Africa Works

The “Bangwa Queen,” a visually-arresting statue taken by German explorer more than 100 years from a religious shrine in the Grassfields region of Cameroon,  is a centerpiece of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s new “Heroic Africans” exhibition. The “Bangwa Queen” normally resides in Paris, in Musee Dapper, which holds perhaps the world’s finest single collection of African art. The return of the statue to American soil is a cause for celebration. The statue, once owned by the cosmetic tycoon Helena Rubenstein, was purchased by a Los Angeles businessman and then, after his death, sold at auction. Only later did the piece turn up in Paris as part of the Dapper. The “Bangwa Queen” is believed to be the single most valuable work of traditional African art and has long been an object of fascination among avante-garde artists as well as enthusiasts of tribal art.

What’s the clearest sign yet that fears about rising disorder in Nigeria are creating near-hysterical conditions in the minds of many people living in this benighted country?

The answer to this question is itself another question: can mobile-phone calls kill … instantly?

Some Nigerians think they can.

The BBC, an endless source of edification on all things African, has reported that panicked Nigerians now believe a mobile phone call can kill. Not any phone call but a call from the number 09141.

Alas, the BBC’s own intrepid reporters were unable to complete a call to this number — and they haven’t received either — casting doubt on the veracity of this “urban legend” sweeping the country.

The fears over the number have escalated to the point where the venerable Nigerian Communications Commission has said that killer phone calls are “unimaginable” and that “unscrupulous persons” are spreading fear.

The specter of the killer phone call seems, to an untrained and distant eye, a rather pointed case of displacement. Instead of fearing for the collapse of their own society, Nigerians are displaying their fear into the irrational. In a dismaying example of political escapism, Nigerians are resorting to magical thinking to cope with the very grim daily reality experienced by many in Nigeria.

In the politics of running and hiding — a politics not unique to Nigeria but carefully cultivated in the country — killer phone calls provide a kind of curious comfort to ordinary people must somehow sustain themselves in the face of an everyday irrationality that undermines hope.

Mistreatment of African migrants to Libya from the sub-Saharan bring shame onto the the country’s new governing coalition. Targeting such migrants because of their skin color — they are black — is deeply troubling.

Libyan rebels have happily received decisive support from an international community — led by France and the U.S. — who subscribe to race-blind principles. Having been empowered by aid based on these principles, the rebels should not abandon basic human decency in their treatment of migrants from “black Africa,” whom they are unfairly labeling as mercenaries hired by the former regime.

In truth, Ghaddafi cynically manipulated Libya’s relations with sub-Saharan Africa, opening his country to economic migrants, especially from West Africa, and to human smugglers who helped these migrants find ways into Europe. In his brittle attempt at finding international allies, Ghaddafi promoted a pan-Africanism that sought, again cynically, to unite North Africa with the sub-Saharan. That Ghaddafi had no interest in actually buildng bridges beween these two regions fatally undermined his pan-African project. Moreoever, by permitting large numbers of black migrants into Libya, Ghaddafi sowed the seeds of resentment against them by his own resentful and alienated population.

Now that Ghaddafi is gone, rebellious Libyans want the Africans migrants out as well. The views of the Libyan people should be respected but there also should be no violent and immediate expulsion of black Africans either. These migrants in Libya don’t deserve punishment. Rather they should be helped out of the country in an orderly process supervised by the International Organization for Migration or individual governments, perhaps France.

The anti-black attitudes of Libyans are neither unique to Libya or to North Africa. Nor are they new to Libya either. And black migrants face bias even in Europe and in Asia. When a new government forms legally and legitimately in Libya — and a new constitution is written and approved as well — Libyans may decide to halt all new migration into their country. But for now Libyans ought to be patient with the migrants in their midst, and recognize that their presence is only one more legacy of their longtime dictator. Just as all the institutions of Libya will take years to reform or rebuild, so too will its migration rules and regime. For now black migrants ought to be treated fairly and generously. Such an approach by Libyans is justified on its own merits but also would represent a downpayment on what Libyan reformers owe the West — and the rest.

Princeton Lyman, the U.S. Special Envoy to Sudan for the Obama administration, provides a trenchant back-story to the birth of South Sudan in an essay in the inaugural issue of The Cairo Review of Global Affairs. Lyman, better known as an Africa expert for the Council on Foreign Relations and an editor of an excellent volume on US-Africa relations, writes with special passion and pith about the improbable end to the Sudanese north-south civil war and the birth this summer of the new nation of South Sudan. Among his more significant insights: the looming problem of Sudan’s Abyei region, which was left out of the partition deal between north and south. “The people of Abyei understandably feel angry and abandoned,” Lyman writes. Yet Lyman suggests that grievance may not be enough to force Abyei onto an already-crowded pan-Sudanese political agenda. “Abyei is not a large region and, contrary to media descriptions of it being “oil rich,” its oil output is relatively insignificant,” Lyman insists. A political solution, he says, proved impossible in the run-up to South Sudan’s birth and stability in Abyei remains elusive – a potential flash-point worth understanding better.

In a victory for the beleagured judiciary in Uganda, a magistrate has acquitted Kizza Besigye of all remaining charges arising from his leadership in peaceful protests against the government of Yoweri Museveni. Besigye has repeatedly lost to Museveni in national elections, yet he remains the most potent symbol of opposition to a leader who frequently acts in an autocratic manner. The decision by Magistrate George Wetyekere provides a reminder — which the judge made explicit — that Ugandans have the right to publicly demonstrate against the government.

To be sure, Museveni’s animus towards Besigye has reached epic proportions, so that his harassment of Besigye is unlikely to end. But the ruling offers a hopeful message to ordinary Ugandans that their president cannot act with impunity against his critics.

In Zambia, if you’re running for president, best to know, who is your Daddy?

The so-called “parentage” clause is being used as a club by opponents of Zambia’s president Rupiah Banda, who might be considered the luckiest man in African politics. Banda was elevated to the presidency by the death of his predecessor and then won election in 2008 after his leading opponent ran a mistake-filled campaign.

Desperate that Banda may win again, political opponents are asking questions about Banda’s father — and alleging that he was really born in neighboring Malawi and not in present-day Zambia as required by law.

Former Zambian president Kenneth Kuanda was also battered by such allegations, and after he’d served a president too.

The trouble with parentage clause is that they poorly reflect the colonial history of the region. Both Malawi and Zambia were part of Britain’s colonial regime and movement between colonial entities by Africans was normal, if not encouraged by the British. There was a similar mobility in France’s African colonies. So it is not too much to say that many of today’s politicians in Africa have parents who were in the prime of their lives prior to the border-obsessed post-colonial era which ended some 50 years ago. With the advent of nation-states in Africa in the late 1950s and early 1960s, the long experience of easy movement within sub-regions of the African continent was quickly forgotten and national identity took on towering legal and sometimes cultural significance. Ivory Coast is another country where parentage of political leaders has become, unfairly and irrationally, a testing ground for legitimacy.

The corrosive effects of an unthinking nationalism continue to bedevil African politics. Banda may not deserve another term as Zambia’s president but defeating at the polls is a necessary exercize that cannot be avoided by resorting to re-engineering his personal biography, fictitious or not.

On the north coast of Jamaica, the echoes of West Africa were many. Chizo and I spent the first five days near Runaway Bay, an incomparable stretch of coast where Christopher Columbus allegedly put anchor on one of his voyages to the Americas. Another day we headed into the mountains, winding our way through narrow roads on our way to Bob Marley’s birthplace at Nine Mile. Among the Rastafarians, Africa of course holds a special place, and not only Ethiopia but also Ghana and Nigeria, from which so many Jamaicans are descended and which contributed greatly to the politics of Pan-Africanism. Jamaica also provided Chizo with her first visit to a majority-black country outside of the African continent. We had the vacation of our lives, enjoying the food, music, people and ocean. Besides celebrating her birthday, we also celebrated the birthday … of AfricaWorks, now 5 years young.

Jeffrey Gettleman’s excellent article on the Somali famine presents a useful reminder of Amartya Sen’s famous insight that famines, chiefly, are human constructions. The persistence of famines isn’t a tragedy but rather a consequence of social and political breakdowns. In the Somali case, the country’s long civil war– and the tactics used by contending factions — means that famine is a tool of combat rather than the result of “food shortages” as such.

Because famines usually arise from dysfunctional distribution of food resources (rather than from an absolute shortage of food), aid agencies are inevitably limited in what they can do to alleviate famines. Moreoever, realities on the ground mean that famine aid inevitably benefits combatants as much or more than the truly needy. In Somalia, political dysfunction mocks the good intentions of relief agents. That famines are man-made does not obviate the need for famine relief efforts. However, the social construction of famines ought to give rise to a parallel public understanding of why famines persist and the limits of humanitarian aid.

On theatlantic.com page devoted to my new essay on the birth of South Sudan, the abuse I receive for promoting greater division of African political boundaries — and thus more African nations — we find the predictable responses from readers — many of whom are masked by monnikers and psuedonyms of the cowardly — are trapped in older forms of nationalism which no longer usually apply to sub-Sahara, if they ever did. Ask expected, if you ask these same people — for some of written me individually in such a manner — if they want independence for their aggrieved sub-national terroritory and they always say, yes. So often their logic doesn’t apply to them, only others.

The most important issue about sub-nationality and seccessions that went unmentioned in my Atlantic piece is rather non-obvious. I also fave amalgamating some African nations. So while some African polities can be very small, some existing small ones could be better served by merging with healthier neighbors. Malawi provides a convincing case. Even Hastings Banda, the country’s independence, protested when he learned that Malawi would have independence only as a solo affair and not as part of the-then Northern Rhodesia (or Zambia today). When I visited Malawi several years ago, during hard times for most of its people, I became convinced that Malawi (as a political entity) deserved to die, and that its people (let’s call them the “former Malawians”) would be better served as an autonomous region under Mozambique. In the years since, Malawi has rallied, its politicians having shown uncharacteristic moxie expecially in regards to some effective, if unorthodox, agricultural policies.

But my general point still holds. Just as Africa ought to produce many new nation-states, out of the ineffective ungovernable super-states that currently make healthy politics impossible, some very ineffective African nation-states should expire. Togo is a prime example. A dictator dies, his son takes power, holds a sham election, keeps power. No one cares, not even the people of Togo. I say release them for the bondage of Togo-hood and split this very small, poor and profoundly abused piece of territory among Ghana and Benin. So much would be gained in human happiness and virtually nothing would be lost … in a world without a Togo.

The most significant scientific journal in the world, Nature, has asked this important question. Intellectual life in Africa remains virtually ignored around the globe, and almost no attention is given to scientists in Africa. The noun, African Science, would strike many as an oxymoron. How might science get done at all amid the disaster, disease and mayhem?

To be sure, since 2000, when I first visited the African continent, and in my 30 visits since, I have always paid attention to the scientific and engineering research that was happening in my midst. Because I brought to my African encounters a personal history of engagement with computing, electronics and the politics of science, I paid special attention to these areas, though I could not possibly completely ignore medicine and social sciences either. From the very start, I found brave and vital scientific efforts happening in the sub-Saharan.

The question the journal Nature asks in its important survey is how much of the science in Africa is world class? How much is merely a creature of donor funding? And how much might be actually benefit large numbers of needy Africans? And finallty, to what extent does scientific training, especially at universities in Africa, simply breed a new generation of talented people who depart the African continent — and never return to live and work?

The Nature package doesn’t fully answer any of these questions, but the editors and writers make a brave attempt and they frame their effort with wisdom and sensitivity. “It is easy to be fatalistic about science in sub-Saharan Africa,” Nature writes in the introduction to the package. “Researchers there face so many systemic problems — poor facili- ties, lack of funding, corruption and government instability — that it seems impossible for any single willing scientist in the developed world to make a difference for their African counterparts. But as the stories and commentaries in this issue make clear, success can emerge from individual efforts, both from researchers in Africa and from those on other continents.”

These successes can only multiple in the decades, and even centuries, ahead. Science in Africa — as distinct from science by Africans living elsewhere in the world — is of vital importance, not only to Africans but to everyone on the planet.