Sean Jacobs's Blog, page 635

Slipping into individualistic comfort

The daily word of inspiration (cut and pasted from Contemporary Literature) from my favorite, comtemporary Communist, Jeremy Cronin:

… At present I am inclined to make my poems much more actively disruptive within themselves, to foreground contradiction and paradox, to enact interruption, to celebrate the parenthetical, to make manifest the unresolved. In the first post-1994 decade of democracy in South Africa, public discourse was overwhelmed with the notions of harmony and self-congratulatory contentment. We had achieved a "political miracle," we were a "rainbow nation," we had finally "rejoined the family of nations," we were "a winning nation," internationally we could "punch above our weight," we were at the cutting edge of a global "third wave of democracy," our own achievement heralded an "imminent African renaissance." Of course, there is much to be proud of in the South African democratic transition. The public discourses of the time were certainly flattering to all of us in the new political elite (myself included). But the tendencies towards excessive contentment and therefore closure have been even more helpful to the old, the well-entrenched economic elite in the mining houses and financial institutions, the very entities that helped to shape a century of racial segregation and apartheid. They were perfectly happy with a message that said the black majority has got the vote now, uhuru (independence) is upon us, the struggle is over, a luta discontinua!

To my discomfort, some of my own earlier poetry, written in the spirit of a counterhegemonic project, risked being anthologized into the discourse of this shallow, postcolonial triumphalism. A poem like "To learn how to speak / With the voices of the land . . .," which I performed frequently in the 1980s, and which was intended as a relatively defiant expression of unity in diversity (in opposition to apartheid's diversity in unequal diversity), is all too easily decontextualized in the present.

However, the present also has other dangers and temptations. Many South African intellectuals, novelists and poets among them, have slipped into the individualistic comfort zone of "speaking truth to power." I say "comfort zone" because the political power reality to which the truth is supposedly spoken is a relatively benign and often disorganized power reality. Recently I was asked to participate in a television series on dissident artists from around the world. I declined: I like to think of myself as being critical, but I don't think of myself as a South African dissident—although that's exactly how some of my ideological opponents within the broader ANC would be happy to label me and other like-minded left activists.

During the apartheid period we were not endeavoring to speak truth to power, as if we were petitioners. We were trying to contribute, in small ways, including through poetry, to forging an alternative hegemonic power. Surely the struggle, then and especially now, is not so much to speak truth to power as to make truth powerful and, the hardest of all, power truthful … I think that the strategies deployed in my post 1994 poetry are somewhat different to those in the preceding period, but there is still the same ultimate, aspirant trajectory towards trying to build a sense of a collective "us" in my poems. I want to be part of a democratic hegemonic project, not a prophet in the wilderness.

Source: Contemporary Literature.

Faaji Agba

On Friday, July 22, Seun Kuti, play the Prospect Park Bandshell in Brooklyn. However, the real treat on that bill will be the warm-up act, Faaji Agba, a collective of octogenarian Nigerian musicians. The link is to a planned documentary film about the group (by Nigerian director Remi Vaughan Richards), some of whose music careers date back to the 1940s.

* On Friday, July 29, Malian singer Oumou Sangare, is set to perform.

The inequality of news

Simon Kuper in the FT Weekend, takes shots at "the news":

… [N]ews has become news about rich people. Today's economic inequality is reflected and driven by inequality of news.

Much of this news about rich people is produced by just a few English-language sources. A wire service will put out a story, a newspaper will get a scoop or BBC.com will run a headline, and within seconds the "news" gets parroted by websites, TV channels and newspapers from Warsaw to Waikiki. It saves them hiring their own reporters. Lady Gaga sings at a gay pride rally in Rome and the whole world simply reprints the story.

And so news becomes news about a small global elite of athletes, entertainers, royals and politicians …

These celebrities are overwhelmingly Anglophone. Only stories in English get duplicated around the world. People who write in English prefer celebrities who speak English. In Forbes magazine's recent list of the "World's Most Powerful Celebrities", the highest-ranked non-native-English-speaker was Cristiano Ronaldo at number 43, and even he had created his brand while playing in England.

The global elite has grown fantastically rich in recent decades: the average person on Forbes's list pocketed an estimated $45m last year. Consequently, we're forever reading about rich people. Indeed, being rich has become almost the criterion for being newsworthy. A sportsman or artist who isn't rich is not counted as successful and therefore not given airtime. And if you get airtime, you can generally convert it into more money through endorsements, speaking fees or reality TV (the future for New York's Congressman Anthony Weiner). Everyone in the news is rich, or soon becomes so. (Cognoscenti call this the Sarah Palin Effect.)

… [W]e forget the poor. They may always be with us, but not in the media. The perhaps 2.5 billion people with less than $2 a day get ignored, due to the triple whammy of being poor, non-white and non-Anglophone.

For instance, there's a new treatment that stops the spread of Aids, but rich countries are reluctant to fund it. This has generated a few worthy editorials in highbrow publications, but otherwise is considered too boring to tweet.

Even the white Anglophone poor struggle for airtime … When poor people did get airtime, it was often as objects of derision on Jerry Springer-like shows …

At best, the poor get covered as a faceless group: young Spanish demonstrators, or foreclosed Americans in tent cities, or African Aids orphans. Rich people appear as individuals, and are therefore more vivid. Even when we depict them as "fat cats", they are the story. In fact, we've become exactly the media that an unequal world requires.

Source.

The Life and Times of Harry Belafonte

Apart from his role in American racial and class struggles from the 1950s onwards, Harry Belafonte (now 83) played a central role in popularizing struggles for justice on the African continent, especially against white racism in South Africa. Not just by hosting and advancing the careers of South African artists (Miriam Makeba, Hugh Masekela), making music about South Africa's dictatorship (here, here and here for example) but also leading protests, and speaking and fundraising here in the United States. Belatedly Belafonte–he apparently resisted for a long while–is now the subject of a documentary, "Sing Your Song," about his life. The film will screen at the Human Rights Film Festival on Saturday, 25 June, at Lincoln Center here in New York City.   This link take you to some scenes from the film, here's the film's official site and its Facebook page. And below some video PR:

Belafonte  and the film's director, Susanne Rostock, and producer, Gina Belafonte, interviewed on the Sundance Channel (the film premiered at the Sundance Film Festival):

Belafonte interviewed by the AP at the film's premiere in Park City:

And an interview with director Rostock:

Finally here, here and here are some early reviews.

Putting up with being insulted by Malema

The South African Civil Society Information Service (SACSIS) keeps bringing it. This is not the handwringing of The Daily Maverick passing for insight. Much of its goes over the heads of the people its intended. Others dismiss it as partisan or ideological because they can't take the truth.  Recently they carried an op-ed by Jane Duncan on the rightwing political ideology of the Democratic Alliance. (I cut and pasted it here.) Now there's piece about the bargain between the ANC government and whites:

The ANC's role in achieving [a] state of existence [where there is a great deal of policy convergence between the ANC and the DA] cannot be underestimated and it has every right to be upset that its credentials to preside over this order – rather than the DA for instance – is so under-recognised by the media and the predominantly white middle classes.

Indeed, how much the ANC has transformed itself in the service of solving the great South African conundrum is remarkably unappreciated.

How is it possible to deliver (largely) white entitlement, wealth and security in a sea of (mostly) black poverty, and still emerge with political credibility and stability?

What commentators in 1994 used to call the South African "miracle" – the peaceful settlement to a seemingly intractable problem – lives on today in the form of apartheid ghettos, 40% unemployment and the extreme wealth and success of corporate South Africa.

In response to this potential powder keg, the ANC has successfully managed to keep the institutions of the current order intact and functional.

How could it do so?

Precisely because it still carries the legitimacy of having been a liberation movement.

As such, the ANC is the "broad church" from Nelson Mandela to Tokyo Sexwale and Pravin Gordhan to Julius Malema. The ANC's qualification to manage the new South Africa is precisely that it can take along with it, COSATU, the SACP and the angry, frustrated black middle classes. It can provide a home for these elements, rely on the ongoing votes of the working class and poor (a constituency that it has long abandoned) and yet deliver a balanced budget, a strong Rand, and membership of the BRICS.

The ANC has never canvassed elections on the basis of reminding whites of their own complicity in apartheid's savagery. In both provinces where they had to contend with the possibilities of regional challenges, the Western Cape and Kwazulu Natal, they did not expose the role of Buthelezi's IFP in killing thousands of activists or the Nationalist Party in forced removals. Instead, they placed reconciliation above settling scores.

The ANC has tried so desperately to be the "great South African party," the natural party of governance, technically competent and showing statesmanlike qualities. The latter includes the CODESA negotiations, the sunset clauses, the concessions to white capital, the merging with the Nats, including "Die Stem" in the national anthem, sending Tony Leon to Argentina as ambassador, giving a Deputy Minister position to the Freedom Front's Pieter Mulder, committing to consultation on everything, supporting the Springboks…the list goes on.

This was not just, as some would claim, a "Mandela Project." Remember he always said that he was just a "disciplined member of the ANC."

To stand back and reflect on this phenomenon a little more globally, this is what political parties, now referred to as the "centre left," with historically plebeian electoral support, are so ideally suited for. They have the necessary political credibility to carry out unpopular programmes. Who is carrying out the most far-reaching austerity programme in Spain today? The Socialist Party. Who is knuckling down to carrying out the IMF's demand that everything must be privatised in Greece? Why, PASOK, the Greek Socialist Party, of course.

Who had the moral authority to implement GEAR, to help the South African monopolies go global, to cut corporate tax and yet preside over a country with the highest inequality in the world without unleashing a revolution? Why, the ANC, of course.

Remember when white people hoarded candles and tins of baked beans in preparation for the 1994 elections? Well the collapse didn't come.

Remember the doomsday books written about what would happen "when Mandela goes?" Well he went and the whites continued to do very nicely, thank you very much.

Remember when the much-maligned "cold" Mbeki (but at least he's one of us and speaks good English) was being kicked out by the frightening Zuma of the "bring me my machine gun" fame? Well, Mbeki was kicked out and Zuma smoothed himself out. Okay, so he still has too many wives and girlfriends, but he appointed the highly professional, Pravin Gordhan as Finance Minister, Trevor Manuel as Planning Minister and the Freedom Front's Pieter Mulder into the cabinet — and it was business as usual.

The ANC has delivered every time.

So you might have to put up with being insulted by Julius Malema and cringe at the boorish manners of the nouveau riche, Kenneth Kunene. But, as they say, "Africa is not for sissies." Surely it's a small price to pay for that holiday home in Plet?

Of course this is not a project of liberation or social justice (the historical mandate of the ANC when it was still a liberation movement). It is a project in which all the institutions of the current order are respected and taken as a point of departure even for those in opposition to the ANC. Economic policy is not even debated by the political parties in parliament (what is the DA's economic policy anyway?).

On the issue of macro economic policy, all accept GEAR and its neo-liberal prescriptions as inviolate. This consensus extends beyond the ANC and the DA. It includes the succession debates within the ANC and the various contenders for leadership within the party.

And the service delivery issue? Well the ANC says that's not about policy or resources. That's just about getting counsellors to sign performance contracts and knuckle down and do the job. The DA also says that the policies are fine and that the resources are there. It's just that the ANC appoints the wrong people for the job because of "cadre deployment."

This is not to suggest that the ANC entered this scenario wilfully and with full knowledge of its responsibility to keep the old order intact. No, the ANC made its choices between 1989 and 1994 on a much simpler objective: compromise now to get political power and then use the political spaces to build a broader transformation.

Its strategy was to use the institutions of the state and complement these by reaching out to a broader "South Africanism" to ensure that everyone accepted their credentials as the party, which could be trusted with the new order.

But the ANC underestimated the stranglehold of South Africa's monopolies and white intransigence, as well as the neo-liberal ethos dominating the world today. And it underestimated how morally corrosive the trappings of power would be, and how much a class of beneficiaries would emerge for which political power is not a vehicle for social transformation but for personal enrichment and aggrandisement.

The transformation of the ANC is now complete.

How have the beneficiaries responded?

White monopoly capital takes an extremely anti-developmental approach, while the white middle classes find the ANC's lack of sophistication intolerable despite enjoying the best living standards in the world. And the black born-frees? Well, they've got the same benefits as their white counterparts and they share the same concerns – so it's the DA for them.

* The image is David Goldblatt's "27 April 2007″

Fascism and Aesthetics

Jeremy Cronin is my favorite Communist. Astute, intellectual and a poet. Cronin is a former political prisoner and now ANC member of Parliament in South Africa. "Even the Dead" is still my favorite poem. I recently chanced upon a 2009 interview he did with the academic Andrew van der Vlies (featured on this blog here) in the Journal of Commonwealth Literature. (You need a subscription or access to an academic database to read it.) Much of it is about Cronin's poetry (more for diehard literature types), but in-between the interview contain some great insights about political life and political art in South Africa now. I'm going to cut and paste a few of them here.

For starters:

… [I]n the present South African situation, it is particularly important to reconsider many things in the light of the new reality. The ANC-led movement is no longer a persecuted formation; it is in power, at least in political power. Walter Benjamin writes somewhere that fascism systematically introduces aesthetics into political life. It marshals art into what he describes as "the production of ritual values." He suggests that we should respond to fascism's rendering politics aesthetic by politicizing aesthetics. I certainly do not think that we are on the brink of fascism, not even remotely. But the dangers of the aesthetic, including poetry, now being pressed into the service of a lulling complacency, a ritualistic sentimentalism that loses the zip and edge of the collective self-emancipatory struggles of the previous period, are very real. The aesthetic runs the danger of becoming anesthetic …

Source.

Music Break

Nice video for "Bienvenue au Cameroun", a track by Cameroonian (yeah) artist Ayriq Akam.

Buying 10 Hollands*

It's not just Evil Arab City States or Chinese firms that are buying up vast tracts of land in portions of Africa, set to produce specialised food crops exclusively for export. Now, the news is that "[s]ome prominent American universities and pension funds, among other wealthy foreign investors," are also "allegedly purchasing huge tracts of land in Africa." And it isn't just a list of usual suspects from the Ivy League.  Yes, Harvard and Vanderbilt have used hedge funds and financial speculators to acquire large agricultural properties on the African continent. But even "Iowa University and many other US colleges with large endowment funds" have already been able to, via foreign investment groups, acquire hundreds of thousands of hectares of fertile land, some with 99-year leases—acts that may lead to the "eviction of thousands of local farmers," according to Anuradha Mittal, executive director of the Oakland Institute (Oakland Institute), a California-based think tank, which looked at such transactions in seven African countries: Ethiopia, Mali, Mozambique, Sierra Leone, Sudan, Tanzania and Zambia. In Ethiopia, the government is already "relocating tens of thousands of farmers out of their traditional lands while it negotiates property deals with foreign firms."

In 2009 alone, nearly 60 million hectares—an area the size of France—of African lands were purchased or leased, Oakland Institute stated, mainly through "Emergent Asset Management, a London-based firm which is run by former currency dealers from JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs…Emergent's clients in the US may have invested up to $500-million – with the assumption that they will make returns as high as 25 percent."

These land deals, like any other we've previously blogged about, are characterised by a lack of transparency, "despite the profound implications posed by the consolidation of control over global food markets and agricultural resources by financial firms," as the Oakland Institute report clarified. While the companies involved in these deals protest that they are ethical in their practices, and though companies such as AgriSol said it wants to work in cooperation with local farmers, "up to 325,000 hectares of land [AgriSol] purchased is occupied by Burundian refugees who have farmed the land since 1972," are now being "pushed out in favor of white South African farm managers."

Read the full story here and here.

* The title is from What's Up Africa. That's how Ikenna Azuike, in the latest episode of the web series, described the land garb.

American Universities in Land Grabs

It's not just Evil Arab City States or Chinese firms that are buying up vast tracts of land in portions of Africa, set to produce specialised food crops exclusively for export. Now, the news is that "[s]ome prominent American universities and pension funds, among other wealthy foreign investors," are also "allegedly purchasing huge tracts of land in Africa." And it isn't just a list of usual suspects from the Ivy League.  Yes, Harvard and Vanderbilt have used hedge funds and financial speculators to acquire large agricultural properties on the African continent. But even "Iowa University and many other US colleges with large endowment funds" have already been able to, via foreign investment groups, acquire hundreds of thousands of hectares of fertile land, some with 99-year leases—acts that may lead to the "eviction of thousands of local farmers," according to Anuradha Mittal, executive director of the Oakland Institute (Oakland Institute), a California-based think tank, which looked at such transactions in seven African countries: Ethiopia, Mali, Mozambique, Sierra Leone, Sudan, Tanzania and Zambia. In Ethiopia, the government is already "relocating tens of thousands of farmers out of their traditional lands while it negotiates property deals with foreign firms."

In 2009 alone, nearly 60 million hectares—an area the size of France—of African lands were purchased or leased, Oakland Institute stated, mainly through "Emergent Asset Management, a London-based firm which is run by former currency dealers from JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs…Emergent's clients in the US may have invested up to $500-million – with the assumption that they will make returns as high as 25 percent."

These land deals, like any other we've previously blogged about, are characterised by a lack of transparency, "despite the profound implications posed by the consolidation of control over global food markets and agricultural resources by financial firms," as the Oakland Institute report clarified. While the companies involved in these deals protest that they are ethical in their practices, and though companies such as AgriSol said it wants to work in cooperation with local farmers, "up to 325,000 hectares of land [AgriSol] purchased is occupied by Burundian refugees who have farmed the land since 1972," are now being "pushed out in favor of white South African farm managers."

Read the full story here and here.

 

'The Ghetto Cinderellas'

The Williams sisters are playing Wimbledon this year. Flemish newspaper De Morgen is pretty excited about it. So excited, in fact, that the front page of this weekend's sports section headlines: "The Ghetto Cinderellas are back." Meanwhile, German newspaper, Die Welt decided to interpret the Dallas Mavericks' NBA Finals win as a triumph of Europe over "ghetto basketball."