Sean Jacobs's Blog, page 551

Jeffrey Gettleman's continent

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Chief among the debates (or what passes for debates on blogs, Twitter and in mainstream media) about #Kony2012, are these two questions: whether or not external observers should raise awareness or otherwise stage interventions in a conflict zone, and if so, how interventions should be carried out. While it is clear that Elliot Ross (on this blog last week) was not suggesting external observers should stand by and watch a gruesome war, his comment that effective activism is not about "Angelina Jolie or coloured wristbands or me" produced the most ire among supporters of #Kony2012 in the comments section of his post. And I don't think it is because my generation was introduced to "slactivism" through Mark Zuckerberg, as Elliot suggested. There is something much more familiar about the angry reaction of so many commentators over the last few days. "At least we're doing something" was the rallying cry we grew up with. We came of age when US Secretary of State, General Colin Powell, was talking about "a moral imperative" (forget the facts) to invade Iraq. But what is striking, is the way the Kony campaign has been framed in near exclusive negative terms. The goal is simply to take out Kony. As many critics have pointed out, Invisible Children does not really promise to do anything beyond raising awareness that people have suffered horribly.

The campaign is galvanized by guilt and shame, and it demands displays of vulnerability. But Russell is not the only one gaining from such exposure. In the most recent issue of The New York Review of Books, not a journal known for its emotionalism, Jeffrey Gettleman (The New York Times East Africa correspondent) also invites his readers to confront a failing continent. Gettleman's article "Africa's Dirty Wars" is supposedly a review of political scientist William Reno's new book Warfare in Independent Africa. But there is very little discussion of Reno's arguments, methodology, or sources.*

Gettleman's continent looks like this:

1. "Classic wars" have ended in Africa — messier, predatory forms of conflict began replacing ideological movements when colonialism "faded" in the 1960s.

2. When the Cold War ended the superpowers suddenly disengaged from the African continent. Without American or Soviet pressure on rebels to stay united, countless factions have formed and "very cunning rebel leaders" were replaced by "simple thugs" who make little effort to develop persuasive ideology or win recruits.

3. While countries like Angola (who after suffering colonial violence, had to live through a Cold War-infused civil war) are successful because of their oil reserves, "many parts of Africa are clearly sinking deeper into violence, chaos, and obscurity."

To clarify, foreign governments did not disengage from the continent when the Cold War ended in 1992. In fact the political scientist William Reno has written extensively on the evolution of US/Angolan relations throughout the 1990s and early 2000s. Reno observes that Angola remained one of the US's largest supplier of oil throughout most of the 1990s. About 70% of Angola's 1998 oil production of 760 000 barrels per day was exported to the United States. Oil exports from 1993 to 1998 provided about 87% of the MPLA regime's formally recorded revenues (exclusive of loans and aid), which means that US customers provided the MPLA regime with about 60% of its total revenues ("The real (war) economy of Angola," p. 202). Reno suggests that US based oil firms, state officials, and international financial institutions have helped create a system of "private diplomacy"– effectively undermining nation building efforts in order to secure their interests.

But in his version, America tragically abandoned Africa after defeating the Soviets. So Gettleman creates more distance between cynical American actors and repackages many of the old writing-about-Africa tropes.

He starts in "that corner of Congo so isolated," where the Belgian cotton industry lies in ruins and branches are dripping with mangos. He also saves the worst for last, giving the reader a look at the enemy: "at the all-you-can-eat hotel buffet where turbaned figures laughed as they heaped mountains of rice and meat onto their plates…" before introducing us to a "fresh faced aid worker" who asks him if he wants to see a woman who has been tortured by the LRA.

It is possible that his closing graphic scene is meant to be taken as metaphor. Gettleman juxtaposes The Economist magazine's December cover story "Africa Rising" with the image of a "convalescing" female victim. The metaphorical suffering of Africa is more convenient because it is always silent and always passive. It also depends on gendered forms of aggression. Gettleman ends the piece with a crude description of the woman's mutilated mouth, which will be "forever open, like a scream." It is not clear whether the woman who recently survived torture gave consent for Gettleman's viewing. But the presence of her/his silent, suffering African body, it doesn't seem to matter. This is what guilt-based aggression looks like; exposing and displaying someone else's vulnerability becomes an easy way to reinforce your own strength.

* I am not the only reaching this conclusion; Alex Thurston, better known as Sahel Blog makes basically the same observation on his blog: "Reno, as quoted and summarized by Gettleman, is keen to historicize African rebellions (particularly by assessing the impact of the end of the Cold War) and to subdivide them into different categories; Gettleman, for his part, seems keen to generalize patterns of conflict and to suggest that the nature of violence in Africa today mostly has to do with what he sees as the pettiness of the actors involved." You can also read Zach Warner's critique of Gettleman's review.

Arise Fashion Week

Pillbox hats are back! What else, besides a nouvelle variation of the old-school "Turkish" headgear, is in style at Arise Magazine's 2012 fashion week in Lagos? After a drive through Victoria Island to get there, passing massive signs advertising "JESUS", golden highrises and tattler headlines blaring "BOKO HARAM'S PLOT TO ATTACK SOUTH UNCOVERED," we're treated to waterfalls of fabric accentuating the lively flows of a woman's walk, necklines wider (and going deeper) than a duck's wake, and enough flash to invite comments about how 'colorful' Africans can be. Even from a distance, we can see the cut and construction is far superior to anything Gwen Stefani might attempt with "African" fabric. Here's hoping that one day, AIAC is invited to the front row!

#Kony2012 is a Parody

#Kony2012 is no joke (million of people still send money to Invisible Children and one its first public critics, a Canadian student who runs a tumbl blog called Visible Children, has received death treats), but it hasn't stopped the comedians from coming out. Here's a few floating around in our inboxes, or passed around on Facebook and Twitter. First up is "Tony 2012: Stop the Tiger," which is both gross and pitch perfect. It's by a comedy group, who seem to specialize in frat boy humor. Of course they have merchandise.

It's not Youtube if someone does not make a "response video." #Tony2012 already has one:

Then there's the Australian "rap news agency" Juice Rap News. At least these guys have some politics.

Finally, since Invisible Children compared Kony to Adolf Hitler; you knew this was bound to happen. That Hitler meme on Youtube gets in on the act:

Amsterdam is a Continent

ZAM is an international multimedia platform celebrating African creativity and new thinking, priding itself on a network of over 500 African journalists, photographers, writers, artists, academics, visionaries, doers and hundreds of peers in Europe and elsewhere. (Which we can attest to.) The original Dutch version of ZAM Magazine has been around for a while but to widen their reach, the magazine has reinvented itself as "an independent, quarterly print magazine on Africa and beyond" that will be launched in Amsterdam today. The first international issue features contributions by Helon Habila, Achille Mbembe, Paula Akugizibwe and Elnathan John; profiles of artists Jane Alexander and Ayana Vellissia Jackson (the portrait on the magazine's cover, above, is by Jackson); opinion pieces by Kalundi Serumaga, William Gumede, Kassim Mohamed; Africa is a Country (yes); and much more.

Speakers tonight will be Kunle Adeyemi, Palesa Motsumi and Idsis Akinbajo (with visuals by Bouba Doula and tunes by DJ Bamba Nazar). ZAM's new facebook page has all the details.

(Tonight's launch is open to everyone interested so if you're in Amsterdam, shoot them an email confirming your presence at events@zammagazine.com — and tell them Africa is a Country sent you.)

How to read Africa is a Country

"Soweto" (@Jodi Bieber)

A few people have emailed us about the not-so-new layout here at AIAC; mostly about finding old posts on this new layout. The main complaint: "When I am on your home page, I can't find a way of accessing any recent posts older than 'Latest posts' or hope they're in 'Top posts'." (Only the last posts appear on the main body of the front page along with a 'Featured' post.) True. Here's some advice: Click on the 'More…' button at the bottom of the front page. That will take you to a blog version (dates descending) of AIAC. Or click on the 'Archive' widget on the right and choose a month, say 'January 2012′, and all the posts for that month will appear in chronological order (by date descending). The other option: If you're looking for a specific post, just use the 'Search' option at the top of the page in the header. Or, if you're looking for the work of a specific blogger, click on her/his name. Hope that helps and keeps you reading.

Music Break. Gaël Faye

Bujumbura-born Gaël Faye (you know him from the Paris hip hop outfit Milk Coffee & Sugar) returned to Burundi to record this video with singer Francis Muhire for 'Petit Pays' (a first single off his upcoming 'autobiographic' album). It's an ode to that 'small country', with the images pushing some safe buttons (happy kids and green rolling hills), but Faye's French parlando is quite beautiful, his mind floating between the Burundi of his past, the Rwanda of his mother and the France of his father.

The Invisible Christians of #Kony2012

In the last few days every journalist (or outraged blogger) covering #Kony2012 has been so busy reporting on what the bloggers have been saying and putting together salad after salad of African (and therefore authentic, true etc) opinion, that they have utterly failed to actually do any journalism. That's right: reporting. Finding out what this thing is actually about. So far as I can tell there hasn't been much of this. As a result the conversation has either taken the form of handwringing over What Is To Be Done in Northern Uganda (we all think we know more about this than six-year-old Gavin and so we can all speak with great confidence on such matters) or else gawping blankly at the colossal, though suspiciously self-pronounced, power of social media. A big part of the story that is being missed is that Invisible Children and their project are firmly rooted in evangelical Christianity.

"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.)

#Kony2012 could turn out to be a big thing in the young history of the internet or it might just blow over and go away. In either case it constitutes a major development in the very much longer history of Western missionary activities in Africa, and that is the frame in which #Kony2012 needs to be understood.

Invisible Children are not at all a break away from old modes of Western engagement with the African continent towards something new-because-social-media-driven; rather they come directly out of a missionary tradition of American evangelicalism that has been growing more and more obsessed with Uganda for years. When the most successful missionaries in the world are Nigerians in the vein of Redeemed Church's Gulfstream-riding phenomenon Enoch Adeboye, and when someone like Adeboye is busy setting up churches all over America, any would-be American missionaries who fancy themselves as adventurers need to find new kinds of mission work, new ways of making themselves relevant to African societies like Uganda when converting people no longer makes sense as a primary goal.

One option has been to foment homophobia. Another, it emerges, is to make manipulative documentaries about yourself in which you urge young people to campaign for America to have another war. Maybe if technology-infatuated but proudly secularist outlets like the Guardian had looked into this, they might come up with with less mealy-mouthed (and even mealier-mouthed) coverage.

But 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.

You can watch that video of his Liberty University comments here.

And he's been pretty good at keeping a lid on it, though anyone who saw his bizarre "interview" with the fawning Piers Moron must have been struck by Russell's sudden slippage into highly-charged apocalyptic rhetoric as he indulged his delusions (the main one being the notion that Kony spends his evenings twiddling his thumbs in front of the Piers Morgan Show):

To recap: "Here's the beauty of the times we are living in," said Russell, "we are living in dramatic times and so the world is waking up to the fact that Joseph Kony right now is listening to the world. And what we want the world to know and to start hashtagging right now is "Kony Surrender", because he can hear us, he knows, he's watching."

Among the weirdest of Russell's sayings is certainly his classic claim that, "We can have fun while we end genocide. It's an adventure." This accounts for the Invisible Children's mysterious commitment to being fundamentally unserious, and while in the various responses to critiques that IC has issued they have argued that being serious is just far too boring for them, when he spoke at Liberty, Russell explained himself rather differently:

We're going to have a blast doing it because we feel like God calls us to be joyful in the work that we're doing, no matter what we're doing, and so that's really what we're about.

My point is not at all to suggest that people of faith have any less legitimacy than anyone else to engage with these kinds of issues. Pointing out the Christian basis of Invisible Children is no kind of exposé. Rather I'm saying that faith should not be excluded from the discussion of #Kony2012 just because people want to talk about how amazing they think Twitter is. It's a crucial part of all of the histories that are in play here and mustn't be ignored. Popular discussion in the US should not be about Northern Uganda (about which most of us know very little) but about our own culture. (If you haven't figured it out by now #Kony2012 is not Africa.) Why are we so susceptible to this kind of emotional manipulation and why are we incapable of engaging with the African continent in anything but the most manic fashion? The evangelical basis for the whole project needs to be reckoned with in answering these questions.

Footnote: Jason Russell Miscellany

There's a super-weird bit in the Liberty speech where Russell discusses the connection he feels with Jacob, the young Ugandan whose brother was killed by the LRA and who features heavily in the Kony2012 video.

When Jacob, who was 14, said "I want to kill myself because i have nothing to live for", I actually resonated with that because when I was 16 I wanted to kill myself because being raised in musical theater wasn't cool.

Not to make light of a teenage Russell wanting to commit suicide, but comparing your suburban fate with that of a homeless child fleeing a war zone. He can't be serious.

For those who just can't get enough of the cringe, a must-read is a toe-curling Q&A by the photographer Patrick McMullan with Jason Russell from last year.

Selected highlights:

My middle name is Radical.

I am from San Diego, California, with an upbringing in musical theater. I am going to help end the longest running war in Africa, get Joseph Kony arrested & redefine international justice. Then I am going to direct a Hollywood musical.

If Oprah, Steven Spielberg and Bono had a baby, I would be that baby.

New book on 'how modern Africa reshaped jazz'

Following his lengthy Thelonius Monk biography, historian Robin DG Kelley, has a new book, "Africa Speaks, America Answers," on how "modern Africa reshaped jazz, how modern jazz helped form a new African identity, and how musical convergences and crossings altered the politics and culture of both continents." The book covers the careers of four artists. Ghanaian drummer Guy Warren and South African jazz singer Sathima Bea Benjamin* — who both made careers in the United States — are featured. The African-Americans Randy Weston (piano) and Ahmed Abdul Malik (bassist) make up the rest.

PopMatters has an excerpt from the Prelude to Africa Speaks, America Answers (published by Harvard University Press). You can read the whole excerpt on the Popmatters site, but here's a glimpse:

By exploring the work, conversations, collaborations, and tensions between both African and African American musicians during the era of decolonization, I examine how modern Africa figured in reshaping jazz during the 1950s and early 1960s, how modern jazz figured in the formation of a modern African identity, and how various musical convergences and crossings shaped the political and cultural landscape on both continents. This book is not about the African roots of jazz, nor does it ask how American jazz musicians supported African liberation or "imagined" Africa. Rather, it is about transnational encounters between musicians, or what the ethnomusicologist Jason Stanyek calls "intercultural collaboration," and encounters between musicians and particular locations (such as Lagos, Chicago, New York, or Cape Town). In other words, it hopes to explain how encounters with specific places, people, movements, cultures, provided fertile ground for new music and musical practices.

Links to two early reviews: Chronicle on Higher Education and The AV Club.

* BTW, Benjamin is also the subject of a full-length history, "Musical Echoes: South African Women Thinking in Jazz" (Duke University Press, 2011), co-written by musicologist Carol Muller and Benjamin.

#Kony2012 is 'magical'

After watching this clip from CNN of a hyped-up Jason Russell addressing Joseph Kony directly through the screen (on Piers Morgan's "interview" show on CNN), we asked Swedish anthropologist Sverker Finnström if we could share his thoughts on #Kony2012:

The machinations of the Invisible Children lobby, in its ability to lure the youth of the west, reveal that it has far greater magical powers than the ruthless Lord's Resistance Army. Their lobby reminds me of Bronislaw Malinowski's old thesis that "magic is to be expected and generally to be found whenever man comes to an unbridgeable gap, a hiatus in his knowledge or in his powers of practical control, and yet has to continue in his pursuit." But let's update the Malinowskian legacy; a more contemporary understanding magic can be postulated as that which we do not yet understand, or a measure of our incomprehension of local explanations for any given situation. Whatever we describe as "magic" even involves an active decision not to understand. So, with the film "Kony 2012″, Invisible Children has now fully become part of the magical terror of global war, produced not primarily by any Africanness, but in the emplacement of global forces on the African scene.

A most prominent feature of the Invisible Children lobby is the making and constant remaking of a master narrative; it reduces, depoliticizes and dehistoricizes a murky reality of globalized war into a completely black-and-white story pitting the modern Ugandan government and its international partners in development who defend the noncombatant citizenry against the barbarian Lord's Resistance Army. And this is the magic of it: the good guys are not good because they are good, but by default, and because they are recruited to the allegedly good side. For example, the rebel commander carrying out the 2008 "Christmas Day massacre" in Faradje in the Congo, with 143 people brutally murdered and globally reported on, has since defected, been granted amnesty, and is silently working with the Ugandan and American forces.

The pragmatics of such cooperation and the American military intervention itself has been described by a US officer on the ground: "These ex-L.R.A. guys don't have many skills, and it's going to be hard for them to reintegrate", he said to New York Times. "But one thing they are very good at, is hunting human beings in the woods." So they are welcomed to the assumed good side… My question: Is this the bandwagon we want to jump on? "Don't study history, make history," say the Invisible Children lobbyists in one of their videos. Yes, you should study history.

It is somehow a paradox that the DVD cover to the original "Invisible Children Rough Cut"-film had a quote from Margaret Mead. When I received the Margaret Mead Award for my book on the war in northern Uganda, in my award speech I secretly referenced the problematic Invisible Children lobby, by referring to the same Mead quote. Here is again the reference:

As the conflict that I write about has dangerously evolved and expanded in time and space, over ever widening stretches of Africa and with a most violent logic of its own, so increases the relevance of my book and also the works of my colleagues, which just as mine build on in-depth and long-term fieldwork engagements. There are some important books out there now that take us beyond the many stereotypical journalist accounts. It is my hope that these books can find a wider readership, and that they inspire people to reflect critically upon what is going on in Africa today, and not least our role in it. Here I see dialogue as the only hope in our contemporary global times of militant and military thinking. If we join the dialogue we can work for good and peaceful surroundings, in Uganda and beyond. "Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world," as the legendary quote attributed to Margaret Mead has it. "Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has."

* Sverker Finnström is associate professor of cultural anthropology, based at Uppsala University, Sweden. He has authored "Living with Bad Surroundings: War, History, and Everyday Moments in Northern Uganda" (Duke University Press, 2008), for which he was honored with the 2009 Margaret Mead Award, offered jointly by the American Anthropological Association and the Society for Applied Anthropology. He is also a contributing author to "The Lord's Resistance Army: Myth and Reality" (Zed Books, 2010). He has done anthropological research on northern Uganda since 1997.

Shameless Self-Promotion

An essay I wrote for AIAC on David Goldblatt at the Jewish Museum in Manhattan (2010) is in the latest edition of SAVVY, a Journal for Critical Texts on Contemporary African Art based in Berlin. The 3rd edition of SAVVY is devoted to looking at the "The fire behind the smoke called political art": that is, the relationship between art and politics, and whether the two are an "inseparable couple"; it's edited by Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung and Andrea Heister. Some great essays in there.

My essay, "David Goldblatt at Manhattan's Jewish Museum," is in the "Retrospectives" section, on pp.91-106. (Warning: it's a huge file. But it's free!)

Here's the journal's promo blurb:

Talking about politics and Africa is always crackling. Talking about politics and art is always a guarantee for a hot debate. Then of course talking about art, politics and Africa is a recipe for an electrifying discourse. An objective and constructive critique without pledging any predetermined allegiance to a specific school of thought is an important ingredient in this recipe.

What is for certain is, arts and politics are not of different planets. They share the same playground, they are not antagonistic but complementary to each other and usually co-exist in a symbiotic relationship… and that was evident in many of the texts we received. Surprisingly, we received no article claiming the independence of art from politics or propagating „l'art pour l'art". Is art for art sake a blunt imagination or is it just not an African issue? Art is known to be able to reflect, in one way or the other – consciously or unconsciously, the socio-political, physical or psychological context in which an artist finds him-/herself. Art and the so-called "Schaffensdrang" have to do with a need to create, and often this need stems from a reaction to one's immediate or extended surrounding.