A Glimpse of the World

New BBC Feature on ‘Disappearing Shanghai’

July 14, 2009 12:53 AM

The BBC has just posted a slide show feature on my Disappearing Shanghai book project on its website.

Featured Writing

LETTER FROM AFRICA: President for Life, and Then Some

May 13, 2010 12:00 AM

In the months before his death in 1993 at the age of 88 (or, as widely rumored, as old as 100) and after 33 years in power, the president of Ivory Coast, Félix Houphouët-Boigny, fondly repeated a formula he had once announced publicly to the nation.

“A king of the Baoulé has no right to know the identity of his successor,” he is reported to have said.

Mr. Houphouët-Boigny may have belonged to royal lineage, but critics said he seemed to be forgetting that the Baoulé were only one of Ivory Coast’s 50 or so ethnic groups, and that he was the president of a would-be modern country. Few were fooled about the old leader’s real intention to rule as president for life, come what may in his aftermath. And the aftermath in Ivory Coast has indeed been grim.

West Africa’s most prosperous country has been ripped apart by a civil war whose roots trace directly back to the contested circumstances of his succession, and the old regime has been replaced by a predatory authoritarianism under new leaders determined to hang on at all costs.

If discouraging African plotlines like these were limited to Ivory Coast, few would dwell on these circumstances nearly two decades later.

Unfortunately, the muddled and forestalled succession story of Ivory Coast has become a prevalent narrative across much of the continent, symptomatic of what political analysts increasingly regard as a kind of African disease.

With increasing frequency, leaders are scheming to modify the rules governing the transfer of power with the aim of hanging on as long as possible, and in an increasingly common twist, Africa’s presidents are positioning their children to assume the reins of power after their demise.

The latest African country to be visited by this leadership crisis is Nigeria, Africa’s most populous nation by a big margin, and one of the world’s 10 largest oil exporters. Nigeria walked a tightrope for the last six months as its elected president, Umaru Yar’Adua, who finally died last week, disappeared from public view, while being treated for a number of serious ailments. During most of that time, he was hospitalized in Saudi Arabia and silent, save for a few words weakly uttered into the microphones of the BBC, in a bid to quell rumors that he had died or was comatose.

Ostensibly aimed at reassuring the public, Mr. Yar’Adua’s whispered mini-interview did nothing of the sort. By that point, Nigerians and foreign diplomats alike were worried about the maneuverings not of the president but of his handlers, who seemed mostly determined to prevent the constitutional transfer of power to the vice president, Goodluck Jonathan, who persevered for several months as an acting head of state, but one with sharply limited powers, and a cabinet, bureaucracy and possibly even security forces reluctant to accept his leadership.

These were vulnerable times for Nigeria. What was most dangerous about this stretch was not the mere fact of a power vacuum, though. As with Ivory Coast, forestalled and unresolved successions often invite ethnic polarization and heightened competition along other identity lines, from geographic to religious to linguistic.

The Nigerian presidency has recently rotated between northerners (who are predominantly Muslim) and southerners (who are often Christian). In this instance, in Nigeria, that meant northern elites grumbling about the loss of their “turn” at the presidency with the disappearance before the end of his term of Mr. Yar’Adua, a northerner, and his replacement by Mr. Jonathan, a southerner.

Nigerians have, of course, been down this road before. Their civil conflict, the Biafran War, fought between 1967 and 1970, is one of the worst episodes of violent identity politics in post-independence Africa.

“The pathology here is the failure of elites to transfer their loyalty from their precolonial identities to the postcolonial state,” said Makau W. Mutua, the dean of the University at Buffalo Law School. “Instead of a tool for governance, the office of the president becomes a tool for domination, in which the resources of the nation are husbanded for the benefit of a family, a clan or an ethnic group.”

Although war is the most spectacularly costly consequence of fudged presidential transitions in Africa, it is far from alone in stunting the continent’s development. More common than civil war, and yet quietly devastating, due to its atrophy of the state, sycophancy and corruption, is the effective presidency-for-life.

Although few have openly proclaimed it since the days of Idi Amin in Uganda, it has become the virtual quest of so many African heads of state that it ranks today as a near standard.

Between 2005 and 2009, the presidents of three African countries, Togo, Guinea and Gabon, died in office, after a cumulative 104 years in power; two of these leaders, Omar Bongo of Gabon (42 years) and Gnassingbé Eyadéma of Togo (38 years), were succeeded by their sons. Political analysts say that similar scenarios could unfold in countries as diverse as Egypt, Libya, Equatorial Guinea and Burkina Faso, where long-ruling African leaders appear to be grooming their children to follow them.

“What we’re seeing is what happens in places where the only way to get rich or to stay rich is through political power,” said Patrick Keenan, a scholar at the University of Illinois College of Law. “This is not about resource wealth alone, but wealth in general. The people in these regimes hang on for dear life.”

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Flickriver

May 26, 2009 12:23 PM

I’m off to China soon, where I’m pushing to complete work on my Disappearing Shanghai photography project, which I hope to publish in book form in the coming year. I’ve been working hard on this, re-scanning hundreds of 6x6 negatives on a rented Imacon (expensive!).

There will be a rather different emphasis with this summer’s photography proper, with a focus on intimate interiors in both the old neighborhoods I’ve haunted for the last five years and in the newly built neighborhoods on the city’s periphery, where tens of thousands of people have been relocated.

I’ll be updating my website Click here to see it quite a bit over the weeks ahead. I’d also encourage people interested in my work to visit my Flickr stream. A good way to do so is through the link below:

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John Updike - A remembrance

January 28, 2009 12:15 AM

I never met John Updike, except in print.
In the February 5, 1996 editions of The New Yorker, he wrote this of my work:

“Last summer the dying Congolese novelist, playwright and poet told the Times correspondent, Howard French, “Africa is the only continent left that has not found its way. We have this incredible wealth, of resources and spirit, but outsiders like France are just robbing us, while blessing our dictators.”

Tansi made this statement in the remote village of Foufoundou, in his native African state of Congo, where he had found remission from the symptoms of aids by way of mixture of herbal medicines and incantations that mixed “African traditional healing and Christian evangelism.” Tansi told his interviewer, “I had been to hospitals in Brazzaville and Paris, but they had been unable to do anything for me. It wasn’t until I came here, following the voice of a prophet that my condition really began to change. I should have come long ago.” But his native herbal concoctions had not helped Tansi’s wife, Pierrette, who, lying emaciated and feeble on a mat, claimed they had made her mouth so sore that she could eat nothing but oranges. Two weeks later, both she and Tansi were dead.”

He was 47 and widely considered the leading writer of Central Africa. His miserable end betokens the misery of Africa, a continent beset by AIDS, famine, poverty, corruption, tyranny and genocidal massacre…” (the article continues at some length.)

There was an honor, naturally, in having one’s work mentioned by Updike. But there was something more, too, an odd coming together in this experience of two of the writers on Africa whose fiction had most affected me: Updike and Tansi. More about Tansi can be found on this site. As for Updike, his novel, The Coup, is not particularly well appreciated, but its a jewel of perception, of wicked humor and of observation — both of an imagined Africa, if that’s possible, and of the United States, whose provincialism, tawdriness and vacuous commercialism, the author lampoons without mercy.

Both of the offerings below come most highly recommended.

Link

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Echo Valley

January 11, 2009 7:54 PM

I’ve created a new gallery in my photography website by the name of Echo Valley consisting of photographs from my “lao jia,” my homeland, in the deepest sense of the word, in north-central Virginia. There’s an accompanying essay in the “News” section of the website. Please enjoy.

Click to visit the gallery

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