Lesotho politics has been far from mundane as of late. In February of this year, the Prime Minister of Lesotho, Pakalitha Mosisili, formed a new political party called the Democratic Congress (DC), taking most members of parliament with him. With the formation of this new party, Mosisili effectively broke away from the party he had led for 15 years, the Lesotho Congress for Democracy (LCD). In his stead, former Minister of Communications, Mothetjoa Metsing, has taken the reins of the LCD. A third major party, the All Basotho Convention (ABC), is another breakaway from the LCD led by veteran politician Tom Thabane. Following their break from LCD, the DC party’s new logo was originally to be a cross, however such allegory upset local religious groups and DC leaders eventually adopted the three-legged cooking pot instead. Further controversy was stoked when the DC party was accused of holding campaign materials owned by the LCD in 19 constituencies across the country including the capital city, Maseru and other urban areas. Lesotho’s Independent Electoral Commission (IEC) responded with a one-week campaign ban for the DC in the 19 offending constituencies, an order that the DC party flat out ignored without consequence.

Despite the controversies, this year’s National Assembly contest has been marked by massive voter engagement with an especially strong showing for young and first time voters. Rallies, famo music performances and to a lesser extent, social media, have been used to generate support for parties and candidates. Key issues that affect the majority of Basotho include: employment, agricultural investment, union wage negotiations, access to education and labor mobility to and from South Africa. Because no party wants to resort to forming a coalition government with their rivals, competition for voters’ allegiance has been rather intense.

While each party is representing itself as the one that can best be trusted by Basotho factory workers, farmers, civil servants and students, it’s evident that other, more clandestine constituents are being courted as well. The incumbent Prime Minister Mosisili in particular has realized the value of partnerships with foreign investors, especially South Africans and Chinese. Kenny Kunene, South Africa’s infamous “Sushi King” (who also invests in mining) has reportedly been a contributor to Mosisili’s political campaign at a time when Lesotho’s diamond mines are exhuming some of the largest stones in the world. Lesotho’s mountainous highlands have long been of strategic interest to the South African government as well, with giant dams supplying essential water to the Johannesburg area for domestic and industrial use. Chinese investors, who operate many of Lesotho’s textile factories, have benefited from being able to keep wages low on Mosisili’s watch, to the vexation of Basotho factory workers. Chinese contractors have been busy with projects across Maseru. Notably, the recently opened Ying Tao restaurant in one of Lesotho’s nicer hotels, the Lesotho Sun, has quickly become a popular meeting place for Basotho elite and Chinese businessmen.

Back outside, in the hills of Lesotho’s countryside, the image of the country’s trademark woven hat, emblazoned on waving cloth of blue white and green has kept watch over the massive campaign rallies of the political parties. At each boisterous event, homage is paid to this conical woven hat and the proud statehood it represents, during the singing of Lesotho’s national anthem, “Lesotho fatse la bontata rona”.

During the first verse of the anthem, the crowds sing with great harmony, that theirs is a country more beautiful than the others, a country to be loved. There is an allusion to the country as a body that gives birth to and nurtures its children. Yet, a question remains – after the elections, which children are to prosper most from the country’s nourishment?

Sesotho:

Lesotho fatse la bontat’a rona,
Har’a mafatse le letle ke lona.
Ke moo re hlahileng,
Ke moo re holileng,
Rea le rata.

English:

Lesotho, land of our Fathers,
You are the most beautiful country of all.
You gave us birth,
In you we are reared
You are dear to us.

* Zachary Rosen is a documentary photographer. His work has been featured on this blog before.

Also from Burundi: Mudibu has a story and a song to share (H/T Karl Steinacker):

The exceptional Y’akoto tells us a bit more about how she goes about writing songs but in between her French words there’s an example too:

Jitsenic (Jitsvinger and Arsenic) dropping verses and truths on South African Bush Radio:

Akala and Selah wrote ‘A Message’:

From Mali, remember Ben Zabo?

From the band named after a Nigerian state capital, Benin City:

Iyadede gives Mark Ronson & The Business, Andre Wyatt and Boy George a makeover:

The Mighty Third Rail — the alternative hip hop trio that combines beat-boxing, poetry, violin and upright bass:

And a full concert by Rachelle Ferrel and George Duke band. Live in Montreux (1997):

Between the relentless media coverage, the twitter deluge, the pronouncement by a South African judge (“This is a matter of great national importance”), and declarations by the South African President’s daughters about “the straw that broke the camel’s back,” you might be forgiven for thinking that–finally–some urgency about South Africa’s big issues was making national news. Were we talking about how to deal with the persistent racial and class inequality, joblessness, and a lack of government accountability? Not so much.

Instead, the fuss revolved around a piece of agitprop art by artist Brett Murray that cut and pasted a limp penis and President Jacob Zuma’s head onto a Soviet era poster of Vladimir Lenin. By midweek the ruling party had sued the gallery displaying the work and demanded that a Sunday newspaper “remove it from the internet” (huh?) and two men had entered the gallery and defaced it. (The different treatment of the two men–one of them was white–by the media and gallery security, is another story, entirely. But let’s not get distracted.) The leader of the South African Communist Party, an ANC ally, called for a boycott of the newspaper.

Inside South Africa the whole thing, apart from making the artist Brett Murray very famous, is playing out as a battle between freedom of expression and African “values.” Some half-baked theorizing about black sexuality compared Zuma to Sara Baartman, the nineteenth century Khoi women abducted and displayed at freak shows in Europe.

Liberals smell authoritarianism (this is “Africa”) and impatient black elites see white racism. As far as the dignity argument is concerned, this is not a series of naked photos taken of the president by insatiable paparazzi. It is an artist’s representation of a penis that, as far as we know is not modeled after the actual one, but is meant as an artistic statement about contemporary South African politics and Zuma’s complicated and scandalous personal life. The question is whether it’s successful. Most critics are unimpressed. The ANC appears to be Murray’s biggest promoter.

So it no longer matters that Murray makes didactic and uninteresting art. The fact that so much passion can be generated around it, when the material conditions in which people live are so dire (see the AIDS activist Nathan Geffen’s critique of the whole thing here or that of Tselane Tambo, daughter of the late ANC leader, here), perhaps makes Murray’s point much better than his artwork ever did.

We are mostly stunned at how the ANC and its allies have handled this. (You have the spectacle of people like Buti Manamela of the Young Communist League, tweeting about arranging marches to the gallery before the poster was defaced, protesting at the court, and forwarding essays about “black male sexuality”.)

But perhaps we shouldn’t be. New South African politics and how the country’s media report it, has always been done in such a way that someone with little knowledge of the country or its history, chancing upon its public discourse, would mistake it for Somalia or North Korea.

Here’s what the proponents of freedom of expression (who incidentally remained silent or oblivious when Murray’s gallery refused to display some of his other work for fear it may offend Jewish and Muslim South Africans) and those on the other side yelping about African “tradition” can’t or won’t see: this is plain electioneering by the ruling party. Whether it started out deliberately like that, is not at issue here. What is, is that the ANC is giving red meat to supporters. Check how ANC supporters have come out in support of the party on social media. They know about Zuma’s personal failings and how his party has failed them when it comes to housing, health care and schooling. But they’re living in a world where the mainstream rubbish trade unions and the white leader of the main opposition party refer to black South Africans as “refugees.” So they still have no choice but to vote ANC. The ANC knows this and they’ve doubled down. They don’t care about critics on this one. Critics of how the ANC is handling this don’t vote ANC anyway and the ANC does not need them. In any case, another day spent on posters about penises is another day in which people don’t talk about government ineptitude. The ANC has found its comfort zone in a visionless neo-liberal malaise. This serves to generate a politics buttressing the wealthy at the expense of the poor by channeling and mobilizing legitimate anger away from the failures of capitalist exploitation. Moral of the story: The ANC is a cynical political party now. South African politics is finally normal.

* Melissa Levin contributed to this post.

In Omotoso’s first feature film, “God is African” (2003), set in 1995, the fictional nephew of the murdered Nigerian writer and activist Ken Saro Wiwa fights inaction and opposition from fellow students at his Johannesburg university to publicize the fate of Saro Wiwa and other Ogoni activists who are about to be executed by Nigerian junta. The South African characters, despite their very recent experiences of oppression, show little empathy for their Nigerian counterparts. Now, twelve years later, his second feature, “Man on Ground,” covers related themes. In that first film, the violence plays out somewhere else; this time, the violence plays out within the frames of the film, in Johannesburg. (The characters also share names with those in the first film, and some of the actors return–Hakeen Kae Kazim, who started his career in “God is African” and is now a regular in Hollywood and on American network TV, stars in the new film too.)

Principally, the film revolves around two brothers, Ade and Femi. Ade (Kae Kazim), a successful lawyer based in London, travels to Johannesburg for a conference with his wife. He  also arranges to meet his estranged brother, Femi (played by Fabian Adeoye Lojede). The brothers could not be more different: the latter is a former student activist, who, after being tortured (seemingly by the Abacha regime), fled to South Africa where he ekes out a living doing odd jobs in restaurants, sells hair extensions and works on construction sites. Femi does not turn up for the meeting, but soon, his South African fiance, Zodwa, turns up at Ade’s hotel to report that Femi is missing. He had gone to work in a township on the edge of Johannesburg. We learn that this is the weekend during which the pogroms against African migrants to South Africa took place–which so happens to be concentrated around said township (the film is loosely based on real events). Femi delays his departure from South Africa and goes, together with Zodwa, in search of Ade.

What follows is a thriller of sorts. The use of music, recurring scenes of fire and matches being lit, editing cuts building anticipation (Aryan Kaganof, familiar to readers of this blog, edited the film) and flashback scenes (to the brothers’ joint childhood and the events leading up to Femi’s disappearance) all add to the suspense and fills out the plot, pushing the story forward. We, of course, know the outcome: while the horrific porgroms shocked privileged South Africans who live outside that dividing line created by destitution, millions already living within those confining walls of extreme poverty were not surprised that resentments towards the makwerekwere (a slur meaning”foreigners” from other parts of Africa) boiled over, especially because heat was added by political instigators who stood to gain. But the circumstances of and motives for Femi’s death are not so clear cut.

Though the film does not explore the relationship between Ade and Zodwa–they don’t say much, apart from Zodwa repeating Femi’s accusations of a feud with Ade–it is clear that they reflect Omotoso’s longtime interest in the relationship between Nigerians and South Africans after Apartheid. Zodwa (Femi’s fiance) in particular, is an interesting character, as is her relationship with Femi: from a chance encounter with Femi, they became a couple, lovers, expectant parents and engaged to be married before he disappeared. The scenes between Zodwa and Femi are tender as they whisper sweet nothings to each other or repeat the same word in Zulu and Yoruba. They also represent a different kind of future or encounter between South Africans and other Africans.

This story is, of course, all probable. There are lots of “mixed” South African-Nigerian couples in big cities like Johannesburg and Cape Town, but there is also a way in which this films tells a story that reflects Omotoso’s wish. Most of the other South Africans Femi and later Ade encounter are xenophobes–with the exception of Zodwa, Ade’s boss (central to the film’s outcome) and, crucially, a policewoman, who, in a flashback (or fantasy?) scene explains Ade’s rights to him in a very friendly, personable and helpful tone. The policewoman’s attitude is striking given the reputation of the South African authorities towards migrants and refugees from African states (in contrast to white migrants) are notoriously condescending at best, and violent at worst. But perhaps, these insightful scenes also wink at Omotoso’to politics: imagining a different kind of future for intra-African relationships inside South Africa for the African diaspora. I find Omotoso’s work refreshing for not shying away from hard questions - in this case migration, xenophobia, corruption, state inaction and political opportunism - while still creating and producing work that can be entertaining, gripping and accessible.

* Man on Ground screens Saturday night at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.

To begin with, the BBC begins with an utterly terrible opening line: “There is arguably no worse place in the world to be gay than Africa.” Oh God. First, the article begins with a depiction of Africa as monolithic and homophobic—only to then present South Africa as the great hope for gays and lesbians in the homogenously-rendered continent. This is both problematic and somewhat irresponsible. Taken as a large bloc, yes, there is certainly a troubling history of institutional homophobia throughout much of the continent, but to posit that Africa (as a magical unit) is the singularly worst place to be gay is dangerously totalizing. Such a linguistic move obscures realities throughout much of the Middle East and Eastern Europe for men and women that identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender. It also conveniently forgets new developments, like Malawian President Joyce Banda’s new announcement to work to decriminalize homosexuality. Finally, the opening statement situates Africa as uniquely homophobic and particularly awful—thereby falling neatly into contemporary Western discourse on the continent.

The BBC article continues by quoting International Lesbian and Gay Tourism Association (ILGTA) spokesman Eugene Brockman as saying, “We are also attracting gays from all over Africa itself and for those forced to stay in the closet in their home countries, South Africa is liberating.” While it may appear to be quite encouraging, the pronouncement is not without problems. Such a statement obscures as much as it illuminates about contemporary LGBT politics and intersectional realities within Southern Africa. Indeed, this assertion can be construed as a form of ‘homonationalism,’ a term coined by theorist Jasbir Puar. For Puar, homonationalism occurs when a confluence of factors allow LGBT-identified men and women to invest in traditionally heteronormative hierarchical structures of race, class, and gender in order to pursue larger aims of nation-state. In particular, Puar works within an American context, referring to the potential inclusion of ‘proper homosexual’ subjects (read as white, male, and affluent) through same-sex marriage and military service in order to advance national interests both domestically and abroad (in particular against Latin American immigration and those people deemed suspect in the War on Terror). The project is likewise possible in South Africa; in pursuit of the ‘pink rand’ leveraged by affluent and internationally-inclined LGBT visitors, businessmen, politicians, and marketers seek to represent the country as a progressive paradise where men and women historically marginalized by their sexual orientation can partake in social and recreational activities within the Rainbow Nation.

The problem is that, despite Brockman (and the BBC)’s assertions of a ‘liberating South Africa,’ such opportunities are certainly not equally available to men and women within the country. Junior, a 23 year old gay-identified immigrant from the Democratic Republic of the Congo living Cape Town, offers a different take on the perceived freedoms of the ‘new’ South Africa. Nearly two years ago, he left his hometown of Kinshasa, which he described as his deeply homophobic, for the ostensibly tolerant and globally acclaimed gay friendly Cape Town.

The choice was anything but easy. Not only did it force him to leave his friends and family behind, he also had to sacrifice his law degree. The final push to leave came when his mother announced that she would personally guarantee a violent fate for him if he admitted his attraction to men. “Like most people in the DRC, my mother believes homosexuality simply does not exist in our country,” Junior said.

After enduring the months-long saga of registering as a sexual refugee, he started his search for a job. He kept his expectations modest and decided to pursue a job in hospitality. “They continuously promised they would call me, both the gay and ordinary restaurants, but they never did. I remember feeling quite optimistic about a restaurant that is known for its feminine gay waiters, until they told me they only hire white guys.” A few weeks, heavily dwindled savings and soaring levels of desperation later, Junior got in touch with other gay men from the DRC.

“They told me that being black, gay and foreign in Cape Town means exclusion from the regular job market. According to them, the only way to earn some money is by performing sex work outside the gay clubs.” Instead, Junior visited an NGO that specifically supports sexual minorities. “Half an hour later I walked out with a food parcel of which the expiry date told me it had gone off months ago. I was homeless at this point, but they could or would not assist me.”

Things appeared to look up when an NGO referred him to a gay-friendly shelter in Khayelitsha, a Cape Town township. Yet Junior’s nationality, like his race had previously, singled him out from the inclusion promised in the city. “They started to harass me for my Congolese nationality,” he recalled. “The xenophobia was palpable. When my belongings were stolen, I immediately left.” A second gay-friendly shelter proved no better, and eventually Junior left what he felt was described as outright racism, fortunately finding a place in PASSOP, an NGO that focuses on protecting refugees in and around Cape Town. Junior now works for the organization’s Sexual Refugees Program to protect, guide and assist those refugees who, just like him, are drawn to Cape Town for its promise of sexual liberation and find the reality somewhat short of the rhetoric.

The experiences of men like Junior suggest that the sexual liberation touted in Cape Town (and South Africa at large) are highly mediated by race and class, social realities still deeply interwoven in South African life. In particular, Cape Town has come under fire in South African media recently for continued perceptions of racial exclusion and discrimination, despite the city’s self-identification as a progressive and inclusive urban center for all citizens. A very public spat over Twitter between provincial leader Helen Zille and activist/singer Simphiwe Dana in January led to a flurry of discussions over race and access to the city. Mail & Guardian columnist Verashni Pillay commented eloquently on the entire situation that “an entire component of human relations and understanding has been largely left out of our dealings with each other in a fractious and hurting post-apartheid landscape.” A series of vitriolic attacks on Pillay for her writing underscored that Cape Town cherished its status as a beacon of tolerance (around both race and orientation), and many observers would simply not believe that people of color would be displeased with life in the city.

“When you have money, it’s quite easy to set yourself free from discrimination and danger,” Junior says. “Many of the white gay and lesbian people here can afford to reside in a safe and progressive area, but the majority of us live in townships. In openly embracing your sexuality there, you run the risk of getting abused, raped or murdered.” Junior’s statement emphasizes that gay and lesbian equality in South Africa is strongly mediated by race and class, and that sexual freedom is often available to those who have the racial and literal capital to afford them.

The BBC article somewhat works to acknowledge this, by quoting film-maker Fanney Tismong, who emphasizes that while “gay couples are increasingly receiving a lot of support in South Africa…there are still issues, particularly for the lesbian community in the country who have experienced shocking discrimination.” Tismong’s statements are true, and there is a shocking prevalence of racial and sexual violence within an ostensibly tolerant nation, particularly against black, lesbian-identified women in townships.  Yet, as writer and activist Sekoetlane Jacob Phamodi has argued, the phenomena of targeted violence as well as the term ‘corrective rape’ need to be situated within patriarchy, homophobia, and class structures, lest they run the risk of reinforcing racial and cultural stereotypes and bolstering a particular form of gay rights that reinforce the idea of the ‘enlightened’ South African versus the ‘barbaric’ traditional African that seems to run through the BBC article in general.

While the enshrining of protected rights within South Africa’s constitution continues to mark a significant step towards safeguarding the rights of LGBT-identified people, the freedoms enumerated in the document are not applied evenly or consistently across race, class, and gender in the Rainbow Nation. While celebratory, the rhetoric of ‘enlightened South Africa’ leading the way for a benighted African continent hides as much as it explains; it runs the risk of privileging the enclaves of acceptance for wealthy, white, male South Africans (and similarly identified international tourists) while ignoring the day to day realities of the majority of men and women within the country (and the continent at large).

T.J. Tallie is a PhD student in history at the University of Illinois, focusing on race and masculinity in colonial Africa. He lives and researches in Durban, South Africa. Maria Hengeveld studies gender and sociology at the University of Cape Town; she previously wrote about black lesbian rape in South Africa and homophobia in Malawi.

* Pinkwashing is a term used by the global gay movement to describe the Israeli government’s ‘deliberate strategy to conceal the continuing violations of Palestinians’ human rights behind an image of modernity signified by Israeli gay life’.

Picture credit: ”Nhlanhla Yika” (2011) from Sabelo Mlangeni’s Black Men in Dress.

Perhaps, one personal reason why I photograph, is because I live with a constant feeling of loneliness. I do have the tendency to be quite introvert, but I am not the melancholic type, don’t get me wrong. I would like to consider myself as rather cheery, but still, the loneliness comes. Photography, I find, has a way of positively and proactively reveling in solitude. I love photographing – and I love the moments that surround it; the walking, the observing, the feeling, and the fulfillment that comes from the solitude of working with the image later. I love finding a subject and engaging in this meeting of two worlds; My world, and the person’s world. I shoot digitally, however for my personal work I prefer to shoot with film. I find that analogue has a way of truly honoring life. It respects the value of each second’s passing – there is no way to turn back. And so, the image captured on celluloid stands as a sole visceral relic of the past, the only one other than your own memory. The magic of film lives – and this is evident too, after processing the image – when I learn something more about that moment; a detail I may have not noticed: the expression of someone in the background, a shadow, suddenly life from the past reveals itself in our present. I am always in awe of this. Besides what I said about solitude, I will say in the same breath, that it is this loneliness that pushes me to reach out and meet the world. With street or documentary photography, you encounter incredible moments that you share with strangers. For seconds, or minutes, when I photograph a stranger, or a new friend, I am allowed a glimpse into their life, and they perhaps glimpse into mine; a trusting, fleeting friendship is forged. So in this way, photography for me, is a balanced marriage between solitude and companionship. This companionship may be with the subject, or with the viewer. Photography is a way of plugging into my humanity, and proving my own humane existence to the world. There is an island off the coast of Kenya called Lamu. There are many donkeys there, countless cats and there is only one car. It is at least a 24 hour journey by road from Nairobi, and a flight there is usually US$300. I am yet to pin-point why, but most of my personal projects revolve around this island: a long-term documentary I have begun working on, a fiction film I would like to make there next year, and of course, a body of photography work that I have been building on.

School Boys

I will start with this image (above). This photograph on a personal level, reminds me of a great time of strength, a time when my personal and professional life converged. My heart was breaking, and as it is often with heart-break – you push yourself into making bigger strides. I gathered all the money I could find, bought all the film I could buy, and I left to Lamu to whimsically begin research on a documentary film idea I had. My budget was tight, but life has to happen, and so for days I would walk, photograph, and interview people. This photograph I took when I had stopped for a Fanta. The image reminds me of the feeling of being inside, and longing to be outside in the world. Photography for me sometimes is only about me longing to be somewhere else, or be someone else. And this image, yoh! I just wish I was that boy running and splashing my foot into those puddles! Aesthetically, I love this image because I see motion in the boy’s stride. And I love their sharp reflections in the puddles. Also to be frank, I love seeing school children, especially in Kenya, where education is sadly a privilege and not a given.

The Forgotten Teaspoon and The Cloudy Day Outside

Well. I am not sure how to articulate why I like it. The only two words that come to mind are ‘forgotten’ and ‘overlooked’.

Ali

I met Ali as I circumambulated Lamu. We talked, and walked and he took me up to the sand dunes. There you can see the Channel below you, and the Island of Manda opposite. Lamu – specifically this area, Shela – has seen a surge of gentrification by wealthy foreigners. Once its surroundings were only mere sand dunes and mangroves. Now houses are cropping up and changing the social and environmental fabric of the Lamu Archipelago. I respect Ali and I appreciate the kindness that he showed me.

Ayako

I took this image with a disposable underwater camera. It is of my lovely, dear cousin, Ayako.

James

I took this photograph a week ago in James’s small Kiosk in Lamu. My colleague and I trekked for ages to find James, though we had never met him. I do not have much to say about this photograph, except that I am struck by how the two males seem to be unaware of each other. Yet they have a very similar expression. It is almost like I merged the two images.

Follow Philippa on Twitter @ONETHIRSTYFISH.

The filling station was no longer a filling station. The pumps had been removed, but the plaza remained, and so did the fluorescent lights, which now bathed in their tepid glow a low-slung cement building and, to either side, a clutch of white-sided vans parked tidily in a row, some with passengers sleeping on board. It wasn’t clear where one might go to get fuel, but the larger question was whether we could leave at all. At the checkpoint at the entrance of town, the rebel soldiers told us the roads were closed for the night, and that our van should park with the others and proceed at first light. Because of the innumerable checkpoints it had taken five hours instead of the usual three to get from Bouaké to this place, Niakara, where the road to Korhogo branched off from the main highway that ran north toward Mali. [...]

Prior to the issue’s release, read Siddhartha’s full piece here.

Photo credit: Camille Millerand.

Sammy Wanjiru became the first Kenyan to win an Olympic gold medal in the marathon with his record-shattering performance at the 2008 Beijing Olympics. What makes Wanjiri’s achievements so remarkable is that most marathon runners only peak by their late 20s and early 30s. His winning time of 2:06:32 was nearly three minutes faster than that of the previous record holder, Carlos Lopes of Portugal, who won the event at the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles. Wanjiru’s win in 2008 also made him the youngest marathon gold medal recipient in seventy-six years. That race is considered by many to be one of the greatest marathons ever and two years later in Chicago he continued to stun spectators with perhaps the most exciting marathon win anyone has ever seen. In the final stretch of the 2010 Chicago Marathon, an all-out battle – the likes of which I personally have never before witnessed in a distance running event – broke out between Sammy and Ethiopian runner, Tsegaye Kebede. Then, in the final few hundred yards of the race Wanjiru accelerated into a full sprint uphill, leaving Kebede in the dust and crossing the finish line of his final race in a truly spectacular fashion.

The questionable circumstances of Wanjiru’s death (the police initially called it a suicide, while Wanjiru’s mother has accused his wife of murder) has certainly resulted in considerable media coverage of the man and his story. While most of this coverage is predictably lazy and rife with all the clichés and stereotypes we have come to expect from journalism on (East) Africa (e.g. red earth, the natural athleticism of Africans, tribal violence, poverty, corruption, rural life, etc), Xan Rice’s piece stands out for its discussion of the history of alcohol abuse among Kenyan runners and its treatment of the issue of why Kenyans are such successful distance runners. Although Rice is unable to steer clear of these tropes completely, he makes an effort to emphasize the fact that the success of Kenyan (and more broadly, East African) runners has little to nothing to do with genetics. Rather, he cites the high altitudes at which these athletes train and the intense competition from their training partners as a partial explanation for the dominance of East Africans in the world of competitive distance running.

For the most part however, Rice does not dwell on these risky nature vs nurture-style debates, choosing instead to focus on Wanjiru’s unconventional style and the psychological, cultural, and familial pressures that may have contributed to his turbulent lifestyle and alcohol abuse. He points out that Sammy Wanjiru is but one case of a much larger trend of alcoholism among Kenyan runners and suggests that the kind of support and regulation present within the national running industries of places like Ethiopia is absent in the Kenyan counterpart. This fact, he implies, may go a long way in explaining how such a trend has gone unaddressed for so long.

* In a somewhat related note: For those interested in the world of running in East Africa, the documentary “Town of Runners” was released last month. The film focuses on young runners from Bekoji – an Ethiopian highland town which has produced some of the world’s greatest distance athletes. I have yet to see the film myself, but it seems interesting enough. I’ve included the trailer below.

I’m not a Chelsea fan, and watched the game with a fervent Chelsea-hater (learning that there is a tight kinship, down to color-coordination, between that and our local North Carolina tradition of deep, bilious Duke-hating). But I’ve got a soft spot for Drogba — his goals, and his goal celebrations, and the moments like this one where he performed a few steps from the “Drogbacité” dance on this video (posted and commented on by Sean Jacobs and Elliot Ross here). (For the full musical experience of Drogbacite, watch the video of the song by Shazaku Yakuza.)

But I am a fan of spontaneous, charismatic, oration — or at least of the idea of it. So it was that reading about Drogba’s post-victory performance suddenly redeemed the whole thing for me. After all, if a money-soaked, increasingly corrupt, time-devouring, and often seriously disappointing football culture should do anything, it should produce moments like this one:

Drogba, draped in an Ivory Coast flag, danced around the trophy on the pitch. But it was in the locker-room afterwards, we learned from The Sun, that he celebrated by transforming the trophy into an interlocutor, and his teammates into rapt (or so I imagine; though maybe they were chattering through the whole thing while itching themselves) spectators. It was a fifteen minute speech, during which Drogba excoriated the trophy for having eluded him for so long. He went through the details of the story: losses at Moscow and Barcelona, and all the matches of this campaign that had led to this moment. At one point he transformed the trophy into a sought-after lover who had spurned him for too long: “With the entire squad looking on, Drogba demanded to know why the trophy had been flirting with him for so long yet had always avoided him.” But in the end, he turned the trophy into a religious object, ending “his amazing 15-minute performance by bowing down to the cup and offering a prayer of thanks.”

We need, clearly, to call an emergency symposium of specialists in public oration — gathering Classicists who can speak to us about ancient Greeks and war with Ethnomusicologists who have studied West African griots — to write a proper analysis of this performance. For now, let’s just content ourselves with wishing that we had been there to see that brief sanctification.

This journey began in Abidjan, but much of it took place somewhere else — in, or on the edges of, French society. Drogba was sent by his family to life with his uncle, professional footballer Michel Goba, when he was five years old. His family eventually migrated to France in the midst of the austerity and political turmoil of the 1990s. As Adekeye Adebajo has written in a review of books on Drogba, his time in France was one of isolation. In speaking about his adolescence, Drogba referred to the Guinean novelist Camara Laye’s story of the painful exile of a student in France in the 1950s.His father, who had managed a bank back home, took menial jobs and the family lived in a cramped banlieue apartment in an area with many other African immigrants. “Didier’s teenage years in France were cold, lonely, and largely friendless,” writes Adebajo, defined by a sense of “sociocultural dislocation” for which football provided “some solace.”

Football became Drogba’s profession, though he played in the 2nd division for several years before battling his way to Olympique de Marseille, and from there to Chelsea. He had — and still has — many ardent fans in France’s banlieue neighborhoods, where people remember his story. In a horrifying 2008 video shot in the banlieue of Montfermeuil, the  journalist collective Rue 89 documented a police beating of Abdoulaye Fofana. It took place during a France-Tunisia football match, which was being played not far away in the Stade de France. Fofana was watching the game when the police burst into his apartment, claiming he had thrown a fire-cracker at a passing patrol. They dragged him down the stairs, beating him all the way. As the video ends with an interview of his shocked family, you can see that his living room was covered with posters of soccer stars, including Zidane and, prominent, Drogba.

Drogba shares an experience on the edges of French society with players like Zidane, Makelele, and Thuram. But among his generation of players who came up through the French system, Drogba was one of the few of his calibre to opt not to play for France. Though his did play on a national French youth squad at one point, he ultimately opted for Ivory Coast as his national team. We can briefly imagine what might have been had he chosen to play for France instead — what might have happened in the 2006 World Cup, for instance? “Ils auraient pu jouer en équipe de France”(“They could have played in the French national team”), laments one website sporting a photograph of Drogba. But Drogba has expressed pride in his choice: This past February, when his team lost to Zambia in the African Cup of Nations Final — in part because of a missed penalty by Drogba — he commented that when the team returned to the Ivory Coast they were hailed and celebrated despite their loss.

We weren’t really expecting that. This country is different — they always come to see us even when they lose. I had the luck to play for the French team when I was young. But I don’t think that if I played at the senior level I would have ever gotten this kind of reception.

He might have been thinking of what happened to his former Chelsea teammate Nicholas Anelka during the 2010 World Cup, when he was kicked off the team and excoriated in the press for a locker-room outburst against Raymond Domenech. Drogba spoke up for Anelka then, and soon after the Champions League final news broke that the next step in his journey will be to join his friend at Shanghai Shenhua in China. If that ends up happening, it will be a fascinating twist in a story that has stretched from Abidjan to Dunkirk to Marseille to London and now Shanghai.

Will Drogba ever give another speech quite as good as the one he gave in Bayern the other night? Only if the occasion arises. As one reader pointed out in response to an earlier version of this post, that occasion might be just one year away: if Ivory Coast manages to clinch the African Cup of Nations, as they weren’t able to this year. What a speech Drogba might then give to that long and painfully sought after trophy? A long and winding tale, with a long evocation of the beautiful and moving game they lost against Zambia. And what if — we can dream! — they were to go on, full of confidence, and win the World Cup in Brazil in 2014? If either of those victories happen, let’s hope someone will be prepared with a video camera in the locker-room this time — to capture Drogba hassling and adoring another trophy. It would be worth seeing the Ivory Coast win just to see that, no?

* This is a slightly edited version of a post first published on Laurent Dubois’s blog Soccer Politics earlier today. We repost it here with kind permission.

The act, presumably the work of a pro-SCAF provocateur intending to libel the protesters (more on that here), seems to represent a revolutionary image of transition from a region which, in 2011, started to disseminate a mass of images to the rest of the world, images authored by civilians in those countries which demonstrated an assumption of political agency by the people, sadly absent today in the capitals of the ‘free’ world.

In January, Al Jazeera published Hussein Omar’s forceful response to suggestions that Egypt was incapable of protecting its own cultural heritage. The  volunteer operation to order and restore the rare holdings of the Institut library after the fire is an important part of this narrative, as is the huge donation of books by Sheik Sultan al-Qasimi. In both instances the preservation of Egypt’s cultural heritige is not a condition of Western imperialism, and in this spirit Omar wrote that:

More than ever, a deep engagement with Egypt’s heritage will allow them to engage in the important and political role of questioning the totalising narratives that the Egyptian state has long attempted to impose.

The rejection of these totalising narratives appears to have been a consistent characteristic of the ongoing Egyptian revolution, in which state imposition appears increasingly legible, and undermined by individual acts of protest, graffiti, art. The imposition of a totalising dialectic which Said sketches out in Orientalism has receded in this mass of new images from North Africa.

Shortly before his death in 2003, Said reasserted that the “orient”, in the context of George Bush’s Middle Eastern adventures, was still a potent political force: the “orient”, he argued, ‘that semi-mythical construct which since Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt in the late 18th century has been made and remade countless times.’

More recently, however, Hamid Dabashi has theorised the end of orientalism – and postcolonialism – in two books: The Arab Spring: The end of Postcolonialism (2011) and Postorientalism: Knowledge and Power in a Time of Terror (2008). You can watch a video of Dabashi discussing the Egyptian revolutions with David Harvey and Anthony Alessandrini, here, in which he claims that: “this is a book that comes out of a deep sense of belonging with this revolutionary moment … and contrary to what metropolitans call the participant-observer, I am not an observer in the Arab revolutions, I’m a participant …”

This Thursday (one day after the first round of Egyptian presidential elections), Ahdaf Soueif – Egyptian émigré novelist and founder of Palfest, now based in London – will give the Edward Said lecture at the British Museum. Her title is “Mina’s Banner: Edward Said and the Egyptian Revolution”, which takes its name from “Mina Danial, the young Coptic activist killed by the military in Cairo on October 9, 2011, in the Maspero massacre.” Maspero, the building in downtown Cairo which houses the state television and radio station (and named after French Egyptologist Gaston Maspero) was where Soueif had her first job. In February, Yasmin El-Rashidi wrote about encountering the novelist in Tahrir Square:

I approached her myself when I too, realised who she was; she spoke first of women and their extraordinary role in the revolt, and then looked me in the eye and said that she had dreamt of this. “I had a vision of revolution. It happens in Tahrir – Liberation Square.” (Guardian)

Soueif’s book Cairo: My City, Our Revolution begins:

Many years ago I signed a contract to write a book about Cairo; my Cairo. But the years passed, and I could not write it. When I tried it read like an elegy; and I would not write an elegy for my city.

As it is Soueif’s presence in Cairo which enables this departure from the elegiac vision of Cairo to Soueif’s involvement in the revolutionary present, it will be interesting to see how far she agrees with Dabashi’s theoretical sense that the conditions of ‘orientalism’ have vanished from contemporary political cartographies.

* Soueif’s lecture, with contributions from Omar Al-Qattan and Jacqueline Rose, is on Thursday at the British Museum (more details here).