On a phone call the other day with a new friend, Zay, we ended up on the topic of religion. “Did you attend madrasah?” I asked her, referring to the Arabic schools that offer primary and secondary education where subjects like the linguistic characteristics of Arabic and Islamic theology and jurisprudence are taught.

She responded yes, but that she no longer remembers most of the things she was taught there. “I can still write my name in Arabic, I can still write Bismillahir Rahmanir Raheem, and oh, yeah, I can still write some of the 99 names of Allah,” Zay said.

Zay’s experience is reflective of people of my generation in the southwestern part of Nigeria, where I’m from. Most only attended madrasah when they were young, before dumping it when they emerged more fully into life. Some, like Zay, told me they ran away from madrasah because their teachers, or ustadhs, flogged them too fiercely. But others told me that they dropped out to focus on their Western education, which they knew was the more economically sound path.

For me, balancing these two schools of knowledge has always seemed normal and natural. Growing up, I attended Western school Monday through Friday and attended madrasah on Saturdays and Sundays. The reason my experience was different was thanks to my father, who spent his life promoting Arabic and Islamic learning in Nigeria. The more I’ve learned about his efforts, the more I’ve realized why it meant so much for him to encourage Nigerians to be proud to speak Arabic, and study at madrasah, rather than let this education fall by the wayside in a country where there is little profitable motivation to pursue it.

In the 1960s, the author’s father established the Arabic studies school at the family house in Iwo. Courtesy of author.

Growing up, I knew, even as much as my mother tried to conceal it from me, that my father had died when I was still in her stomach. As I got older, I started to ask for more information. When I was 10, she pointed at an old landscape photo that hung above the window of our living room. In the picture, my father, a Black, plump man, is standing amid Arab men, smiling. Later, when I was 15, I came across an undated, self-published book my father wrote, titled “The Presence of Arabic Language and the Religion of Islam in Southwest Nigeria.” In the introduction, he observed that Christian missionaries were “snatching the children of Muslims into their English schools in order to get them to abandon their religion and take up their religion or believe in any other religion.”

To understand what he meant by this, it’s important to understand the history of Islam and Christianity in Nigeria. Both are understood to be colonialist ideologies because Nigeria, before it became Nigeria, had its own traditions. But both belief systems have permeated Nigeria thoroughly (today approximately 51% of the country identifies as Muslim and 47% identifies as Christians).

My father was likely writing in the 1950s, at a time when more students began to leave Arabic schools for English schools. The Christian missionaries, my father posited, were able to sell them on a Western education because it promised them more opportunities for advancement. Arabic studies, at the time, only promised to teach a better understanding of how to worship God—seemingly at odds with a growing and modernizing economy. He recognized that if something didn’t change, it would put the study of Arabic and Islam on a path of gradual erasure in the Nigerian educational system. So, he thought: Let me establish something similar in Arabic so as to attract back the Muslim children.

In the 1960s, he began this work, establishing his own Arabic school, which originally started at the family house in Iwo, before it took on a modern classroom-based learning setting in 1962. He called the school, which I later attended, Markaz Shabaab–l–Islam, or the Islamic Youth Center. Other scholars in the region, like Sheikh Adam Al-Ilory, created similar educational programs to build standards and structure around Arabic studies at the time.

The author’s father (middle) with the students of his school. Courtesy of author.

Despite their work, the present structure of the Nigerian education system offers fewer and fewer opportunities for advancement for those who attend madrasah. That’s why, though the number of Arabic students produced every year in its junior schools equals, if not exceeds, the number of students produced in Western schools, the drop-off point that follows for secondary school is steep. Unlike madrasah, Western schooling offers students an opportunity to dream of, for instance, attaining government or white-collar jobs. When students finish madrasah, there should be something equivalent in the system which guarantees them an application to higher institutions, for instance, without sitting for external examinations, to incentivize further Arabic study.

I think about what it would look like if Nigeria valued Arabic education more and rewarded the efforts of those who are still passionate about learning the language. It is not about Islam, the religion, but Arabic itself, because faith is different from knowledge, just as a Western education is different from Christianity. The way I see it, for the Arabic language to have permeated our culture so thoroughly since its introduction in the 11th century through the northern part of the country, disseminating through trade and migration with North African countries like Egypt and Sudan, makes it even more deserving of study. This is especially the case in a complicated region like the southwest, where our Indigenous language—Yoruba—does not share similar phonemes with Arabic.

Though my father’s struggle was a long time ago, his determination inspires me today; he started his Arabic studies at a young age, learning the rudiments of the Qur’an from his paternal grandfather, Sheikh Bukhari. To learn modern Arabic, he traveled to different Arabic-speaking countries. His first trip, to Saudi Arabia in 1942, came at a time when such a trip necessitated taking camels and horses. When such transportation was not possible, he trekked on foot. What made it worth the struggle? I think the answer is that faith and a thirst for knowledge can be chronic.

Before I read my father’s book, I was unconsciously starting to throw myself wholly into Western education, because that’s understood to be the path to thrive in the country. But his writing has helped me recognize how important it is to not throw away his work, and this legacy of being a student of two schools of knowledge.

The final pages of my father’s book include three photographs. The first is a group picture of my father and his first set of students at the Islamic Youth Center. Tiny in the picture, he looks way younger than the photo my mother first showed me of him. The second picture is of him, flanked by older men, robed in Agbada, embroidered, traditional Yoruba attire. All of them wear caps and firmly-knotted turbans. The caption under this picture reads, “a picture taken by friends and well-wishers as send-off for Al-Hadj Ahmad Muhaly Al-Bukhary on his trip to Mecca and some Arab countries.” The third picture is an isolated picture of the first building in the school my father established. A wooden signpost rests against the wall of the building, the door and the windows shut. The caption below the picture reads, “Here is the picture of Islamic Youth Center in Iwo.”

Staring at these pictures, I wonder if my father knew that all his hard work would make a difference. But the more I look, the more I am certain he knew that the school he built would. It was his way of ensuring that he could share his wisdom and teachings with generations to come—offering inspiration to me and others who continue to matriculate through that door captured in the photograph.

The post My Father, the Madrasah, and Me appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Acrobatic troops across Kenya’s coast continue to perform at star-studded venues while struggling to support themselves financially. (Photograph by Sabine Skiba)

The majority of acrobats working on Kenya’s coast today come from impoverished backgrounds. They chose this work because it allows them to celebrate their cultural identity and heritage. (Photograph by Sabine Skiba)

Though formal training centers don’t exist across the coast, acrobats form brotherhoods of performers to fine-tune their choreography and support one another. (Photograph by Sabine Skiba)

Kenyan acrobatics nods to both the long history of circus artistry in the African continent and its modern evolution. (Photograph by Sabine Skiba)

Kenya’s acrobats have toured the world, appearing in venues from Mexico to Israel. (Photograph by Sabine Skiba)

Over the last two decades, the salaries for performers have remained largely stagnant in Kenya. (Photograph by Sabine Skiba)

To ensure this profession has a sustainable future, acrobats are advocating for fair pay and for Kenya to recognize the circus arts as an integral part of its national heritage. (Photograph by Sabine Skiba)

It’s showtime at one of Kenya’s five-star resort hotels.

Tourists from around the world move in small groups to the performance area next to the pool to see the evening’s headliner: Burning Spear Acrobats.*

The five members showcase the art and skill of Kenyan acrobatics. They adjust themselves into elaborate human pyramids. They fly through the air in perfect synchronicity as the ropes turn in opposite directions during the double rope skipping act. And they create an impressive tower of stacking chairs and hand balance from one to another to great heights.

Their performance is both a glimpse into the centuries-old performance traditions from Kenya and other African countries, with accounts dating back to at least the 14th century, and the evolution of its modern form, which developed in Kenya alongside its tourism industry in the 1960s.

But the future of this art form is in jeopardy. While resorts across Kenya’s coast sell tourists on these shows, they do not pay their performers a living wage. Because of that, Kenyan acrobats don’t know how much longer their show can go on.

The majority of acrobats working on Kenya’s coast today come from impoverished backgrounds and have only basic schooling. Though the path to becoming an acrobat is less financially stable than working in construction, as gardeners, or as drivers of motorcycles or tuk-tuks, those who seek it out do so because it enables them to be creative and steel their bodies, while taking pride in their cultural identity and heritage.

To break into the industry, young Kenyans will approach relatives and friends who already perform to mentor them. The troupes’ training is self-driven. They meet on the soft sand beaches before the heat of the day to practice and then again in the afternoons to fine-tune choreography. They have no facilities, no safety equipment, and no health insurance. The Burning Spear Acrobats were fortunate in that they started in a north coast village that had a training location with a pole and a rudimentary stage. But though formal training centers do not exist on the Kenyan coast, acrobats form brotherhoods of performers who support each other in their quest to live their lives with dignity.

Troupes tend to have a fixed day of the week performing in the various hotels, for weekly, bi-weekly, or monthly engagements. Successful troupes will work five to six days a week. Others are not so fortunate and have to make do with one to three performances. The frequency of performing is also dependent on the tourism seasons; the low season provides only scant opportunities and is a tough time for performing artists.

The unpredictability makes international contracts more prized. Over the years, many Kenyan acrobats have performed in tourism venues from Mexico to Israel, on cruise ships, and at international festivals. Despite being a fixture on the cruise circuit around the world, Kenyan—and African acrobatics more broadly—have yet to receive the mainstream recognition they deserve. Still even the base-level international contracts they take provides them with some financial stability. Most acrobats who have worked internationally for a year or more are able to save and acquire a small plot or build a small dwelling on ancestral land.

But in Kenya, the profession is struggling to survive. Part of this is because of the state of the tourism industry. Over the past two decades, the country has been hit hard by terrorist attacks, notably the 1998 U.S. embassy bombing, the 2013 attack on the Nairobi Westgate shopping mall, and a series of al-Shabaab strikes. More recently, the COVID-19 crisis handed a significant setback to the sector. As hotels have tried to maximize their profits amid this uncertainty, they’ve done so by not adjusting their performance budgets to the rising costs of living.

Over the past 20 years, salaries for performers have remained largely stagnant. As reported by senior artists, salaries in 2003 ranged from 1,500 to 3,000 KES (Kenyan Shillings) per show for a group of five (the equivalent of roughly $20 to $39, though that represented a higher purchasing power back then). Salaries have increased only marginally since; today they range between 1,500 and 5,000 KES for most shows (roughly $10 to $32 per group per show), which amounts to a de facto decrease.

Meanwhile, the cost of living has skyrocketed in Kenya. Food inflation has been especially dramatic, averaging 9.74% per year from 2010 until 2023. This has left performers living hand-to-mouth, with hunger knocking on the door, especially during the off-season. The fact that the situation is especially bad in hotels catering to audiences of predominantly white tourists from the global north is reminiscent of colonialist practices of showcasing “exotic” people and animals. While complaints about low wages have increased across the working-class population in Kenya, acrobats and other performing artists are particularly vulnerable.

Ethnic discrimination also plays a role in these worsening conditions. Performers are overwhelmingly members of the Mijikenda, an ethnic group consisting of nine distinctive peoples who live along the coast. Since independence, the ruling parties of Kenya have invested heavily in their own ethnic constituencies, while coastal Kenyans—without sufficient political power in the capital city of Nairobi—have had to put up with pot-holed roads, poor healthcare, underfunded education, and a general lack of investment. The overall situation has also led to the performers and other members of the Mijikenda to be treated poorly by some of the hotel management staff and entertainment managers, who are responsible for determining performers’ salaries. Several of these managers have even taken small cuts from the salaries of acrobats. Most hotels do not allow tipping after the show, and where it is allowed, the result varies and are not enough to supplement incomes.

Combined, these factors have led to a precarious financial situation that if it continues, will push the culture of acrobatics in the country to disintegrate. That would be a loss for Kenya and the world.

One step to rectifying the situation is for Kenya to recognize the circus arts as an integral part of its national heritage. Neighboring Tanzania, for example, is already investing in training institutes for its acrobats, who also tour internationally. South Africa houses the renowned Zip Zap Circus, the Zip Zap Circus School, a permanent venue for circus arts in Johannesburg, and an Acrobatics Federation of South Africa that specializes in acrobatic dance, among others.

Currently in Kenya, the nonprofit Sarakasi Trust Foundation is the only major development organization investing in the circus arts. Located in Nairobi, its Sarakasi Dome—which has dance studios, an auditorium, and various multi-purpose spaces—offers training that empowers artists creatively and economically, including education on social entrepreneurship and life skills. More such support is needed for acrobats on the coast. For now, the performers are left to continue to push to find solutions to their dire situation, despite the many obstacles in their way. For example, a well-established advocacy association they created was shut down in 2015 as part of a larger government crackdown on community-based and other non-governmental organizations that were suspected to have ties to terrorist organizations. Performers continue to attempt to organize and negotiate with hotels, but such campaigns come with a risk because artists fear retaliation and that they will lose their jobs if they become associated with such movements.

The result is that Burning Spear Acrobats, along with other troupes on the coast, continue to perform at star-studded venues while juggling other jobs to get by. They continue in the hopes that Kenyan acrobatics, and African acrobatics more broadly, are given their rightful place in the pantheon of awe-inspiring circus arts of the world, and receive fair compensation for such work. As one of the members of Burning Spear Acrobats said recently, “People need to understand that acrobatics is a serious career, that it requires commitment and discipline. We deserve respect for our work.”

The post Don’t Close the Curtains on Kenya’s Acrobats appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

“No race holds the monopoly of beauty, of intelligence, of strength / and there is a place for all at the rendezvous of victory,” wrote the Martinican poet Aimé Césaire in Notebook of a Return to the Native Land, first published in 1939 and later translated from the French by Trinidadian intellectual C.L.R. James.

Many writers have quoted these lines from Césaire, but more striking is the fact that 16 years later, such a rendezvous did occur. In 1955, 29 countries from Africa and Asia met in Bandung, Indonesia, for the historic Asian-African Conference—a diplomatic summit of the emerging postcolonial world. The sense of common purpose and solidarity at the meeting, which became known as the “Bandung Spirit,” served as a unifying myth of decolonization. For decades, Bandung epitomized a political, cultural, and historic front against the past legacies, present dangers, and future threats of imperialism in Asia and Africa. Though real-world conflicts would erode this spirit over time, Bandung and its ethos of self-determination persisted as a global symbol and attitude in the popular imagination.

Co-sponsored by Indonesia, India, Burma (present-day Myanmar), Ceylon (present-day Sri Lanka), and Pakistan, the 29 invited diplomatic delegations met from April 18 to 24 to address the pressing issues facing their continents during the early Cold War period. A number of well-known leaders attended, including Jawaharlal Nehru of India, Zhou Enlai of China, Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt, and Sukarno of host country Indonesia. The remaining delegations represented countries from Japan and Jordan to Egypt and Ethiopia, as well as Sudan and the Gold Coast (Ghana), which would soon be independent in 1956 and 1957, respectively.

As a consequence of this wide range of geographic representation, the Bandung meeting initiated a new period of postcolonial diplomacy and Third World internationalism, which comprised an alternative “third way” beyond the U.S.-led capitalist democracies of the First World and the Soviet-led communist states of the Second World. Refusing the pressures and demands of this new great power rivalry, Asian and African countries sought to define their own destinies after global decolonization.

The Color Curtain: A Report on the Bandung Conference, published in 1956 by the African American novelist Richard Wright, remains the most influential account of the meeting, capturing the details of the event as well as its historic importance. The diplomatic summit struck Wright with a sense of astonishment from the moment he learned it would take place, revealing his underlying Western-centric worldview as well as his desire to connect with the wider world experiencing decolonization. Wright had already visited a part of this world as depicted in his preceding book on the British Gold Coast, entitled Black Power: A Record of Reactions in a Land of Pathos (1954). His trip to Bandung subsequently expanded his sense of decolonization and its global meanings.

The Color Curtain still retains a certain interpretive power today due to Wright’s prominence as a Black intellectual and how the conference’s themes touched upon deeper issues that Wright had grappled with for decades, including the roles of race and racial identity in the modern world, the function of class politics, and, not least, the possibilities of freedom at individual, community, and global levels. The moment of global self-determination at Bandung intersected with Wright’s own long-standing attempts at individual self-determination.

As the title of Wright’s book underscored, the group of emergent nation-states assembled at Bandung ultimately highlighted a “Color Curtain” in world affairs. Wright’s phrasing echoed both the better-known Iron Curtain, which separated Western liberal democracies from the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc, and a famous remark by W. E. B. Du Bois. In 1903’s The Souls of Black Folk, Du Bois declared, “The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color-line, – the relation of the darker to the lighter races of men in Asia and Africa, in America and the islands of the sea.” Wright’s account therefore situated the Bandung Conference against a dominant U.S. foreign policy framework, which retained certain imperial-like qualities, as well as within a genealogy of Black American thought.

Yet the importance of Bandung was not, of course, limited to an American worldview. Sukarno’s opening address captured the moment of opportunity, both diplomatic and symbolic, for postcolonial Asia and Africa, in which he asked:

What can we do? We can do much! We can inject the voice of reason into world affairs. We can mobilise all the spiritual, all the moral, all the political strength of Asia and Africa on the side of peace. Yes, we! We, the peoples of Asia and Africa, 1,400,000,000 strong, far more than half the human population of the world, we can mobilise what I have called the Moral Violence of Nations in favour of peace.

“The Moral Violence of Nations” implied an ethical, rather than military, approach to achieving world peace. This vivid phrase set the tone for how Asian and African countries could participate in the evolving global order: as a force for solidarity and intercontinental accord, rather than conflict. Sukarno’s words consequently presaged what became the Bandung Spirit—a feeling of global political possibility when Asian and African countries collected their interests together.

Yet the Bandung Conference remained a one-time event, despite an attempt to hold a “Second Bandung” outside of Algiers in 1965. By then, the energies of decolonization had begun to dissipate in different ways. Antagonisms between Bandung attendees, such as India and China, eventually rendered moribund the potential of future diplomatic collaborations along the same lines as those in 1955. Still, the symbolism of the Asian-African Conference continued to inform intercontinental solidarity and anticolonial internationalism until the end of the Cold War. The conjoining of political stance and geographic space through the idea of Afro-Asianism generated new geopolitical alignments and aspirational projects, including the 1961 founding of the Non-Aligned Movement, a new grouping of developing nations, which Nehru largely spearheaded against China’s competitive influence. The impact of Bandung was also on display at the 1966 Tricontinental Conference in Havana, Cuba, which inaugurated Latin America’s commitment to Third Worldism under the leadership of Fidel Castro.

Bandung as a unifying myth of decolonization offered a tantalizing vision of transnational solidarities that could sidestep preexisting cultural differences and political conflicts. It attempted a remaking of the world on terms favorable to those who had been colonized for centuries across the Global South. Yet, like most political myths, there were real-world limits that compromised its idealism. Césaire’s imagined rendezvous was both attained and incompletely realized. The work of economic, cultural, and political decolonization remains. The Bandung Conference today conjures these ghosts of unfulfilled futures, serving as a reminder of the lost political prospects and forgotten historical itineraries of the past that continue to haunt our present dreams of decolonization—and our realities.

The post When Asia and Africa Envisioned a New World Order appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

For weeks, all our friends have thought I’m over worrying, overreacting. We pack our things. On the way out of town, we pass the park, where many people are wearing white-and-blue face masks and gloves, armed with bottles of hand sanitizer. J. goes to buy bus tickets, and I take an okada to the nearest pharmacy, all the while worried that being on a motorcycle, my face exposed to the air, is a screaming risk.

“No,” the sales girl tells me, “our own has finished. It’s only in the market that they are selling masks and gloves and sanitizers.” I don’t trust the quality of the health kits in the markets, though, so I return to the park and tell J. that we have to ration the hand sanitizer we had bought before coming, that we have to make it last until we get back to Big City.

We are rattled, when we get to Big City, to find people moving freely, buying, selling, pushing in crowds, as if unconcerned that an airborne disease is ravaging the world and has entered our country. We enter a keke, I start a conversation with the driver and tell him he needs hand sanitizer, J. is irritated that I’m talking to strangers again, and we get to ShopRite. No masks, no gloves; hand sanitizer prices have jumped nearly 300 percent compared to in the Small Town, and we laugh. We check the other big mall. Nothing. And the third big mall. Nothing.

Finally, we give up and go to J.’s apartment. We clean up and debate how much cash to withdraw, because if there is a financial crash, there will be a public rush, and ATMs will be overcrowded. The following day we are in the market, stocking up as if we are preparing for a military siege.

For 17 days, I stay indoors. A third of the population of Big City seems to be moving about freely, and from the balcony I watch with longing. J. steps out occasionally to buy food and supplies. Each time he returns, I greet him at the door with two different hand sanitizers. I worry ceaselessly that we will get sick.

For the next week we are safe, physically. But I am thinking of my father, who has been hospitalized for a different illness. Because of the lockdown, interstate borders are closed; no crossing is allowed except for medical or essential resources. I am unable to see my father. J. keeps me from descending. It will take two dreary weeks, but my father will get better and I will vomit 300,000 Naira—still not the biggest contribution to the bill.

My friend, E., invites me to his radio show. I go to the studio and talk about the step-by-step failure of our federal and state governments in combating the pandemic. I keep myself from expressing too much anger that security operatives and hunger are now bigger threats to ordinary Nigerians than an airborne virus. The public is pressing the national and state governments to do something, take responsibility, to actually lead, and soon we have a buzzword: palliatives. But instead of the governments bringing palliatives, security operatives bring bullets and people are shot, killed, for flouting lockdown rules. Why? When the palliatives begin to come, there is a collective sigh of shameful disappointment at what some governments offer: cups of rice, an onion, tomato paste. We are seeing decades-old corruption manifesting.

On social media, a few people suggest that this could be the keg that finally blows Nigeria into a revolution. But most of us understand better: No matter how bad it gets, Nigerians will adapt. It is as the legendary Fela sang: shuffering and shmiling. Because we have been here before, here several times. Every time things go bad, we shout and say they are going bad, and then we grumble and adapt, and whichever new dysfunction it is becomes our new normal.

Nigerian Twitter, that singularly combustible space, buzzes with new trends every few hours. We are debating the announcement of curfews, the military’s harassment of health workers and journalists, the fresh wave of armed robberies in Lagos, the usefulness/uselessness of celebrities. One night, a Nollywood Superstar is seen on video partying in a hall full of people. The backlash is swift and brutal, damning and extensive. The police arrest her. She makes another video explaining: All those people in the first video have been together, safely sheltering in place since before the lockdown. Days later, #TwitterNG is burning again because many government officials gathered to attend a funeral, flouting social distancing rules. All animals are equal but some are more equal than others.

Meanwhile I return to my novel. Now that I know I will finish it in months, I am excited, a contained cyclone, and wary, reminding myself to focus and do the work first, sentence by sentence, feeling by feeling. I revive my reading: several books at once, a section of Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life followed by a few chapters of Sally Rooney’s Normal People followed by parts of Maaza Mengiste’s The Shadow King followed by a portion, because I am throwing back more often, of V.S. Naipaul’s In a Free State. I add Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace, although I have no intention of finishing it anytime soon.

I’m also spending more and more time on YouTube, looking for songs. A few Afropop songs come on my radar and I am intensely grateful: DopeNation’s “Zanku,” Mayorkun’s “Of Lagos,” AdekunleGold and Kizz Daniel’s “Jore,” Joeboy’s “Call,” Tekno’s “Kata,” Naira Marley’s “Puta Pxta,” R2Bees’ “Sunshine,” and from across the Atlantic, G Herbo’s “PTSD.” The beats transport me.

May comes and J. travels, and I am alone in the apartment, fielding phone calls, surprised at my energy levels. I go on Instagram Live for a literary chat. I resume my morning and evening walks. A few states relax their lockdowns. Everyone knows that infection rates will climb. My worry is having only two medical face masks, which cannot be reused. In a Twitter video, I see that the market closest to me is open and that people without face masks are being turned away. In just ten days, from May 1 to May 10, the country went from 1,000 confirmed cases to more than 4,000.

The next morning, I put on my blue-and-white mask and get to the market only to find all the entrances closed, people gathered at a few, a police van parked at the biggest one. From a vendor, I buy five face masks of different designs and colors. Because most of the material is Ankara, many Nigerians have elevated face-masking into fashion, matching each day’s mask with their clothes. By the time I turn back, some people begin to run. A convoy has parked, big SUVs with glinting black windows, and out steps the Governor. It is a measure of the social climate of our country that these people are running when they see their governor. I walk past, acutely aware that I could be humiliated by the police just for not being rattled. Nothing happens.

That evening, I get in a keke and go to the park. Afterward, I drop off something for a friend in the Small Town and decide to walk home. It is getting darker, the sky a glowing brown. On the road where I saw the Governor earlier, young men are running around bare-bodied, playing football.

I stay indoors for the next two days and step out on the third night to buy food. At a traffic-less junction, boys are playing football, the yellow road lights their mini stadium light. Only a few people are walking; most are seated in front of houses. Something must be wrong. I go to Google. A curfew has been in place for two days, 8 p.m. to 6 a.m., and in my hibernation, I am only just finding out.

I turn back. Near the apartment, I hear sirens. I see a police van racing from where the road bends, and people walking on the street scatter, and I run, flying up the stairs and into the apartment.

The post A Letter From Nigeria, Where Coping With COVID-19 Entails Twitterstorms, Bullets, and Corruption appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

It wasn’t the Axis’s invasion of their ancestral homeland that concerned these Bedouins, however, but rather their mistreatment by their own government. With the outbreak of the war, they had been thrown into a prison reserved for foreign subjects, and their families were suffering gravely in their absence. Accordingly, they demanded an explanation for why they were being punished as if they were strangers in their own native land.

“We are your subjects,” the Bedouins contended, “and if the government does not want us to be its subjects, we implore you to let us know the name of a state we can join in order to request compensation for our families.” They concluded the petition on a similar note of sarcasm: “We truly believe that we do not belong to the Egyptian government; for, if we did belong to it, adhering to its laws [as we do], it would not subject us to [such] treatment as foreigners.”

Why did the Egyptian government view its own desert-dwelling Bedouin population with such suspicion and contempt? After all, shouldn’t the native inhabitants of Egypt’s desert domains, which comprise roughly 90 percent of the country’s land surface, have counted as being just as Egyptian as inhabitants of Cairo or the Nile Valley?

The answer to these questions lies in the complex history of Egypt’s formation as a modern territorial nation-state.

Nations must never be taken for granted. They do not exist from time immemorial as naturally bounded and cohesive social units, but rather are actively made (and often re-made) to serve particular political projects in particular places at particular times. Even Egypt—ostensibly one of the most ancient political civilizations on the planet—underwent dramatic transformations in the late 19th and 20th centuries before it emerged as a modern nation-state like the one we know today.

One such transformation involved the projection of a unified territorial identity from the center of power (Cairo) into the furthest reaches of the state’s sovereign domains, including the Western Desert. While other nation-states underwent similar transformations, the Egyptian case contained some particular elements that would turn out to be consequential for the country’s region and its history.

My own interest in the territorial dimension of Egyptian nationhood began nearly a decade ago, on a 10-hour bus journey across Egypt’s Western Desert to the remote oasis of Siwa. As I stared out my window at the endless barren expanses, I began to wonder how all of this beautiful wasteland became part of Egypt in the first place. My sense of bewilderment only grew when I arrived in Siwa, which lies only 30 miles from the Libyan border and has an ethnically distinct population that more resembles that of some Libyan regions. (Siwans are of Berber descent and did not speak Arabic for much of their history.) The Egyptian history I had studied as a graduate student, focused as it was on Cairo and the Nile, had little to say about the incorporation or political status of such far-flung places.

So I set out to craft a comprehensive modern history of the vast region I came to call “the Egyptian West.” My foray into the archival sources yielded many surprises. For starters, I learned that Egypt’s western border had gone undefined for most of the country’s history, and that the first modern political map attempting to delineate such a border—an Ottoman map from 1841—went missing for the better part of a century. Although various statesmen periodically noted its absence—Lord Cromer, the British consul-general of Egypt from 1882 to 1907, surmised that the map was “supposed to have been lost in a fire which destroyed a great part of the Egyptian archives”—no one seemed especially vexed by this. In fact, Egypt’s marginal borderlands were typically ignored in the cartography of the period. When they were represented at all, they were left intentionally fuzzy.

The powers in the region—Britain and the Ottoman Empire (still technically sovereign over Egypt)—actually conspired not to define the border, lest it provoke unnecessary legal or diplomatic controversy. This stance became particularly thorny during the first decade of the 20th century, when the Italian government—seeking to lay the groundwork for its colonial occupation of Libya, which would begin in 1911—repeatedly pressured the British to draw a western border.

But the Italians’ protests fell on deaf ears. Citing “the peculiar position in which Egypt stands with regards to Turkey [the Ottoman Empire],” the British agreed with the Ottomans that it was better policy to leave the border ambiguous. A bona fide border between Egypt and (Italian-controlled) Libya would not be defined until well after World War I, in 1925, following a diplomatic treaty that was signed shortly after the elusive 1841 map resurfaced at the eleventh hour. (It had been found deep inside the Ottoman archives, in Istanbul.)

Nations are not made merely by drawing borders around sovereign territory, however; they must also to some degree incorporate and assimilate their heterogeneous populations into a unified political community. In Egypt, this process began in the last quarter of the 19th century, but it had mixed results.

Law was one institution that the government attempted to use as an instrument of assimilation. Beginning in the 1870s, the government passed a series of reforms that aimed to streamline jurisdiction and legal practice across the country, including the deserts and western oases. But it was not long before the government reneged on this project and ceded judicial autonomy to the inhabitants of the country’s vast borderlands.

In the case of the town of Siwa, one official tried to explain the government’s striking about-face by citing the remoteness of the oasis as well as the fundamental distinctiveness of its people. “The town is far from Egypt by a distance of approximately twenty days traveling by camel,” he argued. “It falls in the middle of the desert, and its people have different customs and (linguistic) conventions, and tastes that diverge completely from those of the Egyptians, by virtue of the fact that they are pure [Bedouin] Arabs.” Here is one clear case of the modernizing Egyptian state succumbing to the extreme challenges of standardizing its institutions across the full expanse of its sovereign territory; Siwa was simply too far and too different to be folded into the Egyptian national judiciary at this time.

There would be other such cases. In 1905 and again in 1908, the Egyptian government passed legislation that sought to place its administration of the country’s various Bedouin tribes on firmer footing. The new laws—undertaken in large part to counter the trend of many Egyptians falsely claiming Bedouin descent in order to demand the exemption from military service that the tribes had long enjoyed—strove to “organize [the Bedouin tribes] in an administrative fashion approaching the organization of towns and villages.”

When it came to actually enforcing the new laws, however, the government—again hard-pressed to exert its sovereign control in the sparsely inhabited deserts—was forced to cede considerable power to the local tribal leaders themselves. Despite the veneer of formality added by the legislation, Egypt’s Bedouins were still being treated as a people apart.

So it probably shouldn’t have come as such a surprise when the Western Desert Bedouins found themselves in jail at the start of World War II, and being treated by their government like a dangerous fifth column. The Egyptian government’s internment of its people is best interpreted as a reflection of its own lack of faith in the mechanisms through which its territorial sovereignty had been asserted in the country’s western borderland. Egypt might have clarified the limits of its territorial statehood with the 1925 border treaty with Libya, but it had by no means woven an enduring social fabric for the collective nation within those boundaries.

The Egyptian state’s antagonistic relationship with its own Bedouin population continues to this day. This is clear in the Western Desert, which has emerged as a haven for militant groups reportedly linked to the Islamic State. The Egyptian government’s heavy-handed response has led to some grave mistakes, none more egregious than the security forces’ aerial assault on what turned out to be a caravan of Mexican tourists on a Bedouin-led desert safari, killing 12 and wounding numerous others. The now years-long Egyptian military campaign in the Sinai Peninsula, nominally waged to root out the Islamic State as well as Al-Qaeda, is another sign of enduring conflict in the borderlands.

In these present-day events are echoes of the particular history of the country’s emergence as a modern territorial nation-state. Moments of significant political upheaval, from World War II to the complicated fallout of the Arab Spring uprising of 2011, have always seemed to foster contests over territorial sovereignty in the country’s borderlands. And what we see today is not so different from what the Egyptian government was struggling with over a century ago, when it first sought to consolidate the nation at the margins of its sovereignty. As a result, what it means to be Egyptian in the country’s desert borderlands remains an open question.

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On this particular day in 2007, a commercial showed a young boy playing soccer at a glittering sports academy called Aspire in the tiny ultra-rich desert kingdom of Qatar. I’ve been a soccer fan my entire life. I started running around the pitch as a five-year-old and had the pleasure of playing at Princeton under future U.S. national team coach Bob Bradley. So when I got home from the gym, I Googled “Aspire Academy” to learn more.

I was surprised to discover that Aspire, a state-owned sports academy built at a reported cost of over $1 billion, had launched the largest talent search in soccer history earlier that year. They were, in effect, looking for unicorns: those rare young players who can excel at elite international soccer. I would eventually join the search and learn much about both the sport and the nature of talent itself.

The program, called Football Dreams, was bankrolled by one of Qatar’s richest men, Sheikh Jassim bin Hamad Al Thani, a member of the country’s royal family. It was led by Josep Colomer, a former youth director at FC Barcelona who helped launch the glorious career of Argentina’s Lionel Messi.

In 2007, Colomer and his fellow scouts held tryouts for more than 400,000 13-year-old boys in seven African countries as they looked for soccer’s next superstars. Out of this pool, they chose the best two dozen players and flew them to Doha where they were scheduled to participate in a weeks-long final tryout at Aspire. The plan was to select a handful of the best kids and train them to become professionals at the biggest clubs in Europe. Aspire presented Football Dreams as a humanitarian program, but many people suspected the true goal was to lure these boys into playing for Qatar’s national team since the country lacked the population to produce world-class players on its own.

A boy takes a shot at Ibrahima Dramé’s soccer school in Ziguinchor. Photo courtesy of Sebastian Abbot.

Soccer has long been called the global game, but the program took globalization to an almost absurd new extreme. Where else could you find a Spanish scout working for a Qatari sheikh hunting for African players to send to European clubs and possibly one day the World Cup?

I flew to Doha in January 2008 to spend a few days with the African boys while they were at Aspire for their final tryout. I tried to make sense of what I found and wrote an article about the program for the AP.

Years then passed as I moved to Islamabad to cover Pakistan and other parts of the world. I embedded with U.S. troops battling the Taliban in Afghanistan and spent time with Libyan rebels waging war against Qaddafi. But Football Dreams stayed with me. I always wondered what had happened to those talented African boys I spent a few days with in Doha. I was intrigued by whether Qatar would find soccer’s next superstars and what the country’s motivations really were.

In 2014, I decided to leave my job at the AP to write a book about Football Dreams. The program had become even more fascinating over the years as it expanded outside Africa and held tryouts for millions of boys. Qatar also bought a club in Belgium to serve as a farm team for these players as they sought to complete the journey from the academy to the world’s top clubs.

My research turned into a four-year odyssey that took me to 10 countries across four continents. I spent months in West Africa visiting the towns and villages where the boys came from; stood on the sidelines of the same dirt fields where they played growing up and were spotted by Qatar’s scouts; and even hitched a ride with a Nigerian militant to visit a small fishing town where Colomer hoped to find the next Messi.

The inside of a shop that specializes in repairing soccer cleats in Kaolack, Senegal. Photo courtesy of Sebastian Abbot.

In Qatar, I raced across sand dunes in a 4×4 with new Football Dreams recruits while they were in Doha for their own final tryout. In Belgium, I bellied up to bars in the small town of Eupen to hear what locals thought about the fact that their team, the Pandas, was now owned by an Arab country they knew little about and filled with African teenagers.

Along the way, I realized that while the program represented the extreme edge of soccer’s globalization, it was indicative of how much more international the sport has become in recent years. This is especially true at the youth level. When Messi first showed up at Barcelona in 2000, it was extremely unusual for the club to contemplate taking a 13-year-old boy from Argentina into its famed academy. A few years earlier, accepting a kid that age who lived near the club would have provoked debate. But as the hunt for global soccer talent has accelerated, teams have started focusing on younger and younger players all over the world.

One of the other big takeaways was just how difficult it is to identify which kid has the potential to become a star—even for experienced scouts like Colomer, who know what to look for. They understand that physical traits like size, speed, and strength will tell them relatively little about a player’s potential. Even technique has its limits. The most important factors are mental ones, like game intelligence and personality, but these are the hardest to measure. As a result, the success rate of picking kids who make it to the sport’s top level is incredibly low, even at the best academies. Only one-half percent of the kids who join a Premier League academy in England at the Under-9 level end up making it through the years to the club’s senior team. That’s one in 200 players

A player traps the ball during a pickup game on the beach in Senegal’s capital of Dakar. Photo courtesy of Sebastian Abbot.

That hasn’t stopped clubs from aggressively recruiting kids as young as five years old. Much like venture capital investing, the money made from one spectacular success, or saved by not having to buy an equivalent player, can make up for a high number of failures. But kids aren’t companies, and there’s a serious personal cost for the thousands who don’t make it. Plenty of players who are identified as the next big star at a young age dedicate thousands of hours to training and then watch their career prospects peter out over the years. Along the way, players are forced to sacrifice time with family and often end up neglecting their schoolwork. Many struggle to find a new path when a professional career doesn’t work out. Of course, there can be real benefits to academy life as well: camaraderie with teammates, learning the importance of hard work, and so on. But the sting of failure can be painful and lasting.

Unfortunately, that proved true for many of the Football Dreams players. They all believed they were destined to become stars in Europe. After all, they had been marked for greatness in a process that was more than a thousand times more selective than getting into Harvard. They also had a rich Arab sheikh in their corner. But even then, only a fraction succeeded in living out their dream and making it to major European clubs. The game is just that hard. Many of the others ended up playing at low levels in Europe, returning to Africa, or washing out of soccer altogether. Those who watched their dreams fade away often complained that Aspire didn’t do enough to help them find a new way forward.

This is the harsh reality of international soccer. It’s littered with broken dreams. Even so, the supply line of young dreamers will continue, especially from many places in Africa where making it to Europe can seem like the only way up and the only way out. It may be a nearly impossible dream, but for many of them, the away game seems like the only game worth playing. They don’t focus on the 99 percent chance of failure. They see the one percent chance of success.

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But thanks to laborious archival research and the linking of two rare and important documents, I’ve been able to shed new light on where these Africans came from and provide illuminating details about their capture and their lives in bondage. This account adds pieces to a story that is still imperfect, but—crucially—more human.

In 2008 I began tracing those 72 people—one cohort of captives—from a single slave ship in Sierra Leone to the plantations of South Carolina. At the heart of the study were two documents. The first was a tally of the captives “purchased” in 1754 by the captain of the Rhode Island sloop Hare traversing Africa’s Upper Guinea Coast from 24 different slave dealers, whose names were included in the document. The second was a list of white South Carolinians who took ownership of 55 of the captives.

The shortcomings of these lists reflect the times. The slave dealers in Africa and the white Southerners are all listed by name. The slaves are listed by category: number, gender, and age. And so, even though these 72 people have been my constant companions for eight years, I don’t know the names they carried with them from Africa to America. Still, by linking these two documents and by tracking the Hare captives from Africa to specific plantations in South Carolina, we get a closer look at the inner workings of the slave trade and also at how these Africans, mostly speakers of the interior Mande languages, with some speakers of coastal Atlantic languages, came together to cope with their circumstances in colonial America. Indeed, there is much to be gained from the simple act of recognizing that these enslaved West Africans were not a randomly selected crowd, but rather a coherent group of people with a common background on which to draw as their labors built the foundation of the colonial economy.

Ayuba Suleiman Diallo was seized on the Gambia River and taken to Maryland in the 1730s.

The experience of being taken at the same time and from the same general region in Africa did create a bond. I was able to document ways in which these slaves, both on plantations and in cities, tended to live among people of similar Mande background. Those who wound up in Charleston found themselves in the largest community of African-born people in North America. The number of Mande speakers probably approached 1,000. Those who wound up in rural areas also found themselves among “countrymen.” In one rice-planting neighborhood, I was able to document at least 30 people from the same part of Africa living within walking distance of each other.

These details may not seem like much, but they are a crucial addition to our understanding of Africans in the colonies. Ethnographic and ethno-historical methods have been useful to get at African life in early America, but they tend to work better with African Americans than with pre-1808 African-born migrants. Elsewhere, such as in Portugal and Spain, the Catholic Church forced the acknowledgement of the humanity of slaves, and civil law granted them a few nominal rights. As a result, there is much we can learn from those records.

But in British North America, the most commonly available information relates to the categorization of Africans as property: in wills and probate inventories, in plantation records and runaway advertisements, and in related governmental and court records. There is little to no information about their history and culture.

There are a couple of places to look for hints—primarily slave-related advertisements that appeared in colonial newspapers. As one of the few sources in the North American archive where African cultures are acknowledged, the notices have proven indispensable to historians. Most don’t record cultural information but rather the region of the African coast from which the person’s slave ship arrived: the Gold Coast, “Calabar,” “Angola.” Sometimes just “Guinea.” Their veracity is suspect, however, since they were frequently drafted by planters whose knowledge of their slaves’ background was virtually nil, hence the prevalence of phrases like “a new negro” and “a lad from the Guiney country.”

Still, for South Carolina at least, not all newspaper ads were the same. Some were for runaways, but many others were workhouse advertisements, generated when a suspected runaway was captured away from home. Prisoners were then housed in the Charleston, South Carolina workhouse until reclaimed.

The owner was not present so the information had to come from the captive, and it tended to be more detailed. The workhouse warden would place an ad in the newspaper, providing as much information as he could. Workhouse ads contained more references to “Keeshees,” “Congoes,” and “Mandingoes” than to “new negroes.” The information needs to be handled critically, of course. Closely read, the notices suggest that many of these ethnonyms emerged as the product of conversations between captives, interpreters, and interrogators, a process which itself provides valuable insight into relations among Africans.

Advertisement for slaves from the Hare. South Carolina Gazette, June 17, 1756.

Another underutilized source is testimony by Africans. Not the dozen or so canonical slave narratives that most historians know, but the incidental (and often accidental) glimpses of autobiographical testimony by Africans that can be found in sources ranging from court records, to church records, to obscurely published reminiscences and local histories. Most of these are brief, and most are related in “as told to” fashion by whites. But given the sparsity of the record, they are invaluable sources that can help us to recover the African migrants’ humanity.

A group of scholars has collected almost a thousand such testimonies from across the Atlantic world, including many from North America, which eventually will be viewable via Studies in the History of the African Diaspora—Documents Project (SHADD) at York University in Toronto. The project, on which I’m an editor, is slated for completion in 2018.

Even without the names of the 72 captives at the center of my research, armed with these scraps of detail, the numbers themselves can tell an important story. Statistics from the the 17th and 18th centuries are notoriously spotty, but it appears that Africans probably constituted the largest group of transatlantic migrants to British North America, outnumbering even the English.

By the latest estimates, almost 279,000 people were carried directly from Africa to North America before the American Revolution. If we add those Africans and people of African descent who were brought to North America from the Caribbean, via the inter-colonial trade, the true number is probably closer to 350,000 out of a total of 800,000 Old World migrants. And that wasn’t the end of it. Another 100,000 Africans would arrive in the years between the end of the American Revolution and the end of the legal slave importations in 1808, against about 50,000 immigrants from Europe.

It is certainly fair to question comparisons between aggregated “Africans” and disaggregated English, Scots-Irish, French, and Germans. Unfortunately we’re faced with another information gap—the political identities that Africans carried to North America are mostly unrecoverable, for statistical purposes at least. But we do know what regions they came from. If we break those down, pre-revolutionary migration looks like this:

We could debate the historical and cultural coherence of such artificial designations as “Upper Guinea” and “Gold Coast”; but we could probably do much the same for “England” and “Germany.” The point is twofold: that Africans constituted a significant proportion of the early American population, and that our interpretations should take full account of their history and differences. Up to this point historical accounts generally haven’t done that.

Once historians start thinking about Africans as people and not solely as property or laborers, we will also need to engage more deeply with African history. Even so, I must admit that having undertaken that task myself has not allowed me to exorcise the ghosts of the Hare captives. I imagine scenes from their lives, working, creating, and dying. In this way, I’ve lived with them, but I’ll never know them.

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Four years ago, in Germany’s newspaper for intellectuals, Die Zeit, the prominent author Gero von Randow called for Tunisia to be granted membership in the European Union. Today, we Europeans should be scratching our heads about why we haven’t already asked.

Yes, Tunisia is in North Africa, not far across the Mediterranean from Italy. But as a German who has done democracy work in Tunisia, I’ve learned there are three strong and rational reasons for making Tunisia an EU member, as well as an emotional one, which might be more important.

But first, the rational reasons. There is the strategic argument that, at a time when millions of migrants are flooding into EU countries from Arab regions, the EU would be wise to have its own beachhead on Arab soil.

After all, the integration of our new Arab citizens who have already arrived in Europe will require great efforts. A European Tunisia might well mitigate some immigration pressure to Europe, by offering an Arab option. (Tunisia today already shelters more than 300,000 refugees, mainly from neighboring Libya.) And it would be a wise parallel. Just as European communities learn through integrating people into their cities and towns, the whole of Europe would learn by working to integrate a new country.

The billions in development aid that would flow to Tunisia, a nation of 11 million with a per capita income that is less than half of the EU’s poorest members today, would pay off in the long term, since success in Tunisia could bring about a change for the entire Maghreb, where people are watching the struggling democracy closely. EU membership for Tunisia would be akin to a Marshall Plan for the region.

Then there’s the argument that Tunisia has been building a deliberative and democratic society that we should encourage and honor. There is no greater effort to form an enlightened Islamic society, as the Nobel Peace Prize committee recently acknowledged in giving its award to Tunisia’s leading civil society group. And Europe, by embracing Tunisia’s commitment to democracy, would offer a contrast to Turkey, a would-be European Union member which is descending into illiberal Islamist nationalism. The moderate Tunisian Islamists, the Ennahda Movement, have no equal in the world, and Ennahda leader Rachid al-Ghannouchi was rightly applauded for willingly stepping down from power 2013 to make way for democracy and the rule of law.

Then there’s the fairness argument. Tunisia launched the Arab Spring, and its push for democracy, but the spring is now drowning in Arab blood. The West, with its disastrous collaboration with iron-fisted rulers in the region, bears responsibility for this. Many people in the Maghreb—the region that includes Tunisia, Algeria and Morocco—are already drawing the depressing conclusion that the West doesn’t really believe in democracy, so why should they? On a recent visit to Tunisia, students from the University of Carthage asked me pointedly why they couldn’t travel freely and go on student exchanges like their counterparts in Europe.

Offering Tunisia membership in the EU would counter this narrative—by rewarding democracy. And it would be fair—an acknowledgment Tunisians’ sacrifice, through violence and terrorism and economic struggle, to keep their democratic revolution alive.

Finally, there’s the emotional reality that Tunisia feels European. It’s a wonderful country, a pearl of the Mediterranean that resembles Sicily. It now grows more olives than the whole of Italy. Its multilingual population is very familiar with the French and deeply connected to the Italians. It’s in the heart of a region that has been deeply tied to Europe for thousands of years.

Those who have spent enough time in Tunisia know that this is where East meets West; that Tunisia is a European bridge.

Of course, the Tunisians may balk. The country was a French protectorate until 1956, and maybe Tunisia wouldn’t want to feel again like a European colony. But it would be the right thing to ask. And it surely is the right time.

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UCLA historian Richard G. Hovannisian, whose parents survived the genocide of Armenians that started almost exactly 100 years ago, recalled how his parents’ generation never grappled with had happened to their families or why. “There was no analysis,” he said. That began to change in the 1960s, with the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Israel for his role in the Holocaust and, in 1965, the 50th anniversary of the Armenian Genocide.

But Jok Madut Jok, a historian born and raised in Sudan and co-founder of the Sudd Institute, said that the concept of genocide is still difficult for the world to wrap its head around—and thus address. Genocide “has gotten stuck in a very tight space between political activism on the one hand and scholarship” on the other, he said. And so it is caught between horror and fascination, war and criminalized massacre, emphasizing race and claiming shared humanity, political correctness and moral and legal obligations to act, he said. We continue to haggle over what is a genocide and what isn’t, said Jok. But at the heart of it is that a large number of people died for who they were.

Still, University of Wisconsin political scientist Scott Straus said that whether you’re looking at the long arc of the 20th century or just the last 20 years, “a lot of progress has been made” in terms of public awareness of genocide, and how national and international institutions address it. Genocide is “incredibly difficult” to stop, reduce, prevent—or rebuild from. Even if we can all agree that we should stop genocide on a moral and ethical basis, said Straus, we should appreciate what a challenge it is to do so.

Yet the word “genocide” itself remains freighted. Why, asked Raustiala, is the term so powerful, and what does it mean?

World Peace Foundation research director Bridget Conley-Zilkic said that the legal definition of genocide—which was crafted in 1948—requires the demonstration of the intent to destroy a group in whole or in part. What’s difficult is that this usage means that to get a legal finding of genocide, you must “get inside the mindset of the perpetrator” and prove intent to destroy a group, not just to push a group out of a certain area or defeat an insurgency.

Barack Obama used the term “Armenian Genocide” while running for president but has not done so while in office, including in his recent address on the hundredth anniversary. Hovannisian said that Obama the candidate did not understand the kind of political and economic pressures he’d be subjected to from Turkey as president. But Hovannisian noted that France officially recognized the Armenian Genocide a few years ago; the Turkish government withdrew their ambassador and cut off economic ties—but only for six months.

But even if crimes aren’t labeled genocide, Jok pointed out, they are still crimes. The challenge is how to make it difficult for a group—whether it’s a state, a political party, or an ethnic group—to kill another group. He also said that one of the difficulties in identifying genocide lies in the fact that it “happens under the cover of war.” And the ongoing power struggles and fighting can make it difficult to get to the bottom of genocide during these conflicts. Perpetrators can defend themselves with the fact that war involves killing people. But Jok said that there is a distinction between killing armed men and women—which is war—and killing women and children, which is not.

Yet most wars do not include genocides or mass atrocities, said Conley-Zilkic. The challenge is to figure out how to identify those conflicts that do—and how, exactly, to intervene. She said that there is no question, for instance, that the Syrian government is responsible for ruthless brutal violence against civilians. But, should the U.S. intervene, what is the endgame there? Should the current regime be removed? What do we think would happen in the aftermath of regime change?

These are not easy questions, said Conley-Zilkic. But what is revolutionary is the priority placed on posing them—and that has achieved real results. The number of mass atrocities around the world has declined, as has the number of people being killed.

Straus agreed, noting policy intervention improvements such as the creation of the U.N. Office of the Special Adviser on the Prevention of Genocide and a U.S. Atrocities Prevention Board. Awareness of genocide is much greater than ever before, he said; “a kind of conscience that didn’t really exist 25 years ago” is now in effect—one that leads to political will.

Hovannisian said that intervention remains a stumbling block. If done incorrectly, intervention can lead to a backlash and reaction that are worse than no intervention as all. European powers put pressure on the Turkish government to implement reforms in treatment of minority groups before the genocide began. But then Europe stepped away, only to add to the suspicion of Armenians as a threat. Hovannisian pointed to recent history of U.S. intervention in the Middle East as reason for governments to take care before knocking out one regime after another.

In the audience question-and-answer session, the panelists were asked why the U.S. government has failed to intervene over and over again, from Armenia to Bosnia.

Straus and Conley-Zilkic said that the kind of miscommunications that plagued the government as recently as the early 1990s—where letters between agencies and branchers were lost, and different government organizations claimed ignorance of atrocities being committed in Bosnia and other parts of the world—would not happen today because there is more collaboration than ever before.

But Straus said that while people know and care about genocide a great deal today, stopping it is an entirely different issue. The will to stop genocide exists; the ability to do so does not.

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In that callous chamber, an Akan priest prayed for me in Twi. He was thanking the ancestors for returning me home, my tour guide, Edward, told me. Then he asked: “How do you feel about where you are standing? How do you feel about standing on this ground of your ancestors?”

Viscerally, I knew that someone related to me likely started his or her journey here centuries ago, that I had a kinship to “The Slave Coast,” where millions of Africans were sold into domestic bondage and transported to Europe and the Americas between 1665 and 1807. I had read Alex Haley’s Roots. But that was his story, and those, his people. The stories I had heard throughout my childhood were not of the kings and queens stolen from an African homeland, but of everyday warriors here who fought and died for my rights to vote; to go to school; to choose where I would live, and whom I would love. They were my father, who fought in the Vietnam War as a United States Marine (my brother, a second-generation jarhead who fought in the Persian Gulf conflict); they were my mother, the first in her family to graduate from college (me, the first in mine to earn a master’s degree). My people were architects and game-changers; innovators and writers; preachers, teachers, chefs, and hope-builders; they were black, proud, and American—like me.

A family photo in front of First A.M.E. Church, Los Angeles: L.A. Littlejohn, Sr. (her father), the author, and Jane Littlejohn (her mother).

Days earlier, stepping off the plane into the bustling city of Accra, never had I been surrounded by so many faces that looked like mine, and yet I felt as foreign among them as I had years earlier on a trip to Tokyo. Having African ancestry and black skin did not make me a sister but a stranger with my neat, fresh-from-the-salon, straw-curled ’fro now seeking to connect. This journey to Ghana became a rite of passage to a new consciousness of my own Americanness.

Unlike some friends I knew, I didn’t have an emotional tether to the “Motherland.” This was not a trip I’d planned to take and, at the start, it wasn’t about me. This was work: a freelance assignment for Essence magazine, to document a Canadian woman’s journey through the region for a travel series on what is now WE tv. The 10-day expedition took me into the crowded marketplaces of Accra and Kumasi, where women transported food on trays atop their heads; to remote villages slicing cocoa pods from large stalks, stamping Adinkra symbols into fabric with Kente craftsmen, and fishing in tiny wooden boats in Elmina.

Everywhere I went, someone from my probable ancestral homeland sought to connect me to the tribes in my African lineage: the shape of my eyes, the angular point of my nose, the texture of my hair, the color of my skin. All telling signs of my heredity. And yet with each tracing of my face, it brought me closer to home, to my America.

Trying to articulate that feeling is a little easier now than it was back then when I launched into a discussion with a young African waiter at the hotel restaurant in Kumasi about the connections between Africans and black people from America. I was 33 and, up until then, had never really been challenged on such matters of race, culture, and identity. His was a cynical viewpoint, that the only interest blacks in America had about the African continent was Kente cloth and hairstyles, a commercialized appropriation of the culture which was being, at best, misappropriated. He accused us of decorating our homes with African masks and statues while knowing nothing of the heritage. He laughed at the very idea of Kwanzaa.

“How many of you African-Americans would trade your lives in America for one here in Africa?” he asked. He answered himself: “Not many.”

Then he asked, “Are you black or African-American?”

He sneered when I replied, “Black.” He defined “African-Americans” as those who look African (which I was told I do) as opposed to “black” which, for Ghanians, are people of East Indian lineage.

For me, it was more complicated. I was born “black” in the late 1960s to my mother who, in 1940, had been born “colored”; and to my father, born “Negro” in 1944. I was in high school when Jesse Jackson proclaimed us all “African-American.” My father’s people were servants who came to the U.S. from Scotland (and the surname, Littlejohn, from the Englishman for whom they would later work); my mother’s maternal family tree traces back several generations to an Irishman and a Native American woman from an unknown tribe.

Growing up in Los Angeles, my childhood felt no different from that of my peers of other hues: there were the annual trips to Disneyland, Magic Mountain, and Knott’s Berry Farm; Dodger games; snowball fights in the San Bernardino Mountains; and summer road-tripping from California to wherever our Dodge motorhome would rumble.

I was a deft skateboarder and roller skater. I learned to ride my bike at Dockweiler Beach in the South Bay, where my parents, brother, and I would go on late-night grunion runs in June with my best friend Rochelle, her mother (of Japanese and Anglo lineage), and her father (black). And despite her mixed roots, fair skin, and long, fine brown hair never to be singed by an iron pressing comb, Rochelle was still just as black as me.

The author, enjoying the Southern California winter at the Rose Parade with friend Rochelle Ginyard in 1980.

Granted, I didn’t look like the California girls that the Beach Boys sang about, but I connected as much with Sally Fields’ Gidget as I did with Cicely Tyson in Sounder and The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, the stories of groovy West Coast girlhood and the centuries-long struggles of black womanhood.

By the time I was in junior high school, my parents had moved us from our cozy three-bedroom home near Inglewood into a sprawling two-story, four-bedroom View Park place that my dad’s sister often referred to as “The White House.” We were blue-collar middle class, not quite the Huxtables from TV, but there was a family just like them who lived across the street: a doctor, an educator, and their six well-adjusted, scholastically successful, good-looking kids. From our hilltop neighborhood, we were the embodiment of the American dream, and Martin Luther King, Jr.’s.

My blackness was born out of a particular American experience; raised on gospel music, jazz, and a wooly-haired, brown-eyed Jesus who was black like me; reared on the Southern cuisines that my mother learned to prepare as a caterer for white families in her Cleveland hometown; disciplined by those values of respecting one’s elders, hard work, community, and achievement.

In Africa, I am obruni, which, in the most literal terms, means “white man,” or “foreigner.” It was how I was referred to many times while in Africa. It was not meant as an insult, just an acknowledgement that I was not of that land, no matter how deeply my roots ran through it.

Someday I will to return to Ghana, for a journey that is my own, maybe on safari in the northern region, or with my parents on a holiday vacation in Accra. (Stories I’ve heard of Christmastime there sound not unlike summer break beach parties in Miami.) But not before I make that trip to Scotland and to England, where I am told I’ll also find a lot of my people.

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