The African Cities Reader is a biennial publication that brings together contributors from across Africa and the world to challenge the prevailing depiction of urban life on the continent and redefine cityness, Africa-style. It is a joint creation of Chimurenga Magazine and the African Centre for Cities at the University of Cape Town.

The third installment of the Reader explores the unholy trinity of land, property and value – the life force of cities everywhere. In an era of late modernity marked by a speculative compulsion that takes on a spectral character as it instigates adventures of city imagineering, deal-making and symbolic reinvestment, the material effects are often displacement, violence, daylight robbery and yet another round of elite seduction. The incessant (re)making of the African city is a game that leaves few untouched or unmoved and literally prepares the ground for the inhabitation of another 400 million urban dwellers over the next two decades.

In this issue António Andrade Tomás picks through the post-independence architectural ruins of Luanda and reveals the vice and violence that permeate the act of securing land and home in a city greased with the ‘devil’s excrement'; Andile Mngxitama challenges the historical and contemporary rhetoric that positions land theft in South Africa in the realm of material dispossessions and asks us to plumb deeper to discover the narrative of loss that is the black experience; Billy Kahora reflects on the state of the ‘estate’ of his Nairobi childhood and finds its decay symptomatic of the malaise of a middle class that has lost its mind; and a transformative vision for the Lagos National Theatre is presented in four conversations and seven performative pamphlets.

Other contributors include Maud De La Chapelle, Armelle Choplin, Marion Broquère, Simon Nancy, Jean-Christophe Lanquetin, Jumoke Verissimo, Adolphus Opara, Ayodele Arigbabu, Hunter And Gatherer Collective, Jahman Anikulapo, Koni Benson, Faeza Meyer, Sean Christie, Anne Pitcher, Marissa Moorman, Göran Dahlberg and Matthew Wilhelm-Solomon.

Read it online here

Patrice Nganang recalls the duel between politics and the literary sphere in 1990s Yaoundé – a time when the campaign for ‘democracy’ exposed the chiasmus that is the Cameroonian intelligence, and the words of Mongo Beti ignited a movement for dissent, return and reconstruction.

What I remember most about the years of fire is that I had a lot of time on my hands. But there are some days that stay with me – one of these in particular I recall, even though I can’t be sure of the exact date,  is an evening in February 1991. And there are gestures, as well, that I recall – even if in the end they would have no effect. And moments that I won’t easily forget, because they are inscribed in that greater history in which we were all caught up during those years, and which went by the name ‘democratisation’.

The banned Mongo Beti conference, which was to have been held at the Hilton Hotel in Yaoundé on the occasion of his return to Cameroon after 32 years in exile, was one of those moments. The petition that we, students at the University of Yaoundé put together, in support of Beti to speak on campus instead of at the Hilton, is one of those actions without any effect about which I would like to speak. However, to make sense of what I am saying, one needs to be aware of a few things, most importantly of the public aura that surrounded intellectuals at that time.

In essence, Beti’s return to Cameroon would stay with me as a memory of the chiasmus that is l’intelligence camerounaise. First of all, the context is important. There had been an open letter by Célestin Monga, ‘Democracy falsified’, published in the newspaper Le Messager of 27 December 1990, opposite an acerbic article by Beti. This would be the opening salvo of the campaign for democracy. In the following February, too, there was an issue of Jeune Afrique Economie that set the groundwork for what was to come: a lengthy feature in which photos of Paul Biya and Mongo Beti appeared side by side (with the latter presented as the ‘pope of the opposition movement in Cameroon’), which symbolised the way we understood the duel between politics and the literary sphere in those years, and the way we would live out this duel.

Mongo Beti was the personification not only of the intellectual, but also of the political opponent: grounded in principle, bearing in his words a long tradition of battles waged, anchored in a Cameroonian civil society that was clearly in the process of constructing itself around him, around us, through the press, through public conferences, but not yet through public gatherings.  Above all, it was Beti’s writing that resonated in our minds, adolescent youth that we were, writing we had all read at school – from his Cruel City most notably.

Now that I think of it, Mongo Beti was the political opponent by default, given that Cameroon had lost its guardian of the opposition, Ernest Ouandié, at the stake. Of the life-force of battles long past, there remained thus only the force of intellect: the mood of a certain spirit that Mongo Beti incarnated: the spirit of contestation.  An entire political movement, previously wiped out, had found its final refuge in his words, in their infinite quest for independence, their resistance and their dissidence; above all in his book Main basse sure le Cameroun (The Rape of Cameroon), which was closed off to us as much as foreclosed by the authorities, because the men of whom it spoke remained silent in our midst, or more often dead. The Union des Populations du Cameroun (UPC), the nationalist party of whose spirit it was the bearer, was still banned, and departures from Cameroon were rationed by exit visas, with women forced to get their husbands’ permission to travel. Oh, those were the years of fire, at whose heart all that remained to call out the UPC’s memory was the meteor of a literary figure.

The extraordinary thing about the UPC is essentially that it hasn’t left behind any emblematic living persons whose return would be, above all and tautologically, a political act. They returned during those years, their faces forgotten, destroyed by suffering, by the pettiness even of their expression, with merely symbolic value because their stature had never been increased by the ‘democratisation’ project that we expected from them and that was too big for their shoulders to bear.

The power that still holds Cameroon hostage had, at the time, not only succeeded in fundamentally discrediting all those who lived abroad and were in opposition to it, but also managed to negate all the surviving pockets of political activity that would have been the vehicle for the return of the exiled politicians: there were no audio cassettes using underground means to spread the words of any renowned political dissident; no samizdat press ricocheting through the network of silently chattering conspiracy; and, above all, no banned party leaders for whom one could wait at the airport.

The Cameroonian history of ruin and destruction was still to come; a history that would be written in the blood of the Front Social-Democratique, which had awoken the hopes of the people in Bamenda on 26 May 1990. Nonetheless, 6 May 1991 – a few months after Mongo Beti’s return – saw the ‘parliament’ explode into being at the University of Yaoundé. Its structure would later be reproduced in Côte d’Ivoire in the form of the agoras and sorbonnes. In essence, this was a public explosion of conspiracies that had been formulated in the inspired and courageous meetings held by the students – word jugglers at best. Though sporadic, these quickly evolved a structured form – around a tree, in any free space at the university – to talk about everything, that is, about politics. In those years political discussion was banned at the University of Yaoundé and politics was practised in the form of a dictatorship, or through organisations of a purely tribal nature; politics had been taken hostage by so-called student representatives, who were none other than representatives of the administration.

This was not a spontaneous process. Before the student leaders who had been elected by us, their comrades; before the parliament that was very well structured and that defined the boundaries of free speech on the campus; and before this contestation, which would soon find its voice in Corantin Talla alias Schwarzkopft, Nene Fadimatou alias Winnie Mandela, Senfo Tonkam and numerous others who today are in exile, there were already self-defence groups, which had been artificially created by the powers-that-be – a repeat of the strategies that had previously permitted the negation of all dissident voices through intimidation and violence and that had kept Mongo Beti in exile.

It is impossible to talk about Beti’s return without talking about this parliament – even if it was only embryonic – because one must explain clearly who these young people were who had come to listen to him in February 1991, and why they were there. When I see the photos taken in those days, and compare them to the ones I have of the meetings of the parliament, what strikes me most is the presence of the same faces in both groups – the migration of the parliamentarians from the Beti conference photos to the ones taken at meetings in students’ rooms. Politics and literature were in total agreement, according to all the evidence, and suddenly, in a sort of seepage of communication, the students took the political initiative.

From that perspective, the very dynamic Literary Circle can be understood as their fortuitous meeting point – because it was within the framework of the Circle, whose sensibility and parliamentary relations were never hidden, that we took the initiative to invite the author returning to his native land to talk on the campus, as soon as we had learned that he was really back in Cameroon. But we still had to convince him to do so.

The most efficient method was obviously to talk to our professor, the critic Ambroise Kom, who remains his intellectual heir. By the way it was Kom, I think, who advised us to draw up a petition, because without this how could we convince the dean of the faculty that a conference on Cameroon’s most famous writer should be held on campus, during those years when it was still necessary to have a conference paper approved by the dean before it could be read?

I can still see us, on the eve of the conference to be held at the Hilton Hotel, striding up and down the campus accosting students to ask them to sign the long sheet of paper on which we had set out our position. The reason for this petition was all too obvious to us: why should Beti speak at the most expensive hotel in the capital when the university, with its empty lecture halls, was there and ready to allow him to share his knowledge? When, by the way, some of our professors had written and published doctoral theses on him? It was an insult to our intelligence, we all agreed.

If the Literary Circle previously had no raison d’être, here was one knocking on its door. And we, who were directing the events, would represent it before the author, delivering to him the student petition in the name of our courageous comrades, in the name of Cameroonian youth, hands on hearts as in the mass ceremonies of which we dreamt so much. The truth is that during these years we were nothing but dreams.

When I think of that time, I laugh. The first signature on this petition, I still recall clearly, was that of Bolanga Henri Pascal, at that time the president of the Literary Circle, the second that of Thierry Mouelle, his deputy, and the third was mine. All the other signatures were fakes, because the first friend, not a member of the Circle, whom we asked to sign, scrawled a name which – I remember it well – wasn’t his.

It astonishes me to this day: not the fake signature from this friend, whom I know nonetheless to be a political firebrand, but rather the fact that it never occurred to me to sign with any name other than my own. Naiveté? I still haven’t grown out of it. (Beti, by the way, signed his books with pseudonyms too – his real name being Alexandre Biyidi Awala. Indeed, the name of the president of Cameroon, Paul Biya, is a pseudonym). This friend advised to fill the petition with invented signatures as the most efficient way to get the writer to speak on campus – otherwise he would not come, ‘because the students won’t sign’.

‘If the students won’t sign, let’s ask the professors.’

Whose idea was this? I no longer know. But it was this that would lead us to discover the full extent of the cowardice of our lecturers who, in other circumstances, when it was a matter of exposing the meaning of apartheid, of colonisation, of racism, of negritude, a matter of semiology and semiotics, structuralism and deconstruction, would launch into lyrical flight.

‘Sign?’

‘Yes , Monsieur.’

‘Why?’

‘So that Mongo Beti will come and speak on campus.’

‘On this campus?’

‘Yes , Monsieur.’

‘You know, it’s not as simple as that.’

I prefer not to mention the names of these professors here, especially because some have since died. Why sully their memory by revealing the fear that trembled in their eyes when they were confronted in their offices with a banal choice: to bring or not to bring a Cameroonian writer, whose works they were teaching, to speak at the University of Yaoundé?

‘You know, literature is more complex than that.’

‘In what sense?’

The foggy theories that conceal cowardice, I saw them in the course of those days; the tongue that turns to the hardest wood to maintain its silence, I heard it then. That theory is, in the end, nothing but the resignation of the intellect became entirely clear to me on that afternoon. I was truly chagrined at the discovery that the solemn ceremony of handing over the students’ petition to the dissident writer returned to his country would be a farce because the list of names that we had concocted was indeed a long one, very long, but fake.

I admit that I contributed false signatures. Under the trees in a garden, my friends and I threw ourselves into this shameful exercise in falsification, which under other circumstances we would have vilified. The cause! The cause! What didn’t we do for it in those years with our twisted and distorted blows? Bolanga, the president of the Literary Circle, was he the one who handed over our shabby document to Mongo Beti? I don’t know exactly, because on the evening of the mythical handover of the petition that was supposed to happen at the home of Professor Ambroise Kom, I wasn’t there.

What was certain was that Beti was not permitted to speak at the Hilton Hotel, his conference (where I was) having been banned at the last minute by order of the sous-préfet. He made a brief impromptu speech in front of the hotel, certainly, but the banning was followed by a campaign waged by the official media that presented him as a ‘French tourist travelling to Cameroon’.

The following morning, as a substitute for the evening event, Beti spoke at an architect’s office in the Avenue Kennedy, in a brief, improvised public exchange with his compatriots, who had been disappointed at the cancellation of the previous evening. I still remember that he was introduced there by, among others, Cilas Kemedjio – a member of parliament. He signed some books, including the issue of Jeune Afrique Economie, in which he placed his signature next to the photograph of himself to the amusement of the crowd. After this gathering, my friends from the Literary Circle and I had a group photo taken with him. He would later allude to our student conditions and to the parliament, in one sentence in an essay crammed with figures that he dedicated to his return to Cameroon, La France contre  l’Afrique : Retour au Cameroun (France against Africa: Return to Cameroon). Eventually he became a bookseller in Yaoundé. But it would be ten years before he finally spoke on the campus of the University of Yaoundé.

As for the parliamentary leaders, they were no longer there, having been banned for life from all universities in Cameroon. Most of them are spending their 20th year in a sad exile that began in 1991, and has thrown them onto the tortuous roads of Burkina Faso, Benin, Germany, the USA and elsewhere. One of the rare among them, Jacques Tiwa alias Nkrumah, who returned to the country after his peregrinations, would be executed on 28 February 2008 in Douala, at the heart of another tumult orchestrated to get rid of the same tyrant.

This article is also available in Chronic 1, published August 2013. To purchase in print or as a PDF head to our online shop. Copies coming to your nearest dealer now-now. Access to the whole issue and Chronic online archives is available for $28 for one year or $7 for a month.

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Rakesh Khanna explores the web of Indian-language crime fiction publishing, in which colonial legacies and twisted plots in realms of sorcery and subterfuge are not limited to the page.

Hindi, Urdu, Bengali, and quite a few other Indian languages have long traditions of crime fiction, yet very little of it has ever been translated or read outside of South Asia. This is partly economics – translation is expensive business, but there’s also a lingering colonial snobbery favouring English, and a different kind of snobbery within regional language literary circles that considers crime fiction déclassé.

And then there’s the shadowy world of pulp publishing: a world where the true identities of the creators are often concealed or faked, and one that frequently operates on the outer fringes of the law. In this world, there are no book fairs or launches, no fancy cheese and wine events celebrating authors. The books are commissioned in dingy head offices nestled in crumbling buildings in Old Delhi’s Chandni Chowk and sold on paan-stained sidewalks, crowded bus stops, and six thousand small-town railway platforms stretching from the deserts of Rajasthan to the jungles of West Bengal.

It’s the sprawling world of Indian-language publishing today, but its roots are older, embedded in  19th century North India, where popular fiction was dominated by epic fantasies known as dastangoi. In both Hindi and Urdu, these lush, expansive romantic adventures often had plots centred on a tilism, a sort of enchanted puzzle created by a sorcerer. A tilism might be an object, a palace, or an entire realm infused with astrological power. Like today’s detective novels, it is the task of the hero of the book to solve, or conquer, the tilism.

The hero of a tilism story is often accompanied by a trickster sidekick known as an ayyar. Part ninja, part illusionist, part spy, and part master-of-disguise, ayyars are typically more mischievous, typically more compelling than the nominal leading characters. They elaborately fake their own deaths, only to re-appear later. Another trick is to drug an enemy ayyar, stash her unconscious body and then impersonate her by means of a magical disguise in order to infiltrate the enemy camp. As this game of false identities escalates and the ayyars go deeper and deeper undercover in the mysterious landscape of the tilism, the reader becomes less and less sure who is who, who is still alive, and who can be trusted.

Around the turn of the century, the tilism novel was rivalled by the crime novel, which arrived from Britain in the form of the penny dreadful and quickly spawned local knock-off industries in a dozen or more Indian languages. These versions are line-for-line translations of the originals, but have undergone what modern business-speak terms ‘content localisation’. Richard is renamed as Rahul; a bowler hat becomes a turban; fish and chips are transformed into a masala dosa; a creepy Italian vivisectionist becomes a creepy Punjabi vivisectionist. Pseudonyms of the translators – or rather transplanters – grace the covers. The original author is uncredited.

It’s difficult to muster much opprobrium towards the early 20th century Indian plagiarists. The whole concept of copyright was a bit foreign to begin with. No one could have felt very guilty about cheating the rights-holders in the United Kingdom while that country was busy pillaging India’s resources and massacring its peace activists. Plagiarism was a trifling offence, a misdemeanour in the face of the crimes of colonialism. These were pulp novels, after all. The cover prices were low. The profit margins were slim. Who would ever discover they were rip-offs? Even if they did, who would care?

Of course, not all Indian-language crime writing was plagiarised or even derivative. There were plenty of original voices. One of the standouts was the Urdu writer Ibne Safi. His 246 novels, all set in the same unnamed, fictional, South Asian metropolis, are an innovative fusion of the sprawling dastan epics with western detective fiction, and his characters – both his detective heroes and his long list of supervillains, colourful enough to rival those of the Batman universe – are modern-day ayyars of a sort. They wear suits, drive cars, and flirt with foreign ladies at swanky nightspots; and yet they are also masters of disguise, and they have the classical ayyari penchant for using knockout drugs.

Safi’s novels were translated into Hindi (in which his Muslim hero Colonel Faridi was given a Hindu name, Colonel Vinod) and kept readers across north India enthralled for decades. Meanwhile, Tamil-language pulp writers in the south had tired of the transplant fiction trick and began developing a unique style of breakneck-paced thrillers, often incorporating mythological themes, and almost always featuring a male-female detective duo. To the east, in the state of West Bengal, where genre boundaries were more fluid than elsewhere, there was some crossover between crime writing, children’s literature, and respectable literary fiction, notably in Satyajit Ray’s much-loved Feluda series.

But in other parts of South Asia, the rip-offs continued, and on an ever-grander scale. In 1963 in Dhaka, Bangladesh (then East Pakistan), a writer named Qazi Anwar Hussain set up a Bengali-language publishing house called Sheba Prokashoni. Hussain began churning out a series of spy novels starring the character Masud Rana, Agent MR-9 of Bangladesh Counter-Intelligence (a fictitious agency). The first few Masud Rana titles drew some inspiration from Ian Fleming’s James Bond series, but were nevertheless original works. They were devoured by a generation of young readers hungry for international intrigue and steamy sex scenes. Later, as Hussain’s company grew into Bangladesh’s largest paperback publisher, he stopped writing Masud Rana himself and began employing a small army of ghostwriters.

Today there are well over 300 Masud Rana novels, many of them prefaced with the disclaimer: ‘This novel follows a foreign plot.’ My Bengali-reading informants tell me that this is an understatement; most of the later books are straight transplants, in which Masud Rana is little more than a renamed Dirk Pitt or Jason Bourne. For years, Sheba Prokashoni also published close Bengali adaptations – uncredited – of Alfred Hitchcock’s Three Investigators series and Louis L’Amour westerns, so the company is presumably nervous about entering markets outside the country.

Considering Bollywood’s notoriety for lifting plots from Hollywood, perhaps it’s no surprise that the situation in Hindi pulp publishing is even murkier. In the 1980s, unauthorised Hindi transplants of a multi-volume American crime novel series by Donald E. Westlake – the Parker books – became some of the all-time bestselling titles in Indian history. Hundreds of thousands of copies flew off the shelves on railway platforms, probably more than Westlake ever managed to sell in English. British writer, Desmond Bagley, and many others were robbed in the same way. It’s an indication of the deep divisions in Indian society that Hindi publishers have continued to get away with this without the country’s large English publishing establishment (which includes multi-national companies such as Random House, which first published Westlake, and HarperCollins, which holds the rights to Bagley’s work) ever taking notice.

The Hindi pulp fiction industry was, until recently, headquartered in the 4000-year-old city of Meerut in Uttar Pradesh, which has a reputation as one of India’s more lawless states. Few authors and publishers ever set down terms in a legal contract. Publishing houses are perpetually opening, merging, splitting, and going out of business. A few star authors – for example, Ved Prakash Sharma, whose Wardi Wala Gunda is probably India’s all-time bestselling novel – own the rights to their work. But most crime novels are done as work-for-hire by ghostwriters. These literary ayyars may take on several different identities for several different houses. While building a brand, a publisher may also choose to use more than one ghostwriter for the same pseudonym.

Reema Bharati is one such name, an incredibly prolific author who seems to lead a curious multivalent existence. Once a brand has been established around the name Reema Bharati, an interesting situation arises: since no one has clear rights, the original publisher can’t complain too loudly if a competing publisher decides to publish a book written under the same pseudonym. And so Reema Bharati may be credited with the work of yet another set of ghostwriters unknown to her original creator, with a new colophon on the title page.

This makes standard forms of literary journalism impossible. How to even write about this world, its books? You can’t trace the evolution of Reema Bharati’s style. You can’t meaningfully compare her latest novel with her earlier work. You can’t hear her speak on a book tour. You can’t interview her. You can’t even be sure if the real author is still alive. The world of the journalist or critic becomes submerged in a tilism where it is impossible to know who is who, who is dead or living, and who can be trusted.

The mysteries proliferate, as do the crimes. While Reema Bharati’s back cover author photographs show a smiling, homely, middle-aged Hindu woman, other authors have written books in which Reema Bharati is a character – a ravishing, intrepid and slightly slutty superspy, who cruises around New Delhi in a sports car fitted with machine guns and an invisibility switch, entrapping corrupt politicians and invading the secret lairs of megalomaniacal scientists.

In Sweet Fire, A Reema Bharati Novel (translated here from the Hindi by Daisy Rockwell), the heroine introduces herself as: ‘Miss Reema Bharati. [An agent] affiliated with India’s fiercest and most dangerous investigative institution, the Indian Secret Corps. My Chief, Mr. Khurana, is crafty like a wolf, but he is also fast and brave, like a cheetah.’

A seduction scene swiftly follows. Reema has rendered her victim, the 21-year-old Major Ashok, insane from desire. ‘A light but intoxicating smile’ plays on her lips: ‘Poor guy! I thought to myself. He had no idea what games were being played with him in the name of the law. Who knew what would happen to him once he discovered my true identity.’

Unlike the hapless Ashok, we can never unveil Reema. And she is not alone. For other characters, the transformation has happened in reverse; Keshav Pandit, for example, started out as the fictional hero of a novel by Ved Prakash Sharma, but has since become a wildly prolific author himself. Like Agent Smith in the Matrix movies, Reema and Keshav now exist both inside and outside of a multi-authored fictional universe.

There are excellent original Hindi crime novels being written today; it is, after all, a vibrant genre that’s been going strong for more than a century, in a language with a few hundred million speakers and ever-increasing literacy rates. But with the entire industry mired in a tilism of disputed rights and copyright infringement, few publishers are willing to risk translation and, even if they did, standard forms of mainstream literary marketing are seemingly impossible. How then to publicise these books? Until someone is able to solve this puzzle, some of India’s best crime writing will remain underground.

This article is also available in Chronic 1, published August 2013. To purchase in print or as a PDF head to our online shop. Copies coming to your nearest dealer now-now. Access to the whole issue and Chronic online archives is available for $28 for one year or $7 for a month.

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Akin Adesokan confronts the ‘real world of Nigerian politics’ and comes to grips with the ‘universal seductions of authoritarian power’ that make for ever-thickening plots.

Two-point-eight billion naira,

Oil money issy missing

Dem set up enkwayary

Dem say money no loss-y o…

Money no loss, dem shout again

Enkwayary come close o.

E no finish? E no finish? E no finish….?

Fela Anikulapo Kuti, ‘Army Arrangement’

Oyinbo ko k’ole, afara ni ko fe.

[The white officer does not mind robbery, he only abhors tardiness.]

Lagosian saying

My first major publication was an Op-ed article titled ‘Not Unknown, But Unmentionable’, which ran in The Guardian (Lagos) sometime in 1989. It was a rejoinder to another piece, which sought to explain the October 1986 murder of the journalist Dele Giwa as a mystery, an ‘unknown’. Giwa was a flamboyant US-trained magazine journalist, who had been blasted to death upon opening a parcel that he believed came from the President. After nearly three years his killers had not been discovered, much less prosecuted. No one in Nigeria had ever died from a parcel bomb; only the truly well-informed knew of what the apartheid murderers used to eliminate Ruth First.

Famous Lagos lawyer and human rights activist, Chief Gani Fawehinmi, had tried to bring charges against two officials of Nigeria’s intelligence agency, and had experienced long spells of imprisonment for his trouble. At the time my article appeared, Fawehinmi was in preventive detention, a victim of the iniquitous Decree Two, which empowered the military regime to detain indefinitely anyone considered a security threat. He eventually published a book, The Murder of Dele Giwa: The Rights of a Private Prosecutor, documenting his argument.

My point in the article was that Giwa’s killers were not unknown, but that they were so highly placed in society that no one dared mention their names. As illustration I drew upon a story in Igbi Aye Nyi (1978), a Yoruba novel, with its theme the advent of colonialism and in which the absolute ruler of a town turns himself into a sheep at midnight to carry out burglaries.

This example of the sovereign as criminal appealed to me at the time because it was so spectacular. With a more complex understanding of the nature of power and powerlessness, other kinds of stories now seem more compelling. In Babatunde Olatunji’s Egbinrin Ote (1979), a set drama text for the West African School Certificate examination, the most visible characters are Ogaalu (Boss of the City) and Obakole (The King Does Not Frown Upon Stealing), both very powerful leaders of a Mafia-like group the king himself fears to hate. If I recall well, their group gets to decide who becomes king (a king in Yoruba literature is like the sheriff in the literature of the southern US: less powerful but just as ubiquitous).

Now, step back into the real world of Nigerian politics, colourful as a flower garden in bloom. Whether by the scent or by the colour, I’m drawn like a bumble-bee to the Ibadan-based godfather-kingmaker, Alhaji Lamidi Adedibu (d. 2008). This man caused the sitting governor of Oyo State to be impeached in 2006 because the governor would not let him go directly to Abuja, the capital, to collect the state’s monthly ‘allocation’. As soon as the impeachment procedures were concluded in the house of assembly, the former deputy-governor, now elevated to governor, took his retinue and a television crew to Adedibu’s house to thank him for putting him in office.

The following week, when the list of new commissioners was released, it emerged that Adedibu had handpicked 15 out of the 18 officials. All were swiftly confirmed by the state legislature which, the previous week, had voted 18 to 12 for impeachment. Adedibu patronised motor-park thugs, and broke up their unions – or widened the break already in place – as he searched for foot soldiers in his campaigns.

An equally dramatic plot played itself out in Anambra State, in the east. Chris Ngige, the man elected governor during the 2003 general elections, needed the support of Chris Ubah, a dropout and self-styled godfather, to secure the position. Although the vote was anything but fair, the godfather wanted his cut of the deal. Ngige dithered or balked, and for weeks, then months, in 2004, Ubah and his thugs laid siege to the State House and would not relent until both men were invited for a meeting with the President, Olusegun Obasanjo. During the meeting, Ubah confronted Ngige, daring him to deny that his election had been rigged. Obasanjo went public, claiming that he had ended the meeting by ordering the two combatants out of his house. Ngige was not removed from office, nor was Ubah prosecuted for his destructive brigandage. It took the Supreme Court to void the election, but on the basis of a suit filed by another candidate in the gubernatorial race.

Such is the state of politics in Nigeria, the predators’ republic, before, during, and after military rule. The president (did he know about the parcel bomb?) boasted to the television camera that ‘we’re not only in government, we’re very much in power’ in June and then, without explanations, ‘stepped aside’ in August. A former military prime minister was falsely accused of fomenting a coup plot, then convicted, jailed, and medically murdered by those supposedly caring for him. The doctor who’d administered the injections appeared, less than a month later, before a military tribunal trying another set of coup plotters. Two very powerful soldiers – the military administrator of Lagos and the chief of army staff – pointed fingers at each on the pages of newspapers as the one responsible for the bombs that animated the city with the explosive noises of an Xbox game-board, and both remained firmly in office. The said chief of army staff later starred as a suspect in the attempted murder of a newspaper magnate and former minister who once sat at official meetings with him. The minister of justice was killed by hired assassins and the politician detained as a suspect in the murder case was elected senator while still in jail. No matter who was in power in Nigeria, the state itself was a criminal.

According to Fela’s song, ‘Army Arrangement’, only USD2,8 billion of oil money disappeared without trace in 1982. In 1993, the amount more than quadrupled to $12,4 billion, money that Nigeria had raked in from the sale of oil following the 1991 Gulf War. In November 2012, the attorney general (AG) declared that he could not procure the report of the panel that had probed how the money was spent, and a judge ruled that civil society groups lacked the jurisdiction to sue the AG.

Africanist political scientists have invented a variety of evocative phrases to explain this state of things: ‘the modernity of witchcraft’, ‘private indirect government’, ‘neopatrimonialism’, ‘amoral public’, ‘the rule of the elders’, ‘la politique du ventre’ or ‘la politique de bas’. The Cameroonian scholar Achille Mbembe, no small player in these namings, took a stance many find irresistible. As he wrote in an essay published in 2006, politics in Africa is a daily confrontation with death.

But let’s look at it differently, without turning away from Nigeria. The man in charge of the Ministry of Petroleum Affairs when $2,8 billion went missing was Brigadier Muhammadu Buhari. The press had given him hell during the investigations, but soldiers were not in power in 1982, so Buhari’s ability to be vindictive was limited. In December 1983, soldiers struck. And who became head of state? Buhari, now a major-general.

In one of his first interviews, Buhari vowed to ‘tamper with that’, ‘that’ being press freedom. By February 1984, Decree Four was Nigeria’s most fearful law and, before the year was out, two journalists were serving long terms in jail as its first casualties.  General Ibrahim Babangida overthrew Buhari after a year or so, and his first act was to abolish Decree Four. But he retained Decree Two, which he used to punish Fawehinmi and many others. It was under Babangida’s watch that the $12,4 billion went missing; the Financial Times journalist who first reported the story was promptly deported. Babangida began a costly transition to civil rule that, billions of Naira and half a decade later, only culminated in the terror of General Sani Abacha. Another of Fela’s songs from the 1980s has a name for them: ‘VIP, Vagabonds in Power’.

From the preface to the Penguin edition of John Gay’s Beggar’s Opera (1986), I gather that a character like Peachum could intervene in the judicial process and implore judges to ‘peach ’em’ because corruption was rife in 18th century England, and judges doled out cruel and excessive verdicts. This was a ploy meant to strike fear into the hearts of hapless suspects – minor criminals such as debtors, pickpockets and brawlers – and the aim was to present the process as inscrutable and awe-inspiring. That way, the accused would fear the judge sitting farther up and away in court – a sort of Almighty – and be incalculably grateful when, following Peachum’s intervention, the tin god tempered justice with mercy. Thinking about this practice, I find myself drawn to two different situations.

In the first instance, a teenage boy is caught with a sack of live chickens near the house of a powerful chief. Neighbours fall upon him and are ready to lynch him for the malfeasance. But we know of the incident because it is being filmed, as a sequence in Chef! (1999), the disarming film by the Cameroonian director Jean-Marie Teno. The powerful chief in the story is Teno’s uncle, the leader of the secret society in Bafoussam. The presence of Teno and his camera saves the boy’s neck – people in the crowd are happy to be filmed arguing in favor of ‘human rights’, never mind what is going on inside Bell Prisons in Yaoundé. In the film’s final sequence, the powerful chief emerges holding a staff, heralded by his followers, some of them seen earlier mouthing ‘les droits des hommes’ among the lynch mob, and in the ceremonial call-and-response that confirms the chief in his place, we are made to confront the universal seductions of authoritarian power.

The second instance is the kind of executions which a district officer, Henry Ward-Price, carried out during his tenure in colonial southern Nigeria, as narrated in his memoirs, Dark Subjects (1939). Ward-Price was in His  Majesty’s service prior to the war and produced a personal account, told in the voice of a man reminiscing with friends after dinner, under the benign influence of port and cigarettes. I consider Ward-Price, a Welshman, a more conscientious chronicler of colonial service than the novelist Joyce Cary – the better writer, of course, but reading Dark Subjects, I marvel at the ease with which Ward-Price dispensed capital punishment for the most common crimes. Why did colonial government deploy capital punishment so frequently – death by hanging, for all grave crimes? Is there a trace here of the cruel and excessive treatment of criminals in Walpole’s England? On the other hand, in Ibadan, and specifically during Ward-Price’s time as district officer, chiefs routinely fined capital offenders, rather than executing them. As one of the Ibadan chiefs says, you cannot reform someone you have already killed.

Yet, down the years, could this kind of rationality have foisted the Adedibus and Peachums on society? Legalism is at its most developed since Moses took delivery of the Ten Commandments. Yet the world watches, entranced by the full light of irony dressed as norm, as the powerful conduct themselves in plain disregard of the rule of law.

It used to be ‘the usual suspects’ who were rounded up after the criminal state had done its bit. Now it is enough to trust the full light of irony. After all, the world thinks of it as norm, in Washington, in Yaoundé, and elsewhere.

This article is also available in Chronic 1, published August 2013. To purchase in print or as a PDF head to our online shop. Copies coming to your nearest dealer now-now. Access to the whole issue and Chronic online archives is available for $28 for one year or $7 for a month.

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By Rustum Kozain

Perhaps too short for the reading pleasure it provides, the 50-year old classic Ambiguous Adventure follows the life of Samba Diallo, a child of the Diallobé elite. In many ways parallel to its Senegalese author’s life, the story tracks Samba from his days at the Glowing Hearth Koran school to being a philosophy student in Paris to his return to the country of his birth.

Set during the early parts of French colonial encroachment, Samba is a child when his elders address the central issue facing the Diallobé: stick to traditional modes of bringing up their children and face a form of obliteration, or enroll them at the new French schools so that they can survive and take on the colonial system of government; stick to a purist form of cultural survival (here Islam) and face material hardship, or engage with colonial systems and prosper. In the book’s allegorical lyricism – and put to Thierno, the Koran teacher, by the 60-year old Most Royal Lady, an elder cousin of Samba – the value of Koranic education has eroded: ‘Envelop yourself in shadow, retire into your own heart, and nothing… will bring good fortune to the Diallobé. Your house is the most scantily furnished in the countryside, your body the most emaciated, your appearance the most fragile.’

Thierno, in response, pushes his spiritual line, inspired by glories of the past. In Samba he has identified a prodigy and wishes to turn the boy into ‘such a man as the country’s past had produced’. He can only admit to himself the truth of the Most Royal Lady’s withering critique: the country needs the benefits of western medicine and technology. And the reader will cringe in sympathy with him, no matter how much one agrees with the Most Royal Lady.

The novel is essentially a collection of Socratic dialogues between various characters. Early on, Samba reveals himself as skilled in such intellectual combat, taking on his father (called ‘the Knight’) when he is still at (French) school. Here already Samba has to confront a dilemma: the division between Islam and western rationality, between tradition and modernity, may not be intellectually sustainable or defensible.

As a royal or elite role model, thus, Samba is eventually sent to Paris for his university education. Here he encounters various characters with whom he has further Socratic conversations about his dichotomous dilemma. There is the native French family, whose daughter, Lucienne, tries to convert him to Communism, but he maintains: ‘I do not fight for liberty, I fight for God.’

He befriends Pierre-Louis, the head of an immigrant African family and becomes friends with his granddaughter, Adèle, who is French-born and who eventually romanticises Africa based on Samba’s own homesick stories.

The tale is thematically similar to a host of novels from the same period, those which expressed a rising concern with colonial oppression and anti-colonial nationalism. In general didactic – raising awareness or consciousness and proposing remedies to the material inequalities and psychological malaise of subjected peoples – these novels were nevertheless written in the colonial languages, inhabiting, so to speak, the dilemma which they addressed: more specifically a call to national assertion, with its attendant appeals to pre-colonial cultural identities, expressed in a language that could be understood, not necessarily by cross-lingual local audiences, but by colonial audiences in the metropoles.

Ambiguous Adventure takes this existential and intellectual dilemma as its central theme. Unlike Thierno, who withdraws and seeks refuge in his faith, Samba wants to reconcile the knowledge of God with the very thing that challenges his culture. But such reconciliation is incommensurable and dramatised in the colonial subject as a deep ambivalence. Samba, from early days in the new school, recognises a split in himself; one that will eventually become two ineradicably intertwined traditions of epistemology. As he says to Captain Hubert (son of Pierre-Louis) later in Paris when he dismisses Samba’s anxiety with nonchalance:

On the contrary Captain, it is this attitude of yours which seems impossible to me… I am not a distinct country of the Diallobé facing a distinct Occident, and appreciating with a cool head what I must take from it and what I must leave with it by way of counterbalance. I have become the two. There is not a clear mind deciding between the two factors of choice.

More than there not being two distinct sets of traditions inside the person is the fact that there is no untainted position from which to choose between the two. As a thinker himself, Samba thus takes heed of Lucienne’s earlier words to him: ‘The intellectuals could neither answer these questions nor avoid them.’

The rumination on colonialism and its implications that make this novel is certainly didactic, but the author leavens this through the skilful use of dialogue. The conversations between characters may be set-piece Socratic dialogues, but Hamidou Kane writes them somewhere between speech and lyricism, so that characters’ words attain a kind of mysticism and wisdom that remain fresh 50 years on. Never does the reader feel that he/she is being preached to. The ending is tragic, but the novel does not blame this end on the particular direction that Samba followed – the insistence that he can get rid of neither traditions, that he is forever made up of the two.

Or does it? Fifty years on, the themes are still with us: opportunistic appeals to tradition and culture in order to foreclose on criticism and maintain power in the face of a growing African middle-class ‘modernising’ by way of the brutalities of a global neo-liberal settlement (what I call late-colonialism rather than post-colonialism), which ignores the humanising principles behind pre-industrial societies; and, in places, the rise of an anti-modernising Islam (or Christianity, for that matter) as political principle to counter the long-lasting effects of colonialism that survive in a national comprador bourgeoisie’s rule.

These themes provide Ambiguous Adventure with a prescience which recasts its tragic end. Does Samba’s end dismiss his conflict or does it cast judgement on the world’s dismissal of his conflict? Can we survive as humans by negating or embracing the dualities that colonialism blessed and cursed us with?

This article is also available in Chronic 1, published August 2013. To purchase in print or as a PDF head to our online shop. Copies coming to your nearest dealer now-now. Access to the whole issue and Chronic online archives is available for $28 for one year or $7 for a month.

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A Letter from Kampala

By Kalundi Serumaga

‘I want to talk to mummy.’

With those words, the edifice of a commitment to the emancipation of Uganda’s women should have come crashing down. It did not, but its inherent hollowness was certainly confirmed in my mind.

The words were spoken by one Miria Matembe, a Ugandan feminist icon and media magnet. A lawyer, former government minister and former parliamentarian of long-standing, Matembe was being kept waiting on the end of a phone line to Uganda’s first lady, Mrs Janet Museveni. It was an election year. Matembe had recently learned that her long-uncontested seat in parliament was to be challenged.

Janet Museveni is the patron and leader of The Uganda Women’s Effort to Save the Orphans, a pillar of her church, a dutiful wife, a graduate in education from the national university; a government minister; an elected member of parliament; and, seemingly, a model of African womanhood and of gender representation in politics.

Nowithstanding, in March 2009, the Uganda-based Independent Magazine published a feature that listed no fewer than 30 persons employed in senior positions in the government and army who were said to be related to the Museveni family, mainly through the first lady; some years before, the Observer Magazine ran a story about how the president and the first lady contributed to cronyism and corruption in the Uganda police force; in November last year, a former health minister, in the dock for embezzling roughly US$100,000, submitted documentation to back up a convoluted story as to how he had actually passed all the cash to the first lady (in her capacity as a minister) through one of her minions; and  rumours abound about how Janet Museveni acquired her degree in education.

This is where Miria Matembe – today an outspoken critic of government who condemns theft and corruption at every turn – becomes relevant. Matembe cut her teeth building a civil society body working on gender issues. She served on the board of the Uganda chapter of FIDA, the global feminist advocacy body; for many years she captured the public imagination as a member of parliament, during which she called for the castration of child-rapists and stronger laws for work-based sexual harassment.

Matembe was the model of the liberated – and liberating – Ugandan woman that feminism had been waiting for. And yet here she was referring to the wife of a dictator as “mummy”. Was this an attempt to feminise patriarchal power or to celebrate positive matriarchal power? As with the African dictators, intellectual excuse-making has for too long mollycoddled persons who wear ill-fitting clothing of political virtue.

Janet Museveni’s husband runs one of Africa’s longer-running dictatorships. For more than a quarter-century, it has orchestrated the economic ruin of Ugandan society through full-throated adherence to the economic policies as per the Washington Consensus and backed up by brute military force. What relief is offered in the form of socio-economic donor aid has been gobbled up by a vast network of cronies. All this is offset by the great donor-driven gender programme, which has ensured affirmative action on elected positions and university entrance points, the creation of special parliamentary seats and the appointment of Uganda’s first woman vice-president.

Although Museveni cannot be held responsible for her husband’s actions and omissions, we can ask ourselves why ardent feminists such as Matembe find themselves in need of a person who keeps such company.

This article is also available in Chronic 1, published August 2013. To purchase in print or as a PDF head to our online shop. Copies coming to your nearest dealer now-now. Access to the whole issue and Chronic online archives is available for $28 for one year or $7 for a month.

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by Bwesigye bwa Mwesigire

2000

There are two rivers of Literature, so-called mainstream Literature (Euro-American), and the Other Literature (including African Literature), named after their histories. They come from Europe and America and the rest of the world, from two different histories. They come from swathes and swathes of land in countries with different names, at some point looking so diametrically opposed to each other, never knowing they will meet.  They get tired of running alone, as it is such a long way to the globally shrinking market of literature. They want to reach this sea so that they can rest, stop running against each other. A bridge is built in London in the memory of Sir Caine, former Chairman of the Booker Prize Foundation, who is said to have had a liking for African Literature. Under this bridge, the two rivers meet. Fifteen years on, we are standing on the bridge and looking down so we can see the the various ship owners from African Literature-land taking charge of the direction of their river.

The Love Poems

In the middle of his how manyth year in journalism and writing, an excerpt of his manuscript was submitted for the Caine Prize for African Writing. Like Lomba, the main character in his story, the 2001 Caine win grants him access to more pencil and paper and kicks off a diary of achievements. It is easy for us to say it was easy. It was not easy. He had to write, we may not know if it were in secret, or mostly in the early mornings like Lomba, but we know that the attention from the Caine friends and British media kept peeping through, waiting impatiently for his next work.

Waiting for an Angel is published in 2002. And he is named African Writing Fellow at the University of East Anglia. A few years later, he is a 2005/2006 Chinua Achebe Fellow at Bard College, New York. Like any other business, testimonials are important for the image of the writer, and a prize is one such big testimonial. It is a big booster for a resume. It does not substitute the need to actually be up for the game. He proves himself as an editor. He co-edits the British Council New Writing 14 anthology, and the 2011 Granta Book of the African Short Story in which he declares that the time has come for the post-nationalist African writer who writes stories set in the world with strong African characters. He was thinking Chika Unigwe’s On Black Sister’s street set in Belgium, Osondu’s Voice of America, and more.

With two more novels under his belt, Measuring Time, published in 2007 and Oil on Water, published in 2011, the plunge into the academia is timely. He teaches Creative Writing at George Mason University in Washington. Now a diasporan, he joins other African writers in the diaspora to found the African Writers Trust, on whose advisory board he still sits. The Trust seeks to coordinate exchange of skills and other resources between African writers in the Diaspora and writers on the continent. The plunge into this type of social entrepreneurship comes full circle when in 2013, he launches Cordite books, an imprint of Nigerian Paressia publishers dedicated to publishing African crime fiction.

A love poem is incomplete without some thorns and bones to pick. In 2013, he levels criticism at the Caine Prize in a review of NoViolet Bulawayo’s We Need New Names published in The Guardian. The lovely Caine is being stabbed by one of its own for creating an aesthetic of African suffering. This must have hurt. It attracted unnecessary attention to the Caine too. The spokesperson rarely wants attention to themselves. The Caine knows this. The love affair was saved. He judged the 2014 Caine Prize and penned a blog-post about an African literary tradition. A spokesperson is a vessel for a message not their own. The message really is of African writers. Not Sir Caine’s. Does he now live in Abuja? There is a freedom earned. Being based in Abuja would not hurt the business of writing. Not any more. The careful business of branding takes care of that and the Caine set the painter’s brush roving in 2001.

Discovering Home 

Cape Town, June 1995 -There is a problem. Achebe may not have locked African Literature in the toilet of post-colonial writing but it seems the upstairs shower-room is locked and the tales from African writers are not freshening. There are small riots at many doors of literature curriculum development bodies all over Africa, as heavily post-colonial literature drunk writers bang on the doors demanding space alongside Achebe, Ngugi, Soyinka, P’Bitek and other post-colonial writers.

There is always that point at a party when people are too drunk to be having fun; when strange smelly people are asleep on your bed; when the good literary content runs out except in internet chat-rooms; and when you realise that it is your responsibility to breathe fresh air into the African Literature flat. You have been working here, in Observatory, Cape Town, for 2 years and rarely breached the boundary of your clique. Fear, you suppose, and a feeling that you are not quite ready to leave a place that has let you be anything you want to be — and provided not a single predator.

You are going home for a year. You will be encouraged by your online publisher when he insists he must submit a travel creative non-fiction piece of yours to this new prize, the Caine. You do not think so much about it. Then they write back and inform you that your piece is ineligible because they consider only stories that are published in anthologies, collections in print and not online stuff. You rant back, and write an incoherent essay about there having not been a single print anthology published on the continent in the last year. You do not expect that you shall win the prize, but you win it.

You return from London 10,000GBP richer and decide you will invest it in a literary journal to publish your writer-friends with whom you have been struggling. You call the journal, So What? Kwani?. Some call it the next Transition, in reference to the 1960s journal that used to be published by Rajat Noegy in your other mother-country, Uganda. Whatever they say, you do your thing. Publish good writing. The Pull Him Down syndrome does not spare you. But who cares? The next year, Yvonne Adhiambo’s story Weight of Whispers, which you published, also wins the Caine.

Tongues start wagging. Your friend Chimmy it is rumoured could not win the prize the year you won it because Habila, a fellow Nigerian had bagged it the year before. Things like, it could not reflect well to have back to back Nigerian wins. But Yvonne does win the thing after you. The rumours will even worsen in future when Chimmy writes a short story Jumping Monkey Hill in which it is said the administrator of the Caine of the day is attacked in the name of fiction. Rumour mongers have grown some mega-bytes of memory and Chimmy is the victim. When in 2013 she describes male writers shortlisted for the prize as her boys, the internet burns. In the same interview she added more wood to the fire by suggesting that she gets much better submissions for her workshop than the Caine gets. Some conspiracy theorists say she protests too much.

You become the fence between her and the Caine. This is how PR works. Should work. Positive or negative publicity is good. Your baby, now a ten plus child Kwani? co-publishes Chimmy’s internationally successful books in Kenya. You annually co-facilitate her Farafina workshop in Nigeria. You connect her to Lupita Nyong’o and now the discussions around taking her Americanah novel to the big screens are nearing conclusion. On Yvonne Adhiambo Owour’s launch of Dust, her internationally acclaimed book published by Kwani? in Kenya, Chimmy is present to offer support and launch Americanah in Kenya.

Some useless people are talking too much about you having not really published much fiction since the win of the Caine but you see, there is a method to your madness. You become a name in the creative non-fiction genre. Your memoir, One Day I Will Write About This Place is an Oprah Book club selection. Your satirical rant, How to Write About Africa published in Granta is an instant hit. You do more freelance writing and you get published in The New York Times, The Guardian and many other well-paying international publications. You do the rounds as a writer in residence at Union College in Schenectady, New York (2007) and at William College (2008). You do this writer in residence thing well, Kwani? is running well, things should be getting in order. You are chosen to direct the Chinua Achebe Center for African Literature and Languages at Bard College, where you rub shoulders with Achebe himself very often.

You have reached the zenith. Successful entrepreneur. Very influential in the literary world. There is a certain brand of Africanity building around you. You declare you are a Pan Africanist and not Afropolitan. A good PR establishment is a vessel. Not the message itself. Carries others’ messages. Does not rob the shine off clients. You rubbish the World Economic Forum when they name you a Young Global Shaper. This is how influence works. Snubbing influence validators is itself a form of influence. When TIME names you one of the Top 100 Influential people in the world, publishing a bio that your bosom friend Chimmy writes, we now can tell your artist self will be uncomfortable about the idea that you are influential. You want to remain creative.

A lot of tongues wag as to why TIME never bestowed onto you the validation before you came out as gay. You have now become a very important idea that several homophobic literary enthusiasts admit to loving your work and being confused about your being gay. Like your Caine winning entry, the personal, the political, the confusion, the genius all mix in one. The Caine could only blush at the association with you. Your ingenuity. The Kwani? Manuscript prize alongside other Kwani? initiatives now launches careers of more ingenuity. The message is sweet, the vessel’s satisfaction not in doubt. You are based in Kenya now. Everything starts there.

Hitting Budapest

We are on our way to Budapest. You know it is Bastard and Chipo and Godknows and Sbho and Stina and Darling. We are going even though we are not allowed to cross Mzilikazi Road, even though Bastard is supposed to be watching his little sister Fraction, even though I would be killed dead by mother if she found out. We are the types of characters the tide of post post-colonialist critics do not want to see in African Literature any more. We appear at a time trendy African Literature locates its African characters in the West. We come as a rude interruption of the critics’ navel-gazing. We are unwanted. African writers are writing for the mainstream. The rivers have joined and they are writing global novels. Human literature. They want their work to be listed alongside every other work according to its genre, not because of where their ancestors were born. They are celebrating the fact that their books are just displayed alongside other Fiction titles. Not the African Fiction section. Leave that for the dead Achebe, the Afro-centric Ngugi and others of that generation.

They are willing to burn old bridges like the Caine, and even blame the spokesperson for this aesthetic of African suffering they are describing our stories as. They are eager to tell the story of African privilege. The story of being born in London, studying at Oxford and Harvard and being mentored by world-class renown writers like Alice Walker, you gerrit? Who cares if there is a gang of children somewhere thinking about guavas to steal in Budapest, and can die for them? Where there is such gnashing of teeth and so much hunger, stomachs feel like somebody just took a shovel and dug everything out?

Our story is beautiful and the good old Caine does not abandon us. We win it in 2011. Our story actually grows beyond Hitting Budapest to a whole novel. Our creator is probably the world’s most soft-spoken writer. She is nothing like us. We are mongrels. Mischief is our other name. But there is something to be said about letting one’s work speak for them. Despite the poverty pornography noise, Chatto and Windus in 2012 acquires rights to publish We Need New Names in an auction. Tongues wag. The price is high. At some level, one wonders why The Caine got the flak for our story. We could have done absolutely well in the market without the good old prize.

Our creator was already doing an MFA at Cornell University when the Caine happened. A Truman Capote Fellow. We Need New Names is happening when she is making the move to Stanford as Stegner Fellow. Of course it helps to have the good folks at the Caine saying good things about her. Of course as the old woman who urinated in a lake, it does not hurt to add some drops, even if in a sea.

We start to change the Zeitgeist when our story is shortlisted for the 2013 Man Booker Prize. The Caine folks have a good story on their hands. Some people even start calling our creator the Caine poster-girl. Maybe this is why The Guardian review aims to berate our stories as porn?  This is the first time a former winner of the Caine is shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. It is a story of From the African Booker to the Real Booker for our author. The first black African woman and Zimbabwean to be shortlisted.

This is the thing. If there is anything our creator is committed to, it is her craft. Junot Diaz already saw that she was going to blow up, when she published our exploits in Budapest in The Boston Review. So many other awards want to associate with us. The Etisalat Prize for Literature comes and our creator just swallows it. The Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award is taken home. Junot Diaz chooses her for The National Book Award’s “5 Under 35″. The Guardian First book Award folks do not want to be left behind. We Need New Names is shortlisted for 2013. The Barnes & Noble Discover Award follows. The 2013 Los Angeles Times Book Prize Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction comes in too. More less prestigious awards come.

While other past winners of the Caine follow and amazing things have happened, are happening and will happen for them too, largely with their ability to actually work and make use of the PR the Caine provides, our author’s political commitment to African Literature continues to reach wider audiences. Now a member of the Writivism Board of Trustees, a programme that identifies, mentors and promotes African writers resident on the continent, more stories, whether similar to ours or not will surely keep reaching out there without denying their Africanness. She is also starting a literary journal soon in Zimbabwe to provide a platform to grow more talent. And of course other characters will be born by her. We already feel immortal though. And I am confident I speak for Chipo, Bastard, Stina, Godknows and Sbho, even though I drifted away into America. I will return to the continent in the not so far future when our creator also returns as she has said to various interviewers.

Under the Bridge

Fifteen years on, since Leila Aboulela’s The Museum, through hard work, the African writers who have had the opportunity to associate with the Caine establishment can attest to the journey to the global literary marketplace. And not quite suddenly, stories do not have to be changed and written a certain way to win global prizes, be included on world best-seller lists and featured at book clubs. Like a good PR practitioner the Caine establishments deflects attention from itself to their clients. If anyone does not see that under the Caine bridge, the global market and African Literature have met, let them buy some pair of eyes.

In pursuit of some scriptwriter talent, Billy Kahora discovers that academic mantras, conservative world views and hand-me down observations stunt a rendering of the true grit that must be lived to be imagined in a Nairobi noir.

The cinema like the detective story, makes it possible to experience without danger all the excitement, passion and desirousness which must be repressed in a humanitarian ordering of life. – C.G. Jung

What I can’t get over is that so good a first novel was written by the fuzz.– Norman Mailer on lawyer George V Higgins’ crime novel The Friends Of Eddie Coyle.     

Way before I was asked to supervise a team of writers to script Nairobi Half Life, a film on the petty criminal ways of downtown Nairobi by German film director, Tom Tykver, I was tasked by a local publisher with finding the great unpublished Kenyan crime novels. This was the publisher’s second attempt, premised on an earlier failure, to build a crime novel series together with the best crime reporters in the country. Most of these reporters had not read much of the genre but they had a forensic knowledge of the Kenyan hustle, maintained a working knowledge of the latest cons and scams and knew the history of all the real-life ‘Wanted’ characters of contemporary Kenyan crime. They could also deliver a detailed account of police investigations and procedures, narrate from memory a full year’s roster of Nairobi’s numerous hijackings, drug busts, spare-parts car rings and credit card frauds, and had total recall of criminal executions by police frustrated with the justice system.

In what passed for editorial meetings, in downtown bars, over drinks, the reporters shared their war stories. These were older tales of the infamous CID boss, Mr Shaw, and his sidekick, Mr Patel, from the 1970s; the even more notorious Wakinyonga, Nairobi’s first star bank robber; and car spare-part magnates, Wanugu, Wacucu and Rasta – three of the most infamous newspaper cut-ups in 1990s Nairobi’s sitting rooms. The publisher and editor were curious why such vivid oral accounts never made the papers? Why were all newspaper crime reports by-lined by the men sitting with them invariably: ‘5 men were shot dead by police as they allegedly…’ – the standard four paragraphs and an added police sound-bite? Here, the reporters paused then all laughed knowingly and simultaneously.

‘This is Kenya,’ one muttered.

A month later only two of the original six reporters had submitted 1000 words each. The controlled experiment failed, the Nairobi Confidential Manuscript resulted in a few A4 sheaves. In follow-up phone conversations the reporters interrupted the publisher’s queries with newer accounts of more outrageous incidents. It became clear that the reporter’s addiction to their adrenaline-filled lives far surpassed any ambitions for the tedium of novel writing. It was then that I was brought in and the reporters were made sources and sounding boards for ideas for the crime-genre experiment. Thus began the first known attempt to create a Kenyan/East African crime genre, one that had floundered since the 1980s, with criminal novel accounts such as John Kiriamiti’s My Life In Crime.

The American noir origins of successful crime fiction evolved from the particular worldview of post-war society. A resultant jaded cynicism, coupled with the belief in the existence of pure evil, proved ideal in developing immediately successful nihilistic aesthetic, idiom and form. Kenya in the 1990s, with all its crime and corruption, instead produced a strong penchant for satire, realistic humour, self-mockery and Sheng-based hip hop. After 2002, the emergence of a new generation of writers working in different styles and voices promised the emergence of some form of genre writing. Combining these new voices with knowledge of Nairobi’s sociological criminal realities seemed a new way to start building a crime novel list.

But what kind of crime novel? The crime genre involves several sub-genres in the detective story, noir, and the general criminal story with criminal protagonists – Raymond Chandler, Jim Thompson and Elmore Leonard respectively being the best examples. When we decided to open it up to all the sub-genres, I held a workshop with some young and passably good writers whom I thought would take to genre writing pretty easily. From previous work with them at Kwani?, the Nairobi-based literary journal, I knew they were still some way from becoming sound fiction writers; it would prove a mistake to assume that genre writing requires less skill.

Crime fiction, like its literary counterpart, requires a grounded understanding of the special elements within the genre. I photocopied what I considered key excerpts from crime writers such as George V Higgins, Elmore Leonard, Walter Mosley, Tony Hillerman and James Lee Burke, and handed them over to the writers in the workshop to illustrate some key elements of crime fiction: plot, stock characters, dialogue and setting. I mixed all this with local classics such as John Kiriamiti’s My Life In Crime, The Bushtrackers by Meja Mwangi, local magazine photo-comics from the 1970s – Big Ben In London, Samson and Spear and even Barbara Kimenye’s Moses series.

I also included a travelogue by a British writer named John Williams titled Into the Badlands, an account of Williams’ travels all over the US talking to crime writers to prove that the best crime fiction was as good as any American literary fiction, possibly even better when it came to capturing contemporary social conditions. I wanted the writers in the workshop to understand that good crime fiction could also have serious literary credentials. But more importantly, Williams illustrated how crime writers styled the very essence of their craft, language, dialogue and voice to what they perceived the surroundings to be. How the chaotic register of James Ellroy reflected his angsty experience of downtown Los Angeles; how Tony Hillerman appropriated Navajo traditions in New Mexico to produce cop detective novels that were unique in setting and execution; and how they were all different and adapted to how crime writers perceived their settings.

I set up a discussion to test the writers’ knowledge of their settings. I wanted to find out how well they knew the criminal milieu of the different places they hailed from and where they planned to set up their stories: downtown Nairobi, old Mombasa town, slum Nakuru by the lake, Homa Bay. What did they know about Kenyan style ngeta muggings, karaus, obohos cons, shit-throwing chokoras – the origins of Kenya’s criminal class, wagondis and their relation to class hierarchies? Did they understand the symbiotic nature of police kitu kidogo corruption and the existence of organised crime in Kenya? I asked all the writers to identify a crime they were interested in to serve as a contextual tableau within which they could write a crime story, with emphasis on the elements mentioned and some research on their settings.

Most of the first draft submissions were passably good literary novellas with a convenient crime as the centre-piece of the story. There was a piece about a bank robbery, whose drama was the internal life of a hand-wringing character’s moral dilemmas. Another used the recently concluded post-elections violence to frame a rape narrative. One older female writer who worked for an international anti-drugs organisation wanted to recreate an environmental crime that had political overtones and which allegedly occurred in Nyanza province in the 1960s. Clearly, the writers had not internalised the idea of a formula – they lacked bold protagonists, such as Chandler’s Marlowe, or mysterious dames who intrigued, or stupid overbearing cops who were recognisable as part of our reality, their settings. Characters were drawn on clearly literary frames – there was a sense of the bildungsroman in most of them. There was invariably the good boy/girl who falls into temptation through bad company or circumstances, but eventually finds their way back.

I realised that the worlds the writers inadvertently depicted were framed within their world experience – the conservative worlds imbibed through a mix of tradition and mainstream Christianity in school, family and mtaa spaces. These world views seemed completely entrenched – immune to a complete suspension of disbelief into other more unsavoury universes that the crime genre delved in. More ominous seemed an internalisation of what writing should be, as pressed upon many a young writer at school, university and by literary critics, mostly academic – oft-repeated mantras that can lead to the death of the freedom of the imagination.

For the second draft, I stressed the need for a clearly drawn protagonist, an antagonist – a River Road gumshoe detective, a Wakinyonga with a good heart, a class conflicted Wacucu who had had to come through the skids. I asked for mtaa street language that encompassed whole worlds. I crossed out huge swathes of text learnt from literary fiction mulling over the human condition, characters’ deeper motives. After a third rewrite, the polished versions remained narratives that read like first fiction – they still failed to submerge themselves in particularly criminal or police worlds. Even when we tried the old tricks – changing point of view, narrator, imagining new voices – the manuscripts were still unable to capture unique, distinct aspects of the crime genre.

Half of the stories I have published since my first story in Kwani? have involved some crime or other as a sub-plot and moral corruption has always served as a context. I remain fascinated by aspects of Kenyan society that require general dishonesty, especially in official and public spaces; how bribes or ethnic reinforcing serve as necessary shortcuts for basic services in government offices and what that means for individuals in the larger questions of life, good and bad; and what the blatant systemic pursuit and respect of money, rather than the search for quality in one’s work, mean in the drama of our lives. All this is great fodder for crime writing. Of course, in practice, especially in something as direct as the criminal genre, this kind of writing requires a severe suspension of disbelief on the part of the writer. A complete immersion into a different point of view, possibly never experienced, is required, along with the technical tools and skills to pull this off. Well-meaning young writers, well-schooled in the mores of good Kenyan society, with all its conservatism, know and understand crime but mostly through third-hand reports, faraway anecdotes, bland news reports. Ultimately, the great crime writer is one who can embrace and understand the criminal soul, undo all he has been taught from the other side of ‘good society,’ to write properly about crime in its many facets. Those with first-hand knowledge of these worlds are either deeply immersed in observation of it, like the reporters, or are too busy doing what writers perpetually avoid, living life. Criminals live by crime. Writers write about it. Kenya’s most successful criminal novel, My Life In Crime, is a straight bildungsroman written as a simple memoir. Rather than an overt sense of style, its shock value and its immediate knowledge of the subject of armed robbery are what sells.

The two crime experiments echo the dilemma of how to produce successful crime fiction on the continent. Firstly, all first-hand knowledge on crime and its sociology can only be mostly acquired second-hand – the material for research open to crime writers in the West is hardly available. Also, most young writers on the continent learn their trade from reading literary fiction in school. The dearth of good crime writing means that those who pick it up come to it without internalising its unique criteria and technique.

When director Tom Tykver asked me to suggest writers for Nairobi Half Life, I asked him what the general premise of the film was. He wanted to do something on Nairobi’s sense of the hustle in which crime and survival in the city were part of the context. As we inadvertently developed the concept, I gave him some broad scenarios on rural/peri-urban migration, city survival, modern aspiration – and slowly we talked the central figure of the film, Mwas, into being. After a series of creative sessions we came up with a general storyline that included Mwas’s origins, his arrival in the city, his immediate introduction into the spare-part crime world.

I’d long been fascinated with accounts of criminal life and the sociology of Nairobi’s surrounding danger zones: Wangige, Kinoo, Uthiru, Lari, Riruta, Kangemi, Ruiru, Kiambu town, Gachie, Mucatha, Kikuyu. Some of the older spaces had been the first sites of pre-independence Central Province urbanisation and later became home to Nairobi’s middle-class citizens. Ultimately, population explosions, failing agro-economies and changing sociological conditions created informal settlements side by side and in between upper middle-class homes. At first these areas provided informal labour and eventually raw material for organised crime in the city. The peri-urban areas became the openly criminal retreats that eventually turned on the more affluent and respectable citizens, who also became victims of armed robbery. Ultimately, these areas became informally controlled by criminal overlords, who used their new wealth to buy or forcefully occupy the old middle-class homes. The context from which Mwas came from in Nairobi Half Life was as a result of this evolution.

From the second failed crime workshop experiment I knew what was required was a writer who had both a working sociological knowledge and the language and voice of the contemporary peri-urban space. I introduced Potash, a writer and blogger I had worked with, to Tykver.  And though Tykver originally wanted one writer to work on the whole film, I convinced him that he required different skills and knowledge for the scenes set in Nairobi. I had long been fascinated by the crazy stories one heard from Kirinyaga Road, otherwise known as Grogan (after a colonial Colonel Grogan) and the thieving capital of spare parts in Nairobi. A frequently told story was how motorists who had parked there to buy a spare part would meet up with a street vendor as they returned to their vehicles. This vendor would offer a wheel cap, a front light, petrol cap or side mirror. The hapless motorist would brush away this street creature, only to later discover that they were being asked to buy their own car parts. The next day they would fork over cash for what had once been legitimately theirs. These tales of Grogan included renditions of a criminal spare-part economy of millions of shillings. There were accounts how one could order a part and receive it in an hour. One of the young writers that I had worked with for the crime writing series, Sam Munene, understood the day to day nature of Nairobi street life. His manuscript for the crime writing workshop showed an instinctive understanding of Nairobi’s underworld. I asked Sam to re-adapt some of the sections of Nairobi Half Life to include the spare-parts syndicate on Kirinyaga Road.

I told both Sam and Potash to take these particular worlds on their own cultural terms and languages – to envisage Wangige in Kikuyu and downtown Nairobi in Sheng, before rewriting in English, as best as possible. I also asked both to retain elements of both languages where English failed to explain the circumstances. The believability of the Wangige and Kirinyaga Road scenes come from these processes.

I also told Tom that we would need someone else to reformat the material into a script as both writers worked in standard longhand prose. Actress Sarah Mwihaki joined the team and brought with her a working knowledge of Nairobi’s theatre world that also helped shape how Mwas could become an actor in the city.

Together we thrashed out Mwas’s trajectory, a schizophrenic existence that said a lot of about Nairobi living – a way of life that involves constantly moving through completely different universes and inter-linked languages in a quest to survive one of the continent’s harshest and most expensive cities. Working on Nairobi Half Life, we were all too aware how most fictional depictions of Nairobi render it in compartmented extremes, either through developmental accounts of terrible slum conditions with insistent macro-narratives of crime, inequality and injustice, or glossy economic advisories that talk up tourism, wildlife, upmarket hotels, hourly access to beaches, mountains, forests, latte cafés and business brochures that boast of infrastructure, professionalism, upmarket neighbourhoods, technological advancement, cocktail bars and adult entertainment. Nairobi Half Life was an opportunity to produce a narrative that showed how all these were symbiotic to each other.

The success of Nairobi Half Life was however cemented by the skills brought by a larger team of specialists who do some of the work required by the individual writer in producing a novel. The omniscient presence of the camera, the actors’ talents and the technical prowess of the cameraman are to film narrative what style, voice and idiom are to writing. On a practical level, the larger film production machine has in-built research mechanisms and budgets from larger audiences, economies and markets that confound any publisher. Tosh Gitonga’s camera work reproduced many of the downtown scenes with an immediacy that even the best writing would have struggled to. The oral improvisation of the actors in catching the right strains of Sheng overcame the in-built weakness of text to reproduce the same language on the page.

With the emergence of a great Nairobi crime film, the possibilities for a contemporary great Nairobi crime novel abound. And this, like the film, requires a crime reporters’ encyclopaedic knowledge of crime and its ways in Nairobi; the sociologist’s penchant for research and conceptual understanding of how different societal spaces are inter-connected and how all these are related to crime; an ear for the oral in these different societies; a theoretical understanding of the crime genre in all its manifestations; the storyteller’s understanding of how all these can be brought to bear as entertainment; and the writer’s feel for the written word, stylistics, voice and point of view.

Recently I watched the film Viva Riva, another successful account of criminal life in this part of the world, and was struck by some similarities to Nairobi Half Life that would be good criteria for future crime writing on the continent: first, the careful selection of a specific criminal world that is well researched and articulated, such as the petrol racket in Kinshasha or the spare-part scam in Nairobi; second, an immediate use of language natural to the setting; and third, a conceptual understanding of organised criminal spaces and their complex relationship to mainstream society.

One useful narrative mechanism from both films is the consistent play between the normal and the deviant: love and friendship in criminal gangs and strange oddities in the ‘normal’ mainstream. Both films have crucial topographical compasses and settings. The river is a metaphorical guide in Viva Riva; Nairobi’s ugly brown and grey concretes, paper structures, mabati surfaces and stone exteriors serve as a great canvas for Nairobi Half Life’s plot.

Yet, one major difference can be observed in both films that underscores my earlier point: that the failure of the crime writing experiment with contemporary Kenyan writers lies in a failure of the imagination based on deeply held and imbibed value systems that curtail the writers’ honesty and ability to really see their society. And from that, Viva Riva trumps Nairobi Half Life in one particular aspect – intimacy and sex. Viva Riva does not shy away from sex and its relation to the public. It recognises that the very nature of the intimacy is crucial to both societal and criminal spaces. Sex in both films is rightfully a commodity, a central aspect to aspiration, ownership and manifestation of power relations in criminal spaces. But in its depiction of the act, Nairobi Half Life carries over the failures from the crime writing exercise – the writer’s conservative hangover from well-oiled social mores, from tradition and Christianity, and from a consistent mantra on what writing should be.

Nairobi Half Life attempts the coy – it does not fully integrate sex in all its manifestations in Mwas’s experiences of Nairobi. And that is a serious cop-out in a city in which sex is regularly deployed as a mainstream commodity, where the criminal world is firmly interlinked with prostitution and where informal commercial arrangements and sex are key motivators in criminal life. Viva Riva captures this in a severely adult and worldly Congo, while Nairobi Half Life stutters, choosing rather to explain away the world of sex through Mwas’s boyish sexual reticence as young romantic love. Contemporary Nairobi writers will only find the proper voice and idiom required for the crime genre, whether in film or the novel, by being bold about sex and its role in society.

This article is also available in Chronic 1, published August 2013. To purchase in print or as a PDF head to our online shop. Copies coming to your nearest dealer now-now. Access to the whole issue and Chronic online archives is available for $28 for one year or $7 for a month.

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By Elnathan John

It is June 20. I am in pain. The surgery was a success but I hate these crutches; hate the lingering pain around my right ankle, the heaviness in my arms and shoulders. The doctor gave me Tramadol to ease my pain – one in the morning, one in the evening. Ten days. Not more, or else I become a junkie.

I have taken the tab for this evening. I am still in pain. My bag of pills sits by my bed, illuminated, so that I can read the pack from where I lie: PENGESIC 50. TRAMADOL HCl 50mg CAPSULES. I am hungry. Tempted. In pain. I reach for the pack. Pop out another capsule. One minute. Ten minutes. Twenty minutes. The pain has reduced to a dull throbbing. I am floating. ‘I’m fucking high,’ I say to myself. But then I am hungry and my girlfriend, who was supposed to come yesterday, and the day before, still hasn’t come. What kind of girlfriend sends you a text saying she’s shopping and will see you later when she knows you are currently an invalid? I don’t need her. I don’t fucking need her. She can shop all she wants. Epiphanies. She drinks too much. She loves her job more than she loves me. More epiphanies. She is a Kenyan. Kikuyu. They killed people in the Rift Valley. The painkiller kills more than my pain. I send her a text message. I have had enough of this relationship.

I wonder if I can make it to the Farafina Trust/Chimamanda Adichie Writers Workshop in Lagos next week because I am in pain and have only one good leg and have broken up with my girlfriend, whom I still love, and I am very broke and am very high very often. I think of cancelling. But I don’t. I buy a ticket and prepare for Lagos.

On the plane I wonder what kind of people will be there – I know only Chimamanda Adichie and Eghosa Imasuen. I have popped another painkiller and am starting to get sleepy. It is drizzling when we land. The pain is only slight as I hobble to get a taxi. Lekki Waterside Hotel. On the way I call Okey, the workshop administrator. He is patient. He does not get exasperated when we lose our way. I want to meet him.

The fair, flat faced woman at the door gives me a cocktail of suspicious stares and customary politeness. She does not smile.

‘I am here for Farafina.’ Her face softens. She checks my name on the list. Room 114. First floor. I order dinner and look forward to seeing the rest of the class. Irene, a maid at the hotel, brings my meal. She is slim, dark complexioned, with a nice smile. I ask her where she is from.

‘Kogi. Igala.’

‘Naago,’ I tell her. Thank you.  I am truly grateful for the first real warmth I have experienced in a week.

June 23. I hobble down for breakfast. I will say hello to everyone in the room, I tell myself. I will be nice. I practice my smile. Chinyere is the first person I meet. I know Chinyere from Abuja. We both are members of the Abuja Literary Society. I succeed in being nice to everyone. Gimba Kakanda, who I know only from Facebook, helps me get a plate of food and a cup of tea. I sit at the same table with Chinyere, the white woman, and another black woman – light skinned, wise eyes, low voice…

I ask them their names. The white woman is Lauri. With an ‘i’ not ‘ie’.

‘I am from a little village in Botswana,’ she says, ‘Mahalapye. Forty-thousand people.’ I can’t place her accent; her voice is a cocktail of American, Southern African, and maybe Brazilian inflections.

I ask the other woman her name. She whispers something I cannot hear. Already I love her voice, even though I can barely hear what she says.

‘Wame,’ Lauri echoes loudly.

‘Are you from Botswana too?’

She is Motswana and is speaking in a combination of soft words and whispers and I am carried away. That is until Chinyere decides to take over the conversation. I indulge her for a bit but no, I want to hear the black Botswana woman. She looks over 40, as does Lauri, but her skin is beautiful and her eyes are lovely, dark watery deeps; I stare.

Wame says little. Sometimes she answers with a nod or shrug or just a gentle sweet smile.

I note that a few people are uncomfortable with the hazel-eyed Dutch journalist, Femke. She comes across as the stereotype: bored, white, sexually unsatisfied, desperate for sad African stories to sell to a Western magazine. She joins us at lunch and whips out her little notepad, asking questions. Wame and Chinyere are at the table. Somehow the conversation slips into my not wanting to have children. Chinyere is disgusted. ‘If your parents refused to have children would you have been here?’

Femke smiles. Chinyere turns to Femke. ‘Do you want children?’

‘I don’t.’

Chinyere is silent for a few seconds. I want to burst into laughter. Not only does Femke not want children, she’s an atheist and is in an open marriage. Chinyere will pass out if she knows. All the while I can tell Wame is not interested. She does not want to be a subject for this white journalist. She does not want to answer any questions. We start talking about God, well, Chinyere does, and Femke excuses herself. I am not in the mood to argue about anyone’s God. I get up too.

Femke is shocked when she hears that I have never been outside Nigeria. She has not met a black, African man in Africa who holds the views I hold about family, about alternative sexuality, about God. She shows me her new book, Gin-tonic and Cholera, written in Dutch. Too bad I can’t read it, I tell her. We keep talking and I think she is not that bad after all.

The night is beautiful, warm and humid. Okey is buying drinks. I am careful not to drink too much because I know I will have to climb the stairs with my crutches. Damn I hate getting up to pee. I hate having to balance while I hurry to let loose my penis before I wet myself. I should pee before my bladder becomes so damn full. Okey is bent on getting me drunk.

Olumide is a charming guy and I am having fun making fun of him. My first exercise in class is about him. I like the way he half leans, half crouches, the drawl in his trace American accent, his smile… These fuckers are gonna think I’m gay by the time I’m done here. Can’t you just say a man is good looking without being called homo?

Chimamanda looks even better than she does in her photos. And her skin, damn! I would have said smooth, velvety skin but that’s such a cliché and in a writing class a cliché is a mortal sin.

Pemi asks me: ‘Please, are you a partial homosexual?’ She asks because I have done two exercises with gay characters. Her eyes widen and she looks away, as if she regrets the question, is afraid to offend me. I can’t help laughing.

‘How is one a partial homosexual?’ I ask.

Back on the bus. Wame. I sit with her everyday and I can’t get anything out of her. I want to take off her glasses and say to her, like in the movies: Look into my eyes and tell me you don’t wanna talk to me. She looks out the window and smiles when I compliment her. I want to tell her: I can read your thoughts, you think: I heard it all, you don’t move me. Not that I am sure that she is thinking that, I just want to get something. Anything. I am at a wall and all I can hear are the answers to my questions bouncing back. I want to tear it down and run right through. I am almost sure what I would see beyond it: Sad and happy and afraid and hopeful and beautiful, mostly beautiful; a distilled beauty fortified by experience and adversity and a good heart.

June 25. I have spoken to Tahirah a few times and I discover that the slim, pretty, even-toned brown girl is on the same floor as me. She describes herself as neurotic and blinks a lot when she speaks. She says yes, a bit reluctantly, when I ask her to have dinner with me.

It’s 9:30pm and we are having tea and toast in my room. I am glad to have her. I love sharing meals. After a few words, Tahirah takes over the conversation, moving so swiftly between topics, she leaves me dizzy. I try to contribute in vain; she is not listening. She keeps on and on and doesn’t realise when I doze off. Tahirah is sweet and doesn’t hold it against me. She leaves at midnight having eaten only two slices of my eight slices of toast.

I am loving this workshop. Loving the challenge; the fact that there are writers more intelligent and impressive than I am. Loving Gboyega’s funny stories, Uncle Emezuom’s occasional wise sayings, Morenike’s streetwise analysis, the glint in Chimamanda’s big beautiful brown eyes, Nkem’s big hair and nerdy glasses, Glory’s confounded look. These guys are great. I am forgetting all my woes. Forgetting the Kiswahili I have learnt to say over the past three months. Nakumiss sana. I miss you much. Forgetting my homelessness. The pain in my arms and legs. I am loving Lagos and the bus rides from Lekki to Victoria Island. Ah, the bus rides! The rides into Wame’s soul; the waiting for her to say: come in, come into my world.

June 27. Adewale Maja-Pearce is in the room when we arrive. I have met him before in Abuja. We shake hands and he asks what happened to my leg in clean British accent. I like listening to this half Scottish, half Yoruba, 58-year-old man. He doesn’t have a lesson plan so he asks us what we want to do. After four days with the deliberate, structured Chimamanda, most people are taken aback at his question. I like him anyway. He has a lot in his head, this man.

I hobble until I reach room 105. I want to knock on the door, ask if Wame will spend some time with me. I want to hear her Botswana stories, the things that make her sad, her dreams, her fears. My spirit is eager but my body is cowardly. In my room, I pick up the intercom and dial 105.

‘Did you get the attachment with the email?’

‘No, I didn’t.’ Silence. ‘Ok, bye.’

Coward! Fucking coward! I can’t even tell her I want to see her. So what if she says no? Coward!

I lie down, but cannot sleep. I read her story. It is beautiful and sad, just the way I like my stories. She is beautiful and there is a hint of sadness in her eyes, just the way I like my women. It doesn’t matter to me that she is 47, or did she say 48? I close my eyes and wonder what she is doing in her room. Is she lying down, reading? Is she staring at the ceiling, thinking? What is she thinking?

I am grateful to Tolu. He takes my laptop downstairs in the mornings. Everyone is so sweet – they hold open the doors for me, get my food and pull out a chair for me. I can’t think of anyone who isn’t lovely. I like the way Irene laughs – a deep resonant giggle. She insists that what she is wearing is a weave and not a Chinese wig as Gimba calls it. She is sweet and young.

I try to avoid Chimamanda at lunch. The image of her in my head is perfect. Overexposure may reveal something I do not want to see.

June 29. Binyavanga Wainaina is cracking us up with all his funny, vulgar examples. Chinyere, the unofficial representative of Jesus in this workshop, is scandalised. She can’t believe how easy it is for Binj to say fuck or dick or cunnilingus. How comfortable he is drinking local ‘man-power’ while he teaches. If only Nkem’s mother could hear what he is teaching her 19-year old. I laugh. This crazy Kenyan writer is intelligent, in spite of his hangover, his bloodshot eyes and his haphazard teaching style. Every joke has an important lesson embedded in it. I wonder if everyone is getting it.

I stare at Wame in class. A few times she catches my eyes, smiles. I want to tell her, Wame, I am waiting for you. I am waiting for you to take down the high brick wall guarding your lovely soul. I want to tell her, but again I am that coward. I only smile and ask silly questions.

Funke is really a talented writer. Her approach to storytelling is fresh. She strokes her beautiful healthy hair when she reads. Uncle Emezuom reminds me of Achebe and Cyprian Ekwensi when he reads. Wame gives me her collection of short stories, Go Tell the Sun. She signs it: Elnathan, For the conversations we have shared that I hope will continue. Wame. I read those lines again and again. I hope the conversations will continue. I really do.

July 1. Tash Aw leaves me in awe of his brilliance. I want to be like this good-looking, lanky Chinese Malaysian when I grow up. Perhaps this is the only time I don’t stare at Wame. Today is the final day and still I stand behind that brick wall. Somehow I am comforted by the fact that I may have stood closer to that wall than most people here. She gives me joy, this Wame. I feel everything around me freeze when she reads her breathtaking stories, her voice – sotto voce, slightly tremulous, but clear and lovely. Time stops and I am in Botswana, a Motswana for the few minutes that feel like hours; I travel through her smoky eyes to heaven. This Wame.

July 2. Faith Adiele. Elegant, mixed race, confident, short brown spiral curls dyed gold in front. She reminds us that she speaks in a thick American accent just in case we didn’t notice and wonders if we can understand her. This is not rural Masailand I want to tell her. Your culture is the most exported culture in the world, of course we understand you! She has an Igbo tattoo on her right wrist as well as a red string. She is Buddhist. She is colourful. The teacher with the most structured lesson plan. We do a lot of exercises. Again I see just how intelligent the members of the workshop are. I am proud to be part of this.

July 4. Departure. Yesterday we had the dinner-and-literary evening and stayed out until almost 3am chatting with Chimamanda and Ivara. Last night was my last chance to see Wame. I am sad as I pack dirty and clean clothes into the same bag. I stop and think I need to try one last time. I need to tell Wame how I really feel; I am tired of waiting. My body is reluctant, but I say to myself: Mind over matter. Mind over matter.

I pick up my crutches and head to room 105. My heart is banging against my ribcage. I have already been here this morning, but just asked the same silly questions: When is your flight? Who is taking you to the airport? Now I am back for the real thing. I will tell her that when I see her I cannot breathe and when she reads time stops and when she smiles my soul is glad.

Knock Knock. Knock Knock. She opens and I see someone else is in the room. Fuck no! Not today! Not now. I smile, and say we have packed and are ready to go. I say goodbye to both of them, hobble back to my room. My hands are trembling. I light a fag and drag harder and longer than I ever have. Shit!  I had it all planned. Say it all. Hug her tightly. And if she hugs back, be audacious, kiss her and tell her you have always wanted to. You will miss her. You will miss her. You like her. You like her very much.

We are downstairs waiting for a bus to pick us up. I hate goodbyes. Osemhen and Funke go out to negotiate with the bus driver. Lagos girls do it better. I sit and think of Wame. Waiting has cost me. I will never wait again I tell myself, never! I will reach out until I am rejected; hold on until I am blown off.

The bus is here. Wame comes downstairs and suddenly energy leaves my body. There is nothing to say now but goodbyes. I hobble slowly toward the door, look into her eyes and say: ‘I will miss you’. She cannot know how much. She cannot feel the beating of my heart and the coldness in my bones. She cannot see that I waited, patiently, foolishly at the entrance.

We hug tightly and I plant a firm long kiss on her soft right cheek.

‘Keep in touch,’ I say.

‘I will,’ she says, smiling through smoky eyes.

I can feel in that hug that perhaps she knew I was waiting. In those few seconds I feel the brick wall fall and I embrace it all – rich naked beauty, just like I had imagined it. She knew! She fucking knew!

I hobble away from this woman I may never see again, who made me wait 10 days, who gave me more than she gave most people here, who took me to dizzying heights of pleasure just by living, speaking, smiling.

I was patient. I waited. I waited for Wame.

This article is also available in Chronic 1, published August 2013. To purchase in print or as a PDF head to our online shop. Copies coming to your nearest dealer now-now. Access to the whole issue and Chronic online archives is available for $28 for one year or $7 for a month.

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By Vivek Narayanan

Lately, I’ve had trouble sleeping at night: full of strange unnameable anxieties, my head crowded with voices, disjointed thoughts, fragments of paragraphs, half-phrases. Trying to understand where this is coming from, I read from bits and pieces of writers, who themselves have written essays that feel like bits of blog posts and Wikipedia shards wired together – that argues that my brain is being completely rewired, retooled, that we are all being retooled.

Some argue that the new media has forever altered our attention span, that the experience of being completely lost and absorbed, an experience they say you only got from a printed book, has disappeared. I can’t disagree with them. I wonder seriously if I will ever again finish reading a whole book, if discrete books themselves have not secretly disappeared from the face of the earth, each smeared deftly into the other. Indeed, I even wonder if I will ever again be able to have a complete and private thought, to even remember what that is like.

What a strange set of contradictions I appear to be caught up in. The internet is the new main source of our reading, especially in India, after the old, great libraries have been left to quietly rot, after the bookstores have started to fill themselves up with hundreds of copies of the same three or four bestsellers. The internet is a place of plenitude; it caters to the finest niche taste as much as the bottom line; it places very few restrictions on length, and literary journals – like the one I co-edit – have not only been getting cheaper, but also longer and longer, carrying extended essays with little trouble. At the same time, the internet is still the place where, statistics prove, one spends, on average, not more than 50 seconds reading a page.

In the midst of all this, the book has been replaced by a universe of screens, screens of every possible type, shape, quality – screens for every need and temperament; yet, precisely because it is impossible to predict the capabilities of the device a given text will be read on, and how that device will render the text, one ends up feeling there is far less freedom to explore things like design, typography and blank space. Suddenly, nearly everything one reads is in Georgia font. The idea of publishing itself has changed forever, in ways that we have not fully grasped, in a way that even our languages have not been able to keep up with. When one hits that ‘publish’ button on one’s blog, how is this different from publishing as done by Random House or Open Magazine? We aren’t sure. Never again can a writer be kept from her readers, so it is claimed – and yet in that very noise, when every reader is also a writer, there is apparent terror, the desperation of making one’s voice heard in the clamour. Never is one lonelier than on Facebook.

Everything is now available but, at the same time, I can’t shake the feeling that everything is also missing. The soul has fled, along with the body, from the digital text, I think. It is as if, unbeknownst to our former selves, we have quietly become an alien species.

Well, says my alien self, what’s wrong with that? If the individual author has disappeared, if the world is just an endless ocean of text that you take in and spit out; when you gobble through hundreds of thousands of pages in a few seconds, alighting for a brief time on only the phrase or piece of information you need; when you have the freedom to assemble your own unique book of life, what is wrong with that? Isn’t it right to upset the hierarchy of author and reader?

Troubled by these irresolvable contradictions, these different me(s) inside of me, I finally fall asleep. I wake into a beautiful dream. It isn’t a dream of the distant past; no, far from that, just the opposite, it is a place where screens of every type proliferate – fat, thin, long, circular, triangular, held in your hand, scanned into your retina, or running in a scroll along the ceiling.

As one walks through one’s day, one reads books, but books of every type: the old novels, yes, but also new books written specifically as sound and light shows that animate along long horizontal panels; or books with soundtracks synched in; books built from automatic recombinant snippets that change as you read them; books as Excel files; and books written and rewritten by bots. Somehow in the dream, these are not disorienting at all; I have grown used to them. Writers have learnt to do truly meaningful things with these possibilities, rather than simply promote them as ideas or use them to advertise versions of the old. But the real beauty of this dream is still to come.

Stumbling on a small alcove, parting its lace curtain, I find a printed book of the kind that everyone has predicted will become extinct. Let’s say it is a book of poems; let’s say it is a shrine to all the things that are supposed to one day be obsolete: letterpress printed, thick, grainy paper, hand-cut and hand-bound, the shape not standard, the margins not standard, instead each poem, each word, according to its needs, lovingly laid out across the page. I bring it to my face and take in the smell of its pages. Importantly, it is a brand new book, a book of my own time and not a relic from the past. I run my fingers across it and feel its erotic charge; I read with my fingers as much as my eyes. Has it been made for me by a friend?

Thinking about it in a new way, I evaluate the ‘specs’ of the technology in my hand: its unique pleasures for all the senses; its ability to last a thousand years with the right paper and binding; its structural integrity; its uniquely efficient spatial organisation of data; and its opportunities for artists; its simplicity that draws your attention and holds it. I look up, and the screens are still there. I understand then that the book in my hands has become, not obsolete, but more special in its presence, and also that the interest of the screens is, equally, in being able to do something different than the printed pages. Each makes the other more real. Nothing is replaceable, nothing cancels the other out. Nothing is past, present, or future.

I am afraid that this world in which I am having my cake and eating it might disappear. Yet, as I walk around, I find the opposite happening: it grows more populated; people have taken to writing on and renewing all the media of the past. There are new books being written on stone tablets, on temple walls, on palm leaves, on long scrolls – the last of these not so different from the new web pages. Then I see the poems of the Chilean Raul Zurita, written in the sky with a skywriting plane, or in the desert with bulldozers, visible from space. As more printed books arrive in the post – far from extinct – among them are envelopes from the Trinidadian poet Nicholas Laughlin, each containing a one-line minimalist poem on a card; you wait months for the next in the sequence to arrive.

The most unrealistic thing about this world is that poets are at the centre of it; yet, haven’t they, through their various experiments, pioneered both the new media writing, the writing beyond the page, and then stubbornly, triumphantly, brought back the persistence of the printed page? I am beginning to see that the dream is not so far from the world I will soon wake up in. We are outside now. The sun is setting. I am going with my lover to the movies; it is an old-fashioned large theatre – the kind in which one can sit with hundreds and feel truly, thrillingly alone. The movie begins. But it has no pictures. Instead, on the screen scrolls text that goes on for hours, a whole novella. Curled into each other’s bodies, drinking in each others’ smell, and mingled with the smell of all the others reading simultaneously, silently in the dark, completely absorbed, my lover and I sit and read the whole thing.

This article is also available in Chronic 1, published August 2013. To purchase in print or as a PDF head to our online shop. Copies coming to your nearest dealer now-now. Access to the whole issue and Chronic online archives is available for $28 for one year or $7 for a month.

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“Spare a thought for secularism. One month into the life of The Satanic Verses, only two states anywhere in the world had taken decisive action against the book and they had done so purely for secular reasons” – Achal Prabhala unravels multiple strands of irony swathed around this most irreverent book.

In the early months of 1989 I became obsessed with a brash, sophisticated and worldly Indian immigrant to England, whose nascent renown peaked in a spectacular international crisis. It was the story of the season: newspapers were full of it, newspaper editors were in the thick of it, national security was threatened, and Muslim potentates were involved. Her name was Pamella Bordes, or as a Daily Mail teaser had it, Per-mell-a Bor-dez, thereby conferring upon her a sultry Latin mystique. She began life as Pamela Singh, with a single ‘l’ and in middle-class Punjabi comfort. In 1982, she won the Miss India crown, which took her to Europe – and there was no looking back.

Seven years later she was another person in another country, a researcher at the House of Commons and the lover of big-name editors, high-ranking parliamentarians and Middle-Eastern arms dealers all at once – while somehow still finding the time to turn tricks on the side. Alas, the good life was not to last; a curious tabloid and an undercover investigation ended it all; the revelation that Gadaffi’s top lieutenant and several of Her Majesty’s finest had rolled in the same hay proved too horrific for the fragile islands to handle, and the press had a field day.

In pre-liberalisation India, Pamella Bordes’ story was reported with the usual hysterical screams, but there was a distinct touch of pride in the telling of her torrid tale. Pamella Bordes was supernaturally glamorous, and she was one of ours. Sure, it was a scandal, but it was a scandal of the highest order. I was lost in a vision of her face, her body and her story. And three months into my rapture, when the paparazzi chased her down in faraway Bali – precipitating a road accident that left her face wrecked beyond recognition – I was incensed. At that moment, in the middle of my interminable teenage interregnum, I knew exactly how I wanted to spend the rest of my life: rescuing her, comforting her, and providing her the everlasting love that someone of her exceptional sex appeal so clearly deserved.

There was, of course, another brash, sophisticated and worldly Indian immigrant in London who was causing trouble at exactly the same time. This young man, a nascent celebrity too, would go through his own transformation – from a bright, young writer of experimental fiction to the fictional experiment known as Joseph Anton. Somewhat unusually, his transformation could be traced back to a single day – Valentine’s Day. On 14 February  1989, the ailing Ayatollah Khomeini – standing in for the greasy London publicist Max Clifford, who would discover the Pamella Bordes story and sell it to the world – issued a fatwa calling for Salman Rushdie’s head. In the next few months, both scandals vied for the headlines. Rupert Murdoch’s News of the World had the big Bordes scoop early in March 1989; the Evening Standard exposed her Libyan connection immediately afterwards; the Daily Mail ran an exclusive tell-all that April; and shortly after, Pamella Bordes was lying bruised and broken in Bali. Then she fell of the map.

In India, where none of these newspapers had any meaning, I remember reading of the fatwa as it happened. And I remember being mostly uninterested in Rushdie: he was a sleepy-looking, persecuted man, I was a lonely hormonal mess, and she was the sexiest woman in the world. Then one day I saw the connection between both events acknowledged in a cartoon, which had a confounded Margaret Thatcher poking her buck-teeth out of a window while competing placards called for Rushdie’s death and Parliament’s dissolution (‘These Indians! These Indian-born Indians!’) – and I felt a surge of pride. Here, at last, were two tropical émigrés I wanted to identify with – the hooker and the heretic – dominating conversation the world over in the most unpredictable manner possible, bringing a nation that both had narrowly missed being colonised by to its knees.

Two decades later, Pamella Bordes is nowhere – having renounced her old self and fashioned a successful career as a photographer – and Salman Rushdie’s gripping, gossipy memoir of the fatwa days is everywhere. I could not have predicted this but, clearly, I knew nothing. I could not have known that 1989 would be the year in which my world fought to turn itself inside out. The planet was preoccupied with publicly snuffing the last breaths of life out of communism, while India was secretly plotting her own assault on socialism, and no one, certainly not anyone in the West, quite understood how insignificant scraps from the final battlefield of the Cold War would ignite other debris from the wreckage of utopia to form the defining problem of our time. This is especially evident from the archives of Private Eye, the satirical fortnightly which serves as the unofficial house journal of Fleet Street.

In 1989 Rushdie made two Private Eye covers, back to back, the first on 3 March (a solemn colleague of the Ayatollah says: ‘Have you read the book?’ to which the Ayatollah replies: ‘Are you mad?’), and the second on 17 March (a beady-eyed Margaret Thatcher greets a fully costumed Mickey Mouse with: ‘How nice to see you Mr Rushdie’). Pamella Bordes got two covers of her own as well, on 28 April of the same year and 2 February of the next; and in the year that followed the announcement of the fatwa, it would not have been unreasonable to claim that both stories attracted a roughly similar amount of attention. And it might not be unreasonable to claim that had Joseph Anton – or whatever equivalent of it – been written in the mid-1990s, it would have been the kind of book heralded by free-speech liberals and anti-censorship activists, and otherwise left sympathetically alone. Had it been written in the years immediately following 9/11, it would probably have become a war-on-terror classic, revered at the American Enterprise Institute and the White House and decried by the left. As such, written and published as it was in 2012, after the world has turned several times over and after the pitch of the conversation has lost that first flush of unreasonable passion, it’s just pure gold. There’s a lesson in here for publishers and punters alike: sex scandals will come and go, but holy wars are written forever.

The current edition of the book that started it all is inscribed with what are surely the truest words ever to come out of publishing PR: ‘You can’t make this up’. Random House describes The Satanic Verses as Rushdie’s ‘most galvanizing book’. It must have certainly felt that way in South Africa in 1988. In the waning years of Apartheid, as the ANC relaxed its calls for a cultural boycott of the country, a congress of struggle writers – COSAW – and the anti-Apartheid Weekly Mail put together a literary festival at which Rushdie was invited to speak, ironically as it would turn out, against censorship. On 28 October 1988, three days before Rushdie was due to arrive, the Apartheid government galvanized against his book. From petition to decision, the deed was done in four days flat, and The Satanic Verses became the very last work of literature to be banned by the departing regime. The festival organisers were plunged into crisis, Rushdie’s invitation was rescinded, and a brief war broke out between Nadine Gordimer, who didn’t think it worth risking the author’s life to honour a principle, and JM Coetzee, who uncompromisingly honoured it in the Weekly Mail, lambasting the ‘madness of settler apocalyptics’ and lamenting the fallout – the ‘smiles in the mosques’ and ‘chuckles in the corridors of Pretoria’. (‘In retrospect,’ he would later write, ‘I think Gordimer, in her prudence, was right, and I was wrong.’)

The Apartheid government wasn’t the only one galvanizing. In Rushdie’s account, the decision to rescind the invitation came from within. People who qualified as Indians and coloureds –two of the numerically minor racial categories in operation at the time, both with significant Muslim representation – were part of the struggle too. He writes of a telephone conversation with a concerned South African who described himself as a ‘liberal, modern person’, who urged him to stay away for his own safety and for the ‘well-being of the anti-Apartheid movement’. Nadine Gordimer called, ‘agitated and distressed’ about plans to ‘kill him and bomb his meetings and attack those who had invited him’. Fatima Meer, among the highest-standing Muslims in the ANC all through its underground years, called the book ‘a malicious attack on his ethnic past’ – referring to the author – and said: ‘In the final analysis it is the Third World that Rushdie attacks, it is the faith of the Third World itself’. Two of the country’s oldest minority activist organisations, the Natal Indian Congress and the Transvaal Indian Congress – both of which Mahatma Gandhi helped found and were closely aligned with the ANC – exerted all the anti-Rushdie pressure they could. COSAW did not want to upset its allies, much less its numerous Muslim members, and it didn’t help that the Weekly Mail was popularly perceived as being run by Jews. Finally, a compromise was reached: Rushdie called in to the meeting from London and got to say his piece.

The story of this unlikely congruence of white supremacists, Muslim fundamentalists and earnest revolutionaries is narrated by Peter McDonald in his wonderful book on the consequences of Apartheid censorship, The Literature Police. Indian and coloured people were the Apartheid-era’s swing-vote; people whose sympathies could be courted by the left and the right, and frequently were. In 1984, under tremendous international pressure to display some evidence of their humanity, the ruling National Party – the Nats – devised a tricameral parliament. It was a neat little trick. Indian and coloured people now had official seats at the table, though in reality, very little power.

Nadine Gordimer’s conspiracy theory, McDonald relates, is that Indian puppets in government were responsible for whipping up mass consensus on Rushdie. She went further, blaming a pact between what she called ‘Muslim extremists’ and the Apartheid government for creating the fire-storm the festival organisers faced. The truth is unclear, because not all notes on the censorship file survived the journey to the archives, but what is clear is that Gordimer was under-reporting the struggle within the struggle, and that despite the numerous South African Muslims who publicly stood up for Rushdie’s right to speak, the country was easily hoodwinked by the loudest voices on the block – the retrograde Muslim Judicial Council and the Council of Muslim Theologians – into believing they spoke for the whole block.

One of the loudest voices on the block belonged to a charismatic, self-taught, 70-year-old evangelist from Verulam in what is now KwaZulu-Natal. Sheikh Ahmed Deedat had turned a childhood grudge at not being able to hold his own against Christian missionaries into a lifelong vocation. With early assistance from the Bin Laden family in Saudi Arabia, he turned his vocation into an empire. (Deedat’s Durban base, the Islamic Propagation Centre International, until recently had the words ‘Bin Laden’ prefixed to its name.) His appeal was obvious: he spoke English fluently, his speeches were colourful and coherent, his message was always on-point, and he could summon obscure passages from the Quran on call. He had the easy, vernacular charm of a street-fighter. His grey beard gave him authority; his sassiness and salty tongue made young men feel he was one of them; and that he invariably had a dark, frightening and violent lesson to impart didn’t really matter.

On 1 October 1989, one year after the South African ruckus and several months after the fatwa had been declared, Deedat rented the Royal Albert Hall in London to rally his troops. And in this instance he had a curious message for his followers. He skirted over Islamic objections to the book – as though Rushdie’s sins in this direction were a foregone conclusion – and concentrated instead on why Britain and the rest of the world should be offended, offering what would turn out to be a masterclass in secular dissimulation.

‘I can’t read The Satanic Verses in my own country,’ he began, informing the packed auditorium that the book had been banned at home – by the Apartheid government, mind you – because it was ‘racist’. The proof? Rushdie said ‘Niggers eat white man’s shit.’ These words, of course, do appear in The Satanic Verses, and in italics, as racist graffiti drawn on the walls of a low-income English council estate, or at least the dreamlike approximation of one. But Deedat was on a roll. He made reference to all manner of Gods, he scoffed at his audience for being racial cowards, and he appealed to their patriotism – their British patriotism. He had a British passport, he told them, proudly holding it aloft – ‘I am one of you.’ And this, he said, was what Rushdie thought of their mutual countrywomen: ‘White women – never mind fat, Jewish, non-deferential white women – were for fucking and throwing over.’ This is what he called ‘our Maggie’: a bitch. Rushdie said British people ‘fuck their own sisters’. (And by the way, he used the word fuck fifty-two times in his book.) Rushdie said Londoners are ‘bastards’. He claimed to have had sex with the Queen of England.

It was heady stuff, and even though Deedat didn’t offer any practical pointers that night, his audience of six thousand – among whom only one person had apparently read the book – exploded with mirth. (The lesson would follow shortly in a lecture entitled ‘Should Rushdie Die?’ – to which the 70-minute-long answer was ‘Yes’ and had something to do with his fate being encoded in his surname.) The genius of Deedat’s critique, however, was the worldly nature of his appeal – and to appreciate his foresight as well as the forgotten nature of that time, one only has to imagine the impossibility of a similarly chummy recruitment message – replete with Biblical allusions, street slang and a passionate defence of the West – emerging from some Taliban hideout today.

When the Pakistani horror film Zibahkhana (Hell’s Ground) was released in 2007, it became an instant classic. Omar Ali Khan’s tight, clever and blood-spattered tribute to the Hollywood schlock-horror cinema of his youth was feted by genre fans as far and wide as Denmark and Brazil. Within Pakistan, unfortunately, aside from a few wildly successful private screenings, it had an aborted run – its theatrical release coincided with Benazir Bhutto’s shocking assassination, and it fell by the wayside as the nation shut down. What was surprising, however, was that it made it past the Pakistani censors at all –for the killer in the film turns out to be a disturbed young man draped in a shuttlecock burqa. The man-in-burqa routine is as old as the burqa itself and has long been a staple of South Asian comedy and farce, but this was different. This was the ‘burqaman’ – a cross-dressing, pathological serial killer decked out in the universal marker of Pakistan’s state religion, in a film guaranteed to be seen around the world. At a screening of Zibahkhana a few years ago in Bangalore, the film scholar, MK Raghavendra, made an insightful remark. He was grateful for having watched it, he said, and more so for it having been made in Pakistan – for if Zibahkhana had been an Indian film, it would have never made it out of the gates. He was right, of course. Pakistan-bashing may be a time-honoured and widely permissible filmic tradition, but when it comes to Islam, the censors, whether serving a secular government or not, tend to treat domestic Muslim sentiment as a powder keg waiting to explode.

Authenticity counts for something; the confidence that authenticity bestows counts for even more. But our secular governments and their minority subjects, trapped in a death volley of mutual charges of inauthenticity, have trained each other to play it safe. (Despite the heft of the Hindu right, Hinduism is given slightly more room to play.) The point is not so much whether an Indian film like Zibahkhana will ever be cleared for public viewing; it is that a film like it will never be made in this country. How then did an Indian Muslim writer acquire the cred to create something as brazen as The Satanic Verses? One source of Rushdie’s authenticity is surely the location and time of his childhood – wealthy, worldly Muslims growing up in 1950s Bombay did not know how to cower. Another source of his authenticity is the secret that lay in plain view for all to see: until the publication of his memoir, for anyone who didn’t look too closely, Salman Rushdie was an Indian who migrated to Britain, and that was that.

In Joseph Anton, Rushdie opens up about his family’s migration to Pakistan in 1965. While Rushdie was being educated in England, his parents and his sisters were charting a new course in Karachi, surrounded by relatives and friends who had undertaken the great trek back in 1947. Things did not go well for them, and his family slid into a genteel decline. One sister left for London, another for Berkeley, his father died, and Rushdie’s mother and youngest sister stayed on in the country all through the fatwa years, right to their very ends; aided by cousins and companions, they came to no harm. Despite all this – or perhaps because of it – Rushdie is no fan of Pakistan: his exact words are ‘Pakistan sucks’. In his own description, he is an Indian from Bombay and always will be, which is both an incontrovertible fact and, in light of his parents’ subsequent choice of longitude, a determined act of self-invention.

Then there are the stories that circulate among members of his extended family in Pakistan, stories that cement the gaps in Rushdie’s account of his immediate family’s selves, homes and nations: the house his father bought on a whim in Karachi in 1947, which invited the Indian government’s wrath upon him even though he hadn’t intended to leave Bombay; the fifteen-year-long harassment his family faced from that selfsame government for being suspect of wanting to leave, a harassment that eventually drove them to leave – first to London, and then Karachi; the towel factory his father invested in immediately upon arriving in Pakistan that went to pot, setting in motion the gradual depletion of his considerable finances; the lasting anger of relatives close and far, who felt they had been served up as comic caricatures in Midnight’s Children; the rumour that Benazir Bhutto, memorably sent up in Shame as ‘the Virgin Ironpants’, was in fact his middle sister’s closest childhood friend and therefore doubly wounded by the description; the discreet changing of the nameplate on the home in the upmarket Defence neighbourhood, from Rushdie to Ahmed when the protests began in 1988; and the fact that he financially supported his mother and his youngest sister single-handedly for the better part of two decades, through all the bad times.

Pakistan is the arsenal of authenticity that Rushdie has never used, whereas anti-Rushdie hysteria is the arsenal of authenticity that Pakistan has practically used up. Election after election, to this very day, denouncing Rushdie is political shorthand for patriotism. Call it bukkake by the book; here, more than anywhere, he remains an enduring orgasmatron in the infinite circle jerk of competing pieties. And it isn’t just the state who bounces on this bandwagon – the film industry climbed on board with an epic feat of imagination called International Gorillay (Gorillay is guerillas rendered in Punjabi). Its cult status is well deserved: the ‘Rushdie’ of the film is a slippery hedonist, whose devious plot to bring down Pakistan consists of opening up a chain of discotheques and casinos with the support of Mossad; he hides his pious prisoners in his lair somewhere in the Philippines and tortures them by reading aloud from a terrifying book called The Satanic Verses; his chief opponents are a determined group of brothers, whose method of slipping by unnoticed in modern-day Manila is to disguise themselves in full Batman costumes; and just when you think the battle may be lost, a quartet of levitating Qurans sizzle him with divine laser beams from on high, restoring happiness in the land.

The short arc of this strange film is an instructive lesson in the myriad opportunities presented by enemies of the God. On the film’s release in 1990, its director, Jan Mohammad, promoted his creation by unapologetically lashing out at Rushdie for insulting the Prophet. Later in the year, after a highly profitable domestic run, and after soaking up all the righteous money it could absorb, International Gorillay battled British censors for an international release – a move that Rushdie himself came out and supported. And by this time, the film’s producer, Sajjad Gul, had prepared a more palatable pitch for his global audience: ‘To me, it’s a satire on the whole issue,’ he told the New York Times. ‘If it had been made in England or America, it would have been made by Mel Brooks. That’s how people should view it.’

Appropriately enough, it was in Pakistan I first encountered a shape-shifting, border-crossing phenomenon from Bombay called Zakir Naik. Virtually every single video store I visited in Lahore and Rawalpindi prominently displayed his packaged sermons, and overcome by his ubiquity, I succumbed. I was intrigued to discover a wholly 21st century missionary: a self-taught man-of-the-people on a relentless charm offensive, armed with a medical degree – and a medical practice – and blessed with a worldwide audience, courtesy Peace TV, a Saudi-funded television station he runs out of Dubai. And I was delighted to discover Naik learnt his trade at the feet of the master, Sheikh Ahmed Deedat, and had become his most successful protégé ever. They first met in Verulam in 1988 – which makes their union exactly as old as The Satanic Verses – and the master devoted the next decade to shaping the servant in his image, with evident success. At one of their last meetings, a supine and severely diminished Deedat conveyed his appreciation to a tearful Naik from his hospital bed: ‘Zakir my son, I am proud of you, thanks to Allah Subhanahu Wa Ta’ala, you have made mincemeat of the Hindu, the Christian and the Jew. My son, you have achieved in four years what took me 40 years!’

Like father, like son, Naik’s charm is utterly of his time – and of his country. In place of a potty mouth, Naik ramps up the humour; his coy homage to Deedat’s favourite expression is to mutter the acronym ‘Father Uncle Cousin King’ with a wink and a pause. On the Rushdie question, he derides the Ayatollah for getting in on the game so many months after the book was banned in India (‘I congratulated Rajiv Gandhi! He did the right thing!’), and then launches into a heartfelt disquisition on Rushdie’s misdemeanours against Hinduism, specifically his portrayals of the revered Sita and Rama as wanton and drunk, and of the reviled Ravana as worthy. Twenty years after Deedat, Naik’s sermons end with exactly the same conclusion – namely, that Rushdie needs to die – but the blow is softened by a comparison of the ways in which a blasphemer can be sent on his way in Christianity and Islam, since, according to Naik, Leviticus offers only one option – stoning to death – while the Quran offers four. ‘In Christianity, there is no option,’ he concludes, repeating his point, ‘and in Islam there are four options. You can choose.’

Double-speaking preachers are hardly extraordinary, and it’s almost a job requirement that they be clever and charismatic. Yet, what is extraordinary about Naik is that he dissimulated his way right into the heart of secular Indian news media. His articulation, his youth and his good looks – not to mention his medical degree – were taken for good sense, and he turned into some sort of ‘sensible face of Islam’ on my television screen, being cheered on by the Hindi film director Mahesh Bhatt and appearing as a talking head on India’s most progressive news channel, NDTV. The apex of his achievement was to be interviewed by Shekhar Gupta, the editor of the national newspaper, Indian Express. In a March 2009 episode of Walk the Talk, a weekly programme Gupta hosts on NDTV, Naik was given a rousing welcome as the ‘rock star of tele-evangelism’. Gupta, who is something of a right-winger, went on to say: ‘He’s not preaching what you would expect a tele-evangelist to preach; he’s teaching modern Islam, and not just Islam, but also his own interpretation of all the faiths around the world.’

It was all downhill from there: Gupta marvelled at his modern attire – a suit – and his modern medium of expression, cable television; he was heartened to hear Naik did not believe Islam condoned the Bombay attacks of 26/11; he nodded meekly when Naik hinted that 26/11 might have been an inside job and 9/11 a giant conspiracy, and again when he suggested it was fine for Muslim girls to be kept away from schools if they were only going there to ‘lose their virginity’; and finally, having run out of ways to coddle him, Gupta forced the good preacher to describe his mission as ‘getting people from all religions together’ and signed off.

Getting people from all religions together is kind of what the government of India had in mind as well when it first confronted The Satanic Verses. For the ruling Congress Party, that sentiment translated as: ‘Are we doing enough to keep the Muslim vote?’, which meant in turn that India banned the book on 5 October 1988, a mere ten days into its life, famously becoming the first country in the world to do so. It is less well known that South Africa was the second country in the world to ban the book, though the processes that led to the book’s banning in both countries were remarkably similar. Weirdly, the Indian ban was invoked by the Finance Ministry, which prohibited importation of the book into the country under the Customs Act of 1962. (Possession of the book itself was not a crime, so if it magically materialised and fell into your lap, you were fine.) More weirdly, the Finance Ministry issued a press release stating that the ban ‘did not detract from the literary and artistic merit of Rushdie’s work’, which led Rushdie to call it his strangest good review, foretelling VS Naipaul’s dementedly funny dismissal of the fatwa as ‘an extreme form of literary criticism’.

The standard narrative of the events leading up to the ban is this: hardline Muslim organisations in India began mobilising around the book at about the time it was published in the UK, and the loudest and hardest line belonged to one Syed Shahabuddin, who happened to be a sitting Member of Parliament at the time. Strident Shahabuddin had long since secured a place for himself as the nation’s voice of Islam; only a few years earlier, he had effectively slapped Muslim women all over the country by pressuring the then Prime Minister,  Rajiv Gandhi, to strengthen Muslim personal law in matters of alimony relating to divorce, a move that entrusted all decision-making around alimony to the hands of men, overruling a civil law judgement that provided a fairer outcome to the women affected. The ‘Shah Bano case’, as it came to be known, was met with outrage all around, but the Congress – at least in its own eyes and Shahabuddin’s – had officially ‘done something for Muslims’, and would do so again.

All this is believable and true. And yet, like in South Africa, there were also more earnest and well-intentioned efforts to ban The Satanic Verses. Prominent among these was the opinion of Sikh historian Khushwant Singh – a legendary writer, Congress confidante and secular strongman – whose warning bell for The Satanic Verses rang loud and clear. As a consulting editor at Penguin, Rushdie’s publisher, Singh was given the manuscript in advance and he wrote in the Illustrated Weekly of India that the book deserved to be banned – becoming the first respectable intellectual to come out and say so. But as Rushdie reveals in Joseph Anton, it was another article that started it all.

Shahabuddin did not actually read The Satanic Verses; his opinion of the book was formed solely on the basis of an article he read in the fortnightly magazine India Today. The author of that piece was the journalist Madhu Jain, who happened to be visiting Rushdie at his home in London when the bound proofs of his new book were delivered to him. She asked for a copy and got one. Nine days before the book was launched in London, she published her review. It was headlined ‘An unequivocal attack on religious fundamentalism’, it misquoted him saying: ‘My theme is fanaticism’, and it ended with the ominous words: ‘The Satanic Verses is bound to trigger an avalanche of protests.’ What was this, Rushdie furiously writes, except ‘an open invitation for those protests to begin’? Twenty years later, Rushdie’s fury at the review subsided but did not disappear. Given the scale of subsequent protests, he eventually came around to thinking that even if that review had not been written, something else was sure to have sparked the fire sooner or later.

With the publication of Joseph Anton, Madhu Jain was pushed into the spotlight. In a short essay in the weekly news-magazine Open and in an interview with the Times of India, she disclosed, for the first time, what really happened. Jain admired Rushdie, she was on his side: ‘Worried about the reaction of Muslim fundamentalists to some of the passages in the novel, I wished Salman to say that it was not just Islamic fundamentalism but fundamentalism of all kinds that he was against,’ she said. ‘Unfortunately, the editor of the books pages of the magazine at the time, who later went on to edit a national daily, plucked some of the more volatile extracts from the novel – those about the Prophet’s wives – and inserted them into the book review.’

The blaring headline was not her choice either – it was devised by the same editor. Jain tried to explain this to Rushdie but was never forgiven. And who was this unnamed editor who spiked the review that started it all? None other than Shekhar Gupta, the man who would learn to love Zakir Naik and American corporations and Hindu governments in equal measure, hereby inaugurating a long innings as the confused champion of scatter-shot right-wing secularism.

Spare a thought for secularism. One month into the life of The Satanic Verses, only two states anywhere in the world had taken decisive action against the book and they had done so for purely secular reasons. One country – independent India – was officially secular, and the other – Apartheid South Africa – was a Christian state on the cusp of a secular transformation. Although for all its faults independent India was never a white supremacist occupation, the countries were 20th century creations both – modern, mongrel republics with multitudinous faiths, races and persuasions to reconcile – and, call it opportunism if you will, or just plain goodwill, but both banned the book.

Spare a further thought for the trajectories of their secularism. It is perfectly fair to suggest that Indian secularism started out sincerely – indeed, as did Pakistan’s, at least as evidenced by Muhammad Ali Jinnah’s opening words at his country’s first Constituent Assembly meeting in 1947: ‘You are free; you are free to go to your temples, you are free to go to your mosques or to any other place of worship in this state of Pakistan… You may belong to any religion or caste or creed – that has nothing to do with the business of the state.’ (The sentiment quickly disappeared, as did the speech, which no longer exists in the archives of Radio Pakistan.) South African secularism traces its roots to a surprising source: racism. The Nats, who won the vote in 1948, and would keep it through the better part of the 20th century, built a system out of loosely organised sentiments, policies and practices. They called it Apartheid, and it may have been the country’s first official exercise in multi-racialism.

By the 1980s, Apartheid multi-racialism was in need of an update, and a tricameral parliament was the state’s strategic response. (Black people had already been consigned to their own equally powerless political units in the ‘Homelands’.) The ANC’s response to this multi-racialism was non-racialism, and it was an emotional masterstroke all the more for being sincere. It was from these histories, unwittingly or wittingly, that South African secularism emerged: as an unintended consequence of the Apartheid state’s mobilisation of minorities; as a residue of the resistance agenda; and as an afterthought whose implications neither the state nor the struggle had the time to understand.

Of course, what followed with The Satanic Verses would overshadow everything that had happened in India and South Africa. As the weeks progressed, in quick succession, the book was banned in Bangladesh, Sudan, Somalia, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, followed by a host of other Islamic states, and a few non-Islamic ones too. Four months after the first wave, the Supreme Leader of Iran fought the fog of medication and caught up with those revolting Sunnis (and how) – propelling his Shias ahead of the curve and defining the rest of Rushdie’s life. Understandably, Joseph Anton is a book whose main preoccupation is the morbid preoccupation this theocrat had with its author. Understandably however, commentary on the Rushdie affair still fixates on why the Islamic state is to blame for everything that happened, never mind that it was the calamitous action of a secular state that precipitated and blessed the worldwide crisis that ensued.

And what of The Satanic Verses in India and South Africa today? The 1988 importation ban remains in place in India and no domestic publisher has dared give it a go, though Rushdie has been generally welcome to visit the country for several years now – except, as he recently found out, when a secular government is in power and when the country’s largest state is about to go to the polls. Earlier this year, Rushdie was ‘strongly advised’ to skip an appearance at the Jaipur Literature Festival by the Congress-led government in the state of Rajasthan on mysterious ‘security concerns’, coincidentally only one month before elections were due to be held in the state of Uttar Pradesh, which sends in some 20 per cent of the parliamentary headcount, and where the Congress hoped to win. (He could not be physically banned because as a government-recognised Person of Indian Origin he does not require a visa to enter the country.) The Darul Uloom Deoband, among the nuttiest and most nationalist Islamic seminaries in the state, whose previous excursion in the media was as the site of a major scandal – a television crew bribed its administrators into issuing fatwas against credit cards and double beds, and filmed the operation – noticed Rushdie’s inclusion in the Jaipur programme and cranked it up loud enough for the Congress to hear. As it turned out, the party had tin ears and was routed, coming in fourth, trailing even the right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party, whose Hindu mobs only 20 years ago had led the destruction of one of the oldest mosques in the state – the Babri Masjid – and a subsequent massacre of Muslims; oddly enough, it seemed as if 35 million Muslim voters in crushingly poor Uttar Pradesh cared more about their prospects for a better life than whether a man who wrote a book a long time ago would be allowed to spend an hour on a stage at a gathering of literature fans in a city far away.

In February 2002, the 14-year-old ban on The Satanic Verses was technically lifted by a brand-new law in brand-new secular South Africa. Like with all transitions, there were gaps between the old and the new, and one of those gaps was the status of books banned by the Apartheid regime. As South Africa’s justly celebrated constitution came into being in 1996, so did a whole set of revised laws, including the Films and Publications Act of 1996, which created a Film and Publication Board whose primary mandate was to protect children from pornographic media. In January 2002, a library in the city of Cape Town wrote to this board, asking for the ban on The Satanic Verses to be lifted so it could acquire and hold the book, and the board complied.

‘Hundreds of books placed on the prohibited list under the previous regime are still technically banned,’ a board spokesperson at the time said. ‘Since we have not looked at a blanket unbanning, we take our cue from the public and access one book at a time.’ Six months later, after a flurry of petitions, protests and threats of extreme violence – led by many of the same organisations who had fought Rushdie in 1988, save for the revolutionaries, who now ran the country – a flustered Film and Publication Board changed its tune: ‘Several recent media reports have suggested that the controversial book, The Satanic Verses, by acclaimed novelist Salman Rushdie has been “unbanned”… Such reports are misleading and inaccurately reflect the status of all publications within the Republic of South Africa,’ the board declared in a press release in July 2002, disclaiming responsibility for the decision and denying there had been one at all. ‘The Films and Publications Act of 1996 effectively repealed all banning orders against books and publications… The Satanic Verses has thus been legally available in South Africa since 1996, and the recent outcry against the book seems unprovoked.’

Unprovoked or not – and regardless of whether the book was freed by default or by design – the outrage was effective, and the board took it seriously, appointing a committee to decide whether the ban deserved to be reimposed (the book had in fact been available in bookshops in South Africa for several years). McDonald writes in The Literature Police of the difficult problem committee members faced: they were duty bound by the constitution to uphold Rushdie’s ‘freedom of artistic creativity’,  and yet, despite their individual objections to ‘the aggressive tone in which the complaints had been made’ they nonetheless felt ‘sympathetic to the charge of blasphemy and of the severe hurt to the religious sensibilities of the Muslim community’.

The committee’s final pronouncement, which was accepted by the board, consisted of three key points: the first was that however offensive, The Satanic Verses did not constitute, in McDonald’s description, a ‘word crime’; the second followed from the first: since the book could not be classified as a crime, the committee all but apologised for not being able to give it an XX classification, the severest category in the Films and Publications Act, which would have cut off all access to the book and criminalised its distribution; and the third point was the decision – the committee gave the book an X18 classification and recommended that it ‘should not be for sale in public in South African commercial booksellers or any other commercial outlet, nor should it be available for borrowing from any municipal or public library.’ And so it came to be that eight years into the life of one of the most progressive states in the world, under what is arguably the most thoughtful constitution anywhere on the planet, The Satanic Verses was classified as porn; wedged somewhere between Emmanuelle Vol. 6 and Bright Lights, Big Titties, but still, a whole shelf below the snuff film.

Here’s the thing with religious states: they’re honest. They set expectations low. There’s no pretence: no willy-nilly dangling of freedom and fulfilment and choice or possibility and fluidity and hybridity or pluralism and syncretism and secularism. But I don’t live in a religious state and I don’t want to, and I kind of really like all the words in that last sentence, though I’ll admit they’re glib and overused, and I don’t know anyone, especially anyone living in a religious state who looks at this outmoded entity as a polity worth emulating. I look at India and South Africa – mongrel nations riddled with imperfections both, nevertheless polities that started out embracing their impurities, and really meant to find a way to turn them into a celebration (and almost did), and then chose expediency and settled for the resulting mess, but still held on to the hope even while burying it at the graveyard of good intentions – and I see a future which more or less everyone wants to have work out. And I wonder how the secular blueprint that charts this future was beaten down to something so brittle and flaky it could be broken by a mere book. Jabbing my finger at the bearded nations gives me no comfort. They did not let me down. It’s true, only love can break your heart, and the broken promise is the only betrayal that matters.

ime is everything. Pamella Bordes knew it: by sitting out a few news-cycles and becoming another person again, she knew she could engineer a total eclipse of her past. Salman Rushdie knew it. All he had to do was stay alive and wait, and he knew he could once again become the man who wrote Midnight’s Children and Shame. And many sincere objectors who waded in to The Satanic Verses thought they knew it too. As they still do: it grows louder slowly, this chorus of concern whose chant is not now, why now, any time but now – and its extended versions, not here and not like that. (I suppose place and manner count for something too.) He knew exactly what he was doing, they say, with just as much conviction as the God squad – somewhat forgetting that since the fatwa, Rushdie has had to suffer a joint statement with Ayaan Hirsi Ali, frequent appearances on Bill Maher’s television show, and, as he touchingly recounts in Joseph Anton, whole evenings with the foremost deep thinker Bernard Henri Lévy; clearly, a future too ghastly for anyone to have planned to have.

Yet, it’s an interesting hypothesis. What if? What if a fictional rendering of the story of Islam had been told in a time before Islam was marked, say in the 1970s, a time when terror was red and terrorists were pink? What if the storyteller had been the real McCoy, say, an Arab Muslim conventionally respectful of his faith and born and bred in a place as old as Islam itself? And what if the story had been drafted with deference to every major and minor religious sensibility? And what if it had been officially approved by the leading madrasa in the world, and backed by the governments of several Islamic states?

That story was, of course, told, and by just such a man; his name was Moustapha Akkad, and his tribute to the birth of Islam was a sprawling, budget-busting, Hollywood film called The Message. Born and raised in Aleppo, Akkad moved to Los Angeles to study film at the age of 20 and stayed on, working with Sam Peckinpah and making his way through the industry. He went for broke with The Message, spending years on the planning and the financing, and shooting two versions simultaneously, in English and Arabic. He cast Anthony Quinn and Irene Papas, and brought in Maurice Jarre to compose the music; he persuaded Muammar Gaddafi to finance the film and facilitate locations for his crew in Libya; and he received hard-won religious sanction for his script from the Al-Azhar University in Cairo. Akkad was well aware of the perils that awaited any film project called Mohammed, Messenger of God – his original title – and having already been chastised by the Muslim World League in Mecca, he took every care not to offend. Prophet Mohammad, his immediate family, and the first caliphs do not appear in flesh and blood anywhere in the film; the prophet is signalled only in slight, poetic nuances – a gust of air, a flickering shadow, or a muffled voice – and the opening credits clearly state the film’s strict adherence to this religious code.

Visually, it’s a stunning film: Akkad gave it the full Hollywood treatment, and it has grand, sweeping epic written all over it. Akkad was mainly interested in the story – the old-fashioned kind of story – and the film works because his characters are human beings all, full of frailties and quirks and passion and doubt. The Message went on to become a beloved token of the faith for children and adults alike; even Zakir Naik excitedly approved, calling it ‘one of the best movies I have seen on Islamic life’. Indeed, watching the film today, you would be hard pressed to think of it as anything but a beautiful spectacle of love and spirituality. But when it first released in 1977, it set off a storm of protest that dominated American headlines, culminating in a two-day siege in which over 100 people were held hostage in Washington DC, leaving two people dead and several more wounded, including a young Marion Barry, who would go on to become Mayor of the district. The protesters who brought the city to a standstill were led by Hamaas Abdul Khaalis, a one-time leader of the Nation of Islam, who had broken away to found his own movement, the Hanafis. Khaalis and his Hanafis had not actually seen The Message, but were under the impression that it depicted the prophet disrespectfully and threatened to blow up the B’nai B’rith building in Washington unless the film was withdrawn. (They also seized DC’s City Hall and the Islamic Center of Washington.) Unfortunately for Akkad, the hostage crisis dominated the opening of his film in the US, permanently affecting its chances at the box office. He was baffled. All he had wanted was to bring his world to the whole world.

Here’s another what if: what if he was the proto-Rushdie? Akkad spent the rest of his life making movies. Two years after the debacle of The Message, he produced a low-budget slasher film on a lark – and hit jackpot. Halloween, which might just be Hollywood’s first foray into honour killings in the American suburbs, is best known for launching the career of Jamie Lee Curtis and inspiring the slasher genre; it also became one of the most profitable independent films of all time, spawning a long and lucrative franchise that lives to this day. Mainstream commercial success, however, only strengthened Akkad’s resolve to write his full self into the world, and he never gave up trying to make the big Islamic Hollywood epic. Tragically, the comparison with Rushdie took a twisted turn when Akkad was killed in November 2005 in an Al Qaeda attack; he was visiting Jordan to attend a wedding at the Radisson hotel when bombs ripped through three Amman hotels, injuring hundreds and killing at least 57 people. It was a sad way for a good man to go. Al Qaeda had no beef with this unlikely ambassador of Islam: he had simply been in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Twenty years before that fateful trip to Jordan, Moustapha Akkad was fighting sandstorms in the Libyan desert. When they came, without warning and regularly, actors covered their faces and stopped in their tracks, and crew-members rushed to shroud their equipment and props with plastic sheets. In the middle of all this physical and human chaos, Akkad was making not two, but three films simultaneously – the English version, the Arabic version and a documentary on the making of both. In The Making of an Epic: Mohammad, Messenger of God, released the same year as the film, Jack Hildyard, who served as director of photography, accounted for the story’s most enigmatic character.

‘We used the camera as the prophet,’ he said, ‘And all actors who are talking to the prophet looked directly at the camera. Sometimes the prophet had to move, stand up, or sit down, and we used our camera just like another actor in the picture.’

Akkad is a gentle, soft-spoken presence all through the documentary, whether busy and bare-chested in the Libyan heat or wearing a tweed coat and puffing at his pipe in the studio.

‘Yes I would do it all over again,’ he said toward the end of the film. ‘We were 28 different nationalities and cultures, we were able to bridge these different cultures and work with a spirit of cooperation and understanding. And I think if this film carried the same message I’d be even happier.’

Right at the outset, and despite the enormous difficulties he had to overcome just to begin work on this project, he displayed no bluster: ‘It is a personal thing for me,’ he said, leaning towards the camera with something like force. ‘Being a Muslim myself, who lives in the West, I felt it was my obligation, my duty, to tell the truth about Islam. I thought I could tell the story that would bridge this gap to the West.’

This article is also available in Chronic 1, published August 2013. To purchase in print or as a PDF head to our online shop. Copies coming to your nearest dealer now-now. Access to the whole issue and Chronic online archives is available for $28 for one year or $7 for a month.

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By Shamil Jeppe

Timbuktu is symbolic. I mean it’s a place, but it’s also, for me, a symbol of a written tradition across a huge region. In symbolic terms it calls attention to traditions of writing that pre-dated the introduction of the European script and the printed book. Because if you look at the history of the book and people writing about African literature, for the most part, in the vast majority of cases, their emphasis has been on European script languages and on the printed book. And what you have in Timbuktu and that whole Sahel region is a tradition of writing and bookmaking that is very different.

These were locals who adopted a religion that had its origins in Arabia. And in these early origins and spreads it was through traders and the conversion of the rulers of the “kingdom” of Ghana. At least as far as we know, it was only the elite! For a long time what we talk of as West African Islam was the conversion of the ruling elites. As far as we know, not the people in the countryside, the majority. That’s a much later development.

You see also in the history this recurrent appearance of “reformers” trying to “cleanse” the society, “cleanse” the elite and introduce a pure form of Islam. But many of these reformers are not Arabs. They are locals. They just have more text knowledge, more book knowledge. And so, the Timbuktu texts are full of these conflicts. They reflect on these conflicts. They trace and they track the unevenness of Islam in that region. So, there is a lot in the manuscripts about the social history of the region.

You see also in the history this recurrent appearance of “reformers” trying to “cleanse” the society, “cleanse” the elite and introduce a pure form of Islam. But many of these reformers are not Arabs. They are locals. They just have more text knowledge, more book knowledge. And so, the Timbuktu texts are full of these conflicts. They reflect on these conflicts. They trace and they track the unevenness of Islam in that region. So, there is a lot in the manuscripts about the social history of the region.

The Arabic language is the vehicle for the expression of views and ideas and the writers are not Arabs. These are local scholars, largely Songhai and Fulani. There was the great Songhai “kingdom” and there were scholars, Tuareg scholars, but there were scholars who created Arabic genealogies for themselves. That happens a lot throughout the Sahel, the fabrication, the invention of a past that is exotic, outside the continent. It’s not only Muslim people who do this. The Ethiopian tradition is that they are Solomonic, they are from the Middle East and that they are not African. So it’s not peculiar to the Fulani or these other peoples who are Muslims in West Africa. There are these myths of tradition, myths of origin that begin off the continent among numerous ethno-linguistic groups.

So, I’ve always said, when people ask us what was the significance, for us or for the world, when the libraries were raided, I said, firstly, in the first instance, it is local, it is regional. And from there you can make larger claims. But you have to understand the materials in their context.

This article features in the sixth issue of the Chronic (June 2015), an edition in which we depart from and contest crude fictions about the Sahara as a boundary. Designed in collaboration with Studio Safar in Beirut this special edition of the Chronic – published in its entirety in Arabic as Muzmin – argues that the Sahara has never been a boundary, real or imagined.

To purchase in print or as a PDF head to our online shop. Copies coming to your nearest dealer now-now. Access to the whole edition and Chronic online archives is available for $28 for one year.
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-Mongo Beti

Un homme de l’appareil

Un manque total d’organes de presse est certainement la meilleure pierre de touche de la dépendance d’un peuple. L’Afrique noire dite francophone, sans doute parce qu’elle est maternée par Paris avec le soin jaloux que l’on sait, ne dispose d’aucune grande publication quotidienne ou hebdomadaire; ses élites doivent donc, bon gré malgré, s’accommoder de Jeune Afrique, un magazine tiré à 130 000 exemplaires que son propriétaire, Béchir Ben Yahmed, propose chaque semaine de Paris aux bourgeoisies francophones du Maghreb et de l’Afrique sub-saharienne.

Si ce qu’on appelle la francophonie était, à l’instar de ce qui n’a jamais voulu se nommer anglophonie, un culture de lucidité et de transparence, personne ne perdrait aujourd’hui son temps à épiloguer sur la personnalité de Béchir Ben Yahmed et les récentes révélations du Canard enchaîné n’en seraient point pour un militant français ou africain d’extrême gauche. Il suffirait de dire que Jeune Afrique, le très prospère magazine de Béchir Ben Yahmed, est né au début des armées soixante et qu’il a commencé à grandir sous le gaullisme musclé de l’agonie de l’Algérie française et des balbutiements sanglants de la communauté franco-africaine qui allait devenir la coopération franco-africaine. Et chacun saurait aussitôt à quoi s’en tenir.

Au début du gaullisme, Jacques Foccart, secrétaire général de l’Elysée pour les affaires africaines et malgaches, exerce sa cruelle férule sur les jeunes Etats « indépendants » noirs; il s’emploie à y installer les roitelets nègres qui vont devenir les incomparables instruments de l’impérialisme français, au prix parfois, comme au Cameroun, de centaine de milliers de patriotes ou de militants progressistes délibérément assassinés.

Aucune feuille ne s’aventurerait dans ces contrées sans la complaisance sinon le soutien de Jacques Foccart, un homme sans complexe sur qui les mots indépendance des journalistes, liberté d’expression, respect de la vérité font le même effet que jadis, sur l’autre, les deux syllabes du mot culture. Avec Jacques Foccart, c’est à prendre ou à laisser : on se soumet ou l’on renonce. Alléché par les promesses du nouveau marché, Béchir Ben Yahmed se garde bien de s’écarter; et se soumet donc à Jacques Foccart pour qui c’est un jeu d’enfant de l’intégrer dans le jeune appareil néo-colonial français où le brillant Tunisien va faire merveille, n’ayant guère besoin d’opérer que des ajustements mineurs au cours des vingt années de continuité franco-africaine qui viennent de s’écouler.

Si Béchir Ben Yahmed et son magazine Jeune Afrique se trouvent donc aujourd’hui, au moins en ce qui concerne l’information des pays francophones de l’Afrique noire, en position de quasi monopole, ce n’est nullement un hasard. C’est le salaire d’un zèle jamais démenti au service des dictateurs francophiles et de leurs maîtres successifs de l’Elysée.

Point n’est besoin, sauf aux sujets de quelques Etats noirs tout à fait obscurantistes, d’ouvrir une nouvelle livraison de Jeune Afrique pour savoir ce qu’elle contient.

Premier principe de la philosophie politique de Béchir Ben Yahmed, le locataire de l’Elysée est, par définition, un homme qui a raison et qu’il convient de vénérer, à moins que son éviction ne se dessine à l’horizon. Durant tout le septennat de Giscard d’Estaing, Béchir Ben Yahmed encensa le cousin de Bokassa avec un empressement obscène. Mais, à quelques semaines du premier tour des dernières présidentielles, alors que les sondages attestaient que l’électorat était parcouru de remous inquiétants pour Giscard, Béchir Ben Yahmed se rallia à Mitterrand avec autant de fracas que de soudaineté.

Deuxième principe, corollaire attendu du précédent – du moment qu’un dictateur noir bénéficie de l’appui de l’Elysée, et quoi qu’il fasse, c’est l’un des plus grands dirigeants de l’histoire de l’Afrique, c’est un nomme au charisme impressionnant, etc. Jeune Afrique garda sa sympathie pour Bokassa, vaillant massacreur d’enfants, jusqu’au jour où Barracuda débarqua des parachutistes français à Bangui, en même temps qu’un certain Dacko promu successeur de l’ex-cousin de Giscard.

Troisième principe : c’est un crime contre l’esprit de laisser passer un numéro de Jeune Afrique sans un éditorial fulminant des anathèmes contre les ennemis de la liberté et de la démocratie, périphrase plaisante destinée à désigner du doigt les Etats noirs à régimes progressistes plus ou moins teintés de marxisme. En effet Béchir Ben Yahmed a parfaitement assimilé les leçons de son ancien maître Jacques Foccart : l’ennemi, c’est la subversion et son frère jumeau le verbalisme marxiste. Eh oui, n’en déplaise aux idéologues, tels sont les seuls et vrais ennemis de l’Afrique noire, et non la corruption des dirigeants, ni la surexploitation des paysans africains par les multinationales françaises ni le racisme des nouveaux colons, coopérants et assistants techniques.

A nous deux, dollar

Ajoutée à la servilité, à l’arrogance et à la démagogie savamment dosées selon les circonstances, la nouvelle facette révélée par les documents que vient de publier Le Canard enchaîné achève le portrait de Béchir Ben Yahmed, directeur de Jeune Afrique, un terroriste de la feuille imprimée, une sorte d’Al Capone de la rotative. Rien n’y manque.

Le 25 novembre 1981, l’hebdomadaire satirique révèle, documents à l’appui, que le directeur de Jeune Afrique est en pourparlers avec le colonel Kadhafi, président de la Libye, pour l’organisation d’une campagne de presse visant à améliorer l’image exécrable de l’homme fort de Tripoli. Pour ce faire, Béchir Ben Yahmed envisage de publier plusieurs dossiers dans les journaux qu’il dirige (à commencer par Jeune Afrique), avec des prolongements dans les journaux occidentaux prestigieux tels que Le Monde. Il promet d’associer à l’entreprise des écrivains et des journalistes respectables de plusieurs grands pays, y compris la France; une liste de ces personnalités est citée. L’affaire doit rapporter au bas mot quatre millions de dollars à Béchir Ben Yahmed. Le projet stipule : « Etant entendu que la mention publicité ne figurera pas sur les textes publiés dans Jeune Afrique. »

La révélation du Canard enchaîné prend tout son sens si l’on se rappelle que, en 1980, Jeune Afrique traîna courageusement le colonel Kadhafi dans la boue, n’hésitant pas à publier à la une de son numéro du 25 juin 1980 une photo expressive du président libyen adornée de la charmante légende : Attention, il tue !

Vilipender un chef d’Etat en 1980 et lui proposer en 1981 un contrat de publicité personnelle (et rédactionnelle) pour la somme fabuleuse de quatre millions de dollars, comment appelle-t-on cela dans le milieu ? Le double jeu. Ce procédé caractérise très exactement un directeur de journal qui ne croit en rien, exception faite du dollar. Où est donc passé le chantre inspiré de la démocratie, synonyme de vérité et d’abnégation ?

Béchir Ben Yahmed répond aussitôt, non pas en intentant au Canard enchaîné une action en diffamation, mais en réclamant la constitution d’un jury d’honneur, autant dire l’enterrement élégant du scandale, sans doute au terme d’un joyeux gueuleton à la Tour d’argent, entre hommes du milieu.

Quelques mois après les premiers contacts avec la Libye, Béchir Ben Yahmed, décidément en veine de cynisme, a fait proposer à un représentant du chef d’Etat égyptien Anouar El Sadate, l’ennemi juré de Kadhafi, un contrat de publicité personnelle dans les mêmes conditions, rédigé exactement dans les mêmes termes, y compris la pittoresque clause : « Etant entendu que la mention publicité ne figurera pas sur les textes publiés dans Jeune Afrique. »

C’est encore Le Canard enchaîné qui le révèle, cette fois dans son numéro du 2 décembre, ajoutant en prime que Béchir Ben Yahmed donne dans l’imposture lorsqu’il met en avant les saisies dont son magazine est victime dans certains pays africains, car le directeur de Jeune Afrique ne laisse pas alors de négocier à son avantage le règlement des exemplaires saisis au prix, parfois, de juteux pots-de-vin distribués aux responsables politiques du pays en cause, comme ce fut le cas pour le Maroc en mars 1981.

Comment désigner cette technique autrement que par le mot racket ? Au Maghreb comme en Afrique noire, les dirigeants politiques indigènes sont presque tous des dictateurs impopulaires au service des puissances étrangères, et d’ailleurs protégés par ces dernières (à l’exception d’une poignée de pays, dont précisément la Libye et l’Algérie, auxquelles on peut avec raison reprocher tous les vices, sauf celui d’inféodation à l’étranger). Ces dirigeants sont saisis de panique à l’idée de voir leurs tares s’étaler dans une publication ayant une audience internationale au risque d’attirer sur eux l’attention des organisations réputées défendre les droits de l’homme, et particulièrement d’Amnesty International.

Béchir Ben Yahmed n’ignore pas cette situation. il sait d’autre part se trouver en position de quasi monopole, au moins en ce qui concerne l’Afrique noire francophone. Comment cet homme cupide ne succomberait-il pas à la tentation de monnayer son silence ? Le Canard enchaîné révélera le 16 décembre que, en 1977, bien qu’étant alors virtuellement en état de cessation de paiements, le Sénégal de M. Senghor consentit à Béchir Ben Yahmed, pour la constitution d’un fumeux Fonds d’Investissement pour le Nouvel Ordre mondial de l’Information, le prêt d’une somme de cent millions de francs CFA (deux millions de francs), au taux de 7 %, après avoir emprunté la même somme à un organisme de crédit international au taux de 12 %. En d’autres termes, le milliardaire Béchir Ben Yahmed se fait financer par les misérables contribuables du Sénégal, comme un vulgaire maffioso. Il paraît que vingt pays, dont les noms ne sont malheureusement pas précisés, à l’exception du Sénégal et du Togo, apportèrent leur généreuse obole, et que le grandiose projet demeura dans les cartons sans que les bailleurs de fonds soient indemnisés.

Le Canard enchaîné révèle d’autres affaires dont le détail importe peu maintenant que le lecteur connaît les méthodes de Béchir Ben Yahmed, un personnage qu’il faut bien considérer comme le grand manitou de l’information « de qualité » en Afrique noire francophone, et qui n’est qu’une espèce de Robert Hersant du pauvre. L’Afrique mérite-t-elle vraiment cela ?

Un bon eleve du journalisme a la française

Cela dit, rendons justice à Jeune Afrique et à son directeur général Béchir Ben Yahmed : il n’est pas le seul, tant s’en faut, à pratiquer les méthodes méprisables que nous venons de dénoncer; toutes les publications francophones soi-disant africaines fabriquées à Paris en sont coutumières : même quand elles se proclament progressistes, leurs rapports avec les roitelets nègres sont manifestement régis par des pactes occultes fondés sur la stratégie du passe-moi le séné, je te donne la rhubarbe. Afrique-Asie, magazine réputé progressiste et même suspect de pro-soviétisme aux yeux de certains connaisseurs, n’a pas publié un seul article critique sur le Cameroun depuis plus de six ans, très exactement depuis que le président Ahmadou Ahidjo, l’un des dictateurs noirs francophiles les plus invétérés dans la répression sanglante de l’opposition populaire, autorise la publication de Simon Malley à circuler dans son fief, qui représente un marché considérable. Afrique-Asie, ardent défenseur du Viet-Nam, de l’Angola et des combattants sahraouis, ne dédaigne pas la publicité des entreprises d’Etat du Cameroun. Qui disait que l’argent n’a pas d’odeur ?

Allons plus loin encore. Tant qu’à dénoncer le rôle de l’argent destructeur des plus nobles valeurs du journalisme, pourquoi s’arrêter en si bon chemin ? Fi donc des tabous et des réputations les mieux établies dans la presse française elle-même. Imaginons un instant que le très prestigieux et très « progressiste » Le Monde consacre au Chili du général Pinochet un épais supplément couvert d’annonces publicitaires financées par les entreprises du cru et débordant de dithyrambes en faveur de l’assassin d’Allende, rédigés exclusivement par des hommes connus pour leur amitié pour le tyran de Santiago, combien de gens en France feraient une crise d’apoplexie ? De tels suppléments sont pourtant chose courante dans Le Monde, au bénéfice, il est vrai, de Pinochets noirs francophones, tels que Ahidjo, Mobutu, Bongo, Eyadema, et tutti quanti, dont personne de sérieux n’ignore que, à l’instar de leur homologue chilien, ils massacrent leurs opposants, les torturent, les enferment dans des camps de concentration dénoncés par la Section française d’Amnesty International, qui n’a pourtant pas toujours brillé par son courage – notamment du temps de Giscard d’Estaing.

On ne saurait, certes, demander au Canard enchaîné de tout faire, de jouer en quelque sorte les justiciers infatigables. L’information est une affaire trop sérieuse pour qu’on puisse l’assimiler au westen. Pourtant en se bornant à épingler le seul Béchir Ben Yahmed, un personnage tous comptes faits assez minable, et qui a beau jeu aujourd’hui de crier au racisme, lui que son ancien collaborateur Carlos Moore accusait récemment de racisme, n’est-ce pas s’exposer à paraître sacrifier à la politique du bouc émissaire ? J’ai abondamment montré dans Main basse sur le Cameroun, livre célèbre que personne n’a lu en France, comment le journal Le Monde, en décembre 1970 et janvier 1971, dénatura en connaissance de cause et avec opiniâtreté le procès politique par lequel Ahmadou Ahidjo crut se débarrasser des deux chefs de l’opposition camerounaise, n’hésitant pas à livrer l’un d’eux au poteau d’exécution. Or mon livre n’émut pas grand monde ici, même lorsqu’il fut interdit et saisi par M. Marcellin, le ministre de l’Intérieur de Georges Pompidou.

Qu’une espèce de tâcheron sans aucune élévation comme Béchir Ben Yahmed, voyant le « meilleur journal français » recourir impunément aux techniques du mensonge, en ait conclu que la déformation relève de la norme journalistique dans l’hexagone, quoi de plus naturel ? Après tout Béchir Ben Yahmed n’est jamais qu’un valet, et chacun sait que le propre du valet est d’imiter ses maîtres.

Disons-le donc tout net : en l’occurrence Béchir Ben Yahmed n’a fait qu’imiter, peut-être maladroitement, Le Monde.

A moins qu’il ne soit distribué avec équité et selon des normes immuables, le blâme, ici plus qu’en d’autres circonstances, risque d’apparaître comme l’expression haineuse de la peur de la concurrence. Cela rappelle un peu trop ces tribunaux du Sud raciste des Etats-Unis où seuls les Noirs comparaissent pour viol. Le crime ainsi qualifié y est devenu la spécialité exclusive dune catégorie providentiellement minoritaire et d’ailleurs colorée. En d’autres termes, la majorité blanche dominante, ayant seule la parole, a pris l’habitude d’en user rituellement pour se soulager de son abjection en la projetant sur l’Autre. C’est commode, mais un peu trop facile. En vérité la presse française tout entière est malade de l’Afrique. Nous n’avons cessé de le dire dans Peuples noirs-Peuples africains.

Les grands noms du journalisme français dont Béchir Ben Yahmed est accusé d’avoir imprudemment promis le concours au Colonel Kadhafi auraient dû remplir la presse de leurs protestations indignées. Il n’en a rien été, et pour cause. Il s’agit de personnages que Béchir Ben Yahmed rémunère déjà au titre soit de ses publications périodiques, soit de sa maison d’édition. Quant à leur concours dans la manipulation de l’information, Peuples noirs-Peuples africains, en étudiant la critique littéraire francophone dominée par des professionnels français le plus souvent ignares, a mis plusieurs fois en évidence le mécanisme de cette propagande que Vince Packard aurait sans doute classée sous la rubrique de la persuasion clandestine.

Cela peut commencer par un certain Jacques Chevrier développant un jour dans Le Monde diplomatique la thèse bouffonne selon laquelle Senghor serait le parangon de l’écrivain contestataire noir (quand chacun sait que c’est un bel exemple d’Oncle Tom). Trois semaines plus tard environ, quand on retrouve cette absurdité dans Le Monde quotidien sous la plume d’un certain Philippe Decraene, elle a reçu quelques modifications de style et de contenu pour s’adapter au ton du journal. Un mois se passe encore, puis un certain Claude Wauthier dans les Nouvelles littéraires reprend l’idée, sous prétexte de la discuter, mais de façon à ce qu’il soit bien clair qu’il y adhère au moins en partie. Puis, c’est le tour d’un certain Robert Cornevin dans Le Quotidien de Paris. Etc. C’est sans doute ce traitement très respectueux qu’une autre équipe de masseuses thaïlandaises aurait appliqué à l’image du colonel Bagatelle de Tripoli.

A l’Est, la langue de bois retentit au rythme cadencé des gros sabots officiels. Dans le monde libre, les griots adorateurs du veau d’or sont des as du camouflage. Quant à l’information objective, elle risque d’être longtemps encore une idée pure, sinon neuve. Alors en face de ces infinis, qu’est-ce qu’un Béchir Ben Yahmed ? Le néant. Et encore.

* First published in the Tunisian journal, Tumulte, in 1982.

This article features in the sixth issue of the Chronic (June 2015), an edition in which we depart from and contest crude fictions about the Sahara as a boundary. Designed in collaboration with Studio Safar in Beirut this special edition of the Chronic – published in its entirety in Arabic as Muzmin – argues that the Sahara has never been a boundary, real or imagined.

To purchase in print or as a PDF head to our online shop. Copies coming to your nearest dealer now-now. Access to the whole edition and Chronic online archives is available for $28 for one year.
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Co-founded in 1960 by Bechir Ben Yahmed, the weekly magazine Jeune Afrique has been instrumental  in cementing the divide between the “Arab North” and “Black Africa” . It is also a key agent in “Francafrique Project”, the network of personal relationships and political, economic and military mechanisms that bind France to its former African colonies.

This article features in the sixth issue of the Chronic (June 2015) and is designed to be read alongside Jeune Afrique, an edition in which we depart from and contest crude fictions about the Sahara as a boundary. Designed in collaboration with Studio Safar in Beirut this special edition of the Chronic – published in its entirety in Arabic as Muzmin – argues that the Sahara has never been a boundary, real or imagined.

To purchase in print or as a PDF head to our online shop. Copies coming to your nearest dealer now-now. Access to the whole edition and Chronic online archives is available for $28 for one year.

By Moses Marz

In 1968, Béchir Ben Yahmed launched his first attempt at establishing an anglophone version of Jeune Afrique by producing annual “Reference Volumes on the African Continent”. The books are up to 450 pages thick and are presented as essential business guides produced by an “impartial team of journalists”. In 1972, Ben Yahmed opened an office in London and published three reference volumes under the name Africa Magazine. Because of a lack of financial support, the publication was discontinued in 1975.

Surviving a sudden drop from 150,000 to 40,000 copies sold a week following the devaluation of the FCFA in 1994, Ben Yahmed announced that Jeune Afrique would split into Arabic, francophone, anglophone and international editions. The Arabic translation, Bil Arabiya, appeared twice in 2004. The English version, The Africa Report, edited by Patrick Smith and based in Paris, has been more successful since its launch in 2006, selling up to a self-proclaimed 400,000 copies each month.

1968-71 “Africa” reference volumes published by Jeune Afrique

1968-71 “Africa” reference volumes published by Jeune Afrique

1968-71 “Africa” reference volumes published by Jeune Afrique

This article features in the sixth issue of the Chronic (June 2015) and is designed to be read alongside Jeune Afrique Map and Bechir Ben Yahmed ou l’avide a dollars de Jeune Afrique. In this edition we depart from and contest crude fictions about the Sahara as a boundary. Designed in collaboration with Studio Safar in Beirut this special edition of the Chronic – published in its entirety in Arabic as Muzmin – argues that the Sahara has never been a boundary, real or imagined.

To purchase in print or as a PDF head to our online shop. Copies coming to your nearest dealer now-now. Access to the whole edition and Chronic online archives is available for $28 for one year.
Buy the Chronic

By Jamal Mahjoub

The first house we lived in after moving to Khartoum had an air of danger to it. There was something there that didn’t feel right. A small rock garden by the entrance held over a dozen types of cactus. Some had big flat leaves, others furry yellow spines that stuck to your fingers and were impossible to remove. We were warned not to play there – for fear of scorpions. It could have been a scorpion that killed the duck we kept in the back garden. We liked to think it had been a snake after we discovered a sloughed-off skin, desiccated and translucent, on top of a dusty packing case in the disused garage. Our cat staggered in one morning foaming at the mouth with rabies. There were dark corners in that house and it was overshadowed by the ghost of the previous occupant, a man who had managed to electrocute himself by carrying a standing lamp out onto the damp lawn one evening to read by.

It was in that house, my father told me years later, that he had spent the night with some of the conspirators who were involved in the attempted coup of July 1971. He was close friends with several prominent members of the communist party, though he was not himself involved, which is probably why they chose to stay there. They spent the night smoking and drinking, making phone calls, waiting. In the morning he drove them around town in the family car to see what had happened. It soon became apparent that the coup had failed. Nimeiri had managed to mount a counter-coup and the plotters were being rounded up. Many were executed, others fled the country or went into hiding. My father came home that day prepared for the worst. He wrote out forward-dated cheques so that my mother would be able to survive while he was in prison. How far did he go, I wonder? Three months? Six? How long did he think he would be detained? It was out of character, reckless and the most overtly political thing he ever did in his life. The episode had a profound impact on him and his health.

When Jaafar Nimeiri first came to power he seemed invincible. We watched him, young and dynamic, on our old black-and-white Hitachi television, standing up in an open car, riding on the roof of a train, waving an ebony staff, clasping his hands together in fellowship. A man in constant motion. North, south, east, west. He was everywhere and nowhere at the same time. Women ululated, men sang and everyone cheered. He was forever opening new development projects: irrigation schemes, engineering colleges, housing complexes. We saw him leaping over bulls that were laid down in the sand before him, their throats slit in sacrifice.

With the signing of the Addis Ababa Agreement of 1972, the civil war in the South came to an end. Not that we had really seen much of the war. It was distant and low-key and seemed more remote than the Palestinian struggle. We were subjected to daily propaganda messages about this struggle: revolutionary songs and images of Fedayeen fighters leaping over trenches, crawling under barbed wire. Palestinian women in rags came to our door asking for food. If we didn’t eat up our lunch, we would be reminded of the children starving in the refugee camps.

The South was a world away, inhabited by the lanky men we saw working on building sites. Wearing cut-off shorts slung over bony hips, they balanced sand in square-sided jerrycans on their heads as they climbed the flimsy scaffolding. It hardly registered that these people might be at war with us for a reason, for a lot of very old reasons.

Aerial view of Khartoum, 1972

Nimeiri led a charmed life. Later on he would convince himself that this was not accidental. Once, while leading a column of tanks in the South, he climbed down from the turret to walk back to the vehicle behind him to ask for some snuff. While he was standing there a shell landed on his tank, blowing it to pieces. He was a handsome man who bore a vague resemblance to the boxer Muhammad Ali, who was a hero all across Africa and was to meet George Foreman in Kinshasa in 1974 for the famous “Rumble in the Jungle”. Nimeiri epitomised the progress of the nation. Through him we believed we were destined for greatness.

In civics class we learned how the country was developing. There were ambitious five-year plans for this and that. We memorised figures for the amounts of fish hauled from the Nile, for how many hectares of wheat and dura and sugar cane we produced. The photographs in the textbooks revealed a country to be proud of: fields of bobbing white cotton, shiny new factories. We would feed the world, become the breadbasket of Africa. We didn’t need oil. We had water and land enough to grow food for the entire continent.

A year after he came to power, Nimeiri nationalised everything in sight, beginning with the banks and foreign companies, and ending with restaurants and cinemas. He overhauled the administrative system, devolving power back to the nine provinces and away from the capital – a move that would come back to haunt him. The Addis Ababa treaty was the crowning achievement, bringing an end to a civil war that had been going on for 17 years, since before independence. The country was finally at peace with itself. Nimeiri had succeeded where all previous attempts, civil and military governments alike, had failed.

The enigma of who or what Nimeiri really was remains. When he first stepped onto the podium he was a young colonel inspired by Nasser. Like their Egyptian counterparts, the men of the Sudanese Free Officers Movement were driven by discontent. In the South they were fighting a war they could not win, while back in Khartoum the politicians bickered and quarrelled among themselves. The early years held great promise. Nimeiri had come, he declared, to sweep away all that had gone before. He signified modernity and change. Revolutionary purity would purge the system of favouritism, immorality and corruption. The old guard was replaced by new thinkers: academics, technocrats. It was to be about merit rather than personal influence, a radical notion in a society where family and tribal allegiance always trumped ideology.

The nation united behind him.

The Presidential Palace was renamed the People’s Palace. In the schoolyard we did Chinese calisthenics, raising our arms and bending our legs in time to the commands from a military man with a microphone. The nation was energised by socialism. When visiting heads of state arrived we were ushered out of class to stand by the roadside and cheer the presidential cortège. We were part of the collective spirit that united north and south, Christian and Muslim, east and west.

In those first five years Nimeiri went a long way towards setting the country on the path to achieving its potential, something we all dreamed of. He seemed like the embodiment of the promise that lay in the grand idea of a Sudan that was big enough to encompass its own internal contradictions. He came to symbolise the idea of belonging, of inclusiveness, of nationhood.

Behind the popular rhetoric, however, so much of what we wanted to believe turned out to be part of an elaborate fairy tale. Did we hear what we wanted to hear? What began as an adventure, a bold attempt to unite the nation and work towards the greater good of all, ended in pathetic failure. The broad scale of the vision was whittled down to war and starvation, to persecution, bitter recrimination, paranoia, cruelty, sectarianism and superstition.

The adventure was short-lived, but still, those early years remain a reminder of what might have been.

By the late 1970s Nimeiri had begun to believe in his own myth. He became more concerned with re-jigging his story than with making history. In a ghost-written book published in 1978, he claimed that Islam had always been at the core of his thinking. A patent lie, it was a vain attempt to realign himself. By then his health had begun to deteriorate. He suffered from arteriosclerosis and diabetes as well as liver damage from excessive drinking. Significantly, he also survived a number of coups and he came to believe divine intervention had saved his life. He had cheated death by changing his routine – it had to be more than good luck.

How quickly the euphoria of the early years evaporated. A gap emerged between the aspirations of the skilled middle classes and the opportunities available. People moved abroad, crossing the Red Sea for the oil-rich Gulf States. Islamism replaced socialism. In 1979 Hassan al-Turabi, in a move that presaged the Islamist takeover of 1989, was installed as minister of justice. State ownership gave way to economic liberalisation; liquid assets, shares, state land, petrol and gas were sold off. Corruption proliferated. Those closest to Nimeiri profited most. The Islamic banks were brought in. The great development plans vanished in a spiralling confusion of serious debt with bank loans for hundreds of millions of US dollars being borrowed at extortionate rates for projects that never materialised: refineries that were never built, cement factories that never arrived, helicopters delivered that no one had asked for.

Nasser’s death in 1970 marked the end of pan Arabism. The oil boom brought a level of wealth never dreamed of before to the Middle East. To many this new decadence was a betrayal of traditional values. Images of “oil sheikhs” at play in the West were viewed as shameful. They lent wings to a new wave of puritanism sweeping through the region. In Mecca, an apocalyptic sect of radicals seized the Sacred Mosque in a bid to redeem Islam. In Egypt, Anwar Sadat was gunned down in October 1981 by members of the Islamic Group, a radical faction guided by Sheikh Omar Abdel-Rahman, the same blind imam who later passed through Khartoum only to surface in New Jersey linked to the 1993 attack on the World Trade Centre. Further afield, the Soviets invaded Afghanistan and found themselves fighting the Mujahideen.

Nimeiri was ahead of the curve, already riding the Islamist wave. Twelve short years after the Addis Ababa Agreement he imposed Islam on the entire country, reignited the civil war and undid much of what had been achieved. Where he had once sought to eradicate the traditional Islamic parties, now he tried to achieve what they had never managed, what the Mahdi himself had led his followers into battle for 100 years earlier – a pure Islamic state on Earth. The coups, the ill health, everything seemed to be conspiring to push Nimeiri towards his mystic leanings. Like some latter-day King Lear, he descended into the madness of self-delusion, gradually whittling away the country’s political institutions to leave him the unchallenged master, the imam of all imams. His closest advisors were reduced to a secretive palace cabal of religious seers, magicians and soothsayers.

Under the newly imposed September Laws, a personal and brutal interpretation of Sharia, hundreds of people, many of them non-Muslims, were sentenced to amputation of their right hands or cross-amputation – where the right hand and left foot are both removed – for petty crimes. The Sudanese Bar Association concluded that the September Laws were “unconstitutional and not a true reflection of Islamic law”. It hardly made a difference. In an open letter to academics in 1983, Nimeiri likened himself to Haroun al-Rashid, the 8th-century caliph of Abbasid Baghdad. He ordered the release of 13,000 inmates from the city’s prisons. When he addressed them at Kober Prison, Nimeiri told them he had forgiven them, just as the Prophet Mohammed had forgiven the people of Mecca. In a country of saints and Sufis, the president had come to believe in his own divine mission.

In January 1984, a year before he was ousted, Time magazine summed up the state of affairs in the country. President Nimeiri had started the year, it said, by pouring a can of beer into the Nile – the first drop of five million dollars’ worth of alcohol (later estimated at 11 million). Thousands lining the river bank had cheered. Two weeks earlier, wrote the correspondent, a crowd of 500 had watched a thief have his right hand amputated. Meanwhile, only 10 per cent of the 200 million acres of arable land in the country was being cultivated. Sudan was US$8 billion in debt and crippled by shortages of goods, skilled workers, even electricity.

In the South, the war was reborn as a religious jihad. At stake was the exploitation of two natural resources, water and oil. As Khartoum went back on its promises a hostile political climate emerged. The South saw its natural resources being lifted from under its very nose. Around the Bentiu area petroleum exploration that had been going on since 1978 suddenly turned serious. Preliminary reports estimated the potential for some 50,000 barrels a day (one-tenth of current figures) which would bring in around US$250 million a year. A refinery was being planned for the northern part of the country. Again, this was not reassuring. It reinforced the impression that the oil would be siphoned out of the South as fast as possible. In March 1984 John Garang’s Sudan People’s Liberation Army attacked Chevron’s oil installations and war returned to Sudan.

The Nimeiri era remains one of the most beguiling and contradictory in the country’s history. It defined so much of what was to come: the rise of Islamist politics, the loss of the South, the corruption, the cronyism. From bringing out the best in the nation Nimeiri left us with the worst. Of all the country’s rulers, he was the one who came closest to achieving the dream of a nation united, a nation that celebrated its diversity rather than suppressed it. Like all heroes, he was deeply flawed, convinced in the end that it was not the nation that came first, but himself. By the 1980s, age and mortality were catching up with him. In the end he succumbed, falling back on old prejudices, seeing his role as ruler as his God-given right. The decade is remembered now for the images of famine in Eritrea that turned Africa into a helpless child holding out an empty bowl. Africa was once again reduced to the notion of the continent as an unfathomable, endless catastrophe. It was a sad end.

This article features in the sixth issue of the Chronic (June 2015), an edition in which we depart from and contest crude fictions about the Sahara as a boundary. Designed in collaboration with Studio Safar in Beirut this special edition of the Chronic – published in its entirety in Arabic as Muzmin – argues that the Sahara has never been a boundary, real or imagined.

To purchase in print or as a PDF head to our online shop. Copies coming to your nearest dealer now-now. Access to the whole edition and Chronic online archives is available for $28 for one year.

By Helmi Sharawy

I have pointed out in the past that the three spheres of interest in Egyptian politics (Arab, African and Islamic, in this order) mentioned in President Gamal Abdul Nasser’s booklet Philosophy of the Revolution did not indicate the real priority given to Egypt’s relations with Africa.

The period 1956 –1960 was rich in nationalist fervour, both in Egypt and in Africa, where the struggle for independence was the first priority. The declarations of self-rule, or independence, came one after the other, so much so that within a few months in 1958 we saw Felix Moumie, the leader of the Union du Peuple du Cameroun, visit the African Association, followed immediately by Ignatius Kangave Musaazi, the leader of the Ugandan National Congress, who left the brilliant John Kaley to manage their office in Cairo. Then came Oginga Odinga to start the office of the Kenya African National Union, followed by Oliver Tambo to open the office of the African National Congress of South Africa.

Malcolm X praying in the Mohammed Ali Mosque, Cairo, Egypt, September 1964

Some of these extended their stay in Cairo, while many more left permanent representatives to establish offices there, their best opening to the outer world. The rule was for the leader to hold a personal meeting with Nasser before leaving the country, and he would obtain Nasser’s instructions for founding that new office and allotting time on the broadcasting system. Some other members of the office would be posted at the secretariat of the Afro-Asian Peoples’ Solidarity Organisation.

These close political – and personal – relations with such well accredited leaders of their countries were a cause for pride among all of us in the African Affairs Bureau. All these leaders occupied modest offices beside my own modest office at the African Association, but they were all a model of activity and vitality. The financial help given to such powerful parties in their respective countries was generally modest. I remember that all that was given to a liberation leader to carry out a country-wide election campaign before independence in 1964 was equal to US $25,000.

African Liberation Movements in Cairo

African National Congress (ANC), South Africa
Basotho People’s Congress (BPC), Lesotho
Djibouti Liberation Movement (DLM), Djibouti
Eritrean Liberation Front (ELF), Eritrea
Eritrean People’s Liberation Front (EPLF)
Etudiants du Tchad (ET)
Frente de Libertação de Moçambique (FRELIMO)
Governamento do Angola Independente (GRAI)
Kenya African National Union (KANU)
League for Liberation of Somalia (LIGA)
Le Mouvement de Liberation du Congo (MLC)
Movimento Popular do Liberacion do Angola (MPLA)
Partido Africano da Independência da Guiné e Cabo Verde (PAIGC)
Swaziland People’s Party (SPP)
South West Africa National Union (SWANU)
South West Africa People’s Organisation (SWAPO)
Uganda National Congress (UNC)
Union do Independente Angola (UNITA)
United Northern Rhodesia Independence Party (UNRIP)
Zanzibar National Union (ZNU)

This article features in the sixth issue of the Chronic (June 2015), an edition in which we depart from and contest crude fictions about the Sahara as a boundary. Designed in collaboration with Studio Safar in Beirut this special edition of the Chronic – published in its entirety in Arabic as Muzmin – argues that the Sahara has never been a boundary, real or imagined.

To purchase in print or as a PDF head to our online shop. Copies coming to your nearest dealer now-now. Access to the whole edition and Chronic online archives is available for $28 for one year.
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By Nisreen Kaj

For a long time, I was sure Lebanon was in the sky.

I was, I think, five years old when I first left Lagos for Beirut. I remember flashes, here and there, like how excited I was to be in a plane for the first time. Nigeria – country of my birth, country of my mother – was below, and Lebanon – my father’s country, where I was from – was above; it was that simple in my child’s mind. It felt like I was moving on up, just like in that song by The Jeffersons.

I didn’t know much about Lebanon but I knew I was Lebanese because my father is Lebanese. We ate piping hot man’oushe za’atar religiously on Sundays, and I knew words like alwada’a and arjouki because Dad rented Sindibad on VHS. And I knew a few things about Lebanon, like the weather in February, from audio cassette recordings sent by family I’d never met, and my father enrolled me at the Lebanese Community School, where I spent mornings reciting the Lebanese national anthem in Arabic.

I remember the one and only time I spent with my grandmother in Aramoun, a land so steep it felt like I would fall off and land in Lagos. I remember adoring my brown suede boots with the zippers and fake fur. And I remember my grandfather, how he served me tea in a yellow transparent cup and watched me stir and stir with childish glee (we had opaque cups at home, you see).

I came back to Lebanon again when I was 16. By then I knew the story of how my grandmother had fled to Tripoli in the north during the war while my grandfather protected the family home, alone, with a gun. I remember bullet holes in a wall somewhere. I remember the cross-dresser in high heels and fishnet stockings in my aunt’s neighbourhood, and how no one (but me) reacted as he walked by.

It would take a third visit for me to properly understand my relationship with Lebanon. It was on this trip – I had come to study at university – that I began to realise that who I am (or who I thought I was) is a production, never complete, always in process.

Nisreen Kaj, far left corner, at Lebanese Community School, Lagos, Nigeria, 1994

By the first month of my first year here, I had learnt how to walk. I walked everywhere, whenever I could. I learned to navigate Beirut’s web of beautiful streets that went up and down at every turn with ease. As weeks rushed by, I became invisible, a ghost. People would walk past without a glance as I held the lift or building door open for them, and they would respond to the white friend next to me even though I was the one who asked for directions.

At other times, I was so visible. I was Ethiopian, Sudani, Sri Lankan (not Nigerian and never Lebanese). I became the maid, the prostitute. I was immoral, unintelligent, filthy. I was, exotic, samra (tanned), and surprisingly fluent in English. Mothers would question sons about my presence and teenagers would follow me and chant “sharmouta, sharmouta” (“whore, whore”). Police would rudely demand my ikamah, my residence permit, only to be disappointed when I handed them my ikhraj il aid.

—

Over 72 per cent of work permits issued by profession in Lebanon in 2007 fell under the category “maids”. Lebanon is home to more than 250,000 female migrant domestic workers (in a working population of around 1.5 million). These women come from countries such as Ethiopia, Sri Lanka, the Philippines, Madagascar and Nepal. They work as providers of affordable child and elderly care services, being willing to work for lower wages than Lebanese workers will accept.

Yet, although they form a substantial part of the country’s labour force and ethno-scape, migrant domestic workers  are excluded from Lebanese labour law, leaving them without the protections and benefits available to others, such as the legal right to form or join unions and the right to a minimum wage.

In addition, they work under the kafala system, a sponsorship system that ties the worker to one kafeel (sponsor) who becomes legally responsible for her. This system provides the employer with legal protection, a sense of ownership, and has a paternalistic aspect to it as well, as it renders the employee dependent, legally and otherwise, on her kafeel (in fact, it’s not very unusual to hear a migrant domestic worker refer to an employer as “mama” or “baba”).

As a consequence the sector is rife with complaints of non-payment and under-payment of wages, confiscation of passports, forced confinement, restricted communication, food deprivation, inadequate living conditions, excessive work hours, and physical, psychological, emotional and sexual abuse.

All of this has created a condition of modern-day slavery in Lebanon, where migrant domestic workers are dying at an alarming rate, often by committing suicide or trying to escape from an employer.

The demography of Lebanon’s domestic worker population was very different prior to its civil war. The position of domestic help was usually filled by women from neighbouring countries such as Palestine, Syria and Egypt, who, although they were similarly excluded from the Labour Law, did not experience the same abuse as today’s migrant labourers. According to a 2010 publication by sociologist Ray Jureidini, this was primarily due to “a shared culture with an understanding that family honour was at stake”. The civil war led to a mass exodus from Lebanon to different parts of the world and Jureidini says it was during this period that employment agencies started recruiting Sri Lankans to work in Lebanon as domestic workers, resulting in today’s very lucrative industry. The kafala system was introduced a year after the war ended in 1990.

Nisreen Kaj with her mother Joyce, 1983 (photographs courtesy of Nisreen Kaj)

I called my father a few times during my first year at university, asking to come back home. Dad would tell me to finish my studies, and assure me that it would all pass. A decade later, he called and out of the blue he said, “Nisreen, I’m so sorry for all you’ve had to go through all these years.” Hearing my father say that brought tears of absolute relief. Hearing those words from him lightened my spirits. But it pained me as well, to think that he felt some kind of guilt for the racism I’ve had to endure living here.

In the years between the first plea to my father and that apology, I graduated from university and found myself in a job I secretly enjoyed, but where I also had to bite my tongue when racist shit was being said by seemingly educated colleagues (like how Sudanese were biologically proven to be less intelligent than Lebanese). I also found myself volunteering with organisations and initiatives such as the Antiracism Movement, Support the Rights of Migrant Domestic Workers, the Lebanese Centre for Human Rights, the Insan Association, and the Migrant Workers Task Force. It was through one such initiative, Taste Kulcha, that I began to find a different way to view the racism I had been facing here, one which pushed me to see it within the larger social and historical context.

—

I met Hayeon Lee and Simba Russeau in early 2009.

At that time, Simba was starting what she described as a “cultural exchange platform” called Taste Kulcha, and Hayeon and I joined her. We spent weekends together eating what I reinvented as Nigerian food or what we accepted as Korean cuisine. We laughed and made light of our experiences of racism – “Did he really ask you why all crime in South Africa is done by black people!?” – and went about our work. It was a great year.

It was during the months of Taste Kulcha that Simba had a discussion with students at an American University of Beirut ethics class on the issues faced by migrant domestic workers in Lebanon.

During that talk, students said they were not used to seeing black people in Lebanon with “expensive” things, so it was only normal to assume that they were stolen. Some said Lebanon was an expensive country, so it was best for migrant domestic workers to have no choice than to reside in the homes of their employers; the kafala was “for their own benefit”.

Since there seemed to be no sympathy for migrant domestic workers, Simba then presented the case of a black Lebanese who faced discrimination based on physiognomic identifiers, and asked the students what they thought about that. There were two main reactions: first, many agreed that this was racism, “because if they are Lebanese then they should not be treated this way”; and second, many of the students were not even aware that black Lebanese existed.

That for me was quite a revelation.

I decided there and then that I wanted to work on a photography project with Simba on Lebanese of African or Asian heritage. There were many reasons for this, but two really stuck out for me. One was to show that we did in fact exist. That you could be black and Lebanese. The other was that, after years of listening, observing and volunteering, I felt it was time the discourse on racism in Lebanon included new voices, the voices of Lebanese who faced racism.

Simba and I started discussing how to go about the project. Sadly, Simba had to leave Lebanon soon after and a year later I approached another photographer, Marta Bogdanska. From our discussions, we finally put together Mixed Feelings.

Within the Mixed Feelings project, we created two sub-projects. The first one presented portraits of 33 Lebanese individuals of African or Asian heritage. These photos were orchestrated, each face captured against a white background, giving no context, leaving the audience to see only the person in front of them. Cutting through the photos were textual portraits, comprising quotes taken from interviews conducted with some of the participants. The second sub-project comprised reproduced material from the personal archives of 16 Lebanese families of African or Asian heritage (photos, letters, documents, interviews), in an attempt to explore racism, otherness and sameness, belonging and socialisation,  within our society’s core unit, the family.

In 2014 we took the first Mixed Feelings sub-project around Lebanon and I also learned a few things during these travels. For instance, during a talk we had at Issam Fares Institute at the American University of Beirut, a representative from Insan Association highlighted the number of ways in which racism is embedded within different systems in Lebanon.

She explained that migrant workers are categorised into four classes each of which is afforded different rights. In category 1 are “white collar” workers such as CEOs and owners of companies – jobs dominated by Europeans and Americans – and category 4 is specific to migrant domestic workers. She explained that categories 1 and 2 have the right to family reunification, a right not extended to workers in the third and fourth categories. She also explained how recruitment agencies perpetuate the racialisation of migrant domestic workers, where, for instance, Filipinos are among the highest paid in Lebanon as they are thought to be more intelligent and better at cleaning. Moreover, the Ministry of Education has all but made it impossible for migrant domestic workers to register their children at public schools or semi-private schools.

—

As a kid I went to Tade School. I loved singing the Nigerian national anthem and the times I spent with Gbenga kneeling in the corner with our arms up as punishment for arriving late yet again. When I finished Primary 4, my father sent me to Lebanese Community School (LCS), where I spent mornings reciting the Lebanese national anthem in Arabic.

I remember on one of my first days at LCS, a student approached me in the playground and she asked, “So, what religion are you?” My father is Muslim and my mother Christian but I answered “Muslim”. I thought that’s what I was because that’s what my father was.

“Yes, but are you shi’a or sunni?” she asked. Almost apologetically I stumbled out the words “I don’t know what that means”, because I really didn’t know what it meant and I felt bad for not knowing. “How can you not know what you are?” she said before storming off.

I didn’t think much of this until almost a decade later.

—

The Lebanese arrived in West Africa around the late 1800s, with speculative sources putting the date as early as 1860 in Dakar. What is certain is my father’s arrival in December 1975, a hundred years later. Mohammed Kaj found himself in Sokoto, Nigeria, at the age of 16, months after the start of the Lebanese Civil War.

My father can tell you just about everything there is to know about Nigeria’s history, politics and football. He speaks fluent Hausa. He had his car stolen at gunpoint, was beaten to a pulp by armed robbers while my mother and brothers were kept locked in the bathroom, and almost drowned with my mom at Bar Beach when I was a kid. There is no bigger fan of pounded yam, banga with snails, and kolanut. Yet over the past 40 years he has refused to get a Nigerian passport. To do so, he feels, would be to sever the ties with his homeland. But he rarely goes back to Lebanon, and when he does, he can’t wait to go back to Nigeria.

—

During my upbringing in Lagos, I was the “half-caste”, two halves that made a whole. Others called me oyinbo, “white”, an identity of difference but one that did not feel undesirable; on the contrary. I remember one evening in Leeds, where I had gone to do my master’s degree, a Nigerian friend making a jab at me for being mixed, specifically for being of Lebanese heritage. And before the comment had sunk in, another Nigerian friend came to my defence saying, “She no dey shame us, she no dey shame us, why you dey talk like that?” It was the first time in 30 years that it crossed my mind that all the years growing up in Nigeria as a “half-caste” could be perceived as shameful.

—

A couple of years ago, I went back home for a holiday and I insisted on going to a funeral. I had never attended a funeral in my life. So when I heard that my mother’s uncle’s mother had died and she would be buried in Warri, I insisted on going. I guess I also wanted to see the things I never really knew, like my mother’s childhood home, her family which my family had never met.

I remember the clean air, women in thick lace and elaborate headscarves, men in beautiful wrappers and black hats. We followed the funeral procession. Trumpets blared, drums played and music filled us. People danced as the coffin moved up and down in the hands of carriers in blue and white. Performers twisted and twitched and guests wondered out loud why a rainmaker had not been consulted to hold back the rain. My mother’s uncle’s mother was buried in the middle of her living room.

I struggle to understand why exactly this day did not disturb me as it did the people to whom I tell this story in Lebanon. I found it beautiful, the entire experience. The celebration of a long life lived, rather than a plunge into sadness. And that returning to the ground, and in a way that coming back home, it felt natural, just like how the end of a long life is intended to be.

This article features in the sixth issue of the Chronic (June 2015), an edition in which we depart from and contest crude fictions about the Sahara as a boundary. Designed in collaboration with Studio Safar in Beirut this special edition of the Chronic – published in its entirety in Arabic as Muzmin – argues that the Sahara has never been a boundary, real or imagined.

To purchase in print or as a PDF head to our online shop. Copies coming to your nearest dealer now-now. Access to the whole edition and Chronic online archives is available for $28 for one year.

Ziad Bentahar is an assistant professor of French and Arabic at Towson University in the United States. He grew up in Morocco, where his interest in the country’s competing relationships to “the Arab world” and to rest of the continent began. His recent scholarship looks at reasons why the identities of “Arab” and “African” seem, from our contemporary vantage point, so distinct, as though a writer or scholar must choose one or the other. Here, he talks with Marcia Lynx Qualey about history’s shifting boundaries and different ways of imagining connections between African literatures.

Marcia Lynx Qualey: Can you talk a bit about the longstanding literary and learning connections that bridged the Sahara, for instance the primacy of Timbuktu as a site of learning, the movement between the Kingdom of Ghana and the Maghreb, between Sudan and Egypt, and other pathways?

Ziad Bentahar: Certainly, the connections are longstanding. Not just in terms of literature and education, but in all related realms of cultural expression: language, religion, arts, education, economy, architecture, and so on. The way that we divide the world geographically, and the regional borders that we take for granted today are not absolute. One obvious example is the question of where Europe ends and Africa begins. There was a time when it was said that Africa began at the Pyrenees (meaning Spain was really not European – too Moorish, perhaps?). Now, it would seem that, for some, Africa really begins at the Atlas Mountains, leaving North Africa in limbo.

At different times, Timbuktu, Kairouan and Granada, might have been seen as part of the same cultural space. When one looks at a current map and sees Spain and Morocco in different colours, or Algeria and Mali, Sudan and Egypt, or even Yemen and Ethiopia, it is easy to forget that these national borders are relatively new. The Sahara Desert, the Mediterranean Sea, or even the Red Sea, are not necessarily boundaries, they have rather been highways for the exchange of people and ideas through history.

In the case of North Africa, the connections with the rest of the continent have mainly (although not exclusively) centred on education, economy and religion.

You mentioned Timbuktu as a site of learning. It is very tempting to visualise a romantic picture of a past that involved student-exchange programmes between Timbuktu and the al-Qarawiyyin University in Fes. Certainly, scholars from either side of the Sahara – and within the Sahara – corresponded widely to exchange opinions on religious matters.

As far as economy goes, historians say that Mediterranean markets emerged with the Carthaginian Empire in the ninth century BCE, fostering the growth of trans-Saharan commerce and trade routes. With the arrival of Islam, human exchanges through north-south trade and commerce in Africa undoubtedly increased, both in Western Africa and along the Eastern coast of the continent. Actually, at times the human exchange was because humans were what was being traded.

Finally, it is important to remember the role of pilgrimage in these exchanges. The first thing that comes to mind is the infamous story of Malian emperor Mansa Musa’s hajj in the fourteenth century, and the price of gold in Cairo dropping significantly for a while after he stopped in Egypt on his way to Mecca, because he carried with him (and left behind) so much of the precious metal. It is easy to imagine that this sparked some interest in further southern exploration among North African rulers, whether it is in the empires of Mali, Ghana, or the Songhay that Morocco conquered in the sixteenth century.

These historical sketches validate, in a way, the idea that the Sahara is not a boundary. But the language professor in me cannot help but think of the kinds of writing that people used within this space, for things like the correspondence of scholars or ambassadors, drawing up contracts, planning a project, recording a travel account, or even for entertainment. Those are all part of the literary connections bridging the Sahara, and we should absolutely add to it non-written forms of literary expression, like music, poetry, and so on.

MLQ: Part of the disruption of ties between what we now call North and sub-Saharan Africa seems to be how we construct the “beginnings” of literatures here based on Western models. You point to Négritude poets as being connected to a “beginning” of African literatures in the 1930s, and Arabic fiction is often seen as starting in 1913 with Muhammad Husayn Haykal’s novel Zaynab. Both of these have to do with re-imagining national identity in a colonial border context. Does it change the disruption at all if we imagine different “beginnings” for African literatures? 

ZB: It is important to keep in mind that this has little to do with literature itself, in a vacuum, but rather to do with literature studies as a discipline. When I mentioned Négritude in my article, I did not mean that it was a literary beginning, but that it was a new theoretical beginning. In other words, it is not so much a literary issue as it is one of categorisations of fields of study.

We can certainly find ties if we imagine “new beginnings”, as you put it, no matter where we choose to find these beginnings. As a matter of fact, we can also find ties in the 20th century, or now as well. Even the Négritude poets have generally tended more to inclusion than exclusion.

The point is, how do we study, categorise and analyse literatures?

Une si longue lettre Mariama Bâ Heinmann, 1981; Palace Walk Naguib Mahfouz Anchor (reissue), 2011; God’s Bits of Wood Ousmane Sembène Heinmann, 1970; Things Fall Apart Chinua Achebe Heinmann, 1958

MLQ: Can you discuss Heinemann’s “missionary” role of opening up new markets for British books? They were, in part, publishing African writers in order to sell books to African readers.

ZB: Sometimes there are very pragmatic, non-literary factors to these things. When discussing this topic, one can very easily get the impression that all these boundaries and classifications are the result of bad will or ignorance. It is very tempting to think that there is a conspiracy separating North and sub-Saharan African literatures that needs to be brought to light, or that the ties linking literatures from different parts of Africa are simply not known, and it is only a matter of telling people about them. That is not what I hope to convey at all. Oftentimes, superstructures of power and knowledge manifest themselves in very pragmatic ways, like book markets and publishing industries, for example. There are also illiteracy rates, publishing rights, and other very down-to-earth reasons why some literatures are published where they are, and classified as they are.

MLQ: Is there something to be gained from reading Ibrahim al-Koni in Senegal, or Ousmane Sembène in Libya? Or both together somewhere else?

ZB: Absolutely! When I first became interested in African literature, I was an undergraduate in an English department in Morocco, and a Chinua Achebe novel made a tremendous impression on me because it helped me understand myself and my own society. I remember thinking: if you just replace Igbo names with Arabic names, you could swear this was taking place in Morocco. This also applies to Senegalese works like Mariama Bâ’s novel Une si longue lettre (So Long a Letter) or Ousmane Sembène’s films. I can easily see how Libyan students could gain insights into their own selves and societies by reading Nigerian literature, or Congolese students reading Algerian literature. That being said, I would be happy if Ibrahim al-Koni was read a bit more in Libya to begin with, or in other Arabic-speaking countries, for that matter.

MLQ: Do you think 1967, and North African writers’ re-focusing on Palestine, was an important turning point in the disintegration of literary ties between North and sub-Saharan Africas? Or were the links between these two (imagined) regions already so weak that anything might have effected this disruption?

ZB: I am inclined to think that the issue is that these regions are imagined, as you say, rather than it being a matter of ties being weak or strong. It is very problematic (albeit very tempting) to think of these spaces – African, Arab, Islamic, francophone – as monolithic. But the point is that they are diverse, and, ultimately, artificial.

When we talk about there being no boundary between North and sub-Saharan Africa, how far south are we really prepared to go? Should Moroccan literature necessarily be classified alongside South African literature? When we were talking about Timbuktu earlier, it seemed logical to visualise a broader Islamic northern Africa. Does it mean we should simply move the Saharan boundary a bit south to include only those countries with a significant Muslim presence? When we spoke of French being a language in common between the Maghreb and West Africa, does it imply that the boundary today should reflect colonially inherited languages, following a line along the eastern borders of Tunisia, southern Algeria, and Niger, for example?

Any classification, ultimately, is inadequate. The point is to not take these classifications for granted, and question them. Because they are inadequate and vague, however, , they are also flexible. So it is conceivable for North Africans to call themselves Africans when they are fighting the same colonial empire as other African countries, then call themselves Arab when pan Arabism is in the air, then African again when it is convenient or back in fashion. I think politics play a role in this, whether it is the Cold War, oil crises in the 1970s, or the aftermath of September 11. It does seem awfully convenient to be able to say, “I’m African, not Arab, I have nothing to do with Iraq, so don’t bomb me please”, but it is only possible because “African” and “Arab” are vague, artificial, and therefore flexible terms. “Europe” is as well. So is “the West,” which, today, as far as I understand, does not include Morocco, a country whose very name means “the Occident” in Arabic, and yet was the epitome of what we think of as Western civilisation six centuries ago.

What I find interesting is that “Arab” and “African”, more often than not, are considered mutually exclusive, and a liminal space like North Africa tends to be the one or the other at any given time, and rarely both at once.

MLQ: Are there translations of big authors like Naguib Mahfouz and Tayeb Salih into other non-European African languages: Oromo, Swahili, Hausa, Amharic? 

ZB: I should hope so. I seem to recall seeing a Mahfouz novel in Swahili once.

MLQ: In the study of African literature, is there any special status for Tamazight/Berber writers, who can’t really be called “Middle Eastern”?

ZB: Why could they not be Middle Eastern? The problem there is that these labels, as artificial as they might be, are very powerful in shaping the way we view the world, and unfortunately they are also mutually exclusive. Tamazight is not considered a Middle Eastern language, but why not? What about Coptic? Or the languages you just mentioned? I think you just hit the nail on the head: the point of literature is to question these things, like identity, and what it means to belong to a region, a country, a continent, a society, a civilisation, a period; for example, by getting us to ask: is Tamazight Middle Eastern, and what does it imply about the very meaning of “Middle Eastern?”

The answer to your question is no, there is no substantial status for Tamazight, to my great chagrin. Of course there are scholars who study Tamazight-related things, I am not saying no one does. In fact, I commend those few scholars who do. But Tamazight literatures and cultures are still cruelly understudied, given the potential. I do not know Tamazight myself, otherwise it would likely have taken a larger role in my own research. I think the main reasons for this lack of interest in Tamazight fall more into the category of pragmatic things I was referring to before, where to publish these literatures, who is going to read them? and so on, rather than intrinsically literary factors. Thankfully, the internet has helped with the dissemination of cultural production in Tamazight.

The future of Tamazight literature as a discipline, which I very much hope takes off very soon, is likely to come from Europe, if only because of significant Amazigh communities in such places as France or the Netherlands, and it is there that Tamazight literatures and cultures are most likely to become more widely studied. Teaching Tamazight in a North American university would not hurt, however, and I encourage any of your readers who have an idea on how to start such a programme to let me know if I can help them in any way.

MLQ: At PEN’s May festival in New York, there is a focus on “Africa”. As you would expect, North Africa is marginal, with just one off-site event bringing in Moroccan literature, and at least one of the organisers didn’t even know of the event. Indeed, the organisers didn’t seem to find North Africa’s marginalisation from the discussion at all troubling. Should they? 

ZB: Of course it is troubling because this marginalisation questions the very meaning of Africa. Not to mention that North Africa suffers from a double marginalisation, so to speak, since it has tended to not be central in “Arab” literature either. Because it is between two categories – Arab and African – it ends up being marginal in both.

But I would like to point out that North Africa is not necessarily an innocent victim in this scenario. If North Africa is only African when it is convenient, without investing itself in an African space and an African identity, it is bound to not hold a central place in the discussion. This applies to literature. Many North African authors and literary scholars do not consider themselves African. Those who do are a minority.

MLQ: I have got feedback, for instance, from sub-Saharan writers who say, “The Arabs already have their festivals and prizes, don’t come barging into ours.” Indeed, there seems to be a framework of limited resources and a sense of competition for these.

ZB: I, too, have had my share of encounters with authors and scholars, both from North and sub-Saharan Africa, as well as from elsewhere, who consider the two to be separate. But there was a time when that was the only attitude I encountered. I do feel that it has changed in recent years, slowly but surely.  I suppose that time will tell whether it is durable change, or negligible fluctuations in an inevitable overarching drift between North Africa and the rest of the continent.

What I find problematic is that these exclusionary discourses are rarely based on any clearly articulated ideology.

Certainly the framework that you refer to is insufficient. If someone thinks that North African literature should not be included with Africa because Arabic literature has its own festivals and prizes, fair enough. But this strikes me as missing the broader question of why are “Arab” and “African” considered mutually exclusive, and what does it reveal about the very meaning of “African” and “Arab”? I think that literature and culture are ideally positioned to raise these important questions and eventually direct us towards answers.

Meanwhile, I’d like to remind sceptics that no one seems to question North Africa’s place in Africa during the Africa Cup of Nations. Maybe I should research football rather than literature.

MLQ: You don’t mention the mutual racisms that compound this severing of ties. For instance, in an issue of African Writing to which I contributed, and wherein Elliott Colla translated a story by Ibrahim al-Koni, there was a quite offensive caricature of an Arab that ran right alongside al-Koni’s story. And anti-black racism among Arabs surely needs little detailing. Among writers I have found a more open and anti-racist atmosphere, but to what extent do you think these figure in?

ZB: I think that racism is fundamental in this separation. The difficulty in addressing it (and I do address it in my research, although, I admit, not yet satisfactorily) is that it is not clearly defined in this context. If it were more clearly articulated, it would be easier to attack it. But race is complicated, and, when it comes to North Africa, it is particularly ambiguous. This makes it difficult to talk about race and racism without confirming and validating racist paradigms, even when one does not adhere to them, or if they are inadequate when it comes to the specific case of North Africa. I am also unclear on whether this racism is the cause of the separation or its consequence, although I suspect the answer is both the cause and consequence, like a vicious circle.

The problem is also not at the level of the individual only, it is in larger structures. The fact that you generally find a more open and anti-racist atmosphere among writers – which has been my experience as well – is consoling, but does not mean much, unfortunately. Individuals are not necessarily racist, or aware of perpetuating and/or benefiting from racism. The story of the caricature that you mention is an example of that. Similar acts of racism are normalised, and many of their perpetrators would be shocked and surprised if you drew attention to the racism in their attitudes.

The optimist in me still believes that literature can open minds. After reading Elliott Colla’s translation, one may find the caricature beside it suddenly problematic, and engage with it more critically.

This article features in the sixth issue of the Chronic, an edition in which we depart from and contest crude fictions about the Sahara as a boundary. Designed in collaboration with Studio Safar in Beirut this special edition of the Chronic – published in its entirety in Arabic as Muzmin – argues that the Sahara has never been a boundary, real or imagined.

To purchase in print or as a PDF head to our online shop. Copies coming to your nearest dealer now-now. Access to the whole edition and Chronic online archives is available for $28 for one year.
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By Akin Adekosan

The setting was a night party somewhere in Old Yaba, Lagos, in February or March 1993. I was sitting backstage with the fuji musician Alhaji (Chief Dr) Sikiru Ayinde Barrister, still in his forties, but by now self-described as “Alhaji Agba” (Grand Old Alhaji), and was having quite a task getting him on tape. I was researching a magazine article on the state of popular music, at a time when, on the evidence of what was booming from the roadside record store, the field seemed to belong exclusively to Sir Shina Peters and Abass Akande Obesere, barring the occasional croon of Orits Wiliki. What happened to the singers, those tenuous links to the old highlife greats, who overwhelmed synthesizers by the sheer power of their singing?

Having interviewed Obesere and been assured by Peters’s bodyguards that “Star” would smile on me, I sought out the Fuji Exponent equally revered by the two current raves.

But Barrister would not grant me an interview, citing the unsuitability of the venue. “I won’t be able to concentrate,” he intoned repeatedly, the last word ringing as in a chant.  After the performance, then? Oh, but he would be too tired. The point, however, was that I had been invited to this owambe by his PR manager, after several futile visits to the Fuji Chamber, in Isolo. Our conversation was constantly interrupted by people, mostly women, coming to pay homage, whisper something, lodge an appeal, each departing in what appeared like an unvarying state of grace.

A selection from the 60 albums produced by Ayinde Barrister in his career spanning 1972-2008

A selection from the 60 albums produced by Ayinde Barrister in his career spanning 1972-2008

I quickly realised that the few hours between the star’s arrival and the start of performance were sacred, reserved for holding court and priming for the show. He remained courteous and exaggeratedly respectful throughout, addressing even me as “Dear mi” and instructing his aides to allow me to sit near the dais as the show took off. Like every journalist worth his transport allowance, I remained hopeful of an interview until dawn. Then I headed home, sleepy and disappointed.

It was my first encounter with Ayinde Barrister, one of the musical idols of my childhood. From listening to the narrative homily “Itan Sunmoila” (on the 1974 album Ori Mi Ewo Ni Nse?) while standing outside a record store in Inalende, Ibadan,  and promptly forgetting I was on an errand, I followed Barrister’s career through the mid-1990s. By this time, of course, I had seen through the ideology, but music is habit-forming in the extreme, and detesting the politics of a song does not mean that you quickly get it out of your head. Hardly a day passes when I don’t hum one of his tunes.

A selection from the 60 albums produced by Ayinde Barrister in his career spanning 1972-2008

A selection from the 60 albums produced by Ayinde Barrister in his career spanning 1972-2008

Barrister was one of the most prolific musicians Nigeria has known, releasing about 60 albums between 1972 and 2008. He viewed himself correctly as an exponent, an innovator, a bridge across traditions, genres, and generations; styling himself poetically as “Fertilizer” (the title of his 1985 album), and fine-tuning this self-description by inventing others (“Manure”, “Garbage”, “Waste-Dump”) because, in the philosophical orientation of his milieu, an evocative expression was first declared, then explained as an afterthought. He was the Fertilizer because, as master of fuji music, it was his natural place to soak up all sorts of insults and dirt from everyone. He justified this with the proverb “Akitan ti o gb’egbin ko nii kun” (A dumpsite intolerant of waste will not fulfil its destiny). But he was the Fertilizer in a more telling way, as the one who synthesized different forms to create a hybrid genre: fuji. Barrister was canny enough to propound the theory of the genre in “Fuji Reggae Series II”, released in 1978.

A selection from the 60 albums produced by Ayinde Barrister in his career spanning 1972-2008

A selection from the 60 albums produced by Ayinde Barrister in his career spanning 1972-2008

A selection from the 60 albums produced by Ayinde Barrister in his career spanning 1972-2008

He called:

“Hello ladies and gentlemen, who can tell the full meaning of fuji sound?”

“Eni f’oyinbo, Ayinde n’ile ana re, nilati tumo re o.” (The person who goes to his in-laws’ home to speak “grammar” is obligated to translate for himself.)

Then: “Fuji sound

Is the combination of musics,

Consisting of apala, juju, aro,

Gudugudu, Afro, possibly highlife.

Mo le gbe t’Olatunji Yusuf yo,

Mo le gbe t’Obey Commander yo,

Mo le gbe t’Afro-Fuji yo…”

A selection from the 60 albums produced by Ayinde Barrister in his career spanning 1972-2008

A selection from the 60 albums produced by Ayinde Barrister in his career spanning 1972-2008

A selection from the 60 albums produced by Ayinde Barrister in his career spanning 1972-2008

The track continued in this vein, each mention of a master of a genre (“apala”, “sakara”, “juju”, “Afrobeat”) becoming the pretext for incorporating a tune from that genre. This was a foundational moment in Nigerian popular music for several reasons.  First, he was drawing attention to the inclusiveness of a genre yet to be born, “a combination of musics”. Second, he was paying homage to those masters who, by the way, were his superiors in age and experience, and to acknowledge them was to declare his resolve to imitate or “copy” them (and vice versa), while implicitly announcing himself as an emergent force.  Claims of superiority were the driving force of the popular genres. Third, he was doing what none of the genres, with the exception of Afrobeat, could do, that is, sing in English “grammar”, a move understood as a gesture toward the increasing proliferation of dance-hall disco songs in urban Nigeria. He began to release songs with titles in English, and the scale of his beats was raised at least two levels above apala and sakara in tempo, thus lending itself more easily to dancing. Finally, this song was musical praxis at its best; with it, Barrister was practising an art as he preached it.

There were other innovations. He expanded the size of his band, bringing in more percussive instruments for sonic variety, like dundun (Kamoru Ayansola) and gudugudu (Shamsideen Adisa), and incorporating the jazz drum set (Tunde Balinga), the four-tone gong (Kola Kazeem), and the tambourine (Sessy Show).

It was said that older musicians like Yusuf Olatunji and Haruna Isola felt affronted by him because he failed to attend (or arrived late at) a meeting called around this time. But there were other contexts for Barrister’s emergence as signified by this aesthetic positioning. Olatunji died in 1978, and Isola, the next person in seniority, was well engrossed in institutional work with the establishment of Phonodisk, the record-pressing company. The only serious challenger was the Abeokuta-based apala musician, Ayinla Omowura.

The battle for supremacy was fierce.  When Barrister complained in a song that his music “had disappeared from where it was kept”, Omowura derided him and called him out by name, which was unusual. In 1980, the mercurial Omowura died violently, stabbed by a band boy (who was subsequently convicted and executed), while the fuji master was performing in Kano.  According to Omowura’s camp, Barrister’s failure to pay a condolence visit to the family was a convenient ploy, and in his recorded tribute, he was compelled to absolve himself through a string of maledictions. Following Isola’s death in 1983 and a tourist visit to Disney World in Orlando, Florida, Barrister was now unchallenged. Although Ayinla Kollington was to prove an implacable rival for much of that decade, the rivalry was actually more social than musical in a strictly aesthetic sense.  They fought over women and patrons, and bragged about foreign concerts. Barrister charged through that decade doling out homage to the living and the dead, defending the profession of “were” music, stating and restating his claim to “supremacy”, the title of another album from 1985. Of three people he remained forever reverential: Victor Olaiya, Ebenezer Obey and King Sunny Ade. “Fuji Creator”, one of the songs from this period, was reportedly judged a “classic” by a friendlier competitor, the late Dauda Epo-Akara (d. 2005).

The other context was sociological, the dawn of Nigeria’s Second Republic and the advent of a particular type of patron. This was the Lagos/Ibadan/Abeokuta socialite with ties to the politicians, mostly belonging to the National Party of Nigeria (NPN). Barrister was so close to the members of this group that he often sang their praises in his “live plays”, but his political skills were so sharp that he rarely praised them in albums. He came closest to outing this intimate group in a highly coded reprise of his tribute to Bobby Benson, the late highlife maestro:

“Be ba ti r’eja

Asin pel’eta

Be ba ti r’eja

E ma d’odo ru rara

Be ba ti r’eja, e ma d’odo ru rara o.”

(“Once you’re done fishing, folks, please do not muddy up the waters.” Several names were mentioned, all of them men most likely to know what he was talking about.)

A selection from the 60 albums produced by Ayinde Barrister in his career spanning 1972-2008

A selection from the 60 albums produced by Ayinde Barrister in his career spanning 1972-2008

Barrister was gifted with fantastic lungs, an inestimable asset which enabled him to stretch syllables, change tones and emphases while articulating phonetically complex structures. He excelled in the social satires (“efe”) having to do with the sexual, and he sang these in acceptable ways. But he was also a great social commentator, fulfilling the basic role of the artist as a dispenser of “imoran” (advice), art as a form of example. In albums or songs like “Iwa”, “Suru Baba Iwa”, “Ka f’owo ran omo nile iwe” (on the importance of education), “Ise Loogun Ise” (on work), “Destiny”, and many others, he enjoined his listener to strive for a well-adjusted, purposeful life. His elegiac tribute to the late footballer Muda Lawal was a masterpiece.

The philosophy of his music was conservative, reactionary even, although it was partly redeemed by recourse to allegory in songs addressing political issues of the day.  A whole album, Omo Nigeria (1978), focused mainly on Yoruba cities and even more exclusively on places where his patrons came from, with fleeting mentions of “Hausa Ina kwana” and “Agbor”, hometown of one of his wives.  The most embarrassingly evergreen remains his rejoinder to Fela Anikulapo-Kuti’s “Zombie”, in which he defended soldiers on the grounds that he was a retired staff-sergeant, while remaining blind to the song’s critique of militarism, and to Fela’s personal woes.

A selection from the 60 albums produced by Ayinde Barrister in his career spanning 1972-2008

A selection from the 60 albums produced by Ayinde Barrister in his career spanning 1972-2008

He influenced many fuji musicians, especially Alhaji Wasiu Ayinde (KWAM I) who adopted his oriki in homage, Adewale Ayuba, Wasiu Alabi (Pasuma), and Barry Showkey. The career of Tajudeen Alade (Deputy Commander), the one person who worked with him as an apprentice, did not really take off. Barrister more than excelled in his chosen profession and he clearly made his mark. By any artistic standard, he was successful, and outstandingly so.

Will his legacy endure? Nigerian artists have often faced serious challenges in terms of sustaining tradition; so abysmal is the organisation of the society’s productive forces. This is tied to another intractable problem, the social orientation of the class to which Barrister belonged, as exemplified in my encounter with him at the owanbe at Old Yaba.

This article features in the sixth issue of the Chronic (June 2015), an edition in which we depart from and contest crude fictions about the Sahara as a boundary. Designed in collaboration with Studio Safar in Beirut this special edition of the Chronic – published in its entirety in Arabic as Muzmin – argues that the Sahara has never been a boundary, real or imagined.

To purchase in print or as a PDF head to our online shop. Copies coming to your nearest dealer now-now. Access to the whole edition and Chronic online archives is available for $28 for one year.
Buy the Chronic