Black Looks

• A melancholy moment

  Posted: December 30, 2010, 7:38 pm by Sokari

  
  
  

• Michel Martelly exposed as Stealth Duvalierist

  Posted: December 23, 2010, 8:17 pm by Sokari

  
  
  

  Excellent article by Jeb Sprague on what lies behind the hype of Michel Martelly – stealth Duvalierst

  In the media coverage of Haiti’s ongoing electoral crisis, presidential candidate Michel “Sweet Micky” Martelly, whom ruling Unity party candidate Jude Célestin edged out of Haiti’s Jan. 16 run-off by less than 1%, has been portrayed as the victim of voting fraud and the leader of a populist upsurge against Haiti’s crooked Provisional Electoral Council (CEP).

  Some have questioned his presidential suitability by pointing to his vulgar antics as a konpa musician over the last two decades, where he often made demeaning comments about women and periodically dropped his trousers to bare his backside. The real problem with Martelly, however, is not his perceived immorality, but his heinous political history and close affiliation with the reactionary “forces of darkness,” as they are called in Haiti, which have snuffed out each genuine attempt Haitians have made over the past 20 years to elect a democratic government. Far from a champion of democracy, Martelly has been a cheerleader for, and perhaps even a participant in, bloody coups d’état and military rule.
  

  Duvalierist Affinities
  Under the Duvalier dictatorship, Martelly ran the Garage, a nightclub patronized by army officers and members of Haiti’s tiny ruling class. At a recent press conference, Martelly spoke nostalgically of the Duvalierist era, when François “Papa Doc” Duvalier and later his son Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” enforced their iron rule with gun and machete wielding Tonton Macoutes, a sort of Haitian Gestapo.

  “Today the dog is eating its vomit,” lamented Marcus Garcia of Radio Mélodie FM in a Dec. 8 editorial. While “Michel Martelly openly defends the Duvalier regime in a press conference,” the youth who have been duped into supporting him are “without memory of [the infamous political prison] Fort Dimanche-Fort La mort, without memory of the Nov. 29, 1987 electoral massacre,” when neo-Duvalierist thugs killed hundreds of would-be voters.

  In a 2002 article, the Washington Post explained how the konpa singer was a long-time

  “favorite of the thugs who worked on behalf of the hated Duvalier family dictatorship before its 1986 collapse.”

  But the mainstream media of late has yet to pick up on the singer’s past affiliations. Duvalierist affinities should not be taken lightly. Human rights groups such as the League of Former Political Prisoners and Families of the Disappeared compiled a partial list of several thousand of the Duvalier regime’s victims, which was published in Haïti Progrès in 1987, but total estimates of those killed under the U.S.-backed 29-year long dictatorship range from 30,000 to 50,000 people. After Baby Doc’s fall in February 1986, a mass democratic movement, long repressed by the Duvaliers, burst forth and became known as the LAVALAS, or flood. Martelly quickly became a bitter LAVALAS opponent, making trenchant attacks against the popular movement in his songs played widely on Haitian radio.

  The Rise of Aristide and the 1991 Coup
  Following his dramatic election with 67% of the vote in Dec. 16, 1990 elections, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, a former parish priest and LAVALAS movement leader, was inaugurated on Feb. 7, 1991 as Haiti’s democratically elected president, but then deposed by a military coup, for the first time, on Sep. 30, 1991, only eight months into his first term. Martelly “was closely identified with sympathizers of the 1991 military coup that ousted former President Jean-Bertrand Aristide,” the Miami Herald observed in 1996.

  The military junta that ruled Haiti between 1991 and 1994 was bloody and brutal. According to Human Rights Watch, some 5,000 people were murdered by the junta’s soldiers and paramilitaries, and thousands more tortured and raped. Hundreds of thousands were driven into hiding and exile.

  Martelly became the coup’s joker, applauding the junta while it was in power. He was friends with the dreaded Lt. Col. Michel François, who, as Police Chief, was the principal director of the coup’s executioners.

  For instance, according to a fact-finding report by former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark’s Haiti Commission of Inquiry into the Sep. 30 Coup d’Etat, François drove a red Jeep leading several buses full of soldiers into large crowds demonstrating against the coup on the Champ de Mars in front of the National Palace on the night of Sep. 30, 1991. (A January 1991 coup d’état, nine months earlier, had been turned back by such massive demonstrations.) The crowds applauded the soldiers, thinking they had come to put down the coup. Instead, on François’ signal, the bus windows opened, then police and soldiers mowed down hundreds of demonstrators with machine- gun fire.

  Martelly claims his moniker “Sweet Micky” (also the name of his band) came from a nightclub performance in 1988, but it’s a nickname Col. Michel François also shared. U.S. documentary filmmaker and writer Kevin Pina recalls a concert at the El Rancho Hotel in Port-au-Prince in July 1993 where:

  Colonel “Michel François, … who was also called ‘Sweet Micky’ after the coup of 1991 because people claimed he would have a broad smile on his face as he killed LAVALAS partisans, took to the stage” and “held up Martelly’s hand announcing to the crowd, ‘This is the real Sweet Micky.’” Pina adds, “That’s the first time I ever heard Martelly referred to as such.”

  One concert that Martelly performed at the request of Michel François and military junta leaders was billed as a demonstration against Dante Caputo, the United Nations special representative to Haiti who was attempting to deploy UN human rights observers into the country. At that same time, the Haitian army and the infamous FRAPH death squads were slaughtering members of the anti-coup resistance.

  Martelly, known at the time to have many friends throughout the military, explained to the Miami New Times:

  “I didn’t accept [the request to play] because I was Michel François’s friend, I did not accept because it was the Army. I went because I did not want Aristide back.”

  Most shockingly, Father Jean-Marie Vincent (who was killed by a coup death-squad on Aug. 28, 1994) accused Martelly of accompanying the Haitian police on deadly night-time raids to track down suspected LAVALAS resistance leaders.

  “We have information that Michel Martelly has been traveling with death squads from the police when they go out at night to hunt and kill LAVALAS leaders,” Vincent told filmmaker Pina in a videotaped interview.

  After Aristide returned to Haiti in October 1994, Martelly spent most of his time living “in a condo on Miami Beach,” where he “had a regular gig at the Promenade on Ocean Drive, where his band Sweet Micky performed compas, rhythmic Haitian dance music,” according to the Miami New Times.

  In 2000, Aristide was overwhelmingly elected to a second term. But the George W. Bush administration, also coming into power at that time, launched a destabilization campaign to overthrow Aristide, which is detailed in Peter Hallward’s 2007 book Damming the Flood. Martelly became a willing participant in that germinating coup.

  In 2002, the noose was tightening around Aristide.

  Former soldiers had attempted a coup on Dec. 17, 2001, and the U.S. aid embargo was taking its toll. Nonetheless, Aristide’s government had launched several social investment programs including food cooperatives, the building of unprecedented numbers of schools, subsidization of school books, and other literacy promotion.

  In his 2002 Carnival song, Martelly referred “to recent riots at a dockside warehouse here that were sparked by word that officials from Aristide’s party were stealing from a food program for the poor,” wrote the Washington Post. Although corruption under Aristide paled next to that under the 1991 military junta that Martelly supported, his Carnival song hit a nerve. By 2003, Martelly was on average spending $150,000 to $200,000 on his floats for Port-au-Prince’s annual Carnival, according to the Miami Herald. During Carnival, in which mockery of the government is a tradition, Martelly aimed extremely sharp and vulgar criticism at Aristide.

  During that time, “Kolonget manman ou Aristide” was one of Sweet Micky’s refrains, perhaps the worst curse one can make in Kreyòl, meaning literally “the slave master fucked your mother.”

  The 2004 Coup and its aftermath
  In February 2004, Aristide was driven from power yet again. A U.S. Navy Seal team took the president from his home – Aristide called it “a modern kidnapping” – and sent him into exile in Africa, where he remains to this day. In the build-up to that coup, so-called “rebels” composed of former Haitian Army soldiers and former FRAPH death-squad paramilitaries, ran raids into Haiti’s Central Plateau and North, savagely executing dozens of Aristide supporters, government offi cials and some of their family members.

  Wyclef Jean, a friend of Martelly, described the “rebels” as freedom fighters “standing up for their rights.” Following the coup, U.S., French, and Canadian soldiers occupied Haiti and set up an illegal de facto regime. As outcry against the February coup grew, Martelly held a concert in Port-au-Prince in April 2004 to counter calls for Aristide’s return. The concert was entitled: “Keep him out!”

  In September 2004, Tropical Storm Jeanne flooded the northwest city of Gonaïves, killing some 3,000 people. U.S.-installed de facto Prime Minister Gérard Latortue was widely criticized for his ineffective and belated response to the disaster. One of his few initiatives was to hold a fundraiser with business leaders of the Haitian American Chamber of Commerce. Martelly, who had used his music only to undermine Aristide, headlined the Latortue gala, the Miami Herald reported. In 2006, with LAVALAS militants driven into hiding, jailed, or murdered, the Latortue regime held an election which brought former-President René Préval back to power. The LAVALAS base supported Préval, thinking he would bring Aristide back, free all the coup’s political prisoners, and reverse the neo-liberal march of the Latortue dictatorship.

  But Préval betrayed these expectations, creating a government dominated by coup supporters and working closely with the foreign military occupation which had now been handed off to the UN.

  He soon became reviled by large swathes of the poor for failing to enable Aristide’s return or to restart many of Aristide’s popular social investment programs. By 2009, Préval’s CEP banned Aristide’s party, the Lavalas Family (FANMI LAVALAS), from partial senatorial elections and later presidential and parliamentary elections. Préval’s weak response to the catastrophic January 2010 earthquake accelerated his decline.

  The 2010 Selections and Martelly’s Rise
  Finally, the CEP fixed general elections for Nov. 28, 2010. The Associated Press reported Dec. 10 that Martelly’s “political popularity took off in the weeks before the vote and seems to have surged since it appeared he had been narrowly disqualified from the race.” This surge owes a lot to Martelly’s hi-tech campaign, which outgunned and outclassed his 18 rivals by launching tens of thousands of computerized messages asking people to vote for him. Martelly hired a slick Spanish public relations firm to manage his campaign and break into the spotlight.

  “The Madrid-based Sola, who played an indispensable role in getting Mexico’s Felipe Calderón into the president’s chair in 2006, has been running the Martelly campaign for the past seven weeks, which goes a long way toward explaining how the antic-prone musician suddenly emerged as a leading contender for Haiti’s presidency,” reported The Toronto Star on Dec. 6.

  Calderón is widely considered to have stolen the 2006 election from leftist candidate López Obrador, a dirty victory which pleased Washington.

  The firm Ostos & Sola has also helped the campaign of Lech Walesa, the transnational elite’s darling in Poland. Damian Merlo, Ostos & Sola’s executive director and Martelly campaign point-man, worked on the presidential campaign of U.S. Republican John McCain before joining the firm. All of these associations raise questions about what “hidden hand” may be behind the Martelly campaign.

  “Today’s $50 million question: who is the Miami businessman who reached out to Antonia Sola to be Michel Martelly’s campaign fixer?” wrote the Toronto Star. “Sola smiles at the question, all Spanish charm. He’s not saying. ‘A friend, a businessman, presented Michel to us in the U.S.,’ he says.” The key to Sola’s formula for Martelly was to present him as an “outsider,” even though he had been the ultimate “insider” with the procoup bourgeoisie that overthrew Aristide twice.

  On Nov. 28, as it became apparent that Haiti’s election was riddled with fraud and disenfranchisement, Martelly joined with 11 other candidates to call for election’s annulment. But later that day, Edmond Mulet, who heads the UN Mission to Stabilize Haiti (MINUSTAH), personally called Martelly to tell him that he was leading, Al Jazeera reported. Sweet Micky, without even telling the other candidates in the impromptu front, jumped back in the race. The next day, Martelly denied he had ever signed the joint letter read in his nodding presence at the candidates’ joint press conference on Nov. 28 calling for the election’s annulment. He explained:

  “his change of position by saying his candidacy had been leading in polling stations where there had not been fraud,”Chicago’s Daily Herald reported.
  “He saw all the fraud happening on election day,” motorcycle taxi driver Weed Charlot told IPS about Martelly. “But now he sees he has some votes and power. So he’ll accept the election.”

  The same day he spoke to Martelly, Mulet called candidate Mirlande Manigat to also tell her she was leading in the vote. She too pulled out of the candidates’ annulment front. Then, on Dec. 7, the CEP announced that Manigat was leading with Unity’s Célestin in second-place, and hence the second-round. Martelly, who apparently came in third with just over 21%, about 6,800 votes short of Célestin, switched back into protest-mode. Popular anger was already high with Préval and the CEP for excluding the LAVALAS Family (FANMI LAVALAS) (only 23% of Haiti’s 4.7 million voters turned out, according to the CEP). The election mess was the last straw.

  Furthermore, there was rage at MINUSTAH for attempting to cover-up that its troops in Mirebalais had accidentally introduced cholera into Haiti, where the disease is now a pandemic. With Wyclef Jean at his side predicting “civil war,’ Martelly channeled the deep popular frustration to attack the government for “robbing” him of a victory he claimed should have been his. The result has been a wave of election-related mayhem.

  “It is clear that most of the acts of violence in Haiti around the election have been carried out by Martelly’s supporters,” said Ricot Dupuy of Radio Soleil d’Haïti, based in Brooklyn. “Thousands of his supporters have paralyzed the capital and other cities in protests that included attacks on public buildings,” Reuters reported. Some people have died in driveby shootings and skirmishes between Martelly’s supporters and those of Célestin. In late November, Haitian journalist Wadner Pierre witnessed a group of Martelly supporters at the Building 2004 voting center in Port-au-Prince throw rocks and chant: “If you don’t let us vote, we will burn this building down.”

  Martelly supporters are responsible for burning a number of government buildings in the capital and in the southern city of Aux Cayes. They have also assaulted some opponents, while Célestin backers have been accused of killing at least one Martelly supporter.

  Former Col. Himmler Rébu said on Haiti’s Signal FM that he had witnessed the tactics of Martelly’s troops in the street. “This is not something simple,” he said, a Kreyòl understatement that implies there are hidden forces at work. In short, there are two movements in Haiti today which are being simplified into one. There are the LAVALAS masses mobilized against Préval’s fraudulent exclusionary elections and the UN occupation, as well as for Aristide’s return.

  Then there is the bid by Martelly, using his and Wyclef’s celebrity and Ostos & Sola’s scientific techniques, to co-opt this movement to bring him to power. To confuse people, he equates Préval with Aristide, pretending they are the twin governments responsible for the “failed policies” of the past two decades. In reality, Haiti’s sad state today can be mostly attributed to the 1991 and 2004 coups which Martelly supported.

  Furthermore, the power behind Préval – Haiti’s pro-coup bourgeoisie – is close to Martelly, and imperialism is not threatened by him. We are witnessing a fierce rivalry between two factions which share the same two backers: Haiti’s anti-LAVALAS business class and transnational elites with the U.S. as their most powerful state apparatus.

  As Martelly explained to the Huffington Post’s Georgianne Nienaber, he is very much in tune with Washington’s prescription for Haiti, supporting

  “anything that will help exports… anything that will help the private sector.” Secondly, Martelly does not support the people’s call to end the UN occupation of Haiti: “I want to say to the international community, the diplomatic corps, and non-governmental agencies that we need them,” he said in the same interview.

  Ultimately, Martelly is not a “dark horse” candidate, as Canada’s Globe & Mail suggests, who has come out of nowhere to lead “Haiti’s young and dispossessed.” He is a man with a long history of service to Haiti’s “Morally Repugnant Elite.” During his campaign, Martelly was fond of saying that in Haiti “it’s more about the man than about the plan.” If this is true, Haitians should have grave misgiving about a man who has backed two coup regimes that used death-squads to silence the poor majority and throttle Haiti’s nascent democracy.

• It’s only out of our hands if we don’t want to pick it up*

  Posted: December 22, 2010, 7:42 pm by Sokari

  
  
  

  It’s been just over three weeks and I am finally getting a sense of the destruction to the people and the city of Port-au-Prince.  My original plan to meet with women organising in the community has  fallen short of what I had hoped due to family crisis, cholera, election protests and now petrol shortages.   This is my final week and we have a bunch of  meetings planned from the past 3 weeks to fit in before I leave .Still I feel I have met sufficient community activists to get a sense of the truly amazing work they are doing and I will write of these in my final piece, but the story has changed and that in itself is a Haitian story and in this year,  more so than usual.    The earthquake is unavoidable and the intensity of the destruction is overwhelming.   There is a randomness about the destruction. Whole streets destroyed except for one building and in others the whole street standing with one structure collapsed.

  All over there is rubble which in parts occupies half the street and often in competition with the “Preval’s International Filth” -  the huge mass of refuse which threatens everyone’s existence except the pigs which grow fat from endless munching.   No one should be forced to live in such an environment and no matter how much you try to clean your own patch, and people do this all the time in an almost continuous motion, its going to make very little difference if there is no where for the rubbish to go.

  The issue of large amounts of street refuse and unsanitary conditions is not peculiar to Haiti by any means.   But here it is compounded by the earthquake devastation, the IDP camps and now cholera.   And neither here nor in Nigeria or most other places is sanitation  given the priority it requires.  Rea tells me refuse collection and sanitation is used by political opponents to discredit one another for example in 2002 she was in charge of a cleaning crew in.  They would go out at night clean the streets but the next day the streets would be full of refuse again.   One particular day they hid and were able to catch the rubbish dumpers who were working for a political opponent in the area.

  I call it “Preval’s International  Filth” because its a reflection of  their disdain and disrespect for the Haitian people.    Why should cleaning the city be left to a few men and women of  the Yele Corps when it is the responsibility of the government and all those driving around in trucks with “humanitarian” signs painted neatly on the side and who control the means to clean up the city.  Especially now in the time of cholera.

  The great white stomping  tanks and trucks guzzle the streets.  Young men with brown and black faces, their blue helmets bobbing up and down – Brazil, Guatemala, Nepal, Nigeria – holding the grey steel of their weapons in one hand and their crutches in the other, they gaze blankly at the streets below their high top perch.   In her 2004 novel, Memories of an Amnesiac describes the 1915 invasion by and subsequent occupation by the US  until 1934 as “the boots” – “the boots” returned in 2004 and remain today….

  “The first to have seen them.  Who was the first? The one who received the first slap?  They should have known, or at least foreseen the end, to worry that person.  Leaving her house?  Or rather strolling down the street, looking at the interior of stores not knowing that no one would remember that first day.   What was she thinking of? What went on in her head, in her heart? What happened to her body in front of all these foreign beings? She closes her eyes, opens them; was she blind? Her ears perceive the sound of footsteps, this dull sound of boots on the beaten path.  She tries to count. One, twenty-five, ten thousand.  What does it matter.   They are here.  Within earshot, the sound gets closer.  Motionless, she sense their approach.  She wants to run away. But where? The boots walk past her without noticing the presence of the only witness.  Anonymous.  The boots could care less about this lone blind person, petrified at the corner of a street.   The boots could care less about this country.  The boots know nothing.  They have been sent, they have been given orders, they have embarked on gigantic boats.  The boots have left their wives and children behind.   Perhaps the boots felt like crying.  One must not feel sorry for them.   One must remember everything, all of it.  For the blind man, they will remain the boots of the first day.  Later on, he will no longer hear the sound of the footsteps.  His ears will fill up with the noise of guns and shots.  Later on, he will understand that his ears had not fooled him.  These boots on the damp soil [it was raining that day], the boots were the Other.    Maybe on that very same day, did the boots become canons and guns? It is only necessary to determine the exact moment the blind man became aware of the change.  At the moment when faking a smile was no longer needed? The day when what had been for so long took place.”  [Memoir of an Amnesiac by Jan J Dominique]

  Six weeks ago the international media was full of reports on the outbreak of cholera now it has largely been forgotten but for the people of Haiti it remains a daily reality.  The second week I was here, a neighbour, an elderly woman died and the other family members were all sick but fortunately they have recovered.   Last Monday I walked just 10 meters across the path to buy some soft drinks from a young man and his wife and of course we exchanged money.   24 hours later he was in hospital with cholera and now no one will buy drinks from his wife so in addition to the illness the family have lost their very meagre income.    I had exchanged money with him and could not remember whether I washed my hands before touching my mouth.   Someone gives a kiss – the passing of affection becomes the passing of infection as  few days later she discovers the woman has cholera.    The young children all play together so of course they are especially vulnerable even if they wash their hands before eating.   So the cholera is passing from person to person and is very very real for all of us.  On Wednesday and Thursday last week I visited a family member in hospital and on both occasions whilst waiting outside someone arrived with a cholera victim.  In the early hours of Friday people were seen in Martissant 25 running with wheel barrows carrying cholera victims.    More of the women from Bobin who I was supposed to meet my first week have fallen ill together with their families and there is no doubt in my mind that these stories are replicated throughout the country.  Everyone is at risk.   Outside of Port-au-Prince the problem is worse.  In Jérémie the hospitals can no longer cope and for those small villages with no hospital or clinic people just die.

  Rea and I discussed the idea of giving out rubber gloves to the traders in this community to protect them and their customers but we only have a limited supply of gloves for the moment.     During my first week I was down by a river on the edge of town and spoke to groups of women who were washing clothes about how they were managing to get clean water.  All said they were buying purifying tablets from the market and one woman said she used bleach.  This again is a problem as one has to be careful that the right quantities of bleach and water are used and the question remains as to the long term medical consequences of using these methods.

  Tents are everywhere from huge camps of ten thousand, to medium ones,  small ones and the occasional single tent alone.   Blue and grey tarps [USAID gifts from the American people reminding us of their omnipresence] together with tents of all shapes, sizes and colours are woven into the ruins of buildings, perched on top of buildings and attached to buildings.    Recently I received an email from a tent spammer who must have picked up I was in Haiti and sent me a list of tarps and tents at discount prices.  This is not how people should be forced to live even for a short period let alone a year and there is no hope of change on the horizon.  I think of other refugee camps like the Palestinian camps in Beirut and the Saharawi’s of Tinduff in the southern Algerian Sahara both of which have been in existence for thirty odd years.  What passes through your mind passes mine…. It cannot be possible.

  And there are the wounds – amputees with arms, legs, feet and hands missing, scared faces and bodies.   Many of the wounds are not visible like the woman who stands alone on a street by a food vendor.  She stands mouthing words silently to herself and waving her arms in gentle movements almost as it they are being pushed into motion  by the gentle sea breeze of the night.

  Its easy to forget PAP is by the sea. I only spot the occasional glimpse of the grey green waters far away.   These are deceptive. The channels in the city which lead to the sea are full of refuse and sewage.  Last time I was here we ate a lots of fish and seafood. One day we were in a supermarket where there were packets of frozen fish.   I asked Rea if there was a fresh fish market in the city.  She replied she no longer buys fresh Haitian fish because of the sewage which flows into the sea and the danger of Kolera.  Two days later she cooked me fish.   That is the nature of this wonderful family.  In  my own silence like a voyeur of the mind, I wonder what tragedy lies behind the faces of the people who survived.  Whose homes survived? Whose didn’t.  Who lost loved ones, neighbours and friends. Who are those that face a lifetime of injury and loss.  At the school I meet a young girl who was lifted from the rubble after two days.  Another whose family home collapsed and they lost everything.  Another whose father died and another and another.  Some are living in camps, some with family, some far from their destroyed homes, some have gone to the country and never returned.

  In Champ Mars  lies the remains of the  crushed palace looking like a broken wedding cake along side which there are thousands and thousands of tents.  The ones on the outer parameters facing the main boulevard have set up shop providing, barbers, beauty salons, seamstresses, vendors of food and other necessities.  Rising above the devastation of Port-au-Prince in  twisted irony, the three heros of the revolution remain standing – Toussaint L’Overture, Jean-Jacques Dessalines and Henri Christophe.  Do they speak of a fallen people or to a people on the verge of rising once again?  The weirdest structure still standing is the “2004” cone tower soaring above the whole city and built by President Aristide.  No one seems to know what exactly it represents but I take it to be a symbol of the “2nd Haitian revolution” – the flood of Lavalas.  It speaks, you are trying to kill us but we are not dead yet, there is a 3rd revolution to come.  In the now infamous recitation of Toussaint L’ Ouverture on his forced exile to France, Aristide spoke on his similar forced exile in January 2004

  “In overthrowing me they have only felled the tree of Negro liberty…..It’ll shoot up again, for it is deeply rooted and its roots are many” [quoted from “Create Dangerously by Edwidge Danticat]

  All we have to do is struggle and wait for that moment which in turn will become a history of this great Black country.

  * Taken from a James Baldwin quote on the myth of helplessness

  “I do not believe in the twentieth century myth that we are all helpless, that it’s out of our hands.  It’s only out of our hands if we don’t want to pick it up”.  [James Baldwin “From Nationalism, Colonialism, and the United States: One Minute to Twelve - A Forum” published in “The Cross of Redemption”]

• Secrets?

  Posted: December 21, 2010, 5:47 pm by Mia Nikasimo

  
  
  

  Khulisa invites our secrets
  My defences are sawn off
  I have no secrets to keep.

  Khulisa invites our secrets
  I wonder what safe space
  There is for vulnerability?

  Khulisa invites our secrets
  I call friends to do a test run.

  I’m not here laying blame!

  Khulisa invites our secrets
  I’m a woman, a mountain
  An ant & I’m proud to be.

  Khulisa invites our secrets
  Are mission statements
  Protective enough?

  Khulisa invites our secrets
  Out in the open to play
  Who mends our wounds?

  Khulisa invites our secrets
  ‘If you decide to keep Secrets

  ills will surely follow!’

  Khulisa invites our secrets
  I want to tell it as it is
  For this I’m woman enough

  Khulisa invites our secrets
  I will tell the truth if at last
  And still sit with my pain.

  Khulisa invites our secrets
  Can this safe space resist ‘Black & white’
  Traditions so deep and steeped?

  Mia Nikasimo (c) April 2009

• Music from Saharan cell phones

  Posted: December 19, 2010, 4:23 pm by Sokari

  
  
  

  Music from Saharan cell phones is a compilation of music shared between cell phones owners in Mali.

  Just to clarify, the music was not collected from “discarded” or “abandoned” cellular phones as has been reported. It’s a sort of funny, the notion that one could find memory cards or cellphones lying around in the trash. No, although an interesting story, the music was simply copied. In the effort of cultural exchange, I traded for a few Townes Van Zandt albums; we’ll see if they’ve survived next time I’m back in Kidal.

  The music can be downloaded here

• Fears of a celibate woman

  Posted: December 17, 2010, 6:16 pm by Sokari

  
  
  

  I want to share a write up by Koluki on London’s “Black History Month” which featured my friend, Chinwe Azubuike – one of the few people I seriously miss now I am away from London. Chinwe is also an occasional contributor to Black Looks in the past. Koluki’s blog is also one of those I haven’t read for a while so I am glad she left a comment which reminded me to visit.

  - A presentation by Chinwe Azubuike, a female contemporary voice from Africa, born in Lagos, Nigeria, who describes herself as a spokeswoman for Nigeria’s deprived class.

  This last one was that which touched me the most, not least because it was protagonised by a woman. Throughout the presentation of her campaign denouncing violence against women, specifically against widows in Nigeria, and the performance of some of her poems, I was moved almost to tears at times.

  There I was in front of this short, slim, yet strong young lady who, with her short-cut hair – which reminded me of exactly how I used to wear mine (… for that I would either go to a barber’s shop or cut it myself, and sometimes my late partner, who also liked it very much that way, would cut it for me…) when I was about her age and had also just published my humble first, and so far only, book of poems – holding all my attention and emotions, between the gravity and tension of the subjects she is dealing with and the distension and pleasure of a frank smile conveying to her audience the idea that suffering and healing are facts of life: the first being inflicted upon us by others (and sometimes by ourselves), the second being brought about by our conscious decision to stop both the causes and the consequences of that suffering.

  Fears Of A Celibate Woman

  The selfish lust of man
  Has
  earned him my doubt and distrust.

  With this vast body of desires,
  I
  feel forsaken

  Who is fit to uncross my twisted legs
  And throw them
  wide apart?
  For my core is burning

  Oh! You knight in shining Armour,
  Come and prove me wrong.

  She followed the paused, pulsating, reflexive (and reflective) reading of each poem (just as I would read my own) by a short explanation – something that I never did with mine, either verbally or in writing (except of late with some I’ve published on this blog), because it is my belief that poetry either succeeds at being self-explanatory or is innefective. She also somehow concurred to this assertion by saying after the first reading that it “probably wasn’t fair to do that as the author should just leave it to the audience to make sense of the poem.” However, in doing so, she was also implicitly acknowledging something that I have experienced myself: the risk of our poems’ intended message being lost in “the senses” (translation … transliteration… prejudgements… prejudices… meaning… projection … association… appropriation…) the audience, or the reader (not to mention the, often reckless, critics…), may discretionarily attach to them – but then, that’s the gamble inherent to poetry writing, especially that of the symbolic kind, isn’t it?
  

  To The Memories Of Homage

  I still remember the duty your
  lips pay
  left and right as you walk
  down the aisle of people back in
  motherland

  The responses of women
  with wrappers wrapped high above
  their breasts
  busy, bustling with wares to be assembled for an early sale
  in the glowing warmth of the morning sun
  They never forget to respond~
  with the chewing sticks stuck in their mouths
  They never forget to call
  out your name
  even before a salute leaps out of your lips

  I still
  remember the sequential interference
  of greetings that stops you in your
  track
  to enquire the fate of your house-hold
  and livestock if you
  possess any
  At times irritating, but all in good faith
  by well meaning
  hearts and acts of brotherliness

  I remember the rebukes your
  unintentional mind attracts
  from those who surpass your age when morals
  evade you
  The slogan says ‘it is not love’
  yet we engaged in it without
  ceasing
  it gave and earned us respect

  So whenever I see familiar
  faces here
  who avert their eyes,
  I wonder what they think salutation
  depicts.

  Well, at the end I took the opportunity to thank Chinwe for her beautifully crafted poems and to briefly say how much the underlying themes of both her poetry (e.g. the loss of her father, celibacy, or the sense of solitude and isolation in the diaspora with that permanent longing for echoes of the motherland in each of our smiles lost in those on the streets or at bus stops we momentarily think might be one of our own but really don’t want to know us) and her campaign (the ritual – both symbolic and physical – humiliation, moral degradation and prosecution of widows in Nigeria) were so close to some of my own life experiences.

  I also shared with her and the rest of the audience the trials of widows in Southern Africa (particularly those in countries most affected by the HIV/AIDS pandemic in the region) which are very similar to those she described as happening in Nigeria, albeit for different reasons and in differing cultural settings, and how, for example, the passing of the 2005 Family Law in Mozambique (see details here and here) was a significant landmark in addressing some of these issues and their root causes.

  But throughout, perhaps the only thing I really wanted to tell her but didn’t muster was something along the lines “do you know that there are women who are deprived even of the right to widowhood?”

  - While looking up on the net for some more information about Chinwe, who also forms part of Exiled Writers Ink, a collective of artists and writers, I found out that she was featured earlier this year at my good friend Sokari’s Black Looks;

  - I also visited the website of one of the organisations to which her campaign is linked, which also works with partners and associations of widows in countries where widowhood is a problem in terms of human rights abuses, discrimination, marginalisation, poverty and violence, such as Nigeria, Kenya, Rwanda, Angola, The Democratic Republic of the Congo and Uganda, Widows For Peace Through Democracy – where I came across an organisation which might be worth exploring just for its name: The Organisation of Strong Women who Live Alone .

• What New World Order ?

  Posted: December 15, 2010, 3:41 am by Mia Nikasimo

  
  
  

  What’s new there then? Every time the powerful dream of carnage They call it, “a new world order!” and the rest of us; Lambs to pots Lap it up double time with “Oh my God” condemnation of dissenters. Homage Africa, what’s new about our this wam-bam-thank-you plots?

  Just this, Just this! The fact that over time it has became fashionable to Call, the name, ‘God’ in vain. How so? Bear with me. How do u reply, Respond when you come face to face with the uncanny? Offence? Homage Africa, I want you all; I want you all to know your mind’s sigh…

  What new world order? Oh yes, is this Europe world without Africa? I don’t want to hark on about that duality. Oh, you mean homo hetero, Then? Yes, yes, what about the rest of us then? What, we don’t fit your Absurd self-narrative? ‘Besides,’ you said in spanglish. ‘I’m numero uno?’

  Stop supplanting God’s name blind as bats with your fixed minds… When faced with lesbian daughters, gay sons, bisexual daughters or Sons; blind rage is no answer. How far into the past must we travel Homage Africa, anger won’t loosen tightened shackles or sooth sore!

  I feel so sore right now, I feel so sore emotionally, Oh my God? When faced with transsexuals, intersexes, queers or question children You scream: “unnatural this, unnatural that, spreading cancerous fear. Homage Africa, stop spreading master norms; our land, our brethren

  Migrant homo/hetero-nationalism came from the same soup exclusion; A mind in turmoil scurries for answers & as ever, ever misunderstand Our failings evoke, “Oh my God!” as if for peace out of complicit moons. Homage Africa, foreign religion, foreign approval; check your hand!

  What world order makes your thrust right, ‘oh my God,’ righteousness?
  When your meaning is, ‘What an affront to all you hold dear, dear?’ This new world order of yours is yours. Invisible shackles, invisible… Homage Africa, don’t prolong this torment; our conditioned minds, our fear.

  Mia Nikasimo © October 2010

• NAIJA Voices: We are also Nigerians!

  Posted: December 14, 2010, 6:09 pm by Sokari

  
  
  

  Kayode Ogundamisi meets the voices of Nigeria during the October 1st In[dependence] Day in Abuja

  Main stream media did focus on the “kings and queens” the “very important persons” I was only keen to get the voice of the Nigerian, the unknown heroes and Heroines who make Nigeria great. Those who never get a mention on mainstream platforms. Towards the end of my video I arrived the bomb blast scene and it is to those unknown Nigerians that I dedicate my efforts to. That day October 1st 2010 was a day of celebration for the Nigerian government who had spent a scandalous 17.9 billion Naira on a jamboree for ordinary Nigerians and NAIJAS it was a day of Sorrow, Tears, and Blood “Viewer Discretion Is Advised” Project facilitated bywww.saharareporters.com Kayode Ogundamisi

• The Lost Kingdoms of Africa

  Posted: December 10, 2010, 6:02 pm by Eccentric Yoruba

  
  
  

  BBC Four’s “The Lost Kingdoms of Africa” is a series presented by Dr Gus Casely-Hayford a student of African culture and history and an art historian. The four episodes that make up the series start with this refrain;

  The African continent is home to nearly a billion people. It has an incredible diversity of communities and cultures, yet we know less of its history than almost anywhere else on earth.

  But that is beginning to change. In the last few decades, researchers and archaeologists have begun to uncover a range of histories as impressive and extraordinary as anywhere else in the world.

  The series reveals that Africa’s stories are preserved for us in its treasures, statues and ancient buildings – in the culture, art and legends of the people.

  This sets the stage for fascinating and eye-opening insights into the histories of some of Africa’s “forgotten” kingdoms. Dr Hayford travels through several countries including Tanzania, Sudan, Ethiopia, Nigeria, Mali and Zimbabwe in search of amazing information on four prominent African kingdoms of Nubia, Ethiopia, Benin and Great Zimbabwe.
  
  Each series starts with Dr Hayford posting a couple of questions which he has answers to by the end. So far I’ve seen the episodes on Nubia and Ethiopia both of which are really stunning and full of information. The one on Nubia, I really enjoyed because it reveals the reasons behind the Nubian empire’s fall something that has been on my mind for a long time. The Ethiopian focus is equally marvelous because of its glimpses into Ethiopian Christianity and architecture. Those

  ***

  Eccentric Yoruba is a really not that strange regardless of what her alias may suggest. She spends her days writing and blogging at Curiosity Killed The Eccentric Yoruba and Dreamwidth.

• Women’s movement building and creating community in Haiti

  Posted: December 9, 2010, 10:34 pm by Sokari

  Thousands of words have been written about Haiti in the past 12 months covering everything from the NGOisation of the country, the politics of humanitarian aid, endless questions and discussion on what  happened to the  $ millions donated by individuals and countries, the horrendous conditions in the camps where some 1.2 million IDP are forced [...]

• Thoughts on “Naija Leaks” – WikiLeaks

  Posted: December 9, 2010, 9:44 pm by Sokari

  p.p1 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 14.0px 0.0px; line-height: 19.0px; font: 14.0px ‘Times New Roman’} span.s1 {text-decoration: underline ; letter-spacing: 0.0px color: #1b00ab} span.s2 {letter-spacing: 0.0px} Nigerian Curiosity has produced a synopsis of the “Naija Leaks“. The leaks provide an additional dimension to the relationship between the Nigerian government, Shell – an imperial empire in itself, and the [...]

• Girls’ Sports Day

  Posted: December 8, 2010, 7:00 pm by Eccentric Yoruba

  Today is the official Blog to Rally for Girls’ Sports Day hosted by the National Women’s Law Center in celebration of the importance of girls in sports. The idea behind our Blog to Rally for Girls’ Sports Day is simple: “What did you win by playing sports?” You can use this theme to begin [...]

• “I am just doing my job” – eating the female body

  Posted: December 7, 2010, 6:53 pm by Sokari

  Zanele Muholi’s installation on the objectification and commodification of the female body – “I’m Just Doing My Job” at the Michael Stevenson Gallery, Cape Town. The installation uses raw meat parts in mimicking the women in Japan whose bodies are used to serve sushi for the pleasures of men and some women. [...]

• “I am just doing my job” – eating the female body

  Posted: December 7, 2010, 6:53 pm by Sokari

  Zanele Muholi’s installation on the objectification and commodification of the female body – “I’m Just Doing My Job” at the Michael Stevenson Gallery, Cape Town. The installation uses raw meat parts in mimicking the women in Japan whose bodies are used to serve sushi for the pleasures of men and some women. [...]

• Life in the time of Cholera & NGO empires

  Posted: December 6, 2010, 7:12 pm by Sokari

  This afternoon I had planned to meet with a group of women from SOPUDEP sister school for adult women in Bobin but a number of the women and their families have come down with cholera so the sessions are closed for the moment. Some of the women are in hospital already but there is [...]

• Evidence disclosed by the Independent is corroborated by Ogoni women

  Posted: December 6, 2010, 5:55 pm by Sokari

  The disclosure in the UK Independent that the Nigerian military framed Ken Saro-Wiwa and the Ogoni Eight is something the Ogoni people have always known. The relationship with Shell and the Nigerian military and particularly Lt-Col Paul Okuntimo is also known to the Ogoni and other Niger Deltans and was disclosed in “Where Vultures [...]

• More on Zheng He

  Posted: December 5, 2010, 5:05 pm by Eccentric Yoruba

  Zheng He’s 7th expedition was his last and after years of moving back and forth between the East African coast and China, all contact seized. Some people may look at this and say that the Chinese turned their backs on Africa but if you look at the situation within China in that [...]

• Zheng He’s Star Fleet

  Posted: December 5, 2010, 4:56 pm by Eccentric Yoruba

  In 1414 a Chinese fleet heralded by the Muslim Grand Eunuch of the Three Treasures, Zheng He (also known as Cheng Ho) sailed into the western Indian Ocean for the fourth time since his journey to the East began in 1405. In previously, that is between 1405 and 1414, Zheng He and his [...]

• World Aids Day: Before you pin the red ribbon up your chest…

  Posted: December 4, 2010, 8:36 pm by Sokari

  The following piece was first published in Pambazuka.org and is republished with the permission of the author. As you get ready to pin the little red ribbon on your chests on this World AIDS Day, to express your solidarity with those who have been deeply affected or are infected with HIV, I would like to ask [...]

• Lesbian activist, Ncumisa Mzamelo found murdered

  Posted: December 3, 2010, 8:31 pm by Sokari

  Three weeks after Ncumisa Mzamelo was found dead her story was published on page 16 of the South African newspaper, The Star. This is a story of a brutal murder of a Black lesbian from Bhambayi in KwaZula Natal, whose remains were found in a deserted toilet. Ncumisa was a [...]

• Old computers never die they end up somewhere in Africa

  Posted: December 3, 2010, 5:38 pm by Sokari

  Dumping of toxic waste and unwantables in Africa has been going on for years and continues despite it being illegal since 1992. In 1998 the EU implemented a ban on the exportation of hazardous waste from the West to the developing world, although the USA, Canada and New Zealand refused to sign. Just after the tsunami of [...]

• Haiti: Election observations

  Posted: December 2, 2010, 4:23 am by Sokari

  I am  in Haiti for the next four weeks and will be sending regular updates to Pambazuka.  During my stay I will be meeting with women community organizers and members of youth groups with a view to documenting their work.   Much has been written about the situation in the camps and neighbourhoods such as [...]

Blah blah blah

Fish cakes

Alas a fish cake.

Yet more fish cakes

Guess what ... yeah ... fish cakes.

The end of the fish cakes