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RVA Global: Harassed And Stranded By Kenyan Police

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Stranded on the side of a highway somewhere in Nairobi, we considered ourselves lucky. My boyfriend and I had just jumped out of our Uber in a panic after being threatened by a police officer. “I will take you both to jail too. I have that power,” still rang in my ears as my breathing gradually came back to normal. Before we had a chance to see anything of one of Africa’s most fascinating countries, our first ride in Kenya had quickly descended into a crash course on corruption and harassment by the police.

Typical first time tourists to Kenya, we hopped in our Uber our first day in Nairobi and headed off to the Giraffe Centre to meet some of Africa’s most charismatic megafauna. Our driver — “Mbugua,” we’ll call him — immediately welcomed us to the country, offered us some bottled water, and informed us with pride that he had recently rigged his car with a mobile hotspot. He beamed as he told us the password was his two daughters’ names because they are the joy of his life. As Mbugua turned off the highway, a police officer stepped in front of the car and waved him to the side of the road. When the officer opened the passenger door and hopped inside our vehicle, my stomach sank. I’d never heard of a country where such behavior was legal, and indeed in Kenya it isn’t.

One doesn’t exactly feel comfortable traveling through Kenya as a same-sex couple in the first place. In a land where any sign of intimacy with your partner could result in five to fourteen years’ imprisonment, one is naturally and constantly on guard. When a law enforcement officer randomly gets in the same vehicle with you without provocation or invitation, that feeling of dread worsens.

The officer asked Mbugua if he knew what he had done wrong. Mbugua said he believed he had committed no offense. When the officer reprimanded Mbugua for making a turn outside the dedicated turning lane, Mbugua pointed out there were cars parked in the turning lane, so he had no choice but to go around them. The officer showed no understanding and informed Mbugua he would be taken to police headquarters and placed in a cell unless he could find a way to make up for his “crime.”

Visibly sweating and shaking now, Mbugua turned to us and began to beg at a whisper for money to pay the officer a bribe. Petrified, my boyfriend and I frantically began to discuss how much cash we had, how much a bribe would cost, and whether getting involved could put us in danger when the officer interrupted us, threatening to drag us off to jail with Mbugua and keep us there. Terrified, we quickly apologized to Mbugua, grabbed our stuff, and jumped out of the car before the officer had the chance to make us his new targets of abuse. Stranded on the side of a massive highway my boyfriend and I just stared at one another with confusion, regret, and rage in our stomachs.

One may hope that our experience with this corrupt officer would be an anomaly; however, police abuse in Kenya is depressingly common, and we were some of the lucky ones who managed to escape real harm.

Just in June of last year Kenya’s Independent Policing Oversight Authority (IPOA) finally declared the death of Alexander Monson — a young Brit beaten to death while in police custody in 2012 — a case of police abuse, after years of backing baseless theories that he died of an overdose, and that bruises to his groin were the result of vigorous oral sex. 

The police’s treatment of Kenyans frequently proves worse. Videos of extrajudicial, execution-style killings by police regularly circulate on social media, often posted by bragging officers themselves. In ten days in October, civil society watchdogs like the Mathare Social Justice Center (MSJC) and the Dandora Community Justice Center (DCJC) documented 22 police killings in these two informal settlements of Nairobi alone. Activists claim trigger-happy police simply kill suspects to save themselves the work of actually investigating crimes. Between 2013 and 2015, the MSJC documented 803 police killings in the Mathare neighborhood of Nairobi, collecting interviews with witnesses and victims’ families to be used as evidence, should the IPOA ever investigate.

When police burst into a Kisumu family’s home in a bout of post-election violence in 2017 and struck and killed a six month-old baby, discussion of police abuse once again swept across the country. Despite warnings from police leaders not to harass those they’re intended to protect, corruption and abuse remains rampant. Out of some 9,200 complaints received by the IPOA, they have only managed to secure convictions of officers in two particularly gruesome cases — the murder of a 14 year-old girl in her own home, and the extrajudicial execution of a suspected mobile phone thief.

Convictions remain rare due to three key problems: police obstruction, fear of retribution, and government oversight. Too often witnesses and evidence disappear before the IPOA has a chance to review a claim, and officers face no punishment if they refuse to cooperate in IPOA investigations; thus, there are no incentives or consequences to motivate the police to assist those designated to account for their wrongdoing.

Activists who report police misconduct and key witnesses in cases of police abuse are often threatened and frequently murdered by exactly those officers which they hoped to hold to account. Lastly, the IPOA’s board can hardly claim to be free of political influence, as its members were appointed by a panel hand-picked by President Uhuru Kenyatta.

Furthermore, although international donors have poured millions into the IPOA since its creation in 2011, its funding is controlled by a Parliament dominated by the ruling party, which has no motivation to hold high level officials to account.

The ubiquity of police corruption and abuse in Kenya is not a sickness unto itself. Rather, the criminal and murderous behavior of the country’s police are but a symptom of a culture of flagrant disregard for the rule of law. The development of a more independent judiciary, evinced by waning political involvement in judicial nominations and a string of plucky chief justices in the past years, proves that the spirit of the rule of law in Kenya lives and could one day reign. However, even courts are curtailed by budget cuts and the vilification of impartial judges by politicians. If Kenyans want to live in a country that offers equal protection under the law to all its citizens and visitors, then Kenyans themselves must demand that those who have authority over them are held to account.

Photo via Facebook

RVA Global: With The Bombs Came Bebop

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*This article originally appeared in RVA Mag #35, on the streets now at all your favorite spots.

On the edge of Hanoi’s old quarter sits the Hanoi Opera House. A relic of French colonialism and an architectural beauty, it presents and accomplishes a perfect draw for tourists — but locals know better. They know what’s behind it.

Quyen Van Minh, a Vietnam War survivor and renowned jazz musician, opened the Binh Minh jazz club in 1997. Although it has relocated twice since its debut, the club found a permanent home on Trang Tien, a small V-shaped alley behind the old opera house and the bustling Hang Ma intersection. The club is well guarded by palm trees, smog-stained neon signs, and a lofty fence line.

“Mr. Minh is known as the ‘Godfather of Jazz’ in Vietnam, simply because of the role he played in pioneering jazz as a respected genre of music in Vietnam under socialist rule, and developing Vietnamese jazz as a genre in its own right,” said Stan BH Tan-Tangbau. Tangbau is an ethnographic researcher, and is completing a book on Minh and the history of jazz in Vietnam.

Minh’s club is reminiscent of a neon-saturated Bossa Nova bar. Framed photos and abstract paintings adorn the walls, while the bar still sells Marlboro Lights — Minh’s favorite. The only sounds to compete with the drone of motorbikes outside are the appreciative murmur of the crowd, and the smoky-horn melodies of the band on stage.

The band is a six-piece ensemble, but usually only four of them stay through the whole set; a five-piece drum set and bass backs the baby grand in front, while the center players do a number on the clarinet and saxophone. The audience is an older crowd. Many have been here  before, and are fine with paying the higher rates the bar charges for drinks and smokes as there is no entrance fee.

Minh is easy to spot: His black-and-silver ponytail, jazzman’s goatee, and the cigar clutched between his lips are iconic. He drifts around the room, saying hello to old comrades and bar regulars, his aura cool and cordial. After a few songs, he grabs a saxophone, one of three in rotation, as his piece of choice for the evening.

Minh is Vietnam’s first jazz star, and today one of the most eminent musicians in Hanoi. His grainy, nostalgic cool is a relic of what fell out of favor in American jazz circles decades ago, with the advent of rock and roll music. Jazz in Vietnam today is at the forefront of the live music circuit, with venues located in every major city in the country. Yet until recent years, Vietnam’s relationship with jazz was more complicated than its seventh-chord harmonies.

“Of course, we had jazz in Hanoi from the 1920’s,” said Nguyen Manh, a pianist and professor of Jazz at the Vietnam National Academy of Music. “It was in metropolitan hotels, and back when people watched Charlie Chaplin movies in the theatre. It started in French Hanoi, with French music, but of course it’s not 100 percent jazz.”

While the French first introduced Vietnam to jazz, Manh insists it wasn’t until the Vietnam War that the country saw the introduction of rock-time, brass band jazz. In Vietnam, this conflict is known as the “War of American Aggression,” in which America’s desperate and futile crusade against Communism erupted in senseless genocide. From 1955 to 1975, Vietnam was America’s playground for airstrikes and chemical warfare, creating a strained relationship between Vietnam’s people and American jazz.

“Louis Armstrong soundtracks were always being put on Good Morning Vietnam,” Manh said.

The period brought many firsts to Vietnam, such as shopping malls and saloon life for stationed soldiers, the first inclusion of the press on the frontlines, and the expansion of AFVN (Armed Forces Vietnam Network) radio, boasting they would play “all the hits from back home.” According to historians, B-52 pilots would cut through the air and listen to Bebop jazz while dropping millions of tons of napalm on anything from Viet Cong command posts to villages of women and children.

“Minh’s encounter with jazz and attempt to play began in the late 1960’s, when he first heard jazz on the radio,” Tangbau said. “[He’d] chanced upon an overseas channel, most likely Voice of America’s jazz hour program.”

 

Minh had his own transistor radio. It was Chinese, one of the thousands sent down by Vietnam’s Communist comrades to the north. He used it to listen to the BBC and American broadcasting stations. He was 12, sitting in secrecy, enjoying jazz hits outside his father’s earshot.

Already adept with the guitar and clarinet, Minh was entranced by the new form of music. “It was something new, strange and mesmerizing for him,” Tangbau said. “He has never heard it before. This is because jazz has simply disappeared from northern Vietnam after the end of the First Indochina War in 1954, [when] the new government set the country on the path of socialist revolution.”

After the U.S. exited Vietnam in 1975, jazz was placed on a nationwide ban by the Vietnamese government, who failed to lift the outdated policy until the installation of the “Doi Moi” economic reforms in 1986. Listening to jazz during this ten-year period was considered subversive to the standing government — a simple playback could mean prison.

“All cultural artifacts associated with the capitalist enemy were banned,” Tangbau said. “There was some jazz that came into Vietnam under French colonial rule, mainly in the European style hotels and lounges. A little bit of jazz was broadcast on radio, and perhaps a little bit of gospel in the churches in the first half of the 20th century. All these disappeared in the north after 1954.” Things were a bit different in the south, at least while the United States occupied that part of the country.

“In the south, under American influence, there was some jazz, although rock’n roll was the more popular genre of the time,” Tangbau said. “There was even a small group of Vietnamese musicians who played jazz in the south. After reunification in 1975, all these disappeared.”

For a few years, jazz all but disappeared from public consciousness in Vietnam. “Those who had the chance to study in Eastern Europe were aware of jazz, but there was just no cultural space for it in Vietnam,” Tangbau said. “It was risky to even try play jazz or bring the genre back.”

However, Minh’s desire to continue playing the music he loved outlasted the government’s restrictions. As the Soviet Union began to crumble in the late 1980’s, Minh and other artists were able to play Western music without fear of censorship.

According to Tangbau, the previously negative perception of jazz shifted when the Vietnam Association of Musicians endorsed two concerts in 1988 and 89, orchestrated almost entirely by Minh. “The 1988 and 1989 concerts really turned things around,” Tangbau said. “Jazz was endorsed by the official musician circle. After 1989, Minh was even invited to teach saxophone and jazz music at the national conservatory.”

The music you hear in Vietnam today differs between North and South Vietnam. Whereas in the South, Ho Chi Minh City embraced American culture with fast-paced Bebop and the swell of jazz bars on every block, northern cities like Hanoi took much longer to embrace anything outside old traditions. “Vietnamese jazz is still on the way to developing its own identity, by combining that with our ‘root’ traditional music,” Manh said. “Many Vietnamese folk songs have been rearranged, also many new compositions using our pentatonic scale.”

Minh was able to transform a prohibited practice, one many associated with pain and suffering, into a new method of healing and growth. His dedication and passion for jazz brought a new, younger wave of jazz musicians in Vietnam, including his own son. The multiple generations of jazz musicians were able to create a sense of community that combines jazz with Vietnamese culture, rather than being pushed to the fringes.

Vietnam’s new push for cross-border education is sending some students to Europe for their educations while bringing foreign instructors to teach at the National Academy of Music in Hanoi. However, according to Manh, as their curriculum catches up with France and America, most students are opting to remain in Vietnam. The Academy began teaching jazz as part of their available curriculum in 1991. According to Manh, jazz curriculum gained significant popularity in the 1990’s and early 2000’s.

“So this is one of the biggest schools we have here for jazz — we are the pioneers in the country,” he said. He collaborates with world-class artists and invites many of them to Hanoi for lectures and demonstrations.

“In our [playing] style, we go back to our roots, one that combines western and eastern jazz,” Manh explained. “But for teaching, we try to keep to classical jazz. American jazz has the basics for every student.”

According to Manh, Vietnamese artists wish to explore foreign styles of jazz, a movement which the country has encouraged. In 2005, Vietnam hosted the European Jazz Festival, while in 2017, the San Francisco Jazz Orchestra visited Vietnam to mark the 10th anniversary of Vietnamese and American diplomatic ties.

That same year, under a program sponsored by the U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs, the U.S. Embassy in Hanoi, and the U.S. Consulate General in Ho Chi Minh City, Grammy Award winner Herbie Hancock visited Vietnam with an eclectic ensemble of legendary jazz artists and musicians from the Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz Performance at the University of Southern California. In addition to their performance, the artists spent the following weekend conducting workshops and seminars at the Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City conservatories.

Back in Binh Minh, time stands still. Alongside young, curious locals and wandering tourists, Minh and his group of wartime survivors sit close to the stage each night at 9 p.m. sharp, drinking Hanoi beer.

There are no revolutions, no seminars or symposiums, no fear of survival, no culture wars, no airstrikes, no bombs: There are simply good people, good cigars, and good music.

“Jazz is a universal language,” Manh said. “It’s more than the war.”

Words and Photos by Madelyne Ashworth and John Donegan

Just in Time For Christmas, RVA #35 Hits The Streets Today

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RVA Magazine closes out its 13th year curating culture across the Commonwealth.

This week, RVA Magazine #35 is fresh to the stands, closing out 2018 with a brand-new edition full of arts, culture, music, politics, news and more. From across the state to right here at home, RVA #35 tells the stories of Virginians and wraps up the year with the Commonwealth’s best.

Here in Richmond, hip hop is heating up, and this issue brings you the stories and photos that’ll give you an inside scoop on the scene’s growing momentum. However, it’s not all good news for the RVA music scene, as long-running, well-beloved venue Strange Matter closes its doors. We bring you a fond farewell from the musicians and music fans of this city.

Meanwhile, we’re delving into the always-fertile world of #rvadine with the latest updates from the world-dominating craft beer community of the river city, as well as an in-depth look at the women who are redefining what it means to be head chef at one of the city’s top restaurants.

The city’s visual artists also get some shine, from the digital neuromancy of artist and photographer Chris Smart to the powerful hip hop-focused work of muralist Nils Westergard.

Beyond the River City, we’ve traveled from the shipyards of Norfolk to the mountains of Appalachia to tell the stories of the Commonwealth. From the desk of our sister site, GayRVA, we get a report on Norfolk’s Knight Hawks, an old-school leather club finding their way into the 21st century. We also take a close look at Appalachia, where communities are attempting to move beyond their economic dependence on coal mining and create a sustainable future for rural western Virginia.

Don’t sleep — grab a copy around town. RVA #35 is on the streets now.

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.