Black Looks

Thousands of images of East Africa dated between 1860 and 1960 have been published online.

For more images see the Humphrey Winterton website

An excellent article from the executive secretary of the Nigerian Humanist Movement, Leo Igwe, on the tradition of same sex marriage in Igboland which speaks to the untruth that same sex relationships are “unAfrican”.

One of the contentious issues in the debate over homosexuality and same sex marriage is whether a marriage between persons of the same gender is totally alien to African culture and tradition. Those opposing same sex marriage have continued to argue that same gender union is foreign to Africa. On the contrary, I have tried to draw their attention to the fact that there is a strain of the same gender marriage in African tradition particularly in Igboland.

And that we should not rush to deny this, or pretend it does not exist or just sweep it under the carpet in the quest to establish that same gender marriage is alien to the African continent, and must be banned.

Remembering the Soweto uprisings 33 years ago remains important as the dreams of equity and justice in a new post-apartheid South Africa remains elusive for the majority. Pambazuka News has two features this week on the importance of the uprisings in today’s South Africa.

Blackwash [a new initiative committed to black consciousness in post-1994 South Africa] writes an open letter to South Africa’s Black youth. Reading through this article I get the feeling that the Black youth being addressed are male. There is no reference to women nor to the crimes against women particularly rape and that many rapes are committed by young men – see the video “Corrective Rape“. Yesterday’s I posted a survey on rape in South Africa which found that one in 4 men had raped. Surey addressing the issue of violence against women is an essential aspect of Black consciousness?

Anti-Apartheid activist, Mphutlane wa Bofelo, questions why “considers why ‘former freedom fighters can sometimes be more vicious in attempts to abort freedom” as residents of a squatter camp prepare a class action suit against the government for decent housing.

How is it possible that we have arrived at the point where people take a people’s government to court for such basic things as water and housing, which the constitution fully enshrines? Just recently a South African court ruled in favour of the people for their right to water. Guess who took the people to the appeal court to try and overturn the decision of a judge who is probably inherited from apartheid era? The appeal court ruled in favour of the people. Guess who is thinking of appealing the decision through the constitutional court? Who stood against the decision of the victims of the apartheid-capitalism to take the big corporates that benefited from this system to the international court? Who? Who killed Biko and Hani and Solomon Mahlangu and Hector Peterson and Muntu ka Myeza and Masabata lwate and many others? The Boers and their vigilantes only killed the flesh. The spirit of Mahlangu, Biko, Hani, Peterson, lwate is being killed here and now by us. The Boers failed to kill Biko and Hani. We are succeeding where apartheid-capitalism failed. We kill the spirit of Tambo and Biko everyday. We hate each other. We kill each other. We rape our children . We burn our grandmothers. We love beautiful things for ourselves but ask our brothers and sisters to endure conditions such as Kenville squatter camp. for them Rome will be built in zilion years, for us it takes only one day in office as a CEO, counsellor, director, business big-shot to relocate from Zamdela to Vaalpark and from Mofolo to Hougton.

In “The Jaja Saga: The West Indian End (1888-1891)” Professor Gabriel Olusanya makes the connection between the exile of King Jaja of Opobo by the British colonial government because the King wanted to have control of his resources and with the present struggle in the Niger Delta again over control of resources. In King Jaja’s day it was palm oil, today it is petroleum oil but the foreign actors are the same.

“The same vicious struggle for the control of the oil resources in the Delta has continued in a post colonial and independent federal Nigeria. The British Buccaneers have been replaced by non-indigenous local predators, that in collusion with the big foreign-owned oil companies have seized control of vast oil resources in the Delta area in a manner that can not be said to serve the economic interest of the people of the Delta. Like Jaja, the people of the Delta want to control their own resources.”

King Jaja finally passed away in 1891 which was also the year in which the region presently known as the Niger Delta was formalised as a British colony. Although the British had colonised Lagos as early as 1862, it wasn’t until 1891 that the Oil Rivers Protectorate was created. European traders had been coming to the Delta region since the 15century, first to trade in slaves, then after abolition to trade in palm oil.

The traders were unable to negotiate the hundreds of creeks and dense forest of the Delta and therefore had to rely on the people from the coastal regions such as the Kalabari and Nembe for the palm oil. My own grandfather and my fathers material grandfather were both relatively rich merchants from trading in palm oil and palm kernels right up until the 1930s though by this time the British had already established their commercial interests in the region. Two things happened to end the Kalabari trade in palm oil and kernels. One was the growth of the palm oil / kernel trade in Malaysia which by 1934 had overtaken Nigeria (the plant was taken to Malaysia from West Africa at the turn of the century). The second event was the exploration for oil which began around the same time. Though it was to be some 40 years later before Shell finally struck oil there was a strong indication that oil would be discovered. Once these two factors occurred there was no longer a foreign interest in palm oil or kernels and effectively trading on a large scale ended. What were once relatively rich city states of Okrika, Nembe and Kalabari became the poverty villages and towns they are today. Unlike palm oil, local people did not have the knowledge or means to extract the oil and were therefore completely at the mercy of the oil multinationals and a non-indigenous neo-colonialist state which held them with disdain.

I don’t know when the oil in the Delta will run out but there are probably only about another 30 years left before it dries up, the multinationals pack up and move elsewhere and the Nigerian government disintegrates into it’s indigenous parts. What this tells me is that we (people of the South south and South East) should be re-thinking an agricultural policy which includes palm oil and kernels with the aim of replacing oil and the multinationals within the next 10 years.

Links: Life with palm oil

#NigerDelta

The discovery of oil in Ogoniland in 1958 has singularly been the worst event in Ogoni history. The intervention of Ken Saro Wiwa, in what had become a tragedy for Ogoni people, had a significant impact on a struggle which would lead to the judicial murder of nine Ogoni activists in 1995.

The hanging of the Ogoni Nine marks a defining moment in Nigeria’s history. It was the moment when the line was crossed, even by the standards of Nigeria’s successive military dictatorships. If proof was ever needed of the corrupt and violent nature of Nigerian rulers, this was that moment. In 1992, Shell Petroleum Development Company (a joint venture with Elf and Agip) were responsible for nearly half of Nigeria’s oil production. Of the 94 oil fields [1], five were in Ogoniland.

The aim of the Ogoni people’s struggle against the dual tyrannies of the Nigerian state and Shell was to achieve an alternative to their existence as part of the Nigerian rentier state. Nigeria’s federal and highly militarized system was riddled with corruption and nepotism and had degenerated into a ‘cannibalistic vampire state…. a self-consuming predatory regime’ [2] whose loyalties lay firmly with the multinationals, who were given free rein to abuse people and resources in their business of oil.

The Ogoni were adamant that the federal government should no longer be the sole definer of all things Ogoni and that the oil companies should no longer be able to act with impunity, destroying the ecological system at will. In leading the struggle, Ken Saro Wiwa set himself on a direct collision course with three separate but interlinked opponents: the Nigerian state, Shell and, to a lesser but ultimately more significant extent, the Ogoni élite and the traditional rulers [3].

Saro Wiwa was therefore left with only the masses as his power base in the struggle for autonomy and self-determination. The first step was to reinvent and create a sense of what it meant to be an Ogoni person, and to build a cohesive and universal Ogoni identity, one that went beyond the divisions created by the six separate Ogoni Kingdoms – Babbe, Eleme, Gokana, Ken-Khana, Nyo-Khana, and Tai.

The instruments for achieving change and for creating a new Ogoni identity were to be the Ogoni Bill of Rights and the Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People [MOSOP], backed up with the mobilization of the Ogoni people. The Bill of Rights was written by Ken Saro Wiwa, and on 26 August 1990 it was signed by 30 prominent Ogoni, including the heads of five of the six clans. [4]. The leaders of the Eleme clan declined to sign the document, choosing to distance themselves from the Ogoni struggle as determined by Ken Saro Wiwa. In retrospect, the Eleme refusal is an example of the self-interest and many fault lines within MOSOP and the Ogoni struggle, which would lead to the final isolation of Saro Wiwa.

The Ogani Bill of Rights outlined Ogoni pre-colonial history and pointed to the huge revenue contributions Ogoni oil had made to the Nigerian state, for which the Ogoni received nothing in return. The Bill also alluded to the ‘genocidal’ tendencies of the federal government – tendencies which were leading to the disappearance of Ogoni languages and the extinction of the Ogoni themselves. Finally, the Bill listed seven specific demands of the Nigerian state, which can be summarized as the demand for resource control, political and ethnic autonomy and protection of the environment from further destruction. Whilst it had been a relatively easy task to persude the Ogoni élite to sign the Bill of Rights, persuading them to join MOSOP was a different matter. In his book, When Citizens Revolt, Ike Okonta explains the complexities of Ogoni inter-clan politics which Saro Wiwa had to negotiate, and describes MOSOP as a ‘fragile coalition from the outset‘ [5].

Nonetheless, the Ogoni Bill of Rights and MOSOP were key to the formation of a new Ogoni identity, which moved the Ogoni from ‘an ethnic group-in-itself to an ethnic group-for-itself’. [6]. Saro Wiwa’s vision of MOSOP was for an inclusive mass movement, which would include the two marginalized groups – youth and women – who formed the core of his constituency and continue to do so. The National Youth Council of Ogoni People (NYCOP) and the Federation of Ogoni Women Associations (FOWA) were both crucial to the movement and to Saro Wiwa’s leadership. However the reality was somewhat different.

‘The MOSOP that emerged in September 1990 was a political movement of the Ogoni élite led by the Ogoni élite and conducted its politics in the conventional élite grammar of petition writing and public speeches in English, which ordinary Ogoni, the overwhelming majority, did not understand.’[7] Within a year, the fault lines within Ogoni unity and MOSOP began to show. Ken Saro Wiwa had quickly become ‘the man of the people’ with the support of women and the ordinary Ogoni. This caused considerable concern amongst the élite, who saw the support of Saro Wiwa as a threat to their self-interest and power base. Ato Quayson summarizes well the effect of Saro Wiwa’s mobilization of the masses on the various interest groups:

‘In launching a mass mobilization drive against a multinational oil company and the state, Saro Wiwa located himself at the vortex of multiple historical processes and interests. At the level of the state, his effect of mobilizing a hitherto quiescent minority around oil and environmental rights was a dangerous signal of a new praxis for other disposed minorities, both in the oil producing regions and in Nigeria more generally. At a more local level, he clashed with traditional and more conservative authorities who could not fully grasp the significance of the revolutionary processes that were being unleashed.’ [8]

This is just a brief introduction to the Ogoni struggle against tyranny, to explain how and why things went wrong. As we look to the forthcoming trial of Shell for environmental damage and complicity in the death of the Ogoni Nine, a trial which starts on 26 May in New York, it is worth reminding ourselves of what happened, and why. I will return to the Ogoni in future posts.

[1] Okonta, Ike – When Citizens Revolt”, Ofrima Publishing House, 2008,ousHouse, p198

[2] Apter, Andrew – “Death and the King’s Henchmen: Ken Saro-Wiwa and the Political Ecology of Citizenship in Nigeria” in in Agony Agonies edited by Abdul Rasheed Na’Allah. Africa World Press, 1998, p.132

[3] Quayson, Ato – “Through the Prism of Tragedy” in Agony Agonies edited by Abdul Rasheed Na’Allah. Africa World Press, 1998, p69

[4] Okonta p180

[5] Okonta, p193

[6] Quayson, p70

[7] Okonta, p193

[8] Quayson, p75

Further reading:
Ike Okonta and Oronto Douglas “Where Vultures Feast”
Ken Saro-Wiwa “A Month and a Day: A Detention Diary
Ahmed Khan “Nigeria: The Political Economy of Oil”

In Fine Lines From the Box, South African writer, Njabulo Ndebele begins with a brief story on how as a young man he discovers a box of banned books in his fathers house.

“A turning point in my life occurred when I discovered a treasure trove of banned books in my father’s garage”

The books buried way beneath layers of discarded household items were his introduction to literature and began to give some meaning to the reality of his life as a young Black man in Apartheid South Africa. Books by Peter Abrahams, Todd Matshikiza, Andre Brink, Nelson Mandela, Es’kia Mphahlele and Bloke Modisane to name a few. Now in “The Literature Police: Apartheid Censorship and its Cultural Consequences” Peter D. McDonald’s has brought back to life those banned books, the mindset of the censors as well as the some of the subversive methods used to try to counter the book police.

The book is accompanied by a website which provides lots of additional information including a database of decisions made on the banned books, a list of some of the most notable censors and supporting documentation on the events surrounding some of the banning and lead up to censoring of the books.

The Literature Police: Apartheid Censorship and its Cultural Consequences is published by Oxford University Press.
Source: Michael Titlestad, senior researcher at the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/7858010.stm

Hello all. I’m testing the waters after a long hiatus from the blogging world. If you haven’t come across this link already you might want to take a look. As extreme and absurd as this horrible plan is, it makes me think of the watered-down versions along the West African coastline.

Jacques Depelchin, peace activist and Executive Director of the Ota Benga Alliance For Peace, Healing and Dignity based in the DRC, has written a poem “From Africa to Haiti to Gaza: Fidelity to humanity”. The poem makes the connection between historical and contemporary struggles for liberation and justice from Africa to the Americas, to the Caribbean and to Palestine.

the consequences of
of Relentlessly violating humanity
Now Palestinians, then Africans centuries ago
Today displaced, refugees, best fodder
For humanitarian missions
The modernized version of abolitionists
On a mission which has not changed:
Violate humanity,
Eradicate it if too vocal
But Sabra, Shatila can still be heard

He concludes with a challenge to give name to the truth of what has and what is now taking place.

Palestinians, Africans, in the same boat
When the unending story of negating humanity started
Like Africans they are being processed and branded
Fit to be fodder for humanitarian crisis because what is being done
Must not be called
A Crime Against Humanity

For fear of trespassing which taboo?

No one dares to call the slaughter of civilians
In Gaza by its proper name
A Crime Against Humanity

For fear of trespassing which taboo?

From the times of the Arawaks
Violating, torturing, liquidating
Humanity with impunity
Has led to greater and greater
Crimes against humanity
Franchised differently
Preparing the biggest holocaust
Humanity has ever known and,
When that unfolds, as before,
We shall hear the usual
Shameful lame lie
‘We did not know’.

Read this exceptional poem in full here.

Human Rights Watch have released a 66 page report describing the sodomy laws created by the British colonial governments and continued today in over 36 countries from India to Malaysia, Nigeria and Uganda. The report explains how one sodomy law imposed on India in 1860 formed the basis for all other anti-homosexual laws across the British Empire.

The laws that the Europeans brought dragged a long prehistory behind them. The first recorded mentions of “sodomy” in English law date back to two medieval treatises called Fleta and Britton. They suggest how strictures on sex were connected to Christian Europe’s other consuming anxieties…

Less well known is that codifying sexual offenses began far earlier, in 1825, when the mandate to devise law for the Indian colony was handed to the politician and historian Thomas Babington Macaulay. Macaulay chaired the first Law Commission of India and was the main drafter of the Indian Penal Code-the first comprehensive codified criminal law produced anywhere in the British Empire.[48]

The colonial environment was the perfect field for experiments in rationalizing and systematizing law. The colonies were passive laboratories. A nineteenth-century historian observed that the Indian Penal Code was a success because there, unlike at home, the British government could express “a distinct collective will” and could “carry it out without being hampered by popular discussion.”[49]This autocratic imposition of a unified code took advantage of the “absence of a developed and contentious Indian public opinion around questions of criminal law,” allowing Macaulay a “free field for experimentation.”[50]

Fears of moral infection from the “native” environment made it urgent to insert anti-sodomy provisions in the colonial code. A sub-tradition of British imperialist writing warned of widespread homosexuality in the countries Britain colonized. The explorer Richard Burton, for instance, postulated a “Sotadic Zone” stretching around the planet’s midriff from 43 degrees north of the equator to 30 south, in which “the Vice is popular and endemic …. whilst the races to the North and South of the limits here defined practice it only sporadically amid the opprobrium of their fellows.” [51]

It is this law that is used by former British colonies in Africa such as in Uganda, Nigeria and Zimbabwe as well as religious leaders such as Bishop Peter Akinola of the Anglican Church in Nigeria to criminalise same sex reationships under the pretense that they are unAfrican and a Western import. The report is a direct challenge to the lies and cultural revisionism of these people and supports what African GBTI activists and those from other former British colonies in Asia have been insisting – the truth being it is the law that is UnAfrican and a Western import rather than same sex relationships.

homosexuality
LGBTI + Africa

Sexual violence in Zimbabwe dates back to the liberation war in the 1980s when women were used as sex objects serving Zimbabwean soldiers. There has been a silence around the rapes and other acts of sexual abuse which took place at that time. Now following more systematic sexual violence by the state – rape and other forms of torture against women during and following this years elections, Betty Makoni, Founder & Director of the Girl Child Network in Zimbabwe, recently launched the Zimbabwe Rape Survivors Association (ZRPS)

The violence that characterized the presidential run off elections left a trail of disaster in Zimbabwe. The state sponsored post election violence from May 15 to 29 July 2008 left hundreds of women and girls traumatized because of rape which was used and continue to be used as a weapon of war. Many women not only lost their homes they had worked so hard for the past two decades to own but also hands, fingers, legs and their genital organs. Right now there seems to be somewhat every sign of political leadership transition in Zimbabwe and the women are angry and disappointed that there is no pointer that there would be transitional justice for the rape survivors and moreover many of them are still terrified ,displaced and are constantly mocked by their perpetrators and many men left their wives as a result of the public shame brought by the rape. It is feared more than 2000 women and girls in Zimbabwe were raped and due to intimidation and fear have not come out. The Zimbabwe Rape Survivors Association is a loose network of women who survived rape perpetrated by the youth militia under the command of Zanu PF and they will not this time let this case slip off like those before this one. Already the women have partnered with AIDS Free World for collection and preservation of evidence and on 11 September 2008 the idea to come up with the Zimbabwe Women Rape Survivors Association was conceived in Gaborone in Botswana with a vision to create a new culture of transforming rape victims into fearless leaders so that many more women who have not opened do so and have their evidence preserved and survival strategies and security put in place now that the political situation has not stabilized and nowhere in the political deal is stated that there will be justice for victims

Tags:
16 Days of Activism Against Violence Against Women
Rape + Zimbabwe