Abdulrazak Gurnah Wins the Nobel Prize for Literature

 By Henry Srebrnik, [Moncton, NB] Times & Transcript

Abdulrazak Gurnah, the Zanzibari British novelist and literary critic, has won the 2021 Nobel Prize in Literature for “his uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the effects of colonialism and the fate of the refugee in the gulf between cultures and continents.”

An emeritus professor of English and Postcolonial Literatures at the University of Kent in England, Gurnah was born on the island of Zanzibar, then a British colonial protectorate, in 1948. It was long an Arab-ruled island.

In 1698, Omani ruler Said bin Sultan moved from the Omani city of Muscat to what became known as Stone Town on Zanzibar Island. He established a ruling Arab elite and encouraged the development of clove plantations, using the island’s African slave labour.

Until 1884, the sultans of Zanzibar controlled a substantial portion of the Swahili Coast, the Indian Ocean region running from Kenya to Mozambique. For centuries, Arab Muslims in east Africa sold captured Africans to the Middle East and the Sultanate was the centre of the east African slave trade.

The slave trade really took off from the 17th century as more merchants from Oman settled in Zanzibar. The island took on an even more important role in the international trade of goods and consequently also in the slave trade. This is how the largest slave market in East Africa was created.

Senegalese author Tidiane N’Diaye estimates that 17 million east Africans were sold into slavery: “Most people still have the so-called Transatlantic trade by Europeans into the New World in mind. But in reality the Arab-Muslim slavery was much greater.”

It was not until 1873 that Sultan Seyyid Barghash, under pressure from Great Britain, signed a treaty that made the slave trade in his territories illegal. That decree was not enforced effectively and it was not until 1909 that slavery was finally abolished in east Africa.

A military coup in 1964 overthrew the Arab-controlled Sultanate a year after the country gained its sovereignty. It led to the persecution of its Arab minority, which until then had been the island’s ruling class.

As part of the process of decolonisation, political parties were established in 1961. They were primarily organised along ethnic lines: the Arab-led Zanzibar Nationalist Party (ZNP), the African-dominated Afro-Shirazi Party (ASP) and the Afro-nationalist Zanzibar and Pemba People’s Party (ZPPP).

Parliamentary democracy did not last very long. Sultan Jamshid bin Abdullah was overthrown in a bloody revolution that brought the Black African majority to power, and the Sultanate was replaced by the People’s Republic of Zanzibar and Pemba.

The new president, Abeid Amani Karume, targeted the Zanzibari Arabs. The following months were dominated by deep division, tensions and vengeance.

The killing and expulsion of most of the island’s Arabs and the nationalisation and redistribution of land following the revolution did not solve the underlying problems that punctuated post-revolution Zanzibar. The existence of this short-lived socialist republic was ended with its union with mainland Tanganyika, also a former British colony, to form the new entity known as Tanzania.

Gurnah moved to Great Britain as a refugee not long afterwards and has lived in Britain ever since. He has written exclusively in English, his second language. He is a native speaker of Swahili. His novels explore themes of memory, migration, and the legacy of colonialism.

His best-known, 1994’s Paradise, recounts the story of Yusef, an African boy sold into slavery by his father to a powerful Arab merchant named Aziz. Yusuf joins the trader as they travel into central Africa and the Congo basin and are thrown into a world of war and violence. I have included Paradise in a course on African politics that I teach.

Gurnah is the first writer from Africa to win the Nobel Prize in literature in more than a decade and most articles about him call him a Tanzanian or Black African. That doesn’t really describe a person of Arab descent who grew up on an island that had been governed by an Omani royal family from the Arabian peninsula, and who has lived and worked outside Africa for 53 years. Some Tanzanians agree.

Today, Zanzibar remains a semi-autonomous jurisdiction with its own president and government, in an uneasy relationship with Tanzania’s mainland.

 

 

Iraq’s Election Could Have been Worse

 By Henry Srebrnik, [Moncton, NB] Times & Transcript

The Iraq war was arguably America’s biggest foreign-policy blunder since the Vietnam War. Although the American withdrawal from Iraq hasn’t been quite as shambolic as its exit from Afghanistan, Washington’s influence there, almost two decades after George W. Bush’s invasion, is rapidly waning.

One sign of this? A parliamentary election held a few weeks ago was won by a man responsible for the deaths of many hundreds of U.S. soldiers -- yet he was still seen as the lesser evil.

Following the defeat of Saddam Hussein in the spring of 2003, Washington’s troubles in Iraq were just beginning, and much of it was due to the dreaded Mahdi Army led by the Iraqi Shi’ite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr.

It was formed in June of that year with the objective of evicting American forces, and it rose to prominence in April 2004 when it spearheaded the first major armed confrontation against the U.S. forces from the Shi’ite community. Over the years, the Mahdi Army killed a large percentage of the 4,500 American soldiers who died in Iraq.

However, with the U.S. now virtually out of Iraq, al-Sadr has reinvented himself as a political figure. And although a fervent enemy of the U.S., he has shown himself more independent of Iran than most other Shi’ite politicians.

Al-Sadr is the son of Grand Ayatollah Sayyid Muhammad Muhammad-Sadiq al-Sadr, a Shi’ite dignitary who was politically active against Saddam Hussein, for which he paid with his life in 1999.

The Sadrist base is significant in Baghdad and the southern Shi’ite provinces because it represents a Shi’ite underclass that viewed Muhammad al-Sadr as a religious authority who cared for them and preached to them when no one else dared to.

This base continues to feel marginalised today, and Muqtada al-Sadr appeals to them as the heir to his father’s position.

On October 10 Iraqis voted in an early election to determine the makeup of the unicameral Council of Representatives, Iraq’s national legislature. It was held months before schedule to meet the demands of a mass protest movement that was calling for sweeping political reform.

With the votes counted, al-Sadr emerged as the head of the largest party in Iraq’s parliament. His Sadrist Movement obtained 72 of the 329 parliamentary seats -- a significant increase compared with the 2018 result, when it won 54 seats.

The Iran-backed Conquest Alliance (Fatah) bloc led by paramilitary leader Hadi Al Amiri, comprising an array of politicians and militia commanders closely linked to Iran, suffered a significant defeat.

They lost two-thirds of their parliamentary seats, securing only 14 seats, a dramatic loss from a 2018 high of 47. However, former Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s State of Law Coalition, who has also been an Iranian ally in the past, won 35 seats.

Al-Sadr claims that the next government will be a Sadrist one and the prime minister a staunch Sadrist. He is most likely to nominate the politically independent current prime minister, Mustafa al-Kadhimi, for a second term.  

But other partners will be needed to form a government and the risk of taking sole responsibility for government failures may mean that he accepts a coalition that reduces the Sadrist identity of the government. So, while he opposes both Tehran and Washington, his status as a kingmaker isn’t guaranteed, as Iran tries to unite all the Shi’ite parties.

Sadr will likely work with other parties, including Sunni Parliamentary Speaker Mohammed al-Halbousi’s Progress Party (37 seats), the Kurdistan Democratic Party (33 seats), and some nominally independent members of parliament (37 in total), to ensure he retains the prerogative to appoint his prime minister of choice.

Tehran has historically been able to bend al-Sadr to its will when necessary and likely believes that a combination of Iranian pressure and his inherent anti-American tendencies will be sufficient to advance Iran’s core strategic objectives: ousting remaining U.S. forces from Iraq and maintaining a non-threatening, Shi’ite-led client state there.

Iranian rhetoric suggests that its leadership is unwilling to dramatically destabilize Iraq just over the election results. Tehran knows that the makeup of Iraqi governments has never been determined by electoral results alone and that its proxies will still have a say in the process.

 

Mozambique is Mired in Warfare and Corruption

By Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottown, PEI] Guardian

Portugal was both the first and last of the great colonial powers and by the 17th century controlled a vast empire stretching from Brazil in the west to Macau in the east. Not until 1974-75 did it finally relinquish its African colonies, which it considered, after 1951, overseas provinces.

Angola, Portuguese Guinea, and Mozambique were not given up peacefully. Unlike the other colonial powers, Portugal’s overseas interests were considered not marginal but central to its economic existence.

Since the Portuguese state was itself a dictatorship, its people, accustomed to authoritarianism at home, were unmoved by authoritarian rule in the colonies.

So in all three, wars of national liberation were waged for years, mainly by left-wing forces. These groups received military support and training from China and the Soviet Union, and therefore had a Marxist or socialist orientation.

The Mozambique Liberation Front (FRELIMO) was formed in 1962 and under the leadership of Samora Machel eventually gained power, so the country was at first governed as a one-party state along rigid Marxist lines.

But by the late 1970s, events were proving how hollow had been the victory of FRELIMO. The socialist policies pursued by the Mozambican leaders were proving disastrous on the economic side and civil war against the regime was also becoming widespread.

An anti-Marxist guerrilla movement called the Nationalist Resistance Movement of Mozambique (RENAMO) began attacking FRELIMO forces and disrupting local services. After a 16-year brutal civil war that ended in 1992, after one million people had died, the two signed the Rome General Peace Accords. Despite sporadic fighting, it was reaffirmed in 2019.

However, the country now faces a new threat, this time from Islamist forces. Extreme poverty, systematic neglect of the population, and conflicts of interest between local, regional, and international powers have provided a breeding ground for radical groups.

What has emerged is a population that is both historically and presently disconnected from the state and state institutions, living in a nearly ungoverned space, lacking in development and infrastructure, resentful of state abandonment, and, unsurprisingly, susceptible to violent extremism.

The conflict has claimed over 3,000 lives and displaced almost another million since the start of the insurgency in 2017 in Cabo Delgado, in the north of the country. The conflict zone is majority Muslim.

In four years the insurgents took control of most of five districts in the northeastern province. Mozambique’s defence forces are widely regarded as corrupt, poorly trained, and ill-equipped.

The region has huge gas and coal reserves and is the site of a $20 billion liquefied natural gas project operated by French energy giant Total.

This past July, President Filipe Nyusi called for foreign help. Rwanda deployed a 1,000-person contingent at Mozambique’s request to support efforts to restore authority. Rwandan forces have now driven out Islamist militants in Cabo Delgado province.

The Rwandan army has also created a 50-kilometre safety zone for the Total gas project. It will retain control of the towns of Mocimboa da Praia and Palma.

“This approach was probably negotiated at the highest political level between Mozambique, France and Rwanda,” according to Elisio Macamo, an expert on African politics at the University of Basel. For France, moving the biggest gas project in Africa forward is vital, and Paris was even prepared to send troops to secure its interests in northern Mozambique.

Throughout 2021 Portugal has been a particularly vocal advocate of increased military assistance to its former colony, and in May 2021 the two countries signed a new military cooperation agreement extending through 2026.

Apart from all this, corruption has become a major concern in Mozambique. A small elite with strong business interests associated with the ruling party dominates the economy.

Between 2013 and 2014, three Mozambican stateowned companies, ProIndicus, Ematum and Mam, took out $2.08 billion in loans. They came from Credit Suisse and the Russian bank VTB, among others. These funds were meant to finance maritime surveillance, fishing, and shipyard projects.

But no projects materialized, and the operation is believed to have covered up extensive corruption for the benefit of people close to the government.

In late August, legal proceedings against 19 defendants began. Ndambi Guebuza, son of former President Armando Guebuza, and Gregorio Leao, former head of the security services, are charged with blackmail, embezzlement, and money laundering.

Manuel Chang, the former finance minister who signed off on the loans about eight years ago, has been in detention in South Africa since 2018. He is charged with accepting $7 million in bribes and awaits extradition.

This, in a country where half of the population of 30 million lives below the poverty line. Its socialist past is now just a memory. Defeating an insurgency militarily will not erase the centuries of socio-political causes driving the conflict.