The AIAC Podcast

Anakwa Dwamena, our new books editor, and literary scholar Bhakti Shringarpure join us for a discussion on African books and publishing.

Now treated as a prescient representation of the 1968 generation that forever transformed left-wing politics, Jean-Luc Godard’s 1967 film La Chinoise portrays a group of French students forming a Maoist collective and living together in a cosy Parisian apartment where fierce discussions over politics and revolutionary strategy happen with religious devotion. On the only occasion an outsider enters the secret enclave, it’s to deliver a seminar on the “Prospects for the European Left.” The gentleman, introduced only as Omar, is also the film’s only black character. In the seminar’s Q&A, one of the French students asks if a non-socialist revolution can peacefully be changed into a socialist one. In answering the question (“Yes, but under specific conditions”), Omar claims it is based on a false, underlying notion, and asks back: “Where do just ideas arise? Where do just ideas come from?”

Of course, we know that this man is the only true revolutionary in the film because Omar Blondin Diop was a revolutionary in real life. His appearance in the film counts as the only record of him speaking available, and part of a handful of visuals in general. Blondin Diop never had much of a chance to fully announce himself to the world—at 26 years old, he suspiciously died in Senegalese detention in May 1973, 14 months into a three-year sentence handed to him by Léopold Sedar Senghor’s regime. Senghor is equally thought of as a revolutionary, and a significant intellectual for theorizing Négritude. But why would one revolutionary be an existential threat to another?

Writing of the “Senghor myth,” AIAC contributor Florian Bobin notes that “Once you’ve exhausted all the Negritude quotes, you have to confront the fact that Leopold Sedar Senghor ran Senegal as a repressive, one-party state.” Senghor was the quintessential philosopher-king, and as Bobin further observes, “Under the single-party rule of Senghor’s Senegalese Progressive Union (UPS), authorities resorted to brutal methods; intimidating, arresting, imprisoning, torturing and killing dissidents.” A prime example was when Senghor accused Mamadou Dia, the president of Senegal’s Council of Ministers, of attempting to stage a coup against him. Dia had long been advocating for decentralizing power and vesting it in the hands of peasant communities. Despite being a fighter, moving to wage a military campaign against Senghor’s regime, Blondin Diop was thinking against him too. In his segment in La Chinoise, Blondin Diop (who at 21, was already a student-professor) answers the question he puts to the group by affirming democracy, political and economic. Just ideas come from social interaction, from the fight to produce, and scientific research, but above all, “From the class struggle. Some classes are victorious, others are defeated. That’s history. The history of all civilizations.” Who is victorious in Senegal?

In this AIAC Talk then, we want to investigate Senegal’s post-colonial history, especially to grapple with it in the context of Senegal’s ongoing civil unrest against incumbent president Macky Sall. This will not be the first time a popular uprising has emerged in Senegal’s recent history to resist creeping authoritarianism. On June 23, 2011, the Senegalese people mobilized to challenge former president Abdoulaye Wade’s attempt to change the constitution to permit him to run for a third term and to win elections by securing less of the vote. The moment produced the M23, a broad movement for democratization in Senegal, as well as groupings like “Y’En A Marre”; which means “Fed up” and is a collective of mostly rappers and youth disgruntled with Senegal’s political and economic stagnation. What have become of these movements in the 10 years since their inception? How do we make sense of the fact that, this time round, dissident energy is rallied behind Ousmane Sonko, the opposition leader whose arrest following accusations of rape are what precipitated the current crisis?

We are joined by Florian Bobin and Marame Gueye to help us make sense of all of this. Florian is a student in African history and host of Elimu Podcast. His research focuses on post-colonial liberation struggles and state violence from the 1960s and 1970s in Senegal. Marame is an Associate Professor of African and African Diaspora Literatures at East Carolina University. Her work explores gender, verbal art, and migration. She is also an activists of women’s rights in Senegal and its diaspora.

Before the boring neutrality of the “Global South”, there was the counter hegemonic posture of the Third World.  The historic site for the official formation of Third World identity was the 1955 Asian-African conference when delegates from 30, mostly newly independent states descended on Bandung in Indonesia to discuss their mutual ambitions for post-colonial world-making. Then, the affinities between Africa and Asia were obvious and deeply felt.  What has become of this Afro-Asian solidarity? What about China in Africa? And Africans in Asia? 

Our guests for this episode of AIAC Talk are Lina Benabdallah, AIAC contributing editor and Assistant Professor of Politics and International Affairs at Wake Forest University. She is the author of  'Shaping the Future of Power: Knowledge Production and Network-Building in China-Africa Relations' (University of Michigan Press, 2020). Abdou Rehim Lema, from Benin, who is a Yenching Scholar of Peking University, where he completed a Master’s Degree in China Studies, focusing on Politics and International Relations and Christopher J. Lee, an Associate Professor of History and Africana Studies at Lafayette College in Easton, Pennsylvania, author of six books, including Making a World after Empire: The Bandung Moment and Its Political Afterlives (2010, 2nd edition 2019).

In this episode, our monthly interviews with artists, we talk with the director of a new film on a Libyan dissident and discuss a new exhibition on the global black experience.    

In a lecture delivered at the University of Toronto in 2002 called “The Foreigners Home,” the late American writer Toni Morrison offers a reflection on the inside/outside blur that can enshrine frontiers, and borders: real, metaphorical, and psychological, as we wrestle with definitions of nationalism, citizenship, race, ideology and the so-called clash of cultures in our search to belong. African and American writers are not alone in coming to terms with these problems, but they do have a long and singular history of confronting them. Of not being at home in one’s homeland; of being exiled in the place one belongs. 

African and American artists have to come to terms with this too. A recent virtual exhibition created by Cedric Brown, Atlantic Fellow for Racial Equity and an award-winning social impact leader, called “The Shape of Blackness”, offers a perspective on the black experience by South African and American visual artists—one a black majority nation, and the other a black minority nation. Cedric is joined by South African designer and director of Gallery MOMO Johannesburg, Odysseus Shirindza, who is also one of the exhibition’s curators.  

After, we chat with Khalid Shamis, director and editor of “The Colonel’s Stray Dogs”, a film about his dad, Ashur, who lives in London and played a leading role in the exiled resistance against Muammar Gaddafi’s one party, repressive rule. The film is also about family. As Khalid says in the film: “For the forty years he was in exile in England, it felt like killing Gaddafi was more important to him than living with us.” In the end, Gaddafi did fall (we know that because it is history) and Ashur Shamis went back to Libya to help rebuild, but would he be welcome? And did the country move on from him. 

We’re pleased to have the opportunity to ask Khalid these and other questions. The Colonel’s Stray Dogs is not the first film he has made about his family; a previous film, Imam and I, dealt with his maternal grandfather, Imam Haron, and his murder by apartheid police in South Africa. As an editor, Khalid's credits include Afrikaaps (2010), Action Kommandant (2016), Scenes from a Dry City (2018) and The Sound of Masks (2018) amongst many others.

This episode of AIAC talk is devoted to Palestinian solidarity. For international spectators, the case for Palestinian liberation often exists in the heady space of argument, a realm of abstractness. And while there are the visceral images of horror and brutality we are exposed to on our TV screens, when the ceasefires are declared and the violence paused, it can cause us to forget that another violence still remains—in the little things. This is the violence of petty apartheid, a word South Africans used to describe how apartheid’s most debilitating effects, how it controlled the most intimate aspects of life, how it was a daily humiliation. This was exemplified by what happened in East Jerusalem, when Israeli security forces barricaded the Damascus gate esplanade (a popular gathering spot especially during Ramadan), or when those same forces desecrated Al-Aqsa—the point is to rob people of all their dignity in every way.

We want this episode to transport us to the realm of not simply understanding the injustice of apartheid, but of grappling with its totalizing brutality—and it is often the case, that literature, film and poetry can evoke images of places we’ve never been, can allow us to bear witness to feelings we’ve never experienced. Relating the importance of black art in relaying the black experience during apartheid, the South African poet Mafika Gwala declared in his seminal 1984 essay, “Writing as a Cultural Weapon”: “ When you face a truth and there is challenging need to express it, you can most emphatically capture it through poetry, because there is no way you can twist it about in a poem. You have to bring out the truth as it is, or people will see through your lines. It is also through poetry that you find, most soberly, that there has never been such a thing as pure language.”

This episode features South African writers Rustum Kozain, Siphokazi Jonas and Heidi Grunebaum reading the poetry and prose of Palestinian writers and some of their own. Together with Palestinian poets, Mahmoud Al Shaer (with translation by Katharine Halls) and Basman Elderawi, as well as author and essayist Adania Shibli. 

South Africans know the despair and suffering of apartheid. But South Africans also know that apartheid can end. And so, as Palestinians continue to resist, we hope for this to serve as a small gesture of solidarity as they dream of freedom.

It’s hard to begin to summarize the complicated legacy that Bob Marley left behind. While no one questions the brilliance of his musical output (achieved primarily with his band, The Wailers), it is the fact that Marley wasn’t just a musician that leaves us missing not only his eclectic sounds, but wondering about what would have become of his political and cultural trajectory if not for his untimely passing at the age of 36.

Marley achieved an iconography befitting only the legendary, able to transcend the boundaries of the aesthetic, political, and spiritual in his music and life. But this was not without the contradiction which always befalls the greats. As renowned historian of the black Atlantic Paul Gilroy writes, “Marley’s stardom also makes sense in the historical and cultural context provided by the end of Rock and Roll. He was the last rock star and the first figure of a new phase identified as the beginning of what has come to be known as ‘world music’, a significant marketing category that helps to locate historically the slow terminal demise of the music-led youth-culture which faded out with the embers of the twentieth century.”

There was, on one side, the Bob Marley that emerged as a revolutionary symbol, a representative of the Third World that advanced a critique of global capitalism and the imperial domination it depended upon. As Marley declares in War, “Until the philosophy which hold one race superior, and another inferior, is finally and permanently discredited and abandoned—everywhere is war.” Naturally, with an upbringing in this context and explorations in Rastafarian Ethopianism, Africa loomed large in Marley’s life.

There is also a Marley, one arriving posthumously, that becomes sanitized, commoditized, and packaged for mass production. This is the Marley coinciding with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of history. Mobilized as the poster boy for liberal multiculturalism, the Marley of “One Love” became “an affecting soundtrack to essentially boring and empty activities like shopping and getting stoned” says Gilroy. Reggae, once a source of not only creative expression but also a spiritual outlook and emancipatory posture, became watered down as just another genre of music for consumers to select from like they do items on a store shelf. What became of the movement of Jah people?

Joining us on AIAC Talk to discuss the life and legacy of Marley, are Matthew Smith and Erin MacLeod. Matthew is a professor of history and director of the Centre for the Study of the Legacies of British Slave-Ownership. He is also co-editor of the new Jamaica Reader, forthcoming from Duke University Press. Erin writes and teaches on identity, culture, class, race and geography, and is the author of a book about Rastafari who returned to Africa, Visions of Zion: Ethiopians and Rastafari in the Search for the Promised Land (NYU Press, 2014).

On May 5, Karl Marx turns 203. As ever, the legacy of the political-economist, philosopher, and activist remains contentious. Social media routinely produces declarations that reading Marx is unnecessary, that Marxism constitutes a racist body of thought, or that in the public sphere, Marxists themselves are on the fast-track to terminal obsolescence, out of step with contemporary academic and literary trends. Ironically, it has become the conservative right’s favorite pastime to label any and all progressive efforts—especially on issues of identity-based oppression, like Black Lives Matter—as being examples of “cultural Marxism.” How they would rejoice if they knew that Marxism was actually in retreat!

Marxism’s reception in Africa is especially in decline. Such a decline appears stark when considering that in the 20th century, anti-colonial resistance claimed allegiance to Marx. African political leaders particularly adapted Lenin’s idiosyncratic synthesis, or adopted their own “African socialism.” Marx’s use in liberation movements was never straightforward; it was sometimes shallow and opportunistic, vindicating Marx’s own observation that “precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service, borrowing from them names, battle slogans, and costumes in order to present this new scene in world history in time-honored disguise and borrowed language.” One reason for the decline of Marxism in Africa is that all the Marxists have gone. Where to? Many are now in government and presiding over the very economic programs they once denounced.

So, what is Marxism, and who is a Marxist? For his part, not even Marx considered himself one. There are those who believe that Marxism is a living school of thought and practice, open to internal critique and revision when confronting new realities; and those who see it as static and doctrinaire. Who should we believe? Joining us on AIAC Talk to debate if the third world still needs Marx are Annie Olaloku-Teriba and Zeyad el Nabolsy. Annie is an independent researcher based in London, working on legacies of empire and the complex histories of race; and Zeyad is a PhD student in Africana Studies at Cornell University, working on African philosophy of culture, African Marxism, and  the philosophy of science and modern African intellectual history.

April 27th is a significant date for two countries on the African continent, separated by more than 5,000 km across the Atlantic ocean. On this day, both Sierra Leone and South Africa celebrate emancipation from minority rule. For Sierra Leone, it was becoming freed from the British in 1961, and for South Africa, the end of apartheid in 1994, some several decades later. 

The period between the moment of emancipation and the contemporary moment marking it has arguably become consequential for considering both country’s fates. In Sierra Leone, that period has been longer as the idea of freedom was at the core of Sierra Leone’s founding over two hundred years ago, and the contestation over the meaning of that concept shaped its political trajectory since. The capital, Freetown, was first founded in the late eighteenth century by British abolitionists. This would set up a unique relationship between Sierra Leone and the British empire. The colony sat at the head of the British colonial administration in West Africa, with a “westernized” black population fit to fill the ranks of the bureaucracy in its colonizing project. A negotiated independence, won without mass struggle, would leave the work of decolonization incomplete, and a series of coups and military dictatorships, would culminate in a devastating civil war between 1991 and 2002. Following that, Sierra Leone took on another epochal mark, becoming a “post-conflict state.” Other than a brief re-appearance to the world as one of the hardest hit places during the Ebola epidemic between 2013 and 2016, plus a general election in 2018, there has been little interest from the international media to go deeper into what’s behind either the successes and failures of the Sierra Leonean national project.

In South Africa, the fascination has often gone the other way—focusing on the country’s  supposed peace. Indeed, the post-apartheid transition period when the African National Congress (ANC) spearheaded negotiations with the National Party are touted as remarkable for avoiding a collapse into civil war. But South Africa is extremely violent. As Africa Is A Country contributing editor Sisonke Msimang recently wrote for Lapham’s Quarterly, “After the historic 1994 elections that installed the ANC as the ruling party, there were hopes that the violence would end. Murders and rapes decreased in the years that immediately followed, but violent crime remained high. The gruesome statistics have once again begun to rise.” And while the mainstream South African media likes to portray this violence as cultural pathology, it too arises from deeper social and political realities, being most pronounced when citizens confront the post-apartheid state on its failures. 

In this week’s episode of AIAC Talk we’re asking what liberation comes after independence. We are joined by Sisonke Msimang, Oluwaseun Babalola, and Ishmael Beah. Sisonke is a South African writer whose work is focused on race, gender, and democracy, and on top of writing for a range of international publications, she is the author of Always Another Country: A memoir of exile and home and The Resurrection of Winnie Mandela (2018). Oluwaseun is a Sierra Leonean-Nigerian-American filmmaker; she founded DO Global Productions, a video production company specializing in documentaries. Her focus is to create and collaborate on projects across the globe, while providing positive representation for people of color; and Ishmael, born in Sierra Leone, is the New York Times bestselling author of A Long Way Gone, Memoirs of a Boy Soldier and Radiance of Tomorrow, A Novel, with his latest novel Little Family released in 2020.

For most football enthusiasts, the last year of matches and competition bore the stamp of something most people think should be kept out of the sport: politics. 

But as former England football manager Sven-Göran Eriksson once said, “There is more politics in football than in politics.” Rather than separate from society, sports are often a mirror of it—a testament to the prevailing attitudes, to the evolving social and economic relations. If our society has become more globalized, commercialized and unequal, then the nature of sport will develop this way too. 

It is in the interests of the footballing world to project an image of itself as both separate from politics, while simultaneously also being ahead of it. For example, sports boycotts are widely lauded as an effective tool against oppressive regimes, and something which sports players, organizations and their investors are historically inclined to do. In the final analysis, sports emerge in divided societies as a “great unifier.” Describing how this narrative plays out in South Africa, the historian Peter Alegi writes:  

In the opening act, the consolidation of apartheid in the 1950s inspires sport activists to build an antiracist network seeking to racially integrate national teams, thereby casting sport in the political spotlight. The second act is set in the 1960s and 1970s as the sport boycott ostracizes white South Africa from the Olympic movement, world football, and nearly every other major sport—important symbolic victories in the larger quest for freedom. The third and final act unfolds against the backdrop of apartheid giving way to democracy in the early 1990s. Segregated sport federations merge into unified, nonracial institutions and South Africa’s re-entry into global sport is celebrated with home victories in the 1995 Rugby World Cup and 1996 African Cup of Nations, unleashing a wave of rainbow nationalist euphoria throughout the sports-mad nation.  

But what would be the more complicated story? What if, rather than simply being made by politics, football itself was something that made politics too. Writing about the history of white football in South Africa, Chris Bolsmann observes that during apartheid, “white football players, organizations, and administrators maintained close links with Britain, the Commonwealth and the notion of Empire and were at the forefront of globalizing football.” 

Chris joins us on AIAC Talk this week to discuss the forgotten entanglement of South African football with English football at the nexus of empire. His most recent journal article is on the great English footballer, Stanley Matthews’ long association with South African football. Together with Peter Alegi, Chris co-edited South Africa and the Global Game: Football, Apartheid and Beyond (2010) as well as Africa’s World Cup: Critical Reflections on Play, Patriotism, Spectatorship, and Space and South Africa (2013).  

To face the worsening political, social and ecological crisis before us (that most acutely affects the poor and working-class), requires effective and coordinated action from South Africa’s progressive forces. What should be the vehicle for this? As Niall Reddy recently wrote (his was the inaugural post in a series of republications, as part of Africa Is a Country’s partnership with the South African Left publication, Amandla), “Social strains look set to keep accumulating. But assuming that any crisis they produce will automatically redound to the Left’s benefit would be folly. That will only happen if we have the political vision and the organizational capacity to ensure that class becomes the fault line of social polarization. And for that, we need to face up to the challenge of constructing a new party.”

In this week’s AIAC Talk, we’re joined by Niall, Mazibuko Jara and Tasneem Essop to discuss and debate the question of whether South Africa’s left needs a new party. Some are not convinced – as this editorial of South African publication New Frame claims, “Party politics as a whole is an expression of the failures of the past quarter of a century and carries no possibility of a viable way forward, let alone any emancipatory prospects.” Instead, “a Left that could find a way out of the gathering crisis would need to be rooted in genuinely popular organisations, grounded in democratic practices, able to speak to the lived experience of the escalating social and political crisis and directly articulated to actual, existing struggles – from workplaces to communities and campuses.”

Or, should we be persuaded by AIAC Talk co-host Sean Jacobs, who, claiming that South Africa needs democratic socialism, wrote with Benjamin Fogel that, “Like it or not the majority of South Africans believe in democracy. Dismissing their belief as false consciousness and elections—which so many fought and died for—as a mere trick of the bourgeoisie, insults our struggle. Any future left project needs to begin with the premise that 1994 marked a victory for democracy and progressive forces, something that should be built upon rather than rejected or dismissed.”

Niall Reddy, from South Africa, is a doctoral student in sociology at New York University, Tasneem Essop is a researcher at the Society, Work and Politics Institute (SWOP) at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, and Mazibuko Khanyiso Jara is an activist, trainer and popular educator and a former national spokesperson of the South African Communist Party also serving on the Amandla editorial collective.