her boyfriend, Olympic athlete Oscar Pistorius. A ratings bonanza, coverage has ranged from frivolous to the ridiculous. The “international community” “rediscovering” that South Africa is dangerous, violent, even paranoid; or the media’s eagerness to demonstrate the ‘typicality’ of Pistorius. (See TO Molefe’s post from yesterday.) Reeva Steenkamp’s value is as statistic and as corpse, and not much else. (See Linda Stupart’s post here yesterday too.) But has the media gotten anything right? 

What does the event ‘highlight’? On the bright side, Pistorius’ oh so brief imprisonment highlights the plight of South Africa’s disabled prisoners. It would be good if the world, and even more if South Africans at large, paid more attention to the conditions in South Africa’s prisons. Meanwhile, locally, some have noted that the treatment of the Steenkamp case “highlight(s) the police’s general bungling of gender violence cases.”

Pistorius’ fixation, as some have called it, with guns “highlights the violence at the heart of South Africa, a country that suffers more than 15,000 murders every year … The truth is this: guns are us.”

The murder of Reeva Steenkamp “sheds light on the humongous problem of domestic violence, in particular femicide, which is murder of an intimate partner. There are so many cases that happen on a daily bases that don’t even get reported because so many of them that have been reported have just been thrown out of court. The numbers are astounding. And so people get discouraged. They don’t — they don’t report those cases, because there’s just no real justice for women at this point.”

Not every reporter has fallen for the highlight hype nor does every reporter recognize South Africa in the international descriptions, nor, by the way, in Pistorius’ self serving statements in court.

For example, Globe and Mail reporter Geoffrey York noted,

Even in the most dangerous cities, gun-wielding paranoia is not nearly as common as outsiders believe… Studies suggest that 12 per cent of South Africans own guns. It’s a relatively high percentage by global standards. But it still means that the vast majority of South Africans prefer not to have guns in their houses – mostly for safety reasons, since they realize how often guns can be stolen, misused, or accidentally fired.

And as development blogger Tom Murphy noted, homicide is actually down in South Africa. Furthermore, violent crimes tend to occur in areas with high unemployment and low income (as Molefe made the case here too), while property crimes tend to occur in areas of, well, property. This pattern is true for most of the world, and it suggests that those who live in wealthy areas have reason to protect their property, but not with lethal force.

Adriaan Basson, assistant editor editor at South African City Press, noted in Rapport newspaper (City Press and Rapport are part of the same company, so cross-post) that eight out of ten murder victims are killed by someone they know.

Who’s at risk? Women: “guns play a significant role in violence against women in South Africa, most notably in the killing of intimate partners.” So, it’s Reeva Steenkamp who’s typical, whose life and death should highlight something. That of course hasn’t happened.

But there’s still some bad stuff.

This sludge stew all came together the night of the murder, in an interview on PBS with Michael Sokolove, a New York Times reporter who had written an earlier, long profile of Pistorius. Here’s part of what he said:

Oscar liked his guns. Oscar felt under threat, and South Africa is a place that apartheid is over, but there’s a terrible chasm between rich and poor, income equality, and people with money, people with homes, tend to live behind walls, behind barbed wire, behind gates with guns. And this is not a pretty thing. It is somewhat understandable, but I think Oscar’s paranoia, if that’s what it was, was not uncommon to his class in South Africa … I think that perhaps even more than our own violent society and our own gun-soaked society, South Africa society is on a hair trigger. And I think it’s fair to say… that Oscar was on high alert. Oscar was on a hair trigger. Oscar had a paranoia about who might be coming into his house … I didn’t see malice from Oscar. I didn’t see him as a violent person. I did see him as a man of action, coiled, and on a hair trigger. And that has its own dangers.

So, that’s the story. The paranoia of the White master class explains violence. The hair trigger does what hair triggers do. High alert is high alert; ‘we’ are in a Code Red. And the facts be damned. What matters are the impressions, on the one hand, and the perception of malice. Because, as we know, the perpetrators of domestic violence, as of sexual violence more generally, are always recognizable. Aren’t they?