K'naan Live at Millenium Stage

Excerpts from an interview by Clayton Perry on BlogCritic Magazine.

Pictures from the Kennedy Center Performance, February 26, 2009

Having traveled the world, you have an international view of hip-hop that a lot of people don't have, for better or worse. Is there a common thread of themes that transcends all continents that you have seen as you travel?

Yeah, there is. There are differences, too. I look at hip hop or any other kind of thing whatever it is — music or otherwise — and I just think you can exhaust that theme no matter what it is. As good as hip hop is, if there is no perspective shift, if there is no feeling of freshness or something new about it, it can kind of just become exhausting. When you go abroad and you see something fresh, it's eye-opening and it's beautiful. The one American perspective that we are all exposed to and the only one that exists is kind of exhausting. However, to the credit of the American form of hip hop, it's great that it is the one-track-minded element that it is, as well, because sometimes in the foreign world you find a corny element, too, that I can't listen to either. You find it rarely — the thread — but you find it. Sometimes it's great and fresh and not corny.

Do you think there will ever be a day when the lines between the labels of mainstream and conscious hip hop would be blurred?

Well, I don't know. I think that's dependent on what success the albums have. For example, my latest album is exactly what that is, but its success will be viewed on how it reaches people. Troubadour has incredible hook-based, melodic music. And lyrically, it's relevant. It has potential to be on the radio, so I don't understand why you can't do both. I think that is the answer to that question – not the only answer, but I certainly think that's one of the answers. It just depends on success.

At what point did you realize that your music had really made an impression upon people?

In 2008, I was playing a string of festivals in the US and I did a show in Honolulu. The turnout was so amazing! The organizers said they had to open up the back of the tent, which is something they never had to do before. At some point in one of my songs, I was singing to this crowd of thousands and I remember about 70% of the crowd singing along. It was amazing, because I haven't had any albums released in the US, at least not widely. I had no radio support, nothing like that. So I didn't understand how they knew the lyrics. It was a real pleasant and incredibly exciting and surprising moment. So much so, I stopped singing in the middle of the show and just started laughing. My band mates were laughing. The crowd didn't know what was going on. I said, "Excuse me, but I just want to ask how you guys know the song." People started cheering and whatever. It was a genuine moment for me, to actually take that moment and realize it and respond to it.

Over the years, you have mentioned three artists as major influences in your career: Bob Marley, Tracy Chapman, and Nina Simone. Of these, tell me how one has impacted your life and shaped your career.

I'll take Bob Marley. I think the amount of impact Bob Marley has had on humanity – just what he's sown and how many generations it has changed and how many people it has raised and how many kinds of causes it has fulfilled – I think that is, like, way more than any musician has ever been in the history of music I think. For me, that is one of the great things about life – we have the privilege to live under the banner in which he's created this music and this ideology and his relentless kind of spirit of justice and so on. I see myself as someone who is a humble student of that world. To have a connection to his world, in a way, for me is incredibly humbling. To have recorded my album in his house and work with his family, his friends and so on is a big thing for me.

When did you first fall in love with hip hop?

I had a crush on it from the early stages when I was much younger and listening to Eric B. and Rakim. That world – it was just a crush, infatuation. But when I really fell in love with it and became inextricable from my life was 1993 when the album Illmatic by Nas came out.

What did you admire the most about Illmatic?

I am a poet by nature, and I saw poetry in what Nas was doing. And I saw that a young black man can express and share the incredible intricacies of his own life and out of all the things that surround him. He painted the American black experience and the ghetto experience in such a vivid manner that I thought if that was possible in the English language, then it is possible for me to do that with the English language and paint the African experience.

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RIP Tayib Saleh (1929-2009)

Sudan Tribune
February 17, 2009 (LONDON) — Al-Tayib Saleh one of Sudan’s prolific and iconic novelists died today in London from complications related to a kidney condition, one of his close friends told Sudan Tribune. He was 80 years old.

Saleh was born at a village in North Sudan in 1929 and moved to the Khartoum for his bachelors’ degree. He then traveled to UK to receive a degree in international affairs.

During his stay in London, Saleh worked at the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) Arabic service and managed to become the head of the drama division at a record young age.

The Sudanese novelist also worked for the Information ministry in Qatar and the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) headquarters in Paris.

Saleh is best known for his masterpiece ‘Season of Migration to the North’ written in 1966 which deals with the perceptions of people in the third world to the West. The novel was translated to a number of world languages and a subject of intense debate inside and outside Sudan.

It was also selected by a panel of Arab writers and critics as the most important Arab novel of the twentieth century.

Owing to sexually explicit portions of the novel the Sudanese authorities banned the book in the 90’s. The Sudanese novelist at the time said the decision is similar to “locking the stable after the horse already gone”.

Some observers at the time described the move by Khartoum as retaliation to Saleh’s stance opposing the Islamic backed regime. He wrote highly publicized op-ed titled “Where did these people come from? Actually who are they?” questioning what he saw as blatant violation of Sudanese customs and traditions by the government and its figures at the time.

However in an interview with Sudanese TV last year Saleh praised the Sudanese president Omer Hassan Al-Bashir. He also said that a newer version of the government has emerged following the breakaway between Bashir and Islamist leader Hassan Al-Turabi.

A number of Sudanese organizations have recently pushed for nominating Saleh for the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Saleh enjoyed immense popularity and respect among ordinary Sudanese. He is survived by his wife and three girls.

(ST)

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الفاتحة في السوحلي

Kwa jina la Mwenyezi Mungu, Mwingi wa rehema, Mwingi wa ukarimu.
Sifa zote njema zinamhusu Mwenyezi Mungu, Mola wa walimwengu,
Mwingi wa rehema, Mwingi wa ukarimu,
Mmiliki wa siku ya Malipo.
Wewe tu twakuabudu, na Wewe tu twakuomba msaada.
Utuongoze njia iliyonyoka,
Njia ya wale Uliowaneemesha; siyo ya (wale) waliokasirikiwa,
wala ya (wale) waliopotea.
Al-Fatiha in different languages

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Hizbu'llah and Terrorism: Dispelling the Misconceptions

Sura al-Qasas (28) :5 (English): And we wished to be gracious to those who were being oppressed in the land, to make them leaders and make them heirs.

The above verse constitutes one of the foundational beliefs on which the organization of Hizbu'llah draw. There is an all too common misconception, perpetrated by so-called journalists--who write copy using the worst sort of cliches to lock certain mental images into their readers' minds, that Hizbu'llah is a fundamentalist sectarian and terrorist organization. Two relatively recent books help to dispel this notion by placing Hizbu'llah's accomplishments within the framework of Shi'ite political mobilization, the political opportunities offered by the civil war, and the heteregenous nature of Lebanese society. Each book shows the development of Hizbu'llah from a guerilla movement who at times engaged in what the international community deemed as acts of 'terror' into a full-fledged political party with a stake in Lebanese politics.

The first book, by former U.N. observer Augustus Richard Norton, is a short but authoritative account of Hizbu'llah's development in the context of recent Lebanese history. It has the advantage of including some analysis of the 2006 war with Israel, in which Hizbu'llah emerged from a devastating bombardment organizationally intact.

The second book is an older account by a Lebanese insider, based on interviews, televised speeches, and an excellent review and critique of the secondary literature about the organization. Amal Saad Ghorayeb analyzes Hizbu'llah through the paradigm of 'oppression' and sees Hizbu'llah as a theologically flexible, guerilla movement which stands ideologically on the side of the oppressed. This is a helpful paradigm, because it sees Hizbu'llah as basically responding to opportunities to organize people against oppression, using Islam as an idiom, not as an Islamic movement to 'Islamisize' Lebanon and the world.

Hizbu'llah's mission (if not always its tactics) stand in the best traditions of Islamic liberation theology, and are fundamentally consistent with Biblical teaching about God's special concern for the poor (see Matthew 5:5 for the Biblical precursor to the Islamic idea).

One thing both authors stress is the evolution of the party, from a entity existing outside of the system, to a major player on the Lebanese political scene. Hizbu'llah's challenge will be to remain relevant to its mass base and yet manuever within the convulutions of Lebanese politics without being corrupted by the alliances it forges.

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In An Antique Land

Its hard to describe this engaging book from Amitav Ghosh. Is it a novel? A memoir? A travelogue? A historical reconstruction? A distillation of the best traditions of Orientalistism? In fact it is all these and more, a most remarkable journey into a lost world. Ghosh is an Indian historian researching the history of a 12th century Jewish merchant while living in an Egyptian village. Interwoven with his search for Ben Yiju's life from Mangalore to Aden to Alexandria is an often hilarious account of his relationships with the residents of the village. Ghosh humorously relates the litany of questions he is bombarded with about the customs of India ("Ya Allah, do they REALLY burn their dead in India?" is a constant one)

What emerges most strongly from Ghosh's account is the fluidity of medieval Indian Ocean society; how merchants crossed political boundaries with ease and how this movement generated a level of cosmopolitanism and cultural familiarity, a shared understanding across nation, religion, and ethnicity, which we see through Ghosh's account, has broken down. (if it existed at all for the common people).

One of the most affecting sections of the book involves Ghosh's encounter with a healer named Imam Ibrahim who refuses to part with his knowledge for Ghosh's anthropological interest. Goading Ghosh about 'those savages' who burn their dead and worship cows, he provokes an angry outburst from Ghosh, who brags that his country "has had a nuclear explosion."
Writes Ghosh, "At that moment, despite the vast gap that lay between us, we understood each other perfectly. We were both travelling, he and I: we were travelling in the West. The only difference was that I had actually been there, in person: I could have told him a great deal about it...but it wouldn't have mattered. We would have known, both of us, that all that was mere fluff: in the end, for millions of people on the landmasses around us, the West meant only this--science and tanks and guns and bombs."

Altogether this is a most unusual book, and an interesting diversion from more straight-ahead scholarly treatments.

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Omani Music and Poetry from www.jalaan.com

Here's a sample of 'traditional' Omani music from Dhofar; peep the drumming patterns!



Also check this link to an Oman poetry site:المجلة الشعر العماني

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The Uses of History: Meditations on the Production of Historical and Anthropological Knowledge

"If colonial history has been written, the 'history of colonization' remains yet to be written along the lines of a new vision, one resolutely attentive to the local peoples for whom colonization constitutes an important aspect of their history,"
Ndaywel e Nziem

All philosophies and theories of history are in the end, also anthropologies. Now it is true, we cannot insert ourselves into the lives of the historical actors of the past, which is why history occurs at the intersection between current events and collective memory (both archived and oral). What are the "social loci of our knowledge production"? History is not merely done or told, it is done for someone or to someone.

This is why I think it important to examine the ontology of our historical knowledge, because I see that this is so much of what the colonial project developed into. I salute our desire to define our terms precisely, but I also believe that this desire to do so using language, in other words to try and abstract an idea of colonialism from its effects, it interrelationships, its lived experiences, is to push the Sisyphean boulder. At some point, we must, if our work is to have any relevance, leave the shoals of postmodern deconstruction and hesitation, and venture out into the ocean. Certainty is an unattainable goal, but uncertainty is not a refuge.

Indeed, to do as I have suggested is as much a project of personal ethnography as it is a historical project. It is to question the underlying foundations of our knowledge production, to examine the very grain of our categorizations, and to turn the lens of historical consciousness upon ourselves. While we are engaged in such a task, we also, MUST ask ourselves about our own social position. We have yet to truly consider ourselves as beneficiaries, in a sense, of colonialism, or how our position in this university shapes the discourse we present. To those fashioning their dissertation or engaged in the other grueling work of acheiving their Ph.D., such questions perhaps pose useless distractions from the pressing need to theorize and draw conclusions. But unless they are answered precisely, history becomes a game, a playing field on which to experiment with our personal tastes and interests. For one interesting, if revolting, example of this fascination with 'history' as object of distraction is the blogspot called Return to Darkest Africa

I wish to ask us: How can we hope to recover those histories of colonizer and colonized, the context in which they occur, and the 'life-worlds' of both sets of actors, if we have not turned an analytical lens on ourselves, our own categories of knowledge, the way in which we inhabit either (or perhaps both) category (colonizer/colonized) in ourselves. We have to interrogate what Foucault called our 'episteme'--the standards of acceptability that shape our discourse, the conventions of our representation.

This brings us back to another question I posed: Why study comparative colonialism? I suggest that the answer to this question will determine a great deal about the discourse we generate on the topic. I imagine some might say we are engaged in this work to sharpen our brain, to understand a particular historical field better and thus to deepen our analysis of it. But that still leaves the question open of why: What uses will it serve? Is history history for history's sake? My answer, which I share with Thucydides, is that history is useful to those in crisis as a guide for action.

This is where some of the distinction emerges between postcolonialism and postmodernism, though both share some of the same critiques of meta-history. While post-modernism and post-colonialism share the resistance to 'totalitizing narratives', post-colonialism asks us to remain committed to a struggle, a specific SITE of historical interpretation, while post-modernism has (in my view) not decided this question.

This is why, in spite of his historical limitations, I would rather read Frantz Fanon than Fred Cooper. I believe colonialism is one aspect of what Cedric Robinson calls, "a dangerous power set loose in the world." In my view, even if there were notable exceptions-- interstices of opportunity for particular groups within the incomplete hegemony of the colonial project(s)--overall colonialism entailed a very dramatic lessening, something that has been stripped away or taken off balance.

The intellectual output of postcolonial scholars like Fanon, Cesaire, Dubois, C.L.R. James, Martin Delany, and Cabral (to name a few of the most prominent in the Atlantic world and Africa) emerges from crisis, and is marked by a concern to serve as a historical witness against totalizing projects, in doing so it provides the possibility of the consciousness to resist rather than simply serve the dominant powers of the age. Their theories, diverse as they are, do not invite uncritical acceptance, but rather passionate engagement, while their practice ought to inform the way we think about the uses of our historical knowledge. The practice of personal ethnography will inevitably change, or if not change, then clarify, the way we 'practice' history.

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The Frontier in Indian Ocean History

As part of an Envirornmental History class for the esteemed Dr. John McNeill, I am trying to integrate an ecological and envirornmental focus into my study of identity, trade, social change and state building in the Eastern Congo. In other words, I want to know not only how merchants like Tippu Tip built nascent state structures and incorporated Swahili, Manyema, Nyamwezi, and other corporate or ethno-cultural groups into their organization, but also how the movement of these merchant-princes impacted the ecology of the Eastern Congo. What kind of crops did the Swahili Arab settlers plant? What sort of envirornmental changes did they set in motion?

It occured to me that such a project may be difficult to undertake without delving into Congolese and Omani archives. So, as part of a related but alternate set of questions, I would also like to explore how the competing discourses of Belgian, British, German and Arab primary sources sought to portray the envirornmental and social changes the Arabs set in motion. On the one hand, the Arabs called Nyangwe the 'New Bengal' and viewed themselves as bringing civilization and order to the land. They tamed the forest, and brought peace and order.

On the other hand, the many European travel accounts emphasize the devastation of Arab slave-trading, the many famines (which they linked with Arab settlement) and the general negative impact of the Arab presence. Of course this discourse itself, even if it was accurate, came to fulfillment only with European colonization--the worst years of ecological and social devastation were assuredly after the 1890s and the routing of Arab power in the Congo.

This relates back to the concept of the frontier in Indian Ocean history. Is there a way I can talk within an Indian Ocean framework of land-based frontiers? On the surface it doesn't appear to be an obviously helpful narrative framework. However, there are compelling cultural links (the presence of Comorians, Baluchis, and Omani Arabs in the Congo) and economic links (Indian financiers in Zanzibar linked the Congo River basin with the circuits of Indian Ocean capital) that make such a framework interesting. Using the idea of systems theory, which posits that we can find common features of a given 'unit' in terms of shared aspects of organization, I submit we can talk of the penetration of Indian Ocean cultural 'clusters' and the integration of Central Africa into Indian Ocean economic exchange and have legitimate historical evidence to back up our assertion. I am reminded as I consider this question of John Wilkinson's insight about Oman: "Oman as a 'natural' region has no real frontiers: like all such regions it tends to be rather more 'Omani' in places than others."

So it goes with the Indian Ocean: if we identify a set of shared religious practices, common clothing items, culinary features, familial organization, vocabulary, and more, that are found in the Indian Ocean, then certain places will have more ties than others, and this is also related to which 'features' we choose to compare.

Of course the challenge is to determine how much the 'Indian Ocean' actually explains; we want it to do some theoretical work, but we would err to depend on it to do heavy historical work as it relates to Central African history in general--most of the history of the Eastern Congo has logical connections with other lake regions in Tanganyika, Zambia, as well as points north in Uganda. But the fact that so few historians have even attempted to use it to look at the history of Central Africa during the late nineteenth century means that some potentially valuable understandings from this perspective can be integrated in with the existing literature.

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Representing Africa: Spatial, Temporal, and Ideological Perspectives

NOTE: I am posting this from Dr. Mavhunga at MIT; its from the H-AFRICA listserv. Its an excellent statement for getting at the keys to African history as well as the importance of not privileging the archive in all cases. This is in response to Cyril Hromnik, another historian who claimed there was no precolonial state institutions in Africa to build on:


"I was thinking that the Hromnik's position is passe. There has been extensive discussion on this in Terence Osborne Ranger's "The Invention of Tradition" and the "The Invention of Tradition Revisited". Multiple trajectories span off from that discussion, notably Valentin Mudimbe's The Invention of Africa and The Idea of Africa. There have been countless other works, among the Pier Larson, Carolyn Hamilton, and many others.

For me, the question seems to be how to how to take that debate beyond cultural and political histories, beyond an Africa defined according to the temporal and spatial frames of political and other elites. Once we get to that extent of shifting the analysis beyond thematics and physicalities that privilege the elites to the experiences and imagineries of Africa from "the gallery" (ordinary people), my sense is that some of these high-end ideologies like "pan-Africanism", "patriotism", "sovereignty", "power" and so forth acquire new meanings or even lose them. The question then is: Seen from the rural village, from the household of a poor person, what exactly is "pan-Africanism", "colonialism", "institutions', etc.?

As I see it, we risk eulogizing the powerful of Africa and silencing the majority by focusing on "important people". The more you get to the villages, the more you see all this amazing innovation at play, with the relevance of the state being only so far as it provides specific individual needs. Otherwise it is dead to them. Upon examining further these grassroots modes of innovation, it turns out that they pre-date the colonial moment; in fact, they are the sociotechnical infrastructure with which people processed colonial rule into their existence and maneuvered their own existence under colonialism.

Instead of giving colonialism (un)godly powers, we need to go well beyond what Mudimbe called "the colonial library", viz. the record of the pre-colonial and colonial that was compiled after all by colonial writers (Europeans or Africans influenced by European systems of classification). I think going to Africa to examine not just "oral traditions or testimonies" but more-so the "practices" would be a very good preparation to then go into the "colonial library" that Mudimbe was talking about and which is written and stored in dusty boxes.

I would not end or worse yet start in the built archive but the archive of practice and spoken word.

Without belaboring the point further, I must insist that Hromnik was giving the "colonial library" (or a lukewarm reading of it) (un)godly powers. His approach is now in the rear view mirror of history and receding fast.

Clapperton Chakanetsa Mavhunga
Assistant Professor of Science, Technology & Society Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)
E-mail: clappertonm@yahoo.com

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Paris: Secularism Unveiled

I was in a false position everywhere, except within myself, where I was convinced I was telling the truth.
--A House At The Edge of Tears, Venus Khoury Ghata.

I was pretty excited to head to Paris after my Oman trip. I was invited by my friend Dinah, who was TA-ing a class on Immigration and Multiculturalism in Paris for the University of Illinois. The course was taught by a retired professor of French, Evelyne Accad, a Lebanese woman who has written about international women's issues.

The class did not disappoint. From discussing polygamy and the French state to civil war in Lebanon to the issue of female genital mutiliation, I learned a lot and was able to make some interesting observations about French culture and society at the same time.

Disclaimer: I do not speak French. Therefore everything I learned (with the exception of the bits of French I picked up) was through English translation or talks in English. That said, I don't think it made a difference in some of the observations I am about to make.

Its wierd because I had the impression that the French were more progressive than Americans on the whole, but I have to say this is both a stereotype in which Americans associate everything French with being 'cultured' and a factor that depends on the particular French community one is referring to. For instance, it is true that students tend to be more activist, more politically aware, more cosmopolitian (Most students learn at least three languages) than their American counterparts. Having visited several French schools I feel I am on safe ground saying that.

However France illustrates some of the strange contradictions of secular society-- its particular blind spots that are often intimately linked to a strong sense of national and even racial identity (the so-called Gaullic exceptionalism). Nowhere is this contradiction more aptly symbolized than the banning of headscarves in the classroom of public schools. (ironically Turkey, a majority Muslim country, is facing its own version of this secular quandary). Here is where the rubber of religion's removal from the 'public sphere' meets the road of individual freedom. French efforts to promote the growth of the French state and to reify 'Frenchness' is not a project that can tolerate a multiplicity of identities, and is thus at odds with French notions of 'pluralism'. And that explains why not only are headscarves banned, but the call to prayer (اذان) as well.

Obama notwithstanding (I have a feeling a lot of my sentences are going to begin with that from here on out), America has never really resolved this conflict in practice either. For example, witness the powerful pull of the ignorant and racist 'English-only' educational movement. I guess my philosophy would be that, social movements that emphasize a particular aspect of identity are inevitable, especially enlight of forming social movements against powerfully entrenched interests of global corporations, powerful nation-states, and the like. Nevertheless, the insistence on one's single identity inevitably falsifys the richness of everyone's historical reality.

My own observation is that France has a stronger tradition of anthropologizing the 'other', in the sense of making outside cultures a subject of study for consumption by exotic-o-philes. Walking through an exhibit on matriarchy in Africa I had this feeling, and it was accentuated gazing at the innumerable artifacts stolen from the tombs of Pharaonic Egypt in the Louvre. It was a feeling similar to the one I had walking through the Indian Museum in Washington DC a couple years ago: like an eerie sense of displacement and invasion. I felt as if I walking through someone's most intimate personal belongings that had been put out at a common garage sale.

One highlight of the trip (other than my birthday :)) was reading a trio of great books by Lebanese Christian women and getting to meet two of the authors. We read Evelyne Accad's The Excised, Etel Adnan's Sitt Marie Rose, and Venus Khoury-Ghata's A House At The Edge of Tears. All three are very lyrical meditations on religion and growing up, war, beauty, violence, and sexuality. From Khoury-Ghata's book, I learned that apparently some Arabs of the Levant, Swahili is a derisive term for nonsense or baby talk. For me Dr. Accad's book was the most personally evocative, while Sitt Marie Rose is the most innovative in terms of narrative structure and voice. I will end with a meditation from that book, a tribute and affirmation of life in the midst of war-torn Beirut:

"Morality is violence. An invisible violence at first. Love is a supreme violence, hidden deep in the darkness of our atoms. When a stream flows into a river, it's love and its violence. When a cloud loses itself in the sky, it's a marriage. When the roots of a tree split open a rock it's the movement of life. When the sea rises and falls back only to rise again, it's the process of history. When a man and a woman find each other in the silence of the night, it's the beginning of the end of the tribe's power, and death itself becomes a challenge to the ascendancy of the group."

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