Sean Jacobs's Blog, page 595

Music Break. Dengue Fever

A lot of music we like don't come from Africa. Like this one from Dengue Fever, the California-Cambodia combo: an Indonesian protest song "Gendjer Gendjer."

… [T]he song was originally written during the Japanese occupation of Indonesia during World World II when food was so scarce that people resorted to eating Gendjer, a weed that grew in rice fields. The song re-surfaced in the 1960s in Indonesia when there was a violent military coup and government crackdown on communists and ordinary citizens–a period of political turmoil dramatized in the movie, "The Year of Living Dangerously." "Anyone caught listening to or singing 'Gendjer Gendjer' was considered an enemy of the government …"

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Libya's Africa

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Jon Lee Anderson's long profile/obituary of Muammar Gaddafi in latest issue of The New Yorker reads like a compendium of how Libyans and Gaddafi (especially), related to the idea and continent of Africa. Here are the choice cuts:

After the fall of Tripoli, I joined a crowd of curious Libyans streaming into [Gaddafi's compound], which had become a destination for family excursions … I saw a man emerge from a room in a black silk robe and declare, "I am Qaddafi, King of Africa!" Indeed, trophies of the old order became fashionable around Tripoli. One evening, I saw a rebel soldier manning a roadblock with a gold-plated Kalashnikov, one of several such weapons found in Qaddafi's residence. During a rally in Green Square, the center of protests in Tripoli, a fighter danced up next to me wearing a leopard skin, lined with green satin. He said it had come from Qaddafi's closet, and guessed it had been a gift from a visiting witch doctor. It was an article of faith among the rebels that Qaddafi had regularly used magic to prop up his long reign. What other explanation could there be?

…  For some unpopular causes, Qaddafi offered a last resort. Months before Fallaci arrived, he intervened in Uganda to protect the dictator Idi Amin from invading Tanzanian troops and, later, spirited him away to a house near Tripoli. In the interview, Qaddafi defended Amin. Although he allowed that he might not like the Ugandan despot's "internal policies"—which included torture and mass murder—he was a Muslim and he opposed Israel, and that was all that mattered.

… A couple of large cardboard boxes, full of reel-to-reel tape recordings, sat on the floor. El Lagi said that they were secretly recorded tapes of Qaddafi's meetings. "This one is a surveillance tape of visiting African leaders," he said, picking one up, "and this one, from 2009, was made inside the President's palace in Chad." He laughed and exclaimed, "This was Qaddafi! He had intelligence everywhere!"

… Next door [to the house of Gaddafi's son, Saadi], in curious juxtaposition, was a facility called the African Center for Infectious Disease Research and Control. Fighters manned a roadblock there, and a few of them hopped into a car and urged me to follow them. Five minutes away, in a forested area off the main road, they showed me several twenty-foot Soviet-era anti-ship cruise missiles that had been concealed among the trees. The fighters were anxious about the missiles, because they were unguarded. Believing the man they had overthrown to be capable of anything, they worried that these might be chemical weapons.

… During one recent visit to Tripoli, I went to the Burns and Plastic Surgery Hospital to meet a thirty-year-old Ethiopian woman named Shweyga Mullah. For a year, she had been a nanny for [Gaddafi's son] Hannibal's children, and was now healing from fourth-degree burns inflicted by Hannibal's wife, Aline, a Lebanese former model. A doctor showed me to Shweyga's room, where she was in bed, with an I.V. drip attached to one of her arms. There was an odor of burned flesh. The doctor told me that she had been brought in by a Qaddafi security guard, who ordered the doctors to register her as Anonymous.

"She's burned everywhere," the doctor said. Shweyga was fragile, but she was conscious. In a shy voice, she told me that, before she worked for the Qaddafis, she had lived with her parents in Addis Ababa. She was unmarried, and her father was often away, working as a farm laborer. The Libyan Embassy was looking for domestic workers, so she applied and was hired to go to Libya and work for the Qaddafis. Unknown to her, the two had a reputation for violence.

…  One morning, she said, "I was gathering up her son's clothes, but I didn't do it properly. So for the next three days she made me stand in the garden. I wasn't allowed to eat or to sleep." When Aline allowed Shweyga back inside, she went to the kitchen, thirsty after her ordeal, and drank some juice. "The wife came and said, 'What are you doing here?' She accused me of eating some Turkish delight. I insisted that I hadn't. She called me a liar." The next morning, Aline told the other servants to tie Shweyga up, and to boil some water. "They tied my legs and tied my hands behind my back. I was brought into the bathroom and put in a bathtub, and she started pouring the boiling water on me, over my head. My mouth was taped, so I couldn't scream." Hannibal was there, she said, but he did nothing. Shweyga was left in the bathroom, tied up, until the next day. "It was too much pain," she said. After about ten days, the security guard secretly took her to the hospital, but Aline found out. "She said if he didn't bring me back he'd be imprisoned, so he brought me back." Only after Aline fled Tripoli was Shweyga taken again to the hospital. She had been there ever since.

Outside the room, the doctor told me that she would probably survive, but she would need ongoing plastic surgery. "Her life is ruined," he concluded. Enraged by Aline's cruelty, he said, "The same that she did to Shweyga should be done to her." …

… If the Arab states couldn't be united, there was at least the prospect of hegemony in Africa. Qaddafi gave out vast quantities of money and weapons to a bewildering array of revolutionary causes in sub-Saharan Africa. He also supported the fight against apartheid in South Africa. In 1997, Nelson Mandela appeared in Tripoli to proclaim that Libya's "selfless and practical support helped assure a victory that was as much yours as it is ours."

In the mid-seventies, Libya and Chad began a long-running conflict over a uranium-rich piece of borderland called the Aouzou Strip. In 1987, Qaddafi's forces were finally outgunned by local soldiers backed by France and the U.S. He lost seventy-five hundred men—a tenth of the total force—and a billion and a half dollars of military equipment. Ashour Gargoum, the former Libyan diplomat, told me that the Chad episode was "a disaster for Qaddafi." Having set out with ambitions of regional unification, he had shown himself unable to manage even his weaker neighbors. Afterward, Gargoum said, he grew "paranoid and detached from reality."

Source.

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Found Objects No. 16

In the late 1970s the new left-wing government of Mozambique invited Jean-Luc Godard (above filming on the Maputo waterfront) with his partner Anne-Marie Miéville to advice on the start-up of a national TV and film infrastructure.

Read about it here.

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Free Blogger Alaa Abd el Fattah

…Military authorities arrested Alaa Abd el Fattah on October 30. Alaa, 29, is one of Egypt's best-known revolutionary activists and bloggers.  He was accused of inciting violence against the junta –the violence being the Maspero assaults of October 9, when the military cracked down on a demonstration for Copts' rights and killed at least 25 protesters.  (As an added insult, Mina Danial, a revolutionary activist brutally murdered in the Maspero attack, was named in Alaa's interrogation as one of his "accomplices.")

His real crime was that he'd publicly said the military bore full responsibility for the October 9 killings. On his way to his arrest on Sunday, he told a reporter the army "committed a massacre, a horrible crime, and now they are working on framing someone else for it … Instead of launching a proper investigation, they are sending activists to trial for saying the plain truth and that is that the army committed a crime in cold blood."

He was ordered held for 15 days, renewable at the military's discretion. Yesterday, his wife Manal smuggled out a letter; the Guardian prints it here.

Read the rest of the piece at a paper bird.

h/t NM

Photo credit: Hossam el-Hamalawy, aka 3arabawy

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Music Break. Meklit Hadero

Meklit Hadero (Ethiopia | US) – Singer + songwriter.

Ethopian American singer, songwriter and recording artist working on bridging the Ethiopian Diaspora living in the United States with Ethiopians in Ethiopia, through her organization The Arba Minch Collective.

2012 TED Senior Fellows.

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'Why is the US sending its troops to finish off a fractured band of bush fighters in the middle of Africa?'

President Barack Obama's decision to send 100 armed "special forces" to the Central African Republic to flush out Joseph Kony's 400 odd fighters (link to the announcement) has elicit the range of predictable responses.  John Pilger deplored it and American human rights organizations welcomed it. So did the Western media. I love John Pilger, but he hardly writes about or visits Africa anymore. (The last substantive reporting Pilger did on Africa was his 1998 with his film "Apartheid did not Die.")  As for American human rights organizations, the only thing we learned is that they are a powerful lobby in Washington.  But what do Africans  in the region think? Though I've read the Ugandan press online, it's still been hard to find those kinds of opinions in one place. For that I turned to Iranian TV.   What?

Iran's Press TV (basically their version of a global news channel) has a program Africa Today and last week's edition tackled the question in the title.  The video is below. It's worth watching presenter Henry Bonsu and his guests Tabu Butagira (a journalist based in Kampala), Vincent Magombi (a professional commentator) and "a political analyst" work their way through Obama's motives and what local actors may get out of the increased presence of American military personnel.  The panelists reference the newly discovered oil on the borders of western Congo and Uganda, having an armed US presence close to "Islamic fundamentalism" in northern Sudan, the fact that larger numbers of American military advisors are already present in the region, and that Kony's LRA is a spent force. The last time the LRA was a threat was in 2003.  The big winner is Yoweri Museveni. The Americans are basically building a military infrastructure that terrorizes local people and strengthens a dictator.

The video:

There's more programs archived on the show's web page.

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The Hajj of the Revolution?

Millions of Muslims from all over the world are currently gathered in Mecca for the Hajj, a pilgrimage that must be made by every Muslim who is financially and physically able at least once in their lifetime. However, this year's Hajj follows a tumultuous series of uprisings throughout Africa and Southwest Asia, and even the very pious have little patience left with Saudi Arabia's management of this holy journey.

Saudi Arabia is not well-liked generally (what with their un-Islamic institutionalization of denying women basic rights, generously taking in deposed dictators, and their unabashed partnership with the United States on all matters 'anti-terrorism') but every year millions of pilgrims grit their teeth and endure the Saudi bureaucracy in order to fulfill one of the primary tenants of Islam. King Abdullah has already bought off his own citizens (and banned protesting) in order to prevent a Bahrain-style revolt, but can the kingdom continue to depend on the Ka'ba to stifle the misgivings and mistreatment of its annual visitors?

Each year, Saudi Arabia limits the number of people who are allowed to make the pilgrimage – for example, only 3,000 of the 7,500 South Africans who sought visas this year were provided one. While crowd control is a valid issue, prevention of 'political outbursts' is also a high priority. In late October, Saudi Arabia's Grand Mufti, Sheikh Abdulaziz Al al-Shaikh, stated, "Allah did not intend haj to be a place for dispute, haggling… or using it for political agendas or preaching grim sectarianism." However, as Asma Alsharif's report for Reuters points out, "In 1987 clashes between Iranian pilgrims and Saudi security forces led to the deaths of hundreds of people" and to this day, "Saudi religious police patrol the holy cities to ensure pilgrims are worshipping in the manner prescribed by the Gulf monarchy's strict interpretation of Islam."

Furthermore, wealthy Gulf residents receive extreme privileges as compared to the majority of their fellow pilgrims. A far cry from the ideal of ultimate brotherhood and human dignity, the 'Mecca Metro' designed to expedite travelers through the pilgrimage and prevent crowded conditions was initially available only to Gulf pilgrims. Saudi-owned companies sprinkled throughout the world make millions of dollars on the backs of Muslims who are willing and able to wait years to make their Hajj. Needless to say, when Muslims without such financial stability do make it to Jeddah to begin their journey, traveling by foot, sleeping wherever there's free space on the ground, and going without food or water is their reality. All this occurs in a nation that perpetuates horrific human rights abuses against their own citizens and workers – especially migrant women.

Social justice is an essential component of Islam, whether you rely on the prophet Muhammad's declaration that "all mankind is the progeny of Adam and Adam was fashioned out of clay" or Malcolm X's transformative experience on his own Hajj. If we are occupying cities to protest economic, racial and social injustice and we are ousting dictators who allowed our nations to be re-colonized by corporations and foreign militaries, Muslims must also stand up to the Kingdom of Saud. Xenophobia, racism, patriarchal violence and the protection of obscene wealth and power have no place in these ongoing struggles for justice, and regardless of the Grand Mufti's sentiments, the Hajj is supposed to represent the ultimate struggle for human dignity in every Muslim's lifetime. Remember this as you distribute your alms of meat to the poor this Eid al Adha.

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Music Break. Jolly Boys

These guys remind me of Sunday afternoons at my great aunt's house in Parkwood.

This is from last year. Jamaica's Jolly Boys gives Amy Winehouse's "Rehab" the mento treatment.  Here's a recent interview with them in New York City by Large Up TV.

Organized Labor

Samir Sonti in Viewpoint Magazine:

Weakened though they may be, and with all the limitations of their sedentary bureaucracies, [trade] unions are still the most democratic membership organizations in the United States, with established activists and infrastructures in cities across the country that possess the practical skills and resources necessary to carry on the fight [of the "Occupy" movement], particularly when it becomes less visibly exciting. Though union density has precipitously declined in recent decades, still today millions of people have experienced real improvements in their lives through workplace struggles led by existing labor unions, a much larger and more representative cross-section of the population than is likely to turn out at any "Occupy" event.

It's important to remember that historically, organized labor has been the most effective vehicle for challenging economic inequality; it is an empirical reality that when unions are weak wealth concentrates in the hands of the few, and when they're strong it is at least a bit more evenly distributed. A recent study demonstrated that between 1973 and 2007 private sector unionization decreased by over 75% and inequality increased by 40%. In this spirit, OWS might best be considered as an opportunity to push the mainstream labor movement toward a more aggressive organizing strategy and, hopefully, an alternative political vision. Rank-and-file militants in a variety of unions have engaged in this grueling project for decades, with some successes and many setbacks, and perhaps the most encouraging feature of OWS is the space it might create for more work of this sort. However, an opportunity is only as valuable as the concrete steps taken to capitalize on it, and unless the strategic thinking needed to orient and initiate that process begins in earnest, this wave of activism will likely join the recent anti-globalization and immigrants' rights demonstrations in the annals of modern left history while neoliberalism continues its plunder unscathed.

A number of unions have taken up the OWS mantle and some inspiring labor-community partnerships have grown out of it. The New York City Transport Workers Union (TWU) Local 100 was an early supporter, and even went to court to prevent police from ordering union drivers to bus arrested demonstrators to jail. The National Nurses United (NNU), one of the most progressive and militant unions, has been present at occupations around the country administering flu shots and providing basic medical assistance. And the courageous art handlers of Teamsters Local 814 who have been locked-out of Sotheby's auction house – a quintessential symbol of the "1%" – have cultivated a remarkable level of solidarity with the New York occupation, turning out bus loads to their rallies and gaining international attention in the process. These three examples represent elements of the most dynamic and forward-looking wing of an otherwise rather glacial labor establishment that always seems to be on the defensive. The best chance OWS has to become the kind of force necessary to win a more just society lies in following their lead.

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'Soccer movies about poor, brown people'

This semester I co-teach (with journalist Tony Karon) a media politics class on Global Soccer, Global Politics at The New School. It is turning out to be the best thing I've done in a while. It also means watching lots of football-themed films. Some good ones and not all of these are good films. The latter includes a number of films with depressing themes. Don't get me wrong, I am not against films that focus on the ugly side of football. Like Current TV's 30 minute "Soccer's Lost Boys" (this is a link to the film; that's the trailer above) about football factories in Ghana. Instead it is part of a pattern when it comes to African football: It's mostly gloom and doom.  When European football appears on film, at worst it will get the hooligan treatment, otherwise it is all about greatest hits and childhood wonder. (Recent examples include "A Night in Turin" about the England team–with Paul Gascoigne at its heart–that crashed out in the semi-finals of the 1990 World Cup; or just check the trailer for the new film about Liverpool's 2005 European Champions League final triumph.)

Which is I could recognize The Offside Rules' anger in a recent post on his blog:

I'm sure someone will find a way to twist the following statement to make me look like a prick or self-hating negro but here it is anyway: I'm tired of seeing soccer movies about poor, brown people.

Documentary makers, you know we're not a monolith right? There are well-to-do brown folks that play soccer as well. Bring your cameras down to a youth game in [Prince George County, Maryland], MD or Cascade Heights, [Georgia] if you don't believe me. Also there are disadvantaged Europeans and Asians who play soccer as well, give them some shine from time to time.

I'm not saying there shouldn't be films about underprivileged brown kids and the uplifting power of soccer. Not at all. But the frequency with which these things have dropped over the last few years is just ridiculous and extremely disproportionate. Here's a list of the titles that I can think of without Googling:

Chasing the Mad Lion

The Anderson Monarchs project.

Dreamtown

The Day Brazil Was Here

Africa 10

Bush League

And that's just in the past year.

Seriously y'all we're dangerously close to "Magical Negro" territory with these types of films. Why do they keep getting made? At this point it is certainly not original and I've yet to see a follow up film where it shows some drastic improvement in the lives of the subjects since the original film. Come on y'all, we can do better.