Sean Jacobs's Blog, page 649

Zim Ngqawana

Zim Ngqawana (b. 1959), a key member of the second generation of South African jazz musicians, a student of Darius Brubeck, Yusuf Lateef, Max Roach and Archie Shepp and a major influence on the next generation of artists like Kyle Shepherd, passed Monday. Ngqawana, a Muslim, was to be buried today in Johannesburg.

Obituaries here and here.

Some Men in South Africa

A 13-year-old South African girl is the latest victim of "corrective rape," in which men rape lesbians to "cure" them of their sexual orientation in South Africa. As The Guardian reports 31 lesbians have been killed because of their sexuality in the past decade, and more than 10 lesbians a week are raped or gang raped in Cape Town alone. "Last month, a 24-year-old woman who belonged to a gay and lesbian rights group was stoned to death after an apparent gang rape." Why do some South African men do this? The Guardian quotes Dean Peacock, co-founder and co-director of the Sonke Gender Justice Network, an organization that works with men and boys:

… [S]ome men described feeling threatened by gender transformation, including the assertion of women's and children's rights … When you compare South Africa with other countries, what distinguishes it is gang rape: a performance of masculinity, young men proving themselves to each other and saying to a woman: 'We're not prepared for you to assert that kind of autonomy, especially sexual autonomy' … [S]ome men in post-apartheid South Africa occupied a "dangerous nexus" of patriarchy, masculinity, poverty, radical disappointment with the government, profound feelings of insignificance, and a sense they can act with impunity. But they were still individual agents able to make choices, and nothing could excuse horrendous violence against women …

Source.

Music Break

We've featured Dutch R&B singer, Ntjam Rosie, here before. We had to do it again.

Africa's media considered

By Elliot Ross, Guest Blogger

We don't give Africa a pass just because we are Africans. It's a mistake to respond to blanket negative coverage with blanket positive coverage. Africa is overexposed not underexposed. We just get the wrong kind of exposure.

The words of Ugandan journalist Angelo Izama at a recent, wide-ranging conference on the media in Africa at Columbia University.

The forum challenged academics, NGO executives and journalists to address two main questions. What is the state of the media in Africa? And how is it dealing with perhaps the biggest emerging story continent-wide, the rise of the extractive sector?

There was broad agreement that Western reporting on Africa continues to be deplorable – "a hostage to dogma," as Izama had it. And it was heartening to hear from talented writers such as Dayo Olopade, previously at The New Republic and now in Nairobi, that substantial efforts continue to be made to challenge the old cliches in writing.

Olopade is working on a book about Africa and technology called "The Bright Continent", a project she was provoked to begin by Icelandic artist Stefan Einarsson's winning entry in last year's UN Print Ad Competition, entitled "Dear leaders, we are still waiting."

Einarsson trousered 5000 Euros, and got to meet Antonio Banderas at the awards ceremony. "Nobody's waiting for anything," growled Olopade last week.

The most incisive discussion was of the way African journalists are reporting on their own countries. Among the difficulties pinpointed was the fact that only seven African nations have freedom of information legislation, though in the case of Nigeria this has not been for the want of trying.

And in Uganda, Izama has been leading the movement for transparency as the plaintiff in an ongoing court-case which he hopes will mandate the public disclosure of resource contracts.

NGOs as well as governments were criticized for frequently paying reporters for positive coverage, setting back the cause of independent journalism with every envelope passed across the table.

Revenue Watch's Alexandra Gillies offered an instructive comparison of two Nigerian papers with differing relationships to government, This Day and Next, and their coverage of controversial oil minister Diezani Allison-Madueke.

Reporting on a major bribery scandal in the country's oil sector, NEXT journalists Elor Nkereuwem and Idris Akinbajo wrote on April 15 that the most recent "ripoff has created an uproar in the industry, which has been smarting for the past year under what is generally seen as the incompetent, inattentive, and uncommonly corrupt leadership of Mrs Allison-Madueke."

This Day's interview with the minister the previous day had begun thus:

Mrs Diezani Allison-Madueke comes across as detached and straight faced Amazon, that is before you meet her. She combines the rare attributes of beauty, brains, charm and elegance. She is surprisingly friendly, warm and appears on top of her brief. Even at her age, her almond eyes mesmerize.

NEXT was repeatedly held up as a model of vigorous public-service reporting, and there was also praise for Liberian paper Frontpage Africa.

Burkinabé blogger Ramata Sore gave a rundown of other bloggers who cover the extractive industries, but said she is yet to find one solely dedicated to the topic. Reporting Oil and Gas was held up as a strong aggregator of coverage, particularly on Ghana, where the Jubilee Field is expected to provide the country with a billion dollars in new revenue next year.

Chola Mukanga was singled out for the quality of his site, Zambian Economist. Also well worth looking at is the work of the outstanding Angolan journalist Rafael Marques de Morais, who runs his own hard-hitting anti-corruption site, Makangola, and whose recent piece for World Affairs, "The New Imperialism: China in Angola" is essential reading.

In the broader discussion of how the African media reports on the rapidly expanding extractive sector, most panelists took a pessimistic view.

Long time human right activist Peter Rosenblum, now a Columbia professor, said extractive discoveries have transformed the economic basis for a whole swathe of African countries in recent years. He said it was "very hard for journalists to grasp the complicated enormity of what is happening" and to bring everyday meaning to this "massive dislocation."

Rosenblum has read through all of the Wikileaks cables about mining in Congo, including those not publicly available. He called the level of sophistication he found in the documents "tragic," saying they showed that international players as well as local press would do well to attempt to engage the issues in deeper and more serious ways.

He said what he called "the disaster tale, which everyone will tell," diminishes a proper understanding of social and political change, and that NGOs tend to cling stubbornly to catastrophes while history moves on beneath them.

Rosenblum also said he had not found a single recent sale of natural resources anywhere across the African continent that has taken place at a fair market value. He lamented this "massive, multibillion dollar loss of value," and stressed the need for far greater disclosure from governments on the terms of the deals they are entering into.

You can view images of the conference participants–courtesy of conference organizer Karen Attiah–here.

* Elliot Ross also blogged for AIAC on the visit by Tendai Biti, Zimbabwe's Finance Minister to Columbia University's campus.

Music Break

With a nod to the 1990s, one of our favorites, DJ Premier, presents "A New Female MC," Dynasty.

Letter from Tunisia

Gregory Mann, Guest Blogger

Have we already forgotten that the 'Arab Spring' began in the winter?

Ben Ali and co. took flight in January, before the whole word learned that the Arabic word for 'liberation' is 'Tahrir,' as in 'Tahrir Square.' But Tunisia's revolution is not yet ancient history—it's still underway. Here in Tunis, the dust hasn't settled, and the end is unclear. Next door in Libya, not to mention Syria and Yemen, it's hard to know what's beginning, or whether one swallow can make a spring.

In the seaside town of Hammamet, a local businessman boasts that one of his neighbors slit the throat of a pet tiger that one of Ben Ali's in-laws kept there. The beachfront villa Ben Ali gave this amateur zoo-keeper stands gutted and hollowed out, everything in it having long been reduced to ashes and pebbles. Next door, the villa of one of Ben Ali's children from his first marriage was untouched. That wife was respected, say local residents, and they had no quarrel with her children. Meanwhile, in town the last of the burnt out buildings—mostly banks and government offices—are being re-plastered and painted. Tourism has collapsed. Builders are doing well, though, and the price of bricks has shot up dramatically. They're not needed for re-building, but for new construction. Landowners are trying to build as fast as they can while the building codes go unenforced. When a new government comes in this summer, everyone thinks that window of opportunity will close.

In this long moment of waiting, Tunis is a strangely quiet town. The country is in a long pause between Ben Ali's flight and July's elections. Will the pause be long enough for the new political parties to mount a respectable opposition to the better-established, moderate, and business-minded Ennahdha party, with its Islamist orientation? Many doubt it. In the meantime, no one is sure what is happening. Prison breaks are frequent, and strikes flicker across the country. Security forces fired shots on Friday to disperse some of the Islamists' partisans, prompting more than one wag to ask how they could claim to be excluded from a political progress that has hardly begun. Nonetheless, the machine guns on top of the armored personnel carriers all have covers drawn over them, as if they were slumbering while stationed at traffic circles, in front of ministries and banks, or near some of the embassies. They often have water cannons mounted on big blue trucks to keep them company, just as the policemen and the soldiers lighten the burden of their boredom by sharing it. But the Libyan embassy is buckled down, squat and non-descript behind a heavy wreath of concertina. It makes you wonder what the border itself looks like: the Libyan army crossed it over the weekend, bombarding a frontier town and killing Tunisians. Meanwhile, Tunisians are proud to recount that their countrymen are sheltering Libyans who've taken refuge here. Here and there across the capital, collection points have sprung up to gather goods that will be channeled to the refugees. There may be a re-emergent fraternity between Libyans and Tunisians, whose governments long sought to keep them apart. After the supposed death of one of the Colonel's sons, Qadaffi's people sacked European embassies in Tripoli, but the soldiers in Tunis look to have nothing more serious than time on their hands.

It's the politicians who have their hands full. Until January 2011, Tunisia had only ever had two presidents. Other than its neighbor Libya, no country on the continent had seen so little change at the top. 'Stability' is like everything else—it is possible to have too much of a good thing. In a political system that has not seen a great deal of rapid change, these are heady times. A constitutional assembly will be elected in July, but in the meantime, scores are being settled across the country, especially in the impoverished South, where municipal governments have been paralyzed. When Ben Ali and his relatives fled, they left behind a lot of loot, some of it in the form of marble statues dating from the days of Roman Carthage. The generally discredited police are trying to recover some of it, but it's not clear if the mafia-like web of criminality that Ben Ali and company wove can be cleared away in a few short months. Students debate whether what's going on is a revolution or simply 'events.' Some people are looking forward, others over their shoulders. The intelligentsia—or part of it—appears to be afraid of the Islamists. They know that Tunisia has never been secular. The constitution says as much, defining Tunisia as a Muslim, Arab country. It's currently suspended, but remains the starting point for future discussion. Whether its Arab identity will stand is not certain. At least a few Berbers would like to see it go, and you-know-who would like to see French recognized as an official language. But if push comes to shove, the fact that the state is explicitly not a secular one might make it harder for secularists to hold their ground against parties that mobilize around religious concerns—even if such parties have been against the law since the 1990s. The intelligentsia also knows as well as anyone that the opposition to Ben Ali was not spontaneous. Throughout a long winter—twenty-four years long—lawyers led it. Tunisia's youth then launched the 'Arab spring.' Come summer, their work will not be finished.

* Gregory Mann is an associate professor of history at Columbia University.

Music Break

Based in Pretoria, MsSupa shot and edited the video for her 'Dreams' herself, she tells us. She's not pulling any punches.

'We cannot say we are free'

If you judged the disquiet in South Africa by elections, you'd miss a lot. As we wrote here a few days ago on this blog (republished here), the growing discontent with the state and the ruling party has been brewing for a while. Here's another example. Ayanda Kota, the chair of the Unemployed People's Movement in Grahamstown, in the Eastern Cape of South Africa, writing in the Mail & Guardian:

… The ANC tries to control the people with its police, social grants and rallies with celebrities and musicians. The ANC tries to drug us against their betrayal by keeping us drunk on memories of the struggle — the same struggle that they have betrayed. But everywhere the ANC is losing control. Protest is spreading everywhere. Everywhere people are boycotting elections and running independent candidates. Everywhere people are organising themselves into their own autonomous groups and movements.

As Mostafa Omara wrote about the Egyptian revolution: "People in Egypt will tell you: 'Gone are the days when we felt helpless and little; gone are the days when the police could humiliate us and torture us; gone are the times when the rich and the businessmen thought they could run the country as if it were their own private company.'"

In South Africa we long for the same feeling. But revolutions do not spring from nothing. Revolutions come through the united action of men and women, rural and urban — action that springs from their needs. Revolutions happen when ordinary men and women begin to take action to seize control of their own lives.

The rebellion of the poor in this country is growing. More and more organisations are emerging. More and more people have become radicalised. More and more communities have lost their illusions after experiencing the violence of the predator state. More and more people are starting and joining discussions about the way forward for the struggle to take the country back.

The films of Kivu Ruhorahoza

The Tribeca Film Festival ended last weekend. I didn't get to see any films. (Late April, early May is a busy time where I teach). Anyway, a quick glance at the 2011 schedule shows only four films with African themes. Two "from South Africa," one from Egypt (made by Americans and Europeans) and one by a Rwandese. It is the latter film, "Grey Matter," by Kivu Ruhorahoza that I really want to see.  Tribeca hyped it as "… the first feature-length narrative film directed by a Rwandan filmmaker living in his homeland," though Australia also gets credit for the film.  If you're wondering if he sounds familiar, he used to go by Daddy Ruhorahoza. We've featured him here before. In the video above, Kivu talks about the film.  Different sources say the film and Ruhorahosa as a director is the real deal.  For example, right after seeing it, Alexis Okeowo tweeted that "Grey matter" was "… incredible, beautifully written, acted, and directed. best film i've seen this year."   Last week the film won two awards for the festival: Best Actor in a Narrative Feature Film (for lead Ramadhan "Shami" Bizimana) and a Special Jury Mention for Ruhorahoza. The jury wrote of Ruhorahoza's direction: "… For its audacious and experimental approach, this film speaks of recent horrors and genocide with great originality. We wanted to give a special commendation to this filmmaker for his courage and vision."  I promise to see it and report back.–Sean Jacobs.

The films of Kivu Ruhorahosa

The Tribeca Film Festival ended last weekend. I didn't get to see any films. (Late April, early May is a busy time where I teach). Anyway, a quick glance at the 2011 schedule shows only four films with African themes. Two "from South Africa," one from Egypt (made by Americans and Europeans) and one by a Rwandese. It is the latter film, "Grey Matter," by Kivu Ruhorahoza that I really want to see.  Tribeca hyped it as "… the first feature-length narrative film directed by a Rwandan filmmaker living in his homeland," though Australia also gets credit for the film.  If you're wondering if he sounds familiar, he used to go by Daddy Ruhorahoza. We've featured him here before. In the video above, Kivu talks about the film.  Different sources say the film and Ruhorahosa as a director is the real deal.  For example, right after seeing it, Alexis Okeowo tweeted that "Grey matter" was "… incredible, beautifully written, acted, and directed. best film i've seen this year."   Last week the film won two awards for the festival: Best Actor in a Narrative Feature Film (for lead Ramadhan "Shami" Bizimana) and a Special Jury Mention for Ruhorahoza. The jury wrote of Ruhorahoza's direction: "… For its audacious and experimental approach, this film speaks of recent horrors and genocide with great originality. We wanted to give a special commendation to this filmmaker for his courage and vision."  I promise to see it and report back.–Sean Jacobs.