An excerpt from Francis B. Nyamnjoh’s

It is late into the night. Bobinga Iroko is unable to sleep. He is working on the editorial for the next issue of The Talking Drum. He has deliberately refused to carry the story on homosexuality. His priority remains the strike at the University of Mimbo, which, curiously, hasn’t attracted much coverage from the rest of the national press concentrated in Nyamandem and Sawang. He and The Talking Drum, the formidable odds against them notwithstanding, are determined to crusade along like a lone ranger, until victory day. They believe the sun must not be allowed to set on a good idea.

He is also struggling with an obituary following the sudden death, under very mysterious circumstances, of one of the rare genuine intellectuals at the University of Mimbo. Despised by the authorities as an ‘unbelievably vain, hopelessly incompetent and disestablishmentarian crank,’ and known popularly as ‘Intellectual Warrior’, Dr BP (‘Burning Pen’) was found dead last night at his home, his skull shattered, his brain and genitals missing. In his transition from Burning Pen to Buried Pen, he looked more like the victim of a ritual murder than of a robbery. Dr BP was not afraid to make career-limiting statements, and would rather die than be cowed. He had absolute disdain for those who were neither here nor there in their convictions; those who seemed to say things only to please the way a chameleon would its vicinity. To him, such people were shallow, myopic, spineless irrelevances. A screaming and fearless critic who once described the University of Mimbo as the ‘burial ground for enthusiasm’, Dr BP was writing a commentary titled ‘J’accuse’, when he was smashed to death in mid-sentence.

Dr BP died doing what he has always done: fighting to make a difference and making a difference by fighting. To Bobinga Iroko and The Talking Drum, Dr BP died keeping hope alive in a hopeless situation, adding the weight of his pen to efforts to bring back a bit of dignity to the lives of ordinary Mimbolanders stripped bare by shallow pretence, sterile rhetoric and its radical vocabulary of hate. He died fighting the battles he would want those he leaves behind to keep fighting. In a context where many an intellectual has been silenced by the lure and allure of easy virtue and the sterile politics of reckless impunity, BP was the rare exception who stayed wedded to the ideals of the genuine intellectual, academic freedom and social responsibility.

Bobinga Iroko will always cherish BP’s essays and contributions in the pages of The Talking Drum, which were as clear about what he believed to be wrong with the land of his birth as they were about what he thought it would take to make right those wrongs. It is therefore unfortunate and indeed ironic that BP should pass on in a suspicious death most cruel, and not those excesses his essays and commentaries were meant to bury. And it is equally unfortunate that he should leave the scene just when he was ready to share with the world in person the richness of his experience of a country and a university community where a reluctant government and those whose intellects it has numbed would spare nothing to derail the train of hope and human dignity.

BP epitomized those who refuse to stand by and watch the train of hope and human dignity derailed. He stood for those who would rather fight than run away (wasn’t it Bob Marley who said it all – he who fights and runs away lives to fight another day?). BP the flesh and blood may have died, BP the idea has never been more alive. This can be seen in the determination and resilience by students of the University of Mimbo to keep aglow their ambitions of academic freedom and the quest for betterment in equality, dignity and opportunity for all and sundry.

This, as BP and others who have sacrificed their lives have always claimed, requires a particular calibre of leadership. As BP has stressed ad infinitum, any leader, no matter how good, needs others to compensate for their weaknesses. A good leader is one who encourages others to lead without overly dramatizing the fact of being in charge. He or she is one who surrounds themselves with people of contradictory opinions in order to be forced to think, compare and contrast before reaching a decision.

The way forward for the University of Mimbo and for Mimboland, BP stressed in what none could have imagined was his last commentary in the pages of The Talking Drum, is by recognising that leadership is not about the leader. It is about the enabling environment the leader creates for experts in various walks of life and for all and sundry under him or her to offer leadership. A good leader is one who is able to purge him or herself of the delusion that bosses are necessarily better than the people under them. Modesty is the master key to success in leadership, for a good leader immediately recognises that he or she needs support to lead, and that a leader never leads alone. ‘Leadership is more of a privilege than a right, just as a leader is more of a servant than a master’, BP emphasised, adding that only at the University of Mimbo and in Mimboland did the contrary obtain. ‘With leaders who have neither modesty nor generosity of spirit, who thrive on the argument of force and not the force of argument, institutions dry out and wither, not for lack of talent but for lack of purpose.’ Woe betides the leader who takes decisions without consultation, and who excludes from leadership people who have a lot of talent because he or she is too afraid to be contradicted or to discover that no single individual however gifted has a monopoly of good ideas.

‘It is difficult to advise a leader who is always right,’ argued BP, ‘hence the need to create circumstances where other leaders can be fostered. This starts with inclusion, fairness and opportunity for all and sundry.’ BP ended his commentary with the words: ‘We often get the leaders we deserve by giving myopic individuals the power to silence the creativity and difference that should normally edify and strengthen an institution, a community or a country. The University of Mimbo and the people of Mimboland deserve a better fate than the disgrace lumped on them by the predicament of a mediocrity called leadership.’

* Francis B. Nyamnjoh is associate professor and head of publications and dissemination with the Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa (CODESRIA). Nyamnjoh’s Married But Available (Langaa Publishers, 2008) is available at the both .
* Please send comments to [email protected] or comment online at http://www.pambazuka.org/

The following is only a short exerpt of Souls Forgotten. The extend article can be found at the link below.

Four years have gone by since disaster struck the villages of Abehema, Tchang and Yenseh, killing over 2000 peasants and tens of thousands of livestock. Life has not returned to normal for most of the survivors now scattered all over Chuma Division and beyond, but they all seem resigned to their abnormal way of life. They are resigned to being ignored when they complain of heartburn, eye lesions, nerve problems, dying muscles, and paralysis. They have waited long for resettlement, rehabilitation or return from living and partly living, but they have waited in vain.

Four years ago when disaster struck, their fellow Mimbolanders came to their rescue, and so did the outside world. Then, although charred and burnt and roasted, even the most desperate of them found reason and determination to keep hope alive, which they did exceptionally well. This hope started fading only weeks after the immediate flare and universal gestures of solidarity and concern had died down.

The bulk of the victims were temporarily accommodated in camps and tents in Abeghabegh, Kakakum River, Pukafong and Hepalem, while men of science competed with one another to divine the causes of the disaster, ignoring whatever diviner-healers like Wabuah had had to say on the matter. They were determined to force feed Mimbolanders with their conviction that they knew best, and that only their ‘scientific’ opinion would have to count at the end of the day. To them, Wabuah and his likes were simply much too superstitious and illiterate to have anything to contribute. How could they be so insensitive as to deprive Science of the opportunity to be baffled by the fact that it was not in the nature of lakes to simply rise up and wipe out thousands of people and tens of thousands of livestock?

That was four years ago. Today they are still waiting, waiting with fading hope for the scientists’ famous master verdict. The diviner-healers pronounced theirs a long time ago, but no one in high office would listen to them, being schooled in science as modern politicians and civil servants all pretended they were. Waiting for the scientists seems like waiting for eternity. Three years ago, international experts in matters of gases, lakes and volcanoes met, deliberated and separated without agreeing on the causes. Wabuah and his fellow diviner-healers did not meet the criteria for invitation to participate in the conference, which was held under their very noses. The government of enlightened politicians and bureaucrats has repeatedly rejected the verdict of the diviner-healers for being “primitive and superstitious, and for taking Mimboland back to the dark ages prior to colonisation,” but their hopes for “more scientific explanations” are yet to be fulfilled by the high priests of modern science.

Francis B. Nyamnjoh reflects on the central role Issa Shivji has played in the development of African revolutionary scholarship.

It is 15th July 2006 at the University of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. Issa G. Shivji, at 60, is giving his valedictory lecture. Titled “Lawyers in Neoliberalism: Authority’s Professional Supplicants or Society’s Amateurish Conscience”, the lecture marks the end of a rich and distinguished 36 year career of selfless service that started as a tutorial assistant in May 1970 and was crowned with full professorship in July 1986. The lecture is on a theme that has been at the centre of Shivji’s humanity and scholarship since his student days in East Africa and the United Kingdom. If neoliberalism cultivates corporate greed and reinforces an elitist order that never tires of globalizing a culture of poverty, Shivji as a lawyer and scholar has positioned himself passionately and selfishly at variance with neoliberalism. He uses changing land and labour regimes in Tanzania to criticize the changing concepts of personhood and human agency that have tended to question cultures and socio-political communities underpinned by collective success where greed is not the creed. Drawing on leading labour cases, Shivji convincingly demonstrates how Tanzania and Africa have jumped “from the frying pan of state nationalism into the fire of corporate neoliberalism”, hence his criticism of lawyers who come across more as technicians oiling the wheels of neoliberalism than as saboteurs to the corporate greed and global consumer culture it champions.

As he argues, neoliberalism generates a transnational legal intelligentsia to serve and oil it. The neoliberal elite globalizes the so-called ‘rule of law’, not as embedded in liberal political values of the Enlightenment period, but rather as “firmly rooted in the exigencies of the ‘rule of capital’ in the service of a corporatocracy.” The result is the global “expansion and protection of property relations and private appropriation of surplus value,” to the detriment of multitudes of poor and ordinary citizens simply seeking to get by. In the valedictory lecture, reproduced in the popular pan-African Pambazuka electronic news bulletin: Shivji is scathing in his criticism of African lawyers and intellectuals at the beg and call of neoliberalism, which privileges profit over people and is interested in development and culture only to the extent that these guarantee profitability. Shivji has remained consistent and uncompromisingly critical over the last forty years.

In 1968, he published “The Educated Barbarians”, an article that was passionately critical by the injustices of unequal encounters that had reduced being cultured to emptying oneself of all meaningful cultural difference vis-à-vis neocolonial forces and its harbingers in Africa. In those days, as today, Shivji was committed to Africans old and young passionate about making the world a better place politically, economically and culturally. In his words, “We discussed Fanon while we worked in cashew nut farms around the University, taught literacy classes in Mlalakuwa based on Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed, built our own shelters, called houses, through self-help.” It was an exercise of making both development and culture in tune with the lives and expectations of those called upon to partake of both.

This passionate commitment to challenging the culture of injustice and greed with the culture of equality of humanity and the celebration of difference seems to diminish in Africa by the day. Shivji is worried, and blames the insidiousness of Neo-liberalism, which “has taken its toll and the language of consultancy has displaced and replaced the language of conscience and commitment.” He argues that “corporatisation of the university is part of the neoliberal ideological attack on critical thinking, on intellectuals who would ‘Speak Truth to Power’. It undermines the university as a critical site of knowledge, as a mirror of society. No doubt, temptations are great and none of us is immune.” This recognition, notwithstanding, Shivji is particularly scandalized by the fact that even the committed progressive scholars of yesteryears “can only agonize and gradually forget even to diagnose the ills of our society.”

Professor Issa Shivji has had a rich career as one of Africa’s leading experts on law and development issues. He retires as director of the Department of Constitutional and Administrative Law at the University of Dar es Salaam where he has taught since 1970’s. In Tanzania where he was born in 1946, Shivji has served as advocate of the High Court and the Court of Appeal of Tanzania since 1977 and advocate of High Court in Zanzibar since 1989. He has served as visiting professor in Mexico, Zimbabwe, South Africa, United Kingdom, India, Hong Kong and USA, and has won several awards and distinctions. Shivji’s influence as a lawyer, scholar, professor and public intellectual is global. He has researched, written and published extensively on a broad range of issues including on human rights, land tenure, labour, higher education and the politics of recognition and representation.

He has published 15 books that include his 1989 groundbreaking The Concepts of Human Rights in Africa - a critique of dominant ideologies of human rights that seeks to reconceptualise human rights from the perspective of the working people of Africa, 6 monographs, 33 book chapters, 36 articles in scholarly journals, and over 40 other papers, reports and writings in newspapers, newsletters and bulletins. His most recent book -- Let the People Speak: Tanzania Down the Road to Neoliberalism—published by CODESRIA to coincide with his valedictory lecture, consists of 90 critical and thought-provoking essays selected from over 150 written between 1990 and 2005 in three different newspapers. The book captures the richness of Shivji’s contributions as a public intellectual. It deals with the period when Tanzania under external pressures from donors and financial institutions was forced down the road of neo-liberalism. The local compradorial elites whose economic appetites had been suppressed under Nyerere’s radical nationalism now openly flexed muscles to get a place under the capitalist sun as nationalism, radical or otherwise, was abandoned, and neo-liberalism uncritically embraced.

The essays are on varied subjects ranging from the politics of multi-party, the strains and stresses of the Union with Zanzibar, the deep-seated extra-constitutional behaviour of the ruling elite to the hopes, fears and resistance of the working people. In these essays, contemporary Tanzanian history is recorded in sweeping journalistic strokes without burying the commitment of a critical public intellectual in turgid scholarship. As a warning on the slippery slope that neo-liberalism constitutes, Let the People Speak will echo in many an African country. Hence the salience and relevance of Shivj’s renewed call for the resurrection of a radical, people driven Pan-Africanism. Shivji sees in the Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa (CODESRIA), an institution that epitomizes the Pan-Africanism he would want to resurrect. CODESRIA was created in 1973 with a clear mandate to promote the production and dissemination of multidisciplinary social research by African scholars. It was tasked with the responsibility of doing this simultaneously with an investment of effort in transcending the various barriers of language, geography, discipline, gender and generation that hamper cross-national African networking for the advancement of science.

As a foundation member, Shivji has played important roles in the life of CODESRIA. He has been an authoritative and important voice. His high standing and commitment to intellectual activism have played a pivotal role in CODESRIA’s history. The Social Science community in Africa has benefited enormously from the spread of his ideas and influence, and from the encouragement that he has never relented in giving so many people. Shivji has served CODESRIA in various capacities over the years, including as: Chair person for the Drafting Committee to the 1990 Dar es Salaam Declaration on Academic Freedom & Social Responsibility of Academics; Director of CODESRIA Democratic Governance Institute, July – September 1996; Chairperson, CODESRIA Governance Reform Committee, 2000-2002; and Executive Committee member of CODESRIA, 2002-2005. It is this African and global social science community which Shivji has shaped and been shaped by that reacted with outpours of email messages of congratulations and recognition when Shivji made public his retirement through an open invitation to his valedictory lecture.

Without space to do justice to the scores of testimonies in praise of him, let me refer only to a few: Carlos Lopes, a scholar of Guinea Bissau currently Assistant Secretary General at the UNO, writes:

When I was still a teenager I was already reading Issa Shivji, thanks to my mentor's insistence, the late Mário de Andrade, leading Angolan intellectual and founder of the MPLA. When later I wrote my first book, in 1982, quotes from Shivji were prominent. So despite being from a totally different generation I feel I have been in dialogue with Shivji for decades now; and, as a result, consider his enduring influence on my thinking, very important. However what I really would like to mention is the personality of this scholar that always considered himself an agent of change, a revolutionary, committed to the transformation of our beloved continent. From the Dar School to the activism of AAPS, or CODESRIA, Issa has been a reference figure because of his personality. Bonds were established because of his intellectual honesty. We know what he stands for and we know his personal interests matter little for he is a man of convictions, and his convictions are for the good of the collective. At this moment I would like to pay tribute to him and his colleagues that have put the University of Dar es Salaam in the radar of Africa's transformation. We need you!

Dr. Thandika Mkandawire, former Executive Secretary of CODESRIA, author of African Intellectuals, and currently Director of UNRISD in Geneva, writes: Dear Issa, Thanks for the invitation. I really wish I could attend this event to pay tribute to a courageous and inspiring scholar I hope you realise that your retirement at such an early age simply marks a new beginning. I therefore look forward to more of your seminal work. Warm regards

Dr. Jacques Depelchin, a committed intellectual, academic, and activist for peace, democracy, transparency and pro-people politics in the Democratic Republic of Congo, and author of Silences in African History, writes:

Dear Issa, For your fidelity and commitment to emancipatory politics at all times, we can never thank you enough. However, do not worry, although things might look gloomy, there are unmistakable signs that --to paraphrase Ayi Kwei Armah in his novel KMT-- the people of the Sphere shall prevail over the people of the Pyramid. It is easier to heal than to give into the idea that everything has fallen apart. Do take care

Dr. Jimi Adesina, Professor of Sociology at Rhodes University, South Africa, and co-editor of Africa and Development Challenges in the New Millennium, writes: Mzee: Wished I could be there. Thanks for the years of inspiring intellectual leadership that you given all of us and the space that you continue to provide for the intellectual project at the service of ordinary people, who daily do extraordinary things. I am sure this is only a formal end of employment at UD rather than a retirement. May your cooking place never grow cold!

The President of CODESRIA Teresa Cruz e Silva, a Mozambican Historian, had this, among other things, to say: Professor Issa Shivji is a brother, a friend, and in many ways an inspiration to Africans big and small, an intellectual animated by a passion for freedom, a passion well summed up in the title of his latest book: ‘Let the People Speak’. After such an illustrious academic life rich in contribution to the development of Social Sciences in Africa, Professor Issa Shivji deserves his formal retirement from the University of Dar es Salaam, although I doubt, given his wisdom and generosity of spirit, that he is going to allow himself the rest he needs. On behalf of CODESRIA, also represented today by the eminent Professor Archie Mafeje and two former Presidents of CODESRIA, Professors Zenebeworke Tadesse and Mahmood Mamdani -- all three of them founding members of CODESRIA, allow me Professor Shivji to congratulate you and the University of Dar es Salaam for your outstanding academic production and your contribution to the formation of new generations of African scholars in the last decades. Allow me also, personally, to express my gratitude and my tremendous admiration for your scholarship and integrity, as well as your strong intellectual activism illustrated by your writings on Africa and particularly on contemporary Tanzanian issues, and your consistent and very honest positions concerning world politics.

My first true memory of Issa Shivji´s name come from the mid to the late 70´s, after the independence of my country, Mozambique, when at the very new African Studies Centre at Eduardo Mondlane University and under the leadership of Ruth First and Aquino de Bragança, an uninformed young and enthusiastic group of Mozambicans received all the strong influence of the Dar es Salaam school, particularly the very first contacts with issues related with African development, the new research approaches on African history and for the first time a rare chance to read African authors. For scholars of my generation, Issa Shivji´s name always has been a source of inspiration and an extraordinary example of struggle to build up African universities not only with high standards, but with scholars committed to the development of the continent. The huge range of Issa´s achievements was and is still recognized by successive generations of scholars who have his work and intellectual commitment as a source of inspiration. Today we are here to celebrate a transition from one fruitful stage to another one in the academic life of Professor Issa Shivji. Issa´s energy and commitment have been a vital resource for CODESRIA, and for the social science community in general. We sincerely trust that he will continue to guide the young generations and to give more and more of his commitment to African Development. Which is way I say to him: Issa, for this new phase of your life we wish you happiness and good fortune, but CODESRIA cannot guarantee you the rest you so badly need after working so hard. For we need you even more than ever to mentor the younger generation in whom you have sown the seeds of HOPE in a bright future for Africa.

Professor Issa Shivji has never been a lip service scholar, less still a scholar who pays lip service to social responsibility. He does not thrive in dissemblance, and would state his mind even at the risk of being the only voice who dares to say the king is naked in his new clothes. Not untypical therefore, he found reason to voice his concerns about the the Mo Ibrahim Prize for a retired African president which was awarded to Joachim Chissano of Mozambique. In this commentary titled “Robbing Peter to Pay Paul” (see Pambazuka), Shivji argues that “it is naïve, if not mischievous, to award a person – moreover with a cash prize – for bringing peace or democracy to his country.” He questions the reason for the award – “good governance”, the yardsticks by which this is determined, and the derogatory assumptions vis-à-vis Africa, its humanity and dignity that surround the award. He particularly regrets the “uncritical and unqualified celebration” of the award “by scribes and even academics and intellectuals”.

It is too simplistic, he argues, to assume that African problems are created exclusively by Africans, or that the excesses of the world out there has little bearing on the excesses of the world in here. Not to recognize this especially by scholars is dangerous, as it could easily lead to mistaking villains for heroes, mercenaries for savours, dictators for democrats, exploiters for philanthropists, capitalists for socialists. Only such critical understanding can put in perspective the fact that no one who has “made millions of dollars from the sweat and blood of the African people” can be celebrated when instead of returning “a few million to the people through providing badly needed schools, dispensaries, and water wells, proceeds to “add insult to injury by robbing (poor) Peter to pay (rich) Paul.” As Shahida El-Baz remarked in an email to me and others when she read this piece by Issa Shivji, “This is really refreshing. To read/hear such honest, brilliant and committed analysis is like a glowing light in the middle of darkness, where a great number of those, who used to be called progressive intellectuals, enjoy adopting uncritically the fashionable concepts and policies of imperialist globalization. It is also a typical description of what is happening in all our countries. Thank you Issa for holding the torch so high. Keep going…”

The magnitude of Professor Issa Shivji’s scholarly, legal, political and educational contributions to development and culture in Africa and globally, and his humanity, honesty and generosity of spirit constitute a glowing example worth emulating of intellectual and social responsibility in action and in tune with Africa and its predicaments.

* Francis B. Nyamnjoh is Associate Professor and Head of Publications and Dissemination with the Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa (CODESRIA). Email: [email][email protected], Website: www.nyamnjoh.com

* Please send comments to [email protected] or comment online at www.pambazuka.org

Inspired by the market logic, the world is currently hostage to a stifling vision of democracy informed by a very narrow idea of what it is to be beautiful, healthy, successful and free. Nowhere is this better exemplified than in the colossal investment that consumer capitalism has made in slimness, the greatest icon of which is Barbie. This image is made and sold aggressively around the world by global consumer and entertainment media to be consumed as the ideal to which all must aspire, if they are to attain the good life. Francis Nyamnjoh assesses the lessons Africa has learned from the implementation of Barbie democracy and examines alternatives to the market model for Africa.

The idea of writing a paper on Barbie democracy came to me from reflections on the idea of ‘The Market’ and the sort of socio-political institutions this model has tended to inspire. In neoliberal circles, The Market is packaged and presented as omnipotent, omniscient and infallible. It is said to guarantee success for those disciplined by its orthodoxies. It chastises resistance, dissidence and creative difference by a ruthless and reckless extravagance of force, propaganda and self-proliferation. By downplaying the positive dimensions of its sacred aura, The Market has demonstrated it has little tolerance for human sentiments of compassion, solidarity, sociality, conviviality, negotiation, and community, which render one vulnerable in the face of it. The Market comes across as an autocratic and demanding catalogue of insensitivities. As a God-substitute, it trains its followers to develop hearts of stone, which it prescribes to people seeking a better life and to those merely committed to staying alive. Disciples present The Market as the one best solution for the predicaments facing individuals and communities globally. They blame everything and everyone but The Market in case of falls and detours on their way to Calvary. The logic and motto are simple: in victory The Market takes credit, in failure or mitigation, The Market is not to blame. Heads or Tails, The Market always wins.

Among external factors championed in the face of The Market are values that insist on success as a collective pursuit, where achievement is celebrated when it accommodates the dregs of humanity as well. Although portrayed as a constraint by The Market, these values and the notions of success they engender are informed by ideas of personhood and agency that see the individual in the community and the community in the individual. Following this view, people cannot be considered successful individuals independent of the relationships forged with others in their communities. Such an understanding discourages the distinction between the rich and the poor, since it refuses to endorse the privatisation of talent, luck and success, even when these can be traced to particular individuals and communities. This outlook is, instead, informed by a view of humanity as simultaneously free and constrained, and therefore subject to a negotiated, interconnected and interdependent existence.

The Market thus equates success with the actions of those who discipline and punish their own humanity and that of others. The Market recognises sterile accumulation and celebrates individuals who sacrifice the sociality and humanity it perceives as standing in the way of individual self-fulfillment. Hence the slogan: there are no sentiments in business. The Market privileges statistics over people, just as it does profit, and is more comfortable with figures than with actual cases of human victims of its exploits. This makes of surveys and quantification methodologies of collusion and subservience, and ethnographies and qualifications methodologies of emancipation vis-à-vis The Market and its diktats.

The Market, in a way, is comparable to the psychoanalyst. The couch is to The Psychoanalyst what structural adjustment is to The Market. Both The Market and The Psychoanalyst are insensitive to external factors (except when it comes to apportioning blame), and are stubbornly standardised, routinised and predictable in their assumptions and prescriptions. While ready to claim success, both refuse their share of failure. To both, there is no possibility that the structures and assumptions which inform their existence and functions could be part of the problem for which their patients are seeking solutions. The formula for success and failure are to be found in the patient, exclusively. Every individual or community must look within for inspiration to overcome predicaments.

It is within this framework of the real or assumed omniscience, omnipotence and omnipresence of The Market that this paper examines Barbie democracy in Africa, where states have inadequately asserted themselves vis-à-vis orthodoxies informed by The Market, despite popular and ongoing processes to harness the continent’s distinctive creativity, adaptiveness, sociality and conviviality in relationships.

Inspired by The Market logic, the world is currently hostage to a stifling vision of democracy informed by a very narrow idea of what it is to be beautiful, healthy, successful and free. Nowhere is this better exemplified than in the colossal investment that consumer capitalism has made in slimness, the greatest icon of which is Barbie. This image is made and sold aggressively around the world by global consumer and entertainment media to be consumed as the ideal to which all must aspire, if they are to attain the good life. With a focus on consumption as the ultimate unifier, a supreme indicator of cultural sophistication and symbol of civilization, individuals are seen and treated as autonomous agents glued together by a selfless Market slaving away for their cultural freedom, development and enrichment as global citizens. By emphasising the ‘unregulated flow’ and ‘transnationalisation’ of the streamlined, standardised and routinised cultural products of the global media industries, The Market is able to slim all differences down into Barbie proportions. Barbie-like celebrities are recruited to endorse slimming diets, which more ordinary people are then persuaded to follow, with results that entail varying degrees of disappointment.

Its rhetoric of benevolence and munificence notwithstanding, The Market is more about closures than free flows. The agents that sustain it globally promote a largely one-way flow in consumer products that favours a privileged minority as it compounds the impoverishment of the majority. The Market and its corporate media police global material possibilities and consciousness, mostly by denying access to creativity perceived to stand in the way of profit, power and privilege. The result is a Barbie-like socio-cultural, political and economic world devoid of complexity, richness and diversity. In the light of such an impoverishment of difference, plurality is mistaken for diversity, as if an appearance of plenty could not conceal a poverty of perspectives.

Ordinary individuals and marginal communities are thus left literally at the mercy of the Barbie-like information and entertainment burgers served them in the interest of profit. There is a tendency towards convergence in outlook and content, regardless of the nationalities or cultural identities of individuals and communities at the beck and call of The Market and its global gendarmes, the corporate media. The Market and its advocates are most comfortable with passive, depoliticised, unthinking consumer zombies who guarantee profitability at the least possible cost in the name of consumer sovereignty.

Seen in terms of democracy, Barbie (slimness) is imbued with the mission of freeing the individual of relationships or the excess bulk (obesity) of responsibilities standing in the way of personal consumer success. Salvation is to be found in slimness. According to this perspective, the slimmer an individual’s burden of relationships and responsibilities, the better their life chances. Instead of encouraging the rich to get fat with responsibilities and relationships of support to the hungry, consumer capitalism systematically invests in the rich to be thin and unburdened, as it fattens the poor with unfathomable responsibilities, dependencies and a pounding sense of worthlessness and self-persecution.

This Barbie model takes the form of a dictatorship that makes a misery of ordinary lives. But Barbie-isation is at best a bazaar to which millions are drawn but few rewarded or given real choices. Just as obesity is considered an abnormality, so are relationships and sociality seen as dangerous if not watched at close range. A real or false sense of success means that people need not be obsessive about coping with deprivation. In the words of The Economist, [1] ‘People are perfectly tuned to store energy in good years to see them through lean ones. But when bad times never come, they are stuck with that energy, stored around their expanding bellies’ [2]. Persuading people to get thinner becomes an obsession to be supported with public-health warnings and media pressures.

In America for example, the risks notwithstanding, obesity-related stomach stapling operations are on the increase, as people desperately seek to lose weight [3]. According to Dr Trisha Macnair, the despondency of many people who are overweight ‘means that they will go to extremes to reach their goal, try wacky diets which defy common sense, pay large amounts of money for dubious “quick fix” remedies, and even turn to drugs from anonymous clinics, in the hope that somewhere there is an easy answer’[4]. It seems so easy: if only ordinary, overweight or overburdened consumers could follow the slimming menus prescribed by those who know best, they just might realise their dream body, beauty, health, comfort and freedom. In this way, relationships or ties with others are seen as fat that stands in the way of a perfect dream: something that must be burnt out of existence with health foods, slimming pills, fitness exercises, etc. The bulk and bulky are, at the end of the day, mostly disillusioned and disaffected, as the more they strive, the less the satisfaction that comes their way. Instead of learning meaningful lessons on how to bear the burdens of life, they are being schooled on how to shed the burdens of life.

If Barbie has been sold to the rest of the world as an American icon, to most Americans she remains a distant dream and a constant source of embarrassment. Obesity is the order of the day, spawning an industry that generates billions of dollars from products and services consumers hope will help them keep fat in check. According to a recent article on ‘the obesity industry’[5] , nearly one-third of adult Americans ‘are thought to be obese’, and ‘American girls today shop for clothes that are roughly two sizes bigger than those worn by their mothers’. While ‘most Americans are well aware of the risks of obesity’ and believe themselves ‘personally accountable for their weight’, and while ‘miracle slimming drugs and the latest dieting fads become best-sellers’, ‘people are not prepared to give up taste as their solution to this problem’. They refuse to translate Barbie into reality through embracing ‘more healthy lifestyles’, even if they would rush to try out new ‘easy and tasty ways to lose weight’ proposed by those seeking ‘fat profits in fat people’. Sales of healthier foods may be booming, but few are getting thinner as a result. As The Economist observes [6], ‘once people get fat, it is hard for them to get thin’. The future, far from being one of slim Americans paying tribute to Barbie in their fantasies or realities, The Economist foresees ‘a growing herd of fat people’ providing ‘lots of demand for firms supplying everything from bigger towels to bigger beds and, alas, bigger coffins’ into ‘an early grave’[7]. Everywhere, bulk seems to be winning over slimness, with global estimates rising from 200,000,000 adults in 1995 to 300,000,000 in 2003. Whether motivated by culture or by gene, Americans, like everyone else, are, to quote The Economist [8] once more, ‘constantly trying to pack away a few more calories just in case of a famine around the corner’. The same is true of communities and cultures, hence the resilience of relationships and responsibilities even amongst those individuals, communities and cultures most rigorously committed to shedding the burdens of life.

Barbie may well not be anyone’s reality after all, even as she is projected, celebrated, appropriated, and aggressively marketed as an icon. Indeed, those who most passionately pursue the Barbie ideal, quite paradoxically, never really become Barbie at the end of the day. If they don’t simply grow into a muscular Ken as global gendarme high off imperial dogma, they become sickly (as in the case of anorexia, for example) from all the sacrifices they have made, and are hardly, at a closer look, worth all the investments, torture and deprivations endured [9]. The pursuit of Barbie is at best a mirage, at worst a consumer misadventure. If Barbie epitomises consumer capitalism, obesity is to be likened to the community of ties, which individuals are under sustained pressure to break in order to realise consumer success. But since individuals, even in the worst of circumstances, are social beings above all else, shedding relationships and responsibilities is seldom an easy option, and very few succeed in being happy when their ties with others are dead and buried.

Barbie democracy in Africa

What lessons has Africa learnt from its encounters with the Barbie import labelled ‘liberal democracy’? It is commonplace to claim that liberal democracy and Africa are not good bedfellows, and how apt! Implementing liberal democracy in Africa has been like trying to force onto the body of a well-built, well-fed person, truly rich in bulk and all the cultural indicators of health Africans are familiar with, a dress made to fit the slim, de-fleshed Hollywood consumer model of a Barbie-like figure. But instead of blaming the tiny dress or its designer, the tradition has been to fault the popular body or the popular ideal of beauty for emphasising too much bulk, for parading the wrong sizes, for just not being the right thing. Not often is the experience and expertise of the designer or dressmaker questioned, nor their audacity to assume that the parochial cultural palates that inform their peculiar sense of beauty should play God in the lives of regions and cultures where different criteria of beauty obtain. This insensitivity is akin to the behaviour of a Lilliputian undertaker who would rather trim a corpse than expand their coffin to accommodate a man-mountain, or a carpenter whose only tool is a huge hammer and to whom every problem is a nail. The history of difficulty at implementing liberal democracy in Africa attests to this clash of values and attempts to ignore African cultural realities that might well have enriched and domesticated liberal democracy towards greater relevance. And this call for domestication must resist the ploy by opportunistic agents that have often hidden behind nebulous claims of African specificities to orchestrate high-handedness and intolerance.

The greatest shortcoming of liberal democracy is its exaggerated focus on the autonomous individual, as if there is anywhere in the world where people can exist outside of communities or in total absence of relationships with others. Losing the weight of community, solidarity and culture is not an easy feat even to the most dedicated disciples of the Barbie model. By investing so much rhetoric in the rights of the independent, liberal democracy is left without a convincing answer pertaining to the rights of the dependent. Although in principle liberal democracy promises rights to all and sundry as individuals, not everyone who claims political rights is likely to have them, even when these are clearly articulated in constitutions and guaranteed legally. The American democratic system for instance, which champions the Barbie model, offers some interesting examples of how Americans, assumed to be autonomous individuals by law, find themselves bargaining away their political, cultural and economic freedoms in all sorts of ways under pressure from the consumer capitalist emphasis on profit over people.

Notwithstanding the Barbie rhetoric, The American Dream does not come true for everyone who embraces it. The citizenship and consumer sovereignty promised all Americans, can in reality be afforded only in degree and by those who manage to harness the limited economic, cultural and social opportunities that translate into reality, legal and political rights or abstract notions of the autonomous individual. The rest, to get by, must negotiate themselves various levels of subjection and alienation, often with devastating costs to their humanity and that of their dependants or others. Being a rights-bearing individual ceases to be as automatic in reality as is claimed in principle. For those who succeed after hard struggle, the tendency is to monopolise opportunities, since it is, quite paradoxically, only by curbing the rights of others that advantages are best guaranteed in effect. Like with fighting obesity, the majority are those who struggle on a daily basis to fulfil themselves, with varying degrees of failure. This is an effort which, under consumer capitalism, is blamed on the individual to the extent that he or she has failed to sacrifice others through the sacrifice of history, memory, relations or community. Most acquire few advantages despite the profound alienation, inequality, violence, cultural and social malaise, psychic and emotional disorders and exploitation taking place in America today (and increasingly elsewhere) linked to consumer capitalism’s suffocating grip on human imagination and creativity. These limitations of Barbie democracy in the American context may well appear a more palatable form of subjection to some Africans by comparison, but the need to address the rights of the casualties of independent success is no less compelling in America.

Since Barbie democracy appears uncomfortable with salient relationships, community and creative diversity, Africans who subscribe to its rhetoric as leaders find themselves reduced to a Jekyll-and-Hyde democracy: tolerant in principle but muffling in practice. Such African leaders, whether in government, the opposition or civil society, are forced to keep up appearances with Barbie democracy in a context where people are clamouring for recognition and representation as cultural, religious and regional communities. The competing claims for their attention by internal interest groups and external forces explain the apparent contradictions, hypocrisy and double standards that ensue when their actions are appreciated exclusively from the standpoint of Barbie democracy.

Africa’s alternative to Barbie democracy

Despite the noted shortcomings of Barbie democracy, the quest for the missing cultural link in African democracy requires serious negotiation and flexibility, to avoid throwing the Barbie baby out with the bath water. It requires a creativity and nuance that emphasise interdependence between the individual and the community, and between the state and the various cultural configurations that dwell within it. The vision should be a democracy that guarantees not only individual rights and freedoms, but also the interests of communal and cultural solidarities, big and small.

A compelling argument can be made to the effect that the problem in Africa has been undomesticated Barbie democracy, not democracy as pursued in broader forms and possibilities. For democracy to be meaningful in the new millennium, there is a need for honesty about the limitations of the Barbie model, and for recognition of the complex realities, interconnections, and diversities that animate the lives of social actors everywhere. The direction and quality of democracy in the new millennium would depend on an open marriage or conviviality between individual aspirations and community interests, since individuals continue to belong to solidarities despite attempts at conversion by Barbie. It is a fact of life that most people are committed to primary forms of belonging, to which state and country are only secondary, and promoters of Barbie democracy ought to be more honest about this, to avoid opportunism. It is by acknowledging and providing for the reality of individuals who straddle different margins of identity and belonging, and who are willing or forced to be both ‘citizens’ and ‘subjects’, that democracy stands its greatest chance anywhere. If harvesting rights and entitlements requires the denial of rights and entitlements, the only democracy that would make sense in the new millennium is one that reconciles autonomy with dependency, citizenship with subjection. And as the most subjected continent where opportunism has blossomed, Africa should play a leading role in bringing about a democracy more in tune with the rights of dependants.

REFERENCES

This is an updated version of an earlier paper in Dutch published in Internationale Samenwerking (Publication of Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs for Development Cooperation), No.12, December 2003, pp.28-30.
1] December 13, 2003, p.11
2] I would extend it beyond people to include communities and solidarities of various kinds.
3]
4] http://www.bbc.co.uk/health/features/obesity_surgery.shtml
5] The Economist, September 27, 2003, pp.68-69
6] December 13, p.11, 2003
7] The Economist, September 27, 2003, pp.68-69; December 13, 2003, p.11.
8] December 13, p.11, 2003
9] Just by way of a quick example, the UK Daily Mail of October 22, 2003, pp.24-25, carried the confessions of five women who tried celebrity diets for six weeks, and all complained about the disturbing unseen effects on their bodies. One found the diet a nightmare that didn’t seem healthy, made her feel nauseous, and gave her stomach pains all the time. To another, her diet was horrible, tiring and difficult to follow because too prohibitive. A third branded the diet an expensive hassle, and a fourth, who was ‘incredibly tired and desperately missed tasty, easy food such as pasta and rice’, wondered if ‘anyone could live like this for long’

* Francis B. Nyamnjoh is Associate Professor and Head of Publications and Dissemination with the Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa (CODESRIA). Email: [email][email protected], Website: www.nyamnjoh.com

* Please send comments to [email protected] or comment online at www.pambazuka.org

It is commonplace to claim that liberal democracy and Africa are not good bedfellows, and how apt! Implementing liberal democracy in Africa has been like trying to force onto the body of a full-figured person, rich in all the cultural indicators of health Africans are familiar with, a dress made to fit the slim, de-fleshed Hollywood consumer model of a Barbie doll-type entertainment icon. But instead of blaming the tiny dress or its designer, the tradition has been to fault the popular body or the popular ideal of beauty, for emphasizing too much bulk, for parading the wrong sizes, for just not being the right thing. Not often is the experience and expertise of the designer or dressmaker questioned, nor his/her audacity to assume that the parochial cultural palates that inform his/her peculiar sense of beauty should play God in the lives of regions and cultures where different criteria of beauty and the good life obtain. This insensitivity is akin to the behaviour of a Lilliputian undertaker who would rather trim a corpse than expand his/her coffin to accommodate a man-mountain, or a carpenter whose only tool is a huge hammer and to whom every problem is a nail. The history of difficulty in implementing liberal democracy in Africa attests to this clash of values and attempts to ignore African cultural realities that might well have enriched and domesticated liberal democracy towards greater relevance. This call for domestication must however not be confused with the ploy by opportunistic dictatorships that have often hidden behind nebulous claims of African specificities to orchestrate highhandedness and intolerance.

It is important to revisit through non-prescriptive scholarship how civil society and ethnicity and belonging actually relate to democracy in Africa. Such scholarship should examine to what extent overstressing individual rights and underplaying the rights of cultural and religious communities could well be a key problem with the current democratisation process. The future direction of democracy may well be in a marriage or conviviality between individual aspirations and community interests, since Africans continue to emphasise relationships and solidarities over the illusion of autonomy. For democracy to succeed in this context, it must recognise the fact that most Africans are primarily patriotic to their home village, to which state and country in the modern sense are only secondary. It is in acknowledging and providing for the reality of individuals who straddle different forms of identity and belonging, and who are willing or forced to be both 'citizens' and 'subjects', that democracy stands its greatest chance in Africa.

Within this complex I would argue that while the media and journalists may be largely to blame for their highly unprofessional and unethical journalism in liberal democratic terms, other factors have contributed in no small way to such journalism. Evident from this discussion of the relationship between the media and democratisation in a multiparty context is the inadequate attention given to the quality of democracy needed and the quality and role of the media that should foster such democracy. Almost everywhere, liberal democratic assumptions have been made about the media and their role in democratisation and society, with little regard to the histories, cultures and sociologies of African societies.

The difficulties of the media in action must be understood not only as failures, but also, and more importantly, as pointers to the very inadequacies of the liberal democratic model in Africa. If African philosophies of personhood and agency stress interdependence between the individual and the community and between communities, and if journalists each identify with any of the many cultural communities all seeking recognition and representation at local and national levels, they are bound to be torn between serving their communities and serving the 'imagined' rights-bearing, autonomous individual 'citizen' of the liberal democratic model. A democracy that stresses independence, in a situation where both the worldview and the material realities emphasise interdependence, is bound to result only in dependence. The contradictions of and multi-facetted pressures on the media are a perfect reflection of such tensions and a pointer to the need for domesticated ideas of democracy in Africa.

If democratisation requires fundamental changes, as it should, such changes usually entail a challenge to vested interests, be these local, national or foreign, private or public. Contrary to some optimistic accounts, media that have facilitated genuine democratisation may appear rare in Africa. It is however clear that media which decide in earnest to play an active and positive role in this process will find themselves in a hostile environment if prevailing attitudes and practices are not in tune with the spirit of change. For to democratise means to question basic monolithic assumptions, conventional wisdom about democracy, media, government, power myths and accepted personality cults, and to suggest and work for the demystification of the state, custom and society. To democratise in Africa is to provide the missing cultural link to current efforts, links informed by popular ideas of personhood and domesticated agency. To democratise is to negotiate conviviality between competing ideas of how best to provide for the humanity and dignity of all and sundry. To democratise is above all to observe and draw from the predicaments of ordinary Africans forced by culture, history and material realities to live their lives as 'subjects' rather than as 'citizens', even as liberal democratic rhetoric claims otherwise.

The mere call for an exploration of alternatives is, as we have seen almost everywhere on the continent, bound to be perceived as a threat and a challenge. In particular, such a call would receive a hostile hearing from those who have championed the cause of one-dimensionalism nationally and internationally - that is, those who benefit from the maintenance of the status quo, and who stand to lose from any changes. They cannot withstand the challenge, stimulation and provocation that democracy (as the celebration of difference and diversity) promises. They want life to go on without disturbance or fundamental change. And they are well placed to ensure this, thanks to their power to regulate media ownership and control, the power to accord or to deny a voice to individuals and communities. Only well-articulated policies informed by public interest broadly defined to include individual and community expectations, and scrupulously respected, would guarantee against such abuse and misuse of office and privilege.

The future of democracy and the relevance of the media will depend very much on how well African states design policies that negotiate the delicate balance between public interests and private concerns. In the process they must enable the harnessing and interplay between old and new information and communication technologies towards this end. It is a future that could well be bright for communication and democracy in a broad and participatory sense. For, as Alec Russell has quite aptly observed, one of the enduring mysteries and marvels of Africa is the ability of Africans to pick up again from any setback, including even the most appalling of disasters. Such determination, demonstrated through the creative appropriation of various worldviews, values, influences, and information and communication technologies, implies that Africans have simply refused to celebrate victimhood.

* Francis B. Nyamnjoh is author of Africa's Media, Democracy and the Politics of Belonging. London: Zed Books.(May 2005). 320 pages. Cost: Hardback: GBP 60.00 $85.00; Paperback: GBP 18.95 $29.95