Sean Jacobs's Blog, page 663

Music Break

I love the retro-feel and easy flow of this hiplife tune, "Faithful," by Okyeame Kwame featuring Bertha. Here's a rough transcript of the lyrics.

Via Afroklectic

Manning Marable

On Monday a new book on Malcolm X by the American intellectual and historian Manning Marable will come out. On Friday night Marable passed away. Though Marable, based until his passing at Columbia University, is less well-known outside the US, he started his career with a PhD dissertation on the South African political leader, John Dube ("African Nationalist: the Life of John Langalibalele Dube", University of Maryland, 1976) and had an internationalist outlook (I remember interviewing him in Cape Town in late 1997. He was there on the invitation of Idasa for a comparative conference and research on racism in Brazil, the United States and South Africa.) The videos, above, and below were shot as marketing for his book, Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention (excerpted here), and point to some of the new research uncovered by Marable .  Before his death Marable had also set up a tumbl blog and a website for his Malcom X Project which are worth visiting. Here and here are links to two obituaries. R.I.P.

–Sean Jacobs

Helping Libya

Not sure if this more about Seun Kuti's desire to sell more units of his latest album out on Monday (he has been talking a lot the last few days), but he has a way with words:

I'd been following events in Tunisia for months. In Libya, people are fighting for freedom from Gaddafi – but with Western influence. And Britain is Gaddafi's biggest arms supplier; he has houses all  over Europe … You want to help African people – why don't you stop African rulers from stashing their wealth in your countries?… I think a better way for the British and US governments is to load their planes full of my albums and drop them on Libya.

Source

For a debate on the hard issues, see here.

Snake Oil

Selling desperate people false hope, especially AIDS patients, are common on the African continent–well documented in my native country, South Africa–now there's this "faith healer" in Tanzania who has people in East Africa traveling thousands of miles for a homebrewed drink that he claims can cure AIDS, cancer, diabetes, and other "incurable diseases." There's no evidence it does. The report above is by Kenya's private NTV network. Above is Part One of the NTV report; below is Part Two.

There's also Jeffrey Gettleman's report in The New York Times which reveals the "healer" even has a Facebook page.

Journalism

The Land Question

The Guardian's John Vidal reports from Ethiopia's remote Gambella region where in the last 10 years "1.1 million hectares, nearly a quarter of its best farmland" have been sold or leased to foreign companies by the Ethiopian government. The Ethiopian government says 36 countries including India, China, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia have leased farm land there. The World Bank estimates that at least 35 million hectares of land has been bought or leased on the continent as a whole. Vidal reports that 896 companies-including the "Saudi billionaire Al Amoudi, who is constructing a 20-mile canal to irrigate 10,000 hectares to grow rice"–have come to the region in the last three years. Poor, rural people are convinced by Ethiopia's government "to leave their farmland to make way for foreign owned companies growing profit crops for export." The companies hire the locals to work on the farms and pay them an average wage of one US dollar a day. As usual the Ethiopian government spokesman–the government receives tons of food aid while they sell off land–acts like nothing is going on.

Libya and Liberia are neighbors

This is not an April's Fool Joke.

New York Magazine's reporters and editors need to go back to school:

… Fighting continues to rage in Libya, thousands of Libyans have crossed the border into neighboring Liberia, a country fraught with its own troubles as it continues to recover from a decades-long civil war. Around 100,000 Libyan refugees have fled to the poor Western African nation. "It's a serious threat to the stability of Liberia and, I might say, to the stability of all neighboring countries," said Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf in an interview. "There's been a lot of investment for peace in this sub-region; we're beginning to see the result of that investment," she added. "If nothing is done to resolve the crisis, all of these efforts will be undermined.

The same piece also misspelled the name of the Ivorian president-elect (I think they wanted to make him Libyan) and designated Abidjan, the capital of Cote d'Ivoire:

Adding to the troubles is the flow of Liberian mercenaries into the Ivory Coast. The mercenaries are fighting on behalf of the Ivory Coast's entrenched leader Laurent Gbagbo— not recognized by the United Nations—as rebels in the north of the country battle for control. "According to what we hear, both sides are recruiting Liberian mercenaries," said Harrison S. Karnwea Sr., Liberia's interior minister. "When people have been used to living on violence, they have got no profession to earn their living on." On Thursday, fighting had escalated in the Ivory Coast capital city of Abidjan where forces loyal to Gbagbo clashed with U.N. recognized president Alassane Quattara.

Via Wronging Rights, where you can also see a screenshot now that the story has been taken down.

Coming Out in Cameroon

One of the human rights activists featuring in the 2009 documentary Cameroon: Coming Out of the Nkuta is Alice Nkom. The film sketches the daily struggle of young gays and lesbians in Cameroon. Nkom was in The Netherlands this week to talk about their fight.

For a longer talk by Nkom (in French), here she is speaking at conference late last year:

Music Break

I like this video for Sayon Bamba's song 'L'excisée' (from her album Dougna). Born in Guinea she resides in Brussels these days. A message doesn't come much clearer than this.

A road accident doesn't make a revolution

Recent demonstrations in Sudan's capital Khartoum over road conditions and traffic signals have led some observers in the West to speculate about the possibilities of a Egypt-style revolution there (see FT, BBC and Al Jazeera English, for example; Sudan-specific blogs, like Making Sense of Sudan, are silent on the protests). For our sake, I asked a friend in Khartoum–who wanted to remain anonymous–his opinion. Below I print his response:

Traffic and the control thereof are diabolical in Khartoum, and the populace have developed a pretty mental informal code for dealing with things (a combination of subtle physical nudging of cars, flashing lights, flicker use, and the morse code of horn signalling) so I'm not suprised there is risidual or constant anger relating to that issue. But a road accident doesn't make a revolution.

It really doesn't feel like a country on the verge of seriously challenging the intrenched status quo. In the capital there seems to be somewhat fatalistic, support for the peace process with the South, and ongoing constitutional reform (an interim constitution was enacted in 2005 and a new one will have to be drafted after the South breaks away in July 2010), combined with a lack of credible options to the ruling NCP in the broader polity. Even the Sudan People's Liberation Movement's northern chapter (with eight members of parliament and control of one northern state government) favour engaging the current institutional apparatus over taking the fight to the streets.

Constitutional reforms on the back of the peace process have opened some space for quasi-democratic imperatives to take hold, but it's tricky to say if this is purely cosmetic as opposition groups allege. The South African law professor, Christina Murray, was here recently at the invitation of the UNDP to advise officials on the need for reform in the North, in the aftermath of the Southern referendum.

The more threatening (vis a vis the regime) energies are located in the regions to the South , West (Darfur) and North East of Sudan where conflict over resources, anger over marginality and poor access to services is more or less endemic. All three regions are subject to separate peace provisions that channel disproportionate funds (and jobs) to state governments to try and shore up support for the center and the northern national project. But these are local insurgencies, not intelligentsia-led struggles, generally confined to regional and ethnic grievances. Notwithstanding the hundreds of thousands of heterogeneous citizens internally displaced to the outskirts of Khartoum as a consequence of these struggles, it seems unlikely that these energies could be transformed into a coherent explosion in the capital.

But we'll see. Witnesses to the protests at the university in Khartoum in late February counted about 3000 protesters gathered on campus and they were brutally corralled by police (using iron bars) and vigilantes and prevented from taking their protest off campus. Had they made it to the streets, some say, it is anyone's guess if others would have joined in and protests mushroomed. Arrested student and activist leaders have allegedly been tortured, and raped, and disappeared.

Local journalists who reported the rape allegations have since been charged with defamation for publishing credible accounts of abuse. The regime has sent a clear message about the consequences of urban anti-government organisation.

Through March there were two calls for renewed protests in Khartoum that came to naught. Fear, rather than apathy, was the main reason for the no-show. Small protests again emerged on 21 March, but protesters were again beaten into submission. More arrests were made and the whereabouts of some detainees is unclear.

Should the nascent protest movement find traction, and is twinned with support or coincidental violence on the part of regional insurgents, a very chaotic and violent unraveling may ensue.

The general feeling though, is one vaguely Zimbabwean: people are just too poor, too tired of violence, and too trapped in cycles of subsistence, to organize and dream of better times.

The Sudanese have had only 16 years of civilian rule since political independence from Britain in 1956, and have had Omar Al Bashir as leader of the country since his bloodless coup in 1989 following a short, chaotic period of civilian rule. The demographic bubble is heavily in favour of revolution, but significant countervailing forces (repressive, propagandist, and material) work in the old man's favor for now.