Loomnie

G. Pascal Zachary in Fanzine:

The master narratives about Africa are inevitably political; art about Africa and Africans, especially art created by non-Africans, inevitably becomes intertwined with the historical use and abuse of the African imaginary. The political entanglements of literary artists engaged with African affairs are complicated by the emergence of a new humanitarianism, which presents African problems as a litmus for the moral capacity of wealthy societies to respond to the plight of less fortunate souls around the world. Just as the response to the genocide against the Jews defined the contours of conscience following World War II, so today does the engagement with Africa define the moral condition of the developed world. Because the engagement with Africa is a test, often narratives about the region and its people are consciously fabricated and fantastic; bad means are justified by good ends. Master narratives from a century ago have been revived and renovated, aimed at generating vast global audiences, with lies and distortions rationalized as part of what the storytellers themselves view as a legitimate “campaign” to help liberate Africans from various maladies—from disease, bad leaders, environmental hazards, wars and other menaces we’ve come to associate with the region. These “progressive,” or developmental, storytellers have even gone so far as to willfully ignore or distort African realities in order to tell the worst stories possible—and thus attract the greatest possible support, financial or moral or otherwise, for “saving” Africans. Such stories that diminish or degrade Africans have been justified (though rarely publicly) as necessary; for without such stories—true or not, exaggerated or strictly accurate—it is believed that people around the world would not express sympathy for the plight of needy Africans.

Here.

In her latest column, Gillian Tett draws attention to the research of Anne Jefferson, an anthropologist who is studying how mortgage foreclosures are unfolding in the United States. This caught my attention:

In the past century, American culture has developed a well-entrenched, commonly shared national narrative to explain and justify success – the myth of the “American dream”. But, observes Jefferson, while “the American dream narrative explains upward mobility … we have fewer cultural narratives to help us understand and cope with downward mobility”. Thus, widespread foreclosures pose a “narrative challenge”; there is no single, commonly agreed national way to explain these events. Different groups are fighting to control the story.

The column is here.

1. Akin pulls out tissues for President Yar’Adua

2. Goodluck Jonathan makes his first address as president to the country (Video)

3. Reuters says Yar’Adua death leaves succession wide open

4. Next gives details of the burial

5. Discussions and speculations about who will become the new vice president

6. Is it ever too early for 419ers to start trying to use the president’s death in scam emails?

The dust will settle soon. I reserve any major commentary until then.

I just read this on the Nigerian Village Square:

The literary world is abuzz with the news that Achebe in 2010, on the fiftieth anniversary of Nigeria’s independence, and the fortieth anniversary of the end of the Biafran war; is working on a major opus – Reflections on the Nigerian Civil War 1967-1970.

It will cover a chronological history of events that led to, occurred during, and took place immediately after one of the bloodiest wars in history that claimed about 2 million lives. Because the work will be about his life in the milieu of the tragedy, it will not be a strictly historical but autobiographical work. He envisions a book of over 300 pages.

Now, that is something to look forward to.

By Alexis Okeowo for More Intelligent Life.

If you have not heard of Mexico’s native blacks, you are not alone. The story that has been passed down through generations is that their ancestors arrived on a slave boat filled with Cubans and Haitians, which sank off Mexico’s Pacific coast. The survivors hid away in fishing villages on the shore. The story is a myth: Spanish colonialists trafficked African slaves into ports on the opposite Gulf coast, and slaves were distributed further inland. The persistence of this story explains the reluctance of many black Mexicans to embrace the label “Afro”, and why many Mexicans assume black nationals hail from the Caribbean.

Colonial records show that around 200,000 African slaves were imported into Mexico in the 16th and 17th centuries to work in silver mines, sugar plantations and cattle ranches. But after Mexico won its independence from Spain, the needs of these black Mexicans were ignored.

Some Afro-Mexican activists identify themselves as part of the African diaspora. Given their rejection from Mexican culture, this offers a more empowering cultural reference. But with no collective memory of slavery (it was officially abolished in Mexico in 1822), or of any time in Africa before then, Afro-Mexicans are considerably removed from their African roots.

Full article.

Plus, a tiny little bit about Blacks in Germany.

I wrote last week about violent conflict and modes of identification. It comes up again in this nice piece by FT’s Tom Burgis:

Like previous outbreaks in 2001 and 2008, the latest bloodshed in Jos is wrought in the name of religion. Officials from the International Committee of the Red Cross said both Christians and Muslims were among at least 160 killed while other estimates put the toll much higher.

Kuru is almost exclusively Muslim. So too is Anglo-Jos, a neighbourhood of the city where the walls of torched homes have been daubed with Christian slogans. “Jesus the mighty man in battle,” reads one. Inhabitants of Christian quarters, meanwhile, say they are terrified by reports of Muslim vigilantes masquerading as security personnel.

But in Nigeria, religious differences often go hand in hand with ethnic rivalry or serve as a facade disguising it. There are more than 200 ethnic groups within the country’s uneasy federation and regular if often localised disputes among them have claimed thousands of lives in the 10 years since the military handed power back to elected civilians.

Jos, which is situated on the volatile fault-line between the predominately Muslim north and the mainly Christian south, has been among the worst affected areas. There, economic hardship and a long history of resistance to the Hausa-Fulani sultanates further north have been politically manipulated to create what one religious leader calls a “Molotov cocktail” of hatreds.

Some trace the roots of the brutality to the long decline of what was once a cosmopolitan boom town.

Members of the Hausa community, the predominant ethnic group in Nigeria’s north, began migrating to the area in large numbers 100 years ago when British colonial rulers started extracting tin on an industrial scale. Accomplished traders, they prospered not only from mining but also from distributing the agricultural produce of local tribes, among them the Christian farmers of the Berom.

World wars fuelled demand for tin; the gentle climate attracted large numbers of expatriates. Former UK prime minister John Major even did a stint at a local bank in Jos before returning to the UK.

But by 1967, when Nigeria was descending into civil wars, the tin mines had begun to decay. Mismanagement and the economic distortions that followed the discovery of oil rendered them uncompetitive. Residents say the resulting loss of livelihoods was compounded by a government austerity programme in the 1980s.

Underlying the animosities is a perception that the Hausas’ relative success in switching to new lines of business has come at the expense of the Berom. “Round the town, most of the businesses are being run by Hausa men – that has driven their jealousy,” says Mohammed Isa, 56, a Hausa sheltering at a makeshift refugee camp after being forced from his home by Christian gangs.

In full here. It is FT so it is somewhat gated.

1. Nigeria to Limit Domestic Banks’ Market Share to 20%

2. Nigeria in big scamster crackdown

3. Achebe calls for revolution in Nigeria

4. Berlin Wall: 20 years after the fall (with video)

5. Some (Possibly Heretical) Thoughts on Agriculture

6. Is UK Aid failing?

Yesterday I read a journal article on the hypersexualisation of blacks and the redefinition of citizenship in Germany after the fall of the Berlin Wall. In plain English, German women saw black men as exotic consumables – blacks here meaning both Africans and African American GIs. But the experiences in both cases are radically different. It is a really interesting article that tries to cover the two different accounts. I’ve learnt quite a bit about this from conversations with Africans who were in Berlin when the Wall came down.

A friend sent me this story today about a German journalist who goes undercover to discover life as a black person in Germany. Still trying to decide whether I should watch the movie he made from the experience. Wondering why I can’t decide? Read the Der Spiegel article for yourself.

Eamonn Butler, director of the Adam Smith Institute is getting worried about methodological individualism:

I’m getting worried about methodological individualism. Yes, I know that ‘society’ has no life or will or organizing mind of its own, as Marx seemed to assume, and that it is just the aggregation of individuals’ decisions and actions. I know that the ‘price level’ does not affect ‘aggregate supply’ or ‘aggregate demand’, and that these are mere statistics, summing individuals’ reactions to particular prices. And I don’t fall the the scientist guff that ‘we can predict the behaviour of a piece of a gas, even though we don’t know what any particular molecule is doing’, because I know that the ‘molecules’ that social science deals with are individuals who are themselves so complex that their behaviour would fry the brain of the average chemist. And yet…

Former UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher famously (or infamously) told Women’s Own magazine that “there is no such thing as society”, and yes, I see her point. But she went on to say: “There are individual men and women, and there are families.” Aye, there’s the rub. Are we methodological individualists (the term was, I think, coined by Schumpeter, who I wrote about here recently) obliged to insist that everything comes down to the minds, thoughts, values, and actions of individuals alone? Or can we admit that relationships between individuals, like family ties, are pretty basic too? And what about culture, or history, or religion, or even class? These all shape and constrain our individual thoughts and actions. But to admit them as significant is the thin end of the methodological wedge, because these are social phenomena.

An analogy, if I may. A physicist could describe a football match in terms of kinetic energy, friction, and the forces on the ball that sent it in this direction or that. It would be a perfectly correct description, but a pretty dull one: most of us would prefer to hear the commentator talking about the skill of the players, the positioning of the teams, the tactics and strategy, the chances taken and the goals scored. The physicist’s account might be the right way to talk about the workings of the Large Hadron Collider, but it’s not much good for a ball game. Likewise, an individualist account of economic or social phenomena may be true in a trivial sense; but to understand what’s going on, you do need to know that culture, or history, or religion do in fact shape how people act.

And again, if we do detect statistical relationships between social phenomena like a price index and a money supply figure, isn’t that actually rather useful, even if only up to a point? Yes, I know that unless we refer to the individuals, we will make mistakes. A Martian observer may note that every Monday to Friday morning, Grand Central Station becomes packed with Earthlings, and predict this as a scientific law. Except that, one Monday, no Earthlings show up at all. The Martian’s ‘law’ did not account for the fact it was a public holiday. But then, this is how science works – we make a hypothesis, then have to revise it when the unexpected happens. Sure, if we understand the motives of the actors, our predictions will be better. But just because we can’t do that very easily, do we still have to throw out statistics that seem to work?

Earlier today I drew attention to the announcement of the ASA Globalog series on the financial crisis. The first post in the series is already up. Alexander F. Robertson of Edinburgh University writes about Corporate Greed:

The medieval burghers sought to dodge accusations of greed by political bluster or conspicuous acts of charity, but nothing provided better moral cover than their most successful and durable invention, the corporation.  This transcendent meta-body is no freak of nature, no historical accident.  It was invented by European merchants in the 15th century, along with enough moral latitude to allow great commercial ventures to flourish, and many rogues to prosper.  Chambers’ excellent Dictionary tells us that the corporation is ‘a succession or collection of people authorized by law to act as one individual and regarded as having a separate existence from the people who are its members’.  It allows real people to join forces for private gain, to mask their personal identities, dodge their liabilities, and defy mortality.  Moral ambivalence is intrinsic to the corporation.  It is the framework in which individuals are piously held to account, and yet can get away with almost anything.  Back in the 18th century, an English Lord Chancellor asked:  ‘Did you ever expect a corporation to have a conscience, when it has no soul to be damned, and no body to be kicked?’ Continue reading.