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Le Tchad et le Sénégal dénoncent les propos “méprisants” d’Emmanuel Macron

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N’Djamena et Dakar ont vivement réagi lundi aux propos d’Emmanuel Macron qui a estimé que les dirigeants africains avaient “oublié de dire merci” à la France dans la lutte contre le terrorisme au Sahel,…

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Bande dessinée : accusées de racisme sur les réseaux sociaux, les éditions Dupuis retirent l’album “Spirou et la gorgone bleue”

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L’album, réalisé par Dany et Yann, a été publié en septembre 2023.

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The announcement of Idris Elba's casting as Okonkwo in the upcoming TV series adaptation of Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart has stirred an intense debate among Nigerians. At the heart of the matter is not just the question of who gets to embody one of the most significant characters in African literature, but how much respect is paid to the cultural essence of the story. This saga brings up important questions about representation, cultural integrity, and the broader global perception of African stories.

First, let’s address the elephant in the room: Idris Elba. There’s no denying that Elba is a phenomenal actor. His filmography speaks for itself—his roles in Beasts of No Nation, Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom, and The Wire showcase his ability to bring gravitas and depth to complex characters. However, embodying Okonkwo, a quintessential figure in Igbo culture, goes beyond raw talent. Okonkwo is not just a character; he is a symbol of the Igbo people's struggle to maintain their traditions and way of life amidst colonial disruption. The fear is that casting someone who doesn’t have the cultural roots might dilute the essence of this iconic role.

Let’s be real, Idris is so smooth, he could probably charm Amadioha himself, but charm isn't enough to channel the inner rage of Okonkwo. This isn't a DJ set in London; it's a man wrestling with his chi.

Nigerians' frustrations, particularly those voiced on social media, aren’t solely about Idris Elba's acting capabilities. It's about the loss of cultural specificity and authenticity. How do you tell a story so deeply tied to Igbo tradition, language, and folklore without involving someone who is inherently familiar with that world? Think about it—Okonkwo’s speech, mannerisms, and interactions are steeped in a very particular context. His conversations, his proverbs, the rituals he partakes in—they’re woven into the fabric of Igbo life. A misstep here could turn a deeply authentic narrative into a superficial “Hollywood-fied” version of African culture.

We've seen this before. Remember that time Hollywood tried to do a Nigerian accent and it sounded like someone put Naija Pidgin through Google Translate? Yeah, that’s the fear. Next thing you know, Okonkwo will be sipping tea and calling people 'mate'.

There’s also a broader issue at play here. We often talk about telling our own stories, but when push comes to shove, global capital—particularly Western production companies—often dictates how these stories are told. Achebe’s work is part of the global literary canon, but that doesn’t mean it should be reinterpreted in a way that panders to foreign audiences at the expense of its cultural integrity. In this case, Idris Elba, though he is of African descent, represents the face of an international film industry that sometimes sees African stories as marketable commodities rather than cultural treasures.

And here’s the kicker: the book itself reflects the tension between tradition and modernity, the indigenous and the foreign. Some might say the casting of Elba is ironic—a Westernized African portraying a man who resisted foreign domination. Okonkwo’s essence is his stubborn refusal to change. So, while the book’s themes are about adapting to inevitable change, shouldn’t this adaptation resist unnecessary alterations that weaken the cultural roots of the story?

On the flip side, there are those who argue, “It’s just a story, and anyone with the skill should be able to bring it to life.” After all, when you buy the rights to a book, you dictate its presentation, right? This perspective isn’t entirely wrong, but it simplifies the issue. Achebe didn’t write Things Fall Apart as a commercial enterprise; he wrote it to give a voice to a people whose history had been silenced or distorted by colonial narratives. The adaptation, therefore, must honor that intention.

However, let’s not forget that some of the outrage stems from a deeper frustration with the lack of investment in local Nigerian film industries. Why aren’t Igbo or Nigerian producers championing adaptations of our classic stories? We’re quick to criticize foreign interpretations but slow to create our own. Instead of waiting for Hollywood to do us dirty again, we should be on set shouting, 'Lights, camera, action!' in the middle of Onitsha market. If we don’t tell our own stories, next thing we know, Okonkwo will be rocking a fedora and talking like an extra from Downton Abbey.

The truth is, both sides of the debate hold water. On one hand, Idris Elba’s casting is a symbol of how global capital can overshadow cultural authenticity. On the other hand, the absence of local investment in Nigerian art leaves a vacuum that foreign investors are all too happy to fill. The issue is not just about one actor playing Okonkwo; it’s about who controls the narrative of African stories on the global stage.

At the end of the day, this debate is bigger than Idris Elba or even Things Fall Apart. It’s about ownership. Ownership of our stories, our culture, and the way we present them to the world. And until we take charge of our own narratives—financially, creatively, and intellectually—we will always find ourselves reacting to how others choose to tell them.

This is a book we grew up reading and loving, and the original TFA adaptation broke out an amateur Pete Edochie to limelight. Some of these actors will be reading the book like, “Wait, so he broke the kola nut before they talked business? Huh?” My people, let’s just hope the lines sink in before they start misinterpreting the role like it’s Game of Thrones in Anambra. Well, they should read that novel properly and understand its importance and how tied it is, first to Igbo culture, before they consider using the legacy of Africa's greatest writer to rake in bucks at the box office.

Now, there are two things I’m really worried about:

1. If they mess up the Nigerian accents in this one, it’s going to be a disaster. They better get Stan Nze or Uzo Arukwe on the phone ASAP. I’m tired of Hollywood thinking every Nigerian has the same accent. We have over 250 tribes, each with its own way of speaking!

2. This might open up a whole tribal can of worms. A Yoruba executive producer and an Englishman working on a project that’s so deeply rooted in Igbo culture? Yeah, that’s going to be interesting to watch.

At the end of the day, it’s in God’s hands. All we can do now is pray, right? Lol!

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1M views · 17K reactions | Le Sénégal, l'autre pays de la baguette | 🥖 Rapporté à la population, le #Sénégal 🇸🇳 est le plus gros mangeur de #baguette au monde : 10 millions en sont dégustées chaque jour. 

Reportage dans... | By FRANCE 24 | Facebook

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🥖 Rapporté à la population, le #Sénégal 🇸🇳 est le plus gros mangeur de #baguette au monde : 10 millions en sont dégustées chaque jour. 

Reportage dans...

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Map of Africa on the year 1880 AD, Before the European "Scramble for Africa"

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150K views · 1.2K reactions | Ziryab : une institution du monde arabe | Aujourd'hui on vous raconte l'histoire d'un savant, d'un musicien, d'un gastronome et d'un poète. Leurs noms ? Ziryab, Ziryab, Ziryab et… Ziryab.

Via... | By ARTE | Facebook

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Aujourd'hui on vous raconte l'histoire d'un savant, d'un musicien, d'un gastronome et d'un poète. Leurs noms ? Ziryab, Ziryab, Ziryab et… Ziryab.

Via...

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The New York Times’ “Best Books of the Century” List Was an Unforgivable Erasure of African Literature

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The New York Times recently released a list of the “100 Best Books of the 21st Century.” As is typical for the Times, the list quickly went viral and was widely debated and celebrated on soci…

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"Non, la France n'est pas en recul en Afrique, elle est simplement lucide, elle se réorganise." Lors de la Conférence des ambassadrices et ambassadeurs qui s'est tenue à l'Élysée lundi 6 janvier, Emmanuel Macron a balayé les grands sujets de politique étrangère : du retour au pouvoir de Donald Trump au conflit au Moyen-Orient, en passant par la guerre en Ukraine, sans oublier la présence française sur le continent africain.

Le président, qui avait dès le début de son premier mandat exprimé sa volonté de se tourner vers l'Afrique anglophone, est revenu longuement sur les relations parfois houleuses entre la France et ses anciennes colonies, le départ des forces françaises au Sahel ainsi que la réorganisation du dispositif militaire français en Afrique, suscitant l'agacement du Sénégal et du Tchad.

Départ du Mali, du Burkina Faso et du Niger

Le 17 février 2022, la France et ses partenaires européens officialisaient leur retrait militaire du Mali, après neuf ans de lutte antijihadiste pilotée par Paris. Une décision annoncée dans un contexte de fortes tensions avec les nouvelles autorités maliennes ayant pris le pouvoir à la faveur d'un double coup d'État, en 2020 et 2021.

"On a choisi de bouger parce qu'il fallait bouger", a affirmé Emmanuel Macron lors de son discours lundi. "Les dirigeants militaires n'avaient plus pour priorité la lutte contre le terrorisme, la France n'y avait plus sa place parce que nous ne sommes pas les supplétifs de putschistes", a assené le chef de l'État.

Au Mali, Emmanuel Macron et ses alliés dénonçaient notamment la présence - démentie par Bamako - de miliciens "prédateurs" du groupe russe Wagner, considérée par Paris comme une ligne rouge. Les autorités maliennes avaient dans la foulée exigé un retrait "sans délai" de la France, poussant Paris à accélérer son calendrier.

L'histoire s'est ensuite répétée au Burkina Faso où, après un double coup d'État militaire, le nouveau pouvoir a exigé, en janvier 2023, le retrait des forces spéciales françaises stationnées à Ouagadougou. Enfin, le 24 septembre 2023, Emmanuel Macron annonçait le retrait des 1 500 soldats français déployés au Niger, après un bras de fer de deux mois avec les nouvelles autorités du pays, qui avaient renversé le président Mohamed Bazoum et dénoncé les accords de défense avec la France.

Réorganisation du dispositif militaire

Sur la réorganisation du dispositif militaire français en Afrique, Emmanuel Macron a là encore affirmé qu'il s'agissait d'un choix et non d'une réalité subie par la France.

"On avait laissé une présence installée dans nos bases, est-ce qu'elle avait encore une justification ? Plus tellement. Est-ce que c'était ça, le rayonnement de la France ? Non", a-t-il reconnu.

En février 2023, le président français avait annoncé vouloir mettre en place "un nouveau modèle de partenariat militaire", transformant les bases françaises en bases "conjointes" ou en "académies". Un projet qui avait pour but la "réduction visible des effectifs" alors même que des manifestations avaient régulièrement lieu au Sahel contre la présence militaire française, de plus en plus critiquée et perçue comme une émanation du néocolonialisme.

"On nourrissait nous-mêmes un discours postcolonial", a-t-il concédé, en référence au maintien de la présence militaire française.

Début 2024, Emmanuel Macron avait nommé Jean-Marie Bockel au poste d'"envoyé spécial" pour l'Afrique. Cet ancien ministre de François Mitterrand puis de Nicolas Sarkozy, critique de la Françafrique, était chargé de mener des consultations avec les États concernés afin de concrétiser cette réorganisation militaire.

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Sur le plateau de France 24, Jean-Marie Bockel déclarait le 14 novembre dernier que le Tchad - dernier grand point d'ancrage de la France au Sahel, abritant un temps plus de 5 000 militaires dans le cadre de l' opération Barkhane - n'avait pas manifesté la volonté de voir les soldats français quitter son sol.

Pourtant, deux semaines plus tard, au lendemain d'une visite du ministre français des Affaires étrangères Jean-Noël Barrot à N'Djamena, le pays a rompu l'accord de coopération avec la France en matière de défense et réclamé le départ des troupes. Le même jour, le Sénégal annonçait que la France allait devoir fermer ses bases. Depuis, le président ivoirien a annoncé la rétrocession de la base militaire française d'Abidjan à la Côte d'Ivoire.

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Réactions outrées

"Nous avons proposé aux chefs d'État africains de réorganiser notre présence", a expliqué lundi Emmanuel Macron. "Comme on est très polis, on leur a laissé la primauté de l'annonce", a-t-il indiqué, affirmant que plusieurs de ces pays "ne voulaient pas enlever l'armée française ni la réorganiser".

Des propos qui ont fait réagir le Premier ministre sénégalais, Ousmane Sonko. "Dans le cas du Sénégal, cette affirmation est totalement erronée", a-t-il dénoncé. "Aucune discussion ou négociation n'a eu lieu à ce jour et la décision prise par le Sénégal découle de sa seule volonté, en tant que pays libre, indépendant et souverain."

Il a également répondu au chef de l'État français qui estimait lundi que des dirigeants africains n'ont "pas eu le courage, face à leurs opinions publiques", de remercier la France pour son engagement dans la lutte antiterroriste au Sahel.

"La France n'a ni la capacité ni la légitimité pour assurer à l'Afrique sa sécurité et sa souveraineté. Bien au contraire, elle a souvent contribué à déstabiliser certains pays africains comme la Libye avec des conséquences désastreuses notées sur la stabilité et la sécurité du Sahel", a-t-il dénoncé sur le réseau social X.

Le président tchadien Mahamat Idriss Déby Itno est lui aussi monté au créneau. "Je voudrais exprimer mon indignation vis-à-vis des propos récemment tenus par le président Macron, qui frisent le mépris envers l'Afrique et les Africains. Je crois qu'il se trompe d'époque", a-t-il réagi, lors d'un discours prononcé au palais présidentiel et publié sur la page Facebook de la présidence. Son ministre des Affaires étrangères avait précédemment dénoncé "une attitude méprisante à l'égard de l'Afrique et des Africains".

À Paris, une source diplomatique a tenté d'éteindre l'incendie. "Le Tchad et le Sénégal n'étaient absolument pas visés par ces propos puisque ce qui a été annoncé par Dakar et N'Djamena était déjà acté, on était d'accord sur la finalité - c'est juste le timing de ces annonces qui nous a surpris", a-t-elle déclaré à l'AFP.

Le président "ciblait clairement les pays de l'AES [Alliance des États du Sahel, NDLR] et en particulier le Mali", a poursuivi cette source. "On l'a tous mauvaise avec le Mali quand on voit le dispositif, l'investissement humain et financier que cela a représenté pendant des années à la demande des autorités maliennes, et alors que l'on pensait bien faire", a-t-elle expliqué, rappelant que 58 soldats français étaient morts en moins d'une décennie au Sahel.

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"On a oublié de nous dire merci" : la sortie d'Emmanuel Macron passe mal en Afrique

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Lors de son discours devant les ambassadeurs et ambassadrices de France lundi, le président Emmanuel Macron est revenu longuement sur les partenariats sécuritaires avec l'Afrique, évoquant la réduction...

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Interventions contre le terrorisme en Afrique : «On a oublié de nous dire merci», cingle Emmanuel Macron

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«C’est pas grave, ça viendra avec le temps», a lancé le président français lors de la réunion annuelle des ambassadeurs de France.

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Anti-racism: When you picture Doctors Without Borders, what do you see?

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Improbables Librairies, Improbables Bibliothèques. 457,895 likes. La page des amoureux des livres.
 - “One should always be a little improbable.” Oscar Wilde   Contact

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Djédjé Apali | Ainsi s'éteignent les rires des migrants

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Ainsi s'éteignent les rires des migrants de Djédjé Apali. Sans être autobiographique, ce récit éclaire le parcours et la personnalité secrète de son auteur, disparu tragiquement avant de l'avoir publié.

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[LE TEMPS]
Le dessin de la semaine du journal Le Temps, par #BertetVanco l Cecile Bertrand (Belgique), choisi par Chappatte avec la collaboration de Cartooning for Peace et Freedom Cartoonists....

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Le Choisi: A Film About Being Chosen Ft | Baba Diop | 4Keus | Mimmy Yeboah | Lina Chabane

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How Africans Are Changing French — One Joke, Rap and Book at a Time

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More than 60 percent of French speakers now live in Africa. Despite growing resentment at France, Africans are contributing to the evolution and spread of the French language.

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The 86-year-old Francis says a 'forgotten genocide' is under way in the DRC as he begins his trip to two African nations.

Pope Francis sits next to Democratic Republic of Congo's President Felix Tshisekedi as he attends a welcoming ceremony at the Palais de la Nation on the first day of his apostolic journey, in Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of Congo, January 31, 2023 [Simone Risoluti/Vatican Media/Handout via Reuters]

Pope Francis has demanded that foreign powers stop plundering Africa's natural resources for the "poison of their own greed" after he landed in the Democratic Republic of Congo as part of a trip to two African nations.

The 86-year-old Francis is the first pontiff to visit DR Congo since Pope John Paul II did so in 1985, when the country was still known as Zaire.

"Hands off the Democratic Republic of the Congo! Hands off Africa!" Francis said on Tuesday to applause in his opening speech to Congolese government authorities and the diplomatic corps in the garden of Kinshasa's national palace.

Calling Congo's vast mineral and natural wealth a "diamond of creation", Francis demanded that foreign interests stop carving up the country for their own interests and acknowledge their role in the economic "enslavement" of the Congolese people.

"Stop choking Africa. It is not a mine to be stripped or a terrain to be plundered," said history's first Latin American pope, who has long railed at how wealthy countries have exploited the resources of poorer ones for their own profit.

Francis pointed the finger at the role colonial powers such as Belgium played in the exploitation of Congo until the country, which is 80 times the size of Belgium, gained its independence in 1960. He also said neighbouring countries are playing a similar role today.

The 86-year-old didn't identify Belgium or any neighbouring country by name, but he spared no word of condemnation, saying there was a "forgotten genocide" under way.

"The poison of greed has smeared its diamonds with blood," Francis said.

"May the world acknowledge the catastrophic things that were done over the centuries to the detriment of the local peoples, and not forget this country and this continent."

Al Jazeera's Malcolm Webb, reporting from Kinshasa, said hundreds if not thousands of people on the roads followed the pope's motorcade on motorbikes to the presidential palace from the airport.

"The roads were lined up with church groups and schoolchildren from the many Catholic-run church schools run over here in Congo," he added.

"The Catholic church runs about 60 percent of health and education services here ... it's what makes the Catholic Church such a significant institution here [in Congo]," Webb added.

About half of Congo's population of 90 million are Roman Catholics.

The six-day trip, which also includes a stop in South Sudan, was originally scheduled for July 2022, but was postponed because of Francis's knee problems, which were still so serious on Tuesday that he could not stand to greet journalists in the plane heading to Kinshasa and was forced to use a wheelchair on the ground.

Fighting in DRC

Francis was also supposed to have included a stop in Goma, in eastern Congo, but the surrounding North Kivu region has been plagued by intense fighting between government troops and the M23 rebel group, as well as attacks by fighters linked to the ISIL (ISIS) armed group.

The fighting has displaced some 5.7 million people, a fifth of them last year alone, according to the World Food Programme.

Congo accuses Rwanda of backing the M23 rebel group fighting government troops in the east. Rwanda denies this.

"As well as armed militias, foreign powers hungry for the minerals in our soil commit, with the direct and cowardly support of our neighbour Rwanda, cruel atrocities," said Congolese President Felix Tshisekedi, speaking just before the pope on the same stage.

The pope said the Congolese people were fighting to preserve their territorial integrity "against deplorable attempts to fragment the country". The pope did not name Rwanda in his address or take sides in the dispute.

Instead of travelling to Goma, Francis will meet with a delegation of people from the east who will travel to Kinshasa for a private encounter at the Vatican embassy on Wednesday.

The plan calls for them to participate in a ceremony in which they jointly commit to forgiving their assailants.

Source: Al Jazeera and news agencies

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Pope slams foreign plundering of Africa as he arrives in DR Congo

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The 86-year-old Francis says a 'forgotten genocide' is under way in the DRC as he begins his trip to two African nations. Pope Francis has demanded that foreign powers stop plundering Africa's natural resources for the "poison of their own greed" after he landed in the Democratic Republic of Congo as part of a trip to two African nations.

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Anti-racism: When you picture Doctors Without Borders, what do you see?

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Goodwill Librarian. 1,194,396 likes · 612,173 talking about this. Blessed, stressed and book obsessed!

Fun and entertaining posts featuring all things books!

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Is France breaking with its colonial past in Africa?

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It is the end of an era in West Africa as France moves to scrap the currency used by its former colonies.

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King Leopold II statue taken down in Antwerp | Belgian port city of Antwerp takes down a statue of late King Leopold II, days after it was painted by anti-racism protesters. | By Al Jazeera English | Facebook

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245K views, 5.4K likes, 849 loves, 1K comments, 1.6K shares, Facebook Watch Videos from Al Jazeera English: Belgian port city of Antwerp takes down a statue of late King Leopold II, days after it was...

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Omid Safi is the Director of the Duke Islamic Studies Center.

The ceiling decoration of the tomb of Hafez in Shiraz, Iran [Jasminam/Getty Images]

This is the time of the year where every day I get a handful of requests to track down the original, authentic versions of some famed Muslim poet, usually Hafez or Rumi. The requests start off the same way: "I am getting married next month, and my fiance and I wanted to celebrate our Muslim background, and we have always loved this poem by Hafez. Could you send us the original?" Or, "My daughter is graduating this month, and I know she loves this quote from Hafez. Can you send me the original so I can recite it to her at the ceremony we are holding for her?"

It is heartbreaking to have to write back time after time and say the words that bring disappointment: The poems that they have come to love so much and that are ubiquitous on the internet are forgeries. Fake. Made up. No relationship to the original poetry of the beloved and popular Hafez of Shiraz.

How did this come to be? How can it be that about 99.9 percent of the quotes and poems attributed to one the most popular and influential of all the Persian poets and Muslim sages ever, one who is seen as a member of the pantheon of "universal" spirituality on the internet are ... fake? It turns out that it is a fascinating story of Western exotification and appropriation of Muslim spirituality.

Let us take a look at some of these quotes attributed to Hafez:
Even after all this time,
the sun never says to the earth,
'you owe me.'
Look what happens with a love like that!
It lights up the whole sky.
You like that one from Hafez? Too bad. Fake Hafez.
Your heart and my heart
Are very very old friends.

Like that one from Hafez too? Also Fake Hafez.
Fear is the cheapest room in the house.
I would like to see you living in better conditions.
Beautiful. Again, not Hafez.

And the next one you were going to ask about? Also fake. So where do all these fake Hafez quotes come from?

An American poet, named Daniel Ladinsky, has been publishing books under the name of the famed Persian poet Hafez for more than 20 years. These books have become bestsellers. You are likely to find them on the shelves of your local bookstore under the "Sufism" section, alongside books of Rumi, Khalil Gibran, Idries Shah, etc.

It hurts me to say this, because I know so many people love these "Hafez" translations. They are beautiful poetry in English, and do contain some profound wisdom. Yet if you love a tradition, you have to speak the truth: Ladinsky's translations have no earthly connection to what the historical Hafez of Shiraz, the 14th-century Persian sage, ever said.

He is making it up. Ladinsky himself admitted that they are not "translations", or "accurate", and in fact denied having any knowledge of Persian in his 1996 best-selling book, I Heard God Laughing. Ladinsky has another bestseller, The Subject Tonight Is Love.

Persians take poetry seriously. For many, it is their singular contribution to world civilisation: What the Greeks are to philosophy, Persians are to poetry. And in the great pantheon of Persian poetry where Hafez, Rumi, Saadi, 'Attar, Nezami, and Ferdowsi might be the immortals, there is perhaps none whose mastery of the Persian language is as refined as that of Hafez.

In the introduction to a recent book on Hafez, I said that Rumi (whose poetic output is in the tens of thousands) comes at you like you an ocean, pulling you in until you surrender to his mystical wave and are washed back to the ocean. Hafez, on the other hand, is like a luminous diamond, with each facet being a perfect cut. You cannot add or take away a word from his sonnets. So, pray tell, how is someone who admits that they do not know the language going to be translating the language?

Ladinsky is not translating from the Persian original of Hafez. And unlike some "versioners" (Coleman Barks is by far the most gifted here) who translate Rumi by taking the Victorian literal translations and rendering them into American free verse, Ladinsky's relationship with the text of Hafez's poetry is nonexistent. Ladinsky claims that Hafez appeared to him in a dream and handed him the English "translations" he is publishing:

"About six months into this work I had an astounding dream in which I saw Hafiz as an Infinite Fountaining Sun (I saw him as God), who sang hundreds of lines of his poetry to me in English, asking me to give that message to 'my artists and seekers'."

It is not my place to argue with people and their dreams, but I am fairly certain that this is not how translation works. A great scholar of Persian and Urdu literature, Christopher Shackle, describes Ladinsky's output as "not so much a paraphrase as a parody of the wondrously wrought style of the greatest master of Persian art-poetry." Another critic, Murat Nemet-Nejat, described Ladinsky's poems as what they are: original poems of Ladinsky masquerading as a "translation."

I want to give credit where credit is due: I do like Ladinsky's poetry. And they do contain mystical insights. Some of the statements that Ladinsky attributes to Hafez are, in fact, mystical truths that we hear from many different mystics. And he is indeed a gifted poet. See this line, for example:

I wish I could show you
when you are lonely or in darkness
the astonishing light of your own being.

That is good stuff. Powerful. And many mystics, including the 20th-century Sufi master Pir Vilayat, would cast his powerful glance at his students, stating that he would long for them to be able to see themselves and their own worth as he sees them. So yes, Ladinsky's poetry is mystical. And it is great poetry. So good that it is listed on Good Reads as the wisdom of "Hafez of Shiraz." The problem is, Hafez of Shiraz said nothing like that. Daniel Ladinsky of St Louis did.

The poems are indeed beautiful. They are just not ... Hafez. They are ... Hafez-ish? Hafez-esque? So many of us wish that Ladinsky had just published his work under his own name, rather than appropriating Hafez's.

Ladinsky's "translations" have been passed on by Oprah, the BBC, and others. Government officials have used them on occasions where they have wanted to include Persian speakers and Iranians. It is now part of the spiritual wisdom of the East shared in Western circles. Which is great for Ladinsky, but we are missing the chance to hear from the actual, real Hafez. And that is a shame.

So, who was the real Hafez (1315-1390)?

He was a Muslim, Persian-speaking sage whose collection of love poetry rivals only Mawlana Rumi in terms of its popularity and influence. Hafez's given name was Muhammad, and he was called Shams al-Din (The Sun of Religion). Hafez was his honorific because he had memorised the whole of the Quran. His poetry collection, the Divan, was referred to as Lesan al-Ghayb (the Tongue of the Unseen Realms).

A great scholar of Islam, the late Shahab Ahmed, referred to Hafez's Divan as: "the most widely-copied, widely-circulated, widely-read, widely-memorized, widely-recited, widely-invoked, and widely-proverbialized book of poetry in Islamic history." Even accounting for a slight debate, that gives some indication of his immense following. Hafez's poetry is considered the very epitome of Persian in the Ghazal tradition.

Hafez's worldview is inseparable from the world of Medieval Islam, the genre of Persian love poetry, and more. And yet he is deliciously impossible to pin down. He is a mystic, though he pokes fun at ostentatious mystics. His own name is "he who has committed the Quran to heart", yet he loathes religious hypocrisy. He shows his own piety while his poetry is filled with references to intoxication and wine that may be literal or may be symbolic.

The most sublime part of Hafez's poetry is its ambiguity. It is like a Rorschach psychological test in poetry. The mystics see it as a sign of their own yearning, and so do the wine-drinkers, and the anti-religious types. It is perhaps a futile exercise to impose one definitive meaning on Hafez. It would rob him of what makes him ... Hafez.

The tomb of Hafez in Shiraz, a magnificent city in Iran, is a popular pilgrimage site and the honeymoon destination of choice for many Iranian newlyweds. His poetry, alongside that of Rumi and Saadi, are main staples of vocalists in Iran to this day, including beautiful covers by leading maestros like Shahram Nazeri and Mohammadreza Shajarian.

Like many other Persian poets and mystics, the influence of Hafez extended far beyond contemporary Iran and can be felt wherever Persianate culture was a presence, including India and Pakistan, Central Asia, Afghanistan, and the Ottoman realms. Persian was the literary language par excellence from Bengal to Bosnia for almost a millennium, a reality that sadly has been buried under more recent nationalistic and linguistic barrages.

Part of what is going on here is what we also see, to a lesser extent, with Rumi: the voice and genius of the Persian speaking, Muslim, mystical, sensual sage of Shiraz are usurped and erased, and taken over by a white American with no connection to Hafez's Islam or Persian tradition. This is erasure and spiritual colonialism. Which is a shame, because Hafez's poetry deserves to be read worldwide alongside Shakespeare and Toni Morrison, Tagore and Whitman, Pablo Neruda and the real Rumi, Tao Te Ching and the Gita, Mahmoud Darwish, and the like.

In a 2013 interview, Ladinsky said of his poems published under the name of Hafez: "Is it Hafez or Danny? I don't know. Does it really matter?" I think it matters a great deal. There are larger issues of language, community, and power involved here.

It is not simply a matter of a translation dispute, nor of alternate models of translations. This is a matter of power, privilege and erasure. There is limited shelf space in any bookstore. Will we see the real Rumi, the real Hafez, or something appropriating their name? How did publishers publish books under the name of Hafez without having someone, anyone, with a modicum of familiarity check these purported translations against the original to see if there is a relationship? Was there anyone in the room when these decisions were made who was connected in a meaningful way to the communities who have lived through Hafez for centuries?

Hafez's poetry has not been sitting idly on a shelf gathering dust. It has been, and continues to be, the lifeline of the poetic and religious imagination of tens of millions of human beings. Hafez has something to say, and to sing, to the whole world, but bypassing these tens of millions who have kept Hafez in their heart as Hafez kept the Quran in his heart is tantamount to erasure and appropriation.

We live in an age where the president of the United States ran on an Islamophobic campaign of "Islam hates us" and establishing a cruel Muslim ban immediately upon taking office. As Edward Said and other theorists have reminded us, the world of culture is inseparable from the world of politics. So there is something sinister about keeping Muslims out of our borders while stealing their crown jewels and appropriating them not by translating them but simply as decor for poetry that bears no relationship to the original. Without equating the two, the dynamic here is reminiscent of white America's endless fascination with Black culture and music while continuing to perpetuate systems and institutions that leave Black folk unable to breathe.

There is one last element: It is indeed an act of violence to take the Islam out of Rumi and Hafez, as Ladinsky has done. It is another thing to take Rumi and Hafez out of Islam. That is a separate matter, and a mandate for Muslims to reimagine a faith that is steeped in the world of poetry, nuance, mercy, love, spirit, and beauty. Far from merely being content to criticise those who appropriate Muslim sages and erase Muslims' own presence in their legacy, it is also up to us to reimagine Islam where figures like Rumi and Hafez are central voices. This has been part of what many of feel called to, and are pursuing through initiatives like Illuminated Courses.

Oh, and one last thing: It is Haaaaafez, not Hafeeeeez. Please.
The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera's editorial stance.

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Fake Hafez: How a supreme Persian poet of love was erased

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Omid Safi is the Director of the Duke Islamic Studies Center. This is the time of the year where every day I get a handful of requests to track down the original, authentic versions of some famed Muslim poet, usually Hafez or Rumi.

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The skulls of 24 combatants laid to rest after being repatriated from France where they were kept in a Parisian museum.

Republican Guard troops stand with 24 coffins during a ceremony to lay to rest the remains of resistance fighters [Algerian Presidency Press Office/AFP]

Algeria buried the remains of 24 resistance fighters returned from Paris after more than a century and a half as it marked the 58th anniversary of its independence from France.

The skulls of the fighters - shot and decapitated in the early years of the French occupation - were laid to rest on Sunday during an emotional ceremony at El Alia cemetery.

Coffins draped with the national flag were lowered into freshly dug graves in the Martyr's Square of Algeria's largest burial ground, alongside national heroes such as top revolt leader Emir Abdelkader.

An elite unit of the Republican Guard presented arms while a funeral march played in the background, an AFP news agency correspondent reported.

The skulls, once viewed as war trophies by French colonial officers, were flown into Algiers international airport on Friday and then moved to the Palace of Culture where they were placed on display.

The return of the skulls was the result of years of efforts by Algerian historians, and comes amid a growing global reckoning with the legacy of colonialism.

President Abdelmadjid Tebboune, who took part in the ceremony, on Saturday said it was time to turn a page on years of frosty relations with France, calling on Paris to apologise for its colonial past.

"We have already had half-apologies. The next step is needed ... we await it," he told news channel France 24 in an interview.

An apology was necessary to "face the problem of memory that jeopardises many things in the relations between the two countries", Tebboune said.

It would "make it possible to cool tensions and create a calmer atmosphere for economic and cultural relations", especially for the more than six million Algerians who live in France, he added.

Long process

Despite stifling heat, a long queue formed outside the palace and some men and women, waiting to pay their respects, wept, according to footage broadcast by several television stations.

"I came as a fighter, as an invalid from the war of liberation, as a citizen who loves his country," said Ali Zemlat.

The 85-year-old fought in the brutal 1954-1962 war that ended France's 132 years of colonial rule in Algeria.

The 24 fought French colonial forces who occupied Algeria in 1830 and took part in an 1849 revolt. After they were decapitated, their skulls were taken to France as trophies.

In 2011, Algerian historian and researcher Ali Farid Belkadi discovered the skulls at the Museum of Man in Paris, across from the Eiffel Tower, and alerted Algerian authorities.

The researcher lobbied for years for their return and Algeria ' s then-President Abdelaziz Bouteflika, eventually launched the formal repatriation request.

French President Emmanuel Macron agreed to the repatriation in 2018 but bureaucratic obstacles resulted in the delay of their return.

"We have recovered part of our memory," historian Mohamed el-Korso told The Associated Press news agency. "But the fight must continue until the recovery of all the remains of the resistance fighters, which number in the hundreds, and the archives of our revolution."

Source: Al Jazeera, News Agencies

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Algeria buries remains of anti-colonial fighters after 150 years

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The skulls of 24 combatants laid to rest after being repatriated from France where they were kept in a Parisian museum. Algeria buried the remains of 24 resistance fighters returned from Paris after more than a century and a half as it marked the 58th anniversary of its independence from France.

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Il y a encore trop de concepts eurocentrés dans les cours d'histoire en Afrique, 60 ans après les indépendances

Á écouter dans le magazine Pulsations, un entretien en deux parties avec le professeur...

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April 20, 1969: Cornell University student leader Eric Evans reads a statement after members of the Afro-American Society occupied Willard Straight Hall to protest against the university's perceived racism [Photo courtesy of Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University]

Cornell University, an elite Ivy League institution in upstate New York, made history in early September when its English department became the first in the United States to change its name to reflect the global diversity of those writing in the English language.

Staff at the department voted overwhelmingly to change "English Literature" to "Literatures in English" - a symbolic shift away from an overwhelming focus on England.

Carole Boyce Davies, professor of English and Africana Studies, hailed it as a landmark moment in the decolonisation of English literature.

She said English departments were often like "colonial relics stuck in time", retaining a formidable streak of eurocentrism, a legacy of the discipline's central role in Britain's so-called "civilising mission".

Boyce Davies jointly proposed the move in response to the slaying of George Floyd, whose death at the hands of policemen in Minneapolis in May provoked a global groundswell of protest, as well as a wider reckoning about the continued reverberations of white supremacy and empire.

The racism that led to Floyd's death was forged in the academy, she said.

"As academics we are responsible for maintaining the order of knowledge and then transferring this to students who then go out into society.

"Whether they go onto Wall Street or into advertising, become politicians, run election campaigns or enter the police force, they reproduce what we teach them. It's a vicious cycle," she added.

Set among the evergreens and towering waterfalls of Ithaca, Cornell has a long history of social activism. Its founding principle that "any person can find instruction in any study", meant that it was one of the few universities in the 19th century to admit both male and female Black students. In 1969, after a student occupation, it became the first to introduce Africana studies - the study of Africa and the diaspora.

Just more than 10 years before that, Toni Morrison, the African American novelist and Nobel Laureate, graduated from its English department. Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the recently deceased supreme court judge graduated from Cornell in the 1950s and was taught there by American-Russian novelist Vladimir Nobokov.

Mukoma wa Ngugi, a Cornell English professor and novelist, said it was a sign the "marginalised could no longer be ignored". But he added there was still work to be done to create diversity in the field and across the university.

Cornell's decision has also been welcomed by Ngugi wa Thiong'o, the Kenyan literary colossus. Ngugi, who is often tipped to win the Nobel Prize in literature, told Al Jazeera the renaming "opens up to more literary streams in their own right, not just under the umbrella of English literature".

"I hope other universities follow suit," he said.

Ngugi wa Thiong'o and the start of a movement

Ngugi's intervention is notable. Not only because Mukoma, who co-sponsored the proposal, is his son. But also because he himself launched the movement to decolonise English literature at a university in Kenya more than 50 years ago.

Ngugi first encountered English literature when, as a teenager at school, colonial authorities suddenly imposed English as the sole language of instruction.

It was 1952, and the British had just declared a state of emergency to deal with the Mau Mau uprising, a native anti-colonial insurrection that was met with a sprawl of barbed wire gulags, extreme methods of torture, and the dropping of millions of bombs.

Up until then, Ngugi, who grew up in a large peasant family in rural Kenya, knew only his mother tongue, Gikuyu.

He recalled spending evenings by the fireside, as Gikuyu storytellers imparted local wisdom, recounting traditional tales of hares, lions and hyenas, creatures that inhabited his natural surroundings.

But the new school rules meant those caught speaking Gikuyu were caned or humiliatingly, made to wear a metal plate around their neck with inscriptions such as "I AM STUPID".

Meanwhile, achievement in English went highly rewarded. Its mastery was essential to ascending colonial Kenya's steep educational pyramid.

Kenya had become part of the British Empire shortly after the 1884 Berlin Conference, when European powers carved the continent up between them, creating linguistic and cultural spheres of influence.

Once territory had been seized and political dictatorships enforced, the minds of the colonised became the new frontier. The British set about trying to create a privileged but compliant native vanguard, servants of the empire who would ensure the free flow of tea from Kenya, gold from South Africa, and cotton from India.

The images children encountered in literature were reinforced by their study of geography and history, and science and technology, where Europe was, once again, the centre. This, in turn, fitted well with the cultural imperatives of British imperialism.

by Ngugi Wa Thiong'o, Decolonising the Mind, 1984

The need for this was crudely summed up by Robert Babington Macaulay, a British politician serving in colonial India. In 1835, Macaulay called for the introduction of English-language education in India to produce "a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern; a class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect" who could, in turn, transmit Western learning to the masses in the local Indian languages.

His vision rested as much on elevating and universalising English culture as it did on the denigration and dismissal of native ones. "A single shelf of a good European Library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia," Macaulay boasted, despite having no knowledge of Sanskrit and Arabic, the two languages that held pride of place, respectively, among India's predominantly Hindu and Muslim population.

Overlooked cultures

Rooted mainly in oral traditions, Africans' cultures were quickly overlooked. Instead, it was taken for granted that English culture was theirs.

Geoffrey Chaucer's tales of merry pilgrims in the medieval English countryside were now to be imagined, it seemed, as taking place in mid-20th century rural Kenya, dotted with villages and where elephants and wildebeest grazed; while the tea-drinking English ladies of Jane Austen's novels were presumably to be found in the gossiping women of the African village - perhaps the same ones who worked to cultivate the tea they drank.

Then there were the books that portrayed Africans themselves, that played on European stereotypes or were outright racist.

Chinua Achebe, the Nigerian novelist, charged novelist Joseph Conrad with being a "thoroughgoing racist" for his depiction of Africans in his widely influential 1902 novel Heart of Darkness, which tells of a voyage up the Congo river, into the heart of territory the Belgians held with brute force.

In one passage, Conrad describes emaciated Black slaves working the ivory trade as "a whirl of black limbs, a mass of hands clapping, of feet stamping", just one example among many, Achebe said, of him denying Africans "human expression".

Conrad, Achebe argued, depicted Africa as "the other world" and "the antithesis of Europe and therefore of civilization".

Ngugi, in his 1984 classic, Decolonising the Mind, argued that the imposition of English caused alienation.

"Since culture is a product of the history of a people which it in turn reflects, the child was now being exposed exclusively to a culture that was a product of a world external to himself. He was being made to stand outside himself to look at himself.

"The images children encountered in literature were reinforced by their study of geography and history, and science and technology, where Europe was, once again, the centre. This, in turn, fitted well with the cultural imperatives of British imperialism."

Writing back to Empire

In 1959, Ngugi left for Uganda, then also a British colony, to study English at Makerere University, the only university in East Africa. It was one of several institutions the British had established in the colonies to manufacture scholars steeped in its values who could serve imperial interests.

But nationalist fervour was gripping the continent, and what emerged instead were writers and thinkers who began to challenge English cultural hegemony.

While Europe had written Africa off, novelists like Achebe - a graduate from the University of Ibadan in Nigeria - began to write back to Europe. That is, they attempted to rescue and narrate an African past that could subvert Western representations.

Is it right that a man should abandon his mother tongue for someone else's? It looks like a dreadful betrayal and produces a guilty feeling. But for me, there is no other choice. I have been given the language and I intend to use it.

by Chinua Achebe

Responding to Conrad's Heart of Darkness, Achebe, in his debut 1958 novel, Things Fall Apart, detailed the intricacies of daily life in a pre-colonial Nigerian village, embedded words from his native Igbo tongue, and presented the British colonial imposition as marking the destruction - and not the start - of a cherished way of life.

But "writing back to Europe" involved writing in European languages, over the heads and beyond the comprehension of the vast majority of Africans. Did this confront or uphold Empire? Given the wealth of existing African languages, could such writing even be considered African literature?

These were some of the questions posed at A Conference of African Writers of English Expression, a landmark meeting of Africa's budding literati at Makerere University in June 1962.

Ngugi, still a student at the university, attended so he could hand Achebe a copy of a manuscript of his novel Weep Not Child. It would later be published as part of Heinemann's hugely successful African Writers Series.

The proceedings at Makerere were shot through with uncertainty at the lingering effects of colonialism in the emerging post-colonial world.

Achebe, summarising his position at Makerere years later, pondered: "Is it right that a man should abandon his mother tongue for someone else's? It looks like a dreadful betrayal and produces a guilty feeling. But for me, there is no other choice. I have been given the language and I intend to use it."

The great Nairobi literature debate

Obi Wali, a Nigerian critic, urged attendees to write in their local languages and "not play to the gallery of international fame".

"Until these writers and their Western midwives accept the fact that any true African literature must be written in African languages, they are merely pursuing a dead end, which can only lead to sterility, uncreativity and frustration," he wrote in Transitions magazine, one of the most influential pan-African publications of the day.

Later, Ngugi would take up Wali's position, noting that writers working in local languages were excluded from Makerere.

Cornell's decision harks back to the decolonisation debates at East African universities that raged through the 1960s. Reformers at Makerere University - dubbed the "Harvard of East Africa" - pushed to diversify the teaching body. At the University of Dar es Salaam in Tanzania, a group of scholars led by Guyanese historian Walter Rodney, wanted to tear down the rigid borders governing each academic discipline.

At the University of Nairobi, where Ngugi worked, a letter from the head of the English department to staff, in September 1968, started a storm. Proposing modest reforms, Dr James Stewart praised the department's syllabus for its strength in studying the "historic continuity of a single culture throughout the period of the modern west".

Ngugi and two colleagues wrote a letter in response, questioning the underlying assumption that the English tradition was the sole source of Africa's cultural heritage and rejecting the implication that Africa was an extension of the West.

If there was a need to study a "single culture", they asked: "Why can't African literature be at the centre so that we can view other cultures in relationship to it?"

We don't hate English literature, we like it, but we also like African literature - it is a matter of how we organise the relationship between the two. The colonial system wanted to make English literature our centre. We said no, Africa can be the centre also.

by Ngugi Wa Thiong'o

The Great Nairobi literature debate, as it has come to be known, was less about if African literature should be taught as about where it sat on the literary map, Ngugi told Al Jazeera.

"So what we said is we don't hate English literature, we like it, but we also like African literature - it is a matter of how we organise the relationship between the two. The colonial system wanted to make English literature our centre. We said no, Africa can be the centre also.

"We said let's place African literature at the centre, then after that the related Caribbean and African-American literature. Then South Asian literature and Latin American literature. Then European literature. It's about placing it in its proper place in relation to us."

It took until the following year for the university to agree to a newly decolonised "Literature department" with a new syllabus that started in African oral traditions and literature and ended in the Western canon.

Other universities on the continent followed suit, in a powerful show of African cultural independence. The publication of Ngugi's seminal text, On the Abolition of the English department in 1974, helped to fan his ideas further.

Beyond the language of the oppressor

In the 50 years between the Nairobi debate and Cornell's move, Ngugi has also taken the decolonisation debate in new directions.

As the promise of African independence gave way in the 1960s and 1970s to military dictatorship and civil war, Ngugi was among a handful of literary heavyweights to find themselves behind bars for their writing and activism. He emerged in 1978 after more than a year in prison clutching scraps of toilet paper on which was written a new novel in his native Gikuyu. And he has not written a novel in English since.

He has become a strong advocate for writing in Indigenous languages, and delivered in Gikuyu his acceptance speech on receiving the Catalonia International Prize in September.

Today he is adamant that writing in English by Africans should be called "Europhone African literature". To call such work African literature amounts to "identity theft", he said.

There is a real tendency, even when you're claiming to be decolonising and diversifying to keep the centre unchanged and then shovel all the non-British literature into one big grab bag called world literature.

by Priyamvada Gopal

Mukoma, who has written his crime novels and poetry in English would fall into the "Europhone" category. But even he "mourns" the steady erosion of African languages by English, something which he says has led to possessing a "truncated imagination".

Still, he is the co-founder of the Swahili Mabati-Cornell prize, which recognises writing in African languages as well as translation between African languages. It is based at Cornell University.

However, Ngugi's decision to abandon English did nothing to hinder the spread of his ideas. By that point they had already crossed the Atlantic - decades before they would be taken up at Cornell.

Global calls for decolonised curriculums

In the Caribbean, in the 1970s, Ngugi's ideas fed into debates about the place of art forms and languages suppressed during colonialism. It came as writers from the islands - like their African counterparts - found their voice, with George Lamming and future Nobel laureates VS Naipaul and Dereck Walcott attracting global acclaim.

At the University of the West Indies, the decolonisation of English began with the introduction of African and then Caribbean literatures, a process spurred on when a senior university official heard Ngugi speak in Kenya in the mid-1970s. Then came courses on the region's oral traditions followed by research into calypso and reggae.

In the early 1990s, the university's flagship Jamaica campus renamed its English department to one of "Literatures in English" - as Cornell would later do.

"It was part of a wider discourse about decolonising the curriculum," said Professor Carolyn Cooper, who joined the literature department as a lecturer in 1980.

Cooper, who writes a newspaper column in the Jamaican language and is the founder of the university's Reggae Studies unit, said Ngugi's emphasis on overcoming "mental slavery" had been an influence on her own work.

Moreover, Cornell's decision should also be seen in light of more recent demands for decolonisation coming from students born long after the formal end of colonialism, in countries where the decolonisation process has stalled or even soured. They have expanded the terms of the decolonisation debate, and through the use of social media, sparked global conversations.

Over the past 10 years, Makerere University, the Ugandan university where Ngugi studied, has seen several protests and strikes over fee increases which have led to arrests and the use of police violence. The university was temporarily shut down in 2016.

In 2015, the Rhodes Must Fall movement, which was originally directed at the removal of a statue of arch-colonialist Cecil Rhodes at the University of Cape Town, grew into a wider campaign about the persistence of white supremacy in South Africa and has since spread to the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom.

Earlier this year, Cornell agreed to student demands - made in the wake of the killing of George Floyd - to open a research centre on anti-racism. Students there have further called for decolonised curriculums and the hiring of more faculty of colour. a sign the name change is reverberating through the institution.

They have also pointed to the university's own complicity in colonialism, arguing that its main Ithaca campus is built on territory belonging to Indigenous Americans.

The price of Cornell's founding vision of equal educational opportunity, students wrote in September, "was the legacy of forcible Indigenous dispossession and African enslavement, compounded by increasing imperialist expansion and interventionism in the Americas and beyond".

A grab-bag of 'world literature'

Priyamvada Gopal, professor of English literature at the University of Cambridge in the UK, said "a critical mass" of students had successfully made demands to decolonise Cambridge's literature curriculum.

It is a sign that, remarkably, Ngugi's ideas have come full circle, gate-crashing the stately halls of what for centuries was the intellectual nerve centre of the British Empire.

Gopal, who teaches Ngugi to her students, said the recent admission of more students of colour, particularly Black students, had been a factor, but white students had also made demands. "A lot of white students are conscious of issues in a way that the previous generations weren't," she said.

But while there was now a "greater scope" to teach non-European literature, the curriculum was still staunchly "Anglo-centric".

"There is a real tendency, even when you're claiming to be decolonising and diversifying to keep the centre unchanged and then shovel all the non-British literature into one big grab bag called world literature."

Gopal, who graduated from Cornell's English department in 2000, said Ngugi's influence on her had been "quite huge", which was partly why she incorporated local Indian languages into her thesis on postcolonial literature.

"I teach him regularly. There is something to be said for the abolition of the English department as an English department."

Gopal said Cornell's move was "a good direction to go in" but she would like to see things go in a "more radical direction", where literature departments no longer needed to define themselves by any particular language.

"Ngugi was actually saying we need to learn the language of the peasantry and they're not speaking in English," she said.

Ngugi wa Thiong'o, added: "If you know all the languages of the world, and you don't know your mother tongue or the language of your culture, that is enslavement. But if you know your mother tongue or the language of your culture and then you add all the other languages to it, that is empowerment."

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Rewrite the English department: Lessons in radical decolonisation

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Cornell University, an elite Ivy League institution in upstate New York, made history in early September when its English department became the first in the United States to change its name to reflect the global diversity of those writing in the English language.

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Tsitsi Dangarembga: Life in an ‘ever-narrowing Zimbabwe’

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The Booker Prize shortlisted author on being arrested, having more Black characters in fiction and why she writes.

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Best of 2020: The top books by African writers

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From fiction and non-fiction to essays and poetry, we bring you some of the continent’s most exciting reads from 2020.

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The children colonial Belgium stole from African mothers

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Taken from their homes as children, a group of mixed-race elderly people are now fighting Belgium for recognition.

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Historian, professor and decolonial theorist.

A file photo taken in Senegal, then a French colony, in the 1930s shows a European being carried through a river by African porters in a sedan chair [File: AFP]

In 2017, a professor at Oxford University in the United Kingdom proposed a research project. The key thesis: that the empire as a historical phenomenon - distinct from an ideological construct - has made ethical contributions and that its legacy cannot be reduced to that of genocides, exploitations, domination and repression.

Expectedly, such a project raised a lot of controversies to the extent that other scholars at Oxford penned an open letter dissociating themselves from such intended revisionism and whitewashing of the crimes of the empire. One leading member of the project resigned from it, citing personal reasons.

This month marks 136 years since the end of the Berlin Conference in 1885, where western powers met to set the rules for how they would divide up Africa. Historically, theoretically and empirically, it should be clear that the empire was a "death project" rather than an ethical force outside Europe; that war, violence and extractivism rather than any ethics defined the legacy of the empire in Africa.

But it is the continuation of revisionist thinking that beckons a revisiting of the question of colonialism and its impact on the continent from a decolonial perspective, challenging the colonial and liberal desire to rearticulate the empire as an ethical phenomenon.

The 'ethics' of empire?

In the Oxford research project, entitled Ethics and Empire (2017-22), Nigel Biggar, the university's regius professor of moral and pastoral theology and director of the MacDonald Centre for Theology, Ethics and Public Life, sought to do two important interventions: to measure apologias and critiques of the empire against historical data from antiquity to modernity across the world; and to challenge the idea that empire is imperialist, imperialism is wicked, and empire is therefore unethical.

In support of its thesis, the description of the research project lists "examples" of the ethics of the empire: the British empire's suppression of the "Atlantic and African slave trades" after 1807; granting Black Africans the vote at the Cape Colony 17 years before the United States granted it to African Americans; and offering "the only armed centre of armed resistance to European fascism between May 1940 and June 1941".

But the selective use of such examples does not paint a complete picture. Any attempt to credit the British empire for the abolition of slavery, for instance, ignores the ongoing resistance of enslaved Africans from the moment of capture right up to the plantations in the Americas. The Haitian Revolution of 1791-1804 still stands as a symbol of this resistance: enslaved African people rose against racism, slavery and colonialism - demonstrating beyond doubt that the European institution of slavery was not sustainable.

The very fact that, in the Oxford research project, the chosen description is "the Atlantic and African slave trades" reveals an attempt to distance itself from the crime of slavery, to attribute it to the "ocean" (the Atlantic), and to the "Africans" as though they enslaved themselves. Where is the British empire in this description of the heinous kidnapping and commodification of the lives of Africans?

The second example, which highlights the very skewed granting of the franchise to a small number of so-called "civilised" Africans at the Cape Colony in South Africa as a gift of the empire, further demonstrates a misunderstanding of how colonialism dismembered and dehumanised African people. The fact is that African struggles were not undertaken for a trinket like getting voting rights under colonialism. They fought for decolonisation and rehumanisation.

The third example, that the British empire became the nerve centre of armed resistance to fascism during the second world war (1939-45), may be accurate. But it also ignores the fact that fascism became so repugnant to the British mainly because Adolf Hitler practised and applied the racism that was meant for "those people" in the colonies and brought it to the centre of Europe.

Projects like Briggar's, and others with similar thought trajectories, risk endangering the truth about the crimes of the empire in Africa.

Afro-pessimism: Seeing disorder as the norm

What, fundamentally, is colonialism? Aimé Césaire, the Mantiniquean intellectual and poet, posed this deep and necessary question in his classical treatise Discourse on Colonialism, published in 1955. In it, he argues that the colonial project was never benevolent and always motivated by self-interest and economic exploitation of the colonised.

But without a real comprehension of the true meaning of colonialism, there are all sorts of dangers of developing a complacent if not ahistorical and apologetic view of it, including the one that argues it was a moral evil with economic benefits to its victims. This view of colonialism is re-emerging within a context where some conservative metropolitan-based scholars of the empire are calling for a "balance sheet of the empire", which weighs up the costs and benefits of colonialism. Meanwhile, some beneficiaries of the empire based in Africa are also adopting a revisionist approach, such as Helen Zille, the white former leader of South Africa's opposition Democratic Alliance party, who caused a storm when she said that apartheid colonialism was beneficial - by building the infrastructure and governance systems that Black Africans now use.

Both conservative and liberal revisionism in the studies of the empire and the impact of colonialism reflect shared pessimistic views about African development. The economic failures, and indeed elusive development, in Africa get blamed on the victims. The disorder is said to be the norm in Africa. Eating, that is, filling the "belly" is said to be the characteristic of African politics. African leadership is roundly blamed for the mismanagement of economies in Africa. (Yes, there are economies in Africa, not African economies; African economies were long destroyed by colonialism.)

While it is true that African leaders contribute to economic and development challenges through things like corruption, the key problems on the continent are structural, systemic and institutional. That is why even leaders like Thomas Sankara of Burkina Faso and Julius Nyerere of Tanzania, who were not corrupt, did not succeed in changing the character of inherited colonial economies so as to benefit the majority of African peoples.

Today, what exacerbates these ahistorical, apologetic and patronising views of the impact of colonialism on Africa is the return of crude right-wing politics - the kind embodied by former US President Donald Trump, that remains even after his term has ended. It is the strong belief in inherent white supremacy and in the inherent inferiority of the rest.

But right-wing politics is also locking horns with resurgent and insurgent decolonisation of the 21st century, symbolised by global movements such as Black Lives Matter and Rhodes Must Fall. However, to mount a credible critique to apologias for the empire, the starting point is to clearly define colonialism.

On colonisation, colonialism, coloniality

Three terms - colonisation, colonialism and coloniality - if correctly clarified, help in gaining a deeper understanding of the empire and the damage colonialism has had on African economies and indeed on African lives.

Colonisation names the event of conquest and administration of the conquered. It can be dated in the case of South Africa from 1652 to 1994; in the case of Zimbabwe from 1890 to 1980; and in the case of Western and Eastern Africa from 1884 to 1960. Those who confused colonisation and colonialism conceptually, ended up pushing forward a very complacent view of colonialism which defined it as a mere "episode in African history" (a short interlude: 1884-1960). While this intervention from the Ibadan African Nationalist School of History was informed by the noble desire to dethrone imperialist/colonialist historiography which denied the existence of African history prior to the continent's encounter with Europeans, it ended up minimising the epochal impact of colonialism on Africa.

It was Peter Ekeh of the University of Ibadan, in his Professorial Inaugural Lecture: Colonialism and Social Structure of 1980, who directly challenged the notion that colonialism was an episode in African history. He posited that colonialism was epochal in its impact as it was and is a system of power that is multifaceted in character. It is a power structure that subverts, destroys, reinvents, appropriates, and replaces anything it deems an obstacle to the agenda of colonial domination and exploitation.

Eke's definition of colonialism resonated with that of Frantz Fanon who explained, in The Wretched of the Earth, that colonialism was never satisfied with the conquest of the colonised, it also worked to steal the colonised people's history and to epistemically intervene in their psyche.

Cameroonian philosopher Achille Mbembe is also correct in positing that the fundamental question in colonialism was a planetary one: to whom does the earth belong? Thus, as a planetary phenomenon, its storm troopers, the European colonialists, were driven by the imperial idea of the earth as belonging to them. This is why at the centre of colonialism is the "coloniality of being", that is, the colonisation of the very idea and meaning of being human.

This was achieved through two processes: first, the social classification of the human population; and second, the racial hierarchisation of the classified human population. This was a necessary colonial process to distinguish those who had to be subjected to enslavement, genocide and colonisation.

The third important concept is that of coloniality. It was developed by Latin American decolonial theorists, particularly Anibal Quijano. Coloniality names the transhistoric expansion of colonial domination and its replication in contemporary times. It links very well with the African epic school of colonialism articulated by Ekeh and dovetails well with Kwame Nkrumah's concept of neocolonialism. All this speaks to the epochal impact of colonialism. One therefore wonders how Africa could develop economically under this structure of power and how could colonialism be of benefit to Africa. To understand the negative economic impact of colonialism on Africa, there is a need to appreciate the four journeys of capital and its implications for Africa.

Four journeys of colonial capital and entrapment

Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, in his Secure the Base: Making Africa Visible in the Globe, distilled the four journeys of capital from its mercantile period to its current financial form and in each of the journeys, he plotted the fate of Africa.

The first is the epoch of enslavement of Africans and their shipment as cargo out of the continent. This drained Africa of its most robust labour needed for its economic development. The second was the exploitation of African labour in the plantations and mines in the Americas without any payment so as to enable the very project of Euromodernity and its coloniality. The third is the colonial moment where Africa was scrambled for and partitioned among seven European colonial powers (Belgium, Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Portugal) and its resources (both natural and human) were exploited for the benefit of Europe. The fourth moment is the current one characterised by "debt slavery" whereby a poor continent finances the developed countries of the world. Overseeing this debt slavery is the global financial republic constituted by the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Trade Organization (WTO) and other financial institutions. All these exploitative journeys of capital were enabled by colonialism and coloniality.

Empirically and concretely, colonialism radically ordered Africa into economic zones of exploitation. This reality is well expressed by Samir Amin who identified three main colonial zones.

The first is the "cash crops zone" covering Western and Eastern Africa, where colonialism inaugurated "peasant trade colonies" whereby Africans were forced to abandon cultivation of food crops and instead produce cash crops for an industrialising Europe.

The second zone was that of extractive colonial plantations symbolised by the Congo Free State which was owned by King Leopold II of Belgium; Africans were forced to produce rubber, and extreme violence including the decapitation of limbs was used to enforce this colonial system.

The third zone was that of "labour reserves" inaugurated by settler colonialism. The Southern Africa region was the central space of settler colonies, where Africans were physically removed from their lands and the lands taken over by the white settlers. Those African who survived the wars of conquest were pushed into crowded reserves where they existed as a source of cheap labour for mines, farms, plantations, factories, and even domestic work.

This colonial ordering of economies in Africa has remained intact even after more than 60 years of decolonisation. This is because attaining political independence did not include attaining economic decolonisation. At the moment of political decolonisation, Europe actively worked to develop strategies such as Eurafrica, Françafrique, Lomé Conventions, the Commonwealth and others to maintain its economic domination over Africa.

Roadblocks to development

Like all human beings, Africans were born into valid and legitimate knowledge systems which enabled them to survive as a people, to benefit from their environment, to invent tools, and to organise themselves socially on their own terms.

The success story of the people of Egypt to utilise the resources of the Nile River to build the Egyptian civilisation, which is older than the birth of modern Europe, is a testimony of how the people and the continent were self-developing and self-improving on their own terms.

The invention of stone tools and the revolutionary shift to the iron tools prior to colonialism is another indication of African people making their own history. The domestication of plants and animals is another evidence of African revolutions. This is what colonialism destroyed as it created a colonial order and economy that had no African interests at its centre.

Flourishing pre-colonial African economies of the Kingdom of Kongo, Songhai, Mali, Ancient Ghana, Dahomey - which were for the benefit of African people - were first of all exposed to the devastating impact of the slave trade and later subjected to violent colonialism. What this birthed were economies in Africa rather than African economies - economies that were outside-looking-in in orientation - to sustain the development of Europe.

Fundamentally, the economies in Africa became extractive in nature. By the time direct colonialism was rolled back after 1945, the African leaders inherited colonial economies where Africans participated as providers of cheap labour rather than owners of the economies. These externally oriented economies could not survive as anything else but providers of cheap raw materials. They were and are entrapped in well-crafted colonial matrices of power with a well-planned division of labour.

Today, the economies in Africa remain artificial and fragile to the extent that any attempt to reorient them to serve the majority of African people, sees them flounder and collapse. This is because their scaffold and pivot are colonial relations of exploitation, not decolonial relations of empowerment and equitable distribution of resources.

For real future development and a successful move from economies in Africa towards true African economies, there is a need to revolutionise the asymmetrical colonial power structures that still govern the fate of the continent.
The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera's editorial stance.

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'Moral evil, economic good': Whitewashing the sins of colonialism

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Historian, professor and decolonial theorist. In 2017, a professor at Oxford University in the United Kingdom proposed a research project. The key thesis: that the empire as a historical phenomenon - distinct from an ideological construct - has made ethical contributions and that its legacy cannot be reduced to that of genocides, exploitations, domination and repression.

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(Al Jazeera)

Over the past year, billions of people all over the world have relied heavily on internet connectivity to keep in touch with family and friends, learn online, work from home and get vital information about the coronavirus pandemic.

Yet over the course of 2020, 29 countries intentionally shut down or slowed their internet communications at least 155 times, according to a new report published by Access Now, a non-profit digital rights group.

"We are extremely concerned how government authorities are using internet shutdowns as a systemised tool to repress democratic expression, even in the middle of a global pandemic," Raman Jit Singh Chima, senior international counsel and Asia Pacific policy director at Access Now said.

Most shutdowns: India

Authorities in India shut down the internet 109 times over the course of 2020, mostly in Indian-administered Kashmir, which accounted for almost 90 percent of all internet shutdowns in India last year.

From January 2020 till February of this year, the internet in Indian-administered Kashmir was throttled to 2G, making life very difficult for many students in the state who had been moved to remote learning as a result of COVID-19.

"We weren't able to attend our online classes regularly," said Bazillah Ayoub, 24, a student at the Model Institute of Engineering and Technology in Jammu.

"We had a lot of issues - we were asked to submit our assignments which were sometimes 15MB or above that, which got uploaded after one or two hours. Due to that, we all have backlogs in our subjects because we have not submitted our assignments on time," Ayoub told Al Jazeera.

Internet shutdowns in Indian-administered Kashmir are a regular occurrence, with authorities citing precautionary measures as the main justification.

"Shutdowns are used to suppress voices of dissent," said youth activist Kanwal Singh, 30. "We have been a conflict state for the last 70 years."

People in Indian-administered Kashmir experienced one of the longest internet shutdowns in the world with a complete blackout from August 2019 to January 2020, after which the throttled speed of 2G was allowed. The authorities recently restored 4G services in Indian-administered Kashmir after 18 months.

Last year, India's Supreme Court ordered a review into Kashmir's internet shutdowns, stating that they were unconstitutional and violated India's telecoms rules.

"Any government or authority is not doing charity by restoring the 4G services," said Singh. "When the government restored 4G services everyone started celebrating, but the point is this is not charity. This is our right and everyone's right because this is guaranteed by the Indian constitution."

Elsewhere in Asia

In addition to India, the governments of Myanmar, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Kyrgyzstan and Vietnam also blocked access to the internet in 2020.

Myanmar has imposed the longest shutdown recorded to date, which continued from 2019 through 2020 and up to early February this year in Rakhine and Chin states.

As mass protests continue in the country, internet services remain precarious, despite full internet access being restored by authorities in Rakhine and Chin after a military coup last month.

In Bangladesh, Rohingya refugee camps were cut off from high-speed internet for 415 days. The Rohingya Students Network said people in camps were unable to access vital health information during COVID-19 because of internet throttling.

Europe's shutdowns

During the August 2020 Belarusian election, the government blocked social media channels including WhatsApp, Telegram, Viber and Twitter as well as VPNs and Tor browsers.

Despite this, protesters took to the streets to contest Alexander Lukashenko's presidential victory. As a result, the government imposed a full internet shutdown from the night of August 9 to August 12, 2020.

Belarusian journalist Hanna Liubakova, who has been covering the protests in Belarus, told Al Jazeera, "It was very difficult to verify information and do fact-checking because we received a lot of user-generated content."

"Telegram channels became really important for citizens because that was the only platform that kind of worked a little bit at least," said Liubakova. "It became the main source of information for so many people and the trend continues right now."

An increased number of internet shutdowns have been deployed in areas of conflict. During last year's war between Azerbaijan and Armenia over the contested Nagorno-Karabakh region, Azerbaijan shut down social media and communication to citizens for six weeks. The government said it had been done to prevent Armenian provocation.

In the Middle East

The country with the most internet shutdowns in the Middle East in 2020 has been Yemen, a country mired in armed conflict and humanitarian crisis. These shutdowns exacerbated the situation, making access to information and communication - both by Yemenis and by international organisations attempting to work in the country - very difficult.

In January 2020, 80 percent of internet capacity was cut in Yemen following reports of sabotage to fibre optic cables by Houthi rebels.

Jordan experienced three national shutdowns in 2020. The government restricted Facebook Live during a teachers' union protest in July and August 2020. The Ministry of Education also blocked communication applications such as Telegram, WhatsApp and Facebook during national exams.

Other Middle Eastern countries that shut down the internet include Turkey, Syria, Iraq, Iran, Egypt and Algeria.

Africa's shutdowns

Internet and telecommunication services have been shut down across several African countries including Burundi, Chad, Ethiopia, Guinea, Kenya, Mali, Sudan, Tanzania, Togo and Uganda.

In Ethiopia, 100 million people were plunged into a complete media blackout for two weeks following protests after the killing of Oromo musician, Haacaaluu Hundeessaa.

In Kenya, there were at least two reported internet disruptions in 2020 after two telecommunications towers were destroyed in Mandera County by the Somali armed group, al-Shabab.

Latin America

Internet shutdowns have also occurred in Venezuela, Ecuador and Cuba.

In 2020, the Cuban government blocked access to Telegram, WhatsApp, Twitter, and other social media platforms for three days following rare large public protests decrying curbs to civil liberties.

What are the reasons behind internet shutdowns?

Governments have justified internet shutdowns citing fake news, precautionary measures, public safety and national security among other reasons.

The actual reasons for shutdowns have stemmed from political instability, elections, protests, communal violence, information control and exam cheating.

Seven countries including India, Guinea, Belarus, Burundi, Kyrgyzstan, Tanzania and Togo shut down the internet during an election period in 2020.

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Mapping internet shutdowns around the world

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Over the past year, billions of people all over the world have relied heavily on internet connectivity to keep in touch with family and friends, learn online, work from home and get vital information about the coronavirus pandemic.

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The genocide began after Rwanda's Hutu president Juvenal Habyarimana was killed when his plane was shot down [File: Finbarr O'Reilly/Reuters]

France bears "overwhelming responsibilities" over the 1994 genocide in Rwanda and was "blind" to preparations for the massacres, a report by historians said on Friday but added there was no evidence Paris was complicit in the killings.

A historical commission set up by President Emmanuel Macron concluded there had been a "failure" on the part of France under former leader Francois Mitterrand over the genocide that saw about 800,000 people slaughtered, mainly from the ethnic Tutsi minority.

Historian Vincent Duclert, who headed the commission, handed over the damning report to Macron at the Elysee Palace after years of accusations that France did not do enough to halt the killings and was even complicit in the crimes.

The genocide between April and July of 1994 began after Rwanda's Hutu president Juvenal Habyarimana, with whom Paris had cultivated close ties, was killed when his plane was shot down over Kigali on April 6.

A quarter-century on, the issue still poisons modern relations between France and Rwanda under its controversial President Paul Kagame, a former Tutsi rebel who has ruled the mountainous nation in Africa's Great Lakes region since the aftermath of the genocide.

"Is France an accomplice to the genocide of the Tutsi? If by this we mean a willingness to join a genocidal operation, nothing in the archives that were examined demonstrates this," the report's conclusions said.

"Nevertheless, for a long time, France was involved with a regime that encouraged racist massacres ... It remained blind to the preparation of a genocide by the most radical elements of this regime."

The report criticised the French authorities under Mitterrand for adopting a "binary view" that set Habyarimana as a "Hutu ally" against an "enemy" of Tutsi forces backed by Uganda, and then offering military intervention only "belatedly" when it was too late to halt the genocide.

"The research therefore establishes a set of responsibilities, both serious and overwhelming," it said.

Journalist and author Andrew Wallis told Al Jazeera the report is "explosive stuff".

"The one thing that stood out for me was the fact they're saying French intelligence knew it was Hutu extremists that shot President Habyarimana's plane down, which was seen as the trigger for the genocide," Wallis said.

"A previous French judge's report had denied that and put the blame on President Kagame's RPF [Rwandan Patriotic Front party], and this misinformation has done the rounds for 27 years. It was in their archives that they knew this in fact was untrue."

'Personal relationship'

Macron ordered the creation of the commission in May 2019 to analyse France's role in Rwanda from 1990-1994 through archival research.

France notably led Operation Turquoise, a military-humanitarian intervention launched by Paris under a United Nations mandate between June and August 1994. Its critics say it was in reality aimed at supporting the genocidal Hutu government.

There have also been repeated accusations that authorities in Paris helped suspects in the Rwanda genocide to escape while under French military protection.

The report concluded that in July 1994 "murderers but also the masterminds of the genocide" were in a safe zone established by French forces in the west of the country "who the French political authorities refused to arrest".

Mitterrand and his inner circle were also fearful of the encroachment of English-speaking influence into francophone Africa under influence from Uganda and Kagame's RPF.

The report tells of French decision-makers trapped in "post-colonial" thinking who supported the "racist, corrupt and violent" regime of Habyarimana facing a Tutsi rebellion considered as directed from English-speaking Uganda.

Mitterrand "maintained a strong, personal and direct relationship with the Rwandan head of state" Habyarimana, it said.

"Hovering over Rwanda was the threat of an Anglo-Saxon world, represented by the RPF and Uganda, as well as their international allies."

French authorities behaved as if "acting in the face of a genocide was not in the realm of possibility" when there was a "moral obligation" to ensure genocides never happen again, the report said.

Tackling taboos

The 15-member commission does not have any specialist on Rwanda, a move the French presidency argues was necessary to ensure complete neutrality.

But the historians - who include experts on the Holocaust, the massacres of Armenians in World War I, and international criminal law - have been given access to archives, including those of Mitterrand himself, which were long closed off to researchers.

A statement from the French presidency said Macron welcomed the report as marking "considerable progress in the understanding and description of France's involvement in Rwanda".

Officials in Macron's office said the inquiry was not just about improving relations with Rwanda but with the whole African continent, since other countries also have questions about what France did at the time.

While he seeks to position France as an assertive player on the world stage, Macron has taken tentative steps to come to terms with once-taboo aspects of the country's historical record, although many would like to see far bolder steps.

Historian Benjamin Stora was tasked with examining France's actions during Algeria's war of independence and he called for a "truth commission" and other conciliatory actions in a major report delivered in January.

Macron has ruled out an official apology for torture and other abuses carried out by French troops in Algeria.

The contents of the Rwanda report are likely to have a major bearing on future relations between France and Rwanda, which Macron has said he wants to visit later this year.

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France bears 'overwhelming responsibilities' over Rwanda genocide

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France bears "overwhelming responsibilities" over the 1994 genocide in Rwanda and was "blind" to preparations for the massacres, a report by historians said on Friday but added there was no evidence Paris was complicit in the killings.

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Un crâne humain, appartenant au peuple Herero ou Nama, exposé lors d'une cérémonie à l'hôpital de la Charité de Berlin, le 30 septembre 2011. TOBIAS SCHWARZ / REUTERS

L'Allemagne a pour la première fois reconnu, vendredi 28 mai, avoir commis " un génocide " contre les populations des Herero et des Nama en Namibie pendant l'ère coloniale.

" Nous qualifierons maintenant officiellement ces événements pour ce qu'ils sont du point de vue d'aujourd'hui : un génocide ", a déclaré le ministre des affaires étrangères allemand, Heiko Maas, dans un communiqué.

Il salue dans cette déclaration la conclusion d'un " accord " avec la Namibie après plus de cinq ans d'âpres négociations sur les événements survenus dans ce territoire africain colonisé par l'Allemagne entre 1884 et 1915. Les colons allemands avaient tué des dizaines de milliers d'Herero et de Nama dans des massacres commis entre 1904 et 1908, considérés par de nombreux historiens comme le premier génocide du XX e siècle.

" A la lumière de la responsabilité historique et morale de l'Allemagne, nous allons demander pardon à la Namibie et aux descendants des victimes " pour les " atrocités " commises, a poursuivi le ministre. Dans un " geste de reconnaissance des immenses souffrances infligées aux victimes ", le pays européen va soutenir la " reconstruction et le développement " en Namibie par un programme financier de 1,1 milliard d'euros, a-t-il ajouté.

" L'acceptation de la part de l'Allemagne qu'un génocide a été commis est un premier pas dans la bonne direction ", a réagi Alfredo Hengari, le porte-parole du président namibien, Hage Geingob.

Pas un dédommagement juridique

Le chef de la diplomatie allemande précise qu'il ne s'agit pas de dédommagements sur une base juridique, et que cette reconnaissance n'ouvre la voie à aucune " demande légale d'indemnisation ". Cette somme sera versée sur une période de trente ans, selon des sources proches des négociations, et doit profiter en priorité aux descendants de ces deux populations.

Les crimes commis pendant la colonisation empoisonnent depuis de nombreuses années les relations entre les deux pays. " On ne peut pas tirer un trait sur le passé. La reconnaissance de la faute et la demande de pardon sont toutefois un pas important pour surmonter le passé et construire ensemble l'avenir ", a estimé le chef de la diplomatie allemande.

Dans une volonté de réconciliation, l'Allemagne avait remis en 2019 à la Namibie des ossements de membres des tribus Herero et Nama exterminés, et la secrétaire d'Etat aux affaires étrangères, Michelle Müntefering, avait alors demandé " pardon du fond du cœur ".

Un geste jugé nettement insuffisant par leurs descendants et les autorités namibiennes, qui exigeaient des excuses officielles et des réparations. L'Allemagne s'y était à plusieurs reprises opposée, invoquant les millions d'euros d'aide au développement versés à la Namibie depuis son indépendance, en 1990.

Si le travail de mémoire en Allemagne sur la période nazie est généralement jugé exemplaire, celui sur la période coloniale en Afrique, de la deuxième moitié du XIX e siècle et du début du XX e, a été longtemps délaissé.

Extermination de la rébellion

Les tribus hereros représentent aujourd'hui environ 7 % de la population namibienne contre 40 % au début du XX e siècle. Privés de leurs terres et de leur bétail, ils s'étaient révoltés en 1904 contre les colons allemands, faisant une centaine de morts parmi ces derniers. Envoyé pour mater la rébellion, le général allemand Lothar von Trotha avait ordonné leur extermination. Les Nama s'étaient soulevés un an plus tard et subirent le même sort.

Au total, au moins 60 000 Herero et environ 10 000 Nama perdirent la vie entre 1904 et 1908. Les forces coloniales allemandes avaient employé des techniques génocidaires : massacres de masse, exil dans le désert, où des milliers d'hommes, femmes et enfants sont morts de soif, et camps de concentration, comme celui tristement célèbre de Shark Island.

Des ossements, en particulier les crânes de victimes, furent envoyés en Allemagne pour des expériences scientifiques à caractère racial. Le médecin Eugen Fischer, qui a officié à Shark Island et dont les écrits ont influencé Adolf Hitler, cherchait à prouver la " supériorité de la race blanche ".

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Colonialisme : l'Allemagne reconnaît avoir commis " un génocide " en Namibie

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L'Allemagne a pour la première fois reconnu, vendredi 28 mai, avoir commis " un génocide " contre les populations des Herero et des Nama en Namibie pendant l'ère coloniale. " Nous qualifierons maintenant officiellement ces événements pour ce qu'ils sont du point de vue d'aujourd'hui : un génocide ", a déclaré le ministre des affaires étrangères allemand, Heiko Maas, dans un communiqué.

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Feuilletez “Les Soleils des indépendances” d’Ahmadou Kourouma avec les oreilles

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“Les Soleils des Indépendances”, premier roman d’Ahmadou Kourouma, relate l’histoire d’un prince déchu au moment de l’indépendance. A travers une sélection d’extraits et d’archives sonores, explorons les traditions malinké, entre griot, marabout et génie mais écoutons aussi le drame de l’excision.

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ullstein bild Dtl. via ullstein bild via Getty Images

CULTURE - Bandes dessinées, romans et encyclopédies aux oubliettes. Au Canada, environ 5000 livres de jeunesse parlant des Autochtones ont été détruits car jugés inappropriés par le Conseil scolaire catholique Providence, une commission scolaire francophone qui couvre la région de Windsor (au sud-ouest de Toronto). Au total, 30 écoles francophones et 10.000 élèves sont concernés par cette décision.

Déjà en 2019, une trentaine de livres bannis ont été brûlés. Selon le Conseil scolaire, cet événement, "une cérémonie de purification par la flamme", a été réalisé dans un "but éducatif" puisque les cendres ont pu servir comme engrais pour planter un arbre. "Nous enterrons les cendres de racisme, de discrimination et de stéréotypes dans l'espoir que nous grandirons dans un pays inclusif où tous pourront vivre en prospérité et en sécurité", détaille Suzy Kies, considérée comme une "gardienne du savoir" autochtone, dans une vidéo destinée aux élèves de Windsor.

Mais ces nouveaux ouvrages mis à l'index ne subiront pas le même sort. "Ces livres ont été recyclés ou sont en voie de l'être", explique la porte-parole du Conseil scolaire Lyne Cossette à Radio-Canada.

Tintin, Lucky Luke et Astérix en joue

Même des œuvres célèbres sont touchées par cette décision. Un numéro de Tintin (Tintin en Amérique), trois albums de et Astérix et les Indiens ont été retirés des bibliothèques du Conseil scolaire catholique Providence. Une représentation trop erronée des Autochtones est mis en cause dans chacun de ces ouvrages: débalancement de pouvoir, sexualisation de la femme, présentation négative des peuples dans les rôles de méchants, d'alcooliques ou de paresseux...

Aucun auteur n'aurait été informé du retrait de son livre. Radio Canada a interrogé Marcel Levasseur, qui a vu sa bande dessinée Laflèche se faire retirer des bibliothèques. Une œuvre qui se déroule en 1755, et qui, selon le Conseil scolaire, aurait des dessins trop éloignées de la réalité. "En 10 ans, je suis passé de presque gagnant d'un prix à auteur banni", estime Marcel Levasseur.

Même si les spécialistes de l'histoire Autochtone affirment que la plupart des représentations faites dans ces livres sont fausses ou partiellement fausses, leur avis sur leur destruction n'est pas aussi tranché que celle du Conseil scolaire.

"On ne peut pas enlever [ces livres]. Je ne suis pas certaine que c'est la bonne chose à faire. Ça fait partie d'une époque", estime ainsi l'anthropologue autochtone Nicole O'Bomsawin, tout en déplorant une représentation torse-nu de nombreux personnages autochtones.

Sur les réseaux sociaux, où l'affaire a suscité un débat important, des commentaires font écho à ce que propose notamment l'Association pour la promotion des services documentaires scolaires.

Interrogée par Radio Canada, Ariane Régnier, présidente de l'association estime qu'il sera ainsi préférable de faire "de la mise en contexte" et d'expliquer plutôt que "d'effacer l'histoire".

Débat national avant les élections

L'affaire fait grand bruit alors que les Canadiens seront appelés aux urnes pour des élections législatives le 20 septembre, et surtout alors que le pays a été secoué ces derniers mois par la découverte de centaines de tombes dans des pensionnats où étaient enrôlés de force des enfants autochtones. Fin juin, une commission d'enquête a conclu à un "génocide culturel".

Les chefs des trois différents partis nationaux se sont de leur côté opposés à la décision de brûler ces livres, dont Justin Trudeau, premier ministre du pays.
À voir également sur Le HuffPost: Ce chien s'incruste à la télé pendant la météo de son propriétaire

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Au Canada, 5000 livres jugés néfastes aux Autochtones, dont Tintin, détruits

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CULTURE - Bandes dessinées, romans et encyclopédies aux oubliettes. Au Canada, environ 5000 livres de jeunesse parlant des Autochtones ont été détruits car jugés inappropriés par le Conseil scolaire catholique Providence, une commission scolaire francophone qui couvre la région de Windsor (au sud-ouest de Toronto).

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Article rédigé par

L'affaire a fait le tour du monde. Mardi 7 septembre, Radio-Canada a publié une enquête dévoilant la destruction de milliers d'ouvrages, bandes dessinées et albums jeunesse, par des écoles catholiques francophones de la province de l'Ontario, au Canada, suscitant de nombreuses réactions un peu partout dans le monde.

De Tintin à Astérix, en passant par des albums de Lucky Luke, les ouvrages concernés par cette destruction étaient accusés de représenter de manière stéréotypée, voire raciste, les populations autochtones (premiers peuples d'Amérique du Nord et leurs descendants). Mais après des révélations incriminant Suzy Kies, une figure centrale du projet, accusée d'avoir menti sur ses origines, l'opération a finalement été suspendue par ses initiateurs.

Franceinfo vous résume ce qui s'est passé.

Les destructions ont débuté en 2019

En 2019, une cérémonie "de purification par la flamme" est organisée par le conseil scolaire catholique Providence, qui regroupe un ensemble de 30 établissements francophones situés dans le centre-ouest de la province de l'Ontario, explique la radio canadienne dans son enquête publiée le 7 septembre.

Comme son nom l'indique, l'événement est un autodafé : il consiste à brûler une trentaine de livres bannis par le groupe d'établissements, dans une visée éducative et "dans un but de réconciliation avec les Premières Nations" (les populations autochtones du Canada). Les ouvrages ont été sélectionnés dans le cadre d'un projet intitulé Redonnons à Mère Terre, par un comité formé de membres du conseil scolaire et d'accompagnateurs autochtones. Ils ont analysé des centaines de livres destinés à la jeunesse pour vérifier si le traitement des populations autochtones était respectueux.

D'après la porte-parole du conseil scolaire, Lyne Cossette, les restes des livres brûlés ont ensuite été recyclés ou sont "en voie de l'être". Des cérémonies similaires devaient avoir lieu, mais elles ont dû être reportées en raison de la crise sanitaire.

De son côté, le Premier ministre canadien, Justin Trudeau, a immédiatement réagi aux révélations de Radio-Canada, mardi 7 septembre. Il a affirmé qu'il n'était jamais d'accord pour " qu'on brûle des livres", tout en précisant " que ce n'était pas à lui de dire aux autochtones comment ils devraient se sentir ou comment ils devraient agir pour faire avancer la réconciliation".

Plus de 4 700 ouvrages visés

D'après Radio-Canada, qui a eu accès à un document recensant l'ensemble des ouvrages concernés, 155 ouvrages différents auraient été visés depuis 2019, et 4 716 livres auraient été retirés des bibliothèques dans près de 30 écoles. Il s'agit à la fois de bandes dessinées, de romans, d'encyclopédies mais aussi d'albums jeunesse.

On apprend ce matin que des écoles ont détruit 5000 livres jugés néfastes aux Autochtones et aux efforts de réconciliation. Ils ont été jetés, certains brûlés et enterrés, par un conseil scolaire de l'Ontario.

Des livres comme " Astérix et les Indiens " https://t.co/lSaPnMZ1IC
- Gabriel Gagnon (@Gab_Gagnon) September 7, 2021

Parmi les ouvrages figurent notamment des grands noms de la bande dessinée belge tels que Tintin en Amérique, l'un des ouvrages les plus vendus par Hergé dans le monde depuis sa parution en 1932. A l'origine de son retrait, la présence de l'expression "Peau rouge", un langage jugé "non acceptable" par le conseil scolaire. Le Temple du soleil figure également dans les ouvrages retirés.

Des albums de Lucky Luke sont également accusés de représenter le pouvoir du côté des Blancs, au détriment des Indiens, toujours cantonnés dans le rôle de méchants. Le comité dénonce aussi une sexualisation de l'autochtone qui tombe amoureuse d'Obélix dans Astérix et les Indiens. Dans ce livre tiré du dessin animé du même nom, le personnage d'Amérindienne en question porte une mini-jupe et un décolleté. Enfin, le livre Pocahontas, tiré du dessin animé de Disney, a également été retiré des bibliothèques, accusé de sexualiser les femmes autochtones.

Une "gardienne du savoir" qui se révèle ne pas être une autochtone

Parmi les accompagnateurs autochtones qui ont conseillé le conseil scolaire dans la sélection des ouvrages figure Suzy Kies, coprésidente de la Commission des Premières Nations du Parti libéral du Canada (parti de Justin Trudeau) depuis 2016. Elle est aussi "gardienne du savoir" autochtone. A ce titre, elle est chargée de la restitution des traditions orales des peuples des Premières Nations.

Mais une enquête de Radio-Canada publiée un jour après les révélations, le 8 septembre, a révélé que Suzy Kies, centrale dans le projet, n'avait en réalité aucun lien de parenté avec les Premières Nations. Suzy Kies affirmait pourtant auprès de la radio canadienne avoir un parent d'origine européenne, et un autre d'origine autochtone, se revendiquant notamment de descendance abénakie, un peuple présent dans le sud-est du Québec. Mais après consultation des registres d'état civil, la radio canadienne affirme que si son père est effectivement né au Luxembourg, sa mère serait d'origine française.

L'article révèle aussi qu'aucun lien de parenté avec les populations autochtones sur au moins sept générations n'a été trouvé. Un constat confirmé par un élu du peuple abénaki, qui affirme que Suzy Kies n'apparaît pas dans leur "liste de bande". Après ces révélations sur ses fausses origines, Suzy Kies a par ailleurs été accusée "d'appropriation culturelle" par les autochtones, comme le précise Le Monde.

En réaction à cette polémique, Suzy Kies a annoncé sa démission du poste de coprésidente de la Commission des peuples autochtones du Parti libéral du Canada. Dans un courriel auquel le journal canadien Le Devoir a pu avoir accès, elle explique les raisons de son retrait : "Je refuse (...) que l'on se serve de mon histoire pour nuire à Justin Trudeau

Une opération suspendue un jour après les révélations

La polémique autour de Suzy Kies a ébranlé la presse canadienne et a également entraîné des réactions au sein du groupe scolaire Providence, qui a décidé de suspendre la destruction des ouvrages.

Contacté par franceinfo, le conseil scolaire Providence, à l'origine de l'opération, se justifie : " Nous n'étions pas au courant que Suzy Kies n'a pas de statut d'Indien en vertu de la loi et pensions sincèrement avoir la chance de travailler avec une femme autochtone possédant une grande expérience", affirme la porte-parole du conseil scolaire, Lyne Cossette. Elle explique également que Suzy Kies leur a été "recommandée par d'autres leaders en éducation autochtone, et étant donné son implication dans plusieurs autres conseils scolaires, nous avions confiance en elle".

D'après la radio canadienne, près de 200 œuvres étaient encore en cours d'évaluation et donc potentiellement menacées de destruction, dont notamment d'autres ouvrages de Tintin et d'Astérix.

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Canada : Tintin, Astérix, Lucky Luke... On vous explique la polémique autour des 5 000 livres détruits par un groupe scolaire catholique

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Ces bandes dessinées et ouvrages destinés à la jeunesse, accusés de propager des stéréotypes sur les populations autochtones d'Amérique, ont été retirés des bibliothèques d'une trentaine d'écoles. Certains ont même été brûlés. L'affaire a fait réagir jusqu'au sommet du gouvernement canadien.

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Emmanuel Macron est revenu sur l'Histoire liant les deux continents, lors d'un sommet Afrique-France inédit qui s'est ouvert ce vendredi à Montpellier.

"On ne peut pas avoir un projet d'avenir pour la France si elle n'assume pas sa part d'africanité", a lancé vendredi le président Emmanuel Macron lors du sommet Afrique-France, soulignant que "près de sept millions de Français sont intimement, familialement liés à l'Afrique".

"Nous avons une dette envers l'Afrique", "un continent qui fascine le monde entier, qui parfois en effraie d'autres", a-t-il ajouté, allusion aux débats sur l'immigration qui marquent les débuts de la campagne présidentielle.

Emmanuel Macron a défendu ce "nouveau sommet", où il est le seul chef d'État, puisque les dirigeants africains, prévus dans une version initiale du sommet en 2020, n'ont finalement pas été invités. En revanche, l'Arena de Montpellier, dans le sud de la France, accueillait 3000 invités, dont environ 700 jeunes représentants de la société civile africaine.

Macron veut une nouvelle relation entre les deux continents

"Notre pays s'est construit dans ce rapport à l'Afrique. Nous avons près de sept millions de Français dont la vie est intimement, familialement, de manière directe, en première ou en deuxième génération, liée à l'Afrique", a insisté Emmanuel Macron.

"On ne peut pas avoir une France qui construit son propre roman national si elle n'assume pas sa part d'africanité, si elle ne regarde pas à travers ces pages sombres ou heureuses", a-t-il souligné.

"Nous tous dans cette salle, n'avons pas choisi notre histoire et notre géographie". "Nous sommes les héritiers de tout cela", a-t-il développé, en appelant plutôt à choisir "comment bâtir l'avenir".

"Un pays comme la France a un devoir de répondre aux demandes de la jeunesse africaine", a-t-il encore dit, estimant que ce sommet d'un nouveau type illustre une nouvelle relation entre la France et l'Afrique. Il est fait aussi pour "toutes nos diasporas, les Français et Françaises binationaux qui font vivre cette relation".

Le chef de l'Etat prône une autre relation entre la France et l'Afrique mais est régulièrement interpellé sur le passé colonial. "L'Afrique est mariée avec la France, un mariage forcé depuis plus de 500 ans", lui a ainsi lancé une artiste africaine dans la matinée. Ce à quoi le chef de l'État a répondu: "si on reste dans le face-à-face ou le dos-à-dos, on n'avancera jamais".

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Macron appelle la France à "assumer sa part d'africanité"

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Emmanuel Macron est revenu sur l'Histoire liant les deux continents, lors d'un sommet Afrique-France inédit qui s'est ouvert ce vendredi à Montpellier. "On ne peut pas avoir un projet d'avenir pour la France si elle n'assume pas sa part d'africanité", a lancé vendredi le président Emmanuel Macron lors du sommet Afrique-France, soulignant que "près de sept millions de Français sont intimement, familialement liés à l'Afrique".

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Encre Noire et Page Blanche : Aminata Sow Fall | Native du Sénégal, Aminata Sow Fall est LA grande dame de la littérature africaine. Son regard critique sur la société, son humanisme et sa sensibilité... | By TV5MONDE | Facebook

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71K views, 1.8K likes, 203 loves, 54 comments, 870 shares, Facebook Watch Videos from TV5MONDE: Native du Sénégal, Aminata Sow Fall est LA grande dame de la littérature africaine. Son regard critique...

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Stealing Africa: How Britain looted the continent’s art

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The role Britain’s anti-slavery mission played in looting African art. And the campaign to get it returned.

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Ebou Janha holds a document showing his record of service during World War II [Muhamadou Mughtarr Bittaye/Al Jazeera]

Brikama, The Gambia - On an early November morning, 102-year-old Ebou Janha rests a pair of pliers next to his jeweller's anvil and collects his breath before demonstrating how he gunned down Japanese soldiers for the British Empire, 77 years ago.

Speaking in the small white-walled workshop he built in the 1950s when The Gambia was still a British colony, Janha manages five or so Wolof words at a time while his daughter, 55-year-old Mamtutti, translates.

His memory flickers into action as he recalls how, in 1941 when he was 22 years old, he was captured by village elders and sent off to fight against an enemy he had never heard of before.

During World War II, the recruitment of Gambian soldiers was often enforced via a quota system with the 36 local chiefs pressured to supply Britain with 48 servicemen each every month - a number that increased to 75 in March 1943.

British officials also conducted round-ups of unemployed men in the capital, Bathurst (now Banjul), to enlist them into military service. While some soldiers chose to fight, such as the men from Balangar - a village steeped in martial tradition where 35 friends signed up to fight on the same day in 1941 - many others were forced to.

When British army recruiters called for volunteers to sign up, Ebou Janha had little interest in war or the martial culture of his ancestors.

He was born the son of a jeweller in Bathurst and had become his father's silversmith apprentice. He also joined his family in yearly seasonal migrations "upcountry" to their ancestral village of Bwiam, where he harvested groundnuts to be sold in Bathurst with the profits ploughed back into the family's jewellery business.

But Janha's wishes counted for little. During one of his seasonal migrations to Bwiam, he was chosen by his chief for his stocky frame and stubbornness; destined to become one of the few from the village to fight. With ropes tied around him to prevent his escape, he was given days to compose himself and accept his fate.

The young jeweller became one of 4,450 recruits split between two regiments: 2 Gambia Regiment, which stayed in The Gambia to defend home soil; and 1 Gambia Regiment - 1,350 men including Janha who were given training in jungle warfare, before the Royal Navy put them on boats to war in Burma, (modern-day Myanmar), which had been part of British India, in January 1944.

Founded in 1901, The Gambia regiment existed until 1958. Its men fought in both world wars, but Janha is the last surviving member of the regiment to have fought in Burma.

Each day hundreds of people walk or drive past his shop in the sprawling town of Brikama, cars beeping their horns and kicking up the dry-season sand just a foot from the door, unaware that a World War II veteran works inside, carving out silver-coated earrings, bracelets and rings.

Preparation and protection

In 1942, after Janha and the rest of the recruits had finished their basic training, they were given eight weeks to "prepare their bodies", an ancient code meaning to gather their possessions, prepare their wills and begin a "juju" pact with the spirits. Followers of the ancient West African belief system sacrifice a goat or a calf and offer a shilling to the marabou or medium in exchange for protection or blessings. During World War II, Gambian soldiers often carried elaborate juju amulets on their belts.

Following jungle training in The Gambia and Nigeria, the 81 West Africa Division's 6 Brigade - which included Janha's battalion from the 1 Gambia Regiment as well as battalions from Nigeria and Sierra Leone - set sail from Nigeria on July 10. They arrived in Bombay, now known as Mumbai, India on August 14, 1943.

Six months of training followed, before 6 Brigade travelled to Burma, making an amphibious landing as Royal Navy guns blasted Japanese positions in the distance.

"The firing started on the ship. Heavy fire! It continued until we landed and everybody rushed into the bush," Janha explains, becoming animated as he remembers his first taste of war. The sleeves of his delicate white tunic flutter as he mimics the Royal Navy's big guns launching their shells.

"Private Amadou, Private Banta and Sergeant Njie," he says, reeling off the names of his closest friends. "The three of us together."

They formed part of a force historians would later call 'The Forgotten Army' on account of how their operations in the Burma Campaign were overlooked by Fleet Street and the rest of the contemporary press.

The Forgotten Army

Officially called the United Kingdom's Fourteenth Army, the Forgotten Army was formed in 1943 to fight the Japanese in Burma. It was made up of 13 infantry divisions with nearly a million men by late 1944, drawn from two West African Divisions, one East African Division, eight Indian Divisions and two British ones.

The two West African Divisions included emigre Polish officers who had escaped to Britain when Nazi Germany occupied Poland. As many of the Poles could not speak English, they communicated with the West African soldiers in pidgin English, which had been used as a trade language in West Africa for more than 200 years.

After a hurried beach landing and with his bayonet fixed, Janha was soon hacking his way through the dense undergrowth, heading for the steep, verdant summits where he and his comrades would engage Japan's formidable 55th Division. It was this Division that had smashed China's own 55th Division as it conquered Burma and drove British troops out in 1942.

The terrain in the isolated Arakan region of western Burma was inaccessible and harsh, but for the next two years, it would become home to more than a thousand Gambian soldiers.

In the early days of the campaign, the enemy looked like little birds at the top of those tall hills, says Janha, describing how the Japanese and African soldiers jabbed and slipped like two prizefighters trying to get a feel for each other's power in the opening rounds; both aware they were in for a long fight.

Just three days after landing on January 22, the West African troops had to cross the Kaladan River - which traverses mountain passes before snaking down to the rice paddies below - to get at the Japanese, who were well dug in inland and out of range of heavy artillery.

But soon after crossing the river, three members of the 1 Gambia Regiment were killed in an ambush. Janha found himself stealthily crawling along the ground, cutting his way through shrub and thicket, making sure his amulets stayed tied to his belt.

"You will meet the Japanese standing and you would not know whether this person was a human or not, because of the masks they used, and the traps they made, but they used to say of us when we captured them, 'Gambians, small but hot,' because we used jujus and they couldn't take many of us," Janha recalled as a regular customer entered his shop, looking to get a signet ring adjusted and joking about how the "old man" still refused to use a smartphone.

Enemies on all sides

Janha fought for two years in the jungles and on the hilltops of Burma.

There were exceptional acts of bravery and stoic acts of resistance as 6 Brigade defended strategically important locations against often relentless enemy fire. But that did not stop many of its members wondering how they had got there, then later, when they returned home, questioning why their exploits had been ignored.

When German leader Adolf Hitler went on a blitzkrieg to Paris in 1940, causing the French to surrender and the establishment of the puppet Vichy regime, the British colony of The Gambia had found itself surrounded by enemies on all sides. French West Africa - a federation of eight French colonial territories which are now Mauritania, Senegal, Mali, Guinea, Ivory Coast, Burkina Faso, Benin and Niger - was suddenly at war with the UK and its colonies.

The tiny sliver of land on the lush banks of the River Gambia had served Britain's interests during the transatlantic slave trade. And afterwards, when Britain colonised the country, many years of bountiful groundnut harvests had yielded profits that were siphoned off into governing the UK's priorities along the coast in Sierra Leone.

Yet The Gambia remained a colony Britain did not know what to do with and had little interest in developing. A succession of British governments had used the territory as a bargaining chip, hoping the French would trade Guinea - or another of its colonies in the region - for their smallest colony in Africa.

But now, with Britain at war, The Gambia was an important asset in danger of invasion. When the British took the fight to the pro-German Vichy French administration at The Battle of Dakar in September 1940, two British battleships and two cruisers were damaged.

The loss made Britain increasingly aware that Bathurst was of naval importance and so the Royal Air Force built three bases in 1941 from which their Hurricane fighter planes could dominate the region's skies.

But as these defences were being built, Britain's army was licking its wounds thousands of miles away as Japan captured Hong Kong, Malaya (now called Malaysia), Singapore, and Burma. Soldiers from the British colonies in Africa would now be needed to help stem that tide, and block Japan's advance into India.

'Thank God I'm alive'

The first months of fighting went badly for the Gambians. The jungle was thicker than anything the men had experienced before and dozens were struck down by snake bites, booby traps and malaria.

"Our men weren't very well prepared for the jungle involved," says historian Hassoum Ceesay, surrounded by books in his study at the Gambia National Museum, where he is the curator.

"Remember these are mostly village chaps or men from the savannah. Yet perhaps the British thought, well, 'these are Africans and they are used to the bush,' calculating they were used to being in jungles, being around snakes, spiders and eating wild fruit. 'So let's send them into the jungle'. It's not surprising that initially, these Gambian soldiers had this ecological fright, and needed a moral regrouping."

The majority of the 127 Gambian soldiers who died in Burma were killed during the torrid months of February to April 1944; a chapter defined by merciless treks deep into the jungle as blood-sucking leeches attached themselves to their exposed skin and concealed enemy fighters lay waiting to ambush them.

On February 12, Janha's D company suffered nine losses with almost 30 wounded as they besieged Kaladan village. The Japanese were waiting for them with a machine gun the Gambians nicknamed "Kaladan Sam". Its rounds tore through flesh at ease, creating exit wounds the size of mangos. The regiment was forced to retreat.

One week later they crouched on the flank of the 4th Nigerian regiment as they charged up Pagoda Hill - a landmark that gave its occupier the advantage of a prime view over the Kaladan River. The Nigerians destroyed the Japanese position.

Then, on March 1, 1 Gambia Regiment was given orders to defend Pagoda Hill "at all costs", but when the Japanese initiated their counterattack the Gambians were outflanked, overrun and forced to retreat north with the rest of the 81st West Africa Division. They were pursued by the Japanese for more than a week.

The capitulation on Pagoda Hill was Private Janha's and the regiment's nadir in Burma. Twelve Gambians were killed, another 30 were wounded, and 21 went missing, "presumed captured, mutilated and executed by the Japanese," says Ceesay, as he reads from an archive.

When Al Jazeera asked Private Ebou Janha about the retreat from the hill, he lifted his shirt to reveal clusters of scar tissue running from his chest to his waist. With four other members of his unit, he had fallen into a deep booby trap the Japanese had set, hoping to impale the Gambian soldiers as they fled. Before they could escape it, a Japanese soldier threw a grenade in.

"The grenade was powerful! It made me like this. My eardrums were burst. But thank God I'm alive," Janha says, recalling how he managed to control the urge to scream in pain as he burned and then to climb out of the trap as his four friends lay dead inside it.

More than 10 men from D Company 1 Gambia Regiment were left behind Japanese lines on Pagoda Hill. It took three weeks for most to find their way back to the battalion.

Acts of heroism

The Gambian soldiers were continually forced to retreat and a nasty cholera outbreak ripped right through them, causing many to believe they had been cursed. Historian Ceesay says it was "a certainty that all men in the regiment practiced juju" and those still alive would have likely attributed the deaths of their comrades to a lack of juju discipline - breaking their side of the deal they had entered into with the spirit realm.

They believed the spells could be broken by blunders such as not taking their amulets off when they prayed, went to bed, or relieved themselves, or by getting them dirty in the mud of the jungle - or some other failure to fulfil the promises they had made to the spirits before setting sail.

The officers of 1 Gambia Regiment decided it was time for drastic action. They reorganised the men to ease their concerns, dividing the Gambian soldiers between various platoons. They were taken out of action, joining the Indian units of 7 Battalion of the 16th Punjab Regiment for a few days away from the front.

"Many of these men were Bambara (a Mandé ethnic group throughout much of West Africa) and they had this primordial attachment to not being humiliated, to not being defeated in the battlefield," says Ceesay. "So, you have that and you have the juju power they practiced, and then you have a very potent recipe to go back and fight and restore their honour."

Rested and reorganised, the Gambian soldiers were soon back on the march again, and their chance for atonement quickly arrived.

Between May 14 and 20, 1944, the entire 1 Gambia Regiment had to defend Frontier Hill, an elevation guarding Mowdok, and the Mowdok-Baungprei track leading into India.

For one week the Gambians fought off "three major and six minor Japanese attacks", refusing to budge an inch. These victories spurred the Gambians on, just before the monsoon months came, and with it the rain and mud that forced both sides to stop the relentless attacks, and give their men some rest.

Some months passed and the rains stopped, and when they did, one of the greatest acts of heroism in modern Gambian history took place.

One-man attacks

Sitting down with his older brother in Serekunda, the largest city in The Gambia, Momodou Kindi Camara waits as his son and niece return from work and enter the family compound. The muezzin fills the air with the early evening call to prayer.

One by one the family members perform their ritual Islamic washing as Momodou Camara explains how on December 19, 1944, his father Kindi Camara marched with the regiment as they moved out through villages and rice fields under the noonday sun.

As they passed through a farm, the men suddenly launched themselves to the floor. Bullets whizzed by and mortar fire exploded all around them. As Kindi Camara's medal citation reads:
"Without hesitation, firing his Bren Gun from the hip, Pte *Kamara charged the enemy position across 200 yards of open paddy. The enemy concentrated LMG [light machine gun], rifle, and grenade discharger fire on him, but totally disregarding personal safety, he continued his charge. In face of this deadly persistence, the enemy abandoned his positions and fled in confusion."
This was not the first or last instance of a single Gambian soldier forcing an entire Japanese unit to retreat, before the aircraft Enola Gay's bomb bay doors were opened on August 6, 1945 to drop "little boy" on the Japanese city of Hiroshima, changing the world forever. Three days later the United States dropped a second nuclear bomb on Nagasaki. Emperor Hirohito ordered the Japanese army to lay down its weapons.

For the Gambian soldiers, the war was over, but they had to wait until December 1945 for the troopship SS Empire Pride to sail them home. They reached Bathurst in January 1946. The day after they arrived the Gambia Echo newspaper reported the deputy British governor saying all the returning troops did "was talk, talk, talk".

But these trained soldiers could not only now fight, they had also learned mechanics and engineering and discovered new agricultural methods during their time in Burma and India, and as the renowned Senegalese film director and former colonial soldier, Ousmane Sembène, put it: "In war, we saw the white men naked and we have not forgotten that picture."

It would take some time but the death knell of colonialism had been rung. In 1965 The Gambia won its independence. Many of Gambia's Burma veterans joined the pre- and post-independence security and police forces. Others like Ebou Janha and Kindi Camara spent their post-war lives trying to work their way out of grinding poverty.

"What I get from this shop is what we eat," says Janha, with a mischievous smile as Mamtutti hands him his packed lunch of "domada" - a peanut stew - and encourages him to eat.

Momodou Camara and his family hold Kindi's legacy close but are bitter at the way the British washed their hands of him and his descendants, after running the country into the ground.

When American President Franklin D Roosevelt visited The Gambia in 1943, he was so appalled at the homelessness and disease he witnessed that when speaking to UK Prime Minister Winston Churchill, he referred to it as "that hell hole of yours". What he saw in Bathurst further consolidated his anti-colonial views according to his son, Elliot, a lieutenant colonel in the US Army Air Corps.

One son of a Gambian Burma veteran said that all the British left "was a prison, a hospital, and an asylum."

For decades following the war, the British and the Gambian Legion's, and the Royal Commonwealth Ex-Services League (RCEL) - an organisation founded in 1921 to represent the interests of Commonwealth citizens who have served with either the British or Commonwealth Forces - have provided grants, medical funds, and scholarships to veterans and their children, but not all received help.

Many Bambara men picked up the semi-nomadic life they had left in 1943, and others filtered back into their rural villages, hoping to forget the bloodshed.

Alpha Jallow, whose father crossed a river behind enemy lines in Burma to save a badly wounded Rhodesian (now Zimbabwe) officer, and swim with him back to safety, helped set up the World War II Veterans Family Association. For years they have been scouring the country supporting widows and attending the funerals of the last remaining soldiers. Jallow hopes "learning about Gambia's war heroes will become part of the national curriculum."

On Remembrance Sunday, as people in the UK and elsewhere remember the sacrifices of some of those who died, Ebou Janha will likely be in his workshop.

"Even if I'm sick I like to come to my workshop," he says. "I thank God I'm alive now. And I've thrown away all my juju," he adds as he tucks into his stew.

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The last warrior of Africa's 'Forgotten Army': Gambia and WWII

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Brikama, The Gambia - On an early November morning, 102-year-old Ebou Janha rests a pair of pliers next to his jeweller's anvil and collects his breath before demonstrating how he gunned down Japanese soldiers for the British Empire, 77 years ago.

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What a sideway map of the Mediterranean reveals

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The "Mediterranean Without Borders" map was produced, in the political euphoria of 2011, by Paris-based artist Sabine Réthoré. Its profound simple 90-degree rotation not only underwrites an artistic streak, but can also largely impact one's perspective. The end result is that the question is no longer about north-south as much as it is about parity and closeness.

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From scooping a string of important awards to releasing a number of critically acclaimed books, writers from across Africa took the literary world by storm in 2021.

The crowning moment came on October 7, when Zanzibar-born Abdulrazak Gurnah was named the winner of this year's Nobel Prize in literature. Weeks later, South African author Damon Galgut won the prestigious Booker Prize for his novel The Promise, while British-Somali writer Nadifa Mohammed's The Fortune Men was on the shortlist.

African writers who penned novels in French also saw big success, with Senegalese novelist Mohamed Mbougar Sarr winning one of France's oldest and most illustrious literary prizes, the Prix Goncourt, for La Plus Secrète Mémoire des Hommes (The Most Secret Memory of Men).

The novel also saw Sarr win this year's Hennesy Book Award and the Transfuge Award for Best French novel.

Fellow Senegalese author, Boubacar Boris Diop, who is also an essayist and journalist, was awarded the Neustadt International Prize for Literature, a biennial award sponsored by the University of Oklahoma and World Literature Today since 1970.

Completing the trio of successes for Senegal, French-Senegalese novelist David Diop won the International Booker Prize for translated fiction for At Night All Blood Is Black.

This was also the year when Paulina Chiziane, often referred to as Mozambique's first woman novelist, was awarded the 2021 Prémio Camões, widely considered the most prestigious prize in the Portuguese literary world.

Meanwhile, Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi, a United Kingdom-based Ugandan novelist was awarded the 2021 Jhalak Prize for her novel The First Woman.

'More opportunities'

Bhakti Shringarpure, the founder of Radical Books Collective, said the prizes "amplify" the literary scene of various countries on the continent and "generate legitimacy".

"It certainly means more opportunities for African writers with publishers, agents and editors, and an opportunity to be heard. And of course, gaining more mainstream attention means encountering more African literature in bookstores," said Shringarpure, who is also an associate professor of English and gender studies at the University of Connecticut.

While there is little doubt the accolades have cemented 2021 as an exemplary year for literature from across the continent, what kind of effect do the writers themselves think these awards have?

Tsitsi Dangarembga, a distinguished Zimbabwean novelist, playwright and filmmaker who earlier this year won the 2021 PEN Pinter Prize and the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade, said that while the prizes help shine a light on her work for a finite period of time, she was unsure how much of this translated into any form of enduring outcome.

"In five years or so, I would like to look back and say that these awards were the beginning of a period in my life where my work was much more generative in terms of my achieving my goals," said Dangarembga, who is also an activist and social justice advocate.

While she hopes her creative work helps others to analyse the world, Dangarembga said she would also like "the kind of success that increases my influence so that I can impact events in Zimbabwe and on the continent more through my work and social analysis".

'Not bending to Western demands'

While writers from Africa are no strangers to award recognition, which has led to literature from across the continent and its diaspora increasingly finding a place on the global stage, a multitude of factors led to the kinds of success seen this year.

Shringrarpure highlighted the fact that writers such as Gurnah, Diop and Dangarembga are uncompromising in their political conviction and engage literature to give us "complex, nuanced, honest and beautiful portraits of African lives and experiences".

She said, "[They] have never bended to the demands of Western publishing and have consistently refused to accommodate themes and styles that suit mainstream readerships."

This almost disregard of the Western gaze has led to writers and publishers bringing to audiences a diverse range of stories from across the continent. For example, Sarr's La Plus Secrète Mémoire des Hommes tells the story of a young Senegalese writer in France, while David Diop's At Night All Blood Is Black, is a harrowing yet necessary read about a Senegalese soldier fighting in World War I.

Niki Igbaroola, the talent and audience development manager at Cassava Republic Press, a publishing house that publishes works by African writers, said that while the growing bearing of the Black Lives Matter movement on the publishing industry could be ignored, there has also been an "organic rise in the global consumption of African art".

"The problem has never been whether or not the work exists, but if the work is being given visibility", said Igbaroola, crediting the "rogue" nature of social media for causing a shift in the "voices of influence" and affording greater power to readers "in dictating consumer habits".

Indeed, the power of social media, coupled with the existence of publishing houses focused on African literature and what Shringarpure described as "the intensity with which Africans on the continent produce literary and publishing structures online" have all played their part in literature from Africa being widely recognised.

"So far, and ironically, African literature tends to be entirely constructed around single authors," said Shingrarpure, citing award-winning Nigerian writer Chimamanda Adichie.

"It is important that we accidentally stumble upon a variety of African literature from different countries, written in different genres in our daily lives whether we're in the West or elsewhere."

Meanwhile, Igbaroola said that while it is hoped that more African writers gain recognition in the form of prestigious awards earlier in their careers, she stressed that such accolades do not necessarily translate to a larger audience.

"While prizes can boost sales, more often their biggest value lies in prestige and they are not always an indicator that these authors are being widely read, or their books adequately distributed, both on the continent and abroad," she added.

"It is important not to lose sight of this, even as we celebrate these successes."

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African authors took the literary world by storm in 2021

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From scooping a string of important awards to releasing a number of critically acclaimed books, writers from across Africa took the literary world by storm in 2021. The crowning moment came on October 7, when Zanzibar-born Abdulrazak Gurnah was named the winner of this year's Nobel Prize in literature.

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hile on air, CBS News senior foreign correspondent Charlie D'Agata stated last week that Ukraine "isn't a place, with all due respect, like Iraq or Afghanistan, that has seen conflict raging for decades. This is a relatively civilized, relatively European - I have to choose those words carefully, too - city, one where you wouldn't expect that, or hope that it's going to happen".

If this is D'Agata choosing his words carefully, I shudder to think about his impromptu utterances. After all, by describing Ukraine as "civilized", isn't he really telling us that Ukrainians, unlike Afghans and Iraqis, are more deserving of our sympathy than Iraqis or Afghans?

Righteous outrage immediately mounted online, as it should have in this case, and the veteran correspondent quickly apologized, but since Russia began its large-scale invasion on 24 February, D'Agata has hardly been the only journalist to see the plight of Ukrainians in decidedly chauvinistic terms.

The BBC interviewed a former deputy prosecutor general of Ukraine, who told the network: "It's very emotional for me because I see European people with blue eyes and blond hair ... being killed every day." Rather than question or challenge the comment, the BBC host flatly replied, "I understand and respect the emotion." On France's BFM TV, journalist Phillipe Corbé stated this about Ukraine: "We're not talking here about Syrians fleeing the bombing of the Syrian regime backed by Putin. We're talking about Europeans leaving in cars that look like ours to save their lives."

In other words, not only do Ukrainians look like "us"; even their cars look like "our" cars. And that trite observation is seriously being trotted out as a reason for why we should care about Ukrainians.

There's more, unfortunately. An ITV journalist reporting from Poland said: "Now the unthinkable has happened to them. And this is not a developing, third world nation. This is Europe!" As if war is always and forever an ordinary routine limited to developing, third world nations. (By the way, there's also been a hot war in Ukraine since 2014. Also, the first world war and second world war.) Referring to refugee seekers, an Al Jazeera anchor chimed in with this: "Looking at them, the way they are dressed, these are prosperous ... I'm loath to use the expression ... middle-class people. These are not obviously refugees looking to get away from areas in the Middle East that are still in a big state of war. These are not people trying to get away from areas in North Africa. They look like any." Apparently looking "middle class" equals "the European family living next door".

And writing in the Telegraph, Daniel Hannan explained: "They seem so like us. That is what makes it so shocking. Ukraine is a European country. Its people watch Netflix and have Instagram accounts, vote in free elections and read uncensored newspapers. War is no longer something visited upon impoverished and remote populations."

What all these petty, superficial differences - from owning cars and clothes to having Netflix and Instagram accounts - add up to is not real human solidarity for an oppressed people. In fact, it's the opposite. It's tribalism. These comments point to a pernicious racism that permeates today's war coverage and seeps into its fabric like a stain that won't go away. The implication is clear: war is a natural state for people of color, while white people naturally gravitate toward peace.

It's not just me who found these clips disturbing. The US-based Arab and Middle Eastern Journalists Association was also deeply troubled by the coverage, recently issuing a statement on the matter: "Ameja condemns and categorically rejects orientalist and racist implications that any population or country is 'uncivilized' or bears economic factors that make it worthy of conflict," reads the statement. "This type of commentary reflects the pervasive mentality in western journalism of normalizing tragedy in parts of the world such as the Middle East, Africa, south Asia, and Latin America." Such coverage, the report correctly noted, "dehumanizes and renders their experience with war as somehow normal and expected".

More troubling still is that this kind of slanted and racist media coverage extends beyond our screens and newspapers and easily bleeds and blends into our politics. Consider how Ukraine's neighbors are now opening their doors to refugee flows, after demonizing and abusing refugees, especially Muslim and African refugees, for years. "Anyone fleeing from bombs, from Russian rifles, can count on the support of the Polish state," the Polish interior minister, Mariusz Kaminski, recently stated. Meanwhile, however, Nigeria has complained that African students are being obstructed within Ukraine from reaching Polish border crossings; some have also encountered problems on the Polish side of the frontier.

In Austria, Chancellor Karl Nehammer stated that "of course we will take in refugees, if necessary". Meanwhile, just last fall and in his then-role as interior minister, Nehammer was known as a hardliner against resettling Afghan refugees in Austria and as a politician who insisted on Austria's right to forcibly deport rejected Afghan asylum seekers, even if that meant returning them to the Taliban. "It's different in Ukraine than in countries like Afghanistan," he told Austrian TV. "We're talking about neighborhood help."

Yes, that makes sense, you might say. Neighbor helping neighbor. But what these journalists and politicians all seem to want to miss is that the very concept of providing refuge is not and should not be based on factors such as physical proximity or skin color, and for a very good reason. If our sympathy is activated only for welcoming people who look like us or pray like us, then we are doomed to replicate the very sort of narrow, ignorant nationalism that war promotes in the first place.

The idea of granting asylum, of providing someone with a life free from political persecution, must never be founded on anything but helping innocent people who need protection. That's where the core principle of asylum is located. Today, Ukrainians are living under a credible threat of violence and death coming directly from Russia's criminal invasion, and we absolutely should be providing Ukrainians with life-saving security wherever and whenever we can. (Though let's also recognize that it's always easier to provide asylum to people who are victims of another's aggression rather than of our own policies.)

But if we decide to help Ukrainians in their desperate time of need because they happen to look like "us" or dress like "us" or pray like "us," or if we reserve our help exclusively for them while denying the same help to others, then we have not only chosen the wrong reasons to support another human being. We have also, and I'm choosing these words carefully, shown ourselves as giving up on civilization and opting for barbarism instead.

Moustafa Bayoumi is the author of the award-winning books How Does It Feel To Be a Problem?: Being Young and Arab in America and This Muslim American Life: Dispatches from the War on Terror. He is professor of English at Brooklyn College, City University of New York. He is a contributing opinion writer at Guardian US

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They are 'civilised', 'European' and 'look like us': the racist coverage of Ukraine | Moustafa Bayoumi

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hile on air, CBS News senior foreign correspondent Charlie D'Agata stated last week that Ukraine "isn't a place, with all due respect, like Iraq or Afghanistan, that has seen conflict raging for decades. This is a relatively civilized, relatively European - I have to choose those words carefully, too - city, one where you wouldn't expect that, or hope that it's going to happen".

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Depuis New York, Esther Kingambo brise le tabou de la menstruation au Congo

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Esther Kingambo vole au secours des jeunes filles et femmes congolaises qui vivent la période de menstruation comme une véritable honte. Le 31 mars 2022, sa fondation organise un gala.

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Mapped: The Literal Translation of Every Country’s Name

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From Colombia to China, explore this map to uncover the diverse histories and cultures represented in the literal translation of each country’s name.

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Les pages d'Agnès de notre amie Agnès Lorain ont fait une plongée au coeur du Congo Brazzaville. Le jeune Liwa Ekimakingaï vient de mourir. Il va être enterré au cimetière du Frère Lachaise. Sa grand...

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Recent book display at Présence Africaine

Here are images of a few of the books the Going Global with Barbara high school student cohort saw on display when we passed by Présence Africaine last...

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Exhibition

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How has African art been evaluated and valued-and by whom?

That is the question guiding this presentation of more than 250 sculptures from dozens of distinct cultures across the African continent. It is an exploration that seeks to decolonize the Western aesthetic standards long placed on these objects and to elevate the local indigenous perspectives of the works' makers and communities.

When Westerners began to collect and study African art in the early 20th century, they admired objects for a range of perceived qualities; however, they rarely if ever took into account any form of local appreciation, value, or criticism. Western scholarship consequently made many assumptions-some correct and some not-about how visual aspects, like size, rare materials, and embellishments, translated into value in the source cultures.

The Language of Beauty -while acknowledging this narrow historical assessment of African art-focuses instead on showcasing the aesthetic evaluations of the communities and makers who produced the works. Many sub-Saharan cultures share similar criteria for beauty: symmetry and balance, moderation, clarity, and youthfulness. Such determinations, however, go beyond the visual and overlap with an object's meaning and function. Beauty is often tied to goodness and ugliness to immorality. These connections are especially apparent in sculptural representations of the human form, particularly idealized images of powerful men-usually equestrians or warriors-and caring women, typically shown as mother-and-child figures.

Beautiful art often plays a role in interactions between the material world of humans and the immaterial world of spirits. Individuals facing illness and other adversity, for example, may attempt to honor or entice the spirits with sculpted human figures featuring elaborate hairstyles or body modifications that are the result of human intervention.

Conversely, some art and objects require deliberate ugliness in order to mediate between physical and spiritual worlds. Komo masks of the Bamana in Mali, for instance, are covered with layers of crusty offerings and often feature sharp, pointed additions, all meant to express an aggressive and frightening character. And still other works, like the power figures of the Kongo and Songye in southern Democratic Republic of the Congo, combine beauty and ugliness in a way that renders them at once irresistibly attractive and profoundly repelling.

Whether beautiful, ugly, or something that defies these categories, The Language of Beauty in African Art celebrates these objects and the philosophical, social, political, and religious implications for the communities that incorporated, or still incorporate, them into ceremonial and ritual practices and everyday life. In sharing these perspectives, the exhibition also invites viewers to examine their own ideas about beauty and question the influences that impact how we assess and appreciate works of art.

The Language of Beauty in African Art is curated by Constantine Petridis, chair and curator of Arts of Africa at the Art Institute of Chicago. A fully illustrated catalogue accompanies the exhibition and features essays by Petridis as well as other top scholars in the field.

Sponsors

Major funding for The Language of Beauty in African Art is provided by Lilly Endowment Inc., Myrna Kaplan, Gary Metzner and Scott Johnson, Javier Peres and Benoît Wolfrom, and an anonymous donor.

Additional support is contributed by Lori and Steve Kaufman and the Loraine Kaufman Foundation and the Morton International Exhibition Fund.

This project is supported in part by the National Endowment for the Arts.

Members of the Luminary Trust provide annual leadership support for the museum's operations, including exhibition development, conservation and collection care, and educational programming. The Luminary Trust includes an anonymous donor, Karen Gray-Krehbiel and John Krehbiel, Jr., Kenneth C. Griffin, the Harris Family Foundation in memory of Bette and Neison Harris, Josef and Margot Lakonishok, Robert M. and Diane v.S. Levy, Ann and Samuel M. Mencoff, Sylvia Neil and Dan Fischel, Cari and Michael J. Sacks, and the Earl and Brenda Shapiro Foundation.

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The Language of Beauty in African Art | The Art Institute of Chicago

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Exhibition Related How has African art been evaluated and valued-and by whom? That is the question guiding this presentation of more than 250 sculptures from dozens of distinct cultures across the African continent. It is an exploration that seeks to decolonize the Western aesthetic standards long placed on these objects and to elevate the local indigenous perspectives of the works' makers and communities.

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The migrants left a year and a half ago in a truck and are believed to have been lost in the desert and died of thirst.

Chad has been a transit route for people trying to reach Libya and other North African countries from where they try to cross the Mediterranean Sea to reach Europe [File: Ben Curtis/AP Photo]

The bodies of 27 migrants, including four children, have been found in the Chadian desert, according to the International Organization for Migration (IOM), which said they died of thirst.

The migrants left in a pick-up truck nearly a year and a half ago from Moussoro, a town in west-central Chad, and are believed to have gotten lost deep in the desert when the truck broke down and eventually died of thirst, the United Nations-affiliated agency said on Tuesday.

Landlocked Chad borders Libya to the north and is a transit country for migrants trying to reach the Mediterranean.

More than 5,600 people have died or gone missing trying to cross the Sahara Desert in the last eight years, with 110 migrant deaths recorded in Chad, including these most recent fatalities, said IOM. The actual numbers, however, are thought to be higher as many deaths go unrecorded.

This year nearly 150 migrants have died in that desert, it said.

"We are deeply saddened by this most recent tragedy and extend our heartfelt condolences to the migrants' families," said Anne Kathrin Schaefer, IOM's head of mission in Chad.

"Without access to reliable information and safe migration pathways, migrants will continue to take risky roads through the deep and perilous desert, with tragic consequences," she said.

For decades, Chad has been a transit route for people trying to reach Libya and other North African countries from where they will try to cross the Mediterranean Sea to reach Europe. Since 2016, pressure by European Union countries to discourage illegal migration has forced migrants to take dangerous routes, resulting in many deaths, say conflict analysts.

"Those migrants come from South Sudan, Democratic Republic of Congo, Central African Republic, Nigeria, Cameroon, and other countries in the region that are willing to take the risks with the hope of reaching Northern Africa and eventually Europe," said Rida Lyammouri, senior fellow at the Policy Center for the New South, a Morocco-based organisation.

"Sometimes they have to take riskier routes to avoid security forces and human traffickers and at times that risk could cost their lives," he said.

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Bodies of 27 migrants, including children, found in Chad desert

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The migrants left a year and a half ago in a truck and are believed to have been lost in the desert and died of thirst. The bodies of 27 migrants, including four children, have been found in the Chadian desert, according to the International Organization for Migration (IOM), which said they died of thirst.

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Les secrets de Kirikou par son réalisateur Michel Ocelot | "Je ne suis pas sûr qu’aujourd’hui je pourrais faire Kirikou aussi librement"
Nudité, appropriation culturelle… découvrez les réponses sans tabou de... | By Brut | Facebook

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1.6M views, 29K likes, 9.6K loves, 2.1K comments, 18K shares, Facebook Watch Videos from Brut: "Je ne suis pas sûr qu’aujourd’hui je pourrais faire Kirikou aussi librement"
Nudité, appropriation...

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Morocco and France meet in a historic showdown with deep significance for fans of both teams.

The city of Angers, France, sits on a hill in the heart of the Loire Valley. It has played a central role in French history: Its cathedral was consecrated in 1096, and the Edict of Nantes, which for a time put an end to the bloody Wars of Religion in France, was written there in 1598 by King Henry IV.

Today, the town is nourishing other histories. Along its southern edge is the neighborhood Roseraie, which, starting in the late 1960s, became the site of several large housing projects-the likes of which sit outside most French cities and are home to diverse populations, including many immigrants and children of immigrants from former French colonies across North and West Africa. In one of these complexes, Zoubida Belmoulat, an immigrant from Morocco, raised her three sons-including Sofiane Boufal, the virtuosic 29-year-old winger for the Moroccan national soccer team.

Across France, such public housing developments have become, over the past several decades, some of the most important heartlands for global soccer. In the 1980s, players such as Zinedine Zidane (from Marseille) and Lilian Thuram (from Fontainebleau, outside Paris) grew up in them, as did today's French stars Kylian Mbappé and Paul Pogba (from the Paris suburbs of Bondy and Lagny-sur-Marne, respectively). The combination of two factors explains the emergence of so many successful players from these communities: comparatively heavy government investment in sports infrastructure and coaches, and conditions of poverty and exclusion that drive many young people to see sport as their only chance for social mobility in French society.

Boufal started playing on a local team when he was six, and moved through the system and into the academy run by the Angers professional team as a teenager. These academies provide support and training for students as they complete high school, and in return, the players give the professional teams the right to later sign them for a professional contract. Boufal was signed in 2013 and has played for Angers, as well as other teams in France and England, since then.

Because Boufal has both French and Moroccan nationality, he also had a choice to make when it came to international competitions: Would he try to play for France, the country where he was born and raised, or for Morocco, where his family is from? He was scouted at a young age for the Moroccan team and ultimately decided in 2016 to commit to playing for the country. The next years were professionally difficult ones for him, and he wasn't chosen to play for Morocco during the 2018 World Cup. But this year, he has been a critical player in the country's delightful run into the semifinals.

Morocco defeated Portugal on Saturday thanks to a header by Youssuf En-Nesyri off an incredible arcing pass by Yahia Attiyat Allah, both of whom were born and raised in Morocco. The scenes of elated, if slightly disbelieving, fans and players celebrating after the game showed pure joy. But the image that most stood out for its sweetness and humanity was of Boufal. His mother, Zoubida, came to join him, and they danced, looking in wonder into each other's eyes as they moved on the pitch. It was a moment of such intimacy and love that it spread quickly as one of the defining images of the tournament.

Morocco's victories have been historic on many levels. This Moroccan team is the first from Africa to make it to the semifinals of the World Cup. Going into its match against Portugal, a quarterfinal elimination loomed as a likely outcome.

Some purveyors of satisfying soccer narratives had been pumping up the idea of an Argentina-Portugal (and, more importantly, a Lionel Messi-Cristiano Ronaldo) final so much that the hypothetical lineup sometimes took on an aura of commercial necessity. Plenty stood in the way of this scenario coming to pass, of course, including the fact that Portugal would have had to defeat the reigning champion, France. But if you hadn't been watching the Moroccan team closely, you might have assumed the game would go in the other direction. The images of a tearful Ronaldo walking to the locker room after the match, leaving what is almost certainly his last World Cup, were a stunning and unexpected swerve in the tournament's trajectory. Now Messi has sealed his place in the final, and the only question that remains is whether Argentina will face France or Morocco.

The Moroccan team's World Cup victories against Spain and Portugal have been celebrated all over the world, and they've also nurtured the imaginations of soccer fans who are also history nerds. Al-Andalus-the catch-all label for various medieval Islamic states in what is now Spain and Portugal-was freely evoked, and some suggested the winner should get to keep the Alhambra. One historically capacious tweet made this connection: "Morocco, 732 - Morocco, 2022: We have conquered the Iberian peninsula and are prepared to battle France."

But it is more recent history that gives a particular charge to the France-Morocco game. Starting in 1830, when France invaded and began to colonize Algeria, the country played an increasingly powerful role in Morocco, which became a French protectorate in 1912. Morocco gained its independence from France in 1956, but the two countries remain deeply interconnected both by a shared colonial past and contemporary migration. The match between the two teams may be the ultimate postcolonial World Cup derby.

When the two nations confront each other, most of the players on the pitch will be carrying stories of migration. There has been a consistent pattern of Moroccan migration to Europe, particularly Belgium, France and Spain, over the past decades, and the team reflects that. Boufal is just one of 14 Moroccan players who grew up in the diaspora. The defender Roman Saïss was also born and raised in France; four others on the team grew up in Belgium, and some played on the country's national youth teams alongside players they defeated earlier in this tournament. The star Moroccan goalie Yassine Bounou was born in Montreal (although he grew up in Morocco), and Hakim Ziyech was born in the Netherlands and came up through that country's renowned academy system.

France's players are also mostly from immigrant families. Many could have chosen to play for a parent's homeland but opted, instead, for France. Aurélien Tchouaméni, whose stunning strike put the team up against England in their quarter-final win, grew up in Bordeaux as the child of a Cameroonian pharmacist and teacher. Kylian Mbappé's mother is Algerian, and his father is from Cameroon. Theo Hernández (who replaced his brother, Lucas, after he was injured during the first game of the tournament) is of Spanish heritage. And for decades, the French team has been alternately celebrated and vilified for representing a multiethnic France.

Previous games between France and Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia have sometimes become flashpoints. In 2001, a France-Algeria game heralded as an opportunity for postcolonial reconciliation ended early because of a pitch invasion by fans of the Algerian team. The far-right anti-immigration politician Jean-Marie Le Pen-who had long attacked the French team as not being representative of the country because it had so many players of immigrant background-capitalized on the event and announced his 2002 candidacy for president outside the stadium soon after. The pitch invasion, he claimed, clearly showed that many immigrants disrespected France.

Last Saturday night, following France and Morocco's respective wins, there were celebrations in the streets of Paris and elsewhere throughout France. Those celebrations were for both teams' victories; people didn't have to choose between the two. But now, they will.

The only comparable World Cup game to date was a France-Senegal match in 2002, which Senegal famously won-but that was a first game in a group stage. This time, the stakes are much higher, and the potential for conflict between fans seems greater. But to some extent, no matter which team wins the game, both the nation of France and the continent of Africa will be able to claim a part of the victory.

The France-Morocco game brings together many spirals of personal and national histories. The individuals on each team have made different choices about which nation they represent on the global stage. But collectively, they condense stories of movement and diaspora.

At a time when Europe is fixated on controlling and stopping migration from Africa with an intense regime of maritime control in the Mediterranean, the alternative offered by the unfettered and joyous movement of players on the pitch is precious. The game offers us a different way of seeing movement: not as a danger, but as possibility and freedom that makes something beautiful in the world.

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moroccan national soccer team.across france

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defining images of the tournament.morocco

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Morocco and France meet in a historic showdown with deep significance for fans of both teams. The city of Angers, France, sits on a hill in the heart of the Loire Valley.

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Africa on the rise | The poorest and most neglected continent is seeing its global power increase. Fareed's conversation with entrepreneur and philanthropost Mo Ibrahim about... | By Fareed Zakaria | Facebook

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20K views, 528 likes, 33 loves, 50 comments, 248 shares, Facebook Watch Videos from Fareed Zakaria: The poorest and most neglected continent is seeing its global power increase. Fareed's conversation...

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La Belgique ne présentera pas d’excuses pour la colonisation | DW | 22.12.2022

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La commission spéciale “passé colonial”, composée de 19 députés, n’a pas dégagé de consensus sur la question des excuses officielles pour les crimes commis entre 1885 et les indépendances au Rwanda, au Burundi et en RDC.

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Adachukwu Onwudiwe, founder of the Crater Literary Festival, talks to participants at a session in Enugu, Nigeria, on December 15, 2022 [Courtesy: Sam-Eze Chidera/Crater Literary Festival]

Lagos, Nigeria - Earlier this month, an electric bulb glistened above Umar Abubakar Sidi's bald head and his glasses reflected blue light from his computer screen as he sat in front of a bookshelf.

He was about to read from his poetry book on the second of a three-day annual book festival to an audience mostly in the southeastern city of Enugu, almost 600km from Lagos where he lives.

"There is no joy greater than being in communion with fellow creatives," he said with a ready smile before reading.

More than 100 writers, artists and readers had gathered at the Alliance Francaise in Enugu and virtually over Zoom to listen to Sidi and others participate in book chats, panel discussions and conversations at the Crater Literary Festival.

The festival began in 2017 when its founder Adachukwu Onwudiwe was unable to attend the Ake literary festival in Abeokuta, a two-hour drive from Lagos, because she could not get time off from her job as a librarian at a non-profit. As there was no similar festival in Enugu, she decided to fill the gap by establishing her own.

For years, Enugu was a rich literary hub, producing some of Africa's top writers including Chinua Achebe, Christopher Okigbo, Chimamanda Adichie and Chika Unigwe. But over the past decade, festivals that celebrate writers and literature in the region disappeared, according to Onwudiwe.

"There just hasn't been a concerted effort to sustain the literary heritage by the government and the private sector," 34-year-old Onwudiwe, who is also a writer, told Al Jazeera. "Why we wanted to do it [the festival] is to promote literature and creativity. There are those doing things in the region but because their names are not in the big magazines, no one knows what they are doing. So we decided that we are going to cater for those ones."

A new breed

In recent years, researchers have identified a declining reading culture in Nigeria as people's attention spans wane globally, partly due to the rise of social media networks like Instagram and TikTok.

But Onwudiwe said the average age of those present at the five editions of the festival has ranged from 20 to 45. And these youngish people are also trumpeting their attendance on, coincidentally, social media.

"One of the things we discussed is the low attention span, about how we can create to sustain people's attention ... with the right policies within education and culture, we can actually do that," she said.

Across the country, similar new festivals are springing up to showcase local arts, reviving writing communities and facilitating intellectual intercourse in the mould of older ones like the Lagos Book and Art Festival (LABAF) and the Ake festival, which began in 1999 and 2013 respectively.

Perhaps coincidentally, many are happening around the same time in the last quarter of the year as a parallel or precursor to end of year festivities now tagged Detty December. These festivals, spread across different parts of Nigeria, include the Sokoto Book and Arts Festival, the Benin Art and Book Festival and the Kwara Books and Arts Festival, among others.

These upstarts are not only fostering a reading culture but they are breeding new stars, Onwudiwe said.

"The more we create these festivals, the more we give voices to people," she said. "It creates an avenue for authors and publishers to make their works known. I wish for more to happen."

Meanwhile, the Ake festival, which organisers say is Africa's biggest literary spectacle, has been an inspiration for organisers of some of these fledgling events. It held its tenth edition this November, in Lagos.

"I am delighted that I have been able to give more people confidence to found new literary festivals," Lola Shoneyin, veteran writer and Ake festival director, told Al Jazeera. "A part of it [organising the festival] was about showing people what is possible and the fact that I am a woman makes it more important. It means that young men and women could see how they can use their potential."

For Shoneyin, there are not enough literary events in Nigeria and seeing more people taking the initiative to start new ones is a thing of joy.

"I actually met the young lady who started the Benin Arts and Book Festival because she came to Ake festival this year all the way from Benin. Luckily, I was able to spend quality time with her and offered some advice on what to do next," she said.

'The opportunity to engage'

Attendees say the events are giving audiences from across the continent and diaspora access to writers of all genres, and a well of knowledge.

Just before Sidi, a naval helicopter pilot, read his poetry to the Crater faithful, three curators - from Ghana, Sierra Leone and Nigeria - joined a playwright from Owerri, near Enugu, to discuss the 1959 Second Congress of Negro Writers and Artists in Rome.

LABAF, which holds events at Freedom Park, a former colonial-era prison, held a Q&A session with legendary filmmaker Tunde Kelani and screened his political drama Saworoide.

A star-studded cast including Tanzania's Abdulrazak Gurnah and Nigeria's Wole Soyinka, two of only four Black winners of the Nobel Prize for literature, headlined Ake this year. Writers Nnedi Okorafor and Jennifer Makumbi, rapper M. I. Abaga and singer Brymo, and Nollywood stars Shaffy Bello and Deyemi Okanlawon also attended.

Also present was Leye Adenle, the London-based author of the novel Easy Motion Tourist, who said that although he had toured Europe, he only felt truly at home at festivals in Nigeria.

"I still remember ... getting excited at sighting authors I'd read or knew about but had not yet met, and the joy of signing books for Nigerian fans," he told Al Jazeera. "The opportunity to engage one on one with African readers is a privilege that one only begins to appreciate when attending book festivals in the rest of the world."

For Eseoghene Okereka, a 30-year-old writer who attended the Crater festival this year, the event was an avenue to connect with fellow creatives and trade ideas.

"It is very comforting to know that there are people who share your ambitions," she said.

Wale Ayinla, a 24-year-old poet living in Abeokuta, agreed. Attending literary festivals exposed him to a community of older writers whose advice helped him find his voice and navigate the publishing world, he said.

Meeting his heroes also gave him clarity of purpose.

"I remember seeing Wole Soyinka once and I just felt fulfilled," Ayinla said. "I knew I had to do more so I can be able to sit on the same table with this person."

Rewriting the script

But the plot is hardly straightforward for festival organisers working to celebrate culture and put artists on the map. So they have had to rewrite the script.

Unlike bigger festivals which have attracted corporate funding and are able to fly in guests to Nigeria from across the world, Onwudiwe has had to provide her own funds. There has also been the goodwill of a few individual donors and the zealousness of a small cohort of volunteers.

This year, she had to work with a small budget of 390,000 Nigerian naira [$875], which significantly hampered planning.

"We have not been able to secure any corporate sponsorship," Onwudiwe told Al Jazeera. "The creative scene [in the east] is not that big ... being underfunded means that we have to remain small."

Insecurity has also punctured the peace in parts of the southeast, as "unknown gunmen", a catchall phrase for separatists and armed groups, take advantage of what locals call the economic and political marginalisation by the federal government.

So, Onwudiwe has made the festival a hybrid version to cut down on costs and is looking to create other events for children, in efforts to revive a reading culture.

Although it comes at a price, she says she is happy to provide a platform and connect writers with the readers who support them.

"There are times that people reach out to me to say they saw my festival portfolio online and want to meet a guest at the festival and I link them up to buy their books or other things," she said. "For me, that is very important."

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'Communion with creatives': Literary events flourish in Nigeria

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Lagos, Nigeria - Earlier this month, an electric bulb glistened above Umar Abubakar Sidi's bald head and his glasses reflected blue light from his computer screen as he sat in front of a bookshelf.

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Héros d'un film sur les tirailleurs sénégalais, en salle ce mercredi 4 janvier, l'acteur déplore, dans une interview au Parisien, que nos concitoyens dédaignent le continent africain.

"On se rappelle que l'homme est capable d'envahir, d'attaquer des civils, des enfants. On a l'impression qu'il faut attendre l'Ukraine pour s'en rendre compte. (...) Je suis surpris que les gens soient si atteints. Ça veut dire que quand c'est en Afrique vous êtes moins atteints ?"" À en croire Omar Sy, les Français se sentiraient plus touchés par le conflit qui se déroule aux portes de l'Europe que ceux qui font rage sur le continent africain.

Alors qu'il assure la promotion de Tirailleurs, en salles mercredi 4 janvier, film qui retrace le funeste destin des soldats sénégalais envoyés à Verdun en 1917 et dont le récit est souvent méconnu du grand public, l'acteur a donné une interview au Parisien. Dans son engagement pour une histoire qui lui tient à cœur, Omar Sy va plus loin encore. "Quand c'est loin, on se dit que là-bas, ce sont des sauvages, nous, on ne fait plus ça. Comme le Covid, au début, on a dit que c'est que les Chinois", ajoute-t-il.

À lire aussi Les 15 meilleures citations d'Omar Sy

Un propos réducteur ? Il a en tout cas déclenché de nombreuses réactions. L'ancienne ministre chargée des Affaires européennes et députée européenne s'est insurgée contre cet argument qui voudrait que les Français soient moins atteints par ce qui se passe en Afrique, rappelant sur Twitter que 59 militaires français sont morts au Sahel.

À lire aussi Omar Sy signe avec Netflix un contrat phare d'acteur et de producteur

De son côté, Charles Consigny, dans les "Grandes Gueules" sur RMC a ironisé : "C'est un exilé fiscal, peut-être que lui n'est pas touché par la pauvreté des Français !"

"Ce sont toutes ces histoires qu'il faut accepter et reconnaître" expliquait-il sur le plateau de RTL. Cette "leçon" d'histoire donnée par Omar Sy passe mal d'autant plus qu'il base la promotion de Tirailleurs sur le pouvoir de réconciliation de ce film. Il montrerait que "les choses bougent" et apporterait un "message d'apaisement"...

À VOIR AUSSI - Omar Sy s'exprime sur la discrétion de sa compagne dans " Vivement dimanche "

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"Quand c'est en Afrique vous êtes moins atteints?" : pour Omar Sy, les Français seraient plus émus par l'Ukraine que par d'autres conflits

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Héros d'un film sur les tirailleurs sénégalais, en salle ce mercredi 4 janvier, l'acteur déplore, dans une interview au Parisien, que nos concitoyens dédaignent le continent africain. "On se rappelle que l'homme est capable d'envahir, d'attaquer des civils, des enfants. On a l'impression qu'il faut attendre l'Ukraine pour s'en rendre compte.

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The process of undoing the effects of colonialism has never been easy. However, at least, there has been some sort of progress thanks to the advent of social media platforms, which are enabling Africans to reframe the narratives about them. Yet, the journey towards total decolonisation remains long and treacherous.

In the age of information and knowledge, control of the latter is another yardstick for measuring whether one is colonised or decolonised. Sadly, in this regard, the African continent remains colonised. The next battle for Africa's decolonisation should be about the promotion and protection of local knowledge.

To this end, we first need to understand how and why we are still colonised. The next steps should be about the process of dismantling these pernicious vestiges of the colonial era. Generally speaking, doing academic fieldwork in Africa, for example, still relies on colonial practices of a white man going to find information in remote African places, inhabited by "vulnerable" and underdeveloped communities. The end goal is to bring back "home" stories of the colonised. While demographics of researchers continue to change, new researchers mimic colonial practices in collecting data.

In his quest for information, the foreign researcher cannot do this alone. Enter the crucial role of a local knowledge broker who is paid to guide the researcher to study these contexts.

In most cases, the foreign researcher ends up being labelled as an "expert", while the local assistant's voice is either silent or silenced. In some cases, especially when the study touches on sensitive topics, the foreign researcher can travel back to their home country, but often leaving the assistant's safety in their community compromised.

Two difficult questions then remain: How do we recognise these local associates' agency in studies? How do we ensure their safety during and after data collection?

These are some of the questions explored in a study recently published in the International Journal of Qualitative Methods on the plight of the so-called "research assistants" and respondents in northern Uganda.

Jacob, one of the participants in the study, told us a couple of horrifying stories about his experiences working with western researchers in different districts of northern Uganda during and after conflict. He recounted one of these experiences:

"We had finished doing a study on corruption in the police force. The policemen we had interviewed maybe reported us. It was bad ... Then someone stole my computer, my flash disk from home. It got bad when I was harassed and accused of sending intelligence to outsiders. Then I was arrested for a few days," said Jacob, not his real name, a research fixer in northern Uganda.

After various post-independent wars in the Northern Region of Uganda, including the violence committed by the Lords Resistance Army (LRA) and other groups, stories of violence and displacement in districts in this part of Uganda received international attention. Many researchers - seasoned and inexperienced ones using the disaster to launch their careers - from different parts of the world were among those who joined the usual humanitarian workers, conflict entrepreneurs who flocked in Gulu and other surrounding areas. Jacob worked with many of them during and after the conflict.

His ordeal led me to investigate not only the safety issues that have been experienced in the region's context but also research fatigue and power dynamics that exist between principal investigators and assistants. I was motivated to do this study not only because I too was a local research assistant once, but because when I read reflections of western researchers on their safety concerns and other dilemmas they face in these sensitive contexts, I found their earnest attempts at self-reflection have often transformed into navel-gazing. I hardly found, for example, any mention of stories or safety issues of the silent and silenced voices who accompany them. Their voices and stories have been silenced in what has been referred to as the black market of knowledge production.

I agree with the Liberian academic and activist Dr Robtel Neajai Pailey whose recent article How to truly decolonise the study of Africa points out that the current wave of "scholarly decolonial turn" should not be detached from "day-to-day dilemmas of people in formerly colonised spaces and places". These people include local researchers like Jacob.

To decolonise fieldwork, we need to consider three things.

First, foreign researchers need to decentre power, decentre class, decentre gender and decolonise ethical and methodological training and practices before, during and after their fieldwork.

Second, research assistants and other local leaders or ethics committees need to establish guidelines for foreign researchers to follow when hiring a research assistant, and to enforce them. Where they do not exist or authorities are at the centre of the study like in Jacob's situation, research assistants need to create associations to protect themselves as a collective.

Finally, as the Malawian American Historian Professor Paul Zeleza, points out, "Africans", and in this case research associates, need "to develop the means to generate, value, and disseminate their own forms of knowledge." And heed the Nigerian British academic, feminist and writer Professor Amina Mama's advise: "...to better acknowledge African intellectual production, past and present, as we face the newer challenges posed by globalization and its attendant effects in the arena of knowledge production." Intellectuals include these silent and silenced voices.
The views expressed in this article are the authors' own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera's editorial stance.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
David Mwambari

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Africa's next decolonisation battle should be about knowledge

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The process of undoing the effects of colonialism has never been easy. However, at least, there has been some sort of progress thanks to the advent of social media platforms, which are enabling Africans to reframe the narratives about them. Yet, the journey towards total decolonisation remains long and treacherous.

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On November 22, the deadline by which the United Kingdom was supposed to return the occupied Chagos Islands to the African island nation of Mauritius passed. Six months earlier, the United Nations General Assembly had voted overwhelmingly in favour of the reunification, which came on the tail of the International Court of Justice ruling that British control over the islands is unlawful.

London's refusal to abide by the ruling and the UN resolution prompted immediate reaction and accusations of colonial occupation. The African Union demanded "a complete decolonisation" of the islands.

The dispute is all the more significant as it falls just days after the 135th anniversary of the Berlin Conference, at which European powers agreed the rules by which they would parcel out Africa among themselves.

The AU's demand is a bit curious, linking as it does a British withdrawal with "decolonisation". But there is a little more to it than that. In fact, although many on the continent have tended to equate decolonisation with the dawn of independence in the 1960s, independence, in fact, turned out to be a bit of a hoax.

While it undoubtedly improved life for some on the continent, for the most part, it did not mean freedom. Rather, it marked the internationalisation and indigenisation of colonialism. It was to become a tool to transform Africans from being the objects of colonial subjugation into partners in their own exploitation.

This is neatly illustrated by the now largely forgotten Eurafrica project. Conceived in the interwar years, it was a plan to replace European colonial competition for Africa's resources with an internationalised colonialism that would allow Europeans to jointly exploit the continent under the auspices of what became the European Union.

As European scholars Peo Hansen and Stefan Jonsson of Linkoping University in Sweden have noted, "the EU (or the European Economic Community, EEC, as it was called at its foundation) was from the outset designed, among other things, to enable a rational, co-European colonial management of the African continent".

As the Chinese do today, in the years following the end of World War II, many in Europe saw in Africa the resources and markets they required to rebuild their shattered economies and to join the United States and the USSR as a third superpower. Africa and its resources thus featured prominently in discussions over the creation of pan-European institutions.

The Rome Treaty, which established the EEC in 1957, was nothing short of a resurrection of the Berlin Conference's General Act, which 73 years earlier had sought to create an internationalised regime of free trade stretching across the middle of Africa.

In Rome, six European countries, without the involvement of any Africans, promised each other equal access to trading and investment opportunities in what is today the territory of 21 African countries: Senegal, Mali, Guinea, Ivory Coast, Benin, Mauritania, Niger, Burkina Faso, the Republic of the Congo (Congo Brazzaville), the Central Africa Republic, Chad, Gabon, the Comoros, Madagascar, Djibouti, Togo, Cameroon, the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), Rwanda, Burundi and Somalia. In fact, as noted by Hansen and Jonsson, three-quarters of the territory covered by the EEC actually lay outside continental Europe.

Although the British did not join the first EEC treaty, they had similar ambitions for retaining control of their colonies. In 1947, the British Chancellor of the Exchequer, Stafford Cripps, declared that "in Africa indeed is to be found a great potential for new strength and vigour in the Western European economy".

A decade later, in the same year the EEC was set up, British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan commissioned a cabinet committee report on the effect of African independence on "the prestige and influence of the UK" and whether "premature withdrawal of United Kingdom jurisdiction would leave a vacuum which would be filled by a country hostile to the United Kingdom and her Allies".

It was into this context that the countries of Africa were born. Congenitally misshapen, they were easy prey for Europe. The Eurafrica project was simply given a makeover as the 1963 Yaounde Convention signed between the EEC and 18 former French and Belgian colonies. Under the agreement, the Europeans allowed free access to their domestic markets to products from the African members, while the latter were, at least initially, permitted to impose restrictions on the entry of European goods into their territories in order to protect their own infant industries.

Three years earlier, however, the UN Economic Commission for Africa had warned, as by Hansen and Jonsson, that the arrangements were likely to lead to economic dependency by tempting the Africans "to prefer the short-run advantage of tariff concessions [in EEC markets] to the long-run gains of industrial development". This is because the Europeans were unlikely to keep their markets open if the Africans actually decided to lock out EEC goods.

Sadly, the advice fell on deaf ears - not surprisingly, though, when one remembers how independence was procured. It came in on the wings of African nationalism - which Prime Minister Macmillan famously referred to as the "wind of change" in a 1960 speech to both houses of the South African Parliament.

Yet this nationalism was itself born, nurtured, encouraged and shaped by colonialism. Although Europe was "the home of nationalism" according to Macmillan, Africans were encouraged to think of it as genuine indigenous expression. Even though the African nations espousing it were born out of the 1884 Berlin Conference and African nationalist leaders were the products of colonial schools and European universities, African nationalism was still cast as the antidote to colonialism rather than an outgrowth of it.

Further, as described by the late Kenyan professor, Ali Mazrui, "African nationalism seeks to achieve and to maintain equality with Europe." Eurafrica gave African elites the opportunity to prance around the international stage pretending to be the equals of the colonial masters whose bidding they were doing.

By 1962, an American observer in Paris, Schofield Coryell, declared that African countries remained "essentially what they were: agricultural appendages to Europe". If this sounds familiar, it is because African elites are, to borrow from Wole Soyinka, still heading to foreign capitals to loudly proclaim their tigritude, while consigning their countrymen into debt and bondage.

Another famous poet, Leopold Senghor, the first president of independent Senegal, recognised that decolonisation was more than simply independence. Writing in Le Monde in 1957 he declared: "By decolonisation, I mean the abolition of all prejudice, of any superiority complex in the minds of the coloniser, and also of any inferiority complex in the mind of the colonized."

Senghor personified the contradictions of independence. A formidable intellect, he led his nation into the Yaounde agreement, was the foremost proponent of negritude and ruled for two decades before retiring on New Year's Eve 1980, the first African president to leave office voluntarily. He then promptly left for France, where he had been a citizen since 1932.

As Andrew WM Smith and Chris Jeppesen note in their introduction to the book Britain, France and the Decolonization of Africa, "Colonial authority never rested on juridical control alone. Its perpetuation depended upon complex systems of knowledge and power that facilitated the physical, racial, economic and linguistic subordination of colonial peoples." As long as it was built on the same systems and logic, "independence" was never going to undo it.

True decolonisation requires more than just the physical absence of the coloniser. It means deconstructing the frameworks that have been used to define the African's place for him. That is the work that remains to be done.

The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera's editorial stance.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Patrick Gathara

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Eurafrica and the myth of African independence

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On November 22, the deadline by which the United Kingdom was supposed to return the occupied Chagos Islands to the African island nation of Mauritius passed. Six months earlier, the United Nations General Assembly had voted overwhelmingly in favour of the reunification, which came on the tail of the International Court of Justice ruling that British control over the islands is unlawful.

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With a record number of asylum seekers, France is getting tough on immigration. But 450 squatters find shelter in a school building in Lyon.

Cooking at a former middle school building in Lyon, France, that now houses hundreds of men from African countries. Credit... Andrea Mantovani for The New York Times

LYON, France - From their villages and towns in West Africa, the squatters had crossed deserts, seas and mountains to arrive in Lyon, most of them for no specific reason.

The next bus was headed to Lyon, one explained. As France's third-largest city, Lyon didn't seem as intimidating as Paris, another said. A fellow migrant, befriended in a camp in Italy, sent over a WhatsApp message about a place to stay, yet another recounted.

But for Sidi Koné, the reason was Lyon's soccer team. He had always been a fan in his village in Mali, now overrun by Islamic extremists and bandits. France, the former colonial ruler, had always seemed familiar, almost like "family" - and "not unjust."

Two years later, Mr. Koné, 27, is squatting with 450 other men from Africa in a vacant school building that has become a crucible of the continent's hopes, problems and complex feelings toward France. With another winter almost here, the migrants are in limbo in a city that wants to expel them, in a country that is losing its patience and on a continent that has already lost it.

"But my mother is happy I'm here," Mr. Koné said. "Over there, it's life and death."

Thousands of migrants from Africa, the Middle East, Asia and Eastern Europe are now in makeshift shelters across France, in abandoned schools, convents, tents and, in the case of hundreds of Tibetans, in a forest not far from Paris.

France recently overtook Germany as Europe's leading destination for asylum-seekers and is now on track to receive a record number of applications this year, in what experts say is a ripple effect of the migrant crisis. The previous record - 124,000 applications - was set last year, and amounted to a 23 percent jump from the year before.

Applications in France have spiked even as the flow of migrants to Europe has slowed since reaching a peak in 2015 from the wars in Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan. Though Europe has tried to stem migration from sub-Saharan Africa through development aid and other programs, many migrants from the continent - fleeing local conflicts or pursuing economic opportunities - continue to arrive by sticking to routes that have been used for decades.

France has also become what experts describe as a "rebound" destination. Applicants who had been rejected for asylum in another European country are trying again in France.

Gérard Sadik, an asylum expert at La Cimade, a migrants rights group, said that Europe's lack of a "supranational asylum process" encouraged applicants to waste years before finding a country that will accept them, or before they are finally sent back home.

France has increased available housing for asylum-seekers in recent years. But in early November it announced get-tough measures, including restricting asylum-seekers' access to non-urgent health care and the use of a daily stipend of about $8.20 for those not provided with lodging.

President Emmanuel Macron - a centrist who has tacked right in a move to wrest the volatile issue of immigration from his main political rival, the far-right National Rally - recently told a right-wing magazine that his "goal is to throw out everybody who has no reason to be here."

In Lyon, the metropolitan government, which has been trying to expel the squatters from the school building, is appealing a recent court ruling allowing them to stay until next September.

Today, some 450 young, single men sleep jammed inside the school's classrooms and manage the premises - ensuring security, cleaning and making dinner with supplies provided by the city. Most are from France's former colonies in West Africa, though there is a growing minority from the region's former British colonies.

If the squatters rediscovered the natural solidarity often found across Africa, they also faced a lack of unity, corruption, suspicions and tensions - between different ethnic groups, as well as between Anglophones and Francophones, some of whom resorted to communicating in the broken Italian they had picked up on their long journeys to Lyon.

"I've learned so much about the problems of Africa by being here," said Ibrahim Koné, 18, a Malian and migrant leader who presides over a weekly meeting with French supporters. "It's difficult to come to any decisions because many of the people here, like our leaders back in Africa, just want to give orders and aren't interested in democracy."

Mr. Koné, who is not related to Sidi Koné, said that many people suspected the migrant leaders of pocketing benefits from the French, adding that sometimes suspicion was justified. The key to the supply room had been changed, he said, because of pilfering.

On a recent rainy morning, a group of Anglophone men shared a smoke under a shelter in the courtyard. They accused their fellow Francophone migrants of being too close to the French and of failing to aggressively plead their case to the authorities.

"These people were colonized by French people, who gave them the worst syllabuses, poor education," said Sam Amoako, a migrant from Ghana.

"You see this illiterate?" he snapped when a French speaker from Ivory Coast dropped by and started complaining about the living conditions without first greeting the Anglophones. "No bonjour?"

It all began in September 2018 when Ghassen Zaghdoud, a longtime housing activist in Lyon, set his sights on a secondary school that had closed in 2013, Maurice-Scève.

Mr. Zaghdoud, who had spent years taking over vacant public buildings to house the homeless, said the premises seemed perfect for the young African migrants he had noticed sleeping in a nearby park.

When he began occupying the school with about 50 Africans, Mr. Zaghdoud said he was "pleasantly surprised" by the neighbors' reaction. Within days, the squatters had more than enough food, mattresses and other donations.

"I've never had as much support from neighbors in the 20 years that I've been squatting," Mr. Zaghdoud said.

The Africans found themselves in Croix-Rousse, a hilly neighborhood away from the center of Lyon. Once the site of the city's silk-weaving industry, Croix-Rousse is now a gentrifying, sought-after neighborhood with restaurants catering to a "bobo," or bohemian bourgeois, clientele.

Sébastien Gervais, a high school math teacher who moved to Croix-Rousse two decades ago, became involved in a group that supports the squatters and has fought efforts by the city to expel them.

To Mr. Gervais, France has a responsibility to take care of the squatters, especially because they hail from former colonies where the French still exercise great economic, political and military influence.

"Some of them say they're here because France exploits their countries," Mr. Gervais said, "and I think they're right."

Lyon's metropolitan government, which owns the school property, wants to expel the squatters and use the land for a condominium project that would include a share of low-cost housing, said Pascal Isoard-Thomas, who oversees social affairs for Lyon.

The city, which is legally responsible for housing migrants who are minors, relocated squatters recognized as non-adults to public housing. But because adult asylum-seekers are the responsibility of the French government, the city is seeking to expel the remaining squatters from the school, Mr. Isoard-Thomas said, adding that the city's role was now limited to being "the owner of the property."

No former colonial power has kept as big a footprint in Africa as France has. Today, seven decades after the independence of its African colonies, French businesses dominate in the region, where most points of reference remain French. France backs a common currency used there, and 4,500 of its soldiers are fighting against Islamic extremism in five former colonies in the Sahel.

For many of the migrants, France had loomed over them since their earliest days in kindergarten, an ineffable presence that both repelled and drew them.

"It was the country that colonized us, but they have this motto - liberty, equality and fraternity - which means a lot," said Mamadou Sow, a Guinean who grew up in Ivory Coast. "I thought they didn't give it to us in Africa, but that I'd find it here, and that's why I came."

"But I'm here, and I don't see it," Mr. Sow added. "I'm an asylum-seeker but they won't house me. It starts with that."

Others, like Alpha Sow, 24, a Gambian who is not related, drew a distinction between a nation and continent that did not want them, and the local French supporters in Lyon.

Impoverished farmers, his parents sent him at an early age to neighboring Senegal where he begged for years on the streets as a Quranic student, or talibé, for a religious leader. On an annual visit home in his late teens, a fire he set to his family's plot to keep it fertile accidentally spread out of control, destroying neighbors' crops and livestock, he said.

Fearing for his son's life, his father urged him to flee to Europe. So began a six-year odyssey that took him across the Sahara on a well-established smuggling route, where a pickup truck in his convoy broke down and left a dozen migrants to die in the desert; nine months struggling to survive in Libya; a boat across the Mediterranean to Italy where he spent three years in a camp; and, after his asylum request was rejected in Italy, a trek across the Alps into France.

He was aware that France was closing the door on people like him, but he held out hope by pointing to the local French, who had given the migrants pots, cups, spoons, taken them in their cars to hospitals, provided French lessons and helped them arrange appointments with French bureaucrats.

"I don't know what they want from us, I don't know what they want to do tomorrow, why they are coming, I don't know," Mr. Sow said, speaking on the edge of his bed in a tiny room inside the school. "But right now, I can say, alhamdulillah, they are good, and if I see them, all I can say is, 'Thanks, brother, thanks.' "

Mélissa Godin contributed reporting in Paris.

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For African Migrants, Hope and a Home in a Vacant French School

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With a record number of asylum seekers, France is getting tough on immigration. But 450 squatters find shelter in a school building in Lyon. LYON, France - From their villages and towns in West Africa, the squatters had crossed deserts, seas and mountains to arrive in Lyon, most of them for no specific reason.

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Lagos, Nigeria - African travellers flying on international airlines to and from the continent say they are fed up with receiving poor service from flight attendants and ground staff, and tired of being transported in older carriers.

Many told Al Jazeera that they notice the difference when they transit and travel on planes from the same airline, which boast sleeker aesthetics. Suddenly, they get more legroom, larger, touch-screen monitors and friendlier cabin crews.

Nigerian flier Chibuzo Okereke, who flew from Nigeria to Canada via France last year, told Al Jazeera: "The Air France flight from Lagos to Paris had a small screen, no USB charging port, and a limited selection of entertainment in comparison with the Paris to Toronto flight. It was an older aircraft."

International airports have also been accused of applying a different set of standards, with African travellers alleging they experience extra security checks and have to traipse further through terminals to reach their gates.

Brussels Airport's T terminal has come under particular scrutiny - with one blogger, Cosmos Godson, claiming to experience "structural racism" there.

Once inside, passengers cannot leave.

"At Brussels Airport, passengers travelling to Africa are bussed to a terminal that is more or less fortressed from the rest of the airport," said frequent Kenyan traveller Duncan Omanga.

"Airport authorities argue the terminal is for any passenger travelling to Africa, and hence not discriminatory to anyone, but it is obvious that a vast majority of those passengers are Africans."

Brussels Airport attributes the restriction to passport control, which is located before the entrance to the T terminal - nicknamed the Africa Terminal. As such, for security reasons, processed passengers cannot exit the area.

The quality of shopping options available to African passengers, compared with other terminals at Brussels Airport, is another source of irritation.

"The Africa terminal is very bare and has no pharmacy, no fancy shops and no bookshops," said Omanga.

The glass wall that separates terminals B and T creates the illusion of "two worlds" for many passengers.

"The Africa terminal is far and vacant," said Mariama Nyelenkeh, a Sierra-Leonean. "They have one little [coffee] booth in the middle. However, there's a lot of res taurants and bars on the other side."

A message from Brussels Airport's official Twitter account advised passengers to visit Terminal B if they wanted to shop, before heading to T.

While some quietly accept their second-rate flying experiences, others are more outspoken about the apparent double standard.

"From Amsterdam to Freetown, KLM made us wait eight hours on the plane," Nyelenkeh said, referring to a flight she took with the Dutch airline from the United States to Sierra Leone in 2017.

The prolonged delay in the hot aircraft was unbearable.

"I got up twice to ask what was going on. They said we should keep calm, that they were trying to clean the ice [from the tarmac]. Then they gave us water and crackers four hours later," she said.

Later, Nyelenkeh filed a complaint and got a $150 gift card, compensation she deemed insufficient for a ticket worth more than $1,000.

Regarding the episode, KLM said: "Delays will occur as a result of bad weather conditions [and] because of KLM's commitment to passenger safety, KLM, like all airlines, will not operate flights in unsafe weather conditions."

It also stated its "aircrafts are deployed in a manner that optimises KLM's global network".

Tunde Sawyerr, a lawyer, was luckier with his compensation, claiming 600 euros ($665) from Air France after his Abuja-bound flight from Paris was grounded for two nights in 2018.

But while the airline arranged hotel accommodation outside the airport for passengers with legal documents required to enter France, "for the rest of us, the story was different", said Sawyerr.

"We were told they would give us accommodation in the airport the next morning, with the implication being we were going to sleep in the airport lounge that night."

Sawyerr said staff started paying attention to him after he mentioned his profession.

He insisted passengers on cancelled flights were entitled to accommodation, meals, and shopping vouchers for basic toiletries for each day they were inconvenienced.

"It's the international air transport standard," said Sawyerr. "I presented the information to them, and all of a sudden there was a change of heart. They were going to give us accommodation."

Passengers were later lodged in a hotel in the international zone of Charles de Gaulle Airport and in Air France's business lounge. Meal vouchers were also provided.

The French carrier, in an email to Al Jazeera, wrote: "Air France does not discriminate against its African customers [and] obviously makes no difference in the commercial treatment of its passengers according to their origin or nationality."

'#FlyingWhileAfrican'

The Twitter hashtag #FlyingWhileAfrican reveals a litany of grievances against international airlines - flights taking off with dirty toilets, ground staff questioning Africans in priority or business class queues as though they are out of place, and flight attendants sneering at passengers or deliberately ignoring the call button.

"I didn't get any utensils, so I pressed the [call] button repeatedly but got no reply," said Mushtaha Elmusharaf, referring to a Qatar Airways flight to Khartoum.

A frequent traveller, Elmusharaf ended up not eating during the six-hour trip on which, he claimed, there were no screens.

Cabin crew, he said, failed to say "please" or "thank you" in their interactions with passengers.

By the time of publishing, Qatar Airways had not responded to Al Jazeera's request for comment.

The non-African part of Elmusharaf's itinerary, however, was so enjoyable he even took a video of the ultramodern cabin.

"I felt a bit nauseous and the stewardess got me a snack, gave me Panadol, and kept checking up on me during the flight," he said, regarding his Qatar Airways flight from the United Kingdom to Qatar. "The cabin crew were ready to assist, though there wasn't much required."

According to Babatunde Adeneji, a Nigeria-based aviation consultant, the discrepancies boil down to economics.

He said Africa's relatively small market size - 2.1 percent of global air passenger traffic - and limited competition on the continent means the costs of flying bigger and newer fleets are not justified.

"If I'm a European carrier flying out of my hub in Frankfurt where competition has forced me to improve, I'm not going to send those planes to Africa, because Africa is not a bastion of competition or luxury services," he said.

"If I'm going to compete with Singapore Airlines, a first-class airline, I'm going to use my best machine."

Although Adeneji acknowledged racism plays a role in certain scenarios, he faulted weak enforcement of aviation regulations across the continent.

Governments, he said, do have power to ensure compliance.

For example, following complaints from disgruntled Turkish Airlines customers, the Nigerian Civil Aviation Authority (NCAA) in December threatened to suspend the carrier from operating in the country after it repeatedly abandoned checked-in luggage in its hub in Turkey.

Days later, the NCAA the airline had complied with its directive to deploy larger aircraft capable of stowing more luggage.

Ultimately, African travellers want to be treated with the same respect and standards accorded to passengers on other international routes.

"It's just horror stories up and down," said Nyelenkeh. "I don't want to hear 'sorry to hear that' [from the airlines]. Fix it."

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Do airlines and airports treat African passengers differently?

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Lagos, Nigeria - African travellers flying on international airlines to and from the continent say they are fed up with receiving poor service from flight attendants and ground staff, and tired of being transported in older carriers. Many told Al Jazeera that they notice the difference when they transit and travel on planes from the same airline, which boast sleeker aesthetics.

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On March 1, CNN aired a video report titled, Freeing the child slaves of Lake Volta, which followed a succession of similar "docufictions" and publications alleging the existence of pervasive child trafficking and child slavery in fishing communities along the Lake Volta in Ghana.

We (two academics who have studied this issue critically and carried out extensive interviews with members of Lake Volta communities and a member of parliament whose constituents overwhelmingly live on and around the lake) deem it critical to set the record straight as this is a complex social issue which needs careful analysis rather than melodrama and sensationalism.

The allegations of child trafficking and child slavery, which are mostly made by Western-based or funded journalists and NGOs with the help of local affiliates, reflect a limited understanding of the lived realities on islands and communities along the lake. Fishing is one of the few guaranteed avenues of subsistence for islanders and residents of riverine communities along the Lake Volta, and children are rightly taught fishing skills by their parents.

The lake also serves many important functions for these communities. Virtually all economic and social activities take place on or around it. It is not only the main source of employment, but it is also the highway which connects islands, a playground for children, a marketplace, etc. It is, therefore, not unusual to find children fishing, commuting by boat to other islands or simply playing with their peers and siblings on the Lake Volta. Outsiders or those unfamiliar with this fundamental social set-up can wrongly translate the sight of a child in a boat with an adult as a child being exploited or forced to work.

We acknowledge that not all children on the islands and riverine live or work with their biological parents. However, this is not because of rampant sale or trafficking of children, as CNN and others have suggested.

The extended family system is still highly valued in Ghana as it remains integral to the social welfare system. It is, therefore, entirely normal to find children living with non-biological parents or guardians who can offer them educational, apprenticeship and other developmental opportunities.

Additionally, due to expertise and knowledge in fishing on the islands and riverine areas of the Lake Volta, it is similarly not unusual to find children from coastal and other fishing areas of the country (such as Winneba) in apprenticeships and tutelage agreements with fishermen who are not their blood relatives.

A largely ignored aspect of this practice in the CNN and other reportage of this issue is that many children and youth become self-sufficient fishermen in adulthood through these arrangements and, in turn, also train other children and youth. For sure, this form of fosterage and tutelage can be fraught with complications, particularly surrounding the mode of remuneration for child apprentices.

Some fishermen give the agreed wages for the child upfront to their parents, in cases where the child's family is in dire need of money. That children do not get direct access to the income generated from their labour is problematic, but the transfer of money from fishermen to child apprentices' parents does not constitute "sale" of the child.

The cases of child abuse and exploitation in apprenticeship and fosterage arrangements in areas on and around the Lake Volta are the exception rather than the norm. Also, such unfortunate outcomes from well-intentioned child upbringing practices are not unique to this part of the world.

In 2017, for example, 674,000 children in state care in the United States were abused. We cite this number not to point the finger to other countries, but to challenge the tendency by journalists, NGOs and other commentators to resort to pejorative portrayals and characterisations when reporting on such issues in the Global South. The language employed by NGOs and journalists when reporting on child rights problems in rich powerful nations is usually more tempered or considerate.

They do not describe as "child enslavement", for example, the blatant curtailment of the freedoms of children who are cruelly caged in immigration detention as a matter of state policy in the US, the UK, Australia and other countries. We only ask for the same nuance and considered examination in recounting similar problems in Ghana and elsewhere in the Global South.

We challenge CNN, the International Justice Mission (IJM), Free the Slaves and any other actor alleging "widespread" or "pervasive" child trafficking and child slavery in communities along the Lake Volta to provide independent evidence to corroborate these claims. The fact is, cases that should be described or defined at best as "child labour" are deliberately being distorted to tell fantastic stories of "child slavery" and "child trafficking", feeding into stereotypes of supposed primitiveness and backwardness of African communities.

The available statistics suggesting widespread child trafficking or child enslavement on the Volta Lake have been largely produced by anti-trafficking organisations and self-styled "contemporary slavery abolitionists" with vested interests in making such claims, such as fundraising efforts, a desire to boost individual and organisational profiles and so on.

The only semi-independent large scale study of children's involvement in work on the Volta Lake, which was conducted by the International Labour Organisation (ILO) in 2013, is emphatic that the claims of child enslavement are exaggerated. The ILO study confirms, as we also acknowledge, that aspects of children's work on the lake take place under dangerous and exploitative conditions. This is clearly a problem that has to be addressed. However, the study did not find any evidence of children involved in servitude or enslavement, contrary to the persistent claims by some NGOs and journalists.

The media and journalists have a responsibility to provide a balanced account to their audience. It is, therefore, unfortunate that the views of community residents and leaders are often excluded from these reports. As a result, their efforts to address the problem are ignored or undermined.

Over the past decade, a number of social intervention programmes, such as free basic compulsory education, free school uniforms for schools, school feeding programmes, livelihood empowerment against poverty (LEAP) and many more have been implemented in Ghana in an attempt to address social problems like those faced by children on islands and riverine areas of the Lake Volta.

It is clear that these interventions have not yet achieved their ultimate purpose, which is largely because of the scale of deprivation at the heart of these problems. But another reason is that international funding that could help the Ghanian government in this direction is usually awarded to (mostly Western-based) NGOs and actors who mispresent the issue to the media and make sensationalist claims about "widespread slavery".

CNN and others who claim to have purely noble intentions have some ethical questions to answer. Did these children (and their families), many of whom are not familiar with the internet, fully consent to the use of their images in these campaigns? Are these vulnerable children and families whose pictures and videos are taken by journalists and NGOs fully aware that they are going to be used as "poster children" of child trafficking and child slavery? How would CNN et al react if a Ghanaian journalist were to travel across remote and impoverished communities in the US filming children and families who may not fully understand the purpose for the film and may not even get to see how they are portrayed?

There are potential abuses of privilege and power here, which do not seem to have been sufficiently weighed up by all actors involved.

What is more, the CNN video and other portrayals add insult to injury by promoting poorly informed, uncritical and sensational accounts which feed into threats of sanctions and other punitive measures against the entire country and, by extension, the already impoverished islanders and communities along the Volta Lake and elsewhere in Ghana.
Dr Kwame Agyeman also co-authored this article. He is a lecturer in international human rights law at Lancaster University in Ghana. The views expressed in this article are the authors' own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera's editorial stance.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Betty Mensah Samuel Okyere

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How CNN reported on 'child slaves' who were not really enslaved

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On March 1, CNN aired a video report titled, Freeing the child slaves of Lake Volta, which followed a succession of similar "docufictions" and publications alleging the existence of pervasive child trafficking and child slavery in fishing communities along the Lake Volta in Ghana.

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Zarafa (2012)
After escaping the clutches of a slave trader, a bold ten-year-old Sudanese boy befriends a young giraffe and a kind Bedouin, who takes them on a splendid journey via a hot-air balloon as far as the palace of King Charles X of France.

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Directed by Rémi Bezançon, Jean-Christophe Lie. With Max Renaudin Pratt, Simon Abkarian, Abraham Adesoye, Sjaak Caderyn. After escaping the clutches of a slave trader, a bold ten-year-old Sudanese boy befriends a young giraffe and a kind Bedouin, who takes them on a splendid journey via a hot-air balloon as far as the palace of King Charles X of France.

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African literature - Africa and women authors

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Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: The danger of a single story

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Our lives, our cultures, are composed of many overlapping stories. Novelist Chimamanda Adichie tells the story of how she found her authentic cultural voice -- and warns that if we hear only a single story about another person or country, we risk a critical misunderstanding.

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Literary Map of Africa - Ohio State University Libraries

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A bio-bibliographical database, designed to be a comprehensive research and information tool on African literature

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Library and campus resources, news feeds, and blogs covering history, politics and culture of all African nations.

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California Newsreel -The Library of African Cinema

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Films from Africa made by Africans offer restorative images and oftentimes a new film language. The unique films in this collection not only showcase the works of master filmmakers but also innovative new talents who are embracing video technology.

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This week the first lady of the United States, Melania Trump, was in Kenya for a "stop" on her " Africa tour". Her decision to appear at Nairobi National Park wearing a white pith helmet, crisp white shirt and light brown jodhpurs made headlines in international media, which correctly described the pith helmet as a symbol of colonial rule.

So much about the concrete history of white supremacy is poorly remembered or conveniently forgotten. As such, it may be difficult for many to understand why the US first lady chose to dress up in the costume of a colonial settler in Kenya in 2018. To begin to understand the historical resonances she was tapping into (consciously or otherwise) it's helpful to consider the pith helmet in terms of its material history. What is a pith helmet? Who wore one and why? How has it come to stand as such a pungent emblem of empire? What cultural meanings are attached to the pith helmet, and should we think of the US first lady's decision to wear a pith helmet as a scandal?

White Europeans have long been obsessed with the supposed relationship between race, culture and climate. We have persistently tried to stabilise racial difference as a natural and scientific fact, rather than a set of social and cultural ideas that are perpetually being formed, always contested and re-ordered.

Nineteenth-century colonists were supported by leading scientific and medical opinion in their belief that solar radiation in "the tropics" attacked white people's nervous systems and rendered them infertile. Other symptoms of exposure were thought to include laziness, depression, outbursts of excessive passion, insomnia and memory loss. This notion of warm climates as profoundly hostile reflected the deeply held conception of the colonies as, in every sense, another world.

Pith helmets were often worn by colonisers alongside other protective paraphernalia, such as red vests and "spine pads" (a quilted piece of cloth) worn down the back of the shirt to protect the nervous system from the feared "actinic ray". Some even wore pith helmets and spine pads indoors, since even beneath a tin roof they considered themselves in constant peril from the tropical sun. Spine pads were a standard issue item in British Army kit in the early 20th century.

Conveniently for wealthy whites in the colonies, other medical recommendations included forbidding whites from doing manual labour outdoors (they were to undertake supervisory roles only), vacationing to cooler climates at regular intervals, and the repatriation of white children from the colonies after the age of five (typically to an expensive private boarding school back "home").

The pith helmet was part of a pseudoscientific discourse that enforced class, as well as racial domination, since only the rich could follow such medical advice.

The pith helmet is sometimes used to denote a "frontier" spirit of adventure and intrepid exploration. This is wrong. In fact, their historical social role was to emblematise white fragility and anxieties, as well as blurring the distinction between white civilians and the colonial police and military, who also wore pith helmets.

Colonialism extracted labour and resources from "natives" by ordering colonial societies through extreme and everyday forms of violence. But it was always necessary to insist that despite enjoying the protection of colonial states armed to the teeth in order to immiserate and exploit subject peoples, it was whites - and white women, in particular - who were the most vulnerable group in the colony.

In this sense, the pith helmet represents not only colonialism, but whiteness, too. We might think of whiteness as an identity that always noisily insists on its own vulnerability (despite social and economic realities to the contrary) as the principal justification for the oppression of racialised others.

Kenya provides an especially compelling historical example of this dynamic. The anticolonial uprising of the Land and Freedom Army in the 1950s (more widely known as the "Mau Mau" due to colonial propaganda) became notorious for "savage" violence against white settlers.

Through sensationalised news coverage, Hollywood films and salacious novels, the notion of "Mau Mau" as a black bogeyman butchering white women and children was widely popularised. In fact, just 32 European civilians were killed during the whole affair. White settlers responded to these losses by explicitly calling for genocide, rallying to demand the colonial government exterminate the entire Gikuyu people.

We now know more about the scale and brutality of Britain's counterinsurgency in Kenya thanks to recent historical scholarship and the landmark court case brought to the High Court in London by elderly Kenyan victims of colonial torture in 2009 (the UK government eventually admitted to the torture and paid out compensation).

Exact figures are contested, but it is known that tens of thousands of Kenyans were killed by colonial forces during the uprising, while hundreds of thousands more were detained in concentration camps and fortified villages, subjected to routine brutality and forced labour. Rape and castration were common forms of torture, and many victims of such atrocities are still with us today.

My own view is that the US first lady's decision to wear a pith helmet was appropriate and should be taken seriously. The regime she represented in Kenya is a white supremacist one. Her husband campaigned successfully under the fascist slogan "America First," and has since implemented his " Muslim ban" and encouraged the detention of migrants, including separating children from their parents and keeping them in "tender age" cages.

The policies and ideological grounding of the current US administration - and the bogus fears animating its supporters - represent a continuation of earlier forms of imperialism. There is no attempt to disguise the fear and hatred towards people of colour, at home or abroad. The pith helmet makes the connection quite clear.

No country in the West has adequately reckoned with the historical reality of colonialism. Until such a reckoning takes place through broad-based education and memorialisation, it is difficult to see how Western societies can ever move beyond the powerful investment in whiteness that so disfigures our common political, social and spiritual life.

Like Melania Trump, too many in the West look at today's world not as it really is, but through a veil of racial and colonial delusions. As the writer Nanjala Nyabola reflected on the US first lady's visit to Kenya: "We joke, but it's deeply disturbing to see someone who seems to believe that your whole life is some kind of colonial fantasy hellscape."

The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera's editorial stance.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Elliot Ross

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When Melania went to Africa wearing a pith helmet

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This week the first lady of the United States, Melania Trump, was in Kenya for a "stop" on her " Africa tour". Her decision to appear at Nairobi National Park wearing a white pith helmet, crisp white shirt and light brown jodhpurs made headlines in international media, which correctly described the pith helmet as a symbol of colonial rule.

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At least 56,800 refugees and migrants have died or gone missing since 2014, almost double the number recorded by the UN's International Organization for Migration (IOM), an investigation by the Associated Press news agency has said.

The IOM's tally, which mainly focuses mostly on migrants heading to Europe, stood at 28,500 as of October 1.

The Associated Press reported on Thursday that an additional 28,300 people had either died or gone missing according to data it compiled from international groups, forensic records, missing persons reports, death records, and interviews with migrants and refugees.

As an example, the AP said that when 800 people died in an April 2015 shipwreck off the coast of Italy, Italian investigators had pledged to identify them and find their families. More than three years later, under a new populist government, funding for this work was being cut off.

Beyond Europe, the AP said information on the fate of migrants was even more scarce.

Little was known about the toll in South America, where migration among Venezuelans was among the world's biggest today. Or in Asia, the leading region for migration.

"No matter where you stand on the whole migration management debate ... these are still human beings on the move," said Bram Frouws, the head of the Mixed Migration Centre, which surveyed more than 20,000 migrants and refugees since 2014.

"Whether it's refugees or people moving for jobs, they are human beings."

More than 16 million migrate within Africa

Despite talk of the 'waves' of African migrants trying to cross the Mediterranean, as many 16 million people migrate within Africa, the AP said.

Since 2014, at least 18,400 African migrants had died travelling within the continent, according to the figures compiled from AP and IOM records. That figure included more than 4,300 unidentified bodies in the South African province of Gauteng.

Zimbabwean migrant Kholakele, who entered South Africa illegally three years ago, said she had heard stories of people going missing.

Afraid that one day they will end up as anonymous bodies in the streets of Johannesburg, where crime rates and traffic accidents are steep, she told the AP that she barely let her five children out of sight.

"If one of them stays away for longer than 10 minutes, we phone them," Kholakele said.

With a prosperous economy and stable government, South Africa draws more migrants than any other country in Africa.

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Nearly 60,000 migrants have died or gone missing since 2014: AP

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At least 56,800 refugees and migrants have died or gone missing since 2014, almost double the number recorded by the UN's International Organization for Migration (IOM), an investigation by the Associated Press news agency has said. The IOM's tally, which mainly focuses mostly on migrants heading to Europe, stood at 28,500 as of October 1.