Ben Okri on "The Spirit of Africa's people"
I call Africans entrepreneurs of the everyday. Operating in an environment of risk breeds ingenuity. My favorite quote from today touches on that way of thinking:
"The African spirit is fundamentally a creative one. It is an aspect of ourselves I don’t think we have fully grasped. We tend to use it negatively: in crises, in difficulties, on the very edges of necessity. But this creativity of the African spirit, used proactively, in sport, in culture, in business, in education, will be the beginning of the African transformation." - Ben Okri
Read more via The Guardian.
Indochina vs. Syria: Approaches to The Migrant and Refugee Crisis
Day by day, it appears that the migrant and refugee crisis in the Mediterranean grows larger. Last week, the horror seems to multiply as 71 migrants were found dead in the back of a lorry on an Austrian highway and a 3-year-old boy was found lifeless on a Turkish beach.
In the face of these tragedies, I find myself wondering why policymakers have failed to act on the moral imperative to assist people fleeing war and devastation. A few months ago, I wrote about how the world could follow the resettlement model adopted during the Indochina refugee crisis of the 50s and 60s. I've struggled to understand why we have not implemented similar policies, but this blog post by Dr. Christopher Phillips, Senior Lecturer in the International Relations of the Middle East at Queen Mary, University of London and Associate Fellow at the Chatham House Middle East and North Africa program, illuminates the complex reasons why the world has hesitated to follow the model deployed in Indochina many years ago.
I encourage you to read the post in its entirety, but here's one standout passage:
Why were western states willing to resettle four times as many Indochinese refugees a year in 1979 as they have been willing to house in total from Syria? Westerners are no worse off or less capable of hosting refugees than they were in the late 70s. Taking arguably the worst offender, Britain, as an example, the economic situation then was not dissimilar to now. In 1979-82 Britain suffered a recession, far worse than the sluggish growth it has faced during the height of the Syria refugee crisis (2012-15). GDP per capita averaged $9k, comparable in today’s prices to the $40k it averaged in 2012-15, while unemployment averaged 7.5%, compared to 7.3% in 2012-15. In another parallel, in May 1979 a Conservative government under Margaret Thatcher came to power on a platform of rolling back the state, one seemingly emulated by David Cameron and George Osbourne today. Yet that government accepted nearly 25,000 Indochinese refugees, compared to 197 from Syria now.
Update: As of 7 September 2015, Britain has agreed to accept 20,000 refugees from Syria by 2020. Germany will spend 6.6 billion to cope with 800,000 migrants and refugees.
The Ugly Truth of Service Discrimination in Ghana (The Daily Graphic/My Joy Online/Ghanaian Observer)
A few days ago, I had an unfortunate experience with racism in a local Ghanaian grocery store. Tired of hearing stories of service discrimination against black Africans in Africa, I decided to write something. The piece below was published in print edition of The Ghanaian Observer and on the My Joy Online website on Friday, September 4, and in The Graphic on Saturday, September 5.
Growing up in the United States, I have been catcalled and demeaned with many a racial epithet. I have experienced everything from being spat at and called the n-word to having my intelligence belittled due to the color of my skin. When I moved to Ghana earlier this year, I was naïve enough to think that I would no longer be forced to endure such mortifying racial incidents. A few days ago, I was proven wrong.
As an African from the diaspora returning to the continent, I expected to feel at home in Ghana, a hub of black excellence that has birthed heavyweights like Kofi Annan, David Adjaye, Taiye Selasi, and so many more. In Ghana, I never thought my blackness would make me a target of negativity, but I was proven wrong a few days ago at Saagar Impex Supermarket, a small Indian specialty grocery store in Osu. After a long day at work, I went into the store to buy some chickpeas. When I entered the store, I was immediately followed. None of the white or Indian patrons received the same amount of attention.
“Do you want a basket?” one of the employees asked. “No,” I replied. After all, I was only going to buy a few things. My response seemed to invite further scrutiny.
I picked up three cans, browsed through the rest of the store then decided to put one can down where I had picked it up. I walked to the counter to buy the other two.
After paying for the chickpeas, I left the store to buy some vegetables at the stand outside. As I walked away, one of the employees of the store ran out to demand I come back into the store. “Madame wants to see you, “ he said.
Confused, I re-entered the store only to have the storeowner declare that she “knew I took something" and demand to see my purse. You could have heard a pin drop as everyone watched. My mind was racing. Did she really think I would bother to steal a 5 cedi can of chickpeas? As the only black patron in a store full of white and Indian customers, did my skin color make me automatically more likely to steal? Too stunned to cause a scene, I handed over my purse for inspection.
Of course, she didn't find anything inside but a few personal items and the 2 cans she had just sold me. Face flushed and embarrassed, I said, "I am no thief and I demand an apology."
Her response? "Well, I don't know" followed by a tense period of silence. I waited until I realized that was all she had to say before informing her I would never come to her store again and leaving the premises.
As I shared this humiliating story with friends and family, it became increasingly apparent that my story is not unique. There are far too many tales in Ghana and across the African continent of people of African descent experiencing service discrimination or being subjected to racially motivated speech. In 2011, an Italian-run Ghanaian seafood restaurant in Accra was under investigation for operating a “white only policy.” Earlier this year in Kenya, a Chinese restaurant in Nairobi was shut down after its “no black policy” was exposed. For years, friends and family members travelling to South Africa have re-counted numerous incidents of being treated as second class citizens, a reality underscored by the 2011 hashtag #CapeTownIsRacist. Prominent black singers, comedians and other black Cape Town tweeted their experiences with racism in Cape Town, South Africa’s most famous tourist destination. These tweets are unsurprising in light of the fact that the South African President once described Cape Town as a “racist place” with an “extremely apartheid system.”
My experience as well as the experiences of the many people who have sent me messages in the past few days has underscored the urgent need for initiatives like the International Decade for People of African Descent, one of the UN’s priority themes for the next ten years. Part of the objective of the Decade is to recognize ongoing discrimination and promote respect for people of African descent, who continue to be disrespected across the world. I never thought this discrimination would occur in Ghana, a country which is almost 97% black, but my experiences yesterday suggest that racism continues even in what would typically be deemed an unlikely place.
As black people in Africa and its diaspora advocate for policies and programs that combat discrimination worldwide, we must first begin to agitate for change at home by making it loud and clear that such all types of discrimination – including black-on-black discrimination – are unacceptable.
We also must acknowledge the sad truth that other races are not the only ones to perpetrate discrimination. Many black people further entrench cultures of disrespect by treating their own as inferior. This was underscored by the participation of Saagar’s black employees in my public humiliation as they followed me, and then idly stood by at my maltreatment by their employer. I have also seen it through the difference in the customer service I have received versus that of my white expatriate friends. I am often told to “be patient and wait” while white colleagues and friends are served more quickly and with significantly more respect.
While racism in the context of the United States is commonly understood to be a system that systematically advances and favors some while subjugating others politically, economically and socially, these dynamics also exist in Ghana, albeit sometimes less visibly. This reality is particularly tragic in Ghana, where although most of the population is black, Ghanaians still favor many Indians, Lebanese, Chinese and white expatriates over other black Ghanaians in the context of service provision.
Needless to say, no matter how much I crave naan or my favorite spices, I will never set foot in that establishment again.
Motherland Moguls: Meet the 2015 She Leads Africa Finalists
While Sub Saharan Africa has the highest rate of female entrepreneurship across the world (27%), these businesses are typically one-woman enterprises with a small consumer base. Social enterprise She Leads Africa is helping solve the problem by identifying and training high-growth African female entrepreneurs. After a pitch competition with 400 applicants from over 30 countries, SLA founders Yasmin Belo-Osagie and Afua Osei have selected six early-stage entrepreneurs who will compete on September 26, 2015 for a $10,000 prize, direct access to investors and international media attention.
A few days ago I was lucky enough to get the chance to do short profiles of the 2015 She Leads Africa finalists. Ayiba Magazine has been one of SLA's media partners since the organization first launched its pitch competition.
Read more about this year's dynamic finalists via the Ayiba website.
On Taylor Swift's Colonial Era Fantasy "Wildest Dreams"
Can someone get Taylor Swift a textbook on cultural sensitivity? When Twitter and culture critics across the country recently schooled the superstar on the meaning of intersectional feminism, Taylor rightly apologized. But less than a month later, Taylor yet again finds herself in hot water. This time, she has drawn the ire of the Twitter-verse for her ill-advised, bizarre new video “Wildest Dreams.”
“Wildest Dreams” appears like a strange white settler fantasy with echoes of Out of Africa, Karen Blixen’s 1937 memoir that was made into a 1985 film starring Meryl Streep and Robert Redford.
The video recalls the sharp satire of Binyavanga Wainaina’s famous Granta essay, “How to Write About Africa”:
“In your text, treat Africa as if it were one country. It is hot and dusty with rolling grasslands and huge herds of animals and tall, thin people who are starving. Or it is hot and steamy with very short people who eat primates. Don't get bogged down with precise descriptions…. The continent is full of deserts, jungles, highlands, savannahs and many other things, but your reader doesn't care about all that, so keep your descriptions romantic and evocative and unparticular."
As a Kenyan, I find myself particularly uncomfortable with this peculiar brand of colonial era nostalgia. Images of white settlement in colonial Kenya are full of safaris and picturesque rolling green fields, but this cocoon of privilege and wealth came at the expense of native Kenyans who were robbed of their land. James Fox’s true crime story, White Mischief, which I am currently reading, details this culture of exploitative excess well:
“The British aristocracy in Kenya, subjected to a tropical climate and a high altitude, suspended between English traditions and African customs, [was] answerable, more or less, only to themselves. These British colonials remained aloof, always on guard, determined that Africa conform to their needs, and accept without question an imported, heightened ideal of privilege, with all its rules and etiquette and yearning for service and luxury…. The Africans responded to this invasion with infinite patience, often to the fury of the memsahibs, who mistook their attitude for sullenness and even stupidity.”
White settlement in Kenya not only restricted the nomadic movement of Kenya’s Maasai, but also deprived the Kikuyu of their ancestral homeland at the base of Mount Kenya and that of the Nandi and Lumbwa. The land disputes created during white settlement are the root of many of the economic and social problems that plague Kenya to the present day.
Taylor Swift’s portrayal of Africa as an idyllic playground devoid of its native black inhabitants obscures the brutality of colonial settlement. She has the right to use any location as a background for a music video, but by enmeshing the African savannah and old Hollywood glamour, she harkens back to a time when the characters of “Wildest Dreams” were brutally exploited. Times weren't so glamorous for those folks.
The ending message of the video seems to indicate that Taylor’s team anticipated this backlash. The video concludes with the following: ““All of Taylor’s proceeds from this video will be donated to wild animal conservation efforts through the African Parks Foundation of America.”
But really, Taylor… what’s good? Even I could have seen this one coming.
Afropunk and Chale Wote: Celebrations of Black Creativity (Ayiba)
Art by Laolu Senbanjo (@laolusenbanjo) Captured by Lamar Graham (@a.beautiful.mind_) http://sumo.ly/apYL via @ayibamagazine
Originally published in Ayiba Magazine
Last weekend in Brooklyn and in Accra, students and activists, fashion designers and artists, musicians and writers gathered to celebrate black creativity.
In Brooklyn, Afropunk, a self-described “platform for the other Black experience,” is a rebellion against labels and stereotypes; it is an avant-garde homage to the complexities of the people of Africa and its diaspora. The rich diversity of people at Afropunk is accurately captured by the widely circulating images of “Afropunk street style” featuring elegant box braid crowns, immaculately picked afros, and a kaleidoscope of perfectly applied lipstick. While artists like SZA, Lion Babe, and Grace Jones took the stage, festival attendees witnessed live creation of art, explored the SpinThrift Market, and spoke their truth on Activism Row.
Chale Wote, a multi-day festival in Accra’s Jamestown, amplifies the voice of African creativities, portraying an alternative pan-African cultural aesthetic. The name of the festival, Chale Wote, means “Man, let’s go!” in the Ga language. According to festival organizers, Accra [dot] Alt, “the Ga people are the custodians of Accra.” During the colonial era, art was the preserve of the elite; however, Chale Wote aims to democratize the consumption and production of art in a neglected part of the city. No less effusive when it comes to thinking outside of the box, Accra’s residents took the streets in their finest. #AnkaraAllDay appeared to be the motto with women and men alike re-imagining traditional fabrics in new styles. Like Afropunk, Jamestown’s High Street became an atelier as artists painted murals in front of curious crowds. At this year’s festival, street performances dominated as the primary form of artistic expression. Popular Accra house DJ Steloolive continued his reign as the city’s King of Fashion as he strolled the street in his signature cap—a grand master of the “aesthetic of the cool.”
Unlike Afropunk, a two-day festival, which primarily takes place in Fort Greene, Chale Wote took over Accra. Expanding beyond the two-day street art festival, festival organizers also engaged Accra’s community of artists and activists, thought-leaders and youth by putting together film screenings and panels.
As I looked at pictures of friends at Brooklyn’s Afropunk and compared them to my own experiences at Chale Wote, I was struck by how black people across the world are firmly rejecting limiting narratives. Too long has the black experience been circumscribed by a media that does not care to showcase laughter alongside pain, success alongside hardship. The black creatives at the forefront of festivals like Afropunk and Chale Wote are re-affirming the rich diversity that exists in the wide umbrella of “black culture” and utilizing these platforms to empower their vision of the world. This world is one in which black people can embrace their freedom of expression, creativity, and sexuality without fear. In times in which we feel compelled to agitate that black lives matter or rail against the Africa the media doesn’t show us, such safe spaces are essential to the preservation of black life, black liberty, and black people’s pursuit of happiness.