Sean Jacobs's Blog, page 599
October 24, 2011
Gaddafi is Dead, IV
Every major Western government now makes up histories of long-held opposition to Muammar Gaddafi's dictatorship. Then there's the truth: As The Financial Times reminded its readers in January this year (H/T: Peter Dwyer) the West's 2003 decision to change Gaddafi's regime status from dictatorship to reformer, was really about business.
Tony Blair flew down to Tripoli in 2004 to personally embrace Gaddafi; Silvio Berlusconi backed Gaddafi "to such a degree that trade between Italy and Libya is today eight times that between Tripoli and the UK;" on a visit to Paris, Gaddafi's "Bedouin tent was set up within sight of the Elysée palace;" and the "US, Brazil, Germany have all rushed to do business with his regime."
So why is Libya so important to the West?
There were two prizes. First, oil and gas. With 44.3bn barrels of proven reserves, Libya has more oil than any other African country, four times as much as Britain and Norway combined. A confidential document recently released by the UK government declares that Libya is one of the few countries "with medium-term capacity to bring significantly more energy to world markets". For BP, a company with close relations to the UK government, this was immensely attractive. In 2007, it agreed to invest $900m in a deal to explore Libyan fields. As Tony Hayward, then chief executive, said at the time, this was BP's "single biggest exploration commitment anywhere in the world".
The second attraction was the operation of Libyan Investment Authority, a sovereign wealth fund worth $60bn-$80bn, according to analysts. The fund, which opened a London office in 2009, has invested in Britain to a lesser degree than rivals in Qatar and Dubai. But it has recently disclosed a 3.01 per cent stake in Pearson, the educational publisher and owner of the Financial Times. It also owns considerable London commercial property assets. Mohamed Layas, LIA's head, told US diplomats last year that he preferred operating in the British capital to the US because of the "ease of doing business" and the "relatively uncomplicated tax system".
Yes, the FT wrote that.
[image error]
[image error]
[image error]
Revisiting the "Gay Marriage Map"
By Travis Ferland*
The "Gay Marriage Map" that accompanied an opinion piece by columnist Frank Bruni in The New York Times a few days ago, provides a global snapshot of laws affecting same-sex relationships. It especially draws our attention to Africa, where shackled hands and nooses adorn the continent–with the exception of a happy gay couple on the coast of South Africa.
The "Gay Marriage Map" is purely a representation of legal statutes, and it does little to depict cultural attitudes or brutal and frequently undocumented abuses of homosexuals. Senegal, where a horrific media campaign was waged against gays and lesbians in 2008, is not even noted on the map. Neither is Cameroon, where human rights activist Alice N'kom has been working tirelessly to free LGBT persons who have been imprisoned on the basis of their sexuality.
So, what could possibly be wrong in South Africa, the first country to offer equal constitutional protections to sexual minorities? The issue of homophobia goes much deeper than legal codes. It is a cultural issue that takes time and perseverance to overcome. Yes, South Africa's legislature has done something remarkable – hats off to them – but the law has not prevented the so-called "corrective rape" of lesbians, or other hate crimes against gay and transgender individuals. It also does not mean that authorities will take these crimes seriously.
This map also neglects to demonstrate the growing support for LGBT rights across Africa. Throughout the continent, allies and sympathizers are joining the cause and rejecting politicians' use of homophobia to gain power. We should focus our attention on this fledgling movement and the promise it holds. However, we should avoid projecting our own ambitions on a continent that's seen far too much of that.
Bruni's map makes a tragic assumption–that marriage is the ultimate goal of gays and lesbians around the world.
It expresses the global realities of gay rights through a Western and predominantly American system of thought. As stated by Nigerian activist Ifeanyi Orazulike, "we can't remember asking for same-sex marriage." Ifeanyi was speaking at a recent forum at The New School in New York City and referring to the Nigerian bill criminalizing same-sex relationships, drafted in response to increasing Western emphasis on the issue.
Western involvement in African LGBT issues has been helpful at best and disastrous at worst. The West overwhelms the movement at times of crisis, but neglects everyday issues – even when these issues are the product of Western creations. Another panelist at The New School forum, Dr. Cheikh Traore of the UNDP, explained that when President Bush introduced PEPFAR (an initiative providing HIV services in Africa) there was very little Western outrage over its initial denial of service to men who have sex with men (MSM). More attention to everyday details like these could hold great potential in changing deep-rooted institutional and cultural realities.
The West should instead reach out to local organizations and coalitions and listen to their needs. The AllOut.org campaign took this approach in response to Cameroon's imprisonment of gay men. The organization's co-founder, Andre Banks, explained at The New School forum that AllOut.org had been communicating with Cameroonian activist Alice N'kom, but held off on launching a global campaign until she decided it was time.
Africa's fifty-four countries and myriad ethnic groups comprise a complex cultural dynamic. Western organizations will need to determine, on a case-by-case basis, their role in helping grass-roots movements. The "Gay Marriage Map" highlights dramatic global disparities in the legal treatment of homosexual relationships, but it does not broaden our knowledge of the battle for LGBT rights in places like Africa. Perhaps Frank Bruni should make some calls to gays and lesbians in Africa and find out what they would like to have put on the map.
* Travis Ferland is completing a MS in International Affairs at the New School in New York City. He was a Peace Corps volunteer in Senegal and worked for the International Rescue Committee. He moderated the recent New School forum, "Coming Out in the Developing World: Overcoming Homophobia in Africa".
[image error]
Gaddafi is dead, III
Today I started thinking of all the odd bits I have read or heard about Gaddafi. Hopefully I'll post more. Like the apocryphal story of when the G.O.A.T. Muhammed Ali met the future dictator Muammar Gaddafi.
A young Libyan student in London sat on [Ali's] bed, kept him up half the night with dithyrambic visions of Muslim revolution. 'Watch, one day you will see,' said Muammar Qaddafi. Half asleep, Ali said: "Sheeet, you crazy."
* The first place I read this was in my copy of The Esquire Book of Sports Writing (published in 1995). It's in "Great Men Die Twice," a profile of Ali by sportswriter Mark Kram first published in the magazine in 1989. (Kram also wrote a book about the relationship between Ali to and his longtim rival Joe Frazier.) There are other stories about Ali's encounters with Gaddafi which I won't repeat here but you can google. Like when he persuaded Gaddafi to lend the Nation of Islam one million dollars, for example.
[image error]
[image error]
October 21, 2011
Music Break. Friday Bonus Edition
If you can't get Coldplay's stadium rock out of your head, try these 10 (well, eleven) tunes.
First up, Sean's five year old prefers this remix by Dead Prez of "Beautiful Girls" to the original:
The French soul singer Ben l'Oncle Soul's "Petite soeur":
Tiombe of the East Village "spaced-out RnB acid house revivalist outfit" Cubic Zirconia channels Josephine Baker:
(You remember the video Kahlil Joseph directed for the "Black & Blue" track Cubic Zirconia did with Spoek Mathambo, right.)
Belgian rapper Akro (of local Mundele fame) recorded this video in Kingston, featuring Jamaican singer Stacious.
Since it is getting cold, it's worth revisiting the remix of "Your Summer Song" by Exile, featuring one J Mitchell on vocals:
The next clip is not a music video, but one of many trailers for "Hit Me With Music," a new documentary about dancehall:
The French rap collective, 113 (named for a commuter bus number in the "suburbs" of Paris) is now no more. You'll recognize their famous tune "Prince de la Ville." But, according to our French-Algerian connection, 113′s most popular song is that in the video below. It is a humorous take on the cliché of African families in France preparing for the annual trek to the continent with gifts for cousins aunts, nephews…
D'banj, nowadays part of Kanye West's music label, made this song in 2010. It has about 1.2 million views on Youtube. His guest star in the video is popular Nollywood actress Genevieve Nnaji:
More smooth grooves. Oakland's Raphael Saadiq's "Movin' Down the Line":
Brazilian rapper Parteum takes a trip down memory lane on the streets of São Paulo and São Caetano do Sul:
Finally, number 11, the intensity of the late Cape Town rapper Devious is on full display in this video shot in Amsterdam in 2001 by Thomas Gesthuizen. We thought of Devious last week, when Contro'Versy, another Cape Town rapper, passed:
[image error]
[image error]
Occupy Africa
Last week on Columbus Day, Sahara Reporters, the Nigeria-focused New York City-based website, sent a crew down to Zucoti Park where anti-Wall Street protesters are camping out:
Sean: Olga El, who runs "a dance theater for social change," was there, topless (it's legal in New York City), representing for Africa and native people against imperialism. Her ancestors "are from all over Africa and native American." She had "a fusion of things going on in my outfit."
Earlier today, What's Up Africa, pointed to some of the craziness in this video.
Once again, on the run, I canvassed the "office":
Neelika: I love 'representing'. In a country that almost claims to have invented individualism, what's the fuss about representing entire histories, communities, and landmasses? We know that the trope of "representing" comes from the tradition of voicing presence: where minorities and other marginalised people consciously make visible and draw attention to their presence in the world, thereby forcing the dominant cultures – those that make concentrated attempts to make the marginalised disappear – notice. "Representing" shouldn't be dimissed as something that exists only in the cheesy world of P-Diddy, his vodka, et al.
But as Ikenna of What's Up Africa (in the video above) points out, representing here is a nod to some bucolic past existence–what with all the tourist beads and toplessness. It's what gross sunburnt Europeans come to gawk at when they go to 'village performances.' Coupled with what appears to be a dangerous body weight, and a desire for exhibitionism, we are not in Feminist Territory, but in the area that Feminism helped draw our attention to as problematic.
And lovey, that raccoon makeup is just not on. This is how a good movement goes bad. I'm all for unshackling ourselves from the bondage of idiotic social conventions (such as unnecessary rules for what needs to be covered up), but when one couples topless with Africa, one inevitably gets Occupation rights on "Primitive Africa".
Sophia: This is horrifying. Reminds me of the guy in the Schomburg who saw me reading Arabic and asked me if I was African. I said, "yeah, Egyptian," and he shouted "KEMETIC. YOU ARE KEMETIC." I'm with Ikenna.
[image error]
Malawi Prison Blues
Recently Malawians have been protesting against government corruption and cronyism. The focus of citizen anger is President Bingu wa Mutharika. The response has only been state violence and repression; in some instances fatal. Last month Robert Chasowa, a student leader, was murdered under mysterious circumstances. Malawi is a democracy now but they last dealt with this kind of thing under Life President Hastings Banda who ruled from independence in 1966 till 3 years before his death in 1997.
For those looking for a speed read on recent events, I would suggest reading Steve Sharras's recent post at Global Voices. But for a more longer, analytical view there is celebrated poet Jack Mapanje's new memoir, And Crocodiles are Hungry at Night. It just came out and as Elliot Ross (he is an AIAC contributor and grew up in Malawi) writes in Guernica, the book "could scarcely be more timely, offering as it does a history of local tyranny at a time when political violence has escalated to a pitch not seen since Banda's demise." Mapanje who was imprisoned by Banda's regime in the late 1980s, wanted to "alternative history of the nation seen through the lens of my prison." Mapanje, for Ross, is Malawi's "most vital and furious historian" and his imprisonment is "best understood as one of the paradigmatic events in Malawi's history since independence."
It was an outrage that—like Mapanje's poetry—takes us right to the core of what power after empire has meant for that country, as for many in Africa.
As with Nkrumah's Convention People's Party in Ghana, SWAPO in Namibia, KANU in Kenya, and more recently Zanu-PF in Zimbabwe and the African National Congress in South Africa, so in Malawi the Malawi Congress Party (MCP), which had achieved liberation from colonial rule, slipped into what the South African poet Jeremy Cronin recently described as "a problematic habit of identifying themselves as 'the nation.'" This process of substitutionism, which saw political legitimacy monopolized by a single party, was in turn extended to the [ruling Malawi Congress Party] leader, Hastings Kamuzu Banda. He dubbed himself the father of the nation, yet, in a fashion one might almost think of as curiously trinitarian, his power relied on his embodying the nation even as he announced himself its sole progenitor. The investment of such power in Banda alone conveyed enormous political meaning upon his personal narrative, which was parroted within the Malawian public sphere to the exclusion of all others, inculcating a set of myths about the man which even today retain a powerful hold over how he is remembered and memorialized. For Banda was never merely Kamuzu. His most common praise names included the Ngwazi (Conqueror, or Chief of Chiefs), Mpulumutsi (Savior), Wamuyaya (President for Life) and Nkhoswe (Number One). All state institutions were compelled to refer to him as "His Excellency The Life President Ngwazi Dr H. Kamuzu Band."
Mapanje is able to write his nation's history so well through memoir because the signal feature of Malawi right from the start of its existence has been the vicious antagonism of the ruling government towards the country's most talented people. The scale of the waste this has entailed cannot be reckoned with, but with And Crocodiles there is at last a measure of elegy being set down for the droves of bright lives that have been lost or blighted by exile and imprisonment. In a poem written not long after his release, Mapanje situates this group in bitter terms:
And you brethren in dissent / Are out of bounds, meat for crocodiles / Mere cliché in our country's anthology /Of martyrs, perhaps even smudges on /The blank page of this nation[.]
When Mapanje, exasperated in his cell, poses the question, "What can anybody be, when everybody must play Mr. Nobody?," he does so surrounded by the weary victims whose detentions show that Banda's avowed anti-intellectualism, deep-rooted as it was, was just part of the wider system of aggression toward any Malawian who rose above quiescent anonymity.
And Crocodiles are Hungry at Night is the work of many years of reflection in exile, and though the structures and habits of the Banda-era still linger, those years may seem a long time ago for a country whose population is as young as Malawi's. Yet the memoir's publication this summer could scarcely be more timely, offering as it does a history of local tyranny at a time when political violence has escalated to a pitch not seen since Banda's demise. In the last few months, citizens peacefully protesting government corruption and cronyism, fuel and foreign exchange shortages, abuses of academic freedom and attacks on civil society groups, have repeatedly been met with tear gas and live ammunition. The current Vice-President Joyce Banda, who has long been at loggerheads with President Bingu wa Mutharika, last week described the emergence of a "reign of terror" in the country. In all of this, the university remains as crucial a site of resistance now as it was under Banda …
The situation is dire, but Mapanje's memoir provides invaluable historical context, especially so as President wa Mutharika has imitated the style and character of Banda's dictatorship as unimaginatively as he has. His attempts to recuperate the substitutionism which concentrates sovereignty in the presidential person alone, to make himself sole "decider" (as the second Bush had it), have necessitated the concomitant cultivation of a cult of personality. He has taken on Banda's best-known honorific, "Ngwazi," and even formed a copycat youth militia. Political opponents including clergymen and rights activists have had their homes fire-bombed; others have been publicly hacked by the machete-swinging youths of the Democratic Progressive Party Cadets. Wa Mutharika even has his own Lady Macbeth-Cecilia Kadzamira, his second wife Callista, who recently accused NGOs of spreading homosexuality in the country and told them to "go to hell."
The Banda-like stylings are obvious, too obvious to convince. While Banda cast himself charismatically as lion and liberator of the nation, the cupboard of sovereign myths available to wa Mutharika is bare. An elderly former World Bank technocrat, he possesses Banda's egoism and scorn for others, but none of the political gifts that made Banda popular in his time as well as feared. Malawi's civil society, and much of its population, are in more or less open revolt. Wa Mutharika is in the second and thus final term of his presidency: he is a nuisance with horizons in a way that the immutable Banda could never have been for Mapanje.
[image error]
Gaddafi est Mort, II
2011 has been a year ripe for revolution, mass protest and, apparently, extralegal assassinations. It makes sense. After all, dead men tell no tales, and keeping Muammar Gaddafi alive would have been very awkward for Western governments when the International Criminal Court stepped in.
Mahmoud Mamdani's reflections on yesterday's events are apt. He identifies in Gaddafi's downfall a greater trend that has been developing:
Unlike in the Cold War, Africa's strongmen are weary of choosing sides in the new contention for Africa. Exemplified by President Museveni of Uganda, they seek to gain from multiple partnerships, welcoming the Chinese and the Indians on the economic plane, while at the same time seeking a strategic military presence with the US as it wages its War on Terror on the African continent.
In contrast, African oppositions tend to look mainly to the West for support, both financial and military.
That all said: I do not celebrate the death of Gaddafi. I do not celebrate the 'humanitarian intervention' staged by NATO into Libya. I do, however, wish those in Libya who struggled to survive Gaddafi's tyranny for the better part of their lives (Berber, so-called "black African" and "Arab" alike) a better future. 42 years of rule by the same man, one who had his hand in nearly every violent conflict that Africa has endured in that time, is not democracy. It is not pan-Africanism. It is not anti-imperialism.
At this point, Libya's future is far more uncertain than that of Tunisia or Egypt, and we can only wait and see if Libyans have a chance to rebuild on their own terms. With vast oil reserves, the West's "boots on the ground" and the World Bank and IMF chomping at the bit… Here's hoping.
[image error]
[image error]
Gaddafi is Dead, I
As the euphoria dies down, it might be important to recall that we are dealing with at least two Qaddafis: the first, the Qaddafi of 1969-1988, was the anti-imperialist and the nationalist who was yet unsteady about the importance of democracy; the second, the Qaddafi of 1988-2011, was the neo-liberal privatizer and the collaborator with imperialism (notably its war on terror). NATO has killed the first Qaddafi; will the Libyan people slay the second."
[image error] [image error] [image error]
Gaddafi is Dead
As the euphoria dies down, it might be important to recall that we are dealing with at least two Qaddafis: the first, the Qaddafi of 1969-1988, was the anti-imperialist and the nationalist who was yet unsteady about the importance of democracy; the second, the Qaddafi of 1988-2011, was the neo-liberal privatizer and the collaborator with imperialism (notably its war on terror). NATO has killed the first Qaddafi; will the Libyan people slay the second."
[image error] [image error] [image error]
Sean Jacobs's Blog
- Sean Jacobs's profile
- 4 followers
