Africa Works

One of the most decorated journalists in contemporary Africa — Gwen Lister, editor of the Namibian — has handed off her duties to her equally capable deputy, Tangedi Amupadhi.

The Namibian has for decades been a lonely voice of independent analysis in sparsely-populated Namibia, where the government has long been suspicious of the press and worked against stronger voices for civil society.

Lister has withstood relentless criticism from the government and its allies.

Amupadhi has won a Nieman fellow at Harvard University and been a prominent journalist in southern Africa for many years.

Zambia’s new president, Michael Sata, is wasting no time putting his stamp on the country. My friend in Lusaka, the publisher and political analyst, Chanda Chisala, writes that Sata:

“has already fired the whole board of the energy regulation board (because he believes the price of gas is high mainly because of their corrupt deals with the oil companies), he has fired the whole Roads Development Agency (who everyone believes were bribed to inflate road contracts, etc), he has fired all the 72 district commissioners – they were all party appointments and he wants to return the jobs to professional civil servants instead of party cadres. He has fired the Central Bank governor (he had helped the former president grab a bank that belonged to his personal enemy and sold it to South Africans — the sale has now been reversed), he has fired the Chief of Police,the chief of the Anti-Corruption Commission (for becoming partisan instead of professional)…..he has set up a commission to investigate the apparently corrupt way ZAMTEL was privatized, …too many things have happened in the last ten days alone. He has done in ten days what most presidents do in three years, seriously!”

The election of a new president, Michael Sata, to Zambia has renewed attention on the prospects for democratic renewal in the sub-Saharan. In an essay last week in the Atlantic, I argued that absent an Arab-style “spring” in black Africa, Zambia’s emergence as a beacon for democratic change in the region is a shift of great significance. The perspicacious observer of African affairs, George Ayittey, took issue with my central characterization: that radical political change has eluded the polities of the sub-Saharan and that, furthermore, civil-society activists in the Arab world had learned much from their sub-Saharan counterparts. Drawing on important historical context, Ayittey writes:

“You have the chronology and timeline incorrect. The African village revolutions occurred before the Arab Spring. Africa’s village revolutions occurred soon after the collapse of the former Soviet Union in 1989. After the fall of the former Soviet Union, winds of change swept across toppling long-standing dictators, such as Mattieu Kerekou of Benin, Kenneth Kaunda of Zambia. It started out in Benin in 1991 and ended with the dismantling of apartheid in South in 1994.

“In 1990, only 4 African countries were democratic: Botswana, Gambia, Mauritius and Senegal. By 1994, the village revolutions had added the following: Benin, Cape Verde Islands, Congo (Brazzaville), Namibia, Sao Tome &Principe, South Africa and Zambia. There was a reversal in Gambia when a coup was staged in 1994. But by and large, Africa’s village revolutions produced more democracies in the early 1990s. Black Africa was ahead of the Arab world. There was no such thing as the Arab spring in the early 1990s.

Second, what occurred in Zambia was a second revolution. The first occurred when Frederick Chiluba, a trade union leader, won the country’s multi-party presidential election in 1991 as the candidate of the Movement for Multiparty Democracy (MMD), defeating long-time President Kenneth Kaunda. He was re-elected in 1996. Chiluba was a hopeless failure and corrupt and the MMD started to look more like Kaunda’s UNIP party. The election of Michael Sata was a rejection of the MMD.

“Sata’s election is not emulating the Arab Spring. If anything, the Arab Spring has much more to learn from Black Africa because what occurred in Zambia was a reversal of a revolution. The liberation and democratic hero elected in 1991, Frederick Chiluba,  turned out to be no different from the dictator he ousted. As Africans are wont of saying: “We struggle very hard to remove a cockroach from power and the next rat comes to do the same thing. Haba!”

“It could happen in the Arab world, just as it  happened in black Africa.”

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.