Possible Exam Questions:
What colonial exploitations in Africa’s past continue today? Are there particular diplomatic, political or strategic actions that began during the age of colonial imperialism we now condemn, which continue on to this day in similar or identical, unchanging fashion?
If Africa was a country, how would the country be divided up? Would it be divided on ethnic lines, by religion or traditions? What would be the inside or outside influences that could befall this possible experiment?
What would be some of the challenges and trials of a completely united State of Africa, as suggested by powerful African leaders such as Kwame Nkrumah, Nelson Mandela and Muammar Gadhaffi?
Now that you have been exposed to a wide range of the culture and geographical richness of Africa’s many different regions, what can you reflect on your original stated opinion of Africa in our first class together? What has changed, and what has stayed the same for you?
For quite a long time now, I’ve been studying and observing events taking place in Guinea-Bissau, one of Africa’s smallest and most unusual places for the wave of alarming news headlines to be coming out of the tiny West African republic.
Guinea-Bissau, a country only 13,946 square miles with a population of a little over a million, has been desperately poor since fighting a war for its independence from occupation by Portugal’s facist regime in the 1970s.
Lead to independence by the charismatic Amilcar Cabral, who is now seen as an iconic anti-colonial freedom fighter for his bravery and leadership of the leftist revolutionary army, the Partido Africano da Independencia da Guine e Cabo Verde (PAIGC).
The PAIGC, a Soviet and Cuban-funded insurgency, would eventually bring liberation to both Guinea-Bissau and the islands of Cabo Verde. Despite putting up a valiant fight using some of the first tactics of asymmetrical warfare theory, Cabral did not live to see his country’s freedom; he was assassinated in 1973, a year before independence, by Portuguese spies.
After years of colonial subjugation, living with intense aerial bombardment and the attacks of Portuguese troops harassing and destroying the few small towns which prevented the Bissauans from being able to eke out a minor living growing food for themselves and their only export crop, cashew nuts, Guinea-Bissau did not have a good start in the world as an independent nation when the Portuguese capitulated and allowed Guinea-Bissau to become independent in 1974.
Since independence, the country has never found stability. Initially ruled by a military junta, Guinea-Bissau has bounced from leader to leader, with a repetitive series of over 23 coups between 1974 and the late 1990s, each involving varying degrees of violence.
No president in the history of the country has ever served their entire term. The military’s deep involvement in governing has caused a result of infighting and factionality, and has left the country bankrupt, with an almost non-existent state infrastructure.
There is no electricity grid in Guinea-Bissau and no power plant, which means no streetlamps, no traffic lights, major issues with telecommunications and banking, and a huge loss of productivity. At night, candles can be seen flickering in the windows of the mostly recycled-metal tin shacks housing ordinary citizens of Guinea Bissau, their only source of light after the sun goes down.
The buildings, mostly constructed almost half a century ago by Portugal, are rotting away in the steamy heat. Open sewers carry human waste and trash right in front of the doors of people’s houses, causing diseases like cholera to proliferate. There is also no functioning hospital, and GB’s medical service is so lacking that it relies entirely on grants from the Portuguese government to send severely ill patients to Portugal for treatment.
There is no real presence of law besides the military and their soldiers, not really a united army but factions of armed men who simply decide for themselves and by themselves what “law” is for Bissauans.
It is this grinding poverty and complete lack of caring by both the “government” and not even the slightest flicker of attention or recognition of existence from the outside world that has caused Guinea-Bissau to morph from unfortunate and ignored to becoming a massive issue for both Bissauans and the rest of the world: Guinea-Bissau has become the world’s first fully-fledged “narcostate”.
Since 2005, Guinea-Bissau has spiraled further down the path to complete anarchy. Attempts at presidential elections lead to the election of President Joao Bernardo Vieira, a career military man with many rivals, who was killed by soldiers a day after the targeted killing of another powerful army officer, General Tagme Na Wai. These events created a power vacuum, and this lack of authority created Guinea-Bissau’s present problem.
Even though geographically, it is tiny, Guinea-Bissau (GB for short) has a unique position on the Western coast of Africa, highly accessible by ship. GB also controls an archipelago of almost 90 islands, mostly uninhabited, sitting off the coast of the African continent in the Atlantic Ocean. Highly biodiverse, the Bijagos are mostly mangrove swampland, which makes them very hard to access if one does not know the terrain. This would become very important as a strategic advantage for Colombian drug traffickers, who began to exploit West Africa’s Atlantic coastline as a location for incoming drug shipments.
The traffickers made it a routine of paying off many different levels of the government officials of Sierra Leone, Liberia and Senegal, in order to bring in their produce of heroin and cocaine via cargo freighter.
Once the Liberian and Sierra Leonean civil wars ended in the early 2000s, these operations were left without an easy entrance point to move their narcotics through West Africa. In Guinea-Bissau, things had become even more desperate. Colombian traffickers sensed opportunity and began approaching and systematically gaining control over any possible opposition to their plans using the power of their large reserves of money.
What would happen next is something unique: the complete and total degradation of a country to the point its’ main industry and primary function internationally becomes the trafficking of narcotics. This is very visible in this documentary, courtesy of the UK’s Channel 4:
This is Part 1 of “Guinea-Bissau, The World’s First Narcostate”. Part 2, the sequel, will be coming soon).
An amazing talent, Aziza Brahim is considered by many to be the “voice of the Sahrawi diaspora”. Like many Sahrawis, her family were exiled by Morocco in its’ military pursuit of invading and colonizing Western Sahara to commercially exploit its’ mineral wealth in phosphate deposits and rich coastal fishing grounds.
Resisting the Spanish occupation, the Polisario Front (a Marxist anti-colonial revolutionary group and Morocco’s opposition) controls a percentage of the territory of Western Sahara, which it calls the SADR (Sahrawi Autonomous Democratic Republic). It’s main base are the refugee camps it administers in Tinduf, Algeria, where Aziza Brahim was born.
Like many Sahrawi children, Brahim was offered a scholarship and education in Cuba, which supports the Polisario Front. There, she studied music, before returning to the Tinduf camps, and eventually moving to Spain, as many Sahrawi exiles tend to do.
As an artist, Brahim celebrates her family history of resistance, using the poetry of her grandmother as song lyrics. She sings in Spanish, Hassaniya Arabic and Tamasheq (language of the Touareg people) about life as a displaced, stateless person, her dreams, and her goals, among many other subjects.
One of my current favourite singers, Aziza Brahim includes elements of Spanish flamenco, Cuban traditional music, West African “highlife” and American blues to provide a beautifully emotional introduction to the Sahrawi people, their nomadic life, and their brave resistance against a brutal occupation.
Just in case we’ve forgotten, Lagos is huge, geographically, population-wise, and also in terms of cultural influence in Africa, and increasingly, the rest of the world.
Never before has Nigeria’s art and music scene had such a broad global audience. Novels by new Nigerian authors like Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (“Americanah“, “Half of a Yellow Sun“) and Teju Cole (“Every Day is For The Thief“, “Open City” are winning prizes and admirers in the US for their honest, direct and hilarious depictions of Nigerian life, both past history and the jarring, jerry-mandered 21st-century transcontinental life many Nigerians are making the big leap to experience.
Both young Nigerians of means traveling legally for pleasure and higher education at many of the most renowned universities in the US and UK, and those in lower economic circumstances who, (even if it means risking using false documents to travel into the West illegally, or breaking some rules) are pursuing their dream of coming back home to success by traveling to Europe or America in ever greater numbers.
Nigerians are trying to make a better life for themselves and to eventually return to in Nigeria. In the 21st century, connecting to the rest of the world has become necessary for Nigerians, and for many, their reality is spread between Lagos and London, perpetually on the move between the two.
Both of these trajectories are reflected in Adichie and Cole’s books, and in the styles of music filling Nigerian radio airwaves and the vast musical archive that is YouTube, where young Nigerians are most excited about artists like WizKid, a talented DJ and singer who has been performing since the age of 11, and has captured the attention of Lagos’s listeners, along with recent hit-maker Iyanya (who, uniquely, sings in a combination of Nigerian Pidgin and the Efik language), well known for his fast-paced afropop with azonto beat hit, “Kukere“.
I recently visited and lived in Lagos for a short temporary work contract, before traveling onwards on-board a Soviet Antonov propeller plane to the Islamic emirate city-state of Kano, continuing by four-wheel-drive in Nigeria’s Hausa and Fulani speaking north through the other former Islamic emirates Kaduna and Zaria and crossing the border into Niger, a very different country than Nigeria in many ways.
There are very few ways to describe the unique chaos that is the hustle-and-bustle and daily comings-and-goings that are happening in the megacity of Lagos, a city of extreme contrasts; the newer Western mixing with the traditional African. A great way to see a demonstration of this and to capture some of what I saw in my experience with Lagos is to see the Lagos that WizKid captures in his music video “OJUELEGBA”, which centers on themes of transport in Lagos and references the “Ifa” faith, an indigenous religion that is very similar to the folk traditional religions which exist in the Caribbean like vodou and obeah.
The traffic scenes in the video are a very serious part of life in Lagos, a city never designed for the sheer amount of cars now on its roads. The iconic yellow VW vans, which Lagosians call “danfo”, have been modified to take as many passengers as possible and is now as iconic and ubiquitous as the NYC yellow Ford Crown Victoria taxicab.
Lagos boasts some of the worst traffic jams of any country in the road; a myriad of unique quirks like gangs of street youth called “area boys” digging holes in the road and demanding money to fill the holes back up and let cars through to roving vendors selling wares of literally every kind. Businessmen, students, politicians, day labourers; all become equal as one mass as passengers trapped in what is called a “go-slow”, a traffic back up for which Lagos is famous.
Added to the chaos is the ever-present dance of the corrupt policemen and many regulatory agencies, who try to extort the “danfo” drivers and passengers and the melodic calls of the “danfo conductor”, the danfo driver’s assistant who attract potential customers with their clever rhymes and attention-getting slogans, and act as watchmen against the corrupt law enforcement bureaucracy.
As Lagos continues to grow, undoubtedly more and more of the world will become familiar with Nigeria’s unique and special offerings in pop culture, be it through books, films, music or more. Nigerian media captures the relentless changes in society, and more and more of the world is listening and watching.
Justice is sought for the destruction of the many historical artifacts, including the many ancient written records kept in Timbuktu’s oldest mosque and destruction of the shrines of saints in the city, during the 2012 uprising, as the first suspect in the case is turned over to International Criminal Court in the Netherlands for trial. Ahmed al Faqi al Mahdi, an Islamist fighting with the Ansar al Dine Islamist militant group, is to be tried for attacks on buildings of religious significance and his attempts to “cleanse” Timbuktu of “idolatry” through the burning of its ancient library of manuscripts, which contain some of the most detailed records of the history of the Islamic world in Mali and North Africa.
This is the first ever instance of a person being charged in the jurisdiction for “cultural destruction as a war crime”, which is very significant and hopefully will set a future precident for the protection of the world’s most valued historical sites when they are threatened, damaged or destroyed by war.
Deliberate defacement and erasure of important national heritage sites and ancient ruins, such as the large carvings of the Buddha in Bamiyan, Afghanistan which were ruined by rocket propelled grenade fire from the Taliban, the levelling and demolition of the Hatra ruins in Iraq (made famous by the movie “The Exorcist”) and the destruction of the Palmyra complex in Syria by Islamic State militants convinced the archaeological site was “sacrilage and idolatry” has been an increasingly important issue worldwide, as conflicts destroy not only the lives of people but the relics and memories of their heritage.
The UN is attempting to demonstrate by this method that the criminals who attack these precious monuments of the past are culpable for prosecution for their crimes, and attempts to visibly “rewrite” history by the selective removal of national symbols and carefully preserved elements of the past will not succeed.
DEAR SIR OR MADAM, I AM IN NEED OF YOUR URGENT ASSISTANCE IN DEPOSITING A SUM OF SIXTY FOUR MILLION DOLLARS…. His Excellency Field Marshal For Life Secretary Al Haji Naira Mugu No Wahala, CBE.
Dearest readers, I am sure you recieve many an unusual message in your inbox, a plaintive request for help (perhaps some feduciary enrichment?) in a plea from a most important Nigerian official highly placed in the government who needs your assistance with that trifling matter of transferring his hoarded wealth overseas.
Well, HE Al Haji Naira Mugu No Wahala is here to promise you that you will be recieving these meddlesome requests no longer, thanks to recent news from Abuja reporting that Nigeria’s recently (re)-elected president/general, Muhamudu Buhari, a general no-nonsense chap, has passed a deadline for the requirement of all Nigerian government ministries to fund their operations through a single bank account monitored by the Central Bank of Nigeria.
It is through this sensible and concrete measure of law and order that those problematic troublemaking fellow civil servants will no longer be able to “chop your dollar” via corruption and related financial fraud (normally referred to by its code number in Nigerian law, 419).
Buhari, once a dictator and the founder of the ideology of Buharism, who overthrew the Nigerian government in 1983 and ruled with an iron grasp that is fondly remembered by some for it’s “back to basics” approach to law and order (forcing civil servants to do exercise routines when they were late, executions for drug trafficking) until 1985, was recently elected president once again in Nigeria, this time in an actual election.
Reporting on the massive economic losses to corruption based in the civil services, President Buhari has claimed that Nigeria has “lost over 150 billion US dollars in the past 10 years”. This was presumably made easier by the fact that “the government had no idea how many bank accounts existed for each government department”.
Nigerians can rest easy knowing that there is a single answer for that question: 1.
This will no doubt cause hard times for FE Al Haji Naira Mugu No Wahala and his many friends, but it appears “Baba Go Slow” Buhari is here to stay.
Musical Interludes: For Your Enjoyment! In addition to enjoying being a student in PSC2140, I am also a polyglot, and an amateur anthromusicologist. For some liveliness and the interest of readers, I will be periodically posting songs/videos from some of my favourite musicians from across the musically diverse continent of Africa.
Many of these tracks have a specific tie-in to our class material, or unusual features I think would be enjoyed and informative to point out. Expect the unexpected!
Our professor has mentioned the film “Timbuctou” several times in class; a musical welcome to Mali is here presented by the dynamic duo Amadou et Miriam, some of Mali’s most famous singers.
In addition to playing across genres and languages, both Amadou and Miriam lost their sight during their youth. This is only one of the unique features of their amazing musical gift, which draws from a rich collection of different world instruments and regional styles. Bienvenue a Mali!
