#David Van Reybrouck quote

[mijnmobielemoleskine]

Alles was anders, en toch leek het als vanouds.

- David Van Reybrouck (Odes)

[96thdayofrage]

Patrice Lumumba was prime minister of a newly independent Congo for only seven months between 1960 and 1961 before he was murdered, fifty-six years ago today. He was thirty-six.

Yet Lumumba’s short political life — as with figures like Thomas Sankara and Steve Biko, who had equally short lives — is still a touchstone for debates about what is politically possible in postcolonial Africa, the role of charismatic leaders, and the fate of progressive politics elsewhere.

The details of Lumumba’s biography have been endlessly memorialized and cut and pasted: a former postal worker in the Belgian Congo, he became political after joining a local branch of a Belgian liberal party. On his return from a study tour to Belgium arranged by the party, the authorities took note of his burgeoning political involvement and arrested him for embezzling funds from the post office. He served twelve months in prison.

Congolese historian Georges Nzongola-Ntalaja — who was in high school during Lumumba’s rise and assassination — points out that the charges were trumped-up. Their main effect was to radicalize him against Belgian racism, though not colonialism. Upon his release in 1957, Lumumba, by now a beer salesman, was more explicit about Congolese autonomy and helped found the Congolese National Movement, the first Congolese political group which explicitly disavowed Belgian paternalism and tribalism, called unreservedly for independence, and demanded that Congo’s vast mineral wealth (exploited by Belgium and Euro-American multinational firms) benefit Congolese first.

For Belgian public opinion — which played up Congolese ethnic differences, infantilized Africans, and in the late 1950s still had a thirty-year plan for Congolese independence — Lumumba and the Congolese National Movement’s pronouncements came as a shock.

Two months after his release from prison, in December 1958, Lumumba was in Ghana, at the invitation of President Kwame Nkrumah who had organized the seminal All Africa People’s Conference. There, as a number of other African nationalists pushing for political independence listened, Lumumba declared:

The winds of freedom currently blowing across all of Africa have not left the Congolese people indifferent. Political awareness, which until very recently was latent, is now becoming manifest and assuming outward expression, and it will assert itself even more forcefully in the months to come. We are thus assured of the support of the masses and of the success of the efforts we are undertaking.

The Belgians reluctantly conceded political independence to the Congolese, and two years later, following a decisive win for the Congolese National Movement in the first democratic elections, Lumumba found himself elected to prime minister and with the right to form a government. A more moderate leader, Joseph Kasavubu, occupied the mostly ceremonial position of Congolese president.

On June 30, 1960, Independence Day, Lumumba gave what is now considered a timeless speech. The Belgian king, Boudewijn, opened proceedings by praising the murderous regime of his great-great uncle, Leopold II (eight million Congolese died during his reign from 1885 to 1908), as benevolent, highlighted the supposed benefits of colonialism, and warned the Congolese: “Don’t compromise the future with hasty reforms.” Kasavubu, predictably, thanked the king.

Then Lumumba, unscheduled, took the podium. What happened next has become one of the most recognizable statements of anticolonial defiance and a postcolonial political program. As the Belgian writer and literary critic Joris Note later pointed out, the original French text consisted of no more than 1,167 words. But it covered a lot of ground.

The first half of the speech traced an arc from past to future: the oppression Congolese had to endure together, the end of suffering and colonialism. The second half mapped out a broad vision and called on Congolese to unite at the task ahead.

Most importantly, Congo’s natural resources would benefit its people first: “We shall see to it that the lands of our native country truly benefit its children,” said Lumumba, adding that the challenge was “creating a national economy and ensuring our economic independence.” Political rights would be reconceived: “We shall revise all the old laws and make them into new ones that will be just and noble.”

Congolese congressmen and those listening by radio broke out in applause. But the speech did not sit well with the former colonizers, Western journalists, nor with multinational mining interests, local comprador elites (especially Kasavubu and separatist elements in the east of the country), the United States government (which rejected Lumumba’s entreaties for help against the reactionary Belgians and the secessionists, forcing him to turn to the Soviet Union), and even the United Nations.

These interests found a willing accomplice in Lumumba’s comrade: former journalist and now head of the army Joseph Mobutu. Together they worked to foment rebellion in the army, stoke unrest, exploit attacks on whites, create an economic crisis — and eventually kidnap and execute Lumumba.

The CIA had tried to poison him, but eventually settled on local politicians (and Belgian killers) to do the job. He was captured by Mobutu’s mutinous army and flown to the secessionist province of Katanga, where he was tortured, shot, and killed.

In the wake of his murder, some of Lumumba’s comrades — most notably Pierre Mulele, Lumumba’s minister of education — controlled part of the country and fought on bravely, but was finally crushed by American and South African mercenaries. (At one point Che Guevara traveled to Congo on a failed military mission to aid Mulele’s army.)

That left Mobutu, under the guise of anticommunism, to declare a one-party, repressive, and kleptomanic state, and govern, with the consent of the United States and Western governments, for the next thirty-odd years.

In February 2002, Belgium’s government expressed “its profound and sincere regrets and its apologies” for Lumumba’s murder, acknowledging that “some members of the government, and some Belgian actors at the time, bear an irrefutable part of the responsibility for the events.”

A government commission also heard testimony that “the assassination could not have been carried out without the complicity of Belgian officers backed by the CIA, and it concluded that Belgium had a moral responsibility for the killing.”

Lumumba today has tremendous semiotic force: he is a social media avatar, a Twitter meme, and a font for inspirational quotes — a perfect hero (like Biko), untainted by any real politics. He is even free of the kind of critiques reserved for figures like Fidel Castroor Thomas Sankara, who confronted some of the inherent contradictions of their own regimes through antidemocratic means.

As such, Lumumba divides debates over political strategy: he is often derided as a merely charismatic leader, a good speaker with very little strategic vision.

For example, in the famed Belgian historical fiction writer David van Reybrouck’s much-praised Congo: An Epic History of a People, Lumumba is characterized as a poor tactician, unstatesmanlike, and more interested in rebellion and adulation than governance. He is faulted for not prioritizing Western interests.

Lumumba’s denunciation of the Belgian king in June 1960, for example, only served to embolden his enemies, argues Van Reybrouck. Lumumba is also criticized by his Western critics for turning to the Soviet Union after the United States had spurned him.

But as the writer Adam Shatz has argued: “It’s not clear how . . . in his two and a half months in office, Lumumba could have dealt differently with a Belgian invasion, two secessionist uprisings, and a covert American campaign to destabilize his government.”

More powerful perhaps is how Lumumba operates unproblematically as a figure of defiance. As the disappointment with national liberation movements in Africa (in particular, Algeria, Angola, Zimbabwe, Mozambique, and more recently South Africa’s African National Congress) sets in, and new social movements (#OccupyNigeria, #WalktoWork in Uganda, the more radical #FeesMustFall and struggles over land, housing, and health care in South Africa) begin to take shape, references to and images of Patrice Lumumba serve as a call to arms.

In Lumumba’s native Congo, ordinary citizens are currently fighting President Joseph Kabila’s attempts to circumvent the constitution (his two terms were up in December, but he refused to step down). Hundreds have been killed by the police and thousands arrested. Kabila, who inherited the presidency from his father, who overthrew Mobutu, exploits the weakness of the opposition, especially the power of ethnicity (via patronage politics) to divide Congolese politically. In this, Kabila is merely emulating the Belgian colonists and Mobutu.

Here Lumumba’s legacy may be helpful. Lumumba’s Congolese National Movement was the only party offering a national — rather than ethnic — vision and a means to organize Congolese around a progressive ideal. Such a movement and such politicians are in short supply in Congo these days.

But Lumumba’s story offers not just an invitation to revisit the political potential of past movements and currents, but also opportunities to refrain from projecting too much onto leaders like Lumumba who had a complicated political life and who did not get to confront the messiness of postcolonial governance. It also means treating tragic political leaders as humans. To take seriously political scientist Adolph Reed Jr’s advice about Malcolm X:

He was just like the rest of us — a regular person saddled with imperfect knowledge, human frailties, and conflicting imperatives, but nonetheless trying to make sense of his very specific history, trying unsuccessfully to transcend it, and struggling to push it in a humane direction.

It is perhaps then that we can begin to make true Patrice Lumumba’s critical wish, perhaps as self reflection, that he wrote in a letter from prison to his wife in 1960:

The day will come when history will speak. But it will not be the history which will be taught in Brussels, Paris, Washington or the United Nations. It will be the history which will be taught in the countries which have won freedom from colonialism and its puppets. Africa will write its own history and in both north and south it will be a history of glory and dignity.

[nofomoartworld]

Hyperallergic: A World in Crisis: Bending, Quaking, Breaking

Pieter Bruegel the Elder, “The Fight between Carnival and Lent” (1559), oil on panel, 118 x 165 cm, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna (image via Web Gallery of Art)

With 15 fresh, riveting essays by notable political analysts and international studies scholars from nearly as many different countries, The Great Regression, Heinrich Geiselberger’s new volume addressing the many perilous aspects of global interdependence, is a must-read for anyone curious to know more about the deeper structures at play in contemporary international politics.

It will register as particularly refreshing for readers who have grown weary of the mainstream media’s circumlocutory, lamely palliative treatment of today’s rampant global woes. The fraught landscape these writers describe, in sobering if not grim terms, is not one that might soon bend, nor one that is incipiently bending. The world portrayed here is one that is already hellbent.

The contributors’ interdisciplinary range — including journalists, philosophers, sociologists, literary authors, cultural critics, historians and political scientists, among others — makes their generally shared tone of unrelenting urgency and emphatic conviction all the more compelling.

From one taut piece to the next, what the reader finds is not a sequence of differently inflected, somewhat safely conditional forewarnings of an imminent, yet-conjectural ‘great regression’ on an imaginable horizon. Premonitory collections of that sort were already available several decades ago, and their prescriptions were clearly not taken quite seriously enough.

As such, what readers have here are multi-perspectival analyses — now broadly global, now rigorously thematic, now subtly philosophical, now regionally focused — of a ‘great regression’ that is well underway, and one whose consequences are already being seen and felt, and for the most part suffered, by people of most every social stratum the world over.

Geiselberger opens his preface with a brief quote from a 2011 article by Ulrich Beck, and it’s this quote that resonates unwaveringly throughout the subsequent couple hundred pages: “When a world order breaks down, that is when people begin to think about it.” It is thus with those incisive clauses in mind — along with Geiselberger’s succinct definition of the ‘great regression’ as “the product of a collaboration between the risks of globalization and neoliberalism” — that readers are equipped to take in the rest of this remarkably multifaceted, thematically stratified, indeed polyphonic volume.

For example, Arjun Appadurai’s essay addressing the surges of populist authoritarianism all around the world is followed by Zygmunt Bauman’s discussion of crises of migration and integration, which opens with a passage from Kafka’s “The Departure.” The next couple chapters, by Donatella della Porta and Nancy Fraser, respectively, outline the ways in which the ostensibly progressive ideals and inclusivity-fostering agendas of certain democracies have been so consistently deployed in favor of capital that they’ve weakened the very societal support systems they purported to uphold, creating too few winners and an ever-amassing majority of losers — progression ushering in, as it were, its own waves of regression.

Thereafter, Eva Illouz uses Israel as her focus to discuss internal radicalization; Ivan Krastev references a novel by José Saramago to contextualize how so many nations have gone from disconnected to connected, then to barricaded, as citizens of other nations flow over their borders; essays by Bruno Latour, Paul Mason and Robert Misik focus primarily on recent political developments in Europe to address the increasingly defunct strictures and structures put in place by unscrupulous neoliberal capitalists, while Pankaj Mishra does much the same from a more broadly global perspective.

Elsewhere, Oliver Nachtwey discusses decivilization and regressive modernization, while Wolfgang Streeck delves into the return of repression in an age of false narratives; and David Van Reybrouck heralds the end of the European Union with airs of both sincere and cheeky fondness in a kind of open letter addressed to EU President Jean-Claude Juncker. Among the most arresting chapters in The Great Regression is “Post-capitalist counter-movements,” César Rendueles’s veritable master class in analytical relativism and empirically informed critique, in which the “success” of capitalism comes across as tremendously more fearsome than its “collapse”: “If we want to avoid catastrophe, we have to pass from the radicalization of normality to the normalization of a break.”

Hieronymus Bosch, “Triptych of Garden of Earthly Delights” (detail: Hell) (c.1500), oil on panel, Museo del Prado, Madrid (image via Web Gallery of Art)

In his collection-closing piece, “The populist temptation,” Slavoj Žižek, whose multidisciplinary approaches and oft-dystopic views are right at home in this volume, issues a kind of call-to-arms to a worker-oriented left to rebuild itself — yet hopefully not ‘rebrand’ itself — and to do so in a way that transcends national borders. For the Slovenian philosopher, the “big lesson of global capitalism is that nation-states acting alone cannot do the job — only a new political international can possibly bridle global capital.”

The Great Regression consists of descriptions and actionable prescriptions, not loose predictions. It’s a collection of analyses and sharp critiques, not theories. The moment for abstract solutions and promises of gradual change has long since passed; no longer can even the most aloof, sheltered elites honestly deny the disastrous statuses quo, societal as well as environmental, that capitalistic overreach, empty ‘Third Way’ ideals, and failed neoliberal agendas have brought about, with all the electoral volatilities, economic uncertainties, refugee crises, radicalisms, recessions, repressions, and xenophobic outcries that have by now collectively become one and the same quaking political landscape. This is why it’s so crucial that these timely essays cut right to the chase of a global crisis that’s already taking place. The overall vision they portray is that of a particularly chaotic scene à la Bruegel. Depending on how hellish things get — or on how much further they can bend before they break — the next scene might take place in an underworld à la Bosch.

The Great Regression (2017) is published by Polity Press and is available from Amazon and other online booksellers. I’d like to add here that the several chapters of this book translated into English from various other languages are by and large brilliantly rendered. 

The post A World in Crisis: Bending, Quaking, Breaking appeared first on Hyperallergic.

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[axellewarin-blog1]

Weduwnaar schrijft boek over zijn verdriet na 22/03: 'Jihad van liefde'

http://www.hln.be/hln/nl/36484/Aanslagen-Brussel/article/detail/3099626/2017/03/08/Weduwnaar-schrijft-boek-over-zijn-verdriet-na-22-03-Jihad-van-liefde.dhtml

‘Jihad van liefde', een boek geschreven door David van Reybrouck dat het verhaal vertelt van Mohamed el Bachiri. Het boek gaat over een getuigenis dat Mohamed schreef over het verlies van zijn vrouw tijdens de aanslag op het metrostation Maalbeek. In het artikel wordt vermeld dat 'Jihad van liefde' een boekenhit is en over de toonbanken vliegt.

De reden waarom dit artikel mijn aandacht trok, was door de woorden van Mohamed. Hij heeft veel meegemaakt en verloren en zal waarschijnlijk nog heel zijn leven kampen met verdriet en haatgevoelens. Maar ondanks deze woede schrijft hij een boek met als doel mensen aan te spreken en goede woorden te verspreiden. Zoals hij in het televisieprogramma 'De Afspraak' duidelijk maakte: 'Ik kende de Vlaamse gemeenschap niet echt door de taalbarrière, maar ik heb echt een geweldige gemeenschap leren kennen die heel erg openstaat voor mijn boodschap van liefde: terreur kan alleen met liefde bestreden worden.' Voor mensen zoals Mohamed die zulke woorden verspreiden, heb ik enorm veel respect! Zij proberen het goede te propageren en geven hoop aan de mensheid.

Ik begrijp niet waar de wereld naar toe gaat en als ik heel eerlijk mag zijn, ben ik bang. Bang voor mijn dierbaren en geliefden, bang dat mijn leven er binnen 10 jaar helemaal anders zal uitzien dan nu, bang dat de toekomst er niet al te rooskleurig uit zal zien…

Als ik hierover praat met vrienden of familie maken zij me ook duidelijk dat je niet teveel angsten moet hebben, want dat is waar IS naar streeft. Daarom leef ik van dag op dag en probeer ik van elk moment te genieten. Ik heb een mooie quote die voor deze situatie erg van toepassing is: 'Wil je leven of gewoon bestaan?'.

[mijnmobielemoleskine]

Nieuwsgierigheid is een vorm van respect.

David Van Reybrouck

[96thdayofrage]

Patrice Lumumba (1925–1961)

56 years ago today, Congolese prime minister and anticolonial leader Patrice Lumumba was assassinated.

Patrice Lumumba was prime minister of a newly independent Congo for only seven months between 1960 and 1961 before he was murdered, fifty-six years ago today. He was thirty-six.

Yet Lumumba’s short political life — as with figures like Thomas Sankara and Steve Biko, who had equally short lives — is still a touchstone for debates about what is politically possible in postcolonial Africa, the role of charismatic leaders, and the fate of progressive politics elsewhere.

The details of Lumumba’s biography have been endlessly memorialized and cut and pasted: a former postal worker in the Belgian Congo, he became political after joining a local branch of a Belgian liberal party. On his return from a study tour to Belgium arranged by the party, the authorities took note of his burgeoning political involvement and arrested him for embezzling funds from the post office. He served twelve months in prison.

Congolese historian Georges Nzongola-Ntalaja — who was in high school during Lumumba’s rise and assassination — points out that the charges were trumped-up. Their main effect was to radicalize him against Belgian racism, though not colonialism. Upon his release in 1957, Lumumba, by now a beer salesman, was more explicit about Congolese autonomy and helped found the Congolese National Movement, the first Congolese political group which explicitly disavowed Belgian paternalism and tribalism, called unreservedly for independence, and demanded that Congo’s vast mineral wealth (exploited by Belgium and Euro-American multinational firms) benefit Congolese first.

For Belgian public opinion — which played up Congolese ethnic differences, infantilized Africans, and in the late 1950s still had a thirty-year plan for Congolese independence — Lumumba and the Congolese National Movement’s pronouncements came as a shock.

Two months after his release from prison, in December 1958, Lumumba was in Ghana, at the invitation of President Kwame Nkrumah who had organized the seminal All Africa People’s Conference. There, as a number of other African nationalists pushing for political independence listened, Lumumba declared:

The winds of freedom currently blowing across all of Africa have not left the Congolese people indifferent. Political awareness, which until very recently was latent, is now becoming manifest and assuming outward expression, and it will assert itself even more forcefully in the months to come. We are thus assured of the support of the masses and of the success of the efforts we are undertaking.

The Belgians reluctantly conceded political independence to the Congolese, and two years later, following a decisive win for the Congolese National Movement in the first democratic elections, Lumumba found himself elected to prime minister and with the right to form a government. A more moderate leader, Joseph Kasavubu, occupied the mostly ceremonial position of Congolese president.

On June 30, 1960, Independence Day, Lumumba gave what is now considered a timeless speech. The Belgian king, Boudewijn, opened proceedings by praising the murderous regime of his great-great uncle, Leopold II (eight million Congolese died during his reign from 1885 to 1908), as benevolent, highlighted the supposed benefits of colonialism, and warned the Congolese: “Don’t compromise the future with hasty reforms.” Kasavubu, predictably, thanked the king.

Then Lumumba, unscheduled, took the podium. What happened next has become one of the most recognizable statements of anticolonial defiance and a postcolonial political program. As the Belgian writer and literary critic Joris Note later pointed out, the original French text consisted of no more than 1,167 words. But it covered a lot of ground.

The first half of the speech traced an arc from past to future: the oppression Congolese had to endure together, the end of suffering and colonialism. The second half mapped out a broad vision and called on Congolese to unite at the task ahead.

Most importantly, Congo’s natural resources would benefit its people first: “We shall see to it that the lands of our native country truly benefit its children,” said Lumumba, adding that the challenge was “creating a national economy and ensuring our economic independence.” Political rights would be reconceived: “We shall revise all the old laws and make them into new ones that will be just and noble.”

Congolese congressmen and those listening by radio broke out in applause. But the speech did not sit well with the former colonizers, Western journalists, nor with multinational mining interests, local comprador elites (especially Kasavubu and separatist elements in the east of the country), the United States government (which rejected Lumumba’s entreaties for help against the reactionary Belgians and the secessionists, forcing him to turn to the Soviet Union), and even the United Nations.

These interests found a willing accomplice in Lumumba’s comrade: former journalist and now head of the army Joseph Mobutu. Together they worked to foment rebellion in the army, stoke unrest, exploit attacks on whites, create an economic crisis — and eventually kidnap and execute Lumumba.

The CIA had tried to poison him, but eventually settled on local politicians (and Belgian killers) to do the job. He was captured by Mobutu’s mutinous army and flown to the secessionist province of Katanga, where he was tortured, shot, and killed.

In the wake of his murder, some of Lumumba’s comrades — most notably Pierre Mulele, Lumumba’s minister of education — controlled part of the country and fought on bravely, but was finally crushed by American and South African mercenaries. (At one point Che Guevara traveled to Congo on a failed military mission to aid Mulele’s army.)

That left Mobutu, under the guise of anticommunism, to declare a one-party, repressive, and kleptomanic state, and govern, with the consent of the United States and Western governments, for the next thirty-odd years.

In February 2002, Belgium’s government expressed “its profound and sincere regrets and its apologies” for Lumumba’s murder, acknowledging that “some members of the government, and some Belgian actors at the time, bear an irrefutable part of the responsibility for the events.”

A government commission also heard testimony that “the assassination could not have been carried out without the complicity of Belgian officers backed by the CIA, and it concluded that Belgium had a moral responsibility for the killing.”

Lumumba today has tremendous semiotic force: he is a social media avatar, a Twitter meme, and a font for inspirational quotes — a perfect hero (like Biko), untainted by any real politics. He is even free of the kind of critiques reserved for figures like Fidel Castro or Thomas Sankara, who confronted some of the inherent contradictions of their own regimes through antidemocratic means.

As such, Lumumba divides debates over political strategy: he is often derided as a merely charismatic leader, a good speaker with very little strategic vision.

For example, in the famed Belgian historical fiction writer David van Reybrouck’s much-praised Congo: An Epic History of a People, Lumumba is characterized as a poor tactician, unstatesmanlike, and more interested in rebellion and adulation than governance. He is faulted for not prioritizing Western interests.

Lumumba’s denunciation of the Belgian king in June 1960, for example, only served to embolden his enemies, argues Van Reybrouck. Lumumba is also criticized by his Western critics for turning to the Soviet Union after the United States had spurned him.

But as the writer Adam Shatz has argued: “It’s not clear how . . . in his two and a half months in office, Lumumba could have dealt differently with a Belgian invasion, two secessionist uprisings, and a covert American campaign to destabilize his government.”

More powerful perhaps is how Lumumba operates unproblematically as a figure of defiance. As the disappointment with national liberation movements in Africa (in particular, Algeria, Angola, Zimbabwe, Mozambique, and more recently South Africa’s African National Congress) sets in, and new social movements (#OccupyNigeria, #WalktoWork in Uganda, the more radical #FeesMustFall and struggles over land, housing, and health care in South Africa) begin to take shape, references to and images of Patrice Lumumba serve as a call to arms.

In Lumumba’s native Congo, ordinary citizens are currently fighting President Joseph Kabila’s attempts to circumvent the constitution (his two terms were up in December, but he refused to step down). Hundreds have been killed by the police and thousands arrested. Kabila, who inherited the presidency from his father, who overthrew Mobutu, exploits the weakness of the opposition, especially the power of ethnicity (via patronage politics) to divide Congolese politically. In this, Kabila is merely emulating the Belgian colonists and Mobutu.

Here Lumumba’s legacy may be helpful. Lumumba’s Congolese National Movement was the only party offering a national — rather than ethnic — vision and a means to organize Congolese around a progressive ideal. Such a movement and such politicians are in short supply in Congo these days.

But Lumumba’s story offers not just an invitation to revisit the political potential of past movements and currents, but also opportunities to refrain from projecting too much onto leaders like Lumumba who had a complicated political life and who did not get to confront the messiness of postcolonial governance. It also means treating tragic political leaders as humans. To take seriously political scientist Adolph Reed Jr’s advice about Malcolm X:

He was just like the rest of us — a regular person saddled with imperfect knowledge, human frailties, and conflicting imperatives, but nonetheless trying to make sense of his very specific history, trying unsuccessfully to transcend it, and struggling to push it in a humane direction.

It is perhaps then that we can begin to make true Patrice Lumumba’s critical wish, perhaps as self reflection, that he wrote in a letter from prison to his wife in 1960:

The day will come when history will speak. But it will not be the history which will be taught in Brussels, Paris, Washington or the United Nations. It will be the history which will be taught in the countries which have won freedom from colonialism and its puppets. Africa will write its own history and in both north and south it will be a history of glory and dignity.