The Truth That Is Courtenay Griffiths

"There are no fewer than five African leaders awaiting trial at the International Criminal Court.... How is it possible that in 2010 we have a situation where every indicted individual at the International Criminal Court is African and every investigation is, guess where, Africa?....Look, I am not suggesting that African leaders should not be on trial, but I do think that everyone has to be equal before international law....Why is it that the Tony Blairs and the George W Bushes of the world are not being investigated for conducting an illegal war? I am a defence lawyer, but if Blair came to The Hague, I would definitely have to switch sides and do some prosecuting."

Courtney Griffiths, Charles Taylor's defence lawyer 

speaking on the possibility of defending Robert Mugabe 

if the opportunity ever arose.

Quotable Truths

Rhodesia, as a space, defines an English race that discovers through the process of conquest and appropriation the nature of its own civilisation. The English become a race only through relation to their empire;

Rhodesians as spokespeople of the discourses of empire are also naming their own identity. […]

It is in his struggle to discipline both the perceived unruliness of African nature and the nature of the Africans that the Englishman becomes his true self, and the Rhodesian who in turn has appropriated that discourse becomes his or her true self.

(Anthony Chennells 1996:103)

The Genius That Is, Kgafela oa Magogadi

Johannesburg is historically ‘the city of the white man.’ We hope it has changed. Pass laws are now applied to Africans from the rest of the continent. The darker you are the more ‘illegal’ you look. Who bothers foreigners who look ‘legal’? Is it a Pan-African city in which the whiter or lighter you are, the more ‘legal’ you look. The idea of a Pan-African City is tricky. What does it mean? Is it because there are so many African people impacting on the city’s temperament? Do these Africans beat drums? What is a Pan-European City like? Is it like Cape Town? Is Durban Pan-Indian? Back to Johannesburg; there is the Oriental Plaza in Fordsburg for Indian businesses. There’s Chinatown around Bruma Lake. Is it about ownership? Africans own which part of the city? Africans are either struggling to pay the rent or they trade from street pavements. Is this what we mean by Pan-African spaces? … Africans always looking out for police … Police always raiding ‘illegal’ African vendors… I really need to be advised about the meaning of a Pan-African City. 

I grappled with this in Itchy City:

sobukwe’s flock grow cabbages and sweet potatoes on street pavements to feed clothe and school the children school the children teach them to walk on fire, who says the fire is fictitious, it’s a furious figment of the city’s madness, we point fingers at Nigerians, but who is shooting poison in the arms of wingless angels, heaven help us.

extract appears in the essay "Johannesburg" by Jyoti Mistry in the African Cities Reader, April 2010.

'They call me Jay Electronica...%@#$ that call me Jay Elec-Hanukkah, Jay Elec-Yamaka, Jay-Elec-Tramadan, Muhammad Asa-lamaka, Rasula-lasupanuwata Allah through ya monitor!'

FYI

while you was blowin X amount of dollars on a bracelet
the sovereign nation of france was openin they files on the UFO phenomenon i-e spaceships

its just the facts jack may as well face it

every rhyme i write the seal get cracked in the chapter of revalations

a atom get cracked in the blackness of meditation

mysterious s**t

call me Jay Dogon im on some serious/sirius s**t

scholars wonder why do he bust

Allah blessed me with a midasy touch

everything i lay the hands turn to ethopian gold shiny and buffed

i got a firm understandin on the minus and plus

so i aint got time to argue with a rapper bout how he aint got rhymes

that's f**kin with mines

i'm trying to kill lucifer, so if i have to brake

cuz a rapper in my face

tellin me that he the great

you can bet a shiny nickle ill blast his motherf**kin ass way past jupiter

you couldnt be stupider

f**kin with the nuc-l-ear

mayan

aztec lion

asiatic black man from zion

quetzalcotl supreme

lettin off steam

dimethyltriptamine make a man dream

but yall would much rather hear me rappin bout trash

the size of erykahs ass blunts and cash

we need savin
minds are consumed with swine we need bathin.

The Genius That Is, Raimi Gbadamosi

I believe in open borders. The criminalisation of a person for seeking a better life is absurd, especially as the establishment of the Old Commonwealth was based on migration. Immigration is increasingly underpinned by commercial need and the conviction that immigrants should be acceptable to the settled population of the land. Europe has been extended beyond national boundaries to include all other countries within its economic bloc. To satisfy the needs of a hungry economic infrastructure, the European conglomerate utilises the freedoms it has granted itself as a historical bloc to continue economic and political control of the African continent. Raw materials and cheap labour have been the bedrock of a new European alliance. After all, it has been on the level of trade that the historical divisions within Europe

have been subsumed.

from The Not-So New Europeans, essay published in Wasafiri, Dec '08.

How Not to Write About Africa

Written by the brilliant, Binyavanga Wainaina

In the absence of committed leadership, many African countries have fallen prey to military exploitation, to the extent that today the generals constitute the majority at the Africa summit.

This is as it should be, because when political leadership loses the sense of internal direction, when, in bewilderment, it gives up the efforts to find solutions to people’s problems and begin to amass wealth for its own individual use, political leadership tends to become commandist in its state operations.

Logic and rationale become subversive. And when politicians become commandist, they too become redundant, because who is better fitted to command than the army?

Professor Abdulrahman Mohamed Babu

postcript to

How Europe Underdeveloped Africa - Walter Rodney

23rd November 1964: Nation of Islam leader Malcolm X (1925 - 1965), left, with General Abdulrahman Mohamed Babu (1924 - 1996), leader of the Zanzibar Revolution.

(Photo by Keystone/Getty Images)

“Books and all forms of writing have always been objects of terror to those who seek to suppress the truth.”

-Wole Soyinka
The Man Died: The Prison Notes of Wole Soyinka.