My Beauty Best Teacher

TMS sits down for a chat with Ory Okolloh to talk about her transformation from young nerd to one of the most effective activists for citizen empowerment to come out of Africa in the past decade.

Upon reviewing the current upheavals in North Africa and elsewhere on the continent, I felt it is necessary for us – African academics, scholars and intellectuals – to take stock and a fresh look at ourselves: What role have we played in advancing the cause of liberty and improving governance in post colonial Africa. Our record is not very good. Sometimes, self-criticism is necessary in order for us to make progress. You do not have to agree with what I am going to say – diversity of opinion is healthy. There have been outstanding individuals among us who risked death to champion the cause of freedom in Africa. However, as a group we have let Africa down badly by not providing intellectual leadership to the democratic struggle.

“He who doesn’t know where he came from doesn’t know where is going,” says an African proverb. We of the intellectual community are lost; we don’t know where we are going. The recent upheavals in Africa caught us completely off guard. We did not see it coming because we were pre-occupied elsewhere. It seems we are way behind the curve, late to the struggle for democracy in Africa and are now only playing “catch-up.”...[continue reading]

Image courtesy of LSE

...one has to consider the cases of many African countries where these institutions were severely compromised during one-party rule.

Such countries have had huge political problems with their democratisation since they have no credible institutions to adjudicate even the simplest of squabbles. In Malawi all political actors have respected the courts and sought to redress their grievances through the court system. Malawi had more litigations going on than the entire SADC region. One can point to some of the abusive aspects of these litigations but all in all they are partly evidence of the faith in our court system.

When Bingu came to power he promised to reverse the creeping trend towards the politicisation of these institutions. He specifically promised to strengthen the meritocratic basis of the civil service. What we are witnessing now is the shredding of the legitimacy of these institutions by politicising them and by implying that their daily management of their affairs depend on “orders from above”. The institutions are now being pitted one against another.

Perhaps you failed to see that all of this, this ad hoc revolution, was simply the beginning of a shift of consciousness. It takes a lot, you should know, to transcribe the language of a dream into the spoken word of reality. True, all dreams are translatable, all dreams are reality. But within the terrain of the dream and the terrain of reality lie shadows.

What you did was tell the shadows you are beginning to reclaim your reality. Do not feel undermined, betrayed, or normal. There is no such thing as normalcy; there is change lurking everywhere and those mountebanks from the other side know it. They have seen the rise of reality; they have seen, yes. And they know that it is only a matter of time before they are overtaken, overridden, outpoured.

We Changed Egypt by Hossam Hassan

The recent popular uprising and resulting democratic revolution in Egypt inspired many people around the world. Many visual artists who’s work focus on the everyday living conditions in transforming societies have actively participated in the historical evens and through their creative work ensured that it was captured for generations to come. One such artist is Hossam Hassan who took to the streets and documented the trying and tense moments of the revolution...[continue reading]

It would be hard to find a better symbol of media repression in Africa than Eskinder Nega. The veteran Ethiopian journalist and dissident blogger has been detained at least seven times by Prime Minister Meles Zenawi’s government over the past two decades, and was put back in jail on September 14, 2011, after he published a column calling for the government to respect freedom of speech and freedom of assembly and to end torture in prisons.

Eskinder Nega (Lennart Kjörling)

Eskinder now faces terrorism charges, and if convicted could face the death sentence. He’s not alone: Ethiopia currently has seven journalists behind bars. More journalists have fled Ethiopia over the past decade than any other country in the world, according to CPJ...[continue reading]

© Jeff Hutchens for the Open Society Institute

Nigerian political analyst and writer Ike Okonta examines the failure of democratic and civic institutions in Nigeria four decades after the end of the bloody civil war in Biafra. As an Open Society Fellow, Okonta, an expert in ethnic identity and resource conflict in West Africa, is looking at the lingering effects of the war and the increase in oil revenues on the formation of the post-war Nigerian state.

...September 2010, international organizations, heads of state, celebrities and specialists gathered to review progress on the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs).As you may know, the MDGs were set in 2000 to achieve eight anti-poverty goals by 2015. In the midst of the coverage of these grand events, high profile attendees wined, dined and debated the relative merits of each MDGs plan, while the actual “poor,” were not invited to these elite events.
Via 2010 from Project Diaspora on Vimeo.
Project Diaspora decided to change perceptions about the poor by building the Villages in Action platform whereby the voices of the poor can be heard. On November 27, 2010, the first conference was held in a village outside Masindi, Uganda. The goal of this one-day conference was to showcase the grassroots efforts driving economic development and improving the lives of the community – all with little or no assistance from international aid organizations...[continue reading]

Scholars have suggested the importance of integrating African democratization process with grassroots institutions for long-term consolidation. However, the major problem remained the inadequacy of secularism in disentangling the religious from the non-religious intertwined in indigenous African institutions. This essay reconsiders the Burckhardtian notion of secularism for a recalibrated definition that embraces a trajectory of transposed values. Debunking the Burckhardtian notion opens up an analytic terrain relegated to the religious. Thus indigenous African religions are re-conceptualized as civic religions to shed light on their public aspects. The essay then identifies collective ceremonies and the attendant secular/civic rituals as the grassroots institutions housed in indigenous African religions. The analysis also locates the disjuncture between independent African states and the grassroots institutions at this level of collective ceremonies, perceived as sacral or irrational. The objective is to harness them as African building blocks for democratic consolidation

Image courtesy of Bongoweekend

African presidents continue to display a preference for pomp and ceremony over practical action. Sata (president of Zambia) suggests an alternative approach — and is backing up his rhetoric with action. On a recent trip to the historic Zambian city of Livingstone, near the border with neighboring Zimbabwe, Sata traveled by public bus to a meeting with president Robert Mugabe — and then afterwards, even more improbably, settled his own hotel bill.

The Democratic Republic of Congo's President, Joseph Kabila, has just perpetrated a massive hoax in order to retain power. Bowing in principle to the Western-driven demands the our famous but nebulous "international community," Kabila has held just held elections, which he would like the world to believe he has won.
The overall tally, 49 percent for the "winner," and 32 percent for the first runner up, had a ring to it that at first glance, at least for the uninitiated, sounded both plausible and competitive, which in such matters usually go hand in hand. The results proclaimed the Congo to be the latest African country to have traveled far away from the bad old past of continental elections, which authoritarian rulers once routinely "won" with upwards of 95 percent of the vote.

Malick Noël Seck, a Senegalese political activist, was arrested on October 10th, 2011, for delivering an open letter to the President of the Constitutional Council stating that the third term candidacy of President Abdoulaye Wade is unconstitutional. He was charged with making death threats against the members of the Constitutional Council and "contempt of the court". The letter contains no death threats. Furthermore, the letter cannot be seen as "contempt of the court," as members of the Constitutional Council are not magistrates of the Senegalese legal or administrative system.

The formation of M23 – a new movement born out of the 23 June protests against President Wade’s proposed constitutional amendments – is the latest result of African democracy at work. Here different (and sometimes opposing) voices join together to create a singular organization for a common cause to protect and promote the constitution and democratic principles. Instead of adhering to rules about what traditional democracy is and what traditional relationships it permits, M23 went back to the basics in defense of the common good, hence bringing together very diverse sections of society.

courtesy of CS Monitor

Its impact has been both immediate – halting the adoption of the proposed amendments in parliament - and there seems to be potential for the development of a longer lasting impression where civil society has a strong voice in the halls of power. However, this phenomenon will be tested in the upcoming 2012 election when the question of whether the movement was the voice of particular interest groups or truly has the peoples' interests at heart will be answered.

Africa is becoming a hotbed for democracy. Freedom House (whose methods I sometimes disagree with, but who offer a global view of political freedoms over a long period of time) identifies three “free” states in West Africa (Ghana, Benin and Mali), and three in southern Africa (South Africa, Botswana and Namibia) as well as three of the small island states. And more than twenty states meet Freedom House’s “partly free” criteria, including powerhouses like Kenya, Nigeria and Senegal. Zambia is listed as partly free, but this year’s successful election might lead to an upgrade. Nigeria, often dismissed as a basket case, had a pretty good election this year as well.

There’s a danger that we miss a major story here: democracy is taking root in Africa and spreading rapidly. Nations like Zambia, which survived autocratic rule and then dominance by one party are now seeing democratic change. It’s important to cover African crises and tragedies, but not at the expense of the hopeful news of democratic success and change.

No one can say what future holds for Zambia under Michael Sata but Zambians can be assured that they have a man in power that majority of them voted for. Banda has shown that he is a true statesman. His loss is not only a victory for Sata, it is also a triumph and a rare moment for African politics and democracy. Let us hope this is not an isolated incident but a sign of maturing democracy...[continue reading]

After publishing Africa Betrayed (1992) and Africa Unchained (2005), intellectual gadfly, Professor George B.N.Ayittey has crafted yet another masterpiece, Defeating Dictators: Fighting Tyranny in Africa and Around the World (2011) in which he adumbrates the deceptive habits of highly defective despotic regimes in Africa and beyond. Ayittey contends that a dictator is a dictator. He further points out that “The only good dictator is a dead one”(218). The crux of the argument in his book is that Africans and other people chaffing under the yoke of despotism should steer clear of confusing ideological with systemic dictatorship—dictatorship that emerges from faulty institutions and systems. Any political system that concentrates power in the hands of one person, he argues, will inevitably degenerate into a dictatorship. The culprit is the system—not ideology or culture...[continue reading]

Are there any connections with the fact that the more feudal a system, the poorer and less educated the majority of people within those systems usually are? Consider this – two of the most feudal institutions in Nigeria – the Sokoto Sultanate and the Borno Emirate have significantly lower western literacy levels than is common. But these examples apart, President Goodluck Jonathan, in his attempt to win the April 2011 elections has inadvertently waddled into a decades old social and political struggle for the soul of the North...[continue reading]

WHEN the Egyptian authorities realised protesters were using the internet to organise themselves in January, they came up with a simple solution: in an instant they disconnected the nation, cutting off anti-government dissidents from an invaluable resource.The outage inspired James Burke and Chris Pinchen – both members of the P2P Foundation - to begin work on the ChokePoint Project. The idea is to compile a real-time interactive map of the entire internet and identify potential choke points – the physical and virtual locations where internet access could be easily compromised – and who has the power to strangle them.

Senegalese rappers and other members of Y'En A Marre  Rebecca Blackwell/Associated Pres

In Senegal, the political mainstream appears stagnant and the musicians anything but, which explains why laid-back musicians with stage names like Fou Malade (“Crazy Sick Guy”) and Thiat (“Junior”) are leading a vigorous demonstration movement against the country’s octogenarian president, who does not want to leave office.
The usual regional trappings of power — a $27 million monumental statue overlooking the capital, a new presidential plane, tinkering with the country’s Constitution — have not gone down well in a poor but proud West African country used to something better. They have led to a season of revolt, on the North African model, in this coastal country, a former French colony.