Hello all! Still backlogged with reviews due to busyness/wintertime hibernation impulse, but there’s some good stuff this week- two reviews, and an Observed Life of a concert I went to! Enjoy!
CONTENTS
Reviews
Shivji, Class Struggle in Tanzania
Thelwell, The Harder They Come
Lagniappe
The Observed Life, with Peter: The Leafies You Gave Me
REVIEWS
Issa Shivji, “Class Struggle in Tanzania” (1976) - I picked this one up at a sale at the Brookline Public Library. Who was reading Marxist analyses of Tanzania from the seventies in Brookline, I wonder?
In any event, I have it, and read it. 1976 was an interesting moment in Tanzania. By then, it was almost ten years past the Arusha Declaration, where charismatic leader Julius Nyerere declared that Tanzania was going to build “African Socialism,” based on village cooperation, nationalizing foreign-owned business (much of which dated to the colonial era), and forging the country’s own path in the Cold War. Probably the best known artifact of this era were the “ujamaa villages,” planned cooperative villages where socialism, African style, would supposedly be grown from the ground up.
What did Marxist Issa Shivji think of all this? Not necessarily what one would think, in a number of directions. Shivji taught in Tanzanian universities, and belonged to the prominent Asian minority you see in much of coastal East Africa. He writes in the classic inter-Marxist mode- this is when Marxist and Marx-influenced thinkers were taking the “international development” world by storm, in that brief period between America’s defeat in Vietnam and when neoliberalism really started to hit in the eighties. He understands the books — Marx, Engels, Lenin, Mao — and how they apply to the ground better than his interlocutors and he wants to prove it.
Socialism can work in Tanzania, will come to Tanzania, Shivji argues, but it isn’t there as a result of Arusha. Ujamaa is ultimately a conceit of the “bureaucratic bourgeoisie” based in Nyerere’s regime, who defeated the old commercial bourgeoisie (basically, the guys selling sisal and cotton abroad) for power with the help of the emerging working class and the peasants. It’s not an adaptation of socialism- there doesn’t need to be “African socialism” because as far as Shivji is concerned, that’s a patronizing workaround; Africans, like everyone else, can have, will have, deserve to have, socialism, no modifiers necessary. Things don’t look exactly like Russia in 1917, China in 1949, Cuba in 1959, Shivji grants, and we shouldn’t expect it to, but a working class is emerging into class consciousness and will soon get what it is due.
It’s interesting what’s not in this book. I don’t mean this as a dig, really, but you can see it as an artifact of the era just before concern for “human rights” took over the thinking-about-developing-countries realm. Nyerere was far from the worst violator of human rights around, but he did force people off the land into his Ujamaa villages. He controlled the press tightly, and waged periodic campaigns against such “non-Tanzanian” cultural practices as soul music and homosexuality. He also had almost nothing to say about periodic attacks on his own Asian community. You could see this as being beyond Shivji’s strict brief (and this is a short book), but you’d figure the forced migrations would enter into the status of the working class and peasantry… in any event, Shivji’s tradition as he understood it took other stuff more into account. In ten years time, Nyerere (who probably comes up more in this review than he does in the book- it is centered on the reality of class, not the actions of important individuals) would be gone, the dream of Ujamaa and numerous other decolonization-era visions for what Africa could be would fade, replaced by a terrible cycle of exploitation and war. If Marxism provides the blocks with which to rebuild, one has to assume people will have to reach for more elementary ones still than the ones Shivji presents, given the stark realities. We’ll see, I guess. ****
Michael Thelwell, “The Harder They Come” (1980) - A movie novelization praised by Chinua Achebe and Harold Bloom! Well, it makes sense. “The Harder They Come” is an awesome movie (watch it with subtitles), a classic tale of overcoming odds and dying to become a legend, and which helped introduce reggae to global audiences. Michael Thelwell is one of the original Black Studies guys, a civil rights movement veteran, and a friend/editor of Achebe. And as Thelwell points out in his introduction, he does not slavishly follow the plot of the film- among other things, the film runs at a brisk 109 minutes so it’d probably make for a short novel.
Thelwell starts us out in rural Jamaica in the mid-twentieth century. Ivanhoe Martin is a young boy who acquires the nickname “Rhygin” for his “raging” lust for life. He’s always willing to go farther than the other kids- work harder, swim further, jump off higher cliffs into deeper water. His grandmother wants him to follow in her footsteps, farming the green hillside land in a community descended from Maroon slave rebels. But you can’t keep them down on the farm once they’ve heard rocksteady, one of reggae’s progenitors. As a teenager, Ivan moved to Kingston, the big city, and encounters many classic “country bumpkin” pitfalls before starting to lead a dual life- good churchgoing boy, helping repair things around a Baptist compound by day, and “rude boy” by night, running the streets with a gang and watching endless westerns in the movie houses.
Ivan is what I’d (modestly) call “Berard-complete” - a fleshed out character (it was a real risk, too, to turn him into a kind of black Horatio Alger character, but Thelwell knew better) who also isn’t tediously psychologized. His knocks don’t all go into making him a better, stronger person. In particular, Thelwell presents the brutalities of all levels of Jamaican poverty — from wandering the streets of the rich neighborhoods begging for work only to be treated like pests, to the numerous ways the poor rip each other off just to survive, to Ivan getting ripped off by record producers after almost reaching his music stardom dreams recording the titular song — utterly unromantically. It doesn’t make you better. It just sucks.
Eventually, Ivan is hit hard enough he snaps. He cuts up a cruel overseer, gets whipped (Jamaica still used caning as a punishment at the time), and becomes a weed dealer. He gets in with some Rastafarians. The Rastas are a sort of otherworldly presence in the book. Ivan and his friends witness an attempt by Rastas to “take over” Kingston (this happened in real life). Rastas show up at odd points to show a way that black men can be true to themselves in the world. Ivan never becomes one — he loves the flash of the world too much — but they’re an important presence in the book. Eventually, the big fish Ivan works for betrays him and tries to have him killed. This allows Ivan to fully become Rhygin, as he goes on a massive crime spree that makes him a folk hero (and launches his record to the top of the charts). In the end, he’s gunned down by the cops on a beach, calling on them to “send out one man who can draw” so he can fight and die like his cowboy heroes.
It’s an interesting book, written partially in Jamaican patois (with helpful glossary). Thelwell makes good use of the contrasts of types of life- the simple rural life in the villages (which Ivan can’t return to, due to devastating changes while he’s away), life among the “sufferers” of Kingston, glimpses at the nice life lived by exploiters, the mystic experience of the Rastas. One thing I found interesting was the way in which Ivan, in the end, overcame by turning away from his humanity, in large part symbolized by women, especially his girlfriend Elsa who escaped the Baptist compound to be with him. It’s ambiguous whether Elsa betrays him to the police or not- it was either her, or the Rasta partner last seen being tortured by the cops. In any event, turning away from womanhood, with its softness and potential treachery, to finally become the “star-bwai” gunslinger… that seems to be a theme in a fair amount of lore, not unique to Jamaica but pretty common, in my experience, in Jamaican narratives, including reggae lyrics. In Rasta myth (and to a degree, practice) you don’t usually become a gunslinger star, but women very much belong in a separate, subordinate place while men take the “chalice” (weed pipe) and “reason” with each other. Remnant of colonialism, maybe, I’m no expert. Either way, an interesting book. ****’
LAGNIAPPE
The Observed Life, with Peter - The Leafies You Gave Me
Some friends and I drove out to Northampton to see a band two friends of ours are in, called The Leafies You Gave Me! I’ve written about them in this space before. They are very good and I’m not just saying that because I have friends in it. Think Mr. Bungle but nice, or “musiccore,” and you have the idea. Their live shows have a kind of skit element to them that adds to the whole thing without dominating it. I took some pictures! I didn’t take any of Northampton, it’s a cute New England small city, they all look alike.
The opening act was a good singer with a great mustache/makeup thing going on!
There’s, like, ten Leafies so it’s hard to get them all in one shot.
Bassoons! Violins! The violinist is my friend Care, they rule.
Keyboards! Guitars! Saxophones!
The dread specter of the knitting contest promoter!
A showdown before the big knitting contest
Here’s Matt, my other friend in the band, getting ready to knit his heart out… competitively
Matt’s a natural showman
The winner wasn’t Matt! And gets to destroy Matt’s looms and spinning wheels!
Luckily he also has pretty big stage presence and powerful lungs to boot
Blowing the horn!
An important Leafies prop: a bed
Matt gets in the bed
The “masked other” Foucault spoke of??!
Care, jamming on the violin
The object of affection
Man’s (unsolicited) abjection before the object of affection
Man’s abjection destroying the object of affection, so much yarn-spaghetti on the ground
Sing all you like boys, the yarn is out of the egg
Hell yeah that’s some good bassoonery
Jamming
Sleepy Matt and the other dude have pretty great musical chemistry
Matt getting pumped up for the rematch
The rematch! Look at the devil may care way the enemy wears that scarf!
Matt lost again and is gonna do something horrible
I didn’t catch the big kill, but Death did
Death sings a song
Around this time, a masked goon handed these out
Matt finds out a horrible truth about the atrocity he committed
When that remorse hits
It’s ok, Matt, your murdered knitting rival is in heaven now!
After the show, I met this nice cat
And returned home to THIS nice cat!
That looked like a really fun concert!