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WATCH: Concerning Violence

Black Rooted

Nine Scenes From the Anti-Imperialistic Self-Defense

Black Rooted review, 2018: “Göran Hugo Olsson’s Concerning Violence is the first major film to grapple with the work of the influential Martinican author and psychiatrist Frantz Fanon since Isaac Julien’s biographical documentary Frantz Fanon: Black Skin, White Mask (1995). Whereas the earlier film took a holistic, if esoteric, approach to appraising Fanon’s life and ideas (including his upbringing in Martinique, education in France and work in Algeria), the punchy Concerning Violence focuses on a specific sliver: the opening chapter of Fanon’s classic text The Wretched of the Earth (1961), in which the author posits the act of one nation colonising another as a form of pure, subjugating violence. Fanon also discusses violence – in the context of uprising and rebellion – as a means of liberation and physical, spiritual catharsis for the oppressed.

When Fanon’s book was initially published in France, it was banned almost immediately by the authorities, who saw it as a recklessly incendiary glorification of violence. This negative view was only burnished by the book’s preface, written by Fanon supporter Jean-Paul Sartre, which wholeheartedly endorsed the thesis of violence as a cleansing act and, according to Fanon biographer David Macey, overshadowed the actual work. However, as the academic Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak explains in the brief, informative contextual preface that begins Olsson’s film, such a reading fails to appreciate Fanon’s nuance; specifically, it neglects to address his anguish – rooted in the realities of his experiences in French-ruled Algeria – at the cyclical, decidedly non-glamorous tragedy of the very poorest people being reduced, and subjected, to violence.

Concerning Violence, then, represents a welcome attempt to reframe and interrogate an influential but highly contested historical text. As in his previous film, The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975 (2011), Swedish director Olsson has raided the TV news archives of his home country and emerged with a fount of grainy, absorbing footage, presumably hitherto forgotten. He structures the material into nine chapters of varying length (the film’s subtitle is Nine Scenes from the Anti-Imperialistic Self-Defense), and each focuses on a specific struggle for liberation in one of a number of African countries, including Angola, Zimbabwe, Liberia, Tanzania, Mozambique, Guinea-Bissau and Burkina Faso; the footage dates from the mid-1960s up to the late 1980s.

Though at first glance Concerning Violence may seem almost utilitarian in its stark, unfussy formalism, Olsson puts his personal stamp on Fanon’s work. Complementary passages from the text are narrated over the images by singer and activist Lauryn Hill, whose delivery – throaty and languid, but also somehow urgent and incantatory – seems designed to evoke the alacrity of the book’s writing: Fanon was terminally ill with leukemia when he set to work, and he composed and dictated it to his wife Josie in a remarkable ten-week spell.

For a further rhetorical, stylishly pedagogical flourish, much of the text is simultaneously imposed on screen in a white serif font. At this year’s Berlin International Film Festival, Olsson mentioned that this device was inspired by the music video for Prince’s state-of-the-nation anthem Sign o’ the Times (1987). Also notable is Neo Muyanga’s subtle score of roiling, percussive jazz, augmented by peals of muted trumpet that ring out like warning clarions. This forceful stylistic unity, added to the binding agent of Fanon’s torrentially persuasive and poetic language, ensures that Concerning Violence resounds as a far more cohesive statement than The Black Power Mixtape.

Olsson and his editing team structure Concerning Violence so that the archival passages comment on each other even as they are in dialogue with Fanon’s text. Consider two back-to-back segments near the start. With Fanon’s words, delivered by Hill (“For if the last shall be first, this will only come to pass after a murderous and decisive struggle between the two protagonists”), ringing in our ears, the film picks up with a black journalist, newly released from a five-year jail spell in Rhodesia. He speaks calmly of his realisation that, from slavery to colonialism, and up to the institutionalised racism and state-sanctioned torture in the country that would become Zimbabwe, the “black man is at the bottom of everything”; torture, he says, made him “feel indifferent”.

This disturbing, layered film is mercifully free of pat attempts to bring things up to date: chronologically speaking, it concludes in 1987. Yet there’s no doubt that its final passage – in which Europe is described as “literally the creation of the third world”, and America as a “monstrous” colonial power – is intended to give the viewer plenty to process with regard to contemporary nations still suffering the pronounced after-effects of colonisation. In many cases, Fanon’s astringent words seem as relevant today as ever.”

 

Creating Failed States | Next up: Burundi

Public Good Project

November 24, 2015

by Jay Taber

 

The White House

Office of the Press Secretary

For Immediate Release

November 23, 2015

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“President Obama today issued a new Executive Order (E.O.) declaring a national emergency with respect to the unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States posed by the situation in Burundi.”

Power and Kagame

Left: U.S. Ambassador to the UN, Samantha Power. Right: “Butcher of the Great Lakes”, Paul Kagame | “The US based Kagame lobbyists, including the US Ambassador to the UN – Samantha Power – are responsible for the crisis we see in Burundi.” – Dr. Charles Kambanda, Great Lakes Post

The African Great Lakes region (Burundi, Democratic Republic of Congo, Rwanda, Tanzania and Uganda) is rich in mineral wealth. East/West superpower competition for these minerals — used in consumer electronics — has prompted the United States military to arm rebels and dictators alike, as well as to increase the U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM) presence in the region.

Burundi tweet 3

On July 6, 2015, the U.S. State Department announced that Tom Perriello will serve as President Obama’s special envoy for the Great Lakes region of Africa. On November 6, 2015, the State Department announced that Perriello was alarmed by Burundi government violence.  On November 8, 2015, U.S. Ambassador to the UN, Samantha Power, in response to the Burundi government offer of amnesty to insurrectionists, warned of Rwanda-like government massacres.

Samantha-Power-John-Kerry-68th-Session-UN-0OZG7CMnM5Ol

Above: U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry (L) speaks with United States Ambassador to the United Nations Samantha Power during the United Nations Security Council meeting (photo: (Sept. 18, 2014 – Source: Eduardo Munoz Alvarez/Getty Images North America)

As noted by Charles Kambanda, a former professor at the University of Rwanda, what really is happening in Burundi is that multinational corporations are seeking to create a failed state — as they did previously in the Congo — in order to plunder the resources of the region. Avaaz*, an NGO co-founded by Perriello, has called on the UN, US and EU to send in the troops–much like it did in Libya and Syria.

*Avaaz was initially funded in 2006 by George Soros (a currency speculator convicted of insider-trading) through his Open Society Institute.

 

Further reading: Avaaz Hones In On Burundi as Next U.S. Fait Accompli:

https://www.wrongkindofgreen.org/2015/11/18/avaaz-hones-in-on-burundi-as-next-u-s-fait-accompli/

avaazkilllhashtag

WWF Scandal (Part 3): Embezzlement and Evictions in Tanzania

Source: REDD-Monitor

By Chris Lang, 9th May 2012

WWF scandal (part 3): Embezzlement and evictions in Tanzania

WWF is embroiled in a two-part scandal over its work in Tanzania. In October 2011, thousands of villagers were evicted from a WWF project area in the Rufiji Delta. This year WWF Tanzania staff were caught embezzling funds.

On 28 October 2011, forestry officials protected by armed police burned down hundreds of farm huts and cut down villagers’ palm trees. The huts were used to plant and harvest rice. The government had announced the planned evictions in January 2011. One of the people affected, was Bakari Wanga, chairman of Kiomboni village, one of three villages in the Rufiji Delta. “What is happening here is absolute madness, our huts are being torched and coconut trees felled by a group of natural resources officials escorted by the police,” Wanga told the Daily News.

WWF denies any involvement in the evictions. WWF’s Country Director, Stephen Mariki, told the Daily News, that “WWF has never advocated the eviction of communities from the delta. The recent evictions were carried out by government agencies.”

WWF’s project in the Rufiji Delta is a mangrove restoration project. According to Jonathan Cook of WWF-US, WWF is “working with the Forestry Division to replant and restore mangrove habitats degraded by illegal rice farming”.

In November 2011, Betsy Beymer-Farris and Thomas Bassett published a paper titled, “The REDD menace: Resurgent protectionism in Tanzania’s mangrove forests”, in Global Environmental Change. The paper is critical of WWF’s Rufiji Delta project and of REDD:

“Within the context of the Tanzanian state and WWF’s climate change ‘adaptation strategy’, mangrove reforestation reduces the ability of Rufiji farmers to cultivate rice for subsistence needs and thus poses a direct threat to their livelihoods.”

Beymer-Farris and Bassett argue that the evictions of the Warufiji, the people living in the Rufiji Delta, is part of a process of creating a REDD project in the Rufiji Delta, where carbon is more important than people:

“The removal of the Warufiji ‘simplifies’ the mangrove forests in order to make levels of carbon sequestration ‘legible’ for carbon markets.”

WWF’s response to the paper is fascinating. After an article based on the paper appeared in Norway’s Aftenposten newspaper, the head of WWF Norway, Rasmus Hansson, wrote a response in which he attacked the research and wrote that it would “make serious researchers blush”. Beymer-Farris and Bassett replied by explaining that there was nothing wrong with their research and that they stood by their findings.

On 3 February 2012, WWF lodged a formal complaint with the journal that published the paper. WWF requested that the article be removed from the journal’s website.