https://africasacountry.com

Israel’s Sharpeville moment
▻https://africasacountry.com/2023/11/israels-sharpeville-moment

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The Israeli state is fond of telling anyone who will listen that it is now living through its very own “9/11.” It is, in truth, living through its own Sharpeville.

There are important differences between the killing of anti-apartheid protestors by police in 1960 and today’s ethnic cleansing of Gaza. But the impact on the state responsible for the bloodshed may be much the same. And that is a possibility that should deeply worry those who are now turning Gaza into a wasteland.

L’historien Joël Glasman, spécialiste de l’histoire des colonisations en Afrique et dont les travaux portent également sur l’aide humanitaire actuel, analyse les déterminants de l’indifférence sociale aux conditions d’existence de populations entières.
▻https://africasacountry.com/2023/02/ignore-and-rule

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Ignore and rule

By Joël Glasman

What do Europeans do when they hear the war waged by the government of Ethiopia has killed more people than the war in Ukraine?

Europeans love to start the day with a little piece of Africa. Coffee for mum, tea for dad, chocolate for the little one and a banana pocketed on the fly by the teenager for the bus ride to school. Europeans know that their prosperity is built on the work of others. They know that without the oil extracted by workers in Nigeria, the coltan supplied by traders in Congo, and the uranium produced by miners in Chad, their cars wouldn’t run, their phones wouldn’t work and their homes would soon go dark. Yet, how many Europeans are able to locate the capital of Nigeria, Chad or Congo on a map? A kindergarten child can easily name several African mammals, but few would ever suggest the child memorize the name of an African language, society or personality. How can a civilization that thrives on labor in the Global South be so indifferent to these societies?

The literature provides three answers to that question. The first says roughly: It’s capitalism. Capitalism masks social relations. In order to live, workers must produce goods or provide services. But the market-based exchange of commodities transforms relations between workers. Social relations are primarily experienced as “relations between things.” This is what Karl Marx calls “commodity fetishism.” Relationships of production disappear from the field of vision. We end up treating commodities as if they had an intrinsic value, independent of the labor that produces them. Hungarian philosopher György Lukács adds that capitalism reifies social relations. Social relations are objectified, while individuals are plunged into a contemplative stance. Passive, apathetic, depoliticized: the consumer is a spectator.

While Marx and Lukács explain very well how one can use a product every day without knowing anything about the worker who produced it, they don’t tell us why certain workers, certain societies or certain groups are particularly obscured in the culture of capitalism. The economist Samir Amin would answer that capitalism only extends globally through “unequal exchange.” Colonial domination cut the world into two types of capitalist development: the self-centered capitalism of the center, with market growth, rising wages, and consumption. And the extroverted capitalism of the periphery, export-oriented and therefore without significant wage growth. This unequal division of labor logically leads to unequal awareness. While workers in the Global North may be indifferent to the fate of workers in the Global South, the reverse is not true. You can bet that a random Senegalese can name far more French cities than a random French person can name Senegalese cities.

Another form of response however would point less to capitalism and more to the state. In “The Social Production of Indifference,” the British anthropologist Michael Herzfeld shows that bureaucracy treats individuals not as persons but as “cases.” Following Max Weber, Herzfeld shows that the centralization of state power drives a rationalization of practices and a division of bureaucratic labor. The accumulation of knowledge, the creation of specialized services and the professionalization of expertise follow suit. But bureaucratization also increases social distancing. Individuals are no longer linked to each other by face-to-face relations, but by all sorts of “invisible threads:” legal categories, statistics, formalities. French sociologist Béatrice Hibou adds that, contrary to what is often thought, neoliberalism does not debureaucratize. On the contrary, it adds new forms of distancing: numerical indicators, benchmarking, and management techniques. Here again, the problem is more general than the relationship between Europeans and Africans. But colonization has also left its mark on the bureaucratic trajectory. Post-colonial bureaucracy is indifferent to the fate of peripheral populations. Cameroonian political scientist Achille Mbembé calls this “government by neglect.” It’s the exercise of power through abandonment, relegation, and invisibilization. We end up relying on experts and specialists, rather than considering problems for ourselves. Eventually, we hope, someone in charge will take care of the looming problem for us.

A third type of response of course is racism. Racial theory and the dissemination of technologies of division (apartheid, segregation, border closures, encampment) have separated emotional communities. White people do not feel concerned with Black issues; they live in the comfortable quietness of what the philosopher Charles W. Mills calls “White Ignorance.” But indifference also comes from a denial of race. For US-American sociologists Tyrone A. Forman and Amanda E. Lewis, indifference is a new form of racism. While earlier racism was explicit, contemporary racism is less so. When asked about the plight of non-white people, white Americans used to justify their misfortunes on the grounds of biological or cultural inferiority. Today, Forman and Lewis explain, they are content to just ignore it. Pretend to see nothing of the differences so as not to have to worry about them: “Racial apathy and White ignorance (i.e., not caring and not knowing) are extensions of hegemonic color-blind discourses (i.e., not seeing race)”.

Of course, the question of Europe’s indifference to the fate of the rest of the world is an old one. But this question is particularly acute today. The gap between the rapid flow of information and the indifference shown to certain population groups has never been wider. The number of drowning deaths in the Mediterranean (several thousand), the number of people suffering from hunger in Somalia (several hundred thousand), or the number of direct victims of the war in Ethiopia (more than half a million) are all widely ignored. When Europeans read in the newspapers that the war waged by the government of Ethiopia has killed more people than the war in Ukraine, their reflex is to compartmentalize by relegating it a war far away in an exotic place. Chances are they will close the journal before ever realizing that the coffee they are drinking is from there.

#aidehumanitaire #colonialisme #racisme #indifférence #guerres

The age of the Obidients
▻https://africasacountry.com/2023/02/the-age-of-the-obidients

By Camilla Houeland & Sa’eed Husaini. Peter Obi, one of the three main candidates for Nigerian president, is neither a savior nor a socialist, but his candidacy and his supporters have enlivened Nigerian elections.

#Afrique #Nigeria #Démocratie #Elections #Syndicalisme #Mouvement_social

Western media is missing the point
▻https://africasacountry.com/2023/02/western-media-is-missing-the-point

The excessive reporting of the interplay between non-African powers in the Sahel—however crucial it may be to understand regional dynamics—betrays a Western-centric bias in international news coverage.

#France #Afrique #Sahel #Russie #Médias

Italian fascists quoting #Samora_Machel and #Sankara

The use of Marxist-inspired arguments, often distorted, to support racist or nationalist political positions, is known as “rossobrunismo” (red-brownism) in Italy.

Those following immigration politics in Europe, especially Italy, may have noticed the appropriation of the words of Marxist and anti-imperialist heroes and intellectuals by the new nationalist and racist right to support their xenophobic or nationalist arguments. From Samora Machel (Mozambican independence leader), Thomas Sankara (Burkinabe revolutionary), Che Guevara, Simone Weil (a French philosopher influenced by Marxism and anarchism), to Italian figures like Sandro Pertini an anti-fascist partisan during World War II, later leader of the Socialist Party and president of the Italian republic in the 1980s, or Pier Paolo Pasolini (influential communist intellectual).

The use of Marxist-inspired arguments, often distorted or decontextualized, to support racist, traditionalist or nationalist political positions, is referred to as rossobrunismo (red-brownism) in Italy.

In Italy it got so bad, that a group of writers—some gathered in Wu Ming collective—made it their work to debunk these attempts. They found, for example, that a sentence shared on several nationalist online pages and profiles—attributed to Samora Machel—that condemned immigration as a colonial and capitalist tool to weaken African societies, was fake news.

It also contaminated political debate beyond the internet: During his electoral campaign, Matteo Salvini, leader of the anti-immigration party Lega and current minister for internal affairs in Italy’s government, explicitly mentioned the Marxist concept of “reserve army of labor” to frame the ongoing migration across the Mediterranean as a big conspiracy to import cheap labor from Africa and weaken Italy’s white working class. As for who benefits from cheap, imported labor (as Afro-Italian activists Yvan Sagnet and Aboubakar Soumahoro have pointed out), Salvini says very little.

The typical representative of red-brownism is Diego Fusaro, a philosopher who first became known, about a decade ago, for a book on the revival of Marxism in contemporary political thought. More recently, he promoted through his social media profiles and collaborations with far-right webzines like Il Primato Nazionale (published by neo-fascist party Casa Pound), a confused version of an anti-capitalist critique aggressively targeting not only the liberal left, but also feminist, LGBT, anti-racist activists and pro-migrant organizations. Fusaro has theorized that immigration is part of a “process of third-worldization” of Europe, where “masses of new slaves willing to do anything in order to exist, and lacking class consciousness and any memory of social rights” are deported from Africa. As if collective action, social movements and class-based politics never existed south of the Sahara.

Yet, the appropriation of pan-Africanist thinkers and politicians like Machel and Sankara brings this kind of manipulation to a more paradoxical level. What could motivate the supporters of a xenophobic party, whose representatives have in the past advocated ethnic cleansing, used racial slurs against a black Italian government minister, or campaigned for the defense of the “white race,” to corroborate their anti-immigration stance through (often false) quotations by Machel or Sankara?

To make this sense of this, it is useful to consider the trajectory of Kemi Seba, a Franco-Beninese activist who has sparked controversies in the French-speaking world for quite some time, and has only recently started to be quoted in Italian online discussions and blogs.

Initially associated with the French branch of the American Nation of Islam, Kemi Seba has been active since the early 2000s in different social movements and his own associations, all positioned across the spectrum of radical Afrocentrism. In the polarized French debate, traditionally wary of even moderate expressions of identity politics, Kemi Seba’s radical statements predictably created public outcry and earned him the accusations of racial hatred—for which he has been repeatedly found guilty. An advocate of racial separatism (or ethno-differentialisme, as he defined it), he has quoted among his sources Senegalese historian Cheikh Anta Diop, from whom he took inspiration for his “kemetic” ideology claiming a black heritage for ancient Egyptian culture, and Marcus Garvey, whose ideas he reformulated in his call for all the black people living in France and in Europe to return to the African motherland—while classifying those remaining as “traitors.”

While one would expect white oppressors to be his main target, Kemi Seba’s vehement attacks have often been directed toward other black activists and personalities living in France, accusing them of promoting integration or collaborating with the white system (and often qualifying them as macaques, monkeys, or as nègres-alibis, “negroes-alibis”). In recent years, however, he has declared he would abandon his initial supremacist positions to embrace a broader pan-African stance, and moved his main residence first to Senegal, later to Benin. Now addressing a predominantly West African audience, he has co-opted personalities, such as the late Burkinabe president and revolutionary Thomas Sankara—still the most powerful political reference for the youth in Francophone Africa—among his claimed sources of inspiration. He has also endorsed the struggle against the CFA France—an ongoing critical reflection that was started by the work of economists such as Ndongo Samba Sylla and Kako Nubupko, well before Seba started campaigning about the issue. In August 2017, he burned a CFA banknote in public in Dakar—an illegal act under the Senegalese law—and was briefly detained before being deported from the country.

The ambiguous relationship between Kemi Seba’s ideology and the far right has a long history, especially in France. Understandably, his initial racial separatism and his call for a voluntary repatriation of all blacks to Africa constituted an appealing counterpart for French white racists committed to fight the possibility of a multiracial and multicultural France. Kemi Seba, on his side, repeatedly hinted at possible collaborations with white nationalists: in 2007, he declared:

My dream is to see whites, Arabs and Asians organizing themselves to defend their own identity. We fight against all those monkeys (macaques) who betray their origins. (…) Nationalists are the only whites I like. They don’t want us, and we don’t want them.

Some years later, in 2012, commenting the electoral growth of Greek neo-nazi party Golden Dawn in a radio program, he argued:

I want people to understand that today there is nothing to win by remaining in France, and everything to win by remaining in Africa. And the best solution for this… unfortunately, black people only awaken when they realize that they are in danger, when they are slapped in the face. (…) Black people are unfortunately slow on the uptake, they understand only when there is bestiality, brutality. So, maybe, if we had a movement similar to Greece’s Golden Dawn, established in France, and if they threw black people in the sea, if they raped some, then maybe someone would understand that it is not so nice to remain in France and would return to their fucking country, to their motherland the African continent.

His supporters later qualified his statements as simple provocations, but Seba continued to be a favorite guest and interlocutor for far-right groups. For example, the webzine Egalité et Reconciliation, founded by Alain Soral—a well-known personality of French red-brownism who shifted from his juvenile communist engagement to later support for Front National and has been condemned for homophobic and anti-Semitic statements—has often provided a platform for Seba’s declarations. In 2006, Seba praised young white nationalist activists in a long interview with Novopress, an online publication by Bloc Identitaire. The latter is a white nationalist movement which works to popularize the conspiracy theory of the “great replacement”—an alleged plan of “reverse colonialism” to replace demographically the white majority in Europe with non-white migrants and which inspired anti-semitic white nationalists in the US. Bloc Identitaire recently formed extra-legal patrols in order to stop asylum seekers from crossing the border between Italy and France.

In 2008, Seba’s association organized a tiny demonstration against French military presence abroad with Droite Socialiste, a small group whose members were later involved in shootings and found guilty of illegal possession of weapons and explosive material. Their hideout was also full of Adolf Hitler’s books and other neo-Nazi propaganda.

Relatively unknown until recently on the other side of the Alps, Seba has made his appearance on Italian websites and Facebook profiles in recent months. Since Lega’s promotion to national government in coalition with the Five Star Movement, the country has become the avant-garde of an attempt to connect different reactionary political projects—rossobrunismo, anti-EU and anti-global sovranismo (nationalism), white nationalism, neo-Fascism and others—and has attracted the attention of globally known ideologues, such as Trump’s former counselor Steve Bannon and pro-Putin populist philosopher Alexander Dugin (who, not by chance, organized a meeting with Seba in December 2017). Small webzines like Oltre la Linea and L’Intellettuale Dissidente, which following Dugin’s example mix pro-Putin positions with an anti-liberal critique and traditionalist nostalgia, inspiring attacks against feminism, anti-racism and “immigrationism.” Collectively, they have dedicated space to Seba’s ideas and interviewed him, profiting from his visit to Rome in July 2018.

Invited by a group of supporters in Italy, Seba visited a center hosting asylum seekers and gave a speech where, amidst launching broadsides against the EU and African elites who are impoverishing Africa (thus forcing young people to try their luck as migrants in Europe), he slipped in a peculiar endorsement to Italy’s xenophobic minister of internal affairs:

Matteo Salvini [he then asked people in the audience who started booing when they heard the name to let him finish] defends his people, but he should know that we will defend our people too!

He repeated this sentiment in an interview published later on a nationalist blog. Seba basically endorsed the ongoing anti-NGO campaign voiced by representatives of the Italian government. The interviewer suggested to Seba:

Salvini’s battle against boats owned by NGOs, which transport migrants from Lybian shores to Italian harbors, sometimes funded by Soros’ Open Society, reflects your [Kemi Seba’s] same struggles for the emancipation from those Western humanitarian associations that operate in the African continent and enclose you all in a permanent state of psychological and moral submission.

“Yes, I realize this very well, we have the same problem,” replied Seba.

Attacks against the NGOs organizing rescue operations in the Mediterranean have multiplied in the Italian political debate since last year. The Five Star Movement started a campaign against what they called the “sea taxis” and the previous government tried to force them to sign a code of conduct imposing the presence of police personnel on their boats. NGOs have been alternatively accused of complicity with Libyan smugglers (but neither the investigation of a parliamentary committee, nor judges in different Sicilian courts, could find evidence for this allegation).

More broadly, a dysfunctional regime governing migration flows, and the bungled reception of asylum seekers, allows such positions to take root in the Italian political sphere. What is often obscured, though, is that such a dysfunctional regime was originated by the restrictive policies of the Italian government and the European Union, through the abandonment of a state-sponsored rescue program and the externalization of border control to Libya (where media reported the dehumanizing treatment reserved to Sub-Saharan migrants) and other third countries.

Echoing Seba, Italian right-wing bloggers and opinion-makers make increasing use of anti-imperialist quotations—for example, by Thomas Sankara—to fuel this anti-NGO backlash and denounce the plundering of Africa’s wealth and resources by multinational corporations in consort with venal governments, abetted by the development industry. By the right’s bizarre logic, stopping migration flows to Europe would be a part of the same coordinated strategy to reverse Africa’s impoverishment by Europe. This use not only overlooks the fact that African migration to Europe is a tiny portion of the massive migration flows taking place across the whole planet, but also that intra-African migration is significantly more common.

It also distorts Thomas Sankara’s critical views of development, which he formulated at a time when aid mainly consisted of bilateral contributions and loans from international financial institutions, rather than NGO-sponsored interventions. And, ultimately, it generates confusion between the critique of the classical development sector—which is fundamental and has been developed for a long time by dependency theory and other schools of critical scholarship—and an analysis of the rescue sector: indeed, most NGOs currently operating in the Mediterranean are associations created in the last few years with the explicit goal of reducing mortality along the Libyan or the Aegean routes. They have never participated in development projects in sub-Saharan Africa.

What would Samora Machel and Thomas Sankara think today of the so-called “refugee crisis” and of the populist and xenophobic reactions it has provoked all over Europe? White nationalists think that they would be on their side. But what we know from their writings is that their revolutionary politics was never based on an exclusionary form of nationalism, let alone on racial separatism. Rather, it was associated with an analysis of the production of material inequalities and exploitation at the global level, and with class-based internationalism.

This is clearly articulated in many speeches pronounced by Sankara, for example in his frequently quoted intervention on foreign debt at the African Union summit in July 1987 (a few months before he was murdered), where he declared that “by refusing to pay, we do not adopt a bellicose attitude, but rather a fraternal attitude to speak the truth. After all, popular masses in Europe are not opposed to popular masses in Africa: those who want to exploit Africa are the same who exploit Europe. We have a common enemy.”

While many representatives of red-brownism and the new right would probably declare that they subscribe to this principle on paper, most of them are currently engaged in defusing any possibility of a class-based critique of capitalism, to which they prefer sovranismo and its emphasis on renewed national sovereignties. Furthermore, they are more or less directly legitimizing the action of a government that capitalizes on the anxieties of the white majority and of the impoverishment of middle and lower classes, building a consensus around xenophobia, racial discrimination and policies of strict border control, no matter the consequences. The creative use, made by the African youth, of Sankara’s thought in reclaiming and obtaining political change, such as in the Burkinabe revolution in 2014, is a demonstration of the legacy of his thinking as an effective tool for emancipatory struggles—a precious legacy that anti-racists should protect from the re-appropriation and manipulation attempted by the European racist right.

▻https://africasacountry.com/2018/09/twisting-pan-africanism-to-promote-anti-africanism
#Italie #fascisme #marxisme #rossobrunismo #racisme #nationalisme #anti-impérialisme #Thomas_Sankara #Che_Guevara #Simone_Weil #Sandro_Pertini #Pier_Paolo_Pasolini #rouge #brun #Salvini #Matteo_Salvini #Diego_Fusaro #Casa_Pound #extrême_droite #extrême_gauche
ping @cede @isskein

▻https://africasacountry.com/2022/01/abdulrazak-gurnah-and-the-afterlives-of-german-colonialism-in-east-

Abdulrazak Gurnah and the afterlives of German colonialism in East Africa

Tom Menger

When Abdulrazak Gurnah was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in October 2021, the jury honored “his uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the effects of colonialism.” With East Africa being central to much of Gurnah’s work, German colonialism is a regular presence in his novels, more precisely the colony of German East Africa, the biggest German colony of all, which comprised modern Tanzania, Burundi, and Rwanda. Although the history of this territory has been thoroughly studied, it still very much stands in the shadow of contemporary public debates on the German genocides perpetrated against the Herero and the Nama, as well as the debate on the continuities between that genocide and the Holocaust.

German East Africa is especially prominent in two of Gurnah’s novels: the early Paradise (1994) and the recent Afterlives (2020). They invoke several themes. The first, perhaps unsurprisingly, is colonial violence. Though such violence is not always in the foreground of Gurnah’s books, it is always present. When Gurnah’s characters refer to the Mdachi, the Germans, and their African soldiers, the askari, they often use terms like merciless, viciousness and ferocity. German colonial rule in East Africa began with violence, when Hermann von Wissmann waged war on the coastal populations from 1889 to 1890, after these had resisted the attempt of the German East Africa Company to run the colony as a private enterprise. The hanging in 1889 of one of the revolt’s leaders, Al Bushiri, which the Germans orchestrated as a grand spectacle, recurs as an incisive event in Afterlives. [continue reading]

#Littératurepostcol #GermanEastAfrica

L’Allemagne reconnaît avoir commis un « génocide » en Namibie pendant la colonisation
▻https://www.rfi.fr/fr/afrique/20210528-l-allemagne-reconna%C3%AEt-avoir-commis-un-g%C3%A9nocide-en-namibie-pen

Berlin a pour la première fois reconnu vendredi avoir commis un « génocide » en Namibie contre les populations Herero et Nama pendant l’ère coloniale entre 1884 et 1915. L’Allemagne se démarque des autres anciens pays colonisateurs, réticents à reconnaître leurs fautes, et parfois leurs crimes. Cette annonce est le fruit de longues négociations entre les deux États.

▻http://genocide-herero-nama.memorialdelashoah.org/expositions.html

En 1904, en réaction aux règles imposées par l’administration coloniale allemande ainsi qu’aux abus et maltraitances des colons, une révolte éclate dans le Sud-Ouest africain allemand, aujourd’hui la #Namibie. Les forces du Deuxième Reich la répriment avec brutalité et mettent en défaite les Herero. Un ordre d’extermination – émis par le général Lothar von Trotha le 2 octobre 1904 – enjoint les troupes du Kaiser à tuer sans distinction, condamnant ainsi hommes, femmes et enfants. Les Nama prennent à leur tour les armes contre les Allemands et subissent le même sort que les Herero. Dans les camps de concentration ouverts en 1905, comme ceux de Windhoek, Swakopmund et Shark Island, les prisonniers Nama et Herero sont éliminés par le travail et succombent à la maladie, aux mauvais traitements et à la malnutrition. Des crânes de victimes sont alors envoyés en Allemagne à des fins de recherches scientifiques raciales.

#génocide

The strange case of Portugal’s returnees

White settler returnees to Portugal in #1975, and the history of decolonization, can help us understand the complicated category of refugee.

The year is 1975, and the footage comes from the Portuguese Red Cross. The ambivalence is there from the start. Who, or maybe what, are these people? The clip title calls them “returnees from Angola.” (▻https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wzd9_gh646U

) At Lisbon airport, they descend the gangway of a US-operated civil airplane called “Freedom.” Clothes, sunglasses, hairstyles, and sideburns: no doubt, these are the 1970s. The plane carries the inscription “holiday liner,” but these people are not on vacation. A man clings tight to his transistor radio, a prized possession brought from far away Luanda. Inside the terminal, hundreds of returnees stand in groups, sit on their luggage, or camp on the floor. White people, black people, brown people. Men, women, children, all ages. We see them filing paperwork, we see volunteers handing them sandwiches and donated clothes, we see a message board through which those who have lost track of their loved ones try to reunite. These people look like refugees (▻http://tracosdememoria.letras.ulisboa.pt/pt/arquivo/documentos-escritos/retornados-no-aeroporto-de-lisboa-1975). Or maybe they don’t?

https://i.imgur.com/WbgmMg2.png

Returnees or retornados is the term commonly assigned to more than half-a-million people, the vast majority of them white settlers from Angola and Mozambique, most of whom arrived in Lisbon during the course of 1975, the year that these colonies acquired their independence from Portugal. The returnees often hastily fled the colonies they had called home because they disapproved of the one party, black majority state after independence, and resented the threat to their racial and social privilege; because they dreaded the generalized violence of civil war and the breakdown of basic infrastructures and services in the newly independent states; because they feared specific threats to their property, livelihood, and personal safety; or because their lifeworld was waning before their eyes as everyone else from their communities left in what often resembled a fit of collective panic.

Challenged by this influx from the colonies at a time of extreme political instability and economic turmoil in Portugal, the authorities created the legal category of returnees for those migrants who held Portuguese citizenship and seemed unable to “integrate” by their own means into Portuguese society. Whoever qualified as a returnee before the law was entitled to the help of the newly created state agency, Institute for the Support of the Return of the Nationals (IARN). As the main character of an excellent 2011 novel by Dulce Maria Cardoso on the returnees states:

In almost every answer there was one word we had never heard before, the I.A.R.N., the I.A.R.N., the I.A.R.N. The I.A.R.N. had paid our air fares, the I.A.R.N. would put us up in hotels, the I.A.R.N. would pay for the transport to the hotels, the I.A.R.N. would give us food, the I.A.R.N. would give us money, the I.A.R.N. would help us, the I.A.R.N. would advise us, the I.A.R.N. would give us further information. I had never heard a single word repeated so many times, the I.A.R.N. seemed to be more important and generous than God.

The legal category “returnee” policed the access to this manna-from-welfare heaven, but the label also had a more symbolic dimension: calling those arriving from Angola and Mozambique “returnees” implied an orderly movement, and possibly a voluntary migration; it also suggested that they came back to a place where they naturally fit, to the core of a Portuguese nation that they had always been a part of. In this sense, the term was also meant to appeal to the solidarity of the resident population with the newcomers: in times of dire public finances, the government hoped to legitimize its considerable spending on behalf of these “brothers” from the nation’s (former) overseas territories.

Many migrants, however, rebutted the label attached to them. While they were happy to receive the aid offered by state bureaucracies and NGOs like the Portuguese Red Cross, they insisted that they were refugees (refugiados), not returnees. One in three of them, as they pointed out, had been born in Africa. Far from returning to Portugal, they were coming for the first time, and often did not feel welcome there. Most felt that they had not freely decided to leave, that their departure had been chaotic, that they had had no choice but to give up their prosperous and happy lives in the tropics. (At the time, they never publicly reflected on the fact that theirs was the happiness of a settler minority, and that prosperity was premised on the exploitation of the colonized.) Many were convinced they would return to their homelands one day, and many of them proudly identified as “Angolans” or “Africans” rather than as Portuguese. All in all, they claimed that they had been forcibly uprooted, and that now they were discriminated against and living precariously in the receiving society—in short, that they shared the predicaments we typically associate with the condition of the refugee.

Some of them wrote to the UNHCR, demanding the agency should help them as refugees. The UNHCR, however, declined. In 1976, High Commissioner Prince Aga Khan referred to the 1951 Refugee Convention, explaining that his mandate applied “only to persons outside the country of their nationality,” and that since “the repatriated individuals, in their majority, hold Portuguese nationality, [they] do not fall under my mandate.” The UNHCR thus supported the returnee label the Portuguese authorities had created, although high-ranking officials within the organization were in fact critical of this decision—in the transitory moment of decolonization, when the old imperial borders gave way to the new borders of African nation-states, it was not always easy to see who would count as a refugee even by the terms of the 1951 Convention.

In short, the strange case of Portugal’s returnees—much like that of the pieds-noirs, French settlers “repatriated” from Algeria—points to the ambiguities of the “refugee.” In refugee studies and migration history, the term defines certain groups of people we study. In international law, the category bestows certain rights on specific individuals. As a claim-making concept, finally, “the refugee” is a tool that various actors—migrants, governments, international organizations, NGOs—use to voice demands and to mobilize, to justify their politics, or to interpret their experiences. What are we to make of this overlap? While practitioners of the refugee regime will have different priorities, I think that migration scholars should treat the “refugee” historically. We need to critically analyze who is using the term in which ways in any given situation. As an actor’s category, “refugee” is not an abstract concept detached from time and place, context, and motivations. Rather, it is historically specific, as its meanings change over time; it is relational, because it is defined against the backdrop of other terms and phenomena; and it is strategic, because it is supposed to do something for the people who use the term. The refugee concept is thus intrinsically political.

Does analyzing “the refugee” as an actor’s category mean that we must abandon it as an analytical tool altogether? Certainly not. We should continue to research “refugees” as a historically contested category of people. While there will always be a tension between the normative and analytical dimensions, historicizing claims to being a “refugee” can actually strengthen the concept’s analytical purchase: it can complicate our understanding of forced migrations and open our eyes to the wide range of degrees of voluntariness or force involved in any migration decision. It can help us to think the state of being a refugee not as an absolute, but as a gradual, relational, and contextualized category. In the case of the returnees, and independently from what either the migrants or the Portuguese government or the UNHCR argued, such an approach will allow us to analyze the migrants as “privileged refugees.”

Let me explain: For all the pressures that pushed some of them to leave their homes, for all the losses they endured, and for all the hardships that marked their integration into Portuguese society, the returnees, a privileged minority in a settler colony, also had a relatively privileged experience of (forced) migration and reintegration when colonialism ended. This becomes clear when comparing their experience to the roughly 20,000 Africans that, at the same time as the returnees, made it to Portugal but who, unlike them, were neither accepted as citizens nor entitled to comprehensive welfare—regardless of the fact that they had grown up being told that they were an integral part of a multi-continental Portuguese nation, and despite the fact that they were fleeing the same collapsing empire as the returnees were. Furthermore, we must bear in mind that in Angola and Mozambique, hundreds of thousands of Africans were forcibly displaced first by Portugal’s brutal colonial wars (1961-1974), then during the civil wars after independence (1975-2002 in Angola, 1977-1992 in Mozambique). Unlike the returnees, most of these forced migrants never had the opportunity to seek refuge in the safe haven of Portugal. Ultimately, the returnees’ experience can therefore only be fully understood when it is put into the broader context of these African refugee flows, induced as they were by the violent demise of settler colonialism in the process of decolonization.

So, what were these people in the YouTube clip, then? Returnees? Or African refugees? I hope that by now you will agree that … well … it’s complicated.

https://images.jacobinmag.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2020/12/10192555/Screen-Shot-2020-12-10-at-4.25.16-PM.png

▻https://africasacountry.com/2020/12/the-strange-case-of-portugals-returnees

#Portugal #colonialisme #catégorisation #réfugiés #asile #décolonisation #Angola #réfugiés_portugais #histoire #rapatriés #rapatriés_portugais #Mozambique #indépendance #nationalisme #retour_volontaire #discriminations #retour_forcé #retour #nationalité

Et un nouveau mot pour la liste de @sinehebdo :
#retornados
#terminologie #vocabulaire #mots

ping @isskein @karine4

En vrac.

We don’t care about music anyway (documentary about the following Japanese artists Kirihito, L?K?O, Otomo Yoshihide, Numb & Saidrum, Sakamoto Hiromichi, Umi no Yeah!!!, Yamakawa Fuyuki, Goth-Trad, Hiko).
▻https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=we+don%27t+care+about+music+anyway

JAPANOISE: About the Book
▻http://www.japanoise.com/book

a- stream - YouTube
short series of interv. + lives - exp. artists from Egypt, Nigeria, Iran, Kurdistan, the Philippines
▻https://www.youtube.com/channel/UContk8JUR1umGYkBEshErJw
▻https://yt3.ggpht.com/ytc/AAUvwnjOCF3moXNwE4wrcU7YrUl1b_HyRHxDxReAdyUW=s900-c-k-c0x00ffffff-no-rj

Afrorack : le corps de la machine (interview et live session) - YouTube
▻https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NAEGwCaTaDw

Afrorack a fabriqué en Ouganda le premier synthétiseur modulaire DIY du continent africain : pour lui pas de doute, c’est en Afrique qu’aura lieu la prochaine révolution des musiques électroniques.
Lire notre article : ▻http://pan-african-music.com/afrorack...

PAM
Webzine → ▻http://pan-african-music.com

African political techno
►https://africasacountry.com/2020/03/african-political-techno

https://images.jacobinmag.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2020/03/26215825/Indigenous-Resistance-mini-album-cover.-Design-Dubzaine.jpg

n the African futuristic track “Wire Cutter” by Sankara Future Dub Resurgence (SFDR), a group of musicians from Uganda inspired by the philosophy of the Burkina Faso revolutionary, Thomas Sankara, sing: “Yes I seek to inspire / Yes I move with guile / Underground Resistance my style.”

With their love of dub and experimental music, they decided to create a futuristic style of music that draws equally on ancient African knowledge. The video for “Wire Cutter” video was filmed in Kampala, Uganda’s capital. It’s a live recording, but it’s also more than that. “Wire Cutter” is a piece that calls viewers to look closely and notice the images layered throughout the performance space. It’s also important to take note of the space—the one and only Dub Museum.

For example, when the lyrics mentioned above are heard in the video, the camera zooms in on images of Detroit techno artists Underground Resistance (UR). The shot ends with a close-up of Cornelius Harris, a key member of the group. At another point in the track, where the lyrics state “We only fear fear itself, we only fear the collapse of the imagination,” an image of UR’s founder, Mad Mike, is foregrounded.

Images of other experimental musicians and socially conscious visionaries are also featured, such as Laraaji, Turiya Alice Coltrane, Cedric “Im” Brooks, and Audre Lorde. They coexist alongside photographs of ancestral shrines in Uganda, as well as Zar spiritual trance ceremonies in Ethiopia. Lastly, there is a special wall devoted to the West Papua liberation struggle.

African political techno
►https://africasacountry.com/2020/03/african-political-techno

https://images.jacobinmag.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2020/03/26215825/Indigenous-Resistance-mini-album-cover.-Design-Dubzaine.jpg

With their love of dub and experimental music, they decided to create a futuristic style of music that draws equally on ancient African knowledge. The video for “Wire Cutter” video was filmed in Kampala, Uganda’s capital. It’s a live recording, but it’s also more than that. “Wire Cutter” is a piece that calls viewers to look closely and notice the images layered throughout the performance space. It’s also important to take note of the space—the one and only Dub Museum.

For example, when the lyrics mentioned above are heard in the video, the camera zooms in on images of Detroit techno artists Underground Resistance (UR). The shot ends with a close-up of Cornelius Harris, a key member of the group. At another point in the track, where the lyrics state “We only fear fear itself, we only fear the collapse of the imagination,” an image of UR’s founder, Mad Mike, is foregrounded.

Images of other experimental musicians and socially conscious visionaries are also featured, such as Laraaji, Turiya Alice Coltrane, Cedric “Im” Brooks, and Audre Lorde. They coexist alongside photographs of ancestral shrines in Uganda, as well as Zar spiritual trance ceremonies in Ethiopia. Lastly, there is a special wall devoted to the West Papua liberation struggle.

The sonic anchor of “Wire Cutter” is as much about sound as it is about dub poetry and powerful visuals. Driving this narrative is an assemblage of minimalistic electronic noise and non-metric rhythms generated by Dhangsha. In between these sounds, one hears deliberate moments of deep meditative silence, raw and at times distorted African dub poetry vocals, and djembe-driven, percussive grooves created by SFDR.

When the djembe rises to the surface, it reveals acoustic drum patterns that are actually hand -to-skin translations of Dhangsha’s digital rhythms. This is more than simply a moment of “fusion;” it signals the completion of a musical cycle.

When enslaved Africans were forcibly transported to the Americas, they brought their music with them. During the course of almost 500 years, this music continued to change in response to the reality of violent oppression and social survival. For future generations, this music symbolized—and continues to symbolize—resistance, creativity, and the triumph of the human spirit.

The evolution of techno from within Detroit’s African-American community is an overlooked chapter in that story of resistance, but in “Wire Cutter,” a critical exchange takes place as this music returns to the African continent and is reunited with a group of African youth who naturally embrace their ancestral traditions, while looking clearly to the future with outernational vision.

Aniruddha Das, the creative force behind Dhangsha, explains this cycle further:

Dub, industrial dub and related electronic music featunring artists from Uganda, Indonesia, Burkina Faso, Indonesia, the UK, etc. : Sankara Future Dub Resurgence, Dhangsha, King Raab, Carlo Ertola and more.
Dedicated to West Papua.

“n memory of Greg YoungIng.

This track features Ethiopian Amharic singing by Carlo Ertola recorded at CE Studios Addis Ababa, Ethiopia (@carloertola / #makingdreamshappen). Engineered by Carlo Ertola. Thanks to Abeba Fantahun for the Amharic language translation assistance and Giovanna De Franco for the wonderful hospitality. Music composed, recorded and mixed by Ukweli in Toronto, Canada. Words & music two-track mix and edit by Dhangsha done in U.K. Mastered by Sean Savage at seansavage.ca in Canada. Dub thanks to Prasonik for the dub linkage with Curtis Smith aka Ukweli and Tapedave for the file relaying across borders.

We send this out to the people of West Papua

who are experiencing current modern day colonisation

Indonesian transmigration

Let’s rewind in time

When our melanin

became a synomn for evil

under those who would have us despise ourselves

To further their own selfish methods of

”

https://yata-apix-08e4cd25-7b97-4312-97f6-e435c936e1b5.lss.locawebcorp.com.br/bbef2cf56afb4dda95e57127db9e9d99.jpg

▻https://drive.google.com/open?id=1IV2ZnYU73qqrKZzc4e4TK2wMtMRg4MSq
▻https://drive.google.com/open?id=1HHc0FYD3KbAQadBoQF2IOP9dOfr-v0sh
▻https://drive.google.com/open?id=1FxIe5zC5gnK8b5M7_1qNQ8g6NRCmch7p
▻https://drive.google.com/open?id=1AbdXadyell2iLqQoACsl3v08UZcpqY27

Réédition du disque rare de #Hugh_Masekela, Live in Lesotho (1980), en écoute ici :
▻https://matsulimusic.bandcamp.com/album/live-in-lesotho

Un article qui donne envie de l’écouter : Music is the weapon
Atiyyah Khan, Africa’s a Country, novembre 2019
▻https://africasacountry.com/2019/11/music-is-the-weapon

Le concert est censé avoir eu lieu avec Miriam Makeba, mais si elle était peut-être sur scène ce jour là, je ne crois pas qu’elle apparaisse sur le disque...

Aucun rapport : En 1969, un des plus grands humoristes blancs afrikaan d’Afrique du Sud était #Al_Debbo, un plombier d’origine libanaise... bizarrerie...
▻https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=szztriUVqeQ

#Musique #Musique_et_politique #Afrique_du_Sud

The controversial winners of the #Nobel Prize in Economics.

The poverty of poor economics
▻https://africasacountry.com/2019/10/the-poverty-of-poor-economics

https://images.jacobinmag.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2019/10/17134148/Famers-Assembly-Kenya.jpg

Banerjee and Duflo teach at MIT while Kremer is at Harvard. The trio have been at the forefront of pushing the use of randomized control trials (RCTs) in the sub-discipline of economics known as development economics. And partly as the result of their efforts, an ecosystem has developed in which the vampire squids with tentacles of influence across the globe are the “poverty action lab” JPAL, 3ie, and the World Bank’s development impact evaluation group (DIME). The main idea behind their work is that RCTs allow us to know what works and doesn’t work in development because of its “experimental” approach. RCTs are most well-known for their use in medicine and involve the random assignment of interventions into “treatment” and “control” groups. And just like in medicine, so the argument goes, RCTs allow us to know which development pill to swallow because of the rigor associated with the experimental approach. Banerjee and Duflo popularized their work in a 2011 book Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way to Fight Global Poverty.

Even though other Nobel prize awards often attract public controversy (peace and literature come to mind), the economics prize has largely flown under the radar with prize announcements often met with the same shrugging of the shoulders as, for example, the chemistry prize. This year has however been different (and so was the year that Milton Friedman, that high priest of neoliberalism, won).

A broad section of commentary, particularly from the Global South, has puzzled over the Committee’s decision to not only reward an approach that many consider as suffering from serious ethical and methodological problems, but also extol its virtues and supposed benefits for poor people.

Violences xénophobes en Afrique du Sud : 7 (+ ?) personnes ont été tuées, des dizaines de magasins détruits et des camions brûlés. Les étrangers et leurs biens y sont (régulièrement) pris pour cible ces dernières années ; des représailles ont eu lieu au Nigéria. Des images horribles inondent les réseaux sociaux (dont certaines remontent à plusieurs années, attention aux manipulations) et il y aura sans doute un bilan plus dramatique... C’est absolument terrible.
Plusieurs pays (Rwanda, RDC, Malawi) annulent leur participation au Forum économique mondial à Cape Town. Des stars internationales ont annulé leurs concerts en signe de boycott. Des appels tournent à manifester devant les ambassades d’Afrique du Sud un peu partout.

Communiqué de la Ligue de Défense Noire Africaine trouvé sur twitter ▻https://twitter.com/LDNAOFFICIEL/status/1168971327220453378 ⏬

La LDNA CONDAMNE vigoureusement les émeutes xénophobes inter-ethniques en Afrique du Sud,et dans les pays africains. Nous appelons la jeunesse africaine à des manifestations devant les ambassades d’Afrique du Sud en Afrique et dans la diaspora pour dire non à la XÉNOPHOBIE
Ce n’est pas l’Afrique pour laquelle la LDNA lutte. Comme toute bonne chose, le fait tribal ne doit pas rendre xénophobe ; la xénophobie étant le côté mal aspecté du phénomène tribal. Et, il n’y a pas que les Bretons né à la Trinité-sur-Mer (comme JM Lepen) qui peuvent devenir xénophobes, ou ethnohiérarchistes, même des Zoulous peuvent le devenir. N’oublions pas que la XÉNOPHOBIE ne représente l’idéologie africaine donc se taire revient à cautionner. Cette fois donc en Afrique du Sud, ce n’est pas de racisme mais la xénophobie dont il s’agit, mais le problème n’est-il pas ailleurs ?Le problème n’est-il pas la pauvreté atavique des pauvres et la richesse endémique des riches ?
Le problème n’est-il pas le résultat de 20 ans de gouvernance mutilée par le courage et la frilosité, ou mieux encore la cupidité des puissants ? Si nous ne soutenons pas le slogan des assassins d’Afrikaners : « Tuons le Boer, tuons le fermier Blanc », toutefois on ne peut appeler au pardon du crime et à la paix sociale sans qu’il y ait Justice.
Nous la LDNA disons : « Sans équité pas de justice et donc pas de pardon » et si Mandela a été un artisan de la paix, nous considérons que son esprit travaillé par 27 ans d’enfermement a eu des conséquences sur son esprit. Certes certains diront que c’est un homme de transition qui a permis aux afrikaners de rester au pays et de préserver le pays de la guerre civile.
Certes le PIB de l’Afrique du Sud est de $300 Milliards l’an passé.
Certes Mandela n’a pas fait de son pays celui de Mugabe, le Zimbabwe autrefois pays le plus prospère d’Afrique, est aujourd’hui malheureusement, un des pays les plus pauvres du monde.
Mais est-il normal que la transition soit si lente ? Est-il juste que seul quelques affairistes assoiffés de richesses comme l’actuel président-milliardaire Ramaphosa,s’accaparent les richesses du pays ?
Peut-on se satisfaire de ces 20 ans de gouvernance capitaliste façon Mandela ?
C’est pour marquer encore une fois notre désaccord et notre indignation que nous appelons toute la communauté à manifester : nous ne nous laisserons pas berner par l’iniquité et l’injustice au profit de quelques heureux riches qui manipulent.

The Erasure of Dulcie September
▻https://africasacountry.com/2019/08/the-erasure-of-dulcie-september

During apartheid, France and major French corporations were some of the most loyal supporters of South African apartheid government. French companies quickly became the second largest suppliers of arms to South Africa. Source: africasacountry

From Mogadishu to Toronto
▻https://africasacountry.com/2019/06/from-mogadishu-to-toronto

Partway through Hassan Ghedi Santur’s new novel The Youth of God, eighteen-year-old Nuur sits alone in

Skin politics in northern Ghana
▻https://africasacountry.com/2019/06/skin-politics-in-northern-ghana

Between the years 2007 and 2012 alone, the United Nations Development Program’s (UNDP) draft report for

Gender in Cameroon’s anglophone crises
▻https://africasacountry.com/2019/06/gender-in-cameroons-anglophone-crises

Women have undertaken measures to cope and resist against the backdrop of Anglophone—Francophone tensions in Cameroon,

Coming to voice in Cuba
▻https://africasacountry.com/2019/06/coming-to-voice

The history of the black body in Cuba is one deeply interconnected with slavery, exploitation, systems

African homophobia and the colonial intervention of African conservatism
▻https://africasacountry.com/2019/06/african-homophobia-and-the-colonial-intervention-of-african-conserv

A petition to decriminalize sexual acts between people of the same sex was recently rejected by

Invisible voices in the production of knowledge
▻https://africasacountry.com/2019/06/invisible-voices-in-the-production-of-knowledge

In early 2018, a group of 30 researchers based in eastern Congo and Europe who all