!A for Africa in Books --- agk's phlog 14 Apr 2021 @ 1853 --- written on x61 at kitchen table alone in the house for once --- In the antiglobalization movement I learned about Africa the sabotaged. International Monetary Fund structural adjustment programs undermined national sovereignty in the 1980s. Revolutionary national health programs like Mozambique's were destroyed by creditor terms. Famine and war, AIDS and "development" programs followed. In Fanon's _Wretched of the Earth_, I was drawn first to the psychological portraits of colonial torturers, then to his critique of the national bourgeoisie's role brokering neo- colonialism. I knew quislings like that in my country (see Hal Rogers [1]). I hated them. Paul Stoller's _Embodying Colonial Memories: Spirit Possession, Power, and the Hauka in West Africa_ later counseled me to have compassion for powerbrokers who reenact historical tragedy as horrific contemporary comedy. In my early 20s, my boyfriend Mongezi told me about the betrayal of African socialism (black consciousness of Steve Biko and AZAPO) by the neoliberal (color conscious) ANC in South Africa. Ricardo at Black Star Books gave me Ousmane Sembène's _God's Bits of Wood_ (Les bouts de bois de Dieu) about the 1940s Senegalese railroad strike, and books by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, Maryse Condé, and others. I fell in love with midcentury African socialism--and Doris Lessing's critique of it in her _Children of Violence_ series. > Uprisings in the streets speak lounder than words > so when the right man speaks then the crowd get heard. > So it occurred: Mau Mau, Jomo Kenyatta, > mobilizing the poor from Zanzibar to Mombassa, > advancing the cause, outlaws armed and ready > equipped with pistols, shotguns and machetes > up against the military with the will of the people > who would rather be poor in freedom than treated unequal. > The situation's heated; now it's more than just a rumor-- > from the east to the west hear the speeches of Lumumba...[2] Muammar Gaddafi's Jamahiriyah political theory, leadership in the non-aligned movement and African Union, and "king of kings" approach to governance was neither Marxist nor capitalist (and neither secular Arab nationalist nor Islamic fundamentalist). Oil wealth stayed in the country. Despite unemployment similar to other north African and southwest Asian countries, Libya provided free education, universal healthcare, free housing, free water, and free electricity long after African and Arab socialism was destroyed everywhere else. It developed a distinct third way of governing until destruction by the US-led war in 2011. I visited Africa like Limonov's Eddie-baby in _Memoirs of a Russian Punk_ visited far-off places: in books, imagination, and friends' stories. Later in my 20s, I read voraciously on African and Afro-Caribbean use of plants in medicine. The best: Kwame Konadu's _Indigenous Medicine and Knowledge in African Society_, Janzen's _The Quest for Therapy: Medical Pluralism in Lower Zaire_, Verger's _Ewé: O Uso das Plantas na Sociedade Iorubá_, and TRAMIL's _Pharmacopée Caribéenne_. Politics, speech patterns, music, medicine, economics, and history in my country make sense to me through lenses my books use to see Africa. I found Africa in my country in Michael Gomez's _Exchanging Our Country Marks: The Transform- ation of African Identities in the Colonial and Antebellum South_, Loudell Snow's _Walkin' over Medicine_, and Gwendolyn Hall's _Slavery and African Ethnicities in Colonial America_. I met Africans everywhere--at the restaurant and grocery in the neighborhood where Eritreans lived, the hospital where I worked, the soup kitchen and bookstore where veterans of the Azanaian Peoples' Army could be found. Today I follow African wars, vernacular tech, and film. I pay special attention to blacksmiths in Suame Magazine (10 km north of Kumasi,Ghana) who make fences, swings, water pumps, carbide compressors, welding machines, and vehicles from junked cars, les forgerons (blacksmiths) in Maroua, Cameroon, the Jua Kali sector in Kenya, and junkyard computing (and hard-drive data extraction) in Agbogbloshie, Ghana. Large-scale distributed remanufacturing is industrial life in the wreck of "ruined import- substitution industries, shrunken public sectors, and downwardly-mobile middle classes."[3] > Fuelled by Nkruma and drafts of black agendas > by the 1960s each reached their independence-- > but sentenced to life with less than necessary > with the rest of the third world treated secondary. > Unable to bury the very tribe rivalries > that had upheld the system and assisted adversaries > ...atrocities, lost descent, stolen monuments, > and The Economist calls it the hopeless continent. The recent past of Africa is the present in my country. When there is no choice of socialism or barbarism, when remnants of socialism are destroyed at unimaginable human cost, I look to Africa in books for how to care, manufacture, repair, worship, self-govern, be family, communicate, and live. --------------------------------------- [^1]: Tarence Ray (November 9, 2020), "Hal Rogers’s Kentucky Kingdom." Dissent Magazine. [^2]: Verse 3 of Homeland by Sékou The Ambass- ador, a Ghanaian rapper who lives in Germany. [^3]: Mike Davis, _Planet of Slums_. Davis' critique of the development industry belongs on a shelf with Ferguson's _The Anti-Politics Machine: "Development," Depoliticization, and Bureaucratic power in Lesotho_, Werner's _Questioning the Solution: The Politics of Primary Health Care and Child Survival_, and Scroggins' _Emma's War: An Aid Worker, A War- lord, Radical Islam, and the Politics of Oil-- A True Story of Love and Death in Sudan_.