Open Letter to the Ambassador of the State of Qatar

Superior, Colorado, USA

20 January 2013

Mohamed Bin Abdulla Al-Rumaihi, Ambassador
Embassy of the State of Qatar
2555 M. Street N.W.
Washington, DC 20037-1305

Dear Ambassador,

I write with justice in my head,
I write with all impulse of peace,
In fervent hope of Mohamed
Ibn Al Ajami's release.

Please might we find your magistrate
Well understanding of the fact
That poetry surpasses state,
Liberty trumps Sedition Act.

It will be poets who ensure
The glory of your fine Emir
And even when they do incur
Displeasure, they're his vizier.

I pray you grant your poets space
To work the profit of their mind.
Reconsider this Ajami case,
In which all freedoms are enshrined.

Sincerely,

 

Uche Ogbuji

Mohamed Ibn Al Ajami

[Crossposted]

Black night! Black night!

In the case where fear presses back
Through the air, where the torch has expired
On the orphan river,
In the forest, soulless and tired,
Under the anxious and faded trees,
In the wan woods, squalling trunks
Ululate without respite
Over the accursed tom-toms,
Black night! Black night!

—from "Nuit Noire" by Birago Diop, translated by Uche Ogbuji

This poem is excerpted from Birago Diop's short story "Sarzan", well known among literati with interest in African culture. I can only find it in French online right now, but I first encountered it in the collection Jazz and Palm Wine which my father loved and would sometimes read to the family. The excerpt above is from the very end, and I translated it form the French original:

Dans la case où la peur repasse
Dans l'air où la torche s'éteint,
Sur le fleuve orphelin
Dans la forêt sans âme et lasse
Sous les arbres inquiets et déteints,
Dans les bois obscurcis
Les trompes hurlent, hululent sans merci
Sur les tam-tams maudits,
Nuit noire ! Nuit noire !
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I've watched the "Kony 2012" hype and the subsequent controversy with both amusement and bemusement, thought I've thought whatever comment I might have better kept to myself. I wasn't even paying much attention to the whole affair except for a few nuggets that would strike me, usually from when it was on the news my wife was watching in the other room. The first case was when I believe NBC said they would be sending a crew to Uganda to do some fact-checking on the story. That really annoyed me.
Here is a list just off head:
  • Major unrest in Burkina Faso last year
  • Ethno-religious strife in Nigeria's middle belt
  • Al-Quaeda-inspired terrorism in Nigeria's North
  • The Nigerian fuel subsidy removal unrest
  • An oil spill by Shell almost as bad as the Deepwater Horizon disaster (in terms of environmental impact rather than barrels of oil)
  • South Sudan's independence
  • Eradication of Rhinderpest
  • Famine in East Africa
  • The arrest of Gbagbo in Côte d'Ivoire following the mayhem he caused after elections
  • The election of Ellen Johnson Sirleaf in Liberia
  • One of the most engaging African Cup of Nations competitions in my own memory (OK I had to throw that last bit in there).
So many compelling stories coming out of sub-saharan Africa, and it took a viral Youtube video to get NBC to send a crew to the continent.  Even if you were only interested in Uganda, the non-violent protests led by Besigye against Museveni alone were more newsworthy than "Kony 2012".

Now don't get me wrong. Joseph Kony and the LRA have been shocking and disgusting me for at least fifteen years, and of course I'd love to see him brought to justice, but the problem with Kony 2012 is that it perpetuates the approach of over-hype and lazy hyper-focus on one topic that has characterized so much popular Western attention on the continent. It's "Do they know it's Christmas time at all" all over again, and don't let me start on that unspeakable nonsense.

Anyway another snippet from the "Kony 2012" affair that struck me was the clip of the video's creator I half caught in which he was itching about some U.S. city street in the nude while muttering loudly. It instantly brought back a very powerful reminder of Birago Diop's short story, which Professor Willfried Feuser translated in his collection as "Sarzent the Madman." The "Sarzent" ("sergeant") of the story has returned from his military education in France loudly determined to "civilize" his home village. He becomes possessed by the spirits of his ancestors and goes around raving in poetry. I see the broader lesson of the story about the peril of insincerity couched in self-righteousness, especially when rooted in alien, Western values. That's certainly how the story struck me as a child, and in that wise I find the correspondence to this madness of Jason Russell extremely creepy. A friend of mine mentioned that it's as if the man was stricken by the Igbo deity Agwu Nsi.

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Some of the ravings of Sarzan/Sarzent come from Diop's earlier poetry, including his lovely "Souffles" ("Breaths"):

Écoute plus souvent 
les choses que les êtres. 
La voix du feu s'entend, 
entends la voix de l'eau
écoute dans le vent
le buisson en sanglots.

I found the above video with the poem's recitation. I translate it thusly:

Listen more often
To things than to beings.
The fire's voice is heard,
Hear the voice of the water
Listen in the wind
To the bush a-sobbing.

The Nigerian fuel subsidy quagmire

I caught rumblings of the fuel subsidy removal affair while on my holiday travels, but only in the past few days have I gained a sense of just what a delicate moment in time this is for Nigeria.

Dr. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, for whom I've always expressed much admiration, wasted no time after being installed as Finance Minister and over the past quarter, working tirelessly to convince the Federal Government of Nigeria to eliminate the subsidy on motor fuel forthwith. The subsidy was removed as of the first of this year, triggering immediate protests. This is not the first time the government has tried to eliminate the subsidy, and it has always backed down due to popular response, but this time the government seems determined to hold its ground, and Okonjo-Iweala has been quite tough in defending her position. She points out that Nigeria is in danger of financial meltdown to rival that of Greece because of the unsustainable borrowing, much of which goes straight back out of the country in subsidy payments.

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The protests across Nigeria have looked to build on the extraordinary scope of popular actions in 2011, in which Time Magazine famously dubbed the protester Person of the Year, including the use of social media, where on Twitter they have adopted the hashtag "#OccupyNigeria."  Of course the "Occupy Wall Street" protests that have lent vocabulary to so many subsequent protests were against policies that support the so-called "1%" of people who make fortunes off globalized finance, while most of the U.S. is facing a harsh recession. There were actually plans for similar "Occupy Nigeria" protests even before the motor fuel subsidy removal, but the popular response against the fuel subsidy provided a spark that no protest organizer could possibly pass up.

shepard-fairey-time-magazine-of-the-year-cover-0.jpg

I do think this convergence of events has led to an unfortunate side-effect. Rightly or wrongly "Occupy Nigeria" has become seen as a vehicle for protest against subsidy removal rather than a protest against the corruption and mismanagement that in effect creates Nigeria's version of the "1%." The danger, however, is that I think most commentators would agree that at some point the fuel subsidy does need to be eliminated, and the real problem is not the subsidy elimination but the likelihood that the cash that the government would save thereby would just also be siphoned into the pockets of Nigeria's "1%".

Prof. Adeola Adenikinju of the University of Ibadan has been one of the most sensible commentators on the issue, which should not surprise anyone, as there are fewer more coherent discussions of the fuel subsidy conundrum than his 2009 presentation at OECD's Global Forum on Trade and Climate Change. That presentation, "Energy pricing and subsidy Reforms in Nigeria", should be required reading for anyone pondering these current events. He argues convincingly the economic case for subsidy removal, but he also admits the considerable present obstacles. He concludes:

Nigeria needs to keep to a formula based approach for determining fuel prices in the short term, while expediting actions in respect of putting in place a vibrant domestic refining industry.

This is where I think even the brilliant Okonjo-Iweala has missed the road, and at the same time I think the "Occupy Nigeria" crowd must learn the lesson of the accusations of incoherence and unthinking populism leveled against "Occupy Wall Street." Okonjo-Iweala is all about GDP growth, and that one measure can be a powerful blinder for economists. I remember watching her famous TED talk headlined "Want to help Africa? Do business here" and thinking: "OK I can sympathize with the desire to focus on foreign development as a vehicle for recovery on our continent, but isn't it even more important to focus on domestic industry?"

Why must we slaves to the mechanisms imposed by the IMF and The World Bank when China shows that there is more than one way to turn around an economy? We are coming from a similar historical and demographic place with the immense damage caused by Chairman Mao not so different from that caused by decades of African despots and colonial meddling. Yes, I do realize that the biggest issue with that thinking is that no African nation has the combination of ruthless and effective leadership of Deng Xiaoping. Surely there is a middle path, an African path.

I can hardly think of a more apt fulcrum for weighing out such a middle path than this fuel subsidy crisis. Imagine a timetable that clearly leads up to later subsidy removal through a series of confidence-building measures, some of which Prof. Adeola Adenikinju outlines in his presentation. Even Okonjo-Iweala has been forced to articulate a bit better the material gains to the people she expects from the savings from subsidy removal, mentioning health and social welfare programs, urban mass transit and more, but coming as it has, after the fact of the precipitous subsidy removal decision, this satisfies no one.

Unfortunately present discussion has sometimes broken down into he-said-she-said, for example whether subsidy removal was supposed to wait until April, or claims that Okonjo-Iweala has threatened to resign if any compromise is made on subsidy removal. All this heat without light is not helping matters at all. Even shotgun measures such President Goodluck Jonathan's pledge this morning to slash government salaries by 25% are not enough to grow from this crisis into a pattern of long-term solutions. A continued loss in confidence the current president and his talented Finance Minister could play into the hands of the many darker interests in the nation who have been the main actors in the historical sabotage of Nigeria's welfare. I to truly fear the emergence of some player, perhaps even an agent of the "1%," who claims the populist card against the current government and ends up taking Nigeria even further into the dark ages.

Jonathan and Okonjo-Iweala need to repeat their decisiveness in applying the fuel subsidy removal policy, but this time they must rapidly decide on reform of that policy. They need to articular a clear timetable and plan to tackle corruption, addressing the fact that declared government salaries are a fraction of the mismanagement problem. They need to take firm steps to shore up the domestic, refined petroleum industry. They need to deliver credible assessments of the effectivity of the social welfare institutions that Okonjo-Iweala is promising to support with proceeds from subsidy elimination. A solid, independent advisory panel of the likes of Prof. Adeola Adenikinju and former Petroleum Minister Professor Tam David West, among other specialists, could draw up such a timetable for government approval, acting under the highest standards of transparency.

Would such a course be an easy one? Of course not. But I suspect it would be less difficult than navigating the economic (inflationary pressure) and political (popular revolt) perils of the present course.

Above all, I do hope that the government and its security apparatus sees fit to let the protesters have their say. I'm very troubled by reports of hardships suffered by the protesters, and I hope that we can show the first glimmers of a new, modern Nigeria in the treatment of dissent. President Goodluck Jonathan is no Bashar al-Assad, and shouldn't even take a step in the direction of the Syrian crackdown.  I do find myself hopeful that of all the post-war Nigerian governmental regimes, Jonathan's is the most likely to act with the necessary balance and prudence to turn this crisis around and start on the long, hard road to recovery for our nation.

King David's Nkrumah Salute

The first leader of a newly independent Ghana
Faced many a challenge to visions of utopia;
The vision is based on science and agriculture;
Here come the vultures shitting like pigeons on a sculpture.
Nobody's perfect, yo! he's got faults you can list them...

Dr. Nkrumah's intentions were the best
Why it's all a mess cause we still needed lots of help from the West...

Kennedy and his foreign aid
During the cold war turning Ghana into economic slaves...

Military coup after coup it's appaling
Seventh time a charm: enter Jerry Rawlings...

There once lived a great man with a geat vision, great plan,
A great dreamer determined to realize what he'd seen for Africa
Things fell apart at the seams in Ghana...

We salute ya, we salute ya,
Dr. Kwame Nkrumah
—from "Nkrumah Salute" by King David

My cousin and sound producer extraordinaire released this clear-eyed tribute to the great man who spearheaded the African independence movements of the 50s, including that of Nigeria, whose independence came a few years after Ghana's.  Nkrumah was the father among pan-African visionary leaders from Nyerere to Azikiwe who did succeed in the most visible successes of independence, but whose energy and charisma were not quite enough to counter the complex manipulations engineered by colonial powers within the field of influence of the globally influential cold war poles in Washington and Moscow.

What I like about this Nkrumah salute is that it doesn't shy away from calling out the disaster of Nkrumah's Volta river project, which also pioneered errors repeated across Africa where ambition for foreign exchange and rapid industrialization led governments into economic patterns that extended the hegemony of Western powers while decimating indigenous industries.  These errors led to corruption, which led to erosion of the most important human resources and caused perilous internal strains.  In Ghana the false gold was bauxite, which inspired the Volta river project.  In Nigeria it was and still is petroleum.  Such projects required strong central control, which bred autocracy, in which Nkrumah was also an unfortunate pioneer, and eventually this led to a wave of military coups across Africa, and made it easier for the CIA and KGB to conduct their proxy wears across the continent.

Despite all that we rightly salute Nkrumah.  if these have been harsh lessons for Africans to learn, it has been essential that we learn them ourselves, and Nkrumah led the way to such self-determination.  It is also for us to address the problems over time.  We should be wary of quick fixes.  Everyone salutes Mandela for his greatness, but I'm sure he paid careful attention to his African history, and learned the right lessons.  Even Mandela had his elders, among whom Nkrumah was a leading light.

I've always personally enjoyed the fact that Nkrumah took his pan-Africanism even as far as matters of the heart, marrying an elagent Coptic Egyptian lady Fathia, whom he impressed as a fiery African nationalist in the spirit of Nasser.  The marriage fell apart with the strains of Nkrumah's later years in power and Fathia returned to Cairo even before Nkrumah went into exile in Guinea, but after Fathia's death a few years ago she was flown according to her wishes to be buried beside her husband in Ghana.


ObPoeticReference: 

We are the punch bag of fate
on whom the hands of destiny wearies
and the show of blows gradually lose
their viciousness on our patience
until they become caresses of admiration
and time that heals all wounds
comes with a balm and without tears,
soothes the bruises on our spirits.
—from "Ghana's Philosophy of Survival" by Kwesi Brew, richly discussed in "Poetry as Cultural Memory", by Koranteng Ofosu-Amaah.  It's also well worth reading "Africa, 1966" on the same Weblog.

Labor, industry and negligence

Solvency or luxury 
Or modesty of revenue—
Campaigners seem to want all three 
But most that they can have is two.
—adapted from "The Madison Front" by Uche Ogbuji

The above stanza is the crux of my poem, "The Madison Front," which was posted in Verse Wisconsin this weekend as part of their  "Poems About Wisconsin Protests" series.  It takes a critical look at all sides of the politics and economics of the Madison protests. There's also audio of my reading it, which in some cases will automatically play when you load the site. I'll try to figure out how to record better quality audio next time.

The bottom line is that I think all sides tend to miss the most important point, though no one more than Scott Walker and his supporters.  Gutting union rights won't solve their fiscal problems.  The only things that will are increasing revenue or reducing the overall standards of living to a point neither left nor right would be likely to accept.  This is a fundamental problem throughout the U.S.  Most of the talk about "small government" by folks such as the Tea Party is either vague, or focuses on institutions that offend right-wing social sensibilities and are yet the most infinitesimal fraction of spending.  No one who insists on maintaining current levels of defense spending while sniping at environmental and educational institutions is in the least bit serious about budgets.

At the same time the left has lost its backbone.  Despite steeply declining overall tax rates over the past century, right wing campaigners have succeeded in turning "tax" into a word so dirty even progressives fear to use it.  I personally think it's a good ting that tax rates have declined, but I think it's common sense that there reaches a point where you reach the nerve bundle of the tradeoff in my stanza above.

No one in the U.S. seems to be calling the true debate.  Are we willing to accept being the greatest military power in the world by just a small margin rather than by two or three times, or are we willing to sacrifice our standards of living to levels that would place us wel at the bottom of OECD league tables?  No one seems interested in the latter, and I can understand that.  I enjoy having a high per-capita standard of living.  I think the crux of the debate, then should be in the matter of defense spending versus taxation, but everyone seems terrified to press this point forthrightly.

It's hardly unusual for the U.S. to have arrived in this situation.  It's just the way of power in the world.  As Samuel Johnson says in a famous quote:

There is a general succession of events in which contraries are
produced by periodical vicissitudes; labour and care are rewarded with
success, success produces confidence, confidence relaxes industry, and
negligence ruins that reputation which accuracy had raised.
—from section 21 of The Rambler by Samuel Johnson

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And speaking of The Rambler, my search for the above image of Dr. Johnson (caught possibly in the eyes-open phase of winking and blinking) led me to a Weblog established by a gentleman inspired by the great Doctor's efforts.  I've read a few of the entries and it's got a bit of The Copia about it.  I'm always delighted to find a fellow journeyman.

Aged aged man, old old school

The season turned like the page of a glossy fashion magazine.
In the park the daffodils came up
and in the parking lot, the new car models were on parade.

Sometimes I think that nothing really changes -

The young girls show the latest crop of tummies,
and the new president proves that he's a dummy.
—from "The Change" by Tony Hoagland

Came upon this poem like a doctor's dropsy poster.
In the streets the hot pants glittered
and on the corner pimps color-flagged that ass parade.

Sometimes I dress inane in the outrageous.

Those young girls call in robbers on their dummies
and when I need a rhyme I turn to mummy.
—from "Shitstrum" by Uche Ogbuji

I'll mention that my "Quotīdiē" quotes generally derive from admiration, but now and then I pick them for more negative reasons, such as: "How does such a god-awful poem even draw enough attention to be controversial?  I'm never quite au fait on the poetry scene, but even I heard of the commotion Hoagland's poem made at a recent AWP conference.  A "shitstorm" my friend Wendy termed it.  I read the poem and wondered whether it was a prank by an idle sophomore.  I understand the trend towards plainspoken poetry, though I disagree with it.  I think the language of poetry should be special, almost by definition (the language of Williams and Sandburg is much more special than many of their would-be imitators seem to think.)  But there is plain speaking and there is random collage of the inane.  Hoagland's poem sounds like a found poem from scraps overheard at a grocery store.  I myself am not much for plain speaking, whether in poetry or in everyday conversation.  I revel in words perhaps too much for my own good, so I couldn't do much justice to that aspect of "The Change" in my parody.


After the extraordinary productivity I enjoyed participating in Heather Fowler's poem-a-day project last June, I decided to pay attention to National Poetry Month this year, to the extent of joining the National Poetry Writing Month (NaPoWriMo) tradition.  I considered following prompts, but I couldn't find a prompter of Heather's quality, so I decided to just keep it old school.  Read a lot of poems every day and thus shore up inspiration to write.  The kick-off, of course, is April Fool's Day, so I re-read a few favorite comic poems and parodies, including Lewis Carroll's "The White Knight's Song" (or "Haddock's Eyes" or "The Aged Aged Man" or "Ways and Means" or "A-Sitting On A Gate").

He said "I look for butterflies 
That sleep among the wheat; 
I make them into mutton-pies, 
And sell them in the street. 
I sell them unto men," he said, 
"Who sail on stormy seas; 
And that's the way I get my bread -- 
A trifle, if you please." 

But I was thinking of a plan 
To dye one's whiskers green, 
And always use so large a fan 
That it could not be seen. 
So, having no reply to give 
To what the old man said, 
I cried, "Come, tell me how you live!" 
And thumped him on the head. 

This delight is a spoof of a Wordsworth poem, and decided me to write my own spoof; "The Change" came to my mind as a poem ripe for the treatment.

and because that cracker
had a fucking Les Paul and a bottle of Jack,
not giving a damn

strumming those wires like he was Andrew Jackson
putting the Sioux crew on the trail of tears
all like "this land is MY land, bitch!"

Now and then manifest destiny
asks you to lean in and check whether
it's got something on its teeth
and you could just stretch a bit
and box its epiglottis

and I know squat about chess
but that day felt like "Uno, pardners!"
—from "Shitstrum"
395px-In_memorium--our_civil_service_as_it_was.JPG
Really Hoagland's poem is more of an offense to my literary sense than for its supposed race-baiting.  I think it's entirely fair game for a white person to express some ambivalence at how Serena and Venus Williams, the all-but-certain players to whom Hoagland alludes, a pair of girls straight outta Compton like N.W.A., come on to the country club scene of tennis to ruthlessly batter their competition.  I find Serena's "to-hell-with-everybody stare" a wonder of sport, but I can see how some would take it as a blunt challenge to their cherished idols.  And why should a poet not frankly express such ambivalence?  That's why my spoof does not only parody the Hoagland poem, but it also jabs at the responses to the poem.  The very first comment on the Weblog where I found the poem posted is as follows:

This is the most offensive poem I have ever read. With respect, TS Eliot's anti-semitism has nothing on the bigotry expressed in this poem.

You would think he'd laced his work with racist terms and judgments, but I think that would be overstating the case.  I'd say the closest he came was the contemptuous generalization of "Zulu bangles on her arms" but again why should a poet not be free to express the sorts of deep, tortured thoughts that real people do?  If anything, I think he held back.  I decided to do somewhat less of that.  If folks want something to shock their publicly good-mannered faces, why not do it with some gusto?  At first I made the underdog banjo player a black guy, but I figured maybe it was a bit too easy for me as a black guy to take chances with that sort of taboo language.  I thought there was more bite to making him Native American, especially as it plays with contrasts of which "tribes" are the underdogs, and what changes when one such tribe finds a champion, looking back not just to the end of the 20th century, but also the end of the 19th, and the pain and injustice that attended that change in the fortunes of the original population.
Writing "Shitstrum" was a ton of fun, and gave me my first NaPoWriMo entry rather painlessly, for which I'm grateful, but I expect that for the rest of the month I'll address my pen towards the glories of poetry, rather than its silly asides.  I'd consider myself blessed beyond belief if I can write as Serena plays.

Talib Kweli on the Politics of Oil: Ballad of the Black Gold

Spotted this new Talib Kweli song, called the Ballad of the Black Gold in a hypem link (you can watch the video there). Very timely given the recent BP mess. Much respect to Talib for going into some of the history of Oil politics in Nigeria; an excerpt from Verse 2 is below:


Nigeria is celebrating 50 years of independence
They still feel the colonial effects of Great Britain's presence
Dictators quick to imitate the West
Got in bed with oil companies and now the place is a mess
Take a guess, which ones came and violated
They oiled up the soil, the Ogoni people was almost annihilated
But still they never stayed silent
They was activists and poets using non-violent tactics
That was catalyst for soldiers to break into they crib
Take it from the kids and try to break'em like a twig
And make examples of the leaders; executed Saro-Wiwa,
Threw Fela's mom out the window right after they beat her
In an effort to defeat hope. Now the people's feet soaked in oil [?]
So the youth is doing drive-bys through speed boats [?]
They kidnap the workers, they blowing up the pipelines
You see the fires glowing in the nighttime

Quotīdiē ❧ A too-often understated perspective on reparations for slavery

The African role in the slave trade was fully understood and openly acknowledged by many African-Americans even before the Civil War. For Frederick Douglass, it was an argument against repatriation schemes for the freed slaves. “The savage chiefs of the western coasts of Africa, who for ages have been accustomed to selling their captives into bondage and pocketing the ready cash for them, will not more readily accept our moral and economical ideas than the slave traders of Maryland and Virginia,” he warned. “We are, therefore, less inclined to go to Africa to work against the slave trade than to stay here to work against it.”

—Henry Louis Gates Jr.—"Ending the Slavery Blame-Game"

I really don't know much about Henry Louis Gates Jr. except that I got a good laugh out of reports of his response to the police officer who asked him to step outside his own house.  I did find very interesting his article about some of the inconvenient reality regarding reparations the destination countries of slavery to the descendants of those slaves.  Frederick Douglass's argument against repatriation schemes echoes into debate about reparation schemes.  I've been making a similar argument for ages, but then again it's probably easier for me to say, considering I'm the insouciant type whose 'forbear was not the one shuffled off in a coffle to Calabar for a ghastly journey and a ghastlier existence abroad.'

OK, to be sure we don't treat the history of the slave trade as gingerly in Nigeria as we do in the U.S. An old girlfriend of mine was from Arochukwu, and when I wanted to tease her (which was often) I called her "slave trader". She'd call me "bushman" It's all good. Of course I didn't dwell on the fact that my Mom is from near Calabar, where the Aros would typically sell all the slaves they'd captured in their raids on the Igbo interior (where my Dad is from).

—me—"Want a Slave Trade tour? Don't miss Arochukwu."

Certainly any talk of reparations for any historical evil is a mater of politics, and nothing that could be considered balanced convention or regular law.  You could certainly make a reasonable argument that descendants of slaves deserve reparations across the board, from descendants of plantation owners as well as descendants of the damnable potentates who started off the chain of commerce.  It might be a tricky one to identify the guilty parties in the latter case since I doubt there was much record keeping in the Guinea hinterlands, not even in Nsibiri annals of Arochukwu secret societies.  I'd personally work with our family lawyer to get us off because our name 'Ogbuji' clearly indicates that yams were our stock-in-trade, not heads.  But just as US discussion of reparations is more about government compensation schemes than inter-family vendettas, I suspect the way to go for Africa would be hand over a bunch of oil rights to the reparees.  I'm for that.  "Good riddance," I'd say, and maybe given the Deepwater Horizon, the US might be a teensy bit less jealous of mineral rights as well.

(Photo from 'A Breakthrough in Yam Breeding')

Politics and not law.  Jewish families have received reparations for slave labor in Nazi camps, and some people consider the favorable economic zoning given as a sort of ersatz autonomy to Aboriginal American groups a form of reparations.  But I don't think precedents work in such a sociological pea soup.  Maybe one day Palestinians will be able to command reparations for Israeli occupation, with funding provided through compensation for Russian Pogroms, and for the long process of disenfranchisement that led to the Warsaw Ghetto.  Maybe one day Armenians will send a bill to Turkey, and Instanbul/Constantinople can set up an electronic exchange.  Or heck, the Ibibio might send a bill to the Arochukwu, and a good number of North African and Middle Eastern countries might expect to cough up for those swept up in the Trans-Saharan slave trade.  Going back a bit further, I'd find pretty poetic the idea of a dispatch to Rome from Addis Ababa for all that Carthago delenda est business.  Sociological pea soup, I said.

I did, however, find a central lesson for all this in Gates's piece.

But the sad truth is that the conquest and capture of Africans and their sale to Europeans was one of the main sources of foreign exchange for several African kingdoms for a very long time. Slaves were the main export of the kingdom of Kongo; the Asante Empire in Ghana exported slaves and used the profits to import gold. Queen Njinga, the brilliant 17th-century monarch of the Mbundu, waged wars of resistance against the Portuguese but also conquered polities as far as 500 miles inland and sold her captives to the Portuguese. When Njinga converted to Christianity, she sold African traditional religious leaders into slavery, claiming they had violated her new Christian precepts.


Yes, that does sound quite Christian of her.  It's the wide and well-traveled gate in contrast to Wilberforce's skinny porthole, so go figure that when 'President Mathieu Kerekou [sic] of Benin astonished an all-black congregation in Baltimore by falling to his knees and begging African-Americans’ forgiveness for the "shameful” and “abominable” role Africans played in the trade,' he did so in church.  Oh well.  Never mind trying to make sense of it all.  I'll just hang out waiting for my own bill.  If they come for me for any sins of my forbears, they should expect me to make payment from my ancestral yam barn.

PBS's timeline of Nigeria's presidents

In the wake of Yar'Adua's death, The PBS NewsHour published an outline of Nigeria's leaders, under the rubric "Nigeria's Post-Colonial Political Turmoil."  Fair enough, and ever since archetypical man-of-action Nzeogwu* decided he wasn't messing about, it really has been a turbulent cascade, and sobering to re-read even in the drab copy of foreign service wonks.  Stories of the many intrigues that have characterized Nigeria to date were always the midnight snack of my mates and I defying curfew in school, and many of these names are vivid folk heroes and villains to me.  In a recent visit to my parents' they and my Uncles and family friends had even more lurid tales of the machinations surrounding the turnover of power from Yar'Adua to Goodluck Jonathan, and I do wonder where these will fetch up in the endless drama of the Stumbling Giant of Afica.

* Nzeogwu is an extraordinary person whose Wikipedia page does him no real justice.  I recommend to anyone interested in African politics to find one of the several books about him, and about the seismic events he set in motion.  You can hardly do better than the volume by later twice head of state Olusegun Obasanjo himself, if you can find it in print in the West.

Anyway, in their chart is a surprising omission.  Nigerians will spot it in an instant.
  • 1960-66
    • Tafawa Balewa (Northern People's Congress)
  • 1966
    • J.T.U. Aguiyi Ironsi (Military)
  • 1966-75
    • Yakubu Gowon (Military)
  • 1976-79
    • Olusegun Obasanjo (Military)
  • 1979-83
    • Shehu Shagari (National Party of Nigeria)
  • 1984-85
    • Muhamaddu Buhari (Military)
  • 1985-93
    • Ibahim Babangida (Military)
  • 1993
    • Ernest Shonekan (Military)
  • 1993-98
    • Abdulsalami Abubakar (Military)
  • 1999-2007
    • Olusegun Obasanjo (People's Democratic Party)
  • 2007-2010 
    • Umaru Yar'Adua (People's Democratic Party)
  • 2010-present 
    • Goodluck Jonathan (People's Democratic Party)

So where the heck is Murtala Mohammed, whose 1975-1976 regime any Nigerian recognizes as a pivot point in so many ways, in national terms as well as international terms?  You'll rarely find one as much a simultaneous hero and villain to so many.  He was one of those larger-than-life figures in a Nation that could have done with far fewer larger-than-life figures.  PBS hides him in the Gowon section, and briefly mentions him in the Obasanjo (Military) section, even though Obasanjo probably only became head of state because Mohammed had clearly marked him as his second, in the Mohammed/Obasanjo/Danjuma troika.  Danjuma, based on his military influence, could easily have been Mohammed's successor, but even the dead Mohammed's shadow was long enough to set the succession, and eventually the path to the second republic of Shehu Shagari, a drunken orgy of corrupt civilian rule that probably made inevitable the whipsaw sequence of military regimes that followed.

It's more technically correct to have buried M.K.O. Abiola in the Babangida section, although it is the plain reality that Abiola never went from President-Elect to President.

Another observation is the procession from the "(Military)" to the "(PDP)."  If Nigeria is to be a nation where ideas shine as brightly as individuals, then perhaps it's fitting that one of the brighter individuals who stands for some of the more "bottom-up" ideas for Nigeria's future, Donald Duke, publicly ditched the PDP.  (Yeah, and I'm not sure what kind of statement it makes that Facebook is probably the best source for an event that has caused quite a few ripples among Nigerians everywhere).

The PBS timeline does make for interesting reflection, not least upon hope that Nigeria is in for times rather less defined by the drama of personages than have been since 1960.