Sean Jacobs's Blog, page 657

Nigeria's Future

Nigerian creatives, regardless of the election outcome, reckon "the future" is here.

'Brown Baby'

H/T: Rich Flint

Ed Kashi in Madagascar

An unidentified man makes bricks in one of the photographs from photojournalist Ed Kashi's photo-essay "Madagascar" The series "… delves into environmental concerns, documenting the delicate balance between economic development and ecological preservation in the lush island nation."

The photographs are on display at the WFC Courtyard Gallery in Lower Manhattan till May 14.

* Watch and listen to an interview with Kashi at The Guardian's site.

'The Journey'

New track and video, above, for "O Caminho" (The Journey) by London-based rappers Fachadaz (b. in Portugal). The song is produced by Faith SFX. The lyrics, part English, part Portuguese (translation here, just scroll down) is about their "… personal struggles for a brighter future on foreign soil."

Mugabe owns Facebook too

Vikas Mavhudzi remains in detention more than a month after his arrest for comments he made about President Robert Mugabe on the Facebook page of opposition leader and Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai.

He was arrested on 24 February in Bulawayo on allegations of plotting to overthrow Mugabe's government. His detention is linked to his Facebook posting supporting mass protests in Egypt and other Middle Eastern and North African countries.His comment read: "I am overwhelmed. What happened in Egypt is sending shockwaves to dictators around the world. No weapon but unity of purpose worth emulating, hey."

The state argued that through this Facebook comment, Mavhudzi had suggested to Tsvangirai that it was possible to take over the government by unconstitutional means.Mavhudzi made a brief appearance in court following his arrest, but was denied bail on the grounds that he posed a threat to public safety.

But his lawyers have appealed to the High Court, arguing the state had failed to prove that Mavhudzi, who was described as a simple and unsophisticated man, could pose a threat to the safety of the public and security of the state.

Mavhudzi is apparently the first person in the region to be charged for comments posted on Facebook. Reporters Without Borders has joined the Lawyers for Human Rights in Zimbabwe in condemning his detention.

Serious.

In The Name of Malawi

Indeed.

Wang Zhe's images of Chinese in Africa

"Africa Dream – Chinese in Africa," by Chinese photographer Wang Zhe, will be showing in Marie du XIIIème in Paris. The blurb advertises the exhibit as "Oeil de Chine/Coeur d'Afrique": Chinese Eye/African Heart": sadly, the eye—the organ that is associated with rationalist thinking—is given to the Chinese, while the Africans are given (predictably) the heart.

But Zhe's series of images–from what I have seen on his site–depict extraordinary collusions and easy collisions between sets of people who—to the economist and the socio-political analyst's eye, will never meld well—won me over.

The engagements are ordinary: farmworkers, both African and Chinese, driving the donkey-cart, the plough, and the shovel together; a Chinese man smoking a cigarette—the end lit up in brilliant orange as he sucks in—with the framed image of some African leader's smiling face blurring in the background; two health care workers looking at x-rays together, absorbed in a common focal point.

It's a pity that the "Africans" are not given names, or given a particular location; neither are the Chinese. Western viewers no doubt lump together the Chinese into one monolithic Han-ness, just as they do"African-ness."

And yet, Zhe does not gloss over the uneasiness of Chinese presence, despite the dirt under the fingernails of African and Chinese. The tensions, and difference is also there: in one, a Chinese man gestures with his red-cigarette packet-wielding hand, busy shouting into a mobile, while an African man in paramilitary uniform ambles in the background, AK-47 slung easy on his shoulder.

Showing from 11-21st April in Marie du XIIIème, 1, Place d'Italie, Paris.

–Neelika Jayawardane.

Gandhi in Africa

Relevant (longish) excerpt from Anita Desai's review of Joseph Lelyveld's new biography, Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi and His Struggle with India in The New York Review of Books:

At the outset Lelyveld dispenses with the conventions of biography, leaving out Gandhi's childhood and student years, a decision he made because he believed that the twenty-three-year-old law clerk who arrived in South Africa in 1893 had little in him of the man he was to become …

Having accepted the brief of assisting as a translator in a civil suit between two Muslim merchants from India, Gandhi presented himself in a Durban magistrate's court on May 23, 1893, just the day after his arrival, dressed in a stylish frock coat, striped trousers, and black turban, and was promptly ordered to remove the turban. He refused, left the courtroom, and fired off a letter to the press in protest. This was his first political act, predating the incident of being thrown off a train by an Englishman who objected to traveling with a "colored man" made famous by Richard Attenborough's film Gandhi and Philip Glass's opera Satyagraha. Remarkably for an Indian, this seems to have been his first encounter with colonial arrogance and in his autobiography he said it made him resolve to stay and "root out the disease" of "color prejudice." It was the start of what Erik Erikson was to call his "eternal negative" but it is also a simplification, Lelyveld points out, of a much more convoluted attitude toward race, color, and caste that he brought with him from India.

It was a shock to Gandhi to find that in South Africa he was considered a "coolie"—in India the word is reserved for a manual laborer, specifically one who carries loads on his head or back. In South Africa the majority of Indians was composed of Tamil, Telugu, and Bihari laborers who had come to Natal on an agreement to serve for five years on the railways, plantations, and coal mines. They were known collectively as "coolies," and Gandhi was known as a "coolie barrister."

Still, he had a touching faith in Queen Victoria's proclamation of 1858 that formally extended British sovereignty over India and promised its inhabitants the same protections and privileges as all her subjects, voicing her wish that her Indian subjects "be freely and impartially admitted to offices in our service." So when the Anglo-Boer War broke out in 1899 and later the Zulu rebellion of 1906, he led the Indian community—he had joined the Natal Indian Congress—in offering its service to the colonial power "as full citizens of the British Empire, ready to shoulder its obligations and deserving of whatever rights it had to bestow." He was proud of his command of the unit of Indian stretcher-bearers—not, one would think, a likely start for one who came to be regarded as the man who inspired India's struggle, and struggles elsewhere in the world, for freedom.

It was when the so-called Black Act was passed in 1906, forcing Indians living in the Transvaal to register, that he held meetings and urged his fellow men to burn the permits they were required to carry and found himself being marched off, as he wrote, to

a prison intended for Kaffirs…. We could understand not being classified with the whites, but to be placed on the same level as the Natives seemed too much to put up with. It is indubitably right that the Indians should have separate cells. Kaffirs are as a rule uncivilized—the convicts even more so. They are troublesome, very dirty and live almost like animals.

Africans could hardly ignore Gandhi's disparagement of them: Zulu newspapers took note that the Indians volunteered to work for the "English savages in Natal" and even an Indian publication in England called Gandhi's readiness to serve the whites "disgusting." It was only much later—and with the judicious addition of hindsight—that Gandhi claimed that "my heart was with the Zulus" and claimed that the cruelty he had witnessed against them was "the major turning point of his life spiritually," the one that made him turn to nonviolence as a strategy for resistance. This came to be known as satyagraha, which translates literally as "truth force" or "firmness in truth."

This was the strategy he used in 1913 when he launched a campaign against the so-called "head tax," the payment required of every Indian who had completed the terms of his agreement and wished to remain in the Transvaal. It did not involve the native population at all but it ignited a rebellion by indentured labor, a turn unforeseen by Gandhi himself. Indians walked off plantations, railroads, mines, and whatever services employed them in the cities, creating a strike on a scale that made it the first significant event in Gandhi's career. "I was not prepared for this marvelous awakening," he said. Becoming "a self-propelled whirlwind," Lelyveld writes, he traveled by rail from one rally to another, exhorting the strikers to allow themselves to fill the jails to overflowing. (Africans were to take note and use the same strategy of passive resistance in their own struggle to come.) General Jan Smuts called out the army to suppress the strike, which it did with ferocity.

When the strike was called off, Gandhi was hailed by crowds of thousands and now saw himself as the representative not only of Indian settlers of the merchant class but of the lowest of castes, the indentured laborers he had once ignored. He had found his vocation but the outcome—the Indian Relief Act of 1914—fell far short of what the agitation had called for. Lelyveld points out, as did critics at the time, that Indians still had no political rights in South Africa—and did not for another century. The system of indentured labor eventually ended, but that had not been one of Gandhi's demands.

While these huge public turmoils were taking place, Gandhi was experimenting with personal and domestic changes as well: first by establishing a small, self-reliant, rural commune near Durban, Phoenix Farm, with his family and a few friends. Here they were expected to share equally in all duties—editing and printing his newspaper, Indian Opinion, as well as working on the land. He set forth his principles of the ideal life—vegetarianism, nature cures for all ills, home schooling for his children, extreme austerity in all spheres of life. "Meagerness" was the standard by which diet was to be measured, a full meal being "a crime against man and God." He decided that "no man living the physical or animal life can possibly understand the spiritual or ethical" and took the vow of celibacy; his wife concurred.

Gandhi did not follow the traditional Indian formula: his ashram was based not on religion but on universal humanistic thought. How had this come about? Lelyveld believes that "if there is a single seminal experience in his intellectual development," it was reading Tolstoy's The Kingdom of God Is Within You. The Hindu revolutionary Sri Aurobindo went so far as to say, "Gandhi is a European—truly a Russian Christian in an Indian body."

Lelyveld found that he now more or less abandoned his wife and children in Natal for months at a time, despite bitter complaints of neglect from his wife and eldest son Harilal. ("He feels that I have always kept all the four boys very much suppressed…always put them and Ba last," Gandhi wrote dispassionately.) When Gandhi's brother Laxmidas complained that he was failing to meet his family obligations, he replied serenely, "My family now comprises all living beings," and proceeded to assemble a surrogate family made up of mostly European Theosophists who shared his enthusiasm for Tolstoy and Ruskin. He lived for a while with the young copy editor Henry Polak and his wife Millie, then moved in with the East Prussian Jewish architect Hermann Kallenbach. Together they created another rural "utopia," Tolstoy Farm, southwest of Johannesburg, and Gandhi seems to have been happier there than he had been anywhere—enjoying bicycle rides and picnics and the friendship of Kallenbach.

This friendship was close—even romantic, Lelyveld suggests—and Kallenbach would have followed Gandhi when he left for India in 1914 if World War I had not broken out, barring him from entering British territory. All Gandhi's efforts to obtain a visa for him failed, and the two were not to meet again for twenty-three years, by which time Kallenbach had become a Zionist and joined a kibbutz in Israel …

The New York Review of Books.

Skin-Deep

Photographs are perceived to represent reality in their reference to a subject; their ability to create these physical, indexical connections to reality in viewers' minds means that photography is often unquestioningly used as "visual recorder" or as a "documentarian" of socio-political experiences.

When a PR audio-slideshow (in the Guardian) for an exhibit of images that document contemporary South Africa at the Victoria and Alfred Museum in London is coupled with the title "Under South Africa's Skin," only features three white South Africans and opens with one of Pieter Hugo's hyena men and musical sounds that one would associate with "Africa," the viewer may pause to wonder: whose reality is being represented here? This is especially jarring since the exhibition itself features the work of a number of black South African photographers. (Something we picked up when we did a preview post a short while ago.)

 We first hear Jodi Bieber describe herself as "a patriot to my country, to be honest." The first thoughts that come to mind are questions about why someone would need to position themselves using the charged terminology surrounding belonging, authenticity, and nation. But Bieber, to her credit, goes on to illustrate that her work is intimately involved with countering visions of South Africa as a location "lumbered with HIV-AIDS, crime, corruption, and poverty." She asks:

How many times do you see someone at Maponye Mall, an upmarket mall [in Soweto], who's just walking up and down with their shopping trolly, doing boring things like shopping. For me, that's really how I experience South Africa…in some way, it is a frenetic place…it's very alive. If you are creative, I think you have a lot to talk about.

So: reflections in which the denigrated Other is shown going about their daily errand of food accumulation—essentially illustrating that the privileged versions of the Other are just like the European self—aids in the removal of their difference.

Graeme Williams tries to "show my feelings towards change within South Africa in a visual manner." His work typically avoids capturing that "decisive moment" photographs are traditionally meant to "get"; instead there's a number of points of interest and points of focus: the viewer's eye is "pulled to various parts of the frame." That multiplicity of foci mirrors how he views the changes in the country: part of the change is moving in a positive direction, while "another may be stagnating." Here, again, we hear the photographer's desire to exhibit belonging: "It's my society…I wanted to feel that I was closer to my subjects. The photographs were taken…when I was about a metre from the subject…I'm not trying to photograph them as separate from me, but rather that I am within their life."

Hugo's work features a portrait in Messina, a border town between South Africa and Zimbabwe: a white couple who have been taking care of a young back boy for "the last few years"; another is a portrait of a five Xhosa boys who have just gone through circumcision and initiation into manhood, wearing "what appears to be very tweed English jackets and outfits." Also included are Hugo favourites: the Hyena Men, and the computers/obsolete tech-object dumpsite near Accra. Hugo explains his penchant for including subjects who engage in direct gaze-back-at viewers: "I am an active participant in the process…I am looking…[for] the gaze requited. What one has is the desire to look, but also that one is being looked at." As I've mentioned before in a post about the dump site images, the returned gaze of Hugo's subjects elicits a problematic desire to view these Others as persons on a field that is level with that of the viewer—but the viewer is typically a gallery-frequenting elite, as distant as can be from the pollution and pain of smelting copper from wires in desolate, burning grounds. Instead, we feel dread, fear, difference, and pity: all of which, of course, creates a chasm when regarding the pain of others.

For more info, see Figures & Fictions: Contemporary South African Photography

* Images to illustrate this in this post:

Pieter Hugo, 'Pieter and Maryna Vermeulen with Timana Phosiwa'

Jodi Bieber, "Gail' (from the series Real Beauty), 2008

Graeme Williams, 'Soweto' (from the Edge of Town series), 2006.

–Neelika Jayawardane.

Things will get better

Magic Systeme and Tiken Jah Fakoly tells their fellow Ivorians "Ca va aller."