Method to the Madness

Why You Should Keep An Eye on the Northern Nigeria

2012-01-11T18:31:00.000-05:00

Yes, our eyes are trained on the soap opera of the fuel subsidy protests and the re-invigoration of Nigerian civil society, but we should all be very worried about the North. Here’s why.

1 – Before fuel subsidy protests, we were facing an emboldened Boko Haram striking seemingly at will at a mosque around New Years’ Day and a church on Christmas day (you can read on this here), and a Nigerian government that has shown that it has no answer to their brutality. Arrests were made on the Christmas bombings, but thanks to focus on the fuel subsidy issue, many Nigerians did not notice that persecution and investigation of the Christmas Day attacks have stalled.

The worst thing that can happen to the situation in the north is for Nigerian media to look away in favor of another story. With the fuel subsidy taking over media coverage and the presidency’s continued ineffectiveness in security issues, the situation in the north will continue to worsen.

2 – The State of Emergency has done absolutely nothing to improve the situation of the northern states most impacted by Boko Haram attacks. There have consistently been attacks since the closing of borders and heightened surveillance in the state, and the Boko Haram has been so bold as to release a video justifying their attacks on their most recent killings of Christians (perhaps they will release another justifying their killings on Muslims). With their ultimatum for southerners to leave the north, the islamist sect has declared itself owner of the north and determiner of who stays and who does not while the government looks on impotently. Following the group’s ultimatum for Christians to leave the north, they since killed 12 in Adamawa on the 7th of January, 8 in Yobe, and that's just to name a few of the atrocities carried out by Boko Haram in January.

3 – If the situation worsens we will start to see reprisal killings of a higher and higher scale. During the fuel subsidy protests in Benin, there has been the burning of a mosque and citizens have reported killings of Hausas in the Sabo area of Benin on twitter. Following the bombing of an Islamic school in Sapele, Delta State, Many southern regional groups like the Igbo Massob and the Yoruba Oodua People's Congress, and the south-south Niger-Delta Youth for Radical Change have called for northerners to leave the south-east. Christian Association of Nigeria (CAN) vow to defend Nigerian Christians from Boko Haram (without elaborating on how) certainly does not help with the petering away of trust that Nigerian society, as any other forward-moving society, is built on. In addition to worsening economic climes and intra-national security, the last thing Nigeria needs is wide-spread ethnic tension and reprisal killings.

It is not clear that there is anyone that GEJ even must listen to on the issue of fuel subsidy. He will get no pressure from his political party; Nigerians vote personalities, not parties, into power for gubernatorial or presidential elections, so PDP could still win another election regardless of how unpopular Jonathan becomes in his final term as president. It makes sense, then, that GEJ would rather the Nigerian populace focus on the fuel subsidy protests than on the rapidly deteriorating security situation: one problem he has the power to control, and the other he so patently does not.

The situation cannot stay a stalemate for long; the senate president has been asked by his members to tell the president to revert the pump price to N65.00, but there is as yet no official word from the President. With the protests and strike entering its fourth day, one wonders how long the protesters can conceivably hold on, how long the labour can hold its ground and maintain support, and how much pain the presidency is willing to allow be inflicted upon the citizenry.

Holding Up The Mirror to Ineptitude

2012-01-06T19:25:00.000-05:00

On my Twitter feed, I’ve been tracking and commenting on the fuel subsidy issue. But in the haze of the nation’s collective rage on the fuel subsidy removal, and in the euphoria of being virtually surrounded by a heightened sense of political awareness on the part of Nigerians on a level made even more intense thanks to social media, it is entirely possible that we may be allowing ourselves to be distracted by other pressing issues at hand.

Boko Haram has been responsible for two killing sprees in as many days. In Gombe, Gombe State, the Islamic sect sent a gunman to go to a Deeper Life church service and kill 6 and injure 10. In the other, the sect claimed responsibility for the killing of 20 in a church in Mubi, Adamawa State. These attacks, they claim, were in response to the government’s admittedly-laughable State of Emergency in both states.

And those are only in the past two days. On the 3rd of January, in Dutse, some suspected Boko Haram members attacked Birniwa Divisional Police Headquarters in Jigawa State, killing a teenage girl and a police officer before setting fire to the building. In a ridiculing of the State of Emergency put in place by President Goodluck Jonathan, explosions rocked both Maiduguri, the sect’s stronghold in Borno State, and Damaturu, Yobe State, late on Wednesday, the 4th.

This Vanguard piece also has a great timeline of Boko Haram’s attacks on Nigerians. In the face of government’s ineptitude in dealing with them, the sect has even grown so bold as to issue ultimatums to Christians to leave the North, lest they be killed.

It makes sense that the government would rather face a group of protesters it does not believe will hold firm to its purported ideals than its ineptitude in the mirror. And so we must do exactly that: stand firm. And we must hold that mirror up high.

It is good for us to train our eyes on issues like the fuel subsidy removal that directly affect us, but it is also very important that we do not let the rug be quietly swept from under us in other areas. Let us not be inured to the deaths of those that have suffered at the hands of a ruthless band of crazed men. Let us not forget to hold accountable the government that has allowed them such boldness as to believe that our lives are worth more when we lie blown to bits, our blood on our walls, our eyes devoid of life.

The Beginning of the End of a Bad Marriage?

2012-01-06T19:20:00.000-05:00

I published this piece on the fuel subsidy protests in NigeriansTalk.org.

The history of Nigeria has for too long been like a bad Nollywood movie. Nigeria is that battered housewife who has taken her beatings quietly, allowed her earnings to be squandered by her wasteful, alcoholic, extravagant, unworthy husband.

Even when we choose our leaders, it seems we choose to stay on our most destructive trend. Our political leaders and our religious leaders often look the same. We flock to pastors who call our children witches, imams who sleep with our daughters, empty suits who take our tithes to buy exotic cars and gallivant around the world, then return to us to preach humility and simplicity. These beatings, these abuses, these insults to our intelligence, we have taken silently.

For decades, nothing has happened. But 2011 has taught us, from Egypt to Tunisia, right down to the most intractable situation in Libya, that in a moment, decades can happen.

You can read the rest here.

Will We Better Off in MTVBase Was Available Around the World?

2011-10-11T18:29:00.000-04:00

Africa’s image problem, I submit, is more of an issue of Western media’s trouble with nuance than any real malice. It is hard, it turns out, to portray that people can be more than one thing at the same time -- that one can wear fancy Italian shoes with traditional garb; that there can exist in the same country a place where people drive SUVs to the supermarket and a place where some people have to walk miles for clean water in the same damn city. If one must be true, it seems, surely the other cannot. And relatively few consumers of media will really go to African countries themselves. And the few high-profiles ones that do go (looking at you, Kristof) tend to go to confirm their own biases, not challenge them.

And that’s where MTV Base comes in.

MTV Base’s shows an Africa that does not see itself as a problem, but as a party. We are young and sexy. We have style. We go to clubs and drink and laugh and rap and sing along with the best of them. This is us: Our Advertised Version. The "Monkey sweats but you can't tell from its fur" version. In terms of reality, it is not much different from the advertised version of what we are told that we are: overly-reliant on Western generosity, potential atrophying from lack of initiative or care, clay resting too comfortably within the grubby hands of greedy autocrats. In a sense, MTV Base's Africa is as mono-dimensional as the Africa that we see in Western media. It’s just a different dimension, a dimension that we would rather see.

It is not that music video Africa is any more “real” than the West’s version of Africa. Reality, in fact, is beside the point. It’s just another representation as simple as the one that is currently all the rage. The genius of indulging this fantasy of an MTV Base Africa all over the world – I’m fully aware this will never happen – is that it recognizes the need for simple narratives of Africa, and delivers on this. And by countering one simple narrative with another, it adds shade and color to the already-existing simple narrative. In so doing, It brings simplicity and nuance. And what is more African than that?

Those 'Top 20 Africans' Lists

2011-09-07T20:51:00.001-04:00

Thanks to the not-so-mini hiatus and having third world internet issues, I'm only just getting around to posting on these awesome ladies who made Forbes of 20 Young and Influential African women.

Someone on Twitter pointed out the difference in the composition of these lists in the US, for example, versus when the roster is drawn up for African countries. These list in the US and in other Western countries tend to be chockful of entertainers, whereas for Africa they're full of intellectuals.

This was brought up a bit boastfully, but I think the reasoning for this may not necessarily be something folks from African countries should welcome. Indeed, if you took up the 20 Young Americans lists, especially based on poll respondents, it won't feature many intellectuals. That's because it'll be honest. Its also worth pointing out that these Western news outlets are, well, Western, and therefore are more likely to show things as they are in Western countries, not projections of what they'd wish them to be. Forbes, Newsweek, etc, can't know of who really does hold sway in countries like Nigeria, for example. If they did, I doubt they'd put the words 'influential' and 'young' in the same sentence.

But this is all by-the-way. I do love that these remarkable women get such coverage. I'm familiar with the work of women like Funmi Iyanda and Ory Okolloh, and they certainly deserve this recognition, and tons more. I just wish it were people like these that actually controlled our political and cultural discourse. A real list of people with real sway over our cultural imagination will probably be overrun half-witted imams, and megachurch pastors.

Thank You, Mr. VJ, for Playing My Song

2011-08-09T17:35:00.000-04:00

It's been a long time, shouldn't have left you without a dope beat to step to. So here's some dope beats.

I really like this playful one from Kenya by Stella Mwangi. I'm a sucker for anything with house music influence, especially if it comes from anywhere on the continent.

South African house machine Liquideep with "Settle for Less".

I think this girl is Kenyan or Zambian or something, but I honest-to-goodness am not sure (which I actually like). Cool song, and the video is really nice and quirky. Side note: She has a song called Big Nyash. Does that mean what I think it means? In Nigeria, "nyash" often refers to one's ... well.... assets.

Here's one from a favorite, South African rapper AKA. He's one of the best on the continent in my opinion, and this new song is crazy nice. If he keeps this up, I might turn into a stan.

Last but not least - @okayafrica put out a blast today on South African singer Lira's new EP. Stream it in full here.

How Illegitimate Is the Informal Economy?

2011-07-29T16:50:00.002-04:00

This over at NigeriansTalk and this piece at The Economist's Baobab Africa blog on how expensive Angola is have me thinking about the informal sector in most African countries.

Chad's N'Djamena and Gabon's Libreville are second and third, respectively, on the Expensive African Cities list (you can see the world list here). On Luanda, The Daily Maverick puts quite succinctly why the trouble of expensive African cities is such a problem:

As foreign expatriates and the money which underpins them push prices of top end goods and services, so the local elites – who eat in the same restaurants and compete for the same properties – are forced to spend more and more. And to spend, they must earn. As elite salaries rise, so the inequality gap between the vast majority of the country and the few who have made it to the top gets wider and wider. In Luanda, it’s not unusual to see Porsche’s whiz through sprawling shanty towns, their drivers on their way to a top hotel for a R1,000 meal while onlookers ponder how to feed their families on the R10 they earned that day. Not exactly a recipe for social cohesion, or development.

What is scary about the high cost of living in many an African city is not just the effect it has on Africa's rising middle class, but also the fact that most Africans find employment in the informal sector.

According to the International Labor Organization (ILO), the informal sector makes up about 80% of employment in Sub-Saharan Africa, and is also the realm in which most women in the developing world find work, whether we're talking prostitution or selling food on the side of the road (This is in the document below). The number isn't at all far-fetched to me - anyone that has ever walked or driven on a road in an African city can tell that there are far more wooden shacks selling cigarettes and sweets and street hawkers selling recharge cards than there are, say, skyscrapers and shopping malls with banks or salons or boutiques.

An interesting observation: the more developed the economy, the lesser the percentage of people who work outside the margins. 33% of South Africans and 44% of Namibians work in the informal economy, for example, compared to 74% of Madagascans and 82% of Malians). This observation, though, makes one wonder to what extent the state is complicit in creating an informal economy. To what extent is the pervasiveness of informal economies and the resigned acceptance thereof an admission of failed economic policies on the part of African governments? This, from the African Association of Planning Schools, frames it interestingly from a planning perspective:

Ananya Roy (2009:10), in an analysis of the Indian context, argues that planning cannot solve the crisis of Indian urbanisation since ‘planning itself is implicated in the very production of this crisis’. She continues,
Informality then is not a set of unregulated activities that lies beyond the reach of planning; rather it is planning that inscribes the informal by designating some activities as authorized and others as unauthorized.
This view is echoed in Oren Yiftachel’s (2009:88) analysis of the political geography of informality.
He posits the notion of ‘gray spaces’ positioned between the ‘whiteness’ of legality/approval/safety, and the ‘blackness’ of eviction/destruction/death. He goes onto argue that planning is always deeply implicated in ‘whitening’ (condoning, approving) and ‘blackening’ (criminalizing, destroying) different types of informality. Yiftachel states bluntly that the ‘informality of the powerful’ is often authorised by the state whilst alternative forms of informality remain indefinitely gray or are officially ‘blackened’.
Urban planning – that is, the combination of relevant spatial policies – is often behind both the existence and criminalization of gray space. Urban plans design the city’s ‘white’ spaces which usually create little or no opening for inclusion/recognition of most informal localities and population, while their discourse continuously condemns them as a chaotic danger to the city (2009:94).
Roy pushes this point further, arguing that ‘informal spaces’ are produced by the state, and that ‘to deal with informality therefore partly means confronting how the apparatus of planning produces the unplanned and unplannable’ (2005:156).
Wilson (1991) echoes these sentiments pointing out that historically, even the most benevolent projects and traditions of state planning have emphasized control and confinement. Although she stops short of advocating the abandonment of planning, she argues,
There is a sense in which all town planning contains both a utopian and a heroic, yet authoritarian, element. Although its purpose may seem purely practical, it does claim to offer, like the utopian work, a permanent solution to the flux and flow of the ever changing city. The plan is always intended to fix the usage of space; the aim the state regulation of urban populations.
This would suggest that informality demands a critical analysis of traditional planning tools and techniques.

I've included the document here. Check it out.

Informal Economy Toolkit 1

Poem for Sunday

2011-07-24T09:30:00.000-04:00

Ogaga Ifowodo is criminally slept-on. Something that jumps out at you at every poem of his (my favorite is Homeland) is his use of imagery. He makes you want feel it all, like tiny earthquakes in your head. If you must rhyme a poem, this is how it must be done.

And those final lines "Unmarked days quench their suns, black into nights/ and dreams enact weighted hearts in free flights".... the music of that. Goodness.

This one's a favorite from his wonderfully-titled collection God Punish You, Lord Lugard.

Unmarked Hours Beat their Hands Against the Wall

Unmarked hours beat their hands against the wall

grieve for wings plunged in a waterfall.

Outside the window, a woman's shoulders

quake in tribute to a scene of soldiers:

teeth, fragments of flesh in warm blood painted

the picture she sees of those that fainted.

A single call to prayer, amplified

to all of Sin Town, brings mortified

legions to banal rites of righteousness.

As the minister swears his piousness

birds blessed with greater freedom flee our skies

abandoning us to death and muted cries.

Philosophies of suffering dress the walls

of this cell, make the fate of dead seagulls

happier than of failed hearts that bled and wept:

"If men were God!" that mocked the cliff and leapt,

crying out their grief: "Let Nigeria end now!"

No one will inquire who, why or how,

an old or new decree has sanctified

all wrongs in duty personified.

Unmarked days quench their suns, black into nights

and dreams enact weighted hearts in free flights.

Ogaga Ifowodo

November 1997

The Limits to NGOs' Effectiveness

2011-07-21T18:41:00.000-04:00

Over at the Boston Review, Pranab Bardhan is eloquent in making the case against NGOs and their effectiveness and goals. The point that looms in Badhan's argument is that NGOs cannot "dismiss the complexity of issues involved in the problems they hope to remedy or the democratic mechanisms and experiments necessary for finding the best way forward for all parties." When it comes to NGOs working on economic development, though, this gets right to the heart of it for me:

The social activists share with left-wing unions a preoccupation with redistribution, and a lack of concern for generating enough surplus to enable it. There are obvious trade-offs here between incentives for private enterprise and the need for social justice. Faced with these issues, just as the Left might refer to the great things the state can do, social activists refer us to the great things small producers and community-based organizations can do. The small-is-beautiful communitarians often ignore the many cases of local communities tyrannizing minority groups (Forms of lynching reminiscent of the U.S. South continue today in the ethnic villages of Africa and India.) And small local producers often cannot benefit from economies of scale and technological upgrades or invest in high-risk-high-return projects, which require risk pooling with non-local entities. As a result, they remain on the margins, mired in low productivity. While there are scattered examples of dynamic small producers, they don’t represent a viable systemic alternative. When real capacity to create wealth is missing, social activism is often reduced to mere populism, which in the long run can be wasteful and counterproductive.

This takes me back to the early 2000s when coffee farmers and social justice was the sexy issue of the day, and we still see the same thing rearing its head in the push-and-pull between small farms and commercial agriculture. Read the whole thing.

The Trouble With the Caine Prize

2011-07-13T21:09:00.004-04:00

The Caine Prize has a new winner. From the press release at the Caine website.

Zimbabwe’s NoViolet Bulawayo has won the 2011 Caine Prize for African Writing, described as Africa’s leading literary award, for her short story entitled ‘Hitting Budapest’, from The Boston Review, Vol 35, no. 6 - Nov/Dec 2010.

The Chair of Judges, award-winning author Hisham Matar, announced NoViolet Bulawayo as the winner of the £10,000 prize at a dinner held this evening (Monday 11 July) at the Bodleian Library in Oxford.

Hisham Matar said: "The language of ‘Hitting Budapest’ crackles. Here we encounter Darling, Bastard, Chipo, Godknows, Stina and Sbho, a gang reminiscent of Clockwork Orange. But these are children, poor and violated and hungry. This is a story with moral power and weight, it has the artistry to refrain from moral commentary. NoViolet Bulawayo is a writer who takes delight in language."

Hisham Mattar, writer of the amazing In the Country of Men that I just finished last week, said that? Well, that's another story. You can read my review of the story here.

One of the most depressing things about being from an African country, and I suspect it is the same for being from any post-colonial society, is the need to seek validation abroad or by Western standards. You can be the best writer ever, but if a bunch of white guys in academies don't see it, you're not. This applies to disciplines outside of literature as well. It's really as simple as that.

That is what is so extraordinary about the Caine Prize. Folks call it the "African Booker Prize", and with the mantle of premier African literary award comes the weight that The Booker, The Pushcart, The Pen or any other literary award doesn't have - the burden of representation, of validation, of choosing by dint of one's position the face of and state of African literary scene.

If you so much as scroll through the blog, you would see my reviews of each of the five stories that made up the shortlist for the prize. I tried not to absolutely skewer things in reviews (unless, of course, it's really that abominably bad), but as a whole I'm agree with Ikhide Ikheloa from 234Next on the quality of this year's shortlist:

The good news is that the Caine Prize is here to stay. The bad news is that someone is going to win the Caine Prize this year. This is a shame; having read the stories on the shortlist, I conclude that a successful African writer must be clinically depressed, chronicling in excruciating detail every open sore of Africa. Apologies to Wole Soyinka. The creation of a prize for “African writing” may have created the unintended effect of breeding writers willing to stereotype Africa for glory.

The mostly lazy, predictable stories that made the 2011 shortlist celebrate orthodoxy and mediocrity. They are a riot of exhausted clichés even as ancient conflicts and anxieties fade into the past tense: huts, moons, rapes, wars, and poverty. The monotony of misery simply overwhelms the reader. Fiammetta Rocco, the Economist’s literary editor who chaired last year’s judges, crows that the stories are “uniquely powerful.” The stories are uniquely wretched. The chair of this year’s judges Hisham Matar declares presumptuously that the stories “represent a portrait of today’s African short story: its wit and intelligence, its concerns and preoccupations.” Really? Is this the sum total of our experience, this humourless, tasteless canvas of shiftless Stepin Fetchit suffering?

I hope to goodness that this applies only to this years, but judging from Olufemi Terry's Stickfighting Days, pathetic stories seem to be their thing. Emmanuel Iduma, publisher of Saraba Magazine, responded to Ikheloa's comments, which seemed to cause quite the firestorm on the internet and, I hear from someone present, was even talked about in the discussion part of a Caine Prize event that happened in London today:

I believe what is more important is the objective of the story. I assume it is unhelpful to draw a line on what a writer’s process/objective is by his story. Granted, critics do this continuously – yet in the final analysis if we can define a “grand” objective of “the story” we can go past these questions of stories that dance to a Western tune. And what is the West, anyway? And what is even human? So our grand objective must transcend western lines, become human, and take a more particularized stance. Can this grand objective be grasped? I propose that memory, fraternity and essence are merged, so that every writer, of whatever African descent, plugs his narrative into this fusion. Hopefully.

Knowing my own writing process and how much is involved, I'm wont to agree with Iduma. I'm not willing to be cynical enough to say that these writers are, as Ikheloa says, "willing to stereotype [Africa] for glory". I have no idea what led NoViolet Bulawayo to write the story she did, chockful of such familiar tropes on woe-is-me African literature (IMF street? Really??) And I should say here that this is what annoys me the most about the counter-argument to this brand of literature. Writing about Africa does not absolve one from writing well, and bringing complex characters to life, and, indeed, having a plot and creating a believable world for a reader from which (s)he can take away something of value. It really does not.

Writers write. Readers have opinions. It's really that simple. One has a right to put pen to paper or fingers to keyboard and churn out just whatever (s)he pleases. I certainly did not like Hitting Budapest, a plotless story that does not seem to have a point beyond "these kids are poor and live squalidly and you should pity them", but I do not really care about Bulawayo; she can write whatever she wants. I'm madder at the Caine Prize for seeming to favor stories of a particular strain, the ones that are less about characters and the network of trip-wires that make up their humanity and more about flattening characters to render them tools to make a political point, and absolving them from the basic responsibilities that come with writing a good story. I'm madder at them for not asking for complexity, and buying into an oversimplified narrative of Africa - poverty, war, disease, starving/fighting children -- just like most Western media does. I'm madder at the Caine for saying that this collection of stories is the best they could get out of Africa. I'm mad because I and so many people out there know that that is not true.

Al-Jazeera Being Awesome

2011-07-11T20:30:00.001-04:00

Al-Jazeera's Inside Story has a great piece on famine and conflict in the Horn of Africa. It'll never stop being annoying how you can't embed a video from AJE, but the video is Africa's Drought: Is War or Weather to Blame? and the link is here.

I like the effort they go into to get at the question of why the situation is so intractable. If you have all these reports predicting a riot in the Horn of Africa, then why don't you use your knowledge to get at some more sustainable solution (Ugh, I just used the world "sustainable)? How is the long-term vulnerability of NGOs' funding affecting the situation? What do we do about the overflowing refugee camps? How is this all affecting Kenya? It's a good examination on the issues at hand in a way I don't see in most other media, and acknowledges the complexity of the situation.

I have no answers, but this put voice to a lot of questions that I have/had.

Is the AU too Respectful to Gaddafi?

2011-07-05T10:02:00.000-04:00

Can't say I didn't see this coming -- the AU has decided not to honor the ICC arrest warrant, meaning that Gaddafi is still free to travel around Africa as he likes. From News24:

The decision passed late on Friday states that the warrant against Gaddafi "seriously complicates" efforts by the African Union to find a political solution to the crisis in Libya.

AU chairperson Jean Ping told reporters that the ICC is "discriminatory" and only goes after crimes committed in Africa while ignoring those committed by Western powers including in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan.

"With this in mind, we recommend that the member states do not co-operate with the execution of this arrest warrant," said the motion which was shown to The Associated Press and whose passage was confirmed by Daniel Adugna, a spokesperson in the AU commissioner's office.

If the AU's 53 member states abide by the decision, it opens the possibility that Gaddafi could avoid prosecution by seeking refuge on the soil of neighbouring nations.

In light of this news, Elizabeth Ohene has a piece at the Royal African Society pointing out the black African leaders' relative distance to what's happening in Libya, and positing that the AU may just be being too respectful in their dealings with the Libyan dictator. Not that they were that far up his ladder of priorities anyway:

The black Africans, the sub-saharan Africans, the Africans treated this stranger with care and respect. They nodded and said yes knowing fully well they had no intention of doing what he was saying. Of course it helped that he had money and could pick up some of the bills for the organization, but nobody felt squeamish about that.

Prestigious world universities were taking his money. Important world figures were all beating a path to his tent or rolling out the red carpet for him in their capitals. Condoleeza Rice, Tony Blair, Nicholas Sarkozy Silvio Berlusconi, to name a few and they don't come any more important and the deals that come out of those meetings would show his generosity in African countries to be peanuts.

Unfortunately the AU has not learnt that “Obunfura” does not work with the western powers. Saying yes because you do not want to offend does not work in the world of realpolitik. Saying yes in the fond hope that when push came to shove there would be no unpleasantness as dictated by “Obunfura” has landed the AU in a mess. They knew that Gaddafi's time ought to be up after forty years in power, but since you have to treat strangers with care and respect, they couldn't bring themselves to tell him as much and once the uprising started and the rebels made Gaddafi's exit from office their main demand, the AU could not be an honest broker.

They voted for and supported Security Council Resolution 1973 in the hope the enforcement of a no-fly zone would bring peace, and they chose to ignore the gathering war clouds. Not surprisingly their current protests have been drowned in the bombs over Tripoli.

This seems a bit incomplete to me, though. I'm not convinced that the AU is averse to unpleasantness in the Gaddafi situation because he's from North Africa. If AU's were just a North Africa problem, Mugabe and Obiang wouldn't be in power, some heavy focus would be on Museveni with his crackdowns on the population, and there would be pressure on Wade to peacefully cede power instead on trying to going for another term. As we saw in Niger and Cote d'Ivoire, there are certainly situations that the AU would speak up forcefully. I just don't think geography has anything to do with it.

Caine Prize for African Literature - Story Blogging Week V

2011-07-01T16:03:00.001-04:00

In an initiative hosted by Aaron Bady (ZunguZungu), I am joining a coterie of awesome bloggers in reading and reviewing entrants for the Caine Prize for African Literature this year. You can read along with us -- all the stories are available online in PDFs and linked from the Caine Prize website. The fifth and last story on the shortlist is South African writer David Medalie's "Mistress's Dog". Here is my post on the first, second, third, and fourth stories.

Like In the Spirit of McPhineas Lata, this is another story that ostensibly not about any politics, but about the characters and the relationships between them. Here, though, the real story is about power and resentment.

I very much liked the way the story was told, the pacing of it. We see a lot of Nola's bitterness coming through, but the constant calling of her Nola's husband "the powerful man" is an excellent choice, as it tells us so much about their relationship without going into too much detail. The power imbalance in the relationship is driven home by how we do not even know they are married until about half-way through the story.

The Mistress's Dog is very much like What Molly Knew in its themes, albeit less dark and less political. I hate to compare both just because their South African and written by white men (and I did compare Keegan's story to J.M. Coetzee's Disgrace in my review), but they bought struck a similar chord in that one moment when the oppressed figure in the story had one chance at making their own decision, and the self-defeated stance each woman took. Molly did not take the letter to the police in the face of evidence that Rollo may have killed her daughter. Nola chose to roll over and accept a situation she did not want, even when she had a choice to say no. This looks to me a definite point of view regarding power relations in the country, but I'm trying not to make too much of it.

Even as Nola obviously derives pleasure from seeing the mistress's efforts at fitting in, from the interior decorator to the dinners and wine, you get the sense that Nola felt a certain kinship to the mistress through what she sees as their mutual oppression. This passage, in particular, illustrates this:

Nola saw in the mistress the hesitation that the hearty laugh could not hide, the timorousness that was silent but present all the time, like a heart murmur. It was evident to her that the mistress had become a snob largely because she dreaded the judgement of snobs.
In everything she did and said, the mistress declared her determination to be free. She was, she believed, making and remaking herself. It was very hard work. It was expensive too. But it would be worth it if, by chipping away at herself, she could set herself free forever: a complete metamorphosis.
Nola knew, however, that the mistress had not even begun to emancipate herself. And she suspected that she never would. For she, Nola, was not free either, except from anxieties about money. She knew what the mistress had not yet discovered, which was that nothing grew in the shadow cast by the powerful man.

And you get confirmation of that notion as the story draws to a close:

We are the survivors, she thought, the two of us. The powerful man had died in a Cape Town hospital after weeks on a ventilator. The mistress had died in the frail-care section of the retirement village in Johannesburg. The mistress’s dog had outlived them both. And so had she."

The mistress, then, is a fellow traveler in a sense. Nola hates the mistress not so much for daring to have an affair with her husband, but for reminding her so much of herself. The dog Nola is now saddled with, then, is a ticking time-bomb that threatens her with the possibility of power, a decision waiting to be made that will lead to her emancipation.

Of all the Caine Prize shortlisted stories, I'd call this the most subtle in the delicate way it handles its themes. I like that delicateness, but I wonder if it does not have too soft a touch. It was not a very vivid story, and the character herself does not really come into her own at all in the story. Perhaps that was on purpose -- a woman who has spent so much time being suppressed could come across as flat -- but I do not think this needs to have been the case. For one thing, this character hides her lack of esteem well behind resentment. I would have liked to see some more of that anger come across, however seething. Her reaction to the lady in the supermarket rang false to me, because Nola is not a woman unaware of her privilege. I expected her to be apologetic but curt, not to hover and make excuses.

At the end of the story, Nola asks questions we wish Molly had asked herself.

Had she chosen him? Or had she ended up with him by default because she had not, during her life, made the wise, the adroit choices? If we are our choices, then what did it say about her that the mistress’s dog was her last companion?

One finds oneself relieved at the soul-searching and hoping she does indeed hold on to the strength to take her life into her own hands.

A big shout-out to ZunguZungu for being so awesome and hosting the awesome reading session. Go to his blog for links to the posts from the other bloggers reviewing this story.

Caution: Highly Quotable -- Ben Okri

2011-06-28T12:58:00.004-04:00

Ben Okri is as eloquent as ever when he talks about his work on the latest edition of CNN's African Voices.

On Africa:

When I see Africa, I see a medley of richness and possibility, a confusion of past and present, a dance of too many voices, cries of suffering and injustice, a dominant melody of tyranny. I see many different periods in one. The strange thing about Africa is how past, present and future come together in a kind of rough jazz, if you like.

In the midst of so much blood and wars and tribal divisions and confusion and famines and all of that -- that is what I see. It's a rich, complex, confusing music in which a new melody, a new note, is slowly emerging, slowly sounding through.

On his work:

My job in many of my books is to show the impact of perception on reality, why we have the politics we have, the failures we have in society, it all comes down to consciousness, to what we see, to what we consider to be real. And that's the place to do the work in transforming and changing.

On reality:

The longer I live, the longer I look, the more I see that things are strongly connected. I often hear what many consider to be odd synchronicities. someone the other day said to me that they had a dream of someone that they hadn't seen for fifteen years. Then they turned a corner that day and there that person was. What do you make of that? Do you just say, "oh, it's just pure coincidence"? Then I say to them that coincidence is part of reality. You can't chop it up and say that's not part of reality". These things in the midst of life that things are stranger than they appear to be, they're part of reality, we have to let them in and acknowledge them.

On whether he's opening the window for us to his worldview:

Yes, but it's a window that you look into and what you see are aspects of yourself, if I'm any good. The writing, the best writing, is not about the writer. The best writing is about us, about the reader.

Reading is an act of civilization; it's one of the greatest acts of civilization because it takes the free raw material of the mind and builds castles of possibilities. And in the building of those castles of possibilities it frees the creative matrix of men and women. When you can imagine you begin to create and when you begin to create you realize that you can create a world that you prefer to live in, rather than a world that you're suffering in.

Oh, for the gift of being able to drop such gems in regular conversation! Seriously, I wonder if people like this practice in the mirror, measure their words for lyricism and have them scribbled at the ready on notecards. I've joked about this ever since I saw the youtube video of Drake dropping a freestyle on a radio station by reading lyrics off his Blackberry.

Okri really captured the essence of the thing when he talked about Africa, but I find what he says about writing to be so true. The best stuff I read always makes me think of myself and my own reaction to what I am reading. You're not supposed leave a great piece of work with the same thoughts you entered it with.

Check out an edited version of the interview on CNN's page here; there's also video of the interview. Needless to say, I'll be checking out his new book A Time for New Dreams as soon as I can get to it.

Photo credit: PoetryInternational.org

Caine Prize for African Literature - Story Blogging Week IV

2011-06-24T18:08:00.002-04:00

In an initiative hosted by Aaron Bady (ZunguZungu), I am joining a coterie of awesome bloggers in reading and reviewing entrants for the Caine Prize for African Literature this year. You can read along with us -- all the stories are available online in PDFs and linked from the Caine Prize website. This week's story is Botswanan writer Lauri Kubutsile's In the Spirit of McPhineas Lata. Here is my post on the first, second, and third stories.

I’ll begin by saying that I really enjoyed reading this. It is great to see a fun, lively story from the African continent that is not terribly profound. The story was written to make you laugh, and it does. The story is written with a cock of the eyebrow in the reader’s direction, and I love that.

That is not to say that there are not major holes in the story for me. I really want to know how these men could have wives cheat on them so brazenly and do nothing but shrug. I know that the men felt threatened by McPhineas Lata, but it is not clear to me why the men did not react with anger, but with this need to one-up the man, or to please him better. I wanted something, anything, to show that these women were in a position of control enough that if they could cheat on their husbands they could manipulate them enough to feel threatened by this other man’s ability to please them.

On the other hand, I really appreciated how sexuality was not burdened by guilt or shame, nor was it studied or typed into datasets for analysis on population growth data and the like. Like everywhere in the world, sex just is, and I like how it is allowed here to just be. Sex does not feature much in African literature, and it is such a change to see it talked about and lamented over, all in such a humorous manner.

I have a gripe with the story's preoccupation with, well, itself. I’d have liked for the writer to zoom out a bit and show us some imagery, some backstory into how McPhineas Lata became the ladies’ man, or even how these men were beaten into complacency with this man going after their wives. The writer probably meant for the story to stay a funny piece, and probably feared sapping from the comedy with too much background, but I don’t think this need be the case. Zadie Smith’s White Teeth -- and On Beauty to a lesser extent -– was excellent for using background to make the story even more comical, and to really tease out what makes the scene so hilarious.

In the Spirit of McPhineas Lata is very different from all the other shortlisted stories in that it is the least topical. It is the one most about people and less about any profound issue. We definitely need good fiction on profound takes on the human experience in African countries and how they're shaped by socio-political happenings, but it is nice that stories like this can get the attention of international prize juries.

Check out ZunguZungu for updates on what other bloggers had to say about the story as they come.

Hey, Mr. VJ.....

2011-06-18T01:21:00.000-04:00

I haven't put up a jam session in awhile, so here's some songs from South Africa I love right now.

I've loved a lot of what I've heard coming out of South Africa's house scene, but DJ Oskido and Black Coffee really stand out. This particular Black Coffee song is a bit old, but I'm partial to Zakes Bantwini and I just love the feel of this, so laid-back. I liked Oskido's older song Jezebel, but this one is even better. I've said this before, but I really love how South African music takes its influences from outside hip-hop; Nigeria would do well to learn that. As we can see from Siji's Ijo, we can make some pretty good house-inspired music, too, if we tried.

Also, this rapper Khuli Chana is really cool. I prefer AKA as a rapper -- check out his song Victory Lap if you haven't heard it, because it's awesome -- but this is pretty sick as well.

Enjoy.

Caine Prize for African Literature - Story Blogging Week III

2011-06-16T19:07:00.001-04:00

In an initiative hosted by Aaron Bady (ZunguZungu), I am joining a coterie of awesome bloggers in reading and reviewing entrants for the Caine Prize for African Literature this year. You can read along with us -- all the stories are available online in PDFs and linked from the Caine Prize website. This week's story is South African Tim Keegan's "What Molly Knew". Here is my post on the first story and the second.

This is another story that slow-drips on detail - you don't know immediately that Tommie is "more black than white" and that he's an ANC member. You don't get a full picture of dead Sarah Nobrega and why she left until pretty much the end of the story. While Molly pretty much tells you early on that she's with Rollo because, well, where else is she to go, nothing in the beginning prepares you for what happens in the end. I wish the story was more vivid, that the imagery was "painted" as opposed to having the surroundings reeled off like lists, but this seems to be Keegan's style: you're told only what you need to know at this moment. You will know more when the time is right, and it works.

I like the characterization of this very much. The voices are very distinct, and Molly is very well-drawn. You know, right from the onset, her fears of being alone and her regrets, the single-mindedness with which she carries on her tasks about the house, and even feel some pity when watching her maneuver the minefield that is living Rollo. And we are told everything we need to know about Rollo, except that one important thing -- I'd hate to spoil it for whoever hasn't read the piece yet -- but you can almost hear the gruffness of his tone, and the reason for the self-righteousness with which he talks about Sarah in the beginning becomes all to clear at the end of the story.

For outsiders to South Africa's post-apartheid society like me, it is nice to have the scene at the hairdressers where one gets some insight into what the big deal was about Tommie being black and an ANC person. He is colored, but he's picked a side, and the parallel is made quite clear that Tommie bringing his black-power ANC life into the neighborhood is not unlike Tommie bringing his, well, blackness into Sarah’s family. I like how the race issue is layered with resentment for his apparent role in Molly losing her daughter (we think this until the end of the story) and Rollo not getting along with Sarah. Race here reminds me of what we are seeing in parts of the U.S. polity in the Obama era: while not the sole cause for animus, race acts as a sort of amplifier of difference that further sours discourse and deepens resentment. In the case of this story, race makes more stark the differences between the kind of the life she led in her marriage, and the life she left behind with her mother.

It is very difficult to not think of J.M. Coetzee's Booker Prize-winning Disgrace when you read this story, and compare the way race is handled in both. Both paint grim pictures on race relations in South Africa, and the tension that follows when black and white "worlds" collide. The collision in this story, at the funeral service at the church hall with Tommie's black ANC friends, is much less violent than the rape in Disgrace, but still hostile and the discomfort of the two whites, Rollo and Molly, was very telling.

Below is the major quote of the story, and it comes early on:

He knows that all citizens are equal in the new South Africa, but he can’t help but feel some people’s pain more than others’. That’s just the way he is, and the newspapers and television people seem to think the same way, to judge by the posse of reporters and cameras outside Sarah Nobrega’s flat in Goodwood when he left.

There is a certain, for lack of a better word, selfishness in this quote that permeates the entire story. Molly is more concerned about her sense of normalcy than putting her daughter’s killer to justice. Rollo is more concerned about himself than anyone else and, as is hinted, even killed Molly’s daughter out of this selfishness. Sarah didn’t much care about how Tommie would received in her family; she went ahead and married him anyway. It is not for nothing that the only one who made a move that would affect the lives of everyone else in the most positive way was shot dead. It’s an insightful, quietly damning portrait of the people depicted in the story, and perhaps of South Africa's new society at large.

Check out ZunguZungu for updates on what other bloggers had to say about the story as they come.

Mainstreaming Hausa

2011-06-14T17:00:00.003-04:00

I had a conversation earlier today with a few friends about Hausa representation in Dare Art-Alade's new video for "Ba Ni Kidi."

My friend took issue with Dare's "weird" Hausa (the title is grammatically incorrect, he thinks), but I'm more concerned about the circus, the monkey, the magic... it just felt a bit too Aladdin's Genie for me. It is almost like the singer forgot the song was in Hausa, and decided to go Arabian Nights route instead.

I only mean to make an observation -- and not pick on Dare Art-Alade -- when I say that this video has me thinking about Hausa people and their place in Nigeria's mainstream culture. The only thing even remotely Hausa about me is my name, but it's worth lending a thought to the representation of the Hausa -- or lack thereof -- in Nigerian pop culture. And no, I don't mean somebody saying "Nagode Jesu" in church songs, or Style Plus singing a hook to a song in the language.

In addition to being, according to some observers, the least likely to be educated in Nigeria, Hausas have been left behind in Nigeria's popular culture. The artist Zaaki never did get other Hausas to come to the fore in Nigerian music. I am not aware of any major Hausa actresses in Nigerian films who identifies with being Hausa the way Funke Akindele and Omotola Jalade-Ekeinde do with being Yoruba, or Genevieve Nnaji, Patience Ozorkwor (sorry if I'm butchering it), Stephanie Okereke and Rita Dominic are so obviously Igbo. Hausa films are much younger an industry than Yoruba and Igbo ones, but I wonder about their distribution in Lagos; if they only get around in Kano and Kaduna, it will only strengthen Hausa's isolation from Nigeria's mainstream. I am Yoruba, and the people and culture are so thoroughly a part of pop culture that one cannot but notice Hausas' absence when one compares. Couple this with the power Hausa elites have in Nigeria's polity, you get a lot of room for resentment and misrepresentation aided by silence of the group in the mainstream.

And then there's this video.

What makes the video so repellent to me is the near voicelessness of the people whose language and image is used in this song. I know Dare probably just means to put together a fun, interesting music video, but I know that if someone put together a not-so-flattering/ even slightly mocking video on Yorubas, there'd be more of a reaction across followers of Nigerian music. I wonder what a Hausa person would think seeing this, and how they will feel about their inability to affect the way they are being depicted in the popular culture of their own country.

Caine Prize for African Literature - Story Blogging Week II

2011-06-10T18:40:00.001-04:00

This is round two of the one in which I join a gang of awesome bloggers in reading and blogging on the entrants for the Caine Prize for African Literature this year, in an initiative hosted by Aaron Brady (ZunguZungu). You can read along with us -- all the stories are available online in PDFs and linked from the Caine Prize website. This week's story is Beatrice Lamwaka's "Butterfly Dreams." My post on the first story is here.

There was a nice minimalism to Butterfly Dreams that I liked. As in Hitting Budapest one sees the desire to withhold, to not say things outright. We're not told from the outset, for example, that they live in a refugee camp. We're not told, though we can gather, that, though they were probably not rich, they were definitely far from poor before "it" happened.

The point of view Lamwaka chose for the story is also worth praising. Butterfly Dreams is told by someone in the middle of the story who remains unnamed -- a family member, perhaps -- and this gives the appropriate mix of sadness towards Lamunu, a touch of defiance (like when the person was talking about the father and the food they now eat), quietly adamant denial, and mournfulness that permeates the entire story.

Unlike Hitting Budapest, though, I can see why this was written. There would be no story without the return of Lamunu, and she brings the people to which she returns into confront their own violent history. It is a history that no one will want to live through again, and one wonders why they are so welcoming of Lamunu, why they sought her out, listening for her name on the radio every day for five years. Yes, she is family, but no one should be forced to want something simply because it is theirs.

The story’s background is grim, but not without some subtle attempts at hope. The burying of the tipu served as foreshadowing of a new life for the family, a new future. The dream of the return of Lamunu is a butterfly dream. And Lamunu is the butterfly about the house that they watch in somber awe. Calling the story Butterfly Dreams, though, calls to question what the writer is trying to say. Are the characters mad for thinking that Lamunu’s return is necessarily the salvo they think it is? Can a figure of a horrible, violent past coexist in the house of a nation of people who survived its past? We end with Lamunu attempting to live a normal life, go to school like a girl her age, albeit with other children scarred from the same experience that she has had. But it’s an attempt at normalcy nonetheless. It will have to do.

You could probably tell that I quite liked the story, but I am not unaware of sensitivity towards stories of its kind. I’m generally in the camp that says we capped on the need of child soldier stories around the time when Ahmadou Kourouma wrote Allah N’est Pas Oblige, not because these stories are untrue and I don't trust a Western audience to read these stories and nothing else (OK, it's part of it). And even as I can discern clearly what the writer is trying to say about this family and, much broader, about the situation in the country, I'm actually quite ready to forgive that for the subtlety with which I think the story was told. There were no headless bodies on the streets, no raped girls and drugged up children with uzis, no gratuitous appeals for pity. Most of the all, there was a story. Perhaps I'm setting the bar a bit low, but I appreciate all these things.

It does bear repeating that we need more stories of contemporary, heavily-urbanized, not-a-giraffe-in-sight Africa. It's probably fair to say that African countries' citizens are not the same people as they were 50, 25, even 10 years ago. We deserve a literature that reflects our dynamism. While recognizing this, I don’t have a political point to make on the story, because whatever one may think, the story has a point, it has a reason that it was written, and it was indeed written very well. I am consciously staying away from the counterargument that effectively puts down literature like this, because I cannot deny its validity. Hell, I even agree to it myself. I will, however, put this forward: stories like this need being told, and I think this is actually a good way to do it.

Check out ZunguZungu for reviews by the rest of the bloggers.

In Which I Aspire to Questionable Heights of Shameless Self-Promotion

2011-06-04T07:58:00.001-04:00

I debated putting this up here, but I figure I may as well.

An essay of mine on moving back to Nigeria got published in the awesome blog-magazine called This Recording. Here's a bit of it:

Back in Lagos now, I have an older pair of eyes. Nigeria is no longer a place of childhood imagination and birthday parties. Though I do not see this as where I came of age, the fact that it is my home has become more true than at any other time in my life.

It is always understood when you leave Nigeria as a Nigerian that you will return at some point. There is family, after all, probably weddings or, worse still, funerals. And it's not like every minute you are away you aren't wondering what new club has opened, what new slang people are using, what new artist is making waves. Diaspora Nigerians fresh from weeks of partying in Lagos return to regale you with stories of change and mobile phones, of parties that could make Fitzgerald dizzy with jetsetters and entrepreneurs. Nigeria is an escalator of a country, forever moving upwards towards another level that is shinier, more luxurious than the one we left behind. We are a people in transit, living our lives as though forever stuck in the London-to-Lagos terminal in Heathrow. We always seem to be going somewhere, always seem to be moving.

Read it all here. It was also featured in Longform.org, which is every shade of awesome.

There's really no reason why there's the music video of Siji's awesome song "Ijo" below. Almost no reason - Black Looks recommended it to me a long while ago, and I fell hard for the song. Consider this a good use at my Machiavellian powers.

Caine Prize for African Literature - Story Blogging Week I

2011-06-03T19:24:00.003-04:00

In an initiative hosted by Aaron Bady (ZunguZungu), I'm joining a gang of awesome bloggers in reading and blogging on the entrants for the Caine Prize for African Literature this year. You can read along with us -- all the stories are available online in PDFs and linked from the Caine Prize website. There's five stories on the shortlist, and a review will be going up every Friday. This is the first one.

The first story the group will be reviewing is “Hitting Budapest”, a story by Zimbabwean writer NoViolet Bulawayo. What I liked most about the story is the dialogue between the characters, how real it was. I liked the hard-edged innocence of aspiring to be better thieves coupled with not seeing there is something really wrong when a girl is impregnated by her grandfather, scarcely even knowing where babies even come from. I liked how it's not exactly drilled into you that these kids are not the wealthiest. The first thing you learn about them is not their poverty, but that they are kids. And truly, that's all you need to know.

What I didn't like, however, was how I was not sure why there was any need for this story at all. One bothers to write a story, I believe, to point out a moment where things change, either the moments leading up to the change, or the fall-out of the change itself. Basically, I think that a piece of fiction is best when it chronicles a momentous time in a character's life, and the fall-out from such an occasion. Stories can stop and start a narrative so we can zoom in and out like a camera at details and skip backwards and forwards in time, showing to the point of stark nudity particular instances in a character's life in a way that film or any other medium may not be able to. I can't say that this story really does that here.

Perhaps the point she was getting at was that they got to see themselves through the eyes of this random woman in this really upscale neighborhood, but that particular thread wasn't dragged through the story. We get no sense of how the kids were affected by this meeting, save for feeling indignant at her taking a picture of when without so much as offering them food. Maybe the coupling of meeting someone they thought as strange and insensitive with the confronting of a suicide was meant to hint the reader at something about their not knowing how miserable their circumstances are. But they do. They know enough about their situation to want to escape it. Their entire day in the story, they talked about escaping, to Budapest, to America, to South Africa. At the end of the story, I don't know why Bulawayo chose this particular time in the characters' lives, or get any sense how this particular trip to Budapest warranted telling. In sum, I don't know why she wrote the story at all. I don't always think stories ought to have some sort of moral lesson or even a “point” as such; I just like knowing, after I read a story, why it was written in the first place.

In spite of what I've said, and the ending (I found it a bit rushed), I liked reading the story, and I probably will check out more of the writer's work. One of the most gratifying things about this juncture in African literature is how urban some of the stories are, how current, and how younger folks are willing to talk about social issues without moralizing. I'm sure I've said this in this blog before, but I really hate how almost necessary it is as an artist in an African country to feel the need to be topical and have something to say about whatever burning issue there is in our polity. We can't always write about HIV/Aids or poverty, after all, and even if we do, we can't, for the sake of creating art, forget that reality is all about telling stories about people and the very flawed, ver fascinating lives they lead. Even when writers talk about poor people, the best art puts it at the forefront of our minds that we are dealing first and foremost with people, celebrates that humanity before it decries the situation that it lives in, and quietly when it does so. This story does that, as does so many stories people are coming with these days, and that should be applauded.

To see how the other bloggers liked (or not) this story, check ZunguZungu for updates with more blog reactions.

Poems for Sunday

2011-05-29T12:14:00.002-04:00

I couldn't decide on which of these two to put up, so I'm just going to throw them both on here.

One Art gets the most press out of Elizabeth Bishop's work, but this one is one of my favorites. It's an untitled poem for her lover Lilli, a woman who only had lesbian relationships after her husband's death, and their time in together in a small village in Brazil called Ouro Preto. I know less about the history of You Are Happy, but I love the imagery in both. You Are Happy especially makes you want to get out a sweater. Bishop's has an intimacy to it that suggests it had only one person in mind to ever read it, even though it was published in the New Yorker.

And, yes, I love a poem with a subtle innuendo.

[Untitled]

Dear, my compass
Still points north
to wooden houses
and blue eyes

fairytales where
flaxed-haired
younger sons
bring home the goose

Love in hay-lofts,
Protestants, and
heavy drinkers
Springs are backward

But crab-apples
ripen to rubies,
cranberries to
drops of blood

and swans can paddle
icy water,
so hot the blood
in those webbed feet

-- Cold as it is,
we'd go to bed, dear,
early, but never to keep warm.

You Are Happy

The water turns
a long way down over the raw stone,
ice crusts around it

We walk separately
along the hill to the open
beach, unused
picnic tables, wind
shoving the brown waves, erosion, gravel
rasping on gravel.

In the ditch a deer
carcass, no head. Bird
running across the glaring
road against the low pink sun.

When you are this
cold you can think about
nothing but the cold, the images

hitting into your eyes
like needles, crystals, you are happy.

Is Art a Desirable Goal?

2011-05-24T20:44:00.001-04:00

Over at Bombastic Element, a really cool piece up on music in the work of African cinematic masters like Sissako and Absa. Of course, the term "African Cinema" is loosely applied here. Nothing of this applies to Nigerian film. From the piece he linked to from Beatriz Leal Riesco at Buala:

Since the early days of African cinema, music has formed part of a (self) conscious discourse concerning the problematic realities of Africa. Its use has rarely been gratuitous and goes far beyond the traditional—and much less experimental—Western customs of dramatic punctuation, of evocation of place, of establishing an emotional relationship with the spectator in which the image is almost always predominant, or as accompaniment to the never-ceasing rush of action that hardly leaves one time to think… In African cinema, music is stressed in terms of its cultural, poetic, and artistic functions in relation to oral tradition, with reference to such figures as the griot; it is used to critique the reductive commonplace of tradition versus modernity employed by partisans of a fabricated, purist, and ultimately nefarious—in its insistence on the notion of an “unadulterated essence”— “return to the roots”; it is blended into narration as an essential component and as a marker for critical moments; it works to evoke spaces where time slackens and opens up, giving way for ambiguity and reflection; and it mirrors the continuing urbanization of every aspect of African life, its constant contact with a West for which music is often a tool of domestication, of modernization, and of cultural imperialism.

This post got me thinking about the goals of art, if there need to goals at all, or even if art is a desirable end in itself. Music in Nigerian film, of course, is mostly a hodge-podge of often pop ballads, even jingles, that do little to heighten the mood, if not worsening the scene with sickening heights of melodrama. No high-mindedness preoccupies the filmmakers, and this often is enough for their audience.

It's not like Nigerian films cannot be studied; far from it. They tell you a lot about the collective mindset of country today, but one cannot study Nigerian cinema as a unique way that Nigerian filmmakers approach film in itself. To study an approach to film would imply that the idea of making a film was to produce art, not a product. Yes, there is a thin line between art and product (Art is often sold for profit, after all), but for my money, an art form is qualified as such because what drives the artist something beyond the material gain. An artist makes money, yes, but that's not entirely the point.

I was into books and creative writing long before I started watching film, so maybe my lenses are a bit tainted here and a "good" film should not be defined the same way "good" literature often is. Still, I wonder what it says about Nigerian film that we cannot study aspects of the filmmaking by many Nigerian directors the way we can work by Ousmane Sembene and the like, particularly since our industry is so huge and so well-received. I think the ability of a culture to create and present art, and for it to be appreciated and even find an audience from where it can make money is healthy, even desirable, in any society. I think a society should have a healthy appreciation for artistic expression, and have individuals capable of thinking outside their wallets. I don't even think that there needs to be a split between entertainment and art -- I have read a lot of books lately that blur that line (Lola Shoneyin's "The Secret Lives of Baba Segy's Wives" comes highly recommended). Increasingly, though, I wonder if this line of thinking just shows my own bias and nothing more.

I don't know for sure that "art" is the best goal, if it's even the most desirable goal. I think it is, but I can't give any cogent reason for that. All I know is that in Nigeria only a handful of our films can qualify as art, and precious few of our filmmakers are interested in making good art. I wish I had more than my knee-jerk aversion to this fact, but all I know is that I don't like it one bit.

Back in the Day, When I Was Young, I'm Not a Kid Anymore...

2011-05-15T12:04:00.001-04:00

I have entirely too much time on my hands today, so I'm going old school Nigerian music on you guys.

I was going to do old school African music and throw in some Judith Sephuma, Miriam Makeba, etc, but I think I'll keep this narrow. There's some classic cuts here, but lots of awesome songs are being left out. There's no Oyeka, no Daddy Shokey, no Majek Fashek, no Zubi Enebeli. Maybe this post will have a sequel, but I'm not sure there needs to be a definitive list, do you?

Looking at Nigerian music then and Nigerian music now, there's some key differences. For one thing, raggae's influence on Nigerian music has definitely died down considerably. I wonder why that is. For another, there's been a marked change in theme. The preoccupation of such songs as "Obaro" (move forward, or something -- I don't speak the language) and "Ota Dehin Lehin Mi" (Enemy, get behind me), and "Walakolombo" (a promiscuous woman) are very Nigerian, but I'll argue that one sees them a lot less in music now than they do in Nigerian films. Even though it has not completely abandoned its political streak, Nigerian music nowadays is more preoccupied with themes one sees in American music: getting the girl, veiled sexual references, and rappers' braggadocio. Nigerian films, I think, are more derivative of Nigerian society, and therefore much closer to the Nigerian psyche than Nigerian music.

I wonder what will happen once we lose legends like King Sunny Ade, Lagbaja, and Obey. Today, one sees few people taking up high-life or high-life inspired music, all music derived from Nigeria, to be honest. I'd hate to see it die off in favor of this infatuation with all things American.

Enjoy.

Wonga Coups and E-Revolutions

2011-05-07T13:26:00.006-04:00

At the blog Africa Unchained (again, which probably means you should have it on your RSS feed!) is spotlighted S.O.S. Malabo, the web-based effort at a long-needed revolution to oust Theodore Obiang. This guy, mind you, is one of the least talked-about dictators on the continent who somehow manages to keep a country with the highest GDP per capita on the continent in poverty.

I remember taking an African Studies class in college and reading Wonga Coup. It's a book about some Brits' (including Margaret Thatcher's son) failed attempt at a coup in the oil-rich country, but more broadly about the miserable situation the country found itself in with former dictator and Obiang's uncle Macias Nguema. The chapter on him isn't titled “Mad Uncle Macias” for nothing – so virulent was he against standard education or health-care for fear that it was too “Western”, that he let his people go without either. The citizens are also now without access to basics like water and a sewage system, never mind human rights and a free press, according to the S.O.S. Malabo website.

This post was going to be about the role of Twitter and Facebook in revolutions (Suffice it to say that I think the success of revolutions usually rely on more analog factors), but I decided to make it about this book instead. I've been looking for a reason to put something on Wonga Coup at the blog. The story is a bit surreal; it sounds like something that couldn't actually happen in real life (Frederick Forsythe recognized this, no doubt, when he adapted it for a novel). But it did. I recommend you read it.

Image from acmamail.com

Irritated Sigh Turned Blogpost on Lagos

2011-05-01T09:55:00.001-04:00

I saw poster of “I See Lagos” a few weeks ago when I was visiting family, but, thanks to Emeka Okafor's blog Africa Unchained, I now know what it is.

Heh.

It's weird how you can always tell when a government is doing something that bears paying attention to, and when they're not. When INEC sent out its BB Pin and Twitter handle, they also put out billboard and radio jingles with SMS numbers to report election irregularities across the country. That's how you know that they were serious. While governors put up websites to showcase the work they've done in the states, they also take out ads on TV in pidgin and the local language. With this kind of forum that I See Lagos has, where's the analog equivalent? There's a reason why, when folks have important things to say in Nigeria, they don't necessarily go on Facebook to say it. And it is that reason that makes things like this look unserious.

There's nothing wrong with a bunch of diaspora folks and their internet-ready friends with strongly-held opinions batting back and forth on how best to help Lagos in and of itself, but this should not be the sum of what we can expect from our government and other people within relatively-easy reach of the resources that can make a difference in people's lives. This has less to do with getting people talking about how to move the most populous state in the most populous countries in Africa, and more to do with Fashola getting “cool points” with upwardly mobile middle-class Nigerians and the Nigerian diaspora. Nothing wrong with that, let's call it what it is, shall we?

I'm probably being harder on this than I absolutely need to be, but this points to a larger trend I see among more-monied, London-for-Summer-hols Nigerians like myself, where we band together in our little bubbles and beat our Proudly Nigeria drums and extol on the virtues of change. We make election monitoring forums by and for us. Our blogsphere is created by people like us and for us. We are both addresser and addressee. Think about it: do you think Nigerian newspapers have to worry about making less money because folks read 234Next/Punch/This Day/Guardian/Daily Independent online and don't buy the physical newspaper? NYT, LA Times and the Washington Post have to worry about stuff like that, because, in the U.S., internet access is ubiquitous. In Nigeria, it's not, so internet cannot be the default for a national or statewide conversation that we actually really need to have. Gov. Fashola and his posse really ought to think about expanding their scope and widening our conversation to those who don't have the same access as we do. That is, Fashola and his posse should really think about expanding the conversation to within the reach of most Lagosians.

China Meets Angola in an Oil Field

2011-04-30T00:05:00.000-04:00

Two passages in this piece over at Guernica on Chinese investment in Angola and its oil struck me.

The first:

The Chinese, in turn, wanted little to do with the ordinary people whose country they had come to salvage from the wreckage of the last forty years. One day I met Xia Yi Hua, a middle-aged CEO from Beijing who had been in Angola for the last year and a half. He had contracts with the government to build a hotel in Baya Falte for some of Dos Santos’ most loyal military generals and a police academy in Baya Azul. He welcomed me into a spare waiting room and sat down comfortably in a stiff-backed chair. He got his chicken locally, he told me, but received regular shipments of packaged goods from China. His company sent him food. Everything in his office building, a set of low-rise prefab construction at the end of a highway leading out of Lobito, was either assembled in China, or made by Chinese laborers in Luanda. The wooden coffee table at which we were sitting was made of a rare and beautiful dark-colored Angolan wood, but Xia Yi Hua had brought a Chinese carpenter in to assemble the table. He had his own set of rules. No one from his construction company, China Jiang Su, was allowed to have romantic or sexual ties with Angolans.

“The chief for Jiang Su says that the Chinese who have wives in China, they don’t have the right to be with Angolan girls.”

Anyone caught frequenting local girls, he said, gets sent home. “Yes, fired.”

The gap between the two cultures was too vast, he explained, unbridgeable even in matters of the heart.

“For an Angolan to marry a Chinese girl is very bad too.”

What he wants most, it seems, is more Chinese workers.

“We can’t expand fast enough,” he laughed. “I need more Chinese.”

The second:

Zulu is the one bar in Lobito where everyone goes — the Chinese, the American oil workers, the journalists — and it sits on a wide strip of sand that looks out over the bay and the calm gray waters of the Atlantic. There’s a thatched roof hut with a bar serving tropical drinks, and several wooden tables outside. One afternoon I met Zhou Zhenhong at Zulu. He had been in Africa for five years; two in South Africa, which he found too dangerous, and two in Zambia, which he found too slow and too poor. Angola, on the other hand, was safe enough and rich enough to make it worth his time. When I met him, he hadn’t seen his family in two years and didn’t know when next he would. He used to work for CIF, but in 2006 they pushed him out and told him to start his own company. He started with $1 million in loans and since then has made several million more. “It’s a hundred percent per year,” he said. “That’s unique to this country. You don’t see that anywhere else in Africa. Why? Because the Angolans are pushing like mad to have everything done by tomorrow. They want the best and the fastest. If they want a hotel, they don’t want a three-star, they want a five-star.”

Great piece. Read the whole thing.

Fela!

2011-04-22T08:27:00.003-04:00

I'm off to see Fela! this weekend, original cast and all, in Lagos.

*insert excited squeal here*

It only adds to the experience for me that Femi Kuti, the song of the great man himself, has only good things to say about broadway show, and is pleased now after having insisted the show be performed in Lagos.

By the way, Seun Kuti was interviewed in the Guardian recently. Check that out here. He said he once did a cover of Radiohead's "Paranoid Android" when he was in school, but I couldn't find it on YouTube. Oh well...

Via OkayAfrica, Femi Kuti got the cast of the show to perform live with him at the Shrine in Lagos recently. Wish I was there; this must have been a real treat to see.

Caution: Highly Quotable -- Roberto Bolano

2011-04-14T20:41:00.002-04:00

The very-subscribable (hint, hint!) NY Review of Books has been churning out some excellent Bolano essays. I couldn't finish 2666, haven't gotten around to Savage Detectives, and I'm not a fan of the short stories I've heard (yes, heard) so far, but dammit if this doesn't hit the nail square on the head.

Probably all of us, writers and readers alike, set out into exile, or at least a certain kind of exile, when we leave childhood behind. Which would lead to the conclusion that the exiled person or the category of exile doesn’t exist, especially in regards to literature. The immigrant, the nomad, the traveler, the sleepwalker all exist, but not the exile, since every writer becomes an exile simply by venturing into literature, and every reader becomes an exile simply by opening a book.
Almost all Chilean writers, at some point in their lives, have gone into exile. Many have been followed doggedly by the ghost of Chile, have been caught and returned to the fold. Others have managed to shake the ghost and gone into hiding; still others have changed their names and their ways and Chile has luckily forgotten them.

I read this, I think of how Nabokov never stopped writing about Russia, even though he left when he was a child. I think back to Wole Soyinka's We Must Set Forth at Dawn, and the image of him driving across the country upon his return to Ibadan after spending time in Leeds for school. I think of the latest generation of African writers, the ones we'll surely be talking about for years to come – Dinaw Mengistu, Nnedi Okorafor, Petina Gappah. I think of how the bitterest, most cynical Nigerian immigrants felt warm with hope when Nigeria came back from behind to win Brazil, as though that piece of good fortune could somehow transfer to the country's more intransigent problems. I think of my friend's father who was full of anger at his home country that he never taught his daughter, my friend, her native language.

Later on in the piece, Bolano says that “Exile, in most cases, is a voluntary decision” for a lot of writers. That's certainly not true for folks like Soyinka or Chris Abani or Ogaga Ifowodo or a whole host of writers from Somalia and apartheid-era South Africa, but it is for a lot of us modern African immigrants. This is probably due to the cruel irony that the people who most desperately need to leave are often the most trapped, be it in refugee camps or slums or fleeing from village to village in conflict-torn areas. Many of us self-flung across the world aren't forced from our countries because we feel like our lives are in immediate danger. We live in self-imposed exile for the short- and long-term goal of having a better life, however grudgingly we admit that. We're all travelers, with minds like a haunted house, floorboards creaking with cultural sensitives, and expectations of who we will become like silent screams bouncing off the walls in our heads. Maybe that's the point of literature – a way to make sense of this crazy concept of home.

Photo from Latin American Herald Tribune

Not Speaking Yoruba

2011-04-07T16:09:00.001-04:00

It is with more than a pang of regret that I acknowledge that I do not understand Yoruba.

OK, that's not entirely true. After all, there is nothing you can say to me in Yoruba that I won't understand. There isn't enough Nigeria in my voice, apparently, to give this understanding of the language away, but I've actually learned to like that. I relish the look on people's faces when they talk about me in Yoruba as though I am not there, only to have their eyes widen in shock when I respond. Yes, I respond in Yoruba sometimes, so it's probably not true, is it, that I don't know any Yoruba.

I should be more clear: speaking Yoruba, speaking it well, is not the same as speaking English well. You can do quite well without speaking English idiomatically, each word an island that reveals itself through practice of conjugations and direct meaning, like a street increasingly familiar with returning visits. Words in English take their place like soldiers. Subject, verb, direct object. You can get more complex than that if you wanted to, of course, but it really is enough to convey your meaning the majority of the time.

Yoruba, however, doesn't work that way. True, you can learn Yoruba in a classroom, like I did in my primary school days, with paperback textbooks the exact thickness as freshly-ironed adire. You could, but why would you, when you could listen to your grandparents talk, read the Yoruba daily newspaper Alaroyin, watch Yoruba movies and laugh at the grammatically-incorrect English captions? No. Yoruba is to be experienced, lived, not – in the academic sense of the word – learned.

And, anyway, the kind of Yoruba you learn is not the kind of Yoruba you want to speak. Where English lines up, Yoruba is a contortionist. I am going to the market. The market, I am going. Both correct. And as you get to more complex situations, this ability to shape and reshape itself gets even thornier, expecting the speaker to move into a thicket of idioms, metaphor. In English, this will only serve to embellish, soften the stark nakedness of one's words. Not quite so in Yoruba. Individual words in this language can take on so many meanings, depending on where one places emphasis. Ife could be a small, university town some hour or so outside of Ibadan, or it can be love. Oko can mean husband, or perhaps forest, and, maybe, if you really butcher it, penis. This nuance is true not just of Yoruba pronunciation, but of Yoruba itself.

To understand Yoruba, then, is to know not just the words themselves, but the spirit in which the words can be used. Someone like me who merely speaks Yoruba can tell you what is bothering them. A person who truly speaks Yoruba will use metaphor as stand-in for himself, at once distancing himself from his words and bringing him – and by extension, his listener – closer to his real meaning. One realizes that this is not a language to be spoken plainly. And if you do, it is because you don't truly understand.

The older one gets in Nigeria, the more one notices the wedges that so many drive into our society. Accent and language is one such wedge, and it is not lost on me what it means to not speak my language. One finds this in English, too, where even the slightest whiff of foreignness is noted and commented on. Immediately comes to barrage of questions: Where are you from? How long have you lived in Nigeria? How long did you live abroad? These I find more understandable and less curious than the responses one gets to the inability to speak Yoruba. One is often met with what can be described as interest, but it really is something more akin to fascination. Who is this person, where did they come from, that they were so surrounded by English that they never got to learn? On occasion, one may get the “it is your mother tongue, why don't you speak it, eh?” But even this is spoken with in irritability directed at not the fact of one's level of fluency, but rather a fact of one's supposed social status. What that question means is very often “who do you think you are that you can't even deign to speak the language?”

Collective self-esteem issues always seem to pervade post-colonized spaces, and it takes different forms from African countries to the United States, from Asia to Latin America. One may even deem the latching on to something else almost necessary, a step that acknowledges the new standard in which things get validated before crafting something of one's own that meets that standard for oneself. As I say this, I am thinking of the way this new popular culture came up in most African counties, where young folks are no longer ashamed to request songs made in their own countries on radio shows, as they were not even quite a decade ago. I don't know, but I do know that the self-esteem issues that relate to culture metamorphosize, change shape. From the way American conservative nativists in the U.S talk, almost spitting in their withering contempt at the effete ways and artsy sensibilities of Europeans, we from African countries can see ourselves: the way the men from Africa are the more manly; the way the black women are stronger than their frailer, paler counterparts; the way Nigerian children are smarter than white ones, regardless of where the white people come from. We may wallow for awhile, but we always somehow find comfort, grasping at the straws of our inadequacies for something bright to hold on to.

But this is not about the self-esteem of a shapeless collective; it's about my own. After all, it's not like all Nigerians born of my generation speak so abysmally their native language. I wonder what the draw to English and not to Yoruba says about who I was at an earlier age, and what it was that I saw then. And I wonder what this pang of regret really means, and what it says about who I am now.

Congrats, Black Looks/ Women Who Rock

2011-04-02T21:49:00.002-04:00

Seeing as I have a quotable from Nawal el-Sadaawi a few posts ago, it seems fitting to mention that the premier grant-making organization for African women NGOs AWDF has a list out of the top 50 African feminists doing big things.

As you've probably guessed, el-Sadaawi herself is on that list. So are other notables like Nigerian actress Joke Silva, singer Angelique Kidjo, Ghanaian filmmaker who directed the remarkable "The Witches of Gambaga" Yaba Badoe, and the green champion herself Wangari Maathai.

Still, the list would have been incomplete for me without fellow blogger Sokari Ekine, who got a mention for "Utilising the power of blogging and new technology to promote the rights of women and LGBTQI persons". Congratulations, Woman!

And if you're curious about The Witches of Gambaga, a film following 2 women -- among the over 1,000 accused of being witches of northern Ghana -- from a camp that housed them after they were ostracized back to their homes, check out The Guardian's video on the documentary here.

On Debating Nigeria

2011-03-29T03:56:00.000-04:00

The Nigerian #WhatAboutUs Presidential debate left me cold, and it's taken me a couple of days to understand why.

Let's forget for one moment the question of whether or not this debate will change the electoral calculus. It won't. Probably everyone in that room holds themselves in high enough moral standing as not to sell their vote for a cup of rice or a small nylon bag of garri, or perhaps some money. I know, because I'm one of them. Indeed, most politicians can't afford to buy off the dignity of someone who is middle to upper-class. Our tastes are too high. We already have rice, bags of it, probably eat it with stir-fry at fancy Chinese restaurants once a month when we save money. Guys can afford to buy their girlfriends a bottle of champagne (however much he'll wince at his bank statement later), maybe even play the big boy once in awhile – if not every weekend – at Koko Lounge or Marquis or wherever it is those young Lagos folk hang out these days. No, a corrupt politician wouldn't want to buy our vote. Our apathy is so much cheaper.

And apathetic we usually are, even as so many among us profess “Proudly Nigeria”, and believe that we are the ones we are waiting for. But we are not. Because we are already here. We have known for a long time what needs to be done, probably have technocrat friends who could us exactly how, and we have know for a long time. No, we are not any less Nigerian than them, but we are not the critical mass; those other people are.

Let it be known that there are less of the yuppy Nigerians trooping to Victoria Island than there are them. Yes, them. Those people who weren't there in the debate. Those people who are likelier to own a radio than a TV. Those people who were probably on their okadas looking for passengers during the debate, hawking food or recharge cards, selling tomatoes in the market. Those people whose vote is up for resale because they don't see the difference in the candidates, and are so disillusioned because they don't have the same sense of urgency for their stomachs as they do for the country.

Those are the people politicians go to, after all, when they want votes, not us. With our Twitter and Blackberries, our Bella Naija and our good English and trips to London for summer. And I'm not even saying I blame these people. I'm just saying that we do not have the humility to see the smallness of our number. I'm saying that, if we did, we would have had a debate beamed from a market somewhere, with the head marketwoman or Iyaloja moderating, with translators for the Hausa or Igbo presidential candidate.

I'm not saying that that would have helped much either. We as Nigerians are so used to our leaders being unavailable that it may even backfire. What kind of “Big Man” the logic goes, would sit with his servants? And Nigeria has always had a twisted relationship with leaders, these leaders that we have had for so long that never serve. But I wanted something, anything, to show that people in that room, the organizers of that debate, understood. Because something, however, misguided, would have shown that they realized that people like us aren't the ones that matter. Or that people like us are not the only ones that matter. Not by a long shot.

And the fact that we so often don't see it, and very often only give it lip service speaks louder than anything else of why we get the politicians that we do, that acknowledge only one slice of Nigeria in their daily business. That is what we do, too, is it not? And don't our leaders come from us? this society? these people? This society that we have crafted with our bare hands, brick-by-brick, almost adoringly. We will not blow this brick house down if we do not turn the lights away from ourselves, and on to the people who will really change this country, those who need convincing that this change is possible, and those who need convincing that there is actually a way to make it happen. We – diaspora kids, Enough is Enough kids, full-bellied kids, going to Arise Fashion Week in Muson kids, going to art galleries and Silverbird Galleria kids – are not the ones that need convincing. They are.

The secret of our dignity that makes us so hard to buy is our ability to dream. But it doesn't matter if we have stars in our eyes. It matters that they don't. It doesn't matter if we have dreams of a shining city on the hill. It matters that they don't. Because our country will not live off of our dreams. Our revolution wouldn't happen until those people who were not in that room during the debate starve, because they choose to ignore the stretch of that arm offering money for their vote, and dream, too.

Caution: Highly Quotable -- Nawal El-Sadaawi

2011-03-26T10:45:00.001-04:00

Here's Nawal El-Sadaawi in The Nation magazine regarding the Egyptian overthrow of Hosni Mubarak, and reflecting on how to get an oppressor -- whether an abusive husband or a military despot -- to cede power.

The emphasis below is mine.

Well, it’s very difficult. This is everyone’s struggle—whether against men in the family, or against capitalism. It’s power. I don’t think that people in power can be convinced by words or articles. They will never give it up by choice. Even a husband in the house, no—power has to be taken with power. Mubarak resigned because the people showed their power. If it had been only a few hundred protesters, he would never go, but because it was 20 million, the whole country, he had no choice. You can’t eradicate power with weakness. Knowledge and unity—these were power in the hands of the people.

Within a household, the individual woman must have power. It’s not easy—it means political rights, economic independence, knowledge. A lot of women are afraid of loneliness, so when they see a woman who can live alone, then they think, “Hmm, I can do that.” But you need an example, and that is why I am proud to say I have divorced three husbands.

She goes on to talk about gender and dialogue with Egyptian youth. Read the rest of her interview here.

Also, check out a video from her Guardian interview below.

Photo via Racialicious

Building Somaliland

2011-03-25T10:54:00.002-04:00

Courtesy of UNPO.org

What do you do when you see people with fragile bones and in dire need of calcium? Build a milk farm, of course. Duh.

BBC did a short but awesome audio documentary on Somaliland (can't work the embed, for some reason), the autonomous region north of Somalia that declared its independence, showing what people are doing to build the country. Yes, there's remittances from abroad, but more heartwarming are the stories are the ones where people move home from abroad, or build everything from milk farms to major general hospitals built over graveyards with nothing but the internet as their guide, or money in their private bank accounts. This isn't a post on brain drain, but in the case of Somaliland, it's hard not to think that it's best that not everybody stuck around. What would this country do, after all, with all those people and too few sending hard currency from Europe or the Middle East to fuel the economy of a country that, officially, does not exist?

Listening to the BBC report, it's interesting that the government is more preoccupied with international recognition than private citizens, according to the BBC report. Ahmed Silanyo, the president of Somaliland, talks about the need for government to access loans with which to build the country's infrastructure, and, I suspect, funds with which to truly claim the dignity of a government. It's nice that the people in the documentary are quite happy with their country being private sector-driven though; they're going to need that as they continue to build their economy.

Things are far from perfect in Somaliland, one must point out, but they're creating quite the story for themselves.

Here's an old allAfrica.com interview with now-president Ahmed Silanyo. An organization dedicated to the recognition of Somaliland is here.

Picture from UNPO.org

Hey, Mr. VJ.....

2011-03-11T19:00:00.000-05:00

This is going to be a Nigeria-heavy jam session, I'm afraid.

First up is Retta. She's a new kid on the block, and I think I like her sound.

I usually don't like what Banky W comes out with. He's R'n'B, I guess, but that's about it. There's nothing special about him, I don't think, and I can't shake the feeling that if he were not Nigerian, nobody would care a damn about his music. I'll give it to the guy, though, this song is decent.

Leaving Nigeria now to give y'all some South African house. These two seem like quite the superduo.

Finally, this Kenyan gem from P-Unit isn't very new, but I really like it. Does anyone out there speak Swahili? I bet it's just something about a girl, though....

Enjoy.

Pointing and Laughing - Campaign Ad Edition

2011-03-08T16:06:00.000-05:00

Here's the problem with my flying visits to Lagos - I never remember to bring my camera. Worse, I managed to lose the USB cord for my Blackberry. This means that when I happen upon random pieces of awesome I may not be able to take a picture.

Like incumbent Gov. Babatunde Fashola's campaign poster on Lagos's BRT buses, for instance. It's basically a big yellow poster with the governor smiling at you. Below his picture are the words, in bold, purple letters:

GOVERNOR BABATUNDE RAJI FASHOLA SPEAKETH.

Speaketh?

Don't you just love "God Sent Me" rhetoric? This is not nearly as flagrant as current President Goodluck Jonathan's "vote me for the will of our Lord" (I can't find this ad on the 'net, not even on Goodluck's youtube channel), but it's just as funny. Downright hilarious.

On the whole, though, I've found watching campaign ads in Nigeria has been interesting. Muslim and Christian politicians in Nigeria like their religious signaling overt. Some of Muslims make the extra effort to be seen with Chief Missioners of huge megamosques like NASFAT and Ansarudeen. Indeed, Lagos Gov. Fashola spent the first couple of months as Lagos governor cozying up to Muslim leaders, even so far as going after women dressed "indecently" around his government's headquarter's. Christians ones, from Goodluck Jonathan himself onwards, make sure they're seen with megachurch pastors like Redeem's Adeboye and Canaanland's Oyedepo.

This is especially interesting to watch because we have one pastor running for president and one pastor on a ticket as a vice-presidential candidate, neither of whom is throwing his religiosity in the faces of Nigerian voters. Why does this realpolitique on the part of these pastors -- nobody wants to scare away those Northern and Yoruba Muslim voters -- not ring true for these other political aspirants?

I wouldn't go as far as calling this religious hinting in campaigns a trend, though; it's pretty much just an extension of Nigeria's collective religious nature. But it's certainly worth pointing out/rolling one's eyes at/bursting out laughing about.

Guess which of those I'm doing?

Meanwhile, Elsewhere in Africa

2011-03-02T07:50:00.001-05:00

I know we're all enamored with Al-Jazeera and can't tear our eyes away from news about Libya and Egpyt, but let's not forget some of the other pressing issues around the continent.

Iran and Senegal have broken ties due to Iranian arms sales to separatists in the Casamance region.

It is a tug of war between Senegal and the Islamic Republic of Iran. "Senegal is outraged to see that Iranian bullets caused the death of Senegalese soldiers. Therefore, Senegal has decided to sever its diplomatic ties with the Republic of Iran," Senegalese Minister of Foreign Affairs, Madické Niang, announced Tuesday night on state television. The break of diplomatic ties between Dakar and Tehran comes as renewed violence rocks Casamance, Senegal’s southern province where separatist rebels have been operating for nearly thirty years

While we're on the subject of Senegal, there've been some Tunisia-style self-immolations there, too. Two in the past week.

An Amnesty Report shows that both the Forces Nouvelles loyal to Outarra and security forces loyal to Gbagbo in Cote d'Ivoire are guilty of rapes and beatings.

The political crisis does not seem to be abating either -- UN experts investigating possible arms link to Belarus (Flown in via Libya, apparently) were attacked in the country's capital Yamoussoukro. This would constitute a violation of the UN arms embargo on the country, so small wonder that Belarus denies the charge.

Also, Ivorian newspapers have shut their doors in protest of harrassment from Gbagbo supporters.

All this revolution talk understandably has some dictators across the continent feeling a little hot around the collar. Like Mugabe, for example. His forces threw some folks in jail for daring to even watch the Egypt protests, and now is throwing all their weight behind trying to squelch any protests in the country. Pray for them.

Here's some good news: African Union troops seem to be making inroads into Al-Shabaab territory in Mogadishu. According to Boabab (killer Africa blog from The Economist), some foreign fighters also were killed in a bid to take over some strategic districts in the major city.

In a move that's sure to please the U.S. and the EU, Tunisia has gone ahead and legalized an Islamist group. I bet you'll see this in Egypt for the Islamic Brotherhood as well. Heh. I can't wait to see the recalculation of foreign policy calculus. How will this affect trade? Oil? Palestine talks?

I'm leaving some stuff out, but it's pretty clear from even the most cursory scroll through a newspaper website that the whole world's gone Pete Tong.

Now if you'll excuse me, Gaddafi is making another long, incoherent speech, and I need some comic relief.

African Film Fest Begins - Guess Who's Got Trailers!

2011-02-27T06:58:00.002-05:00

A still from the film Restless City, by Andrew Dosunmu.

The prestigious Pan-African film Festival FESPACO (Festival panafricain du cinéma et de la télévision de Ouagadougou) began on the 26th, and I hope to heaven above that I actually get to see some of the movies.

Yes, hope. You'd think it would be fairly easy, but good African films -- as opposed to the ubiquitous Nollywood home videos -- are very difficult to get your hands on. Distribution is rubbish on a lot of these films, so there's an entire list of movies out there that no one ever gets to see. The only reason I've seen L'Homme Qui Crie is because Air France had it in its selection on my flight from DC to Paris. Shame, that.

The good people over at Shadow and Act have a list of the film entries for this year's awards. I'll be looking to them and Bombastic Element for any news and analysis on the events as they happen between now and the 3rd of March.

However, I did manage to find some trailers (sadly, inexplicably, Andrew Dosunmu's Restless City is as yet without one, and I couldn't find anything on Moloch Tropical). I'm particularly psyched about Wanuri Kahiu's short film Pumzi and Hors de Loi. The second Nigerian-directed entry, The Figurine, looks well-acted at least -- I'm wary about anything that has to do with hocus-pocus.

And this is where I casually mention that Restless City has shown at Sundance, Pumzi has shown at Berlin's Film Festival, and Hors de Loi is nominated for a foreign-language Oscar. Awesome!

Anyway, on to the trailers!

Movie poster: www.ethnikka.org

Photo of women: Still from Restless City.

African Bloggers' Statement on David Kato and Uganda

2011-02-26T21:35:00.016-05:00

"We the undersigned wish to express our deep sadness at the murder of Ugandan human rights defender David Kato on 26th January 2011. David's activism began in the 1980s as an Anti-Apartheid campaigner where he first expressed a strong passion and conviction for freedom and justice which continued throughout his life. David was a founding member of Sexual Minorities Uganda where he first served as Board member and until his death as Litigation and Advocacy Officer and he was also a member of Integrity Uganda, a faith-based advocacy organization.

David was a man of vision and courage. One of his major concerns was the growth of religious fundamentalism in Uganda and across the continent and how this would impact on the rights of ordinary citizens including lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgendered / Gender Non-Comforming and Intersex [LGBTIQ] persons. Years later his concerns were justified when the Ugandan Anti-Homosexuality Bill backed by religious fundamentalists was outlined in 2009. David was also an extremely brave man who had been imprisoned and beaten severely because of his sexual orientation and for speaking publicly against the Anti-Homosexuality Bill.

Many African political and religious leaders in countries such as Ghana, Nigeria, Cameroon, Zambia, Gambia, South Africa, Zimbabwe, Uganda, Malawi and Botswana, have publicly maligned LGBTIQ people and in some cases directly incited violence against them whilst labeling sexual minorities as “unAfrican”.

In October 2010, the Ugandan tabloid, Rolling Stone published the names and photographs of "100 Top homos" including David Kato. David along with two other LGBTIQ activists successfully sued the magazine on the grounds of "invasion of privacy" and most importantly, the judge ruled that the publication would threaten and endanger the lives of LGBTIQ persons.

The court did not only rule that the publication would threaten and endanger the lives of LGBTIQ persons but it issued a permanent injunction against Rolling Stone newspaper never to publish photos of gays in Uganda, and also never to again publish their home addresses.

Justice Kibuuka Musoke ruled that,

"Gays are also entitled to their rights. This court has found that there was infringement of some people’s confidential rights. The court hereby issues an injunction restraining Rolling Stone newspaper from future publishing of identifications of homosexuals."

Every human being is protected under the African Charter of Peoples and Human Rights and this includes the rights of LGBTIQ persons. We ask the governments of Uganda and other African countries to stop criminalizing people on the grounds of sexual orientation and afford LGBTIQ people the same protections, freedoms and dignity, as other citizens on the continent."

Anengiyefa Alagoa, Things I Feel Strongly About

Anthony Hebblethwaite African Activist

Barbra Jolie, Me I Think

Ben Amunwa, Remember Ken Saro-Wiwa

Bunmi Oloruntoba, A Bombastic Element

Chris Ogunlowo, Aloofaa

Eccentric Yoruba, Eccentric Yoruba

Exiled Soul ExiledSoul

Francisca Bagulho and Marta Lança Buala

Funmilayo Akinosi, Finding My Path

Funmi Feyide, Nigerian Curiosity

Gay Uganda, Gay Uganda

Glenna Gordon, Scarlett Lion

Godwyns Onwuchekwa, My Person

Jeremy Weate, Naija Blog

Kayode Ogundamisi Canary Bird

Kadija Patel Thoughtleader

Keguro Macharia, Gukira

Kenne Mwikya, Kenne’s Blog

Kinsi Abdullah Kudu Arts

Laura Seay, Texas in Africa

Llanor Alleyne Llanor Alleyne

Mark Jordahl, Wild Thoughts from Uganda

Matt Temple Matsuli Music

Mia Nikasimo, MiaScript

Minna Salami, MsAfropolitan

Mshairi, Mshairi

Ndesanjo Macha Global Voices

Nyokabi Musila, Sci-Cultura.

Nzesylva, Nzesylva’s Blog

Olumide Abimbola, Loomnie

Ory Okolloh, Kenyan Pundit

Pamela Braide, pdbraide

Peter Alegi, Football is Coming Home

Rethabile Masilo, Poefrika

Saratu Abiola, Method to Madness

Sean Jacobs, Africa is a Country

Sokari Ekine, Black Looks

Sonja Uwimana, Africa is a Country

Spectra Speaks, Spectra Speaks

TMS Ruge, Project Diaspora

Toyin Ajao StandTall

Tosin Otitoju, Lifelib

Val Kalende, Val Kalende

Zackie Achmat, Writing Rights

Zion Moyo, Sky, Soil and Everything in Between

For All Aspiring Revolutionaries

2011-02-24T11:23:00.000-05:00

I haven't had it in me to comment on the recent uprisings sweeping North Africa and the Middle East, because somethings are just awe-inspiring, and the best thing to do is to allow oneself to be awestruck by the sheer bravery, the sheer humanity of it all.

Of course, I'm still holding on to my prayer beads for the people of Libya and keeping my eyes glued to the Al-Jazeera twitter feed like everyone else. I can't be the only one who can't wait to see the effect of this new Mexican wave of democracy across these countries on the foreign policy calculus of the U.S. and the EU, even as the emerging leaders may not be as West-friendly as Ben Ali or Mubarak, but that's another blogpost.

For now, I have a poem for you. Change is hard. Revolution is difficult. Both words are deceptively easy to say.

Music VJs Save Lives

2011-02-21T17:39:00.000-05:00

A few things before the VJ works her magic. MTV Base Africa helped put together this music video to encourage Nigerian youths to vote. Like I've said before, the more African pop culture gets, well, African, the more eyes will be on us.

Other songs you should check out. I'm really feelin' Dj Kent and Maleh, mostly because I'm all about house music and this one is actually pretty solid. It needs a remix with a heavier bass, maybe some dancehall hints mixed in, but still -- solid. On the whole, mad props to South Africa for being omnivorous -- I wish other African countries branched outside of hip-hop. Why is this (seemingly) a Southern African thing? Does anyone know?

Anyway, here you go. You're welcome.

Why Do Protests Ever Bring Down Governments?

2011-02-19T16:54:00.000-05:00

The good folks over at the Monkey Cage -- such an awesome blog -- ask a question I've been wondering about myself.

First, who are the pivotal actors in society that can actually force a change in government? Clearly - as is the case in Egypt - the military is always a possible candidate here. But are there others? Party leaders? Key economic figures? Major civil society players? I guess part of what I'm wondering is is this explanation inevitably a story about the military? Or, put another way, will we look back on events in Egypt and describe what changed on Day 17 simply as the military deciding that Mubarak was now a liability, and little more than that?

The second factor this last proposition points to is what exactly is it that protesters can do that convinces these pivotal actors that a change in government is necessary? Is simply bad PR, e.g., protesters getting beaten or killed making it harder for the country to manage its international relations? Could it be more economic, e.g., shutting down commerce in a capital city for an extended period of time? Or might it actually be something more normatively pleasing, such as demonstrating to these pivotal actors that the regime no longer has the support of the people?

A UNC professor writes in to the Monkey Cage with an excellent observation on the nature of authoritarian regimes, and protests in these regimes.

The key to answer this question, I think, is to understand the basic nature of authoritarian rule. While the news media focus on "the dictator", almost all authoritarian regimes are really coalitions involving a range of players with different resources, including incumbent politicians but also other elites like businessmen, bureaucrats, leaders of mass organizations like labor unions and political parties, and, of course, specialists in coercion like the military or the security forces. These elites are pivotal in deciding the fate of the regime and as long as they continue to ally themselves with the incumbent leadership, the regime is likely to remain stable. By contrast, when these elites split and some defect and decide to throw in their lot with the opposition, then the incumbents are in danger.

So where do protests come in? The problem is that in authoritarian regimes there are few sources of reliable information that can help these pivotal elites decide whom to back. Restrictions on media freedom and civil and political rights limit the amount and quality of information that is available on both the incumbents and the opposition. Moreover, the powerful incentives to pay lip service to incumbent rulers make it hard to know what to make of what information there is. Rumor and innuendo thus play a huge role in all authoritarian regimes.

Read the whole thing.

Ad-Watching, Nigeria Style

2011-02-16T12:02:00.002-05:00

If you live in Nigeria, are female and have not gotten funny looks upon going to a bar and ordering something even slightly alcoholic, you haven't lived.

Accordingly, Nigerian ads for beer are blatantly male, with blatantly male slogans like "Ultimate Man" (Gulder) or "For the Real Man" (Legend Extra Stout). But this Star Commercial, taking you on a journey through Nigeria with Sir Victor Uwaifo's "Joromi" playing in the background, is a beauty.

What's the Point of Nollywood?

2011-02-12T18:20:00.000-05:00

The other day, I was watching an episode of a show on the Yoruba movie cable channel (with that, you should already know there would be no embed link to this – sorry!) where Yoruba filmmaker and actor extraordinaire Saidi Balogun was saying how the purpose of his movies is to spread wisdom to Nigerians on how to behave to each other and spread love to their fellow man and roll around in meadows and have flower parties with dolphins and puppies. Or something.

Yes, I know.

It has to be said, hearing a Nigerian filmmaker tout usefulness and wisdom as the point of his movies cannot be a surprise to anyone who has ever seen a Nigerian film. This isn't a direct hit at Saidi Balogun. If anything, I'm actually a big fan of his specifically, and of Yoruba movies in general. Where I find the sanctimony of their storylines to be quite grating and the often-poor quality of the production to be, well, poor, one can easily see the great quality of the acting and a real sense the filmmakers are speaking of a people they know well. Where English actors tend to be stilted, Yoruba actors are fluent, not just in the language, but in the tradition of those who they seek to depict, and this gives their films a sense of ease and color. I would argue that Yoruba filmmakers know Yoruba people in a way that English filmmakers, in the broadness of their intended audience and their lack of mastery even of the language of their art, do not their intended audience. What I'm wondering about is this notion that art must serve some utilitarian end.

Generally speaking, one of the saddest things to me about African artistic expression has always been this need to be 'useful'. Forget the obvious examples of the gorgeous printed design that gets used for clothing and stories in folklore used to spread wisdom. Take literature. Writers in French and English in the independence movements across Africa used their stories and poems to raise consciousness about freedom and political struggle. Then came women like Buchi Emecheta, Flora Nwapa, Tsitsi Dangaremgba, and Ama Ata Aidoo, who used their work to talk about women's experiences. This is not just in Africa, of course; James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, and Zora Neale Hurston's works, for example, were not exactly P.G. Wodehouse-style fiction, after all. The thing is, I love all these writers. Their work was deep and heart-wrenching and difficult. Above all, their work was necessary.

But is this kind of work still necessary?

It is as though, having seen no knowable, physical enemy against which to write our movies, like there was for writers in new pre- and immediate post-independence literature, we have chosen some abstract monster of depravity and corruption and dressed them up like ourselves. I join in the chorus of complaint too often to say that Nigeria isn't that bad, but I think I can say that Nigeria is not all bad. We are a complex lot, and we all know that. And if we are so complex, and fimmakers seek to capture us on-screen, are we not worthy of that complexity by those who seek to depict us?

And if “mega-church Christianity meets Yoruba proverb” morality is really all we can hope for, then it cannot be too much to ask to get some simplicity. Just once, it would be wonderful if someone wasn't trying to preach to me and instead just told me a story about a man who wanted to get a girl and did all sorts of wacky things to make her go out on a date with him. That's it. No juju, nobody giving their lives to Christ at the end of the movie, no Ifa priest and prayer beads, no sudden coming of age. Just so – well-acted, maybe even funny, with characters more fleshed-out than clapboards.

The more I think about it, I wonder if the magic of Hollywood for so many of us non-Americans is this ease to create such movies as they do, movies that do not reach any further than the world that they are seen to create. While I love ambition in any artwork, there is something to the simple romantic story, the action movie with nothing beyond its gunshots and gore, the comedy that seeks nothing but your laughter, that speaks to a level of comfort in one's skin. There is nothing to parse in Titanic and Iron Man for knowledge. It just is. For reasons beyond my ken, the single-mindedness to make such films comes with a certain kind of cultural ease by people no longer driven with a need to ask questions of themselves. For now this is a privilege that it seems Nigeria cannot yet afford, and I hope that one day we can.

There Goes That VJ....

2011-01-22T13:09:00.001-05:00

.. saving my life again. Some new music.

Africa is a Country. No, seriously.....

2011-01-06T03:51:00.000-05:00

It simply doesn't do to feed the romantic, ubuntu-loving, sitting-under-a-baobab notions my continent fellows in the diaspora sometimes to have, but it's hard not to wax poetic about Africa's ever-evolving popular culture. I'm from an Anglophone country, so I'm cut off from a lot of the Zouk and Coupe Decale stuff in Cote D'Ivoire and Senegal; I'm circa early '90s on Congolese music; and Angolan hip-hop sometimes bypasses me. Kenya, Ghana, and South Africa are within my orbit, and it's just wonderful being able to see so much of what's cool outside my little cave. Everybody watches – sometimes with equal parts admiration and derision – Nigerian movies. Nigerian singers often go to South Africa to make music videos. Stars from across Africa make songs together.

Music has become the most meritocratic thing in modern Africa. With all this cross-pollination necessary to make such a huge part of popular culture, it can be said that, in terms of popular culture, the continent is looking more and more like a country. What's cool easily becomes nationalized, then maybe regionalized, and, if the song is particularly cool, even loved across the continent, like Tu-Face's “African Queen” or Brenda Fassie's “Vulundlela” all those years ago. And there's the collaborations. Wyre (Kenya) and M.I. (Nigeria) did a song together. So did Dama Do Bling (Mozambique) and Sasha (Nigeria). And Fally Ipupa (Nigeria) and J. Martins (DRC). According to MTV Base, P-Square (Nigeria) and Tear Gas (South Africa) are planning a collaboration as well. Then Nigeria's superstar Tu-Face performs with a South African band during the 2010 MAMA awards (Yes, this list is heavy on Nigeria, but that's really is where some of the most popular artists continent-wide come from). Everyone cheers, and there really is no reason why we should not. If it's good music, you dance to it. If it's a good movie, you watch it. After all, Van Vicker is not less handsome because he's Ghanaian, nor are P-Square's abs any less defined for the fact of their Nigerianness. All are equal before the eyes of young, cable-having, cell-phone-using, internet-surfing Africans across the continent.

If preceeding times were marked with dogged territorialism, the drawing of cultural boundaries in bright-colored chalk that very often led to varying degrees of conflict, we could be so lucky as to see the signs of inching towards a new way of seeing Africa. It has been interesting to see identity with the continent become a changeable entity, a coat one can slip on when Ghana qualifies for the second round of the World Cup, or off, when one hears about something stupid someone's president did. The territorialism is still there, but more interesting is the willingness to erase the chalklines and adopt the larger, more inclusive identity of Africa. We could quibble with this and wonder if this necessarily a good thing, but I think the presence of this duality should be welcomed.

It is, of course, too early to say definitively what kind of change, if any, that the evolution of a larer African youth culture would bring, but the emergence of the culture itself speaks volumes. Even though the music is mostly derivative of hip-hop, it has ushered in one of the few things in which people look towards their own languages and environment for inspiration. The importance of this cannot be overstated in an Africa where, for the longest time, people have been looking abroad for inspiration, education, livelihood. As this popular culture evolves, it will worth noting the new ways in which the dynamic of this evolution changes, the role of major countries like Nigeria, Kenya and South Africa in this popular culture. If their pop culture influence increases, and thus the popularity and visibility of these countries, would it affect the countries at all politically? What would change? What would not? Why?

Having a window into what young people across the continent are into does a lot more good than simply exposing people to some singers or rappers they may not have heard of before. Even more than improving the quality of music produced on the continent, what has become obvious to me is that Western countries aren't the only ones that need a more complete image of Africa; Africans do as well. From my perch in Lagos, there is something about watching Channel O spotlight nightlife in Luanda, watching MTV to see a rap video from Gabon, or checking out the dresses at a red carpet event for an award show in Cape Town that normalizes people in a way that knowing about HIV rates, political upheavals or development indices cannot.

Programming Note

2010-12-13T17:42:00.000-05:00

I'm not sure how regularly I'll be at this space if internet in Nigeria stays so pricey. I'll try to work things out as I get more settled, but don't expect regular posts until further notice.

*cringes at date of last update*

Hasta.

Obama Plotting to Bring Down the LRA?

2010-11-26T17:14:00.000-05:00

Looks that way:

US President Barack Obama has outlined a plan to disarm one of Africa's most feared rebel militias, the Ugandan Lord's Resistance Army.

It aims to defuse the spiralling bloodshed in central Africa by removing the LRA's leader, Joseph Kony.

LRA fighters will also be encouraged to defect or lay down their arms.

US ally Uganda has for more than 20 years failed to defeat the LRA, notorious for kidnapping children to serve as soldiers and sex slaves.

And Uganda doesn't even seem to mind.

"It's a good move. A welcome move," James Mugume, permament secretary at Uganda's ministry of foreign affairs, told AFP.

Mugume applauded the US for not solely focusing on the military aspect of the LRA rebellion.

"Dealing with demobilised combatants, post-war recovery in northern Uganda, these are key parts of the LRA conflict," he said.

Obama's plan, which followed a law on the LRA passed by the US Congress six months ago, focused on "the defection, disarmament, demobilisation, and reintegration of remaining LRA fighters."

The plan, presented to Congress on Wednesday, also aims to "increase humanitarian access and provide continued relief to affected communities."

Mugume said the African troops currently hunting the remnants of LRA can handle the military operation but would welcome increased logistical support.

"External support is always welcome, but we have the capacity to lead the military campaign," he said.

Of course, the masterplan is thin on detail. I'll have more to say when there's, well, more to say. For now, I suppose I'm just incredulous that the Ugandan government can be so sanguine about what ultimately is a dismissal of them. Much as I'd like to see the LRA gone, shouldn't the Ugandan government, not the United States, be leading the charge here?

Really, Hollywood?

2010-11-22T05:45:00.001-05:00

Another South Africa movie. Jennifer Hudson as Winnie Mandela. Ha. Ha. Ha.

That's the trailer. I'll have more to say about this whole shenanigans, I suspect. Right now, though, I'm just stuck wondering what the heck is the Hollywood fascination with South Africa. This is a bit like how Edith Wharton is granted a voice in U.S. literary royalty, when most women writers are not. I don't understand how certain places, certain things, certain situations get singled out for special attention.

Last Night a VJ Saved My Life

2010-11-21T15:13:00.000-05:00

Heh. In the U.S., I was always the music snob who wouldn't be caught dead on that MTV/BET/VH1 mess. I still get to hold on to my snob cred though - I wouldn't be caught dead with a D'Banj CD, TuFace's new album sucks, and I can't sit through most of the songs by a vast majority of Nigerian singers/rappers/autotuners. Still, there's some good ish out there. MTV Base Africa is behaving itself so well, I had to throw this up in its praise. Here's some music I've been jammin' to.

Marginalization in Europe

2010-11-20T11:53:00.001-05:00

While clawing my way out of the wilderness that is slow internet and all-too-constant travel, I've been watching and listening to a lot on the state of Roma populations across Western Europe. There's been a bit of a controversy surrounding the recent BBC documentary (Just some stuff on the internet I read, honestly - may be nothing), but I pretty much really liked Rageh Omaar's take on Al Jazeera, some of which you can see right here.

This is admittedly a bit outside the scope of the blog, but I find the Roma's situation quite interesting because of what it says about “otherness”and marginalization especially when they clash with political gain on the part of unpopular political leaders (It's worth noting, after all, that neither Berlusconi nor Sarkozy are particularly popular in their respective countries). This isn't a tidy parallel at all, I realize, but I raise this in the first place because it presents a good counterexample to the subject of Chinese who emigrate to Senegal, in particular the position of power that Chinese government occupies in the business dealings of its people in the country, versus the castaway nature and powerlessness of the Roma population in Italy and France.

Along with the Chinese example, this got me thinking about the constant strain of argument about how class, not race, is the main problem facing modern society today. I'm among those who would respond that, well, race is class. Being black itself – just like being Roma itself, or being Latino, or insert-minority-here – isn't the problem, after all. It's the conclusions drawn about one's self-worth, and the apportioning of rights therefore, like food rations.

Ummm....

2010-11-20T11:38:00.000-05:00

I never know what to do when I start blogging after long absences. It feels hella presumptious to be all "You guys missed me, right?", but it also feels weird not to acknowledge the time lag before the previous post and this one. Here goes: Was out and about. Back to your regularly scheduled program.

I'm going to buy this kid's album at some point in this week, I just know it. This song is sort of stuck in my head.

Paging Derek Walcott

2010-10-28T08:03:00.001-04:00

V.S. Naipul -- yea, that one -- has a new book on African traditional religions titled The Masque of Africa. In his review of the book, Johann Hari is righteous on the right to speak of African religions. Cue the sighs.

I have stood in a blood-splattered house in Tanzania where an old woman had just been beaten to death for being a "witch" who cast spells on her neighbors. I have stood in battlefields in the Congo where the troops insist with absolute certainty they cannot be killed because they have carried out a magical spell that guarantees, if they are shot, they will turn briefly into a tree, then charge on unharmed. I have been cursed in Ethiopia by a witch-doctor with "impotence, obesity, and then leprosy" for asking insistently why he charged so much to "cure" his patients. (I'm still waiting for the leprosy.)
Where do these beliefs come from? What do so many Africans get out of them? Can they be changed? These are questions that are asked in Africa all the time, but we are deaf to the conversation. It's not hard to see why. The imperial rape and pillage of Africa was "justified" by claiming Africans were "primitive" and "backward" people sunk in a morass of voodoo, who had to be "civilized" in blood and Christianity. Just as there are legitimate and necessary criticisms of Israel but nobody wants to hear them from Germany, any legitimate and necessary criticism of the problems with Africa's indigenous beliefs will never be welcome from Europeans or their descendants. And yet there they are, ongoing and alive, waiting to be discussed. Must we ignore it?

Later on in Hari's review, he says that African religions "can bring both sweet, illusory comfort and intense terror" to Africans who adhere to more traditional beliefs. Muslims and Christians -- who make up the vast majority according to this Pew Religion in Africa poll -- also "retain these traditional beliefs not far beneath the surface." I found this interesting for several reasons: Don't the practice of religions get affected by the worldview of its adherents? How did the social evolution of Western society, for example, affect the interpretation of Christianity? Is it possible to consider traditional religions without considering the founding philosophy of respective African societies? I ask these questions, not of Naipaul's book (which I plan to read) but of this review and what it says about religion and tradition. I wouldn't have thought that V.S. Naipul would take this on, but I'm curious to see what he has to say.

(Photo Credit: Slate)

Islamic Superheroes?

2010-10-24T21:39:00.002-04:00

This seems to have been on for awhile, but I'm only just hearing of this U.S.-based entrepreneur Dr. Naif al-Matuwa who is making a book of Muslim Superheroes called The 99. From the Guardian:

[That] conviction is that nobody from the outside is going to save Islam from its more extremist elements – it's going to have to save itself. And The 99, featuring 99 characters based on the 99 attributes of Allah, is, he hopes, that means: a way of focusing on the positive aspects of the religion, of inculcating peaceful, life-giving virtues in children and of presenting a peaceful, tolerant, multicultural version of Islam to the rest of the world.

It's a conviction that has seen him so far raise in excess of $30m in three rounds of funding from private investors, fight off a ban in Saudi Arabia (he's subsequently been re-banned but he's fighting it again), and persuaded Endemol, the company behind Big Brother, to produce a multimillion-dollar, 26-part animated series, which in the new year will be shown on Hub, the US network previously known as Discovery Kids that goes into 60 million American homes.

Interesting, huh?

I've always seen action heroes as a creation of myth that appeals to young boys, especially - a way of thinking of their new "superpowers" that come with their newfound maturity, maybe, or an amazement with physical ability that men are taught from an early age to prize. It's weird, then, seeing religion, especially a monotheistic religion, using such modern myths like action comics to launder it's image.

It's not like the marketing of Jesus didn't/doesn't have a comic book-like quality to it, though. The one thing that has always separated the religion from Judaism and Islam has been the Coca-Cola nature of its marketing. By accident of history, Christianity has been able to align itself with Western modernity, and has therefore excused itself of its more turbulent history and disturbing interpretations on now-touchy subjects that's no less violent, oppressive to women, discriminatory to sexual minorities and accepting of such things that we do not accept today (slavery, for example) than its monotheistic counterparts.

Unlike Coca-Cola, though, I'm not sure that growth in number of "consumers" of a religion should be the goal. There should be nothing wrong with religions maintaining a certain severity, even aloofness to mainstream culture. Judaism, for example, even goes as far as being unfriendly to the idea of new recruits, and Islam does not disguise its time-intensiveness, what with encouraging Hajj, encouraging headscarves for women, praying five times a day with ablutions each time. Were I more sternly religious, I'd worry about the omissions that inevitably happen when one puts one's religion in the make-up chair, airbrushes it for its close-up and puts it on a stand for mass consumption.

More generally, I think it's depressing that there are so many efforts these days to absolve the ignorant of the burden of their ignorance. This is where I have to remind myself that the ignorant among us are often the ones who have power. This is also where I get all the more exhausted. Yes, there is truth to the ranting against misinformation of the larger public about all minorities, religious and otherwise, but it scares me to think what it says about people who are so ready to believe such inanities about other people they, in most cases, have no experience with or idea about. And isn't that what we all we are, people?

Then, suddenly, someone thinks that putting an action hero with a Muslim name on a comic book would make Islam more relatable. Good luck with that.

(Photo: The Washington Post)

Jammin' Just Because...

2010-10-17T02:35:00.000-04:00

... it's my blog and I can post what I want to. Some Beninois jazz. And, for good measure, Jimi's awesome set with Stevie Wonder on piano. You're welcome.

Can Puntland Be Effective Against Piracy?

2010-10-15T03:20:00.000-04:00

The folks over at Piracy Studies seem to think so. It's no secret that some of Puntland's governing officials are in the piracy business themselves -- and where there is money in an unstable situation political influence isn't far behind -- but anti-Piracy measures in the semi-autonomous region seem to be at least making the pirates squirm.

Puntland security forces have cracked down pirate hideouts. A substantial number of pirates have already been arrested and tried. An estimated number of 250 pirates are currently jailed in Bossaso, more than in any other country[9]. Moreover the government has sponsored a public awareness campaign to discredit piracy and discourage people from joining piracy gangs. For the campaign the authorities have collaborated with members of the Diaspora, religious representatives, clan leaders and community activists. It is also negotiating with pirates to give up their business.[10] For some these measures are however no more than lip service, have been inefficient and serve to shadow the role of Puntland officials in the piracy business.

The true role of the government of Puntland is probably somewhere in between these positions. While some officials might have benefited from piracy, it is also clear that the government has expressed willingness to encounter piracy and indeed already taken measures. The fact that the epicenter of piracy seems to shift to south-central Somalia, outside Puntland’s territory might be seen as supporting the view that piracy organizations face increasing operational difficulties in Puntland.

I'm surprised the status quo is changing at all, and kudos to Puntland for making any progress on this at all. I suppose I just think it is too much to ask for everyone involved to abandon short-term economic gain for a moral courage that will not pay off for a long time. Without the promise of international recognition, trade and investment in the country, asking that these people quit supporting piracy wholesale has always looked to me to be a fool's errand. I'm not being picky, though - these days, we should take our good news, however limited, where we find it.

Monsanto, Monsanto, Monsanto. And China.

2010-10-14T20:11:00.000-04:00

Yasmine Ryan at the African Agriculture blog (h/t China in Africa) has an interesting piece on the success of Malawi's agriculture policies under Mutharika and the huge GMO organization Monsanto.

Professor Pedro Sánchez of the Columbia University’s Earth Institute was one of the scientists Mutharika chose to heed despite resistance from most of Malawi’s international donors.

“We had a meeting with the newly elected president, Bingu wa Mutharika," Sánchez recalled in an interview with TakePart. "The guy told several of us, ‘Hey, I didn’t get elected to be a beggar nation, and right now we’re begging for about 45 percent of our food. Do you have any suggestions?’

“We said, 'Yes, sir. Subsidize fertilizers and hybridized seeds.' And he did it.”

Within two years, Malawi went from famine to food exportation. Now the fertilizer subsidies have caught on among neighboring countries—10 are testing similar policies, including Tanzania, Nigeria and Zambia. Faced with the evidence of success, USAID, the World Bank, and many European donors are putting their support behind subsidy programs.

Not without its drawbacks, of course.

A major criticism of the Malawi model is that it encourages farmers to turn to a single staple crop (and yes, it's corn, in case you were wondering...). Horticulturist Linda Larish notes that the traditional Malawian staple, a taro-like plant called manioc, has largely been abandoned by farmers switching to imported hybrid corn.

“Even though they are self-sufficient and can grow their own food, they are at the mercy of the seed and fertilizer companies,” Larish says.

Not by coincidence, Malawi’s policies gave Monsanto a foothold for its hybrid maize in sub-Saharan Africa. Is it philanthropy, PR, or simply shrewd business?

Many people I know are ambivalent about Monsanto. When the Gates Foundation invested in the Monsanto, for example, The UK Guardian couldn't but ask why:

Seattle-based Agra Watch - a project of the Community Alliance for Global Justice - was outraged. "Monsanto has a history of blatant disregard for the interests and well being of small farmers around the world… [This] casts serious doubt on the foundation's heavy funding of agricultural development in Africa," it thundered.

But it got worse. South Africa-based watchdog the African Centre for Biosafety then found that the foundation was teaming up with Cargill in a $10m project to "develop the soya value chain" in Mozambique and elsewhere. Who knows what this corporate-speak really means, but in all probability it heralds the big time introduction of GM soya in southern Africa.

The two incidents raise a host of questions for the foundation. Few people doubt that GM has a place in Africa, but is Gates being hopelessly naïve by backing two of the world's most aggressive agri-giants? There is, after all, genuine concern at governmental and community level that the United State's model of extensive hi-tech farming is inappropriate for most of Africa and should not be foist on the poorest farmers in the name of "feeding the world".

Monsanto responded to the questions raised in this Guardian article. And it looks like China's trying to get in on the GMO act with their 20 new organizations devoted to hybrid rice seeds and such. Only time will tell just how destructive all of this, but I foresee lots of land issues in African countries' futures from all this, none of which will be to the benefit of small farmers' livelihoods.

Another Lagos Documentary (and a Little Something on Governance)

2010-10-08T01:08:00.002-04:00

BBC has been killing it with the Nigeria documentaries. Via my twitter friend @419Positive, here's a great one featuring Funmi Iyanda, TV personality and probably one of my favorite people anywhere. She talks to major Lagosians like eccentric entertainer Charles "Charley Boy" Oputa and Lagos State Gov. Babatunde Fashola.

Lagos, unlike the rest of Nigeria, has always had some good luck with it's leaders. We (Yes, I'm from Lagos) have definitely been a lucky state, always having one thing tangible with which to attribute to a certain governor, from Jakande (the free high schools) to Marwa (the bicycle taxis), and Tinubu (the much-needed road splitting in Allen Avenue and ambulances on Third Mainland) to Fashola (the BRTs). My theory is that Lagos is the one place in the country where you do not want to lose face. A lot of major business in Nigeria is done there, so it adds a good amount of pressure on its leaders to make sure that you do a good enough job that you can still make an appearance in those high society parties, those tennis clubs, those functions in those hotels, be taken seriously as a leader as the city evolves in its role as epicenter of one of Africa's major economies. The last place in the world a Nigerian wants to be persona non grata is Lagos.

This line of thinking definitely has its holes. Among other problems, Lagos is quite socially segregated and the ghettos are still sprawling, so this societal pressure has not worked well for everyone (Maybe it's worked best for whom the likelihood of bumping into said governor at MUSON Center or Yoruba Tennis Club are quite high). Still, everyone I've heard from who lives in Lagos quite likes Gov. Fashola. His administration has made laudable changes to improve transportation, but I do not know much about his work on Lagos's ailing infrastructure, nor on his initiatives (I believe there have been some) to encourage small business. It's also worth mentioning that I have no idea how this pressure that I think works so well in Lagos holds out in a commercial area in other regions of Nigeria, like Port Harcourt, for example.

I think I'm right on the merits and I'll stand my ground until corrected, but I'm curious if there is a correlation at all between the number of major cities in a country -- and therefore pockets of industry where a sizable middle class can thrive -- and the likelihood of there being good governance practices.

I Only Write of My Slice of Humanity

2010-10-07T16:25:00.000-04:00

In the most recent issue of Granta that focused on Pakistan, they asked the writers featured how to write about Pakistan. Nadeem Aslam answers, "anyhow you wish."

In real life, and in my writing, I can’t pretend that all Pakistanis are angels any more than I can pretend that all Pakistanis are deceitful. (When they hear the name of the English town Tipton, most people will think of the Tipton Three – the three young men who were imprisoned at Guantanamo Bay. I do too. But I also think of a mosque in Tipton where a mullah was sexually abusing the children who came to learn the Koran from him: when one of the parents found out about it and decided to go to the police, the members of the mosque organisation pulled a gun on the father.) As to the question of what to put into a book, and what to leave out: a good deal is said about the ‘clichés’ that are to be found in sub-continental writing – the mangoes, the monsoon and the spices, the verandahs and the mosquito nets and the extended families. But I would not wish ever to be told that these things are out of bounds to me. Who will tell Derek Walcott that the blue of the Caribbean Ocean is a bit of tourist-board cliché? The palm trees, the warm sands, the beauty of the black women and the beauty of the black men: every page the great man has ever written is full of these things. ‘Verandahs, where the pages of the sea / are a book left open by an absent master …’

This is not to say that these are not tourist clichés – but they must remain available to the artist as well as the non-artist. The genuine artists will bring human warmth and longing and complexity to what is two-dimensional in other, lesser hands.

He's talking about Pakistan, but it can really be true of everywhere. I'm still thinking about the topic of my previous post -- the issue of creating a governance index that I feel is more in response to Western perception of Africa that many Africans have internalized and defensiveness thereof than any wishes to actually change governance in Africa -- and it gets me thinking of how best to react to negative perceptions of where one is from. I like Aslam's approach to this topic. Still, I'm never going to stop being irritated by the quest for a definitive narrative from non-Western writers. It adds to the weight of importance of every news article, exhibit, novel that broaches the topic of Non-Western nations, and I'm beginning to wonder if it is not grossly unfair to the writers as well as to those who are being represented. No one asks Gary Shtyengart or Jonathan Franzen or Dave Eggers to write a piece that sums up the American experience, after all, and that is as it should be. No one should ever have to shoulder that responsibility.

Who Exactly Do African Governance Rankings Talk To?

2010-10-05T00:00:00.002-04:00

Something that irks me about Mo Ibrahim's governance index is that the people in these badly-governed countries have little agency with which to correct the situation. This would take voting, for example. A plebiscite, maybe. A changing of the old guard preferably by popular vote to instill good governance in a transparent, efficient manner that respects the people it governs.

For the most part, if you were to go on the streets of Niamey or Luanda and tell people their ranking on the index, they'll probably just shrug. I don't blame them. When I saw Nigeria's ranking, I texted my Nigerian friends and had a good laugh about it.

Increasingly, I wonder if the point of the index is to show, not that many African countries are governed badly, but that there are "good Africans" out there who care that respective African countries are governed badly. I think this is a good thing to say and think. The problem, however, is to which audience this is directed at.

The world in which so many non-Western people live is such that one must go West -- Europe, America, Canada -- to prove oneself worthy, even amongst ones own. Nigeria's literary darlings are proof of this. Chimamanda Adichie wouldn't have gained such acclaim, for example, had she been based entirely in Nigeria and only been published in Nigeria. Even beyond that, so many Africans in the diaspora are in the diaspora in order to get educated, that we may go to our respective countries and be taken seriously and/or noticed.

The yardstick with which so many Africans -- non-Westerners, really -- measure themselves in decidedly Western. As such, the problem with being known as the "basket case continent" is that you, being from there, have to prove that you are not crazy. There arises this need among some to advertise their humanity, and the people to whom the governance index is being advertised is not to the citizens of the respective African countries who have to endure the bad government, but to them.

Mo Ibrahim's governance index drives home how badly we need to be looked in a good light, but not because we need the investment dollars. Surely, if you are Somalia you aren't getting any, and if you were rich in resources you'd get the investment anyway, well-governed or not (Nigeria and Angola are pretty low on this index, you'll notice). It's because the good guys amongst us need to be seen as separate from the bad guys. The need that people have for this, and the fact that indexes like these are welcome, is just terribly depressing to me.

Poem for Sunday - Venus Hottentot

2010-10-03T02:11:00.001-04:00

The story of Saartjie Baartman is a gruesome one about human beings' ability to objectify so willfully as to render one incapable of being anything except what we want them to be. I'm not going to rehash it - read the Wikipedia entry here.

I first heard of this story in college. A drama professor made us read "The Black Venus" by one of my favorite playwrights hands-down Suzan Lori-Parks. I saw an award-winning rendering of her play Topdog/Underdog, and became interested in her other work. Prof. Harris -- that was his name -- told me that the one of the few plays to ever make him cry was Suzan Lori-Parks' The Hottentot Venus.

This play has been turned into a film. Check out the trailer for it here. Tambay over at Shadow and Act saw it at the NY Film Festival and already has a review up, though I've been made to understand that festival versions are not always the final cut.

Elizabeth Alexander wrote an amazing poem about Baartman called The Venus Hottentot. It's your poem for Sunday.

The Venus Hottentot (1825)

1. Cuvier

Science, science, science!
Everything is beautiful

blown up beneath my glass.
Colors dazzle insect wings.

A drop of water swirls
like marble. Ordinary

crumbs become stalactites
set in perfect angles

of geometry I’d thought
impossible. Few will

ever see what I see
through this microscope..

Cranial measurements
crowd my notebook pages,

and I am moving closer,
close to how these numbers

signify aspects of
national character.

Her genitalia
will float inside a labeled

pickling jar in the Musée
de l’Homme on a shelf

above Broca’s brain:
“The Venus Hottentot.”

Elegant facts await me.
Small things in this world are mine.

2.

There is unexpected sun today
in London, and the clouds that
most days sift into this cage
where I am working have dispersed.
I am a black cutout against
a captive blue sky, pivoting
nude so the paying audience
can view my naked buttocks.

I am called “Venus Hottentot.”
I left Capetown with a promise
of revenue: half the profits
and my passage home: A boon!
Master’s brother proposed the trip;
the magistrate granted me leave.
I would return to my family
a duchess, with watered-silk

dresses and money to grow food,
rouge and powders in glass pots,
silver scissors, a lorgnette,
voile and tulle instead of flax,
cerulean blue instead
of indigo. My brother would
devour sugar-studded non-
pareils, pale taffy, damask plums.

That was years ago. London’s
circuses are florid and filthy,
swarming with cabbage-smelling
citizens who stare and query,
“Is it muscle? bone? Or fat?”
My neighbor to the left is
The Sapient Pig, “The Only
Scholar of His Race.” He plays

at cards, tells time and fortunes
by scraping his hooves. Behind
me is Prince Kar-mi, who arches
like a rubber tree and stares back
at the crowd from under the crook
of his knee. A professional
animal trainer shouts my cues.
There are singing mice here.

“The Ball of Duchess DuBarry”:
In the engraving I lurch
towards the belles dames, mad-eyed, and
they swoon. Men in capes and pince-nez
shield them. Tassels dance at my hips.
In this newspaper lithograph
my buttocks are shown swollen
and luminous as a planet.

Monsieur Cuvier investigates
between my legs, poking, prodding,
sure of his hypothesis.
I half expect him to pull silk
scarves from inside me, paper poppies,
then a rabbit! He complains
at my scent and does not think
I comprehend, but I speak

English. I speak Dutch. I speak
a little French as well, and
languages Monsieur Cuvier
will never know have names.
Now I am bitter and now
I am sick. I eat brown bread,
drink rancid brother. I miss good sun,
miss Mother’s sadza. My stomach

is frequently queasy from mutton
chops, pale potatoes, blood sausage.
I was certain that this would be
better than farm life. I am
the family entrepreneur!
But there are hours in every day
to conjure my imaginary
daughters, in banana skirts

and ostrich-feather fans.
Since my own genitals are public
I have made other parts private.
In my silence, I possess
mouth, larynx, brain, in a single
gesture. I rub my hair
with lanolin, and pose in profile
like a painted Nubian

archer, imagining gold leaf
woven through my hair, and diamonds.
Observe the wordless Odalisque.
I have not forgotten my Xhosa
clicks. My flexible tongue
and healthy mouth bewilder
this man with his rotting teeth.
If he were to let me rise up

from this table, I’d spirit
his knives and cut out his black heart,
seal it with science fluid inside
a bell jar, place it on a low
shelf in a white man’s museum
so the whole world could see
it was shriveled and hard,
geometric, deformed, unnatural.

Is There a Link Between Youth Unemployment and Political Instability?

2010-09-30T02:58:00.000-04:00

Over at his blog, Chris Blattman takes exception to the notion furthered by popular economist known for his application of economics to social issues Gary Becker that unemployed youth are a source of social instability (In Becker's case, crime).

Applying this notion to social instability in African countries, Blattman points that there's "little evidence to suggest" that that such a link rest on two assumptions: (a) poor countries are more likely to see political instability, and (b) economic shocks raise the risk of said instability. Blattman thinks this is wrong, and makes a point one hardly hears being made, but really ought to be pointed out more often:

I have little doubt that the people who riot or rebel are poor, unemployed young men. We can see that. The problem is that the people who don’t riot are also poor unemployed young men.

Most of the population is poor and unemployed and young. It’s not clear that the poorer and less employed ones are the more violent.

If anything, we see the opposite. In the Middle East, profiles of suicide bombers and terrorists suggest they are typically more educated and better off than the average youth.

In research on riots, whether in Nigeria or India or the US, the instigators are often university students or other elites.

Now, maybe the instigators are elite, but the masses they organize are poorer and less employed. Here the evidence is equally weak. Surveys of combatants in Sierra Leone and Uganda, rioters in Nigeria or the US, or the politically violent in Philippines or Iraq, show little connection between mobilization and incomes. None of this statistical evidence is terribly good,but none of it argues in favor of this huge assumption underlying massive policy and programs.

Of course, one can go from one circumstance to another and find exceptions, but I think the point about who instigates political conflict is important. Blattma is an economist and understandably is hedging on being definitive, but I think he's spot on about who exactly instigates conflict. I'm going to avoid the "when two elephants fight" cliche, but I will say this - every war or politically unstable situation has someone profiting from it one way or another. Hint: It's not the people getting killed in the streets, and it's not even always the young men fed a steady diet of guns with butter.

The rest of the talk is interesting. Read all of it.

The Anatomy of a Blogpost on Nigeria's Big 50

2010-09-27T20:23:00.002-04:00

A reflection post on 50 years of Nigeria's independence is an unnecessarily difficult thing to write.

The funny thing is, I can't even really articulate why. I refuses to believe that what I'm afraid of is an effort at stocktaking devolving into a long post of despair. I write posts about Nigeria all the time, after all. Sometimes these posts do teeter on the edge or actually are one long complaint, but ultimately they get written, posted, filed.

The fear, perhaps, is not so much what the post will ultimately have to say, but of where the country itself, and where it will end up next year, at this juncture in our history.

How much have things changed since last year? Yes, we have a president now. Goodluck Jonathan isn't going to fall terminally ill anytime soon (let's hope, knock on wood). The Super Eagles are not up for qualification for an international tournament with only the slightest chances of getting in. Nuhu Ribadu isn't making demands on Capitol Hill in DC. But all that is circumstantial. How different will things be next year when I have to write another post on Nigeria's independence day since so many of Nigeria's troubles come from the same issues of corruption and complete lack of regard of the governed? A lot of the troubles that Nigeria faces will continue. We probably will find out that still more of our elected officials have been stealing from the public coffers. The militias in the Niger-Delta and the North will probably still exist. Mega-church pastors would still buy expensive cars and houses and there will be few investigations into their affairs. Nigerian movies will still be laughably bad. The economy will still grow, but very few will actually know it.

The weight I am feeling on my fingers that renders this post such a chore is not fear at all, is it? It's fatigue. I don't want to throw my hands up in despair anymore. I'm tired of doing that. Lamenting "No water, no light" holds no interest to me. I'm not Wole Soyinka. Pounding my fists on my soapbox is getting irritating. I admire those among us who never tire of crying for change, but I do.

And yet, as living in the U.S. and knowing a fair amount about EU politics has shown me, every country has its problems. Logic then follows that Nigeria has either this set of problems, or another. So as the big 5-0 approaches, I will this space to hope not that Nigeria gets rid of it's problems, but that it replaces them. And soon.

Is the U.S. Going to Recognize Somaliland at Some Point?

2010-09-27T11:26:00.000-04:00

Hard to say, but this is encouraging:

The United States has decided to work closely with semi-autonomous Somaliland and Puntland states in Somali as a means to defeat Islamist extremists.

The initiative represents a substantial policy shift and a step away from dealing with Somalia only through the weak transitional government in Mogadishu.

The Obama administration’s top diplomat for Africa Johnnie Carson said the U.S would send more aid workers and diplomats to Puntland and Somaliland and support the governments of both regions, in the north of Somalia, with development projects.

This new policy by the U.S is expected to aid the fight to fend off extreme Islamist insurgents in those parts of Somalia that have "been zones of relative political and civil stability". According to Mr. Carson the U.S. believes the zones "will in fact be a bulwark against extremism and radicalism that might emerge from the south".

I'm really quite pleased about this. Somaliland could use all the help it could get to keep itself stable. While Puntland already seems to have trouble with pirates within its midst, its worth daring to dream to that a more developed region -- who knows, maybe even some investment here and there -- could put people in honest work. Here's hoping.

Poem for Sunday

2010-09-26T21:25:00.001-04:00

Goodness me, I didn't even know Amiri Baraka wrote poetry. I was too busy falling in love with his amazing play "The Toilet" to check out his other mediums. I'm glad I found his poetry, or I would never have read this.

And I'm putting this up quite late. Yeesh.

Ka'Ba

"A closed window looks down
on a dirty courtyard, and Black people
call across or scream across or walk across
defying physics in the stream of their will.

Our world is full of sound
Our world is more lovely than anyone's
tho we suffer, and kill each other
and sometimes fail to walk the air.

We are beautiful people
With African imaginations
full of masks and dances and swelling chants
with African eyes, and noses, and arms
tho we sprawl in gray chains in a place
full of winters, when what we want is sun.

We have been captured,
and we labor to make our getaway, into
the ancient image; into a new

Correspondence with ourselves
and our Black family. We need magic
now we need the spells, to raise up
return, destroy,and create. What will be

the sacred word?

Relentless

2010-09-25T00:18:00.003-04:00

Via the good bloggin' people over at Shadow and Act, a trailer for a Nigerian movie I -- and here's a shocker -- actually want to see.

RELENTLESS from Lluís Prieto on Vimeo.

I'm excited about this. It's got the ubiquitous Nneka, yes, but it's also got Andy Amadi Okoroafor. I can't tell much about her acting job from the trailer, but I just love the quiet expressiveness of Okoroafor's face. As Rilke would say, not everything is as 'sayable' as people would often have you believe.

What Somali Piracy Hath Wrought

2010-09-24T02:59:00.003-04:00

In a great article over at the New York Review of Books, Jeffrey Gettleman follows a charismatic Somali pirate chieftain Abshir Boyah to tease out some rare insight into how piracy and the inflow of money has affected society and culture in Puntland.

This excess has created a budding pirate culture. Pirate weddings are elaborate two- or three-day affairs, stretching deep into the night, with bands—and brides—flown in from outside Somalia and convoys of expensive 4x4 trucks. The prettiest young women in pirate towns dream of a pirate groom; little boys can hardly wait until they are old enough to sling an AK-47 over their shoulder and head out to sea. In these places, the entire local economy revolves around hijacking ships, with hundreds of men, women, and children employed as guards, scouts, cooks, deckhands, mechanics, skiff-builders, accountants, and tea-makers.

There’s no doubt that in Somalia, crime pays—it’s about the only industry that does. There is even a functioning pirate stock exchange in Xarardheere, where locals buy “shares” in seventy-two individual pirate “companies” and get a respectable return if the company is successful. Most of the money, though, is frittered away. Boyah, who personally has made hundreds of thou- sands of dollars if not millions, asked me for cigarettes when I met him. When I asked what happened to all his cash, he explained: “When someone who never had money suddenly gets money, it just goes.” He also said that because of the extended network of relatives and clansmen, “it’s not like three people split a million bucks. It’s more like three hundred.”

Gettleman also considers the parallels drawn in Martin Murphy's new book Somalia: A New Barbary? between the Berber corsairs who rose to prominence after the Muslim conquest of the much of North Africa came under Ottoman Empire. My first reaction -- and Gettleman writes as much -- upon hearing even the title of the book was that there was tacit approval on the part of the Ottoman authorities who made money off of the abductions and ransoms, whereas the piracy situation in Somalia is helped along by the sheer lack of government structures.

Even with recent efforts by the Puntland government against piracy, I share Gettleman's pessimism on the prospects of peace in Somalia anytime soon, what with the current state of affairs where the TFG is merely hanging on in Mogadishu and the strength of al-Shabab and, to a lesser extent, Hizbul Islam.

There’s very little hope, in the near future, of the transitional government in Mogadishu becoming strong enough to wipe out the pirates’ bases. The government is simply trying to stay alive. The hard-line Islamist insurgents who control much of Somalia have flirted with dismantling the piracy business, but the money is too good. One group, Hizbul Islam, recently moved into Xarardheere and now gets $40,000 from each ransom. The more powerful insurgent group al-Shabab made a deal with the pirates in which they will not interfere with the pirates’ business in exchange for 5 percent of the ransoms. This seems to be the beginning of the West’s worst Somali nightmare. The country’s two top exports—piracy and Islamist radicalism—are at last joining hands.

Geek Players, Love Slayers -- In Africa.

2010-09-23T15:26:00.001-04:00

In a creative writing workshop in college, a professor had us read Steve Almond's "Geek Player, Love Slayer". I loved the somewhat disturbing ease with which he depicts the unnamed female character and her crush on the computer geek in her office, loved the first person narration, the generous layers of humor over all that longing. Then I read the rest of the stories in the collection, My Life in Heavy Metal, and loved them, too. I'm yet to get around the next short story collection he's got, The Evil B.B. Chow, but I suspect that one is also well worth reading.

I knew, based entirely on his writing, that Almond would be hilarious, but this video where he takes on Toto's hit with that infectious "I bless the rain down in Africa" hook I've heard drunkenly bellowed at the top of youthful lungs at many a karaoke event in my college years puts it beyond all doubt. Just like his work, this is hilarious, but with an unexpected depth.

Death of Export-Led Growth?

2010-09-22T05:54:00.005-04:00

Especially because the economic crisis has dealt such a shock to the U.S. economy, which accounted for much of global consumption, the market for developing countries' exports going forward is not going to be as robust as it was before due to the economic flatness that, in the medium term, will be the "new normal" in developed economies.

The recommendation from analysts in the report, which was released last week (yes, I know, but I'm clawing my way out of the wilderness one item in my inbox at a time), is that developing countries need to "boost domestic consumption and allow wages to increase in line with productivity growth". In a story from IPS, UNCTAD's director called for a "paradigm shift" on labour that ensures more formal work, as, according to the report, "There is not a shortage of employment in absolute terms in African countries, but a lack of productive and decent jobs".

The way this sounds to me is that economies that are mostly agrarian are to shift away from jobs that are mostly agrarian.

UNCTAD believes that "sustainable policies for wage increases need to cover both formal and informal labour markets and there needs to be a linkage between the two of them." For those among us who speak economics a bit more fluently, this from STWR teases the labour stuff out a bit more:

A promising strategy for rapid employment generation could be to focus more on investment dynamics, and to ensure that the resultant productivity gains are distributed between labour and capital in a way that lifts domestic demand," UNCTAD Secretary-General Supachai Panitchpakdi writes in the overview to the report.

To strengthen the contribution of domestic demand to employment creation, the principles and objectives of monetary and fiscal policies need to be redefined, the TDR says. These areas of macroeconomic policy also need to be combined with what the report calls an "incomes policy" -- a set of instruments and institution-building measures that would ensure that mass incomes in real terms rise along with average productivity growth.

If rising wages and increased employment in a period of low demand for goods and services sounds like a recipe for inflation to you --

At the same time, [an incomes policy] serves as an instrument to control inflation. As labour costs are the most important determinant of the overall cost level in most economies, adjusting wages to productivity prevents both increases in production costs and demand growth in excess of the supply potential and also widens the room for investment-friendly monetary policy.

I don't really have an opinion on this because, while a lot has indeed changed for developed countries, not a lot has changed in the relationship between emerging markets and developed ones. The skew towards established markets, in terms of needed investment capital and investment dollars/euros/pounds/yen, is very much still there, even in the major seemingly-invincible emerging markets like Brazil, China, India and South Africa. Until that changes, any really good idea in global trade, like free trade on commodities and agricultural products, is just going to get stuck like a hamster on some wheel of paperwork and stalled talks, like Doha.

Aid and MDGs - The Point of It All

2010-09-21T20:12:00.009-04:00

The UN's Millennium Development Goals Summit in NY is running until Wednesday, and has brought development issues again to the fore. Bogged down as I am these days, I'm yet to check out the webcasts of what happened at the TEDXchange or the Clinton Global Initiative Summit 2010. Still, I have had the time to take a peek at the Financial Times, where Jeffrey Sachs and William Easterly show up on the pages with two different takes on aid and MDGs.

Sachs wrote a few blogposts on MDGs for the FT you can read over at their awesome emerging markets blog Beyond Brics. He sums up the conference thus:

The message from world leaders was clear: the MDGs are at the centre of national objectives in poor countries, and remain at the centre of global cooperation of rich countries. But the rich countries were also clear: we need a new financing system to ensure the success of the MDGs. The current approach is simply not adequate.

From the op-ed in FT, here's Sachs on the trouble with aid now:

Most aid has remained bilateral, making it hard to monitor and largely unaccountable. Shortfalls are attributed to problems in recipient countries. Even when aid is disbursed, these programmes are scattered among many small efforts rather than a unified national plan, and include an endless spectacle of visiting dignitaries from donor countries, politicised negotiations, and countless headline announcements of support that all too often fails to materialise.

He wants aid to be provided in pooled funds from donors, much like The Global Fund for TB, Malaria, and HIV/Aids.

The fund pools resources from many donor nations, with an independent review board approving national programmes according to scientific and management criteria rather than bilateral politics. The fund thereby provides aid in a scaled, systematic and predictable way. And while a decade ago all three diseases were running out of control, now all are being reined in with millions of lives saved.

Of course the fund is not perfect, but the programmes it supports are transparent and easily monitored – meaning that when corruption occurs, as it sometimes will, a programme can be halted and the malefactors removed. The fund’s design is a profound improvement over traditional donor aid. But it and efforts like it are chronically underfunded, largely because the US and European donor countries keep too much of their aid budgets in bilateral programmes.

I'm pretty sure many would disagree with Sachs on the Global Fund and the effectiveness of pooled funds. I'd provide examples but the FT later points some out.

In a bit of a face-off, William Easterly also at the FT contends that "The Millennium Development Goals tragically misused the world’s goodwill to support failed official aid approaches to global poverty and gave virtually no support to proven approaches." Only the eighth of the MDGs, he continues, even broaches the topic of private investment. Further:

This is all the more misguided because trade-fuelled growth not only decreases poverty, but also indirectly helps all the other MDGs. Yet in the US alone, the violations of the trade goal are legion. US consumers have long paid about twice the world price for sugar because of import quotas protecting about 9,000 domestic sugar producers. The European Union is similarly guilty.

Equally egregious subsidies are handed out to US cotton producers, which flood the world market, depressing export prices. These hit the lowest-cost cotton producers in the global economy, which also happen to be some of the poorest nations on earth: Mali, Burkina Faso and Chad.

According to an Oxfam study, eliminating US cotton subsidies would “improve the welfare of over one million West African households - 10 million people - by increasing their incomes from cotton by 8 to 20 per cent”.

For my views on aid, here and here. All I would add to that is that I, like Easterly, believe that if the U.S. and EU really want to help Africa out, easing up on (better yet, stopping altogether) the cotton subsidies would be a big boost to the industry. I would go further and say that all food subsidies would help, as would emphasizing farm technologies to increase commercial -- as opposed to subsistence -- agriculture in Africa and decrease the need for food aid, particularly in countries whose economies are almost entirely agrarian. It will also help if the U.S. were to boost exports from Africa in more than just oil and gas.

People have been emailing me this Lancet study, and I see A Bombastic Element also takes it on at his blog. It has some interesting things to say about the point of MDGs, and wonders if compiling the list was ever a good idea. The meat of it:

The very specific nature of many goals, reflecting their diverse, independent origins, leaves considerable gaps in coverage and fails to realise synergies that could arise across their implementation; we draw attention to particular synergies between education, health, poverty, and gender. In some cases, targets present a measure of goal achievement that is too narrow, or might not identify a clear means of delivery. Other challenges encountered by several MDGs include a lack of clear ownership and leadership internationally and nationally, and a problem with equity in particular.

Issues of equity arise because many goals target attainment of a specific minimum standard— eg, of income, education, or maternal or child survival. To bring people above this threshold might mean a focus on those for whom least effort is required, neglecting groups that, for geographical, ethnic, or other reasons, are more difficult to reach, thereby increasing inequity.

The West African Drug Peddlers

2010-09-20T04:47:00.005-04:00

From 234Next:

According to a statement released by the National Drug Law Enforcement Agency (NDLEA), the US President, Barack Obama, said that this was the first time that Nigeria would be delisted from the drug majors list since 1991. The anti-narcotics agency stated that Mr Obama said that Nigeria was a onetime drug trafficking focal point but that the country had taken a lot of drastic steps to make counter narcotics a top national security for the country. He said that international data showed that there was a strengthening of illegal drug trafficking between Latin America and West Africa, especially via Brazil and Venezuela, with a considerable portion of illegal product destined for Europe.

Indeed. From the Economist earlier this year, via The Moor Next Door (whose blog is great, by the way):

WEST AFRICA has become an attractive trade route for Latin America’s cocaine smugglers in recent years. On June 8th two tonnes (2000kg) of the stuff (with an estimated street value of over $1 billion) were seized in the Gambia. While cocaine use in America has fallen by 50% over the last two decades, some European countries have seen consumption rates double or triple. Aided by its corruptible police and flimsy money-laundering laws, up to 150 tonnes of cocaine are estimated to pass through the region a year. In 2006 36% of the cocaine carriers caught in one network of European airports had come from west Africa. In 2008 this had dropped to 17%. Whether this reflects a drop in trade or the traffickers’ increasing skill in avoiding capture is unclear

Here's James Traub with his great report in the NYT in April this year:

According to U.N. reports, as well as American law-enforcement and intelligence officials, cocaine crosses the Atlantic from South America either in small planes, including Cessna turboprops outfitted with an extra bladder of fuel, or in commercial fishing vessels or cargo ships. The drugs are then transported in bulk along one of several routes. Some are taken to the international airports in Dakar, Senegal and Accra, Ghana or elsewhere, where they are generally swallowed in relatively small amounts by couriers and flown to European cities. Other shipments are transported northward by truck or carried overland across ancient smuggling routes before crossing the Mediterranean into southern Europe. The African couriers and crime syndicates are often paid in “product,” which has the additional effect of creating a local market for cocaine.

There was a huge drug bust in Liberia in June this year you can read about here.

Drugs funneled from the jungles of Brazil and Colombia, through to West Africa (often with the help of armed groups) and into Europe. There's globalization for you.

Jammin' With Jimi

2010-09-18T15:53:00.004-04:00

I'm far too big a fan of Jimi Hendrix not to mark the anniversary of his passing on my blog. One of my favorite blogs Shadow and Act has the scoop on two movies currently in development on the man himself, and I'm psyched.

It's been a slow week of blogging, thanks to my life being constantly in flux. I'll try to get back to this house on a semi-regular basis. Above is one of my favorite songs. Enjoy.

Obama the Anti-Colonialist

2010-09-13T15:33:00.005-04:00

Lately in the United States, it seems as though a day does not go by without someone saying something breathtakingly stupid and unfortunate. Or, you know, both. Like this "intellectual" slandering Obama as a "Kenyan Anti-Colonialist". The offending article by Dinesh D'Souza, via Adam Serwer:

It may seem incredible to suggest that the anticolonial ideology of Barack Obama Sr. is espoused by his son, the President of the United States. That is what I am saying. From a very young age and through his formative years, Obama learned to see America as a force for global domination and destruction. He came to view America's military as an instrument of neocolonial occupation. He adopted his father's position that capitalism and free markets are code words for economic plunder. Obama grew to perceive the rich as an oppressive class, a kind of neocolonial power within America. In his worldview, profits are a measure of how effectively you have ripped off the rest of society, and America's power in the world is a measure of how selfishly it consumes the globe's resources and how ruthlessly it bullies and dominates the rest of the planet.

For Obama, the solutions are simple. He must work to wring the neocolonialism out of America and the West. And here is where our anticolonial understanding of Obama really takes off, because it provides a vital key to explaining not only his major policy actions but also the little details that no other theory can adequately account for.

This was the hot topic around the American blogosphere, and D'Souza was -- thank God -- roundly criticized. Over at one of my favorite blogs, Ta-Nehisi Coates highlights a Kenyan reader's comment that highlighted the fact that colonialism in Kenya was, well, bad.

Not to go too deep into it, but Colonialism was horrible. In Kenya, blacks were forced off their lands (there is a reason the most agriculturally productive part of Kenya was called 'The White Highlands'), subjected to harsh rules (pass laws, head taxes, enforced segregation, concentration camps etc), and during the Emergency, an estimated 70,000 - 200,000 blacks were killed (torture, malnutrition disease in concentration camps etc). I could tell you my parent's stories and my relatives stories, but that would take too much time. A good book on this is Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain's Gulag in Kenya - Caroline Elkins

And just because D'Souza is Indian does not mean he has the first clue about African Colonialism. There are some similarities between African and Indian colonization but given the fact that the British had a racial hierarchy (whites, indian and then blacks at the bottom) means there are things the British did in Africa that they never would even have considered doing in India.

Suffice it to say Colonialism was truly evil. Essentially Britain treated Kenya and Kenyan people as possessions to be exploited by any means possible. The only reason that Britain let Kenya go is that after WW2 Kenya begun being a net drain due to the Mau Mau uprising (whose core group was formed by African WW2 veterans who has been conscripted into WW2 on Britain's side and learned military skills and lost their awe of the white man once they saw that he too could be killed just like any man). And even then, they handed the country to people they knew who would be friendly to their interests (Jomo Kenyatta etc).

At independence, most of the wealth and the land in Kenya was in white hands. The Kenyan govt, over the next few years, took ruinious loans from Britain to buy back the land from those same British land owners. Keep in mind that this is land that had been previously stolen from us. In addition, a huge part of the Kenyan economy has been (and is still) foreign owned leading to a huge outflow of capital.

Stupidity shouldn't be given an audience, this is true, but it is times like these that me wonder if our long years of imperialism where people with a bit more melanin had to endure everything from Tuskegee to Mau Mau has rendered us incapable of equality. As horrible and inhuman the treatment could be of those who wielded their "civilization" like a sword over those who they mercilessly ruled, it still bears reminding that even after all this, people like Obama's father had to go to Western world for his education. People like Obama's father understood that they were living in a world that they didn't create, and had to learn its rules. They were like Okonkwo in "Things Fall Apart" watching the world change before their very eyes, and they could either change with it, or die along with the past. To move forward is to go 'there', whether by physically moving from Kenya to Hawaii, or by learning to speak the language. And even after you do, there's no guarantee you would be seen as who you are. The cruelest irony of the post-colonial years is that people keep running into the arms of those who pushed them away.

Elikeh

2010-09-12T18:10:00.002-04:00

Femi Kuti's former drummer Tosin Aribisala seems to be doing big things. Via OkayAfrica, here's him with one of his two bands Elikeh performing at the Kennedy Center. Enjoy.

Poem for Sunday

2010-09-12T04:16:00.006-04:00

I was what mattered in the end.

Truly, first lines don't get better than that.

I came across Sarah Arvio's "Matter" via the NYT, where you'll find this and other poems. Enjoy.

Matter

I was what mattered in the end. Or if
I didn’t matter then nothing mattered,
and if I mattered, well then all things did.

O miracles and molecules, dust, rust.
It was always a matter of matter.
It might be meat or else it might be love

(if I was meat, if I was fit to eat).
What had never been matter would never
matter: you might say this was a moot point.

Clay and dust, ash and mud and mist and rust,
blood-orange sunsets and turning maples,
apples and cherries, sticks and trash and dust,

rumpled papers blowing across a street
(dead letters sent to him that lives away).
There was life, there was loss, there was no such

thing as loss — there was nothing that wasn’t
both life and loss. No, it had to be said,
in questions of matter, nothing was lost.

It might be a matter of carnal love.
This was textual and material,
and for once the facts-of-the-matter were

both heartfelt and matter-of-fact. (Oh,
matter of course was always the mother.)
These were the facts of life, this was my life,

and there I was, right at the heart of it,
my own heart — at the heart-of-the-matter.
And did I matter now or in the end?

O mother, maintainer and measurer,
mud and fruit of the heart, meat of the heart,
the question might be asked, what was the end.

Is Globalization Making Literature Dull?

2010-09-11T19:11:00.005-04:00

Digging through the crates at the New York Review of Books, I came across this article by Tim Parks on how globalization is affecting literature by creating work conscious of its international audience, which may mean that "the kind of work that revels in the subtle nuances of its own language and literary culture" is bound to -- in his words -- disappear.

The proliferation of international literary prizes has guaranteed that the phenomenon is not restricted to the more popular sector of the market. Despite its questionable selection procedures and often bizarre choices, the Nobel is seen as more important than any national prize. The Impac in Ireland, Mondello in Italy, International Literature Award in Germany are rapidly growing in prestige. Thus the arbiters of taste are no longer one’s own compatriots—they are less easily knowable, not a group the author himself is part of.

What are the consequences for literature? From the moment an author perceives his ultimate audience as international rather than national, the nature of his writing is bound to change. In particular one notes a tendency to remove obstacles to international comprehension. Writing in the 1960’s, intensely engaged with his own culture and its complex politics, Hugo Claus apparently did not care that his novels would require a special effort on the reader’s and above all the translator’s part if they were to be understood outside his native Belgium. In sharp contrast, contemporary authors like the Norwegian Per Petterson, the Dutch Gerbrand Bakker, or the Italian Alessandro Baricco, offer us works that require no such knowledge or effort, nor offer the rewards that such effort will bring.

The form-fitting of one's work to appeal to a large audience has always seemed to me to be a bit of an insult to the reader. Still, it's a writer's decision. There are stories from African writers one can think of who obviously try to make the surroundings and names accessible, but I can surely think of quite a few who do not. It doesn't seem to me that Ngugi Wa' Thiongo'o cares either way what you think. I had to google "sadza" when I read Tsitsi Dangaremgba's Nervous Conditions. Sefi Atta and Brian Chikwava are equally unapologetic. Still, I'm not sure that it will be true to say foregoing cultural exclusivity necessarily takes away from the writer's ability to produce "the sort of writing that can savage or celebrate the way this or that linguistic group really live". This line of thinking to me gives too much of an alibi for bad writing.

Part of my reaction is my resignation to thinking that the question of how much to "explain your country/region/culture" versus simply telling your story has always been and always will be an issue for the non-Western European/non-English speaking world. Globalization as it concerns literature is the embrace of the Western European and American literary canon, while globalization in general is the spinning of the world towards an "end of history" type conclusion where we've all agreed that these Western norms are the best way for the world to be, in terms of economics (capitalism) and social mores, and the metric against which we will measure our respective civilizations. While you may see these Western styles "remixed" with local flavor and form-fitted for its new surroundings, I don't see this careful consideration ever going away for the West. The way things have been set up from our collective history, non-Western peoples have to play catch up and seek validation "there". That's not new. And it will only have an effect on our stories if we let it.

The Chinese Experience in Africa

2010-09-08T23:08:00.008-04:00

Over at Al Jazeera, their show Witness has an interesting 23-minute documentary on Chinese people who've made a life for themselves in Senegal.

A few observations:

I liked how Witness spent half the show humanizing the Chinese experience in Senegal. It was a nice juxtaposition - a people who really are seeking a more stable economic situation for themselves and their families, and the economic ruin they (perhaps unwittingly) wrought on the local population that they were so isolated from by virtue of language and other barriers.

I couldn't but compare this to the New Yorker audio slideshow on Nigerian immigrants in Chinese city Guangzhou. Evan Osnos points out here that it's almost always a African buyer and a Chinese seller, showing what I think is the biggest difference between the obstacles that a Nigerian, say, in China has to overcome, and that of the Chinese in an African country. The speed with which Chinese populations grow in African countries ensures (a) they always have a market for Chinese-made products, which allows for (b) growth in Chinese purchasing power.

Of course, Nigerian populations in China grow as well and will ensure a market for popular Made in Nigeria products like Milo, Nido, or Indomie, but that is only true within the Nigerian -- and larger African -- community. The strength that Chinese people have is that they can count on a market, not just from fellow Chinese, but also with the locals as well. With this influence, Chinese people have an upper hand in business dealings that locals don't.

When the Senegalese merchants complained about the quality of goods coming into the country from China, I didn't so much blame the Chinese as I blamed the Senegalese government that allowed such low quality goods in the first place, and the inability of Senegalese government to create a regulatory framework to protect local businesses. Wade's government is probably reluctant to do anything to anger their Chinese benefactors, and I understand why they won't. Individual African countries have a lot more to lose than the Chinese do, and they won't get a better deal on infrastructure and trade with the Europeans or Americans.

Dr. Deborah Brautigam, who blogs here, has a favorable view of China in Africa, and talks about the benefits in the video below.

On Religion and Morality

2010-09-08T02:33:00.001-04:00

Dr. Lionel Tiger takes on the weighty topic of how and why people find reasons to divvy themselves into groups, and the importance of groups to individuals. An interesting interview.

What if Zimbabwe Adopts the Chinese Yuan?

2010-09-08T01:28:00.008-04:00

Zimbabwean Vice President Joice Mujuru seems open to the idea:

Mujuru says this would be a “natural progression and offshoot of the Look East Policy” which has seen China emerge as the country’s biggest trading partner, absorbing most of the agricultural and mineral produce.

"I don’t see why we should not use the Chinese Yuan when most of what we are producing in the country like our tobacco and minerals are ultimately being bought by the Chinese.

She said China was not only a vast market but also the world’s fastest growing economy that needs to be deliberately incorporated into Zimbabwe’s production, manufacturing and marketing matrix.

Maybe the economists among us can better parse the details of this, but from my haven't-taken-economics-since-sophomore-year-college perspective, it is not the changing of currency that makes this a bad idea. Some have argued that the reason Germany is doing so well is that the Euro was down against the dollar for much of the early part of the year, which drove down prices and strengthened their GDP growth through trade (The Economist has a few quibbles with this theory, mind you). The Chinese currency is pegged low relative to the U.S. Dollar or Euro right now and, holding constant the possibility of further shocks to the Zimbabwean economy -- Mozambique-style food riots, droughts, a bad harvest, a more extensive ban on Zimbabwean minerals -- I can see a situation where it's not totally hare-brained for Zimbabwe to peg its currency to the Chinese Yuan. The only question I have is this: Why the yuan? Why not a currency of one of their Southern African neighbors? From their shift on Sudan, China has shown that it can be shamed, so it's not clear if China would even go for that with a country that's not in most of the world's good graces.

I'm trying to engage the idea on a policy level, but I don't see what the Chinese would gain from this that they don't already have from a political and economic standpoint. Mujuru must know this too, and it is this complete lack of feasibility and ability to think clearly on policy issues that is truly scary. Nowhere is it shown that the Vice President even thought to put the shoe on the other foot and think this issue through in a manner that betrays that this VP understands issues that affect the country's economic future. The changing of one's currency to another is a serious economic decision and has widespread ramifications for trade and food prices, among other things. And all Mujuru can come up with is some drivel about a "Look East policy".

Poem for Sunday

2010-09-05T15:13:00.001-04:00

From Jonathan Wells, courtesy of the New Yorker.

The Man With Many Pens

With one he wrote a number so beautiful

it lasted forever in the legends of numbers. With another

he described the martyrs’ feet as they marched

past the weeping stones and cypresses, watched

by their fathers. He used one as a silver wand to lift

a trout from its spawning bed to more fruitful waters

and set it back down, its mouth facing upstream.

He wrote Time has no other river but this one in us,

no other use but this turn in us from mountain lakes

of late desires to confusions passed through

with every gate open. Let’s not say he didn’t take us

with him in the long current of his letters, his calligraphy

and craft, moving from port to port, his hand stopping

near his heart, the hand that smudged and graced the page,

asking, asking, his fingers a beggar’s lucent black,

for the word that gave each of us away.

UN's Soapbox and the Trouble with Bashir

2010-09-02T04:33:00.008-04:00

The fallout from Sudan's al-Bashir's trip to Kenya to celebrate the constitution may be more serious than the Kenyans themselves probably anticipated. A Kenyan Capital FM report says that the ICC has reported Kenya to the UN Security Council and may face economic and travel sanctions, while this report at Kenya's Daily Nation makes it seems as though Kenya might just get away with a slap on the wrist. For more on what the ICC may or may not do, complete with legalese, read Making Sense of Sudan's take.

In his defense of the invitation to the notorious Sudanese president, Foreign minister Moses Wetang’ula made the case that the invitation was necessary to straighten out some issues with Sudan's upcoming referendum. This strikes me as good regional politics -- the less isolated Sudan is and the more greviances between Salva Kiir and Omar al-Bashir are out in the open, the more likely the referendum gets carried out with as little bloodshed as possible. Kenya and Sudan share a southern border, let us not forget. The less bloodshed, the less likely that Sudan's 2011 referendum will result in a refugee crisis for Kenya, who is already in for it Somali refugees. The impression that one gets from UN is that Kenya is supposed to consider the UN's issues with Sudan over issues of regional importance.

I find it curious that the ICC thinks African leaders will go ahead with their plan of persecuting al-Bashir when the AU countries have a resolution pledging to take no action on the arrest warrant. The logic for the AU resolution seems to be the belief that the UN had no grounds to pass any judgment since some AU members had not ratified the Rome Statute which established the ICC. I haven't checked to see how many AU member states have ratified the Rome statute, but every leader, African or otherwise, has their own domestic politics to worry about, and nowhere on the African continent would it look good for them to get too friendly outside of an economic context with international organizations. This, taken together with the AU making their own resolution, should show that Jean Ping et al are sensitive to questions of their autonomy from Western organizations. The UN Security Council that signed off on the arrest warrant does not have many African countries in it, and I have not seen anything indicating that the ICC reached out to the AU to ensure its full cooperation following the AU's resolution. If they had done that, perhaps they would have been spared this situation. Knowing what we know of the AU's stance on Sudan, it was ill-considered of the UN to make announcements of arrest warrants without first checking with the individual countries and the AU that they will be respected and adhered to.

Going forward, the likelihood of the an ICC warrant carrying any weight has never meant less than it does now. If Western countries show a distaste for shaking your hand in public, the logic goes, you could always go to East and deal with China or India, and maybe even Brazil. Rwanda's current problems with the UN report showing the extent of their dealings in the DRC shows that you can house all the refugees asked of you in good conditions, do trade with EU and the U.S., be useful in UN peacekeeping operations, and still be called out in a report. A leader would want to be immune from such scrutiny as much as possible. It is true that the report was leaked and was never intended for release in its leaked form, but if I was an African leader with a few skeletons in my closet I would sleep far easier if I thought that such a report did not even exist.

The UN's soapbox status does not absolve it of the responsibility to not -- I'm paraphrasing from Bombastic Element's headline here -- mouth off checks it can't cash. The body should really only make threats that it can carry out. The sooner they learn that, they better for their credibility.

Nigerian Movies Are 'Bad'

2010-09-02T03:00:00.004-04:00

Over at Africa Works, G. Pascal Zachary highlights this essay from Emily Witt review in The Nation of an essay collection on Nigerian movies. In this thorough review, she wonders aloud about the move away from the Ousmane Sembene movies with an idealogical bent that made up much of the first wave of African cinema, to the popularity of home video movies that critics usually deem technically and artistically "bad".

what does "bad" mean in a global film economy when Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen—in which various main characters function as product placement for General Motors—can pull millions of moviegoers from the deepest recesses of their couches? In the case of Nollywood, "bad" means, on the technical side, a home video aesthetic, poor sound mixing, blinking special effects in primary colors, jarring lapses in continuity and boom microphones sinking into the frame. In the realm of the artistic, "bad" means wooden acting, excess melodrama, displays of consumerism that make Imelda Marcos look like Mother Teresa, baroque screenplays that don't always cohere into a narrative whole, failure to suspend disbelief (indeed, an active effort to encourage it), wailing, catfights and evil mothers-in-law.

A lot of criticism about Nollywood, therefore, concerns itself with resolving the fundamental question of why these usually not-very-good movies (judged, perhaps harshly, according to the above criteria during a few Saturday afternoons spent on YouTube) are so very popular. Their home-video aesthetic isn't just tolerated but relished by viewers, and there is evidently some consternation in certain circles that the postcolonial African tradition of lush, 35-millimeter, French Embassy–funded allegorical films and centralized-government-sponsored Marxist epics has been eclipsed by films like Baby Police, a popular franchise starring a dwarf who harasses unsuspecting citizens at roadblocks (think Gary Coleman as a Nigerian police officer who occasionally leads Bollywood-style group dance numbers).

Zachary on Witt's take:

Witt shrewdly observes that African movies of the sort made by such celebrated Francophone directors as Sembene are “burdened with ideology” (doing what elite Africans think Europeans consider to be art) and far more popular abroad (with the very Europeans who often funded the films in the first place) than at home in Africa, partly because the high-minded pretensions and “puritanical didacticism” of the films drove audiences away. By contrast, Nigerian films about everyday urban life – these are do-it—yourself videos without pretensions and frankly pandering to mass tastes – represent a radical re-ordering of African cinema. Hence the prominent role granted the supernatural, romance, corruption and crime. Unfortunately, Witt’s actual experience viewing Nigerian movies seems limited to rummaging through clips available on Youtube. As a result, while trying to defend the value of Nollywood content, she unfairly stereotypes and denigrates Nigerian films, fixating on the themes of juju, magic and mayhem that do indeed dominate many Nigerian movies though hardly all. Witt even dismisses the content altogether, seeing the films instead as chiefly valuable as signs of rebellion. Yet Nollywood content, while often trivial and offensive, sometimes rises to the level of art and social criticism.

The thing is, I'm not sure that she is unfair to Nigerian movies. I'm a bit tired of people using the success of Nigerian films as a reason to excuse how bad they actually are. From Soulja Boy to junk food, there are lots of things in the world that are bad but popular in mainstream culture just about everywhere. I belong to the "Nigerian movies suck" school of thought, but I don't really care too much that there are a lot of people that enjoy it. I'm more concerned by the fact that so many do not ask for more from Nigerian films than they do from films from, say, the United States or India. If these same people that are comfortable with Nigerian movies as they are will not accept the bad sound mixing, below par acting, and woefully terrible plots that you find in a lot of Nigerian movies, then the audience reaction to Nigerian movies hints at a larger problem of what Nigerians, perhaps even all Africans, expect from their own people.

Cesaria!

2010-09-02T02:15:00.002-04:00

I stumbled upon a documentary of the Cape Verdean singer Cesaria Evora. A late bloomer, she began singing in Paris some 22 years ago and never looked back. Now she's definitely one of the top female voices out of Africa. Check her out.

Generator and Petroleum Importers in the Nigeria's Power Industry

2010-09-01T17:37:00.005-04:00

The glaring omission of generator makers and importers of diesel into Nigeria seems to me to be a lack of real politique on the part of analysts of Nigerian politics.

If there are 18 local and foreign companies vying for a share in a privatized Nigerian power sector, it should not be ignored that all the companies involved in generator-making are necessarily foreign companies: Perkins, Volvo, Honda, Deere (I believe), among others. As I said in a previous blogpost, the Nigerian power industry already has private interests vested in it. It is estimated that U.S.$13 billion a year to fuel generators, which is good business on the part of generator-makers and importers of diesel. As is all too often the case when writing about Nigeria, hard data is hard to come by on who exactly does big business and in what sector, but it will be very curious to me if a lot of moneyed, government-related Nigerians are not already investors in the generator industry, not to mention questions of trade and foreign direct investment from countries these generator companies come from. More urgently, if Nigeria does pull off a better power grid and improved power industry, it could affect the importation of diesel and generators into Nigeria, and thus could impact trade relations.

Also of concern is the government's ability to uphold rules to make sure that its interests align with that of these companies investing in the industry. Nigerian lawmakers do not have a good track record in showing resolve in their dealings with foreign companies. Take gas flaring, for example. There have been promises by many companies to stop gas flaring in the Niger-Delta most recently one from Shell in 2010. Still, a Federal High Court ruling in Benin in November 14, 2005 ordered the company to stop, that gas flaring was a "gross violation" of constitutionally guaranteed rights. What hope does one have that the most recent promise from Shell will be upheld without government pressure if they have been flouting court rulings for at least 5 years without penalty? All this is to say that there have been no systemic changes, in the oil industry or anywhere else, in how business with large companies has been conducted. Mind you, the new power industry will be full of them. One cannot but worry when one sees more foreign interests coming into the Nigerian industry and the government has no ways in which to tweak the incentives so that the interests of the market and the consumer are not at such cross-purposes.

More worrying than political analysts ignoring the reality of the industry is the fact that there has been no indication by President Goodluck Jonathan that he has taken this reality of the Nigerian energy market into consideration. Nobody feels sorry for generator-makers -- I certainly do not -- but it is hard to take seriously a new privatization scheme in a key industry that does not acknowledge the trade relationships that it will affect.

Poem for Sunday

2010-08-29T14:22:00.004-04:00

Here's an old favorite of mine from A.E. Housman.

To An Athlete Dying Young

The time you won your town the race
We chaired you through the market-place;
Man and boy stood cheering by,
And home we brought you shoulder-high.

To-day, the road all runners come,
Shoulder-high we bring you home,
And set you at your threshold down,
Townsman of a stiller town.

Smart lad, to slip betimes away
From fields where glory does not stay,
And early though the laurel grows
It withers quicker than the rose.

Eyes the shady night has shut
Cannot see the record cut,
And silence sounds no worse than cheers
After earth has stopped the ears:

Now you will not swell the rout
Of lads that wore their honours out,
Runners whom renown outran
And the name died before the man.

So set, before the echoes fade,
The fleet foot on the sill of shade,
And hold to the low lintel up
The still-defended challenge-cup.

And round that early-laurelled head
Will flock to gaze the strengthless dead,
And find unwithered on its curls
The garland briefer than a girl's.

A Changing Society in Egypt Begets a New Literature

2010-08-28T18:19:00.006-04:00

I found an intelligent, expansive piece on the effect changing demographics and society in Egypt is having on the literature from the country. I'll highlight it here, even though it comes from a publication called The New Left Review (My disdain for blatant partisanship and the hell I believe Western political labels like "left" and "right" wreak in developed European and U.S. politics is a topic for another day). Here's a taste:

The generation that has come of age since 1990 has faced a triple crisis: socio-economic, cultural and political. Egypt’s population has nearly doubled since 1980, reaching 81 million in 2008, yet there has been no commensurate increase in social spending. Illiteracy rates have risen, with schools starved of funds. In the overcrowded universities, underpaid teaching staff augment their income by extorting funds from students for better marks. Other public services—health, social security, infrastructure and transportation—have fared no better. The plundering of the public sector by the kleptocratic political establishment and its cronies has produced a distorted, dinosaur-shaped social structure: a tiny head—the super-rich—presiding over an ever-growing body of poverty and discontent. At the same time, youth unemployment has been running at over 75 per cent.
The cultural realm, meanwhile, has become an arena for bigoted grandstanding, prey to both official censors—the long-serving Minister of Culture, Farouk Husni, showing the way—and self-appointed ones, in parliament and the broadsheet press. In the political sphere, the Emergency Law, in place since 1981, has been punctiliously renewed by an almost comically corrupt National Assembly. The notorious Egyptian prison system has been made available to us, British and other European nationals subject to ‘extraordinary rendition’. Since Sadat’s unilateral agreement with Israel in 1979 a widening gulf has grown between popular sentiment and the collusion of the political establishment with the worst us–Israeli atrocities in the region, and its de facto support for their successive wars: invasions of Lebanon, Desert Storm, occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq. Egypt’s marginalization as a regional power has only increased the younger generation’s sense of despondency and humiliation.
It is within this unpropitious context that a striking new wave of young Egyptian writers has appeared. Their work constitutes a radical departure from established norms and offers a series of sharp insights into Arab culture and society. Formally, the texts are marked by an intense self-questioning, and by a narrative and linguistic fragmentation that serves to reflect an irrational, duplicitous reality, in which everything has been debased. The works are short, rarely more than 150 pages, and tend to focus on isolated individuals, in place of the generation-spanning sagas that characterized the realist Egyptian novel. Their narratives are imbued with a sense of crisis, though the world they depict is often treated with derision. The protagonists are trapped in the present, powerless to effect any change. Principal exponents of the new wave would include Samir Gharib ‘Ali, Mahmud Hamid, Wa’il Rajab, Ahmad Gharib, Muntasir al-Qaffash, Atif Sulayman, May al-Tilmisani, Yasser Shaaban, Mustafa Zikri and Nura Amin; but well over a hundred novels of this type have been published to date. From their first appearance around 1995, these writers have been dubbed ‘the 1990s generation’.

Read all of it. It's long, but well worth your time. I'm an advocate for good literature, so hunt down work from the writers whose names you see and check them out as well.

While we're on Egypt, brilliant journalists from Monocle World Affairs did an excellent photoessay on Alexandria. Check it out here.

The UN's New Report and Rwanda - Why Now?

2010-08-27T22:54:00.001-04:00

A draft version of a bombshell UN report is blunt on Rwanda's involvement in DRC. From the NYT:

In 1994, more than 800,000 people, predominantly members of the ethnic Tutsi group in Rwanda, were slaughtered by the Hutu. When a Tutsi-led government seized power in Rwanda, Hutu militias fled along with Hutu civilians across the border to Congo, then known as Zaire. Rwanda invaded to pursue them, aided by a Congolese rebel force the report also implicates in the massacres.
While Rwanda and Congolese rebel forces have always claimed that they attacked Hutu militias who were sheltered among civilians, the United Nations report documents deliberate reprisal attacks on civilians.
The report says that the apparently systematic nature of the massacres “suggests that the numerous deaths cannot be attributed to the hazards of war or seen as equating to collateral damage.” It continues, “The majority of the victims were children, women, elderly people and the sick, who were often undernourished and posed no threat to the attacking forces.”

Here's the original story where it first leaked at in Le Monde for those amongst us who speak French. From the UK Guardian:

Among the accusations is that Rwandan forces and local allies rounded up hundreds of men, women and children at a time and butchered them with hoes and axes. On other occasions Hutu refugees were bayoneted, burned alive or killed with hammer blows in large numbers.
It is the first time the UN has published such forthright allegations against Rwanda, a close ally of Britain and the US.

Read the whole thing here.

For anyone who's been paying any attention to African issues, this should come as no surprise. What's more interesting to me, however, is the timing. I, and probably many others, were surprised to see the attention Rwanda was getting over the elections. Among many international reports (Kigali Wire has an especially useful round-up of the election period and analysis here) the U.S. issued a statement of "concern" and there was this intelligent editorial from The Economist on Kagame's oppressive tactics during the recent elections. And now this.

I'm just struck by the timing of it all. What has changed in Rwanda's dealings with the outside world? Kagame has played ball with Congolese refugees, keeping them in camps with, according to the U.S. Assistant to the Deputy Secretary of State Reuben Brigety, relatively good conditions. Rwanda has continued trading with the U.S. Net Exports between the U.S. and Rwanda has been positive in U.S.'s favor and growing between 2006 and 2009 (I didn't consider 2010 because I'm not sure when the fiscal year ends), and I have seen nothing to suggest reluctance to trade with Europe either. With the new regional protocol, Rwanda is set to be a huge influence and key to bringing in foreign investment to East Africa.

In addition, one must question the political wisdom of the UN even putting these thoughts to paper. Is it wise for the UN to come out with a report this explosive against a country that is necessary for peacekeeping purposes in East and Central Africa? Rwanda could pull out of peacekeeping operations, stop helping with the refugee situation, put other East African countries in tight spot as well seeing as it's apparently one of the best places to do business in Africa. Then what? This forces the hands of the U.S. and EU to make them speak even more strongly against Kagame than they probably ever planned to, and have them acknowledge Kagame's larger crimes in the Congo. From the UN's point of view, I just don't see how this can have any upside in the long run.

Politics aside, it's imperative to add that the contents of this report do not come across as a big surprise to everybody who sees it. People in the know have written articles and blogpost upon blogpost on Uganda and Rwanda in the DRC and shouting all this out from the rooftops. The cynic in me cannot but ask: Why is this all coming out in the open now? Are we now dispensing with myths on all international organizations' best friends in Africa? Does this mean the UN et al can finally be clear-eyed about the TFG in Somalia who we know also commit war crimes and use child soldiers? Can we now call out Ethiopia's Meles Zenawi for keeping political prisoners and keeping the polity of his country in a choke-hold?

It's good to see the truth of the matter in the Rwanda-DRC state of affairs finally be acknowledged by the UN in a report, but I'll be looking out for the final version (this is a draft, after all), and reactions from the U.S. and EU thereafter. Until then, I have no idea what all this means.

Update: Re-read the post and found it to be a bit rambling. Sorry about that, but a bit too lazy to go through with a (thorough) edit.

Governance and Privatization in Nigeria's Power Industry

2010-08-26T01:32:00.000-04:00

Goodluck Jonathan is ramping up efforts on stabilizing Nigerian energy supply, and talk of privatizing the industry is once again in the air. Economic liberalization seems to be the default mode for the Nigerian government when its called upon to act more efficiently, but the idea of ceding ground to the private sector on energy ought to make one stop and think.

I have always found the irregular energy supply in Nigeria to be an interesting policy question. Thanks to general waste and age-old corruption, Nigerian electric power authority (It's PHCN now, but I always think of it as it's old name NEPA) has been found wanting in its provision of a public good (electricity). But people have to find a way, don't they? There are products to sell, football matches to watch, drinks to keep cold. The market responds: generators in all sizes. Businesspeople know a good opportunity when they see one, so money -- within Nigeria and out -- floods into the thriving generator industry. The price of kerosene rises and falls for lamps. Binatone makes electric lamps. Out of government inefficiency arises private sector innovation.

Of course, out of private sector innovation come the trouble of incentives -- Who really wants there to be 24-hour electricity? Think about it. The generator-makers certainly don't, or what would then happen to their business? And these energy companies, who would they profit? Certainly, their services would be obtained by many, not all of whom can afford it.

A good metric, I think, for how an exclusively-private power industry can be found in ICT. It is difficult to find hard data on these things (Though page 9 of this study gives some idea) so I have not run the numbers, but I bet that average usage of ICT services per 100 inhabitants would be surprisingly low compared to how many people actually own cell phones, particularly outside urban areas. Why? Because cell phone services are actually quite expensive. People text on their phones much more than they actually talk. They have found a way to make their money stretch further within the current system, and in so doing entrenched the status quo.

The fact of the matter is that the private sector is already in the power industry, and they have served only to entrench the status quo with their products, not challenge it. Nigerians -- the whole continent, I suspect -- prides itself on gritty resourcefulness. Learning how to manipulate your surroundings to the best of your ability is great in the short-term, but it does nothing to turn the incentives in your favor in the long-term. When there is no real consumer protection agency to speak of and the industry is more connected to the government than consumers are, the designated body can take your writhing for comfort as silence in consent.

In order for privatization to work, it needs to make sense for the market to provide energy services at every price range, something I am not convinced will happen. Without that, all this is doing is creating another item on the list that "only certain people" can afford and maybe even adversely affecting the start-up cost for businesses in an economy badly in need of diversifying. In our bid to make more money for GEJ and all his moneyed friends, the questions Nigerians need to be asking is whether all the pieces are in place to ensure that turning over the energy industry to the market can actually work. Privatization cannot simply be a way for elected leaders who need a way out of their duties to govern.

The Importance of Fiction

2010-08-26T00:48:00.000-04:00

This post by Lorin Stein over at The Atlantic lets us in on the importance of fiction.

Literary writing (or, if you prefer, imaginitive writing) has certain advantages of its own, none of them weakened one bit by technology. It can often be funnier than other kinds of prose. It can deal more humanly with sex. It can say shameful things about family life—not by treating them as scandals but, on the contrary, by showing that they're normal. More sins are confessed more deeply, through the screens of verse and make-believe, than you will ever find on a talk show or reality TV. Literature gives the best accounts of intimacy. Lena McFarland is right—you may not learn stuff you didn't know from a work of fiction. But there can be great comfort in seeing the troubles of daily life put into words of power and beauty.

And as David Foster Wallace observed, literature has a way of making you feel less alone. TV doesn't do that. It entertains and entertains, but there is a part of you it gives the silent treatment. In my experience, even the Web can you leave you feeling lonelier, once you turn off the computer. Fiction and poetry connect you, or they can, to something bigger and quieter and more lasting than the day you had at work. The question of posterity is fascinating. Some writers hope to live on, through their words, after death. Some write for the present day. Either way, they take us out of the moment and out of our smallest selves.

I find this all to be true. Read all of it.

I love this song!

2010-08-22T14:48:00.000-04:00

Spoek Mathambo is a king in my ears right now.

SPOEK MATHAMBO – MSHINI WAM from spoek mathambo on Vimeo.

Check out his mix on Fader's podcast right here.

Copyright Laws and Industrialization

2010-08-22T14:09:00.000-04:00

Over at Der Speigel, Frank Thadeusz wonders if the absence of copyright law is what was key to Germany's industrial expansion, and contrasts it with England's.

[Not having copyright laws] created a book market very different from the one found in England. Bestsellers and academic works were introduced to the German public in large numbers and at extremely low prices. "So many thousands of people in the most hidden corners of Germany, who could not have thought of buying books due to the expensive prices, have put together, little by little, a small library of reprints," the historian Heinrich Bensen wrote enthusiastically at the time.

The prospect of a wide readership motivated scientists in particular to publish the results of their research. In Höffner's analysis, "a completely new form of imparting knowledge established itself."

Essentially the only method for disseminating new knowledge that people of that period had known was verbal instruction from a master or scholar at a university. Now, suddenly, a multitude of high-level treatises circulated throughout the country.

The "Literature Newspaper" reported in 1826 that "the majority of works concern natural objects of all types and especially the practical application of nature studies in medicine, industry, agriculture, etc." Scholars in Germany churned out tracts and handbooks on topics such as chemistry, mechanics, engineering, optics and the production of steel.

In England during the same period, an elite circle indulged in a classical educational canon centered more on literature, philosophy, theology, languages and historiography. Practical instruction manuals of the type being mass-produced in Germany, on topics from constructing dikes to planting grain, were for the most part lacking in England. "In Great Britain, people were dependent on the medieval method of hearsay for the dissemination of this useful, modern knowledge," Höffner explains.

Read all of it.

This got me thinking a lot about the issues with development today. Taking the world as a whole, the educational epicenters of our world are in the West. When the UN, World Bank, AGOA, et al say they're trying to help and shaft huge amount of funds into aid projects et al, they center on money-making, not knowledge-making. How does one ensure long-term economic growth without ensuring long-term availability of knowledge by, say, issuing grants to African universities for R&D? Oh, that's right - shoddy economic conditions mean that after all that work in university you probably won't find a job when you graduate, so it's best to focus on primary and secondary education and leave the tertiary be. But if you neglect the tertiary institutions, you're neglecting the future thought-leaders, the pool from which African countries can choose educated leaders and professionals that will create more jobs in the future. Development-wise, their thinking is more like England. We need to get more like Germany.

Is Goodluck Running for President or What?

2010-08-19T23:50:00.000-04:00

Goodluck Jonathan is oscillating so much on his 2011 plans, he makes Hamlet look decisive. He can't just be doing this for kicks - what's his endgame?

From all the tea leaves before us, this next election is not going to be pretty. Northerners want a Northern president (well, they always do, but..) because Yar'Adua didn't have his full term due to his protracted illness and eventual death. To zone or not to zone has been a question for months. Former military president Babangida has voiced interest, so he along with former vice and now out-of-favor with ruling party heads Atiku are said to be the choices for the Northern leaders' endorsement as the election draws nearer. Attahiru Jega, electoral body INEC head, has already started playing doomsday prophet even after the senate granted him funds for conducting the election. It's interesting times in Nigerian politics, and I don't blame anyone wanting to stay away. I sincerely doubt, though, that Jonathan is "scared". One expects, in fact, that if he keeps his Golden Boy image, he's one more CNN and BBC interview away from Kagame (pre-election) Status and he's earned himself a soapbox for life, abroad if not at home.

There's a lot of real politique going on here. Jonathan is not Igbo (which probably wouldn't have helped much anyway), not Yoruba, and certainly not Hausa. It's already a very long shot that he gets the nomination with the heavy-hitters gunning for it, so he has to speak softly and not look like he's trying to assert authority from leaders he doesn't have within a party system that very much depends on where you come from. Waving a cane in the face of leaders from the North and South when you don't have the political pedigree and support that they do would strike me as quite silly on his part. For my money, GEJ absolutely wants to run for president, but he has to win the staring contest first. And if he does, and earns his party's nomination, then he's certainly worth his first name.

Just How Bad Is Nigerian Police Corruption?

2010-08-18T05:12:00.000-04:00

This bad.

The Nigeria Police made a total of N20.35 billion between January last year and June this year from extorting money from motorists at illegal checkpoints, a report by the global organisation, Human Rights Watch has revealed.

Emeka Umeagbalasi, the chairman of the International Society for Civil Liberties and the Rule of Law presented the report in Lagos said checkpoints in the South East yielded the highest sums. Giving a breakdown of what is made from the different regions, Mr. Umeagbalasi said N9.35 billion was realised from the South East, South-South brought in N4 billion, while the South-West nets the police N4 billion. In the North Central, which includes Abuja, N2 billion was made, while the North East and North West brought in N500 million each.

I'm curious to know how one goes about getting such figures nailed to the exact number, but I have no problem with the number per se. Corruption breeds waste. Over at Loomnie's blog, this quote from Elizabeth Dickinson over at the FP magazine as she ruminates on the new Human Rights Watch report on Nigerian corruption:

Like all corruption, there is an element of victimization on both sides of the equation, unfortunately. The people who are extorted from are, obviously, suffering. But so too are the low level policemen in many cases. How can I best illustrate this? Perhaps the fact that the officers were forced to buy their own bullets, uniforms, and pay for their own transportation because the upper ranks had taken the bulk of the funding for themselves or other pet projects. The majority of the officers also likely believed in being policemen, and wanted to be a positive force for their countries. They were proud of their roles and sought to do the best job they could. But they were also pretty hungry sometimes. And as I was once wisely told, a hungry man will do anything you ask.

What is so irritating about Nigerian corruption is just how anti-Robin Hood it is. I think of it as the Sallah theory: What's the wisdom in killing a skinny cow? You'd just end up having to kill more and more skinny cows to get just as much meat as if you'd just waited, fed it with grain, kept it healthy. But these policemen rob a people who cannot afford to be robbed, and so they gain little,which keeps them coming back again and again. And in that way they're just like all the other leaders we have, coming back again and again and robbing a people a lot, little by little.

The Aid Bubble and African Agency

2010-08-17T18:22:00.000-04:00

Folks are pointing out the sea change in Western involvement in Africa. Via Africa Unchained, this from AfriCommons:

One big obstacle to aid is the politics of spending money on other nations’ problems. President Bush enjoyed a Nixon-goes-to-China credibility with conservatives, who tend to be more skeptical of foreign aid. But Obama’s low popularity among conservative voters makes it nearly impossible for him to sell an aid program to them. Reaching out in this way might feed into American stereotypes that Republicans are tougher on national security while Democrats prefer soft power.

What’s more, Americans are not in a generous mood. In a poll released last December by the Pew research organization, nearly half the Americans surveyed said that the U.S. should “mind its own business” in the world. This figure was the highest level of support for isolationism in decades. And it is not just the U.S.; polls show that this isolationism is matched in many wealthy nations in Europe and Asia, including Japan, long one of the biggest donor nations.

It is not surprising that nations such as Italy, one of the weakest industrialized economies, have slashed their aid budgets by more than 30 percent, while France has not met promised commitments, and the Obama administration has presided over reductions in the budget of the Millennium Challenge Corporation from $3 billion requested for 2008 to $1.4 billion this year.

I tend to find stories about the change in Western attitudes towards aid depressing, not because I love aid so much but because it has nothing to do with the countries that receive the aid. This article illustrates that the huge sense of foreboding I feel about Africa's future socioeconomic certainty and the question of African agency in the solving of Africa's problems. Slavery didn't stop until machinery was sophisticated enough to generate capital without using slave labour, thereby allowing for Westerners to grow a conscience. U.S. stopped its involvement with the apartheid SA government* because it stopped being socially acceptable (what with a civil rights for blacks in the U.S. and a more integrated black populace and all). In my view, aid reigned because it served to assuage the guilt of ruining these countries in the first place while providing bargaining chips in dealing with said countries (whose resources, the way, the developed world needs). Many people don't agree with my last point, but seriously, if the U.S. et al were trying to help ensure food security, the right move would be something more like encouraging the liberalization in the trade of agricultural products, not buttressing U.S./French/Dutch farmers with agricultural subsidies. If you cared about the cotton industry, the right move would be exportation of technologies to reduce the start-up cost for textile industries. If you, like Hillary Clinton always says, care about intra-Africa trade, then why have rules of origin that undermine an area you're trying to help?

This, coupled with how divorced many African governments are from those whom they govern, make me deeply skeptical about any shiny development plans anyone may come forward with. I suppose there's the case that when you throw China-Africa trade into the mix the link wouldn't be so inescapable anymore, but that only sounds like an argument that even if the political economy of developed countries were to guide towards demand for more efficient government, we still might not get it in most places. I would love to be wrong about this.

*On this point, I should say I'm being purposely facetious. The U.S. was hanging with the apartheid government well into the late 1980s under Reagan and helped fuel the civil war in Angola that probably would have ended a decade earlier had it not been for U.S., under Bill Clinton, funding UNITA and shielding Savimbi from UN action. I'm probably leaving other stuff out, but bear with me. The purpose of this post is more about aid in Africa than U.S. screw-ups in Africa.

Slum Tourism

2010-08-12T13:00:00.001-04:00

So some people like to tour slums on their vacation? Really? Well, Kenny Odede, writing for the NYT, objects:

Slum tourism has its advocates, who say it promotes social awareness. And it’s good money, which helps the local economy.

But it’s not worth it. Slum tourism turns poverty into entertainment, something that can be momentarily experienced and then escaped from. People think they’ve really “seen” something — and then go back to their lives and leave me, my family and my community right where we were before.

At its best, slum tourism is a bit like white/middle-class kids who listen to rap - you get to hear Rick Ross and Biggie and Nas talking about doing illegal stuff and carrying guns and dealing with women who like their men to be big, rich, tough guys. Except you're probably not. You're probably just an average kid who likes a bit of escapism with your breakfast. Ditto for the comic books you read. And the James Bond movie. And Rambo. It's gory but entertaining, all entertainment, and when you're done with it, you get back to your life, knowing that no matter how hypothetically awesome it sounds or grotesquely bad as to warrant your curiosity, you're perfectly happy right where you are, thank you very much.

Slum tourism truly is poverty as entertainment, nothing more. Odede tries to give the tourists the benefit of the doubt -- maybe they're going to learn about poverty! -- but come on, there is no learning to be done when you throw yourself head-first down the rabbit-hole for an hour or less of emaciated people and poor sanitation. There's only staring and ooh-aahing or cringing. Maybe pity, but then you probably already had that before.

Moyo's Aversion to Aid, and Governance Issues in Africa

2010-08-10T14:50:00.000-04:00

Heh. I never saw this edition of BBC Hardtalk with aid critic and author of Dead Aid Dambisa Moyo slugging it out with Allison Evans of the Overseas Development Institute.

Moyo held her own in this debate, but one cannot deny that Allison Evans dealt a real blow to her thesis here: One has to accept for want of proof that there's no correlation between aid and economic growth, let alone a negative impact that Moyo argues. Evans' argument also fell short, though; she tries to de-link bad governance and not having aid work, which I think you can't. If aid is going to work for a large population, you'd have to make sure that the government has the political will to do so. A government cannot have the political will to do so if it's more accountable to foreign governments and aid agencies than the people who need the aid.

Still, if you were to phase out aid, you'd be working under the assumption that governance will somehow have gotten more accountable to its people. Will it? One can see glimmers of this in some places. Nigeria has seen a few governors who are doing and have done good work (Bola Tinubu, Donald Duke, Fashola, et al). As economies develop, perhaps we will see governors getting younger and/or more involved in business in their countries, thereby aligning their interest to make profit and creating a good environment to do so through policy and governance mechanisms. The era where Europe and America can pay off some military bonehead like they did with Mobutu and Idi Amin to come into power is largely over (I hope), but it did leave an old guard of people who are used to power and not likely to leave. But as we see in Guinea, Niger, Eritrea, and Egypt -- and to a lesser extent in Rwanda, Kenya, Ethiopia, and Nigeria -- this era has not come to an end everywhere. I don't have any answers for what the best development model is going forward, but I seriously doubt that within a 5 or 10 year time-frame all African leaders would suddenly care a damn about their people enough to come up with development strategies for their betterment. In her quieter moments, I'm sure Dambisa Moyo would too.

Why Isn't Bill Gates a Businessman in Africa?

2010-08-08T04:39:00.000-04:00

Over at Ratio Magazine, Nairobi Star's Andrea Bohnstedt can't shake her unease about the Gates Foundation.

The Gates Foundation, in contrast [to aid agencies], is subject to no controls, and the article tellingly describes a meeting of Gates with some of the richest individuals who allegedly refer to themselves as the Good Club and muse how to fix the world. The article also raised the issue that the foundation sometimes invested its endowment in industries and sectors that were seen as detrimental to the poor who the foundation aims to help. The only sector that the endowment cannot be invested in is the tobacco industry, but apart from that it seeks to maximize returns.

I was mulling this ‘venture philanthropy’ with the niggling feeling that I had overlooked something. Eventually, I realized what it was: That Bill Gates, a man clearly so talented in doing business, in earning money, decides that The Poor must be helped through charity. This bifurcation has preoccupied me for a while: People who have been wildly successful in their career in the north will not bring that talent to developing countries. Instead, they bring charity, turning Africa into a theme park for good intentions. Bono and Geldof don’t play African concert tours. They collect donations for Africa, but don’t seem to invest in plain old boring regular companies around here. Bono’s wife runs an ethical clothing company that will get Kibera school kids (because it’s gotta be Kibera, right?) design t-shirts. Why doesn’t she invest in mass production of regular t-shirts? After he sold Celtel to MTC, Mo Ibrahim has set up a private equity fund, Satya Capital, but makes more headlines with his Mo Ibrahim foundation. Why can’t Bill Gates bring his immense business talent to, well, business?
If the Gates Foundation prides itself on doing things a different way, it still does not challenge the aid industry as such: it gives grants to intermediary foundation, many of whom represent the business-as-usual of the aid industry and the illusion of the fixability of single issues.

Here's my calculus.

I don't think the Gates Foundation is completely unencumbered. It could potentially deal a blow to aid agencies, the calculus goes, for the word to get out that African countries also present economic opportunities. With the PR machine having done such a good job of telling people how messed up things are, it would now be hard to be seen as making money from a land where everyone is poor. It'll be hard to spin that, because it'll involve a counter-narrative, one that could potentially be harmful to all the efforts to generate aid for projects all over the continent. Too many images of happy, smiling, not-emaciated children eating cheeseburgers and playing basketball after schools not in clay huts, and next thing you know the Western audience breathes a sigh of relief and thinks, "Oh, good! They're not basket cases anymore! Now we don't have to care since they can take care of themselves!" Folks would stop buying baskets from Africa with proceeds to go to the One Campaign's efforts in some random village. And the US will then feel more comfortable relaxing its 0.7% of GDP aid commitment to African countries (which they already don't meet anyway), and reducing for PEPFAR (Which, even as good as the PR machine is, they're currently doing). Funds slip. HIV rages on. Malaria stays on. Diseases we think we've gotten rid of like Ring Worm re-surface with no funds to fight them. And all because people decided to do what they wanted to all along - look away. It's just easier, the calculus goes, to fall in line with the narrative that already exists.

The sad fact is that reality in African countries is more complex than many give it credit for, but the media - in the U.S. especially - doesn't work with nuances. And when one does the calculus, aid agencies think it's better for folks to see Africa as totally helpless so as to gain attention to their cause. This has a nice tangent to the Kristof brouhaha. A decision on how to represent Africa has been made, and I bet if you were to ask people in aid agencies off the record and in their quieter moments, they will tell you it's for Africa's own good.