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RVA Global: Jozi Streets, On the Grind in Johannesburg

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*This article originally appeared in RVA Mag #34, on the streets now at all your favorite spots. 

“The tension is there, but it is a good tension,” said street artist George “Mars” Kalapov as we toured Art Eye, the gallery he works from in downtown Johannesburg, South Africa.

“There is energy: not like a constrained energy, not constrained by authorities or governments. It is doing what people want to do, and having the common sense to remain human.”

To make his point, he held out his arm and encouraged me to take in the space. Unlike the more curated galleries of Washington D.C., Richmond, New York, and London, this gallery was an unrestrained salvo of artistry, technique, and medium; each piece represented a different version of the South African experience. It is precisely this experience which speaks to the tension that is fundamental to being South African: a tension that has still not found equilibrium 24 years after the end of apartheid.

Originally Bulgarian, Mars moved with his family to South Africa in 1995 when he was six. When his home country started transitioning from communist rule in 1990, it became marked by general strikes and an eventual collapse in government. By 1995, the country was in economic turmoil, brought about by a national program of privatization.

“Things were not going so great, but there was an agreement between governments about doctors being allowed to come into the country,” said Mars.

Spend enough time abroad, and it is easy to find the commonality linking certain kinds of street art together, regardless of their global geography. Some of this art originated with American countercultures in the 1980s and 90s, while others fused with local artistic traditions to form new styles unique to their own spaces. Mars is a product of this environment, coming into street art through the skate culture of Johannesburg in the early 2000s.

“Being out on the street skateboarding, and seeing what [older kids] thought street art and graffiti was, was a big part of it,” he said. “Back then, it was nothing like it was in the states. We had drips and drabs of information coming in.” He admitted that as kids, they just made it up as they went: “We didn’t know you were supposed to pick a name and have a tag.”

Before touring the gallery, I met Mars at a modish coffee shop in the Maboneng Precinct to journey through the city’s multiple layers of street art. Like all cities experiencing gentrification, this precinct was a blend of boutiques, loft spaces, and the creative class — all of which were set against poverty, crime, and corruption. It is a discernible city-scape which was instantly recognizable, and had all of the component parts needed for creativity to flourish; parts that were simultaneously cognizant of the past, but also future-facing.

We didn’t have to go far to see where these things collided, turning a corner onto a thoroughfare that was filled with street art, graffiti, bags of trash, street merchants, and the homeless. Mars’ art ran the length of the street, a mixture of traditional graffiti and murals, painted on the sides of garages and industrial warehouses. Before taking out my camera, I asked him about shooting in this part of the city. Violent crime in South Africa is a fact of life, and Johannesburg is no different. Robberies, assaults, home invasions, and murders rank the city fourth overall nationally in statistics from 2017.

“I’ve been robbed a few times,” said Mars. “I know people who have been hijacked, house robberies, so there is definitely proof of this happening. People are desperate.” To make his point, he shows me a can of pepper spray kept in the side pocket of his hoodie; even the most seasoned of street artists roll prepared.

“You have to be vigilant, but I don’t take any chances.”

The art on the street is not just vibrant and complex for the sake of the medium; it is also reflective and aware of the situation where it lives. While street art in the U.S. has become commercialized and a somewhat expected amenity of gentrified cities, the street art in Johannesburg still feels raw and untamed.

When I bring this up to Mars he simply says, “In terms of the art, you can pick and choose what aspects you want to bring attention to.” He went on to say that the best art is made during difficult times.

“A lot of [artists], myself included, see this as an opportunity.”

And it is not hard to see why artists in South Africa feel this way. Since the collapse of apartheid in 1994, the country has struggled to cope with the historical trauma of a system that used racial pseudoscience to maintain social and economic power. During apartheid, the population was divided into four categories: blacks, whites, coloureds, and Indians, which each came with various privilege and access. In Johannesburg, apartheid cut the city into 11 localities: seven for whites, four for blacks, all but ensuring that this system of segregation kept the black population in a perennial state of poverty — the legacy of which still exists today.

When Nelson Mandela was released from prison after 27 years, and eventually elected president in 1994, South Africa’s economy was in ruins. Years of international sanctions and economic isolation had wreaked havoc on the country’s finances. In the years following apartheid, however, South Africa’s economy rebounded, eventually becoming the economic power-house of sub-Saharan Africa. Yet corruption and mismanagement have plagued South Africa in the intervening years, and since 2011, almost 2.5 million people have slipped below the poverty line.

In Maboneng Precinct, there is a 131-foot mural of Mandela known as the “shadow boxer” by artist Ricky Lee Gordon, which soars upwards of ten stories. The mural is a imposing homage to a leader whose place in our universal consciousness is matched only by figures like Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. In his youth, Mandela trained as a boxer, once saying, “I did not enjoy the violence of boxing so much as the science of it… how one used a strategy to both attack and retreat.”

Johannesburg is a city that feels both offensive and defensive, constantly attacking and retreating; a city that is wild with strategies, hustle, and grind. The street art populating the city is a reflection of this constant tension, which has made Johannesburg a destination for artists globally. One might just as easily find a mural expressing solidarity with African women as one could find old school wild-style graffiti pieces. International artists like Shepard Fairey, Gaia, Pose, and Remed have all come to Johannesburg to tap into this creative tension — but it is local street artists like Mars, Bias, Tapz, Nomad, and Rasty who are on the street every day pushing the bounds of creativity.

Standing outside London Calling, a shuttered punk club now covered with street art and graffiti by artists like Mars, I asked the artist how the cops and city government cope with public art.

“It is a free-for-all,” he said. “Street art is the last thing on the authorities’ to-do list. Most of the community is not offended by graffiti.” Some residents in the city still don’t understand the art, but they support the idea of “adding some color to the community.”

Three Sisters is just such color. Completed by Mars in January of this year, the mural in the Maboneng Precinct tells the story of three black women, each spying on the street from different perspectives. Their faces are bold, graceful, and composed, each woman relaying their own story in a way that is suggestive of experiences only known to each other. When the mural dropped, each woman’s head was wrapped in Shweshwe, a traditional South African print that is identifiable by their intricate geometric patterns. Under the wraps are tags highlighting positive aspects of women’s empowerment, written in the 11 languages of South Africa.

“I wanted to paint something positive,” said Mars about Three Sisters. “It is kind of a protest piece, in that the head wrap has moved from being viewed as negative to something positive and unique to the community.”

While the Shweshwe fabric was eventually pulled off the mural by kids, the women’s empowerment and cultural experiences expressed by the mural endure through the tagged words hidden underneath.

“I knew the material would eventually fall off, revealing the words, which was also a play on time,” Mars said.

Sanele Manqele is a curator at Art Eye, where Mars has his studio. The space not only acts as a gallery, but also a residence space for forward-facing artists in South Africa. Touring the gallery with Manqele, it is clear why Johannesburg has gained such a global reputation for art, fashion, and design.

Asking her about the art scene’s recent growth against the backdrop of income inequality and poverty, she responded by saying that it came down to the story the art tells.

“There is a change in narrative,” Manqele said. “The narratives are becoming more localized to what’s happening right now, and that is necessary.”

Part of this is the political and social spaces in which people are now operating: not only are they aware of the community’s place in the conversation, but also how that conversation can connect artistically across cultures.

Acknowledging this intersection, Manqele articulated how this plays out in the arts scene they are curating.

“There is also experimentation with material and medium, like George’s [Mars’] graffiti,” she said, pointing out the understanding that art no longer has to be contained to “oil and canvas.”

With the growing acceptance of street art into the fine art lexicon, muralists like Mars in the U.S., Europe, and globally have found themselves in high demand. Yet it is the African energy and vibe that sets Johannesburg apart from its contemporaries.

We finished our interview looking out over the sprawling Johannesburg skyline from the roof of the gallery.

“Its unrestrained and un-curated, not just in the way people do street art, but in how they do business and entrepreneurship,” Mars said excitedly, before adding, “people are constantly thinking of creative ways to make it here.”

Before we went back inside, a late afternoon grey had settled over the city. Ellis Park Stadium, famous for South Africa’s Rugby World Cup win in 1994 (the same year Mandela was elected), stood silently in the foreground as the city came alive for the evening commute. From the roof, you could see the streets starting to stir in anticipation. It reminded me that the things we feel for cities are always contradictory: a place somewhere between love and hate, hope and despair.

In this, there is no city like Johannesburg.

“The people are doing what they want to do,” said Mars, before we parted ways. “One day they’ll clean Johannesburg up, but until then, I’m here.”

And that’s life in Jozi.

RVA Global: Like the Confederacy, Colonialism is Hard to Erase in Germany

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Deeply German location names like Johann-Sebastian-Bach-Straße and Ausspannplatz will soon be redubbed in Germany after leaders of the decolonization movement such as Chief Kuaima Riruako, the founding father of the Herero people, and Augistinho Neto, first President of Angola.  

Community activists in Berlin’s Afrikansche Viertel (“African District”) have been demanding such changes for decades; however, these decisions didn’t come from the city district of Wedding in which the Afrikansche Viertel lies.  These moves against the legacy of colonialism were decided nearly 5,000 miles away by the city council of Windhoek — the former colonial capital of German Southwest Africa, also known as today’s Namibia.

Namibia

In Berlin, the fight against the remnants of Germany’s colonial period is not going as well.  Every visitor to the city confronts the country’s horrific past through its monuments: the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe evokes the millions murdered by the Nazi regime just as the remains of the Berlin Wall remind tourists of East Germany’s cruel Stasi, which, at its peak, employed a network of nearly 200,000 spies against its own people.  In stark contrast, Berlin’s only monument to those slaughtered by its colonial officers is the small, nondescript (and often vandalized) “Herero Stone” tucked away in Columbiadamm Cemetery.  Many of Germany’s most atrocious colonizers, however, remain glorified in street and place names in the Afrikanisches Viertel.

The irony of a neighborhood seemingly dedicated to Africans that memorializes colonizers who massacred thousands can only be explained by the area’s perverse history.  Prior to the First World War, German merchant Carl Hagenbeck earned his fortune by becoming one of the world’s largest traders in wild animals, second only to American circus master P.T. Barnum.  His Tierpark Hagenbeck in Hamburg — the first modern zoo with enclosures instead of cages — was such a huge attraction that he sought to duplicate his success by creating the world’s first “human zoo” that would display the people of Germany’s overseas colonies like animals.  Hagenbeck imported 103 Herero people from Namibia’s biggest ethnic group for his “Colonial Exposition” and laid out a street grid honoring Germany’s most (in)famous colonizers, but WWI promptly forced him to shelve his plans, and the quarter quickly filled with the dense six-story apartment blocks typical of Berlin.

Perhaps African migrants saw the Afrikanisches Viertel’s name as a self-fulfilling prophecy, or maybe they were simply enticed by this corner of Wedding’s reputation as an affordable working class neighborhood.  Either way, the population of African immigrants and Germans of African heritage in this part of the city has grown to over 23,500, leading to ever-louder calls for the colonialist names to go.  Berlin Postkolonial — the largest activist group calling for change — has focused its efforts on removing the names of Germany’s three worst colonizers: Carl Peters, leader of Deutsch Ostafrika (Tanzania); Gustav Nachtigal, Commissioner for Deutsch Westafrika (Cameroon & Togo); and Adolf Lüderitz, founder of Deutsch Südwestafrika (Namibia).

Carl Peters, a vocal proponent of Social Darwinism, viewed the indigenous people of modern Tanzania with such disdain, and treated them with such arbitrary cruelty, that his two-year rule of the colony twice provoked popular rebellions against him.  After one of his many concubines slept with another man, Peters hanged them both and massacred each of their home villages, thus triggering the investigations by the Imperial Colonial Office that would lead to his downfall.  Twenty years after his death in 1941, the Nazis lauded his reputation for racist atrocities by posthumously restoring his official title as Imperial High Commissioner, creating a propaganda film that showed him as a hero fighting against the “savages” of Africa, and dedicating a street to him in the Afrikanisches Viertel with a ceremony in 1937 that was attended by Hitler himself.

Memorial to Murdered Jews

While many colonizers in Africa were simply racist monsters, others like Gustav Nachtigal viewed themselves as the white savior that “primitive” Africans desperately needed to bring European-style order to the continent.  Known as one of the great explorers of Africa, Nachtigal’s interest in ethnography and tropical medicine led him across the Sahara and through Chad where he witnessed the horrors of slavery.  He led a coalition of German businessmen to establish the colony of German West Africa, the Kaiser’s first overseas territory, in 1884 in the hopes that European rule would put an end to slavery.  It did not, but the German West African Company continued to reap riches from the colony’s resources until 1919.

After two bankruptcies trying to make a fortune as a trader, Adolf Lüderitz married up and wielded his newfound wealth to purchase an 84-mile stretch of land in today’s Namibia which he named “Lüderitzland” in exchange for £600 in gold and 260 rifles.  With the riches from the port he established (also named Lüderitz) he eventually bought up the entire a 220,000 square mile swathe of land from South Africa to Angola. Two decades later in 1904, the indigenous people of the  German Southwest Africa colony he founded would rise up against their overseers in the Herero Wars.

During the three years of the Herero rebellion, German colonial officials established a pattern of government-directed cruelty and violence that foreshadowed the Nazi’s treatment of Jews, leftists, gays, Sinti and Roma, and all others they despised.  At the start of the war General Lothar von Trotha issued a “Vernichtungsbefehl” — an order to eliminate all indigenous people by massacring the men, and driving the women and children into the barren desert hinterlands.  When the extermination order was finally lifted at the end of 1904, the survivors were herded into concentration camps or transferred to German businesses as slave labor.  

In the camps survivors were forced to clean the skulls of their slaughtered people so that they could be sold to Europe for use in anthropological collections and the faux-science of phrenology.  Historians estimate the death toll of this first genocide committed by the Germans in Namibia is around 80,000 Hereros (~80% of their total population) and 15,000 Nama people (~50% of their total).  German colonial officers would deploy these same tactics the following year in Tanzania against the Maji-Maji Rebellion, which would leave 250,000-300,000 massacred.

Berlin’s leftist parties have been calling for street names glorifying German colonizers to be changed to reflect a more positive heritage of the area, and celebrate Africa’s biggest freedom fighters. Meanwhile, the city’s parties on the right have been engaged in a disingenuous game of rededication, not renaming. In 1986, the local council switched out who the Petersallee in the Afrikanisches Viertel honors by adding a tiny placard beneath the street sign specifying Hans Peters, a Christian Democrat politician and opposition fighter against the Nazis. Today, members of Angela Merkel’s CDU and the far-right AfD are calling for another round of rededication to dodge accusations of continuing to condone colonialism; they absurdly propose Lüderitzplatz honor Lüderitz the city in Namibia, not the man who founded that exact same city in Namibia, which the street is currently named after.

Gustav Nachtigal

Almost a decade ago, the Berlin district of Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg found itself in the same position after a civil society group called for the renaming of the Gröben-Ufer river bank along the Spree. Otto Friedrich von der Gröben founded and led the Brandenburg Gold Coast colony in what today would be Ghana. From 1682-1720, the Electorate of Brandenburg (later part of Prussia) got rich using this small colony as a base to sell inland Africans into the slave trade.  Based on his complicity in the slave trade, the local district renamed the riverbank in 2009 after Mai Ayim — a poet, educator, and leader of the Afro-German empowerment movement. Activists in the Afrikanisches Viertel believe change is coming to their neighborhood next.  

This year, the cultural committee of the local district council called for Petersallee to not just be rededicated, but to finally be renamed Maj-Maji-Allee after the genocide in Tanzania.

At the end of one of the increasingly-popular tours of the Afrikanisches Viertel, the guide closed saying that “Colonialism is a real danger to today.  It’s not just about street signs from one hundred years ago. The attitude behind the signs still exists.”

RVA Global: East and West Intersect in Istanbul

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Stepping off the plane onto Turkish soil felt like being transported to another world. Like hundreds of millions of travellers before me, I had come to see Istanbul, the gateway between Europe and the East.

Istanbul, capital of the Ottoman Empire for almost 500 years, is still a major cultural site for Muslims and Christians, although tourism has declined from a 2014 height of 42 million visitors. When I arrived, in the middle of June’s presidential election, it was against a backdrop of economic instability; inflation was soaring, causing a devaluation of the Turkish Lira. I could feel the tension, even at the airport, where guards gripped their rifles tightly as they scanned the crowd for threats.

Riding from the airport to my hotel in one of the city’s oldest district, I looked out over the skyline, littered by half-finished apartment buildings. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s face was plastered on every inch of the city. Even the sky wasn’t safe from his growing authoritarianism; planes circled the city, each trailing an image of a hopeful Erğodan on its banner.

It was clear the developers and economic elites supported his re-election, but I wondered about the millions of people who wouldn’t  benefit financially and the waning legacy of Turkey’s democratic experiment.

Istanbul street art

The taxi driver translated the posters on his cab for me, echoing the authoritarian mood; “Turkey needs a strong leader.” I wondered how a statement like that could be taken seriously. From 1994 to 2003, Erdoğan was mayor of Istanbul, and since then has been both prime minister and president – surviving a foundering economy and a failed coup d’etat in 2016. Once a strong NATO ally and a contender for the European Union, Turkey has become almost unrecognizable in a modern context. 

Although I wasn’t really here for a contemporary vision. My visit was the culmination of 27 years of yearning to see the city, raised on the stories of my father, an Orthodox Christian priest. My bedtime stories included tales of the Hagia Sophia, the great church of what was then called Constantinople, one of the Byzantine empire’s enduring achievements. In the 10th century, Vladimir the Great sent emissaries around the world in search of a faith capable of uniting the clans of Kievan Rus’, the federation he’d conquered out of the lands that would become modern Belarus, Russia and Ukraine. They found their faith at the Hagia Sophia, where the emissaries had a conversion experience while at an Eastern Orthodox service.

According to “The Tale of Bygone Years,” an early history of Kievan Rus’, the emissaries returned home and told Prince Vladimir, “We knew not whether we were in heaven or on earth. For on earth there is no such splendour or such beauty, and we are at a loss how to describe it.”

As an atheist, I didn’t have the same experience, but the sheer grandeur of the 6th-century monument was deeply impactful. It’s changed over the centuries–serving as a Roman Catholic Cathedral, an Islamic mosque, and now a secular museum–but one can still see the graffiti left on pillars by the Vikings who helped Vladimir conquer his empire. I let my hands rest on one such inscription, and felt the weight of history; someone who had been alive over a thousand years before me had stood right where I was and left his mark. 

Inside Hagia Sophia, now a museum

Istanbul is a walled city. In the 4th century, the Roman emperor Constantine moved the capital from Rome to Constantinople, which became Istanbul in 1923 when the nation shifted from a monarchy to a republic. Since the Romans, it’s been besieged by Latins, barbarian tribes, and the Seljuk Turks, who eventually morphed into the Ottoman empire. As a result, the old city is full of barricades and twisting alleys, each home fortified against its neighbor, bulwarks raised as if it were a small fortress. The graffiti in those alleys shared the voices of Turkey’s citizens over the centuries, enshrined in concrete slabs. In one neighborhood, I chuckled at the sight of a giant phallus painted onto a building; it was easy to imagine a drunken Ottoman soldier laughing at the hastily drawn phallus hundreds of years ago. Some things never change. 

One afternoon, my phone battery died. I made a wrong turn and quickly got lost. Soon, buildings gave way to half-finished developments, and it was obvious I was in the wrong place; I had drawn the attention of several Turkish men, who gestured at me as they spoke to each other. While not feeling directly threatened, I had a keen sense of how quickly things could change.

A liquor kiosk near the men suggested one way out. I didn’t know if they drank, but I purchased a couple bottles of scotch, gambling that the language of spirits would quiet my nerves and theirs. The men appreciated the chance to sit down and have a drink with a tourist, a rarity in their neighborhood. They spoke a little English,  and we sat and talked like travellers have for millennia. 

I told them about life in America and, of course, they shared their opinions about President Trump. In turn, I asked them how the Turkish economy had affected their families. They had worked hard after the 2001 economic crisis in Turkey to rebuild their savings, only to see the value cut down by further inflation. A bottle of scotch was a luxury for them; they appreciated the taste of cheap scotch in the same way Americans savor expensive whiskey. They joked, grimly: Things could always be worse, it could be Syria.

This stoicism seemed to be the Turkish character on full display. Turkey is a nation surrounded by conflict, with borders along Iraq, Iran, Greece, and Armenia. Along the Iraqi border, the Turkish army is still fighting a low-grade insurgency against the Kurdistan workers militia, while the Greeks remain antagonists since 1453, when the Ottoman empire sacked Constantinople. On the Armenian side, there are still charges of genocide against Turkey, and northern Iraq remains an unsolved geo-political conundrum. Internally, Turkey is at strife, too. Islamic State recruits, drawn to the Syrian civil war, use the nation as a crossing point, and the Turkish government has cracked down on journalists; six weeks before I arrived, 24 journalists were arrested simply for asking questions.

The walls of Istanbul

As an American abroad in 2018, I found the experience to be invaluable. I spoke with college students, Erğodan dissenters and supporters, business owners and workers. I was exposed to a way of life I could never have been privy to otherwise. In most cases, I was open about my background, and loved dispelling some illusions they held about Americans. Istanbul is a beautiful place, and to have breathed the same air and walked down the same streets which produced some of the greatest philosophical and theological works the world has ever known was as powerful as it was life-changing. Constantinople was home to the first hospital and the first healthcare system for its citizens; it was at the moral and technical forefront of its age. Seeing its present culture, neither western nor eastern, but distinct, with its own rules and norms, was fascinating.

The Islamic State considers the west to be the surviving Roman Empire, something that they are sworn to defeat. Yet places like Istanbul prove that both east and west can make a home together.

*Photos Jack Clark. Cover photo Landon Shroder.

RVA Global: Far Right Wing Protests and Clashes Gripping German City

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*This is a developing story. 

Germany, ever struggling with their historical demons, has just seen two days of clashes between far-right wing protesters, neo-Nazis, counter-protesters, anti-fascists, and the police. The clashes have taken place in the town of Chemnitz, a town in Saxony in Eastern Germany. Having started after an alleged lethal stabbing by Iraqi and Syrian refugees at a popular street festival, far-right wing protesters took to the streets on Sunday.

According to the BBC, about 100 protesters initially gathered without incident, yet a short time later an additional 1,000 protesters joined their ranks in the city center. The demonstration of far-right protesters was further aided by calls from groups like Pegida, known in English as the Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamisation of the West, while another far-right politician was quoted as saying, “If the state is no longer to protect citizens then people take to the streets and protect themselves. It’s as simple as that!”

Protesters have been filmed giving Nazi salutes and yelling for “foreigners” to leave the country, while German police have said they are now investigating alleged assaults against an Afghan, Bulgarian, and Syrian due to the protests. Yet as the night wore on and the ranks of protesters grew, so did the ranks of the counter-protesters and anti-fascists, who have also massed in the city chanting “refugees welcome.”

Monday was the second night of clashes which left several people wounded as police attempt to contain the situation. The New York Times just reported that after a break in the clashes mid-day on Monday, they resumed towards the evening with thousands of protesters marching with German flags “Chemnitz is ours — foreigners out.” They were also joined by groups of neo-Nazis, who eventually broke through the police barricades. Usage of projectiles: bottles, fireworks, and other items have been reportedly used by both protesters and counter-protesters.

The spokesman for the Prime Minister, Angela Merkel, told journalists. “We don’t tolerate such unlawful assemblies and the hounding of people who look different or have different origins and attempts to spread hatred on the streets.”

RVA Global: Taking on Trump’s Tweet about “White” South Africa

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Last summer, my VCU study-abroad students and I stood in the dim but pretty interior of a little house made of corrugated tin in the Soweto township of Johannesburg, South Africa. With us was Thulani Madondo, a 2012 CNN hero, a vibrant, fast-talking South African who was recognized for founding the Kliptown Youth Program and supporting hundreds of Kliptown students in their efforts to “lift themselves out of poverty through education.” ‘

Kliptown is one of the oldest sections of Soweto, home to more than 40,000 people who live without running water, plumbing, or electricity. Overcoming this type of poverty is nearly impossible in South Africa, yet Madondo could tell story after story about the successful students he has guided through his programs, including the 17 Kliptown Youth Program students who have graduated from university. 

And yet, as we stood there in June of 2017, in the largest township in South Africa where more than 1 million people live in similar conditions, Madondo only wanted to talk about one thing: How we could have voted for [President] Trump when the world watches?  It was the same at every place we visited, and my students were no longer surprised. As soon as our American accents were noticed, South Africans would engage with us in a state of near-constant bewilderment. “This is who you picked to replace Obama? Don’t you know that what you do affects us too?”

This is what makes Trump’s tweet about protecting “white” farms in South Africa so troubling and obviously nefarious for both Americans and South Africans. For those of you who missed it, yesterday the president tweeted, “I have asked Secretary of State @SecPompeo to closely study the South Africa land and farm seizures and expropriations and the large-scale killing of farmers. ‘South African Government is now seizing land from white farmers.'”

Hearing the deep unrest from South Africans about the US election was a curious juxtaposition: Their concern with the US presidency felt like a warning from a people who knew and deeply understood the dangers of a corrupt president, and usually, our conversations ended with that same sense of bewilderment. At the same time, I was having these conversations in South Africa with my students, their highways were lined with political signs pleading with South Africans to rid the government, the country, of their own power-hungry and corrupt president, Jacob Zuma.

Like all townships in South Africa, Soweto is populated almost exclusively by black Africans. This history of townships in the country is intimately tied with South Africa’s apartheid past. As the government codified discrimination and racism into law – apartheid means “separateness” in Afrikaans – people in power enacted laws to move black and other non-white Africans from their homes and restrict their populations to townships like Soweto outside of Johannesburg and The Flats outside of Cape Town. It was a feat of brute force in response to a deep and basal fear: The European explorers who first touched the coast of South Africa in 1498, and colonized Cape Town by 1652, would become the white Afrikaners of today. However, this original Dutch colony and its modern descendants have always been just a small fraction of the overall population.

Photo by Zahra Natalie Govender

The fear that apartheid-era Afrikaners felt about their place in of South Africa and the domination they used to control it became part of their national identity, and shaped the apartheid regime into one that attempted to reduce access to resources and restrict the rights of Africans without white skin. 

The language of apartheid stoked that fear while hammering at what could be lost if whiteness were swamped. D.F. Malan enacted apartheid in 1948, telling other Afrikaners, “Let us stand together, let us preserve our nationality and with our nationality our national character.” In 1964, the Minister for Coloured Affairs, P.W. Botha, told parliament that “I am one of those who believe that there is no permanent home for even a section of the Bantu [black Africans] in the white area of South Africa and the destiny of South Africa depends on this essential point. If the principle of permanent residence for the black man in the area of the white is accepted then it is the beginning of the end of civilization as we know it in this country.”

This is language equating whiteness with being civilized, underlined by the fear of being attacked and overwhelmed by blackness. This kind of racist language has been adopted by white nationalists and supremacists globally – including here in the US.

When neighboring Zimbabwe gained independence in 1980, a majority of the white people who had lived there, including Afrikaners, fled. Robert Mugabe, president of Zimbabwe until a coup in 2017, eventually resorted to tactics including violent seizure of lands from white farmers in an attempt to redistribute farms to black Africans. These policies failed for a variety of reasons and plunged the country into economic chaos. Yet the discord in Zimbabwe illustrated for decades everything the apartheid-loving Afrikaners had feared: blackness coming for what white Africans had worked for. As they watched, it was easy for some Afrikaners and other white Africans to fall back on the original sin of apartheid: the idea of baasskap – white supremacy, or white domination, specifically in the face of an unstoppable black population.

So the words of Donald Trump wrote on Twitter stoke old and deep fears used to perpetuate the mythos of white supremacy and are racist at their very core. 

A classic dog-whistle to remind white South Africans – but more importantly, white folks in his fan base in the US, they are vulnerable to uncontrolled people of color. And that people of color must be controlled. As with everything the 45th President of the United States says, it is irrelevant that it is not true: deaths of white farmers in South Africa have dropped each year for decades, and they are but a tiny fraction of the overall murder rate in the country.

Additionally, the government of South Africa has been very clear in their response that no one, in fact, is seizing any land from white farmers. In fact, the South African government has already voiced their concern to the US Embassy. The South African Times has reported, “Dirco also urged the Charge d’Affaires to indicate to Washington that the people of South Africa‚ of all races‚ are working together through Parliament and other legal platforms to find a solution to this historic challenge and that President Trump’s tweet serves only to polarise debate on this sensitive and crucial matter.”

There are some profound similarities between South Africa’s apartheid history and US Jim Crow laws, segregation, and the Indian Removal Act. Trump’s Tweet is yet another call-and-response based on the vein that unites all of these policies: invoke the fears that cocoon the white supremacy of South Africa, and hear it reflected back from his racist fan base in the US. As my students learned, who we elect in the US does matter on the world stage. For both the US and South Africa, we have decades of reckoning left to achieve any type of racial reconciliation after the end of these policies. In the meantime, there are far more pressing concerns for each country than a false narrative about farms being taken. For both countries, the overwhelming concern is a black population in need. In need of clean drinking water, equal access to resources, and, as Madondo in Kliptown might say, opportunities for young people of color to rise out of the cycle of poverty. 

At a time when hate crimes in America are at a five-year high and white supremacists feel free to walk the streets and openly run for political office on essentially baasskap platforms, this Tweet from our President directed at white South Africa isn’t just about South Africa.  It’s about our lingering demons at home and is another aim at stoking the fires of white supremacy that are burning in the US and Europe to spread beyond the local to a global scale. 

RVA Global: No Need to Punch Nazis: Lessons From Berlin

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Just a couple years ago, most Americans assumed that Nazis had been firmly relegated to the past, never to reappear outside the confines of history books. When Nazis did preoccupy the American mind they kindly restricted themselves to playing the role of evil villains in video games or on the silver screen. Unlike the fictitious Nazis of our entertainment media whose escapades always ended in defeat, the explosion of neo-Nazis after the electoral victory of Donald Trump mainstreamed the alt-right two years ago presents the first real chance for the vast majority of Americans to confront a Nazi in person. After the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville last summer ended with a white supremacist murdering a peaceful protester, the question of how to deal with Nazis has rebounded back to relevance for the first time in over seven decades.

The far-right loves to provoke. They live off of alarming and outraging headlines that win them the publicity they use to fundraise and recruit. Anyone who has ever listened to American intelligence officials talk about Al-Qaeda or Islamic State will recognize this is the go-to strategy of any extremist group. Most far-right provocations in America take place online through racist, neo-Confederate, and anti-semitic Facebook groups or Twitter rants. However, these movements of hate also frequently spill over into the real world. A prime example of such childish provocation came last September when a neo-Nazi walked around downtown Seattle in a leather jacket and a swastika armband “spewing racist vitriol” and hoping to get a reaction. By the time police arrived, the neo-Nazi had been punched to the ground and America was once again convulsed with the debate of whether one should or should not punch Nazis.

Germans have been grappling with their own far-right populist insurgency ever since the AFD, short for die Alternative für Deutschland / “the Alternative for Germany,” metastasized from an austerity-minded, anti-Euro movement to a party of xenophobic, homophobic, and pro-Putin trolls. Since the 2015 wave of refugees who fled Syria’s civil war and sought asylum in Europe, the normally bland world of German politics has been set ablaze by questions of how to differentiate between economic immigrants and fleeing refugees, whether Islam has a place in German society, and how a country that has spent the last 70 years atoning for Nazism should handle the resurgence of a far-right political party.

The people of Berlin have the answer.

Seeking to show off its newfound power after becoming the main opposition party in Germany’s Bundestag, or parliament, in 2017, the AFD declared it would host a march on the capital and invited its supporters to flood Berlin on May 27. In response 70 of Berlin’s most beloved clubs decided to close their doors in May that day and instead throw a party to celebrate everything they love about Berlin and Germany. “We’re everything the Nazis aren’t: We’re progressive, queer, feminist, anti-racist, inclusive, colorful, and we have unicorns,” stated the clubs as they called on their fans to join them in a day of peaceful protest through partying. Under the motto “No Dancefloor for Nazis: Let’s Blow the AFD Away with our Bass,” Berlin’s response to the far-right was born.

The AFD wanted their march to send a message to Angela Merkel and to set the tone in the capital in time for the beginning of the 2018 German legislative session. Through its calls to action on social media, the AFD claims it was able to rally 8,000 supporters to the march—less than 0.01 percent of the German population. Any American, however, is well-aware that the far-right likes to overstate their crowd sizes. Indeed, Berlin state police who closely monitored the event revealed that only 5,000 people were in attendance.

Poster for anti-fascist party

On the same day, the clubs’ Fest der Offenheit, or “Party of Openness,” sprawled across central Berlin from the Brandenburg Gate to the Victory Column in the middle of Tiergarten park. The clubs even organized a parade that featured 32 colorfully decorated floats, all blasting loud techno, house, or trance beats. In total, roughly 70,000 people turned out on Berlin’s streets to dance for hours, covered in glitter, and to show the AFD where they belong: on the sidelines of German politics.

Following their monumental embarrassment, the AFD then turned to another one of the far-right’s favorite tricks: playing the victim. They complained their “Meinungsfreiheit”—the German right to an opinion—and their right to protest had been infringed upon by the clubbers. Supporters of an open, welcoming Germany retorted that “Hate was never an opinion, hate isn’t an opinion, and hate will never be an opinion because hate isn’t reflective or constructive the way opinions are.”  The partiers never intruded upon the AFD march; they simply disrupted it with their loud bass beats and stole the headlines.

Berliners are renown for their “Schnauze”—the gruff, charming, and humorful way in which residents of the capital approach life and each other. It’s no wonder Berliners would choose to take down the far-right with their unique combination of confidence and wit. Last month while the leader of the AFD was swimming at a local lake, a Berliner stole his clothes and ran away crying, “No swimming fun for Nazis!”  While we in America argue over whether it’s OK to punch Nazis, Berliners will continue to show us the way by partying, making jokes, and exposing the far-right as the ludicrous movement it is.