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Oz recently tagged me on Why I Blog About Africa.

Because I am African
I blog about Africa because I am African, because I have lived in Africa most of my life, because most of my family live in Africa, and because there is no other place that has contributed to my formation as much as Africa - at least so far. It is only logical that if I want to blog about a place - or collection of places - and I want to restrict myself to issues that I understand, I would have to blog about Africa. I also know much more about Africa because my research largely concerns two African countries.

Because I get angry…
I suppose I could write something very poetic, something about how much I love the continent, about how there is so much potential, about how the continent throbs with so much energy. But the reasons are more down to earth: I blog about Africa because I get disgusted by actions of leaders of African countries, and by assumptions and assertions about African countries by both Africans and non-Africans.

I tag Akin, Szavanna, and Akinlabi.

He had been watching his son since he started the game. The boy had been chasing a red-head lizard for about thirty minutes, and now he had finally got him. He held the wriggling lizard by the tail and went outside. Still holding him he came back into the parlour of their room and parlour apartment with a bowl and a forked stick. His father wondered what he was going to do with them but he did not ask him anything. He did not want to say anything.

The boy went to a corner of the room and took some water with the bowl from a large, half-full container. That water, his father remembered, was fetched last night after standing in the queue for over an hour. Still he said nothing. He did not say anything not because he did not want to disturb the boy, but because he already knew that he would not get any response. If he asked the boy would probably simply pack his things and go out of the room to continue somewhere else. Instead of asking he decided to watch quietly from where he sat.

Their relationship was strained, very strained. He always tried to be good for his son but he never made it. He knew that the boy respected his mother far more than he did him. Of course, that was expected. For some time it had been his mother who had been providing for him. In fact, he had stopped coming to his father for anything because he knew that he would not get anything from him.

He was a seven year-old, primary school boy. He was not old enough to understand, or to even want to understand, what the case was with his father. His father had become a pest of sorts to him. If he were given a choice he would have loved not to have a father; a mother was enough. The man was a hopeless drunk. Whenever he was drunk he would come home and beat him and his mother. How could a man like that be called a father? Two nights ago he was carried home by some of his less drunk drinking partners who were laughing deliriously as they banged on the door to wake his wife. Throughout yesterday he was sick and could not go out. In the evening he did his first domestic chore in over a week: fetching three buckets of water.

He once had a job, but that seemed a long time ago. The boy could vaguely remember when his father would come home as early as seven in the evening and bring things for them. Sometimes he would bring bread and suya, and they would all sit together and eat a meal that was not even part of the three regular meals of the day. His father and mother would talk about their works. His mother was a petty trader and she would sometimes tell her husband that her wares were almost finished and he would promise to give her some more money.

He could also, through a now very foggy memory, remember the night his father came home with a letter that he gave to his wife after she asked him why he looked sad. When she read it she knelt down and started crying and asking God why he let that happen to her. The boy could remember that he asked why she was crying, and that she replied that his father had been sent away from work because the owners of the company had sold it and the new buyers did now want too many workers.

However, what he remembered very well was that his father started coming home drunk not too long after he was laid off. He used to go to look for work but after a while the only place he went after leaving home was the small corrugated iron-covered structure down the street. There, his friends would buy him drinks. Then he started beating them.

His father watched with shock as he placed the lizard in the bowl, careful enough to leave his tail only after securing his neck with the forked stick. The lizard fought with all his power but he pinned him down with all the anger in him. The lizard opened his mouth to breathe but water rushed into it and he quickly closed it. When he could no longer bear it he again opened it, and then, as before, he quickly shut it. All the while the lizard was thrashing in the bowl of water. After thrashing for a while he became still.

When the boy stood up and turned to face him, his father saw a dark and sweet smile on his face.

Ibadan
1999.

I am currently reading Naomi Klein’s ‘Shock Doctrine‘ so it was really interesting for me to read her profile here. I will come back with the review of the book in the following weeks. You can read the profile in the meantime.

This is on two different levels. One: There is an attack going on in Mumbai, and the exact thing that the attackers want - full coverage, and even commentary that reminds one of a football match - was given to them. See what my good friend Kiran (an Indian who was in India during the attacks) has to say. Well, we might even try to understand it if the news were only locally reported, but the attackers are given global coverage, on every reputable global media outlet. Oh, someone reminds me that it is because of the sites that were attacked. Mumbai, not just the financial capital of India, but also a very popular tourist attraction. The possibility of the death of an American or European tourist makes the news a must cover.

Two: There is violence in Jos, Nigeria. Many more than in Mumbai are locally reported to have been killed. No global media coverage. Reason one: No tourist or Western national, therefore no global interest. Remember, the global media is a Western Media. Reason two: Well, those Africans, they never stop having ethnic and religious conflicts so why pay attention to it when they do it again? Apart from the fact that in every case that is an overtly simplistic description of the conflicts, there are times when there are actual misrepresentation and misreportings. We know that the media, especially television, love their soundbites, but these are sometimes as distorting as to be ridiculous. See Black Looks and Talatu Carmen for more on this.

This Sunday morning, I am sitting on my bed listening to Iyawo Olele, by Dr Orlando Owoh. I remember listening to Orlando’s music on LP in our sitting room when I was growing up. It was one of those old record players that had to constantly have its pin changed… if you remember those. I also remember when Orlando returned from the notorious Alagbon detention centre, and the record he released shortly after that. The album was filled with first-hand experience with humiliation in detention, humiliation both for himself and for others. I can still sing the songs on the album, almost word for word.

Then sometime later, we heard that Orlando had become a born-again christian. It was not too long after Chief Commander Ebenezer Obey became a born-again. Orlando did a song that still makes me laugh out loud each time I remember it…..

I probably should add that I grew up in the town where Orlando spent a large part of his time, not too far away from his hometown, and I was quite familiar with the sight of his Peugeot 505. He even paid for palm wine for some of my friends at some point.

My friend sent me an email a couple of weeks ago to tell me that Dr Orlando Owoh was dead. I really loved that guy, really. He was a great musician. I am not going to make any biography. The current edition of The Guardian has a pretty nice editorial on him, but it probably cannot even top the story already done by the same newspaper in 2006.

Those who are not familiar with his music can have a feel of it here.

Here is the current editorial
Here is the old story, from Molara Woods’ old blog.

Xan Rice of The Guardian interviews Asad ‘Booyah’ Abdulahi, a 42 year-old Somali pirate.

Excerpts:

I am 42 years old and have nine children. I am a boss with boats operating in the Gulf of Aden and the Indian Ocean.

… We give priority to ships from Europe because we get bigger ransoms. To get their attention we shoot near the ship. If it does not stop we use a rope ladder to get on board. We count the crew and find out their nationalities. After checking the cargo we ask the captain to phone the owner and say that have seized the ship and will keep it until the ransom is paid.

… Our community thinks we are pirates getting illegal money. But we consider ourselves heroes running away from poverty. We don’t see the hijacking as a criminal act but as a road tax because we have no central government to control our sea. With foreign warships now on patrol we have difficulties.

But we are getting new boats and weapons. We will not stop until we have a central government that can control our sea.

The full story is here

Hat-tip to Africa Works

Does anybody have any idea where I could get a CD by the Lijadu Sisters? I have been scouting the net but cannot seem to find it anywhere. Amazon lists a cassette and an LP but no CD.

Any info?

Time Magazine reports that  South Korea’s Daewoo Logistics leased 3.2 million acres of farmland from the Madagascar government. The land would be used as a farmland, and the South Korean company hopes this would help secure food supply for their country. The lease is for 99 years.

A Daewoo manager, Hong Jong-wan, told the Financial Times that the crops would “ensure our food security,” and would use “totally undeveloped land which had been left untouched.” Land is scarce and expensive in South Korea, which makes it the world’s third-largest importer of corn. Daewoo says the Madagascar land will be leased for a price of around $12 an acre, which is a fraction of the price for farmland in the corporation’s home country.

The full story is here.

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At the urging of Oz of Mootbox, some months ago, I downloaded a podcast from the Cato Institute. While listening to the podcast I was almost screaming out at the suggestion of one of the panelists. Military strategist and historian Edward N. Luttwak suggested that African governments should be left to fail instead of being propped up by aid from developed countries. His argument, the substance of which is not exactly original, is that African states did not evolve like modern states did in Europe, and so the relationship between the people and the state in Africa is not the same as one would find, for instance, in Western Europe and Northern America.

Peter Ekeh and the two publics
Anybody who is familiar with the literature on state and civil society in Africa would be aware of a similar analysis. Prof Ekeh wrote, in a now much-quoted article,  that an average African has two publics, one was the civil public of the nation-state, while the other is the more relevant immediate group. The immediate group could be the age-grade, the hometown association or even the larger ethnic group. He argues that it is morally acceptable - and maybe even expected - that one robs the civil public of the nation-state to feed the more immediate public. Conversely, it is more of a moral hazard, and therefore more frowned upon, for one to steal from the hometown association or the age-grade association. (For more about Professor Peter Ekeh see here. To get the 1975 paper you would need a subscription, so if you would really like to have a copy leave me a message and I could try to arrange that.)

Back to Edward N. Luttwak
Mr Luttwak suggests that western governments leave failing African states to fail, arguing that that failure would lead to the growth of a more organic structure that is closer to the reality of African societies. Mr Luttwak’s mistake is that the African people of his imagining are long dead and gone; the Africans of today live in a world where there is a state, and where the state has its functions, and they are oh so well aware of that. Go to any village in western Nigeria and you would find how much of a reference point the state is, even if that reference is more about its absence and inefficiency. Ask them what they want and they would likely tell you that they would like the government to remember them, shortly after telling you that ‘ijoba o ranti wa’ (Yoruba for ‘the government does not remember us’). I might be economically liberal in many ways, but I understand the importance of a state. Just ask the directors of Lehman Brothers, or even the private-jet owning bosses of the big car-manufacturing companies in the US. The state is important, and perhaps even more so in less developed countries.

Somalia now
Probably the most vivid case for the importance of the state is that of the most (in)famously failed of all African states: Somalia. The problem that is the failed state of Somalia is most highlighted by piracy along its coasts. Most recently, the pirates have become much bolder and their attacks have become more frequent. For instance, the Sirius Star, one of the world’s largest oil tankers, was recently hijacked. The Economist reports:

As if to underline the point, the tanker’s capture on November 15th, with $110m of crude oil bound for America, was followed by several other hijackings by Somali pirates, including a Thai tuna boat, a Turkish chemical tanker, an Iranian freighter loaded with wheat and a Greek bulk carrier.

Still think there is no need for the state?
There is a great need to police the Somali waters, and one of the ways to do that is to strengthen the capacity of the state to police its own waters. Just so this is not taken as a call to simply equip the state with the latest warships, I hurry to add that increasing the capacity of the state should be a comprehensive approach. That approach has to include incentives to not become pirates. Job creation and the provision of basic infrastructure should be part of these incentives. While there is a need to link the two publics of Professor Ekeh, there is no over-flogging the importance of that civil public.

Hat tip to Mootbox

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