Interruption

While I was preparing my series on the Central African Republic, an act of treachery was perpetrated in the country that I, for now at least, consider my home.

Burkina Faso. Or, to be more precise: Ouagadougou. Because the writ of this merry band (1,300 all told) of ex-president Blaise Compaoré’s personal guards, who have committed this coup d’état, does not extend beyond the confines of the capital. And because they do not even control the city in any meaningful way, they have resorted to terrorising the population. It’s what they have done for almost three decades. As a result, Ouagadougou has fallen: from one of West Africa’s most pleasant cities to one of its most dangerous and unpredictable.

Well done, putchists!

The people, however, are unlikely to be deterred.

I follow things very closely, thanks to the legions of Burkinabè who have taken to Twitter, Facebook and other social media to show the world the extent of this treasonous assault on their legitimate democratic aspirations.

Yes, mistakes have been made during the Transition. Nobody disputes that. And the transitional authorities must take a good look at themselves and ask if they had not bitten off more than they could chew. They should have prepared the country for elections and leave everything else in the hands of the next elected government. But nothing, absolutely nothing, justifies the hi-jacking of the Transition by an armed gang of 1,300 that belongs on History’s garbage truck.

Their actions, last Thursday, have merely postponed their removal. But before they go, things could turn messy and ugly.

There is now mediation going on. The only matter that should be under discussion is their departure. The African Union yesterday gave them 96 hours. They are unlikely to heed that deadline. But there are other things afoot. Town after town is falling squarely in the hands of the people. A general strike of unlimited duration has already been announced. It is likely to be heeded.

These actions of the Burkinabè people need outside support. If an international  blockade is needed, it needs to be enforced. I’m looking at you, President Ouattara and company: your country, Côte d’Ivoire, is key in this respect. In spite of the rumours that political and business friends of ex-president Compaoré have given large sums of money to the gang that kids itself in charge, a concerted national and international action would probably suffice to smoke them out.

1,300 troops against 17 million Burkinabè, minus the few who stand to gain by the death of the democratic dream, however flawed. But as Winston Churchill quipped: democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the other ones that have been tried. It is what the Burkinabè aspire to. A tiny group of fundamentally irrelevant politico-military hooligans will not stand in their way for very long.

Fighting the Void

In the aftermath of another unspeakable massacre in northeastern Nigeria, a earlier orgy of butchery at a school in Peshawar, Pakistan and a relatively small one in Paris last week the worldwide handwringing continues, in tandem with the gloating (in some isolated quarters) about these deaths. What they all had in common was that the victims – ordinary folk from towns and villages, schoolboys, journalists and artists – carried no arms. Their killers did.

In Paris, the murder of 17 people in three days by armed thugs was unusual; massacres of such magnitude are rare in Europe although they do occur from time to time, as they have in Scotland, Germany and Norway. But as the identity of the Paris killers emerged, the media wheeled out the same tired old predictable tropes as they went into their habitual overdrive. I consider 24-hours-a-day rolling news one of the worst mental afflictions that humankind these days has to endure. (Thanks, Ted Turner.) Another affliction is known as “Social Media”. Yes, I am a part of it but it is deplorable to see an ever-expanding tin foil hat crowd that used to have a corner in a London park, a megaphone and perhaps two minutes of the public’s attention now dispose of a worldwide forum, seven days a week, to throw raw sewage into any online discussion. Read the Al Jazeera commentaries and weep.

Every sane person on the planet knows that invoking Islam when burning innocent people in their own homes, sending a 10-years-old girl into a crowded market with bombs strapped to her little body, or indeed mowing people down in their place of work…that none of this implies that Islam endorses murder. Similarly, all are aware that full freedom of speech exists nowhere, a situation that I personally find deeply unsatisfactory. Censorship is alive and well, from religious restrictions in many parts of the world, via the plague of political correctness in much of the West and all the way through to states that have been in the business of shutting down free speech everywhere since forever. Charlie Hebdo has a history of at times pretty serious investigative journalism. Here’s a rundown of those who have tried, unsuccessfully, to shut it down and the list leaves out members of the French establishment who have been no friend of free speech. Freedom of expression will always be negotiated under ever shifting circumstances and conditions. Discussions about the existence, yes or no, of freedom of speech and its limits are part of these negotiations.

Street art, Dakar Biënnale “off”, Biscuiterie de Medina, 2014

But what about those killers? It took a Burkinabè newspaper editorial to cut through all the post-Paris-massacre teeth-gnashing and get straight to the point. There is no reason, Aujourd’hui (Today) argues, to run around in circles asking the same “Why did they do it???” over and over again because the answer will remain the same: a roaring, deafening silence. Referring to the Paris killers the paper said: ‘This type believes in nothing. They don’t believe in God. They don’t believe in the devil.’ This stance, I think, will allow us to move past the distractions (Free speech! False Flag! Religion!) and move into a much more action-oriented “How.” How does a society, any society, prevent this sort of thing from happening?

Short-term is practical. When empty-brained loons destroyed Timbuktu in 2012 and in January 2015 tore through Nigerian villages and shot an editorial team to pieces, the question was: where was the army? Where were the intelligence services? In the first case, the Malian army was fatally weakened by decades of policies, dictated by international donors on whose money the Malian state depends, which never took national security into account. Nigeria, in its turn, has no such excuse and neither do the likes of France. The claims that intelligence prevents similar outrages to occur more frequently may well be true but the fact that the Paris killers were known but not apprehended before they could come into action suggests, in the famous Napoleonic sense, incompetence verging on criminal negligence. Similar was reported about US Intelligence services prior to the September 11 attacks. This will not do. Effective armies and intelligent intelligence are crucial to a nation’s defence; actions that distract from keeping the public safe are borderline treasonous.

Long-term is the more difficult challenge. There are fundamental questions to be asked about the kind of society people want to live in. Are we happy in a society that consigns up to one-fifth of the population to irrelevance because they are considered too stupid or under-educated (Netherlands), or because they live in the wrong postal code (Paris) or because they live in a region that is considered politically irrelevant (Nigeria)? Because this creates tens of thousands of lives filled with resentful nothingness, a Void. And from there, people can easily be sucked into Another Void where nihilism rules and murder exists purely for its own sake, as Aujourd’hui asserts.

For some societies, it may already be too late to have proper protection against the products of The Void; it has been allowed to balloon to unsustainable proportions with extremism on the one side and populism on the other. All this has been made infinitely worse by a crop of leaders who have unleashed criminal and illegal wars because, wait for it, “God told me so”. With politicians like these, who needs enemies? The future of the leading nations of the West does not look good. At all.

Ouagadougou, October 2014. Pic: koulouba.com

So what can be done, then? Forgive me for banging an old drum here but this is where the Left has, unforgivably, dropped the ball. Left-wing politics, where one would traditionally look for answers to these serious redistribution issues has disappeared up its own politically correct arse. It has ditched its social democratic roots, embraced the free market and hung the label “progressive” on a political patronage system created around self-declared representatives of groups that had declared themselves, rightly or wrongly, historically deprived. Crucially, none of these claims were interrogated. You cannot ask hard questions when identity politics has all the answers. It is exactly the same trick employed by the defenders of the assassins of Paris, Nigeria and indeed the criminal, murderous loon Breivik in Norway. The Left, as I have argued before, can only be repaired by a return to basics but does it want to restore its long-lost credibility? The answer seems to be a resounding “No.” 

Where to look, then, to fill that Void? Some claim to have found the answer, parading with knives and guns and beheading people under a black-and-white flag. These are the lost pirates, rebels without a cause, the nothing-believers, as Aujourd’hui calls them. Very frankly, they are a distraction. Where we are heading, I predict, is back – or forward! – to classic class warfare. For a picture of what that entails look no further than the burnt-out buildings I am seeing when cycling through the Burkinabè capital, Ouagadougou. These carefully selected targets all belonged to the ruling class. In different places and in different ways, History is already busy repeating itself and dear reader, do not, for a single second, believe that you will be safe.

A perceptive 2015

One afternoon last May, I took this picture from the veranda of the charming hotel I was staying in Joal-Fadiouth, a few hour’s south of my former home, Dakar.

Looking at it on my laptop a few weeks later I was astonished. Surely, those trees were not there?

Evidently, they were. My memory was playing tricks or – more probably – I had not been watching properly. I toyed with the idea of calling the image “The Phantom Forest” but that wold be unjust to the baobab trees who have been there for centuries. (Not that they’d care much…)

And now I am in Ouagadougou, where a lot has been happening recently as the rest of the world was busing looking elsewhere – or couldn’t be bothered to look – or was in fact watching things but chose to ignore what was happening in front of its nose.

Reality, like those trees, does not care. My job is in essence to look, to look again, to look harder and then ask the inevitable question: ‘Have I missed anything?’

The answer is equally inevitable: ‘Yes, you most probably have.’

Here’s to a perceptive 2015.

Pestilence

This happened about a month ago in Guinea: villagers killed eight people who came to tell them about the dangers of Ebola.

It has been the topic of conversation ever since. Words most frequently used include “brutal”, “savage” and “barbaric”. While these words may accurately describe the killings themselves, they bring us no closer to understanding why this happened. As usual, in the bulk of media reports on events in Africa, there is an essential element missing. History.

From the perspective of an inhabitant of Guinea Forestière, the past 125 years or so have been marked by a litany of highly disruptive events, almost all coming from the coast. The list looks like this, in no particular order:

 

War

Colonial conquest

Forced labour

Land occupation

Forced movement of people

Cultural vandalism on an industrial scale

More war

Masses of refugees from across the borders

Illegal rebel camps

Mass displacement

Environmental degradation…

 

…and, as the French say, j’en passe. By and large, pre and post-independence, men with arms have had a bad reputation here. Historically, they have been mostly seen to vandalise, to rob, to loot and take people away.

It may well be that we now have the first government in history, ever since the French established Conakry late 19^th century, that at the very least has good intentions. But that does not negate the view from the forest, which is, based on painful experience, that pretty much everything that comes from the coast, the capital, the government, is disruptive and violent. A convoy of cars appearing out of nowhere usually spells trouble. People have memories. The village has a memory. The region has a memory. Most reporting ignores that.

Here is a thought, then. After all, there is one item missing from that list above and maybe the thinking of the people in that village, Womey, when they saw that convoy appear, was along these lines: well here’s one thing that we haven’t yet received from the coast, the capital, the government: pestilence. And sure enough, that’s what they’re here to give us.

It is critical to understand where these killings have come from. History be your guide so that true lessons may be learned – and, may I add, not in the ritual sense so beloved by the development establishment. An uplifting story from elsewhere in the region suggests that this is beginning to be the case.

 

Masters of the game

A review of AfricaFrance, quand les dirigeants africains deviennent les maîtres du jeu by Antoine Glaser

Between France and Africa, who calls the shots?

France, assert the conspiracy theorists, who see a concerted, coordinated, well-orchestrated and successful effort on the part of the French to keep their former colonies (and a few others) well in line and on board. Reality, as always, is rather less clear-cut and a lot murkier. Antoine Glaser is very well placed to shed a light on a few corners of this large French-African village; for thirty years he edited La Lettre du Continent, the confidential repository of the inner workings of this large and complex web.

But who calls the shots? In his new book, AfricaFrance, quand les dirigeants africains deviennent les maîtres du jeu, Glaser asserts that the balance of power has shifted. Moreover, this is not even something new. It has always been the case that France needs Africa more than the reverse. For diplomatic assistance, i.e. votes in the United Nations. For some of its enterprises, like France Télécom, Bouygues and Bolloré (all manner of transport, agribusiness, infrastructure). And for its famous force de frappe; uranium from Niger fuelled France’s status as one of the few nuclear powers in the world; it still fuels France’s power stations that bring light to millions of French homes. The French firm Areva runs one of the biggest uranium extraction operations in the world in Niger.

So what has changed? Two things spring to mind as Glaser takes you from Côte d’Ivoire to Gabon to Congo-Brazzaville, Guinea and five others. First, France is no longer the only game in the village; there is healthy competition from the likes of China, North America, Brasil, India and Turkey. All have their designs on the continent and especially in a business sense they are giving the former colonial power a run for her money. Second, France now has to deal with a generation of African leaders who do not hesitate to use their leverage to get what they want. If France does not comply, they go elsewhere.

And third, if you like, the nature of their personal relations has changed. There used to be an axis that essentially consisted of two people. On the French side: Jacques Foccart, the spider who weaved his elaborate web of personal relations over a long period, from before independence in the 1950s until his death in March 1997. On the African side: Félix Houphouët-Boigny, the aristocrat from Yamoussoukro in the heart of Côte d’Ivoire, a former minister and member of parliament in Paris and at the helm of the richest territory in former French West Africa from 1960 until his death in December 1993. They were on the phone daily. Friendship apart, they had a joint interest in keeping French dominance in the region in place; after all, Houphouët-Boigny is credited with the term that symbolises this symbiosis: La Françafrique.

They stopped at nothing to maintain French dominance in the region and this included tearing West Africa’s nascent superpower, Nigeria, apart. Glaser is adamant that the idea to support the secession movement that triggered West Africa’s bloodiest war came from the Ivorian president. Houphouët-Boigny and Foccart, with the permission of General De Gaulle, the French president at the time, set up an elaborate secret operation that circumvented the Nigerian blockade of what the federal government there considered a renegade state and sent arms and humanitarian aid to the beleaguered people of Biafra. They certainly prolonged the war, which lasted from 1967 to 1970, cost one million lives and traumatised countless more.

Biafra. The story, so movingly recorded in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie novel Half of a Yellow Sun, needs much closer study because it is at the origin of a highly pernicious modern-day confluence of cynical geopolitical designs and interventions touted as humanitarianism, with modern media (press, radio and most of all television) as the vehicle to get the “correct” message to the masses. Media consumers were made to think of the people of Biafra as helpless victims of a merciless war machine. Volunteers were flown in to help heal the wounded; they may or may not have been aware of the larger designs of which they were a part (including secret arms deliveries) but they certainly were aware of the power of the media. It is no coincidence that Biafra launched the career of a man whose unauthorised biography I am currently reading, one Bernard Kouchner, a co-founder of what became Medicins sans frontières.

Bamako Airport, February 2013. The Antonov transport plane was shuttling between Dakar and Bamako at the height of the French operations in Mali.

There is no chapter on Mali in Glaser’s book but twice he mentions current French president François Hollande’s exclamation on arrival in Bamako in February 2013, as his army is removing jihadists from the North of Mali: ‘Today is without any doubt the most important day of my political life.’ De Gaulle would not have dreamt of saying something like that. Times have indeed changed in some respects. The Gabonese president Ali Bongo, son of another departed pillar of La Françafrique, Omar Bongo Ondimba, prefers London as a place to do business, as does Alpha Condé, president of Guinea who spent most of life in exile – in Paris. And Denis Sassou-Nguesso, who re-conquered the presidency of Congo-Brazzaville after a vicious civil war that was fuelled on his side by French oil money, clearly is the Africa-French patron today. He calls the shots in Paris. A picture emerges of a French president who, when told by his African counterparts to jump, responds with: how high?

However, the clean break with the past that has often been promised by incoming French presidents, fails to happen. This would mean getting rid of the various webs of opaque, unaccountable, dodgy and at times downright criminal relationships between the movers and shakers in France and Africa. Reading the book you get the impression of watching a film with an endless cast of shady characters that appear, then disappear (sometimes for good) or re-appear in another guise. What to think of the richissime businessman Jean-Yves Ollivier, recently breathlessly lionised by the usual suspects (BBC, Guardian, Independent et al) for his untold part in the liberation of the late Nelson Mandela and the creation of post-apartheid South Africa. Well, he has his cameo in Glaser’s book too: as the best friend of Denis Sassou-Nguesso and an ally of Jean-Pierre Bemba, currently at the International Criminal Court in The Hague on charges of war crimes. Ollivier is also a friend of yet another one of those characters, Michel Roussin, formerly a big shot in the French secret service, then minister for development cooperation and a special advisor to big French businesses with interests in Africa. He has a handful of African presidents on speeddial.

It takes a bit of prior knowledge of the African/French village to appreciate the extent and the depth of these and other networks. They persist, unless countries just break off ties altogether, as post-genocide Rwanda did. But there is another constant here. While it is fascinating to read about all this intrigue, this real-life feuilleton, you must realise that this is a game of the 1%. The vast majority of Africans on whose life some of these games have impacted directly, have an idea of what is going on but no means to influence events. And that is the real travesty of La Françafrique, or Africa-France.

Hero

What do Charles Taylor, Robert Mugabe, Laurent Gbagbo and Thabo Mbeki have in common? Apart from the fact that all have been presidents (one still is and will be until he dies) and all have to a greater or lesser extent autocratic tendencies and three out of four have proved to be prone to violence. Well? Here it is: they all hate The West and the Evil People who populate it although some (Mbeki) are better at hiding it than others (his northern neighbour). And because they all hate that monstrous entity that spreads disease, pestilence, death, destruction and bad entertainment around the world wherever it puts its jackboot, they all have earned the adoring admiration of the magazine I used to write for and from time to time write about: New African, NA for short.

Once upon a time the magazine sailed a journalistic course with regards to Côte d’Ivoire but then I wrote a letter to the editor (never published) reminding him that since Laurent Gbagbo employed exactly the same anti Western rhetoric as its other heroes (if not similar repressive methods like Mugabe) they should support him to the hilt. I remain, until this very day, deeply disappointed that I have never been given credit for the swift change in editorial line that NA performed in order to chime with the magazine’s central narrative: The West is plotting in more than a thousand ways to keep the Black Man Down.

It did obediently reproduce a piece about the Ivorian crisis penned by former South African president Thabo Mbeki, the contents of which came straight from the Public Relations Department of the Front Populaire Ivoirien, Gbagbo’s very own ZANU-PF. To this day, the FPI remains firmly convinced that its leader won the elections and that France’s former ADHD president Sarkozy put Ouattara on the throne with United Nations complicity. And that’s another thing that all these have in common with NA’s central narrative, which is a seductive mix of perpetual victimhood based on kernels of truth without any self-reflection. It produces a deeply disempowering political agenda.

The reason I am writing all this is that I have discovered that NA has added a new hero to its expanding Heroes’ Pantheon. His name? His Excellency, Sheikh Professor Alhaji Doctor Jahya Abdel Aziz Jemus Junkug Jammeh, President of the Republic of The Gambia! He ticks all the right boxes. Came to power in a coup in 1994 and has since developed the mindset that running his country, into the ground as it happens, is his inalienable birthright. He has turned the country into his private property and a police state. Also a haven for money laundering and arms smuggling. And sex tourism for middle-aged women from the UK, Netherlands, Germany and elsewhere. Business Is Booming.

Jammeh’s greatest claim to fame dates back to April 2000, when he ordered the army to open fire on unarmed schoolchildren on a demonstration, while exclaiming his most memorable quote: shoot the bastards. He had a few more executed in 2012 as his jails were facing a capacity problem. Now that’s what I call efficiency. He also supports at least one of the factions that is causing frequent havoc across the border in Senegal’s Casamance Province, effectively holding the government in Dakar hostage: if you allow too much Gambian dissidence on your territory, all hell will break loose in your beloved Casamance. So far, it has worked like a charm.

 

But why has His Excellency etc etc etc earned himself the adoring admiration of New African magazine? Because he hates The West and the Evil People in it. He has become worried about the fact that The West takes a disproportionately large part of Africa’s wealth. This Must Change. He advocates a program of redistribution that he may, one day, want to apply in his own country. Apparently, The Gambia is sitting on oil and His Excellency etc etc has discovered…the Gambian People. To whom the oil belongs. Interesting thought. He has made other striking revelations in the past, such as not needing doctors to cure AIDS; he can do that himself. (I seem to remember Thabo Mbeki had a rather tenuous relationship with the scientific explanation of the disorder…) His Excellency etc etc also likes to employ unregistered armies, like Charles Taylor, to further his objectives. As far as anyone can see he only has one, the same as Mugabe: staying in power until he dies. He has more things in common with the Dear Leader in Harare: he recently left The Commonwealth because it is colonialist and the two are also united in their intense homophobia. ‘Worse than pigs and dogs,’ in Mugabeland; ‘vermin’, in Jammehland.  Both were upstaged recently by Uganda’s gay-hating president Yoweri Museveni, whom NA dislikes intensely because he is deemed a “stooge of the West” but who knows, things may change…

So NA went to The Gambia and did a MAC (Mutual Adoration Chat), went on to publish a few quotes on oil and a letter castigating someone who had the gall to criticise this hero of the fight against colonialism, slavery, exploitation, greed and racism, which as you know are the only relevant hallmarks of The West and its Evil People. I, for one, am pleased to see His Excellency Sheikh Professor Alhaji Doctor Jahya Abdel Aziz Jemus Junkug Jammeh, President of the Republic of The Gambia, curer of AIDS, swift dispatcher of school children, brave protagonist of proxy conflict, expert emptier of prisons and champion of the downtrodden included in NA’s Heroes’ Pantheon. Maybe he could accompany the editor on one of his frequent trips to a certain Heroes’ Acre in the Zimbabwean capital where some heroes are notable for their absence. Not that this should detain this new beautiful pair as they gushingly report from Paradise On Earth.

French alleged comedian Dieudonné messes with PC heads

The BBC, the world’s largest PC (politically correct) echo chamber, has a problem. It has to cover a phenomenon it clearly does not understand: someone from an “ethnic minority’ who makes rather ghastly anti-Semitic jokes. Name’s Dieudonné, he’s from France. The jokes are mediocre at best. Regretting that a Jewish journalist had missed the gas chambers? Oh dear. It’s like Feyenoord fans from Rotterdam, The Netherlands, imitating the sound of gas when playing against Ajax, a team from Amsterdam that has since forever been nicknamed “The Jews”. In poor taste? Absolutely. Dumb? Hey, we’re talking about football fans. Ban it? The height of stupidity. But that is what France’s embattled government of embattled president François Hollande has just done with Dieudonné’s routines.

So the BBC sent a reporter to France to make politically correct sense of it all. The reporter sounded like someone who has spent life mostly in England’s progressive middle class bubble where there exists an unwritten hierarchy of victims. Women first, of course – but they were never discussed as a group during the broadcast. That would have made things dead easy, most especially with a female reporter. Broadcasting House would have spent half an hour going bad bad bad misogyny bad bad bad and that would have been it. Now she just said that the broadcast would contain uncomfortable language. Translation: she was leaving a well-established ideological comfort zone.

And so we share her amazement to find black people – Number Two in the progressive victim hierarchy – who like Dieudonné and are planing to vote for the party he supports, the National Front. She manages to slip in the word “detoxify” when mentioning Front leader Marine Le Pen’s efforts to sanitize the party but she clearly is struggling here. Had it been local whites, Broadcasting House would have spent half an our going bad bad bad racists bad bad bad and that would have been it.

Instead we heard the sound of exploding heads. Blacks voting Le Pen? How the hell was that possible? Blacks calling the Socialist Party a bunch of hypocrites? How the hell could they, we have always been such nice progressive people! Here’s a hint: Labour Parties in much of Europe have squandered a century of social democratic achievement and ditched it in favour of a rancid combination of unfettered free market politics with a political patronage system based on identity politics. They left a massive hole where they should have been, defending their ideological legacy when fascism resurfaced – which happened not, as our BBC reporter dutifully parrots, as a result of the economic crisis. Fascism started gaining ground when the economy was ticking along very nicely and most of Europe was spoiled rotten, a decade ago.

Of course, our reporter made her job a little easier by omission, a classic BBC hallmark. For Dieudonné’s anti-Semitism does not stand in a vacuum; it has a long proud tradition among two of the world’s largest PC echo chamber’s favorite victim groups: black minorities with icons like US community leaders Jesse Jackson and Louis Farrakhan; and North Africans who have been misguided into believing that Islam propels them towards hating Jews. The reporter solved these issues…by not mentioning them, nor indeed the selfsame groups’ highly problematic attitudes towards gays and lesbians; way too frightening. So it was with palpable relief that she found herself back on familiar territory by homing in on anti-Semitism. You see, taken in isolation, anti-Semitism is of course a classic no-no and you don’t even have to mention Israel, a state with which the world’s largest PC echo chamber has a very troubled co-existence.

Further, Dieudonné’s anti-Semitism does not stand in a vacuum but in yet another tradition, equally proud and older than the ones I just mentioned: French. Together with the Netherlands, France was among the most diligent European nations in handing Jews to the Nazis and their gas chambers. It is one of the demons the country has never addressed, like its own bloody colonial past in places like Cameroon (where Dieudonné’s father is from) or its vicious war in Algeria, where Marine Le Pen’s father tortured anti-colonial fighters (who then went on to terrorize their own people in similar fashion). These are among the things that have made Dieudonné possible – but how can you explain all that when you are working with such pitiful, pathetic tools: identity politics instead of history and political correctness instead of a political education?

Finally, and as a matter of course, nowhere in the report was quoted that famous line (French, was it not?): ‘I disagree with everything you say but I will defend to the death your right to say it.’ In that sense, the BBC was dead on-message.

The Shoehorn

Here’s another in an occasional series about a remarkable London journalism-plus-agitprop magazine, for which I once wrote. This time: the United Nations, or: how to shoehorn a pretty good article into the editorial agenda and mangle the result in the process. 

 

If you are a small and poorly-resourced country, you can still wield influence at the United Nations, provided you are focused, united and diligent.

Indeed. I can cite the example of my own country of origin, The Netherlands, tiny but certainly not poorly resourced. Over the past 20-odd years, though, it has substantially dropped the ball on international issues, a perfect reflection of the nation’s newfound obsession with its own navel. It got so bad that one major international magazine (and I think it was The Economist) famously described the Lowlands as “small, pink and irrelevant”. Mind you: that was before the rise of Geert Wilders’ dog and pony show messed up the country’s reputation even further…

The simple truth quoted above was taught by experience and brought home by representatives to the UN from Kenya, Gabon and emerging African heavyweight Angola. But they appear in a story about the UN in this month’s New African, which leads a crusade against a selected few large international organisations. Is there something terribly wrong with the UN?

From the magazine

Where to begin?

It has sclerotic bureaucracies, to start with one of its minor ailments. It is prone to cynical political horse-trading, for instance for the much-hyped Millennium Development Goals. Nobody believed in them and the whole shebang has been quietly dropped since. You can also take a look at the behaviour of various “UN Families” in countries in and around Africa, behaving like wasteful parallel governments that thrive on foreign resources.

And what about the out-of-date Security Council, which is dominated by two powers that still matter (China and the USA) and three ageing former empires (Great Britain, France and Russia)? Can we get rid of The Obsolete Three and replace them with Nigeria, Brazil and India? Thank you.

Early on, the author of the story zooms in on Kofi Annan, the former head of the large Department of Peacekeeping Operations. He went on to become one of the UN’s “most charismatic Secretary Generals, ever.” Fine. But why does she not mention the momentous event that Annan and his Department watched from the sidelines – the Rwanda genocide? There is no shortage of material about it (Samantha Power’s Bystanders to Genocide springs to mind) and it would have told us quite a lot about what is wrong with the UN.

But none of the above qualifies. I can imagine the editor poring over the story and thinking: but why does she not write about…what I asked her to cover? Because, you guessed it, the UN has a major flaw. It is…wait for it…racist. One diplomat – and the only anonymous one in the entire story – pontificates that Africans at the UN are not taken seriously and the only African countries that matter have stuff that the West needs.

AHA! The West! Home to those racist, colonial, slave trading….er, Not Very Nice People. Somehow, this meme had to be woven into the piece. I think the author, having done a decent job, was either sent back to find that quote – or it was made up. Why would this diplomat not want to be named? You don’t put your career on the line with such a quote – not in an organisation where there is a daily shower of all the politically correct buzzings: race, gender,climate change and tolerance, nay: acceptance of the manifold isms in the world. So if he said what was quoted, he has chosen to remain anonymous…out of sheer, ocean-deep embarrassment.

 

This one is rather mild. I am working on a more spectacular one, relating to New African’s hostility to the International Criminal Court. A year ago, that hostility spawned an absolute trainwreck of an article. Coming up at some point in time! 

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. 

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.