Blogging the Caine Prize: Butterfly Dreams

This is a late post that should've been done on Friday (!), but real life got in the way, so here it is:

The second in the series of Blogging the Caine Prize is Butterfly Dreams by Beatrice Lamwaka from Uganda. She is published author and teacher and if interested you can read her story Vengeance of the Gods which was later turned into her first novel.

Butterfly Dreams is the story of a female rebel child soldier who comes back to her family after having been taken to fight by the Ugandan rebels in the conflict between the government of Uganda and the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) in Acholiland.

For me, Butterfly Dreams reads much better than Hitting Budapest - there's a bit more structure to the story and there's actual plot development. However, there's too much overwriting in the some parts of the story and as a reader I felt like there was a slightly tortuous dragging out of the story rather than  purposeful repetition where new facts or twisted metaphors are added. In some places the repetition works, because the writer actually does something with the words or she lets lets the story tell itself.

Compare and contrast:

Exhibit A:

We watched you silently. In return, you watched us in silence. We gave you food when we thought you were hungry. You gulped down the sweet potatoes and malakwang without saying a word. We didn’t want to treat you as if you were a stranger but in our hearts, we knew that you were new. We knew that you would never be the same again. We didn’t know what to expect of you.

Exhibit B:

This is something that we don’t understand. This is our home, something that we don’t know how to explain to you. Something we took refuge in. This is our home that keeps us alive. Keeps us sane. Just huts. Grass and bricks. Just huts to hide our nakedness.

Clearly B is much stronger than A because B actually describes refugee camp where they live and also explores the emotions of the family whereas A is, well, just words. And too many of the same ones, they don't move the story along but stagnate it. At points it comes across as an 'art for art's sake story' because it embraces certain stereotypes about Africa. What Neelika at Africa's a Country calls 'mining for misery.'

Unimpressed by the number of cliches in this story, The Oncoming Hope said in this very frank post:

name an African development storytelling cliché, this story's got it, from child soldier to displacement camps to walking to school though bombs to cartoonishly evil rebel soldiers.

Again I ask, if these are the stories the Caine Prize shortlists, what does that say about how the Caine Prize as a literary institution - with all the power it wields within African literature -sees Africa or expects to see Africa represented?

Backlash Scott had a more balanced, but equally critical view:

 the tone of the writing was what separated this piece from other “poverty porn” types of stories for me. Even then I’m kind of torn. The story is about a family’s struggle to cope with a crisis as much as it is about showing you how bad children have it in the North. While I would hardly expect a writer born in Gulu to shed the atmosphere in which she grew up, it is interesting to see how many of these Caine Prize stories will cater to the troubled-dark-continent narrative. 

...When reading this story I was reminded of the late great Yvonne Vera's Under the Tongue which similarly works on repetition and lyricism - only that Vera brilliantly executes it. Don't believe me, go read her. it also deals with muteness as a result of child trauma and the woman-centered family - Grandmother and mother - become the conduits through which the protagonist, Zhizha discovers a new language with which to speak, it is a language that isn't filled with the trauma of the past. Being taught to read by her mother becomes one way for Zhizha to regain her voice and another is through her Grandmother's stories of the family's history and in speaking, Grandmother exorcises the skeleton's of her past and also regains her right to speak as a woman because her husband had often told her 'a woman cannot speak'. Similarly in Lamwuka's story, the matriarchal family is the healing unit for the protagonist - hence the constant use of 'we' but it's used in a 'we and them' way rather  than an 'us' - as seen in the family dynamics discussed below. Education is also a form of catharsis for the child - but strangely also her obsession. Curiously before she is conscripted and after the war has begun she still goes to school: 

Even when the war started and many children were waylaid, you managed to get there. You cursed the teachers and called them cowards when you didn’t find any children or teachers. Days after a heavy fight between the rebels and soldiers you continued to go to school. You never gave up even when you didn’t find anybody there.

In the present-time of the story Lamunu's about 11 years old, so she was younger before she joined the war. Reading this I wondered how realistic is this, what parent would allow a child to go to school under such circumstances? I know it's fiction, but come on. There's got to be a level of credibility.

In her book, The Body in Pain Elaine Scarry explores the silencing effect of pain and trauma, it 'has a resistance to language' thus making it difficult for the traumatized to speak. So as much as the authorial voice of this story wants Lamunu to speak, she cannot. The pain is 'unshareable' and the only place of refuge is the special school where, through therapy she will speak again and have a new relation to language that will enable her to unburden the horrors of war. On the morning of her first day at school, she speaks:

You said apwoyo. You said thank you to Ma. That’s the first word we have heard you say. 

But the family responds: 

We’re happy to hear you say something. We hope that you will be able to say a lot more. Tell us more than Anena, Aya, Bongomin, Nyeko, Ayat, Lalam, Auma, Ocheng, Otim, Olam, Uma, Ateng, Akwero, Laker, Odong, Lanyero, Ladu, Timi…. Most of all, we want to hear your voice.

If the family still want to hear Lamunu's 'voice', then they are not listening. She has spoken by saying 'thank you.' It's a breakthrough! You'd think they'd make a song and dance about it, but they don't. Perhaps this is why Lamwaka's character finds sanctuary in an educational institution whereas Vera's protagonist finds refuge in her family who educate her and give her a 'new language.' In both of these stories the acts of expression could be described as a gendered performance of orality (oral + literature) as language is a pre-dominantly patriarchal construction and privilege and the wars in both Uganda and Zimbabwe are largely patriarchally-constructed struggles. Mmm okay, nice feminist jab there, I think I'll leave that issue now.

Onto the last bit, which I found really jarring:

Ma says that you will get special treatment. Most of the children are like you. They too have killed, tortured other children. They too fought in a war that they didn’t understand. The teachers will treat you well, Ma says. They have had special training.

'Most of the children are like you. They too have killed, tortured other children.' - From one sibling to another, eh? I get the feeling the family doesn't quite understand the new Lamunu or her condition and they don't seem to want to. Having already lost the father, lived in a refugee camp where they eat posho (a yellow maize meal like polenta that's often used as drought relief food in southern and parts of East Africa excl Kenya) that they used to feed the dog, they really aren't willing to deal with anymore tough emotional issues - they want to move on and be happy again. And they don't have the cultural capacity to do so, either:

"We had never been taught how to unbury a tipu. We only hoped that your real tipu was not six feet under."

For the family, any disruption would open the floodgates of tears and trauma they've tried so hard to keep shut, so Lamunu will have to go deal this at her 'school of the other children' and find her tipu. 

A list co-bloggers and their thoughts on this one:

 The Oncoming Hope, Backslash Scott, Africa is a Country, Method to the Madness, The Mumpsimus and ZunguZungu.

From Obama to O'bama

Barack Obama takes a seat for an expanded bilateral meeting with David Cameron and other delegates in the cabinet room

fotocredit: Jewel Samad/AFP/Getty

jacked from the Graun

Yesterday Barack Obama addressed both the Houses of Parliament (not this pic) as part of his tour to Europe. David Miliband, former Foreign Secretary, now MP of South Shields tweeted:

"Obama speech came alive talking about diverse societies. But not one non-white person on British establishment side of stage."

Though Miliband is part of the very political establishment he derides, this tweet hit home. It's been really weird, surreal even, watching Britain's political elites and media fawn over the Obamas. On Monday Obama was in Ireland visiting the village where his great great great maternal grandfather is said to have come from. And so Obama, or rather O'bama is now an Irishman. To prove it, the Guardian printed an opinion piece with a headline declaring 'Obama finds his inner Irishman.' And the Irish Times ran an interesting commentary by Gavin O'Malley on the political history of the Irish and Black American communities:

"the African American community responded by providing the votes needed to elect the first Irish Catholic president [John F. Kennedy]. The course of history changed. Black merged green and green merged black. Irish-Americans and African-Americans dropped their hyphens... and once again became one."

For those who don't know much, it's informative, but it tends to recall only the good bits about Ireland's past and seems to leave out the bad bits. Seemingly, its o'kay to leave those bits out, as the most of the UK media has done, because on this occasion it's about celebrating the visit of O'bama the 'Irish' President of America. Balance and a more critical approach, would have been a little embarrassing because as there's been plenty of solidarity, there's also been plenty of oppression too. And though present-day Ireland and America certainly paints a better picture of oneness and a people bound by a common identity, it feels strange, but positive, but also weird to watch O'bama being welcomed with a pint of Guinness and a name change. 


Even more awkward was Wednesday. Obama gave a speech in Westminster during which he mentioned his paternal grandfather: 

"It is possible for the sons and daughters of former colonies to sit here as members of this great parliament and for the grandson of a Kenyan who served as a cook in the British army to stand before you as president of the United States,"

Indeed Obama has proved it is possible for the grandson of a Kenyan cook to become President of USA, but the rapturous applause he got shows the bi-polar nature of parliament - which as David Miliband's tweet above notes, is quite unrepresentative. This is the same institution trying to wriggle out of compensating the Kenyans tortured under British colonial rule because the government is not responsible for what happened in its colonies. Obama ever the diplomat, didn't mention how cruelly the British treated his grandfather, a subject he oddly never mentions much. It's odd that, apart from Libya, the highlights of Obama's speech and general tone has been one of acknowledging migrant histories and the benefits of multiculturalism and yet this government believes in 'muscular multiculturalism' and ridiculously proposes no right of appeal on visa rejections. And now that immigration figures have just been released showing an increase in migrants coming on, one can expect to see the right hit the panic button and call for tougher immigration controls. So what was parliament clapping for or was it just the lily-livered lefties?

I Am An African

I believe this extends to all of Africa: North, East, West, Central and Southern,

Happy Africa Day.

The King Had A Dream

 Things I've Done by NattyMusic

Like country music meets reggae meets indie, this is Natty. (a guy most Londoners on the underground scene will know bec of the song ColdTown) Born Alexander Alekio Modiano to a mother from Lesotho and an English dad in San Francisco. Aged one he moved to (north) London where he grew up around African and British musical and cultural influences. According to the bio on his website (nattymusic.com), he had the privilege of working with Mos Def, Queen and Razorlight - before releasing his own mixtape for sale. In 2007 he got signed by Atlantic records and performed at the iTunes Festival. Since then Natty's achieved chart success in the UK, Japan and Jamaica as well and has collaborated with the likes of Roots Manuva and Baaba Mal, among many others. If you're in London this summer look out for him at gigs and festivals, or follow him on twitter @nattymusic.


Anyway the song,The King Had a Dream above was produced a few days before Barack Obama's inauguration, but regardless of Obama's failings, the greater message of the song, a people's legacy of triumph against adversity, still hits home - at least with me.

A Giant Falls

Caribbean theorist, poet and novelist, Edouard Glissant has passed away today in Paris at the age of 82. He had been ill for a long time, but his death comes as a sad and sudden shock to me. I never knew him personally, but I have seen him speak and I know his work. His name is synonymous with contemporary Caribbean studies. This is a HUGE loss. 

Kevin Meehan's obituary from Le Monde:

Eloquent defender of diversity and métissage, the great Caribbean writer Edouard Glissant died on February 3 in Paris, at the age of 82. Poet, novelist, essayist, playwright, thinker, [and exponent of the concept of] creolization, he was born in Sainte-Marie (Martinique) on September 21, 1928 and conducted studies in Philosophy and Ethnology in Paris.

His success upon winning the Prix Renaudot in 1958 for his novel La Lézarde made the general public aware of this intellectual, who never separated his literary creation from a militant reflection. Influenced by the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, he construed the history and geography of the Caribbean politically, demonstrating his revolt against racisms of any type and evoking the indelible mark of slavery on the relationship between France and Africa and all overseas territories.

Opposing any imposed systems and any rejection of the other, Edouard Glissant has been champion of métissage and exchange, formulating in his essays gathered in the “Poétique” series his theses on Philosophie de la relation [philosophy of relation] andPoétique du divers the [poetics of the diverse]. He refused to be constrained by single genre, moving constantly between the novel, essay, and poetry, even within a single work.

Novels Directed towards the Imaginary

Edouard Glissant, who shared at once a respectful and conflicting relationship with Aimé Césaire, the other great personality of the Caribbean world, also expressed his concern for literary parentage, through writers and “disciples” [I would rather translate this as supporting scholars] such as Patrick Chamoiseau, Raphaël Confiant, or Ernest Pépin.

His novels, from Quatrième siècle (Seuil 1965) to Ormerod (Gallimard 2003), are geared towards a mythical and imaginary world, far from any naturalism, but also imbued with picturesque elements specific to certain Caribbean novelists.

After having created a center for research and teaching in Martinique, as well as a review named Acoma, Edouard Glissant founded in Paris the Institut du Tout-monde, aimed at putting into practice his humanistic principles and to allowing for the dissemination of “the extraordinary diversity of the imaginaries of the people.”

Lumumba's Last Letter

My dear companion [Pauline],


I write you these words without knowing if they will reach you, when they will reach you, or if I will still be living when you read them. All during the length of my fight for the independence of my country, I have never doubted for a single instant the final triumph of the sacred cause to which my companions and myself have consecrated our lives. But what we wish for our country, its right to an honorable life, to a spotless dignity, to an independence without restrictions, Belgian colonialism and its Western allies-who have found direct and indirect support, deliberate and not deliberate among certain high officials of the United Nations, this organization in which we placed all our confidence when we called for their assistance-have not wished it.


They have corrupted certain of our fellow countrymen, they have contributed to distorting the truth and our enemies, that they will rise up like a single person to say no to a degrading and shameful colonialism and to reassume their dignity under a pure sun.


We are not alone. Africa, Asia, and free and liberated people from every corner of the world will always be found at the side of the Congolese. They will not abandon the light until the day comes when there are no more colonizers and their mercenaries in our country. To my children whom I leave and whom perhaps I will see no more, I wish that they be told that the future of the Congo is beautiful and that it expects for each Congolese, to accomplish the sacred task of reconstruction of our independence and our sovereignty; for without dignity there is no liberty, without justice there is no dignity, and without independence there are no free men.

No brutality, mistreatment, or torture has ever forced me to ask for grace, for I prefer to die with my head high, my faith steadfast, and my confidence profound in the destiny of my country, rather than to live in submission and scorn of sacred principles. History will one day have its say, but it will not be the history that Brussels, Paris, Washington or the United Nations will teach, but that which they will teach in the countries emancipated from colonialism and its puppets. Africa will write its own history, and it will be, to the north and to the south of the Sahara, a history of glory and dignity.

Do not weep for me, my dear companion. I know that my country, which suffers so much, will know how to defend its independence and its liberty. Long live the Congo! Long live Africa!

Patrice

Patrice Lumumba

2 July 1925 – 17 January 1961

The Assassination of Lumumba

Georges Nzongola Ntalaja in The Guardian

Adam Hochschild in The New York Times

Hochschild: "...[after the assassination] more fateful was what was to come. Four years later, one of Lumumba’s captors, an army officer named Joseph Mobutu, again with enthusiastic American support, staged a coup and began a disastrous, 32-year dictatorship. Just as geopolitics and a thirst for oil have today brought us unsavory allies like Saudi Arabia, so the cold war and a similar lust for natural resources did then. Mobutu was showered with more than $1 billion in American aid and enthusiastically welcomed to the White House by a succession of presidents; George H. W. Bush called him “one of our most valued friends.

This valued friend bled his country dry, amassed a fortune estimated at $4 billion, jetted the world by rented Concorde and bought himself an array of grand villas in Europe and multiple palaces and a yacht at home. He let public services shrivel to nothing and roads and railways be swallowed by the rain forest. By 1997, when he was overthrown and died, his country was in a state of wreckage from which it has not yet recovered.
Since that time the fatal combination of enormous natural riches and the dysfunctional government Mobutu left has ignited a long, multisided war that has killed huge numbers of Congolese or forced them from their homes. Many factors cause a war, of course, especially one as bewilderingly complex as this one. But when visiting eastern Congo some months ago, I could not help but think that one thread leading to the human suffering I saw begins with the assassination of Lumumba.
We will never know the full death toll of the current conflict, but many believe it to be in the millions. Some of that blood is on our hands. Both ordering the murders of apparent enemies and then embracing their enemies as “valued friends” come with profound, long-term consequences — a lesson worth pondering on this anniversary."

Martin Luther King on Ghana

[Independent] Ghana has something to say to us. It says to us first that the oppressor never voluntarily gives freedom to the oppressed. You have work for it. Freedom is never given to anybody. Privileged classes never give up their privileges without strong resistance.

- Martin Luther King Jnr
(1957)

A Note to the Afro-Centrists of the Sentletse Diakanyo School of Thought

When Africans migrated out of Africa to Yemen and elsewhere, my ancestors settled in the Middle East and then trekked back to Africa about 2500 years ago. We have lived there since. I am a Semite, I am a Black Jew, I am Shona, I am Karanga. I am many, many more things. All at the same time. My tribal home is near where Great Zimbabwe was built. On the outskirts of my city, Bulawayo, are the Khami Ruins, also built by some of my ancestors, but I am not African according to one, Sentletse Diakanyo. When asked by the blogger Garg Unzola whether Lemba people are African or not their conversation (see comments) went something like this:


GU: You claim that Semitic people are not native to Africa. Are you suggesting that the Lemba people, who are Semitic and black, are not African? They can't be African, according to you, because being Semitic, they are not native to Africa. Yet they are black, meaning your notion that African equals black fails yet again.
SD: The Lemba people originate from Judea. They’re not African. They may have dark skins, but they’re not African. Indians also have dark skins and they too are not African.
GU: Berber people were explicitly named by Thabo Mbeki as being African. Berber people are also thought to be one origin of the white race. They did both: migrate from Africa and remained in Africa. Does this make Berbers African or not?
SD: That Mbeki referred to the Berber people as African doesn’t make that the gospel truth. He was wrong. The Berbers like the North African Arabs do not originate from Africa. They’re said to have reached North Africa around 2000 BC or so. There was a study was done in respect of the origins of the Berber people.


You can read the rest of this interesting exchange on Garg Unzola's blog, it's a lengthy debate so make sure you have time on your hands and a bowl of popcorn and a drink within reach. I've only selected a few quotes to address what I feel personally compelled to respond to in the faulty logic of Sentletse. There have also been responses to Sentletse's claims on the Thought Leader blog, the Mail and Guardian and News 24. All of these responses have excellently dispelled the myth that Only Black = African from different angles and I'd encourage you to read them all if you haven't already.

On Twitter, Sentletse's claims have caused quite a stir, I've kept track of the #African conversation for the past week and although many people from all over Africa have dismissed Sentletse's claims, there are those who support him. Whether they define Black and African in the exact same narrow terms as Sentletse is unclear to me as in my exchanges with two of these supporters have not stated how far they go along with Sentletse's narrow minded views. If they're with him 100% then I'd like Afro-centrists from the Sentletse school of nativism to know that when they celebrate Africa's great history, they must not include Great Zimbabwe or any of the other ruins built during the Mutapa Dynasty, because these were not solely built by Sentletse's Africans, but by Afro-Asiatic Lemba/ Karangas descendent from Israel as well. Same as the Venda people of South Africa, they are Lemba too so they are not African. I think Sentletse should put that on a billboard somewhere in Vendaland. It would read, 'Bana baVenda, you are not from Africa so you are not African, only Black Africans are!' And just so some of those Vendas who moved to big bad Jozi also get the memo, I think Jo'burg's skyline is deserving of a billboard with the same notification. That one might read 'Dumelang, Afro-Asiatic Sothos who settled here from the Middle East +2500 years ago, you are not Africans, only Black people are! Letsatsi le monate!*' Yes, everyone has to know, it's not just Whites, Indians, Coloureds, or Arabs who aren't African, if your DNA links you to the Lost Tribes of Israel, then you are also not African. It doesn't matter how many millenia your ancestors arrived back in the Motherland after mitochondrial Eve's children's departure, you're not African! It also doesn't matter that your DNA also shows that despite having links elsewhere, you come from the same gene pool as those considered African today, you're not African! (exclamations for emphasis of course!!!)


But back to the history lesson; if Sentletse's nativist logic then the tribes of Guinea whose mtDNA shows that they undertook back to Africa Eurasian migration, means they are also not African. What has been built by the West African Guineans, possibly Senegambians and the African Jews of West Africa from the Ashanti Kingdom to Timbuktu to East Africa where the Nilotic peoples have an architectural and textile legacy to behold, is not 100% African. All Nubians who migrated from elsewhere and spread through Africa are not Africans so when people take pride in the ancient North African civilisations from Egypitian, Kushitic, Aksumite to Carthaginian Empires as African history, they should know these things were not built by Africans, according to Sentletse. No world, it is not to be celebrated as African. Not even King Tutankhamun, Horus or Isis or Makeda the Queen of Sheba are Africans. Send an email, a telegram or a tweet marked urgent to all historians and archaeologists who classify this as African history, it is not! It is Nubian, Berber, Ethiopian or Egyptian history, that has nothing to do with Africa and anyone who says Nubian means Black therefore African is incorrect. That these civilisations were later part of the land mass first called Africa (and not the whole Continent, but a section incl the Middle East) by Leo Africanus is entirely irrelevant. Okay, kids? Even His Imperial Majesty, King Haile Selassie I, descendent of King David is not an African, so by extension any Rastas who call themselves Children of JAH, are not Africans. Maybe even Marcus Garvey who prophesied the coming of this Ethiopian King is not an African, so Sentletse and friends might want to hold back on quoting him as an authority on who is or is not entitled to repatriate to Africa. 


On the plus side though, if there are any Black Indians from the Dravidian line who left Africa at least, 75 000 years, you are African! Yes you fit the two requirements: of being Black and being a modern human when you left Africa, even if it was +75 000 years ago. The Africans who left what is present-day Malawi in search of water migrated to what is today the Indian sub-continent, so if there are any Black Indians of the Dravidian line who can show their ancestors left Africa as modern humans and have moved back to Africa (150 years of Indian settlement in S.A) who read Sentletse's piece and felt offended, they need not be. They are Africans. 


Also, if Sentletse-type Afro-centrists accept that Khoi San, as the first people of South Africans, are Africans then it is those descendent from the Khoi San line who may be classified as Coloured or Black whose mother tongue is Afrikaans. It is thus worth pointing out to Sentletse that Afrikaans is not a bastard language of the Dutch only. It was first spoken by the slaves in the Cape as a 'kitchen taal' with influences from Malay, Zulu, Xhosa, French, English, Dutch, Portuguese and German as well so Afrikaans is an all-round bastard language and is just as much a part of European and Asian origin, as it is of African origin. I'd like to ask Sentletse and his co-signers if they could sift through this bastard tongue and find out what percentage of it is Zulu, Xhosa, Malay, Portuguese, Dutch and so on, just so we know what proportion of African this language really is and could they also tell us whether it's being spoken by Khoi San peoples increases it's Africanness? What %?


 Speaking of bastard non-African languages, could Swahili be taken off the rota as the universal African language of Afro-centrists, now? Anyone care to make a proposal to that effect? It's common knowledge that Swahili was cobbled together from several Bantu languages with Arabic, Indian and European influences thrown in, so it's not really an African language, is it? Those Bantu languages that Swahili sprang from belong to people who inhabit East Africa and Central Africa, some of whom like me, are Semites, not Africans. So Sentletse is wrong, Afrikaans is more an African language than the bastard tongue Swahili or Venda or Shona or Lingala spoken by Africa's 2500 year old 'foreigners'.


But if we want to settle the score over who is what, perhaps everyone should take a DNA test to find out what branches of the gene pool they are from. I'm yet to have a DNA test done and find out what groups I'm from and I have only pieced together my past from family stories and history books which tell me I have my ancestors are scattered all over Africa from southern Sudan to South Africa, as my paternal grandmother's parents were Sothos who migrated to settle in the Masvingo area of Zimbabwe whereas my father's father's tribe can be traced back a few centuries to Tanzania and to the Lemba who are said to have settled in the Masvingo area at some point during the Great Zimbabwe Empire. As the Y chromosome passes on the male lines, confirmation of Semitic identity would depend on one of my brothers or father taking a test as well. On my mother's father's side, there are Lemba ties. A little more digging through history shows that the Shona people are the southern branch of a tribe originating in Sudan. But that is only a fraction of the story as the history of my people's migration extends back further. If I stuck a swab in my mouth and scraped my inner cheek to test my DNA, I wouldn't be surprised to learn that I am from one of the same haplogroups as a Sardinian or Dutch Person or an Palestinian person (see haplogroup link & quote below) I have been told I look like a Black Indian, an Ethiopian/Somali and a Jamaican so perhaps instead of rolling my eyes at the Asians and Italians who think I'm Indian and attribute their error to having lived in small towns where they've probably not many Black people like me, perhaps I should agree and say yes I am all these things because I am human. Being a member of the human family, my relations are scattered all over the globe, we're just different coloured Smarties (M&M's) on the outside, but on the inside we're all the same. It's true! Chaplin and Jablonski have conducted excellent extensive research on how we all came to be different skin colours and I would urge everyone to read it or if that's too dense then watch the TED talk, rather than swallow historical mistruths and pseudo-science as fact.

Race, like culture, class and gender is a myth. It is an arbitrary social construct used to distinguish people for both good and bad reasons based on both good and bad science. When it suits the agendas of certain people and historical contexts, people morph into different identities. A reading of VY Mudimbe's The Invention of Africa shows how, through art Africa and the Africans, as a racial group, were constructed as sameness and then difference by Europeans. Edward Said's Orientalism is another fine academic source that explains how the process of othering occurred and how othering serves to maintain European hegemonies in 'The Orient'. Not too long ago, Black in South Africa and Britain was used to refer to people of Black, Mixed and Asian descent as political solidarity against the common experience of racial oppression. If Sentletse's claims were to be applied to the political meaning of Black then Black cannot be used in this sense, otherwise it means Indians, Blacks & Coloureds are all Africans. Historians of the future, please note the previous generation was wrong to find solidarity in this one name, whereas in the post-1994 Rainbow Nation, Black meant something else so only Blacks and Coloureds are Africans. But not Black Jews! 


I have never set foot in either Israel or Yemen, I come to Judaic practices of holding Sabbath and fasting by way of Rastafari and Shona folklore, but even then, other purist Shonas would raise an eyebrow because I am a middle class Zimbabwean, despite the fact that Shona is my mother tongue, whereas not all Rastas would call me a Rasta because I don't wear locks and I'm a fashion addict, but I pray, I fast and I don't eat meat. The trouble is, I don't care much for absolutism and refuse to be bound by the practices of mankind because my relationship with the God I pray to is a personal one. I believe in plurality and hate rigidity. Africanness is such a dynamic, ever-changing concept embodied in the many lives and histories of people who live on the Continent and it's Diaspora. It's expressed in so many different ways that it's hard to keep track of what one means when they say they are African. When I am in Europe, I feel closer to home so am I more African than those living at home? When I go home do I then suddenly become less African? And what of Black people who are hesitant to call themselves African because their families left one, two, three even six generations ago and never returned? Are they more African than me because they left as modern humans and have the 'right genes'? Are they more African than some of my non-Black friends who've never set foot outside of Africa since their ancestors arrived a few hundred years ago? What if my English and Shona speaking White Zimbabwean friend has a Black grandmother somewhere along the way and my Indian Tanzanian friend who moved to Zimbabwe aged ten has a Black relation somewhere in the family and speaks a bit of Ndebele and a little non-African Swahili, is the Africanness denied, yet across the oceans, the struggle by Blacks and Asians in Europe to be called European is seen as legitimate? Does my friends' being African somehow change the violent past that has come to shape the African present or does it just simply mean we all call Africa home now? The latter is my logic, but what Sentletse's proclaimation seems to suggest is that he, as an African, can always have one-up over non-Blacks and remind them that they will never, ever, ever belong and the rest of us of Semitic origin are privileged guests.

As people, we don't all stay in our neat little boxes marked Shona, Somali, Xhosa, Mauritian, Indian or Arab, that is why there are so many mixed varieties of people across the Motherland. There are things we all share being from the same Continent; culture, values, history and in some cases language. We don't always treat each other nicely as Africans, but that doesn't change who we are. There are some Whites, Arabs, Indians or Coloureds who may not feel comfortable calling themselves African, but that is their prerogative, just as there are people in Zanzibar who see themselves as Persian or in Sudan where people who are as dark or darker than me who may not call themselves African but if I said We are All African, some of them would understand that I meant, despite what we call ourselves, we all are one people. For those of us that do recognise themselves as African challenge the politics of exclusion and singularity inherited by the legacies of slavery, colonialism, apartheid and xenophobia because being African does not mean one racial identity, nor does it have one fixed meaning. 

 Sentletse has no right to declare that some people are not African. He may have the right to his views, but not to assert them in the manner that he does because it is wrong and it is dangerous. Such behaviour is borderline racist. Yes it is. It's the similar sort of divisive rhetoric Mugabe preached in Zimbabwe (a descendant of a Malawian migrant, by the way) and in the UK it's what Nick Griffin and right wing crazies would say, but only it'd be about White British people as 'the indigenous tribes of Europe.' But, thankfully good sense, prevails over stupidity and that is why Britishness and Africanness are plural, evolutionary concepts that includes different cultural and ethnic identities in their definitions. Science trumps pseudoscience so like it or not Mr Diakanyo, all humans come from one common ancester, a female called Eve so WE are all Africans.

*FYI Whether you believe in human evolution or Bible - or part & part like me, the origin of humans is still in Africa.
* Dumelang - Hello, Letstatsi le monate - Have A Nice Day
*Bana beVenda - Children of Venda
*quote on Dutch origins: The Dutch are descended from a group of Homo sapiens who settled Europe during the Paleolithic (40 000 years ago) and Neolithic (10 000 years ago) periods.¹⁵ These settlers originated in the Middle Eastern and brought a discrete set of Y chromosomal and mitochondrial haplotypes, Indo-European languages, agriculture, and pottery.¹⁶
From: http://www.nature.com/ejhg/journal/v12/n7/full/5201151a.html 

Dear Lieutenant-Colonel Sir Henry Galleway & Sotheby's, Selling Stolen Goods is A Crime!

fisttap Naija Blog & Bombastic Elements

A 16th-century ivory pendant mask from the ancient city of Benin is to be put up for sale at Sotheby’s London. On 17 February 2011, the mask is to be auctioned for an estimated £3.5m-£4.5m (US $5.4m-$6.9m). The mask is said to have been belonged to the monarchy of Benin and was worn by the Queen Mother (Iyoba (Female) Oba  (Male)) as ceremonial headgear. Apparently there are four other masks from this era which are held in museums outside of Nigeria because well, they're world history and while this is 100% true, it is sometimes used as code speak for Mother Empire of the West can look after them better than not-yet-civilized, corrupt Nigerians. 

According to the advert for the sale:

The mask and the five other Benin objects will be sold by the descendants of Lieutenant Colonel Sir Henry Lionel Gallwey (in 1913 he changed his name to Galway) who was appointed deputy commissioner and vice-consul in the newly established Oil Rivers Protectorate (later the Niger Coast Protectorate) in 1891. He remained in Nigeria until 1902 and participated in the British Government’s “Punitive Expedition” of 1897 against Benin City. The faces of the five known pendant masks have been interpreted widely by scholars of Benin art as that of Idia, the first Queen Mother of Benin.

That the objects are described as belonging to a 'collection' are not considered stolen goods is disturbing, in the least and Jeremy Weate at Naija blog has picked up on the 'polite violence of the language.' Truth! The colonial exploit is described as some clean and legitimate process, absent of the violence that characterised the takeover of Benin which was it what the Punitive Expedition really was. This clever dressing up of things is reflective of a deeper inability within everyday citizen and media discourse that Britain has with accepting the truth of imperialism, it is not some glorious tale of journeys to 'exotic' lands and world domination, it is a long history of murder, pillage and plunder!!! I live very near to one of London's well-known museums named after an 'anthropologist' who had a 'personal collection' of stuff from Africa and south Asia that fills up two massive rooms equivalent to the size of two small halls. It's interesting that in it's brochures the museum the descriptions smoothly glide over how this vast collection was stolen...ahem, I mean acquired. After all the man had the distinguished occupation of being an anthropologist and explorer so it's perfectly natural for him to have had large 'personal collections' from the 'indigenous tribes' of Africa and south Asia.

But back to this matter of stolen property; the Galleway family are following precedent in setting their asking price at a few million quid because in 2007, an Oba bronze head stolen by another collector was sold for $4.7 million. Clearly, selling stolen goods is a very profitable business, but only when an auction house does it and when it belongs to a colonizer...ahem, I mean explorer. But fear not help/objection is on the way, the Financial Times has (sort of, impartially ...ahem) reported about it, Sahara Reporters in Nigeria are on the case and have a petition  going and some Nigerian bloggers are upset about it too. Apart from Naija blog mentioned above, Bunmi's take on the subject of returning or not returning stuff is that, while he appreciates that returning artefacts may not always be a good thing, he writes:
...I didn't hear the part where the Galleways said proceeds from the sale are going back to help develop Benin and raise the standard of living to the point where their museums and private collectors will be able to lovingly guard and care for million-pound artifacts and, perhaps, build a few art preservation and restoration schools as well.


Co-sign!!!


Now hopefully the Nigerian government will hear about this and care enough to make some noise along with the British government who should do the right thing and say something on this matter, maybe even ask The Met to have a word because if the theft of Jewish Polish paintings by Nazis is grounds for arrest* then surely a certain family has a case to answer.


*the the site where I found this story is quite content to advertise the 'sale' of the Oba mask...oh the irony.

Long Live The Dead Queen

1. I'm a Lady

2. They Don't Make 'Em Like They Used To

3. I Put A Spell On Me

On Sophie, the character cast from a fibreglass mould of Mary's own body: 

Sophie’s eyes are always closed as if in a “constant ecstasy of fantasy” and it’s in her mind that her dress becomes a thing 

of voluminous Victorian splendour. 

“If she opened her eyes, it would be back to work – cleaning this, dusting that. 

Her dress would become an ordinary maid’s uniform” 

For more head to Momo Gallery, Johannesburg for live viewing, otherwise checkout www.gallerymomo.com.

 post jacked from the uber fab bombasticelements.blogspot.com!

The Cool Ruler

Gregory Isaacs 

Son of Judah

Born 15 July 1959, passed 26 October 2010 and to be laid to rest 20 November 2010.

On the 10th of November was a tribute to Gregory Isaacs at a church in Harrow Weald, London after which his body was flown back home to Kingston, Jamaica. He is to be given a state funeral and deservedly so, for his contribution to reggae music and as a lifelong ambassador of Jamaica. In my country, state funerals are the privilege of political figures who fought on the side of the ruling party, cultural contribution matters nought. Still, fare thee well Cool Ruler thank you  for the music, skank sessions downtown and late nights ekasi. 

Night Nurse was legendary.

(UK massive check KissFM for a nice David Rodigan tribute from a few weeks ago, hope it's still there.)

Black History Month

I 

just 

remembered

A 

time 

when

 I 

am 

just

 black

Just 
one
 month 
this year.

...I am a black man 
throughout all the days of the year. 

 Please don’t honour me for just 31 days of the year.

Honour me every day and in every way. 

Stephen Lawrence, stabbed to death for being black

Please don’t clutch your handbag 
when you see me walking 
towards you 
or cross the street just to avoid me. 

It’s alright to make eye contact, nod or even acknowledge my presence. 

I’m probably headed to or back from work 
when we meet…
matter of fact
 the other day I was off to a café with a good book in hand. 

Just 
so
 you
 know, 
I 
want
 absolutely
 nothing
 from 
you 
except 
a little respect 
all the days of the year.

Happy

....to those who still believe 
that one month 
is all we deserve.

Aluta Continua...


by
SirNigel

The first verse of this is a haiku by Sir Nigel (www.sirnige.com) and the rest are his words, I felt they sounded poetic so with his permission, I re-arranged his words into a poem. 
copyright: sirnige
All images jacked from Google, too many to do fotocred.