Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

A lot is missing here, including the fundamental. When talking about protests or ‘revolutions’ the causes have to be highlighted.  The causes mentioned in the article are not causes by symptoms . There is not even a hint to the shared political economy/the dominant economic model and its operations from economic development to finance to debt to finance to unequal exchange. The protests are not new thus one should have a longer overview stretching decades and summed up in a couple of paragraphs, especially when an article is not a news item, one of ‘Big Question’ as the section is called. 

The junta belt Image via  Colonel Assima Goita  on X.

“My examination of the limitations of the racial binary of black vs. white as an analytical category to address the racialization of migrants in the North African context allows for a more nuanced approach to racial categorizations—one that challenges these simplified binaries without erasing the psychic violence of racial labeling or the historical stigmatization of blackness produced by the legacy of slavery, colonialism, and the project of nation-building. This approach is necessary to challenge the construction of migrants as the ‘racial other’ and to support their human right to mobility and belonging.” Contemporary notions of race in Morocco A photo by Chermiti Mohamed

Among the 150-plus photographs, images of Latin America, Africa, and the Indian subcontinent appear hardly at all and usually as a foil or kitschy reflection of Euro-American modernity. North Korea, the kitschiest foil of them all, appears as many times as the entire African continent. For all our differences, [the exhibition ] Civilisation seems to preach, we people of the world are essentially the same, and we’re all trying to make the best of life within the inescapable confines of US-exported late capitalism.

I don’t expect from Andrew Harding and the BBC’s international editor to add a bit of historical context, mainly the working of political economy of the 200 years that emerged in Western Europe then imposed on the rest of the world.  “ After all, Western nations have, for decades, devoted significant energy and cash towards supporting health services, businesses and governments across the continent.”  Putting aside the difference between nation and state and who really did what they did in particular contexts and conjunctures, the obvious is that why then Africa is still in a dire situation. The explanation, people like Harding would like us to put forward, is the same we have heard hundreds of times before: ‘It is their fault, those Africans’, ‘it is in their culture’, ‘they don’t know how to implement the right capitalism’… Harding would be more satisfied if he added NGOs, ‘aid’, ‘free market’, ‘human rights’, etc. Note also how in the title both China and Russia already hav...

It is like that ‘motto’ we heard a few times after 9/11 2001: “We have to fight them there, so they don’t come here.” Paying Africa’s brutal militias to lock up migrants

Mapping the Sahel Background analysis The redeployment of French imperialism in Africa

A long but must read piece by Göran Therborn

Imperial Encore  a text that should be on the reading list of anyone interested in colonialism, material culture as a tool of empire and attempts to extend imperialism through the use of soft power. Review of  Imperial Encore: The Cultural Project of the Late British Empire

A book review

A 2015 movie available on sflix.to

“When the missionaries came to Africa they had the Bible and we had the land. They said 'Let us pray.' We closed our eyes. When we opened them we had the Bible and they had the land.” “If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor. If an elephant has its foot on the tail of a mouse and you say that you are neutral, the mouse will not appreciate your neutrality.” – Desmond Tutu “As with Martin Luther King, many of the same political leaders commemorating Tutu today would have been unlikely to mention him a day earlier, lest Tutu take the opportunity to speak his mind.  This is certainly why he was not invited to commemorate his friend and comrade, Nelson Mandela, at Mandela’s funeral eight years ago. Like King and so many others, we can be sure that all the praises of Desmond Tutu as the great moral compass of the world will be made safely, after he’s dead.  Before then would have been much too dangerous, and he was best ignored until...

“ The international financial press has trotted out the usual boilerplate in its attempt to explain this instability, asserting that African countries cannot manage their own affairs and that Western institutions must swoop in to rescue them. Once again, as the refrain goes, it’s a question of the West’s benevolence in contrast to Africa’s violence and corruption.” “ Political crises in Africa are always an opportunity for Western capitalist economies to set the conditions for more free market measures, more free movement of capital, and more privatization.” “Every  new government finds itself with a list of policies that must be implemented in order to receive the benefit of the IMF, the World Bank, and bilateral aid.” “ The scene is the same no matter which government is in power. Even if a regime falls, the neocolonial extractive model doesn’t.” “Because they’re detached from the real needs of their populations, elites in Africa are facilitating this precarity and poverty and in...

Degrowth economics

Built on the bodies of slaves

Note: I am not doing justice to Mbembe’s arguments in the book by my selection. A full read of the text is recommended. Under what practical conditions is the power to kill, to let live, or to expose to death exercised?  Under the guise of war, resistance, or the war on terror?  Politics ... is doubly defined as a project of autonomy and as the reaching of agreement within a collective through communication and recognition. This, we are told, is what differentiates it from war... Within this paradigm, reason is the truth of the subject, and politics is the exercise of reason in the public sphere. Sovereignty is therefore defined as a twofold process of self-institution and self-limitation (fixing one’s own limits for oneself ). My concern is those figures of sovereignty whose central project is not the struggle for autonomy but the generalized instrumentalization of human existence and the material destruction of human bodies and populations.  Contemporary experiences of ...

  Marx’s debt to people of African descent Related The Africana paradigm in Capital

  The Great Lockdown hits the Third World hard

Why Tunisia, Africa Must Demand French Apology [and Compensation]

Even if it was under Obama or Hilary Clinton, a similar action would have been taken because the US regime (or its army) has never committed war crimes and will never ever commit any. International Criminal Court officials sanctioned by US