Can anyone explain Queen Rania’s presence?
It with great pleasure that I introduce guest columnist Sean Jacobs, a fellow Capetonian who these days divides his time between Brooklyn and Ann Arbor, where he is an assistant professor of Communication Studies and African Studies at the University of Michigan. He describes himself as “a frustrated journalist” (is there any other kind?), and in his spare time edits the online edition of Chimurenga magazine. In 2004 he directed the Ten Years of Freedom Film Festival in New York City in April 2004.
Bono’s Vanity: Showcasing Africa, or Promoting its Glamorous Patrons?
By Sean Jacobs
In 1965, the Senegalese filmmaker Ousmane Sembene wrote and directed — against the odds, with minimal support from his government and a few French patrons, and as a director with 
meager cinematic background — the film Le noir de … (Black Girl) about a young Senegalese immigrant domestic working for a French family in the Antibes. The film, the first feature directed by a black African, was hailed at the time by New York Times critic A.H. Weiler (in now outdated language) as “put[ing] a sharp, bright focus on an emerging, once dark African area and on a forceful talent with fine potentials.” Sembene died this week at 84 after an illustrious career, saluted by another New York Times critic, A.O. Scott, for being as uncompromising in his criticism of Africa’s post-liberation regimes as he had been of French colonial domination. More importantly, Scott pointed out, Sembene was also passionate about celebrating the equality of Africa with the West: “He believed that Africans would experience true liberation when they threw off European models and discovered their own, homegrown versions of modernity.”
One can only wonder what Sembene might have achieved with the resources made available to former rock star Bono in his recent role as guest editor of a special “Africa” issue of the high-end monthly Vanity Fair.
Africa, of course, is now everyone’s pet cause. It offers an opportunity to shine for northern political leaders unpopular at home, and for Hollywood actresses and former and current pop stars to be seen doing their bit for humanity by lining up to visit the continent (mainly its children) or pleading its case in Western capitals. Bono, especially, has built a new career as a savior of Africa and makes much of pulling out all stops to plead the continent’s case — and his access to the corridors of power makes him a lot more effective in this role than his pop predecessor, Bob Geldof. In March this year, the U2 frontman who has accomplished the remarkable feat of being a friend to Nelson Mandela and George W. Bush simultaneously, announced he would guest edit the special issue of the glossy magazine, which would “rebrand Africa” for the magazine’s well-heeled readership and advertisers. His intentions were noble: “When you see people humiliated by extreme poverty and wasting away with flies buzzing around their eyes, it is easy not to believe that they are same as us,” he said.
Capturing the energy of a continent with 890 million and 54 countries in one issue of a magazine was always going to be a tall order, but even then, Bono and his team gets it really wrong. The key personnel included the head of communication of Bono’s RED Campaign as well as the actor Djimon Hounsou, who is credited as a “consultant.” And it shows. At times it looks like another ad for the RED Campaign.
It is never entirely clear whether the purpose of the edition is to showcase Africa — or people who promote Africa in the West, especially within the United States?
Much has been made of the issue’s twenty different covers. Twenty-one “prominent people” photographed by Annie Liebovitz in groups of two and three in a series meant to depict a “conversation” about Africa — she called it a “visual chain letter … spreading the message from person to person.”
The result of all that planning and effort (the real editor Graydon Carter lists Liebovitz’s flight schedule in his “editor’s letter”) is hardly extraordinary — though I was intrigued by, if not sure what to make of, the curious shot of Madonna apparently sniffing Maya Angelou.
Only three of those featured are actual Africans: the actor (and editor’s consultant) Djimon Hounsou, Archbishop Desmond Tutu and Iman. (Three and a half, if you count U.S. presidential longshot Barack Obama, another cover model, by virtue of being the son of a Kenyan economist.)
Not exactly a new brand of Africa: Hounsou is largely a product of Hollywood; Tutu, with respect, has retired from his life as an activist cleric; and Iman’s only qualification is that she was a well-known model in 1980s.
As for the non-Africans featured on the cover, if some of these are Africa’s friends, it does not 
need enemies. President George W. Bush and his Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice are a particularly odd choice — incidentally, they are pictured in a strangely intimate moment with Condi seeming to tug at George’s arm, as if the image was designed to provoke titillated speculation in the U.S. media.
Vanity Fair is not a news magazine, and therefore usually avoids putting people it dislikes on its cover. Carter, in his editor’s note, reveals his differences with Bono about including Bush and Rice, but the rock star appears to believe Bush’s Africa policies may be the “silver lining” of the current U.S. administration. But if silver linings were the criteria, then Thabo Mbeki, probably the most recognizable African political leader for his promotion of democracy, good governance and economic development, ought to have been included — perhaps Editor Bono deems Mbeki’s strange politics on HIV/AIDS and his “quiet diplomacy” on the crises in Zimbabwe are somehow worse than the Iraq war.
As for as strange cover choices go, though, Queen Rania of Jordan tops this list. I hope it was not because Bono thought Jordan was an African country.
A group of actual Africans profiled as representing the “spirit” of the continent — “activists, artists, doctors, athletes, entrepreneurs, economists” are given more limited treatment in short paragraph-length descriptions of their achievements.
The feature articles are written by go-to “Africa hands” in the United States, including Christopher Hitchens (offering a rambling stream of consciousness piece of Tunisia that recycles some earlier reporting), Sebastian Junger (a journalist described elsewhere as fascinated with “extreme situations and people at the edges of things”), and Spencer Wells (an “explorer-in-residence at National Geographic”). Only one actual African contributor, Binyavanga Wainaina on contemporary Kenya, made the cut.
Youssou N’Dour, the Senegalese singer, is credited as a contributor for a piece on a music festival in Mali written by a former MTV executive, but that appears more like a transparent attempt to counter criticism of the magazine’s editors for the limited African “voice” in the magazine.
The big profiles go to anti-poverty economist Jeffrey Sachs (Bono’s friend) and the late Princess Diana — since the issue appeared, much of the mainstream coverage has been about how this article, and an accompanying book, could resurrect the career of Tina Brown. Former U.S. president Bill Clinton writes on Nelson Mandela and Brad Pitt plays journalist by asking Archbishop Desmond Tutu really silly questions. Having praised South Africa for going the route of “restorative justice” — last time I checked nothing of the sort happened — Pitt has a follow-up question for Tutu: “Then it is worth asking what is the outcome for societies who have rushed toward retributive justice, like the Shia in Iraq?” Huh? Madonna gets to redeem herself after her bungled adoption of a Malawian child: she is doing a documentary on orphans in Malawi now.
Nothing substantial is written about the continent’s most populous and vibrant region, West Africa (except for the article on the music festival in the Malian desert). South Africa, the continent’s richest country (with Johannesburg slowly emerging as the continent’s cultural and media capital as the paragraph-length feature on the Africa Channel and the drooling photograph of actress Terry Pheto of the film Tsotsi suggests) gets short shrift. Apart from the Clinton piece on Mandela (which, typical of the tradition here, reduces the former guerrilla to saintly grandfather) and the Pitt “interview” with Tutu, there is nothing that captures some of the struggles to define this new Africa.
Nevertheless, on the upside, publications like the Cape Town-based literary and politics magazine Chimurenga (full disclosure: I am its online editor) and “new wave” writers such as Wainaina, Orange Prize-winner Chimamanda Adichie, Doreen Baingana and Mohamed Magani, among others, are getting some helpful exposure to new (and well-heeled) audiences and readers. And there’s some well-deserved attention for the AIDS activism of people like Zackie Achmat and the global justice campaigner Archbishop Ndungane (Tutu’s successor as Anglican prelate in South Africa, who would have been a more contemporary choice for the cover image), among others.
Also recognized is for the tireless work of New York African Film Festival director Mahen Bonetti, and the filmmakers Teddy Mattera, Gaston Kabore, Jean Marie Teno, and Safi Feye who all, unfortunately, are featured only in a group photo, with their work summed up in one paragraph. The coverage of these figures, however, is very minimal.
But even these upsides are spoiled by the sloppiness of the magazine. According to one of my sources, the one substantive article on the actual work of Africans (apart from Wainaina’s piece on Kenya) — -an omnibus article on the continent’s “literary renaissance” by Elissa Scappell and Rob Spillmann — contains a lot of untruths and plain invention.
For one, Nadine Gordimer, part of the old guard of African letters is described as a “founder member of the African National Congress” and the “conscience of South Africa.” Uh, the ANC was founded in 1912, 11 years before Gordimer’s birth, and only opened its membership to whites in 1969. As for Gordimer being the “conscience of South Africa,” I’m not sure you’d find many South Africans who would have accorded her such prominence in the national imagination.
It also appears that description of the event at the heart of the article — the SLS Kenya/Kwani? Literary Festival — is a bit off base. According to my source (who like me, is a fan of Adichie’s novels) the descriptions of “standing room only” readings given by her in Nairobi, is more an attempt by the writers of the articles to make the story fit the issue’s hype. On the night she read at the University of Nairobi, most festival visitors opted instead to go listen to the much older Ugandan writer Taban Lo Liyong, who was reading in the room next door.
Fela says…
In the end, reading Bono’s Vanity Fair Africa branding edition leaves me remembering what a friend of mine says when he feels he’s been had: “As Fela would say, this is ‘expensive shit’.”
As an Australian anti-Zionist Jew writing about Israel/Palestine, the rules of the game are made clear to me on an almost daily basis. All Jews must support the “Jewish State,” no matter what. Any action carried out by the state is defensible, justified and moral. Any public criticism of Israel will be assumed to be anti-Semitic; if Israel is to be criticized at all, it should only be in hushed tones and in private. Dare to challenge these rules, and you can expect to be bombarded with hate-mail, death-threats and public abuse, invariably from fellow Jews.
This meant separating Zionism from Judaism, and recognizing that being a Jew didn’t mean automatic identification with every Israeli action. This Jewish identity had to not be solely defined through what was “good for the Jews”, but on the universal principles of justice as espoused by the Jewish prophets, i.e. by creating a state that treats all citizens as equal. No religiously based state – Muslim, Christian or Jewish – is able to achieve this, and Israel is no exception. Instead, many Jews continue to identify with Israel despite its flagrant violations international norms, denying those or blaming them on the victims. Just last week, on the 40th anniversary of the Six Day War, 
And they had “liberated” our “holiest” site, an old stone wall in East Jerusalem pocked with pubic clumps of weeds, into whose cracks and crannies I was told that Jews could insert notes to be read by God — like a hotel message cubby. (Let’s just say that by the time I got there, at age 17, this bubbemeis about holy stones and a celestial post office only fueled my atheism.) Not only that, they’d made Israel “safe” by “liberating” the whole of the West Bank, Gaza and the Golan Heights. In six days! A miracle, like the creation story in Genesis! (Of course, many years later, I would learn that it hadn’t even taken that long; Israel had attacked first and effectively won the war in the opening hours by destroying its enemy’s air forces on the ground — Six Days just sounded like a good name for a war given the creation story.)
But the news out of Israel in those mid-year months in 1967 was infinitely reassuring. Israel’s dramatic victory had proved that we, the prickly little state or the Jewish boys in their white Phys-ed (we called it PT) vests and shorts, were not to be fucked with. (I remember a similar effect a decade later, after the audacious raid on Entebbe had freed a group of passengers held on a hijacked Air France plane in Uganda — by then, my friends and I were literally accepting congratulations on Israel’s behalf.) And, I know anecdotally as much as anything else, that anyone ever called a “Jewboy” anywhere in the world walked a lot taller after the first week of June in 1967.
The word “Arab” became synonymous, on the playground and in the classroom, with incompetence and idiocy. “Don’t be an Arab!” I heard a teacher exclaim, more than once in response to a student’s failure to properly carry out his instructions. And, three years after the 1967 war, when the apartheid regime celebrated the tenth anniversary of South Africa’s formal independence from Britain, the ceremony in my school playground saw my Jewish friends and I, in our blue Habonim shirts and scarves and kakhi shorts, line up alongside the boy scouts and the Voortrekkers (the fascist Afrikaner youth movement) to salute the flag and proclaim our loyalty to the Republic (even though the whole point of Habonim was to persuade us to emigrate!). A regime rooted in vicious anti-Semitism and explicit admiration for the Nazis had now come to recognize Israel and its local supporters as a fighting ally in their epic struggle, couched in Cold War language, between white peoples and peoples of color.
Sensing the escalating conflict between the Arab population and the European Jewish settlers who had been allowed by the British, since their conquest of Palestine in 1917, to settle there and establish the infrastructure of statehood — and moved by the impulse to create a sanctuary for the survivors of the Holocaust while avoiding giving most of them the choice of moving to the U.S. or other Western countries — the U.N. recommended in 1947 that Palestine be partitioned, to create separate Jewish and Arab states. The Zionists were disappointed by the plan, because they had hoped to have all of Palestine become a Jewish state. And the fact that it left Jerusalem, where 100,000 Jews lived, within the territory of the Arab zone, albeit run as an international city, was particularly irksome. But the Zionist leadership also knew that the plan was as good as they were going to get via diplomacy, and accepted the plan. (The rest, of course, they would acquire in battle, in 1948 and 1967, in wars that they could blame on their enemies — after all, 40 years after the 1967 war, during which time Israel has been at peace with the enemy it faced on that flank, the West Bank remains very much in Israeli hands, with close to half a million Israelis settled there.)
For Jews of my generation who came of age during the anti-apartheid struggle, there was no shaking the nagging sense that what Israel was doing in the West Bank was exactly what the South African regime was doing in the townships. Even as we waged our own intifada against apartheid in South Africa, we saw daily images of young Palestinians facing heavily armed Israeli police in tanks and armored vehicles with nothing more than stones, gasoline bombs and the occasional light weapon; a whole community united behind its children who had decided to cast off the yoke under which their parents suffered. And when Yitzhak Rabin, more famous as a signatory on the Oslo Agreement, ordered the Israeli military to systematically break the arms of young Palestinians in the hope of suppressing an entirely legitimate revolt, thuggery had become a matter of national policy. It was only when some of those same young men began blowing themselves up in Israeli restaurants and buses that many Israel supporters were once again able to construe the Israelis as the victim in the situation; during the intifada of the 1980s they could not question who was David and who was Goliath. Even for those of us who had grown up in the idealism of the left-Zionist youth movements, Israel had become a grotesque parody of everything we stood for.
Political hegemony is achieved when a narrow group of people is able to convince a wider society that the group’s own, narrow interests, in fact, represent the general interest or the “greater good.” Nowhere is there currently a more visible (if artless) example of such a pursuit of hegemony than in Washington’s efforts to get Iraq’s politicians to pass the oil law drafted under U.S. tutelage. That oil law is packaged as the key to national reconciliation in Iraq, forcing the Iraqis to more equitably share oil revenues. What that packaging leaves out, of course, is that the bulk of those oil revenues, under the law’s provisions, would be controlled by foreign oil companies. 
Much of the U.S. media greeted the election of Nicolas Sarkozy as if the French had elected a White House ally to pull themselves out of their morbid decline. Guest contributor Bernard Chazelle explains why the White House will be disappointed by Sarkozy, and offers fascinating insights into everything from economics to anti-semitism to explain why the U.S. media doesn’t understand France in the first place. 
There’s something a little misleading in the media reports that routinely describe the fighting in Gaza as pitting Hamas against Fatah forces or security personnel “loyal to President Mahmoud Abbas.” That characterization suggests somehow that this catastrophic civil war that has killed more than 25 Palestinians since Sunday is a showdown between Abbas and the Hamas leadership — which simply isn’t true, although such a showdown would certainly conform to the desires of those running the White House Middle East policy. The Fatah-dominated security forces in Gaza answer to the warlord Mohammed Dahlan, long ago anointed by the White House to play the kind of role of a Palestinian Pinochet, and given the backing to beef up his forces to take down Hamas. 
So how could a British Prime Minister move so seamlessly from being Bill Clinton’s best friend on the global stage to being being ideologically and militarily joined at the hip with President George W. Bush? Guest contributor Gavin Evans believes the answer lies in a personality flaw that has been known to overcome liberals and lefties when they get too close to those who hold the real power.