Beyond the biennial: Bamako at 15 years

Photographer: Sammy Baloji. Title: Gécamines, from the series, Memory, 2006. Lubumbashi, Democratic Republic of Congo. Permission to reproduce gratefully acknowledged.

The Rencontres de Bamako, or African photography biennial, which ran from the 7th of November to the 7th of December 2009, in Mali’s capital city, provokes fervent conversation among visiting artists and spectators. Now in its eighth edition, the festival has picked up impressive momentum over the years. Yet there remains little consensus as to its bright spots or its shortcomings. Both call for more sustained critical exploration: what can the biennial provide artists and audiences beyond a passive venue for display? Can it instigate novel spaces or offer artists new ways of rethinking their work in a larger, post-pan-African world?

This year’s exhibitions testified to the sophistication and range of a rising generation of photographers, many of whose careers have benefited from opportunities connected with the event. But lost opportunities were equally in evidence – and sometimes glaring. In conversations with photographers, we heard, not surprisingly, that their demands and desires were not always best served by the Paris-based remote-planning apparatus. The expectations and agendas of distant patrons and markets, usually but not exclusively in Europe, and local Malian actors, are pulling the festival in opposite directions. Issues of sustainability have plagued the event from its inception and, in some instances, have become only starker. Overall, we were left with the impression that sponsors’ approach to organization and oversight of the Rencontres has not always kept pace with developments on the continent. Despite these many challenges, and the complexities of the cultural policies – and politics – behind them, we were encouraged by a number of promising new initiatives sprouting up.

The broad inclusion of artists from across Africa worked against any depth of display in the international exhibition. The mix of mature and new artists, cheek-by-jowl, was, for some, a strength of the event, and new artists provided some of the most compelling work. ‘Borders’ was the theme chosen by the event’s principal sponsor, Culturesfrance, an agency of the French ministries of Foreign Affairs, Culture, and Communication. Some have begun to ask whether a curatorial theme is still needed or relevant. Perhaps the real question should be: whose interest does it serve? This one emphasized the organization’s official goal: featuring African talent unknown in European exhibition circles. This aim responded to earlier biennials, which were populated by established, often expatriate African photographers.

This year’s creative directors and the Malian organizers faced, we learned, inordinate time pressure in the processes of selection and production. The main sponsors (Culturesfrance) dragged their feet in naming the creative directors (Michket Krifa and Laura Serani) until January 2009, an unthinkable 10 months in advance of the event. The delay undoubtedly accounts for the unevenness of many selections. It may also explain the reliance on pat and predictable interpretations in conceptual decisions about many of the groupings. This was particularly the case in the so-called international or pan-African exhibition: portraits of refugees and asylum-seekers were clustered in one or two galleries, the architecture of war-torn cities in another. In discussions of the reasons for the delay, and in the approach to the obstacles it inevitably threw up, what came through was the clunkiness of a top-down, institution-heavy approach.

Whether this approach is typical of ‘northern’ funding remains an open question in Bamako. Samuel Sidibé, director of the National Museum and the head of the biennial’s administration on the Malian side, cited pressure on the part of Culturesfrance to move management from the Malian Ministry of Culture to private associations – which have yet to be devised or, according to many in Bamako, are still precarious where they do exist – as a major factor contributing to this year’s delay and resultant organisational problems: ‘I myself was not in favour of this. Because I thought – I knew – that the [private] structures in Mali are not yet strong enough to manage an event like this’. In the end, this year’s event was not handed over to the non-state structures envisaged in France, and there was little indication that a hybrid public-private organizing body could, or should, be invented in the near future, as some had wished it might this year.

Those structures that have been established by virtue of the biennial’s influence have been conceived largely as development projects focused on stepping up the inclusion of Malian actors and institutions. The fate of these efforts remains wildly uncertain. There is growing criticism (voiced by scholars such as Achille Mbembe among others) of projects funding arts as a means of development and cultural diplomacy. Investment in schools, technical training, and infrastructure has not been able to address the gargantuan divides in access to resources across the continent, nor have these kinds of projects been converted to income-generators for Mali.

Take, for example, the production of the exhibition objects. Thanks to the biennial’s presence, Bamako now has a state-of-the art photo lab able to produce large-format exhibition prints: the Swiss-funded CFP (Cadre de promotion pour la formation en photographie). The CFP has produced prints for past editions, on a limited basis. This year, however, no prints were made in Bamako. All were made in Paris – and shipped, at exorbitant expense, framed and glazed, to Mali. It was explained that the job prices quoted to the festival’s direction by the CFP were 2-3 times higher than those given by the Parisian lab, Picto that ultimately did the printing. Without a local market for large-format prints, no lab can offer ‘competitive’ pricing. It is worth noting that shipping and associated costs such as insurance take up a large proportion of any festival’s budget, and clearing customs in ports around the world remains a monumental hassle. The decision to ship heavy, expensive, and fragile frames from Paris, together with complaints about the DVD players (year after year, videos are not working or not reset after routine power outages long familiar to residents of Bamako and other southern cities whose grids are overtaxed), has become emblematic of a near total disregard for site-specificity and contributes to the sense that the organizers are out of touch.

Renewed, with some success, were the French organisers’ commitments to bring all of the artists to Bamako, to hype them via invited African and European media outlets, and to host big parties where deal-making could unfold. Puma Creative and its spin-off, Creative Africa Network, deserve special mention for their mobility grant programme, which funded travel to Bamako for all exhibiting photographers. This and other efforts to broaden inclusion are only at the beginning stages and will be crucial to the Rencontres’ future. A deeper analysis must ask whether the artists need or want the hype and the deal-making as much as longer-term professional investments and access to other kinds of resources.

A notable exception to this mentality, which sees display as a direct line to the market, accompanied this year’s effort: a portfolio review sponsored by the Goethe Institut SudAfrika. This private forum featured five curators and ten artists, many whom had participated in earlier Bamako exhibitions. The event was decidedly off-programme, timed to overlap by a day with the biennial’s trading-week, so that many participants showed up only as the biennial’s creative direction and other visitors were departing. Peter Anders, the Head of Cultural Programmes for sub-Saharan Africa, inaugurated the first such workshop last year at Maputo. For him and others – Simon Njami worked closely with Anders in elaborating the initiative – the Goethe-sponsored portfolio reviews attempt to redress the biennial’s appearance as a ‘decoration or representation of national interests’. In contrast to the biennial’s professional-week programmes, Goethe’s forum was directed at artists in early and mid-career, and attended to the conceptual dimensions of each artist’s project.

Anders describes the programme as a direct response to the ‘lack of criticism on the continent’. The event’s organizers (including Cara Snyman, Cultural Programmes Officer) are keenly aware of the impact of the lack of fora for substantive critical discourse on the experiences and careers of contemporary artists. Says Anders of the sessions: ‘I’m not sure if it is an original or a new concept, but it is a very concentrated concept…not at all addressed to the public. […] For us at the Goethe Institut, this is a very valid format. To invest in individuals, and not to go ahead directly with realizing exhibitions, but really to support their career: their ongoing career’. Anders and his colleagues are not blind to the fact that this approach, i.e., investment in individual artists, and intensifying forms of critique, represents a marked difference from approaches and agendas that characterized the main event: ‘Our clients are our artists, and not a politician, so that’s the point’.

In a similar spirit to Goethe, but articulated from their own unique positions, many enterprising photographers had their own ideas of the biennial’s usefulness. They formed new alliances, and wondered about staging smaller shows connecting institutions ‘south to south’. In hotel gardens and at nightclub tables, they wondered about dependence on European funding, made claims to access, or doubted them. If the biennial’s organizers continue to maintain their tight grip on production and planning and to devote little to platforms for critical discourse, the artists – and a new generation of activist curators – have their own ideas about what the alternatives will look like.

It was not unusual for discussion of the future to begin with an explicit, often enraged, critique of centralized directives identified with the status quo. In the words of Ananías Léki Dago, a photographer from Côte d’Ivoire who has exhibited in Bamako from the early days, and who has also mounted a pioneering festival in Abidjan: ‘The problem is that the French cultural politics don’t help us to become independent. They organize everything in France and then they come here. They cook there and they come to eat here’. Another artist, who is not Malian but who has lived in Bamako for several years, recounted the story of how, when he was invited to propose a project for inclusion in this year’s biennial, he was given an appointment at a Paris address.

Small acts of resistance were made with gritted teeth and not a little good humor. Several photographers endured protracted layovers and multi-day treks to and from Bamako – refusing to fly to Harare or Maputo via Paris. But still they flew, to discuss their own and one another’s projects, other festivals, new initiatives and new prospects with independent curators and corporate collectors in Nigeria and South Africa – and to engage in broader expressions of solidarity. As Léki Dago also said: ‘My brothers and sisters are here. I have to see them. […] I think that we have to recognize that Bamako is the only important event for photography in Africa, so let’s go there, and when we meet each other, let’s talk. Let’s talk about what we can do, how we can organize ourselves amongst ourselves, from where we are now’.

Jennifer Bajorek, Goldsmiths’ College, University of London and
Erin Haney, National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institution

Speed and Position: The Post-Event City

You can’t take the rush out of a gold rush town and get it to stroll or sit down. The rush is its nervous system fueled by large and singular events. Johannesburg likes to think of itself more as drag strip racing than random family outings in sensible cars. So the 2010 World Cup is the turbo kicking into Johannesburg’s already accelerated history.

The Heisenberg Principal of Uncertainty – more as metaphor than scientific fact – argues that speed and position cannot be measured simultaneously. Or in a nuanced understanding, the more precisely you know one, the less you know the other. It’s a question of concentration and degree, a question in which the observer is implicated.

Right now Johannesburg is concentrated on the Big Event accelerating it into another “World Class” future. It’s laying down fast infrastructure to prove it, from the Gautrain to the BRT, and like Haussmann’s Paris, it will be hard to ignore the spokes of World Class in 2010. It’s an undeniably exciting time for Johannesburg and South Africa.

But what remains of the city, or of cities generally, or of the societies and architectures that compose them, after the Big Event has rushed on to another part of the world? Do cities have other times to return to, or do they just get busy on the bid for the next World Class race meet?

In the uncertainty dilemma, Johannesburg favors speed. It’s a young city. Position is more of an afterthought, the grabbing of styles or the deployment of staging techniques. Or in that secluded moment, buckled up in an airline seat thumbing through the duty-free magazine and feeling compelled to want something, position is just a listless pause before takeoff.

Positions-making-and-having-their-own-times do not often occur in urban thinking in South Africa. It’s why Johannesburg has a problem understanding that immigration - as seepage more than tourism or business trips - is forming more complex urban situations, a cosmopolitan awakening that is continental. Johannesburg could become a unique city to live in, rather than an estate agent’s brochure to read, or a “World Class African City” to visit.

But lurking in Johannesburg there is always a yearning for the fast Las Vegas gambling town– a city where no one is born or dies, but everyone visits for at most two weeks: to make a fortune or lose one, to get married or get divorced, to get laid or hold forth with bourbon. Speed comes at a cost. At high speed, position is a post-modern desert on the way to a craps game - a dumping ground for retreads, sign posts and this week’s failed lottery tickets.

The Heisenberg dilemma of speed and position is not unique to Johannesburg as a city. The dilemma has occurred in all cities growing quickly from provincial origins into metropolitan futures, as more and more people demanded to live in them for whatever reason.

When the dilemma presented itself towards the end of the 19th Century, Chicago conveniently burned to the ground and infrastructure gave rise to the 20th Century version. Sentiment was a non-starter in Chicago’s new beginning. But other cities grappled with measuring the new slang of urban expansion against their outdated design and social dictionaries. In the case of 19th Century London or Paris, it was a repressive classical dictionary where tidiness, beauty and infrastructure were successfully deployed against the “social anarchy” of new urban societies demanding and making new urban forms.

Nowadays property values do the excluding work of classicism in World Class Cities and “New Urbanism” has become the solution for also-ran cities. Prepackage and fence-in, the pocket bourgeoisie add instant property value to World Class Satellites. A few extra bucks for a cappuccino is a small price to pay for hefty guards at the gates ensuring the pockets remain uncontaminated and free to believe they’re in that arcade in Milan.

In cities like Lagos or Sao Paulo, the slang is overwhelming and the dictionaries can’t cope. The organism is too large to put under current design macroscopes, despite heroic efforts by architect-visionaries like Rem Koolhaas, with unfortunately too little time to turn their full attention to Africa, South America or other exotica.

Philosophically, we no longer live in a Newtonian universe where space and time are neatly separated and can be discussed mechanically. To discuss position or speed now is to discuss each with the adjunct of the other, and acknowledge the observer in prejudices. It is relative, yes, but more it is a paradox that demands continual shifts in viewpoint and thinking.

Simply put, position accrues time(s) as depth. Positions are stained by social force and habit, cultural bric-a-brac, topography and climate, each coming laden with ideas and demands. They resist speed and suggest that other times be recognized and built upon. Position is not a nostalgic desire to stand still, but more like having dinner in a motor home speeding down the highway, the concentrated and existential time-within-Time we occasionally call living-for-life or savoring-the-moment.

Speed, on the other hand, is more often than not taken as a singular metaphor that becomes a mechanical solution or a psychosomatic internal combustion engine, a physical or mental force urging us all into a future that necessarily remains just out of reach.

Flying is still an unlikely miracle to most human beings. The unlikely miracle gave rise to the Uber-Bourgeoisie, a World Class that inverted immigration from a movement of the very poor to a movement of the very rich. To the Uber-Bourgeoisie, architecture and cities are an interactive string of spectacles and events designed in fast time. The Uber-Bourgeoisie hit the pause button when they need a moment to dwell in extruded apartments where the kitchen is in New York and the bedroom in Shanghai. World Class Architects are the designers and event managers of this new immigration, the iconic Moses accelerating the Uber Bourgeois into the promised stratosphere of spaces mimicking the space-time continuum and making reluctant concessions to local gravities to prevent champagne glasses falling off tables.

Glancing for a moment out of the aircraft window to look at a stretch of the Sahara that still takes weeks to cross on foot, then returning to read the Economist, it is justifiable to think that humanity now lives in irreconcilable times, and that the humanist, if mechanical proposition in Newtonian thought where space and time seemed predictable and cohesive and could form part of a social solution, is now impossible.

But then suddenly, as happens in the stratosphere, whether financial or architectural, the Uber-Bourgeois Shuttle hit an airless pocket and dropped thousands of meters. The ground and its footsloggers seem not only worthy of thought, but imminent.

Thomas Jefferson envisioned a productive agrarian state in which he hoped cities would play a minor role. His cohort, Ben Franklin, made terse, dismissive edits to Jefferson’s meandering texts, probably because Franklin was impatient to get back to Paris, a city he loved to live in. Philadelphia he reserved for homilies. In the yin-yang of two thinkers carving a Humanist United States out of a soon to be indigenous-free stretch of land some 3,000 miles long, Franklin retained his emotional attachment to the continental European city as an interesting, enjoyable and elaborately social place. Jefferson, on the other hand, foresaw that in the New World, the city would become a mechanical wealth-making device where the rich exploited the poor - the translation of Newtonian mechanics into urban purpose.

Implicit in the 19th Century Industrial Revolution was the growing idea of the city as a functional device. 20th Century Modernism made this explicit and fine-tuned the parts - Corbusian houses as machines-to-live-in – to fit the idea of the city as a productive machine. Lately, with the functional device established, the post-Modern city can now be marketed worldwide as a consumable object or service.

In Heisenberg terms, the continental European city, by and large, through agglomerations of position established by long histories of occupation, resisted the singular idea of the city as speed-turned- device-turned-service. Cities in the New World were less able to resist this; they still fill and empty like a factory floor in economies measured by housing start-ups and foreclosures, as if dwelling were beside the point in contexts based on movement.

Johannesburg is a 20th Century city whose reason for being was the mining and processing of gold. It was born of industrial purpose and would have few references other than speed had it not occurred in Africa, the only continent, other than Asia, where viable indigenous populations had position enough to survive colonialism, then gain independence. So Johannesburg, if it emptied as a factory floor like Pittsburgh or Detroit, would always be guaranteed further occupation. It would lose one value, only to quickly gain another.

There should have been something reassuring in this, that Johannesburg was not weakly positioned in a desolate middle-class landscape like the Mid-West, where immigrant nuclear families were connected like vacuum cleaners sucking wealth from a fluctuating New World grid. Johannesburg might have understood its position more like Rome - a rock on the edge of an ocean, corroded and added to by consistent social tides.

But in the Heisenberg dilemma Johannesburg continues to ignore position and insist on speed. This is because Johannesburg understands itself as a New World City, rather than an Old World City, or Another World City.

Uniquely in sub-Saharan Africa, Johannesburg was founded by settlers neither as an administrative capital, nor a commodity-based city or port. From the outset Johannesburg was an industrial city. So it embraced the paradigm of American cities like Pittsburgh and subscribed to the wealth-making ideas of New World cities, more or less as middle-class processing plants. The wave of post-World War II wannabe-middle-class European immigrants into South Africa certainly reinforced this idea.

But in populated Africa the paradigm was far from convincing. In the New World Continents of North America and Australia, indigenous populations were quickly decimated and an inversion was possible - immigrants became permanent and middle-class and the already marginalized locals stayed marginalized. These were continents that could fully embrace speed and create more or less convincing fictions of position on the blank pages of uninhabited landscapes.

It is almost as if, in realizing its mistake, Johannesburg was forced into denial and developed an obsessive-compulsive need to prove that is was not only part of the New World machine, but could develop it in alarming new ways.

In forcing the necessary immigrant-local inversion during the golden era of the New World City after 1945, Johannesburg and other South African cities began to conceive themselves as countries-within-countries with quality checks to control influx - plants that could then choose raw material from local populations to process into urban middle class. After the International Socialist rhetoric of pre-war South Africa gave way to a National Socialist government after the war, their constituents, the 80% rural Afrikaans population, were first in line to benefit. By the early 60’s, 80% had been urbanized.

Johannesburg was a highly efficient machine, often bemused by bad international reception of its resounding success. In obsessive compulsiveness, it not only kept up with New World infrastructure, but in things like plumbing surpassed the wildest expectations of Modernism, managing to keep the shit of 6 distinct groups of human beings separate and create spaghetti-like facades on factories - an unprecedented addition to Modernist design vocabulary.

The choice of speed and its translation into urbanism as a wealth transferring process, still lingers in post-94 Johannesburg’s thinking and behavior. Johannesburg’s World Class criminal efficiency can be seen as part of this habit, a consequence of propagating the city more as process than position.

But strangely enough, in the singular lead-up to the World Cup and the frenetic construction of mega-public transport systems, the city is showing interesting signs of establishing position, socially, politically and mythically.

The taxi drivers, a growing constituency since the waning years of apartheid, have worked South African cities into a web and lexicon of flexible connectivity, and relish the iconic value of their popular limousines in a city infatuated by smart cars. In the lead-up to the World Cup they are throwing a spanner in the public works, claiming not only their economic and functional role, but also their position as part of the city’s new mythology.

Other than the Russian Constructivist exuberance just after 1916, Modernism with its terse functional and protestant attitude to the human condition, had little to offer that was celebratory. On New Year’s Day in Durban, the taxi drivers eschew the merely functional role of getting people to work. Hundreds gather on the beach front, laden with passengers taking a holiday and setting up barbeques – a busman’s holiday of sorts. To an outsider this might be confused with large family outings, but in the sense of Heisenberg, it is the depthening of position as the 16 person taxi has developed a distinct urban sociability and along with this a political resistance to the one-machine idea endemic to both apartheid and post-apartheid political thinking in South African.

The mark of a city is how it deals with both celebration and tragedy. Whether it is tied to singular events like the Nuremburg Rally or other nation building tactics to gain a sense of social connection and belonging, or whether it develops these from the organic give-and-take and frictions of daily urban life. In South Africa’s continuing social insecurity there are still far too many National Holidays. It’s alarming in a country with a notorious history of collusion between capitalism and the national socialist state that being South African, being sociable and feeling worthwhile as a human being should still be considered the exclusive patronage of the central government or of the marketing ploys of capitalism galvanizing a nation into wanting what it cannot afford.

In the lead-up and aftermath to World Cup 2010, it would be good to remember the street traders and the World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg in 2002. By 2002 street traders had staked their claims, like early gold prospectors, across the horizontal plane of inner city Johannesburg. In the interests of putting on a smart face for international visitors, traders were removed from many city streets for 2 weeks. 2 weeks is a short time in the speedy history of the world, but street traders could not suspend trading for longer than 4 days. So ironically a World Summit on Sustainability put an end to the fragile sustainability of many street traders.

2010 is a much different time from 2002. South Africa’s situation is now reflected globally in the crash of international capitalism and the reappearance of the ground. It seems a better time to concentrate on the experimental possibilities and implications for design and architecture in Johannesburg and other South African cities, than cling to maligned speculations on what is or what is not a World Class City.

By Rodney Place
Place is a Johannesburg artist. He has spent a few years in Eastern Europe.

End of Aids denial era a chance to move forward

Manto Tshabalala-Msimang, photo credits: Mail and Guardian

Much has been written in the press recently about the death of South Africa’s former health minister, Manto Tshabalala-Msimang. Some of these reports pull no punches in highlighting the devastating role of the former health minister in buttressing former President Mbeki’s AIDS denialism. A recent Harvard University study found that the former President’s AIDS denialism was responsible for 350 000 deaths. In addition to this tragic loss of life, there were other less visible casualties. In particular, the polarised character of the politics of AIDS science during the Mbeki-era stymied open and constructive debate about how to tackle the pandemic.

The story of AIDS treatment in South Africa has been widely portrayed as a heroic David and Goliath struggle in which activists were pitted against the might of the state and the global pharmaceutical industry. But of course this is not the only way in which the AID treatment story in South Africa has been, or can be, narrated. Over the past decade, AIDS debates became highly polarised resulting in the emergence of sharply divided camps. During the height of these contestations over AIDS science it was very difficult to debate the merits of a range of issues including traditional healing, nutrition, diet, HIV prevention, ARV side-effects, and drug resistance, without risking being slotted into the pro-Mbeki AIDS dissident camp. Mere discussions of the relationship between HIV, nutrition and poverty provoked suspicion in some AIDS activist quarters. Even support for the government’s promotion of HIV prevention programmes was at times questioned by activists for diverting attention away from grassroots struggles for ARVs. In this highly charged political environment, there was little room for open debate and difference. Mark Gevisser’s empathetic biography of former President Mbeki, for example, was read by some AIDS activists as veering dangerously towards becoming an apologia for Mbeki’s brand of AIDS denialism. Didier Fassin’s (2008) even more empathetic reading of Mbeki’s “AIDS talk” in When Bodies Remember received a particularly hostile response from South African AIDS activists, health practitioners and academics.

The radical polarisation of AIDS positions and rhetorics was to be expected given the devastating reality of the AIDS crisis and the former President’s stubborn refusal to acknowledge the desperate need for antiretroviral therapy within the public health system. It was therefore perhaps hardly surprising that very clear lines were drawn and policed between various positions in AIDS debates during the Mbeki era. Of course similar polarising processes have surfaced in the course of contentious public debates on issues such as global climate change and nuclear energy.

Much has been written about the twists and turns in the politics of AIDS treatment in South Africa. Yet, most of these accounts have conformed to a David and Goliath narrative in terms of which heroic AIDS activists successfully fought against the might of the South African State and the global pharmaceutical industry. These accounts generally assume that activists were absolutely correct in claiming that ART is a financially viable, ethically principled, and scientifically proven biomedical technology whose successful implementation simply needed a cheaper drug pricing structure and the political will from donors and governments. There is very little ambiguity and contextual specificity in these accounts.

Sceptics and opponents of ART are described in these accounts as advocates of irrational arguments and pseudo-science. Some AIDS dissidents and denialists such as former President Mbeki and Manto Tshabalala-Msimang are even accused of complicity in genocide by activists and politicians. Borrowing liberally from anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist rhetoric, the dissidents argued that the profiteering pharmaceutical industry in the West was promoting AIDS drugs in order to exploit Third World markets. TAC activists featured in these dissident accounts as unscrupulous salespersons for the pharmaceutical industry. The dissidents also questioned the efficacy and safety of antiretrovirals, and instead promoted the efficacy of traditional medicines, nutrition, special diets (e.g., olive oil, garlic, African potatoes) and vitamins.

One of the costs of the “dissident debate” was that any questioning of AIDS orthodoxy of any sort was deemed to be complicit with AIDS denialism and dissident science. These highly polemical and politically charged contestations between activists and “dissidents” dominated the headlines, and contributed towards the radical hardening of the boundaries between positions on HIV. This resulted in the production of a stark divide between what was considered “proper science” and “pseudoscience.”

Even questions raised about cultural, logistical, financial and human resource obstacles to ARV rollout were labeled by some militant activists as examples of pro-Mbeki denialist thinking. Within the framework of these “epistemic wars” there was not much room to examine the complexities and nuances of health system realities and constraints.

During the height of these AIDS science wars, a small group of public health practitioners and health systems researchers argued that although the Khayelitsha pilot may have been located in a resource-poor urban community, the actual ART programme was very “resource-intensive.” They pointed out that the Khayelitsha programme benefited from massive donor funding and was supported by the well-resourced city and provincial departments of health. In addition, the MSF programme was driven by committed and highly skilled MSF clinicians, nurses, and activists. Due to its location, the Khayelitsha pilot was also able to attract clinicians and researchers from Cape Town’s academic hospitals and schools of medicine and public health. In other words, these public health pragmatists argued that, notwithstanding the successful treatment outcomes at Khayelitsha, the MSF model was exceptional, and was not easily replicable in typical rural African settings. These health systems practitioners were criticised by activists for claiming that it would be extremely difficult to replicate the MSF model in provinces that were less well resourced and burdened with dysfunctional health systems.

Cultural arguments were also deployed by some sceptics to highlight numerous barriers to testing and treatment. One of the most sophisticated of these arguments appears in Jonny Steinberg’s much acclaimed book on the reasons why a young man Steinberg got to know persistently refused to test for HIV even though he was very familiar with issues relating to HIV and treatment, and he lived close to the MSF treatment site in Lusikisiki. Steinberg’s book offers numerous cultural, social and psychological reasons for the man’s reluctance to test. For some activists, however, studies that emphasised cultural obstacles to treatment were regarded as providing an alibi for not fighting AIDS and providing treatment. As one of the TAC veteran activists told me, the aim of the TAC was to instil scientific ways of seeing the world and to rid South Africans of backward superstitions.
While the AIDS dissident arguments of Mbeki and Rath could be discounted by the activists on the basis of credible scientific studies, it was not so easy to dismiss the observations of Steinberg and others regarding the cultural, social and psychological obstacles to HIV testing and treatment in many parts of South Africa. It was even more difficult to dismiss the claims of public health experts on the extensive challenges of ART provision in the public health systems in South Africa’s poorer provinces.
The response from MSF, together with its TAC partners, was to start up a treatment programme in Lusikisiki, an impoverished rural area in the Eastern Cape Province. This programme sought to prove to sceptics that it was indeed possible to replicate the successful Khayelitsha programme in resource-poor rural settings. As in Khayelitsha, MSF developed a decentralized, people-centred, and nurse-driven approach to ART that was based on primary health care principles and practices, rather than relying on doctors and vertical, hospital-based treatment programmes. Studies of treatment outcomes at Lusikisiki demonstrated that it was indeed possible to have successful ART programmes in resource-poor rural settings.

Whereas the MSF programme in Khayelitsha was well-resourced and had a vibrant AIDS activist movement at its disposal, in Lusikisiki it was much more difficult to mobilize and there were countless social, economic and cultural obstacles to the promotion of HIV prevention, testing and treatment literacy. Activists in the rural villages of Lusikisiki District encountered numerous barriers to their biomedical messages, and alternative conceptions of illness, beliefs in witchcraft, and AIDS stigma and denial seemed much more entrenched in these rural settings. The health systems skeptics were clearly not far off the mark when they identified a litany of constraints and challenges for ARV rollout in the more resource-poor rural provinces.

Throughout the Mbeki period, and up until the present, a number of public health practitioners and academics managed to straddle the scientific and ideological divides that separated activist and health systems approaches. These practitioners and researchers provided pragmatically oriented health policy studies that identified the challenges of scaling-up treatment in South Africa and elsewhere in Africa. These studies highlighted health systems concerns that tended to be bracketed out of the activist frame during the “AIDS science wars”. These challenges to ARV rollout included the growing caseload of people to be maintained on long-term ART; problems of shortage and skewed distribution in the health workforce; and the heavy workload of ART delivery models. Similarly, researchers have called for a strengthening of health systems in order to address the challenges of scaling up access to treatment in contexts characterised by ineffective health systems. They also identified human resource challenges that included inadequate supply, poor distribution, low remuneration and accelerated migration of skilled health workers. Clearly, ART is much more complicated than activists implied during the Mbeki-era contestations over AIDS science. At the same time, the fact that 700 000 South Africans are now on ARVs in the public health system, suggests that the activists were not entirely unrealistic in their expectations.

In the post-Mbeki period activists have reinvented their agenda by moving from protests and litigation to an active involvement with health policy and health systems. TAC has added to its repertoire of strategies, the production of policy briefs on various topics including the disability grant for people living with HIV, male circumcision, and the National Strategic Plan for HIV treatment. The organisation has also become directly involved in HIV prevention programmes and the rollout of condoms, the training of community health advocates, and campaigns against gender-based violence. Clearly, the Zuma Administration’s orthodox position on HIV has allowed for a shift away from the polarisation and discursive policing of the Mbeki and Tshabalala-Msimang period. What it also offers is the possibility of critical reflection on the ways in which contestations over scientific truth unfold under particular historical conditions.

In summary, AIDS activists undoubtedly played a highly constructive role in the fight against AIDS. By contrast, the AIDS denialism and dissident positions of former President Mbeki and his health minister were extremely destructive and contributed towards much suffering and loss of life. Another less obvious consequence of the AIDS science battles elicited by Mbeki and Tshabalala-Msimang was the polarization of debate around HIV, which in turn obscured the complexity of treatment provision and adversely impacted upon efforts to address such issues as HIV prevention, drug resistance and the numerous other challenges of the pandemic. Fortunately, the end of Mbeki era of AIDS denialism has created the conditions for responses that do take these challenges and complexities seriously.

Steven Robins,
First published in the Cape Times, 24th December, 2009

Re-Negotiating the Terms of Contemporary African Art: a reply to Professor Achille Mbembe

In his stimulating discussion “African contemporary art: Negotiating the terms of recognition,” posted to the JWTC Blog on September 8, Professor Mbembe is especially critical of the pernicious influence that Western-funded ‘development’ projects have had on the arts of the African continent. Although acutely aware of the equally baneful influence of the commercialization and privatization of all forms of civic life in the global economy, he singles out development as the primary threat to the continued growth of a vital African culture. I would like to critique his admittedly powerful argument with reference to a recent University of the Witswatersrand doctoral thesis, “Agency, Imagination and Resilience: Facilitating Social Change through the Visual Arts in South Africa” (2009), by artist and activist, Kim Berman.

In his lively conversation with consultant Vivian Paulissen, Mbembe refers to an ongoing collusion between African governments and Western funding agencies in promoting an anachronistic idea of development that lines the pockets of the functionaries while making very little dent in the very real problems of poverty. The so-called ‘humanitarian impulse’ in these (unnamed) development projects is in his view a “vicious ideology that promotes a view of Africa as a… doomed and hopeless continent waiting to be rescued and ‘saved’ by the new army of Western good Samaritans.” According to his argument, these powerful agencies conceive ‘development’ in narrowly materialistic terms, and so are blind to “cultural and artistic critique as a public good in and of itself.” The deplorable result “…is a tendency to conflate African art, culture and aesthetics with ethnicity or community or communalism; to deny the power of individuality in the work of art creation.” And he concludes, “…the function of art in Africa is precisely to free us from the shackles of development both as an ideology and as a practice.” [his italics]. I worry about prescribing any function for artistic practice, but also cannot agree with the basis of this assertion.

In my own view, the commercialism of the international art system of dealers and museums is far more of a threat to the future of the creative arts in Africa, and “the power of individuality in the work of art creation,” than the ideology of development. Despite the supposed success of the Africa Remix exhibition, which only came to Africa (Johannesburg) as the result of a last-minute effort, the work selected for that exhibit fit neatly into the well-established parameters of contemporary avant-garde practice. Although much contemporary art commands respect, all too many artists use technologically-based media to formulate a few sly references to their ethnicities or cultures, without presenting any real challenge to the viewers’ preconceptions or expanding their limited understanding. Whether from the BRIC countries or the Middle East or Africa, the individual creative artist makes work that can be ‘knowingly’ selected for exhibition, and accepted/purchased by a Western viewer. And, despite the very real differences in the contexts from which the artists make work, the art presents a homogenous facade, as a glance through catalogues of non-Western contemporary art will confirm. The discouraging visual uniformity of international avant-garde art production is a direct result of commercialism is therefore a direct refutation of the capitalist-based idea of art as individual expression. If they wish to be regularly included in international exhibitions, contemporary artists must make works that can sell. I suspect that work that truly challenges Western assumptions about a given non-Western region never makes the scene.

Maintaining an art-craft distinction that makes little sense in the South African context at least, Prof. Mbembe argues that “…without a major investment in critical theory, our artistic production will remain in the domain of artisanship. And it will always be left to others to dictate the intellectual, theoretical and political terms of its recognition in the international arena.” Admittedly, I am an outsider, but having taught at various South African universities over the course of the past decade, I have been consistently impressed with the uniformly high standard of academic discourse there. It seems to me that theoretically-based research is both firmly-established and well-supported, as exemplified by the Wits Institute of Social and Economic Research (WISER) and the newly-established research Centre, Visual Identities in Art and Design (VIAD) at the University of Johannesburg. In fact, I would argue that critical theory is so well articulated and taught in universities in South Africa that, as in the West since the 1980s, much of creative art production dutifully illustrates theory, to its own detriment. Critical theory is neither a panacea nor a bogeyman. It is only problematic when teamed with commercialism and used by artists as a sign for a hip product.

The question that should be asked is whether critical theory has been tested on the ground through practice-based, ‘development’ projects, and if so, whether or not it has generated new knowledge and models for rethinking notions of creativity. Again, I would cite Berman’s thesis as evidence that it has, yet neither of the recent books on contemporary African or South African art give so much as a nod to the innovative community arts projects operating throughout the continent. (see: Sue Williamson, South African Art Now [New York, Collins Design, 2009]; Okwui Enwezor and Chika Okeke-Agulu, Contemporary African Art Since 1980 [Bologna: Damiani, 2009]).

But to return once again to the nub of my argument, communalism or ‘lumpen-radicalism’ is not the problem, commercialism is. I would argue that the picture Prof. Mbembe paints of ‘development,’ which is based on his own negative experiences, fails to take into adequate account current approaches to the field. As he certainly knows, ‘development’ has changed quite radically as a result of influential theorists such as Arjun Appadurai and Amartya Sen, as well as the tireless work of artist-activists on the ground in South Africa and elsewhere. Although government policies and procedures justifiably remain open to criticism, the results of these numerous initiatives for the most part have demonstrated that community arts projects have provided its participants with the capacity to “inscribe our voice,” as Mbembe so eloquently phrases it. Unfortunately, despite the vitality of the field of development theory, relatively few community arts projects have been given sustained academic analysis. Contributing to this nascent field, Berman’s thesis places the three major ‘development’ projects she has founded over the past fifteen years—Artist Proof Studio, Paper Prayers for Aids Awareness, and the Phumani Hand-Papermaking Project—in the context of critical, educational and development theory, and demonstrates that individual and collective creativity need not be at odds, but rather can reinforce one another. Rather than attempting to paraphrase, I can do no better than to quote the first paragraph of the first chapter in its entirety:

“The argument that the visual arts can play a positive role in creating social change is based on the premise that a creative collaboration between the community arts and development fields is possible. This thesis argues for a paradigm shift in approaching development in a way that an art educator approaches the facilitation of an artist’s personal and creative growth. Dreaming and imagination facilitate self-expression. Developed further, self-expression is arguably a transforming process of self-creation. Empowerment is the ability to become an agent of one’s own life and to achieve self-actualization. When individual agency is applied as a catalyst to inspire new possibilities, social systems respond to stimulate change.”

Through her case studies, the thesis indeed demonstrates the ways in which change can occur and be sustained. Arguing that seeing beneficiaries as “inert units within a collective…is one of the primary reasons why development projects fail,” (and here she is in full agreement with Mbembe), Berman proposes that when members are seen as individuals with the creative capacity to use imagination and dreaming to envision a better future for themselves, and their voice as a tool to navigate their way out of poverty, they gain agency and their projects can succeed. One of the guiding voices for Berman’s own efforts has been Arjun Appadurai, whose notion of ‘the capacity to aspire’ she has tested with such impressive results. Also referencing Appadurai, Prof. Mbembe concludes that “In circumstances under which millions of poor people indeed struggle to make it from today to tomorrow, the work of theory and the work of art and the work of culture is to pave the way for a qualitative practice of the imagination—a practice without which we will have no name, no face and no voice in history.” (5).

Precisely. I have no problem with this passionate articulation of the function of art! However, to oppose individual creativity and ‘development’ is to sustain an anachronistic definition of ‘art.’ Community arts and individual creativity are not an either/or proposition, either for the artist-activist or for the participants on those projects. The radical paradigm shift in the development studies has opened broader roles for the artist in culture and in society. Because the contemporary museum-gallery system always follows the money, today’s studio artist is ipso facto a commercial artist. At the very least, development projects using the arts are a counterforce to its stifling power.

Pamela Allara, associate professor emerita, Brandeis University

Achille Mbembe’s piece is available at:

http://jhbwtc.blogspot.com/2009/09/african-contemporary-art-negotiating.html

Is there anything to be learned from District 9?

I have read and re-read Ato Quayson’s eloquent critique of District 9 several times and I can only agree whole-heartedly with his assessment of the representation of Nigerians in the film and what it tells us about the enduring stereotyping of Africa and Africans in general in Western thought. However, being Arab and Muslim, I’ve become quite accustomed, it is sad to say, to such negative portrayals in film and have made a conscious decision to ignore it, if only so I could go beyond the frustration and anger at being constantly represented as either a mindless terrorist or a mindless woman, and try to understand what, if anything, these films can tell us about the world we live in.

Popular culture, Bakhtine has shown us, is quite extraordinary in the way it manages to depict and put forth extremely complex issues to a wide audience, even subvert the way they are handled by powerful actors, by resorting sometimes to the most crude and vulgar tools and stereotypes. So what I usually do, these days, is turn off temporarily my critique of these vulgarities, because I’ve become frustrated with the impasse they often lead to. Where do you go after all of these relations of power and distorted representations have been deconstructed? Well if you’re a film-maker, then you make your own films and Nigeria, while simultaneously being villainized in South African films, has also produced the 3^rd largest film industry in the world. But if you’re someone who makes a living analyzing societies, then continuing to critique quickly becomes unsatisfying as things rarely change to the better.

So with District 9, I found myself going beyond the identity politics the film obviously exploited and thinking about a completely different subject that I thought was brilliantly portrayed in a film of this genre, that is the question of humanism in our post-genetic, biotechnological, and biopolitical world. It is an issue that I’ve become keenly aware of thanks mainly to professor Gilles Bibeau, medical anthropologist, who has written and thought much about this issue and for whom I still work on occasion as a research assistant (see Bibeau, G. Le Québec Transgénique, 2004). But before I get to this issue, a word on the form the film took and the tools that are used to transmit its principal message, which in my opinion goes beyond the relation with the Other.

First, I was struck by its construction as a documentary and the role the talking heads play in the documentary, including intellectuals and social scientists, who are trying to make sense, or actually explain to the audience what actually happened. Here, the film is not only giving itself a pedagogical vocation, but also introducing within its intrigue the fact that the story and the discourse built around the story are inseparable. That truth and fiction go hand in hand. The involvement and motivations of those telling the story are ambiguous at best. How involved were the sociologists in the terrible turn of events? Where is the dividing line between observation and participation, between baring witness and using observation as an alibi to do nothing? The reference to realty-TV in contemporary societies is also quite clear. When the displacement of the aliens is ordered, it is done with cameras on hand. All of a sudden, the violent nature of the project of displacement, rather than be exposed to the audience through the presence of the camera, turn it into a video-game. However, soon the sense of false security the presence of the camera introduces, the virtual reality it invites the spectator to delve in through its presence evaporates as the violence becomes all too real and its consequences irreversible through the lead character’s ingestion of the alien’s bio-based fuel. The lead character asks for the scene where he is exposed to the biological fluid to be cut, as if cutting it from the film would make the event actually disappear. However, he soon finds out the there is still some ugly and consequential reality in reality TV as he begins to transform.

By introducing the documentary form, and the camera as witness, the film is asking to be read at various levels, from the most superficial to the most analytical, and through multiple lenses.

Second, I was taken aback by the way the film took words drenched in symbolic imagery but that have been gradually reduced to euphemisms in public discourse and re-invested them with their full meaning by taking away their metaphoric coating and re-using them literally, au pied de la letter, as we say in French, nakedly, through raw anti-semiotic aesthetics, and through revolting, fleshy, bare-life violence. For example the word “alien”, which is used without batting an eye in the United States to describe immigrants whether legal or not, and that has slowly crept into Canadian immigration discourse as well, is given its full meaning by turning immigrants and refugees in the film literally into aliens from another planet – ugly, needy, scary, completely dehumanized aliens. The same goes to the proverbial “the road to hell is paved with good intentions”, when sympathy, charity and humanity lead to refugees being reduced to victims, unable to think for themselves, infantilized, and when they behave badly, re-inscribed in the imaginary, as savages. In the same way, charity looses its aura as it is shown as an essentially egotistical and narcissistic act that is more about making the one “being generous” feel better about himself than about actually helping a fellow being. “The world was watching Johannesburg, so we couldn’t afford to get this wrong, not to help, not to be generous, humane, shelter these disgusting creatures, etc.” one of the characters says (I’m paraphrasing here). It is this form of egocentric and selfish charity that makes it impossible for those involved in the humanitarian project to actually meet and get to know those among the aliens who were scientists, philosophers, etc. They were all seen as victims and so incapable of anything but receiving aid. In the same way, humanitarian aid, coupled with the discourse on militarized security are shown for what they really are, in essence, as contemporary incarnations of the final solution: those who are deemed Other, and who are unexploitable by society in capitalistic terms as Others – here I refer to Achille Mbembe’s talk on the poor being increasingly turned into superfluous people – can only be put under control and reduced to bare survival in concentration camps.

The same technique of turning metaphors into literal reality, is also used on a conceptual level. Biotechnology is no longer portrayed as this highly asepticized endeavour that takes place in clean, slick laboratories, or under a microscope. It is not represented as the triumph of humanity over its own mortality or biological limitations, through the spirit of innovation, invention, curiosity – all that makes us human. It is revealed to be the ultimate form of biopolitics, the symbol of the rise of savage capitalism to its highest and most sophisticated form, that which commoditizes and uses bodies, biology, as its primary material. Mining for exploitable bio-information from alien bodies with the refugee camp as the principal mine, and mercenaries being deployed for fetching the bodies and protecting the premises of the bio-industrial company, just as multinationals, many of which are Canadian, funded by Canadian taxes and billions of dollars of government subsidies, continue to mine Africa to its bare bones using Africans as dispensable labour and arming local militias to the teeth to protect the companies’ mining interests.

But beyond that, biotechnology loses its gloss, as it is quite literally portrayed as the fusion of flesh in its most animalistic form, with its bodily fluids, to metal in places that, in the end, look more like slaughter houses than scientific laboratories. On the one hand aliens are reduced to commodities for bio-industrial exploitation and on the other, biotechnology and the biopolitics that ensue from it, bring about that most taboo of acts – cannibalism. As if reaching the ideal of the post-genetic, biotechnical human can only be achieved through devouring one’s own humanity until all that is left is its pre-human animal bare-life form – primary material par excellence, ready to be exploited and consumed. Cannibalism here is not only shown to be something done by Nigerians, but also as a form of industry, as the father-in-law of the lead character in the film, a powerful bio-industrial CEO, is glad to inflict the most horrifying procedures on his son-in-law, without even an attempt at providing anaesthesia, when he recognizes the bio-industrial and military-industrial value of his son-in-law’s morphing body and the necessity to act quickly before it completely transforms. It is a fundamental rupture in kinship with the son-in-law as a fellow human being, and as a relative, that is again portrayed quite literally through the physical transformation of the son-in-law to a complete Other, an alien no less, which allows the father-in-law to torture him as long as he can extract biological data from his body to use for making bioweapons. Capitalism in this scene is portrayed as the ultimate form of cannibalism. Cannibalism for the 21^st century.

As for the relation to the Other, may be it is the fact that I watch the film as an outsider to South Africa’s palpable racialized daily reality, but I thought first and foremost of how the arrival of the ultimate Other, literally an alien, irreversibly transforms a society, whether it likes it or not, and that transformation continues even after this Other leaves. Transformation, a loaded word in the South African context, does not necessarily lead to something better, the film seems to tell us, although the lead character, is redeemed through his transformation. On the other hand, I couldn’t help but draw parallels between the lead character’s metamorphosis and Kafka’s short story with the same title (Kafka, F. The metamorphosis, 1972), considering that, even though the talking heads in the film are curious about what could’ve happened to the lead character, whether he was dead or alive, an alien or not, things seemed to return to their original order as the aliens were moved to another camp. Just like in Kafka’s story, the metamorphosis in the end had no impact on the system in place, only on two individuals, the alien scientist who managed to escape with his son and the lead character who seems in the end to have grown accustomed to his new form of life, while remaining nostalgic to his former self. We are in the realm of tolerance here, no more, no less.

Is this film a commentary on the politics of transformation in South Africa? A politics that have not necessarily righted the wrongs of apartheid, but only changed the terms of the same racialized relations of power, while bringing about a new scapegoat for racial violence, as we have seen in the 2008 xenophobic attacks on refugees? Even worse, was the refugee camp turned to concentration camp meant to portray the ultimate finality of the politics of transformation? It is hard to tell although quite disturbing to think about… considering that the refugee ends up leaving, and the lead character, an Afrikaner, ends up finding redemption while things stay essentially the same for most who live in the refugee camp…

These are some of the reflections that came to me as I watched District 9. Regardless of the needless caricatures of the Nigerians and the racial undertones Quayson rightfully exposed, there is much there, I think, to reflect on.

Yara El-Ghadban, Université de Montréal

Unthinkable Nigeriana: The Social Imaginary of District 9

This piece was first published on www.zelezapost.com as a contribution to an e-Symposium on District 9. Those interested in reading further contributions to this debate are invited to visit www.zelezapost.com

I: On Growing Up with Nigeria

The first part of my title is borrowed from a piece I wrote after my first ever visit to Nigeria in 1993. My six-week trip happened to coincide with the 1993 June general elections that were subsequently annulled by then President Ibrahim Babangida. I recall the palpable and abject sense of shock and disbelief of the students at the University of Ibadan amongst whom I sat watching the television announcement. I have never encountered such a collective gasp of despair as was emitted immediately after Babangida’s speech.

But I recall this incident for another reason. Thinking back at what Nigeria has meant to me as a Ghanaian, it now seems to me that 1993 and the dire events that were unleashed after that coincided with the gradual shift in the nature of urban myths that were to come out of that great country. Going to boarding secondary school in Ghana in the late 70s and early 80s, I remember that we used to spend an incredible amount of time trading tales about the wonders of Nigeria. There was good reason for this. My own uncle, Uncle Castro, was one of thousands of Ghanaians who had left for Nigeria to search for greener pastures. “Castro” had not been my uncle’s given name, but he had been such a radical at school and so attached to the ideals of the redoubtable Cuban leader that he changed his name and was forever after branded as the incurable radical of the family. He was a teacher, and was a radical in more ways than I can recount. He took off to Nigeria in the late 70s, learnt to speak Yoruba, married a local woman, and was never seen again. Not even the Nigerian expulsions of Ghanaians and other foreigners in 1983 could prize him out of his adopted country.

The infrequent letters that Castro wrote to us from his sojourn were only one source of stories about Nigeria. Many others were completely apocryphal, but no less believed for what they painted about the immense wonders of this much-envied land of milk and honey. My personal favorite from that time is about a hapless Ghanaian student who had been invited to visit his pen-pal (yes, those were the days!) at the University of Kano in Northern Nigeria. The Ghanaian student was utterly flabbergasted at the facilities he saw. But nothing could have prepared him for the surprise that was waiting for him at the dining hall. His friend asked him to join him for lunch and at the end of it, the Ghanaian, without being prompted, decided to take his tray to one of the innocuous looking sinks that lined the walls of the hall at regular intervals. As he was walking towards one of the sinks he noticed from the corner of his eyes what he thought were looks of condescension on the faces of some of the Nigerian students. They turned out to be looks of dismay, but how was he to know? And he had no intention of allowing them to think that he didn’t know what to do in a dinning hall. How dare they think that? How dare they? He continued purposefully towards the sink and turned around briefly to catch his friend gesticulating wildly from their sitting place. He ignored him. Who did he think he was, huh, trying to tell him that he didn’t know how to work a mere tap? Or did he think that because Nigeria was way ahead of Ghana we didn’t have even the most basic skills, eh? Twiaaa! The cheek of it! He continued his walk towards the sink, put his tray to one side, picked up his cutlery, poised them under the tap, and turned it full blast only to see Lo! and Behold! a rich warm stream of dark and absolutely delicious looking drinking chocolate!!! There are different variants of what happens next. In one of them, the chap remains calm and unfazed and places his other capped hand under the tap to gulp down a large helping of the magical drink. After which he continues walking calmly out of the dinning hall, making a dash out of the campus to the lorry park never to be heard of again!

This and other such stories were commonplace in 1970s and 80s Ghana. Yet by 1993 the stories had definitely taken on a different coloration. Stories of Nigerian internal corruption and external scams became increasingly common and many of the stories were distinctive for the sheer audacity that they revealed about Nigerians. These stories, that tended to circulate largely by word of mouth, have over the past few years entered the international public media domain. Some time in 2008 the British media widely reported on an email sent to members of Jack Straw’s constituency, saying he was stranded in Nigeria without his passport on a government mission and pleading that his constituents send contributions to a special bank account to help salvage the poor man out of Nigeria. Jack Straw, variously Home Secretary, Foreign Secretary, and at the time of the scam, Secretary of State for Justice, only got wind of the scam when phone calls started flooding into his Blackburn constituency office informing them that monies had been sent out and that they hoped he could return home safely. Prayers had also been sent on his behalf. Add to this an earlier news item that did the rounds in 2006 of the governor of a provincial state in Nigeria who made away with three million pounds in a brief case, and, on being detained in the UK, escaped his captors and went back to Nigeria via Cameroon by dressing in drag, and we can see the image that has now been firmly fixed in the public mind about “the Nigerian character”.

Thus it is not entirely surprising that District 9, a mixed-genre science fiction and faux documentary film should settle on the image of Nigerians as profiteering gangsters. It is not the only film to have featured that impression of Nigerians. The Informant, with Matt Damon as the lead actor, is the story of a whistleblower working for a large food chemical company in the American midwest. The problem is that the whistleblower is an inveterate liar and has himself been siphoning off millions while trying to discredit his also corrupt senior management. Throughout the film the terms “419” and Nigeria are mentioned, and towards the end a Justice Department investigator explicitly tries to explain the whistleblower’s behavior in terms of the 419 scam phenomenon. Thus “Nigerian scamming” is now being used as a commonplace popular cultural shorthand for audacious shady dealings and corruption. In that respect scamming, as a dimension of “the Nigerian character,” and one that is repeatedly used as a stereotype for the country, is now part of its historicity. It is not dissimilar to the idea that Brazil produces great soccer players, or that Canadians are nice and peace-loving people, or that Australians are generally laid back, or that Swedish women are generally beautiful. These stereotypes and ideas are the elements that cement a community’s historicity both in their own minds and in the minds of others.

II: District 9 and the Representation of the Social Relation

And yet there is something deeply unsettling about District 9’s representation of its Nigerian characters. Recall that in the film the Nigerians are part of the slum dwellers that, with the alien “prawns”, lie outside the bounds of civil society. The Nigerians exploit the prawns by selling them catfood which they crave. Crucially, the Nigerians are also gangsters and seek to amass the aliens’ armaments and ammunitions but for reasons that are not made clear in the film. We are left to speculate by an extension of their depiction as gangsters, that this must be in order to dominate the rest of society. Additionally, and here is where the rudest shock is delivered, they are also depicted as cannibals. At one point in the film the Nigerian gang leader, pointedly named “Obasanjo”, attempts to eat the arm of the partially transmogrified Wikus van de Merwe, the central character, so that he can acquire the ability to manipulate the weapons that he has stockpiled. The aliens’ guns are so sophisticated that they only respond to a particular form of biology, namely, that of the aliens themselves. Obasanjo believes that by eating Wikus’s arm his own human biology will be transformed so that he can deploy their armaments. In many respects it is the dimension of their rabid acquisition of armaments and their explicit cannibalism that reveals the degree to which District 9 is prepared to go beyond the historicity that we noted earlier in registering the absolute otherness of the Nigerian characters. In other words, by not stopping at depicting them as inveterate and heartless scamsters but adding to this a dimension of blind military acquisitiveness and cannibalism the film goes well beyond the pale of what is now a key characterization of Nigerianness. For the film they are first and last barbarians, with no redeeming features.

Despite this highly offensive depiction, however, I think it would be mistake to read the film exclusively in relation to the a-historical othering of Nigeria. There is something much more subtle and complex taking place, which is best understood in what I want to elaborate in terms of the film’s social imaginary. Every literary and filmic text, whether realist, science fiction, magical realist, or otherwise, and no matter how apparently distant from the real world, displays a social imaginary. But what is this social imaginary, and how is it to be understood in the first instance?

In attempting to unpack the social imaginary of this or any other representational text we have to grasp the fact that the social imaginary entails the portrayal of a social relation. Essentially, the social relation has two inter-related aspects to it. The first aspect involves the depiction of the manner by which men and women relate to other people in society. These relations are relations of equality, hierarchy, subordination, self-and-othering, able-bodied vs disabled, and so forth. In a word, they are relations of Power, in the sense made famous by Foucault. The social relations depicted in any representational text can easily be inventoried. Are they depictions of individual vs state, father vs daughter, husband vs wife, culture vs culture, or, as is often the case, a combination of all these? Such an inventory of interpersonal and collective relations, however, has to be augmented by the analysis of a second aspect of the social relation, namely, the ways and means by which the relations of Power are converted into something else. By what instruments is it possible to convert a given set of relations of Power into a different, and perhaps more hospitable (for the foreigner) or democratic (for the putative citizen) or equivalent and respectful (for the family member)? At one level the instruments of conversion may be institutional and external to the self (courts, civic and interest lobby organizations, schools, churches), personal (you resign your job and go back to school), or collective (revolution), or, as is often the case, internal to the self and lying at the level of psychology. The two levels are not entirely separable, yet it is also the case that most texts focus on either one or the other. And each historic epoch provides a dominant way in which the two aspects of the social relation are dialectically connected. Thus, for example, in Native Son Richard Wright depicts the practical impossibility that is faced by a character such as Bigger Thomas in his attempts at freeing himself from the dominant relations of Power in his quest for self-fashioning. This is because, given the depicted race relations of 1930s Chicago, Bigger has not grown up with the requisite psychological instruments by which to successfully achieve a conversion of the relations of Power for his own benefit. Even when the external instruments are presented to him, such as the offer of the job as a chauffeur at the wealthy Dalton’s home, the external gesture is so compromised by the structuring of race relations of the period that Bigger interprets the offer not as an instrument of potential self-fashioning but as a trap. And, because of his psychic formation, the feeling of entrapment that unfolds progressively as the white folks try to be nice to him leads him to want to “blot” out the feeling of incapacitation that they generate inside of him. And because of his inherent social ineptitude and psychic formation the only means that appear pertinent to his own situation are those of violence. Thus the double murders that he perpetrates and which land him in jail. Bigger’s psychic responses are overdetermined by the warped character of race relations in the Chicago in which he grew up. Though this interpretation accords at least with the views espoused by Bigger’s Marxist lawyer in the long court scene at the end of the novel, it is really nothing but a shorthand for a much more complex set of conditions underpinning the dual aspects of the social relation depicted in the novel. But this synopsis serves to make the point about the dialectical links between the relations of Power and the instruments of conversion from one stage to another elaborated here.

In District 9 there is clearly a partial equivalence in the representation of the alien prawns on the one hand, and the Nigerians on the other. Both groups are alien to the civic and political order of Johannesburg and South Africa. Both are depicted as meat eating. At various points the prawns are shown tearing into raw meat as are the Nigerians. At the level of meat eating, the equivalence between the two groups begins to fray slightly when the prawns are shown to tear offending human beings into pieces but not necessarily to eat them, while the Nigerians want to eat a part of a human being. However, since the source of the chunks of red meat we see the prawns tearing into at certain points in the film are not clearly stipulated, there is a vague suspicion that they may also be cannibalistic. Be that as it may, at the level of the relations of Power, both the alien prawns and the Nigerians are depicted as not only unfit to be members of the civic community, but actually not wanted on the voyage (to quote the title of the Canadian Timothy Findley’s novel).

It is when we come to the depiction of the instruments of the conversion of the relations of Power, however, that we see a very sharp distinction between the prawns and the Nigerians. The prawns are shown to desire a mastery of science and technology in spite of all the negative conditions to which they have been subjected. The gritty yet highly sophisticated laboratory the prawn leader sets up with his son in their basement is a marker of this desire for technological mastery. Not only that, they desire the technological mastery not to conquer the people amongst whom they have been forced to live for over 20 years, but in order to go back to their own alien planet to fulfill their destiny. The prawn leader is first and foremost a scientist, but one with a highly developed social conscience. His social conscience is depicted in a miniaturized fashion in the warm and caring relations he establishes with his son, and at a higher level, his desire to repair the space ship in order that he might go back to his planet and return to save his people.

In order to radically alter their social relations in a society that clearly thinks very little of them, the Nigerians in the film on the other hand want to master not science and technology, but the mere use of the armaments they have acquired through exploiting the needs of others. And it is not clear what ultimate claims of sociality they want to make in the mastery of these arms. To the aliens is assigned the mastery of science and technology, but to the Nigerians the mastery first of the alien military technology, and later the society in which they reside The problem with the Nigerians’ quest for mastery, however, is that it is shown as being mediated through black magic (the cannibalism) and thus is essentially the marker of a moral and intellectual deficit. We see then that in the social imaginary of District 9 it is the Nigerians that are the true Other. The prawns are only partially so, because they are shown to possess superior “human” characteristics of familial love, reason (in the mastery of science), and political consciousness (in the prawn leader’s desire to come back and save his people).

So what then as Nigerians and Africans, are we to make of the social imaginary of District 9? The first thing is to acknowledge that the film is representing an image of Nigeria that is also true of what the country is in the popular imagination, and which has been contributed to, willy-nilly, by Nigerians themselves. However, when we shift the focus away from historicity (i.e., the truth or falsehood of Nigeria’s image) we have to account for why it is that, yet again, black life is depicted as somehow the bearer of an inherent moral deficit. This is a highly pertinent question because District 9 is set in a South African society that still bears the scars of years of apartheid and horrible race relations. In such a political context in which the imagining of black life takes shape under the shadow of the race relations left over from apartheid, the depiction of black life, whether individual or collective, cannot be taken as completely innocent. It is first and last ideological. True, the film also shows well-dressed urban blacks protesting the presence of the prawn slum. But that should not obscure the fact that the color coding of the film involves a white protagonist partially metamorphosing into an alien prawn, befriending the prawn leader as a fugitive, and almost being devoured by black folk. And it is not insignificant that the hero is himself a scientist. Thus it is black life that retains the mark of the intractable moral deficit, depicted here in the form of rabid acquisitiveness and cannibalism and handily projected onto Nigerians. Since, as we have shown, the cannibalistic tendencies of the Nigerians in the film exceeds their current historicity as scamsters, what the film does is to deploy their representation as a shorthand to register black life in terms of the excess of unreason (magical thought and cannibalism), something they could have done without referencing Nigeria at all. Given the subtle binary overlaps and oppositions that we have seen help shape the discursive relations between the alien prawns and the Nigerians in the film, it would not be unfair to say that the “Nigerians” are redundant, and that we are obliged to interpret them predominantly as ciphers of black life rather than as a reference to a putative Nigerian historicity as such.

The depiction of black life as somewhat in excess of reason has a long and chequered history, and takes us most famously to Hegel’s views on Africa, Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and through various other disquisitions that have seen Africa and black life posited as the ultimate heart of unreason. Suddenly we see that the depiction of the social relation in Wright’s Native Son is not so distant from that of District 9 after all. In each instance the depiction shows certain race and its links to relations of Power, and in each one the attempt to convert the relations of Power into another set of relations is short-circuited by the fact that the black characters lack the consciousness by which such a conversion might be achieved. The difference between Native Son and District 9 is that Bigger has our sympathy but the Nigerians do not. This, we should note, is also due to the relationship established between historicity and representation. To unpack that we would have to go into questions of the contrast between medium (novel vs film) and generic conventions (realism/naturalism vs science fiction), and ultimately, to the objectives that the representations are expected to achieve in the real world. Perhaps we will pursue this thread another time.

Ato Quayson, University of Toronto