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I would rather be talking about real things. Since September 2011, northern Mali has been on tenterhooks, waiting to see which rumors of risings, rebellions, independence struggles or gang-war will pan out. Yet I am hesitant to even write anything on the situation. I see quite clearly how those living in Kidal and Tombouctou themselves seem unsure as to who has been doing what, and even less clear on what is planned by the bulging troupe of demobbed Libyan soldiers, ex-rebels, competing local and national power networks, criminal gangs, militaries of four countries, freedom fighters, and armed salafists.

Cue Jeremy Keenan. Keenan fears nothing. He has one answer for all questions, one bad guy and one bad guy only who is behind all disorder and suffering. Scholarly rigor and any critical sense are cast aside. Keenan’s strange status — he is a “Professorial Research Associate in anthropology” who apparently does not teach classes or publish scholarly work — at School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London seems to give weight enough to see his pieces published in otherwise reputable outlets. Al Jazeera has printed a number of Keenan’s pieces, although at some point in mid 2011 they wisely moved his work from News to “Opinion”.

People who don’t know much about northern Mali would be very poorly served by reading Keenan’s increasingly odd writing. Keenan used to be a scholar of some note. His 1977 book remains the best English language text on the Ahaggar Touareg of southern Algeria. But over the last decade or two his writing has descended into screed. His 2004 collection of articles, published as “The lesser gods of the Sahara: social change and contested terrain amongst the Tuareg of Algeria”, seems his last work with any scholarly pretensions, with a dozen articles and two books since rehashing the same mix of speculation and a shallow version of anti-imperialism. And while I like a good kick against the pricks as much as the next person, his writing has also increasingly lost any critical rigor it once had. All that remains is a sort of mono-maniacal invective against the Algerian DRS. They are a good target: the Directorate of Intelligence and Security have at least as much blood on their hands as any secret police of any authoritarian state. But the increasingly unhinged supposition that their hidden hands are behind all that is bad in the west-central Saharan region is simply unsupportable. As importantly, it lets some equally bad actors off the hook. It also reduces all Touareg (who prefer the label “Kel Tamasheq” by the way), Arabs, Songhai and other people who make their homes there, to deculturated, classless, ahistoricised puppets. As many people, I had seen Keenan stumble down this unfortunate path for some time. But I never though I would hear him reconfigure the traumatic Tuareg insurgencies of the 1990s and 2000s and their leaders as window dressing for elaborate foreign plots.

And yet here we are, facing Keenan’s most recent work “A new crisis in the Sahel”, which appeared on Al Jazeera English January 3rd. Despite its title, there is nothing “new” here. New events are — in Keenan’s writings — simply another manifestation of a single conspiracy. This nefarious plot involves the Algerian state, the CIA, and literally no one else. They have invented and pay off a “terrorist” group to allow some sort of power grab by Algeria, and extension the United States. This ignores the obvious fact that the United States political elites, along with some on the Israeli right, are much closer to Algeria’s arch-foe Morocco. To read Jeremy Keenan is to know that it is here, in the midst of the Saharan desert, that a great game is being played out, in which invented armed groups pose for cameras and fight no one but sacrificial victims arranged by their handlers. Pain and suffering in the Sahara exists solely to influence the popular press in the United States, Europe and Algeria. It is essentially all for our benefit. And God knows, there is nowhere like the desert 600km north of Tombouctou to stage events which will demand the attention of American newsreaders.

When Keenan began this trip in 2003-4, his take was more plausible. Al-Qaida au Maghreb islamique (AQMI) was still the Groupe Salafiste pour la Prédication et le Combat (GSPC), and US spy satellites were tracking a small band of GSPC kidnappers from their homes in Algeria across much of the Sahara. Keenan was good at stating the obvious, missed by much of the press. The Algerian civil war bred unknowably complex corruption and relationships between Algerian power and its opponents. The United States military and government was keen to portray all conflict as part of its global obsession with Osama Bin Laden, no matter how contrived the links. Easily understood enemies bolstered both political powers just as it funded security services with slick appropriation pitches in Washington and backhanders from smugglers in Tamanrasset or Tindouf. By 2005 this simple linkage has overtaken all of Keenan’s former work. His writing is now almost entirely about this ever deepening, ever more complex conspiracy, the tentacles of which Keenen discovers everywhere. Every conflict, every actor must be hammered into this template. And while his work has slid from the finest academic journals into the popular press and a single journal to which he has some connection, his invitations to cocktail parties thrown by Algeria’s equally repugnant regional rivals have no doubt increased.

Might we not do better consulting other prominent scholars or (gasp) actual Malians, Nigeriens or Algerians? One consequence of Keenan’s writing is that it increasingly removes all agency, motivation, and history from Africans, replacing them with mere puppets of unseen foreign forces. While the DRS or AFRICOM have dark motives, the events he sloppily half describes in Al-Jazeera have much more to do with an actual history of a region torn by the after-effects of European colonialism, rentier-state neo-colonialism, multi-sided regional struggles (in which I suspect Keenan of having some interest), poverty, and ill-governance.

On the level of fact (for instance who Iyad Ag Ghali is and his local/national/regional ties) Keenan privileges rumor over history. And sometimes he departs from history altogether. The portrayal of the 2006 insurgency as a one day affair orchestrated by a foreign government is simply inaccurate, and the failure to mention other factions — such as those led by the late Ibrahim Ag Bahanga or the more conservative Abdoussalam ag Assalat — seem calculated by Keenan to paper over the gaping holes his statements leave. For his citation of a Le Journal du Dimanche article claiming Ag Ghali orchestrated the Hombori kidnaps, there are ten others — citing better informed sources than one anonymous Nigerien security officer — that speculate the opposite. It’s as if he read but one of the hundreds of press reports. Except that sheer poor research would hardly result in finding the single article that speculates in Keenan’s direction. Anyone following these events (again, maybe an actual African!) would tell you this immediately.

Example: why never a mention of French interests? Total just scored a large oil prospecting bloc in the Mauritanian Taoudeni basin just across the border which promises the first oil and natural gas wells in the region. Or French air and ground assets spread from Niamey to northern Burkina to Gao? Or that the Hombori kidnappees were formerly French mercenaries and political fixers for African elites close to Paris? Why not mention the communal conflicts bred of competing nationalisms, bitter caste and class histories, and the deformed half democracy of local governments? Why not mention the affiliations of the former Libyan officers or their history in the 1990s insurgency? Why not mention the extensive interlinked and competing smuggling networks of both local notables and rich men based in Bamako or Tamanrasset? Why not mention AFRICOM’s much longer involvement with Bamako than Algiers? Why not mention the fact that for the third time in six years, many desert side communities in the region are facing famine rooted in environmental degradation, disappearance of forage for herds, and price spikes driven by foreign food trade and market specualtion. These problems are real. They are complex. And they involve shades other than black and white, players unknown to most Europeans or Americans.

Keenan reduces a complicated living history and society to the maneuvers of the Algerian secret police and the CIA. Those are not nice or well intentioned people: no doubt. But the CIA and Algeria’s secret police are easily understandable by western readers. It paints a world of binary conflicts, with simple motivations, focused on Western elites and their concerns. Perhaps this is comforting for his foreign reader, but it is also a narrative that removes several million Africans from their own history, as if they all simply take orders from other white folks with whom Keenan has a beef. And I see nothing either liberating or accurate in any of it.

A Sample of Keenan’s recent work

• A new crisis in the Sahel – Opinion – Al Jazeera English
• The Dying Sahara: US Imperialism and Terror in Africa Pluto Press, 2012 ISBN 0745329616
• The dark Sahara: America’s war on terror in Africa. Pluto Press, 2009 ISBN 0745324525
• Africa unsecured? The role of the Global War on Terror (GWOT) in securing US imperial interests in Africa – Critical Studies on Terrorism – Volume 3, Issue 1 Volume 3, Issue 1, 2010
• Al-Qaeda terrorism in the Sahara? Edwin Dyer’s murder and the role of intelligence agencies – Keenan – 2009 – Anthropology Today
• US Militarization in Africa: What Anthropologists Should Know about AFRICOM. Anthropology Today, Vol. 24, No. 5 (Oct., 2008), pp. 16-20
• Uranium Goes Critical in Niger: Tuareg Rebellions Threaten Sahelian Conflagration – Review of African Political Economy – Volume 35, 2008
• The Banana Theory of Terrorism: Alternative Truths and the Collapse of the ‘Second’ (Saharan) Front in the War on Terror – Journal of Contemporary African Studies – Volume 25, Issue 1
• US Silence as Sahara Military Base Gathers Dust, Review of African Political Economy, Vol. 34, No. 113, Imperial, Neo-Liberal Africa? (Sep., 2007), pp. 588-590
• Conspiracy theories and ‘terrorists’: How the ‘war on terror’ is placing new responsibilities on anthropology . Anthropology Today, Volume 22, Issue 6, pages 4–9, December 2006
• The making of terrorists: Anthropology and the alternative truth of America’s ‘War on Terror’ in the Sahara. Focaal, Volume 2006, Number 48, Winter 2006 , pp. 144-151(8)
• Turning the Sahel on Its Head: The ‘Truth’ behind the Headliness. Review of African Political Economy, Vol. 33, No. 110, Religion, Ideology & Conflict in Africa (Sep., 2006), pp. 761-769
• Military Bases, Construction Contracts & Hydrocarbons in North Africa. Review of African Political Economy, Vol. 33, No. 109, Mainstreaming the African Environment in Development (Sep., 2006), pp. 601-608
• Ray Bush and Jeremy Keenan. Editorial: North Africa: Power, Politics & Promise, Review of African Political Economy, Vol. 33, No. 108, (Jun., 2006)
• Tuareg Take up Arms. Review of African Political Economy Vol. 33, No. 108, North Africa: Power, Politics & Promise (Jun., 2006), pp. 367-368
• Security & Insecurity in North Africa Review of African Political Economy, Vol. 33, No. 108, North Africa: Power, Politics & Promise (Jun., 2006), pp. 269-296
• Famine in Niger Is Not All That It Appears. Review of African Political Economy, Vol. 32, No. 104/105, Oiling the Wheels of Imperialism (Jun. – Sep., 2005), pp. 405-407
• Waging war on terror: The implications of America’s ‘New Imperialism’ for Saharan peoples – The Journal of North African Studies – Volume 10, Issue 3-4 2005
• Political Destabilisation & ‘Blowback’ in the Sahel. Review of African Political Economy, Vol. 31, No. 102, Agendas, Past & Future (Dec., 2004), pp. 691-698
• Terror in the Sahara: The Implications of US Imperialism for North & West Africa. Review of African Political Economy, Vol. 31, No. 101, An African Scramble? (Sep., 2004), pp. 475-496
• Americans & ‘Bad People’ in the Sahara-Sahel Americans & ‘Bad People’ in the Sahara-Sahel, Review of African Political Economy, Vol. 31, No. 99, ICTs ‘Virtual Colonisation’ & Political Economy (Mar., 2004), pp. 130-139

Frank R. Crosswaith, labor organizer and political activist.

Here’s a fascinating new article on the history of Harlem activists A. Philip Randolph and Frank R. Crosswaith, and their involvement with the Socialist Party (riven by right and left factionalism) in the 1920s.

It places them in contrast to Black Nationalism, but highlights the abuse they were willing to put up with at the hands of some purported “comrades” for their belief that race and class struggles are inextricable.

It’s also a nice picture of the diversity of the Socialist Party of America at the time, which in the New York Socialist Party was made up of many dozens of active locals. The full text of the article is available [in html and in pdf ] for a limited time. Some excerpts are below.

The history confirms my longstanding dislike of Victor Berger and Morris Hillquit (the right wing apparatchiks that overtook the party in the 20s) and my love of Eugene Debs and Big Bill Heywood, men continually struggling with the blindness of their times.

In the wake of this, I’m also eager to read more about St.Croix born New Yorker, labor activist and socialist Frank Crosswaith. Crosswaith, although a young radical, a lifelong socialist and prominent trade union organizer, in the 30s and 40s chose the Social Democratic blind alley of Roosevelt and various anti-communist Democratic party front groups.

Cornelius L. Bynum. The New Negro and Social Democracy during the Harlem Renaissance, 1917–37 The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era (2011), 10: 89-112

Randolph and Crosswaith’s assessment of socialism’s radical potential to counter racial discrimination aligned closely with the basic position that Eugene Debs took on race and the Socialist Party. Despite the clear racial animosity that both leaders and rank-and-file members openly expressed from the party’s inception, Debs recognized and strongly argued that racism and racial discrimination fundamentally violated the party’s core principles and mission. Though he was equally susceptible to the kind of personal failings on race that he so forthrightly criticized in others, Debs insisted that economic freedom and political equality went hand-in-hand. This reasoning fit with the sense of open participation at the center of Randolph and Crosswaith’s notion of social justice. Even as Socialist Party leaders and rank-and-file members continued to exhibit deep racial hostility, Deb’s position on economic justice and racial equality largely matched key aspects of Randolph and Crosswaith’s appraisal of African Americans’ plight.

…….

By the time Randolph and Crosswaith joined the Socialist Party it had lost much of the organizational cohesion of its first years. Nevertheless, they still viewed it as African Americans’ best political option. Portraying the plight of black workers as fundamentally caused by the impact of racial discrimination on their ability to “sell their labor in the market effectively,” they were convinced that the solution to this problem lay in greater labor organization and overhauling industrial capitalism. They and others maintained that the competition at capitalism’s core accentuated the economic roots of racism. The Socialist Party’s determination to redress the ills of industrial capitalism and promote unionization led Randolph and Crosswaith to believe that it was central to challenging racial discrimination and fostering the kind of social justice that they envisioned. It was this link between unionization and social justice that propelled them into the Socialist Party and became such a central component of the radical message that they preached in the postwar years.

……..

For Randolph, Crosswaith, and the small group of African Americans recruited into the New York Socialist Party‘s Twenty-first Assembly District in Harlem, this commitment to progressive reform and political mobilization was attractive. Randolph and Crosswaith in particular recognized the significant, if unintended, implications embedded in this electoral strategy for African Americans “seeking human status and full freedom.” The participatory nature inherent in drawing workers into local and regional politics fit neatly with their conception of social justice. As Crosswaith explained years later in reflecting back on his role in building interracial trade unions, he and Randolph understood that “the nation’s labor could not exist half-slave and half-free.” They looked to mobilization and interracial labor solidarity to promote the kind of industrial democracy that would ensure an “equality of responsibility and equality of benefits” for all workers. In fact, their willingness to turn a blind eye to clear racial antipathy in the party seemed largely predicated on the argument that African Americans could only “become a power to be feared and respected throughout this nation” by joining the Socialist Party. Their belief that the party’s emphasis on social and economic reform could be turned to the specific advantage of African Americans certainly seemed to have factored into Randolph’s decisions to accept the party’s nomination to run for New York state comptroller in 1920 and secretary of the state assembly in 1921. Even if Berger and Hillquit never really intended to engage an agenda of social justice for African Americans, Randolph and Crosswaith nonetheless found meaningful resonance between the reform strategies they promoted and the conception of social justice he and Crosswaith were formulating.

Randolph also found common cause with the syndicalist element of the Socialist Party concentrated in the mining and lumber states of the Mountain West. Primarily organized around William “Big Bill” Haywood’s Western Federation of Miners that gave rise to the IWW in 1905, this wing of the party endorsed industrial sabotage and violence as acceptable protest tactics and believed that workers should use the ballot to gain administrative control over government’s police powers to protect striking workers. They adamantly opposed any program of progressive reform on the grounds that it merely forestalled the inevitable workers revolution. Instead, Haywood and the IWW pushed for a general strike to reorganize society around factories, mines, and other places of production. Haywood was an especially strong advocate of industrial unionism. Focusing almost exclusively on labor’s immediate demands, he looked to organize all workers into one vast and well-disciplined labor organization with enough political power to successfully challenge their opponents. Most importantly perhaps for Randolph, Haywood and the IWW attacked all divisions of the working class—racial, religious, and ethnic—as detrimental to the cause of overthrowing of industrial capitalism. This decidedly inclusive organizational policy fit neatly with Randolph and Crosswaith’s conception of social justice and their determination to bring African Americans into the working-class fold.

……..

In the years immediately following World War I, A. Philip Randolph and Frank R. Crosswaith began devising a notion of social justice that set them apart from other African American radicals in Harlem and mainstream white socialists. Although they too believed that transforming industrial capitalism was central to combating racial discrimination, they rooted their assessment of modern industrial society in a conception of social justice that stressed the shared humanity of all and insisted that all were equally entitled to benefit from society’s advances. In fashioning their critique in these terms rather than the more standard producer theory associated with mainstream socialism, Randolph and Crosswaith articulated a position that set out to adapt the broader spirit of postwar reform to the particular conditions and concerns of Harlem. Even as their message of interracial cooperation in organized labor was simultaneously drowned out by the powerful appeal of Garveyism, ignored by white labor unions, and undermined by the Socialist Party’s inability to address the Negro question, the conception of social justice that Randolph and Crosswaith formulated in these years creatively fused black racial identity and class consciousness into an authentic and largely independent strain of black radicalism.

Related articles

• The Frank R. Crosswaith Papers, 1917-1965 at the New York Public Library.
• HW Bio: Hubert Henry Harrison A short introduction to the famous Harlem Socialist, Hubert Harrison (harlemworldblog.wordpress.com)
• Celebrating Hubert Harrison (socialistwebzine.org)
• On the Harlem Socialist activists: Afro-Americans and radical politics (From “Richard B. Moore: Caribbean Militant in Harlem,” edited by W. Burghadt Turner and Joyce Moore Turner) 1969, reprinted 1999.
• the Socialist Party of New York City (SP-USA)
• African Americans and the struggle for socialism, 1901-1925 By Abayomi Azikiwe and How Debs became a socialist by Paul D’Amato (1989) both deal with the same history from a Black Nationalist perspective (dandelionsalad.wordpress.com)
• Study Shows Depth of Unemployment for Blacks in New York – NYTimes.com a little reported survey showing the depth of the ethnic disparity still seen in a “colorblind” New York under “Business Friendly” capitalism (economix.blogs.nytimes.com)

Marching in Imbaba, Cairo,
originally uploaded by RamyRaoof.

One overlooked media revelations from the Arab Revolutions of 2011 is the amount of material released with reusable copyright.

Ramy Raoof in Cairo is releasing his work with a CC Attribution license, meaning popular media, as well as outlets like Wikipedia, have access to images of these historic events.

Al Jazeera, whose coverage of the Egyptian rising has been praised as “what Baghdad 1991 was for CNN“, has released much of its coverage under a cc license. The collective around the “We are Khaled Said“, one of the prime social media instigators of the Egyptian diaspora has done the same.

This may seem a small thing. But remember that in most nations, corporate forces have been for the last three decades repeatedly extending, through force of law, ownership of writing and images far beyond the lives of their creators. The enforcement of such regimes has been strengthened, pushing past conventional understandings of free usage which existed beside copyright law. This has been a noticeable change even in my lifetime. The Xerox machine was first available to mass users in the 70s, articles and books were commonly copied and passed between readers. Such actions, even for out of print works by long dead creators, have been both criminalized and made taboo.

Most worryingly, these legal controls married to internal self censorship, are especially prevalent in academia. While academic books and journals, as well as newspapers, have been successfully digitized and shared across the internet, their diffusion has increasingly been restricted to institutions willing to pay exorbitant sums. JSTOR, the exclusive home of most humanities journals, charges as a subscriber as much as $2,450 per journal title (and there are hundreds) per year. Remember, these are are reprints of old journal articles, which had covered their costs at the time of production either by paper sales or institutional support.

We confront a world in which documents of our own history, especially the powerful medium of video, are owned by entities who punish their dissemination. Like much of the products of our society, most images made since the 1920s have been converted into commodities. Abstracted from their real value, they are mechanisms for making money, and their withholding is crucial to this status.

This, like the Arab oligarchies, is in dire need of a revolution.

Related articles

• On Al Jazeera, a Revolution Televised Despite Obstacles (nytimes.com)
• Arab media revolution spreading change (cnn.com)
• Al-Jazeera’s Revolution? Ctd (andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com)
• The Egyptian Revolution Will not Be Tweeted: A First-Hand Report from Cairo (alternet.org)
• Shadi Hamid for Democracy Journal: The Cairo Conundrum (democracyjournal.org)
• A woman’s ordeal in Cairo #jan25 – Blog – The Arabist (arabist.net)
• Vague thoughts on the Arab Winter Uprisings ” The Moor Next Door (themoornextdoor.wordpress.com)
• Mubarak’s Secret Police “Thugs” Try to Disrupt Revolution (firedoglake.com)

It’s beautiful in New York, and the world if full of things to argue about. Here are three important issues I’ll have to get back to you on.

While the world goes to hell in a handbasket, I have been trying to maintain my sanity with light reading, and sunny days on the back patio. This largely precludes the production of good (or even mediocre) writing. Further political catastrophes and World Cup drama could completely rule it out.

Despite that, there are several things which should appear here soon, plus a reading recommendation.  Advice for further reading and different perspectives is always very welcome.

First, I’m working on a close reading of the latest US / West African drug arrests, this time focused on Liberia. Not to sound too paranoid, but these things never seem to hang together well when examined closely, and I’ve come to believe over the last few years that there is a commonality of interests between several right wing think tanks, a clutch of journalists and “terrorism experts”, UN Anti-Drug authorities, foreign governments, military, and local governments which play up the need for military and legal spectacle at the expense of actual work on development or ending corruption. While there is likely some real criminality going on in this case, I’m prepared to argue that this Liberian sting of aspiring West African drug runners serves more to allow these interests to further very specific political agendas.

Next, there are updates on the Nigerien political transition, with a new electoral law that has generated some controversy, while we wait for several party political and constitutional shoes to drop in Niamey (party leadership, coalitions, charges against Tandja supporters, not to mention and entirely new Constitution of the Seventh Republic that has to be written and voted on by the end of the year).

Most important to me, I’ve finally thoroughly read Dutch historian Baz Lecocq‘s 2002 dissertation, “That Desert is Our Country’: Tuareg rebellions and Competing Nationalisms in Contemporary Mali (1946-1996).“  As it is available online, I had read later chapters when I’d seen it cited some time ago.  But having stormed through from the start, I must say that it is the best thing written on the Malian Tuareg in English (easily) and arguably better than anything in French (to be fair, I’m thinking only of articles I’ve read by Georg Klute, the Bernuses, Claudot-Hawad, and Bourgeot.  I haven’t read Pierre Boilley’s “Touaregs Kel Adagh”, let alone Georg Klute’s ”Die Rebellionen der Tuareg in Mali und Niger”, which I’ve only ever seen in German). With very few changes it could be produced as a very valuable book.

Lecocq’s basic premise – which he candidly admits was not the one he began with – is that French colonialism and the process of independence heightened a pre-existing “racial” prejudice between northern and southern communities in what is today Mali, even when outsiders might be unable to easily distinguish between these groups. Independence, as well as French and upper class Tuareg resistance to the form this independence, only deepened these divisions, reinforcing mistrust on all sides, keeping these communities at daggers drawn. This has played out through profound reordering in the structures and meanings of the notoriously complex and shifting Tuareg social/political order on one side. On the other, the brutality and hamfistedness of southern politicians and military has often exacerbated conflict, frustrating Malian society.  Nine of ten Malian live in the south, and these communities, having paid dearly to create the imperfect economic development and political liberties they now enjoy, have little sympathy with Tuareg demands.

If you’re anglophone and interested in French colonialism in the Sahara, Mali’s first decades of independence, the current “Tuareg problem”, or even the more general history of cultural conflict along the interface of the Sahel, there’s tremendous value in this work.  Admittedly, Lecocq really focuses on the history of “free” clans of Tuareg in (what is now) Kidal Region’s Adagh des Ifoughas, who make up only a portion of the population of even this limited area.  But their politics and culture are central to the 1963, 1990, and 2006/7 rebellions, and all north south relations in Mali.  Without understanding this, I’ve always found the causes of fighting there hard to understand, even in relation to the Nigerien Tuareg rebellions, which seem much more enmeshed in Niger’s politics and culture.

• Current preferred time waster: tommymiles on Twitter

The Guardian had provided blow by blow coverage of the recent hatefest between two British historians of Russia, Orlando Figes and Robert Service. Figes, once touted as the “angry young man” for historians, is more accurately the spoiled brat. A real McCarthyite ax-grinder, who augments his live hatred of dead dictatorships with a holier-than thou “narrative history” creed. This is the 1980s-90s movement of British writers who refused to get their PhDs and were able to write things non-specialists could read, extrapolating their abilities to some new academic movement, heavily laced with Thatcherist posing and making stuff up so the plot’s better. They’re oppressed, apparently.

To sum up, Figes is both a hack and an ass, but he appears on TV frequently, and his fellow academics hate him for that more than anything.

Skip to last month when more traditionalist (but no less conservative, uninspired, presidential-biography writing) historian of Russia Robert Service was “sickened” to discover rude reviews of his work on Amazon! Imagine. Through a series of clever deductions (one of the Amazon screen names was “Orlando_Birkbeck”, Birkbeck being the college where Figes teaches) it was discovered that the rival bad boy was writing said reviews, as well as abuse aimed at other “rivals”. Along with orgasmically positive reviews of his own work. As if that weren’t bad enough, Figes threatened to sic the notoriously harsh British libel laws of Service for complaining. Presented with more evidence, Figes admitted “my wife did it without my knowledge.” Having graciously thrown his life partner under a bus, Professor Figes was later forced to admit that he himself was the malicious “reviewer” (can you call people who write screeds on Amazon reviewers? Perhaps Orlando can pad his resume a bit more).

As entertaining as all this is, it’s the post-partum letters page in the Guardian that’s the real hoot. Amid calls for Figes to be fired, are gems of British wit, such as:

“I really felt for Robert Service (Comment, 24 April) after reading about the turmoil caused to him and his family by someone calling his book crap. News stories of poverty, war and starvation often overshadow the intense difficulties faced by academic historians. I’m sure I’m not alone in finding how he stoically continued to eat sea bass and go jogging while his wife went to yoga during that terrible fortnight to be truly inspirational.”

And Dr Glyn Powell sums up right-thinking opinion: “In all the furore no one appears to have noticed the elephant in the room; Robert Service’s work is, in fact, awful.”

Related articles

• Award-winning historian Orlando Figes: I posted anonymous reviews on Amazon (telegraph.co.uk)
• Figes’ furies (timesonline.typepad.com)
• Stop the Presses! Historian Says He, Not His Wife, Is Savage Online Critic (artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com)
• Poison pen reviews were mine, confesses historian Orlando Figes (guardian.co.uk)
• The professor, his wife, and the secret, savage book reviews on Amazon (guardian.co.uk)
• The shame of Orlando Figes | Robert Service (guardian.co.uk)
• Orlando Figes admits trashing rivals (guardian.co.uk)
• Letters: Ten days that shook the world of Russian history (guardian.co.uk)
• Orlando Figes: Historian admits to writing anonymous reviews on Amazon (telegraph.co.uk)

I recently saw an appeal from US high school students, raising funds for anti-malarial bed nets to be delivered to the DRC. “When people find out they can donate $10 to save a life,” one Tampa Bay kid was quoted saying, “it really hits home, and they want to help.” The group is a “team” in the NBA / Sports Illustrated charity Nothing But Nets, which directs funding to Ted Turner’s UN Foundation along with several huge corporate charities supported by Exxon and other such entities. There’s no reason to believe that donations for bed nets go anywhere other than this project. And while other huge charities (like Oxfam) actually advocate for changing the world trade regime which cripples poor nations, but there’s no reason — if you have the money — why you shouldn’t donate to both.

Malaria kills a million people a year, mostly African children, but is preventable and treatable.

“Malaria is presently endemic in a broad band around the equator, in areas of the Americas, many parts of Asia, and much of Africa; however, it is in sub-Saharan Africa where 85 – 90% of malaria fatalities occur”1

Nations with year round endemic malaria (red)

Let’s be clear.  Africa is NOT the only place where malaria is still endemic year round.  Pretty much all of the tropics, and areas as far north as parts of Turkey, China, and Mexico see malaria year round.  Other areas see it for parts of the year. People live in malaria endemic areas around the world.  People get malaria in some of the most densely populated nations in the world, like Indonesia, India, and China.  But 90% of the deaths are in Africa.

Cases of malaria (note the many places besides Africa)

Africa is just where most of the deaths are.  Is this because people in other places all use bed nets? No, it’s because they have access to healthcare, clean water, have drained swamps near homes, and provided other measures which guarantee long lives.

If the United States and other powerful nations were to seriously deal with poverty, Malaria would cease to be a major threat. The lack of affordable medication, health care resources causes Malaria to be a killer in Africa. Niger, for instance, has just over 300 physicians for 14 million people, but pays tens of millions to the World Bank every year.

In fact, the entire government expenditure for Niger in 2002 was $320 million (in US dollars). By way of comparison the government of the ~ 8.5 million people of New York City have a $59.4 billion budget from 2009, described as an “austerity budget”. Re institution of the New York City sales tax on clothing (which I’d oppose: poor people would pay disproportionately) would bring in $350 million in 2010. The new Yankee Stadium cost $1.3 billion.

Nor is science alone the answer. One commentator noted, following the much hyped DNA coding of the Malaria virus in 2002, that HIV’s DNA had been know for a decade, but we were no closer to a vaccine. Now that malaria vaccines are in large scale trials, there’s no reason to believe that malaria will disappear from tropical Africa like it has largely done from the rest of the tropical world. Children still die of Measles, in outbreaks in Niger in particular. There are vaccines, many children get them, but children forced to follow their families on seasonal migration seeking work or grazing land often miss their boosters. And there are no clinics in most rural areas to administer them.

In 1900, there were malarial swamps across the US south, around Chicago, in the suburbs of Rome. In 1882, Malaria was endemic in half the United States.

“Malaria’s decline in the United States and Europe in the late 1800s was due mainly to draining swamps and removing mill ponds. Draining swamps also exposed good agricultural land, enabling people to afford better houses and thus isolate the sick. Increasing livestock densities may have diverted biting from humans toward cattle, pigs, or horses. Improved housing, isolation of sick people in mosquito-proof areas, better access to health care and medication, and improved nutrition, sanitation, and hygiene all may have reduced transmission and/or mortality rates.” 2

The United States Malaria eradication campaign: Aircraft spraying from the 1920s, DDT advert from the 1940s

So its very clear what the answer is.  If westerners are dying, we should invest in health care and infrastructure, drain swamps, and spray everything that moves with DDT.

The solution offered Africa: Seydou Keita hands out donated nets in Mali

If Africans are dying at the rate of 3000 a day, we should give out bed nets, and send celebrities to “teach them” things.  Again, don’t get me wrong.  Those bed nets will save lives right now, and they are desperately needed.  But if they are the only answer we give, then we are handing Africans out to dry. Again.

Bed nets are not the reason millions of white people don’t die from malaria right now. Doctors, swamp draining, closed sewers, DDT, schools with free vaccination regimens are. Hell, even paved highways, allowing easy transport of medical and construction resources are crucial. It’s not that sub-Saharan Africa lacks bed netting: its that it lacks all these other things. And it lacks these because it is poor. We can go into why that is, but suffice to say its not going to reflect well upon colonialism, dictators propped up by foreign powers, subsidized dumping of Western agricultural products or other goods, Structural Adjustment programs, etc. Malaria vaccines exist now, treatments exist, malarial habitat eradication exists. African’s die because of their poverty and our profits, not lack of bed nets.

See also:

• Link: Why capitalism isn’t really fighting malaria: Phil Ward
• Link:  AntiMalaria day in Mali
• Link: The Great Failure of Malaria Control in Africa: A District Perspective from Burkina Faso
• Link: Africa: Broken Promises on Malaria, 12/13/02
• Link: The billion-dollar malaria moment. Mark Grabowsky Nature 451, 1051-1052 (28 February 2008)
• Link: http://www.malariasite.com/
• Link: BEDNETS FOR MALARIA CONTROL April 4, 1996. International Development Research Centre
• Link:  Katrin Gaardbo Kuhn, Diarmid H. Campbell-Lendrum, Ben Armstrong, and Clive R. Davies. Malaria in Britain: Past, present, and future. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2003 August 19; 100(17): 9997–10001.
• And finally, the wonderful Bad Air: Malaria in Africa Blog, with links and art from 2006.

This one image sums up the — still — late Omar Bongo Ondimba better than any words could. If you want to see where the postcolonials learned their tricks, look to their models. Omar Bongo (née Albert-Bernard Bongo) was French through and through, like Mitterrand with a sense of style, or like a shorter Félix Houphouët-Boigny with more oil and a better car.

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Adding to the “everything the press tells you is a lie” file, here a a couple of articles of the (literally) criminal attacks on civilians in Gaza. First, despite the byline, this article on the “siege on Gaza” was written by Sara Roy before the recent Israeli bombing campaign, and right dates the siege from November 5, when the government of Israel cut off the last remaining food going into the tiny Palestinian territory.  Note: if you put a wall around a city, destroy the little farmland on its outskirts, and ban all trade in and out for 30 years, people become rather dependent on food aid.

By the way, that image to the left is a World Food Program map of Food insecurity in the Gaza Strip (2004).  The wee yellow bit — showing relative food security — was where there had been an Israeli settlement.  Things look much worse today.

If you put people behind walls, cut off their access to the outside world and then cut off their food for two months, I can’t think of a word other than genocide to describe the situation.  Now I can see folks who are perhaps rightly attached to Israel as a haven in the face of 2000 years of oppression and genocide blowing a gasket.  But I just said what everyone will be saying in the history books.  It’s well past time you realize that you’re not doing the Jewish people any favors by supporting a government and military that murders civilians and steals their land.  (And no, appeals to G_d don’t count.  Otherwise I’d be paying rent to the Mohawks, and I’d start a religion which promised me Aruba.  That’s not how adults get along)

Lotsa good people in Tel Aviv understand this (see reports on the anti-war demos there this week) so why otherwise good people in Brooklyn have trouble with it is beyond me.

Further, the governments of Israel has maintained a two pronged policy since 1947: establish facts on the ground by occupying land and make sure there is no Palestinian opposition.

The first is done with settlements and walls and “Military zones” and “national parks” and “buffer zones” and the occasional, random killing of people (see Hebron last month).  The second is done by making sure there is no Palestinian leadership that anyone would want to share a cubical with.  First, the Israelis did this by deporting people.  Second, they used to say “there’s no such thing as a Palestinian.  They’re Arabs making up a national identity because they hate Jews” I remember having government representatives tell me this with a straight face in the 1980s. They also used to say that “Arabs, because they are not as culturally advanced as Westerners, have no sense of national identity, but those in the Territories are being used as fodder by the King of Jordan to expand his territory.”  Why don’t they say this anymore? Because they got some new information and admitted an honest mistake? Or because the government and settlers don’t actually believe ANYTHING they tell the press or even the Israeli center left.  They KNOW this is a game of biding time, and they’d tell you Palestinians have gills and therefore are only occupying any dry land at all out of spite if they thought you would buy it.

But part of this process of ensuring that “there is no partner for peace” in more germane here.  The Israeli government funded (the then tiny, and even then evil) Hamas in the late 1970s and 1980s to really stick it to the PLO who were starting to look more acceptable when they stopped shooting athletes and hijacking airliners.  At the same time, the Israeli government had a policy of rounding up and expelling non-violent secular activists.  There was a whole Ghandian passive resistance group in the West Bank in the 1970s.  What happened to them?  Likud had them rounded up and deported, while releasing the founder of Hamas after serving one year of a life sentence for murder. Even Ehud Olmert was quoted in the Jerusalem Post last year saying: “Netanyahu established Hamas, gave it life, freed Sheikh Yassin and gave him the opportunity to blossom”.

So what is going on now is no “crisis” from the government of Israel’s point of view. Headlines in the US press like “Israel seeks to change rules of the game with Gaza assault” are profoundly ignorant.  This is standard operation procedure.  And until the US and the rest of the world tells Israel that their support is dependent upon the Israeli government immediately accepting the pre 1967 borders (no exceptions), this will go on and on and on and on.

• Reuters/Global Voices Blog roundup from Palestine: “In Gaza it’s 9/11 every hour, every minute, everywhere”
• If Gaza falls . . . Sara Roy (London Review of Books)
• “Hamas is a creation of Mossad (English translation)“   , L’Humanité (Summer 2002).; French original version: “Hamas, le produit du Mossad”, L’Humanité (December 14, 2001).
• The Tel Aviv Anti-War Demonstration.  Adam Keller,  The Other Israel, December-2008–January-2009 issue
• Not their war: Israeli media coverage of the Gaza onslaught has largely ignored the protests by peace activists.
  Chris Dalby. guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 31 December 2008
• Olmert, Netanyahu clash over Hamas and Golan Heights. SHEERA CLAIRE FRENKEL. Jerusalem Post, Feb 13, 2007
• Situation Map-Gaza Crisis. 31 Dec 2008. Source: UNOSAT

That the western press is unanimous in it’s explanation of the crash and burn which is 2000′s Zimbabwe should give you pause.

Mahmood Mamdani, Africanist and Anthropologist at Columbia, and author of 1996′s Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism (which I recommend), thinks we don’t know enough to explain Zimbabwe so easily. If we did, we’d see this isn’t about a dying dictatorship, its about a dying dictatorship being resuscitated by riding the first crashing waves of an economic storm brewing since the end of colonialism in Southern Africa. I think he’s right.

What follows is essentially a potted political history of post Rhodesian War Zimbabwe in which farmers without land are the blind thrashing giant on center stage. The characters you may know from news reports are on the sidelines here: prodding, beating back, or doing battle with this desperate, suffering mass. No one is really fighting for him, but when foes are pushed in his way, things get well and truly broken.

Or else this is a guide on how not to recover from colonialism. Former British Minister Claire Short is quoted in this piece saying since her family was Irish, the government she represented in the 1990s no longer had any responsibility to continue to fund fixing the land mess they made in colonial southern Africa. “We were the colonized, not the colonizers” could be the cry of every carrier of Liberal Guilt when they actually have to open their wallet.

Short recap: at independence large farmers (mostly white) owned all the decent land, as the colonialists took it and shuffled Africans off to bush (the Shona) and industry or mines (the Ndebele), and a few of each to cities. The British guaranteed peace by agreeing to fund slow land transfers, but because there was no compulsion to sell, nothing ever happened. Mugabe and Zanu-PF maintained single party rule the same way the colonialists did: played to their ethnic base (rural Shona), and to their true believers they gave praise rather than help (the war veterans, never given land or jobs got medals). In the 1990s Structural Adjustment crushed what favors Zanu-PF could give and drought started starving people clinging onto the desert reservations assigned by the colonialists. Business leaders, rural and urban poor, Industrial trade unions, all began to demand something, finally, to live on. The British pulled the funding for land purchases. The international community demanded greater austerity, in line with their economic dogma. When the rural poor started taking land, Zanu-PF did what it always did: it kicked them out and gave the land back to the rich. But the west now EXPECTED rather than rewarded this, and Mugabe came up with a gamble: let people keep the land they take. Recent scholarship is challenging the picture of forced redistribution from above, and it looks like the initiative was from below, with Zanu running to catch up. With something to give, Mugabe could finally not just placate his political enemies but crush them. The reaction of the West in trying to depose Mugabe have locked Zanu and the West in a death grip, and its everyone else who’s dying.

But the worst part may be yet to come. If the colonial powers and the world’s rich won’t fix the land mess they’ve created in southern Africa, South Africa and its neighbors could be next.

Mamdani sums up:

The experience of land reform in Zimbabwe has set alarm bells ringing in South Africa and all the former settler colonies where land shortage is still an issue. In South Africa especially, the upheaval and bitterness felt in Zimbabwe seems to suggest that the ‘Malaysian path’ to peaceful redistribution and development is not inevitable.

In 2007, SADC called for an end to sanctions against Zimbabwe and international support for a post-land-reform recovery programme, but earlier this year Western countries brought their influence to bear on key SADC members – Botswana and Zambia – to split the organisation. Ian Khama, the president of Botswana, went so far as to announce publicly that he would not recognise the results of the 2008 elections. The pressure on SADC came not only from Western countries, but from trade-union movements in the region, in particular Cosatu of South Africa, which has strong links with the ZCTU. Here is another striking aspect of the current Zimbabwe crisis: it is not just Western and pro- Western governments that have joined the sanctions regime, but many activists and intellectuals, for the most part progressives, have aligned themselves with distant or long-standing enemies in an effort to dislodge an authoritarian government clinging to power on the basis of historic grievances about the colonial theft of land. Symbolic of this was the refusal by Cosatu-affiliated unions to unload a cargo of Chinese arms destined for Zimbabwe when the An Yue Jiang sailed into Durban in April.

The arguments, which are not new, turn on questions of nationalism and democracy, pitting champions of national sovereignty and state nationalism against advocates of civil society and internationalism. One group accuses the other of authoritarianism and self-righteous intolerance; it replies that its critics are wallowing in donor largesse. Nationalists speak of a historical racism that has merely migrated from government to civil society with the end of colonial rule, while civil society activists speak of an ‘exhausted’ nationalism, determined to feed on old injustices. This fierce disagreement is symptomatic of the deep divide between urban and rural Zimbabwe. Nationalists have been able to withstand civil society-based opposition, reinforced by Western sanctions, because they are supported by large numbers of peasants. The tussle between these groups has even greater poignancy in former settler colonies than it had a generation earlier in former colonies north of the Limpopo, for the simple reason that the central legacy of settler colonialism – the land question – remained unresolved and explosive after independence. Southern African leaders have tried, with some success, to put out the fires in Zimbabwe before they spread beyond its borders. It is worth noting that the agreement between Zanu-PF and the MDC signed in September and brokered by Mbeki accepts land redistribution as irreversible and registers disagreement only over how it was carried out; it also holds Britain responsible for compensating white farmers. In the wake of Mbeki’s resignation as president of South Africa it is vital that this agreement remains in place. Few doubt that this is the hour of reckoning for former settler colonies. The increasing number of land invasions in KwaZulu Natal, and the violence that has accompanied them, indicate that the clock is ticking.

Mahmood Mamdani: Lessons of Zimbabwe. LRB, 4 December 2008

Neal Ascherson (of whom I’m unexplainably always somewhat wary) has a thoughtful — and thought provoking for those of us trapped in the US rah-rah news bubble — essay on Abkhazia in the London Review of Books. In the capitol of what the we reflexively (even on the left) call a “Georgian breakaway region” during the August Russian–Georgian War, Ascherson makes a case from a subtly Abkhaz perspective. This is something we are not allowed to see often, and while both sides nationalist propaganda should be named and shamed, the description this article gives of Abkhaz and Georgia as trapped in a great powers game and at the sharp edge of national mythology, rings very true.

The fangs of this trap are Georgia’s claims to ‘sovereign territorial integrity’, the flat refusal to accept the loss of South Ossetia and Abkhazia which is so eagerly endorsed by European governments and by the United States. But after the disaster of last August (the latest of at least three Georgian efforts to reassert this ‘integrity’ by armed force), three things should have become obvious. The first is that ‘reunification’ cannot possibly succeed in mere military terms. The second is that such attempts achieve precisely what they are supposed to prevent: they actually reduce the independence of Georgia, by increasing Russia’s capacity to threaten and blackmail the Georgian government. The third is that by encouraging Georgia to stick to impossible frontier claims, the West – America, above all – is ensuring that Georgia will remain its helpless client, unable to defuse its own confrontation with Russia and thus ever more reliant on American military, economic and diplomatic patronage.

Plus, we get an example of the word “farouche” used in a sentence. The cats in my backyard are farouche. Wild, a little fierce, a little skittish, a bit ignorant (or even dense), very unpolished, but with an undeniable charm. Especially Steve.

Neal Ascherson: A Chance to Join the World. LRB, 4 December 2008

Written interviews from the 1960s with the WWI German army doctor who saved Hitler’s life, reveal he really did lose a ball at the Somme, due to a wound.  The doctor, Johan Jambor,  recalled ” They called him the ‘Screamer’. He was very noisy. Hitler was screaming ‘help, help’.”

The Telegraph (blech) goes on to remind us of the 1940s ditty: “Hitler has only got one ball, the other is in the Albert Hall.”, and it’s common — now conclusively incorrect — variant:

“Göring has only got one ball, Hitler’s [are] so very small, Himmler’s so very similar, And Goebbels has no balls at all.”