Four Easy Pieces – end

If you look for a divide between “left” and “right” today, you may find that those who think they are on the left say: we need special treatment because we have been victims in the past. Those who call themselves right wing say: we are being discriminated against now and nobody cares about us. Quite apart from the merits or demerits of the arguments, the omnipresence of the word victim is a devastating indicator. “Left” and “right”, “progressive” and “conservative”: all inhabit a society that has no interest in justice. Western society, deeply narcissistic, is looking for therapy.

However, no matter how nicely you dress it up, exclusion continues to rest on external features: chiefly – but not exclusively – skin and sex. Sure, the “progressives” will protest: but but but…we’re only against those who have all the power and are benefitting from unearned “privilege”. And yes, the “conservatives” wail: but but but… we’re only against those who really don’t want to belong here. Both arguments were used, to great effect, in the 1930s. The difference between them? Simple: the clearly delineated segments of society that were singled out for exclusion – or worse. Changing the target population does not signal progress. It signals the exact opposite.

However, it is especially distasteful when done for an alleged “progressive” cause. I found this assessment of the New Labour government on a British newspaper discussion site. I will let it speak for itself: ‘New Labour [was] a reactionary pro-market, oppressive, and even murderous, government which… managed to conserve the appearance of being progressive for many years by using the false veneer of identity politics… Many of us hate the way identity politics has been used to actually replace social justice.’

There is a word underpinning this sentiment: betrayal. While you were managing your supposedly progressive identity sweepstakes, you betrayed the original ideals of the progressive movement. And the results are in: today, the part of the world we call The West consists of a series of balkanized surveillance states where up to 20 per cent of the population has been cruelly written out of the script: uneducated, unemployable, a permanent underclass. Unrestrained commerce rules supreme, even after the monumental banking cock-up of 2008. Congratulations comrades! You were going to fight resurgent fascism – how, exactly?

What you need is a rigorous return to basics. This means the following: you are a member of a community, a society first. You are male, female, black, white, gay, lesbian, migrant, religious, atheist, et cetera second.

It is past time for the Left to rediscover why it was created in the first place: to bring about a more egalitarian society for all. Here is a clue, a paraphrase of that famous James Carville slogan that sums up four lost decades and which the Left needs to re-appropriate: ‘It’s the society, stupid!’ And once again, that means all of it – not just the part that looks and thinks like you.

New Dawn anyone? Let us hope so. All the best for 2013.

After a night’s work: dawn. April 14, 2011, 6am, Nzérékoré, Guinea

 

Four Easy Pieces – 3

Early evening, October 4^th, 1992. It’s five months after my return from Zimbabwe. Resettlement is not proceeding well. But this evening, all private musings become irrelevant background.

There is a massive accumulation of noise. Sirens, hundreds of them. Police, ambulances, fire brigades.All hurry to a place where apparently something absolutely massive has happened. And so it has. A cargo plane belonging to the Israeli airline El Al has lost two engines, made a last attempt to return to Schiphol Airport and has plummeted to the earth, smashing through a ten storeys high apartment block in Amsterdam’s Southeastern Bijlmer district. Fire, death and destruction. The Bijlmer Disaster, as it became known, leaves 43 people dead – probably more.

The Bijlmer is an area planned and designed in the 1960s to provide modern comfortable housing to city dwellers. It was spectacularly unsuccessful. After all, when left to its own devices, an ideology that seeks to uplift an entire society eventually gets to suffer from hubris. Of this Amsterdam social democratic hubris, the Bijlmer remains a powerful symbol.

The area stood largely empty for years. In the 1970s, it became home to many thousands of Surinamese, who were leaving their newly independent country en masse. It is at least ironic that the Independence of the sole existing Dutch colony on the Latin American mainland had been ordained, post haste, by the most progressive cabinet in Dutch history. And then, in one of those inexplicable historical twists, the Surinamese were joined by the descendants of some of their forebears, whom the Dutch had forcibly moved to Latin America, as slaves, mainly from Ghana. The Bijlmer became the destination of choice for African migrants, with papers or without. At the time of the crash, no-one knew for sure how many people were inside that stricken apartment block.

A few days later, the right-wing national daily De Telegraaf, had a picture on its front page of a long line of people waiting to get a paper that would qualify them for some compensation or other, in the aftermath of the crash. The newspaper, not known for its subtlety, asked its readers to note the faces in the line. Black faces. All pronounced to be illegal inhabitants of the disaster area. This is the precise moment that a well-orchestrated campaign began against immigration, with no end in sight.

And so it finally was back with a vengeance: identity politics, of the wrong kind – but identity politics all the same. After all, “we” had been very busy teaching people the virtues of identity politics – of the right kind, n’est ce pas? This old-but-new identity politics, the one “we” had thought we had kicked out of the house, has grown worryingly large, especially after those other plane crashes, this time deliberate, that destroyed the Twin Towers in New York. Immigrants, asylum seekers and Muslims – more and more groups have begun to qualify for exclusion. That is the central message of Geert Wilders, an abnormally successful populist politician in the Netherlands. What you see here is identity politics coming full circle. Fascism: say hello to feel-good fascism, and there is nothing the latter can do about the former: ideologically, politically, morally.

Is there a way out of this mess? Yes, I think there is. It’s called: back to basics. Final part tomorrow.

Four Easy Pieces – 2

Of course: it was the Left that had sent me on my way to Southern Africa. Teaching in Zimbabwe was my minute contribution to the project of constructing a Southern Africa where racial superiority thinking would be a thing of the past, sort of. Nearly every country in the region had shed it – at least formally – and in the late 1980s it was already crystal clear that the last remaining bulwark, apartheid South Africa, would be next.

That was the message of a massive musical extravaganza, the Harare leg of a series of world-class concerts called Human Rights Now. It had been organised by Amnesty International in 1988. I was fortunate enough to be there. Peter Gabriel! Tracy Chapman! Bruce Springsteen! Oliver Mtukudzi! And the high point? Music I had never heard before – mbalax, made by the man I share this city with and had the pleasure of interviewing earlier this year: Youssou Ndour.

But there were other matters I was blissfully, stupendously unaware of, and not just inside Zimbabwe itself. Under my radar, something was happening to the movement I felt myself part of. This became much more evident when I had – reluctantly – returned to Europe. I noticed screed after column after thesis, with increasing frequency and loudness, denouncing a portion of society deemed congenitally “racist”, “sexist”,  “homophobe”. That portion was, inevitably, the only group that was able, by dint of breathing in and breathing out, to be all these things at the same time. In one phrase: people who looked – more or less – like me.

With hindsight the following question is legitimate: could it be, that when we progressives were busy throwing out one reprehensible form of thinking like apartheid…through the front door, through the backdoor, off the balcony if necessary…could it be that we were simultaneously inviting into the living room another form of reprehensible thinking? One that did not sound exactly similar but was, in point of fact, exactly the same? I think now that the answer to that question is a resounding “Yes”.

My other city, Amsterdam, where I was born, had a proud tradition of social-democratic rule. It gave us, among many other things, housing projects for the working classes that are still the envy of the world. It would have been utterly inconceivable for those who designed these plans that their ideas about “uplifting the masses”, to use that ancient phrase, would have excluded specific groups because of how they looked. That was precisely what fascism had been about and wherever it reared its head, progressives joined forces to ensure it did not  gain power again. Today, the left is powerless to defeat it. Why? Because it has been dabbling in what I prefer to call: feel-good fascism.

Sometimes, a dramatic event can serve to highlight this like no other. Part three, tomorrow.

Four Easy Pieces

Mutare is a charming town in the east of Zimbabwe, a six hours’ bus ride from my former home in a remote rural area. It was April 1992 and I was strolling along the High Street for the very last time, a long goodbye to the music venues, some (rather dodgy) hotels, the shops, department stores, restaurants and market stalls. And of course: numerous friends.

My contract with this nation’s Ministry of Education had come to an end. I had worked as an English teacher in two very different schools. One was a well-established Roman Catholic mission school, the other so fresh that on my first visit it still smelled of bricks and mortar, like Zimbabwe’s Independence itself. These were rollercoaster years. Triumph and optimism played ball with disappointment; there was comedy and tragedy in spades and there were, for a lot of us, the traces, never fully erased, left behind by a single road tragedy in August 1991.

Zimbabwe was a “donor darling”, in reception of huge amounts of aid, no questions asked, certainly not about the murderous military campaign president Mugabe’s army had just finished in the South and the West. With the aid came hordes of development workers and volunteers. People like me: adventurous, reasonably professional, not armed with sufficient knowledge of the country to understand what was really going on there…but crucially, with impeccable left-wing political credentials. In short, not particularly suited to deal with a country freshly out of its war for independence and inhabited by people with street cred well beyond their age.

Still, now the contract is over and I am making my last Mutare round. Inevitably, I meet other volunteers. Small talk.

‘So you’re leaving?’ followed by ‘And what’s next?’

Well, I quite like this work to put it mildly. So my reply runs like this: ‘Well, I’m going back home but I hope to be back soon, in some other posting, I’m sure something will come up. So yes, I’m looking forward to more development work.’

‘You can’t,’ one of my alleged colleagues states, matter-of-fact.

Slightly taken aback and definitely not taking the hint, I venture: ‘I can’t…why not?’

‘Because you’re white – and you’re male.’

We say our goodbyes, me gobsmacked, she in excellent spirits, on her way to her next assignment.

Fast forward 20 years and I am working in Dakar as an independent correspondent. My reflections on what had been bothering me about the movement that calls itself “progressive” had brought me back to that Zimbabwean street and I realise that this was the very first time I had come across a phenomenon that has strangled to near-death that part of the political spectrum that thinks itself “of the Left”. Part two, tomorrow.

Gays and a London magazine

In the next few weeks/months (whenever I feel like it) I’m going to write some occasional comments on a magazine I used to write for. It’s a monthly called New African that offers the reader a combination of pure journalism and seriously agenda-driven writing. Making the distinction between the two can be difficult, although in this case, it’s not. Alright, here goes. 

 

New African’s editor Baffour Ankomah has decided to add a new dimension to the magazine’s tradition of heaping praise on some (not all) violent power grabbers like Charles Taylor and Robert Mugabe. In February this year, Ankomah wrote another one of his popular editorial commentaries, known as Baffour’s Beefs. Beefs has two key stylistic elements: it uses a lot of words and takes forever to get to the point. But there is never any mistaking of the target of his rhetorical long-distance arrows. This time it was gays.

Mind you, the targets are always arrived at by way of others, in this case David Cameron, the UK prime minister. Cameron said earlier this year that he was making aid disbursement contingent on African nations showing respect for (among others) gay rights. (You know my view on aid so we’ll leave that issue to one side for now.)

Beefs asked the question why Cameron ties giving aid to promoting something that ‘affronts the innate values of the African…’ This is a nasty little rhetorical trick he uses on occasion, to great effect. In this case, the implication was crystal-clear: molesting a gay man or a lesbian is akin to socking it to The White Man, who, and this is an important subtext to a lot of New African’s output, is racist, colonial…let’s say: Not A Very Nice Person. The writer carefully offers an extraordinarily mealy-mouthed ‘That however does not mean that we should persecute gays, as in Uganda or Malawi….’ but the point that gays are fair game has been made and will be repeated later.

In December, to be precise. Subject matter of Beefs this time: who will be the new Head of the Church of England? One main contender was John Sentamu, with whom Ankomah has a long-standing feud, originating in the former’s criticism and the latter’s starry-eyed admiration of Zimbabwean president Robert Gabriel Mugabe. Comrade Bob, like a true born African, does not like gays either.

So: why did Sentamu not become the new Head of the Church of England? We’re hundreds of words into Beefs when the cat finally comes out of the bag: Sentamu is against gay marriage. That is why he did not get the job. You see, white men are not only Not Very Nice – they also shag each other. And here, Ankomah uses his trick again: Sentamu remembered that ‘…he was African after all…’, hence his anti-gay and gay marriage stance. Oh really?

Early 2011, I had the pleasure of interviewing the long-serving Cameroonian lawyer Alice Nkom, the first African woman ever to have been called to the bar in her country and a tireless campaigner for the rights of her compatriots (my radio report is the bottom link on this page). She famously defended the late crusading journalist and fellow citizen Pius Njawe. Equally famously, she defends the rights of sexual minorities in her country, where a widespread theory circulates that claims the French colonizers only granted independence once they were sure their successors were all gay… Back on Planet Earth, here’s a lengthy quote from my interview with Maître Nkom. Read this slowly.

‘Homosexuality is un-African? No, homophobia is un-African. It has entered the continent in tandem with two imported religions: Christianity and Islam. The most important value of our Constitution is the equality of all people in terms of rights and obligations. This means that regardless of my sexual orientation or my religion I have the same rights to protection of my home and my private life, as everyone else. In consequence, whatever I get up to in my home, in my bedroom, is my affair and mine alone and as long as I don’t call the police because there is danger, absolutely no-one has the right to come and disturb my peace. So when I defend the rights of sexual minorities I am following to the letter the constitution of Cameroon and I am helping the president to guarantee the constitutional rights of all.’

Maître Nkom later added that the persecution of sexual minorities, apart from being unconstitutional, also targets the poorest people in society. ‘I find that personally hurtful and it goes against all the values I have been inculcated with since childhood.’

A lawyer I will never be but I reckon it is appropriate to end here with a simple: I rest my case.

There are more interesting features adorning New African, such as its unwavering support for certain autocrats, its animosity towards the International Criminal Court and, of course, Europe. That’s for some other time. 

Deadly Geography

Sometimes, reality hits home when you move temporarily away from it. In February, I was covering the first round of Senegal’s presidential elections – out of Dakar.

Coming back from Tambacounda (where I met two excellent rap artists) and Kaolack (where an office belonging to the then ruling party was burnt down) I was looking at the landscape from a bush taxi and thinking: this is all very empty. Sand. Savannah. A few trees. A few homes. And a town or two.

Our taxi took a brand new ring road around the town of Diourbel, 146 kilometres from Dakar. Then we joined the old road to Thiès, which runs next to a railway rack. It was astonishing how fast places were filling up. Sand and savannah were still there but the rhythm of the settlements increased – dramatically.

Long before we got into Thiès, we were driving through what was basically giant sprawl. The final stretch from Thiès itself to Dakar, 65 kilometres, is fast becoming one massive megacity.

Not much later, a story in La Gazette (called Deadly Geography) made the point. It said that more than half of the entire Senegalese electorate was living in three rather small districts: Dakar, Thiès, Diourbel. Tambacounda district, which has far more surface area than those three combined was home to…less than 4% of the country’s electorate.

The strain is obvious. Newspaper Le Populaire reported this week that the National Statistics and Demographic Office had calculated that between 2000 and 2009 rents some parts of Dakar had gone up by almost 40%. Forty per cent! Friends keep telling me to NEVEREVEREVER abandon this apartment I’m renting because I will never get this much value for money again…

Question: where did these eye-watering rent increases take place? Sure, Central Dakar, where the expensive offices are. But also in Guédiawaye and Pikine. That’s where the poorest people in town live! If this is the free market at work, someone’s clearly having a laugh.

The strain is obvious in other ways too. Power cuts at any moment. Water pressure in many parts of town (expect the expensive ones) is now so low that this shower you have in your bathroom is…decoration, basically. Any agglomeration that grows at such breakneck speed cannot possibly expect service provision to keep up.

Yes, we know. Cities continue to grow fast because rural folk look for opportunities not available in the village: money, jobs, and so on. Some succeed, a lot more don’t. Fact is, very few go back. I met the grand total of one on my country trip: Vincent had left behind his dreadful and badly paid job as a night guard and had started farming. He was glad to be out of Dakar. But there are very few like him.

Dakar was home, this week, to a massive jamboree called Africites, in the obscenely expensive King Fahd Palace (formerly the Meridien). Hopefully the mayors from all corners of the globe and the other luminaries caught a glimpse of “the other side of town”, if only to reinforce their firmly held and often voiced conviction that they are firmly in touch with “The People”.

More to come on cities. Making them places where you can lead a decent life rather than just vegetate is arguably the biggest challenge on the planet, although it appears that they’re having a word about this thingy called climate change in another jamboree far from here. Well, not that far actually: you can fly directly from Dakar to nearby Dubai. On Emirates.

Dear Oh Dear, BBC

At its best, the BBC World Service’s From Our Own Correspondent offers interesting insights into countries that radio listeners may never visit.

On other occasions, the program gets things rather spectacularly wrong. Such as when Celeste Hicks, in her own tale, wanders into the dressing room of Nahawa Doumbia, one of Mali’s most celebrated jelis and gushes ‘I’m from the BBC!’ To which this national icon, tired of an evening-long performance, will probably have thought: et alors (so what)? Mercifully, there are still plenty of places in the world were someone who waltzes in with the three magical letters “B-B-C” on her lips does not find red carpets immediately being rolled out. Bless.

Anyway, Hicks gets her interview in the end and then proceeds to pontificate about how and why Mali’s musicians, renowned the world over, are not using their voices to comment on the situation in the North of their country. To which I, an order of magnitude less polite than Nahawa Doumbia, can only respond with:

W—-T—-F?????

Well, alright, she has probably missed Salif Keita in this week’s Jeune Afrique stating: “Anyone who bans music is not a Muslim.” Amin to that, by the way. But really: how long does the list have to be of Malian singers, musicians, performers who had plenty and then some to say about what is going on in their country. Let’s say, off the top of my head:

♪Singer/instrumentalist Fatoumata Diawara

♪Mali’s premier diva Oumou Sangaré

♪Singer/guitarst Samba Touré, whom I interviewed in Amsterdam this summer

♪Fadimata Walett Oumar of the band Tartit

♪Amkoullel, Mali’s very outspoken rapper

…and that’s just one cull of a few months trawling the Radio Netherlands Africa website. (Here’s a radio show I did on Mali just a few months ago, if you have a little time.)

You can add the likes of Cheikh Tidiane Seck, Bassékou Kouyaté, Toumani Diabaté and many more. And then you can add the story of the radio presenter in Gao who was beaten up by the Salafist invaders as he refused to obey their orders. And the youth protests because the Salafist invaders have taken their music away. Or indeed my own interview with Manny Ansar, director of the Festival Au Désert, which will become a caravan for peace this year (and I’m joining, yes!). 

And, incidentally, if by any chance you cannot make it to this festival – you have two things in Amsterdam to look forward to…

Manny Ansar told me that the (mostly foreign) Salafist vandals who are destroying North Mali ransacked his festival property and emptied a Kalashnikov on the sign of his festival. ‘The message was clear,’ he added drily. But never one to give up, he then told me about his audacious plan. His festival was going to travel, in a wide, elegant double arc around Salafist-occupied North Mali. One through Mauritania and South Mali; the other through Algeria and Niger. The gesture is very clearly designed to say this: you cannot stop us.

Hicks has at least four years of experience in the Sahel. How could she have missed this plethora of Malian music commentary? It’s genuinely puzzling. I guess that in her defense one may say that she works in and for a bubble. The BBC, like its newspaper cousin The Guardian, recruits from a limited pool of white, middle class, uni graduates – or, in the name of diversity, from a slightly larger pool of people who don’t look like white, middle-class uni graduates but who think like them. But is that really the explanation?

So, for those of you who were as genuinely flabbergasted as I was by this episode of From Our Own Correspondent, apparently done in Bamako, it’s not you. It’s the BBC. Again.

Local authorities

Question: are all local authorities the same? Or, as my old Zimbabwean friends would say: do they all have the same mother?

Exhibit HERE: when the Autoroute de lAéroport was built, only a few short years ago, it bisected the lovely village of Yoff. ExhibitTHERE: the same occurred in the 1960s, when the village of Badhoevedorp (where I grew up) was cut in two unequal parts by the A9 motorway.

The one in Yoff is level with the surrounding area and… I just remember, I wrote about this here and don’t have to repeat myself any more unnecessarily that I do already…

Now – here comes the point.

When the road was finished, people still wanted to cross to go shopping, see their family, go to work, see their friends and so on. As there was the grand total on ZERO footbridges, people set about crossing the lethal sixlaner on foot. Dangerous, definitely. Got a better idea?

Well yes: bridges of course! There is today a grand total of TWO, about a mile apart and (of course) not at the one point where it would have made the most sense, i.e.: where people actually cross. So the daily death-defying runs across l’Autoroute remain.

Until yesterday.

Sharp whistles rang out. The sound, which usually conjures up images of bent traffic cops trying to extract some cash from wily taxi drivers, came from gendarmes who were, for the first time ever, actually preventing people from crossing the road!

The road in question. Pic taken from one of those bridges, just two hours after a kerosine tanker had crashed on the day I moved into my apartment, October 2009.

So this is the solution the powers that be come up with: do not, whatever you do, come up with a solution that would actually be popular – no. Do not, under any circumstance, build a bridge that people may actually want to use. No: use enforcement instead. And leave the undesirable situation in place. That way, everybody wins, no?

Incidentally, that awful road in my old village is of course still there – noise 24/7, elevated six metres into the sky and going on for miles. Another Exhibit THERE: Amsterdam municipality has decided to build the most expensive piece of pipe humankind has ever seen so that it can also say: we have an Underground, saddling generations of Amsterdammers with a grotesquely inflated local tax bill.

I’d welcome more examples of administrative insanity, I’m sure there’s loads. Not that they ever learn anything but it’s fun exchanging the horror stories. Meanwhile, the gendarmes will certainly be back. Not holding my breath as to when that third footbridge will be built…