Culture and the New Imperialism

THIS FLESH IS MINE
Andrew French and Tariq Jordan. Photo: Richard Davenport

A few months ago, I had the chance to spend an evening chatting with Ken Livingstone. It was wonderful. Ken is 80 now, and his short-term memory isn't perfect, but his long-term memory absolutely is and his political understanding seems as sharp as ever. He also displayed a rare generosity of spirit, telling me how much he admired John Major, who had been his predecessor as Leader of Lambeth Council back in the 70s, and who "got things done". He was, it's fair to say, much less generous in his assessment of Boris Johnson, who "just didn't do the job" as Mayor of London (or anything else); but his only real bitterness was reserved for the tabloid press, who had caused him great personal pain and political turmoil by labelling him an anti-Semite. The same, of course, happened to Jeremy Corbyn. You've got to hand it to the Tory tabloids: only they could so manipulate the media as to convince the bulk of the population that men like these, who have dedicated much of their life to campaigning against racism, are actually themselves racists.

I've had some experience of this myself. Back in 2014, when we presented THIS FLESH IS MINE in a co-production with ASHTAR Theatre from Ramallah, I received quite a number of emails which accused me, and the company, of being anti-Semitic. There were no explicit references to Jewishness or Israel (or even Palestine) in the play, which deliberately used a mythological framing to distance its exploration of the cyclical nature of violence and its manipulation by global power blocs from the detailed specifics of the ongoing occupation. It seemed that the simple action of collaborating with Palestinian artists, which I absolutely agree in itself does come to constitute a political statement, was also regarded as inherently anti-Semitic. Where is the racism in that equation? In the artists who reach out to one another with the aim of furthering dialogue and understanding, or in the person who regards anything and anyone Palestinian as by definition expressing hatred towards Jewish people?

The ongoing genocide in Gaza has brought these issues to the fore again. Our online reading of THE GAZA MONOLOGUES in late 2023 attracted Zoom-bombers, who were determined that the stories of Gazan youth should not be heard. We did all we could to make sure they were heard, and to avoid making the Zoom-bombing itself into "the story". This is a real problem in the current debate (and I feel very conscious that in some ways this post is itself contributing to that problem). I have every sympathy with the people who have been calling on the media to stop making Bob Vylan's Glastonbury performance "the story", as this only distracts from the reality of what is happening in the Occupied Territories. Chanting “Death, death to the IDF” does not represent any sort of humanitarian or nuanced approach: but neither does the (nominally Labour) UK government's response, which has been to condemn the BBC for allowing its live stream of the concert to continue. The Culture Secretary, Lisa Nandy, has been taking an ever-more aggressive stance towards the public broadcaster over its coverage of Gaza, most recently demanding "Why has nobody been fired?" in relation to the BBC's showing of the exceptional and very moving documentary Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone, which was pulled from iPlayer when it emerged that the 13 year old narrator was the son of a Hamas official. 

Let's pause there for a moment. Does the identity of the boy's father actually make the film inherently biased or inaccurate? I don't think so. The statistics around casualties issued by the Gaza health ministry are actually lower than most estimates, and that's because they are carefully verified. The BBC always states that these statistics come from "the Hamas-run Health Ministry", which is the equivalent of saying that we have "the Labour-run Health Ministry". Hamas is the elected government of Gaza. Yes, the UK government (and many others) regards it as a terrorist organisation, but this is a matter of semantics and positionality. The activist group Palestine Action is also now a proscribed terrorist organisation in the UK, even though its actions could easily and more appropriately be prosecuted as criminal damage. South Africa's ANC was also a proscribed terrorist organisation before that narrative underwent a complete turnaround. The Hamas attack on Israel was undoubtedly brutal and indiscriminate: but is it really justified to describe this action by an elected government as a simple (and mindlessly evil) "terror attack", if the actions of the elected (if decidely insecure six-party coalition) government of Israel are always called acts of "war", or even of "self-defence"? Why do we not call the actions of Israel "terrorism", or the actions of Hamas "war"? Isn't the difference only in the viewpoint? The documentary was as objective (and as subjective) as any other film made by and about young people going through constant bombardment and daily trauma. The only justification for its effective banning is the sense that this is somehow the work of "the enemy": a sense that also implies a view of Israel as being on "our side", the "good guys" in a Manichean, black and white world. The language and the discourse, the cultural dimension, really matter; particularly in this conflict which has such huge implications for the entire world.

The kind of censorship and prejudice that Nandy is exercising is not confined to the UK. America has a long-standing commitment to stamping out any criticism of Israel: Trump's attacks on students who protest against the genocide are only a logical development of the unwavering support shown by the US towards what is essentially its client state in a geopolitically vital region. Mainland Europe, and particularly Germany, is moving ever further to the right, which includes increasing its support for Israel, both economically and culturally. To give a few examples:

- Last month my friend Elli Papakonstantinou was presenting her theatre piece Holy Bitch at the Neuköllner Oper in Berlin. It's an angry, feminist work, and at one point there was a brief reference to the genocide in Gaza. The management asked her to remove this from the show, and, when she did not, greatly reduced the publicity they gave to the work. Journalists refused to cover it. The subtitles went blank when the dreaded word "genocide" was spoken.

- Lina Majdalanie & Rabih Mroué are Lebanese artists living in Berlin, whose most recent work Four Walls and a Roof used Brecht's 1947 appearance before the "Un-American Activities Committee" of Congress to delve into questions of artistic freedom. At one point, they mention that when they first came to Germany, people used to ask them about censorship in Lebanon. Now people in Lebanon are asking them about censorship in Germany. 

- Back in 2022, before the latest overwhelming attacks on Palestinian populations, the great playwright Caryl Churchill had an award for her lifetime's achievement rescinded by a German-appointed jury because of her support for Palestinian causes. As Lina Majdalanie puts it: "Cancellation of invitations, awards, conferences, theatrical  pieces, exhibitions... Public accusation and condemnation of this writer or that artist, or anyone else... Dismissal of journalists, academics... Public funding subject to political obedience... The list goes on."

- In April 2020, the German government’s anti-Semitism commissioner, Felix Klein, decided that the Cameroonian historian Achille Mbembe was "not suitable" to deliver the keynote at the Ruhrtriennale because of his supposed anti-Semitism. The root of this accusation turned out to be Mbembe's 2016 essay The Society of Enmity, in which he applies post-colonial ideas, examining Israel as a settler-colony, and pointing out how the treatment of Palestinians in the Occupied Territories "recall the reviled model of apartheid". 

Mbembe's argument seems decidedly mild and understated in the light of what has happened since. It wasn't even a particularly unusual point to make. As long ago as 1951, Hannah Arendt had pointed out links between Germany's history as a colonial power and the development of the systematic murder machines of the Nazis' Holocaust against the Jews and other perceived "enemies". Mbembe's point was that European (and by extension, North American) societies have a need for a racialised "Other" - "a Negro, a Jew, an Arab, a foreigner" - to provide a justification for their acquisitive and rapacious colonisation of territories beyond their own. The "resettlement of the world" he explained, "often took the shape of innumerable atrocities and massacres, unprecedented instances of 'ethnic cleansing', expulsions, transfers, and concentrations of entire populations in camps, and indeed of genocides." The first genocide of the 20th century was not the Third Reich's Holocaust but the massacre of Herero and Nama people in Namibia by the German Second Reich. The mindless racism that it betrayed serves to underline Mbembe's point that Nazism cannot be regarded as uniquely evil, but should be understood as an extreme maifestation of the cultural mindset that underpinned imperialism, and continues to be present in neo-colonialism today. 

The reason Mbembe's argument was deemed anti-Semitic was not simply that he compared Israel's policy towards Palestine with settler colonialism and apartheid, but also that his placing of the Holocaust in an historical and cultural perspective undermined the prevailing belief that this event was uniquely evil in the history of the world. It suits the state of Israel to construct the Holocaust as exceptional and evil rather than historical, because that can be regarded as a justification for the total paranoia with which it segregates its populations, militarises its borders and attacks its neighbours. It also suits Germany, and the wider constructs of "Europe" and "the West" in which that state plays such a leading role. "Vergangenheitsbewältigung", the "struggle of overcoming the past", has come over time to elide into a strangely self-congratulaory position, whereby unquestioning German support for Israel and a delusional imagining of anti-Semitism in every critique of Israeli policy represents a fundamental break with the past. Paradoxically, it also permits other forms of racism to take hold, as the current drift to the right bears witness. If something is "Evil" then it ceases to be historically and culturally explicable: it becomes simply an enemy to be fought perpetually and incessantly. This is how fascism comes to beget more fascism.

The moment we look at the Holocaust as an historical event, then both its deep roots in European culture and colonialism and its current repercussions in global geopolitics make much more sense. "Reich" means "Empire": Nazism was a logical development of the 1492 project - the process whereby a self-satisfiedly "Christian" and "civilised" Europe imposed its hegemony on much of the world, with racist ideology as its justification. Israel's unbridled aggression is a similar continuation of what Columbus began: Western economic interests and a religion of the Book are being used to wipe out an indigenous population. It is through a nation's relationship to colonial histories that its stance on Palestine can most clearly be understood. The United States is an Empire founded on genocide: of course it supports the state of Israel. Great Britain ran the largest Empire the world has ever seen: it too, supports Israel. Germany is in a weird space of denial about its Imperial past: and it supports Israel. On the other hand, a country like Ireland (which we are proud to call Border Crossings' second homebase) has a colonised people's understanding of land grabs, of the use of religion to mask political incursions, of hunger as a weapon, of partition and the militarization of the streets. Ireland has a strong affinity with the Palestinian cause: as this current exhibition in London attests. The vast majority of the Global South - the nations that understand what it is to be colonised - stand with the Palestinian people too. It is deeply depressing to see that humanity is still locked in to the colonial paradigm. 

We need to re-think how post-coloniality is applied. The "post-" doesn't just mean "after": it means "in relation to". Culture and the academy have made much of post-colonialism in relation to cultures and peoples that once were colonised, to the extent that the approach has come to seem a bit tired, and rather patronising, as if (say) Gikuyu society in Kenya can only be understood in relation to the former (and current) British presence there. But if we turn the post-colonial mirror back on the former colonisers, it becomes altogether more illuminating. Let us start to recognise that we still behave as we do on the world stage because of the deep-seated assumptions and prejudices that made our societies into colonial powers. Let us recognise that the crass sloganeering of the right ("Take Back Control", "Make America Great Again") evokes a colonial policy of agression, acquisition and oppression, grotesquely misrepresented as "greatness". Once we have dared to look properly at ourselves, perhaps then we will be able to stop supporting genocide, and cease to brand as racist the very people who are standing against the scourge of racism. 

The views expressed in this post are personal to the author and do not represent an official position of Border Crossings.

The African Novel

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie in the BBC programme

I'm a great fan of David Olusoga. Over the last few months, he's been particularly impressive, not only making some superb historical documentaries (A House Through Time from Bristol being a case in point), but also keeping his cool and arguing coherently in the face of absurd online arguments around Black Lives Matter, the toppling of statues etc. The timely repeat of Britain's Forgotten Slave Owners (an important inspiration for THE GREAT EXPERIMENT) was provocative and moving. Last night, I watched his new documentary on the African novel: Africa Turns the Page - The Novels that Shaped a Continent.  It's on i-Player for the next month, and well worth watching.

The programme started (of course) with Heart of Darkness, and the pioneering role of Chinua Achebe in claiming the form for himself in Things Fall Apart. But, as the programme went on, I found myself becoming disturbed by a teleological subtext, which seemed to suggest that the African novel, originating in Africa, has now become a "global" phenomenon, triumphant in it conquest of international markets.  There were lots of shots of Booker dinners, with the acceptance speeches of Ben Okri and Bernardine Evaristo.  There was a great celebration of Oyinkan Braithwaite's My Sister, the Serial Killer as "a novel that everybody is reading." I couldn't help feeling that Chinua Achebe would have been very surprised to be told that "everybody" spoke English, lived in the Western world, and could afford the latest bestseller. I have absolutely no objection to the prizes, authors and novels in question - in fact, I thought Girl, Woman, Other quite stunning - but I do worry that a documentary about post-colonial literature should see the validation of that literature in terms of global (for which read globalised, Western) markets, and prizes bestowed in the former imperial centre.

The novel is, of course, a globalised form in a way that theatre is not.  There were theatre-makers included in the programme, but they were tellingly discussed only in terms of the novels they had written. This seemed particularly obtuse in the case of Wole Soyinka, whose work has been predominantly in theatre, and only occasionally in the novel. Watching this programme, you would have thought the Nobel prize was awarded for Season of Anomy alone. But perhaps the more telling figure for this discussion is Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o. 

Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o

Ngũgĩ also appeared in the programme, again discussed solely in terms of his novels, and not as a theatre-maker. Because of this, his hugely important decision to write in his native Gĩkũyũ, rather than the élite global English, seemed almost absurd. He was contrasted with the apparently more cosmopolitan Achebe, whose use of English was regarded as somehow more progressive. It was patronisingly explained that the use of Gĩkũyũ "wasn't really a problem", because the novels could be translated into English. Of course this is true, and from English they can also be translated into other African languages, much in the way that Girish Karnad used to translate his Kannada plays into English so that they could then be translated into other Indian languages. But the implication of the programme was that translation into English - the language of the Booker - was an end in itself. The programme included clips from Gavin Esler's Hard Talk interview with Ngũgĩ, but not the bit where he points out the absurdity of the Caine Prize for African Literature being confined to work written in English. 

Ngũgĩ's son, interviewed in the programme, did say that writing in Gĩkũyũ meant "his mother could read it" - but it also meant that all the other Gĩkũyũ could as well. It was through his work in theatre that Ngũgĩ, who has long been aware of African culture as oral rather than literary, came to the realisation that language choices are central. Ngũgĩ had already written novels that were socially and politically critical when he began the Kamĩrĩĩthũ Popular Theatre experiment, so brilliantly described in his book Decolonising the Mind. It was the staging of plays in Gĩkũyũ that led to his imprisonment and subsequent exile (as well as that of his collaborator Ngũgĩ wa Mĩriĩ, whom I was lucky enough to meet in Zimbabwe), and to the forced closure of the theatre group.  As Fancis Wade has argued in the New York Review of Books:

His play had been critical of the regime of Jomo Kenyatta, also a Gĩkũyũ; it depicted the leadership as inward-looking and elitist, far removed from the Kenyan peasantry whose interests it claimed to champion, and responsible for the acute economic inequalities that persisted long after independence. But, then again, the books he’d written before in English had similarly taken aim at postcolonial power-holders. Could it be that his crime, even long after Kenya had returned to indigenous rule, was to shun the English language? Had his jailers—among them, political leaders who had been the vanguard in the anticolonial struggle—taken up the mantle of linguistic authoritarianism from the same foreign power they had driven out? And did his use of the vernacular threaten the leadership by speaking directly to the masses not literate in English, thereby continuing the anticolonial struggle, in effect, après la lettre?

This is spot on, and underlines the importance of writers like Ngũgĩ shunning the glittering prizes of the global stage for an engagement with the realities of African societies. Of course it's great that his novels, and his plays, have been translated into English: I wouldn't be able to discuss him otherwise, and his exile in America would be pretty challenging.  But wouldn't it also be helpful if the work of African writers in English could be translated into African vernaculars?  Achebe's Things Fall Apart is the most translated of all African novels, yet of the 61 languages listed on this website, only 9 are African languages, and Gĩkũyũ is not among them.  To put that in perspective, there are around 2,000 different languages spoken on the continent.