The AIAC Podcast

As the literary scholar and a regular contributor to the site, Bhakti Shringarpure, recently wrote on Africa Is a Country, “Decolonization has taken over our social media timelines with a vengeance. With hundreds of thousands of ‘decolonize’ hashtags, several articles, op-eds, and surveys on the subject—and plenty of Twitter fighting over the term—one thing is clear: decolonization is all kinds of trendy these days. So, we are naturally forced to ask: What counts as ‘authentic’ decolonization in 2020?” For some, decolonization, and its attendant concepts like “decoloniality,” have become something of an empty signifier, too much of a catch-all to meaningfully refer to anything. For others, it raises a complaint still worth addressing: that knowledge production, across universities, media and culture, remains built on a foundation that marginalizes non-Western sources of knowledge.

These debates often proceed as non-starters because there is very little precision over what exactly is being debated. Beyond the terms in use (which is what typically clouds things), there is a need to ask what is decolonization for? For all of its supposed weaknesses as a theory and practice, what need must it be addressing for it to demonstrate such resilience in spite of those weaknesses? This week on AIAC Talk we are exploring two scholars and activists whose body of work, though once marginal, are beginning to grow in prominence as these questions become more pressing. With Bongani Nyoka and Joshua Myers, we will discuss the social and political thought of Archie Mafeje and Cedric Robinson.

In his seminal text, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition, Robinson posits the group of black intellectuals challenging Marxism at the height of anticolonial consciousness as forming a distinct, political tradition, one whose critiques constituted “the continuing development of a collective consciousness informed by the historical struggles for liberation and motivated by the shared sense of obligation to preserve the collective being, the ontological totality.” What should we make of figures like Mafeje and Robinson, and the range of concerns they championed, which, although they did not use the term, could be read as a project to decolonize classical left-wing theory? What informs their resurgence today, and is it a project that in its assertion of an African cultural heritage, eschews the universal? Or, should we take our cue from Mafeje, who in his defense of Africanization in the essay “Africanity: A Combative Ideology” argued that “‘if what we say and do has relevance for our humanity, its international relevance is guaranteed.”

Dr. Bongani Nyoka is a Lecturer in the Department of Political and International Studies at Rhodes University, and is the author of two books on Mafeje: Archie Mafeje: Voices of Liberation (HSRC Press, 2019) and The Social and Political Thought of Archie Mafeje (Wits University Press, 2020). Joshua Myers is an Associate Professor of Africana Studies in the Department of Afro-American Studies at Howard University. He is the author of We Are Worth Fighting For: A History of the Howard University Student Protest of 1989 as well as a new biography of Cedric Robinson, which is called Cedric Robinson: The Time of the Black Radical Tradition, forthcoming with Polity Books.

This year marks 10 years since the Arab Spring began as a protest movement in North Africa and the Middle East, transforming the region and ushering an era of social upheaval still with us today.

Much of the anniversary-related commentary on the legacy of the Arab Spring fixates on how this challenge failed. We are told to look at Egypt, Tunisia, Algeria and especially Libya—things haven’t changed, or they are much worse than before. But, the mistake of this diagnosis is its assumption that the historical process started by the Arab Spring is complete. We are still in the interregnum from which it started, and for Iranian-American scholar Asef Bayat, the Arab Spring typified the political mobilizations characteristic of the interregnum, what he calls the “non-movement”—“Non-movements refers to the collective actions of non-collective actors; they embody the shared practices of large numbers of ordinary people whose fragmented but similar activities trigger much social change, even though these practices are rarely guided by an ideology or recognizable leaderships and organizations.”

For Bayat, the post-2008 outpouring of non-movements constitute “revolution without revolutionaries”—but the journal Endnotes turns this on its head, noting that instead, “we are witnessing the production of revolutionaries without revolution, as millions descend onto the streets and are transformed by their collective outpouring of rage and disgust, but without (yet) any coherent notion of transcending capitalism.” From the Arab Spring itself to moments like #FeesMustFall, the non-movement provides the organizational form for a disorganized age. 

In this episode of AIAC Talk we explore how much longer the revolution will remain deferred, and are joined by Nihal El Aasar and Zachariah Mampilly. Nihal is an Egyptian independent researcher currently based in London and Zachariah is the Marxe Endowed Chair of International Affairs at the Marxe School of Public and International Affairs at Baruch College, which is part of the City University of New York.

For most South Africans, the 29th of March is an unremarkable date, a day like any other. Few recognize the name Dulcie September, or know of her brutal murder in Paris on this day. September was the ANC chief representative for France, Luxembourg and Switzerland in the 1980s, and was the only high-profile ANC member to have ever been assassinated outside of Southern Africa. As Rasmus Bitsch and Kelly-Eve Koopman write in Africa Is A Country, “Her murder has never been solved and September is not a household name in South Africa. Neither of those things are coincidental.”

A new documentary, Murder in Paris, makes a notable contribution to undoing the silence around September. Directed by Enver Samuel, whose most recent films include Indians Can’t Fly in 2015 (about the death in detention of anti-apartheid activist Ahmed Timol), as well as Someone To Blame in 2017 (about the eventual inquest into Timol’s death), the film, which features investigative journalist Evelyn Groenink’s quest to get to the bottom of Dulcie’s murder, adds to a body of work that seeks to relook unresolved and buried apartheid traumas. This week on AIAC Talk, we are pleased to be joined by Enver and Evelyn, author of Incorruptible: The Story of the Murders of Dulcie September, Anton Lubowski and Chris Hani. 

There are many families – like that of Ms September’s – who until now don’t know who took their loved ones, or where they disappeared to. For many, the scars are still fresh, the anger still deep. In our last segment we talk to Madeleine Fullard, who leads the Missing Person’s Task Team, an organization that emerged from the TRC and which is responsible for finding the remains of murdered anti-apartheid activists.

The roots of International Women’s Day originate from the Socialist Party of America organizing a “National Women’s Day” in 1909 to honor a 1908 garment workers strike, and inspired by this, at the International Socialist Women’s Conference the following year, a group of German socialists (including Clara Zetkin, Luise Ziets, Paula Thiede and Käte Duncker) proposed an International Women’s Day. As Cinta Frencia and Daniel Gaido note for Jacobin, for these women, the adoption of the day “meant promoting not just female suffrage, but labor legislation for working women, social assistance for mothers and children, equal treatment of single mothers, provision of nurseries and kindergartens, distribution of free meals and free educational facilities in schools, and international solidarity.”

But, as women continue to wage these struggles, it is important to look beyond the North American and European history, and to recognize the contributions of feminists from elsewhere since as Rama Salla Dieng emphasizes for Africa Is a Country series “Talking back: African feminisms in dialogue”: “There has been a deliberate erasure of generations of women from Africa, The Caribbean, India and Latin America because they contest mainstream feminism so their voices should also be heard, the specificities and nuances of their diverse struggles acknowledged.” So this week on AIAC Talk, we’re interviewing Professor Shireen Hassim, Rosebell Kagumire and Rama Salla Dieng. Shireen, a South African academic, is the Canada 150 Research Chair in Gender and African Politics at Carleton University, Rosebell is a Ugandan writer, award-winning blogger and pan-African feminist, and Rama is a Senegalese writer, activist and lecturer in African and International Development at the Centre of African studies at the University of Edinburgh.

It’s no surprise that streaming services are growing on the African continent. Although Africa is treated as the final frontier of global internet connectivity, its fortunes are fast changing, indicated by heightening efforts to improve digital infrastructure and make data and broadband more readily available. So, as more Africans become digital denizens, streaming services are taking notice – the decision by Netflix in December to appoint Strive Masiyiwa to its board (a Zimbabwean businessman who founded of Liquid Telecom, Africa’s largest independent fibre operator), announces their serious intention to gain a foothold on the continent.

This seems like a good thing. Now more than ever, Africans have access to not just content, but also big-budget content that is locally produced. Netflix, for example, is using original programming as a way to attract African audiences, a market which could grow to 13 million subscribers by 2025. Shows like Queen Sono, Blood & Water and recently, Namaste Wahala, have globally trended and made Africans feel like for once, they are the ones exerting cultural influence on the West rather than it being the other way round. But how true is this actually? As an AIAC contributor pointed out in a review of Queen Sono not so long ago, “Since Hollywood cinematic conventions have been entrenched as hegemonic cinematic conventions, the possibility for international filmmakers to work outside of that mold is almost impossible.”

Consider another recent intervention, this time by the acclaimed American director Martin Scorsese in Harper’s Magazine, suggesting that some artistic integrity can be salvaged through streaming if it’s structured around curation rather than content: “Curating isn’t undemocratic or ‘elitist,’ a term that is now used so often that it’s become meaningless. It’s an act of generosity—you’re sharing what you love and what has inspired you. (The best streaming platforms, such as the Criterion Channel and MUBI and traditional outlets such as TCM, are based on curating—they’re actually curated.) Algorithms, by definition, are based on calculations that treat the viewer as a consumer and nothing else.”

So joining us on AIAC Talk to discuss how digital technologies are changing African film and TV are Mahen Bonetti, Dylan Valley, Sara Hanaburgh and Tsogo Kupa. First, we’ll be joined by Mahen, a pioneer in bringing contemporary African films to Western audiences. In the early 1990s, Mahen started the New York African Film Festival, which changed the way Americans consumed films from and about Africa. Mahen has also firsthand experienced the transformation from primarily offline viewing to being available on streaming services like Netflix, Amazon, Showmax, Iroko TV or Criterion Collection. We want to ask, what does the film festival look like in the age of streaming? And what stories are African filmmakers trying to tell, what makes one worthy of being showcased, and who is watching them anyway?

Then, we’ll talk to Dylan, Sara and Tsogo, who all happen to be AIAC contributors, with Dylan also serving on our editorial board. Dylan is an award-winning documentary filmmaker and lecturer at the University of Cape Town, Sara is a scholar of African literatures and cinemas at St. John’s University, and Tsogo is a writer and filmmaker based in Johannesburg. It was Tsogo who made the observation about Queen Sono cited above, and with the three of them we’d like to explore the general prospects and limitations of streaming on the continent. While the more popular offerings on streaming platforms could crudely be seen as simply “candy floss entertainment,” more “content” in the ocean of mass culture–as distribution mechanisms, do they make it possible to, as Sara asks in a recent piece, “conceive of a future where African auteur films can enjoy shooting and editing on the continent, uninhibited by national and international politics…can African cinema find distribution beyond the festival circuit?”

And actually, what do we make of the category “African cinema” to begin with? Monolithic description, or useful shorthand?

The campaign for global immunization against the SARS-CoV-2 virus is proving tougher than everyone anticipated. The simple reason is that the world was never prepared for something like this. A combination of underfunded and disjointed health systems, dwindling vaccine supplies, and emerging variants compromising the efficacy of the available vaccines have complicated the roll-out for most countries, with many others being unable to even begin as the richest horde stock.

This week on AIAC Talk, we’re looking at both the successes (and shortcomings) of how places in Asia and the Pacific (like Bhutan, Vietnam, Japan and the Indian state of Kerala) responded to COVID-19, widely praised as avoiding the false dichotomy of saving lives or saving livelihoods. We are interested in developing a comparative perspective that refrains from oversimplifying it to a single factor. To help us assess these countries varied efforts we’ll be joined Sakiko Fukuda-Parr, a development economist and professor of International Affairs at The New School, where her teaching and research have focused on human rights and development as well as global health.

Cornel West, the American philosopher: “There were two great men in apartheid South Africa. The first one was the architect of the apartheid system, Hendrik Verwoerd, and the other great figure was his prisoner, Robert Sobukwe.” This edition of AIAC Talk - coinciding with the anniversary of Sobukwe's death in 1978 - explores the latter's life and legacies.

Derek Hook, a South African-born professor of psychology at Duquesne University, and the editor of a recent collection of over 300 of Sobukwe’s letters called "Lie on your wounds: the prison correspondence of Robert Mangaliso Sobukwe" (Wits University Press, 2019). Precious Bikitsha, a history graduate student at the University of Cape Town, researching the writings and contributions of black women to South Africa’s political history,. Phethani Madzivhandila, a pan-Africanist historian, activist and AIAC contributor.

More on Africa Is a Country: http://africasacountry.com

Who exactly is Bobi Wine? Setting aside the system he rejects, what does he stand for? A new podcast series hosted by the Sudanese-American rapper Bas, and produced by Spotify, Dreamville Studios and Awfully Nice aims to probe exactly these questions. The Messenger follows Bobi Wine’s rise from his upbringing and his artistic career all the way to his political prominence. This week on AIAC Talk we’re joined by two of its producers, Dana Ballout and Adam Sjöberg. Dana is a Lebanese-American documentary producer, podcaster and journalist, while Adam is a documentary filmmaker and commercial director based in LA too. We want to ask them what they’re uncovering about Wine, his life story, political influences and worldview. We’d also like to hear about the podcast—who’s behind it, how it came together, and why podcasting was the chosen medium to tell this ongoing story. And why this story?

And then, from unpacking one medium, we move to another. Next, we’re talking to Aimée Bessire and Erin Hyde Nolan. Aimée is an affiliated scholar who teaches African art history and cultural studies at Bates College, and Erin is a visiting assistant professor at Maine College of Art, where she teaches the history of photography, and visual culture, and Islamic art. Both of them, are the authors of Todd Webb in Africa (Thames & Hudson, 2021), a collection of photographs taken in Africa by the renowned photographer Todd Webb. While his shots of everyday life in big, Western cities like Paris and New York are well-known, less so are the ones from his travels in Africa, taken in 1958 across Togo, Ghana, Sudan, Somalia, and what we now know as Malawi, Zambia, Zimbabwe and Tanzania. That some of these countries were once known by different names, summarizes the period of tremendous change and upheaval that the photographs capture, located at the “interstices of colonialism and independence” as the authors write in the book’s introduction. We want to talk about the photographs, the people and places portrayed in them, but we also want to talk about the politics of photography itself—whose gaze reflects them, what narrative are they trying to push? For example, what are we to make of the fact that Webb’s project was commissioned by the United Nations?

Israel's main ally is still the United States. But Israel is also looking to shore up its support elsewhere, particularly in the Middle East and Africa. In the second half of 2020, Israel partially or fully restored diplomatic ties with the UAE and Bahrain in the Middle East, as well as Sudan and Morocco in Africa. Despite Trump’s exit, Israel’s campaign for normalization is not finished yet, and Africa has always been of particular interest to it for obvious reasons. As Netanyahu told Israeli ambassadors to Africa in 2017, "The automatic majority against Israel at the UN is composed—first and foremost—of African countries. There are 54 countries. If you change the voting pattern of a majority of them you at once bring them from one side to the other. You have changed the balance of votes against us at the UN and the day is not far off when we will have a majority there."

This week’s AIAC Talk is devoted to the life, thought and legacy of Amílcar Cabral. Cabral was the complete revolutionary: an astute theoretician, fierce fighter and gracious politician (with a professional background as an agronomist to boot). Part of a generation of anti-colonial leaders who were “gone too soon”—which include the likes of Patrice Lumumba, Thomas Sankara, and Samora Machel—Cabral succumbed to a similar fate, and was assassinated by collaborationists on January 20, 1973 at the young age of 48.

Joining us to discuss Cabral’s legacy are António Tomás and Ricci Shryock. António is an anthropologist, trained at Columbia University and currently teaching in the Graduate School of Architecture at the University of Johannesburg. Using newly available archival resources, António has just written a new biographical study of the life and thought of Cabral, called Amílcar Cabral, the Life of a Reluctant Nationalist (forthcoming, 2021). Ricci is a journalist and photographer living in Dakar, Senegal, covering West and Central Africa. She is also part of Africa Is A Country’s inaugural class of fellows, working on a project about the role of women in Guinea-Bissau’s liberation war.