The War Against African American Cultural History and Art Institutions

Museum of African American History, Boston, MA

This small but respectable institution, Museum of African American History in Boston, has just been notified by the Trump administration that it will no longer receive federal funding, as do most museums in the US.

Two weeks ago, the President Trump announced that his administration has set its eyes on eviscerating the National Museum of African American History Culture, Washington, DC, for what his executive order describes as "divisive narratives that distort our shared history," If all of this is simply anti-DEI and not the barefaced campaign that it is to bankrupt Black and African American history and memory institutions and to erase the contributions of a particular group of people to the making of the United States, then why is this admin not cutting funds from these other "DEI" institutions that primarily conserve histories and cultures of racial/ethnic/cultural groups, including: * American Swedish Historical Museum, PA * Chinese Historical Society of America, CA * French Heritage Museum, IL * German American Heritage Museum, DC * Hispanic Society Museum and Library, NY * Holocaust Museum, NY * Irish American Heritage Museum, NY * National Indo-American Museum, IL * Philadelphia Museum of Jewish Art, PA * The Museum of Russian Art, MN * Weitzman National Museum of American Jewish History, PA * ETC? So, when they wield the DEI sledgehammer only against African American institutions, we must see instead a new war against America's original sin. We watch.

Sings of things to come: The era of US Big Man

I am finally moving to Bluesky

After many years on Twitter/X, and given the cesspoolthat platform has become since Mr. Elon Musk took it over, I have decided to move to Bluesky, the new platform. If you are interested in and want to follow me, here is my Bluesky handle: 

Featured in Princeton University's "Audacious Bets" Video:

This really nice video was recently produced by Princeton University for its Venture Forward: "Audacious Bets." Proud to be featured in this program and for the recognition of my work at the university.  

Full video: 

On Belgium's Kind Leopold II and the "Congo Holocaust."

In preparation for my seminar course on Kongo Art this semester, I have been reading new stuff and revisiting filed materials on the history of the Kingdom of Kongo, the Congo Free State, and the Congo DRC. And I keep coming back to the 20 years that did what 400 years of industrial slavery could not do to a vast land and its people.

Men with severed hands

I refer to the sometimes-called “Congo Holocaust” perpetrated by the Belgian King Leopold II (between about 1885 and 1905), which by some accounts reduced the population of the Congo by half. With the initial support of the US Congress, and subsequent approval of the European powers Leopold had claimed the Congo territory--ironically called "Congo Free State"--as his personal property at the Berlin-Congo Congress of 1884-85. Below is an excerpt from John Daniels’ 1908 comment on the 1905 Report of the Commission of Inquiry into King Leopold of Begium’s Congo Free State. That report was the basis for the successful international human rights campaign that forced Leopold to hand over the territory to the Kingdom of Belgium, which in turn colonized and voraciously exploited the territory until 1960. The Congo region never recovered from King Leopold’s crime.

“The [1905] Report of the Commission of Inquiry shows that the great underlying iniquities in the Free State are: first, the wholesale theft by the "State" of all the land except the merest hut spaces, leaving the natives landless in their own country; second, as a necessary concomitant of the theft of the land, the seizure of all the produce of the land with which the natives might and should engage in legitimate trade for their own betterment, and by the almost total lack of which they are rendered possessionless in their own country; third, the enforcement upon the natives of a so-called tax in labor (that being, as the Congo officials naïvely contend, the only commodity left to the natives with which to pay taxes) which is so enormous, as actually enforced, that it keeps the natives at work for the State almost incessantly, making of them at last slaves in their own country.”

John Daniels, “The Congo Question and the "Belgian Solution" The North American Review, Vol. 188, No. 637 (Dec., 1908), pp. 891-902.

J'accuse, Nigerian Government and political class!

As of this morning, Saturday, December 21, 2024, at least 100 people, mostly women and children were crushed to death in three different parts of Nigeria: Anambra and Oyo States, and the federal capital, Abuja. How? They all trooped out in search of free rice distributed by state or private organizations ahead of the Christmas celebration. Clearly without plans for adequate crowd control and without care about the level of desperation among the population, the organizers failed to manage the process, leading to stampedes. So, scores of hungry mothers, wives, and children went in search of food. They were served death. We mourn the dead. 

Words fail me. 

I feel nothing but utter disgust for the criminal enterprise called governance in Nigeria today. We have watched with increasing alarm as a network of individuals from all parts of Nigeria systematically take the country hostage not just by corrupting the political process as never before, but also simultaneously binding the economy into dirty bunches and hauling them, with stupendous brazenness, into their godforsaken private bank accounts. Or in a good number of instances--according to news reports--into vast septic tanks, when they find no means of moving their loot into the vaults of financial institutions scattered around the planet.

I feel nothing but deep indignation for the folks in Nigeria who have bled that country for so long to the point that not even water sips out of its veins. And yet, there is no accountability. No one here or out there to force them to stop their murderous rampage on a most resilient and resourceful folk who make up arguably the world's most complicated nation (500+ languages; almost 400 ethnicities; nearly 50/50 ratio of Muslims and Christians; 220 Million people in a contiguous landmass just a third more than the US State of Texas). 

The lack of accountability and the brazenness of Nigeria's political process would, in 2023, see a ruling party that did its best to immiserate the entire population and watch as frightening levels of insecurity spread over the land apparently returned to power for another four years. Or do you think that Nigerians are tragic masochists edging ever closer to auto-asphyxiation? 

The economy has cratered since that election. The government feeds the people slogans. The politicians allot themselves mindboggling salaries and, alongside their accomplices outside of government, do their best to live their versions of the high life. Even so, the recent photo of a family in Southeastern Nigeria with children showing telltale signs of kwashiorkor--that dreadful malnutrition disease perhaps seen first in postcolonial Africa during the Biafran War and since in some of the world's worst sites of humanitarian catastrophe--announced the frightening reality of today's Nigeria. That photo tells you everything you want to know about the people who turn up at these Christmas rice distribution events and end up dead.

I do not know how we get out of this.

Damn the vampires! 

 

"Gavin Jantjes, To Be Free" Exhibition at Whitechapel Gallery, London

Congratulations to my dear brother @salahsmh for organizing the long overdue retrospective of the South African artist Gavin Jantjes @whitechapelgallery, London. The show, titled "To Be Free," after Nina Simone, ended about two weeks ago.

It was the latest of Salah's 3-decades long incomparable work of redrawing the map of modern and contemporary art through groundshifting solo and group exhibitions and publications, and through his work as a professor. Salah, for instance, opened up Venice to African artists when he initiated the "Africa in Venice" program that produced two highly acclaimed exhibitions by African artists in the early 2000s, leading eventually to the now-normal presence of Africans in the International Exhibition and, even more important, approximately 10 national pavilions in recent editions of the biennial. He has been singularly responsible for keeping our journal Nka afloat in the years when publishers and funding agencies had no interest in our vision. And, in his time at Cornell, he has trained quite a few of the scholars working actively in the academy and the museum, quite apart from establishing the Institute of Comparative Modernities at that Ivy League university.

So, why is the Jantjes exhibition important? Gavin is one of the most consequential artists of the early (1970s) anti-Apartheid movement who, in forced exile in Europe, participated in the making of black international art and cultural networks there in the 1980s. Later in Norway as a curator and scholar, Gavin, perhaps more than anyone else, transformed Oslo into a thriving global contemporary art destination. Since 1994, Gavin has played a major role in building a new, multiracial art industry in South Africa. His work as a painter, printmaker, and multimedia artist is in itself terrific, profound, technically sophisticated and, earlier on, politically intelligent.

And yet, it had to take Salah's curatorial intervention, once more, to give Gavin his due by organizing this exhibition with the institutional backing of @sharjahart, where the show opened earlier in the year before traveling to Whitechapel.

We have seen this before. Ibrahim El-Salahi (b. 1930), arguably the most significant and influential 20th-century modernist from Africa had no major museum exhibition in Britain where he has lived for decades, until Salah, after years of trying unsuccessfully with US and European museums, found an ally in and support from the intrepid @hooralq and @sharjahart where Salahi's magnificent retrospective opened, before traveling to the Tate Modern in 2013.

Great to see you in the gallery yesterday, dear Gavin. Wowed by the chromatic poetry of the new paintings. Congratulations! #gavinjantjes #whitechapelgallery #salahmhassan #tobefree