Loomnie

I review Edward R. Carr’s book for SAIS Review. An excerpt:

Underlying typical research is the assumption that a more intense integration into the global market economy is the solution to development problems, and that GDP growth brings an improvement in the well-being of a country’s citizens. Most existing development indicators have these same assumptions behind them. In a case study example, Carr shows how development data collected with these sorts of assumptions are often interpreted to signify what the interpreter wants, while a more careful reading would show that the data, in and of themselves, mean nothing. As Carr puts it, “The result is an echo chamber of misunderstanding with regard to life and events along globalization’s shoreline,” because the questions that are asked, and the data that are gathered to answer them, are “detached from the processes and events that really matter on the ground,” which, in turn, is due to flawed understanding of globalization and development.

And:

… Carr urges us to stop devising methodologies that aim to find out whether development projects might work or why they do or do not work without first asking basic questions about the social, cultural, economic, and political situations that have produced the situations that the projects aim to tackle. Instead, we should consider proper understanding of the situation as a prerequisite for any engagement, and proper understanding starts with leaving the echo chamber of development and globalization to question one’s assumptions.

The full thing is here (gated).

Caine Prize (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

So, I decided to pretend that I know something about literature and join the Caine Prize blogathon this year. For an introduction to the blogathon, see Aaron Bady’s post here. 

My commentary on the first story, Rotimi Babatunde’s Bombay’s Republic (pdf), is below. Other bloggers’ reviews are at the bottom of the page.

The first two-thirds of the story is in some sense a coming of age story. A young man who has probably never left his hometown is made to go and fight a war on behalf of the British Empire in faraway Burma. Though he witnesses brutalities, he comes out of the war with the knowledge that the fantastic was indeed credible. He finds the racist stories that the British had propagated about the savagery and cannibalism of Africans amusing. He had not thought it possible that anybody would think that he could eat human beings, or have a tail. He was surprised that it was possible to be awarded a medal for acting out of fear and not bravery, or that he could be praised for killing a white man. Stephen Derwent Partington describes these ‘surprises’ as ‘a series of miniature rites-of-passage’.

Entangled in the coming of age story is the now well-worn tale of the discovery of the humanity – weaknesses and frailties, actually – of White colonialists. In this story, this is particularly played out in the case of a Captain whose mental health deteriorates in the face of the brutality of war. This general trope is scarcely an original one, at least not since Biyi Bandele wrote Burma Boy. Even before that, in popular discourse, Burma boys were said to have returned with the knowledge of the white man’s weakness and the awareness that they could fight those mere mortals for independence. The veracity of this standard story is not as important as the place it holds as part of the independence struggle lore. I grew up in Nigeria hearing this story. It is therefore refreshing to see that Bombay’s life, in the latter part of the story, does not repeat this cliché but moves towards the fantastic. Bombay, who had learnt that everything is possible, and witnessed the jumbling together of things, the transcendence and unsettling of categories, returns from Burma to inhabit a jailhouse, from which he declares independence from the state in which he was born – a state that was at that particular time in formation, struggling to gain its own independence from the colonial authorities. Actually, in some sense, this is pushing the limits of the boundaries of the possible. Only a person who knows that everything is possible would imagine a jailhouse to be a republic, and one person its entire citizenry.

Bombay’s life, in the latter part of the story, reminds of Fela Kuti’s. It is a life in which the stuff of legends is created in the meeting of the fantastic and the banal. Fela, known as a teller of tall tales himself, had a Republic that he declared as independent of the Nigerian state. He too spent time in prison, and his cell at the Alagbon prisons was called Kalakuta Republic, after his ‘outside world’ Republic.

Even though he does not repeat the Burma returnee cliché Bombay is still recognisable. He is a Big Man who spins wealth out of political power, and whose political sovereignty and legitimacy is fully acknowledged only by himself. In that sense, one can read Bombay’s inhabitation of a jailhouse as a metaphor for the alienation that high political office sometimes imposes on office holders, especially those whose legitimacy is questionable. Over a decade ago, when the wives of Nigerian state governors visited Mrs Mariam Abacha in the Aso Rock Presidential Villa in Abuja, she remarked that they – the governors’ wives – should endeavour to regularly update the president and first lady about what goes on in the country. For, according to her, it is difficult to keep abreast of happenings in the country when one is in Aso Rock. In the latter part of his life, her husband, Sanni Abacha, rarely left the Villa, trapped in the prison of his own making. The fact that Bombay, whose ‘eyes were opened’ and world expanded, went and lived in a prison also invites reflections on intellectuals who succumb to the trappings of power and delusions of grandeur. Think of Robert Mugabe and Yoweri Museveni.

This story is a good and refreshing departure from the kinds of stories that won the Caine Prize in recent years.

The Caine Prize shortlisted stories:

• Rotimi Babatunde (Nigeria) ‘Bombay’s Republic’
• Billy Kahora (Kenya) ‘Urban Zoning’
• Stanley Kenani (Malawi) ‘Love on Trial’
• Melissa Tandiwe Myambo (Zimbabwe) ‘La Salle de Départ’
• Constance Myburgh (South Africa) ‘Hunter Emmanuel’

Other bloggers on “Bombay’s Republic”

The African Peacebuilding Network (APN) of the Social Science Research Council (SSRC) invites research grant applications from African researchers, policy analysts, and practitioners working on conflict and peacebuilding at universities and research institutions or regional governmental and non-governmental organizations in Africa.

About the African Peacebuilding Network

The APN promotes independent African research and analysis on peacebuilding in or near countries and regions affected by violent conflict in Sub-Saharan Africa.

About the APN Research Grants Program

A core component of the APN, the Research Grants program is a vehicle for enhancing the quality and visibility of African peacebuilding research regionally and globally and for making such knowledge accessible to key policymakers and research centers of excellence in Africa and around the world.

Substantial support is available for research and analysis on issues such as:

• Conflict prevention, mediation, management, resolution, and transformation
• Environmental change and conflict
• Post-conflict democratization, governance, and reconstruction
• The relationship between peacebuilding and statebuilding, including state-society relations and state reconstruction
• Transitional justice, reconciliation, social and economic justice
• Peacekeeping and peace support operations
• Disarmament, demobilization, and reinsertion
• Security sector reform
• The role of the media and civil society
• Peace partnerships involving the UN, the AU, and Regional Economic Communities
• Gender, youth, identity, and culture
• International actors and peace interventions

Grants are awarded on a competitive, peer-reviewed basis and are intended to support six to seven months of research. Up to fifteen grants of a maximum of $15,000 will be awarded.

All grantees are required to participate in two Africa-based workshops that will provide opportunities to refine research focus and methodologies, present findings, explore ways to make work accessible to multiple peacebuilding constituencies, and develop constructive working relationships with other grantees, senior academics, and practitioner facilitators.

Research Grant Proposals

The APN is interested in innovative projects that demonstrate strong potential for producing high-quality research and analysis that can lead to practical action on peacebuilding and/or facilitate inter-regional collaboration and networking among African researchers and practitioners.

Proposals should clearly describe research objectives and significance (with a clear alignment between research design/method and research questions and goals), demonstrate knowledge of the research subject and relevant literature, and address the feasibility of proposed research activities, including a time frame for project completion. Applicants should also discuss the likely relevance of the proposed research to existing knowledge on peacebuilding practice and policy. Individual and joint proposals are welcome.

Eligibility

Applicants must be African citizens currently residing in a Sub-Saharan African country.

Academics must hold a faculty or research position at an African university or research organization and have either a PhD or a master’s and at least two years of research experience.

Policy analysts and practitioners must be based in Africa at a regional or sub-regional institution, a government agency, or a non-governmental, media, or civil society organization and have a master’s with at least two years of work experience.

Application Process

Available on the APN website: http://www.ssrc.org/programs/apn/. The APN strongly prefers that applications be uploaded through our online portal. Alternately, completed applications can be e-mailed or delivered by post or courier service.

Deadline for Applications

Applications are due by 9 p.m. EDT, June 15, 2012.

Additional Information

If you have further questions, please contact APN program staff by telephone at (212) 377-2000 or by e-mail at apn@ssrc.org.

This is a pet peeve of mine. Why are European and North American media houses willing to splash pictures of dead and/or mutilated bodies of Africans on newspapers and on-air? I really have to find the time to do a proper post on the subject. But while you are waiting, see this, from G. Pascal Zachary:

The New York Times yet again last week displayed a disquieting pattern of presenting dead Africans on the front page of its great newspaper, while refusing to present dead Americans in the same fashion. In the latest instance of what I call the pornography of African, Times editor prominently displayed on the top left corner of its April 24 front page “the burned body of a boy.” The disturbing photo might seem appropriate — unless one considers that the children killed by, for instance, American drone attacks in Yemen or Pakistan, never receive similar photographic display. So even on the narrow grounds of newsworthiness, the contradictions are evident and ample: for mysterious “reasons,” dead Africans can be displayed in lavish fashion — this photo of this dead boy was in color! — while death inflicted by Americans cannot be displayed. Neither are the deaths experienced by Americans in combat suitable for front page photographic treatment (or inside the paper either).

The full article is here.

This is what I’m rocking for the whole of today. Mucho thanks to my friend Kola for sending me the link. Dude, you made my day.

As you’ve probably heard, the Pirate Party got elected into the Berlin state parliament late last year. They got 8.9% of the votes, which gave them 15 seats. Last month in local elections in another state, Saarland, they got 7.4% of the votes, but more importantly, they got 25% of the first-time voters and about the same share from previous non-voters (see this post by Marian Wirth on Google+). Some people have been pretty dismissive of them. See this article by foreign policy wonk, Dr Ulrike Guérot, in which she compares them to the Occupy movement in the US (I am not even going to try to discuss how seriously misinformed and misleading that is). On the other hand, some say that the Pirates are going to democratise Europe. Well, let’s just say that I dont think that is even one of their main goals. The most important thing to know, as the founder of the first Pirate Party, the Piratpartiet, says in the video below, is that they grew out of a protest movement and they are just beginning to deepen their philosophy. The fact that they are making real inroads in Germany is a sign of that.

What about Africa? They talk a little about that during the last 10 minutes of the video.

Thanks to Menelic for sending me the link to the video.

Elizabeth Grant at Open Democracy:

 … so long as the narrative of a tolerant Germany is more important than the experience of those who are testing that dream, the country will be condemned to repeating these traumas and disgraces. Racism has much to do with accepting what you don’t understand, and, as such, the fight against it takes a lot of lateral thinking. The fact that Germany does not bear the shame of a history of minstrel shows doesn’t make it into a sort of cultural isolation chamber where blackface can be used independent of its connotations elsewhere in the world. The fact that you like eating Turkish food doesn’t make döner kebab a good symbol to use in referring to a tragedy that involved several Turkish Germans. Productive discussions of prejudice necessarily have to allow space for that which is beyond one’s own experience. Tolerance is an endless negotiation: no country has mastered it completely. But to reach the next level Germans must start to contemplate its ‘unknown unknowns’ and have a little faith in someone else’s narrative.

Here.

The call is here. If your paper is selected you get an all-expense-paid trip to Berlin for the conference.

It’s been a while since I last did this. Blame it on Twitter and Facebook. And Google Plus. Depending on your social media of your choice, click any of the links to join me there for stuff I share. But for today, the links:

1. The disappearing virtual library Chris Kelty on the shutdown of Library.nu (as my friend @sepoy said on Twitter, “This is like the destruction of the library of Alexandria.” Couldn’t agree more.)

2. “It takes a lot of armour to drain an oil-soaked swamp” – The Economist’s less than critical piece on Dr Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, Nigeria’s  “co-ordinating minister for the economy and the minister of finance” (really, that is her full title). By the way, she is said to be a strong contender for the headship of the World Bank when Robert Zoellick’s term expires.

3. What happens at Davos? – Nick Paumgarten on the World Economic Forum. Hint: “Davos is, fundamentally, an exercise in corporate speed-dating”

4. Nice Brits wouldn’t lock up children who ask for help, would they? Stephanie Donald on child asylum seekers.

5. The Tuareg: Between Armed Uprising And Drought – by Baz Lecocq And Nadia Belalimat.

6. From Galactic’s new album Carnivale Electricos. Enjoy! 

Head over there to see the list. And don’t forget to vote!