A painting sits glowering on the wall of the Jack Bell Gallery in London. Figures daubed in bright colours stare out from the canvases against a dark background broken up by bits of newspaper cuttings. This is Les Fantomes, the work of Aboudia, a 26-year-old Ivorian painter whose stark images have recently been receiving some much-deserved attention.
It’s clear that truth and reconciliation commissions are half-successful attempts at inventing half-baked feelings of national identities (turning a blind eye to economic restoration in South Africa; with some self-interested pressure from above in Rwanda). So it is interesting to note that Côte d’Ivoire’s new president Alassane Ouattara reasoned that one of the first things his country needs is a TRC. The newly-appointed commission counts 11 members, with footballer Didier Drogba one of them, representing the country’s diaspora.
“Without being a football player,” he tells BBC Sport, “I’m not sure you would be sitting here talking about my country.”
The “expensively but understatedly dressed” (qué?) player said ‘yes’ when Former Prime Minister Charles Konan Barry called and explained him he needed Drogba to help him bring peace in the country. Drogba says: “The war that happened a few months ago was crazy. It was unbelievable for all the Ivorians. We couldn’t believe it was happening and we need to sit together and speak about it to make sure it is the first and last time.”
Let’s hope Drogba is right. (Anyway, this may be the beginning of a new career back home for the aging footballer. We do know that part of his football legend is that he brought a momentary peace during the civil war of the early 2000s.)
But taking into account other recent commissions’ track records, we can only wonder why Drogba took the bait. The Ivorian TRC will succeed when it manages to expose and dismantle the grip the concept of being ‘Ivorian’/'autochtonous’ holds on the political debate, and thus on its people. It would be no small feat.
I’ll take any excuse to post about football.
Fifa, football’s world controlling body, announced the latest rankings for world football this week.
Not surprising are the top five nations: Spain, Netherlands, Germany, Uruguay and Portugal.
We of course care about the African rankings.
The African teams in the top 50 are: Cote d’Ivoire (no. 16, down one place) followed by Egypt (36th, down 2 places), Ghana (37th, down 1), Burkina Faso (41th, down 1), Senegal (42nd, up 7), Nigeria (43rd, down 5), Algeria (46th) and Cameroon (48th).
My team, South Africa, is just outside the top 50: they’re 51st, down 4 places. (Didn’t they draw and beat Egypt in recent African Nations Cup qualifiers eliminating the 6-time continental champions from next year’s finals?)
Sierra Leone (now 68th, up 24), Togo (95th, up 26) and Namibia (119th, up 24) are three of the six teams outside the top 50 who improved their position on the rankings by more than 20 places.
This week, fifteen years ago, the rapper Tupac Shakur was gunned down on a Las Vegas street. The combination of his personality–he was a “gifted storyteller“, an explosive personality and had an intensity that was unrivaled among most pop stars. As Robert Pierre writes on his blog at The Washington Post: “… Whatever he was doing, he was all in. All in with black nationalism for a while. All in with his love for black women. All in for the West Coast. All in for the Thug Life. All in.”
Tupac, of course, came from a very political family, so he must have understood his impact. (He acknowledged as much in interviews.). And as we know, his intensity did not just appeal to just young people here in the United States, but also on the continent.
As a 2003 Woodrow Wilson Center report on young people in the developing world, notes:
Tupac Shakur is famous across Africa, most particularly among urban youth. His music is as common in many urban neighborhoods as Bob Marley’s once was. His face and poses, pictured on clothing and in murals, are now widely familiar. A popular T-shirt has a black background, showing Tupac (spelled “2Pac”) looking alert, with U.S. dollar signs ringing the collar and his most popular slogan, “All Eyez on Me,” across the bottom. “All Eyez on Me,” indeed—Tupac’s lyrics expressing his alienation, fury, and his conviction that his quest for revenge is thoroughly justified, the police sirens in the background of many of his songs, the belief that he was not really murdered but is still alive (often proclaimed in “Tupac Lives” graffiti), all conjure an image of a defiant, proud antihero, and an inspiration for many of Africa’s young and alienated urbanites.
In a section on young people and war the report’s writers note his impact on young soldiers in Sierra Leone’s late 1990s civil war. There, rebel soldiers adopted Tupac as their “patron saint”:
“The rebels wrote Tupac’s lyrics on the side of their vehicles” during the Freetown invasion, one Sierra Leonean refugee later recalled. “They wrote ‘Death Row,’‘Missing in Action,’ ‘Hit them Up,’ ‘Only God Can Judge,’ and ‘All Eyez on Me’ on them” … the rebels “favored Tupac T-shirts and fancy haircuts”.
This was also the case in the civil wars in the Democratic Republic of Congo and most recently Cote d’Ivoire and Libya. And as Paul Rogers (of LA Weekly) blogs this week, rebels fighting Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi’s regime now also take inspiration from Tupak Shakur. One young rebel fighter told a British journalist: ”I only listen to 2Pac before going to shoot Gaddafi boys.”
Easy listening. ‘Bassa’ is a song by the Côte d’Ivoire-born, Mali-raised and now France-based artist Fatoumate Diawara. We could use a translation — because maybe it’s no easy listening at all. Anyone?
There’s been a resurgence interest in the inscrutable African mask in several museums lately, including this horrible one at the Barbie Museum. Its as if the more evidence there is that the African of the European imagination does not exist in static primitivity, the stronger the attempt to put it back into that caged zoo.
Thankfully, there’s something different at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, in a small section of a first floor gallery: “Reconfiguring an African Icon: Odes to the Mask by Modern and Contemporary Artists from Three Continents” (March 8, 2011–August 21, 2011).
Ever since Man Ray’s image of the porcelain-white visage his mistress, Kiki, juxtaposed with that of a gleaming Baule portrait mask from Côte d’Ivoire was published in French Vogue (“Noir et Blanche,” May 1926), the West appropriated the African mask as the visual object that embodies static “primitivity.” Roll in Picasso, André Derain, and Henri Matisse, whose collective homage to the inscrutable Other helped manufacture visual distance from the primitive, while inviting comparison and desire.
The Met’s small exhibit includes the Beninese sculptors Romuald Hazoumé and Calixte Dakpogan (that’s Hazoumé “Ibedji (Nos.1 and 2) Twins,” completed in 1992, above) and American sculptors Lynda Benglis and Willie Cole. Using natural, traditionally used materials, the effluvia of consumption, and fine, coloured glass, these four artists experiment with re-personifying the performative and living qualities that masks embody in their original, animated contexts, re-configuring those traditional ‘Western’ associations of masks with the savage/native/other.
While Hazoumé and Dakpogan are artists who are intimately involved in the business of traditional masquerade and mask-making (Dakpogan is a descendant of a family of royal blacksmiths), their work gestures towards Benin’s long history of trade—exchanges that defined its cultural, religious, political and aesthetic history. Hazoumé use of a series of discarded petrol jerrycans, and Dakpogan’s repertory of discarded consumer goods, including cassette tapes, floppy disks, CDs, combs, sandals, and soda cans are a humorous nod to Marcel Duchamp’s readymades, inviting the viewer into a conversation about the multifaceted, multilinear relationship with the West, modernity and the disposable nature of consumption.
Magic Systeme and Tiken Jah Fakoly tells their fellow Ivorians “Ca va aller.”
James North:
Orientalism takes a different form in sub-Saharan Africa. There, Orientalists do not emphasize the “Islamic” angle quite as much, although they do sometimes suggest that a “fault line” running across the Sahel, with an expansive “Islam” to the north and “Christianity” to the south, is a reliable guide to conflict in many countries.
But in Africa, the Orientalists are more likely to emphasize that “ancient tribal enmities” explain contemporary conflict, without necessarily adding the religious dimension.
I recently returned from the West African nation of Cote d’Ivoire, in which fighting with a strong ethnic base is still simmering. Several thousand people are already dead, and up to 1 million are refugees. I produced this fairly lengthy report for The Nation.
The mainstream Western press cites ethnic differences to explain the violence there. I found that citing ethnicity is not “wrong,” but woefully incomplete.
In short, Cote d’Ivoire['s economy] is dominated by millions of small cocoa planters, who grow the raw material from which our chocolate is made. Big Western multinational corporations, like the U.S. agribusinesses Cargill and Archer Daniels Midland, shamelessly underpay the small Ivorian farmers for their cocoa beans. I met with these hard-working, likeable people, and I listened to their bitter complaints.
Without a reasonable income from cocoa exports, the Ivorian economy stagnates, promoting frustration, particularly among young men. Unscrupulous local politicians use ethnicity to mobilize support. Violence grows, and then explodes.
One key fact here is that these ethnic differences are not “ancient tribal hatreds.” Until the world cocoa market weakened a couple of decades ago, the various ethnicities in Cote d’Ivoire got along well. The economic crisis raised the tensions.
The average well-meaning American sees a brief, confusing report on his television news, in which wild-looking young African men are riding around brandishing weapons in Abidjan, Cote d’Ivoire’s commercial capital. Cargill and Archer Daniels Midland are never mentioned.
