Sean Jacobs's Blog, page 94
July 5, 2022
Panthers in Congo
Still from Congo Oy�� ��. The beginning of 1971 was a rough time for prominent Black Panther Party militant Eldridge Cleaver. In exile since 1968 following a shootout with the Oakland police, he was living in Algiers and attempting, with his wife Kathleen, to hold together the ���international section��� of the Panthers. But conflicts over strategy within the party, fueled by FBI infiltration and violence, reached a breaking point that February, when party co-founder Huey Newton expelled Eldridge Cleaver and the rest of the Algiers group. To make matters worse, the ���Marxist-Leninist��� states that Cleaver had been most enamored with���China and North Korea���began to soften their relations with the Panthers��� primary adversary: the US government.
Feeling abandoned and isolated, the Cleavers jumped at an invitation to visit Brazzaville, capital of the recently-proclaimed People���s Republic of Congo, in April. Having tried to build a movement in the US that fused Black liberation and socialist revolution, the Cleavers were enticed by Africa���s first self-declared Marxist-Leninist government. At the end of the trip, returning full of excitement about what he saw in Congo, Eldridge wrote:
What the Soviet Union meant to Europe, what China meant to Asia, and what Cuba meant to Latin America, the People���s Republic of the Congo means to Africa and to black people everywhere��� Now for the first time in history, Africa and the Black World have such a center of people���s power. And this center of people���s power is destined to exercise the same kind of influence upon Africa and black people as the other centers did in their parts of the world and upon their peoples.
But the trip to Brazzaville was also an opportunity to experiment with a new medium of communication at the time: video. The Cleavers, joined by two other Panther activists, brought a new handheld video camera to Brazzaville, entrusted to photographer Bill Stephens. Stephens quickly edited the footage (with guidance from French filmmaker Chris Marker over the phone), and it was then narrated by Eldridge. As historian Sean Malloy explains, the resulting film, Congo Oy�� (We Have Come Back) became the start of the Revolutionary People���s Communications Network. The network, driven by Kathleen Cleaver, attempted to quickly create, replicate, and distribute videos that would connect disparate groups of former Panthers and their supporters around the world. But Congo Oy�� seemed to quickly disappear until a copy was found preserved at the New York Public Library about a decade ago.
Roughly cut and coming in at just over 46 minutes, it is a deceptively complex film. Eldridge Cleaver���s narration molds the footage into a lesson for Black Americans about the power of Black sovereignty and armed struggle. But in the spaces between Cleaver���s narratives, the film also offers a rare glimpse into a little-known African revolution and the thinking of its most committed leaders, some of whom would be executed just two years later. What the film so compellingly shows is how these militants���some American and some Congolese���arrived at different interpretations of the revolution.
Into an unknown revolutionThe former Panthers touched down in Brazzaville more than seven years after the start of the Congolese revolution. Yet, for them, it was new. In contrast to Eldridge Cleaver���s confident narrative over the film, the camera mostly captures the Cleavers listening to their Congolese counterparts, with Kathleen taking copious notes and translating. They were there, the film implies, as diligent students of a revolution they were only learning about for the first time.
Since the early 1960s, Black American activists had paid close attention to events in Congo, but not that Congo. Rather, it was the other Congo, the massive Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), with its capital located directly across the Congo River from Brazzaville, that was known around the world. The DRC had been the site of one of the most egregious displays of neo-colonial interference by the US and its Cold War allies in Africa. Belgian and US authorities actively worked to destabilize the newly independent government and facilitated the assassination of the first Prime Minister, Patrice Lumumba, in 1961���sending the country into crisis and paving the way for the rise of the US-backed military officer Joseph Mobutu.
Lumumba���s murder radicalized a generation of young African and African-American activists in the early 1960s, who, like Malcolm X, began to talk about ���the Congo��� as being synonymous with the extension of American white supremacy abroad. But international attention on the crisis in the DRC meant that the revolution unfolding on the other side of the Congo River went largely unnoticed.
Unlike Lumumba, the first president of Congo-Brazzaville, Fulbert Youlou, had little interest in confronting the entrenched power of the former colonial power, France. Youlou was an avid anti-communist, deeply hostile to Lumumba, and also to the young radical intellectuals, students, and trade union leaders in Brazzaville. But in August 1963, Congo���s three trade union federations came together to call a general strike that soon turned into an urban rebellion and toppled Youlou���s government. It was the first popular uprising in Africa to overthrow a postcolonial government.
The next five years of the revolution were messy. Into the political void created by the 1963 uprising, a group of young students and recent university graduates came together to launch a series of ���youth��� initiatives in defense of the revolution. Through mass rallies, debates, study groups, and a new newspaper, they exposed thousands of young Congolese to Marxist and anti-colonial concepts. While mobilizing young city residents to repair streets and sewers, the new youth leaders also recruited Cuban advisors to help organize their followers into armed urban militias. Protective of their autonomy, youth leaders kept these initiatives mostly independent of both the new government and the national army.
In the process, emerging youth leaders became increasingly influential in state politics. The Congolese leaders that the Cleavers interviewed in Congo Oy�����Jean Baptiste Ikoko, Ange Diawara, and Claude-Ernest Ndalla were, by 1971,�� ���veterans��� who had built their influence through their earlier work in independent youth organizations. On multiple occasions in the mid-60s, young militants had turned back attempts from both sides of the Congo River to overthrow the new government.
Far more coherent in their political goals than the ���elders��� who ran the new Congolese government, the youth leaders were also able to push through reforms aimed at achieving what they called ���true independence���: the expulsion of French troops from Congo, the nationalization of the education system (then run by foreign administrators and missionaries), and the nationalization of Congo���s French-owned utility companies. At the same time, activists like Ndalla helped make Brazzaville a center for leftist exiles from across central Africa. Angolan anti-colonial activists from the People’s Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA) arrived in 1964 and that same year, Che Guevara came to Brazzaville to meet them, beginning a thirty-year Cuban campaign of support for the MPLA and Angolan independence. During the Cleavers��� tour, Congolese authorities made sure to facilitate their trip to MPLA training camps along the border.
But control over the direction of the revolution became increasingly fraught by 1968, when a group of young army officers stepped in and took power. Led by the 29-year-old captain, Marien Ngouabi, some of the youth leaders agreed to follow him and incorporate the youth militias into the national military. This was how the Cleavers��� interlocutors in the film, Ikoko, Diawara, and Ndalla, came to occupy prominent roles in Ngouabi���s government. By the end of 1969, Ngouabi had declared Congo to be Africa���s first ���Marxist-Leninist��� government, eschewing the ideological ambiguity of the first revolutionary government.
Marxism-Leninism, an amalgamation of Maoist and Stalinist interpretations of Marxism at the time, was the same framework through which Cleaver and the Black Panthers had developed their own political perspectives in the United States. Thus, much of the language and iconography of Ngouabi���s regime looked familiar to the visitors. Stephens��� camera captures posters and placards featuring portraits of Guevara, Mao Zedong, Ho Chi Minh, and Vladimir Lenin. Such images were not specific to Congo���s new ���Marxist-Leninist��� turn���all would have been regular sights in Brazzaville, raised on the streets by youth organizations since 1964. But they represented a shared canon of Third World Marxists familiar to militants from both sides of the Atlantic.
Bringing Africa back to the USThough shot exclusively in Congo, Congo Oy�� is addressed to a prospective Black American audience. Opening with a plan of a slave ship and footage of the Cleavers visiting a site of memory from the era of Portuguese slaving, Eldridge romantically recounts the visceral feeling of reunion he had with the people they met in the ���land of our fathers��� after ���400 years of slavery in Babylon.��� Cleaver refers to Harlem renaissance poet Countee Cullen���s famous poem, Heritage, in which Cullen asked: ���what is Africa to me?��� Cleaver replies:
In the Congo, we were getting that answer for ourselves. We walked among the people, and mingled with them freely and we talked to them about our common plight, our common history ��� it was as though we had come home from a long journey, to find ourselves there waiting for us.
And yet the Panthers��� interest in Congo was not simply rooted in nostalgia for a lost homeland. Cleaver instead felt that he was reviving Malcolm X���s insistence on conceiving Black liberation as a global struggle. He thus began his pamphlet on the Congolese revolution, published shortly after his visit, with a section entitled ���After Brother Malcolm.��� Malcolm was, in Cleaver���s telling, the one who ���achieved the historic task of connecting the Afro-American struggle for national liberation and the revolutionary struggles of Africa��� through his travels in the continent, his friendship with Zanzibari revolutionary Abdulrahman Mohamed Babu, and his attempt to create the Organization of Afro-American Unity. Cleaver continues: ���He, more than any other single influence, raised our consciousness to a level where we became even more directly prouder of Africa and our African ancestry and heritage.���
But the death of Malcolm X created a divide among Black American radicals���one that the Eldridge Cleaver felt the revolution in Congo could resolve. For him, Malcolm���s death led some to embrace ���African culture��� while repudiating Malcolm���s call for an armed, militant struggle. Partly in response to the rightward shift in the politics of ���cultural nationalism,��� other activists who remained committed to Malcolm���s strategy of ���revolutionary Black nationalism��� (including the Panthers) became fixated on ���the gun��� and moved away from their connection to Africa.
For Cleaver, the revolution in Congo offered the potential to resolve this divide and revive Malcolm���s vision:
The historical fact of the existence of a Marxist-Leninist nation in Africa destroys all arguments supporting the perpetuation of the contradiction between the revolutionary black nationalists and the cultural nationalists, which for several years has bottled up and stifled an unestimated amount of revolutionary energy.
Halfway through Congo Oy�� the viewer hears Cleaver recount the moment of this realization.
Yet such a historical task was a heavy burden for a small African nation of just over one million people. In the film, Jean-Baptiste Ikoko, a former youth militia activist turned leader of the new Congolese government, is hesitant to make the Congo the standard-bearer for global Black liberation. In reflecting on his time as a student in the US, Ikoko is frank: far too many people he met in the US held a romantic view of Africa, as a land where people lived free of exploitation and class conflict. ���It���s not true,��� Ikoko tells his visitors, lamenting, in particular, the exploitation of Congolese women. For Ikoko, there was nothing virtuous about celebrating aspects of ���African culture��� that ran counter to the egalitarian and liberatory goals of the revolution.
Further, Ikoko challenged any notion that race or Blackness was a natural source of pride or unity������this is not the main point. The main point for us is to get out of the exploitation.��� In the film, we don���t see or hear how the Cleavers respond, but Ikoko���s comments complicated Cleaver���s perception of the revolution. As Sarah Fila-Bakabadio argues, Cleaver saw the Congo he wanted to see, as a symbol that proved the compatibility of the Panther���s merger of Black nationalism and Marxism. Congo was to be the place where a specifically Afro-American struggle organically connected to the Third World. But Congolese leaders were, at the end of the day, focused on building a nation-state, not a global revolution. And as Ikoko���s comments suggest, ���race was not the main denominator in their struggle.��� Though Eldridge Cleaver had hoped to make Congo the new home of the Panthers��� international section, the Congolese government had other priorities.
Revolution by the gunCleaver���s adoration of the militarization of the revolution also masked problems beneath the surface. Much of the footage in the second half of the film focuses on the ���People���s Army������the new name for Congo���s national military, which was meant to embed a politics of socialism into military culture. With the government now led by an army officer, Marien Ngouabi, it was no surprise that the army began to play an elevated role in politics. Stephens shows a May Day placard indicative of this: ���Without an army of the people, the people would have nothing.��� The film also captures the call and response chants often led by Ngouabi himself and answered by young soldiers: ���Down with neocolonialism! Down with imperialism! Down with tribalism! Honor to the people!���
The sight of a sovereign black nation with a national military, whose stated aims were an end to imperialism and support of the lower classes, was extremely alluring to Cleaver���especially in an era when the US military had expanded its war in Southeast Asia and clearly stood for the opposite. In contrast, Congo offered hope that ���someday,��� Cleaver narrates, ���the Afro-American people will also have their gun, and their army, and they will be free.��� When he asks Congolese leader Claude-Ernest Ndalla for a message to the Afro-American people, Ndalla replies:
The fight that we have against the American imperialist in Laos, Cambodia, Congo, Chile, Vietnam, those fights don���t have���can���t have���the same impact that the fights that the Afro-Americans lead against the imperialism within their own country. To the Afro-Americans���you have to fight through violence, revolutionary violence, you have to respond to the imperialists with revolutionary violence.
From Ndalla���s call to arms, the film cuts to a final shot of Congolese soldiers singing an ode to the Black Panthers and their struggle. Celebrating the downfall of American power, the soldiers sing of the US, ���Having been hidden, the revolution is in his house.��� But as much as Ndalla���s words validated Eldridge Cleaver���s own perspective on the need for armed resistance, for Congolese leaders there was no question that Black Americans and Congolese had their own unique struggles. As Fila-Bakabadio points out, in Cleaver���s urgent desire for global solidarity, he chose not to acknowledge how much his project differed from that of the Congolese government.
The visitors were also likely unaware of the troubled situation in Congo. What the Panthers could not see during their brief three-week visit was how little the military regime���s rhetorical commitment to anti-imperialism and Marxism extended into practice. This situation frustrated two of the young Congolese leaders interviewed for the film: Ikoko and Diawara. In February 1972���less than a year after they appeared in Congo Oy�����Ikoko, Diawara and other former youth activists orchestrated their own attempted coup, which they hoped would be accompanied by a popular uprising in Brazzaville. The uprising never materialized and the attempt to take power failed, sending them into the forests just west of Brazzaville, where they tried to build a guerrilla force. They were captured and executed in 1973 under Ngouabi���s orders. Today, interest in Diawara, Ikoko, and their rebel companions has been revived among young Congolese interested in radical alternatives to the seemingly interminable rule of President Denis Sassou-Nguesso. Importantly, Congo Oy�� offers the only known audio recordings of these martyred revolutionaries.
Though the film showcases major figures from Congo���s past, they are greatly outnumbered by shots of unidentified people out in public: men enjoying rumba music, school children marching, women at a market, young soldiers listening to commanders, and spectators straining to see the 1971 May Day parade. The film does not dwell on any one particular person for long, soon moving to the next. But Stephens��� choice was clear: The Congolese revolution�� could not be understood solely through the words of government officials. Congo Oy�� instead presents the revolution���and the potential of solidarity across the African diaspora���as being the work of all kinds of people, not just the most recognizable leaders.
The author would like to particularly acknowledge Sarah Fila-Bakabadio���s and Sean Malloy���s scholarship on the Cleavers��� 1971 visit to Congo.
July 4, 2022
The war that doesn���t say its name
Destroying small arms in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Image via UNDP on Flickr CC BY-NC-ND 2.0. Not all suffering holds the same value; this is a maxim that ISIS propagandists understand just as well as cable news editors. In her essay on war, Judith Butler writes: “War sustains its practices through acting on the senses, crafting them to apprehend the world selectively ��� disposing us to feel shock and outrage in the face of one expression of violence and righteous coldness in the face of another.���
This is certainly the case for the conflict in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Two snapshots illustrate this. First: on April 27 this year, Jules Alingete, a celebrated financial inspector, stepped up to a podium in Houston, Texas. He was addressing a small conference room of businesspeople to convince them to come and invest in the Congo. What he said, recorded for thousands to see on social media, shocked Congolese: ���Be assured, we do not have war in Congo. We see the war on television, we are in Kinshasa, Mbandaka, Lubumbashi, the big cities ��� it is a situation more than 2000km from our institutions.���
The second snapshot: the pageantry and fanfare of heads of state arriving to the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM) in the Rwandan capital, Kigali, on June 20. Thirty-five heads of state were supposed to attend. However, at the same time as Prince Charles was shaking President Paul Kagame���s hand, the M23 rebellion was making inroads in the neighboring Congo, most likely with Rwandan backing. None of the diplomats attending, including Justin Trudeau, Boris Johnson, and Muhammadu Buhari, expressed concern.
Both cases represented a firm looking-away from suffering. There are more people displaced in the Congo today than ever before: 5.9 million, more than anywhere in the world except for Syria. In the first three months of the year, around one thousand civilians were killed by various armed groups in the eastern Congo.
My new book, , tries to understand why armed conflict has persisted in the Congo despite numerous similar peace talks, billions in international aid, a national army of 130,000 pitted against ragtag rebel groups and the largest UN peacekeeping operation in the world.
These snapshots from Houston and Kigali offer pieces of an answer. Over the past 26 years of fighting, while many have suffered from the conflict, a slim class of commanders and politicians has emerged for whom the conflict has become a source of survival and profit. Alingete, the financial inspector, encapsulated the view of many Congolese elites���the war is distant and does not threaten their political survival. In the meantime, Rwanda has seen meddling in its neighbor as a core national interest, while foreign donors have looked the other way. Thus conflict, as well as peacemaking, have become ends in themselves, while the fighting is carried forward by its own momentum.
The nutshell version of the Congo war is this: In 1996, a coalition of regional countries���led by Rwanda, Uganda and Angola���ended the 32-year reign of Mobutu Sese Seko. That coalition installed Laurent-D��sir�� Kabila, a mercurial and veteran rebel, as president in 1997. Kabila fell out with Rwanda and Uganda, sparking a new war, which began in August 1998 and split the country into four major parts. In 2002 a peace deal was signed, the Accord global et inclusif, which reunified the country and forged a transitional government. A new constitution was signed, creating democratic institutions and decentralizing power to the provinces, inaugurating the Congo���s Third Republic.
Conflict, however, persisted. Paradoxically, even as violence escalated, the nomenclature was toned down after the 2006 elections. The UN peacekeeping mission was transformed into a post-conflict stabilization mission; as armed groups mushroomed, there was no peace process to engage them. This, as Congolese sometimes call it, is the war that does not say its name.
To understand why the conflict has persisted and become so entrenched we have to look at the attitude that both the Congolese and Rwandan governments, the two main actors during this period, have taken.
The Rwandan government was the first mover in this latest phase of the war, provoking a crisis before the transitional government had even begun in 2003. Kigali pressured former rebels to refrain from joining the new government and to launch a new rebellion, the National Congress for the Defense of the People (CNDP). Then, after the CNDP was integrated into the Congolese army in 2009, the Rwandan government backed another rebellion, the M23, the same insurgency that is making headlines again today.
But why would Rwanda be such a spoiler? Two theories often make the rounds: that of ethnic solidarity and of economic profiteering. Both are problematic. Yes, Rwanda made a fortune off Congolese minerals. But neither the CNDP nor the M23 really helped with this; in fact, Rwanda���s exports of gold and tin from its neighbor have skyrocketed in the years since it withdrew from the eastern Congo following the defeat of the M23 in 2013.
Alternatively, diplomats and pundits often claim that Rwanda has intervened in the Congo out of solidarity with Tutsi there (many high-ranking Rwandan officials are Tutsi). That clashes with dozens of interviews I conducted with Congolese Tutsi soldiers and community leaders, many of whom felt betrayed and manipulated by Rwanda. One ex-CNDP officer lamented: ���They supported us because they needed us. And when they no longer needed us, they turned on us.���
This leaves security. Supporters of the Rwandan government often mention security as the overriding imperative, in particular the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR), some of whom participated in the 1994 genocide. There is no doubt that the FDLR threat formed an important part of the decision-making process. However, the last major incursion of the FDLR was in 2001 and today they are a spent force. Nonetheless, given the central place the genocide still plays in Rwandan memory and politics, the FDLR remains a powerful symbolic threat. In some cases, genocide ideology has become a pretext for the RPF to repress opposition; in others, RPF officials are motivated by genuine concern.
The institutional culture of the RPF, which is infused with a bunker mentality and believes it needs to have ���strategic depth��� in its neighbor, has also contributed to belligerency. As one of Rwanda���s top security officials told me: ���What would the United States do if Al Qaeda had a cell operating in Tijuana? It would send troops in and take no hostages.���
In the Congo, the political elites have also been complicit in the wars, although in a very different way. Their approach to the conflict has been a mixture of apathy, fatalism, and opportunism. For leaders in Kinshasa, the war in the eastern Congo was extremely peripheral to their survival���politicians were not punished at the polls for their neglect of the east, nor was the fighting there a security threat to the country���s capital, one thousand miles away.
While many politicians have normalized and essentialized the violence, others see bringing an end to the conflict as potentially risky. The main reason for this stems from the importance of the military during the period following the transitional government of the 2003-2006 period. Political elites in Kinshasa were more worried about military dissent within the army than about the grievances of the local population. By deploying most of the army to the east, keeping officers��� salaries low but their discretionary allowances and bonuses high, and giving them a free hand in racketeering, political elites protected themselves from possible coups and enriched themselves through kickback schemes.
The fragmentation of actors and these interests have produced what I describe as involution. Over time, the main stakeholders��� approach to the conflict turned inwards, becoming invested in their own reproduction, and then became stuck. There is, however, no grand conspiracy. Due to the multiplicity of players and the shadowy nature of these networks, each actor finds it difficult to imagine another logic, let alone take concrete actions to reform, even though almost every actor within the current system finds it reprehensible.
International actors have contributed to this quagmire. Donors and peacemakers focused on technocratic reforms, rather than addressing the inequalities built into the structure of the Congolese state; and they ignored parallel developments in the private sector that dramatically entrenched the political elites in charge of the state. This technocratic approach congealed following the elections of 2006. This transition to a stabilization framework was built on the problematic, implicit assumption that the Congolese government wanted to create efficient, disciplined institutions instead of privileging the cultivation of patronage networks and political survival.
The second major flaw in how donors approached the conflict was evident in how the economy was managed. The rapid liberalization of the Congolese economy during this period brought about dramatic growth but also compromised the peace process and helped entrench conflict dynamics related to the predatory state.
At the beginning of the transition in 2003, the Congolese economy was tiny, around $9 billion in terms of real GDP, and state revenues were only $730 million for a country then of 51 million���as a comparison, the budget of Oxford University in 2020 was $3.4 billion. The size of the Congolese economy, however, soon grew dramatically, as the peace process brought about the privatization of many of the country���s most valuable mining concessions.
This privatization was backed and encouraged by donors who believed that private investment would not undermine the peace process but bolster it. However, some of the investments in mining, for example, were extremely questionable, made far beneath market prices by shadowy offshore companies. Estimates for losses of just a few of these deals range between $1.36 billion and $5.5 billion, while less mediatized, transfer pricing and tax evasion by reputable multinationals have probably been of a similar magnitude. This transfer pricing, along with the squirreling away of corruption money by elites, led to massive flows of money out of the country. According to one calculation, $25.6 billion left in the Congo in capital flight between 1996 and 2010. The enormous wealth that accrued to the ruling elite during this period solidified their hold on power, undermined democracy, and created enormous inequalities.
Today, however, simple solutions for the Congo are hard to come by. The conflict has transformed trade networks, social hierarchies, mentalities, and political structures���there is no one strand of this cat���s cradle that can be tugged to collapse it. The challenges facing Congolese are generational.
The stirrings of a new political consciousness can, however, be felt. The youth movement, LUCHA, was created almost exactly 10 years ago by youths in Goma as a new form of mobilization. It refused foreign financial support, created a flat organizational structure with consensual decision-making, and focused on the bread-and-butter issues of governance: water, electricity, and security. Their main actions were visible, popular protests in front of state institutions. After the protests, they would pick up trash and sweep the streets. ���We want to show people that politics is not about access to power, that it is about serving others, about caring,��� Luc Nkulula, one of their leaders who shortly afterwards died tragically in a fire, told me. This may be exactly what the Congo needs.
July 3, 2022
How we tell the story of African film history
In December 2019, film connoisseurs in Ethiopia received a rare treat when the Addis Ababa Cinema Houses Administration Enterprise arranged a festival to showcase some of the classic Ethiopian movies made between 1964 and 1992. These films had been largely inaccessible to filmgoers, filmmakers, instructors, and students, for decades. The last time any of them screened was in 2008. The desire to go back in time and see some of these early masterpieces was evident as crowds lined up to enter the Ambassador Theatre in the center of Ethiopia���s capital city. After the screening, audiences expressed joy and amazement at the artistry of these films and wondered why they had not had the opportunity to see them before. Since then, the question still on everyone���s mind is what is to become of this rich cultural heritage, and how will it be appreciated by the next generation.
The first film in the line-up was Hirut, abatua mannew/Hirut, Who is the Father, the first black and white feature film, produced and written by Ilala Ibsa and directed by Lambros Jokaris in 1964. It portrays the story of Hirut, who was forced to become a prostitute, but instead of accepting her fate, she attempts to alter her life by enrolling in school. The film offers a progressive portrayal of Hirut as she grows into a successful, educated, modern woman. The film also has beautiful shots of a modernizing Ethiopia, including the newly constructed African Union building in Addis Ababa and the streets of Asmara in the early 1960s. The screening was followed by some personal anecdotes by relatives of Ilala and crew members still living.
For fans of African cinema, this film is significant for a very important reason. Usually, film historians consider Ousmane Sembene���s classic film La noire de��� to be the first feature-length African film, produced in 1966, and his later film Mandabi, produced in 1968, to be the first feature-length film in an African language since La noire de��� is mostly in French. But Hirut, abatua mannew, a film entirely in the Amharic language, was made earlier, which might raise questions for what we consider ���African cinema��� and for how we tell the story of African film history.
The next film was Gouma (usually translated as Blood Ransom), directed by Michel Papatakis in 1974. Unfortunately, some of the celluloid reels of this film have decayed over time, so the audience was unable to see the entire movie. The film is set in Wello and explores Ethiopian indigenous culture. In the story, the main character, Tariku, accidentally kills his friend, and so, instead of the death penalty or retributive justice, the community opts for a traditional, restorative conflict resolution system���the gouma. For this, Tariku travels to several locations to beg for money to donate to Zewudu���s family. Though it appears unusual in Ethiopian films to focus on a single person for an extended period of time, the film���s one-and-a-half-hour story beautifully communicates its theme with good aesthetic and cinematic elements. The film achieves a balance between honoring indigenous traditions and gratifying public interest in a socially conscious, modern Ethiopia. The question on our minds, however, is how can we find a way to preserve and restore this important film.
Another film that screened at this festival was Aster, directed by Solomon Bekele Weya in 1991-1992. Its production was begun under the Derg regime and the film was completed shortly after the Ethiopia People���s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF) came to power. The film, set in the 1960s, is told through a sequence of flashbacks in which the protagonist reveals her life story to a friend at her wedding anniversary dinner party. The film moves between the night Aster delivers her story and flashbacks to her history. The story dramatizes class conflict, as Aster���s husband is a doctor from a wealthy family while Aster comes from a more humble background.
There is another feature-length film from this era: Behiwot Zuria (Around Life), produced in 1989. Unfortunately, this film could not be screened at the festival, but the director, Berhanu Shiberu, was there to share his experiences. Its story focuses on the psychological decline of Almaz, who loses her husband and then her child. As such, the film critically examines the social construction of gender and reflects on social conventions. In the final scene, after Almaz has gone mad and is wandering a graveyard, she meets an intellectual who comments on the contradictory nature of social institutions and explains to Almaz that it is society that is insane, not her. The film ends its story by leaving it open-ended with a song called Mela, which is an Amharic word for a solution.
In addition to these fictional dramas, there are numerous documentary and essay films that were not shown at the festival. Among these is the important film, Wondimu���s Memories, directed by Teferi Bizuaehu in 1976���a reflection on the progress of the revolution that was screened at the important Pan-African cultural festival, FESTAC, in Nigeria in 1977. Moreover, the directors of Gouma, Behiwot Zuria, and Aster also made several documentaries during this time.
In spite of the missing material, the audience���s excitement was fantastic to see. In the past, Ethiopian film audiences were skeptical of the continuity between Ethiopian cinema���s early period and the current generation of filmmakers. Internationally, when most people think of Ethiopian cinema before the 21st century, they think of the directors Haile Gerima and Salem Mekuria, who have lived and worked in the US since the late 1960s. Many readers of Africa Is a Country are probably familiar with Haile and Salem���s many films, including Harvest 3000 Years (1976), Sankofa (1993), Ye Wonz Maibel (Deluge, 1997), and Teza (2008). But this festival reminded us of the prolific and diverse creative talent from this earlier time period by connecting the older generation with the new.
The success of this festival in 2019 inspired another festival, Retrospective on Ethiopian Films, in Addis Ababa in March 2021. This second event, a collaborative venture between film producer Yidnekachew Shumete, film scholar Michael Thomas, Yikunoamlak Mezgebu, the director of the National Archives and Library Administration, and Elias Mengistu, the manager of the Addis Ababa Cinema Houses Administration Enterprise, continued the energetic reconsideration of the past and future of Ethiopian cinema. Thomas���s new book, Popular Ethiopian Cinema: Love and Other Genres, will be published later this year. He is one of several academics involved in an important book on Ethiopian cinema, Cine-Ethiopia: the History and Politics of Film in the Horn of Africa, published in 2018 by Michigan State University Press.
The success of these retrospective festivals and the work of many Ethiopian scholars and intellectuals, such as Aboneh Ashagrie and Menelik Merid, has inspired a desire to recover these earlier films. Recently, an effort was made to create a digital copy of Hirut that could be more easily screened in theaters, but considering limitations on the budget and available technology in Ethiopia at this time, there is still hope for a full frame-by-frame digital restoration in the future.
Retrospective festivals such as these, along with such scholarly work, also give us a lot to think about and raise a lot of questions. For example, one might ask whether there is much continuity across the generations, considering the changes in government in 1974 and 1991. What sorts of films were being made in the 1970s and 1980s and how did they reflect the time period? How did Ethiopian filmmakers from that era participate in international and Pan-African conversations about film art?
In our scholarly essay ���Early Ethiopian Cinema, 1994-1994,��� published in the June 2022 issue of the African Studies Review, we attempt to answer these questions through a comprehensive and in-depth analysis that situates these films�� in their historical and cultural contexts. For too long, these films have been dismissed or ignored as propaganda films from a bygone era, partly because of assumptions about repression during the Derg regime, which governed Ethiopia from the mid-1970s to 1991. We argue that, in fact, these films were remarkable, artistic achievements that still have something to offer us today. Sadly, as they have been entombed in an archive for so many decades, many have already begun to deteriorate. To preserve these films and make them available to the world requires the attention of many responsible individuals and institutions.
It is our hope that all interested parties can begin the work to properly preserve and restore this cultural heritage.
June 30, 2022
The skeleton in the closet
Reflection of a block of flats in Cardiff Bay Docks. Credit Simon Rowe via Flickr CC BY 2.0. ��� Girl from Tiger Bay, Shirley BasseyThere���s a crack in every pavement, underneath there is a beach
It’s been a long time longing as history repeats
In late December 2019 I heard of a new book that told the melancholic odyssey of Somali seaman, Mahmoud Mattan, to 20th century Tiger Bay, Cardiff where he was wrongly found guilty of the murder of Lily Volpert, and sent to hang in the gallows on September 1952. My great grandfather also lived in Cardiff during that period and it wasn���t long before I tracked down the author, Nadifa Mohamed, and inquired if he was in the novel. He is, she assured me, but ���a very brief part though.��� I would have bought it anyway but that news only increased my anticipation. It’s not everyday that one is accorded the flattering accolade of finding a kinsperson in a Booker nominated novel.
I was born and raised in Cardiff, and was surprised to find that my great grandfather, referred to in the book as ���Dualleh the Communist,��� was present at Mattan���s trial. He was a prominent activist and a thorn in the side of the South Wales police force who thought he was ���unwittingly associating with Communists,��� according to their archives. Did they actually think he wasn���t aware of what the hammer and sickle symbolized, I laughed, as I sifted through their records about him.
I still got through much of my life without any knowledge of the fact that the last man sentenced to death in Britain was Somali, hung where I grew up and probably knew a relative of mine. What���s more astounding is the manner in which it was quietly brushed under the carpet and willfully forgotten until Nadifa Mohamed dug it up and helped the story reach a global audience. Mattan was posthumously exonerated in 1998, but that would have been little consolation to his friend���s, children (one of whom took the revelations about his father very hard) and grieving wife, Laura.
Caution around spoilers are redundant in this story, as many knew how it would end for the protagonist, but the book still offers a lot to its readers and does two things with skill and insight. Mohamed pieces together Mattan���s life and forensically researches his trial, but also works hard to provide a snapshot of the stage upon which this drama played out to help us understand the context. Tiger Bay, Cardiff���s main port, early on became one of the most cosmopolitan places in Britain, with a dynamic, diverse, and textured community drawn from across the empire.
Mohamed���s own descriptions illustrate how Cardiff changed from a sleepy, homogenous city in South Wales, to a raunchy, culturally rich mini-metropolis:
A parade of hulking great Vikings with blond beards and ripped shirts bloodied from brawls, of Salvation Army bands looking for drunks to save, of robed Yemenis and Somalis marching to celebrate Eid, of elaborate funeral cort��ges for the last of the rich captains of Loundon Square, of Catholic children clad in white on Corpus Christi, led by a staff-twirling drum major, of makeshift calypso bands busking to raise enough money to tour the country, of street dice games descending into happy laughter or nasty threats, of birdlike whores preening their feathers to catch a passing punter��� Old maligned Tiger Bay, as tame as a circus lion.
The docks were only a square mile, hemmed in and isolated from the rest of the city, but contained the world.
The city hosted singer, activist and athlete Paul Robeson, gave us Shirley Bassey and Patti Flynn. Sheikh Saeed Ismail��� ���Wales��� best known imam������born to a Yemeni seaman and English mother, served his community in Cardiff for over 50 years before he died in 2011. My own great grandfather, an early member of the Somali Youth League, which had an active chapter in Cardiff even before Mogadishu, was an acquaintance of prominent socialist and suffragette Sylvia Pankhurst, who took an active interest in East African politics. The Fortune Men thoughtfully recreates this world and its eclectic assemblage of strange and fascinating characters, brought together by currents which they rode to Cardiff, but were beyond their control.
The backdrop of this story, however, is 1950s Britain, a deeply racist society where the word ���nigger��� was in common use, race riots often took place, and where the press spent as much time chastizing and taunting minorities as it did probing the actions of its government. The South Wales Daily bemoaned the ���large influx of native races.��� A bigotted police officer in the novel exemplifies the attitudes common in Cardiff about Tiger Bay at the time: ���The ports are our broken skin��� into which ���queers, darkies, hoodlums, communists and traitors of every description��� furtively wriggled in. After he was sentenced, Mattan���s own barrister described him as a ���half child of nature, half semi-civilised savage.���
Mattan is a defiant and uncompromising character in the face of this racism. Ever the diplomat, when a prison guard denies him water���even as he possibly faces a death sentence���he obstinately tells him ���Cocksucker, fuck you.��� In a quiet moment of reflection he queries his attitude, his unwillingness to play the role of the quiet and grateful immigrant. ���I get my pride, I get my revenge,��� Mattan concludes.
Mohamed isn���t a ventriloquist though, pulling Mattan���s limbs, generating his thoughts and moving his lips. Her own positioning as an author allows her to get extremely close to him. Mohamed���s father���whose own story is fictionalized in her first novel,�� Black Mamba Boy ���was also a Somali seaman, who came to Britain at about the same age as Mattan. In that regard she is a part of this story and its many afterlives. Her father would have been familiar with the racism Mattan experienced, the cultural deracination, the insults and taunts, the struggle to build a life in an extremely hostile environment, in a world so different from the stagnant comforts of home in Somalia.
Mohamed describes Mattan���s philosophical bent as ���the makhayad [cafeteria] school of thought,��� a set of distilled nomadic maxims he���d heard old Somali men expound as they sat around drinking tea. Its key principles are as follows: life is full of hardship, nothing is permanent and don���t get too emotionally tied to this short but perilous ride. In that regard he wasn���t totally responsible for much of what had happened in his life. Every time he���d made an effort to get his act together and find stable ways of making ends meet, doors were slammed, his name was too exotic or complexion too dark.
Even with his renewed faith came as he gazed into the abyss of his mortality facing a death sentence. His last ditch attempt to pierce the concrete walls of his cell and speak to God in the hope of a miracle are left unaddressed as gravity brings his inflated ego back to earth:
He began to strut and blush his days away and completely forget that his life meant nothing and was as fragile as a twig underfoot. He had needed to be humbled ��� he can see God���s wisdom so clearly now.
But she makes very little effort overall to impute any good to Mattan or excuse his excesses; even his relationship with his mother wasn���t great. This book isn���t a militant crusade to restore his good name, quite the contrary, and that���s what makes the novel so compelling. Though Mohamed had been captivated by the story since she found the newspaper clipping about Mattan���s murder in 2004 (���Woman [Laura] Weeps as Somali is Hanged��� was the headline), its release comes a year after George Floyd met his own premature end at the hands of Minneapolis police officers. In the city where the novel is based, Mahmoud Hassan died shortly after he was released from the custody of South Wales police blooded and beaten in 2020. An investigation of the latter case is ongoing. Like Mattan, both men were mistreated by authorities in whose trust they were but it’s in that recess between the man (whatever his deeds and racial background) and his rights (guaranteed by law) that we get a glimpse of the politics of this novel.
By excavating this story Mohamed brings Cardiff to life at a time when it was avant garde, putting it back on the map. She also complicates Britain���s history through the personal tale of one otherwise insignificant person. Mattan didn���t live his life like a man who thought his story was a globally significant one but ���fate had ambushed him.��� Mohamed describes him as a ���ghost���, ���a human silhouette in motion.��� She colors that silhouette, gives his story profound meaning, and puts flesh on a skeleton that Cardiff attempted to hide in its closet.
Life to the sound of gunfire
Group of women in front of Kataguiri village school, May 7, 2022.�� Sarah Leduc. On this Saturday in May, the entire village is on high alert. The bazin fabrics shimmer in thousands of colors on Kataguiri Square, in the Bangui commune located in the south of the Tahoua region in Niger. The residents are hurrying to welcome education supervisor, Oumarou Ibrahim, who has come to check on the remedial teaching program put in place for the 560 displaced Nigerian children registered at the rural school. On this day, approximately sixty of them are huddled in silence on the school benches, in the sweltering heat of the tin-roofed classroom.
���Education is the key to integration,��� declares Oumarou Ibrahim, who takes his role very seriously. ���We have Hausa in common, but young Nigerians must also learn French.��� The Supervisor sits behind the teacher���s desk and calls a student to the board, to see proof of his progress. The selected student hobbles over, with 120 eyes glued to his back in solidarity, and deciphers in an uncertain voice a few words in Hausa. He passes the test, and the 120 eyes smile at him, still without a word. A model class, if we disregard the backpacks with the humanitarian logo, the tattered clothes or that look of an old soul peering from under a veil at the back of the class, of a child who has already seen too much.
���Some families leave their children with host families then return to Nigeria. They are alone but safer here,��� Oumarou Ibrahim continues. The little ones are sheltered from the violence of criminal groups, rampant in northern Nigeria, not far from there. The commune of Bangui is only one kilometer from the border of the Nigerian state of Sokoto. (Nigeria is a federation made up of 36 states, which share their sovereignty with the federal government of Abuja.) Between the two lies a common valley and a river, which is dry this season.
Before we didn���t know the sound of gunfire���The problems started two years ago,��� Mahamadou Labou estimates roughly. The old Nigerian fled to Kataguiri in September 2021 with his five children and their families. ���Before, we didn���t know the sound of gunfire,��� he says. This breeder, first, had his cattle stolen, then a night raid convinced him to flee. ���The bandits came at night with guns, they shot everywhere, they scared us. So we left. We walked from the village of Danjani, 10 km from here. We left everything behind, our fields, our houses������ he says.
Like him, some 18,000 Nigerians have taken refuge in the commune of Bangui and the approximately twenty surrounding villages, 2,000 of which are in Kataguiri. Nationally, on April 30, 2022, almost 200,000 Nigerians���refugees or asylum seekers, primarily from the states of Katsina and Sokoto, located in northwestern Nigeria���had found refuge in Niger, according to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). The UN agency expects to see those numbers to increase. ���I fear that we will have regular influxes into Niger as long as there is unrest in neighboring countries,��� UNHCR representative in Niger, Emmanuel Gignac said in May.
Nigerians are fleeing criminal groups who are pillaging their villages, stealing their cattle, kidnapping for ransom, imposing zakat (taxes) and killing when they are resisted. ���Civilians are often the first victims,��� said United Nations Secretary-General, Ant��nio Guterres, on a visit to Niger in early May. According to the UN, nearly eight out of ten victims of attacks are civilians. According to the International Crisis Group, over the last ten years, at least 8,000 people have been killed in northwestern Nigeria, thousands of others have been kidnapped, and hundreds of thousands displaced.
At the origin of this violence lies ���a long-standing rivalry between Fulani herders and predominantly Hausa farmers [���] combined with an explosion of criminal activities and cases of infiltration of jihadist groups,��� according to the think tank in a published report two years ago. Hundreds of armed organizations are involved, some with dozens of members, others with hundreds. ���In the context of an explosion in trade in light small-caliber weapons in the region, organized gangs operating in forests far from the reach of the authorities have multiplied,��� the report reads. This violence has been exported to the Niger side of the border, to Maradi since 2016, then to Tahoua in 2019.
���There are jihadists among the bandits and bandits among the jihadists.���Driven either by the lure of profit or to defend their property, the armed groups adopt methods similar to those of jihadist groups���like the two factions, offshoots of Boko Haram, Jama���at ahl al Sunnah and Islamic State West Africa Province (ISWAP)���which run rampant further east in the border areas of Nigeria���s Borno and Yobe states. ���These are very mobile groups, who circulate on foot or motorcycle, with their faces covered so they are not identified and who sow terror. There are jihadists among the bandits and bandits among the jihadists,��� states an agent of the United Nations, a security specialist in the Tahoua region.
The security crisis also raises ���fears that the region could become a gateway, a territory that would link the Islamist insurgencies in the central Sahel and the insurgencies that have lasted for ten years in the Lake Chad region and northeastern Nigeria,��� according to the International Crisis Group.
The populations in exile in neighboring Niger, however, only find relative security there. If refugees can pass through, so can the criminal gangs. The defense and security forces (FDS)���police, military police and national guard���are however increasing patrols at the border. But with more than 30 kilometers in the bush for the commune of Bangui alone, the border is too vast to be fully monitored.
Impossible to secure borders���We are dealing with enemies who attack our populations with the same weapons as our own soldiers. They are looting everywhere, with weapons that come from Libya. [���] We do not have the means to monitor all our villages,��� Mohamed Bazoum, the President of Niger conceded in February 2022. Bangui nevertheless is one of the villages that benefit from the attention of the Head of State. When he came to visit it last January, he had promised ���a relentless fight against those carrying out abductions of people [���]. Most of those people have been arrested, particularly in Maradi, Tahoua and Zinder. Those who remain in Bangui, we will stop them, and we will fight them with all our strength.���
Despite the efforts made, security remains difficult to ensure. In April 2022, between 30 and 50 criminals, according to local witnesses, have managed to reach Bangui on foot. Pushed back by the FDS during an offensive that lasted more than two hours, the damage was limited that time. But that has not always been the case. ���In one year, there were at least three attacks which have caused deaths and injuries, and there were several ransom demands,��� says the Mayor of Bangui, Ado Oumarou Maidawa. These types of violent acts are increasing throughout the border area, which extends along nearly 1,500 kilometers with Nigeria. On May 25th, a new attack was reported in Birni N���Konni, 150 kilometers west of Bangui. Targeting the police station, it left at least two dead and several seriously injured.
���We are managing to push back the bandits, but not to stop them because they arrive on foot, on motorcycles. They carry out quick raids and then leave. Sometimes they hide in the villages with the help of local accomplices. They are well informed and use the time between shifts to attack,��� Education Supervisor Oumarou Ibrahim explains. Thus, fear has gradually overcome the inhabitants of that village. ���We sleep badly. We are suffering from psychosis, and that feeds the rumors. Recently, we were informed that 104 motorcycles had arrived. When you know there are three per motorcycle��� People in the village were panicked. Luckily, they did not come. But we are always on our guard,��� Oumarou Ibrahim sighs.
���They come from Nigeria, but we are all Hausa”Against a common enemy, local and displaced people stand together. In Kataguiri, the village chief asked each inhabitant to do his part. ���There is no refugee camp in Bangui. The displaced get by with their host families,��� the mayor explains.
Issa Yahaya, a modest farmer who already has two wives and a dozen children to take care of, welcomed up to ten households in his compound. At the beginning of May, when we met him, three were still there, sheltered by UNHCR tents pitched in the corners of the mud courtyard. ���For us, it is a social obligation to host. They come from Nigeria, but we are all Hausa. We are one big family, we support each other. Everyone lives well together,��� he explains.
Exchanges of goods and between people are as intense as they are historic in this border region which was one state before European colonization. In the 19th century, the Sokoto Caliphate, the largest African State at the time, covered the entire region. ���We share the same valley with Nigeria. Someone who is not from here cannot tell the difference between the two countries,��� the mayor emphasizes. ���The commune of Bangui is a zone of transhumance. Before, our herders used to graze their cattle on the Nigerian side, and vice versa. We were always going back and forth between Niger and Nigeria. We speak the same language, we are the same people, the same families. There are even villages that have been cut in half by the border.���
Trade has not dried up as is evident from the constant activity of transport trucks on the main road linking Tahoua (Niger) to Sokoto (Nigeria). Purple onions from Galmi, very well-known in the sub-region, are sent by the tons to Nigeria, which in return exports its hydrocarbon, distributed at the pump and on the black market, and its agricultural products. But the migratory route is now one-way, and the exodus is gradually turning into exile.
The threat of a food crisis���Go back?���, old Mohamadou Labo bursts out laughing. ���We cannot even dream of that anymore! Things are so bad back home; we cannot even think of going back.��� Though he claims to have permanently laid his mat in Niger, he leaves each morning to cultivate his land on the Nigerian side. Despite the dangerous journey, he travels the ten kilometers that separate him from his land and returns before the sun goes down. ���We need to eat,��� he sighs.
It is difficult for the host families to feed those new mouths while an unprecedented food crisis looms in Niger. Between structural drought, global warming and higher food prices because of the war in Ukraine, nearly 3.6 million people risk food insecurity in Niger, including 600,000 children, UNICEF warns. ���All the signs are there to indicate that there will be a serious food crisis in the weeks to come,��� according to UNICEF representative in Niger, Stefano Savi. ���If the situation deteriorates in Nigeria, and pushes populations to take to the road, there will be repercussions in Niger,��� he continues, considering that both local and displaced populations are in danger.
���In the beginning, we all ate from the same plate. Now, things are harder, you have to be careful,��� says Issa Yahaya. One month away from the hunger season, his millet and sorghum granaries are already almost empty. So, the farmer has no more surplus to sell. ���But the refugees received a little aid, so they also share,��� the head of the family goes on. Upon their arrival, Nigerians receive help from humanitarian organizations: UNHCR provides shelter, UNICEF a non-food kit for their settlement (mosquito nets, mats, soaps, pagnes, dishes, school supplies���) and the WFP a food kit.
���When the rains come, we will have peace of mind.���For the commune, the massive population growth is also difficult to absorb. ���Water is lacking in Bangui, and the influx of refugees poses a threat to the potable water system,��� the mayor warns. Almost every morning, the city is without water and electricity for several hours. Construction is underway to transform a borehole into a water reserve and rehabilitate inter-community health centers to increase healthcare capacities. ���Thanks to the partners, we put our efforts into education, health, water and food distribution, but it is not easy,��� the town councilor admits. ���Until the security issue at the border is resolved, it will remain very complicated for us.���
���We hope that the Nigerian authorities address that because insecurity causes displacement,��� the mayor goes on. ���The danger is next to us, but not ours. However, we are the ones who bear the consequences. It is our FDS who ensure the security of the Nigerian villages near the border.��� Ado Oumarou Maidawa deplores the lack of cooperation with Nigerian elected officials. ���Nigeria leaves the ground open to the bandits. Our FDS are in pursuit of them here but cannot go too far on the Nigerian side to catch them. And there, no one fights back to thwart the attacks,��� he regrets to say.
The Nigerian president, Muhammadu Buhari, however, has repeatedly shown his determination to combat criminal activities and fight against those he describes as ���mass murderers.��� In September 2021, a large-scale military operation was carried out in northwest Nigeria, initially focused on the state of Zamfara, then spreading to the bordering states of Katsina, Sokoto and Kaduna. But, like Niamey, Abuja is limited by the lack of personnel and resources of its security forces.
Failing to be able to count on a strong military, the town councilor Ado Oumarou Maidawa leaves his fate to the gods. ���When the rains come, we will have peace of mind,��� he sighs. With the rainy season, the bed of the Gagere River, which forms the natural border between Niger and Nigeria, will become flooded. ���When it���s dry, the river allows everyone to pass. When it is full, between July and October, the few points of passage are easy to control. That does not completely prevent bandits from intruding, but it limits them.��� The inhabitants of Bangui, whether locals or refugees, will have to wait a few more weeks before they can sleep peacefully. In this month of May, there is no shadow of a cloud on the horizon.
A big African literature prize in an African language
Mombasa. Image credit Xiaojun Deng via Flickr CC BY 2.0. In 1978, Ng��g�� wa Thiong���o, then a prisoner of Kenya���s postcolonial dictatorship, announced that he would cease writing in English, the ���language of power.��� From then on, he would write and publish in Gikuyu, his native language.�� Ngugi didn���t stop publishing in English, to the point every year literary pundits and odd makers put their reputations and money on him every year before the Nobel Prize for Literature is announced.�� He still published novels in Gikuyu however.
Publishing in local languages in many African countries is restricted to school instruction books or work manuals, and most African languages still struggle to establish a foothold in the commercial publishing industry or in literary and intellectual culture. There are some exceptions, such as Afrikaans in South Africa���the result of vast state and other investment from the Afrikaner business class, as well as the language being tied to a racial nationalist political project of the National Party. So, efforts like the Kiswahili Prize work to undermine the marginalization of African languages in literary culture. In this interview, Lizzy Attree, one of the founders of the prize along with Mukoma wa Ngugi (Ngugi���s son), in 2014, answers some questions about the prize and indigenous language publishing on and from the continent.
Sean JacobsWhy do we need a Kiswahili Prize right now?
Lizzy AttreeIt���s the only pan-African, global literary prize for African literature in an African language. So yes, we need it.
Sean JacobsHow do you compete in ���the prize economy,��� especially when all the big Western awards have been for African literature or African writers this year?
Lizzy AttreeThe Kiswahili Prize competes because there are no other global pan-African prizes for African languages to date (since the NOMA Prize ended in 2009). The other big Western awards have gone to some work in translation from francophone or lusophone Africa, but none for Kiswahili. The Kiswahili Prize awards a large US dollar sum annually donated by African philanthropists at Safal Group, the largest producer of steel roof sheeting on the continent.
Sean JacobsDoes it matter for the work you do that all the big Western prizes went to African writers?
Lizzy AttreeIt matters because all the other major book prizes are playing catch up after over 70 years of neglect.
Sean JacobsHow do you respond to perceptions that the Kiswahili Prize is being hosted or administered from within American and British institutions? [Mukoma wa Ngugi is an academic based at Cornell University and Attree, also an academic and board member at Short Story Day Africa, is based in London].
Lizzy AttreeThe Kiswahili Prize Awards are hosted by Mabati Rolling Mills in Kenya and ALAF Ltd in Tanzania���both subsidiaries of the Safal Group, which is an African conglomerate headed by Manu Chandaria. The link with Cornell University is via Mukoma and the Africana Studies Department at that university, which supports the Prize���s website platform and covers some of our travel costs to Africa and back. The Prize administrator and director is Munyao Kilolo, who is based in Nairobi. Earlier this year the Prize re-branded as the Safal-Cornell Kiswahili Prize for African Literature to reflect the name of the key sponsor. African philanthropy for African cultural production has been the main mission of the Prize since its inception in 2012.
Sean JacobsWhy has no African country decolonized its publishing industry beyond local versions of English, French, Portuguese or Arabic languages?
Lizzy AttreeThere are many African countries that have already begun decolonising their publishing industries by publishing in multiple African languages and in translation. For example, Jacana Media [South Africa] publishes books in Afrikaans, English, isiXhosa, isiZulu and Sesotho. Their website explains that, ���These books were made possible with the support of Biblionef and funding from the [South African] National Arts Council.���
Perhaps no country has fully decolonized, but the decolonisation is definitely under way.
The Department of Arts and Culture in South Africa published a Troubadours series in multiple languages from Afrikaans to isiZulu. Plus its tautologous to say that ���local versions��� are not languages in themselves, always evolving and incorporating mother tongue expressions, accents, linguistic variation, slang, play, music and diction across vast regions and language groups and between countries via porous borders. I could give examples from Guinea Bissau, C��te d���Ivoire, Mozambique, and Sudan and Morocco, among others.
Of course, some may claim that Africans have indigenized English or French. But the question still stands regarding Indigenous languages.
Indigenous languages can be considered a derogatory term by some, as can ���local��� languages. Languages plural are all in flux, and ���Africans��� do not have single identities, neither for that matter do ���Europeans��� or ���Americans,��� or ���Britons.���
Sean JacobsWhat do you make of a statement by someone like Mahmood Mamdani during a public lecture at the University of Cape Town in August 2017, that ���it is no exaggeration to say that Afrikaans represents the most successful decolonizing initiative [on language] on the African continent.��� Mamdani suggested that this was only possible via state support, what he referred to as ���a vast affirmative action program.��� By this, he meant it came about through investment in and subsidies for the book industry, for publishing; facilitating monopolies to emerge; building Afrikaans medium universities, etc. Mamdani���s point was that no postcolonial government on the continent had elevated indigenous languages to languages of science or humanities, beyond what he described as ���folkloric.��� He was implying that private initiatives won���t get us there. You need the state. Thoughts?
Lizzy AttreeYes, you need the state, and the state is acting in many African countries. For example in South Africa as I mention above, but where progress is slow because there are so many competing languages to cover; and in Tanzania where Kiswahili is the main language of education. The African Union has also more recently returned to the political mobilization of Kiswahili as an African language, and UNESCO declared July 7 as World Kiswahili Day in an attempt to raise the visibility of an African language worldwide.�� Rwanda has adopted Kiswahili as a national language and South Africa teaches Kiswahili in some schools. Obviously the people and living languages have to be involved and enfranchised too. I wonder if Mamdani has considered Tanzania as a case study? There is also an argument to be had about Arabic as an African language.
Sean JacobsHow has the ���space��� for literature in local languages in East Africa changed in the last five years? Are there any trends or patterns you are seeing? From what you know or your research, is it any better in any other region in Africa?
Lizzy AttreeAnecdotal evidence suggests there is a lot of enthusiasm for writing and reading in African languages, and that primary-level education in mother tongues is being widely encouraged.
Sean JacobsAre there locally-oriented models of publishing and distribution that better align with the reading audiences of those places, rather than copying traditional Western publishing practices?
Lizzy AttreeThis is a huge question, but I bet if you ask the people at, say, Mkuki na Nyota, a company that has been publishing in Tanzania for decades, they���d have better data. That said, many authors are self-publishing, or publishing online. There are hidden boxes of classic books in Kiswahili on street corners in Dar es Salaam, probably stolen from libraries around the country and for sale if you ask to see what else a bookseller has available other than textbooks and books in English.
Sean JacobsDo readers have different preferences about the length, size, style or voice, sales location of the texts? Are publishers tapping into those preferences?
Lizzy AttreeAgain, publishers like�� Mkuki Bgoya in Tanzania or Ahmed Aidarus in Kenya would know better. From what I have seen, though, when you take books to the people, into the marketplace, or to a bus station there is an appetite for books, if they are affordable. There���s an interesting article I can recommend by Zamda Gueza and Kate Wallis in Eastern African Literary and Cultural Studies about Dar es Salaam���s female-led book clubs and their influence.
Sean JacobsWhat can publishers do to advocate for students to be able to master their own languages in schools rather than the refrain by teachers ���no speaking vernacular!���?
Lizzy AttreeLobby the education departments of their governments and create a culture in which looking inward, rather than seeking external validation, underpins an investment in preserving African languages, before they are lost completely. This approach doesn���t just lie in books, but is a philosophy of life, and can be advocated across civil society, media, and communications platforms.
Sean JacobsApart from your prize, what are the other ways for readers to find their way to non-Europhone literature in translation? What are the good presses? The literary magazines? For you at least. How do we find them?
Lizzy AttreeThere aren���t many. Paivapo Publishing in Kenya is publishing children���s books in mother tongues. And Jalada continues its translation project. Imbiza is also open to publication in multiple African languages. Cassava Republic won a grant to publish an African languages imprint in 2019 and started publishing children���s fiction in March 2022 in Hausa, Igbo and Yoruba. Ituika is a good place to keep a watching eye, as it expands its network of translators and advocates for translation in African languages.
Sean JacobsCan you say a little about the 2022 winners of the Kiswahili Prize?
Lizzy AttreeHalfani Sudy and Moh���d Omar Juma won $5,000 each at the 2021 Mabati-Cornell Kiswahili Prize for African Literature awards announced at a special ceremony on January 27, at the Mlimani City Conference Centre in Dar es Salaam.
In first place for fiction, Sudy���s novel manuscript Kirusi Kipya (New Virus) is about a female soldier, Hannan Halfani, who discovers a secret plot to assassinate President Mark Mwazilindi at the palace. She shares the secret with detective Daniel Mwaseba.
In first place for poetry, Moh���d Omar Juma���s Chemichemi Jangwani (Spring in the Desert) is a poetry collection about a newly elected local representative who has to deal with various social, economic and political issues.
In second place for fiction was Lucas Lubago���s novel manuscript: Bweni la Wasichana (The Girls��� Dormitory) and the runner up prize in any genre was Mbwana Kidato���s Sinaubi, which judges described as ���a new form of writing.��� While it is highly creative, it is neither a novel, nor a play. Both Lubago and Kidato won $2,500 each.
Sean JacobsFinally, what are African writers ���saying��� in local languages that they aren���t in the so-called ���colonial languages���?
Lizzy AttreeCritiquing the government, satire, comedy, writing about crime, jealousy, passion, sex, espionage, the position of women in society, religious ideology, traditional medicine beliefs and practices.
June 29, 2022
Like a bad rain year
Image credit Sanjini de Silva via IWMI on Flickr CC BY-NC-ND 2.0. In early June, Senegalese President and African Union (AU) head, Macky Sall, met with Russian President Vladimir Putin. At the top of the agenda were the food security consequences of Russia���s war in Ukraine. While at least 30 of Africa���s 54 countries have condemned Russia���s invasion of Ukraine, they have often done so carefully and in a more muted fashion than many European, North American, or Asian countries.
While there may be many reasons for the AU���s careful approach to Russia at this particular moment, Africa���s dependence on the Black Sea region for agricultural inputs and cereal grains likely figures among them. The consequences of the Russia-Ukraine War, piled on top of two years of COVID-19 disruptions, climate change, and conflict in some areas have once again exposed the vulnerabilities of African food systems. While growing food insecurity on the continent requires emergency measures in the short term, a longer-term strategy must consider new approaches for strengthening African food sovereignty.
Average global food prices have risen more than 40% since 2014-2016. According to the World Food Program, of the 811 million people facing food insecurity in 2022, about 282 million may be found in Africa (roughly 21% of the region���s population), with particularly acute hunger hotspots in Ethiopia, Nigeria, South Sudan, Somalia, the Sahel region, Benin, Cape Verde, Guinea, Zimbabwe, Angola, Madagascar, and Mozambique.
Together, Russia and Ukraine are among the world���s top three exporters of wheat, maize and sunflower oil and African countries import more than 40 percent of their wheat from these two countries. The importance of wheat in African food regimes ranges widely across the continent. Africans on average consume 49.5 kilos of wheat per annum as compared to a global average of 65.5. However, this varies between 25.2 kilos per capita for African countries South of the Sahara (where other grains like maize, rice, and sorghum or millet are as or more important) and 143.8 kilos per capita for North African nations, one of the highest regional averages for wheat consumption in the world.
Countries like Egypt are in a particular bind as bread is a major food stuff and it relies on Russia and Ukraine for 50-60% of its imports of wheat. While the price of bread is heavily subsidized in Egypt, the government is struggling to maintain reasonable prices given skyrocketing wheat costs, which increased 165% between May 2021 and May 2022 due to war-related disruptions and speculation.
Russia is also a major exporter of energy and fertilizer, and shipments have been disrupted due to sanctions and the unwillingness of insurers to provide coverage for cargo vessels in the Black Sea. Several African countries, such as Cameroon, Ghana, Senegal and Kenya, have historically relied heavily on Russia for their fertilizer imports. These disruptions raise costs for farmers or depress yields when fertilizer is too expensive to purchase or in short supply. Lastly, rising energy costs not only drive up the cost of food transport but the cost of cooking gas that is widely used in many African cities. In South Africa, for example, higher cooking fuel costs often lead lower-income households to cook less nutritious meals and rely more heavily on prepackaged foods, with consequences for nutrition.
Africa���s food system predicament did not happen overnight but is largely the consequence of food policy reforms over the past 40 years. Beginning in the early 1980s, the majority of African countries adopted structural reforms at the behest of the World Bank and the IMF. As a result, many African countries moved away from policies of food self-sufficiency and focused on the export of a few commodities for which they were deemed to have a comparative advantage. This policy shift, combined with increasing rates of urbanization on the continent, led to a steady rise in grain imports, particularly rice and wheat.
While this approach worked throughout the 1980s and 1990s when global food prices were relatively low and stable, it unraveled quickly in the mid-2000s with the 2007-2008 global food crisis, a period when average food prices rose by 50% and rice by 100%, a shock that hit a number of African cities particularly hard. In response, many African leaders began to re-emphasize food production, but they pushed energy-intensive production methods as per the New Green Revolution for Africa, which emphasized the use of improved seeds, inorganic fertilizers and pesticides.
The reliance of African food systems on grain imports and energy-intensive farming methods makes them vulnerable to supply chain disruptions and energy price fluctuations. One strategy for emphasizing greater African agency in food systems is food sovereignty, defined as ���the right of peoples to healthy and culturally appropriate food produced through ecologically sound and sustainable methods, and their right to define their own food and agriculture system.��� Food sovereignty approaches often emphasize agroecology, or the combining of crops, greater crop diversity, field trees and compost to boost yields, manage pest problems, and maintain soil fertility.
Not only are food sovereignty approaches that emphasize agroecology more accessible to the poorest of the poor, but they would provide African countries with greater autonomy in a world where supply chain disruptions and energy price fluctuations are inevitable. Like a bad rain year, the Russia-Ukraine War is neither the first nor the last such disruption, and all concerned need to think long and hard about how to build less vulnerable and more resilient African food systems.
No amount of foreign currency can justify this
Beirut. Image credit Katharina Ziedek via Flickr CC BY-NC-ND 2.0. What is happening to Kenyan domestic workers in the Middle East? In the last three years, 93 Kenyan workers have come back home in body bags. As it keeps downplaying these suspicious and violent deaths, one wonders what it will take for the Kenyan government to defend the rights of all of its citizens. The following article is a part of our series of reposts from The Elephant. It is curated by editorial board member Wangui Kimari.
Last month, Beatrice Waruguru���s body arrived at Jomo Kenyatta International Airport from Saudi Arabia, almost a year after she was reported dead. Like many other young Kenyans seeking job opportunities in the Middle East, many of them women, her family says Waruguru left Kenya for Saudi Arabia in February 2021, and died under suspicious circumstances in December that year. The family maintains she was tortured. Waruguru worked as a househelp.
In 2010, Rose Adhiambo went to Beirut in search of a job at the age of 24, only to return home in a coffin six months later after being subjected to a catalog of abuse by employers. Jane Njeri Kamau, 36, died under similarly harrowing circumstances in November 2014, also in Lebanon, where she had been employed as a househelp. Njeri fell��ill��while in police custody��together with her friend,��22-year-old Margaret Nyakeru. Both had been detained after fleeing��from their respective employers because of�����ill-treatment���. They had been arrested in May of that year and held for five months. Nyakeru lived to tell the story.
The above cases suggest that the ill-treatment and abuse of Kenyan workers in the Gulf is not new. The problem does, however, appear to be have worsened with the COVID-19 pandemic and the ongoing economic crisis.
While the US remains the largest source of overseas remittances into Kenya, accounting for 63.2 per cent, the Middle East��has emerged��as an important rival in recent times. According to Kenyan Wall Street, remittances from Asia in the twelve-month period leading up to February 2022 amounted to US$42.5 million, with Saudi Arabia being the largest source (US$19.2 million), followed by Qatar (US$7.1 million) and the United Arab Emirates (US$4.6 Million).
Speaking to the media, Sharon Kinyanjui, WorldRemit Director for Europe, Middle East, and Africa Receive Markets, explained that this development is a consequence of growing rates of migration from Kenya to the Middle East, itself a reflection of increasing rates of unemployment, compounded by the COVID-19 pandemic, back home. According to the Kenya National Bureau of Statistics Economic Survey 2021, total employment outside small-scale agriculture and pastoral activities stood at 17.4 million in 2020, down from the 18.1 million recorded in 2019. In the same period, the survey finds, wage employment in the private sector declined by 10 per cent from 2.1 million jobs in 2019 to 1.9 million jobs in 2020, and ���informal sector employment is estimated to have contracted to 14.5 million jobs.���
In July 2021, Labour Cabinet Secretary Simon Chelugui said that since January 2019, the ministry had facilitated the employment of over 87,784 Kenyans in the Middle East, the majority of them working in Saudi Arabia, Qatar, UAE, and Bahrain.�� But these young Kenyans are taking risks because states such as Saudi Arabia have an extremely poor record with regard to the labor rights and working conditions of domestic workers. Reports of Kenyan domestic workers in Saudi Arabia suffering physical and sexual abuse, or dying under controversial circumstances have continued to appear in the press.
Stella Nafula Wekesa left Kenya in August 2021 to work as a househelp on a two-year contract. She died on 10 February 2022. A��medical report from Saketa Hospital in Saudi Arabia��indicates��that Stella succumbed to cardiopulmonary arrest, but her family has said she died after her employer refused to take her to hospital, and alleges that she had suffered mistreatment under previous employers.
Appearing before the Labour and Social Welfare Committee in July 2021, Labour Cabinet Secretary Chelugui told members of parliament that 93 Kenyans have been killed while working in the Middle East in the last three years. Most were in Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the UAE. The Departmental Committee on Labour and Social Welfare also noted that 1,908 distress calls were reported between 2019 and 2021, with 883 being reported in 2019-2020 and 1,025 in 2020-21.
Chelugui had been summoned to explain��the circumstances that led to the death of Melvin Kang���ereha in Saudi Arabia in 2020. Kang���ereha��was also��domestic worker, a job she obtained��through United Manpower��Services, a��recruitment agency. She was reportedly abused��and mistreated by��her employer��and did not return home alive.
In its 2021 report Amnesty International said migrant workers continued to be vulnerable to abuse and exploitation under Saudi Arabia���s sponsorship system, with tens of thousands arbitrarily detained and subsequently deported. The situation is no better in Qatar, which has faced criticism of its human rights record in the build up to the 2022 World Cup. ���In the decade since Qatar was awarded the right to host the World Cup, exploitation and abuse of these workers has been rampant, with workers exposed to forced labor, unpaid wages and excessive working hours,��� reports Amnesty.
Lebanon, which is grappling with a deep economic crisis and growing poverty, is emerging as another problematic destination for Kenyan migrant domestic workers. The Middle East Eye and��Al Jazeera, among other leading international media, have highlighted numerous cases that point to poor working conditions and abuse.��As in the Gulf countries, many of the affected persons appear to be female domestic workers, underlining the gendered nature of the threats faced by Kenyan and other workers in the region: A report by the International Labor Office finds that when it comes to ���women���s paid employment and treatment of migrants, the region is falling behind others.���
Why is labor migration to these countries so distinctly marked by exploitation, abuse and life-threatening conditions?
At the core of the problem is the notorious Kafala system, which the Council on Foreign Relations describes as a mode of sponsorship that gives private citizens and companies almost total control over migrant workers��� employment and immigration status. Institutionalized in most Arab Gulf countries and some neighboring states like Lebanon, the Kafala system renders migrants vulnerable to the whims of employers who retain control over their legal residency and right to work. The consequences for women are particularly harsh. Those who manage to escape abusive work conditions do so without their passports, which remain in the custody of their tormentors. It becomes complicated for employment agencies to intervene as they would be in breach of contract.
Despite the structural nature of such victimization, a good deal more could be done by the sending countries to protect the growing number of migrants opting to work in the Middle East. It is revealing that working conditions and levels of harassment appear to vary considerably depending on the country of origin of the workers. According to the aforementioned ILO report, workers from the Philippines, for instance, receive higher pay. If on the one hand, such discrepancies are evidence of a racially segmented hierarchy of discrimination, they also reflect the extent to which individual governments are willing and/or able to guarantee the protection of their citizens abroad.
Critics of the Kenyan government point to its failure to offer meaningful consular assistance to victims of abuse. Consulates often do not arrange for flights back home and workers are often told to fundraize for the cost of their repatriation.
Mary Vimto, who went to Lebanon in 2014 through a broker who had no office, is now in her eighth year under the same employer. Mary���s experience has been good, but while she herself has not experienced harsh treatment, Mary tells me, ���Kenyans are suffering in Lebanon.���
And does the consulate help?
���To say the truth, the consul told us he doesn���t have any connection with the Kenyan government, so he cannot help Kenyans easily,��� says Mary, who uses social media to raise awareness about the difficulties faced by Kenyan women working in Lebanon. She goes on: ���Because I do��YouTube videos, I [learn about] problems from different ladies as the majority don���t get help from the consulate unless you pay some money. Assume you don���t have the money?��� she asks.
In a January 14, 2022 report, the Middle East Eye��said that some��20 Kenyan women��had��camped for a week outside��the Kenyan��consulate in Beirut seeking repatriation. Most of the women were domestic��workers some of whom had suffered��physical and sexual abuse that had worsened with the��economic crisis��in Lebanon and the COVID-19 outbreak. The situation of these domestic workers is complicated because Kenya does not have an embassy in Beirut. But even if it did, there is little reason to believe that the situation would be any better than in Saudi Arabia where the Kenyan mission has been of little help to Kenyan domestic workers in that country, at least according to Kenyans working or who have worked there.
Asked whether the Kenyan consulate offered her any help, Vera, another Kenyan victim of abuse by employers in Lebanon, told the Elephant that it didn���t, and that at one point, the officer she spoke to told her she had to stay put. Vera called her mother and informed her about her situation but neither the agency in Nairobi nor the Ministry of Labour offered any help when Vera���s mother visited their offices.
The other key weakness of government policy is the lack of regulation to control the activities of brokers���individuals and groups operating recruitment agencies (some of which are unregistered) that profit from enlisting domestic workers on terms that amount to modern-day slavery. For instance, one of the women who camped outside the Kenyan consulate in Beirut told��the��Middle East Eye that she traveled to Lebanon in November 2021, having been promised a salary of US$300 by her agents. Upon arrival, her employers��offered her half the amount agreed���US$150.��She couldn���t��accept the work��as the money wasn���t enough to cater for her family back in Kenya, and became desperate to return home.
Rose Adhiambo, whose death in 2010 is mentioned above, had been connected to an employer by Interlead Limited, which describes itself as a trusted and accredited agent, ���a pioneering Human Capital Management (HCM) Solutions Company that provides manpower sourcing services for organizations locally and across the globe������ Adhiambo���s employer subjected her to conditions akin to slavery. Her body was found on the first-floor balcony of a building in Beirut���s Sahel Alma neighborhood. ���She is said to have fallen to her death from the sixth floor of a building in a bungled bid to escape from a house where she worked as househelp,��� The Standard��reported in September 2010. Before attempting to flee, Adhiambo had called her family and informed them of her situation and her intention to escape.
The case of Vera, a returnee from the Gulf who was interviewed by The Elephant, is also illustrative. Vera went to Lebanon in August 2014 on a two-year contract, having deferred her education at Moi University in the first semester of her second year because she couldn���t afford to pay the fees. While at her home in Nairobi, she was approached by a woman who told her about opportunities to teach English in Lebanon. Abela Agencies, whose offices were at the time in Uganda House, Nairobi, arranged for Vera to travel to Lebanon. She was offered US$750; the contract was in Arabic.
Upon Vera���s arrival in Lebanon, she learnt she would instead be a domestic worker on a US$200 salary. ���I was connected to a lady employer. The house was on the 16th floor in the middle of Beirut. They have these big windows and flowers on the outside. I was okay with watering the flowers but my problem was cleaning windows from the outside. I couldn���t do that as it was risky,��� the beginning of problems with her employer which culminated in her employer taking her back to the agency in Beirut. ���I had not settled; I was not experienced as a housemaid. I couldn���t function well because what I got on the ground was not what I anticipated. I was also not well briefed,��� Vera says.
Vera was employed by a second family for whom she worked for five months. She says that although they were not physically abusive, there were restrictions on what she could touch or eat, and she was only allowed to call home once or twice a month. When one of the sons in the family moved out, she was asked to work for his young family and the situation escalated;��the wife would leave her locked up in the house and she was not allowed to operate the TV. ���They would go eat out and leave me without food. They would then tell me there is milk powder and sugar and I can make tea for myself. She would bring bread on Monday and make me have it until the next week,��� Vera says.
When the going got extremely tough, she demanded to return home. The response was harsh: ���I paid a lot of money, I bought you and you have to work for at least seven months for me to recover my money,��� Vera recalls. When Vera fell ill, she was not taken to a hospital.
Government policyIn November 2021, Francis��Atwoli, the Secretary General of the Central Organization of Trade Unions, termed the working conditions in the Middle East as slavery and called for the closure of agencies enlisting Kenyans to��work in the Gulf. ���As a government, we should take care of our people. We are tired of watching our children coming back in coffins,��� Atwoli said. However, Atwoli���s seriousness on the matter has been questioned given his preoccupation with succession politics rather than with the welfare of workers.
The government has rejected calls to ban the export of labor, with CS Chelugui arguing, ���It is only a small percentage of Kenyans who are suffering, while more than 100,000 Kenyans were under favorable conditions.��� Given the growing macro-economic importance of remittances from countries such as Saudi Arabia, it seems unlikely that calls for a ban will be heeded anytime soon, a fact which underscores the importance of addressing the need for better protections at the policy level.
There have been attempts by parliament to address the Middle East problem. In November 2021, the Senate Labour and Social Welfare Committee presented a report to parliament in which it accused recruitment agencies of riding on the absence of formal agreements or memorandums of understanding between Kenya and other countries to manipulate desperate jobless Kenyans.
���And where they exist, the agreement falls short of taking care of the interests of the workers,��� the report by the Senate Labour and Social Welfare Services committee reads in part. The committee also reported that recruitment agencies and employers were taking advantage of the lack of policy and a legal framework on labor migration to exploit Kenyans working in the Middle East.
It further reported that Kenyans working as domestic workers do not receive consular assistance to protect their rights. ���With the growing numbers of migrants to the Middle East, there is need to streamline key prerequisite processes for effective governance,��� the report says. It recommended the immediate suspension of all labor migration of domestic workers to Saudi Arabia, where abuse and employment conditions akin to slavery are particularly rife.
When I asked him whether the government is doing enough to protect Kenyans in the Middle East, Senator Sakaja, chair of the Labour and Social Welfare Committee, told me it doesn���t and that, in fact, the government is squarely to blame for the problem. ���First, the reason they go there is because there are no jobs here. There are more than 18,000 Kenyans in Saudi Arabia, the majority are domestic workers. But some have been successful,��� he said.
Sakaja noted that most of those who have gone there through the��Musaned system are okay. ���In that system, you can check the house she is working in, the contacts and where the passport is,��� he explained.
However, Sakaja spoke of the presence of rogue agents who run the business as human trafficking. ���Because for every girl you send out, you are given almost US$1,500, it is as if they are putting potatoes in sacks. They don���t care. You should have insurance, their return ticket and be recognized by that [Musaned] system so that there is proper reporting,��� he said, adding that all the agencies should be vetted afresh.
Sakaja argued that the Philippines has over 300,000 workers in Saudi Arabia but they don���t have cases of their people being killed or harassed because their government has set up a system to liaise with the government of Saudi Arabia. He also decried the shortage of personnel to handle consular issues. ���We only have one labor officer called Juma. From Riyadh to Jeddah are thousands of kilometers. So, we said we must have more labor attach��s and officers in Jeddah and Riyadh and safe houses in case of anything,��� he said during the interview.
Sakaja also said that there are Kenyans languishing in deportation centers, and others who have been buried in cemeteries in Saudi Arabia. (Sakaja���s remarks in parliament are reported in the Hansard from page 23.)
Before resigning to join active politics, former Foreign Affairs Chief Administrative Secretary Ababu Namwamba said he was leading a review of the Diaspora Policy and, together with CS Chelugui, reviewing the bilateral legal instruments with all the Middle East countries ���that are causing Kenyans a lot of trouble.���
A Labour Migration Management Bill was to be passed and a Migrant Workers Welfare Fund established following a government directive at the Cabinet level. The bill is still stuck in the National Assembly, while the fund is yet to be operationalized.
What is so difficult about establishing bilateral agreements, vetting agents and putting in place a system that works?
Interest groups are active in pretty much every sector in Kenya���individuals working in government or have influence in government who use their power for financial gain. If Haki Africa is to be believed, the migrant labor sector is no different. In a report published by the Daily Nation, the Mombassa-based national human rights organization claimed one government official owned 10 labor recruitment agencies.
So powerful are some recruitment agencies that they have reportedly bribed members of parliament to go slow on a clampdown, a claim corroborated by Senator Sakaja who went on to allege that some members of parliament and officials from the Ministry of Labour own the recruitment agencies. Cotu���s Atwoli is on record saying, ���most of the recruitment agencies in the country are owned by senior people in government and operate with impunity.���
Needless to say, confirming such allegations is far from straightforward. It would nonetheless explain why, despite Sakaja���s report and former Nominated Senator Emma Mbura���s April 2015 petition in the Senate seeking better policies for Kenyan migrants in the Middle East, not much has been achieved.
Mbura, a human rights activist, had proposed that the government develop a framework that spells out the minimum entry-level salary, weekly and daily rest periods, and signs a special employment contract with Saudi Arabia to protect Kenyan workers. The framework, she said, would also provide Kenyans with paid leave, non-withholding of passports and work permits, free communication and humane treatment.
Whatever the obstacles to reform, one thing is clear: a complete overhaul of the entire labor export industry is necessary because unless substantive reforms are undertaken, Kenyan migrant workers, particularly women, will continue to return to their families abused and mistreated. Unless we listen to those who live to share their tales, others will continue to arrive in body bags���a state of affairs no amount of foreign currency can justify.
This article is the first in a series on migration and displacement in and from Africa, co-produced by The Elephant and the Heinrich Boll Foundation���s African Migration Hub, which is housed at its new Horn of Africa Office in Nairobi.
June 28, 2022
The ���alternative��� money economy of Nigerian students
Image credit Laura on Flickr CC BY-NC-ND 2.0. The small nation of Northern Cyprus on a shared island with the Republic of Cyprus off the coast of Turkey is home to just 350,000 residents, but more than 20,000 African students.
Northern Cyprus is technically an internationally unrecognized state, except by Turkey. Since it declared independence in 1983, however, it has become a prime destination for education migration, with higher education contributing to 10% of its economy as of 2018. When famed Nigerian author, Chigozie Obioma, arrived in Northern Cyprus in 2007, he was among a handful of African students. Less than 20 years later, Nigerians represent the largest group of non-Turkish students (followed by Zimbabweans, Cameroonians, and Congolese).
Frustrated by the state of higher education in Nigeria, a system unable to guarantee a degree uninterrupted by frequent strikes, and the value placed on foreign certification given the scarcity of employment after graduation, Nigerians find easy footing in a straightforward passage to Northern Cyprus as a prime education destination. Pressures in Nigeria translate to prospects in Northern Cyprus as the latter leverages its favorable proximity to Europe and English-language instruction. Students further praise the ease of visa entry requirements relative to other European countries and the comparable quality of European education for less-than-average European tuition.
Nigerian students typically arrive with voracious optimism at the prospects of working and studying at the same time.��For some, hope atrophies when they gain illegal employment at local hotels and restaurants with meager pay and sometimes work under exploitative conditions. Others operate side businesses selling foodstuff or offering beauty and hair services to other African students: ���We are just rotating the funds we have within the black community and survive on that,��� laments one PhD student from Oyo State. Still, other students adeptly access remote work, leveraging their teaching and technical skills.
Nonetheless, an interminable source of ire for Nigerian students is the ability to pay school fees and living costs.��Students are unable to make international transfers because Northern Cyprus restricts the transfer of money from Nigeria due to the latter���s notorious financial reputation. More pervasive, however, is the general disinterest and unwillingness by Northern Cyprus banks to provide student accounts that permit foreign transactions.��The Central Bank of Nigeria adds to the encumbrance by capping travel allowances at US$4,000, the permitted amount students can legally exchange before departure. Upon arrival in Northern Cyprus, the Central Bank of Nigeria further restricts currency flows by limiting overseas debit card withdrawals to the paltry sum of $50 a month. From day one, the squeeze of monetary policies narrows the formal paths to finance what is considered reasonable program fees (for example, ���3,100 for a Master���s to ���6,500 for a PhD). So how do so many Nigerians still study in Northern Cyprus despite the financial challenges?
Unsurprisingly, an entire economy flourishes in the interstices of institutional impasse. Nigerians are at the epicenter of this milieu of plural money. ���Virtually everyone is a currency exchanger,��� a Nigerian PhD student from Lagos chuckles as he explains the ubiquitous reliance on peer-to-peer money transfers among the Nigerian student diaspora on the island. Those with US dollars in hand find willing compatriots ready to exchange for Turkish lira, the currency used in Northern Cyprus. Otherwise, students can deposit naira to a peer���s account in Nigeria, and then the receiver will credit the depositor with its lira equivalent in Northern Cyprus.
In 2021, the rapid depreciation of the Turkish lira against the US dollar, losing more than 40 percent of its value, was compounded by inflation of more than 40 percent in the same year. The exchange rate nosedive and the skyrocketing cost of living steeled residents to find refuge in other stable currencies. Now, rents are settled by British pounds, school fees are paid with Euros, and consumer goods are purchased in US dollars. For those earning in naira, the fact that inflation of the lira is greater than inflation of the naira means they are treading ���above sea level,��� remarks another Nigerian PhD student, relieved to be the temporary victor in the steady decline of relative currency values. The lira has become a hot potato to be quickly converted short of paying government utility bills and everyday spending.
Further adding to the hodgepodge of circulating currencies, remote work generates remuneration not only in the trifecta of hard currencies now coveted on the island: British Pound, Euro, and USD, but also cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin and stable coins. Earnings cover the cost of living while the surplus is remitted back to Nigeria along peer networks to fulfill familial obligations.
Transacting in three hard currencies, two national currencies, and a plethora of cryptocurrencies mentally taxes the most calculative minds, not to mention accounting for the time to make this money.��Endowed with prodigious endurance, Nigerian students balance multiple income streams while diligently completing their degrees.��Incremental losses incurred by moving from currency to currency translate to marginal gains siphoned off by compatriots, and then brushed off as the cost of schooling in Northern Cyprus.��When no other viable options exist, a peer-to-peer system for collective survival is indispensable.��In 2022 Nigerian students continue to operate a resilient, ���alternative��� money economy they created for themselves���delivering exactly what it takes to obtain the education they seek to forge ahead.
We are actually reading
Image by Ronald Yeung for Columbia GSAPP Books via Flickr CC BY 2.0. This is an unprecedented time for the world of books and publishing, with an extraordinary number of books being published worldwide. Not only was the panic that a digital revolution would spell the end of books pretty short-lived but people are actually buying more books than ever. It is hard to say whether this is due to greedy behemoths like Amazon or the proliferation of book-related content on online platforms, local reading groups, and celebrity book clubs. But the excitement aside, the killjoy in us wants to know: are we actually reading books or are we just hyping them?
The world today is rich with dynamic ideas, culture, and art, and an inspired and energetic generation of people who are willing to fight oppressive structures. Yet, again and again, we see revolutionary concepts being turned into commodities. We get news from everywhere on our phones, give money for good causes at the push of a button, and amplify gross injustices through a tweet but we might suspect there���s a lack of depth in all this and we might even feel confused about whether our contributions are actually making any difference. We���ve become used to radical ideas such as feminism, anti-racism, decolonization, and even activism itself getting co-opted, diluted, and repackaged. We live within a paradox: many of us want to activate and engage our inner warrior, but we also know that many of these causes and ideas have been watered down, branded, and are now probably on sale for 60% off. This phenomenon comes in the way of movement and community building and of devising a systematic push to uproot oppressive structures and rethink traditional frameworks of knowledge.
Where are books and reading in all this? The global literacy rate is at an all time high (over 80%) and global connectivity is also increasing with more than 60% of the world having Internet access. People are definitely reading more, though it���s not necessarily books. At the Radical Books Collective, we believe that books remain the most important tools for societal, political, and individual transformation. But only if we read them! Our reading habits have been taken over by smartphones and the Internet. When we read on screens, we read headlines, quotations and memes. We ditch longreads and move to three-minute quick reads. We pile up PDFs and ebooks but we may not even open them. Books have also become overly curated, siloed and compartmentalized in ways that do not allow different streams of knowledge to overlap and intersect to give us an accurate picture of our world. Thus we land in yet another paradox: while we seem to have more choices than ever and total freedom to choose what we want to read, the reality is that our choices have largely been made for us. Think of the iconic Cerulean Top scene in Devil Wears Prada where Miranda Priestly (Meryl Streep) breaks down ���choice��� for cowering assistant Andy Sachs (Anne Hathaway). Let���s apply this to publishing.
The book industry has benefited tremendously from digital innovation with the invention of e-books and reading tablets, and with the ability to reach massive numbers of readers through online advertising and marketing. The Internet gives an impression of freedom and openness but gatekeeping still happens. Certain information gets amplified and others never see the light of day. Corporate publishing is able to optimize search engines and dedicate big budgets to generate marketing buzz, ensuring that the same books and authors populate our cultural spaces. This drowns out critically important voices. In fact, many readers don���t even know where to look if they want something outside of what they see displayed on the shelves. And that���s not all. Social media platforms, blogs, Instagram influencers and sponsored book clubs have become so influential that they have begun to impact which books get published in the first place. We are being bombarded with the message that publishing is getting more diverse, more queer, more international, more Black, but what about that small, independent, constantly broke section of the book industry that has always been progressive and pushing those boundaries? Its very survival hangs in the balance.
With the COVID-19 pandemic posing a dire threat, left-wing publishers formed a coalition called the Radical Publishers Alliance in April 2020. They declared: ���With the entire book and magazine industry in jeopardy, the only response from radical publishers could be one of unity and solidarity. Uniquely embracing a non-competitive approach to the publishing industries, the Radical Publishers Alliance endeavors through mutual support to develop anti-capitalist publishing strategies benefiting publishers, authors, and readers alike.��� They argue that the need for ���critical left-thinking��� is urgent as the ���long��� fight against capitalism is imminent. The Radical Books Collective is in solidarity with their mission.
Our intervention is simple: we want to read more, read more widely, and read together. We are creating an inclusive and non-commercial approach to books and reading. We organize book clubs, book and author events, and immersive seminars on foundational radical books. Book clubs today mean big profit for entertainers and conglomerate publishers, but we are nudging book clubs back into an educational and communal space by changing how books are read, circulated, reviewed, and talked about.
We choose bold, politically exciting books ideally published by small presses. We chat about the chosen book for 45 minutes and then meet the book���s author at the end. Our mission is to build discussions around pressing and challenging topics, such as prison and police abolition, feminism, racial justice, and climate justice. Many of these topics have been relegated to fixed categories in bookstores (physical or online), which not only prevents ideas from being in conversation with one another, but also can lead to self-censorship. Lefties scoff at fiction and people who like punchy stories don���t want to read praxis-oriented non-fiction. At our book clubs, people tend to step out of their comfort zone and read something new and different. The author visit at the end breaks down barriers that readers might have had to exploring the topics at hand and leads to a fuller engagement.
Reading together is our first agenda at the Radical Books Collective. But we also want to create awareness about publishing circuits: Who publishes whom? What is the role of agents and editors? Which books get reviewed and which ones don���t? Which books get loads of hype and which books get buried before they are even really born? Why do certain styles and forms of writing thrive and which ones are spurned as difficult, foreign, “bad writing,” hard-to-connect-with, not the right fit, etc.? Lastly, the Radical Books Collective remains deeply concerned about the ways in which the last few centuries of European colonialism have eroded structures of knowledge through violent interventions in publishing and education. We are cognizant of colonialism���s ongoing impact on the politics of languages, translation, publishing infrastructures and costs, the politics of distribution, and access to books.
We certainly don���t have the answers but we are committed to confronting the hard questions through our podcast the BookRising and through our book events and Radical Foundations seminars. Radical books expose structures of oppression and stimulate our imaginations to advance transformative futures.
Radical Books Collective has now teamed up with Africa is a Country to bring you these progressive conversations about books, literature and publishing on this platform. We have a playful series called Bookends lined up, Reading Lists from writers, editors and scholars, reviews of radical books and feature essays about news, circuits, events and scandals in the book and publishing worlds.
Come read with us. Here.
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