Sean Jacobs's Blog, page 522

My favorite photographs N°6: Stanley Lumax

Stanley Lumax (born in New Jersey, US where his parents, Ghanaian immigrants, settled) lives in Brooklyn. He has made a name for himself photographing hip hop and basketball culture. In our “favorite photographs series” we ask photographers who make portraits of African subjects to introduce us to their work. They pick their five favorite photographs, describe the subject matter, what brought them to the image and what kind of mood they were trying to capture. Thanks to Stanley for obliging. 

Look your brother in the eye

While studying at Temple University, my photography professor Ed Trayes talked about capturing a photo of window washers. For some reason, I’ve obsessed with capturing this photo ever since that day. I’ve taken others, but never managed to capture an eye to eye image until this day in South Africa. It was symbolic in so many different ways. Looking out of a window and seeing someone that looked like me, in a continent that birthed us. Here I am on one side of the window with all my privilege given to me by a business trip to see the World Cup and volunteer at an HIV-camp. There he is risking his life to earn a honest living in the South African winter as high up as the mountains that serve as his background. As simple as a photo as it was to get, my hesitation was always based on potentially making the subject uncomfortable, as though I was literally looking down on him. My simple head nod confirmed that wasn’t the case. I also couldn’t help but notice the slight cock of his helmet. Again, natural style. Hip hop influence as I saw it.

Beautiful music without a sound

I volunteered in Khayelitsha while in Cape Town for the 2010 World Cup. It was fulfilling in many ways. I went there with assumptions and was not only pleasantly surprised, but inspired by the spirits of the youth. Beyond their joy and ambition, I was moved by their sense of creativity, which manifested itself in their style.

I came across this young girl whose sense of style and confidence caught my eye. She was so comfortable with the camera it was as though she’d been waiting all day for me to show up.

Check out my chucks

My last day in Johannesburg, Nthabiseng, a fashion designer who gave me the opportunity to shoot students at a school in Daveyton, took me to an area called Yeoville. When I told local folks back in Sandton that I went there, they would look at me the same way they would in New York if I told someone I was in Brownsville or The South Bronx. It also set the tone of what to expect when as we drove on to the main street. Nthabiseng said: “Stone, turn off your computer. People here are hungry.” She was warning me that the additional attention I was bringing to the car by downloading photos as we drove was not a good idea in this area. It definitely had that vibe. Immigrants from all over Africa, reggae music, tons of discount stores and people hanging out.

I was attracted to this photo because of the Chuck Taylors this man was wearing. He was trying to keep warm rubbing his hands together over the Imbawula, because contrary to popular opinion, South Africa gets cold. I’ve always made it a habit of giving people I photograph something in return for their allowing me to photograph them. I’ve always had a bit of a naive approach to photographing areas considered dangerous. I never look at myself as an outsider and I’m humble and open to learning when I approach my subjects which I think is easy to see.

Colonialism revisited

After seeing Ghana beat Nigeria and lose to Cameroon in the Cup of African Nations and then two years later seeing their remarkable run at the World Cup, I decided I would take my first trip to England to see the Black Stars play the English national team at Wembley Stadium. Never having been to a football match in England, I had no idea what to expect. Having talked football with some Milwall fans at work, who educated me on how newspapers could be used as weapons, I definitely had some anxiety that this would be an intense game with some heated fan interaction. The game went on without incident. The most intense moment was walking back to the train from the stadium.

Imagine thousands of people leaving a football game at the same time. Amongst those people, some English, some Ghanaian, there were police officers on horses. Barely any room for us to move and now we have to clear the way for horses. Although there was some playful taunting of the officers it was pretty harmless.

Father and daughter start their day

In 2008, I returned back to Ghana, the birthplace of both my parents. The year before was my first time in 25 years, so this trip was a bit more familiar. I had the opportunity to spend the night in Afiadenyigba In the Volta Region. Home of the Ewe people who my father belongs to. My uncle Bright, who is the caretaker of my deceased grandfather’s house, was taking his oldest daughter to school on his motorcycle.

The photo moved me, because I was expecting my first child, a girl as well. I had given him a shirt that a good friend and college roommate Chris Hermitt had created for his line of T-shirts, “I’m So NY”. My uncle definitely had a sense of style, with his vintage by function not fashion motorcycle, his helmet, shades and sandals. His daughter wearing her school uniform and Mickey Mouse socks.

For more work by Stanley, visit his website: Stoneface Photography.

Malawi’s Twittersphere

When Bingu wa Mutharika was hospitalised in April it was at first extremely difficult to find reliable information about either his personal condition or the high drama of political theatre that was unfolding. By far the best place to go for this turned out to be Twitter, where a number of Malawian reporters posted live updates as the situation developed. Twitter can be relied upon to be the very first place where Malawi’s breaking news is broken, and useful links are shared, such as to Al Jazeera’s live online coverage of President Joyce Banda’s swearing in or to Zodiak Radio’s daring live reporting from inside Kamuzu Central Hospital as Mutharika was admitted.

Last month I wondered aloud on AIAC’s own twitter page as to who our followers would recommend from within the bulging Malawian “Twittersphere”. Be warned, it’s not a gentle place. As Sean remarked the other day: “The Malawians really go at it.”

Here are some of the suggestions we received. Post your own below the line.

Mabvuto Banda (blogs here) ~ one of Malawi’s pre-eminent journalists, Banda currently works for Reuters and the New Internationalist and can be relied upon to keep you abreast of all major Malawian news stories. I love when he posts pictures too, like the one above of Jeff Sachs boring Madonna, or when he’s stuck in his car waiting for the presidential convoy to emerge
Jimmy Kainja (blogs here) ~ always eloquent and insightful analyst of Malawian politics and social affairs, writes columns for the Nation newspaper
Agnes Dumi Mizere (blogs here) ~ journalist and frequent tweeter with a special focus on health and gender issues
Kondwani Munthali (blogs here) ~ prolific journalist and blogger with the Malawi Nation. Tweets a lot about God
Thandika Mkandawire ~ Chair in African Development at the London School of Economics and Olof Palme Professor for Peace with the Institute for Future Studies in Stockholm. Seismic thoughts on geopolitics leavened by instagrams of his potted plants
Mbachi Joyce Ng’oma (blogs here) social and political activist focused on women’s rights
Nathan Chiume ~ New York based observer of Malawian and Tanzanian affairs. Son of the late Kanyama Chiume, a hero of the independence struggle and Malawi’s first Minister of Education
Luso Mnthali ~ talented Malawian writer based in Cape Town
Steve Sharra (blogs here) ~ always lively stuff from Sharra, a writer and academic
Malawi Elections 2014 ~ impressive and popular social media project aimed at promoting democracy and debate in Malawi ahead of the next electoral cycle. An excellent source on daily developments in national politics
Pilirani Semu-Banda (blogs at The Skirt) ~ insightful blogger on health, gender, politics, and inequality, Pilirani deserves a bigger following
Kim Yi Dionne (blogs here) ~ political scientist with a focus on Malawi based at Texas A&M University. Has good sources in Malawi.

Who’d we miss?

The world’s media watched (sort of) as Angola votes

The three most interesting things about the recent Angolan elections were: one, that we knew the result before election (the question was by how much). Two, why did the Angolan ruling party, MPLA, spent so much on election advertising and, three, did anyone notice that the MPLA also used former Brazilian president Lula’s favorite marketing firm to run the election?

Earlier this month, the world watched (sort of) as Angolans went to the polls to vote in a new National Assembly, and indirectly elect their president. The MPLA—in power in Luanda since Angolans won independence from Portugal in 1975 — surprised no one when it claimed about three-fourths of the ballots and voted to extend José Eduardo dos Santos’s 33-year presidency five more years.

Then something odd happened: Público, one of Portugal’s leading left-of-center dailies, printed Prime Minister Pedro Passos Coelho’s message to dos Santos like the latter is still overseeing the colony. After patting both countries on the back for their efforts to promote peace, stability, and democracy, Passos Coelho assured dos Santos that they are “in this together” in the twenty-first century.

International media coverage has continued, as opposition parties challenge the legitimacy of the election results based on irregularities in the electoral roll and vote-counting.

We can’t stop watching.

We’ve even started a scorecard to keep track of all the ways English media outlets make China the focus of electoral coverage. Coverage breaks down according to strategic national interests:

Only Al Jazeera’s Barnaby Phillips, who was a BBC correspondent in Angola in the mid-1990s, bothered to ask a “man on the street” and actual MPLA supporter what he thought of the elections.

The Guardian found the most reactionary army general-turned-Porsche-seller to get this scoop:

“We have to remember one thing: in Africa we look at our head of state as our father and it is very difficult to change,” mused the former army lieutenant colonel. “The Angolan people look at our head of state as a father.”

Is he onto something? The Angolan anthropologist António Tomas wrote about this very dynamic in Angola in his PhD dissertation (in Anthropology at Columbia University): That is that the oppression/resistance model explains some things, but it does not explain everything, and less and less these days on the continent.

So let’s talk about the Angolan political system as part of — not just responding to — global commercial interests. For starters, as we said at the outset someone in the press might have asked why the MPLA spent so much on advertising instead of just citing the figure or the fact that they used former Brazilian president Lula’s favorite marketing firm to run the election.

* Marissa Moorman contributed to this post. Here’s The New York Times article.

Charting the Angolan Elections

Earlier this month, the world watched (sort of) as Angolans went to the polls to vote in a new National Assembly, and indirectly elect their president. MPLA — the political party in power in Luanda since Angolans won independence from Portugal in 1975 — surprised no one when it claimed about three-fourths of the ballots and voted to extend José Eduardo dos Santos’s 33-year presidency five more years.

Then Público, one of Portugal’s leading left-of-center dailies, printed Prime Minister Pedro Passos Coelho’s message to dos Santos like he’s still overseeing the colony. After patting both countries on the back for their efforts to promote peace, stability, and democracy, he assures dos Santos that they are “in this together” in the twenty-first century.

International media coverage has continued, as opposition parties challenge the legitimacy of the election results based on irregularities in the electoral roll and vote-counting.

We can’t stop watching. We’ve even started a scorecard to keep track of all the ways English media outlets blame China. Coverage breaks down according to strategic national interests:

Only Al Jazeera’s Barnaby Phillips, who was a BBC correspondent in Angola in the mid-1990s, bothered to ask a “man on the street” and actual MPLA supporter what he thought of the elections.

The Guardian does talk to the most reactionary army general-turned-Porsche-seller to get this scoop:

“We have to remember one thing: in Africa we look at our head of state as our father and it is very difficult to change,” mused the former army lieutenant colonel. “The Angolan people look at our head of state as a father.”

Is he onto something? António Tomas wrote about this very dynamic in Angola in his PhD dissertation in Anthropology at Columbia University. The oppression/resistance model explains some things, but it does not explain everything, and less and less these days on the continent.

So let’s talk about the Angolan political system as part of — not just responding to — global commercial interests. For starters, someone in the press might ask why the MPLA spent so much on advertising instead of just citing the figure… or the fact that they used former Brazilian president Lula’s favorite marketing firm to run the election.

* Marissa Moorman contributed to this post. Here’s The New York Times article.

Friday Bonus Music Break

Another ten music videos that we’ve been playing a lot recently. The first one above. Kudurista Titica’s ‘Ablua’ is a stomper. (Talking about Angolan music, and its history: Marissa Moorman has been consulting Afropop Worldwide for a new series called Hip Deep Angola, the first part of which, ‘Music and Nation in Luanda’, you can listen to here.) Next, still from Angola, and I have a hunch Titica served as an inspiration for Edy Sex:

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An older Namibian Overitje pop tune, but Ondarata (remember them) just now put their video for ‘Tukutuku’ on YouTube:

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Janka Nabay and his ‘Bubu Gang’, whose live performances have become legendary by now, made this video for ‘Somebody’:

From Mali, Ben Zabo’s latest music videos are a treat:

As he did with that other project The Busy Twist, Gabriel Benn (alter ego: Tuesday Born) plays around with images recorded in Ghana in this video for ‘Kwabena’:

Jupiter Bokondji (from Kinshasa) and his band Okwess International in the studio:

South African Bongeziwe Mabandla is working hard on completing his debut album. I hear all kinds of influences here:

On his website, Ian Kamau (who spent much time travelling and performing in South Africa recently) explains why he wrote ‘Black Bodies’:

And because we feature not nearly enough poetry or spoken word, this ‘park jam’ from Obscur Jaffar (Burkina Faso):

All Black Everything: Big Frizzle’s ‘Africa’

This music video for Big Frizzle’s ‘All Black Everything’, produced by London-based media house GlobalFaction made me wonder about GlobalFaction’s politics, and their use of imagery. I’m struck by the flood of historical images featuring in recent Congo-related music videos. Congo, in many music videos, gets often used as a stand-in for ‘Africa’ in general. And Big Frizzle’s, I’d say, is just one more example. The list is long. Especially but not exclusively, as this video shows, francophone rappers. It shouldn’t come as a surprise of course. Photos, documentaries from colonial archives, fiction films and clips of those films started to circulate ever since the arrival of YouTube or DailyMotion, and (music) video makers have been having a ball downloading and pasting them to conscious and less conscious lyrics.

One of those photos used here (around the 4:00 minute mark) is a portrait of monsieur ‘Nkazi’ by Stephan Vanfleteren. It’s a contested photo. It graces the cover of a massive tome by Belgian author David Van Reybrouck about Congo’s history (published in Dutch some years ago, recently translated in French and German, and soon available in English too). More than two-hundred thousand copies of the book have already been sold. Monsieur Nkazi died before the book came out. The portrait is contested because Nkazi’s family claims it reinforces a stereotypical image of “a poor African” and that they didn’t consent on having his portrait used for the book. And so they are asking for a compensation. The foreign language versions of the book won’t be carrying the photo.

Anyway, to return to the video, the use of these images, and the politics behind these kind of videos: I wanted to hear other opinions so I asked the Africa is a Country desk.

Sean Jacobs: At first it looks like a parody of Big Black Af (played by Mos Def) and his crew (whose fictitious members included Charli Baltimore, Cannibus and MC Serch as “One-Sixteenth Blak”) with its overbearing black global politics and “back to Africa” politics, but it is clear that it is a much harder version of what Kanye West half-heartedly wanted to do with ‘Diamonds of Sierra Leone’. Only problem, with much of rap, is that it doesn’t offer much else than consciousness and identity politics.

Mikko Kapanen: I have been thinking about this a lot: what is the purpose of political music? I am interested in Hip-Hop in particular. I think at best it can be a soundtrack to political activity or politicising the audiences. Giving them references and pointers to find more information. There are some exceptions to this rule — I never get tired of sharing this link — but for the most part music and musicians just direct their audiences towards what they feel is important. Like said, I am specifically talking about political Hip-Hop, but did A Change is Gonna Come communicate hard information or just a mood of certain people in certain time and place? Or Public Enemy? The answer is ‘sometimes yes’ and definitely the artists themselves have consistently talked politics in the interviews and on stage, but more often than not, the lyrics capture something less easy to describe and that’s why many times these songs can work as a soundtrack to other struggles as well.

In my opinion this specific song and video are great. I enjoy them and I have enjoyed music from Big Frizzle before (he’s more of a chorus guy normally) and videos from GlobalFaction whose YouTube channel has at the moment nearly thirteen million views. We must realise that these guys have got a lot of muscle amongst certain audiences regardless of the fact that mainstream media don’t really support them in any way. What the mainstream media do support however is a whole lot of shallowness and I welcome any opposing force to that. That is why I think that there is a massive and massively significant connection between Congo and by any means necessary. It’s part of the same conscientising campaign these artist are on and I for one applaud that. I would also say that the circles that the artist and video maker represent are involved in other positive movements outside of their primary artistic expression.

It’s true by the way what Sean says about Bamboozled style Mau Mau anger; one is reminded of it, but I’d go as far as saying that the UK — I mean people elsewhere are still surprised that there are Black people in the UK — has a very different context to the US. Of course there’s no need to make more general statements, but I have observed in my four long years in Birmingham that the African-Caribbean community in the UK has got its own kind of identity politics and they don’t have a similar umbrella as, say, African Americans.

All in all as a fan of Hip-Hop — when it’s done in a progressive spirit — I always want to support positive movements. It’s easy to be cynical about music like this, but the market pressures around it are strong and they are directing all the attention and money to music that is between empty and hateful and this — together with many other songs of course — is a welcome interruption to it.

Wills Glasspiegel: What’s up with the link between massacres in Congo and the idea that he too seems to be down for the use of “any means necessary?”

Dylan Valley: I think it’s a dope beat and conscious lyrics but it doesn’t feel very timely, it feels a little played out and a bit contrived. It reminds me Wole Sonyinka’s response to the French Negritude movement: “A tiger doesn’t proclaim its tigritude, it acts.” And although I’m still nodding my head to this, I prefer Hot Cheetos and Takis:

Boima Tucker: Hot Cheetos and Takis is cute… and real. Plenty youth I’ve run into out here think that’s what passes for a meal. American malnutrition. Let’s rap about it.

I think I still prefer to read a book (3.5 million views and counting) if we’re looking at novelty factor.

But if we’re talking about impact towards further action? I don’t know if any overt political message via popular culture can do that. These days especially, it seems that the subliminal (mainly fear) is what most moves people to action. A video like Big Frizzle’s is mostly useful, in our contemporary moment of digital identity politics, for those of us who are going to post it to our tumblrs and twitters. Now your followers can know you’re #fashionable #global AND #militant.

As far as militant Black British, it’s nice to see. Played out identity politics from the US perspective? Perhaps. But not being an insider to contemporary UK culture, it makes me want to find out more, and as Mikko illustrated, maybe collaborate with these folks. And that in itself I guess is a form of movement towards action.

I personally can’t wait for the video for Somali Malitia Mali Mob’s ‘Pirates’ to drop. The producer told me there will be lots of guns.

And all that’s why VYBZ KARTEL IS SO ENIGMATIC AND AMAZING!

The trouble with South Africa

I’ve been puzzled and not a little disturbed by the lack of empathy on South African social media with the horrific events at Marikana, where 34 protesting miners were killed by police on August 16th. Yes, someone has posted a few links here, a few comments there, but given the magnitude of this event, and what it means for the country I would have expected a wave of slogans, a mass of altered profile pictures and so forth expressing collective grief and outrage. Not so. With few exceptions (this is one), I think there was more activity in solidarity with Pussy Riot than with the Lonmin miners. There was more of a social media flurry over claims that retail chain Woolworths refuses to hire white staff. In fact a recent Google search analysis (definitely reflecting how white social media are) on South African advertising site Marklives had the top three searches from South Africa as: the death of actor Michael Clarke Duncan (he did play very large, monosyllabic black men who don’t say much), followed by the fake racism at Woolworths and then the weather.

A friend suggests that the relative silence on Marikana is because there is a lot of confusion on who the good guys and bad guys are. Really? Yes, it seems protesters had killed two policemen and two security guards in the days leading up to the massacre (though the context is murky, and the death toll prior to August 16th included three protesters and two other men).  Yes, some video footage shows the miners aggressively confronting the police. Nevertheless, a police response that results in 34 deaths and many more injuries is hugely disproportionate. At the very least, it indicates dismal police training and preparedness for dealing with such situations.

But then came carefully researched reports (here and here) by South African journalist Greg Marinovich, positing that even though some miners had died in the confrontation with police, police had subsequently hunted down and killed at least 14 men in cold blood. Marinovich’s own investigation and observation was backed up by research conducted by University of Johannesburg sociologists Thapelo Lekgowa, Botsang Mmope and Peter Alexander. There were other reports that some of the miners had been shot in the back — while fleeing. If this was not enough, police arrested 259 of the miners and charged them, not with the death of the two policemen, but with the murder of their own protesting colleagues. An outrage and an absurdity as pointed out by University of Cape Town constitutional law professor and prolific blogger Pierre de Vos. (The charges were subsequently withdrawn.)

Subsequent interviews by other media outlets seem to corroborate Marinovich’s allegations.

And yet despite all this, despite many articles pointing out the terrible conditions under which the miners work, and the gaping inequalities and disparities behind their protest, there seems to be inertia — huge reluctance among the public to fault the police and express any kind of outrage — or even sympathy for the miners. First came denial: an article in The Star that appeared shortly after Marinovich’s first article appeared was headlined “Journalist’s Account of Shooting Questioned”. The entire article was based on the comments of a single security analyst who rejected Marinovich’s allegations simply because he couldn’t bring himself to believe the police would behave in such a manner. Another article by Philip de Wet (who previously blogged at The Daily Maverick where Marinovich’s articles were published) asserted that it is simply impossible to ever know what really happened. Which is, as Marinovich has pointed out (in a must read interview), just ‘bullshit’.

So what’s going on? Partly, it’s to do with people’s tendency to believe and react to images over text. The majority of readers commenting on these stories insist on trusting television news footage of the moment over painstaking forensic investigation. But it also has to do with the way most media have covered and continue to cover the strike. This was pointed out by academic Julie Reid, also in the Daily Maverick. Her piece also argues that the day-to-day event-based coverage has also helped obscure a very worrying much larger trend of police violence against citizens. Beyond a lack of investigation and intelligent mining of the data, I have not come across any article that has attempted to get into the lives of the miners, show them to us as individuals, and help us genuinely understand their daily struggles. Much (if not everything) of what has been written lately glosses over miners’ past, dreams, desires, frustrations, etc. Short: their lives. The failure to give attention to those details made it impossible to imagine what it would mean to live a miner’s life, which has allowed the debate to be sucked into a very ordinary South African debate — a spiral of numbers, acronyms, figures, maps and politicking that works as a cover to say: we haven’t got a clue. This opinion piece in City Press (a major Sunday newspaper) by novelist and former university administrator Njabulo Ndebele is one of the few texts out there that at least hints at some sort of identification/empathy with the miners. (This weekend, City Press, also finally published short profiles of all the victims of the police massacre at Marikana — on the website you can read it in five parts: here, here, here, here and here — basic piece of journalism we urged on our Facebook page right after the massacre just happened.)

There have been few reports putting hard questions to the mine owners.

Some newspapers have published the dubious claims of analysts (like the discredited Mike Schussler) that the Marikana miners — who live in a squatter camp next to the mine — are paid too much anyway.

But it’s about more than just the media.

The ANC leadership and its allies in the trade union movement and the Communist Party seem at a loss how to respond, either characterizing the miners as dupes of party rivals of President Jacob Zuma (Julius Malema slots into that role) or as irrational (an interpretation the media dutifully reports). The Democratic Alliance, the second largest political party in parliament, is hardly on the side of the black poor; in the first statement by a DA politician right after the massacre, the party’s parliamentary leader, Lindy Mazibuko (the most senior black leader in the otherwise white DA) said that the massacre presented an opportunity for the ANC to finally deal with the unions. (This is the kind of sentiment which also underpins coverage and editorial comment in the country’s “leading” broadsheet, Business Day).

Many South Africans don’t seem to care at all whether or not these allegations against the police are true. They express sentiments similar to those aired by the new police commissioner, Riyah Phiyega, that the police should not be sorry for the 34 deaths, as “the safety of the public is non-negotiable”. Apparently working class miners, striking for a decent wage and safe working conditions don’t count as ‘the public’. The trouble is, if we are to believe Julie Reid’s well-substantiated argument that police violence is widespread and increasing, this definition of ‘the public’ seems to be getting ever narrower. Will we take notice only when we find ourselves suddenly outside the circle?

* Sean Jacobs and Tom Devriendt contributed to this post.

10 African films to watch out for, N°2

‘Grand comme le Baobab’ (“Tall as the baobab tree”) is a film told through the voice of Coumba (in Pular language), who tries to avoid her 11-year-old sister from being sold into marriage to settle a family debt in rural Senegal; shot mostly with a local cast.

 

Then there’s two films for which we don’t have trailers.

Ivorian actor Isaach de Bankolé (his breakthrough role was in Claire Denis’s ‘Chocolat’) plays a Rotterdam scientist returning to “his African roots” in South African director Rudolf Buitendach’s Some location video here and here.

‘Small Small Thing’, a documentary about widespread rape of young girls in Liberia.

Director Paul Haggis is producing a feature film about Hugh Masekela’s life; the director will be South African Mukunda Michael Dewil, whose latest film, ‘Vehicle 19′ (shot in Johannesburg) stars Paul Walke. Also an excuse to post Nadine Hutton’s impressive photography of Hugh Masekela.

The promo for ‘Oblivion’, a yet to be finished Ethiopian feature about “telafa”, a practice whereby young women are abducted for marriage. Here’s the fundraising page.

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The documentary film ‘Stolen Seas’ about Somali piracy won ‘Best Picture’ at the Locarno Film Festival earlier this year.

Here’s an interview with the director.

Shortly after Ben Ali fled Tunisia, the first sit-in began. ‘Fallega 2011′ is a documentary by Rafik Omrani.

Finally, three films projects that are in their initial stages:

‘Night Has Fallen’, a new film by Akin Omotoso whose ‘Man on Ground’ I reviewed here.




‘The Boda Boda Thieves’ by Ugandan Donald Mugisha will be shot later this year.




And Jonathan Wacks will be putting South African author Andrew Brown’s bestseller ‘Coldsleep Lullaby’ to film.


We’ll try to turn these ‘Films to watch out for’ posts into a regular feature. See the first part here.

10 things we learned from the African Cup of Nations qualifiers

Christian Atsu

1. This high-stakes knockout format might not be so bad after all. Qualifying groups are long, turgid affairs, especially the European ones, international football’s equivalent of the snoozetastic-but-moneyspinning Champions League group stages. Knockout football puts the big names at risk, as they should be. This past weekend was joyous.

2. Look out for the central African sides. I reckon DR Congo look a good early outside bet (remember Zambia were 50-1 behind Burkina Faso and Libya pre-tournament last time round) and nobody will want to play Egypt’s conquerors CAR in January if they manage to hold onto their slender 1-0 lead over Burkina Faso.

3. The Sudanese really know how to celebrate a goal:

Watching big Sudan-Ethiopia games feels like being back in the 1950s. All we need is Ad-Diba to turn up with his whistle to referee the second leg.

4. Home advantage is everything. Just ask the Moroccans, the Angolans or the Cameroonians. On the flip side, it means all three of those teams will hold out hope of turning their ties around in October. It also means that despite their recent struggles Bafana Bafana can’t be discounted as serious contenders.

5. Cabo Verde could have a big future in the African game, especially if they can prevent their top players representing other nations.

6. As Jonathan Wilson points out, Cote d’Ivoire’s defence looks a bit dodgy. Kolo Toure is seriously slowing down these days and former Dunfermline Athletic stalwart Sol Bamba might be a favourite of Sven Goran Eriksson, but he’s not the most positionally sound. Thankfully Eboue has been restored by Sabri Lamouchi at the expense of the clunking Gosso. Hopefully Seydou Doumbia will be next.

7. Papiss Demba Cissé is a genius. The man scores goals most players wouldn’t dream of attempting:

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8. Zambia have to be very careful in their second leg in Kampala. That one is going to be tense, and I’ve a hunch Uganda will do a number on the African champs.

9. I miss Samuel Eto’o. What price a dramatic return for the second leg? If not, Cameroon look doomed. Whatever the internal drama behind this years-long row, when it comes down to it it’s a dispute between a handful of soon-to-be-forgotten officials and one of Africa’s greatest footballers ever, and the result is to that a huge chunk of international matches is missing from his career and Cameroon are absolutely hopeless.

10. Remember the name: Christian Atsu. Is he the Ghanaian Messi? We don’t know but he looked tasty against Malawi and Porto’s scouts really know talent when they see it.

On the ‘white man’ comment by Israel’s Interior Minister

Portrait by Kehinde Wiley (from his series The World Stage: Israel)

A muted response in the blogosphere persuaded me to write about Israeli interior minister Eli Yishai’s now not-so-recent remark, which I’ve come to think of as ‘the “white man” comment’. If you missed it, in June 2012 Yishai, responding to criticism of Israel’s treatment of African migrants, claimed that: “Muslims that arrive here do not even believe that this country belongs to us, to the white man.”

Amid staggering incitements to xenophobia by its politicians, Yishai’s statement was perhaps the most quietly telling of a certain Israeli psyche. And even if a few bloggers have pointed to a possible distortion of Yishai’s words, the ultra-orthodox intelligentsia in Israel has an embarrassing history (see ‘Who America belongs to’) with respect to this sort of thinking.

On the surface the comment reminded me of Museveni’s stated hope, in a 1997 Kinshasa speech, that Africans might be able to overcome their Anglophone/Francophone divisions and create a Bantuphone Africa. What about us, the Nilote-speaking Acholis and Langi in the North of his own country, wondered. And what also about the whole of non-Bantuphone West Africa?

But while M7 can be forgiven for knowing little about Africa’s complex linguistic realities, Yishai is surely aware that half of Israel’s population are Sephardi/Mizrahi (intellectuals like Ella Shohat prefer the term Mizrahi). In fact a few bloggers were quick to point out that Yishai’s own parents had made Aliyah from Tunisia. Peter Beinart has written on similar tensions and prejudices which surface between the Sephardi and Ashkenazi wings of his own family.

But there’s so much more nuance to unpack, and most analyses don’t go nearly deep enough.

The late British historian Tony Judt argued that Israel’s dilemma is not that it is a European “enclave” in the Arab world “but rather that it arrived too late.” Judt is referring to the anachronism of founding in the middle of the 20th century “a state in which Jews and the Jewish religion have exclusive privileges from which non-Jewish citizens are forever excluded.”

But Yishai did not say, “This country belongs to the Jew.” If he had, it would have been taken as the familiar hasbara. The choice of words seemed instead to signal something more interesting, the possibility of ethno-national transformation, and suggested another anachronism at work: was Yishai preparing Olim to be ready to acquiesce to the necessity of becoming white?

Eli Yishai (center)

In How the Irish became white, American historian Noel Ignatiev explains that, in 19th century America, “white” was not a physical description but one term of a social relation which could not exist without its opposite.” Ignatiev was describing the process by which Irish migrants proved their whiteness through violence and hostility toward free blacks. And the Irish were not alone: in the early 1900s Southern and Eastern Europeans occupied the same indeterminate racial terrain, a purgatorial proving ground, until they too demonstrated fitness to be seen as white.

Israeli society is partly analogous to that of historic America, albeit infinitely more complex. There’s every appearance that two paths exist to full citizenship in the Jewish state: whiteness and Jewishness. And while it might seem intuitive to the wider world that Jewishness would be of greater importance, this is far from certain.

A 1970 amendment to the country’s Law of Return (LOR) relaxed the definition of a Jew to offer refuge to anyone that would have faced persecution under the Nazis’ Nuremberg laws. Prior to that, only those meeting halachic (religious law) standards were admitted. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, Israel accepted a significant number of migrants, at least 100,000, perhaps twice that number, with tenuous or no Jewish ancestry whatever.

Many adherents of Russian orthodoxy migrated to Israel for economic reasons, and did so using forged documents and the loosened application of LOR. Ironically, many citizens of the former Soviet Union, Jewish or goyim, departed for Israel simply because their preferred destination—the U.S—had been closed to them because “Israel persuaded the United States to cap the number of Soviet refugees. Germany also virtually ended Jewish immigration after being pressured to do so by Israel in early 1991,” according to conservative think tank, the Cato Institute.

Israel welcomed Russians immigrants for several reasons. Since 1973, the US State Department has provided annual refugee and migration grants to support the integration of Jews returning from the Diaspora. In 1992, when Soviet emigration reached its peak, the U.S. Congress approved an amount of $80 million for use in the housing and integration of emigrants.

According to a 2001 Jerusalem Post essay “U.S. government support is closely tied to the number of immigrants, a substantial decrease in that number would cost the Jewish Agency a significant chunk of its operating budget. Pressured to produce “numbers,” emissaries find it much easier to round up those with minimal or no Jewish connection than to concentrate on the smaller pool of Jews.”

But a willingness to grant citizenship to non-Jews cannot be attributed solely to fiscal concerns. The former USSR was home to very many underemployed scientists and professionals. As historian Shlomo Sand notes in The Invention of the Jewish people, “[Israel’s] pragmatic needs were too strong to exclude other white immigrants,” even though “this…situation forced lawmakers to balance the narrow definition of the Jew by widening significantly the right of Aliyah.”

Unsurprising then that in 1999, amid heated debate in the Knesset over tightening LOR precisely because of the entry of non-Jews, Ehud Barak reportedly shouted: “If only we had one million more Russian immigrants.”

Barak also told the press that he considers the incomers from the ex-Soviet Union “the greatest gift Israel has received since its establishment.”

These sentiments stand in sharp contrast to the treatment and reception of Falash Mura, Abyssinian crypto-Jews whose ancestors converted to Christianity to avoid persecution. Ironically, it was Eli Yishai, during a previous term as Interior Minister, who declared, “I see the pain and I intend to do everything possible to ease the terrible suffering and bring all the Jews left in Ethiopia to Israel.”

Social activist in the Ethiopian-Israeli community Elias Inbram wears a protest T-shirt that says: “Caution: I am not an African infiltrator”

Despite Yishai’s vow, Israel for several years maintained a controversial monthly quota of 300 for arriving Falash Mura, and granted members citizenship only on condition of conversion to Orthodox Judaism. It is thought that as many as 30,000 Falash Mura remain in Ethiopia and yet, significantly, Israel’s government announced in 2010 that it would close Ethiopian Aliyah with a final airlift of 8000 before 2014.

Even Beta Israel, Ethiopian Jews recognized as “fully Jewish” as far back as the 16th century, faced hostility and institutional discrimination before and after being airlifted to Israel in the early 1990s. A senior official at the Jewish Agency claimed that  “[taking] a Falasha (sic) out of his village, it’s like taking a fish out of water…I’m not in favor of bringing them [to Israel].”

In contrast, Russian Christians have faced little pressure in the Holy Land to assimilate. Cultural familiarity and the value attached to their technological skills render moot their adherence to another faith. Russian goyim readily learn Hebrew and serve in the IDF but their numbers and non-conversion have altered the country’s Jewish character. Butchers selling pork are now common, as is the sight of IDF soldiers wearing crucifixes.

There have been unintended consequences. According to the Jerusalem Post, “the derogatory Russian term for Jews, “Zhid”, is now commonly heard on Israel’s streets and anti-Semitic graffiti graces cities with large Russian-speaking populations like Ashkelon and Ashdod.” In 2006, Haaretz reported that neo-Nazi street gangs from the former USSR had terrorized an ultra-orthodox community for two years.

The considerations— socioeconomic and ethnocultural—that account for disparate treatment of migrants are not arbitrary. Israeli political scientist Shlomo Avineri explains that Ashkenazim dominated political and economic life in Israel from its founding. Subsequent “Jewish immigration from mainly Arab countries in the 1950s and 1960s gave rise to ‘Middle Eastern’ cultural patterns. With it, the perception that Israel is a ‘European-type’ country—situated in the Middle East by coincidence only—became increasingly contested. The recent Jewish mass immigration from the former Soviet Union changed the balance once more toward ‘European’ cultural patterns.”

“In fact,” posits Sand, “Zionism was part of the last wave of nationalist awakening in Europe, and coincided with the rise of other identity-shaping ideologies on the Continent.” Although West European Jews were involved in its formation, Zionism’s real incubator was the “secular modern Yiddishist civilization densely packed into the cities and towns of Poland, the Ukraine, Lithuania, Russia and Romania.”

According to Sand, with time the character of Western Europe’s nationalisms tended broadly to become more civically and politically inclusive and tolerant of minorities. Whereas in Germany and further east—Russia, Poland, Hungary—“ethnobiological and ethnoreligious ideologies triumphed.”

Zionism was thus simply another strand of the then-flourishing mittel-European instinct toward “tribal” nationhood, and as it gained ideological strength what arose with it was a powerful wish among the leadership to prove beyond doubt that the Jews were a biological and historical entity, a race, perhaps not wholly pure in blood, but with shared descent from Abraham; a people that had managed to remain largely distinct and apart from the societies in which they lived for centuries. Jewish scientists and theorists—Ber Berochov, Arthur Ruppin, Aaron Sandler, Jabotinsky—generated racial, even eugenic theories that paralleled the thinking produced by the Third Reich.

And yet, Sand points out, a “profoundly Eurocentric outlook was even stronger than the concept of the Jewish race.” The aforementioned Ruppin, a longtime correspondent of Hans Günther, the father of Nazi race science (who Ruppin visited in Germany even after Hitler’s rise), wrote In The Jews of To-Day, “the Jews have not only preserved their great natural racial gifts but through a long process of selection, these gifts have been strengthened. Perhaps owing to this…selection Ashkenazim are […] superior in activity, intelligence and scientific capacity to the Sephardim and Arabian Jews, in spite of […] common ancestry.”

Growing belief in a Jewish essentialism in turn fed a desire to acquire and settle sovereign territory. For if Jews constituted an ethnos and were not merely the scattered adherents of an ancient monotheism then they possessed a claim as compelling as that of Poles or Germans to a land of their own. In pursuing a deliberate strategy of nation formation, the mostly secular Zionist leaders saw the expedience of enlisting Judaism’s “religious imaginary” as the basis on which to reconstitute an ancient “exiled” people long assimilated into disparate cultures across the old and new worlds.

Subscription to racial theories receded among Zionist theorists just as it did in the wider scientific discourse. Through Aliyah, the country became ever more ethnically and culturally diverse, and yet in the realms of business, politics, and academia a de facto Ashkenazi pre-eminence has endured.

And periodic allusions in the media to a “demographic time bomb” discloses the persistence of an orientalist and ethnocentric worldview that cuts across religious and cultural backgrounds. These coded words have been invoked in connection with Israeli Arabs, and Mizrahim (see pg. 22), but also with the Ultra Orthodox and Russian goyim. And of course there is the ongoing existential peril of the Muslim Arab presence in the Occupied Territories and the wider Levant.

The consequence of several decades of ad hoc demographic policy and tactical political maneuvering is that today’s Israel is a precarious, unsustainable and bewildering amalgam of religious and tribal sectarianism, eurocentrism, ethno-nationalism and neoliberal economics. As a polity Israel at times displays a startling contempt and ambivalence for the wider world. Internally, spheres of liberalism exist that rival those in Western countries but there are also great lacunae: the ongoing occupation and subjugation in the occupied territories, of course, but also that civil marriages and burials are inexistent; such matters are governed solely by religious authorities. Sammy Smooha of Haifa University implicitly rejects the assertion that the term “Jewish democracy” contains no internal contradictions by classifying Israel, with Slovakia and Estonia, as an “incomplete” or “ethnic” democracy.

It is not difficult, with a little research, to delineate a hierarchy predicated on socioeconomic and ethnic-cultural categories. In such a society, African “infiltrators” necessarily occupy an unequivocal and lowly position. Economic migrants like the Russian Christians, they are nonetheless viewed as too poor, unskilled and dusky to be offered Israeli citizenship on the grounds of “whiteness.” Ironically, while African migrants would likely be willing, if the choice were offered, to convert to Orthodox Judaism so as to gain citizenship, this is inconceivable.

The violence against Sudanese and Eritrean migrants (one overlooked dimension of the spectacle in Tel Aviv is that it produced images which overturned a familiar, even well-worn visual trope of industrialized countries: the looting and destruction by blacks of Jewish-owned shops) revealed a crude and virulent racism entirely unrelated to the ongoing dehumanization of occupation. However, Africans, unlike Palestinians in the Occupied Territories, were for a brief time “permitted” to enter and live in Israel proper.

All that said, it is most probable that Yishai’s words were directed not at Mizrahi would-be Olim (scarcely any remain, and persuading Persian Jews to make Aliyah is in any case not an official priority), but to a different audience: Zionists in the European and American Diaspora, which in Sand’s words “have the option to emigrate to Israel…but have chosen not to live under Jewish sovereignty and prefer to retain another nationality.”

As he explains, “the old nationalist discourse that revolved around the idea of Aliyah has lost much of its appeal … today, Israel’s strength no longer depends on demographic increase but rather on retaining the loyalty of overseas Jewish organizations and communities.” In fact, “It would be a serious setback for Israel … if all the pro-Zionist lobbies were to immigrate en masse to the Holy Land.”

As Yiddish culture in the U.S has waned, America’s Jews, predominantly of East European stock, have developed greater attachment to Israel. Diaspora Jews provide invaluable financial and political support to Israel even if, as Sand observes, they “do not understand the language of the nation supposed to be theirs.”

Two fatal trends are working gradually to undermine the present status quo: younger Western Jews are, progressively, less unquestioningly supportive of Israel than their parents; and the number of Jews leaving the Jewish state exceeds that of those entering. Israelis are relocating to Europe as well as the US; Germany has the world’s fastest growing Jewish population. The absurd goal of Philip Roth’s doppelganger in Operation Shylock, to ignite a reverse exodus of Jews from the Levant to Europe, no longer seems quite so absurd.

In the short term, however, Faustian bargains continue to be struck that are intended to ensure that the Holy Land remains in the right hands.