Sean Jacobs's Blog, page 96

Punks of the Witwatersrand

The Rise and Fall of National Wake, South Africa���s first multiracial punk band at the height of apartheid, that sang about state violence and political freedoms. Still from This is National Wake.

The history of South African music under apartheid can roughly be divided into two categories. The first, and arguably the best documented, is that associated with the exile Jazz diaspora���think Miriam Makeba at the UN and Hugh Masekela performing at London���s anti-apartheid rallies. The second is of those musicians who remained in the country and carved out musical spaces and subcultures in a context of police harassment, surveillance, and relative isolation.

A new documentary, This is National Wake, by Mirissa Neff sheds valuable light on this under- examined second category. Like many others, I first heard of National Wake through the 2011 film Punk in Africa. Live footage from that documentary is electrifying. Who knew that South Africa had a band that sounded like a mashup of The Clash, Stooges, and Gang of Four? Almost no one, which makes Neff���s documentary all the more valuable.

National Wake emerged from a student commune just north of downtown Johannesburg. In the late 1970s an increasing number of progressive white students from Wits University had moved to the neighborhoods of Parktown, Hillbrow, and Yeoville. With them came countercultural identities and spaces that provided opportunities for political organizing, multi-racial collaboration, and artistic exploration.

Anyone who has seen the documentary Searching for Sugarman (about the Mexican-American musician���s appeal among white South African army conscripts) will have some sense of the insularity of South African cultural life during this period. Apartheid delineated firm boundaries between ethno-racial groups. Afrikaans radio focused on European classical and folk music, while Radio Bantu focused on ���traditional African music.��� Those groups who had obvious cross-cultural references and combined musical stylings were heavily discouraged. Jazz, in particular, with its racial mixing and connections to African American culture, was seen as particularly threatening.

In this environment what National Wake did was radical. They played music as a racially integrated band, sang about state violence and political freedoms, and combined musical genres.

Their biggest hit, International News, evokes a murder scene, where a blanket draped over a body barely conceals the horror of apartheid violence below:

Put a blanket over Soweto
They put a blanket, nowhere to go, no
They put a blanket over the news
They put a blanket, nothing to choose

Eschewing the usual talking-heads format, the documentary combines gorgeously grainy Super 8mm footage of the band���s live shows with commentary, primarily, by the only surviving band member, Ivan Kadey, and former housemate and roadie Vusi Shibambo. The other band members included two brothers, Gary and Punka Khoza, alongside Paul Giraud and Steve Moni. The Khozas are black, Giraud and Moni white.

At the opening of the film, we hear Kadey reflect: ���We were all cast in roles because of that oppressive system, but music is different. There���s an intimacy of something happening in the moment and then it���s gone.��� It���s a powerful opening statement, and the rest of the film attempts to answer the question of whether music can help us transcend these socialized divisions.

The footage, however, is the real star. High energy gigs on Rocky Street in Yeoville, domestic workers in doeks (headwraps) dancing alongside hippies in the streets. Sweaty bodies dancing cheek by jowl in a Sharpeville club, the black township made famous two decades earlier by police violence against protesting black crowds. As Shibambo puts it, ���When we were dancing, there was no apartheid.���

But of course, apartheid was there when they returned home, when they played to segregated audiences, and when people assumed Kadey was the leader of the band because he was white. These dynamics came to a head when, at the height of their success, they were invited to play the Chelsea Theater. They could perform as a multi-racial band, but to a whites-only audience.

It was all too much for Gary, he retreated to Soweto until Ivan went to make peace, but the writing was on the wall. It was unclear to Gary where the band would take him aside from the back of a police van with a cracked skull. The risks for him and his brother were far greater and the possibilities of success more limited. Gary eventually quit the band and left the country for England where, at least for a time, he became a part of the London jazz scene.

It���s here that the documentary takes a darker turn. We hear from Gary���s ex-wife, who tells of his mental breakdown during this period. She left with their child, and he returned to South Africa. In one of the more moving scenes, we see a mute Gary hunched over a piano, improvising a sprawling melodic piece, light and airy, at the end he simply looks up.

Still from This is National Wake.

The band member���s trajectories after the breakup of National Wake provide a depressingly familiar South African story. Kadey falls back on his architectural training, leaving the country for a successful career in the US. The Khoza brothers meanwhile struggle to realize their musical aspirations at home and abroad. They didn���t have much to fall back on. We learn that Gary committed suicide and Punka died of AIDS.

Documentarians make editorial choices about the elements of the story to focus on and how much context is necessary. At just over one hour, though, it seems a missed opportunity to provide a more thorough exploration of this complex and overlooked period of South African music history.

National Wake emerged at a particular time and place. The film provides the usual historic markers: Sharpeville in 1960, Soweto in 1976, the 1985 state of emergency. These are no doubt important, but what of the killing of Steve Biko in 1977, the assassination of Rick Turner in 1978, conscription and the war in Angola?

Because National Wake emerged from the radical student milieu of the late 1970s, this context is critical and could provide an opportunity to better understand the political events that defined the counterculture movements of this period.

Then there���s the space of Johannesburg itself. Kadey has described Parktown and Yeoville as critical to the emergence of the band because they were, at least for part of the day, somewhat integrated. Residents of these neighborhoods recalled them as spaces where apartheid rules were often overlooked and racial mixing occurred at a range of venues. It is unfortunate that the documentary does not dig a bit deeper into how these urban dynamics made this music possible.

While National Wake were the only multi-racial punk band of this period, they were hardly the only band making angry, subversive music. In 1983, Kadey co-founded the Shifty Label, which would release multiple anti-apartheid albums and become associated with the alternative Afrikaner Vo��lvry movement. We don���t get a sense of these musical connections or the broader punk scene that formed around this label in the early 1980s. There is significant opportunity for filmmakers to document bands like The Genuines, a goema-punk group from Athlone, a coloured township in Cape Town, or the Kalahari Surfers, Warrick Sony���s experimental sound art group featuring the poet Lesego Rampolokeng from Soweto.

For those of us who knew nothing of this history and suffered through the Mango Groove years of the mid-1990s, this film is a powerful excavation of South Africa���s rich musical past. It demonstrates the power of punk to challenge established orders and build more equitable ways of being together.

Land grabs and conservation propaganda

To preserve biodiversity, protected area lands should be returned to African indigenous communities who play an essential role in conservation. Ngorongoro Crater, Tanzania. Credit David Berkowitz via Flickr CC BY 2.0.

Amid the unprecedented global ecological crisis, Africa still supports one quarter of the world���s biodiversity and the largest assemblages of megafauna. Indigenous Africans of the rangelands, desert, and forests have always protected their fauna and flora. Land where they exercise traditional rights to be central for global biodiversity conservation. But today they are facing the threat of a colossal land grab by Western conservation agencies, and their corporate and state allies, who advocate to double the coverage of protected areas around the world by setting aside 30 percent of terrestrial cover for conservation by 2030.

Protected areas are the national parks, forests, game reserves, and other places from which states evict original inhabitants for biodiversity conservation. They already cover 15.73% of the terrestrial surface. The Global South accounts for 66% of that coverage, primarily located in Africa, the Caribbean and Latin America. Many African countries have set aside between 35%-42% of their national territories exclusively for wildlife and biodiversity compared to 12.45% in the US. Indigenous and human rights activists are sounding the alarm, comparing the 30×30 plan to the second Scramble for Africa, one that would further dispossess, militarize, and privatize the commons in Africa.

An overlooked yet critical perspective of protected areas is their primitive accumulation function to transfer wealth and immaterial values of nature from colonies to colonizers. They start with the violent dispossession of Indigenous communities, followed by militarized control over the territory, and commodification of lands and wildlife resources by the corporate imperialists. The 2022 book, The Violence of Conservation in Africa: State, Militarization and Alternatives, demonstrates why dehumanization and violence against Africans are permanent features of conservation in Africa, and how Western conservation agencies wield power to assault African states��� sovereignty, in order to gain political and economic control over vast areas rich in biodiversity.

The NGO African Parks embodies the growing influence of conservation driven by Western capitalists and their allies in the African political class. Founded by a Dutch billionaire, the agency acquired and manages 14.7 million hectares of land across 11 African countries in West, Central and Southern Africa. It has been at the forefront of the militarization of parks in Africa, recruiting rangers from local communities who receive paramilitary training from French and Israeli military personnel. African Parks is not unique.

Many conservation NGOs are led by Western capitalists who indulge their own private interests and bankroll platforms like Capitals Coalition to push ideas about the best way to save the last remaining African wildlife. Western financiers like Goldman Sachs and The Blackstone Group are working in unison with international conservation NGOs seizing on the biodiversity crisis to package predatory agendas under the guise of conservation. Yet the violence and sheer pace and scale at which conservation in Africa absorbs Indigenous lands to be integrated into the global capitalist system for commodification has gone vastly uncriticized. Why is that, and what forces sustain such an enduring yet insidious image of moral high ground in conservation?

The propaganda machine of conservation

Protecting wildlife requires an understanding of what we are protecting it from. Colonialism, capitalism, and white supremacy birthed this incommensurable ecological crisis including the rapid decline of wildlife populations. It should also be clear that protecting biodiversity dominates the framing of the Black Internationalism movement, while the Convention on Biological Diversity pushes an obfuscating vision of a global society living in harmony with nature that serves little more than to maintain the status quo ushered through a colonial and capitalist global order.

But the propaganda machine in the capitalist core has convinced its population that the poor African and their exploding population are the major drivers of wildlife extinction; that if the poor African, merely disgruntled by the crop raiding elephants roaming in their village, also benefited from conservation they would be motivated to protect wildlife. Never mind all the government resettlement policies, and state sanctioned land grabs by corporations that are pushing the poor African further into dangerous wildlife territory. The African rendered poor by ongoing colonial plunder and wanton expressions of domination. The impoverished African that we collectively deem as disposable, and so the one who must bear the brunt of turning their land into Empire���s private zoo. They deploy dangerous anti-African rhetorical devices using slogans like ���African chainsaw massacre��� and ���Every African is a poacher…��� and convince us that the best ally to save wildlife is the elite class who pays $800 a night to luxuriate in the African wilderness, and the trophy hunter who nearly decimated the elephant population. And so, they tell us that tourism can save wildlife while providing meager employment to the dispossessed Africans.

When conservation organizations are challenged, their response is to sell their position on higher ground by arguing that biodiversity conservation is an ethical necessity even with a legacy rife with racism, dispossession and the central to Indigenous cultures. The appeal of most well-intentioned Western conservationists to consider indigenous rights sounds like a plea on behalf of the voiceless that falls short of calling for full restitution of land rights, stopping the expansion of protected areas and disbanding militarized conservation. None of these accounts interrogate the entire colonial apparatus that reproduces circumstances where landscapes are emptied of people, and the African villager is paid crumbs to serve tourists, while the Western educated researcher incessantly theorizes about conservation policy misfits, and has Africans convinced that we have no choice but to negotiate with colonizers about issues on our lands.

Our media acculturation through movies like The Lion King and Out of Africa cement imaginaries of benign conservation with such tenacious reign over our imagination that doesn���t allow any critical analysis of who and what elephants and rhinoceroses really need protection from. Instead, they produce self-proclaimed wildlife defenders with narrow sets of interest focusing on single species conservation. As a result, mainstream conservationists���largely dominated by middle- and upper-class liberals of the Global North���adopt as their symbolic leader, White conservationists like Jane Goodall whose image has been rendered palatable, and non-threatening to corporate interest. Yet, they rarely contend with the forces that murdered the recalcitrant and uncompromising land and water protectors, such as Fikele Ntashangase and Berta C��ceres, who launched a full assault on rapacious corporations and their state allies to protect the ecosystems that give and sustain life for humans and wildlife. Instead, they pitch the tired narrative about empowering poor Africans and turning them into foot soldiers in their orchestrated war on wildlife. What is most dangerous about these reductionist takes is that voracious forces are seizing on the conservation-development nexus as a way of packaging predatory agendas under the guise of conservation, to acquire and control natural resources in areas of the Global South rich in biodiversity.

As we think about the future of conservation alongside the liberation struggles of Black and Indigenous peoples, privatizing and militarizing the commons to ���protect��� biodiversity have no place in our world. Instead, land should be restored to its original owners by birthright, where they can exercise traditional rights that have proven to be central in global conservation.

The struggle to protect land, water and wildlife from destructive forces is deeply entangled with the de-colonial struggle. Survival International has been at the forefront of the battle to decolonize conservation by working with Indigenous communities to protect their land and livelihoods, and offering a vision we should all draw lessons from to save the last remaining biodiversity hotspots.

Land Grabs and Conservation Propaganda

To preserve biodiversity, protected area lands should be returned to African indigenous communities who play an essential role in conservation. Ngorongoro Crater, Tanzania. Credit David Berkowitz via Flickr CC BY 2.0.

Amid the unprecedented global ecological crisis, Africa still supports one quarter of the world���s biodiversity and the largest assemblages of megafauna. Indigenous Africans of the rangelands, desert, and forests have always protected their fauna and flora. Land where they exercise traditional rights to be central for global biodiversity conservation. But today they are facing the threat of a colossal land grab by Western conservation agencies, and their corporate and state allies, who advocate to double the coverage of protected areas around the world by setting aside 30 percent of terrestrial cover for conservation by 2030.

Protected areas are the national parks, forests, game reserves, and other places from which states evict original inhabitants for biodiversity conservation. They already cover 15.73% of the terrestrial surface. The Global South accounts for 66% of that coverage, primarily located in Africa, the Caribbean and Latin America. Many African countries have set aside between 35%-42% of their national territories exclusively for wildlife and biodiversity compared to 12.45% in the US. Indigenous and human rights activists are sounding the alarm, comparing the 30×30 plan to the second Scramble for Africa, one that would further dispossess, militarize, and privatize the commons in Africa.

An overlooked yet critical perspective of protected areas is their primitive accumulation function to transfer wealth and immaterial values of nature from colonies to colonizers. They start with the violent dispossession of Indigenous communities, followed by militarized control over the territory, and commodification of lands and wildlife resources by the corporate imperialists. The 2022 book, The Violence of Conservation in Africa: State, Militarization and Alternatives, demonstrates why dehumanization and violence against Africans are permanent features of conservation in Africa, and how Western conservation agencies wield power to assault African states��� sovereignty, in order to gain political and economic control over vast areas rich in biodiversity.

The NGO African Parks embodies the growing influence of conservation driven by Western capitalists and their allies in the African political class. Founded by a Dutch billionaire, the agency acquired and manages 14.7 million hectares of land across 11 African countries in West, Central and Southern Africa. It has been at the forefront of the militarization of parks in Africa, recruiting rangers from local communities who receive paramilitary training from French and Israeli military personnel. African Parks is not unique.

Many conservation NGOs are led by Western capitalists who indulge their own private interests and bankroll platforms like Capitals Coalition to push ideas about the best way to save the last remaining African wildlife. Western financiers like Goldman Sachs and The Blackstone Group are working in unison with international conservation NGOs seizing on the biodiversity crisis to package predatory agendas under the guise of conservation. Yet the violence and sheer pace and scale at which conservation in Africa absorbs Indigenous lands to be integrated into the global capitalist system for commodification has gone vastly uncriticized. Why is that, and what forces sustain such an enduring yet insidious image of moral high ground in conservation?

The propaganda machine of conservation

Protecting wildlife requires an understanding of what we are protecting it from. Colonialism, capitalism, and white supremacy birthed this incommensurable ecological crisis including the rapid decline of wildlife populations. It should also be clear that protecting biodiversity dominates the framing of the Black Internationalism movement, while the Convention on Biological Diversity pushes an obfuscating vision of a global society living in harmony with nature that serves little more than to maintain the status quo ushered through a colonial and capitalist global order.

But the propaganda machine in the capitalist core has convinced its population that the poor African and their exploding population are the major drivers of wildlife extinction; that if the poor African, merely disgruntled by the crop raiding elephants roaming in their village, also benefited from conservation they would be motivated to protect wildlife. Never mind all the government resettlement policies, and state sanctioned land grabs by corporations that are pushing the poor African further into dangerous wildlife territory. The African rendered poor by ongoing colonial plunder and wanton expressions of domination. The impoverished African that we collectively deem as disposable, and so the one who must bear the brunt of turning their land into Empire���s private zoo. They deploy dangerous anti-African rhetorical devices using slogans like ���African chainsaw massacre��� and ���Every African is a poacher…��� and convince us that the best ally to save wildlife is the elite class who pays $800 a night to luxuriate in the African wilderness, and the trophy hunter who nearly decimated the elephant population. And so, they tell us that tourism can save wildlife while providing meager employment to the dispossessed Africans.

When conservation organizations are challenged, their response is to sell their position on higher ground by arguing that biodiversity conservation is an ethical necessity even with a legacy rife with racism, dispossession and the central to Indigenous cultures. The appeal of most well-intentioned Western conservationists to consider indigenous rights sounds like a plea on behalf of the voiceless that falls short of calling for full restitution of land rights, stopping the expansion of protected areas and disbanding militarized conservation. None of these accounts interrogate the entire colonial apparatus that reproduces circumstances where landscapes are emptied of people, and the African villager is paid crumbs to serve tourists, while the Western educated researcher incessantly theorizes about conservation policy misfits, and has Africans convinced that we have no choice but to negotiate with colonizers about issues on our lands.

Our media acculturation through movies like The Lion King and Out of Africa cement imaginaries of benign conservation with such tenacious reign over our imagination that doesn���t allow any critical analysis of who and what elephants and rhinoceroses really need protection from. Instead, they produce self-proclaimed wildlife defenders with narrow sets of interest focusing on single species conservation. As a result, mainstream conservationists���largely dominated by middle- and upper-class liberals of the Global North���adopt as their symbolic leader, White conservationists like Jane Goodall whose image has been rendered palatable, and non-threatening to corporate interest. Yet, they rarely contend with the forces that murdered the recalcitrant and uncompromising land and water protectors, such as Fikele Ntashangase and Berta C��ceres, who launched a full assault on rapacious corporations and their state allies to protect the ecosystems that give and sustain life for humans and wildlife. Instead, they pitch the tired narrative about empowering poor Africans and turning them into foot soldiers in their orchestrated war on wildlife. What is most dangerous about these reductionist takes is that voracious forces are seizing on the conservation-development nexus as a way of packaging predatory agendas under the guise of conservation, to acquire and control natural resources in areas of the Global South rich in biodiversity.

As we think about the future of conservation alongside the liberation struggles of Black and Indigenous peoples, privatizing and militarizing the commons to ���protect��� biodiversity have no place in our world. Instead, land should be restored to its original owners by birthright, where they can exercise traditional rights that have proven to be central in global conservation.

The struggle to protect land, water and wildlife from destructive forces is deeply entangled with the de-colonial struggle. Survival International has been at the forefront of the battle to decolonize conservation by working with Indigenous communities to protect their land and livelihoods, and offering a vision we should all draw lessons from to save the last remaining biodiversity hotspots.

Land grabs and the propaganda of conservation

o preserve biodiversity, protected area lands should be returned to African indigenous communities who play an essential role in conservation. Ngorongoro Crater, Tanzania. Credit David Berkowitz via Flickr CC BY 2.0.

Amid the unprecedented global ecological crisis, Africa still supports one quarter of the world���s biodiversity and the largest assemblages of megafauna. Indigenous Africans of the rangelands, desert, and forests have always protected their fauna and flora. Land where they exercise traditional rights to be central for global biodiversity conservation. But today they are facing the threat of a colossal land grab by Western conservation agencies, and their corporate and state allies, who advocate to double the coverage of protected areas around the world by setting aside 30 percent of terrestrial cover for conservation by 2030.

Protected areas are the national parks, forests, game reserves, and other places from which states evict original inhabitants for biodiversity conservation. They already cover 15.73% of the terrestrial surface. The Global South accounts for 66% of that coverage, primarily located in Africa, the Caribbean and Latin America. Many African countries have set aside between 35%-42% of their national territories exclusively for wildlife and biodiversity compared to 12.45% in the US. Indigenous and human rights activists are sounding the alarm, comparing the 30×30 plan to the second Scramble for Africa, one that would further dispossess, militarize, and privatize the commons in Africa.

An overlooked yet critical perspective of protected areas is their primitive accumulation function to transfer wealth and immaterial values of nature from colonies to colonizers. They start with the violent dispossession of Indigenous communities, followed by militarized control over the territory, and commodification of lands and wildlife resources by the corporate imperialists. The 2022 book, The Violence of Conservation in Africa: State, Militarization and Alternatives, demonstrates why dehumanization and violence against Africans are permanent features of conservation in Africa, and how Western conservation agencies wield power to assault African states��� sovereignty, in order to gain political and economic control over vast areas rich in biodiversity.

The NGO African Parks embodies the growing influence of conservation driven by Western capitalists and their allies in the African political class. Founded by a Dutch billionaire, the agency acquired and manages 14.7 million hectares of land across 11 African countries in West, Central and Southern Africa. It has been at the forefront of the militarization of parks in Africa, recruiting rangers from local communities who receive paramilitary training from French and Israeli military personnel. African Parks is not unique.

Many conservation NGOs are led by Western capitalists who indulge their own private interests and bankroll platforms like Capitals Coalition to push ideas about the best way to save the last remaining African wildlife. Western financiers like Goldman Sachs and The Blackstone Group are working in unison with international conservation NGOs seizing on the biodiversity crisis to package predatory agendas under the guise of conservation. Yet the violence and sheer pace and scale at which conservation in Africa absorbs Indigenous lands to be integrated into the global capitalist system for commodification has gone vastly uncriticized. Why is that, and what forces sustain such an enduring yet insidious image of moral high ground in conservation?

The propaganda machine of conservation

Protecting wildlife requires an understanding of what we are protecting it from. Colonialism, capitalism, and white supremacy birthed this incommensurable ecological crisis including the rapid decline of wildlife populations. It should also be clear that protecting biodiversity dominates the framing of the Black Internationalism movement, while the Convention on Biological Diversity pushes an obfuscating vision of a global society living in harmony with nature that serves little more than to maintain the status quo ushered through a colonial and capitalist global order.

But the propaganda machine in the capitalist core has convinced its population that the poor African and their exploding population are the major drivers of wildlife extinction; that if the poor African, merely disgruntled by the crop raiding elephants roaming in their village, also benefited from conservation they would be motivated to protect wildlife. Never mind all the government resettlement policies, and state sanctioned land grabs by corporations that are pushing the poor African further into dangerous wildlife territory. The African rendered poor by ongoing colonial plunder and wanton expressions of domination. The impoverished African that we collectively deem as disposable, and so the one who must bear the brunt of turning their land into Empire���s private zoo. They deploy dangerous anti-African rhetorical devices using slogans like ���African chainsaw massacre��� and ���Every African is a poacher…��� and convince us that the best ally to save wildlife is the elite class who pays $800 a night to luxuriate in the African wilderness, and the trophy hunter who nearly decimated the elephant population. And so, they tell us that tourism can save wildlife while providing meager employment to the dispossessed Africans.

When conservation organizations are challenged, their response is to sell their position on higher ground by arguing that biodiversity conservation is an ethical necessity even with a legacy rife with racism, dispossession and the central to Indigenous cultures. The appeal of most well-intentioned Western conservationists to consider indigenous rights sounds like a plea on behalf of the voiceless that falls short of calling for full restitution of land rights, stopping the expansion of protected areas and disbanding militarized conservation. None of these accounts interrogate the entire colonial apparatus that reproduces circumstances where landscapes are emptied of people, and the African villager is paid crumbs to serve tourists, while the Western educated researcher incessantly theorizes about conservation policy misfits, and has Africans convinced that we have no choice but to negotiate with colonizers about issues on our lands.

Our media acculturation through movies like The Lion King and Out of Africa cement imaginaries of benign conservation with such tenacious reign over our imagination that doesn���t allow any critical analysis of who and what elephants and rhinoceroses really need protection from. Instead, they produce self-proclaimed wildlife defenders with narrow sets of interest focusing on single species conservation. As a result, mainstream conservationists���largely dominated by middle- and upper-class liberals of the Global North���adopt as their symbolic leader, White conservationists like Jane Goodall whose image has been rendered palatable, and non-threatening to corporate interest. Yet, they rarely contend with the forces that murdered the recalcitrant and uncompromising land and water protectors, such as Fikele Ntashangase and Berta C��ceres, who launched a full assault on rapacious corporations and their state allies to protect the ecosystems that give and sustain life for humans and wildlife. Instead, they pitch the tired narrative about empowering poor Africans and turning them into foot soldiers in their orchestrated war on wildlife. What is most dangerous about these reductionist takes is that voracious forces are seizing on the conservation-development nexus as a way of packaging predatory agendas under the guise of conservation, to acquire and control natural resources in areas of the Global South rich in biodiversity.

As we think about the future of conservation alongside the liberation struggles of Black and Indigenous peoples, privatizing and militarizing the commons to ���protect��� biodiversity have no place in our world. Instead, land should be restored to its original owners by birthright, where they can exercise traditional rights that have proven to be central in global conservation.

The struggle to protect land, water and wildlife from destructive forces is deeply entangled with the de-colonial struggle. Survival International has been at the forefront of the battle to decolonize conservation by working with Indigenous communities to protect their land and livelihoods, and offering a vision we should all draw lessons from to save the last remaining biodiversity hotspots.

The propaganda of biodiversity conservation

Biodiversity conservation in Africa is a pretext to dispossess indigenous communities for imperialist primitive accumulation. To preserve biodiversity, protected area lands should be returned to African indigenous communities who play an essential role in conservation. Ngorongoro Crater, Tanzania. Credit David Berkowitz via Flickr CC BY 2.0.

Amid the unprecedented global ecological crisis, Africa still supports one quarter of the world���s biodiversity and the largest assemblages of megafauna. Indigenous Africans of the rangelands, desert, and forests have always protected their fauna and flora. Land where they exercise traditional rights to be central for global biodiversity conservation. But today they are facing the threat of a colossal land grab by Western conservation agencies, and their corporate and state allies, who advocate to double the coverage of protected areas around the world by setting aside 30 percent of terrestrial cover for conservation by 2030.

Protected areas are the national parks, forests, game reserves, and other places from which states evict original inhabitants for biodiversity conservation. They already cover 15.73% of the terrestrial surface. The Global South accounts for 66% of that coverage, primarily located in Africa, the Caribbean and Latin America. Many African countries have set aside between 35%-42% of their national territories exclusively for wildlife and biodiversity compared to 12.45% in the US. Indigenous and human rights activists are sounding the alarm, comparing the 30×30 plan to the second Scramble for Africa, one that would further dispossess, militarize, and privatize the commons in Africa.

An overlooked yet critical perspective of protected areas is their primitive accumulation function to transfer wealth and immaterial values of nature from colonies to colonizers. They start with the violent dispossession of Indigenous communities, followed by militarized control over the territory, and commodification of lands and wildlife resources by the corporate imperialists. The 2022 book, The Violence of Conservation in Africa: State, Militarization and Alternatives, demonstrates why dehumanization and violence against Africans are permanent features of conservation in Africa, and how Western conservation agencies wield power to assault African states��� sovereignty, in order to gain political and economic control over vast areas rich in biodiversity.

The NGO African Parks embodies the growing influence of conservation driven by Western capitalists and their allies in the African political class. Founded by a Dutch billionaire, the agency acquired and manages 14.7 million hectares of land across 11 African countries in West, Central and Southern Africa. It has been at the forefront of the militarization of parks in Africa, recruiting rangers from local communities who receive paramilitary training from French and Israeli military personnel. African Parks is not unique.

Many conservation NGOs are led by Western capitalists who indulge their own private interests and bankroll platforms like Capitals Coalition to push ideas about the best way to save the last remaining African wildlife. Western financiers like Goldman Sachs and The Blackstone Group are working in unison with international conservation NGOs seizing on the biodiversity crisis to package predatory agendas under the guise of conservation. Yet the violence and sheer pace and scale at which conservation in Africa absorbs Indigenous lands to be integrated into the global capitalist system for commodification has gone vastly uncriticized. Why is that, and what forces sustain such an enduring yet insidious image of moral high ground in conservation?

The propaganda machine of conservation

Protecting wildlife requires an understanding of what we are protecting it from. Colonialism, capitalism, and white supremacy birthed this incommensurable ecological crisis including the rapid decline of wildlife populations. It should also be clear that protecting biodiversity dominates the framing of the Black Internationalism movement, while the Convention on Biological Diversity pushes an obfuscating vision of a global society living in harmony with nature that serves little more than to maintain the status quo ushered through a colonial and capitalist global order.

But the propaganda machine in the capitalist core has convinced its population that the poor African and their exploding population are the major drivers of wildlife extinction; that if the poor African, merely disgruntled by the crop raiding elephants roaming in their village, also benefited from conservation they would be motivated to protect wildlife. Never mind all the government resettlement policies, and state sanctioned land grabs by corporations that are pushing the poor African further into dangerous wildlife territory. The African rendered poor by ongoing colonial plunder and wanton expressions of domination. The impoverished African that we collectively deem as disposable, and so the one who must bear the brunt of turning their land into Empire���s private zoo. They deploy dangerous anti-African rhetorical devices using slogans like ���African chainsaw massacre��� and ���Every African is a poacher…��� and convince us that the best ally to save wildlife is the elite class who pays $800 a night to luxuriate in the African wilderness, and the trophy hunter who nearly decimated the elephant population. And so, they tell us that tourism can save wildlife while providing meager employment to the dispossessed Africans.

When conservation organizations are challenged, their response is to sell their position on higher ground by arguing that biodiversity conservation is an ethical necessity even with a legacy rife with racism, dispossession and the central to Indigenous cultures. The appeal of most well-intentioned Western conservationists to consider indigenous rights sounds like a plea on behalf of the voiceless that falls short of calling for full restitution of land rights, stopping the expansion of protected areas and disbanding militarized conservation. None of these accounts interrogate the entire colonial apparatus that reproduces circumstances where landscapes are emptied of people, and the African villager is paid crumbs to serve tourists, while the Western educated researcher incessantly theorizes about conservation policy misfits, and has Africans convinced that we have no choice but to negotiate with colonizers about issues on our lands.

Our media acculturation through movies like The Lion King and Out of Africa cement imaginaries of benign conservation with such tenacious reign over our imagination that doesn���t allow any critical analysis of who and what elephants and rhinoceroses really need protection from. Instead, they produce self-proclaimed wildlife defenders with narrow sets of interest focusing on single species conservation. As a result, mainstream conservationists���largely dominated by middle- and upper-class liberals of the Global North���adopt as their symbolic leader, White conservationists like Jane Goodall whose image has been rendered palatable, and non-threatening to corporate interest. Yet, they rarely contend with the forces that murdered the recalcitrant and uncompromising land and water protectors, such as Fikele Ntashangase and Berta C��ceres, who launched a full assault on rapacious corporations and their state allies to protect the ecosystems that give and sustain life for humans and wildlife. Instead, they pitch the tired narrative about empowering poor Africans and turning them into foot soldiers in their orchestrated war on wildlife. What is most dangerous about these reductionist takes is that voracious forces are seizing on the conservation-development nexus as a way of packaging predatory agendas under the guise of conservation, to acquire and control natural resources in areas of the Global South rich in biodiversity.

As we think about the future of conservation alongside the liberation struggles of Black and Indigenous peoples, privatizing and militarizing the commons to ���protect��� biodiversity have no place in our world. Instead, land should be restored to its original owners by birthright, where they can exercise traditional rights that have proven to be central in global conservation.

The struggle to protect land, water and wildlife from destructive forces is deeply entangled with the de-colonial struggle. Survival International has been at the forefront of the battle to decolonize conservation by working with Indigenous communities to protect their land and livelihoods, and offering a vision we should all draw lessons from to save the last remaining biodiversity hotspots.

The institution of Alex Magaisa

Magaisa, who died this month, set agendas, and demanded the highest standards from the political and intellectual classes in Zimbabwe. Alex Magaisa via The Big Saturday Read ��.

Zimbabwe born academic and lawyer Alex Magaisa died suddenly, aged 46, of a cardiac arrest at Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother Hospital in Margate, Kent on June 5. Besides spending most of his career teaching law at the University of Kent in the UK, he was a public intellectual, a prolific columnist, a legal commentator on rule of law and constitutionalism in his native Zimbabwe.

For two decades Magaisa contributed analysis to The Daily News (before it was bombed and banned), online platforms such as New Zimbabwe, and more recently his own blog, The Big Saturday Read, a weekend feast that was in popular demand in Zimbabwe and its diaspora. His ideas set agendas, and demanded the highest standards from the political class. There has been nobody quite like him in contemporary Zimbabwean intellectual life. The outpouring of grief since the announcement of his sudden death has been enormous. Magaisa is considered to be one of the best legal minds of his generation. He was a key adviser in the recent constitution making process in Zimbabwe and features in Camilla Nielsson���s 2014 film documentary Democrats, which offers a glimpse at the political mechanics of a modern African country. He subsequently served in the office of Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai as his chief of staff.

Despite occupying such powerful roles, Magaisa���s medium of choice was Twitter. He spent many hours sharing analysis of Zimbabwean politics, but also engaging with ordinary people about mundane subjects, such as football, gardening, and the rural village where he grew up. This accessibility and openness endeared him to many. He had the gift academics envy, the ability to communicate with many audiences. The art of Magaisa���s public writings was imbued with folkloric wisdoms, the quotidian, and anecdotes from the everyday. Readers saw themselves in his writings, which were stripped of all the legalese.

Magaisa was a subtle and enthralling figure whose sense of community made him connect with people from across the social divide, or who shared opposite political views. We met at the University of Kent campus where I spent four years as a doctoral student between 2008 and 2012. We became friends in part because of our mutual interests in reading and writing. Magaisa is among a lineage of black Zimbabwean intellectuals who have passed through Kent, a place, I would argue, that has quietly influenced the intellectual traditions of Zimbabwe since the 1970s. The University of Kent was one of the first institutions in the UK to recognise and teach postcolonial and Commonwealth studies (including African literature) as areas of scholarly inquiry. Some of the students in the university���s early cohorts included a group of Zimbabweans who had been banished from Rhodesia because of their political activism, and other notable Africans such as Abdulrazak Gurnah, the recent winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature. It was the base from which Musaemura Zimunya, the most prominent of these scholars, almost single-handedly fought for Zimbabwean literature and its writers in the 1970s and early 1980s.

Since 2007, when Magaisa joined the law faculty, he kept this long tradition in Kent alive. I remember him holding court at the K Bar, a popular campus outlet. One of his major gifts was to bring people together. There were no hierarchies in our gatherings. Students, former students, faculty, non-university members congregated at weekends to debate, watch football, braai, and drink. Because we all belonged to different political and social backgrounds there were often fierce debates about the current state of Zimbabwe, and its futures. Magaisa was our high priest without whom all civility would have been lost, punches thrown, or bad words traded. We all learnt from Magaisa���s superpower: the ability to listen to all sides of a story.

It is through this generosity of spirit that also made Magaisa an institution builder. He co-founded think tanks and policy platforms because the ethos of his intellectual project was predicated on collective consciousness. It is too early to tell Magaisa���s legacy, but he has no doubt influenced a generation of Zimbabweans.

Magaisa was born August 10 1975 in Chikomba district, a place from which his intellectual philosophy was deeply anchored. He went to St Francis of Assisi High School and graduated from the University of Zimbabwe with a Bachelor of Laws degree in 1997. He later received a Chevening Scholarship resulting in him graduating with a doctorate in law at the University of Warwick in 2004. He worked as a lawyer and legal manager for Zimbabwean and British firms before joining Kent Law School in 2007.

His sudden death was a shock. Memorial events have been held in Canterbury and Harare. His body will be repatriated for burial in Zimbabwe, where a large crowd is expected to converge to bid farewell to this illustrious son of the soil. He leaves behind a wife, Shamiso, and two sons.

Cricket, lovely cricket

This month on AIAC Radio, Boima invites Liam Brickhill to talk cricket, select some cricket related tunes, and glance at the game from the viewpoint of Zimbabwe. Brian Lara, West Indian cricket team. Image via Wikimedia Commons.

This month, continuing our theme of music and sports, we take as our inspiration the game of cricket. We start by listening to some classic songs that celebrate cricket, particularly from the West Indian side, and then invite Liam Brickhill, who writes on Zimbabwean cricket for Africa Is a Country, to select some songs and talk about his love for the game.

Listen below, or on Worldwide FM and follow us on Mixcloud.

More than a national pastime

Nigeria did not qualify for Qatar 2022. The troubles in the country's football administration reflect the crises in the nation���s political culture. Football Practice. Kaduna, Nigeria. Credit Allan Leonard (@MrUlster) via Flickr CC BY-NC 2.0.

Recent contests over the presidency of the Nigerian Football Federation (NFF) have been keenly contested, with good reason. Nigeria���s size and football pedigree (the Nigerian men���s�� national team has qualified for the World Cup six times and won the African Cup of Nations three times) mean occupants of the NFF presidency have frequently used this position as a launch pad for more senior positions in both the continental (CAF) and global (FIFA) football governing bodies. Amaju Pinnick, the current president, is no exception. He has served as CAF���s First Vice-President and was recently elected to the FIFA Council, the sport���s highest governing committee. Being feted overseas, however, does not mean that Nigerian football is well organized. In this, it reflects the crisis in the country���s political institutions.

After decades of military rule, many state institutions in Nigeria have been corrupted into preferring a governance structure with a lot of power concentrated at the center. This often means abuse of structures set up to keep leaders in check. The last two heads of state, Goodluck Jonathan and incumbent Muhammadu Buhari, undermined institutions that were supposed to be independent, such as the central bank governor and the judiciary. This political partisanship also extended to football administration. Jonathan infamously banned the men���s national team from participating in tournaments after it was knocked out of the 2010 FIFA World Cup in South Africa. It took the threat of an even bigger ban by the global body for the country���s president to reverse course. (FIFA discourages political interference in football administration by governments; it can lead to automatic suspension of a national association and its teams from international competition.)

But the NFF doesn���t always need political interference from political leaders to undermine the game. For example, it has a technical team that has tremendous input in player selection, undermining the power of the national coach to choose their own teams. The NFF has also developed a reputation for abusing its oversight functions by arbitrarily dismissing team captains who dare to complain about mismanagement. There have also been reports of enforced policies of representation to avoid marginalizing parts of the country. Very few fans care about these things when the country plays well. None of the players that started the African Cup of Nations final against Burkina Faso in 2013, which Nigeria won, were from the northern part of the country. Fans from those regions and states still supported the team���s eventual victory in South Africa. Not qualifying for Qatar, however, has brought these sporting failures and mismanagement back into the spotlight.

One of the main complaints about the NFF has been its failure to build domestic structures to develop the local game in favor of a policy that focuses on the national team. Nigeria has a large diaspora and, as a result, can pick from world-class players born in Europe. These players have made Nigeria competitive in African Cup of Nations or World Cup competitions. As a result, there is no incentive to develop and invest in talent back home. This has been a strategy of the NFF under Pinnick and there has been little space for it to be questioned or reviewed. This is not to knock the passion that players born in or based outside Africa can have for their countries. Many of them display true patriotism and commitment to the national team. But their participation in national teams has to be balanced with providing opportunities to promising talents within the country and using that to develop the domestic game. Many of Nigeria���s successes, especially its record of winning five world championships at the U-17 level, have been founded on doing just that, and some might rightly point out that the failure to replicate it at senior level is a tragedy of mismanagement.

The failure of the men���s national team, the Super Eagles, to qualify for Qatar 2022 brought all these tensions and problems back to the fore.

On March 29, the Super Eagles took to the field against Ghana at the M.K.O. Abiola Stadium in the federal capital Abuja. This was the second of a two-legged qualifier for a place in Qatar. In the first match, the teams had drawn 0-0. Because of the away goal rules, which favor the visiting team, Nigeria had to win the second game.

The choice of Abuja as a venue for the match, given the stakes, seemed odd. The Super Eagles hadn���t played in Abuja since 2014 and had a stronger rapport with crowds in Uyo, Asaba and Lagos. Many consequential matches played at the stadium had resulted in losses,�� from a draw with Guinea that prevented the team from qualifying for the 2012 African Cup of Nations to losses in the finals of the two tournaments that Nigeria had hosted there: the 2003 African Games and 2009 FIFA U-17 World Cup. The stadium���s racing track creates a distance between the field and the stands and makes it difficult for the home crowd to make it daunting for opposition players and to cheer on the Super Eagles when they need a lift.

The match was played a day after a passenger train between Abuja and nearby Kaduna was attacked by gunmen. With unsubstantiated reports of another incident at the stadium and a country dealing with economic and security challenges, the football team was dealing with the responsibility of lifting the mood.

In the end, the Super Eagles came short. The game ended in a 1-1 draw and Nigeria was out. As ESPN summarized: ���Nigeria had qualified for six of the previous seven World Cups dating back to the United States in 1994, and their absence from this year’s tournament will spark an inquest from the country���s football authorities.��� That���s when some fans in the stadium expressed their disappointment by storming the field and destroying infrastructure. Quartz Africa reported: ���As the final whistle was blown, plastic bottles rained from the stands on the running tracks close to the field. The players were barely in their locker rooms when hundreds of spectators climbed down to begin vandalizing the canopy coverings for coaches and reserve players, wooden advertising panels, and goal nets.���

The outburst of violence and chaos also reflected frustration with the match-day experience at games in Nigeria. Transportation to and from games is often chaotic and even affects those not planning on attending. Seating structures are rarely adhered to and cause more confusion and aggression. There is little support for attendees who are very young, pregnant, and elderly and there is a lack of planning in case of an emergency.

For all this, Nigerians haven���t lost their faith in football or the Super Eagles. Like fans elsewhere on the continent, they keep dreaming. Like Zambia conquering the continent in 2012, or Senegal recently capturing their first AFCON championship. There is always a sense of expectation and anticipation whenever a sporting opportunity comes around. Despite warnings to stay away and fears of failure, many Africans trooped to their stadiums to urge their team in an attempt to qualify for the World Cup. New heroes always emerge, new chances are discovered and there is always the promise of the next time.

Perhaps this is the narrative of what this beautiful game and our states have in common: the faith that while today might be difficult, there is always the optimism of a better tomorrow. Nigerians are no different.

The promise of platinum

Platinum holds promise for a net-zero future. But the promise of platinum cannot be founded on the broken promises endured by those who live in its spaces of extraction. Smelting infrastructure. Marikana, April 2022 �� Kate Dawson.

It is April 28 2022, a day after South Africa���s Freedom Day. The price of platinum is US$939.60 per ounce and South Africa is the leading global producer of platinum, home to nearly 90% of the world���s reserves.

I am in Marikana, in South Africa���s North West Province, a place that has become almost synonymous with the brutal murder of 34 striking miners by the South African Police Service at the Lonmin platinum mine on August 16, 2012. It is almost a decade since this dark day and as Chris Molebatsi, a researcher at Benchmarks Foundation and a long-serving activist in the area, explains to me preparations are being made to honor those who lost their lives.

As we meet and speak with people in the many communities of Marikana, news is spreading of events taking place in Mmaditlhokoa, a settlement that borders the Tharisa Mine, a 20-minute drive from Marikana. Molebatsi makes a phone call and we enter Mmaditlhokoa from a main road, which connects the vast web of mines, smelters and communities to the rapidly growing town of Rustenburg. Among crowds of protesting people, Mdau Christinah, a spokesperson of Mining Host Communities in Crisis Network, approaches us and shares the significance of the day���s events: They have successfully lobbied against a blast that was due to take place at the encroaching open-pit platinum mine, just moments away from their homes.

Cracks appear and dust settles

Blasts are common occurrences in the vicinity of Marikana and the landscape has been littered with signage that declared the date and time of blasting. Typically, the notion of blasting accounts for the drilling of holes in which a detonator is planted and charged, reducing rock formations into fragments from which valuable materials can be extracted.�� Waste is composed into new mountains of unwanted earth that appear like gray hills among the mountainous landscape. On our way into Mmaditlhokoa, we catch a glimpse of today���s blast declaration. Christinah shows us a letter, which announces:

Blasting will take place on the West Mine on 28 April 2022 between 15:00-17:00. Blasting crew will ensure all necessary premises are evacuated. Kindly remain outside the blasting area until permission is given to re-enter the premises.

As Christinah points out, the time provided on the letter does not corroborate that on the sign, which declared a blasting time of between 1pm and 5pm. This is just one of the many discrepancies that make living in Mmaditlhokoa precarious and unpredictable.

Mmaditlhokoa has not always been in the place it is today. At the turn of the 20th century, Molebatsi recalled, the community was displaced by Aquarius Minerals, a multinational company with roots in Australia. Some locals were provided houses on land designated as ���permission to occupy.��� Others were relocated elsewhere. Soon after this re-settlement however, Tharisa Minerals commenced their own operations nearby, informing the already-relocated community that they would once again be relocated in five years. A high platinum price saw an expansion of the mine at rapid rates, with the open pit mine encroaching ever closer. Molebatsi highlighted the racial inequality that underpinned regimes of compensation during this period, explaining that ���Tharisa Mine compensated white farmers and landowners for dust, noise and lights, but did nothing for the black community encircled by their blasting and dust.���

Mdau Christinah, Spokesperson for Mining Host Communities in Crisis Network (left). Resident of Mmaditlhokoa stands in front a zinc house built by Tharisa. Residents complained of the structures��� inability to regulate temperature, as well as fears of the roofs unhinging (right). Mmaditlhokoa, April 2022 �� Kate Dawson.

Within just two years of their new settlement, 850 people were relocated to the opposite side of the road, with concerning accounts of forceful evictions and loss of property. The community were told that this location would be permanent, that the homes built would be of good quality, that they would have access to clean water and that they would be employed in the mine. Yet, far from permanent homes, zinc structures were constructed by the mine for some of the community. Today, residents complain of the inability of the structures to regulate temperatures, their ongoing fears of roofs unhinging, as well as reporting that cracks appeared throughout the structures and water inundates their homes when it rains. Residents also reported poor-quality water and the high unemployment in the community. Any employment in the mine is often short-term, they explained, and limited to ���general jobs,��� such as cleaning or grass cutting, and sometimes in exchange for the community permitting a blast. As Molebatsi reflects, ���two years after Tharisa started its operations, it employed only one community member who served in the kitchen, despite the promises made during the consultation process.���

As the mine continues to encroach closer to Mmaditlhokoa, the blasts are felt ever stronger, reverberating throughout homes, shops and community structures. As Christinah explains, ���we experience flying rocks due to blasting rocks flying from the mine.��� Of grave concern are the incidences of physical violence that according to Christinah follow the community���s refusal to evacuate their homes: ���the mine [Tharisa] has never come to us to tell us what happened to those who brutally assaulted us.���

Dust routinely fills the air, with Christinah and others reporting the health implications of ongoing air pollution���including the recording of fine atmospheric particulate matter with a diameter of less than 2.5 micrometers (PM2.5 levels)���which, when inhaled, Christinah explains, ���goes through blood easily.��� With the help of a handheld device issued by Benchmarks, Christinah records the PM2.5 levels daily, revealing the extreme levels of hazardous air that the community lives with, reaching as high as 804 micrograms per cubic meter of air���well beyond the good to moderate values of 0-100, and extending beyond the most hazardous category, which delimits a value of up to 500. These levels present serious risks of developing respiratory illnesses, (see also Chen and Hoek, 2020), with such afflictions among the most prevalent health concerns in the area, according to traditional healers. Respiratory diseases sit within a longer list of serious health impacts, from pregnancy complications to epilepsy that the community reports.

Blasts continue as the mine expands and once again, relocation is on the cards. The community is exhausted. People want better, permanent homes in a new location, further away from the unrelenting blasts of the encroaching open cast mine. They want a promise of a better life in a place they can feel secure. But they have been told that this could take between a minimum of six years.

Platinum holds promises

The notion of the ���broken promise��� echoes throughout Marikana, with residents frequently recalling the many made by the mines through Social Labor Plans���the strategic reports drafted to obtain and renew mining licenses. Employment, decent roads, access to healthcare and enterprise opportunities are among the many promises made by mines to host communities. In some cases, signs of promises being upheld might emerge, only to disappear. Residents share stories of mining representatives collecting CVs, giving the appearance of an employment process. Then, nothing happens. With unemployment levels high among the host communities, this is a painful broken promise. The appearance of a promise being upheld provides momentary hope and reduces the likelihood of imminent protest. It also plays a part in appearing to uphold obligations, likely useful for the purposes of internal and external company monitoring.

These broken promises underpin the extraction of a material that is increasingly positioned as integral to the green transition. The recent history of platinum on the global market is fraught. In 2015, Volkswagen admitted to tampering with the emissions data with respect to their diesel vehicles. Diesel cars fell out of favor. With platinum used as a catalytic convertor for diesel engines, the market turned on platinum and prices plummeted. Today, platinum is seen to hold a different future and one that will be increasingly important in the context of legislative shifts towards net zero economies.

Indeed, platinum is a material central to the green hydrogen economy���the electrolysis of water, with platinum performing a catalytic function. The ���green��� production of hydrogen is different to ���gray��� production, where natural gas is used. Hydrogen strategies are being drawn up globally, with ten governments adopting such strategies in 2020, including Canada, Russia and the EU. The UK���s Hydrogen Strategy seeks to meet an ambitious goal of 5GW of low carbon hydrogen by 2030���a production ���equivalent to the amount of gas consumed by over 3 million households in the UK each year������with hydrogen seen as a crucial way of decarbonizing transport, energy and industry. Reference to platinum is entirely absent in this report. In an Earth Day video, the World Platinum Investment Council (WPIC) proclaims that platinum falls in the ���hydrogen sweet spot���making a call to further invest in platinum to secure net zero futures. Other reports also indicate that platinum demand is set to grow.

Cattle grazing in front of an air ventilator, which provides air to the underground domains of the mine, with the intention of regulating temperature and removing dusts and other noxious gases. Cattle grazing is an important livelihood for communities in Marikana and is under threat. Residents at Mmaditlhokoa lamented that their cattle had been killed by the electric fences of nearby mines �� Kate Dawson.

The shift to greener economies will not be immaterial. It will require vast amounts of materials, or so-called critical minerals to be extracted from the earth, with potentially devastating consequences for people and environments. Discussions are taking place in various forums, including the World Rainforest Movement, which critically asks us to unpack the Green Transition or an Expansion of Extraction? The World Bank is also developing a Climate-Smart Mining Initiative.

The discussion of materials for decarbonization must be grounded in places of extraction, reminding governments, industry, and consumers that greening in one place means blasting in another. Of course, the benefits of decarbonization are not contained within the places in which policy change happens, with reduced carbon emissions necessary to limit the damaging impacts of climate change throughout the world. We have seen this connectedness all too clearly through the stark asymmetry that distinguishes the nations responsible for the vast majority of carbon emissions from the places where the most devastating impacts of climate change are being felt.

The extraction of critical minerals and metals in the name of the green transition demands open, honest, and transparent conversations, centering the lives and demands of those people and places from which such materials are extracted. The distribution of costs and benefits, losses and gains, inclusions and exclusions, needs deep examination. Indeed, in places where contested land claims are common and most often rooted in colonial histories of excluding indigenous populations from land ownership and emboldening local power elites, questions need to be asked about distributions, royalties, and stakes.

The promise of platinum

In November 2021, Tharisa Minerals announced an extension to the lifespan of its chrome and platinum group metals (PGMs) mine in Marikana to 2041. Phoevos Pouroulis, the CEO of Tharisa commented, ���This development further cements the reputation of the Tharisa mine as a world-class, long-life asset that underpins our business and will continue to provide a sustainable, low-cost platform for over 50 years.����� Low-cost, open-pit, long-term. Who and what is subsidizing the low-cost production of platinum? Where does this leave the host communities of Marikana? What is the future of Mmaditlhokoa?

Platinum holds promise for a net-zero future. But the promise of platinum cannot be founded on the broken promises endured by those who live among the violence of its extraction.

What is it about the Kenyan postcolonial state?

The lesson from political economist Rok Ajulu���s academic work and activism: it���s not enough to change the ���tenants,��� but fight to change both the ���state��� and all of its houses. Still from Breakfast in Kisumu.

In early May 2022, with almost three months to the August election, Kenya had close to 50 presidential candidates, and 5,000 people running for the 1,500 Member of County Assembly (MCA) positions. Ultimately, not all of these aspirants will be cleared by the Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission (IEBC) (more like ���blunder commission��� judging from the 2017 elections and its lack of preparedness for the August 2022 poll), but the question remains���one that the political economist, Rok Ajulu, asked in his 2021 book Post-Colonial Kenya: The Rise of an Authoritarian and Predatory State: what is it about the post-colonial state in Africa that makes so many people want to control it?

In this impressive compendium, Ajulu chronologically and exhaustively mapped out the authoritarian turns of the Kenyan post-colonial state. In doing so, he documented the predatory nature of the colonial regime and how three successive African governments��� headed respectively by Jomo Kenyatta, Daniel Arap Moi and Mwai Kibaki���have built on this legacy and, in addition, weaponized ethnicity at specific junctures to consolidate control and accumulation. And not just any accumulation: predatory and parasitic hoarding���in the sum of trillions of dollars and with many detrimental effects for the population���that is only possible when steered, despite declarations to the contrary from the top.

While he charts the oscillating, often moderate and neo-imperial allegiances of actors such as Jomo Kenyatta (the late father of outgoing president, Uhuru), Tom Mboya and Moi���none of whom were great fans of the Mau Mau���Ajulu���s focus is on how the state ���becomes brazenly the instrument of the dominant political elite. This type of regime gravitates towards authoritarian dispensation of power precisely because economic mobility and expansion of the new elite is largely tied to their continued control of state-power.���

This thesis, while not unique to Ajulu and recognized in everyday discourse, is anchored here in a prolific and comprehensive archive, which also makes evident, as does the author, that the predatory pursuits of politicians are not unencumbered, even against the heavy-handed authoritarian implements (read political assassinations, state sanctioned ethnic clashes) they use to entrench them. Although Ajulu does not dwell on protests or resistances�� to this authoritarian rule over four decades(please read this powerful book by Maina wa Kinyatti for that), and focuses primarily on party politics and the trajectories of (in)famous politicians to narrate the incremental creation of an authoritarian state in Kenya, the constant tug and pull of class tensions and the heterogeneous actions of supposedly homogeneous ethnic populations are always on the horizon.

Who is this man Rok Ajulu? In the short film about him called Breakfast in Kisumu, his daughter, the filmmaker Rebecca Achieng Ajulu-Bushell, documents his academic and political labors dating to his exile from Kenya in the early 1970s. Oriented around interviews she had with him���and it is his narrations that piece together the diverse landscapes that are the visuals for this film (we actually, interestingly, barely see Ajulu)���his voice takes us through his life as a student, political activist�� and academic, in a journey that spans Bulgaria, Lesotho, the UK and South Africa. The evocative images of these countries where Rok Ajulu lived, while recent, anchor this narrative that accounts for a life of political praxes in academia and beyond. Though his sojourns mainly pivot around academic pursuits, we also hear about his labors as an agricultural worker in Bulgaria, a pirate taxi driver in Fulham, London and, importantly, as an organizer with the Committee for Action and Solidarity for Southern African Students (CASSAS) while at the National University of Lesotho in the late 1970s and early 1980s (for this work he was imprisoned for three weeks).

It is, perhaps, this period as an anti-apartheid organizer in Lesotho that created the path to a life in South Africa from 1994. Here he taught at Rhodes University and married Lindiwe Sisulu, the current Minister of Tourism (and one of the aspirants vying to succeed Cyril Ramaphosa as South Africa���s next president), and daughter of renowned anti-apartheid activists Walter and Albertina Sisulu. Consequently, it is in South Africa, rather than Kenya, where his influence was more extensive, even as Kenya appears to have been the primary focus of his academic scholarship.

Ajulu-Bushell���s poetic film demonstrates that her father���s life was not ordinary. But it is perhaps the internationalist and pan-African paths he chose that led her to recognize him, as she does in this film, as a ���father��� but not a ���parent.��� Her bid to understand her father���s life as an adult and, simultaneously, to document his political praxes, appear to be what has prompted this documentary. While the style of the film may not be for everyone���there are a few seemingly gratuitous appearances of the filmmaker���Breakfast in Kisumu is an important tribute to a father, and one who is representative of a generation who endured many unanticipated and painful exiles for nations and lands which did not always claim them, but for which they gave their lives.

As the final book Ajulu wrote before he died of cancer in 2016, Post-Colonial Kenya: The Rise of an Authoritarian and Predatory State is informed by questions that, likely, the author grappled with throughout his life.

Against the impending 2022 Kenya general elections that are not cause for much inspiration ���with the male dominated alliances, handshakes, intrigues and elite contestations that characterize it���Ajulu���s thesis still rings true: that the state is the primary vehicle for accumulation and thus engenders a predatory authoritarianism by those who want to control it.

After years in an exile(s) documented by Ajulu-Bushell���s film, I���m not sure how optimistic Ajulu was for our Kenyan future, for he wrote in his final book: ���Besides the change of tenants at the state house, not much really changed. The mandarins who used to lord it over the hapless rank and file remained in their same old places.���

At the very least, this generation can turn to the histories Rok Ajulu has documented in his book, as well as those he lived, to reflect on how, for this election and the next, we are not just going to change the ���tenants,��� but will fight to change both the ���state��� and all of its houses.