Category: Perspective

How Ebola challenges the ‘Africa Rising’ narrative  

A medical worker checks his protective clothing  at an MSF facility in Kailahun, Sierra Leone. (Pic: AFP)
A medical worker checks his protective clothing at an MSF facility in Kailahun, Sierra Leone. (Pic: AFP)

A Cameroonian friend shares a conversation between two of his fellow nationals in an airport. One of them remarks that he is not feeling too well. The immediate, and hysterical, reaction of the other is that he must have Ebola.

“Maybe you’ve been infected with Ebola from those Lagos passengers at the arrival hall,” my friends recounts one of them saying.

On Twitter, a Kenyan user notes that passengers on flights from Entebbe to Nairobi are not being screened for Ebola. The checks are inconsistent, he notes, meaning the disease can be brought in to the nation via Uganda.

Last week, a hoax did the rounds on Whatsapp as Zimbabweans shared a Photoshopped version of a local newspaper with a headline claiming that the country had confirmed its first Ebola patients.

With news that the DRC has reported its first two cases of Ebola, fear and panic is set to deepen if the virus continues to spread outside of west Africa. A meme doing the rounds on social media shows a surge of people running in all directions from a central location with a caption to the effect, “When Pastor says someone in the congregation has Ebola and he’s going to heal them.”

It may all seem a joke, especially for Africans who are geographically distanced from the epidemic’s epicentre, but a scenario as posited in that meme is probably not far from becoming a reality. With inadequate health response mechanisms bedevilling many parts of the continent, death from Ebola remains a real threat. 

But as West African nations seal their borders to protect their nationals, as international airlines abandon routes that ply nations worst affected by the epidemic, and as western nations claim and evacuate their citizens affected by the disease, a larger problem beyond the virality of Ebola – both physical and mediated – is festering.

Over the last few years, meticulous work has gone into crafting the ‘Africa Rising’ narrative; a narrative founded upon the continent’s rising economies (like South Africa and Nigeria), the emergence of tech and innovation (think Kenya) and the growth of a middle class that we might call ‘post-African’; savvy, urban, cosmopolitan with no flies to swat off their faces and no begging bowls in their manicured hands.

In a May editorial, David Brooks of the New York Times wrote about ‘The Real Africa’ wherein he cited various economic measures – trade and mobile phone growth among others – to show why Africa has become “the test case of 21st-century modernity”.

The challenge I have always had with this narrative is that while the statistics do point to a truth, another truth, a truth of lack, still prevails.

Across the different parts of Africa I have had the privilege to visit in the west, east and south of this continent, I have seen the consumerist dream (high-end malls, cars, mansions and general financial exuberance) coexist with abjection, poverty and depleted social services. The rich do exist, but they are not the majority.

In many ways, the spread of Ebola shows up this suitable Africa Rising narrative. It shows hysteria, fear and othering, things which many Africans in poverty already have to live with daily, away from the narratives of luxury. Quite instantly, Ebola has become ‘the great leveller’ among Africans, reperpetuating stereotypes of barbarism and savagery; that Africans eat ‘strange foods’ like fruit bats and bush meat and other ‘filthy creatures’, that we are unclean, diseased and therefore dangerous.

A photograph taken from the window of a bar in Seoul, South Korea, aptly shows how collective and inclusive this othering has become. “We apologize, but due To Ebola virus, we are not accepting Africans at the moment,” the notice reads. The Daily Beast reports that in Italy, some schools have warned that pupils of African origin will require additional health certification before returning to school; something which has not been deemed necessary for white pupils who may have travelled to Africa over the summer vacation.

In palpable ways, Ebola has opened up way for the ‘dark continent’ narrative to re-emerge, if it ever really disappeared. And in its inclusivity, Africa is collapsed into one territory, one country, one race, even if the fatality of Ebola represents about 0.15% of the continent. Through these short-cut understandings emerges a dominant global hysteria that lends itself to racial profiling and generalisations that make me wonder just how far, if at all, the discourse around blackness has progressed. 

But the converse of this argument shows us, as Africans, being complicit in this typecasting in many ways. Ebola is serving to deepen regionalism (west Africa versus the rest of Africa) and the dangerous sort of nationalism that has often led to ineffectual collaboration across the continent; a superiority complex we tend to develop when we buy too deeply into the Africa rising ideology. Therefore, it is a ‘them’ that is diseased, a ‘them’ that must be avoided at all costs. And the great irony of it all is that a few months ago, the continent banded together to support African teams at the World Cup, the majority of them from the region that has since been affected most deeply by Ebola.

As we rail against news channels like CNN getting the geographical locations of Niger and Nigeria wrong, let us not forget the challenges we face beyond the semantics, which I agree are essential to get correct. If Africa – given its wealth of human and natural resources – cannot contain Ebola, then we must sober up and accept that we haven’t risen to where we should be, given the accompanying discourse of booming economies and commodity markets.

The truth, for me, is somewhere between the dichotomies (“rising” and “darkness”) that have been constructed for easy navigation of, and interaction with, Africa. The continent has great promise and developments, but it also has many challenges to overcome. For how do we term it rising if we must constantly fall to our feet in failure to respond to our own problems?

Fungai Machirori is a blogger, editor, poet and researcher. She runs Zimbabwe’s first web-based platform for womenHer Zimbabweand is an advocate for using social media for consciousness-building among Zimbabweans. Connect with her on Twitter

The Mandela story ends where it began

Nelson Mandela. (Pic: AFP)
(Pic: AFP)

The way the Mandela story ended was the greatest comfort I could have ever been given. I could say that his funeral was the greatest gift that could have been given to the people that gave birth to him. It was the greatest tribute to Africa. Something about it was cheeky, it spoke more about the soul of the man who would become famous as the darling of the world. The Mandela who had been sown to everyone else but the Eastern Cape would choose his final resting place to be in the rolling hills of the Eastern Cape. Struggle heroes such as Oliver Tambo, Walter Sisulu and Chris Hani who all hailed from the rural Transkei were buried in Johannesburg.

Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela, that great giant whose Xhosa name is often misunderstood by the international community, was buried in the region where his umbilical cord lies. This man was not like the men in his village who may have only lived in one place their whole lifetime. This man was once sentenced to life in prison far away from his people, where he was never supposed to see the hills on which he once played or walked. As a free man he became president and he was revered the world over. He has seen the most beautiful places and the worst places in the world. He was celebrated and continues to be the most celebrated human being that has ever walked the earth within their lifetime yet, Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela chose Qunu as the place of his final rest. Rolihlahla means “to pull a branch”, which means to cause trouble. African languages revel in idioms and proverbs and his indigenous name is no different. His father named him on purpose. Mandela caused much trouble to the apartheid system until it was brought to an end. As a freed leader Mandela caused trouble with his own people, challenging them to be at peace in a time that was supposed to be marked by bloodshed. In Patricia de Lille’s words: “Many of us believed that we would shoot our way to Pretoria. but he [Mandela] convinced us to talk.”

Mandela famously instructed a heated stadium to throw away their weapons into the sea. He was causing trouble, the kind of trouble that is character-building and takes people to new heights and leads them to realise something greater. Mandela continued to be a trouble maker as president, he infuriated black South Africans by refusing to change the Springbok rugby emblem and by wearing a Springbok jersey at the 1995 World Cup final. That was the kind of trouble that forced South Africans to cross over old barriers and dare to see one another as people who are not playing on opposite sides but as one nation. Mandela was the kind of trouble maker that forced us to face our pain by showing us what is on the other side of the pain if we leave our bitterness behind.

Nelson Mandela, dressed in a number 6 Springbok jersey, celebrates after South Africa beat the All Blacks by 15-12 to win the 1995 Rugby World Cup on June 24 1995. (Pic: madiba.mg.co.za)
Nelson Mandela, dressed in a number 6 Springbok jersey, celebrates after South Africa beat the All Blacks 15-12 to win the 1995 Rugby World Cup on June 24 1995. (Pic: madiba.mg.co.za)

How does this trouble maker end his story? How does he conclude his life? How does he continue to trouble the leaders who succeeded him? While Jacob Zuma’s Nkandla was still at the centre of national scrutiny, Mandela would be buried where the poorest people of the nation live. He would force the nation to look at the forgotten province of the Eastern Cape. He would make it most difficult for our leaders to ignore the state of the rural community in South Africa. He would add further pressure by being so important that all the leading men and women of the world would want the honour of attending his funeral in rural Transkei. He could have chosen to be buried in Johannesburg or a more accessible, developed area – one South Africa could later show off as a famous site, like we did during the 2010 World Cup. That event hardly registered in the Eastern Cape, nothing happens besides poverty in these forgotten hills. Here, in Qunu, Mthatha, former rural Transkei among the forgotten poor, where development has not yet been imagined, Mandela would host one of the largest events of the 21st century. The world would bury its hero. Qunu would be known. Mthatha would be uttered in the powerful offices of every continent and every major nation. East London would be discovered, along with the famous peaceful hills of the rural Eastern Cape and its beautiful wild coast. He would cause trouble by disrupting ordinary rural life with the arrival of the most prestigious world leaders and celebrities, cameras flashing non-stop. Qunu, despite not being built as a world stage, hosted the world’s greatest leader. Which village in the world can share that same story?

I absolutely love how the Mandela story ends… it ends where it began. It ends where economic justice is still waiting and where recognition and acknowledgement of the rural people is still pending. It ends where the battleground of colonialism and apartheid began. It ends there because it has not yet begun until it has been accomplished and completed where it began. It ends where life is romanticised by onlookers and those who live in it are forced to pack up and live in shacks in the cities because of poverty and lack of resources. It ends here, where Mandela chose to be buried among his people.

The coffin of Nelson Mandela is carried on a gun carrier for a traditional burial during his funeral in Qunu on December 15 2013. (Pic: AFP)
The coffin of Nelson Mandela is carried on a gun carrier for a traditional burial during his funeral in Qunu on December 15 2013. (Pic: AFP)

Mandela’s burial place forced the world to look at the seemingly unsophisticated simplicity he came from, the place that most Africans would identify with. He was laid to rest on the hills that taught him the greatest gift his life gave to the world, the power of forgiveness through his ability to preserve the dignity of humanity, even when a human being behaved like an enemy. Here kings, queens and presidents came to behold the humility he came from and returned to. How could such greatness hail from such a place, they must have asked?

The people of the Eastern Cape had to be onlookers as their greatest son was buried. However, they would remain there while the world would leave. They would forever know those rolling hills and have reason to keep looking. This provides all sorts of possibilities. It means that life in the now world-famous Eastern Cape will not remain the same. It indeed cannot.

 Siki Dlanga is a writer and poet. She has published an anthology called Word of Worth. She is passionate about nation building, sits on the South African Christian Leaders Indaba steering committee and is a member of Freedom Mantle. Connect with her on Twitter: @SikiWrites

Africa’s mad and most loved emperor

Chaka

Who doesn’t love a good story about the rise and fall of empires, blended with a spicy bit of romance and the gothic intensity of a mad king?

Chaka, by Lesotho writer Thomas Mofolo, is that kind of novel – a weird and gripping tale about one of the most enigmatic figures in African history.

“I do not believe,” Mofolo writes, “that there was ever a human being whose life was as full of mystery as that of Chaka.” An attempt to capture this mystery led Mofolo to write Chaka in 1910. But his missionary publishers were so freaked out by the novel that they refused to publish it until 1925.

Chaka is the guy who grew up knowing that everyone, except his mother, wanted him dead. Tough luck for a kid born near perfect. Tall, handsome, brave, hardworking, and self-sacrificing, Chaka could not understand why everyone hated him. Like any oppressed soul, Chaka believed that things would change since right and justice was on his side. That illusion faded away when he heard his father order his death even as he stared Chaka in the eye.

Chaka is on the run from assassins when he meets one of the most ruthless witchdoctors that ever graced the pages of an African novel. Isanusi is the guy who makes things happen. He is the magician, the sorcerer, the therapist, the priest, the conman, the strategist, the visionary, the confidante, the doctor, the hit-man, the fixer—the everything man – that every great empire-builder in history has had by his side. The novel is worth reading just to see Isanusi at work.

He’s the one who “inoculates” Chaka with the “medicine of blood.” “If you do not spill blood,” Isanusi explains to Chaka, “it will turn against you and kill you instead. Your sole purpose should be to kill without mercy, and thus clear the path that leads to the glory of your kingship.”

Isanusi turns Chaka into a killing machine. A man who had been hunted all his life had returned to bring the world to its knees.

Mofolo’s novel is a dark, mysterious, and poetic critique of the principle of violence that defines all empires.

By living up to this mandate to kill or be killed, Chaka instituted a political order never before imagined in his part of the world. But the blood on which his beautiful empire is built does not stay still forever. Chaka is eventually consumed by the violence that made him king and lives out the rest of his days in what Wole Soyinka has described as schizophrenia. The story of great emperors gone mad is old and familiar, but Mofolo tells it with all the dark, romantic flair of an African storyteller – sorcery, the supernatural, graphic violence, and tragic love. 

No story about war and empire is complete without a special someone. The love of Chaka’s life is the “amazingly beautiful” Noliwa—the girl with the “light brown complexion like a cannabis seed.” How Chaka screwed things up with such a goddess of a woman is a depressing and perplexing story. It is easily one of the most sublime moments in the history of modern African tragedy.

If Achebe had not happened, Mofolo’s Chaka would have been the Things Fall Apart of our generation. There are novelists in Africa – a multitude of novelists. But there’s only a handful of storytellers. Achebe was one. Mofolo was another.

Anyone who loves a damn good story should partake of Mofolo’s dark and quirky love song to a king who inspired a continent and paid the ultimate price.

Buy Chaka by Thomas Mofolo trans. by Daniel Kunene here.

Brittle Paper is an African literary blog featuring book reviews, news, interviews, original work and in-depth coverage of the African literary scene. It is curated by Ainehi Edoro and was recently named a ‘go-to book blog’ by Publisher’s Weekly.

Chido Govera: Transforming lives in Africa by growing mushrooms

Chido Govera. (Pic: futureofhope.org)
Chido Govera. (Pic: futureofhope.org)

When she was 10 years old, Chido Govera was offered a way out. A relative walked many miles to see her and said: “You know, I see that you’re suffering and I would like to help you. The only way I can help you is my husband has a friend and he’s around 40, he’s been struggling to find someone to marry and he thinks if you marry him, it would be a chance of escaping all this poverty and abuse. So you should come and meet him next Wednesday.”

Other girls in Govera’s position in rural Zimbabwe might have acquiesced. She never knew her father and lost her mother to Aids when she was seven. She was left to care for her grandmother, who was virtually blind, and her five-year-old brother. She would often wake up at 4am, search for firewood, walk at least a mile to fetch water, work in a field, attend school and go to bed hungry. She was also physically abused by members of her extended family.

When it all became too much, aged nine, she dropped out of school, abandoning her mother’s dream for her of boarding school and studying in America. “It was tough,” she recalls. “I remember I cried many days after that and I used to watch other kids going to school that I used to run around with, and it was painful. But it was more painful to go to school and spend the whole time thinking about what’s going to happen when I get home. Getting back home to watch the hungry faces of my granny and little brother. It was unbearable.”

So when next Wednesday came, the young girl with few prospects was expected to meet the man 30 years her senior who would become her husband and provider. “The reason why I was supposed to find it attractive to marry him was because he had two sisters that were going to South Africa to buy clothing and coming back to Zimbabwe.”

She chose a different path: “I did not go because I realised if I got married, then I was leaving my grandmother and my little brother alone and I wouldn’t be able to help them any more.

“When I was eight years old I’d told myself, ‘I want to help other young orphans so they do not have to experience what I was experiencing.’ I thought, ‘If I get married, am I achieving that or not?’ And it was clear that was not the way to go. I didn’t go to meet the guy and my relative told me, ‘I tried to help you, you turned that down and from now on you’re pretty much on your own.'”

Green fingers
Today things looks very different for Chido Govera. At 28 she is a successful farmer, campaigner and educator with her own foundation, The Future of Hope. She has trained nearly 1 000 people in communities in Zimbabwe, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ghana, Cameroon, Tanzania and South Africa. Her work has reached schools and communities in India, Aboriginals in Australia and entrepreneurs in the US and around Europe. The key to this one-woman revolution is mushrooms.

A year after turning down the stranger’s marriage proposal, Govera was among 15 orphan girls in Zimbabwe invited to receive training in mushroom cultivation, supported by the Belgian environmental entrepreneur Gunter Pauli. She had been accustomed to harvesting mushrooms in the bush but this was different: “My grandmother was so knowledgeable that even when she couldn’t see any more she could smell which mushrooms were edible, inedible, poisonous … But to grow them was very strange.”

The group received bags of waste mixed with spores and learned how to manage a mushroom house. In less than a week, mushrooms were growing. When Govera took her first taste of one, it came as a shock. “They were completely different from mushrooms gathered from the forest,” she laughs. “It was a bit like eating a snail. It had sliminess to it and the crunchiness of a snail.”

Soon the group was producing enough to sell, earning money to buy food and pay for the school fees of orphans including Govera’s brother. “You realise that if you can work, you can actually get there step by step, you can put food on your plate,” Govera says. “In this case it was converting waste into food, creating food for the community, but also doing something that no one else in that community was doing. We were unique in that time, doing something that was highly scientific without having studied at all. In my case I’d only done five years of primary-level education. It was like magic.”

The girls’ success made them attractive marriage material and of the 15 taking part, 13 quickly fulfilled society’s expectations by finding husbands. Again, Govera did not. Instead, from the age of 12 to 16, she was to be found in a university laboratory taking advanced studies in what she describes as both the art and science of mushroom cultivation. She continued to hone her expertise during spells in Colombia, Serbia and China.

And in Pauli, she discovered the father figure that had always been missing in her life, most notably when she was being abused and had no one to turn to. “One of my biggest dreams, of course, never having met my father, was to actually have a father.

“The lady who was teaching us in the laboratory sent a message to Gunter Pauli saying, ‘You know what Gunter, we have a girl who’s got green fingers, mushroom fingers, and unlike the others she doesn’t want to get married.’ Then he says, ‘Well, what does she want?’ He was told she needs a father and that’s how he became my daddy.”

‘We are not what happened to us’
As Govera travels the developing world teaching mushroom farming to women and orphans, she is also pioneering new techniques, for example growing mushrooms from coffee grounds for commercial use.

Otherwise she divides her time principally between South Africa and Zimbabwe, a country many still associate with 90-year-old president Robert Mugabe’s authoritarian regime and its ruinous economic policies. “I don’t think I would be doing what I’m doing now in Zimbabwe if I didn’t believe there is a possibility for a change,” she says.

“I strongly believe that, regardless of what is happening in politics – not just in Zimbabwe but in many different parts of the world – if we want to change things, we will need to go to the grassroots and teach them to stand up for themselves, because if we can empower them beyond being a victim of a political situation, then we are making change happen.

“The reason why I go into communities, select groups of young orphans, empower those and bring them back into the communities to inspire change there is because we need to change the way change is viewed. People say politicians or the grownups or the successful ones are going to change things in the country, but I think everyone has a part to contribute.”

Zimbabwe’s politicians are sometimes accused of being imprisoned in the past. This is not something Govera herself could be accused of as she looks back on that 10-year-old who, one Wednesday, decided to take the road less travelled.

“I learned to redefine myself regardless of what happened to me when I was a kid,” she reflects. “I’ve been able to reclaim myself. This is something that’s required for every individual. We are not what happened to us.

“From those experiences there’s some kind of lesson that inspires me to do what I do now, but I’m not back in the moment when I was 10. I’ve dealt with that. I just look at the future with a new hope. I’m 100% sure that I am not going to be one of those women who say, ‘Things are the way they are because I grew up as an orphan.'”

David Smith for the Guardian

Dear Zanu-PF, here’s my application for one of those 2.2 million jobs you promised

Dear post-election Zanu-PF (aka Government of Zimbabwe)

RE: APPLICATION FOR ONE OF 2.2 MILLION JOBS

With reference to your election manifesto, which excited even the MDC-T to splitting point and made me put a cross next to your name on the ballot paper, I hereby apply, publicly, for any one of the 2.2 million jobs you promised in Zim Asset. In case you have forgotten, this is that economic blueprint you came up with in October 2013, which is meant to “to provide an enabling environment for sustainable economic empowerment and social transformation to the people of Zimbabwe”.

July 31 marked exactly one year since I cast my first official ballot in the country’s elections, ending previous attempts at maintaining my political virginity. Now, there is some background I should give you. I do not bet or play the lotto because everything I put my bet on seems to lose. Even when I want my football team to win, I don’t watch the match. That is why I have not been voting all these years. I hated to see what I love losing. But last year, for the first time, I took the risk – and the jinx was broken! You won the election. However, looking back on my country, I’m concerned about whether the jinx was really broken. Could it be that in you winning massively, Zimbabwe actually lost quite a lot?

Forgive my rambling. With so many of my job applications gone unanswered, I do not know if it was my cover letter that failed me, or the comma that was missing from my CV, or if it’s just that none of the 2.2 million jobs you promised are on the market yet. But the issue at stake here is that I am looking for a job, and urgently so, because I am 31 and unmarried and cannot afford to be unemployed. One may ask why I am applying to you. Most of the companies I approached are either already closing down or downsizing staff, and employing me is an unrealistic dream for them. But I know you have 2.2 million jobs that you promised me in 2013, and I have come to claim at least one.

I am one of those “resources that gives Zimbabwe a comparative advantage over regional and other international countries is its economic complexity that includes the strong human resource base, which is an outcome of a deliberate educational policy instituted by the ZANU-PF Government at Independence in 1980.” Unfortunately, I have been trying to make myself a useful resource with little success, hence I’m approaching you so that you can employ me.

I hold a qualification in tourism and hospitality, among other numerous qualifications, and should be glad that tourism is one of your key target economic areas with huge potential. It’s just that I have not seen what you referred to in Zim Asset as “Quick Wins” or “rapid results yielded “in the shortest possible time frame (October 2013 – December 2015)”. Obviously I blame this on the fact that no initiatives have been implemented or “blitz interventions” made since I voted for you. Damn the sanctions, of course. Oh, I had forgotten that there are also sanctions-busting strategies. So damn the inaction. What have you been doing this whole past year?

Secondly, survival has taught me all these other vital skills and given me a great deal of experience, which will account for any gap periods in my CV. Like most others, I am now a serial entrepreneur, sometimes vendor, marketer, social media enthusiast, administrator, occasional job-hunter and writer. So, do not get me into the unemployed-experience-unemployed conundrum. I don’t deserve it, neither do millions other Zimbabweans who have faced desperate situations, including this economy, and lived through it.

And if there are any other things that you deem important which I do not have, such as a driver’s licence and a passport, please remember that I might not have been able to afford the $200+ required to bribe driving inspectors, or had the time to wait in unending queues at the Registrar General’s offices.

And lastly, if it turns out that all the other vacancies have already been filled by the numerous educated but unemployed youths roaming the streets – most of whom are thinking of leaving the country – I would like to become one of the officials in the Office of the President and Cabinet who will “play a leading and co-ordinating role as overseer of the implementation process to ensure attainment of set targets of the Plan.”

At least I know that vacancies still exist in this section of Zim Asset because, with nothing happening, my only guess is that no one is co-ordinating the implementation process of this brilliant document. My claim to employment in this section is backed by my qualification in monitoring and evaluation, and validated testimonies that I am discreet, patriotic and intelligent enough to meet your requirements.

Please note:

  1. Do not take this a joke; I really need a job and so do millions others. And the earlier you make those “blitz interventions” for “Quick Wins”, the better it is for all of us. December 2015 is not far away.
  2. At this point don’t refer me to non-working youth funds. I have tried those before. All I need is a job. A piece of land would be a welcome alternative though.
  3. Please ensure that I get a job in haste before South Africa and its post-election ANC deport the more than 3 million jobless Zimbabweans there back home.
  4. I can attend interviews as fast as the kombi you want to banish without an alternative can take me to the venue.

Regards (because we are compatriots and I deserve better from you),
Lawrence Hoba

 

Lawrence Hoba is an entrepreneur, author and passive politician.  His short stories and poetry have appeared in The Gonjon Pin and Other Stories, Writing Lives, Laughing Now, Warwick Review and Writing Now.  His anthology, The Trek and Other Stories (2009), was nominated for the NAMA in 2010 and went on to win the ZBPA award for Best Literature in English. It tackles the highs and lows of Zimbabwe’s land reform. Connect with him on Twitter: @lawhoba