Can a 419 Scam Letter Lead to Romance?

I received a 419 email letter a year ago and on the spur of the moment decided to begin a dialogue with the writer, a Miss Naomi Bangura whose father “lost his life in the course of the crisis in Seira loene.” Fortunately for her, he had willed her $14.3 million in a Cote D’Ivoire bank account. Now she just needed my help in getting it out of the country. And of course in return for this help I would make my fortune. This is how the relationship got underway. My replies to her first two (un-edited) letters are in italics; please read from top going down, there will be future posts continuing this weird exchange.

From
Miss Naomi Bangura
Avenue 22 Rue 4
Treichville ,Abidjan,
Cote d’Ivoire

Dearest,MMK

I love your profile and i have Decided to get in touch
with you,to see if you can help me solve my problem.

My name is naomi bangura. My father had lost his life in
the course of the crisis in Seira loene .My father
willed in cash, the sum of $14.3M USD which he
deposited in a bank here in Cote D’ivoire in suspence
account.in Abidjan west Africa, with enabling
conditionalities for the release of the fund which are
as follows:

(1) That I must be 24 years or above.(2) That upon
request for the release of the fund, there must be
evidence of investment intentions especially outside
the west africa, I contact you therefore to confirm if
you can absorb me in partnership in your company or
possibly advise me on any investment opportunity in
your country.

When I reach agreement with you, the bank will release
my fund into an account that you shall nominate and I
will come over to you to commence business partnership
with you with the fund.

I expect your urgent response including your
addresses, your telephone and fax number.

Thanks for expected cooperation.

My regards,

miss naomi bangura.

dear naomi,
I am so sorry for your los. I have heard of Sierra leone on tv and know that it is having lots of problems. You appear to be ver young and I hope you can be helped. have you tried save the children? I give them money every year. my business is in tiling residential houses here in croydon in london so i do not know if that is the kind of business tjat the bank would accept. but if it is, write me an email and maybe you can do some business with us. I look forward to hearing from you and may the lord bless you.
MMK

From
Miss Naomi Bangura
Avenue 22 Rue 4
Treichville ,Abidjan,
Cote d’Ivoire

Dearest,MMKiam happy to read from you today and i know,
that God will use you to bless me. Firstly, i want to assure you of the safety of this transaction and i will invest it in your business venture as soon you claim this fund from the local bank in abidjan. i will also give you the deposit certificate my late father use to deposit the fund with the bank for proof. I will like you to enter into an agreement with me so that the business will be legal. I will go to the bank later today to ask the president of the bank if they will accept you you.I know that they will accept you, i will like you to send me your telephone number and fax number for me to submit to the bank to enable the bank to contact you for further directives regarding this fund that is still in their fix suspense account.

I am tired of staying in this country because of the political problems and the safety of my life. i want to meet you soonest so that i continue my education. God bless you and the family.

Mr MMK, I want you to re-assure me that you will not betray me immediately you confirm this fund to your account, i want to make it known that this fund is my last hope and i will not live to loose it.Awaiting your prompt response.

Yours Naomi Bangura

SIR
HOPE YOU ARE ALRIGHT IN HEALTH. IAM WONDERING WHY YOU HAVE NOT RESPONSE TO MY MAIL.

I WANT LET YOU KNOW THAT I HAVE GONE TO THE BANK AND THEY HAS ACCEPTED YOUR OFFER. YOU SHOULD FORWARD THE REQUIRED INFORMATION TO ME IMMEDIATELY SO THAT I WILL SUBMIT TO THE BANK LATEST MONDAY.

THANKS AND GOD BLESS.

YOURS FAITHFULLY,
NAOMI

Dear Naomi,
i am sorry that I hgave been out of touch for the last week, one of our employees died in a tragic accident faling of the roof of a building when fixing a leak. anyway, i am glad that the bank has accepted my offer of us doing busines together. but our lawyers need to be in contact with the bank directly so could you please send us the details and we can take it from there. also could you send a picture of yourself to me?
Take care.

This continues the curious correspondence that I had with a one Naomi Bangura who ‘loved my profile’ and decided to ask for my help securing a fortune her father left her in Ivory Coast. Since the letter found me while I was conducting research in Kigali’s jails last year, I was bored enough to seek entertainment wherever I could find it. So I adopted the persona of a working class Englishman who owns a roofing company in the London suburb of Croydon and has recently had an employee killed on the job. My replies are in italics and the first few exchanges can be found in an earlier posting on April 28th.

Dear Mr MMK,

I thank you for your letter,as I regret of the death
of your fellow employees. I pray for his soul to rest
in perfect peace.

I think I welcome your idea of involving your
lawyers,at least it will help to speed up this,so that
this money will be transferred without any delay.

Please here is the contact of the bank.

Bank of Africa,Abidjan
Tel:22507753535
Fax:22521341457
E-mail:info_boahq@financier.com

The contact person is Dr Kevin Idris,the director of
remittance department.

Please, I will appreciate if you contact the bank
immediately,and request them to transfer this money,so
that I will leave here as soon as possible,to live a
better life and continue my education.

I have attached the certificate of deposit and my
picture for you,and will be glad to see yours.

Thanks you and God bless you.

Naomi Bangura.

Dear MMK,
Beloved Mr MMK am very glad to have a person
like you on my way and i am sure is not a mistake
because before i got your contact i prayed and fasted
for 3 good days and this is divinely made by the power
of Jesus christ.
And i will not stop praying for you and all the
members of your family in Jesus name.
Please,sir i will you to contact me as soon as
you contact the bank.
Have you received my picture and bank document?
God bless you is my prayer.
yours naomi.

MMK,
Sir,how are you today?am afraid because i have
not been hearing from you for a long time,after
sending my picture and bank document and contacts i
want to ask you wheather you have received them or
not;Have you contacted the bank?
Frankly,speaking i am worried for not hearing from
you,remember you promised to help me,this money is all
my hope and life you know there is political problem
here in ivory coast for confirmation check this
(WWW.ABIDJAN.NET).Being a young girl of my age i need
your help and direction and if you cannot help me is
better you let me know now so that i can look for
another person that can help me.
I know that you might be busy of one thing or the
other but you have to remember that am a young girl
and human being and i see you as my father.
My greetings to your family and may GOD bless you
all amen.
Am waiting for your message.
Naomi.

Dear naomi,
I am sorry have been out of contacy. sory about you feeling so sad. as i told you one of my workerts got hurt ansd that is what we have beenn focusing on. really want to help you but am wondering about the money. just when you wrote me and even kindly sent me your picture (you are a very younf and atractive girl) someone wrote me a letter who is also in the same probliems like you. is this common problem? he was writing from liberia and had a lot of monery in the bank. almost fifty million which he offered to share if i helped him. i am tempted to also do busines wityh him, what do you thinlk? it would be good money for me and it would also help youbng people in trouble. tell me your thoughts.
thank you and cheers.
mmk

Mass of Appetites: A Nairobi Bar Horror Story

I was wondering what to post and then thought of Buffet Park in Nairobi, which is a collection of bars and nyama choma joints in posh Hurlingham. I spent a number of entertaining evenings there this past December and was struck by a sense of being in a space built to accommodate appetites: intense longings and ambitions for position and power. You could tell from the way everyone’s eyes constantly scanned the room rating, dismissing, pleading and dissecting all. Whatever you had done during the day established your position in Buffet Park at night, and perhaps the reverse is true as well. Daytime victories in business, government or politics were reflected in nighttime winnings of sex, food and attention. Two sides of a coin. So I started thinking of a man who has been at this for a while, whose spirit is corrupt during the daytime and how he would behave at night. I called the guy Mass of Appetites and wrote this very short horror story about him. Enjoy the experiment, if you can.
MMK

The Mass of Appetites is always on the make, out on the town most nights of the week, like a shark that cannot stop swimming and hunting for a single moment lest it drown. His German automobile turns into the bar parking lot slowly, ponderously, with the drivers behind him hooting their exasperation. Appetites drives carefully and his car is always very clean. It has one of those pine tree air fresheners dangling from the back mirror alongside a small smiling green troll doll bought on a trip to Dubai last year. The inside of the car is immaculately cleaned and the outside polished to a dull sheen. He looks for the parking space that will afford the most people a look at his car and is willing to wait interminably for one to free up. He crouches in his seat, taking in the sights, with his soft paw-like hands holding onto the velvet-bound steering wheel. When the watchman informs him there are open parking spaces further down, he chooses his response carefully from his two-item menu: threaten or cajole.

He takes in the other cars in the lot, which are mostly Toyota Corollas bought from Dubai – the unmistakable mark of the striving classes. In the old days the ladder’s steps were: servant quarter in Golf Course, house in Buru Buru, a plot in Githurai, house in Plains View and the final move to Kileleshwa. Now it is about modes of transport: mathrees for a few years, the Shuttle, a used Nissan Sunny, new Corolla, used BMW then finally the Mercedes Kompressor. They will never rebel he thinks with an amusement laced with contempt, they will only keep switching their modes of trajectory to account for every national failure. Finally parked, he heaves his distended belly out of the car by first putting both feet on the ground then with a heavy grunt rising. He maintains surreptitious glances at the car, nervous that it will be stolen and also curious what everyone thinks of it.

Appetites ambles into the bar, beady eyes darting in all directions as he seeks friends and targets. His eyes take in the girls barely out of school, judging the firmness of thigh, the weight of buttock and most importantly the state of finance. He can guess within a few hundred shillings how much everyone has in their purse or wallet. Pocketing, he fingers a wad of notes with one finger and then subtly rubs it against his penis which is already semi-engorged with possibility. As he walks toward fellow appetites with whom he’s done ‘Tender business’ in the past and who he calls his friends but secretly loathes, he notices a girl, dressed in a tight black dress that hugs a curvaceous body, who is eyeing him with what she imagines is a knowing eye. A frission of excitement runs down his sweaty back. She is the best kind – the ones who imagine that they KNOW, who want to eat into his wad, to use him. He chuckles inwardly knowing that he is unusable and cannot be lied to because he has achieved the exalted state of decadence which is the truest form of freedom. It does not matter that she has coupled hundreds of times or has a boy she loves and comes to this bar only for the money, he can smell the remaining strands of innocence woven into her firm youthful flesh. He likes to be the final nail in the coffin. She will not know that when he heaves his hairy thighs off the bed with his fang dripping semen, he will have pulled the last bits of innocence out of her and transformed her into the undead.

He calls for a triple shot of Johnny Walker Black and three kilos of roast meat – fuel for the hunt – while loudly ordering a round of drinks for the table. Miming conversation with his fellow Appetites, who do not mind since they too are busy, he sweeps his eyes across the room taking in the men this time. He wonders whether they present any competition for his mission. He casts around seeking those that appear to be in love, wanting to watch them for little lapses that betray the futility of their attempt to find happiness. Spotting one such couple seated with the girl in black he notes the boy’s eyes occasionally glazing over as they covertly take in the sight of strangers’ thighs and arses. Soon the girl will be ready for Appetites when she finds out that her beloved, but slightly disappointing boyfriend is pawing her sister or sleeping with her best friend. He has seen betrayal a thousand times, but gets a delicious charge each time.

The girl in black gets up to go to the bathroom and Appetites, now in full Nosferatu mode, eyes her proud back which tapers to a point before her hips and buttocks explode outward and then settle onto thick hard thighs and thin calves. She walks slowly, uncomfortable in heels that are a bit too high for her, tottering and parting her way through the crowd with a subtle caress here and a hip nudge there. She will do, oh yes, there will be a feeding tonight. But first he must seek that dark, strong thing deep inside him that attracts his prey as surely a flame draws a fly to its destruction. He has never put a name to it, but knows that it emerges in the presence of Black Label, a wad of money, noise, low lights and innocence.

The meat arrives and he reluctantly invites the other Appetites to partake. They fall to it with unembarrassed relish. Tearing, guffawing mirthlessly, wiping grease off bulging, sagging cheeks and holding forth on “prots in Dadora”. Appetite matches them bite for bite, caressing his pot belly to summon the confidence monster who must emerge soon if the girl is not to fall to one of his companions. Here she comes.

She is heading for her table but her eyes are fixed on the table of Appetites, aware that they are rich and on a hunt. She thinks herself their equal in worldliness, confident that her beauty, which she has used to toy with many men, will see her through an encounter with any of them. Appetite watches her amused glance and snickers inwardly knowing that like everyone uprooted and thrown into the thousand universes that are Nairobi she belongs to many and yet to none – she longs for anchor and is seeking it without recognizing her desperate need. She has one of those new fangled Rasta hairstyles made of artificial hair. This strange combination at first puzzled Appetite who had only ever seen locks in pictures of Bob Marley and Dedan Kimathi. He has since come to realize that they have nothing to do with political struggle. They are a flag for a painful process of self-remanufacturing, a response to any one of a thousand traumas faced by the child of a middle or upper-middle class family that has tumbled to genteel poverty. Such girls always tell teary tales of the mistakes Daddy and Mummy made as the to-be-Rasta attended some fancy private school and then went abroad to find Me, he feels a surge of hatred. They make for the easiest prey. He knows how to lay a trap that allows them to feel the greatest degree of freedom even as the noose tightens – it is how they prefer to be ambushed. His first move must confirm her opinion of him and then there will be nowhere to go but up, all the while borne by her pleasant surprise.

‘You are a ngao and you need to imbibe liquids’
‘Yes, I need absorption because I am fleeing from the center – centrifugal as they say’
‘I do not know you, but I think that you are more centripetal – that you are seeking the center’
‘I guess so but what do you intend to achieve by these means of disturbance, surely not twinning?’
Ah, she has moved too fast, resisting even before he attacks. Vulnerability. Appetite is listening beneath her words, seeking food for the dark thing. And it is stirring, detecting that as confident as she sounds and looks there is a wistful undertone that betrays a need of something soon to be determined.
‘In the beginning was nursery and the sound of gasps and grunts when your Mummy left the house, then came primary school when you heard the impact of hand-cheek collisions. You need to know you were the critical element in the causation, it was your fault,’ he breathes as he opens his legs slightly wider so that she is standing between them.
‘What is your name and why are you here seeking to still your misery?’ Her question betrays her ignorance; does she not know she is conversing with desire?
‘I am Appetites son of Starvation.’
‘And I am Needs daughter of Fallen Success.’
‘You seek a port and slavery’
‘Perhaps I do, though I dare say that I believe it to be open sea and freedom’ she retorts with spirit. He feels a surge in his loins as the dark thing arrives in its full magnificence, it has not been this excited in months!

He loudly orders a round of drinks. And then slowly, as a hunter will part the reeds before delivering buckshot, he brushes a sweaty hand against her hip awaiting her reaction. She eyes him, eyes full of questions and suddenly turns to walk away leaving appetites staring at her receding back, the excitement in him battling with hatred. His companions are in full stride talking of plots and deals, and fat man versus fat man politics. They feed on so little he thinks; money to them is the thing. They want prestige and to be feared. How petty when there are souls to be taken and broken, do they not know how much energy there is in a human body that is expended at the moment of death? Appetite has learnt over millennia that there are many deaths and that he can draw succor from all of them. He ambles towards her, using his belly to push his way through the crowd.

‘I’ve been looking for you, Needs, do you know why?’
‘Yes, you seek flesh and what lies underneath it. You want to love me, and you resent me for that.’
‘I know exactly what you mean, you are perhaps wise.’
Appetites likes the way it is going.

(c) MMK 2005

The Vampire State and the Moral Dimensions of Kenyan Citizenship

Kenya is many things and many peoples, a dizzying blend of communities and individuals; not a single entity with a common understanding of itself. A friend of mine recently asked: How does Kenya arrive in your village, at your doorstep? As a friend or a foe? In the case of the Pokot, or the Digo, the Mitumba dealer, the Hawker, the people of the Northern provinces or a Somali-Kenyan in Eastleigh, Kenya is an attacker.

The government’s innate drive is to consolidate its powers through relentless centralisation. In its every action, whether to build schools or to suppress free speech, the goal is to make government the fount toward which all our efforts and hopes are ever directed. Small arms programs, presented as security measures, are in fact a way of disarming peoples who do not recognise its right to police them. So too the refusal for Kenyans to bear arms legally, a stance that has more to do with ensuring State House’s peace of mind than it does fighting criminals who already possess illegal weapons anyway. We have even heard of a colonial law, the Chief’s Act, being proposed to improve security. By John Michuki no less, who during the Emergency was nicknamed Kimondero or the crusher of testicles.

MPs meanwhile have gained a 120 million shilling campaign fund, as part of the Constituency Development Fund, and yet I recently met a Turkana guy who let me know that his MP will not visit their constituency because the road is too rough for his new car! Already the CDF is nothing more than a sinecure for the MPs’ relatives and friends. Wouldn’t it be better for taxes to be cut on the basis that Kenyans know what best to do with their money? Tax money is not government money, it belongs to people who have worked their fingers to the bone to earn it only for it to be handed to a fat cat who will not even visit his constituents.

There is a desperate need for a politics of small government in Kenya. The state does not need to only be reformed, it needs to retreat from entire swaths of Kenyan life so that being a citizen – which the majority of political publics in that country desire – is on the basis of attraction and not force. This state governing us does a bad job not merely because of the greed of its leaders but because it was never constructed to do what it promises. Every aspect of government from marketing boards, parastatals, the policies in the North, hawkers and development to national parks and their animal and human inhabitants emanates from colonial Kenya. And the reason for their creation in the first place – all those years ago – was two-fold: to advance uncompetitive, racist and mediocrity-loving settler interests and to dampen African agency or resistance to colonialism. What has replaced these goals is also two-fold, to advance elite and urban mwa-mwa-mwa interests (you know of what I speak: the babi three-cheek kiss) and to keep the wider country politically and economically immobile so that the status quo is not threatened. There can be little doubt that the end of colonialism came, really, as an administrative change-over. Thus the cry for yes to privatization, lower taxes and limited powers, without which Kenya will only become a poorer, more brutish place, is not a slavish miming of Western economic liberalism, it is actually a full-blooded call for decolonisation. There is no other path that I can see to Uhuru, to freedom – as a people and as individuals.

Then the next question that must be asked is whether there is a moral dimension to Kenyan citizenship. In no language other than English and Kiswahili can you say Kenyan citizen. Corruption, which is the popular enemy of the day, implies that there is something to corrupt. Yet well-known politicians who are known thieves and even murderers are widely voted for and considered leaders. To the supposedly politically sophisticated Nairobi elite, this smacks of ignorance. But not really. It is more a lack of loyalty to the centre. Nairobi and the government is where you get things for yourself and your people, whoever those are. There are no moral claims it has on you outside of some rhetoric directed at NGOs and donors. So that to the people who are stealing, and the vast patronage network that looks to them, there is nothing to corrupt for they have imputed no purity or moral validity to the state or the nation. The pressing issue then becomes how will Kenya, the nation not the country, and the state acquire a moral dimension so that even as we ponder citizen rights, we are ready to acknowledge obligations? How to meld all the political communities, which include tribes, ages, regions, urban groupings and classes, into a single moral entity?

These are the two issues that Kenyans need to engage with: the nature of the state and the moral calling of nationhood.

My thoughts on the latter have been drifting for the past year to the idea of transcendental spaces. Social spaces which by their nature urge a person to extend beyond present limitations to become ‘better’, that mold a common identity on the basis of faith and hope. You guessed it: I have been suspecting that the moral citizenship that we seek will come via the church and the mosque. I shall get into this more as part of a discussion. But let me finish by saying that what Kenya needs is not a new constitution, we need a covenant between ourselves and our government. There is a difference between the two, but I shall stop there …

Martin

Please read this op-ed for a perfect illustration of the Kenyan state as vampire.

The Matrix Redux: The African Version Scene III

Tree-Hugger Smith: As you can see, we’ve had our eye on you for some time now. It seems that you’ve been living two lives. In one life, you’re (Peter) Kamau wa Njogu, program officer in a respectable human rights NGO that is considering getting into the Maasai land thing. You fly to conferences monthly and write frequent proposals to the Swedes. The other life is lived in sullen resentment, where you go by the alias “Range Rover Driving Rasta Revolutionary”, or Boi.

Boi: How dare you, who are you to talk to me this way? I care, I really do…

Tree-Hugger Smith: Be patient, listen. You are exhausted with the futility of it all; the savages just won’t listen. They are so power hungry and corrupt and act in such bad faith, and they are so tribalistic. You have decided that there will be no global revolution, so you instead make grand personal gestures: a kind word to the security guard, and extra dollar or two to the gardener, “keep the change” to the waiter, and yoga on Saturdays. Does anyone understand how draining it is to make a $70,000 per year while partying in Porto Allegre and reading all that postcolonial theory to spout (impressively) at parties? Both of these lives have a bright future, Boi, they sustain my work here.

Boi: You can’t scare me with this Du Bois double consciousness stuff, by implying you know me or even worse by suggesting in your snide way that I am that part of Fanon’s post-independence bourgeoisie, which “…is not engaged in production, nor in invention, nor building, nor labor.” I know what’s up; I know that I am a part of a global progressive movement. Besides, who are you to question me when we are supposed to be in this fight together?

Spoon boy: Do not try and justify aid. That is impossible. Instead only try to realize the truth.

Boi: What truth?

Spoon boy: There is no aid.

Boi: There is no aid?

Spoon boy: Then you’ll see that it is not the aid that’s bad, it is only yourself.

Tree-Hugger Smith: Did you know that the aid conferences held every week in a different city are meant to design a perfectly sustainable way to reduce African suffering to acceptable levels? Where none suffers to the point of extinction? Why don’t Africans get in line with NEPAD, agree to our dream for them? Frankly, it has been a disaster. They do not accept the programs in their entirety. Decades of development have been lost. Perhaps we lack the programming language to describe the world we are building for you: sustainable indigence. But I must admit that as Europeans, and here I include my African schoolmates at Harvard who are colleagues, we define our reality through African suffering.

Cypher: Jesus. What a mind-job. It just sounds to me like you need to unplug, man.

Mzee: Boi, you should be listening to Smith. I’ve seen a white aid worker burst into tears at the sight of a dead elephant and a winner of the Nobel Prize literally hug a tree… I’ve seen plenty that would boggle your African mind if it were free. People working for the aid industry have imbibed entire libraries and yet refuse to recognise the prison they guard. Men have expended entire intellectual and moral clips at them and hit nothing but hot air, yet their greed and blindness is still based on a world that is built on rules. Because of that, they will never solve your problems or own your victory.

Boi: For real Mzee, you’re starting to scare me.

Mzee: What is real. How do you define real? Are your little activist campaigns drawn from the African’s political body or are they impositions that even when positive ultimately rob him of his ability to shape his universe? Are you spouting global revolution only to rob the African of his revolutions? There is the world that you know and then there is the one that will one day exist. You will not birth the real, Boi, the world of tomorrow; you are merely a shadow, unreality, and a farce. Africa is to be delivered to her independence by that crude, tribalist, ignorant, poor, hustling, reactionary person who exists within a multitude of political communities that will burst into a thousand instances of violence and cooperation as they seek primacy and purchase. You will be swept away by this process because the anchor of aid that makes you so powerful today will make you irrelevant tomorrow.

Boi: AI? You mean my role in aid is artificial and doomed to failure?

Mzee: You are part of a consciousness that spawned an entire race of African servants: western liberalism of the right and left kind. We don’t know which of the two are winning. But we know that they are born of the same parent, that they would have Africans at the receiving end of their wisdom and would have us build our world in their image. At present, the left types, like Smith, are far more dependent on our misery and it is believed that they would be unable to survive the pouting and posturing that Africa’s allows them to adopt as they pretend to continue the revolutionary traditions of socialism. Since the world wars, when their brethren chose nationalism over revolution, they have been content to yoke us with their lifeless dreams – provided they are in charge.

Boi: No. No, Mzee. Don’t.

Mzee: There are conferences, Boi, endless conferences where Africans no longer think. For a long time I wouldn’t believe it, but then I attended a few aid meetings, engaged in cocktail chatter and considered how you came to this juncture. I listened as dead political categories were brought to life, heard the excitement caused by a post-modern political philosophy that chooses to obfuscate where clarity of thought and expression is required to inspire political action. I realised that they had lost their faith but none of their childish self-indulgence. Smith is part of a Western generation that is determined to thumb its nose at its parental authority (corporations and old white men: The Man) and uses our misery as its proxy and paycheck. Boi, I must tell you the truth: your attraction to ‘power to the people’ rhetoric, love of Bob Marley, Sartre and your vacations in Senegal are part of a new phenomenon: African flower power.

Scene IV coming up soon, watch this space…

Rock-star economics are not helping poor Africans

Franklin Cudjoe, a friend of mine from Ghana who I met in London last year, recently wrote an op-ed for the Daily Telegraph whose sentiments and analysis matched mine so closely that I begged him for a copy to put on this blog. The absurdity, nay madness, of rock stars holding forth on Africa’s crises has driven me to distraction. Not only are the solutions they advocate – increased centralisation of governance and begging – completely futile, but the fact that I am supposed to get teary eyed with gratitude sickens me. Poor Africa, isn’t it enough that you must endure war and poverty without being subjected to mediocre, over-the-hill rockers come to save you?

I think Franklin says it effectively enough though. Read on.

Personal view: Rock-star economics are not helping poor Africans
By Franklin Cudjoe (Filed: 18/04/2005)

Have you purchased your obligatory white band? Did Sir Bob Geldof send you an e-mail recently, reminding you to ogle his celebrity colleagues “clicking” away on television? Did you join the all-night vigil at Westminster Abbey to shiver in the cold and “wake up the government” about the need to “make poverty history”?

This year, the UK’s “development” charities have joined hands for a high profile campaign which claims that politicians have an unprecedented opportunity to eliminate poverty in the run-up to the G-8 meeting in July.

Rock stars and charities can be powerful advocates for good causes, and they generally have good intentions – but in many cases their lyrics do not genuinely rhyme with the silent hum of the very poor they seek to protect. Their economics are just plain wrong. They ignore history, peddling the misguided belief that poverty, famine and corruption can be solved with foreign aid, debt relief and other policies that have already failed Africa.

One pillar of their current campaign is to eliminate farm subsidies in western countries, a noble goal which indeed would help to achieve a level playing field for agricultural producers around the world. Yet this view is rife with hypocrisy: the same organisations promote subsidies (what they call “fair trade”) for farmers and businesses in poor countries to shield them from the effects of competition.

Coldplay frontman Chris Martin has said that Ghana’s rice, tomato and poultry farmers need to be protected from cheap imports. Yet the problems of Ghana’s farmers lie elsewhere: they and other entrepreneurs are stifled by punitive tax regimes and the high cost of capital, not to mention our disarrayed land tenure systems which lead to low crop production.

Neither Mr Martin nor fellow celebrities have mentioned these problems: they claim that the world’s trade regime is “rigged” in the name of “free trade”, harming poor countries like Ghana and benefiting interest groups in wealthy countries. The only solution, they say, is to protect local economic interests.

If we did ban rice and tomato imports, just how would we feed ourselves? Ghanaians depend on rice as a major staple in our diets, yet local production caters for only 30pc of the rice we consume.

Subsidies to local producers also mean fewer choices for consumers. The average Ghanaian has suffered because of shoddy goods made locally by protected industries that do not face any competition. Who can blame consumers for buying higher quality and less-expensive foreign goods?

Indeed, some savvy Ghanaian businessmen have helped both local farmers and consumers, for instance by providing locally produced rice in packages that ensure the rice isn’t stale when it reaches the consumer. Similarly, other Ghanaian entrepreneurs now collaborate with their Italian counterparts to produce tomato paste brands with Akan names, Ghana’s widely spoken language.

Protection for local producers also means that African countries trade very little with each other, as illustrated by the World Trade Organisation’s 2001 statistics. Africa’s share of intra- and inter-regional trade flows to western Europe alone was 51.8pc, while it was a paltry 7.8pc within Africa.

Development charities loathe international agencies such as the IMF and World Bank – many people would agree though that dealing with these agencies is like playing with loaded dice. They have empowered our politicians to engage in shady liberalisation deals, where international contracts are rigged to favour their cohorts with fat kickbacks.

Such agencies have often advocated ill-conceived policies in the name of market liberalisation – while they simultaneously push foreign aid and flawed development strategies onto us. Even the average Ghanaian knows that these “reform” programmes have achieved nothing other than to enable our bureaucrats to procure gold-plated Mercedes for themselves and their cronies.

But the real problem is not the IMF, World Bank or “rigged” trade rules. The problem lies with us as Africans and especially our leaders, to improve our own wellbeing, and to encourage economic growth through political and institutional reforms.

The solution to all that ails us is not aid, debt relief or “fair trade”. It is to adopt institutions to harness the entrepreneurial spirit that exists in every African country, to enable Africans to trade with each other and anyone else in the world.

Establishing property rights would be an important first step; an effective, transparent and accountable legal system is another. Combined with respect for private property and the rule of law, these broad reforms would encourage entrepreneurship, trade, innovation and even environmental protection because they empower people – rather than the politicians.

As our economies grow and develop, people will be able to afford better technologies, clean water, superior energy sources, better healthcare, and insurance. But one is unlikely to hear such ideas from rock stars and development charities.

While these high-profile campaigns continue to blame western countries for our poverty, they simply give our own politicians more excuses to delay badly needed institutional reforms. Poor Africans would be far better off without rock-star economics.

• Franklin Cudjoe is director of Imani. He will speak at the Global Development Summit in London on June 28

Ryszard Kapuscinski: Martin Kimani says it is a storm in a teacup

Dear All,

I could keep silent no longer. This storm over Kapuscinski is occurring in a tea cup, and it is only right that it should be so for the man and his writing occupy no greater a space despite his book being folded into every Peace Corps do-gooder’s back-pack. The reason I say this is that Kapuscinski is only one of a vast Western army mining Africa for its misery like others do its oil and precious stones. He is therefore in the final reckoning a symptom, but one with a turn of phrase, a nerdy hey-look-at-me-courage and an audience of hungry journalists, aid workers and liberals hanging on his every morsel of misrepresentation to make their baby vulture selves feel just a little better.

Kapuscinski actually strikes me as more pathetic than dangerous for the dangers that many Africans face are of far greater magnitude than this man’s seat in an a little panel being held in New York City. I have often attended such panels for the visceral thrill of feeling wonderfully alive while observing unintentionally absurdist dramas. I am willing to bet many shillings that the panel droned, ponderously and self importantly on the IMPORTANCE OF THE WRITER and his place in making sense of evil and violence or laughter and resistance or poverty and music or HIV and film or the Girl-Child and Fela Kuti. It does not matter what they discussed because Kapuscinski and Soyinka or Rushdie, all of them, were performing: entertaining an audience that had paid good money and drank pre-wisdom wine and dressed in black – this after all is Manhattan. They held their chins, chewed on their spectacle stems, drunk some Evian water and generally held forth as they had on a thousand other panels to the very same spectators. Even the gasps of delight and outrage were scripted for everyone on the stage had been carefully selected for this purpose.

Meanwhile in Ituri, a brother was sharpening his machete, hitching up his trousers, cocking his much-used AK-47, getting ready for a bit of sport. This dude has nothing to do with Kapuscinski, and may even one day boil him when he fails to take the last flight out. That for sure would cement his reputation: he was soooo intimate with Africans, knew them inside and out actually, and now even resides inside the belly of one…

It has often struck me sadly that part of the reason that Kapuscinski survives his trips into war zones is that he is white. Were I to postpone my return ticket to ‘civilization’ in a bid to write a last-one-out-of-hell story alongside him, I would almost be guaranteed some steel and pain. Why this is so is puzzling to me, and feels like risky ground to explore. It is only one of the many issues that I think that our thought and energy can be devoted to productively. Kapuscinski, and his place or non-place in panels, is of little consequence. He is on them precisely because what he thinks of Africa dovetails quite well with its place as the hell that assures the west that it is heaven. Of course this does not mean he should not be challenged but one needs an awfully large amount of energy and time to do it with any consistence.

My suggestion: throw this stuff out there so that a few of his eager beaver fans can turn on him and with the time that liberals of all stripes seem to have now that they are consigned to the margins, they will hound him all over the world. I can see the pimply faces peeking above fair-trade T-shirts; accompanied perhaps even by a few earnest dreads huddled on the steps of a PEN event with little signs saying NO LIES KAPUSCINSKI. Perhaps even a radical or two taking up the call of No Justice, No Peace or some such slogan. The result of course would be that Kapuscinski’s speaking engagements would double as would his audience, this time drawn by the delicious prospect of controversy.

We live in a world that promises solutions for every ill. But there are few for Kapuscinski and his nonsense. You can neither speak truth to him or his audience for they are engaged in an act of eating and savoring his racism, without which the fruits of their wealth would be much diminished. Miserable Africa is needed desperately and Kapuscinski is actually an aid worker providing goodness and relief to the parched western soul. I am determined to offer no solutions for there can be no African response to Kapuscinski: the very concept of talking to him as an African I find to be a waste of time. It is a tug and pull over a place and a concept that makes little difference to individual life, notwithstanding the so-called Africa policies and initiatives which are nothing but grand delusions and Trojan horses for western aid liberalism and its little African servants. I want to deal with that brother with the AK, what does he want I would like to know and why does white skin, in my impression, seem to shield you from his machete? Ah, so many questions, such a short time, so much urgency, but not for Kapuscinski.

Regards,

Martin Kimani

Ryszard Kapuscinski: The Debate Starts to Sound Academic

I have been fascinated and excited by the debate that Binyavanga Wainaina started with his letter protesting Ryszard Kapuscinski’s depiction of Africa and Africans throughout his career. His foil is Remi Raji of the Nigeria PEN Center who writes with erudition and intelligence, arguing that Ryzard’s participation in a PEN event in NYC should not be “muzzled”. The rest of the debate or discussion if you are a diplomatic type can be found on the sidebar and on this post – always reading from the bottom upward… Read on and let me know what you think.

Hi Binyavanga,

Let me take off from your other “confession” and say that it is necessary to look here, beyond the immediacy of the present affliction, that is the subject of our mutual but different concern, the cause of this unplanned dialogue: Kap? It is important to look beyond the Kap phenomenon and perhaps look inward and ask, where are “we” in the share of ideas of power, or rather, in the power of ideas. Here we tug at a very serious issue of the collective, that is the “African condition” (I am not sure if this is the forum to deliver so many pregnant worries, pains and aspirations); and I can only add that the current rule of such species as the likes of Kap, in the media/culture wars, and many others before him, is the unfortunate result of incapacitations, inflicted and self-inflicted, strewn all over the continent.

Saturday in New York has passed but many other Saturdays in America, Europe, and Australasia will come… We will continue to witness such viral claims of journalese pretending as great literature, at the expense of a race, the othered members of humanity whose nights are still inscrutable and mysterious to behold? We will continue to witness these and other ignominies because our own system of challenge is not coordinated, because the apparatuses of state are wont to turn the other eye, and because the continental intelligentsia has been isolated and denied any significant play in the course of the re-definition and redemption of the State; our skepticism will multiply but will not count if we fail to speak at the right fora and opportunities. What for instance is the African Union without its programmatic punch? And what is a Diaspora divided against itself? The inflation of such blighted imagination as Kap’s did not start in a day, and will not end, suddenly. It goes a long way. But if you don’t believe in “the free-flow of ideas”, how can we make sense to one another? I hope that this journey is not taken in vain. Sincerely,

Remi

Hi Remi,

I must say I am enjoying this conversation. Thank you for your insights, and willingness to take this journey with me… Another confession: the secret gagger in me wants him tied and bound, but I know this to be futile and unhelpful. Why does the instinct to gag rear its head?

Because any African knows the particular flavour and danger of his kind of language. It is responsible for many deaths. It is the language that seeks to justify your incapacity, to distance your humanity from his centre. Now, much of what he says, Remi, and this is where the threat of Kap is at its most dangerous: that even though a twelve year old African would laugh at some of his propositions, the very nature of his language is compelling to the exact person he wants as a readership: the liberal European, American who has never been to Africa, and who has deep inside him, built by the ideas of Conrad and Blixen and CNN and countless made for television Dramas, an idea that Yes the African is indeed a strange being, maybe even a child who needs a firm (but loving) hand.

Ryszard Kapuscinski is the intellectual leader of this community, who, sadly (and if his writings were only about affecting the minds of Europeans, I do not care) have a huge effect on our lives. Now. A large part of the history of Africa has been decided by a well-armed and powerful Europe, with a well-armed and compelling ‘way’ of seeing us that justified their actions. Talk to any Reuters or AP journalists based in Africa: Ryszard Kapuscinski is their guru. They put out news that dominates the coverage of the continent to the rest of the world….and their primary source to ‘understand our minds’ is Ryszard Kapuscinski.

So back to PEN. By asking why they invited him, I was not suggesting they gag him – his books are widely available in mainstream bookshops all over Europe and America. Penguin love him, and publish him. But, there are many great writers. What I ask is, Why Kapuscinski?

Is PEN America’s open-mindedness so open that they would invite a known and racist and bender of well-documented fact to their most important event? Where the ’select’ are called?

How are we to read this? Am sorry. I find it hard to believe that the effect of PEN’s action will be an ‘exposure’ of his falsehoods. What they have done is to ‘validate’ his point of view: to say that there is Meaning and Good in his body of work…and any criticism that comes from such an event will simply show that there is another side to a writer who has already been certified as a “great truth teller’ by PEN themselves…

Whatever happens in New York, he will add to his CV, and get better and bigger book-deals, and have more ‘authority’ than he had before… I wish I believed in the inherent free-flow of ideas that would suggest that, as (you say) the Yoruba say: “A lie may journey for twenty years, soon Truth will break its spell, in one day”.

In these days of spin and the power of one broadcast to reach a whole world, the truth is that it is those closest to the nerve centre of ‘the broadcast’ who will impose their truths on the rest of the world. This is how KAP got to his lofty perch. This is the method that will keep him there. Salman Rushdie, a man I thought had quite a good nose for bullshit says this about KAP:
“Kapuscinski’s writing, always wonderfully concrete and observant, conjures marvels of meaning out of minutiae.”

(Binyavanga Wainaina)

Hi Binyavanga,

I believe we are reaching an interesting point about the phenomenon I choose to abbreviate as Kap. And for that I will be brief. No, I have not suggested that we should not “protest” what others (including ourselves) write about “us”: on the contrary I am saying that when we do so, we should understand the difference between monologues and dialogues. I personally care less about what Granta and Mr. Harding have to say about their own “product”; and of course, I do not speak for PEN America but I do know that Pen’s charter does not approve of any intent to “gag” the other. Rather, it is in a forum as the one you’re attending that the truth can square up to lies and distortions. As the Yoruba say, “A lie may journey for twenty years, soon Truth will break its spell, in one day”. The simple fact that a Wole Soyinka would “share” the same arena with Mr. Kap will tell you that the symbolic day is nigh…

So there, I read, I write, and I teach writing. And I will be delighted to read your novel about this new experience!

Remi (Raji)

Hi Remi,

Thank you for your response.

I write for a living. The question of representing the world I come from is, of course, uppermost in my mind. All I am saying is that I find it difficult to understand why Ryszard Kapuscinski should be speaking at Pen’s gathering this week. The truth is that Kapuscinski occupies a central role in the minds of many (including the PEN American centre). In their minds he is “one of the world leading writers”

It is this that has got him the invitation to New York, to share a strange with people like Wole Soyinka, and Margaret Atwood and Salman Rushdie.

Of course we will continue to write. But are you suggesting avoiding protesting what others write about us, simply because our writing will ‘replace’ them? That is not true. Conrad is as influential now as he was then … and Ryder Haggard is still in print…is still available in AFRICAN libraries…

The very act of inviting him validates what he stands for and has written to readerships and literary communities who seem not to know better. Jeremy Harding is familiar with Africa, having lived there and he thinks Ryszard Kapuscinski is the ‘Greatest Intelligence to Bear Upon Africa Since Conrad.’

So here I am. In his writing the man insults me, the continent I live in; manufactures facts, and makes sweeping racists statements about the nature of ‘my mind’ – turning the African Mind into some sort of below-the-line not quite human (for a human to be of self-criticism makes him not human I think). He can publish this boldly, without editors cringing (in Granta!)

It is important for us to speak to falsehood and to speak loudly. I do not see the logic behind an argument that says that one’s only response should come from one’s writing.

This is all taking place in 2005, in a conference organised by a ‘culturally’ sensitive, progressive organisation supported by many open-minded and intelligent writers from around the world….

So I am maybe trying to understand PEN America’s reason for inviting him: that maybe everybody’s voice should be represented? Even the unreconstructed racists? His short and snappy sentences?

Or the larger truths he has brought out that make his Victorian attitude towards race somehow palatable?

Is there not, somewhere, a line drawn?

I am asking is it possible that now, a hundred years after Conrad, after years of Achebe and Soyinka, somebody can get away with saying:

“The European mind is willing to acknowledge its limitations, accept its limitations. It is a skeptical mind. The spirit of criticism does not exist in other cultures. They are proud, believing that what they have is perfect…”

Is this how PEN promotes ‘understanding between cultures?”

How very progressive!

I must write a novel about it!
(Binyavanga Wainaina)

(From Remi Raji)
“…Having ’sympathy’ for Mr. Kapuscinski suggests that he has ‘lost’ something – is the ‘victim’ of something- whereas the truth is the victims are those he chooses to distort with his pen…”

Thank you for the response. This is exactly my point, if I must say it in another way. Mr. Kap has indeed “lost” something that all explorative writers should cherish: the ability to see a part of his own world in the prism of the world he tries to portray, and he’s in fact the victim of his own loss or inadequacy. And this is why many would not agree that the writer here is an expert on African issues.

Those he chooses to distort with his pen are not without their own writers and chroniclers, and therefore the point is for us to have the chance of contending with several perspectives (of facts and lies, naming and mis-naming, of fiction written as truths…) on the same subject. The same continent that fired the “truthful” imagination of Rider Haggard, Joyce Cary and Joseph Conrad is the same one which propelled the “fictional” world of Achebe, and of Ngugi, la Guma, Armah, Ba and the rest.

It is good to see through the media game and the wars are so contentious, but then, you can’t stop the subjectivities of some kind of writer by merely saying it; as a writer, you have to out-write him, the same way a generation of African writers has done with considerable success. Yes, I am not too skeptical about this bit, because I know for every one racist there are eleven anti-racists to give one hope, for now and for the future.

Remi Raji

The Matrix Redux: The African Version Scene II

Scene II

The continuation of Scene I of the Matrix; The African Version. The first scene can be found in the March archives. Enjoy and could someone please teach me how to link stuff!!

Mzee: The aid industry is everywhere. It is all around us. You can hear it every time words like sustainable, indigenous, governance, NEPAD, Humanity and wellness are used, or phrases such as fair trade, me-time, evils of globalisation and capacity enhancement. You can see it on every 4×4 with a logo on its door, in the raw tuna salad and the cocktail of diet coke with a dash of St. Petersburg vodka ordered by the healthiest looking person in the most expensive bar you know. Missing that, you can see it when you turn on your television: it is a declaration issued at a giant conference in Porto Allegre, Monterrey or Beijing; there, you are told, a consensus on your future has been reached. You can feel it when you go to work…just before you are downsized, when you listen to politicians now perfectly arrayed into government, opposition and civil society. It is the world that has been pulled over your eyes to blind you from the truth.

Boi: What truth?

Mzee: That you are a slave, Boi. Like every African you were born into bondage. Into a prison that you cannot taste or see or touch. A prison for your mind.

Boi: Okey dokey… free my mind. Right, no problem, free my mind, free my mind, no problem, right…

Mzee: This is your last chance. After this, there is no turning back. You follow the baby-boomer flower leftists in their attempt to foist their failed revolutions on you: the story ends, you develop some African capacity, give micro-credit loans to gutsy women you admire, rage at Starbucks, and believe whatever Tree-Hugger Smith wants you to believe. Open your eyes and you stay in Wonderland, and I show you how deep the rabbit-hole goes.

What is aid? Control. Aid is a liberal generated dream world built on the vision of an individuality that is universalised in the image of Smith. It is an attempt to extend a legal and moral code that is everywhere similar. It is contemptuous of the political life of the African, believing as it does that he does not possess one. In the final analysis, it is the vulture that uses African misery as an orientation of its identity: they must be seen and see themselves to be good. Distress is the balm on the wound of a liberal nihilism that everyday rots further as Smith battles to reach for goodness at no cost to his privilege. It seeks control in order to change an African into this.
[Holds up a Mojito cocktail and a picture of a laughing child in a refugee camp]

Boi: No way. No way. This is crazy. But I know Fanon by heart and I am down with the people.

Mzee: I didn’t say it would be easy, Boi. I just said it would be the truth.

Boi: But…listen, I have to think about it all. You’re heavy man. Besides, I have to rush; I am meeting Tree-Hugger Smith in a few minutes so I’ll ask him what the deal is.

Scene III coming up soon, watch this space…

The Honesty of Marathon Running: Paula Radcliffe Takes on Susan Chepkemei

I am just watching the London Marathon which unsurprisingly is entirely focused on Paula Radcliffe who has won after pulling away from the pack on mile 5 and relentlessly piling on the pressure since. Susan Chepkemei is trying to keep up and not being quite able to stay with it. Of course I am pulling for her as a Kenyan and also because I had the privilege of meeting her in August 2004.

She told me how she had broken the world half marathon record in Lisbon three years previously. She won that race by 30 seconds and told of how she had doubted she would even finish due to the fast start and her not feeling well! That she went on to destroy the field is a testament to her courage and to the combative spirit Kenyan runners possess. I had always thought that world beaters, winners and record holders start out their endeavors as winners. So it was a surprise when Susan related how much of the race had been run with nary a thought for the record – she just wanted to salvage her pride by not backing away from the challenge.

Running is war. A war that ruptures muscles, destroys pride, dissolves knees. It is a sweaty, smelly war: Radcliffe for instance squatted to empty her bladder mid-way through the race! Then, in a moment that is a priceless lampooning opportunity, this is what she said about the incident on a BBC interview: “I think I need to apologise to the nation for having to stop like that but I was losing 10 seconds every time my stomach cramped up.” “It was a similar problem to Athens but there was no danger of me being glycogen-defeated again. I knew if I stopped I would be able to get rid of the cramp and concentrate properly again.” Apart from the humor though, imagine the desire for victory it takes to squat for a pee with millions watching and a nation’s hope on your shoulders.

Running at a championship level comes down to honesty. When the pain is increasing with every step and your opponents rhythm hints at yet to be tapped reservoirs of strength, you must be honest about who you are. The pain and pressure strips away pretence and those that manage to hold onto them rarely become champions. If Kenyans like Susan have such honesty, where did it come from? It is certainly not drawn from the country’s elite of robber barons and their hangers on. It does not come from any aid or development policy. Nor from foreign knowledge. Sitting with Susan at the posh Java Coffee House in Adams Arcade, surrounded by mwa-mwa-mwa kissing Kenyans and expats, no one seemed to recognize her. She is probably better known in Europe than she is in Kenya, especially middle class Kenya. And I think this is because Kenyan runners are drawing on sources of inspiration and belief that are anathema to what the country has become. The runners are honest, disciplined, tough, organized and talented. The country’s leaders and the class they are drawn from (see my March essay: Babylon System is the Vampire!) are dishonest, brutal, disorganised and need no talent to maintain their mediocrity and robbery.

The results of the race: Radcliffe in 2.17:42 followed 5 minutes later by Romania’s Constantina Dita. Then came Kenyans Susan Chepkemei, third, and Margaret Okayo.

I will make another entry shortly on the men’s race and Martin Lel who won by running a personal best, meaning that he run the best he has ever done when the pressure was at its highest. Why is he not a hero in Kenya?

Stop Moaning: The English Response to Years of Defeat

How did the English ever manage to conquer such a large swath of the world? London can barely run itself much less entire continents, I should know because I live here.

Train tracks are held in place by blocks of wood, rusty nails and a brick. The train system, like virtually every other public service is in a state of acute crisis. Thankfully the operator apologises with reasonable sounding phrases that would have you imagine delays are a rarity.

The time on the tube is mostly spent wondering how you will afford David Beckham’s life, which is splashed on every headline and that you are a loser for not emulating. By the time you extricate yourself from your fellow, habitually unsmiling passengers, you slouch outside to cold, grey skies, and incessant rain.

Thank God you have lunch to look forward to. Will it be the fried candy, fried chicken, soggy vegetables or the fried tomatoes? Whatever you choose to eat, be prepared to pay dearly for it – if not financially, then surely with blocked arteries. And remember you only have an hour to wolf it down before you return to your badly paid job.

You might be lucky enough to survive without depression therapy into the evening. Then you can anticipate a few hours at your local pub, surrounded by the same unsmiling train passengers you thought you had left behind forever. If this is not good enough for you, try one of the three TV documentaries on the First World War playing on any given night.

Actually don’t bother, they all say pretty much the same thing: “We are a plucky lot blessed with a good moral compass and able to sacrifice for jolly old England,” all correct sentiments, I suppose, with the exception of the ‘jolly’. When it comes to you poor devils who were colonised, there is a grudging admission that it was wrong to oppress you. But hurry, it’s time to move back to happily reminiscing about the greatness of old England.

There are few people whose self-perception is so painfully contorted to ignore reality as the British. The famous stiff upper lip for instance, disguises a complete inability to connect with others and a shyness that borders on phobia – it’s a case of the shy guy who pretends to hate women.

It also helps when you are being screwed by painfully high taxes, late trains, bad food, high rents, traffic jams and trying to digest the cultural significance of the latest story on the thong Kylie was spotted wearing at Lord Elton’s party.

The importance of sacrifice keeps cropping up, but much of it amounts to putting up with privations brought on by mediocre government and enduring yet another Royal scandal (“I wish I was your tampon Camilla,” Prince Charles once muttered thickly on the phone) The obsession with a glorious past gives testimony to this being an age of British decline and it’s not a pretty thing.

Living with such a storied history has made many here insecure. A widespread dislike of foreigners might once have resulted from imagining that they were all a sorry bunch, but now it springs from the fear that associating with them will expose one’s inadequacy.

You see, for the British, identity is competitive: “I am better than you because I once ruled you. But since I don’t any more, I am better because, ah, well, my great grandfather was mowed down as he walked slowly towards a German machine gun nest at the Somme after his officers thought him too stupid to run in correct formation.”

In case this is sounding like the rant of some disaffected ex-colonial subject, it is. The fact that I am from Kenya, a country that was ruled for more than half a century by people so dentally challenged, rankles.

The British are many things and most of them, if not really wrong or evil, are boring and slightly pathetic. One example suffices to tell you everything you need to know about the country: Tim Henman.

Here is the great hope of British tennis who in his own words states that “winning is everything,” a sentiment that is widely accepted across Britain.

However, like the rest of this country’s athletes, businesses, dentists, train operators and health service administrators, he has not had much actual practice winning. There are those 11 titles won in a decade of professional tennis in places like Tashkent, Brighton and Reunion.

Now, this would be fine if he were just some minor talent, but remember this is a man who has made fans weep when he was bundled out of yet another Wimbledon (reaching the semi-finals on four occasions amounts to cruelly teasing the British public’s fevered expectations.)

As he sportingly accepts defeat after defeat he is frequently referred to as a gentleman, a status many Britons aspire to as they surreptitiously take in the naked breasts of the page three girl.

For the British, defeat has come to define the past 50 years of their national life to such a large extent that putting up a fight as you get gutted is now the only recourse. Henman’s game reflects his country’s approach to everything.

It is careful, yet mediocre, and shows few flashes of creativity. I must admit though that his pronouncements of future victory do bear bleak testimony to his possession of a vivid imagination disconnected from reality.

Above all, his demeanour on the court is dignified. There is little panic in evidence as he gets blasted away and treated with obvious disrespect by his opponents. You might deal with him like a calf in a slaughterhouse, but don’t expect him to beg for mercy. Here I have to stop and acknowledge that there is something perversely admirable about this attitude.

If the British have anything to show the poor Asians or poorer Africans they once ruled it is this: stop moaning so much about your problems, show some pluck, for God’s sake, and never let them see you sweat.

Ryszard Kapuscinski: Binyavanga Replies to Nigerian PEN Centre

(Binyavanga’s reply to Remi Raji of the Nigerian PEN Centre)
Hi,

I agree. Mr. Ryszard Kapuscinski has a right to believe and write what he wants; and so ‘gagging’ him makes no sense to me. What is important is making our own voices clear about how we see our world.

I am far more skeptical than you are about his motives, and have less sympathy. His frequent manipulation of generally acknowledged fact signals to me one who chooses to bend reality to suit his preconceived notions (or notions he wishes to perpetuate). I do not believe his distortions to be the well-meaning exoticisations of a ‘naive’. With each book his boldness has become more apparent…

It has become a great tradition in literature and in the media to make careers over reporting on the ‘unknown’ – mostly because one can avoid the kind of upfront criticism and scrutiny one gets from reporting from within one’s source country – to the same audience…

Having ’sympathy’ for Mr. Kapuscinski suggests that he has ‘lost’ something – is the ‘victim’ of something – whereas the truth is the victims are those he chooses to distort with his pen. And those who buy into his ideas and perpetuate them, and decide how to see Africa, based on his eyes…

The pen is a powerful thing…

Many thanks,

Binyavanga Wainaina

Stop Moaning: The English Response to Years of Defeat

How did the English ever manage to conquer such a large swath of the world? London can barely run itself much less entire continents, I should know because I live here.

Train tracks are held in place by blocks of wood, rusty nails and a brick. The train system, like virtually every other public service is in a state of acute crisis. Thankfully the operator apologises with reasonable sounding phrases that would have you imagine delays are a rarity.

The time on the tube is mostly spent wondering how you will afford David Beckham’s life, which is splashed on every headline and that you are a loser for not emulating. By the time you extricate yourself from your fellow, habitually unsmiling passengers, you slouch outside to cold, grey skies, and incessant rain.

Thank God you have lunch to look forward to. Will it be the fried candy, fried chicken, soggy vegetables or the fried tomatoes? Whatever you choose to eat, be prepared to pay dearly for it – if not financially, then surely with blocked arteries. And remember you only have an hour to wolf it down before you return to your badly paid job.

You might be lucky enough to survive without depression therapy into the evening. Then you can anticipate a few hours at your local pub, surrounded by the same unsmiling train passengers you thought you had left behind forever. If this is not good enough for you, try one of the three TV documentaries on the First World War playing on any given night.

Actually don’t bother, they all say pretty much the same thing: “We are a plucky lot blessed with a good moral compass and able to sacrifice for jolly old England,” all correct sentiments, I suppose, with the exception of the ‘jolly’. When it comes to you poor devils who were colonised, there is a grudging admission that it was wrong to oppress you. But hurry, it’s time to move back to happily reminiscing about the greatness of old England.

There are few people whose self-perception is so painfully contorted to ignore reality as the British. The famous stiff upper lip for instance, disguises a complete inability to connect with others and a shyness that borders on phobia – it’s a case of the shy guy who pretends to hate women.

It also helps when you are being screwed by painfully high taxes, late trains, bad food, high rents, traffic jams and trying to digest the cultural significance of the latest story on the thong Kylie was spotted wearing at Lord Elton’s party.

The importance of sacrifice keeps cropping up, but much of it amounts to putting up with privations brought on by mediocre government and enduring yet another Royal scandal (“I wish I was your tampon Camilla,” Prince Charles once muttered thickly on the phone) The obsession with a glorious past gives testimony to this being an age of British decline and it’s not a pretty thing.

Living with such a storied history has made many here insecure. A widespread dislike of foreigners might once have resulted from imagining that they were all a sorry bunch, but now it springs from the fear that associating with them will expose one’s inadequacy.

You see, for the British, identity is competitive: “I am better than you because I once ruled you. But since I don’t any more, I am better because, ah, well, my great grandfather was mowed down as he walked slowly towards a German machine gun nest at the Somme after his officers thought him too stupid to run in correct formation.”

In case this is sounding like the rant of some disaffected ex-colonial subject, it is. The fact that I am from Kenya, a country that was ruled for more than half a century by people so dentally challenged, rankles.

The British are many things and most of them, if not really wrong or evil, are boring and slightly pathetic. One example suffices to tell you everything you need to know about the country: Tim Henman.

Here is the great hope of British tennis who in his own words states that “winning is everything,” a sentiment that is widely accepted across Britain.

However, like the rest of this country’s athletes, businesses, dentists, train operators and health service administrators, he has not had much actual practice winning. There are those 11 titles won in a decade of professional tennis in places like Tashkent, Brighton and Reunion.

Now, this would be fine if he were just some minor talent, but remember this is a man who has made fans weep when he was bundled out of yet another Wimbledon (reaching the semi-finals on four occasions amounts to cruelly teasing the British public’s fevered expectations.)

As he sportingly accepts defeat after defeat he is frequently referred to as a gentleman, a status many Britons aspire to as they surreptitiously take in the naked breasts of the page three girl.

For the British, defeat has come to define the past 50 years of their national life to such a large extent that putting up a fight as you get gutted is now the only recourse. Henman’s game reflects his country’s approach to everything.

It is careful, yet mediocre, and shows few flashes of creativity. I must admit though that his pronouncements of future victory do bear bleak testimony to his possession of a vivid imagination disconnected from reality.

Above all, his demeanour on the court is dignified. There is little panic in evidence as he gets blasted away and treated with obvious disrespect by his opponents. You might deal with him like a calf in a slaughterhouse, but don’t expect him to beg for mercy. Here I have to stop and acknowledge that there is something perversely admirable about this attitude.

If the British have anything to show the poor Asians or poorer Africans they once ruled it is this: stop moaning so much about your problems, show some pluck, for God’s sake, and never let them see you sweat.

Ryszard Kapuscinski: Nigerian PEN Centre Replies to Binyavanga’s Rage

Dear All:

Thank you for bringing this to specific attention. There is indeed reason to shudder at some of the statements credited to Mr. Kapuscinski about Africa and cultures “other” than European, but these things are not new. He has been pinned to the memory of Mr. Conrad but I doubt if his energies or talents are close to the name. However, the invitation extended to Kapuscinski should not be considered a great source of alarm or terror the way I understand it now: it is his writings that must be given equal space and challenge as the writings of other authors who are Africanists or Afrocentric. Of course, there are ranges of Afrophobia, Afropessimism, and Afrophilia which you can’t gag or sanction, but which we have to deal with for, I predict, another half of a century. This is why I consider the statement of Mr. Dickson Migiro to “gag him” (itself sounding as a Conradian quip in “Heart of Darkness”) unnecessary and out of tune with the real spirit of free expression.

I have scanned through one or two interviews granted by Mr. Kapuscinski, in search of references to Africa, and have come to some preliminary understanding of his mind-set. He was fascinated by an idea of an imagined, monolithic African eldorado; he had the rare opportunity of contact with moments and places in the real Africa, and soon the subjective fascination of the writer blurred the objective sense of the journalist in him. In short, he is a factionist and sensationalist. For this, we need not ask for the guillotine but sympathise (if not challenge) with his too-familiar colonial opportunism.

Asking for a “fatwah” is to invite cheap and further popularity to the reprehensible imagination. What’s left? Let the true Africanist with an informed view of Africa talk back to the likes of Mr. Kapuscinski wherever they are. Talk, not gag.

Sincerely,
Remi Raji
— Nigerian PEN Centre pennigeria@yahoo.com

Parselelo Kantai wows them at the Oxford Literary Festival

On Thursday (14/4), I went to Oxford to listen to Parselelo Kantai read at that city’s literary festival. Other than being one of my closest friends, Parsa is a hell of a writer: he is Kenya’s best journalist in my opinion and was first runner-up in the 2004 Caine Prize for African Writing. The reading was held at the Holywell Music Room, which an elderly English woman primly informed me was the oldest concert hall in Europe, built in 1742. She went on to add that Handel might have first performed there and listed a couple of other famous composers and musicians to have appeared on its stage. I was struck by how connected she felt to an event that happened hundreds of years ago – so much so that she said it with a kind of genteel boastfulness. I think to a large extent places like Oxford have become to the English a much needed reminder of accomplishment and glory in a time when a sense of group purpose is increasingly rare. Anyway, let me get back to Parsa’s reading. In the near future, I will post a little piece I have been thinking of called ‘The Soul of the Englishman Harbors a Little Accountant Holding a Form in Triplicate’. There is a rant there that must get out.

Parsa was reading with Brian Chikwava who was the 2004 Caine Prize winner. There was a healthy audience of 150, most with that faintly anxious, earnest expression of the liberal who loves LITERATURE. Parsa read an excerpt of ‘The Story of Comrade Lemma and the Black Jerusalem Boys Band’. (See the link at the bottom to read the story.) It is a short story of a man who in the 1960s wrote an enormously popular song, but has since descended into poverty and obscurity. He is discovered and promoted by a condom company representative who with the collaboration of the media is determined to use his story to move on up. Kenya’s story in a nutshell: the use and abuse of heroism and hope. The reading was gripping and Parsa was looking seriously bohemian in his Lenin cap and beard.

The scene was surreal. Parsa reading a story about a man tossed aside in Kenya’s rush to ‘modernize and develop’ our way out of the slums of the Comrade Lemmas of this world. A story of a man ignored, and possibly even broken, in his country’s bid to become Oxford, read to an appreciative Oxford audience. It was, as the oracle said in the Matrix, enough to bake my noodle. I wondered how Comrade Lemma is appreciated back in Kenya. Is it translated with the same tools that the Oxford audience was using to reach their murmurs of approval? Does it matter? I suspect that the Oxford audience was hearing a great story of a lost hero found, and an amusing take on the absurdities of African nation-building. The poor urban Kenyan, on the other hand, would have received the reading like the re-opening of a wound. It would have talked to him of how the patriotism felt by so many in the heyday of independent Kenya was stillborn, a perversion. How the colonial state continued unhampered, this time staffed with black personnel wielding pan-African rhetoric rather than the mzungu preaching British exceptionalism. The fate of Comrade Lemma, ignored one moment, exploited the next, would have reminded most Nairobians of what their government does to them daily. In Oxford, Parsa, I realized, was a talented performer who tells a good story, and of course there is nothing wrong with that. But in the Kenya outside posh Westlands, Comrade Lemma is a revolution: a painful and entertaining story of who we are. I think it needs to become a play, a movie and that the Comrade Lemma song needs to be heard everywhere.

Just before did his thing, Brian Chikwava treated the audience to his latest short-story: a hilarious comedy of manners set in a village in the midst of a witchcraft feud. He later sang and I enjoyed sitting there, in that old building, hearing an African producing so much beauty. It felt like I had gone far from home, into the heart of a foreign place, only to suddenly encounter home again. When I needed it most.

The link to Comrade Lemma is below and I will post some pictures of the reading the moment I figure out how to work the technology…

http://www.kwani.org/stories.htm

Ryszard Kapuscinski: Binyavanga Wainaina’s Rage in Manhattan

Dear Friends,

I am in the US, on a reading tour and just found out that Ryszard Kapuscinski will be speaking at various fora in New York City starting on Saturday the 16th of April 2005 – invited by PEN America.

(Read this extract from the PEN Charter:)

MEMBERS OF PEN should at all times use what influence they have in favor of good understanding and mutual respect among nations; they pledge themselves to do their utmost to dispel race, class, and national hatreds and to champion the ideal of one humanity living in peace in the world.

I have read with astonishment the lies Ryszard Kapuscinski peddles about Africa – and his growing ‘authority’ on African issues. He has been called by Jeremy Harding of the Evening Standard:

“The Greatest Intelligence to Bear upon Africa since
Conrad”

His books are widely read by Development types; are recommended to journalism students all over the world; the big news networks encourage their correspondents to read Kapuscinski to understand the ‘African mind’. He is a one of the most influential sources of reference for Aid workers and policymakers on Africa. He often speaks about the continent to people who make serious decisions about us.

And he is a fraud. A liar. And a profound and dangerous racist.

I urge you all to forward this to all concerned African and writers you may know; and to email a protest to PEN International and any and all media, blogs and literary publications you may know…

I have the following emails of Pen International offices in Africa and around the world. I do not know which will be most effective. If anybody needs to contact me my US telephone number is: 202 390 6216

I suggest we bombard them all with a protest.

Yours,

Binyavanga Wainaina

info@internationalpen.org.uk,info@internationalpen.org.uk, pen@pen.org, antonio@pen.org, bridget@pen.org, journal@pen.org, andrea@pen.org, nasst@dircon.co.uk, rudebs@icon.co.za, intpen@dircon.co.uk, info@internationalpen.org.uk, faridah@dhaka.net, penclube@ig.com.br, sylproct@coppernet.zm, info@internationalpen.org.uk, mwpen@sdnp.org.mw, penkenya@ndima.org, mackay2248@yahoo.com, faridah@dhaka.net, fearnley@waitrose.com,
gyorgyey@aol.com, ccomarts@utlonline.co.ug, info@pensweden.org, sudaninexile195@hotmail.com, rudebs@icon.co.za, anthonyf@icon.co.za, sierraleonepen@yahoo.co.uk, memgoree@sentoo.sn, shbali@packages.com.pk, pennigeria@yahoo.com, penkenya@ndima.org, antonio@pen.org, bridget@pen.org

Parselelo Kantai wows them at the Oxford Literary Festival

On Thursday (14/4), I went to Oxford to listen to Parselelo Kantai read at that city’s literary festival. Other than being one of my closest friends, Parsa is a hell of a writer: he is Kenya’s best journalist in my opinion and was first runner-up in the 2004 Caine Prize for African Writing. The reading was held at the Holywell Music Room, which an elderly English woman primly informed me was the oldest concert hall in Europe, built in 1742. She went on to add that Handel might have first performed there and listed a couple of other famous composers and musicians to have appeared on its stage. I was struck by how connected she felt to an event that happened hundreds of years ago – so much so that she said it with a kind of genteel boastfulness. I think to a large extent places like Oxford have become to the English a much needed reminder of accomplishment and glory in a time when a sense of group purpose is increasingly rare. Anyway, let me get back to Parsa’s reading. In the near future, I will post a little piece I have been thinking of called ‘The Soul of the Englishman Harbors a Little Accountant Holding a Form in Triplicate’. There is a rant there that must get out.

Parsa was reading with Brian Chikwava who was the 2004 Caine Prize winner. There was a healthy audience of 150, most with that faintly anxious, earnest expression of the liberal who loves LITERATURE. Parsa read an excerpt of ‘The Story of Comrade Lemma and the Black Jerusalem Boys Band’. (See the link at the bottom to read the story.) It is a short story of a man who in the 1960s wrote an enormously popular song, but has since descended into poverty and obscurity. He is discovered and promoted by a condom company representative who with the collaboration of the media is determined to use his story to move on up. Kenya’s story in a nutshell: the use and abuse of heroism and hope. The reading was gripping and Parsa was looking seriously bohemian in his Lenin cap and beard.

The scene was surreal. Parsa reading a story about a man tossed aside in Kenya’s rush to ‘modernize and develop’ our way out of the slums of the Comrade Lemmas of this world. A story of a man ignored, and possibly even broken, in his country’s bid to become Oxford, read to an appreciative Oxford audience. It was, as the oracle said in the Matrix, enough to bake my noodle. I wondered how Comrade Lemma is appreciated back in Kenya. Is it translated with the same tools that the Oxford audience was using to reach their murmurs of approval? Does it matter? I suspect that the Oxford audience was hearing a great story of a lost hero found, and an amusing take on the absurdities of African nation-building. The poor urban Kenyan, on the other hand, would have received the reading like the re-opening of a wound. It would have talked to him of how the patriotism felt by so many in the heyday of independent Kenya was stillborn, a perversion. How the colonial state continued unhampered, this time staffed with black personnel wielding pan-African rhetoric rather than the mzungu preaching British exceptionalism. The fate of Comrade Lemma, ignored one moment, exploited the next, would have reminded most Nairobians of what their government does to them daily. In Oxford, Parsa, I realized, was a talented performer who tells a good story, and of course there is nothing wrong with that. But in the Kenya outside posh Westlands, Comrade Lemma is a revolution: a painful and entertaining story of who we are. I think it needs to become a play, a movie and that the Comrade Lemma song needs to be heard everywhere.

Just before did his thing, Brian Chikwava treated the audience to his latest short-story: a hilarious comedy of manners set in a village in the midst of a witchcraft feud. He later sang and I enjoyed sitting there, in that old building, hearing an African producing so much beauty. It felt like I had gone far from home, into the heart of a foreign place, only to suddenly encounter home again. When I needed it most.

The link to Comrade Lemma is below and I will post some pictures of the reading the moment I figure out how to work the technology…

http://www.kwani.org/stories.htm

The Matrix Movie: The African Version

Opening:

Tree-Hugger Smith: I’d like to share a revelation that I’ve had during my time in Africa. It came to me when I tried to classify your species. I realized that you’re not actually mammals. Every mammal on this planet instinctively develops its natural equilibrium to exploit the surrounding environment to its advantage, but you Africans do not. You move to an area, ask for bribes, hack each other to death with machetes, and you multiply, and multiply, then you get sick and die and die. The only way you can survive is through my help, my mercy because I will not allow you to move to another area especially if it is my home. There is another organism on this planet that follows the same pattern. A virus. Africans are a disease, a cancer of this planet, you have the plague of inferiority and our capacity building and governance programs are the cure.

Scene I
(A mobile phone rings in a listless NGO office on Nairobi’s Lenana Road. Seated at a desk before a stack of UN reports sits a young man sporting dreadlocks, listening to Senegalese music and occasionally poring over a copy of Franz Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth)

Mzee: Hello Boi. Do you know who this is?
Boi: Mzee?
Mzee: Yes. I’ve been looking for you, Boi. I don’t know if you’re ready to know what I have to show you, but unfortunately you and I have run out of time. You work for them Boi, and you’re a good kid, I want you to know what you have become.
Boi: What are you talking about Mzee? I work for one of the top charities in the world, where every employee understands that they are a part of an aid effort that brings hope and life to millions of destitute Africans. Thus if I have a problem, the charity has a problem.
Mzee: The Matrix, sorry, I mean the aid industry is a system Boi. That system is our enemy. But when you’re inside an NGO or a donor agency, you look around, what do you see? Dreadlocks, middle class rebels against the homogenising influence of Western capital and culture, lawyers, counsellors, human rights and fair trade activists, a collection of well-to-do do-gooders. They are the people who are trying to save us Boi, but ostensibly have succeeded in imprisoning us in ever-deeper dungeons. But until we realise what they are, these people are still a part of that system and that makes them our enemy. You have to understand most of these people are not ready to be unplugged from the gravy train that is Western charity and mind control. And many of them are so inured, so hopelessly dependent on the system, that they will fight to protect it.
Boi: Oh shit. Oh shit, shit.
Mzee: I imagine that as you assess Blair’s Commission for Africa, you’re feeling a bit like Alice. Hmm? Tumbling down the rabbit hole?
Boi: You could say that.
Mzee: I see it in your eyes. You have the look of a man who accepts that he is cornered by the forces of nature and his own nature, both which conspire to destroy him. You have the look of accepting what you see because you expect to wake up. Ironically, that’s not far from the truth. Do you believe that Africans will survive or ever thrive, Boi?
Boi: Not without Tree-Hugger Smith’s help, he’s good, honest, he is!
Mzee: Why?
Boi: Because I don’t like the idea that I’m in control of my life, that my undeveloped capacity is responsible for my overdeveloped underdevelopment.
Mzee: I know exactly what you mean. Let me tell you why you’re here. You’re here because you know something. What you know you can’t explain, but you feel it. You’ve felt it your entire life, that there’s something wrong with the world. You don’t know what it is, but it’s there, like a splinter in your mind, driving you mad. Do you know what I’m talking about?
Boi: What? The fact that Bob Geldof sings to feed me, that Blair has cried for my being a scar on the conscience of the world, that I am every year aided by billions of dollars while I remain hungry, that even as conflict counsellors roam the land I am still liable to death by machete or missile? Please Mzee, tell me why I get so much help and yet have so much trouble, what, pray me, is aid?
Mzee: Do you want to know what it is?
Boi: Yes, well at least I think so … be gentle.

Scene II coming up soon, watch this space…

Think Bush is cynical? Check out France in Ivory Coast

The French have been on a moral high horse since the American invasion of Iraq. They have been joined in their age-old pursuit of American bashing by other Europeans and a smattering of African urban ’sophisticates’. French foreign minister, Dominique de Villepin, he of the square jaw and aristocratic mien, was on every television channel, patiently explaining the primacy of international law in regulating the foreign policies of states. It was, he said with much huff and puff, fundamentally immoral to ever take military action against another state without the approval of the UN Security Council if not in self defense. Well. If America broke international law to invade Iraq, then it must mean that France’s 3,800 soldiers in the Ivory Coast under a UN peacekeeping mandate must reflect French high moral standards, right? Not so, says Boubacar Boris Diop writing in Le Monde Diplomatique. France’s present role in that benighted country is only the latest chapter in its colonial misadventures in Africa. Praise for international law by the French has its roots in a desire to allow them to remain global players in a period when they are increasingly unable to hold as much sway as they used to. The ideals the likes of Villepin proclaim so proudly are in reality geopolitical machinations to subject American power to European dictates. In the 19th century when the tables were reversed, it was America that was heard to call for a rule of law in the international system. My point in going into all this is to caution Africans from reacting in knee jerk fashion when their former colonial masters try and recruit them as allies in Western power struggles. Follow this link to see how Boubacar Boris Diop has broken it down. You know what? I really have no technical skills so I do not know how to create links within these posts – help! So just go ahead and click on http://mondediplo.com/2005/04/10diop

Yvonne Vera’s Obituary

Last night I was Instant Messengering with Gimbiya Kettering, my newest friend who told me that she had just heard of Yvonne Vera’s death. Gimbiya, who is a great fan of Yvonne’s, told me of the powerful emotional and aesthetic impact on her of books such as Stone Virgins. Below is an obituary for a bright flame extinguished in the prime of life, to be missed by a Zimbabwe and an Africa that is in dire need of her unflinching gaze.
mato kima

(Her titles: Without a Name, Under the Tongue, Stone Virgins, and Butterfly Burning. These novels were widely recognized, translated into seven languages and Vera won the 1997 Commonwealth Writers Prize (Africa Region), 2002 Berlin Literature Prize (work in Translation), and 2002 Macmillan (UK) Writer’s Prize for Africa (adult fiction).)

Yvonne Vera
1964-2005

A tongue which no lover lives, no longer weeps. It buried beneath rock.

My tongue is a river. I touch my tongue in search of the places of my growing. My tongue is heavy with sleep. I know a stone is buried in my mouth, carried under my tongue – Under the Tongue, Yvonne Vera

Bulawayo is the second largest city in Zimbabwe, the cultural and economic hub of the western region. In 1964, when Yvonne Vera was born it was a township in Southern Rhodesia. When she left in 1980 to go to York University Canada, Zimbabwe was celebrating its independence. She returned to the city to work as the director of the National Gallery, and began writing her novels. Her poetic lyricism has immortalized the city and its inhabitants.

My first exposure to Vera was on a course syllabus, when Butterfly Burning was assigned in an African Writers Course. I had grown up in Africa and in literature courses had studied Achebe, Ngugi and Saro-Wiwa. But, it was only when I was a graduate student in Washington DC, in a course taught by an American, when I first came across Vera’s work. In the campus bookstore, I bought a trade-paperback edition of the slender novel. Its cover was elegant: a butterfly pattern that reminded me of Dutch-wax print cloth and a naked woman crouched on the cover, looking at the ground before her. It was a few months before I took it from my stack of semester-reading, expecting an easy read. Nothing could have been further from the truth.

Vera’s prose is poetic, language so graceful that it cannot be read quickly. Each word demands its own time and its own meaning. I was halfway through the book before I realized that I didn’t actually know what it was about. In class the next morning, the professor summarized the plot of the novel so that we could discuss its themes: abortion, rebellion, dreams, and suffering. I took notes furiously, promising myself that I would find all of this in the novel when I reread it. Two readings became my reading pattern for Vera’s novels: First for the beauty, then for the story. The two only coming together after I closed the book, shut my eyes and allowed her words to flow over me.

Vera was unafraid of writing about the reality of life in Bulawayo, where many suffer poverty, violence, and despair. She took on the taboo subjects of rape, incest, abortion and the position of women in her country. Yet all of this is done in such compelling language that a reader gains hope in the strength of Vera’s characters. It is her novels that took her writing, and eventually Vera herself, out of Zimbabwe.

Her life seemed intertwined with Zimbabwe’s. She was born in 1964 when Ian Smith became prime minister and a year later declared independence under white rule. In 1980, when the Black African population won its independence, Vera left to read for a doctorate from York University in Canada.

I knew she had been in poor health. But I imagined her as a writer-in-exile, her eyes and her heart turning back to Zimbabwe as she tried to write about the place and people so important to her. The distance must have caused her pain. I imagine her broken-hearted, wasting away with homesickness. If I have used images more fitting to a novel than to real life, I suspect that Yvonne, whose characters’ vivid lives made ours brighter and better as a result, would approve.

Gimbiya Kettering

PS: Please go to the African Review of Books for some good reviews of Yvonne’s work. Use the link below:
http://www.africanreviewofbooks.com/Reviews/vera1.html

Reviewers Expose Kapuscinski’s Falsehoods

John Ryle in the Times Literary Supplement

http://www.richardwebster.net/johnryle.html

Extract:

“In this mode of writing – the tropical baroque style – nothing can be ordinary or familiar. Everything is stretched and exaggerated the opposite of home. As Kapuscinski has himself written elsewhere of South American baroque. “If there is a jungle it has to be enormous… if there are mountains they have to be gigantic… if there is a plain it has to be endless… Fact is mixed with fantasy… truth with myth, realism with rhetoric.” The direction of his blurrings and inventions and exaggerations becomes clearer in the light of this inadvertent self-criticism. Africa is a continent without bookshops, he avers. Its rulers are illiterate. Its inhabitants are prisoners of their environment, or of their bloodline. They are afraid of the dark. They live on milk. (Who knows? They may have heads beneath their shoulders too.) Thus Europeans can never really understand them; they can only marvel at them. With the last suggestion we are approaching the true nature of Kapuscinski’s enterprise. It is an outgrowth of the one historical experience that the inhabitants of this hugely various continent do have in common with each other: the experience of colonization (or military occupation) by European powers. Despite Kapuscinski’s vigorously anti-colonialist stance, his writing about Africa is a variety of latter-day literary colonialism, a kind of gonzo orientalism, a highly selective imposition of form, conducted in the name of humane concern, that sacrifices truth and accuracy, and homogenizes and misrepresents Africans even as it aspires to speak for them. “

Aleksandar Hemon for the Village Voice

April 19th, 2001

http://www.villagevoice.com/books/0117,hemon,24106,10.html

He seems to have also mesmerized the editors of Granta, The New Yorker, and The New York Review of Books, which all published lengthy excerpts from his book, oblivious to or uninterested in the underlying proto-racist essentialism that ultimately casts a shadow on The Shadow of the Sun.

Kapuscinski’s stated ambition is not to write “a book about Africa, but rather about some people from there.” He is careful to say that Africa is “too large to describe,” adding, “Only with the greatest simplification . . . can we say ‘Africa.’ In reality, except as a geographical appellation, Africa does not exist.” In an early chapter entitled “The Structure of the Clan,” Kapuscinski acknowledges that “in all of Africa, each larger social group has its own distinct culture,” which is why “anthropologists never speak of ‘African culture’ or ‘African religion, ‘ knowing that . . . the essence of Africa is its endless variety.”

But Kapuscinski is no anthropologist. In the face of his own feeble disclaimers, he quickly plunges into making generalizations about “the African.” For example, “The European and the African have an entirely different concept of time,” he announces early on. Africa might not be a single conceptual unit, but “the African” somehow is. “Let us remember”—he writes—”that fear of revenge is deeply rooted in the African mentality.” “The African” to Kapuscinski seems transcendental and trans-historical, even when he acknowledges the horrors of the slave trade, which “on the psyche of the African . . . left the deepest and most painfully permanent scar: the inferiority complex.”

“The African mind” is largely defined by its difference from “the European mind,” a difference that has metaphysical consequences: “In Africa, the [Christian] notion of metaphysical, abstract evil—evil in and of itself—does not exist.” The difference is deeply rooted and practically unalterable: Kapuscinski seems to agree with an “elderly Englishman,” a longtime resident of Addis Ababa who believes “the strength of Europe and its culture . . . lies in its bent for criticism. . . . Other cultures do not have this critical spirit. . . . [They are] uncritical in relation to themselves . . . [laying] the blame for all that is evil on others.” “They are,” seethes the elderly Englishmen, “culturally, permanently, structurally incapable of progress, incapable of engendering within themselves the will to transform and evolve.” For Kapuscinski, as for the Englishman, the real difference and disparity between races is in “the mind,” rather than skin color—he fumes against the racism absurdly based on skin color, and would probably be shocked if told that his obsessive listing of essential differences is essentially racist.

WHERE AND WHEN WILL Ryszard Kapuscinski BE SPEAKING?

Saturday 16th April 4:00–5:30
Where: The New York Public Library, South Court
Auditorium: 5th Ave. & 42nd St. (Enter on 5th Ave.)

Confronting the Worst: Writing and Catastrophe (SOLD OUT)
Svetlana Alexievich, François Bizot, Caroline Emcke, Philip Gourevitch, Ryszard Kapuscinski, Elena Poniatowska; moderated by Susie Linfield

MONDAY 18TH April

700–9:00 pm
Where: The Town Hall: 123 West 43rd St.

The Power of the Pen: Does Writing Change Anything? The twentieth century was a long quarrel between those determined that the answer should be yes and others who feared that the writer’s engagement in the world would diminish art without improving politics. The goal of this evening is not to answer the question but to find the words with which we can begin to think it through.

The New Yorker hosts an evening of readings by Margaret Atwood, Nuruddin Farah, Jonathan Franzen, Ha Jin, Ryszard Kapuscinski, Antonio Muñoz Molina, Salman Rushdie, Shan Sa, Wole Soyinka, and others; introduced by David Remnick.

Ryszard Kapuscinski: The Literary Vulture Circling African Suffering

I am not for disguising the violence and poverty that afflicts parts of Africa – in fact I am for it enough that I am writing a doctoral thesis on the place of genocide in political life by studying Rwanda. But I know that I am not the only one who is sick and tired of these European writers who come to Africa to wax on about bloodthirsty militias, corrupt and stupid officials, and, of course, good hearted prostitutes. Certainly all these observations are true, and to a large extent I agree with them. What I hate though, is how Africa for too many European writers and humanitarians is merely a mirror to confirm their superior humanity.

Africa’s importance to the world is not the minerals under its soil or its markets, as many neo-lefty types would contend. Its real resource is its misery and that is what writers like Ryszard Kapuscinski chase so feverishly. They are joined in this quest by the other ambulance chasers, the international NGOs and donor agencies, all united in their vulture-like need of the hungry and oppressed. See below as Binyavanga Wainaina, the founding editor of Kwani?, Kenya’s acclaimed literary journal, takes on the vultures. He starts with quotes from some of Kapuscinski’s more famous works. The next posting – ‘Binyavanga’s Rage in Manhattan’ will include his powerful rant which gave me goose pimples. Also see my previous posting (Misericonomics) on just this issue. Some Quotes by Ryszard Kapuscinski about Africa and Africans:

Extract from Granta 48 Africa Issue:

The European mind is willing to acknowledge its limitations, accept its limitations. It is a sceptical mind. The spirit of criticism does not exist in other cultures. They are proud, believing that what they have is perfect.

Extracts from Shadow of the Sun:

Let us remember that fear of revenge is deeply rooted in the African mentality.

The European and the African, have an entirely different concept of time.

In Africa, drivers avoid traveling at night darkness unnerves them they may flatly refuse to drive after sunset.

… in Africa a cousin on your mother’s side is more important than a husband.

The kind of history known in Europe as scholarly and objective can never arise here because the African past has no documents or records, and each generation, listening to the version being transmitted to it, changed it and continues to change it…

Absurdity of the Week

The British Council in Nairobi on April 8th hosted a public debate on Kenya, Britain and the Mau Mau. On hand was David Anderson, writer of the critically acclaimed ‘Histories of the Hanged – Britain’s Dirty War in Kenya and the End of Empire’, one of two recent books that have re-written the history of Kenya’s Emergency Period. He was joined by FEMNET’s Muthoni Wanyeki and Professor Michael Chege for a panel that I take it was going to debate the brutal and illegal war that the British prosecuted against the Mau Mau. Fine people, with fine sentiments. But what is strange of course, make that downright weird, is that the forum was held at the British Council. As always in Kenya, even when you are complaining about colonial daddy, you must use his institutions and resources to do so. I was not present, but I doubt that poor ex-Mau Mau fighters and supporters who never received compensation for their sacrifices and injustices borne were allowed into that room. I want to be wrong, but I can already see the shiny NGO types with their airy talk of marginalisation and resistance and policy swinging their expensively oiled dreadlocks and acting outraged at the British. In Kenya when we do absurdity, we go all the way to the point that an onlooker would be convinced that he is in a mental ward at Mathare Psychiatric Hospital. Do you know what the whole horse and pony really was about? Mau Mauing – in the Tom Wolfe sense – the British into extending more cash to the NGOs present. I will talk about that in the next post: The new Mau Mauing…

See the London Review of Books’ review of the books on Mau Mau by David Anderson and Caroline Elkins: http://www.lrb.co.uk/v27/n05/port01.html

The New Beggardom: Kibaki Catches a Cold

Have you guys read of the Kenyan government’s flailing during the Nairobi donor meeting on Monday April 10, 2005? Kibaki rolls in for the meeting an hour late saying that he has been delayed by a cold. The excuse struck me as having such a childish and chastened noisemaker-in-primary school note. Of course the dude went on to talk the usual nonsense of how the government was doing its level best to fight graft and had effected economic recovery successfully. Just tell that to the hawkers chased off the streets or the used-cloths (mitumba) dealers whose taxes were raised 200% a month ago. Of course after the meeting at 5-star Safari Park, the whole sorry bunch, beggars and none do-gooding donor do-gooders, after making noises at each other, all took off for their shared digs in Lavington.

Go here for the story: http://www.eastandard.net/hm_news/news.php?articleid=17763

Misericonomics: Who Will Win the Nobel Prize for this One?

There is a Commission for Africa that has just released its report. Bob Geldof, its chairman, has gotten a shot of fading publicity on the back of suffering Africans.

Is it unreasonable to argue that Africa’s greatest resource is its suffering?Bono, Gordon Brown, Tony Blair, Kofi Annan and other more junior members of the International Do-Gooder Club (IDGC) waste few chances to lecture audiences on their moral responsibility to the benighted African continent. Capitalized words like Justice, International Community, Conscience and Humanity are thrown about with reckless abandon. More radical members of the IDGC, safely making pronouncements between grant applications to the same institutions they purport to loathe, prefer to use Neocolonialism, Racism, the North-South Paradigm, Resistance and Solidarity. Their African counterparts have formed the International Beggar Elite Club (IBEC). They don’t care what words are used as long as the conclusion is Cash Money.

What both these clubs agree on is that Africa is blessed with a wealth of natural resources; if it is on the periodical chart then you can bet that a miner can find it somewhere beneath the continent’s blood-soaked soils. Lest they be accused of being rapacious neo-imperialist corporate types, interested only in exploiting this natural wealth, the IDGC never misses a chance to praise Africans as the greatest resource, as a people whose potential will one day be unlocked by capacity-building development programs.

On the thesis that Africa needs charity to throw off the deadly shackles of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse – ‘it’s an emergency not a cause’ according to the ever-funky Bono – many billions of dollars in the last three decades have traveled from the pocket of the western tax payer. But what these secular saints do not mention is that Africa’s gold, coltan, diamonds, uranium, oil and copper, to name just a few, pale in value when compared to the continent’s single greatest resource: its misery.

While Asia, for one, is awash with profits made from the old fashioned and thoroughly discredited economic logic of buying and selling stuff, the IDGC and IBEC have hit on a new means of production. It is called Misericonomics or Misery Economics for the uninitiated and it operates like a giant employment and enrichment scheme for the two clubs.

This is how it works. First you need lots of death, disease and poverty for as many Africans as possible. This is easy after a few decades of yet another Western effort to save Africans from the communist embrace of the Red Bear left them saddled with brutal dictators, awash in cheap weapons wielded by rebels whose manifesto, shared by the governments they opposed, amounted to, ‘give me Cash Money and I press trigger’. The Africans have also been enthusiastic in the pursuit of maximum suffering by inventing forms of conflict that could teach trained CIA and KGB agents a thing or two. Whoever is to blame for the suffering, its supply is growing: many African countries are getting poorer at a time when most regions except parts of Western Europe are enjoying buoyant economic growth.

The next necessary condition for Misericonomics is the linkage of African suffering with Western paternalism. This is achieved by polemics blaming the West for Africa’s dire straits – by way of Neoliberal-driven globalization, slavery and colonialism – or hectoring it to act out of concern for a shared humanity. It does not matter whether the reasons are genuine or not, the point is to prepare the western taxpayer to fund the aid effort which has grown into an annual industry worth over $7 billion and that the clubs now propose be doubled. The final element of this new economic paradigm is for upwards of 30% and often far more to go into administrative costs for the IDCG while a significant amount of the remainder is commandeered by members of the IBEC.