Sunday, May 27, 2012
Tuesday, May 22, 2012
Forward ever, backward never: the naked Zuma and the progress of outrage
After an outburst of protests from governing party and traditionalists against a painting of a naked Jacob Zuma, the countries' lefties are upset. Sixteen-year old South Africa has 'failed', says a former white politician, who in the past spoke out against apartheid. 'This is not progress', says a media guru with a similar anti-apartheid-outspokenness history. Another university professor: 'This is not a laughing matter. Tolerance was tested and failed'.
Is South Africa going backward, instead of forward? I believe the opposite is true.
Let's recapitulate briefly. A white South African artist has painted SA President Jacob Zuma in a Lenin-like pose, leading the way forward, in reddish tones. In the painting, Zuma's genitals are exposed -and they are, as many have noted, impressive. Many people like it. Those who like it (I am among them) are predominantly white (or beige/caramel), urban, arty, and progressive, and they can see the artistic value in combining the notions of a 'revolutionary leader' and 'sexual black male'. They can even appreciate that the image of the 'black man with the big penis' (an organ that, additionally and of course, leads him) has some roots in racist imagery.
But instead of wanting to forbid a portrait of this image, they see that an artist can, and must, creatively use all images to create new images -and debate, and emotion. That, after all, is what art is all about. And, on a much simpler level, if any black male leader ever asked to be portrayed with a lot of emphasis on his penis, it is surely Jacob Zuma? From his 'machinegun' song to his (self-embraced) reputation as a womanizer and a traditional male, he has played a large role in the creation of this image. Conversely, it can be argued that therefore a picture of Zuma-with-his-pants-off is NOT art -precisely because it is so much reality. Where is the artists' imagination? What does he add?
But boy, is Brett Murray an artist. In juxtaposing the sexual traditional male Zuma with the revolutionary people's leader Zuma, he has created something so daring, so controversial, and so true, that South Africa is bustling with debate, emotion, and even violence, as a result. The governing party and the presidency, who could have stayed quiet and make it go away, attracted worldwide publicity to the painting by their outraged press statement and court case. A black church leader called for the artist to be stoned. Someone threw paint over the painting. Whites from Cape Town to Ventersdorp started writing and phoning in really racist comments. This was fun.
Then a friend of mine wrote on Facebook "It is an insult to me to do this to my leader". He attracted a dozen comments, which I could not totally understand since they were all in isiZulu, but I gathered they agreed with what he said. It got me thinking that traditional values of respect for elders and leaders, and embarrassment with regard to depictions of nakedness, especially when combined with elders, do not only exist in Ventersdorp and Ulundi. My friend, and most of his friends, are urbane, modern people, who can talk about sex, believe in human rights and press freedom, and can make fun of, and criticise Zuma or any other leader. They would not jail artists or forbid paintings. Still, they feel that showing this painting to the world is bad form and offensive.
I then started counting tweets labelled #Zumaspear and saw that few of those who expressed pro-artistic-freedom-outrage in the face of traditionalist outrage, were black/African. Most black tweets focused, not on the painting, but on the roughing up by Gallery security guards of a black paint-thrower. (Seemingly, there was a white -paint thrower too, -and he was not beaten up. Another interesting side track.) One tweet, -judging by the picture from a young African woman-, said that the painting was "rubbish that reminds us of Sara Baartman who was paraded naked across Europe."
My friends' Facebook comments and the tweets on #Zumaspear show that the notion that South Africa once was a (sexually) modern, progressive, country, where you could ridicule and embarrass leaders without anybody blinking an eye, and that we are now 'failed', or 'going backward', is absurd. It never was a modern country. Only an intellectual, urbanised, westernized, relatively small, class in this country is modern. African societies everywhere are in the 1950's with regard to sexual politics and issues such as respect for authority, modesty and blasphemy. Many whites, too, especially in non-artistic, non-intellectual and rural spheres of life, would be equally outraged, and probably more violent, at sexually explicit images of Boer generals, Jan Smuts or FW de Klerk. And, remember, FW dumped Marieke to commit adultery with someone else's wife. (OK so he did marry her later, but then again, so does Zuma.). The only reason why conservative whites are not outraged at this painting of the president, is because it is a black president.
And what would we say, if an artist had painted such a picture of Nelson Mandela? Or a female black leader?
Go, Brett Murray! In as much as an artist has engaged the conservative establishment and provoked national debate, this is not deterioration -it is progress. Blacks are even going to galleries now! Granted, they are marching rather than visiting, but even that is progress. This is how progress happens.
Every second, there is more progress on Twitter. One black tweep wants input from black male visual artists, a wonderful request (come on black male visual artists, we haven't heard from you yet, I think?) Another black tweep opines, rather maturely and to the point, that a President 'who lets it all hang out' is the problem, not the artist depicting him. Zuma should step down, because he, not the artist, embarrasses public opinion. A lot of other black tweeps want attention to revert back to school books, toilets in poor areas, employment. I read a whole lot of creative, constructive, forward-thinking inputs. I see no Taliban, there is no police or military action. Not the artist, but the defacers were arrested. The ANC goes to court, as it should. That is what the court is for. And the painting,damaged or not, shoots up in value.
To finish, here is what Ferial Haffajee, editor of City Press, a newspaper with a large black readership, has to say. '(some of us at the paper) wanted the image to lead the arts section, but too many people objected on grounds that ranged from us being a family paper to concerns about dignity and cultural values. We put the image inside and ran a funny version on page 1, its indignity coverend by a price tag.' She continues: '(SA) is a sexually aware, satirically sussed and progressive country. At the same time, we are a traditional society with a president who is most well known for his many marriages. Our identity is not as simple as the cultural chauvinists and dignity dogmatists like to make out. Ours is, by design, a live and let live world.'
In the body of her article, Haffajee also states very clearly that 'as journalists worth our salt' we cannot condone, or be complicit, in censorship. So we don't destroy pictures, we are not at the beck and call of the establishment. The fight between art, free thought, and power, is on, as it has always been. But that doesn't mean anybody is going backward. Forward ever, backward never, as Lenin, the man whose pose the painted Zuma adopts, would say.
Is South Africa going backward, instead of forward? I believe the opposite is true.
Let's recapitulate briefly. A white South African artist has painted SA President Jacob Zuma in a Lenin-like pose, leading the way forward, in reddish tones. In the painting, Zuma's genitals are exposed -and they are, as many have noted, impressive. Many people like it. Those who like it (I am among them) are predominantly white (or beige/caramel), urban, arty, and progressive, and they can see the artistic value in combining the notions of a 'revolutionary leader' and 'sexual black male'. They can even appreciate that the image of the 'black man with the big penis' (an organ that, additionally and of course, leads him) has some roots in racist imagery.
But instead of wanting to forbid a portrait of this image, they see that an artist can, and must, creatively use all images to create new images -and debate, and emotion. That, after all, is what art is all about. And, on a much simpler level, if any black male leader ever asked to be portrayed with a lot of emphasis on his penis, it is surely Jacob Zuma? From his 'machinegun' song to his (self-embraced) reputation as a womanizer and a traditional male, he has played a large role in the creation of this image. Conversely, it can be argued that therefore a picture of Zuma-with-his-pants-off is NOT art -precisely because it is so much reality. Where is the artists' imagination? What does he add?
But boy, is Brett Murray an artist. In juxtaposing the sexual traditional male Zuma with the revolutionary people's leader Zuma, he has created something so daring, so controversial, and so true, that South Africa is bustling with debate, emotion, and even violence, as a result. The governing party and the presidency, who could have stayed quiet and make it go away, attracted worldwide publicity to the painting by their outraged press statement and court case. A black church leader called for the artist to be stoned. Someone threw paint over the painting. Whites from Cape Town to Ventersdorp started writing and phoning in really racist comments. This was fun.
Then a friend of mine wrote on Facebook "It is an insult to me to do this to my leader". He attracted a dozen comments, which I could not totally understand since they were all in isiZulu, but I gathered they agreed with what he said. It got me thinking that traditional values of respect for elders and leaders, and embarrassment with regard to depictions of nakedness, especially when combined with elders, do not only exist in Ventersdorp and Ulundi. My friend, and most of his friends, are urbane, modern people, who can talk about sex, believe in human rights and press freedom, and can make fun of, and criticise Zuma or any other leader. They would not jail artists or forbid paintings. Still, they feel that showing this painting to the world is bad form and offensive.
I then started counting tweets labelled #Zumaspear and saw that few of those who expressed pro-artistic-freedom-outrage in the face of traditionalist outrage, were black/African. Most black tweets focused, not on the painting, but on the roughing up by Gallery security guards of a black paint-thrower. (Seemingly, there was a white -paint thrower too, -and he was not beaten up. Another interesting side track.) One tweet, -judging by the picture from a young African woman-, said that the painting was "rubbish that reminds us of Sara Baartman who was paraded naked across Europe."
My friends' Facebook comments and the tweets on #Zumaspear show that the notion that South Africa once was a (sexually) modern, progressive, country, where you could ridicule and embarrass leaders without anybody blinking an eye, and that we are now 'failed', or 'going backward', is absurd. It never was a modern country. Only an intellectual, urbanised, westernized, relatively small, class in this country is modern. African societies everywhere are in the 1950's with regard to sexual politics and issues such as respect for authority, modesty and blasphemy. Many whites, too, especially in non-artistic, non-intellectual and rural spheres of life, would be equally outraged, and probably more violent, at sexually explicit images of Boer generals, Jan Smuts or FW de Klerk. And, remember, FW dumped Marieke to commit adultery with someone else's wife. (OK so he did marry her later, but then again, so does Zuma.). The only reason why conservative whites are not outraged at this painting of the president, is because it is a black president.
And what would we say, if an artist had painted such a picture of Nelson Mandela? Or a female black leader?
Go, Brett Murray! In as much as an artist has engaged the conservative establishment and provoked national debate, this is not deterioration -it is progress. Blacks are even going to galleries now! Granted, they are marching rather than visiting, but even that is progress. This is how progress happens.
Every second, there is more progress on Twitter. One black tweep wants input from black male visual artists, a wonderful request (come on black male visual artists, we haven't heard from you yet, I think?) Another black tweep opines, rather maturely and to the point, that a President 'who lets it all hang out' is the problem, not the artist depicting him. Zuma should step down, because he, not the artist, embarrasses public opinion. A lot of other black tweeps want attention to revert back to school books, toilets in poor areas, employment. I read a whole lot of creative, constructive, forward-thinking inputs. I see no Taliban, there is no police or military action. Not the artist, but the defacers were arrested. The ANC goes to court, as it should. That is what the court is for. And the painting,damaged or not, shoots up in value.
To finish, here is what Ferial Haffajee, editor of City Press, a newspaper with a large black readership, has to say. '(some of us at the paper) wanted the image to lead the arts section, but too many people objected on grounds that ranged from us being a family paper to concerns about dignity and cultural values. We put the image inside and ran a funny version on page 1, its indignity coverend by a price tag.' She continues: '(SA) is a sexually aware, satirically sussed and progressive country. At the same time, we are a traditional society with a president who is most well known for his many marriages. Our identity is not as simple as the cultural chauvinists and dignity dogmatists like to make out. Ours is, by design, a live and let live world.'
In the body of her article, Haffajee also states very clearly that 'as journalists worth our salt' we cannot condone, or be complicit, in censorship. So we don't destroy pictures, we are not at the beck and call of the establishment. The fight between art, free thought, and power, is on, as it has always been. But that doesn't mean anybody is going backward. Forward ever, backward never, as Lenin, the man whose pose the painted Zuma adopts, would say.
Sunday, March 11, 2012
Note to my children
Like being 'not-a-racist', being good is not easy. Be wary of people who tell you you are good if you like their status, follow them, share their posts, sign their petition or buy their product. All those things do is give these same people a constituency, power, money. You don't have to do what Nelson Mandela did and spend 27 years in jail before you can be called 'good'. But you can't be good without spending some time and effort. Like reading up. Find out who is already busy doing the 'good' that you want to support. Find out how many groups claim that their thing is the best thing. (Just to hammer this point home: there were many, many, perfectly nice teenagers in a country far, far away, who followed a man called Adolf. They believed that Adolf's enemies were really vicious child-eaters. They were wrong, of course, Adolf was the really vicious child-eater and his enemies were the good guys.) I am not saying that your cause is wrong. I am not saying that it is wrong to try to be good. Please do try to be good. But do read up first.
Saturday, March 10, 2012
The invisible ones
And another thing. "I am not invisible", tweets a teenager from the region in Uganda where Kony was active up to 6 years ago. "I am Acholi". Which, maybe, indicates the real damage done to this childs' peers in the US, Europe and wherever else 'invisible children' are trending. The publics' strings are pulled in the name of something that cannot be seen. Or heard. We have been told about 'voiceless' people before, and donated money to individuals who claimed to be their rightful voices. We have swallowed that too, and felt all the better for it. Those invisible, voiceless beings make it rather easy for us to feel good about ourselves. We don't have to observe. There is nothing to see, since this is about invisible people. And since they are most probably voiceless too, we don't have to listen either. All we have to do is to watch and hear things presented to us by very vocal people with access to our screens and earphones. And follow them. Scary.
What do Kony and StopKony give our children that we don't?
Joseph Kony is on Twitter now. It's probably not him but it could be. "I give children belonging and respect", he tweets. If the StopKony campaign has had one result, it is now that all of us, really all of us, are debating on social media. No mean feat.
So I am here too. And am trying to distinguish between warlords who tempt children with belonging, status, shiny items and a cause, and a viral video that does the exact same thing. "In our village, we all wanted to join Museveni's army. It was the thing to do if you were a boy. From a nobody, you were now going to be a fighter. You were going to ride in jeeps. Your were going to do some good, you were going to matter. It was very exciting", Frank Nyakairu, now a multi-award-winning journalist, once told me. Nyakairu's dad wouldn't let him. The son became a journalist and a human rights activist instead.
If we look a bit further back, we might find a parellel between Kony on the one side, 'Stop Kony' on the other side, and the medieval Childrens' Crusades. Church leaders would come to villages and recruit children to fight for Christ, against the devilish Moors. Children, often leading pitiful existences, would feel elated at the prospect and join, often encouraged by relatives who couldn't feed them. On the way, the children would service the armoured church leaders, war lords of that time. They were cannon fodder, labour force, and, probably, providers of sexual services to those stronger or higher up the ranks. All for the good cause. Even Kony's army is called the Lord's Army.
What do parents do when our children come to us and want US$ 30,- to join the 'Stop Kony' crusade? Do we feel inadequate, since a bunch of slick Americans were able to inspire them, and we weren't? Do we lecture them to say that they don't know what they are talking about, that Ugandan activists have been fighting Kony and a corrupt government, and it would be better to listen to these people before you follow American crusaders and an agenda only the Lord (or Obama) knows? Do we inform them that it takes more to fight a warlord than to like a status and order a bracelet online? All of the above?
We are, of course, all green with envy at the fact that 25 million young people connected with each other, and with a cause. Kony gave them belonging and respect. Interesting, that.
So I am here too. And am trying to distinguish between warlords who tempt children with belonging, status, shiny items and a cause, and a viral video that does the exact same thing. "In our village, we all wanted to join Museveni's army. It was the thing to do if you were a boy. From a nobody, you were now going to be a fighter. You were going to ride in jeeps. Your were going to do some good, you were going to matter. It was very exciting", Frank Nyakairu, now a multi-award-winning journalist, once told me. Nyakairu's dad wouldn't let him. The son became a journalist and a human rights activist instead.
If we look a bit further back, we might find a parellel between Kony on the one side, 'Stop Kony' on the other side, and the medieval Childrens' Crusades. Church leaders would come to villages and recruit children to fight for Christ, against the devilish Moors. Children, often leading pitiful existences, would feel elated at the prospect and join, often encouraged by relatives who couldn't feed them. On the way, the children would service the armoured church leaders, war lords of that time. They were cannon fodder, labour force, and, probably, providers of sexual services to those stronger or higher up the ranks. All for the good cause. Even Kony's army is called the Lord's Army.
What do parents do when our children come to us and want US$ 30,- to join the 'Stop Kony' crusade? Do we feel inadequate, since a bunch of slick Americans were able to inspire them, and we weren't? Do we lecture them to say that they don't know what they are talking about, that Ugandan activists have been fighting Kony and a corrupt government, and it would be better to listen to these people before you follow American crusaders and an agenda only the Lord (or Obama) knows? Do we inform them that it takes more to fight a warlord than to like a status and order a bracelet online? All of the above?
We are, of course, all green with envy at the fact that 25 million young people connected with each other, and with a cause. Kony gave them belonging and respect. Interesting, that.
Tuesday, October 26, 2010
Things that will not work - or will they?
The state is where the stuff is and theft is the only way to get it
On the subject of Africa, the world seems intrigued by the question whether 'it' will ever work. 'It' can be the economy, or the production, or the output from the various professions, but in most of the debates 'it' is the state. The state has to provide education and health care and such things, or police and justice protection for the raped women of the Congo. As the raped women of the Congo, the people without health care and the suffering matriculants of South Africa will testify, the state in Africa rarely does that properly, if at all.
Everybody already knows the answer to the question whether 'it' works (that's a no), but somehow many, especially in the development aid business, are keeping their hopes up that they can help make it work. If only people were more aware of their rights, or maybe if we attach still more good governance criteria to development aid, or, you know what, let's just do all these things that the African states do not do all by ourselves. Hence training and health projects, and community rape counselling projects.
These things are nice for those in Africa who get project stuff, of course. It's still no justice, or a proper future in society, but, hey, at least you got vaccinated or they made a booklet from the workshop where you spoke about how you were raped. Of course you still see the governing elite driving around in Mercedeses, eating development aid pie in infinitely bigger chunks than you ever will, and being utterly useless, and the police are still drunk and in cahoots with the criminals and rapists, but that is that, then. Useless fat governing elites is what Africa is all about after all, and since they are so utterly useless, all of us, taxpayers in north and south will just have to continue to help them get fatter. In Uganda, a health reporter wrote, there was 'fat aids' and 'thin aids'. You had Fat Aids if you were employed or subsidized by development aid in the field of Aids, and Thin Aids if you actually had Aids and were left to your own devices. There were more people with thin aids than with fat aids.
An article by Johny Steinberg in some time in Octobers' Sunday Times illustrates what the state and the governing elite in Liberia is all about. It's where most of the stuff is -ever Liberian, no matter how poor or illiterate, knows that. The villagers in the village where Steinberg spent some time, knew that. When Steinberg asked them why a son from almost every family in the village had joined the murderous hordes of Charles Taylor, when the latter waged his war on the then ruling elite, the answer was simple. They were going to the capital, Monrovia, to get some stuff. To go with Taylor was the way to get barbed wire, tools, a sugarcane press -which was what the villages' sons duly brought back. All of it is rusted by now.
Stuff hoarded by some people in the capital. To Steinberg's Liberian villagers, that was, and probably is, all the state was. In the absence of health, education, justice, infrastructure, communication, some sort of sense to the organisation of the country, the state is a place where some people sit with all the stuff. And all you can hope for is to get some, too.
This view of the state is most probably shared by many citizens in Africa, even in the continent's most developed country: South Africa. What else is the current South African run on state contracts, state jobs, state projects, than a race to 'get some' too? You can wait to get a decent clinic, a proper school, a policeman who actually defends you from criminals, but are you really going to do that when, in all likelihood, that is going to be a very long wait? 'Every day I get phone calls from relatives and friends of relatives. I must give them jobs', says a friend of mine, a manager in the SA Post Office. "A job or a contract. It's what I must do if I am a good sister, a good aunt. I try to explain that that would be corruption, but they just don't understand that. To them, they must get something because they have nothing and I am the only way they can get it."
The Forum for African Investigative Reporters, which I work for, has recently done an investigation into criminally driven development in Africa. FAIR has found economic activity and even schools being built (and sometimes run) by pirates, smugglers, corrupt local strongmen and prostitutes. If you compare amounts of money with developmental results, criminal or extra-legal syndicates seem to do a lot better than most states. The question would be why that is.
My non-scientific gut feel would be that it is because, at least, criminality is something that people come up with by themselves. Many observers have remarked on the originality and creativity of criminal plans worldwide, whether it's applied to 419 type scams or ATM plunder. I imagine that you think long and hard about what you can do with your skills, your environment, your fellow perpetrators and your hapless targets, if you are a criminal. That attitude, coming up with a 'business plan' so to speak, and carrying it out, must be very different from being an employee in a state machinery that you no more own than I own the English sweepstakes.
Of course the lack of a 'business drive' goes for civil servants everywhere. Images of thumb-twiddling civil servants who don't care about the public are of all times and places. But I believe that the situation is worse in Africa, because state machineries there are even more alien to the average citizen than they are just about anywhere else. "This is a machine that the whites put on us after they stole our computers", says my friend, Prudence Mbewu, the ZAM columnist.
Prudence Mbewu once wrote this sentence in a column (in another publication), only to see it deleted from the final article when it was published. An intelligent editor had caught the 'mistake' Mbewu had made. Of course Africans never had computers before the whites came. Silly Prudence! Luckily she had him to protect her from embarrassing herself, or so he must have thought.
It never occurred to this editor, whose name shall remain a secret, that Prudence Mbewu had not meant it literally. She had merely meant to say that colonialism had disturbed the clock, the chronology, of Africa's organic development. What would Africa be if whites had never come? Would Africans have developed TV, Facebook, protein shakes and Richard Branson? Would they have come up with different things? We will never know. We only know that the whites did come, that they came with steel and gunpowder and governance, and that that is that. A strange machine was placed over what was essentially a rural context, and most Africans were excluded from it until a few dozen years ago. (Interestingly, in his new book, Dennis Goldberg refers to a remark made by none other than Nelson Mandela about this phenomenon, in 1964, during the Rivonia trial. I don't have the book with me, so I paraphrase from memory: 'Don't think you can use your marxist concepts here the way you do in Europe', Goldberg recalls Mandela telling him. 'You guys went through hundreds of years of different economic and industrial stages. We had our society and then came colonialism.')
In the West, states grew organically from what once were agricultural tribes and later regional strongmen who, still later, started defining themselves as 'nobles'. Nobles became regents and regents became party leaders. Industrialisation came, then parliamentary democracy, and the modern state. It took some time, all of it happened where the Netherlands are now, and most of it was done by fellow Dutch people. To a child grown up in the Netherlands, you can explain that there is some kind of logic to what is now the government. That you had William I, II, III, then Queen Wilhelmina, then evil conquerors (Nazis), then our heroic resistance (we like to leave out the less heroic parts), then our democracy. We feel good about all that. Or at least we feel that we have a place, a meaning, a kind of joint project going on, to which -even if we all have different viewpoints and heated arguments between ourselves- we all contribute.
To Liberians, however, the state is the current administrators in Monrovia who sit with all the stuff. And judging by what my friend the post office manager says, even the current administrators in Pretoria think of themselves as simply lucky in that way, and try to get some for their friends.
And are they mistaken to see it it in that way? Maybe not as much as we would like. Maybe they see what so many well-meaning development helpers don't see: that it's impossible to make the state machinery here work in the way they would so desire, that is, just like in the West.
Let's look at the state machines in Africa. It was 'given to us without a manual', again, in the words of my friend Prudence Mbewu, but that is not all. It also has to work in circumstances that it was never even designed for. This is a machine that (because of pressure from donors who are concerned about the environment) reserves large tracts of land for nature reserves, so that farmers can't farm there. There are large numbers of farming 'squatters' in nature reserves in Ivory Coast. These farmers are seen as 'problems' rather than agricultural entrepreneurs who are developing the country.
This observation goes some way to answering the question why successful entrepreneurs in Africa seem to operate largely outside state frameworks, i.e. extralegally or illegally. The state structures simply do not encourage people to start doing their own thing and make a living. Some countries tax farmers so heavily (with the tax going into the pockets of the governing elite) that many of them now rather grow the illegal marihuana (at least this can be sold outside state frameworks) than the traditional crops. Under pressure of donors, the state in Mozambique prohibited the use of DDT, with as a result tens of thousands more deaths from malaria (Just as a comparison: Holland is too cold for mosquitoes, and we did use plenty DDT when we needed it). African states pay lip service to modern ideas about child labour, in countries where entire families only stay alive because every family member of whatever age works. African states are complex, unwieldy burocracies, totally unsuited to serve people in their particular context. This is a machinery that often just stands in people's way. It's a machine that jars and grinds everywhere.
How surprising is it that such a machine is often not properly used?
This is the question I would like answers to from the development aid bobo's, the IMF and World Bank people and all others involved in 'promoting good governance' in Africa. How does one adapt an alien, unwieldy and cumbersome machine so that it can work here? How do we not only get the driving and management skills, but get the alignment right between what needs to be delivered (health, education, etc etc) and the system that is supposed to deliver it?
Supporting professionals and entrepreneurs, professional associations and quality practice at grassroots level (not from two-men-and-a-computer-type NGO's, but real people doing real work) would probably in the long run work better than continuing to prop up state structures that don't work. In the process, state structures and functions that are needed to serve these grassroots activities, will become clearer defined. Then these functions, rather than looters on top, can be supported.In the process, maybe a pirate or two will abandon their plundering game and become active in 'normal' businesses that can accompany these processes.
Supporting investigative journalism in local African media, with a view to the information needs of African audiences and not only to NGO hobby horse subjects that change all the time (today its environment, tomorrow its gender, last week it was education), would also help.
But there I go talking about FAIR again.
On the subject of Africa, the world seems intrigued by the question whether 'it' will ever work. 'It' can be the economy, or the production, or the output from the various professions, but in most of the debates 'it' is the state. The state has to provide education and health care and such things, or police and justice protection for the raped women of the Congo. As the raped women of the Congo, the people without health care and the suffering matriculants of South Africa will testify, the state in Africa rarely does that properly, if at all.
Everybody already knows the answer to the question whether 'it' works (that's a no), but somehow many, especially in the development aid business, are keeping their hopes up that they can help make it work. If only people were more aware of their rights, or maybe if we attach still more good governance criteria to development aid, or, you know what, let's just do all these things that the African states do not do all by ourselves. Hence training and health projects, and community rape counselling projects.
These things are nice for those in Africa who get project stuff, of course. It's still no justice, or a proper future in society, but, hey, at least you got vaccinated or they made a booklet from the workshop where you spoke about how you were raped. Of course you still see the governing elite driving around in Mercedeses, eating development aid pie in infinitely bigger chunks than you ever will, and being utterly useless, and the police are still drunk and in cahoots with the criminals and rapists, but that is that, then. Useless fat governing elites is what Africa is all about after all, and since they are so utterly useless, all of us, taxpayers in north and south will just have to continue to help them get fatter. In Uganda, a health reporter wrote, there was 'fat aids' and 'thin aids'. You had Fat Aids if you were employed or subsidized by development aid in the field of Aids, and Thin Aids if you actually had Aids and were left to your own devices. There were more people with thin aids than with fat aids.
An article by Johny Steinberg in some time in Octobers' Sunday Times illustrates what the state and the governing elite in Liberia is all about. It's where most of the stuff is -ever Liberian, no matter how poor or illiterate, knows that. The villagers in the village where Steinberg spent some time, knew that. When Steinberg asked them why a son from almost every family in the village had joined the murderous hordes of Charles Taylor, when the latter waged his war on the then ruling elite, the answer was simple. They were going to the capital, Monrovia, to get some stuff. To go with Taylor was the way to get barbed wire, tools, a sugarcane press -which was what the villages' sons duly brought back. All of it is rusted by now.
Stuff hoarded by some people in the capital. To Steinberg's Liberian villagers, that was, and probably is, all the state was. In the absence of health, education, justice, infrastructure, communication, some sort of sense to the organisation of the country, the state is a place where some people sit with all the stuff. And all you can hope for is to get some, too.
This view of the state is most probably shared by many citizens in Africa, even in the continent's most developed country: South Africa. What else is the current South African run on state contracts, state jobs, state projects, than a race to 'get some' too? You can wait to get a decent clinic, a proper school, a policeman who actually defends you from criminals, but are you really going to do that when, in all likelihood, that is going to be a very long wait? 'Every day I get phone calls from relatives and friends of relatives. I must give them jobs', says a friend of mine, a manager in the SA Post Office. "A job or a contract. It's what I must do if I am a good sister, a good aunt. I try to explain that that would be corruption, but they just don't understand that. To them, they must get something because they have nothing and I am the only way they can get it."
The Forum for African Investigative Reporters, which I work for, has recently done an investigation into criminally driven development in Africa. FAIR has found economic activity and even schools being built (and sometimes run) by pirates, smugglers, corrupt local strongmen and prostitutes. If you compare amounts of money with developmental results, criminal or extra-legal syndicates seem to do a lot better than most states. The question would be why that is.
My non-scientific gut feel would be that it is because, at least, criminality is something that people come up with by themselves. Many observers have remarked on the originality and creativity of criminal plans worldwide, whether it's applied to 419 type scams or ATM plunder. I imagine that you think long and hard about what you can do with your skills, your environment, your fellow perpetrators and your hapless targets, if you are a criminal. That attitude, coming up with a 'business plan' so to speak, and carrying it out, must be very different from being an employee in a state machinery that you no more own than I own the English sweepstakes.
Of course the lack of a 'business drive' goes for civil servants everywhere. Images of thumb-twiddling civil servants who don't care about the public are of all times and places. But I believe that the situation is worse in Africa, because state machineries there are even more alien to the average citizen than they are just about anywhere else. "This is a machine that the whites put on us after they stole our computers", says my friend, Prudence Mbewu, the ZAM columnist.
Prudence Mbewu once wrote this sentence in a column (in another publication), only to see it deleted from the final article when it was published. An intelligent editor had caught the 'mistake' Mbewu had made. Of course Africans never had computers before the whites came. Silly Prudence! Luckily she had him to protect her from embarrassing herself, or so he must have thought.
It never occurred to this editor, whose name shall remain a secret, that Prudence Mbewu had not meant it literally. She had merely meant to say that colonialism had disturbed the clock, the chronology, of Africa's organic development. What would Africa be if whites had never come? Would Africans have developed TV, Facebook, protein shakes and Richard Branson? Would they have come up with different things? We will never know. We only know that the whites did come, that they came with steel and gunpowder and governance, and that that is that. A strange machine was placed over what was essentially a rural context, and most Africans were excluded from it until a few dozen years ago. (Interestingly, in his new book, Dennis Goldberg refers to a remark made by none other than Nelson Mandela about this phenomenon, in 1964, during the Rivonia trial. I don't have the book with me, so I paraphrase from memory: 'Don't think you can use your marxist concepts here the way you do in Europe', Goldberg recalls Mandela telling him. 'You guys went through hundreds of years of different economic and industrial stages. We had our society and then came colonialism.')
In the West, states grew organically from what once were agricultural tribes and later regional strongmen who, still later, started defining themselves as 'nobles'. Nobles became regents and regents became party leaders. Industrialisation came, then parliamentary democracy, and the modern state. It took some time, all of it happened where the Netherlands are now, and most of it was done by fellow Dutch people. To a child grown up in the Netherlands, you can explain that there is some kind of logic to what is now the government. That you had William I, II, III, then Queen Wilhelmina, then evil conquerors (Nazis), then our heroic resistance (we like to leave out the less heroic parts), then our democracy. We feel good about all that. Or at least we feel that we have a place, a meaning, a kind of joint project going on, to which -even if we all have different viewpoints and heated arguments between ourselves- we all contribute.
To Liberians, however, the state is the current administrators in Monrovia who sit with all the stuff. And judging by what my friend the post office manager says, even the current administrators in Pretoria think of themselves as simply lucky in that way, and try to get some for their friends.
And are they mistaken to see it it in that way? Maybe not as much as we would like. Maybe they see what so many well-meaning development helpers don't see: that it's impossible to make the state machinery here work in the way they would so desire, that is, just like in the West.
Let's look at the state machines in Africa. It was 'given to us without a manual', again, in the words of my friend Prudence Mbewu, but that is not all. It also has to work in circumstances that it was never even designed for. This is a machine that (because of pressure from donors who are concerned about the environment) reserves large tracts of land for nature reserves, so that farmers can't farm there. There are large numbers of farming 'squatters' in nature reserves in Ivory Coast. These farmers are seen as 'problems' rather than agricultural entrepreneurs who are developing the country.
This observation goes some way to answering the question why successful entrepreneurs in Africa seem to operate largely outside state frameworks, i.e. extralegally or illegally. The state structures simply do not encourage people to start doing their own thing and make a living. Some countries tax farmers so heavily (with the tax going into the pockets of the governing elite) that many of them now rather grow the illegal marihuana (at least this can be sold outside state frameworks) than the traditional crops. Under pressure of donors, the state in Mozambique prohibited the use of DDT, with as a result tens of thousands more deaths from malaria (Just as a comparison: Holland is too cold for mosquitoes, and we did use plenty DDT when we needed it). African states pay lip service to modern ideas about child labour, in countries where entire families only stay alive because every family member of whatever age works. African states are complex, unwieldy burocracies, totally unsuited to serve people in their particular context. This is a machinery that often just stands in people's way. It's a machine that jars and grinds everywhere.
How surprising is it that such a machine is often not properly used?
This is the question I would like answers to from the development aid bobo's, the IMF and World Bank people and all others involved in 'promoting good governance' in Africa. How does one adapt an alien, unwieldy and cumbersome machine so that it can work here? How do we not only get the driving and management skills, but get the alignment right between what needs to be delivered (health, education, etc etc) and the system that is supposed to deliver it?
Supporting professionals and entrepreneurs, professional associations and quality practice at grassroots level (not from two-men-and-a-computer-type NGO's, but real people doing real work) would probably in the long run work better than continuing to prop up state structures that don't work. In the process, state structures and functions that are needed to serve these grassroots activities, will become clearer defined. Then these functions, rather than looters on top, can be supported.In the process, maybe a pirate or two will abandon their plundering game and become active in 'normal' businesses that can accompany these processes.
Supporting investigative journalism in local African media, with a view to the information needs of African audiences and not only to NGO hobby horse subjects that change all the time (today its environment, tomorrow its gender, last week it was education), would also help.
But there I go talking about FAIR again.
Friday, October 15, 2010
Puritanic morality kills babies and girls
In September 1983, in Mexico City, 17 year old Hortensia Aguilar gave birth to twins in secret and alone. Having hidden the pregnancy from her catholic family -who never educated her about sex-, with no support from a fly-by-night boyfriend and living in extreme poverty, she buried the newborns alive in the same field where she had agonized in labour during the night. The crime was discovered. 'Baby murderer' screamed the headlines the following day, showing pictures of a crying brown girl being led away to prison in handcuffs. Knowing Mexico's prison system, that, like many prisons, punishes desperately poor and powerless people far more than it punishes real criminals, she may still be there.
At the time I thought that traditions that forbid girls to have sex, but not help them to avoid pregnancies, would maybe persist for another few years, but would then finally give way to a more humane environment for girls.
I was wrong.
In October 2010, twentyseven years later -the same period spent in jail by Nelson Mandela for having defended human rights- Evelyn Lesabane, 18, ate rat poison and died after having been humiliated at school for being in possession of a condom.
Never mind all the safe sex campaigns and the aids awareness workshops and the fact that the school, in Alexandra township, probably officially espouses all the right NGO-type messages, girls are still not supposed to have sex.
This is what girls know: if you have sex, you die. You die either in septic childbirth, through unsafe abortion, or you die in jail because you tried to cover up your shame and despair through infanticide or child abandonment. You die because your mother/father/reverend/local nurse will shout and shame and embarrass you so much that you will kill yourself.
My 16 year old daughter and her class were told, by a white female teacher in Pretoria, that an abortion 'often' results in shock and death. In the lesson and study sheet, no difference was made between unsafe septic and hospital abortions. The next message on the study sheet was that a girl, if she survived the abortion, was surely to commit suicide after realising what she had done.
If only it was easy to not have sex. If only girls had no hormones, boyfriends, pressures to deal with, if only they felt no misery, loneliness and need for hugs, if only they were made of titanium. I suppose then one could avoid sex altogether. (But, actually, we all know that you can't.)
So you try to prevent pregnancy. Then you get embarrassed by a teacher or a clinic sister or your own family, or your boyfriend. Evelyn Lesabane was so humiliated by the office lady at school who shook her, shouted at her, took her to the principal and had her suspended, that she ate rat poison. My daughters' class was shown a movie showing the most frightful pictures of venereal diseases and scenes of ruined lives. The cause of all that misery? Sex. Not one mention of safe sex, or how to avoid STD's. The only acceptable way of life is total abstinence.
Dozens of teenagers tell stories -only to those who want to listen- that they tried to obtain and carry condoms, only to be lectured and punished. So after that, they didn't. And got pregnant. And ended up dead or in jail. In 2010, dead babies are discovered daily on rubbish heaps, in long drop toilets and along the road. Hortensia Aguilar a million times over.
I still see George W. Bush grinning when he made that speech about abstinence on TV. 'It's a sure thing, it works every time', he said.
At the time I thought that traditions that forbid girls to have sex, but not help them to avoid pregnancies, would maybe persist for another few years, but would then finally give way to a more humane environment for girls.
I was wrong.
In October 2010, twentyseven years later -the same period spent in jail by Nelson Mandela for having defended human rights- Evelyn Lesabane, 18, ate rat poison and died after having been humiliated at school for being in possession of a condom.
Never mind all the safe sex campaigns and the aids awareness workshops and the fact that the school, in Alexandra township, probably officially espouses all the right NGO-type messages, girls are still not supposed to have sex.
This is what girls know: if you have sex, you die. You die either in septic childbirth, through unsafe abortion, or you die in jail because you tried to cover up your shame and despair through infanticide or child abandonment. You die because your mother/father/reverend/local nurse will shout and shame and embarrass you so much that you will kill yourself.
My 16 year old daughter and her class were told, by a white female teacher in Pretoria, that an abortion 'often' results in shock and death. In the lesson and study sheet, no difference was made between unsafe septic and hospital abortions. The next message on the study sheet was that a girl, if she survived the abortion, was surely to commit suicide after realising what she had done.
If only it was easy to not have sex. If only girls had no hormones, boyfriends, pressures to deal with, if only they felt no misery, loneliness and need for hugs, if only they were made of titanium. I suppose then one could avoid sex altogether. (But, actually, we all know that you can't.)
So you try to prevent pregnancy. Then you get embarrassed by a teacher or a clinic sister or your own family, or your boyfriend. Evelyn Lesabane was so humiliated by the office lady at school who shook her, shouted at her, took her to the principal and had her suspended, that she ate rat poison. My daughters' class was shown a movie showing the most frightful pictures of venereal diseases and scenes of ruined lives. The cause of all that misery? Sex. Not one mention of safe sex, or how to avoid STD's. The only acceptable way of life is total abstinence.
Dozens of teenagers tell stories -only to those who want to listen- that they tried to obtain and carry condoms, only to be lectured and punished. So after that, they didn't. And got pregnant. And ended up dead or in jail. In 2010, dead babies are discovered daily on rubbish heaps, in long drop toilets and along the road. Hortensia Aguilar a million times over.
I still see George W. Bush grinning when he made that speech about abstinence on TV. 'It's a sure thing, it works every time', he said.
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