Sean Jacobs's Blog, page 95
June 27, 2022
Patrick Lyoya���s life mattered
Bus Stop, Grand Rapids, MI, 1990. Image credit Tom Powell via Flickr CC BY-NC-ND 2.0. In 2014, eighteen-year-old Patrick Lyoya resettled with his five younger siblings and their parents, Peter and Dorcas, in Michigan, United States, where they joined a growing population of Congolese refugees seeking better lives. That same year, Michigan native Christopher Schurr traveled to Kenya for a mission trip, where he and his then fianc��e (both white Americans) married. On the morning of April 4th, 2022, the two men would meet for the first and last time.
Early that morning, Lyoya was pulled over by Schurr���now a police officer in Grand Rapids, Michigan���s second largest city���allegedly for driving with an unregistered license plate. In a matter of minutes, the traffic stop turned into a foot chase (a high-risk behavior increasingly discouraged in police reform circles), a struggle, and ultimately, an execution. While pinning Lyoya down and kneeling on his back, Schurr fatally shot Lyoya in the back of the head.
More than two months later, on June 9th, Kent County prosecutor Chris Becker announced murder charges against Schurr, in a rare but welcome turn of events. This is an important development in the fight for greater accountability for police use of deadly force. Over the past two months, local leaders and activists have kept up the pressure. Groups like the Grand Rapids Association of Pastors, which includes the support of nearly 70 local pastors from across denominations; the Grand Rapids NAACP, the Black civil rights organization; and other local leaders have been pressing authorities for transparency, accountability, and police reform in Grand Rapids. The police department there has been under investigation since 2019 by the Michigan Department of Civil Rights. In his statement, Becker argues that Schurr���s use of deadly force cannot be characterized as self defense. The defense disagrees, saying Lyoya���s murder was ���justified.��� The Lyoya family will now have to endure the lengthy and painful legal battle ahead.
Perhaps Schurr���s mission trip to Kenya is irrelevant to this latest example of America���s lethal problem of over-policing of Black communities. But we should acknowledge the cruel irony of a White Savior dressed in blue���who dressed ���like an African��� for his Christian mission wedding���pinning down a Congolese refugee and fatally shooting him in the back of the head in the name of self-defense. Not only was Patrick Lyoya the victim of a violent reality in America where Black people are nearly three times as likely to be killed by police than white people. He was also the victim of American austerity economics where policing stands in as a response to the defunding of social services and resettlement means acculturating to the impossible mathematics of pulling oneself up by their bootstraps without a safety net.
Born in Uvira, Democratic Republic of Congo, 26-year-old Patrick Lyoya lived for over a decade in the Dzaleka refugee camp in Malawi (the camp receives 300 new arrivals on average monthly, the majority from the DRC) before being resettled with his family in Lansing, Michigan���s state capital, at the age of 18. According to The Washington Post, Peter and Dorcas Lyoya worked ���odd jobs,��� and the family of eight shared a small apartment when they first moved to Michigan. Patrick Lyoya later moved to Grand Rapids where he moved between family and friends��� homes and where he most recently worked on the factory floor of an auto manufacturing plant. Not long before he was killed, Patrick had just moved into his own place, a milestone for the 26-year-old refugee.
According to people close to him, Lyoya worked hard to take care of his family. He wanted to buy or build a home for his mother as part of his quest to achieve a comfortable middle-class American life. He was also a father of two and an active member of the Congolese community, where he was known to help new arrivals find their footing. Lyoya attended the Restoration Community Church of the United Methodist Church, where Pastor Banza Mukalay, also a refugee who resettled in the US, remembered him as a hard working young man who ���tried to make his future better.���
As much reporting has highlighted, Patrick���s life was complicated. According to Pastor Joshua Munonge Kibezi of Kalamazoo, MI, who lived in Malawi as a refugee with the Lyoyas, Patrick sometimes worked three jobs to support himself and his family. But existing media profiles have highlighted Patrick���s legal troubles dating back to 2015 without meaningfully reflecting on the ways in which resettlement policies intersect with anti-Black biases in America that place refugees like Patrick firmly into a violent cycle of over-policing and under-resourcing of Black immigrant lives.
In recent years, Grand Rapids, MI, has become an important place of resettlement for refugees from the DRC. According to one source, between March and October of 2019, 319 out of 490 refugees who resettled in Michigan were Congolese. And according to resettlement agency Bethany Christian Services, Grand Rapids was becoming the ���no. 1 place��� that Congolese refugees requested for resettlement as part of the process of ���secondary migration��� by which refugees seek to follow or reunite with family members through the resettlement process. As of 2019, Grand Rapids was home to about 8,000 refugees from the DRC and 11 Congolese churches.
However, national resettlement numbers have significantly declined in recent years, particularly under the former Trump administration. This has meant that social services have also been slashed. Resettling in the US is exceptionally hard, as sociologist Heba Gowayed shows in her new book that details American resettlement policies and their implications for Syrian refugees. Resettlement in America relies heavily on the notion of ���self-sufficiency,��� treating newcomers as ���American low-income workers��� and denying them crucial services for integrating into American economic and social life.
But the story doesn���t end there. Where state and federal support services fall short, the growing Congolese refugee community in Michigan has been working hard to uplift and support its members. Pastor Kibezi (who was close to Patrick) runs a nonprofit called African Community Kalamazoo. It gained official nonprofit status in 2019, formed to ���cater to the needs of all Africans, African refugees in Kalamazoo County, Michigan and by extension, the United States. Also, we promote the unity of Africans, and support the development of our host community.��� Among their services, African Community Kalamazoo works to ensure members of the community have adequate access to food, translation, and interpretation services for non-English speaking immigrants and refugees within the community. (You can make a donation to their cause here.) According to their website, they are currently working to open a childcare center and provide help with finding affordable housing solutions for its community members. They are also looking for volunteers and donations of household goods, including food and diapers. Patrick Lyoya was involved in this work, too���work that the refugee community is doing to improve the lives of those whom American resettlement practices have failed to protect and uplift.
Now, in light of the recent tragedy that has struck the refugee and Black community of Grand Rapids, Patrick���s father, Peter, cautions those who may be thinking about seeking asylum in the area: ���I want to say for those people who are seeking asylum here, refuge, I don���t want you to think this is a safe place. I thought it was a safe place, but it seems like we are in danger even when we come here.��� As Swahili speakers, the Lyoyas have relied on translators for interviews. It is unclear from media reports how strong Patrick���s English skills were���but New York Times reporting indicates that language was a barrier for him, possibly even in his encounter with Schurr on April 4th.
Earlier this month, Michigan banned Swahili (and Spanish) dictionaries in its prisons, claiming that the ���books��� contents are a threat to the state���s penitentiaries.��� But this move begs the question: how many among the growing Congolese population in Michigan are landing in the prison system? Statistics are not readily available. However, data compiled by the Vera Institute of Justice shows that while Black people make up 15% of Michigan���s population, they make up 53% of the state���s prison population (and 37% of its jail population). According to The New York Times, Patrick Lyoya had spent some time in and out of jail. And according to some readers��� comments, Patrick���s legal troubles seem to justify his murder, which is a sad reflection of how too many Americans uncritically think about crime���violent and nonviolent���as a reflection of the individual more than as a reflection of America���s austerity economics and deepening social divides.
Patrick Lyoya���s case has drawn national attention. The Reverend Al Sharpton eulogized Patrick at his funeral on April 22nd, and Patrick���s parents hired well-known civil rights attorney Ben Crump. Davionne Smith, a Black Lives Matter activist and cousin to Breonna Taylor (a Grand Rapids native), has helped organize marches calling for justice for Patrick and his family.
Patrick Lyoya���s life mattered. Black Lives Matter.
The doctor from District Six
Joe Schaffers talking to students about Cape Town. Credit Tom Slater CC BY 4.0. Honorary degrees are routinely awarded by elite universities to elite individuals, such as philanthropists, benefactors, business leaders, politicians, celebrities, and retired academics.�� They are almost never awarded to working class people of color who have responded to the indignity of oppression with a lifelong commitment to community. On July 4, 2022, the University of Edinburgh is awarding the degree of Doctor honoris causa (Honorary Doctorate) to someone who sets a new benchmark for receiving such an award.
Joe Schaffers was born in July 1939. His childhood was shaped by the rich community life in a municipal housing complex called the Bloemhof Flats, located in District Six, an extraordinarily vibrant and diverse neighborhood in the heart of Cape Town���s city center.�� The many cultures and creeds of District Six shaped a unique local language and cuisine, as well as beautiful music, art, literature, and poetry. In 1966, this special and soulful world was torn apart when the apartheid government declared that District Six would become an area for the ���sole occupation of the white race group.��� This declaration was under the Group Areas Act: a strategy of ethnic cleansing of urban space. If you were classified as Coloured (the apartheid term for people of mixed race), Asian, or Black African, and lived in an area that became classified White, you became a ���disqualified��� person and were forced to leave.
In Cape Town, the Group Areas Act was implemented in order to turn valuable urban land to more remunerative uses and to realize the apartheid dream of turning the central city, the Atlantic seaboard and the Southern Suburbs into an ���orderly��� white city, serviced by cheap Black labor that would, under no circumstances, be allowed to live and play in that white city.�� Pre-apartheid, Cape Town was one of the least racially segregated cities in sub-Saharan Africa, but all that changed in dramatic and appalling fashion under the Group Areas Act.
In the late 1960s, Joe Schaffers, his family and more than 60,000 other residents of color were forced out of their homes in District Six, which were then razed to the ground in anticipation of rebuilding the area for white people only. The uprooted community was split up and dumped in cheaply-built housing in so-called ���colored townships.��� People found themselves miles away from District Six, and miles away from each other, forced to live in bleak areas that the authorities named���with great insensitivity���after former District Six locations (e.g. Lavender Hill, Hanover Park). This was a constant and cruel reminder of the history and identity that was taken away from them. In the process, their living conditions and life chances deteriorated dramatically.
Joe Schaffers was always community orientated, and he adapted to the hardships imposed by apartheid by pursuing a distinguished career as a health inspector. He worked for the Cape Town municipality for 34 years and coordinated a team that addressed the abysmal conditions in every area where displaced people were forced to live. Schaffers understood the enormous psychological trauma of apartheid forced removals, and his work helped many families through those experiences. His leadership resulted in improvements in the quality of life for tens of thousands of people. This profound achievement was especially remarkable during a time of brutal social engineering and resource deprivation for all people of color. After retiring from the municipality in 1998, Joe began working at the District Six Museum, a remarkable institution that preserves the memories of District Six while explaining the causes and consequences of its destruction.
I first met Joe in the Museum in April 2004. After spending a good two hours taking in all the poignant displays, I began a conversation with him, and asked where I should walk to see what was left of District Six. He got someone to cover for him, and together we walked for about an hour through the ruins.��It was like being mentally electrocuted as he seamlessly integrated an awesome knowledge of neighborhood, city, country, region and globe���laced with a glorious mix of wit, wisdom, anger, and passion. Afterward, Joe headed back to the Museum; I walked further along Constitution Street, into the heart of the empty, forlorn, enormous tract of grassland in the heart of Cape Town where more than 60,000 souls once lived. I had spent my PhD (1999-2003) researching displacement caused by gentrification in Toronto and New York City, and I thought I knew something about the dirty politics and systems causing evictions and displacement.��But I hadn���t experienced anything like Joe teaching before. I remember saying out loud something like, ���My students need to experience this.���
For various reasons, it took 12 years to make that happen. But in 2016, with my colleagues Jan Penrose and Julie Cupples, I began taking our undergraduate geography students to Cape Town on a field course. When planning it, I reunited with Joe (a joyous moment), and he became totally committed to what we set out to do in this fascinating context: educate our students about racial inequality and anti-racist struggles, community organizing, empowerment and hope, in profound and novel ways.
Joe���s role at the Museum involves sharing accounts of forced removals and their serious consequences, which are still felt acutely today, 28 years into South African democracy. He educates visitors from all over the world about the human rights violations that result from ideological indoctrination. Perhaps most important of all, he discredits any belief in race as a biological category that justifies the unequal treatment of human beings.
Every year, Joe has been extraordinary with our students; I just knew he would be.�� Time spent with him gives them a strong sense of the enormous importance of place in all human life���the very essence of geography. District Six is part of Joe Schaffers���the spirit of the place circulates through him and shapes his worldview. It emerges in all his stories, his knowledge, his music (he is a renowned jazz singer in Cape Town), his deep love for the community that nurtured him, and for his people. His teaching is honest, passionate and truly beautiful not just in spite of the pain of what happened to District Six, but because of it.
Regrettably, the passage of time, political and economic strife, spin, and laziness mean that injustices like what happened in District Six can fade into history. Joe brings them right back into the present, as stern warnings against where we are going as a species and against the ruinous politics that enabled forced removals under apartheid. There are thousands of people in Cape Town (and way beyond) who do amazing work against the odds, against the forces of inequality, without any recognition, without any expectation of praise. For them, it is almost a calling, but also, in many ways, it is aligned to Samora Machel���s rallying call, ���A Luta Continua.���
Therefore, we felt that an Honorary Doctorate for Joe would be a powerful and far-reaching display of support for all local, national and international organizations committed to struggles aligned with those to which Joe has devoted his entire life. But it���s also a celebration of a truly great Capetonian, who is an inspiration and friend to so many.
June 24, 2022
Against the youth fetish in politics
Mass meeting on Jammie Plaza, University of Cape Town 2015. Image credit Tony Carr via Flickr CC BY-NC 2.0. ��� Members of the Situationist International and some students at the University of Strasbourg, On The Poverty of Student Life, 1966.Youth is in revolt, but this is only the eternal revolt of youth; every generation espouses ���good causes,��� only to forget them when ���the young man begins the serious business of production and is given concrete and real social aims.��� After the social scientists come the journalists with their verbal inflation. The revolt is contained by overexposure: we are given it to contemplate so that we shall forget to participate. In the spectacle, a revolution becomes a social aberration���in other words, a social safety valve���which has its part to play in the smooth working of the system.
In South Africa, June is officially celebrated as Youth Month given that on its 16th day, the Soweto Uprising is commemorated (the day in 1976 when black students in the township protested the imposition of Afrikaans as a medium of instruction and against the Bantu Education system and, in response, the apartheid government killed 176 of them).
As is the fate of most holidays intended to mark sober occasions, Youth Day has since become a generic platform for long-winded platitudes and paeans to the youth, mostly from political and business elites eager to make new voters or consumers from the demographic. This year was no different. South African president, Cyril Ramaphosa, delivered an address imploring that ���We must invest in their [the youth���s] development, and support their efforts to define a new future for our country.��� Ramaphosa���s political home���the African National Congress���was arguably the modern trailblazer of youth politics in South Africa, when the likes of Nelson Mandela, Oliver Tambo and Anton Lembede founded its youth league in the 1940s. Since then, the ���Young Lions��� have had little to be proud about. All of the ANC Youth League���s last four leaders���Collin Maine, Julius Malema, Fikile Mbalula and Malusi Gigaba���aided ex-president Jacob Zuma���s rise within the party by supplying him with a reliable base of support (in exchange for inclusion within the mass patronage network he perfected). Nowadays, the league���s biggest problem is that many of its members are not, in fact, youth. What does youth even mean to a party where youths are often in their forties?
This, of course, is a political syndrome not unique to South Africa, nor to our historical moment.�� Everywhere, it is an article of faith that young people are predisposed toward radical politics, destined to be the stewards of social transformation at any given age. And everywhere, the youth tend to disappoint when they come of age. How this entrenched assumption in politics came to be, would require an intellectual history beyond our scope here. Suffice it to say, that the usual story attributes this inheritance to the legacy of May 1968, when campus radicals were at the forefront of the social upheavals that gripped France and reverberated across the world, from Brazil to Mexico, Morocco, and Senegal. From that point, young people cemented their central place in politics, no longer subordinate to the hold of traditional authorities such as the family and state. And since then, every new uprising is reflected through the prism of post-war tumult, and a hope that another 1968 moment is on the horizon.
South Africa also traces its spirit of youth radicalism to the historical process inaugurated in 1968-1969, what the political scientist Mahmood Mamdani calls ���the South African moment,��� expressed through the twin development of Black Consciousness and student-driven union politics, and proving to be ���the epistemological revolution that would spur decolonization.��� Of course, 1976 is held in the collective imagination as the pivotal episode that inspired the youth-led mobilizations that followed in the 1970s. And in post-apartheid South Africa, #RhodesMustFall and #FeesMustFall are assigned a similar significance in re-ordering the political landscape. In many summations, the mid-2010s student movement constituted the most important challenge to the post-apartheid political consensus, especially as an advance in political consciousness in the same way that Black Consciousness is regarded, and from which Fallism drew the bulk of it its major inspiration.
The specter of change evoked by Fallism has since faded. Looking around, what one sees is not a groundswell of young South Africans participating in politics, but widespread disaffection. Whatever our hopes for the Fallist generation, they have since scattered and fragmented, leaving little institutional legacy behind. Some of its leading figures are pursuing political careers within South Africa���s mainstream parties, others have settled for stable jobs on main street, while only a minority have joined the NGO-union-social movement nexus, which constitutes something of a Left. This mirrors a dynamic evident in the student movements of the 1970s. In one of the more notable examples, Mamphele Ramphele, a prominent Black Consciousness Movement (BCM) activist,�� became a business leader (at her peak, becoming a managing director of the World Bank), and when she returned to politics, did so by forming an under-performing, liberal-governance political party (eventually, Ramphele came close to joining South Africa���s centre-right opposition, the Democratic Alliance, a party unashamedly allied with capital and in favor of the wholesale privatization of public services.) Many others of this generation are languishing in the fate of most young people in this country���joblessness and indigence. (At present, unemployment is 63.9% for those aged 15���24 and 42.1% for those aged 25���34. Of those brackets, 32.6 % and 22.4 % are graduates).
The point here is not to pathologize and accuse young people of betraying a generational mission, of being prone to ���sell out.��� Rather, it���s to say that for all our hopes that the young will deliver us from evil and despair, we ignore the intractable fact that someday, they too will grow older. Insert here, that over-quoted line about lacking a heart if you���re not a lefty at 20 and lacking a head if you���re not conservative at 40, or however it goes. No doubt, whenever that saying comes up it���s to insist on the folly and supposed non-viability of left-wing ideas. As an aside, the white old guard of the DA pushed out most of its young, black hopefuls in this spirit, given that they campaigned for responsive economic policies, such as urban rent control, which is seen as too far for the party���s market-fundamentalist orthodoxies. But, the sentiment also reflects the core truth of the contemporary situation, which is the dull, economic compulsion of capitalist life. Put another way, past the institutionalized shelter of young adulthood���preoccupied, in the standard story, with chasing a degree���comes the expectation to present oneself to the job market and make a living. Life goes on.
Still, this is not so for the majority of young South Africans. Few have the chance to attend institutions of higher learning (less than 10% of black South Africans between the ages of 18 and 29 are enrolled in institutions of higher learning), and to spend time jostling with ideas (and are especially excluded from graduate education). The idea that young people are the future, reflects the standpoint of the upwardly mobile, of those with something to look forward to (at least, as having expectations of this).
What is often forgotten is that the Fallist generation are first-class beneficiaries of the ANC���s post-apartheid class project. One area where the ANC succeeded was enabling access of black students to elite public universities in South Africa, which is why it was them who really spooked ANC rule. What they openly challenged was the post-apartheid arrangement: that while the black middle class now equals the white population in actual numbers, very little has changed as far as whites remain the face of the ruling economic class, and the poor, with little exception, comprises much of black South Africa. The question provoked was: how come this country remains not in our image? Indeed, Fallism was not functionally revolutionary in its ambition���it did not really seek to overturn the post-apartheid order root and branch. Instead, it was for a share in the promised democracy, for the belated promise of socio-economic inclusion to be fulfilled. But, what it confronted was a historical juncture where the available economic pie was shrinking. For a while now, capitalism has been stagnant and unable to deliver economic growth with a rise in living standards. The system is beyond inclusion.
Before the tumults of 68, the Romanian-French Situationist, Isidore Isou, began his call to arms, Youth Uprising, with a warning: ���From the extreme Right to the extreme Left, all parties boast of representing the young or fighting for their future!��� South Africa���s political elites and its elected representatives���from the venal ANC to the reactionary DA, and the moribund Economic Freedom Fighters, all claim the allegiance of young South Africans. This is not mirrored in the polls, with one of the main headlines of last year���s local government elections being the large absence of youth voters (less than 20% of the population aged 20���35 registered to vote). From this, it should be clear that the political establishment hardly registers with the majority of young South Africans. But that���s because these South Africans are hardly legible to the political establishment. Once again, when we speak of ���young people,��� we never do so neutrally. The images we conjure up���whether of a political firebrand ready to campaign for change, or of an entrepreneurial go-getter���all implicitly reinforce the ideology of meritocracy.
We envision not just any young person, but ���young��� does the adjectival work to create the image of a person who is hard-working, productive, and capable (alas, not all of us can be Mail & Guardian Top 200 Young South Africans). As Julius Malema, (the founder of the EFF in 2013 after his expulsion from the ANC Youth League) put it in his 2022 Youth Day address: ���The Youth���are not a charity case, we were never a charity case, we are not asking for handouts, we want to work the land ourselves, we want to work the mines ourselves, we want to own the banks ourselves.��� So then, the crisis of youth becomes simply that they are being deprived of opportunities they deserve, and the quibble is reduced to ���why?��� (the ���left��� say whites are hoarding all the opportunities, the right say excessive state interference is suffocating young people���s industriousness). The flip side of this is the subtle contempt for all seen as outside the category of the talented, which translates to contempt for the vast majority. Malema, again: ���Stop surrendering to drugs, to alcohol.��� Last year, Malema was all about the idea of a ���new black,��� with calls on the youth to be a ���generation of responsible black people.��� All statements sound as though they were lifted from Bill Cosby���s infamous Pound Cake speech.
South African politics across the spectrum, effectively accepts as a virtue some version of elite-led social progress, including those seeking to ���shake up��� the landscape. It���s no surprise that Songezo Zibi (mostly known for once being the editor of South Africa���s leading business daily, Business Day), for example, has announced his ambitions for seeking office on a platform that would draw on the ���skills, education and drive of [the] professional class.��� For one thing, Zibi���s reflects a tired trope in South African politics���where habitual references to the nameless ���masses��� are just a sop���the real belief is that it is the ascent of a credentialed youth that will usher in change to the country (vanguardism, after all, is this country���s oldest political tradition).
As it stands, this class is down and out, on the bleak path of proletarianization that afflicts professionals everywhere. That even a middle-class existence is precarious, with households a missing paycheck away from financial catastrophe, is not simply the outcome of a peculiar moment in our history characterized by poor leadership and incompetent governance. A captivating political agenda in South Africa must make the connection between the general malaise and the nature of capitalism. No matter the level of efficiency, so long as economic power is concentrated in the hands of the investor class, all it will do is continue to aid their accumulation and prosperity. It is designed to redistribute wealth upwards, and for the rest of us to lose out.
The alternative to this is not more effort scratching our heads together and figuring out how to make a broken system work. In the post-pandemic era, while the rest of the world is embracing what the author Paolo Gerbaudo describes as a ���neo-statism that calls for stronger state intervention in the economy in order to protect society��� (and as recent elections in Colombia, Chile, Honduras, as well as in France underscore), South Africa remains invested in socio-political frameworks that are fundamentally anti-statist and which imbue the private sector with the starring role in driving development. Of course, the ANC���s mass patronage system has undercut any capacity for the state to deliver. But the answer is not rolling back the state. To wit: ���It is a tragic irony that combating the phenomenon of corruption (effectively, the privatization of politics) leads to greater privatization.��� Undue faith in private enterprise to drive economic dynamism and create jobs belies historical ignorance. At no point in history has society taken a substantial leap forward in the quality of life without the state playing a central role to constrain the tyranny of the market and its oversized role in governing our lives.
The conceptions of the good life pervasive among young South Africans accept this basic premise. Supposedly, an economy that works is an economy that gives everyone an equal opportunity to succeed and get rich. Freedom remains somewhat the animating ideal of South Africa���s political imagination, but it���s an idea of freedom that grows narrower and narrower, and burdens individuals with the responsibility of actualizing it on their own. In fact, what���s more the case is that this ideal is receding further and further from the collective unconscious, replaced by an ethic of bare survivalism. An idea of the good life is evaporating, most are resigned to what comes their way. We must fight for a different imaginary, one that locates the moment of freedom in socialized provision, a world that gives everyone the material resources to be able to truly determine what to do with their own lives, relieving us of the pressure to brutally compete for them. A program rooted in this vision would include universal basic income, the expansion of public transport, decommodifying healthcare, affordable housing (and rent control), democratizing basic education, plus marrying job creation and decarbonization through our own green new deal.
Besides being barely able to support themselves, young South Africans lament the obligation that befalls them to support their extended families���the so-called ���black tax,��� in local parlance. It is, on the one hand, perfectly rational that many would resent being responsible for the well-being of relatives, and perceive it as a hindrance to their own aspirations; it merely projects the spirit of self-interest that rules the modern subject. On the other hand, the complaint has some validity on its own: there is something deeply absurd about a world where the power over life and death appears to rest with individuals, no less exercised intimately over one���s kin. We must take this instinct to its natural conclusion, and realize, as the twentieth-century Christian socialist thinker R.H Tawney did in Equality, that:
It is not till it is discovered that high individual incomes will not purchase the mass of mankind immunity from cholera, typhus, and ignorance, still less secure them the positive advantages of educational opportunity and economic security, that slowly and reluctantly, amid prophecies of moral degeneration and economic disaster, society begins to make collective provision for needs which no ordinary individual, even if he works overtime all his life, can provide himself.
However,�� this world will only come by reigning in the power of capital and subjecting it to the common good. This requires a big fight, one that repolarizes society across class lines. And, in the words of French philosopher Jean-Claude Mich��a, ���In this era of youth culture, it is fitting to recall one basic detail: youth has never been a class. It is a moment of life, transformed into a market.��� At least since the 20th century, youth has been a commodity, a signifier of vigor and vibrancy, and, as Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm notes, ���… seen not as a preparatory stage of adulthood but, in some sense, as the final stage of full human development.����� In our burnout society, no one seems convinced by this anymore – youth is an ideal that is inaccessible even to the mathematically young. There is no comfort in consumption (who can afford it anyway), no beauty in being young, only fatigue and restlessness.
In South Africa, one wonders how the idea of youth with its promises of professional mobility ever took hold, considering that the persistence of structural unemployment always made it an impossibility for the majority. We have been misled by a kind of post-professional class affect���the longing for ours to experience a comparable degree of social leadership and relevance as elsewhere (particularly in the West). But we are living through the crisis of this stratum, not its ascent.
As emphasized in a pamphlet distributed to 10,000 students by the Situationist International at the University of Strasbourg in 1966, ���In reality, if there is a problem of youth in modern capitalism it is part of the total crisis of that society. It is just that youth feels the crisis most acutely.����� The total crisis of society now acutely afflicts all. We must push against the notion of young people as a political constituency, which essentializes and naturalizes their propensity to lead and revolt. It is specific historical conditions that give rise to this, rather than something innate about youthfulness. So, youth revolt comes in cycles throughout the ages, and these cycles become briefer and briefer just as the times become harder and harder.
The titular character in Bertolt Brecht���s Life of Galileo famously quips that ���Unhappy is the land that needs heroes.��� We could similarly say, unhappy is the society that needs its youth to revolt, to be its ���changemakers��� or ���thought leaders.����� Young South Africans, to be sure, have played a decidedly positive role in shaping South Africa���s political future. But, it is a sign of our social and political disorder that they should have to in the first place. Ultimately, I am indifferent to the role of youth in politics, whether their significance is earned or unearned. Politics is about effectiveness, and casting youth as a political subject (rather than what they are, which is simply a demographic), is a bad way to do politics. It shouldn���t matter much���a good political program must be able to appeal to the greatest majority of people possible.
The irony is that, it is in those moments of history when the youth go beyond themselves���resisting the pressure to craft a special role to play in the march of history���that young people are the most effective actors. What distinguishes the South African moment in the 1970s and the Fallist moment in the mid-2010s is how successful each was at this. The former, was able to forge the elusive bond between students and workers, whereas the latter (not for a lack of trying, at various points), was unable to take its politics past the campus gates and to the wider populace.
Young people are going to be essential to any transformative political movement in this country. But, it has to be a movement that gives the mass of ordinary young people real avenues for political participation, ones not based on them already being enlightened insiders. Still, we���ve got our logic upside-down. Rather than fantasizing about the potential for young people to change this country, we have to change this country for young people, with young people. A good society, with robust safety-nets for everyone, would finally give them the chance to taste the thrill of being young.
June 23, 2022
Is the academic boycott of Israel a violation of academic freedom?
London. Image credit Alisdare Hickson via Flickr CC BY-SA 2.0. Since 2004 the Palestinian Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI) has called on the international community to boycott Israeli universities as a way to pressure Israel to end the occupation of Palestinian land and cease the violation of the human rights of Palestinians. In December 2018 a conference was held at Stellenbosch University in South Africa titled ���Recognition, Reparation and Reconciliation: The Light and Shadow of Historical Trauma.��� Various scholars and practitioners conducting research on collective trauma, the work of truth commissions around the world, reconciliation in societies affected by political turbulence and war, and peace building in various contexts, convened to engage with the theoretical, conceptual, and practical aspects of these topics.
The first iteration of the conference program listed a symposium titled ���Can we empathize with the narratives of our enemy? Encountering collective narratives of the ���other��� in the Israeli-Palestinian context,��� at which several Israeli scholars were to make academic presentations. Citing the academic boycott, several South African activists objected to the symposium, stating that it was paradoxical to discuss peace and reconciliation while at the same time as Israel continued to occupy the West Bank and East Jerusalem and wage regular military attacks in the Gaza Strip. The symposium was cancelled and replaced with one titled ���Palestinian Suffering: Why the Boycott Against Israel Matters,��� at which activists argued for an academic boycott of Israel and why such a boycott was especially necessary at the conference.
First, the conference was on reconciliation, an activity that is rendered impossible in the context of the ongoing occupation of Palestinian land and related human rights violations by Israel. Second, the conference took place in South Africa, a society with a rich history of protest, that was isolated during the apartheid era, and whose academic institutions had at the time been subject to boycott themselves. Thus, an academic boycott of Israel, including individual Israeli academics, was considered a logical extension of the academic boycott of South Africa. Third, the protest against the Israeli delegation was based on the assumption that academic freedom is not an unfettered right but one that exists in the context of other rights, and that could in the case of the conference be trumped by a human rights imperative.
The fourth was the argument against ���normalization��� of the conflict, which regards the two opposing sides���Israel and the Palestinians���as locked in a human drama in which each has an equally valid reason for their position and in which each is bestowed equal moral and ethical stature. Acceptance of normalization either ignores oppression or accepts that it must be lived with, thus conferring its ���normal��� status.
The outcryThe response to the cancellation of the Israeli symposium was vociferous and resulted in an international outcry citing the violation of academic freedom. The South African Jewish Board of Deputies (SAJBD), which acts as the main Jewish religious authority in the country, stated that the withdrawal was ���contrary to good academic standards and attempts at reconciliation.���
Wendy Kahn, the spokesperson for the SAJBD, expressed ���outrage��� at the withdrawal and stated that the boycott activists were engaging in ���bullying tactics,��� to which the organizers ���caved in.��� She also rejected the idea that the delegates voluntarily withdrew and stated that the decision to exclude them from the conference program was made without their knowledge or agreement. She referred to the protestors as ���extremist, fringe groups,��� and regarded the decision to rescind the invitation of the Israeli delegation as ���a disgrace and an embarrassment��� to Stellenbosch University. Kahn stated that the ���banned academics���confirmed that they were removed from the conference program ���because of threats to disrupt the event.��� She did not provide details about who issued these threats, nor did she provide details of the content of the threats. Professor Shifra Sagy of Ben-Gurion University in Beersheba, a member of the canceled Israeli delegation, stated that the activists protesting the Israeli presence had ���threatened to blow up the conference��� if she and her colleagues participated. The Israel Academia Monitor also stated that ���BDS activists threatened to ���blow up��� (the) conference if Israeli activists took part in it.��� Yet, nowhere in the public statements of those protesting the Israeli delegation at the conference was any intention expressed of disrupting the event either violently or non-violently.
Citing discrimination on the basis of his national origin, another member of the Israeli delegation, Professor Arie Nadler of Tel Aviv University stated it is ���a hollow venture when certain people cannot speak in public because of their gender, nationality, color, or religion. This is discrimination of the most violent kind.��� The narrative of fear and its association with violence at the conference was clearly prominent, but again no information exists that any threat was ever issued by groups or individuals protesting the presence of the Israeli academics.
An article in Israel Hayom, a popular newspaper in Israel that supports the country���s right-wing parties, was titled ���South African university conference caves to BDS, disinvited Israelis.��� It conveyed the impression that the decision to ask the delegates to withdraw was not made for principled reasons but to acquiesce to an activist movement whose presence was ostensibly potentially physically threatening. Ben Gurion University rector Chaim Hames cited the incident as the ���… latest ���victory��� in South Africa for the Boycott Israel crowd, for whom intimidation and threats have long been the tools of choice.��� He stated that the real victims were the South African people, and values such as intellectual honesty and academic freedom. Professor Hames further stated that the comparison between Apartheid South Africa and Israel ���does violence to the millions of black and coloured South Africans who suffered under decades of Pass Laws, separate beaches, ���Bantu education��� requirements and a thousand more violations of civil rights and of basic human dignity on a daily basis.���
His view was that the conference would be ���much the poorer, morally and intellectually, for not having Israeli academics there.���
Stellenbosch University Professor Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela, the conference chair, indicated that she wished to shield Stellenbosch University from protests and ensure that the conference would not be derailed by the incident. She stated ���we believe in academic freedom, and we believe in the right to boycott, given the role that this played in our own struggle against Apartheid. But I also know that our conference was not the appropriate vehicle for the application of the boycott.��� Gobodo-Madikizela appeared to convey a sense of sympathy for the Palestinian struggle without necessarily committing herself to the academic boycott of Israel.
South African Jewish Report (SAJR), a weekly newspaper aimed at the local Jewish community, claimed that Stellenbosch University���s administration made the decision to rescind the invitation of the Israeli delegation. It quoted a Facebook post by a local commentator, Brenda Stern, who stated ���once again, SA [South Africa] bows to BDS hate and loses an opportunity to contribute to peace and reconciliation������ The emphasis was on the university itself for ostensibly stifling academic freedom, even though no conference-related decisions were under the purview of any university administrator, but were in fact the responsibility of the conference organizers.
The SAJBD���s Kahn accused Stellenbosch University of betraying the values of academic freedom and diversity. The assumption was that the university had betrayed its own principles by permitting the cancellation of the symposium of the Israeli delegation. In response, Stellenbosch University���s rector, Professor Wim De Villiers, stated on the university���s website that ���the most disappointing outcome of this sequence of events is the absence of robust debate on the Israeli-Palestinian issue at the conference.��� The university issued a statement expressing concern that academic freedom was curtailed by canceling the original symposium.
The activists protesting the Israeli presence at the Stellenbosch conference argued that human rights should trump the notion of academic freedom. To argue that academic freedom should be unfettered and that academics should be able to participate in meetings, symposia, and conferences regardless of their political context and backgrounds reflects the view that scholarship is apolitical or at least politically neutral. On the other hand, if there is acceptance of the fact that scholarship can be influenced, abetted, and restrained by political systems, then the academy may be more accurately viewed in the context of geopolitical dynamics. Universities exist and function as a consequence of history and political dynamics in their respective societies, and to a large extent reflect the political challenges with which states constantly engage. Israeli academic institutions form part of the state apparatus, constitute a key component of the ideological construction of the state, and support Israel���s hegemonic political-military establishment. In this way they are implicated in Israel���s systematic denial of Palestinian rights, even though some individual academics may take a principled stance in favor of human rights.
Nonetheless, there is a clear tension between the call for an academic boycott and academic freedom. Academic freedom is part of a liberal philosophical framework that promotes the unfettered flow of ideas. An academic boycott seeks to limit this freedom in the pursuit of a political ideal, namely, the achievement of political and social rights for Palestinians. The traditional view of academic freedom suggests that any academic boycott is always a violation of academic freedom as it asks academicians and scholars to withhold collaboration, scholarly discussion, and conference participation with their counterparts who work in countries that are the target of boycotts. However, the academy is not above politics and scholarship is influenced, facilitated, and restrained by political systems. The academy is thus a political space where some wield power while others do not. To this extent, universities and academic conferences exist and function as a consequence of historical and political forces and reflect the political challenges of the day.
June 22, 2022
African liberation and African scholarship
Photo by Jeffrey Ofori on Unsplash On five different occasions, from 1962 to 1985, African studies scholars from across the globe convened on the African continent for the International Congress of Africanists (later renamed the International Congress of African Studies). The first of these was convened in Ghana in 1962. Organized by Nigerian historian Kenneth Onwuka Dike and featuring prominent keynote speakers Kwame Nkrumah, W.E.B. Du Bois, Alioune Diop, and several others, the first Congress portended the end of African Studies as a colonial form of knowledge production located, for the most part, outside of the African continent.
���The past few years,��� Dike announced in his welcome address, ���have seen the accession to independence of the majority of African States; today, with great pride, I welcome you all to what I hope may prove to be a landmark in our efforts to regain our intellectual and cultural independence.��� In his opening address, Nkrumah made clear the responsibilities of everyone in attendance:�� ���it is incumbent on all Africanist scholars, all over the world, to work for a complete emancipation of the mind from all forms of domination, control and enslavement.���
Subsequent Congress convenings in Dakar (1967), Addis Ababa (1973), Kinshasa (1978), and Ibadan (1985) built on the momentum generated in Accra, drawing scholars from across the continent and across the globe. The Addis Ababa meeting, which occurred on the 10th anniversary of the founding of the Organization of African Unity, was chaired by Samir Amin, the Egyptian-born economist whose work on dependency theory, world systems, underdevelopment and neocolonialism is arguably without parallel. (Amin would become the founding Executive Secretary of CODESRIA in that very same year.)
During Amin���s tenure as Chair, the Addis Ababa Congress passed several critical resolutions. The name ���International Congress of Africanists��� was replaced by the name ���International Congress of African Studies��� because delegates believed that the term ���Africanist��� implied the perspective of an outsider. Another resolution affirmed ���the necessity of commitment to African liberation on the part of scholars engaged in the study of Africa,��� while others called for intensified research on ���natural catastrophe and economic dependence��� and for the increased participation of women scholars.
Although subsequent congresses were convened after the Addis Ababa meeting, momentum toward the full decolonization of knowledge production about Africa and its recentering on the African continent dissipated dramatically, as state systems collapsed, as the stranglehold of structural adjustment tightened its grip, and as Africa-based scholars struggled with massive underfunding of higher education. No congress meeting has been convened since 1985.
In 2019, the African Studies Association of Africa (ASAA), the African Studies Association in the US (ASAUS), and the Association for the Study of the Worldwide African Diaspora (ASWAD) began discussions aimed at reinvigorating the extraordinary transformational momentum in African studies globally that began in Accra 60 years ago. Early in 2020, the three associations agreed to work together toward convening a sixth congress. In 2022, Africa Is a Country became part of the organizing core, largely to aid multimedia communication globally. Affirming the necessity of including the global African diaspora in any forum dedicated to African Studies, the ASAA, the ASAUS, and ASWAD jointly agreed to convene a Sixth International Congress of African and African Diaspora Studies to be held in Accra in August, 2023���thereby marking the 60th anniversary of the founding of the Organization of African Unity and the 50th anniversary of the Third International Congress���in the city that hosted the very first congress.
Coincident with the African Union���s creation of a Diaspora Division, the 2023 ICAADS Congress will bring together African and African Diaspora studies to formally mark the intellectual and political unity of Africa and the African diaspora and to reflect on the broadly shared histories, contemporary realities, and future destinies of continental Africans and African-descended people across the globe. This International Congress is intended to serve as a forum to affirm the shared social, political, and economic challenges among Africans on the continent and people of African descent in the diaspora.
Building on the work of the five previous congresses, the 2023 ICAADS Congress in Accra will continue the intellectual and political project of decolonizing knowledge about Africa. The ���congress��� format facilitates the dual purpose of an academic conference with policy implications addressing urgent contemporary issues impacting Black communities across the globe.
Since our preliminary discussions three years ago, we have witnessed a dramatic increase in anti-Black violence globally, an escalation in environmental and public health disasters, which disproportionately impact Black people and other historically marginalized communities. At the same time, from Black Lives Matter to Fallist youth movements, from demands for reparation and repatriation, to women���s and LGBTQI+ mobilizations, we are inspired by new forms of politics and new forms of organizing across the continent and the diaspora.
We convene this Congress with the intent of grappling with a set of key issues at the forefront of many of these current struggles for a more just, equitable, and sustainable world: reparations; the repatriation of African artifacts; neocolonialism and Pan-Africanism; re-engaging the sixth region; gender and sexuality; citizenship; policing and the state; environment and public health; the status and treatment of African migrants inside and outside of Africa; and Africa���s positions in international conflicts.
Moving toward the Congress in August 2023, organizers are planning three preliminary headliner events: at the Ghana Studies Association conference in Tamale, Ghana in July 2022; at the annual ASAUS meeting in Philadelphia in November, 2022; and in Washington, DC in March 2023 for a symposium co-hosted by the Moorland-Spingarn Center of Howard University and the Carter G. Woodson Center of the University of Virginia. All three of these events will be extensively covered by Africa Is A Country.
Democraticizing money
Gor��e Island. Image credit ljubar via Flickr CC BY-NC 2.0. Despite being one of Africa���s greatest economists, Joseph Tchundjang Pouemi is little known outside Francophone intellectual circles. Writing in the 1970s, he offered a stinging rebuke of orthodox monetary theory and policy from an African perspective that remains relevant decades later. Especially powerful are his criticisms of the international monetary system and the CFA franc, the regional currency in West and Central Africa that has historically been pegged to the French currency���at first the franc, and now the euro.
Pouemi was born on November 13th, 1937, to a Bamile��ke�� family in Bangoua, a village in western Cameroon. After obtaining his baccalaureate and working as a primary school teacher, Pouemi moved to France in 1960, where he studied law, mathematics, and economics at the University of Clermont-Ferrand. Pouemi then worked as a university professor and policy adviser in Cameroon and Cote d���Ivoire. In 1977, he joined the IMF but quit soon after, vehemently disagreeing with its policies. He returned to Cameroon and published his magnum opus, Money, Servitude, and Freedom, in 1980. The recently elected president of Cameroon, Paul Biya, appointed Pouemi head of the University of Douala in August 1983���then fired him a year later. On December 27th, 1984, Pouemi was found dead of an apparent suicide in a hotel room. Some of his friends and students argue he was poisoned by the Biya regime (which still governs Cameroon), while others believe that harassment by Biya���s cronies drove Pouemi to suicide.
International Monetary SystemWriting in the turbulent 1970s after the breakdown of the Bretton Woods regime of fixed exchange rates, Pouemi anticipated the three ���fundamental flaws��� with the international monetary ���non-system���: one, using a national currency, the US dollar, as global currency; two, placing the burden of adjustment exclusively on deficit nations; and, three, the ���inequity bias��� of the foreign reserve system, which makes it a form of ���reverse aid.��� All three issues have been highlighted by the economic impact of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Long recognized as a problem, the challenges with using the US dollar as the world���s currency have once again become apparent. Low- and middle-income countries (which include essentially all African countries) have to deal with the vicissitudes of the global financial cycles emanating from the center of the global capitalist system. As the Federal Reserve raises interest rates to combat inflation by engineering a recession���because if borrowing costs rise, people have less money to spend and prices will decrease���they are increasing the debt burden of African governments that have variable-rate loans in US dollars. Already, the World Bank has warned of a looming debt crisis and the potential for another ���lost decade��� like the 1980s. Moreover, higher interest rates in the US lead to the depreciation of African currencies, making imports more expensive and leading to even higher food and oil prices across the continent.
Pouemi viewed the IMF���s attempt to create a global currency through the 1969 establishment of the special drawing rights (SDR) system as an inadequate response to the problems created by using the US dollar. The issuance of SDRs essentially drops money from the sky into the savings accounts of governments around the world. The IMF has only issued SDRs four times in its history, most recently in August 2021 in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. With African governments dealing with falling export earnings and the need to import greater amounts of personal protective equipment���and, eventually, vaccines���there was a clear need to bolster their savings, i.e., foreign reserves. The problem is that the current formula for allocating SDRs provides 60% of them to the richest countries���countries that do not need them, since they can and have borrowed in their own currencies. Of the new 456 billion SDR (approximately US$650 billion), the entire African continent received only 5% (about US$33 billion).
Decades ago, Pouemi had slammed SDRs as ���arbitrary in three respects: the determination of their volume, their allocation and the calculation of their value.��� Instead, Pouemi advocated for a truly global currency, one that could be issued by a global central bank in response to global recessions and that prioritized financing for the poorest countries. Such a reorientation of SDRs could provide a way of repaying African nations for colonialism and climate change.
Secondly, unable to get the financing they need, African governments with balance-of-payments deficits (when more money leaves a country than enters in a given year) have no choice but to shrink their economies. Pouemi strongly criticized the IMF, which he dubbed the ���Instant Misery Fund��� for applying the same ���stereotypical, invariable remedies: reduce public expenditures, limit credit, do not subsidize nationalized enterprises��� regardless of the source of a country���s deficits. Devaluing the currency is unlikely to work for small countries that are price takers in world markets and instead improves the trade balance by lowering domestic spending. The IMF has become ���a veritable policeman to repress governments that attempt to offer their countries a minimum of welfare.��� The current international monetary non-system then creates a global ���deflationary bias,��� since those countries with balance-of-payments deficits must reduce their spending, while those with large surpluses���like Germany, China, Japan, and the Netherlands���face little pressure to decrease their surpluses by spending more.
The third major issue with the current international monetary non-system is that developing countries have to accumulate foreign exchange reserves denominated in ���hard��� currencies like US dollars and euros, which means they are forced to transfer real resources to richer countries in return for financial assets���mere IOUs. Pouemi claimed that ���if the international monetary system was not ���rigged,��� reserves would be held as other goods like coffee or cocoa, gold for example. But the system is ���rigged���; coffee reserves are quantified as dollars, pound sterling or non-convertible francs.��� Instead, in the late 1970s, governments like that of Rwanda effectively lent coffee to the United States by using export earnings to purchase US treasury bills, whose real value was being quickly eroded by high inflation in the US. Hence, we live in a world where developing countries like China and Brazil lend money to rich governments like that of the US. As Pouemi explains: ���The logic of the international monetary system wants the poor to lend to���what am I saying���give to the rich.���
CFA francPouemi was also a harsh critic of the CFA franc, since maintaining the fixed exchange rate to the euro implies abandoning an autonomous monetary policy and the need to restrict commercial bank credit. Pouemi also argued that the potential benefits and costs of currency unions are different for rich and poor countries, and that therefore it is inappropriate to analyze African monetary unions through a European lens. His thoughts are especially relevant at a moment when the future of the CFA franc and West African monetary integration are up for debate.
In theory, by fixing the exchange rate to the euro, the two regional central banks that issue the CFA franc���the Banque centrale des ��tats de l���Afrique de l���ouest (Central Bank of West African States) and the Banque centrale des ��tats de l���Afrique centrale (Central Bank of Central African States)���have relinquished monetary policy autonomy. They have to mimic the European Central Bank���s policy rates instead of setting interest rates that reflect economic conditions in the CFA zone. The amount of CFA francs in circulation is also limited by the amount of foreign reserves each regional central bank holds in euros. Therefore, ���the solidity of the CFA franc is based on restricting M [the money supply], a restriction not desired by the states, but one proceeding from the very architecture of the zone.��� As a result, the economies of the CFA franc zone are starved of credit, especially farmers and small businesses, hindering growth and development. In Pouemi���s words, ���There is no doubt, the CFA remains fundamentally a currency of the colonial type.���
When discussing the possibilities for a single currency for the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), Pouemi stressed that the potential benefits and costs of currency union are different for rich and poor countries. ���There is not only a difference of perception of the mechanisms of cooperation��� between Europe and Africa, ���there���s a difference of the conception of common life. Economic cooperation as it is conceived in the industrialized West is the Kennedy Round, North-South dialogue, the EEC, etc.���in other words, essentially ���customs disarmament��� or common defense; armament is the rule, disarmament the exception.��� In Africa, however, economic cooperation is a positive-sum game. Conventional economic theory argues against monetary integration among African countries, since they trade little with each other. But to Pouemi, the goal of monetary integration is precisely to get these countries to trade more with one another. He also questions the view that monetary integration should come last, following the same sequence as the European Union from free trade zone to customs union to common market and, finally, to currency union. ���This view is not only imaginary, it is practically non-verified; we have seen examples. Theoretically, it is indefensible: a 10% decrease in tariffs could be … offset by a devaluation of 10%.���
Pouemi also dismissed arguments that Nigeria would dominate the proposed ECOWAS single currency as another example of the classic colonialist tactic of ���divide and conquer.��� While he acknowledged that ���monetary union between unequal partners poses problems,��� these are ���only problems, open to solutions.��� They do not make monetary integration unviable. Such integration need not limit sovereignty. In a regional or continental African monetary union, no ���currency would be the reserve of others. Each country would have its own central bank, free to conduct the policy that best suits the directives judged necessary by the government. The only loss of sovereignty following such a union would be the respect of the collective balance. It would not be appropriated by anyone; it would be at the service of all. It would be, for that matter, less a loss of sovereignty than the collective discipline necessary to all communal life.���
Pouemi advocated for an African monetary union with fixed exchange rates between members, the pooling of foreign reserves, and a common unit of account���like the European Currency Unit that preceded the euro. He thought that the debate over whether the CFA franc is overvalued is misguided, since there is no a priori reason for its members to have the same exchange rate. Fixed but adjustable exchange rates���as in the Bretton Woods system or European Monetary System���would allow each nation greater monetary and exchange rate policy autonomy. Settling payments using a common unit of account instead of foreign exchange reserves would help economize on the latter. Moving toward the free movement of capital, goods and labor���as envisioned by the African Continental Free Trade Area���would help diffuse shocks through the monetary union. Finally, such a union would need to have a common policy on capital controls or at least collective supervision of international capital flows.
ConclusionAs Pouemi so eloquently lamented: ���History will hold on to the fact that all of [Africa���s] children that have tried to make her respected have perished, one after the other, by African hands, without having the time to serve her.��� We do not know what Pouemi could have accomplished had he had the time to serve Africa for longer. All we can do is heed his call that ���in Africa, money needs to stop being the domain of a small number of ���specialists��� pretending to be magicians.���
June 21, 2022
Bookends: Khadija Abdalla Bajaber
Image courtesy Graywolf Press ��. This post kicks off Radical Books Collective���s Bookends series.
Khadija Abdalla Bajaber was only 27 years old when she won the inaugural Graywolf Press African Fiction Prize for a manuscript in progress which soon became the novel The House of Rust. Bajaber���s first book has been called an ���astonishing��� and ���glorious sea-infused��� debut and is also the first work in English to depict the deeply rooted Hadhrami culture of East Africa���s coastal regions. Bajaber grew up in Mombasa, Kenya, and studied journalism while dabbling in poetry and fiction writing. The House of Rust tells the coming-of-age tale of young Aisha, who takes off on a sea voyage in search of her missing father. Borrowing from Swahili and Hadhrami folklore, contemporary speculative fiction, and magical realism, Bajaber has constructed a complex narrative with multiple stories nested within one another. For our first Bookends post, we asked the young writer to tell us all the little things (from foods to films) that get her imagination going.
Radical Books CollectiveBooks to stare at
Khadija Abdalla BajaberI have a shelf my mom, dad, and I (yes, all of us, many cooks) installed above my writing desk. Two shelves, actually. These are for books of personal importance���books gifted to me by people I love, or books I purchased for myself from when I was young. So these feel like sentimental purchases, books that are not for lending. Or, at least, not to be lent to just anyone. I don���t necessarily treasure them for what���s within so much as the deliberate intention associated with them. I can also track where I started making the deliberate move to read more Kenyan and African books. So seeing poetry collections by Michelle Angwenyi, Logan February; books like Dust by Yvonne Owuor, Blackass by A. Igoni Barrett; short story anthologies like Land Without Thunder by Grace Ogot and Equipoise by Nairobi Writing Academy writers, edited by Makena Onjerkia; and literary magazines like Down River Road���it gives me a little boost. I���m not a very organized person, but I���m very satisfied with how carefully I���ve organized them; they please my eyes. I guess you could say that inspires me? I will sit back and look at all my books and feel satisfied that they have not escaped my keeping for the most part. I have lent out Deathless and The Bell Jar to a trusted person, but they are an exceptional person! There���s also City of Bohane by Kevin Barry, which I���m in awe of simply because I hadn���t read anything like it before and I haven���t read anything like it since. Very distinctive and charismatic style.
Radical Books CollectiveTunes on loop
Khadija Abdalla BajaberI don���t often listen to music while I���m writing; it depends on the way I���m feeling that day. I have some playlists for certain moods, but once a story has finally gotten good momentum and feels more realized, I tend to listen to one or two songs on repeat. I don���t choose the song; song chooses me. They don���t always have anything to do with the story or even the vibe of the story, but I���ll loop the same songs. I���ve��been listening to the same song by Dehd on loop for two days writing one short story. Then again, certain eras or phases in my life have certain albums that define them, or albums and artists I go back to a lot. Or people the album reminds me of. So it doesn���t always have anything to do with writing or the work.
Radical Books CollectiveInspiration binges
Khadija Abdalla BajaberThe Fall, directed by Tarsem Singh, is a very important movie to me. As for series, I felt particularly moved by The OA and then very much soothed by Midnight Diner and Tokyo Midnight Diner.
Radical Books CollectiveAmuse-bouche
Khadija Abdalla BajaberI don���t really eat food when I���m writing���if I munch on something I get too distracted to write!���but I try to have water nearby. If I get hungry, that���s a good time to take a break from the writing desk, stretch a bit, refill, take a walk, socialize, and play.
Radical Books CollectiveCannot do without
Khadija Abdalla BajaberGood stationery, a very fine black marker, a very smooth blue ball pen, a very sharp pencil. I like graph paper books or math books.��I got myself a clipboard, that way if I need to kick my legs up onto the table or lie back on a couch, I can comfortably sit back and still have a stable surface to write against. I benefit from having a window with a tree outside.��I need a closed door and an empty room. Sometimes I���ll play a silly little game on my phone or on my Nintendo Switch if I���m in that kind of mood and need a little break.
Radical Books CollectiveThe look
Khadija Abdalla BajaberSomething loose in the shoulders. Breathable. Big shirts or T-shirts. I need to be able to cross my legs and move them about, so tights. Or gym pants. Or pajamas. I need to have taken a good shower first.
Radical Books CollectiveWitching hours
Khadija Abdalla BajaberI try to write when I can���sometimes I get a lot of work done in one sitting and then it takes a few days before I can have that time to myself. I write pretty well when I should be working on other things, and not so well when I have time to write. I���m trying to build that discipline and structure now, so I���m writing more often these past few weeks. I���m more concerned with quality than quantity.
The Mexico option
Image credit Matthew Rutledge via Flickr CC BY 2.0 In the 2018 Mexican general election, Andr��s Manuel L��pez Obrador (known as ���AMLO���) swept to victory. His presidential victory coincided with the historic collapse of the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI). Barring losses in 2000 and 2006, the PRI had ruled Mexico uninterrupted since 1929 (under three different titles). In 2012, PRI���s Enrique Pe��a Nieto won the presidency with 39.17%; but by 2018, the PRI received just 16.4% of the vote compared with the 54.71% (the largest margin since 1982) received by AMLO���s Movimiento Regeneraci��n Nacional (MORENA). The issue of corruption was front and center in this election, and AMLO explicitly framed it as a systemic byproduct of neoliberalism. While markets were initially rattled, capital was not in an outright panic; AMLO had broadly promised that ���his government will not spend beyond its means.��� In 2018, The Economist cited ���uncertainty,��� but three years later AMLO���s face was plastered on their print edition as ���Mexico���s false messiah.���
The Economist alluded to various ruinous policies, but it is AMLO���s actions in the energy sector that justified the typical association of a leftist leader with proto-fascist figures such as Viktor Orban, Narendra Modi, and Jair Bolsonaro. AMLO���s energy reforms are geared toward reasserting energy sovereignty over an (increasingly foreign) private sector that owns most of Mexico���s renewable energy. The subsequent contestation has sparked national referendums, attempted constitutional amendments, and cases in the country���s supreme court. The market-led transition creates such contestations wherever it leads. It generally wins. Thus, the battle for Mexico���s energy sector offers an essential example for the left���and for South Africa���s especially.
The PRI and the revolution in developmentMexico offers a rich history of class struggle, from its independence to its 10-year revolution that ended in 1920. The postrevolutionary years saw a series of inter-elite violent contestations. In Origins of the Mass Party, Edwin Ackerman explains that the constitution of the PRI (then the Partido Nacional Revolucionario) was to ������institutionalize the revolution��� by offering a vehicle for the circulation of the elite and [to] discipline ���the revolutionary family.������ Irrespective of the needs of the elites, under President L��zaro C��rdenas (1934-1940), the PRI���then the Partido de la Revoluci��n Mexicana���followed the postwar Keynesian pathway of state-led development. The nationalization of Mexico���s oil in 1938 was, and remains, a source of great national pride after the unfettered foreign pillaging of its resources during the 31 years of the Porfirio D��az regime (1877-1911). Then, Mexico was beginning what Christy Thornton calls its ���revolution in development,��� which sought ���to devise new rules and institutions for managing the global economic systems.��� Indeed, the World Bank was irked by this state ownership and refused to loan capital in the 1950s to the state-owned oil company, Petr��leos Mexicanos (PEMEX), although it did offer capital to partially state-owned power utility the Comisi��n Federal de Electricidad (CFE). The ���revolution in development��� even saw Mexico use foreign investment to nationalize the electricity sector and the CFE.
Eventually, the neoliberal turn set in, and Mexico���s foreign debt would supply ammunition to its spate of liberalizations under the PRI. Thornton reflects that the ���revolution in development��� had inadvertently been ���used to dismantle the country���s state-led developmental project.��� But the energy sector remained largely off the table, and capital would have to bide its time until the PRI returned to power in 2012 under Nieto. This return saw it continue on a path of liberalization, now explicitly targeting the energy sector through the Energy Transition Law of 2013. PEMEX was cleared to do business with private companies on exploration, which came with various modalities of privatizing reserves that were discovered. But it was the spate of reforms privatizing the power sector that drove the mass confrontation today.
To liberalization and back againThe opening salvo in the war for Mexico���s power sector came in 1992 under former president Carlos Salinas de Gortari, when gas companies were afforded power-purchase agreements (PPAs), locking the government into purchasing their power at agreed-upon prices for decades. Two decades later, former CFE officials are in court over awarding contracts to a US gas company ���which had no previous experience in the energy industry.��� Despite their lawyer���s connection to the Salinas family, these contracts were under Nieto, whom Sean Sweeney of Trade Unions for Energy Democracy calls the ���poster child for ���the standard model��� … power sector privatization.��� Nieto���s reforma energ��tica (energy reform), as is standard, empowered the market over the public sector. Private companies were allowed to produce and sell power for the first time, while PEMEX and CFE were demoted from state-owned enterprises to ���productive state enterprises��� with corporate structures. The CFE was to be ���unbundled��� and mandated to ensure ���value creation��� by ���ensuring the country���s energy security.���
Unbundling is a preliminary step towards liberalizing a power sector. Traditional power utilities��� generation, transmission, and distribution divisions are ���unbundled��� into separate companies. In the case of CFE, its generation was further separated into six entities to compete alongside private generators. These generators were granted PPAs for as long as 20 years with CFE���s transmission and distribution division. But they could also simply bypass the CFE by forming direct contracts with qualified private end users. In Mexico, these PPAs and other contracts were awarded via auction. The first round saw 18 proposals accepted from 11 companies (three from three Mexican companies), while the second round saw 36 proposals accepted from 23 companies spanning 11 countries.
These private generators could count on significant support from the state. Fixed transmission charges were scrapped, and the extensive transmission infrastructure required to connect renewable energy projects was also covered by the public. Companies were also afforded depreciation-based tax breaks. This was justified on the basis of climate commitments, since solar and wind projects dominated the auctions. As is so often the case, Mexico adopted the ���privatize to decarbonize��� mantra. It was therefore able to further justify these projects as they expropriated the lands of local communities and deepened their inequality. But such matters are apparently not worth considering. AMLO���s battle with private generators is simply reversing ���positive trends in Mexico���s energy industry��� in favor of its ���dangerous addiction to fossil fuels.���
Portrayals of AMLO as anti-climate and pro-fossil fuels (in his support of PEMEX) have gone beyond the business press to garner condemnation from Bill Gates and Mexico���s North American trade partners. Seemingly, all his critics have chosen to ignore the dire state of the energy sector he inherited. The Mexican government could do little when the Texas blackouts of last year came their way. Northern Mexico receives up to 80% of its power from private generators that answer to nothing but their bottom line. While the national electricity demand never exceeded 47 gigawatt-hours (GWh), Nieto���s auctions had granted enough projects to take the supply to 84 GWh. Another reality of renewable energy that is consistently ignored is the impact of its intermittency. The existing Mexican grid could not handle the surges and drops in supply that accompany changes in the weather, and private generators refused to support the upgrades necessary to ameliorate them.
In a landmark memorandum to energy officials, AMLO described the CFE as ���almost in ruins: indebted, with its productive capacities reduced [and] subject to regulation that privileges individuals in the implementation of the energy reform. The deep-rooted vices of inefficiency, corruption and waste were preserved.��� He further laid out his own plan ���to implement the new policy to rescue Pemex and CFE it may be necessary to propose a new energy reform, we do not rule out that possibility; that is to say, the option to present an initiative for constitutional reform.���
In 2021, AMLO���s reformed Electric Industry Act (EIA) was signed into law, outraging international investors. Since its passage, AMLO���s energy ministry has canceled various transmission expansion contracts, demanding that private generators cover these substantial costs that are perennially excluded from total production costs in favor of just marginal costs. The piggybacking of large businesses��� ���self-supply��� on the grid, described as a mercado negro (black market), was also canceled. Given the dire state of the CFE under Nieto, AMLO���s reforms, pilloried by some as ���(counter)reforms,��� are better characterized by Sweeney���s description of a ���wall of resistance.���
Nieto���s reforms locked the CFE into a subservient position to private generators, whose power got priority. This leaves the CFE in the position of having to back up the intermittency of these generators at a loss. Last year, the CFE reported that its dealings with private producers had cost some 20 billion US dollars through subsidies, exchange rate and inflation risks, irregular supply of power, and rising rates. Instead of leaving the CFE to continue to waste away, AMLO���s law guarantees its central position in supplying the nation���s power. And contrary to critiques of fossil addiction, it is the CFE���s emission-free hydroelectric plants that get first priority, and whose underutilization had previously caused floods.
But the private sector has fought back and taken the government to court. After various losses in local courts, the EIA survived the country���s supreme court, despite a majority of justices voting against key sections such as the prioritization of CFE. AMLO has also attempted to write the law into the constitution through congress. He held a referendum on his presidency in the buildup, and while he won with 93% of the vote, only 18% of eligible voters turned up. It all made little difference during the vote on constitutionalizing the reforms to the EIA, where ALMO���s bid fell well short of the two-thirds majority required in the lower house. Seemingly undeterred, AMLO simply nationalized Mexico���s lithium reserves (a critical mineral for clean energy) with a simple majority two days later.
Mexico is taking back its energy sovereignty, and it has tasked CFE with the job. In doing so, it is laying the groundwork for a potential public pathway towards decarbonization. Irrespective of its much trumped low cost, renewable energy is still not profitable enough. The market-led transition is failing us. We need public investment divorced from the necessity of profitability. We need what Matt Huber and Fred Stafford call ���big public power.��� AMLO is fighting for big public power, but it is not clear whether decarbonization is a pillar of his agenda. He did that ���Mexico is going to show how it is one of the biggest producers of clean energy,��� but did so in the face of a report by his own energy ministry that they are falling short of their targets as private renewables are curtailed. This has been enough for green and climate organizations such as Greenpeace the government over the EIA. It is a far too common occurrence that in its desperation for decarbonization, the climate movement lines up behind renewable capital against relatively fossilized public utilities.
Lessons for South AfricaThe similarity between the Mexican and South African situations is uncanny. Mexico can be viewed as perhaps a few years ahead of where South Africa is now. South Africa is set to embark upon its own self-supply ���Wild West��� pathway which will no doubt bring about the same problems as it did in Mexico. The combination of the land requirements of renewables, the track records of private generators, and South Africa���s land question creates a ticking time bomb. Eskom (South Africa���s national power utility) has been unbundled just like the CFE was, although the process is not entirely complete. The South African government���s renewable energy plans are almost entirely reliant on private capital through auctions producing long-term PPAs. The priority of the power supply from Eskom���s generation division will almost certainly be downgraded by its future ���Independent Transmission System and Market Operator��� in favor of clean private generators, but it will have to keep its plants running to fulfill its ultimate purpose to back up the grid.
That Eskom intends to dramatically increase its gas-power capacity seemingly confirms this. The case of the CFE under Nieto demonstrates that this arrangement will not be economically feasible without significant tariff hikes and continued bailouts. But the plan has always been for Eskom to be sidelined. Like with the CFE and PEMEX, Eskom has also been steadily corporatized, its procurement and provision of services outsourced. Cheap renewables and climate change have made the final blow of unbundling appealing beyond capital. But these play second fiddle to perceptions that Eskom is beyond saving. With South Africans constantly in the dark, such perceptions are hardly unwarranted. This is where the Mexican and South African situations diverge. There is no AMLO, no MORENA, in South Africa.
I have argued elsewhere that given the choice between capital and the vanguard of state capture, the former is preferred. But it should not be accepted. To reject this binary, the left needs to go beyond putting credible options on the table (many already have) to building a political entity capable of delivering it���and taking back the defense of Eskom from those who would continue to loot it. MORENA has centered its politics and much of its policies on tackling corruption���this is an absolute necessity for any prospective South African formation. Of course, AMLO did not magically appear in 2018; he had received over 30% of the votes in the previous two elections. But making the South African public pathway credible does not necessarily require taking the reins of government. AMLO and MORENA have demonstrated an alternative, and the South African left would do well to look to Mexico for some answers.
June 20, 2022
World Refugee Day from the US-Mexico border
Josiane Moukam. Image courtesy Epsacio Migrante �� 2022. Africa Is a Country Radio put together a special show for Worldwide FM on World Refugee Day (June 20th). In it, we take a visit to the US-Mexico Border and interview Josiane Moukam, Cameroonian activist living in Tijuana who works with the Espacio Migrante, an organization that assists migrants who arrive in Tijuana from all over the world. We ask her about the experience of African migrants in Mexico in particular, and what the importance of World Refugee Day is to her. The interview was conducted by Africa Is a Country video director, Ebony Bailey.
Listen below, or on Worldwide FM and follow us on Mixcloud.
A new politics, from the ground up
Khayelitsha Township, Cape Town, South Africa. Credit Julie Laurent via Flickr CC BY-NC-ND 2.0. For more than a decade, Axolile Notywala has worked alongside fellow organizers and activists in Khayelitsha, Cape Town to tackle infrastructure failures facing Black communities living in that township and its adjacent informal settlements. These failures grow out of the legacy of apartheid that deprived Black people and other communities of color of public infrastructure.
The promise of transformation that came with the fall of apartheid and the 1994 emergence of a full franchise for all South Africans have fallen short. Today, millions of South Africans are navigating worsening economic circumstances. Across the country, we are witnessing growing political disaffection. And in the vacuum of transformational leadership left by the contemporary political class, xenophobic talking points are emerging as a rallying call for various political parties.
Cape Town���s ongoing challenges are emblematic of the rest of South Africa. Notably, communities remain fractured���the outcome of the apartheid legacy that forced communities of color to live apart from each other, limiting their capacity to build power together. Notywala believes that transformation requires a movement that transcends these divides and builds solidarity across communities, and from the ground up. Drawing on his previous experience, he is working to build the Movement for Collective Action and Racial Equity (Movement for CARE), which particularly seeks to bridge the long-standing divide between Black communities and Coloured (largely multiracial) communities. As Notywala observes in the Q&A below, given that these communities are marginalized in similar ways, they stand to gain political ground when in solidarity. The conversation was edited for length and clarity.
Dupe OyeboluCan you give us a brief account of the political organizing currently happening in Cape Town?
Axolile NotywalaA lot of organizing over the last few years has focused on spatial segregation, which is a legacy of apartheid. Under apartheid, the darker the color of your skin, the more you were pushed outside of the main central business district and city centers.
So as a Black African���again that���s an apartheid label in itself���I live in Khayelitsha which is about 30 kilometers away from the city center. The people who live around the city center and in the suburbs of Cape Town are predominantly white and, in the middle, you have mostly Coloured communities. As a result, a lot of political organizing has been around trying to get people back into the city center because that’s where the best public services are. And those services range from basic services to schools, roads, and public transport.
Dupe OyeboluYou already started to reflect on the historical context of Black and Coloured communities under apartheid spatial segregation; can you briefly offer a little more context on the dynamics between these communities?
Axolile NotywalaThis is something that I���m also trying to better understand in my work. But its roots are in apartheid legislation, in particular the Group Areas Act, which divided people based on their skin color. Under the Act, Black African people would be segregated in different parts of the city. Coloured people in different parts. Indian people in different parts. And white people in different parts. This was the divide-and-conquer strategy of the apartheid regime. The aim was to make sure that all these non-white groupings did not mix, otherwise, they might become the majority and have more power.
This divide-and-conquer strategy meant moving people away from each other. If you were to look at the geography of Cape Town, you���d see that it’s separated by railways or national roads, which make it difficult for people to cross neighborhoods. The further away you are from the central business district or the city center, the harder it is to go to the next neighborhood. Two colleagues call Cape Town ���the city of islands��� in their book, to indicate just how separated communities are.
This spatial geography, in terms of who lives where, has predominantly remained the same post-1994���more specifically between Coloured and Black African people.
Most of the organizations working in these communities tend to focus on Black African communities, with very little intentional organizing in Coloured communities. There are a couple of specific challenges that have made this historically difficult. For instance, there are language differences between communities. My mother tongue is Xhosa, while most Coloured people speak Afrikaans. There has also been some rhetoric that the ANC favors Black African people because it is comprised of mostly Black African leaders, though, in reality, they just treat everyone badly.
During apartheid, people were ranked���white people, then Indian people then Coloured people, and then Black African people���and so there���s still that notion that Coloured people are seen as better than Black African people. For many people, it���s just a lack of understanding of the history of how these ideas came about.
In our movement work, we’re trying to bring in the ideas of the Black Consciousness Movement of Steve Biko, which refers to all these non-white people as Black people, thereby doing away with these apartheid connotations.
Dupe OyeboluCould you briefly describe how you came to this work?
Axolile NotywalaWhen I began my Fellowship year in AFRE, I started to reflect on some of the challenges of movement building. I���d considered these issues before, but my time at AFRE allowed me to dig a bit more into concerns of race, white supremacy and anti-Black racism. Having to engage with the dynamics in South Africa and to hear comrades in the US was also important. I specifically remember hearing a US peer���s story of being referred to as a Coloured person in South Africa, and being confused by that because he refers to himself as Black. I think that type of story sparked something on top of reflections that I���d been thinking about.
Prior to that, I started in political organizing and activism, without having really studied politics. And so I participated in this politics and in my activism understanding and dealing with many issues that have that had to do with race and racism, structural and systemic racism and discrimination. But I think because I���d never been part of any political studying���I studied politics through the work���I never had a chance to intentionally dig deep into issues of racial inequality and white supremacy even though my work dealt with those things. Through my involvement in AFRE, I got to think more about those issues alongside the issue of solidarity between communities. It made me want to actually do more work to build solidarity between these two communities who are essentially marginalized in very similar ways, if not the same ways.
Dupe OyeboluWhat challenges have you been facing as you���ve gone about this work?
Axolile NotywalaOne of the difficulties is the fact that many of those involved are also working in different spaces so it���s always difficult for people to commit time to this work. It has also been difficult, even for myself, to start a movement and build it from scratch, while also trying to have full-time work on the side.
This gets into this other challenge of funding and funding movements in the context of South Africa. I���m still trying to have more engagements around how donors and funders understand movement building, because sometimes there���s different treatment of movements versus NGOs, even though there can be blurred lines between those two types of organizations. These professionalized NGOs are able to more easily secure funding than movements, especially when movements start.
The next challenge has been how to actually build this conversation with some of the Coloured comrades. Hopefully, in the next few months, this is something that we���ll be able to do. There are some we���ve been able to bring into the movement, but I think because of the depth of the divide, it���s going to take a whole lot more. And even though there are quite a lot of urgent issues around housing, police brutality, and illegal evictions that people in the movement want to organize around, we need to start the movement-building process from the beginning in terms of political education. In order for us to try and build solidarity and bridge these divides, there’s an unlearning process in terms of how we understand the politics of this city and of these divisions.
Dupe OyeboluGiven all that���s happening in the country, and these challenges, where does your hope lie, for the years ahead?
Axolile NotywalaWhen we started the movement-building process last year, it was partly geared around political power, people taking space and taking power in the political arena. For context, many people in the spaces that my comrades and I have organized are essentially fed up with mainstream politics and mainstream political parties, the ANC, the EFF, the DA, all of them.
And as someone who has organized for the last 12 years or so, I recognise that a big challenge is not having anyone on the inside, within government or within politics, who is able to take up some of the policy positions we���ve developed. As a result, my comrades and I have been thinking around the concept of radical municipalism, which essentially deals with the question of, ���how do we bring politics back to the people, especially at the local level?���
Based on this, one of our goals was to see how to support people outside of these mainstream political parties in taking up power.
What gives me hope is that many people were engaged when we brought these ideas to them before the elections last year, even though we didn���t have much time. People saw this as a viable political alternative, as political hope where people have long felt hopeless. Seeing people self-organize into community action networks during strict lockdown levels during the pandemic brought another hope. Most of these community action networks were geared towards these politics that we are trying to work toward, the politics of care, where they provided humanitarian support for people who didn’t have food or didn���t have resources.
For me, these instances indicate that there is an appetite among people to organize and to be organized; there just needs to be an umbrella body able to bring people together. And I feel like the movement and the ideas around the Movement for CARE offer exactly that.
Dupe OyeboluAny final reflections?
Axolile NotywalaGiven the degree of segregation in Cape Town, many people are still questioning whether we have freedom. People will tell you that we have democracy, but we aren���t free as yet, because we aren���t able to move or live in different spaces of the city. Because of how the infrastructure in Cape Town is, there still isn���t freedom for people to be in solidarity with each other. And this is 28 years after democracy.
Because part of the movement-building process is to create those spaces of conversation, I���d like to bring together different people from different backgrounds around conversations on this idea of what it means to be free in Cape Town, in South Africa.
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