How can we think about bodies and circulation without deferring to the dominant binary of western discourse on the so-called “refugee crisis”, which is central to both contemporary European politics and how the early 21st century will be remembered. On one side is the openly racist discourse that underpins the border policies responsible for thousands of deaths at sea and on land within and outside Europe. On the other is the liberal discourse that premises freedom of movement and eliminating borders against the backdrop of western, individualist thinking, thereby reinforcing neoliberal market logic and the nation state. Both, as Max Jorge Hinderer Cruz argues, are two sides of the same coin.

We begin at a false point of departure when considering bodies and circulation: the deeply embedded western view of the subject as human individual, and thus, the human body (and the human as such) as an autonomous, individual organism. We consider circulation not as departing from the human body (the body that circulates), but of the human body itself, departing from circulation, aiming at re-establishing the dignity of what we call an extended body, and of human life in general. Paraphrasing Brazilian geographer and fierce globalisation critic, Milton Santos, we say the human body is in circulation, and circulation is in the human body. In other words: no circulation, no body, no life.

There are two obvious ways to relate the human body to circulation. First, there are humans, people that circulate, moving over land and sea. Second, there are things that circulate through human bodies, such as food and water, which are indispensable to human survival. Now, if we shift our focus from the individual human body to circulation as such, we can see a vast field of interconnection: circulation is the organising principle of human life—from the biological (metabolism) to the cultural (music); of all geological movement (the tide, the seasons); of the planetary and stellar movements; and last but not least, of the market. For most societies on the planet, the will of the cosmos depends on what these societies themselves can reciprocate spirituality and materially. It is fair to say that most spiritual, economic, social and biological forms of organisation seem to rely in one way or another on the principle of circulation.

There are three planes or dimensions of circulation that directly relate to human life on planet earth:

the circulation of individual organisms, such as blood circulation in humans and animals, or the biochemical circulation in plants;

the movements on the planet, such as the flow of rivers and atmospheric change, global circulation (production, distribution and consumption) of goods or people under the current capitalist order; and

a vast array of movements related to cosmic circulation, such as day and night, the measurement of time, meteorological and seasonal changes, energy and spiritual forces, divine equilibrium, societies’ cosmologies and even ideological formations.

All three dimensions of circulation are inseparable, and have infinite points of intersection, overlap or superposition. Let’s stick to the example of the individual organism: to keep the human metabolism going, the human needs food. If the human individual lives in a contemporary metropolitan city, it is likely the food travelled or was shipped from another place, another country, perhaps even another continent. A major part of the meat Europeans eat comes from Asia, for example. If we are talking vegetables or fruit, availability is likely dependent on the season. It might well be that the people employed for the harvest are seasonal migrants. Another example is the complex interaction of rain, daylight, minerals and oxygen in plants during photosynthesis. Or think of any given temporal overlap of the female menstrual cycle and the moon cycle. From the point of view of the cosmos everything is matter, energy, in relation to each other and in process of circulation. In short: none of the three planes of circulation can be separated from each other. They all are integrated, co-exist in constant interrelation, and their balance is sustained by precisely those inflection points that lead to other dimensions of circulation.

THE SKIN

(THE INSTITUTION OF THE DOUBLE DIFFERENCE)

The human body is a virtually infinite multiplicity of simultaneous molecular movements, transactions and rhythmic overlap of temporalities that perpetually extend the limits of the skin. Contrary to such a notion, the central historical principle for the regulation of populations is establishing the individual human skin as a frontier. In fact, establishing the “individual” human as defined by the outline of his or her skin, can be considered one of the most effective technologies of government to organise life in the capitalist world.

Biologically, the skin is considered the largest human organ, and it serves numerous functions, many of them existential to the individual human organism. It serves to regulate temperature, to protect other organs, and is crucial for both assimilation and expulsion of organic matter. Also, the skin is one of the most vital organs of perception and communication, and as such it serves a social function.

Historically, particularly in so-called western societies, the skin gained fundamental importance in economic, juridical and political terms. It was established as a double difference: a) the frontier between the “inside” and the “outside” of the body; and b) the difference between the “self” and the “other”, including such notions as “me” and “you”, and the “I” and “we”. This double difference defines the “law of the individual” as governing principle, and the skin was culturally established as its representation par excellence (It is interesting to note that many societies lack the word or even the notion of “I”.)

The establishing of the skin as double difference, though, does not entirely close off the “inside” and the “outside”, but rather separates it conceptually and politically. As we have pointed out before, some of the vital functions of the skin lie in its permeability and transmissibility. Closing off the “inside” from the “outside” would almost instantly lead to the death of the organism. On the contrary, the purpose of this double difference lies in the rigid control, the supervision, and the taxation of everything that goes inside and outside of the body. Indeed, all dominant ideological and religious formations that contributed to our global present—such as Judaism, Christianity, Islam, the nation state, capitalism, the liberal market, individual property, psychoanalysis—have made decisive contributions to the project of administrating, explaining and mediating above everything that affects the human body, everything that crosses the “I”, every penetration of the skin and the body.

In modern capitalist society it seems every diet, every defecation, every act of violence towards oneself and others, every perception, every act of speech, every act of care, is either ideologically “mediated” or economically regulated by consumption. This is why the great moral taboos of modern society generally are associated with the violation of the rules or laws that organise the permeability of the individual body, and often aim to punish or delegitimise transgressions of it. We only need to think of the act of killing (by perforation of the skin or cutting off air supply, for example), defecation, sex, drug use, the act of speaking out, and so on. Jurisdictions and morals are parts of the systemic effort to detect, control and administer what goes through all bodies at all times.

Although jurisdiction and morals in western societies ultimately claim to be protecting the security and integrity of the “inside” of the body, at the same time there are two main constructs that regulate the systemic accessibility of the “inside”, and thus legitimate violence against the body: race and gender. In western societies it is a fact, that the darker a skin tone is, the more legitimate and even legally upheld it is to violate the integrity of its “inside”; put a bullet through or whip it open. Historical and present-day record tells us so. The same can be said about the accessibility to the “inside” of women’s body through sexual assault, as reproductive incubator and disregard for the psychological or physiological repercussions for women as a result.  

Both race and gender are decisive factors in the denial of fundamental rights that pertain to the individual, including freedom of choice and control over one’s body and life; the denial of this basic freedom continues to be largely regulated and eroded by a ruling economic imperative in contemporary liberal and post-colonial societies.

THE EXTENDED BODY AND THE HUMAN CONDITION

(THE WATER CYCLE PARADIGM)

Once we have understood the legal, economic and political function of the double difference represented by the skin, we should be careful to refer to “humans circulating” and “things circulating through humans” in an enumerative way, since the opposition of “things that circulate through our bodies (in and out)” and “human beings circulating on the surface of the planet” reaffirms a pre-given ontological difference following the dominant understanding of the “human” in western society, and that of all other “things”.

If, on the other hand, we look at the human body from the point of view of circulation, we must extend our understanding of that body and overcome that difference. For human life, the human body and circulation are inseparable: the “things” that circulate through it are the body itself. It is not the skin, but various forms of circulation that compound existential elements and flows and integrate it as an extended body. Let’s take the example of water:

The human body is two-thirds water. That water is in constant exchange, it isn’t still inside the body, it needs constant refill and expulsion, otherwise the organism dies. It is similar with other life preserving elements like glucose or oxygen: if the organism doesn’t constantly get them, it cannot survive. These elements de facto have a physical extension. They literally form existential parts of the body. The same two-thirds of the human body simultaneously belongs to another living cycle, the natural water cycle, and thus is constantly flowing along its path in a constant flow, and inseparably connected to the living natural cycle of water that embraces the whole planet. Seen from the perspective of the human individual, to exist at least two-thirds of what is considered to be inside the human body, is constantly also outside the human body. An individual might understand it thus:

Two-thirds of my body is not only mine. I share two-thirds of my body with the natural water cycle. Two-thirds of me is constantly flowing in rivers, in the ocean, levitating as clouds  raining down, watering the fields. Who knows, perhaps two weeks ago two-thirds of my body was floating along the River Seine in France, or along the coast of Cameroon, or is in this moment raining down on the Brazilian rain forest.     

THE COSMIC AND THE POLITICAL

(INSIDE AND OUTSIDE OF EUROPE)

Alarmingly, there are masses of quantifiable floating bodies on the Mediterranean Sea right now: bodies that are not allowed to get to a safe harbour in Europe, or that are sunken by Frontex with armed force; bodies and parts of bodies that are washed onto the coast, or dissolve into the water; bodies that are deliberately set “outside” of their human condition by European border politics.

Yet the primary problem is not the border. To be set “outside” of one’s human condition, means to be cut off from access to existential elements or flows that constitute the living extended body. If a living organism has been cut off from water, through its theft by pollution or privatisation for example, it means that the existential element, water is no longer accessible and, therefore, the survival of the living organism is in acute danger. The only chance to survive is to immediately go after that which has been stolen, to the house of the one responsible for stealing it.

From a cosmic perspective, every closed European border is an extension of the skin as double difference. The body is contained in circulation, just as circulation is already contained in the body, and no border can change that. Yet, for a refugee floating on the Mediterranean, a closed border is as murderous as an open wound, a denial of the primal human right to live.

More than any border, it is the predatory forms of contemporary capitalism that simultaneously secure Europe’s wealth and make vast regions outside of Europe unlivable. The current crisis is still that of the refugees’ lives and the human condition of their bodies, and not of Europe’s safety or wealth. A bit of welfare and a visa here and there, and opening or closing another border will not solve the problems inherent to capitalism. Those Europeans who argue otherwise—who claim to have invented human rights, and all its associated discourses on the right of movement—are being intolerably cynical. For only if the “inside” of Europe assumes the political responsibility of what their political system has done – and still does – “outside” of Europe, will an end to this “refugee crisis” be imaginable.

 This and other stories and maps are available in the new issue of the Chronic, On Circulations And The African Imagination Of A Borderless World, which maps the African imagination of a borderless world: non-universal universalisms, the right to opacity, refusing that which has been refused to you, and “keeping it moving”.

To purchase in print or as a PDF head to our online shop, or get copies from your nearest dealer.

by Moses Marz

Elected four times as mayor of Palermo over a period spanning more than 30 years, and holding various posts as public servant and European statesman in between, Leoluca Orlando’s first political opponent was the mafia and its affiliates in the Italian political establishment. When his former friends and fellow anti-mafiosi Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino were assassinated in 1992, everyone thought Orlando would be next in line. He was affectionately called il morituro, the walking corpse, by the people of Palermo. With their support, particularly support from women and the youth, he managed to first rid the city of the taboo of speaking about the mafia, and slowly regained control over the city, house by house and street by street.

Mayor Orlando’s reputation as a fearless anti-mafia fighter was rarely questioned until, in the late 1980s, the Sicilian writer Leonardo Sciascia, in a Corriere della Sera newspaper article, dismissively referred to Orlando and Borsellino as “anti-Mafia professionals” shortly before his own death. Sciascia claimed that the mafia was content to play along with what they perceived to be show court trials organised by Orlando, serving as effective cover for their general change in strategy. In fact, in the 21st century the Sicilian mafia, Cosa Nostra, was still alive and well, even after Orlando had announced his victory in 1999. By then the mafia no longer claimed as many lives as it had in the previous two decades, where the body count reached levels comparable to the conflicts raging in Belfast and Beirut at the time. The mafia had effectively been driven out of local government structures—leaving Palermo open for business with the globalised economy, and for hundreds of thousands of tourists arriving on cruise ships every year—but it still thrived in the world of business. Going with the times, Cosa Nostra teamed up with the Nigerian mafia on the trafficking of heroin and sex, while they themselves specialised in dealing in weapons and human trafficking.

Throughout these internal transformations, immigration never featured as a prominent issue in the mayor’s political life. Palermo, at the centre of the Mediterranean, had for centuries been a crossroads for cultures from across the world, who lived side by side without attracting much attention. This was to change when the so-called “European migration crisis” reached Sicily in the aftermath of the assassination of Libya’s president, Muammar Gaddafi in 2011. As Gaddafi had prophesised, his removal effectively opened the Libyan ports for travel across the Mediterranean. In the following years, half a million migrants passed through Palermo, a city with barely more than half a million inhabitants. In the summer of 2018, the crisis hit fever pitch and the mayor’s reputation and power was put to test. The Aquarius, a ship carrying 629 migrants who had taken the route through Libya, was approaching the harbour of Palermo requesting permission to dock. Matteo Salvini, Italy’s Deputy Prime Minister from the right wing party Lega Nord, who had been voted into power the same year as junior partner in the Five Star Movement’s three-party-coalition, announced that the Aquarius should be sent back to Libya if none of the other EU countries was willing to take in the migrants. Following Salvini’s announcement, the conflict among European heads of state reached levels not witnessed since three years prior, when Germany eventually granted millions of Syrian refugees asylum in violation of the already-defunct Dublin Convention.

In defiance of Salvini’s order, Mayor Orlando went on national television and declared that, “Palermo in ancient Greek meant ‘complete port’. We have always welcomed rescue boats and vessels who saved lives at sea. We will not stop now.” Along with Domenico Lucano, the mayor of the small town of Riace in the neighbouring region of Calabria, Orlando had earned a reputation as among the most outspoken opponents of the xenophobic discourse upheld by European states. In the Charter of Palermo in 2015 he called for the abolishment of the residence permit and for the recognition of mobility as a human right. His practice of personally welcoming new arrivals whose boats were rescued or intercepted by the Italian coast guard, and symbolically bestowing on them the civic status of Palermitans, was viewed as heroic by a section of the European left, but could be dismissed by a larger audience as eccentric and utopian. The brief showdown between Salvini and Orlando underlined the fact that the mayor’s actual realm of political influence did not even include the harbour of his city. The Aquarius was denied entry and had to travel another 1,296km to the coast of Spain before its passengers were sent to France following an offer by President Emmanuel Macron.

In an atmosphere of defeat and renewed urgency, the mayor was invited to deliver a speech at the Teatro Massimo as part of the official opening of an art biennale hosted by the city. Orlando was not the only one to speak that evening. The organisers had invited an academic and an artist from New York and Paris respectively to speak to the biennale’s theme of “Planetary Garden—Cultivating Coexistence”. An admirer and supporter of the arts, one of Orlando’s favourite analogies of the importance of synchronicity between citizens and society in the fight against organised crime, was the two-wheeled Sicilian chariot—with one wheel representing the law and the other culture. Given his stance on what he called “cultural contamination” the mayor’s endorsement of the biennale, and vice versa, worked on several levels. The Teatro Massimo provided a fitting stage for the event. Considered as one of Europe’s finest opera stages at the end of the 19th century, the theatre had fallen into disrepair in the decades in which the mafia gained total control of the regional government of Sicily. In 1974 it had to close for reparations that ended up taking 23 years, with most of the money re-directed to corrupt politicians. It was only in 1996, in Orlando’s second term as mayor, that the theatre was reopened with the gilded frieze over its main entrance declaring: “Art Renews the People and Reveals their Life”.

Its five stories of opera galleries, decorated in gold and with a round glass ceiling depicting a biblical scene, looked imposing as the hall filled with international visitors of the biennale and Palermitan activists who had staged a demonstration in the city centre the night before against the fate of the Aquarius. The atmosphere in the hall was sombre, yet expectant of how the mayor would respond to the defeat at the hand of the government in Rome. The international guests were asked to address the theme of the biennale. They spoke about the inherent human desire to move and offered several personal anecdotes about their own migration experiences, which led to a call for solidarity and openness towards strangers. Apparently upset with the superficiality of their remarks, the audience grew increasingly impatient during their conversation. From the back rows a voice shouted, “Enough! We want to hear the mayor!”—a demand that was supported by clapping hands among others in the audience.

When the mayor finally took to the stage he was visibly exhausted from the recent events. But when he started speaking, none of the tiredness could be seen. Once again, he proved his ability to win over his audience with his sense of purpose and immunity to admit defeat which had over time turned him from il morituro into il presidente for the people of Palermo. “Migration can no longer be considered as a problem of borders, be they cultural, religious or identitarian, problems of social policy or access to the labour market”, he began. “The logic of emergency and the policies that have lasted for decades must be left behind! Human mobility should be appreciated as a value in and of itself, a resource, and not a burden for any country.” There was loud applause. He attacked what he called Italy’s “creeping economic racism” that cynically denied migrants entry, while at the same time maintaining a system of neo-slavery on the plantations of southern Italy, before turning to the bickering among European politicians about accepting a few hundred migrants.

“Do you think that among 600 million Europeans there is not enough space to accommodate 500,000, one million, two million, 50 million immigrants?” He laughed and shouted, “Of course there is!” After a brief pause to allow for the noise in the audience to taper off he continued: “They speak of economic migrants as if they do not have the right to asylum. What does that mean? Are they saying that it is not okay to die when there is a war in your country? But if you are dying of hunger that is okay? That does not make any sense! Abolishing the residence permit is our only possibility of building a new citizenship, one that is based on sharing, reciprocity and mutual respect, on implementing policies of empowerment and autonomy!”

After an even louder applause he ended his speech saying, “I have survived the war against the mafia and I have won. I will also win this war even if it shall not be in my lifetime. I have seen what the future looks like. It looks like Palermo—like a mosaic, not a painting. And as the mayor of Palermo it is my privilege and honour to welcome you all to this beautiful city. You and I, we are all Palermitans!” There was a standing ovation when the mayor came down the few steps from the podium. A small crowd of visitors and journalists had gathered to speak to him, and he obliged them smilingly. That is when shots were fired from one of the opera lodges. The two body guards standing behind the mayor were caught off-guard. The mayor was hit and died almost instantly. The assassin was never found.

The news of how the mayor paid the ultimate price for his ideals soon spread across the world and brought his project the attention it had never before received. Among the rumours on who was behind the murder, the most obvious candidates were right-wing extremists, potentially operating with the blessing of Rome and the Catholic church, as well as his old enemies from the mafia. Some analysts even went as far as speculating that the mayor had orchestrated his own assassination, considering how perfectly his death had been set in scene. They asked why the mayor survived all those years fighting against the mafia, while those closest to him had been eliminated. Was not the very fact of his survival making him suspicious? Have not all those who advocated real change been killed before they could reach their visionary goals? Was killing himself not his only way out before he would, sooner or later, betray the struggle for radical change?

On the night of the murder, the streets of Palermo swelled with people, in honour of the mayor’s life. Via Maqueda, the street leading to Teatro Massimo, was filled with mourners dressed in black, whose assembly drew lines from the theatre to the town hall behind Piazza Pretoria, and all the way down Via Vittorio Emanuele to the sea promenade, Foro Italico. In scenes reminiscent of the Egyptian Tahrir square demonstrations in 2011, the people did not leave the streets in the days and nights to come. What began as a mourning procession spontaneously transformed into a fully-fledged demonstration. The banners held up by protesters read “Global Apartheid Must Fall”, “Residence Permit = New Slavery”, “We Are All Palermitans” and “Let Mayors Rule the World”.

A few weeks into the protests, a camp at the sea promenade was set up and called Resurrection City in homage to the Poor People’s Campaign created in the wake of the assassination of Martin Luther King Jnr. What at first looked like a refugee camp, quickly turned into a breeding ground for a political movement that took up the mayor’s struggle for the abolishment of the residence permit. But judging it too moderate, they articulated their claims in more radical terms. The inhabitants of Resurrection City elaborated new concepts of belonging and being together that were informed by the experiences of migrants and social organisations developed in refugee camps across the world. Their calls for a “right to opacity”, “the abolishment of the integration paradigm” and “relational freedom” not only shifted the content of the debate around migration, but the very terms used in that conversation. Fearing that the mayor’s understanding of human rights would do little more than ensure a steady influx of cheap labour catering to the needs of an ageing European population, they advocated a different sense of justice, one based on the dictum “I am because we are, and since we are, therefore I am”. The sense of freedom growing out of this perception would be different from the personal liberty to do whatever one pleases; a relational kind that urges individuals to act responsibly in relation to their community and with an awareness of the interdependence of all beings.

At first the mainstream media tried its best to channel the movement in ways that would portray Orlando in a similar light to Angela Merkel, after her severe loss in the German elections in 2015. But once the protest in Palermo spread to other European cities, with the initial support of the mayors of Barcelona and Rotterdam with whom mayor Orlando had developed close ties during their meetings at the Global Parliament of Mayors, the movement developed a dynamic of its own. After initial resistance to what they dismissed as an impractical proposition, leftist parties and NGOs across Europe realised that this was their only chance of regaining a degree of relevance. During decades in which they appeased voters by pledging to fight for increasing levels of social justice that led them to endorse a nationalist agenda equal to that of their opponents, they were completely marginalised in the course of several elections.  

Orlando offered a new vocabulary, a new historical framework against which it was possible to formulate claims for a different politics. It became increasingly clear that the city, not the nation state, would be the framework in which such a politics could be articulated. The nation state had worked well for promoting the independence of autonomous nations and individual freedoms. Its disposition towards the pursuit of selfish interests made it, however, unsuited to survive the age of interdependence. The city, as the place where pragmatism and creativity overruled ideologies of sovereignty and nationality, appeared to be the way out of the cul-de-sac in which the minority-majority dialectic of national democracy had led. What was called for was a return to the beginning of human civilisation, only this time not to Greece and its polis, but to the African villages from which the storytellers were never banished and palavers ended in consensus, or with the decision to dislocate and create new communities elsewhere.

The winds of change had already taken on the force of a tornado in the imagination of the people when several European nation states, following the lead of Portugal, eventually openly invited migrants to settle. The EU parliament passed a Structural Adjustment Program for itself—one that would provide migrants with the necessary infrastructure required to settle in Europe, further their education or continue the profession they had learned at home, and build communities that were in line with their ways of life. This, it hoped, would grant the international community a new lifeline. Too late. The nation state, once dismissed by a famous Nigerian writer as the greatest crime against humanity, should be no more. With the assassination of the mayor, its death-sentence had been pronounced.

See Part II & III.

 This and other stories and maps are available in the new issue of the Chronic, On Circulations And The African Imagination Of A Borderless World, which maps the African imagination of a borderless world: non-universal universalisms, the right to opacity, refusing that which has been refused to you, and “keeping it moving”.

To purchase in print or as a PDF head to our online shop, or get copies from your nearest dealer.

By Roberto Alajmo

Background: 

The ship Mendelsshon—referring to an NGO, and having on board 20 crew and 155 migrants rescued offshore Malta—has been drifting in the Straits of Sicily and the Ionian and Tyrrhenian seas for 12 days in its quest for a landing place; an odyssey caused by prohibitions and proclamations of the Italian government that came to a conclusion in Palermo’s port, where landing and disembarking were at last authorised.

Situation:

On the dock, everything is ready to welcome the shipwrecked people. Twelve ambulances, throngs of healthcare professionals, cultural mediators, police officers, journalists, photographers, cameramen, and about ten additional characters who are difficult to label. As well as the authorized personnel, there is a small crowd of curious onlookers and/or layabouts, kept at a distance by a set of barriers and by the watchful eye police. Many hold their mobile phones and want to make sure they work properly, in order to take some pictures or shoot a video.

In a preeminent position, surrounded by a ring of collaborators first, and then another ring of journalists and photographers, stands the mayor Leoluca Orlando wearing a mayoral sash displaying the Italian flag, a detail that emphasises the official character of his presence. It is not the first time Orlando stands on the dock to highlight his personal commitment and the whole City of Palermo’s efforts in welcoming migrants.

Some minutes prior, some operators wearing white overalls and gauze masks boarded the ship Mendelsshon. Now, the first of them is back on the steps of the ladder, and is immediately followed by a second one. Each one of them accompanies a black person wrapped in a golden thermal blanket. They begin descending.

The attack:

Orlando take two steps forward, preparing to welcome the migrants. In such circumstances he usually does not deliver a public speech, but shakes the hands of each new-comer, one by one. He is about to do that, and everybody is expecting that: a simple gesture conveying a strong meaning.

But this time, things are different.

First, a buzz is heard. Then, a woman screams.

Everyone turns around in an attempt to understand what is happening.

It happens: a guy, an ordinary guy, of average age, average build and average crazed expression has avoided police detection and climbed over the barriers.

Now he is face to face with the mayor. A hostile face-to-face confrontation, but not too hostile if we consider only the looks they give each other. However, the guy is holding a big gun in his hand. That gun changes everything.

Two shots are fired in rapid succession. Orlando’s Twitter consultant is the first to realise what is going on. His response is straight out of an action movie, he uses his body to shield his Chief. But he’s too quick off the mark, before the gun actually fires. As a result, he is on the ground the very moment the bullets plunge into the mayor’s chest. The mayor stumbles, his collaborators try to support him but they are only able to accompany his body falling to the ground.

One hour later:

News about the murder of Mayor Orlando spreads around the city, the country and the world.

The New York Times online edition, just thirty minutes later, declares: “

PRO-IMMMIGRANT MAYOR KILLED IN PALERMO”.

The people of Palermo are dismayed, touched, they cannot believe it. Everyone looks for news on the web, but the reporting is always the same. The killer, who was immediately arrested, is found to be a degenerate, a former militant of a xenophobic, extreme-right movement, from which he was expelled some months earlier due to repeated and disorderly intoxication.

Within a few hours, two rallies are organised: one at the port and another in front of the Town Hall. The respective organisers represent two incompatible factions within public opinion, both attributable to the left wing. The rally at the port is dispersed by police, who are also leading the investigation and have restricted access to the crime scene. So, the port demonstrators have decided to join the other rally (initially criticised as reformist), and the crowds are massive. When the gathering is at its peak, a huge picture of smiling Orlando is displayed from the central balcony of Palazzo delle Aquile, the Town Hall. Many people cannot hold their tears.

Two days later:

The funeral draws thousands, starting from Orlando’s home and passing through the whole city up to reach San Domenico square. It is an extraordinarily long procession, held by will of his family to allow the entire city to say goodbye to the mayor who left his personal mark on Palermo more than any other, by making it the most welcoming capital in the Mediterranean area. The body is buried in the church of San Domenico, the city’s pantheon where, for years, someone would leave a small bunch of field flowers at least once a week.

The same day, during an expressly called meeting of the Council of Ministers, the Italian government denies its inflexible course of action in the matter of immigration and allocates €20 million to support reception and promote the integration of refugees. This set of norms is named after the late mayor.

Two months later:

In the light of some recent limitations allegedly imposed by the European Union, a new Council of Ministers reviews the so-called “Orlando Package”, reneging on €19.5 of the €20 million; but it drafts, in exchange, a programme of lectures and meetings in schools at all levels. Goal: to spread the culture of true tolerance among the younger generations. On this occasion, the government spokesperson invents a slogan that is reported by every newspaper: “Tolerable Tolerance”, meaning Italy must aspire to a tolerable level of tolerance.

Investigations on the murder continue, focusing on the killer. There seem to be no instigators: the guy was drunk and out of control from a psychological point of view; he was in legal possession of the gun. Besides the official investigation, there are uncontrolled rumors that the assassination was motivated by personal hatred not politics—despite what appears to be overwhelming public opinion on the motive. At the beginning, this theory seems some harmless bullshit. But, in the weeks following two radically opposing positions arise: those who believe it is no bullshit and those who think it is not harmless.

One year later:

On the anniversary of the Good Mayor’s (nowadays Orlando’s nickname) assassination, during a simple ceremony at the crime scene, the new mayor, who belongs to the political party La Lega (The League) and was elected only about four months earlier, chooses some touching words to commemorate the martyrdom of his predecessor, talking about him with great respect, despite their differing political views, and condemning violence of all kind. He makes only a brief mention about the circumstances and motives behind the murder, still considered confidential information held by the Judiciary that has taken charge of the investigation.

Despite the anesthetising effect of public ceremonies, generally speaking, the memory of that assassination stays alive. During his life Orlando provoked strong and opposing opinions, but the passing of time has laid a veil of almost unanimous respect, affection in some cases. Even his boldest opponents in politics recognise his role in changing Palermo, and the way Palermo is perceived in the world.

His political legacy is a whole different story. The center-left wing, despite being more or less united, is not able to find an appropriate candidate to replace his predecessor, and during the following municipal elections was easily defeated by the solid front grouping the xenophobic right-wing movements and their conniving mates. The actual weakness of the city’s progressive groups is made worse by the spirit of current times, influenced by simplifications spread by populists.

Ten years later:

The spirit of times remains the same. People still talk about the many positive things that the Good Mayor did, but in the meantime, people keep electing Awful Mayors.

However, it would be unfair to say that there is no news.

For reasons that are difficult to explain, in this 10-year glaciation, many associations, movements and clubs are still active in Palermo, and have preserved the seeds of welcoming.

Also ideally speaking, each of these associations put these seeds aside, wrapped them in a cloth and put them away for safekeeping at the bottom of a drawer. History spins around in a bizarre way, it seems, and suddenly all these associations, movements, clubs, and single individuals too, open that drawer at (almost) the same time, take the cloth holding the seeds and metaphorically plant them. They plant them metaphorically, and they metaphorically wait.

Fifteen years later:

Just at a time when all hope seems long lost, something begins to happen in Palermo. It looks like that the soil was still fertile and the seeds have germinated. After being on the verge of extinction, a great number of small associations have finally started to streamline their efforts, dismissing divisions and marching steadily in one common direction. Things begin happening in town—rallies, concerts, performances, seminars—all produced with little or no money. But the best among Palermo’s citizens are like cactuses, they don’t need to be watered.

Palermo’s associations present their own candidate at municipal elections. His name is Orlando Lucchese, a 30-year old whose mother is from Senegal and whose father is a street-food seller in the working-class district of Albergheria. Through enormous sacrifices, his parents send him to study in Paris. He comes back to Palermo expressly to run as the mayor. According to initial predictions, he does not have a chance. He knows just a few people, he owes no favours to anyone, he answers to no one, but making these his strong points, he surprisingly wins, and defeats his opponent, a lawyer nominated by the right-wing under the predictable slogan: “Italians first”.

An interview with the new mayor appears in the main local newspaper, titled “History does not stop”, in which Lucchese, among other things, recalls an incident that occurred when he was a teenager. He was at the port on the same day the Mayor Orlando was murdered. He had gone to hang around there with some friends, had seen the crowd of people and got near the barriers to take a closer look. The newly-elected mayor affirms that only seconds before the shots that killed Orlando were fired, he had exchanged glances with the mayor, and with that glance Orlando had sort of said hello to him.

He calls it that: “Sort of said hello”.

See Part I & III. 

 This and other stories and maps are available in the new issue of the Chronic, On Circulations And The African Imagination Of A Borderless World, which maps the African imagination of a borderless world: non-universal universalisms, the right to opacity, refusing that which has been refused to you, and “keeping it moving”.

To purchase in print or as a PDF head to our online shop, or get copies from your nearest dealer.

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By Stacy Hardy

My cover is easy. There are a million roles I can assume. A thousand identities to choose from. But they are all the same. Worker. Foreigner. Non-resident. Non-citizens. Visa. People. A Million. More. Homeless. Visiting. Residing. Born. Brought. Arrived. Acclimatizing. Homesick. Lovelorn. Giddy. Tailor. Solderer. Chauffeur. Maid. Oil-Man. Nurse. Typist. Shopkeeper. Truck Driver. Watchman. Gardener. Temporary people, as Deepak Unnikrishnan calls them. Smuggler. Hooker. Tea Boy. Mistress. Temporary. Illegal. Ephemeral. People. Gone. Deported. Left. More. Arriving.

It will be easy for me. Like me, they are wanderers, although for very different reasons; nobody drove me out of my country, I have never travelled. My name is Paolo Bruno. I have a white father and a black mother. I am both African and European. For blacks, I am white. For whites, I am always a black man. You can call me Ibrahim or Saba, Matteo, Adama, Francesco, Ebongué, Claude or any other name you chose. Maybe I am merely a made-up person, an alter ego invented for my story. Or my name is really Samir or Paulo Diop Ravenna and I am a character hijacked straight from the pages of a migrant writer like Pap Khouma or Tahar Lamri to serve a purpose.

Already my words are over familiar to you. My name is Suleymane, Aymen, Tommaso, Nikita, Simon, Modou, Shukri, Taageere, Xirsi, Diriiye, Safiya, Barni. You see me with my friends on the streets. We talk in loud Italian. Every now and again we stop for a kebab or a pizza. These are our borders, the germinal points of arrival in our daily comings and goings in and out of the house. We could name ourselves a thousand other ways and be the protagonists of a thousand stories, most hard like a punch to the stomach, a few have happy endings. What’s important is that in everyday life as in fiction there exist many true Paolos.

We are the new citizens of Italy. Labeled as second-generation immigrants. It was not us who travelled. We followed in the wake of our parents’ journey and found ourselves here. Immobile travellers, eternally travelling. I know just one urban landscape and it is this one here before my eyes, or rather, here inside me, in the depths of myself. The label I bear—second rate citizen, second generation—carries within it a journey not made by me, a stigma inherited rather than earned. I have a movement without ever having gone anywhere.

Like me, my employer does not divulge his real name. I do know know who he is exactly. It doesn’t matter. I can call him Luigi or Matteo or Luca or Pietro or Roberto or Maurizio or Simone. It makes no difference. I imagine he is mafiosi. Or from the far right—one of a plethora of small parties and movements with extremist ideologies that has sprung up lately. Their names are in the papers and on TV—the National Front in Italy, CasaPound Italy, Lega Salvini Premier, Forza Nuova allied with Fiamma Tricolore to form the Italia agli Italiani far-right coalition.

I encountered many of their supporters during my years in prison. They were not unlike to me and my friends. They too are from working class families. They too have never travelled. Like me, they know nothing. They are home here but they live on the margins of society. Like me, they work various jobs. Look for work. Look and despair. Because the living is easy in Europe, as everyone knows or presumes or imagines, but only if you have some money or a scholarship or a wealthy family or even a measly casual job working in agriculture, or as petty drug pushers, pimps, or prostitutes in piazzas and urban train stations. But even these jobs are scarce these days. Like me, they live with their mothers; their bellies are full but they are hungry. It is the same for all of us. We spend our days on the streets or in bars, smoking and talking, complaining and scheming, dreaming of a future that never comes.

I met my employer at one such haunt in Ballarò. An ironic destination? No, I doubt my patron has the flare or imagination for that. Rather, I guessed, that it provided him with a handy cover for the transaction, but also spared him being seen in public with someone like me: a black man, black Italian. If the setting, with its loud music and smells of maffè, bothered him he gave no indication. We took a table near the back and got straight to business. He said he had heard of my work, that’s what he said.
It’s been a while since I worked, I retorted.
It’s better this way, he replied then, without missing a beat, he placed a leather briefcase on the table and begun to open the lock. It was then that I saw the envelope. He handed it discreetly to me across the table.
I haven’t said yes, I said as I slipped my finger inside and touched the notes. It’s been a while, I insisted.

I remember how warm the wind was that day. It was blowing in from the sea and I remember the salt. The taste of salt in the air. I remember what I wanted to tell him, as we sat across from each other in that bustling café whose windows were grazed by the ocean salt, that clingy, inescapable substance that reminds us all who we are—or how we got here—when we feel it on our skin or tongue. Instead of taking the money from his hand and nodding in agreement, I wanted to say: in the end, we are similar, him and me. You and I. You me. The Syrians and Sri Lankans and the Senegalese, the Arabs and Indians and the Chinese, and the Roma, the soccer hooligans of Juventus or Lazio, Po Valley politicians, the migrants and the killers of Yusapha Susso… We are all of us one human race.

Instead I bit my tongue. I counted the notes. I took the job for the same reasons one always takes these jobs. The thickness of the wad in front of me. The freedom it promised. The freedom to escape my birth, my history and destiny. You can call me a sellout. Fine, I am a sellout. Is it not economic that governs life? I take comfort in the words of Khouma’s Elephant Salesman, who, like me is a second generation migrant: selling is not only a question of resistance… it is an art.

Maybe killing is one too? At any rate, the job was easy for me. It is true I know nothing of the world. It is true I have spent much of my life in prison, behind bars, but I used my time well. For my cell I made a thousand journeys. Safir fa fi assafaru sabaatu fauaid—Journey forth, because travel has seven benefits—one of the Arabs in my cell block told me when I first arrived. I challenged him to name one. He smiled, then explained that the word “safar,” has the same root as “book”—“sifr.” Every journey is a reading. Every book is a journey.

As if to demonstrate he began to loan me things from his library. From him I read the greats of Italian literature: Dante Alighieri, Carlo Levi, Italo Calvino, Alessandro Manzoni, Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa. From this same library I have I also learned the language of parents. The migrants tongue. A tongue that usually is cut out. Silenced. But these days literature is overflowing with stories of migrants. I have as my guides Senegal-born Pap Khouma and Saidou Moussa Ba, Moroccan-born Mohammed Bouchane, and Tunisian-born Salah Methnani. I have Ubax Cristina Ali Farah and Igiaba Scego of Somali origin; Shirin Ramzanali Fazel and Sirad S. Hassan, also from Somalia, Maria Abbebù Viarengo and Gabriella Ghermandi from Ethiopia, Erminia Dell’Oro and Ribka Sibhatu from Eritrea, then there is the Cameroonian-born Ndjock Ngana, and from beyond Italy there is Nadifa Mohamed, Fatou Diome, Laila Lalami, Shailja Patel, Alain Mabanckou, Abdurahman Waberi, Tahar Ben Jelloun, Paulette Nardal, Warsan Shire and more: Deepak Unnikrishnan, Dinaw Mengestu, Sulaiman Addonia, Nuruddin Farah, Biyi Bandele, Leila Aboulela, Jamal Mahjoub, Moses Isegawa. This is to say nothing of the whole generation of migrant Nigerian writers birthed by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. As Equatoguinean writer, Juan Tomás Ávila Laurel puts it: the story of a continent emptying itself in order to go to another one has to be told.

From these, I am easily able to construct a cover story that will gain me direct access to my target. He is himself a character out of a novel or a movie. A legend in Italy for taking on Palermo’s mafiosi, today he claims he is fighting for migrants to freely enter EU states. He is also himself an author. From his book, Fighting the Mafia & Renewing Sicilian Culture, I can gain access to his long war to end the Mafia’s decades-long reign, the struggle that came after to preserve what he calls the civic life of a great European metropolis that followed. I read between laughing. I consult other sources. The mayor’s habits are well documented by the press. He is a regular on the streets of Palermo, I see him myself. I have witness his pageant on the docks. His pantomime of shaking the hands with those newly landed. Every time a ship with rescued migrants enters the harbour of Palermo, the mayor is there to greet them. Welcome, he says again and again. Welcome. Welcome. The worst is over. You are citizens of Palermo now.

Like my fellow travellers, I will be there to shake his hand. I will have no trouble gaining access. I can adopt one of a hundred stories. I will speak of my reasons for making the journey. There are so many motives to travel. So many routes to take, but only one destination. I will tell a heart-wrenching story. I will say war drove me. I will quote Ali Farah and describe the violence that erupted suddenly. I will pepper my language with strong images: A burning city that glows like a brazier. A filthy firework under the full moon. They ask me how did you get here? I will answer: Can’t you see it on my body? The Libyan desert red with immigrant bodies, the Gulf of Aden bloated, the city of Rome with no jacket (Shire).

Or maybe I will take a more measured intellectual tone like that of Nuruddin Farah or Mahjoub. Speak of economic hardship. I will conjure history and point to the legacy of violence in Africa, an epic tale of clashing creeds, of colonialism campaigns and conquests. I will point to the hopelessness of my future. I will say: All those legions of third-world areas coloured red on the map, soon decimated… Devaluation. Demolition of our currency, of our future—of our lives, pure and simple! On the scales of globalisation, the head of a third-world child weighs less than a hamburger (Scego).

Or I can evoke Binyavanga Wainaina, claim it is a rite of passage. A contemporary coming of age ritual to be performed by all young men. Why is it only westerners are allowed the luxury of travel and time to find themselves? Maybe I will say there is nothing to be found. I will simple say madness overcame me. I will call it a pandemic that spread like the plague…. The bell rang and rang, sparing no one, infecting minds with the migration bug (Kahal).

Maybe I will tell all these stories one after the other. As Ávila Laurel says it: Don’t ask me where I came from. It was via lots of places… They told me I no longer have a country, that’s what they said at the border: you’ve no country any more, now you’re just black.

Or I will tell none. I will say nothing. Simply stand and stare. Tight-lipped. Mute. After all as I have learnt from Souleymane Bachir Diagne: When you know long before you get there that the Europeans will want to deport you on arrival, it is imperative you do all you can to flummox them…. Say nothing at all and there is nothing to translate.

When the mayor comes to shake my hand, I will be ready. I will pull the gun concealed in my jacket. His last words will be: The worst is over.

See Part I & II. 

 This and other stories and maps are available in the new issue of the Chronic, On Circulations And The African Imagination Of A Borderless World, which maps the African imagination of a borderless world: non-universal universalisms, the right to opacity, refusing that which has been refused to you, and “keeping it moving”.

To purchase in print or as a PDF head to our online shop, or get copies from your nearest dealer.

Thousands of Africans, physically displaced and economically disabled by postcolonial dis-order, confront daily the violence of passage to, across and within borders of relative safety. Tagged all manner of other: temporary, foreign, homeless, opportunist, ephemeral, 2nd generational, thief, fence jumper, black… they arrive, are birthed, reborn—regardless of birthplace, status, story—as Europe’s “migrant crisis”; moving targets for xenophobes, organised criminals, nation state mafias… and LeoLuca Orlando, the sitting mayor of Palermo, fearless critic of Italy’s anti-immigration policies (Europe’s creeping economic racism),  and architect of the ‘complete port’, the borderless city of welcome and renewal. A speculative trilogy by Roberto Alajmo, Stacy Hardy and Moses März profiles the mayor dubbed “il morituro”—the walking corpse— and the potential demise of the nation state.

I. THE MARTYRDOM OF MAYOR ORLANDO

Moses Marz

Elected four times as mayor of Palermo over a period spanning more than 30 years, and holding various posts as public servant and European statesman in between, Leoluca Orlando’s first political opponent was the mafia and its affiliates in the Italian political establishment. When his former friends and fellow anti-mafiosi Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino were assassinated in 1992, everyone thought Orlando would be next in line. He was affectionately called il morituro, the walking corpse, by the people of Palermo. With their support, particularly support from women and the youth, he managed to first rid the city of the taboo of speaking about the mafia, and slowly regained control over the city, house by house and street by street.

Mayor Orlando’s reputation as a fearless anti-mafia fighter was rarely questioned until, in the late 1980s, the Sicilian writer Leonardo Sciascia, in a Corriere della Sera newspaper article, dismissively referred to Orlando and Borsellino as “anti-Mafia professionals” shortly before his own death. Sciascia claimed that the mafia was content to play along with what they perceived to be show court trials organised by Orlando, serving as effective cover for their general change in strategy. In fact, in the 21st century the Sicilian mafia, Cosa Nostra, was still alive and well, even after Orlando had announced his victory in 1999. By then the mafia no longer claimed as many lives as it had in the previous two decades, where the body count reached levels comparable to the conflicts raging in Belfast and Beirut at the time. The mafia had effectively been driven out of local government structures—leaving Palermo open for business with the globalised economy, and for hundreds of thousands of tourists arriving on cruise ships every year—but it still thrived in the world of business. Going with the times, Cosa Nostra teamed up with the Nigerian mafia on the trafficking of heroin and sex, while they themselves specialised in dealing in weapons and human trafficking.

Throughout these internal transformations, immigration never featured as a prominent issue in the mayor’s political life. Palermo, at the centre of the Mediterranean, had for centuries been a crossroads for cultures from across the world, who lived side by side without attracting much attention. This was to change when the so-called “European migration crisis” reached Sicily in the aftermath of the assassination of Libya’s president, Muammar Gaddafi in 2011. As Gaddafi had prophesised, his removal effectively opened the Libyan ports for travel across the Mediterranean. In the following years, half a million migrants passed through Palermo, a city with barely more than half a million inhabitants. In the summer of 2018, the crisis hit fever pitch and the mayor’s reputation and power was put to test. The Aquarius, a ship carrying 629 migrants who had taken the route through Libya, was approaching the harbour of Palermo requesting permission to dock. Matteo Salvini, Italy’s Deputy Prime Minister from the right wing party Lega Nord, who had been voted into power the same year as junior partner in the Five Star Movement’s three-party-coalition, announced that the Aquarius should be sent back to Libya if none of the other EU countries was willing to take in the migrants. Following Salvini’s announcement, the conflict among European heads of state reached levels not witnessed since three years prior, when Germany eventually granted millions of Syrian refugees asylum in violation of the already-defunct Dublin Convention.

In defiance of Salvini’s order, Mayor Orlando went on national television and declared that, “Palermo in ancient Greek meant ‘complete port’. We have always welcomed rescue boats and vessels who saved lives at sea. We will not stop now.” Along with Domenico Lucano, the mayor of the small town of Riace in the neighbouring region of Calabria, Orlando had earned a reputation as among the most outspoken opponents of the xenophobic discourse upheld by European states. In the Charter of Palermo in 2015 he called for the abolishment of the residence permit and for the recognition of mobility as a human right. His practice of personally welcoming new arrivals whose boats were rescued or intercepted by the Italian coast guard, and symbolically bestowing on them the civic status of Palermitans, was viewed as heroic by a section of the European left, but could be dismissed by a larger audience as eccentric and utopian. The brief showdown between Salvini and Orlando underlined the fact that the mayor’s actual realm of political influence did not even include the harbour of his city. The Aquarius was denied entry and had to travel another 1,296km to the coast of Spain before its passengers were sent to France following an offer by President Emmanuel Macron.

II. FROM ORLANDO TO ORLANDO

Roberto Alajmo

Background: The ship Mendelsshon—referring to an NGO, and having on board 20 crew and 155 migrants rescued offshore Malta—has been drifting in the Straits of Sicily and the Ionian and Tyrrhenian seas for 12 days in its quest for a landing place; an odyssey caused by prohibitions and proclamations of the Italian government that came to a conclusion in Palermo’s port, where landing and disembarking were at last authorised.

Situation: On the dock, everything is ready to welcome the shipwrecked people. Twelve ambulances, throngs of healthcare professionals, cultural mediators, police officers, journalists, photographers, cameramen, and about ten additional characters who are difficult to label. As well as the authorized personnel, there is a small crowd of curious onlookers and/or layabouts, kept at a distance by a set of barriers and by the watchful eye police. Many hold their mobile phones and want to make sure they work properly, in order to take some pictures or shoot a video.

In a preeminent position, surrounded by a ring of collaborators first, and then another ring of journalists and photographers, stands the mayor Leoluca Orlando wearing a mayoral sash displaying the Italian flag, a detail that emphasises the official character of his presence. It is not the first time Orlando stands on the dock to highlight his personal commitment and the whole City of Palermo’s efforts in welcoming migrants.

Some minutes prior, some operators wearing white overalls and gauze masks boarded the ship Mendelsshon. Now, the first of them is back on the steps of the ladder, and is immediately followed by a second one. Each one of them accompanies a black person wrapped in a golden thermal blanket. They begin descending.

The attack: Orlando take two steps forward, preparing to welcome the migrants. In such circumstances he usually does not deliver a public speech, but shakes the hands of each new-comer, one by one. He is about to do that, and everybody is expecting that: a simple gesture conveying a strong meaning.

But this time, things are different.

First, a buzz is heard. Then, a woman screams.

Everyone turns around in an attempt to understand what is happening.

It happens: a guy, an ordinary guy, of average age, average build and average crazed expression has avoided police detection and climbed over the barriers.

Now he is face to face with the mayor. A hostile face-to-face confrontation, but not too hostile if we consider only the looks they give each other. However, the guy is holding a big gun in his hand. That gun changes everything.

Two shots are fired in rapid succession. Orlando’s Twitter consultant is the first to realise what is going on. His response is straight out of an action movie, he uses his body to shield his Chief. But he’s too quick off the mark, before the gun actually fires. As a result, he is on the ground the very moment the bullets plunge into the mayor’s chest. The mayor stumbles, his collaborators try to support him but they are only able to accompany his body falling to the ground.

One hour later: News about the murder of Mayor Orlando spreads around the city, the country and the world.

The New York Times online edition, just thirty minutes later, declares: “

PRO-IMMMIGRANT MAYOR KILLED IN PALERMO”.

The people of Palermo are dismayed, touched, they cannot believe it. Everyone looks for news on the web, but the reporting is always the same. The killer, who was immediately arrested, is found to be a degenerate, a former militant of a xenophobic, extreme-right movement, from which he was expelled some months earlier due to repeated and disorderly intoxication.

Within a few hours, two rallies are organised: one at the port and another in front of the Town Hall. The respective organisers represent two incompatible factions within public opinion, both attributable to the left wing. The rally at the port is dispersed by police, who are also leading the investigation and have restricted access to the crime scene. So, the port demonstrators have decided to join the other rally (initially criticised as reformist), and the crowds are massive. When the gathering is at its peak, a huge picture of smiling Orlando is displayed from the central balcony of Palazzo delle Aquile, the Town Hall. Many people cannot hold their tears.

III. EVERY JOURNEY IS A READING

Stacy Hardy

My cover is easy. There are a million roles I can assume. A thousand identities to choose from.  But they are all the same. Worker. Foreigner. Non-resident. Non-citizens. Visa. People. A Million. More. Homeless. Visiting. Residing. Born. Brought. Arrived. Acclimatizing. Homesick. Lovelorn. Giddy. Tailor. Solderer. Chauffeur. Maid. Oil-Man. Nurse. Typist. Shopkeeper. Truck Driver. Watchman. Gardener. Temporary people, as Deepak Unnikrishnan calls them. Smuggler. Hooker. Tea Boy. Mistress. Temporary. Illegal. Ephemeral. People. Gone. Deported. Left. More. Arriving.

It will be easy for me. Like me, they are wanderers, although for very different reasons; nobody drove me out of my country, I have never travelled. My name is Paolo Bruno. I have a white father and a black mother.  I am both African and European. For blacks, I am white. For whites, I am always a black man. You can call me Ibrahim or Saba, Matteo, Adama, Francesco, Ebongué, Claude or any other name you chose. Maybe I am merely a made-up person, an alter ego invented for my story. Or my name is really Samir or Paulo Diop Ravenna and I am a character hijacked straight from the pages of a migrant writer like Pap Khouma or Tahar Lamri to serve a purpose.

Already my words are over familiar to you. My name is Suleymane, Aymen, Tommaso, Nikita, Simon, Modou, Shukri, Taageere, Xirsi, Diriiye, Safiya, Barni. You see me with my friends on the streets. We talk in loud Italian. Every now and again we stop for a kebab or a pizza. These are our borders, the germinal points of arrival in our daily comings and goings in and out of the house. We could name ourselves a thousand other ways and be the protagonists of a thousand stories, most hard like a punch to the stomach, a few have happy endings. What’s important is that in everyday life as in fiction there exist many true Paolos.

We are the new citizens of Italy. Labeled as second-generation immigrants. It was not us who travelled. We followed in the wake of our parents’ journey and found ourselves here. Immobile travellers, eternally travelling. I know just one urban landscape and it is this one here before my eyes, or rather, here inside me, in the depths of myself. The label I bear—second rate citizen, second generation—carries within it a journey not made by me, a stigma inherited rather than earned. I have a movement without ever having gone anywhere.

Like me, my employer does not divulge his real name. I do know know who he is exactly. It doesn’t matter. I can call him Luigi or Matteo or Luca or Pietro or Roberto or Maurizio or Simone. It makes no difference. I imagine he is mafiosi. Or from the far right—one of a plethora of small parties and movements with extremist ideologies that has sprung up lately. Their names are in the papers and on TV—the National Front in Italy, CasaPound Italy, Lega Salvini Premier, Forza Nuova allied with Fiamma Tricolore to form the Italia agli Italiani far-right coalition.

I encountered many of their supporters during my years in prison. They were not unlike to me and my friends. They too are from working class families. They too have never travelled. Like me, they know nothing. They are home here but they live on the margins of society. Like me, they work various jobs. Look for work. Look and despair. Because the living is easy in Europe, as everyone knows or presumes or imagines, but only if you have some money or a scholarship or a wealthy family or even a measly casual job working in agriculture, or as petty drug pushers, pimps, or prostitutes in piazzas and urban train stations. But even these jobs are scarce these days. Like me, they live with their mothers; their bellies are full but they are hungry. It is the same for all of us. We spend our days on the streets or in bars, smoking and talking, complaining and scheming, dreaming of a future that never comes.

I met my employer at one such haunt in Ballarò. An ironic destination? No, I doubt my patron has the flare or imagination for that. Rather, I guessed, that it provided him with a handy cover for the transaction, but also spared him being seen in public with someone like me: a black man, black Italian. If the setting, with its loud music and smells of maffè, bothered him he gave no indication. We took a table near the back and got straight to business. He said he had heard of my work, that’s what he said.

It’s been a while since I worked, I retorted

It’s better this way, he replied then, without missing a beat, he placed a leather briefcase on the table and begun to open the lock. It was then that I saw the envelope. He handed it discreetly to me across the table.

I haven’t said yes, I said as I slipped my finger inside and touched the notes. It’s been a while, I insisted.

 These and other stories and maps are available in the new issue of the Chronic, On Circulations And The African Imagination Of A Borderless World, which maps the African imagination of a borderless world: non-universal universalisms, the right to opacity, refusing that which has been refused to you, and “keeping it moving”.

To purchase in print or as a PDF head to our online shop, or get copies from your nearest dealer.

A Manifesto/ Mediation on State of Black Archives in America and throughout the Diaspora

by Harmony Holiday 

The ashes a black mother scattered into the lap of a seemingly indifferent police chief, her daughter’s remains in ash and shackle, the ashes of her daughter who had been killed in jail either by neglect or force, whose death was falsely recorded as another suicide in the holds, those are our archives. Both the video recording that captures the black ashes scattering into a white man’s lap, and the mother’s ritual, her piercing curse-on-him glance into his smug visage as she unleashes those tiny chimes he cannot jitter or equivocate off no matter how many laws he passes to defend his sickness, or lies he inks on dead trees, or phony official records they keep to contradict true stories. We keep a record of both the ritual and its transfiguration into object or commodity or reproduction on our tongues’ slow limbo between these broken lands. We understand that we are caught between two opposing tribes formed from the ark or archive, up— one in with the energy of a spirit-driven self-perpetuating fractal, the other a rusty arrow that hopes to block out the sun and infects everything on its path, draws blood to sustain itself.

A clash of methods is festering, one wherein western sercretaryism (like syncretism but without the magic) and preemptive snitch culture (mis-telling the histories of the black, brown and innocent who have been muted by state power before the truth comes out), attempts to undermine the ancient technology of oratory, storytelling, collective memory, epigenetics, the ankh, knowing what we know. Because brown bodies must learn to care less about being right in the eyes of a penal code built on their criminalization, than about feeling right while carving out a life under this system, even if that means waging open spiritual attack on upholders of said system in their place of worship and terror, the courtroom, as that fearless mother did, we are willing to weaponize our archives and disappear them depending on what our spirits demand, what soothes our souls and that of the collective.

In this way, the throbbing void where Lee Perry’s Black Ark Studios once flourished as a haven for dub music and invention in Kingston, Jamaica, before he burned it to the ground to lift the curse of sycophants and phantoms, that void is our archives. The space he cleared and malicious intent he banished with that deliberate fire, became the improvised catalog of the music and lifestyle invented there, now a resounding radio silence. As those who saw the space as a trend, flop house, or museum-to-be, sigh in grief at its incineration, Lee Perry himself gasps at them in ritual annoyance and does his victory spin, reminding everyone that his creative energy is no one’s prop.

The Dogon Tribe in Mali, West Africa, a group of souls who descend from a distant stellar force in the universe called Sirius B, who know this to be true and can explain their origins in the cosmos with an accuracy that alarms and disarms Western Scientists because it is too advanced for the West’s neurotic linear logic, The Dogons’ lucid and unwavering knowing that blackness is a sacred technology, is our archives, the blueprint for the ark our memories of the future builds. We understand that to be ancient or from before is to be the future, and that we haven’t caught up with ourselves here, and can understand colonialism in terms of our own generosity of spirit and awareness that we carry urgent messages in our DNA and long to distribute them and help this planet remember its true role in the order and chaos of things.

In the Library of Congress, the only existing copy of the second volume of jazz bassist Charles Mingus’ autobiography, Beneath the Underdog, rests in quiet staccato with a gun-shaped space cut out of it, for this is where he hid his piece. The gun cubby and all of the missing notes tell as much of his story as an uninterrupted manuscript would. That empty space where an automatic weapon might have been is our archives, the loot on our ark that we abandon if it starts to weigh us down, because it was acting as a musical instrument anyways, improvising with the surrounding space to create an object only the black spirit can decode.

The thousands of pages of notes the FBI takes on the mundane activities of black writers and cultural workers, from describing the clothing we wear to the slightest shift of tone in our voice during public speeches or private conversations, to who we hugged hello, to who we walked inside with and closed the door until the next morning, that state surveillance is our archives, the data they try to crunch and manipulate to compensate for a magnetism native to blackness that they will never understand, and cannot conquer.

The ongoing project of piecing together my own father’s illusive history as a singer, recording artist, sharecropper, ninja, black cowboy, who was never properly taught to read or write, teaches me again and again to examine what was kept hidden or remote as meticulously as I do the obvious landmarks and trapdoors of a past. We are forced to do so much in code that sometimes that what we have left in us to perform and share openly is armor that grants us deeper access to our private selves, satiates the spectator’s curiosity, nudges the hounds off our backs. The recordings I find of my dad at home sketching ideas as he let the tape roll are often more beautiful and powerful than his fanciest studio recordings for this reason.

The ashes in the lap, the vast empty space, the pages hugging the gun, the Dogon’s unsung prophecy, the informant falling in love with the blackness he was sent to dispel, the father humming at sunrise and forgetting to ever press rewind, these are our archives, records of how we disappear to become ourselves, and emerge from that refuge with our spells intact and an understanding of how blackness in the west demands disguises and our job is to steal our masks back from their museum consciousness. But then what?

On the one hand, like animals who eat their young at the slightest scent of a human hand, we must destroy false and adulterated records of black life, must do so ruthlessly, but in the other hand, the hand they aren’t holding coercively or stuffing with bibles and Kierkegaard, we want our whole story, all of the the ugly beauty, all of the library walls, all of the anthologies and any other monolithic prestige that will get us wings in universities, textbooks that don’t lie, bulldozers to knock down those wings and rebuild them as domes or Lee Perries, memories that we can trust and transform when necessary, and selves that we recognize with or without the armor of code and performance and brand, We want to know who we are when we’re not busy outrunning the plantation guards. So we must go to work in two crucial directions.

One: we are building black archives of the unreal, which is to say, reinstating our fantasies through how we collect displaced data from the past and impose it upon the now like a threat, more of a promise, that our futures will reflect these fantasies, will be them realized, with or without us. This practice is dangerous because we end up with art objects comprised of lost histories and often sell them back to the institutions and audiences responsible for their obscurity in order to fund the work, further alienating ourselves and subjects because we haven’t yet attained the real estate, the land, on which we can play out and protect our fantasies. We outsource these archives of our unreal glory to stages because again, for us, the urgency is to create and destroy in a pattern as close to nature as possible, to feel like our natural selves again, not to adhere to procedure. And so we disappear glamorously, leaving small traces, lipstick on massah’s collar, footprints in the concrete, but ultimately these tender unrealities we offer are mangled by art consumers and no longer ours, they’re co-opted so well youtube and google are holding market research groups on the ‘black authenticity demographic,’ and we move on before the urge to riot or Do the Right Thing sets in.

Two: Where is our sh*t? All of it? Who is keeping track? How many black heroes, villains, and plain citizens, have estate sales that end in all of their information being bought by a university library never to be openly shared again. Why is there no centralized record of these sales and other sale-like transactions? Why is it easier to find records of FBI surveillance of black citizens of ‘interest’ full of snide judgement and slander, than it is to find our stories in our words backed by the evidence that is our lived experience. If we are going to play the game of trying to earn credibility and capital through the sale of our most personal and transcendental information, in hopes that maybe it will be used to defend and honor us, when instead it is often later mobilized for character assassination, if this the path we believe will lead to some moveable feast, then we should demand to know where these open secrets are being kept, because for every well-maintained archive, there is one we are forced to burn to the ground for kindling, or just plain dirt.

—

This is a call to all scholars, writers, musicians, citizens, with an emphasis on members of the African diaspora, to join in the building of a centralized database that will tell the story of where and when and to whom and for what expressed purpose, our stories or archives are sold. We will also hold an annual conference on archival practices within the diaspora. The central question driving this endeavor is this: does the way we treat our archives mirror how we treat ourselves, and if so, what is it telling us as a diaspora do we feel like heroes or abandoned children looking for anyone to take us in? Are we too quick to forfeit autonomy for the comfort of institutions? How would the landscape be appear if we demanded land on which to house our freedom archives, archives ranging from sheer ideas and forms of movement and speech, to papers and tapes and films, to vastness and black meditative silence? By demanding more of our archival material we are demanding better for our bodies, growing unwilling to turn them over to these same institutions exchanging our labor on their terms for our entire cultural inheritance and sometimes a living-wage that distracts us from we trade? Autonomy is built from the archive up, universities are nothing without their libraries and even this republic is built on unapologetically cataloged surveillance and graves of any and all threats to its tyranny of values. It’s possible that the first and most crucial step in wresting black bodies from the illusions of freedom that propel this system, is reclaiming our archives and building schools and think tanks and communities and alliances based on our records as we keep them. The journey will teach us how the state really feels about freedom. And maybe we’ll be granted some token surprises like peace, and space to do the work that our spirits need and no new friends in the FBI.

When photographer Carrie Mae Weems reimagined a photo of a runaway slave whose back had been whipped so brutally the scars were permanently raised-roads on his path to liberation, Harvard, alleged ‘owner’ of the original photo, threatened to sue her. In response, she dared them to, suggesting it would be a good conversation to have on the record—who owns our memories and do they use them to sell us our nightmares, renamed American dreams? Harvard’s radio silence on the matter came next, nobody wants that kind of publicity. And Ezra Pound, beloved poet and Nazi sympathizer whose estate is careful to keep the parts of his archive that divulge his views separate from to rest and so high up the ivory tower you’re lightheaded just to get there, so that scholars can’t unearth too much of his too soon and we can keep comparing him to the Blues, like thieves from ourselves, fanatics. I guess what I’m saying is maybe these institutions buy our archives and pay for our labor in order to shut us up, to pacify us and try to domesticate our histories or induce selective forgetting, to yet again gain the last word, and maybe just the thought of that as a possibility will be enough to set us looting, peacefully of course, just coming to collect and understand and announce what’s ours and find some place to keep it, like Carrie did, where everyone from Harvard to home can bear witness.

Also see The State of Black Collectivity in the Year of the Sheep – a vital and urgent message of black collectivity and a Call for an Archive of AfroSonics. 

Listen to Astro/Afrosonics Archive: Charles Mingus Jazz School: Holiday’s audio collage from her Astro/Afrosonics Archive, a collection of Jazz Poetics and audio culture. For the Pan African Space Station (PASS) she imagined a jazz school with Charles Mingus in charge.

And: Astro/Afrosonics Archive: Amiri Baraka work(s)

Both recorded at the Pan African Space Station (PASS) at Performa New York, 2015. For more visit http://panafricanspacestation.org.za

Fore more visit and Afrosonics archive. 

Fred Moten and Saidiya Hartman sit down to talk about the temporal and traditional in the age of refusal – of movement, of citizenship. They offer up a different way of thinking, a pathway to another understanding of community as well as the possibility of harnessing fugitivity as a creative empowering strategy*.

Saidiya Hartman: One of the places I think about the outside is in this constitutive paradox. Frederick Douglass talks about the thought in deed or the thought in song and a philosophy of abolition that’s made inside the circle of slavery. He says, “one is only able to give an account of it from the outside.” One way of thinking about this idea is in temporal relations, which I think is wrong because then the outside comes after the inside. Rather, I think the tradition is to produce a thought of the outside while in the inside. Yes, the enclosure is brutal… but the practice is always about finding a way to produce an outside within that space. It seems to me that a history of black thought (one that’s not the thought of canonical thinkers) the thought of most folks is really devoted to this labour of trying to produce an outside, trying to create an opening, which is often only discernible belatedly and it’s discernible as it becomes marked as crime or as it’s subject to a new form of enclosure that is the response to a certain kind of making/happening. Given the kind of unceasing onslaught of militarised violence directed against a civilian population, I’ve been thinking a lot about the space of the hold and what happens there. For me, part of the paradox is that the ordinary is constituted by stuff that is so terrible and impossible to bear and yet in that context, people make things happen, they continue to act/ produce. I want to keep those two things in tension; both the terror and the opening.

Fred Moten: It reminds me of an essay by Foucault on Maurice Blanchot called The Thought of the Outside. One way to think about it is the reason why we feel it necessary to constantly, I don’t want to say go back to the hold, but the reason we feel it necessary to renew our consciousness of being in the hold, so to speak, is because maybe there’s a way in which the thought of the outside can only occur from the inside. On one hand we speak in reverence of a tradition of the thought of the outside or the tradition of those able to be in two places at one time. I always thought that was the real importance and beauty of Harriet Ann Jacobs’ Incidents in the Life of a Slave, which is about constantly trying to figure out how to be in two places at the same time, under absolute duress, often in both places. But there is a sense in which the constant renewal of the terms and conditions of that inside/outside opposition becomes debilitating in many ways in and of themselves.
It reminds me, I’m from small town in Arkansas called Kingswood that only has 300 people. My aunts lived in another town that wasn’t really a town, called New Edinburg, which the people in Kingswood would call “the country”. Then there were people who lived so deep in the woods that we referred to them as “living out from” New Edinburg. So, I’ve been trying to think of living out from the outside, or out, so to speak, of that inside/outside opposition. It’s hard to not think of yourself in some kind of infinity loop or some kind of Yayoi Kusama infinity room, but when I think of the outdoors, the black outside, I think of it as this thing which is to be out from the outside. Or what are the conditions that would make such a thought possible, and also necessary, so a meta out; an ec ec; extra ecclesiastical.
The thing that was in my mind for the last few weeks before coming back here, was that when I lived here before, as a kid, I could just always hear somebody running. I just felt like being in those instances of being out in the woods. That for me is where I was closest to the runaway. So, I can’t separate the outside from this constant necessity and activity of running away, of flight. This means that the outside is always bringing those constraints with it. And it’s impossible not to think about those things now. It’s always impossible to not think about those things, but for some reason it just seems like there are more people getting shot these days. It’s not actually true, but it just feels like it is… so…

SH: One of things I thought was interesting from this “out-from”, even in this space what you’re already countering is that threat of enclosure/captivity. When you describe the “out-from”, there is a lovely book on marronage and it talks about petit marronage and marronage on the border, people who were close enough to the plantation to still be caught, who found a way to live in the trees but couldn’t leave any marks of human habitation. To me that’s a kind of an out-from. So, you escaped a certain kind of enclosure but that threat… it’s a certain dance… you’ve made this other mode of dwelling often inside the trunk of trees but you’re not in a relationship with the land via farming, the land isn’t displaying any signs of cultivation. What I wrestle with is the threat, the terror, the violence of enclosure and the vulnerability, the precarity of these makings. And we continue to make and create because that’s all we can do. There’s a kind of opening but there’s the structural container—the forces that are making living hard, impossible. And that those define so many of the circumstances in which these experiments and living unfold.

FM: Somehow, I haven’t been able to make myself clear when it comes to certain things but I feel like it’s probably not my fault. I don’t know that it’s possible to be clear when it comes to these kinds of things, but let’s say… and I get scared about saying certain kinds of stuff because I feel like sometimes it could seem really callous and I don’t mean… I don’t want to seem that way because it’s not that I don’t feel, or that I don’t care. But let’s talk about it in terms of what it means to live in a way that would not reveal, not show, no signs of human habitation. Obviously there’s a field, a space, a constraint, a container, a bounded-space because every time you were saying unbounded, I was thinking, is that right? Noam Chomsky used to make this really interesting distinction –and I don’t think I really fully understood it – between that which is bounded but infinite, and that which is unbounded but finite. So, if it’s unbounded, it’s still finite and there’s a quite specific and often quite brutal finitude that structures whatever is going on within the general; if we can speak of what it is to be within the general framework of the unbounded… there’s never… I mean, the whole point about escape is that it’s an activity. It’s not an achievement. You don’t ever get escaped. Like, “I escaped!” No! And what that means is that what you’re escaping from is always after you. It’s always on you.
What’s interesting to me – but its hard to think or talk about – is that we can recognize that absolute horror, the unspeakable incalculable terror and horror that accompanies the necessity of not leaving a trace of human inhabitation. And then there’s the whole question of, what would a life be that wasn’t interested in leaving a trace of human habitation? So fuck the human, human-inhabitation!
I think of a phrase I often use – and I always think of it in relation to Fannie Lou Hamer, because it’s just me giving a theoretical spin on a formulation she made in practice: to refuse that which has been refused to you. And that’s what I’m interested in. And that doesn’t mean that what’s at stake is some kind of blind, happy, celebratory attitude toward all the beautiful stuff that we’ve made under constraint. I love all the beautiful stuff we’ve made under constraint but I’m pretty sure I would love all the beautiful stuff we’d make out from under constraint better. But there’s no way to get to that, except through this. We can’t go around this. We gotta fight through this. But, by the same token, anybody who thinks they can come even close to understanding how terrible the terror has been without understanding how beautiful the beauty has been against the grain of that terror, is wrong. There is no calculus of the terror that can make a proper calculation without reference to that which resists it. It’s just not possible. So this is the key thing to me.

SH: I agree. When I think about these forms of living like petit marronage and how they come to an end and not even an absolute end because new practices emerge and there have always been an endless number of beautiful models of living otherwise. But that encounter: defeat and then we must reemerge again. So it’s not like you’re insufficiently accounting for the terror but I think that maybe we’re at this kind of shift. Like my own thinking right now is that we just have to be involved in that unceasing labour, producing these new experiments in living even as defeat continues to be the outcome… but we’re not stopped by that defeat. To escape isn’t finite. And I understand my “now” always in relationship to all these other “nows”. And often what has met those kind of beautiful experiments is certain forms of defeat, by the state, by the police, by reforming agents. It doesn’t mean that they kill or quash or can stop or snuff out that process but that’s also part of the field too.

FM: I remember when you and Frank B Wilderson had that interview on “The Position of the Unthought” and you were messing with Fredric Jameson. There’s a romanticism that goes with detachment around this notion of the narrative of defeat, which he thinks specifically in relation to the league of revolutionary black workers… and it’s an insufficient account, it’s problematic. Part of the problem is what if it turns out that the kinds of terror, the particular kind of history that we’re trying to work through – talking about you as historical figure and me as profoundly ahistorical figure. It’s like, it’s not even something you can really talk about within a calculus of victory and defeat.
Defeat is a word that seems applicable in many ways. And then you know there’s a whole specific black Christian discourse on victory that one wants to appeal to every once in a while… but it just might be that part of the problem is that the concepts we have been given in order to try and think and talk about this stuff we try and talk about, just don’t work. They’re inadequate, inoperative. And it might even be the case that the concept itself is an inadequate mental construct or that conceptualism itself is an inadequate intellectual disposition. It’s like we’re working on some other kind of stuff. I feel this reading your work all the time. You’re saying these things, using a given language but I know you’re talking about something else, in some other language. And so you have to work through that, it’s a difficult thing and I’m gonna just keep going. And I see black studies now as reaching a kind of crisis in a certain way; we just can’t keep going on like this. The conceptual apparatuses at our disposal are inadequate. And we’re just kind of spinning our wheels in a lot of ways, pushing up against the same hard rock so to speak. And it doesn’t mean that what’s needed is a new kind of theoretical disposition. It’s really a new set of kind of moral and ethical dispositions about how we treat one another and how we talk to one another. And it goes against the grain of any kind of a sense of somebody being able to achieve an adequate theoretical perspective on things by themselves. It’s a great relief to realise that I don’t have to do it by myself anyway. So whatever is inadequate about what I’m doing; luckily you’re doing something. It’s just not a one-person job.

SH: I agree with you, we could say that’s an inadequacy or incommensurability between an available critical vocab and that which we’re trying to describe. You might think about this with W. E. B. Du Bois and the general strike. What he’s trying to describe is so vast and this is like okay, maybe if I call it this, it can bring some stuff into the view about how this is a politics of refusal against capitalism and the conditions of work, even as it is so much more than that. So, I agree with you about that inadequacy. I feel like I’m involved in a much more humble labour. I think I’m trying to describe belatedly, the things people have fought and have done and I’m just attending to them. So it’s this labour of regard, it is tripped up or struggling with how to illuminate that and it’s not that it isn’t a resource we work with and in some way know, but it’s an intimate labour in regard to what others have done and have thought, so, I’m a describer. But Fred, I don’t know if you want to talk about the poetry, your writing practice, which is so rich and varied and multiple…

FM: I got to the point where, I mean, there’s so much overlap between the two things and I’ve never felt embarrassed about being interested in theory. I never was all that invested in being called a theoretician either. I was just somebody who was interested in theory and in that kind of general sense of people seeing, thinking about stuff and maybe certain movements of abstraction from what one sees and feels. I was always happy to be interested in doing that kind of stuff and I was also always happy to be interested in poetry and I never thought of these two things as being so utterly separate. The older I get, the more impossible it is to keep them separate but I do think, they both constitute, in the end, two different forms of description but it’s the same work.
One way to think about it is people have different approaches to things, and a lot of it is just kind of temperament. The whole time I’m thinking of that classic old time song, “Keep on the Sunny Side”. I love that song and the way I do my work is I’m always looking at the sunny side. The peculiar nature of the sunny side in regard to black social lives is that it’s dark, but I’m still looking for the sunny side. But I know there are other people who don’t need to look for the sunny side. They’re more like midnight folks or 3am folks. Like Bobby “Blue” Bland, where every blues song happens at three in the morning? My mom used to say her arthritis always hurts most at 3am. Luckily, everybody doesn’t have to do the same thing. And what sad ethical condition are we in when it seems like everybody has to do the same thing? Why, now, does everybody have to do the same thing? All this writing, the state of this or that discipline, all carry an unspoken assumption that all are doing the same thing and everybody not doing the thing that I’m saying, is wrong. No! That’s just stupid, ridiculous. So there’s a bunch of different ways, attitudes, dispositions that are necessary to try to provide something that would approach an adequate description of who, what we are and who, what we might be.

SH: I’ll say two things, and it’s a kind of a gross simplification, but in certain liberal storeographies of slavery it ends with a great legal act of emancipation. And writing scenes and writing my dissertation, one was about the non-event of emancipation because of the way in which these emergent modalities of servitude took place within a discourse of freedom, rights, liberty. I guess for me there was something more rotten at the core, which is about the imposition of a certain regime of the subject that was so fundamentally defined by property, and that being as good as it gets. So, I think it was both the impossibility of the achievement of those things that define a kind of liberal citizen subject in the West, the free being excluded from that. But then what are the kind of constituents of that subject to begin with and is that something that one wants to sign onto anyway? So many of the articulations of freedom, so much of the kind of practices of the ex-slave or the freed, articulated kind of another imagination of freedom altogether. So there’s the imposition of a certain regime of the subject and a certain conception of the domestic is crucial to the production of that subject.

FM: I feel this general sense of having come to an impasse in a certain kind of way is interesting. It depends on how you think about it. So, let’s say that within a field that is bounded on the one hand by incompatible predications of the free, and on the other hand the burdened individuation (to use Saidiya’s terms). That within this structure that is bounded so to speak by those terms, there’s only so much you can do theoretically but that doesn’t mean that you stop trying to come up with things. Because the other notion of predication that has been in the back of my mind the last couple months is this predication that Nate Mackey had as he talks about predications “rickety spin”. I guess I’ve just begun to think what one might be able to do against the grain; of an incompatibility of a set of imposed predications that is continually spinning out, in however rickety, raggedy way, an endless series of predications.
There was a certain moment in which the critique of authenticity, let’s say in black studies or whatever, became so puritanical, that any sentence of the type: “blackness is x”, was almost against the law, against the rules of the people and somebody would come get you… Touré or somebody. But, I’m interested in something like an endless proliferation of sentences of the type: blackness is x. Recognizing that those sentences might come from anywhere and might be animated by any number of possible motivations. But that necessity of predication, which could even be said to take the form of a certain kind of a meditative, worshipful kind of form, that’s important. And I think it’s one of those things in terms of describing what people have felt and what they’ve done. That’s one of the things that people have done.
By the same token, there is this other slightly parallel track to predication, which may be just naming or nominalisation of these things as kind of connected but not exactly the same thing. And these are important cultural, aesthetic and intellectual activities that are crucial to anything; like what one might call a kind of… whatever you want to call it: A resistance. Fugitivity. War. Whatever. These are important activities to be engaged in because then it gives us a chance to think and talk. It gives us a chance to be together, as we meditate with one another on these questions. Hopefully with some friends, food, wine, kids running around. This is totally important. And from my perspective, these are activities that must be done, to use the old Cornel West phrase, “outside of the normative gaze of the white man”. It’s just that at a certain point, you can’t be worried all the time about what he says or thinks. For some reason I think this is particularly difficult for academics because we are addicted to being graded and they do the grading, or let’s just say the degrading.
What I’m trying to say is that sense of… well, is this the right term? That’s a debilitating question but is this a term that we can start… that can get us talking about something? Is this a term that can help structure a certain kind of fellowship amongst us? That’s a different kind of question.

* This is the edited transcript of a conversation that took place in 2016, part of a series titled “Black Outdoors: Humanities Futures After Property and Possession”.

 This and other stories and maps are available in the new issue of the Chronic, On Circulations And The African Imagination Of A Borderless World, which maps the African imagination of a borderless world: non-universal universalisms, the right to opacity, refusing that which has been refused to you, and “keeping it moving”.

To purchase in print or as a PDF head to our online shop, or get copies from your nearest dealer.

“Dislocation” is how Congolese rumba historians describe the incessant splinterings that are part of the story of every major band – in a music system where the “first to leave” holds the place of pride.

Between 1997 and 2008 the group Wenge Musica lived through 18 dislocations – almost twice a year, starting with the epic rivalry between JB Mpiana and Werasson. Many of these ran parallel to the great war in Congo – another major site of dislocations.

In the new Chronic, On Circulations and the African Imagination of a Borderless World, we map Wenge Musica BCBG family tree.

To purchase a copies of this issue in print or as a PDF head to our online shop, or get copies from your nearest dealer.

Congolese World of Sound from the archive:

For the Pan African Space Station (PASS), Binetou Sylla — DJ, producer and Syllart label-boss — curated a series of shows focused on Congolese rumba and its offshoots. This episode includes music from Nico, Franco, and Tabu Ley. Recorded for PASS in Paris at the exhibition Beauté Congo – 1926-2015 – Congo Kitoko, Fondation Cartier.

For more music visit Pan African Space Station (PASS). 

Then Achille Mbembe explores the Beautiful in the Congolese World of Sounds and tracks how the languid melodies characteristic of “classic” Congolese rumba (1950s-1970s) gave way to a new sound, a music laced with emotions ever in conflict, where the theatrical and the oneiric are superimposed on one another across a savage ocean of sounds, screams and noise – the sound of Koffi Olomide, Quartier Latin and Wenge Musica.

Read online or order it in print as a Chimurenganyana from our online shop.

Also dancer and choreographer Faustin Linyekula sets movement to a soundtrack of ndombolo, a music whose driving rhythms and sheer physicality offers the possibility for liberation from war and oppression, but simultaneously risks perpetuating the very violence and subjugation it seeks to transcend. ““The most important thing is not the aesthetic object. Art is not important. The most important thing is to believe in something in a context where it’s impossible to believe in anything. The work is thus an act of faith, says Linyekula. “So the form emerges. It’s music but it’s music that only makes sense when it has a physical impact. So we will turn up the volume. It has to be loud so we’ll stop hearing all the noise – NGOs, politicians, propaganda, statistics. So I can hear the sound of my body and then the sound will get the bodies to move.”

Read it online or dig deeper with Chimurenga 16: The Chimurenga Chronic, available here in print or PDF.

Tracing further movements and disolations across borders, Ranga Mberi travels back in musical time to the 1980s and 1990s, the era of sungura music. Dubbed the “authentic sound of Zimbabwe”, sungura weaved together Congolese rumba with Zimbabwean jiti and Tanzanian kanindo.

Real it online or order the Chronic, “The Invention of Zimbabwe”, which writes Zimbabwe beyond white fears and the Africa-South conundrum – available in print or as a PDF from our online shop. 

The new addition of the Chronic asks: What is the African imagination of a borderless world? The African world has produced plenty of these and the Chronic, On Circulations And The African Imagination Of A Borderless World seeks to map and pay tribute to these existing works that articulates histories of circulation from an African perspective: from non-universal universalisms, to the right to opacity, refusing that which has been refused to you, and “keeping it moving” and more.

It is thus largely a bibliographic project and the maps produced for this issue are based on a growing library of books, recordings, essays and stories by countless writers, thinkers and musicians around the world.

The bibliography below represents a selection of the primary resources used to produce the maps and the issue. It is an part of an ever growing library that re-images our world beyond so-called progressive discourse on “freedom of movement” and “no borders” against the backdrop of deeply Western individualist thinking. Keep coming back for updates.

ON CIRCULATIONS AND THE AFRICAN IMAGINATION OF A BORDERLESS WORLD

Required reading:

Le discours antillais, Édouard Glissant, 1981, Éditions du Seuil.

The idea of a borderless world: Tanner Lectures on Human Values, Achille Mbembe, 28 March 2018, Yale University, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NKm6HPCSXDY.

Additional reading:

African Orature and Human Rights, Micere Mugo, 1991, Human People’s Rights Monograph Series, no. 13.

African Philosophy as Expressed in the Concepts of Hospitality and Ubuntu, Julius Gathogo, Journal of Theology for Southern Africa, no. 130, pp. 39 53.

A history of the upper guinea coast 1545-1800, 1970, Walter Rodney, Monthly Review Press

Altered States, Anthony Kwame Appiah, 1991, Wilson Quarterly.

Asante in the Nineteenth Century: The Structure and Evolution of a Political Order, Ivor Wilks, 1975, Cambridge University Press

Beyond a Boundary, CLR James, Duke University Press Books; 1993.

Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double-Consciousness, Paul Gilroy, 1993, Harvard University Press

Charte du Manden, Wikipedia, 2018, https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charte_du_Manden

Comment philosopher en islam ?, Souleymane Bachir Diagne, 2014, Philippe Rey.

Containers, Carriers, Vehicles: Three Views of Mobility from Africa, Clapperton Chakanetsa Mavhunga et. al. 2016, Transfers vol. 8.

Decentralization and territorial politics: the dilemma of constructing and managing identities in Uganda, Morris Adam Nsamba, 2013, Critical African Studies, vol. 5, no. 1.

Decolonise: Open African Borders, Achille Mbembe 2017, Mail & Guardian.

El Despertador Mexicano, Zapatista Army of National Liberation, 1993, http://archive.oah.org/special-issues/mexico/zapmanifest.html

Éloges des frontières, Régis Debray, 2010, Gallimard.

Europe’s Other Self, Stuart Hall, 1991, Marxism Today, vol. 35, no. 8.

Frères migrants, Patrick Chamoiseau, 2017, Éditions du Seuil.

Knowledge of Africa, Knowledge by Africans: Two Perspectives on African Studies, Paulin J. Hountondji, 2009, RCCS Annual Review.

Les Migrants et nous: Comprendre Babel, Michel Agiers, 2016, CNRS Editions.

Les miroirs vagabonds ou la décolonisation des savoirs (art, littérature, philosophie), Seloua Luste Boulbina, 2018, Les presses du réel.

On the Postcolonial and the Universal ? , Souleymane Bachir Diagne, 2013, Rue Descartes, no 78.

Philosophie de la relation, Edouard Glissant, 2009, Gallimard.

Politiques de l’inimitié, Achille Mbembe, 2016, Éditions la Découverte

Quand les murs tombent, Edouard Glissant and Patrick Chamoiseau, 2007, Galaade Éditions.

Reading Ibn Khaldun in Kampala, Mahmood Mamdani, 2017, Journal of Historical Sociology, vol. 30, no. 1.

Sortir de la grande nuit, Achille Mbembe, 2010, Éditions la Découverte

Sovereignty, Territory and Authority: Boundary Maintenance in Contemporary Africa, Lee J.M. Seymour, 2013, Critical African Studies, vol. 5, no. 1.

Rending the Nomad: Film and architecture reading Fulani, Ikem Stanley Okoye, 2010, Interventions, International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, vol. 6, no. 2.

The African Frontier: The Reproduction of Traditional African Societies, edited by Igor Kopytoff, 1987, Midland Books.

The Evolution of the Administrative Boundaries of. Ashanti, 1896-1951, R. B. Bening, , 1978, Journal ofAfrican Studies, vol. 2, pp. 123- 150.

The Ink of the Scholar, Souleymane Bachir Diagne, 2017, Codesria.

The Gadzingo: Towards a Karanga Expansion Matrix in 18th- and 19th-Century Southern Zimbabwe, Gerald Chikozho Mazarire, 2013, Critical African Studies, vol. 5, no. 1.

The Odyssey of Human Rights, Ajume Wingo, 2010, Transition, No. 102, pp. 120-138

The origin of others, Toni Morrison, 2017, Harvard University Press

Audre Lorde’s Transnational Legacies, Stella Bolaki, Sabine Broeck, Sabine Bröck-Sallah, 2015, University of Massachusetts Press.

The World The Text and the Critic, Edward Said, 1983, Harvard University Press.

Tûba: An African Eschatology in Islam, E. Ross, 1996, PhD Thesis, University of Montréal.

Une nouvelle region du monde, Edouard Glissant, 2006, Gallimard.

What Do You Mean There Were No Tribes in Africa?: Thoughts on Boundaries: And Related Matters: In Precolonial Africa, Donald R. Wright, History in Africa, vol. 26, pp. 409-426

THE BORDER IN THE EUROLIBERAL IMAGINATION

Required reading:

Borderland Europe – The challenge of migration, Balibar, Etienne, 2015, Open Democracy, https://www.opendemocracy.net/can-europe-make-it/etienne-balibar/borderland-europe-and-challenge-of-migration.

Exodus, Paul Collier, 2013, Oxford University Press.

Movement and the Ordering of Freedom, Hagar Kotef, 2015, Duke University Press.

Why No Borders, B. Anderson et al, 2009, Refuge Journal, vol. 26, no. 2.

The Rights of Others: Aliens, Residents, and Citizens, Seyla Benhabib, 2004, Cambridge University Press.

Universal Declaration of Human Rights, United Nations, 1948, http://www.un.org/en/universal-declaration-human-rights/

Zum ewigen Frieden, Immanuel Kant, 1795, F. Nicolovius.

Additional reading:

Atlas de migrants en Europe, Migreurop, 2017, Armand Colin.

Barbed Wire: A political history, Olivier Razac, 2003, The New Press.

Border as Method or the Multiplication of Labor, Sandro Mezzadra 2013, Duke University Press.

Borderlands, 2016, Michel Agiers, Wiley.

Borderwall as Architecture: A Manifesto for the U.S.-Mexico Boundary, Ronal Rael, 2017, University of California Press.

Development Goals in an Era of Demographic Change, Worldbank, 2016, http://pubdocs.worldbank.org/en/31141444230135479/GMR-Over-and-Exec-Summary-English.pdf

Globalization for Development: Trade, Finance, Aid, Migration, and Policy, Ian Goldin, Kenneth A. Reinert, 2007, Worldbank.

Human Flow, Ai Weiwei, 2017, AC Films.

La forme-camp. Pour une généalogie des lieux de transit et d’internement du présent, Federico Rahola, 2007, Cultures & Conflits vol. 70, pp. 31-50.

Les refugies une bonne affaire, Nicolas Autheman, 2017, Le monde diplomatique.

Open Borders: A Utopia?, Harald Bauder, translated by Sophie Didier, spatial justice, 2013, no. 5.

Marcos Ramirez Erre: Border art ‘from this side’, Jo-Anne Berelowitz, 2006, Journal of Borderlands Studies, vol. 21, no. 2.

Migration Borders Freedom, Harald Bauder, 2017, Routledge.

Migrations sauvetage en mer et droits humains, Philippe Rekacewicz, 2009,  https://visionscarto.net/migrations-sauvetage-en-mer.

Minoritarian Democracy: The Democratic Case for No Borders, James A. Chamberlain, 2017, Constellations vol. 24, no. 2.

Passing Through: India’s Border Fence with Pakistan, Elizabeth Rush, 2012, Le monde diplomatique.

Re-Imagining the Border Border Art as a Space of Critical Imagination and Creative Resistance, Giudice and Giubilaro, 2015, Geopolitics vol. 20, no. 1.

The Age of the World’s Borders, PisseGuri82, 2018, https://moverdb.com/world-border-age/.

The Border Art Workshop, Art for Social Change Toolkit Blog, 1984, https://artforsocialchangetoolkit.wordpress.com.

Theory of the Border, Thomas Nail, 2016, Oxford University Press

The Figure of the Migrant, Thomas Nail, 2016, Standford University Press.

The Intermediary Class, Sam Allingham, 2018, The New Yorker.

The Jean Monnet Bridge, Center for Political Beauty, 2015, http://www.politicalbeauty.com/rescue.html.

The magna carta manifesto liberties and commons for all, Peter Linebaugh 2008, University of California Press.

The Mediterranean’s deadly migrant routes, BBC, 2015, https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-32387224.

The mobilities of ships and shipped mobilities,  Anyaa Anim-Addo, William Hasty and Kimberley Peters, 2014, Mobilities, vol. 9, no. 3.

The Reconstruction of the Free World, Ulrike Guerot and Robert Menasse, 2016, OpenDemocracy https://www.opendemocracy.net/can-europe-make-it/ulrike-guerot-robert-menasse/europe-reconstruction-of-free-world

Walled States, Waning Society, Wendy Brown, 2014, MIT Press.

We Are Everywhere: The irresistible rise of global anti-capitalism, Notes from Nowhere, 2003, Verso.

We Refugees, Giogrio Agamben, 1995, Symposium vol. 49, no. 2.

Where on Earth Are You ?, Frances Stonor Saunders, 2016, London Review of Books. Vol. 38 No. 5.

Why Immigration Controls Are Not Coercive, David Miller, 2009, Political Theory vol. 38, no. 1.

THE UNHOLY TRINITY

Required reading:

Settler Colonialism: Then and Now, Mahmood Mamdani, 2015, Critical Inquiry vol. 41.

Racial comparisons, relational racisms: some thoughts on method, David Theo Goldberg, 2009, Ethnic and Racial Studies, vol. 32.

A Political Theology of Race: Articulating Racial Southafricanization, David Theo Goldberg, 2009, Cultural Studies, vol. 23, no. 4.

Additional reading:

Après le mur. Les répresentations israéliennes de la separation avec les Palestiniens, Cédric Parizot, 2009, Cultures & Conflict, pp. 53-72.

Border / Skin, Lindsay Bremner, 2005, http://www.academia.edu/6089661/Border_Skin.

Deutsche Integrationspolitik als koloniale Praxis, Kien Nghi Ha, 2009, transcript, pp. 137-150.

Enduring territoriality: South African immigration control, Darshan Vigneswaran,  2008, Forced Migration Studies Programme, University of the Witwatersrand.

In-secure identities: On the securitization of abnormality, Merav Amir and Hagar Kotef, 2018, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, vol. 36, no. 2, pp. 236-254.

Israel Closure Policy, Amira Hass, 2002, Journal of Palestine Studies, vol. 31, no. 3, pp. 5-20.

Israel’s Holocaust and the Politics of Nationhood, Idith Zertal, 2010, Cambridge University Press

Mapping Europe’s War on Immigration, Philippe Rekacewicz, 2013, Le monde diplomatique, https://mondediplo.com/outsidein/mapping-europe-s-war-on-immigration.

The Architecture of Erasure, Saree Makdisi, 2010, Critical Inquiry, vol. 36, no. 3, pp. 519-559.

The EU’s expulsion machine, Alain Maurice and Claire Rodier 2010, Le monde diplomatique, https://mondediplo.com/2010/06/12expulsions.

The invention of the concentration camp. Cuba. Southern Africa and the Philippines 1896-1907, Jonathan Hyslop, 2011, South African Historical Journal vol. 63, no. 2.

The refugees welcome culture, Joshua Kwesi Aikins and Daniel Bendix, 2015, Africasacountry, https://africasacountry.com/2015/11/resisting-welcome-and-welcoming-resistance.

Walking through walls, Eyal Weizman, 2006, EIPCP, http://eipcp.net/transversal/0507/weizman/en.

THE NEWSPAPER, THE NOVEL AND THE INVENTION OF THE NATION-STATE

Imagined communities: reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism, Benedict Anderson, 1991, Verso.

PANAFRICANISM VS. THE NATION-STATE I & II

Africa Unite ! Une histoire du panafricanisme, Amzat Boukari-Yabar, 2017, Éditions la Découverte.

Toward the Seventh PAC The Pan-African Congress Past, Present and Future By C.L. R. James, 1976, Ch’indaba.

AFRO ASIAN MOVEMENT

Required reading:

Afro-Asian Movement: Ideology and Policy of the Third World, David Kimche, 1973, Israel Universities Press

Lotus Magazine, Nida Ghouse, 2015, Chimurenga Chronic/Muzmin.

The Pharaoh’s New Clothes, Sophia Azeb, 2015, Chimurenga Chronic/Muzmin.

Colonial Architecture or Relatable Hinterlands? Locke, Nandy, Fanon and the Bandung Spirit, Robbie Shilliam, 2015, Constellations, vol. 23, no. 3.

Additional reading:

Afro-Asian Third-Worldism into Global South: The Case of Lotus Journal, Hala Halim, 2017, Global South Studies: A Collective Publication with The Global South.

Making a World After Empire: The Bandung Movement and Its Political Afterlife, edited by Christopher Lee, 2007, Ohio University Press.

Legacies of Bandung: Decolonisation and the Politics of Culture, Dipesh Chakrabarty, 2005, Economic and Political Weekly vol. 40, no. 46, pp. 4812– 4818.

Postcolonialism: From Bandung to the Tricontinental, Robert Young, 2005, Historein no. 5, pp. 11– 21.

The Darker Nations: A People’s History of the Third World, Vijay Prashad, 2007, The New Press.

The Midnight Ride of Kwame Nkrumah and Other Fables of Bandung (Ban-Doong), Robert Vitalis, 2013, Humanity: An International Journal of Human Rights, Humanitarianism, and Development vol. 4, no. 2, pp. 261–288.

NEGRITUDE VS AFRORADICALISM

Africa Unite ! Une histoire du panafricanisme, Amzat Boukari-Yabar, 2017, Éditions la Découverte.

MOVEMENT OF JAH PEOPLE

Freedom as Marronage, Neil Roberts, 2015, University of Chicago Press.

Africa Unite ! Une histoire du panafricanisme, Amzat Boukari-Yabar, 2017, Éditions la Découverte.

Fugitif, où cours-tu ?, Dénètem Touam Bona, 2016, PUF.

Maroon Societies: Rebel Slave Communities in the Americas, Richard Price, 1979, Johns Hopkins University Press.

NO PASS, BUT NINE PASSPORTS

Required reading:

Makeba: My Story, Miriam Makeba with James Hall, 1988, Bloomsbury.

Miriam Makeba in Guinea – Deterritorializing History through Music, Yair Hashachar, 2015, MA thesis, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

Playing the Backbeat in Conakry: Miriam Makeba and the Cultural Politics of Sékou Touré’s Guinea, 1968–1986, Yair Haschachar, 2017, Social Dynamics vol. 43, no. 2, pp. 259-273.

The Miriam Makeba Story: Miriam Makeba in Conversation with Nomsa Mwamuka, Miriam Makeba and Nomsa Mwamuka, 2004, STE Publishers.

Miriam’s Place: South African jazz, conviviality and exile, Louise Bethlehem, Social Dynamics, 2017, vol. 43, no. 2, pp. 243-258.

Additional reading:

Liberated Threads: Black Women, Style, and the Global Politics of Soul, 2017, Tanisha C. Ford, The University of North Carolina Press.

Miriam Makeba: Fidel Castro es una de mis estrellas, Cubaencuentro, 2005, http://arch1.cubaencuentro.com/cultura/noticias/20051006/11d15e783a3681722b1599b7ca1ada24.html.

Miriam Makeba, l’exilée qui devint Mama Africa, Natou Pedro Sakombi, 2016, Reines & Héroïnes d’Afrique blog, https://reinesheroinesdafrique.wordpress.com/2016/03/04/miriam-makeba-lexilee-qui-devint-mama-africa/.

Miriam Makeba: Mama Africa, Gamal Nkrumah, Al-Ahram Weekly Online, 2001, http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/Archive/2001/558/profile.htm.

Miriam Makeba: une vie au service d’un art engagé, Michaël Mouity-Nzamba, Bulletin de l’Institut Pierre Renouvin, 2014/2, no. 40, pp. 111-125.

Nina Simone in Liberia, Katherina Grace Thomas, 2017, Guernica Magazine, https://www.guernicamag.com/nina-simone-in-liberia/.

Obituary: African Icon: Miriam, Thelma Ravell-Pinto and Rayner Ravell, 2008, Journal of the African Literature Association, vol. 2, no. 2, pp. 274-281.

Ready for Revolution: The Life and Struggles of Stokely Carmichael (Kwame Ture). Stokeley Carmichael with E. M. Thelwell, 2003, Scribner.

The Cultural Revolution, Artistic Creativity, and Freedom of Expression in Guinea, Lansine Kaba, The Journal of Modern African Studies, 1976, vol. 14, no. 2, pp. 201-218.

The Voice of (Which?) Africa: Miriam Makeba in America, April Sizemore-Barber, 2012, Safundi: The Journal of South African and American Studies vol. 13, no. 3–4, pp. 251–276.

WHEREVER I’VE GONE I’VE GONE VOLUNTARILY

Wherever I’ve Gone, I’ve Gone Voluntarily: Ayi Kwei Armah’s Radical Pan-African Itinerary, Jonathan B. Fenderson, 2008, The Black Scholar, Vol. 37, No. 4, pp. 50-60.

The Healers, Ayi Kwei Armah, 2000, Per Ankh.

Osiris Rising: A Novel of Africa Past, Present and Future, Ayi Kwei Armah, 1995, Per Ankh.

Two Thousand Seasons, Ayi Kwei Armah, 1973, Heinemann.

Why Are We So Blest?, Ayi Kwei Armah, 1972, Doubleday

The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born, Ayi Kwei Armah, 1968, Heinemann.

One Writer’s Education, Ayi Kwei Armah, 1985, West Africa, pp. 1752-1753.

The Eloquence of Scribes: A Memoir on the Source and Resources of African Literature, Ayi Kwei Armah, 2006, Per Ankh.

Our awakening. An Evening with Ayi Kwei Armah: Lecture at Berkeley University (transcript excerpt), 1990, Ayi Kwei Armah, http://www.africaspeaks.com/reasoning/index.php?topic=5904.0;wap2.

New Insights from Ayi Kwei Armah: Conversation with Ayi Kwei Armah and Ayesha Harruna Attah, 2016, https://www.ghanawebsolutions.com/videos.php?v=knCGdYGJWXs.

Ayi Kwei Armah Radical Iconoclast: Pitting Imaginary Worlds Against the Actual, Ode Ogede, 2000, Ohio University Press.

DISLOCATIONS IN THE CONGOLESE WORLD OF SOUNDS

Required reading:

JB Mpiana, Wikipedia, 2018, https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/JB_Mpiana.

Hervé Gola Bataringe alias Ferré chair de poule, Univers Rumba Congolaise blog, 2012, https://www.universrumbacongolaise.com/artistes/ferre-chair-de-poule/?cn-reloaded=1.

L’histoire de la separation de Wenge Musica BCBG 4X4, Congo Musique blog, 2010,  https://congo-musique.skyrock.com/2891184757-L-HISTOIRE-DE-LA-SEPARATION-DE-WENGE-MUSICA-BCBG-4X4.html.

Rumba Rules: The Politics of Dance Music in Mobutu’s Zaire, Bob. W. White, 2008, Duke University Press.

The African Frontier: The Reproduction of Traditional African Societies, edited by Igor Kopytoff, 1987, Midland Books.

Wenge Musica, Wikipedia, 2018, https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wenge_Musica.

Wenge Musica Maison Mère, Wikipedia, 2018, https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wenge_Musica_Maison_Mère.

Werrason, Wikipedia, 2018, https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Werrason.

Additional reading:

Happy Are Those Who Sing And Dance: Mobutu, Franco, And The Struggle For Zairian Identity,Carter Grice, 2011

Made in Congo: Rumba Lingala and the Revolution in Nationhood, Jesse Samba Samuel Wheeler, 1999, University of Wisconsin—Madison.

Modernity’s Trickster: “Dipping” and “Throwing” in Congolese Popular Dance Music, Bob W. White, 1999, African Literatures vol. 30, no. 4.

Rumba on the River: A History of the Popular Music of the Two Congos, Gary Stewart, 2003, Verso.

Terre de la chanson: La musique zaïroise hier et aujourd’hui, Manda Tchebwa, 1996, De Boeck Supérieur.

The Genesis of Urhan Music in Zaire, Kazadi wa Mukuna, 1992, African Music vol. 7, no. 2.

The Political Economy of Migration and Reputation in Kinshasa, Joseph Trapido, Africa: The Journal of the International African Institute, vol. 81 no. 2, 2011.

The value of Africa’s aesthetics, Achille Mbembe, On the Postcolony, 2015, WITS Press.

Variations on the Beautiful in the Congolese World of Sounds, Achille Mbembe, 2009, Chimurenganyana Series 1.

JAZZ AND THE WHITE CRITIC

Livre culte, livre maudit: Histoire du Devoir de violence de Yambo Ouologuem, Jean-Pierre Orban, 2018, Continents manuscrits.

Yambo Ouologuem: On Violence, Truth and Black History, interviewed by Linda Kuehl, 1971, ChickenBones: A Journal for Literary & Artistic African-American Themes, http://www.nathanielturner.com/yamboouologuem.htm

Yambo Ouologuem: Postcolonial Writer, Anti-Wahabist Militant, 2015, Chimurenga Chronic.

In Search of Yambo Ouologouem, Christopher Wise, 2012, Chimurenganyana Series 2.

LE TOUT MONDE

Sartorius: Le roman des Batoutos, Édouard Glissant, 1999, Gallimard.

Ormerod, Édouard Glissant, 2003, Gallimard.

Tout-Monde, Édouard Glissant, 1993, Gallimard.

La Lézarde, Édouard Glissant, 1958, Éditions du Seuil.

Le quatrième siècle, Édouard Glissant, 1964, Éditions du Seuil.

La Case du commandeur, Édouard Glissant, 1981, Éditions du Seuil.

Mahagony, Édouard Glissant, 1987, Éditions du Seuil.

 This bibliography is for the new issue of the Chronic, On Circulations And The African Imagination Of A Borderless World, which maps the African imagination of a borderless world: non-universal universalisms, the right to opacity, refusing that which has been refused to you, and “keeping it moving”.

To purchase in print or as a PDF head to our online shop, or get copies from your nearest dealer.

by Thabo Jijana 

On December 13, 2016, in Salem Party Club v Salem Community, the Supreme Court of Appeal ruled in favour of 152 land claimants representing a community of amaXhosa who’d been dispossessed over a century ago by the 1820 British settlers and their descendants. While the court victory has been rightfully celebrated as a tentative triumph of South Africa’s processes of restorative justice, Thabo Jijana suggests that Salem Community v Government of the Republic of South Africa and others is also a seminal event in how it asserts the legal validity of oral history (as largely provided by the community’s witnesses) vs. documented proof (by the landowners).

To talk about death, Black rural grief … TO DEATH, putting into question colonial constructions of space, so metadiscursive whenever old memories resurface, ever drenched in exhaustion re: foiling the artifices of whiteness, the hail of not once yielding to the Lethe ruptured afresh, reflective nostalgia at high octane, the seeing of place a fundamental disruption of our ways of seeing, to expose that ideology to which much fart-puffing has been tithed, a furious binge ensuing for the untidy, esoteric spark of the anecdotal

, and that’s when I thought, in that anew-coiled moment of ah-hem, perhaps

perhaps

FORGETTING IS NOT THE PROBLEM but that where white is the colour

BLACK IS THE NUMBER

In recognizing the maneuvers by which Black rural bantu have found fugitive means to refute the immanence of forgetting, this must be said

: we are all forced to resituate Black death within a retropresent though still largely spontaneous sphere of memoir-realizing, by which we mean what defines our kin (to each her own, idiosyncratic as to the relational dot) decides how we greet their deaths … to treat dying as not only representational of the life histories we corroborate with our body language but as archival material resistant to the forces shoving their imperialist erasure down our throats, discrediting the settler value system inherent in historicizing rural people’s borderless movements … self-dossier-ing one’s life bedevils us to hang onto the explosive psalms of our everyday, tracking the hems of our being one remembered detail at a time, a lifetime of identity-making cut down to its minutiae …

What I am attempting to convey is the simple but heavy truth

that

BLACK PEOPLE ARE ALWAYS KEEPING SCORE

, especially in those moments when even statistics usher us, needle and thread, towards a necessary return to riddling narratives, those vain appeals that come again within your hearing and that we send away without having responded to them in their space, our space, the space that their passage describes, as if an imperious force dictated that the same figure be taken up again and again, that an endlessly new version of it be created, thus making sure, through the repetition of a model, a structure, a gesture, of the incessant reiteration of signs that trace faces and stories, A REFUGE AGAINST THE IRREVERSIBLE, better verbalized in the context of the unmitigated presence of death in rural communities such that recalling faces, names, quotables, locations, genealogies takes on a running commentary bar sustained depth

1. Rarely, as they did in my childhood, are heads of families buried in the familial yard, by the kraal these day

2. I hail from a Ciskei village of erstwhile farmworkers violently relocated from their original farmlands

3. In the fifteen years since my father died, I have visited his grave (by myself or otherwise) four times

4. 30 out of the 45 people who met their deaths in Marikana came from rural Transkei

5. Bestowed on my village recently was its right to ownership of stolen land

As in Salem Party Club and Others v Salem Community and Others (2017), in which Salem’s Black community, Tyelera, had the Constitutional Court uphold its right to ownership of land they were dispossessed of, Justice Edwin Cameron was quick to remind the 17 applicants opposed to the Tyelera community’s claim to the Salem Commonage

: Oral history is not only concerned with historical facts, but also the values and convictions of the community it recollects

7. Grace Nichols, probing

: How can I eulogize their names

What dance of mourning can I make?

8. A tangent on the grammar of this data, stretching my limits of coherence to say

: the informatics of Black death become the chains whose links often tie us into straightjacketed readings of this historiography of rural bereavement, predetermining the tone of our solidarity with unfamilial sorrow

9. In voicing the past, we look to rural rituals (and dying, as a critical life stage, comes with a plethora) as the most visible confirmation of the replicability of rural memory, if only to critique our strong tendency to rationalize dying as primarily existing beyond the phenomenal world

1o. 2:40-47 of Nomvula, the Freshlyground album where Zolani Mahola sings Yhini na bethuna usishiyil’ uSis’ Nono! Usishiyil’ uSis’ Nono!

Nomvula is not without tender moments describing the mourners’ behaviour; Zolani’s father did not weep at the burial, maybe incl. Zolani

: Zandl’ ezincinci zalahl’ uthuth’ eluthuthwini singasazi nesizathu

More a young girl’s unbelief at her loss than a rejection of the routine of mourning she is undergoing

In the way Mahola mouths her mother’s moniker, she near-plumps herself onto the words until they tumefy at the waist and an oval shape begins to form and just at the point of yielding to Ohhh finally the sentiment catches up with the curve of her lips and Nono deconstructs into No-noooo, No ohhhh

11. It is this manipulation of datum qua defying the threat of not remembering, memories piled upon memories, flashes of happiness upon blind spots and the promise sadly left unsaid, lamentations thrusting at me with their belligerent arrowheads still dripping with warm blood, which interests me

: Ukufa kudibanisa abantu

In Tyelera they took me to the old graves, some behind colonial-era buildings, others next to the R343 heading towards Kenton-on-Sea viz fleeing Makhanda, some so concealed within unpeopled forest and at such a commanding distance from where Tyelera’s present Black population resides only the lone daring hunter and village historian would remember the coordinates, wading for long stretches at a time through stubborn foliage and the tricky sideways gravel footing, my ZCC cap-wearing guide keeping his inferential talk going as he hand/foot-flicked one isiphingo branch after another ‘ntsinde shrub aside until we started running out of saliva and had to make do with our own private thoughts – Funisile Khathu took me to eMqwashini, on the Rippley Farm, belonging to a settler-descendant farmer who, Khathu knew in no uncertain terms, would grant us access on any day and so we stole through the unflinching fence as the sun on our right segued into a vadoek mud-toned … Yet again, to plus another opportunity inviting a flare up of colonial scars, Khathu pointed at gaping holes where the only explanation was that the graves were derelict, the ground long overdue in starting to cave in, and, he would add, for my benefit, even though the farmer tilled the land when he chose to uwuhloniphile lo umqwashu and the gathering of stones around it and so it was clear the farmer never went near the milkweed tree with his tractors … In another vivid moment as Khathu and I rifled through a roadside edge of the forest, small, unassuming stones suddenly appeared at our feet and my guide was quick to halt his walk and declaim

: Here, here are some of the other graves I told you about. You see

[pointing over the fence]

[me looking his way, standing to attention two footsteps away]

now this farmer won’t allow us to go through the fence but look closely, there they are

[Khathu pointing before him]

[me same posture]

you can see the arrangement of stones, of course the people who died here weren’t buried with fancy headstones so we’re not going to see that, but look

[still pointing while his face is turned to me]

[same posture me]

people are buried here

[face now turned towards the graves]

[walking ever so slowly towards where Khathu is pointing]

these stones mark their burial sites

12. I am assailed by voices ceding to informatics the task of quantifying the unquantifiable, fervid notations of all sorts of facts that torment me with their unstated realisation that the death register is already full of strangers’ names and not enough rigour will do justice to one’s grieving – to get into that subconscious region, as Marechera says, a region where a ghost has rights

13. What Lesego Rampolokeng calls graveyard upheavals of self-revelations do not come easily, what with processing death in an age of digital infinitude, our lives ever whirling in constant flux

: given our terms of reading the everyday, when we react to the moment in a clickety-clack of views, condemning the whole to a jumble sale, the Limbo of the Fathers narrowed down to one canonical gospel … Sihlala kwabafileyo only to help contextualize our foraging, writing reconstituted as a court appeal, a rural writer pleading on behalf of his own worldview

14. Syl Cheney-Coker’s impression that the graveyard also has teeth rests on an appreciation of the grave as the penultimate terrain on which Black rural lives are irrefutably manifest as dis/continuous in their fabrication, the cemetery as cardinal seat of amaXhosa cultural heritage – lineage, in this case, can be interpreted as drawing its power and validity from death, one’s clan praises as evidentiary of the villager’s embeddedness and oneness with place, neither placing on death a severe if fragile finality, thereby rendering the dead completely quiet in influencing events in the living world nor exerting undue reliance on the masquerades of memory

15. It is true that my epitaph in lieu of visits to my father’s grave owes its germination to the very thesis underpinning death in the rural imaginary: not only do we believe living continues even after death but it is in the dead that resistance to our subalternity is best crystallized

16. What Mqhayi waseNtabozuko means when he reminds us that We amaXhosa never die, for death to us is profit and gain,/ for there we get our strength,/ for there we gain our speed

17. To argue that graves, as emblematic of rural in/visibility in both Tyelera and elsewhere, authenticate the dead as crucial participants in the behavioral economies of the living is to repudiate that perception of the Mandelafrican village as nugatory, silent in matters of nation-building, counteracting the primacy of the settler’s framework of worthiness, that prevailing fantasy of an unpeopled countryside available for capture and definition, accentuating those human figures who appear to blend into the natural environment so that even when we see these villagers afforded some visibility, we don’t really see them as they are invisibilized by their surroundings,  their dispossession justified by the very location that defines their being

: a world of bizarre customs as ogling prospects, beholden to NHC protectionism if not exotification

: of Contralesa paternalism dressed as indispensable benevolence

: of broken English, a world that has to apologize for its poverty, a world that gets by thanks to the outsider’s affirmation and rescue, appealing on its knees in Sassa offices

:  of long queues outside the clinic, of bad roads, of overcrowded classrooms, of skinny goats, of barren farming fields, of absent fathers, of grandmothers left to raise their daughters’ children alone

: a world that has accepted its place in the isolation cell, ever folding its hands on laps outside the helper’s office, eagerly anticipating a bank notification

: a world that has learnt the meaning of silence, embracing its muteness with the bum jiggle and spit on its calloused palms come the MEC’s visit

: a world no one wants to belong to

: a world of shame

: a deadened world

: a world, ultimately, that is absent

18. To pay a visit to one’s family graves, then, is to summon into presence the physically absent in a way that reasserts the validity of one’s ways of knowing – what T. Spreelin Macdonald, in considering Vonani Bila’s Jeanette, My Sister (about the death of Bila’s youngest sibling, who is buried between two houses at Bila’s Shirley Village of Limpopo, her grave marked with two flat stones), calls A LABOR TO RESURRECT AND INTERACT WITH THE DEAD, thereby seeking to affirm a persisting bond between [Bila and his sister] that resists [Jeanette’s] sinking into absence

19. I quote from the City Press series Faces of Marikana, about a miner born in the village of Paballong, near Matatiele

: Thabiso may have known that he was going to die …

In his modest shack in Nkaneng a few months before he was killed

, he told his wife

, Mma Kopano

, the mother of his only child

, whom he lovingly always called Dear

: Respect me when I’m dead

: Respect my grave

A pre-ending and an alternative lie, who is Joy and who is Joyce?

: The dead won’t sink

They keep returning to the surface of the dam, some as skeletons, some bodies half-decomposed, floating aimlessly or otherwise circling the dam in search of familiar faces, still in their tattered burial blankets of ox-hide; whole families dead during a famine or the last tribal war in memory – after the year’s harvest, the villagers in the dam come alive and talk with the living, asking them for updates of the year they missed out on, parents admonishing children for missing the last festival a year ago, patriarchs leaving orders for what is to be done with their livestock and land in their absence, miner-husbands conferring with housewives, great uncles answering to suitors who had come, in their absence, to ask after the hand of an orphaned granddaughter in marriage, fathers laying charges with the chief’s emissary for wives they suspect to have committed adultery without their expressed consent, fathers discussing the next suitor for their wives, matriarchs informing their sons of women they wish to be their next wives (friends’ daughters, women from other villages … domestic worker-women they consider to be lifelong younger sisters), young boys forlornly watching their former love interests carrying babies they did not father, men who died as boys waking up to confront younger brothers who now have as much hair on the sides of their faces as … fathers who “left” under mysterious circumstances and might still be suspicious of their wives’ skills in the cooking compound and finally the chief, when he elects to speak, rising from his throne to lament that the affairs of the land are going in the direction of the unknowable … a dot of wet mud is made by dipping a finger in the shallow waters and pressing it on the centre of your forehead, as sacrifice withal

In this dream, I am the only one tasked with going around the dam and striking up random conversations with those who have no relatives around or beef with anyone present

20. A version of the present free of the anxiety to belong to any absolutist trope, given an incongruous understanding of time and space as they operate within a rural setting in discoursing around the settler notion of African hegemony, as defined by not just a recreation of past models by way of manufacturing somewhat idealistic future modes of being, this onrush of tired whimsicality still caught up with the need for Western science to correspond to our rationality-defying present

, hence we look back there

really look

to finally see how, in navigating the forest of stereotypes that weigh down the rural, the absenting of our ancient ways in reading the world

, IT IS THE DEAD WHO BEAR WITNESS TO OUR LIVING

, less the living eyewitness thereof

: as if the names, the gestures, the places, and the time, having bloomed separately in simple maxims, were for an instant to accept being united under a common law so that one would know finally, as in the hard light of a blunt interrogation, who made what, where, and when (Jean Frémon)

When I was finally taken by Khathu, late in that June 14, 2017 afternoon, to the home of Ntayise Dyakala, a member of the Salem Community Property Association, the body that had been fighting to reclaim 66 square kilometers of land on behalf of the Black residents of Tyelera since 1998, early supper was served with a spoonful of sepia memories of those who’d experienced firsthand the Fourth Frontier War that robbed Tyelera’s Black community of a portion of Tyelera they had occupied pre-1812 and which now belonged exclusively to settler descendants, among them the white owners of Kikuyu Lodge and the commercial farms tracing their title deeds after the wars of dispossession, those owning the forests and roadsides where much of Khathu and my decolonial flesh fictions on rural persecution occurred … the next morning, as Ntayise Dyakala and I entered his ancestral graves at the Bradfields Farm, besieged by a selfish need to construct a more concrete and less ah ngimnandi testimony verifying MY EXPERIENCES of death within a rural space, Ntayise Dyakala furnishing me with one explanation after another about these or those family graves, a gospel of plangent cracks, to witness Black anger materialize at the crunch of a footstep on gravel, polluted as we are with grief (Wopko Jensma), forever feuding against the rural’s marginalization

; to palliate the spirits of our upbringing, percolating with vehement repudiation at conventional ways of mourning, of remembering, of seeing, to have the revelation penetrate your bones, milking the marrow

: WHEN IT COMES TO RURAL LAND REFORM THE REAL MEAT IS OVERWHELMED BY TOO MANY FLAVOURS

I remember telling myself with a clarity borne of having seen too many burial sites and heard enough oral testimony the previous day

: Kakade there was a community of Black people living on the Salem Commonage phambi kokuba iTyalera became Salem

20. Song, here in the form of a prayer, says Marian De Saxe, of Vuyisile Mini et al approaching death as if enthusiastically, is transformed into A SHOW OF STRENGTH AND PROTEST AND HOPE, in much the same way that Nkosi Sikelel‘ iAfrika evolved from a prayer to a liberation song to an anthem … SINGING ONE‘S WAY TO THE GRAVE is also A DEFIANT ACT of altruism WAITING FOR AN AUDIENCE TO ACT, as ASSERTION OF EXISTENCE AND BEING

Among his old family graves, Ntayise Dyakala says to me

: They were all buried here before we were forced away. You see

[pointing over to the most recent grave]

[me looking his way, listening]

you can tell from that name we’re not the only ones

[the Dyakalas]

who have family buried here

I wanted to understand what this assertion of the unbreakable connection of identities between the dead and the living … not LEAVING … meant regarding how the villager processes death so far as it concerns the ways in which we collectively shape current rural identity, memory included … to commune, so to speak, with the graveyard of relationships that inform my philosophies … I have been considering the place a grave occupies in the rural worldview long enough to know that the grave has, overtime, shifted its position from the venerated to the diversionary, from when one feared pointing at the graveyard (or did so with a crooked index finger so as not to “provoke” the wrath of those “asleep” in the cemetery) to a familiarity such that communal grave-digging sessions back in my village can turn rowdy without fear of ancestral retribution ever figuring into the transgression … It is never clear, in weighing the cost of my silence on how dying remains a unifying force in rural communities, if presiding over Grave Crimes Against [my] Struggle is to set myself up on the dock, giving evidence against my other selves on the witness stand, prosecuting on behalf of my ideals: disputatious thinking, sure, offensive to the senses, but nonetheless a grave narrative of mis/counting the funerals I’ve been to and those I’ve missed and those I don’t remember attending; to get close enough to the edge of the abyss and consent to what memories, quotes, scents I carry to suggest a redefinition of the borderscape

Caught in the maze of unbearable absence (Joseph Guglielmi), in remembering those I love and am linked to by blood, talking Black rural death is a means of expression at grief’s disposal, what  Maurice Blanchot would call the gentle madness of remembering forgetfully … rural death in this case cannot be measured as pure and simple loss … it has to mean more

: Where is the least power? In speech, or in writing? When I live, or when I die? Or again, when dying doesn’t let me die?

22. The accused is not my father (Ah Chul’unyathela, Malamb’edlile!), retired as he is to his absenteeism … but a son who has seen with the eternal corner of the eye too many things I instantaneously consigned to the back of my mind, still working the treadmill towards the finitude of my understanding, taking that short walk to the grave, only a rational thought away … Only a strong feeling away … Meeting all the versions of yourself which did not come out of the womb with you … Those who wear their skeletons on the outside

23. Sithetha nge mvuma ‘kufa, nge insurrectional avowals, nge tjotjo estrongo for only uVerwoed

: Love is found even where the dead lie

24. Using death in the service of a search for empowering beliefs about the rural, rejecting the imprisoning notion of the villager as meek effigy, excavating scraps of Black rural voices babbling polyglot-al to polemical effect, taking up the associative inquiry of our grazing living

, not those voices who confront without necessarily dislodging even in praise of the threat of forgetting, aware that the infiniteness of the threat has in some way broken every limit

: The fly that has no one to advise it follows the corpse into the grave

The Tyelera moment teaches me to neither fear the final day nor wish for it – death is the temporal villager in the city, wandering in a warren of exile-forced solidarity with the world and the multitudes of identities that intersect at his heart, a raucous, if consistently improvisational, montage of maestro boasts regardless of the limits of his migrant-mobility, using an assertive language to solidify fragile networks of thought-currency, twisting lines of not forgetting into twines of punishment and that awareness

: IT IS NOT POSSIBLE TO QUIT THE ANCIENT IDENTITIES

Question me on how we read the present

, suggest to me the need for a rural-bound and unabashedly intrusive manipulation of memory

, to clean up the canon of limited and limiting beliefs about the rural

, to entice redemptive reports around village living

and not this perceived neutrality that comes with merely curating the act of rural typecasting at the expense of pushing against our consignment to the bottom of the page/afterthought paragraph/back of the museum

: There can be this point, at least, to writing

, says Blanchot

: TO WEAR OUT ERRORS

Ever the trier of the Quenellian fact of constraint, the second day, leaving by way of Makhanda, on the road, early noon, Ntayise Dyakala with his son, I REMEMBER: abantu abadala bagqiba = sivile = siyavuma = UMNTWANA UDE WABA NGCONO … a raindrop of a motive sneaks up on me with the politeness of an anus pump, to retrain the bowels as I am third-worlding on the R343

: History, the stockpiling of daily events, works in the moment and the moment belongs to the present; those who mourn must learn to appreciate the dead before they can appreciate the living … we’re not made to talk or write for eternity, but for the moment, and it’s the accumulation of moments that makes continuity: Edmond Jabès

– everything has changed except the graves: Mzi Mahola

– not dead but sleeping: Anna Della Subin

– the dead ones who are not dead, the sleeping ones who are not sleeping: Nichols

– endlessly signifying what is absent: Frémon

– the point of this discussion is that she did not die: Georgia Anne Muldrow

– you’re dead, Kintu rebuked … what have you come back for: Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi

25. The past to which we were subjected, which has not yet emerged as history for us, is, however, obsessively present (Edouard Glissant)

26. Says Mzwandile Matiwane, in To My Sisters? Once I am dead/ urinate on your hands/ and wash your faces/ and cleanse off the curse/ that has befallen the AmaNqarhwane clan

Says Mandla Ndlezi, in When It Comes? O, dig it/ like a cave/ and let me squat/ inside and wait. // Snugged in/ animal skin/ ready to/ get up and go!

27. Satisfied, I came among my guests like a man who has returned from the grave to complain about the death certificate … In Black Sunlight, Marechera

28. It is in Alfred Qabula, being of Flagstaff, rural Transkei, that we see someone wholly underplay the factsheet of his grieving, making it clear that to count the bodies of the dead has already exhausted its effectiveness, that addressing the elusive monster, mano a Cde, can be another approach in foregrounding the heart’s clangs of pain

: Death

enemy of man

Woe unto you …

then

29. There is no use arguing the case of our social death if to be alive means even our births are already suspect

30. On the threshold of a rejected birth

, says Jabès,

we write in the shadow of what has been written, but never read

In his dissenting judgement when the Tyelera land claim came to the Supreme Court of Appeals in Bloemfontein in February 2016 (the commercial farmers and lodge owners of Salem appealing the Land Claims Commission’s original ruling in favour of the Tyelera claim; majority judges in the SCA assenting to Tyelera’s claim), Azhar Cachalia, Judge of Appeal, weighs the evidence of two witnesses for the Tyelera community in the following manner

: In response to a further question as to how Salem got its name, he answered almost as a child telling a story would … His evidence was difficult to follow, perhaps due to his lack of education and literacy … the sequence of events itself is bizzare … Nondzube’s hearsay evidence was relied upon to … He is uneducated and his evidence was not easy to follow …

I quote Cachalia in one lump of mangled quotations especially to show how the infantilizing of Msele Nondzube and Cachalia’s insistent valuing of formal education in discrediting Ndoyityile Ngqiyaza’s testimony points to a larger problem in how Mandelafrican rural people suffer most rampantly under essentialised notions of identity, even to highlight the parts that verify how the methods of rural memorizing can never be authenticated in Romanesque scrolls but that which is lent and borrowed through story, gesture, personal moment, dream, ritual and myth, the past kept contemporaneous one generation after another even as memories fray

31. Says Motlalepula of Boroeng village and brother to Khanare Monesa, slain during the Marikana Massacre, Khanare’s wife already with child at the time of Khanare’s passing

: My only hope is that when his child is born, he’ll look exactly like him

: The child will be a reminder to all of us that we once had a beautiful brother who was killed

Research for this essay was supported by a grant from the Taco Kuiper Investigative Journalism Fund, run by Wits Journalism (Wits University).

All pictures feature Funisile Khathu and were taken by the writer while visiting some of the graves belonging to Tyelera’s African population.

Reading List 

Where White is the colour/Where Black is the number, Wopko Jensma, The faces of Marikana, City Press, Born in Africa but..: Women’s poetry of post-Apartheid South Africa in English, Isabelle Vogt, Nomvula, Freshlyground, Black Insider, Dambudzo Marechera, My Spirit Is Not Banned, Frances Baard as told to Barbie Schreiner, No mining in Xolobeni, demand activists, GroundUp, Collected Poems, Alfred Temba Qabula, South African History Online, These Hands, Makhosazana Xaba, Eulogy, Grace Nichols, Salem Party Club and Others v Salem Community and Others (2017, January), Salem Party Club and Others v Salem Community and Others (2017, December), Not dead but sleeping, Anna Della Subin, Caribbean Discourse: Selected Essays, Edouard Glissant, Johann Louw paints as counter-feminist and settler fantasist of sorts, Percy Mabandu, Ah, but your land is beautiful, Zamansele Nsele, Habari Gani Africa Ranting, Lesego Rampolokeng, Steve Biko and Black Consciousness in Post-Apartheid South African Poetry, T. Spreelin Macdonald, The Graveyard Also Has Teeth: With Concerto for an Exile: Poems, Syl Cheney-Coker, Umfi uMfundisi Isaac William Wauchope, SEK Mqhayi, Sing Me a Song of History: South African Poets and Singers in Exile, Marian De Saxe, When It Comes, Mandla Ndlezi, Kintu, Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi, To My Sisters, Mzwandile Matiwane, Writing At Risk: Interviews Uncommon Writers, Carlos Fuentes, The Dead Protect Us!, Daily Sun, Endlessly signifying what is absent, Jean Frémon, The writing of the disaster, Maurice Blanchot, An Uneducated Discourse, Xola Stemele, The book of remembrances remains to be written, Joseph Guglielmi, Arrow of God, Chinua Achebe, Itineraries of a Hummingbird: an interview, Edmond Jabès, Everything has changed (except the graves), Mzi Mahola, A Thoughtiverse Unmarred: Prologue, Georgia Anne Muldrow, Memory of a dead memory, Edmond Jabès, Hybridity and Transformation: The Art of Lin Onus, Bill Ashcroft

Kodwo Eshun discusses selected paragraphs of music criticism, taking in Kim Gordon’s Art Forum essays, Philip Brophy’s 100 Modern Soundtracks, writing by Dave Tompkins and more, from Off The Page 2011 at the Playhouse Theatre in Whitstable.

Talk: Kodwo Eshun discusses ten paragraphs of music criticism from Sound and Music on Vimeo.

Native Maqari and Keziah Jones Villa Medici channel Fela take on on Democrazy, migrant labour and hospitality in crisis.

For more check out the last words of Fela Anikulapo Kuti.

BLACKOUT
Native Maqari x Keziah Jones
Villa Medici – Villa Médicis
RÉACTIVATION À PARIS LE 7 OCTOBRE VIVA VILLA
PLACE DALIDA 22H
#felakuti #migrantlabour #hospitalitycrisis

by Akin Adesokan

Imagine,
first,
a priestess of Esu (Elegbara), the West African god of the crossroads and inspiration for the less tangible practice of hermeneutics. The woman, in her late sixties when the story begins, in August 1976, in a small village three hours by car north of Lagos, is also the mother of twins born in 1930. One of them was dead within months of birth, hence the obligatory recomposition of the spirit of the departed in ere-ibeji. The twin sculptures are polished to shiny black by original emulsion and decades of oiling and handling. Her profession of Esu does not confl ict with her attendance on the spirit of the twins, or even the fact that her children answer to Muslim names. Both are her life, fabric of the relative peace of early-to-mid-twentieth century western Nigeria, “with its modern constructions with one foot in the bush…the whole area with its infi nity of night lights that appear to illuminate the noise”, as seen through the eyes of Edouard the Antillean. The peace was relative because, in times past, when she was not yet a child, gunshots from the hundred-year wars were the heartbeats of life, its passions the periodic fi res of ostentatious destructions. Insensate times: the smell of burning ivory, the sound of blunderbuss, the undying certainty that what was sold down the river for a fl ask of rum or sachet of gunpowder could not, like the river, fl ow back. What was gone was gone; the law of eternal return did not apply. Her name is Elesu, she who professes Esu.
Imagine,
next,
an out-of-job councillor, a creature of the military regime which has been in power for ten years, and claims inspiration from the warlike spirit of the iron-god to whom dogs are sacrifi ced by all workers in iron every February. He has no job right now, two years from the Constituent Assembly that will prepare the constitution of the Second Republic. Councillors’ positions are rotated among a crop of semi-educated men who used to be foot-soldiers of the Action Group, the party of the West that distributed the good things of life from Olympian helicopters. A fi fty-year-old Methodist with the habit of clutching a leather folder everywhere he went, Kansilo was a councillor long enough to have evolved an identity from the job. He is no longer one, but he still performs the duties – aff ects the pomp and circumstance of performing them. Such is the fl uidity of life on this fringe of offi cialdom, villages managed by the invisible hands of civil servants at the Secretariat, who are “directed to inform” by the Permanent Secretary who in turn keeps his position at the mercy of the Military Governor, Brigadier Oga Kekere. In this milieu, of a violence so deadening as to penetrate the very stuff of life into which its monstrosities disappear to be reborn as armed bandits shot at the Bar Beach on the pen-wielding authority of Brigadier Oga Kekere, it doesn’t matter that Kansilo is no longer in the Service. Who cares who knows?
Imagine the third character,
Cousin T, a.k.a. Tarifomah (Inter-Reformer), alias I-Dey-Dere, bus-loader, tout, back-up singer for an apala band, apprentice driver, possessed of an incredible gift of the gab. Cousin T doesn’t really live in the village; he lives in Ibadan but, as an apprentice driver, he arrives with the passenger mammy-wagon almost daily, and it is not unusual for him to miss a return journey as the lorry blasts its silencer out of the village while he is busy distributing his gifts to crowds who can’t get enough of him. When those gifts are wrapped in the foil of his poetry, the listener gets the distinct impression that the man had an argument who spoke of the language of this gift-giving as the missing link between music and speech. Cousin T would say: When a shoemaker’s wife prays, ‘May accursed feet not enter our home’, she is ruining her husband’s business.
He would say: ‘I shall feed on (i.e. prosper from) my profession’ is a prayer unbecoming of the night-soil man. He finds out what’s going on in the world by listening to the radio or eavesdropping on the news-stands at the Ayeye Terminus while waiting on a Bedford lorry. This is Ibadan, that city of improvised “refreshment stands or beer halls lining up along the brush” of which, again, Edouard the Poet of Relations sings in a French syntax mediated by skeptical Pan-Africanism. Cousin T makes history out of news, legends out of phrases. By the time he’s done explaining the latest involvements of Chief Mangosuthu Buthelezi of the newlyformed Inkatha Freedom Party in anti-apartheid politics, his audience is invited to imagine a figure out of a Daniel Fagunwa novel, down to the name. The chief as Gongoshu. Twenty when the story begins, Cousin T has had rough dealings with Elesu in the past. We’ll get to that. The word is out, and Cousin T brings it home, that a spectacular festival showcasing the best of African arts, cultures and customs is in the pipeline. It will be held in Lagos, at the National Stadium and inside the magnificent theatre just imported for the purpose from Sofia, Bulgaria. The theatre is designed like a Colonel’s cap; the head of state is Lieutenant-General Obasanjo. This is what Cousin T says: Lagos is hot. Obasanjo takes off his cap, and sets it down saying, “That is your theater! Dance dance dance and forget your sorrow!”
People laugh. They are gathered under the massive acacia tree at the edge of the bus station, with a view of the road to Ibadan. Someone wonders if Obasanjo had then returned home with his head bare. Cousin T smirks and says that army caps are ten for kobo. He says that Lagos is crowded, or there would be two or more free caps to throw around. But there is no space to waste in Lagos. Tarifomah, someone else asks him, have you seen this cap? And how can anyone dance inside a cap? Go to Iganmu, Cousin T fires back. I dey dere, he says. The cap is shiny and big, but you can’t get inside. For now there is no access.
Once he says I dey dere, people usually back off. If he doesn’t say that, he says, finger pointed: You dey dere? It is late morning. The passenger lorry is long departed, but if Cousin T gets through with this undertaking, he might yet be on time for the second trip, at two o’clock. So the interrogation continues. This dance in Lagos, what is it about? Did someone old and wealthy die? Cousin T says it is all about Festac.
What does it mean?
His lips pursed to deliver a sneer as fitting response to the dumb question, Cousin T wonders what “mean” means.
What does Lagos mean? What does Tarifomah mean? Just alias, he declares with a superior air. You see it you know it.
But alias for what?
Festac alias African dance and culture!
No one can miss the exclamation punch of the statement.
Down the road, a figure emerges in resplendent agbada, clutching a leather pouch under his arm. Cousin T is the first to notice, and as he watches the figure approach, he makes a comment under his breath. The rest giggle.
What does he say to make people laugh at the approach of this important man? Kansilo is not resident in the village, but people know him very well. The youth especially, able-bodied men like Cousin T, are getting close to the age of dread at this time of the day. Thank God this is August. Last March, every March, Kansilo enters the village with the stealth of a jungle cat, the last of a team comprising six strong-armed men, each of whom has found his way in through one of the numerous bush-paths. These are the tax officers, and it is their duty to gather as many young, able-bodied men as possible, ask to see the receipts of their income tax. That prized paper, with the coat-of-arms of the State Government sitting at its crest! If you are of tax-paying age and you do not have this paper, you do not loiter about the village at ten o’clock in the morning. You take off at the sight of the man dressed in a flowing agbada and carrying a leather pouch. For Kansilo’s men do not arrive by car or lorry. They sneak in, on foot, like bad blood in the network of arteries leading to farms and rivers and other villages, and swoop on a group of layabouts, like the one currently listening to Cousin T’s rhapsodies. You know they have arrived the moment you feel a sudden grip at the scruff of your shirt. Nobody really takes the precaution of paying taxes until this tail-end of the financial year, and so the operation ends with the hemline of one man’s shirt becoming entangled in the hemline of another’s shirt, on and on, until the eight or so victims totter about in a quandary, a spectacular source of jeer for the village urchins. They are chain-ganged three miles to Kansilo’s village, Metoh (from Methodist), from where, unless any of them is able to come up with the tax amount and purchase his freedom proofed with the stamped-paid receipt, they are transported to the council jail at Ido. The age of dread is the tax-paying age. Thank God this is August, that’s what Cousin T says in an undertone. Kansilo walks past them, his demeanor so businesslike it is doubtful that he returns the courtesy of their greetings. He knows where he is going, so no need to ask for directions. The village is constructed in the shape of a honeycomb, houses bunched together in parallel rows that rise and dip in depth, so that to make one’s way from the outskirts to the centre, one proceeds by a series of incrementally diagonal paths that look like shortcuts between the lower and the higher depths. Kansilo’s destination lies between the centre and the outer edge of the village, a distance of a hundred and eighty metres. Crablike he moves, barely nodding to the obligatory ‘welcome’ muttered at him, a sign of extreme bad manners for an out-of-villager. Where is he going? What is he up to? After one or two unkind cuts at the personage in garrulous dress, Cousin T returns to his unfinished business. Next January, he says, I will be at the National Stadium to see Festac.
He cannot miss the absolute lack of interest in this subtle offer. Everyone knows that all it takes Cousin T to reach Lagos is a wave of the hand at an approaching bus at the Ayeye Terminus, where most drivers are his pals. And he hops on board, paying his way with a running order of jokes, puns, tales and songs. And if he asks to take you along, who can pass up such an offer? The one person certain to go with him is already there – Femo, a distant cousin of his and a notorious acolyte at the Afrika Shrine. But the priorities of Cousin T’s audience seem to have been altered by the arrival of Kansilo, who has the gait of a man going to see the village potentates. Is the tax season about to change? There is no point worrying; whatever brings him will be known even before he departs.
Kansilo taps carefully at Elesu’s door, which is also the door of the village chief. It is a Compound, a coterie of compartments internally divided as rooms or quarters belonging to each section of a large family according to the pattern of seniority among the male children of its original builder, framed with an open courtyard. Kansilo has crabbed his way into the courtyard. A stranger entering a house as big as this at this time of the day usually announces his presence outside the main entrance, but he has huge credit here. When the village chief ran foul of government funds during the 1973 National Census, he faced more than reprimand. As in most matters to do with money, details of the scandal became as complicated as denominating the new currency, but as the people of the village came to understand it, their chief had simply been faced with the dilemma of making a living out of an accident he had historically risen to defeat. It was better to see it in those terms – the tragic fatality of a way of life not guaranteed to endure. Either that or the misfortune applied to the entire village of Multiple-Paths, steeply decadent, bankrupted by the same habits that used to make it prosperous. But Kansilo had stretched out a helping-hand; the chief’s ordeal thus ended with three days away from the village, a fate more bearable than a judicial inquiry, and when he returned, maligned defender of his people’s interests, it was to continue to reinforce the very system that had once ambushed him. He had Kansilo to thank. The chief is advanced in age; he’s the first son of the family, older than Elesu’s husband by eighteen years. He is not the reason the renewable councillor taps at the door today.
Elesu comes to the door; seeing who it is, she enthusiastically throws it open – it is something of an honor to receive him.
There are a few people about the Compound: children too young to go to school, young women preparing for the market, the very old, like the chief, observing the routine of boredom with the experience of half a lifetime. Having admitted the visitor, exchanged pleasantries, responded to small-talk with the fulsome mien of a former beneficiary, Elesu invites Kansilo to a seat. But no, says the man with the leather pouch, what brings him is not something to discuss in the hallway, within hearing distance of young women’s ears primed like magnets for the iron-filings of gossip. At a corner of the courtyard, to the distant left of the door through which Kansilo has just walked, sits a private shrine of Esu, the squat and dark fellow, marked with a block of laterite the size of a human head, the supporting wall muraled with years of palm-oil offerings. Further down, in an alcove built for the purpose, are the carvings of the god in different poses, each representation reverential but honest, in commonsensical acknowledgment of his ways: principled unpredictability.
Nearby there are also the ere-ibeji, the sculptures embodying the spirit of the twins, one of whom still lives, has just sent himself off on an errand before the arrival of the august visitor. In front of the alcove, there’s a bench carved out of brown stone, a bigger laterite to stand guard over the smallish king of hermeneutics. Elesu and her guest sit. Then someone appears at the outer door of the courtyard: Cousin T.
What does he want? He stands looking directly into the courtyard, seeming to need attention but not daring to step into the house. What does he want? Elesu’s conversation has hardly begun. Asking for a moment’s excuse, she rises and goes toward the young man. But before she reaches the door, Cousin T breaks into a smile, bows comically, and turns tail. He does not look back. A stunned Elesu watches him go, apprehensive of pranks.
She looks out. There is no one else about. Another shrine of Esu sits in the open, on the near side of the courtyard, behind the house to the left that cuts a diagonal line to it. A few years ago, Cousin T was in the village for a whole week. Out of job or out of trouble, he went everywhere, trailed by desperate village urchins looking for mischief once it became clear that their leader had run out of stories. No one knew when and how it happened, but a little before noon, a hawker of shea-butter calling into Elesu’s courtyard noticed an unusual amount of fresh soil at the shrine. Earth plowed afresh around the mound of laterite, its circumference littered with potsherds, ceramics and bits of a broken gourd. It was an obvious sign that the shrine had been vandalized; when Elesu appeared to admire the freshness of the shea-butter (she had no intention of buying), the hawker made a comment about the freshness of earth around the shrine. Shocked, the priestess responded by flinging herself down, on the spot, in awestruck homage to the abused god. She launched into a panegyric, an endless song that looped in and out of sonic focus, adumbrated by the charged desperateness of the singer’s motive. A heartgrieving sight; the hawker was too scared to watch. She lifted her tray and ran. Sufficiently placated with songs and chants, Esu grinned at the priestess, who approached, led by the light of the grin beaming from the halo of brown earth freshly turned. Elesu reverted to her eulogies, now at the measured pace of a plea, placatory, tuneful, but lowtoned, the complacent cooing of a pigeon nestling under the eaves in the heat of the day. Another round of curtseying at the foot of the god, and the priestess tossed a bit of palmoil on the laterite. Propitious palm-oil, the fluid measure of temperance.
Shortly after, Elesu stumbled on an urchin sitting in a corner of the village, scooping food out of a tin. The lad was eating Geisha, mackerel canned and stewed in tomato sauce. The moment he saw the woman, he rose and fled. Soon she happened on another, who acted likewise, and when she came to the third, she didn’t let him know what was upon him before she got hold of him.
I didn’t do it, the scared imp cried, Tarifomah took us there!
News of Elesu’s detective work had reached Cousin T; by the time she appeared at the village centre, cuffing the scamp by his ear, the priestess had amassed a crowd eager to know what had happened and desperate to know what was going to happen. Cousin T stood to one side, studying the crowd, watching Elesu closely. He watched her tell of the abomination of wrecking the shrine of the god of unpredictability. He watched as the crowd reacted in total astonishment to the passionate, patient reconstruction of the horrifying spectacle of a violated shrine. It came down to this: Cousin T had led a band of urchins to the shrine to dig up old coins used as offering to Esu, and had distributed the money among them. Never before, it was said, had this kind of thing happened to even minor gods, the benign ones that people struggled to shake out of neglect. But this, and to Esu, of all things! It didn’t matter whether or not Cousin T took some for himself. It didn’t matter that any offerings given to the god belonged to none but who wished to use it.
The graph of the priestess’s tale rose and rose, attaining an exaggerated level of declamatory anger, and climaxing with a furious finger pressed down at Cousin T’s nose, a rather mild punishment for the offence, and of which, by the general snorts of indignation that preceded it, the crowd seemed to approve. Then it happened. As swift as the climax of Elesu’s anger, at the very moment her forefinger touched the accused on the nose, a sharp object shot out of the youngster’s hand, catching the sun’s rays with a dazzling immediacy and immediately drawing a red line across the width of the woman’s face. The contented snorts erupted into even more indignant shouts of astonishment, but Elesu’s voice rose above all else. Her face dripping blood, she beat a path through the diagonal cluster of houses crying, I had no idea that he was armed! I didn’t know that he stood for danger!
The brutal act of slashing the face of a respected woman was condemned; Cousin T was overpowered, hauled before the elders, and scourged. But that day and the next, everyone wondered if he, and not Elesu, had acted on Esu’s behalf. Was not unpredictability, after all, the first thing about this god? In later days and months, Elesu healed the wounds dealt her by working out a friendship with her attacker. And people said: That’s Esu’s way. The deity who attacks his defender.
And people said:
There must be a reason that things turned out that way for Elesu. The god she attended might not be predictable, but he was always principled.
It is from of this sense of purpose and dread that she has risen to approach the comical figure loitering at the door of the courtyard. But he is gone; there are no other rascals around. She scurries toward the shrine to the left of the outer wall. There is nothing unusual about it. She repairs to the laterite bench where Kansilo sits and waits.
Out of his leather pouch, he brings a copy of Daily Sketch.
First, he opens the newspaper to its centre spread, placing it on the bench for Elesu to see it. Then he begins to speak. We of the black race are blessed with culture and tradition. We have a great civilization. Our governments recognize this wealth; our cultural heritage is our wealth. Eleven years ago, in Dakar, our people came from different parts of the world, they went to celebrate our rich cultural heritage. It was so good that they agreed to do it regularly – every ten years. Our country is the next host. In January next year, we will have a new festival. It has a name already; they call it Festac.
Our government has built big spaces to host it. It is a good thing for us.
He pauses. The priestess, who has been nodding to this odd but nice-sounding speech, says nothing. She watches him; she wonders if he needs a drink of water. She calls into the house for water for the guest. Aware that a more magisterial tone is called for, Kansilo brings the newspaper closer to his face, and reads a passage aloud, but slowly, because although Daily Sketch is an English-language newspaper, he pronounces words that cause Elesu to nod in comprehension.
“By the term art, we mean all disciplines that are useful to social life and have the character[pause]ristic feature of imparting beauty to the world: sculpture, painting, architecture, music and dance, drama, cinema, etc. The black and African art is not only an important and an essential element of black and African civilization and the greatest contribution of the latter to human culture, indeed it is also, for the structure of the civilization, an element and a factor of specif[halt]city…”
Kansilo translates as he reads, but Elesu hears only two things: the voice of a preacher, modulated in the mystifying Talking- Book gestures of the missionaries of her childhood, and the word “contribution”. Is this about an attempt to impose new levies? Are people of Metoh planning to plant a church? But she knows better than to ask. She listens. You do not ask the riddle-maker what the devil he means; you beat the devil of riddles by being phlegmatic. What Kansilo means is that as a priestess, custodian of the objects and accessories that impart beauty to the world, Elesu is one of a few people from around the black and African world to give Festac a good welcome. And since opportunity comes but once and opportunity lost can never be regained and time and tides wait for no one and heavens help those who help themselves and the journey of a thousand miles starts with a footstep and no one sings Don’t-Pass-Me-Over while lying down, I Kansilo, who know these things because of my contacts and exposure, wish to inform you that before it is too late, we have to make use of the opportunity that is knocking at the door.
Atop the deep column of the article Kansilo reads from sits the Festac logo, the majestic head of Queen Idia, the prize ivory sculpture pilfered during the punitive expedition in Benin in 1897. The logo is so positioned that an eye trained on the page cannot miss it; the paper is held in such a way that it is all Elesu sees when she looks. The Queen Idia is an oblong face with the stylized eyes looking down, as if at the nose, two vertical gashes lining the forehead, and behind these, the rest of the head, is the headdress, a complex beadwork bordered by twelve tiaras arranged in a semi-circle. Perhaps a crown, the feminine version of the king’s spectacular royal wear, the envy of those who knew what beauty it would impart to the world and had ensured that it stayed there, in the world, far away from home. They stare at the page for what seems like seventy-nine years. Something waits to be said, Elesu is the one to say it, but Kansilo’s personality has been forged in the crucible of inconvenient moments, the political perception that all transitions are profound or risky and that in order to stay in touch with power it is necessary to befriend forbidden knowledge. Elesu, staring at the female head, is riveted by it. Perhaps not. Kansilo speaks, gesturing at the sculptures nearby, in the alcove:
All these too can be put in the newspapers, so that they can impart beauty to the world and bring honour to those at home.
A short speech; having said so much indirectly, Kansilo entitles himself to the declarative. To which Elesu, after a pause just as short, replies that as a custodian she is but an intercessor, and she will perform this role by “asking my father”. She means that the undertaking calls for the propitiation of the fellow of Iserin, the squat mound of laterite present at once in here and out there. There is more: the head of the household, also sitting somewhere nearby and close to dotage, has to be told. In two days, perhaps, it will be possible to offer a detailed response to this declaration. There is more, but a question will suffice. Why is no one sending men and materials to propagate this Festac, like it happened during the National Census? Where are the posters, the radio jingles, the mobile trucks with loudspeakers cackling from their roofs? Kansilo says that the process has just begun. That’s one reason he is here, so early in the day.
Both are satisfied.
Kansilo rises to go; he crabs in the direction of the alcove, ready to admire the sculptures. Or merely regard them. He stands and stares. He feels like touching, but he will have to bring forth a coin or two; a toss of palm-oil will not do – that’s a gesture permitted only the priestess.
Stepping out of the courtyard, Kansilo pauses to light a cigarette. His gait is less businesslike now; he is sauntering through the village, tracing the same diagonal walkways he has earlier hurried through. When the retired councillor pauses again, to acknowledge greetings from familiar voices, Cousin T, who has never been far away, coughs and breaks into a ditty: The sky is overcast. Let no one smoke. The thunder king does not take kindly to flames.
The rude song startles Kansilo; he turns to look. Then he turns back to complete his greetings, hoping that his acquaintance will at least tongue-lash the youth. The man exchanging greetings with Kansilo sucks his teeth, seeking refuge in a proverb: When a child outgrows the whip, he invites the sanction of the lip; when the rebuke grows tame, the withering eye brings him shame.
He says it loud enough for Cousin T to hear, but the young man doesn’t seem to care. He circles the area like a rooster angling to mate, humming, whistling, and snapping his fingers to take the score. Unsure what his motives are, Kansilo quickly ends the pleasantries and goes on his way. The ditty is longer than three lines, but Cousin T withholds the final line, where the punch lies. Twenty-two years ago, when he had not yet been born, the song was very popular as a political jingle affronting the Action Group, party of the West, in quarters like the village of Multi-Paths where its rival, the NCNC, had a foothold. The line says: Penkelemes does not take kindly to the Palm Tree (the symbol of AG). Kansilo, let us recall, was one of the foot-soldiers of the old party.
Several hours later, close to six o’clock in the evening, Kansilo is back, his leather pouch clasped under his arm. This time, he stops under the acacia tree, to acknowledge greetings, scanning the gathered faces for the rude lad of earlier in the day. Cousin T is not there. Kansilo doesn’t have to stop for long just to respond to greetings; he is careful to look serious, to affect the demeanour of the offended. If he wishes to convey the impression that Cousin T is in trouble, he seems to succeed. Whether he is in a position to make the trouble real, beyond impressions, remains to be seen. Walking slowly now, but with greater deliberateness, he makes his way to the house lying between the centre and the outer edge of the village of Multiple-Paths. Cousin T’s song proves prophetic; the sky is becoming overcast: August, month of a million rains.
When Kansilo sweeps into Elesu’s courtyard, it is as if the woman has not moved a step from the stone-bench inside the portico. She is there, languid on her paunch, picking her teeth in a distracted manner that suggests more habit than necessity. Is she irritated to see him! His influence notwithstanding, the perception of the retired councillor as an unrelenting hustler is as common in the village as rain in August. If in the morning Kansilo was exploratory and indirect, this evening he is deliberate and to-the-point; if the purpose in the morning was to introduce or promote Festac, now the point is to claim its object, that thing which imparts beauty to the world; in the morning it had been up to him to break the ice, now he puts Elesu on the defensive, his mouth trained on her like a hose, drenching her with a deluge of questions:
What does the chief say? Which of the twins does this represent? Why is the shrine here and not there? What will the god demand? When will you be ready to receive Festac agents from Lagos? Do you mind if I talk to other priestesses?
The sky is overcast; it is twilight in the village of Multiple- Paths. Somewhere in the neighbourhood, amid the chatters of eventide, a noise more systematic than rhubarb is building up. In the distance, the sky rumbles with the sound of thunder. Following the attack from Cousin T, apart from consciously befriending the youngster, Elesu also revived a practice common to devotees of Esu, but which time and the pressures of Chrislamity had all but rendered quaint: the vow of abstinence. She took to fasting twice a week. Meditation concentrates the spirit. After Kansilo’s departure earlier in the day, she has considered this option, a purer way of readying the spirit for the reception of signals on how to proceed. It is Esu, more than the chief vegetating in the parlor, whose consent is primary. With the aggressive questioning, Elesu secretly wishes for the inspiration to handle the challenge. The noise from the centre of the village continues to rise, or come closer. The rain-clouds gather in density, throwing a dark pall over the village with the coming of dusk. It is time to bring out the storm lanterns. The young girls of the house are returning from the market. The noise trails them, getting louder the deeper they disappear into the Compound. It does not enter with them; it remains outside the courtyard, rowdy but determined, the frustrated hooftaps of a bridled horse. Elesu rises to light the courtyard.
When she returns, Kansilo is on his feet. The noise, strident and declamatory, stands permanently at the outer door. Drumbeats. The sky is overcast. The sky growls. Thunder sunders the sky, it shudders. Furious fingers of lightning scratch the sky. The night is alight with the sparks. The sound of stones beating an alarm out of tins and bottles has the unsettling clarity of bata, the drum of the thunder god. Then it stops, to be replaced by a one-tone song with an oddly familiar ring: The sky is overcast. Let no one smoke. The thunder king does not take kindly to flames.
The voice is as familiar as the song: Cousin T. To Elesu it is clear that Kansilo is ready to leave, although his questions remain unanswered. Wait a moment. The minor shrine at the foot of the laterite bench is near the site of the ere-ibeji, repositories of the spirits of the twins.
Kansilo, I’m done for! Where are my twins?
Use the light well, Elesu, use the light in your hands.
Cousin T and his band of drummers are straining at the bridle. The sky dense with moisture cracks from the menace of unruly noises, thunder and lightning, bottles, tins and stones…!
Kansilo, where are they? Wooden sculptures don’t walk!
Patience, Elesu, patience. I’m standing here with you.
Kansilo, I will ask my father to find them for me!
Patience, Elesu. Let me help you…
Sango, the thunder king, is the spirit of the rainy season.
When the god is on the prowl, in anger or leisure, his devotees observe a worse affront than smoking: leaning on a wall. Kansilo, moving out of the way of Elesu’s desperate search, leans backwards, his back resting on the wall of the courtyard. A deafening roll of thunder crashes to earth with the rains, its impact so strong it knocks the storm lantern out of the woman’s hand, plunging the courtyard into darkness. The rain descends in noisy torrents, but above it rise the singing voices of Cousin T’s orchestra, calling on the thunder king to behold the audacity of mortals, and act. Kansilo blunders through the wet twilight without his pouch.
In the morning, after the rain, a sodden copy of the Daily
Sketch will stick out of the pouch, next to the ere-ibeji, dark and polished, washed clean by rainwater.

Calls for restitution African artifacts from Western museums are mounting. Against this backdrop, Nigeria’s response to the British (Second World Black and African Festival of Arts and Culture) in pirating the head of Queen Idia to use it as a logo for Festac 77 , proposes another dissonant route that challenges the very idea of the work of art as unique object.

Tam Fiofori gives the history “When in the run-up to FESTAC ’77 Nigeria asked Britain and the British Museum to return the exquisite carved ivory mask of Queen Idia which had been chosen as the symbol of the FESTAC ’77 logo, the British had the diplomatic nerve to suggest that the Queen Idia could be loaned to Nigeria for a sum of two million pounds sterling. Of course Nigeria rejected the ridiculous offer and, Oba Akenzua 11 – Patron of the Benin Bronze casters, Ivory, Wood carvers (and other) Guilds – asked the best of the skilled ivory carvers of Benin to produce a ‘photographic’ copy of the original carving and this was successfully used for FESTAC ’77.” (Forever Bronze, Modern Ghana, 2009)

Meet the artist who pirated Queen Idia back in calving the Festac 77 mask below.

Check out Akin Adesokan’s Festac 77 a faction that explores art piracy, the curse of Festac and its many restless gods and even suggests the festival was curated by Esu Elegba:

“Imagine,
first,
a priestess of Esu (Elegbara), the West African god of the crossroads and inspiration for the less tangible practice of hermeneutics. The woman, in her late sixties when the story begins, in August 1976, in a small village three hours by car north of Lagos, is also the mother of twins born in 1930. One of them was dead within months of birth, hence the obligatory recomposition of the spirit of the departed in ere-ibeji. The twin sculptures are polished to shiny black by original emulsion and decades of oiling and handling. Her profession of Esu does not confl ict with her attendance on the spirit of the twins, or even the fact that her children answer to Muslim names. Both are her life, fabric of the relative peace of early-to-mid-twentieth century western Nigeria, “with its modern constructions with one foot in the bush…the whole area with its infi nity of night lights that appear to illuminate the noise”, as seen through the eyes of Edouard the Antillean. The peace was relative because, in times past, when she was not yet a child, gunshots from the hundred-year wars were the heartbeats of life, its passions the periodic fi res of ostentatious destructions. Insensate times: the smell of burning ivory, the sound of blunderbuss, the undying certainty that what was sold down the river for a fl ask of rum or sachet of gunpowder could not, like the river, fl ow back. What was gone was gone; the law of eternal return did not apply. Her name is Elesu, she who professes Esu.”

Soyinka proposed we simply steal them back:

“Perhaps the single most significant event of that festival, however, was one that never did take place: this was the repatriation of the original of the symbol… [the] famous ivory mask from Benin, exquisitely carved and detailed, remained safely ensconced in the vast labyrinths of the British Museum in London. The mask was stolen property, and the aggrieved had a right to reclaim their property by any means. What I proposed instead was that a task force of specialists in such matters, including foreign mercenaries if necessary, be set up to bring back the treasure—and as many others as possible—in one swift, once-for-all-time, coordinated operation. Spiriting away the Benin mask for FESTAC—the 1977 Festival of Black and African Arts—in good time for the opening of the festival would have been much easier, cost much less, and redressed, albeit symbolically, an ancient wrong. I was quite ready to be part of the team. The potential consequences seemed trivial, considering the prize.” (Wole Soyinka, You Must Set Forth at Dawn: A Memoir, 2007)

This has been this has been the basis for Nigerian cultural production since Festac – Onitsha, nollywood, Naija jams etc. Also read Uzor Maxim Uzoatu’s on the Onitsha Republic and Louis Chude-Sokei on how Nigeria invented the internet.

More soon come! Watch this space for the FESTAC book and LP.

In his new book, The Sound of Culture: Diaspora and Black Technopoetics, Louis Chude-Sokei samples freely from history, music, literature and science, conjuring new meanings from dead texts, to build an echo chamber where the discourses of race and technology collide. At a time when automation threatens jobs and pits humans against machine and Artificial Intelligence systems manage financial markets, Chude-Sokei’s arkeological excavations reverberate through the future-present. In this conversation, he joins Kodwo Eshun and Appau Junior Boakye-Yiadom on a journey into science fiction and Afrofuturism that engages the intimate relations between black peoples and technology within the wider imperial histories of industrialisation and slavery.

“What then comes up for me in this conversation about the limits of the human is what constitutes the human, right? Because whenever you ask whether or not this is human or that is human, you’re actually asking “what is the human?” in the first place. Which is a question that we still don’t really know. The same thing when we talk about artificial intelligence. What artificial intelligence has taught us is that we don’t know what intelligence is. Whenever we encounter a machine, can it think? Does it have a soul? And then the question becomes: well, what is thinking? What is a soul? Are they human? Do they merely mimic us? Will they take over from us? Will they revolt? These same exact questions that were asked about slaves during slavery. This is not an accident. Things that seem accidental are not accidental at all. It’s a shared logic around a restrictive understanding of what constitutes the human. And that’s where blacks and robots and machines really come together – not just in a clever, theoretical formulation. It’s there in history. It’s why Robert Johnson wants to have sex with his phonograph.”

Read more from an edited transcript in The Chronic: The Invention of Zimbabwe.

 The Chronic, “The Invention of Zimbabwe”, writes Zimbabwe beyond white fears and the Africa-South conundrum.

The accompanying books magazine, XiBARUU TEERE YI (Chronic Books in Wolof) asks the urgent question: What can African Writers Learn from Cheikh Anta Diop?

To purchase in print or as a PDF head to our online shop, or get copies from your nearest dealer.

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In April 2018, PASS welcomed back Georgia Anne Muldrow and her “ancestral orchestra” feat. Thandi Ntuli Quartet and The Monkey Nuts to Pan African Space Station (PASS). Below is an excerpt of that night. Breathe!

For more visit the Pan African Space Station.

On 1 October 2009, Pan African Space Station hosted Udaba at The Centre for the Book, Cape Town.
Udaba was a musical flurry of passion, soul, soothsaying, truth-telling and jazz poetry that takes you on flights of improvisational abandon. Their politically engaged elegies fused vernacular lyricism, Xhosa praise singing and African indigenous music on jam-like sets with a rotating crew of regular collaborators. Udaba drew their inspiration from Xhosa literature and they referred to their music as Umculo Buciko (musical essays).

For PASS, Udaba collaborated with spoken-word author and filmmaker Kgafela oa Magogodi.

Ubada have since disbaned, but two of the five founding members, Liyo and Pura hasve formed Izithunywa Zohlanga (Messengers of the Nation) to use indigenous repertoire and idioms to produce music and literature that speaks directly to the present in post-Apartheid South Africa while at the same time being custodians of our heritage through performances. Koketso Potsane writes on the new duo here. 

From 11 -15 December 2016, the Pan African Space Station transmitted live in Amsterdam from the OBA Central Library.

PASS is an experiment in speaking, listening, playing, partying and community, featuring collaborations with artists and rebels whose practices draw from and respond to a variety of contexts; prompting us, through performance, conversation and other forms, to imagine how worlds connect.

Listen to Kodwo Eshun further entangling our imaginations with ‘Music of Resilience’, recorded on day two of the intervention. For more from PASS in Amsterdam, please visit our Mixcloud.

Other contributions include ‘Black Stereo’ (Jimmy Rage and Bamba Al Mansour), Chandra Frank, Franck Biyong, Sammy Baloji, Akinbode Akinbiyi, Faustin Linyekula and Jose Pereelanga paying tribute to Franco and TPOK, Amal Alhaag and Maria Guggenbichler reminding you to ‘Count Your Blessings’, Angele Etoundi Essamba, ‘Protest Pop’ with Neo Muyanga, Em’kal Eyongapka, Aurelie Lierman and many many more. More about the landing can be found here.

This installment of Stories about Music in Africa features Shabaka Hutchings and The Brother Moves On (Raytheon Moorvan, Siyabonga Mthembu, Zelizwe Mthembu, Simphiwe Tshabalala and Ayanda Zalekile)

Stories About Music In Africa is a series of Pan African Space Station transmissions, concert-lectures, recorded at the Chimurenga headquarters in Cape Town as well as satellite locations across the African world.