ladies and gents, djimon hounsou

With an excellent primer written by Binyavanga Wainaina (a really good writer and journalist) on how NOT to write about Africa (which BTW is not a country).

Quiet on the set…. a-a-a-and action!

an evening with ward churchill

 

Ward Churchill shortly after winning his wrongful dismissal court case

This will be a long post. It began Thursday afternoon, but could only be posted today because (as we all know from experience) life intervenes. I apologize in advance for any mistakes or fudging of the material for whatever reason.

 

——-

There are about 450 people, maybe more, sitting in a large lecture hall in the old Concordia building in downtown Montreal. It’s the same building that black activists and students occupied in the ’60s, back when it was Sir George Williams University. They awakened in some Canadians, if only for a while, concern over segregation, the civil rights movement, black consciousness. That keen awareness faded because it was easy for people here to see those issues as someone else’s problems.

We’re there to watch a film entitled American Outrage about Mary and Carrie, the Dann sisters of northern Nevada. They’re Western Shoshone. They’ve been locked in a battle with the United States Government for the past forty years. The film reminds us that the battles haven’t only been legal. 

The U.S. Bureau of Land Management (BLM), acting on instructions from the Bureau of Indian Affairs, the Attorney General’s office and the Department of Justice in Washington, D.C., has engaged in threats, physical intimidation, arbitrary arrest. Officials have invaded (there’s no other word that fits) the Dann ranch and those of other Western Shoshone with helicopters in the air and heavily-armed officers on the ground to rustle their horses and cattle, or stampede the herds off grazing lands. The film makes it clear that someone, or something, wants the Shoshone people off their lands.

The U.S. Government argues that a treaty signed in the 1800s was nullified “by steady encroachment,” a non-existent legal concept the Dann’s lawyer tells us is bullshit. The Federal Government also charges the Dann with “unpaid grazing fees” on “unoccupied federal lands” to the tune of $5-million. These are fees, the Danns say, for using their own land, Western Shoshone territory. Yet, U.S courts have backed up the U.S. position to the consternation of the United Nations’ Committee for the Elimination of Racism and Discrimination. CERD has investigated and informed the U.S. that it has violated the rights of the Western Shoshone and it wants answers. 

That was two years ago. Since then, the U.S. has ignored the CERD finding. Mary Dann has died; she was in her 80s. The U.S. decided to explode a nuclear device on the lands of the Western Shoshone and render it useless to anyone. Anyone, that is, except the huge, international gold mining conglomerates that the film’s producers tell us have been behind the decades-old campaign to displace the Western Shoshone all along. A victory is won though when the government cancelled that A-bomb explosion in the face of growing opposition across the country.

The audience is primed by the time Churchill takes the stage. He’s taller than I pictured. Trademark jeans, leather jacket, and neck-length hair. I expect a high-pitched, strident voice for some reason. He delivers a low, almost mumbling rumble with occasional humour and irony. He picks up on the general theme of righteous anger against racism, colonialism and evil or corrupt governments despite arriving near the end of the film. He fumbles around at first, then picks up.

He compliments and condemns at once. He speaks of the “legitimate aspirations to liberation” of Indigenous peoples across the Americas. Not your fault, he says to the audience, because… “Most people don’t choose to be complicit in genocide. Most people don’t choose to participate in or condone genocide.” Yet they do, he implies, by inaction or sitting by and doing nothing. They allow it to happen nonetheless. Genocide has been committed and is being committed, Churchill tells the audience. That was the message in the film: colonialism is still here, in so-called post-colonial America.

Churchill says cultural assimilation has been and still is the aim of today’s forms of internal colonialism throughout the Americas.

“The aim is to confuse Indigenous peoples of their tribal identities so they lose the ability to define themselves. Eventually, they will not be defined. They lose all sense of their own tribal identity. Indigenous people will then be indistinguishable from anyone else. When that takes place, colonialism will have accomplished what it set out to do.”

He reminds the audience of the international definition of cultural genocide. “It isn’t the eradication of a single person or individual. You need to eradicate the group. What do you call it when the group’s ability to define themselves no longer exists? When the group no longer has its tribal identity? I call that cultural genocide, and that is exactly what is going on today in the Americas, and elsewhere in the world.”

“I’m not going to differentiate between one genocide going on in the world or another,” he continues. “I’m not going to compare genocides. You know, Auschwitz versus smallpox. I’m not going to argue about the scale of one or another; this one is bigger or worse than that one. I’m not going to argue about the scale, or the method of delivery, or whether this method was more efficient than some other method or way of measuring. I just want to make clear that it genocide is going on today, and we all know it.” 

Churchill was fired a couple of years ago from his teaching job at Colorado University. He had written an essay years earlier about the terrorist attacks that brought down the Twin Towers at the World Trade Center in New York City in September, 2001. He tied the terrorist attacks on 9/11 to U.S. foreign policy. “The chickens had come home to roost,” he told the audience in Montreal.

Churchill has recently won a wrongful dismissal lawsuit he filed against CU. The reason, according to CU, was Churchill’s less than rigorous research methods and plagiarism. Churchill won his case, and a $1 award for damages (he asked for $1-million), because he argued, and the judge agreed, that the real reason was political pressure applied on the university to get rid of Churchill for that article he wrote. This Montreal audience has obviously followed the case. They applauded when Churchill summarized his firing, the court fight, and the judgement (although no mention of the symbolic $1 damages award). 

There are several perspectives on Churchill, who has written several books mainly on U.S. Indian affairs policies, but some touching on topics such as colonialism and post-colonialism in Africa or India. For example, some Native Americans have attacked Churchill as a wannabe, a white man in buckskin. Read more here, and here, and here. <all links to Indianz.com with links to the original stories> 

I had to leave early so I didn’t hear the rest of Churchill’s presentation or the Q&As that followed. However, two things, a quote from Churchill, followed by a comment from a Mohawk who attended and left early as well:

“There are some who ask how can this (cultural genocide) be legal in the U.S., or in Canada for that matter? Well, it was made legal. They made laws to make these things legal. Laws existed to further these policies and make these actions by the state legal. Remember that Hitler’s Germany had laws too. The [NAZI] state enacted laws and acted legally when it committed its genocide. Just because it had laws making everything legal did not make it right. It wasn’t.”

“I guess it’s important for people in there (the auditorium) to hear what he has to say, but I’ve heard it all before. I know this stuff. We learned it the hard way or at home. For a lot of them, it’s important to know what their government does in their name.”

[END]

forks in the road

You may have heard that a peace conference in South Africa had to be cancelled after the ANC government refused a visa for the Dalai Lama, making it impossible for him to attend. Noble Peace Prize laureates such as former Archbishop Desmond Tutu stood on principle with with their fellow laureate, unlike the ANC, and refused to attend the conference without him. A lesson, an example, for other countries in Africa, a stern warning from China. But also another lesson for me. 

I have learned so much from South Africans – about their country certainly, but also about  Canada and its Indian policies, its system of internal colonialism. So many of my own illusions and misguided hopes have been shredded by clear visioned, straight-talking South Africans who have helped me see true evil in all its ugliness. They ripped veils of self-delusion from my eyes. I can no longer look at the countries that I call home the same way anymore.

Why my interest or concern for the Dalai Lama, for South Africa, for Canada? Read this and perhaps you’ll understand.

South Africa had a choice. It could have been a shining light for human rights and democracy for all of Africa and even the world, but it seems to be heading down a different road these days, mere weeks before national elections. It seems to be heading for the “big man” form of governance like so many failures on the continent and away from the original intent of 1994.

Mandela’s dream of a “rainbow nation,” the example he set by stepping down after one term in office, his commitment to protecting and abiding by a constitution that put to shame those of many other countries, including Canada’s. It’s been only 15 years since those first elections that saw the old regime fall, and the new one with Mandela replace it. 

Only, the African National Congress wasn’t supposed to replace the old regime of the National Party. The explicit promise to South Africans, and the implied promise to millions of others around the world who worked to see that first truly democratic election day take place, was that the old regime would be dismantled. Nobody, except perhaps the most cynical of ANC insiders, wanted to see the old system that protected the elite, privileged few subverted and adapted to suit a new set of masters.

The vast majority of people across South Africa actually believed that a better, more equal and fair nation would emerge afterward. They spilled their own blood to topple the apartheid regime, and spilled their guts to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission afterward. They did so with the hope that their children could inherit a country that people like Mandela, and Tutu, and Mama Sarah could be proud of.

I worry now because I’m afraid that Canadians (at least some of their leaders) are not learning how to avoid past mistakes that resulted in massive violations of human rights, but are learning from South Africa’s example how to smother them with ever more efficiency.

On this end, consider Canada’s on-going refusal to recognize international covenants on Indigenous rights, its denial of humans rights of Indigenous peoples within Canada, and the refusal by Canadian governments’ to honour even its modern treaties, to say nothing of its historic ones. All the while, Canadian politicians travel the world bragging how it is improving the lives of Indigenous peoples, in effect lying to the world.

South Africa is still teaching me. Still reminding me to see through the illusions and lies. Sometimes, though, I wish it didn’t have to anymore.

nooo…. it can’t be

But it is. So many wasted years of self-abuse and at great cost… only to find out that maybe I wasn’t seeing things after all. (sigh)

transports me

I was trying to find some filters and plug-ins for Photoshop when I ran across this site and some amazing photos of Khayalitsha township in South Africa. I was lucky enough to meet a couple of the Grandmothers Against Poverty and Aids (GAPA) during my last visit to Cape Town last year. So I was touched, amazed, moved by the picture in one of the galleries on this site. Hope you are too.

if it wasn’t so sad, it’d be laughable

President Robert (Mad Bob) Mugabe has declared that there is no longer an epidemic of cholera in Zimbabwe. In MugabeWorld, the UN and Britain had invented a health and humanitarian crisis with thousands of people infected, dead or dying as an excuse to invade this pearl of Africa.

mad bob mugabe

I worked with a journalism trainer from Zimbabwe a few years back. When I was in South Africa this past summer, I asked around for him. I wanted to know how he was doing. I knew he had gone back to Harare long before the last elections because he felt strongly that the story of Robert Mugabe’s descent into madness had to be told before he took the country down with him. Too late, both for my question and for Zimbabwe. My friend has not been heard of in quite some time. Zimbabwe is already trapped between a madman and the international community’s refusal to intervene.

You don’t need a degree in political science or psychology to make the assessment. It’s clear – to all – that Zimbabwe has for decades been in the grip of a brutal dictator with a slim grasp on sanity. After taking power 28 years ago (1980) from the white-led government of Ian Smith, as Prime Minister for about 6 years then taking and holding onto power as President ever since, Mad Bob has shown a brutish side that many ignored or overlooked. According to friends from Zim, one Ndebele and one white, foreign nations still make excuses to forgive one idiotic, disasterous, destructive move after another.

There were two particularly disastrous decisions in recent years that should have finally provoked the international community to act, but didn’t. One was Mugabe’s decision to take over farms run by whites and hand the land over to his ruling party’s cronies. Within a year, the former breadbasket of Africa became the litter case of Africa with widespread food shortages and the collapse of the economy. Then there was Mugabe’s decision to allow his generals to get involved in Africa’s “world war;” one that saw Mobutu toppled in Zaire and Kabila take over as President of the Democratic Republic of Congo. At one point, the armed forces of 11 African nations were involved in this war, dicing up the former Zaire with the resultant raping, pillaging, killing.  More than 5 million people have died in these conflicts, but the generals profited from the spoils in mining and logging concessions with foreign conglomerates.

Today, South Africa still holds Mugabe in power despite the immense suffering of people in Zimbabwe. More than 5 million people have fled Zim for South Africa to escape his brutal rule, to seek a future where none existed back home. Nearly one-third the total population of Zimbabwe lives in exile. Despite riots in June across South Africa against so-called “foreigners,” pleas from the MDC opposition in Zimbabwe and international aid and human rights organizations, as well as people like Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu, the ANC government of Thabo Mbeki and now of Kgalema Motlanthe propped up the Mugabe regime.

A cholera epidemic is now spreading in a country that once boasted a safe water system throughout most of the country. But it has fallen into disrepair, the people who ran the system have left, the government is too poor to fix the water treatment system, so people drink what they must. They fall ill and die because there are few doctors, no medicines, no running clinics or hospitals. International aid and human rights organizations are again calling for emergency intervention to avert an even bigger human disaster. But this is the reaction from Mugabe and his government through Sikhanyiso Ndlovu, Zimbabwe’s information minister:

The West is seeking to use the window of opportunity provided by the disaster to justify military intervention

This madman must go. Now!

human baggage, human bondage

My dinnermates wanted to know more about INPUT, the international public television conference held early May in Johannesburg, and what I did, saw, heard there. I mentioned a workshop organized by Sylvia Vollenhoven about slavery called “The Human Bondage Project.” Sylvia thinks huge, and plans a global examination about the basis of historic forms of slavery and its contemporary effects upon the world.

I mentioned some of the comments from the mostly African audience. One man rose to tell our shocked group that he had been bought and sold nine times as a farm worker in South Africa. He was not an ancient man. His comments sparked others to insist that the Project, therefore, must be “an African project, with African stories and only African perspectives.” I then told my tablemates that I made a contribution to the workshop, a confession really, to show that slavery must be a truly global story.

I told the audience that I came from a “people who practised slavery.” I explained that my Kanienke:haka (Mohawk) nation waged wars for territory, defence, domination, or trade. In the process, my people took male, female and child captives as slaves. In this way we replenished the genetic pool, learned about other groups and societies, extended our diplomatic relations far beyond our national boundaries, and through work and intelligence our slaves helped us establish the Mohawk nation as a dominant military and trading society in eastern North America.

“They (the slaves) could become full citizens of the Mohawk nation,” I explained, “if they learned our language, adopted our customs, followed our laws, accepted our religion and spiritual beliefs. We absorbed or assimilated them into our people. Some became leaders of our people, valued for their knowledge of other languages, laws and customs.” I explained that this was not a one-way street because other nations took Mohawks and others as slaves too.

“What I didn’t tell that audience in South Africa, and Sylvia wished I had, was that we also took a lot of Dutch, French and English as slaves. Very often, they did not want to return to their own people,” I said, “especially many of the female slaves. They had more rights and status in Mohawk society than they would ever enjoy in their own European societies.”

It is a fact that most European captives preferred to remain with their Indigenous American owners. I mentioned the on-going controversies with the Cherokee Nation’s attempt to deny citizenship to the Freedmen. The Freedmen are former slaves who decided to stay with the Cherokee after the U.S. Civil War. The Freedmen chose to endure the death march called the Trail of Tears along with the Cherokee; an ethnic cleansing carried out by the U.S. Army after President Andrew Jackson ordered the removal at gun-point of Native Americans east of the Mississippi River to “Indian country” in the Oklahomas.

With our little group was a CBC editor and my former producer in radio. She sat there muttering almost chant-like throughout: “Slavery is bad. It is never good.”

Now, this wasn’t a discussion about the merits for or against slavery. It was an attempt to explain that historically, slavery was never a simple matter. Even today, discussion about slavery cannot be limited to “slavery bad… never good.” It was and is a much more complex subject that goes to the heart of human endeavor; social, political, religious and economic interaction and how societies evolve and grow.

Slavery has many overt and ugly facets, which we rightly condemn. We know that the export of millions of Africans to the Americas and Europe was one of humanities great holocausts. It bled the African continent and robbed its nations of almost any chance of social, cultural or economic stability even to this day. Slavery also has many not-so-obvious and even benign forms of human bondage that occur in every society.

For example, a few years ago, an advocate against child sexual exploitation named Cherry Kingley blew me away as she described the legalized and licenced operations that make such exploitation possible and even profitable. We permit pimps in their various forms to own male and female, adult and child sex slaves. Hotel, motel and bar managers know what’s really going on in those rented rooms of theirs. So do taxi drivers who transport johns to and from these establishments, often acting as tour guides for the sexual predator. Except for the pimps, all are legally licenced by elected city councils. Those sitting on city and town councils are neither stupid nor ignorant about the part they play in this trade. This is but one example where the supposedly moral and upright citizenry meet and collaborate with the ugly underworld in an ages-old dance in social commerce.

What are sweat shops in Toronto or Montreal if not slave shops? Aren’t migrant farm workers in the cabbage fields of southern Quebec not a part of an agricultural and economic slave trade? What are one-company or one-industry towns, if the inhabitants have little or no other choice for employment. Why is it that nearly every mine, drilling or logging operation in northern Canada has its own comfort girls made available for the use of workers?

It is not a simple matter, as my former producer would have it, of drawing a line in the sand with those on one side instantly and unreservedly evil while on the other is the pristine good. To me, that is absolute hypocrisy; turning a blind eye to the various forms of human bondage that occur in everyday life in Canada and around the world, pretending it doesn’t exist, or condemning the reality of other peoples lives.

A man in Indonesia takes money to feed his large, starving family in exchange for one of his daughters to serve a family in Malaysia. She will likely end up a prostitute in Thailand. A young Cree boy his early teens in north end Winnipeg signs up with an escort agency because he needs the money to survive. It isn’t right. But these types of transactions take place everyday. It is reality.

In my opinion, my former producer refused to accept that the world is a complicated place; that every society and group has practised obvious and not-so-obvious forms of slavery in the past and continue to do so today. To her, the world is reduced into those two simple phrases, “slavery bad… never good.” By refusing to consider degrees of human bondage, other perspectives, other realities, my former producer was imposing her own morals, values, and her situation upon everyone else. She set a standard on morality using her own life as the yardstick by which others will be judged.

When Winnie speaks…

…as the voice of reason and sanity in South Africa on violence in the townships… Well, you can just fill in the blanks all by yer lonesome. Cuz I dun’t want no soccer club coming after me. I’m a foreign devil, alright. And that makes me fair game in these here neck of the woods. So I’ll just mosey on over to the editorial and comment pages at the Mail & Guardian, one of the best English-language newspapers here abouts.

If you go there, check out the Winnie Madikizela-Mandela interview, the Drew Forrest commentary (really great analysis on why President Thabo Mbeki is such a dud, and why the ANC and every newspaper in the country wants him gone asap).

“zenophobia”

I read a column by Jonathan Jensen in the Times (of Joburg) entitled “The Machetes Of Our Minds.” Great title. It’s on “zenophobia,” as Jensen writes on a blackboard in a primary school classroom. The students immediately correct his spelling; it’s spelled with an X. He’s a bit surprised, but only a bit, that these school children know how to spell the word perhaps even better than their parents. Everyone, Jensen writes, has been throwing the word around during the past few weeks.

Jensen is shocked by the killings that have torn apart townships from Joburg to the Cape Flats: “But is it xenophobia?” He notes that everyone is throwing the word around. He also says that he is in no way downplaying the seriousness of the violence. Still, Jensen questions “the lazy tendency to label a complex phenomenon and then satisfy ourselves that we have a neat explanation for an atrocity.”

That was my point in a previous post.

Jensen writes that it is so easy – too easy – for the government and the police to label the violence as “xenophobia” but also to attribute it to a mysterious “third force” that is never identified by them. Few reporters chase them for an explanation for their use of these two terms, except for those from the Mail & Guardian.

In Jensen’s view, the present violence is the result of frustration with long-standing grievances that the poorest in this country have against the ANC government for failing to control immigration, to build new homes and create jobs fast enough for the original residents while at the same time allowing immigrants and refugees to jump queues by taking advantage of corrupt authorities with bribes and pay-offs. Combine all of the above with a long history of violence in this country that has seen 14,000 people killed in the four years from 1990 to 1994, and the ANC’s first term as national government.

During that same period, 22,000 people were injured in the violence, mostly between the ANC and the Inkatha Freedom Party. This is many times more than the total numbers of people killed or injured in all of the violence from the 1960s, when townships exploded in anti-apartheid demonstrations, until 1990 when the ANC and other parties of liberation were unbanned and Mandela and others walked out of prison.

The present violence in South Africa, according to Jensen, may be traced to this long history of violence; violence as a means to an end, as a constant facet of society, as the backdrop to everyday life. Look at the endless taxi wars, the break-ins and armed roberies, the gangs, and much more, he writes.

“We are all traumatised by our violent past; this time it was foreigners, tomorrow it will be someone else.”

“If any evidence was needed that the Truth and Reconciliation Commission failed to deal with national trauma, the events this month were it. It does not matter, therefore, whether you spell the word with a Z or an X, the problem staring all of us in the mirror is not xenophobia.”

I don’t entirely agree with his assessment, but it makes one think about the the link between SA’s violent past and how it has affected so much of the population – of all races. I don’t have the personal experience to refute his argument. I hear similar statements from taxi drivers, although in very different language. It’s his assessment of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which he states has failed to resolve the national trauma as though there were an inherent promise there.

Everyone I’ve discussed the TRC with has said that it accomplished its main goal – helping avoid a civil war and bloodbath on all sides. It was a compromise arrangement, a stop gap, between the former Afrikaner rulers and the incoming coalition of liberationists. The TRC was designed to allow people from one end of the country to the other to express their pain and anguish, to ask for answers (such as where their loved ones might be buried), to permit them to confront their antagonists, to demand the truth about their perpetrators’ crimes from the perpetrators themselves, and thus allow an amnesty – if and only if they told the truth. But it was not about healing the national trauma.

Because its scope and direction was so limited by the two main opponents (Afrikaner and ANC), the SA Truth and Reconciliation Commission was hamstrung from the start; unable to demand answers from international corporations and businesses that propped up the apartheid regimes for deecades, that funded and supported the former SA regime’s destabilization of other countries in southern Africa (and protecting their business interests in the process), that instigated foreign governments to support, train and fund counter-insurgencies in countries such as Namibia, Angola and Mozamibique. So not everyone was compelled to come forward to testify, to answer charges against them, to tell the truth, to seek amnesty.

Some individuals, like those corporations, got off scott-free.

People know that. They also know that some in the ANC got off with their crimes as well. So did those in the Inkatha Freedom party, in particular Manogsuthu Buthelezi and King Goodwill Zwelethini for ther crimes committed in their names or under their direction. That was the compromise. What the TRC could not do was instruct or direct the incoming elite to NOT order that big mansion, those gas-guzziling Mercedes sedans, those expensive Italian suits, to not resemble so very much the pigs in George Orwell’s “Animal Farm.”