Anthropologically Speaking

December 25, 2009: A Nigerian-born male, with secondary education in Togo and university education in London, said to have been radicalized during his university days in London, and to have been further radicalized in Yemen, attempted to detonate an ‘incendiary device’ that he had sown into his underwear before getting on a flight to Detroit. The situation was contained with the help of fellow passengers.

The flight originated from Amsterdam Schiphol airport, where the airport security failed to detect the said ‘incendiary device’.

The first reaction of the American Transportation Security Administration was to immediately announce a one-hour rule. This means, among other things, that nobody on a flight bound for the United States is allowed to leave their seat during the last hour of the flight, not even to go to the toilet.

Reacting to this, some commentators complained about how it seems that the US is playing catch-up with terrorists. They wondered whether terrorists would actually repeat their last failed tactic.

Shortly after the news of the Detroit terror attempt, there were debates in the media about whether or not a full-body scanner would have detected that there was some foreign article in the underwear, and if so, whether it would not be better to have full-body scanners in all airports. One should point out that now would be a good time to invest in the shares of companies that manufacture said scanners.

January 3, 2010: The American Transportation Security Administration declared Nigeria ‘a country of special interest’ and added it to a list of countries whose citizens would have to go through ‘enhanced screening’.

Commentators wondered whether it was really wise to alienate potential allies in the fight against extremist Islam, pointing out that Nigerians had done all they could to stop the situation, and that ultimately, it was American officials who dropped the proverbial ball.

Other commentators wondered at the generalization about a country from one isolated case, especially since there was nothing in the young man’s past to suggest that he had been radicalized, or had radicalized others, in Nigeria.

In reply to these, other commentators stressed the fact that Nigeria could be a hotbed of terrorism, especially because there have been what have been largely termed religious violence in the Northern part of the country. In counter-reaction, some pointed out that this is an overtly simplistic take on violent conflicts that are a lot more political than religious.

January 6, 2010: The Nigerian Senate gave the United States a seven-day ultimatum to remove the name of the country from the list. They threatened the severance of diplomatic with the United States if the United States refuses to remove the name of the country from the list.

On the same day, Mrs. Dora Akunyili, Information Minister and rebrander-in-chief of Nigeria, who had earlier tried – albeit unsuccessfully – to distance Nigeria from the young man with poor taste in underwear, said that the inclusion of Nigeria on the list had ‘the potential of undermining long-standing and established US-Nigeria bilateral ties and the goodwill the US enjoys in Nigeria’.

January 7, 2010: Barack Obama, the American President said, at a press conference, ‘we will not succumb to a siege mentality that sacrifices the open society and liberties and values that we cherish as Americans, because great and proud nations don’t hunker down and hide behind walls of suspicion and mistrust.’

Some commentators said that this was in reaction to those who said that United States was now suffering from a ‘siege mentality’ by introducing measures that some see as becoming, on the one hand, increasingly invasive of individual privacy, and on the other, increasingly isolationist.

Glaringly absent was any mention of the threat by the African superpower.

January 8, 2010: Mr. Michael Aondoakaa, Attorney-General and Minister of Justice of Nigeria, speaking on behalf of a president whose state of mind and health remain largely unknown, allayed fears of any confrontation. He said, ‘we cannot be talking about ultimatum at this stage.’ He also said that the two countries would avoid a potential face-off by resorting to diplomatic solutions to the issue.

To which Petrodollar-land heaved a sigh of relief.

There is a thing about being so close to something that one does not see it anymore. Anthropologists normally refer to it as going native. You have gone native when you no longer see the obvious things anymore, when the things that an outsider notices stares you in the face but you are no longer able to see them. This is usually because you have developed a blind spot for them, and they have become normal, almost natural.

There is also the other kind of blind spot, the kind that comes from being native. Anthropologists know about that too very well. Since we study people, we know that studying people of ones kind comes with the added requirement of being able to stand back and look critically in order to see things that would be obvious to foreigners, but that are not obvious to the native.

This is because we anthropologist normally study the everyday mundane things; we try to understand how people live their lives, how people make sense of things, understand, interact and deal with day to day issues. Sometimes something impressive and unusual happens; most times they don’t.

Unlike history, anthropology favours the everyday. History, on the other hand, is not very kind to the ordinary. Journalism too. News is a break from the ordinariness of the day, that is why no news is good news. It normally means that the day has been, well, normal. Of course, one can debate what normal means.

These things came to my mind after reading an Amnesty International report on police brutality in Nigeria. They report on the frequency of extra-judicial killings, on torture, on the refusal of counsel to detainees, and on the refusal to allow those who have been injured during torture access to doctors.

To underscore this, let me give an instance. When I was a teenager, I was at a hospital when a police pick-up van drove up, legs sticking out of the back of the van. They brought the naked, dead bodies of six persons to the hospital morgue. I remember wondering whether those people might have left home that morning not realising that they would turn up as bodies at the back of a police van. I don’t remember thinking about how they died and questions around justice or the use or abuse of police powers.

The Amnesty report gives detailed examples of people who have left home to be shot down by the police in the course of the day. To be fair, one has to acknowledge the fact that the police is massively underfunded and probably underpaid. It has almost become normal for the police to never come, or, like the lines of a Tracy Chapman song, to always come late, if they come at all.

And those who look like they might have some better training are busy guarding ‘important dignitaries’ (read those who are rich enough) and foreigners. I recently read about a foreigner who complains about being followed around by her MOPOL escort. Her employer does not allow her to leave the Island area without a team of MOPOL escorts. Of course she cannot refuse them, otherwise the company would not let her stay in the country. The interesting thing is that the sight of guarded foreigners actually promotes the impression that ones life is in mortal danger if one does unless you are being guarded by specially trained policemen.

We have become blind to a lot of these things because we are used to them, because they have become part of us. We have become used to our commuter bus drivers handing out that note to the policeman at the roadblock, to reading in the newspaper about a number of extra-judicial killings by the police, to hearing about ‘accidental discharge’. We are also used to the sound of a certain kind of hoot in heavy traffic, a hoot that signifies that an important dignitary is being ferried across in an important car, escorted by a van-full of MOPOL. Of course, the main reason the person is important is because they are a foreigner. We are so used to these things that we have become numb to them.

We must begin to rouse ourselves out of this complacency and ask questions. Are bribes openly given to or extorted by the police and extra-judiciary killings normal in a democracy? What is the government doing about them? Will any political party make them campaign issues in 2011?

In the BusinessDay of December 15, 2009

Recently, we got the news in Germany that the most famous German investigative journalist dyed his hair dark and painted himself black in order to experience what it means to be black in Germany. The reaction of the Black German community was simple: they found his treatment of the issue very distasteful and simplistic.

According to an article in Der Spiegel, the main problem was that in the entire movie, there was no discussion with black people about their own experience of everyday racism. This was a point that infuriates many Black Germans; their point is that he should have at least – if not instead – spoken to black people about their experience and let them speak for themselves. A spokesperson of the Initiative of Black People in Germany told Der Spiegel, ‘As is so often the case, someone is speaking for rather than with us.’

This issue came up in a discussion I had a couple of days ago with a black American here in Philadelphia. He too told me about everyday racism in America.

While I was in New York a few days ago, I observed many black people around Grand Central Station and Times Square, people who looked like they were in really bad shape. A Nigerian who lives in Philadelphia (you have to understand that there is a difference between an African and a Black American) told me that a walk downtown in any major American city would show the disproportionate number of black people who are homeless, relative to other ethnic categories. Many walk up to passers-by to beg for money.

Different studies have shown that there is an overwhelming proportional majority of black people in American prisons. Apart from the fact that racial tension that is most often bottled up explodes once in a while, there are issues of institutional racism. As an example, Charles M. Blows, a New York Times op-ed columnist, points, in a recent column, to the fact that the current financial crisis has dealt an especially harsher blow on blacks in comparison with other ethnic demographies. He cites a research report on the subprime mortgage problem: ‘blacks were the most likely to get higher-priced subprime loans, leading to higher foreclosure rates.’

This is in the face of America’s first black presidency. Indeed, Mr. Blows observes that there seems to be a backlash of sorts. As he points out, there are more and more evidence of overt racism in the country, evidenced by the increase in hate crimes. Google searches also seem to bear this out. The internet search company has even issued an advert that is partly an apology and partly an explanation of the technology that makes certain images of certain persons appear higher on the search list.

The easy thing to do is to blame Black Americans for their plight. Some Black Americans describe this as ‘tough love’ – the attitude and belief that it is the fault of black people for not lifting themselves out of poverty. The argument of Black Americans who are against ‘tough love’ is that one needs to consider the rigged structure that produces such outcomes. In other words, institutional racism is very often responsible for the preponderance of blacks in American prisons, for instance.

I do not live in the US – I am only here on a short visit – and I cannot begin to pretend that I have more than an anthropologist’s first impressions. I do however find it disheartening not only that the world’s richest country has a lot of homeless people, but that most of the homeless belong in one category.

This whole experience reminds me of an episode at a programme on Cultural Diplomacy that I attended in Berlin. After a talk by the ambassador of Lesotho to Germany, a Black American who was in the audience stood up to ask a question about what African countries think of the racial inequality and discrimination in the United States of America. He specifically asked whether African countries are thinking of possible ways of assisting other black people around the world.

My response to him would be that racial inequality is not limited to the borders of particular countries. It stretches across the globe, and has often resulted in Africa being imagined as the Other of the European/American/White Self. Besides, how could African countries even begin to think of doing anything about racial inequality within the borders of countries they hope will give them one form of assistance or the other?

In the BusinessDay of November 9, 2009

In Africa, generally, the left-right political divide does not make much sense. I do not remember the last time I heard of a Nigerian political party with meaningful social democratic ideals. I have instead listened to populist politicians talk about how they would make education, health care, and social welfare available to all, without saying anything about the sacrifice that would have to come with that.

Perhaps the only semblance of that divide to be found in the recent past is in the parties created by General Babangida. You remember Social Democratic Party and National Republican Convention? Despite the ‘official’ ideologies of the parties, anybody who knew anything about their members knew that they were all cut from the same cloth. That is aside from the fact that they were artificially created, state-sponsored, parties.

We had our own 1989 in Africa. It started in Benin. Mathieu Kerekou’s military regime put out a press release a few weeks after the Berlin Wall came down. The regime declared that Marxism-Leninism was no longer going to be the official ideology of the state. A National Conference followed a few months later in February 1990. Other countries, mostly from Francophone Africa, also convened national conferences – Congo in February 1990, Gabon in March 1990, Zaire (now DRC) in February 1991, Togo in July/August 1991, Niger in July 1992, and Chad in January 1993. These countries were in a fiscal mess by then.

Enter Structural Adjustment Programme.

Washington Consensus, a term coined in 1989, started reigning supreme. The way countries in fiscal nightmares and economic woes could get out was by the adoption of structural adjustments programmes sponsored by the Washington-D.C-based, Bretton Woods institutions, the World Bank and the IMF. Under structural adjustment programmes, the first thing that had to go was as much of government spending as possible. Privatisation of government-owned companies and the deregulation of government-controlled sectors followed. If these were not done, the states would not get help from the Bretton Woods institutions.

African states were advised to withdraw from the provision of social services. In actually fact, by then, they could not afford to provide those services anymore, due to the inefficiency of the government, and/or corruption. It was not only communism that lost when the Wall fell; like Ian Buruma rightly pointed out in a recent article, social democrats lost the Marxist ideological basis for the ideals they were promoting.

It was also about then that the World Bank discovered that ‘civil society’ could be a vehicle for development. Defined in the most inclusive sense, civil society included non-governmental organizations. Development aid for the ‘people’ was channeled through them, the ‘third sector’. If one could not get a job with the government or a private company, one either started an NGO if one was resourceful enough, or one went to work for one.

Things first became much worse, especially with the withdrawal of the state from the provision of many social services. But people adjusted; and then things got better. Companies that were ‘properly’ privatized did not perform much worse than private companies in the developed world. Same with companies that were started in deregulated sectors of the economy.

The loss of the moral basis of socialist ideals along with the fall of the Wall meant that the death of the African Welfare State was without even a whimper. Francis Fukuyama called it The End of History. States learnt that they either jumped on the bandwagon of neo-liberal policies or go the way Zimbabwe went soon after.

In Africa of today, we have a wide range of states – from rentier states to client states – all with a more or less capitalist outlook, most pseudo-democratic. Totalitarian states of the 80s had to look for ways to legitimize their rule by adopting a semblance of multi-party democracy.

Today, poverty and lack of security are still huge problems; corruption is still a major issue; public infrastructure is in a mess. Africa needs progressive, modern, outward looking democratic states. If that is the kind of state we want, this is a good time to have a debate on what their role should be.

In the BusinessDay of October 27, 2009

The most popular way of looking at China in Africa is through the dual lenses of international relations and international trade. One main argument that comes out of this is that, the way China does business in Africa has made the countries that are pushing some African countries to do better on human rights and governance issues to start re-considering doing so. The simple reason being that China’s ‘no strings attached’ policy means that Chinese business interests are not coloured with any desire to change the way African governments run their countries.

The effect of this is that many countries that see that sanctions which are imposed against African countries do not really deprive the countries of funds are re-thinking the wisdom of depriving themselves of raw materials. What is the point when money comes from China anyway?

Another argument that comes out is in relation to the use of Chinese labour in construction sites in Africa. A case in point is that of railway constructions in Angola, a country that suffers from high levels of unemployment. A couple of years ago, the BBC reported popular discussions by Angolans that Chinese workers are nothing but prisoners, especially because they never leave their camps. When asked why his company does not employ Angolans, a Chinese factory owner in Luanda says, ‘African people, they don’t like work too much, they like relax’. He goes on to say that his workers work for ten hours a day, while Angolans work for only eight.

I find the racist-tinged comments of the factory owner distasteful, to say the least. The money paid out to governments by Chinese companies is not for development – anybody who has followed the discourse on aid knows that much; the stuff of development is employment. It is when people have the dignity of earning their own wages, of being able to provide for their families, that one thinks of development. It is extremely dissatisfying to note that Chinese companies are allowed to bring in their labour from China, even the unskilled ones.

What could one expect? On the larger scale, I would not really expect much of a change in Chinese activities in Africa. After all China’s growth, which feeds much of the world’s appetite for cheap goods, has to continue to be fuelled by raw materials, even in a post-recession world. And producers of Chinese cheap goods have to continue looking for new consumers, hence Africa. What one would hope for is that African governments are smart enough to get better deals for their citizens.

But then, this assumes that the people who run African governments consider the interest of their citizens. This is one issue in which one would have to wait and react to each situation as it arises. General statements that are couched in moralistic terms confuse much more than the sentiments that back them might intend.

One must however note that things are gradually changing. A colleague who does research in Angola says that there are now provisions that foreign companies operating in Angola have to employ Angolans, not only for low-skilled works, but also in managerial positions. What I still do not understand is why Chinese companies are allowed to bring in unskilled labour. That truly baffles me.

However, of all the considerations of Sino-African relations, the level at which I find it most interesting is the level at which Chinese and African individuals meet and interact – or not. While I was doing research in Benin, I saw many Chinese traders who have very little interactions with Beninese people. There are some who have lived in Benin for five year but speak no French. I see how Chinese store owners bring their Chinese workers with a bus to the shops, bring them home-cooked Chinese lunch at work, and generally frown at anything outside simple buy and sell interactions with Beninese.

My opinion is that things will change over time, as the Chinese find that they are not just in Africa for a few years, and that they might end up staying for longer than they initially thought. One sees these days, for instance, that Chinese businessmen are not just in the construction, extractive and financial industries, but also trade. I would be interested in knowing how this relationship changes and develops over the next few years. It sounds like a great Ph.D topic. Any takers?