In Timbuktu, a race to preserve Africa's written history

Ancient manuscripts in Timbuktu, that prove a written history often overlooked by the rest of the world, are crumbling due to lack of funding for preservation

Ancient manuscripts in Timbuktu, that prove a written history often overlooked by the rest of the world, are crumbling due to lack of funding for preservation

Ahmed Saloum Boularaf, a local businessman, shows off his grandfather's private collection of 1700 manuscripts, some of which go back to the 13th century. He is looking for funds to help conserve and repair the manuscripts, which are fast deteriorating.
(Scott Baldauf/The Christian Science Monitor)

By Scott Baldauf Staff writer 
posted December 16, 2009 at 10:04 am EST

Timbuktu, Mali —

Ahmed Saloum Boularaf is holding a leather-bound sheaf of documents that date back to the 13th century. The manuscript contains a poetic rendition of the life of the Prophet Mohammad, written in the lacy Arabic handwriting of an African scholar who knew how to read before some Europeans even knew of the existence of books.

Like most of the 1,700 manuscripts in Mr. Boularaf's private collection – which includes ancient books on medicine and history, astronomy and mathematics -- this one is beginning to crumble, and Boularaf knows that in a very short time, his manuscripts and the knowledge they contain, could be lost forever.

“For Africans, this is a treasury of our culture, and my home is open for all the researchers of the world to come,” he says. “My grandfather had the idea that we must copy these manuscripts before they are lost. We have some manuscripts here that are so fragile that if we don’t do something quickly to study them, conserve them, they could be lost.”

Depending on your perspective, Timbuktu is either the end of the world or, if you are coming from the desert, the first welcome sign of civilization. Once a great city of commerce, where camel caravans crossed the Sahara to trade slabs of salt in exchange for gold or slaves, Timbuktu was the meeting place of cultures.

At its height, from the 11th to the 15th centuries, it was a university town with vast libraries. Scientists here were postulating that the earth was round at a time when many European sailors were terrified of sailing off the edge of an earth that they thought was flat.

Some of the manuscripts that were written or collected here were so precious and rare that scholars from as far away as Spain and Egypt would send written requests for copies to be made.

Today, Timbuktu’s historic legacy gives a much more complete picture of Africa, more sophisticated than the primitive continent that European colonials and missionaries portrayed to the world. This makes the race to conserve the manuscripts of Timbuktu all the more important and urgent.

“The manuscripts of Timbuktu completely change the way we think of Africa,” says Sidi Mohamed Ould Youba, the adjunct director for the Ahmed Baba Institute, Timbuktu’s largest library and conservator of manuscripts. “When I handle a manuscript, I think about the rich African past. We had a long history, with a big advantage compared with other countries, including those in Europe. The Westerners like to think they can come here and tell us about good governance, but we were already writing about good governance back in the 16th century.”

Nobody knows how many manuscripts might be tucked away in cardboard boxes or steel trunks in the mud-walled homes of Timbuktu. But tens of thousands of manuscripts have been identified, and thousands have been designated for conservation or repair, funded by Western, Middle Eastern, and African foundations, and carefully preserved by Malian artisans and experts.

In the conservation room at the Ahmed Baba Institute, Garba Traore is preparing a sheet of writing that has torn in half, its edges rapidly crumbling in his hands. He lays down a heavy but flat sheet of plastic, then a sheet of a fibrous paper called “bondina,” then a sheet of gauzy transparent tissue paper. With a paintbrush, he spreads a clear methyl cellulose glue, and then lays the manuscript carefully on top.

It takes a good few hours to blot out and squeeze out the excess glue with a large metal pressing machine. But the final result is a sheet of paper that is sturdy enough to hold, and that should remain preserved for centuries to come.

“For me, why this is important, it is for the satisfaction of preserving our history,” says Mr. Traore, the conservator. “It is not for the money, it is not just for Africa. This is for the world, because everyone who wants to come to see the manuscripts can now come and see.”

For African leaders like South Africa’s former President Thabo Mbeki, Timbuktu’s rich past is a powerful symbol that Africa is not a blank sheet of paper onto which the world can scribble its wisdom, but rather a continent that simply needs a “Renaissance,” a rebirth into a world where Africans are equal players and controllers of their own destiny.

One of Mr. Mbeki’s first trips was to Mali, where he promised funding and training for conservators like Traore at South Africa's national libraries in Cape Town and Tshwane (Pretoria).

“Timbuktu is part of our collective conscious,” says Rantobeng William Mokou, South Africa’s ambassador to Mali, on a recent trip to visit the Ahmed Baba Institute’s newly built facilities in Timbuktu. “We have been given a lie about our history, that it was always an oral history, never a written history. But, here, we find history written by Africans about Africa. This needs to be preserved.”

For well-known collections such as the Ahmed Baba Institute and the Mama Haidera Institute, preservation and conservation are already well underway. But for the perhaps dozens of small private collections around Timbuktu, help is far away, and not likely to come.

Abdul Wahid, a local teacher and grandson of a great Timbuktu scholar and copiest, opens a steel trunk stacked full of manuscripts. He is fortunate, because a Moroccan businessman based in France has donated enough money to help construct a private library where the manuscripts can be stored.

But he knows that unless he can get money to start cataloging, digitizing, and preserving these fragile books, they may easily crumble away into dust.

“At first I was going to sell these manuscripts, but then I realized how important they were and I want to preserve them,” says Mr. Wahid, holding a 15th century manuscript while a mama goat and her baby wander around the courtyard, bleating.

In these books is more than mere knowledge, but also a sense of pride. “These manuscripts tell us that we had people who studied astronomy, medicine, and science, and many things,” he says. “At first we thought we didn’t have a history. Now I believe we had books on many of these subjects before Europe.

This column will change your life: A frightening prospect

Why is it that we enjoy being scared half to death by films and books?

• Oliver Burkeman
• The Guardian, Saturday 13 March 2010
• Article history

There must be more scary things than this... Photograph: Bobby Yip/Reuters

One wild and windswept recent afternoon – I know it should have been late at night, but it wasn't – I finally got around to watching Paranormal Activity, the ultra-low-budget horror film that became an underground success thanks to the curious pleasure so many people take in being scared half to death. (Don't watch it twice, or you may get scared fully to death.) Even at 3.30pm, when watched alone at home, it's an extremely creepy movie, documenting the haunting of a couple whose apartment becomes the target of a vengeful force intent on driving them to the edge of sanity with some old-school ghostly techniques: doors that suddenly slam, TVs that switch themselves on, scrapings and groanings with no discernible source. At one particularly tense point, the fridge in my kitchen started to buzz; I wheeled around, saw my own reflection in some mirrored cupboard doors and nearly yelled out loud – which isn't, I should clarify, how I normally respond when looking in the mirror. In short, I enjoyed myself immensely.

But why? This mysterious truth – that so many of us seem to find fear entertaining so long as it's fictional – has bothered philosophers and psychologists for long enough that it has a name: the "horror paradox". (The more general mystery of "pleasurable negative emotions" goes back to Aristotle.) Encountering a chainsaw-wielding maniac in fiction is obviously less traumatising than meeting one at the bus stop. But why should it be actively fun? One theory is that we simply feel a rush of relief when the horror ends; another is that the emotion in question isn't really fear, just excitement; a third is that we secretly love violent mayhem, but feel able to admit it only when it's make-believe. There's an evolutionary speculation, too: that we've developed to find blood and gore hypnotising – the rubbernecking effect – so as to ensure that we carefully study potential threats to survival. But there's little research to bolster these, and none quite captures the thrilling blend of fear plus pleasure that a good scary film evokes.

One more persuasive, if partial, explanation is what the scholars Dan Ariely and Michael Norton call "conceptual consumption" – the idea that in a society where our most basic needs are easily provided for, we channel our urge to consume into the nonphysical realm: we gorge on celebrity blogs, or seek out vicarious extreme and unfamiliar experiences, through movies and books, to add to our "experiential CVs", and take pleasure in the process. But to explain the fun of fear specifically, I wonder – without much evidence, but when it comes to the horror paradox, no one has much evidence – whether we can learn something from victims of real horror. Survivors of accidents, armed robberies and the like report feeling focus and clarity in the moment itself: discursive thought, with all its associated stresses, falls away. This is the kind of "flow state" we'd look back on, in any other circumstance, as happy absorption. Of course, once thought kicks in again, there's nothing happy about their predicament. But perhaps when you're on the edge of a cinema seat, waiting to find out what's lurking behind the bedroom door, you're in a similar state of absolute, almost Zen-like focus? You are reaping the benefits of being in what seems a life-or-death situation – with the immeasurable bonus of realising, a split-second later, with delighted relief, that it isn't.

oliver.burkeman@guardian.co.uk

(Tuesday, June 30, 2009)

In Honor of Grace Lee Boggs' 94th Birthday

Over at A Book Without A Cover, Adele has put up a post announcing the upcoming celebration of Grace Lee Boggs' 94th birthday. In honor of this prodigious Detroit icon and her ongoing legacy of tireless social activism, I'm reposting a Zuky piece I wrote upon reading her autobiography a couple of years ago. Happy Birthday, Grace!

~ ~ ~

[ Originally posted on March 6, 2007 ]

Grace Lee Boggs — Living for Change

In the landscape of Asian American activism, Grace Lee Boggs is a giant, a legend, an icon.

Recently I've been re-reading her 1998 autobiography, Living for Change. As I see it, this is must-read anti-racist history.

Born in 1915 in Providence, Rhode Island, Grace Lee Chin was the Chinese American daughter of middle-class restaurant owners. Grace spent the Great Depression studying philosophy, undergrad at Barnard College and doctoral at Bwyn Mawr College. After which, she dove into radical politics with a full head of steam, joining the Socialist Workers Party, where she took on the pen name of Ria Stone.

In 1939, the Socialist Workers Party split in half over the question of whether or not to continue to be loyal to the Soviet Union (following the invasion of Finland and the Stalin-Hitler pact). A majority followed Trotsky in maintaining the need to support the Soviet Union despite its degenerate state ("bureaucratic collectivism"). A minority broke away and formed the Workers Party, led by Max Schachtman, Marty Abern, and C.L.R. James. Grace fell in with this latter crowd. She writes of this period:

Despite my growing suspicions that my new comrades represented the past rather than the future, the Workers Party's decision to oppose World War II reassured me that I was in the right organization. My main reason for remaining in the party, however, was that I had met C.L.R. James when he stopped in Chicago to talk to the comrades on his way back from organizing sharecroppers in southeast Missouri. Tall, black, and strikingly handsome, C.L.R. was everything that the Chicago branch was not. He was bursting with enthusiasm about the potential for an American revolution inherent in the emergence of the labor movement and the escalating militancy of blacks. When together with another comrade I met him at the train station, he was carrying two thick books, volume 1 of Marx's Capital and Hegel's Science of Logic, both heavily underlined. When he discovered that I had studied Hegel and knew German, we withdrew to my basement room where we spent hours sitting on my old red couch comparing passages in Marx and Hegel, checking the English against the original German. It was the beginning of a theoretical and practical collaberation that lasted twenty years, until we went our separate ways in 1962. [...]

To study Marx and Lenin and to work with C.L.R. I moved back to New York after the Workers Party convention. For a while I lived in my mother's house in Jackson Heights. Later, when she began renting out rooms, I rented apartments in different parts of the city. In the 1940s you could live in New York for very little money.  [ Pictured, from left: Raya Dunayevskaya, C.L.R. James, and Grace, in the 1940s.]

Living in New York and working with the Johnson-Forest Tendency inside the Workers Party opened me up to a whole new world of people, ideas, and activity.  I visited the Schomburg Collection in Harlem and read Amy Garvey's compilation of her husband's philosophy and opinions. It was exciting to discover that Marcus Garvey's Back to Africa movement had been inspired in part by the Russian Revolution. Lenin, said Garvey, had seized the opportunity of the crisis of the Western powers caused by World War I to make the October Revolution. People of African descent scattered all over the world, he thought, should follow Lenin's example and exploit the postwar crisis to recover Africa for themselves. The Workers Party had organized Interracial Club with an office on 125th Street in Harlem where we held regular forums. They were chaired by Lyman Paine, who took the name of Tom Brown. After meetings we would go to the Apollo Theater, the Savoy (where I heard Count Basie one night), or Small's Paradise. Connie Williams, a West Indian friend of CLR's, owned a calypso restaurant in the Village where James Baldwin and Richard Wright hung out. [...] Katharine Dunham, one of the founders of the ethnic dance movement, invited me to give a class in philosophy to her dance company. But my own ideas where changing so rapidly in my new milieu that I couldn't imagine myself teaching anybody anything.

Grace's work with C.L.R. brought her many interesting opportunities. In 1954 she collaborated with Mbiyu Koinange on a booklet entitled The People of Kenya Speak for Themselves. She worked with Kwame Nkrumah, author of Towards Colonial Freedom, who eventually made a triumphant return to the Gold Coast. Through her activism, she also met Jimmy Boggs, a factory worker from Detroit whom she eventually married and worked alongside until his death in 1992.

As should be obvious by now, Living for Change captures a series of personal and political snapshots of leftist political development from a unique front-row perspective. From World War II on the home front, through the Civil Rights era and the Black Power movement, through the 80s and her "return" to China to come to terms with her own roots, all the way up to her latest philosophical reflections as she looks back on all her years in politics, Grace Lee Boggs has given us something invaluable: a genuine piece of herself, a piece of her beating heart and soul, a high-minded clear-eyed telling of a revolutionary tale.

Grace is still at it, too. As recently as 2003, Grace was the keynote speaker for the MLK Day Symposium at the University of Michigan. See also this excellent 2005 interview.

I'll leave you with this passage from the introduction of Living for Change:

I consider myself blessed to have been born a Chinese American female with two first names: Grace and Jade Peace. [...] Had I not been born female and Chinese American, I would not have realized from early on that fundamental changes were necessary in our society. Had I not been born female and Chinese American, I might have ended up teaching philosophy at a university, an observer rather than an active participant in the humanity-stretching movements that have defined the last half of the twentieth century. [ Pictured: Grace at 18.]

I never thought I'd be writing my autobiography. As late as the spring of 1994, when Shirley Cloyes of Lawrence Hill Books suggested it, my response was that I would rather continue my movement-building activities.

At that time Jimmy had been dead for less than a year and I was still trying to figure out what I was going to do on my own or, indeed, whether there was any "my own." That is what often happens when you lose the person with whom you have lived and worked closely for decades. Especially if you are a woman, you need time to re-create yourself, to discover who you are. In my case this need was even more acute because for the most of the forty years that I was married to Jimmy, the black movement was the most important movement in the country. So I borrowed a lot of my identity from him—to such a degree that some FBI records describe me as probably Afro-Chinese. [...]

When we first met in 1952, I was a city girl from a middle-class Chinese American family. Despite the fact that I had already been involved in the radical movement for more than a decade and had even worked in a defense plant during World War II, I was still essentially a product of Ivy League women's colleges, a New York intellectual whose understanding of revolutionary struggle came mainly from books. Jimmy had been born and raised in a small town in Alabama where there were only a couple of stores on the main street. [...] I was a Chinese American, an ethnic minority so small as to be almost invisible. He was an African American who was very conscious that the blood and sweat of his ancestors had made possible the rapid economic development of this country and who had already embarked on the struggle to ensure that his people would be among those deciding its economic and political future. 

Ten years after our marriage Jimmy's first book, The American Revolution: Pages from a Negro Worker's Notebook, was published.  [ Pictured, from left: Jimmy Boggs, Grace Lee Boggs, Ted Griffin, in 1957. ] To our amazement it brought a letter of congratulations from the British philosopher Bertrand Russell, initiating a correspondence during which Jimmy did not hesitate to lecture Russell, who was at the time probably the West's best-known philosopher, respectfully but firmly pointing out his ignorance of the ongoing struggle in the United States. As he wrote in the introduction to The American Revolution, "I am a factory worker but I know more than just factory work. I know the difference between what would sound right if one lived in a society of logical people and what is right when you live in a society of real people with real differences."

I believe that the story of how Jimmy and I, coming from such different backgrounds, were able to enjoy such a productive life together can be instructive to other Americans, especially in light of the rapidly changing ethnic composition of this country. [...] With this situation will inevitably come new stresses and strains. If the new immigrants are viewed as a threat, these tensions can explode as they did in South Central Los Angeles in 1992. On the other hand, if older migrants — and except for Native Americans, we have all migrated to this country, by choice or in chains — can see the new arrivals as people on whose backs we have prospered and whom we now need to make ourselves whole, we can embark together on the struggles necessary to make the United States of America what it was meant to be — a country that all of us, regardless of national or ethnic origin, will be proud to call our own.

2010 POETRY CONTEST

 

ABZ will continue the ABZ Poetry Prize for a first full-length book of poems.

 

In 2007, David Baker selected Postcard on Parchment by Christine Stewart-Nunez. Her book was published in 2008.

 

In 2008, Heather McHugh selected The Other Language by Mark Brazaitis, which was published in 2009.

 

Most recently, Mark Halliday chose Ordinary Mourning by Carrie Shipers, which has just been published.

We are looking for original poetry manuscripts between 48-76 pages.

ABZ will publish the winning manuscript and award the author one thousand dollars and fifty copies of the winning book.

The winning manuscript thius year will be chosen by Angela Ball.

Each manuscript must be bound only with a binder clip and sent in an envelope or package with a May or June 2010 postmark with a reading fee of $28.00 in US Dollars as a check or money order payable to ABZ PRESS. The deadline is June 30 2010. Include a table of contents, acknowledgements, and two title pages. One title page should have only the title. The second title page should have the author’s name, address, phone number with area code, and e-mail address. Please indicate any poetry books or chapbooks (with fewer than 48 pages) you may have published.  Simultaneous submissions are OK with us. Let us know if you win another prize.

Manuscripts will not be returned. Please keep a copy of your manuscript.

To receive notice of manuscript arrival, include a stamped, self-addressed postcard.

To receive notice of contest results, you must include a stamped, self-addressed envelope. You will not receive the notice in 2010 unless you include such an envelope.

The reading fee entitles the entrant to one copy of the winning book. Copies of the book will be sent in May 2011 when the book is published.

Send manuscript to:

 

ABZ Poetry Prize
ABZ Press
PO Box 2746
Huntington WV 25727-2746. 

Congratulations to Cynthia Marie Hoffman, who has won the 2010 Lexi Rudnitsky First Book Prize in Poetry for her collection Sightseer.

The Lexi Rudnitsky First Book Prize (formerly the Lexi Rudnitsky Poetry Prize) is a collaboration between Persea Books and The Lexi Rudnitsky Poetry Project. It sponsors the annual publication of a poetry collection by an American woman poet who has yet to publish a full-length book of poems. The winner receives an advance of $1,000.00 and publication of her collection by Persea.

In addition, beginning this year, the winner receives the option of an all-expenses-paid residency at the Civitella Ranieri Center, a renowned artists retreat housed in a fifteenth-century castle in Umbertide, Italy.
 

Submission Guidelines:

• Submitted manuscripts should include two title pages: one containing the author's name, the author's contact information, and the title of the collection; and another containing only the title of the collection.
• It is recommended that submitted manuscripts be between 48 and 96 pages. They should be paginated, with the title of the collection included on each page as a header or footer, and fastened with a clip. Please do not staple or permanently bind submissions.
• Submissions may include a page of publication credits. However, they should not include other sorts of acknowledgments, thank-yous, or dedications.
• Submissions must be primarily in English to be considered. Translations are not accepted.
• Submissions must be received (not postmarked) between September 1 and November 1 (or the first weekday thereafter if November 1 falls on a weekend). They should be sent to The Lexi Rudnitsky Poetry Prize, c/o Persea Books, PO Box 1388, Columbia, MO 65201, and should include a check (in U.S. funds) in the amount of $25.00, made payable to the order of The Lexi Rudnitsky Poetry Project. Please do not send submissions to Persea’s New York City office.

The winner is chosen by an anonymous selection committee and announced on Persea's web site in January. Submitted manuscripts will not be returned.

OTHER TONGUES: Mixed-Race Women Speak Out — Open Call for Submissions

February 8, 2010

OPEN CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS!

OTHER TONGUES: Mixed-Race Women Speak Out

Co-editors Adebe D.A. and Andrea Thompson are seeking submissions for an anthology of writing by and about mixed-race women, intended for publication in Fall 2010.

The purpose of this anthology is to explore the question of how mixed-race women in North America identify in the 21st Century. The anthology will also serve as a place to learn about the social experiences, attitudes, and feelings of others, and what racial identity has come to mean today. We are inviting previously unpublished submissions that engage, document, and/or explore the experiences of being mixed-race, by placing interraciality as the center, rather than periphery, of analysis.

Please send one (1) submission of up to 2500 words of poetry, fiction, creative non-fiction, or spoken word as a SINGLE attachment to othertonguesanthology@gmail.com

Black and white images and artwork should be 300 dpi and sent as attachments in jpg. of tiff. format. Artwork and photography limited to three (3) per applicant.

Please include your contact information, including your name, address, phone number, e-mail, title(s) of work submitted, type of submission, and a short artist bio (50 words max) in the body of the email, with your name and the type of submission in the subject line (e.g. “Jazmine – Poetry Submission”). All submissions are due April 15, 2010. Incomplete submissions will not be considered.

If you prefer that your contribution remain anonymous, please include this preference at the top of your submission. All personal information you provide will be kept strictly confidential.

If you have any questions about this project, please contact the Editors, Adebe DeRango-Adem and Andrea Thompson, at othertonguesanthology@gmail.com

For more information: http://www.adebe.wordpress.com, http://www.andreathompson.ca or visit us on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=276479812662

We look forward to reviewing your submission!

WEB: Free Access to Women and Social Movements in the United States this March

March 14, 2010 in Uncategorized
Tags: archive, history, primary source, public history, web

Source: The Pedestal 2, no. 1 (February 1970): 1. Courtesy of Simon Fraser University Archives.

“To celebrate Women’s History Month,Women and Social Movements in the United
States 1600-2000,Scholar’s Edition, will be freely accessible for the month
of March so that all librarians, students, instructors, and scholars can
explore the site’s rich collection of primary materials and teaching tools
without passwords or fees. The URL is http://wass.alexanderstreet.com.  If
your library doesn’t subscribe, do take advantage of its accessibility this
month to take a look at the resource and remind yourself about what it
offers.

WASM Scholar’s edition includes 91 document projects and archives, almost
40,000 pages of full-text sources, a separate database of 90,000 pages of
publications of federal, state, and local commissions on the status of
women, and the exclusive online edition of the research classic, Notable
American Women.”

Access the database here:  http://wass.alexanderstreet.com

Curse of the Coal Train

Monday, February 8th, 2010 by Andy Davis

“The coal train is a motherfucker,” says Hugh Masekela in Songs of Migration, in his build up to performing the classic song “Stimela”.
“There are no happy songs about trains in Africa.” The train is a symbol of dislocation, forced removals, the leaving of loved ones, insecurity and upheaval. And then he begins to blow that flugelhorn. “Stimela” is a monument of a protest song. A triumph. It’s an artwork so large and encompassing that it hardly fits into the confines of its definition as a song, overflowing at the edges. As an artwork, it transcends. It’s a touchstone, a piece of magic that cuts straight to the most cogent concerns of our country, simply and succinctly. It conjures so much concentrated emotion into those 6 minutes that when Hugh screams that choo-choo whistle, he vents the emotions and frustrations of everyone. He taps straight into that rich vein. The collective consciousness. It’s a shriek that cuts deep in the soul. You have to be made of stone to not be moved.

So it’s little wonder that using “Stimela” as the impetus Hugh Masekela, along with writer and director James Ngcobo and the esteemed vocal talent of Sibongile Khumalo, have created an entire play around the theme of migration. It’s really a series of curated songs by the likes of Mackay Davashe, Joseph Shabalala, Victor Ndlazilwane, Gibson Kente, Hugh Masekela, Dorothy Masuka and Miriam Makeba, among many others, that were inspired by the great trek from the village to the city, from traditional, communal and ancestral lands to the townships and hostels of the cities. As Hugh puts it, “Migration is always the result of social and political upheaval, poverty, war and colonialism.” As people moved to the cities they brought with them their culture, their mannerisms and their longing for a better life. It’s fertile ground for political theatre, as relevant today as it ever was.

The whole show operates like an extravagant jazz gig, with the band taking centre stage and all the players singing and acting around them. True to form, it’s a well assembled troupe, the band ably led by Ezbie Moilwa on the keyboards with Tshepo Mngoma on violin and vocals, Fana Zulu on bass, Ntokoso Zungu on guitar and Godfrey Mngcina on percussion. The acting choir (as in a choir that acts) made up of Kuki Mncube, Bonginkosi Zulu, Happy Motha, Gugu Shezi, Linda Thobela, Thumbeza Hlope and Nomdumiso Zondeki were all exceptional.

From the outset Bra Hugh takes to the stage with an extended jive that belies his status as madala. The guy’s almost 71 years old and he can still boogie and bend down low like a jags teenager. It’s a treat to see him on a stage as intimate as the Market Theatre. The Market Theatre, like Hugh, has seen its fair share of controversy and struggle, from fiery plays of revolution and the vibrant struggle culture of the anti-apartheid movement, the boycotts and censorship through the post-apartheid demise of Joburg’s CBD and it’s subsequent Newtown revival, the theatre has stood by stoically. And it’s a real pleasure to watch the struggle veteran blow his horn, and let Sibongile’s voice pick at your heart strings, in this venerable space.

Although a bit long in parts, and maybe deserving of an interval to break up the show, the nicest thing about Songs of Migration is that it never feels the necessity to translate anything. The majority of the action takes place in isiZulu, isXhosa, Pedi, Tswana and tsotsi taal mixed up with bits of English and Afrikaans. It doesn’t pander to a Northern Suburbs audience, it’s like you can almost hear Hugh admonishing the crowd, “if you don’t speak Zulu or any other African language, fuck you, what’s your problem, you’ve been here long enough to learn something, at least.”

And although the music is largely Southern African in origin, there’s a stirring rendition of a Yiddish folk song about forced migration and even a re-imagining of “Sarie Marais”, but with Zulu vocal harmonies. Renditions of “Hamba Nontsokolo” and the Masekela hit about being caught out late without a pass in apartheid suburban Johannesburg, “Mama Ndoro”. There’s an incredible take on Ladysmith Black Mambazo’s “Nomathemba” that’ll leave you with your bottom jaw on the dirty floor. The music then swings through the cotton fields of the Mississippi and the old gospel of the American South, via Lagos Nigeria with Fela Kuti’s “Languta” before returning to Mzanzi for the finale.

After the show, Bra Hugh and Lady Khumalo, swanned around the adjacent restaurant of Gramadoelas, amicable and stately, a couple of fans bugged them for photographs while the rest of the patrons basked in their glow, ate malva pudding and drank beer.
“This is just the beginning of a series of plays.” Said Hugh. “Each one focussing on a specific theme or issue in the music.”

Songs Of Migration plays at the Market Theatre until 21 February 2010

Stimela
There is a train that comes from Namibia and Malawi
there is a train that comes from Zambia and Zimbabwe,
There is a train that comes from Angola and Mozambique,
From Lesotho, from Botswana, from Zwaziland,
From all the hinterland of Southern and Central Africa.
This train carries young and old, African men
Who are conscripted to come and work on contract
In the golden mineral mines of Johannesburg
And its surrounding metropolis, sixteen hours or more a day
For almost no pay.
Deep, deep, deep down in the belly of the earth
When they are digging and drilling that shiny mighty evasive stone,
Or when they dish that mish mesh mush food
into their iron plates with the iron shovel.
Or when they sit in their stinking, funky, filthy,
Flea-ridden barracks and hostels.
They think about the loved ones they may never see again. Because they might have already been forcibly removed
From where they last left them
Or wantonly murdered in the dead of night
By roving and marauding gangs of no particular origin,
We are told. They think about their lands, their herds
That were taken away from them
With a gun, bomb, teargas and the cannon.
And when they hear that Choo-Choo train
They always curse, curse the coal train,
The coal train that brought them to Johannesburg.

Fighting for Home: Housing Struggles Across the US

Screenings and Discussion with housing activists from New Orleans, Brooklyn, and Miami

Type:

Education - Workshop

Date:	Sunday, March 14, 2010
Time:	3:00pm - 5:00pm
Location:	Zeitgeist Multi-Disciplinary Arts Center
Street:	1618 Oretha Castle Haley Blvd
City/Town:	New Orleans, LA
	View Map

Description

Housing activists from Miami’s Take Back the Land, Brooklyn’s Families United for Racial and Economic Equality (FUREE), and Mayday NOLA discuss housing issues in their communities. Featuring the film Coming Home: The Dry Storm and pieces from the multimedia documentary portrait Housing is a Human Right.

Tickets are $8

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Legal Scholar Michelle Alexander on “The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness”

A new book by legal scholar and civil rights advocate Michelle Alexander argues that although Jim Crow laws have been eliminated, the racial caste system it set up was not eradicated. It’s simply been redesigned, and now racial control functions through the criminal justice system. [includes rush transcript]

 

Part II: Michelle Alexander on “The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness”

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Guest:

Michelle Alexander, author of the new book The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. A former director of the Racial Justice Project at the ACLU of Northern California, she now holds a joint appointment at the Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity and the Moritz College of Law at Ohio State University.

Rush Transcript

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Related Links

• Michelle Alexander: "The Age of Obama as a Racial Nightmare"

 

JUAN GONZALEZ: President Obama’s election a year and a half ago continues to be lauded for ushering in a new era of colorblindness. The very fact of his presidency is regarded by some as the final nail in the coffin of Jim Crow. Yet, today there are more African Americans under correctional control, whether in prison or jail, on probation or on parole, than there were enslaved in 1850. And more African American men are disenfranchised now because of felon disenfranchisement laws than in 1870.

A new book by legal scholar and civil rights advocate Michelle Alexander argues that although Jim Crow laws have been eliminated, the racial caste system it set up was not eradicated. It’s simply been redesigned, and now racial control functions through the criminal justice system.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re joined now from Columbus, Ohio by Michelle Alexander, author of the new book The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. Her latest article exploring how the war on drugs gave birth to what she calls a permanent American undercaste is available at tomdispatch.com. She’s a former director of the Racial Justice
Project at the ACLU of Northern California. She now holds a joint appointment at the Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity and the Moritz College of Law at Ohio State University.

Michelle Alexander, welcome to Democracy Now! Nearly half of America’s young black men are behind bars or have been labeled felons for life? That’s an astounding figure. Also, what does it mean in terms of their rights for the rest of their lives?

MICHELLE ALEXANDER: Yes, thanks largely to the war on drugs, a war that has been waged almost exclusively in poor communities of color, even though studies have consistently shown that people of color are no more likely to use or sell illegal drugs than whites. The war on drugs waged in these ghetto communities has managed to brand as felons millions of people of color for relatively minor, nonviolent drug offenses. And once branded a felon, they’re ushered into a permanent second-class status, not unlike the one we supposedly left behind. Those labeled felons may be denied the right to vote, are automatically excluded from juries, and my be legally discriminated against in employment, housing, access to education, public benefits, much like their grandparents or great grandparents may have been discriminated against during the Jim Crow era.

JUAN GONZALEZ: Well, you mention that the—in the war on drugs, four out of five people arrested have actually been arrested for use of drugs, not for—or possession or use of drugs, not for the sale of drugs. Could you talk about how the—both political parties joined in this increasing incarceration around drug use?

MICHELLE ALEXANDER: That’s right. The war on drugs, contrary to popular belief, was not declared in response to rising drug crime. Actually, the war on drugs, the current drug war, was declared in 1982 by President Ronald Reagan at a time when drug crime was actually on the decline. A few years later, crack cocaine hit the streets in poor communities of color across America, and the Reagan administration hired staff to publicize crack babies, crack mothers, crack dealers in inner-city communities, in an effort to build public support and more funding, and ensure more funding, for the new war that had been declared. But the drug war had relatively little to do with drug crime, even from the outset.

The drug war was launched in response to racial politics, not drug crime. The drug war was part of the Republican Party’s grand strategy, often referred to as the Southern strategy, an effort to appear—appeal to poor and working-class white voters who were threatened by, felt vulnerable, threatened by the gains of the civil rights movement, particularly desegregation, busing and affirmative action. And the Republican Party found that it could get Democrats—white, you know, working-class poor Democrats—to defect from the Democratic New Deal coalition and join the Republican Party through racially coded political appeals on issues of crime and welfare.

And the strategy worked like a charm. You know, within weeks of the Reagan administration’s publicity campaign around crack cocaine, you know, images of black crack users and crack dealers flooded, you know, our nation’s television sets and forever changed our nation’s conception of who drug users and dealers are. And law enforcement efforts became targeted on poor communities of color in the drug war. And drug law enforcement agencies, state and local law enforcement task forces committed to drug law enforcement, have been rewarded for drastically increasing the volume of drug arrests. Federal funding flows to state and local law enforcement that boost the volume of drug arrests, the sheer numbers.

Many people think the drug war, you know, has been targeted at violent offenders or aimed at rooting out drug kingpins, but nothing could be further from the truth. Local and state law enforcement agencies get rewarded for the sheer numbers of drug arrests. And federal drug forfeiture laws allow state and local law enforcement officials to keep 80 percent of the cash, cars, homes that they seize from suspected drug offenders, granting to law enforcement a direct monetary interest in the profitability and longevity in the drug war.

And the results have been predictable. Millions of poor people of color have been rounded up for relatively minor nonviolent drug offenses. In fact, in 2005, four out of five drug arrests were for possession. Only one out of five were for sales. Most people in state prison for drug offenses have no history of violence or significant selling activity. And during the 1990s, the period of the greatest expansion of the drug war, nearly 80 percent of the increase in drug arrests were for marijuana possession, a drug now widely believed to be less harmful than alcohol or tobacco and at least as prevalent in middle-class and suburban white communities as it is in the ghetto.

AMY GOODMAN: Michelle Alexander—

MICHELLE ALEXANDER: President Clinton—

AMY GOODMAN: Yes, I just wanted to bring it up to President Obama, because this piece you wrote, very interesting, at tomdispatch.com called “The Age of Obama as Racial Nightmare.” Explain.

MICHELLE ALEXANDER: Yes, well, you know, today, people around the globe, people of color in particular, have been celebrating the election of Barack Obama as kind of our nation’s triumph over race and the history of racial caste in America. Yet, the appearance of racial equality, the superficial appearance of racial equality that Barack Obama’s election has afforded, serves to mask a deeply disturbing underlying racial reality, which is that large segments, you know, a majority, of African American men in some urban areas, are either under the control of the criminal justice system or branded felons for life, locked in a permanent second-class status.

This vast new racial undercaste—and I say “caste”, not “class,” because this is a population which is locked into an inferior status by law and by policy—this vast population has been rendered largely invisible through affirmative action and the appearance of success with, you know, a handful of African Americans doing well in universities and corporations. The sprinkling of people of color through elite institutions in the United States, due to affirmative action policies and the limited progress of middle-class and upper-middle-class African Americans, creates the illusion of great progress. It helps to mask the underlying racial reality, which is that a racial caste system has been reborn in the United States. Young men of color, in particular, are labeled as felons, labeled as criminals, at very young ages, often before they even reach voting age, before they turn eighteen. Their backpacks are searched. They’re frisked on the way to school, while standing waiting for the school bus to arrive. Once they learn to drive, their cars are searched, often dismantled in a search for drugs. The drug war waged in these poor communities of color has created generations of black and brown people who have been branded felons and relegated to a permanent second-class status for life.

And the reason for their excommunication from our society, our mainstream society, is for engaging in precisely the same kind of drug activity that is largely ignored in middle-class and upper-middle-class white communities. People often say to me, “Well, if people—if, you know, black and brown men don’t want to be labeled felons, well, then they just shouldn’t commit drug crimes.” But, you know, we have known, as a nation, for a long time now that simply prohibiting drug activity does not lead people to stop using illegal drugs. We learned that lesson with alcohol prohibition. Banning the use of alcohol didn’t discourage many people from using or selling alcohol. And people of color are no more likely to use or sell illegal drugs than whites. Our stereotype of a drug dealer in the United States is of an African American kid standing on a street corner with his pants hanging down. But the reality is that drug dealing happens everywhere in America. Drug markets in the United States, much like our society generally, is relatively segregated by race. Blacks tend to sell to blacks. Whites tend to sell to whites.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re going to have to leave it there for the part one of this interview, Michelle Alexander, but we’re going to ask you to stay after for part two, which we’ll play on Democracy Now! Michelle Alexander, her new book is called The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness.