In an interview with Harvard University academic Tommy Shelby in the latest (and uneven) Transition magazine:
What is Africa to me now, … I don’t know that we can assume that there’s anything spontaneous about the forms of recognition involved. And I think that’s compounded by the globalization of African American culture as American culture. Africa functions in this dreamscape much of the time as a place from which no light can escape, as the heart of darkness, as the core of unreason. Why would people want to identify with misery, AIDS, all of this? I don’t know that they do. I know also that there are many people here who want to re-create the terms of that solidarity and for whom it is important to have the Africa in African American as something that is vital and contemporary and dynamic, to allow Africa into the same present that they inhabit, not to make it a matter of archaic Africa. But I think those people are kind of a minority—they’re struggling for their lives, really. For example in Europe—and it’s problematic, too, in that context of a revived notion of charity instead of politics—there’s a big argument about African debt and the economics of the contemporary relationship with Africa. Here in the U.S., for other reasons I suppose, I just see Darfur everywhere, and I’m a little bit skeptical about why that has emerged or what sort of vehicle that is for the residuum of solidarity with Africa. I’m a little bit unsure about what that really means.
You can read the whole interview here.
I like the feel of the words of Gilroy here. I admire his work a great deal. His thoughts on the dreamscape of Africa, and also of Darfur made me think about two things.
1. I’ve just ended a long three month trip around Angola, travelling by local kandongueiro, bus and occasionally plane and at one surprise point, helicopter. It was nothing less than wonderful. When I came back to Luanda, back to base, I walked into a room of people watching the news. It was about HIV AIDS in Southern Africa: Image of starving baby being fed humanitarian food on screen. It was a strange sensation. Having passed through, I haven’t counted, but perhaps 14 of Angola’s 18 provinces, I saw many many sites but I did not see this. I sighed, and felt so relieved that I chose to leave the BBC and stop my previous life as a news reporter. It’s totally weird. It’s not just crap. It’s weird. It conjuers images from the clouds, from the burracos, perhaps, and leaves you wondering what the camera and crew did to get these pix.
2. The second thought, about Darfur, also made me think about Zimbabwe. The situation in Zim is clearly very bad, no doubt about that. But all the news on Zim and all the news on Darfur make you wonder about the rest of the vast continent. When did the BBC last send a team to hammer Gabon’s Bongo on the head? I’m looking forward to reading Mahmoud Mamdani’s book on Darfur which I believe is due out later this year.
Thanks Leo for pointing us to this.
I have found Al Jazeera to be a corrective to the kind of un-nuanced BBC et al reporting in the West. And thanks to the web, despite no US cable operator wanting to touch Al Jazeera English, I can watch it on the web.
Sean, I think you are right that Al Jazeera is relief from BBC et al. But I wonder how long it will last… for Al Jazeera is packed, I mean PACKED, with BBC staff. And certainly not it’s most imaginative and critical staff. Sure, some of them are good: but a lot of them are the same mediocre people who churned out crap for the Beeb. I wonder how long it will be before AJ shifts direction downhill.