The Republic of Dissent

Missionaries, explorers, saviors and the heart of Darkness

Great stuff from Mukoma Wa Ngugi:

For western journalism to be taken seriously by Africans and Westerners alike, it needs Africans to vouch for stories rather than satirizing them. I am not saying that journalism needs the subject to agree with the content, but the search for journalistic truth takes place within a broad societal consensus. That is, while one may disagree with particular reportage and the facts, the spirit of the essay should not be in question. But Africans are saying that the journalists are not representing the complex truth of the continent; that Western journalists are not only misrepresenting the truth, but are in spirit working against the continent. The good news is there have been enough people questioning the coverage of Africa over the years that Western journalists have had no choice but to do some soul searching. The bad news is that the answers are variations of the problem.

Michela Wrong, in a New York Times piece shortly before the Kenyan elections, debated the use of the word “tribe.” She acknowledged that the word tribe “carries too many colonial echoes. It conjures up M.G.M. visions of masked dances and pagan rites. ‘Tribal violence’ and ‘tribal voting’ suggest something illogical and instinctive, motivated by impulses Westerners distanced themselves from long ago.” But she concluded the piece by reserving her right to use the term. She stated that “When it comes to the T-word, Kenyan politics are neither atavistic nor illogical. But yes, they are tribal.” The term tribe should have died in the 2007 elections when Africanist scholars took NYT’s Jeffrey Gettleman’s usage of the term to task. To his credit, Gettleman stopped using the term.

If you have Wrong insisting on using a discredited analytical framework, you have others who position themselves as missionaries and explorers out to save the image of Africa. But their egos end up outsizing the story.

Well, the problem starts with the simple fact that Africa is not a country and that therefore Kenya is neither Mali or Cote d'Ivoire and vice versa.

A powerful speech and then nothing as usual!

From Helen Epstein :

The administration’s neglect of human rights in Africa is a great disappointment, since the president began his first term by laying out ambitious new goals for the continent. In July 2009, when his presidency was only six months old, Barack Obama delivered a powerful speech at Cape Coast Castle in Ghana, the point from which millions of African slaves were shipped across the Atlantic. He called on African countries to end the tyranny of corruption that affects so many of their populations, and to build strong institutions that serve the people and hold leaders accountable. The speech seemed to extend the message of his much-discussed Cairo address a month earlier, in which he called for a new beginning for Muslim relations with the West, based on non-violence and mutual respect. Many thought that the policies of the new president, himself of Kenyan descent, would depart from those of the Bush administration, which provided a great deal of development aid to Africa, but paid scant attention to human rights.

After more than four years in office, however, Obama has done little to advance the idealistic goals of his Ghana speech.

Oh Well as the one himself once said words matter and the trouble here starts with the fact that having an 'african' policy doesn't mean much for there is no africa. Moreover, the saddest fact  is that reality when it comes to Obama's deeds in countries on the african continent doesn't matter because of the worst and most dangerous anti-intellectual form of identity politics.

I bet that at least some Nigeriens are happy to have a drone base in Niamey.

Détruire n'est pas créer

I agree with Tim Black on this:

Under Cameron’s gaze, the problems in Mali are simply collapsed into a grand narrative in which good people fight bad people, just as Blair, alongside President George W Bush, proceeded to view world affairs through the prism of the ‘war on terror’.

The narcissism of this essentially Blairite approach to foreign policy is as incredible as it is reckless. In each case, they really do think this conflict is about them. Arbitrarily chosen, far-flung trouble spots act as ad hoc stages on which a Western leader can show the people back at home just what a good person he is. For Cameron, it was Libya and now neighbouring African states. For Blair, it was the Former Yugoslavia, Afghanistan and, of course, Iraq.

It was a grisly irony, then, that while Blair spoke of the necessity of intervention in north Africa, of trying to do the right thing, the stage of his most infamous display of doing the right thing – Iraq – appeared once more on the fringes of the world’s news bulletins: a suicide bomber, aided by several others, had attacked a police headquarters in the northern city of Kirkuk. At least 36 people were killed and 105 were injured.

At some point, there has to be the recognition that as Camus would say détruire n'est pas créer and that destroying monsters ( which is more often than not about seeking them desperately) isn't the same as fixing problems that are so complex that they require something more than the use of force.

That said power, faith and money have pierced Blair's eyes and ears, which explains why he isn't just irrelevant, but the epitome of what political success can do to the people who are more ambitious and self-righteous than anything else.

Le mal au Mali

The pic of the day via Spiked:

Mali, Niger, France, US, Whac-A-Mole

From the great Stephen W. Smith:

The bigger question is not why France decided to intervene but why America has held off. Is it simply imperial overstretch and war-weariness? That seems a little thin, given the hue and cry in Washington about ‘ungoverned spaces’ and ‘terrorist safe havens’. After all, the Sahara is six times as big as Afghanistan and Pakistan combined. And why sink money into the Trans-Sahara Counterterrorism Partnership – more than $1 billion since 2005 – or foot the bill for Operation Enduring Freedom Trans-Sahara, if at the end of it all al-Qaida is allowed to march on Bamako? Why would Obama order more drone strikes than his predecessor against the leaders of Somalia’s al-Shabaab, a group with relatively weak links to international terrorism, but not lift a finger to stop AQIM from taking over Mali? Unless, of course, in addition to a division of labour with the French, the point is to ‘disaggregate’ the multiple terrorist threats in Africa, tackling each individually rather than addressing any common denominator, and so deny jihadism a chance to coalesce. In this regard, even if the French were drawn into the quicksand in Mali, Nigeria would most likely remain the region’s focal point for the US: with 150 million inhabitants, it is the most populous state as well as the biggest oil producer south of the Sahara, and has an active homegrown salafist-jihadist group, Boko Haram (‘Westernisation Is Sinful’). When I put these thoughts to a US military staffer involved in anti-terrorism in Africa, he replied tersely: ‘What we’re doing in Africa is a sort of Whac-A-Mole’ – a reference to an arcade game in which players force moles back into their burrows by hitting them on the head with a mallet. He went on to quote the sixth president of the United States, John Quincy Adams: ‘America goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy.’ Well, not any longer perhaps. But France has done precisely that.

THIS can't end well!

Still Hubris and incompetence

From Brendan O'Neill:

What the current instability in north Africa really reveals is not that Islamists are taking over the world, but rather that Western governments are utterly incapable of acting in their own interests on the international stage these days. The chasm that now separates what is in the West’s interests and what the West actually does in global politics is enormous. So determined were the British and French to score some PR points by bombing Libya in 2011 that they didn’t give a moment’s thought to the potential consequences – and now the French military, backed by Britain, is getting stuck into the Libyan fallout in Mali, and both governments are panicked by what is happening in Algeria. The true danger on the world stage today is not a global Islamist conspiracy to demolish Western values, but rather the fact that international affairs is now overseen by immature, narcissistic showboaters who know nothing of realpolitik, nothing of diplomacy, nothing of blowback, and nothing of history.

The trouble with hubris and incompetence is that they lead to a stubborn blindness that makes results inconsequential for the emphasis is placed on feeling good rather than on doing what works.

Conceptual boxes

From Daniel Drezner:

Foreign policy pundits are just like the rest of the monkey-brain population -- we like to put things in clear conceptual boxes -- particularly when we lack specific knowledge of the particulars, as is the case with Mali.  It will be easy, in the coming days, to put Mali into the "Afghanistan" box (bad) or the "Libya" box (good or bad depending on your partisan affiliation) or what have you.  Given that France and the West African countries are willing to shoulder the primary military burden of this engagement, however, it would seem that the U.S. could ramp up some humanitartian assistance for the affected areas.

Ah haven't we seen all of 'THIS' before and has fixing it ever worked?

Not yet

This from Gregory Mann is worrisome:

Mali differs from Afghanistan in important ways.

Mali is not (yet) a deeply militarized society — although in the months since Tuareg fighters returned from Qadaffi’s Libya that is changing rapidly.

Mali is not (yet) a narco-state. Northern Mali has become a lucrative zone for drug smuggling, which finances al Qaeda franchises worldwide. Yet none of those drugs are produced in Mali, where Afghanistan’s poppy growers have no parallel. Faced with stiffer surveillance and interdiction, smugglers will go elsewhere.

Finally, Mali is not (yet) a failed state. True, it is grievously weakened, and its army is in disarray. But the government continues to function in the territory it holds. Children go to school, civil servants go to work, and people go about their business.

 I have the sinking feeling that most people are guessing when it comes to Mali just as they were about Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya and that more often than not their guesses are not even educated, but based on hubris and wishful thinking.

Owning Mali

From Robert Fox:

Once more we are hearing of the need to combat an international threat from global Islamist extremism. No one dares use the term ‘war against terror' any longer, but the West faces many of the same questions as in the campaigns launched by President George W Bush in Afghanistan and Iraq.

France is in danger of finding that it owns the Mali problem, so weak is the Mali government and its forces. A long and uncertain ground campaign awaits them.

It's always dangerous to own a country one doesn't understand, isn't willing to allow to grow up and to thus make its own decisions.

Irresistible urge

The sentence of the day from Charlemagne:

However much successive French presidents say that they want to put an end to post-colonial intervention in Africa, with few other takers for the job it usually proves irresistible at some point.

Saving women from brown men

I agree with Kweli Jaoko on this with the usual caveat that I don't agree with the west/rest division:

The banality, say, of tweeting and hashtagging, is part of the socio-historical through which misogyny becomes reflexive. Banality becomes the training we put ourselves through to make misogyny reflexive. What might it mean to understand misogyny through the kind of training that produces reflexes? Certainly the banality of tweeting and hashtagging labors to traffic the misogyny of #TeamMafisi and pass it off as ordinary, everyday, as part of the affects and intensities exchanged through the internet, and therefore something one must put up with. The fallacy is that misogyny is slightly inconveniencing.

As Western media deploys an Orientalist lens that locates rape and misogyny squarely in India—meaning, in the Global South, outside the West, and, yet again, as the need to save brown women from brown men—I would like us to think locally. Misogyny is not just a problem in India; in Kenya; or on Twitter. It is a problem everywhere, including here in the West from where I write.

Well it is always easier and satisfying even to criticize the barbarians rather than to recognize the world has, how should I put it, a woman problem!

A quagmire in the desert

Art Goldhammer on the French intervention in Mali:

I don't know if it is possible to have a quagmire in a desert, but Mali may offer an example.

The problem is that wars nowadays are won on TV especially when the victims are more than likely going to be people with no media access and to whom most, especially journalists, will have a hard time relating to!

The post-genocidal regime in Rwanda and Congo

Sugary excerpt from Stephen W. Smith must-read post on Congo and Rwanda on the London Review of Book's blog:

The post-genocidal regime in Rwanda has time and again been able to raid and plunder its Congolese neighbour with no, or little, risk of punitive sanctions. Britain finally seems to have reservations about the validity of washing away a genocide with a torrent of crimes against humanity, and the UN Security Council has demanded an end to outside support for the M23 rebels, but the United States is still shielding Kagame from blame. Thanks to American support, Rwanda is about to take up a two-year seat as a non-permanent member of the Security Council. (...)An estimated 700,000 Congolese have been driven from their homes during the last bout of fighting in the east. Tens of thousands of unarmed civilians have been killed by Rwandan forces in eastern Congo. An estimated five million have died as indirect victims of warfare, from hunger, displacement or disease. The combined charges against all the warlords so far indicted by the ICC, from the former Liberian president Charles Taylor to the M23 commander Bosco Ntaganda, a.k.a. ‘The Terminator’, fall short of the war crimes committed by President Kagame and documented by the UN. But the ICC doesn’t seem to know.

The trouble here is as always that the people who could make a difference refuse to see the situation in ordinary terms and instead 'africanize' it. Doing so dehumanizes ordinary Congolese for the insistence that Africa is a country condemns very different olaces on that continent to remain the heart of darkness/blackness. 

 

Zuma Zero

The sentence du jour is from an editorial from South Africa's Mail and Guardian on the most exotically and manly dangerous leader of a democracy, Jacob Zuma, South Africa's president:

The biggest bridge Zuma needs to build is the one across his own credibility gap.

How credible could a man who believed that he could avoid an HIV infection after raping having forceful sex with an AIDS infected women by taking a shower be?

 

'Western Guilt' and Rwanda

Interesting stuff from Jessica Pressler:

“From a public-relations point of view, doing work in Rwanda is very astute,” says Tom Zoellner, co-author of the biography of Paul Rusesabagina, whose heroic acts during the genocide were dramatized in the movie Hotel Rwanda. “What happened there was so catastrophic, and it touches a deep nerve of Western guilt, that we allowed that to happen, that it’s been sort of an ­international-aid darling.” In recent years, both Barclays and JPMorgan Chase have sent charitable delegations to the country, but among banks, Goldman Sachs maintains perhaps the most significant presence, dispatching employees to help train female entrepreneurs in the capital city as part of the 10,000 Women program it launched a few months before the 2008 crash.

For the temporary do-gooder, Rwanda also provides a more pleasant volunteering experience than, say, refugee camps in South Sudan, which aid workers this summer likened to hell. “Rwanda is sort of like Tuscany with banana trees,” says Zoellner. It’s temperate and green, and subsequent to the genocide, President Paul Kagame’s business-friendly quasi dictatorship has maintained social order while seeking to lure foreign investment and turn Rwanda into Africa’s Singapore.

Whatever one thinks of Kagame, it is impossible to deny that he is great at international politics in part because he understands that his country is Rwanda and not Africa.

Where Africa is

From Howard W. French:

And across Africa, a feeling of letdown at the Obama administration’s lack of engagement with the continent is palpable. Because of his background, expectations were higher for the incumbent president in this regard than they have been for perhaps any of his predecessors.

After a rousing early trip to Ghana in the summer of 2009, where he praised that fast-growing country’s maturing democracy and summoned African leaders to serve their populations better Obama has all but abandoned direct personal engagement with the sub-Saharan portion of the continent, squandering his great potential for strong personal connections with the continent and the soft power benefits that go with it.

This is more than a personal story, though. The reason why American leaders tend to ignore Africa is linked to a traditional belief, deeply seated in our foreign policy establishment’s mindset, that the United States has no vital interests in the continent. An important associated thought is that Africa can only and forever be a burden, with the US called upon to foot the bill when major crises erupt there.

Africa isn't a country! That is the essential part of the problem.  Howard French, Barack Obama and most Americans and people think that it is. 

Mali as Afghanistan in 1996

The dumbest statement I have read this week so far from Francois Heisbourg of the Foundation for Strategic Research via the Washington Post:

This is like Afghanistan 1996. This is like when Bin Laden found a place that was larger than France in which he could organize training camps, in which he could provide stable preparations for organizing far-flung terror attacks. 

Comparaison n'est pas raison. Comparing Mali to Afghanistan is as smart and as appropriate as comparing Cap-Vert to Monaco. Wrong similes and metaphors in international politics are always signs of impending doom.

Mali

Mali was mentioned four times in tonight's 'foreign policy' debate and sadly neither Obama nor Romney could manage to put things in perspective as Walter Mead did before the debate:

Mali was first destabilized thanks to NATO’s intervention in Libya, which sent weapons and fighters streaming into the northern deserts, where they found little opposition from the government. Other Islamist fighters from the Middle East soon came flocking in to this sandy patch of ungoverned territory. Their ranks are reportedly bolstered by thousands of local child soldiers.

The Libyan afterparty—the unintended consequences of NATO’s little Libya misadventure—sadly drags on well into the night.

Why do I have the sickening feeling that the afterparty is just starting and instead of learning that intervention is not a panacea, idiots who have never been to Mali or n that region of the world (I do not mean Africa) are going to decide to fix everything with 'surgical strikes!'

Motherhood as extra-training for women

Quote of the year from Jacob Zuma, the President of South Africa, who epitomizes the fact that the end of Apartheid in his country didn't mean the end of misogyny:

I wouldn’t want to stay with daughters who are not getting married. Because that in itself is a problem in society … Kids are important to a woman because they actually give an extra training to a woman, to be a mother.

The other invisible blacks

Sugary excerpt of the day from Jina Moore :

In American newspapers and on American TV, Africans remain objects—of violence, of poverty, of disease, and ultimately of our own compassion. Like the abolitionists’ stories of the Jamaican slave revolt, our compassion narratives ultimately are not about the people in whose name they are told. They are about us. We like these stories because at some level, we already know them, and because they tell us we are caring, and potentially powerful, people.

As always I have to assert that 'Africans' don't exist.  Africanity is  the first, most potent and seemingly most invicincible colonial invention.

 

 

 

Checkbook non-racism

This from Elliot Ross disturbs me:

Our governments, our multinational corporations, and even our society collectively have been making identical gestures for a long time. If we can’t rid ourselves of our deeply embedded and carefully structured racism, we can at least convince ourselves that our giving to an undifferentiated entity described in the vaguest terms as “charity” and “Africa” somehow renders our racism absurd, at least to us, and so allows us to construct a defence, however flimsy, against internal suspicions of racism. This is combined with the scrupulous application of a public and legal definition of racism and racist practice that is exclusively concerned with delimiting and criminalising a narrow racist lexicon. This means that only a complete idiot would choose to deploy this vocabulary and thus make themselves vulnerable to accusations of racism. With some ingenuity, we Brits have managed to concoct for ourselves a notion of racism that allows us to feel more virtuous and less racist than ever.

Come on Elliot, mon frère, let it go! We are in 2012 not in 1962 and the times, they are changing, no they have changed.  The trouble isn't that the notion of racism has been so narrowed  that a checkbook can serve as proof of non-racism, but rather that virtue is as tied to racism as it is to charity.

At some point, societies/people are going to have to come to terms with the reality that there can't be any citizen with clean souls (that for that matter people's souls are private matters)  and that thinking the bad and doing the bad are two very distinct things.

When cock is politics...

Sugary excerpt of the day from Jennifer Thorpe's take on the whole Brett Murray's Zuma painting (The Spear of the Nation) with his cock exposed:

Zuma has characterised himself as a man’s man. He celebrates a masculinity that emphasises sexual virility and supports polygamy in the face of an HIV epidemic spread by multiple concurrent partners; a masculinity that emphasises that men take sex when they want it and, despite being accused of rape, never once says that violence against women is wrong; and a masculinity that is heteronormative and homophobic (see comments about pushing down gay men, and appointment of John Qwelane and Mogoeng Mogoeng). His masculinity has been the core of his politics thus far, and perhaps the core appeal to those who vote for him. When it is under threat the very core of what he stands for is under threat. That the painting was defaced by men is interesting and reflects that perhaps these scary sentiments about manhood and its untouchability are shared by many other men, not only Msholozi.

For now we’ll have to see what happens in court for Zuma and for the two men who defaced Murray’s painting. In the meantime state resources will be spent in court cases that focus on what it means to be a man. The politics of the cock are alive and well. And this whole saga had taught us all that they are not up for discussion.

 I have to admit that I believe that the painting to be on point for it goes to the core of what/who Zuma is and why his politics are problematic: they  justify the worship of the cock, any vile behavior in the name of a non-existent africanness which force morality, ethics to be about who people are (which is determined by their race, gender, class for individuality isn't allowed)  rather than about what they do.  This explains why Zuma can rape have manly sex with a HIV positive woman and still become president of South Africa.

Colonial mentality

One of my favorite songs at the moment is Fela Kuti's Colonial mentality. I find it to be both profound and hip while disagreeing fully with its title and its message, which is a proof of the universality and greatness of Kuti's music (it is difficult but to enjoy it, I have to ignore his politics and his misogyny).

I stopped a long time ago to believe that there is such a thing as blackness and africanness/africanity.  I have realized that the quest for authenticity  is similar to Caligula's destructive and impossible one for the sun in  Camus's play in the sense that it always ends with a witch-hunt for there must be monsters to blame for shortcomings and traitors to chastise for their refusal to be 'true africans' or whatever else is considered to be pure or socially acceptable.

Colonial mentality is a great song with a political message that I despise because it is culturalist and defines identity in terms that are too absolute and too reactionary to be productive.  To put things bluntly,  since existence precedes essence, what matters is the choice for people aren't being in themselves. Whether a mentality is colonial or not is no longer an essential question for what matters is individuality and responsibility. That said, the song is awesome and Fela Kuti's message is worth listening too because although his conclusion is erroneous,  it is both legitimate and pertinent while being too self-absorbed and ideological to be complete.

 

White man's international justice

Adrian Hamilton on the Charles Taylor's trial by The Special Court for Sierra Leone and its verdict:

Taylor's trial still has the smack of white man's justice to it – and not a little hypocrisy.

Taylor has been condemned for stoking up a rebellion in another country with appalling consequences for its civilian population. But what else was the West doing when it armed the Taliban to fight the Russians in Afghanistan, and how else would you describe the calls to send arms to the insurgents in Syria, however noble their cause?

Taylor's defence was right on one point. He wouldn't be there if his machinations had suited our purposes.

I don't agree with Hamilton's phrasing, but it is pretty clear that the trial of Charles Taylor was problematic for reasons that have nothing to do with white man's justice. The case against him was weak and its prosecution inadequate. It doesn't mean that Taylor wasn't responsible, it means that the process to determine his guilt was flawed. However, the essential question remains about the adequateness of the tools to achieve international justice and about how fair and equitable does the process have for its verdict to be just instead of just being about retribution.

Santorum as the future messiah for 'Africa'

This bit from Jack C. Chow arguing that a President Rick Santorum  would be good for 'Africa' is as offensive as it is narrow-minded:

Alone among his rivals, Santorum has staked out global health as one of his preferred instruments of asserting American power abroad. He is the only Republican candidate to declare he wants to "keep and expand" Bush's humanitarian aid push in Africa. In contrast, Mitt Romney is "very reluctant to borrow lots more money to be able to do wonderful things" if other countries and groups do not contribute more; Newt Gingrich has called for government-run foreign aid to be replaced with private incentives; and Ron Paul, a physician, has asserted that "all the foreign aid in the world will not transform Africa into a thriving, healthy continent." [...]His record so far is promising. [...]He has couched aid programs as "one of our best international investments" and credited humanitarian aid and fighting AIDS as critical to winning "hearts and minds" in competing against the influence of "China and Islam" in Africa. "We have done more good for America in Africa and in the Third World by the things that we've done," he said at the Nov. 22 debate. "And we have saved money and saved military deployments by wisely spending that money not on our enemies but on folks who can and will be our friends." His reasoning echoes the arguments asserted by the late diplomat Richard Holbrooke about saving Africa from a demographic cataclysm caused by HIV/AIDS.

Chow's argument is offensive for two reasons. The first is that he makes the ignorant  presumption that African countries are all the same and therefore that their sole priority is to battle Aids. The second reason is that Chow obviously believes that charity is what African countries need most from America is aid or rather charity.

Thus, arguing that President Rick Santorum would be good for "Africa" is as condescending as it is paternalist because it reduces very different countries to a single aspect Aids while asserting ideologically that they need to be saved by an American president who will believe that it is his religious duty to do so.

Qaddafi and vindication

Juan Cole on the death of Gaddafi and the intervention of the US and Nato:

The Arab League, President Obama and NATO have been vindicated in their decision to forestall the massacre of eastern Libyan cities such as Benghazi. The region’s remaining bloodthirsty tyrants, who have not scrupled to massacre non-combatants for exercising their right of peaceable assembly and protest, should take the lesson that mass murder is a one-way ticket for them to the sewage drain of history. As I told the NYT today, ““The real lesson here is that there is a new wave of popular politics in the Arab world… People are not in the mood to put up with semi-genocidal dictators.”

I don't agree with Juan Cole or rather with the way he chooses to phrase the issue for two reasons. The first is that I don't think that death of Qaddafi or of any dictator is the measuring stick as to whether American intervention in the country was successful. If it were the case, Iraq would be a success.

The second reason is that long term matters especially when the policy before intervention whether it was direct or not was to interact with Qaddafi's regime.  In short, my problem is that Cole is solely moralizing the issue because he agrees with the policy instead of judging it on its merit, which is what happens on the ground.

I have to admit that because I lived through the capture of Saddam Hussein and his death, there is something about these flashy events that unsettle me while I hope that everything ends well and while I know the conclusion  will depend on acts not on good feelings and intentions.

The politics of aid and development

Question of the day taken from Peter Gill,'s article on Ethiopia and the politics of development assistance :

Is the rich world interested in helping Africa’s poor or in promoting government systems which resemble its own?

Race and American delusions

I have a problem with Bill Benzon's post on Chinua Achebe and Joseph Conrad at the Valve in which he compares them to Ike Turner and Sam Philips and finishes by suggesting that the solution is to get beyond the boundaries of language. Sugary excerpt:

The point of this exercise, no, this demonstration, is that language and its reasonings and arguments cannot, in principle, encompass everything. That life itself is greater than language goes without saying – or does it? What matters is how we conduct ourselves around and about, in the shadow of, language.

Because I believe as Eluard that les mots ne mentent pas, I have a problem with  what Benzon is demonstrating.  The attempt should never be to get beyond the boundaries of language, but to acknowledge them and to break them down. 

I know I promise to stop bashing constantly Obama (I believe that I'm doing it rationally and analytically), but I believe that his 2008 campaign showed that Benzon is wrong and that America's problem with race isn't about its people not being able to get along, but rather about their need to believe that race is all encompassing and that  it is about something grand, when it is about petty stuff and about that itch that Benzon seems to have to want Achebe and Conrad get along.  It is far too obvious that Achebe didn't want to get along with Conrad, but needed to punch him in the gut to affirm his own existence and to define in his own terms what it meant or rather didn't mean to be 'african' (my contention is that it doesn't mean anything for Achebe has much more in common with Joseph Conrad than he does with Ferdinand Oyono).

In short, my point to Benzon, to America, and to Americans  is get over it already! Race isn't about race and instead of obsessing about getting along or pretending that you want to or that you do get out your own way and stop being so self-involved!

Obsessing about making history

The sugary excerpt of the day comes from the great Stephen Smith from his must-read article on Laurent Gbagbo:

‘Gbagbo was born before shame,’ ordinary people in Abidjan used to say. It didn’t necessarily mean they disapproved of him. It was more a case of stating the obvious. The way he looked at it, history was the victors’ account of a merciless fight. ‘It’s difficult for us to make history,’ he once explained to me. ‘We have to carry out our own French Revolution with Amnesty International peering over our shoulder.’ Murder, intrigue, corruption, bare-faced lies, betrayal, ethnic cleansing: all means would be justifiable provided the end was attained. In Gbagbo’s home region, where Ivory Coast’s main cash crops are grown, the sons of the soil, the Bété, turned against migrant workers from poor Sahel states and against fellow Ivorians from other parts of the country.

It is alarming, to say the least, that so many political leaders are worried about making history rather than governing and improving the lives of their 'people.' Obsession with history is one of the reasons why there have been so many Mugabe, Gbagbo, Amin, Doe, Taylor, Gaddafi on the African continent for after all if one's only concern is history, the people become means to achieve greatness not much else, politics is religionized and political violence becomes acceptal and even normal.

Zombies at the Vatican

Another proof from R.W. Johnson that faith in politics is about the bling and should remain in the private sphere:

The news that Robert Mugabe and his wife Grace were among the million people (including 22 ‘world leaders’) who thronged St Peter’s Square for the beatification of the late Pope John Paul II lends a piquant note to what was already a gothic occasion. Their presence was not, in itself, surprising: Mugabe tends to remember he is a Catholic whenever it is convenient – as in the case of his marriage to Grace, celebrated in a Catholic high mass in Harare, although they had by then already had two children. More recently, however, the main point has been to evade the EU’s targeted sanctions and thus provide Grace (widely known as ‘Dis-Grace’) with opportunities for her extravagant shopping trips. The Mugabes were in Rome in 2005 for John Paul II’s funeral, and again in 2008 and 2009 for UN food conferences – they get a free pass from the Vatican and from the UN, of which Zimbabwe is still a member.

Congo, Mobutu, Stendhal and authenticité

Sugar excerpt from VS Naipaul, which needs no commentary, although I have to say that it bugs me:

One day in Kinshasa I had the inspiration to leave the hotel and take a taxi to the university. They were very all very nice, very welcoming, although they had no idea who I was or what I did. And I thought then, here are all these very bright people, whose minds are going to be turned to lead very soon - this was in Mobutu's country, and they had to be turned to lead if they were to earn a living. And I wondered how this could be done. And I had a feeling that it was done through this old belief. And Mobutu gave to it a nice name, authenticité. There are these brilliant young people who would talk to you about Stendhal, something so far from their experience, and talking quite intelligently about it. And yet when you met them in their next incarnation as government officers, all that had gone away.

Libya as Obama's failure

Ouch ! It's another way to say that I agree with Professor Bainbridge when he makes this solemn and sullen proclamation this:

I don't think anybody can trust Obama's judgment on military matters anymore, if they ever could.

I wanted this intervention to turn out better than it has (watching Bernard-Henri Lévy on American TV defend it forced me to question the thoroughness and seriousness of the decision making behind it). Things may still work out at the end, but it is obvious that there was too much faith, hope, wishful-thinking and not much hardcore analysis on the ways to intervene in Libya because doing so felt not only good, but it felt right and was telegenic.

Damn Barack you make it so hard for me to trust you ! It's another way to say that I wish I knew how to quit my Obama-skepticism.

Côte d'Ivoire, Libya and the audacity of hope

A good question from Gideon Rachman:

If the UN and western military forces are prepared to intervene so forcefully in Libya, why has the response to Ivory Coast been so relatively feeble?

The answer is an easy, but alarming one:  Ivory Coast Côte d'Ivoire is Côte d'Ivoire and Libya is Libya. That statement of fact means simply that it is easier to deal with the dead of Côte d'Ivoire than with the ones of Libya because there is a widely accepted presumption that some parts of the African continent are  at the heart of darkness, and thus too barbaric, and too 'out there' to be helped/saved. That explains why Congo (DRC) has never captured the world 's attention.  In shot, it all comes that to that silly Obamanian world hope. It is easier to accept hopelessness in Côte d'Ivoire than in Libya.

The universality of International law

Quote of the day from Anne Orford :

The bombing of Libya in the name of revolution may be legal, but the international law that authorises such action has surely lost its claim to be universal.

One question comes immediately to mind: does international law has to be universal to be just? My answer without much analysis is no.  However, international law does have to be consistent and to be aware of its contradictions to address its own obvious inadequacies. What bothers me about Libya isn't the act, but its consequences and its effectiveness. The possibility that the Libyan intervention may fail or succeed in such a manner that it becomes extremly expensive not financially, but morally is a problem.

The illusory Sarkozy moment

Oh no, Gavin Hewitt fell for the glitz and I have to say that it is breaking my heart to see a great analyst fall:

If sometime in the future the Libyan opposition win and come to power in Tripoli, they might consider a statue to the French president. There could be a Sarkozy Square or even a boulevard named after him.

There is no doubt that the French leader, with his renowned energy, was the key player in driving through a UN resolution that now allows "all necessary measures" to be used to protect civilians in Libya. He was undeterred by a divided EU and a G8 palpably unenthusiastic about any military action.

Hewitt focuses on the trees because there is no forest. There is no there there. The context  matters more than the bling. Given the fact that Sarkozy and others licked Gaddafi's feet when he had something to give them and that now that they clai to have had the epiphany that he is dangerous, they are much more cautious about acting to get rid of him,  the Libyen crisis cannot be about Sarkozy. In short, Sarkozy started to do a part of what needed to be done,  even if everything ends up wel and that he 'saves' the day, it cannot be said that he was the savior and that he had the solution. Sarkozy (and others) created the problem and took the minimum steps to clean his dirty hands. 

The only real heroes here, the people who are having their moment are the ones who died and who are fighting on the ground hoping that the poseurs who are using their revolution to reinvent themselves politically ill have the courage to do more even when actions will be expensive.

The devil you know...

Juan Cole on the Obama's position on Libya:

Washington appears to have decided it slightly preferred the devil it knew, and that may well be what it gets– though now a wounded devil talking crazily about global jihad against the West if things don’t go his way.

I'm surprised that people are surprised by what's happening in Libya and by the fact that Obama believes in real politik especially when idealism or doing the right thing is about something other than giving speeches and singing  "we have something in common."

The 'thing' speaks for itself

Gideon Rachman on Gaddafi and the 'contradictions'of the 'international community' (I have nothing but disdain for that term) :

There is no acknowledgement that is a disgrace that Libya is a member of the council [the United Nations Human Rights Council] in the first place. However, this is not some weird accident. It is the settled will of the international community. The Libyans were voted onto the council in May – getting 155 votes of the 192 UN members. Gaddafi is obviously a popular chap.

 

Gaddafi as the EU's bastard

Interesting point from Nathalie Rothschild,which I admit makes all warm and fuzzy:

In fact, the EU’s fear of unregulated migration has been a trump card for Gaddafi. Assuaging this EU fear has been a way for the Libyan leader to rehabilitate himself in the eyes of the West after years of ostracisation. At the same time, threats to close and open borders have become a way for Gaddafi to hold the West to ransom, as he threatens to block trade deals or relax border controls unless Europe meets his demands. So it is not surprising that Gaddafi gave European nations the ultimatum of distancing themselves from the pro-democracy protesters or facing the supposed opening of the immigration floodgates from Africa. This is a real worry for the EU, which preaches about the virtues of democracy and human rights yet which has no interest in defending freedom of movement.
As we have seen with recent events in Tunisia, Egypt and elsewhere, when people get a taste for freedom there’s no telling what they’ll do to achieve it.

When I was young, I thought at least that Gaddafi (Gadhafi, Khadafi) had presence, now he is just a caricature of the man he once was, even though it was always a bastard,  but bastards with presence can be inspiring leaders to the blind.

Good sense starts at home

The sugary excerpt is from Juan Cole's interesting post on Mubarak and his humiliation of Obama and America, I don't agree with a lot of Cole's assertion, but he is onto something and his main point ihat foreign policy has domestic repercussions and vice versa is valid:

As long as the president and the Congress are willing to lie down and serve as doormats for America’s supposed allies in the Middle East– out of a conviction of the usefulness of their clients and the inexpensiveness of putting them on retainer– there will be anti-Americanism and security threats that force us to subject ourselves to humiliating patdowns and scans at the airport and an erosion of our civil liberties every day. We are only one step away of being treated, with “protest zones” and “Patriot Acts” just as badly as the peaceful Egyptian protesters have been.

Foresight and narrow-mindedness

Fraser Nelson over at the Spectator's Coffee House can't step out his way to see the forest through the trees:

In Egypt, the army look like they are settling in. If there is regime change, I doubt that whoever takes over will be pro-Western (the crowds will likely remember that the tear gas used on them was dispensed in canisters saying “Made in USA”). The grim fact remains that Iran is racing towards the bomb, and if they succeed then the Sunni world – in Saudi Arabia and Cairo – will likely follow suit. I’d love to see some wind of change blowing through Arab street, but I still fear that we’re heading for a multi-polar nuclear standoff in the only part of the world which is mad enough to use nuclear weapons. I do hope I’m wrong.

The trouble with Nelson isn't that he may be wrong or can be right, but rather that he sees Egypt not as a country like his own or any 'normal' one (I would use Western, but I don't believe in the existence of the West or in the division of the world between the West and the rest). Egypt to Nelson is a means to an end or worst a part of a jungle whose happenings must not be allowed to disturb the peace and stability of the 'modern world.'  The issue isn't about what the events of Egypt means for the rest of the world, but about what they mean for Egyptians. It is alarming to realize that too many including the prominent members of the Obama administration haven't learned from the greatest mistakes of the past. Doing so would have taught them that tolerating wrongs to avoid the worst never works in international politics for the simple reason that it legitimates the worst by delegitimating the moral arguments against it.

Thus, tying to the fall of Mubarak to the nuclearisation of Iran and of the whole middle east is like tying the fall of Louis XVI to the rise of anarchy in Europe and of the reign of terror. History isn't gastronomy and Egyptians are thus neither ingredients nor slaves of a predictable or controllable future.

The Egyptian State and legitimacy

Sugary excerpt of the day is from Juan Cole on the Egyptian revolt (I don't think the word revolution applies here, at least not yet):

The Nasserist state, for all its flaws, gained legitimacy because it was seen as a state for the mass of Egyptians, whether abroad or domestically. The present regime is widely seen in Egypt as a state for the others– for the US, Israel, France and the UK– and as a state for the few– the Neoliberal nouveau riche. Islam plays no role in this analysis because it is not an independent variable. Muslim movements have served to protest the withdrawal of the state from its responsibilities, and to provide services. But they are a symptom, not the cause. All this is why Mubarak’s appointment of military men as vice president and prime minister cannot in and of itself tamp down the crisis. They, as men of the System, do not have more legitimacy than does the president– and perhaps less.

I'm wondering whether this means that this revolt will  end with the reestablishment of the Nasserist state rather than something more democratic, in other words is it just a fight to return to what 'worked' in the past ?

Obama's Tunisia

Sarkozy's handling of the events in Tunisia was widely criticized. I'm simply wondering what will be said of Obama's handing the events in Egypt.

Real politik may be effective, but it has a price especially for leaders who had the audacity not of hope, but to declare themselves different/better/more moral than their predecessors to end up shamelesslly continuing too many of their policies. Ah the illusions of change !

Right diagnostic, wrong solutions

At least Chinua Achebe, to the contrary of Obasanjo, gets part of the diagnostic  of the ills of Nigeria right:

We have endured a terrible failure of leadership – not just individuals, but a whole class of potential leaders, from which I do not absolve myself. The role of the intellectual is difficult. We should live by what we preach and we should speak out. In that way we always seemed to be superior to our former western leaders. For them, writers and painters just had to write and paint and keep out of politics. Leadership in all its forms is a sacred trust in a democracy, almost like an anointed priesthood.

Is it just me or isn't there something wrong when people  are too obsessed with 'identity', authenticity, an all the glitz to focus on just getting things right? I may be a petulant child, but I'm coming to the conviction that there can only be a decline of intelligence when the focus is on the 'who' especially when there is neither a collective nor a single answer to that question. 

There isn't such a thing as the African being and the fact that Achebe and Obasanjo are desperately looking for it explain why they never saw the forest through the trees.

Self-reliance is for others

Quote of the day is from Olusegun Obasanjo, Nigeria's former president :

Africa needs as many friends as possible. And if anything there should be co-operation from east and west, to pull Africa up.

I find this sentence appalling. As always 'Africa' is used to create an imaginary entity, which one doesn't have to define, but simply has to dream and to be able to assert something that is illogical without being challenged.

Africa is as real as Xanadu. There are only african countries, which have to realize that their destiny is in their hands and that it is foolish to believe that all countries on a continent have a common destiny and identity. In short, Obasanjo, as all of his peers, uses the word 'Africa' to hide from the sad reality that he has no imagination and not enough no-how to help Nigeria. He is suffering from what I like to call the Caligula complex, which is the obsession with the sun to avoid focusing on what one considers small and prosaic things, but which are, alas, essential.

Radio France Internationale

I appeared on a show called le débat africain (in French) on RFI in which I asserted that there isn't such a thing as Africanity. It is a position on which I will elaborate on December 13 when at last, I'm having, at the Lucernaire in Paris (7 pm), a soirée to present my book, L'Empreinte des Choses Brisées and of course to sign copies. So if you are in Paris or just want to pick a fight with me or just to listen to something fresh on identity, sexuality and les choses brisées, come and bring a friend.

 

1. La diaspora africaine aux Etats-Unis

(19:31)

2. La diaspora africaine aux Etats-Unis

(19:31)

'Africa' and Vile psychologization

I found the following sugary excerpt from Brendan O'Neill vile :

It isn’t because they have been brainwashed that many Africans choose not to wear condoms. It could be because, in a continent where there are still high levels of infant mortality, they want to have as many children as possible, since children are frequently needed to work on the farm, earn money and care for older generations. Or it could be because they want to express their love for each other in the most intimate way possible, without a sheath. Or – and I know this will be hard for the Home Counties humanists to comprehend – it could be because in countries where life is short and expectations low, people have different attitudes to risk than we in the West do. There are many reasons why Africans – both Catholic and non-Catholic – might choose not to wear a condom, and they are not irrational. And, of course, there’s the very basic fact that in very poor countries with little medical infrastructure, diseases spread faster and have worse consequences than they do in the developed West, with or without papish propaganda.

First, I don't know who O'Neil is talking about when he talks about 'Africans.' Second, I wonder why the behavior of some people from the african continent is analyzed as the norm for all, as something that all those people  do because they are from there. In short, in an attempt to make a fair point, Brendan O'Neill took a shortcut, which led him to the middle of nowhere for after reading him, he succeeds in doing only one thing, which is forcing people who come from the same geographical location the same who act a certain way, by implying that the action in question is conditioned mysteriously in part by that strange place, where nothing is the same, that isn't part of history, where gravity doesn't function, where people are particular, a place that is the Babylonia of culturalists and of tribalists: Africa.

What is most disturbing and distressing is that it never occurs to O'Neill that the 'Africans' he is talking about are just people like him and their behavior have nothing to do with a supposed and nonexistent Africanness, but their own individuality. I mean why and where guys would get the idea that having children and sleeping with a lot of women without protection is a sign of manliness as Harvey Mansfield would say?  Eh oui, a lot of people from the heart of darkness are just Harvey Mansfield's disciples  and believe selfishly, in a manly manner, that they are such masterpieces of nature that they need to breed as much as possible to create 'little thems' to make the world a better place. The foolishness of unapologetic and deified manliness are universal.

Naipaul and writing about 'Africa'

Excerpt of Aminatta Forna's review of V.S. Naipaul's latest The Masque of Africa: Glimpses of African belief in the Guardian:

It is a quest through the continent for the spirit of African belief, the belief systems that preceded the arrival of Christianity and Islam – which is very much in keeping with the legacy of Joseph Conrad, who is referenced several times in the book. Already this feels cliched and tiresome; one yearns for the day when an author from outside can approach Africa without invoking the "heart of darkness" mythology. In 1975, Chinua Achebe published an essay attacking Conrad's best-known work as racist and already the novelist Robert Harris has described The Masque of Africa as "toxic".

This review makes me feel uncomfortable for two reasons. The first reason is that again, it is assumed that there is a such a thing as an "Africa" populated by Africans, with a particular identity and beliefs, which make them atypical or rather which explain why their continent is conventionally believed to be unmodern or in the back of the train of civilization. The second reason is that it seems that too writer who wants to write about the African continent like to make it feel as if it is an unique undertaking that must be judge by different standards and that their work must be judge with compassion and while having a forgiving consideration that they are doing something too difficult by going to the barbarians. The trouble is that reviewers and critiques enable them more often than not and judge their work as if it is different, out of the margins of literature because the subject matter is particular and so dark and foreign.

Since having my book published, I have realized that in France, in particular, it assumed that Africa and Africans are so different and atypical that their writings have to be belittled or graded with a curve and that more importantly, they are only entitled to talk about darkness, africanity, colonialism, and post-colonialism. The trouble comes when you refuse to fit that mold...I have wondered whether Conrad's The Heart of Darkness would be such as classic if it had been written by one of the 'savages.' Culturalism is destroying literature.

The allusory and illusory African World Cup

Interesting and informative words from Sanza Tshabalala (first quote) and Ann Berstein (second) on the South African World Cup, the obsession with race and the horrendously stupid and anti-intellectual notion that it was the African World Cup:

The more the African teams were going down, the more I started getting worried about our race relations. I thought, we [Africans] are not doing well otherwise and I thought we would do well in football and it would maybe do something with our pride.
I’m obsessed with race issues. South Africans should be behind African teams. Then I went to see the Argentina-Nigeria game, at Ellis Park. And I see young Indian professionals, white people, all dressed up in Lionel Messi jerseys, and the few of us [who] are supporting Nigeria – probably 2 per cent of the stadium. I sat there thinking, ‘What’s this society going to?’ Because we’re meant to be supporting an African team, aren’t we?

---

Why? Why should we support an African team? There isn’t a black view, nor is there a white view. What’s striking to me, going to a Soccer City game, was that you were seeing very large numbers of this emerging black lower middle class. They could afford to come to the game, they had all the right clothes and they were there. Class is more important now.

This World Cup confirmed my belief  that Africanity/Africanness  is a concept created by those who refuse to acknowledge the complexities and the diversity of the African continent either because it challenges their prejudices and received ideas or because it is more convenient for them to believe that the populations of the African continent, as Conrad's cannibals, are the same and therefore have the same views, the same needs, and the same identity. It would be too inconvenient for Sepp Blatter, the president of FIFA, the football international governing body, to accept the idea that the South African World Cup was solely the one of a country not of a continent because it would mean taking the risk to have another country on the same continent host the World Cup sooner than in a decade or two. In short, africanity/africanness is about anything but reality for it is an attempt to take short cuts to avoid acknowledging unsettling realities and to be content with bienfaisant paternalism or simply paternalistic humanism.

Ghana not Africa

Ghana lost yesterday. I had predicted that the Black stars would win if they were capable of ignoring the symbolic "crap" about Ghana representing the whole African continent and some type of imaginary "Africanity." Ghana lost yesterday mostly because the pressure of representing something other than itself crushed its players. Asamoah Gyan, the poor guy who missed the penalty that would have sent his country to the semi-final, thought undoubtedly about all the fluff, about the idiotic and anti-intellectual notion that he was carrying the hopes of 'Africa' on his shoulders instead of calming himself down to remember that Ghana isn't 'Africa'  and the game against Uruguay wasn't another absurd and futile identity struggle.
Next time, because there will be a next time for Ghana, its players should just think of themselves, their country, and ignore the burden of a nonexistent common identity and of a idealized history. Ghana isn't 'Africa' and remembering it can only be productive for it is a liberating reality.

Before or after whatever

Scenery: It's hot, humid, and quiet, but this calme trompeur will not last for it is less than an hour from the game between Ghana and Uruguay... It's amazing to see how all-encompassing sports can be when it becomes about something other than fun, but about identity. I'm sports fanatic, but I wouldn't die for it. In any case, I'm not watching the game for I'm going to bed. I watched too much tennis (Nadal  won!!!) and Brazil lost, which made my day. Besides I know the outcome of the game already: Ghana is going to win. The Black stars will win because they are the better team and because the only thing that can stop them is all the fluff and the burdensome symbolic noise, which may paralyze them and make them believe that they are fighting for something bigger and that football is an identity struggle which can repair injustices or rather fix a country's and  a continent's ills. Thus, Ghana will win if the Black Stars make the temperate choice to play just football and to ignore the chatter about its meaning.