Announcement: Postdoctoral Fellowship in African Politics

Postdoctoral Fellowship
Contemporary Politics and Social Forces in Sub-Saharan Africa

Hampshire College invites applications for a three‐year postdoctoral fellowship in African Politics. This Mellon‐funded position is one of five to be filled in 2009‐10 in cooperation with the Five College Consortium (Amherst, Hampshire, Mount Holyoke, Smith colleges and the University of Massachusetts, Amherst).

Hampshire College encourages inter‐disciplinary teaching and research. While in residence at Hampshire, the Fellow will fully participate in one of the nation’s most vibrant academic collaborations, including the Five College African Studies Council with nearly thirty faculty members having a teaching and research interest in sub‐Saharan Africa. There is related support from colleagues and library and
research facilities at all five campuses, each located within a twenty‐minute drive of the others. Over three years the Fellow will teach six courses, four at Hampshire College, and two at Smith College.

The Fellow will be provided research and teaching mentors at Hampshire College, which will host the fellowship. The candidate should have fieldwork experience in the study of contemporary politics and social forces in sub‐Saharan Africa, with a particular interest in broad processes of inclusion and exclusion at the national level. Applicants should have research and teaching interests in one or more of the following themes: how processes of social and political inclusion and exclusion are generated and resources are deployed at national and local levels; the use and limitations of formal democratic frameworks for political and social inclusion; how social class, religious and ethnic identities play out in formal state institutions; the nature and use of major national and local ideologies; social movements, including those of youth, women, religion, ethnicity and the growing middle class; the politics of discrete organizations of civil society; the relationship of civil society organizations to popularly based social movements; and the relationship of political parties to civil society organizations and social movements.

The successful candidate must have completed all requirements for a Ph.D. before assuming the fellowship.

Position begins fall 2010. Review of applications begins late January 2010 and will continue until the position is filled. Hampshire College is committed to building a culturally diverse intellectual community and strongly encourages applications from women and minority candidates. We offer a competitive salary and comprehensive benefit program, including support for research. Applicants should send a letter of
interest, C.V., research prospectus, writing sample, and three letters of reference to:

African Politics Postdoctoral Search Committee
School of Social Science
Hampshire College
Amherst, MA 01002
www.hampshire.edu

Hampshire College is an equal opportunity institution, committed to diversity in education and employment.

Contemporary African Art Since 1980 on another list

Athenaeum Boekhandel, the independent bookseller based in the Netherlands, has listed Contemporary African Art Since 1980 among Best Art Books of 2009

In the Wake of the Undie Bomber

As many had feared, the US government has now added Nigeria to the list countries of terrorists, following the failed attempt by the would-be Undie Bomber, Farouk AbdulMutallab to bring down the Detroit-bound flight on Christmas Day.

Come to think of it. Because of the action of this young man who, by all accounts, had contacts with Yemenis who allegedly equipped him with the bomb he was to detonate on that flight, all Nigerians are now made to pay for his sins. No one has come up with any account of collaboration between the Undie Bomber and ANY OTHER NIGERIAN in his dastardly act; no one has claimed that he got his weapon from Nigeria, or that he hatched his plot inside Nigeria. Instead, news reports indicate that he came into Nigeria from Ghana just before his flight out of Lagos. Prior to this time, he lived outside of Nigeria; and it is because his family had lost contact with him (News from Nigeria indicate he might have even denounced his family not too long ago), that Muttalab Senior went to the American Embassy/CIA to seek their help in locating his son...

All of this is to say that punishing all Nigerians--indeed subjecting them to the kind of treatment now prescribed for people from the so-called security-risk, former axis-of-evil, countries, simply because the Undie Bomber carried a Nigerian passport, smacks of another knee-jerk, discriminatory response by the US government.

If the singular act of the Undie Bomber is enough to now profile all Nigerians, one might ask how come all Britons were not treated as potential terrorists after Richard Reid (the Shoe Bomber) failed to destroy the American Airlines Miami-bound Flight 63 in December 2001? Unlike AbdulMutallab, Reid, seems to have hatched his plan with help from British and European citizens. Yet Mr. Reid was presented as a terrorist who happened to be British, while his compatriots were not made to suffer for his criminal act. Now compare that with the serious bashing Nigeria--a country of 140 million people that have, until the Undie Bomber, not shown any particular tendency toward the kind of terroristic acts they must now prove that they do not collectively condone or actively support--is getting from the US media.

Nigerians may rank high on the 419 scale or in the Medicare Insurance fraud schemes, but relatively speaking, it has not produced more al qaeda-style "terrorists" than the United States or Britain. So someone should give my green passport a break!

Aah, right. I get it. Finally. Nigerians are being punished with the full body search and secondary screenings at the airports because they can't seem to find their President who has gone MIA since late November 2009. Didn't they say he is somewhere in Saudi Arabia!? Now, I need the US Embassy, Abuja phone number.

In Memoriam: Dennis Brutus (1924-2009)

Farewell firebrand
and lyrical daredevil
whose campfire burned
Apartheid's homestead

Go well, insolent poet
and radical prisoner
who hurled words
at the world's insanity

Safe journey!
transcendent traveler
incandescent light
in heaven's conscience

On the Failed Christmay-day Terrorist

Until yesterday, Nigerians like me used to argue that despite my fellow compatriots' involvement in Advance Fee Fraud (aka 419) and Medicare Insurance Fraud, there was no reason to associate Nigeria with Al Qaeda-style terrorism. With the frightening news yesterday of a botched attempt by a Nigerian citizen to detonate an explosive device on a Detroit-bound Delta flight, my country and its citizens have now joined that inglorious list of terrorists' homelands.

While details of this incident are still fuzzy, information from Nigerian media, reveals a very disturbing reality. According to This Day, the father of the alleged failed bomber--a wealthy banker and former minister--had in fact contacted the "American authorities about his son's radical Islamism, and that "a source close to him said he was surprised that after his reports to the US authorities, the young man was allowed to travel to the United States."

While the authorities in Nigeria and the US try to unravel this Christmas-day bombing attempt, it sure bothers me that a young man whose father claims to have warned the American government about the activities of his son-- a fellow who had, according to news reports, moved to Egypt, and later Dubai from where he denounced his family (a sure sign of the extent of his radicalization)--was given a visa to travel to the US, when my 65-year old mother is denied visa to visit her grandchildren in the US, many respected Nigerian colleagues routinely refused entry to attend conferences. The pertinent question is why a character like Mr. Abdul Farouk Umar Abdulmutallab to enter the US, given what the authorities must have known about him; or is it because of the fact that he, unlike my mother and my fellow Nigerian scholars, are part of the Nigerian wealthy, political class?

I wonder if it now means that I have to go through routine secondary screening at the airport (or occasional ejection from the airport) like colleagues of mine who have the singular misfortune of holding passports issued by countries associated with terrorism. In any case I thank God that failed in his terrible mission.

Contemporary African Art Since 1980, in the web media

Our new book, Contemporary African Art Since 1980, has received some worthy mention in two influential web sites:

It has just been listed no. 2 in the Daily Beast's 20 "Best Art Books of 2009." See the entire list here

Also, Xena Jardin, a founding partner of and regular contributor to Boingboing.net, wrote a blog on the book. Click here

Extra-Judicial killings in Enugu, Nigeria

If you follow news from Nigeria closely, you must by now be completely sated by stories of constant, imponderable acts of violence levied on the citizenry by the state police and security forces. Even more than during the years of military dictatorships, the scale of extra-judicial murders taking place in Nigeria today calls for international condemnation, since the Nigerian government appears unwilling to pay serious attention to this terrible phenomenon.

Earlier in the year, the Nigeria army was drafted in to quell the violent uprising by the radical Islamist sect Boko Haram in North Eastern Nigeria. How did it end? Well, the leader of the sect Mohammad Yusuf was arrested, paraded in front of the media and later handed over to the police. The next thing we saw was his dead body. The police initially said he was killed in a gun battle, until an army officer controverted the police account by asserting that Yusuf was handed over to the police alive and healthy (save for some minor injuries he sustained during the uprising). Photographs of him in hand cuffs in police custody surfaced. The police changed its story: he was killed while trying to escape from custody. When human rights groups complained the Minister of Information, sulkingly stated that the man's death will be thoroughly investigated. That was it. Yusuf's father-in-law, a so-called financier of the sect, was executed illegally by soldiers, in front of cameras. (Watch with caution!)

Now both the BBC and some national newspapers are reporting the recent mass burial of more than 70 bodies lodged at the mortuary of the University of Nigeria Teaching Hospital in Enugu, the former capital of Eastern Nigeria. Bodies apparently deposited by the police since the past 6 months. The police has once again come up with its usual mantra: these bodies, we are told, were casualties from gunfire exchange between police and armed robbers. But media reports indicate that 6 of the bodies are of young men the police had paraded in public alive recently as a gang of kidnappers. They were never prosecuted. But their bodies turned up in the mortuary. In another instance the police claims that one of the dead bodies belonged to a teenager SUSPECTED of armed robbery.

These stories leave me cold. It makes me wonder what bloody nation--I know it is a leap to think of Nigeria as a "nation"--thinks so little of the lives of its citizens. Someone has to account for these wasted lives. Someone must be responsible for the apparent brutality of these so-called security agents.

What rankles me is that the Nigerian Ministry of Information is busy buying image launderers to help "Re-brand" Nigeria. The least the Ministry can do for my fellow citizens is investigate and let the world know how those piles of bodies at the UNTH mortuary came about. The families of some of the "disappeared" men are pleading for help, and if it is indeed true that the human rights of these Nigerians have been so violently violated, no amount of re-branding will help the image of our country.