Babule 1.10 to 6.40 and then Unplugged

For a period of some six months or so, between October, 2008 and March, 2009, I shared the following snippets of views from some of the greatest minds amidst us with my family and friends. In 1.10 all the way to 6.40, I pretty much shot from the hip. And I then unplugged. I have decided to share the snippets and the unplugging that followed with you here:

BABULE 1.10

To what extent can one speak of an African knowledge, and in what sense? Etymologically, gnosis is related to gnosko, which in ancient Greek means “to know”. Specifically, gnosis means seeking to know, inquiry, methods of knowing, investigation, and even acquaintance with someone […] Gnosis is different from doxa or opinion, and, on the other hand, cannot be confused with episteme, understood as both science and general intellectual configuration.

V.Y. Mudimbe, The Invention of Africa: Gnosis, Philosophy and the Order of Knowledge, 1988

                                   

BABULE 1.20

I understand that facts alone can’t always settle our political disputes. Our views on abortion aren’t determined by the science of fetal development, and our judgement on whether and when to pull troops out of Iraq must necessarily be based on probabilities. But sometimes there are more accurate and less accurate answers; sometimes there are facts that cannot be spun, just as an argument about whether it’s raining can usually be settled by stepping outside. The absence of even rough agreement on the facts puts every opinion on equal footing and therefore eliminates the basis for thoughtful compromise. It rewards not those who are right, but those […] who can make their arguments most loudly, most frequently, most obstinately, and with the best backdrop. 

Barack Obama, The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream, 2006

                                   

BABULE 1.30 

We must be impatient with those of us in the public service who see themselves as guardians of rubber stamps, thieves intent on self–enrichment, bureaucrats who think they have the right to ignore the vision of Batho Pele, who come to work as late as possible, work as little as possible and knock off as early as possible. 

Thabo Mbeki, President of the Republic of South Africa, State of the Nation Address, 2004 

                                   

 BABULE 1.40 

The concern for rank, the quest for distinction, and the insistence of the [Cabinet] Minister on due pomp are expressed through such rhetorical devices as repetition and lists, contrasts between words and things, frequent antitheses, a tendency to exaggerate and indulge systematically in superlatives, a common use of hyperbole and expressions that go beyond reality, and preference for imprecise propositions and vague generalizations, complete with constant references to the future. To be effective, this verbal trance state must reach a point where all that matters is the harmony of the sound produced – because, by and large, it is the particular arrangement of sound that brings on a state of “possession” and triggers the mind’s voyaging; the space it creates through violence, though, is, in the postcolony, totally colonized by the commandement. 

The production of vulgarity, it should be added, needs to be understood as a deliberately cynical operation. It is political in the sense [that] every polity is governed by “master fictions” little by little accepted into the domain of the indisputable. The postcolonial polity can only produce “fables” and stupefy its “subjects,” bringing on delirium when the discourse of power penetrates its targets and drives them into realms of fantasy and hallucination. This is why the rhetorical devices of officialese in the postcolony can be compared to those of [Eastern European] communist regimes – to the extent, that is, that both are actual regimes given to the production of lies and double–speak. For this reason, then, all verbal dissidence, whether written or sung, is the object of close surveillance and repression.

Achille Mbembe, On the Postcolony, 2001 

                                   

 BABULE 2.10

The leader pacifies the people. For years on end after independence has been won, we see him, incapable of urging on the people to a concrete task, unable really to open the future to them or of flinging them into the path of national reconstruction, that is to say, of their own reconstruction; we see him reassessing the history of independence and recalling the sacred unity of the struggle for liberation. The leader, because he refuses to break up the national bourgeoisie, asks the people to fall back into the past and to become drunk on the remembrance of the epoch which led up to independence. The leader, seen objectively, brings the people to a halt and persists in either expelling them from history or preventing them from taking root in it. During the struggle for liberation the leader awakened the people and promised them a forward march, heroic and unmitigated. Today, he uses every means to put them to sleep, and three or four times a year asks them to remember the colonial period and to look back on the long way they have come since then.

Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 1963 

                                   

BABULE 2.20

I have always thought that inequalities between the rich and the poor in Malawi are more fundamental than inequalities founded on other bases in terms of improving standards and reducing poverty. This is not to say that regional, district and other forms of inequality do not matter because in practice they do. What I am suggesting is that we must be wary of allowing or using debates over various forms of inequality to obscure and suppress debates over economic and class inequalities. This is particularly important as we approach elections when candidates of various shades will be searching for ways to connect to ‘the people’.

[…]

In my view, concocted loyalties based on ethnicity, religion and region should not trump class. On 3 February, 1983, the State disagreed and, on the same campus on which I work today, two Special Branch gentlemen turned up to express that disagreement in the form of detention–without–trial orders for Tubby, Killion, Zang, Alexander, Andy and I, all of us students in our twenties. Over the next 15 months, the State accommodated us at some of its less comfortable facilities as a way of ‘teaching’ us that this campus talk of class struggle was really a threat to public security under the Preservation of Public Security Act.

I am obviously a poor learner because I insist 25 years later that it is still really about class inequalities.

Fidelis Edge Kanyongolo, View on Quotas, 2008 

                                   

BABULE 2.30

There are those who will still think that constitution making is a task that rests wholly within the realm of lawyers. Indeed, all constitutional texts in modern times have been drafted by lawyers. Behind the texts, however, are the most important political actors and forces of a given society, persuading some interpreters to take the view that constitution making represents the work of the political, of political politics, and of le pouvoir constituant. In such a conception, whoever holds the ‘constituent power’, or acts in its name, hires the lawyers. But does the method of constitution making really matter? Either way, the method itself maybe deemed epiphenomenal – a formalistic façade either for the activity of experts or for the fundamental expression of an unlimited sovereign power.

Andrew Arato, Forms of Constitution Making and Theories of Democracy, 1995 

                                   

BABULE 2.40

What is consented to after a free inter–party election is not simply which party should rule. The effect of the voting is not merely in determining which party is in a majority in the legislature but also which is in a minority and by what margins of strength the different parties are separated. The balance of forces which emerges after a free election is what enjoys the composite consent of the electorate as a whole.

Ali Mazrui ‘The tensions of crossing the floor in East Africa’ in AA Mazrui (ed) Violence and thought: Essays on social tensions in Africa, 1969 

                                   

BABULE 3.10

They must ask, Can the subaltern speak? […] For the ‘true’ subaltern group, whose identity is its difference, there is no unrepresentable subaltern subject that can know and speak itself; the intellectual’s solution is not to abstain from representation. The problem is that the subject’s itinerary has not been traced so as to offer an object of seduction to the representing intellectual. […] How can we touch the consciousness of the people, even as we investigate their politics? With what voice–consciousness can the subaltern speak? Their project, after all, is to rewrite the development of the consciousness of the […] nation.

[…]

Within the effaced itinerary of the subaltern subject, the track of sexual difference is doubly effaced. The question is not of female participation in insurgency, or the ground rules of the sexual division of labor, for both of which there is ‘evidence’. It is, rather, that, both as object of colonial historiography and as subject of insurgency, the ideological construction of gender keeps the male dominant. If, in the context of colonial production, the subaltern has no history and cannot speak, the subaltern as female is even more deeply in shadow.

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’, 1988 

                                   

BABULE 3.20

The stranger is a subject who has been understood in the West in very different ways over the past eighty years. Sara Ahmed makes the important point that strangers are not real subjects but socially constituted, discursively produced positions. [M]y starting point is with the stranger as understood by Laura Nielsen and her subjects—that is as someone who has not been knowingly encountered before. Social, cultural, ethnic, or economic forms of distance or alienation frequently underpin this personal unfamiliarity. Unintelligibility may also do so. This does not mean the stranger is unreadable. What it does suggest, however, is that from the perspective of the standpoint holder, they appear too normatively different or dissonant

to be explained to others (even as they may be affectively experienced and even engaged with by the standpoint holder themselves).

Davina Cooper, ‘Being in Public: The Threat and Promise of Stranger Contact’, 2007 

                                   

BABULE 3.30

They never charged Fumbani. We had not seen or heard of him since I saw him step out of the car in front of me and go into an open prison shortly after our abduction. While we were on trial for more than one and a half years, they kept Fumbani locked up and pressed him to give evidence that we had come to Malawi to kill Dr. Banda. They tortured him with spanners and electrical wires and tried to turn him against his own parents. He was only 22 years old. They did not succeed in making him their crown witness. He stood against it, but Fumbani has never been the same since. He has a lot of scars on his body, but his soul is even more scarred. He gets depressed and does not want to talk to anybody. To date he does not want to tell his story and it is a big problem. I talk and talk about my suffering and it helps. If he would only open up, I think that things would clear.

Vera Mlangazua Chirwa, Fearless Fighter: An Autobiography, 2007

                                   

BABULE 3.40

When my grandmother was raising me in Stamps, Arkansas, she had a particular routine when people who were known to be whiners entered her store. Whenever she saw a known complainer coming, she would call me from whatever I was doing and say conspiratorially, “Sister, come inside. Come.” Of course I would obey. 

[…]

 As soon as the complainer was out of the store, my grandmother would call me to stand in front of her. And then she would say the same thing she had said at least a thousand times, it seemed to me. “Sister, did you hear what Brother So-and-So or Sister Much to Do complained about? You heard that?” And I would nod. Mamma would continue, “Sister, there are people who went to sleep all over the world last night, poor and rich and white and black, but they will never wake again. Sister, those who expected to rise did not, their beds became their cooling boards and their blankets became their winding sheets. And those dead folks would give anything, anything at all for just five minutes of this weather or ten minutes of that plowing that person was grumbling about. So you watch yourself about complaining, Sister. What you’re supposed to do when you don’t like a thing is change it. If you can’t change it, change the way you think about it. Don’t complain.”

Maya Angelou, ‘Complaining’, Wouldn’t Take Nothing For My Journey Now, 1993 

                                   

BABULE 4.10

[Mohandas] Gandhi’s apparent absence from the foreground of postcolonial theory is all the more curious […] His influence, however, is more far–reaching than the infrequent appearance of his name might suggest. What are the reasons for his invisibility? The historical legacy of the liberation struggles has been to foreground the later resort to a politics of violent revolution, represented by [Frantz] Fanon, over Gandhi’s non–violent resistance and, it could be added, resistance to all forms of conflict, including those of class and gender. This is augmented by Gandhi’s unfashionable adherence to the ‘spiritualization of politics’ – the idea that the spiritual diffuses all aspects of everyday life, including the political, and should form the basis of the way humans live. Such is his sanctified status that much of the literature on Gandhi tends to be devotional rather than analytical, abstracting his thoughts and beliefs while downplaying the material aspects of his political practices.

Robert J.C. Young, ‘Gandhi’s Invisibility’, Postcolonialism, 2001 

                                   

BABULE 4.20

What is commonly called a social or national economy is […] a network of many interlaced economies. Its order shares, as we shall see, with the order of an economy proper some formal characteristics but not the most important one: its activities are not governed by a single scale or hierarchy of ends. The belief that the economic activities of individual members of society are or ought to be part of one economy in the strict sense of this term, and that what is commonly described as the economy of a country or a society ought to be ordered and judged by the same criteria as an economy proper, is a chief source of error in this field. But, whenever we speak of the economy of a country, or of the world, we are employing a term which suggests that these systems ought to be run on socialist lines and directed according to a single plan so as to serve a unitary system of ends.

While an economy proper is an organization in the technical sense in which we have defined [economy] […] the cosmos of the market neither is nor could be governed by such a single scale of ends; it serves the multiplicity of separate and incommensurable ends of all its separate members.

The confusion which has been created by the ambiguity of the word economy is so serious that for our present purposes it seems necessary to confine its use strictly to the original meaning in which it describes a complex of deliberately coordinated actions serving a single scale of ends, and to adopt another term to describe the system of numerous interrelated economies which constitute the market order. Since the name ‘catallactics’ has long ago been suggested for the science which deals with the market order and has more recently been revived, it would seem appropriate to adopt a corresponding term for the market order itself. The term ‘catallactics’ was derived from the Greek verb katallatein (or katallassein) which meant, significantly, not only “to exchange” but also “to admit into the economy” and “to change from enemy to friend”. From it the adjective ‘catallactic’ has been derived to serve in the place of ‘economic’ to describe the kind of phenomena with which the science of catallactics deals. The ancient Greeks knew neither this term nor had a corresponding noun; if they had formed one it would have been katallaxia. From this we can form an English term catallaxy which we shall use to describe the order brought about by the mutual adjustment of many individual economies in a market. A catallaxy is thus a special kind of spontaneous order produced by the market through people acting within the rules of the law of property, tort and contract.

Friedrich A. Hayek, ‘Market Order or Catallaxy’, Law, Legislation and Liberty, 1976

                                   

BABULE 4.30

When I hear businessmen speak eloquently about the “social responsibilities of business in a free-enterprise system”, I am reminded of the wonderful line about the Frenchman who discovered at the age of 70 that he had been speaking prose all his life. The businessmen believe that they are defending free enterprise when they declaim that business is not concerned “merely” with profit but also with promoting desirable “social” ends; that business has a “social conscience” and takes seriously its responsibilities for providing employment, eliminating discrimination, avoiding pollution and whatever else may be the catchwords of the contemporary crop of reformers. In fact they are – or would be if they or anyone else took them seriously –preaching pure and unadulterated socialism. Businessmen who talk this way are unwitting puppets of the intellectual forces that have been undermining the basis of a free society these past decades. 

[…]

 

The political principle that underlies the market mechanism is unanimity. In an ideal free market resting on private property, no individual can coerce any other, all cooperation is voluntary, all parties to such cooperation benefit or they need not participate. There are no values, no “social” responsibilities in any sense other than the shared values and responsibilities of individuals. Society is a collection of individuals and of the various groups they voluntarily form.

The political principle that underlies the political mechanism is conformity. The individual must serve a more general social interest – whether that be determined by a church or a dictator or a majority. The individual may have a vote and say in what is to be done, but if he is overruled, he must conform. It is appropriate for some to require others to contribute to a general social purpose whether they wish to or not. 

Unfortunately, unanimity is not always feasible. There are some respects in which conformity appears unavoidable, so I do not see how one can avoid the use of the political mechanism altogether. But the doctrine of “social responsibility” taken seriously would extend the scope of the political mechanism to every human activity. […] That is why, […], I have called it a “fundamentally subversive doctrine” in a free society, and [in] such a society, “there is one and only one social responsibility of business – to use it resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits so long as it stays within the rules of the game, which is to say, engages in open and free competition without deception or fraud”. 

Milton Friedman, 1970

                                   

BABULE 4.40 

The hour of capitalism’s greatest triumph is its hour of crisis. The fall of the Berlin Wall ended more than a century of political competition between capitalism and communism. Capitalism stands alone as the only feasible way to rationally organize a modern economy. At this moment in history, no responsible nation has a choice. As a result, with varying degrees of enthusiasm, Third World and former communist nations have balanced their budgets, cut subsidies, welcomed foreign investment, and dropped their tariff barriers. 

Their efforts have been repaid with bitter disappointment. From Russia to Venezuela, the past half–decade has been a time of economic suffering, tumbling incomes, anxiety, and resentment; of ‘starving, rioting, and looting,’ in the stinging words of Malaysian prime minister Mahathir Mohammad. In a recent editorial the New York Times said, ‘For much of the world, the marketplace extolled by the West in the afterglow of victory in the Cold War has been supplanted by the cruelty of markets, wariness toward capitalism, and dangers of instability.’ The triumph of capitalism only in the West could be a recipe for economic and political disaster.

[…]

But if people in countries making the transition to capitalism are not pitiful beggars, are not helplessly trapped in obsolete ways, and are not the uncritical prisoners of dysfunctional cultures, what is it that prevents capitalism from delivering to them the same wealth it has delivered to the West? Why does capitalism thrive only in the West, as if enclosed in a bell jar?

[T]he major stumbling block that keeps the rest of the world from benefiting from capitalism is its inability to produce capital. Capital is the force that raises the productivity of labor and creates the wealth of nations. It is the lifeblood of the capitalist system, the foundation of progress, and the one thing that the poor countries of the world cannot seem to produce for themselves, no matter how eagerly their people engage in all the other activities that characterize a capitalist economy.

Hernando de Soto, The Mystery of Capital: Why Capitalism Triumphs in the West and Fails Everywhere Else, 2001

                                   

BABULE 5.10

In more recent years […] the problems of growth and employment in the developed countries and the stagnation and low economic growth and the obvious role of interventionist [S]tate in the high–performing countries have revived interest in development economics and development States. Recent writings have rigorously restated such central concepts of development economics as externalities, endogenous technological learning, asymmetric information, structural rigidities, transaction costs, and the public–good nature of information. Each of these provides a clear theoretical justification for public intervention.

This counter counter–revolution, which in fact began during the prime of neoclassical orthodoxy, has provided a basis for reassessing market failures and once more elevating the prominent role of government. The intellectual precursor to this revolution was provided by [Bruce] Greenwald and [Joseph] Stiglitz [,] new trade theories [and] the new growth theories. 

[…] 

After nearly two decades of controversy, the balance of opinion tends to suggest that the way forward might well lie at the centre. It is broadly agreed that although the market and private–sector initiatives should be the fulcrum of economic activities, the transformation of most developing countries to higher levels of economic performance cannot occur without a relatively efficient, capable, and willing [S]tate. 

Thandika Mkandawire and Charles Chukwuma Soludo, Our Continent, Our Future, 1998

                                   

BABULE 5.20 

If there is a consensus today about what strategies are most likely to promote development in poor countries, it is this: the ‘Washington Consensus’ – the oversimplified rendition of policies recommended by international financial institutions and the US Treasury – did not provide the answer. [T]he [...] Washington Consensus and [...] its orthodox recipes failed to generate economic growth in the countries that applied them [...] [T]he ‘post–“Washington Consensus” Consensus’, [...] has emerged as a result of the growing dissatisfaction with the Washington Consensus failures. [The] [a]spects [of the ‘post–“Washington Consensus” Consensus’] include: the agreement that a successful development strategy cannot come only from Washington but must include the developing world in a meaningful way; one–size–fits–all policies are doomed to fail; countries should be given room to experiment, use their own judgment, and explore alternatives; development requires a balanced role between the [S]tate and the market and the strengthening of the institutions in each; and finally, success must be measured not only in GDP, but also must account for distribution as well as social and environmental sustainability. 

Joseph Stiglitz ‘Is there a Post–“Washington Consensus” Consensus?’ in Narcís Serra & Joseph Stiglitz (eds.) The Washington Consensus Reconsidered: Towards a New Global Governance, 2008

                                   

BABULE 5.30

It is still midmorning in Malawi when we arrive at a small village, Nthandire, [sic] about an hour outside of Lilongwe, the capital. We have come over dirt roads, passing women and children walking barefoot with water jugs, wood for fuel, and other bundles. The midmorning temperature is sweltering. In this subsistence maize–growing region of a poor, landlocked country in southern Africa, households eke out survival from an unforgiving terrain. This year has been a lot more difficult than usual because the rains have failed, probably the result of an El Niño cycle. Whatever the cause, the crops are withering in the fields that we pass.

If the village were filled with able–bodied men, who could have built small–scale water harvesting units on rooftops and in the fields to collect what little rain had fallen in the preceding months, the situation would not be so dire as it is this morning. But as we arrive in the village, we see no able–bodied young men at all. In fact, older women and dozens of children greet us, but there is not a young man or woman of working age in sight. Where, we ask, are the workers? Out in the fields? The aid worker who has led us to the village shakes his head sadly and says no. They are nearly all dead. The village has been devastated by AIDS, which has ravaged this part of Malawi for several years now. 

[...]

Malawi actually put together one of the earliest and best conceived strategies for bringing treatment to its dying population, and gave an enormously thoughtful response to the challenges of managing a new system of drug delivery, patient counselling and education, community outreach, and the financial flows that would accompany the process of training doctors. On that basis, Malawi made proposals to the international community to help Malawians try to reach about a third of the total infected population (about three hundred thousand people) with anti–AIDS drug treatment within a five year scale–up period. 

Yet international processes are cruel. The donor governments – including the United States and Europeans – told Malawi to scale back its proposal sharply because the first proposal was ‘too ambitious and too costly.’ The next draft was cut back to a mere hundred thousand on treatment at the end of five years. Even that was too much. In a tense five–day period, the donors prevailed on Malawi to cut another 60 per–cent from the proposal, down to forty thousand on treatment. This atrophied plan was submitted to the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, TB, and Malaria. Incredibly, the donors that run that fund saw it fit to cut back once again. After a long struggle, Malawi received funding to save just twenty–five thousand at the end of five years – a death warrant from the international community for the people of this country. 

[...]

In the face of this horrific maelstrom, the world community has so far displayed a fair bit of hand–wringing and even some high–minded rhetoric, but precious little action. 

Jeffrey Sachs, The End of Poverty: How We Can Make It Happen In Our Lifetime, 2005 

                                   

BABULE 5.40

The alternative strategy being proposed here is the need for an economic environment in which the future structure of the economy is prefigured by government’s policy thrust such that market forces are allowed some degree of free play but nevertheless persuaded, by the structure of incentives, to direct their investments and activities toward those select activities that promote the fulfilment of sub–strategies. The proposed strategy entails the government engaging in indicative planning supported by market–augmenting targeted and phased policy measures. 

It is not necessary that the government directly participates in productive activities except perhaps, for some degree of participation in productive activities such as banking, where the control over the allocation of credit is important.

In short, through indicative planning and the selective, targeted and phased support for key activities within a market environment, the [S]tate would ensure that private market activities operate towards the realization of desired long term development goals.

Guy Mhone ‘Dependency and Underdevelopment: The Limits of Structural Adjustment Programmes and Towards a Pro–Active State–Led Development Strategy’, 1995

                                   

BABULE 6.10

1967 Parole Hearing Man: Ellis Boyd Redding, your files say you’ve served 40 years of a life sentence. Do you feel you’ve been rehabilitated?

Red: Rehabilitated? Well, now let me see. You know, I don’t have any idea what that means.

1967 Parole Hearings Man: Well, it means that you’re ready to rejoin society...

Red: I know what you think it means, sonny. To me it’s just a made up word. A politician’s word, so young fellas like yourself can wear a suit and a tie, and have a job. What do you really want to know? Am I sorry for what I did?

1967 Parole Hearings Man: Well, are you?

Red: There’s not a day goes by I don’t feel regret. Not because I’m in here, or because you think I should. I look back on the way I was then: a young, stupid kid who committed that terrible crime. I want to talk to him. I want to try and talk some sense to him, tell him the way things are. But I can’t. That kid’s long gone and this old man is all that’s left. I got to live with that. Rehabilitated? It’s just a bullshit word. So you go on and stamp your form, sonny, and stop wasting my time. Because to tell you the truth, I don’t give a shit.

Morgan Freeman as Ellis Boyd “Red” Redding in Shawshank Redemption, 1994

                                   

BABULE 6.20

The Cheerful Girls At Smiller’s Bar, 1971

The prostitutes at Smiller’s Bar beside the dusty road

Were only girls once, in tremulous mini–skirts and oriental
Beads, cheerfully swigging Carlsbergs and bouncing to
Rusty simanje–manje and rumba booming in the juke–box;
They were striking virgins bored by our Presbyterian
Prudes until a true Presbyterian came one night. And like
To us all, the girls offered him a seat on cheap planks
In the dark backyard room choked with diesel–oil clouds
From a tin–can lamp. Touched the official rolled his eyes
To one in style. She said no; most girls only wanted
A husband to hook or the fruits of independence to taste;
But since then mini–skirts were banned and the girls
Of Smiller’s Bar were ‘ugly prostitutes to boot!’

Today, the girls still giggle about what came through

The megaphones: the preservation of our traditional
et cetera, et cetera, et cetera …

Jack Mapanje ‘The Cheerful Girls At Smiller’s Bar, 1971’ in The Last of the Sweet Bananas, 2004

                                   

BABULE 6.30

We Real Cool

[The pool players.

Seven at the Golden Shovel.]

We real cool. We

Left school. We

Lurk late. We

Strike straight. We

Sing sin. We

Thin gin. We

Jazz June. We
Die soon.

Gwendolyn Brooks, ‘We Real Cool’ in The Bean Eaters, 1960

                                   

BABULE 6.40

Graffiti at 1^st Ave. and 46^th St., NY

It aint your daily creeps that come here.

No. These are not the yobs that ply and
plunder inner city Peckham or the tsotsi of Jozi. You
will not see the rogues of Bangkok or the petty
hoodlums of Queens here. This aint no place for the
low life from inner–city everywhere.
World government trudges these corridors.

FIT AND PROPER PERSONS.

I am sat in a venerated private cubicle. The hawkish

eyes of CCTV envelop this hallowed gentlemen’s restroom.
I look at this revered wall and read with bewilderment:
‘The UN Sucks!’

PECULIAR PRIVACY.

I sat still…

gently smiled…
continued to read;
slowly…
and stared at the
wall with placid pleasure.

The outfits here tell tales of sophistication: What is behind

these suave suits and glistening leather shoes. The air here wears
exotic whiffs of fragrance. Every space is invaded
with confident regality. The men and women in
these offices seem air–brushed …

FIERCE FORMALITY.

I have been told of books and covers

and judgments. Appearance and Reality. I have
been told of curiosity and dead cats.
I choose curiosity and read on: How dare
these debonair world governors
proclaim on a UN wall:
‘Osama was here!’

WHAT TEMERITY…

WHAT INCONGRUITY…
WHAT…

Chikosa Mozesi Silungwe (on file with the author), 2006

                                   

UNPLUGGED

‘Babule’ (pronounced wah–woo–læ) is a KyaNgonde word that literally means ‘tell them’.[1] I decided to develop the Babule Series as a conversation with my family and friends on Knowledge. The unilateral decision was made fully aware of the risks involved; I could come across as patronizing or indeed vain. However, the Babule Series must serve two purposes: first, it must challenge every reader to go beyond their comfort zone and engage with other discourses on Life that are contained in the vast human library. Secondly, the Series seeks to persuade the reader to constantly challenge the world view through critique. A balanced critique emerges if one fully understands the basis of the argument by the ‘Other’ before taking a definitive position whether in agreement or disagreement with the ‘Other’. While this Series is merely a tip of the iceberg of Knowledge out there, it is hopefully adequate to prod the reader into ‘action’.

In the paragraphs that follow, I put the various snippets of the Series in perspective. I demonstrate the rationale (or lack of it) in putting the material together:

Babule 1.10 to 1.40 celebrates Africanity from the continent and the Diaspora. I took two sages each from Francophone and Anglophone Africanity. VY Mudimbe points out the existence of African gnosis. Mudimbe’s scholarship has been that the tendency to fit African Knowledge into Euro–American parameters for its own sake is retrogressive. Achille Mbembe bluntly proffers an explanation for the tendency. He has said that the tendency arises out of the haute bourgeois’ stranglehold on the African; a stranglehold that leaves the African in a state of perpetual trance.[2]

Moving on from Mudimbe and Mbembe, I shared Obama and Mbeki. Just like it has been said of Cuba before him, I suggest that Barack Hussein Obama, Jr is an idea.[3] Obama’s piece seeks to show that often simplicity makes all the difference. He says: ‘But sometimes there are more accurate and less accurate answers; sometimes there are facts that cannot be spun, just as an argument about whether it’s raining can usually be settled by stepping outside.’[4] Thabo Mbeki highlights the lack of patriotism that pervades the public trustees driving African political economies. It is dishonourable; and every proud peopleist must detest this kind of dsyfunctionality in public service.

In light of Thabo Mbeki’s rebuke, it is pertinent to go back to the beginning of the beginning. In broad terms, Babule 2.10 to 2.40 addresses the issue of State formation and its sustainability. The thoughts of Frantz Fanon have dominated and justified the liberation struggles of Africa and the Diaspora whether through ‘peace’ or ‘bloodshed’ from the 1960s and beyond. Fanon’s piece from Wretched of the Earth demonstrates, in so many ways, the political betrayal that has befallen Africa and the Diaspora. In my view, State formation and its sustainability depends, in part, on the manner with which the rich / poor divide is closed. An ever–increasing middle class, the petit bourgeois, is necessary for the sustenance of the African political economy. This is how I have read Fidelis Edge Kanyongolo. I read Kanyongolo as implicitly agitating for the nurture of a middle class that becomes the centrepiece of postcolonial Malawi and the wider African political economy. In this respect, Kanyongolo’s point complements Achille Mbembe.

A constitutional framework is a key political tool for State formation and its sustenance. Andrew Arato urges us to be intolerant of the deference accorded to lawyers in constitution making. Being a lawyer myself, I am not ashamed to state that some of our kind miss the broader political–economic picture and can be so pedantic such that their positions become muddled and jejune. In my view, a hyper–litigious lawyer – the one who commences litigation at every opportunity – is counter–productive to the political economy.

Babule 3.10 to 3.40 is an all–woman ‘coterie’. Gayatri Spivak is the celebrated professor of literary criticism and literary theory at Columbia University, New York, US. She has been lauded as one of the pioneers of Subaltern Studies. Her article, ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’ is considered as one of the founding pieces of Postcolonialism as a field of scholarship. Davina Cooper, a Warwick alumnus, is a Professor of Law and Political Theory at Kent. She specializes, among other things, in ‘everyday utopias’ – space and sites of exchange. This space and sites includes the school, sex, religion, politics and speech.[5] Vera Chirwa needs no introduction. In case you do need an introduction then you will find a wholesome Vera Chirwa in Fearless Fighter: An Autobiography. Spivak, Cooper, Chirwa and Maya Angelou are a celebration of womanhood. Since the beginning of ‘history’, the woman has repeatedly triumphed against the odds. The very life of Angelou, for example, epitomizes this resilience that, I suggest, is innate in the woman; especially the principled and pragmatic woman.

The decades after the Second ‘World’ War have witnessed theses and antitheses on the nature of ‘Development’ and consequently what must underpin the ‘theory’ of a political economy. Babule 4.10 to 4.40 delves into these treacherous, albeit exciting, waters. Robert Young’s comments on Gandhi, while made in the context of postcolonial discourse, seek to demonstrate that principle must underpin government, let alone, governance. Hence, as the ‘State’ receded in the late 1970s and beyond, and as the clichesque ‘free market economy’ took centre stage, it is important to quickly observe the influence of the Mount Pelerin Society’s thought. Notable amongst the Mount Pelerin socialites is Friedrich Hayek. Hayek’s thesis of the catallaxy as a market order underlies the so–called neo–liberal order at the beginning of the 1980s and beyond. Margaret Thatcher is on record to have boasted that Hayek was her bedtime reading.[6] The most robustly sound of the marketists has remained Milton Friedman who, with impressive academic rigour, buried the role of the ‘State’ in the political economy. By the time Hernando de Soto arrives with his solution for the ‘Everywhere’, the die had already been cast.

Where are the antitheses to the ‘market’ school? In the vast array of the ‘deconstructionists’ and critics; in Babule 5.10 to 5.40, I have highlighted five scholars who, in my view, have been relatively balanced critics over the years. First, Thandika Mkandawire and Charles Chukwuma Soludo – Thandika being a Swedish of Malawian origin and the incumbent director of the United Nations Research Institute for Social Development, and Soludo being the incumbent governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria and a distinguished macroeconomics academic; Joseph Stiglitz – a Professor of economics at Columbia University and a one time Clinton Administration advisor and high ranking World Bank economist; Jeffrey Sachs – a Professor at Columbia University and special advisor to the United Nations Secretary General; and Guy Mhone (of recent memory) – a Malawi national and accomplished academic  who, among other achievements, helped to develop the initial framework of the Growth, Employment and Redistribution (GEAR) programme of the post–apartheid Government of South Africa. The centrist is the new radical. In light of the present global economic climate, the market critique has turned out prophetic.[7]

Babule 6.10 to 6.40 epitomises the power of the word. Shawshank Redemption[8] can be summed up in one word: Hope. In the words of Tim Robbins as Andy Dufresne in Shawshank Redemption: ‘...hope is a good thing...’ Mapanje invokes humour to critique a regime’s overly regulation of social conduct. The poem is a commentary of the infamous Decency in Dress Act;[9] a law passed by the Malawi legislature in 1971 banning the wearing of trousers and mini–skirts in the case of women, and long hair and bell bottoms in the case of men. The Act was repealed in November, 1993.

I interpret ‘We Real Cool’ as an expansion of the urban expression ‘too cool for school’; a parent’s rebuke of vain, youthful popularity and emphasizing the importance of a decent education. The ‘Graffiti’ piece; may all take note that there is more where that piece came from. These lines (and many other lines in your minds) must be cherished. As the brother has said in as many words: ‘We all started out crying.’[10]

Finally, the whole Babule Series serves as a humble contribution to realising James Earl ‘Jimmy’ Carter’s principle; that a person must be revered because of the content of their character and not because of what they own. This resonates with some of the age–old principles of our forefathers and foremothers: nzeru n’chuma (intellect [intelligence] is wealth); akasam’wana ndindi unandi, mandanda gakwe aga (do not see the warbler’s bird’s smallness; these are its eggs); or mulomo wa banyako ni munkhwala (shared wisdom [intellect] is a virtue). By all means babule; you have to tell them.

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[1] I previously clarified the meaning of the term in an electronic mail sent on Tuesday, October 28, 2008. For a detailed discussion of the Ngonde as a people: see Owen JM Kalinga The Ngonde Kingdom of Northern Malawi c.1600–1895 (PhD Thesis: University of London, 1974); and Owen JM Kalinga ‘Trade, the Kyungus, and the Emergence of the Ngonde Kingdom of Malawi’ (1979) 12(1) The International Journal of African Historical Studies 17–39.  

[2] ‘African’ in this sense refers to the ‘poor’ in the widest sense of the term.

[3] In a recent interview with Sky News, Willard C. ‘Will’ Smith Jr also referred to the notion of Barack Obama as an idea: see http://news.sky.com/skynews/Home/World-News/Actor-Will-Smith-Believes-Barack-Obamas-Inauguration-As-President-Means-World-Is-Changing-Forever/Article/200901315205192?lpos=World_News_Second_US_Elec_Article_TSR_Region_9&lid=ARTICLE_15205192_Actor_Will_Smith_Believes_Barack_Obamas_Inauguration_As_President_Means_World_Is_Changing_Forever (visited on January 31, 2009). My ideation of Barack Obama here is to suggest the emergence of a 21^st century political norm.

[4] See Barack Obama Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream (Edinburgh: Canongate, 2008) 127.

[5] See http://www.kent.ac.uk/law/research/profiles/cooper.html (visited on January 6, 2009).

[6] See John Ranelagh Thatcher's People: An Insider's Account of the Politics, the Power, and the Personalities (London: HarperCollins, 1991) ix.

[7] See for example Markus K Brunnermeier ‘Deciphering the Liquidity and Credit Crunch 2007–2008’ 23(1) Journal of Economic Perspectives 77 for an account of the global economic meltdown that started in summer, 2007.

[8] Based on Stephen King’s novella, Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption, the motion picture is hailed as the best motion picture that never won an award from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (the ‘Oscars’).

[9] Cap. 7: 04, Laws of Malawi (now repealed).

[10] When Nesta Robert ‘Bob’ Marley was asked how he started his (music) career, he is on record to have said: ‘we started out cryin’; in reference to the first sound a baby blurts out after their first breath at birth. The expression inspired the name of Marley’s first group – a group he formed together with Winston Hubert MacIntosh (later Peter Tosh), Neville Livingston (later Bunny Wailer), Franklin ‘Junior’ Braithwaite, Beverley Kelso and Cherry Smith (also known as Cherry Green or Ermine Bramwell) – the Teenagers; later the Wailing Rudeboys, the Wailing Wailers, and finally, the Wailers: see for example http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/365877/Bob-Marley (visited on February 4, 2009).