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MWAZINDIKA NAIROBI
Sunday, October 20, 2013
Wednesday, October 9, 2013
Sunday, June 9, 2013
PROTESTS AT TAKSIM SQUARE: THE NEW YOUNG TURKS
By now you will have seen
pictures of police battles, burning tyres, riot shields and tear-gas- stricken
protesters. These images have become so familiar to us over the past few
years that we are almost immune to them.
Tahrir has become a byword for Athens, Spain, and Rome. But what you can’t get
from the pictures is the extraordinary transformation that has taken place in Taksim Square – the centre of Istanbul – in the space of a mere ten days. It has become
a living, breathing community of peace, love and hope. “Woodstock” people
whisper as they walk amongst the stalls of free food, books, and the forests of
posters and red flags.
Wind back to one week before:
Taksim on any day of the week packed full of cars; traffic jams even at midnight! On one side
where the stairs were built out of the gravestones from an Armenian cemetery,
the buses normally collect. Turkish drivers aren’t patient at the best of times
so the air is rent with the sound of beeping. Now there isn’t a motor vehicle
in sight; all is calm and quiet. Around the square people break into dance;
elsewhere political gatherings address the faithful.
But the
movement has historical precedents. The Young Turks were a diverse group of
Turkish citizens who rebelled against Ottoman Sultan Abdülhamid II and his
extremely authoritarian government in the early 20th century. The Young Turks
are often credited with laying the groundwork for the modernization of the
Ottoman Empire. The association of the Young Turks with radical ideas and
revolutionary change is so widespread that the term is often used in slang to
refer to groups of youthful and politically active individuals who agitate for
change.
The origins
of the Young Turks lie in 1889, when an atmosphere of quiet dissent began to
spread throughout the Ottoman Empire, primarily among students and disaffected
members of the military. After a brief period of constitutional government from
1876-1878, the Sultan suspended the Turkish Constitution, causing a great deal
of unrest among many Ottoman citizens. The Young Turks began meeting in small
cells to talk about the creation of a secular, constitutionally based
government as an alternative to Turkey's existing monarchy, and the movement
quickly spread until 1906, when the Young Turks came out in the open and began
to actively agitate for change.
Now in this country where
insulting Turkishness (whatever that might mean) is a crime, there are posters of Recep
Erdogan as Hitler. His insult to the people – that they are mere hooligans –
has become a rallying cry as well as a running joke. Huge posters demonstrate
the likeness between the two. Whilst the streets were burning the government-imposed
media blackout showed films of penguins so now they, too, have become a part of
the common language of defiance. Older citizens who saw plenty of upheavals in
the last century shake their heads in amazement saying, “We have never
witnessed anything like this before.”
The organisation of the
protesters is impeccable: all over the square and the adjoining Gezi Park (the
threatened destruction of which instigated the protests) every inch of space is
covered by tents, blankets, tables laden with food and information posts. There
is a map to indicate where things are. Barricades block all the entrances so
that only the trusted can enter. There is a library, a makeshift clinic, theatre
masks and gas masks. In order not to allow the municipality with its large vans
to collect rubbish, each morning the community organises a roster of members to
clean up the mess, passing bags along a human chain. Instead of the streams of
relentless shoppers each caught in his own acquisitive world, people wander
about engaging one another in talk.
What began as a protest
against the demolition of one of the few remaining green spaces in Istanbul has
become a beacon of radicalisation for the whole country. Each night as dark
falls, the city is alive with the sound of pots and pans. Cars hoot at one
another to show solidarity and there is a general atmosphere of gaiety.
Erdogan has planned to bring
back Ottoman barracks and to transform the square into a pedestrian precinct.
This is in the name of progress – like the billion dollar infrastructure
projects like the third bridge over the Bosphorus and the third aiport, slated
to be the biggest in the world. Not for nothing did the current issue of The
Economist show the Prime Minister draped in the clothes of a Sultan, for this
is how he has seen his role. But the people won’t have it; they have long
smelled a rat and know that the Islamist leader has been enriching his own
coffers. The construction at Taksim has been allocated to a member of his
family; as elsewhere, Turkey’s wealthiest have done well out of the expanding
economy but the majority of those employed work in appalling conditions for
very little pay. As for any rights at work – forget about it.
Erdogan may show contempt for
his people but meanwhile the lira is dropping in value and investors are
turning away. Those are things he can’t ignore for long.
Tuesday, May 21, 2013
Friday, March 29, 2013
Tribute to Chinua Achebe
BEATING THE WHITE MAN AT HIS OWN GAME: THE
GENIUS OF ACHEBE.
If Chinua
Achebe had been living in Dickens’ time, he might have succeeded in selling
“Things Fall Apart” as a serial the way the great English novelist had done,
keeping a growing audience hanging on each last word, savouring it until the
next episode appeared. Because the story-telling in every chapter is so highly
skilled that it is complete in itself.
The world
mourns the passing of a great writer though he had lived more than his biblical
four-score and ten and his best work was well behind him. Africa was his life,
his being, the subject of his writing, the object of his fascination. Not just
Nigeria but Africa because he came of age at a time when there were men with
Pan-African visions like Nyerere, Nkrumah, Senghor, Kaunda and Mandela. They
knew that the boundaries drawn on the map did not represent their reality.
Without denying their own place and time, they had a sense of what linked them
historically and geographically. Like Ngugi wa Thiongo Achebe was forced to
live outside his beloved home country but anyway, the writer needs distance. He
can see things up close all right but it is those things that are further away
in space and time that exile gives him in abundance along with melancholy,
nostalgia and long-term memory.
Some have
criticised Achebe for romanticising pre-colonial times but this is a
misunderstanding. If there is nostalgia it is for a time when the society he
knew proceeded according to agreed sets of rules rather than the free-for-all
we know now. Personal preferences didn’t count. The book’s hero Okonkwo is
specially fond of his daughter Ezinma who “looked very much like her mother who
was once the village beauty. But his fondness showed on very rare occasions.”
Can she
bring him a chair to watch the wrestling? “No, that is a boy’s job.” There is
no bending of the rules. Everyone knows that.
Writers of
all races have been forced or have chosen to live elsewhere. Samuel Beckett not
only chose Paris but decided to write in French in order to deliberately “impoverish”
himself – not a negative concept but a way of stripping language to its barest
bones. But Africans were not best known for their novels. The world knew them
as oral storytellers. If there were Shakespeares buried in Timbuktu’s sands we
didn’t know about them. What Achebe did was to lift that art into a written
form and beat the white man at his own game. Soon there would come a time when
the best writing in English no longer came from “that sceptred isle” and Achebe was one of the first in that class.
We still have
so much to learn from him, most of all, in my view, from Things Fall Apart.
Ngugi may have berated him long ago for writing in the language of the
oppressor but by now there are so many “Englishes” that the criticism no longer
holds water. Achebe turned the
oppressor’s language into his own; he moulded it in such a way that it could
speak with Igbo proverbial overtones and at the same time mock the colonialist. Take the last chapter: Okonkwo has on the
spur of the moment killed an enemy messenger. Achebe doesn’t judge him; the man
was filled with rage and had been provoked beyond endurance. It’s what he had
to do at that moment. He has, like Oedipus and Agamemnon before him, shown
hubris and the author knows his Greek tragedies. Fate has its own punishment. The
next chapter begins with a visit from the District Commissioner who is looking
for Okwonkwo. The men of the village are uncharacteristically helpful.
“We can
take you where he is and perhaps your men will help us.”
The DC is
puzzled.
“One of the
most infuriating habits of these people was their love of superfluous words, he
thought.”
Of course
this is deeply ironic; Achebe knows that the art of the novel lies in multiple ironies:
from the individual sentence to the chapter to the entire edifice. It is the colonialist
whose words are superfluous. As he approaches the small crowd of weary men
looking for Okonkwo it is he who utters needless threats. “Unless they produced
Okonkwo forthwith he would lock them all up.” Had he been able to read the
scene and the mood he would have kept quiet.
Led by the
hand we arrive with the band at Okonkwo’s body hanging from a tree. (Remember
that we don’t see Oedipus gouging out his eyes at the discovery that the oracle
was right.) This is why the men have been so obliging: their custom doesn’t
allow them to bury a man who has taken his own life.
“It is an
offence against the Earth, and a man who commits it will not be buried by his
clansmen. His body is evil and only strangers may touch it. That is why we ask
your people to bring him down, because you are strangers.”
Strangers
to each other and themselves. The poor DC can’t cope: nothing in his education
has prepared him for such a moment. His way out is to reassure himself that
this is a mere “undignified detail” and his mind escapes to the book he will write about these
wretched people. Unlike Okonkwo’s lifelong friend Obierika who is filled with
rage, he feels nothing. He can only come up with abstract thoughts. This
episode in the life of a micro- civilisation “would make interesting reading.
One could almost write a whole chapter on him. Perhaps not a whole chapter but
a reasonable paragraph at any rate.” It is a magnificent irony given that the
entire trilogy let alone this book centres on Okonkwo! One can almost hear the
author chuckling quietly to himself. “One must be firm in cutting out details.”
A man who cannot feel can never produce a work of art. “The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of
the Lower Niger” – the DC’s pompous title - form the last words of the book. There is no
need to say who is primitive.
Achebe was
equally adept at essay writing, adopting an easy conversational style which
took the reader into his confidence. His breadth of reading is formidable but
he never loses a sense of humility. In “Thoughts on the African Novel” (Hopes
and Impediments - Selected Essays 1965-87) he writes:
“What I am
saying really boils down to a simple plea for the African novel. Don’t fence me
in.”
Rejecting
the idea that the African novel is an impossibility because the genre was born
in England he continues:
“I have no
doubt at all about the existence of the African novel. This form of fiction has
seized the imagination of many African writers and they will use it according
to their different abilities, sensibilities and visions without seeking
anyone’s permission. I believe it will grow and prosper. I believe it has a
great future.”
His own
work is the proof of that.
Wednesday, February 13, 2013
Kampala's famous Kavalagala All Night Dancing
http://the-star.co.ke/news/article-107278/nightlife-kampalas-sin-cityhttp://the-star.co.ke/news/article-107278/nightlife-kampalas-sin-city
Thursday, January 17, 2013
Archived Nation articles
http://www.accessmylibrary.com/search/?q=Betty+Caplanhttp://www.accessmylibrary.com/search/?q=Betty+Caplan
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