The Republic of Dissent

Bob Geldof's blinders

Bob Geldof slams the BBC for its report suggesting that some of the money he raised through Live Aid/Band Aid was used by mercenaries to buy weapons in Ethiopia:

But this BBC story was neither about me nor Band Aid. By disingenuously posturing as "serious" reporting, it pretended the total failure and negligence of all the great humanitarian workers and their organisations in the worst famine in modern times, and how miraculously not one of them spotted that no one was getting food despite everyone supplying it!
It beggars belief that anyone would take that seriously. Where were all the dead people then? If no one was getting food, why was nobody dying? That would have been one of the first questions I'd have asked. But they weren't dying because they were getting help, and massive amounts of it. But of course no one did ask where the bodies were at the World Service. That and many, many, other unasked questions.No, this story here is of the total collapse of standards and systems at the World Service, which has a special and particular duty of care to the truth.

I have to say that I don't understand why Geldof is more enraged at the BBC than at the possibility that the money that he raised was used to do something than to the feed the hungry in Ethiopia. He doesn't even want to consider the possibility that it might be true, which tells that he doesn't know about Ethiopia or about African countries because otherwise, he would be singing a different tune about finding ways to make sure that when celebrities raise money, it gets to the right people.  For some people, Bob Geldof is obsessed with the image of what he created, he wants to remain a perfect, pure and totally selfless enterprise, which was also absolutely successfully. Unfortunately, the real world doesn't work that way and more often than charitable funds because they go to places without civil societies, without accountable governments get mismanaged. That's reality. It may be a hard fact for Bob Geldof to accept, but he is going to have to accept and address it to show that his charitable acts are about more dealing with facts than perfect and commercialized images. Nobody is saying to Geldof not to dream grand dreams, but simply not forget that the real world is neither neverland nor celebrityland.

Bringing Congo to London

Great stuff from Jon Day:

The Congolese embassy, a shabby unassuming building at the insalubrious end of Gray’s Inn Road, is very different again. I used to go there regularly, on jobs from mining companies asking permission to get digging. Occasionally, I’d share the waiting-room with immaculately dressed Sapeurs, flamboyantly suited and booted fashionistas who’d wait in line clasping ornate canes and wearing Davey Crocket hats. More often than not, I’d be alone. But I’d often clock up an hour’s waiting while the correct stamp was being located, or the right person came back from lunch. I don’t know if any of the visas I subsequently delivered turned out to be fakes.
The embassy was set alight in 2007, in an arson attack allegedly perpetrated by supporters of Combattants de Londres, a group dedicated to preventing Congolese musicians who support Joseph Kabila from performing in Europe. Embassy staff were evicted from their homes in 2008 as no one had paid the rent. Ovens, clothing and furniture filled the embassy’s waiting room for months. The hallway leading into the building remains blackened by fire, and the burnt smell still lingered in the air the last time I was there.

Something is wrong with this reality, but I don't have the words to formulate it because I believe that it would be too painfully simple to say that we are uniquely the product of our environment.

When Winnie bites Nelson

Winnie Mandela is probably one of the few persons who is not afraid to slam her former husband, even though he is a God in South Africa. After reading her comments, I have to believe that any movie made about her will be better than any movie made about Nelson Mandela because she is more flawed and thus more human; actors and directors aren't going to be afraid to go "there." A few of her reproaches to her former husband: 

Mandela did go to prison and he went in there as a burning young revolutionary. But look what came out.(.,.) I cannot forgive him for going to receive the Nobel [Peace Prize in 1993] with his jailer [FW] de Klerk. Hand in hand they went. (...) Do you think De Klerk released him from the goodness of his heart? He had to. The times dictated it, the world had changed, and our struggle was not a flash in the pan, it was bloody to say the least and we had given rivers of blood. (...) I had kept it alive with every means at my disposal.

Something tells me that Winnie Mandela wishes Mandela had remained in prison so she would never had had to fade in the background as a disposable thing when he came out because she wasn't clean. Part of the truth of course is that Winnie Mandela never learned to become a stateswoman because she believes in radicalism ,raciality, identity politics, money, and not much else. For after all, she is speaking up this loudly now because she wants somebody to pay her to shut up.

Zuma, Mugabe, and Ivory Towers

I agree with Justice Malala on this:

For Zuma's information, there are no sanctions against Zimbabwe. There are targeted sanctions against Mugabe and his closest ministers and business inner circle. These are the people who have laundered Mugabe's wealth and maintain his foreign accounts.
It is worth remembering, in case Zuma has forgotten, that Mugabe wants sanctions lifted against him so that he can visit his daughter, Bona, at university in Hong Kong - and take her shopping elsewhere in the world.
Meanwhile, the children of ordinary people in Zimbabwe have no education. Schools have closed because teachers have fled to work as gardeners in South Africa and elsewhere. Zimbabwe, which once had the best education system on the sub-continent, is now ruined and its children rendered illiterate.

The Queen and the Sleaze

And now, for my almost daily Zuma update (I promise to stop soon because just writing about Zuma makes me feel dirty), Charlotte Bauer's take on his meeting with the Queen:

Possibly the only British citizen not troubled by Jacob Zuma's state visit to the UK this week is the queen, host of his two-night sleepover at her house. In 58 years on the throne the British monarch has put out the welcome mat for more sleaze than Lolly Jackson on a Saturday night at Teazers.

Mugabe loves the Tories

Just another sign that the Apocalypse is coming for the Brits Conservative or just rather that David Cameron can't become Prime Minister of Britain unless Gordon Brown continues to help him, Robert Mugabe is supporting his candidacy:

We have always related better with the British through the Conservatives than Labour. Conservatives are bold, Blair and Brown run away when they see me, but not these fools, they know how to relate to others.

The buffoon and the cultural imperialists

The South African Times's editorial on Jacob Zuma's State Visit to Britain puts it just right :

You've got to feel for Jacob Zuma. There he is in London being described by one right-wing commentator as a buffoon and bigot. The state visit to the UK was supposed to finally afford him the opportunity to move on from weeks of criticism of his scandalous relationship with Sonono Khoza. Instead the sex scandal is following him around like chewing gum on the sole of his brogues.
But why, oh why, did he choose to react by saying that the British believed Africans were barbaric? All because one blogger on the Daily Mail's website was provoking him.
His ill-considered response accomplished two things:
It soured the attitude of his hosts, who were now being caricatured as racist jingoes - not by a lone South African blogger, but by its president; and
He displayed vulnerability when he ought to have projected strength.

Whoever is advising Zuma ought to be taken out back and given a sharp kick on the shin.

The point is that buffoons especially the ones who cannot justify their own vile conducts or who have their godly manliness challenged are prone to attack others, to use culture as an excuse, and to accuse others of cultural imperialism because they refused to accept that some people have the right to be barbarians.

Obsessing about Colonial history

Louis Georges Tin's (a vice president of the French version of the NAACP, Le Cran) interview in the Root offers another proof that unfortunately, the United States has exported successfully its racialized views of history and of society to France. Sugary excerpt;

In spite of the process of decolonization, French institutions continue to believe in the good they think they have done colonizing the world. Many intellectuals refer to colonization with a sense of nostalgia and think it was a privilege to be colonized by the French.
(....) I know this debate may seem a bit odd. It could not happen, I hope, in other countries. Confronted by the United States, India, Australia and many other powerful countries, the United Kingdom could hardly claim that colonization was “positive.” We could say the same thing about Spain, confronted by Mexico, Venezuela or Colombia.
But France remains in a dominant situation toward its former colonies. So it is still possible to maintain these ideas. For example, when he went to Dakar in 2007, a few months after he was elected, [French president] Nicolas Sarkozy made a famous speech in which he stated: “The African man could not make his way into history. In his imagination, everything always starts again, and there is no room for human adventure and any notion of progress.” You could not imagine Zapatero (Prime Minister of Spain) saying the same thing to Chavez, or Gordon Brown saying this to Obama. But being in a dominant position, France can “afford” to act in that way when it comes to its former colonies.

I agree with the popular, but yet vacuous notion that it is important to know about history to learn from it. However, increasingly, history has become a way to fight old battles, to make political arguments about the present, about social justice, and more importantly about the distribution of wealth in a society. I am tired of obsessing about history, of thinking that it conditions the present. I have had, to the contrary of too many people, to stop assuming that the past is so sacred that it cannot be defied and has to overshadow our common humanity. The problem that I have with people such as Louis-Georges Tin and the members of Le Cran  is that they believe that America is a model on the race issue and that they have to racialize every question to one day have a French Barack Obama, as if that would be a sign that all is well again in la Douce France. In other words, my message i to Tin and others:is to let it go at last, to focus and to take care of the present and more important of France's future without putting race at the center of everything to achieve social justice.

Adopting "black" children

I almost agree totally with Angie Chuang on this:

Bring up race and adoption, and watch people squirm. The deep racial politics of adoption are mired in centuries of colonialism, as well as white paternalism over domestic minority groups and developing countries. The result: They have left scars as deep as forced adoption of American Indian children into white families in the mid-20th century—and fresh ones from the campaign to convert Muslim Indonesian orphans to Christianity after the 2004 tsunami.
The current-day realities of transracial adoption remain tangled in the U.S. government’s own conflicted policies about race-matching versus “colorblind” adoption, as well as constantly shifting regulations in countries such as China, the former Soviet Union and Guatemala. There are uncomfortable contradictions: Whites are chastised for their reluctance to adopt black children, but then those who do adopt black children are criticized for not being able to prepare black adoptees to face discrimination—or embrace their identities.
And the most unsettling contradiction of all: Isn’t adoption an act of love? A selfless act? Can we honestly tell the parent of an adopted child who happens to be of a different race that their bond is somehow tainted by generations of racism?

The main issue remains that race is still seen as essential to one's identity and that for too many people, black children especially when they come from Africa are like animals who have to be raised in the wild in order to remain themselves, to retain their blackness. I had an interesting experience at the airport last December as I was waiting for the arrival of an Air France flight. There was this French woman who was holding a "black" toddler who was being unruly, running everywhere, she kept running after him and you could tell that she felt that she was his mother. I was with a Friend who is Brazilian who said because he couldn't believe what he was seeing  "I'll bet you anything that the kid is either mixed [even though the child was so obviously not] or that she is married to an African and the kid is his." The child was holding a balloon who said "welcome home Daddy" We waited and when the Dad came, he was white white. My Friend couldn't believe his eyes, and just remarked, "I guess when you want kids desperately and cannot have them, you will love whatever you can get." That's just shows that people have narrow views when it  comes to race and that they believe that black kids or others need parents who look like not to be lost or to become something/someone they were never meant to be.

Live Aid and weapons

If one is surprised to read this then one is really naïve or just living in the colorful world of Jacob Zuma:

At least some of that money was likely to have come from the £150 million raised by Live Aid and Band Aid. More than three million copies of Do They Know It's Christmas sold in just five weeks in late 1984 to raise funds for the estimated eight million Ethiopians facing starvation. Up to a million died.
According to a report published on Wednesday, rebel soldiers disguised themselves as grain traders and handed over sacks of sand hidden beneath genuine food aid, in return for cash from Western donations.

The simple fact is that when aid is sent to countries with no civil society or working government to make sure that it gets where it needs to go, it tends to get lost in the way or rather to find its way in the pockets of a lot of unsavory characters.

The tyranny and fetishism of culture

Jacob Zuma just won't let me leave him alone when he continues shamelessly and shamefully to use culture as an excuse for his incivility and barbaric manliness:

When the British came to our country they said everything we are doing was barbaric, was wrong, inferior in whatever way ... I don't know why they are continuing thinking that their culture is more superior than others.(...) Bear in mind that I am a freedom fighter and I fought to free myself, also for my culture to be respected. (...) I've not looked down upon any culture of anyone ... and no one has been given an authority to judge others.

What a limited, pompous, and dangerous argument ! I guess we should just let the Talibans stone women in the name of Islam, we should tolerate female circumcision because Africa was colonized and yes, finally,  we should say to "African women" as Fela Kuti would say that they should be grateful to be one of the numerous possessions of "African" men who are all Kings with great needs that no just one of them can satisfy. I have the feeling if Zuma were white, and were justifying the unjustifiable by using culture, he would be called a racist because people would say that he is in fact saying that some people have the right to be savages because it is their nature and because their culture encourages barbarity.

Agathe Habyarimana, dirty hands, and responsibility

Philip Gourevicth on the arrest of the former first lady of Rwanda, Agathe Habyarimana and what it says about the new and improved relation between France and Rwanda

French statesmen are not in the habit of travelling to small African countries that they used to run as puppet regimes to eat fistfuls of crow. But that is precisely what Sarkozy did last week when he stood beside Kagame in Kigali and declared that France had made mistakes during the genocide, and had to reckon with them. Afterwards, commentators made much of the fact that Sarkozy had not issued a full apology. But in a country whose history is still bloodily contested, Sarkozy’s frank acknowledgment of the truth of his former antagonist’s reality sent an unmistakable message. Without France’s cover, the pretense that Rwanda’s genocide is an open question is stripped barer than ever. With this morning’s arrest, we can see that France’s change of attitude toward Rwanda was at least partly influenced by the facts presented in the case against Madame Habyarimana. In November of last year, a pair of French judges went to Kigali to study the evidence assembled by Rwanda’s Genocide Fugitives Tracking Unit. Meanwhile the French case against Kagame’s coterie appeared to be crumbling. Whether France will extradite Madame Agathe to Rwanda remains to be seen. She has already been released on bail. But such is the warm mood between the two governments that Rwanda’s prosecutor general, Martin Ngoga, declared today that he had every confidence in the French judiciary—a statement that was simply unimaginable from a Rwandan official six months ago.

I don't think that Madame Agathe will ever be extradited to Kigali. She is one of the few remaining relics of a stubborn an still alive past and she is the symbol of what used to the French Rwandan policy. Extraditing her is a risk that France cannot afford to take because it would force it to consider the responsibility of its own politicians and government officials. To me, the key question remains how far Kagame  is willing to go to prosecute of the members of the Habyarimana regime and those who played a role in the genocide and more importantly what price he is willing to pay to have them judged by a court of law. I may be wrong and it is surely too easy to say what I'm about to say far away from the situation, but I believe that an inflexible obsession with punishing all of those who have dirty hands as Sartre would say may hinder reconciliation for it is clear that the genocide happened because the majority of the population got their hands dirty or did nothing while people were being viciously slaughtered like animals. Thus, in short, the central issue is what does a country do when it becomes obvious that almost all of its citizens bear some responsible for the darkest hours of its history, what level of responsibility becomes forgivable or at the very least tolerable to move it forward?

Rwanda, Free speech, and reconciliation

I have to admit that I have mixed reactions when reading this from Stephen Kinzer's article on Paul Kagame and his efforts to advance the reconciliation in Rwanda after the genocide:

Kagame's government has passed laws against disseminating "genocide ideology", meaning views that could inflame communal hatreds. People are supposed to describe themselves only as Rwandan, never as Hutu or Tutsi. Kagame claims these laws are necessary to keep Rwanda back from the abyss of violence. If he enforces them during the political campaign, though, critics will accuse him of suppressing free speech.
Last month, a Rwandan-born businesswoman who has spent more than a decade in the Netherlands, Victoire Ingabire, arrived in Rwanda and announced that she was a candidate for president. Her party is based abroad and not recognised in Rwanda. According to a UN report (in French), she is supported by leaders of the principal Hutu insurgent group, which is among factions terrorising the eastern Congo.Ingabire's first statements after landing in Rwanda were thinly veiled appeals for Hutu solidarity. "There is no shame in saying I am Hutu or am Tutsi; there's nothing wrong with that," she told one interviewer.
Appealing to ethnic identity this way is illegal. The official press launched a sharp campaign against Ingabire, and her campaign group has been attacked at least once. She has been interrogated by police and warned that she will be arrested if she continues preaching "genocide ideology". Amnesty International responded by accusing the government of "intimidation and harassment".Nonsense, replies President Kagame. He believes western human rights activists underestimate the prospects for a new outbreak of ethnic violence in Rwanda, as well as the danger of allowing ethnically charged speech. "We've lived this life," he said angrily at a news conference. "We've lived the consequences. So we understand it better than anyone from anywhere else."

I am torn for two reasons.  I believe that Kagame is right and that the priority had to be on making sure that history didn't repeat itself and that therefore no fighting words lighted up the poudrière. However, I also realize that those are short-term measures which may lead to cover old wounds without leading to healing.  I wonder whether it is possible to have reconciliation based solely on the victims' terms especially when they are still a minority as the Tutsis are in Rwanda. I worry about what is going to happen not only really after Kagame, but in more than twenty years for now when it would be less difficult for too many with a tenacious sense of resentment and entitlement not just to deny the severity of the genocide, but to deny its very existence.

Indigenous Zimbabweans and the racialization of racism

Robert Mugabe may not senile, but he is still a racist as this sugary excerpt of a post by Annie Lowrey shows:

Today, in Zimbabwe, a highly controversial new law requiring businesses to be majority-owned by indigenous Zimbabwean citizens comes into effect.
Within the next 45 days, every company with an asset value over $500,000 needs to submit paperwork detailing the racial background of its shareholders. If the company has a majority of white or foreign shareholders, the Indigenization and Economic Empowerment Act -- brainchild of President Robert Mugabe, whose catastrophic land reform act caused hyperinflation and famine -- requires it to transfer shares to indigenous Zimbabweans.
The goal of the law -- "a deliberate involvement of indigenous Zimbabweans in the economic activities of the country, to which hitherto they had no access, so as to ensure the equitable ownership of the nation's resources" -- is a noble one. But the law is a calamity that promises to drive away foreign dollars and further the impoverishment of average Zimbabweans.

It troubles me that people are reluctant to call Zimbabwe a country with a "race" problem and Mugabe a racist because they are justifying his actions with history as if a rose has stopped to be a rose to be a rose when it is of a different color. In other words,  I find it outrageous that Zuma can consider even asking the Brits to lift/ease the sanctions on Zimbabwe and that there seems to be a complaisant silence from too many people who like to scream racism on this story when one doesn't need much of an imagination to guess what they would be saying if Mugabe and the so-called indigenous Zimbabweans had another skin pigmentation.

South Africa and the middle of nowhere

Needless to say that I agree with Daniel Howden on this:

Grandstanding foreign trips are usually the cue for questions about who is in charge of a country in the absence of its elected leader. Jacob Zuma's state visit to Britain has instead prompted some in the South African media to ask if anyone is really in charge of the continent's political and economic giant, even when he's at home.
Less than a year after winning the general election, the desire among ANC supporters to make a break from the divisive era of Thabo Mbeki has left them with a different, but equally dangerous, problem. Mr Zuma built support within the ruling alliance by reaching out to diverse – and divergent interests. While this worked in propelling him to the top office, telling everyone what they want to hear is a poor strategy for running a country.

Tthe problem has everything to do with whom Jacob Zuma is rather than what he says. He is a paltoquet, somebody who believes that he is South Africa and therefore has a lot of trouble rising above his own imperfections to make his country proud or at least to show enough leadership and wisdom to bow to the principle that in democracies, especially when they are as fragile and as unequal as South Africa is, it is critical that the people on the top accept the idea that their nation is one of laws and not one of men. I have to say that I cannot believe that anybody is surprised, but in any case, I hope that Zuma finds some humility in London and returns home a new man. Well, the trouble with fairy tales isn't that they never come true, but that they make one too hopeful that one stars to hallucinate.

Sisterhood

Quote of the early morning from Henning Mankell:

There are many things you can say about the need of assistance in Africa. But one thing is absolutely sure, that we have to see to that the women of Africa who have such enormous responsibilities and no influence at all, have much more influence. Sometimes I get a little angry asking myself where are all the feminists in the West who should really help their sisters out in Africa. But it is not only a feminist question; it’s a question of humanity.

China, Mugabe, and Africa

No comments necessary to the news that China threw at its embassy in Harare a birthday-bash  for Robert Mugabe except to wonder whether the Chinese have any standards to their African policies and whether there is anything that they won't do (but again that something one can wonder about many world powers in Africa):

Mugabe celebrated his 86th birthday on Sunday and made time to attend a party held in his honour at the Chinese embassy in Harare, China's Foreign Ministry said in a statement.
Hailed as a saviour by fanatical supporters and praised throughout Africa for standing up to what many see as bullying by the West, Mugabe is hated in equal measure by opponents who accuse him of being a dictator.
Mugabe "thanked the Chinese embassy for its painstaking preparations for the birthday celebration and ... hoped to further expand friendly cooperative relations in every field between the two nations", the Foreign Ministry said.
The ministry's website showed pictures of Mugabe cutting a birthday cake in front of a large sign wishing him "Happy 86th birthday" and addressing almost 100 guests.

Sarkozy is whipped

After reading Sarkozy's semi-excuses to Rwanda, I believe that there are two explanations for the changes in Sarkozy who used to be against repentance. The cutest and less plausible one is that he discovered Jesus. The most credible one is that he got whipped by the realization that France will not remain a player in some parts of Africa and elsewhere where it has a long and sorted histoiry unless it softens its image and seems at least to be aware that it made mistakes before.
I believe hat the Sarkozy's apology tour is less about redemption or a real change in policy, but about realpolitik and competing with the Americans and the Chinese for the attention of countries who love apologies because they believe that their past is one of the few commodities that they have to bargain their future.

Ridicule doesn't kill, but...

Kadhafi is taking himself for Ben Laden again surely because he misses the days when he was the  enemy number one of the US and of the West:

The masses of Muslims must go to all airports in the Islamic world and prevent any Swiss plane landing, to all harbours and prevent any Swiss ships docking (...)There is a big difference between terrorism and jihad.

I guess that all one can do here is to regret that Libya has enough oil to make its dictator able to buy anything including respectability and more importantly to have the World forget that he is a dangerous Putz with delusions of grandeur.

The wonderful South Africa of Jacob Zuma

Africa Intelligence has a must-read article on what it calls "the state of Jacob Zuma." Reading it forces one to wonder how long can South Africa and more importantly South Africans can afford to have a Berlusconi as their head of state especially when they are dealing with so many existential issues.  Sugary excerpt:

Reports of President Jacob Zuma’s political demise are exaggerated. Yet what should have been a moment of triumph for him during the 20th anniversary of Nelson Mandela’s release from prison proved to be yet another tribulation in his worst week yet as President. The usually unflappable Zuma looked rattled as he arrived at Parliament in Cape Town to give the State of the Nation address on 11 February. His speech was a damp squib – too plodding to fire up his political base and too short on specifics to impress the markets.
Just days before, Zuma had been pushed into making a public apology over revelations that he had fathered another child out of wedlock, this time with the daughter of football mogul and owner of the Kaiser Chiefs club Irvin Khoza. For once, the commentariat’s talk of ‘floodgates opening’ and ‘circling hyenas’ did not seem overblown as African National Congress insiders briefed journalists that Zuma’s promiscuity was a liability to the ANC.
It was Zuma’s third public apology – the first two were about having unprotected sex with another friend’s daughter and making belligerent remarks about gay people – which raises doubts about his sincerity and his own standing. More so because, we hear, the pressure on him to apologise came from some of his most senior allies, such as KwaZulu-Natal Premier Zweli Mkhize, leader of the Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu) Zwelinzima Vavi, and South African Communist Party (SACP) Secretary General Blade Nzimande.Despite the efforts of Zuma’s spin doctors to downplay the political importance of the affair, it was clear that many ANC supporters – and not just the middle class ones – were deeply critical of his behaviour. Many senior ANC people see that voters link Zuma’s lifestyle and tough economic conditions in the townships. Some poorer ANC supporters complained that Zuma’s wives, concubines and extended family get state subsidies while others must wait for government services, jobs and houses

I'm coming to the conclusion after reading a lot of South Africa that one of its problems is that it has one dominant party, the African National Congress (ANC) that will probably continue to rule for the foreseeable future. The ANC has no real incentives, no political threats to its power to do what's right to the country when those acts might be bad for the part and starts to believe that the ANC is South-Africa.

France, Rwanda, and the weight of History

This sugary excerpt from the New York Times's article on Sarkozy's upcoming visit to Kigali bugs me:

“We will recognize the errors of judgment that France and the international community made,” said the palace spokesman, adding that the purpose of Mr. Sarkozy’s visit was not to ask pardon but to open a new chapter in relations.
Rwanda has taken steps to move past its French-speaking past. In November, it was admitted to the Commonwealth of Nations, only the second former colony without links to Britain to join.
At the same time, Rwanda also restored relations with France and each country decided to halt its genocide-related lawsuits against the other.
In an interview last week, with the weekly newspaper Le Journal du Dimanche, France’s foreign minister, Bernard Kouchner, suggested the creation of a commission of historians on Rwanda, “to find out what happened then.”
“It will take months, years but we will do it,” Mr. Kouchner said.
Mr. Sarkozy, he said, “is not opposed to having France look at its history.”

I have the unsettling feeling that history is been used as both a bargaining and a political tool and that is despicable. That doesn't mean that France's hands are clean when it comes to the Rwandan Genocide, but rather it is too serious of an issue to be trivialized by short-term political gains. It's probably a naïve view to hold, but I don't like it when history becomes solely about present day politics and when politicians are trying to write history to either alleviate what they perceived as past, but severe mistakes or to place the emphasis of what they believe to be essential elements to justify their present conduct. Sarkozy's visit to Rwanda can only a positive if he doesn't try to blind Rwandans with history by forgetting to talk to its present's day political leaders about the present and some of their own mistakes in places like the Congo (Democratic republic of Congo).

The destruction of Mogadishu and the Somalization of the world

Tristan McConnell on Mogadishu, the capital of Somalia and its permanent state of war away from the camera and thus from the gaze of the world that is destroying what used to be a beautiful city:

The current round of fighting is just the latest in Somalia's decades-old war. Al-Shabaab, an Islamist militia that recently confirmed its allegiance to al-Qaeda, is battling the Transitional Federal Government for control of the country. The TFG gets diplomatic support and money from the UN, soldiers from the African Union and military hardware from the US; take any one of these away and it would collapse like every other administration in the past 19 years. In 1991, the country's last functioning government - itself a venal dictatorship - was defeated by an alliance of clan militias. The warlords then turned on each other, fighting for economic and political control. Somalia has been a maelstrom of violence ever since.
There have been moments of respite. In 2006, the militias were defeated by the Islamic Courts Union - a political group of which al-Shabaab was the armed wing. But within months the union had been chased from power by a US-backed Ethiopian invasion.Now, al-Shabaab is back - stronger and more radical - and holds sway over much of Somalia. Mogadishu is a city of ruins, bearing testimony to the years of destruction. Roads are broken; buildings are shattered, concertinaed to the ground or lacking outer walls, like giant honeycombs.

When reading McConnell's description of the chaos in Mogadishu, I'm reminded of André Glucksmann's prediction that the world is going to be somalized, meaning that we would be seen more cities been destroyed and torn apart without much international concern and especially without any coverage in the media.Unfortunately, I fear that most of those dark holes will happen on the African continent for we know that it is easier to succumb to fatality, resignation and to  the grotesque idea that Africa is cursed  when the inconceivable and the unacceptable is happening within its countries.

Precarious states and instability

I agree with Lauren Gelfand on this:

The situation in Niger is a sobering reminder of the precarious state of democracy and good governance in a region all-too-familiar with the replacement of an ostensibly elected president by a military regime. Next month brings with it the one-year anniversary of the assassinations of the president and the head of the army in Guinea-Bissau, which has deteriorated into the world's first genuine narco-state. Guinea is only barely back on track towards civilian leadership with a transitional government comprised of both political and military figures, while Mauritania has struggled to regain its legitimacy after two coups in three years executed by the same military officers.
Add the ongoing leadership crisis in powerhouse Nigeria, the rising tensions in Ivory Coast ahead of elections now five-times postponed, and the slow and unsteady progress towards post-conflict reconciliation in Sierra Leone and Liberia, and there is no mistaking the fact that good governance and strong civilian institutions are needed more acutely than ever in West Africa.

Frightening stats

Just reading this scares me:

There are 41 million girls around the world who should be in primary school all week, but aren't, the Department for International Development says. At least 20 million of them are, like Abigail, in sub-Saharan Africa.
In Ghana, 91% of boys, but only 79% of girls finish primary school. By the time they complete junior high school – for 12- to 15-year-olds – 65% of boys and just 54% of girls are still in lessons, says the lobby group the Ghana National Education Campaign Coalition.

This reality is going to be very difficult to change as long as people keep using traditions and the so-called absolute divinity of "ancestral" norms to justify the unjustifiable and the inexcusable.

Dangerous African Colonels

Elizabeth Dickinson's thought-provoking answer to the question of why African coups are usually by colonels, but not generals or any other lower rank officers:

Why not the generals? At least in the countries I know in West Africa, this makes perfect sense. Generals are often close to the leadership; their appointments are usually somewhat political and come with the benefit of a bit of patronage and a lot of pomp and circumstance.  I met Generals in Nigeria who led more comfortable lifestyles than some Lagos bankers. They're educated, often cosmopolitan, and know that they have more to lose through a coup than by simply staying put. They have no reason to upset the  status quo. And at least in countries where there is a history of coups, politicians are also equally wary of annoying their military upper ranks for a similar reason.
So why not the little guys? Well, because they could never do it. The usual ranking soldier is underpaid, if paid at all. They're often undertrained, and couldn't mobilize the resources or strategy to get the job done. (Having said this, the little guys do often go along with a coup once it's happening ... nothing like the sense that your paycheck or next meal is moving to make you want to follow it.)
So the middle guy is the one left. They're paid better than some, but not good enough for most.

Mugabe at 86

Mugabe is or is going to be 86 years old. Bob Marley, if he can watch what is happening nowadays, wishes surely that he could rewrite his famous song, which celebrated proudly the hard fought independence, which Zimbabweans seized from Britain by warning them against providential men who believe that they are the state and their country cannot survive without them.
What do you wish a dictator who was once a national hero and an example for other leaders on the continent and who has become just a vulgar racist, narcissist, and autocrat on his Eighty-sixth birthday? : to die the mouth open in his sleep as soon as possible so that there is no bloody coup or political revolution and so that his people can at last start to build their country without living in the past and hanging on to old resentments.

African coups d’état

Appalling and despairing fact from Brian Whitaker:

Over the last 60 years Africa has witnessed more than 80 coups, though worldwide the number is declining. While it would be nice to attribute this decline to the onward march of democracy, there are other factors at work too.
In some countries, for instance, there is no need for the military to show their hand directly. They have enough influence behind the scenes to ensure that only "acceptable" civilian leaders can form a government. Often this is a better option for the military than seizing power themselves because it serves their interests while giving an appearance of legitimacy.
Establishing legitimacy is a major problem in the traditional kind of coup – which is why some plotters use more subtle methods.(... )Another factor is that traditional military coups are probably becoming more difficult to organise. The successful ones these days tend to be in out-of-the-way places, like Niger, where the state apparatus is still fairly rudimentary.

The courage to overcome laziness

Good advice for Jacob Zuma from Suntosh Pillay :

Laziness and cowardice are the sources of immaturity, according to Kant. Our president must therefore address his lazy and cowardly attitude. Too lazy to put on a condom; too cowardly to stay faithful to his wives. Too lazy to keep the promises he made to a nation; too cowardly to apologise on his own accord without public pressure. Too lazy to give us concrete measurables in his national address; too cowardly to tackle the rot of corruption and cronyism that is eating away at his party’s ideals.
Lazy enough to quote someone like Mandela at length, but too cowardly to live up to such inspiring ideals.
Will the ANC’s president have the courage to use his own thinking faculties to further South Africa? He fought for a democracy. Democratic ideals are part and parcel of the era of enlightenment. Sapere Aude, Mr President. Dare to be wise; this is the motto of the Enlightenment, after all.

"White" liberals

These series of  rants from Verashni Pillay about "White liberals" show that next to America, South Africa is the most racialized country on earth, in fact "the race" issue, whatever it is camouflages, may even be more explosive in the streets of Pretoria than in the ones of DC:

• In any conversation about apartheid, white liberals will immediately and loudly bring up the fact that their parents were forced to join the army. As if this fact mitigates generations of economic and political advantage. As if life is a neat game of tag where you can shout "Nix!" and invoke some sort of blanket amnesty, instead of the messy web of power it really is.


• White people are very used to hearing the sound of their own voice. A white liberal friend once told me he had been to an academic conference where a paper was presented on the best responses to white guilt. It was lauded for positing silence, and listening, as a solution. I waited to respond to this interesting idea but my friend spoke about it without pause for about ten minutes without allowing me a word in edgewise. Eventually I left mid-sentence to get a drink.


• White liberals who love Africa are the funniest. Look for the pale male donning an African print shirt and rocking out to Johnny Clegg. To be honest, the only actual black man I know who wears African shirts is Madiba. And he's, you know, Madiba. Funny thing about this kind is that they'll wax lyrical about the African dream but never quite bring themselves to date an actual black woman. I guess they leave that to the European tourists.


• White liberals never, ever, think it's weird that they have no good black friends. In fact, if you bring this up they'll think you're being racist. Then they'll whinge about how hard it is to meet black people

Enduring colonial legacy

I would like to agree with Tsenay Serequeberhan on this, but I do not and I have to say that the fixation of some of Colonization as if it has to the defining moment of all people who come/live/originate from Africa is bugging me :

European colonialism was established in the belief that “superior races” have the privilege and the duty to civilize the less fortunate, “inferior races.” The “ideological pacification” of the colonized occurs when this insidious and humiliating idea is decisively implanted in African psyches and is accepted by Africans as their destiny. As Frantz Fanon put it: “In the colonial context, the colonizer does not stop his work of breaking in [d’éreintement] the colonized until the latter admits loudly and clearly the supremacy of white values.” Long after the end of colonialism, this “breaking” goes on paying handsome dividends to our former colonizers. It secures indirect, but effective, hegemonic control of the periphery—that segment of the world which, by virtue of its broken heritage, presently occupies this marginal position. Broken docility! Is this, then, our postcolonial condition?
To date, the most enduring cultural legacy of colonialism has been this broken sector of African society that has internalized the colonial model of human existence and history. This is the segment that, on the whole, rules contemporary Africa. Not grounded in an indigenous history, but the residual dregs of colonial Europe, it has, as the yardstick of its existence, what lies beyond its shores. This is what Fanon refers to as the worship of the “Greco-Latin pedestal.”

Defending the Chinafrique

With some reservations, I agree with Barry Sautman and Yan Hairong on this:

The Chinese, it is said, are in Africa only for natural resources, to feed China’s industry and huge population. To exploit the continent, they provide loans and aid to rogue regimes. They worsen the plight of Africans by dumping cheap, shoddy products in their markets and ruin local industry. Chinese investors pay Africans a pittance, in contrast to more ethical Western firms. Given all that, China can only be an obstacle to Africa’s development.      
It’s an exciting tale but, alas, the media have gotten it all wrong. It’s not mainly China that impairs Africa’s development, but a world system of neo-liberal capitalism, based on privatization, trade liberalization, and reduced social spending, into which China is now partly integrated. As part of the same world system, China and the West have many activities in common in Africa, but there are also some distinctly Chinese trade and investment practices and these are often more appealing to Africans.

"Africa" has a lot to gain by the involvement of China and that it is too easy and too sensationalistic to keep seeing Africa and Africans as objects of exploitations. It is never go when Africa is the place where hegemons, particularly formal colonial powers, are able to come and to serve their national interests without giving much in return and diversity and multiplicity are essential, That said, the focus as always ought to be elsewhere since development  remains the central question and that we knows that it cannot be accomplished by trading partners or even solely international trade.

Short-termism and foolish pride

Ah, finally, some common sense on Jacob Zuma and the lack of outrage over his conduct and the gullibility of too many South-Africans and Africans:

(...) We are all guilty of "short-termism". And we are all so malleable. We are interested in the here and now, and are so quick to consign history to the dustbin.
We are momentarily outraged that the country's president, Jacob Zuma, has with a friend's child sired yet another child out of wedlock. We are then even more dumbfounded by his logic -- that once he has paid inhlawulo, he has taken personal responsibility and that should be the end of the matter.
We fall just short of asking him to resign, but are all mortified by South Africa's international reputation as represented by this first citizen. But ever the strategist, Zuma releases a statement apologising on a Saturday, essentially dictating the content of the country's largest newspapers on Sunday. He gets the front page on his terms and we all move on.
Moving on means mechanically changing gear -- disconnecting from the discourse of Zuma the philanderer to speculate on his state of the nation speech.
We are so easily gratified and gullible. It reminds me of how former president Thabo Mbeki was crucified for a very long time for not speaking out against Zimbabwe's President Robert Mugabe. And once he had muttered a reluctant, incoherent disapproval, we were left with nothing to say other than "too little, too late".

Vocabulary, Good intentions, and self-satisfaction

I'm always happy when Nicholas Kristof learns new words, especially when he learns in places such as the Democratic Republic of Congo, and loves himself a lot more for it :

I’ve learned some new words.
One is “autocannibalism,” coined in French but equally appropriate in English. It describes what happens when a militia here in eastern Congo’s endless war cuts flesh from living victims and forces them to eat it.
Another is “re-rape.” The need for that term arose because doctors were seeing women and girls raped, re-raped and re-raped again, here in the world capital of murder, rape, mutilation.
This grotesque vocabulary helps answer a question that I’ve had from readers: Why Congo?

I have to admit that I have a problem with Kristof. He rubs me the wrong way because I can't shake the perception, solely based on my reading (which may be, I admit bias) of his op-eds in the times, that he is the Albert Schweitzer (Sartre's great- great uncle) of Journalism. He goes to strange places in Africa and elsewhere armed with nothing more lethal than his good intentions, observes, writes, and returns filled the self-satisfying and aggrandizing belief that he has changed the world. Because I know that may be unfair to Kristof I'm going to continue to beat up myself about my dislike and suspicion until I find a way to like him. However, to return to the most important subject, which is Congo, I have the feeling that Kristof's reporting is part of the problem precisely because it adds to the sad and desperate mythology of the place by sending the message that normalcy means aid, more reporting, instead of the acknowledgment of the harsh reality that the Congo is the Congo because nobody has an interest in it becoming something else and because what it is works for everybody including people filled with good intentions and interested in learning new words and things such as Kristof.

Zumaland is the heart of darkness

I'm not going make a comment, but since today is the 20th anniversary of Nelson Mandela's release, I will only say that I hope that there is a way to clone Mandela before he dies to avoid South Africa and Africa to remain Zumaland.

A Dark continent

Provocative words from Leo Igwe:

Part of the reason why Africans are deeply religious, spiritual and supernatural in outlook is because the people have given up hope of achieving justice and happiness in this life and in this world. (...)Justice is light and injustice is darkness. Eradicating injustice is an enlightening and illuminating process. So tackling unjust systems is critical to the growth and development of humanism in Africa. Today Africa is a dark continent not because there is something fundamentally wrong or lacking or extraordinary with the regional geography and weather conditions. Africa is a dark continent because of so many acts of injustice that reign supreme in the region. Africa is mired in darkness because of the reign of anomie, the terror of barbarism, the ubiquity of impunity, criminality and savage acts.
Unfortunately, Africans always point accusing fingers on colonialism and imperialism for injustices on the continent. As if there were no unjust acts or systems in Africa before its contact and ‘corruption’ by the outside world. When it comes to analyzing and addressing Africa’s problems and predicament, colonialism is always a cop-out or an alibi. Imperialism is a reason or an excuse Africans always tender to avoid responsibility- accepting or taking responsibility for their mistakes and failures.
Africans always comfortably prefer blaming the West and the whites for their woes and troubles. Surely, injustices predate and post date colonialism in Africa. Unjust acts have been going on in Africa for ages.

The trouble is not that Igwe is right, but that he isn't wrong.

Zuma is just another powerful normal man

Ah, so people just have a narrow mind to see the need to defend "Africanity" even though it is an illusion and more importantly when their first instinct should be to condemn vile behaviors instead of focusing on the fact that they come from a particular group. Those were my first thoughts  when I read this op-ed in the Mail&Guardian by Verashni Pillay  :

Zuma's contravention of a certain public and cultural standard by having an extramarital affair is unlikely to earn him more than a slap on the wrist by his party and alliance.
In the double standards that attend reporting on our very African president, the international media seems to forget that dodgy behaviour on the part of men in power is hardly an exclusively African trait. Sex scandals are ubiquitous as they are deliciously satisfying media fodder.
The fact of human nature is that we can all be corrupted.

I need to take a moment to resist the urge to vomit.

The refusal to bury the dead Françafrique

Stephen Smith has, as almost always, an essential article in the London Review of Books on Françafrique. He argues, and I agree with him,  that it has been dead for a long time despite the fact that both France and African leaders, because they need to maintain the illusion of a special relationship, refuse to bury it. Sugary excerpt:

Then why not issue the death certificate of Françafrique and turn the page? Because neither successive French presidents – from the Socialist Mitterrand to the post-Gaullist Sarkozy – nor francophone Africa’s heads of state, especially the remnants of the old guard, want to let go. Too much is at stake, namely the political survival of the heads of state and the status of French diplomacy. France remains a last resort for weak regimes under threat in Africa, while francophone Africa is still an echo chamber for France’s international pretensions.
(...)A general I spoke to recently in Paris – a figure whose long history of postings and interventions resembles a political map of the continent – thinks much the same. ‘During the Cold War, we were a power to reckon with in our part of Africa,’ he said. ‘Since the 1990s, we’ve been moving out. That’s now visible to the naked eye. There’s not much left to show for our presence and no political will at home. And we no longer have the means. But we maintain the fiction of our “presence” and endorse the course of events we no longer determine. Which is the worst of all policies.’In a handful of European countries – Germany, Holland, Poland or Spain – where a bad Africa policy is thought to be better than none at all, France’s leverage on the continent is still admired. Their own approach is confined to the ritual expression of ‘grave concern’ in government press releases and the application of humanitarian band-aids to the continent’s open wounds. But seen from Paris and put into perspective, France is bound to become as irrelevant to its former colonies as Belgium is to Congo, 80 times bigger and seven times more populated than its former coloniser.

The key point here is that the illusion that there is a special relationship between France and Africa where sentiments, a long common history and in many cases a shared language are most important national interests is false and truncates the essential debate of the future of those countries and of their relationship with the rest of the world. In other words, la Françafrique is useful because it gives France the pretension that it still has its Gaullist grandeur while maintaining Africans under the self-satisfying but emasculating illusion that the French are in charge of their future and that they are the one enriching France.

On Africanity and literature

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie on Chinua Achebe and his influence on "Africa":

As a university student in the 1950s, in addition to reading Wordsworth, Shakespeare and Coleridge, Achebe also read Joyce Carey’s "Mister Johnson," a novel set in Nigeria, which Time magazine had named the "best book ever written about Africa." Achebe disagreed. Not only was the Nigerian character in the novel unrecognizable to him and his classmates but he also detected, in the description of Nigerians, "an undertow of uncharitableness ... a contagion of distaste, hatred, and mockery."
There has been much written about Chinua Achebe’s "Things Fall Apart" as a response to Mister Johnson, and one likes to think that Achebe would have written his novel even if he had not read Cary’s. Still, the prejudiced representation of African characters in literature could not but have had an influence on Achebe’s development as a writer. He would, years later, write a famous essay about the portrayal of Africans in Joseph Conrad’s classic novel "Heart of Darkness," arguing not that Conrad should not have written honestly about the racism of the time, but that Conrad failed to hold an authorial rejection of that worldview.
The strangeness of seeing oneself distorted in literature – and indeed of not seeing oneself at all – was part of my own childhood. I grew up in the Nigerian university town of Nsukka in the 1980s, reading a lot of British children’s books. My early writing mimicked the books I was reading: all my characters were white and all my stories were set in England. Then I read "Things Fall Apart." It was a glorious shock of discovery, as was "Arrow of God," which I read shortly afterwards; I did not know in a concrete way until then that people like me could exist in literature. Here was a book that was unapologetically African, that was achingly familiar, but that was, also, exotic because it detailed the life of my people a hundred years before. Because I was educated in a Nigerian system that taught me little of my pre-colonial past, because I could not, for example, imagine with any accuracy how life had been organized in my part of the world in 1890, Achebe’s novels became strangely personal.

Adichie's assertions bug me. They do because she focuses on differences, which to her seem to be fundamental. Her use of the expression "unapologetically African" is problematic (it would have been less controversial is she had said used the word Nigerian even though the use of the word unapologetically would have remained a problem). Africanity doesn't exist. In fact, it has never existed. It wouldn't presumptuous to presume that Chinua Achebe is very different than his ancestors and that in fact, when he wrote Things Fall Apart he focused on his desire to be himself rather than on his Nigerianity or Africanity (although for him, being Achebe might have meant be a true Nigerian and African). What I'm trying to see is that people cleverly used Africanity to defend their individuality and unfortunately often to justify differences that reason and decency (due seldom to their lack of imagination and knowledge) cannot. The point is Achebe's greatest achievement wasn't the affirmation of an identity, but the creation of one, one, which was solely his. People who look like him or have commonalities with him don't have to embrace it, but solely to recognize and not to delegitimate. At the same time, those who do as Adichie shouldn't equate with Africanity as a way to argue that there is just the Chinua Achebe's way to show that one comes from Africa. Adichie conveniently ignores that issues of identity have plagued Africans precisely for the  reason that because they is no agreement on a definition, the focus is placed on  resentment, victimization, the colonizers, and the fact that Africanity means to "unapologically" be different than them and to confront their contradictions.
The reason why I have argued that there is not such a thing as "African literature" or even as "African writer" is simply those popular and narrow categories don't mean anything. I have the strong suspicion that writers from the continent have too many essential differences to be put in one narrow categories and that when they are not ideologues or marketers would acknowledge that neither their nationality nor the fact that they are from a vast and heterogeneous continent defines their writing.

Medicalizing human behavior and justifying vileness

Good, but limited point, (which makes it too easy to make) from Gideon Rachman on Zuma, his wife, children, polygamy, and sex therapy:

Despite having three wives and a fiance, Zuma’s latest was conceived with yet another woman. I saw Zuma questioned about his polygamy at Davos and he faced down his critics without embarrassment. But this latest episode has actually forced him to apologise. So what are we to conclude? Polygamy good, adultery bad? Nineteen children fine; twenty children way over the top?
Helen Zille, the leader of the Democratic Alliance, is quoted as saying - “We believe President Zuma needs sex addiction therapy, as was recommended for Tiger Woods…” This strikes me as a ludicrous attempt to medicalise behaviour that may be reprehensible - but is also, frankly, how rich and powerful men have behaved for centuries. Should all those Turkish sultans with their harems also have been sent for sex addiction therapy?

Are we always going to allow/justify/excuse/dismiss manly particularities because they have always existed? If that's the norm, can we all be allowed to be manly and to follow the example of Jacob Zuma or is this permissiveness solely applies to  despicable men's actions supposedly justified by history, nature, and culture?

Human rights and the deification of traditions

Tzvetan Todorov on human rights:

I’m not against human rights. Who could be against human rights? But I’m a little sceptical about their use. It seems to be that the preliminary of human rights is indeed something that we should cherish very much, which is the capacity of finding a common ground. I observe, however, and I think that’s why I have this sceptical view, that human rights nowadays are used as a kind of instrument for justifying our Western superiority. And as soon as we observe that somewhere rights are not exactly accepted in the same way, we consider these countries definitely inferior and maybe even deserving punishment.
I think that we in the West are very proud of our traditions and justly so, but we still have a lot to learn from the Chinese traditions, from the African traditions, from all sorts of ways of being elsewhere. We need to pay attention to these rather than extracting one savage habit such as clitoridectomy, and say, “Well, how can you do that?”

I disagree with him for two simple reasons. The first is that I don't think that there is such a place as the "West" and the rest for this distinction comes from the denial of the reality that the world is too small and the west has become the rest and vice versa. This fact doesn't mean that we are all the same, but rather that differences cannot longer be sacred and justified by invoking a glorified past or unchallengeable faith in the divine. My second reason for disagreeing with Todorov is that although I'm to acknowledging the human rights are problematic especially in the sphere of international affairs, that reality doesn't mean that cultural differences are legitimate excuses/justifications for barbarism and cruelty. Culture doesn't justify anything and more importantly, traditions can be barbaric, grotesque, and unique without using the human rights criteria or comparing them to what others or to use a lauded term "civilized" people do. It is always important to pay attention to savage habits because they affect more often than not an incredible amount of people.

Colonial arrogance

It is because of statements such this one that I have never been able to know quite what to make of Wole Soyinka (I have always thought that his writings were too restricted and restrictive, but that doesn't mean that he isn't a good writer):

England is a cesspit. England is the breeding ground of fundamentalist Muslims. Its social logic is to allow all religions to preach openly. But this is illogic, because none of the other religions preach apocalyptic violence. And yet England allows it. Remember, that country was the breeding ground for communism, too. Karl Marx did all his work in libraries there.(...) Colonialism bred an innate arrogance, but when you undertake that sort of imperial adventure, that arrogance gives way to a feeling of accommodativeness. You take pride in your openness.

Why do I have the unsavory feeling that too many greater of certain epoch are incapable to accept that Africa got decolonized over 40 years ago because they cannot let go of a world were there has to be the colonizers responsible for all the ills of the world and the colonized, eternal victims of history?

Culture as a justifcation for the indefensible

I cannot stand Jacob Zuma for so many reasons and reading that he's using his culture to defend or rather sacralize polygamy doesn't surprise me. It is just a reminder that we live in the age of excuses not of reasons where cultures, traditions, religions, all the crap that kill intellectualism are prevalent precisely because people don't know how to reason and to justify the fact that they are blindly following their most base urges or living ascetically. If "Culture" is a good excuse for despicable differences then there shouldn't be any problem welcoming the Taliban and other extremists on the international stage and to accept stoning, female circumcision, honor killings and whatever else.

Feeling African

Interesting point from John McWhorter:

(...) native-born blacks are African in a “different” way than actual African immigrants--but this would be a feint rather than an argument: clearly, the proper formulation, if we are to put it on the table, is that native-born blacks are African to a much lesser extent than African immigrants. In truth, a black man from Jacksonville has more in common with a white one from Tucson than he does with a man three years out of Senegal.
And I would argue that native-born blacks are so vastly less “African” than actual Africans that calling ourselves “African American” is not only illogical but almost disrespectful to African immigrants. Here are people who were born in Africa, speak African languages, eat African food, dance in African ways, remember African stories, and will spiritually always be a part of Africa--and we stand up and insist that we, too, are “African” because Jesse Jackson said so?
After all, most of us don’t feel meaningfully “African” in the least. Sure, we’ve gotten used to saying “African American,” but it has become a kind of frozen expression, like, indeed ice cream (we don’t think about it being “cream of ice” when saying “eyescream”) or even knee-l (the word kneel has knee in it--did you ever think about it)?

I need more time to digest McWhorter's arguments before deciding whether I agree with his points. I already know that I share his main sentiment, but he misses the essential point: there isn't such a thing as an "African identity." I always objected to the preconceived notion that being black means being African or having something to do with African. It doesn't. The assumption that Africa is the Black continent, is moronic. If it was the case where would we bury J.M. Coetzee? Australia? I don't think so. What would we do with the Maghreb, Egypt and Libya? In other words, feeling African is an imaginary or reactionary sentiment, which even the natives of Africa don't feel  naturally unless they are pushed into a narrow place and have to choose to define themselves against what they consider to be the injustices of an unsympathetic world not to say a "white world," which is of course too is part of their imagination.

Fiction and Darkness

Chinua Achebe on Conrad's Heart of the Darkness and its racism:

I did not see myself as an African in those books. I took sides with the white men against the savages. In other words, I went through my first level of schooling thinking I was of the party of the white man in his hair-raising adventures and narrow escapes. The white man was good and reasonable and smart and courageous. The savages arrayed against him were sinister and stupid, never anything higher than cunning. I hated their guts.
But a time came when I reached the appropriate age and realized that these writers had pulled a fast one on me! I was not on Marlowe’s boat steaming up the Congo in ‘Heart of Darkness’; rather, I was one of those unattractive beings jumping up and down on the riverbank, making horrid faces.”

I've always wondered how much racism is acceptable for books who written in times when the prejudices which they transcribe were the norm. In other words, should we be able to read Conrad, Voltaire, or Céline without feeling not only guilty, but dirty? Can any work of fiction ever be equated to The Protocols of the Elders of Zion or Mein Kempf ? My only problem with The Heart of Darkness has always been the chosen limitations, which Conrad placed on the story because he was aware on his superfluousness and the subjectivity of his experience in the Congo and of the fact that he needed to give his readers what they wanted. I would have love The Heart of Darkness to have been more graphic, that is for example for "the savages" to either eat the "whites" on the boat or for the "civilized" people to just massacre them.  What I'm trying to say is that fiction has a right to racist, grotesque, vile or whatever else, the problem is its infeudation to biography or reality, when it is asked to represent the world as it should be or even as it is. Achebe seems not to be able to accept the fact that racists or rather prejudiced people can be good and even great writers and that to me is disappointing.

The common tale of a nation divided

Interesting bit from R.W. Johnson's article in the London Review of Books on next year's soccer football world cup in South Africa:

The World Cup, it is everywhere said, will market South Africa around the world, create jobs and be highly beneficial to the country’s development. In fact, it will be very much for the delectation of the well-off. At least in ancient Rome the poor got to see the chariot races and gladiatorial contests, but there is little chance of the same happening here. In practice, one may be sure, it will be the new elite who will flock to the games in their Mercs and BMWs. It is quite common in South Africa for higher civil servants or mayors and councillors from poor areas to award themselves trips to the Olympics or other such international events, often taking hundreds of hangers-on with them, all paid for from the public purse. There is little doubt that the World Cup, being local, will see more of that sort of thing than ever.

African literature

Interesting thoughts from Aaron Bady:

(...) after all, what is African literature? The more one thinks about it, I find, the more it falls apart as a category. Which is to say, while it certainly exists in a phenomenological sense, trying to place that phenomenon in any kind of empirical context is a project of fast diminishing returns: the more seriously you attempt to group the literary production of an entire continent into a single term, the more you occlude the fundamental fictions of that categorization from your vision. I’m not going to go over all the different kinds of linguistic, cultural, historical, geographical, and racial categories that different critics have tried out in their search for a securely definable field of “African literature” (each of which is at least usefully wrong) but to treat any of them as anything but imperfect fictions is to naturalize (and thus sacrifice the ability to think critically about) those very discursive narratives.
If once wishes to wax Foucaultian, though (and “one” does wish, in this case), it does exist as a set of institutional practices that produce a coherent discourse. And if we are invested in thinking empirically about the basis on which the literary production of African literature happens, that institutional discourse certainly does exist as an expression of a commercial desire mediated by a particular messy set of critical taste-making devices. Which is to say, somewhere between the publishing industry’s attempt to create a product to market (and a market for their product) and the desire by writers and readers to have a relationship through by that marketplace we find the effort by critics of all sorts to make it happen, and concrete institutional structures through which they do it.

There isn't such a thing as African literature because there isn't such a thing as an African identity or even as Africanness, Africanity or an African citizenship. The fact is although there is a continent called Africa, there are no Africans and therefore African writers don't exist.There is as wide a gap between Chinua Achebe and J.M. Coetzee as there is between Philip Roth and Gabriel García Márquez. It might be worth our while to wonder why some are obsessed with defining non-whites by what sets them apart rather than by what they have in common with the rest.
Marie Ndiaye won the Goncourt prize yesterday and although she is very much a French writer, at the beginning of her career librarians wanted to classify her work in the African literature part of their bookstores because she had a Senegalese name and because she looks black since her father was in fact Senegalese even though she has grown up in France and never went to Senegal until she was an adult. Already the Los  Angeles Times literary blog has called her the first black woman (Americans have a problem with race and with the idea that métisse doesn't mean black and that black doesn't mean much) to win the prize even though she isn't black and doesn't describe herself as such (to the contrary of Obama who did for political reasons), which shows that she refuses to be defined by what  race conscious people perceived as essential existential categories. 

Les mêmes choses

After reading the following assertions from Yasmin Alihbai-Brown, I am reminded how much the fact that the only connections that our times to race are racism, ethnicity, and identity blocks any forward thinking because the focus is placed on particularities and différence and on the erroneous assumption that self-derogation is solely ideological:

So much of the media is embracing the new world, and today's most popular TV programmes, especially reality shows, feature a cornucopia of racial types. Yet "ethnic" psychosis persists and is manifestly getting worse.
On Asian marriage sites or matchmaking newspaper adverts, third-generation British Asian men want "wheaten" brides. In black communities western features are craved, hair is straightened, skin lightened for reasons profoundly disturbing. Jet gets herself a pointy, long nose. Now, she says, she looks rich enough to shop in Waitrose.
Back in the 1960s the Black is Beautiful movement in the US spread across the world and made us proud to be who we were, even in Kampala, Uganda where I was growing up. I stopped ironing my hair to look like Jean Shrimpton's, and my African college room-mates went Afro. No more burnt hair in the sink and a new dawn, we thought. For a few decades, yes. Now comes globalisation spreading Starbucks and standardised western notions, and with it a surge in "ethnic" self-loathing and self-mutilation.
What is different now is the absence of any political and social fightback. Race is dispensable, can be wiped out if you can pay for the privilege.

Ubuland

I found this video of Idi Amin Dada, the former dictator of Uganda talking his ability to dream the future not only funny, but enlightening. Not very much has changed for the perceptions remains and when one looks at things today in Uganda and elsewhere, it is difficult not to think of Alfred Jarry's famous play Ubu Roi  except that here it is not the French middle class, which is at the center of the theater of the absurd in this case. What is alarming is that there are some who believe that Dada was great partly because he was a thorn to the sides of the Brits and to the Israelis. In other words, the standard for political greatness in many African leaders is standing up to the former colonizers and to foreigners and being a menace to the world as leaders such as Dadis Camara and Omar Al Bachir show just to name two of them.

Guinea and its dangerous manly man

I would find this video outrageously funny if it wasn't about the fate of a poor, small, and martyred African nation, Guinea, in desperate need of leadership taken hostage by a dangerous and manly idiot who believes that God made him king. Even by the worst or the most generous of standards, Captain Dadis Camara is a clown who should have never been allowed to rule Guinea. He is convinced that to be Guinean, African, and finally a statesman means to be just as Harvey Mansfield would say manly that is to scream when he can neither reason nor convince and to crush the people who contest his authority. It's heartbreaking to say, but the fact that an African country can have such an idiot as its head of state shows that its future generations, because they were lied to by a previous group of political leaders, which was more or less polished and "western," will in the hope for change (here those two hypnotizing words again) be tempted to follow manly fools who will try to convince them that to be authentically African (whatever that means) is to defy reason and civilization.

Choosing the right representative

Through quite innovative means, I'm able to watch Gadhafi (Gaddafi)'s performance at the United Nations. I'm using the word performance because that's what it is. His goal isn't to convince people that he is right, but to put himself in the spotlight. He is talking about an important issue, the need for the African Union to have a seat on the Security council but nobody is taking him seriously because he is an actor who, just as Joe Pesci in Casino or in Goodfellas, captivates/scares people, but doesn't inspire them or make them believe in what he says. Africa needs better spokespersons,  someone who can at least appear to be credible and not just what Africans want to hear about Western hypocrisy and double standards, colonization, and reparations.