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SIR VIDIA'S DARKEST SHADOW: V.S. Naipaul (1934-2018)
16 min read.
Naipaul's racism appears to have been transactional right-wingery by one who knew there was a cash-paying audience that loved that sound. By A.K. KAIZA
A. K. Kaiza
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The first and only time I saw him, Sir Vidia looked frail. Face like a mask, pudgy fingers suspiciously handling the microphone, and eyebrows firmly chiseled in place, he looked as though he had been dragged to school on a day he would have rather stayed home in bed. That day, Sir Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul was at Makerere University, replaying the character he had played four decades earlier, as misanthrope in residence. The Naipaul event was immediately after lunch on a late March afternoon. The sun was beaming down directly over the equator and I remember the hall being hot with precipitation.
It's a decade now since that March 2008 afternoon. Looking back, it seems that V.S. Naipaul, sitting there in Makerere University's Main Hall, looked like a piece of wood carving. Like one of those giant Chinese wood reliefs, there was his grand magnificence. The brilliance of his finish was outstanding. And this magnificence, this brilliance, was all the more magnified because he was forever on the verge of becoming, tantalising the audience with the possibility that this rendering might come alive.
Arrested in 2D by a physique in distress, Naipaul's dyspeptic mien marked the entire afternoon. He kept sinking into his chair, till at the end of the event we could only see his head and shoulders. Perhaps he had come expecting a hostile audience. Perhaps it was the heat and the stuffy air. Maybe he had been unwell. Maybe it was the sight of us, a room full of black people.
A farcical afternoon. Exhibit A: What was Naipaul doing in Makerere? Who comes to Makerere anymore? Even ten years before that, when I had been a student there, we had not thought we could rate a writer, even a third-rate one. And here was a Nobel laureate, Sir Vidia, in person.
Had he come to mock us – again? But seated there in plain sight, Mr. Naipaul looked done with mockery. He had mocked Trinidad. He had mocked India. He had mocked Africa. He had found Ugandans disgusting. He had been the founding CEO and majority shareholder of the flourishing global literary corporation of jibing sneers.
That was back in the day when he looked chipper, when Makerere – the university – had been of enough value to make a killing out of mocking. By 2008, Makerere ("Maka Ray Ray" as Naipaul reportedly pronounced it) was too far gone for anybody to be interested in mockery or disdain. By 2008, the mocking of black people for profit had been tarnished for a while, which meant that the days of Naipaul's unqualified standing as a brilliant truth teller were behind him. "Controversial" had replaced "brilliant", "controversial" being what you call an oaf you are too fond of to let go despite mounting evidence of his oafishness. Even in its time, "brilliant" had been used by certain British right-wing media in a way that you felt meant Naipaul gave the n****rs what they deserved.
We, the few hundreds of us, and Naipaul, who we had all come to stare at, could not have been more mismatched. Right there you could understand why the first time round in the 1960s, Mr. Naipaul had been unenthused about actually having to live in Makerere.
We, as no doubt our fathers' generation had been then, were not very impressive specimens. Too black for our own good, we were too frayed around the racial edges. We squatted at the university, unable to fit in with the masonry and the woodwork, which had been cut for Europeans. Unaware of the value of glass windows and flush toilets, we had run down a once famous university. We came from the bush to line up for maizemeal and boiled beans in dining halls built for three-course meals with salad dressing.
There was everything imperfect about us. We had not invented the wheel. We had never manufactured steam locomotives. We still imported, rather than made, paper, which meant that we were still attempting to beat out novels on drums. Yes, we still did that, make drums, and still beat them. Civilisation was wasted on us. And outside the hall, footpaths crisscrossed the once immaculate green lawns laid out in the 1930s and 1940s by Oxbridge visionaries. Six decades after Prof. C.S. Turner transformed the technical school founded in 1922 into a university, tribalism had long become the most important criterion for staff appointments.
Naipaul's coming hence, four decades since he had last been, could have been for any number of reasons. Self-flagellation would not have been the least of possibilities. Material for a new book? Why? He was a brilliant writer. Could he not have invented some sordid tales about us from England, where they had been inventing marvelous things (and steam engines) for centuries?
His was a complexity of prose, rather than of ideas, so why the effort? If he was gathering material for a book, why fly so far when he was already in his 70s?
And us? Why did we turn up? We had never been enthralled by any of the things he had said about us. The admiration we had for his prose style outstripped our love for his books. But we had admired him because we wished that the people with power liked us as much as they liked him. We wanted his good luck (which can look like agreeing with him). Were we self-flagellating too? Could we not have simply read his comments from the safety of our houses? Or was some sado-masochist strain still alive within us?
The collision was utterly unavoidable, a true literary crash. A room filled with the undesirable, coming to an unwanted event to see an unpleasant guest. And that, more rather than less, summarises Naipaul's oeuvre. In this iteration, hostile questions from the audience: a university lecturer asking a clever question about Tagore, and Naipaul, sensing his Indian roots intruded upon, rapidly slaps it down. Poor chap, he had spent his life teaching V.S. Naipaul books, and had stayed awake all night choosing which question would be best for the event. Next, a Ugandan of Asian descent takes too long with the mic, speaking up too fondly, getting on Nadira's nerves and deserving what was coming his way; Lady Naipaul cuts him cold and says, next question?
If nothing else, this ping-pong moment was it. Naipaul was in town, game on. Right on cue, Lady Naipaul took charge. She had become the moderator, leaning forward all afternoon while Naipaul slunk back in his chair. The real moderator must have wondered if he had come to the wrong stage.
Naipaul murmured his responses. One thing he said still rings clear in my memory. He said "Africa came to me intuitively. It was not by searching."
And then the hall emptied. Naipaul shuffled out. The thick entourage that had brought him in taking him out.
Like everyone else present, my journey to that afternoon had begun long ago, albeit in my case, not far away from that hall. Two decades earlier, I had gone to secondary school at Makerere College School, tucked inside the university itself, and read my first Naipaul book there. On the morning of his visit, I had packed my copies of Naipaul's books, just like you do when you go to a speaking event and the author will be present, and afterwards you line up and confess your besotted heart, and the author, having to wear a droll, heard-it-all-before face, nonetheless signs the books with a flourish. I looked at my collection: a 1957 edition of The Mystic Masseur that I had procured from a flea market and the still fresh-smelling Enigma of Arrival reissued after the Nobel Prize of 2001. I recollected the contents of that, and of another book, Sir Vidia's Shadow (hatchet job on Naipaul by one-time disciple, the American writer, Paul Theroux).
I then remembered how the opening of The Middle Passage had alerted me to something alarming about Naipaul that only expanded in later books and became all you saw in him. Some things not even magnificent prose could conceal.
I left the books on the top of the workbench in my workshop and headed out for Makerere. Naipaul's wife Nadira and the university's literature department staff staged a praetorian guard around him, an impenetrable phalanx of reverence. Asking him to sign books was impossible. Naipaul looked like he would suffer a mental breakdown if an African spoke to him. By day's end, he looked like he needed to see a doctor. Still, he might have persevered and signed the books, and you would have had to throw them away later.
There was something terribly Naipaulish about the university that stuffy afternoon. Eighteen years before, at the age of 14, when my journey to that afternoon commenced, I had read my first Naipaul, Miguel Street, on Makerere hill at Makerere College School. The edition I read had a foreword by Laban Erapu that mentioned Naipaul's time in Uganda. I had assumed then that Naipaul was Ugandan.
Miguel Street – that sardonically cheerful primer, of which there had not been that many copies in the school – had exchanged hands many times among us kids and we talked much about it. It had been something of a staple. You had to know Miguel Street. Elias and the posse of Bogart et al, their comical putter, the mother with as many husbands as children. A sing-song toned collection of stories, curious names, absurd accents. Miguel Street was the book from a man who had a twinkly view of life as a thing to be had to the full. We related to these tales. We laughed.
It was in this mind-frame that five years later, in 1995, I had picked up from the university library an old copy of A House for Mr. Biswas. I half-expected to find in this book the loveable characters from Miguel Street. Certain things were similar. Mohun went off to England, to study, as Elias had dreamt.
Back in the 1990s, with Empire still within striking cultural memory, we too had dreamt of going to English universities. We were starting off from the same place as Naipaul, his clutch of characters so recognisable to us, their sense of the future our own. You understood that fever in A House for Mr. Biswas.
What drove Naipaul's characters was what drove us. Empire had emptied its subject populations of their subjective selves and their metaphysical heritage, which had been replaced by England, Oxford, high tea, biscuit and crumpets, Piccadilly. An equal opportunity impoverisher, the British Empire had left penury and hurt in so many parts of the world that a book from any of these parts tended to speak to all parts. What a Sir Hathorn Hall committed in Aden, or Trinidad, he repeated in Uganda – serial murderers leaving tell-tale signatures of their deeds dotted along the grim, imperial trail.
Naturally, we got Trinidad.
What drove Naipaul's characters was what drove us. Empire had emptied its subject populations of their subjective selves and their metaphysical heritage, which had been replaced by England, Oxford, high tea, biscuit and crumpets, Piccadilly. An equal opportunity impoverisher, the British Empire had left penury and hurt in so many parts of the world that a book from any of these parts tended to speak to all parts.
Empire had taught us to believe in the same things and we had come to believe in them. We dreamt of red letter boxes. Oh, but these lucky red letter boxes lived in London.
As I read deeper, I began to protest. A House for Mister Biswas got heavy. Some leaded weight pulled down the mirth of Miguel Street to darker places. Still you soldiered on, expecting some lift, a sliver of sunlight. Yes, you would always remember Mrs. Tulsi. One day I thought I found her running a bakery in Kampala. And then I thought I met Mr. Biswas himself nursing big-time literary ambitions as a sourpuss editor in a newsroom.
The darkness in the novels was piling up, getting heavier, in that way readers know when the plot has advanced to that point where you size up the remaining pages and determine them too few for the story to work its way back to a different tenor.
I was young and not entirely appraised of what novels were capable of. As young readers tend to, I simply thought I had landed on the wrong novel. Another Naipaul might bring back that Miguel Street thing. In the meantime, A House for Mr. Biswas was teaching me just how serious novels could be. They could also detail stark-real ugliness. The novelist did not have to imagine, as a pot boiler author had to; he could simply observe. Mr. Naipaul made you see how it was possible to weld art into social reality. He made half a millennium of globalising history his material.
Naipaul could be called the Anti-Jane Austen. Miss Austen had examined the same history; you must see through her writing to know it is detailing crimes of history. But she had seen only the other side: the English manors, the indolence, the unbelievable wealth that the slave trade had made possible in the English countryside. She never questioned where the wealth of the characters in her novels came from. She never asked what those young men in need of a wife did when they went overseas. Naipaul laid out the exhibits.
The exhibits – the deformed progeny of Empire's victims, the craven, the dehumanised – were his material (a Naipaul word). He looked with the dispassionate temper of a forensics expert. These novels were not for escapist reading. It seemed to me that this was as serious as writing would ever get. Naipaul's craft made everybody else seem to be winging it, wanting it, sleight-of-hand bathos that quickly drained you of interest. Others write so their brilliance could be praised. Naipaul? His was meditation, a haloed temple of letters. He had convened a one-man caucus and solely written a constitution of looking. To have not seen the world as Naipaul had seen it was to have been guilty of sheer unconstitutional acts. The writer was chief justice, high priest.
There had been Graham Greene; but he could be unconvincing in the role, and he tended to overdo the disgust. There had been Joseph Conrad, but he had tended towards sentimentality. Ernest Hemingway had haunted the same geography as Naipaul. Against what Naipaul had to say, the American was a mere flower girl. Hemmingway loved Kenya; he just never saw Africans (natives, savages) the entire time. Naipaul saw Africans; he was grimly aware of us.
At the age of 20, when I read A House for Mr. Biswas, I could not as yet tell what that thing was, what had made Naipaul's voice so stately, for I was sure that it was a stately voice. I had not found any of Miguel Street in it. Rather, I emerged from A House for Mr. Biswas overawed by grandeur. The plunge to pathos happened with the steadiness of a murderer strangling his victim. An unrelenting vision of dystopia.
I was in my 20s when I got the full measure of Mr. Naipaul. By then, Uganda had begun to normalise; books were available once more and we had been liberated from borrowing dog-eared texts from friends and relatives. That was when I began to tell that the early books of Naipaul were fundamentally different from his later books, books of he wrote between his late 30s and into his 50s.
The overriding themes of the early books is escape from the colony. The barbs of later years were already there, the mockery, the casual racism; except back then Naipaul thought of them as jokes. The later books are about settling in, and once that project got underway, the books became about the world, its expansiveness. But also about sharpening. Mr. Naipaul begins to grind and file and sand his prose, the sharp defining of edges, the details focused on. His prose knows what to search for, with just the right emphasis, a few strokes that hint at a larger form without overstating. He was becoming a master craftsman.
The novels carry something extra, a certain uncheerful enjoyment even. Ralph Singh, the protagonist narrator of The Mimic Men, has that quality. The Mimic Men signalled the arrival of the man who would later write The Enigma of Arrival.
And then there were the travel writings. The Middle Passage brings to life the Caribbean in ways you, as an outsider, are grateful to Mr. Naipaul for, even though you have a pile of indictments against him. Then in India, in An Area of Darkness, Naipaul goes for broke. He writes with an urgency he has hitherto not displayed, nor will again. One feels, reading the travelogue, that Mr. Naipaul writes faster than he sees. He arrives in Bombay like a tightly-packed grenade, the ejector of a lifetime's hearing, reading, expecting, ready to go off. This book defined Naipaul like no other. In comparison, there is something processional about The Middle Passage, a processionalness you find in his Caribbean books, novels and travelogues. Explosions, of theme and prose, don't go off. But they contain the toxins and poisons that came out of Naipaul whenever he met black people.
Naipaul went out of his way, beyond necessity, in a Trumpian gratuitousness, to mock black people even when there was no discernible literary gain. He made no effort to engage with black people. He treated Indians with less contempt, but the derision was still there. It might look like he gave some thought to Ramnath the "steno" in An Area of Darkness, or to Jivan, but no. It is fascinating how decidedly uncurious Naipaul's brand of curiosity was.
His first book on India may have been his most connected (Naipaul was drawn to India), but it was written by a man trapped in a certain view of colonial peoples. Even from the depth of Africa, we could tell that Naipaul failed to see that India was a bigger place than his commentaries offered. Jivan's refusal to stop sleeping on the pavements despite having a job and owning a taxi is interpreted by Naipaul as India's foolhardy attachment to the Gita, Hinduism's religious text. To the rest of us, Jivan was displaying an imperviousness to colonialism's and capitalism's crass anti-metaphysics. For me, this vignette of Jivan was too two-dimensional. After all, by the 1960s, Naipaul's view of "conquered" peoples was already antiquated, even amongst the ranks of colonial anthropologists, who had a more nuanced view of colonised peoples.
In Naipaul's world, we Africans are "Negroes" with "physique", "nursing racial injustice". There is always the hint of violence towards us when we appear in his books. In The Mimic Men, we show up at the British Council, garishly dressed up, the gold-rimmed spectacles Naipaul places on us are there so that they can clash against the darkness of our skins. We expect "sex" like a tribute, a right, because we are racially wronged. But that's in the diaspora. In Africa, in A Free State (so now we come to Uganda, although the reason Mr. Naipaul came to Uganda in the 1960s was so he could write The Mimic Men), we are deeply indolent, with our bush ways and our lazy eyes. We are a backdrop to Europeans lives, and often the backdrop to breaking European marriages.
Deep into his career, Mr. Naipaul, like Ganesh Ramsumair in The Mystique Masseur, adopted the identity of an Englishman with an Oxbridge accent that replaced his Caribbean intonation. Ganesh, the shape-shifting artist, remains an enigma in Naipaul's oeuvre. Who is he? What does he mean? What indeed do these middling characters in Naipaul mean? They people his writing entirely, the Jimmy's of Guerrillas, the characters upon whom instances are mounted? As if of necessity, the author is decidedly nasty to these sorts. They are de riguer (a la Naipaul), angry, pretentious, dangerous, always without fail, dark-skinned. Naipaul is afraid of them. He is also violent towards them.
Is understanding these mid-level characters key to understanding the politics of Naipaul? Why is Naipaul afraid of them? One clue, but no overall explainer, is that they have a politics. They are confronting Empire. They are the reverse of the Naipaul hero, if that is not an oxymoron. They are not enthusiastic about Oxbridge accents. They are not changing names from Ganesh Ramsumair to G. Ramsay Muir (a typical Naipaul joke of the earlier books). They are changing names from James to Haji or Ngugi.
But do we have a right to be brutal in our assessment of Mr. Naipaul? He was born at a time when Empire looked like extending and consolidating, rather than crushing. How deep did the psychology of that go? For him to have written as he did, to see the world through only one measure (Britain, Europe) – a measure in which other races failed to measure up, a measure in which being African ("bow and arrow people"), Arab ("Mr. Woggy") was failure in itself, speaks of something other than penetrative insight. To not allow for the validity of a different world is to have been immensely delimited. But might Mr. Naipaul have escaped it? Was it necessary for him to have been the writer and the man he was in order for him to see with clarity?
It would be simplistic to say that the need, indeed, the entire undertaking of having to fight for liberation, was too much for Naipaul. His position on the most important movement of the 20th century (independence from colonial rule) might be described as ambivalent, except, if you are ambivalent about freedom, then what exactly are your values?
It could be as simple as this: Mr. Naipaul was that all-too-typical, but special, victim of Empire, the favoured colonial subject. There was divide and rule – some colonised people were considered less savage than others, people who displayed almost-white qualities. These divisions marked the entire breadth of Empire, from the aristocrats of Buganda (convinced into collaboration by effusive British praise), to the Tutsi of Rwanda (whose position the Belgians tragically imperiled by calling them semi-white Africans), to the Singhala of Sri Lanka (treated more favourably than the black Tamils). In the Caribbean, the indentured Indian labourers were taken to the Atlantic, not as slaves, as the black Africans had been. It is very important to remember that. It was this thin substratum of Empire that tended to oppose liberation movements. They actively collaborated, often virulently, as in the case of Kenya, against fellow Africans, in the fight for independence.
In Empire, this modicum of elevation from the bottom was very important and so when the British said you were not that dark, not that negroid, your status protected you against slavery and forced labour. This bred its own psychosis. We may want to describe Naipaul in elevated terms, but his own unease once in India (he finds the land of his forefathers too unhygienic) speaks of this. The elevated elite in Empire knew that once they accepted the bribe of racial elevation, they would become accomplices. It was hence in their interest to perpetuate colonial rule, for once it ended, their position would become terribly exposed. The liberation fighters whom Naipaul mocks were a threat against the collaborator class.
In Empire, this modicum of elevation from the bottom was very important and so when the British said you were not that dark, not that negroid, your status protected you against slavery and forced labour. This bred its own psychosis.
When the worst came, the bargain was to choose the racialist humiliation because the patronising treatment at least guaranteed some goods. Mr. Naipaul's English reviewers perhaps understood this – a brown man acknowledging the hegemony, affirming that the Empire was appreciated by the middle races (hence at least intelligent) as civilisation. They praised his books at a time when they were fighting a losing battle against their black subjects.
You could understand the racism of Joseph Conrad. But Naipaul? The relationship of his narrators to Europeans is telling. It is always to prove how they are better than white people. There are the clueless young white people whom his narrators are proud to dominate intellectually. The white women in his books have to be degraded; the violence and contempt with which his characters treat them appears like the acting-out of suppressed rage. White people are his main audience and he must show them how he is neither Negroid nor Indian. These are the people who either granted or denied scholarships to the Eliases of Miguel Street.
It was thus easy to be bullied into calling V.S. Naipaul a brilliant writer. But you had to have occupied his very position – to have had an ambivalent position towards the colonial project – to have called him so. What you needed was just that much politic education to see that the 20th century was changed by the men and women despised in Mr. Naipaul's books. To understand the minds of those who imprisoned Nelson Mandela for 27 years, you have to absorb Naipaul. His was one of the attitudes that had to be defeated for people of colour to become free.
It was important for me to go through Mr. Naipaul's books after his death. But the realisation that I was reading him the last time in this involved manner, with the heat with which I once did when the writing was not yet done, when he was still around, was hard.
Now Naipaul's forced racism – for it feels like that – does not really feel like that. Rather, it appears to be transactional right-wingery by a certain savvy type who knew there was a cash-paying audience that loved that sound.
By A. K. Kaiza
A.K. Kaiza is a Ugandan writer and journalist.
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V.S Naipaul
Hatred and Self Loathing: Naipaul's colonial shame
Speak of Me as I Am: Reflections on Aid and Regime Change in Ethiopia
We can call the kind of intrusive donor clientelism that Cheeseman is recommending Good Governance 2.0. His advocacy for strengthening patron-client relations between western donors and African governments, and his urging that donors use crises as a way of forcing regime change and policy conditionalities, is ahistorical, counterproductive and morally indefensible.
Jimi O. Adesina, Andrew M. Fischer and Nimi Hoffmann
In a piece, published on 22 December 2020, that he describes as the most important thing he wrote in 2020, Nick Cheeseman penned a strong criticism of what he calls the 'model of authoritarian development' in Africa. This phrase refers specifically to Ethiopia and Rwanda, the only two countries that fit the model, which is otherwise not generalisable to the rest of the continent. His argument, in a nutshell, is that donors have been increasingly enamoured with these two countries because they are seen as producing results. Yet the recent conflict in the Tigray region of Ethiopia shows that this argument needs to be questioned and discarded. He calls for supporting democracy in Africa, which he claims performs better in the long run than authoritarian regimes, especially in light of the conflicts and repression that inevitably emerge under authoritarianism. His argument could also be read as an implicit call for regime change, stoking donors to intensify political conditionalities on these countries before things get even worse.
Cheeseman's argument rests on a number of misleading empirical assertions which have important implications for the conclusions that he draws. In clarifying these, our point is not to defend authoritarianism. Instead, we hope to inject a measure of interpretative caution and to guard against opportunistically using crises to fan the disciplinary zeal of donors, particularly in a context of increasingly militarised aid regimes that have been associated with disastrous ventures into regime change.
We make two points. First, his story of aid dynamics in Ethiopia is not supported by the data he cites, which instead reflect the rise of economic 'reform' programmes pushed by the World Bank and IMF. The country's current economic difficulties also need to be placed in the context of the systemic financial crisis currently slamming the continent, in which both authoritarian and (nominally) democratic regimes are faring poorly.
Second, we reflect on Cheeseman's vision of aid as a lever of regime change. Within already stringent economic adjustment programmes, his call for intensifying political conditionalities amounts to a Good Governance Agenda 2.0. It ignores the legacy of the structural adjustment programmes in subverting deliberative governance on the continent during the 1980s and 1990s.
Misleading aid narratives distract from rebranded structural adjustment
On the first point, Cheeseman establishes his argument early on by stating 'that international donors have become increasingly willing to fund authoritarian regimes in Africa on the basis that they deliver on development'. In support of this assertion, he cites a table from the World Bank that shows net Official Development Assistance (ODA) received by Ethiopia surging to USD 4.93 billion in 2018, up from just over USD 4 billion in 2016 and 2017, and from a plateau oscillating around USD 3.5 billion from 2008 to 2015.
These aggregated data are misleading because ODA received by Ethiopia from western bilateral donors in fact fell in 2018 (and probably continued falling in 2019 and 2020). The World Bank data that he cites are actually from the OECD Development Assistance Committee (DAC) statistics, which refer to all official donors (but not including countries such as China). If we restrict donor assistance to DAC countries – which is relevant given that Cheeseman only refers to the US, the UK and the EU in his piece – disbursed ODA to Ethiopia fell from USD 2.26 billion in 2017 to USD 2.06 billion in 2018 (see the red line in the figure below).
Figure: ODA to Ethiopia (millions USD), 2000-2019
Source: OECD.stat, last accessed 30 December 2020.
There was a brief moderate increase in DAC country ODA starting in 2015 and peaking in 2017. Cheeseman might have been referring to this. However, contrary to his argument, it was likely that the reason for this increase in aid was primarily humanitarian, responding to the refugee influx from South Sudan that began in 2015 and to the severe drought and famine risk in 2016-17. It was also probably related to attempts to induce incipient political reform following the major protests in Oromia in 2014, which Cheeseman would presumably condone given that conventional measures of democracy and freedom improved in 2018. Indeed, it is notable that committed ODA from DAC donor countries fell even more sharply than disbursed aid in 2018, from USD 2.49 billion in 2017 to USD 2.07 billion, reflecting the context in which these countries were negotiating hard with the Ethiopian government at the time.
Instead, the sharp increase in ODA in 2018 came entirely from the International Development Association (IDA) of the World Bank Group, which increased its mixture of grants and loans to the country from USD 1.1 billion in 2017 to USD 2.1 billion in 2018. This subsequently fell to USD 1.8 billion in 2019 (the dashed green line in the figure).
Such ODA has been explicitly tied to the World Bank's long-standing goal of liberalising, privatising and deregulating the Ethiopian economy, thereby 'reforming' (or disassembling) many of the attributes that have allowed the Ethiopian state to act in a developmentalist manner. These attributes include state-owned enterprises, state control over the financial sector, and relatively closed capital accounts, in strong distinction to most other countries in Africa (including Rwanda).
For instance, in October 2018 it approved USD 1.2 billion from the IDA in support of 'a range of economic reforms designed to revitalize the economy by expanding the role of the private sector… to gradually open up the economy and introduce competition to and liberalize sectors that have been dominated by key state-owned enterprises (SOEs)'. The support aimed to promote public-private partnerships in key state-owned sectors such as telecoms, power and trade logistics as key mechanisms to restructure these sectors, as well as broader deregulation and financial liberalisation. It is also notable that the World Bank prefaced this justification by emphasising the political reforms that had already been embarked upon, and the promotion of 'citizen engagement social accountability' in Ethiopia.
In other words, contra the idea that western donors have been increasing their support for an authoritarian development model, they have been gradually withdrawing aid since 2017. The World Bank pulled up the slack in 2018, and in December 2019 both the World Bank and IMF promised more funding in support of ongoing economic reforms. The economic liberalisation has in turn undermined political liberalisation and has been a key source of political destabilization.
The bargaining hand of these donors has been reinforced by the economic difficulties faced by the Ethiopian economy – in particular, a hard tightening of external foreign-exchange constraints. Balance of payments statistics reveal that the government had effectively stopped external borrowing after 2015, a policy that it was advised to adopt in its Article IV consultations with the IMF in 2016 and 2017 as its external debt distress levels were rising. As a result, the government became excessively reliant on donor grant money as a principal source of foreign financing. Yet the country continued to run deep trade deficits, in large part because its development strategies, as elsewhere in Africa, have been very import and foreign-exchange intensive (e.g. think of the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam, requiring more than USD 4.6 billion to build, the bulk in foreign exchange). Significant capital flight appears to have taken place as well; for example, errors and omissions reported on the balance of payments were -USD 2.14 billion in 2018. In order to keep the ship afloat, the central bank burnt through over USD 1 billion of its reserves in 2018 alone.
Contra the idea that western donors have been increasing their support for an authoritarian development model, they have been gradually withdrawing aid since 2017
This severe tightening of foreign-exchange constraints needs to be understood as a critical structural factor in causing the development strategy to stall. Along with non-economic factors, this in turn put considerable strain on the government's ability to stabilise political factions through the deployment of scarce resources, of which foreign exchange remains among the most important, especially in the current setting. Again, the point is not to apologise for authoritarianism, but rather to emphasise that the current situation is rooted deeper within a conjuncture of systemic crises that go far beyond any particular form of political administration.
Indeed, Cheeseman commits a similar oversight in ignoring the previous systemic crisis that the present is in many ways repeating. Later in his piece, he asserts: 'The vast majority of African states were authoritarian in the 1970s and 1980s, and almost all had poor economic growth.' This is an ahistorical misrepresentation of the profound global crisis that crippled Africa from the late 1970s for about two decades and which was the source of the poor growth he mentions. Then, as now, economic crisis was triggered throughout the continent by the severe tightening of external constraints, which neoliberal structural adjustment programmes exacerbated in a pro-cyclical manner despite being justified in the name of growth. The combination crippled developmentalist strategies across the continent regardless of political variations and despite the fact that many countries were performing quite well before the onset of the crisis. Such historical contextualisation is crucial for a correct assessment of the present.
Along with non-economic factors, this in turn put considerable strain on the government's ability to stabilise political factions through the deployment of scarce resources, of which foreign exchange remains among the most important, especially in the current setting.
In this respect, there is a danger of putting the cart before the horse. Most countries that descend into deep protracted crises (economic or political) generally stop being nominally democratic, and yet this result becomes attributed as a cause, as if authoritarianism results in crisis or poor performance. Cheeseman cherry-picks two papers (one a working paper) on democracy and development performance in Africa (which like all cross-country regressions, are highly sensitive to model specification and open to interpretation). However, drawing any causality from such studies is problematic given that states tended to become more authoritarian after the global economic crisis and subsequent structural adjustments of the late 1970s and 1980s, not the other way around. For instance, 16 countries were under military rule in 1972, compared with 21 countries in 1989 during the height of adjustment. Faced with crippled capacity under the weight of severe austerity and dwindling legitimacy as living standards collapsed, many states responded to mass protests against the harsh conditionalities of adjustment with increasing force. As such, economic crisis and adjustment plausibly contributed to the rise of political instability and increasingly authoritarian regimes. Other factors include the Cold War destabilisation, which western countries fuelled and profited from. In other words, the political malaise across Africa at the time was driven by as much by external as internal factors.
Aid as a lever of regime change
This leads us to our second point concerning Cheeseman's vision of aid as a lever of regime change. Cheeseman is at pains to emphasise that rigged elections and repression of opponents have contributed to the recent emergence of conflict in the Tigray region. While these are important features, Ethiopian intellectuals have also emphasised that conflicts in contemporary Ethiopia have taken place against a history of imperial state formation, slavery and debates about the 'national question', or what has sometimes been called 'internal colonialism'. These conflicts are shaped by the system of ethnic federalism, in which ethnically defined states control their own revenues, social provisioning and security forces. They have been affected by foreign agricultural land grabs, which interact with older histories of semi-feudal land dispossession. Most recently, there have been concerns that regional tensions over the Renaissance Dam and agricultural land may help draw neighbouring countries into the conflict.
In the face of this highly complex and rapidly changing context, no one person can identify the optimal response. It plausibly requires regular collective deliberation by people who are deeply embedded in the context. In particular, the brief political liberalisation of 2018 was followed by a sharp uptick of political violence on all sides, rooted in fundamental tensions between different visions of statehood. Such situations cannot be solved simply by 'adding democracy and stirring'; they require deliberative governance.
Yet, Cheeseman's piece seeks a reimposition of the very political conditionalities that were a primary factor in subverting deliberative governance on the continent during the first wave of structural adjustment and its attendant Good Governance agendas. Such conditionalities work by constraining the open contestation of ideas and the process of informed consensus-building. They undermine the sovereignty of key institutions of the polity and the economy. And by doing so they degrade the historical meaning of development as a project of reclaiming social and economic sovereignty after colonialism.
Indeed, as Thandika Mkandawire has argued, the previous wave of political conditionalities and democratisation reduced democracies to formal structures of elections and, by wedding and subordinating them to the orthodox economic policy frameworks established under structural adjustment, led to what he called 'choiceless democracies'. Such 'disempowered new democracies' are incapable of responding to the substantive macroeconomic demands of voters and thereby undermining substantive democracy, deliberative governance and policy sovereignty.
In particular, the idea of a democratic developmental state is meaningless in the absence of policy sovereignty. The institutional monocropping and monotasking of the type that Mkandawire wrote about does not merely prevent key institutions, such as central banks, from using broader policy instruments to support the developmental project. It also involves the deliberate creation of unaccountable policy vehicles, such as Monetary Policy Committees (MPCs), which operate outside of democratic oversight, but have considerable hold on the levers of economic policy. MPCs are in turn wedded to neoliberal monetarism. The message to such disempowered new democracies is that 'you can elect any leader of your choice as long as s/he does not tamper with the economic policy that we choose for you.' Or as Mkandawire wrote in 1994, 'two or three IMF experts sitting in a country's reserve bank have more to say than the national association of economists about the direction of national policy.'
As Thandika Mkandawire has argued, the previous wave of political conditionalities and democratisation reduced democracies to formal structures of elections and, by wedding and subordinating them to the orthodox economic policy frameworks established under structural adjustment, led to what he called 'choiceless democracies'
In such contexts, the prospect of a democratic developmental state is severely diminished. Ensuring significant improvements in people's wellbeing is important for the legitimacy of democracies. Yet the subversion of policy sovereignty significantly constrains the ability of new democracies to do so, setting them up for a crisis of legitimacy.
If democracy is to be meaningful it should involve the active engagement of citizens in a system of deliberative governance. Civil society organisations, in this context, are meaningful when they are autonomous institutions of social groupings that actively engage in boisterous debate and public policymaking in articulating the interest of their members. Yet, donor clientelism in Africa has wrought civil society and advocacy organisations that are manufactured and funded by, and accountable to, donors, not the citizens. This is a substantive subversion of democracy as a system of deliberative governance.
In this respect, we can call the kind of intrusive donor clientelism that Cheeseman is recommending Good Governance 2.0. His advocacy for strengthening patron-client relations between western donors and African governments, and his urging that donors use crises as a way of forcing regime change and policy conditionalities, is ahistorical, counterproductive and morally indefensible. In particular, it does not take into account the destructive, anti-democratic role of western-backed regime change and policy conditionality across the Global South during the era of flag independence. Even recently, these donor countries have disastrous human rights records when pushing for regime change in countries such as Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya. Their support for military dictatorships, such as in Egypt, has been a central pillar of foreign policy for decades. And several of these donor countries worked hard to uphold apartheid in South Africa. They have no moral high ground to push for regime change, and little record to ensure that they could do so without causing more harm than good.
Moreover, external actors attempting to enforce their narrow view of democratisation in contexts of deeply polarised and competing visions of statehood, and in the midst of economic instability reinforced by already burdensome economic conditionalities, austerity and reforms, could well be a recipe for disaster. As a collective of intellectuals from across the Horn has emphasised, the people of Ethiopia in particular and the Horn in general must be at the forefront of developing a lasting peace. This would likely require a developmental commitment to supporting state capacity and deliberative governance, not undermining it through external interference and conditionalities.
This article was first published in CODESRIA Bulletin Online, No. 2, January 2021 Page 1
Last year marked the 10th anniversary of the death of Mohamed Bouazizi, who on 17 December 2010 set himself alight at Sidi Bouzid in an act of self-immolation that made him the iconic martyr of the Tunisian revolution.
Mohamed Bouazizi's name is familiar to all; less so is his background, although the facts of his story are well known and documented. This article will explore the links between the different sequences of 'protest' processes in Tunisia, from the 2008 strikes in the minefields, to the most recent (2017-20) El Kamour protests in the country's south-east. It will also consider the concept of socio-spatial class solidarity, both in turning an individual suicide into the spark for a major uprising, and in facilitating collective resistance and its role in long revolutionary processes.
Two key questions arise: what in Bouazizi's profile, life and circumstances was of such significance that his suicide sparked a huge popular uprising whose impact, direct and indirect, was felt worldwide. And what can he teach us about the origin, scale and longevity of the Tunisian revolution?
We must therefore examine the suicide of Mohamed Bouazizi within its familial and personal context, but also within the more general context of the political protests against the Ben Ali dictatorship, and especially against the processes of dispossession, impoverishment and exclusion. Sidi Bouzid was clearly a focus of the protests and resistance then spreading throughout Tunisia's marginalised regions. The prolonged mining strikes of 2008 were a key stage in the actions.
Born into poverty, Mohamed Bouazizi was raised by his mother after he lost his father at the age of three. As the eldest son he grew up with a moral 'obligation' to support his mother, to the detriment of his education, and he left school without qualifications. Some time before his dramatic act, he acquired a barrow and scales and started selling vegetables but his informal business attracted endless administrative hassles and police harassment. Finally, on 17 December 2010, the police seized his meagre equipment to put a stop to his trading. Angry, frustrated and desperate, he turned to the only act of resistance that still appeared open to him and thereby unwittingly triggered the countdown to Ben Ali's fall, scarcely one month later, on 14 January 2011.
'Individual' suicide and class solidarity
Between the prolonged mining strike of 2008 and the shows of solidarity unleashed by Bouazizi's self-immolation, many social movements were active across Tunisia. Among them were the protests made in Sidi Bouzid in June and July 2010 by peasant farmers whose demands focused on a number of issues: access to natural resources such as agricultural land, and water for drinking and irrigation purposes, state aid, and the complex problem of indebtedness.
According to several witnesses interviewed in Sidi Bouzid, as well as two family members, Mohamed Bouazizi took an active part in these demonstrations. Whether or not this is so, I would identify a clear link between the peasant 'protests' of summer 2010 and those that followed Bouazizi's desperate act – a link that explains why this particular case, in contrast to other suicides, sparked a popular uprising across the country. First to take to the streets after Bouazizi's self-immolation were other peasant farmers' children identifying with his fatal act of resistance and despair.
Here was a clear example of 'class solidarity' among local populations directly affected by the region's multiple social and economic problems. Over the next few days that same class solidarity also found expression nationwide, moving from the 'rural' zones (including 'rural towns'), to the popular quarters of larger towns, and finally to the big urban centres, including Tunis. The progress of the protests suggests the existence of a distinct class-consciousness embracing all the 'popular' classes, rural and urban.
Since the early 1980s, the governorate of Sidi Bouzid has been the site of a rapid, state-initiated intensification of farming, designed to create a modern, export-oriented agricultural hub based on exploiting deep underground water reserves and attracting private and public capital. Over the past four decades Sidi Bouzid has been transformed: from a semi-arid desert fringe with an extensive agriculture based on olives, almonds, pasture and winter cereals, it has become Tunisia's leading agricultural region, producing over a quarter of the nation's total output of fruit and vegetables.
But behind this undoubted technical success lies a real social and ecological failure. Socially Sidi Bouzid remains one of Tunisia's four poorest regions (of 26 in total), while ecologically the level of the water table is plummeting, water for irrigation is increasingly saline, and soil damage is visible, even to non-specialist eyes.
Since the early 1980s, the governorate of Sidi Bouzid has been the site of a rapid, state-initiated intensification of farming, designed to create a modern, export-oriented agricultural hub based on exploiting deep underground water reserves and attracting private and public capital
Here investors – who are mostly outsiders, often called 'settlers' by the local population – accrue capital and profits; meanwhile peasant farmers accumulate losses, tragedies and suicides. Without this huge socio-spatial fault, which divides Tunisia between a dominant centre and dependant periphery, Mohamed Bouazizi's death would scarcely have merited a mention. And that same divide also lies at the heart of several other shocks which will be discussed below.
After the Sidi Bouzid uprising ended with the fall of the Ben Ali dictatorship, several more protest movements arose, all forming part of the same resistance processes in the social and spatial periphery.
The Jemna oasis movement began in 2011 and concerned rights to land and resources, while the El Kamour movement (2017-20) also involves rights to local resources and in particular to 'development': two different struggles each of which constitutes a key moment/sequence in the same process of dissent.
At Jemna and El Kamour, as in other cases, the key to mass mobilisation lies in the processes and dynamics of socio-spatial class solidarity: 'This is where I come from, I belong to this region and this social group, I am being deprived of resources materially and/or symbolically, so I support those who dare to say "no" and resist'. In summary, this is what you can hear in Kebili-Jemna, Tataouine-El Kamour and elsewhere; what you can read in the media reports of declarations made by local populations. And underlying it all, 'driving' resistance and 'cementing' solidarity, lie profound feelings of injustice and demands for dignity.
Jemna: rights versus law; a disruptive legitimacy
Following the Sidi Bouzid episode and the fall of the dictator, in 2011 an oasis was 'discovered' that was probably new to the majority of Tunisians. Situated in the desert, midway between Kebili and Douz, the Jemna oasis owed its sudden appearance on the map to a significant new collective action, stemming directly from specific elements of colonial history that resurfaced after the wall of silence placed around them had been breached.
While most French colonists chose to settle in north or north-west Tunisia and created big cereal farms and/or stock-raising enterprises, and even vineyards and orchards, others preferred to head south and specialise in date farming – in particular the Degla variety, whose export market in France and Europe was virtually guaranteed. Among this latter group was one Maus De Rolley, who in 1937 created a new date-palm plantation around the core of the ancient Jemna oasis. The plantation today covers some 306 hectares, including 185 hectares planted with approximately 10,000 date palms.
Although local populations had held these lands as common and indivisible (tribal) property, they were dispossessed without compensation on the pretext that nomadic herding (pastoralism) was not a genuine productive activity, and that the land therefore was uncultivated. At independence, these populations – who had battled against the occupiers – held great expectations that the new authorities would return their stolen lands.
The Jemna oasis movement began in 2011 and concerned rights to land and resources, while the El Kamour movement (2017-20) also involves rights to local resources and in particular to 'development'
When the colonial lands were nationalised in 1964, however, the government decided to place them under state control, confiding their management to the body that administered the state's agricultural land, the Office des Terres Domaniales (OTD), which thereby became Tunisia's biggest agricultural landowner. Bolstering this strategy was the collectivisation policy of the 1960s, which aimed to reorganise agricultural land and create state 'socialist' cooperatives.
Yet the real argument against the redistribution of the nationalised lands lay elsewhere: small peasant farmers were judged too ignorant and archaic, too lacking in the necessary financial and technical means, to develop a modern intensive agricultural sector – a stigmatisation that still recurs today whenever discussion returns to this subject and/or to questions of agricultural models and political choices related to farming and food.
Over the following decades, the heirs made some efforts to reclaim these lands, but it was not until early 2011 that the first organised occupations of OTD lands were launched by local populations describing themselves as the legitimate successors. Among them was Jemna's local population, who occupied the former De Rolley plantation, claiming rights of property and of exploitation. The authorities demanded an end to the occupation, and the resulting impasse lasted for several years. The government argued that the occupation was illegal, while the occupiers countered that they held a legitimate right to resources and especially to community assets, including the indivisible and inalienable commons.
After a long period of tension a compromise was reached. By mutual agreement, the state ceded full management of the palm plantation to the local population while retaining ownership of the land. Might the latter have believed this negotiated settlement to be the only viable compromise?
Underlying the government position was the fear that any solution implying the grant of freehold to the legitimate heirs might create a legal precedent and set an example that would unleash a torrent of other land claims, all drawing on the same colonial and post-colonial past. But the occupation alone had set that example already, inciting other local populations to reclaim – with some attempts at occupation – the lands snatched from their grandparents during colonisation. Furthermore, I would argue that the Jemna case also served to fuel claims of a legitimate right to other local 'natural' resources such as water, minerals (for example, phosphates) and oil that mobilised populations in the Tatouine region.
El Kamour: the 'will of the people'
Resistance entered another phase, not without success, at El Kamour – a locality situated in the barren steppes of south-eastern Tunisia, south of the town of Tatouine, on the tarmac road leading to the oil-fields in the extreme south of the country. The 'dispossession pipeline' carrying crude oil to the port of Skhira, 50 kilometres north of Gabes, runs through here, and this geographical position close to the pipeline is the immediate reason for El Kamour's sudden appearance on political maps of Tunisia, as well as in the media.
Behind El Kamour, however, lies the governorate and town of Tataouine (Tataouine is the capital of the governorate of the same name), with over 180,000 inhabitants. Arid and barren, this region contains most of Tunisia's oil reserves, producing 40 per cent of its petrol and 20 per cent of its gas. Yet Tataouine also records some of the nation's highest levels of poverty: in 2017, for example, 28.7 per cent of its active population were unemployed (compared with a national average of 15.3 per cent), while for graduates the rate rose as high as 58 per cent.
Events in El-Kamour, 2017-2020: a brief chronology
The El Kamour movement began on 25 March 2017, with protests in various localities in the governorate, all converging on the town centre of Tataouine. The protesters were demanding a share of local resources, particularly oil, as well as greater employment opportunities and infrastructure development. Met by silence from the government, on 23 April they organised a sit-in at El Kamour. Tensions mounted on both sides, and an escalation became inevitable after the prime minister visited Tataouine and met the protesters. His plans to calm the situation with a few token promises came to naught and the discussions ended in deadlock. On 20 May the pumping station was occupied for two days before being cleared by the army, and tensions remained high.
Eventually, on 16 June 2017, an agreement was signed with the government through the mediation of the Union générale tunisienne du travail (UGTT), which acted to guarantee its implementation. The terms of the agreement promised the creation of 3,000 new jobs in the environmental sector by 2019, and 1,500 jobs in the oil industry by the end of 2017. A budget of 80 million dinars was also earmarked for regional development. But, to the frustration of the local population, the agreement was never implemented. The government simply bided its time, gambling that the militants would tire and the movement run out of steam.
'This is where I come from, I belong to this region and this social group, I am being deprived of resources materially and/or symbolically, so I support those who dare to say "no" and resist'. In summary, this is what you can hear in Kebili-Jemna, Tataouine-El Kamour and elsewhere.
On 20 May 2020, however, the El Kamour activists resumed their protests and sit-ins in several places, piling on the pressure and blockading several routes to bar them to oil-industry vehicles. On 3 July they organised a new general strike throughout the public services and the oilfields, and on 16 July they closed the pumping station, blocking the pipelines carrying petroleum products north. But the El Kamour militants had to wait until 7 November 2020 before they could reach an agreement with the government's representatives, in return for which petrol producers and other oil-sector enterprises were to resume operations immediately.
Signed by the head of government on 8 November 2020, the agreement contains a number of key points, including several that had previously featured in the 2017 accord but had not been implemented. These included, dedicated 80-million-dinar development and investment fund for the governorate of Tataouine; credit finance for 1,000 projects before the end of 2020; 215 jobs created in the oil industry in 2020, plus a further 70 in 2021; 2.6 million dinars for local municipalities and 1.2 million dinars for the Union Sportive de Tataouine.
The big social movements discussed above all have several points in common. Firstly, they are very largely located in southern, central, western and north-western Tunisia, the same marginalised and impoverished regions that between 17 December 2010 and early January 2011 saw huge protests in support of Bouazizi and against current social and economic policies. Secondly, while differing in detail, the principal demands of these movements all relate essentially to the right to resources, services and a decent income. None, or virtually none, are linked to 'political' demands (political rights, individual freedom). Thirdly, in their choice of language, and of several 'spectacular' actions, these social movements display a radicalism that marks a clear break with the political games played in and around the centres of power. Finally, almost all these movements are denounced and accused of regionalism and tribalism, sometimes even of separatism and treachery. Protesters are suspected of being manipulated, of being puppets in the hands of a political party or foreign power.
Yet these movements have enjoyed some, albeit relative, success – a success impossible without the class solidarity shown in the three examples discussed above, and the ties of domination and dependency that for decades have characterised the relationship between Tunisia's centre of power (the east coast) and its deprived and impoverished periphery. Finay, these same examples, and other more recent cases, demonstrate that the 'revolutionary' processes launched in early 2008 are still active in Tunisia and will probably remain so for many years to come.
This article was first published in The Review of Africa Political Economy journal
We Need New Names
Africans are saddled with the burdens of colonial structures that the post-colonial elites simply refuse to supplant. If language is a unifier of cultural, economic and social values, then we must decolonise our languages and dismantle colonial borders based on imagined ethnicities.
Oduor Obura
In late 2019, the Luanda Boda Boda Riders' Association purchased a bus for public service. The association is located along the Maseno-Luanda border and its membership is largely drawn from the Luanda and Maseno catchment area.
The name of the association has a lot to do with the state of our union as a country or even as a region. It is a microcosm of ethno-nationalist tensions existing in Kenya and many other regions of Africa, and the changing times that bring new and multiple ways to negotiate these invented differences. The boda boda association is a chance to look at how we negotiate citizenship daily, and how we can overcome some essentialist ideals that are so deeply entrenched in eastern Africa.
The boda boda association draws membership from Luanda and Maseno, two small towns that are barely three kilometers apart. Maseno was established as a mission town and gets its name from oseno, which is a Luo word for the indigenous tree that used to be dominant in the area before ecological colonialism. The Kinyore (the Luhya sub-group inhabiting the Maseno and Luanda corridor) calls the same tree luseno. Oseno has since been colonised by the blue gum commonly called bao, which is indigenous to Australia. Young people would be at pains to identify oseno in Maseno today. Shortly before colonialism, Luanda had been established by a Luo chief from Gem Yala. Currently Luanda is dominantly a Luhya town, and it is located in Vihiga County. I have grown to like the sound of Maseno. For me, the word conjures pleasant images of green hilly spaces.
Imperial creations
Kenya, like the majority of other African countries, has never been a nation-state. Kenya's territorial boundary, as we now recognise it on maps, was drawn exactly a hundred years ago, in 1920. It is a border that split, for example, the Luos into three different countries (Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania). As part of these colonial processes, the Somali people were also split into three countries, with a section of them occupying Ethiopia, Kenya and Somalia and Somaliland. It is instructive to recall that coastal East Africa presented similar challenges. The current Zanzibari semi-autonomy in Tanzania and the conspicuous Pwani Si Kenya slogan are witness to the inherent pressures in the formation of nation-states in this part of the world. The boda boda riders in Maseno-Luanda zone show us only too well how we have an incomplete sense of ourselves and our politics when we are inclined to always think and conceive of ourselves and our communities as complete.
In 1929, the colonial administrator, Charles W. Hobley, said, "The Kikuyu and its blood relations on the slopes of Mount Kenya are, next to the Kavirondo, the most numerous native society in Kenya colony. They have no internal homogeneity, so were brought under control section by section."
Therefore, the Kikuyu as we popularly know them today, are a creation of the colonial empire and each section was amalgamated onto another until they were made to imagine themselves as one whole part. This imagination has seeped into the dominant Kikuyu popular imagination, yet tensions still exist on who should claim the authentic Kikuyu title and name. A popular myth names Murang'a as the place where Mumbi first set foot, and thus the Kiambu Kikuyu are actually considered proper Kikuyu as opposed to the Murang'a Kikuyu who have interacted with the Embu and Meru communities. It is weird how we still stick to these categories as authentic, without the slightest examination of the histories and names behind them.
Electoral voting patterns and the legendary Kiambu-Muranga division still remind the Kikuyu of their incompleteness as a nation. This also applies to what we have think of as the Luos, the Luhyas, etc. The "tribes" (I will use the terms community or nations) as we see them today were invented in the colonial era. The introduction of a centralised and domineering government was a creation of the British empire. It was created along the Westphalian Christian state system to enhance resource extraction and organise labour along pliant and easily micromanage-able paradigms in Kenya.
Before colonialism, local communities had several centres of power, not necessarily along political lines, but sometimes along religious leaders and familial loyalties. This is still evident in the way religion plays a major role in our conception of ourselves and their celebrity status in national governance dialogues. As an illustration, Mgahanya, the rainmaker of the Banyore community in colonial Kenya, drew his power not from politics but from his hereditary technology of controlling rains. Indeed, Mgahanya's power would be sought by the Luo neighbours as well whenever the need arose to have a rainmaker present. For his prowess and popularity, Hobley gave Mgahanya the title of a principal chief, thereby instilling new ways of looking at a rainmaker, not as a helper in the society but as someone who had the power to lord and rule over his relatives, friends and foes with an iron fist. Mgahanya's rainmaking power was finally, and dramatically, curtailed by Hobley himself. In divesting Mgahanya of his political power gained through rainmaking, Hobley instituted new ways of gaining power in the society. Power would never be the same again in eastern Africa.
Evidently, government in pre-imperial Kenya was largely by consensus. But this was not always the case. The Mazrui family's control of the slave trade in Mombasa reminds us that consensus was not always the default governance case in colonial and pre-colonial Kenya and that power was not always benign. In other words, the long history of governance in Kenya has experienced ruptures and transformations. Perhaps this history, culture and knowledge of power might be useful when we finally decide to finally form a government that is focused on ourselves. This would be a better alternative to the exhausting gerrymandering the political elites in Kenya frequent.
Moreover, Hobley, in Kenya: From a Chartered Company to a Crown Colony, further notes that he played an important part in reviving the importance of the Kiama among the Kikuyu, but of course to enhance colonial government. The idea of a Kikuyu elders was revitalised and invented as an essentialised entity by the colonial government. While reconstituting the tribe for the colonial agenda, Hobley instructed the heads of the Kiama (for whom he invented the title "chiefs") to be detached from their compatriots in order to give proper judgments. In one instruction, the Kiama authority was not only centralised but also given sweeping powers and stripped of communal ethos and emotions. The colonial reconstruction of African societies was an unmitigated cultural disaster whose legacies we still contend with in present-day Kenya, such as the nationalist insinuations in differentiating Luos from the Banyore people in the Maseno-Luanda corridor.
From Hobley's new ways of creating and accumulation of power, political leaders in Kenya have since stuck to the idea of leadership as a manifestation of paramount chiefs. The impersonal detachment and the attempts by public officials to centralise power can also be seen in how Kenyan doctors perceive their patients, how head teachers treat poor parents, how immigration and customs officials mistreat Kenyans in their own country, how bus conductors mishandle passengers, and how factories pollute Lake Victoria and its environs with impunity. The colonial system is replicated in every public sphere. Scarcely does one transcend this system.
The Westphalian state
After the end of colonialism, we did not take stock of our various systems of power and ways of naming in the community. Rather, we adopted and imported the Westphalian state model that was used to institute various hegemons, with each community waiting for a turn to lord over other communities. The communities that have been at the helm have ensured that the patronage system instituted by Carey Francis, Charles Hobley, and Lord Delamere, among others, has been perfected for a post-independence Kenya. Community nationalism as a basis for mobilising power is a narrative that has been employed in Kenya. This happened right from the first Kenyan president to the present president, since they could not pursue an alternative Africanist ideology with which to administer the country. They failed to either take notes from or apply the history of the country as far as governance was exercised. They lost a grand chance to decolonise governance and bring back the government to "we the people" of Kenya. And now Luanda boda boda riders have shown us how one can undermine such dominant narratives.
To appreciate this, one needs to understand that Maseno-Luanda is divided along "Luo" and "Luhya" communities. During each election period, this division is amplified by politicians. They incite tribal animosity among people who ordinarily intermarry, language differences notwithstanding. Indeed, the dhoLuo language has evolved to use Semeji or Omejo in reference to Luhya in-laws. That is how frequent intermarriage occurs here and how transcultural conversations have been conducted here despite the politicians and Kenyan comedians who frequently prop up negative ethnicity in their speeches and performances, respectively.
Maseno was the place the Church Mission Society (CMS) missionaries established the first Anglican church in western Kenya, circa 1906. The two communities grew around this church. Along with the growth of the church, the established ethnic differences also grew. Thus, Maseno Mixed Primary School would later be created, not as a mixed school for boys and girls, but as a mixed school for Luos and Luhyas! The idea of "mixed" in this case was founded on ways of negotiating cultural differences and not to denote gender.
For a while, in its long history, this primary school had its own Luhya and Luo staff coming to teach at different times of the day. Independence-era Kenya would see the split of this Maseno Anglican church into North and South. Maseno South diocese became the Luo church while Maseno North diocese became the Luhya church. The growth of Maseno as a mission town was doomed due to its cultural topography. The Maseno South diocese relocated its headquarters deep in Luo land, to Kisumu. Maseno North pushed its diocese deep in Luhya land to Kakamega. In other words, a single Christian religion could not keep its adherents from the two cultures together. This was the design of the colonial government. Each community would be coalesced together within itself, especially as a way of breaking down each community's governance structures. But inter-community solidarity would be robustly discouraged. Mgahanya would eventually be appointed a principal chief within the Banyore community, after all his power was no longer needed among the neighbouring Luo, for Hobley had effectively taken charge of administering the Luo nation.
The independence-era Kenyan state also drew a border between the two communities, locating Maseno in Luo Nyanza and Luanda in Western Province. This imagined boundary was based on the colonial separation of the Luo from the Luhya. What if the boundary was to be re-drawn along matters that boda boda operators find useful, such as geographical features, and not along ethnic territories? For boda boda operators, features such as hills, muddy terrains, valleys and flat lands denote how much fuel a motorbike consumes.
We need new solidarities
Can we have associations not based on the colonial structures, like this boda boda group does? Africans are saddled with the burdens of colonial structures that the post-colonial elites simply refuse to supplant. Post-independence Kenya has cost lives, in the name of the community. The Kenyatta presidency quickly consolidated ethnic capital to misrule the state. Ethnic patronage quickly grew deep roots and it has irretrievably thrived, until now. Nearly all the chiefs under Moi rule were imperial personalities in their own right and might, just like they were in colonial Kenya.
We need new solidarities like the Luanda Boda Boda Association, but devoid of unchecked rugged capitalist ambitions. Kenya's model of its solidarity is based on capital accumulation. In the fullness of its agenda, organisations founded on purely commercial interests morph into monopolies and create the same trap that the founders initially ran away from: poverty, disempowerment and powerlessness for others. The Luanda Boda Boda Association might not be cognisant of the fact that the public transport business is usually the function of an operational government. Even if they are, they have chosen to ignore that, under the illusion that they are working hard and sustaining themselves. The self-employment agenda of this association rips apart ethnic loyalties because it co-opts Luo and Luhya communities.
I am not into economics, here, I am on the use and ab-use of names – how innocent names like Luanda Boda Boda Association circumvent a nationalist current. The afterlives of this name embrace the inclusion of other communities not associated with the cultural geography of the Maseno-Luanda route. The association teaches us how to bring back two communities that have been divided by colonial and post-colonial Kenyan rulers. Resiliently, the people still head back to certain elements of solidarity that existed way before the arrival of Hobley and his imperial British associates.
At the same time, we might have to remember that Luanda was founded by a Luo chief, as we are reminded by Bethwel Ogot who convincingly presents this event in his autobiography My Footprints in the Sands of Time. Contrary to its founding, Luanda is currently located in a Luhya-administered ethnopolis. The street-level motorcycle association undermines the political narrative in the control of Maseno-Luanda borderlands. The politics of Maseno-Luanda is pegged on community divisions. These boda boda motorcyclists, however, teach us lessons on cosmopolitanisms.
It is also instructive to recall that the Maseno-Luanda topic is a divisive factor and always comes up during election periods. However, the boda boda riders frequently move in and out of Luo and Luhya "tribal" zones conveniently and daily, with or without electoral cycles. If only the road network could catch up with the socialised motorcycle networks! These riders transcend the names and political divisions that were issued by the colonialists and their successors in post-colonial Kenya.
Boda boda riders transport passengers with little reference to ethnic origins. They move within and around the Luo and Banyore nations. Indeed, the motorbikes work across the tribal difference in a way that seems to shorten the already -narrow cultural distance between the two communities. In the process, they circulate cultural contacts between the two, and defy the political elite who thrive on the divisions. And now their bus will move passengers beyond Luo and Luhya nations. Linguists will observe the historical and structural complexities that separate Luloogoli, Libukusu and Kinyore from the Luo language, the obvious one being that dhoLuo is a Nilotic language and the other dialects belong to the Bantu language family.
The thing with language is that one owns the power to name things, to make a world with yourself at the center, to rewrite (hi)stories of far-flung peripheries. Take the ethnonym Luhya, as an example. Before this coinage, the Luhya were part of the Kavirondo people. The Kavirondo was initially the Eastern Province of Uganda before it was switched to Kisumu Province of the East Africa Protectorate, and finally moved to western Kenya. The umbrella term Kavirondo included both Nilotes and Bantus around Lake Victoria, all the way to Mumias and Mount Elgon. The freedom of colonialists' naming of African communities was an enaction of the powerlessness of these communities vis-à-vis the colonial imagination and grammar. Within the Luhya nation there are a total of about 17 linguistic groups. The term Luhya is an artificially constructed ethnolinguistic reference to many closely related (some of which are not mutually intelligible) Bantu-speaking peoples. They include the Bukusu, Tachoni, Wanga, Marama, Tsotso, Tiriki, Nyala, Kabras, Hayo, Marachi, Holo, Maragoli, Idakho, Isukha, Kisa, Nyore, and Samia in Western Kenya. Their cultural divergences are many and multilayered, with the Tachoni tracing their ancestry to the Nilotic group of Nandi in the around the 14th century.
To fit yourself in a name that classified and considered you part of exotica needs careful self-extraction out of such languages. This need is even more immediate when one remembers how this classification was done without the agency and input of the local people and their collective consciousness and knowledge systems. Thus, the iLoikop people are made into Maasai, the iSampuru became Samburu. The various communities known as Nandi, Kipsikis, Pokoot, and Tugen are collapsed into an easily classifiable and ruled "tribe" called Kalenjin. This is in spite of the cultural and linguistic differences between them. In these cultural acrobatic movements mediated by colonialist linguistics, Kakamega (spelled as Kakumega in colonial orthography) was not the name of a town but an ethnonym in reference to the Idakho and Isukha communities.
If language is a unifier of cultural, economic and social values, then we need a new generation of names. We need Names 2.0. These names could consider political and cultural differences and histories. We need a new name for a governance that will neither be called kleptocratic nor a kakistocracy. We need new names for Luos, who pride themselves in Nyikwa Ramogi (based on a point of origin, not a colonial classification). Don't we need a new name for the daughters and sons of Mumbi? We need new names that denote plurality, but account for differentiated identities, like the Mijikenda. (My translation of "Mijikenda" would not be a tribe but "nine homes".) We need decolonised names in order to open or transcend some of the worlds which were closed by colonial naming processes.
Renaming ourselves might not be an easy way to redesign our nominal worlds, which were forced into cruel unions in Berlin in December 1884. It might even prove to be a messy but it is still a necessary activity. We need to open these worlds that were closed by colonial naming processes, like the Luanda Boda Boda Association has done. Every time we use these new colonial names, we acknowledge the problematic grammar that inherently operates within them. We also reiterate that the names did not aim to usefully matter to Africans. We repeat the insufficiency of English to capture the nuances that exist in our cultural worldviews and political lives.
I must reiterate here that these names were not arbitrarily drawn; they were created to enhance control. Perhaps post-colonial eastern Africa should ask what control mechanism the various ethno-nationalities initiate. For example, the Luhya group is one of the reminders that ethno-nationalism is an invention that is a mirage. It was created for divide et imperium purposes. As Bethwel Ogot reminds us, there was no Luhya empire prior to colonialism. Yet the colonial history implies the presence of a Luhya empire. The Nabongo Mumia was no threat to the neighbouring Kager clan. However, as a paramount chief, Nabongo Mumia, was a creation of the British to pacify western Kenya, especially to control the northeastern Kager clan of the so-called Luos.
We need new names, donge?


text:
Michael Gargiulo, Pretrial Hearing 45
Michael Thomas Gargiulo, Arrested in June, 2008
Personal Update:
It's been a few days since I vacated my home of 21 years. I am in temporary housing until the end of December. Luckily, I chose a place where I can still take the Orange Line to the Red Line to get to the downtown Clara Shortridge-Foltz criminal court building.
I'm the first person attending this case on the 9th floor. There are barely 8 people spread out along the long hallway. There are attorneys going into Dept. 106, Judge Fidler's court that I've never seen before. There must be another hearing beside Gargiulo's today. I suspect Gargiulo's hearing will not be first up on the schedule.
There is a pretty young girl on the floor obviously waiting for Dept. 106 to open. She might be a reporter or an intern with the DA's office.
Second chair defense attorney Daniel Nardoni arrives in the hallway. I also see lead counsel Dale Rubin down at the center of the hallway, entering Dept. 103 or 104. Mr. Nardoni approaches a woman he recognizes on the floor and they chat.
DDA's Dan Akemon and Garrett Dameron arrive on the floor. They stick their heads into Dept. 106 to check in with Judge Fidler's clerk, Wendy, to let her know they are here. I overhear someone ask if Mr. Rubin is in Dept. 106. As always, Mr. Nardoni says hello to me, addressing me by name. A few minutes later, Mr. Rubin comes down the hall from Dept. 103. The hallway is still very empty. Hardly any traffic. It doesn't appear that there is a single courtroom on the floor that is currently in trial.
I head into Dept. 106 say hello to Wendy and take a seat. I pass the defense and prosecution teams having a very friendly chat in the ante chamber. It's very refreshing to see all the attorneys on both sides of a case treat each other with respect and deference. From what I've observed over the years, DDA Akemon and Mr. Rubin have known each other for some time and get along quite well.
There will be another hearing before Gargiulo's. Gargiulo's case will be heard at 10 AM.
Mr. Nardoni enters and greets the court reporter. There are several other attorneys here for the other case, which is a multi-defendant case. Mr. Rubin is in the courtroom. When he takes a seat, I notice his pink and blue large check-patterned socks.
The other case, they are going to bring the defendant's out.
Judge Fidler takes the bench. The three defendant case - possibly two trials or even three separate trials. The entire matter is held over to December 7th. And that's it. Judge Fidler is off the bench.
For the first time, I notice that there is a sanitary soap dispenser on the wall where the door to the custody area is. The dispenser is directly under the courtroom clock.
There is a quick court review of a wire-tap hearing. For those of you who don't know, Judge Fidler hears and rules on, I believe, all the requests for a wire tap in Los Angeles County.
In the well of the court, I see DDA Akemon passing a document to Mr. Rubin and Mr. Nardoni. It appears the defense is officially receiving the document. Mr. Nardoni responds to DDA Akemon, "Thank you Daniel." Mr. Rubin is mentioning something to Wendy about bringing a cart from home to place behind the defense table to hold all the files they will be working with on the case.
I see DDA Akemon dropping off a document at the clerks desk. I overhear a quick comment, "No rush." It has something to do with witnesses.
The chatter I'm overhearing at the clerks desk is a March start date for the Gargiulo trial. My heart sinks. One of the cases in the prior hearing is likely to be next up on Judge Fidler's calendar to start in January. Judge Fidler's calendar rules everything else. From what snatches of conversation I'm hearing now,and from what I believe I heard the clerk discuss with other counsel in the prior hearing, one of the three defendants in that case, is not in the greatest of health. The goal is to get his case to trial as quickly as possible. That's why Gargiulo will probably go after that case.
Gargiulo is brought out. He is completely clean shaven except for a very small mustache. The green bag he carries with him is placed on the floor at his feet. He's wearing his black, horn-rimmed glasses. He looks much the same as he has in prior hearings.
Judge Fidler takes the bench for the Gargiulo matter. The defense 995 motion is first mentioned. I've been waiting for the defense to present their 995 motion back in 2013, several attorneys ago. For those not familiar with a 995, it is a defense motion to dismiss the case. It's usually the first motion filed after the completion of the preliminary hearing. Judge Fidler asks if they wish to argue. Mr. Nardoni speaks for the defense on two motions by the people to admit evidence: the 1101b DNA evidence in the 1993 Illinois murder of Tricia Pacaccio and the People's Perkin's Operation.
Mr. Nardoni briefly states that the court is well aware of Illinois v. Perkins (a ruling affecting Miranda when undercover agents are placed in a jail setting). Mr. Gargiulo was at the LA County jail (in LASD custody) when he was brought to another city jurisdiction, and placed in a cell with two undercover agents. Mr. Nardoni argues that this Perkin's Operationin Gargiulo's case was different than the usual encounters. "He was taken out of the cell and grilled. ... put back in the cell ... taken out again a grilled by LAPD and Downey police." In the people's response, they state Gargiulo had the benefit of a toilet and sleep. Mr. Nardoni argues the People's Perkin's Operation goes beyond a Miranda type issue. Mr. Gargiulo was not given medication he required. "They took undue advantage of him."
Mr. Nardoni then argues that, over counsel's objection, the Tricia Pacaccio evidence that was admitted in the prelim under 1101b. He argues that the Pacaccio case, as it is related to the other homicides, there is nothing that relates except the stabbing. Mr. Nardoni argues the evidence is not unique enough.
Ashley Ellerin murder in February 2001. Nardoni argues, "Easy to say but for Pacaccio, he would [never?] been held to answer on Ellerin alone. ... There's no evidence on it's face. ... The last time [Gargiulo] was seen in the area [of Ellerin's murder] was around November 2000." From January 1st to her [Ellerin's] death he was never seen in the area. There was no DNA No footprint match. No hair fibers or anything to connect [Ellerin's murder] to Mr. Gargiulo.
With the Pacaccio evidence, they [people] are able to prove identity as it relates to Pacaccio, and they are trying to piggyback Ellerin case onto that.
Judge Filder asks to hear from the people. DDA Akemon informs the court that back in December, the people dismissed the burglary charges. I believe DDA Akemon informs the court that these issues were litigated before the prelim, ruled admissible and it is not proper to relitigate them here. DDA Akemon goes over the basics of the preliminary hearing: 10 days long; 46 witnesses and 37 exhibits. There are over 1,221 transcript pages. In conclusion, the people had Gargiulo connected to three [attacks] and evidence of violence against three other women. Very compelling circumstantial case.
Mr. Nardoni tells the court that he thinks Mr. Akemon misspoke. We have DNA in Pacaccio. She was found at [her] doorstep at home, outside. Others, the attacker broke into apartment[s]. Mr. Nardoni mentions the Bruno case and that in the Murphy case, the same incident the attacker broke in. "Ellerin, that's not a break-in." Detective Small testified all the windows were secured and could not determine any point of entry of the residence or someone [had a] key to the entrance. Mr. Nardoni states that there were two other people who had keys to Ellerin's home: her roommate and the manager. The Ellerin case is unique. There's no DNA in Ellerin or any other physical evidence.
Judge Fidler rules. "I believe Judge Johnson had more that enough evidence..." The court mentions the 1101b and Perkin's Operation. The motion to dismiss is denied.
Mr. Nardoni tells the court, "We need a trial date." Then the case that has been in Dept. 106 for the past nine months is mentioned. The 12 defendant preliminary hearing in the medical insurance fraud case is the one involving Kelly Soo Park. My notes are not clear on who makes the comment, 'That hearing has got to be coming to an end.'
The court tells the parties that another case will go before them in January. It's not a death penalty case. It will be tried in two separate trials and be six to eight weeks for each. There is one defendant that they need to get to trial first. The other defendant could possibly go after the Gargiulo case. Wendy reminds the court that Mr. Rubin is waiting to retire. I silently note that Mr. Rubin has been waiting to retire since 2017. The Gargiulo case will be Mr. Rubin's swan song.
A return date is finally selected: February 1, 2019 with the case calendar set at zero of 60 on that date. There is speculation that the other case could fall through and not go to trial in January. DDA Akemon, Mr. Rubin and Mr. Nardoni confer. They ask the court if there is a date in December that they can return. Wendy states there are no dates available in December. Judge Fidler's calendar is packed.
Mr. Rubin addresses the court. In 2016 Judge Gordon assigned the case over to him once Mr. Lindner was relieved. Mr. Rubin was assured the case would go to trial in 2017.
Judge Fidler tells the parties that the 12 defendant trial [prelim?] is a disaster.
DDA Akemon tells the court that they are in agreement with the defense. They are hoping not to lose their place in line. The clerk tells the parties there is no November date available either. Judge Fidler asks to speak to Wendy for a second. DDA Dameron tells the court that whatever date, the February 1, 2019 date would be for arguing the 1101b and Perkin's motions. The February 1st date is locked down.
The court addresses the defendant. "Mr. Gargiulo, is that agreeable to you sir?" Gargiulo responds, "Yes."
The court states they will litigate both.
Then the issue of a jury questionnaire is discussed. Mr. Rubin informs the court that the defense does not want one. They want to have individual juror questioning in voir dire. Mr. Rubin tells the court a name of the type of questioning, I have "...Hobi preferred" but I don't know if that's the correct term. Mr. Rubin wants to question jurors individually on their feelings on the death penalty vs LWOP. Mr. Rubin states again he is against a jury questionnaire. He prefers a capitol exam.
The court responds, "If you would like to make a formal motion.... I'm disinclined." Judge Fidler recommends to the parties to prepare a jury questionnaire.
And that's it. At 10:10 AM Gargiulo rises from his chair. The sheriffs pick up his green bag and hand it to him. Mr. Nardoni goes back into the custody area with him. About five minutes later, Mr. Nardoni comes back out of the custody area.
Outside in the hallway, I ask Mr. Rubin for a moment of his time. As polite as he has been over the past three years, he appears a bit irritated by my request. I explain that I am an independent journalist who has covered this case since 2012 and am hoping that he would be willing to share copies of his motions with me.
I don't mention to him that I am hoping he will be willing to share copies of his motions because as an independent journalist, my budget to purchase them from the court is very limited.
Mr. Rubin flatly declines. He tells me I can purchase copies of his motions from the court. I then ask him if he and his co-counsel would be willing to sit for an interview. I make it clear to him that I would not be asking about the case but to do a profile on them as defense attorneys.
Mr. Rubin's tone changes. He is quite adamant in saying no. He tells me he never cooperates with the press. He does not speak to the press. He mentions several major networks by name that have contacted him on the case. Mr. Rubin tells me he never cooperates or sits for interviews. He says that I can go online and find out everything I need to know about him.
Mr. Rubin's response is disappointing since I will have to explore other avenues for getting copies of any defense motions. I know I will not be able to purchase them all. However from a defense standpoint, Mr. Rubin's policy of not cooperating with the press benefits his client the most.
Looking back, I find some irony in all of this. Over the years, I have been contacted by a few people who knew Gargiulo. Some have shared information. Some have not.
In June of 2015, I was contacted by a woman who stated she was in phone and letter contact with the defendant. She knew him from high school. This was during the time that Gargiulo was represented by Mr. Lindner and it was clear from the pretrial hearings that Gargiulo could not stand his counsel, refused to cooperate, was trying to get a new counsel assigned and was unsuccessful in that endeavor.
The individual stated that Mr. Gargiulo wanted me to contact him via letter and possibly meet with him in the private attorney area to discuss the court proceedings with him. The individual stated that Mr. Gargiulo thought that the judge [At the time, this was Dept 108, Judge Sam Ohta] and his defense attorney were "...being deceptive in court and he feels that he is involved in a wrongful case." I respectfully declined.
As an independent journalist with limited resources, T&T has had a long standing policy of zero contact with potential trial witnesses or charged defendants while the case is pending. Anytime someone has contacted me on a pending case, I always check with the assigned Deputy DA's to see if the individual who has contacted me is on a witness list or someone on their radar. Some journalists might ask, How could you pass up the opportunity to sit and talk to Gargiulo? To me, the answer is easy. My goal has always been to report on the story as an observer. I don't want to become a part of the story and end up on the witness stand myself.
Uncertain Future for Trial Coverage
I was hoping that the Gargiulo case would go to trial in January and take the estimated five months for three trials: guilt, sanity and penalty phases. I had originally hoped that I could continue reporting on T&T for another year, but things have changed for me. That's not going to be possible. I will need to return to employment much sooner than I had originally projected. I was hoping that in June after the case was finished, I could brush up on my computer skills and look for work in my prior field as a compliance auditor in the financial industry.
With this trial starting in March or even later means after covering the case since 2012, I probably will not be able to continue T&T and cover the Gargiulo trial without an additional source of income at the same time. Possibly a sponsorship if I can find one or trying to raise funds through a Go Fund Me campaign.
So unfortunately, at this time, things are uncertain for continued trial coverage into 2019.

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


text:
Bill Bell: Big appetites and old pals
By Daily News | |
PUBLISHED: February 14, 2010 at 12:00 a.m. | UPDATED: August 28, 2017 at 11:04 a.m.
I'm writing this column on Friday, Feb. 12, 2010, President Abraham Lincoln's 201st birthday.
Friday also was the seventh annual meeting of the Lincoln Club of Whittier founded by its first president Rudy Cervantes, retired necktie maker and super-salesman. Rudy has put ties around such necks as the late President Ronald Reagan and late great entertainer Elvis Presley.
The auspicious seventh anniversary meeting was held at Whittier's flashy new restaurant, Seta in Uptown Whittier.
Cervantez, public relations super star Bruce Martin and me created the club to get together to talk about Abraham Lincoln and other things around town. We had so much fun with it that kept it going and have since added more members.
Friday's meeting was a luncheon occasion hosted by Martin and presided over by the club's president, Whittier's own Ruth B. Shannon. The meeting welcomed newly inducted senior member Hubert Perry, a 96-year-old native-born Whittierite, and last year's inductee, former Whittier City Manager Tom Mauk, who is now Orange County's executive officer.
Sumptious-eating-at-the-expense-of-the-host-with-bottomless-pockets topped the agenda of pressing business to be conducted.
The squash soup was, indeed, really good and also bottomless.
The meeting opened with some earnest and respectful discussion about President Lincoln.
We spoke words of reverent respect for two departed members and our namesake – Ed L. Shannon, Alan Davidson and Abraham Lincoln.
On the glum side, our discussion touched on the universal downtown of the economy but we quickly decided that if we wanted to feel bad we could all go home and watch CNN.
Last year the Lincoln Club, with five members present. voted 3-2 to support an NFL Stadium in the City of Industry. This year we just touched on the subject again.
Since I was sitting across from Tom Mauk, I asked him what he thought about a stadium in Orange County. He said the county has a great location for a stadium but there would be no public funding available for it.
The biggest item on this year's agenda was a motion by president Shannon that the Lincoln Club propose to the Whittier City Council an individual plaque of special recognition honoring former Whittier Mayor Allan Zolnekoff as the prime mover behind the building of the Greenway Trail.
The motion was unanimously passed by all six members present.
The Club was also advised that a major celebration marking the 20th anniversary of the Ruth B. Shannon Center for the Performing Arts is in the planning stages.
The last order of business was to schedule the next annual meeting of the Lincoln at the Nixon Library and Birthplace in Yorba Linda, where we could eat and visit the replica of the East Room of the White House. There were no dissenters.
Meeting adjourned until 2011.
newsbybell@aol.com