Purity

Brexit on 23 June follows a trend across Europe, supposedly in response to the existence of an overweening and undemocratic European Union. (Very briefly: I do believe the EU suffers from hubris, I do believe the EU is in great danger of becoming a corporatist neoliberal venture for which it was never intended and of which the euro is the symbol. But I also believe that in spite of the urgent need to fundamentally reform the European Union the world is infinitely better off with one than without one.)

I want to go somewhere else with this piece. The trend across Europe and elsewhere in the western world is the arrival/re-appearance of nationalist and anti-migration movements. This is echoed in another trend, happening across the globe from West Africa to Southeast Asia.

One day before Brexit, the wonderful Pakistanti Qawwali singer Amjad Sabri was murdered by self-styled Islamic radicals in Karachi. Earlier this year the world witnessed the destruction of Palmyra by Islamic State (or ISIS), an act of vandalism rivalled by the blowing up of the Bamiyan statutes by the Taliban in Afghanistan in 2001 and the vandalism perpetrated on Timbuktu by self-declared jihadist invaders in 2012.

What do they all have in common? I would argue: the idea of purity. Or, to put it better: nostalgia for purity, the illusion of purity. It never existed but they want it back.

The rhetoric is interchangeable. Prior to the referendum that returned the tragic Brexit vote, British nationalists talked about reducing immigration, taking back control from a monstrous – and what’s more: foreign – bureaucracy and return to the green and pleasant self-ruled lands of old times. Without too much interference from outside and even fewer migrants thank you very much. Elsewhere in Europe, extremist politicians talk about sovereignty, the need to curb immigration and to stop the EU. ‘I want my country back,’ is their rallying cry.

Sufi music is abhorrent to the Taliban because it pollutes the otherwise pristine and sweet unspoilt sound of prayer. Monuments and tombstones and artefacts make the mind of the beholder stray from the correct path of a blemish free faith where no idolatry takes place.

It is the illusion of purity: an unspoilt people, an unspoilt faith, the pristine English village, the Khalifate. That dream of purity can only be fulfilled through destruction and vandalism. What is tainted and unclean must be removed. Whether it’s a monument, music or an institution like the European Union. Sacrifice is unavoidable, even if it means putting an entire economy or a future generation in jeopardy. Purity requires the use of a wrecking ball. Brexit and the blowing up of monuments are two sides of the same coin.

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None of this is new. But it has become more virulent and more aggressive of late and moves to counter it have been shockingly inept. Why? I believe that this is in part because of the overwhelming victory of globalisation and its attendant ideology (neoliberalism) and in part because of the total collapse of the countervailing progressive movement.

The Thatcher/Reagan revolution informed by the unfettered free market ideology peddled by the likes of Milton Friedman has been successful beyond its wildest dreams. It has reversed virtually everything that an organised and united people’s force fought for during a century and a half. Unions everywhere, anti-colonial movements everywhere. Today, neoliberalism is continuing the business of taking us collectively back to the 19^th century. States have been rolled back, utilities that provide life-saving basic services  (water for instance, health care) have been or are being privatised, structural adjustment programs have ravaged economies from Latin America to Asia via huge chunks of Africa – the list is long. The very welcome demise of the dictatorial and inept Soviet Union and its European satellite states in 1989 cemented the Thatcher/Reagan victory.

The progressive movement has struggled to find an answer to this free market steamroller. Instead, it has adopted most of the steamroller’s principles (the main one being that Greed Is Good) and has been looking for a visage, something to mask the fact that it may look progressive but is the exact opposite. The visage was already present in its ranks and was eagerly adopted as its faux progressive front. It’s called identity politics.

Starting with second wave feminism in the late 1960s it has since morphed into a multitude of movements that have their own navel and their own victimhood as their unique focal points. They have rendered the old and lofty principle of international solidarity obsolete. To mask this simple fact, Diversity was invented, which incorporates (and I use this word deliberately) an in-crowd of people who all look different but who mostly and basically think the same thoughts. Progressive it is not: this movement has attached itself eagerly to the globalisation agenda. And as I have argued earlier, it is precisely for this reason that it fails to counter resurgent European nationalists, religious extremists and the other purity seekers. 

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Purity is the reaction globalisation has engendered. Races should not mix. People should not mix. Cultures should not mix. Musics should not mix. Countries should not mix and most certainly not be “overseen” by some supranational busybody. It is telling to see that extreme rightwing groups in the United States combine utter hatred for the United Nations (another international bogeyman) with a stunning lack of knowledge about the organisation. Donald Trump is their champion and, as if to illustrate my point, the other presidential candidate is a shell for corporate America with a ghastly track record as former Secretary of State. I live in a region that has to deal with the atrocious fallout of the criminally catastrophic decision to oust Libyan dictator Muammar Ghadaffi (someone they were previously more than happy to do business with), of which Hillary Clinton was an active and enthusiastic supporter.

Because of the Left’s astonishing incompetence in reviving the forces of solidarity that used to cut across all identity lines (race, sex, sexual orientation and everything else) both forces – globalisation and the purity movements – will continue to run amok and crash into each other. The have-nots have been divided by identity politics and will not stand together again. It is curiously ironic that the likes of Brexit are driven by another type of identity politics, a variety the faux progressives disapprove of: rural, working class or former working class and (dare we day it) mostly white, subject to a condescending sneering campaign by those in possession of the correct identity politics. This has backfired spectacularly.

Brexit is a tragic mistake. Purity, be it racial, ideological or religious is a dangerous illusion. The progressive movement is dead and its faux progressive identity politics driven replacement an abysmal failure. We need something new. Maybe it is already there, unable to stop the steamroller but at least attempting to slow it down. New bold citizen-led movements show a way forward, like the one that removed autocrat Blaise Compaoré, then resisted a coup attempt by his presidential guard, and a new one, aimed to get genetically manipulated cotton removed. All three in Burkina Faso. We could do with a lot more like these.

An open space

Part 4 – The Elites

Laurence D. Wohlers, a former US ambassador to the Central African Republic, spoke extensively with members of the CAR’s political elite, tiny and often related through family ties. They lay the blame for their country’s decline squarely at the feet of its leaders. This, Wohlers argues, is another heritage of France, in particular its highly centralised presidential system that was emblematic of the early days of the Fifth Republic. Incidentally, references to De Gaulle, whose coup ushered in the Fifth Republic, are frequently in evidence when you travel around the country.

The elites have benefited from a relatively short period of time when education was up to standard (this period ended 35 years ago) and have all been working in government. What is striking about the CAR’s economics is that even those economic activities (outside extraction or timber) that could conceivably be done by Central Africans, particularly commerce, are all in the hands of – mainly – outsiders: French, Portuguese, Lebanese and the now dwindling Muslim community from as far afield as Senegal. It is unclear why this should be the case. You see evidence here and there of local entrepreneurship and there does not appear to have been an ideology that actively discourages business from taking off, so this is a mystery.

Near Bocaranga, northwestern CAR

In asking the elites what they think went wrong, Wohlers uncovers some interesting issues. The elites insist that the past 200 years of CAR history, marked by slave hunts and colonialism, have destroyed traditional authority. This may be self-serving: in the villages this authority clearly still exists, which the political centre of the country then chooses to ignore. However, their second and very important point, and one that is constantly confirmed by people you speak to on the ground, is that there never was an issue between Muslims and Christians. The recent religious overlay of what was, fundamentally, a politico-economic problem (neglect in all spheres of life – be it health care, education, roads, water, you name it), is the result of what was perceived as Muslims joining that destructive armed gang that called itself Seleka. This triggered the response, when Muslim homes and shops (and even their mosques) were destroyed in a move that utterly devastated the local economies across the country. And even this is not universally the case. The “Muslim versus Christian” theme that international media have picked up is dreadfully simplistic at best, even when the pictures seem to suggest otherwise.

Similarly, the elites dismiss the story angle of “ethnic” preference. It was simply not there, at the very least until the presidency of André Kolingba in the 1980s. He resorted to bringing his own people for self-protecting purposes and following that, things went quite badly wrong. The elites also regret the gradual decline of the state of governance, especially since the removal, by France, of Bokassa in the first of four violent takeovers. After Bokassa, they say, civil servants began to lose their sense of duty to the nation and things slowly started to rot, like that Administrative Building on Boganda Avenue, named after Barthélémy Boganda, perhaps the best president the CAR never had. He led the independence movement since 1946 but when Independence came in sight he was killed in a plane crash that remains suspect. Mistrust of the French among Central Africans has several historical sources; this is most definitely one of them.

But what about the role the elites themselves played in all this? Here, Wohlers is a little too cautious, perhaps also because self-assessment and self-criticism are things humans the world over are not terribly fond of. What we do find, though, is that the elites’ inability to stop the destruction of their country is in part due to their inability (or unwillingness) to set up what Wohlers calls “countervailing power”. This has everything to do with pragmatism. In a patronage system, fed by two predatory systems (commercial concessions and taxation), you know which side your bread is buttered. And even though elite competition has been fierce but largely shorn of violence, rocking the boat is not an option when you want to keep your privileges and your money. So, in order to survive regime change, you re-invent yourself. None of this benefited the country in any way.

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.

Masks in a Church (part 1)

De Nieuwe Kerk in Amsterdam is the temporary home to an exhibition of masks, statutes and other works of art. From Ivory Coast. On display until February 15 next year, so there is plenty of time for you to make up your own mind. This is my take on the event. In two parts.

 

The intentions surely were beyond reproach: let’s make a presentation of “African” masks and familiarize the public with their aesthetic value, their creators and their authenticity. The event was sponsored by – among others – KPMG, an accountancy firm, the Amsterdam Fund for the Arts, the Prince Clause Foundation and two largish Dutch public broadcasters, TROS and AVRO, usually on the lighter side of entertainment. (Ironically, these two now occupy the building that was once home to Radio Netherlands Worldwide, the former Dutch international broadcaster.)

Do excellent intentions lead to excellent results? Not always. On the last day of my brief visit to The Netherlands in November I visited De Nieuwe Kerk, an austere Protestant church on Dam Square, in the heart of old Amsterdam. The church forms the backdrop for an exhibition that is entitled: Magical Africa.

That is a bit of an exaggeration. The country in question is not “Africa”, in fact it is, as the folder announces, Côte d’Ivoire, my next station. And then not even all of it: Côte d’Ivoire is the size of France and home to at least 64 languages. The subject matter of the exhibition, masks, statues and a few contemporary works of art, have been taken from four regions: the lagoon area around the largest city of Abidjan on the southern coast, the centre of the country where the second-largest city Bouaké and the capital Yamoussoukro are located, a portion of the Grand West where the Dan and the Wê live and the savannah area of the North, were the Senoufo live and were you find the town of Korhogo. That’s not “Africa”, that’s a few parts of Côte d’Ivoire. I can understand the PR value of the name but it annoys nevertheless.

Even within that limited setting the differences proved to be astonishing. Compare the fear-inspiring masks that came from the forests that straddle Liberia, Guinea and Côte d’Ivoire to the more tranquil poses produced in the centre. The Baulé, who live in that part of the country have been a central presence in Ivorian politics and business for many decades, dominating the plantation economy and delivering the first two heads of state after independence. Aristocracy, if you like, which predates Independence. By contrast, the Dan and the Wê in the forest have been much more marginal to political life and, in fact, have had to live with numerous groups of newcomers, driven there by French colonialists and post-independent governments. It is a political configuration that is reflected, although in different ways, in Liberia, Guinea and Sierra Leone. To my (admittedly, still Marxist) mind, at least, material culture informs artistic expression here. It is tempting to call the forest masks “raw” and the central statues “refined” but that feeds into another issue that I will deal with later. Suffice for now that what is missing from the exhibition, as with so much Africa reporting, is context.

Well, there is some, in the anthropological sense of the word. We see words like “Dan”, Sénoufo”, “Baulé” and “Lobi” hung like neon signs over the various carefully assembled works of art and explanations are offered about their functions and their makers. Fair enough. But what does that do with the viewer? Not unreasonably, the viewer will associate a particular work of art with a particular people from a particular region. And will freeze those in time. Again, it stands to reason that this happens but anyone who has ever been to Côte d’Ivoire knows that, self-declared or ascribed origins apart, these monikers are essentially meaningless. There is probably not a single Ivorian alive who can claim to be a 100% pure and undiluted member of any “tribe”. The French word for this mixed state of affairs is brassage and it is a reality inside the borders and indeed across them.

“Tribe”, “origin” or indeed “Ivorianness” (or Ivoirité, as it was called) only becomes an issue when it is turned into a instrument in the hands of unscrupulous politicians on the prowl for cheap and easy vote winners. Toxification of the political debate is the inevitable result, as anyone witnessing the arrival of the Geert Wilders Dog & Pony Show in The Netherlands can testify. The same happened in Côte d’Ivoire in the 1990s. Suddenly people became the champions of the Wê, the Bété, the Baulé, or indeed The True Ivorians.

So my problem here is the essentialism: this is how the Sénoufo portray people during particular festivities or rites. This is how the People Around The Lagoon do things. Reality is a lot more fluid (what to think, for instance, of the Sénoufo who live in the Grand West, or the giant melting pot known as Abidjan?). It is of course a major challenge to point that out during an exhibition and the curators did find at least one credible way around that problem. More on that in the second and final part.

Socialist snobs

A new book uncovers a part of Angola’s yet to be written history

 

Every nation has some days in its calendar that stand out as occasions for festivities or remembrance. The Netherlands remember the dead of World War Two on May 4 and celebrate national liberation from Nazi occupation the next day. Guinea has at least two reasons to pay special attention to September 28: the prelude to independence in 1958 and a massacre in the capital’s largest stadium 51 years later. Some have gained global notoriety: July 4 in the United States; July 14 in France; August 6, when the first nuclear device in world history was detonated over the Japanese city of Hiroshima.

But some countries go to extraordinary lengths to suppress any and all memory to what should be a national event, for good or ill. Angola is such a place and May 27, 1977 is the date its government wants forgotten. What happened on that day is the subject of a book by the former BBC correspondent in Angola, Lara Pawson.

All credit to the Angolan government’s success in suppressing information it does not like and memories it wants its subjects to forget: when Pawson arrived in Angola she had never heard of the vinte e sete de maio; it only lived on in the nation’s underground memory. She came across it when witnessing the suppression of a tiny anti-government demonstration. Most people, she was told, live in fear and in the words of one, ‘completely tranquil.’ According to her informants this can be traced back directly to what happened on May 27, 1977.

On that day, rebellious troops briefly took possession of the national radio station, staged a raid on the capital Luanda’s central prison and freed its inmates. There was an anti-government demonstration. The response was swift and brutal. The leaders of the uprising were hunted down and killed; the Sambizanga neighbourhood in Luanda, seen as a centre of the rebellious movement, was severely punished with the loss of many lives. The 9^th Brigade, which had supported the uprising, was decimated. Cuban troops, who were in Angola to help the MPLA government against US and South African-backed invasions, were in the forefront. ‘We went on a demonstration and were met with Cuban bombs,’ was how one Sambizanga resident describes the May 27 events. How many died in the aftermath? Nobody knows but at the conservative end of the scale is “thousands” while others mention tens of thousands. But what was it and what was it all about? Pawson sets out to find answers to these questions.

In a London library she finds the official version of events, issued by the ruling Movimento Popular de Libertação de Angola, or MPLA but evidently not available in Angola itself. After all, the vinte e sete never happened, right? But the official MPLA document darkly mentioned “factionalism” as a menace to party unity and identified two men, popularly known as Nito Alves and Zé Van Dúnem as the ringleaders. Alves was the president of a popular football club, Progresso de Sambizanga. Football and politics have had a symbiotic relationship in Angola; during the anticolonial struggle involvement with the administration of football clubs served as a cover for political activity.

According to the MPLA Political Bureau, the Alves/Van Dúnem plot was percolating throughout party structures and it therefore had to be dealt with in the only way the party knew how: violent repression, which duly happened in the wake of May 27. The MPLA Politbureau renamed the factionalist movement and called it an attempted coup while dropping more dark hints, this time about foreign imperialist involvement, which made the bloody repression of Alves, Van Dúnem and their civil and military sympathisers all the more easy. In one chapter, Pawson recalls the story of one soldier who spent nights in his entirely darkened apartment while security forces loyal to the government (“all whites and mixed-race,” he says) went looking for him. The events were bloody. But what was it all about?

The official MPLA version falls apart as the book progresses but it becomes clear that there is not a single explanation for what happened on and after May 27, 1977. Certainly, it was about the direction the ruling MPLA should take and most accounts take the view that Alves and his people were getting exasperated by the increasingly bourgeois line the party was taking. They were far more radical. But other issues got in the way too. There may have been personal scores to settle, some may have wanted to really overthrow the government of president Agostinho Neto but what most definitely also played its part was the explosive issue of race and class.

During the four centuries that the Portuguese ran Angola (first the coast and then the interior) a complex racial hierarchy had evolved with whites at the top, three mixed race categories in the middle and blacks at the bottom. These categories all too often coincided with the station of life people occupied: blacks were almost universally poor and excluded from lots of economic activity while whites served as anything from administrators to taxi drivers. For centuries, mixed race people were working as pombeiros, whose job it was to sate the Portuguese unstoppable appetite for black slaves from Angola’s vast interior. Four hundred years of Portuguese rule had resulted in a country where the races mixed with each other but also had this toxic hierarchy to adhere to.

And this also permeated the anticolonial revolution. It was almost exclusively led by white and mixed-race intellectual Marxists who excelled in revolutionary rhetoric but could not help but look down on their fellow black Angolans. Socialist snobs would be the best way to describe them. Even the rebellious movement could not escape it, as Pawson discovers when she interviews the brother of Zé Van Dúnem, one of the slain rebel leaders. ‘We should really minimise the role of Nito (Alves,bp),’ the brother says. After all, he was not of the same pedigree. Elsewhere he is described as pé descalça, someone who goes barefoot. And he was black.

And racist – against whites, insists a Portuguese man. He was also caught up in the vinte e sete events but refuses to talk to Pawson about the events and instead gives her his books. He thinks the Neto presidency was a disaster but that Alves would probably have been even worse, because he hated whites and mixed-race people. This is of course unverifiable, but there are hints throughout the book that an Alves presidency (if that was indeed what he was after) would have been every bit as intolerant as the one that eventually replaced Neto’s and has been in place ever since. José Eduardo dos Santos has overseen the transition of the Marxist elite at the helm of the MPLA into the venal elite that runs the country today. What has remained is the political asphyxiation of anyone and everyone that disagrees with the professed party line.

The simple fact that this book exists is good in and of itself. It challenges the government-mandated silence over the subject and indeed the official MPLA account of the events, even if precious few in Angola will probably have heard of it. We now have some idea of what happened there and then. What we are less sure about is the why. Was it a coup, a demonstration, a violent uprising, an intra-party rebellion or all of these? Was ideology the issue, or race, or personal feuding or all of these? How much foreign meddling was involved: Soviet, Cuban, South African, American?

In the Name of the People is a welcome first attempt at a comprehensive understanding of May 27, 1977 and required reading for all those who are interested in modern Angolan – or indeed, dare I say it – African – history. Here’s hoping that more will follow. Having said that, there are a few things that grate about the book. Indeed, the Angolan stories Pawson tells are rich material, fascinating, harrowing and moving. And she tells them well. But I was far less charmed by her musings from her London sitting room or personal ruminations when visiting dramatic places like the Mulemba cemetery where some of the victims of the vinte e sete have been buried in a mass grave or an entirely superfluous tale about a dog, mad or sick, humping its mother. More rigorous editing would have cut these passages.

And then there is of course the inevitable slew of anti-male comments endemic in too many books written by female journalists. British foreign journalism previously was “male-dominated”, which we know we must translate as “inherently evil”. There is also the passage where she feigns incomprehension at a “white British male” (the terminology is a dead giveaway) describing himself as “an ordinary worker”. Yes, in the highly charged Angolan racial context he obviously connected with the elite but that does not qualify Pawson to question the man’s self-description just because she comes from a society that has not had a single positive thing to say about “white males” for the past half century or so. Stuff like this has no place in a serious work of journalism, especially when the subject matter is so rich and so complex.

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.

Heretical question

Last year, in case you missed it, the world was made aware of the existence of Mindy Budgor. Indeed: an earth-shattering event, made even more so by the hagiographic BBC coverage of her life achievement. Which was: taking a short-cut to becoming a warrior in an utterly unspoilt Maasai community somewhere in Kenya, the First Female!!!! I suggest the thinking among said Maasai was probably: ‘If we just give her what she wants, maybe she will then just go away and leave us in peace.’ Oh yes, she wrote a book. Warrior Princess. For those with strong nerves, here’s the interview.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-23713202

Over the last two decades or so, we have been subjected to an endless parade of individuals using a fairly randomly chosen bit of Africa (preferably unspoilt but with mod cons), as a décor for the all-engulfing drama of their own extraordinary and massively important lives. So we had Angelina Jolie shutting down Namibia because she needed the nation as a backdrop for the singularly important event of her giving birth. We also had Madonna, although she skipped the entire birth giving thingy and just went to Malawi to get herself an orphan or two. She then decided to raise the entire country in the best way possible (her own, of course) but omitted to inform the government of her plans, which, bizarrely enough, failed to amuse president Joyce Banda. Oh and we had Christina Aguilera, last September, making ‘an emotional trip’ to…Rwanda; that’s a bit like visiting Auschwitz for a very private cleansing ceremony. The website Africaisacountry took that little ego-stroking gem apart here:

http://africasacountry.com/the-bullshitfiles-christina-aguilera-feeds-rwanda/

I came across one bona fide example last year. She was using the tourist-infested seaside resort of Abene, in the Casamance, as her very own African backdrop. She runs, among many things, a music festival that must unfold itself in exact accordance with her wishes, musicians be damned. One day she was upset because she had received lip from a few local women she was leading in development (naturally). They apparently did not agree with her methods. The village queen in question was of European extraction but unlike Budgor, the locals won’t be shod of her any time soon, it seems.

Image from a large exhibition in Imagine, Ouagadougou, March 2013. One of my readers wrote in and said the work could possibly be by or have taken inspiration from the great Beninois artist Georges Adeagbo. Thanks, Judith! 

I am moved to relate all these tales because I have recently been trimming my archives. Among the papers I consigned to the dustbin were a few reviews of a book by a Dutch journalist, applauding the demise of the White Man in Africa. One review mentioned that the book related how in some parts of Africa (certainly not here in Dakar), lighter-skinned people were used in advertising because it sold the product better. Odd, that.

In another review of the Dutch journalist’s book, the celebration of ‘the White Man slipping from his pedestal’ in Africa also got a mention. Oddly enough, the reviewer went on to count the blessings of development cooperation, which historically has been rather intimately connected with the presence of said White Man. A while ago I wrote a little miniseries about the many problems associated with development.

http://www.rnw.nl/africa/article/let’s-talk-about-aid-final

You see, I do not consider the disappearance of the White Man from Africa a bad thing. Quite the contrary. But I find the barely concealed glee with which said disappearance is described by the (inevitably female) author a little disingenuous. In her own article, that went along with the promotion of her book “Goodbye Africa”, Marcia Luyten (the Dutch journalist in question) notes with relish that the white man ‘no longer plays a significant role,’ must ‘abandon his superiority’ and ‘arrogant paternalism’.

My guess is that journalists like her cannot help it. They have grown up in the wake of a movement that has spent the last fifty years smashing this perceived superiority of the (white) man over the head, having its remains hung drawn and quartered and burnt to cinders for good measure. Cheering at man’s individual or collective misfortune has, unfortunately, become one of its unbecoming hallmarks. Equally unfortunately, the same movement has come to dominate the discourse that has blighted the African landscape of ideas for the past half century: the discourse of development. The result? A depressing parade of cut-and-paste “Women and Development” projects, equally applied in the arch-conservative Christian-dominated regions of Southern Africa and in the stagnant matriarchies that are liberally sprinkled all over West Africa. No wonder our development friend in Abene had arguments; West African women as a rule do not take kindly to being told what to do.

Many moons ago I reviewed a book by the writer Lisa St Aubin de Teran, who was, in her own words, leading the village of Cabaceiros in Mozambique from poverty to a safer existence. Cool. She was extremely busy with a new tourism resort, schools and all the rest of what constitutes, according to Westerners, “development”. All this happened against the backdrop of – here we go again – an utterly unspoilt Africa where people play drums in the moonlight. A lot. The book came out at roughly the same time that former French president Nicholas Sarkozy made that imbecilic speech here in Dakar, declaring that Africans ‘had not entered history’. I concluded my review of the book by saying that Sarkozy got a volley of richly deserved flak for his stupidity. When, on the other hand, a rich white woman writes roughly the same, she shoots to the top of the bestsellers list. Superiority? Paternalism? I think Luyten was looking at the wrong sex. Or gender, if one is ideologically so inclined. But all this does prompt this extremely heretical question: what is it with (some) white women and their colonial fantasies?

Still, it was quite a relief to read that there was some room left for The White Man in Africa, minus arrogance, paternalism, superiority and I guess he’d better leave his testosterone at home too. On second thought, he’d better bring it along because because the first issue Luyten brings up is geopolitics, to be exact: the very real threat of jihadist fundamentalism. And lo and behold, Dutch white people (even men!) have heeded the call and taken the plunge…after the French who got there first. They will gallantly gather intelligence and do all manner of good and useful military things, in order to save the career of Bert Koenders, the former Dutch development minister (Labour), currently heading the UN Mission to Mali. He needs his succession of UN posts like a fish needs water; a goodly portion of the Dutch Labour Party views him in the same way as I imagined the Maasai considered Ms Budgor.

Another area where the White Man (minus arrogance etc, you get the picture…) can be useful is Business – although he must take a leaf out of the book of his Chinese competitors and become rather ruthless and imbued with realpolitik. Bit strange, that.

But the third reason for white people to bother with Africa is the best: humanitarianism. Yes!!!! There is still space and scope for White Saviours! Provided, I assume, they are female. It’s a bit like sex tourism in The Gambia, Casamance and Kenya, I suppose. It’s all OK, as long as (white) women do it.

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! 

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.