Bar-Sharci

15 Things to Know Before You Go to Hargeisa

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<b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Hargeisa is not Mogadishu.</span></b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> Most people don’t know much about Hargeisa, in northwestern
Somalia. But for many travelers, its location alone is a red flag. For more
than 25 years, news from the region has been a relentless stream of violence
and despair, even after the country managed to cobble together a (<a href="http://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/560/media/images/82552000/gif/_82552397_somalia_control_624_v3.gif" target="_blank"><span style="color: blue;">laughable</span></a>) central
government in 2012 after 22 years of statelessness and civil war. Yet major
southern Somali cities like Mogadishu, Kismayo, and even the de facto federal
capital of Baidoa are all a little too rough around the edges for tourism. But
the story of Hargeisa is different from the rest of Somalia. It’s the capital
of a self-declared independent state (<a href="http://csis.org/story/why-united-states-should-recognize-somaliland%E2%80%99s-independence" target="_blank"><span style="color: blue;">unrecognized</span></a>) called
Somaliland, formed when the historic colony of British Somaliland merged with
Italian Somaliland in 1960. Somaliland started to pull away from Mogadishu in
the 1980s, so when the Somali government collapsed in 1991, local ‘Lander’
leaders quickly moved to quell violence within their borders, declaring
independence and forming a new government that has presided over a relatively
peaceful two decades. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">A Somaliland Member of Parliament relaxes at a restaurant in
Hargeisa. Photo: Mark Hay </span></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Bad things <i>have</i> happened in
Hargeisa—just rarely, and not recently.</span></b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">
Somaliland sometimes skirmishes over its eastern provinces, known as Sool,
Sanaag, and Cayn, with neighboring semi-independent Puntland. <a href="http://www.aljazeera.com/news/africa/2008/10/2008102993331438553.html" target="_blank"><span style="color: blue;">In 2008</span></a>, terrorists managed
to bomb the presidential palace and an Ethiopian diplomatic outpost in
Hargeisa. But Somaliland officials, desperate to prove their mettle to the
international community and achieve global recognition as an independent state,
have ensured that major cities maintain order (if not always law), succeeding
well enough that Hargeisa, and cities such as Berbera, Borama, and Burco, have
functional police forces and streets you can walk on unarmed–even at night–and
safe enough to have some fun.</span></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Getting around is easy. </span></b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">In the 1980s, Hargeisa, seeking self-determination, was
bombed to bits by Somalia’s longstanding military dictator, Siad Barre. Its
streets are still mostly dirt. And the rebuilding city is evolving so quickly
that maps can’t keep up. With an estimated population of 1.2 million, over
eight times the city’s population in the 1970s, you’d think it would be easy to
get lost in this expansive, dust-choked urban labyrinth. But it’s not, thanks
to the numerous and cheap taxis and buses that work their way around town. It’s
not even all informal: taxis are marked and metered, and buses are regular. If
you stand still for five minutes, some form of transit will roll by with
someone in the driver’s seat or passenger area who understands just enough
English to get you where you need to go. </span></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">The Ambassador and the Maan-Soor
aren’t the only hotels in town.</span></b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">
Aside from a handful of intrepid backpackers, most of the people who come to
Hargeisa are academics, aid workers, <a href="http://blogs.cfr.org/campbell/2015/01/15/somalia-ready-for-oil-exploration/" target="_blank"><span style="color: blue;">industrial oil prospectors</span></a>,
and a <a href="http://www.somalilandfoundation.com/home/?p=1199" target="_blank"><span style="color: blue;">large cadre of Turkish developers</span></a> looking to
spread their nation’s soft power throughout Africa. For the sake of security
and amenities most of these folks stay in one of two hotels. The Maan-Soor, on
the northwestern fringe of town, offers a blast wall, permanent armed guard,
and attentive staff often for long-term or returning foreign guests; the
Ambassador offers much the same on the south side of town near the airport,
convenient for short-term functions and conferences. Both pop up as the top
options in town for all travelers, and both are insular and Western. Although
you’re unlikely to find them easily, there are other options. Many hotels in
the heart of Hargeisa are perfectly safe, well stocked with resources, and
trafficked by much more colorful and diverse characters (who will gladly mingle
with you in this more relaxed atmosphere). The staff are a little more mellow
and can help you arrange anything you might need, from SIM cards to trips into
the countryside, all on the cheap. I’m personally quite fond of the Oriental
Hotel, which is just blocks from Hargeisa’s main drag and <a href="http://roadsandkingdoms.com/breakfast/in-praise-of-porridge/" target="_blank"><span style="color: blue;">serves a mean porridge</span></a>. </span></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">This city is wired up.</span></b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> The birth of a <a href="http://www.budde.com.au/Research/Somalia-Telecoms-Mobile-and-Broadband-Statistics-and-Analyses.html" target="_blank"><span style="color: blue;">thriving telecoms industry</span></a>
has been one of the few universally reported success stories out of modern
Somalia. In this free market, entrepreneurs have flooded the country with cheap
cellphones, offering some of the lowest data and international call rates in
the world, with pretty strong signal even in rural areas. They’ve even managed
to jigger their way into internet connections, often via cooperation with firms
in neighboring Djibouti and Ethiopia, which are strong enough to support most
downloads and streaming. (I streamed the first season of <i>Orange Is The New
Black</i> from a Hargeisa hotel room over the course of a few dull Ramadan
days.) Combined with fairly lax browsing restraints, this is a perfect recipe
for international connectivity and entertainment in an otherwise remote part of
the world. </span></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Almost every market is a grey
market.</span></b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> Local entrepreneurs are bright, and
probably more resourceful than many guys on the Google Bus. But they’re still
operating in an unrecognized region, under a local regime that’s mostly
disconnected from global financial institutions, leaves postal operations to
DHL, and has minimal international business leverage. It only follows that a
lot of goods in the market came literally came off the back of a truck and were
paid for under the table in cash. The computers at that Internet café are riddled
with viruses. The batteries in that market will run dry within the space of a
few hours. That jacket is just one cleverly disguised long thread, waiting to
unravel cartoonishly as soon as it meets an attractive snag. And none of this
junk is even that cheap, thanks to “irregular shipping practices.” Really, if
you need consumer goods in Hargeisa, just bring them along.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">One of
Hargeisa's outdoor markets. Photo by: Mark Hay </span>

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<b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Bring cash.</span></b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> Preferably a stack of cold, hard, American dollars. The
nation is not hooked into the global financial system in any meaningful way.
Cash services are shaping up in Hargeisa, which has just started to launch a
series of traditional bank branches and reportedly launched its first <a href="http://somalilandsun.com/index.php/economic/5158-somaliland-salaam-financials-facilitates-local-servicing-of-international-credit-cards-" target="_blank"><span style="color: blue;">two ATMs in 2014</span></a>. But you
still can’t rely on these young banks and ATMs for all your financial needs.
Also, Hargeisa will try to milk a little money from you as soon as you touch
down, charging entry, exit, and security fees at border control, often forcing
you to change some dollars to shillings upon entry as well. </span></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Ignore the Somaliland Shilling.</span></b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> The Somaliland Shilling hovers around S$7,000 to $1, uses
tiny notes that max out at S$5,000, and exchanges at negotiable and uneven
rates from roadside vendor to roadside vendor. Most financial services take a
cut out of your cash. Everyone takes USD as a valid alternative currency. A
pocketful of Shillings is useful mainly for small change and cheap street
vendor items such as bottled water or a candy bar. However, dollars are so
coveted that locals are loath to make change in US currency, opting to pay you
back in Shillings instead.</span></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">There are a few financial services
that you can use.</span></b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> If you’re dead set against carrying
a big wad of cash around, you can make use of Somaliland’s two financial
services: <a href="http://magazine.good.is/features/can-a-family-business-save-somalia-s-economy" target="_blank"><span style="color: blue;">Dahabshiil</span></a> and <a href="http://roadsandkingdoms.com/2013/mobile-money-in-a-dusty-land/" target="_blank"><span style="color: blue;">Zaad</span></a>. The first is a local
money wiring system (and a cornerstone of the regional remittance economy), by
which you can cheaply send dollars to Hargeisa and store them in secure and
well-respected locations. The second is a mobile money system that allows you
to send ethereal cash to most vendors, even street side shacks and rural folks,
who’re hipper to currency digitization than most major American retailers,
meaning that you might actually have an easier cash-free, non-credit shopping
experience in Hargeisa than at home. But, as with any service, you’ll lose a
little cash off the top and it adds steps between you and your dinner. </span></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Mind the hidden social tensions.</span></b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> Although Hargeisa epitomizes Somali optimism, the commerce
and conviviality can mask long-standing divisions. Somaliland, like the rest of
Somalia, is predominantly Sunni Muslim, but local Somalilanders are split along
still-relevant clan lines, often accusing each other of clan favoritism and
power monopolies. All of the locals together often resent southern Somali
immigrants who they see as honing in on the success of the region. Both of
these groups marginalize the hell out of a <a href="http://reliefweb.int/report/somalia/study-minorities-somalia" target="_blank"><span style="color: blue;">series of minority communities</span></a>,
historically held down in an indigenous racial quasi-caste system and rapidly <a href="http://www.vice.com/read/minorities-and-migrants-are-fighting-for-last-place-in-somaliland" target="_blank"><span style="color: blue;">losing their hold</span></a> even on
their traditional jobs. And all of these parties throw a little shade at
returnees from the diaspora, cast as outsiders getting too big for their boots.
And across the board, people tend to ignore the refugee populations, mostly
Ethiopians and Yemenis fleeing poverty or violence and stuck in the region with
nowhere else to go. These tensions won’t affect your trip, but it’s good to
keep them in mind to avoid needlessly stepping on some sensitive toes and
stoking social issues. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">A barber and member of the the Gaboye community, a
marginalized group in Somaliland. Being a barber is a traditional but
threatened Gaboye caste job.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> Photo: Mark Hay</span></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Sit down, shut up, and eat your camel.</span></b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> Although many restaurants are opening up serving Western,
Yemeni, Middle Eastern, and Ethiopian fare, much of what’s on offer for cheap
is local Somali food – which is not too diverse. I could warn you about the
sickly saccharine breakfast <i><a href="http://www.mysomalifood.com/lahooh-spongy-pancake-like-bread/"><span style="color: blue;">laxoox</span></a></i>, the fact that you’ll need to master
eating loose rice with your hands, or the shocking monotony of the coastal
region’s diet. But the most important thing I can warn you about here is this:
You’re going to eat a metric shit-ton of gamey, tough, and greasy camel meat. <a href="http://roadsandkingdoms.com/2013/how-do-you-like-your-camel-meat/" target="_blank"><span style="color: blue;">Camels are legion in Somaliland</span></a>.
Somalia as a whole is home to half of the world’s 14 million camels, and arid
Somaliland is their ideal environment — so they’re one of the easiest and
cheapest sources of meat at roadside stands. Camel meat is not tender. You’ll
also eat a fair share of camel’s hump, which is a spongy, fatty tissue,
resistant to all mastication, as well. This is a valuable commodity and
offering it is a kind gesture, so don’t turn it down. And if you happen to have
to drink the milk, know that it is truly foul, but muscle through the
experience by repeating this mantra: <i><a href="https://au.news.yahoo.com/sunday-night/features/a/25468433/i-drank-camel-milk-for-a-month-heres-what-happened/" target="_blank"><span style="color: blue;">This is very healthy milk</span></a>.
This is very healthy milk. This is very healthy milk.</i></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Camel meat
Photo by: Mark Hay </span></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">You’ll get a minder whether you want
one or not.</span></b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> Ever wary of the bad press a dead
or missing foreigner would bring to their independence movement, whenever you
leave Hargeisa the government requires you to pay for a dude in fatigues with a
questionably functional Kalashnikov to accompany you. Usually they’ll try to
get you to use a private car service as well, so most day trips outside
Hargeisa can cost an arm and a leg—all in the name of making absolutely sure
you don’t lose an arm and a leg. But trips to Berbera and Laas Geel, on
well-secured and trafficked roads, are usually exempt from this requirement, so
they’re your best bets to freely visit the hinterland. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">From the
caves of Las Geel, looking out at the wadi. Las Geel is a trip visitors can
make without a minder. Photo by: Mark Hay </span></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">A day trip to Las Geel is
quasi-mandatory.</span></b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> Though some people come to
Somaliland as misguided war tourists or to check off Somalia on their world
travel map, most come to understand a region often presented as impoverished
and pitiful. This latter group will usually be content checking out the <a href="http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/roads/2013/09/somaliland_s_camel_market_could_camel_meat_be_this_unrecognized_nation_s.html" target="_blank"><span style="color: blue;">local camel market</span></a>,
grabbing tea at a roadside shack, and spending nights chilling with a few
locals chewing <i>khat</i> and shooting the shit. But that doesn’t mean there’s
nothing touristy to do around the city, and probably the best option is a quick
day trip (about four or five hours in total) to Laas Geel. Long known to locals
but only documented by French archaeologists in 2002, <a href="http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2013/may/1/ancient-art-in-diplomatic-limbo/?page=all" target="_blank"><span style="color: blue;">Laas Geel</span></a> is a rough rock
outcropping in the middle of the desert, which displays some of Africa’s oldest
and best-preserved rock art–some parts dating back to 9,000 B.C.E.–which are a
big point of national pride. They’re not the country’s only historical sites,
but other rock art masterpieces are in the restive Sanaag, and ruins at Abaasa,
Amud, and Zeila are inaccessible, looted beyond repair, or just poorly
maintained. Laas Geel is the best option for tourism. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Rock art at Las Geel. Photo: Mark Hay</span></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">The beach at Berbera is overrated,
but you should still go.</span></b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> Berbera is
a once-significant Red Sea port trying to regain its relevance and become an
engine of growth. Aspirations to develop the port have granted it one of the
nation’s best roads (to and from Hargeisa), a route sufficiently fast and
well-traveled that the government usually waives its minder requirement. Most
tourists try to make the trip for the pristine beaches, maybe go snorkeling
with the aid of the local Maan-Soor branch, and chow down on some local
fish—which is more than enough to make most visitors happy. But the place is a
furnace, pushing highs of 110° F all summer with equally absurd humidity
levels. As with any travel beyond Hargeisa, the price to simultaneously bake
and stew in sand are higher than you might expect – or think reasonable. But
the chance to see a bit more of the country on your own for a day is still
worth it. </span></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Hargeisa is more than just a staging
point. </span></b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">The city lacks for landmarks. The
best it has to offer is a downed MiG-17 fighter jet, a monument to when the
regime in Mogadishu carpet-bombed Hargeisa in 1988 during Somaliland’s independence
bids. There are theatres or clubs, and minimal entertainment and nightlife.
Sometimes it can seem like the only thing to do is drink tea or chew the mild
narcotic <i>khat</i>. But every year, more and more Somalis return to the city
from the diaspora, eager to revitalize Somaliland and bring with them new
developments. In the evenings, the streets and restaurants are hopping with
people meeting and greeting, chatting and dealing, often in English as well as
Somali, because some have returned from America and Europe. It’s a vibrant
crush of culture and exchange. And during the days, there are even a few cool
new sporting teams—acrobats and martial artists—holding low-key public
exhibitions, which are striking to see on the dusty red streets. Hargeisa might
not have the most institutional fun on tap. But you can still have a good
time—and simultaneously challenge your media-soaked preconceptions about a
region, which is more than you can ask from most vacation spots in the world. </span></div>
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<span style="mso-ignore: vglayout;"><a href="http://roadsandkingdoms.com/author/mhay/"><br /></a></span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><a href="http://roadsandkingdoms.com/author/mhay/"><span style="color: black;">Mark
Hay</span></a> is a freelance writer based out of Brooklyn, N.Y. An incessant
carnivore with a special love for organ meat, he jumps at the chance to go on
any and every culinary adventure possible. You can find his writings on food
and everything else regularly in GOOD, Modern Notion, and VICE—and irregularly
all over the place.</span></div>
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15 Things to Know Before You Go to Hargeisa

Hargeisa is not Mogadishu. Most people don’t know much about Hargeisa, in northwestern Somalia. But for many travelers, its locat...

The Militant Intellection Complex… a Conversation with Pius Adesanm

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<strong>AFRICAN WRITING: </strong>In your ‘day job’, you teach in a Canadian
University, but you are also a widely-published commentator on Africana. You
don’t believe in the need for distance in the practice of academia, then? <br />

<strong>Pius Adesanmi:</strong> Thank you for your question. I am a public
intellectual and a chronicler of Africa. I have wholly embraced that vocation
with its generous hassles and miserly joys. The condition of Nigeria and Africa
today are too desperate for me to find any joy or personal satisfaction in
producing exclusive literary-theoretical jargons that could only be understood
by colleagues and advanced doctoral students.<br />

And, no, I do not believe in the need for discursive boundaries between town
and gown. My philosophy of intellection and knowledge production has been
shaped over the years by a very broad range of populist (I hope one can still
use that term in a non-pejorative sense today) traditions. The writer and
public intellectual that I am today were shaped by all the big isms of the
political and ideological Left even with all their warts. I strive constantly
to hone an intellectual praxis marked by its embeddedness in the social, an
underlying immersion in volk consciousness, a rootedness in the idioms of the
street, and a permanent suspicion of power that cannot in anyway be cocooned in
academia. I am just too restless for the epistemic isolation that is academe. <br />

And don’t forget that I am also a product and student of the French
tradition of public intellection. If you look closely at 19th and 20th century
France, especially roughly from Emile Zola’s “J’accuse” down to our times, the
ideas that powered and inflected society did not come as a result of the likes
of Jean-Paul Sartre, Pierre Bourdieu, Andre Breton, Raymond Aron, Louis
Althusser, Pierre Fougeyrollas, Michel Foucault, Alain Finkiekrault, and
Bernard-Henri Lévy merely sitting down to philosophize from the hallowed halls
of the Sorbonne or the Ecole Normale Supérieure. Many of these thinkers were or
are also agitators, columnists, anarchists, and animators of the public sphere.
Anything you could do to keep power on its toes and prevent complacency on the
part of the people was welcome. <br />

At the risk of boring you, let me remind you that public intellection is
also not a new thing in Africa. The only new dimension is the increasing
appropriation of the internet as a space of public intellection as we see, for
instance, in the very visible listserv praxis of Nigeria’s Mobolaji Aluko, a
Professor of Chemical Engineering with a public intellectual vocation
underwritten by social and political justice concerns. Other than this new
online dimension, the field of African public intellection has been very rich
since the upsurge in continental production of discourse and knowledges in
European languages began in the 20th century. In no particular order, the likes
of Wole Soyinka, Chinua Achebe, Odia Ofeimun, Edwin Madunagu, Ayodele Awojobi,
Bala Usman, Eskor Toyo, Niyi Osundare, Biodun Jeyifo and so many others have
contributed enormously to blurring the boundaries between town and gown in
terms of activism and essayistic interventions. South Africa, Kenya, Congo, Uganda,
Malawi, Cameroon, and Zimbabwe have all given us the likes of Archie Mafeje,
Bernard Magubane, Eski’a Mpahlele, Ali Mazrui, Paul Tiyambe Zeleza, Florence
Wambugu, Mahmood Mamdani, Achille Mbembe, Lovemore Madhuku, John Makumbe, and
Ernest Wambia dia Wambia just to limit myself to those. I like to flatter
myself by believing that I am qualified to be called a devoted student of these
illustrious practitioners of African public intellection.<br />

<span style="mso-no-proof: yes;"><img alt="http://www.african-writing.com/eleven/images/AW15.gif" height="8" src="file:///C:\Users\BARKHA~1\AppData\Local\Temp\msohtmlclip1\01\clip_image001.gif" width="21" /></span>:
Dr. Laurent Gbagbo (President of Cote d’Ivoire) is another ‘public
Intellectual’. What is your advice to him at this point of his country’s
political history?<br />

<strong>Adesanmi</strong>: Dr. Laurent Gbagbo was a public intellectual.
Today, he gives a bad name to the very essence of public intellection. He is
one of those fellows who just make one wonder if one isn’t pouring water in a
basket in terms of our collective struggle to articulate and push better
narratives of Africa. Everywhere I go in the lecture circuit, people say: do
not pathologize Africa; cherry pick positive stories about Africa for western
audiences; Africa has no monopoly of negative narratives. The trouble is: a
single Gbabgo destroys in one second years of positive image casting by those
of us struggling to re-narrativize that continent. I feel somewhat personally
assaulted by the Gbagbo tragedy because I am as Francophone as I am Anglophone.
I’ve been following Gbagbo for a very long time. It’s sad to see what he has
become.<br />

<span style="mso-no-proof: yes;"><img alt="http://www.african-writing.com/eleven/images/AW15.gif" height="8" src="file:///C:\Users\BARKHA~1\AppData\Local\Temp\msohtmlclip1\01\clip_image001.gif" width="21" /></span>:
Africa has a long history of liberators who are too easily satisfied by the
liberation of their own wallets. The first wave that brought independence to
the former colonies chose not to break down the power structure of the
colonists and simply inserted — and entrenched — themselves in it. Our
post-independence history has roughly followed that template, of opposition
leaders that become worse than the ‘dictators’ they oust. You speak of a
‘permanent suspicion of power’ that cannot be cocooned in academia. Have
African ‘public intellectuals’ who cross the political divide fared any better?
Are our centres of intellection actually liberating minds, or generating the
ideas to truly liberate their societies? Or are they just vehicles to catapult
an intellectual elite into the casinos of power.<br />

<strong>Adesanmi</strong>: ‘Liberators’ is a very huge basket into which I
assume you have dumped a very broad range of actors in the continent’s
liberatory processes: nationalist politicians, trade unionists, student
unionists, youth unionists, creative writers of the Negritudinist and
cultural-nationalist dimension and, of course, academics and public
intellectuals. I am offering this disentanglement just to get a proper handle
on your question. I think you are also super-imposing the typical Nigerian
scenario of cross-over intellection on the whole of Africa. It is true that
more than thirty years of military rule and corrupt civilian interregnums have
eventuated in a corrosion of values of which the co-optation of the
intellectual by the state has been a manifest consequence in Nigeria but that
is not always the case with the rest of Africa. <br />

I prefer the template of one of Demoractic Republic of Congo’s foremost
public intellectuals, Ernest Wambia dia Wambia. I am sure you know that he
studied in the United States and wrote a formidable doctoral dissertation on
Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Jean-Paul Sartre before settling down to an eclectic
academic career that saw him eventually teach at Harvard University before
moving to the University of Dar-es-Salaam. By the 1980s, he had become one of
Africa’s famous and influential public intellectuals and got into trouble often
with Mobutu Sese Seko. I am sure you know that he went to the trenches during
the second Congo war against Laurent Kabila and became a leader of the rebel
movement, Rally for Congolese Democracy. Yes, a famous African public intellectual
quit the University and picked up a Kalachnikov against Laurent Kabila in the
1990s. That story is not very well known in Anglophone Africa because of the
iron curtain of language but it happened and I daresay that it is far more
gripping than our own narrative of a young writer who held up a radio station
three decades ago while trying to defend the ethos of democratic practice in
Nigeria. This is not to diminish Soyinka’s truly heroic act. Today, Ernest
Wambia dia Wambia is a progressive Senator in DRC and still one of the most
active and prominent names in Africanist academic and political discourse
circles. That is a kind of African public intellectual trajectory that has been
overshadowed by the Nigerian model of collaboration with the corrupt postcolonial
state in Abuja. We must be careful, however, not to pathologize the Nigerian
model. After all, there were intellectuals who collaborated with the Vichy
regime in France.<br />

<span style="mso-no-proof: yes;"><img alt="http://www.african-writing.com/eleven/images/AW15.gif" height="8" src="file:///C:\Users\BARKHA~1\AppData\Local\Temp\msohtmlclip1\01\clip_image001.gif" width="21" /></span>:
We refer mainly to that broad clique who find themselves in power, or with
access to the spoils of power.<br />

<strong>Adesanmi</strong>: That is true — especially in Nigeria where the
state has been able to ruin the names and reputation of too many of our public
intellectuals but like I just pointed out in the case of Wambia dia Wambia,
collaboration with power has not been the only destiny of public intellection
in Africa and Nigeria. Part of the problem here is that your question assumes,
as it is often frequently done, that the work of the public intellectual must
always eventuate in concrete, benchmarkable results in terms of the advancement
and liberation of society. Sometimes history dictates otherwise by
interpellating them just to produce ideas and permanently disrupt the settled
verities of those in power. When Octavio Paz says that thinking is the only
obligation of the intelligentsia, he makes a lot of sense to me. Thinking is
really the only debt that the public intellectual owes his society. Thinking is
what I believe I owe Nigeria and Africa.<br />

<span style="mso-no-proof: yes;"><img alt="http://www.african-writing.com/eleven/images/AW15.gif" height="8" src="file:///C:\Users\BARKHA~1\AppData\Local\Temp\msohtmlclip1\01\clip_image001.gif" width="21" /></span>:
Do you really subscribe to Octavio Paz? Do you not see a crisis of imagination
in Presidential Houses across Africa? An abundance of people with power who
don’t know what to do with it? Is there not a place for Think Tanks that
actually bend their minds to concrete policy? Can African taxpayers afford the
luxury of ‘abstract thinkers’?<br />

<strong>Adesanmi</strong>: Octavio Paz was not just talking about abstract
thought. He was talking about intellection tout court. That said, abstract
thought and concrete policy intellection are not mutually exclusive. Those
producing policy papers in American thinktanks do not operate ex nihilo. They
are coming from the abstract thought that has either framed philosophies of the
Left or the Right depending on their respective political persuasions. In the
USA, all the lunatic rightwing public policy papers and recommendations churned
out by equally lunatic rightwing thinktanks in Washington, and which served as
the springboard for so many policies of the Bush-Cheney junta, are traceable to
the abstract thought of the Chicago School of economics and the towering
artifice of its singular messiah, the late Milton Friedman. That is the man
whose abstract thought and vision informs the worldview of the racists in the
American right — those crazy neocons and tea partyers. In essence, there is no
such thing as policy intellection shorn of philosophical roots in abstraction.
There are in fact two immediate dangers in the perspective of your question.
One is the danger associated with the oft-repeated fallacy that the situation
in Africa is too dire for abstraction. When that mode of reflection is
translated into the lingo of the street in, say, Nigeria, it eventuates in
certain national attitudes to intellection. Hence, politicians and even the
general public begin to dismiss any sustained and rigorous intellection as
dogon turenchi or big English. The rise of illiteracy in Nigeria and the
generalized hostility to knowledge is remotely linked to the hostility to
abstract thought. Otherwise informed Nigerians then go online to make
thoroughly illiterate statements asking for more action and less grammar. <br />

The second danger lies in the fact that apathy towards abstract intellection
and ideas all over Africa means that the intellectuals who tend to coalesce
around the islets of power to produce the concrete policy papers you are
talking about would be coming from ideological backgrounds that are inimical to
the interests of the African/Nigerian people. Do you think that Olusegun
Aganga, Charles Soludo, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, Yayi Boni, Alassane Ouattara, and
others in their Bretton Woods ilk come from a concrete policy background shorn
of abstract thought rooted in specific ideologies? Of course not. They are all
products of all kinds of neo-liberal imperialist abstractions acquired in the
context of American thinktanks and institutions. What we need more in Africa is
precisely the sort of rigorous primary abstract thought that could be at the
base of the ideological impulses of the second layer of policy intellection
that susbsequently lands at the table of the minister or the president.<br />

<span style="mso-no-proof: yes;"><img alt="http://www.african-writing.com/eleven/images/AW15.gif" height="8" src="file:///C:\Users\BARKHA~1\AppData\Local\Temp\msohtmlclip1\01\clip_image001.gif" width="21" /></span>:
Do you see any signs that this Ideological Thinking Rooted in African interests
and realities is going on? Or is Africanist Thought still client to
SinoEuroAmerica. Won’t you admit that much of our intellection amounts to
intellectual masturbation where our so-called intellectual elite fail to apply
their abilities to actual solutions.<br />

<strong>Adesanmi</strong>: Sure, you do have a point about the preponderance
of intellectual masturbation and the evident failure of intellection in the
area of concrete solutions. But I see that as a symptom of much deeper problems
in Nigeria associated with the corrosive effects of the prolonged years of
democratic stagnation on national values. I have been to conferences — academic
conferences — in Africa where the government would send ministers to attend
sessions and take notes and mingle with intellectuals and even invite those
intellectuals to their respective ministries for post-conference dialogue with
their staff. This happens a lot in Southern Africa. Now, can you imagine a
minister in Nigeria attending an academic conference as an ordinary participant
who is going to attend every session and take notes? Unless you invite him to
come and disturb the opening ceremony with his flamboyant convoy and sirens two
or three hours late, he won’t attend. This, over the years, has led to a
devaluation of intellectual production in Nigeria. There are also African
countries where I have noticed that governments give specific developmental
briefs to Universities and ask them to produce thought. That adds value to
intellectual labour and creates an outlet for thought to be translated into
beneficial societal products.<br />

That does not happen in Nigeria because the government is still fighting the
war that the military declared on the University even more than a decade after
the restoration of democracy. That explains why Governor Bukola Saraki of Kwara
State and his colleagues in the Nigerian Governors’ Forum instinctively opted
for Harvard University when they dreamt up a project of capacity training for
Nigerian governors. It was unimaginable for them to team up with a Nigerian
University. But I see signs of change, especially in southwestern Nigeria with
the Yoruba Academy trying to serve as a bridge between intellectuals and state
governments in that part of the country. New generation intellectuals like
Diipo Famakinwa, Wale Adebanwi, Yinka Odumakin, and Sola Olorunyomi are all
gearing up to ensure a connection between intellect and governance in
southwestern Nigeria on the platform of the Yoruba Academy. To return to the
initial frame of your question: ideological thought rooted in African interests
is going on powerlessly in many places in Africa. I say powerlessly because to
try to produce that kind of intellection independently of western power
structures is to begin with a great disadvantage in Africa. But those who are
resolute are trudging on. An interesting body of work has been emerging from
Ayi kwei Armah’s Per Ankh Collective in Dakar. This body of work is the sort
that travels in the direction of ancient African societies and knowledge
systems for abstraction and not in the direction of the West.<br />

<span style="mso-no-proof: yes;"><img alt="http://www.african-writing.com/eleven/images/AW15.gif" height="8" src="file:///C:\Users\BARKHA~1\AppData\Local\Temp\msohtmlclip1\01\clip_image001.gif" width="21" /></span>:
Speaking about intellectuals and public policy, are you a Dead-Aider? Dambisa
Moyo’s controversial book [Dead Aid: Why Aid is Not Working and How there is a
Better Way for Africa] preaches Trade, not Aid (to grossly oversimplify a
complex subject). Where do you stand on the subject?<br />

<strong>Adesanmi</strong>: Moyo is precisely a good example of an Africa
public policy commentator coming from the sort of Western neo-Liberal knowledge
systems that I have been analyzing here. I am not exactly sure that her attempt
to break away from what she was taught in those places has worked.<br />

Adesanmi: How do you preach trade in conditions of gross global inequality?
What power does Cote d’Ivoire have over the price of her cocoa? Can you stop
the US from granting those subsidies to her own farmers and thereby creating a
non-level playing field between her own farmers and Latin/Central American
farmers? Can you subject trade to the goodwill of the buyer — especially if
that buyer is a capitalist West? “Trade, not aid” is a convenient platitude
that has no future in the more realistic global capitalist world that we
encounter in the works of Naomi Klein. And who says that aid is always
inimical? Israel is one of the world’s biggest aid recipients.<br />

<span style="mso-no-proof: yes;"><img alt="http://www.african-writing.com/eleven/images/AW15.gif" height="8" src="file:///C:\Users\BARKHA~1\AppData\Local\Temp\msohtmlclip1\01\clip_image001.gif" width="21" /></span>:
But is the current Aid regime not analogous to AIDS in the sense of breaking
down Africa’s auto-generative capabilities?<br />

<strong>Adesanmi</strong>: I am more opposed to charity than I am to aid. I
have constantly written against charity as an offshoot of a formidable Mercy
Industrial Complex<br />

<span style="mso-no-proof: yes;"><img alt="http://www.african-writing.com/eleven/images/AW15.gif" height="8" src="file:///C:\Users\BARKHA~1\AppData\Local\Temp\msohtmlclip1\01\clip_image001.gif" width="21" /></span>:
What is the difference between ‘aid’ and ‘charity’. Do you believe that
one-off, no-strings-attached grants are more inimical than the various ‘aid’
packages linked with procurement and repayment conditionalities?<br />

<strong>Adesanmi</strong>: The layman’s distinction that I make between the
two is purely idiosyncratic and may not meet with the approval of development
experts and expats but when have I ever taken those fellas seriously? I have
always seen aid as transactions between states and public world bodies (the UN,
the European Union, Africa Union) that allow for a structured and supervised
trickle down of a fragment of the global North’s surplus to the global South in
order to ensure that the state in the global South maintains its comprador
essence while the state in the global North continues to supervise neocolonial
asymmetries with a squeaky-clean conscience. <br />

Charity on the other hand is when guilt-ridden Westerners pushed by a messianic
complex and convinced of their essential Christian goodness, decide to do
something about the hunger and the diseases of the Other in the global South.
Once the Westerner self-fashions in this manner, there are options open to him.
He puts money in an envelope meant for charity as part of Sunday offertory in
his church; he dumps a can of tomato soup or a pack of Uncle Ben’s rice in
those ubiquitous charity baskets in schools, shopping malls, hospitals. Beyond
this level, it becomes more structured because non-state, non-governmental
agents and structures takeover: Oxfam, médecins sans frontières, Save the
Children, Save Africa, Adopt a Child, Save this, Save that. These agents and
structures, in turn, appeal to western celebrity culture. Enter Bono, Angelina
Jolie, Madonna, George Clooney, Oprah. Enter restless celebrity-academics like
Jeffrey Sachs. Enter specific African countries that permanently appeal to the
proclivities of this Mercy Industrial Complex: Malawi, Mali, Chad, Sudan, South
Africa (the part of it that is ‘Africa’), the Congos, Kenya. Enter very
specific registers that go into how the targets of the Mercy Industrial Complex
are narrativized: mosquito nets, malaria, wells, boreholes, protein deficiency,
hygiene, handwashing practices. This, of course, means charity jobs that are
advertised in very interesting ways by these actors. An Australian charity
organization was recently looking to hire a hand washing specialist!<br />

<strong>Adesanmi</strong>: I thought I already sketched out the basics of
how the Mercy Industrial Complex functions. If you look at the foundational
expression of which my own formulation is but a claque, the Military-Industrial
Complex, you will notice a recurrence of diction and registers all leading to
the same psychology: essential goodness. Hence we have a defence industry in
the United States that must corrupt Congress and the Executive in order to
ensure that unheard-of percentages of America’s national budget continue to
flow to the arms sector; hence we have politicians who must find value for all
the money they pump into that sector by trying to put American military bases
in every country in the world if possible; hence we have an electorate that
fetishizes “our men and women in Uniform” and a clergy that prays for them when
they go out to bomb thousands of people in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan in the
service of the Military-Industrial Complex. <br />

All this is powered by a certain national sentiment: we are too essentially
a good people to allow the rest of the world escape the privilege of our values.
We should bomb those values into them whenever necessary. You will see that
attitude to the rest of the world even in the way American diplomats discourse
the rest of us in the Wikileaks cables. Not even Britain, their traditional
Chihuahua, escaped all that condescension. The same mode of self-fashioning
powers the Mercy-Industrial Complex albeit with different actors. Mercy, a
narrative of the self’s essential goodness, has become this gigantic industry
that involves all the actors listed above — charity organizations, churches,
NGOs, celebrities, all using the media to reach the hearts and pockets of
westerners already afflicted by the messiah complex. This in turn spins
dramatic scenarios on the ground when these people go to donate their cookies
and hamburgers in Darfur. And there is of course always the photographer on the
lookout for that shot that just might win a Pulitzer Prize.<br />

<span style="mso-no-proof: yes;"><img alt="http://www.african-writing.com/eleven/images/AW15.gif" height="8" src="file:///C:\Users\BARKHA~1\AppData\Local\Temp\msohtmlclip1\01\clip_image001.gif" width="21" /></span>:
Your language skills include French and English, which equips you to negotiate
your way through most African cities. Is this the most Pan-African step our
educational systems can take? Or is it more beneficial for African pupils to
learn to write and speak an indigenous African language in addition to their
great European language? <br />

<strong>Adesanmi</strong>: I assume that by our educational systems you are
talking exclusively about the continent. Language is not the most pan-African
step our educational systems in Africa can or should take. It should begin by
enhancing processes of African co-presence in University classrooms throughout
the continent. African Universities have more exchange agreements with European
and North American Universities than they have with fellow African
Universities. My school, Carleton University, alone has agreements with
Universities in Ghana, Tanzania, Botswana, and South Africa, and we are casting
our net wider in the continent. The inflatus for this is obvious: the sentiment
that such agreements open up opportunities for those African Universities to
benefit from the superior resources of Western Universities. What does this
translate to? Western African studies classrooms have become considerably more
holistically pan-African than any classroom could ever hope to be in the
continent. <br />

Let me give you an example. I teach one of our core introduction to African
studies courses at the undergraduate level. Enrollment is always between
100-160 students every semester. The first time I taught that class, about
eighty of those kids were from more than 30 African countries as I later found
out. That is a single Canadian University assembling students from more than
half of the continent in just one classroom. No University in the continent,
not even South African Universities, is currently in the position to do that.
African Universities need to constantly work on how to enhance continental
capacity for such mutual co-presence in the class room. That must, of course
work, in tandem with the need to constantly break down the iron curtain of
language. I have for instance constantly written about the impact of the
language barrier on African literary discourse. The other day, Olu Oguibe was
complaining on Facebook that the younger generation of Nigerian literati didn’t
know who Mario Vargas Llosa was after the 2010 Nobel was announced. <br />

That is a small problem compared with the appalling knowledge of the
francophonic half of the African literary process in Nigerian discussions.
There is so much Anglophonic provincialism going on in places like Krazitivity,
Ederi, and other outlets of Nigerian literary discourse. People jump up in
those places and make authoritative and sweeping statements about African
writing: statements that are not valid once you cross the border to Cotonou
from Lagos. You would think that the likes of Calixthe Beyala, Alain Mabackou,
Kossi Effoui, Bessora, Fatou Diome, Marie Ndiaye, Nathalie Etoke, Leonora
Miano, Alain Patrice Nganang, Yodi Karone, Simon Njami, Gaston-Paul Effa, J.R.
Essomba, and my very good friend, Abdourahman Ali Waberi, never wrote anything
in African literature. Of course, the francophone clan is also guilty of this
provincialism. As far as I know, only the likes of Waberi and Alain Patrice
Nganang regularly display any awareness of the fact that they have counterparts
in Uwem Akpan, Chris Abani, Helon Habila, Chimamanda Adichie, Lola Shoneyin,
Chika Unigwe, Unoma Azuah, Ogaga Ifowodo, Amatoristero Ede, and Remi Raji. If
you ask me, the situation was not like this with the Soyinka-Achebe-J.P. Clark
generation. <br />

<span style="mso-no-proof: yes;"><img alt="http://www.african-writing.com/eleven/images/AW15.gif" height="8" src="file:///C:\Users\BARKHA~1\AppData\Local\Temp\msohtmlclip1\01\clip_image001.gif" width="21" /></span>:
T.S. Eliot’s poem, The Journey of the Magi, has these lines, that have also
inspired the title of one of Chinua Achebe’s novels: ‘We returned to our
places, these Kingdoms,/ But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,/
With an alien people clutching their gods/ I should be glad of another death’.
Is religious zealotry becoming more of a life and death question on the
continent? What options?<br />

<strong>Adesanmi</strong>: For Africa, the poem should read autochthonous
people clutching alien gods. I have been a very close observer of the wind of
Pentecostalism blowing over the continent. Commentators always reach for the
easy Marxian cliché of religion being the opium of the people but I prefer to
see religion in a much specific political frame: it is the exutory that has
come to replace everything that political independence promised the people and
failed to deliver on. If you return to the narratives of independence as framed
by the nationalist generation in the 40s down to the 60s, you will see that it
was framed in terms of concrete deliverables to the people that contemporary
pulpit performance by the continent’s flamboyant pastors and Islamic clerics
seem to be mimicking. Take all the biblical quotations away from the pulpit
oratory of Chris Oyakhilome or Enoch Adeboye and you may very well end up with
Nnamdi Azikiwe’s galvanizing nationalist oratory. And precisely because
Africa’s/Nigeria’s new religious zealotry of the of the Pentecostal variety no
longer frames faith and salvation in terms of the hereafter but more
specifically in terms of material comfort deliverable by a God who isn’t a God
of poverty, religion has become the second great euphoria after the first
euphoria of independence.<br />

<span style="mso-no-proof: yes;"><img alt="http://www.african-writing.com/eleven/images/AW15.gif" height="8" src="file:///C:\Users\BARKHA~1\AppData\Local\Temp\msohtmlclip1\01\clip_image001.gif" width="21" /></span>:
But there is a cross-over between the political and the religious, is there
not? In Uganda political uprising was retooled to murderous effect with the
quasi-religious edge of the LRA. In Nigeria, Pastor Tunde Bakare is for
instance in the vanguard of political resistance. Do you see the political
profile of religion growing or waning.<br />

<strong>Adesanmi</strong>: If we define the political in very generous,
broad terms, yes there is always an intermesh between the religious and the
political. Don’t forget that Christianity’s entrance into Africa was intensely
political insofar as the missionarization of the continent was the precursive
event to formal colonization. But if we zero in on an instrumental definition
of the political in terms of structural praxes that could enhance and expand
the space of human agency, such as we see in the case of Pastor Tunde Bakare in
Nigeria, then the political profile of religion is waning. We must separate
religion as positive political praxis — as we have with Tunde Bakare — from the
more generalized instance feature of religion as a feature of postcolonial rot
as evidenced in the collaboration of falmboyant pastors with the rotten
postcolonial state in a place like Nigeria. The Bakares are easily crowded out
by the recidivists among the clergy<br />

<span style="mso-no-proof: yes;"><img alt="http://www.african-writing.com/eleven/images/AW15.gif" height="8" src="file:///C:\Users\BARKHA~1\AppData\Local\Temp\msohtmlclip1\01\clip_image001.gif" width="21" /></span>:
Now onto football! At a recent FIFA session, Russia trumped England to host the
2018 world cup. It seems the consensus that a couple of highly-publicised media
reports on FIFA corruption by The Times Newspaper and the BBC Panorama
programme may have scuppered England’s chances. Is this media self-interest or
principle above nationalism? Should national media look at national interests
before going to press? (Consider for instance, the role of the American mass
media in the run up to the Middle-Eastern wars)<br />

<strong>Adesanmi</strong>: I am perhaps the worst person to have to handle
this sort of question because of my own permanent hostility to England in
football matters. I can’t stand English noisemaking and sense of entitlement.
I’m a fanatical watcher of the Premiership like every good Nigerian but I can’t
stand the English media and football establishment. I was glad when they got
trounced in South Africa. I am glad they were trounced by Russia. The English
media is an insufferable cry baby in football matters. As an intellectual on
the Left, my opinion of the American media is even worse — unless you are
talking about The Nation and, maybe, MSNBC. The rest is just ignorant
teapartyism masquerading as media in America<br />

<strong>Adesanmi</strong>: Of course national jingoism in the media has its
uses. An intellectual like me would have little to scream about if the British
and American media suddenly became less nationalistic! This is where you have
to give it to the Nigerian media though. Despite the general perception that
they have been bought — except the rising online rags like Sahara Reporters and
Nigerian Village Square — there is very little nationalistic jingoism. Some of
the worst headlines that the world sees about Nigeria are very often lifted
from the headlines of Nigerian newspapers<br />

<span style="mso-no-proof: yes;"><img alt="http://www.african-writing.com/eleven/images/AW15.gif" height="8" src="file:///C:\Users\BARKHA~1\AppData\Local\Temp\msohtmlclip1\01\clip_image001.gif" width="21" /></span>:
How courageous have African creative writers been, when it comes to reimagining
a future. Did Chinua Achebe’s A Man of the People cop out with the coup ending?
How will a 21st century writer end a novel that would be truly prophetic (like
Chinua Achebe was) in today’s world?<br />

<strong>Adesanmi</strong>: Yes, Chinua Achebe in A man of the People and
T.M. Aluko in Chief the Honourable Minister were both prophetic without copping
out by ending those novels with coups. I guess we are in an era where the
creative writer — if she feels interpellated by political themes — may have to
start imagining structures and societies that would come after the unraveling
of the African state as we know it. The coup endings in Achebe, Aluko, and
others were not envisioning alternatives to the postcolonial state. They were
merely signalling the takeover of that state by non-democratic elements. That,
in itself, pre-supposed that democracy was a possible answer to the African
dilemma. But we have seen in Nigeria, Cote d’Ivoire and in so many other places
that we have to begin to imagine other possibilities of political becoming
beyond the state.<br />

<strong>Adesanmi</strong>: Wikileaks can only be revolutionary here in the
West because of the nature of their society. You know, our mutual friend, Nduka
Otiono, has been working for a very long time on the nature and uses of rumour
and street narratives in Africa — with emphasis on Nigeria. I have followed his
scholarship with keen interest as it teases out the intermesh between rumour,
civic agency, and politics in Nigeria. In our preponderantly oral culture where
transactions between ruler and ruled depend considerably on rumour, many of the
things that wikileaks normally reveals would have been rumoured and discoursed in
free newspaper reading parliaments, in Molue buses, in beer parlours and in
such other spaces of public disquisition. By the time official versions come
out, the rumour-version of such event would have settled in public
consciousness. Rumour is always precursive and attenuates the impact of
revelation. <br />

Of course there are cultural differences that would shape attitudes to the
shock value of revelations about secret wives. Don’t forget that a secret wife
may shock perhaps in Britain but I am not sure it would shock anybody in France
if the President had a secret wife. After all, they have the deuxième bureau
concubinage system in their culture even if western arrogance and conceit make
them pretend that those things exist only in Africa.<br />

<strong>Adesanmi</strong>: Strengthen civics as a subject in every primary
school on the continent. Design and implement a pan-African civics syllabus
under the aegis of the African Union. The continent is paying a very huge price
for the absence of early exposure to civics. The other day in my neighbourhood,
I saw kids — like seven year olds — wearing police tags and watching passing
cars. They had notebooks and other stuff. I was curious. That was their police
responsibility day at school. The police department puts them in specific
locations. When they notice suspicious behaviour on the part of drivers, they
write down your plate numbers etc. They are already being taught that in the
elementary school<br />

<strong>Adesanmi</strong>: You are right. There is always that danger but is
the alternative any better? the fanatical followers that made Gbagbo possible
in Cote d’Ivoire and who actually gather in daily public fora at a place
misnamed La Sorbonne in Abidjan would perhaps be different African subjects if
they had civics; Nigeria has produced almost two generations of citizens without
civics and look at the price we have paid. That is why I am proposing a
pan-African civics template that would not just be a reflection of the morality
of any African government.<br />

<span style="mso-no-proof: yes;"><img alt="http://www.african-writing.com/eleven/images/AW15.gif" height="8" src="file:///C:\Users\BARKHA~1\AppData\Local\Temp\msohtmlclip1\01\clip_image001.gif" width="21" /></span>:
You were the inaugural winner of the Penguin Prize for African Writing, for
your book, You are Not a Country, Africa. It is due on the bookshelves soon.
What can your readers expect in the book.<br />

<strong>Adesanmi</strong>: If they have read Angela’s Ashes or the Soyinka
of Ibadan and You must Set Forth at Dawn, they will easily understand what I
try to do. I have described that book as a cultural memoir of the African
continent. The essays are in the creative non-fiction mode, starting with
specific events and experiences that cover the last thirty years of my life.
The essays then use such anecdotal vignettes to move into a more sustained
reflection on issues of politics and culture across the continent. The title
comes from a line in Abioseh Nicol’s famous poem, “The Meaning of Africa”. The
Sierra Leonian poet was writing in the fervent of Anglophone African cultural
nationalist poetry in the build up to political independence and he says: “You
are not a country, Africa/you are a concept/fashioned in our minds/each to
each/to hide our separate fears”. Can you think of a better definition of
Africa?<br />

<strong>Adesanmi</strong>: The thought always crosses one’s mind. Like most
Nigerians in the diaspora, a great deal of my time is spent agonizing and
developing high blood pressure over the monumental mess and disappointment that
is Nigeria. And if the conditions are not there for you to pull a Wambia dia
Wambia and pick up your Kalachnikov against the forces of evil ruling Nigeria
in Abuja, if you know that accepting an appointment from them almost always
comes with the Faustian precondition of selling your soul and relinquishing
your voice and joining all that corruption, you sometime think that maybe you
should go and stand for election in some capacity or the other. Anything to try
and make a change. But then you remember that the so-called society we are
looking for will continue to need dreamers, thinkers, and those whose jobs it is
to narrate her! <span style="mso-no-proof: yes;"><img alt="http://www.african-writing.com/eleven/images/AW15.gif" height="8" src="file:///C:\Users\BARKHA~1\AppData\Local\Temp\msohtmlclip1\01\clip_image001.gif" width="21" /></span><br />

The Militant Intellection Complex… a Conversation with Pius Adesanm

AFRICAN WRITING: In your ‘day job’, you teach in a Canadian University, but you are also a widely-published commentator on Africana. ...

Ma Dhici Doonto Wariye Layska Xidhi Doono Gudoomiyaha Maxkamada Sare S.land

F. Lee Bailey CROSS-EXAMINES a witness

معجزة إسمها الإراده..حلقة مميزة مع دكتور مصطفى محمود

Millenium Development Goals for 2015

The birth of Republic of Somaliland is it 26 June or 18th May?

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as we have accustomed before or as usual for every country there is a day which they commemorate as there day of independence which they hold it as there highest regard and our day was 26 jun but that date was changed to 18th May which is the day that Somaliland people reclaimed there governance from the union of Somalia.<br />
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So the argument which arises for this change of date from 26 Jun to 18th of May is what is the reason behind or is it valid reason to justify for this change that Somaliland people did not take advantage of this date but rather the second one which they have reclaimed their governance and succeeded a vibrant system of governance.</div>
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Somaliland reclaimed its Independence but not disaffiliated  from the rest of Somalia and its not a new state but an old one which took its independence from the Great Britain and recognized by a 35 states so by adding this into the account we should reconsider the  historical effect that this change of  date could have to us and that the rest of the world we only see Somaliland just seceding state. </div>
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Hambalyayn iyo u ducayn Gudoomiyaha Cusub ee Maxkamadda Sare ee S/land iyo duruufaha ku gadaaman

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Dhamaan bahda cadaalada ama inta ku shaqaysata u garnaqa,difaacida,ku oogida,u doodida xuquuqaha iyo inta kale ee danaysa arimaha Garsoorka Somaliland waxay u dhagtagayeen ku dhawaaqidda gudoomiyaha cusub si u buuxiyo mid ka midda saddexda jago ee qaranka uugu sareeya uuguna eeda iyo xasaasiyadda badan iyagoo ku shaqeeya duruufo adag,waxaana wax la naawilba loo magacaabay jagadan mid ka midda dhalinyartii wax baratay intii dalka lagu soo noqday, Prof. Aadan X.Cali anigana ka shakhsi ahaan noqday mid ka midda macalimiintayda mudadii aan dhiganaayey Jaamacadda Hargeysa.<br />
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Shaqadda maxkamadda Sare oo aan ku koobnayn ka garnaqa heerka rafcaan ee dacwaddaha madaniga ah iyo kuwa ciqaabta ah oo qudha se siddoo kale waxa ay tahay maxkamadda Distoorka iyo Maxkamadda Sare ee cadaaladda ee ka garsoorta danbiyadda lagu oogaayo xubanaha goloyaasha qaranka,waxaana u sii dheer intaas inuu noqonaayo gudoomiyaha Gudida caddaaladda oo ah gudida magacowda garsorayaasha  iyo Xeer Illaaliye ku xigeenaddaba.<br />
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Dadka inta badan faleeya arimaha garoorku waxa ay isku qabtaan arinka gudida cadaaladda iyo dhaqaalaha maxkamadaha  oo uu markii u horeysay ee la abuurayey wakhtigii Marxuum Cigaal laga dooday oo ahayd in la kala saaro gudidda cadaaladda iyo Maxmadda Sare iyaddo ka hor imanaysa tiir  garsooridda oo dhan u asaas ah oo ah inaan nina gartiisa  isagu ka garnaqi karin  (No one cannot judge his case).haddi ay dhacdana uu lumaayo tiirkaasi asaaska u ah garsoorida iyo siddoo kale shaqadda dacwad qaadiseed,hubineed   ee ah inay hubiso in la dabaqay qodobka sharci iyo in loo fasiray siddii ku habonayd iyo ta maamul ee Gudoomiyaha u taala oo badan awgeed ay haboontay kala saaristoodu.<br />
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Qaar kalena waxa ay raacsanayihiin siddan ay maanta u samaysantay oo xitaa dhaqaalaha garsoorayaasha iyo kaaliyashaba ay maamusho Wasaaradda Cadaaladu bixisana mushaharkooda iyadoo siddoo kale dhaliil badan loo soo jeediyo qaabka xubaha gudida cadaaladda loo soo magacaabo.<br />
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Dhawaan waxa la magacaabay garsoorayaal in mudo ah lagu tobobaraayey Wasaaradda Cadaaladda ahaana dhalinyaraddii ka soo qalin jabiyey jaamacaddaha dalka waxaana si bilaa qorshe ah  loo kala diray dhamaantood goboladda dalka iyagoo darajada garsooranimana laga wadda dhigay heer degmo,meelaha loo diray meel lahayd maxkamadd degmo ama haddii ay jiirtayba baahi garsoore degmo o taalay aanay jirin.<br />
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Gudoomiyaha cusub waxa haddabaa la magacaabay iyadoo waxaas oo arin oo iska hor imanayaa ka jiraan Maxkamaddaha baahi badan oo wax ka badal u baahana taalo inta ogaalkayna aanay ka daahnayn isaga arimahaasi.<br />
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Cadaalad in laga hadlaa waa fududay se waxa adag fulinta cadaaladda waxaan macalinkayga uugu ducaynayaa inuu Illaahay ku sugo caddaaladda u fududeeyana fulinteed.<br />
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Hambalyayn iyo u ducayn Gudoomiyaha Cusub ee Maxkamadda Sare ee S/land iyo duruufaha ku gadaaman

Dhamaan bahda cadaalada ama inta ku shaqaysata u garnaqa,difaacida,ku oogida,u doodida xuquuqaha iyo inta kale ee danaysa arimaha Garsoor...

Constitutional Struggles in the Muslim World: Introductroy Overview