When I heard Rio had been awarded the 2016 Olympic Games over Chicago, I was conflicted about Chicago's loss, the city where I lived until a couple of months ago. Wandia Njoya perceptively captures why Chicago lost, notwithstanding the syrupy interventions of the Obamas and Oprah that did not move the Olympic officials. She observes that for much of the world the United States remains unloved as an aggressive imperial power despite Obama's election.
One could add that in the post-Cold War, post-9/11, and post-Great Recession worlds, the so-called emerging economies and regions are flexing their global presence more assuredly than ever before as the historic hegemonies of the western powers decline. Chicago's humiliating ouster in the first round of the voting is one more symbol of the erosion of the United States' fearsome sanctions and seductions. It is a sharp reminder of waning American power in the emerging new world order and the global limits of the American self-narrative embodied in President Obama's election.
Rio's victory brought back memories of my visit to that over-romanticized city in 2006. I went there as part of my global research project on African diasporas[1]. My visit to Brazil, a country that holds a special place in the Pan-African imagination, lasted several weeks and coincided for a few days with the Second Conference of Intellectuals from Africa and the Diaspora (CIAD II) convened by the African Union and the Brazilian Government, which was attended by several presidents and many leading intellectuals and artists from Africa and the Americas. The conference was held in Salvador, Bahia, where I moved to after Rio.
In his opening remarks at the conference, President Lula endearingly reminded his guests that Brazil has the second largest African population in the world after Nigeria. He didn't mention the fact that Afro-Brazilians largely remain second class citizens. Below is an entry from my travel journal written on July 14, 2006 when the African delegates to the conference saw a different Brazil, a more unsavory country far from the myths of ‘racial democracy' and carnival conviviality. Personal names have been removed for confidentiality, except for the names of public officials or those who made public presentations.
***********************
July 14, 2006: The CIAD conference ended with political drama. As had become customary over the past two days the conference did not start on time. It started well after the scheduled 10:00 a.m. The morning session was devoted to a series of speeches. It was the third and final plenary on ‘The Need for a Political Pact between Africa and the Diaspora for Peace, Democracy and Development.' Incongruously it was moderated by a delegate from the International Organization for the Francophonie, a white French woman, Christine Desouches. The speeches though were less bland and predictable than during the plenary of the presidents and prime ministers.
The 2004 Nobel Peace Prize winner, Wangari Maathai, was the first to speak. She delivered a short, powerful speech on the indivisible connections between peace and environmentalism, noting that the maldistribution of resources was a major source of conflict, so that environmental protection and justice, equitable access to resources, combined with good, participatory governance are indispensable for sustainable development and human progress.
Gilberto Gil, the Brazilian Minister of Culture, delivered another powerful address paying tribute to the struggles of the black movement for freedom in Brazil and the Pan-Africanist movement in Africa and proclaimed a new pact with Africa for Africa's and Brazil's development. He called for the establishment of networks of teaching, research and cultural exchanges among writers, producers, musicians, and artists and the implementation of a worldwide Africa diaspora network that intervenes in global forums. A new pact was needed among the several Africas of Africa and the diaspora.
Continuing on the theme of a new pact, Frene Ginwala, the former Speaker of the South African Parliament, urged that the new political pact between Africa and the diaspora must be based on the common values of peace, democracy and development; it must recognize the commonality and particularities of experiences. Peace can only be ensured with justice and human security which entails the provision of human rights, respect for diversity, and the protection of people not leaders. International resources must be mobilized for peace and conflicts to end, and there should be no double standards among nations, with one set of standards for the strong and another for the weak. As for democracy, it means more than elections; it is a process that involves the continuous participation of citizens in which civil society and social movements are actively engaged. She poked fun at the U.S. 2000 elections. Intellectuals need to be part of the democratic process as well as of the pact, they must be actively engaged and not act as ivory tower commentators. In turn, governments need to recognize the important role of intellectuals and make space for them. The proposed pact should not be exclusive. We need to shape global agendas, the architecture of the global system. We need to talk about the poor and marginalized everywhere, support multilateralism against unilateralism and speak out against invasions including the recent one in Palestine and condemn state acts of terrorism as ferociously as we condemn other acts of terrorism directed at civilians. She received excited applause, no doubt for her veiled jabs at the United States.
The next two speakers were far less inspiring and were received with ill-disguised impatience. The former President of Cape Verde, Antonio Mascarenhas Monteiro shared his personal recollections of Brazil in his youth, commended the objectives of peace, democracy and development, and lamented the continuing conflicts and poor social conditions in Africa and noted that while some countries had made considerable advances many more were unlikely to achieve the MDGs. The African diasporas could help by trying to influence specific governments to implement the MDG goals, assist in transferring knowledge and investments, and by establishing continuous dialogue.
The Royal Counselor from Morocco, André Azoulay, talked as if Morocco is not a part of Africa by referring to the town of Ginawa and its festival as the face of the real Africa in Morocco, an example of Africa's legendary openness to universality. Later he emphasized Morocco's role in Africa's liberation struggles recalling the role of the Casablanca conference as well as Africa's immense contribution to philosophy, science and the arts. He noted that Africa is both African and Arab in nature and Morocco is a country of cultural synthesis which has been open to all forms of culture and spirituality. For example, Morocco welcomed Jews during the Nazi holocaust. He regretted the rise of retrogressive forces, the onslaught of spiritual and cultural fragmentation in a world ostensibly divided between the globalizers and the globalized. Morocco, he declared, wants to be a full partner in the proposed new pact.
The President of the Supreme Court of Benin, Conceptia Ouinsou, lamented that up till now the diaspora has not been taken into account by African governments at continental and national levels. This was now changing as realization has grown that the diaspora, a historical and contemporary phenomenon, is essential for Africa's development in this era of globalization and new information technologies. It can assist to fight against poverty, in resolving conflicts. As a motor of Africa's transformation, the diaspora must be allowed to participate in African affairs. The question of travel visas for the diaspora needs to be revisited in this context. The audience gave her polite applause.
The cavernous auditorium came back alive when two Afro-Brazilian musicians were asked to speak to counterbalance, Gilberto Gil announced, the impromptu honor given to Stevie Wonder yesterday. The young man wearing baggy jeans, a t-shirt and a cap is a member of a hip hop group. He spoke with passion, stating that the city of Salvador has been mobilized and energized by the conference. The much older singer, who had played at the concert last night, was as powerful and eloquent as Stevie Wonder. She noted that changes in the country enabled the convening of CIAD II in Salvador. She saluted the black movement, condemned the suffering and challenges facing black people in the world, and celebrated the rise of black officials at the highest levels of government including three cabinet ministers for the first time in Brazilian history, and the need for solidarity and more far-reaching interventions to promote the dignity, rights, and status of Afro-Brazilians. The audience rose to its feet, fired up by her raspy, jazzy voice. It was a prelude to what was to come shortly.
It was when Edna Maria Santos Roland was speaking that the demonstration occurred. Roland is the coordinator of the group responsible for monitoring the Durban Declaration and Program of Action. She recounted the context in which the Durban anti-racism conference was held, the U.S. and Israeli boycotts, and how discussions around slavery, the slave trade and reparations, and the Middle East conflict dominated the conference. She noted that soon after were the September 11 terrorist attacks which reflected and reinforced rising tensions in the world.
The demonstrators burst into the staid auditorium with banners, chanting for quotas and against racism. It was electric. We all stood up and many in the audience joined the demonstrators, most of whom were students, in the ecstatic chants and handclapping, as they made their way to the platform to the apparent dismay of some of the officials sitting there. But I saw Roland waiving them forward. Two students went on the dais and read the manifesto, copies of which were later circulated. I recognized the female student from the session at the Federal University of Bahia yesterday afternoon. The manifesto or motion of support read in part:
We, representatives and intellectuals of Africa and the diaspora, gathered at the II CIAD-Conference of Intellectuals from Africa and the Diaspora, in Salvador, Bahia, Brazil, taking place from the 12th to 15th of July 2006, we consider that the racial inequality in Brazil has deep historical roots and this reality will not be modified significantly without the application of specific public policies...
Considering that Brazil has the second biggest black population of the planet and must repair the asymmetries provoked by policies of Brazil's government promoted during the First Republic which granted special benefits to stimulate European immigrants to come to Brazil, at the same time it denied the same benefits to Brazilian afro-descendants.
Considering that the Brazilian system of superior education is one of the most excluding of the world. The average percentage of professors in the Brazilian public universities does not reach 1% when blacks represent 45.6% of the Brazilian population...
We consider that Affirmative Actions, based in the positive discrimination of those injured by historical processes, are the legal means for repairing the degrading effects of racism.
We support, therefore, the National Day of Mobilization in Defense of Quotas (18 August), and that the Brazilian Congress approve, with maximum urgency, the Law of Quotas (PL73/1999 and the Statute of Racial Equality (PL 3, 198/2000).
Then they broke into song, Nkosi Sikelel' iAfrika, the national anthem of the African liberation movement in southern Africa and post-apartheid South Africa. The crowd joined and I saw many Africans in the audience choking with emotion, and a few wiping tears from their eyes. It finally brought home to the African participants, as nothing else could, of the gravity of the racial situation in Brazil, the explosive tensions they had so far been shielded away from in the opulent surroundings of the convention center and their hotels, all located in the affluent white districts of Salvador away from the black, relatively impoverished masses, of the deep racial inequalities that make a mockery of official and white Brazil's professions of racial democracy and Third World solidarity. For that reason, I felt immensely proud of the demonstrators, grateful for their courage, for bringing the conference to reality, for opening the eyes of the African and American delegates, forcing us to offer support and endorse the struggles of our people in this country of vast potential, where the largest African diaspora resides and calls home.
The demonstrators left the hall chanting, singing, and clapping triumphantly and many in the audience followed them. In a little while, the formal speeches continued but in effect, the conference was over; it had ended on a high note unanticipated by the organizers.
I went to lunch with A at his hotel, the Blue, where we were joined by B and C. D and E sat on an adjacent table and we told them about the demonstration they had missed at the convention center. It was a great lunch, full of rich intellectual conversations and lots of banter. A is a fascinating, a man of impressive intellect who is given easily to laughter. He talked about the challenges facing Afro-Brazilians intellectuals and about his own work. He noted that exclusions of Afro-Brazilians are most manifest in medicine, engineering, law and the information technology fields. He originally trained in history and got his Ph.D. in Sociology and Anthropology at the University of Texas at Austin. His work centers on communication, memory and cognition in African diasporas. His Ph.D. was on the role of language as a process of symbolization, the ways in which metaphors and metonyms have been deployed in diaspora societies to construct identities and build resistance in everyday life. He compared the idea of cool in the U.S. African American society, culture and imagination and the idea of ginga in Brazil. He studied in Harlem where he spent a year and Menguera in Rio. He is intrigued by the processes of fusion of African-American coolness with local symbolization as represented for example in Afro-Brazilian hip hop. These interactions and intersections are part of the global-local nexus evident in black representation throughout the diasporas. I mentioned that following what I had witnessed at the demonstration this morning, I would be interested in organizing a project on affirmative action in Brazil, the U.S. and South Africa as a way of promoting diasporic intellectual discourse on constructions of race and public policies that are more intensive and productive than is possible at large conference such as CIAD II[2]. He thought it was a great idea and suggested the inclusion of India where affirmative action debates are rife. We agreed that this would also be a way of bringing in the African diasporas in Asia. He mentioned the conference he had helped organize last October on global African diasporas to which many of my former colleagues from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign came. When we returned to the convention center, I introduced him to my friends from CODESRIA. He is great contact for CODESRIA and all of us seriously interested in working with our Brazilian colleagues.
The afternoon session was taken up by presentations of the conclusions of the debates in which the rapporteurs of the eight sessions gave their reports. They had ten minutes each, but several went over, some almost double the allotted time. Boubacar Barry seemed less interested in summarizing the two history sessions, one of which I had participated in, than in making his own presentation. Shadrack Gutto and Godwin Murunga adhered faithfully to their mandates and provided good summaries. I didn't listen to the rest. It was more fun talking to people and taking pictures in the packed hallways.
Before long, I noticed some commotion over the draft declaration orchestrated by the Senegalese foreign minister who objected to what seemed like a rather innocuous proposal that the ‘African Union should establish a steering committee of intellectuals to assist the Commission of the African Union in the preparation of III CIAD.' Apparently, a permanent mechanism was created after I CIAD located in Dakar. What I found quite objectionable was the arrogant manner in which the minister spoke, the nationalist posturing in a Pan-Africanist conclave, threatening to derail the passage of the declaration. One of his countrymen who wore his graying Afro as if the seventies have never ended tried to reason with him, and so did a friend of mine from CODESRIA. In the meantime, and this time more legitimately, the Brazilians were seeking inclusion of support for a clause on affirmative action and reparations.
The closing session in which the presentation of the Salvador Declration was to be made started long after its scheduled time as the two groups went back and forth with the co-Chairs of CIAD II, Gilberto Gil and Frene Ginwala. In the end, by then it was almost eight, Ginwala called the assembly to order and noted two revisions had been made, first, to accommodate the Senegalese government (it was not said in what way), and second, to include a clause supporting affirmative action and reparations in Brazil. The latter was greeted by the Brazilians and many in the audience with screams of applause. And so CIAD II came to an end; befittingly in recognition of the struggles and demands of Africa's largest diaspora. It was an immensely fascinating moment.
F and I left together back to the Pestana hotel. He mentioned that G and H wanted us to call them when we returned to the hotel and have dinner together. H regaled us with stories of the adventures it took to bring Stevie Wonder to CIAD II on the opening day. H is a fantastic story teller. It was a pleasure to watch her and G, their fondness for each other, the way they look and listen to each other, the smiles and pride on their faces as the other is talking. I recalled my fascination when I first met them together at a conference at Rutgers university.
After dinner, we decided to go and listen to music. H had a car and a driver--the privileges of knowing and coming with Steve Wonder, we teased her. We were first driven to a club that, from the lines outside, seemed all-white--young white yuppies or children of the Salvodorian white elite. H remarked that she hadn't come all the way from Los Angeles to be at such a club. We looked for a more racially mixed and friendly venue but couldn't find one. We ended up at a less ostentatious joint where a live band was playing. But even here, there were hardly any blacks, except for one woman waiter and one male musician. We resigned ourselves and did more talking than listening to the music.
From the club we drove to Pelourihno, the predominantly black part of town to a hotel where F and G were also booked. Two hotel rooms in two different parts of the city, money talks indeed, I thought to myself. The hotel was converted from a Catholic nunnery. It has beautifully decorated corridors, well manicured gardens in the middle, and lovely verandahs. We sat outside the restaurant and were served some light snacks of smoked salmon and freshly made strawberry juice for me and wine for F and G, which they seemed to enjoy thoroughly, while H mixed her sips of wine with fruit juice. We kept coming back to the demonstration and the glaring contradictions of Brazil, the superficial social harmony the country likes to sell to the outside world and the harsh realities of systemic racism, the embrace of Africa in Brazilian culture and the denigration of blackness in Brazilian society. A couple of times the hotel's food and beverages manager came and talked to us at length about his love for his job. The first time it was cute, the second time a little irksome. He seemed clearly enchanted by us, our apparent cosmopolitan familiarity and difference.
The driver didn't seem in the least perturbed when he drove F and I back to the Pestana hotel at such an ungodly hour. On the way, F raved about G and H who he had met at the Johannesburg international airport on his way to the CIAD II conference. He was impressed by their intelligence, artistic souls, and charm. I marveled at the complicated conditions and circuits of the pan-African world, the joys and sorrows, the tragedies and triumphs, the continuous struggles. When I got to my room, I could hardly believe it. I couldn't recall the last time I had stayed up so late club hopping!
Notes
1. Over the past four years, the project has taken me to fifteen countries in South America, the Caribbean, Europe, North America, and Asia in each of which I kept a daily travel journal like reproduced here. The travelogues are under preparation for publication.
2. I eventually developed a project entitled, "Rethinking Race and Affirmative Action in the U.S. and South Africa," which in 2008 received a grant of $250,000 from the Ford Foundation. Unfortunately, Brazil had to be dropped because of funding constraints. The project involves faculty at the University of Illinois at Chicago where I was then distinguished professor and head of the Department of African American Studies and the University of Cape Town where I have an appointment as an honorary professor.
