!A for Africa in Books
---
agk's phlog
14 Apr 2021 @ 1853
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written on x61 at kitchen table
alone in the house for once
---
In the antiglobalization movement I learned
about Africa the sabotaged. International
Monetary Fund structural adjustment programs
undermined national sovereignty in the 1980s.
Revolutionary national health programs like
Mozambique's were destroyed by creditor terms.
Famine and war, AIDS and "development"
programs followed.
In Fanon's _Wretched of the Earth_, I was
drawn first to the psychological portraits of
colonial torturers, then to his critique of the
national bourgeoisie's role brokering neo-
colonialism. I knew quislings like that in my
country (see Hal Rogers [1]). I hated them.
Paul Stoller's _Embodying Colonial Memories:
Spirit Possession, Power, and the Hauka in West
Africa_ later counseled me to have compassion
for powerbrokers who reenact historical tragedy
as horrific contemporary comedy.
In my early 20s, my boyfriend Mongezi told me
about the betrayal of African socialism (black
consciousness of Steve Biko and AZAPO) by the
neoliberal (color conscious) ANC in South Africa.
Ricardo at Black Star Books gave me Ousmane
Sembène's _God's Bits of Wood_ (Les bouts de bois
de Dieu) about the 1940s Senegalese railroad
strike, and books by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, Maryse
Condé, and others. I fell in love with midcentury
African socialism--and Doris Lessing's critique
of it in her _Children of Violence_ series.
> Uprisings in the streets speak lounder than words
> so when the right man speaks then the crowd get heard.
> So it occurred: Mau Mau, Jomo Kenyatta,
> mobilizing the poor from Zanzibar to Mombassa,
> advancing the cause, outlaws armed and ready
> equipped with pistols, shotguns and machetes
> up against the military with the will of the people
> who would rather be poor in freedom than treated unequal.
> The situation's heated; now it's more than just a rumor--
> from the east to the west hear the speeches of Lumumba...[2]
Muammar Gaddafi's Jamahiriyah political theory,
leadership in the non-aligned movement and
African Union, and "king of kings" approach to
governance was neither Marxist nor capitalist
(and neither secular Arab nationalist nor
Islamic fundamentalist). Oil wealth stayed in
the country. Despite unemployment similar to
other north African and southwest Asian
countries, Libya provided free education,
universal healthcare, free housing, free water,
and free electricity long after African and
Arab socialism was destroyed everywhere else.
It developed a distinct third way of governing
until destruction by the US-led war in 2011.
I visited Africa like Limonov's Eddie-baby in
_Memoirs of a Russian Punk_ visited far-off
places: in books, imagination, and friends'
stories. Later in my 20s, I read voraciously on
African and Afro-Caribbean use of plants in
medicine. The best: Kwame Konadu's _Indigenous
Medicine and Knowledge in African Society_,
Janzen's _The Quest for Therapy: Medical
Pluralism in Lower Zaire_, Verger's _Ewé: O
Uso das Plantas na Sociedade Iorubá_, and
TRAMIL's _Pharmacopée Caribéenne_.
Politics, speech patterns, music, medicine,
economics, and history in my country make sense
to me through lenses my books use to see Africa.
I found Africa in my country in Michael Gomez's
_Exchanging Our Country Marks: The Transform-
ation of African Identities in the Colonial and
Antebellum South_, Loudell Snow's _Walkin' over
Medicine_, and Gwendolyn Hall's _Slavery and
African Ethnicities in Colonial America_.
I met Africans everywhere--at the restaurant
and grocery in the neighborhood where Eritreans
lived, the hospital where I worked, the soup
kitchen and bookstore where veterans of the
Azanaian Peoples' Army could be found.
Today I follow African wars, vernacular tech,
and film. I pay special attention to blacksmiths
in Suame Magazine (10 km north of Kumasi,Ghana)
who make fences, swings, water pumps, carbide
compressors, welding machines, and vehicles from
junked cars, les forgerons (blacksmiths) in
Maroua, Cameroon, the Jua Kali sector in Kenya,
and junkyard computing (and hard-drive data
extraction) in Agbogbloshie, Ghana.
Large-scale distributed remanufacturing is
industrial life in the wreck of "ruined import-
substitution industries, shrunken public sectors,
and downwardly-mobile middle classes."[3]
> Fuelled by Nkruma and drafts of black agendas
> by the 1960s each reached their independence--
> but sentenced to life with less than necessary
> with the rest of the third world treated secondary.
> Unable to bury the very tribe rivalries
> that had upheld the system and assisted adversaries
> ...atrocities, lost descent, stolen monuments,
> and The Economist calls it the hopeless continent.
The recent past of Africa is the present in my
country. When there is no choice of socialism
or barbarism, when remnants of socialism are
destroyed at unimaginable human cost, I look to
Africa in books for how to care, manufacture,
repair, worship, self-govern, be family,
communicate, and live.
[^2]: Verse 3 of Homeland by Sékou The Ambass-
ador, a Ghanaian rapper who lives in Germany.
[^3]: Mike Davis, _Planet of Slums_. Davis'
critique of the development industry belongs on
a shelf with Ferguson's _The Anti-Politics
Machine: "Development," Depoliticization, and
Bureaucratic power in Lesotho_, Werner's
_Questioning the Solution: The Politics of
Primary Health Care and Child Survival_, and
Scroggins' _Emma's War: An Aid Worker, A War-
lord, Radical Islam, and the Politics of Oil--
A True Story of Love and Death in Sudan_.
