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Don’t Blame Each Other. Build Solidarity

Germany is obsessed with the wrongdoings of individuals. Would the pandemic be over if more people took individual responsibility?

Jacinta Nandi
24/01/2022

So a mum from Leo’s Kita recently told me a story about her sister who works in a test centre. One day, after a hard day at work, she went into Edeka on her way home. She saw someone there who had tested positive that very same day – and should have been in quarantine! She went to the branch manager and told him about it. The manager promptly made an announcement over the tannoy: “Can anyone who tested positive today please leave the store”. And five people left the building.

I don’t really believe this story, by the way. I’ve heard it often – sometimes it was in Lidl, sometimes in Aldi, one time it was even in Rewe. Each time exactly five people leave the supermarket after the manager’s announcement. I just don’t believe it. If I had broken quarantine because I needed to buy food, I wouldn’t go home without what I’d just bought. I’d have stood firm.

And me, personally, I would have been more worried about my leaving the store announcing my guilt to the whole neighbourhood, than just staying put and – should anyone ask me about it – claim that I must have a Doppelgänger who tested positive.

But I’m like that, you know, lots of things are more embarrassing to me than they would be to Germans. Every time when I mistakenly press the button in the Straßenbahn, I leave the tram and walk. And walk. And secretly think: no-one in the Straßenbahn knows that I made a mistake. That’s just what I’m like.

But you know what I do believe? I fully believe that there are people who are in quarantine, or even in isolation who break the rules, break the law, even. Because they need to get something to eat, man.

I still haven’t really understood what people in Germany are meant to do when they’re in quarantine but they need to eat? After all, the only thing seen as worse than popping to the shops in quarantine is the dreadful “hamstering”. People who hamster have no solidarity but breaking quarantine is illegal.

I keep on hearing German fantasies about friendly, helpful neighbours who bring grocery shopping round to grannies and single mums. Well, I don’t know about you guys, but this famous neighbour-quarantine-voluntary-delivery service agency hasn’t contacted me yet. (Bit of a shame really!) I live outside the city centre – there’s no Gorillas or Flink here. What should you do? What should I do? What are people meant to do, exactly?

I now know single mothers who may not have broken isolation, but have broken quarantine rules out of mix of necessity and desperation. And there are some people who have done even worse things than that: I, for example, have drunk tea with coconut milk. And yep, it tastes as bad as it sounds. I drank it all up and I hated myself.

Germany is obsessed with the idea that individual people fuck up a lot. The breathlessly disapproving anecdote about Edeka is about five individuals who have sinned, they have fucked up, they have failed, they are total losers. They should have gone shopping BEFORE they got tested (which, by the way, wouldn’t have actually put less people at risk of infection) or maybe they should have signed up for Gorillas. Or they should have stocked up on enough food for exactly ten days (and not a day longer, or else they’d be hamstering!). Or maybe they should have just spent their entire quarantine ordering food on Lieferando. Or I dunno: maybe they should have used the quarantine as an excuse to lose weight.

In Germany, individual people are always failing. They travel too much, their kids have too many parties, they get vaccinated too soon like a selfish, vaccine-hungry helicopter mamas – or else not soon enough like the uneducated people from “certain” communities. “Do you know…”, people ask, “…what the problem is in this country? No sense of responsibility! This pandemic would have been over long ago if there had been a greater sense of responsibility!”

But those five people in that Edeka are like cigarette butts in an Agatha Christie novel – they’re just red herrings. Disapproving of them comforts us. The truth is, staying alive during a deadly pandemic is fucking hard. It’s difficult enough for people who have money, a steady partner, good mental health. And for those people who were struggling already, it’s almost impossible.

I’m writing this text standing up by the way –just like Goethe. My back hurts, yesterday I had to carry my youngest child through Aldi. He refused to move, so I carried him on my hip with one arm, and pushed the pushchair with the other, and he’s just too heavy for that kind of shit. After shopping, I sat with him on the floor and hugged him. He slowly calmed down, his breathing slowing down, his body getting heavier.

I gave him some chocolate and watched his cheeks get redder. An old lady, a granny, who’d already had a go at us in the supermarket bawled me out. She spat out: “A great way to reward him for bad behaviour!”

“I’m not rewarding him, actually” I answered. “I’m distracting him.”

We’re obsessed by the failures of individual people: holidaymakers, Party-People, quarantine breakers, and the greatest public enemies – Anti-Vaxxers. Look, I’m not saying that these people aren’t selfish. What I’m saying is that precisely because these people are selfish, because people ARE selfish, and because life in a pandemic is pretty fucking difficult, we need to build a system that allows us to behave with solidarity.

To be honest, I don’t believe that individual people in Germany should be shopping more for the grannies and grandpas and single mothers who live in their apartment buildings. If you do feel that you need to do this, then yeah, go ahead, be my guest, just do it. Von mir aus, as we say in German. But I personally feel everyone in Germany is pretty fucking exhausted.

I don’t feel that German people, that individuals living in Germany, the individuals who make up the German nation, are particularly irresponsible or lacking in solidarity. I believe that people in Germany find it hard to admit that life is difficult – and that some people’s lives are much harder than others. To be honest, I think Germans are in total denial about this.

The health insurance – or, as far as I’m concerned the social services – should send food to people in quarantine – above all, to old people and single parents, people like that, but really, let’s be honest, to everyone. More child benefit should be made available to people who voluntarily want their kids to leave the Kita until the pandemic is over. We should abolish the punitive compulsory school attendance laws. And there should be more (and not less!) free PCR tests.

The plural of individual responsibility is not individual responsibilities but shared responsibility. We should try to forget the five people in Edeka. Yeah, yeah, yeah, they shouldn’t have been there. But maybe they were just hungry.

This article first appeared in German in analyse & kritik nr. 678. Translation: Phil Butland. Reproduced with permission.

US fascism – the view from Europe

Fascism is a real threat in the USA. But we still have time to organise the mass resistance needed to stop it

Mike Hembury
23/01/2022

Almost a year to the day after the assault on the US Capitol Building by an insurgent right-wing Trump-supporting mob, prospects for the continuation of US democracy – such as it is – after the Biden administration are looking bleak in the extreme.

Not only have the main instigators of the attempted coup not been punished (in spite of overwhelming evidence pointing towards the deliberate nature of the act) but a majority of the Republican party remain convinced that the 2021 election was stolen and that the current government is illegitimate.

The Republican response to the lost election was to double down on the myth of the Big Steal, and to repudiate the validity of the electoral process. Dissenters within the ranks have been purged and electoral officials who carried out their duty in the last elections (to the displeasure of the Trump faction) have been replaced across the country by Trump loyalists. This sets the scene for a very different outcome in the next election.

In its purging of moderate elements the Trump Republicans fully embraced an anti-democratic, insurgent agenda. This sees violent resistance against any other outcome than a Trump win as being fully acceptable. The result is a dangerous alliance between ultra-conservative, Christian fundamentalist and openly fascist elements . It represents a grave and growing danger to women, people of colour, the immigrant and LGBTQI communities and the working class in general.

The Trump agenda is openly billed as the “revenge tour”. From a European perspective at least – the historical parallels to periods preceding the fascist coups in 20th-century Germany and Spain are too stark to ignore.

How should the Left respond to the Trump agenda?

So what should the response of progressive and democratic forces be in the face of a gerrymandered Trump win in 2025? Or the renewed threat of a coup in the event that the electoral process holds up and the Republicans lose once again? To put it another way: with the Republicans now so openly manipulating the democratic process, how can a Republican win be taken at face value?

By way of historical analogy, it is worth comparing the responses of the Spanish and German labour movements in the face of a fascist takeover. The leaders of German Social Democracy acquiesced in the electoral victory of the Nazis in 1932, only to find themselves banned, arrested and sent to concentration camps in the weeks and months that followed. That fact surely counts as one of history’s greatest failures of judgement.

By contrast, in 1936 Spanish workers poured onto the streets on hearing the news of Franco’s putsch, confronting insurgent troops and fascist militia. They went on to implement bold social reforms in the areas under democratic control in the civil war that followed.

And although there’s a lot of talk right now in the US media about the threat of civil war, perhaps it’s the prospect of a peaceful handover of power to a nakedly anti-democratic Republican party that is more worrying.

It was certainly a peaceful transition to a fascist government that spelt the end of the German Weimar Republic, and led to the smashing of the labour movement, persecution of minorities, war, genocide, Holocaust and the deaths of up to 75 million people in World War II.

The gravity of the situation in the USA is beyond doubt. President Biden has described it as “a dagger at the throat of democracy”. Former US Secretary of Labor Robert Reich recently called for a “war to save American democracy”. The Democrats are making efforts to counter Republican gerrymandering by enacting voting reform at federal level. However it would be a mistake to count on mere parliamentary manoevers as an effective strategy against a nascent, broad-based and militant fascist movement.

The role of the Democrats

In the fight against fascism, illusions in the class interests of the Democratic Party are no substitute for the self-activity – including self-defence – of the working class and the oppressed. As Democratic senator Bernie Sanders put it recently: “It is no great secret that the Republican party is winning more and more support from working people… It’s not because the Republican party has anything to say to them. It’s because in too many ways the Democratic party has turned its back on the working class.”

In this respect, Sanders is right. The response of the working class and allied progressive forces cannot be subordinated to the inherently conservative agenda of the Democratic Party nor to the supine position of the trade union leadership. In contrast it must be an independent response, based in workplace, union and community organizing. It must be committed to mutual self-defence in the face of any form of fascist aggression, whether at neighbourhood, city, state or national level.

The coming mid-term elections in 2022 and the presidential election 2024 mark key threats to existing democratic and civil rights gains in the United States. Progressive forces and democracy defenders should use the current breathing space to mobilise, make their presence felt and create a genuine united front against the fascist threat. In spite of all the bluster and the current hype around the Trumpist insurgency, in overall terms the extreme white-power right are still a minority.

Progressive change is possible

Rebecca Solnit argued in the Guardian

“While the right has become far more extreme and has its tens of millions of true believers, it is morphing into a minority sect. This has prompted their desperate scramble to overturn free and fair elections and other democratic processes. White Christians, who were 80% of the population in 1976, are now 44%. Mixed-race and non-white people are rapidly becoming the majority. On issues such as climate, people of colour are far more progressive; if we can make it through the huge backlash of the present moment, the possibilities are dazzling.”

The United States has a rich heritage of militancy for progressive causes and movements. Its mass struggles for justice have been inspirational to peoples around the world. America is not just the country of slavery, Jim Crow and the KKK. It is the country of rebellion and resistance both militant and peaceful, of MLK and BLM, the Women’s March on Washington and Christopher Street, of Blair Mountain and the West Coast Waterfront Strike.

If white-power Trumpist Republicans return to power unopposed in 2024, it will surely mean the end of the universal franchise in the USA, the end of American democracy for at least a generation. It will mean incarceration and terror for thousands, if not millions.

Fascism is not something that can be solved by appeasement. It can only be opposed by mass mobilisation and mass resistance.

So at this historical juncture, what’s it to be, America? What path will you take: Germany ‘32, or Spain ‘36?

How did Berlin Museums get the Benin Bronzes? Part Two

Anti-colonial activists have succeeded in having some plunder returned to its original country, but the struggle goes on

Hari Kumar
22/01/2022

This is the second part of this article. You can read part one here.

The complex nature of Western scholars in colonial times

It would be one-dimensional and anti-dialectical to ignore the scholarly and sweeping visions of some of the leading “Orientalists”. Sir William Jones, for example, first translated Kalidas of 400 AD (“the Indian Shakespeare”) from Sanskrit into English. He undertook his studies in 1785, in the colony of “British india”. In his book, India discovered, he declared Sankskrit “more perfect than either Greek or Latin”. It is true he was seen by Edward Said in a more diminished way than perhaps he deserved:

“He was appointed to ‘an honourable and profitable place in the Indies’, and (took) up a post with the East India Company (to) study to gather in, to rope off, to domesticate the Orient & turn it into a province of European learning.”¹

Another such individual was Adolf Bastian, the first Director of the Berlin Ethnological Museum – founded in 1873, out of the Kunstkammer of the rulers of rulers of Brandenburg-Prussia. Bastian was inspired by his mentors Rudolf Virchov and Alexander von Humboldt to embrace a natural science to understand a “unitary humanity of the world”. ²

This museum now contains more than 500,000 objects. Bastian strived to build “a universal archive of humanity,” which he believed was the key to revealing a total history of humanity.” He thought he was consciously trying to preserve the cultures of the world before modernisation (let us call it colonialism) destroyed their traces:

“Adolf Bastian’s mantra became: “the last moment has come, the twelfth hour is here! Documents of immeasurable, irreplaceable value for human history are being destroyed. Save them! ”

But though uncomfortable with it, even he was quite happy to accept funds from the German colonial administration after the state entered that game.

In contrast to Bastian, his heir Felix von Luschan openly avowed an imperialist view:

“Luschan eagerly harnessed colonial troops to collect body parts, and especially skulls… during the Herero Wars and subsequent genocide in German South West Africa (1904–7), Luschan … he asked for colonial troops to collect the skulls of the vanquished following any altercation … women were forced to scrape the flesh off the skulls of the dead.”

In von Lüschan’s book People, Race, and Language:

“[H]e lamented the loss of the German colonies during World War I. And he hoped the African section (of the) new Volkerkunde Museum in Dahlem… would be ‘the most beautiful and greatest monument for our colonial troops.”

And yet, Luschan was a divided man. For he also fought against racist views in general, impressing W.E.B.Dubois with his lecture in 1911 at the First Universal Races Congress in London, attacking “race science”.

In 1902, at the German Colonial Congress in Berlin he denounced myths of racial difference and the putative benefits of European influence, arguing that too often in Africa and Oceania “Civilization = Syphilization” and that European poison was summed up in the four S’s: “Slave trade, schnapps, syphilis, and shoddy goods.”

He understood why Benin had isolated itself during the nineteenth century, after seeing what active trading with Europeans did:

“[L]ike almost all African coastal towns, Benin completely shut themselves off from Europeans as they understood the tremendous danger they faced from the brutal slave trade of white savages… a poison that decomposes.”

His last book was unequivocal:

“All humanity consists of only one species: Homo sapiens; there are no ‘wild’ peoples, only peoples with different cultures than ours.”

Racists had argued the Benin Bronzes “could not be by negroes” as they were such masterworks. To the contrary, in his book on the Bronzes Luschan simply “dismissed the reports from the leading British scholars O. M. Dalton and C. H. Read of a mysterious ‘white’ man bringing these techniques to Benin centuries earlier” and avers instead that, “we have come to know a great and monumental native art in Benin from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, which at least in individual pieces, is the equal of contemporary European art.”

Luschan referred to the Bronzes with glowing praise, claiming they were among “the most valuable discoveries that have been made in the area of art and technology of Africa.” Luschan’s analysis undercut racialized arguments about differences between Africans and Europeans, between “blacks” and “whites”, undermining colonial ideologies based on notions of biological racism.

Berlin’s Ethnological Museum becomes the Humboldt Forum

The Berlin collection had grown in leaps and bounds, as shown in the number of objects from African and Oceania – From 1880: 5,845; in 1895, 25,672; in 1905, 59,737. At its peak, it was almost an unrivalled force in terms of its acquisitions.

Of the Benin Bronzes, the British Museum received only a few hundred items from the Foreign Office in 1897. Most were sold by the state, but also some from British officers and soldier looters. The cost rose dramatically on the art market and the British Museum was priced out. This is how Berlin came to house so many Benin Bronzes.

In 2006 the old Berlin ethnological museum became the core of the Humboldt Forum. The newly unitary German state aggressively sought to erase marks of the DDR. The Palast der Republik was torn down and the Berliner Stadtschloss re-built. ³ The total cost of this project was an estimated 590-690 million euros, largely from the German state.

Individual capitalists – like Wilhelm von Boddien, a tractor tycoon from Hamburg, or the widow of retail magnate Werner Otto – also funded some 105 million euros – for the grand plan. Some consider the result a strange place:

“An imposing Disneyland castle minus the fun… to project an image of an idealised past…. an imperial palace, crowned with a golden crucifix, as a showcase for colonial booty…. This was the building, where Kaiser Wilhelm II resided as his troops committed genocide in Namibia and brutally suppressed an uprising in Tanzania in the 1900s.” ⁴

The grassroots movement “No to Humboldt 21! Moratorium on the Humboldt Forum in Berliner Schloss!” issued a challenge:

“We demand the suspension of work on the Humboldt Forum in the Berlin Palace and a broad public debate: The present concept violates the dignity and property rights of people in all parts of the world, and is Eurocentric. The Humboldt Forum opposes the claim of equal coexistence in the migration society.”

This fight was not successful, but it was part of a change in at least one section of German society.⁵ The anti-Semitism and vicious genocide of the fascist Nazi regime had been acknowledged in many ways, including on-going compensation to persons and to the state of Israel. Yet the silence on Germany’s role in African colonialism effectively comprises a “colonial amnesia”:

“Germans believed that they had nothing to do with the colonial exploitation of large parts of Africa, Asia or South America. They were innocent—so many believed—of the devastations brought about by European colonialism.”

“In 2004, the centenary of the genocide of the Herero and Nama peoples confronted a wide German audience with German atrocities of a hundred years before […] the official apology… sparked […] conservative circles [to] denounce the German Minister for Economic Cooperation and Development Wieczorek-Zeul, who had delivered the apology, as a ‘traitor.’” ⁶

The proliferation of anti-colonial sentiments and consciousness of German people, scholars and intelligentsia can be seen from perusing various websites including “Berlin postkolonial e.v.”:

“[M]any civil-society initiatives in the Federal Republic of Germany have worked towards a critical public discussion of the German colonial past.”

Anti-racist initiatives have been creative. In one example, a group of artists, dramatists and musicians known as “Kolonialismus im Kasten” put a downloadable, alternative self-audioguide to Berlin’s Deutsches Historical Museum (DHM) exhibits of the time of the German Empire:

“In our museum tours, we have addressed the history of German colonialism, which the local public hardly notices. We have shown that colonialism meant violence, racism and economic exploitation, but also produced fierce resistance. And we drew attention to the problematic presentation of German colonial history in the DHM… as if there were no connections between colonial history and popular culture, Reichstag debates or the development of science.“

Indeed, a change has taken place:

“This growing rumbling of protest in the public echoed the postcolonial discussions.” ⁷

The Current Situation

The movements in Germany and Berlin failed in their first goal – to prevent the building of the extravagant Humboldt Forum. But they were not isolated in Germany, or world wide. As early as 1983, the Minister of Culture in Greece, Melina Mercouri, had expressed in very emotive terms why repatriation of stolen art is so important to many nations today:

“This is our history, our soul. They are the symbol and the blood and the soul of the Greek people.” ⁸

This was, of course, directed at the ‘Elgin Marbles’ of the Greek Parthenon, held onto jealously by the British Museum. Neil McGregor, Director of the British Museum (2002-2015), and one of three founding Directors of the Humboldt Forum (2015-2018), rejected return in 2006:

“Repatriation is ‘yesterday’s question […] Questions of ownership depend on the thought that an object can only be in one place. That’s no longer true.” ⁹

McGregor is increasingly out of step now; his imperial pomposity in his popular books shows him as a colonial-excusing paternalist. The progressive trend in German museum culture was noted and applauded by Hochstadt in the American Historical Association. ¹⁰

President Macron of France asked two experts, the historian Bénédicte Savoy and the economist Felwine Sarr to investigate the looted African treasures in France. Savoy and Sarr recommended in 2018 that:

“’any objects taken by force or acquired through inequitable conditions’ by the French Army, scientific explorers or administrators between the late 1800s and 1960 be handed back […] Ms. Savoy said ‘Europe’s arrogance toward the legitimate desire of Africans to reconnect with their heritage is now a thing of the past.’” ¹¹

France will return 26 of the objects looted from Benin during a separate 1892 French invasion which made Dahomey a French colony.

It is hoped that an Edo Museum of West African Art will be built for 300 items “on loan from European museums, if the money to build it can be raised […]designed by Sir David Adjaye.” ¹² Germany announced it will return 11,000 Bronzes from around the country, most from Berlin. The Dutch also recommended this; likewise, Belgium’s pillaged objects are to be returned to the Democratic Republic of Congo. Britain remains obstinately silent. ¹³

Conclusion

Even this battle within the museums is not yet over, of course. As museum activist Matthew Vollgraf notes, there is still resistance from a co-director of the Humboldt Forum linked to SPD politicians:

“Prominent art historian Horst Bredekamp […] declares “postcolonialism” and “political correctness” to be nothing less than a prelude to fascism. In a February 22 article in the FAZ, “How Much Identity Can Society Tolerate?”, [Social Democratic politician Wolfgang] Thierse vents his frustration at a heterogeneous group of phenomena (with) leftist identity politics, from gender pronouns to the removal of statues and renaming of streets. Although he appears virtually oblivious to the obstacles and inequalities which many minorities face in Germany today.”

No doubt some of this repatriation attempts to dampen anti-racist calls, emanating from the banlieues of Paris. However cavilling is not for now. The extensive anti-racist movements of the last decades, especially since 2004 – has moved the needle. True more needs implementing in the daily grind of lives of immigrants and diverse peoples, but something of consequence has improved.

A longer version with fuller quotes and history will be available shortly at ml-today.com

Footnotes

1 Cited in Amrit Chaudhuri, ‘Two Giant Brothers’; London Review of Books; Vol. 28 No. 8 · 20 April 2006

2 H. Glenn Penny; ‘In Humboldt’s Shadow A Tragic History of German Ethnology’; 2021. Other quotes in this section are also taken from this book.

3 Thomas Thiemeyer, ‘Cosmopolitanizing Colonial Memories in Germany’ 2019 Critical Inquiry; Vol.45(4); p.967-990

4 Oliver Wainwright, ‘Berlin’s bizarre new museum: a Prussian palace rebuilt for €680m’; Guardian Sep 9, 2021.

5 Morat, Daniel, ‘Katalysator wider Willen: Das HumboldtForum in Berlin und die deutsche Kolonialvergangenheit’; Zeithistorische Forschungen/Studies in Contemporary History 16 (2019), S. 140-153

6 Michael Perraudin and Jürgen Zimmerer; ‘German Colonialism and National Identity’.

7 Thomas Thiemeyer, ‘Cosmopolitanizing Colonial Memories in Germany’, Critical Inquiry 45 (Summer 2019); 967-990.

8 This is our history, this is our soul. They are the symbol and the blood and the soul of the Greek people

9 Charlotte Higgins, ‘Into Africa: British Museum’s Reply to Ownership Debate,’ The Guardian, 13 April 2006.

10 Steve Hochstadt, ’Reckoning With Colonial History – A Berlin Museum Faces the Future’; Perspectives on History; Oct 2017, Vol. 55 Issue 7, p50-55

11 Farah Nayeri and Norimitsu Onishi; “Looted Treasures Begin a Long Journey Home From France”; New York Times; Oct. 28, 2021

12 Alex Marshall; A New Museum to Bring the Benin Bronzes Home’; New York Times; Nov. 13, 2020

13 Alex Marshall “As Europe Returns Artifacts, Britain Stays Silent”; Dec. 20, 2021; NYT

Uprooting the Minerals-Energy Complex

Climate activists in South Africa are mobilising and making concrete demands, reports Alex Lenferna, secretary of the Climate Justice Coalition

Alex Lenferna
20/01/2022

During the week of September 20th 2021, thousands of people in every province of South Africa mobilised under the banner of #UprootTheDMRE. They were protesting against the polluting, unjust and harmful energy and mining agenda of Minister Gwede Mantashe’s Department of Mineral Resources and Energy (DMRE). They demanded a more just energy and mining future.

The mobilisation was conceived of and planned by the Climate Justice Coalition and partners, and was supported by dozens of civil society organisations. It was not just about climate change. It was about a more intersectional vision of climate, energy, and mining justice, which brought together those who are being harmed by the DMRE’s agenda.

It was led by mining affected communities. They are tired of the DMRE greenlighting polluting and harmful mining and energy projects without their free, prior and informed consent. They are tired of corporations who rarely honour their promises to communities made in social and labour plans. And they are tired of the intimidation and violence they face for resisting.

It was led by youth activists, unwilling to have their future condemned to deepening climate chaos by the DMRE’s polluting plans for lots of new coal and fossil gas, at a time when climate science makes clear we must move away from fossil fuels. Youth who are tired of job opportunities in green industrialisation foreclosed by those with vested interests in fossil fuels.

It was led by communities sick of being plunged into darkness through loadshedding. Communities which lack proper access to energy, because the DMRE refuses to unlock a renewable energy future which would be the fastest, most affordable and job-creating way to bring new energy online. Communities demanding a Green New Eskom that can provide clean, safe and affordable energy for all.

It was led by workers and communities demanding that we move to renewable energy through a rapid and just transition, that leaves no one behind and invests in their future so they can be part of a lower carbon economy. They were demanding one million climate jobs and more social ownership of renewable energy.

It was led by local communities in the Karoo who are saying no to water-intensive and polluting fracking for fossil gas. It was led by fishing communities who are resisting the corruption-ridden plans for polluting powerships, which could devastate their local fishing grounds and cost South Africa hundreds of billions of Rands.

Demands

At a national level, the coalition collectively created a list of demands that were delivered to the offices of the DMRE across the country. The demands were summarised into the following five points:

The leadership and structure of the DMRE must be transformed to fulfil a mandate for an inclusive, socially, economically, and ecologically just energy and mining future. Mantashe must step aside to allow new progressive leadership.
There must be a rapid and just transition to a more socially owned, renewable energy-powered economy, providing clean, safe, and affordable energy for all, with no worker and community left behind in the transition.
There must be no new polluting, corrupt and expensive coal, oil, and gas projects. We demand One Million Climate Jobs instead. Reject the costly, unnecessary, and allegedly corrupt powership program, & investigate officials within the department around irregular deals.
Communities must have the right to say no to mining projects. That includes free, prior informed consent, the upholding of social and labour plans, and the right to sustainable alternative modes of development.
Minister Mantashe and the DMRE must stop blocking and inhibiting Eskom’s transition to renewables. We need a Green New Eskom driving a just transition to a more socially owned, renewable energy future.

In a perversion of anti-colonial discourse, he has tried to paint a defence of coal as an act of resistance against Western imperialism. A rather twisted perspective, given that he is defending one of the worst vestiges of apartheid: the coal-fired Mineral Energy Complex…

Doubling down on extractivism

Months later, the DMRE offices are yet to respond. Their non-response is part of a broader trend in which the DMRE repeatedly ignores civil society and community voices, while marching to the beat of polluting corporations.

Instead, Minister Mantashe and his lawyers have threatened to sue the Secretary of the Coalition (the author of this piece) for an article detailing the reasons why the coalition was marching. In response, the coalition issued an open letter denouncing such intimidation tactics as part of the increasingly authoritarian, undemocratic and unjust energy agenda of Mantashe and the DMRE.

Just the week after the #UprootTheDMRE protests, the DMRE hosted a conference in Limpopo, announced to the public the night before. Community and civil society representatives were not invited; corporations and industry were. At the conference, the DMRE declared the attacks on coal “premature”, and invited coal, oil and gas corporations to invest in South Africa.

Minister Mantashe for his part has spent the months since the mobilisations in strong defense of fossil fuels and against clean energy. In a perversion of anti-colonial discourse, he has tried to paint a defence of coal as an act of resistance against Western imperialism. A rather twisted perspective, given that he is defending one of the worst vestiges of apartheid: the coal-fired Minerals- Energy Complex (MEC), which has made South Africa one of the world’s most unequal and polluting countries.

The coalition was not naive in thinking that the mobilisation by itself would (re)move Mantashe, or uproot the DMRE or the MEC they vociferously defend. What it has done though is help build political power and grow the movement. It has helped expose how Mantashe’s DMRE is increasingly out of step with climate reality, economic reality, and even its own government.

That disconnect was perhaps most clearly demonstrated during COP26. There, the South African government signed on to a R130 billion climate finance agreement aimed at accelerating a just transition away from coal. Just a few days later, Mantashe decried the “global anti-fossil fuel agenda” and called on Africa to resist the supposedly imperial clean energy agenda of the west – while wanting to sell Africa off to western fossil fuel corporations instead.

The Struggle Continues

To continue the struggle against Mantashe and the polluting DMRE, the coalition and its members are engaging in a range of related actions. We recognise that this struggle will require deep and sustained movement building, deploying multiple tactics to ensure radical change.

In the end, the MEC is deeply rooted in South Africa. Uprooting it is a central pillar of uprooting the toxic economic, social, and ecological legacies of apartheid.

On the legal front, the #CancelCoal litigation is taking the DMRE to court for its decision to procure 1500MW of expensive, unnecessary and polluting new coal power plants. As a new report from the University of Cape Town’s Energy Systems Research groups shows, those plants are unnecessary for energy security. They would cost at least R23 billion more than a least-cost optimal electricity plan, and result in 25,000 job losses and lots of unnecessary pollution.

On the governance front, the coalition is working to undertake research on how to transform the DMRE’s governance away from being a defender of the MEC, to a force for a socially, economically and environmentally just energy and mining future. The aim is that, in early 2022, we will release that research as part of our efforts to help transform the department.

The coalition will also be escalating actions targeting the DMRE and Minister Mantashe. Planning has already begun for non-violent direct actions that will focus on both the DMRE and Mantashe as the recalcitrant forces leading our country into an economic and ecological dead-end.

On the popular education front, the #UprootTheDMRE mobilisation stemmed from the coalition’s campaign for a Green New Eskom. Looking forward, as part of the campaign, we will continue to run popular education programmes across the country to grow the movement and show how the DMRE remains the biggest obstacle to transforming Eskom and our broader energy and mining sector.

In all of these activities and more, the coalition welcomes new member organisations and formations who want to work together and join arms in the struggle to uproot the harmful MEC, and build a more socially, economically, and ecologically just future in its place.

Work of a generation

In the end, the MEC is deeply rooted in South Africa. Uprooting it is a central pillar of uprooting the toxic economic, social, and ecological legacies of apartheid. The deeply unequal wealth accumulated by the MEC is largely built through exploiting people, workers and the environment.

To undo the MEC’s deep economic and ecological inequality, tools like a wealth tax can help redistribute riches from wealthy and polluting corporations and individuals. It is vital, though, that such measures invest in a truly just and transformative transition which redistributes not only wealth but also ownership, public goods, and community and ecological well-being.

The #UprootTheDMRE mobilisation was in the end just a moment in the broader struggle against the MEC and, in particular, the government departments and officials who choose to defend and deepen it, rather than overturn it. To truly uproot that deeply unjust system is the work of a generation, as we undo the extractive and harmful legacies of apartheid.

This article first appeared in Amandla! magazine

How did Berlin Museums get the Benin Bronzes? Part One

What role do the self-dubbed, ‘great’ museums of the Western world play in colonialism?

Hari Kumar
19/01/2022

After much bluster, the Berlin Humboldt Forum finally agreed to return its collection of the ‘Benin Bronzes’ to its native Nigeria. What are these Bronzes, how did many end up in Berlin? First of a two part article.

1. World museums gloss over brutal acquisitions

Walking through museums we are often awed by their beautiful artifacts. The most famous museums dub themselves a venue of “the world’s civilizations!” Some believe this and do not see any of the blood of former owners or makers dripping over the art. But an important image that should come to mind is the violent, physical robbery of the colonies. This was fused into a core racism around ‘enslavement’, as Marx put it:

“The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the aboriginal population, the beginning of the conquest and looting of the East Indies, the turning of Africa into a warren for the commercial hunting of black-skins, signaled the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production. These idyllic proceedings are the chief momenta of primitive accumulation.”

This ‘primitive accumulation’, looting or stealing of wealth from the colonies on an astronomic scale is often recognized. But less appreciation was given to the systematic plunder of specific artistic, religious, artifacts of colonies. Ripped away from context, they were presented as ‘art objects’ or ‘ethnic’ resources. Only recently have exhibit plaques hinted at their true history. How did the Benin Bronzes come to be in Berlin? The answer lies in the colonial ‘scramble for Africa’.

2. The Niger River and Benin in the ‘Scramble for Africa’

A seaman called John Lok first brought slaves from Africa to England in 1555. But colonists in Africa lagged behind their peers in India or the Americas, and the ‘African Company’ of England started only in 1588.¹

In 1712, the slave trade escalated after England secured a monopoly to supply slaves to Spanish colonies. But the trans-Atlantic trade became untenable by the end of the century. Several revolts broke out (San Dominguez 1791 with the short-lived but critical Haiti ‘Black Jacobins’ of Toussaint L’Ouverture in 1804; Barbados un 1816; Guyana 1823; Jamaica 1831). Moreover, eager to increase huge fortunes, sugar plantation-owners produced surpluses. Equally important, was the dramatic agitation of English workers urging reforms, including of the slave trade. It was widely appreciated by workers that, as Marx said:

“Labour in white skin cannot emancipate itself where it is branded in black skin.”²

Chartist literature was replete with references to slavery, for example in his poem ‘The Prisoner to the Slave’, Ernest Jones wrote:

“From my cell .. I think I am not the less free

Than the serf and the slave who in misery dwell…

What fetters have I that ye have not as well,

Though your dungeon be larger than mine?

For England’s a prison fresh modeled from hell.” ³

English workers were in part inspired by democratic struggles of the American Revolution and the French Revolution. For several reasons then, English reform capitalists of the Whigs found it expedient to pass anti-slavery legislation in England in 1807, but with enormous “compensation” to the sugar barons. Later came the Reform Act of 1832.

Readers interested in knowing more about how slavery really ended are encouraged to read Luke Thomas’ 7 Reasons Why Britain Abolished Slavery and Robin Blackburn’s interview: What really ended slavery?

By 1838 the trans-Atlantic slave trade was over for England, France, Belgium, Germany and other Europeans bar colonial rivals Spain and Portugal. ‘Abolition’ now became a moral high-ground for England, Belgium and Germany – by which to condemn Spain.

All colonial states built their own trans-Atlantic slave trade supplied by local African chieftain slavers. While slavery had been present before colonial trading, it was on a much smaller scale and exploitative intensity. Suddenly former European colonial states professed ‘anti-slavery’ policies, in reality to increasingly penetrate Africa.

To minimize competition between the colonial countries for pieces of Africa, the Berlin Conference Treaty of 1884-5 attempted to parcel out sovereign areas. But this attempt was futile.

Their professed mission was to suppress African slaver tribe-chiefs – while destroying local culture and society. At Berlin, England, France, Germany and King Leopold of Belgium – sounded high moral notes. What did these “blessings of civilization” look like? The Earl of Cromer (Sir Evelyn Barer) British overlord over Egypt made the diplomatic language explicitly every day:

“We need not always inquire too closely what these people, who are all, nationally speaking, more or less in statu pupillary, themselves think is best for their own interests.”

In 1870, only one tenth of Africa was under European control, but by 1914 only “about one tenth – Abyssinia (Ethiopia) and Liberia – was not.” [Chamberlain op cit] In fact Lenin had a very similar formulation, tied to the pre-monopolization stage of international imperialism. It was still possible said Lenin, for ‘free grabbing’ of territory – but this would end in an intense struggle for re-division of the world:

“when nine-tenths of Africa had been seized (by 1900), when the whole world had been divided up, there was inevitably ushered in the era of monopoly possession of colonies and, consequently, of particularly intense struggle for the division and the re-division of the world.”

3. What happened in 1897 in the kingdom of Benin?

In replacing the slave trade, the most important goal for Britain became acquiring palm oil from the Niger delta. After 1886, the Royal Niger Company vigorously pushed forward in search of palm oil and kernel, and rubber for British industry. Local chiefs monopolized this trade, but were forced into subservient treaties. King Jaja of Opobo was simply seized and exiled for resisting. Benin was the capital of the Edo kingdom of the Oba (King) Ovoramwen Nogbaisi or Drunami, who also resisted treaties, refusing to meet British consuls or traders.

In 1892 a treaty was forcibly imposed on the Oba. However by fetishising commodities (gum opal and palm kernel), and taxes, the Oba continued to restrict trade. Increasingly, British officials openly discussed how and when to remove him from any power.

In 1897, the British put together a punitive expedition to attack Benin. It comprised of 5,000 men supported by 2,500 carriers, ten Royal Navy ships and their battalion of 310 marines, armed with 38 Maxim guns and 1200 regular rifles. Tens of thousands died in the assault, breaching the later Hague Convention, but also the 1874 Brussels Declaration and the American ‘Lieber Code’ of 1863, and the St Petersburg Declaration of 1868.

Again the British justified the military intervention as ‘suppressing’ cannibalism and slavery. Captain Heneker said it was an: “example of how savage nations as rule have to be cowed by … heavy losses.” No prisoners were taken, all were slaughtered – estimated in the thousands. The city was in the words of Victorian explorer and colonial ethnologist Mary Kingsley – systematically and carefully ‘smashed up’.

The injunction of Lord Wolseley was certainly followed:

“Your first object should be the capture of whatever they prize most, and the destruction or deprivation of which will bring the war rapidly to a conclusion”.

The looting of the palaces, houses and mortuaries though not even now tallied, was likely around 10,000 bronzes, ivories and other objects. The Oba was exiled and died there.

4. What law existed?

In the colonial era during the French Revolution, some objets d’art and scientific objects looted had been restituted in 1815 by the Duke of Wellington, who stated such acquisitions were contrary to the practice of war between civilised nations. Lord Castlereagh wrote a memorandum at a peace conference, saying the Napoleonic removal of works of art to France was “contrary to every principle of justice and to the usages of modern warfare.”

This idea was formally recognized by the 1899 the Hague Convention on the Laws of War, extended by the 1907 Hague Convention on Laws and Customs of War on Land. In Article 47 of the 1899 Convention a bald statement is simply: “Pillage is formally prohibited.” Article 56 states:

“The property of the communes, that of religious, charitable and educational institutions, and those of arts and science, even when state property, shall be treated as private property. All seizure of and destruction, or intentional damage… to historical monuments, works of art or science, is prohibited, and should be made subject of proceedings. “

Somehow this was never accepted about the Benin treasures, neither by the states or their museums which housed them. The Benin kingdom still exists today, but it is now part of Nigeria. Since its’ formal Independence in 1960, Nigeria with Benin called for the return of the Bronzes and artefacts. Until recently they were met by blank refusal.

5. The Benin Bronzes and Western colonial museum culture

Such seizures disempowered the subdued country’s past. At another level, of course, it was a monetary money-grab. These artifacts rapidly became the subject of anxious acquisition and speculation in the auction houses of the West.

Very quickly their exceptional beauty was appreciated, but more perceptive eyes saw deeper. The British Museum Keeper of Medieval Antiquites (1921-1928 ) Ormonde Maddock Dalton declared the cast brass reliefs: “a valuable manuscript – a new ‘Codex Africanus”. This judgement was correct, although equally he was both racist and incorrect in other statements on the Bronzes. Indeed, the Benin treasures are “some of Africa’s most exquisite works”. But they were and are – much more:

“the bronzes were records of events… Those… not made for record keeping, were made for a religious purpose and kept on altars… you will be reading, as it were, the pages torn off from the book of a people’s life history; you will be viewing objects of our spirituality, albeit, you may not fully understand its import.”

Objects taken to the mother country could be rewritten, often labelled ‘inferior’ to that of the colonist metropolitan culture. The process mythologised how the ‘civilized white race’ had brought higher values to the colonies of an ‘empty past’. As the colonist explorer Sir Samuel Baker told a Victorian audience in 1874:

“Central Africa… is without a history… (a) savage country… no vestiges of the past – no ancient architecture, neither sculpture, nor even a chiselled stone to prove that the Negro savage of this day is superior to a remote ancestor…. We conclude that the races of man which now inhabit [this region] are unchanged from the prehistoric tribes who were the original inhabitants.”

Museum artifacts are immediately de-contextualised. But they also provide a base for intense study, often by genuinely interested scholars. The varied individual stories of these scholars are complex. Nonetheless, regardless of each individual, their collective work for the colonizing nation helped to consolidate power.

King George II enabled the Act of Parliament to establish the British Museum in 1753, when Sir Hans Sloane gave 79,575 objects to the nation. The first objects added were an Egyptian mummy (1756), and objects from Captain Cook’s voyages (1767-70). Next the Rosetta Stone was added in 1802. From inception, its conscious aim was to provide “an ordered representation of the world in miniature.” ⁴ An exhibition at the closely related Victoria and Albert museum was hailed by a newspaper in this way:

“No alien, of whatever race he may be – Teuton, Gaul, Tartar or Mongol – can walk through the marvelous collection at South Kensington and look at the innumerable variations of our national Union Jack, without feeling the enormous influence that England has had, and still has, over every part of the globe. (The Graphic 8 May 1886).”

Museums throughout Europe displayed a hierarchy where objects evolved in a linear pattern from less to more advanced civilisations. But supposedly the colonial enslaved could not of course have ‘high art’. This proved an initial hurdle with the Benin pieces since they were so extraordinary, overcome by solid scholarship of a contradictory figure Luschan.

The second part of this article will be published on theleftberlin website soon

Footnotes

1 A.L.Morton “A People’s History of England’; p. 205; p. 297; New York 1974

2 Capital Vol 1; Part III Chapter VIII sec 3.

3 Ernest Jones’, ‘The Prisoner to the Slaves,’ 1851; in ‘An Anthology of Chartist literature”; Moscow 1956, p.171 ‘

4 David Levering-Lewis; ‘The Race to Fashoda’; 1987 New York; Weidenfield & Nicholas; p.10.,