Signs of unease in South Sudan

And its precious oil resource is at the heart of it. There was a vivid expression of this in the sight of Southern Sudanese lined up along the streets of Juba town early this week to welcome President Salva Kiir Mayardit upon his return from the AU summit in Addis Ababa. Significantly, this was the first summit Kiir attended as representative head of state of the newly independent country, and therefore the first at which he had the opportunity to present in a speech to his contemporaries, the position of South Sudan, now a sovereign state, on a number of issues. Arguably the most significant of these is the question of oil wealth sharing and the current crisis facing Sudan and South Sudan. His speech reiterated South Sudan’s desire to avoid war at all costs, touching on the principle of ‘peaceful coexistence’ and the need for ‘reasonable and fair commercial engagement’ between the two countries. But this desire is probably only ostensible, if public displays (of anything) can reliably be used as a yardstick. Back on the streets, quite aside from the obvious message that those in charge appeared to be putting across by actively blocking off a major road and holding up most traffic into town for up to six hours, it was nonetheless the sheer, unmitigated display of power and military presence when the president finally arrived and was escorted from the airport that quite stirred. The sight of tens upon tens of heavy 4x4s (the standard means for most South Sudanese elites) and military vehicles mounted with heavy machine guns, seemed almost like a declaration of war. Or a declaration against any notion that one might have regarding South Sudan’s willingness to remain docile on a question over which it remained in conflict for more than two decades. To insiders, the provocation made by Sudan cannot be ignored, and this show of ‘solidarity’ with the president on the stand he had adopted at the collapsed Addis talks – that the country’s wealth, borders and security would be protected as all costs – was necessary. Jubilant citizens carried banners announcing that “South Sudan is not a province of Sudan”, and “South Sudan’s oil belongs to its people!” These tended to evoke sympathy: it is not this country’s doing that Khartoum brazenly continues to edge back on its obligations under the oil-sharing agreement. Neither does it help that most of the oil infrastructure lies on the territory of Sudan. South Sudan has faulted Sudan’s unilateral decision to enact a bill to levy a fee of $32.2 dollars per barrel of oil that passes through their territory, accusing it of diverting and confiscating the oil by force while negotiations were taking place to determine a fair fee. South Sudan considers this a violation of their sovereignty, and has taken the decision to cease oil production indefinitely. Despite the governments assurances to the contrary, this is a move which if let to stand, is bound to hurt both countries severely, and almost certainly open up South Sudan, already feeling the weight of a growing humanitarian crisis due to violence in Jonglei state, to the vagaries of foreign aid dependence. South Sudan’s oil, that which Alex de Waal has termed as its doomsday machine, continues to bind this country’s historical trajectory inextricably to a story told through perpetual cycles of war.

Quote

"Books reveal your true self, guide you to what you will become, and illuminate your world just like the sun lights your day. There are two truths in this world, the first is God which is a permanent truth, and the second; the world, is temporary. We came to this life to read the second truth in order to understand the first, and those who do not know are the ones who do not read."

- Khalil Ashour-

Egyptians shall not be cheated out of their revolution

I visited Cairo a couple of weeks ago. To those who enquired, my impression of the Revolutionary Tahrir Square was that I thought it felt too sanitised. I could not explain it beyond this English word that refers, among other meanings, to the act of ‘making something more acceptable by removing unpleasant or offensive features from it’. In that beautiful large space, at the time laid bare, manicured and too tidy, something seemed absent. I could not help feeling that the masses crawling around it in the evening traffic and on foot should instead have been surging into it. Some of my companions walked into the empty square and made soundless protest gestures, much to the amusement of the motorists and pedestrians, some of whom I could have sworn looked on almost longingly. As if they knew that time was running out within which to reclaim and immortalize this historic space that the post-Mubarak military regime sought to erase from their consciousness. Well, Egypt has again imploded, with violent protests taking place in Tahrir Square over the past few days. The people are demanding postponement of legislative elections which they are certain will be a sham amidst the violence and negotiations. They have rejected the façade of a military-led transition to civilian rule, and are angry at the slow pace at which reforms have been conducted, if at all. The people are aware of Egypt’s geo-political significance in the region, and are suspicious and resistant to external intervention on their behalf. The Military Council’s ostensible resignation left the people unperturbed; they want an end to military dictatorship. Period. Protestors have been killed in the clashes, but Egyptians will not accept anything less, nor should they. My other impression of Cairo, of a great city drowning in abject poverty drives me to hope that this time victory shall truly be of the people, who no doubt recall a time when visitors left only with the memory of its architectural splendor.

Wangari Maathai embodied the Doable

Deeply moved by her passing, I have been searching for the right words with which to eulogise Prof. Wangari Maathai. I realise now that part of my inertia came from that place in all of us that in seeking greatness, or great ways to express things, also constantly settles for the shortest, loudest, most effective, ‘right’ way to do so. We seek greatness not in the depths of the more seemingly mundane acts of everyday life, depths that are often not always visible to us, and certainly not to public scrutiny. We are conditioned to find greatness in the most vocally explained, justified and visible areas of our public selves. We have eschewed the private and the silenced, and with it any critical self-reflexivity and introspection that accompanies a slow, honest, conversation with oneself. We scorn grace and meditative states of being, the only spaces really where ego does not thrive and cannot survive; the only spaces within ourselves where we are able to ask the difficult questions, no matter that the answers rarely appear immediately. That existential space of lack – lack of immediate solutions to our livelihood requirements, intellectual cravings, spiritual contentment, material needs and wants – is paradoxically also the space in which the human being is most connected to the self, to nature, and to the Earth. It is the level of acceptance at which one realises that we are not constantly in control of that which provides for our wants and needs. It is the point at which one may acknowledge, however remotely, the presence of a greater force than the self, a force that is always at work to help us achieve our perfect lives. I think that Wangari Maathai’s greatness lies in her having recognised and acknowledged the existence of this space very early in her life, and occupied it with an amazing grace that shone through for all those that could, to see. She was an icon in many ways, and to me, shall remain a living force and symbolic representation of the notion that ‘everything we love can be saved’. She taught us to live in ways that sanctify and honour the simplest and most basic part of our being, that part of us which notices and acknowledges Nature and the natural in the everyday. This part is accessible to every human being regardless.

In memory of Biko

Thirty four years to this day Bantu Steve Biko’s life was brutally snatched by apartheid’s dark forces. In 31 full years this proud African had ingrained an indelible legacy through the founding of a black student organisation and created a national ‘black consciousness’ movement whose aim was to combat racism and the South African apartheid government. That the white racist supremacist government invested so much brutal force and resource in subverting the actions of one man, the generation and movement behind him spoke to the powerful truth of his claims. He was banned in 1973, a ruling that prohibited him from speaking in public, writing for publication and from any travel. Yet even then, Biko’s thought and message, particularly in relation to the necessary conscientization and emancipation of black people could not be extinguished.

It is difficult to reconcile feminism with nationalist liberation discourses; black feminist thought with patriarchal, heteronormative notions of race and class resistance; feminism with the black consciousness movement. In the eyes of black females, sexism and misogyny overshadowed progressive political teachings on black liberation. The one often stifled and silenced the voice of the other, and feminism struggled to retain its voice through critical theorizations of these schisms, albeit in ways that seemed ready to sever the bonds rather than rescue them. Looking for rapprochement between Biko’s black consciousness and black feminism may thus entail a temporary rejection of feminism’s seeming irreconcilability to totalizing discourses of a distinctly classed and racialised being, and necessitate the re-reading of black liberation discourses from the point of view of African humanism, which draws closer to ideas espoused in African womanist thought.

For Biko spoke to more than just the black man when he rejected the notion of magnanimity as a gateway to power, urging acceptance of the fact that no group, however benevolent, can ever hand power to the vanquished on a plate. He summed it up thus: ‘the system concedes nothing without demand, for it formulates its very method of operation on the basis that the ignorant will learn to know, the child will grow into an adult and therefore demands will begin to be made. It gears itself to resist demands in whatever way it sees fit.’ This realisation, that the power to demand those things that we deem necessary to exist as free and complete human beings belongs to each one of us is one of the most powerful notions upon which black feminism and womanism in particular gained force; through which they carved their way out of a predominantly racist white supremacist discourse, and began to theorise subalternity and difference.

I have wishfully argued this point in relation to another revolutionary African nationalist, the Democratic Republic of Congo’s Patrice Lumumba: nationalist leaders in many African countries in their struggles for independence were more inclined to give voice to issues deemed at the time to be crucial for unity and state formation, among which the liberation of women was rarely a priority. The language and articulation of these issues often betrayed a startling androcentrism. Yet there are signs that his thinking might have evolved: Steve Biko – husband, father, lover, comrade, friend – might have re-visited some of his earlier writings in gendered response to the current urgency to recognise women’s role alongside men in struggles for social justice in South Africa and across the continent. The current resurgence of interest in his works may also create a critical climate where his writings and life might be reassessed from a feminist standpoint.

In death as in life, the potency of Biko's thought remains as much a source of anxiety to those that resist change as it inspires those that long for equality and freedom.

Be Drunk

One should always be drunk.
That’s all there is to it; its the only way.
Not to feel the horrible burden of Time
That breaks your back and bends you to the earth,
You should be continually drunk.

Drunk with what?

With passion, with anger, with outrage or with justice, as you please.
But get drunk.

And if sometimes you should happen to awake,
On the stairs of a palace, on the green grass of a ditch,
in the dreary solitude of your own room,

and find your drunkenness is ebbing or has vanished,

Ask the wind and the wave, ask star, bird, or clock, ask everything that

flies, everything that moans, everything that flows, everything that sings,
everything that speaks,

Ask them the time; and the wind, the wave, the star, the bird and the

clock will all reply:

“It is Time to get drunk! If you are not to be the martyred slaves of Time,

be drunk, be perpetually drunk!
With passion, with anger, with outrage or with justice, as you please”.


Sylvia Tamale’s adaptation of the poem ‘Be Drunk’ by Charles Baudelaire

Africa badly needs a new intellectual radicalism

A small but critical mass of intellectuals in Africa and the African Diaspora are slowly re-submitting to the reality of the need for the kind of philosophical radicalism that pierced the colonial, imperialist logic and delivered political independence for many during the sixties. The urgency of cultural and economic discontent in present day Africa demands complete mental reinsertion into the destructive political and economic psyche out of which we are interpellated. We have allowed distance to settle between critical thought around the compelled state of majority of our lives and the optimism of a freely imagined and experienced state of being. We have ensured that for us, the ‘urgency of now’ has taken the form purely of economic greed, couched as need. We have allowed selfishness to masquerade as individuality; substituted deep introspection into one’s living conditions in relation to others (which might beget a sense of shared humanity), for a reductive individualism whose corrupt moral basis each day produces self-centred cynical individuals. We are in this cynical form reproduced through our bankrupt economies, media, universities, social circles and institutions of worship. We are too blinded by grandiose notions of where the road is leading us to critically examine where it is we stand at present in relation to critical issues of class, of race, of sexuality, of ethnicity, of religion, of disability, of gender. More in the immediate, we have forgotten to look back to really see those that are walking a step behind us. Or wait with those that have ceased motion altogether. Those, ironically, might be the people slowed by a reflective philosophical interrogation of the road thus far travelled, those overwhelmed by the weight of all that needs to be done as we move forward. Those are the people that are everyday sacrificed for speaking out, vilified by reactionary media, political parties, intellectual spaces and by very compliant societies. Africa badly needs a new radicalism. The great Western intellectual, existential hegemonic traditions we so admire are slowly giving way to Eastern hegemonic ones as the global order shifts. In a continent that still knows so little about its own great traditions, this transition can only push it further away from itself. Those that speak of a yet unexplored great African philosophical tradition are ordinarily humiliated into abandoning what is conservatively considered to be naive utopia, for, it is argued, ‘which aspect of our lives remains undiluted or unaltered’ in the wake of globalisation everything? Yet those Africans that have something to offer in the direction of a liberating consciousness must remain unperturbed, and reclaim a state of being in which our collective humanity actually matters.